Page 254 of May: Bloom & Bane

“I am using what is required to fulfill the request,” the reaper replies.

He raises his hand, and black tendrils of shadow spill from his palms, wrapping tightly around his shins and thighs. The darkness hardens, molding over the fractures, locking the broken bones into place.

He stands, and the shadow-braces groan under his weight. From the narrow floor of the pit, the world looks entirely different. Stalagmites surround us like a frozen jail cell. He scans our surroundings.

“The shortest distance between two points… is a straight line.”

He raises his left hand toward the wall. Deep within our chest, Ashán’s magic surges to life. A spear of hardened shadow shoots from his palm and sinks deep into the cliff face high above us. It snaps taut, hauling our broken body straight up the rock like a grappling line. The instant we land, he fires another.

She won’t recognize you, I plead, beating against the inside of our body. You are going to break her heart.

He pauses, eyes dropping to his hands.

“The heart is a fragile mechanism,” the voice whispers back to me. “It breaks regardless.”

Another spear erupts from his palm, and we shoot over the canyon lip. He severs the shadow line, letting it dissolve back into himself, and immediately resumes his march toward her scent.

No. There has to be something left.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR DAUGHTER? I scream.

Several heartbeats pass before he speaks again.

“Daughter?”

He searches for the word, turning it over, trying to find where it belongs.

“Offspring?” he asks.

My heart leaps.

“A continuation of her bloodline? The second name?”

Ash… my voice cracks. Ash please… You already love her. You tell her bedtime stories. You feed her with your shadow every night. Don’t tell me… I sob. Don’t tell me the only danger she was ever meant to survive… was you.

His head rolls to the left until the shadow muscles in his neck pull taut.

Crack.

He tilts his head to the right.

Crack.

“I don’t like this,” the reaper says.

Somewhere beneath the curse… Ash is still listening.

Keep fighting, Ash... I’m coming.

I search the fractured corners of our mind, hunting for the one thing the curse could never taint. I find it buried in the dark—a bedtime story he whispered to Vaelína when he thought the rest of the world was asleep.

Once, there was a creature made entirely of darkness. He lived in a deep, cold hollow, and he believed if he ever touched The Sun, he would only destroy it.

“Stop.”

He was sure he was a monster. But one day, a beautiful, stubborn, copper flower started growing right in the center of his void. And it wasn’t afraid of his shadows. It bloomed because of them.

“I said stop,” he rasps.