Bereft: Demise

30 | Of the Soul

I avoided Darius after my conversation with Peroth. It wasn't difficult to do. The Sin checked on my whereabouts periodically, typically finding me in the dining room with the wolves and Elias, in one of the lounges reading, or chasing Lionel from Peroth's things. Otherwise, I struck out into the manor's vast unknown, determined to occupy my mind and keep away from the Sin of Pride.

I knew I wouldn't be able to avoid Darius forever. Not confronting the baffling facts given to me by Sloth was juvenile, but I struggled to rationalize what he'd said. I had thought I understood Darius's motives, at least in the abstract. He was using our contract as a vehicle for his own vengeance—as a way to kill Balthier for himself and for me, and yet....

Before learning of Envy's involvement, before knowing my motivations and my goals, the Sin had given up a piece of his soul, risking a terrible fate. He had risked his life.

Darius was a snowballing contradiction. In one breath he'd insult my entire species and call me a mewling human—in the next he'd praise my bravery and my lack of adherence to human nature. It was my fate to die in his hands, and yet the creature had thrown himself before bullets and mages for my benefit. He wanted so fiercely to live he risked his very survival. 

I knew little, inconsequential details about Darius. I knew he became cranky when he was hungry and wasn't quite sure what mayonnaise was for. After perusing his bookshelves, I knew he liked poetry, especially the works of Keats and the darker tales of renowned Gothic writers. I knew he loved his brother just as much as he hated him. He liked to drive and loathed the term supernatural. Prideful to a fault, Darius was still brimming with regrets. Sometimes, in an unguarded moment, his eyes would open to a bottomless oubliette of remorse, grief, rage, and introspection.

For brief windows of time the true creature beneath the stone mask would peer from his self-imposed prison, and with each glimpse I stole of the true Darius, the more confounded I became.

I knew nothing about him. I knew nothing of his plans, of his motives, of his reasoning. I understood so little of who the man really was.

So I avoided Darius. I avoided him until I was ready to confront the tangled catastrophe of my own thoughts. 

A week passed. It took some time, but I managed to find a calendar and deduce I was half way through October. I spared a thought for my phone and laptop, both left in Verweald in my rush to leave, which wasn't one of my brightest decisions, but I guessed it was much too late to complain about it now.

I walked one of my more well-traipsed hallways, one hand lingering on the chair rail—careful not to touch the ghoulish wallpaper—as I counted doors under my breath. I didn't have a firm destination in mind. I only wished to avoid Darius and to find a place where I could avoid my mind's spiraling conundrums.

Instead of contemplating the Sin of Pride, I turned my thoughts to the inexorable passage of days. 

My sister had been dead for two months now. God, time was a fickle bastard. In so many ways, Tara's presence remained with me, a tangible memory I clung to and fooled myself with. Sometimes, in the early morning when I woke bleary-eyed before the dawn, I would forget she was dead and my heart would break again when I realized she was gone.

Some mornings I felt her keenly, and yet others I realized I couldn't quite remember the exact pitch of her laugh, or I worried I had forgotten some minuscule facet of her face or her voice or her manner. Tara existed only as a tapestry of gathered details in my head, and I was terrified parts of that tapestry may unravel without my knowledge, that I would lose parts of my sister. One day, I worried I would wake and my well-woven tapestry would be nothing more than a moth-eaten rag and I would lose Tara all over again.