In a blink, they were back home. The wind no longer smelled of burnt skin and flesh. It was cold. The ground beneath them was white snow, not black marble lined with red lights and ancient dust. And although they left behind the ancients to their crypt, fear was a paralyzing poison. In a blink, they were home, but that staining ichor followed them there. There it pooled beneath the traitor.
Arahael gathered himself post-teleportation. He shifted through the shallow snow, around to the dark, red-clad figure. Coren. It was dark overhead. They left at sunset, just about. Returning to darkness somehow was fitting.
Gwenyth stared at the shadow she knew to be bleeding, and how it morphed the snow into a memory unkind. Her fingertips prickled with numbness though she felt no cold from the temperature, the ground seemed to hug her feet, holding her perfectly still while Arahael moved in haste for her. Coren's screams weakened, lessened into that of mere pants and gasps.
She should be glad.
The chord of thought buzzed in the back of her mind, into her ear.
There as she stood above her opponent, the traitor to her and her people, that idea that she should be glad to revel in his defeat and suffering weighed. Like a single bob of a reel floating on a lake. She wanted it, didn't she? Wasn't this a means to an end?
But the uneven flutters of Coren's eyelids interrupted her thoughts. Gwenyth was stuck, watching them, watching him. A fixation that distanced her from the continuous drain of his wounds. They almost tunneled out from her mind entirely; out of sight, out of mind. A darkness that hazed, framing her line of vision that captured only Coren's face.
His suffering creased his nose like she had seen it do before when he was repulsed by an idea that Silver Swyftfurusat had. The corners of his mouth were pinned down, but if they lifted just an inch it could nearly resemble that funny look he would give her when he was being mischievous. Somewhere in the blink of his corrupted eyes--if she looked hard enough, the smile that would light the purple in his eyes would come back to her in flashes.
Air and phlegm caught in Coren's throat. Gwenyth blinked hard. She really thought he had been smiling at her then. When she blinked, she caught water on her cheek. Snow that melted upon the impact against her warm skin. Still warm from Junction West.
Arahael spoke to her. She could always tell when he did; his voice, by now, was a dagger-sharp tune in the niche of the memories they made together. Not unkind, but colder like it used to be--when they were acquaintances, and when he was scolding her to be better, to be stronger. Even with its harsher undertones, she still moved.
She approached them both. Small steps that seemed so far already. Prints behind her carved her path around the blood pooling at Coren's right leg and to his right and remaining arm. Without a thought, she knelt.
Gwenyth had done this before. Not here, not with Coren or even Arahael, but in Ellador. This is what she grew up learning. The teachings of the Pillar of the Dead returned to her in the pleasant whispers that nostalgia musters. They bonded around her, embracing her, like the arms of a caring mentor.
Both of their eyes were on her, watching her. Waiting for something. She didn't know what to say, and so in her usual form, she said nothing. Because even she was waiting.
It was a time like this that she could almost hear the harp chords in the whistle of winter around them. Too far to be heard clearly, yet reminding her all the while of what was to be done.
Her hand moved on its own accord and hovered at Coren's shoulder. Sing. Isn't that what she was meant to do now, at a time like this? Sing the Song of the Damned. The lesson commanded in a familiar, disembodied voice. And still, she couldn't do it. Her throat tangled with words and thoughts and feelings that formed a knot; and so she could not speak at all, let alone sing.
She hated that feeling. Choking. Above all things, the one obstacle she disliked the most was the feeling of being speechless, stuck, made silent by emotion. What kind of self-betrayal was it to be mute by your own overwhelming feelings?
Her frustration bubbled inside her chest and spread through her veins. It almost clouded her ears before Coren's struggles to say her name broke through. He said it once. He said it again, only stronger by a hair. She blinked and returned to him.
His eyes were dimming, losing their corrupted red shimmer. He had been reaching for her too, it seemed, but fell short. His hand fell to his chest. She fought at the knot in her throat, gulping once, to no avail. Her breath rattled like his.
"Don't carry this, it's not your fault." His voice played on its weakest strings. "It was me. I was wrong, about everything."
She stared so intently in the last light of life in his eyes that she failed to see his fingertips grasp up to touch hers. Even though her gaze didn't break from his, a part of her felt the urgency to give her living, breathing warmth into his cold skin. Yet their touch was soft together.
His words weren't a jarring break in the orchestra of nature. Somehow in spite of everything that carried them to this exact moment--the betrayal, the ire, and the hurt--he sounded exactly, fully like she remembered him to sound. When he wasn't trying to impress anyone, stand-off, or play with people. He wasn't playing her. This was his honesty. The honesty they had once had at the top of a lonesome tower on the edge of the city.
Before she knew it, her fingers had found his hand and wrapped it tightly within her grasp. She was clinging to him, and she couldn't argue against that. She was holding to the final moment of goodness that maybe revived in him, or maybe it had been there all along, buried somewhere in the blackness that had taken hold of him.
Gwenyth said nothing to Coren. Nothing to Arahael. She held on to watch the corruption finish bleeding from his body, cleansed from him, and his light, the light of his soul, gather at his chest. It lifted from his vessel and drifted in its return to the Soul Rivers. And so, she wept.
