Fate and Destiny (The Fated Series, #2)

Ch. 99 - Fauna - Her Last

I never thought I'd be back here again. Standing in front of her grave, staring at the dirt and pinning a million wishes to it thinking that they'll sprout like seeds and take bloom. I had her all over again, and in the span of a few cycles, she was gone.

It's like some sick game the Gods are playing, dangling everything I've ever wanted in front of me, and then snatching it away just as I start to reach for it. I had her, I had my father, a family, and for a mere few seconds, I had someone who wasn't family that I had come to love. Two someone's. Ten years ago they took her. A few months ago and my father followed. Two years ago they took those two loves and made me feel two very different types of pain at the same time and watched as I practically fell apart and turned into what the rumors whispered about.

Then they brought it all back. The family, the love, the friends, and then her all over again, and it's happening all over again. They gave me my fate and then forced me to break it. The friends and family I had found were ripped from my memory, and though I have those images of the past back, they feel distant. They feel like someone else's. And now this.

It feels different, weirdly enough. I still mourn, I still cry, I still make my wishes and look at the upturned earth expectantly, but it...it feels like only a mere shadow of how it before. I thought it might've been because the first time she died she was tortured until her body gave out, and this time she went of her own mind and will, but that's not it.

Her real body lays in the Dearg Forest, wrapped in a cotton blanket and laid in a grave only marked by a stack of three stones beside a burnt-down cabin. Lance and I watched our father dig the grave. He broke down more than once doing it, and we stayed far enough away to avoid being hit by the shovel and dirt he'd throw. Each time he did he apologized. He'd hop out of the deepening hole to hug us and soak our tears into his shirt. And then he'd go back, and he'd dig deeper. We sat there until morning when he finished and lowered her body into the grave. He filled it over her, and we stayed there all day. I thought I'd never see her again, and then I came here, and somewhere in the middle of my remembering, I realized that she never left.

She was in Melody. In the strong-willed mare that late Queen Adeline gifted her grandson. When I realized where she had gone ten years ago, I felt a part of me that I lost return. I didn't feel whole, but I felt...more. Watching her leave this world all over again hurt, but to me, I lost her ten years ago.

Eleven.

It was eleven years ago. I smiled when I realized that she almost died on the exact day that she did the first time. It'd be just like her too. Three more days. Even now, the ache where that hole she left doesn't feel so painful. Maybe it's because I already lost her, but whatever it is, I wish it wasn't keeping so much at bay.

Unlike me, Darius has been a wide projection of emotions since Melody's heartbeat stopped. He's been silent, but his body and the elements moving of unnatural patterned forces say all the words unspoken. His fists clench, his eyes go distant and then dark, the wind will test the durability of the few pins Kat put in my hair this morning to keep the shorter strands at the front from falling in my face, and torches which had been fully lit along the walls went out and refused to relight throughout the night.

Darius didn't speak when we buried Melody's body beneath the willow tree when the moon was high above our heads. We moved her while people were asleep and had been moved from the western side of the garden to its opposite. I stayed with him all night, falling asleep against the trunk of the willow, tucked into his side. He didn't. Much as she was my mother, she was his. His grandmother's last gift to him before she died. He thought he'd have years with her. That he'd ride into battle on her back against demons she'd crush with her feet and tear with her teeth. He wanted to hear the rolling storm that was her run. Now, all that's left are memories and questions of What If?