Runesight

6 - The Bane of Stars

There were no dreams, only memories. Memories that were unbound from the paint I'd firmly affixed over them. Eliax never wondered why she'd chosen paint to mask the blood, but I knew that answer. I knew so many of the answers.

I just couldn't look at them, not yet.

There was no blood when I was just eighteen. When I'd lived for ten years with a barrier of blue and red paint masking it from view. It...it might still be there, but I didn't have to think about it. I could be happy.

But Eliax didn't like that idea. She wanted to know what I'd gone through. She wanted to fix us. She wanted to know who she was and why she was the way she was. She hated the idea of never knowing something as crucial as her own past.

Neither of us had any say in the nighttime. As our dreams scraped away the paint and for once made us a cohesive whole.

A cohesive whole that could do nothing but hurt.

The same memory sounded over and over, now that it was recovered there was nothing I could do to force it back beneath the surface forever.

--

I was running.

I was crying.

I watched them, their eyes fading into darkness, their skin turning black and brittle, the blue of their life force falling away into shadows. I watched as their soundless yells met my ears, thousands of dying wishes falling into my mind.

One man wanted nothing more than to tell his sister he was sorry. One wanted to finish his mother's gift.

They were all valiant men.

I ran past them, the guilt and fear overwhelming me as I clutched two pendants in my hand, two versions of the same spell that could save one person each.

One was for me.

I watched the nightmare as the massive spell of destruction took hold. I ran through the battlefield, the stench of rot in my lungs. The stench of death. They were all dying. Everyone except for me.

My light feet pattered against the cold blood stained grass, I barely left a mark where I went besides the sets of bloody footprints as my bare feet spread it like paint. Paint was something beautiful that I loved. Something I could hide behind.

I screamed his name.

The warriors around me that dwarfed me in stature fell to the blade of a single culprit. A blade of pure death. A blade that swallowed the human armies, the Tuvei protectors, and...him.

He was nowhere. I was too late. I couldn't save him.

All I did was let him fade into the blackness.

The lingering memory was the closest to the surface from earlier, and in every way, it was the worst memory to be in that place. That was the day I'd lost everything. My home. My trust. My king. My best friend.

All I had left was vengeance.

--

Eliax felt her eyes snap open, her heartbeat was like a drum in her ears, quick and painful. She felt her throat constricting, her mind spinning.

She felt cold as death. Her mind replayed the scent of rot, but it didn't go further than that. Eliax knew the memory that went with it, but as she reached to peek at it, the resonance pulled it away from her grasp.

She needed to...ugh her mind was spinning....she probably needed to go over some different memories to figure out why this one was so terrifying. Yes. That was the right word. Eliax had never felt that before, but as her heartbeat slowly lessened and her mind dulled from the panic that had brought out its edge- she could accurately say that this was terror.