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How cruel a life, that the sight of my dead wife means hope.
“Blood for blood,” Evey murmurs like she knows what the hell she’s talking about.
They touched her lips. They helped pull her ankles. They buried her in the soil. But they didn’t just bury her, did they?
All the family I could have had. A wife. Sons. Daughters. Grandchildren. They’ve been slaughtered before they ever were. Eo will never hold our daughter. She will never kiss our son to sleep and smile over at me as his little hands clutch my finger.
I’m all that’s left of
that family that could have been. A dark shadow of the man...
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They made a woman choose death for her and her unborn child over a life of slavery.
He was a good man. But good men die. To free them, to protect them, we must be savages. So give me evil. Give me darkness.
Had I really forgotten? I am a child of hell, and I’ve spent too long in their heaven.
He always thinks because I’m reading, I’m not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.
real
Perhaps that’s where I’m going now. To see her. To die and find home again in the Vale with my wife. But if that’s true, why am I not full? Why does the hollowness grow inside me the closer I draw to her?
We are not our station in life. We are us—the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.
He can’t say any more because I’m hugging him and crying. I sob and hold on to him, shaking, scaring him. He doesn’t move except to pat me on the head. All the weight falls from my shoulders. Someone knows. He knows and he’s here. He knows and he came to help me. To help me.
“Hands, I think, were not meant to feel so much.”
ughhhhhhuhhh
I would not have raised you to be a great man. There is no peace for great men. I would have had you be a decent one. I would have given you the quiet strength to grow old with the woman you love.
FUCKIJJJJJJ
Death begets death begets death, and ever more.
“You’re a sinister little shit, aren’t you?” Victra asks. “I’m Gold, bitch. What’d you expect? Warm milk and cookies just because I’m pocket-sized?”
“You will fall to ruin because you believe that exceptions to the rule make new rules. That an evil man can shed the trappings of wickedness just because you want him to. Men do not change.
“You are a worm who thought himself a serpent just because you slither.
I don’t want to be here. I want to be home, with her, with my child who never was.
💔💔💔💔
“I promise,” I say, meaning it even as I intend to hurt him again and again.
“Each time I returned to my wife, I told her that her boys died well.” He fidgets with his ring. “There’s no such thing.”
“Always, Darrow. Always.”
All the love I’ve earned and lost and still wish to live for, I let burn in me.
I’ll wake in our warm bed, my hand tangled in her hair. I’ll wake to love and know that in the world before, I did my best.
She’s wrong. It’s not over. All I see behind my eyelids is a world of war. There is no other future for me, for us.
How much longer can all these stitches hold? In the end, will there even be pieces left of me?
“For peace, in whatever way we find it.” He turns to me. “Isn’t that why you fight?”
Strip a man of what he loves, and what is left? Just hate. Just anger.
Should have left this place perfect in memory. I wonder if Eo is safer there, safe from my eyes. If I saw her now, if I came back, would I be so in love? Would she seem so perfect?
And she gave the most she could, did the best she could with what she had. That’s why I will always love her, and it is why I know whether or not she would give her blessing for what I go to do. My heart can’t stay here in this cage she herself has fled. It must move on.
Life has been less kind to her than to me. She’s had a stroke. It breaks me to see her body fail her. To know I wasn’t here for her. To know her heart was broken. “I would know you … anywhere.” She
