Gabriel
Footprints in the snow. Blood dragged through white ground. A line leading away from the chaos, away from the road, away toward deeper darkness. It was fresh. Too fresh. My body reacted before my mind did, crawling after it as if the answer to everything was strung out in front of me like a wound.
And as I followed, memories began to strike me again.
Not the tearing kind this time. Softer ones. Crueler because they were softer.
I remembered a picnic in the park on a bright day, the kind of day that made the world look safe even when it wasn't. Vivienne had spread out a blanket under a tree while I pretended not to notice how carefully she arranged everything. Iris had disappeared for a moment and then popped back up with that serious little expression she got when she thought she was doing something noble.
"I cooked something for you," Iris had announced.
Vivienne had looked up from the basket, pretending surprise. "For me?"
I had been sitting beside them, leaning back on one hand, already smiling before I even knew why.
Iris had pulled out an aluminum pie pan filled to the brim with wet sand, leaves, random bugs, and what I was fairly sure had once been a dandelion. She held it out with the pride of a queen offering a banquet.
Vivienne stared at it for a long second.
Then she gave it the gravest nod I had ever seen in my life. "It looks… edible," she said carefully.
Iris narrowed her eyes. "You have to enjoy it."
Vivienne put a hand to her chest like she had been deeply moved. "Thank you for the meal."
She even pretended to eat it.
Iris watched her with the sharp focus of a judge. After a moment, she asked, very seriously, "Why do you never actually eat anything I make?"
Vivienne froze.
Her eyes widened in disbelief, and slowly she turned her head toward me with the most offended expression I had ever seen her wear. I still remember the exact silence before I lost it. She leaned toward me and whispered, scandalized, "She is trying to kill me."
And I laughed so hard I had to bend over.
Another memory hit me while I crawled.
Vivienne and I were on a rooftop at dusk, both of us wrapped in blankets because she had insisted the air was "romantic" and I had insisted it was cold. She had rested her head on my shoulder while we watched the lights come on across the city one by one, like the world was waking up in reverse. Iris had been asleep inside, tiny and warm and safe. Vivienne had traced idle circles into my hand and asked me what I thought the city looked like from above when nobody was dying in it.
I had told her it looked tired.
She had laughed softly and said, "Then we should make sure ours gets more rest."
I remembered the way her laugh sounded in the dark. I remembered the way Iris used to fall asleep with one hand curled around my finger like she was making sure I stayed.
The trail led me onward until the trees opened into a wider stretch of snow, and I saw movement ahead.
My chest hitched.
Two figures in the distance.
I could barely see them through the blur of my eyes, but I knew them immediately anyway. The shape of Vivienne. The smallness of Iris beside her. My whole body shook with a sudden, terrible surge of relief so strong I thought it might split me apart.
They ran toward me.
Vivienne's hair was white in the moonlight, her face pale, her expression full of a sad sort of softness that made me hurt before she even spoke. Iris was beside her, little feet moving fast through the snow, red and white hair bright against the dark.
"Look at you," Vivienne said when she got close enough, and her voice was so painfully familiar I almost sobbed on the spot. "You're such a mess…"
There was something wrong with her tone. Too gentle. Too sad. But I was already falling into the feeling of being seen. Being found. Being taken in.
She reached for me.
"I can take you home," she murmured, crouching down so she could lift my head with both hands. "We'll clean you up. You don't have to keep doing this alone."
Then she pulled me into her arms.
The warmth of her touch undid me instantly.
I broke apart in her hold, crying into her shoulder, and she hummed softly above me the way she always used to. My hands clutched at her clothes. My body shook with the force of relief. I could feel Iris nearby, could hear the small sounds of her moving closer, and all I could think was that they were safe. That they were here. That I had found them.
"I'm glad you're both safe," I whispered, my words broken by tears. "Both of you. I'm glad you're safe now. It's okay. Everything's going to be alright now."
The world shifted.
No warning. No transition. Just a violent, sickening change as though the scene had been grabbed by the throat and turned inside out.
The warmth vanished.
The arms around me were gone.
I was on my knees in the snow again, and in my arms were the bodies of Vivienne and Iris.
I made a sound that didn't feel human.
Vivienne's hair was dusted with snow, her face strangely calm, almost peaceful in the cruelest way possible. A gash on her head had painted part of her hair red. Iris was limp in my arms, small and cold and horrifyingly still. I stared at them, and my mind rejected it again and again, like a door that would not open no matter how hard I slammed into it.
"No," I whispered. "No, no, no. You're alive. You're alive, I just—"
My voice shattered.
I shook my head violently, sobbing so hard that I could barely breathe. "No, you were just here. You were just talking to me. You were—"
But my hands were already feeling the truth. The stillness. The weight. The absence of breath. The finality.
I had lost them.
Again, and now all at once.
My vision began to blur in earnest. Tears. Blood. Snow glare. Grief. I looked up through it and saw another figure standing at a distance beyond the bodies, just at the edge of the white world.
A woman.
Her hair was blond, but her voice—God, her voice—had the same shape as Vivienne's in the moments when she got serious. Calm, steady, commanding. Her spiritual aura rolled toward me in waves so powerful that even from this distance, it felt like standing too close to a storm.
Life is cruel, she said. But demons are crueler.
I stared at her, my whole body trembling around the corpses in my arms. "Who are you?" I managed, though the strength in my voice was nearly gone.
