Chapter 1989: An About Turn - Part 4
The help that she wanted, but then the responsibility that the help seemed to invoke. If anything were to happen to Oliver because of the changing of their plans, and the necessity he saw in saving Lasha Blackthorn’s father – Lasha had said, more than once, that the guilt was not something she could deal with.
They were all a razor thin edge. Nila felt it in herself, and she felt it in Blackthorn too. How was it that they wandered forward, as if they were creatures of strength, and as if they had overcome all there was to overcome? They tried to tell themselves the lie that they were heroes now, and all would be well.
Nila wasn’t so sure that she believed that. She had not been in the battle against Tiberius, but she could feel the sting off those that had. The haunted look in their eyes, and especially in Oliver’s.
That was the danger, she had come to realize, in growing so close to someone. In allowing her own heart to be bound up in Oliver’s. To feel the strength of his suffering, as indeterminable as it was, as if it belonged to herself.
It dislodged old memories and old wounds in her heart that she would rather have kept hidden, as if the strength that she had was insufficient, and all those old weaknesses were now bowing, under the added weight that they had to bear.
She remembered strongly the fear – it was the fear more than else. It was fear everywhere as of late. They were afraid in the moment, every single one of them, she cared not how highly they stood. Hod was afraid. Blackthorn was afraid. Oliver, most certainly, was afraid.
They existed in darkness now, as dark as the landscape that Nila had slumbered in, and impossible to pierce, like that veil of trees that hid yet deeper and more terrifying darknesses right in front of her.
They had been born the ultimate cruelty, of having such a light, right there in the palms of their hands, and then there in the sky, to follow like a guiding star, only to have it snatched away, in the cruelest and most impossible form.
The sheer cruelty of it, perhaps that was the worst of it. It shattered the worldview that Nila had built up. She had told herself a childish story when it came to the battlefield.
Her experience on it was tainted by Oliver, and she had to admit, increasingly, there was a childishness to Oliver that was undeniable. His views – and the magic of them, that saw others so inspired – were childish at their heart. And perhaps that was what gave them their honest purity – to have endured as much as he, evidently enough that the pain was registered in his very eyes, and yet still hold to that idealism, that was a strangeness that was impossible to ignore.
Yet it was that strangeness that had blinded her. He believed in a justice, and a herosim, that the battlefield more often than not did not display. Still, it was the only way she could find her place upon it, that place that she so hated. Where corpses were piled up high, and the special thing that was life was so easily snuffed out.
She still could not reconcile that fact, that death could be handed out so easily. It was a struggle. She thought she had a handle on it. With her hunting, she was a grim reaper in her own right. Was it only people that she held to be above the rest? She hated herself if that was the truth of it. If she simply saw animals as so inferior, that she could snuff out their lives with no worry.
She didn’t think that was the case, or at least she hoped it wasn’t. Though she claimed their lives as often as a wolf, she still liked those creatures which she hunted. She did not hunt with malice, but with necessity in her heart. She thought that they could understand the stage that they played on. They engaged in their competition, to see who might live towards the next day, and there was a degree of fairness in it.
That look on her father’s face, then, when the sword wound that had seen him claimed finally drained him of enough blood that death seemed certain. Why was that so different a look, to the glassiness of a dead animal’s eyes?
"Of course... Of course, stupid, that’s your father, of course you’d hate it," Nila tried to tell herself, to cleanse the shakiness of her hands.
The trembling in her, the weakness. Gods, she hated it. She saw the way Oliver now trembled in his sleep. Was it the present that was so terrible, and had dealt this to them, or was it truly those memories of the past that they had kept so buried? She thought it was a mixture of both. Tiberius had dealt them two kinds of wounds. He had injured their world view, and an innocence that the Stormfronters were not even aware was an innocence.
He had forced upon them a corruption that they were made to deal with. A nightmarish, shattering thing. Something they had to wrestle with, beyond his death, for the atrocities that he had committed.
Were they not the same – was Karstly not, when he and Blackthorn saw those Verna men and women buried, in order to force a hand?
She wondered. It was cruelty of the highest sort. Perhaps it was cruelty even worse than Tiberius’. Were they the Tiberius to their enemies? Or was there something else?
Tiberius seemed to turn cruelty into a pursuit, he knew it better than any other. He had reached the highest levels in it. To simply be touched by him, or to come near him, was to be corrupted by him.
The aftermath of all that he had left. Could they blame it all on him?
She wondered again. Was he not just the largest rock that had fallen so recently in the pond – could they blame him?