But Interitus always was one step ahead of me.
When I look back at all my failings, this one will always be the worst.The one that changed all our futures.
One smile, and just like that, all possibilities are gone.
She bares her teeth at me.She’s already won, I just haven’t realised it yet.
As I breathe out, behind me, a final breath is drawn in.Such a small noise, yet it slices through all my futures and all my pasts.
It severs all the possibilities I could have created, and it zeroes down to all the ones I now choose to destroy.
Time rushes back in a roaring explosion.
“No.”It’s a scream.
My arms outstretched.
Too slow.Too slow.
I turn.One step.Then another.My arms reaching for Gellara.She lands so heavily I almost drop both of us.
I collapse to my knees with her.
A solitary line of dark blood flows from the corner of her mouth.One of my sister’s serrated feathers protrudes from her chest.Her demon magic leaks into the air.A beautiful ruby red smoke that almost glitters.
The feather pierced her crystalline heart.
The park fills with the scent of woodsmoke, summer sunsets and the faintest trace of ocean.And the stronger the scent grows the more my tears fall.
“Gellara…” I whisper, hysteria already strangling my voice.“Gellara,please.”
I shake her shoulders, but her eyes are staring through me at nothing in particular.Her body is too heavy in a way it shouldn’t be, and her magic drifting on the air when it should be wielded.
“She was a distraction,” Interitus says.“It’s better this way.It’s always better when it’s just us.”
I fall quiet.
Ever so quiet.
I don’t reply to my sister and that agitates her.Behind me, her feet shift from spot to spot.
I lay Gellara’s body down amongst the grass and rise.
My cheeks are dry now.
I cannot cry, I cannot mourn, I cannot move past this.
For my insides are growing dark, my vision pinpoints on my target.
I am only wrath.
I am only violence.
I am only vengeance.
What I am about to do is wrong, but I have no intention of stopping.Knowing that brings me an odd sense of calm.I always thought Interitus and I were so different.But every time she destroyed something I’d made, she did it with the clear, concise efficiency of someone who doesn’t fight themselves.
The difference between us, I always told myself, was choice.That I was not capable of what she was.
