This was what was in the man’s head. And it was there in the most elemental of ways. It was almost as though he’d never grown past a certain point in his life.
Suddenly, lifelike people made of magic dust shimmered in the middle of the room. A couple dancing. Their kisses were loving, their laughter real. He gasped. “My mother,” he said. “And my father.” He reached a hand into the mist, and they vanished. He cried out. “Come back.” He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “That was before he died. Before she became sad.”
The next image was that of a woman in bed and a little lad running to her side, only to be told to leave. He needed his mother, and she’d shooed him from the room. She threw things at him until Cecelia could even feel the lad’s pain.
“Your mother changed after your father died,” Cecelia said calmly.
He nodded, continuing to watch. Two men formed in the dust. They looked alike. “My brother,” he said.
“What happened to him?” Cecelia asked.
Then image changed to that of a duel, and she saw the man fall to the ground in a pool of blood. “He died,” Mayden said simply.
She saw the image of three caskets being lowered into the ground. They couldn’t all have died at the same time, but this was in his mind, after all. “My mother,” he said. “My brother. And my father.” He took a deep shattered breath. “They all left me.”
“They all died.”
He turned to her and snarled, “They all left me!”
She nodded, finding it easier to agree.
“When did you break?” Cecelia asked softly.
The image changed, and the vision of a little lad being smacked by an older woman, probably his mother, came into view. “I changed then.” The scene changed to a different one of violence. “And then.” Still the same woman, another scene. “And then.”
The little lad grew up to be a man. But the man was broken. She could see it in his eyes. And he could as well.
“This is what I am,” he said.
“Our memories can make us, or they can take us,” Cecelia said. “It looks like yours took you.”
“They took me,” he repeated, but his tone was flat.
“It’s not your fault,” she said.
He looked up at her as though he looked for salvation.
“My sins, show them to me.”
Cecelia turned to face the wall. She couldn’t watch any more.
He grunted as each scene changed. She could hear that much. He began to fidget. And he scrambled to get away from the images until he was pressed against the low stone window, and he sat inside its frame.
“Don’t fall,” Cecelia said.
“I have done too many bad things.”
“It’s all right. I can take your memories and put them in a box. I can fix you.”
“No one can fix me.” He let the gun fall to the ground, and it went off with a resounding boom and a flash of light. Cecelia covered her ears and waited for the pain to hit her.
***
Marcus searched the ballroom calling Cecelia’s name over and over. “Why did you let her walk away from you?” Marcus shouted.
“We thought Mayden went with you,” Claire explained. She buried her face in Lord Phineas’s chest.
“Where would he have taken her?” his father asked.