You cannot fear death when you are immortal, but you can certainly appreciate it.

From the Appendices to The History of Merata, entitled “Ancient Shurwin Axioms”

Chapter Twenty

She had not spoken a single word since awakening the day after Harri’s death. Because disposing of the dead bodies would have taken too long, Kir had opted to carry Siara far enough away from the scene of death that anyone who passed the corpses would not be able to find those who had survived the ordeal. Harri, however, he had refused to leave behind. No matter what treachery might have been involved in the scene back there that had very nearly resulted in Siara’s death, Harri had been his friend and the man Siara loved. So Kir had insisted that Ana create a litter of sorts out of one of the tents and drag the man’s body behind her to the small copse of trees in which they had taken refuge through the past moonfall and sunrise.

When she’d finally awakened, Kir had almost immediately shown her to Harri’s peacefully reposing body, expecting that she might need some time to grieve. Instead, she had turned coldly away from the sight of her dead lover, walked a short distance away, and curled up into a ball on the ground.

Ana had proceeded to make a very poor attempt at comforting her—“Hey, Siara. Get your lazy ass up and get over it. People die. Shit happens.” Not even her cursing could rouse Siara from her lassitude.

Finally, about midday, Kir had insisted that they move on. When he asked Siara what she wanted to do about Harri, she had just shrugged. It was Ana who had come up with the idea to return his body to his mother. From his stories, they all knew she lived in Castra, a small town in Cryn, and it was on the way to the home of Palli’s friend anyway. Siara did not object, and so they had started on their way. At the nearest town, they had purchased a wagon and a horse, and since then had been traveling steadily and somberly towards Castra.

Ana had attempted to engage him in conversation since their journey to lay Harri to rest had begun, but Kir did not feel much like practicing his speech. His heart hurt every time he thought of the man lying dead in the back of the wagon. This was the first time in his life he had ever experienced needless death and the loss of a true friend. Harri had been so young, intelligent and driven, and he had made Siara so happy. Moreover, he had been a truly kind person. Now, for no reason other than that he had defied his father by trying to keep that wretched assassin from killing Siara, his life was over.

Even worse, he kept replaying in his mind, over and over, the scene that had played out just before the assassin’s death. Somehow—even now, he could not figure out what he had done wrong—the man had managed to evade both him and Ana, and all he’d been able to do was watch helplessly as the assassin ran towards Siara. In that instant, he had seen two realities. In one, Siara did not notice the man in time and Kir watched her delicate throat be cut open by the assassin’s knife, her blood mingling on the blade with Harri’s, her life drained from her in a pool of thick, red blood.

In the other, the true reality, she used her firewalking skills to burn the assassin to a crisp. It was the only vision that gave him any measure of relief these days. Not even the reminder that the assassin’s death was the truth, however, could completely eliminate the fact that Siara’s death had been an equal possibility. Either vision could have come true.

He could have lost her.

Glancing back at her where she rode silently in the back of the wagon, Kir could not help but wonder if he already had lost her. She was so quiet, so withdrawn. Somehow he kept thinking that if she would just allow herself to properly grieve, then perhaps she could push past this rut. Unfortunately, his every effort thus far to draw her out had failed.

By the third day of their travels, he began to notice what a pointed effort Siara made to avoid Harri’s body. She refused to even look in the direction of the covered corpse, as if the mere thought of the dead man disgusted her. That was when it finally registered with him that Siara could not yet grieve Harri’s death because she was still aborbing the enormity of his betrayal. Even if Harri had never truly intended to deliver her to his father—whoever his treacherous father might be—his intentions had been far from pure. He’d been sent to spy on her, and while he might have undergone a change of heart, he’d never felt it necessary to enlighten Siara, whom he was supposed to have cared about.

When they stopped for the night, pulling their wagon a ways from the road and pitching a single tent to share between the three of them, Ana immediately went off to hunt for dinner. Although they still had some supplies remaining, they were well aware that without Harri’s funding, they would need to be more frugal.

Left alone with his quarry, Kir sat deliberately close to her at the fire. There didn’t seem to be any tactful way to approach the topic he needed to address with her, so he opted for bluntness.

“He loved you,” he said slowly, hoping that she understood his message. When she looked up at him, her eyes filling with tears and her lips quivering, he knew that she had. “He loved you,” he repeated, more forcefully this time.

Finally, the dam she had been keeping on her emotions broke. Siara burst into tears, her entire body shaking with the force of her grief. She didn’t even think twice about accepting Kir’s comforting arms, just allowed herself to be held until the storm passed. When it was over, she had fallen asleep in his arms, her tear-stained face relaxed into an expression of child-like innocence. He could not resist placing a tender kiss upon her forehead, overwhelmed himself with emotion of an entirely different kind than the grief she had just displayed. Although he did not fully understand it, he knew that what he felt was something monumental, something that could possibly change the very fate of the world.

