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I exhaled, wanting to tear the letter to pieces and throw them in the Ark, unable to so much as pierce it with my claws.
My love’s last words to me. This was all I had left. This, and the portrait I’d torn apart in front of her.
She’d watched me rend her face in effigy. That would be her last memory of me, destroying her, shouting at her.
I had broken… everything.
As night fell, I remained in the darkness, holding her final words to me close. Smelling the reek of blood from above. Listening to the change of guards, the soft call that all was well, and not hearing anything at all. Eyes unseeing, the words on the page becoming a blur.
Sometime later, beyond my reckoning, there was a soft knock on the door. The light of dawn was coming through the window; Cirri was gone.
I had obeyed her last wishes. I would let her go.
Visca stepped in, her face hard and frowning, her nostrils flaring as she smelled the blood.
“Good ancestors, Bane, what are you doing, crouching in here like that?” She wrinkled her nose. “Didn’t you let someone in to clean the body up? We’ve got warg-sign in the southwest, and as I was pla
I blinked, the words swimming back into focus.
I imagined eyes like the deep forest, but hard and cold. Her hands forming irrevocable words: You are just the same as them. Monster.
“Bane?” Visca’s voice, growing sharper. “What is it? Where’s Cirri?”
Wroth had been right. My brother had told me… and I had not listened.
I shook my head, wondering how I could ache inside when I was hollowed out into nothing.
Strange, how calm I sounded. A far cry from the fiend screaming inside my head. “My wife has… Cirri has left me. She’s gone.”