I will never feel this pain again, because I cannot.

Who can count all our losses? I can’t. No one can. But there is something we can do to protect ourselves from them.

When Melik died, I realized. I couldn’t stand around anymore, thinking about trying to do the right thing. I have to be strong, and being strong means I can’t expect anyone to come and help me.

When I was a child, I used to cry all the time, just like everyone else. Like every child, every kid who needs something – food, attention, whatever. And it always brings people running to you. It gets you what you want.

Eventually though, they stop coming. Because you’re a grown-up now, you’re not supposed to cry. You can’t wait for someone else to make you feel better.

Grownups don’t stop crying because they’ve forgotten how, they stop crying because they realize it isn’t going to work anymore. Scream all you like, no one’s going to come.

So, a long time ago, I stopped. I took care of my own damn self. But that didn’t make me strong.

I get hungry, I open up the pantry. I get lonely, I go to say hello to that weird kid who shows up looking for a fight, talking about his dad like he’s some kind of avenging angel… and I figure I can take him and his sister under my wing, help them out a little bit…

But I can’t save them. And I couldn’t save them, and it hurt me that I couldn’t, because I got too damn attached.

Well, that’s life. You don’t always get what you want. Eventually, the people who’d coddle you when you used to cry and scream get tired. And they stop coming.

Badem

With the blast of the mad angel’s horn

Avishag was dragging him limping staggering through the city. The whole world obscured by tears and blood and sweat. His eyes stung and hair clung to the sides of his heads. Everything was too warm, though the air was cool with the promise of spring rain. He elevated his bad leg above the ground – the bones slowly knitting themselves together under a healer’s hands, fragments straightening themselves out, touching. On that side, a discarded spear made for a good crutch. The wood had decent grip, despite Badem’s sweating body. Adrenaline didn’t help much.

“Hey, hey, come on. Stay with me.” Avishag kept talking to him as they fled down the nearest alleyway, keeping him focused on what was in front of him. His friend – alive.

Distant gunfire came in bursts, the sound of it in one ear out the other. Badem set a hand against the wall of the alley to steady himself, and Avishag stepped close, putting an arm over the back of his neck. “Come on,” she hissed into his ear, “we have to go. Get to safety.”

“What’s happening?” Badem managed to breathe through the delirium and the pain. “What happened?”

“Soldiers. It’s finally happening. Again.” Avishag forced Badem forward with each step, though Badem had to bend down and hunch over so that Avishag could keep her grip on him. “I’m not letting them take you too. We’re getting out of here.”

“And where?” Badem said, not sure he was making any sense. They turned a corner and stumble-ran along the edge of the canal for a short distance. “We can’t leave the city. They’re going… house to house…” The two slowed and Avishag let Badem fall from her shoulder for a moment, stepping forward to scope out the scene. Badem leaned painfully against the wall, putting all his weight into his arm so he wouldn’t buckle on either leg and tumble to the ground. With the canal to his right and a wall to his left, he felt exposed – pushing the butt of the spear hard into the ground so that he wouldn’t go unsteady. He couldn’t hear the water flowing through the canal over the explosions and bullets and the screams in the distance.

The horrifying screams were the worst of it. They sent shockwaves down Badem’s spine, pushing on his instincts to turn and run, though he knew he wouldn’t make it far before dropping into the canal himself and being washed away, a mess of blood and bone. He struggled against his own will to stay still, a dog caught in a trap knowing that its options were to chew its own leg off or wait for a human rescue.

Avishag put her ear to the corner of the wall and tilted her head slightly, then pulled back in a swift, fluid motion, stepping along the edge. “Someone’s coming,” she said, quickly moving to pull Badem back under her arm.

“No,” Badem said. “Not enough time.” He took a single step forward on his one good leg, elevating the other above the ground.

“Are you stupid?” Avishag hissed. “Come on, I’m not losing you too!”

“Then I hope you have a weapon, because you said someone’s coming and we can’t move fast enough to –“ Badem stopped whispering when he heard the footsteps approaching. Invictan combat boots made heavier impacts against the earth than his or Avishag’s shoes, not to mention that the wearers were much heavier. Badem saw the barrel of a rifle appear around the corner of the wall, like iron sprouting from stone. He leaned all the way into the wall, coiled his leg, and shifted his grip on the spear. Pieces of stone dug little lines into his arm, stinging painfully. He huffed in a breath that came out as a strangled scream and, putting all his weight into a single desperate strike, struck forward with the spear.

