The floor was the first thing that I noticed. The warehouse, when we used it, had a bare, stark concrete floor. Smooth, but unpolished. Now, however, there was a large circle in the middle of the floor that was no longer concrete, but dirt. At least five meters in diameter, it was the last thing that I had been expecting when I had opened the door.

Still, the innocuous circle did nothing to soothe my anxiety. And the splattered blood everywhere else didn’t do much more. The punching bags were all torn to shreds, their fluffy innards strewn about the haunted, bloody scene.

The last thing my eyes found was the small obelisk-like thing that stood at the edge of the dirt circle. It stood almost a meter tall, rising up out of the ground.

Carefully, slowly, I made my way from the door over to the dirt circle, the dread a physical weight in my gut. My shoes sank into the spongy dirt as I walked, like I was stepping into a bed of moss.

The room was dead silent, so quiet I could hear Ren’s breath from across the warehouse. So the thud that sounded out as my knees hit the floor was jarring; an explosion of sound, despite the dirt muffling it.

It was the words written at the top of the little monument, crude letters carved into the stone, that blew my feet out from under me. That kicked me in the gut so hard I lost my breath.

‘Here lie heroes of the best kind: innocent’

I knew it had been coming, I’d known in the back of my mind that it would’ve been impossible for my men to have survived a catastrophe of this magnitude, but to have it confirmed hurt like nothing else had in a long time. I had hoped beyond hope that Ren would open the door to a miracle, open the door to Theo’s smiling face and Leo’s grumpy one, to lively conversations and cheer.

But this was no miracle, this was cold reality. And they were dead. All of them.

“I left room for you to write something too,” Ren said from behind me.

I didn’t answer, still lost in shock.

Time passed, slipping through my fingers like sand. I didn’t move, scarcely breathed, stuck like a stone statue. I kneeled at the grave of my people, thinking and thinking. I thought of the first night I had met them, of the many nights that followed, full of laughter and happy exhaustion. Of spars and competition, of trivial drama and problems. Full of life.

And I thought of how they died, of their last moments in this world. I could figure out the general circumstances that led to them being here. Likely, they had been captured just as they had begun their assaults on the Fight House people, betrayed by their own friends. Owen’s plan must’ve been to have some sort of big reveal here, after capturing Ren and I.

Which meant that they would have been left here, bound and defenceless. Easy pickings for the murderous bugs.

And it was all because of me. Because of my ambition, my naïveté, my stupid trust. They may have died regardless, whether they had ever met me or not, but the fact that they had been here, tied up and utterly unable to fend for themselves, was a direct result of my own mistakes.

And I didn’t know how that made me feel. Or, rather, it didn’t make me feel. Anything, at all.

I felt empty, hollow. I shed no tears, felt no raging tides of anger or guilt or sorrow. Just an aching emptiness in my chest, devoid of any emotion at all.

Hours passed before I finally spoke again. “Did you bury them yourself?” I asked. My voice was raw, rough.

“What was…Yeah, yeah I buried them,” Ren replied from behind me. Evidently, he had not moved either.

“You should have waited for me. I had every right to be there, to have buried them with my own hands.” Anger crept slowly into my voice, just a hint of it.

“I know, Ruby, I know you did. But I was not going to let you witness what I did. I was not going to open the door for you to find what I found.” Ren breathed out, his voice full of an emotion I couldn’t quite name. “There’s pain, Ruby. Physical, emotional pain. And that can change you, break you. Mature you. And then there’s what was in this warehouse when I walked in, Ruby. That’s different. You can deal with the pain, but not that. Not while I’m here, while I can do something about it.”

Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

“And what, you can? You can deal with it? It won’t hurt you?” I asked, turning to him. My voice was bitter, and it grated against my ears.

Ren met my gaze with a smile, his glossed eyes soft and tired. The sheer volume of emotion on his face utterly silenced me. It was an expression on par with how he had looked at me the first day that we met, his eyes a sight I would never forget for the rest of my life.

“Oh, it hurt, Ruby. It hurt the first many times I had to deal with it. It shattered me to pieces, broke what little humanity I had left.” His eyes were haunted, drenched in guilt and sorrow. But he was not speaking of today, I could see it on his face. He was miles away from this warehouse. Years away from this warehouse. “But eventually, I did what I had to do to survive. I stopped feeling it, stopped caring about it. Stopped thinking about it. So you ask if this can hurt me? Not anymore, Ruby, not anymore.”

