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Night had fallen by the time the villagers hauled Jenna back. Her efforts had exhausted her too much to resist.
“They’re alive,” she insisted through her tears. “I know they are. They must be somewhere, further down the river–”
Her elders only shook their heads and forced her into a bed. Her grandmother did all she could to ‘talk sense’ into her – Even if they had survived the boulder, in what sort of state would they have crawled out of the river? Everyone knew monsters and angered animals continued to swarm the area. Jenna herself had fled from some while on her fruitless search along the river. And she had her strength still. But her brother and parents... Injured, half-drowned, depleted of their Psynergy…
With good reason had the village’s own search party failed. Perhaps that came as a kindness. Would ‘closure’ have truly paid for the horror of…
“But they’re not dead! They can’t be! Not all of them! My parents would never have let… Felix, at least… I have to go back! Please, let me go back! Somewhere out there, they must…”
But the village elders didn’t let her, and by the time they judged her stable enough to go without supervision, she knew the time had passed for her to make any difference. Still she hoped. Maybe they had survived, injured, and just lacked the strength to travel. Maybe they had lost their bearings, camped out somewhere in the wilderness, and still sought out a settlement to give them the directions back. Maybe they had somehow lost their memories…
Maybe, maybe, maybe. But no one ever returned. And so Jenna eventually gave up and gave in – useless, selfish, cowardly failure of a daughter and sister that time had made her – and continued on with life. Her grandmother needed her. Her parents and brother would have wanted it that way.
Surely.
(And if something seemed oddly familiar about the masked man staying upstairs at the village inn… Jenna had grown up enough to waste no more of her time on idle delusions. And so she turned her back on his stammering self and headed after Isaac and Garet, forcing herself to focus on the excitement of the trip to Sol Sanctum...)