He did not sleep. He did not need to. But there were nights, and this was one of them, where the absence of sleep felt like a cruelty rather than a convenience.
He sat where he had been sitting since the morning. The graveyard was empty now of the living. The stone was cold beneath him in the way that stone eventually became cold, slowly and without announcement, and Blook had not moved because moving felt like it required a reason, and he did not currently have one.
He thought about the list.
He had never written it down. There was no need. His memory did not degrade the way mortal memory did, softening at the edges, blurring the specifics, replacing faces with impressions and names with feelings. His memory kept everything. Exactly as it was. Exactly as it had been. Every name. Every last moment. Every small and private thing that happened at the end, the things no one else had been close enough to see. He was the only one who remembered most of them at all.
That thought arrived the way it always did, without drama, without ceremony, and settled into him like a stone into still water.
He began.
Aquila. Rogen. Zephine. Marlow. Sampo. Remi. Sienna. Calista. Mirelle. Draken. Emery. Velvet. Louch. Tove. Aldric. Sable. Korren. Wren. Jade. Salazar. Fenwick. Icarus. Calla. Akumu. Matta. Lorne. Polka. Dusk. Milo. Nilah. Maeve. Johann.
He stopped.
Not because the list was finished. The list was not finished. The list, if he was honest, could continue past the point of any meaning, past the point where names remained names and became instead a sound, a texture, a weight without shape. He had not been able to do anything. He had never been able to do anything.
BLK: That's the whole of it, isn't it.
He said it to no one. To the graves in front of him, which did not respond, because they were graves. To the night, which continued regardless. To whatever it was he had been addressing since the morning, that shapeless presence he kept speaking toward despite knowing better.
BLK: Every single time. And I just. Watch.
The word landed in the dark and disappeared. He sat with it. The list did not shorten. It would not. It would only ever grow, name by name, year by year, for as long as he remained what he was. There was no end to the watching except the end of everything, and everything showed no signs of ending on his behalf. He looked at the newest graves. The earth was still fresh. It had not yet learned the shape of what it held.
Something moved through him that he did not have a clean word for. Not grief, exactly. Grief implied a separation, a before and after. This was older than grief. This was the thing underneath grief, the bedrock of it, the thing that had been there since Draken, since the first, since he learned what watching cost and learned it too late to unlearn it.
He was very, very tired.
And for the first time, in a long and uncountable life, the thought he had not yet allowed himself to finish began, very quietly, to finish itself. He did not let it. Not yet. But it was there now. And it was not going away.