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It began, at the start of an unusually brisk September afternoon, as it always did: with darkness.
The shadows of nightfall that lingered long past the dawn were usually a comfort to Phil, a constant reminder of company snaking around the objects in his home and skulking up his walls until they wrapped around him, embracing his body in their inky cloak. Even in their absence, he could always count on the sudden breeze uplifting the curtains and familiar yet forever unavoidable goosebumps appearing on his arms; and then, the gentle beams of warm sunlight pouring into the room finally disintegrating into blinding darkness. It’s a reminder, even after all these centuries, that he is not alone.
Phil gave her credit, she’d taken to being rather tactful about it since the kids. These days, the wind left as fast as it arrived, playful gusts that threw his hat askew and teasingly extinguished his torches as he placed them, just to watch him bristle with confusion and break into laughter. The elation of each interaction never lessened, never has in all these years. Phil isn’t sure if that’s a natural quality of being married to an immortal Goddess who speaks to you from an ethereal, otherworldly plane of existence, or if he’s just that far gone, but he tends to claim the latter. It’s easy to. When he’d smile at her tricks, he’d feel the warmth of her presence in his chest with every gust of wind, and if he were very lucky he’d catch a whisper of her voice, her joyful laughter, echoing in the recesses of his mind.
The late September breeze was nothing like this.
If Kristin’s presence were usually a gust of fresh air, a constant breeze to stir the life of the Earth around him, then with September came a windless lull. Phil would peer out the window each morning and scan for the swaying of the forest or the rippling waves of grass but instead find the air to be still and unmoving, his walks along the riverside far quieter than he had grown accustomed to. The shadows came and went as though busied with other affairs, and even with the increasingly vocal flock of crows following Phil around he still struggled not to take it personally, or to linger too much on the silence of the house after Technoblade left soon thereafter.
“Make sure Will is alright,” Phil had told him — it wasn’t a question, but Techno had nodded gruffly either way.
Things got worse after Techno left. By the time October came around, he would find himself doubled over on the floor every so often, crows pulling at his hair and heart pounding out of his chest with an inexplicable and all-consuming sense of doom crawling beneath his skin until he began to tremble and shiver from head to toe. Phil would hear her voice, sometimes, during these episodes, so faint he could barely make out more than a few words. Sometimes it was his name, or love, or sorry, but as time went on and the sounds became less and less clear, and he could only hear one word anymore: Wilbur.
The crows pecked at his son’s door, most days. Phil would often find himself laid flat in the bedroom next door, listening to the rhythmic tapping of their beaks on the damaged wood, imagining the wind in his hair. Other times, the incessant noise would drill into his skull like an ice pick as he stared down at the next letter he’d intended to write to Wilbur, despite not having gotten a response in weeks. He would write until the quill snapped in half from the tension in his hand, or until a headache pounded at his temples and he finally yelled at the crows to stop.
After several hundred years of solitude, Phil thought he’d have conquered that strange, ringing hollowness that reverberated through his chest when the silence turned deafening, but something about stillness had become suffocating in the past month.
Mostly, he tried not to think about it.
He and Technoblade had that in common, though Techno seemed to manage it better than him. Phil was the type to fret, and Techno fretted over Phil’s fretting, and that would go on until the feedback loop caught up with them enough for Techno to point it out and disrupt it.
“You worry too much,” he’d often say, and Phil would always laugh, a bright sound no matter how dim the room. He would remark that he had every reason to worry, given that he’d had to pull Techno’s snout from being stuck in the ground three times that week alone.
Techno would snort, “I thought I smelled something!” and Phil would laugh louder, the sound of it echoing off the walls in a feedback loop neither of them would attempt to interrupt.
The crows didn’t peck outside Techno’s bedroom; they knew better by now, after years of scolding and books thrown at the door. Phil usually preferred it this way — it made it easier for him to sit in the hallway with his wings pressed up against the door, holding the newly-received letter in his hands and breathing slow, ignoring the pit of irrational dread slowly carving out his insides. The words on the page bounced around the walls of mind until their interference pattern overwhelmed him, and he dropped the letter frustratedly to the floor. Tapping his fingertips against the door, he yearned like he never had before to hear that 900-page book about sword-fighting tactics collide with the wall again. Techno’s is better to tap on than Wilbur’s, anyway, whose well-pecked door now has an awful hollow sound to it.
