Ethera Grave by Essa Hansen

Author:Essa Hansen [HANSEN, ESSA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2023-07-19T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

GRAVEN UNITY

Abriss headed for the Haunt out of arrival habit, even though Ksiñe was gone. Unity soothed her feelings of loss in an incongruous way, like a jagged-looking object being smooth to the touch.

She was still marveling at her reconstruction. She brushed her fingers over a perfect eye and cheek, the ravines filled in, and her neck a smooth, soft surface. Walking was easy, movements fluid. Fatigue had erased from her cells. More than systems optimized, something in her physiology had been solved, attuning to Unity so she could sense and manipulate it without needing Azura’s energy infusing her. Without disintegration.

It meant she didn’t need Ksiñe anymore.

Down the tunnel of steps, she entered his long, dim series of rooms. His creatures shuffled—so many less than before. Their hidden roosts and wall enclosures had been opened. The remainder came back hoping their person would return.

“I am a sad consolation,” Abriss told them as she crouched, letting them come to her. “But I’ll take care of you. We can wonder together whether he left us because he was clearheaded and wished to, or if he desired to stay and left only because gravitas made him.”

She didn’t need Ksiñe, but she would miss him. She had been foolish to think camaraderie would last this time. Her hopes for herself were poison, always taking away the things she wanted, ever since she was little.

Abriss sat and stretched her legs out. The spixt affectionately headbutted the small of her back. Scaly petrins looped her ankles and tasted the air with their long tongues. She petted a team of small winged mammals that landed on her shoulders. Then she gave herself a long while in the quiet, dusky space, with Ksiñe’s creatures weighing down and snuggling up, soothing one another.

The Graven saved my life. Abriss turned that warm feeling around and around.

“All right,” she said at last. “Mundane tasks help sad minds.”

The animals followed her as she filled water dishes from the rain cache. She prepared an armful of food bowls and set them in rows. Even the shyer animals spilled from their hiding places for a meal. It was the last of the foodstuffs Ksiñe had made.

Abriss wasn’t needed elsewhere: unified action was welcoming and rehabilitating absorbed planets. She was no longer the figurehead of change, her gravitas no longer as strong or tantamount. Creatures and individuals—even whole ecosystems—were so harmonized to the rhythms of being, there was a gravitas among one another. It was so commonplace to care and be aware. Beginning to be privy to one another’s feelings and thoughts, immediate cognitive empathy dissolved the concept of other.

She relished a feeling of freedom even as she nursed a great loss.

When her heart was ready, she treaded to the back of the Haunt where she knew Dejin was missing.

What she didn’t expect was Aohm, shriveled and desiccated. And Sisorro, a pile of shredded matter and delicate, hollow bones.

“No. Not—not now that…” Abriss clenched her fists until they ached. Tears watered her view of the remains.

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