The Quiet Refusal

“Sometimes the worst wounds aren’t the ones that bleed—they’re the ones you refuse to stand up from.”

Kain stood motionless before the Portal, his thin frame dwarfed by the translucent shimmer of its surface. The light played against the planes of his face, casting faint reflections across his skin like ghostly fingerprints. I watched him from a short distance, torn between the part of me that defaulted to practical thinking and the quieter, more painful thread that had woven itself through everything since the night fell apart. Loss had begun to accumulate here—not in sudden ruptures, but in slow, brutal layers.

He looked so young then. Not just in years, but in the way his shoulders curved forward, in the slackness of his arms hanging at his sides. The usual edge in his stance—so often animated by wit or sarcasm—had been stripped away. What remained was something raw. Exposed. It tugged at something deep inside me. An ache, soft and unwelcome, like an old injury flaring with the cold.

Beatrix had gone through before he could reach her—one moment there, the next a flare of unnatural light and she was simply gone. The Portal pulsed silently in her absence, indifferent to the longing it had left behind. Kain hadn’t moved since, his breath shallow, his expression etched with disbelief. He looked like a boy left on a train platform long after the carriage had disappeared.

I moved to stand beside him, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. He didn’t acknowledge me, but that didn’t matter. Some griefs weren’t meant to be spoken to—they just needed to be witnessed. We both stared into the shimmer, as if the act of looking might bring her back.

The weight of the last few hours pressed hard against my chest. Duke’s still form. Jamie’s hollow grief. Joel’s absence, a hole cut straight through our group. It was all beginning to coagulate into something I couldn’t quite name—a disoriented heaviness, as though time itself had slowed and thickened.

Kain’s face remained turned toward the Portal, his gaze caught in that liminal place where she had vanished. There was no rage in him, no demand. Just the quiet, bitter confusion of someone who’d trusted in something, and found it lacking.

My eyes drifted downward, drawn by the instinctive catalogue of injuries I couldn’t seem to turn off. That was when I saw it—the dark bloom of blood seeping through the makeshift bandage at his leg, sluggish but insistent.

“Kain, your leg is bleeding,” I said quietly, trying to keep the alarm from tipping into panic. My voice was edged with concern, sharper than I meant it to be.

He didn’t answer straight away, but I saw his jaw tighten, the faint flinch of someone pulled momentarily back to themselves. The stain was growing, spreading like a warning signal, and for the first time since Beatrix’s disappearance, I felt something close to urgency rise up through the numbness.

Kain’s glance at his leg was fleeting, but in that split second I saw everything—the dull throb of pain behind his eyes, the weariness seeping into his bones. There was no drama in his reaction, just that quiet, familiar resignation I was beginning to recognise in all of us—the kind that settled in after too much loss, too little sleep, and a landscape that seemed bent on unravelling us. He masked it quickly, schooling his features into a blank stoicism, but the pain had already escaped—just for a heartbeat—before he could lock it down again.

He turned and began to limp toward the base of the sandy hill, dragging his weight with a stiffness that made me wince with every faltering step. The movement looked wrong, each shift of muscle a negotiation with agony. And then, with a low, exhausted grunt, he collapsed onto the packed earth. A small puff of dust rose around him and drifted away on the dry breeze, as if the land itself was trying to shrug him off.

I rushed to his side, breath catching in my throat, knees sinking into the sand beside him. My hands went instinctively to his arms, fingers curling with urgency around sweat-slicked fabric and too-thin limbs. “Come on, Kain. We should head back to camp,” I urged, my voice tight with worry. I wasn’t just trying to move him—I was trying to hold back the fear that maybe he couldn’t be moved at all. That maybe this was the line his body had drawn in the sand.

But he shook his head, slow and firm, refusing even to look at me. His jaw had set in that familiar, stubborn line, the one I was rapidly learning meant no—not just to me, but to anything resembling common sense. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet. Not until he decided. That same defiance that had fuelled him to chase after Beatrix was now pinning him to the ground like an anchor.

I exhaled sharply, the breath leaving my lungs with a sound that felt too much like defeat. There was no point dragging him. He’d dig in harder. “Fine,” I said, the word falling out of me like a snapped twig. “But I’m going to bring Glenda and some supplies back to look after that wound.” My tone brooked no argument—I didn’t care how much resolve he thought he had. That leg was going to be dealt with, whether he liked it or not.

He didn’t respond. Just stared out toward the hazy horizon, eyes distant, face set against the ache in his body and whatever storm still raged behind his silence.

I stood slowly, brushing sand from my knees, casting one last glance over my shoulder as I began to move away. He looked impossibly small down there—crouched at the foot of that hill, half-swallowed by ochre dust and shadow, like some relic left behind by a harsher age. There was something unbearable in it. His strength, still there, but buried now beneath layers of fatigue and unspoken hurt.

I pressed a hand to my chest, as if I could soothe the twisting pain behind my ribs, and turned away. He needed help. And I wasn’t going to let him disappear into that sand without it.