The water is everywhere, violent and sharp. It batters and bloats me like a forgotten corpse. I fight to break free, but I can’t swim. I feel whole but as I struggle against the waves, only one hand exists to push the currents back. The sharpest waves carry the past with them, cutting into me and carrying my blood into the rapids around me. A thousand mistakes tear at me, a little at a time. Taking just a little skin as each collides with me. I can’t stop it; I can’t even breathe.

Some of them are easy. Their stings are tolerable and familiar. An argument with Ed. Waiting too long to tell them about Annie. Realizing my father would hate me in this life as much as the last. Learning both of my parents hated me the first time. Then I am slapped in the face as I open my door and I know it’s coming. But not yet. First I have other mistakes to remember. They grow more painful. Mary, the child hoping for a brighter future. The girl I couldn’t protect. The other house of penance, burned to the ground. These eat at me far more. Then I am in a room with Autumn, yelling at her. Treating her like a woman far older than she was. I try to turn away but I am on a rooftop with her, fighting to want to save her. A roof top I put her on. And I know it is coming.

Darian’s spell forms over the city because I was too slow. Grief like an avalanche tries to drown me. I use it to fight back, but I only grow stronger. I can’t save them all. I can’t. People are dying in the hundreds because I wasn’t careful enough. I wasn’t fast enough. I wasn’t strong enough. And their deaths were painful. Sudden. How must it have felt for their loved ones, to have a life and a family and to see them gone in a moment? How must it have hurt? I felt it. Every one. I want to turn away but I can’t. I am still being beaten and drowned by the furious waves. And then I am there. In that old abandoned building. Joking with my brother. Making light of my own misery as he retrieves the jewelry from my missing arm. I feel sick. I want to stop it. To change it. I can feel the mistake. When I break my promise to my mother. I can’t watch it happen again. I can’t.

I have no choice.

I turn, and I leave. I leave him there, after he helped to save my life. After he helped to keep me stable and sane. I leave him there. ‘Stay safe’. These were the last words I would ever say to my brother. ‘Stay safe.’ What a fucking joke. What does that even mean, in a city that is about to burn? ‘Stay safe’. Stay fucking safe. I left him with a platitude, and he died. This doesn’t just cut into me. It tears through me. It carves a hole in my chest and tears at the flesh around my heart. It hurts. It hurts too much to bear, and suddenly I am back on that rooftop, not stopping Autumn from jumping but pushing her myself. Then I am there again, but I fall instead. One more day. That is what I had said to her. One more day at a time. I can face one more day. One. More. Day.

My eyes are weary as I open them to a blurry world. There is something… red in my face. My body is sore, revealing the poor quality of my sleep. Thick, crusty rheum cakes my eyes as I struggle to focus.

“Annie, are you alright?” Sara asks. I blink a couple times and the red blur resolved into her auburn hair, hanging over me as she jostles my shoulders. “You were… whimpering, in your sleep again.” I bite my lip in embarrassment at this. As I regain consciousness, I become disgustingly aware that I’ve sweat through my night shirt again. This does not help banish the feeling of vulnerability.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” I apologize. Sarafyna has been through so much more than me. And yet, every single morning for two weeks, I have woken her up with my nightmares of leaving Henry behind. “We do have a spare tent. You don’t have to deal with me every morning. I know you must be tired,” I offer. I don’t know how I want her to respond. Her warmth has been what allows me to sleep every night, but the burden of putting that on her is unfair and it is getting to me.

“I want to be here with you. I like being here with you. And I could never leave you trapped in a dream like that,” she dismisses. Her hand runs along my arm as she says this and I feel that familiar spark of warmth. It’s small but it radiates through me. And helps thaw the ice in my blood. “Come on, let’s get cleaned up and make breakfast. It’s not long until sunrise.”

I sniff, then nod as she stands. Even at night, shrouded in darkness, she is beautiful. I don’t know if I could keep doing this without her. But I can. “One more day,” I whisper.

