Chapter 4: Interlude I

“Tell me,” Valhera said, breaking the oppressive silence. “Is it possible… to forget?”

Ithana took a deep breath, sitting straighter in her chair. Her gaze wandered around the room before settling on one of the Undying’s many scars.

“You mean… this night.”

“Sometimes I wonder… why I’m allowed to forget things. Simple things, like… what I had for breakfast. The words I’ve said, or… sometimes, even, the things I’ve done. But never that night.”

“Memory is a difficult thing. It has a way of changing us. How the past changes the present, how the dead may touch the living.”

“I know,” Valhera said. “And I was changed by that night. In ways… I couldn’t even fathom.”

Ithana’s head craned in a slow, steady nod. “And now, you lay before me, stained by the past. It… is the way of all living things. As we touch the world, it touches us in turn.”

Valhera thought on that for a moment. The voice in her head thought on it, too.

“Even so, we remain agents of our own desires. What happened that night… it is little justification for the path you since have led.”

Valhera closed her eyes. “I know. I make no excuses for the things that I’ve done.”

“Truly? Then perhaps you should spare me your condemnation.”

“We both were fools. But I tried to be better. I tried to right my wrongs.”

“Of course. And I simply… desired the death of our world?”

Valhera gritted her teeth, wanting nothing less than to feed his fire. Instead, she pushed the voice aside and addressed Ithana. “You didn’t answer my question.”

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“All things fade in time. However permanent they may seem.”

“In time,” Valhera replied, kneading her fingers. “In time. Maybe. Maybe there are moments where that’s true. In time, it grows numb. But in time, it comes back.” She stared at the wall for a long moment. “Your mind wanders and you see it all again. And no matter how well you convinced yourself, before… your memory tells you you’re wrong. You’re crooked. Nothing… is how it should’ve been.”

Ithana was quiet for a while. “No one exists without those kinds of memories. They are what give us form, and shape, and… direction. No matter the color, no matter the shade. But we are more than our worst moments. A woman is better… than her darkest self.”

Valhera stewed on those words. Her memories had given her a very particular direction, toward a destination far afield from her original goals. Somewhere dark and incarnadine, hollow and vile. Somewhere much of her had withered away, leaving the creature… that had been born that rainy night.

For a moment, her blood ached and burned. She had no business lamenting what had already happened, what could not be changed.

“A while ago, I stopped trying to make sense of what happened,” she said, biting down as her curse faded from mind.

“Indeed, our world is mad.”

She ignored it. Turning once more to the Dreamer, she asked. “What’s left, then? After everything is gone?”

Ithana laced her fingers. “It’s not for the living to know.”

“But these things follow us… even after death.”

She sighed. “They may. But nothing is eternal. It… is not the nature of our world. Perhaps… another death awaits us, long after our bodies have turned to dust.”

“From oblivion born, to oblivion returned.”

Valhera breathed in deep, held the air for a while, then let it whisper out. She thought about the scars on her back—not those inflicted in battle, but those carved as penance. Still, they burned with undying fire, her very flesh once haunted by the souls of the slain.

“Maybe,” she said, bowing her head. “But I don’t think it matters, what awaits us beyond the Veil. They say that the living may change as the dead remain the same… but here, we never escape the past. Because even if we forget, it will always come back. Maybe the world itself remembers who we wronged.”

She tried to sit upright, but the effort was still too much. As she lay limp again, her nails dug into her palms.

“I don’t think the stains ever fade,” she said, eyes cold like ice, like frost. “No one escapes the dead.”