Ill Omen's Light (Lux/Jinx)

Chapter 18: Faces On Your Wall

Sometime in their lost time, dusk had overtaken the Firelights' sanctuary.

Chemlights buzzed and flickered as they lit the dark, their ambience pooling on the knots of the great trunk and gleaming on the tree's vibrant foliage.

But they didn't reach every corner of the Firelights' domain. For one space, the only lights were candles, carried in the hands of the living, their wishes and their memories brought to share with the dead.

Ekko ran his thumb along the scars on his chest. They felt smaller, less swollen and angry than they had when he'd first become cognizant of them. It couldn't have been more than a couple of hours. If that.

Below, Kay and Shomi stood by the wall, heads bowed, laying candles amid the cluster, beside two cracked feline masks laying at the foot of the wall. Meela was halfway up the wall on a scaffold, her face somber and tear streaked as she spray-painted the first outlines of Tavi's portrait, Javen's beside him. Two loving, smiling faces, the brothers as they'd been in life.

Theirs would be small. Even with the wall spreading out to each side, they were running out of room.

Below, they mourned two deaths. But for Ekko, there had been far more than two today.

He squeezed his eyes shut as the flickers of other timelines assaulted him. Claws, shearing through Scar's chest. Tearing off Kew's head. Sending half of Meela in one direction and half in another...

Ripping Jinx open.

Not real. Not now. Just echoes. Ripples. Aftershocks of almosts and could-have-beens. Eventually they'd fade, even his memories of them becoming just dreams of something that had happened to someone else as everything smoothed over.

Time was nothing if not resilient.

Ekko rubbed his chest again, where the same claws had sliced into his vital organs. Here he was, only hours later, with only scars and future nightmares to show for it.

That had happened. In this timeline, this memory. And yet he was still here.

Different kind of reversal of fate. Felt different, too. The undoing not of a could-have-been, but a should-have-been.

It didn't feel right.

I should be dead.

Quiet footsteps approached him. Here she was, too. Lux, the girl standing very much warm and alive beside him at the base of the tree, even as Ekko flashed through memories of watching her die...

It never got easier.

"Still doesn't feel real," he mumbled, "If it hadn't been for her, we'd be painting me up there too. Don't know how to feel about that."

"Maybe grateful," said his companion, "You're alive, after all."

Lux's thoughtful face moved into his periphery.

"Well, I'm grateful," she said, "We're all here because of you and your marvelous device, as well. I can't forget that."

She smiled at him, and Ekko blushed and scratched the back of his neck.

Lux then turned a questioning gaze to the wall.

"This is all the people we've lost," he said softly, "Just our way of remembering them. Honoring who they were, what they gave to this community. We don't...always have bodies to bury."

"I see," she said, her face unreadable as her eyes roamed the wall.

"Most of the newer ones were during the Turmoils, or since. Chembarons and their gang wars, overdoses or accidents or sickness," Ekko turned over the dial for the Z-drive in his hand, "Sometimes I can save them. Sometimes, even with this, there's not enough time."