Sabrael
He remembers everything before it all went black.
He remembers the fog that formed around him like a mold, squeezing and suffocating him as he passed through. He remembers the stilt-legged monsters that chased and chewed him raw and ragged. He remembers the others, how greyed they were by their time on the Other Side. Death hadn’t been kind to any of them, of course, and he hadn’t escaped the peppering of his hair or the wrinkling of his skin. He remembers, most of all, the gaping black hole that had swallowed him completely. As he fell, the reaching fingers of the dark had broken and remade him all at once.
He only trembles when he remembers this.
Time heals, but it does so slowly.
He lives the life of a refugee. He could go to Ischia, perhaps, but instead lingers like he is still a ghost in the meadows. This is what she felt, he thinks, the sun and then the stars spinning above him day and night. This is what she carried with her. Sabrael cannot hold onto the image of Wallace too long; the woman’s face blurs in and out of focus as if behind an amorphous fog.
Gentle warmth pools in the small of his back and he closes his eyes into the sun. His skin has knitted back together where it was split by the claws of the Things, but scars pucker him. His ears have tried to heal, too, but they will never be the same. One is split mostly down the middle and the other has lost the tip. The slowest to recover is his mind, though. Both the Things and the hole planted a seed of fear in him that blossomed instead of healed over time. Fear is a new emotion for him. It grows alongside the other thing in his gut –
Sabrael grows and swells and lays the egg at the beginning of winter. He doesn’t understand the alien magic of it, doesn’t understand the ability to make life from seemingly nothing. A part of him worries what lies within the dark-shelled egg (dark like the hole, the uncanny same shade as his worst nightmare). A part of him thinks he should crush it and be done with the whole thing. But he feels a tenderness towards this extension of himself that he cannot explain. There is hope radiating from every fine hollow in its mottled shell. There is light waiting to burst from within; he knows it to his core.
It is all that he has now, this hope.