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It was a deceptive and eerie contrast from the battle that raged above the surface, and the girl who now sank beneath the flaming ship welcomed the lie.
Her father once said the dark side of the truth was that once your eyes are open to it, you cannot return to the blissful ignorance of before. “Things cannot be un-seen or un-known,” he would say.
Bravery is something rooted deep within the bones of those with no fear. Courage is in the marrow of those whose bones shake with fear, but they force their bodies to keep moving despite it. While she was not brave, she was courageous.
Eventually, her fear became a part of her. A thick black thread woven through her spine that when pulled without warning, would draw her taught like a bowstring.
But the reality was, she was scared, tired, and a little broken. Everyone saw the pearl, not the layers of toil and crushing weight that formed it.
She was confident she would need to vomit but had grown accustomed to multitasking.
She recalled the collective desperation she felt when the healer had proven utterly useless. His efforts were like trying to stifle the flames of a burning meadow with a thimble.
Those words ricocheted in her heart, leaving bruises with each collision.
With sobering clarity, she realized that with every fear of hers having come to pass, there was nothing left to be afraid of. She had fallen to the bottom of the abyss, and here, not even the monsters could find her. It was there that she found the will to climb.
“Sit,” he said with his lips. Play he said with his eyes.
Calder had seen her broken on the shore, but what he failed to understand was that she had been broken long before he found her and she knew how to put herself back together.
Making herself a martyr for the sake of pride was not an honorable hill to die on. At best, it was a foolish, stubborn, and slightly elevated patch of dirt.
He had run into so many dead ends in search of the truth of his mother’s death that something vital in him cracked. Pieces of himself lost over time, leaving edges ragged and raw.
The sense that she was a lost piece,
It was unclear if Calder used his opponent’s emotions against them or if he consumed them, fed from them to nourish his own savagery.
Emer closed her eyes as she worked to calm the building thrum, her body growing heated from the storm of emotions and doubt. When she opened them she found Calder’s obstinate glare pinning her down, plucking at her already frayed nerves as if it produced his favorite melody.
The landscape of Obanes looked as if kindness fell in love with violence. Her soft fields and whimsical trees wrapped themselves around the hardness of the rocks and sharp cliffs.
He was the cliffside and she was the ocean, liquid and chaotic.
She had not been brave. She had been the desperate daughter of a dying man who thought she could be enough to fix things while slowly breaking herself. She clutched herself and wept over how wrong she had been.
Taking another deep breath and lifting her chin higher, she added, “I would rather die chasing after hope than submit to hopelessness in safety.”
“I think the Elders must weave a special bond into the hearts of brothers and sisters. If you were to cut us open, you would find a matching thread that connects us. That is why we fret. Because if their hearts break, ours will follow,” she observed, lost in thought and rambling for longer than she intended.
They traded details back and forth, offering pieces of themselves equal to what the other had shared and removing their armor without leaving themselves unnecessarily bare.
Chaos, it seemed, had gotten a taste of Emer, and now it was addicted.
She rose from the ground, a portrait of beauty and violence much like the cliffs by the keep, and just like the cliffside, she was now covered in blood.
A hint of mourning swept through her heart. Not for the man who lay dead before her, but for herself. For the girl from the meadow who never reached the shore. The part of herself that drowned below those waves—the one that would have felt sorry.
For a moment, Emer glimpsed a contentment she did not realize her nervous soul could experience and knew it could quickly become something she craved.
Securing his mask into place as the moon secured its place amongst the stars.
“Tell me something good, for I should not like to face even a small death with a heavy heart,” she asked, referring to the belief that one’s time asleep is its own kind of temporary death when the soul is separated from the realm of the living but not quite joined with the realm of the dead.
If she traced the words back through the air, they would lead straight to his heart, in the space he had carved out for his mother.
She could see her heart crafting someone as brave as Calder, and her spirit someone as wild as Keane. They embodied the cautionary tales she grew up with, passed down like recipes throughout the generations. However, compared to the men before her, the stories were made with inferior ingredients, resulting in a version paler than the real thing.
“The monster you know is less terrifying than the one you don’t,” Calder answered.
“I am certain the Elders wove in her nervousness for fear of facing her without it.” Keane’s voice was warm with affection.
The way they can cut and wound, one might see words as solid things but after centuries of bending and twisting them into pleasing shapes, Keane knew better. Words could be a balm as easily as they could be a blade.
The relief in her features was a dull knife in his chest and the pain was evidence that at least once upon a time he had a heart. His long life had given him unmatched tolerance, and the hurt never reached his eyes even as he felt his soul blacken a little more.
Beholding the mountain felt like looking at the last page of a book. Emer held her breath, ready to turn the final page and silently praying that she would find the happy ending she so desperately hoped for.
Fear has claws that dig in deep and the scars that it leaves once you are freed from its grip still manage to sting at the faintest touch. Emer felt like her whole body was a wound.
