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"I have always wanted to believe the best in you," I tell him quietly. "I wanted a father figure. I wanted someone who understood me and what I was going through with my magic." I reach out, touchinghis cheek.
After all we've been through together, this may be only the second time I've touched him. He leans into my hand with the fervor of someone starved for touch.
"I wanted it to be you."
We stare at one another while his body shakes and fights against the restraints. The loss of his magic and the energy he's exerting are weakening him by the minute, and the manic light is leaving his eyes.
"It's just…" I inhale sharply. "This is the only way. Don't you see? It was never supposed to be like this, Himureal. Somewhere along the way, the magic became perverted with selfish desires. The world needs a cleansing that only I can provide."
"I… please, please, Shadowweaver." His quiet voice, so broken, so human, cuts into me and almost shakes my resolve. But there is no saving him. There is no coming back from the lives he stole. As he struggles and fights against the shadows that I have weaved between and around his limbs, his chanting is a plea to me to understand, to save him, to spare him. The passion and fear in his words are so at odds with his normal intonation that I almost do a double-take to check who it is that I have restrained.
I clasp the back of his head with my hand, stroking gently, his hair incredibly soft and almost cool to the touch. I shush him quietly as I pet his head and slowly slide his blade across his throat.
"Sleep well, Frostweaver. Maybe in the next life, we can tryagain."
He sputters and gasps, his blood leaking onto my hands, my arms, and my clothing as I hold him close to me and run my hand down the back of his head as his life drains out of him.
Death is silent.
One would think it would be loud, like the body is putting up one last fight on its way out of the realm.
But it's not.
True death, the moment whatever part of you it is that makes you, you, leaves the body, is so silent it almost sucks the sound from everything around it.
I untwine my shadows and gently lower the Frostweaver's body to the ground. The dripping of his blood from the slice in his neck is obscenely loud in the vacuum of sound his death has created. But as I lay his body on the white marble floor, swirling with the blood and death of today but soaked in the residue and memories of two great men who once resided in this room, the silence screams at me.
The world is changed, for better or for worse, because the full power of Winter now flows through my frozen veins and because this God died a man by my hands.
My hands.
They're shaking in a way they have yet to after a kill. My teeth are chattering as if the magic that now lives within me has decided that I am unworthy, and it must shatter me from the inside out.
The blood that soaks into me is rich, and its metallic smell lights up parts of my brain and magic that I would prefer toignore.
I know the madness that lives in that blood, and I want no part of it.
Slowly, I rise to my full height, my eyes dancing over the two supine and motionless bodies on the floor around me. I have to let the others know, and then we can make a plan for what to do next.
Up until now, Shadow had remained still and quiet around my neck, an unmoving support that is so much a part of me that it is easy to forget he is around at all sometimes. He slides down my arm and rests his head in my hand, silently urging me to summon my shadow vision.
So I do, pulling the darkness around me with Rainworth on my mind.
As I walk through the darkness to the now-familiar door of Rainworth, I feel a tightness and a tugging in my chest. I didn't expect killing Himureal to affect me as much as it did, but this pain is unfamiliar. I rub my chest as I step through the door into the deep twilight.
The moon casts a warm orange glow on my chosen family. Waiting for me, Jaz, Plume, Cirrha, Taegan, Morrow, Tulip, and Mace are scattered around the grass, some standing, some sitting, all looking directly at me.
"Viola!" Mace shouts, rushing towards me. I hold up a hand, halting him a few steps from me.
"It's not my blood," I say, my head woozy from the tugging in my chest and the smell of the blood. "It's his.The Frostweaver is dead."
"We know, we think-" Mace begins, but I cut him off, holding my hand up. I can't hear him, and his voice is garbled in my ears.
"Wait," I say, shaking my head, trying to clear whatever it is that is clogging my ears. Through my blurry vision I can see my companions all stepping towards me, slowly, carefully, like I am a rabid animal they are fearful of.
I rub my hands on my face, dragging them down my flesh to try to push some clarity into my sight. In doing so, my hand breeches the boundary of my lips momentarily, and I taste the familiar, earthy flavor that blood holds.
The vaguely metallic aroma overwhelms my senses, and my vision goes out entirely, my limbs buckling, and just before I fade into blackness, I hear my name on the lips of someone I love.
