The village was asleep. Lanterns still burned along the main path, though most had dimmed to low, guttering things that barely kept back the dark. The square was empty. There were no sounds at all at this hour, save for the very occasional grumble of one animal or another. Otherwise, there was little but silence.
My mana reserves were rather hollow. I drew in ambient mana as I walked, but the rate of even that was a pitiful thing. I did not slow down. Ash walked beside me. She had not spoken since the forest. She had an odd expression on her face whenever I glanced in her direction -not odd enough for me to break the silence first.
The hut sat at the edge of the village, half in shadow. “She will be asleep,” I said.
“She won’t be.” Ash’s voice was certain. I wondered where she found her certainty from, though she would certainly know more about this than I.
We reached the door. It was not much of one -just rough planks of wood set into a frame of mud and clay. I raised my hand and knocked, and the sound was louder than I intended in the stillness. There were footsteps inside, and then the door opened.
The mother stood in the doorway. Her name was Shera. Ash had told me on the walk here, though I had not asked. She was thin -thinner than the last time I had seen her, and that had only been hours ago. Her eyes moved from Ash to me and then back. “Why are you here?” Her words were flat.
“To do what I promised,” I said. “Or have you forgotten in less than the span of a single day?”
The mother stared at me. The silence stretched long, until she finally stepped aside.
The hut’s interior was less than I had expected, and I had not expected much. It made Martha’s home look like a palace. A single small room with a cold hearth that had not been lit in some time, judging by the dead ash inside it. This ‘Shera’ had stopped tending her own fire. The mother moved toward the back of the hut, where a cloth hung across a doorway. “He’s through here.” Ash moved to join her.
“Stop.”
The woman turned. Ash turned as well, and in her eyes was a question. I had thought about this. I had thought about it in the forest, between the beasts that Ash had brought me
I raised my right hand. A wisp of black fire curled from my fingertips. It was small. The darkness of it caught the dim light and swallowed it. Swallowed everything. Shera’s eyes fixed on it. “This is the power I will use on your son,” I said. “It is a power that can hurt...that can destroy. In the wrong hands, it will unmake whatever it touches. This is not like the white flame.”
The fire curled and guttered between my fingers. The room was very still. “To heal the boy, I must use this flame to break what the Ink left in him. There is no other way, and I am confident in my ability to do what I have said.” I paused. The next words cost me something, though I could not have said what. “There is still a risk. It is small, but it is real, and it is not nothing.”
The mother’s face had not changed, though Ash’s certainly had. Shera watched the black flame for a time. It is unbecoming of a queen to send a retainer to a death they did not know was coming. That is why I told her. “The choice is yours to make. It is not mine.”
I let the Requiem die. My hand fell to my side. The silence that followed was the longest I had endured in Hamel. Shera did not look at Ash. She did not look anywhere but at me, and I watched the decision move through her like a thing alive. This asking was an uncomfortable thing, for it could fail where my demands never had. There was sense in my words, and the risk was truly small, and yet it was there. I would not hide from the truth. Shera hunched in on herself, and I thought she’d made her decision. I thought she was going to refuse.
Her arms had folded across her chest, and every small part of her trembled. It was not cold. I was asking much of her, and yet offering more still. I would not judge her for her refusal. Though once, I would have.
Then Shera’s shoulders straightened. There was no fire in her eyes and no battle cry on her lips. She simply stood a little taller than she had a moment before, and when she spoke, her voice did not waver. “Can this thing really fix my baby?”
“Yes.”
“Then there’s no choice to make.”
I held her gaze for a long moment. In it I saw a resolve I had not seen in some of my most capable lieutenants. Something different than the steel of my soldiers, and yet no less fine. This woman had no power at all, and yet, for this one moment, I considered her a great warrior. I inclined my head. I could respect resolve. Even I would not dare mock or tarnish such a thing. The mother turned and pulled back the cloth.
Ash fell into step beside me as we moved toward the doorway. “I didn’t think you would say that,” she said quietly. “Any of it.”
“Neither did I,” I muttered. The words had felt like handing someone a weapon and trusting them not to use it. A strange thing, but it worked.
