Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 77692 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77692 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 311(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
The most fitting.
“You are my whole heart,” I tell her.
Luna smiles softly. “And every beat, Halun.”
My hands find hers and squeeze. “Give me a moment with my father?”
“Of course, anything.” Luna stands on her tip toes, but I still have to bend down to give her the kiss she silently asks for. “I’ll be right here when you’re done,” she whispers against my lips.
I kiss her harder the second time. “You better.”
Bo is wiping his face and already looking beyond me to find where his mate went on the path when I turn back to my brother and father. Nowas, on the other hand, now looks only to me. It takes two strides between the two of us to close the distance but when my forehead meets my father’s for what I know will be the final time, the rest of the world bleeds away.
“I will see you again, Halun,” he tells me, his tone sure and strong. “And I am happy to soon see her.”
He lets those be his last words to me as he releases my arm and steps back when his mother’s voice calls from the catacomb.
“Now, Nowas?”
“Bey, Mother. Now.”
I don’t move to see how far Bothaki has gone, or if he’s even still in the courtyard with us. My hand does reach back for the woman I know is waiting, and sure enough, Luna’s hand finds mine and I feel her settle in behind me.
Because I didn’t want this experience to be traumatic for her, we’d walked through what would happen when my grandmother returned from deep below in the catacombs. It’s not meant to be scary, or painful for my father, and wherever he sits to drink the concoction of the Onata that Sinad produces for him is where he will stay until Bothaki or I carry him to his final resting place.
He’ll thank Hallalah for his life and death before he drinks, and when his eyes close, they’ll never again open.
That’s it.
If only …
Luna’s hand tightens around mine, but I just watch my father as he approaches his mother. Sinad smiles up at him as she produces a small ceramic bowl. Before she lets him take it, I hear her tell him, “I knew the day you were born that I would have to someday let you go, but carrying that pain has always been worth it for you, my son. The blessed one. Nowas The Blessed.”
He grins as if she’s told a joke the rest of us don't know. “Yes, I am.” my father touches his forehead to hers and says, “Mada, Rayna.”
The rain finally starts when my father turns back towards us. I know he’s put some thought into his final moments if only because I noticed the seat of cushions under the tallest tree of the garden when we first arrived. But because he didn’t note them to us, we didn’t acknowledge their presence, either.
Now, he settles into the cushions and his mother finds her way beside him. My father doesn’t ask me if I want to sit with him as well, but my feet feel embedded into the stone pathway beneath me, anyway. I probably couldn’t even move if he asked me to.
“Say hello to Mother for me,” I tell him.
He lifts the bowl, and nods to me. “I will.”
I’m suspended in time and a sense of surrealness as I watch my father murmur words over the bowl that many a Hallan have said before him while his mother begins unfurling a blanket she brought. I think she believes it hides the tremor in her hands, but I see it.
My father thanks Hallalah for his life, death, and everything in between. The rain finally starts falling from the sky when he takes his first sip of the herbs my grandmother has mixed and prepared to be sipped like any other warm drink we might enjoy. By the time his bowl is empty and slips from his hands, my cloak lined with black satin is drenched straight through and my father’s eyes close.
Instantly, the light of Hallalah leaves his physical body, the illumination taking his shape and melting into the ground beneath him. Had I blinked, I would have missed it. It’s when I want to scream the most because in a snap he’s gone, and we can’t take that back. It’s finite. Forever. I’ll never hear my father’s voice or see his eyes again.
Still at her son’s side, my grandmother watches me as she blankets my father in a quilt I know used to hang from the foot of her bed.
“It will be okay, Halun,” she tells me. “It’s your time, now. Do what must be done.”
She says it to me as if she has to remind me. Like I don’t understand how nothing will be the same once I leave this garden.