Branches from elderly trees lash out at his face. Indigo’s legs run faster despite the aching throbs spreading throughout his limbs. Determined to see things for himself, the village, and the faces of his family smiling and all right, Indigo doesn’t stop once; not even when cuts are slashed across his cheeks by the wood around him, nor when the smell of iron invades his senses as blood trickles past his jaw and colors his skin into faint shades of golden hues. He runs. He runs. He runs, and runs, and runs until he is out of breath, panting and kneeling in front of the scene he’d yearned to flee last night, for nothing else matters in his mind but assuring the safety of his loved ones.

Yet, what Indigo sees makes him want to look away and look forever all the same.

The Council member had been right, he realizes. It is as if the kiss of death itself visited the village between then and now. The bodies of people who accompanied him throughout his childhood—people he’d once admired in the past—lie there as horrid silhouettes turned to stone would, picture-perfect statues who’ve fallen off their stands.

Indigo takes a step back. He gasps and shakes his head before tripping over his own two feet. “No,” he whispers as he backs away. “No, no, I couldn’t have… I didn’t mean to—”

A line from the forbidden tome—his greatest inspiration and teacher—flows through his mind.

“To the one who shall let his curiosity go too far, to the one who plays with unique mixtures not meant for the world’s eyes, you will regret having tried.”

Indigo had believed this referred to the creation of an unusable potion that simply wouldn’t meet its desired effect. However, now, it instantly clicks with him: I truly hadn’t a clue back then. “And now they’re all gone,” he whispers, his voice enveloped with tremors as he meets his sister’s lifeless eyes. “They’re all gone, and it’s too late to save any of them…”

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And it’s all my fault.

Tears fall from his eyes. “I’ve made a horrible mistake…” The salt of them stings cuts he knows he’ll need to cover up later with healing balms if he wants any chance at survival—with them, he would rouse suspicion, and he doesn’t want that; he wants to appear as the normal, old Indigo who has done nothing wrong.

Indigo whimpers. As his breaths leave his lungs, his gut recoils and churns inside his body. “I’m sorry, everyone. I’m so, so, sorry.” Daylight breaks. Birds begin to sing in the branches around him. Indigo grits his teeth. He grabs a fistful of dirt and throws it at the trees. “Shut up,” he mutters. “Why are you so happy?” But the birds do not stop, and he wants to scream, yet he knows he can’t—for they will find him if he does.

Suspicious. Normal. Normal. Suspicious. The words linger in his mind.

He wonders if he should have been amongst the faces of stone as well. A deep, ingrained in his heart part of him is shouting, yelling that this act is one he won’t ever be able to atone for.

Indigo bends over. His head hangs low. He figures that if the Council doesn’t kill him, then the guilt throwing punches at his insides just might. And as his stomach rejects the reality lying before him, he throws up all over the ground and entertains a brief fantasy where either the mage from before or a human soldier finds him—covered in vomit and blood—and finally puts him out of his misery. “No,” is still the only word able to make it out past his mouth.

He covers his shaking lips, now smeared by his palms tainted by the soil. The birdsong gets louder while dawn breaks into pure daylight. Indigo wants to close his eyes, to get lost in it now; but behind his eyelids, familiar tortured faces look back at him with disgust.

It’s like his legs are rooted to the ground, like he could stay here forever and mourn their stone-turned bodies until his falls apart. Yet if he’s learned one thing in life, it’s that survival always wins over empathy, and as the impending footsteps of multiple presences near, the ties he had to the Earth are quick to be severed.

This time, he does not head to the shore, but toward the mountains—where the Academy still stands, proud and tall.