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She never answers me. I watch her walk off, I listen to the bedroom's door slam shut. I know she's angry, her every move carries the scent of her flaring temper--but that's fine, that's only because she's lost. Of course, not everyone has a second chance, not everyone meets Death and survives to tell the tale.

Perhaps she didn't deserve to die, but she did deserve the torture of it. If God or Devil--or vedmaks--had ever existed, they'd say the same. And she certainly doesn't deserve a second chance for everything she's done.

Little liar, Fire Girl. Can you live with your lies now?

Yet, she's not the worst. She thinks she remembers it all, but she looked at Vlad's photo today and saw a stranger. A blank page, an empty canvas, a palette of shades and hues. She didn't even recognize her own old self in one of the pictures. It saddens and relieves me all at once, it hurts me, and it saves me. A mixture of tangled emotions, so troubling. I asked her, and she lied again.

She doesn't remember who killed her.

And she won't. It's the price of death. Memories. Families. Friends. She's been alone in the darkness for too long. Soon, she'll figure out she doesn't remember the faces and the voices of anyone from her past. There will be feelings, colors, smells, a number of words associated with people, but reality? A blur.

Dead are not those who can't breathe, but those who have no one to love and no one to be loved by. That's the real torture--being dead inside while still breathing. Take someone's memories, and what's left of the person?

Wherever Yaroslava went tonight, wherever she goes--ever--there will always be a void in her mind, too deep to fill fully anew.

Will she be scared? Heartbroken or outraged? Will she wonder why? Surely, she'll try a face after a face, a feeling after a feeling, a word after a word, but none will seem right. I wish I could tell her, but it would break her.

Memories...My veins singing, I want to scream, to tear the pictures down, one by one, trash them, smash them against the floor. Break the glass frames into shining pieces and rip the photographs into snowflakes. So that there's not a face left. Not a color undamaged. So that the razor-sharp edges of glossy paper and glass bite into my palms and make my skin prickle with blood.

But instead, I just stand in the dark hall, frozen, silent. If I tear and rip and scream, I'll have no one to clean up the mess but myself. And it'll be another wave of panic, another hurricane, just like it used to be when my father would say, You act selfish, Mir.

And Yaroslava will hear, she'll come back, she'll ask questions I can't answer. Yet. Because I know her past, but she doesn't know mine.

She doesn't allow the very idea that love and hatred have such a thin line it sometimes blurs, dies out like a flicker of flame. That a friend can turn their back on you. Sometimes we mistake pain for an accessory of love. Sometimes we mistake fear for devotion. Sometimes we take the punishment for granted.

I did.

Yaroslava doesn't remember who killed her, but I do. And without knowing it, she'll lead me to her old friend, she'll help me destroy him.

It's not about Yaroslava Slavich anymore, her story is over. Mine has just begun.

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