“Gareth, hold on… please… hold on!” My tortured memories beg and plead, but no matter how hard they barter with the past, I already know what happened. Bloody chains hang from my sides, as I walk amidst a smoldering village, or rather the beginnings of one. I can hear my breath enter and exit my body as I walk between corpses of mostly women and children. They had their chance for peace and spat in its face.

I awoke in a cold sweat, my breath just as ragged as it was in my dream. I stare into the starry sky above me and tears fill my eyes. The straw of the roof I lie upon crunches under my weight as I adjust myself and attempt to fall asleep again, knowing fully well that it won’t be the peaceful escape that I desperately desire.

I hear more crunching and ruffling of straw as a visitor has come to keep me company, “Aeramen you can come inside… Skath, please come inside.”

“Ashe, I can’t… every time I look into the hollow eyes of Esther, I know it’s my fault,” I say hiding my face from her.

Ashe crawls up to my side and sits next to me and we embrace the silence as neither of us can fully verbalize the emotions we have kept hidden over months of horrors and sadness. Once again Ashe attempts to beckon me inside and I brush her off my shoulder.

“If I wasn’t inside sleeping soundly that night, I might have gotten to Gareth in time to heal him. I might have been able to prevent… I’m not going back in,” I say turning onto my side and then curl myself into a ball to hunker down on the roof.

Again, silence permeates the night, and we eventually hear a door open to break the tense darkness. We hear sniffling and I know exactly who it is. I cover my face in shame as I hear the weeping of Lilith, as she goes to mourn her lost husband. Then again, it’s not just Lilith that mourns, the whole village has a palpable sorrow and fear that consumes it.

I can tell that Ashe is waiting for Lilith to be out of earshot before she speaks, “do you blame yourself for what happened? Because none of us do. We let our guard down and the dregs of Gehenna’s vengeful spirit came for us.”

“Gareth died in my arms, and I couldn’t save him. He had a future! He had dreams! Now, his dreams are lost forever,” I say breathily as if in a whisper, “They had a future! They had dreams! Now the retribution of the teratolion has silenced so many. I thought that Uzuri would choose differently, but now so many are but ash on an unceremonious pyre.”

I look at my hands and they are covered in the sanguine scarlet of my shame. The blood I spilled at the site of atonement wasn’t the last to be added to my guilt, but the first baptism of condemnation. Nearly half of who once lived in this village have been purged from the lands of Nuren, and it’s all my fault. I started something that I was warned would have horrific consequences and now I live where so many innocents have been silenced.

“The Gehennan Separatists chose their fate the day they killed Gareth. Uzuri lost a brother and the man she loved to Gehenna. She knew that you and Gareth did everything in your power to protect all the Unadeamy and wanted to protect us from the remaining scourge of Gehenna. She did what needed be done… without her decision to destroy the separatists… Gehenna’s legacy would never let us sleep in peace,” says Ashe, but I can tell she is shaking and told me those words less to convince me of their truth, but herself. Each word felt rehearsed, and despite the practice they were still so unsure.

I don’t respond, as I understand the logic in Ashe’s words. I’ve tried to justify Uzuri’s decision to myself in similar ways several times. However, I still can’t help but think that maybe there was a peaceful solution. Perhaps over generations of goodwill the poison of Gehenna would have been purged from the minds of the Gehennan village, but that possibility no longer exists. You can’t reason with the dead.

I perpetuated the cycle of violence created by Gehenna, and I know that a desperate, indoctrinated, and uprooted people were merely holding firm to the faith of their past lives. Like Gehenna before, they were purging the demon and heretic from their sacred valley, and in turn they themselves were destroyed. If the fight was fair, perhaps both sides would have annihilated each other, but the teratolion have an army that outnumbered the separatists in a way that it was a legion to one. The decision was swiftly made, and I had no power to reason with Uzuri as my face and identity are no longer that of Skath, but Aeramen. I could merely watch as the horde of claws ripped and tore through man, woman, and child, setting fire to Gehenna’s last hold out on this world. I sit in a village that mourns the loss of their brethren and now knows that they live at the mercy of the teratolion, that at any moment, at any slight, at any deviance, they too may be wiped off the face of Nuren.

I let go of my legs and sat up, to look Ashe in her eyes. Much like my own they are red from many shed tears. She has lost family, friends, and much more because she sided with me. I try to put a hand on her shoulder, but my resolve faulters and I keep my hand to myself. I’m the reason for her pain… for all their pain.

Ashe reaches for my hand and places it on her shoulder and despite her tired and saddened expression, her eyes are filled with a quiet determination, “Skath, this is all Gehenna’s fault. He poisoned so many of us. Do I wish that everything turned out differently… I do, but wishing does nothing to bring back the dead, nor does it change the past. We did our best and let’s face it, every human in Unadeam could be dead right now. You saw the teratolion army. It would have taken our village hundreds of years to grow that size with the Amolacrimae and Trials of Martog in place. The few lives we saved would have been snuffed out if not for us. Gehenna had us walking a knife’s edge and we didn’t realize it. I’m alive thanks to you and all we’ve sacrificed. This village can dream and live thanks to that, as before under Gehenna the specter of Martog was in each of our shadows.”

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“Who are you trying to convince with that little speech,” I say removing my hand from Ashe’s shoulder, and we both greet the silence of night again like an old friend. Neither of us can believe the world we live in now. I have to somehow justify these people to the Totalion and say they are worthy of salvation, but within the blink of an eye I’ve witnessed genocide committed by the woman I loved. I mean love, right? I put my head into my hands and stared over the village, which I still feel so out of place in. I just want some peace to grace my mind. I also can’t help but wonder, if I was still Skath, could I have prevented all this pain and suffering.

