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All it takes is a single spark.
The little pile of kindling she’s set on the ground lights easily enough. From there, the flame catches on the house beside it. All that is left is to watch and wait. Confirm the kill, a quiet voice whispers. She doesn’t bother turning to see who’s spoken. There is no one else out on this dawn-lit street.
Fire races up the oak log foundation.
It’s beautiful.
It’s awful.
Cherri doesn’t know anymore.
But if this is what it takes to be free, to see the world and spend her life with Apo? Then it has to be right.
The fire burns the same color as the sun on the horizon, slowly dripping across that distant line where the sky meets the ground. Maybe one day she will cross it with Apo. And for that to happen, this is what she must do first.
There is a gasp and a muffled scream from inside, louder than the crackling of blaze as it engulfs an entire side of the mansion. But there is no smoke spewing from the windows and doors. Just little streams seeping between the cracks. Obsidian blocks stand sentry at every possible exit. Nothing is going to escape this gruesome, painful death.
This is an execution. A burning at the stake. A price long overdue for a crime that can never be forgotten.
Cherri knows that another version of herself would have found a cruel, twisted sort of vindication in that. That quiet voice in the back of her mind is a part of her still but she’d like to think that it’s been tempered by love; it is the Cherri that Apo met and has now flourished to become the person she is today.
She’d like to think that she’s become better than the person she was. Her eye has healed over, scarred and blinded and still painful on the bad days. The nightmares still come often with memories of a knife tearing across her face and the fear that had paralyzed her as it had happened.
The last thing she’d ever see with two eyes was the look of rage on the one who’d raised her. And then there was nothing. There had been so much blood. There had been so much pain. There had been so much betrayal. But there was nothing where her vision in that eye had once been.
The ultimatum had come and Sal Kuna had been her last chance. She’d failed spectacularly, in a way that she hadn’t even expected herself to be capable of.
So she thinks it’s reasonable that she’s envisioned her vengeance before. Fantasized about something she’d expected to be a rageful affair. Something tinged in the fury and agony that had lingered in the dull, lonely months it had taken the slash on her face to scar over and her eye to turn a terrifying ashen grey.
She’s thought about plunging blades through the cold, callous heart that molded her into the monster she became. She’s thought about trying her hand at poisons. She’s considered anvils and crossbows and buckets of lava or water.
But the fire is easier. Apo deserves better than to spend a morning in a cold stream as dried blood slowly flakes from under her fingernails and the crevices of her palms.
Cherri would like to think that she’s grown softer, grown kinder in these past months. That Pity changed her from that jaded bounty hunter she’d been when she first stepped foot in that town. She’d like to think that she isn’t hateful anymore. That the lives of others matter more to her than bounties now. Because for the first time, she thinks her life might be worth living.
Waves of heat ripple out in every direction as the roof caves in with a loud crack. A cloud of dark, evil looking smoke swallows her whole.
The screams from inside the building have been silent for a long time.
She didn’t even bother remembering the moment it stopped.
Their lives were fragile and she broke them but there is not a single fleck of sympathy left in her heart to dredge up. Not for them. Not for him. Not after the time she’s lost and the life she’s wasted.
Cherri lets herself look away from what remains of the burning foundations to stare up and down the street. It’s a small town. Just a couple buildings lining a single road. Nobody here has anybody to miss them when they’re gone. Nobody will mourn this place.
In another life, Cherri would have become one of them for good.
She doesn’t try to stop it when the sparks spread. The blaze is as hungry and desperate and almost as uncaring for morality as the people it chases. Nobody bothers stopping for her as they stumble from their burning homes and flee. The sky has just begun shifting from purple to pink to orange but black smoke hangs dark over a town with one inhabitant.
The very air hurts to breathe, heavy and choking with the acrid scent of desolation that makes her lightheaded. All Cherri can hear is the crackle of fire.
She thinks about the crossbow in her inventory, the one she has used to kill so many before in the name of bounty and survival in this unforgiving world. It is the same one she’d held to Apo’s temple with threats of taking her head if Sal Kuna was already too dead to kill again.
Who would she have become if she’d pulled the trigger? Would she have ever found purpose? Love?
Or was she just a killer at heart? A cruel, selfish predator hidden behind impermanent peace and tempered instincts.
Who is she to change when she has taken that chance from so many others without so much as a moment of hesitation or a second thought?
She steps forward to stand before the obsidian blocks she’d placed in front of the main entrance. Ashes shift and crumble away beneath her steps but she draws near enough that she could touch the smooth, black rock if she wanted to.
