A Deadly Bite

28.1 || Pick Ourselves Up

"Why don't the heroes give up?" Sarielle asked her father once.

He looked up from the book on his lap, his brows knitting a pensive expression as he pondered his response, the same way he did for every one of her questions. Curiosity, he always said, was a virtue. It was how one's mind developed, a vital tool of the youth which never failed to invoke wisdom. Curiosity was how the world unfolded. It was the way she would learn, and so she asked all she could of him in these treasured moments of his company.

She sat beside him in this particular moment, nestled in blankets and peering at him in impatient silence. The hour was late, and sleep tugged at her eyelids, but he had said he would finish the story. Her father never lied.

When the seconds became too heavy to bear in quiet, she rushed to elaborate. "It's impossible for them to win now. They're doomed to die. Why do they keep fighting?"

A slight smile curved his lips, pushing that telltale clever twinkle into his swampy green eyes -- the only feature she hadn't inherited from him. Some days she wished they matched entirely, but now she merely soaked in the look, letting it summon her own smile, though her curiosity continued to burn.

"They have hope," he said simply.

"Hope?" She frowned. "Is that enough?"

The twinkle brightened, sharp and clear as a star. "Hope is always enough, Sarielle. No hero can ever be doomed if she has hope." He slung his arm around her, tucking her into his chest, and she giggled.

"So they'll win, then?"

His brows raised. "That would be spoiling the ending, wouldn't it?" He moved the book so it lay between them, its enticing cursive words for them both to share. "Let's find out."

Let's find out.

Gazing out upon the deadly destruction that sprawls on until the horizon, her sword's hilt biting into her palm, Sarielle wishes the stars could spoil her own ending and explain to her how to proceed.

They are silent, however, their glow muted beneath the sheet of darkness. The black sky reflects in shards of glass across the street. A shattered window, shards strewn beside a shattered home. A knot ties in her stomach, clenching tighter the longer she looks.

In the wake of a disaster, there should be shouts and screams. There should be desperate voices, crying children, pounding feet as people flee. There shouldn't be silence. It shouldn't be so suffocating, so empty, so devoid of life. Some of her father's stories could paint images dark enough to leak into her childhood dreams, but this was like nothing the greatest of storytellers could have imagined. This view is a ghost, designed to haunt. It's cold.

She turns sharply, back turned to the dark horizon and eyes on the dead ground, clutching her sword so tight she fears it will break. "We aren't doomed," she says, forcing steady, determined calm into her voice. "We're never doomed if we have hope. There must--"

"What hope?"

She freezes, shooting a glance over her shoulder. Fiesi doesn't return it. He remains crumpled on the ground, head in his hands, grey cloak spilling out in a pool around him as if it imitates the withered grass. "What hope?" he asks again, quieter, the words cracking right through the middle. "Nathan is gone. Shaula will... she's..." He sucks in a ragged inhale, sounding as if he fights a sob. "I can't..."

Guilt claws upward from Sarielle's gut. She jerks her head sharply to the side, threading a hand through her messy curls. In a way, this is what Fiesi always warned them about. He's known from the beginning that this would happen. She called him wrong, thought him cruel and misguided to convince himself that such merciless darkness could ever exist, though she knew all she needed to about the foolish world of magic. Perhaps it's hypocritical, in the end. She thought herself above paying their concerns heed, and now she's paying for it.