48. I'm sorry, mother

Chapter 48: I'm sorry, mother

Dust hung thick in the air long after the shockwave had finished tearing through what remained of the crypt, and it took several long minutes before anyone found the strength to move at all.

Eto came to first, pulling himself up out of a pile of shattered stone that had once been a tomb, blood crusted dark down half his face, his broken arm screaming with every shift of weight. He looked around through the settling haze, counting bodies with a hunter's cold efficiency even through the pain.

Freya. Alive, stirring against a collapsed pillar, coughing dust out of her lungs.

Elara, further off, Mikaela already crawling toward her.

And there, near the center of what used to be the chamber's floor, a small huddled shape lying still amid the wreckage.

Eto was moving before he'd finished registering the thought, half stumbling, half crawling across broken stone until he reached him.

Finn.

Small. Impossibly small, lying there in scraps of cloth that had been robes a minute ago and were now just fabric, his chest rising and falling in shallow, uneven breaths, skin pale as the moonlight filtering down through the hole torn in the ceiling above them.

Alive.

"Alive," Eto said, rough, disbelieving, and something in his chest that had been clenched tight for a week finally let go all at once.

"Finn." Mikaela was there a second later, Nora dragged along beside her, the girl's legs unsteady but moving under her own power now, something awake in her eyes that hadn't been there an hour ago.

Nora dropped to her knees beside him without a word, taking his small hand in both of hers, and the tears that started then didn't stop, running silent and steady down her face as she pressed his hand against her cheek like she could pour warmth back into him through sheer will alone.

"You idiot," she whispered, voice cracking. "You absolute idiot, don't you dare, don't you dare do that to me again."

Finn didn't answer. But his fingers twitched, faint, against her palm, and that was enough. That was more than enough.

She didn't move after that. Not when Freya suggested they needed to get him somewhere safer, not when Elara reminded her the whole church could still come down around them. She stayed exactly where she was, holding his hand, refusing to so much as loosen her grip, and nobody had the heart to make her.

***---***

Back at the barracks annex, the night had already turned strange before word of the church even reached them.

The children who'd gone quiet, one by one over the past weeks, all of them at once began to scream.

It started with a boy near the far wall, a sound tearing out of him that hadn't come from his throat in longer than anyone could remember, raw and terrified and utterly wonderful, and it spread from cot to cot like fire catching dry grass, every hollow, empty child in that barracks suddenly thrashing awake with screams loud enough to wake the dead.

The guards came running first, swords half drawn, certain something had gotten in among the children, and found instead a room full of kids sitting bolt upright, sobbing, screaming, clutching at themselves and each other like they'd just remembered how, disturbing every other sleeping child in the barracks who woke in turn to a chorus of chaos that made no sense until it made all the sense in the world.

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The light was coming back into their eyes. One by one, the same way it had gone out of them, and by the time the sun came up there wasn't a single quiet child left in that whole barracks, only a room full of exhausted, hoarse, gloriously loud kids finally able to make a sound again.

***---***

"Look at her," Freya said, slow, working the Keth out careful the way she always did, feeling for each word before she committed to it. "She's, she's back. All the way back. That doesn't, I don't think that happens if the thing's still."

"Still alive," Mikaela finished, when Freya's Keth ran out before the sentence did. She crouched a short distance off, wiping blood from a split lip, eyes moving between Nora and the wreckage where the creature had gone down under that final blast. "You think it's actually dead."

"I don't know what I think." Freya's brow furrowed, hunting for the right shape of it. "Finn, the real one, he was screaming. Fighting it. From inside. And then the light, and then, then this." She gestured at the ruin around them, at Nora's clear eyes, at Finn's shallow breathing. "If the thing had won that fight, if it was Finn who lost, wouldn't she still be like she was? Empty?"

"Maybe." Mikaela chewed on it, glancing toward Eto, who stood silent over the two children, listening to every word even through the gaps where Freya's grasp of the language stumbled. "Or maybe it's something else. Maybe whatever connection it had to her just, snapped, whether it won or lost."

"But she's crying. She's holding his hand and crying like a person who just got him back, not, not someone who." Freya shook her head, frustrated with her own vocabulary. "Not someone who is grieving. I don't have the word."

"Mourning."

"Mourning, yes. That. She isn't."

Eto's eyes moved from Nora's face, present and wet with tears of relief rather than grief, to the wreckage where the Feyra had fallen, and something in his chest that had been braced tight for a fight to the death eased, just slightly, just enough to notice.

"Dead," he said, the single word carrying more hope in it than certainty.

"Maybe," Mikaela said again, softer this time, wanting badly to believe it. "It makes sense, doesn't it? Finn broke free, and if the thing he broke free from didn't have anywhere left to, to exist, if breaking free killed it along with itself, that would explain all of this. Nora waking up. The screaming. Everything."

"I want to believe that." Freya's grip on her sword hadn't fully relaxed, some old soldier's instinct refusing to let her stand fully down even now. "But I've fought things before that should have died and didn't. Things that looked finished and weren't."

"You think it's still out there."

"I think," Freya said, choosing her words with the same careful weight as before, "that I would feel a great deal better if someone actually confirmed it, instead of all of us just hoping very hard that it's true."

The city had been saved.

Except it hadn't.

Then the rubble behind her shifted.

Everyone turned at once.

The Feyra rose up out of the broken stone where the final blast had thrown it, and it should not have been able to rise at all. Every wound Eto had opened in its side, every crack Freya's blade should have left, gone, closed over smooth and whole as though the fight had never touched it. Weakened, yes, the dark energy at its edges guttering thinner than before, but whole. Alive.

Eto was moving before he'd finished processing it, lightning already sparking weak along a fist he could barely close, Freya's sword coming back up despite the tremor in her arm, both of them bracing for another round neither of them had the strength left to survive.

The creature didn't so much as glance at them.

It rose into the air instead, looping once, twice, lazy arcs through the dust and moonlight pouring down through the air, robes trailing behind it like it was simply stretching muscles that hadn't moved in too long, and then it dropped, slow and deliberate, coming to rest directly at Elara's feet.

It bowed its head.

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Mikaela's hand had frozen halfway to her knife, Freya's sword hung useless in the air, and Eto's fist had gone still, lightning dying out along his knuckles as every last one of them stared at the old woman standing calm and untouched in the middle of the wreckage while a demon knelt in front of her like a dog come home.

Elara looked down at it, and there was no fear on her face at all. Only something tired, something old, something that had been waiting a very long time for this exact moment.

"So." Her voice came out steady, quiet, carrying the weight of far more years than any of them had ever guessed at. "After all this time, and every warning I gave you, you come back to me. How pitiful."

The creature lowered its head further still.

"I'm sorry, mother," the Feyra said.