Tears streaked my face, and I kept running. Crushing sorrow strangled my insides, and I quickened my pace. Muscles tore in protest, and I cried louder, sobbing brokenly from a bottomless well of pain.

Every kilometer was a just punishment, the abuse on my body a price for my failures. No one deserved a beating more than me, and I absorbed that pain until my bones buckled upon the beach.

The sun’s heat burned my back, and I lifted my pounding head, squinting through tangles of hair.

A towering cliff rose before me, and the shore curved inward, forming a crescent that spanned sixty paces.

The beach where my father was arrested.

I crawled to the shade of the nearby outcropping of trees, and my ears perked to the sound of buzzing.

Swarms of flies hovered over the brush, and as I drew closer, I saw the blood-soaked fur.

My father’s dead hounds.

With a nauseated cry, I pushed to my feet and staggered along the inlet in the direction of his cutlass and boots. I summoned just enough energy to gather his belongings before crashing to the sand.

My heart pulled toward my mother, and my desperation to find her seemed to conjure her out of the sky.

Lying on my back, I gazed up at the cliff, and there she was, floating on the edge of the precipice.

Golden hair whipped around her head, her arms stretched out to the sea. She was an apparition of unearthly beauty, screeching fiercely into the wind.

“Edddddric!” A loud shrill cry shattered her voice as she chanted his name over and over.

She didn’t look down at me, didn’t move her attention from the sea.

How was she in the sky? Soaring over me like an angel? I must have been dreaming her.

Because I needed her.

But something didn’t feel right.

I curled my hands in the sand, testing the scratchy grains against my skin. Would I be able to feel that in a dream?

Why was she on the cliff? Had she floated there? Or climbed?

Panic stitched through my chest, and I fumbled to my feet, clinging to my father’s possessions.

Seagulls swooped and cawed around her, and she mimicked their form.

“Edric, my love!” Arms open like a bird, she stepped off the cliff and took flight. “Edric!”

Her gown rippled around her, and the bellow of her cry broke with the tide. But instead of gliding out to sea, she plunged to the rubble of boulders below.

My entire body jerked as she hit the rocks.

I would die for him.

Numb paralysis spread through me.

Not real.

My feet carried me forward, but there was no feeling. No breath.

Muscles failed, and I used the cutlass for support, stabbing it into the sand and stumbling closer. Closer. Until her broken form filled my view.