Chương 91: What Grief Builds

The snow ahead of Elian had stopped being white a long time ago. It ran the color of rust in every direction now, churned and thick, and through it walked his brother, moving the way weather moves... no hesitation in the stride, no consideration paid to what stood in front of it, only the flat, ceaseless motion of something that had already decided the whole field belonged to it. Elian followed three steps behind and could not close the distance.

The first creature Keth found was small, fast, low to the ground — a rat-thing grown large as a dog, too many legs scrabbling for purchase on ice-slick stone. It didn't have time to turn before Keth's blade found it, one clean motion, barely a pause in his own stride to account for the kill. The body folded sideways into the snow and Keth stepped over it without looking down. The second was larger.

A wolf-thing, alone, separated from whatever pack it had once run with, and it lunged the moment it caught his scent — teeth bared, a sound tearing loose from its throat that should have, by every law Elian understood about fear, made a boy stop and think. Keth's barrier answered instead, catching the lunge mid-air and folding around it in a shape Elian had never once seen the Echo take before — narrow, hungry, closing like a fist rather than a wall.

The wolf-thing's spine gave with a sound that reached Elian's ears a half-second after his mind had already, mercifully, tried to file it as something else. The third and fourth came together, twin shapes born from the same wrongness, and Keth didn't slow for either of them.

A spear formed and unformed twice in the span of three seconds, punching through one throat and then the next, and blood arced black against the frost in twin fans that Keth walked through without breaking stride, without lifting a hand to wipe his own face clean of what had landed there. The fifth tried to flee. Keth caught it anyway — the barrier stretching thin and fast across twenty feet of open ground, wrapping around a fleeing shape that had done nothing in that moment except be afraid, and closed.

Elian counted without meaning to. He had learned the habit from Lira, once, in a training yard that felt now like it belonged to some other, gentler war, and he hated, more than almost anything else tonight, that the habit had chosen this exact moment to finally, fully take root in him. Five. Keth turned toward the sixth without pause, without breath, without anything in his face that resembled a boy Elian had grown up beside.

"Elian." The voice came from behind him, soft, familiar in a way that made something in his chest seize before his mind had finished understanding why. He turned. Nothing stood there. Only snow, and smoke, and the vast churning dark of a battlefield that did not care, even slightly, whether a boy turned around to look for ghosts in it.

"Elian, look at him. Really look." He turned back. Keth had found a sixth creature now, something low and segmented, and the kill came fast, brutal, economical — no wasted motion, no hesitation, and no anything else either. No relief. No horror. No recognition, even, that what he was doing might once have cost him something to do.

"That's not him," the voice said, and this time, when Elian turned again, a shape stood where nothing had stood a moment before — freckled, grinning even now, a spear balanced loose against one shoulder the way it had always rested there, patrol after patrol, a lifetime ago.

"That's not my Keth anymore, and you know it, and you're just standing here watching it happen."

"Talia—""Don't." The grin didn't waver, and that, somehow, was worse than if it had.

"Don't say my name like that's going to fix anything. I've been dead a long time, Elian. I don't get to help. I only get to watch, same as you, and I am so tired of watching people I love disappear one piece at a time while everybody else decides it's easier to look away." The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

The seventh creature screamed as it died, and the scream cut through Elian's chest like something physical, and when he looked again the field had blurred at its edges, his own vision swimming with something he refused, for one more second, to properly name.

"He can't feel it," Talia's shape said, quieter now, walking beside him though her boots left no print at all in the churned snow.

"Whatever's happening to him. I don't think he can feel any of it landing. Look at his face, Elian. Look at what's missing from it." Elian looked. Keth's face, when the torchlight found it clean enough to see, held nothing at all — no grief, no fury even, nothing that resembled the boy who used to touch his own scar and feel, in the space around the dead tissue, everything a person was supposed to feel. Just flatness. Just motion. A body doing violence because violence was the only shape left available to it.

"You have to stop him," Talia said.

"You know that. You've known it for the last ten minutes and you haven't moved."

"I don't know how."

"You do." Her voice had gone gentle in a way that hurt worse than anger would have.

"You've always known how. You just don't want to pay for it."

Another voice joined hers before Elian could answer, warmer, looser, carrying a grin even through words that held no humor in them at all.

"She's right, you absolute disaster." Aurelian's shape fell into step on Elian's other side, and something in Elian's chest broke a little further just at the sound of it, familiar and wrong and gone, gone, gone.

"I died doing the one useful thing I ever managed with my life, and I'd really rather you didn't waste it standing here having a conversation with two dead people instead of saving the one who's still breathing."

"I can't lose him too."

"You're not going to lose him." Aurelian's grin didn't fully hold this time, something raw showing underneath it.

