There was no time. The word from the scout had been a frantic whistle, and the reality was a ravine filled with the sound of panic. Lauri, Anastasya, and Jukka scrambled down the dusty slope into a chaotic scene of nearly one hundred refugees trying to flee with their lives bundled in their arms. They were a disorganized mass of terror, their evacuation progress a scant 10%, a testament to their fear. An old Ailuropodine was trying to drag a heavy weaving loom, its threads snagging on the rocks. A mother was screaming for a child who had run the wrong way.
— Form lines! Move west! — Anastasya’s voice was a blade, cutting through the noise. — Leave everything!
Lauri pushed through the crowd, his warden’s instincts taking over. He saw a small, familiar figure huddled near a rockfall, her face streaked with soot and tears. Elina Rovio. The young apprentice who had stumbled into his grove, the very face of the blight that had forced him into this sober, aching world. He started toward her, his own objective crystallizing in the chaos. He had to get her out.
— Elina! This way! — he shouted, his voice raw.
Then the sound began. It was not the roar of a flood, but a low, pervasive hiss, like a million insects chewing on the world. On the eastern edge of the ravine, the horizon darkened. A clean, sharp line of absolute blackness appeared, a moving wall of corruption that devoured the grey dust and petrified trees as it advanced. The leakage from the Progenitor’s Cradle had turned the blight into a wave, a solid front of decay moving at a terrifying ten meters per second.
The sound hit him first. A collective shriek rose from the refugees, a high, thin sound of pure terror. It was the same sound. The same as the shriek of stressed wood on the high mountain pass. The same as the cries of his kin as the graft-bridge gave way and the rocks came down. His vision tunneled. The dusty walls of the ravine became the sheer rock faces of his memory. The panicked refugees became the falling bodies of his friends.
His muscles locked. His breath caught in his throat, a stone lodged beneath his ribs. He was no longer in the ravine. He was back in the moment of his greatest failure, a spectator to a catastrophe he had caused. His body was a prison of memory, and he was paralyzed within it.
Through the roaring in his ears, he saw Elina. She had seen him, seen him freeze. Her face, which had held a flicker of hope at the sight of him, was now a mask of terror. She ran toward him, her small hand outstretched. It was a plea. A question. An accusation.
— Lauri! — her voice was a tiny thing, swallowed by the hiss of the advancing wave.
The blackness touched her. It was not a fire that burned or a force that struck. It was an unmaking. He watched, a statue of guilt, as the corrosive sludge of the Tears of Ash washed over her feet. Her fur, her skin, the very flesh of her arm began to dissolve, turning into the same black, weeping fluid that now composed the wave. She reached for him, her form coming apart as she did.
— Lauri! Move! Snap out of it! — Anastasya’s voice was a distant shout, a command from a world he could no longer reach. She was trying to pull others back, her face a rigid mask of tactical fury, but her words could not penetrate the shell of his trauma. He could not move. He could not breathe. He could only watch.
The wave rolled over the place where Elina had been. There was a final, wet sizzle, and then she was gone. The loss was absolute. The hope she represented, the reason he had started this journey, was consumed. His worst fear, the one that had haunted his nectar-fueled nightmares for five years, was made real. His inaction had killed again.
The wave passed, leaving behind a slick of glistening, corrosive black. The screaming had stopped. There was only the sound of the hissing decay and the quiet, desperate weeping of the few who had managed to scramble up the western slope. Lauri stood alone in the devastation, the silence in his head now louder than the screams had been.
His hand, shaking with a violence that had nothing to do with withdrawal, went to his belt. His fingers brushed against the familiar, cracked surface of the Nectar Flask. The symbol of his failure. The crutch he had leaned on for so long. It was empty. It had been empty for days, but he had carried it out of habit. A phantom limb.
He unhooked the gourd. It felt weightless, a hollow, meaningless thing. He looked at it, then at the black sludge that had been a girl. He let it fall from his fingers. It landed in the corrosive mud with a soft, pathetic splash. For a second, it floated on the viscous surface, a final relic of his old life. Then the blackness consumed it, and the flask dissolved into nothing.
The last piece of the old Lauri was gone. His identity as a warden, as a survivor, as anything at all, was erased. With nothing left to be, he turned. He did not look at Anastasya or Jukka. He did not look at the survivors. He ran. He fled from the scene of his failure, abandoning his allies, abandoning the mission, and plunged into the grey, silent darkness of the Ashen Tracts.
The air was still. The grey dust did not stir.
