Immortal Empire by eden Hudson

Author:eden Hudson [Hudson, eden]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shadow Alley Press
Published: 2023-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Raijin

Between mourners, Hush’s hand gripped Raijin’s arm. Deep, bleeding grief poured into him from her. There were no clear thoughts, just the surge of pain and heartache and need to escape. She tried to communicate regret and a bevy of images Raijin couldn’t sort through, but she could not form her normally organized impressions.

He bent his head to her and assured her in a low voice, “It is all right. You know as well as I do Lysander wouldn’t have cared for this. Go.”

She was gone almost before he finished speaking. The guai-ray senses felt her signature break into a run at the edge of the village. Raijin wished he could run, too. A flight through the trees with the icy wind on his face at a speed that outpaced thought and memory and the wooden signature of a shrine rather than their friend.

The rites continued, the villagers bringing their offerings for Lysander’s next life. Raijin felt their pain and confusion as keenly as his own, the guai-ray senses unable to block them out, and his spirit unwilling to let them bear the burden alone.

When Raijin had lost his mother and his school all in the span of a few days, he’d been mostly alone. Nael had wanted his attention and needed care, and that had saved Raijin from giving in completely to the swirling blackness that clouded his mind in those days. Ultimately, however, he had been free to mourn as he pleased, away from the sting of others’ pain. Now an entire village depended on him to share their grief, and every new stab of loss left him a little colder.

Did any of them know how much Lysander had influenced their settling here, creating a village they could call their home? The earliest of the Ji Yu had seen the foreigner swinging a burled steel axe, packing logs for those first cabins, daubing chimneys as if he’d been born a stonelayer—but did they understand that without Lysander’s intervention, they might still be wandering the world, their chieftain too stupid and inexperienced to realize the toll such a lifestyle took? As with all the other good the foreigner had done, Lysander hadn’t wanted anyone to know he was responsible. He had shunned recognition in all its forms.

I’m nothing. I come from nowhere. I’m not even here now, and I never will be.

He wasn’t in this quiet ceremony, that much was certain. The funerary rite wasn’t for him, Raijin knew, but for the ones who had been left behind.

After the final mourner passed, Raijin helped gather the wood and set it ablaze. A bodiless pyre for the man who had been able to disappear.

The last of the villagers slipped away, back to their hearths and families. The Uktena followed, speaking words to him that he barely heard over their sorrow. Koida and Cold Sun remained, but kept their distance.

In the wake of that first unfathomable wave of death that had taken away everyone in his life, Raijin had been a child mourning for something irreplaceable, not only in the world, but in himself.

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