Chapter 166: Life Only Is Because Of Death

Six years ago, the kingdom of Carrion Spire was in grave danger.

Espel Fyrebloom remembered that night too clearly for a child her age. From the balcony of their family estate, she could see the lower wards turning into a wall of flame while the smoke climbed into the sky.

Her hands had been wrapped around the iron railing, and beside her Oden had been screaming so hard his voice kept cracking.

Their parents were down there.

Elias and Mura Fyrebloom had been some of the best Awakeners in the city. When a Demon Break took over the nearby town of Lockswan, they had been dispatched to join the vanguard that would save the city.

Of course, like every other Awakener, they had believed they could stop it if they worked hard enough. They stayed long after the others pulled back, slaughtering Demons, saving civilians and patching wounds.

But it wasn’t enough.

When the miasma broke through the quarantine line, the government couldn’t waste any more time. They were afraid of the rot spreading farther, afraid of losing control, afraid of what would happen if they waited too long.

Carrion Spire was one of the bastions of the world and had to be protected no matter what.

So, the government sent the Extinguishers.

Despite their names, they weren’t here to turn off fires; they were here to light it up. They set the entire town of Lockswan ablaze with fire blasters made of the same purifying energy found in Purification Baths.

The only problem was that just as one could drown inside a Purification Bath, one could also burn in the flames, even though they were meant mainly to kill Demons and miasma.

They burned everything. The Demons. The citizens and the Awakeners who couldn’t evacuate in time.

"Let me go!" Oden had been shouting, thrashing against the Kingdom Servant holding him back. "They’re still down there!"

The man’s grip only tightened. "Stay still, kid."

"Don’t tell me to stay still! Mom!" Oden screamed. "Dad!"

Espel was the one who stood still.

She watched the fire spread over the district below. She watched the sector burn until the outlines of streets and buildings disappeared behind the smoke. The heat rolled up even to the upper ward, and ash drifted through the night air.

"They’re gone, Oden," she said quietly.

Her brother turned on her with red eyes and a face streaked with soot and tears. "How can you say that? They’re burning them!"

Espel looked at her brother, then back at the flames. She watched a burning building collapse, sending a plume of black ash into the night sky.

’Why is Oden crying?’ she wondered, her mind processing the chaos mechanically. ’Is it because mom and dad are dead? But they were always going to die, right? No one leaves forever.’

She narrowed her eyes. ’He is crying because he feels loss. But he feels loss because he had hope they would survive. And he had hope because he forgot that mom and dad were going to die one day.’

She peered into the burning city. ’Even the government. They’re burning the city because they’re afraid. Even though everyone here is also eventually going to die. I don’t understand.’

Espel didn’t shed a single tear for either of her parents. It didn’t make any sense to her to cry when it was factual truth that her parents would die one day. The day had just come sooner.

No big deal.

Oden didn’t see it that way. He cried for their parents, for the people below, for everything being lost at once. Espel couldn’t quite understand why he was falling apart.

The world was doing what fearful people always did when they thought something was slipping beyond their reach. They destroyed it.

When the ashes settled, the Academy took the twins in and called it mercy.

They moved them into their foster program. They dressed them in clean clothes, spoke to them with practiced sympathy, and introduced them as the children of fallen heroes.

It was a beautiful lie. Awakener Supreme was ultimately the same institution that had ordered the burning of the sector and now acted as if it had saved them.

Oden grew up furious.

He awakened early, and when his Grace manifested, it matched him perfectly. It was volatile and sharp, full of the same poison that had settled into him after that night.

He began slipping away from the Academy at odd hours, meeting people he wasn’t supposed to know, and eventually he found his way into the Serpent Society.

It gave his anger a direction. A name. A reason.

Espel changed in a different way.

While Oden burned, she mostly watched.

In fact, apart from awakening as a Healer Mage, she probably never changed at all.

Even as she got older, she couldn’t understand why people acted the way they did. No, she did understand it. She just couldn’t experience it, and that made all of it feel nonsensical.

