He settles down to wait.
The past evening seemed to be one long blur of noise and adrenaline. The bright lights of fire and magic seem etched into his eyelids when he closes his eyes, and his ears ring with the sound of screams and explosions. Now, at last, the dauntless quiet of the forest at night reclaims the road. Even the thundering pulse in his throat settles, and his breathing calms.
He turns his head to look in the direction of the charred circle where the fat man had died.
It starts slowly. For a while, he stares into the dark, unseeing. His breathing is calm, quiet.
A single teardrop falls to the ground.
Another follows, then another. Before long, tears fall in a steady stream from his face to the ground, and he curls around himself, hugging his knees and sobbing in near-silence. The force of his sobs shakes his whole body, but he lived too long with his parents on the run to let them out in full, and so he muffles them as best he can, even now.
His parents. In his mind he can see them as they had been when he had bolted from the campsite. He'd had almost no time, seen so little, but between the flashes of his father's lightning and a few small fires – probably his mother's work – what he had been able to see was more than enough.
His mother had been dead before he even made it outside the tent. A flash of lightning had revealed her body sprawled face-down fifteen feet from the tent's opening. A sapling had fallen next to her, desiccated and leafless, though the previous morning had seen it green and strong.
His eyes had caught on his mother's body before his father's bellows broke through to him. Lightning flashing from both hands - a feat Darren had yet to accomplish – his father ordered him to run. He had considered disobeying. He couldn't just leave, and it wasn't like his father could possibly lose. His father had bellowed again, more forcefully, and this time he had obeyed. He'd run for no more than thirty seconds when he saw the flash of green light and heard his father's shout cut off with frightening suddenness. Some part of him had known instinctively what that meant, and so he'd begun running in earnest.
And now he would never see them again.
Even if he could find his way back to their campsite, which he was not at all sure he could do, all he would find were bodies. Bodies that would bear evidence of whatever foul magic the fat man had used to overpower them, as well as the attentions of whatever forest creatures managed to find them before he did.
Never again would his mother's sharp tongue send her husband and their son into fits of laughter, her stern brown face undone by the crinkle around her dark eyes. Never again would he sit in front of the campfire, entranced, as his father spun stories of old gods, the Fade, and the Blights.
Never again.
They had expected to be separated eventually, at least for a time. He was just old enough, now, to have really noticed how many Templars were around, and to be impressed at how successful his parents had evidently been at avoiding detection. Part of him, the childlike part, believed that this luck would continue to hold forever. Other, wiser parts realized that this was almost certainly not true, and further realized that many of the things his parents had taught him were to deal with that exact eventuality. So he had set about enjoying life as fully as possible, aware that their future was uncertain but also that at worst, his family faced imprisonment in a Circle.
That feeling of preparedness seems to mock him now. The grief would have crashed down on him regardless, with shock and exhaustion to give it strength, but this was worse. The maelstrom of loss, helplessness, and shame hit him like a hurricane, leaving him completely defenseless against the sneering voice inside him that mocked his pride, his weakness.
You thought you were so smart, didn't you? So clever for seeing so much, for seeing where things might go. So blasted smug, weren't you? The voice laughs. You're not smart. You're not clever. You have nothing to be proud of. You're weak. You're useless. If that woman hadn't come by when she did, you'd be just another corpse in the woods. Like Mom. Like Dad. You left him. You left him to die. And now you're just going to leave them for animals to find. Like so much garbage. You're worthless.
The voice goes quiet, mostly. Darren lays there in the bushes, hugging his knees, tears streaming down his face. He says nothing back. There's nothing he can say.