Kyle watched it all, intrigued despite himself. Naked, covered in dirt and ash, Arin was clothed in the most opaque material of all: determination. She wore it like a shroud, obscuring everything but her intent. Even had she the most alluring figure in creation, Kyle was sure he'd ignore it all, simply to watch her proceed with her grim determination.
Which she did. The coil of rope was excessively heavy, but a single end of it was manageable. That end, she tied to a kitchen cleaver she found in the wreckage. Heavy enough to give direction, but light enough to lift. She bent backwards and with the knife and rope in her right hand—her good arm, if such a thing existed—and lurched forward, flinging the awkward mass sailing over the skewed timber. When the knife came back down, it reversed direction, using the beam as a fulcrum, and swung back toward her. She stared at the oncoming knife without care, and only threw her arms up as a delayed reflex. The finely honed blade, one her mother sharpened almost daily for proper chopping, bit deeply into her hands.
Kyle winced on her behalf. The quill was one thing, but now she bled freely. He watched her curl her right hand around the smaller end of the blade, and yank her left hand backward, dislodging it from the deepest edge. That hand, slick with blood, held the handle as she peeled her right hand away from the tip. He stared in disbelief. She didn't scream, cry, or even acknowledge that vicious attack, leaving her left hand basically useless. Both hands expelled steadily pulsing surges of blood, each slower than the last, as her heart struggled to continue, punished and deprived of fuel.
She didn't care. Only a few more minutes, and that suffering would be moot. All of it. Every last iota, rendered to the history books and urban legend.
Maybe history books would have served her better as sources of information, and not chronicles of her fate. She was no expert with nooses, remembering only pictures seen in passing of outlaws at the gallows. Her father told her that was the fate of indecent men, and she believed him. It only fit that she'd die in that manner, as an outlaw of fortune, robbed of death as her family was blasted to embers. She inexpertly produced an ugly noose and hung its bulky mass around her neck like a macabre necklace.
Without a frame of reference, she secured the other end to the remains of the stove, assuming its weight more than enough to serve as an anchor. She knew nothing of slack, or of her own remaining weight, though. She climbed atop a nearby stack of brittle boards, closing her eyes as if in prayer, then looking up at the bloodied noose her gushing hands fashioned, hoping for an easy death.
And then, nude, bloody, blackened by soot and watery ash, and barely able to stand, she fell forward, spreading her arms wide in a careless swan-dive into a pile of broken china.
Were wishes dreams, and dreams intentions, she might have succeeded. Instead, the old wood stove did its job stupendously. Its wrought-iron bulk more than countered her miniscule mass, but the already weakened roofing beam didn't fare so well. With a loud crack like a wild gunshot, it snapped, loosing the rope and letting her free-falling body crash into several shards of dishes and glassware.
Kyle watched, and even compared to the freakish hell-spawn he'd witnessed in this place, Arin's demise was one of legend. Smashing into remains of the kitchen did elicit a helpless cry from her. So too, did the rope which yanked her head back, beating a choked gasp from her already abused frame. But as the rope went slack, the true wonders began. The roof support, even without tiles or crossbeams, was still a substantial amount of heavy wood. Singed or otherwise, when it fell, it dislodged almost everything else. Anything leaning on it came crashing down. Remaining fragments of walls trapping it were flung skyward, if only slightly. Ashes galore painted the sky, obliterating all color and reducing the world to a monochrome simplicity.
When it was all over, Arin's body must have been under hundreds, even thousands of pounds of wood, nails, and roofing tiles. Kyle wondered if they'd ever find her. No way... they'll just think she ran away. Nobody will ever come here again.
But Kyle was too hasty. From somewhere in the distance, maybe even where Arin was buried, he could hear a soft whimpering. Though almost inaudible, it carried voracious wroth and desperation. It spoke of failure and grief of wisdom and experience, heart-breaking from the likes of a child. And the muffled sobs continued, under the rubble, insulated from Kyle by feet of broken garbage, yet inescapable. It was then he knew true sorrow.
Arin had been cursed, through her own actions or mere accident, she was thrown upon the irony of fate. She saved a life, even the insignificant one of a mere rabbit, and was rewarded with a boon: temporary reprieve from the pitiless clutches of death. She avoided her family's fate, and even her own desires were thwarted by the power of she who spun, measured, and cut. This new life was not her own, and she was utterly defeated by it.
And so she wept, first in a weak series of dry heaves, to a consuming crescendo of wracking gulps and coughs. She'd failed. She'd failed in every possible way, and even death had forsaken her. Somewhere, curled in a ball, impaled on bits and pieces of porcelain, tears of absolute loss ran down her grimy and blood-smeared face. She was consumed, and she had nothing, and without that, her determination collapsed to disgrace.
Kyle too, began to cry, so powerful were the messages carried by her soulful weeping. He wished he'd tried harder—to escape, to thwart her attempted suicide, to block the scene from his eyes, anything—instead of idly cataloging her misfortune.
Arin's laments caught the turbulence of this odd world and consumed it fully. No matter how timid each breath, or subtle her dirge, it echoed from the mountains, the fallen town, and though never above a whisper, Kyle's spirit. He was literally bled dry of conviction, and as his strength faded, so too, did the crying.
It became part of him, something he would remember until the day he died, either awake or asleep, those haunting convulsions of despair. It was maddening, and it didn't matter. She wept, and she wept, and she wept.
Broken, crushed, and dying, she wept.