He doesn’t give himself the luxury of falling apart.
Not when his magic finds his mother and that heartbeat of hers is so still. Not when he takes his father to her and he watches him breakdown in a way he had never thought possible. Not when he has to watch his father sob over her lifeless body, her chest cracked open clean in two. Not when he takes her home, when he leaves the panther broken and still and hollow on that riverbank, staring into the abyss of nothing.
He holds it together.
He feels nothing but numbness.
Even when he brings her to Hyaline. When his golden light covers her and brings her home. When he takes her to the mountains—not far from where Sochi and Breach lie. A mausoleum of the cliffs. He washes her clean. Sews her chest back together again. Leaves her serene and peaceful. He can nearly convince himself that she is sleeping, the way she looks like this, and even then, he does not break.
He just wraps her with a magical barrier and turns to leave, face dry and eyes unseeing.
He swallows hard and then teleports back to the river, although far away from where he knows his father remains. It is only then that a sound comes from him and it is a broken thing. A keening wail that is only barely covered by the sound of the river that rushes by him. It cracks through him like lightning and thunder and he wonders if he will survive the pain that follows—the fury that nips on its heels.
Because he knows.
He knows.
The smell on her. The magical imprint. It was not an accidental death. It was not a predator gone astray. It was intentional. It was cruel. It meant there was another magician out there who had taken his mother from him and the shadows ripple out from him in an explosion of darkness, shaking the leaves from the nearby trees and splintering one so that it crashes to the ground. There was a magician out there who had taken something from him that was his own—that was his to protect.
And the only thing that swallows the pain is anger.
And the hunger for revenge that follows.
The hunger that comes.
so as our grief falls flat and hollow upon a billion blooded seas
all our worst ideas are borrowed (you do and don't belong to me)