Series Content Advisory
Scriptures of Nokternum is a dark fantasy story involving grief, trauma, violence, death, coercive control, forced experimentation, and bodily alteration. Some chapters address past suicide, abuse, blood, severe injury, and psychological manipulation. Additional chapter-specific warnings are provided when necessary.
Additional Chapter Warning
This chapter contains detailed discussion of planning suicide and dying, childhood emotional abuse and neglect, traumatic grief, forced experimentation, violent ideation, and intense emotional distress.
Chapter 15: “Goodbye Did Not Mean Dead”
Event Date: May 24th, 2010 - 1:18 AM PDT, Earth
Lightstorm did not take the sentence back. Kaostar did not survive it cleanly. The stream carried leaves into the dark.
For a while, neither of them moved. The water slipped around Lightstorm’s submerged fingers, broke against the narrow bones of his hand, and continued as though it had not been asked to hold anything impossible. The shroud clung wetly to his shoulders. Beneath its torn edge, faint violet-white electricity stirred once and vanished before it could become shape.
Kaostar remained several paces away. Not close enough to touch. The few paces between them offered no real safety. The sentence stayed between them.
I loved you while I was planning to die. It changed nothing. It changed too much. Kaostar stared at the soil near his knees until the grains of mud became individual and meaningless.
He searched for a way to absorb the confession without coming apart. He found none. Lightstorm’s hand lifted from the stream. Water fell from his fingers in thin, silver lines.
Kaostar looked at the droplets because looking at Lightstorm’s face would have been asking too much of whatever remained of his control. Lightstorm said, “You look like you want to argue.”
“I do.”
“Then why aren’t you?”
“Because not every wound is improved by being immediately corrected.”
Lightstorm’s mouth tightened beneath the hood.
“That sounds like something someone taught you.”
Kaostar’s gaze moved to the stream.
“Several people have made the mistake of caring near me.”
Lightstorm did not answer. The forest pressure beyond the ridge shifted again. Far. Not approaching.
Not retreating either. Both of them listened. Neither spoke of it. Kaostar’s ears lowered slowly.
When he spoke, his voice came quieter than before.
“Who taught you that?”
Lightstorm’s shoulders stiffened.
“What?”
“That love had a limit.”
The stream moved. The trees did not. Kaostar kept his hands visible. He did not lean forward. “You believed I was waiting for someone else to return. You believed care was something a person eventually regretted giving. Who taught you that?”
Lightstorm’s fingers curled against his palm. For a moment, the only light beneath the hood came from his eyes. Then he looked away.
“Before you.”
Kaostar did not interrupt.
“Before the creek. Before the theater hallway. Before I knew your name.”
The shroud shifted as Lightstorm drew one knee closer to himself.
“My foster parents taught me care was conditional.”
Kaostar became very still. Lightstorm’s voice remained low.
“They didn’t say it that cleanly. People like that rarely do. They make you learn it in pieces.”
A thin current crossed his wrist and disappeared into the damp fabric.
“A door closing harder when you cried too long. Food placed down like a debt. Silence after you made someone angry. Apologies demanded for being difficult before you understood what you had done.”
Kaostar’s claws slid into the soil. Lightstorm saw. He continued anyway. “Sometimes they were kind.”
The sentence sounded like it cost him more than the others.
“That was worse.”
Kaostar’s eyes sharpened. Lightstorm looked toward the water.
“If someone is cruel every day, you learn the shape of the cage. If they are kind just often enough, you start believing the cage opens when you behave correctly.”
The stream took another cluster of leaves. Lightstorm watched them go.
“I learned to measure rooms by mood. Footsteps. The way someone breathed before speaking. I learned when to disappear. When to apologize. When to become quiet enough that keeping me would not feel like work.”
Kaostar’s voice lowered.
“Lightstorm.”
“No.” Lightstorm’s head turned, not fully toward him. “You asked.”
Kaostar closed his mouth. Lightstorm’s blue eyes remained fixed on the stream.
“By the time you loved me, I already believed care was something people regretted giving.”