The crows would come eventually, of course, seeking his company or his food or his hat to hide inside of, but by then he was usually asleep on the floor, so he didn’t mind much.
In November, the current changes, and it changes fast.
The sensation starts with the same darkness that had found him in the many months before September, any humor that it had once carried drained away and forgotten by the crushing, omnipresent aura of impending death suddenly pressing down on Phil’s shoulders. Shadows lingered over his frame as Phil stared himself down in the mirror, his eye sockets hollow and leaden as he tried to push past the nagging worry eating away at the cavity in his chest. He’d felt it before, but the fear was always accompanied by the determined knowledge of an upcoming battle to prepare for. A dragon to slay, a monster to hunt, a tyrant to vanquish by way of his sword and bow.
On the early morning of November 16th, when Phil is roused from his sleep by this horrible gnawing despair, there is no violent beast to destroy. Kristin’s voice comes to him, clear as it has ever been, with one name: Wilbur.
The crows are raucous, chittering and chirping in distress, clinging to the bottom of Phil’s robe as he treads heavy-footed from his bedroom.
“What, what?” He asks, as he pulls on a shirt. They caw loudly at this, fighting one another for the spot on each of his shoulders until he shoos them away to gather his things. In the soft light of the lanterns, their feathers sheen with a warm cast of orange, appearing more brown than black, and Phil flutters his wings in unconscious reply to their worried chirping. He stares at the front door for a moment before he turns around and hushes them until the only sound in the room is the skittering of their tiny feet on the stone floor and the howling wind coming from outside.
They blink at him as he speaks; “I’ll bring him home, okay?”
Phil doesn’t know if he’s convinced anyone, but the anxiety is thrumming from his chest down to his fingertips now, the wind pushing against the door impatiently. He’s out of time to find out.
The threshold between his home and the outside opens with a creak, and the whirlwind begins.
It’s pitch black, the outline of the nearby forest barely visible, a silhouette against the placid moonlight. No hope of stillness or peace remains against the unrelenting wind as the trees twist and bend and Phil’s hand flies up to his hat to keep it in place, his hair whipping against his face and feathers fluttering behind him. The sword on his hip feels heavy in its sheath.
Death is in the air.
Phil braces his feet on the ground, digging his heels into the damp soil before flapping his wings once, twice, and then rising until no part of him remains tethered by gravity. His stomach flips with the ascent, exhilaration and dread pooling together in his gut. Phil huffs out a breath and looks up to the moon as he flies, a waning crescent, where it is suspended just below its highest point in the sky.
It’s a long flight, one he wouldn’t have been able to make so quickly without Kristin’s aid. She molds the winds to her will, propelling him through the skies with speed that makes him grateful there’s no great mountains between here and there, and he can feel her energy flow through him as the drafts come and go underneath his wings to guide him in the right direction. He’s about to ask her if he’s close by when the gusts of wind supporting his gliding frame suddenly turn freezing, goosebumps prickling across his arms, and glimmering lights of civilization begin to sparkle over the distant horizon, humbled only by the glow of the nearly setting moon. Underneath him, an overgrown thicket of trees sways in the wind, branches no doubt groaning in protest where they cannot be heard.
There’s a large flag swaying in the distance, just past the densest part of the forest. As Phil nears it, he squints, the fabric of it as black as the night and appearing so heavy that it can’t properly flutter as a flag should when the breeze runs through it. Instead, it hangs there, limp, only shifting minutely each time the gusts change direction.
Worry strikes Phil in the center of his chest and he flaps his wings a few times, clenching his jaw. This is the mighty L’manberg, or so he should assume, given Wilbur’s letters. It’s hard to imagine his son creating such a turgid, vapid pastiche of a flag, not after all the hours of excited rambling he’d been on the receiving end of after Wilbur had first read through an old vexillology textbook Techno gifted him.
“It’s about memorability,” Wilbur had told him once, pacing around the living room and gesturing emphatically. He would often smile and tilt his head while he talked, bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, or shaking his hands excitedly at his sides. “The delicate balance of distinct yet simplistic, all while meaning something more.”
Phil had smiled, too, the energy contagious. He prodded, “Does every flag have a deeper meaning to it?”
“Every good one!” insisted Wilbur. “Each color represents something personal to the nation — or, maybe just the person making it.” He added, a bit sheepish. “I’ve designed flags, too, but that doesn’t make me a nation.”
