The word stayed in the air after she had said it.
Offered.
Solandre turned, still bare from the waist up, as though turning his body toward the word would help him receive it differently. The cold garden air touched the crow on his back and he felt it the way he felt nothing else in that moment, with total precision.
Solandre : "Them?"
Not a question exactly. More the sound a mind made when it was trying to process something that did not fit inside the available space.
Solandre : "I offered them...?"
Vela was not in front of him anymore.
He knew she was behind him before he felt her. Her presence announced itself the way cold announced itself before it touched skin, the awareness arriving slightly ahead of contact. Then her fingers were on him, moving across his back and then his abdomen with the patience of someone who had all the time available and had decided to use it.
She leaned close to his ear.
Vela : "Let me show you how devoted you were."
His vision went black.
Not the black of closed eyes or a room without light. A black with depth that pressed inward, and then he was looking at himself from the outside and the garden around him was the same garden but wrong in the way of a memory, the edges slightly softer, the light slightly different, the sequence of events already fixed in a way that the present never was.
A vision.
He watched himself standing at the center of it.
No.
The wrongness settled into his chest with the weight of something that could not be undone.
A memory.
He was in the garden. The same clearing, the same hedges, the same dry fountain. The seven of them were with him, Sera among them, walking behind him in the silence of people who had followed without being told why and had not yet decided whether to ask. They moved the way people moved when they trusted the person ahead of them, which was to say without question, which was to say completely.
He watched himself lead them here.
He watched himself stop.
The shadow at the edge of the clearing shifted and Vela stepped out of it the way something stepped out of a space it had always occupied and had simply chosen to make visible. She stood in front of the version of him that Solandre was now watching, and the version of him that Solandre was now watching went down on one knee.
He took her hand.
He pressed his mouth to it.
Solandre (memory) : "They are yours."
Vela disappeared.
For one second the clearing was still. The seven of them stood in the garden in the silence of people who did not yet understand what had just changed about their situation. Sera was slightly behind the others, her crimson hair catching the light, her eyes moving between the empty space where Vela had been and the back of Solandre's head as he rose from his knee.
Then it started.
Solandre watched the way a person watched something through glass, present and entirely unable to intervene. Vela moved through the shadows the way water moved through cracks, not around obstacles but through them, occupying the darkness between one moment and the next with the ease of something that had been doing this since before the garden existed.
The sounds arrived before the images.
Flesh. Impact. The sound of a body discovering what it was not built to withstand. Then the voices, not screams yet, something beneath screams, the sounds people made in the first seconds before the mind had finished telling the body what was happening to it.
Solandre could not look away.
He tried.
He could not.
He watched Vela move through the clearing with the unhurried efficiency of something completing a function, her movements containing no anger and no pleasure, only the precision of something that was very good at what it was doing and had decided to do it thoroughly.
The seven became fewer.
He watched it happen to each of them in the detail that memory preserved when it wanted to be cruel, each face, each sound, each moment that the body stopped being what it had been.
Then Sera.
Vela crossed the clearing toward her with the same unhurried patience, and Sera was on the ground by then, and Solandre understood from the way she was on the ground that she had lost her legs and had not yet finished understanding it. Her eyes were still clear, still looking for something that made sense, the expression of someone whose mind was refusing the information the body was sending.
Vela took her by the hair.
The sound Sera made when she was dragged across the wet grass was not a scream. It was something anterior to screaming, a sound with no shape and no direction that came from somewhere below language and stayed there.
Vela threw her down in front of the version of Solandre who stood at the center of the clearing.
Sera looked up.
Not with hatred. Not with terror. The specific confusion of someone who was still, despite everything, waiting for an explanation. Still believing one existed. Still believing the person above her was the person she had always known him to be.
Sera : "Solandre.."
Just his name. As though saying it was enough. As though he could still answer and the answer could still change something.
Sera : "I don't understand! I don't understand what's happening! Solandre, please. Tell me... what's happening!"
Her voice did not rise. That was the worst of it. She was not screaming. She was speaking with the voice of someone who still believed the situation could be explained, that he would explain it.
Sera : "Why won't you look at me?!"
The version of Solandre in the memory looked at the ground.
Solandre watched from outside and felt something inside him dissolve completely, quietly, without announcement, the way certain things ended.
Solandre : "STOP!"
A murmur. The word came out emptied of everything that words usually carried.
Vela did not acknowledge him.
Solandre : "PLEASE STOP!.. Stop it please. I don't want to see the rest. Please."
He knew only that Sera was on the ground below the version of himself that stood with its eyes down, that her hands were reaching through the wet grass toward the fabric of that version's clothes, and that the reaching was going to stop very soon.
Vela's blade was black and moved faster than the eye could follow.
The sound it made was very small.
Sera's arms were no longer attached to her shoulders.
She collapsed without support and the sound she made when she hit the ground was the sound of something that had been holding itself together through will alone and had finally run out of will. She lay in the grass and her eyes were still open and they were changing, the shift of eyes that had been bright and present and full of a warmth Solandre had known since childhood, moving toward a place where light did not return from.
Vela stepped behind the version of Solandre in the memory and put her arms around him from behind.
Vela : "Prove your loyalty to me, my dear. Kill this woman."
The version of Solandre in the memory looked down at Sera for the first time.
Sera looked up at him.
Her eyes had the quality of someone who had already let go of most things and was holding onto one last possibility with what remained. The last of the brightness in her eyes was not hope exactly. It was the absence of the decision to stop hoping. The refusal to arrive at the conclusion that the evidence demanded.
She was still waiting for him to explain.
The version of Solandre in the memory raised his hand.
Solandre closed his eyes.
It did not help.
The sound reached him anyway, small and final and unremarkable in the way of things that ended something that could not be started again. When he opened his eyes the real clearing had returned. Cold air. Wet grass. Bodies. The shirt on the ground. The mirror still suspended.
He was on his knees again.
He did not remember going to his knees.
What kind of person stands there like that.
What kind of person looks at the ground.
What kind.
The thought dissolved each time at the same point. At the image of Sera's hands moving through the grass. At the version of himself standing above her with his eyes down.
He had watched himself do it and had no memory of deciding to and the memory Vela had shown him was his and he could feel that it was his and he did not understand how both of those things could be true at the same time.
He wanted to wake up.
He knew he was not asleep.
He screamed.
The sound that came out of him was real and full and went nowhere, absorbed by the sealed clearing with the same absolute indifference as everything else.
The garden held it.
The garden held everything.
And gave none of it back.