The Last of Them
Cain and Aclima were not yet two years old when Eve conceived again. This time, I was prepared—hardened by the experience of our first births. I was steadier, less afraid. But as any woman who has borne more than one child will tell you, no two labors are ever the same.
Eve's pains began in the early hours before dawn, and by nightfall, the child still had not come. Her body trembled with exhaustion, and her face was drawn with a pain deeper than I had seen before. My confidence faltered. A dark fear settled over me: perhaps the luck Eden had granted us had finally run dry.
In my desperation, I considered seeking help. For a fleeting moment, I even thought of returning to the horde—despite knowing it would mean my death. But then I remembered: my horde was not the only one out there, and to expose myself was to expose Cain and Aclima. I could not risk them. I could not leave them fatherless in this dangerous world.
Eve, ever composed, never lost her faith. She believed so deeply in the sanctuary of Eden that even as her body convulsed with pain, her spirit remained still. When I told her I might leave, she simply reached for my hand and said, Stay. Everything will be fine. That was Eve—unshakably optimistic, even in the face of darkness. It was one of the many things I loved most about her.
And in the end, she was right. That night, through agony and blood and sheer will, she gave birth to a son. We named him Abel.
The struggle of his arrival should have warned me of the life he would lead—the mark he would leave. But no man can read the future in a newborn's cry. And in those early moments, all that mattered was that he was alive, and so were we.
After Abel's birth, the thought of Eve conceiving again filled me with dread. I couldn't bear the idea of risking her life a third time. We had already been blessed—perhaps too generously—with three healthy children, and I feared that testing the bounds of our luck, no matter how magical Eve believed Eden to be, would invite tragedy. The memory of her agony during Abel's delivery remained vivid in my mind, haunting and unshakable. To shield her, I began to withdraw—from her body, then from her heart. I didn't know how to navigate love, only survival, and in trying to protect her, I ended up wounding the woman I loved most.
In all my years, I had never loved anyone the way I loved Eve. And if I lived another hundred and thirty-eight years, I knew—I would never love another the same. But she mistook my distance for disinterest. She thought my desire had faded, my affection dried up. She didn't understand that even after witnessing her torn open by the heads of our children—after seeing her blood, her agony—I wanted her no less. If anything, I loved her more fiercely for the pain she had endured.
One day, she came to me in tears. She told me how the distance was breaking her. She begged me to return to her, not realizing that I had never truly left. I only wanted to keep her safe. But in trying to shield her, I had made her feel abandoned.
In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to show her she was still mine—and that I was still hers. Out of love, desperation, and longing, I lay with her again, hoping to ease her troubled heart.
Perhaps it was fate mocking me. Or punishment for daring to believe I could outwit nature. That was how she conceived for the fourth time.
Seth's pregnancy and birth were not as harrowing as those that came before him. Eve delivered him on a warm, sunlit afternoon, her pain noticeably less than with Cain, Aclima, or Abel. I was grateful to have another son. In the brutal world we inhabited—a world ruled by men—I believed that every additional boy was a shield, another pair of fists to protect what was ours. But from the moment Seth entered the world, it was clear he was unlike the others.
He was born small and sickly, his cries thin and shrill—like the endless screech of a wounded bird on the edge of death. His skin was red and freckled, almost translucent, and his eyes shone with a strange yellow tint, as if some sickness or spirit had marked him from the womb. He didn't even seem fully human to me. I remember looking at him and thinking, What horrid, malformed creature have we brought into the world?
Eve hadn't carried him as long as she had the others—I hadn't counted the days, but I knew. He came too early. Unformed. Fragile. And I feared that was why he was born so ill. Eve blamed herself. She wept in silence, convinced that her body had failed him, and though I never voiced it, she saw the truth in my eyes: disappointment. I didn't expect Seth to survive. I thought we would endure his cries for a few nights, then bury the noise along with him.
But Eve wouldn't allow that kind of indifference. No mother could. And so, for her sake, I played the role of a father who wanted his son to live. We kept him beneath the sun during the day and by a roaring fire through the cold nights. Eve fed him crushed herbs and whispered songs into his fragile ears. She told me he had arrived too soon—that he still needed the warmth of her womb to survive—and the sun and fire might mimic what he'd lost.
