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The moon is different here. He meant he wanted to go home.
“You don’t fix hurts by pretending they never happened. You treat them like infected wounds. You dig deep with a burning knife and gouge out the rotten flesh and then, maybe, you have a chance to heal.”
“They’re never gone. Do you understand? They still come for you in your sleep. Only this time they’re dream-wraiths, not real, and there’s no escape from them because they’re living in your own mind.”
“We’re bound.” He pulled his shovel back from her grasp and gave her a wan, exhausted smile. “Your pain will always be mine.”
“It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.”
So cruel were the whims of history.
There are never any new stories, just old ones told again and again as this universe moves through its cycles of civilization and crumbles into despair.
Let them think of us as dirt, Rin thought. She was dirt. Her army was dirt. But dirt was common, ubiquitous, patient, and necessary. The soil gave life to the country. And the earth always reclaimed what it was owed.
Nothing lasts. The world does not exist.
Just this night, just this moment, they had entered a liminal space where their past and their future did not matter, where they could be the children they used to be.
They sat in miserable and desperate silence, wishing and regretting while the bloody moon traced its ponderous path across the sky.
They were enemies now—and she could bend his will, but she’d never again have his heart.
Traumatised for life
Take what you want, it said. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.
He couldn’t, or he would shatter.
Because Kitay—the third party, the in-between, the weight that tipped the scale—had chosen to follow Rin into the afterlife and to leave Nezha behind. Alone.
Kitay 😭😭😭
He knew exactly what choice she’d made and what she’d intended. And that made everything—hating her, loving her, surviving her—so much harder.
