For today’s post, I wanted to point out a detail I put into Shadow of the Stormbird. If you haven’t read it yet and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here! Hehe. This is the fic where Aloy and Avad are together in the beginning, but Aloy eventually breaks up with Avad when Nil appears in her life again.
In the first chapter, Aloy is sitting at the balcony in her suite in Meridian contemplating the jungle before Avad wakes up. She’s whispering out loud to Rost about the things she’s been doing, similar to what she would do when visiting his grave in the game. Then Avad wakes up and says:
“Aloy? Who are you talking to?”
Aloy turned at the sound of his sleepy voice, then returned to the bed and sat on it cross-legged. “Just thinking out loud,” she explained. “Planning my day.”
For Aloy, talking to Rost is a private and very emotional ritual, and she doesn’t share the reality of it with Avad.
Later, when Aloy and Nil are reunited, Aloy is again sitting at the balcony and contemplating the jungle, but when Nil wakes up and asks her what she’s doing, their exchange is very different:
“What are you doing over here?” Nil finally asked.
“I was talking to Rost,” she replied with a rueful little smile.
Nil leaned back against the balcony and folded his arms. “Asking ghosts for advice?” he said with a half-smile. This was how she’d described her ritual to him once before. Nil had long accepted it as one of her lovable idiosyncrasies, but now, having done something similar himself after she’d sent him away, he had a new understanding of the practice.
Suntress smiled back at him, but her eyes were earnest. “Sometimes ghosts give the best advice,” she said softly.
Nil knows the reality of Aloy’s private ritual of talking to Rost. She trusted him with this very private part of her life before they broke up, and in this little snippet as they’re reunited, we see that Nil not only accepts it as just being one of her quirks, but really understands her.
I wanted this mirroring to show the clear differences in the depth of Aloy’s relationships with Avad and Nil. Through no fault of Avad’s or Aloy’s, Avad really was just a stopgap for her, a placeholder where the person she really loved was missing. Whether intentional or not, Aloy kept a distance between herself and Avad by not sharing the more intimate parts of herself with him. As Nil says in another chapter of Shadow, “[Avad] might share your bed, but his reach is shallow. He doesn’t know what it is to love a Stormbird.”
Let me know if you guys noticed this too! And as always, thanks for reading along!! xoxox
The Sharper Edge of Love: Romance, Sex, and Fanfic 