I blinked, the image of the ash-piles seared onto my vision. The tavern swam back into focus. The stranger was still there, waiting for an answer to his foolish, heartbreaking word. 'Stuck.'
"People don't get stuck here," I said, my voice hollow, the memory leaching all its warmth. "We're brought here."
His brow furrowed. "What? By who?" he asked, confused.
"Many people have theories, but the leading one is that we were brought here by the Estuary Eye," I said, the rag in my hand moving mechanically over the same spot on the glass. "You definitely saw that thing, right?"
The Estuary Eye a massive eye in the sky, as though reality had cracked and let something stare back offers a glimpse behind the curtain of existence. Nobody can say much about it. The Greyones seem to worship it (if that is what they do), and staring at it too long gives headaches, nausea, and sometimes even the grotesque bleeding from the eye socket, as if the thing should not be seen by mortal vision.
"Yes, I saw it," he said, a shudder running through his frame. "But my instincts told me to look away. It felt... hungry."
"Wise man," I muttered. "Well, anyway, what does your sister look like? Maybe someone has seen her." It was a pointless question. I already knew. A woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, arriving five years ago? There had only been one.
"Her name is Lana. She has blonde hair like me with blue eyes. She is about five feet tall." He leaned forward, a desperate energy emanating from him. "She has a spirit, a fire. You'd remember her."
Lana. I remembered her all too well. She had arrived full of that same fire, refusing to be cowed. She had asked questions, challenged the gloom. She'd been kind to Nada. She had arrived about five years ago, just before... before the cove. And her defiance had drawn the wrong kind of attention. She was killed and brutally slaughtered by the Greyones for sport. They didn't turn her to ash. That time, they used claws we didn't know they possessed. It was a message. A reminder that they could be cruel in more ways than one.
"Oh, I think I know who you're talking about," I said, my throat tight. I had to tread carefully. To offer the truth too bluntly was a cruelty of its own. "She wore an alabaster pendant. A little bird, wasn't it?"
His face transformed. The grim determination melted away, replaced by a pure, unadulterated hope that was so bright it was painful to behold. He looked younger, the weight on his shoulders momentarily lifted. "Yes! Yes, I carved that for her when we were children. Where is she?" he asked, his voice cracking with emotion.
Hope. I know enough now to know that having it is one of the worst things for you in this place. It lifts you high, and when you fall, you break. I had to be the one to make him fall. There was no kindness in delay.
I placed the glass down and met his gaze, letting my own mask of weary resignation drop for a second, allowing him to see the genuine sorrow there. "I am sorry," I said, the words heavy and final. "But she died five years ago."