Chapter 138: We will find her
Lia sobbed for a while. He said nothing nor did anything. He simply watched and allowed her to cry while running his hands through her hair until she was finally alright. She stepped back and looked at Ren, then proceeded to wipe her tears with the back of her wrist.
"Sorry," she apologized.
"It’s alright. I’d love to know what ticked you off that bad, though," he said while looking at her with eyes of genuine care.
She took a deep breath and then spoke. "He said my mother was still alive. He said it," she said the words fast, as if she would be unable to say it if she slowed down.
Ren’s eyes widened when he heard that. "Your mother is alive?" Ren asked.
"That’s what he said. My head is filled with possibilities that she is alive somewhere. I want to believe that what he said was to try and get me to save him from his death, but I can’t... I can’t help but imagine if what he said is true," she said, clenching her fist tight as she looked at the ground.
"I should throw these thoughts away. I watched my mother collapse after using the sword. There is no way that she is alive," Lia said.
"You saw her collapse. Did you stay there and be sure she died?" Ren suddenly asked, a question that he would be considered rude for asking in any world, but there was a reason for it.
She looked at him for a few seconds, then her mind drifted back to the night. She recalled that she cried while her father yanked her away after she looked at her mother’s body for a bit. She recalled crying herself to sleep, and when she got to see her brother again, it was a closed coffin.
"I-I’m not sure," she said, realizing that she was not even sure if her mother was truly dead.
Ren saw the look of realization on her face, and then he proceeded to speak.
Ren looked at her for a moment.
"There might be a possibility that she is still alive," he said.
Lia opened her mouth to argue.
"Your father said it," Ren continued before she could. "Right before the blade came down. A man does not use his last words to lie." He held her gaze. "Is there anything that could be a link? Anything at all that could point to where she might be or what happened to her?"
Lia shook her head slowly.
"There was a full burial," she said. "Everything was done. A coffin, ceremonies, all of it." She clenched her fist at her side. "There is no way she could be alive. There is just no way."
But even as she said it, her eyes dropped to the ground, the words not quite landing the way they were meant to, like she was saying them to herself more than to him and finding they were not doing the job they used to do.
"I don’t know anything," she said quietly. "I don’t have a single thing that links to her still being alive."
She shut her eyes.
When she opened them again, they were steadier, but the pain sitting behind them had not gone anywhere.
"If she was alive," she said, her voice climbing slightly, "she would have come back. She would have found me. That is what a mother does." She looked at Ren. "Right?"
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe there is a reason she could not."
Lia looked at him.
"The sword," he said. "It affects the person who uses it. You know that better than I do. Something might have happened when she used it. Something that went wrong in a way that neither of you could have predicted or controlled, not death but something else." He kept his voice even, not pushing, just laying it out. "That might be why she never came back. Not because she chose not to. Because something stopped her."
Lia stood with that.
He watched her turn it over, watched her try to build the wall back up around the possibility and find that the bricks were no longer fitting the way they used to. Her jaw worked. Her fist tightened and then loosened.
She could not verify it.
She had not seen her mother buried. She had not seen her confirmed dead with her own eyes. She had cried herself to sleep and woken up to a closed coffin and had accepted it because she was young and grieving, and there had been nothing to suggest otherwise.
Until thirty seconds ago.
"I cannot even tell myself for certain," she said, almost to herself.
"No," Ren agreed. "You cannot."
He let the silence sit for a moment and then continued.
"Search for anything. Any record, any letter, any object that links to what might have happened to her. If you find something that points to the possibility that she is out there, I will help you find her," he said plainly, with no ceremony behind it. "Whatever it takes."
She looked at him.
The gratitude that moved across her face was not the polite kind. It was the kind that came from somewhere deeper, that arrived when someone had done more than was asked of them enough times that the person receiving it no longer knew how to account for it properly.
"I don’t know why you keep helping me," she said. "I genuinely don’t. But I am grateful. More than I know how to say."
Ren looked at her for a moment.
"Do what you are meant to do," he said. "Be the baron this town needs. Keep things moving forward." His expression did not change, but something in his voice settled into something more serious. "And do not forget that we still have no idea what is actually behind the spiders. That matters. That has to be solved."
She nodded.
"We will find out if your mother is alive," he said. "I told you I would help, and I meant it. But first things first."
She nodded again, steadier this time.
Ren looked at her for one more moment.
Then he spread his wings and lifted off, rising above the treeline and disappearing into the sky, leaving her standing at the edge of the forest with everything he had said still settling around her.