The Beginning After The End novel Chapter 381

Chapter 381 - Epilogue

A dry cough wracked my body, and I jerked awake to pain. A thick cloud of dust obscured everything but the blood-stained stone floor I had expected to be my funeral bed.

My last thought before falling unconscious floated back into my mind. This was how I expected death to feel. Every part of me screamed in anguish, the pain of each wound crowding against the rest, one overriding another in my mind until it felt as if my entire body had been cut to pieces by—

The asura!

Despite a strong desire to never move again, I turned my head, jostling my broken bones and creating a fresh chorus of agonies.

I couldn’t see anything through the heavy blanket of dust. But neither could I sense the asura’s unbearable presence.

Taking a deep, steadying breath, I rolled onto my side and heaved, pushing myself up to my feet. Rocks and debris clattered off me, and the gash in my chest pulled painfully, partially sealed by dust clotting in the wound.

My legs wobbled, the tattered scraps of my armor clanging together like empty tin cans. I tried to push mana out into my body to give myself strength, but was met only with a dull, squeezing pain from my core, which was all but empty.

The backlash made my stomach turn and bile rise in the back of my throat.

Flashes of the battle started coming back to me through the waves of nausea and pain, and my breath seized in my lungs.

Varay, Mica, Aya...

They were all—

I spun around as stone clattered from the wall or ceiling somewhere in the distance. My senses were dulled, my thoughts crawling along like slugs in my skull, and there was a low roar in my ears like I was underwater. Only my sense of smell seemed to be functioning properly; the cavern stank of brimstone and scorched soil.

Dim, murky light cut through the obscuring cloud, a few quick flashes, and I sensed mana moving.

My mouth opened of its own accord, but I stopped myself from shouting. I didn’t know who or what was out there. It could be the asura, or survivors returned from the tunnels—or Alacryans, alerted by the disturbance our battle had no doubt caused in the desert above. And I was in no fit shape to defend myself if they turned out to be hostile.

The image of blood gushing out of shattered black crystals overlayed the last memories of my own “death,” and I felt a brief glimmer of hope, but just as quickly tamped it down.

I shouldn’t have survived that battle, and I couldn’t find it in myself to harbor even the smallest hope that any of the others had as well. I’d seen what Taci did to Aya and Varay, and despite the voice that had sounded in my head in those last moments of consciousness, I knew that not even a Lance could survive those wounds.

Still, I couldn’t simply ignore the presence of another here, and began limping in the direction of the light, moving as quietly as my battered body and ruined armor would allow.

The cavern floor was in ruins. The rubble of lightning-blasted and cold-shattered rock made footing treacherous, and I had to navigate around several deep gouges scored in the earth by Taci’s strikes. A partially intact wall from one of the many demolished buildings had been flung several dozen feet and was now resting at an angle against a huge boulder dislodged from the ceiling.

Carefully, I crept up the side of this wall, then from the bolder to a higher shelf of rock that curved around toward where I’d seen the light. The dust thinned as I moved toward the far edge of the cavern and I squinted through it for any sign of who or what had used mana.

It was difficult to believe what I saw.

“M-Mica?” The words clawed reluctantly out of my throat, the effort of speaking setting fire to my many other wounds.

The dwarven Lance glanced up at me from where she kneeled beside a second figure. The right side of her face was stained with tear streaks through caked-on dirt. Dozens of long, straight slash marks criss-crossed over the left side of her face, and a black, bloody hole was all that remained of her left eye. Her entire left side was soaked red-brown with dried blood and some kind of wet mud that she had compacted over her ribs.

There was blood dripping from her palms where she’d dug her fingernails into them, and her normally playful gaze met mine with a hollow emptiness that made me question if she was truly alive or just some dark aspect of my own subconscious.

When she turned her unsteady gaze back on the second figure, my eyes reluctantly followed.

Aya’s face was pale, her dark eyes staring sightlessly up to the cavern ceiling high above. Her stomach was a gory ruin where Taci had dealt her fatal blow.

“I...” I had to stop and clear my throat, then went on. “I thought I heard her, just before the end. She...she said...”

But I had to stop again, unable to speak around the lump in my throat.

Mica’s shoulders sagged, but she didn’t reply.

Sliding awkwardly, painfully, down the ledge, I moved to Aya’s other side and gingerly sat.

Once, it would have been impossible to imagine myself on the verge of tears over the death of another soldier—especially another one of the Lances. It was with little guilt that I remembered my callousness after Lance Alea’s unexpected death. She deserved better, and so did Aya. There was no shame in shedding tears for a friend taken far too early.