[It's all over. You watch, with your hands folded into your sleeves and your thoughts dulled and red, as Granny and A-Yuan play their game of hide-and-seek, slowly in deference to Granny's arthritic knees. There are few places in the Burial Mounds where a child can play freely, safely, properly. You and the Wens contrive to do your best. A-Yuan is sensitive enough to have caught some of the atmosphere of fear and despairing terror that pervades their little home, but they do their best to distract him, to continue on with him as though life is still the semblance of normalcy it had reached just a few months ago. Why hurt him more? he's already condemned to death, just like the rest of them.
You don't have to ward the little hill with its copse of scraggling trees. You're stretching yourself thinner and scraping yourself rawer by the day, trying to build your wards strong enough to withstand the inevitable invasion, trying still to keep them all safe, trying to find a way out for the Wens if not yourself, trying, trying, trying. You should not be sparing strength for this sentimentality. You do it anyway.
Your sister would have appreciated it. In some other world, her son and A-Yuan could be playmates. Some other world, where you hadn't killed her and her husband, and doomed the people under your care.
Granny meets your eyes for a moment, while she makes the rounds of the trees, and you both try to smile at each other and fail before just nodding. A-Yuan is laughing, the only laughter that's been heard in the Burial Mounds these last days: ah, to be a child again, with any trust that the adults will make it right for you.
You are going to die. They are all going to die. You welcome it for yourself at this point, not so deep down. But perhaps--
no subject
You don't have to ward the little hill with its copse of scraggling trees. You're stretching yourself thinner and scraping yourself rawer by the day, trying to build your wards strong enough to withstand the inevitable invasion, trying still to keep them all safe, trying to find a way out for the Wens if not yourself, trying, trying, trying. You should not be sparing strength for this sentimentality. You do it anyway.
Your sister would have appreciated it. In some other world, her son and A-Yuan could be playmates. Some other world, where you hadn't killed her and her husband, and doomed the people under your care.
Granny meets your eyes for a moment, while she makes the rounds of the trees, and you both try to smile at each other and fail before just nodding. A-Yuan is laughing, the only laughter that's been heard in the Burial Mounds these last days: ah, to be a child again, with any trust that the adults will make it right for you.
You are going to die. They are all going to die. You welcome it for yourself at this point, not so deep down. But perhaps--
The memory ends.]