"The capital?!" Jason found himself exclaiming out loud. "You can't honestly expect anything good to come from going there…"
Vanya suddenly whipped her hand towards Jason, and he flinched back instinctively. Far too slowly for it to have been any use if she had actually been aiming for him. The sparrow, however, avoided her arm deftly and took to the air. "What is that thing!" she screamed in anger. Where had that come from?
"It's just a sparrow," Jason tried calming her, but she wouldn't have any of it.
"I know what it is, but why is it with you? The sparrow is a symbol of the human's god. Horrible creatures," she continued. Jason wasn't sure if she was referring to humans or sparrows. Probably both.
"I don't really know why she's following me," Jason began, but he didn't get the chance to continue.
"Following you? How could you have not mentioned this before?"
"I think it's cute," Nora said, surprising them both. The girl really was on her own wavelength. She couldn't possibly be doing as well as she acted, Jason thought.
"We can talk about this later, we don't have time to spend talking. We need to take care of business here and move on before anyone comes to see what's happening here." The house was mostly gone by now, but its smoldering remains would be leaving a trail of smoke visible for miles.
"No one will be coming," Nora said quietly. "No one ever comes."
"What business do we have that needs to be finished anyway?" Vanya asked at nearly the same time. She didn't mention it, but her eyes made it clear she wasn't done with talking about the sparrow.
"We need to…" He tried pointing with his eyes towards the bodies in the distance.
"We need to what?" Vanya asked, but Nora answered before Jason could say anything.
"He's saying we need to bury the dead people," she said. There was no emotion in her voice as she said it. How much death had this girl seen that she was more comfortable talking about it than he was?
"Burial? You humans are so barbaric," Vanya scoffed. "What's the point of putting them in the ground? It's just more work for the living. We can…"
"I don't care about the other humans, but we should at least give her family a proper burial," Jason began, but Nora interrupted him.
"What do demons do when someone dies?"
Vanya was surprised at the question. She had to have been at least as surprised as Jason was at how easily Nora spoke to her, but she answered. "I'll show you," she said, standing with a grin. Yes, Jason was definitely the odd one out when it came to talking about death.
"It was your family that died, correct?"
"Yes," Nora said softly.
"And did they die well?"
Nora paused for a moment. "My dad killed a couple of them and my mom and brother died to protect me."
"So you were the weak one," Vanya said bluntly. It wasn't a question.
Nora's eyes fell, and Jason began to protest, but Vanya put a hand up. This was going way too far. She was just a little girl and her family had just died!
"I don't want to be weak," Nora said finally. "I want to be a demon like you."
"No pathetic excuses, go gather your family together and retrieve your father's weapon."
"She shouldn't have to do this herself, I'll take care of it," Jason said, but Vanya stopped him again.
"They died because you were too weak to protect them," Vanya told the girl who finally had tears in her eyes. "The least you can do is this tiny thing."
"Nora you don't have to…" He reeled, falling to the ground as something struck him. He slowly opened his eyes to the smoke filled sky. What had happened? Were they being attacked? He leapt to his feet, but only Vanya was there. Nora had started running across the grass towards the house.
"The girl is weak, but you are weaker," she said in disgust. "I'd be better off killing you and taking this girl back in your place. At least she makes an effort to become stronger." Vanya turned away from him, and Jason was left standing alone again.
He wasn't built for this kind of thing. He'd never even seen a dead body outside of funerals before today. How could that tiny girl stand so strong, despite what she had been through?
Jason was one of few people who knew for certain that he could sacrifice his life for the people he loved, but after losing them, he had fallen to pieces. He had lost everything that mattered to him and been left empty, without a purpose.
In the distance he could see Nora struggling with the weight of her father's body. He had to be three times her size, but she was slowly dragging him across the ground. He was probably covered in blood with horrible wounds from the bandits who had killed him, and yet Nora was carrying him.
Jason watched, unsure if it was horror or awe, as Nora slowly worked her way across the yard, inch by inch, until she had finally made it. She let her father fall to the ground and began walking away from the house to find her brother. She found him quickly, and was able to lift him much easier, finally pulling him to where her mother and father lay waiting.
Jason felt like crying himself and he hadn't done a single thing.
He followed behind Vanya, silently not wanting to draw her anger again. As lightheartedly as she spoke about death and killing, she was taking this very seriously. Nora was on her knees, heaving when they got to her. Her face was red and she had tears streaming down her cheeks, but she looked up when Vanya returned.
"Is that your father's weapon," the demon asked Nora who nodded silently. "Good, stack the bodies and stake them down with the sword."
"Wha…!" Jason started to say, but stepped back at Vanya gaze. In that moment, he was sure that she would kill him if he continued, no matter what the tellers had told her.
Nora looked at the demon, but finding no mercy there, she turned back to the bodies, slowly stacking them on top of each other.
She was covered in blood by the time she was finished. She lifted the sword, but it was too big for her to handle properly. She tried anyway, lifting it higher and higher. It slipped from her hand, but Vanya caught it as it fell and put it back in the girl's hand. They gripped it together, lifting it up over the bodies, and then plunged it through the bodies with a crunch.
Jason didn't cringe away this time, but he still didn't like it. You didn't force kids to plunge swords into their parents when they died, you held them and kept them safe while they cried. You comforted them telling them that everything was going to be alright. That was what he had been prepared to do. That was the world that Jason knew.
Now, more than when he had been shunned in the village, more than when he had seen the foreign constellation in the sky, more than when he had watched demons slaughtering people with ease, he felt how different this world was to his own. People were the same. Even the demons seemed to be remarkably human-like in many ways, but their life was different. They didn't live comfortably surrounded by comfort and happiness like Jason now realized he had. The people in this world lived with death.
Nora ran off after they finished at Vanya's words, and returned with a flaming block of wood. She bent down and set her father's clothing on fire. It took a moment for the blood soaked clothing to light, but finally it did. He watched behind the others as the bodies burned, and worked hard to not recoil at the smell.
Vanya waved her arm and the ground surrounding the bodies disappeared, creating a barrier preventing the grass from spreading, then she bent down to the girl beside her. "Now you must become strong enough that no one else must die for you."