Harem Apocalypse: Every Moan Levels Us Up!

Venna looked at me. The group at the road were still talking among themselves, their voices a low hum drifting across the grass. The graveyard held us in its own heavy, sunlit quiet, the kind that pressed down on your shoulders and made every breath feel deliberate.

"This isn’t the first time I’ve seen you," she said.

I held her gaze and waited, the sun warm on the back of my neck.

"I see you in my dreams. You’re always there." Her voice stayed steady, like she’d been carrying this secret for a long time and had finally decided today was the day to set it down. "We have a baby. We’re together. You fight for me."

Her eyes stayed locked on mine but drifted slightly as the memories pulled at her, pupils dilating then contracting. "Sometimes you kill me. Sometimes you’re the enemy. You’re everything in my dreams, Abram. Everything I have... and everything I’ve never had."

Her eyes came back to me fully.

I was breathing a little more carefully than I had been a moment ago.

One by one, the cars at the roadside pulled away. Engines faded into the distance until there was nothing left but the two of us standing between the graves. The sun beat down direct and warm.

"Who are you, Abram?" she asked, voice soft, almost a whisper carried on the breeze. "Who are you to me?"

"I don’t know," I said. "I genuinely don’t know, Venna."

She sighed and nodded, like she’d expected that answer and had already made some kind of peace with it. Her shoulders dropped a fraction. "When I saw you standing there, I saw everything. All of it at once." She caught herself and gave a small, self-conscious smile, the corners of her mouth lifting briefly. "I know how that sounds."

"It doesn’t sound crazy," I said, keeping my voice even.

She looked at me for a long moment, eyes tracing my face, then down at Riya’s simple tombstone, the carved letters sharp in the sunlight, then back at me. We stood in the silence and let it stretch, the sun warm on our faces, a bead of sweat tracing slowly down my spine, Riya’s name carved in the stone beside us, and whatever strange current was running between us that neither of us had a name for yet.

"We should probably go," she said eventually, her voice breaking the quiet gently.

"Yeah."

We started walking out of the graveyard together, side by side, both carrying questions that had no answers yet. Our footsteps fell in quiet rhythm on the grass, then transitioned to the crunch of gravel as we reached the path. I didn’t need more time with her to know she was a good person. Some things you just read right the first time—the honesty in her eyes, the absence of calculated edges.

A single black car waited at the roadside. Hers. The engine was off, metal gleaming under the sun.

She glanced at it, then at me, her blue hair shifting as she tilted her head. "Are you in a rush?"

"No," I said.

She smiled, small and real. "Neither am I." She looked down the quiet road ahead, squinting slightly against the light. "Let’s walk."

"Yeah." I stripped off the suit jacket and slung it over my shoulder. "Good idea."

The sun warmed my arms as we left the car behind and started down the road together, the weight of the day and her dreams hanging quietly in the air between us.

We started walking, both of us unhurried, the quiet road stretching out ahead with no particular reason to rush. The afternoon sun warmed our backs as we moved. I couldn’t name exactly what was running between us—only that even in the silence, Venna felt strangely familiar in a way I hadn’t earned yet.

It wasn’t the hard-won familiarity I had with Sherry, built through shared danger and darkness. This was different. Like meeting someone you’d already decided to trust before you even knew why.

"I have this thing," Venna said after a while, her voice cutting softly through the quiet. "I can see into a person’s past if I want. I got it from my mother."

"That’s something," I said, glancing sideways at her.

No cars passed us. Just the two of us and the trees lining both sides of the road, their leaves rustling gently in the breeze. Houses sat far back from the pavement, half-hidden behind fences and gardens, making the whole stretch feel like it belonged to no one in particular.

"But I can’t see yours," she added, glancing sideways at me, her steps slowing for half a beat. "I’ve tried."

"There’s nothing in my past worth your time," I said, the words coming out flatter than I intended.

She took one step, almost stopped, foot hovering for a split second, then kept walking, like she’d wanted to argue but thought better of it. Her fingers brushed the side of her dress.

"The past helps a person understand the present," she said. The trees moved past us in slow, steady rhythm, branches swaying overhead. "The future too. What I hate is that I can see everyone else’s and I can’t see my own. I don’t know who I am, Abram. I genuinely don’t."

"The past doesn’t make you who you are," I replied, my shoes scuffing lightly on the pavement. "What you do today does. What are your days like?"

She was quiet for a long moment, the gravel crunching softly under our shoes, a small stone kicking ahead of her foot.

"I go into the capital," she said finally. "The dark room. I meet strangers I can’t see, and after... I never find them again." She said it plainly, the way people talk about things they’ve turned over in their head so many times the shame has worn off. "My mind tells me each one of them disappears after. Like they stop existing the moment I stop being near them."

I didn’t answer.

She sighed. "That’s my daily life. So who does that make me?" She didn’t wait for an answer I didn’t have. "A person is their past. I have no father I know. No history I can read. When I saw you standing at that grave, I saw something I haven’t seen before." She looked at me directly, eyes clear and searching. "I saw answers."

I turned that over. She wasn’t entirely wrong in how she was thinking about it.

"I know my father," I said. "I know my mother. I know my purpose." I paused, the road curving gently ahead. "And there are still days I don’t know who I am."

She stopped walking and turned to face me fully. The sunlight caught the blue in her hair, turning strands almost electric, and the quiet intensity in her eyes sharpened.

"I can take you back," she said. "Before everything started. Before the walls. I can take you to the beginning, and I think when you find yourself there... I’ll find myself too." She spoke with the calm certainty of someone who had been waiting a long time to say it. "Do you want to know who you are?"

I looked at her. She had cornered me the same way Eleanor had—not with force, but with a question that made everything else feel suddenly smaller.

"Yes," I said.

The word hung between us on the empty sunlit road. Venna’s eyes stayed on mine, steady and full of something I couldn’t yet name, while the breeze moved through the trees around us.