Chapter 77

The world stopped. Everything froze.

At the sight of the sword piercing through Wallace, Aris thought time couldn’t move any slower than it was in that moment. Wallace. A man he’d known for more than twenty years. Wallace, the man who had trained his brother and him.

Wallace. The man, who had saved his life on more occasions that he could possibly count, had been rammed through with a sword wielded by his wife.

Aris had seen thrusts like this before. It wasn’t something that one could recover from. Wallace would be dead in less than a minute. Every second that passed bled his life out.

Wallace had been murdered. He’d been murdered by Aris’ own wife. He knew from the second that Evrain had touched her, she was gone. Whatever of her that was left in her would be destroyed.

Torn apart and rent to pieces.

He knew that.

Aris saw that, and still, his heart wrenched so hard he thought it might physically tear in two.

He tried to scream. Tried to find his voice. Tried to do something. Anything. But he was weak.

He was too weak.

There was nothing he could do.

Aris could only watch. And watch he did.

He saw the shift in his wife’s eyes. He saw when glimmer of who she’d been shined through.

She leaned in and whispered something to Wallace.

Her hand guided his to the small dagger he had strapped to his hip.

It was almost a relief when he saw his old companion’s last act of sacrifice, driving his blade into the neck of his wife Corrine. Aris felt he might have a heart attack from the grief that he knew would overwhelm him, and he might never recover from. It felt as someone had cut open his chest and wrung out his guts, twisting them until there was nothing left in them. But in Wallace’s last act, he’d given Aris the greatest mercy of sparing him from needing to slay what had taken over the body of his beloved.

He had done what he knew that his former pupil Aris wouldn’t be able to do. He killed Aris’ wife, and in killing her, killed the demon that had wrought untold havoc on the world. He killed a scourge who had lived for centuries, always consuming and destroying.

He’d put out a wildfire, something that in its very nature fed off of destruction.

Wallace killed the heart of evil that had torn Vealand and a score of other countries to pieces.

Wallace had killed Evrain, and he had killed his wife. Aris didn’t know if he could ever forgive the man, but Wallace had known that when he’d driven the knife into Corrine’s neck, severing her carotid artery and burying it into her neck vertebra.

There was a stillness in that moment.

It was as if all the chaos that had been unfolding below them, all of the destruction and terror, had been deflated. With the death of Evrain, the fighting slowly died off too. The clash of swords didn’t disappear, but it lessened, replaced by the sounds of men desperate to stop the fires that were consuming their city in a mirror of what had unfolded at the hands of Evrain’s monsters, the men and women he’d taken as children and tormented, destroying their minds through systematic torture until they swore a blind, psychotic loyalty to the mad Emperor.

They had killed them. Killed the Inquisitors.

They had destroyed the foundations that Evrain had laid.

It was something that demanded celebration.

They had destroyed Evrain. They had saved their nation.

Cillia woke from her stupor. A spark of recognition lit her near vacant eyes and she stumbled her way to Kestrel, clinging onto him in a clutch that refused to break and turned her knuckles and forearms white.

Kestrel in turn had enveloped both Sephira and his young ward Cillia in a desperate grip. In a grip that Aris knew all too well. It was the grip that he use to hold onto his wife Corrine in so many times.

The grip that said ‘you’re mine. To let go of you would mean my death.’

That’s what it felt like to Aris.

He felt a dead man.

His heart had been torn from him. His soul frozen in a block of ice that might never thaw from it being frosted over by the death of his wife.

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He wished he could die with her. It would be easy enough. He had lost so much blood already.

He could just slip away.

He could leave everything and be by Corrine’s side. He wouldn’t have to live in the nightmare of a world without her.

It would be so easy. He just had to stop fighting. He just had to close his eyes and let go. He could feel the blood seeping out of him. It was slowing, but he knew that if would just let go, he would be too far gone for a healer to restore him to his battle torn body.

He let go.

The darkness didn’t come quickly. It crept through him slowly pushing it’s way into every facet of his being.

He felt its touch upon his fingertips first. They turned wooden. There was no feeling left in them. They had done their work. They had done it well. Now it was time for them to rest. Time to let everything fade to black.

Aris had done his work. He’d finished. He could die in peace. He would be free to return to Corrine’s side. He wouldn’t be forced to live a day without her.

He wouldn’t be forced to learn to move on. He could let go. He could forget. He could be free.

He was going to die here.

A hand reached out. It was tiny.

It was pulling him back.

Another hand joined.

A small chorus of voices.

They begged him. They pleaded with him. They told him not to go. They told him that they couldn’t survive the world without him. He couldn’t abandon his daughters. He couldn’t let them live in such an uncertain time without him.

They needed him.