For one second, Kaostar’s mind reached backward toward names, addresses, doors, throats. He crushed the thought before it became useful. This was not the place to turn Lightstorm’s pain into a target. This was not the place to make his grief look protective by giving it teeth.
Lightstorm kept watching the stream.
“You kept giving and giving,” he said. “And I kept waiting for the moment you would realize I cost too much.”
“You never did.”
“I know that now.”
“You did not cost too much then.”
“I know that now.”
“You were fifteen.”
Lightstorm flinched. Kaostar’s tone hardened, not at him, but around him.
“You were a child being taught that need was a debt.”
Electricity flared beneath the shroud, weak and unstable.
“I was old enough to know what I was doing.”
“No.”
Lightstorm’s eyes snapped toward him. Kaostar held the gaze.
“You were old enough to hurt. That is not the same as being old enough to understand what pain had taught you to believe.”
Lightstorm’s expression twisted.
“Don’t make me smaller.”
“I am not.”
“You are.”
“No.” Kaostar’s claws pressed deeper. “I am refusing to let the people who damaged you borrow adulthood from your suffering and call it consent.”
Silence crashed down between them. Lightstorm looked away first. His breathing had changed. Not faster.
Rougher. Kaostar wanted to cross the distance. He did not. Lightstorm’s shoulders rose beneath the shroud, then lowered.
“They taught me being loved meant behaving well enough not to exhaust whoever had agreed to keep me,” he said. “You were the first person who made it feel different.”
Kaostar’s face tightened.
“And I still couldn’t believe you.”
The words were not accusation. They were worse. They were grief without somewhere to go. Kaostar looked at the stream until his vision blurred.
Lightstorm drew his hand back under the shroud.
“What happened after?”
Kaostar did not move.
“After what?”
Lightstorm’s voice became flat.
“After I died.”
No one moved. Kaostar’s eyes closed.
“You do not need to hear that tonight.”
“I need to know what I did.”
“What happened to me was not something you did.”
“Tell me.”
Kaostar opened his eyes. Lightstorm stood across from him, shrouded, shaking, alive and not safe and not gone. A thing beyond every prayer he had forbidden himself. Kaostar looked away.
“When you stopped breathing,” he said, “I did not accept it.”
Lightstorm’s claws tightened beneath the fabric.
“I thought I had missed something. A movement. A pulse. Anything. I kept checking.”
Kaostar’s voice flattened, not from lack of feeling, but from too much of it pressing itself into a narrow shape.
“I kept calling your name. Part of me was still waiting for you to answer.”
Lightstorm’s posture folded inward by degrees.
“I moved you more than I should have. I knew better. But every time I took my hands away, it felt as though I was agreeing you were gone.”
The creek returned without permission. Not this stream. That creek. Cold mud. Bent grass. Water moving as though nothing important had happened beside it.
Kaostar stared at the current.
“I remember pieces more clearly than I remember the order. Mud on your hand. The sound of the water. Your weight against me. My own voice becoming something I barely recognized.”
Lightstorm did not speak.
“You don’t have to—”
“You asked.”
Lightstorm’s mouth closed.
“I held you because warmth still felt like evidence. I knew what death was. I had seen it before. None of that knowledge mattered when it was you.”
His claws curled against the earth.
“Every change in your body felt like reality asking me to agree again.”
Lightstorm’s hand came out from beneath the shroud, not reaching, not touching. Only visible.
“Who found you?”
Kaostar’s eyes opened. His expression changed. Not softer. Older.
“The world.”
Lightstorm went still.
“Sirens. Police. Paramedics. People who were trying to help.” Kaostar swallowed. “I understood that later. At the time, all I could see was that they had arrived after there was nothing left to save.”
Lightstorm’s gaze lowered.
“What did you do?”
“I hated them.”
“Did you hurt them?”
“No.”
Kaostar looked down at his hands.
“I wanted someone to blame badly enough that almost anyone would have done.”
The stream sounded too much like the creek for one breath.
“But I still had you in my arms. To become violence, I would have had to let you go first.”
