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Clancy wakes up with lead in his stomach and a pounding in his head. He doesn’t remember much about last night, just the fire, the alcohol, and the Torchbearer’s arms cradling him safely as they slept. But hangovers have never felt like this before.
Something’s wrong.
He stumbles out of his tent, making it only a few steps before he’s throwing up in the dirt. But there’s no one around to see his embarrassment. There’s no one around at all. And the panic he’d felt upon waking kicks up another few notches.
He checks every tent, his unease doubling every time he finds another one empty. And he’s so focused on that, and on the campfire, slowly burnt down to embers with no one to tend it, that he doesn’t even realize it’s sundown and not sunrise until the sky begins to darken overhead.
How long was he asleep?
He searches his mind for his last memory. The Torchbearer had kissed him softly before burying his face in Clancy’s neck. His voice whisper quiet as he’d said, “I love you. You know that, right?”
Clancy knew that, Clancy knows that, but what Clancy doesn’t know is where the hell everyone has gone. And then it hits him.
Two weeks ago, Clancy had finally made it home. Two weeks ago, Clancy had been reunited with the Torchbearer, the real one, not the figment tasked with guiding him back. And two weeks ago, the Torchbearer had kissed him, not softly that time, and told him that if he ever lost him again, he’d die.
No, he thinks, and “No!” he shouts, though no one is around to hear him. They couldn’t have left, could they have? The plan was to attack Dema in one week’s time, for the banditos to create a disturbance in the city while Clancy went after Nico. Take down the king and the rest will fall. But that was supposed to be in a week.
Clancy runs, his feet carrying him wildly in the direction of the city, his heart pounding in time to the fears circling his thoughts like vultures. They can’t be dead; he can’t be dead. He tries to force these thoughts into the swirling mess inside his head but every time he does, the fear comes back at him with a vengeance, threatening to cripple him as he runs.
It’s the middle of the night when he finally makes it. The city is on fire, the world around him burning as he steps over the bodies of his fallen friends, green and yellow splashed with blood. And Clancy might be sick again if he had anything but fear and rage inside his stomach right now.
He looks down at the antlers, picked up without him even really realizing it, still clutched in his fists like a lifeline. And then he looks up at the tower, tears in his eyes, running down his cheeks, as he raises his hands, closes his eyes, and reaches out.
He can hear himself sobbing when the seize takes hold, can hear his own grief like an echo as he opens his eyes and looks up from the floor of a darkened room. He’s in the tower. He is in the tower, the Torchbearer is, his body not even cold yet despite being drained of the life that had lit him up like a thousand suns. And as that knowledge washes over Clancy, all he’s left with in its wake is incomprehensible rage.
He's screaming, his voice ragged with it, the emotion primal as he gets to his borrowed feet and meets the eyes of the bishop he was supposed to kill.
“Hello, Clancy,” Nico says, and though Clancy cannot see his face, he can hear the smile in his voice.
It will be the last one Nico ever wears.
They fight, the dagger the Torchbearer had died clutching against the one the bishop always carries with him, but in the end, it doesn’t matter. Nico can’t kill what’s already dead, and Clancy will not stop until Nico’s lungs are as empty as the Torchbearer’s, his rage carrying him on through the fight until Nico is nothing but a lifeless heap on the stone floor.
He falls to his knees, dropping the blade so he can wrap his arms around himself, around the Torchbearer, one last time. His face buried in his shoulder, in the fabric of the Torchbearer’s hoodie, as he chases the scent of him before it’s gone forever.
“I love you, too,” he says with the Torchbearer’s voice. “You know that, right?” But the Torchbearer does not respond. And so in the end, all that Clancy is left with is the silence of the dead.