11. Elia #2
She pulled away as the body of the scythe collapsed at her feet.
Violet blood trickled off into the stream it lay beside.
Its eyes remained open, but its strained and shallow breathing receded into silence.
Flora felt the blade slip from her fingers and heard the thud as it hit the ground.
She looked at her hands, bloody and trembling, feeling as if she were watching herself from afar.
There were voices rising all around in panic, but all she heard was muffled, incoherent noise. Flora watched as her people craned over Noec, begging and wailing, dressing and holding pressure on his wounds as if it could bring the life back into his eyes.
“Get him to the water,” Flora ordered, her own voice as distant as a memory. “Now.”
Heron, with a tear slipping down his cheek, let his bow and quiver fall to the ground.
He bent down over Noec and lifted him up gently, as if he were again just a boy.
Noec’s hair, darkened with blood and sweat, hung over the half-open glimmer of his green eyes.
The group followed Heron over to the shallowest part of the stream, where he laid Noec in the water gingerly.
The water swirled around him with violet and crimson.
Flora stood at a distance from Lunara’s healing waters, watching as the scythe began to crack and crumble like smoldering wood, its blood leaking through the fissures in its shell, seeping down and polluting the once clear iridescence of the water.
She stared at the now pitiful creature, unable to look at the boy who lay beyond it.
She dragged her feet along the edge of the water, stepping over the corpse as it fragmented and crumbled as her heart did the same.
Finally, her vision came upon his face. His eyes remained barely open, but his chest did not rise or fall.
She watched as absent tears and blood dripped from his cheek.
Beneath the holes in his bloody clothes, his wounds faded with the burning healing of the water, but he never once flinched at the pain.
Not a sound, even as his very ribs moved back into place.
There was one thing they all knew, but could not dare say: even Lunara’s healing blessing would not bring back the dead.
The villagers floated around him like ghosts, their lamenting voices no more than a distant hum.
Flora felt her eyes well, hot with tears, and she didn’t have the strength to hold them back.
Every night, she would come back to that shimmering waterfall and stand in that diamond water alone.
His warm voice would never again brighten her day with “good morning”, but she would still hear it every time she stepped out of the water.
Earth was not home, and Emyre was not home. Not without him.
And then, she thought, there was too much she hadn’t said; things she should have had a lifetime to say.
Their village suffocated in the grasp of despair. It was even as if the children had run out of tears, and all that remained was a strangling darkness as their parents squeezed their hands. They had lost Sona. They had lost Perri. But Noec? How could she lose Noec?
Flora fell to the edge of the water on her hands and knees, sobbing until her cries left her breathless. Softly, she mumbled his name, her eyes blurring as tears fell, rippling her pathetic reflection in the water below with a strange light.
Suddenly, she began to see herself from the outside: weak, alone, and a jinx upon anyone unfortunate enough to care for her.
Her sadness boiled over into anger, enraged with her own inadequacy, enraged that her courage hadn’t arrived in time to save him, and enraged that she hadn’t died in his place.
Augmenting her frustration was the whispers of those around her, every word of their quiet murmurs prodding her insecurity.
She tried to muffle her cries, but only trembled harder as she pulled her knees to her chest, hiding in the shadow of her hands.
“Flora.” She heard Heron’s sure and gentle voice, and she felt a warm hand on her shoulder. “Flora,” he repeated more urgently. “Flora, are you hurt?”
He took her shaking hands and pulled them from over her eyes. A man knelt in the water before her. He watched her with a veil of worry over sparkling emerald eyes. This voice, these hands—this wasn’t Heron.
“Noec?”
She couldn’t breathe as a warm smile smoothed across his lips.
“Noec!” Her broken sobs rolled into giddy laughs as they each studied one another.
Flora wrapped her arms around him, the water from his hair and clothes tingling as it dribbled onto her.
He pulled her close, so close that she could feel the enchanted water rushing across her knees.
“Noec, you’re alive,” she whispered, squeezing him tight.
She pulled away, placing a hand on his cheek. He smiled that joyful and true smile.
In a flurry of embers and cheers, they began to dissolve into another world. Even as their environment changed from a bright, lively autumn afternoon to a dark, quiet living room, their eyes never left one another.