My mouth tasted of blood and shame.
“Both of you,” he barked, his voice cracking through the smoke. “Dismissed.”
Lazarus and I turned and left.
We stepped out from the stifling heat of the tent into the night. The air was cold and heavy with smoke, the battlefield still smoldering beyond the camp. The stars looked dim through the haze—small, dying things. The firepits cast long shadows across the sand, stretching like the ghosts of the fallen.
I could still hear Turtanu’s words echoing inside me—You’re the kind of son a man drinks to forget.
I thought of my father. The rage in his eyes. The hand that had struck me when I was a boy. The promise that if I ever shamed his name, he’d erase me from his bloodline.
My throat closed. The weight in my chest ached.
Outside, beneath the black sky, I grabbed Lazarus’ arm and pulled him into the shadows—away from the guards, away from eyes.
“Lazarus… my father’s going to kill me,” I whispered. My throat burned as the words tore out. “He’ll disown me. You don’t understand, Lazarus—he doesn’t forgive. He’ll strip everything from me, piece by piece, until I’m nothing. He’ll destroy me just to prove he can.”
Lazarus caught my shoulders, firm and grounding. His grip was solid, his gaze cutting through the dark like something real in all the ruin.
“You haven’t lost me,” Lazarus said, gripping my shoulder harder. “You’ll never lose me. We’ve bled together—crawled through blood and ash together. Whatever your father does, whatever comes next—we face it together. You hear me? You’re not alone. Not while I’m still breathing.”
The words sank in, quiet and fierce.
“Thank you,” I murmured beside him, voice barely audible. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
At first light, we left the camp.
The battlefield shrank behind us—miles of scorched plains and broken bodies left to the vultures. We rode side by side on weary warhorses, their hides streaked with dust and dried blood from the long road home. The air was cold, the sky pale with the coming dawn.
For days, we had passed through villages burned to the ground, past toppled altars and caravans reduced to cinders. The trade road to Ugarit was worn thin by war and sorrow.
Lazarus tried to speak—to fill the silence that hung between us like fog. He talked about the men who had survived, the few who laughed even when the world burned, the moments that still felt human. He tried to remember them as more than ghosts, to pull light out of the ruin.
I listened, but I didn’t answer.
His words drifted over me like distant waves. My thoughts were louder, heavier. Each step of my horse thudded through me like a heartbeat I couldn’t quiet.
Turtanu’s voice still rang in my head—You’re the kind of son a man drinks to forget.
I didn’t know if I was riding home—or riding to my execution.
As we crested the final ridge, the city appeared—Ugarit rising from the horizon in the pale wash of morning.
Its sandstone walls caught the first touch of sunlight, glowing gold against the lingering smoke of distant fires. The twin towers of the temple shimmered in the new light, and beyond them, the harbor gleamed like beaten bronze, ships anchored in the calm waters, their sails catching the dawn.
Closer still, down a narrow dirt path that branched from the main road, his home waited.
We slowed at the fork. Our horses pawed the cold ground, their breath steaming in the chill morning air.
“This is where I turn,” Lazarus said, his voice rough from silence.
I gave a small nod.
He hesitated, his gaze searching mine, then forced a thin smile. “We’ll be all right,” he said softly. “You’ll be all right.”
I wanted to believe him.
But as he turned his horse down the path and disappeared into the waking light, the weight in my chest only grew heavier.