“You’ve designed flags?” Phil found himself inquiring without thought, and Wilbur looked equal parts embarrassed and bursting out of his skin to tell him more.
He’d preened, running a hand through his dark hair and averting his gaze.
“Well, yeah,” Wilbur admitted. “They’re not very good, though. I’m just a beginner.”
Phil shook his head. “No way,” he says. “I’m sure your flags are very memorable, Will.”
Wilbur frowned in that endearing way he did whenever Phil complimented him, his cheeks dusting pink and his eyebrows lifting up. When Phil had offered to look at his designs, it had only taken a moment of thought before Wilbur had nodded and sprinted down the hall to his bedroom, only slowing as Phil called after him to do so.
They’d spent the rest of the night under the lamplight, sitting together and flipping through Wilbur’s notebook. The shadows left by the soft, yellow glow of the lamp cradled Wilbur’s face gently, the roundness of his cheeks shaded smoothly and the sharp lines of his jaw and chin casting large shapes of darkness down his neck and chest. Phil had thought to take a picture of him like that, but Wilbur stirred the moment he moved his hand from its place on his back and he decided against it.
“What’s this one?” Phil asked, leant forward and pointing at a corner of the page where one of the flag designs had been redrawn four or five different times, with unreadable handwriting scrawled all along the margins. A few of the flags had a dark semicircle on the left side; one had a rectangle, another a square, but all of them showed an X placed somewhere throughout. One touted at least a dozen, hatched in the corner inside of the square, and a few others had lines of them along the edges of the stripes. The largest flag on the page was one of the semicircle ones, with one large uncolored X in the middle and three stripes; red, white, and blue, to the right.
“This is one of my favorites,” Wilbur had told him, pointing at the big one. “I really liked the look of the cross. I’ve never seen something like that on a flag before, but it’s still really distinctive. I think if I ever made a nation, this would be the flag I chose.”
Phil patted him on the back. “It looks awesome, mate,” he praised, honestly. “What do the colors mean?”
Wilbur had shrugged, “I don’t know,” He responded. “Can’t find meaning in a nation that doesn’t exist.”
“Well,” Phil had said, humor in his voice, “you better get on that, then.”
Wilbur laughed. “Do I look like a president to you?”
Phil watched him run a finger across the page of the notebook, some dust from the colors rubbing off on his skin, and caught a strange, longing sort of expression on his son’s face.
He’d smiled. “Not yet.”
Wilbur snorted, leaning back from the book and stretching, lazy and languid like a cat. “I don’t think I’d make a very good president,” he confessed, and then paused. “But the flag is pretty good, right?”
Laughing, Phil nodded. “It’s great.” He watched Wilbur’s smile go toothy and crooked.
“Even if it doesn’t exist?”
“Even if it doesn’t exist.” Phil asserted. “Your country doesn’t have to be physical, you can make one in your mind, and the flag will matter just as much.”
“But I’ll have no citizens.” complained Wilbur.
Phil reached up and ruffled his curly hair, warmth surging in his chest. “It’s your nation,” he’d said. “It can be whatever you want it to be.”
Wilbur seemed to consider this, making a popping sound with his lips that he’d taken to mimicking from Phil, and then stopping a moment later.
“Alright.” He stated, decisively.
“Alright?”
“I’ll make a nation.” declared Wilbur. “In my mind. And one day, I’ll invite someone else to it, and we’ll make it real.”
His dark eyes had glimmered when they met Phil’s, and the shadows that fell over one side of his face didn’t seem to matter in the wake of that brightness. Phil hugged his son loosely, and said;
“I hope I’ll be there to see it, someday.”
The warmth of the memory dies as quickly as it arose against the harsh, cold wind. The town that Wilbur had longed for, hoped for, fought for, now suddenly below him; small buildings packed tightly together and a grand podium poised against a hilltop. Adjacent to the surprisingly quaint city is an ocean with rickety wooden docks and houses suspended on the water, sparkling as the moon reaches the horizon. There are small light fixtures throughout the location, and as he drops altitude he can make out a crowd of people gathered in chairs in front of the podium.
