Chapter 28 Toran
Toran
The room was empty.
A breeze teased the open window, the hanging curtains rippling hard with the same feeling surging within him.
Nes was gone.
She had left him behind. They were a team, and she’d said she would wait, but still—he should have known better.
The empty room was proof enough. She didn’t wait.
And he was alone.
Toran told himself he wasn’t bothered. He knew Nes. He knew how contrary she was, how she liked to thwart him and flaunt her independence.
But anything could happen to her, on her own in the Ditch.
She’d left.
The shaking started in his left thumb. An innocent jitter that quickly infected his whole hand. He laid the hand on the hilt of his sword, curling his fingers around the wrapped leather, hoping the feel of the metal would ground him.
But all he saw was this empty room and the space where she’d been.
And then another room, another empty space from another time.
A ring sitting on the quilted bed in Loriana’s old room.
The cut of the yellow crystal in its center, the six silver prongs holding the stone in place, the etching along the band—her engagement ring.
The ring that should have been on her finger, should have never left it after he slid it over her knuckles.
Loriana had promised him she’d wait for his return, promised she would marry him. But she’d broken those promises when she left Gadore.
The shaking spread up his arm, across his chest and down. Loriana had left him. Nes had left him.
His every thought was suddenly consumed by those words, his brain bashing them into his skull until his head hurt.
How dare she leave me.
His shaking increased, the uncontrollable anger inside him bursting out in motion.
She’d left him.
A shimmer in the corner of the room had him turning his head. Loriana’s ghost stood there, the wooden paneling on the wall making her white nightgown appear smudged and dirty. She stared at him, a sort of hopeless pity on her face.
He didn’t need her pity.
“How could you?” The words were seething, every syllable popping with the anger taking over. “How could you leave me?”
She only blinked at him.
“I loved you, and you left!” he shouted. The words came, and he could not have tamed them if he tried. He no longer wanted to try. “You took your things and sailed home, breaking your promises, and for what? To get yourself killed?”
Her mouth remained closed, her lips tight.
“Why’d you do it? Tell me,” he demanded. “Tell me why!”
Loriana’s ghost took a single step toward him.
But real or hallucination, he didn’t want to see her anymore.
He couldn’t stand to look at her and not know why she’d abandoned him.
Why she’d taken his love, then absconded with it across the sea.
Because of her, he’d taken up drinking. Because of her, his life had begun to feel like a curse.
He grabbed the thing closest to him, a pitcher of water atop the dresser, and chucked it at Loriana.
The water arced across the room, falling in a long splatter to the floor. Glass soared through Loriana’s form to smash against the wall so hard a few pieces embedded themselves in the grain of the wood.
He peeled his eyes away from the broken glass, lifting them to the spot where Loriana’s ghost had been. She was gone.
Alone. Again.
When he’d learned of her death, he’d felt as if his world had been erased, as if the life he’d had had been smudged away. He’d wanted to choke the very air from his lungs even as he gasped for breath between sobs.
Toran would not cry tonight. Not as he had the night he learned of Loriana’s death.
When he regained control and the shaking stopped, he began cleaning up the broken glass.
His anger wilted to petals of agitation as he took care not to cut himself.
Pieces swept into the trash, he positioned himself on the edge of the bed facing the window he knew she’d come back through.
Sat on the bed and tried to convince himself Nes wasn’t dead like Loriana.
Like the rest of his legion members. He sat there and tried to convince himself Quint’s search for siren hair wasn’t the suicide mission Toran feared it was.
He tried to convince himself he was not alone.
And when he couldn’t convince himself of anything, he threw a blanket over all his emotions and let the feeling of nothing take over.
Downstairs, he heard the swaying bodies and cacophonous laughter. Outside, there were lanterns for open stalls and flames flickering behind mixed glass. There were bottles and boxes and bodies.
But all he felt was nothing.
Nothing as he retreated from the world like the coward he was. Like the coward he’d always been. Because everyone knew—it was only the cowards who survived.