Page 14 of On Burning Paths

I guess my other side just must be sensitive to it.

“Stick together. Stay alert,” Thorian orders.

We make our way back to the edge, close enough to feel the deep grief of the place once more. The sadness hits me before we've fully stopped moving. It doesn't announce itself as grief usually does, as a sharp thing, sudden and painful. It seeps. Like cold water rising through floorboards, slow and inevitable. The wrongness of this place settles into my chest and doesn't leave, and by the time I've drawn a full breath, it's already inside me.

Thorian has been quiet since we moved back to the threshold. He looks out over the landscape now, and a shadow moves across his eyes.

I don't know what the others feel standing here. I wonder, not for the first time, whether the weight of this place lands differently on all of us, whether our losses have made us porous in different ways, cracked open in shapes that allow different kinds of grief to get in.

The death of my parents was the worst thing that ever happened to me. Grief is a monster that eats you alive, gnawing slowly and carefully to maximize the pain. The more you struggle against it, the harder it bites. Even now, remembering them doesn't bring warmth first. It brings their absence. The torture of reaching for a memory and finding that joy has been replaced with the echo of losing them.

If I felt such pain at losing my parents, I can't begin to fathom how the parents of these children felt. Many of them were plucked from their beds in the middle of the night, taken from the physical world to function as fodder for something they never asked to be part of. How would it feel, to anguish and search for your child, only to learn through some diviner that they were gone? That Aqualis or Valtor had deemed their life inconsequential enough to end without hesitation?

The girls and boys who lost siblings that day. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Families left with a gaping black hole. Loss is a sinking, sucking thing, pulling at everything around it. Losing a child like that surely ended even the happiest of marriages, turned family members against one another. And if the graves are here, it means those families, already torn and suffering, didn't even get the closure of a funeral. They didn't get to wash the body, or speak over it, or lower it into ground they could visit.

They were simply gone. A child there one night and not the next, and nowhere in this world to mourn them properly.

Being witness to suffering like this, to true innocence held in purgatory for nothing more than a god's vanity, feels like it shifts the foundation of who I am. It makes it impossible to simply exist in this space. To breathe. To remember that I am here with a purpose of my own, that I have a sister waiting for me, that I am meant to cross through this place rather than kneel at its edge and weep.

Fenric paces back and forth just beyond the threshold, his boots toeing at the edge but not crossing. It's as though we can all feel it. An invisible pressure pulses just beneath the soil, a clear delineation between where we stand and where the cemetery begins.

A shout rings across the field.

We turn to look, watching as one of the warlocks breaks free from his group, shrugging off their grasping hands and strutting out among the gravestones.

My breath catches in my lungs, my heart starting to beat faster and harder. Thorian’s arm tightens around me.

As much as I hate the warlocks for how they behave, and how they’ve leveraged their magic against us, I’m still suspended in a state of captive apprehension and concern for him. I despise them for ambushing us at the swamp, for nearly incinerating Fenric and me, but that doesn’t mean I want them to die in some horrible way before my very eyes.

In fact, I’m not sure I’m capable of wishing that fate on anyone.

As the warlock walks, a dim white magic sparks in his palms, like tiny little lightning strikes in the rising fog. The man walking through the stones is Ulric. He wears deep green silk robes and walks with his head high, his bald head gleaming in the moonlight. As he goes, his boots dig into the soil with abandon.

It gets harder to see him, harder to make him out, and I realize that the fog that I barely noticed before is getting denser, rising up from the earth, as though summoned by the gods. And, likely, knowing their flair for the dramatic, it was them. Setting the scene for whatever is going to happen next.

Like a production. A concert for us to enjoy.

The nausea in my stomach gets worse at the idea of them sitting somewhere above us, drinking and making merry over the resting place of these children.

I let out a breath, and Thorian’s hand shifts to my waist, holding me still, offering a comfort that moves through my shaking, confused body.

Beside us, Fenric glances at me, then back to the action. He shifts from side to side, unable to stay still. Even from where I’m standing with Thorian, I can feel the heat radiating from his body.

Just a ways down the perimeter of the cemetery, the vampires stand and watch the warlock’s progress, too. I fight to keep my gaze from lingering on Talon. I can’t deny my happiness at seeing him alive, even knowing it doesn’t make sense… since we're competing against each other.

I suppose I’m still grateful to him for saving my life in the gardens. And… and maybe I still can’t ignore the strange pull I feel towards him.

Magnus shouts something angrily from the side of the field, but doesn’t make any move to follow his teammate. Ulric keeps walking, and we watch him, and it truly feels like he might make it through. That the act alone, just to face such a thing so bravely, might be enough of a trial.

Dusk is completely gone, the soft purples and blues completely replaced with that blanket of dark that I’ve come to know as the standard night sky here. There are no stars, but the moon shines almost eerily, casting a white-blue glow over everything, diffusing through the fog like a spotlight in a theater.

When Ulric makes it nearly halfway through the cemetery, some of the other groups begin talking again, arguing among themselves.

They clearly don’t want to be overtaken. But I suspect they don’t want to move through the graveyard either. Slowly, a few of them begin trickling into the field, taking tentative steps, their caution and haste battling for precedence.

Thorian makes no move, gives no orders. We stand unmoving. Waiting.

Then, faintly, I see something shifting. A great, yawning veil of sadness rolls over me, and I rock forward with the impact of the feeling. Grief and agony and despair suck at my throat, making my insides feel hollowed out.