Chapter 6 #3
I didn’t kill her, but my sorrow and pain can’t stand for anything else.
She moves to the side, and I continue walking, meeting the eyes of every child in my path.
A boy, skinny and lithe, holding a toy to his chest desperately, one of his legs missing.
Two teen girls holding hands as they stand still, their eyes tracking me.
A baby crawling along the ground, wailing like all he wants is his mother, her milk.
More and more of them appear, and the brush against my soul turns to a scraping, nails fighting for purchase on a smooth surface. It’s uncomfortable, but there are no relived memories. No pain and anguish beyond what I feel faced with the reality of what happened to the innocents before me.
Swallowing through it all, I keep whispering to them. Sweet nothings, apologies for what they’ve gone through.
“You are loved,” I whisper, still thinking of Lyra.
Though my parents weren’t killed here, weren’t killed like this, I still know what it’s like to lose someone to the wrath of the gods.
I think of what they might want to hear.
“Those you left behind miss you, cherish you. They have not forgotten what happened. Your memory lives on with those who remember you on the earthly plane.”
Thorian and Fenric follow when I lead, and I wonder if they can feel the souls around us. If they can even hear what I’m saying, or if they’re trying to tune everything out.
Walking through the burial ground is exhausting, both physically and emotionally.
By the time we stumble out through to the other side, I feel much like I did when grieving my parents.
I’m cried out and limp, my body heavy with the weight of the feelings I had no idea how to process.
And yet, being out of the graveyard eases the feelings just a little.
“We’re through,” I tell them. “You’re safe.”
“Nyx,” Thorian whispers, dropping his blindfold down around his neck and reaching for me. He leans down, tracing his nose along mine, his thumbs brushing over my cheeks before he kisses me. I sigh into it. It’s a kiss that gives more than it takes, one that’s not wanting, but supporting.
Loving.
When he steps back, breathing hard, Fenric slides in, pulling me to him and putting his arms around me, holding me as my knees start to buckle.
As always, his embrace is warm, and I realize after meeting his heat that I’m shivering.
It’s drizzling lightly now, the thunder still groaning ominously in the distance, mist still pushing up to our knees.
“Nyx,” Fenric says, kissing me briefly and pulling back to push his hair away from his forehead. “That was unbelievable.”
“I could feel their power,” Thorian says.
“I could too.” Fenric nods in the demi-god’s direction. “It took everything in me not to pull away the blindfold. It was like they were pushing for it. I could hear you talking, but I’m not sure what you said.”
"That was… incredible," Thorian says, and when I turn to look at him, meeting his eyes, I see understanding there. Like maybe he heard the things I was saying to the little ones. “Nyx Nocturne, you are the strongest person I have ever had the pleasure of knowing.”
“I’ll second that,” Fenric says, pulling me in and saying the words into my hair. A second later, Thorian’s arms are around me, and I realize I’m surrounded by them yet again.
The men who, somewhere between the swamp and the graves and every dark mile in between, stopped feeling like teammates and started feeling like something I don't have a word for yet. They release me, smiling, and they start toward the trees, leaving the trial behind.
I linger, then look back at the graveyard.
The Ashen are still there. I don't know what I expected. That crossing through would change things, or somehow set them free. But the shapes are still moving between the headstones, dark and slow and small. So small. There’s the ghostly outline of a child crouching near a grave.
Another standing at the edge of the field, face turned toward us, as though watching us leave.
Something pulls in my chest. A hook, deep and certain.
I think of what it felt like to reach them. The way the grief had threatened to swallow me whole, and then shifted into something else entirely. The connection, recognition, the particular ache of one lost person finding another. They had responded to that. To being seen.
And now I'm about to walk away from them, leave them here, trapped in this in-between place, never able to rest, never able to find whatever comes after. The trial is over for us, but nothing has changed for them.
I think of my mother. My father. The way losing them taught me that grief left unwitnessed festers until it poisons everything around it. Someone saw these children's suffering today and walked straight through it on the way to their own ambitions.
I’m not sure I can be that person.
When I think of my parents, of their integrity, of how they always chose the harder, kinder thing, I feel it settle into place.
All at once, I know what I have to do.