Loretta of the Lamp - The Fallout

Alone I break (Wishing for sleep)

Loretta shot bolt upright.

Because from the very beginning, she had known how to wake.

From the day her father had failed to wake up, Loretta had feared sleep. She'd never slept deeply, and never slept long. Sometimes she never slept at all, instead falling between various stages of wakefulness. She had long suspected that this was why she dreamt so much.

Her mother always told her she stopped breathing when she slept. Loretta told her she was stupid, but now she suspected it was the failure to breathe that woke her. A failing in her human body that was reminiscent of her father.

She was wide awake now, beating the remnants of the incense away from her face with her hand. The curse had dissipated, broken. Her heart lurched with agony in her chest as she stood and looked across the valley. The Djin King was gone, and Akil was gone too. The slab of stone on which they had fought lay empty.

Stumbling, she made her way over to it and crashed to the ground on her knees. This was where Akil had lain asleep for thousands of years before she interrupted his rest, and where it had all now come to a final end.

He was gone. She knew it without question.

For all his worry and questioning over what would happen if they were separated by death or distance, now they had the answer. Loretta was still alive and in the lamp, and he was gone, expelled back into the world with no magic and no ability to return. She would never know where he had gone.

There was a moment of mad desire in her to attempt to follow the Djin King out of the lamp to his exile in Morocco, to kill him, to know that he was dead and had paid for what he did, but logic told her this was pointless, she had already seen the fate the Djin King would suffer. He was dead already, by her own hand. That would have to be punishment enough. Reason argued with her grief, but eventually reason lost.

All the fury and rage at everything surged through her from the pit of her being, like fire in her veins. The valley shook with a quake that ran from Loretta throughout the entire mountain. Lines in the stone appeared around her, stones began to fall from the ceiling, and rise from the floor in dust and smoke also.

Loretta clenched her fists and screamed. The lines in the stones became cracks, and the cracks became rifts.

She didn't want to go back, she didn't want to go forward, she didn't want to stay. The tears that streamed from her eyes turned into blood as the vessels in her eyes burst, and the blood burned so hot it became fire and smoke.

Around her, the earth liquified and rose up in pillars of stone, like organic vines that exploded from the epicentre that was Loretta. The sound of it all was deafening and yet the Sleepers still slept.

Akil had sacrificed himself to stop the Djin King's madness.

That was why he had asked her twice if she was prepared to die. He'd planned all along to take the Djin King with him, but he couldn't have known if Loretta would survive the severance. He could suspect it, because he had survived it before, but he couldn't know it for certain, because when Loretta was expelled from the lamp the last time, she had still been a genie. The gypsy's curse could not remove that power from her.

But this time the Djin king had stolen Akil's power, and there was nothing to tie Akil to the lamp.

He was gone.

She opened her eyes only when she finally had to breathe, and she saw the chaos she was causing around her, filling the cavern with webs of stone and destroying the earth.

Misbah still lay just across from her in silence, nothing touched her, though the stone gathered around her. When Loretta saw her still peaceful, part of the Lamp that had been created for her, everything stopped.

She fell back onto the empty slab that should have held Akil's body. The shock and emptiness churned in her heart still, but her rage was silenced by the horror of the destruction she had caused.

Akil could have told her his plan. She should have made the sacrifice instead, he was far better equipped to be the one left alive in the lamp.

And why had he told her to wake up?

WHY?

She'd blindly obeyed him and now here she was, wide awake.

He'd been right from the beginning, it wasn't her problem, it never was her problem, and now she had taken it all on her shoulders, all the mess left behind.

She pressed her cheek down to the warm marble where Akil had lain and wished for sleep to take her.