Everything's Lost To The Wind (1/5)

Writers: Avery
Date Posted: 5th May 2026

Characters: Irrkali
Description: Irrkali goes to see her son.
Location: Dolphin Cove Weyr
Date: month 9, day 28 of Turn 12
Notes: This is a followup to “Leaf On The Wind” from last year - the storm Threadfall. It’s in 5 parts because the original was over 6k. Part 1 of 5.

There was a section of the Infirmary that was quiet and dark. Located
near the back, out of the way of the triage areas, the surgery zones,
the critical care area, far from everywhere where people were
constantly bustling. Even out of the way of the beds where people
convalesced for days or weeks, where healers moved in and out on their
scheduled rotations. There was a small area that was only in use
sometimes. An area often avoided. One with a hush over it. Everyone
spoke and walked quietly in that area. In the rest of the Infirmary,
there was constant light and constant noise - from the injured making
sounds of pain or calling for help, from the healers rushing from bed
to bed to tend their patients, from the sounds of feet against stone
and instruments against trays, the sounds of voices giving commands
and whispering comfort and stating diagnosis. But in this area, there
was only loss, hanging heavy in the quiet and the dark.

The morgue. Or the resting chamber. The viewing room. Different
locations might call it different names, but it was always the same
accursed place in the end; the chamber of no life.

There were no windows for natural light in that stone chamber. Glows
in baskets on the walls and hanging from the ceilings typically
provided it. After the recent renovations, electrical overheads had
been installed throughout the entire Infirmary - after all, it was
important for healers to have bright lights to see when they treated
patients, unclear vision could cause harm to patients. But it was also
good for resting patients to have deep darkness for sleep,
uninterrupted by bright lights natural or artificial.

So when the overheads were turned off, it was the kind of dark where
one could wake from sleep and not know if their eyes were closed or
open, where night or day had no meaning. Only the glowbaskets (when
placed and uncovered) could provide light to see by, to distinguish
those awake and asleep. Asleep and unconscious. Unconscious and dead.

Sometimes the glowbaskets stayed hooded, their glow muted. Sometimes
seeing wasn’t a blessing. Sometimes the comforting dark was needed.

Like right now, as a woman enters to see the body of her son.

~*~

What does it feel like to walk into a room when you know it holds the
dead body of a person you love?

When you enter a new space normally, your eye might cast methodically
to take in certain things you’re seeking, or might dart around wildly
to take in everything around you at once. When you enter a room where
you know a corpse is, you look wildly until you lay eyes on the only
part that matters. The small slice where the occupant you’re here for
rests. Once you look at the shell of someone you have known and loved
for years, your eye freezes on the sight, riveted by the horror that
will burn its way into your mind’s eye forever.

You will see one or more of those breath-stealing horrors - that
particular pallor of skin tone, that stillness of the chest, that
vacancy of gaze, that unnatural rigidity - and it will let your
primitive hindbrain that does nothing but keep you alive know
instinctively ‘this is no longer alive’ and shrink back in
shock-fear-preservation so that you don’t meet the same fate: You know
it’s _gone_.

And then another process in the mind runs, the one of identifying
socially, of matching the details of what’s in front of you to your
visual directory of everyone you’ve known and met. Whether it’s the
fair, the facial features, a particular mole, your mind will sort
through whatever’s remaining on the body and will find a match and
tell you: You know this person. And then your conscious mind has to
perform the final task and overlay image of ‘person you know’ over
‘dead thing’. Not that it wants to. A part of it will keep spinning
out. Reaching for any reason to deny what it sees. The conclusion it
has drawn. To have it not be that you recognize the body as who it is
- was. It has to be a mistake. Someone else.

But your mind knows, and now you have to feel it. You know _them_, how
they’re related to you, be a distant acquaintance, a constant
annoyance, a rival, a lover, a child, a parent, a sibling. Everything
about that relationship that you’ve ever felt over the history of
time, it swells up in a giant surge that hits you in the gut all at
once, no difference in strength by temporal distance, between the rage
of five turns ago and the warm affection of eighteen turns ago and the
joyfulness of last week. Memories of all the time you’d spent with
them floods your brain, every time you had a chance to interact,
clearer than it’s ever been before. Every analysis you ever ran on
this relationship, every awareness of who else connects to them, to
you and them, every pair and triad and group connection between you
and them and others, remembered.

Your body stores the physical echoes of emotions you’ve felt. It
reacts to a dump of adrenaline hormones as everything hits you all at
once. Viscerally, in the gut, in the hindbrain, and now in the heart -
that it’s _someone of yours_ dead. Truly dead, with no possibility of
breathing again. You know now: _they’re_ gone. They’re _gone_.
_They’re gone_ is one phrase now. Together will be twined these two
things ; the state of not-being and their identity as a person,
everything they were to you. (Everything you could have been in the
future still. But there’s no future. Not anymore.)

It hits you, and then you have to decide what to do next, how to
process this massive insult to the body and mind and heart. There are
many options, physical and emotional. They may look similar between
two different people, even though they are motivated by the uniqueness
of each relationship pair. In the end, your response is yours and
yours alone.

This is the one she takes.

In that cubicle in the quiet back corner of the Infirmary, Irrkali
walks in. She sees the body of her son. She falls to her knees by the
cot, and screams.

Last updated on the May 24th 2026

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Everything's Lost To The Wind (1/5)