Cael lost his breath completely upon hearing that voice, the air leaving his lungs in a rush. He slowly turned around, brimming with anticipation and desperate hope, his body moving almost against his will. After turning fully, he saw her standing there before him.
His mother.
She wore an elegant black dress that complemented her pale skin perfectly, flowing around her like water. Her skin was glowing with an ethereal radiance and she was radiating pure beauty as she smiled gently at Cael, the same warm smile he remembered.
"M-M-Mom…" he said in a barely audible tone, his voice shaky and uncertain, his lips trembling uncontrollably. His eyes were wide with disbelief as she began walking gracefully towards him across the salt.
The closer she got, the more the walls that Cael had worked so desperately hard to build up around his heart began to break down, crumbling like paper. Soon tears welled in his eyes, blurring his vision. His mother approached him slowly and looked him directly in his eyes, eyes that had been so filled with rage and anger just a while ago but were now simply the vulnerable, wounded eyes of a young boy who missed his mother more than anything in the world.
Cael couldn't contain himself anymore. The dam broke completely.
He launched himself onto his mother, wrapping his arms around her and hugging her so tight as if to never let her go, as if holding her tightly enough could make her real. Tears began to flow effortlessly down his scarred cheeks as he cried into his mother's dress, his body shaking with sobs. "Mom… I miss you… I miss you so much," he said in broken words of pure sadness as he squeezed her tightly against him, burying his face in the fabric.
His mother wrapped her arms around him gently in return, her embrace warm and comforting. "I miss you too," she said simply, her voice as gentle as he remembered.
But their reunion was abruptly interrupted.
Cael felt it before he saw it. It was hot, which was so rare in a world of endless cold, but it was unmistakably hot. Very hot. He opened his tear-filled eyes slowly to see his mother, who he still had his arms wrapped tightly around, was catching fire.
First slowly, small flames appearing on her dress, and then soon she was sporadically engulfed in roaring flame that consumed her entire body. She did not scream or cry out in pain. She simply stayed in her position, hugging her son tenderly even as she burned.
Cael felt the intense heat radiating from her. He felt the pain of the flames pressing up against him and singeing his skin, it was agonizing and excruciating, every nerve screaming at him to let go. But he didn't let go, because he knew somewhere deep in his mind that this pain was just mental, just psychological torture. These flames would not cause real burns because they were not real fire. He knew that none of this was real, it couldn't be.
Because as much as he desperately didn't want it to be true, as much as every fiber of his being wanted to deny it, his parents were dead. They were killed brutally right in front of him and nothing in this world or any other could change that terrible fact.
But whether this vision was real or not, he still needed to hug this illusion posing as his mother. He couldn't stop himself from squeezing with all his might as they burned together in the flames, holding onto this last moment with her even if it was just a cruel trick of his breaking mind.
But soon the fire stopped abruptly, and his mother fell apart into ash in his arms, her body disintegrating completely. The ash blew away like dust in the wind, scattering across the white salt flats until nothing remained. Cael released his empty hug and looked down at the ash that still remained on his palms, the only physical evidence she'd been there at all.
He looked around him slowly to see that his father, the red cross, and all the cloaked men were gone too. Vanished as if they'd never existed. The salt flats stretched empty in every direction once more.
He stood there for a long while in that desolate field of salt, completely alone, his tears slowly drying on his face in the cold air. Finally, after many silent minutes, he spoke aloud to no one.
"I'm going mad," he said simply, his voice flat and emotionless, acknowledging the undeniable fact of the matter.
He was seeing things now. Vivid hallucinations. But after all that had happened to him and everything he was currently enduring in this wasteland, it only made sense that his mind would begin to fracture. Actually, it would be weirder if he wasn't going mad under these circumstances. Complete isolation, constant survival stress, trauma, starvation, it was a recipe for psychological breakdown.
But either way, understanding it didn't make anything easier to bear.
He started to feel completely consumed by the feelings he had tried so hard to keep pushed back and buried deep. He felt tears trying to fight their way out again, hot and insistent behind his eyes. His face shook intensely with the effort of holding everything in, his jaw clenched, his whole body trembling.
Before suddenly—
"AHHHH!"
He screamed out in pure, unfiltered rage as he dropped hard to his knees on the salt. He began punching the salty ground as hard as he possibly could with both fists, over and over and over again in a violent rhythm. His knuckles split open. Blood began to flow. He kept punching until the white salt became thoroughly stained red with blood from his hands, creating growing crimson pools on the pristine surface.
And only then did he finally cease his assault, his breathing ragged and harsh, his chest heaving. Tears welled up in his eyes once more as he knelt there broken and bleeding.
He screamed once more into the empty wasteland, a wordless cry of anguish and fury that echoed across the endless white expanse, a primal sound of grief and rage and utter despair that had nowhere else to go.