Chapter 113: The Enclave Attack I

"We didn’t expect help, but help came. Some of the elders joined, swearing they’d rather die than beg; others gritted their teeth and followed us into the places we had no right to go. And one by one, the coughing eased. Beds cleared. Mothers who’d been rowed past the worst of it began to sit up and hold their children again. Hope swelled so quick you could feel it like a tide."

A brittle laugh, meant for himself and not shared, escaped him.

"It felt like we’d stolen the world back. We sang in the streets that night. My father announced, with a drunken grin, that I’d not be alone forever, he said my mother was carrying another, that I’d have a sibling at last. We danced, stupid and loud, because you don’t know how to keep still when the thing that’s been dragging you down finally loosens."

His teeth clicked. The gladness he described was raw and immediate; then the shadow came. The tone in his voice changed; the words began their slow drop.

"But we were seen. Or maybe they were waiting," he said, and the conviction in those few words was the sort that made Sophia inhale sharply. "The Enclave... the ones who were supposed to have laws, those supposed to protect our kind. They came descending like vultures. As if the moment we found breath was the moment they chose to take a hand. They branded us traitors. They called us plague-bearers and closed ranks. They didn’t ask questions. They marched in, and what was kindness a morning before became the reason to burn and to break and to kill."

He looked up at the sky as if searching for a star that wouldn’t answer.

"Ronan’s brother..." He exhaled, a ragged thing. "Ryker..." he said with a small smile on his face. "I treated him like an older brother the same way I treat Lysander. He was always causing trouble and even Daniel complained about him. When the attack happened, Ryker made sure Ronan locked himself in a drum. Funny how even with that, Ronan still sneaked a look and saw how his brother and mother were killed."

Sophia’s throat went dry. She had known Ronan as present and loud and sharp-tongued, but she had not known the way fear and memory braided through him.

Sophia stared with an open mouth because she could not believe that Ronan who was always joking around had suffered something as tragic as this. When he had even spoken about his parents, his mother and brother, he didn’t sound as sad as Orion did.

"Raina...she’d managed to escape the first sweep of the attack. She fled past men with spears and wolvess. She came back because she heard they’d taken Brynhild. She ran into slaughter to get a blade for her sister. She never left empty-handed; she brought a sword with her. But she couldn’t do anything with it. She had not yet learned how to use a sword. She had not even gotten her wolf at that time either. Most of us hadnt. She found Brynhild but Brynhild’s eyes were bloody. And the man who did it laughed loudly. Raina struck him down. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t good with the sword. She stabbed him and continued until he passed out from the pain but before that, he had already pierced her with his sword. Raina died in Brynhild’s arms. She was the strong sister and her last words to Brynhild was that she shouldn’t be scared. That Brynhild will be stronger without seeing."

Orion still remembered how they’d seen Brynhild later on. How Raina’s body had covered her that they thought Brynhild was even dead. And how Brynhild had been in denial, refusing to believe that Raina was dead. Telling them that Raina fought for her and protected her and that Raina couldn’t be dead.

Orion could not help it neither could Sophia as silent tears poured down their eyes. Orion spoke with the conviction that he was the reason everything happened but she didn’t believe that.

"My parents... they stayed," Orion said. "They stayed because they had honor and because they refused to leave anyone behind. Daniel..he was my father’s beta. He ran with me. He made sure to protect me when he should have been protecting his family. He lost his arm for that."

There was more to that but Orion’s guilt didn’t let him see that he saved Daniel also.

He drew a breath so long it trembled. The branches above them whispered, and Sophia felt how small their voices were against the tide of what he’d lived.

"Zena...you saw her today. You saw how she looked at death and then at the living. Zena’s family all died that night. She came home to a silence that made her teeth chatter. She went mad for a while, cursing the moon, cursing names, and then she fell ill too. It was after the attack that she became ill."

"Madam Tyler lost her only son. She had already lost her husband a while before and everyone knew how difficult it was for her to get a child and she lost him."

"Caspian, lost his husband. And Mary..." His voice caught on Mary’s name, softening like weathered stone. "Mary... she’d been tasked with looking after her younger siblings. When the attackers came looking, she clutched them so tight she wouldn’t let them go. They tried to pry them free from her but she wouldn’t let them. She lost two fingers in the process, and she watched as they killed her siblings in her presence."

Sophia felt the air hollow in her chest. She knew each person he had mentioned personally. She knew them all and like Sam had said, they did not behave like that had lost a lot especially like this.

"Everyone who could fight that night, fought. We fought for our lives. We fought for what remained of us." He told her.