Chapter 158 – In the Shadow of the Day

That was it. She was done. John would have loved to have this feel like a victory. He came here, prepared for her to be a mindless monster, to kill her for what she did to Rave. He came here, prepared to help her if she was just as much a victim of happenstance as he was. He came here, and he failed to satisfy himself with vengeance or success.

There was no way to remove her from the site in time, neither could he heal her without Undine. He didn’t feel victorious, just tired. Tired of training, tired of this fight, tired of loss and tired of tragedy.

However, fate had one more tragedy prepared for him. Thana’s legs gave away under her. Barely, John managed to move in time to catch her. The small woman, so wounded and torn, lay across his arms like a cold piece of porcelain. The pain of his body, the lack of security he had, none of it mattered in that moment. Carefully, infinitely carefully, he knelt down, lowering her along with himself.

“Hey… John…,” her voice was barely a whisper behind her wide smile. Despite the knowledge that she would die within the minute, Thana was happy. Despite the pain she was in, she was happy. Despite the complete despair that her life had been, she was very happy at this moment. “…describe the sun to me…”

“What do you even mean by that?” he asked, despite knowing better. He couldn’t fathom such a question, how somebody could even need to ask.

“I obviously never saw it… hey, what are you crying for?” she half-laughed, half-coughed.

The tears had started without him noticing and there was no way to stop them now. Tears of relief and of depression, of sadness and the knowledge that it was over. For him this chapter of his life was over, for Thana it was everything.

Still, the pale girl in his arms was grinning. “…I am the one dying here, you giant fucking baby… come on… tell me…” Her amethyst eyes were barely moving anymore, the pupils dilated as all of her muscles relaxed.

John swallowed back the tears, “The sun it… it’s a big circle in the sky… and…”

“The sky…that is blue, right?” Thana asked as the fire in her eyes slowly dimmed. The fire of life that had burnt too bright in her, if only for a few days, so bright that it had consumed her own in the process. Burning out and fading away, with nothing good coming from it.

“Yes, a beautiful light blue,” John explained, failing to steel his voice. Between sobs and falling drops, he tried his best to tell her in the moments she had left. “It stretches everywhere like an endless ceiling but you know it doesn’t matter how far it stretches because you will never reach it.”

“That… sounds… awful…” Thana giggled, followed by a series of coughs that shook her whole body, robbing her of a few more precious seconds. With worry and a heavy heart, John waited for things to calm down. Her eyes were half lidded by the time she did. “A-are you…still there?” she asked, the dots in her eyes had stopped.

Her tiny pale hand twitched ever so slightly. John took it and then, following an impulse, he embraced her whole body. He was incredibly careful, like she could shatter at any second.

“I…think that…means…yes…” she whispered, one of John’s tears landing on her face. He was crying with her in his arms.

“The sun travels along the horizon during the day, you can’t even look at it because it is too bright. It…” He spoke hastily, wanting to tell her everything he could, fill her last moments with something but deafening silence. Then he noticed a window in front of him.

Gaia had sent this his way, there was no doubt about it. Even the supreme deity had taken pity on the fate of this girl. John accepted and the world around him transformed. From where he sat, green started growing outwards, replacing the floor and everything else. The blood red carpet, ripped apart by the fight, was replaced by a radiant green. It replaced the shards of the tank that Thana had spent most of her life in. It replaced the dark spots of fallen lifeblood, spilled by Thana in her torment induced insanity. It replaced the reason and the actions of her sins.

“I… just hope…this is… the…end…” Thana whispered, the grin weakened to a no less blissful smile, “I… hear them… again… at the edge of my mind…”

“Don’t say that. Just for a moment longer. Stay with me for just another moment,” John begged.

“…Fine…” was the final answer he got. The change disintegrated the walls. The plain stretched further as the walls unravelled and the twilight of the chandelier was replaced with the twilight of the rising sun.

A beautiful green sea that endlessly stretched around John, tinted softly red like the sky that covered the world from one horizon to the other. The sun in all its glory rose, its rays touching the world gently, ending the shadow of the day.

“Hey, Thana. There it is. There is the sun,” he said with a smile. He bathed in the warm light and then looked down on the figure in his arms. The smile he wore for just a second died immediately and was replaced with even more tears.

In his arms lay the lifeless body of Thana, a name that was as little her own as any other choice that had been made for her. Her mouth had never tasted food besides nutritional solutions. Her nose had never picked up the smell of anything outside of blood and chemicals. Her eyes had never seen the sky, only cement ceilings. Her ears until her last day never picked up on a word of niceness. Even now, as her pale, blueish skin was touched by the sun, she never got to experience it.

Her eyes looked at nothing, her body was cold already. Her powers had consumed all the blood and warmth inside her. Yet she smiled. Not the insane smile she had worn at the start, not the apologetic smile she had given him towards the end of their fight, not the broad smile she had worn once she knew she would get what she wanted. No, a fulfilled smile. At the very last moments she hadn’t lamented her life, she had only been happy that it was over.

John wanted to hate her for this, for just accepting her fate and aiming at death. But could he really? Would he, in her situation, have done anything different? Only in pain, denied emotions unless he was fighting or killing? What could he have done? He was left without answers.

Reaching out, to close the lifeless eyes, John wanted to do her one courtesy. Even this, her body could not sustain. The moment his fingertips touched her, the skin began to wither. Slowly at first, rapidly expanding by the second, her entire form fell apart. Skin, bone, muscle, everything about her collapsed into a fine red dust.

At the end he was left with nothing but a pile that looked like ground up rust. In it lay Aclysia’s crystal and a hellishly deformed piece of metal. It was like a mixture of a miniaturized spine and a centipede, lying where her head had been. He didn’t need to use Observe to know what the hated thing was.

A sudden gust of wind rolled over the field, claimed the red dust and whirled it through the world, this radiant plain. The first and only natural wind John would feel inside an Illusion Barrier, Gaia claimed the remains of Thana. John hoped that the goddess carried her somewhere better.

Season 1 – The End.