The Empty Ones (Fantasy Romance)

7. The equation of worth

Over the following weeks, I kept seeing Sita in my dreams; her and thunder. The thunder was striking me at the back of my neck and the hole extended till
it breached my chest, drowning my screams in blood and my inner life in horror.

I didn't want to accept it but I had to, Mairi was right and there was nothing we could have done, besides the fact that we were both one strike away from meeting a similar fate.

"What are you doing?" asked Mairi in her usual tone.

"Praying for Sita," I answered when she caught me whispering a chant and throwing flowers into the stream that was crossing the monastery grounds.

Our religion, the Faith of Zenith, says that all rivers flow together into one point in the depth of the ocean, and from there, down to the underworld. That's why we send our dead on burning piers on water, to find that path to the dark realm of silence.

It was a costume for Southerners to honor their dead by throwing flowers and other gifts for the deceased into flowing waters, so those could reach them and appease their souls. Souls that suffered a violent death were known to often not accept their condition, not find peace, and sometimes the energy they accumulated was so strong that they breached their realm, protruding into the world of the living, clinging to it as to the only thing they knew.

"Generally I would not care what you do, but if someone like your annoying friend Fera suspects that we saw stuff we shouldn't have, going stuff we shouldn't, it's going to mean at least more broken bones. It's been a whole moon circle already, try to get over it."

"I can't. I keep seeing her face in my dreams. It seems that everyone forgot she ever existed! Nobody is mentioning her ever since, as if she had never been here."

"And better neither do you."

"I can't help it," I snapped.

"Try harder if you know what's good for you."

"As shut up!" I screamed.
Mairi was looking at me with a mixture of annoyance and a strange kind of respect mingled with amusement. I couldn't hold her gaze for long, nor the sharp expression, and my voice softened while my lower lip started to tremble.

"It was the first person I watched dying," I replied in the end. "And it was awful." I sniffled loudly. "When my father was murdered, men invaded the estate and locked me in a room while my stepmother was killed in the adjoined one. I heard only the screams. Now I can't help picturing it too, very, very vividly."

"I am sorry to break it to you but it will certainly not be the last death you witness. You can choose to be a sensitive snowflake but that is not really going to help in this world. Life is like this, mostly horrible," she said in a harsh tone but at the same time, she kneeled beside me and wrapped one arm around my shoulders. With her other arm, she took a flower and tossed it into the stream smiling a bit. "The first cut is the deepest."

I felt mellow in her arms and sunk onto her chest crying. Unexpectedly she didn't ask me to back off, just stayed there for minutes brushing my arm softly with the knuckles of her left hand.

"Was your stepmother nice?" she asked at some point.

"She was nicer than my father and seemed to not hate me. Sometimes she told my father to spend time with me. He never did but at least she asked and she baked really good honey cakes. When they killed her she was with child, and unlike the previous many times, the child stayed with her till the seventh moon circle. I would likely have had a sibling. Maybe if it would have bared magic father would have been less angry with me."

Mairi scoffed. "Your father should have been angry with himself if he wanted to be angry with someone. He made you, not the other way around. I am sorry about your stepmom and the child and the honey cakes. I never had any."