She watched students panic over exams, cry over rankings, and cling to whatever the Academy told them to value. They loved. They feared. They hoped. They broke. All of it seemed to send them in circles.

She didn’t understand why they made things so painful for themselves.

The answer came to her in her second year.

She found a stray cat behind the botanical gardens, half-hidden under a hedge. Some low-level beast had gotten through the campus wards and torn it open. Its breathing was wet and uneven. Its ribs were crushed. The blood beneath it had already turned the grass dark.

Oden had been there too. He glanced at the animal, grimaced, and stepped back.

"Just put it out of its misery," he said. "It’s suffering."

Espel knelt in the dirt.

For a while she just looked at the creature. Then she reached out, and soft pink light gathered around her hand.

Bloomwings appeared one by one, pink butterflies with glowing wings. They settled over the cat’s body gently, and where they touched, the damage began to close.

Bone knit back together. Flesh sealed. And after a moment, the cat started breathing fine, healthy as the day it was born.

Oden stared. "You healed it."

Espel watched the animal blink and lift its head weakly.

Then the light changed.

The pink glow darkened. The butterflies’ wings sharpened and turned black. They looked like moths now—dark and unsettling.

The air around them cooled. The grass under the cat began to wither, first at the edges, then all at once.

What had been green a moment ago went gray and then brittle. The soil seemed to hollow out under the Gravewings’ presence.

The cat let out a frightened screech and ran off into the bushes.

Oden stared at the dead patch of earth, then at her. "What was that?"

Espel rose slowly, one of the black moths settling on her finger. "I healed the cat," she said. "Then I sped up the decay in the ground."

Oden looked at her like she had spoken another language. "That’s not the same thing."

"It is," she said. "It’s just a different state."

He shook his head, angry now. "No, it isn’t."

"You asked me to kill the cat."

"I didn’t know you could heal it," Oden stared at her. "I didn’t even know you had awakened. When did you awaken?"

"Would you prefer if I killed the cat then let the plants grow brighter."

Oden grimaced. "Why do you have to kill any of them if you can save them both?"

"Why do I have save any of them at all? What is so different between living and dying?"

Espel looked at him with quiet patience, as if the answer was obvious and he had simply missed it.

To her, the difference people made between healing and decay (living and dying) was emotional, not logical. One side made them feel good. The other made them feel afraid. But both were part of the same process.

Things grew. Things changed. Things ended. Humans turned those facts into moral judgments, and then they suffered because of them.

For some reason, everyone believed healing was noble and death was evil. Why?

How different was that from the government believing the miasma was evil and burning it away was righteous? Why do everyone let their feelings decide what is true?

This was what Espel found absurd.

Oden’s anger only grew.

"When are you going to join me in the Society, Es?" he asked. "We have to fight. What they did to Mom and Dad can’t just be ignored."

Espel lowered her hand and let the moth vanish.

"You’re going to hurt yourself if you keep running on that kind of anger," she said.

"You sound like you don’t care."

"I care enough to know you’re not thinking clearly."

He glared at her, venomous aura flickering at his shoulders. "I’m going to change this world."

Espel watched him storm off through the gardens, his hatred carrying him faster than reason ever could.

She didn’t stop him.

She only stood there in the fading light, looking at the dead patch of grass where the moth had rotted the earth.

Oden was too emotional. He would keep chasing pain until it swallowed him whole.

Espel turned back toward the dorms with that same calm expression she always wore when she’d already made up her mind.

This world was sick. People were always hurting each other because they loved too much, feared too much, hoped too much. They clung to life, yet despised death.

But what is life without death?

’Life only is because of death,’ she whispered to herself. She always whispered that to herself. ’Life only is because of death.’

It was time for humanity to free themselves from the chains of emotions and live a life driven by pragmatism. Accept death the same way we accept life.

If they could not free themselves from that...

then someone else would have to do it for them.