3. The Way The Fates Found
Haera
Tears were charting frantic paths down her cheeks. She knew why the delicate sign of sorrow graced her face, and for a moment, she made no effort to stop them on their journey. The silence was taunting her with its emptiness. Mocking her vulnerability. Suddenly ashamed, she swiped the moisture away. A slick liquid smeared onto her face in its place. It was warm, and there was more of it still, all over her hands. The tranquil wind moving through the trees was even more mocking than the silence’s cold shoulder, and though the clearing it was whispering through was still, it was void of calm.
Bodies.
Almost all of them were decapitated, their fragmented parts heavy on the blood drunk earth. Not a single blade of grass beneath them had escaped the tinge of carnage, and the flowers not trampled raised their heads proudly to the pink and purple sky. She watched the wind caress them, their heads swaying in the wind. Their petals bore the stains that bled through from the blood shower that had rained upon them. One was crushed under her weight as she fell to her knees at his side.
Everything was stained.
The jagged edges of the ratty clothing that hung from his body swallowed the pints of blood that leaked from his wounds. She tried to steady her hands as she reached for his face. He was caught in the slow throes of death, only partially present in the dimension of the living. Many had met their deaths before him, and after him there would be more. But looking into his blue eyes ripped at the fibres under her skin. Her throat closed in a quiet demand to go with him while she held his gaze, and only when her gaze raised to the clouds did her ability to breathe return .
The prayers for help that had tumbled out of her lips over and over hadn’t changed the vision before her. None of the gods was coming to save her father.
Reality felt like a cold dagger. A blade to her skin.
The thread that had brought and bound her to this plane of existence was quivering, gasping for breath, and fading away before her eyes. Her palms trembled against his cold cheek, and then he was moving. Raising slowly, the arm he had left sought hers while his other lay blue and mangled in the tufts of grass just beyond them. Gasping and sputtering from the immense effort, he took her hand into his. Twilight crawled into the sky though the sun still beamed, and his eyes dimmed, just in time to the light in the sky as it was fading.
In the disappearing blaze of light around them, she looked into his eyes. Eyes that matched hers. Exact to the shades of icy blue that stained the muscles of his irises. They dulled segund by segund, wavering between relaxing completely, and staying present. He was fighting to keep them open as the void beckoned to him louder, needing to look at her for as long as he could until he had no choice but to let go.
He gasped again, the jagged gash down the side of his throat oozing and sputtering harder as he tried to speak. The gurgle of the wound was horrifying in the otherwise silent clearing, and he gasped roughly again, desperate to swallow air instead of his own blood. His grip on hers tightened, his eyes met hers, and then, words.
“I’m sorry, Haera.”
His heaving chest quieted, and after another moment, his ragged breathing silenced. The shattering of her heart was so loud that it echoed around her, splintering like glass and falling into her stomach. Her vision spun as she looked at his peaceful expression, and though pain was cleaving through her empty chest, silence placed its kiss upon her lips. It was quiet save for the wind in the trees again.
The sun was rising over the hill, and her brows furrowed. It had just set. But then the whispers of a song took her hand, pulling her back to awareness as she followed it. She was in bed. It was soft around her. She curled into the blankets, knees to chest after looking around the room. Her bookcase was across from her bed and her father’s eyes looked back into hers from her open locket on the dresser. The skyline was outside the window, the bed was beneath her. She was in her room – not in the forest. It was just a memory. A memory that haunted her nights, mumbling dark scenes of emptiness into her ear that warped her dreams into the same sequence nigh after nigh. Swiping the moisture on her cheeks away again, she looked down at her hands. This time, there was no blood on them.