My legs tremble. Not from the cold, but from weakness. A reminder why I decided not to lower him down myself, what with how I can’t trust my limbs right now. My conscience wouldn’t have any forgiveness left for myself if I dropped him. Not after I collapsed in the greenhouse yesterday, neither Mother nor I making it to his side before Death.
A lump clogs my throat, thinning my breaths. Because of me, he died alone.
As the men position Daron over the open earth, Mother cries even harder. “It is not natural,” she wails, rocking back and forth, the green shawl around her shoulders flapping with the motion. “A mother…burying her child. It goes against the earth. It goes against God! My son… Oh, gods, my son!”
The straps hiss as Daron is lowered. The sound is too familiar: rope sliding against wood, friction whispering through the air.
His body descends.
Mother’s cry turns into a strangled, animalistic sound, and she lunges forward as if to follow him into the hole. It’s Miss Hampshire who catches her by the shoulders, gentle but firm, holding her back from falling into the grave with him.
“He’s gone,” Miss Hampshire hushes in a low voice, her usual restrained demeanor broken by a single tear that runs down her cheek. “Do not cling. All it does is trap his soul.”
That last word lands like a dagger, but it doesn’t just pierce. It eviscerates, stabbing into my gut and tearing upward, thinning the air in my lungs until all strength leaches from my body.
“I will take your soul,”Vale’s voice whispers around me,“and I will drag it down to the deepest, darkest pit.”
My next inhale struggles past the sensation as I lift my eyes from grave to thicket. Vale stands far from the funeral, at the fringes of the forest near the gnarled roots of a tree. A part of it, yet utterly separate. Uninvited, yet observing from a distance. Present, yet not daring to step closer.
Mist drifts from the shrubs and curls around him, turning his long black coat nearly gray. He stands stiff, unmoving, his gaze set on the grave, blending so perfectly with his dreary surroundings that one blink might make him disappear.
I wait for the anger. I wait for the familiar, purifying inferno of rage to rise and clean everything else out. So I can hate him. So I can loathe him.
Somehow, I can’t.
Maybe my chest is too full. Packed tight with desperate grief, suffocating shame, and a guilt so heavy it threatens to crack my ribs. Maybe there’s no room left for hate. No energy for loathing.
I just stand there with a resigned calm, a defeated acceptance. The urgency that has driven me for weeks—the goal to save my little brother—has been stripped from my muscles. I am naked in my failure.
How did I ever think I could win against Death? After all this, how could I possibly love him?
Vale lifts his eyes.
They connect with mine across the damp expanse of the graveyard. The distance is significant, dozens of yards of mist and headstones between us, yet I see him with painful clarity. I see the shadows beneath his eyes, the rigid line of his shoulders, lips clenched into a thin, pale line.
Or maybe it’s just what I want to see.
Maybe I need to see that this loss has carved a piece out of him, too, just to fan that lonely, tired coal in my chest back into a struggling gleam. The fog seems to indulge me in this foolishness, blurring his edges until he looks less like a god and more like a man standing alone in the cold. Self-exiled.
Why didn’t he break the curse?
He said he couldn’t. He roared it at me in the greenhouse, his voice cracking with an agony of his own. But how can that be? He created it. And even if he isn’t the one who can break it, then why fight my attempts with such determination that it took from me what I held most dear?
The confusion breeds a spark of heat.
Not quite anger.
Defiance.
I lift my chin. It’s a sharp, deliberate movement, cutting through the lethargy of my grief. I make certain he sees it. I make certain he feels the weight of my eyes on him, burning through the fog.
I hate you.
He shifts then. His chin sinks toward his chest, almost a gesture of profound submission, and his gaze drops away from mine. He looks down at the grave again. At the first shovel of dirt sprinkling my brother.
Mother’s sobs rise into another wave. She cries out, a high, piercing shriek that snaps the tension. Her knees give out completely, and Miss Hampshire stumbles, barely catching her before she hits the mud.
“I failed him,” she wails, voice breaking into pieces. “Saints, I failed my boy. I…I arrived too late. I was—I went for a walk. To find herbs. By the time I arrived…my boy wasgone.”