Before he could fully analyze his premonition, Ana returned from her hunt with three dead rabbits, her gaze homing in on Siara’s sleeping form. When she saw the tracks from Siara’s tears, her expression softened somewhat.

“She finally let go,” she noted.

“Yes,” Kir confirmed. “It is not over, but at least it has begun.”

Ana nodded once, curtly. “Could have at least waited until after she started the fire,” she grumbled with her usual surliness.

Kir just smiled, knowing how Ana used her ill temper to conceal the fact that she did occasionally experience normal human emotions. She seemed to have made it her personal goal in life to push everyone away, and while Kir suspected that he knew the truth behind that, now was not the time to address her forced frostiness. Now was for Siara.

So he sat back as Ana built a fire to cook their meal, just enjoying the feel of Siara in his arms and the knowledge that soon—maybe not tomorrow, or even a week from then, but eventually—her heart would heal.

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The sound of shovels hitting dirt echoed in the warm air surrounding the small cottage belonging to Vivian Aynsmore and her three children. All boys, these offspring were all the result of a valid union between her and a middle-class Crynian farmer. When her husband passed away two years ago, all three boys had elected to stay on with their mother and help her with the yearly harvest of crops. While the woman loved her three sons dearly, it had always been her first, the one born out of wedlock, that she loved best. Thus when Siara and her friends had pulled up in front of the cottage with Drake’s corpse in their wagon, the woman had been inconsolable for hours.

Siara could well understand. Those first few days following his death, she had slipped into a state of numbness, feeling almost suspended over a pit of aching grief as she waited for the truth to settle in. Or the truths, more like. That he’d been working for his father—identity unknown, aside from his being an Irkna worshipper—and that he was now dead. Somehow Kir had managed to shake her from the precipice, shoving her headlong into grief, and she had yet to determine if she was grateful for his interference or not.

“I worried about him constantly,” Drake’s mother said quietly. They were seated at a small table behind the cottage, watching as the menfolk toiled to dig a grave for the deceased. Ana was inside the cottage, preparing Drake’s body for the burial. Neither Siara nor Vivian had been able to bring themselves to do that task. “He left when he was just sixteen. By that time he’d already made a fortune marketing these adorable little jackets one of our neighbors made to decorate wine bottles. They both profited from the deal, but his incredible business sense immediately appealed to his father, who was trying to make his way in politics at the time.”

Although Siara had already heard this tale before from Drake, she listened patiently to his mother’s rendition. She knew that although his father came from a wealthy and privileged family based in Antarr, his parents had cut him off when he was nineteen after some hushed-up indiscretion with a local girl. Having to make his way on his own had not daunted Drake’s father. Instead of making money in honest ways, however, he did so through blackmail and other get-rich-quick schemes. Creating Drake, unbenknownst to him, was probably the most profitable venture he’d ever taken. Perhaps if he’d realized this sooner, he would not have so quickly cast aside the boy and his mother.

Because he’d never completely severed ties with Vivian and Drake, the man had known immediately when Drake began to make a name for himself. He’d immediately taken advantage of the boy’s prosperity by threatening to harm Vivian if Drake refused to pay him a monthly stipend. For nearly a year, he had complied. Finally, unable to continue giving in to his father’s demands, living in constant fear of harm coming to his mother and her new family, Drake had opted to move away, change his identity, and attempt to escape the demon who had impregnated his mother.

For years, his ruse had worked. If his father didn’t know where he was, then Vivian was pretty much useless to him, so they were all safe. Then, apparently just recently, his father had managed to track him down. Instead of demanding money, however, he’d demanded Siara. She still did not understand why.

“Who is Drake’s father?” she found herself asking once Vivian had finished her story.

“Not someone to trifle with,” Vivian assured her. “I once thought the sun rose and set at his will; he was such a charismatic man. Not until I got pregnant did I realize what a snake he was. All of that intelligence and charm focused on evil…” She shuddered. “To this day, most people don’t realize how truly base the man is. Many people praise him as the kindest, most forward-thinking Dekacon official in Merata.”

Siara stifled a gasp at the knowledge that the corrupt Irkna-worshipper who had blackmailed his son into spying on her was a powerful Dekacon official. This meant the corruption truly did go farther up than just Nakra and Ericsha. Although Ericsha was also part of the illustrious Dekacon, he was one of the lesser-knowns.

“You need to be careful, Siara. Azir Amenda does not like to be crossed.”

