Someone laughed in the darkness, but there was no one to hear it but Laruku. Dead children, dead parents, dead siblings, and dead lovers all rotted under his feet. In the frozen dirt they melted away until they were nothing but bone, and then the bone dissolved too and by then, even the memories of them would be gone. The world kept spinning and people forgot, or they died themselves. The hybrid had a dead son too, but it had been his daughter that had buried him. For a while, he had had two dead sons, but one had seemed to have risen back out of the ashes -- he hadn't seen Arkham for almost a year now, that was only a little more than how old the boy was. He'd never really been his father.
I have a son buried,
his voice said, Outside of Inferni, where he was killed.
Had Rachias told him that? Had Gabriel? Had someone else? The knowledge was there; how it had gotten there was not. It didn't matter -- he had always known it would happen anyway. Andre only grew up to die; Laruku really should have just killed him himself that day. That would have been the responsible thing to do. Kill your own children, not other people's.