Ibeos: What If?

Chapter 14. What Have I Done?

The wind moaned gently across the plains, threading its fingers through the broken soil and dancing around the feet of statues that had once been living, breathing beings—characters I'd loved. People who, once upon a time, had laughed and hunted and celebrated beneath these very skies. People I'd given names to. Families. Culture.

People I'd written to die.

And then, I broke.

Tears welled in my eyes before I could stop them, hot and quiet. I turned away from Thilo, but the sight of the field—the silent agony locked into stone—burned into my soul. I wept. I wept for the people I had written as set dressing for player glory, I wept for the ones who never had a voice.

I stumbled back a step and dropped to one knee, my hands gripping the dry earth as my body convulsed with the weight of it all. The tears came hard and fast, the kind that had no breath between them. My shoulders shook with each heave as the guilt crashed over me like waves—relentless and suffocating.

"I'm sorry," I gasped, voice breaking. "I'm so fucking sorry."

Thilo crouched beside me but said nothing. He didn't place a hand on my shoulder or try to offer comfort. He just knelt there, quietly, giving me space to fall apart beneath a sky that had once borne witness to beauty—and now only held smoke and ghosts.

"I didn't mean for this," I croaked. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. It was just... a story. I didn't think they'd feel it. I didn't think they'd actually die."

The silence of the plains stretched long and far, broken only by the sound of wind threading through the stone tails of the fallen.

"How many of them..." My voice was barely audible. "How many turned to stone just to try and stop him?"

"Too many," Thilo said softly, his voice thin. "They look like... warriors. Or guardians. Each of them. Standing against something unstoppable."

I looked up through the blur of tears at the closest one—a young kitsune, face twisted in defiance, one arm shattered at the elbow, the stone chipped where a blade must have once pierced. I remembered her.

I'd named her Kaeya.

She'd died in a single roll of the dice.

My stomach turned.

"I never should've written this," I whispered.

"You did," Thilo said gently, but firmly. "And now you're here to see it."

The wind howled again.

"I need to make this right," I said, wiping at my face, my fingers trembling with the effort. "I have to. I can't let this be my legacy."

I wiped my face with my sleeve as I turned away from the field of statues—these frozen sentinels of a tragedy I had once scribbled into a notebook for drama's sake. Now they watched me, and I didn't deserve to meet their gaze. Silence hung for a moment more before I spoke again.

With the faintest effort, I pulled my thoughts into focus, trying to gauge where we were. The realization came with a slow, cold clarity. "We're not even that far from Greca," I murmured, more to myself than to Thilo. "Where we left. Probably a couple hundred miles... give or take."

I dragged a hand down my face, trying to recall old campaign maps, sketchy distances that now meant something more than the length of a travel montage between sessions.

"The closest nation is Swo Plos," I said aloud, pointing vaguely east, where distant mountain peaks loomed behind a gray veil. "Tucked in the stone ridges over that way. Padsin's slightly more south—still east—but the desert between here and there would be suicide on foot. No water. No shade. And without a mount or some kind of transit... we wouldn't last a week."