To Phil’s bewilderment, Kristin suddenly redirects him away from the group of people, the currents pushing him toward the back of the hilltop. His heart pounds in his ears. The wind whistles noisily as he zeroes in on a spot to land, his mind going blissfully silent for the few seconds of complete focus it requires to land briskly but safely from this height, eyes fixated on a flat patch of grass and dirt. Phil’s wings spread as wide as they can go, no shadow to be cast on the ground below amidst the blackness of the night as he turns in place, drifting in a tight circle until he leans back and the draft falls away, Kristin kindly lowering him to the ground. He lands on both feet with a heavy thump.
He takes a moment to lean over, hands on his knees, catching his breath for a fraction of a second. Kristin’s presence endures unremitting through his intuition, however, insistently guiding him around the side of the hill until he comes across a strange formation of stone, loose rocks and slabs arranged in a distinctly familiar, distinctly human way, messily piled in front of what is clearly some kind of entrance.
It’s all too familiar. Phil feels sick to his stomach.
His pickaxe clears away the stone in one swift swing, and then he’s stood in a narrow hallway, the walls vibrating with the echoes of someone’s voice — low, forceful, impassioned.
His son.
Kristin’s presence is suffocating in here, yet even still he marches forward toward the voice, the weight of her hands on his shoulders shoving him onward despite his instincts screaming for him to run, freeze, do anything but get any closer. As Phil approaches, he feels her influence tightening its grip on his mind as his sight is briefly overtaken by a vision of a button on a wall, and when he blinks to clear it away he can see it, just past the outline of Wilbur’s body sitting in a chair. Nausea and dizziness hit Phil in another terrible wave, and he braces one arm on the wall as he surges forward. Kristin’s voice in his mind overlaps itself with urgency, murmuring destruction, destruction, and he’s going to press it, Phil, he’s going to do it to himself.
Death hangs heavy on his hip, rings loudly in his ears. The stone walls are an echo chamber of his son’s own design.
Wilbur stands, and he’s speaking to himself again, unaware of Phil’s presence creeping his way.
“The thing that I built this nation for doesn’t exist anymore!” he exclaims, voice bouncing off the walls. “The thing that I worked towards doesn’t exist anymore!” He hunches over the wall, the button hidden from Phil’s view behind his body.
“It’s over.”
Phil steps into the room.
“What are you doing?”
Wilbur visibly jumps at the sound of his voice, spinning around and stumbling to the side in panic, hand clutching at his chest. His eyes are wide, desperate, and blink over and over in apparent disbelief when they catch sight of Phil.
“Phil?”
Wilbur stares at him. He looks different than he did when he left all those months ago, Phil’s heart clenching sorrowfully in his chest as he takes him in. There’s the dirty trench coat, colored dull brown and laden with holes and tears, strings of fabric sticking out messily, and a white button down with an unpleasant-looking red stain on it covering Wilbur’s heaving chest. His hair has grown out, one eye partially obscured, the other sunken and ringed by dark circles.
He looks more tired than Phil has ever seen him.
In the small lapse of silence Phil can hear the cogs turning and scraping against one another in the chaotic workings of Wilbur’s mind, and he can’t dredge up any last ounce of surprise when the next thing he says is a clear attempt at a lie: “I wasn’t doing anything! We just made Tubbo president, we, um… we won!” Wilbur smiles, or rather performs an empty and practiced imitation of one before pushing up one of his sleeves and avoiding Phil’s gaze. He mumbles, “We won the war. Schlatt’s gone, Phil, so, um…”
Phil knows Wilbur as well as he knows himself; and he knows lying best of all.
“Uh huh,” Phil agrees sardonically. He pauses, peering around the room, glancing with concern at the unsettling writing on the walls and inhaling the scent of gunpowder. “Is this L’manberg?” He asks.
Wilbur’s dark eyes flicker back to him, irises perpetually moving, searching for something untold, and he makes a vague gesture with his hands.
He stutters, “Well, it’s sort of like — the area around it is complicated, you wouldn’t…” Phil raises an eyebrow and Wilbur looks away again.
“Geography, and all that.” He adds.
His cheekbones are more prominent than they used to be, the shadows from the torches carving him gaunt and pallid. Phil chews on his lip nervously. He realizes for the first time today that Kristin’s gone dead silent, and despite finally being here with his son for the first time in so long, he feels suddenly and irrevocably lonely. He crosses his arms across his chest and leans against the wall of the archway.
“Mhm.”
