I Am Never Alone

Something shook me hard.

Shapes swam above me, smeared and stretched like paint dragged across wet canvas. Beyond the crumbling stonework of the half-collapsed building, steel clashed and a creature roared, the sounds muffled and distant, drowned beneath the buzzing that filled my skull.

Someone lifted my upper half off the frozen floor. A cold, slimy liquid slid past my bleeding, cracked lips.

“EUGH!”

I retched as the stench flooded my mouth, like I'd licked the bottom of a swamp. A firm, warm hand clamped my jaw shut while another pinched my nose. I thrashed with what little strength I had left, but a multitude of hands pinned me down by the arms, the shoulders, the legs.

"Noo!"

My protest died against a palm, darkness eating at the edges of my blurry vision.

"Just swallow the damn potion!"

"Zoe, please just drink it…" a calm voice whispered in my ear.

Fine!

I gulped the substance down, coughing and groaning as it burnt its way to my stomach, my whole body feeling like it had been set afire. I clutched my belly, convulsing, my back arching off the ground in a silent scream of agony. My skin felt like it was being ripped apart cell by cell. My bones cracked as they rearranged themselves, my organs sliding back into their original spots. The pain short-circuited my brain, a never-ending torture that wouldn’t stop.

I lay there panting, out of strength and energy, staring at a collapsed obsidian ceiling, a hole punched through one corner, snowflakes drifting lazily through it. My knuckles no longer stung. I flexed my fingers. My skin is back.

"There she is."

Marie leaned over me, green light fading from her fingertips, a crease of worry carved between her brows.

"Welcome back."

"What… was in that?" My voice sounded like gravel dragged over a washboard.

"You don't want to know."

"Y-Yeah… I guess I don’t."

I pushed myself up onto my elbows, head swimming. Kai sat cross-legged to my right, her golden spear laid across her knees. On my left, Ior was still holding my wrist in a grip that could've crushed walnuts, glaring at me like I'd personally offended her.

"You bit me," she accused.

"You were suffocating me."

"I was saving your life, you ungrateful donkey!"

Behind her, Zelo sauntered in, twirling a dagger dripping with black blood, Bjorn ducking in after him and stamping frost off his boots.

"That's the last of them, for now." Zelo sighed, visibly disappointed. "They barely put up a fight. Guess they don't like the smell of Marie's brew either."

"Nobody likes the smell of Marie's brew," Kai muttered.

"Nobody asked you to drink it," Marie shot back.

I stared at the five of them, half convinced they'd melt away the moment I blinked. All I saw was Marie's rolled-up sleeves, Kai's scowl, Ior's puffed cheeks, Zelo's lopsided grin, his forest-green hair plastered with frost. Bjorn, still ridiculously tall, still hunching to fit under the doorframe. Are they… real? They have to be, right?

"T-thank you guys but… why are you here?"

They shared a look, none daring to speak to me at first.

"We, uh, had a chat with Atos." Kai rubbed the back of her neck. "Right after you left. Things were… tough, as you remember."

My breath caught.

"He was thrashed, obviously." Bjorn lowered himself onto a fallen beam.

“He barged in right in the middle of dinner!” Ior grumbled.

"He told us to get it together." Marie's voice softened. "He made a whole big speech. About how cowardly we were to let you walk off on your own. About how it wasn’t right to abandon our friend, no matter the circumstances."

"He said he'd do anything to get that chance again." Kai stared down at her spear, fiddling with the metal. "So we packed our things and followed Bjorn’s lead as soon as he and Ior recovered, thanks to Marie's healing.”

The girl in question blushed, turning her head away.

"We would've caught up sooner if someone hadn't insisted on the scenic route." Zelo added, jerking his thumb at Kai. "Thank the gods somehow Bjorn turned out to be some godsend arcanist, otherwise we'd be stains on a rock! Did you know about that, Zoe?!"

Let's pretend I'm still a bit dizzy.

"It was. A. Shortcut!" Kai growled.

"It was. A. Cliff. Kai!" Bjorn and Ior groaned in unison.

Zelo threw his arms in the air; Marie hid her smile behind her hand. Kai rolled her eyes at them.

“It could’ve been a shortcut, at least!”

