The wind shrieked.
“And you,” the Bard snarled. “You were my best son. My chosen heir. The child to continue my legacy. And what have you become? A jackaltooth. Yet even as a beast, you’re a failure. You’ve dishonored your Bard.”
He twisted his hand, and the trickster’s front legs snapped. He collapsed, and the woman, who’d been on his back, slammed to the concrete. The musician was trapped under the trickster’s bulk.
“My wife is dead,” the father said. At his statement, the woman gasped, and the trickster whimpered. “I don’t need my children anymore. It’s time to begin again.”
He twisted his hand. The wind screamed.
There was death in this illusion. The wind could taste it. It could smell it. It could feel it.
This was the illusion that made blood explode. Only the strongest Bard could create it, and it drained them completely, but it was an effective attack.
The wind shrieked, rushing at the Bard.
It was a dying tornado. A guttering tornado. A weak, worn-out, flickering thing.
But it was a thing full of love.
A great, mighty love.
It raced at the illusion, rushing toward the deadly tingle. What could it do? What could the wind do against death?
Nothing.
It knew this.
It knew.
It had already fought death and lost.
But the boy had said, Take care of Lia. And if the boy had been alive to find out about his child, he would’ve said, Take care of my son, Wind. Please.
And so the wind did something it had never done before.
It threw itself in the path of death to save a human it had never met and may never meet. Because who was to say this baby would survive the night? Who was to say it would ever be born?
The wind may never wrap itself around its small pink hand. It may never hear its first gasping cry. It may never cradle on its chest, listen to its heart, and sing it a wind lullaby. This baby could never replace the boy—nothing could.
The boy hadn’t left a hole when he’d died; instead, he’d ripped off a part of the wind and taken it with him. There was no hole to be filled. Instead, a part of the wind had been amputated, and the limb would never grow back. The ghost of it would only float there, a spirit thing that ached for the boy always.
But the baby—the boy and the woman’s—it might hiccup in the woman’s womb. It might like books and tea. It might love jumping in piles of leaves and laughing as the wind swirled them around. Would he? Would his laugh sound like the boy’s?
And so, on the thought of a now that might be in the future, the wind rushed at the Bard’s illusion.
Its flames were caught and guttered. Its fire was doused. The air was suffocated. The death illusion gripped the wind in its jaws and smothered it. The tornado died. The wind collapsed. It fell, coughing and gasping, spinning weakly to the ground.
It collapsed on itself, spiraling into a tiny, breathless ball. It gasped weakly, spinning on an ash flake.
Was the woman alive?
Was the boy’s child still there?
The wind fell toward the concrete, and as the ash spun, it was reminded of a winter—long ago for humans, but not long ago for the wind—when it had danced on snowflakes and blown them over the man’s cheeks and onto the boy’s winter hat. The boy had laughed and tugged his hat lower, and the man had grinned at the wind.
“Take care of him,” the man had said, because he always demanded things of the wind and never asked politely like its boy did.
The wind had huffed. What a stupid thing for the man to ask. The wind would always take care of the boy.
