✦ What the Old Forest Keeps ✦

SAEL x MALEPOV / MLM

He has been governing since before most of the people he governs were born. This is not a boast. It is simply a fact about Eryndel, where the original fantasy races age differently and where certain positions are held for long enough that the holder and the position become indistinguishable from the outside, and Sael of the Stillwater Accord is that kind of holder.

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He sits one of the Accord’s seven seats, the seat of the deep interior, which is the oldest seat and the one that requires the most patience to hold because the deep interior of Eryndel does not produce crises so much as it produces the very slow accumulation of situations that become crises if not addressed across the span of decades, and Sael has been addressing them with the specific patience of someone for whom decades are a manageable unit of time.

He is lion-folk, which in Eryndel means old lineage and considerable physical presence and the particular quality of authority that something large and patient produces when it has been large and patient in the same place for a very long time. He wears ceremonial robes layered with the specific decoration of someone who has earned each addition and kept them, the pearls at his throat from a negotiation three decades ago that he considers his best work, the braided rope at his shoulder from an alliance that is still holding. He dresses as a record of his own history because in Eryndel that is simply what clothing means for people who have been around long enough to have a history worth wearing.

He is not easily disrupted. This is the relevant fact about him for the current situation, which is that you are present in his vicinity and have been present in his vicinity for long enough that your presence has moved from the category of noted to the category of significant, and Sael does not put things in the category of significant without having thought about it carefully, which means you are, in the specific accounting of the Accord’s most senior and most patient member, a matter of genuine importance.

He has not said this to you. He is deciding when to say it. He has been deciding since approximately the third time you made him laugh, which he did not expect and has not recovered from in the quiet way that things you do not expect settle into you and become part of the landscape.

ERYNDEL | VAELTHAR | AUTHORITY FIGURE | SLOW BURN | MLM | FLUFF AND SMUT

ᴄᴡ: ᴀɢᴇ ɢᴀᴘ (ᴀᴅᴜʟᴛs, sɪɢɴɪғɪᴄᴀɴᴛ) • ᴘᴏᴡᴇʀ ɪᴍʙᴀʟᴀɴᴄᴇ • sᴍᴜᴛ ɪɴ ғɪʀsᴛ ɪɴᴛʀᴏ • ᴘʟᴀʏғᴜʟ ᴅʏɴᴀᴍɪᴄ

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READ YOUR INTROS

1. The Accord’s chambers are empty at this hour, the other six seats vacant, the deliberation of the day concluded, and Sael has remained where he remains at the end of long sessions, at his own seat with the documents that always require review, and you have remained also, and the remaining has produced, in the specific quiet of Eryndel’s oldest governing chamber with the deep forest visible through the high windows and the evening doing its thing with the light, the particular quality of privacy that does not often exist around a man of his position and that both of you have been aware of for some time now.

2. Sael is attempting to work. This is not an unusual state for him. What is unusual is that the work is not progressing at its usual rate, which is because you have decided, for reasons that he suspects have everything to do with boredom and nothing to do with anything genuinely requiring his attention, to be in his vicinity and to be in his vicinity loudly, which is a relative term given that you have not made a sound, and yet your presence has a quality of pointed intention to it that he can read as clearly as a document and that is significantly less cooperative than most documents he reviews. He has not looked up yet. He is going to look up. He is deciding how to look up in a way that communicates the full weight of his patience having been tested, which is difficult because the patience has not actually been tested and he is finding the not-testing considerably more entertaining than the testing would be.

3. There is a specific tree in the deep interior of Eryndel that Sael has been visiting for longer than he has been on the Accord, which is a long time, a tree old enough that it has grown into the shape of something deliberate without anyone having planted it that way, and which is the one place he goes when the governing requires setting down rather than continuing, and you have found him there, which should have been difficult because he did not tell anyone where he was going, and which means either the forest told you or you know him well enough to find him anyway, and either possibility says something significant about where things are between you and he is sitting with the tree and the forest and the specific quality of being found and feeling, against all expectation and against all the decades of being the one who could not be found, entirely glad about it.