Badem caught a glimpse of flesh in between the bottom of the helmet and the top of the chestplate, and he angled his spear to run the soldier through.

The spear bounced off the top of the chestplate.

Badem stumbled back from the recoil and, by pure instinct, lowered his injured leg to the ground. The moment it touched, the moment it took weight, pain shot through him and he buckled onto one knee, his vision flashing black for half a second before the spread of sky and wall and stone and blood appeared before him again. He cringed, hand over his head, expecting at any moment to lose himself forever.

The impact of the spear didn’t pierce the armor, but the force was enough to knock the soldier off balance for a moment. He recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. Avishag jumped on him, desperate. He punched at her head, hit her shoulder instead as she bucked up over him, and knocked her to the ground. The soldier rolled over Avishag, losing his grip on his gun in the process, and put his hands on Avishag’s throat. He leaned his head down, probably chin to chest, as he squeezed.

Badem screamed when he stood up, and had to stagger forward one-and-a-half-legged, but he saw his target exposed by the lowering of the soldier’s head – the increase in the size of that gap between helmet and torso armor – and he took it.

When the soldier’s grip on Avishag’s neck loosened, she sputtered and pushed him off her in his dying spasms. Avishag’s stance was unsteady when she got back up to her feet, and she swayed a little, but she managed to get over to Badem and lift him back up onto one foot. “Come on,” she said. “We’ll go to the Reaper Monastery. Got to be the safest place in this city.”

“Or the most dangerous,” Badem said through gritted teeth, but he was too tired to argue.

Badem didn’t even notice that Avishag had picked up the dead soldier’s gun until she fired it, jolting Badem from his half-asleep pain-ridden daze and forcing an Invictan to take cover behind another building. Avishag didn’t stop firing until the two of them were out of sight of that soldier, and then she kept glancing over her shoulder, making sure they were really safe. The battle kept going. But it seemed to have little interest in the two of them, or at least to be willing to stay away.

They slipped into the Reaper Monastery through the front door, ushered inside by a terrified militia guard huddling low and peering every few seconds through the scope of his long rifle. Point defense cannons roared overhead, and little fragments of shell shrapnel rained all around, littering the ground, sliding off the militiaman’s helmet.

Within, twisting stone hallways led them east and north, and then left and then right and Badem, unable to focus, lost track of which direction they were heading. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“Inside,” Avishag breathed. “Just… away from the door.”

“I don’t know which way we’re pointed. Let’s just stop.”

“Alright.” Avishag nodded. “Alright.” She slowed their pace, and eased Badem to the ground in a hallway corner, then sat down next to him with the rifle in her hands. “Look that way,” she said, pointing down the right fork in the corner, while she faced to the left. “And stay awake. Please stay awake.”

“Don’t worry,” Badem said, smiling. “I’m pumped full of weird drugs. I don’t think I could sleep if I wanted to.”

They lay there for a while. Badem wasn’t sure how long he sat leaned up against the corner, his head turned to the right, temple resting against a stone wall, listening to the distant rumbling of combat above and south and feeling it vibrate through the stone, through the ground, all the way to his skull. He resonated with it, the violence up above – like water, and he the swimmer, although he rested barely conscious at the bottom of the sea.

With the fading of his adrenaline, the pain started to come back, although his medicine helped somewhat. His leg screamed at him, but it screamed from behind a wall – immobilized and trapped in a room with no escape, pounding against the door, trying to warn its host of the danger of moving himself at all. Badem had no intention of doing so. He’d moved enough.

“Avishag, if we get out of this –“

“When we get out of this,” Avishag said. “The city will hold out.”

“If we get out of this,” Badem repeated. “Invictus wants to destroy Mirshal more than anything else. Wiping the Vale off the map is just a side benefit. We aren’t Mirshal, but we’re sitting right in the center of their hall of power. It’s all the same to them, I’m sure. But if we get out of this… where do you want to go?”

“Me?” Avishag laughed bitterly. Then she paused, and Badem could hear the hesitation in the air. She shrugged, and he felt her shoulder rub up against his. “I don’t know. How should I know? I should say ‘home’, but… well. We aren’t going to have a home anymore, after this, are we?”

“I’m sure we could stay here,” Badem said. “But who’d want to do that, right?” He chuckled.

