Part Four — What’s Left

The sun came up like nothing had happened, which felt like the first real betrayal of the day. I'd have understood a gray sky. I'd have understood rain. Instead I got a clean, indifferent morning, birds already back in the trees they'd abandoned the night before, like the forest itself had already moved on and was waiting for me to catch up. 

I don't think I'm going to catch up. Not for a while. 

I made my way back toward the house — what was left of it — mostly because I didn't know what else to do with my legs, and standing still in one spot felt somehow worse than walking toward the wreckage. 

There wasn't much of it left. The roof was gone entirely, one wall standing at an angle that had no business still being upright, and the rest scattered in pieces I didn't have it in me to sort through. I didn't find my mother. I didn't find my father either. I told myself that meant something hopeful, for about four seconds, before the more honest part of me pointed out that a fight between beings like that probably didn't leave things behind to find. 

Okay. Okay. Think. What do you actually know how to do. 

I sat down on what used to be the front step and made myself take stock, because falling apart wasn't going to feed me and it definitely wasn't going to keep me alive through a second night alone in the open. 

I knew how to fly, badly, up to about seven feet. I knew how to hold a sword, though mine had been a wooden practice one and it was somewhere under the collapsed east wall now. I knew how to sense the shape of my own anti-mana, could pull it out thin enough to light a single leaf without touching the branch beside it. 

None of that is "how to survive alone in a forest with no parents at age eight." None of that is anything. 

But it was what I had, so it was what I used. 

Water wasn't hard — there'd always been a stream a short walk from the house, and it was still there, untouched, which felt almost cruel in how normal it looked. Food was worse. I'd never once had to feed myself; there'd always been a fire already going, a meal already half-made by the time I was hungry enough to notice. I spent the first full day mostly failing at that — burned what I tried to cook, ate some of it burned anyway because my stomach didn't care about technique. 

This is humiliating. I died once already as a grown man and now I'm losing a fight to a fish. 

I slept that first night curled against the standing wall, the one piece of the house that still looked like it belonged to a house, because some part of me needed to be near something that remembered what my life used to look like, even if it was just splintered wood. 

I don't remember deciding to cry. I just remember doing it, quietly, for longer than I expected, and then stopping, not because I felt better but because there wasn't anything left in me to keep it going. 

By the third day, something had shifted, and it wasn't grief going away — it never really did, not then, not for a long time after — but underneath it, something colder and more useful had started to settle in. 

Nobody's coming to fix this for you. Nobody's going to explain the mixed aura, or why they wanted you dead for having it, or what happens next. You have to be the one who makes yourself capable of finding out. 

I started training again on the fourth day, alone, with no one correcting my form and no one there to notice if I hurt myself trying too hard. It was clumsy and it was slow and more than once I pushed too far and ended up flat on my back in the dirt, aura sputtering out from strain instead of control. 

But I kept doing it. Every day. Because the alternative — sitting still, waiting for something to happen to me the way something had already happened to everyone I had — wasn't something I could live inside of. 

I don't know how long this is going to take. I don't know if I'll ever actually be strong enough to face what I saw that night. 

But I'm not going to find out by doing nothing. 

I buried what I could find of my mother's favorite things — a hairpin, half-melted, a scrap of the blue fabric she used to wear — under the standing wall, because it felt wrong to leave with nothing marking that they'd existed at all. I didn't have anything of my father's. I told myself that was because the fight had scattered everything too far to find, and mostly, I believed it. 

Then I picked a direction, because staying on a mountain with no house and no parents wasn't a plan, and started walking. 

Somewhere out there, someone knows what I am. Someone can teach me what nobody ever got the chance to. 

I just have to find them before I run out of whatever's keeping me moving right now.