Till the End of Time

Chapter 4 - Dusk's Longing Song

A warm dark crimson had been painted all over my hands, I felt a growing darkness crawl up my spine. I let out a wailing shriek as I felt mozorost tear my life away to feed death who loomed before Aithera. Hot tears dripped from my face as her body remained cold and pale, tucked in a tight embrace, with the wretched harpoon from before still there.

It's silvery tipped edges trickled with a deep carnelian from Aithera's body. It stained the deck akin to when we had slain Saimea. Her scales had been almost dyed the exact same shade and now I was watching it spill from her body. That memory had plagued her for weeks on end, with her screams piercing the stunning silence aboard the whaler.

Yet nobody had noticed the scarlet that had clearly spread from the original pool it had begun as. I felt a faint beating underneath where her pulse would be, where it is. I could almost feel relief surging through me but regret that she still had to experience death. Being so close to it that if not for our younger selves, that she would have been ripped away from us.

I could barely feel the creeping silence that fell over the deck as Tamar ran up beside me, hoping to revive her. Despite the soft beating of her heart that thundered below my clammy hands. Tamar stumbled beside me as she began to fumble about, screamed for a healer and muttered under her breath. Yet every single time I tried to listen, I could hear tides welling up and drowning me beneath them. And I would be left floundering and still trying to keep my head above the water.

My fingers began to slip from Aithera who was being dragged away by the other crew members, their footsteps echoing over the solemn silence that I could still not bare. I could hear the faint rumble and sighs of Rusayle, still breathing but not for much longer.

Rough and heavy finger pushed through the empty space that would have been filled with Aithera's much more slender and softer ones, a memory that felt like a stranger and a ghost at the same time. I couldn't tell anything apart from the shrieking and roaring thoughts that remained trapped inside my head. They slowly but gently dragged me through hollowed out halls and abandoned cabins. An image of caramel halls now turned into a rotten muddy and disgusting sepia.

Instead of Aithera sitting on her coarse woollen blanket, there only was a well tided bed as the person left me be in suffocating darkness. The walls closed in around me as the planks shifted to drown me and silence any screams. I slipped down them as I drew my knees in and my legs curled up beneath me. Blood-curdling screams clawed at my throat in a desperate escape, yet they only came out as a pathetic low cry.

Instead of her glowing smile and silly comments on the current moment, there was only a static silence and the soft churning of the waves below. The world wasn't itself anymore yet a pale imitation as that world hung in the balance somewhere else in these halls. Far, far away from my grasp that I could only yearn for in the coming hours and minutes.

Beneath me, laid a slumbering Aithera, who had not once risen from her sleep. I was tempted to cry again but I had already spent them all in the first few hours and all that slipped out was the smallest trickle of a tear. A fraction of what I had shed before, yet it held just as much as emotion as it did.

I ran my hand through her slight knotted and wavy hair. The strands glowed a more golden in the faint sunlight that had climbed its way up the sky after dark. It chased away the others with its brightness, yet it was prided as the best. The best in the sky yet doomed with a lonely existence because it shunned itself with the glory of its own light. Now it laid in the sky, collecting its tears for another day where it could show us all how lonely it truly was.

Slowly, Aithera stirred beneath me as she gently reached out for me, though I guessed the Healers may or may not have put too much anaesthesia. As she may have done it in a non-conventional manner as her arms remained outstretched and her hands grabbed at the thin air before her. I let out a small chuckle as I watched her confusion grow apparent as she sat there.