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It’s a week until the Draining Spell, and it’s the last time he’s going to speak to Arianna Clawthorne. He lights a candle for his old friend’s soul, and lets the mist take him.
Except, when he wakes up in his mind, it’s not golden halls or caves. It’s completely dark, and then it’s not, and he’s standing in a place that hasn’t existed for four hundred years.
Arianna’s golden eyes met his—wide and afraid, her pupils turned pinpricks in the sun’s glare—and before he could ask anything of her, she turned on her heels and ran into the shattered temple, bare feet slamming against broken glass.
The stream prickled in Phillip’s eyes. He shoved his hand in front of his face and kept his stride heavy, the torches flaring as he walked past, dancing a tango of light across the cracked tiles. He peered around the glimmer swirling in front of his gaze, but every time the vague silhouette of a familiar body appeared, a lash of sapphire and crimson dispersed it.
The air smelled of something sweet and longing—a strange, mineral sweetness, a natural scent of the outside that hadn’t followed Arianna for many years, but he remembered when she could break rivers and families in two. The Arianna he held now smelled of old smoke and a sharp, metallic bite. Phillip cocked an eyebrow, swaying on his feet.
“You were always one for theatrics,” he said, “I shouldn’t be surprised.”
Nothing, huh, he thought. She used to rise to stuff like that. Take it as a challenge—show off a little with a crooked, weaponised smile, a laugh clattering in her teeth.
“Hey, little miss chaos,” he called out, a rising excitement in his chest that he didn’t find a need to tamper down giving it a teasing rumble—Arianna was his friend, first and foremost, they knew each other, didn’t they?
“It’s me,” he continued, turning his stride into a prowl, hunting her across the razed golden halls without concern.
“Ari,” he said, ducking between the columns with a sly smile, “Arianna, I just wanted to catch up. Maybe ask you about the harvest… maybe about what I might reap tonight. C’mon, it’s been so long, I miss you.”
He thought he heard the echo of a hurried step and he pounced around a column with a sparkling grin, almost slipping on the wet tile, but no one was there. He blinked in dazed surprise, then rolled his shoulders and resumed his stalk through the thickening shadow. Funny witch, he thought to himself.
He hadn’t noticed it before, but sure enough, the room was surrounded in thick, black smoke, curling around his ankles.
“Ha,” he chuckled, “You’re making me work for it, it’s a prank, I remember you and Caleb—” he pursed his lips, he didn’t know why it felt like he was fifteen again, he wasn’t, Caleb was dead, Arianna was dead, “Come on,” he tried.
“We haven’t seen each other for so long, at least say hi to me before you make me look like an idiot in front of everyone else.”
Why was he saying that?
It wasn’t the truth. He—
They’d gone longer without seeing each other, was the answer he could stomach.
“Heel.”
A woman slid from the shadows, cloaking herself in them, inky blackness spilling from supple skin, not kissed by age or marred by tragedy, instead, speckled with swirling galaxies, her black hair twisted into two thick bunches on the side of her head like a goat’s horns.
“Arianna?”
She opened her eyes, peeking yellow bulbs at him with a cheeky chuckle that smelled of slight madness. Her mouth slipped from the darkness, teeth sharp and glistening in the pale light of her gaze. Through the haze of the past, Phillip knew that something was wrong, but he knew it with a part of his brain, that while usually dominant, had been held under water by clawed, blackened fingers.
His mind was drowning in the prance of flame, in her kiss of fire, and the anticipation of memory. She smiled so her nose broadened and crinkled, power dripping from her eyes and dropping to stain her cheeks.
He smiled back.
He took another step toward her, and she slipped back into the darkness. Phillip’s heart fluttered eagerly as she vanished, he’d played this game before, and he always run: they could run as far and fast as their legs could carry them, but Caleb and Arianna would always fall back into his grasp, and in the end, he would keep them both.
At first, he never found pride in that conquest. He brushed off the low, drowning half-voice he thought he’d heard, and tripped after her, following the scuffing sound of fabric on stone into the depths of the chamber. From where, the voice piped up again, struggling against the hands shoving it under, there would be no escape.
The voice sounded like it’d already given up on him. Good.
He skidded to the edge of one long, rectangular pool, filled to the brim with sloshing, glowing blue water that looked more inviting than any ocean. His heart stopped as he tilted his gaze upwards, to her standing on the surface of the water as if it were dry land—as if something like that was possible by someone like her—naked.
Her tangled bleeding hair fell in dripping, blackening curls, framing the cruel sharpness of her face—docile, and not silhouetted by patches of blackness, just framed—and covering her naked body when he blinked.
He was mine, too the air hissed, dipping back and forth from Arianna’s voice, his mother’s forgotten sighs, Hunter’s anguish and Caleb’s clipped screams, swirling into murky waters; into becoming indistinguishable. A shattered stained glass of hurt. I was hurt, too!
I cried, too!
It took every piece of my soul, too!
The silhouette in front of him ebbed and flowed, into the mirage of his mother, his brother and Arianna’s disappointed glare that’d coldly followed him for years after her body had rotted, how she’d seemed afraid of him and conquering at the same time, her body turning away from him—right before she ran, and he followed.
