i worshipped at the altar of losing everything )
Run, she had said or screamed.
And he’d run.
He’d staggered to his feet and, crippled beneath the weight of his grief, he’d torn down the length of the beach and across the plains and he had not stopped until he’d reached the forest. Because he could hear them, but he did not dare look back to see them.
Ensconced in shadow, distracted by the adrenaline coursing through him, he did not immediately realize that the chest was not heaving. Sweat had not gathered along his flanks. The heart was not beating. It took several moments, in fact, for him to realize these things. Ah, but when he did, it shot white-hot fear straight through the center of him. He had known, of course, that the heart was useless – that he had taken his sister’s immortal blood on his tongue as she’d died and it had become his – but it had continued to beat. He had breathed and the heart had beat and he had been alive, albeit it in a different way than mortals.
But the heart lies dormant in its ribbed cage now. There is no pulse to quicken as the fear sinks into the marrow of his bones. There is no breath to come in great, heaving gasps as he tries to work out exactly what has happened.
He feels the same now as he had as he’d traversed that great desert in the afterlife, searching for his sister. He feels neither hunger nor thirst. He is impervious to the cold, it seems. Immune to all these things that plague the living.
He feels suddenly numb, struck dumb by his realization, and he staggers through the forest until he finds someone. He wants to suck in a sharp breath but he does not breathe at all. “Can you see me?” the voice is thin without breath to buoy it. What he means to ask is, am I dead?.
