Chapter 47 #2
Wordlessly, I offer a near imperceptible dip of my chin.
Gray looks like he wants to say something else, but making the better choice, he simply does as I ask, collecting Draven with the help of Finlay and heading off in the opposite direction.
Draven’s sister joins them, glancing at me over her shoulder before she goes.
Her eyes are hardened, but there is empathy in them.
When they finally disappear, I mindlessly rise to my feet. My magic reaches out, happy and eager to sense familiar magics. Powerful magics. It is a feeling entirely at odds with everything else weighing down my muscles and clotting my heartbeats.
Not receiving an answer to the magic I need, I go from house to crumbled house, collecting items that will aid me.
I gather a thick, wooden branch. Old cloths.
I then pour remaining oils from lamps onto the cloths, tying them onto the branch with strategic knots. Then I find my final item: a matchbox.
When I light my makeshift torch, going from fallen to fallen and kissing them goodbye with flames, I sing the song Neilina sang while bleeding in my lap. I’m not sure why. Yet it pours from my lips, not needing to be understood right now, instead only needing to be felt. To be spoken.
I know she called it a ballad, but as I sing it, I can’t help but notice it sounds like a lament.
I pause, allowing myself to stare at the forming river of fires, my chest tight.
Draven said he would burn the world for me, and he did. Here, right before my eyes, a world of its own burns.
The words once felt romantic.
Now they taste like ash and bile on my tongue.
Night is well on its way by the time I finish lighting each body on fire.
I searched and searched for survivors. I could not find a single one.
It results in a winding string of glowing vermillion scattering like burning stars across the ground.
Perhaps it might be poetic to honor death this way, after all.
From stardust we came, between the ashes of what burns in the sky.
To ashes we return, until we remerge into the stars as nothing but dust.
When I return to the main area from my trek down the southern trail, my body exhausted in so many more ways than one, I find a person kneeling at the center of the many ongoing fires, shoulders hunched and unmoving.
I know within an instant who it is.
I stop at the black-stained stream, dropping my torch into the tainted waters. Then I walk to Casimir, kneeling down beside him.
He does not say anything for a long, long time.
“What happened?” he finally asks, his voice both alarmingly steady and hollow.
I swallow, chewing at my cheek as my eyes watch all the smoke rise into the sky. The cloying smell which should not be familiar to me, but is, swims in the air. “They came for me.” I don’t elaborate. I know I don’t need to.
“I see.”
Casimir doesn’t move. He just stares silently. Not speaking. Not raging. Just…frozen.
“Casimir, I…” I pause, biting down on my lip, not sure what to say. There is nothing I can say. Still, I try. “I am so sorry. This…this is…”
“This is what it always comes to,” he murmurs, still not having moved an inch.
“This is horrific,” I nearly sob. Tears prick my eyes once more, and I truly wonder how much more my heart can withstand and still beat.
“Yet it always comes to this, doesn’t it?” He finally turns to face me.
I am gutted beyond the point of repair at what I see.
Every inch of his composure—every single muscle dictating his movements—shows a sullen acceptance for what’s before him.
But not his eyes. Gods, no. Confusion, shock, incomprehensible pain—it’s all there.
His eyes show someone who is beyond that of a broken man; they are of a broken soul. Lost. Forsaken. Beyond repair.
My bottom lip quivers at the sight. Just last night, he and I…we were laughing together. Discussing eating cake at dinner. He was thawing, his eyes warming.
Now he’s more frozen than ever before.
“It always comes to this,” he murmurs again, more for himself than me.
“Murder. Persecution. It did centuries ago, and it continues to do so today. Nothing has changed, and it never will. Humanity is broken. It is flawed beyond repair. Corrupt, self-serving, and only attentive to the side of the narrative that is most comfortable to believe. The side that best serves power.”
“Cas…” I reach for him, simply feeling like I want to hold him right now. Gods, he just lost everyone he loves. His entire family. How is someone supposed to reconcile that?
He shakes me off, his expression cold and empty as he refuses my touch.
Wordlessly, while still staring at the crackling flames surrounding us, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a dainty, leather-corded necklace.
It has a small amethyst stone carved into the shape of a flower resting at the center.
He barely glances in my direction as he slowly takes my hand.
Casimir places the necklace in my palm, gently guiding my fingers to close around it.
“To replace the one you lost.”
My heart squeezes violently in my chest. “Cas,” I croak, all other words feeling lodged in my throat. “I am so sorry. I—”
He holds up his other hand. “Don’t,” he whispers, the harsh sound entering the world softly.
He removes his fingers from mine, dropping them into his lap.
“Go,” he commands, the instruction a fractured rasp.
“I won’t come after you again. I have no reason to fight anymore. No need for you. You are…free.”
“Please.” Tears blur my vision. “I don’t want to leave you. Not like this. Not after—”
“Go,” he demands again, the word still a whisper yet booming through my skull as if shouted.
“Come with me,” I say without thinking. I reach for his hand with my free one, and I squeeze, trying to bring him back from the void he’s sinking hopelessly into.
“Don’t stay here alone. Don’t isolate yourself from the world for two more centuries.
You—you don’t deserve that. There is good in you, and you have perspective.
I have seen it on more than one occasion.
” The necklace practically burns against the skin of my palm while my silken training clothes sear the rest of me.
“‘Good,’” he scoffs lowly. “What a fickle word.” His eyes latch onto me, brutal and unrelenting. “You only now think I am capable of good because you began to understand what I was fighting for. If you had not, you would never deem me or my actions as ‘good.’”
I don’t let him deter me. “So let’s help Solaya understand them too. Understand you. People need people. It’s how we stay the path. Come with me.”
His smile quivers on his lips. “I am sorry, darling, but I have bled and burned enough for those kingdoms already. I have no desire to help them understand. My only desire is to watch them choke on their own self-righteousness and burn by their own oil-drenched sins. To destroy each other with their very own hands.”
“But—”
“Lyra.” His voice is entirely devoid of warmth.
Detached from any prior fondness he once used when uttering my name.
“If you do not leave now, then my temper will snap, and I will show you how far removed from ‘good’ I truly am by slaughtering all those within my territory.” His already frigid eyes somehow grow colder. “That includes you.”
I fight off my tremor, lifting my chin instead. “You don’t mean that.”
“Test me then, if you are so keen on gambling with your life.”
“Cas,” I plead, ignorantly reaching for him again.
He jerks away. “Stop calling me that. Cas is dead. Cas has been dead. I was nothing more than an ignorant fool for allowing myself to forget that.”
I make one last effort. My final, pathetic plea. “What if I said I need you? Want you in Solaya with me?”
“You don’t.”
“And if I said I care about you?”
His jaw sets in a hard line. Silently, with slow, rigid movements, he rises from the ground, dusting off his clothes. He only spares me a glance. “Then that was your mistake to make.”
He walks deep into the sea of burning flames, disappearing behind the smoke.