Souls Made Darker
While Oti ponders the nature of his existence, he is visited by an ancient entity he's come to know closely over a series of secret meetings. A simple misunderstanding, however, leads to a clash between Balthazar and Oti's sister, both of whom assume their true forms and battle over the once peaceful field of meditation. (Warning for descriptions of blood and violence, and mentions of death.)
They damned us, came the thought, for no other reason than our souls were made dark. He had heard Lady say that, pouring over her lab tables and charts while the shadows leaning out from her shoulders stared farther and flickered like flames. The data sheets beneath her claws had something to do with distant lands, where both of them had been born. Where almost nothing survived.
He'd written that down as a reminder to himself across the edge of his bookmark and every now and then his eyes wandered to it, picking at the words, messages scrawled expertly between lines on a page, a footnote, a story, a memory of what it was like to be dying. Right now daylight around him was a veil piercing his robes where they were folded over flower beds. There were petals and roots at his feet. Grass whispered things and exchanged secrets with the trees that circled the clearing, and encased the meadow in scented rays of color.
He put the book down for a moment and sighed. The darkness of the forest on the horizon was different in every direction. Farther away, touching clouds and etched with gold, was the mountain he could now call home, the place where the valleys met like veins to a heavy heart. If he were to follow them there, he'd find the Fae gardens and the riverbeds and rolling fields fed by spring water. Today, he'd gone beyond, somewhere quiet, and new, to know peace again, and to read.
Though he wasn't really getting much reading done. It was more out of habit that he tapped at the cover of his book, as if to test that it was still there, letters under fingertips, concealed in ink and yellowed paper. His mind seemed content only to wander, and it went for a moment back into another forest...
He remembered rotted earth and dead trees, and cliff sides so high that as a child he could not imagine ever scaling them. Endless night swathed that land, to keep it hidden from the rest of the world--it was ironic, then, that his kind were branded for all to see. Across his arms he carried the mark of the damned; he'd seen it on many others like him, on Lady's hand and foot, his sister's back, to set them apart from the rest. The emblems were wired into their code, embedded, locked so that removal was all but impossible. It was a part of who they were.
He didn't mind the marks. It was what others made of them, the assumptions they came up with and acted on, that were troubling. It was the looks of scorn and disgust, and fear, sometimes outright attacks meant to purge him that stung long after and sank, in his blood, in his pulse that pulled and tossed and tore him apart. Some would run from him the moment they met, fleeing into the darkness or further into the light, some sneered and some froze, silent as fog and unable to avert their gaze, as if they saw not his face--pale and ghastly as it was--but something else entirely. Part of him did not want to know what they saw in his place; another yearned for it. But what monster they made and what monster he might have been he could not discern. He still thought of it often.
To be judged and to be seen as a shadow, as a creation of the imagination painted over his figure and his face that suggested ferocity, and darkness, and death haunted him through all waking hours. He wore a mask, to hide himself, hiding from the world he loved and hiding from the stars and the stares and the seething madness that overtook strangers to whom he was forever strange.
And because of it Ara had warned him more than once not to go wandering carelessly in the daylight hours. But he liked the day, and the sun, and being able to see the flowers in bloom. To just sit among them and their smiling faces as they swayed and changed in the wind and take the time out of the day to listen to what they had to say, that was bliss. That was worth the flight from the mountain and into both his favorite spots and little secret places he'd never been to before. Such as this one.
He just wanted to read his damn books. Maybe write his own some day. The surrounding valleys of the mountain were maintained by the Fae of Queenie's Court, but this was beyond their borders and the trails of their daily patrols. So there was something of a risk coming here, and deep down he didn't want to be any more of a burden to his sister. But this was such a nice field, small but full of sunlight and some flowers he didn't yet recognize. He wanted to get to know them. He wanted to be surrounded by life, by new things, because he'd spent so long in the death and the despair was sick of having to crawl, day to day, second to second, and scrape by the skin of his teeth. He touched his fangs, in afterthought. So badly he wanted those days far behind him, to be able to walk in new light, dream something else. He loathed being dragged back to that place in his head, for he was afraid he might never escape it again.
They damned us. It was written on his bookmark and written over his body in a language all could understand. For no other reason than our souls were made dark.
He wondered sometimes if creatures like him were even allowed to have souls.
..."Of course you have a soul," Lady had said when he'd asked her before, with such certainty that he stood shocked and still in the middle of her laboratory floor. And she took him in her arms and held him for a bit, because he needed it, and then sent him on his way with a big book of poems she'd been keeping on a top shelf with all her trinkets and notes and some of her other favorite things. "Keep it," she'd said. "It's yours. To make a part of yourself." He had read them on the mountain top and memorized them all, and recited them into thin air, a duet of song and the gentle movement of his hands together.
When he'd asked Queenie, later on, she stopped sifting through the leaves and the branches and the high barriers of magic around a corner of the Fae library, and laughed her loud and tricky laugh. "If I asked you the same question," a glint in her voice, "what would you tell me?"
