The Sketch Rift: The Seal of Demons

Debt Settled

Moth cleared his throat from the ridge upon which he stood, overlooking the onlookers overlooking their protagonist's repose. He flitted his gaze every which way, eyes welling with tears from knowledge only he now claimed.

"...We made it."

Their eyes flashed toward his, but promptly returned to their centrifuge: Sam, nestled in the ruins of a tyrant's abode and a titan's grave.

"Soal," Irene tilted her tear-drenched face and burrowed into his with her stare, breathing however little one required to survive, sensing however little one needed to live, even if he were conscious. "Soal?"

She caressed his cheek and brushed aside a lock of scarlet-spattered hair. Where once a lustrous crest was enmeshed nestled a patch of unblemished skin, interposing a quilt of opposites around it. She faltered at the replacement, but did not retract her touch.

"Soal?"

The darkest hour had come and gone, but what lay ahead was murky. Sulukrita was defeated, but Hendera was a silhouette. The Reacsoa Hand was not the basis of any grievous mutilation – Irene briefly speculated why that possibility had even crossed her mind, determining nothing – but it had vanished without a trace. Its guardian was dead, but the boy was not.

"...Sam."

Sluggishly, half-sightlessly, his eyes flickered open. As his pallor flushed into the past, hers swelled with relief.

A beam made two, a mutual lean forth to embrace, taxed his injuries; the attempt crumpled him into her arms, and she clumsily lifted him upright. Alice, elated and dismayed at once, hurried to reinforce his other shoulder, and suddenly Sam was draped between lives, wading over land at a fresh one's dawn, mid-sunset.

He swept the setting with uncertain glances, averting head-veering to ease the transition to activity post-onslaught. All that remained of Hendera girdled him: not quite jubilant, not quite exultant, but reveling in the modest bliss that trailed bombastic victory, sullied by weight of those fallen, grateful for their collective martyrdom. Isabel, Anibar, Nathaurus; they beheld Sam thus as the flock parted for him, flanked necessarily by Irene and Alice, whose aspects were similar. Even the heavens shared the outlook: over minutes, crimson paled to a washed-out maroon, and then some.

Serenity took hold as August 31st unwound. What red petrichor did so never deserted its home in lightless tubes; it fueled the hearts that made it.

Sulukrita's carcass appeared to sublimate at the same rate the starlight accepted his absence. All foul things withered from bone and flesh, revealing, eventually, Moth, meandering from behind a massive rib that split and shattered too quietly. His face was almost incredulous, partly mollified, partly riled, by concessions done and yet to occur, standing dejectedly in the middle distance from the crowd, wringing his fist in his thoughts at the remembered who were "once" here, the struggle that "once" transpired, an opportunity withdrawing amidst chaos.

Buoyed on by Alice and Irene, Sam's impromptu promenade ceased at Henderians' edge. A ways before him, on Snolaherat's western end, slumped the ruins of the Calendar, and, around it in every direction, mere wreckage. These hills were built from less natural clay.

Behind these people, a city risen from the hopeless was razed. Hundreds of worlds were sealed in a disintegrating skeleton, doomed to rot and join their overseers' sky. Their war was over, and its combatants uttered not a word.

"Silence," Sam managed to enunciate; he shut his eyes and hung still for minutes on end.

Hendera understood, and mourned with him.