Epiphany

⇞ hope for survival ⇞

My whole body was breaking, the muscles, the bones, the heart, and the soul.

Maybe I didn't need my memories backed. Just maybe I didn't want to know where I played in the palace and then see people drown in a poisonous flood caused by Sverre. I didn't want to remember the time my mother ran shrieking as a sword slashed her back and the blood dripped as she kept running. And mostly I didn't want to remember how I left her to die when she asked me to run. But there was a mini part that brought me immense strength to break down and that was Nazereth in the market when he offered me water while I was on run from the guards.

My mother kept me alive for too long and her love kept me going. And yet she knew as I did now that the memories I held might have just made me give up on life. My whole Kingdom against me, my own people hunting me, my childhood where I heard dead people and would scream the entire night not knowing I might be feeling someone else's pain or how my own father hated me.

My memories of being a slave was nothing compared to what these old memories were.

"Why did you keep me alive?" I asked my mother's soul who looked calm through all this.

"Because an Empath is what the world needs."

"No, no you are wrong. I have been nothing been a disgusting creature. I have a weird power to deprive people of their thoughts and I have hurt people and even controlled my husband's thoughts. You should have just let me die." I said feeling all the misery infecting my mind.

"He loves you doesn't he?" She asked and I nodded slowly not sure if it was still true.

"And this one, did he do his job?" She asked looking at Morel now turned into a cat and sitting near me.

Morel meowed gracefully, I have never heard him respond like that.

My mother smiled. And yet there was something about her, she doesn't feel like my mother, she had no warmth and no compassion.

She gave me memories back, she almost broke me from within, she smiled at me like she loved me and she knew things about me that I didn't and yet it was like she was a mere soul too tormeneted to care about anything else.

"It was not you in my dream, when I held the weapon?" I asked sure about how she would never tell me to use my power.

She was as afraid of it as anyone else was.

"No, that's the weapon. It was forged my the elemental gods to enhance your power and but in order to increase your power you need to let yourself go. Just you alone cannot handle the pain and misery of the universe, the weapon bears it for you while you can let your soul rest and weapon guide you."

It was just like  the gem.

"But it would be like losing yourself and taking the worst of all and channeling all that agony into something sinister."

"If I don't use the weapon."

"You will soon die, the soul can only take so much even though you are an Empath. It will perish because you also feel more than others."

"Then you want me to keep using the weapon?" I asked with every part of my being losing hope.

"Destroy it, the more you use it, more it will take over. Once your soul is subdued by all the souls it carries you will be nothing but a accumulation of pain and misery, an evil everyone feared."

So she meant even though she saved my life before, she needed me dead now.

"Is there a way I can survive?" I said not wanting to die because Nazereth would be devastated or maybe I was overthinking.