Interlude
Everything was still.
Not even the breeze would grace the wasted land.
The sun was a faraway thing, distant beyond the treetops, trying to flee beneath the horizon as fast as it could.
Everything was black and charred.
The clinic was no more than ash. The taste of smoke lingered in the air, like it had been permanently seared into the atmosphere.
Everything was gone.
The fire had spread quickly. The flames had roared from the main room, rising fast toward the bedrooms upstairs where patients and aides slept. Privya had roused everyone and seen to it that each person in her care made it safely outside.
Then she’d gone back in.
Nina and Corin had begged her not to, but Privya had darted into the flame-ridden building.
She’d emerged moments later with an armful of notebooks—two decades’ worth of research.
She’d barely passed the stack of papers into Corin’s arms before hurrying back inside.
This time, she returned with a basketful of elixirs.
Corin had tried to block her from going in again, physically barricading the door.
But Privya was determined to save her life’s work.
Corin and Nina waited, huddled together. Corin had said a prayer for the first time in fifteen years. The clinic kept burning and burning, the smoke covering the sky, the wood crumbling away.
Privya never emerged.
Finally, Nina went in after her, ducking low to avoid the acrid smoke. She carried Privya’s limp body outside, and Corin tried to resuscitate her.
Tried, but did not succeed.
The fire eventually burned itself out, starved for fuel after devouring every crevice of the clinic. Their pain, however, lingered on. Countless voices cried into the night, grieving for the woman who had given them a new life.
That sorrow did not fade as they said a prayer to bless Privya’s soul. Nor when they laid her in a hand-dug grave at the edge of the forest. Nor when they left to find shelter.
Elyse knelt at that grave. Her stomach was twisted with the chaos of too many emotions.
Sadness, anger, horror. She wrapped her arms around her middle, holding herself tight, as if she could smother the pain.
The greatest emotion of all, though, was the one that had a sob tearing from her throat.
It was guilt—guilt for the agony she had brought upon her friends.
For she knew without a doubt who had done this, and why.
Killian knew, too. He stood behind Elyse, his hand on her shoulder, tears on his cheeks. His pain was double-edged. He grieved for himself and the loss of a loving friend, but he also grieved for Elyse. He knew the weight of her guilt as it crushed her down into the soot-covered ground.
It was difficult to comfort someone when your own heart was breaking, a lesson Killian was already familiar with. But he would try.
Behind them, Nina and Corin held one another. The confidence Privya had given them had been torn away, a new trauma now piled onto their battered hearts. This time, though, they had each other. This time it would be okay. That’s what they told themselves.
Elyse was not ready when she rose from that grave.
She might have waited one hundred years, and she still would not have been ready.
But goodbyes were not patient, nor merciful.
So,l when her anguish turned to a dull throbbing in her core, she pulled her friends close and left the clinic—left Privya—for the last time.