And suddenly, I don’t want Auren anywhere near this. The dead bodies of the soldiers—my evil, festering father—they don’t deserve to be in the same space as her. In this same atmosphere.
I have to take her away from this place. Far away. So I pick her up and I turn from Glassworth Palace, and then, I start to walk.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t care. I’m just following this incessant need to carry Auren away. As if putting distance between her and the place where she was killed will somehow make the claws of death recede from her, to force her from its clutches.
Or maybe I just want to take her from the land that has so utterly betrayed her. The land that let her be stolen away and then let her blood soak the soil when she returned.
I leave behind the death at the palace’s courtyard. Trail down the long slope from the plateau. Avoid the river. Bypass the road that forks off toward Lydia.
My gaze stays straight ahead while I keep Auren’s body cradled in my arms. Her head is tucked against my shoulder, ribbons gathered at her lap, some of the lengths fallen down to stream below.
People follow.
First, it’s just my mother, plus Wick and the other Vulmin from the courtyard. But as we pass Lydia, more join us from the city. They see me carrying Auren, and the whispers and gasps and sobs pull them onto the road. They join in the march, like communing in a parade of a public death rite.
Everyone falls into the fray, walking behind me, keeping a respectful distance. Their quiet crying and steady footsteps are the chorus of a somber song.
My gaze shifts down to Auren’s face. I could almost believe she’s only sleeping, if I weren’t so in tune with her. But I am, so I feel her absence through every thought, every blink, every breath.
When my heart nearly burst with poison and killed me, I thought that was the end. I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen.
I was wrong.
This—thisis the worst. For the breeze to still flow and for steps to still tread, and for the world to just keep on going after she’s ended.
For me to still live, while she’s dead in my arms.
I don’t want it. I don’t want this life if I can’t share it with her.
Thick, horrific emotion clobbers my heart as I look back up at the road. I know I’m in shock, know that numbness hasn’t released me from its grip, and I don’t want it to. Because I know what follows will be something I can’t bear.
The reality that I exist in a world where she does not.
I clutch her tighter against me, long after the sun sets and night clutches us in its grip, and still, I walk.
When Auren came here, she had to remember who she was. But I’ve always known exactly who she is. Light and life. Love and warmth. A gleaming vibrancy that I never deserved but never would have given up. She is mine and I am hers, for all of eternity.
In every life.
But in this one, she has been taken from me.
And it’s my fault.
If only I had been stronger when I was young. If only I had snuck into my father’s bedchamber one night while he slept, and rotted him through. If only I’d been faster, more powerful today, been able to kill him before he could hurt her.
Instead, the person I hated the most…killed the one I love the most.
The severed pair bond keeps tearing me to shreds. Crevices spreading, gouging, deepening into the pits of my innermost self. All while the song of the grieving follows me.
I failed her.
My shame clings. Sticking to my breaths with hot blame and fusing with my every thought. A paired should never fail their bonded, and yet, I have. Fatally so. I tore the world open and made her come here alone and unprotected.
Every bad thing has happened because my rip brought her here in the first place.
Maybe that’s why I realize I’m walking toward the bridge. I blame Annwyn as much as I blame myself. This land and I, we were supposed to be her home.
Instead, we became her end.
