Page 114 of Decimation

Instead, it implodes.

It collapses my chest.

My legs buckle. I go down, with my knees hitting floor with such a thud that I feel it in my very teeth.

All of this was for her.

The thought is a white-hot spike driven through me. All these years of patient, venomous scheming. The alliances, the careful architecture of vengeance I have plotted with the meticulousness of a master builder…. she was the heart that began to beat within it. She took the monstrous engine of my hate and gave it a purpose beyond mere destruction.

She looked at my scars, my blood-soaked history, the tainted parts of my soul, and she did not flinch.

She saw me, and she made me believe that a life after all this horror was possible.

She made the revenge worth having, because it would pave a golden path to a future where her smile was my sun, and her joy was my whole world.

But there is no future now.

That golden path leads here, to this silent room. To this final, defiled masterpiece of flesh and stillness.

Right now, my brother is being anointed with sacred oils, draped in robes of gold and white, preparing him for the grand ceremony at the cathedral. He is on his way to meet his fate in a trap I have spent a lifetime laying out.

The stage is set.

The players are in motion.

The finale is fucking primed.

But what does it matter? What does anything fucking matter now?

The vengeance, the power, the empire of ash I have to build? They are the playthings of a fool. A fool who believed he could have a heart after he had cut out so many. The only real thing, the only true thing, was this. Was her, and now it is gone.

It is all fucking gone, and my life is meaningless without her.

A desperate, defeated clarity seems to settle over me as I realise that I am worthless now, that everything is worthless.

I lie down, I curl my body around hers. I mould my chest to the line of her arm, my knees to the curve of her hip. The warmth of her body seeps into me, against my skin, in a terrible, last intimacy. I bury my face in the tangled, perfumed mass of her hair, that field of silk that still smells of her, just her, under the taint of all this abject horror.

The sobs that tear from me are not human. They are the breaking of not just a person, but their very soul. Hot, silent, wracking torrents shake my entire frame. My hand finds hers. It is cool, but not yet cold. I interlace my fingers with hers in a final, desperate lock.

I will stay here.

I will hold this anchor as the world burns down around us.

It is the only logical choice.

A life without her is not a life. It is an echo. A haunting, and I will not be a ghost in my own story. I will let the flames write the ending right here, our ash entangling and rising on the same thermal column of destruction.

It is not a tragedy. It is a consummation.

I close my eyes, waiting for the heat, for the crackle, for the smoke to filter in and then the flames to consume us both.

I press my lips to her temple, just below the obscene cross of blood. My tears cut channels through the gore on her forehead. A silent, final benediction.

Goodbye, my heart. Goodbye, the only thing that was good in this entire fucking world.

And then, I feel it. So faint, so impossibly slight, I convince myself I imagine it. But it comes again. A rise, a fall. A fractional, rhythmic expansion against my ribs.

My breath dies in my throat.