"But if you don't do something in about the next thirty seconds, you're going to lose whatever's left of him, even standing right there in front of you, breathing. That's worse, Elian. I promise you that's worse."

The eighth kill came fast, ugly, Keth's blade finding a deer-thing's throat with no ceremony at all, and something in the way the creature's legs kept twitching after it had already fallen finally, finally broke whatever had been holding Elian in place.

"Keth!" His own voice tore out raw, cracking on the single syllable, and Keth did not turn. Did not slow. The word simply passed through him the way everything else tonight had apparently learned to pass through him, unfelt, unremarkable, one more piece of noise in a field made entirely of noise. Talia's voice, close now, almost gentle.

"He can't hear you like that anymore. You know what you have to do." Elian understood, in the same breath that let him finally accept it, exactly what she meant. He had felt the shape of the choice building in his own chest for the better part of the last hour — since Wren's hand went loose in his, since the wrongness had struck him like vertigo with no direction to fall in, since every quiet, cumulative cost of a night that had already asked more of him than any single night should ever be allowed to ask.

He had one more thing left to give it. He understood that now, standing in the churned red snow with two dead friends walking beside him and refusing, out of love, to let him look away.

"I accept," Elian said, and his own voice did not sound like his voice at all, "that Keth becomes normal." The words left him and did not stop leaving him. Something vast opened beneath his own sternum, a door he had felt trying to open for a year and a half and had always, carefully, kept shut — and this time he did not shut it.

He let it stand open, let whatever waited on the other side pour through unchecked, and understood, distantly, floating somewhere just outside his own body, that this was what it had always been going to cost, sooner or later, the very first time he asked his Echo for something this large. Blood found his nose first. Then his ears, warm and sudden, running fast down both sides of his jaw.

His vision doubled, tripled, the whole field smearing into red and white and red again, and still the word held, still the acceptance poured out of him in an unbroken current he no longer had any power to stop or slow. I accept that Keth becomes normal. Somewhere ahead of him, through the doubling of his own vision, he saw his brother's stride finally, finally falter.

Keth stopped mid-motion, blade still raised, and something crossed his ruined, blood-streaked face that had not lived there in over an hour — confusion, first, raw and childlike, and then, arriving behind it like a tide finally permitted to come in, something far larger and far worse. He looked down at his own hands. At the blade still clutched in a grip gone white-knuckled. At the field around him, churned and red and littered with things that had, until very recently, been alive.

"Elian," he said, and his voice cracked wide open on the single syllable, "Elian, what did I—what's—" He turned. Found his brother on his knees in the snow, blood running freely now from nose and ears and the corners of both eyes, his whole body trembling with an effort that had clearly cost him everything he had left to spend.

"Elian!" Keth was moving before the name had finished leaving him, the blade falling forgotten into the snow, and he reached his brother's side and dropped down beside him, hands hovering, uncertain, terrified in a way that had nothing left in it of the flat, ceaseless thing he'd been only seconds before.

"What did you do," Keth said, and this time his voice broke properly, raw and young and finally, finally full of everything that had been missing from it all night.

"What did you do, Elian, you weren't supposed to—""You're back," Elian managed, blood thick in his own throat, his voice thin and proud and utterly exhausted.

"That's all. That's all that matters right now."

Keth's whole face crumpled, and the sound that came out of him then belonged to no careful, measured grief at all... it tore loose raw and ugly and enormous, both hands fisting in his own hair, his shoulders shaking with a violence that made Elian's own battered chest ache to watch.

"I couldn't feel anything," Keth said, the words coming broken, half-swallowed by his own sobbing.

"Aurelian died and I couldn't feel it, I couldn't feel anything, I killed I don't even know how many things and none of it — none of it touched me, Elian, I thought something was broken in me forever, I thought—""It's back," Elian said, weak, reaching for his brother's hand with fingers that trembled too hard to properly close around it.

"Whatever it took. I don't know if it's back all the way. But you're crying, Keth. You wouldn't be crying if it hadn't come back at least a little." Keth's hand found his properly this time, gripping hard enough to hurt, and he pressed his forehead against Elian's shoulder and simply broke, fully, everything that had been dammed up behind that flat, terrible stillness finally given somewhere safe enough to go.

"I can only feel fear," Keth said, muffled, wrecked.

"And I can still feel wanting to kill things. That's it. That's all that's left where it used to be. Everything else — Aurelian, Talia, you, all of it — I have to work to find it now. It's not just there anymore. I have to go looking." Elian held him as best his own trembling arms allowed, blood still tracking slow and warm down his own face, and understood, distantly, that somewhere in the last several minutes both of them had paid a price neither would ever fully finish paying.

"Then we'll go looking together," he said.

"For as long as it takes. I'm not going anywhere; and I finally understand you well enough to promise you that." End Of Chapter Ninety One