Alec felt a strong hand on his shoulder and he looked up to see Marco standing over him, reassuring, looking down with a face filled with sadness and compassion. It was also a face of strength, a face silently urging him to go on.

“My friend,” Marco finally said, his voice hesitant and deep, “I understand your grief—no, in truth, I cannot understand it. I have never had a loss like yours. But I know what it’s like to have nothing. To feel like nothing. To have what you love taken from you.”

Marco sighed.

“But I also know that life pushes on, whether we want it to or not. It is the tide of a river that cannot be stopped. You cannot kneel here forever; you cannot collapse and die. You must go on. Life demands you go on.”

Alec wiped away tears, embarrassed to be crying before his friend as he slowly became aware of his presence.

“I don’t see how I can,” Alec said.

“To want to go on living, you must have a reason, a purpose,” Marco said. “A will. Can you think of no reason? No purpose? Not one reason to live?”

Alec tried to think, his mind a blur, spinning. He tried to concentrate, but he found it hard to focus on any one thought.

Alec stared down at the earth, cast red by the sunrise, and he saw his life flashing before him. He was overcome by memories of he and Ashton playing when they were kids; of pounding steel in his father’s forge; of his mother cooking; of happy times in this village when it seemed as if they would all live here forever. Life was perfect, it seemed, and always would be—before Pandesia invaded.

As he had that last thought, slowly, something began to crystallize in his mind. Alec slowly remembered Ashton’s final words. He recalled the look in his brother’s eyes, the feel of his hand clutching his wrist.

Avenge me.

They were more than words. They were a command. A life sentence. His brother’s look at that moment, the fierceness in his eyes, a fierceness he had never seen in his life, still haunted Alec. It was unlike his brother to ever condone violence, to condone vengeance. Yet in his dying moments he wanted it, more than Alec had ever seen anyone want anything.

As his words rang in Alec’s mind again and again, like a bell tolling, Alec began to hear them, like a mantra, rising up in his mind. They ignited a fire that began to course through his veins as Alec turned and looked away from the graves, from his village, and out, toward the horizon. Toward Pandesia.

They drove him to stand.