He'd looked down at his feet, "... That you have a soul, of course."
"There's your answer."
... He was thinking about it again today. He knew there were data entries that suggested he was something evil. Cruel, and merciless, destructive. A virus. King of the Undead. King of death... He felt sick inside and sick in the sun, doing his best to ignore a gnawing pressure building up between his bones, which prickled his blood and the code that ran through him. Then emptiness, nothingness, something he could fill perhaps with the color of the flower fields or chapters from a book...
The book. He clutched it in his hands, close to his chest. This one was full of short stories from various authors, all filled with magic, all collected from the human world. Neo had bought it for him, from a library sale, she'd said, where there were very often good things scattered all across the shelves and stacks that just needed another home. "I'll take you sometime," she said, when she gave it to him, "when you're ready. You can pick your own books--it'll be fun. They section off part of this big parking lot underground and fill it with aisles and aisles of things. A sort of maze of only half-organized books, more books than should ever be able to fit there. You can fill up a whole bag with whatever you want. Wander around for as long as you want. You'd like it, Oti."
He really did think he'd like it. It was just a matter of getting comfortable enough with the idea of being around so many other people--such events were well-attended, she'd warned him. And while he was fine alone, off in the forest, or on the mountainside, or even in the deep parts of the Fae archives, he was not so fond of the eyes and the voices and the things they might say behind his back. Neo, he trusted, he knew. He did not know many other humans. There were certain risks involved traveling between worlds, or trying not to get in trouble.
The thing was, he looked human enough. His sister had said with her usual confidence that he could most certainly pass for one, and that most people wouldn't give it a second thought, but perhaps for his corpse-white skin. "I'll go with you," she'd promised, and hugged him close. "You'd just need a change of clothes. You know, they'd probably love it, your robes and cape--those humans--but you wouldn't want all the attention. You could do with something more ordinary--by their standards, I mean. You'd want to blend in more. I'll make you an outfit, yeah? Blue or black? Or red? It'd look so nice with your hair."
And then she'd touched his bronze-colored braid and bangs with a grin and ran off looking for her fabrics.
"An adventure, when you're ready for it," Neo reminded him again, in her calmer fashion, and left it at that. But that was Neo's way, to give the option and let him decide for himself. And then she set herself up deeper in the mountain with her journals and laptop with Lady and started filling in more data sheets and scribbling in various notebooks. Some of it calculations and tribulations all about whatever she was researching, some of it prose completely unrelated, which she said came to her like gusts of wind from time to time, petering in, tip-toeing out. Then there would come thunder from the clouds, and El would descend in a roar of wings and turbine blades and bow his silver head, with more data for them to pour over. That was the rhythm of things.
... Today, they'd gone into the human world to collect data there. Sometimes he wished he was brave enough to go with them. But he was not brave; he never had been. Ara had fought for him and defended him and looked after him since the day he was born, and he would not have survived in the dark without her, in that desolate place made of forests full of rotted wood and acid rain. The world he had known had been the terrible, forsaken lands of the damned, cursed throughout with the urgent, crippling kind of darkness that eats at all it knows and all it touches and burns scars into the hearts of those who meddle with it. Darkness without purpose, without bounds, remnants of the ancient days. And it was in that darkness he first opened his eyes, and she looked at him and at once hugged him and took him into the shadows and taught him how to be still, and quiet, and to listen. And night after night he would sit, quiet, listening, waiting for her while she patrolled or hunted or tried to find them a new hiding place. She would tuck him away, saying "It's all right, Oti, it'll all be all right," and then disappear to keep her promise. And while she was away he would wait again, out of sight, and think about what life without fear would be like, and all the while flinching and ducking beneath the branches and the dirt and holding his breath, when some tree would collapse or the underbrush shuddered and some shape he couldn't catch quickly enough escaped from blackness to blackness. Sometimes the shapes were slain before his very eyes, by something bigger and for which he had no name, and he dared not breathe, but made himself as small as he possibly could be, as insignificant, thinking to himself: Oh... but for a second or a small length of space, it could have been me. My blood running through the ground and through the teeth of the thing that dragged the dead shapes away. And would it be him, next time? Taken away into the dark from which all had come, and to which all must surely return... Would he ever have to take a life away...
No. Ara had killed all their lives so he would not have to. She made hard choices and did harsh things to keep the burden from falling to his shoulders at all--she didn't want it to come to that. "Never stop being kind," she'd told him, when they were small, and huddled together amidst the debris and the dead trees and sheltering from the heavy data storms that poured mercilessly from a beaten, harrowed sky. "Never stop being yourself, Oti. My brother, my friend, so gentle and kind."
It was because of her he could still be gentle and kind. He kept the book clutched to his chest with one hand and with the other reached to welcome the blossoming face of a flower on the hill, pale as he was beneath the warmth of the sun.
