The entire Plane.
Still.
Fi knelt at his side for a moment, a lifetime, until Antal wrapped an arm around her. She shrugged him off.
Then stood.
She backed away from the bed.
She walked out the door.
She stepped into the cold.
Inquiring eyes fell upon her.
She ignored them.
Tears streamed down her cheeks. She couldn’t make them stop.
She crossed the yard.
She walked faster. Something boiling in her chest.
Into the forest with shaking hands.
Shaking teeth.
Shaking heart.
She walked faster.
She found a Curtain.
She pushed herself through.
She was cold.
She was alone.
She screamed.
Fi opened her lungs and screamed, not another soul to hear her on that barren Shard, a scream across flat ice and into the depths of the Void, every echo swallowed by uncaring eternity. She screamed until the sound cracked and the cold air cut her throat, until all the emptiness surrounding her filled with her anguish.
And that wasn’t enough.
So Fi ran. Like she always did.
She pushed through another Curtain, onto the rock-cracked plain of another Shard. She screamed long enough to splinter stone, until the crunch of gravel beneath her boots grated like gnashing teeth. It wasn’t enough.
Seven years, and she’d never told Boden she was sorry.
Another Shard. Petrified trees stretched stony limbs to the Void sky, barren of leaves. She screamed until her voice echoed through each twisting bough, was carved forever onto the white of the trunks. It wasn’t enough.
Seven years of holding back, too terrified to tell him what he meant to her.
Another Shard. A lake like glass beneath a red aurora, a hum on the breeze like a funeral prayer. She screamed until ripples quaked the water’s surface, clawed stones from the beach and hurled them to shatter everything around her. It wasn’t enough.
This was how she’d always fled. Into nothingness, into the maze of dark mirror worlds beyond her cruel reality. Why was none of it enough this time?
