The Fae World: Unknown World: Lyn: Talking to Jane

“Anne,” a female voice called.

It took Lyn a few moments to realise that someone was calling her, who obviously didn’t know that she’d stopped answering to Anne centuries before. The name held too many memories, so she’d asked everyone she knew to call her Lyn in an attempt to begin her life again, but there were a few people she hadn’t been able to. Like, as she turned around to find out who was calling her, Jane, who had disappeared about a year after she’d been rescued. Lyn didn’t think she’d ever see Jane again, but there she was, looking very different to the girl who had been rescued from the Tower. As their eyes met it was easy to see Jane still remembered the Tower, it wasn’t a place that anyone could forget, and Lyn had a feeling it was their shared memories of the Tower that were the reason for her return.

“I go by Lyn now,” she said, watching Jane warily.

Jane nodded. “For a time I thought about changing my name, but it’s not going to change who I was.”

“Nothing will change who either of us was.” Lyn ran a hand through her hair, feeling uncomfortable. “I’m more interested in who I’ve become in the years since and that is why I chose another name. Anne’s someone I left behind a long time ago.”

“Do you ever regret it?”

Lyn raised an eyebrow. “Regret what exactly?”

“Letting them rescue you from the Tower?”

That was once a question Lyn would have had difficulty answering, even after she’d made the decision to leave Anne far behind her. “No, I don’t. I’m too happy to be alive. Do you?”

“Sometimes, Lyn.” Jane shook her head, sighing. “Everything changed when they came and sometimes I wish I’d had the courage to tell them to leave me where I was, but I wasn’t ready to die. Now… if I had the choice again knowing what I would become I can’t help thinking I would have stayed in the Tower.”

“Maybe you would.” Lyn smiled. “I might have done as well, because I wouldn’t have believed it was possible that one day I would be a sorceress, looked up to by hundreds of girls who want to follow in my footsteps. There were girls who wanted to follow in my footsteps back then, but it was different.”

“Back then you changed the world.”

“It would have changed without me. Henry was the one who made the changes and I was just the reason. If I hadn’t been there it would have been someone else he fell madly in love with. I was just the unlucky one to fall in love with him in return.”

Even though Lyn had been told that looking at the other possibilities would just make her unhappy she hadn’t been able to stop herself from viewing the other lives of Anne. In one she’d been lucky enough to survive loving Henry and ended up living in a convent, while in the others it had been disaster after disaster. When he fell out of love with someone it was as strongly as he fell in love with them.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.