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She’s fucking insane.
“I know you didn’t choose this life, Kaspias. And even though you should suffer for everything you’ve done to my family, I want to give you the memories you deserved as a little boy before this country corrupted your heart.”
I glare at her in stupid confusion. Mouth open and eyebrows raised. Her nonsensical sentences are making me feel like I’m having a goddamned aneurysm.
Before I can insult her, a mirage of my childhood spins around us. The sight is gruesome, bloody, full of every lesson I was taught, even in infancy when the human brain isn’t even formed yet. It’s all here. The time I was forced to watch the meat carnivals that go on in the villages around our base. How I cried when my best friend, Creed, died of infection from getting a finger cut off with a rusted blade. The many sessions our instructors trained me to feel happiness at the sight of decapitation, at a person screaming in pain.
Skylenna watches it all in silent revulsion.
But I’m not fazed. Did she think I’d cry? Show even an ounce of emotion? This is nothing. It was necessary to build me into the unstoppable commander I am today. I see others go through these exact scenarios every single day.
However, Skylenna sees a memory of me crying for my mother in a dark cell at the age of four. I look away, avert my eyes to anything else. It’s the only memory that makes me furious, hateful, resentful.
As she tightens her jaw, the images change drastically. She shows me a cottage in the woods. It isn’t until I see my mother on a kitchen table that I realize what moment in time this is. I watch Sophia die, slowly, with small whimpers that escape her full lips. I watch as Arthur bleeds to death while he clutches his toy rabbit to his chest.
It’s one thing to hear of these stories.
It’s another to witness them play out before me.
And Skylenna closes her eyes, gripping my hands before I can yank them away. Without warning, every memory we just watched play out begins to drain from my mind, funneling down a black hole Skylenna created. And just as I panic from the loss of everything that’s made me who I am, I’m blinking through new moments of my life.
Sophia holds me in her arms as a toddler, picking me up from my crib to kiss my wet cheeks and warm forehead.
Sophia scolds Kane for pushing me into a trench of mud before dinner.
Sophia hands baby Arthur to me to hold for the first time. Kane and I gaze down at him, making a pact to protect him no matter what.
Sophia cleans my scraped knee, dresses it with a bandage, and kisses it with a smile. Kane asks to go next, even though he wasn’t the one to fall.
Sophia sends Kane and me to our room after we bring a goat into the house, and it shits all over her new carpet.
Sophia holds me.
Sophia sings to me.
Sophia loves me my whole life.
It all hits me like an earthquake happening inside my body, inside my aching soul, splitting everything I know apart. I watch my life play out with Kane—the times we’d play pranks on Arthur or the days we’d take him on adventures through the forest. I even meet Skylenna as a little girl. I watch them fall in love.
With an abrupt gasping sob, I fall to my knees in front of this strange, gallant, all-consuming phenomenon of a woman. How long have we been here? Decades? Centuries? Time has no beginning and no end. She’s crying, too. Holding my face in her hands, seeing my life play out in front of her own eyes as well.
And I’m suddenly not the man I was before. I’m the man that Sophia raised, because everything else was drained from existence. Everything else was obliterated. And all that’s left is the love I have for my two brothers and the mother who gave me everything.
49. All We Have Left
Marilynn
“Niles,” I gasp.
He’s hanging from the wall with fresh burns on his sides, wincing as he tries to take deep breaths in and out. Warrose is next to him, staring straight ahead without blinking, as if he’s in a trance.
I turn around, taking a step back as I watch Skylenna gripping the sides of Kaspias’s face. He’s on his knees in front of her, eyes rolling back in his head.
“Get us down, Mar,” Niles pleads.
I nod with a racing heart, dashing to his side to unbolt the iron contraptions around different parts of his body. “What happened?” I ask him.
Niles grunts as I unlock one of his ankles. “They did something to Dessin. Something about making him see Skylenna differently. And then she fucked up Masten, not sure how. Ow, fuck, easy!”