“One more day,” she agrees. She then looks down at me one more time with a gentle smile. Her scars are more prominent than ever now. The scars not just of her past but of what she did to survive it. I haven’t seen them fade or disappear since we took her back from the Kingdom of Endings. This too is beautiful. I finally stand as well and put up a sheet so both of us can get dressed. This act carries enough tension to collapse a lung, but neither of us knows how to move past it. We do this every day because, well. Life is strange. If we weren’t dating, it wouldn’t feel strange to change in front of each other. If we had started sleeping together, it would also be normal. But with everything that has happened… It’s weird. We are both ready to move forward but both emotionally petrified by our recent history. So we live together. Share a tent while travelling. Sleep in the same bed, or bed roll as the case may be. But we both feel an ever building tension we are both too broken to address. Which leaves us with this sheet. God I am so useless with this shit now.

As usual the tension fades a bit as we both emerge from our tent into our quiet campsite. We have been traveling for about a week now, finally fulfilling my promise to Ember. There are no roads on the route we have to take, as close as Sara could get us to this supposed border with the republic. We have had to travel on foot. Around us are three more tents for Autumn, August, and Ember respectively. As usual I first look to Autumn's tent, still closed. I lift up my goggles to get a look inside, and see her still sleeping, or at least in bed. She hasn’t had any more luck with consistent sleep than I have. Ember too remains in her tent, but August’s… August’s tent is empty. Immediately my hackles rise and my muscles tense.

“Shit, Where’s August?” I curse, Sara raises an eyebrow and starts looking around while adrenaline floods my body and my breathing shortens. “August? AUGUST!” I scream. Where did he go? I can’t see him anywhere. We don’t know what is out here, we’ve never been this far before. Shit. Shit shit shit. “August, where are you?” I yell again. Sara’s hand rests on my shoulder. Autumn bursts out of her tent in her night gown and a panic while Ember blearily emerges from hers.

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“August is missing?” Autumn immediately interrogates while Ember wrinkles her nose. I keep scanning the mundane evergreen trees all around us but he fails to present himself.

“Relax, he’s taking a piss,” Ember dismisses. Almost immediately the man himself emerges, the colors appearing on my goggles a moment later. I pull them off and see my friend, messy hair and baggy pajama pants looking at me sheepishly.

“Sorry, sorry. I was only gone a moment!” he apologizes before he sees my face and his own pales. “Are you, uh, alright, Lil?”

I shudder and try to shake it off, forcing my face into a neutral expression. “N-No, I’m sorry. I don’t know why I… I’m sorry,” I apologize. What was that? Since when have I failed to keep calm over something so small? We haven’t run into a single enemy this entire trip, and I’d actually expected some of Ember’s old friends to show up at some point. But it has been safe. There is no reason to react so strongly to an empty tent. I must have seen and missed him with my radar spell, if he was that close. But I was panicking. Over nothing. Fuck this could get dangerous. I can’t be like this. People are counting on me to be better than this. I can see the same thought in Ember’s eyes. “One more day,” I whisper again. Autumn catches my eye and gives me a hesitant nod.

After bringing down every king of Potestia, I had promised to help Ember. Or, at least see what her country was like. Meet the sages. But she needs the woman who fought for Potestia. Not this puddle of sweat and anxiety. How does Sara manage like she does all the time? How has she gone into the Radiant Woods so many times? I feel like I am the one shackled now. Once loss has struck once it’s like it lurks around every corner, waiting for an opportunity to strike again. No one says anything to me. Autumn and Sara understand. August does a little. And Ember… is Ember. She is at her best when she is quiet regardless.

