Chapter 24: Little Lydia

“What in the Nether and Nine Hells happened here!?”

I didn’t know how to answer that, not in a way that would make sense. There were more pressing matters anyway. I glanced over to where Nira still lay unconscious and spoke plainly, “Can you take a look at Nira?”

Lydia’s attention snapped to her instantly. “What happened?”

“She’s hurt—”

That was all she needed. She moved with urgency. Her boots splashed through puddles forming on the stone floor from the broken windows and the open door where the storm still howled. Lydia knelt beside Nira without ceremony, broke the arrow by the shaft in one swift motion, and yanked it free. Nira groaned softly, but remained limp.

Lydia whispered, “Healing Light,” and her hand glowed with warm magic, bathing Nira’s wound in gentle radiance.

While the healing worked, I spoke. “We need to talk.”

“I know,” Lydia replied. Her eyes flicked to me briefly, and in them I saw the weight of what she had just walked into. She turned back to her spellwork, but her face betrayed something haunted.

I stepped closer, not too near. “Listen… We’ll leave as soon as the rain—”

“No,” she cut in sharply. Her voice was steady but firm.

She turned and faced me fully now. “We will talk,” she said, “and I will listen.”

“You don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

She gestured to one of the pews, the one closest to the altar. “Sit.”

I stared at the bench for a long second before walking forward. I sat down. Lydia followed, helping Nira’s limp form up and onto her lap. She adjusted the girl, brushing away strands of damp hair from Nira’s face with uncharacteristic tenderness.

The church was quiet save for the ambient roar of rain and the occasional crash of thunder. The shattered window at the far end let in flashes of light. The open door framed a silver curtain of water and flickering lightning. A small pool of rainwater had begun to spread across the once-red carpet.

Trying to break the silence, I asked, “How about the kids?”

“I told them not to come back to the church…” Lydia’s voice was distant. “Little John found me. Told me what he saw.”

She paused. Her eyes drifted over her shoulder, toward the carnage I had left behind.

“I’m not a stranger to violence,” she said. “I worked as an adventurer for some time. Lived through more life-and-death moments than I can count…”

I studied her expression. “Tell me… Have you killed a person before?”

Lydia hesitated. “N-no, I think… I killed a goblin once. Does that count?”

I tilted my head slightly. “I don’t know about goblins.”

This was new to her.

“When I first woke into existence,” I began, “I killed an orc, an elf, and two humans. That’s four. Counting today, between Irene and her goons, that makes nine. Nine souls. Gone. My point is… you’ve never seen death up close where you know who did it and who didn’t make it.”

Lydia remained quiet, her arms wrapped protectively around Nira.

“I don’t know if my reaction is the right one,” I admitted. “When I kill, I don’t feel anything. Sometimes… I feel invigorated. Not proud of it. I know it makes me wrong. If there was a way to move on, to be better, I’d take it. But here I am.”

I looked up at the broken cross hanging at the front of the church. It leaned sideways, barely clinging to the wall.

“I don’t really believe in gods or fate. I think people are just… what they are. I don’t know much about the world, not like you do. But even I can see we’re trouble. The sooner the rain stops, I’ll take Nira and leave. We don’t belong here.”

I never got to finish the thought.

“No,” Lydia said again, firmer this time. She adjusted her hold on Nira and turned to face me directly.

“You’re not leaving.”

She didn’t raise her voice, but it had weight.

“You and Nira… You're my responsibility now. Don’t you see that? There must be a reason the two of you ended up in this broken old church. I don’t believe in coincidence, and I sure as hell don’t believe in abandoning people just because it’s convenient.”

She looked around the ruined building, then back at me. Her eyes weren’t angry, but resolute.

“Everything that’s happened, it doesn’t have to end with you walking away. You and Nira… whatever you are, whoever you’ve been… you’re not alone. Not anymore.”

Her voice cracked faintly at the end, but she steadied it with a breath.

“You stay. You both stay. And we figure this out. Together.”

I wished there were more people like Lydia back on Earth. Earnest. Steady. Anchored in her convictions with a kind of quiet purity that didn’t feel forced or performative. She didn’t preach, didn’t push, didn’t flinch. Just stood there, battered by rain and blood and the unspeakable things I had done, and still chose to sit beside me like we were equals. Like I wasn’t some freak…. Sheesh… who was I kidding?

Statistically speaking, of course there’d be someone like Lydia back on Earth. Out of eight billion, there had to be at least a handful who believed in people the way she did, who clung to their principles even when it hurt. Maybe they were nurses, volunteers, mothers who kept meals warm for sons that never came home. Maybe they lived in the same city I did, walked past me once or twice in the street, but our paths never crossed at the right moment. Maybe if I’d met someone like her back then, I wouldn’t have turned out like… this.

But I’ve always considered myself a realist.

So I really stared at her and asked the question that had been bothering me since the first time she said she wanted to help us.

“Why do you want to help us so much? How do I know this isn’t a trick?”

