The Heroes Fall -1- When War Calls

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  Jaden didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t know what he was going to do. He felt he didn’t know anything anymore. Everything he had come to believe was being taken from him, again. It was the fall of Callibra repeated. Nothing was safe. Not him, not Alyssa, not the cities they would have lived in. Nothing.

  Jaden continued to run deep into the forest, the endobraces ignited, allowing him to dodge through the trees automatically as his mind tried to escape elsewhere. It had all been pointless. Everything he had achieved was in vain. He should have stayed with Alyssa like he had wanted to. He shouldn’t have listened to Adonis or Blair. They had used him. They had made him leave Alyssa to deliver their message and they had let Alyssa fall. They had given him some training, but it had only been because his grandfather had wanted them to. The Daijuar, he thought, did not remain elusive because they needed to hide, they just didn’t care for anything but themselves. Those that were meant to protect the innocent were frauds, and now there was nowhere he could turn.

  He closed his eyes in defeat, running blindly through the forest. His foot soon clipped a tree root at the edge of a stream with a waterfall crashing down into it on the right. He fell face first into the water with a great splash, and it began to glisten with what looked like thousands of tiny stars dancing on the surface as the endobraces released their energy into it. Jaden made no attempt to get up as the waterfall pushed him further downstream toward another steep descent. He could hear something inside him telling him to stand up and save himself, but it was soon overridden by a single repeating question.

  Why?

  There was nothing left. It had all come to an end. Soon his final breath of air would fail, and he would take in another of water, giving himself back to the earth.

  But as the air pocketed under the water, nothing else entered his lungs. He was being lifted above the surface, as if the endobraces had a mind of their own and were saving his life. As he reached the bank, he coughed out some of the water he had allowed in and he opened his eyes to a woman sitting in front of him.

  ‘Raquel,’ he whispered.

  She bowed her head to him and then looked to the stars above, where the rings shown brighter than usual. She was no longer paying him any attention. Ignoring him, as if she didn’t care why he had chosen to let himself drown, why he had been running or why he was crying. Jaden put his head down on the ground in front of her lap. He did not feel up to trying to understand her this night, or how she had come to be in the same place as him at all. The kiss he had seen Alyssa give her new love haunted him. He had not been ready for it. He had expected her to be happy to see him, not to look at him as if she had never met him in her entire life. It was too much. What had he done to deserve it?

  ‘I can’t do this anymore. I can’t live like this,’ he said, and he felt Raquel’s warm hands rest on his back, soothing and calming him as he drifted half to sleep.

  ‘Your power grows,’ she said, but Jaden did not seem to hear.

  ‘They call me lost,’ he said after a few minutes, ‘but maybe I am the one that found the way.’

  There was no response given by Raquel, and they remained where they were for the rest of the night, with Raquel doing what she could to help heal his wounds.