“What happened to you is horrible,” I said. “But this has to stop. You must free yourself from the pain, or you will never stop hurting.”
For a breath, nothing moved. No whisper. No pulse. Only the blight’s darkness pressing against my skin like a second, suffocating flesh.
Then the shadows shivered.
Not in anger this time. In uncertainty.
A sound rose from them, thin as cracked glass. A question, not a threat.
“How?”
The single word struck through me, raw and trembling, as if hundreds of torn souls had spoken it in the same breath. I felt them waver, wavering like children lost in smoke, unable to remember the sky.
My throat tightened.
“You must let go,” I said softly. “Not of who you were… but of what was done to you. You cannot carry that pain any longer. It is killing you. It is killing everything.”
The mass recoiled again, but not from my voice, from what it remembered.
Black lightning rippled across their bodies. The shape of the falseKael flickered beside them, snarling in silence, as if the memory itself refused to release its hold.
Another voice rose, broken and desperate.
“We tried.”
“I know,” I breathed. “And I’m not asking you to forget. Only to stop clinging to the hurt that chained you here. The storm outside—it’s not your enemy. And I’m not. You are not alone anymore.”
The shadows trembled like a field of reeds caught between two winds—the new storm and their ancient grief.
For the first time, they did not strike.
For the first time, they listened.
“Free yourself of the past,” I whispered. “Do not become its echo.”
The crowd softened, the tar loosening its grip until it slid from their forms in slow, trembling ribbons. Faces emerged where only shadow had stood, hollow cheeks, quivering mouths, eyes brimming with sorrow so old it seemed carved into them. Loneliness clung to them like a shroud, yet beneath it flickered something fragile. Something close to hope.
“That’s it…” I whispered.
Black lightning split the air in two, separating me from the crowd. The false Kael reformed at their backs, rising from their shadows like a vengeful echo dragged out of the dark. Its shape twitched, unstable, its face a warped snarl of his, Kael’s features stretched too thin, too hollow.
It clung to the blight like a parasite desperate not to be torn free.
“No…” I whispered. “You are not real.”
The thing lunged.
Its storm crashed into mine, a torrent of black lightning and twisted memories, slashing across my mind with the force of a blade. I staggered, the air ripped from my lungs as the creature seized my shoulders, its hooks sinking into my skin, pouring cold tar into me.
“You will not take them,” it hissed, its voice layered with hundreds of griefs. “You will not destroy what we are.”
Pain detonated through me—blight, storm, remembrance, all at once. Bursts of black lightning swallowed my vision. It was trying to push itself back inside me, to anchor deeper, to drown out the souls who had begun to listen.
“No,” I gasped. “You are not them. You are the pain.”
The false Kael’s grip tightened, black vines writhing down my arms, forcing me onto my knees again. It bent close, forehead nearly touching mine, lightning cracking behind its teeth.
“You cannot save them,” it whispered. “You are too small. Too weak. You break.”
