Vignette: After the Anointing

Note from Haley: Eremon has been sneaking into my mind quite often lately - likely because I’ve been spending so much time with Thorne and Oda. :) So to appease his Highness, I’ve been working on some vignettes and scenes from the Defender of Histories timeline from his POV.

This one’s short, but it was fun to explore! It’s a moment that falls immediately after chapter one of Defender, when Eremon chooses Lira to inherit the archive. The scene where he performs the inheritance rite and anoints her completely changed the book and the trajectory of the series when I wrote it in, so I want to pay it homage.

If you’ve been hanging out with me for a while, you know that Eremon’s character was very different in the early versions of Defender. He was much older, married, and did not persist past the first chapter. When I made him younger and put him in close proximity to Lira, their instant spark blew me out of the water, and the rest is history.

In essence, I think what Eremon wants you to know is that he single-handedly changed the entire series, and you’re welcome. ;) Ha!

Here we go!

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Eremon had never been nervous in the presence of a woman before. Any woman. 

But this had been Silira.

All those years of admiring her from a distance—of dreaming about a day when he could justifiably share space with her—had culminated in an impromptu anointing ceremony in the Defender’s inner chamber this afternoon.

His hands had been slick with sweat as he’d applied the anointing oil to her palms. Her forehead. Her eyelids. 

Mortal gods, his imagination had run away with him, too. 

Lira had been close enough to kiss. 

He shivered at the memory. 

She had knelt before him for the rite, and he couldn’t help but kneel, too. He’d played the move off as a desire to treat her as an equal (“one historian to another,” he’d said), but truly, he’d knelt in reverence. 

And because he was weak for her. 

This woman had been the object of his affection since the day of his father’s burial, when they were both twelve years old. 

Eremon remembered it vividly: Lira’s grief-stricken mother, whose husband had died alongside his own father, had gripped her children’s hands on the Dome’s courtyard. It was rainy and cold, and he remembered the wild frizz in Lira’s dark brown curls—the wide-eyed stare she’d pinned on him when they locked eyes. 

For a moment, it felt as though the world had slowed, and they were the only two people in it. 

Eremon and Lira had shared in the most profound loss of their lives, yet beyond that moment, they had never met face-to-face. At the time, he’d believed they may never even speak. He’d felt a palpable connection with her all the same. 

Today, that connection had become real. He only hoped that it wasn’t too late to explore. 

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Hope you enjoyed!! :) I’ll be back with more (and longer) snippets soon…