Again, that long, slow blink; as though it’s weighing him as he is now, hands and knees in the dirt. It’s a stupid question, and he knows it - dying always hurts. Palamon taught him that much.
For a moment, he feels like running.
“He’s dead, then. For the last time.”
“All light casts a shadow,” says the Ghost. Jaren’s Ghost. His Ghost, now. He doesn’t know if he’s meant to laugh.
He wonders if this is how Jaren always felt, if one day he’ll learn to live with the sword that now hangs over him, heavy not just with doom and danger but with the weight of responsibility.
“Will you help me find him?”
Again, that horrible silhouette, the fire and the screams. The bark of Jaren’s cannon. The hiss of something rotten.
The Ghost turns and tilts, whirrs on its axes, stares into the noonday sun.
“I do not think it will be hard.”
He nods, as though he thinks the same, as though he knows that even were he to run, he could never outrun this. When he looks up at the Ghost, the world settles, and everything he’s brought with him - the ash that clouds his nightmares, the hot coal of fury he took from the ruins of his hometown, the Ghost of a dead man floating before him - coalesces. Weight. The moment has weight. He recognizes the sensation from his childhood, as though he’s outside of himself looking in; the feel of The Last Word, Loken’s dead eyes, a shadow in the night - he can see them laid out in a line, bringing him to this moment, to this choice.
To a spark offering a bargain. He wonders if he should be thankful. He wonders if he is a puppet.
The old anger kindles inside him again, and that faded coal begins to glow. He holds it back, just for now, because he has a purpose once more and he needs to see it, whole, without the shimmer of anger to distort it. But he lets it build, somewhere beyond his knowing, because long ago he learned the truth he once felt in the weight of Jaren’s cannon: there will always be monsters in the shadows.
He’ll just have to shine that much brighter.
He exhales, and some of the panic fades. From the ground where a boy knelt, a Gunslinger rises.