We stepped through the cloth doorway. The room was small. It was barely enough space for the straw bed where Marin lay, and the wooden stool beside it. The air was still. The boy lay on the bed. His eyes were open and they saw nothing. His chest rose and fell and a blanket was pulled to his chin.
Beside the bed, curled on the floor with her knees drawn to her chest and her head resting against the edge of the straw, was Sara. The girl was asleep. One of her hands rested on the blanket, near Marin’s arm. Her breathing was slow and even, and her face, in sleep, held none of the brightness I had come to know. She looked too young for a vigil she had clearly been keeping for far longer than tonight.
Something in my left arm trembled. I looked at the girl for a long time. Too long, perhaps. “Ash.” My voice was low. “Move her aside...gently.”
Ash knelt. Her hands were careful as she lifted Sara from the floor. The girl stirred but did not wake. Ash carried her to the far corner of the room and set her down on a folded cloth, arranging her so that she lay on her side.
Ash stepped back. The mother stood in the doorway, arms wrapped around herself. I knelt beside the bed. I placed my left hand on Marin’s arm. The skin was warm beneath my fingers. “Let’s begin,” I said, to no one but myself.
The Requiem answered when I called it. I threaded a wisp of Ruin through the index finger of my right hand, thin as I could make it -thinner than I had managed with any creature in the forest. The flame was barely visible, a tendril of darkness that I fed into the boy’s arm with all the care I could. Even now, I had to strain not to unmake the boy entirely.
The Cradle followed. I pushed Bloom through the index finger of my left hand at the same time, letting it flow alongside the black, a sheath of warmth around a thread of cold. One to unmake, and the other to protect what lay behind.
The small room changed around us. The shadows in the corners lengthened, dragged toward the black thread in my right hand, while the blinding white from my left cast harsh silhouettes against the mud walls.
I found the barrier at once. It was exactly as I remembered. A wall with no seam and no fault. The System’s decision on a child it had judged unworthy. The Requiem pressed against it. The barrier held. I pushed harder. The black flame spread across the surface, searching for purchase, and found none. My jaw clenched.
Through the Requiem’s touch, I could feel what lay beyond the wall more clearly than I had the first time. The boy was there, distant and dim. Dimmer than he had been before. I could feel the shape of his mind, the texture of what he had been before the Ink had sealed him away.
He had been excited. That was the impression that came strongest, just as it had before.
The barrier was not a wall, that was simply my impression of the judgement I felt. It said, 'this one is not enough'. It said it with the weight of a System that had measured the worth of untold numbers, and believed what it had decreed. What it had seen, and how it had judged, none could say. Only that the decision was final.
I pushed. The Requiem strained against the barrier’s surface and the barrier strained back. My hand shook, and a pain was building behind my eyes -the old familiar pressure, though this time it came from this boy, rather than myself.
The Cradle held steady around the thread of black, but I could feel it faltering. My mana was draining. The thin reserves of this world’s power were simply not enough for what I was asking of them. Every second that passed cost me more than the last. The barrier did not crack.
I closed my eyes. Through the Requiem, through the impression it carried, I felt the boy again. He was fainter now than he had been moments ago. His life was drifting. Whatever spark of self remained behind that wall had been drifting for days, alone in the dark. There was no fear in him. There had been, once. In the first hours, perhaps the first day. Now there was only weariness. A readiness to stop. Not to die -I did not think the boy understood death, not truly.
My throat tightened. My hands were still shaking. The barrier had not so much as scratched.
I was failing. The Requiem was not enough. The Cradle was not enough. My mana was guttering like a fire in a storm and I could feel the moment approaching where I would have to pull back or risk losing control entirely. If the black flame slipped even once….
The boy would be unmade. The way I had unmade so many things.
My arms burned. My vision was narrowing. The room had shrunk to the space between my hands and the boy’s small arm. There was only the child and the two marks on my skin that were not enough, that had never been enough, that-
A sound came from behind me. The soft rustle of a sleeping child shifting in the corner of the room. I did not turn. I knew who it was. “You fool,” I hissed through my teeth, and the words were barely above a breath. “If you make Sara cry, I will hound you to the ends of the earth.” The boy could not hear me. There was nothing in him that could receive my words, and nothing in me that should have spoken them. I said them anyway.
