Chapter 8 Unknown
? Thorne ?
I don’t arrive anywhere. There’s no moment where I understand that I’m dead.
There’s just a loosening, a thinning, like the world has been gently unfastened from me and I’m drifting through what remains.
Time doesn’t move forward anymore. It folds.
It loops. It spills. I’m everywhere I ever was all at once, and somehow it all feels quieter than it should.
I thought there would be a reckoning. Instead there’s this soft, unbearable clarity, the kind you only get when nothing can be changed anymore.
I see my life not as a story but as a pattern.
All the places I stood still so others could move.
All the moments I absorbed without comment.
All the times I stayed when leaving would’ve been easier and maybe smarter.
I wasn’t brave about it. I didn’t think of it as sacrifice.
I just knew how to hold things, how to make myself useful by just… being there.
They come back to me slowly. Arden first, because she changed the shape of everything without ever trying to.
She was family in the way that isn’t possessive or wanting.
She was blood without blood. Survival without transaction.
I loved her because she kept standing when she shouldn’t have been able to.
Because she kept choosing to exist even when the world taught her not to.
I loved Rafe too because he loved others like it was a rebellion, because he felt everything at full volume—even when the world had silenced him.
And Kane. Fuck. I loved Kane—I loved my brother—because his anger was honest and alive and never small, and because despite that, he was never angry toward me.
They weren’t separate to me. Creed. They were a constellation.
I loved being part of that, the quiet center they orbited without realizing it.
I didn’t need them to love me back the same way.
I never did. Loving them was enough. Being there was enough.
Staying was enough. And maybe that’s why it hurts now in this strange, distant way.
Not because I’m gone, but because I can finally see how much of myself I gave without ever keeping anything for later.
There is no later. There’s just this drifting awareness of having been necessary.
If there’s anything like regret left in me, it isn’t about dying.
It’s about not being able to stay just one moment longer.
About not being there for the next thing they’ll face.
About knowing that the shape I held for them will collapse and they’ll have to learn how to carry the weight I held themselves.
I hope they don’t mistake my absence for abandonment.
I hope they know I didn’t leave because I was done loving them. Never.
I think now about all the things I never said because they didn’t need saying.
How I assumed there would be more time to keep holding things together.
How I believed my role was infinite simply because it had lasted this long.
But I was there, and I was theirs, and I’d do it all again without hesitation.
Kiss her. Hug my brother. Learn sign language.
Fight at their sides, fight distantly, fight always.
Catch fire just by proximity to my little flame and dance in her warmth.
I loved, and I was loved. What a fucking miracle. It’s all I remember—them. Everything else, all that shit, it’s just gone, and so am I. Finally.