It is awkward as we put breakfast together and pack up the tents. No one speaks really. But we have to get going. Another day on the road. We are quiet for hours. Ember is always too annoyed to talk to anyone. Autumn hardly ever speaks at all. And the awkward exchange this morning has silenced the rest of us. I spend the time reflecting on the state of my family when we left. My mother’s artificial warmth. Gilbert’s pleading that I stay. And Ed’s… I don’t know how to describe Ed. He seems to have disconnected from reality entirely. One look at Sara reveals she is thinking of her own family, Sam and Peter. It’s a somber march toward Republic land.

That is, until we emerge from the woods and a black dot finally appears on the horizon. Ember’s actual hackles rise. “There it is. The barrier. I hope you are ready, Sarafyna. New sages often struggle to pass through this,” Ember advises. I squint but I can’t make it out.

“That’s maintained by nexus energy?” I ask. “Any idea how that works?”

“How the fuck should I know,” Ember retorts. “I just know you can’t pass through without a nexus sage, and it protects us from the nexus itself.” I roll my eyes at her,

“My apologies,” I intone, “I will stop asking questions. I’ll communicate exclusively with meaningless hand signals and make a plan to kill the sages based on whatever information that provides.” I don’t expect her to be sunshine and rainbows but for fucks sake, is she going to make me regret every damn thing I don’t know shit about?

“Just don’t waste my time with questions I obviously would have told you about before, alright?” she grumbles and I roll my eyes again.

“You know, I’d say you talk like someone who has never had their ass kicked, but I know for a fact you have. Don’t make me sic my girlfriend on you,” I quip back. I say that, but I feel slightly grateful at the same time. For how insufferable she is, bickering with her makes me feel a little normal again. It allows me to think of, well, something that isn’t my brother.

“It’s… it’s wrong” Sara interjects and I am immediately covered in gooseflesh.

“What do you mean?” I ask and she shudders.

“It’s like the Radiant Woods but… sturdier? I don’t know. I don’t know…” she trails and I nod, moving closer to her and running my left hand against her back. Or, my real hand. I am still unused to my right. It feels real but… not at the same time. I can’t tell if it actually itches or if that is a phantom feeling from the real limb I lost. In any case, we keep walking, and the speck in the distance gradually grows into, well, not a speck. A massive obsidian stone hovers in the sky. Even I can feel it now. The air around it, trying to reject us. To push us back. Every moment I think it is too large to exist. Then a moment later I learn I was not as close as I thought and it is even larger. Hours pass, partially due to distance and partially due to the slowing effect proximity to it seems to have.

Everyone is exhausted by the time we stand beneath it, but eventually, it is nearly directly above us and Ember holds out a hand, making contact with an invisible wall. “This is it,” she says. “We won’t be safe once we pass through here. There will be monsters. There will be bandits. And worst of all, there will be the Guardians of Stone. We cannot let our guards down and, if we run into anyone sapient, let me speak first. You will reveal your ignorance too quickly if any of you do,” she warns.

“If only there had been a friendly resident of this country to answer our questions over the week it took us to get here,” I scoff and she glares at me. “Yeah, I get it. We appoint you public relations manager, the job you were clearly born for. Come on, we need to get through here. This stone in the sky is giving me the creeps.”

“I agree, we gotta get out of here,” August chimes in and Ember stares at Sara.

“That would be up to our local sage here,” Ember responds, looking at Sara, who is biting her lip and rubbing her arms as if she is cold.

“You alright, Sara?” I ask, suddenly less focused on shit talking Ember and far more focused on the woman next to me. I need to pay more attention to her. If I have been struggling with the loss of Henry, how much must she have been fighting with her own trauma this entire time?

“I’m… fine,” she replies. “Just… it’s just not right. It feels like sickness. Like if sickness left my body and filled the air around me, but I can still feel it. You’re right, we need to get far away from here.” With that she holds up one hand, and I can feel the pressure in the air lessen. Ember actually stumbles as the wall she is pressing her hand to seems to turn to liquid.

I take a deep breath, and nod, wasting no more of our time or Sara’s effort than necessary. I take a deep breath, and walk forward into a brand new world.