Thea had never truly dealt with death. She had brought it to many, but never had she mourned a loss as deeply as she did now.
She had never mourned her parents — she never knew their fate. She clung to the idea that they were still alive somewhere, waiting for her to rescue them. It was a nice dream, but she knew it was unlikely.
She had never mourned her aunt Annie — like she did with her parents, she held fast to the seedling of hope that her aunt had escaped Lastwall. Nobody had heard from her again after she left with the Pathfinder Society, but Lastwall was quarantined before it fell. Thea liked to imagine there was a pile of unsent letters waiting for her in an abandoned building there.
She had never mourned Sophie — her caretaker, her guardian, her oldest friend. Sophie had sent Thea away before she had died. She had wanted Thea to live her life as she chose and to remember her without sadness.
She had never mourned Vrail — she, again, didn’t know if he’d survived the systematic purge of Alseta’s children. He was a tough old man, she knew, but even the strongest could be felled with the right spell.
She had never expected that the first deaths she would mourn would be her own and those of her friends.
When she first opened her eyes to the pallid light of the Boneyard, she saw the long line ahead of her. She knew Corvi was somewhere in that line, alone. When she turned to look behind her, she was horrified to find Drenn and Ziranna there.
They weren’t supposed to be there. They were supposed to be alive, defending the world against Tar-Baphon and his armies. They were supposed to defeat Karzoug. They were supposed to keep Damirah, Kochka, and Ikmacheck safe. She was supposed to keep them safe.
She began to reach for them, to embrace them, to see if they were real or some cruel illusion when a crystalline light engulfed Ziranna. Then she was gone.
“Does this mean…?” Drenn asked. Thea clung to the small bit of hope she thought she heard in his voice. It had to be! Their friends were coming to the rescue. There was no other answer. Was there?
“I…uh…I’m not sure. We can only hope,” she answered, hope and excitement and a touch of fear coloring her words.
She glanced down at her hands, still free of their usual gloves. She’d stopped wearing them a few weeks ago, the mark on her left hand clearly visible now. Her heart sank. She had been given a mission that she had failed to complete.
“I’m sorry, my goddess, that I failed you,” she whispered to herself while the fingers of her right hand absentmindedly traced the mark. An old nervous tick of hers.
She wasn’t supposed to die, not yet. Not when Alseta still had plans for her. Not before Tar-Baphon had paid for the murders of her brothers and sisters. Not while her friends were still in danger.
Anger and grief ran strong through her. She could feel herself shaking with the intensity of the emotions, but a soft, spectral hand descended to her shoulder with the comforting touch of a mother calming her child.
“You did not fail, daughter,” said Alseta in the warm, loving tone Thea had sought solace in time and again. It was nice to know that even in death, her link with her goddess had not been severed.
On her other shoulder, she felt the weight of a much larger, more solid hand. Drenn’s.
“I don’t think either of us failed our goddesses. We gave our lives justly,” he told her. She nodded slightly, a small, sad smile forming on her lips.
“And if we don’t come back…I’m satisfied with what we did.” He was right. They had given their lives for a noble purpose, that she couldn’t deny.
She reached out to put her hand on his shoulder in return, a show of camaraderie, but before she could reach him, the same crystalline light that took Ziranna surrounded her.
“No!” she cried out, still trying to reach Drenn. She had to take him with her. He deserved to be taken first. He was the strongest, the unshakable. Surely he would be of more use alive than she would be.
No amount of pleading changed the light’s target or that Drenn was just far enough out of reach now. She struggled, still trying to drag him into the light with her —
—
Everything hurt. Her arms, her legs, her body, her heart. There had been no paid in death, so she could only assume the spell her friends had cast had worked. She was alive again.
She slowly sat up and cast around for Drenn, hoping that she had somehow managed to drag him back with her. Her eyes landed on his body. Unmoving. She had failed.
She briefly registered that Ziranna crushed her and Damirah into a hug. She knew she should take comfort from it, but she couldn’t. She could only resist the urge to scream, to plead with anyone who would listen, that she didn’t deserve to be the one brought back. Drenn and Corvi were much more useful to their little band of misfits than she was.
—
She didn’t remember going back to the tower, didn’t remember laying out the bodies of their friends, didn’t notice that Kochka was gone, didn’t see that Ikmacheck had went off on his own. She was too wrapped up in her own grief.
Nothing seemed to shake the chill that death had left behind, not even a warm bath or the thickest blanket she could find. It was bone-deep and left her feeling wrong.
Ziranna had taken to sitting vigil, but Thea couldn’t bear to. It made the chill stronger, as if death was calling her back with a sweet siren song she wouldn’t be able to resist. The anger flooded back, strong and hot and unbearable.
She made her way to the training room with her old falchion at her hip. There were no enemies to fight, no wrongdoers for her to punish, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was the anger, the fury, that boiled within her. She slashed and hacked at the training dummies that filled the room. Any other day they would remind her of her childhood, of her wooden toy sword she would use to fight the dastardly scarecrow that held an imaginary tyrannical rule over Sophie’s wheat fields.
This time, as her blade hissed through the air, she was reminded of all that had come to rest on her shoulders. The fate of her order. The defeat of Tar-Baphon. The safety of her friends. The safety of all of Golarion. She fought for as long as she could, until her falchion seemed twice as heavy as before and her arms could no longer lift it. She backed up to rest against the wall, panting from the exertion. Her sword clattered to the floor as her aching joints followed behind.
She sat on the floor, legs drawn to her chest and wings wrapped tightly around herself, as she cried. She poured all her fears, doubts, frustrations, pains, grief, and anger into the salty rivulets pouring down her cheeks as she let her body sink to the floor and into fitful, exhausted sleep.
