Lunara's Realm · Deer

Wren

Solitary deer of the shoreline

I always felt like someone was listening - and I was glad of it before I knew who.

- - Wren

Who she is

Wren goes to the same stretch of shoreline every evening, and has done it for long enough that it stopped being a decision. She would tell you she likes the quiet there. What she actually likes is that the quiet there is different from the quiet everywhere else, though she could not have told you how, and never tried.

The friendship arrives the way she prefers things to arrive, slowly and without ceremony. A voice across the water, then a conversation, then an evening she finds herself walking toward rather than simply reaching. She asks less than most would about who is speaking. That is not incuriosity. She has never believed that knowing a thing is the same as understanding it.

What she does not know is what she is standing above. She is not naive about that, she is uninterested in the question, which is a rarer and stranger thing. Someone listened before she knew anyone was there, and she was glad of it, and the gladness came first. Whatever she learns afterwards has to make its case against a feeling that was already true.

Where you have met her

novel

Voice Beneath the Tide

Relentless storms drive Tendrul from the open sea and into the calm waters of a secluded cove. Hidden beneath the waves, he finds something he has spent much of his life avoiding: someone who might notice him. Wren returns to the shoreline each evening. At first, Tendrul only watches. Then a few words across the water become conversations, and conversations become a friendship neither expected. She knows his voice, his thoughts and the parts of himself he has dared to share. She does not know what waits beneath the surface. When Moros discovers their friendship, the old Sea Code leaves no room for compromise. Land and sea are meant to remain apart, and Moros is determined to protect that boundary before either of them pays the price for crossing it. Tendrul can retreat beneath the waves and remain the voice Wren trusts, or risk being seen as everything he fears she will see.

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