Chapter 1171 (1/2)

Six months after she ran away from home, Illym remembered her surprise at being a relatively well-known killer on her current planet. People would pay her quite a bit of money, either to kill someone or not kill someone. Illym, somewhat glad to have found something that she was extraordinary at, accepted the money.

There were sometimes attempts on her life, or others paid to do the opposite of what she was doing, but that honestly just excited Illym more. For a few seconds, she would remember the clarity of her desire to live that she had discovered in those shallow puddles of dirty water in the alley. And Illym truly had learned well; she always won such fights.

Her living slowly turned more comfortable.

Because she truly was extraordinary at killing. Those moments of struggle were her life was pitted against another’s… that was the only time she truly felt alive. That small fear of death warmed her. And even when Illym needed to begin to toy with her food so it would feel interesting, it was still enough.

All the while, Illym grew more capable at struggling against the wound in her soul that would give her the shakes. When they would try to come, Illym would wrestle the shakes back until they behaved. Sometimes they came frequently, sometimes a month would pass without them arriving. Either way, Illym refused to be weak. She refused to feel helpless.

She had discovered a new Path for herself and wasn’t willing to be forced from it.

Illym remembered the day, only a month and a half before her sister’s scheduled wedding, she stood over the corpse of a child who had witnessed something he shouldn’t and realized that she would not return for Radiance’s wedding. She wiped the crimson liquid from her hands on her leather pants. Then she returned to the client and reported her success.

Even now, Illym could remember the way the child’s body had lain contorted… but she could not remember a single detail about the face. Maybe this was the living that Illym had found, but it was a Path stained with blood. It was… tainted.

And there was one person in Illym’s life that she still loved too much to taint. Better if they each struggle to find their own happiness… apart from each other.

As the day of her sister’s wedding approached, Illym’s fear mounted. Anxiety was a beast that lived in her stomach and sucked away all the moisture so that her lips were constantly dry. Despite the resolution not to go, she couldn’t ignore the approaching date.

Likely her anxiety influenced her will, because suddenly every day seemed like a struggle to resist the return of the shakes. To the point that the day before her sister’s wedding, it was almost overwhelming. The shakes seemed to have an imperative to seize her, controlling her body toward helplessness. Illym remembered fighting them tooth and nail.

And winning.

The day of Radiance’s wedding passed. Illym felt relief and a terrible emptiness. The shakes receded until they only seemed like a memory. Illym remembered years of living, becoming so powerful on that small planet that none dared cross her. They were no longer paying her money, but fealty.

She never felt alive anymore. She just felt… empty. And now that Illym had missed the date of her sister’s wedding, there seemed something… final in their parting. Like they now had a future.

Randidly witnessed a memory of Illym staring out the window, hoping that Radiance had found the same successes resisting the wounds to their soul that Illym had. The sky outside was cloudy.

It took her father twelve years to find Illym.

She remembered his face. It was so much skinner and more lined than she remembered. And what he then told her seemed to infect Illym with that same strange sense of aging.

The day before Radiance’s wedding, they had found her dead in her bed. Wasted away to nothing, because in the prior six months Radiance had only awakened from her deep sleep for a few scant hours at a time. Radiance’s fiance had been devasted, crying for days until the body was buried. And Illym’s parents hadn’t seen him since.

And then her father confessed that he only discovered her by coincidence. After the disappearance of Illym and the fact that she didn’t come back for the wedding, her parents believed that Illym had died. For twelve long years, they had mourned both girls.

Illym couldn’t breathe. She remembered realizing that the affliction she had struggled so hard against, the weakness that Illym took such great pleasure in smothering, was probably the soul of her sister. The echoing return of the shakes she experienced as Illym realized she had slowly strangled Radiance to death, refusing to allow weakness into herself.

Then there was the memory of her father, leaning forward toward Illym and saying in his gravelly tone, “One of the last things Radiance said was… ‘when you see Illym, remind her to enjoy life more. It’s… such a blessing, isn’t it?’”

Illym, the terror of that small world, began to cry. She looked inside for her weakness and found none. She only cried harder.

The two halves of the soul had finally been made whole. Yet she hadn’t even noticed.

Illym went back to live with her parents and realized a terrible truth; her parents were the same as she was. They were powerful, but they reached that power by climbing over mountains of corpses. It was only ever Radiance who was different. It was only ever Radiance that was special.

It was Radiance that deserved her happily-ever-after.