She looked at him with huge, lagoon-blue eyes that reflected the pools and him standing like he didn’t know what to do.
He was sacred to me!
Arianna’s face split open with a sickening crack and flowers bloomed from dripping gold blood. Her pupils darted across her eyes, panicked. For a moment, he thought he could her gasp something that sounded like an apology, before he back snapped shut and divinity bled into her eyes with a scream that sent smoke racing to choke him.
He was sacred!
I was sacred!
You tarnished it!
He surfaced at the shore, noting in surprise how he’d crumbled against the flowing water, yet—he was standing on it, like there was a pane of glass separating them—but he could feel the coolness of it lapping against his feet, curling around his ankles, even though there was nothing to see—he could feel the invisible chains.
He pushed himself up, his hand embraced by the water, but it pushed against him instead of swallowing him whole. He stood on shaky feet to face her.
“Arianna?”
A yellow face tilted playfully, black eyes watching him; a dark ocean with a golden lighthouse in the middle, beckoning him to either safety or steering him to the confronting shore and blinding light of confession.
“Mom?”
Phillip’s pulse thumped, slamming against his ribs. He briefly drew back, a little nervous at the potential confrontation. But she smiled, and she was wearing Ellie Clawthorne’s face and a broad, warm, welcoming smile that he hadn’t seen in so many years.
He found himself flooded with relief; his knees weak. He swung his arms, then his body, across the pool to catch her.
You took my sister.
She ran away with you.
She chose you.
Ellie clicked her tongue just like how Arianna did. I told her not to do it. I begged her not to. I told her that you were both straight bastards and that I didn’t trust you. I told her that she was a tragic fool. She laughed and told me that she could handle herself.
Look at what she became.
She could have been something great.
She should have been something great.
I spent my life wondering whether I’d made the right choice that night, when I went out for a smoke after yelling at my older sister and considered whether I’d be willing to pay the price for saving her from you.
Before Phillip could recoil, ask, or even really respond to her words—he was doused with water as Ellie dropped under the waves and didn’t surface. He reeled and gasped, falling to his knees. He tried to grip the side of the pool, scouring the waters with his eyes. They unwillingly slipped closed and stamped against his eyelids were hers; leading him by the hand into the temple, calm and still as glass again.
He caught his breath, shooting awake and tried to shake the fuzziness from his head, cursing Arianna as he did. He stood with a growl and pulled his cloak tighter around him. He sharply turned away from the pool, cursing Arianna as he did. Again. He nearly tumbled backwards into it when a boyish face stared at him from only a few paces away.
“Pyre.”
He could barely get the words out, red-rimmed eyes watching him cautiously, as if he’d attack—twenty years younger than when he died. Pyre was hovering above the floor, his body drawn unnaturally and his neck cracked at a sickening angle to regard Phillip, whose throat lurched at the sight. It looked painful and he had to get him down and he had to speak to him and they—
Pyre’s tunic ruffled, as if he was being carried through the air by someone. Carried away from Phillip.
Behind him, Arianna was reclining on her side, leaning her upper body against the wall, her hand drawing lazy patterns in the air. Look at him, Arianna’s voice hissed—her lips not moving an inch—Keep an eye on him, or you’ll lose him again. Her gaze was disinterested, looking through him instead of at him.
Under golden curls, Pyre was beaming brightly at Phillip.
“Pyre,” Phillip tried again, closing the distance between them, his hands raised, “Stay still, I’ll come and help you down, okay? I’ll come and help you and we can go home, okay?”
Phillip’s voice unwillingly hitched at the end as he stumbled forwards, his pulse racing now. He reached up to catch Pyre’s ankle, feet bare and ice-cold. Pyre just ducked up and dissolved into grey mist.
I was never good enough for you. You never loved me. I saw the truth. I chose to leave you. You killed me.
Phillip lunged, a cracking scream clawing its way out from the deep of his chest as he collapsed against the ground, his knees aching and eyes blurring with barely restrained tears. He could feel Pyre everywhere around him, feel the lurch of the knife in his gut, feel the betrayal dragging him down.
Open your eyes.
He didn’t, and yet, still, in front of him, sat Henry Clawthorne, dripping with thick smoke, his kind eyes studying Phillip as if he knew everything. He splayed out his hands, warmth dripping from his gaze as he gathered Phillip in his arms, tucking him against a broad, breathing chest, the crown of his head tapping against a sharp jaw.
Why are you so tall? When did that happen? I remember you. You barely reached my chest.
Henry hummed as the smoke rose to bury them, and Phillip didn’t fight him, his eyes slipping shut. “Open your eyes,” Henry instructed, “I missed them.” His voice rumbled across the ages and didn’t sound entirely real—like an amalgamation of time and his memory of Henry.
“Look up at me.”
Phillip’s eyes, against his will, slipped open, as if someone else had laid their fingers against his lids and pulled. Henry smiled down at him, his face bisected, blood running down to pool at his drooping lips, listless and cloudy white eyes blinking languidly.
Phillip blacked out.
