But I am selfish.
"Don't leave me here,” I whisper, my forehead on his. It’s a broken request, and I’m shamelessly begging with my pride in tattered pieces at my feet. I need him to stay with me. He places a gentle kiss on my cheek, his breaths coming shorter.
"You'll bury my ashes with them?" He asks, his eyes pleading.
Rexxan’s huge hand takes Stellan's other one. "I'll make sure it's done, Stellan," he says, acknowledging what I cannot.
"Take it out," he begs again, asking Rexxan this time. Rexxan's steady fingers unbuckle a strap at my thigh, pulling out the last glowing vial of liquid. He tips my best friend's head forward slightly, pouring it into his mouth. I watch the features of Stellan's face relax as his pain vanishes into the night.
"Thank you, Stellan," I whisper, my tears merging with his own on his muddy face. "For everything.”
"No, Rennalya. You saved my life in so many ways. It's been a privilege," he replies, as Rexxan's hands tighten around the hilt of the sword in Stellan's chest. I reach around his neck and unclasp the chain with his wife's rings on, placing it in his bloody hand for him to hold onto.
Stellan grins, of course, because he's Stellan. “Thank you, beautiful.”
“Don’t get fat in the afterlife,” I say, as my broken fingers close his fist around the rings.
He laughs, his hand shaking around the necklace. "I love you, Rennalya. I loved you from the day I met you."
"I love you too."
"And one more thing?" He whispers, choking on his words, red blood running out of his mouth. I nod, sobbing through the hand that's clasped over my mouth. His eyes flick to Rexxan, then back to me. "Just marry the old bastard, won't you?"
I'm laughing and crying all at once, my heart splintering into two as Rexxan stands, flexes his fingers around the sword, and pulls it from Stellan's rib cage. Blood spills over his chest and onto the cold, dark forest floor, and I watch as the famous eyes of Stellan Helaneth fade from green to grey.
I collapse onto his chest, my body wracked with sobs as I feel something inside me crack. Something I know that even time will never repair. Rexxan's arms wrap around me, a feeble attempt to keep the broken pieces of me together as guards pick up Stellan's body to take back to the palace. Rexxan beckons a healer to follow as he carries me to the cave where Stellan said Onyx is.
I'm sobbing as Rex illuminates the cave with magic, but when I spot Onyx, I feel worse. He looks like he's dying too. He is sat up against the cave wall, and when his gaze meets mine, a tear runs over his cheek. "He's dead, isn't he?"
I nod through silent tears as the King carries me over to my injured brother. I press my dirty forehead to his, crying with him in silence because there is nothing to say to make any of this better.
When I pull away, Onyx is staring at the ceiling, and when I look down, I see exactly why. His leg is completely mangled. I swallow the sick that threatens to appear in my mouth. "I took a potion for the pain, so I can’t feel it," he whispers, weakly. "But I think I'm a dead man talking."
"No," I reply, my whole world crashing around me for the second time today. Rexxan says something to the guard in a language I don't know whilst I take Onyx's shaking hand.
Rexxan is calm and unbothered, just cracking on with things like it’s another day at work. "Rennalya, keep talking to him, please." He empties the healer’s bag onto a cloth on the cave floor. "Tweezers, Ren," he demands.
"What?" I ask, through my sobs.
Rexxan reaches over me and takes some long tweezers from a case, and with steady hands, pulls the first wolf fang from my brother’s leg. "Rennalya, I need you to do as I ask, when I ask, yes?”
"Will he make it?" I whisper, utterly broken. Rexxan presses his lips together. It's amaybe. I pass him a yellow flask of something when he asks me to, watching him force Onyx to drink it before casting some sort of spell on my brother. "Slows his bleeding," he explains, examining the bone in Onyx’s leg. He looks like he knows what he’s doing. I’m sure he hasn’t done this ten times before, but he looks as though he has, and in that moment, I don't think I've ever been so grateful that I crashed the party of the Forest King last summer.
Talyn arrives first, his eyes softening at the sight of me, shattered and destroyed on the cave floor. "Thank you both, on behalf of the whole kingdom," he says, before crouching beside Rexxan. He shows no shock at the extent of my brother’s injury, but the grave look that he and Rexxan share tells me that my brother’s life is in the balance.
To me, it looks like his leg is half off, but Talyn just calmly begins discussing things with the King in healer-speak. Despite my best efforts to keep him awake, Onyx falls unconscious quickly as a flurry of healers surround him, working to save his life, trying to slow his bleeding with both science and magic.
At the centre of it all is Rexxan, his hands and arms dripping in Onyx's blood as he gives orders to everyone around him. He makes me leave while they reset the bones in my brother’s thigh, and for that I am glad. I just cling onto Onyx's arm for dear life, whispering to him over and over in case he can hear me.
"Will he make it?" I ask, once I've been sitting there for hours, a gaping hole in my chest as I try to grapple with the reality of losing my greatest friend. Maybe I’ve already asked that once. Maybe I’ve already asked it a hundred times. All I know is that I’ll keep asking it until someone gives me the answer I want. My eyes are shut. I can't make them stay open any longer.
"There's a seventy percent chance, I'd say," replies Talyn, his usual matter-of-fact self.
A silent sob escapes my lips. It's thirty percent too low. "I can't lose him. I need him." This is all my fault.
"He won't die, Rennalya. Not while I have breath in my body," reassures Rexxan, soaking cloths in different potions and tonics.
I lie with my head on Onyx's chest, his bleeding hand in mine, waiting and waiting for them to tell me whether he's going to live or die. But exhaustion eats away at my resolve, sickness jumbling my thoughts, and eventually I have no choice but to give in to my bruised and broken body as I black out on the cold floor of the cave.
