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Her eyes were dead. There was no fire in them. The spark she’d once regarded as the most intrinsic part of who she was had gone out. She was a vibrant corpse, hardly different from the necrothralls haunting Spirefell.
“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”
“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”
They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.
“I’m sure there’s something poetic in it all, but right now all I feel is a new set of manacles.” He let go and stepped away from her, heading for the door. “So forgive me if I dislike looking at you. I’m still adjusting to the ways these new ones chafe.”
“You are not required to make your death convenient. You are allowed to be important to people. The reason I’m here—the reason I’m doing any of this—is to keep you alive. To keep you safe. That was the deal.” He searched her face. “They didn’t tell you.”
“You’re wrong because I’m part of the universe,” she said. “A tiny piece, I admit, maybe never an important or mathematically significant one, but still a piece. You and I are not separate from it. No one is. It matters to me, everyone who’s died and everyone who will, and everyone who suffers. As long as I exist, I will always care. And that means that part of the universe does.”