"What do you know of souls and the sky?" he asked, as it bowed to touch his fingertip, nodding, to and fro, up and down, the petals not quite fully unfurled. An answer, in its own way, regarding silence, and change, and what was it that dug at him like roots and buried secrets and underground streams?
He lifted its face up to the light for a moment. When he spoke he did so, silently, saying to the flower deep in thought while moving his hands to ask, "Does it have a name?"
"... Would you want it to?"
He didn't know. If it was better not to name it or to know what it was and then have to answer it and name a solution. "There are dead things inside me," he said, quietly, "ink on paper, reading messages between the solid lines..."
"But will you let them really die? Do you keep digging, or do you let go? Leaves fall in the forest. They die. The trees let go."
"They become something else don't they?"
"Seeds. Thoughts. Seeds of thought. There are many planted inside you too. Living things. We are all dust and data that has gathered over time."
He nodded back. A sound across the clearing caught him and he glanced into the rolling fields of white and blue and rose and gold. He did not hear again from the flower, and when he stood he pulled his cape about him much like a castle, something to guard him from whatever it was that had stepped from the forest. And the sun beat at him, beat at the collar of his cape and his forehead and along the strands of his hair, fiery but quiet, while his eyes burned and strained and bled tears of stark crimson trying to look too far into the light.
"I would have thought," said a voice, "that you'd know my darkness by now." It was melodious, water gliding down high mountain slopes, softly to meet his ear. He held his breath and turned to a figure who had crossed space and time with an ease that suggested something more than supernatural, done so naturally. And even out of the forest, and fully in the light, there was indeed a darkness about him.
He was tall--taller even than Oti and built much more firmly as though from stone and ice rather than skin and bone, though his long, heavy cape obscured most of his figure. His face was sharp and pale, and his hair golden, glimmering brashly in the sun against his black robes. Power restrained in the lines of his mouth, in his hands, though he held them like a dancer on stage or a thief with a dagger, purposeful elegance and precision that could only be described as artistic.
He was not really a man, any more so than Oti was a man. It was but a form he could assume, when he wanted, and that he enjoyed, that embodied something more mortal and more manageable, or so he liked to put it. Oti had never seen his true shape, though he could guess at its likeness, sensed what it must have been, as a fellow creature born damned and who knew so intimately the secrets shared by all offspring of the night.
Balthazar was something older than even the dark lands themselves, but darkness itself could not be confined to a mere place. It was everyone and everything, this the dark children knew--it was a part of death and just as equally a part of life. Now Balthazar's towering shadow fell over him, the mountain, the water, the whisper that leads the weary to sleep and the dead to rest.
"I was distracted," Oti admitted. "I was talking to the flowers."
"Of what?"
"Souls."
"Ah." He gestured to the hill. "May I?"
Oti gestured back, and Balthazar smiled and they sat beside each other in the flowerbed.
"Where have you been?" that was a sigh, not of anger but of relief. "It's been weeks, months, since I saw you last, I thought you might not come again. That maybe you had moved on, more hunting, more questions than answers. But I had hoped to see you; I thought that maybe you'd forgotten--"
"Forgotten?" Balthazar drew back a moment, troubled, and his hair caught a breeze and shimmered glasslike over his cloak. "Oti, Oti... How could I ever forget to come back to you?" He leaned back with his palms on the hill, in the grass, and turned his head up to the heavens. Most of his face was obscured behind a polished helm, and over the top of it his horns towered like jewels or roots or other things that grew in the dark, arching up to challenge the sun. "I've been searching, as you know, and my search took me farther than I meant to go. You understand how that is?"
Oti nodded.
Balthazar sighed. "And I meant to write. I told myself, every night, to write to you, about the sky so alive and stars overhead how I see them in your eyes, always. I longed for that so much. I longed for this." He raised his arms towards the fields and the forest, though his gaze, Oti could tell, was fixed on him. "But in the end, I could not. It hurt me that I could not--and did I hurt you? I'm sorry. There had to have been a way, had I looked long enough. But I was twisted about and on another tide, pulling, further away until I lost the trail. All that for naught. And to have been so far, so close..."
"You could have chased it. You don't ever need to come back, you know. Souls shouldn't be tied so tightly that they cannot be free," said Oti. "Lady told me that."
Balthazar smiled, "Oh, but that's not it at all. No, I want to. To come back again, and again, just as freely as I go. I'm not tethered anywhere," he paused, musing. "Not anymore. She is wise, your mother. I should like to meet her someday."
"I think you should," Oti fumbled at the cover of his book, skimming fingers from edge to edge and along the tips of the pages where it fell open. He remembered what the flower had suggested, about seeds and leaves. The pages of the book were once trees, were they not? The words within were planted seeds that together made chapters and forests...
Balthazar tipped his head towards the cover, "What have you brought with you today?"
"Short stories," Oti said, in a whisper, as if sharing a secret. "It's a very old book, and some of the pages are missing. I searched the databases, but it went out of print a long time ago. I don't even know the title, look..." He flipped forward from the cover, "That page is gone too, and the front is all worn away. It was never digitized in its entirety, and it would have been lost, I think. Neo found it."
