I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She doesn’t remember when she left Sylva.
What she remembers is that Brigade had left sometime before her.
She remembers realizing that there was nothing much left worth staying for.
She remembers that moment in the rain when he had found her, used a wing to protect her from the downpour. And he had something about her wanting for death and she’d said something like, ‘could being dead be any worse than this?’. She does not remember what he’d said then, if anything. She supposes now that it doesn’t matter.
She is uncertain now whether or not any of it had ever mattered.
She has spent the better part of the last few years interrogating all of the things that live in her chest and has decided that she no longer wants any of them. Least of all the heart. A troubled, foolish thing that yearns for things that she’ll never have and has no business wanting in the first place. But she has always been a stupid girl, Lilian. Her father had tried so hard to convince her otherwise. Clever girl, he said when she knew the answers to his simplest questions. She had not been clever then, merely good at remembering, and she is not clever now.
She wanders down to the edge of the river. Because she had found Velkan there once. And because she remembers, even still, how small she had felt when she’d skittered away from the cracking ice and collided with an immovable force.
She drags in a staggered breath as she ventures closer, dips her head for a drink, thinks about how fiercely she has wanted to fling herself into the current and let it carry her away. Because there has to be someplace better than this, she thinks. Some place where the heart does not ache and she does not have to think about what an insufferable fool she is and has always been.
But she does not surrender herself to the current. Merely turns her head at the sound of someone approaching. Her heart lurches and she exhales, “oh.”
lilian
