I’m going to ruin it
1439 Words
FARAH
Elara doesn’t speak for a long time after he leaves.
She moves around the room quietly, pressing a damp cloth to my forehead, easing a cup of something bitter and herbal to my lips, pulling blankets up around my shoulders with the practiced efficiency of someone who has tended to wounds far worse than mine. But her eyes keep darting to the closed door, and her hands aren’t quite steady.
“How many times has this happened?” I ask her. “The episodes. How many times have you cleaned up after one of them?”
She stills, just for a moment, before she resumes tucking the blanket around me. “This is the third.”
“And the other two? Were they like this one?”
“Worse,” she says quietly. “The first one, we thought you were dying. He—” She stops herself, pressing her lips together. “The healers thought you were dying.”
I catch the slip but let it go. She means Caspian. He thought I was dying, which means he called for help, which means I was right about that crack in his armor, however thin and hairline it might be.
“Elara.” I push myself upright against the headboard, ignoring the throb of protest from behind my eyes. “Tell me about the others. The other Seraphas. Were you there for all of them?”
She gives me a long, measuring look, and I realize I have no idea how old she actually is. Her face is young, but her eyes carry the same weight Caspian’s do—that depth of someone who has watched centuries fold and unfold like a map worn soft at the creases.
“Not all of them,” she says finally. “Only the last three.”
“Then tell me about those.”
She sits on the edge of the chair nearest the bed, and she folds her hands in her lap, and I watch her decide whether or not to trust me. It takes a long moment. When she speaks, her voice is low, careful, like she’s carrying each word to me across a great distance and doesn’t want to drop any.
“The fifth one was the hardest,” she says. “For all of us.”
My chest tightens. The fifth lifetime. The one I told him about. The one where Serapha loved him.
“She wasn’t like the others,” Elara continues. “She fought the purpose. From the very beginning, she fought it. She used to sit in that window—” She nods toward the narrow window across the room, the one that looks out over the forest, “—and talk to him for hours. Just talk. Not strategy, not whatever game the Goddess was playing. Just two people trying to understand each other.” She pauses. “He laughed, in those days. Real laughter, not the cold kind. I hadn’t heard it before that. I haven’t heard it since.”
I am not going to cry. I refuse to cry. I’m still too raw from the memories, from feeling everything Serapha felt in that lifetime, from the particular agony of loving someone and killing them anyway.
“How close did they get?” I ask. “To breaking it. You said they were close.”
“Close enough that the Goddess herself intervened.” Elara’s jaw tightens. “That’s how we knew. She doesn’t usually bother. She sets the curse and she walks away and she lets it run its course because it always does, it always has. But that time, she stepped in directly. Because the bond they’d formed was strong enough that Serapha might have actually resisted the compulsion on her own. Might have chosen differently.” She pauses. “The Goddess couldn’t allow that.”
Something cold moves through me. “So there’s no way to fight it.”
“I didn’t say that.” She meets my eyes. “I said the Goddess intervened to prevent it. That means there was something to prevent.”
I turn this over in my mind, examining it from every angle, looking for the angle that gives me leverage. Somewhere in the castle, Caspian is moving through his evening with all his carefully cultivated coldness and his seven lifetimes of grief, and he is telling himself that hope is foolishness, and part of me hates the Moon Goddess with a ferocity that surprises me.
Not for the curse. Not even for the seven deaths.
For what she did to him in the time between. For taking a person capable of laughter and turning him into someone who doesn’t believe he’s allowed to have it anymore.
“The witch’s magic,” I say. “The woman in the market. She triggered this deliberately.”
“Yes.”
“Why? What does she want?”
Elara is quiet for a moment too long.
“Elara.”
“She serves the Moon Goddess,” she says. “Or she did, once. Now—” She exhales through her nose. “Now we’re not certain. She has her own agenda. She’s been circling the edges of this cycle for several lifetimes, waiting for something. We don’t know what.”
“She told me I was different,” I say. “Before the market. She looked at me and she said something was different about this one.” I press my fingers to the bridge of my nose, pushing back against the lingering ache behind my eyes. “I thought she was being theatrical. But she knew. She knew the memories would break through like this.”
“Yes.”
“She wanted them to.”
“Yes.”
“Why would she want me to remember?” I’m thinking out loud now, pulling at the threads. “If she serves the Goddess, she should want the cycle to continue. She should want me ignorant and compliant and walking obediently into my own ending.” I look up. “Unless she doesn’t want the cycle to continue.”
Elara’s expression gives nothing away, which is its own kind of answer.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“Someone who has been watching this story for a very long time,” Elara says carefully. “Someone who is tired of the ending.”
I think about that for a long moment. Outside the window, the forest is dark and silver-edged with moonlight, and somewhere out there the Moon Goddess is probably watching all of us move around her board like pieces she’s already calculated the use of. The thought makes me furious in a way that feels cleanly clarifying, like cold water.
I am not a piece.
I am Farah Collins, and I did not ask for any of this, and I am not going to play out someone else’s tragedy just because it’s been playing out for seven generations before me.
“I need to talk to him,” I say.
“He won’t come back tonight.”
“Then I need to go to him.”
Elara blinks at me. “You can barely sit up without wincing.”
“I know.” I push back the blanket and swing my legs over the edge of the bed, and the room tilts dangerously for a moment before steadying. “Help me anyway.”
She stares at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, something moves across her face—something I might call relief if I were being optimistic.
She stands and offers me her arm.
“His study,” she says. “Second floor, east corridor. He goes there when he can’t sleep, which is most nights.” She pauses. “Knock. Don’t walk in. He has a tendency to throw things when startled, and his aim is unfortunately excellent.”
Despite everything, despite the grief and the residual pain and the weight of seven lifetimes pressing down on me, I almost laugh.
Almost.
I take her arm and let her help me to my feet, and the floor is cold through my thin socks, and the castle is dark and quiet around us, and somewhere on the second floor, east corridor, a man who has died seven times is sitting alone with the particular company of someone who has learned not to hope.
I’m going to ruin that for him.
I’m going to ruin it thoroughly.
The Moon Goddess can watch if she wants. I don’t particularly care.
- Writer