Balthazar knew what he meant and hummed into the wind.
He stroked the cover gently, "It's a good book. But I haven't gotten very far into it. I keep... I keep getting..."
"Distracted?"
"Yes."
Balthazar stroked his hand with his own, fingertips first, then looping around through the motion again, his knuckles, his veins, then the wrist, resting there. "Why don't we read it together?"
So they did. Coming up with words to fill the missing pages. They laughed, they cried their bloody tears, they struggled together in contemplation, finding what had been lost. Oti would keep a hand curled on the edge of the page, and Balthazar from time to time would place his hand atop it. Briefly sometimes. Sometimes for a long, long while, and they turned the pages together, putting their heads, their cheeks, their noses together, so that the weight of one rest wholly on the other, and the book lay open over both of their laps.
When the sun was at its highest, Oti had trouble reading, as the light hit the page a certain way and rebounded, so that he had to shield his face, and rest his head in the familiar darkness of his cloak. Balthazar would read to him, for he was not bothered so much by the light, and pulled his own cape about Oti and wove flower stems into patterns over his hair while he recovered from the sun's unwitting assault on his senses. "What pretty hair you have," he whispered routinely as he worked, running his fingers along the strands, root to end, flower to flower. While Oti pressed his face into his shoulder and waited for the light to relent or for a cloud to pass over the sun and let him look out on the world again.
... It was something Balthazar asked him, back when they first met: "Why would a creature such as yourself choose to walk in broad daylight? When it makes you sick, and weak?"
"Because it also makes me happy," Oti had said, pointing to the flowers, and the sky, and the small insects minding their own business and buzzing along the underbrush and into the field. He knew the smell of the soil and the stones underneath and the caress of the wind while it sailed over the sunlight mountains and into the valleys, shifting its tune. How could he shut himself out of knowing the world and all it had to tell by day, simply in a different light?
"But what of the night?"
"Oh, I love the night," he sighed, and pulled his cape about himself. The night made him feel alive. "But I also love the day. Is that wrong?"
"No," came the laugh. "Not at all."
He would come to know Balthazar over many moons and many meetings, some of which rolled day after day returning to some place out in the hills, and some of which he had to wait, weeks or even months between them. Balthazar would write to Oti often, through those longer periods, letters and poems and sometimes simply little notes that said thinking of you. Oti kept all of them, stashed between the pages of his books for safekeeping, to pour over when he was alone.
He'd never mentioned Balthazar to anyone else, not even his sister. He didn't really know why, only that he liked to sneak away to the valleys and sit and wait and read his books, until Balthazar showed, and then they would talk for hours and hours, until the day had gone and the darkness glided from hill to hill and then overtop the mountain to take its place, and the fireflies dotted the fields and danced with the night they, too, loved. Over time they took to holding hands and holding out until they could next see each other.
Balthazar told him things of the dark lands he'd never known before, and about his old castle, which used to stand at its heart, where he kept countless books and scrolls and spells and knowledge from the ancient times. Where the hallways were lined with paintings and poems and hidden passages, and the keys to the doors and the dungeons and were magic things, chants and songs and ways of knowing darkness and all it was and all it could be. With pillars and balconies and bridges carved of stone and ice and weathered with grace, so that the dragons and beasts adorning them all carried an essence of incredible might, proof of how old they were and how much older still they could be. There were study rooms and great open spaces with gothic windows and painted glass, ceilings so high they could have kept stars strung throughout the columns and the art adorning it from corner to corner. And how it was lost, to something he did not understand, and how parts of his mind were lost too, so that he did not remember those dark secrets he kept, or the oldest of the spells. And that was why he had to search so much, for the pieces of himself that were missing, though he did not know if he was ever getting closer, or chasing dead things through an undying abyss.
"I don't know all that I am anymore," he'd sighed about it, and spread his hands, then rest them on his knees. And Oti had folded his hands over them, and beneath the cold flesh he felt very faintly a pulse, of anger of fear, of sorrow--a heartbeat.
"So you understand," Balthazar had said, quietly, "why I must keep searching..."
"I understand," said Oti, in barely a whisper, but the message was clear.
Balthazar had smiled at him, a painful, light smile washed out a great deal by the midday sun, but beautiful in its shape, its craft, how it was set and what it was set upon his face to do.
... Now Balthazar was giving him that same smile as he drew himself out of his cape and blinked, mismatched eyes of a storm and clear sky into the light. With one hand he touched Oti's cheek, and his chin, gently, and then the hand trailed off, and was at his side, in the flowerbed.
