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A woman sits with her back against a cave. Her lover lays dead before her; her weapon in her hand, stained with ink-black blood. Silence falls as the battle continues overhead, but as she can hear is her breath, all she can hear is the tranquillity.
There’s a crumpled, broken body thrown across the room, and it won’t be the first or last time that she stops to question her role in all his; her culpability, whether she too, should crumple and collapse on herself, a dying star against the backdrop of celebration.
It’s been years since she discovered the lonely prisoner to whom life already passed, the boys wearing the face of dead men, glimmering, flickering brutality being perfected in front of her eyes; she’d had enough lonely nights, both when her heart was beating, and she didn’t want it to and when she desperately wished it would. She’s had ample opportunity to blame herself.
And blame herself she does.
She forces herself to exhale, forces herself to slid down, lay her weapon next to her when she wants to throw it in the boiling sea never look at it again—the curved dagger that took her husband’s life rests against her hip, and she thinks.
She thinks about all the questions she could have asked him and all the signs she should have noticed. She reminisces on the day he disappeared, the first time she saw the untold ravages his curse for power would have on his body—and she liked to think, just so she could close her eyes at night and not see everything she could (should) have prevented stamped on the inside of her eyelids—that his mind fell, too.
She remembers the weeks spent stealing away in the night, searching for him, and the despondent trips home each and every at dawn, how her feet would burn and how she would promise that she was fine.
That she was angry instead of grieving.
Should she have looked harder? Would she have been able to save him from himself? She doesn’t think so, but she’ll never have the answer.
And what of her husband?
Should she have questioned him, too? Should she have known that someone who saw her and loved her so completely must be too good to be true?
(She should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should, she should.)
There were little things; there always are, little things that made her almost speak up, almost made her act. But when it finally happened, she was drowning in red. She always seemed to miss the forest for the trees until the only option to survive was to burn it all down.
She spent lifetimes thinking about three.
She still isn’t sure what happened, what she just did—what she had been trying to do. She just knew that she wanted to destroy that horrid device, wanted to destroy the face that tried to say he cared about her, that he understood, and she doesn’t remember anything other than wanting, needing, it to stop; the violence she caused, the lies, the fighting, the betrayals.
She only wanted it to be over.
That’s all she remembers.
And then she remembers collapsing, and looking at her own blood flow sluggishly from her own veins, feeling the cool stone against her back, the bile rising in her throat as she looked in front of her, as she cupped a hand that’d bandaged all her wounds.
A hand that she couldn’t reach for now. A hand that wouldn’t save her again.
Well, she gasps, it’s over. She finally did it; he’s gone, and her world can begin to recuperate and rebuild into something she knows she should be excited to see. She knows she should be excited that children will only hear the stories of the war she ended but never have to experience it on their own flesh.
But she’s not.
She’s not because she loved him.
She loved both Phillip and Caleb.
She’s not because she lost the only person she had for three hundred years.
The war she ended. The war she started.
She thinks of the day she saw him again, how she sat criss-crossed in his mind, how she’d lost her voice from screaming, how her feet burned from running away from him, how he’d seized her by the ankles and wrists and forced her to listen.
She thinks about dancing under the pale embrace of the starlight with Caleb.
Phillip screams: You made me what I am!
She nods.
Caleb screams: You made me what I am!
She nods, clutching his leathery hand, cold and dead and dead for the better part of four hundred and she gathers her knees against her chest, still gripping him, and she nods against the bone of ortet, pulling him into her embrace.
She calls Phillip to her, thick vines dragging a limp corpse, and his head’s against her hip and ensconced with his brother, a hole in his chest where she vaguely remembers her fist being, the pattern of her stolen pants peeking out through it.
You made me what I am.
A woman sits with her back against a cave—her life laying dead before her at her own hand—and cries, and cries, and cries, and cries.