CHAPTER 195

CHAPTER 195
Nala's home was deeper in the underground than I expected.

Jock and Kelin carried their sister between them, flying above us.

I walked behind them, keeping my eyes on Nala and not letting myself look away. I had been looking away from things my entire life, and I was done with it. I had done this. I was going to look at the consequences of my actions.

The landscape changed as we moved deeper, the scorched ruin of Hades' domain giving way to something entirely different. Trees that glowed faintly from the inside, their bark silver-white, their roots so deep and tangled they had broken through the ground in great arching loops that the wolves stepped over without breaking stride. I noticed them, pressed my lips together, and kept walking.

The Tamzyns finally stopped at a clearing.

I could tell this was close to their home, maybe a few metres away from their city centre.

In the centre was a flat expanse of earth darker than everything around it, rich and deep, the kind of soil that had never been disturbed. The trees surrounding it had grown in a perfect circle and their branches met overhead, interlocking, forming a canopy that filtered the underground's strange light into something warm and gold.

It looked like it had been waiting.

Nobody told me this was where she belonged. I just knew it the way I knew things now, through the earth, through the connection that had been built into me before I understood what it was for.

"Here," I said.

Jock made a low sound in his throat and Kelin's head dipped once.

Then the wind began blowing hard

He flew above the trees and landed right next to his daughter's body.

He was enormous in the way that things born in the deep underground are enormous, built on a different scale entirely, his form that of a dragon but older and denser than anything I had seen above ground. His scales were a deep burnished copper that caught the gold light filtering through the canopy.

His gaze moved to Nala's body first.

I didn't say anything because there was nothing I could say at that point that wouldn't be an intrusion on whatever was passing between a father and his dead child.

He covered her with his wings and closed his eyes, purring.

Her brothers began screeching but not in pain, like a song.

A mourning song.

After a few minutes, it all stopped and silence reigned.

Then the older Tamzyn nodded at me and I took it as my cue.

I opened the earth carefully, with what little was left in me. Every movement cost me something but I didn't stop. My hands were shaking badly, the sun's power having burned through everything on its way out, and I was running on something that wasn't quite energy anymore. Something closer to stubbornness and grief and the refusal to let her lie anywhere that wasn't worthy of her.

We lowered her in together, the four of us, and the wolves sat in a ring around the clearing without being asked and the silence was intense. I stood at the edge and looked down at her and still couldn't find words adequate enough so I didn't try.

I just pressed my hand to my chest one more time.

Then I filled in the earth.

Gold flowers slowly began spreading from the centre outward in a ring that kept growing until the entire clearing was covered in them. I stood in the middle of it with blood drying on my face and my hands. I breathed in and out and let the silence hold me for a moment.

Then Nala's father walked towards me and placed his head on my shoulder, not enough to push me down as his head weighed more than my entire form but just enough that we were touching.

I felt the connection forming and I was slammed with something akin to grief, yet not quite.

Acceptance.

Then he pulled back.

"Give me your hand," he said.

I did as he said and pressed my palm flat against his snout without hesitating and the connection deepened.

Images came first.

Nala as she must have been before I knew her, young and reckless and furious about everything, burning half a forest down in a fit of temper while Jock watched from a safe distance with an expression of profound personal exhaustion. Nala learning to fly properly, crashing, getting up, crashing again, her stubbornness a thing that was existent before I came into the picture.

And then the day she ran after her brothers, insistent on joining them to bond with me.

The tears came silently and I let them fall, not like I could stop them if I tried.

"She chose this," her father said, his voice moving through the connection as much as through the air. "Every moment from the day that bond formed, she chose you. Not out of obligation. Not because of what you are or what you carry. Because of who you were to her."

"I told her to stay back," I whispered tearfully. "I told her over and over."

"I know my child, she loves you more than you love yourself so I'm sure she did this with her whole heart."

Gosh, the male lost his child and is still the one comforting me.

I thought of Inferno and something cracked open wider in my chest.

"I keep losing them," I said. "Everyone who comes close to me. Everyone who chooses me." My voice broke on the last word. "Maybe the problem is me. Maybe I'm the thing that kills the people who love me and I should stop letting anyone get that close because at least then—"

"Look at the ground," he said quietly.

I looked down at the gold flowers covering Nala's grave, spreading across the entire clearing, more of them than before, still growing.

"Feel it," he said.

I pressed my other hand to the earth and felt it open to me the way it always did, that familiar connection running downward and outward in every direction, and what I felt stopped me completely.

The underground was alive in a way it hadn't been.

I could feel it even from here, running through the roots of the silver trees and the soil of the clearing and far beyond, a vitality moving through the deep earth like blood through a body that had been sick for a very long time and was finally, slowly, beginning to heal.

"Inferno rests," the Tamzyn said. "Just as Nala rests. All of mine who have passed away rest in the earth that is healing because of what you do above it." He held my gaze. "They did not die for nothing. They died for this. For the world getting better. Do you understand me?"

I couldn't speak.

"You are not the thing that kills the people who love you," he said. "You are the reason their deaths mean something. Those are not the same thing and you will not confuse them again."

"What do I do now?" I asked, because I was genuinely confused about my existence and purpose.

He was quiet for a moment.

"You go back up," he said simply. "And you keep going."

I shook my head because I didn't see how but I knew he was right, I couldn't let her death be in vain.

He looked at Jock and Kelin, still standing at their sister's grave, and something passed between them that I wasn't part of and didn't try to be.

Then he looked at me one last time.

"She was proud of you," he said. "From the very beginning."

And then he clapped his wings and joined the trees, flying back to his cave.

I stood there for a long time.

Then Jock raised his head and looked at me, his eyes red from grief, and I crossed to him and pressed my forehead against his and felt his breath come out shaky and enormous against my hair.

"We have to go back up," I said quietly.

"I know," he said.

"Not yet," Kelin said from the other side of the grave, his voice rough. "Just another minute."

So we stayed another minute.

All three of us standing over the gold flowers in the clearing while the underground breathed around us, alive and healing and full of the quiet presence of everyone we had lost and couldn't get back.

Then I straightened.

Wiped my face with the back of my hand.

And we walked back through the underground toward the living world, carrying everything we had lost and everything we still had left to do, and I didn't look back this time because their father was right.

I had to keep going.