Page 44 of Where the Light No Longer Follows

“A few more moments. Time will not mind.”

“Because you’ve made a bargain?”

“I’m a good businessman, what can I say?”

Silene reached for the monkey toy he’d bought her and squeezed its middle, making it release a few high-pitched sounds at his face. “I have the bear. You take the monkey. To remember me by.”

He rubbed a shaky hand to her face before taking the stupid monkey. “You think I will ever forget you?”

“I hope you will. Eventually.”

Ten o' Clock

Azriel remained quiet for a long while after her request.

A request she had never thought she’d ever make.

“Krune is no more, Silene,” her oldest friend said.

She did not know what struck her first at the news of her old town’s fate. Relief or sorrow. “How can a town be no more?”

“It might not be for me to say.”

Dread pooled in her stomach. “I should have asked sooner. About my brother, too. About why I didn't see him when I arrived.” She hugged her arms around her middle. “I was just hopeful it was a good sign that he wasn’t. That he’d gone somewhere nicer, maybe been reincarnated already.”

The quiet that fell between them had Silene’s ears roar with noise of terror. “He did not die that day with you, Silene. He died a day later. Along with all of Krune. Then the entirety of your old realm followed.”

Her feet swayed, and she braced her hand on the dark wall of his gloom filled home before she’d collapse. “What?”

“The poison you gave him did not take.”

No, Silene had made sure. Silene had made so sure he’d go with her, she’d even used half her potion on him, too, so he’d go painlessly and faster than her even. “Then…then h-how did he die?”

Silene's spine steeled straight when he lowered his head and went quiet, her hand flying to her mouth to muffle her cries. What had she done? Had she left him in her father’s hands?

The man who sold her the poison had promised it would be quick and that it would not hurt. Even though her brother had hurt all his life, hurt was all he had known, she had not wanted him to hurt. She’d put more on his plate, so he’d leave without pain. She’d put her own half in it, too, when she had fed him that one last meal that evening—a meal they had never had before, one she’d given too much in exchange of the little coin she’d gotten only to make sure her brother at least had one good meal before his death. “How did he die, Azriel!”

“It took the strength of many. Luke died a God.” His dark eyes met hers. “He’d found out about everything that morning when he woke and you didn’t. When he’d gone to bury you and been told the truth by a passerby. He died avenging you. I found him amidst many deaths, hundreds and thousands. But the blood spilled was owed to him for what those people had done to you, had witnessed been done to you and remained quiet, so I left his soul behind, and someone else found him.”

“W-Who?” she asked, a prayer more than anything—a prayer than nothing worse had found him.

“My brother,” he said, and Silene swayed. “Luke had prayed for him. To bring you back in exchange for the price of his own soul. A request my brother did not have the power to grant because—”

“Because what?” she asked. “Because what, Azriel!”

“Because I took you away from his reach forever.”

Her hand went to her throat, to the scar that had once been a wound—her last wound. A wound she’d had to inflict upon herself after she’d woken at dawn sick to her stomach and realising her portion of the poison had not been enough to kill her. A wound she’d opened with the very same knife she’d cooked her brother his last meal. “Is it because I…because I—”

“No, Silene. It was because of him. He made a bargain with me.”

“A bargain? Gabriel made a bargain with you?”

“He did. And now he forever pays for it.”

A bargain, Azriel’s words whispered in her ear long after she’d left his home and travelled to a world she’d sworn to never step in, one she would not haunt. A world where Azriel had promised that her brother was happy. That was all Az had told her. She was to find out the rest—to piece the puzzle on her own.

Her feet remained rooted on the spot behind a tree trunk as she watched from afar a small wooden cottage surrounded by towering conifers, clouds of smoke pouring from its chimney and the hearth of fire in front of it.