His body hastened to life at those words. He didn’t want to return, but Aris felt his soul returning to him, forced back into his body.

He fought it. He wanted death. He wanted to be by Corrine’s side.

But he couldn’t.

Aris couldn’t be with her. He knew it. He knew that that was the cowards way out. He knew he needed to be brave. Vealand needed him. The Empire needed him. It would die without him, caught up in the destruction that Evrain had started. Fiell needed him.

His family needed him.

They needed him. He couldn’t abandon them. Not in some mad hope to rejoin his love, not when it would leave his family rudderless, lost, orphaned to a cruel world.

No. He would survive. He would live. Aris wouldn’t allow himself to die here. No when doing so would mean abandoning the remnants of Corrine that she’d gifted the world with.

He would not abandon them.

Their cries brought him back to life. The black that encroached on his vision receded. Life flooded back into Aris’ veins.

With a gasp he returned to them. He returned to a world without her. A world where each breath would be the torment of separation. Where each moment was a moment spent without Corrine by his side. His heart didn’t stop aching, but instead of pulling him away from life, it now highlighted his embrace of it.

He still had two younger daughters. Two daughters who would be without a mother. Two daughters that he swore to himself he’d raise with enough love for what had been taken from them with the death of their mother. He had Sephira, his brother’s daughter that was just as much his own daughter.

At that thought Aris realized something.

He wasn’t his father. Despite his fears. Despite the terror that had haunted many a sleepless night, Aris wan’t his father. He wouldn’t break like his father had done when he and Van had lost their mother what seemed like ages ago. So long ago, that despite Aris’ tutelage under the fallen Wallace in Memory Magic, his mother’s face was little more than a nebulous blotch of pink skin. He wouldn’t be like his father. He was nothing like the man. He had love to spare. He would move on, sustained by the memory of Corrine’s love, not frozen in a bastardized memory of it.

Aris cried, how was it that even in her death, Corrine had still counseled him and shown him not only the fool he was, but also the strong, loving, and powerful man that he had a difficult time seeing himself as?

She was a treasure that had been taken from the world too early. She was a scapegoat that had taken the sins of Evrain and bore them upon herself. She had resisted the monster long enough to allow the dying Wallace to ram a knife into her neck.

She had paid the ultimate price to save her tiny world and Aris would spend the rest of his life praising her sacrifice and sharing the memory of her to a world that may never know just how much Corrine had done to save them from evil.

She would be remembered. She would be celebrated.

*****

After more than an hour spent in the room, recovering and healing, the group left the tower.

Aris raided the throne room. The battle and subsequent fight to stop the flames that threatened to eat the rest of Fiell if they weren’t stopped, had kept the harsh, but stoically elaborate throne room of the keep from being touched by the fighting forces.

Aris commanded Kestrel to fetch a healer for Sephira while he found the most ornate of the wrappings and tapestries that painted the stone walls and used them to wrap the bodies of Wallace and his wife Corrine, whom Kestrel had helped to bring into the heart of the keep.

It was only fitting that they be buried in the fineries of the fallen emperor that they had slain. They would be honored in the way that he had, but never should have been, honored. He would wrap them in fineries fit for the greatest of royalty.

They would be heralded as they deserved. They would be the new heroes of an empire bereft of anyone to believe in. They would be regarded as the saviors they were.

Aris would make sure of it.

Aris didn’t know what time it was when he, Kestrel and his niece, no, his daughter, Sephira and precious little Cillia, who, though silent, The general could sense a well of questions and precociousness bubbling beneath the shell shocked surface of the poor child, strode through the mouth of the keep into the sky to which the darkness was quickly retreating as the sun bathed the burning embers of fallen buildings in its warm embrace.

It was with little fanfare that they were first greeted. Those that had been battling hours ago had focused their attentions on fighting the fires instead of each other and were still battling what was left of the blazes that had consumed so much of the town around Fiell’s keep.

They turned to him slowly.

It was nearly an hour before a substantial crowd gathered. Aris didn’t know why he stood there. He had been treated by the same healer that Kestrel had found for his daughter, but every moment he kept his feet beneath him sapped his already leaking strength.

“It’s him!” the voices started to chime. “It’s Aris!” they said.

The people, desperate for a leader. Desperate, in the face of the losses that had been wrought at the hands of now dead Emperor Evrain gathered before him.

Still he waited. He stood stoic before them. He stood until he felt he couldn’t anymore. He was a mountain in the tossing sea of uncertainty. He was the hero that Vealand hadn’t known it had needed until Evrain’s life had been snuffed out and his absence left a void and the feeling of a perverted wrongness that permeated everywhere his presence had been.

The sun had nearly reached its noontime peak when his face, a mask of pain and pride, spoke.

“Let me tell you a story,” Aris began. “A story of memories…”