Cas' Memories

She drifts through the days like a haze. Five dawns, and yet it feels like forever and no time all at once. Little distractions ground her, a day of rest from their weary travels, a small kindness passed on.

But then it’s the night the sun won’t rise. Those small pleasant nothings are behind them, and she has no choice but to face it. By the worried glances the others are shooting her, she’s not hiding it well.

She’s not the bitter, angry person she once was – not mostly. It’s evaporated now as quickly as it set in, as the hatred and rage sprung up into her heart when faced with a choice that wasn’t a choice at all.

But she’s not the person he left her four years ago either. Her small budding hopes for the future, her quiet and comfortable solitude. The empty, self-destructive hatred is gone, but it’s left a small, helpless sadness in its place.

She’s scared. Though she hides it, though she fights anyway, she’s scared.

She promised him she would be better. And what’s left of her reformed, broken soul isn’t worse now, but it’s no better. She took a thousand steps back and now she’s right where he left her again.

The dread pooling in her chest keeps her awake long into the night. Sleep finds her for but a blink.

She awakes into a dreamy fog, like a blanket cast over her consciousness. Where there should be morning light, darkness surrounds her. The feeling is familiar, like reaching back into time. Ocean waves crash before her half-closed eyes and someone leans against her.

It can’t be real. Her home is gone. She jolts awake, her panicked, groggy mind trying to make sense of the darkness, her companions’ awake sounds, the familiar feeling of warmth seeping into her scales.

It’s darker than the darkest night. Her eyes fall on a candle set by Kadoren’s bed, his face illuminated though his eyes are closed in quiet contemplation. And then they’re drawn to the window.

She’s seen this same sky before. On a day she no longer remembers, though she can still feel the impression of it etched into her soul. As a child with Cephi by her side, the last time with him so weak they could only just make it outside. Once in the terrible after of him being gone, when she sat by the window until his spirit quietly left her, once with the promise of a hopeful future spread before her.

And now. Now no longer knowing who she is, or what will happen to her when this is all over.

Her friends leave her to her own devices. Only when they go does the stone that petrifies her break enough to cross the room to the window.

The wind is cool in the sunless day, the world drenched in darkness with the silhouettes of trees visible against the sky. Planets only a shadow in the new moons, stars barely an impression in the darkness, galaxies with colours that only just touch the blue-black canvas, now burst radiant through the night sky as clearly as if they’d ascended into the heavens.

Looking at it makes her feel dizzy, like a mortal spying on forbidden worlds between realities, secrets unknown spread clear before her.

On the Darkest Day after his death, she was so consumed by grief that the words almost didn’t come. But she found them. The hell that she’d lived through once he was gone, the terrible things her parents had said and done since. How much she missed him. How much she hated it.

And, though it scared her to admit it, how worthless it all was, how little her continued existence seemed to mean. How she just wanted to go to sleep and be with him again.

The next time it was easier, a happier tale if still very much a lonely one. She told him she would keep trying. Even though she didn’t want to, even though it was hard. She didn’t know what the next four years would bring, but she would be there to see it.

But now, as she stares into the darkness with her friends’ soft murmurs through the wall and his presence hovering patiently over her, though so much has happened, though so much has changed…

She can’t find the words for any of it.