Arden’s anguish pierces through the clearing, wet and guttural. My heart wrenches.

There was no reversing it now, there was no bringing him back. Frost’s death was an example Aries made. I knew he’d go far to lure me out of hiding, he’d done it with Milo, he’d done it with Feya, I don’t know why I’d thought Frost was invincible to the same fate.

But Frost… Frost he’d gone after because he was always with me. With Inferno. He couldn’t have known I was connected to Feya, known what Milo meant to me.

Arden clung to his corpse, her tunic slicking with his still warm blood. “No, no, no, no!” She chanted like it would reverse time, like the blood would slick itself back in and the wound would sow itself closed; like he hadn’t stopped breathing minutes ago.

The longer I watched the more my stomach turned, I swallowed, “Arden.” She didn’t turn. I tried to muster the courage to speak again, speak louder, but no amount of hero visage could fix this. No amount of heroic compensation would give Frost back his life — give Arden back her brother.

Her cries dried in her throat, heaving through cracked breaths. The clear creak streamed through the muddied cuffs of her trousers and leaked through the cracks in her tattered boots from where she’d dropped over Frost. I wanted to move closer. I wanted to drop beside her and wail my anguish to the Gods, I wanted demand answers as to why they always took everything good from me and still expected I be good in turn.

I wanted more to follow Aries through the twist of the woods, wretch him from the brood he rode and run the same curling dagger through his pale throat.

Instead, I planted my feet firmer into the ground.

“Why?” Arden rasped. She spun wildly to face me, standing between my and Frost’s body with purpose, her crazed eyes glowing with a ring of aflamed gold. “Why is it that everywhere you go death follows? Inferno follows, Aries follows?”

I stayed silent. The answer rolled over the tip of my tongue, ready to spill like the shimmering black of Blight River’s tressing waters. But I couldn’t break the promise I’d made him, even in death it held safe.

Arden snarled before me, her teeth bared roguishly. “It’s you, isn’t it? You’re The Omen, you’re the forsaken curse — you’re her.” She figured. “Inferno. The fucking hero who gets everybody killed. You must enjoy it; from Feya to Milo to Rin and now… now my brother! You just keep coming back for fucking more!”

She was hysterical now, any derision gone in place for deranged snickers. It stung and it would stick with me for the rest of my life, but I didn’t blame her. Dealing with Aries — dealing with Inferno, with me — was a never ending battle that tore apart even the strongest and left them shells of only their worst traits; I never knew how to stop it.

“Say it, Anala, fucking say it. Tell me how you had me and my brother follow you on a quest to the death, tell me how you lied and deceived us, how you let him murder my brother and just fucking stood there and did nothing!”

I wanted to tell her, I wanted to spill the secret and all it’s blurry details, in all its burning glor, but I’d promised him I’d never dare.

Frost never told me what to do if Arden figured it out herself, and I realised he’d planned to be there, he’d panned to explain it himself. The realisation struck through the adrenaline with a warping sickness. Even knowing who he was traversing through the lands with, Frost hadn’t been prepared to die, not by his hands. My eyes clouded with welling tears.

I couldn’t lie to her — not now, not when Frost lay limp just behind her, his eyes slack of life. Telling her would at least give her a choice to make for herself, a privelage so many of us had lost.

“I…” The lump in my throat was hard to swallow through, thick with grief. “I am her. The Omen. Inferno.” I tilted my chin down, fighting the bile lumping my stomach.

Arden didn’t speak and her silence rang over the trickle of the stream and the whisper of the woods, stilling it. Arden’s lack of words said all that needed to be. She could forgive brutal winter nights huddled in a thin tent and swarm attacks of Buzentheya, because those things weren’t my fault, those were things that fell by chance. But Inferno? Aries? The Omen? That was all my fault, they were all things I chose to keep them around. No amount of explaining would fix this — fix Frost’s gaping throat.

When her quiet broke it snapped through the air and ripped me from the trenches of thought with a dizzying force. “You should’ve handed yourself over to him the second he talked of the Killiah Serpent. You’d have done us all a favour.” She glowered.

“At least with you dead,” Arden said, “There’d be someone worth while to step up and save us. Not some silly little girl who can’t save herself, let alone the rest of us.” She pivoted, striding to kneel over her brother with numb vacancy.