"I missed you," said Oti, suddenly and aloud and with his own hands, which moved silken and precise together along the back of a cool breeze. "I began to go farther from the mountain, hoping, one day I would see some sign of you. That you would appear over the hill or from the forest, and that when you came back perhaps I could take you to the mountain. You know, don't you, that I've kept everything you've ever written to me? Always, always put carefully among my books, and here." He pressed his chest. "Always close, here..." A sigh escaped him, thinking about it, and the rainy days when sometimes he went out into the storm to be alone and sometimes when he sat at the mouth of the mountain cave, simply waiting and listening through the sound of the water rushing, running, turning the fields and the forest all around them the most eternal green.
His hands were shaking, frigid, and Balthazar took them gently in his own, folding them, warming them, clasping them between his palms so close that across their knuckles they could feel, pulsing faintly, their hearts.
"Always close," Balthazar's echo planted deep in the sound. "Won't you tell me what you dream of, Oti?" A ripple of a smile spread gently across his face.
"What I dream of..?" Oti sighed, and shook his head, moved by the drumming noise.
He dreamed of many things. He did not know where to start, and got lost, trying to recall the details as one does when flipping through a favored book. Of dying, sometimes, and of the terrible ways things could go wrong, that he would worry over when he was small when the shapes in the woods would kill and bury each other, and when every breath could expose him. So he would be torn and bled dry and put into the ground. Did he see his corpse, lying there, in the brush? Or was it the reminder, some silhouette he drew in, imagined in brush strokes over death he had seen, that kept him in a stupor... Those moments returned to him, pained and feverish, splintering to pieces which cut and twisted the wounds, re-opening them.
He dreamed of flying, a creature of the night no force could catch, between the lines of a page and opposing currents, his wings lithe and great and painted with spells he spread over the land and sea. Together with constellations on the horizon he rose, until night became dawn and he drew closer to the sun, which did him no harm, and into which he could look and see the parallel world, a passage to it, so that he might cross over. If only he were brave and strong.
Of having to feed from a body spread over a stone tablet in a moor, alive and trying to throw him off while he drank the life away. And gravity had surpassed him, holding him down against the open flesh; he'd broken the skin so that the blood flooded and pooled at his feet, chains binding his ankles to granite as the blood soaked through his clothing and his shame. He could not release the death grip, his hands and his fangs at the throat, and while the thing twitched and tossed and he tried not to look into the eyes, into the soul...
Of standing in the middle of a decorated stage, singing passage after passage of his favorite plays, knowing every word of every scene, the soul of the story and how to make it real. He danced it, in and out of every character and all their woes, showing the world how to become them and their sorrows, so that he moved to tears the faces of all those watching. Shapes in the crowd safe from the spotlight burning deep into his skin and raising him, higher, to the ceiling, to the chorus he led them through one last time until the curtains came down.
"And you," he said softly. "I dream of you, and your coming here to find me. We sit sometimes atop the hills, in the sun or by the night, and sometimes we go into the forest, where the trees grow taller than the eye can see with each step, and the pathways travel deep, into the ground, until there is nothing but darkness, and silence, and the sound of you speaking to me. We join our hands and dance our way forward. And it is our darkness, our silence, where we go searching together, to a place only we know, and only we have ever been or can go. There is no longer a path, but shadow and the comfort that comes between the eyes when you sleep, deeply and soundly. We circle, spellbound, speaking to life new magic, round and round as the moon rises. As we draw closer, and draw old runes with the sweep of our feet, following steps and whispers--things I can't quite remember. But it doesn't really matter. There are stars..." He closed and opened his eyes. "It is a place of both darkness and light, our place, our dance, our secret, alone..."
Balthazar leaned to take his shoulders. His breath was warm and familiar and so near to his cheek he could hear the heartbeat behind it, gracious and powerful and ancient. But with great care he'd bowed his head down over him so that Oti could see nothing but him--he wanted nothing but to gaze at into all the details of his twisted beauty: the slit of his bottom eyelid only barely visible from that angle, and at how his hair became a halo of gold gleaming all around him, and how his horns caught and held the sun. He wanted to wrap his arms back around Balthazar, and rest his head against him, to know peace and the drumming noise and follow it down, down, nightfall, moonbeams, curtains and capes draped about each other and closing in.
Instead he cast his eyes away, back at his book, color burning again in his face. He did not know why he did it, some muscle reaction or recoiling from the glare of the sun, for he so badly longed for the closeness, to just touch their heads or their fingers together and be still. The shape formed on Balthazar's lips was something he'd never seen before, but he wanted to know that too. But as if fighting him, his own body lurched, and he struggled to say something, to tell him that he--
Then there was a shadow over them. Just as swiftly as it appeared, Balthazar hurdled over him, blocking Oti's body with his own. In his true form he rose, so that the two great figures obscured the sun, the fields, the forest. The first crashed into him and sent him reeling over the flowerbeds in a shower of serpentine scales and blood. Oti staggered to his feet, squinting into the distance where two massive beasts lay sprawled, winding circles round each other and leaving deep tracks in the land. When they snarled, the trees trembled, and the wind, which dare not blow between them, fell dead and silent.
