I knew that there was no fighting around us and that he had lifted me, somehow, away from it all. Behind his face, there was only the empty sky. He was speaking again, but I heard nothing. He pressed his face to mine: cold stone against immortal flesh. His pain. It permeated the creeping paralysis of my mind. I felt it, the ragged pulsing anguish of his pain. The grief of a god. I knew it then, that there was nothing he could do. Somewhere, in the thickening mist of my thoughts, I drew on the image of my children’s faces; I pulled them to the forefront of my disappearing vision, and I saw us
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