Some people wanted a second installment... so here it is. I cried while writing it.
There was a phrase that Will had often heard repeated by soldiers. A comparison for their pain. A pain like a splitting skull.
Will had always thought the phrase ridiculous. How would any of them know what it felt like to have your head split open? It wasn't like anyone had ever survived the experience, much less them. Why didn't people just assume the pain based on how serious the injury was? An club to the head was sure to hurt. Was there any reason to compare it to a splitting skull?
Yet here he was, sliding in and out of a blood-soaking reality. He felt as if a Skandian had just taken a battleaxe to his head.
He heard Halt talking to him, his voice low and urgent but strangely muffled. Will had to strain to hear him, and it hurt.
"Hold on, Will," the Ranger said. "Just hold on. We're almost there. Hold on for me."
I'm trying, Will wanted to say. It hurts, Halt. It hurts like all hell.
He wanted more than anything to stay conscious. Images flashed through his mind, horrible images of blood and death and pain. He didn't want to lose himself to that. He wanted to feel Halt holding him, carrying him through the suffering.
But it was too hard to hold on. Slowly, slowly, he drifted away from reality.
He stood on a battlefield. Bodies littered the ground, crumpled and bloodied and unmoving. Vultures soared high above, circling down lower to feast. The sky was streaked with bruise purple and fiery orange and the crimson of fresh blood.
He was the only one alive, standing in the midst of a horrible massacre. He saw Araluen soldiers among the dead, soldiers he'd fought beside before. He saw Erak and his Skandians. They'd been so powerful in life, and he couldn't over the vulnerability that clung to them in death. All the soul and spirit had been sucked out of them. Soon, there would be nothing left but bones.
He looked to his left and stifled a cry of horror. Alyss and Evanlyn lay side by side, their blonde hair matted and streaked with blood. A spear had buried itself in Evanlyn's chest, right through her heart. Alyss's head had been severed from her neck, and lolled in a pool of dark blood.
Vomit and bile rose up into Will's throat. He fell to his knees and wretched, wanting to erase the image from his mind. Two of the people he loved most in the entire world. Dead.
Where'd he been? Why hadn't he saved them?
Guilt warred with sorrow in his chest, tightening it until he couldn't breathe. His sobs mingled with screams of agony. What had he done to deserve this?
He stumbled to his feet shakily, struggling to force air into his lungs. A glint of silver caught his eye, and he turned.
Gilan was curled into a ball. Three spears and a battleaxe stuck out from his body and awkward angles. Enemy bodies were scattered around him, impaled by arrows and decapitated by Gilan's sword.
The pain rose in Will again, choking him. He screamed at the sky until his voice was hoarse. The vultures matched his cries with pitiless screeches of their own.
It happened again and again, as he walked through the carnage. He saw King Duncan, all his limbs chopped off and littered around him. He saw Horace, frozen in death with a silent scream on his features. Everyone he'd ever loved was there, on that battlefield, dead.
There was one body in the distance, and Will knew who it was without even going up to it. He didn't want to see it. Seeing Halt dead would be the last straw for him.
Yet somehow he knew that if he didn't see it, feel the pain, and accept it, he would never be able to leave this hell.
He shuffled forward, dread filling the cavity in his chest where his heart had once beat. It was as if he wore iron shoes, holding him down, drowning him in his own sorrow.
Halt's body was neither bloodied nor maimed. Instead, it was grotesquely well-preserved. His skin was pale and cold, his eyes closed as if in peaceful sleep. Someone had even crossed his arms over his chest.
A small dart stuck out of his neck. Will, his hand shaking, pulled it out. The tip was coated with blood and something green.
Poison.
How ironic that the greatest warrior in the world had been felled by a single poison dart.
The pain came again, but not in the sharp clarity it had before. It was a slow burn now, eating him from the inside. He felt numb all over. He'd simply expended everything in him.
His brain couldn't process what he was seeing. Halt couldn't be dead, It was impossible. He couldn't die.
But he was.
Will closed his eyes and let the pain settle in, let it root itself in his veins. He is dead, Will thought. They're all dead.
Up until this point, he'd felt like his was hanging on to the edge of a precipice, four fingers away from plunging into a bottomless abyss. With every death, some force had peeled away a finger from the rock. Until Halt, he'd been holding on with one finger.
Having accepted the death of his mentor, Will finally lost his grip. The world spun around him, and the ground dropped away.
He opened his eyes. He was in a bed, in the infirmary.
"You almost died," said Halt, and Will turned to look at him.
"So did you," the boy replied, and smiled.