There’s a long pause as Wilbur calculates what to say next, and Phil watches him scan the room.
“This… is L’manberg, I will admit.” he acquiesces.
Phil catches his gaze again and steps further into the room, sidestepping around the chair positioned in the middle to look at him closer. Wilbur slouches a bit as he approaches, arms crossed loosely, then awkwardly shifting to shove his hands in his pockets. He does not smile, or tilt his head, or wave his hands cheerfully — his voice is not fluid and melodic as Phil remembers it; his limbs shift around stiff and mechanically, songbird’s grace eroded away into the shadows under his eyes. A rush of anger sparks down Phil’s spine, and he puzzles over what terrible things this nation could have done to his son to have brought him here. Slowly, with his gaze on the floor, Wilbur steps aside so Phil can see the wooden button buried shoddily in the stone wall.
Wilbur lifts a hand and gestures at it. “Do you know what this button is?”
“Uh huh.” Phil affirms, the memory of Kristin’s vision fresh in his mind. “I do.”
Wilbur blinks and nods slowly, to himself, like he’s trying to process something but isn’t sure where to begin. Then he turns to face the wall, and Phil’s heart pounds hard in his chest at the proximity of his hand to the button, observing carefully as Wilbur makes no move to push it. Instead, he makes a wide, dramatic gesture toward the scrawled writing on the walls, and then turns back to Phil.
“Have you heard… the- the song, on the wall?” Wilbur questions.
He doesn’t wait for Phil to reply this time, continues on as Phil takes in the bizarre writing, messy and erratic. Despondence overtakes him with the unexpected thought that Wilbur’s jumbled handwriting appears at home when carved into a wall like this, his words displayed proudly, created in a performative illusion of permanence despite the inevitable loss of coherency through erosion and time.
Wilbur continues, stammering, “I was just saying — I made this point. And it was that, um… there was a special place. But it’s not there anymore, you know? It’s…” He trails off.
Something pulls at Phil, and he takes another step forward.
“It is there,” he tells Wilbur, focusing on keeping his voice even. “You’ve just won it back, Will.”
As he speaks, Wilbur turns slightly away, and Phil just barely catches the glassiness of his eyes and the violent tremble of his hands before he clenches his fists at his sides and then cries out, sharply, “I’m always so close to pressing this button, Phil!” He slams the side of his fist against the wall and folds over without warning, bracing himself against the stone, eyes squeezed shut and wincing like he’s in pain.
“I’ve been here,” Wilbur cries, voice breaking, “seven or eight times.”
Tentatively, Phil reaches out a hand to Wilbur’s hunched figure, but stops halfway with his arm suspended in the stagnant air when the entire room begins to quake and shift under their feet, only a moment later accompanied by the crashing sounds of distant explosions. Adrenaline surges through Phil once more and his wings fluff up as he stares at the ceiling, bits of gravel falling to the floor and sliding off the brim of his hat, and then back at his son, who visibly flinches at the noise but hastily turns back toward the wall with the button when Phil attempts to meet his gaze.
“They’re fighting,” Wilbur remarks, distantly.
He catches some of the dust in the air and pinches it between his fingers, watching it disintegrate into nothingness.
“And you want to just blow it all up,” Phil states, not quite a question.
It comes out as barely a whisper, hand braced against the wall just next to the button, when Wilbur answers, “I do.” Then, hesitant and quiet, he starts, “I think I…” but trails off into silence before he can finish.
Phil steps forward. “You fought so hard to get this land back.”
The floor shakes again, and it dawns on Phil that whatever wretched things occurred to lead Wilbur to this room have just as easily led many others to whatever terrible fate meets them just beyond these walls. Resentment, ugly and ruthless, nags at him. Wilbur lifts his hand and trails his fingertips over the rough edges of the button, and Phil holds his breath.
“I don’t even know if it works anymore, Phil.” Wilbur considers. “I could press it, and it might…” His voice is cut off once more by the crackling of fireworks and a chorus of screaming from above. Wilbur abruptly stands up straight, eyes shining.
Phil chokes out a laugh. “Do you really want to take that risk?” He reasons, “There is a lot of TNT potentially connected to that button.”
They just stand there, for a moment, shrouded in dust falling from the ceiling and listening to the sounds of chaos erupting from beyond. When Wilbur speaks again, his voice is hollow.
“Phil,” he says.