Balthazar gave one arm a shake, blood and thick silk threads trailing down the length of it. He seemed unfazed, his attention now entirely on the dragon rearing up to challenge him.
It was Ara. She too had taken her true shape and charged Balthazar, to pin him down to the hill with her webs. She was smaller but quick, and burning with a ferocity with which Oti was all too familiar when he saw her fight. Her face was molded by molten fury and she cracked her tail like a whip in the air, wielding the poison barb along the tip as a warning. She was entirely focused, one predator posturing against another, and her scales glinted black and violet as she coiled her body in preparation to strike again.
Oti stood dazed. It took him a while to realize what had actually happened, wandering out of the stupor, one step, another step, into the sunlight and towards the pair. Because now he recognized truly the burning look in his sister's eyes, from so many times before, back to childhood, back to when she'd step in to save his life. She must have misunderstood something--she was so obviously trying to protect him. She saw Balthazar take his shoulders from somewhere in the forest, he thought, and then launched herself full-force into battle, because she'd give life and limb to keep him safe. She must have just come across them and acted at once, because she could not afford to wait. For all her life she'd been keeping him out of trouble, keeping him alive, and now he knew she would not back down.
Balthazar must have thought she was aiming for him instead when she charged, and retaliated. Now the two demon creatures tore into each other with such force that the earth shivered again, and he began to comprehend, ill as it made him, that they might very well try to kill each other. The idea of it carved its way like a stake through his chest, very cold, and blunt. Blood. The smell of blood was overpowering and stung in his nostrils, in his lungs, and knotted itself in his throat so he could barely breathe after.
He called out to them, but his voice went unheard under the clash of their claws and their wings snapping open, jaws snapping shut. Ara's teeth fixed with a horrible crack around Balthazar's forearm and he snarled, centering magic in spite of the pain, and turned all the blood around them to spiraling crystal swords. The blades flew, and cut, lodging themselves into wing membrane and the small slots left between her damaged scales.
Oti screamed with his sister as she recoiled from the blow and went about tearing the ice from her wounds. In her claws, in boiling rage, they shimmered and melted, and she struck with her many legs at his hydra heads, twisting tooth and nail into each other in an effort to get to their cores.
Trembling, Oti stumbled forward, reaching out, somehow never quite reaching them, begging to get their attention. But no voice could he isolate in his throat, and no strength could he gather in his fingers to articulate them. He could feel the terrible grief in his own core beating out of control, knowing soon it would erupt, volcanic ash and fire and darkness--stronger was the throbbing like a promise long overdue, and threatening to make him pay.
Everything, it demanded from him. His breath, his body, his soul. It was not the blood stench that drew him forward but the horror of seeing two worlds collide, his whole life, within the wings of creatures diving and churning faster and more violently than any storm. Before him the hills were waves and he was rocking, stumbling over his own feet trying to reach them, up and down and up and down, never getting any closer, though the sun swallowed him whole, and the blood that blanketed the fields and pooled, stinking, thick, in pockets of earth slowed him significantly. He could never hope to make it in time.
They were swearing at each other, Ara and Balthazar, and swerving to avoid dirty blows coming from different directions. Serpentine coils gouged over the hills and divided what was left of the flowers. Shadow, sun, forsaken were the places where they exchanged blows while the world went quiet. Oti kept calling to them, aloud and with his hands, but the words wouldn't form. He couldn't find a way to speak amidst the clash and the reek of blood which flooded all his senses in distant spikes of pain. His eyes, unable to focus, mistook shapes and sounds for things they were not, and the ground became dark, open water. The forest was gone. Something snapped inside of him.
I don't want to Turn, he thought. He fought it, the power crackling in his coding and trying to burst out into flames and deep, dark secrets. One sob half-formed, the power leaked; another, and he was clawing at the sea he thought he was in. His fingers raked solid ground, to try to bury it within, through the flowerbeds and the shallow roots, the trenches along ocean floors... If I could just breathe--he'd been holding his breath, trying not to cry, or to look directly out into the sun where the demons were ripping each other apart. But he could not turn inward, that would surely expose his next form. So he dug, and scratched, and swam, aimlessly, biting his lip and biting back tears. So his face was painted too with blood, rivers carved deep and dripping all the way past his chin as he stumbled, and crawled.
And he struggled through the hills and the waves, trying to breathe, to keep his head above the blood water. He made a stiff choking noise as he moved against the current, against the power in his chest heavier than all the heavens, throbbing as it meant to transform him.
He heard his sister scream again, and he wanted to reach her, to help her. To help them both. Stop it, he said only to himself, his hands shaking, speaking no language. I could not stand to watch you die. I could not stand to lose you...
He sank. To his knees and to his sorrow, and would not stop sinking, so that the world was foam, and darkness, and falling into a bottomless well he became empty and cold. His body seized, and his eyes sealed shut, and he felt himself change with regret that could have only come from inside his own code and dragged him farther down. The flowers, fragile, and miniscule beneath his newly fledged claws and wings and the sweep of his own scaled tail, withered and died without a word. And he wept. He wept until he could open his eyes, not knowing what to do or how to reach them, and the tears of dark blood doused the whole side of the hill.
