Imperial (Insight #8)(49)

“What is it? What does he guard?”

He just stared, no words. I balled my fist and held back the urge to hit the table.

“Vade, you better tell me. He is glorious, and it would bring me great sorrow to end him, but I will if he continues his threat against your line. Tell me now what he is guarding.”

Nothing.

“Vade. I am obviously close to what this secret is that you have with the Creator. Tell me before I make a tragic mistake. How can you trust Him so dearly? How can you know without a doubt that if I remove Silas from the equation that what you deem precious will not be harmed?”

“You are waltzing all around it with closed eyes. I do trust Him, because He has never failed me.”

“Has He not?” I was deeply offended. I adored my Creator, I really did, but He was gone. He left when the other kings betrayed Him. He left me in that Veil, took Vade from me.

“No, He has not. He has never left you or lost faith in you or me,” he stated evenly, successfully keeping all anger out of his tone.

“I really wish I could see it that way. I’m full of rage. Lost and blind. There is no way out without loss. Have you seen the evil the kings have created? How it lacks any real essence?” I questioned.

“I have, along with the mists and petals they have abandoned, the ones that have no idea who they are, who seek to rule a Realm that can never be ruled by one, for it was created for all.”

“Then tell me why in the hell He left me in that Veil? Why our race was ripped apart? Why it has come to this?”

“If I tell you why, the lesson would be lost on you.”

“You are the only teacher I trust.”

“You should trust Him,” he said with a sigh.

“We are suffering from communication issues at the current moment,” I bit out.

At that moment, the lights dimmed a little more and wind that should not exist blew the rose petals across the table. The pattern looked sporadic to me, but Vade read something within them.

He reached his long fingers to them, adjusting two jagged lines that they had created and the cluster of the pile that they had escaped from.

“What did you do each day there?” he whispered, glancing up to me to ensure that I was staring at the rose petals.

My imagination took over for a moment. “Beyond guarding The Fall, I…I watched the procession of death.”

The petals slightly resembled the path those regretful souls would travel down before reaching the throne of the Reaper.

“What did you witness in that procession?”

“Regret.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

“Horrible. Those souls were focused on their regrets. They had cherished material items and forgotten the ones they cared for, thought that time in their previous existence was infinite. They wanted to freeze time instead of moving forward and trusting that they would find those souls again.”

“Is that all they regretted?” he pushed.

I thought back over the random conversations I’d had with the dead. They were not like the one with Cowboy; he was calm, at peace. He was more than rare, he was a singularity. He was the only one I’d met like that. The others not only held regret, but a tinge of anger. Now at the end of their path, they had discovered that the people they thought had harmed them or hindered them had done no such thing. They had done that to themselves by not letting their wrath for them go. One even told me that he lived his life looking back and not forward, and he would give anything to live it again with his eyes faced forward.

“No,” I whispered. I had left my thoughts wide open to Vade, so he was seeing what I remembered, feeling it.

“What else? What else did that dead soul you are thinking of say to you?”

I cringed. The soul he was talking about had only stayed in the cathedral for one day before he was forgotten by his past life and forced to move on by the Reaper.

We had kinship because he, too, was abused as a child, he, too, trusted very little, and he regretted not trusting more, not understanding that just because that one soul hurt him that it didn’t mean that all others would, too.

“You already know.”

“I also know that the same problem will consume us until we learn our lesson from it.”

“I did not learn anything there.”

“Which very well may be why the Reaper could only offer you a reprieve and not a permanent stay.”

“What, Vade? Just say it. How is this my fault? Beyond the fight, beyond asking the Creator to let me be the example that our kings would follow, and later defending my line, what did I do?”

“You asked Him to be a solution?” he said as his eyes widened for an instant.

“I did. The moment I realized that the other kings had not only crossed the line, but also destroyed it. I vowed to Him through my thoughts that I would be the example, that my example would be so powerful that the other kings would remember what they were supposed to be. I told Him to use me as His weapon—and what did that get me? A wretched fight between us, followed by a demanded sacrifice that benched me from this war.”

“I asked Him, too,” Vade said nearly silently.

“When? After you told me my way was wrong, that I had to stay nourished and strong?”

“No,” he breathed. He swallowed his anger. “I asked Him before you were raised.”