Session Twenty-Five — 08/17/26
1832 AS — Namal 27
The Silence Where Bridget Should Be
I do not know how to write this.
That is not true. I know how to write. I have always known how to write, how to turn terror into rhythm and blood into metaphor, how to polish disaster until it can be carried by music. I know how to make the room laugh after the blade has been drawn. I know how to make grief stand upright long enough to bow.
I do not know how to write this.
The day began still beneath the ice, in the cave that had closed behind us like a mouth. We had already found carvings older than letters and a shape moving through the dark that we called a ghost because naming a thing is easier than understanding it. That morning we pressed farther in, following suspicion, thin ice, and the stubborn belief that the way out of a trap is often hidden deeper inside it. This is the sort of belief adventurers praise afterward and curse while practicing it.
There were markings in the cave: infernal signs cut or drawn into the walls and floor, language with teeth in it. Mikani could make sense of some of it, enough to tell us that serpent or dragon signs were present, enough to know that this was not merely old art or weathered memory. Behind the ice, or beyond the ice, we found the shape of a working: a summoning circle, like a cousin to the one we had seen upon the tower. In its center was the word for ice in Demonic, and around it signs for calling things that should have remained elsewhere.
I have learned to dislike circles.
They suggest order. They suggest containment. They suggest that someone believed power could be drawn, named, placed, and controlled. This is arrogance in geometry, and it rarely ages well.
The circle answered.
An ice elemental came forth, and with it mephits of ice, a polar serpent, and a frost salamander, all cold and motion and appetite. The chamber became noise: cracking ice, breath frosting in the air, steel biting, spells bursting, shouted warnings, pain measured in numbers because numbers are sometimes the only way the mind can bear what the body is enduring. I remember fragments more than sequence. I remember Faban moving before thought could become fear. I remember Gildas hurling power into the chamber until the ice itself seemed to ring. I remember Roon and Corvinas standing where sane men would not stand. I remember Mikani pouring healing into wounds that opened faster than mercy could close them.
And I remember Bridget.
She was where she always was, somehow small and impossible to miss. Quick, sharp, brave in the way of people who would insult death if it stood too close. I have been told by many people to be quiet over the years, but no one did it with quite her mixture of annoyance, affection, and absolute confidence that I had earned it. She teased me as though it were a sacred duty. She drank as though the world owed her the cup. She laughed in places laughter had no business surviving.
Gods, I miss that already.
The fight worsened. I do not know how many times we nearly lost someone before we truly did; death stood so close to all of us that it became difficult to tell who was still arguing with it and who had gone silent. Corvinas fell beyond ordinary healing. Bridget fell as well. Others were down, bleeding, freezing, or held in the grip of things born from the circle. The air was full of calculations: who could be reached, who could be healed, who was merely unconscious, who had crossed the line that only Revivify might cross.
There are choices no person should be asked to make.
Mikani had one diamond's worth of time and grace. One spell. One chance to call a soul back before the door closed. Corvinas lay dead, a servant of his god, a man of oaths and light and infuriating righteousness. Bridget lay dead too, my friend, our friend, the little terror who had survived so much that I had foolishly begun to believe survival was simply one of her habits.
Mikani chose Corvinas.
I write that sentence and hate the shape of it. Not because I believe she chose wrongly. That is the cruelty. I cannot even give my grief the clean satisfaction of blame. Corvinas lives because Mikani did what she believed was right in a moment that would have broken weaker souls. Bridget is gone because there was not enough mercy in the world for both of them.
What kind of gods make mercy scarce?
Fuck the gods.
I know. I know what I am writing. I know there are powers who listen, powers who judge, powers who have granted us breath and healing and warning and flame. I know Mikani's faith saved Corvinas. I know Namaloa has answered before. I know songs are supposed to soften anger into meaning, to make suffering bearable by arranging it into something beautiful.
I do not want beauty.
I want Bridget to tell me to shut up.
I want one more drink I pretend not to want because she is watching. I want one more barb thrown across a campfire, one more eye roll, one more impossible shot from the shadows, one more moment where she makes danger seem rude for interrupting us. I want the world to have made a different bargain. I want the rules to have bent for her the way they bend for kings, monsters, prophecies, and every other grand thing that thinks itself important.
But the rules did not bend.
Corvinas returned to himself, his soul pulled back by Mikani's hand and the last narrow thread of divine permission. Bridget did not. We learned, somehow, that her soul could not be returned, that even if another spell had been attempted, it would not have answered as we needed. I do not understand why. I do not know whether that knowledge is comfort or merely another knife.
When the fighting ended, the chamber stank of death, melted ice, and things that should not have been alive in the first place. A giant named Rastov appeared afterward, as though the world had remembered we still needed a road. He spoke, took interest in the remains of the salamander, and led us onward through the cold toward the Monastery of the Open Hand. I remember someone asking who would carry Bridget. I remember that her body was small.
Too small.
There is a cruelty in carrying the dead. They become weight without motion, silence without rest. They do not argue about the route. They do not complain about the cold. They do not insult the bard when he deserves it, which is often. A body can be borne by arms, but the absence has no proper place to hold it.
I had wondered, only yesterday, whether I had placed my trust in the right people when I revealed the Grimoire. Tonight that question feels smaller and larger at once. These are the people I trusted with the truth, and one of them is gone before I know what that trust will cost. Did I give Bridget a burden she should never have had? Did she die carrying a secret I placed among us, or did she die because this is simply what the road demands from those who walk it?
I do not know.
I only know that I told them the truth, and then the world took one of them from me.
There will be a burial. There will be words, because there are always words, and because I am cursed with them even when they fail. Perhaps there will be a song someday, though tonight that thought feels obscene. How does one rhyme with absence? How does one set a melody to the space beside the fire where laughter used to sit?
No more drinking.
No more laughs.
No more teasing the bard.
No more telling me to shut up.
Gods, I miss that most of all.
The monastery waits ahead, and the Wells still fail, and Salazar still moves, and the Grimoire still rests beneath my hand with all its impossible weight. The world has not paused for Bridget, which is perhaps the cruelest proof that it is still the world. But I will pause. I will write her here, because memory is the only grave I can dig tonight.
Bridget was here.
She laughed.
She fought.
She was loved.
And fuck the gods for making that past tense.