While he was sobbing, they stopped. Their heads turned, to him and then to one another, and they saw at once reflected in the other's face the mirror image of concern, the panic, the desire to protect him. The ceasefire was signed without words as they swept over to Oti, one over each shoulder, all shadows joined from three broken figures. He reached out to them again, and they took his great hands, which were scored evenly with the mark of the damned.
Then just like that, all three looked human again, though drowned in plains of blood and scorched earth.
"What did you do?" That was Ara, sharply, with a growl that seeped from the throat and trickled along the edge of each exposed fang.
"What did we do?" said Balthazar, and shook his head. "You weren't trying to attack him, then?"
"Weren't you?"
"Gods, no," he breathed. "Never."
Ara said something under her breath that must have been very rude, and clasped Oti's one hand with both her own. She knelt down beside him and checked him over, all as if she'd done this before. Once satisfied she stood again, and he did the same, though he was not sure if his legs would hold steady or become pillars of bloodied sand and collapse. Ara took the tattered edge of her cape and wiped the remaining tears from his face.
"Ah," Balthazar said, to himself, as if he'd just made the connection, "You're his sister."
"And you?" Ara snapped, pointing almost as if to strike him, and then stopping mid-way. She saw the way they were looking at each other, her brother and Balthazar, and clapped her hand to her face instead. "For gods' sake," a sigh, and then a period of silence as she peered out between the space of her fingers, all bloodied from the fight and thin, but swift in every movement. Back and forth between them. "Oti, why didn't you just tell me you had a boyfriend?"
Oti blinked and flushed. The words left him faster than he could form the thought all the way through, "Boyfriend?"
Balthazar burst out laughing and threw back his head, so that just a glimpse of his eye gleamed from beneath his horns and helm. It seemed so obvious, now that Ara had said it, that he'd said it, that Balthazar brushed his arm against his shoulder ever so lightly as he regained himself.
"I mean, we--"
"We never had to say it, did we?" Balthazar mused aloud, and quite amused himself.
"Well, no, I suppose not..." the end trailed off, unnecessary.
Balthazar made a humming noise and reached out to him, "May I?"
Oti answered by throwing his arms around him. Balthazar let himself laugh again and held him there, pushing his cheek down over his forehead, holding him, rocking him. He pressed his lips tightly to Oti's forehead and kissed him once, twice, then a kiss on each temple right above where his mask flared out to make dual rose-colored wings.
It felt nice. And the passage of time seemed not to matter to him, nor the way his face was stained, nor the ache in his chest that must have come from the code there running quicker and quicker, the drum, the heartbeat at his core, which skipped and murmured and sang. He put his head against Balthazar's chest and heard the same sound.
He thought he could stay there, motionless, for a long while more, but something very urgent woke him from the trance, and with wide eyes he tore his gaze around the field. Battlefield now. The hills had been leveled and the flowers burned and the earth, once so rich, now so saturated with blood that it had turned into a thick, sucking mud, darker than before and boasting a tart, rusted smell. "Your wounds!" Oti parted their embrace as he said it.
"I've been worse-off," said Ara, with a shrug. "I'll get an earful from Lady, though. We should go check in with her. You too," she pointed at Balthazar. "You've got some explaining to do."
"Ara, don't--"
"Hell, Oti," she'd already started pacing, wanting to be rid of the place. "I thought he was going to hurt you. When I got back to the base I couldn't find you anywhere, and I said to myself, oh, you must be at the labs. But you weren't. Or the Court? But you weren't, and no one there had seen you today--not in the library, not in the gardens. I started checking the usual spots, like your place by the willows, or the lavender beds by the river bend, nothing, nothing, nothing. I started to get worried, that you'd wandered off somewhere and gotten caught in the light, or lost, and then I started imagining the worst. You know how that works? I panicked. I went farther and farther, past the borders, though I didn't really realize it at the time, and then I thought I heard your voice, and someone else's. I didn't even think, you know. I saw him put his hands on you and I--I got angry--because I guess I'd already made up my mind that you'd gone off somewhere and gotten into trouble. And I said to myself, I've already wasted too much time trying to find you again, and damn it, if I waited another moment I might have lost you forever. And I couldn't bear that."
"I'm sorry," his voice was soft. "I made you worry--"
"No, oh no. I'm sorry," a pause. "I want to be mad. At someone. And I couldn't possibly be mad at you, you know that. You don't owe me all your secrets, and I smother you sometimes, and I forget that you can--you do--do things on your own. I jumped to conclusions."
"So did I," said Balthazar, for a moment revealing his pearly fangs, "and in my haste, made an assumption--an enemy--of you." He seemed to be studying her, the tone of her voice, her expression, the extent of the injuries. He very slowly raised an arm, bloody still from battle too, and began to mutter a spell.
