Chương 30: A Fool

POV: Evelisse Ardentia I sat in a chair beside the bed, in one of the inns in Flola. Milo lay sleeping, the skin over his ribs gone a purple where the blow had landed. How does a Dark Lord take a wound from a common troll? And the quest had said a troll, not two, and certainly no grovewyrm. The grovewyrm tugged at a thread in my memory; Milo had hit it with that fire of his, purple, clinging, the kind of flame I knew could only be cleansed by holy power. I'd seen it before. The last Dark Lord had used it.

So the grovewyrm should have burned until there was nothing left. Yet, it had cleansed the fire. Which meant the creature could call on holy power, or had been imbued with it by someone. I had never heard of a grovewyrm carrying a holy element. I looked at Milo. His breathing had steadied. I had worked a basic healing over him, not enough to completely heal him instantly, but enough to close the bleeding inside. That meant the second troll had holy power too.

On top of that, the trolls, who had been supposed to not show aggression, charged at Milo; monsters that had left the town untouched for days, turning vicious the instant they laid eyes on him. Why? Dark Lords didn't draw monster aggression, not like this, not aimed, not coordinated. I had spent my whole life believing the Dark Lord sat at the very summit of evil in Lycora. And yet here one lay, laid low by something as small as a monster's fist, and the wrongness of it pricked at me.

It felt like there was a higher power at play here. Was it Lord Luminaryn reaching down directly? No. If Lord Luminaryn meant to strike the Dark Lord dead, it would have happened ages ago, not through a holy-soaked troll. I hadn't thought about any of it in the moment. I had simply moved. But now, with everything still and done, it caught up to me, and settled like a stone. Why had I saved the Dark Lord? Because he had saved me? Twice? It was past noon.

He would wake soon, and when he did, we would return to Eremiah. And then it would be tomorrow. Tomorrow, when the Church came for him. What was I going to do? The quest was meant to make things clear, for me to sort out my thoughts. Had it? Or had it only handed me more questions? I thought of the moment he went limp in the dirt. What I felt then wasn't clean or simple; panic, fear, a confusion that blurred the edges of everything.

And the whole way to Flola, running with his weight against me, through all that noise in my head, one sentence had repeated itself, over and over, refusing to quiet. Please don't die. I knew it wasn't grave. I knew he'd live. It was absurd to even think the words, when every part of my mind told me he was in no real danger. And still they rang. So I supposed, at least, one thing had become clear. I don't want Milo to die. It was wrong. It was not supposed to be true.

But it was, and just as I went to push it back down where it belonged, sis' voice surfaced from the night before. Stop deciding what you want by asking what you're allowed. But shouldn't I? Sis didn't know what Milo was. If she did, would she still have said it? My own secrecy had walled me off from the one person who might have told me the truth of myself. Maybe I should have just told her everything. I was sinking back into the loops I knew led nowhere when a low groan pulled me up out of them.

My eyes went to the bed. Milo stirred. His brow creased, eyes cracking open against the light, fixing blearily on the ceiling. He squinted, turned his head to the side, and found me. Something flickered across his face, a small widening of the eyes, before it smoothed back over.

"Evelisse? Why are you—" He swallowed.

"Where are we?"

"An inn in Flola. You passed out and I carried you here. Fortunately, the owner recognized me and gave us a room for you to heal in."

"Oh. Right." He huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh.

"That was pathetic. The Dark Lord, knocked cold by a troll." He shifted to sit up and winced, one hand going to his ribs.

"Were you the one who patched me up?"

"A basic healing spell. You should be whole again by the end of the day." The silence came down between us, awkward and total. I had nothing to fill it with, and from the way his gaze dropped to the white of the bedsheet, neither did he. Something pressed heavy on my chest. The room turned close and airless. I stood.

"You should rest," I said.

"Where are you going?" I didn't know. That was the honest answer.

"... Just to get some air."

"Can we talk? Quickly." I looked at him. He had the face of someone carrying too much. I imagine I wore the same one. We had done nothing but talk these past few days; outside his hut, in sis' house, through the whole night market, and still we kept circling the same ground. The quest was meant to break the loop. It had, a little, but nowhere near enough. I had wanted to run out of room to delay this, again. It couldn't keep dragging on. Not with tomorrow looming. Not with Ywain.

