Heart of Life

Epilogue

Your name is Timber, and you are currently standing by a pyre. After the fight with Angelica, Loren's soul was destroyed, and shortly after he pulled himself back together, he went mad. For two hundred years you tried to help him, but his instability only progressed further and further. You didn't want to, but you had to end his life. He was unhappy, and the screaming! Nearly every time he saw you, he'd start wailing incoherently, for no reason. You never sensed Faolein again in either him or the statue, and you have to wonder if losing the being that so quickly intertwined with him was what really broke him. You feel tears well up as you lightly drop your torch onto the stack of wood.

Some days, he was back to himself, his warm, dorky, somewhat naggy self. You liked those days, especially since on those days, he was loving toward you. He remembered nothing of Angelica, but he doted on you. He loved you. He was your other half, your idiot siren without a clue about the world. He would sit with you by the shores of the River of Immortality, and you would talk to each other. But then, something in his eyes would change, and he would go quiet, and would start to shriek. It broke your heart every time, but you couldn't bring yourself to put him out of his misery. It was selfish, you knew, but those days? Those good days? You couldn't bear to even think of it.

So why the pyre?

He came to himself, you recall. His guardian self. He told you to kill him, right then, or he would do it himself. Again, you felt it was the least you could do, so you used the power that you had honed and perfected to break his essence and bind it to the statue you created. You knew that the sirens would never take him without his soul in a whole piece, so here you stand, burning the body of the guardian of the River of Immortality. You watch the flames climb, you watch the nymphs in the water and the trees falling over themselves with grief. Their grief will never even touch yours.

After the battle with Angelica, the gods that had woken soon slipped into slumber, with the help of the newest witches. You created them. You bound Kalisha's soul to a woman and let her create a new coven. They, with you, restored the lopsided balance of before, and you became, once again, the most important being on the earth. Unfortunately, as you stand at this pyre and watch him burn, you realize something. The River guardian isn't supposed to live. Like Faolein, they're supposed to die to restore the peace and save the Heart from darkness and corruption, as Angelica had almost succeeded with her purposeful isolation of you both by curse. You drop to your knees and bow your head, no longer holding your strength.

Without death, there can be no Life.