Phil’s eyes follow the line of his chest as he breathes in and turns his head just slightly, just enough to look Phil in the eyes and evoke a ripple of fear down his spine. Shadows obfuscate Wilbur’s features, large swaths of darkness slinking down his figure in broad lines. When he meets Phil’s gaze at last, his irises don’t move at all. Determination drips from his voice.
“There was a saying, Phil, by a traitor.”
A tear cascades down the slope of Wilbur’s cheekbone. They look at each other, father and son together at last, and everything is still.
He turns back to the button, and Phil feels his body frozen and suspended alone in time; he feels those freezing September mornings and those lonely October afternoons, feels that night when Wilbur showed off his dream of a nation that didn’t exist. He feels the days of warm laughter after his son brought home a brother, and the company of Techno at his side as they fought together in the cold of the Arctic. He feels the dread, the all-encompassing darkness of death, feels it hanging over him, sparking down every synapse and running through his veins with every second that passes.
Wilbur smiles, and salutes.
“It was never meant to be.”
The button makes a tapping sound when Wilbur presses it. It’s a hollow noise.
“Oh my God,” Phil breathes. First, nothing moves. Then, with the creeping hiss of the redstone signal lighting the explosives, the Earth is being ripped apart with a roar, thunderous shrieking explosions igniting all around them.
Before he can even register what’s happening, Phil’s mind goes utterly blank and he’s moving, no thoughts except the weight of Wilbur’s body in his arms as he launches himself forward and curls his body and wings around his son, his feathers cradling Wilbur’s shuddering shoulders protectively as the walls around them burst into shrapnel and fire.
Blinding pain shoots down his left wing and Phil screams, every nerve ending lighting on fire and roaring in agony while his ears ring, high pitched and droning, with the impact of the explosion. It’s as though he can feel every feather being plucked at once, every muscle being ripped apart, the blood-curdling stabbing sensation running down the side of the wing until he keels over and cries out again as the feeling propels down his spine. He clutches Wilbur to his chest and yells out his unfettered suffering until his throat burns and his body convulses from exertion, screaming himself sore until he can finally hear his own voice again.
When the dust clears enough for him to see, he lifts his right wing and can barely make out figures of people fleeing in the distance through the ongoing blasts. He stares at the horizon, where the moon has set and the colors of the sky are beginning to change with the imminent sunrise, and then looks back down at Wilbur, who begins to cough.
He pries himself out of Phil’s grasp, shoving away his vice grip roughly and crawling over to the edge of the remaining stone that once made up the room they had stood in, Phil wincing and standing clumsily before limping after him. There, on the pedestal of destruction, Wilbur sits on his knees with his head thrown back and his hands covering his face, wheezing and gasping, and then collapses forward onto his hands.
“My L’manberg, Phil!” He cries, voice booming and echoing through the rubble, louder than even the ongoing explosions. “My unfinished symphony — forever unfinished!”
He slumps forward at Phil’s feet and clings to the fabric of his tattered robes. “If I can’t have this, no one can, Phil!”
Emptiness claws its way into Phil once again, harrowing dread washing over him, his shoulders tensing. Phil gapes at the wreckage, squinting and catching the familiar sight of a Wither, explosions following it and smaller figures running from the path of destruction. Techno is there amongst them, rocket launcher poised on his shoulder and firing without discrimination.
When he looks back down, Wilbur is pulling something metallic and glimmering from the wreckage at his side.
His sword.
Despite the rush of alarm at the sight, Phil’s movements are too clumsy to grapple him for it, his entire left side gone slack with pain, and he steps backwards as Wilbur holds out the sword to him, handle first. Hesitantly, he takes it, thrill soaring through his exhausted and injured body as he hopes feebly that his son’s fettered breath is the one remnant of this place he can take home with him.
Wilbur looks up at him, face tear-stained, rubble stuck in his hair and hands trembling as they grab the sword by its blade and redirect it to his own neck. The world turns grey and colorless. His eyes are pleading, and his voice is much the same as he begins to cry out;
“Phil, kill me!”
Phil allows the words to echo in his mind as the numbness in his left side spreads through his entire body, pins and needles from head to toe, and he stares at his son for a long time, taking in his disheveled appearance, the panicked and despaired look in his eyes — he stares for so long he hardly notices the wind picking up and swirling around him as the presence of darkness overtakes his awareness and time slows entirely until he can barely see anything at all.
