The Caligo Saga: Shattered

Ash does not remember what it was before the fire took it.

She had thought about that more than once, lying there with the stone cold beneath her back and the sky burning violet above her. Whether the ash remembered the tree, the letter, the wedding gown. Whether it screamed, somewhere far beneath its own silence, for what it used to be.

She thought she was becoming ash.

There had been a scream before this. Hers, she thought, though it no longer felt like it belonged to her by the end. Now there was only the after—the strange, suspended hush that follows something breaking beyond repair. Smoke curled from the blackened grass in slow, lazy spirals, and somewhere above her, impossibly steady against a sky that should not exist, Inyx watched without blinking. She swore she could see tears in the raven's eyes. She didn't know if they were for her or for him.

Probably him.

Don't, she tried to say. Or perhaps she only thought it. Don't do this. Not for me.

He didn't listen. He never listened when it mattered most—that had always been his particular, infuriating flaw, one she had loved before she'd had the sense to be afraid of it.

His hands were shaking when he pressed them to the wound the world had made in her. She remembered that most of all. Not the pain—the pain was already leaving, already going somewhere she couldn't follow—but the shaking. As if the earth itself trembled beneath his palms.

"Stay," he said. Just that. As though it were a command the universe was obligated to obey.

Light bled from him then, and it was not warm like fire, nor cool like water, nor sharp like wind, nor patient like earth. It was all of them and none of them, a colour with no true name, and it poured out of him like something being torn loose rather than given freely. She felt it drag through her chest, through her bones, through the marrow itself, unraveling something that was never meant to be touched by mortal hands.

You will destroy yourself, she thought, or tried to say, or only feared.

He smiled instead. A terrible, beautiful, breaking smile.

"Let me."

The last thing she heard was a woman's voice, calling his name from somewhere far away, frightened in a way she had never heard her sound before. The last thing she felt was his forehead pressed to hers, his breath uneven against her skin, whispering something that might have been a promise or might have been a prayer—she could no longer tell the difference, and perhaps there never had been one.

Then the violet light swallowed everything.