Mourning

For a while, the loudest sound I could hear was that of my racing heart, followed by that of the wall of flame.

Then, I heard howls.

“We’re going to survive!” Someone cried. “We’re going to survive!”

“WE’RE GOING TO SURVIVE!” echoed the remaining fighters.

“Aaaaaah!” I screamed, adrenaline still drumming in my ears.

“Ray!” Merlum shouted. “Hear, my brothers and sisters! Ray exposed the underground fighters before they could pull their full trap on us! Everyone, three cheers for Ray!”

The remaining typhins joined in on the chant. “Ray! Ray! Ray!”

A smile broke over my face. “Thank you! I couldn’t have done it without all of you!”

“Don’t be so humble, kid! Quick thinking like that doesn’t develop overnight,” Merlum bellowed, clapping the backs of the other typhins on the battlefield.

“I can say the same about you, wind mage,” I yelled at Merlum. He laughed.

Amidst the celebration, Caramine’s voice rang clear. “Moonlight! We have no time to waste. Anyone who is physically able, tend to the wounded. Council, let us negotiate the terms of surrender with Tundra. Once we have settled upon a deal, we will collect our spoils.”

“Yes ma’am!” cried the typhins.

And with that, everyone disbanded. I watched as typhins began hobbling back towards the carriages in pairs and trios, the uninjured guiding the hurt. The children doused the remaining flames surrounding us, allowing our elders to rush out to greet the returning.

I slid out of my carriage and onto the gritty earth. Luckily for me, the terrain was not sandy, but I still had to catch myself to not fall over with the crutch. I surveyed the area around me. Lotus was standing over a few of the captives, including the one she stole the oil from, until Merlum came to take all the captives away. Wait, was that blood under Lotus’s right armpit? When did she get injured?

In the center of all the carriages, I saw two bodies on the ground, one far smaller than the other. Was that who I thought it was?

No. It couldn’t be. But it had to be.

Steeling myself, I walked towards the bodies.

Memme laid in a pool of blood far larger than anything I thought her body could’ve contained. She was fifteen, which would’ve been six in human years. A child. I remembered how excited she was to have found the water just over a day ago, as if she’d just won a game. She wasn’t afraid of thirst at all, I realized, and it was all thanks to her leadership. It was that same innocence that left her completely unprepared when her assassin slit her throat.

Easing myself down with the crutch, I sat on the ground across from her twin brother, Remme. He wasn’t moving. Somewhere in the crowds that surrounded us, wounded warriors thanked the medics as their gashes were cleaned and dressed with ointment and bandages.

“Can I redo this?”

I looked up. Remme had not moved.

“Father said that the desert remembers everything. When we die, if you’ve been good, you get to be reborn, and you get to redo the things you did wrong in the last life,” Remme muttered. His voice barely registered as a whisper.

I could not answer.

“Why aren’t you saying anything?” He whimpered.

A lump caught in my throat. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “Remme, it’s not your fault. It’s people like me who failed to keep your sister safe. You did as much as you could.”

“But not good enough,” he whispered.

I had no words. Part of me wanted to leave and fetch Razzel, who probably actually knew what to say. But part of me knew that leaving Remme in this moment would only cause him to blame himself even more.

And then I remembered: Razzel just lost Allegor, too. Her son.

Eventually, though, she came over. “Do you mind giving us a moment?”

I understood, and left them to process death together.

Before I knew it, I had walked far past my carriage and into the main battlefield. I must’ve missed the Council negotiating the terms of the surrender, as now, in the center of the battlefield, sat a slowly growing pyramid of crates. I suddenly realized: deal or no deal, we had forcibly stolen someone else’s sustenance to make ours.

I looked away from the crates, into the distance. A mountain of rubble laid where the ridge once was. Allegor probably laid in there somewhere, as did Tiana. We sent our more dexterous fighters to scale the mountain, and yet death was their only reward. If the fighters were at the top of the ridge when it collapsed, there was no other possibility.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Merlum, his eyes reflecting the flickering gold of the fire.

“Want to pay respect to the dead?” He offered.

I nodded.

We walked past Tundra’s tents, past the bustle of people taking Tundra’s crates, and stopped by a large boulder in the rubble. It was still, and the rubble was clean, save for one streak of crimson barely visible between the cracks. A few other Moonlight members scrambled over the boulders, moving smaller rocks in desperate hope for an arm, a leg, anything with a pulse to emerge from the waste.

“So, you accepted that they cannot be saved?” Merlum finally asked.

“I’ve seen enough broken people to know the limits of the human body. No human would have survived that collapse. And I realized that you guys are not that different.”

Merlum nodded. “Humans and typhins, the way we’re built, we really aren’t so different. We’re…all just so fragile, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” I said.