She ignored the question.
Instead, she stepped closer, her gaze fixed on me with a kind of fierce, terrible certainty. "You fought," she said, "and you lost your family because you did not have the power to stop it."
I clenched my jaw hard enough to hurt.
Her eyes did not leave mine. "Do you want power?"
My breath caught.
I looked down at Vivienne's face. At Iris's hair. At the impossible stillness of both of them. "I…" My throat closed. "I don't want to lose anyone else."
"You already have."
Her voice cut through me like a blade. "And you will lose more if you remain as you are."
"No," I whispered.
She moved closer, and the pressure of her soul became so immense I felt dizzy. It was like standing on the edge of something vast and ancient and merciless. She crouched in front of me, reached out, and with haunting gentleness caressed Vivienne's cheek. Then she stroked Iris's hair with the sort of tenderness that made the scene feel even more impossible.
I tried to look at her face.
I could not.
It was not pain stopping me. It was something deeper. The weight of her presence pressed against my senses so hard that if I looked directly at her, I felt like I might die from the force of it.
"Is losing your family not enough?" she asked.
My breath came in shaking fragments. "It's all I can bear," I whispered. "I've already lost enough. I can't— I can't do this again."
"You think your suffering is complete?" Her voice sharpened. "You think this is where it ends? Then you are more naive than you are broken. If you leave things as they are, you will be forced to watch this world keep taking from you until there is nothing left to take."
I shook my head, tears falling onto Vivienne's hair. "No. No, I won't. I'll leave someone else to do it. Someone stronger. Someone—"
The woman laughed.
It was not a cruel laugh. That somehow made it worse. It sounded disappointed. "I cannot believe I once loved such a cowardly man."
The words struck something raw in me.
I flinched, anger flashing through the grief like a sudden spark. "I am not a coward."
She looked at me then, and the pressure of her gaze nearly made me bow my head.
"Then why are you still kneeling?" she asked.
I opened my mouth and closed it again.
Her expression changed, becoming bolder somehow, heavier with thought. She turned slightly away from me, as if speaking to the snow itself. "What could have possibly made you this way?" she murmured, and the question sounded less like a taunt and more like a condemnation of the world around me.
Then she faced me again.
Her voice became stronger. Sharper. "You are standing in the wreckage of your life, holding the people you love because you were not strong enough to protect them. And now you tell me you want to remain weak because you are afraid of what strength might demand?"
I swallowed hard.
"You think power is a curse?" she went on. "No. Power is responsibility. Power is the ability to answer cruelty with force. It is the only language hell understands. Do you think those monsters will stop at your wife? Your child? Your friends? Your city? They will not. They will keep coming until the world is nothing but a graveyard full of people who were too frightened to reach for the only thing that could save them."
My fingers tightened around Vivienne's shoulder.
She leaned closer, voice low and deliberate now. "Take my power, Gabriel. Become something that can kill demons. Become something that can make them fear you. You already know what happens when good men stay weak."
I stared at her through the blur in my eyes.
"You can hate what you become," she said. "You can rage against it. You can curse it for the rest of your life. But if you refuse, then every death after this will be on your hands, too. Every person they take, every friend, every child, every beloved soul—because you would not seize the strength in front of you."
"No…" My voice was barely there.
"Yes," she said, and now there was fire in it. "Yes. Because this is not the end, Gabriel, it is the beginning. You think the demons came for your family because the world is random? No. They came because cruelty is organized. Because hell is intentional. Because evil does not wait politely for good people to be ready."
She moved one hand toward my chest, not touching me yet, but close enough that I could feel the pressure of it. "So choose. Stay broken, and bury everyone you love. Or become a weapon and make the monsters bleed for every life they have ever stolen."
My throat burned.
I looked down at Vivienne. At Iris. At the impossible stillness of them both.
"I can't lose anyone else," I whispered again, but it sounded weaker now. Less like a boundary and more like a prayer.
The woman's face hardened with something like frustration. "Then do something about it."
I shook my head, tears freezing on my cheeks. "I don't want to become that."
"You already are something," she snapped. "The only question is whether you will be useful."
That hit me like a slap.
For a moment, I did nothing but breathe, broken and shallow, the weight of the corpses in my arms like the weight of the decision itself. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say no. I wanted to ask her to make it all stop. I wanted to scream that I had already lost too much and that any power that demanded more blood from me could rot in hell.
But the image of more people dying because I had stayed small kept clawing at my mind.
And then I thought of Vivienne's laugh.
I thought of Iris's hand in mine.
I thought of all the people I might never get to protect if I stayed here, on my knees, waiting for mercy from a world that had none.
When I hesitated, the woman rose.
She looked down at me with impossible pity. "This is why you are still alive," she said. "Not because you are strong. Because you are unfinished."
I tried to look up at her, but her aura pressed down so hard that my eyes watered and my skull hurt. "I…" I swallowed. "I don't know if I can."
"No," she said. "You do not know. That is different."
She straightened, and I felt her decision before she even spoke again. "Think quickly, Gabriel. You do not get to stay innocent forever."
Then she vanished.
Not faded. Not walked away. Vanished, as if the snow had opened and taken her with it.
The silence afterward was absolute.
I stared at the place where she had been, then at the bodies in my arms, and the last of my strength finally gave out. My fingers went numb. My vision slipped sideways. The snow blurred. The world tilted.
I could feel myself falling.