Page 132 of To Trap a Soul

There are meant to be deathless, just like me!

“You know I am not omniscient,”Weldir stated quietly.

“I know,” she sobbed out through hiccupping tears shuddering her chest. Her mouth was sticky, and her saliva thick and clinging from the roof and bottom of it. “I know that, butstill!”

Why hadn’t she felt this horrible change in the world? How could she have slept peacefully through such a terrible thing? How could that make her feel undoubtedlyworse?

Within mere moments, her eyes and lips swelled from the onslaught of her tears, yet nothing could compare to the twisting ache coiling tighter and tighter in her chests. Her lungs shuddered as her hands shook against her face.

Lindi didn’t know how to process this. Something she’d never been afraid of, had never been prepared for, because... how could agod’schild die?

“Grab your artefacts. I think it’s best if I bring you to my realm.”

With a watery cry, Lindi just sightlessly fisted the strapping of her satchel and nodded. She turned into a Phantom to easethe transition, as she always found it easier when she was in the form he could touch. It didn’t pull on her stomach so hard, like she’d been thrown off a cliff.

Other than the glow of her lantern being lost, his realm didn’t look all that different than night. Weightlessness lifted her, yet it was like she was sinking with a lead ball resting over her sternum and she was drowning. She knew that wasn’t true, but the waves of her grieving emotions were crashing over her, and she couldn’t make it to the surface to breathe through her heaving chest.

She finally peeked open her swollen eyes to look at him.

He wasn’t curled up in pain like she was. He wasn’t crying, wasn’t shuddering with the loss. He looked the fucking same, justfloatingthere half visible, like nothing was the matter.

She wanted him to hurt too – to know it all meant something to him. She didn’t even want strange, monstrous children to begin with, so why was she the one dying on the inside instead of him?

“How?How did it happen?” she croaked, covering her face in her hands once more to cry into them.

She almost considered turning physical, like turning into a Phantom in the ‘real’ world, so she could escape her tears. She wanted to shed the fear and grief that clung to her body and rattled her very bones.

“I believe Orson crushed his skull, but I’m not certain. I was not watching at the time.” Weldir folded his arms and turned his head to the side. “He waits by Nathair’s skull.”

Lindi hated the way a nasty creature crawled inside her, full of disappointment and blame. A Demon was one thing, but his own brother? And worse still, she hated coming to the realisation that she may have had a favourite child.

Simply because he was her... first.

The first to be born, the first to hold, the first who ever spoke to her. Nathair was where she’d been setting all her hopes and dreams, knowing one day he may have allowed her to walk beside his slithering form. He was patient with her, unlike her other children, and he may have joined her across the world to teach the others.

And it didn’t help that, out of all her children, Orson was the most... aggressive. He snapped and snarled and warded her away, even despite Nathair’s promises of safety.

She didn’t want to feel hate towards Orson, didn’t want to cast the blame at him when he didn’t know, but... it was there. It bubbled beneath the surface, and she tried everything in her might to keep it down, to keep it in. To shift the blame elsewhere, but there was no one else except her and Weldir.

With all her heart, she blamed him for not knowing, for not somehow stopping it, but she felt she was somehow at fault too.

I should have been here. I should have been watching!

Yet her children were adults who did not want her around. Most didn’t trust her,exceptNathair. And they were hundreds of thousands of miles apart.

How am I supposed to protect them when they are all so far away?!

Why did Weldir have to ask this of her? She’d been okay with it when she thought they were deathless, formidable, indestructible beings.

To know that wasn’t true... was utterly terrifying. They were so far apart, out of her reach when she tended to another, and incapable of protecting each other... or themselves.

Did that mean she had to keep them apart? To stop them from creating any meaningful bonds?

But that sounds so lonely.

“I need you to collect his skull for me, Lindiwe,” Weldir stated.

Lindiwe lowered her hands fully from her face. “Is that all you have to say to me?” she asked with a shake in her voice, before she inhaled. All the building rage and sorrow mingled into one, and she threw her hands out to the side and clenched them into tight fists. “It’s like you don’t even care! One of our children just died and all you want to talk about is his skull?! I don’t want to see it!”

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