It was a subject on which Qebhet could talk at length, albeit usually with a good deal of self-censorship. She had shepherded countless generations of mourners and mourned through death; she'd seen it at its cruellest and its most cathartic. She'd seen the moments of connection and healing that were possible when the barrier of taboo didn't stand between the living and the dead.
But today her head was somewhere else entirely, and under Genesis' words she heard an echo of her own.
It's not the dying. She had said it to Hecate once – scant months ago, the other goddess shivering beneath a blanket as her morgue-chilled body remembered how to pump blood. The dying hurts, but the killing...
I don't want anyone to die, Kaden had said. A voice in the dark, so small and so bowed down with guilt over the murder he'd almost been forced to commit.
He hadn't wanted to be a killer. He hadn't wanted somebody else to choose for him, like Ares would have done—
No. Like Ares would do for his infant son.
Kaden would never have abandoned the baby. He cared too much for that. He had sacrificed too much.
The thought sent a pang through Qebhet's heart, and this time the dread and the guilt welled up too fast for her to push down on it.
"...yes," she agreed, too late and too weak to be convincing; it took her an instant to remember what she was even agreeing to. "Yes, I think... um." She was too shaken, too scattered; she couldn't find an end to the sentence and she stumbled on it abruptly. Her skin felt cold despite the golden warmth of the sun. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm... not myself today."