I dropped my gaze as he stopped talking, unable to handle the emotion on his face. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, my voice soft.

Ren gave a half laugh at that. “It’s life, Ruby. You’ll learn too, eventually, if you decide to stay on this path you’ve chosen. But you don’t have to, if you choose not to. If you choose to bury Rosefire here, with them.”

“If I live long enough to make that choice,” I said with a sardonic smile. “But there’s no way in hell I’m gonna give up on this, on Rosefire, now. Not after this. Rosefire breathes its last when I do, and not a second before. And for them, no matter how impossible the situation is, I’ll work until Rosefire is everything I promised them it would be, or die trying.” Although I had been talking to Ren, it began to feel like I was speaking directly to the people underneath me. “I swear, on my life, that I will work every day I have until I join you all, to become every bit the legend I promised that you’d be.”

Turned over my shoulder, I called out to Ren. “Pass me whatever you used to write your message.”

He hesitated for a second, before pulling out a simple dagger from under his hoodie and tossing it over to me. An action the significance of which I would only fully understand much, much later.

I caught the dagger carefully, unused to handling any sort of blade. It really was a simple thing, inornate and modest. The blade was a foot long, silvery and thin, double edged and ram-rod straight. Its handle was about half as long as the blade, ovalish and wooden, wrapped in a gauzy black cloth.

I didn’t pay it much mind, only giving it a cursory glance over before turning my attention back to the stone. I weighed my words carefully, fully aware of how important this moment, and the words that I chose, were.

Here lie the founding members of Rosefire. Men of great hearts, great loyalty, and great courage. In Rosefire’s name they shall live on, carried on its wings to whatever greatness it achieves.

That took up all the space I had on the rock, so I stopped there, staring numbly at the words I had written. Objectively, it was laughable, to claim that Rosefire would see any kind of greatness now. The chance had been minuscule at best when the world had been normal, but now? When I myself only had at most a few more days to live? Reason dictated that it was pure madness, utter foolishness. But what else could I do, what other option did I have? To give up now would be to dishonor the name of those under my feet, and I could not do that, not after everything I had already done to them. So it didn't matter what reason declared, what logic dismissed as impossible. I would make it happen, one way or another. I would put every fiber of my being towards that goal, in spite of the insurmountable odds, so that when I died, I could greet my friends with my head held high, knowing that I had done everything within my power to fulfill my promise to them.

With my mind still numb, I suddenly swept my hair over my shoulder and grabbed it in my hand, acting almost in a trance. Its blood-red color was stark against the black and gray palette of the warehouse. I’d always kept it at a constant length, letting it fall just above my hips. But today, for the first time in my life and with almost no conscious thought, I held my hair at a length just above my shoulder and swiped at it with the dagger. One quick and soundless cut was all it took, and the rest of it came fluttering down like bloody snow.

It landed on the dirt, each strand striking against the brown of the ground. “I’m gonna kill him,” I said suddenly, staring at the painting of bloody rivers that my hair had created. “That’s all that's left to do in this world, I guess. I’m gonna find the person who did this, and kill them.” The word felt strange on my tongue. Foreign. Kill.

I was no stranger to death, but never had I ever considered causing one. Perhaps I’d always believed I could rise to the top through intimidation and fighting, without bloodshed. A naive and stupid thought, I could see now. Ren was right, I thought, pain can mature you. It’s a shame it’s too late now.

I pushed myself up to my feet, knees groaning, and turned to face Ren. “It’s a suicide mission, I know. But it’s what I’m gonna spend the rest of my time doing. I won’t hold it against you if you want to leave.” It hurt to say, and I knew I would be unspeakably sad to see him go, but he truly had no reason to stay. I was marching straight to my death, and the both of us knew it.

Ren fixed me with a small grin. “And do what? I said it before, Ruby. You have my loyalty until I get bored, and this seems like the funnest mission yet. What better way is there to go out in an apocalypse than trying to assassinate the cause.”

I returned his grin with a small smile of my own, grateful beyond words that I wouldn’t have to spend the last few days of my life alone.

“But, before we go,” Ren said as we left the warehouse and made our way back to the desolate streets, “there is one more place that I’d like to visit, one last time.”