Audrey is also a man character in Missed Opportunities and Hearts of Cinder

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There isn’t a day in Audrey’s life that isn’t shadowed by grief.

The house is both a tomb and a memorial. In the chapel, her portrait overlooks the empty seats, once a flirty offering, now a blasphemous memory.

Her likeness, as the goddess of love.

Her grief, as a husk of former companionship.

It’s quiet. As the decades passed, everyone had learnt to leave her alone on this day – and all the days like it.

Forty years ago, Lawrence died. Her true yet unfulfilled love, leaving behind fond memories and poems and sketches – and an emptiness that could never be fulfilled.

Forty years ago, she lost five dear friends and a little sister.

Almost thirty years ago, her mentor succumbed to the years of pain.

Around the same time, another friend left for the Feywild and never returned.

“I suppose it is the curse we have to bear,” Remi had said to her some twenty-odd years ago, before she also disappeared from Audrey’s life in a quite way most unbefitting of her station. Audrey didn’t know what or when happened to her. She wasn’t invited to the funeral, and the only time she visited the grave, she didn’t dare to ask.

One by one, everyone left Audrey.

She kept going, perhaps on pure stubbornness. If it was a curse, she would resist it as long as she could – no matter how miserable it made her.

Lawrence’s death, Lawrence’s sacrifice – all of their sacrifices – didn’t deserve to have them cursed.

She stands in the chapel, looking at her own younger face, and no longer has any tears to shed.

They both wear red. She’d never worn mourning clothes – no one expected her to, since she and Lawrence never married, never so much as started courting. The fire no longer listens to her commands, so the red silks are all that remains of her old life she so desperately clings to.

The woman on the painting looks regal and and full of passion.

Audrey is tired, and there are white streaks in her hair and wrinkles on her face, the marks of the inevitable passage of time.

Audrey opens the bottle of wine she brought with her, takes a swig straight from the bottle – so unladylike, so reminiscent of the days spent avoiding sleep around the fire, amid laughter and friends.

“To love,” she toasts bitterly, her voice echoing in the empty chamber. To days spent watching each others’ backs, to adventure and braving the danger together.

“To love,” she whispers, and the painting watches her in silence. To flirty winks, and to the mornings spent at the tailor’s, and dancing and singing together.

People promise her it would get easier as time goes on, but it doesn’t. Her grief is still enormous, still immeasurable, and as years add more death to it, it only seems to grow.

It’s especially bad at this time of year.

She has no tears anymore. All she has are rage and sadness and emptiness. On her knees in a crude imitation of a prayer, she wails and screams. There is no one to calm her down, no one to offer a soothing hand and share the pain.

Audrey has always been a creature of fire, and her grief is a raging blaze the same way her love was.

One day, she thinks, it will probably burn her to ashes.