Requiem
I don’t remember anything that happened after that.
I don’t remember anything for a month after the war ended. I don’t know why. If I could have had it the way I wanted it, I would have forgotten the war itself, and all the dreadful things that I had been through. But the only part I got to forget was the part that came after. The last thing I remember is sobbing above Peter’s motionless body, there in the rubble of the school we had once gone to. The rest of the story has been filled in by anecdotes, but I’m as distant from that story as you are from mine.
Mom found me sleeping next to Peter. She says that I slept for a whole day, and didn’t wake up again until I was in the hospital in the city of Bozeman, many miles away from Salem. I didn’t say a word to anyone for a week, or so I am told. I didn’t show any emotion. Mom was worried sick about me. Dad and Clea came to see me, but I was like an empty shell. I didn’t cry until the day Silas Darrow came to visit me with his dad. The moment I laid eyes upon him, it was like it all came crashing back to me. He sat down on my bedside and hugged me, and we both cried and cried for what felt like hours. But I wasn’t crying out of grief. If anything, it was relief. Silas was alive. He had made it through all this.
The Third Battle of Salem was the end. The Phoenix Stone was destroyed, and the Death Eaters were finally gone for good. But the casualties of the war had been high. 13,000. That was the estimated number of people who had died in all three battles, though the actual number might never be known. The largest casualties had been from the Soul Vortex in the Second Battle, and the Battle of the Rings in the Third. But every theater of the war had seen immense loss of life, losses that no number could ever do justice to. Salem would never be the same again. That peaceful town where wizards, witches, and muggles all lived together in harmony was a thing of the past. What remained now was only the hallowed remains of the place where I’d grown up, a place forever tainted and grayed by the monster of war.
It would take years for the city to be rebuilt. The lives and livelihoods that had been shattered by the Death Eaters could never be brought back, but human beings have a strange sort of tenacity about them. Within a few months of the Phoenix War’s conclusion, the Shichang Asian market was back in business. The buildings downtown destroyed by the Soul Vortex were repaired. Angel Carson was elected mayor on a cabinet of peaceful restoration and muggle-wizard cooperation. The Aurors remained in town, and established a new regional office, dedicated to the sole mission of safeguarding the city from ever experiencing another Phoenix War. Donovan Trackwell was dead, but like Lord Voldemort before him, there would always be others eager to take his place. The work was far from done.
The one who had ended Darkanoss’s life was Jared Manning.
It was the sacrifice he made for his sister. When he threw himself in front of Jenna Widow’s Killing Curse, he had placed a protective charm over Zoe. It was the same thing that had happened to Harry Potter decades ago, when his mother sacrificed her life to protect him from Lord Voldemort. When Trackwell attempted to cast the Killing Curse on Zoe, it rebounded, and ended his life instead. It was his final mistake, the one thing he had overlooked. Or not. Trackwell may have thought he planned for every contingency, but there was one thing he could have never counted on: the love that the people of Salem had for each other. Love tied Emma’s soul to me, and allowed me to destroy the stone. Love protected Zoe from the curse, love that ultimately finished off Trackwell once and for all. Love had saved the people in Lynnville, and the ones evacuating from the Soul Vortex, and the people taking shelter in Summerroot. They rebuilt that school, or so I am told. A symbol of the future that Salem wanted to strive for, a future not defined by the violence of the past. A future of peace.
But that was a future I would not see. Not long after the Third Battle of Salem, I left that city and never came back. I enrolled at the Utah Academy, the newly opened magic school several states away, and graduated four years later. I found a career that kept me outside of the United States, and far, far away from that town of so many memories both beautiful and painful. I couldn’t bring myself to look at the faces of the other survivors, or even my own family. All I wanted was to run away, and that’s all I’ve done in the past ten years: run away. I don’t even know where I’m going anymore. I maintain a pretense of having a life, like anyone else, but the truth is that my life ended a long time ago. I died there on the floor of John Proctor Middle School, next to my best friend. These words are written by nothing but a shell, inhabited by the remnants of a boy who did not deserve to survive where so many others perished.
There is no lesson to this story. That is the conclusion I have come to, after having relived it all. Or if there is a lesson, then perhaps I’m too blind to see it. I know no answers will find me here, at least. I can type away for hours and wish to find the solution to it all, but I can never undo the things that have already happened. There can be no moving on, not for people like me. The gentle teachings of Sam and Summerroot, those that taught us to be peaceful and kind, and not do harm upon one another – they have no meaning in this world of hate. That’s what I thought, at least.
But there is one thing. There’s still something inside of me. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. It’s not a sensation I can put into words. But it reminds me of those days of my youth, when I would skip stones on the river with Peter, or when Silas and Liam and I would explore the woods searching for hidden wonders among the mountains of Salem. It reminds me of being on the playground with Emma. That sensation is her, the soul that still lives within me, tied to my own. And even though my own soul is empty, hers keeps me living, keeps me breathing. She’s filled with all this unnecessary hope, the unwavering hope of a child. The kind of hope so stubbornly naïve that nothing can ever take it away. And though my mind may never know why my feet move forward, Emma’s flame stays with me, and keeps me carrying on.
Today, I received a calling. For the first time in ten years, I’m going back to that place. To Salem.
To my home.