A Chance At Death Part 3

Okay so I did consider not publishing the final part this week and instead doing my monthly wrap-up and making y'all suffer. But I'm not actually that mean. Well, actually I am, but I didn't have time to do a monthly wrap-up post this week so I guess you are in luck XD

Anyway, onto the third and final part...

“I’m sorry, Sephone,” he mumbles staring down at his hands. When he raises his eyes I notice that they are rimmed with red in the pale bluish glow of the glowgems. “I’m sorry for the pain I caused, but I’m not sorry for what I did.”

I reach up to massage my temples, a brief jolt of pain before my magic soothes it, and once again wonder what it would be like for him, to always have that pounding in his head. To always be in pain, and not have his magic make it stop, because it is his magic that causes it.

“It wasn’t worth it, Hade,” I say softly.

“Some people made it out.”

“I could have saved all of them!”

Even buried under the dirt and rocks, deep in this cavern I can almost imagine that I smell the smoke. Even though it was an event of the past, I can almost hear the screams. So many dead, and all for what? One useless mage to breathe?

I’m not worth it.

“I could have saved them,” I say again.

“At the cost of your own life,” he replies softly, but firmly. His low mumble is something that I realize I would have missed in the underworld. For someone capable of such destruction, Hade is so quiet. He can’t even speak loudly for fear of making the pounding in his head worse.

“It was a price that I was willing to pay.”

“But I wasn’t,” he replies, his voice finally raising to a bitter edge.

I stare into his black, seemingly soulless eyes. “Who gave you the power to make that choice?”

He blinks and looks away. “No one. No one said that it was okay for me to just let them die because I couldn’t lose the one person who had ever meant anything to me. I know that you certainly did not ask me to save you. But as you were bleeding out before my eyes…” his voice breaks, but he straightens and meets my gaze again. “It was a choice I made all on my own. It’s my rotten fate. I destroy everything. Everything I touch surely dies. The Prince of Death they are calling me. Even when I save someone’s life, even when I heal instead of kill, somehow people end up dead anyway.”

It is a rotten fate. For the both of us. I was supposed to fix everything, everything. I only needed to do one thing. Die.

And I couldn’t do that one small thing for the greater good.

Hade may have healed me, but I had allowed my spirit to return. I could have fought I, but I hadn’t really wanted to die and now so many others were dead because of it.

“Now I have their blood on me,” I say softly, staring down at my hands. Pale and unblemished with callouses from my time spent wielding swords. They are deceiving, they don’t look like they have been permanently stained.

“Their blood isn’t yours. It never will be. You are not the only one who has to live with this choice. I’m the one who actually made it. Do you think that it doesn’t destroy me as well?” he cries at last. Then he recoils with a grimace, his own voice causing him pain. “Don’t you think that the weight of every soul the world lost because of me does not drag me down?” he asks again more softly. “They drag me all the way down to the underworld with them.”

He slumps against the wall as a ragged sob escapes his lips and echoes through the otherwise empty cavern.

I want to rant and wail and scream, but I don’t dare raise my voice again for fear of the pounding in his head. Instead I stare blankly at the flickering glowstones.

Death was my destiny and yet I lived. How could that even happen? How can someone cheat their destiny?

Destiny is final.

Final like death.

My eyes flick back to Hade’s crumpled form. Unless my destiny wasn’t what I had thought it was. Such a beaten broken boy, barely holding onto a magic that could destroy us all. What if he someday lost the will to keep fighting? What if one day he succumbs to the aches in his head?

But his magic isn’t always bad. He used it to save me, and maybe that wasn’t the wrong choice.

Perhaps I wasn’t fated to save those people in the village after all.

I was prophesied to save many by destroying myself. I had always thought that it would be through bleeding my magic out. Everyone had thought that, my own mother had thought that when she tried to flee the land with her infant daughter so that she would not be forced to live that fate. The people of the land thought it when they forced her to return to her home.

I had thought it, growing up, knowing that every breath that I breathed was borrowed.

But we were all wrong. My fate never included death. My fate didn’t have anything to do with my magic at all. It could have saved one village, stopped the army for a time. Delivered a crippling blow against the Tibernans, but they would have rallied. They would have come back and this time I wouldn’t have been there to stop them.

My solution was not a permanent one. My solution never would have saved everyone.

I step forward toward Hade. He doesn’t look up at my approach, which means that he can’t shrink back as I move to wrap my arms around him. He stiffens, but then melts into my embrace.

Then we both cry.

Him because of untruths he has believed and me because I finally know the truth.

This broken boy with madness in his head. This prince with seemingly no purpose has the hardest destiny path of them all. His eyes are not soulless but just tortured because he is the only one who can stop his people and end this war.

I was born to save many by destroying myself.

Now I know what that prophecy truly meant. Because it destroyed me to not save those people in the village when I could have. Men, women, and children died. Whole families consumed in the fire. But that wasn’t my destiny to save them. My destiny wasn’t to die, but to live. My destiny is to save the Prince of Death so that he can save others.

Annnd... that's a wrap. Well mostly. I'll also share a picture a drew of this story for the same anthology that I entered them both into. It wasn't chosen to be featured either.

Aww, my poor Hade boi is crying

Well, that's all. What did you think of the story? Do you think that I should feature more flash fiction on my blog? Isn't that picture just pure tragedy? Comment Below!