The fish of this world, colourless and plain, lie across the bay.
There is silence around him.
A quiet that is sheathed in the noise of warriors trudging over damp sand, charcoal dragging over parchment, humans whimpering and hacking and crying—thrown into the thinning group of survivors.
The silence comes from her absence.
A clanging, abrasive wave of emotion should be striking him, assaulting his ears.
But it is gone.
Her body, too.
In the hours of searching, he found not a trace of her.
Now, the unit is preparing to march on again.
As though she isn’t gone.
Samick does not help Arwyn count the surviving humans. He does not help pack the debris of the camp. He does not report to the general whose stare cuts into him every other moment.
He considers the death of the fish.
Strewn about the floor of the bay, starved of water, their lifeless bodies lie limp in the darkness.
It is a darkness that she cannot traverse.
If she is out there.
If she survived.
If she is lost.
“Samick.”
Ormus advances on him.
It is not the accent that betrays his identity, that twang from the eastern parts of the Blood Court. It is the uncertainty that ripples beneath a natural authority.
Samick does not turn to look at the second-in-command to General Raske.
Ormus stops. Does not get close.
They rarely do.
“Raske has demands of you.”
The general’s summons should spur something in him. If not a feeling, then a shred of tradition. Respect. Obedience, at the very least.
But he has found something to hold his focus.
Among the colourless, plain fish, Samick considers the one with the faintest hue of pink in its grey scales.
“I will report—” Samick turns an ice-cold look on the second. “—shortly.”
Shortly.
But not now.