Lightstorm’s eyes closed.
“I couldn’t.”
A faint current moved beneath the shroud and disappeared.
“Eventually they took you from me.”
Kaostar’s paws flexed once.
“Do you remember it?”
“Pieces.”
His eyes remained on his hands.
“Someone speaking carefully. My own voice getting louder, then smaller. Faces I hated because they were still alive. And afterward, my arms feeling wrong because there was nothing in them.”
Lightstorm’s breathing shook once.
Kaostar looked toward the trees.
“The world continued.”
His voice became very quiet.
“I could not forgive it for that.”
Lightstorm opened his eyes. Kaostar’s hand moved to his chest, to the place where the creek stone remained buried beneath altered flesh.
“That was when helplessness stopped feeling survivable.”
The stream seemed to darken around the words.
“I began believing that if I were stronger, faster, powerful enough, nothing could ever arrive too late again.”
Lightstorm stared at him.
Kaostar’s hand curled over the stone.
“I mistook power for a cure.”
No one spoke. Only wind and water filled the silence. Far beyond the ridge, the pressure shifted again. Distant.
Patient.
Lightstorm’s ears shifted beneath the hood.
“Harrow?”
“He was there the next morning.”
“Not at the creek?”
“No.” Kaostar looked toward the water. “After. When there was nothing left for me to hold.”
His claws loosened slightly in the soil.
“He stayed far enough away that I did not feel cornered. He offered food. Places to sleep. Doctors. Silence. I refused almost all of it.”
“Why?”
“Because surviving felt too much like accepting what had happened.”
Lightstorm lowered his head.
“A few days later I disappeared into a cave because emptiness felt safer than people.”
Kaostar gave a humorless breath.
“Harrow found that too.”
“Did you eat?”
“Enough to remain alive.”
“Sleep?”
“When my body forced me to.”
Lightstorm’s shoulders sank beneath the shroud.
“I stopped living like someone who expected a future,” Kaostar said. “I kept your things because I was afraid memory would change you if I did not preserve everything exactly.”
His expression tightened.
“Memory changed anyway.”
A small electrical tremor passed through Lightstorm’s shroud. Not attack. Pain finding the wrong language.
“I started looking for explanations. Anything that claimed death was not as final as it looked. Anything that suggested helplessness could be corrected.”
Kaostar pressed a fist against his chest.
“I kept hearing you.”
Lightstorm looked up.
“Not truly. I know that now. But grief used your voice.”
His fist pressed harder.
“At first it sounded like memory. Later it learned exactly what I was most afraid you would say.”
Lightstorm said nothing.
“Every resemblance became a wound. Every unanswered question became something I thought power might solve.”
Kaostar’s gaze drifted toward the opposite bank.
“At some point I stopped asking how I could get you back and started asking what I would have to become so I would never be that helpless again.”
“And Metatronas?”
Kaostar’s expression went empty in a different way.
“He did not approach immediately.”
“He waited.”
“Yes.”
“For what?”
“For everyone else to fail.”
The forest pressure beyond the ridge shifted again, distant and wrong. This time neither of them looked away from the conversation.
“Harrow kept a door open. Other people offered help I had already decided could not reach me. Metatronas watched until he understood which parts of me had stopped responding.”
“What did he offer?”
“At first, nothing.”
Kaostar stared toward the opposite bank.
“He listened.”
“That was how he began. He let me speak about you without becoming uncomfortable. He never told me to move on. He never told me you would want me to live.”
“Because he didn’t care.”
“Because he understood that every person who told me what you would have wanted made me feel as though they were borrowing your voice.”
Lightstorm looked down.
“I would have wanted you to live.”
“I know.”
“But hearing it then—”
“Would have made me hate whoever said it.”
Kaostar’s expression tightened.
“Metatronas told me my grief was proof that the world had failed to understand what had been taken from me. He said pain of that magnitude should not be healed.”
Kaostar’s pale blue eyes fixed on the dark water.
“It should be used.”
Lightstorm’s claws extended.
“He made it sound respectful.”
“Yes.”
