Page 198 of Famine

Forgiveness is preposterous.

I don’t need to do it. Not today, not ever. I still get to have Ana.

Ana, who every second is losing bits of her life, the clock counting down to her end.

My steady pulse grows frantic.

I don’t need to decide today.

I don’t.

But the longer I wait, the closer to death she’ll get. Is it wrong that I want to age with her?

Forgiveness. I turn the word over and over in my mind. Forgive these petty, wicked creatures.

It’s so wholly oppositional to what I’ve been doing this entire time.

Above me, storm clouds gather, the thick plumes of them darkening the sky. The ground is beginning to shake—just a little.

I think of Ana. Ana, who asks nothing of me. Ana who saved me before she knew what I was—and then saved me again once she did know.

Ana, who I forgave long ago—I forgave her the very night we met. And I’ve forgiven her every day since—for harming me, for hating me, for every slight she’s inflicted. It’s easy enough to forgive someone like Ana, who is kind when she doesn’t need to be. Ana who is radiant and thaws my cold heart.

It’s much harder to forgive everyone else, especially when everyone else includes the people who once hurt me.

They made ribbons of my skin, they disemboweled me, they stabbed me—over and over—and burned me alive.Those men and women made pain an art form.

And the very night Ana saved me, my body still mutilated, God forced me to consider that damnable word.

Forgiveness.

You ask too much, I’d whispered into the darkness, my voice broken.Far too much.

I hadn’t been able to forgive this teeming mass of humanity then. Istillhaven’t been able to do it. But I know intuitively that I don’t get mortality until I do this.

I swallow.

A raindrop hits me. Then another. The ground beneath me is shaking.

If I forgive humanity, then what?

I think of these wretched people, with their crudely-dug wells and their rickety corrals full of bored looking animals. I think of the crumbling cities overgrown with plants.

Human hearts are spiteful and selfish; they are what bid me and my brothers here.

As though aware of my thoughts, my armor materializes on my body, and my scythe and scales appear a mere arm’s span away from me.

I feel the weight of not just my armor, but my hate and anger, my task and my immortality—all of it—on my shoulders.

I drop to a knee and place a fist against the trembling ground, even as raindrops begin to patter against my armor, coming down faster and faster. My breath is labored and my ever steady heart is quickening.

Something’s happening to me. I don’t know if it’s as simple as my mind changing, or if the forces that brought me here, the forces that made me a man and forged my purpose into form are now transforming.

“Famine?”

I jolt at the sound of Ana’s voice.

My gaze flicks up from the ground, where small plants have started to flower and twist up my wrist.

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