you could love me if i knew how to lie

Beat winced when his aunt spoke. He stopped in his tracks, looking over one pointed shoulder blade. "It is my fault. Everyone close to me dies." There was no way to convince him otherwise. Not at this point in his life. "If I'm not cursed, why are they haunting me?" The boy turned fully to look at her, anger and confusion in his glassy gaze. "I see them all the time. They follow me." The work that the healer had done on him made it so much worse.

A look of pleading exhaustion settled on the child's disheveled features. "I can't take any more, Aunt Twig. If you die..." He would kill himself. He would go to the nearest cliff and throw himself off. Or walk out into the sea and never come back. The boys fragile mind could take no more. There was a limit to everything and the child was fast approaching his.