Aftermath

Chapter 26: But I'm Not Leaving

Reunited with his Song and with time catching up to him, Ingressus reconciles with a familiar face one last time and finds all is far from well

In fact, this time, he isn't so sure that he will make it out

Author's note: the art for this chapter - similar to chapter 10 - comes with a tiny blood warning

******************

"BECAUSE I'M NOT STRONG ENOUGH!"

Ingressus awoke in a shock as his own words echoed in the empty space around him, and he gasped for air, clutching at his chest as though he had only narrowly escaped drowning in those words. He looked down and found that he was sat in shallow water in what seemed to be the old waters of Nestoria – exactly as he had been found all those decades ago when he first washed up there as a child. He brought his hands up out of the water to look at them, watching as the droplets fell from his palms. He felt his damp hands with his fingertips, feeling the cool water seep through his skin. He was still alive...

At least, he thought he was...

But Nestoria didn't look the same. It was destroyed. The shoreline had been ravaged of its wildlife and all of the assets that the Nestoris clan had built to make it home – the fishing village, the campsites and even the piers were absent, making the place seem long abandoned and uninhabitable. It looked almost dystopian.

Why was he here?

The water he sat in was murky, choked of oxygen from the remnant smoke of fearful flames that stole only everything from the people who deserved it least. His fearful flames. From his own corrupted desires. The horizon was foggy, and the smoke danced lightly over the water, small ripples forming in its place and it glided along into the distance. If he squinted, Ingressus could barely make out the geological stacks that once littered the seafront crumbling under the weight of the pain that he had inflicted on the Ardoni clan, showing that he could destroy that which did nothing. That he could destroy everything, whether he wanted to or not.

There was one thing that struck him about his environment, and that was the reflection of yellow in the ripples of the murky water in front of him. His heart skipped a beat as the pattern of the yellow slowly revealed itself into something familiar and, when he looked up, he saw the back of a small Nestoris Ardoni stood perfectly still only a matter of feet before him just looking out to the horizon. Ingressus stood up to approach the child, each step careful so as not to spook him, for he was unsure of how he even ended up in Nestoria, himself.

He held his arm out to touch the young Ardoni.

"Achillean?" he whispered.

The small Ardoni didn't acknowledge Ingressus' question and continued looking out to the scene-less horizon. There was nothing to see. There was nothing there, but his attention was captured, not unlike Ingressus' attention was during the Nestoria sunsets.

As Ingressus laid his hand on the child's shoulder, the coldness of the Ardoni struck him and he flinched as if having been burnt by searing heat. Still the child didn't move.

"You are not strong enough," he whispered.

Ingressus stood back with a start, horrified by the child's voice. It echoed just like his waking words did and he hated it, but he hated it more after hearing them in the same voice as his brother. It shook him to his core, and he wasn't so sure that he wanted to be in Nestoria anymore; but he was trapped. There was no way out.

As he slowly reached out to the small Ardoni again, his hand passed straight through him as though Achillean was nothing but a ghost and it startled Ingressus. He looked to his hands and saw that they were covered in blood – but it wasn't his own. He didn't know where it had come from until the small Ardoni in front of him turned around and spied the bloodied hands of the Voltaris and screamed. His scream was piercing and Ingressus panicked, washed by confusion as to what was happening. The scream wouldn't stop, and it kept getting louder and louder until Ingressus stopped hearing it. He stopped feeling anything at all.