“He made destroying you sound like honoring me.”
“Yes.”
The electricity around Lightstorm’s body brightened. Kaostar did not react.
“I should kill him,” Lightstorm said, and the words sounded less like a threat than a way to keep from shaking.
“He expects that.”
“I don’t care.”
“You should.”
“Why?”
“Because he knows what rage does to people who believe they have nothing left to lose.”
Lightstorm looked at Kaostar’s altered form.
“You’re speaking from experience.”
“Yes.”
The answer carried no defensiveness. Lightstorm paced along the stream. His movements grew sharper as anger replaced sorrow.
“What did he make you do?”
Kaostar did not answer. Lightstorm stopped.
“What did he make you do?”
“Things that are not part of this conversation.”
“They happened because of me.”
“No.”
“You said he used my death.”
“He used me.”
“And you let him?”
Kaostar’s eyes flashed with sudden anger.
“I was not brought back with a shroud, a stolen storm, and enough awareness to question what had happened!”
Lightstorm recoiled. The cruelty of the comparison reached Kaostar the moment it left his mouth. He forced his voice lower, but the rage remained.
“I was dismantled slowly,” he said. “He did not place restraints around my wrists on the first day. He placed explanations around my grief. By the time the physical transformation began, I believed suffering was the only honest part of me.”
Lightstorm stared. Kaostar rose. His tail moved sharply behind him.
“He taught me to despise the weakness that had allowed me to lose you. Then he offered to remove it. He changed my body piece by piece while telling me each wound made me less vulnerable to the world that had taken you.”
Kaostar pointed toward the healed marks beneath his torn coat.
“This regeneration was presented as mercy.”
Lightstorm’s fury faltered.
“The strength was mercy. The claws were mercy. The new form was mercy. Every time I survived something Darkshyne could not have survived, Metatronas told me I was moving farther from the person who had failed you.”
Lightstorm’s mouth opened. No words came.
“He made me ashamed of being the person you loved.”
The current around Lightstorm vanished. Kaostar looked away.
“That is what happened after.”
For a long time, neither spoke. The forest had grown darker around them. Moonlight filtered through narrow openings in the canopy and scattered across the stream. The water seemed colder now, though nothing had changed except what had been said beside it.
Lightstorm removed one hand from beneath the shroud. His fingers were trembling.
“I don’t know what to do with that.”
“You do not have to do anything.”
“You tell me I’m not responsible, then describe years of suffering built around my death.”
“I am telling you the difference between cause and blame.”
“They feel the same.”
“They aren’t.”
“They are to me.”
Kaostar turned toward him.
“Then listen to me as the person who lived through it.”
Lightstorm reluctantly met his gaze.
“I was devastated because I loved you,” Kaostar said. “I was manipulated because Metatronas chose to manipulate me. I committed my own actions because I made choices inside the damage he cultivated.”
His voice roughened.
“You died because you were drowning in pain you could no longer interpret clearly. None of those truths erase the others. None of them become solely your crime.”
Lightstorm’s jaw tightened.
“I still left you.”
“Yes.”
Kaostar did not soften it. Lightstorm flinched.
“You left me,” Kaostar repeated. “You made a decision that injured me beyond anything I knew how to survive.”
The electrical glow beneath the shroud returned.
“But I will not turn that injury into evidence that you deserved what happened to you.”
Lightstorm looked down.
“I was angry,” Kaostar said.
“Were?”
“I still am.”
Lightstorm’s eyes rose. Kaostar’s expression was grief-stricken but steady.
“I am furious with you.”
Electricity moved between Lightstorm’s claws. Kaostar remained where he was.
“I am furious that you decided my life would be easier without you. I am furious that you trusted your pain more than you trusted me. I am furious that I had to learn the weight of your body after your life had left it.”
Lightstorm’s breath shook.
“And I love you.”
The electricity flickered.
“Those truths have lived together inside me for years.”
Kaostar’s voice broke.
“I hated you for leaving. I hated myself for not stopping you. I hated everyone who continued breathing as though the world had not ended.”
Lightstorm’s face twisted.