I watched Merlum continue to stare into the rubble. His own sister had died in the trap, and it sounded like he had accepted it. Was that normal? Or was that just what happens when you see too many deaths? Memme, Allegor, Tiana, and more whose names I never learned. Just how many more typhins would they be joining?

The last few typhins searching the rubble clambered out, one by one, dejected. They joined up with the rest of the party back at the carriages. Not long after, Merlum left, too. I left with him.

We loaded our carriages and treated the filigreed typhin from Tundra, freeing him from his bonds, before immediately shooting out south. Behind the dust kicked up by our horses, the shadows of Tundra members freed each other from their restraints, and began surveying the damage.

Lotus sat in silence on the left side of our carriage, nursing the now-bandaged wound in her side. I opened my mouth to say something, but realized I had no words.

“It’s fine,” Lotus whispered, and I melted back into myself.

And now, with nothing but the steady drumbeat of the Redlands, there was nothing stopping me from thinking about the raid.

I just killed two typhins. Maybe more. One with a direct shot to the head, and another in her tail, a fatal hit I didn’t even realize was fatal. Then I celebrated.

Why did I celebrate? Was it just because I could still shoot anything at all?

Growing up, I always resented my parents for celebrating. Half of my childhood was just hearing their parade of mundane victories jangling about the town like a pair of cheap cowbells. I hated their self-assured acts of humility, the ones that always seemed to bring about praise as if everyone were reading a script. I hated the hours they spent reliving some run-of-the-mill monster expedition, instead of spending that time with me. I hated how people clung to the achievements like so many flies to rotting flesh. On days my parents celebrated, I ate the languid leftovers on our table, alone and miserable. On the days my parents celebrated, I felt in my soul that my life was not mine to live.

I eventually realized that the drinking and partying was, to an extent, a social obligation. And that by the time everyone was done carousing, my parents had no more energy to spend with me. At the end of the day, most of what my parents did was keep the village safe. So why not celebrate?

But no matter what, I figured I would never celebrate the death of sentient beings, of any of the peoples who were just trying to make the Daemon lowlands their home. I would never try to hurt them, unlike my mother whose very first mission involved setting up and poisoning a well for the vampires. Our neighbors, even if unfriendly. This is how I wanted to distinguish myself—and actually slaying the demon, for Accipitus’ sake. This is how I wanted to be different from everyone else in the goddamn Daemons.

When I was nine, I awoke to shrieks. A group of people from the neighboring village was torching the head shaman’s house, three houses down and across from where I slept. I heard someone accuse him of practicing black magic. Accuse our shamans of sealing a deal with the demons; and that’s why our town still had so much food, still had so many hunters, when decades ago we had neither. People with pitchforks swung wildly at anyone who would get close to them. Among the rioters was the woman who once sold us eggs.

My parents jumped into the fray to protect the shaman. In the heat of battle, my father killed the leader of the uprising. The remaining people all turned on him, but eventually they were all contained, and our townspeople dragged them all the way back to their own village.

The next day at noon, the head shaman hosted a feast, and personally sang the praises of my father.

I ran away from home that day. I brought my training sword and dashed into the woods as far as my legs could carry me, then I began to swing indiscriminately at trees who did nothing to deserve my cuts. I stayed out through the afternoon and into the evening, and as the moon arced over the sky, I could hear my parents crying out for me in the woods.

And now, nine years later, I shot a typhin through the head. Intentionally. Then I pivoted to look for the next one without so much as a blink. I didn’t realize my shot would kill the other, that I couldn’t aim for the tails.

I killed typhins, and everyone cheered. And I cheered with them. At least eight of our bandmates had died, too; yet in that moment, we cheered.

The carriage went over a bump, and I realized then that my jaw was clenched, as I’d channeled the weight of all those deaths directly into it. Slowly, I forced myself to release that tension. Only then did I notice just how exhausted I was. Damn. I guess my body yearned for sleep before the bodies of the dead had time to grow cold.

I slept in bouts, just like the beginning of our journey. But I kept seeing the image of the catapulted typhin crashing into bare earth again and again. Screaming. I could still hear our teammate saying that the injury was lethal. I could still watch her scimitar go down. I tried counting sheep to control my frenzied mind, but the sheep kept turning into typhins.

The next few days, Lotus tried to initiate conversation with me several times. I guess she must’ve done this on the day I shut down after our argument, after I went through her notebook. Out of respect and remembering what she said about my shutting down, I tried to respond to her, but could hardly focus on what she said.

Eventually she caught on and left me alone. The afternoon after, as the typhins once again settled into the sand to rest, I watched as Lotus slipped out of the carriage and vanished into the sea of canvas and reinforced wood.