Because this is how I remember it.
How I’vealwaysremembered it.
The moment everything ended.
But this time, it’s not the hazy details from twenty years ago. It’s the living memory in detail I can’t escape. The memory from someone who saw it all.
The contents of my stomach rise in my throat, burning and wretched.
But then—the light shifts. The image trembles, like the memory itself is remembering something I never saw.
“She’s the last one,” one of them says. “The king will want her alive.”
Alive.
For a heartbeat, I forget how to breathe, how to think, and desperation for answers burrows so deep it feels like it's ripping out my insides.
My small frame tucks behind a crate, making myself so small I fold into the shadows. As if I was always meant to find safe harbor in dark places.
My mother’s scream echoes through the night, strangled and rasping. Her pleas to leave. To run. But I can’t leave. My legs won’t work. Instead, I swallow my sobs. I press them down so far I forget they exist. Instead, I burrow deeper into the darkness.
They haul my mother forward by her hair towards a wagon, her limp body scraping against the stones like her life means nothing.Like she isn’t my mother.
“There will never be an Earthbound on the throne again, Dawnmere bitch. The Dawnmeres will be forgotten. Like they never existed,” a guard snarls low into her ear, uncaring if she can hear or not.
A cloaked figure appears from the alleyway. A round-bellied figure casting a long shadow over my mother, hood pulled low, a dagger dripping from his palm that glints under lantern light.
“Remove your hands from the woman,” he commands, voice cold as steel.
And somehow, it sounds familiar.
The guards snicker at him.
“Or what?” one taunts. “We’re on orders from the king. Stand down, sir. Or you’ll be hanging from the gates before dawn.”
The tall figure steps closer, unafraid. “I will not ask again. Unhand the woman.”
The guards laugh, as if the man’s words are an idle threat. They drop my mother’s lifeless frame to the filthy streets, and close the distance between them.
“Well, go on, then. Show us what you’ll do about it,” one man jeers, pushing the hooded figure in his broad chest.
But that’s all he does?—
Moonlight glints off the hooded figure’s blade, before it carves a fatal slice through the guard’s throat. He crumbles to the stones, face pressed into the filth of Virellin the same way my mother’s is.
The young girl with auburn hair and eyes like emeralds, hidden in the darkness, crawls across the slick earth, clawing her way across the stones. She sees no more. A lifetime of pain and anguish forged into her soul in heartbeats.
But the memory continues.
The hooded figure stands blood-slicked and victorious, surrounded by bodies, his boot still pressing into a twisted neck.
But he bends down to my mother, his hands gentle and tender as he brushes chestnut hair from her beaten face.
“Come here, love. I’ve got ya,” the figure rumbles.
And that’s when I know.
He scoops up my mother, holding her in his arms, pulling her to his chest as if she’s precious.Sacred.