Impacts echoed through the walls, distant, weak, but piercing to Badem’s tired ears. With each lurching, shaking vibration in the stone behind his head, he wanted to retch. He couldn’t.

“We could,” Avishag murmured. “We could stay here.”

“Aren’t you going to go to that school in Dresh?” Badem smiled and leaned back. “The one from that old magazine you kept showing me… Looked like you must have had that thing crumpled up somewhere in your little house for years.”

“That’s ‘cause I did,” Avishag said, smiling. Echoes came closer. Avishag drew a nervous breath. “I doubt I’d ever get in though.”

Badem smiled, pressing his hand against the floor to push himself up a little higher. He was slipping. Starting to. “I thought you said you were sending letters back and forth with a professor there. That she said you’d be a great engineer someday.” He glanced down the hallway just as an armored foot appeared around the corner, and his smile turned to a dull frown – half fear, but half confusion too.

“I lied,” Avishag said, stepping over Badem and raising her rifle as she surged upward. “There were no letters.” And then her confession was drowned out in a hail of gunfire. The Invictan soldier fell before Avishag did – although everything was hazy in Badem’s mind, events unfolding more slowly than they naturally should have, his mind too addled to catch up right away with his eyes and ears.

Blood bloomed from Avishag’s left arm and, through the hollow echoing sounds of the bullet shockwaves inside of Badem’s skull, the sound of snapping bone cut like an arrow out of the dark. The rifle flew out of her hand, still firing for half a second as it sailed in the air. Plumes of dust burst up from the rock of the wall opposite Badem where bullets tore into it. It filled the hallway. Avishag fell to one knee, nearly landing on Badem’s bad leg. She leaned against the wall, against him, howling.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and Badem wasn’t sure if she was sorry for the lie or for getting hurt. But neither was something he could blame her for. So he simply reached out an arm and put it around Avishag’s shoulders, whispering, “it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay,” as the sounds of booted feet approached down the far hallway.

And then they stopped, and were replaced by the tinny screams of Invictan soldiers inside their helmets. Air rushed past Badem and Avishag, and the dust went with it, and in the dust there was sand and glass. It swept away, and then the wind stopped, and everything was silent.

Badem glanced at Avishag. Blood still flowed from her arm rhythmically, but she had laid her head against his neck and closed her eyes. Passed out from the pain, Badem had to guess. He fumbled in his pockets, wondering if he’d been left anymore of the precious healing drug. Would the medics have stuck it into his pockets? Or perhaps the hood of his jacket? No such luck. He grinned and shook his head. Would have been nice of them to leave him a little gift, and yet – here he was, alone but for the unconscious body laying against him.

He drifted away.

When Badem woke up, he was in a bed, which told him two important things. One was that he was still alive and the second was that he probably wasn’t in prison. This bed was much too normal and plain – albeit incredibly uncomfortable – to be a prison slab. At least, Badem imagined a prison would be something more… elaborate. Ostentatiously uncomfortable, something that was really more for the onlookers to fear than for the actual discomfort of the one confined.

Then again, Badem Teke had never seen a prison in his life, so he couldn’t prove any of this.

He could hardly see his surroundings, or at least his mind didn’t want to process what he was seeing. It was a plain room, he could tell that much, but every time he tried to focus on any object in particular, his brain became distracted, and his eyes unfocused as whichever part of his mind processed visual input simply went away to focus on something else for a while.

An insistent thought tickled at the back of Badem’s mind. It made his fingers twitch, made his feet shift under the sheets as he lifted himself up on the bed – definitely not in jail, he wasn’t even chained down – and caused him to turn his head. Turning his head turned out to be a small mistake, as his neck protested with shocks of jolting pain. That was alright. Finally the thought turned and tickled his tongue and came out his lips as a hoarse, groggy protest: “Where’s Avishag?”

Given that no one rushed to his aid, Badem had to assume that he hadn’t been heard. After all, he was not in jail. So he was probably in an infirmary. So someone was supposed to help him. But no one came – and when he glanced around, he saw that anyone else he could see, for the brief moment before his mind lost focus again and his concentration went elsewhere, was either asleep or barely lucid enough to respond. Badem turned in the bed and, groggy, pushed his legs to the side, setting his feet down on the floor.

It was cold! He shot up, shocked by the cold, which turned out to be another mistake. The blood rushing from his head as gravity took hold made him dizzy and blurred his vision. When it settled, he was not standing at all, but laying on the floor.

