Page 150 of A Grave Not Made For Mourning
I did all I could to save his soul, and yet, I can’t shake the feeling that it wasn’t enough.
His soul, not just his body, but his soul.
Azaire once said,What if we’re Zola’s way of finding balance? Putting together two people with a similar predisposition?I didn’t admit it at the time, but I clung to that idea. I thought that, for the first time, the universe was giving back all that I’ve lost.
I thought Azaire was that—an apology from Zola herself.
But now, I’m starting to think we were never meant for balance at all. Maybe we were put together to be torn apart.
Azaire had written,I know that change is inevitable, that there is nothing constant in life. But when I look into her eyes, I don’t believe it. What I do believe is that, more than anything, she and I will break those odds.
But we didn’t break the odds, did we? Weprovedthem.
I turn toward the trunk of his tree, my hand brushing the bark, silently pleading for something—anything. Just one flicker of feeling, one sign he’s still with me.
But my pleas go unanswered.
“Please,” I beg Zola, the stars, the sky—anyone and anything that will listen. My forehead presses against the trunk, the roughness scraping my skin. At least, for a moment, the pain is a distraction. “I need to feel him. I have to know he’s somewhere.”
The words break in my throat, as fragile as a piece of glass, as if speaking them might bring him back—just for a moment.
This goes unanswered, too.
I’m fighting so desperately to hold on to who I am, to not let the anger and the anguish take me down with it. But it’s getting harder. I feel lost, broken. I feelscrewed. This world—this cruel universe—makes me feeleverything, every unbearable emotion, only to rip away the one thing I want most.
I lean down and pull at the grass beneath my feet. Ripping it out of the ground, feeling it die in my hands. I hope the universe feels it, too.
I hate it. Zola, Sulva, Ayan, I hate every god with everything in me. As I fall to my knees, I want them to fall with me.
ForDesdemonato fall with me.
Azaire is gone.
His soul’s not in this tree, and he’s not in the sky, either. He is gone.
Utterly, entirely, irreversibly nothing.
And if Zola will take from me, I’ll take from her. I’ll be vindictive, I’ll be angry, I’ll be ruthless—I’ll be the things Ma was in those journals. The things, I realize, she was protecting me from becoming. The reason that Pa fought so dearly to keep me from going down this path.
He took my emotion to protect me—but reversely, he’s damned me.
I’m not powerless like this universe wants me to be. I’m far from it. I won’t go crying into this night; I’ll go shouting and kicking and screaming. Fighting and killing.
I’ll topple this world with my mere will.
My hands weave through the grass, nails digging into dirt. The ground beneath me trembles with such force that leaves and branches begin to fall, swirling around me like a storm. They settle in a perfect circle.
None of them touch me.
Screw the gods. What have they given me? A life of endless sorrow, of death I never asked for, and power that only tore me apart.
Why am I holding on to this idea of being a good person—this tame Eunoia, trying to protect the world from me—when all the world has done is take from me, and all I’ve done is cry for it?
As I’m about to slip into the darkest trenches of my mind, the unmistakable feeling of a person approaching pulls me to the present.Lucian.I sit as unassumingly as I can manage.
But the anger is too strong.
“Don’t do it,”the boy says.
