Cameraman Never Dies-Chapter 272: I’ll be back in a bit

Seraphis coughed, and another warm spray erupted from her throat. The sound she made was not a sob nor a scream but a ragged animal noise between both, the sound of a throat that had known too much.

Eleyn reached for her, hands steady despite the way her fingers trembled, clutching Seraphis's shoulders and pulling her up so she did not fall face-first into a puddle of her own making. Mina had just disappeared, but the three people fighting Eleyn were all dead.

"Stay with me," Eleyn said, voice strangled. It was more a command than a begging, one woman holding another to a sliver of sense.

Seraphis blinked at her. Her eyes were glazed, red-rimmed, and yet they burned with the small, precise hunger of someone who had a need. "She…" Seraphis rasped. The words were thin, barely there. "She—"

"There, you see?' Mina suddenly reappeared, prompting Eleyn to be on guard. "That is what truth looks like. It spills out of you and stains you. It comes back."

Eleyn pressed a hand to Seraphis's mouth and felt the warmth there. She smelled iron and salt and the ghost of roses—something desperate Seraphis had kept in a pocket of her mind from a life before this. Eleyn's hand came away wet. She looked at Mina and found no satisfaction in hatred, only a cold, empty corridor of consequences.

"Why?" Eleyn asked, small and furious, "Impulsus!" She sent Mina flying into the distance, but her landing was flawless.

Mina shrugged and, for once, the gesture was small. "Because you asked for the truth. I brought a lantern and lit it. You must forgive me that it was the kind that reveals the floors you hide under."

Seraphis tasted blood and memory and the scent of a child and did not know how to make them separate. Clara's body lay limp in her arms. The knife was still in her hands like a small accusation. The wound was red and terrible. Seraphis's fingers closed on Clara's wrist and felt a pulse slacken into stillness, or maybe it was her imagination. She had meant defense. She had made defense into an end.

Seraphis did not know why she had become attached to the girl; maybe it was her tiny hope that made her see Selena in this girl, but she couldn't forgive herself for killing this child. She pressed her forehead to the side of Clara's cheek and felt the cold bloom of death there. Her body would carry the memory of this into the nights she had left. She would carry a child's shape where none should be. She would carry a world rearranged.

She breathed, and the world filled with small, ordinary sounds that mattered now: the rustle of cloth, Eleyn's steady hands, the distant, indifferent cry of a bird. Mina watched as a woman collapsing into ruin and a woman standing with a knife both seemed equal to her. She clapped once, a sound that was not a mock but the finish of a performance.

"Now," Mina said lightly, and she turned away as if the clearing bored her. "We have business elsewhere." She walked with the air of a person who had completed a duty and was going home. "But you have what you asked for. The truth fits you."

Seraphis watched her go and felt her whole body protest. She wanted to run and tear at the world until it bled clean. She wanted to climb the nearest tree and pull the moon down. She wanted to press her face into the earth until it told her that she had not really done this thing.

Instead, she pressed her hands to Clara's face and closed the eyes that still had the faint, terrible gleam of someone who had died not once but more than once and still carried a smile.

Eleyn held Seraphis upright while Seraphis tried to find the space to breathe despite the taste of iron in her mouth and the whole sky gone from her ribs. The clearing smelled of wet leaves and smoke and a new kind of ruin.

She knew it was futile to try and heal Seraphis; the backlash from fully unsheathing her sword was not something that could be healed. It was the downside of this weapon; the user was also its prey.

Above them, the sky was its honest color again; the moon was a distant thing of normal light. There were marks on the trees and the pocked earth, and blood on their boots and on their palms. The consequences were not going to be fixed by saying the truth had been said. They had been real, and they would be heavy, and they would not leave.

Seraphis closed her eyes and let the world pass through her. The blood that had been in the sky now pooled at her feet and soaked into the dirt like a witness. When she finally opened her eyes, they burned like someone who had been washing their face with ice. Her blade lay at her knee, its edge wet and useless now. Mina's footsteps had gone soft in the trees, and for an hour the forest made room to breathe in the wake of the violence. 𝗳𝐫𝚎𝗲𝚠𝚎𝗯𝕟𝐨𝘃𝚎𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝗺

But Seraphis wasn't looking anymore. Her gaze drifted upward, toward the break in the canopy where the sky hung untroubled. Light slid across her cheek, and something in her face softened, as if she had briefly remembered a gentler shape of the world. A thin line of red traced down from the corner of her mouth. She swallowed hard, and her voice came out like a splinter:

"Hope."

Eleyn frowned. "What?"

Seraphis blinked slowly, the motion heavy with exhaustion. "Hope," she whispered again, this time as if speaking to someone only she could see. A ghost, a memory, a child she had failed. "That would… work."

Her lips curled — just slightly, painfully — into something that was almost a smile, or maybe the echo of one she wished she still knew how to make. Ether once more circulated inside her as she cast one more principle.

Her chest rose once more. Stopped. Rose again, thin and ragged, like paper catching in the wind. And then it didn't rise at all.

For a span of heartbeats, Eleyn did not move. She kept her hands on Seraphis's shoulders as if warmth alone could coax breath back into her. The forest waited with her, held in a tense stillness that made even the night insects forget themselves.

And in the giant shade of the forest, where nobody saw her, Eleyn wept silently.