Forever and Onward
an excerpt

“Tomorrow…” The word hung limply in the air, ominous in its softness, and yet its mellow touch was untainted. There was neither regret nor anxiety in its gentle brush of syllables, only a sorrowful sort of acceptance—the acceptance of a thing that no amount of power in the world could change.
Drawing in a deep breath of the cooling, evening air then letting it out in a long, slow sigh, Shino looked up into the deep, red and orange sky. “Yeah…”
There was a moment of silence, followed by the rustle of clothes and grass as someone sat up. “Do you ever wonder…how it might have been? If we had not chosen to walk this way?”
Turning his head to the side to give the speaker a long look, Shino frowned slightly. “Sometimes, but it’s stupid to linger on things that won’t change. If I could turn back time I’d choose the same anyway. I couldn’t have done otherwise then, and I wouldn’t now.”
“But if we hadn’t, then maybe…maybe they’d all still be alive.”
Sitting up abruptly, Shino turned to give his companion a hard look. “And then what Var? The rest of the world in ruins? All of us with our throats cut in our sleep because we didn’t fight when we could? It would have been more than just them if we hadn’t fought—you know that.”
Looking down at his hands, the sorcerer sighed, his fingers worrying at the hems of his loose, black sleeves. “We weren’t the only ones who could fight…”
Shino opened his mouth but he was interrupted as a third voice cut into the silence, its tone weary yet stern. “Give it a rest Shino. New wounds do not heal with ease. We’ve all lost, you should know that.”
Fists clenching in the grass by his sides, he lowered his head and closed his eyes. Caris was right. He did know—he could still feel that heavy, twisting feeling in the center of his chest that had been there since he had seen his mother’s body splayed out over the kitchen floor, her eyes wide and opaque with a fear that would be imprinted upon her face until the day time wore away the last remnants of her features. It was seared into him now, branded on his eyelids so that every time he closed his eyes he saw it all again and his throat would clench as the palms of his hands ached with that merciless anguish—that unyielding guilt that he had not been there, if not in time to save her then at least in time to say goodbye. In a way, it had made him glad that he had never known his father.
Inhaling deeply, he turned back to the darkening sky, stomach twisting with a sudden wave of shame. Such wounds never healed, but Var’s were more recen than theirs.
“Sorry,” he said quietly. The soft brush of the wind lifted the word away from him and carried it aloft, turning it into a wispy, mist-like thing that curled gently over and around them all before being carried up into the distant horizons of the sunset. Bound in its caress was everything that was anything that they had left—their words and their wills.
“It’s all right.” Closing his eyes, Var inhaled deeply, filling his lungs with the scent of freshly crushed grass. “it’s not your fault after all, it was mine…for putting them all in danger without ever thinking of whether or not I could actually protect them… They…didn’t want any of it…”
“That’s enough.” Bolting upright, the fourth and final member of their little band’s voice cut through the air like the crack of a whip. “Self-pity is a weakness and ‘if only’s never solved any problems. You will only get your own spirits down and then you might as well be doing the enemy a favor.”
Three pairs of eyes turned to the short, fierce-eyed figure and Shino had to suppress a grin—he had too much to do to be run through with a sword right now. Letting out a long sigh, Caris finally sat up, reaching over to place a soothing hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“It is not self-pity Kori,” he said quietly, his eternally calm green eyes shifting from first one of them to the next and onward before turning upward to the crimson sky. “The fact that we can grieve for those we have lost is proof that we are not like them—that and that we at least know what we are fighting for. And that is something we must never forget.”
Kori opened her mouth for a moment as though she were about to argue, but a shadow flitted behind her eyes and she looked away, her short, disheveled hair scattering bits of grass as she did so that fell lightly to the ground like feathers from the wing of a bird. Reflexively, one of her hands reached up to clasp the shape of the pendent that hung beneath her tunic—the one that her brother had given her on her fifteenth birthday. It felt warm even through the fabric with the fire that had been wrought into it and her lips pressed tightly together as something in her throat clenched.
Drawing in a deep breath, the conjurer withdrew his hand from her shoulder and closed his eyes. Lifting both his palms so that they faced towards the sky, he opened them again as he let an almost inaudible word slip from his mouth to be set adrift. And in its wake, above the brush of his fingers, a path of white flowed, becoming wider and thicker until a finely woven blanket flowed across his outstretched arms. Lowering his arms, he leaned over and draped the blanket over the girl’s shoulders.
“You shouldn’t use your energy like that,” she snapped, pulling away angrily and giving him a hard look somewhere between incredulous fury and a deep seated gratitude that she would never voice. “You’ll need every ounce of power you’ve got.”
The tomorrow went unspoken between them, its weight still heavy in the atmosphere all around them. Any thought need really only to be said once, for its presence can only bear new meaning to the world for a single instance as all the reiterations to follow would be empty shadows following on the worn path left sunken forever in time by their predecessor. And yet there were always too many thoughts to be voiced—too many things that needed to be said but most of which would never be expelled from minds reluctant to give them the haunting strength of reality, even if it was only the reality woven by the spoken word.
Sometimes there was no greater reality than what was spoken…what was believed.
Caris straightened finally, a small smile playing around his lips. It was a true smile, if not a joyful one. “If I am going to end my days by the next setting of the sun, then what better time is there than now? The best we can do for ourselves for this moment, for now, is to remember that we are still alive and that we have all of us once lived.”
And it wasn’t only of them he spoke, but of all those who had been lost—even those who had chosen not to fight and to simply let the tides of time wash away their footprints from the sand. Life was a fleeting thing, something they had all come to know all too clearly, but memory was existence and that in itself was eternal.
“Well…” Scooting around so that he was facing the others directly instead of giving his neck a hard time, Shino felt a small grin tugging at the corners of his own mouth. “If we really are going down then at least we’re going to take ‘em with us.”
Kori straightened, orange eyes blazing with reflected sunlight, bright and pure as fire. “Agreed.”
“They will regret ever having dared to tread upon land that was not theirs,” Caris murmured, the cold edge of steel clear in his voice.
Sighing, Var inclined his head. “And let the lost rest easy in their graves with the knowledge that they shall be avenged.”
And around them the wind rose ever so slightly, blending their words into a promise that gleamed in their eyes and in the deepening colors of the sky as the grassy slopes of the hill fell away on all sides into a world that, for the moment, they were free of. It was waiting for them, but it always had been after all and another day was just another day, no more or less.