Their bickering faded, as if someone had stuffed cotton into my ears. Atos. I could easily picture my drunk, stubborn, hopeless father, barging into my friends' home to lecture them about the one thing he'd never managed to do himself. I chuckled to myself. He’d swing his beer around, spilling half of it on the carpet, and blow every breath he took in their face…

He'd do anything to get that chance again, huh?

So would I.

It started as a hiccup. Then my shoulders were shaking and I couldn't stop them, the sobs tearing their way out of my throat, my face buried in my healed hands. I couldn't breathe nor think. I could only see him, smiling at me as the ground swallowed him whole. ‘It's okay, Zo. Keep fighting’ the idiot said. Like anything about THAT could ever be okay!

"Zo?" Marie reached for my shoulder. "Zo, what is it?… Did… Did Atos find you on the way here?"

I nodded.

“...Is he here somewhere?”

The tears flowed faster than I could wipe them away. I shook my head.

The room went silent as they pieced it together. Bjorn's shoulders sagged. Kai turned towards the hole in the ceiling, jaw working, blinking hard at the falling snow. Ior let go of my wrist to cover her face, leaning back against Kai. Zelo stopped twirling his dagger, leaning hard against the wall, staring at nothing. Marie pulled me against her, and I let her, clinging to her coat like a child.

We stayed like that for a while, the four of us, grieving a man who'd never quite known how to be loved.

My head jerked up, and I dragged my sleeve across my nose. Gods, I’m such an idiot!

"I’ve got to go get Yumii."

"Who?"

"A friend. She's still out there, somewhere in that blizzard." I scrambled to my feet, legs wobbling like a newborn fawn's. "We got separated. I need to find her."

Kai was already up, spear in hand, wiping her eyes.

"Then what are we waiting for?"

The blizzard swallowed us the moment we stepped outside.

The undead found us long before we found Yumii. They crawled out of the snow in their rusted, ancient armour, dragging themselves towards us with that same wet, rattling groan. It was easy to let the anger take over once more, my emotions boiling in my guts.

The shadows pooled at my feet, frost blooming across the snow, and my sword rose into my waiting hand. I lunged forward, my friends yelling at me to come back. Sorry, I cut a zombie’s head off, but I need to get this out of my system. A growl slipped out of my lips as I danced in between the running corpses, black blood spraying all over. My blade hummed as it shifted shapes time and time again. Yesss, more!

I was fury incarnate, a tornado of steel that slashed through every threat. I stabbed a monster at lightning speed with small daggers, jumped off its falling corpse and slammed another in the ground with a spike mace. Unrelenting, I stabbed an undead in the mouth with a dagger and immediately followed through with a slash of my sword, rolling over its bent back to reach another zombie and crushing its skull with a well targeted strike. I lost myself in the battle, a smile growing wider on my face the more I killed.

"Gods…" Marie's whisper barely carried over the wind. "She’s using it?!"

I glanced at my friends, who stood in a line, watching me decimate the onslaught. Kai didn't take her eyes off me, her spear half-raised, as if she wasn't sure which side of it I stood on.

"She must've had it rough."

“Where can I get one of those?” randomly asked Zelo, stabbing a zombie in the face.

My friends rolled their eyes at him. An ice knight burst out of the fog, its long blade sweeping low, digging trenches through the snow.

"Kai!"

Her javelin was already airborne, punching through the knight's knee and pinning its leg to the frozen river underneath it. I ran up the trapped monster and brought my sword down through its neck; the body shattered into glittering shards beneath my boots. Marie hurled a vial into a knot of undead, and thick roots burst from the snow, coiling around their legs and dragging them down. Bjorn ploughed through the tangled mess shoulder-first, sending half of them tumbling off the ridge, then swung from afar at the stragglers with a roar that shook the snow off the ledges above us, a thick wall of ice spikes catching up to them. Zelo danced between the stragglers, his daggers flicking in and out of armour gaps like a bee’s sting, giggling like a kid at a fair. Ior threw punches after punches, hands covered in her trusty spiked gloves, into the nearest zombies' jaws; their heads always exploding after impact.

“Did you see that?!” she shook out her wrist, beaming after a particularly large explosion.

“Everyone saw that,” Bjorn sighed, avoiding the flying chunks of meat. “Can’t you be a little more… clean?”

“Some of us actually work for our kills, you know!” she threw back at him. “We don’t just stand around moaning at our hands!”