"Milo." I sat back down.

"There are some things I have to tell you." So, against everything I'd been taught was right, against everything I should have done, I told him. About tomorrow's attack. About Ywain, who is the new Hero now, that he might not come alone, that he could bring others with him. Milo listened to all of it. I could see the questions stacking up behind his eyes, but he held them, until I finished.

"That's... all of it," I said. He sat with it a moment, working through it.

"Can I ask a few things?" I nodded. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"Why is Ywain the Hero now? Is it because the Church decided you failed, like, for not killing me when you had the chances?"

"... yes."

"And tomorrow." He paused.

"Will you be there? Fighting alongside him?"

"I don't know." The words came slowly.

"But, I think I won't."

"Why?" Because I'm tired. Because I don't want any part of anything that might hurt you. Because I think…that isn't what I want. I couldn't push a single word of it past my teeth. He must have read something in my silence, because his expression gentled.

"Sorry. That wasn't fair of me, pushing you to answer.

""... I just think we can find another way through this," I said.

"What?"

"Milo, I—" My throat closed. I made myself open it again.

"I don't want you to die." It came out smaller than I meant it to, and once it was out I couldn't take it back, couldn't dress it up as duty or strategy or anything other than what it was. My hands had found each other in my lap, fingers winding tight. I stared at them instead of at him.

"I've spent most of my life being told what you are," I went on, and the words came faster now.

"That you're the enemy. The thing I was made to destroy. And I believed it, because believing it was simple, and because I had to. But then you—" I stopped. Started again.

"You saved me, you helped my sister, you panicked over a handkerchief. You told me to do what I wanted, when most people in my entire life has ever once asked me that." My voice was unsteady. I pressed on anyway, because if I stopped now I would never get the rest of it out.

"And I can't make it fit. I can't make the monster they described fit the person you are. I don't know how to hold both of those at once." My nails bit into the back of my hand.

"I'm supposed to want you gone. Every instinct they drilled into me says end it, says the world is worth more than you. And every time the chance is right there in front of me, I—" The breath shook out of me.

"I can't. I can't, and I hate that I can't, because it means I don't know who I am anymore without the thing I was supposed to be." The room had gone very quiet.

"But I can't join you either." I forced myself to look up at him, finally.

"Do you understand? I can't stand against the Church, against everything, and just — pick you. I don't know how to be that person. I don't know if I'm allowed to be." A bitter sound caught in my throat.

"So there's your answer. I don't want you dead, and I can't fight for you, and I am no use to anyone like this. I'm just... stuck." I hadn't realized I was breathing hard until I stopped to do it. I'd never said any of that aloud. Not to anyone, not even to myself, fully. It hung there in the air now, ragged, exposed, and I felt unbearably naked. Milo didn't answer right away. When I dared to look at him, he wasn't recoiling, wasn't pressing his advantage, wasn't doing any of the things I'd braced for.

He just looked at me, steady, careful, like I was something that might break if he moved too fast.

"Okay," he said quietly.

"... Okay?"

"You don't have to pick." He shifted up against the headboard, slower this time, a hand bracing his ribs, but his eyes stayed on mine.

"That's — Evelisse, that's the whole thing I've been trying to say, and doing a spectacularly bad job of. I'm not asking you to fight for me. I'm not asking you to stand against the Church, or to choose a side, or to be anything you're not. You don't have to do anything."

"But tomorrow—""Tomorrow's mine to deal with." Something in his face tightened at that, but he didn't look away.

"If you're not there, then there's no version of tomorrow where you have to watch me die, or worse, where you're the one holding the sword. You go home. You stay with your sister. You let me handle my own mess."

"And if you can't handle it?" My voice cracked on it.

"if Ywain—""I'll make it out." He said it simply, like it was already decided.

"I promise." I shook my head.

"You can't promise that. You don't even know what you're walking into."

"No," he admitted.

