Chapter 38 - Refraction

My world is a murky, distorted soup of sensation. I float in a place between waking and dreaming, where the sharp edges of reality have been boiled soft. 

There’s a constant, rhythmic scraping sound to my left, like stone on stone. To my right, a man lost in a painful slumber. 

A brook of agony is pulsing a line of static from my arm up to my neck, it emits a venomous, violet light visible even through my closed eyelids. I feel like a furnace heating the entire room.

A damp cloth has been laid across my forehead. The cold shock hurts.

“Her fever isn’t breaking and my healing still isn’t working.”

The words drift by me, unmoored. The scraping sound stops, replaced by the clink of glass.

The sound of the man’s breathing deepens into a groan, a sound that stretches and warps, into a crowd murmuring in anticipation. 

The clinking glass becomes the nervous jingle of costume jewelry. The infirmary dissolves. The scraping sound returns, but now it’s the heavy grate of the fire door being dragged shut, a sound of finality.

I’m standing in the wings again. The smell of dust, sweat, and hot stage lights is nostalgic. The floorboards beneath my feet are a familiar, solid reality. 

The director, a man whose face was a roadmap of theatrical triumphs and failures, is giving his final notes. His voice nasally and ill-suited to the grand pronouncements he loves to make.

“Remember, the stage is a sacred space. Once you step into that light, you are no longer yourself. You are the story. Nothing, and I mean nothing, breaks that illusion. The show must go on.”

His words were a source of inspiration, but now they’re a curse. 

A vertigo catches hold of me and I’m pulled into my cramped dressing room. My parents are there. My father, his hands still rough from his day job, gently adjusts the collar of my costume.

“You’re going to be great!” he says, his pride makes my chest ache. “I can’t believe it’s my daughter up there on that big stage!”

My mother has a latent soft smile on her face. “All those late nights memorizing lines, all that time you spent practicing until your voice was hoarse… look where it’s brought you. We’re so incredibly proud of the dedication you have. You’re chasing your dream with everything you’ve got.”

I’m forced to nod. When all I really want to do is lurch forward and grab hold of them. Embrace them in every presence of their love.

Their warmth is ripped away from me. 

I’m on stage, frozen in the spotlight.

The show must go on. The show must go on. The show must go on.

The show must go on. The show must go on. The show must go on. 

The show must go on. The show must go on. The show must go on. 

But the show is over. The real world has torn through the curtain, and it is a nightmare of fire and smoke. 

The silhouettes of people scrambling over seats, their forms made monstrous by the wrathful orange wisps. 

My director’s face melts into a new contortion before the smoke swallows him whole.

My lines, my blocking, my entire performance, it's all incinerated in the blaze. 

The script has been flipped and I am now the audience to this abhorrent actuality.

The smoke infuses into my lungs, my head, my throat, until the world is nothing but a smothering grey fog. 

I can feel the heat try to latch across my body loosely clasping to my arms and legs.

I try relentlessly to shake it off but all I can feel is my head growing more tense.

“Someone hold her down, she's seizing.” Is that Clovis? 

As I shake more and more the smoke discomposes into a strange coagulation. 

“Hello Shikara.”

The voice is an island of calm in the storm of my thrashing consciousness.

“It seems my warning has gone unheeded.”

“I tried, I mean I really tried to be brave and bear it but I just feel so angry.” 

I’m snapped back to Elara and Hakota’s ruined home. My neatly folded clothes amidst the carnage. Their single, tangled shape amidst the wreckage. 

The kindness they showed me, repaid with annihilation.

My voice breaks as it’s overwhelmed by my despair. “I didn’t run, I fought. I saved that little boy, I saved Riel. But I couldn’t save the two people who really deserved to survive, how is that fair?”

My Will’s expression is unreadable, but there is no pity in it. Only a deep, piercing clarity. “Do you believe bravery is a shield? That it will prevent bad things from ever happening to you ever again?”

I refuse to accommodate the question and the smoke shifts as it refuses to not be acknowledged. 

“Do you not think that real bravery comes from being able to handle their deaths without being consumed by your anger?”

“Without my anger, I wouldn’t have survived. Without my hatred I wouldn’t have had the conviction to keep going. I’m allowed to feel like this, they’re my emotions.” I retort, trying not to sound too bitter. 

“Yes, but you are still angry now. Your hatred has not dissipated. You are still angry at what happened before. You are angry that it happened again. You are angry that you let it happen again.” The smoke becomes denser as it layers judgement after judgement. 

I’m bewildered by the smoke. “Am I never allowed to feel angry again? My experiences shape who I am.”

“You allow the anger to shape who you are, rather than by the love and kindness you’ve been shown.” The smoke begins to be enveloped with colours of all sorts as its true form finally emerges. 

She takes a step closer, her form shimmering. “You think your effort was for nothing because the outcome was tragic. But your bravery wasn't for them, Shikara. It was for you. It was the act of choosing to care, knowing it would hurt. It was the choice to stand and fight for a home you had only just found. That’s what you need to embrace.”

Her words don't soothe the pain; they give it a different shape. A different weight. The price of belonging.

“You may feel like you failed to protect them. You’re allowed to feel that way.” she says, her voice now a gentle echo as the grey void begins to thin. “But you did not fail them. You honoured them. You are now the embodiment of their kindness. You carry their memory.”

The infirmary seeps back into my senses. The scraping of the mortar and pestle. The groan from the man in the next cot. The cool cloth on my head. I’m no longer seizing. I’m just lying here, broken and burning.

I open my eyes. The world is a blurry mess. But I don’t need to see clearly to know what is there. I can still feel an intermittent pulse from my arm but it doesn’t feel as heavy.

The grief for Elara and Hakota is still a raw, open wound in my chest. It will be for a long time. But beneath it, something else has taken root.

This pain is the price of living a life worth living.