[What keeps Renfri coming back to the beach in the days and weeks after the Leviathan incident finally draws to a close is ultimately a single word rendered in text: Yes. Not the sort of thing that would seem to have the power to preoccupy a person's thoughts — or at least, not unless you happened to know the question it was answering.
Did you see me die?
Yes.
It's a strange thing to be so hung up on, when she's already died once. When she talks about it in casual conversation because it's a thing that's already said and done, the very reason she's even in Trench to begin with. It's not even the first time she's escaped a moment where she was supposed to die and didn't; she's been doing that, after all, since she was fourteen.
But there's something about this that won't go away, because it's not that someone intended for her to die, it's not that she was supposed to die, it's that but for things unfolding the way they did, she would've been just as dead as the others who were taken in the chaos that gripped this beach just a few short weeks before. She would've been among them because it was a vision that would've come true, but for the influence of someone standing just a little to the left of it.
She would have died here, and she didn't, and she keeps coming back to thoughts of when she'd been running from the beast and it'd cornered her, when it'd had every chance to finish her off, and yet for just one instant —
Did you see me die?
Yes.
There are no answers to be found on this beach, she knows, but that's not enough to keep her from coming back again and again, anyway.]
post-leviathan, as promised
Yes.
It's a strange thing to be so hung up on, when she's already died once. When she talks about it in casual conversation because it's a thing that's already said and done, the very reason she's even in Trench to begin with. It's not even the first time she's escaped a moment where she was supposed to die and didn't; she's been doing that, after all, since she was fourteen.
But there's something about this that won't go away, because it's not that someone intended for her to die, it's not that she was supposed to die, it's that but for things unfolding the way they did, she would've been just as dead as the others who were taken in the chaos that gripped this beach just a few short weeks before. She would've been among them because it was a vision that would've come true, but for the influence of someone standing just a little to the left of it.
She would have died here, and she didn't, and she keeps coming back to thoughts of when she'd been running from the beast and it'd cornered her, when it'd had every chance to finish her off, and yet for just one instant —
Yes.
There are no answers to be found on this beach, she knows, but that's not enough to keep her from coming back again and again, anyway.]