"I know nothing about proper combat, and I know Ywain is strong. I almost got killed by him before. But I'm promising it anyway. Because—" a faint, crooked smile, the first I'd seen since he woke— "I've got a lot left I want to do. I'm not planning on dying in some forest before I've gotten to any of it." The smile faded into something steadier. I wanted to argue.

I wanted to tell him a promise wasn't a strategy, that I'll be fine had never once made anything fine, that he was being reckless and absurd and that I'd already lost more people than I could hold to exactly that kind of confidence. But underneath all of it, beneath the fear and the protest, something in my chest loosened by a fraction. Just a fraction. The weight of what should I do tomorrow, the choice that had been crushing me flat for days, he'd simply reached over and lifted it off me.

You don't have to do anything. No one had ever taken something off my shoulders before. They only ever added to the pile. I didn't trust it. I didn't believe, not really, that tomorrow would spare him. But for the first time in longer than I could remember, the next day wasn't mine to decide.

"... Okay," I said. Barely a whisper. He nodded, like that was enough. Like I was enough, exactly as undecided and useless and stuck as I was. And I had to look back down at my hands, because I did not trust my face not to show him the rest of it; the part I still couldn't say, the part I wasn't sure I would survive saying. Once Milo was steady on his feet again, he said we should head back. He'd fly me to Eremiah, then carry on to his forest from there.

"Um — do you want me to go slower this time? Since, you know." He gestured vaguely at his own hair. On my behalf, I realized, I had been a windblown disaster after the last flight. I told him not to bother. He'd have to crawl through the air to spare me the mess, and it wasn't worth it. He could fly the same as before. We thanked the innkeeper and made for the edge of town. As we walked, Milo started in with questions.

"Are there elves here? I've passed through villages, towns, and I've never once seen one." An odd thing to ask. Though perhaps not, for him. I'd never been taught where Dark Lords truly came from. They simply appeared, and Heroes were made to put them down. But where did they come from? How much did they actually know of Lycora? The previous Dark Lords I'd heard of had shown no curiosity about this world at all — they wanted only to ruin it.

"Elves keep to the far side of the continent," I said.

"The elven kingdom of Silvanis."

"Are they arrogant? Did they help fight the last Dark Lord?"

"No. The Dark Lords never even marched on Silvanis. It's as though the elves live in a world of their own. For all of Astrea's reach, even we hold no sway there." He nodded, mulling it. I could tell more questions were stacked up behind his eyes, but the gate was close now.

"I'll save the rest for later, I guess." He looked out over the road ahead.

"I have to say, this place is genuinely interesting."

"... Where do you come from?" I'd barely registered the question before it was already out of my mouth. He went still. Then a long, faraway look crossed his face.

"Um. I'll... tell you. When the time's right." I didn't press him. It wasn't long before Eremiah rose up in the distance, but with it, something else. Smoke. Milo felt it the same instant I did; his flight surged faster without a word between us. As we closed in, the shapes resolved into flame; buildings near the entrance burning, black smoke pouring up into the afternoon sky. We came down hard. We ran in. The Clasped Hands inn was alight, fire chewing up the timber. The old couple stood before it, helpless; Mr.

Aldric's fists clenched white at his sides, his wife's face buried sobbing against his shoulder. A handful of patrol mages worked the blaze with water spells that looked far too small for it. I turned, taking in the rest. Shopfronts caved in and smoking. A cart overturned and splintered across the road, its goods scattered and trampled. The ruin ran on, building after building, far down the main road. Sis. I ran. I could hear Milo's footfalls behind me.

But before I reached her street, there, in the plaza where the market had been just nights ago, I stopped short at two figures I knew. The little girl. The one with three eyes. She stood in the open, hurling blasts into the houses one after another while their owners watched everything they had come apart. She was laughing. Delighted. Having the time of her life. And above her, wings spread against the smoke, the demon girl. I turned to Milo. He had gone white.

Staring like he couldn't make sense of it, like none of this was meant to happen. Of course. Of course he would wear that face. I had been a fool. I had let him take the weight off my shoulders, let myself believe a promise, let myself want him to live, and all the while this was waiting on the other side of it. It seemed I had made a mistake, trusting him. I rushed towards him.