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“Did you love him?”

The sun was setting, casting the sky in a brilliant rainbow of colors, and Vivian and her sons had long since retired within their home. Only Siara and Ana remained by Drake’s gravesite, Kir having taken their wagon to the nearby village to trade it for two more horses. The two girls sat at the table behind the cottage, watching darkness descend around the grave of a man who had been both benefactor and friend.

“Yes,” Siara said without hesitation.

“Why?”

That question gave her pause. “I’m not really sure how to explain it,” she finally admitted. “We just…well, clicked. I never felt uncomfortable around him, we never ran out of things to talk about, and he was just an all-around good person.”

“Sounds more like a friend than a lover,” Ana noted.

“He was also a very good kisser.”

“Duly noted, but still not enough to convince me.”

Siara looked at the girl suspiciously. “Why are you pushing this? Are you just trying to piss me off again?”

Ana shrugged. “Just trying to figure it all out.”

“Look, Drake was my first relationship. Ever,” Siara said significantly. “I mean, it’s not that I never wanted to have a relationship with a man, I just never really had the time. Between working and all of the extra little things I had to do during our downtime and keeping Kyrin out of trouble…”

“That’s just depressing.”

“Tell me about it. Still, I can’t say that I have any regrets, in spite of all the grief. Now at least I know that I can love. After all these years, I had given up hope on loving anyone but Kyrin, and even that love has always been tainted by the fact that I secretly yearned to be on my own.” She sighed, resting her chin in her hands as she stared at the stone marking Drake’s grave. “I’m still going to miss him. The nights are going to feel so empty without him to talk me to sleep.”

“At least I’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep,” Ana grumbled.

“I still can’t believe he’s really gone,” Siara said after a few silent minutes.

“His memory will never go away,” Ana said quietly, her gaze turning distant, reflective. “They never do. But in time, you will make new memories and new friends, and the old ones will begin to fade. Before long, you’ll barely remember their faces, or the look in their eyes as they died. It will all be like some distant, bad dream.”

Siara looked at the girl thoughtfully, knowing that her little speech had to have come from personal experience. Yet what child her age could have experienced such bone-deep loss and gained such infinite wisdom? Sometimes, when she wasn’t annoying her to death, Siara could not help but wonder what sort of childhood could have shaped Ana into the belligerent and yet strangely wise little girl that she was now.

“I wanted to die,” Siara admitted. “When I watched him fall, when they pulled out their knives, I actually hoped they would kill me.”

“Dying is easy,” Ana assured her. “Living past tragedy is what really proves your mettle.” She sighed. “You would have died with him. But would you have died for him?”

Again Siara had to stop and think. If she could have died in Drake’s place, would she have? Sadly enough, she was pretty sure that the answer was no.

Just then, a noise in the distance drew their attention to the horizon, where Kir was leading their horses towards Vivian’s small barn. “I’m thinking about finding a way to trick him into a bath,” Ana advised her. “Do you think it might be possible?”

“I’m sure you could trick him into one, but could you get him to actually wash himself?”

“That could be problematic.”

After securing their horses, Kir loped towards them, covered from head to toe in dirt. It clumped in his hair, completely cloaking its true color, and was smeared all over his face and every inch of visible skin. When he reached them, he looked down at Siara, a question lurking in his oddly-colored eyes.

“I’m fine,” she assured him, a hint of a smile on her lips. The first since Drake’s untimely death. Unable to resist the temptation to tease him, she pointed at his nose, the only clean part of his face, and said, “You have a bit of dirt on your nose.”

Kir immediately lifted his hand to rub at his nose, just as Siara had predicted, and promptly spread the mud on his hands down the bridge of his nose. Both Siara and Ana snorted in an effort to contain their laughter. When Kir glanced down at his hand and realized with what he’d just attempted to clean his nose, he chuckled sheepishly.

It was in that instant that Siara realized something monumental. What Ana had been trying to tell her earlier made sense now.

Life moved on. She still had a thousand reasons to live and only one to die—and even that was just a flimsy excuse. She still had a book to decode, a brother to rescue, and possibly an entire world to save. And in spite of their differences, she had two staunch allies to assist her.

Life moved on.

And so would she.

Author’s Note This is the end of Book One. I haven’t actually written Book Two, Earthstomp, but it will continue the story of Siara and her companions, and it will also introduce new characters, including Tika and Rahm, a pair of swindlers from Nubanynn, one of whom happens to be the next conduit…

I have at least started the second book, but I’m still debating if I want to post chapters as I write them or wait until I’ve finished the book (which, hopefully, shouldn’t take me more than a month or two). Keep an eye out if you’re interested!