Her lips parted, but nothing came out. Her gaze faltered. She looked down, then off to the side, anywhere but at me. There it was. The hesitation. That flicker of uncertainty I’d been waiting for. I’d seen it too many times. It was the look of someone holding something back.

I sighed, not out of frustration, but from the confirmation. “It looks like I expected something impossible.”

I turned to Nira. Her breathing was slow and even, but her skin was pale. Carefully, I brushed my hand against her cheek, let the static between us pass through my fingers. My soul folded into hers like I was sliding into a familiar room. In a blink, I was behind her eyes, looking out. I stood, swaying slightly as I adjusted to the shape of her limbs, and walked toward the door.

“Wait,” Lydia called out.

I stopped.

I didn’t speak. Didn’t turn. Just waited.

I heard her shift. Her footsteps approached, light but deliberate. Her mouth opened, closed. I could hear her gathering the courage to say whatever she’d been holding in.

I started to turn away again, when she finally spoke.

“I’m a witch.”

I stopped. I didn’t speak. I simply stood there, anchored by her words, waiting. Lydia’s voice wavered at first, thin as thread, but with each breath, she seemed to find the strength to hold it together.

“My mother had been a witch,” she began, and already I could tell this wasn’t a story she often told. “I was older than Nira now when they took her away. I didn’t really understand it then. In my head, I just knew the people called my mother a bad person, and the law had to take her away. That’s all anyone said. Beyond that, I knew nothing, except she was called a witch.”

She swallowed, her throat bobbing visibly as she steadied her voice. “I survived because my mother hid me. She used her magic to keep me away from their eyes. I don’t know how she did it, only that I was found days later, alone, without even a scratch.”

Lydia closed her eyes. Her breath hitched in her chest, then drew out slowly. Her hand rose, palm open, fingers spread. Then, with quiet determination, she closed it.

In a blink, the old church was gone.

We stood in a forest clearing, the trees towering like silent sentinels around a modest hut in the middle. Moss coated the walls, and smoke curled up from a crooked chimney. The rain had stopped, at least in this illusion, but the air held the stillness of something sacred and sealed off from the world.

I turned my head, scanning the place, unsettled. “Where are we?”

“We’re inside my magic,” Lydia said softly.

Before I could ask what she meant, the door to the hut creaked open.

We watched as a younger Lydia, maybe ten, maybe eleven, stepped outside barefoot, holding a satchel twice the size of her arm. Her hair was tangled, her dress dirt-stained. A blonde woman followed, tall and stern, with pale green eyes that mirrored Lydia’s.

The woman shouted after the girl, venom in her voice. “I never wanted you!”

Little Lydia flinched.

“You hear me? You’re a curse! I wish I’d left you in the river when I had the chance!”

The words sliced through the clearing like knives. I winced, instinctively reaching out, even though I knew neither of them could see me.

“I remembered her words so vividly,” Lydia whispered beside me. “I hated her because of them. I thought she truly meant it. I didn’t understand, not then.”

The vision shifted.

The clearing darkened. Thunder cracked in the distance. Shouts echoed through the trees, dozens of voices, angry and armed.

“I only realized as I grew up,” Lydia continued, her voice barely holding, “that she said those things to make me hate her. To make me run. To make sure I lived my own life.”

The scene ahead changed again.

We saw the same hut. Only now it was engulfed in crimson fire, not from the sky, but conjured by trembling hands. Lydia’s mother stood at the doorway, arms spread wide, her spell anchoring a false story into the world. The illusion she cast was so flawless, even the witch hunters approaching the flames didn't question what they saw.

“She killed me that day,” Lydia said. “Or made them think she did. The house burned. She let them take her instead.”

The memory played out in brutal silence.

The woman, bound and dragged to a stake in the square, didn’t scream as they set her aflame. She didn’t beg. Her eyes were fixed beyond the crowd, perhaps on the image of a daughter she’d already said goodbye to.

“It was all an illusion,” Lydia said again. “Cast so thoroughly, so completely, the witch hunters never dared check the remains. The story they saw was enough. They thought they’d won.”

The illusion around us melted like ash in the wind.

We were back in the hut, but this time it was quiet. Still. A single room. A small bed on one side. A pale dawn leaking in through the window.

On the bed, the younger Lydia stirred.

She sat up, blinking sleep from her eyes.

“Mom…?” her voice broke.

Silence answered her.

When she stumbled to the door and found it ajar, something in her broke. A sound tore out of her, raw and desperate. She screamed. She cried until her body curled in on itself, small and helpless. Watching her collapse on the wooden floor, hands clutching at nothing, I felt something tighten in my chest. The sound of her sobbing echoed in my ears.

It reminded me of Nira. Of the night she clung to me after waking from a nightmare, all wide eyes and shivering breaths. Of her voice, shaking as she said, Don’t go. Please.

I looked down at the little Lydia in the illusion, her situation mirroring Nira’s.