All the wounds began to close--whether time was being reversed or the natural processes of mending propelled wasn't quite clear, but whatever curses and poisons and grime that saturated their blood slipped harmlessly out of their veins and splattered to the soil, becoming crystals of all different colors. Then the flesh and bone rippled and twisted and sealed, slowly, like a current reversed or a tide washing in. Ara and Oti watched, silent and focused, and dared not interrupt him or the dark power that flowed fruitful from his lips and his fingers as he curved them to the shape of shadowed things, drawing symbols in the air. Then, at last satisfied, he stopped, his song edging off to a whisper, then a thought, and he lowered his now immaculate hands and sighed.
"Shame," he was calm, though sadness drifted in him as he said it. "I used to know much more powerful spells for this sort of thing. Forgive me, I've forgotten them." If at all possible, he looked much paler than before, and his cape, black and grand, contrasted starkly over top his skin.
Ara's eyes widened, "How did you--" And then she left it there, sensing that it might be best not to ask. She knelt down to retrieve one of the crystal shards, turning it over and lifting it toward the sun, so it sparkled in an onslaught of lilac and blue, but it had no answer for her either. From where she had plucked it under her feet, the ground shifted as seeds burst from their shells and upward, through the blood and bed of jewels. And soon the whole field was changed, again.
Balthazar smiled, in his mannerly way, his statuesque face beautifully framed by late daylight and a breeze that had just now again begun to blow. He took Oti's hands in his again, very gently, as if to tell him there was nothing to fear, and bowed his high head.
"You need rest," said Oti, who could feel still the traces of magic in the tips of Balthazar's fingers, where it had drawn a great deal out of him. "Both of you."
Ara's eyes were narrowed thoughtfully, only barely visible behind the cover of her hat and collar. She was holding the crystal still, and stared at Balthazar through it, "You could have killed me." It was a simple statement. A stinging realization. "With that kind of power."
Balthazar's head remained lowered, crowned with nothing but grave certainty and his helm and heavy horns. He said nothing, but Oti knew very well that it must have been true. Never before had he been in the presence of that kind of darkness, the true strength undisguised, though clearly controlled--kept in check with some unspoken accordance. Or was it that, as Balthazar had mentioned before, he simply did not remember how to use his magic anymore, that he had forgotten those spells and songs... For some time, he had been aware, that Balthazar was something ancient, but just how old he'd never been sure. And yes, he had guessed at what it would be like, exposed in his real shape, but to see it, to experience it, to reflect upon it now was overwhelming altogether.
He knew why Balthazar hid his eyes. Because anyone who looked carelessly into them could fall dead in an instant, or be overcome with madness they locked up for too long within their cores, fall prey to their vices and sins without looking back. Those eyes, blood colored, carried in them that ancient darkness, without law or limit, from which all are born and to which all must go. But he had not uncovered them in the battle. Nor had he cast any outstanding spells. He had not even broken the surface of the deep, dark sea that was his power.
Oti wondered at that. How much Balthazar had simply forgotten about himself or how much he purposefully chose to close off, just as he hid his eyes underneath the protection of the metal helm.
He had always known Balthazar as someone gentle and courteous, who came to sit with him in his favorite places and read stage plays and fold flowers into his hair. Who whispered to him with their foreheads together and who came up with prose of his own to recite, who wrote to him in a language he could only describe as love, for such eternal, such true love it brought blossoming in him when he read over and over every letter. But he had also always known Balthazar as someone who had shouldered heavy secrets, and who had purposely masked parts of himself along with his full potential. Perhaps for his safety, or for those around him, or that and more. There were things about him he had not shared, because he could not distinguish them himself anymore or because he had not yet seen the need to. But he seemed troubled by it all the same. It was one of the things he would have to explain in greater detail.
As if lost in some puzzle of her own, Ara knelt down and laid the crystal in the dirt again. Below it another filament of green reached out of the earth and shoved it unto its side, all in a matter of seconds.
They said nothing, for a while, but looked about the clearing and where all three of them, as great demon creatures, had towered over the land and bled into it, leveling the hills into premature graves. Where their shadows once blackened the ground, and where their blood had burnt it, flowers had started to sprout again, attuned to the magic and granted new life from old lyrics and ash. The wind had picked up again, carrying off the fallen petals and the deep blood scent, faster and more confident now that the rage had been quelled. For all the death and all the scars cleaved through the field, life was renewed by the spell. And like reflections of the sun off ocean waves, the crystals gleamed among streaks of newly fledged green, soon to be covered by roots and leaves, and then taken back into the ground.
He had been devastated by the state of things and how they might have to leave that place, but that pain started to subside. He got the sense that soon enough, there'd be no trace of their battle at all. Only if the forest would tell. Only if someone would listen.
And beyond the tress, the mountain loomed. One way or another, they all turned their attention to it, as it seemed to call out to them, saying: it is time, children of the night, children born with darker souls, to come home.