“Then I hated the part of me that still loved you, because loving you gave Metatronas access to everything.”
Kaostar pressed a clawed hand against his own chest.
“But it never stopped.”
Lightstorm turned away. His shoulders shook once beneath the shroud. Kaostar did not approach him.
“I’m sorry,” Lightstorm whispered.
Kaostar closed his eyes.
“I know.”
“No. Don’t say that as if it’s enough.”
“It cannot be enough.”
Lightstorm looked back at him.
“There is no sentence that repairs what happened,” Kaostar said. “There is no apology large enough to contain six years.”
“Then why say any of this?”
“Because the truth matters even when it cannot fix us.”
Lightstorm stared at him.
“Us,” he repeated.
Kaostar’s ears lowered.
“I don’t know what else to call what remains.”
Whatever waited beyond the ridge did not interrupt. That made it feel less merciful, not more. Lightstorm looked toward the open forest beyond the stream. The direction of his body changed.
Kaostar noticed immediately.
“You’re leaving.”
Lightstorm’s silence answered first. Then he nodded. Kaostar’s claws flexed. He forced them still.
“Where will you go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let me help you find somewhere safe.”
“No.”
“Lightstorm—”
“I cannot stay with you.”
Kaostar’s expression went blank. Lightstorm’s voice became firmer, though the pain beneath it remained.
“Every time I look at you, I see him.”
“Metatronas?”
“I see what he did after me.”
Kaostar lowered his gaze.
“I see Darkshyne,” Lightstorm continued. “Then I see someone who is not Darkshyne. Then you say something only he could know, and I don’t know which part frightens me more.”
Kaostar nodded slowly.
“You deserve time.”
“So do you.”
“I have had six years.”
“You had six years with a grave.”
The words stopped him. Lightstorm looked toward the forest.
“You did not have six years with me standing in front of you.”
“No.”
“You need time to understand that I am not the person you preserved in your memory.”
Kaostar’s voice was faint.
“I know.”
“And I need time to understand whether you are Darkshyne, Kaostar, both, or something Metatronas constructed to break me.”
Kaostar accepted each possibility without protest.
“Will I see you again?”
Lightstorm’s mouth tightened.
“I don’t know.”
Kaostar glanced toward the stream.
“You said the future did not naturally belong to everyone.”
Lightstorm’s expression shifted. Kaostar looked back at him.
“I will not ask you for a promise you do not believe you can keep.”
Lightstorm stood motionless.
“But I need to ask one thing.”
“What?”
The question dragged the creek into Kaostar’s mouth before the words left it. His voice changed. Not harder. More frightened.
“Do you intend to die again?”
The forest seemed to contract around the question. Lightstorm’s electricity disappeared. His face became almost unreadable. Kaostar waited.
He did not move closer. He did not soften the question or withdraw it.
“I don’t know what I am,” Lightstorm said at last.
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“No.”
Lightstorm looked toward the dark water.
“I don’t intend to die tonight.”
Kaostar’s jaw clenched.
“Tonight.”
“It is the most honest answer I can give.”
Kaostar fought visibly against the terror the answer caused him. Then he nodded.
“All right.”
Lightstorm looked surprised.
“You’re not going to argue?”
“I want to.”
“Then why not?”
“Because I remember what it felt like when every promise became a restraint.”
Lightstorm studied him. Kaostar’s claws pressed into his palms.
“But if tonight changes,” he said, “find me.”
“I may not trust you.”
“You do not have to trust me completely to stand near me until the danger passes.”
“I may want to be alone.”
“I know.”
“And if I tell you to leave?”
Kaostar’s voice hardened.
“If I believe you are about to die, I will refuse.”
Lightstorm’s eyes narrowed.
“That sounds like a restraint.”
“It is a boundary.”
“You don’t control me.”
“No. But I control whether I participate in abandoning you.”
Lightstorm stared for several seconds. Then, almost imperceptibly, he nodded. Kaostar exhaled. Lightstorm stepped across the stream.
