Kings Game

Chapter 104 - Nightmares

(1)

Some part of Kell knew she was dreaming. The logical part of her brain knew that she was experiencing past memories and current fears grafted together into an emotional abomination. What she was experiencing was old, fake, and completely separate from reality. None of that made a damn bit of difference. The blood on her hands was still hot and sticky, the body in her arms was heavy and limp, and the pain inside her was unbearable.

She sat in a field, rocking back and forth and crying. Everyone was dead. Nul was lying face down in the dirt, their body half burned away. Roran was a mess of shattered glass, scattered across the field with his head staring sightlessly up towards the sky. And Karyn was bleeding out in her arms all over again. The sword wound was fresh and pumping out blood while Kell did her best to stymie the flow. Karyn kept staring up at Kell, her lips moving wordlessly, speaking some final message that Kell would never hear.

Around her friends were piles of bodies. They were the nameless soldiers she'd murdered over the years. The people that she'd killed and left behind, victims of her quest for fight the Kings. She'd run her spear through them, she'd cut them down with her sword, she'd strangled them with her steel hand. Kell had massacred countless people and the nightmare still wasn't over.

Kell was beyond the ability to form any sort of coherent sentence. There was nothing but pain. Her body was completely unharmed and yet she was in more pain than she had ever been. She was alive and well and it was agony. She didn't want to be here anymore. She didn't want to suffer anymore. She wanted it to be over. She wanted to be with her beloved. She wanted to-

"Kell?"

Kell's eyes flicked open and she gripped the side of the couch to keep from lashing out. Darling was staring down at her, looking worried. Darling was good at looking worried. Where Kell was fierce and rugged, Darling was sweet and pretty, with cute little eyebrows that knitted together in concern and big watery eyes that reminded Kell of a puppy dog. She reminded Kell of Karyn.

Taking a deep breath, Kell closed her eyes and forced her body to relax. She was lying on a couch in Darling's study. She must have dozed off. Removing her death grip from the cushion, Kell sat up.

"Yeah?" she asked. "What's up?"

"You looked like you were having a nightmare," said Darling.

Kell shrugged. "Dunno, I don't remember my dreams."

Darling continued to stare at her, her worried expression becoming more pronounced as she pouted with her lips and knit her fingers together. Kell pushed herself off the couch to get away from her sister's depressing expression and stretched.

"Any booze left around here?"

"It's just past lunch," said Darling.

"A perfect time to start drinking," said Kell, making her way over to Darling's wet bar. She poured herself a few fingers of amber liquid while ignoring more of Darling's sad expressions. "So, what are you working on today?" asked Kell, hoping to change the subject.

"More of the same, I'm afraid." Darling made her way back to her desk. It had been replaced since Kell had last seen it. Everything in the room had been replaced. New rugs, new desk, new bookcases. Even a new wet bar with different bottles of booze. It felt like a completely different place, which was probably the only reason Kell was able to come into the room at all. She didn't know if she'd be able to face the old room where Karyn had died.

"With the quelling of the loyalists," Darling went on, "and the end of the war with the Esmun Republic, things have started calming down. I'm tracking and redistributing resources to help with the rebuilding. I received pushback at first, because we gave a lot of resources up for no cost, but the Kings have been generous with their payments since then. Uhlara is beginning to prosper. Within another year or two, I think we'll be better off than we ever were under Usov."