Since Esmera was abandoned on a stranger's doorstep as a baby, the only person who has looked out for her is herself.
Until a lark starts visiting her, leaving behind exotic flowers and iridescent pebbles that the internet doesn't recognise.
Esmera...
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They must've merely been retracing their earlier steps through the cavernous network to return to Parnakshi, but Esmera's feet felt heavier than they did then with suppressed grief.
She shouldn't hurt this much for Hira. The wildcat was free of this world and its pain. It was only Esmera who had a heavy responsibility to bear.
She had this week to focus on helping Tauram save Milatanur. They would succeed.
There would be no uncertainty, no wavering on Esmera's part. If she failed to protect Milatanur from the gods' wrath, whoever killed her family would be dead before she'd ever reach them, and she couldn't let that happen. For Hira, and for everyone else who had been injured or killed in the massacre 23 years ago.
Tauram kept his arm around her but said nothing. It unsettled Esmera. She always knew him to have some retort, some comeback to lighten any mood. Maybe he didn't know what to say. What was there for him to say?
Even Anjarah seemed to have no words, a flickering silhouette leading the way through the dim, dusty tunnels with a little shadow scurrying at her feet.
Esmera replayed Hira's words in her mind over and over again. It was the only sound she could hear apart from the soft, feeble breathing surrounding her.
It was the only time she would ever talk to anyone in her family. She hadn't known that at the time, or she might've used the opportunity better.
She had thought she might be able to visit Hira again and ask her all the questions she had about her family, but there would be no other visits. No other answers unless she visited the past with the memory walker.
But there was someone who had lived in the past, someone who might have some answers for her, and he was right beside her.
"What were my brothers' names?" she asked Tauram.
There were three of them, he had told her the day before, but that was all she knew about them. When she closed her eyes and tried to recall their faces, all that came up were blanks. Maybe that was no surprise. Esmera had the gift of auditory memory, not visual.
She could only guess at her brothers' appearances. They must've had curly hair like her. They must've shared her olive-toned skin and deep brown eyes.
She closed her eyes. She thought she could remember their childish laughing. She could remember them exclaiming the first time they saw her, heard them shoving each other as they tried to be the first to hold her little hand.
She didn't know whether it was her mind replaying actual memories or just wishful thinking that she had some recollection of the family she would never know.
"Givan was the oldest," said Tauram, his voice rough when he finally spoke. "Then came Yasif, then Abi."
All three of them gone, just children. Esmera didn't want to think about it—whether they had fought, whether they had suffered, how terrified they must've been as they watched everyone around them die.