The Requiem flared. The black flame touched the barrier once more and this time, the fire did not simply press against the surface of the barrier, but the concept beneath it. The inside of the inside.
Unworthy.
That was the word written into the wall. A judgement passed on a boy who had done nothing wrong at all. It carried the cold, crushing arrogance of the Gods. It pressed against my mind, demanding I yield to its design. I do not yield.
I had overturned decisions before. I had done these things with power that could reshape the world. I did not have that power now, but what I had was enough. There was only one judgement that mattered in this world, and that was my own.
The Requiem bit into the concept. Unworthy. I felt the word resist, felt it push back with the weight of the ageless System behind it. My black flame ate at its edges, and the Cradle poured in behind, filling the space the Requiem carved. Warmth where there had been cold. Beginning where there had been ending. The barrier cracked.
It was a small crack. No more than a hairline fracture in something that had been seamless. The sound it made was not a sound at all, yet my ears popped as the pressure in the room fractured with it. And through the gap I felt him.
I poured everything I had into the crack. Both marks blazed. My arms were numb. My vision was a single bright point of white and black. Blood ran from my nose, hot across my lip. The last dregs of my mana tore at my own core as I wrung it dry. I did not care. The barrier split.
Sara woke to sobbing. She did not know where she was at first. The floor was hard beneath her, and there was a folded cloth under her head that she did not remember being there. The room was dark.
The sobbing was Shera’s, the kind woman who had taken care of her so very often. Sara sat up. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and looked toward the bed. Shera was there, bent over Marin, her arms wrapped tight around him.
Marin was sitting up. His eyes were open, and they saw everything. Sara’s breath stopped. Marin was crying. His hands gripped the back of his mother’s shirt, and his fingers were white. He was crying. He was awake.
Sara did not understand. Right now, she did not care to. Her eyes burned. She scrambled forward on her hands and knees, crossing the small room in a heartbeat, and threw her arms around them both. Marin’s shoulder was warm beneath her cheek. He was shaking, and Shera was shaking, and now Sara was shaking too, and none of them could stop.
“Marin,” Sara whispered. “Marin, Marin, Marin.” She said his name because she could, and because if she did, then he could hear it. Through the blur of tears, Sara saw his arm. The sleeve of his nightshirt had ridden up, and there, on his forearm, was a single yellow Spark.
Sara held on tighter. The three of them stayed like that for a long time, until the sobbing softened into something quieter.
Lys!
Later, when she lifted her head and wiped her eyes, she looked around the room. There was nobody else there.
The night air hit me like a wall. I made it four steps past the hut before my legs betrayed me.
The ground tilted and the stars smeared across the sky in a long, bright streak. My knees buckled. An arm caught me before I hit the dirt. It was stronger than mine, and it held me upright with an ease that I found deeply offensive.
“I..d-do not need a Hero’s help to walk,” I said. The words came out slurred.
“I’m offering it anyway.” Ash’s voice was quiet. She had my arm over her shoulder and her own arm around my waist. My feet dragged as she walked.
We moved through the dark village in silence. The lanterns flickered. My head hung, and I could not seem to raise it.
“You lied to me.” Ash said it after a while. Her voice was even, with no accusation in it. I did not answer. “In the forest, you said you calculated the mana. You said you planned the whole day around having just enough.” She took a few more steps. “You didn’t have a plan at all, did you?”
The path to Martha’s hut was not long. It felt like it stretched for miles. My feet found each step only because Ash’s arm kept the rest of me from folding. I said nothing. Ash did not press. Eventually, the hut came into view. Warm light leaked through the shutters.
“Why didn’t you stay?” Ash asked. Her voice was softer now. “To see the boy wake up.” She paused. “To see Sara.”
The door was right there. “What right do I have,” I whispered, “to see something like that?”
I felt Ash’s grip tighten.