Page 9 of Emylia

It was too late, the fire had already consumed him, his body little more than a pile of ashes. Defeated and unable to support the weight of my grief, I crumbled.

Powerful arms caught me before I hit the ground, shielding me, protecting me.

Didn’t Sebastian know it was pointless?

No one could save me, not even him. Anguish ran through my veins, devouring every inch of me. Every breath without my father was torture.

He was my world; how could I live without him?

The answer was that I couldn’t.

And now I would have to.

ChapterFive

Dirt encrusted my fingertips, clumping beneath my nails. Absently, I flicked it free, letting it fall to the earth—already forgotten.

"Are you sure you want to do this today?"

The strained tenor of my mother’s voice cracked against my resolve, brittle as the dirt beneath my fingernails.

Neither of us wanted to do this. So, what did it matter what day it was?

The days had blurred together anyway, bleeding into one long, unrelenting ache. Three weeks had slipped by since I watched my father’s body burn—since the world I knew was reduced to ash and memory.

I had stared at his urn for days, willing it to fill the hollow inside me, willing it to bring him back.

But all it did was remind me of everything I had lost. The emptiness gnawed, relentless, until even looking at it felt like tearing open a wound that would never heal.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn't survive one more second of pretending this wasn’t real.

"If we don’t do it now, we won’t have another chance until we return," I said.

My voice sounded steady, but it was a lie.

A beautiful, necessary lie.

Outside, I held myself together. Inside, I was shattered. Obliterated. A thousand splintered pieces held upright by nothing but sheer stubbornness and the refusal to fall apart where my mother could see.

It didn’t feel right to leave without burying him. Without putting him to rest.

Even if it meant carving finality into my bones, even if it meant admitting he was truly gone—he deserved more than to be left adrift in limbo because I couldn’t bear the weight of goodbye.

Even broken, even lost, I owed him this.

A cold wind stole through the clearing, carrying the scent of salt and earth. It twisted through the branches of the ancient weeping willow, making dappled light dance across my skin like ghosts.

My gaze lifted to the tree—drawn, as it always was, to the wonder of it.

Fluorescent pink leaves—cherry blossom flowers scattered through the drooping boughs—glimmered under the bruised sky. The tree was a living miracle, a relic of some forgotten magik that defied everything we knew.

I had only ever seen it here.

We had planted it together, my parents and I, on my first birthday. Seventeen years later, it towered over trees a thousand years its elder, as if it had swallowed time itself.

Its branches bore the weeping beauty of a willow, kissed with cherry blossoms, its leaves shimmering from the brightest cobalt to the softest blush, depending on the season and the storms.

In autumn, the leaves would break free, drifting over the cliff's edge—a sheer drop sharp enough to shatter bone.

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