Our fighting force had gone from six to four. I didn’t possess any of the stag’s powers, our Erlking was missing, my friend was sick, and to top it all off, there was a sinking feeling in my gut that told me none of this would be enough. We would fail and die. The world would end despite our attempts to stop it. The feeling hurt so bad, I wanted to scream and rage and cry. If I ever saw Soren again in this world or the next, I would bang on his chest and scream to his face, why did he have to leave, what had been so important to leave us to die? His crippled pride? His sense of superiority? His inability to accept that he didn’t need to be the strongest or the fastest? I wanted to shout at him, repeat the words he’d said back to me a long time ago about love and hate and trauma, and I wanted to screech and know why I wasn’t good enough for him to stay. Why we weren’t good enough to die with. My tears flowed like the sea, and this time I did nothing to stop it and let the pain flow out of me in a rushing river of tears and sobs and curses.

After a quarter hour, I dried my tears; all they were doing was distracting me from the precious sleep I needed. Diaval wouldn’t want me to cry; she’d want me to fight with twice the strength so she could fight alongside me in spirit. She wouldn’t want me to grieve; she would want me to kill the thing that did her in, and if I couldn’t kill it, she would want me to face it, never fear it, and spit in its metaphorical face.

I had to do that now, for Diaval.

When I did finally fall asleep, I dreamt of the world on fire.

21

WE ALL FALL DOWN

IT WASN’T SURPRISING to find myself wide awake in the early hours of the morning, watching patches of red break through the misty sky. There was too much going on, too much to think about, and in a few hours, we had to fight a monster, stronger than anything we’d been up against before, and our forces were decimated with Diaval sick and Soren gone.

Usually someone had some lucky, harebrained plan that ended up working, but no one here was inspired at all. It was like we were all resigned to this fight somehow leading to our deaths, to Diaval’s death, to Soren’s death. What would happen to the stag’s power if I died? I still couldn’t reach it, not even when I stretched my mind to the farthest corners I could. Maybe it had already been drained from me and passed on to another person, someone who may not be in intimate danger of dying.