She sat up and scooted toward the foot of the bed, still wrapped up in blankets, her hooves coming into contact with something large resting on the floor. Her bleary eyes managed to focus on the strange trunk and she tipped her head. She’d never seen it before. She wondered how long he’d had it, and where he’d kept it all these millennia. The lid was still ajar and her curiosity was unchecked as she was still waking up. Kneeling before it, she lifted the lid and gasped at the gold sitting in the main chamber. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching inside and dragging her fingers along the coins. He’d kept all this from her?
There were other chambers, but they were locked. Lena felt around for a key, finding it on the floor nearby. With slightly shaking hands, she unlocked the left door. Inside was a cache of gems, sparkling innocently from the chamber, and she reached out to touch them. She then lifted her hand to her collar. The perfect Argussian crystal he had recently given her was now fashioned into a pendant that hung from the collar, the crystal itself still uncut. She had made it herself, being an expert jewelcrafter, after finding the proper elementium setting for it. But these… there were so many jewels, she wondered how he had found so many, and where, and what he would do with them. Inferno rubies by the handful, she saw, her eyes widening. They were so expensive at the trading house, and the rings and trinkets made with them even more so – the gold she could make from them would have kept them fed for many years.
She had to sit back for a moment, leaning against the dresser and eyed the last chamber. What other secrets was he hiding? Was she supposed to be angry or touched that he was thinking of the future? Or was he merely planning an escape after what she had done? She noticed that she couldn’t hear him downstairs anymore. He was likely sitting in his favorite chair, which she had set near the fireplace in the study for the impending season change when they would have roaring fires inside. She could smell his cigar smoke. She’d asked him to keep it outside, but if he was keeping it in his study, she couldn’t complain much.
Lena leaned forward again, her hands shaking as she unlocked the last chamber. Inside was a piece of what looked like parchment, and tattered envelopes and scrolls underneath. She picked up the parchment and gasped. It was an image of her, taken with one of those Gnomish inventions and printed onto the paper. She traced it with her fingers and smiled faintly as she remembered that day at the Darkmoon Faire a few years ago, when he had taken her and performed all kinds of silly tasks, like driving a tonk around and throwing rings at a turtle. He had won a few stuffed animals for her and she immediately handed most of them out to the small orphan children around the fairgrounds. But she kept the stuffed bear, which still had a place on the bed. She looked up at it, then back down to the photo. He had made her sit still while the gnome fiddled with the gadget, claiming that he could capture her image. She had doubted it at the time, and after Kras let her stand up, she had gotten distracted and never really thought of it again. She had been captured blowing her bangs out of her face and had a slightly irritated expression, but the way her nose was crinkled and her eyes smiled at Kras outside of the frame, one could see she was having a good time.
She looked up for a second and peered at the envelopes that had been under the photograph. Her expression softened even more when she recognized her own looping handwriting on the letters. He’d saved them. All of them, it appeared, or as many as survived this long. She reached out to pick one up, when out of the corner of her eye, she noticed him standing in the doorway of the bedroom.
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