Shattered Memories

Dietfried.

Reagan’s entire body went cold. Numb. He couldn’t feel the floor beneath his feet. Couldn’t taste the acrid soot in the air. Couldn’t hear Liam or Elisa’s voices talking to him.

His chest seized. He couldn’t breathe.

Air. I need air. The thought was distant, and in a voice that didn’t belong to him, but he obeyed it anyway. Even as the room swam around him, he turned and stumbled out of it.

He crashed into the doorway but didn’t feel it. A piece broke off beneath his hand, but he couldn’t figure out whether he should hold onto it or let it go. Something sharp bit into his palm.

He let go.

Outside. Cold. Reagan stumbled a few more steps before his stomach flipped, and he threw up the dinner he’d had at the inn. Acidic and bitter.

Dietfried. It can’t be.

The information felt wrong. Disconnected.

There has to be a mistake. It can’t be him.

Everything hurt; nothing made sense. Reagan tried to straighten, to force his body to walk back into the house, but the ground tilted away beneath his feet, and the sky dropped down to meet him.

And everything slipped away.

Reagan was six years old again, and large, warm hands were picking him up, lifting him into the air until he could almost touch the high ceiling of the small living room. His giggles rang out around him, but there was something off about the sound. It was like a warning, a threat.

A premonition.

The face before him cleared: messy blonde hair; deepset, dark brown eyes; a sharp jawline with pale yellow stubble; a long nose; thick brows, and a scar along his cheek that traced a line from his ear to the mole beneath his ear.

“You’ve gotten taller since I last saw you!” said a low, rugged voice. It had a familiar warmth to it, one Reagan had always found comforting.

Little Reagan opened his mouth to respond, but he never got the chance.

“I bet you’re even taller now, aren’t you?” the voice said, losing its jovial edge. The figure holding him no longer had a face. It was a shadow, amorphous and impossibly deep. “Now that you’re all grown up, living through years that weren’t meant for you.” Cold. Harsh. The words stabbed deep in Reagan’s chest. They were ones Reagan had told himself countless times, ones that haunted him deep in the night when all was quiet.

He struggled, but even at his full height, he couldn’t worm his way out of those hands, that tight grip. They tried to crush him. He couldn’t breathe.

Desperate, he reached for the sword sheathed at his hip, but it wasn’t there. There were no other weapons in sight, nothing he could use to defend himself. All he saw were the blackened remains of a house.

His house.

The charred toy chest in the corner. The wooden horses by the overturned carriage. A table that once supported stacks of his father’s journals, the same journals Dietfried had borrowed. Everything was in one room, because the walls had crumbled away. He could just make out his mother’s dark blue hair beneath the table, singed by flames that had since burnt out.

He was standing on the floor again, and he didn’t need to look down to know Liam would be laying at his feet, bleeding, staring blankly with that glassy look in his eyes.

“Why?”

The question slipped out from between Reagan’s lips as a whisper. It dropped into the ashes crunching beneath his feet. He felt like he was standing upon a pile of sand.

A dark figure stood in the far corner. He was nothing but a shadow, yet Reagan knew instinctively that it was Dietfried.

“I’d also like to know,” Dietfried said. “Why did you stay hidden in the closet? Why Liam and not you? Why didn’t you save them?” The voice was Dietfried’s, but the words were Reagan’s.

“That’s not what I wanted to know,” Reagan said. His voice was hoarse, and he tasted blood in the back of his throat. No more words would come out.

“Does the rest of it matter?” Dietfried said. He took a few steps closer, but the soot never cleared away. He still didn’t have a face, though he wore the same all-black uniform as the man Reagan had seen in his closet. “They’re all dead because of you. You had the power to save them, but you didn’t.”

Before Reagan could respond, the figure disappeared. He was alone in the empty house, surrounded by a silence that crept beneath his skin.

“You stayed with us,” Reagan said to the empty room. His voice echoed around him. “My parents welcomed you in. You were a part of our family. You ate with us at the dinner table. You used to sneak sweets out of the kitchen for Liam and me and play games with us when my parents were too busy. You sat in my living room, by the fireplace, and told stories with my father.”

As though conjured by his words, the scene materialized before him.

He could almost feel the comfortable warmth of the fireplace, could almost hear the logs crackling. Dietfried had built the fire. He’d lit a match and touched it to kindling, and for young Reagan, seeing that for the first time, he was fascinated.

“You can light a fire without a spell?” he asked, wide-eyed, staring at the extinguished match. Tendrils of smoke slithered upward from the white head of the match.

“That’s right,” Dietfried said. He had taken his seat in the plush leather armchair closest to the fireplace, and he reached down to lift Reagan and seat him on the arm. “Not everyone is blessed with magic like you and your family, so the rest of us have to make our own.”

Reagan remembered kicking his legs as he asked Dietfried question after question, all while perched on the armchair. Dietfried had kept four-year-old Reagan from falling over, and he’d answered all the questions Reagan had peppered him with. Each question was met with a smile, some with a laugh.

Then Reagan’s father had joined the conversation, and he and Dietfried had spent the rest of the night talking about magic and what Dietfried was studying at the capital. The theories of it, the origins of it. Reagan had been too young to understand any of it, and he’d soon dozed off, leaning against his godfather until someone carried him to bed.

He’d felt safe.

“How could you betray us?”

But the Dietfried in the armchair didn’t respond, and even as the memory faded away, Reagan never found the answer he was seeking.