Bereft: Demise

38 | Of a Wolf's Howl

The cold, uneven patter of raindrops alighting upon my face released me from the vice of somnolent dreams. My mind was reticent to let go of the Isle's memory, as if the flame and heat consuming the once idyllic land of the Dreaming Children were devouring my mind as well.

Water trickled over my chilled skin, pooling in the curve of my throat and against my side. The muscles of my arms were trembling from the cold when—confused and stiff—I woke enough to view my surroundings.

I was outside. The morning sky was blanketed with its usual thatch of gray clouds, preventing the temperature from dipping into the frozen chill of early winter. That didn't stop the rain from being ice-cold, however, nor did it stop my entire body from jerking violently as steam billowed between my lips.

What in the hell? I thought as I sat up, my head swimming and my muscles weak from shivering. What am I doing out here?

Am I outside the ward? 

Fear was a sudden, painful shock to my bogged system. I threw myself from the heather and spun, wildly searching from any familiar landmarks in a bid to find where the manor was. My legs were numb, my feet bare and stark against the dark, wet mud. I stumbled and caught myself on a tombstone. 

Tombstone. My fingers crawled over the pitted stone arm of a weeping angel perched on top of the grave's marker. It was ancient, its face so weathered all but the vaguest impression of its features was gone. I had been sprawled in the bracken next to it, rolled against the sunken stone of the grave. 

"Not outside the ward," I gasped and relief settled in with an almost physical weight as I sagged against the chiseled angel. Though the cemetery was vast, I knew it all lay within the ward's boundaries. I hadn't crossed outside.

I may have been inside the ward, but I didn't have any clue where I was. The fog was dense and intensified by the moaning October winds, the manor lost somewhere beyond the immutable mist. I could barely see more than a handful of yards in any direction, and the graves beyond my vision were just wispy specters disappearing into the dim.

I sank onto the grave's edge, deciding whoever was buried there was too long dead to care if I sat on his final resting place. My head swam and nausea quaked in my middle, warning of the inevitable onset of mana sickness.

I braced my arms around myself and trembled. If I don't get back to the manor and get warm, mana sickness isn't the only sickness I'm going to have.

The memory replayed in my thoughts in a single explosion of color and sound. The rush of it brought stars to my vision, and I hunched over my knees in a bid to swallow the bile rising into my throat. The violence I'd witnessed swirled at the forefront of my mind and the thunder of voices followed after as if I stood a great distance away from it all.

Don't they understand we're trying to help?!

Pitiful things, to never be whole again.

What have we done?!

What had the Sins done? From what I'd seen, they hadn't done anything aside from attack and kill the creatures responsible for ripping the Isle asunder—and yet the Dreaming scorned them, and the Sins—who were usually the first persons to deny responsibility for their actions and blame their predatory nature—didn't deny they were complicit in the Realm's destruction. Why though? Why accept the burden of an entire world's demise? 

What was I supposed to learn from the memory? That the Sins were capable of guilt? That the elves had died screaming their rage to the blackened, cracked sky—had died with swords in hand and had thrown themselves into the fire to save their realm?