Electricity flashed beneath his feet, carrying him over the deepest portion before disappearing. He landed on the opposite bank and pulled the shroud tighter around his body. Kaostar remained where he was. Lightstorm took several steps into the trees.
Then stopped. He did not turn around.
“What did you call me?” he asked.
Kaostar’s chest tightened.
“When?”
“Before.”
Kaostar knew. He looked toward the ground.
“Stormy.”
Lightstorm’s shoulders shifted beneath the fabric.
“I remember that.”
Kaostar’s eyes closed.
“You pretended to hate it.”
“I did hate it.”
“No,” Kaostar said, and something almost gentle entered the ruin of his voice. “You hated when anyone else heard it.”
Lightstorm looked back over his shoulder. For one brief instant, something almost familiar moved through his expression. Not a smile. The memory of one.
“You still sound too certain.”
“I learned it from you.”
The expression vanished. But not harshly. Lightstorm faced the forest again.
“Goodbye, Kaostar.”
Kaostar flinched at the finality embedded in the word. Then he realized what it no longer proved. He forced himself to answer.
“Goodbye, Lightstorm.”
Lightstorm disappeared between the trees. Kaostar listened. Footsteps moved through leaves. A branch shifted.
A faint electrical current passed through the air and receded. Then nothing. Kaostar did not move. He remained beside the stream with his back straight and his expression controlled.
One minute passed. Then another. He listened for any sign that Lightstorm had stopped nearby.
Nothing.
He extended his awareness through the forest, searching for the familiar aura. It moved farther away, briefly strengthening when Lightstorm crossed an exposed ridge, then weakening again beneath the trees. Kaostar waited. He counted three hundred breaths.
Then three hundred more. He followed the aura until it became a distant impression. Then until it became almost indistinguishable from memory. Still, he waited.
Lightstorm could not hear him. Kaostar had to be certain. He checked the stream. The ridge.
The trees behind him. The path Lightstorm had taken. No blue eyes watched from the darkness. No electricity stirred the leaves.
No familiar presence remained near enough to sense his voice. Only then did Kaostar’s body begin to shake. It started in his hands. A faint tremor moved through his claws, causing them to scrape against his palms. Kaostar stared at them as though they belonged to someone else.
He tried to close his fists. They would not obey. His breathing changed. One broken inhale.
Then another. The control he had maintained through the fight, the accusations, and every impossible word beside the stream collapsed at once. Kaostar folded forward. A sound tore from him.
It was too raw to be called a sob. He dropped to his knees beside the water and caught himself with both hands. His claws sank into the mud. His shoulders convulsed.
“He was here.”
The words came out fractured. Kaostar stared at his reflection in the stream. Black fur. Rust-red markings.
Metatronas’s work looking back at him.
“He was here.”
He struck the water. The reflection shattered. Kaostar gasped and pressed both hands against his face. Lightstorm had spoken.
Lightstorm had remembered. Lightstorm had hated him. Lightstorm had loved him. Lightstorm had walked away alive.
The truths collided inside Kaostar until none of them could be held separately. He clawed at the ground. Mud packed beneath his nails as he dragged himself closer to the base of the ancient tree. His back struck the roots.
For a moment, he tried to sit upright. Tried to breathe. Tried to become the controlled creature Metatronas had designed. His body refused.
Kaostar doubled over again. Years of grief surged upward without shape or sequence. Lightstorm’s body cooling in his arms. Official lights flashing through creek trees.
Metatronas listening. Metal restraints. Black fur replacing what Darkshyne had been. A shrouded figure beneath the trees.
Electricity. Blue eyes. The word goodbye. Kaostar gripped the sides of his head.
“No.”
His voice cracked.
“No, no, no—”
He could not tell which memory he was refusing. He slammed one fist against the root behind him. Wood splintered. The impact tore skin from his knuckles.
It healed before the next blow. Kaostar struck again. And again. The root fractured under the force.
His hand regenerated each time, trapping him in a cycle of injury without release.
“He was alive.”
Kaostar laughed once. The sound was hysterical and broken.
“He was alive.”
