Soulwoven: Exile

Interlude Four

Interlude Four

Three hours after the destruction of Emeth'il

Maegan stumbles through the ash.

It clogs her nose, her eyes, her mouth, her hair. It falls from the sky like snow. It gathers around her ankles and compresses like dust beneath her boots. The husks of trees glow or smoke or hiss, broken teeth in the mouth of a dying beast. Where before there were endless green hills, she sees the white-and-black, maggoty body of a bloated forest as it dies. She's walking down what she thinks was once a stream, but it's so choked with ash and mud she's no longer sure.

Tears fill her eyes.

They've left her. Soren and Tsu'min both. She awoke when the dragon's breath consumed half of Emeth'il in a heartbeat, and they were gone.

Alone, she thinks. All alone.

When the dragon turned its anger on the forest, she hid in the only place she could think of—a spring near Mi'ame's garden.

And like an idiot, she kept the book with her.

She holds its soggy pages against her chest. Maybe the lines of ink won't run too far. Maybe some of it will be salvageable. Maybe the stories, somehow, will survive.

She cries. Cries for the loss of so much. Cries for the waste of her life.

Emeth'il is gone now. The dragon has cracked it open like a bone, sucked the marrow out, left the broken husk behind. She feels like an ant, cornered by the hands of a cruel and grasping child, then left to live.

It's time to give up chasing stories and go home.

One of her boots crunches through the corpse of a still-burning log beneath the ash, and the coals touch her ankle. She leaps up, but the fire is in her boot now, burning. She reaches down to free herself, but the pain is maddening. She falls, and there are more coals waiting for her on the ground. They singe her hair, burn her neck and back. She rolls out of them, in agony. Worse than she has ever hurt before. Her boot finally comes off. The coals drop out and puff into the ash like angry, swollen tears.

Her ankle is seared, the skin red and wet. It hurts. It hurts so badly.

Alone, all alone.

She is going to die, in a bone-white forest earning its name in a way it never has before. She's going to die with everyone else, and what's left of her book is going to burn up with her. It will all be for nothing. She should never have left home.

A tree creaks.

She looks up.

It's falling toward her, and she knows it will end her life.

"Girl!" a voice shouts. "Move!"

A pair of hands hurls her out of the path of the tree. She shuts her eyes. Her body crashes to the ground, and her chin bounces. There's more pain, but it disappears into the whirlpool of the burns. The sound of something enormous coming down fills the world.

And then everything goes quiet.

She lies in the ash, wondering if the pain has driven her mad.

The voice spoke Aleani. It carried the rocky cadences of Du Hardt.

She rolls over and looks behind her.

An enormous broken tree lies at the bottom of the streambed, still burning. Its heart, spilled across the ground, is red and pulsing.

A ghost stands before it.

He's covered in ash from head to toe. His dreadlocks are filled with it. It coats his eyebrows, his cheeks, his lips, his clothes. He walks toward her, leaving deep boot prints on the ground.

She knows him. It's the eyes, she thinks. She'll never forget those eyes, as long as she lives.

The ghost kneels in the ash and asks if she's all right. He touches her ankle, gingerly. She recalls a day when she fell and twisted that ankle, and her father—her father—knelt and touched it gingerly and asked if she was all right.

"You—" she says. She's shaking. The ghost slips his arms underneath her and lifts her as though she's still that child. He begins to walk, leaving the choked streambed she's been following. He takes a faster route toward the sea, where perhaps there will be safety from the fire.

"Ha," he replies.

She drapes her arms around his neck. He's strong. So strong. Just like she always thought she remembered. His eyes are wet and red, swimming with tears from the smoke.

"Am I dead?" she asks.

The dam hemming in his tears bursts. They slide over his cheeks. Beneath the unnatural white of the ash, his skin is as dark as hers. As dark as she remembers. As dark as it has always been.

"No," Len Heramsunreplies. "I am alive."