The Keepers' Evil

Thirty-Eight: It's not anyone's fault

Song- The view between villages: Noah Kahan

"It's not anyone's fault."

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Goodbye had meant to bring peace and solitude, it had meant to bring voluntary isolation and welcomed silence. But goodbye meant so little when the recipients wouldn't wave you away, wouldn't let goodbye simply mean goodbye.

I was learning that the world was full of words that hadn't meant what they suggested; goodbye had been said, whispered to my brother back in Feldcroft, yet he had found a way back to me to again. I love you had been said amongst wisps of hair being tousled and delicate kisses pressed to the tip of my nose, yet Ominis' heart had still found another.

There was a resistance to my heartbreak, one that was only counteracted by the incessant notion that I couldn't have blamed him for falling in love with another, especially not the girl who needed him more than I did. Madeleine was hurt, captivated by danger in all of the ways that she didn't want to be, and Ominis wouldn't have been able to ignore her silent pleads for help. Ominis was just as hurt and lost in the wild world of pain, and Madeleine could find a commonality in that.

Ominis' heart was not to blame. I wasn't sure that I would've been strong enough to let my eyes stick onto the girl that couldn't keep herself upright, that slept more than she woke, that cried all through the night in bouts of an unnatural pain from an incurable curse. That girl needed peace, she didn't need her heart to be won. Still, it had been a beautiful temporary.

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It had been almost ten days, ten days of worry and panic, restless nights and sickening pain. But it had also been ten days of laughter and chess games, painfully played instruments and frozen walks around the garden grounds. Ominis and I may not have held each other's hearts forever, but he continued to hold me together through the indescribable.

I had once chosen to silence Sebastian, to strip us both of the communication and embraces that made us who we were. Solomon had been all I had known, the only one capable enough to understand the pain that unveiled me of my being and carry my mind through the sleepless nights and screams of my lungs and limbs. Sebastian had been there, but fourteen and fifteen, even sixteen, had been too young to have expected him to do what Solomon had. Sebastian often forgot just how young we had been, how young we still were.

I had once chosen to silence Sebastian, but suddenly, when my hand had been forced in the matter and my pleads left unheard, I realised how Sebastian had felt and my guilt began to eat at my body alive. At least the curse was resilient enough to allow me the feeling of death. Guilt just stayed, it stuck until you wanted the relief, but couldn't find it.

"What are you lost in over there?" Ominis chuckled to try and mask the worry, but I knew Ominis better than perhaps he thought. There was always a slight squint to his eyes as if, despite his lack of sight, he could feel the weight of all the stresses and worries that sat upon my mind as if they were his own. Perhaps they were, maybe we did just share worries and he truly could feel them. I supposed loving Sebastian, even Madeleine, had its own set of consequences, ones that we had to share.

"Just thinking is all." I smiled softly as if to dissuade my own guilt and pain from triggering Ominis' protectiveness, but perhaps the simple task of thinking meant to worry in itself. It was rare that any of us could think without it being plagued with a million mental disputes.