Slowly he pushed himself back up again. This time he stood slowly, hesitantly, conscious that moving too quickly might be the very last thing he wanted to do.

Like a young child learning to walk again, he took step forward after hesitant step, breathing in and out slow until he was sure he understood how his lungs worked. He glanced left and right at the beds, seeing only unfamiliar faces. Then one familiar – hard to forget, he had to admit - face walked through the door, staring with milky-white mage-blinded eyes.

“Oscar?” Badem whispered through cracked lips.

Oscar stepped forward toward him, held out an arm to catch him as he lurched forward. His head turned to the side, away from Badem, and he leaned back to hold the incoming weight. “We should get you some water,” he said. “Avishag is okay. Her arm’s a bit busted but it’ll heal. How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” Badem said. “But walking. Wait.” He blinked, and the memory flashed in his mind: Devani, floating in the air, surrounded by sand. And pain. So much pain. “Didn’t I break my leg?”

“What, did you hit your head on the way down too?” Oscar chuckled. “Yes, but the drug they gave you healed it. As soon as the adrenaline was out of your system it really kicked in, and well – that’s why you’ve been asleep the past day.” Badem felt the secure hold of another arm around his back, and couldn’t help but laugh.

“So I’m being guided by a blind man instead of the other way around. New things happen every day.”

Oscar’s head snapped up at that, and for a moment Badem thought he was about to get yelled at. Instinctively his eyes shot to the floor and he opened his mouth to mutter an apology for talking too much, but then Oscar simply laughed. “Yeah, go ahead. Let’s go find your sister.”

“I don’t have any brothers or sisters,” Badem said, “she was Melik’s sister.” But he went with Oscar anyway.

“Ah,” Oscar said, leading Badem into the next room. “I’m sorry. I… heard you three mentioned once or twice by Hilda. I assumed you were all siblings.”

“Close enough,” Badem murmured. “Can I talk to her?”

“Of course,” Oscar said, helping Badem walk while his mind adjusted and recovered, until he was walking again on his own.

Badem stumbled – several times, and seemed to lose consciousness for brief moments as he did. But Oscar caught him each time, prevented him from falling, and by the time they got across the room – in a series of false starts and momentary stumbles – Oscar was walking again. Though he seemed a little hazy, he put one foot in front of the other without Oscar having to hold onto him tightly.

Avishag was sitting up in a hospital bed, fully conscious and responsive, although her arm was still in a sling. She waved with her uninjured arm when Badem approached. Looking past him at Oscar, she asked: “Is he alright to be out walking around like that?”

“Yeah,” Oscar said. “Marginally. I’m not going to try and stop him.”

“What happened to your arm?” Badem mumbled out, lurching forward and sitting down on the nearest chair near Avishag’s bed.

“You don’t remember?” She arched an eyebrow. “Right before those elder council people showed up to protect us.”

He thought for a moment. In the back of his mind, Avishag was falling, blood blooming from the crook of her arm, bone cracking. She fell.

“My leg, though…” he murmured. “Why haven’t they given you that medicine?”

“There’s not enough to go around,” Avishag said. “I’m not going to die. It’s fine. This arm’s going to heal… mostly.”

“Mostly?” Badem looked up at Oscar.

“Well.” Oscar shrugged. “No wound ever really heals all the way. But mostly is good enough.”

Badem leaned back against the chair, arching his back. The lights turned too bright for him for a moment, and he winced, holding up his arm to shield his eyes.

“You’re okay to be walking, but don’t push it,” Oscar said, hearing Badem hiss in discomfort.

“So the war’s over?” Badem said.

“For now. Kind of.” Oscar shrugged. “Ever since the battle here ended, we’ve been making contact with more and more villages around the Vale. They’ve all been hit hard, but the army’s receding every day. The column of retreating Invictan soldiers have mostly just kept going. A couple villages they stopped at, tried to burn down.” Oscar sat on the corner of the bed. “People are still suffering and dying every day. But everyone knows it will be over soon – the Invictans are lashing out as they flee for the south, but they’re still completely disorganized and demoralized, so…” he raised his arms, palms up. “Inevitably, things will be over soon. For the better.”

Badem nodded and leaned forward in the chair. “Good,” he whispered. “So we don’t have to stay here any longer.”

Oscar turned his head, still facing it away from Badem, not letting the young man see his uncanny eyes. “And… where will you go?”