Bjorn flicked his hand, a wave of snow swallowing her whole. Ior burst out, spitting ice, yelling for bloodthirsty vengeance.

For a few glorious minutes, it felt like old times.

We found Yumii beneath another frozen river archway, back pressed against the ice, surrounded. Blood dripped from her nose and ears, her arcane sputtering around her fingers like a dying candle, barely enough to keep a circle of snarling Cinder Fangs at bay.

"YUMS!"

Her head snapped at us. I ran straight at the pack, sword at the ready. Kai's spear whistled past my ear to impale the wolf lunging at my throat. I shoved my weapon in between another creature’s eyes and flung it into the last few monsters, baring my teeth and roaring like an animal.

Between the six of us, the fight didn't last. The last Cinder Fang yelped and fled into the blizzard, Kai threw her spear high up in the sky, her golden tattoos glowing as she shoved her hand downwards. The golden weapon followed its master’s orders and slammed down onto the fleeing wolf, snow flying high in the air after the orbital impact.

Yumii dropped to the ground, her knees gaving out. I turned her upright, Marie scrambling to grab a healing potion.

"Zoe…" Her grip on my coat was weak. "You're alive."

"Takes more than a mountain and a thousand beasts to get rid of me." I brushed the frost out of her hair. "You look awful."

"Thanks." Her eyes drifted over my shoulder, narrowing. "Who are they?"

"Great friends of mine that came here to help,” I pointed them out one by one. “Marie, the sweet one here is our healer. Then there’s Kai, our voice of reason; Ior, our eternally mad bodyguard…”

“Grrr!” She flexed her muscles. I rolled my eyes.

“That’s Zelo, our mascot,"

“Hey! I didn’t have to tag along, you know?!”

“But it is much appreciated! Will you play a song for us?” Ior stuck her tongue out. Zelo tackled her in the snow.

“...and Bjorn, who could calm even the sea, but never these two." I hesitated. "Kai knew Elyah too."

Kai's head whipped towards us so fast I heard her neck crack.

"Wait. You knew Elyah?" She crouched in front of Yumii, eyes wide. "You were the friend she travelled with, weren't you? Where did you two come from? What were you looking for? Why did you split up? Did she-"

"Kai." I put a hand on her arm. "She doesn't remember. And how did you even know about that? Elyah never told me anything!"

“Me neither,” she shrugged, “but I’d overheard the guys that brought her in talk about how they were two faeries.”

Marie frowned. "What do you mean, she doesn't remember?"

So I told them about the arcane's cost, how the memories faeries trade away are gone forever and how much of her life Yumii had already given away.

Kai sank back on her heels, the colour draining from her face.

"I'm… I'm sorry. I didn't know."

Yumii's lip trembled. A tear slipped down her cheek, freezing halfway down. I pulled her into my arms, and she buried her face in my neck.

"I'm sorry," she sobbed. "I'm sorry I failed all of you…”

"Yums… What are you talking about? You didn’t fail us."

She pulled back, her eyes red and swollen.

"I did… A long time ago… Back at the Twilight Forest, I found out that the entity, whatever its name is, had come here before, and that knowledge is shared faery to faery, because so many of us died fighting it."

The carvings on the Council's doors flashed before my eyes. The chanting circle, the dying soldiers, the hordes of twisting, multi-limbed monsters, it all made sense to me now. Of course…

"The book said we went into hiding once the empires collapsed..." Yumii sniffled, staring at her hands. "...and that I was one of the elders at that time."

"But," I frowned, "you'd be thousands of years old... Faeries don't live this long… right? How are you alive?"

Yumii turned her head away, biting her lip.

She didn't answer. I really would’ve liked some answers about now, Yumii!

Marie put her hand on my shoulder, calming the storm brewing in my mind. ‘Give her a minute’, said her eyes. I winced but nodded, getting up, pulling up the faery at the same time.

"The fortress is this way." Bjorn pointed up the slope, towards a dark shape looming within the fog. "If there are answers anywhere on this mountain, they're in there."

I looked up at the black twisted structure above us, parts of exposed to the air. Long archways wrapped around the mountain side, leading to other parts of the castle. No wonder they struggled to take this fortress, I bit my lips, it looks impenetrable.

But I was so close. I was about to get Sam back, no matter the cost.