Time Can Heal (But This Won't) A Darkling Series

So, Before You Go Chapter Five: We Are Quiet, and We Are Cold

In the age of men and monsters, there was a father, Daedalus, and a son, Icarus. A terrible life they had, and a way to escape it, Daedalus discovered. He warned Icarus to take up his wings of wax but never fly too close to the sun. Daedalus in all his genius, though, should have known this: if a man has power, he will never listen, and his own self-confidence will be his undoing.

The corridors are emptier than they used to be, you think. They echo more than they did. Whispers wend their way back to you with a greater alacrity than normal gossip would usually allow. Only two people have vanished from your hideaway, and they were never allowed to wander the premises anyway, but that doesn't stop something from feeling like it's missing.

An answer occurs to you after a day or so: the missing one is you. You're still here, technically, still on safe soil under the watchful eye of the man you love. That gaze seems to shift by the day, though, transmuting and altering until it is something, everything, nothing at all.

You stare at the Grisha as they pass you by. In your eye, you see not the living bodies but the dead, the ones littering the floor of the Spinning Wheel. Have they been buried, you wonder? In your culture, it was assumed that someone would take care of the dead, place a coin under their tongues so they could pay for passage across the river Styx and cross over into the Underworld.

Otherwise, they would be restless ghosts, all bunched up on the wrong side of the banks like sun-bleached reeds fading away into nothingness as they watched each new soul pass successfully or join their numbers. You wonder what happened to the ones who never paid now, if they have already vanished into memory or if they will remain there until you die, too. You wonder if Alina came back to bury her dead, or if the Grisha you killed are doomed to never ending permanence, an intransient state of being that gnaws at you for all eternity.

You think about it sometimes, what will happen when you die. Who will place the coin under your tongue, who will burn your body and let your ghosts and gods take you back into their arms one final time? The answer had always been Aleksander. Even when you convinced him you were dead, some part of you always assumed he would do it. Somehow, he would know to find you, and he would remember how to keep you safe. He told you, once, that he searched the forest for weeks for your body so he could complete that ritual. He never succeeded, obviously, and he never forgave himself.

It will still be him to do it, you think. No matter how you feel, no matter what tumultuous memories and emotions are racing through your heart, Aleksander is the one who has heard the stories of your past, who would complete the ritual with the most respect and diligence. There is no one in this world like him. There is no one, and there never will be. Of this, you are certain. Your centuries have taught you as much.

You only wish that he could believe the opposite of you. He loves you, you know that, but you may not be the only one to stand out amongst the crowds. There is another, and he is speaking to her right now.

Alina Starkov has been a lot of things to you at a lot of different times. She was a friend, at first, someone who understood the pain of being an outsider amongst the First Army. She was your coworker, a fellow cartographer and someone who would save your life because she trusted you to save hers. Then she was a road carrying you to certain doom back to the Little Palace. She gave you an excuse to join the oprichniki and stay close to Aleksander, and then, when she started meaning more to him, a reason to leave Os Alta.

You saved her from Aleksander when she learned the truth about him, and you traveled with her to find the stag. She revealed you in front of Aleksander, and when her fear of your abilities overpowered her trust in you, she stabbed you through the heart and left you to die in the Shadow Fold without her sunbeams to save you. Friend, ally, would-be murderer; Alina is complex to you, but right now, she is a rival, and a rival in the affections of someone you previously thought would only ever be yours.