Instead, she lets her strength give out and crumples to the ground. The smoke stings at her eyes and throat. Burning ash flecks her skin and digs into her knees. Searing heat presses against her face and arms almost as though she’s pressed red-hot metal to her skin.
Her eye tries to water with moisture that is burned away before it can collect so she closes it and turns her face up to a sky that she can no longer see.
Have I been good enough? Have I done enough to make up for the death I’ve caused? The pain? How could I ever earn this life with Apo, this joy and happiness and blissful peace, when all I’ve ever given to this world is destruction? Is there anything I could ever do, anything I could ever give to truly be good and not just good enough for her?
“I’m sorry,” she says with a voice too hoarse and broken for anybody to understand. But there is nobody left in this town to listen anyway. Just the destruction she has wrought to everything they know.
Though she does not know these people, she thinks she’s sympathetic. That the apology she breathes into the air unheard is genuine.
She coughs with lungs that burn and wheeze with each breath and realizes that maybe this is the end. That her story will come to a bright, fiery conclusion here where her prologue began.
In a town of corruption and pain and emotions that burned so hot with hatred that they became nothing at all, she will disappear into a handful painful memories to let go of and miss as time passes on without her.
She hopes Apo will remember her. Reminisce on the softness that she had planted in Cherri’s cold heart even when she is too long gone to return it.
The hopeful daydreams they have etched into each other’s minds are tinted in a little hint of melancholy as she erases herself from them. Soon it is just Apo and the earth and the sky at the edge of all things without her.
Her chest hurts with love and smoke-filled breaths as she coughs and coughs and coughs until her throat is raw with irritation and grief.
How odd it is that she mourns the happy, loving, loved Cherri who would have danced with Apo under dark nights with endless stars. That Cherri who has never existed beyond the walls of two minds. That Cherri who will never exist when this one is gone.
In another life she would feel sorry for making the owners of the house die this way but she is not forgiving enough even after all this time. Because whereas the Cherri of old was quietly rageful out of spite and pain, she’s grown up to become a creature of emptiness. Numbness.
The Cherri of today is hollow without Apo’s love to fill the voids that death left behind.
She wishes she could have given Apo a proper goodbye. But maybe it is easier this way, to have disappeared mysteriously in the night and left nothing but a cold, empty dent in the grass that will stand straight again by afternoon. No body to bury and no blood to stain memories long after it has been roughly scrubbed away.
The vision of Apo’s smile lingers in her mind as the pain of breathing smoke grows stronger than the pain of suffocating heat pressing in from every direction.
It’s not a nice way to die but Cherri finds that she doesn’t mind. She probably deserves nothing more. At least the fire is mercifully avoiding her, leaving the smoke to smother her instead. Burning would be painful.
Without warning (or maybe she’s just missed the signs) strong arms wrap around her from behind, lifting her easily off the ground. The blood rushes from her head and the darkness crowds into her vision but the grasp on her is too desperate to let her fall. Soft, curly hair brushes against Cherri’s cheek as her savior leans forward to adjust their grip.
“A-Apo?” she gasps, wincing at the way the sound comes out ragged and painful.
“Cherri, I’m here.” Apo carries her back down on the road where the heat doesn’t hurt quite as much anymore and sets her down. The arms around her waist disappear for a moment only to settle under her knees and shoulders. The rough asphalt stops digging into her skin as she is picked up again.
Cherri blinks and they’re back at their campsite from last night. The only smoke that remains is the tainted breath still left in her lungs and the soot that covers her practically from head to toe.
Apo, who hasn’t even tired in the distance she’s walked, somehow manages to trip over a gnarled root at the last moment and the two of them go down in a heap.
Cherri blinks again and she’s staring up at a blue sky with her head in Apo’s lap and fingers gently combing through her hair. It still hurts to breathe and her lips are cracked and there is a new bruise forming down her entire right side but the sky is blue instead of that dreary, ashy grey.
Neither of them say anything for a long moment, the sound of morning birds tweeting in the background filling their ears instead. Cherri closes her eyes to let the warmth of the sun settle comfortably across her face.
She knows there will be a reckoning later. Apo will need answers and an explanation but for now, she leans back on the hand not occupied in Cherri’s hair to stare up at the sky as well.
One day they will see the world with each other. At the edge of all things known, Cherri will stand right by Apo’s side. And in the time between now and forever, they will be together.