The laugh transformed into a sob so violent that his entire body curled around it. He had imagined this moment in countless forms. In some, Lightstorm returned unchanged and ran into his arms. In others, Kaostar begged forgiveness before waking alone.
Sometimes Lightstorm condemned him. Sometimes he promised never to leave again. Never had Kaostar imagined the reality. Fear.
Distance. Electricity crawling over a resurrected body. Lightstorm looking at him as though Darkshyne’s love had become another trap constructed by Metatronas. Kaostar pressed his forehead against the earth.
“I’m sorry.”
He did not know whether he was speaking to Lightstorm, Darkshyne, or whatever remained of himself.
“I’m sorry.”
His claws tore through moss.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t stop you.”
Another breath broke apart in his throat.
“I’m sorry I let him use you.”
Kaostar’s tail curled tightly around one leg.
“I’m sorry I became this.”
He tried to swallow the next sob and failed. The sound rolled through the empty clearing. No one heard it. That knowledge made the grief worse.
Kaostar had waited to be alone. Now the loneliness was absolute. He threw his head back against the tree and stared through the branches at the night sky. For six years, he had prayed to nothing.
Not for resurrection. He had stopped allowing himself that fantasy. He had prayed only for one more word. One more moment in which Lightstorm might know that he had not died unloved.
Now Kaostar had received more than he had permitted himself to imagine. And it hurt so much he thought even Metatronas’s body might finally fail to contain it.
“He knows.”
Kaostar pressed a trembling hand against his mouth.
“He knows I was there.”
Relief struck him with the cruelty of another wound. Lightstorm remembered the hand. The voice. The final promise.
Darkshyne had not vanished from his last moments. Kaostar’s body arched as he screamed into his palm. He dragged his hand away. The sound escaped fully.
“LIGHTSTORM!”
The name tore across the forest in relief. Six years of uncertainty went with it. He screamed until the air left his lungs. The echo struck the ridge and returned.
Lightstorm. Lightstorm. Lightstorm. Kaostar listened to it fade.
Then the meaning changed. Lightstorm was alive. But he had still died. No resurrection could remove the creek, the cold, the weight in Darkshyne’s arms, or the years Metatronas had filled with violence.
No miracle could return the people they had been before that night. The relief collapsed inward. Kaostar’s face contorted.
“Lightstorm…”
The name emerged as a plea. He lowered his head. Then screamed it again.
“LIGHTSTORM!”
This time it was grief. The sound ripped through him with everything resurrection had failed to repair. Grief for the frightened person who had believed love would be safer without him. Grief for Darkshyne, who had remained beside a body until warmth became memory.
Grief for Kaostar, who had survived long enough to be feared by the one person he had wanted to recognize him. His voice broke midway through the name. Kaostar collapsed onto his side. His claws clutched at his chest as though the regeneration beneath his skin might mistakenly close the wound that mattered.
It did nothing. He sobbed into the earth. The forest absorbed each sound without judgment. Eventually, the violence of the breakdown diminished.
Not because the grief had passed. Because Kaostar no longer possessed the strength to express it. He lay beneath the tree, trembling. His face was wet.
Mud covered his hands and clothing. The damaged root beside him had begun leaking sap. Kaostar stared toward the path where Lightstorm had disappeared. He imagined the shroud moving between the distant trees.
Imagined pale ears beneath the hood. Imagined the faint, irritated look Lightstorm once wore whenever Darkshyne used the private name he claimed to despise. Kaostar’s mouth opened. For several seconds, nothing emerged.
Then his chest tightened one final time. The name came from somewhere beneath grief. Beneath transformation. Beneath Darkshyne and Kaostar and every weapon Metatronas had built from their ruins.
It came from love.
“STORMY!”
The scream shattered into a sob. Its echo traveled through the trees long after Kaostar’s voice failed.
Stormy. Stormy. Stormy. Kaostar closed his eyes. Somewhere beyond the ridge, Lightstorm continued walking.
Kaostar did not know whether he would ever return. But for the first time in six years, goodbye did not mean dead.
~ To be continued ~