To my astonishment—and, shamefully, to my dismay—he endured. Each morning, I half-expected to wake and find him gone, the cries finally silenced. Instead, I woke to that same keening wail, and I had to wrestle with the darker corners of my heart, where crueler instincts whispered temptations I dared not act upon. I never harmed him. But I would be lying if I said I didn't sometimes imagine the silence that would have followed.
Even in Eden, where peace cloaked the land like a blessing, I lived with the constant fear that it could all vanish in an instant. The world beyond our borders was cruel and unforgiving, and I wanted my children to be strong—ready to face whatever darkness might one day find its way in. But when Seth was born—early, fragile, and ill—it felt like one of my deepest fears had already come to pass. His weakness disturbed me. It offended the brutal logic I had learned from the horde: that the weak perish and the strong endure. There was no room for frailty in the world as I understood it.
As he grew, Seth's condition never stabilized. Illness clung to him like a second skin. One day he would laugh and play in the sunlight, and the next, he would be stricken down—feverish, breathless, unable to rise. It became a cycle, a tormenting rhythm that sapped our strength and drained Eve of sleep and spirit. At times, the strain felt unbearable. I began to wonder if sparing him from a lifetime of suffering—and us from the slow erosion of hope—might be a mercy. I considered ending his life. Not out of cruelty, but out of desperation and fear.
But Eve would not hear of it. She stood between me and that dark temptation with a fire I had only ever seen in battle. She made me swear that nothing would happen to Seth—that I would love him as I loved Cain, Aclima, and Abel. It was a promise I could never fully keep, though I made it anyway, for her sake. Each night I lay beside her, secretly hoping the child would slip away in his sleep, that we would wake to silence and be released from the burden of his suffering. That secret hope remains one of the greatest shames of my life.
But Eve—Eve was a warrior in her own right. Where I faltered, she endured. She scoured the land for herbs, crushed roots and leaves into medicines with trembling hands. She spent countless nights awake, rocking Seth in her arms, whispering comfort into his fevered dreams, coaxing life into a body that seemed determined to reject it. She fought for him with a devotion I could never match. And through her strength, Seth lived—not because of me, but in spite of me.
While nursing a constantly ailing Seth, Eve conceived again—four years after his birth. I hadn't wanted more children. Seth's fragile state had arrested all my hopes for the future. I lived in fear that we would bring another child like him into the world: frail, half-formed, tethered to life by Eve's sheer will. By then, Eve and I were deep in the worst phase of our marriage. The closeness we once shared had eroded under the weight of grief, exhaustion, and unspoken resentment. We barely spoke. We hardly touched. But loneliness has a cruel way of softening even the hardest edges. One night, without words or apology, we reached for each other—if only to remember what we once were. Fate, always listening, took that moment and made a child from it.
It was an easy pregnancy—remarkably so. And like her first delivery, Eve bore twins: two healthy daughters we named Awan and Azura. They were strong, loud, full of color and vitality. I should have been thankful, and a part of me was. It felt like fate had tried to make amends for Seth—like it was offering me proof that not all our children would be burdens. Still, I could not shake my disappointment. Sons meant strength, security, survival. Daughters, for all their beauty, did not ward off the dangers of the world we lived in.
And as if to reopen the wound, Eve's devotion to Seth never waned. Even with two newborns in her arms, it was always Seth she returned to first. I resented her for it. I resented him for needing her so completely. It was Aclima, now older, who stepped in where her mother had withdrawn. She tended to her sisters with a tenderness beyond her years, filling the space Eve could not.
In time, Seth began to recover. His body hardened, his skin lost its pallor, and the long nights of fever faded into memory. But the illness left its mark. He remained small for his age—soft-spoken, hesitant, easily overwhelmed. The world had not carved him the way it had carved Cain or Abel. He had survived, yes—but survival is not the same as strength.
In the end, Eve and I were blessed with six children. We tried for more, but fortune—once so generous—turned its face from us. The next conception ended in silence. The child had died in her womb long before it was ready to meet the world, and Eve, poor Eve, had to endure the agony of labor only to deliver death. He was a boy—my fourth son, had he lived. I held his lifeless body in my hands, and for the first time in a long while, I felt small again, helpless before the will of the earth.
Years passed. No other child ever quickened in her womb again. We kept trying, stubborn and hopeful, as if we could bargain with the gods or twist fate into mercy. But eventually, nature took its course, and Eve passed beyond the age of childbearing. Our days of creation were over. The house was full, and yet a silence settled in—a silence shaped like the child we lost, and the ones we never had.