Page 59 of Veil of Death and Shadow

Rina was my best friend, but she was Sora’s sister. Still, even with the evidence stacked up against me, Sora refused to blame me for her death. She also adamantly resisted every single one of my attempts to refuse her friendship, to push her away. Eventually, I grew exhausted trying, and allowed myself the hope that the universe saw fit to let me keep her.

I hadn’t let myself add any other close relationships since—platonic or romantic—nor did I have any plans to. Sora was alive and here—a reality I still couldn’t quite let myself feel safe in—and that would be enough. I didn’t need anyone else. I wouldn’t risk anyone else.

“What kind of curse?” Levi asked, the stretch of silence oddly heavy now, where it had been light and playful just a moment ago.

“She’s convinced that everyone she loves is doomed to die an early death.” Sora dropped her head on my shoulder. “I’ve never really believed in curses myself, but I can’t imagine a more tragic one than that.”

“Well,” he shifted next to me, and I felt his stare like a flame against my cheek, “you clearly managed to get past her defenses, didn’t you? And from what I can tell, you’re still very much alive. So, if there was a curse, surely, it’s broken, no?”

“You’d think.” She tried skipping a stone, but it landed with a heavy plop, just two feet in front of us. “At least that's what I’ve been trying to tell her. For years. But apparently not. And she refuses to let anyone else in to test my theory that if she was cursed, she’s not anymore. Frank’s the closest thing she has to a friend outside of me, which is just absurdly depressing.”

“How’d you manage it?” he asked, the two of them carrying on with the conversation as if I wasn’t here, even though I was quite literally lodged between them. “Get her to be your friend, I mean.”

“Sheer stubbornness,” I muttered, “and a relentless lack of self-preservation.”

“Pure persistence, an iron will, and an absolute rejection of every attempt she made to push me away.” Her voice was full of pride, but I could read the layer of sadness in her expression when her eyes briefly met and held mine.

For the most part, Sora was an open book, at least when it came to the joyful and adventurous parts of herself she wanted to share with people. Her response to everything we’d been through was to love with abandon and wear her heart on her sleeve—the exact opposite of mine. It was like the moment shelost Rina, she became determined to live her life to the fullest for the both of them.

Still, open as she was, it was rare for her to be quite this forthcoming, least of all with someone we’d been on a first name basis with for all of an hour. Usually, her lack of filter was one of my favorite things about her. Right now, I’d give my left kidney for her to stop talking.

When she opened her mouth to say something else, I pressed my hand across her lips—the vibration of her groan tickling my fingers.

“I think you’ve hit your tequila limit tonight.” I grabbed the bottle from her, taking a long pull from it myself—a failed attempt to dispel how uncomfortable this conversation was starting to make me—and then set it down next to Levi, where she couldn’t reach it.

She pulled my hand away, her nose scrunched in a pout. “No I didn’t. That bottle is still practically full.”

“If it helps,” Levi said, his voice almost a whisper as he picked up the bottle and started to pick at the label, “sometimes it feels like I’m cursed too.”

When I turned towards him, I expected to find a teasing grin on his face. But when I studied him, the final rays of the tired sun delicately framing the shadows in his expression, I swallowed back my retort. He wasn’t mocking me or poking fun.

All I saw stretched across the sharp contours of his face was a familiar, suffocating grief. He wore it the way I did—a well-loved uniform that he could disguise or temporarily transform, but at the end of the day, when you took off the mask, the base of him was this.

“What kind of curse?” Sora asked.

“I don’t know.” He considered for a moment, likely trying to temper how much he should share in a way that Sora had failed to do. “The kind where my entire life leads in exactly onedirection—no matter how hard I try to veer it in a different one.” His eyes held mine with a determined focus. Something about the way he looked at me felt like he could see through me, like he could shuffle through the pages, reading every thought—even the ones that I fought to keep hidden from myself. “And that particular path is, unfortunately, a lonely one. Not one that I can drag anyone along for anyway.” He let out a humorless chuckle and shook his head, an attempt to brush the thought away, or maybe just frustration with himself for revealing a wound he wasn’t ready for strangers to see. “I guess that’s not really a curse. Maybe more so fate.”

Fate.

The word brushed against my brain like a caress. I’d never really believed in fate or destiny. My life has been a series of simply trying to survive one moment long enough to reach the next. But now that he mentioned it, the lines between fate and a curse appeared rather fragile.

If anything, fate seemed worse—inevitable and inescapable—more suffocating even than a curse.

A curse, at least, could be broken.

Shrugging, he peeled away a thin layer of the label, his focus locked on the nearly translucent strip of paper like it held the answers to the universe’s most confounding questions. “Sometimes fate can have a way of feeling as hopeless as a curse, I guess. Unavoidable, like I’m a pawn in my own life.”

I felt a strange urge to reach out for his hand, to ease the heaviness that seemed to suddenly shroud him, to pull him back from wherever his thoughts had carried him away to.

“Who says that you don’t have agency in constructing your own fate?” Sora sat up, her eyes clear and firm—any sign of the tequila’s effects dissipating instantly. Her jaw clenched as she studied him, like she was angry on his behalf. “Your life belongs to you, Levi, and you alone—don’t let anyone box you insomewhere you don’t want to be. If there’s something you want, go after it—fuck anyone who gets in your way. Even fate.”

She delivered the speech with the focus and determination of a general leading a crew into battle. I felt the familiar flare of her protectiveness. Her iron will and stubbornness extended far beyond her own benefit.

A heavy silence fell over us all for a moment.

“Maybe fate is real,” she said, her voice quieter now. “I don’t know, and I suppose I never will. But if I do have a fate and it leads me somewhere I don’t want to go, at least I know I won't go down without a fight. Sometimes just the illusion of free will can be enough.”

For most of her life, Sora had been dragged through the mud, held there by rules and people who fought to keep her down. In some ways she had it far worse than I did.

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