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Aurrir was floating in a sea of darkness, trying to understand what his Deva wanted from him. The same dream, night after night, week after week, month after month- for the past four months it has just been the same message, the same dream. And it still struck him as the wrong thing to do, to his very core.
A yellow light pulsed from nothing infront of him, growing to a humanoid size and wavering in shape as Valandras' voice surrounded him and echoed again, repeating the same instruction that struck so wrong.
"Remove. End. Purify." Valandras pauses as he always does, before suggesting what Aurrir cannot follow What Valandras knows he cannot follow. "Kill."
"I can't- " Aurrir tries to say, but the words carry no sound.
This time though, it's different. Valandras slowly shifts when he answered, the yellow darkening and hue changing to orange, before red starts to bleed through until the entirety of the figure was red- and there was a flash as the light died in an instant, and suddenly Aurrir felt like he was falling through the air and something in his chest felt like it broke.
Valandras spoke one more time, "Consequences..." He said, the end of the word punctuated by the feeling of a sudden stop at the end of a fall.
Aurrir jerked awake in a panic, gaze flickering from point to point around him, as if he was searching for some unseen danger. Moments of silence pass, the only sound in the room is Aurrir's ragged gasping breaths as he tried to make sense of what had just happened- and how the dream had ended.
And the... broken feeling in his chest. Something was missing. What that something was he didn't know as he felt the cold creeping into his limbs, and his heart began to ache. For what or why, he doesn't know.
He knew quickly that he wouldn't be able to rest for the rest of the early morning- he didn't even bother to try at that point, not seeing the point to the tossing and turning with the broken feeling. He knew the remainder of the night's rest wouldn't come.
He tried to pass the time, eventually making his way to a chair in his room near the window, a book in hand that he tried to focus on, barely paying attention to or absorbing what he was reading for the next few hours as he tried and failed to ignore the growing pain. The ache in his chest spreads to pain lacing down his back and through his shoulders. The cold in his limbs becomes almost frigid as enough time passes, and his grayscale vision slowly comes back to color as light returned to the world and the sun rose.
He rose to put his book back, only making it two steps before the pain spiked to an extreme and an unexpected pained shout escaped him as it felt like the muscles or his back and shoulders were tearing themselves apart.
His wings tear into existence without him calling them as his legs gave out from beneath him, crumpling to the ground in a heap, taking every ounce of self control to not cry out in pain again. He can't help it as he tried to curl his wings around him, almost as if it was an attempt to hide as the stark white feathers changed, black trailing through like ink drops bleeding through parchment.
Aurrir didn't realize he had started crying out in pain, and that he didn't stop as he practically writhed in place, unable to move.
He never heard the door open behind him or the gasps of those who saw him, his once white feathers now black as pitch, falling out and sloping off by the fistful. His screams only increased in volume as the feathers fell away and left nothing but skeletal remnants in their place.
He gasped, curled on a ball on the floor with his new skeletal wings limp. When he looked to the door, he saw those that his shouts and screams had called. His brother, sister, and his father. When his gaze locked with them though and he tried to rasp out for help, his siblings flinched back- his sister turning and fleeing as fast as she could with a look of utter terror, while his brother had only stumbled back and was flinching away.
His Father though. The man paled, pulling his other son away from Aurrir, his look of concern quickly turning to one of disgust and he didn't say a word once he realized what had transpired.
Before Aurrir could even speak, his Father had pulled his brother the rest of the way out of the room, and closed the door behind them. The click of a lock seemed louder than it ever had been before, and Aurrir was left alone after aftershocks of pain tore through him, and he was left surrounded by rapidly decaying feathers that he had once been so proud of.