We eventually see Lilith return from her journey to Gareth’s grave. The signs of new life protrude from the sun shaped hole of her Unadeamy dress as her belly begins to grow heavy with child. We watch as Lilith touches her stomach and looks back at her husband’s grave. Eventually, Lilith, content in her night’s journey disappears under the roof of the house Ashe, and I sit upon, the sounds of a door breaking the quiet of the night.

I look at Ashe, and I see her arms wrapped around herself as she shivers in the cold darkness. The scars on my wrist open and my blood intertwined with my essence begins to weave a cloth blanket that quickly takes shape and wraps Ashe in its warmth. She grasps at the blanket and shudders looking at my wrist whose scars quickly heal over as if they had never been open in the first place. Having seen Lilith on this cold night, I turn my attention to Ashe and ask, “Do you still plan to come with me beyond the valley of Unadeam? The woman you love needs your support right now, especially now that she’ll be alone if you do leave.”

Ashe doesn’t immediately respond, and we both reflect on my words. Days after my funeral, the first of many deaths impacted the peace of the valley. From the hempen swinging desperation that I left behind years ago, we found Mary’s corpse. The traitor’s guilt overcame her, and she atoned for her shame in death. I hate that I still resent her especially considering Gehenna threatened her and her sister with all manner of defiling harm to force her to betray her friends. I hate that I partially blame her for the death of my family, but if she was just a bit stronger, maybe things could have been different. Maybe my parents would still be alive. I hate myself for thinking this way, knowing who was threatening her, how timid and afraid she was, and that she betrayed us to keep herself and the sister she treasured safe.

“Lilith has Esther, and Esther has her. A part of Gareth lives on in her and they’ll find comfort in each other and her baby,” says Ashe bringing her knees to her chest to bury her face in them, “I still dream of leaving this valley, and I know there has been a lot of religious reform, but my love is still not amongst those changes. My love is still sin to them and won’t be accepted by Lilith.”

I nod and place a hand on Ashe’s back, as she’s right. Even after Esther became the new high matriarch and changed much of the religion of her mother back to the old ways, she left certain commandments of the goddess the way they were. To a certain extent, the religion of the goddess is a fertility cult, so Ashe’s love would be seen as blasphemous. There really isn’t a future for her here.

Ashe looks at me and asks, “What about you? Are you going to go after the woman you love? You are still alive; your face may be different but your heart’s the same. If you don’t do something by tomorrow morning, you’ll lose her forever.”

“It is the will of my master that she becomes a queen. The man that currently courts her, will make her a queen not only of the Western Mountain Halls but rani of the Eastern Dune Empire. He is a better and more worthy man than I, as he brought her out of the gloom of my death and I was graced with her smile once more, not by my efforts but his,” I say picking a piece of straw from the roof and I twiddle it between my fingers before I let the breeze take it from my hand.

Ashe reclines backward and stares at the starry sky and says, “What about your happiness? You’ve gone through so much for her, and Uzuri loves you deeply. Don’t you deserve what you’ve fought for. Doesn’t she deserve to know that you are still alive?”

“According to my master, she’ll be pivotal in saving thousands of lives in the near future. Also, if I did marry her, our marriage would cause a war amongst the three teratolion kingdoms due to differences in religious and political opinion… in a sense my being dead to her has already saved several lives from the horrors we’ve witnessed. We only saw a fraction of the teratolion armies of the Western Mountain Hall, could you imagine a war between that army and two others just as large? I cannot sacrifice so many lives to indulge in a moment of happiness for my own sake, especially after what we’ve seen,” I say and memories of women and children being torn in twain by monstrous claws, and pyres made of newly made homes burn into my mind. It is better that I’m dead to Uzuri, and that the lie persists.

“Will we ever know happiness Skath?” asks Ashe as she turns her head to me again.

Parts of me wants to say something of comfort to Ashe, but my heart answers before my mind does, “I don’t know…”

“So, will you be attending the royal proposal tomorrow?” asks Ashe and I bite the inner flesh of my cheek as I don’t want to respond to that question, nor do I want to be present, as the future I had hoped for will be taken from me.

It has only been a few months since my funeral and already Uzuri is about to wed. Then again, Mul’Rensi the maharajkumar of the Eastern Dune Empire swept her off her feet. In the depths of Uzuri’s sorrow, he made her laugh. In the struggles Uzuri has had assuming her new role as princess, Mul’Rensi stood by her side and acted as a guide. Whenever Uzuri felt different, he stood as a confidant, as he too is a teratolion of mixed blood. He has been there when I could not be, and sometimes I think he is a better match for Uzuri than I could ever be. He brings out of her the queen that she was always meant to be, whereas I would have merely squandered her potential and perhaps even limit the happiness she could have in this life.

Ashe shakes my shoulder and asks again, “Skath are you going to attend the royal proposal tomorrow?”

I shake my head and say, “no… not unless I’m invited, and even then, I’ll try to find an excuse not to attend.”

A new voice pipes up that makes a shudder go down my spine, as not only do I recognize the voice, but it is not a voice of one of the villagers of Unadeam, “At the behest of King Upendo. I Mlinzi, captain of the guard formally deliver this invitation from his royal highness for a private audience. It is good to know that you are alive and well, Skath son of Turas, son of Angtos, the savior of the princess Uzuri.”