The lone tear, shining with an unearthly, antique light, etched a slow, measured line down Lysander's crystal cheek, every face mirroring the frozen hues of a thousand shattered realities. And in its glorious autumn, Elara saw the fleeting, vivid vision: a shared sunrise tinting a beautiful, abandoned world in hues she had never known, a whispered promise of endless love given beneath a blazing sky filled with unfamiliar constellations, and a crimson vow, the same as the sign that glowed faintly upon her own hand, being gradually etched into weathered stone, joining two hearts forever in a union of love and destiny. The vision vanishes as abruptly as it had appeared, and Elara is left gasping in the crystal hush, her heart pounding with a frenzied jumble of shock, an increasing, disturbing perception that resonated deep in the very marrow of her bones, and an overwhelming feeling of loss for a life she could hardly even begin to understand.
The voice of the guardian, a slow, heavy boom that shook the very crystalline matrix that was around them, appeared to respond to the intense gravity of the moment, witness to a rediscovery of the truth. "Echoes from the past reverberate loudest in the moments of profound connection, where veils separating what was from what is become tenuous."
Elara's own gaze locked on Lysander's rigid expression, now set with an even more intense, more desperate longing, a soundless witness to the grand passion she had so recently witnessed, a yearning that shattered the rigid moment. She was engulfed by a surge of overwhelming need, a basic body craving for a life that she could no longer recall clearly but sensed seared upon her very self, a bittersweet echo of a forfeited life.
Caius, held captive in his crystal suspended state, his powerful shape confined, looked upon them with a steadfast purpose that burnt through the trapped air, his unyielding gaze a physical force amid the suffocating stagnation. Eyes, filled with a fierce mix of love, increasing awareness of the desperate predicament unfolding before him, and a glimmer of pain, held a subdued, agony-evoking question: Who was this man to her? What share of her heart was his?
"That… that was real," Elara thought, the realisation shattering within her mind like a fragile, hesitant dawn after a long, dark night. "That vow… the feeling… it felt unmistakably right, a truth ringing from the very marrow of my soul."
Lysander seemed to sense her increasing awareness, a flickering, near-extinguished flame of hope illuminating his tense face, a silent acknowledgement of a tie awakening over the frozen chasm. He tried again to form words with his mute effort, his frantic attempt more fervent now, an effort to bridge the impossible distance, to express the love and the past that bound them together.
Aethel's voice, its rough edges sharpened like a knife by an icy desperation, shattered the fragile quiet in Elara's mind, a toxic invasion into her increasing memories. "Lies! Illusions! Desperation's creation! The guardian is trying to fool you, to destroy the true and eternal bond between us! That wasn't your history, Elara! Our bond is the one made through destiny, in actual power!"
Elara winced away from Aethel's icy poison in the tone of her mind. The possessiveness was a clamping cage, the desperate striving to confine her within a delusion, suffocating the tender shoots of her recollecting memories. She pulled her mind away from Lysander, from the lingering warmth of the vision, from the inevitable charm of their lost connection.
"What was your name?" she hurled her mind, a silent, desperate interrogation across the crystalline distance. "What were those vows? Tell me of all that I have forgotten."
Lysander strained with every crystalline fibre, his rigid muscles tensed with the strain, and though no sound issued from his mouth, Elara felt the faintest whisper brush the edge of her mind, a name like the soft crunching of leaves in a neglected forest: Lysander. And along with the name, another fleeting gut sense: their hands clasped tightly around the newly written scarlet vow, the stone cool in their palms, their faces shining with a love that was both timeless and wholly new, a union wrought in a time prior to the ruin of the void.
Lysander. The name thrummed inside her, striking a deep, half-forgotten note in the core of her heart, a sorrowful tune of lost love and perhaps recovery. A sharp, overwhelming grief washed over her, a belly-to-heart sense of loss for a lost love, erased from her memory, an emptying ache in the fabric of her being.
Caius's own eyes, however, continued locked on Elara with unyielding devotion but now also suffused with a bottomless despair, a dawning realisation of the magnitude of her lost history, the weight of love she had abandoned. In his unyielding regard, one might discern that he loved her, a silent pledge that he would stand by her side, no matter what secrets the frozen landscape held, no matter where her heart led her in the end.
"The vows were of profound protection," the guardian spoke, its voice a dirge, one of lament for lost love to the ravages of darkness and time. "Of shared destiny, a journey intertwined through lives. Of a love not to pass away within mortal realms, but a beacon against the encroaching void. A love placed directly in harm by the very creature that now claims you, Elara, a shadow upon your true past."
Elara's heart winced with a hard, burning pain. Aethel's possessiveness, its repeated attempts to control her will and conduct, now appeared as an outraged profanation, a wrenching theft of her own history, and a silencing of her own person.
"Aethel. What did you do?" she steadied her mind, her voice trembling with a newfound anger, a rightful fury against the creature that had stolen her history. "What did you take from me? What lies have you woven?"
Aethel's inner voice cracked back, a flood of chill rage and desperate defence. "I rescued you, you foolish girl! From him! From the destruction that would have brought total ruin to the void's infinite arms! Our bond is one of strength, of true destiny, of a fate far greater than any fleeting sentimental attachment!"
Elara obstinately defied Aethel's poison, her heart solely on Lysander's cold corpse, on the unquenchable reality exposed in the tear of remembrance. The love she witnessed, the abiding bond she knew, was inescapable, a reality deeper than all of Aethel's clever words.
"Lysander", she murmured again, the name a bittersweet harmony within her, a key that opened darker hidden recesses of her heart. "I… I remember something else. A feeling of… fierce devotion. A light that chased the shadows away."
A soft, almost ethereal smile played about Lysander's stern lips, a subdued acknowledgement of her resurfacing memories, a spark of hope rekindled in the crystal silence.
The guardian's voice boomed out, the undertone of warning, the call against the increasing instability. "The convergence cannot be sustained for much longer. The strings of reality strain and are on the verge of snapping. A choice must be made, Elara. The balance must be restored before all is lost."
Elara looked from Lysander's warm, hungry gaze to Caius's steadfast devotion, his eyes shining with a love that asked for nothing but her happiness. The burden of the past and present pressed upon her, a crushing weight of love, broken vows, and an impossible choice.
As the guardian's ominous words hang in the crystalline air, the frozen scene begins to flash with increasing intensity, the hues in the halted realities shifting erratically, bleeding one into another like a defective watercolour painting. Aethel's inner voice weeps in unbridled fury, a shivering shriek of imminent loss, and a new, ragged crack, radiating an ominous aura of black, malevolent power, coalesces in the crystalline matrix near Caius, and out of the inky darkness of the cleft, a dark, shadowy tendril, as slender as a lash and as keen as obsidian, begins to find its way towards his frozen form, its touch portending a shivering and untold destiny.