Onainat walked around the battle scene, almost spiraling around what was made so plain by Iluq's cries. She could not seem to catch a breath for how heavy her lungs felt. Debris crunched beneath the heels of her travel boots when she squatted at her father's side. He looked as if he could open his eyes, which would twinkle before he smiled. For a moment, she could have believed she would hug him again, the way she did when he used to sit on their porch in Chlen and doze.
Don't go. Please.
She touched his cheek. Her fingers glowed faintly for a moment before going out. There was nowhere for her magic to turn. Blue eyes, like hers but empty, looked out to some far distant point like endless black windows. An empty home. Onainat's cheeks were wet when she pressed her fingers to her lips and then brushed them gently over his eyelids.
He was not here.
"Shadows move only because the sun lights another place," she whispered. "His way be open, unfettered..."
He was not here. Not any more.
Onainat swallowed and pressed her hand against her face. Her sorrow, a foreign, pitched keening, pushed through her teeth. The rim of Skandra's hat almost seemed to droop in response. Onainat reached out, almost desperate, and took hold of Iluq's shoulder, as if to remember...what he had asked of her before he had gone. Without saying goodbye, even though he had known again where he was off to. That part did not seem to hurt as much as his absence; it was only a thorn on the stem of her grief, which grew stronger and stronger in her chest.
Onainat pried the young dragon from her father's shoulder, careful not to disturb the ocarina that he still clutched in his hands. It was not a cruel grip, but a restraining one. She remembered being held this way, once. Onainat held Iluq because he couldn't. And it was the only thing she could think of to...