The universe slows to a halt around him, his soul ripped from its place in his body and into the plane of void and shadow he answers to.
“Kristin?” He calls, and for the first time in a very, very, very long time, he feels afraid of what he might hear.
As he speaks her name, he lifts his gaze from the void where Wilbur’s figure used to be and fixes his eyes on the horizon. Not a second later, he intakes a sharp breath and watches as the lightening sky warps and distorts until it is slowly consumed by void and blackness, and Phil reaches out a hand blindly until he feels her warmth amidst the freezing wind.
Her hand comes into view through the shade, reaching out and holding onto his own, inhumanly graceful, and chills run down Phil’s spine as he shudders in her presence. Familiar, haunting, and beautiful.
When she reveals herself to him in her entirety, her smile is sad.
“My angel,” she professes, and Phil keens breathlessly, gripping onto her like the mockery of a lifeline she is. Her voice is unnaturally smooth and lyrical as she speaks to him with finality.
“His time is come.”
Phil will be the one to live. Even as death reclaims powerful civilizations once wrought with hope, forests once lush with life, and sons once held close, Phil will live.
As Kristin holds onto him, Phil has never felt more dead.
Her hand never leaves his as he begins to shake, as he collapses onto his knees against the jagged stone and hyperventilates, the suffocating burden of death snuffing out the flames of his soul until he’s lying there, empty, heaving and crying. She never falters as he begs, as he pleads, as he mutters, “no, no, no,” over and over until his throat runs dry. She looks at him with unparalleled tenderness, glancing just over his shoulder at the ruined, bloody mass of feathers, and watches as he sobs and convulses on the floor with the weight of dread and imminent death flooding into his body.
She covers the hand that holds the sword with her own, and lifts the other to cup the side of his face, wiping at the tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Maybe you’ll understand someday.”
Through the blackness, he hears Wilbur begging, “Kill me, Phil. Phil, stab me with the sword, murder me now.” Kristin’s weight beckons him forward as his son shouts;
“Look, they all want you to! Do it, Phil, kill me.”
As the shadow fades into the light of dawn and his soul is returned to its place in his numb body, he pleads, with Wilbur, with Kristin, with himself; “You’re my son!”
He glances back at the ruins of Wilbur’s nation, the home he built, and he lies.
“No matter what you do, I can’t…”
Wilbur groans and slams his fist against the stone, and Phil wants to reach out and grab him so he doesn’t have to watch his knuckles turn raw and bloody but his right hand is gripping the sword like a vice, Kristin’s weight heavy around it, and his entire left side remains numb and stubbornly unmoving. He knows, feels it in his gut, that her will is his duty; that any blood he prevents will not grant him forgiveness for the blood he must let.
Wilbur screams, “Look!” throwing his arm out and pointing at the wreckage. “How much work went into this, and it’s gone?!”
Rubble shifts underneath Phil’s feet and he inhales haggardly. His broken wing adjusts, a lightning bolt of throbbing pain shooting down his spine while the wind blows ferociously, bowing over trees and howling in his ears. When he reels back, sword in hand, Kristin is not the one who pushes him to do so — the wind quiets, just briefly, awaiting his answer to her call for justice. He’s never been one to disappoint her.
Phil closes his eyes and recalls the dragons he’s slain, the monsters he’s hunted, the tyrants he’s vanquished, and attempts with great futility to imagine his son’s trembling figure is that of a terrible beast. He thinks of the cosmic tides as they crash against the shore, the rise and descent of nations large and small, the mighty fall of leaders once great, and the role that they all must play in it. The eternal ticking pendulum of grief, unforgiving and cruel. Just as time itself is beholden to him, he is beholden to death.
“Do it, Phil.”
The sword pierces his son’s body in one slash, and slices clean through his back with one more push. The sound of it is horrific, metal puncturing through skin, muscle, and bone, ripping apart organic tissue into a bloody mess of gore, and Phil shudders, falling to his knees. He grips the hilt of the sword until his knuckles turn white and he chokes on his breath against the putrid stench of decay. Then, finally overcome, he wails uninhibited, holding Wilbur against his chest for the last time, and feels his son’s blood coat his hands and soak into his clothing, his body falling still, limp and lifeless. Phil exhales.
Death is in the air, and he breathes life into her.