The smoke dissipated, and he surfaced, waving his hands to bat the plumes from his face.
Arianna was sitting crumpled on the floor, her legs splayed out behind her, wet tears shaking her thin frame. Before I learned civility, she said in his ear, her breath hot against his skin, even if she was so far away, someplace else, with someone else—I used to scream ferociously.
The unspoken carried on the wind before she dared speak it aloud.
I don’t know what happened. I know everything that happened. I could draw you a map across my skin, across the scars that you drew on me like they were stars. I could write directions to every hurt you ever caused me—how long it took to get there, which winding road to take to maximise it.
With jerking, halting movements, she wrapped her trembling arms around her middle, choked sobs rattling across the room and shaking its very foundations. The shadows danced in the corner of his eyes.
“Mama,” she whined, a sound so low it got caught on the brambles of her throat, “Why?”
I was a force of nature!
I was there for you, and you chose to destroy me.
Do you still taste my blood on the tip of your tongue?
Was there someone else in here with him? He kept thinking he could hear a voice. Or was the sound of his own thoughts? A loud, thrilled squeal interrupted him.
“You came back!”
Phillip whipped around so quickly his head ached and saw a small, elderly woman hurrying towards him, joy dancing across her face. Her green dress flowed behind her as she ran to him, and the face he’d missed for four hundred years settled against him.
He instinctively spread his arms for her, and she flew into them—lighter than he remembered, cooler, too. She smelled of the smoke left behind from a cannon. Or was that just the smell in here? The smell of—
She planted a kiss on his cheek, pulling him from his thoughts. “I knew you’d come back to me, my son! Tell me, where’s your brother?”
“Of course, mama,” he replied softly, smiling as he pushed away the creeping sensation strolling down his spine. He scooped her up against him and hugged her properly, pouring all his tension into the embrace, sighing at it left his body. He held her tighter. Something stung his chest.
“Ah! Fuck!”
He sucked in through his teeth and recoiled, his mother gaping up at him. He looked down and saw her wearing a glittering brooch with a golden falcon. The pin was loose, it must have pricked him. It was dripping gold onto the floor, and his mother tried to catch his eye again, but he was oddly mesmerised by how the gold sparkled against the blood, a single, midnight-black eye of onyx staring up at him.
She wasn’t like this.
Phillip dropped his mother in shock. She squeaked, but as he hastily ducked to help her back up, she vanished into ash. A frosty shiver coursed through him; his stomach felt hollow—like someone had jammed their fingers all the way down. He stood and glared into the mist, puffing his chest and the words spilling from his lips before he could think:
“She loved us!” he snapped, “She was trying to protect us!”
The wind answered him. You know that’s not true. You know she watched. You know she did nothing.
“I… that’s not true.”
But it is.
Oh, it is.
And you know it.
The reason we ran away wasn’t because of the glittering allure of power or glory. It was to get away from her. From father. You wanted to go back because you’ve always been afraid, and you don’t know how not to be.
“No…”
Heat flared across the walls, burning his skin without leaving a mark.
You wanted to try to live your own life!
And then you decided you couldn’t do it! So, you gave up on yourself! Again! And because you gave up on yourself, you had to deny me of my life!
“I didn’t give up! I—”
“—I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
But you did.
You got me out of your sight, didn’t you?
And my son!
You knew how much I wanted to live. The voice’s pitch changed, dipping into something darer, fingers swirling across black ocean, you knew how much I wanted to live because when you tried to take my life, I fought you. I fought to stay with my family.
Like or not, that included you.
All of this is temporary.
He jerked back, stumbling drunkenly over his own feet.
“It’s not like that!”
Phillip was trembling, he was clammy, and his tendons were out of tune with the rest of him—like if someone had pulled him tightly and let go with disdain. He looked wildly around the empty room, and then, he caught the scent. Dark and sharp and expansive, piercing through the mist like an arrow—it was the smell of burning.
His mouth went sand-dry; his throat and eyes stung.
A glitter through the mist of his past. A sunbeam breaking through the rainclouds. A golden rose blooming through grey ivy, wrapping themselves around Caleb’s limbs and refusing to let him go. Phillip couldn’t see anything but his brother’s silhouette and the grey criss-crossing across his body, but he imagined his smile, contorted into a silent scream, his eyes wide.
All of this is temporary.
“Caleb?”
He stood before him, head held high, hair coiled on his head and looking like a golden snake, glaring at him—sapphire eyes, honey dripping from his listless eyes, as vibrant and foreboding as a cornfield at dawn, the mist evaporating as it touched his burning skin.
Caleb’s eyes studied him, drank him in, and Phillip felt himself drawn bare under Caleb’s fierce gaze.
My wife was not the only one who was destruction wrapped in a wedding ring.
His heart stopped.
What was it like, then, brother?
Why did you do it?
Don’t think I don’t know.
Caleb’s lips didn’t move, his voice came everywhere: from inside Phillip.
“I—it…”
He lost his words, threw them into the deep. Caleb’s eyes mined his soul, his brow quirking upwards in a scowl that he’d gotten all-too accustomed to during the past hundreds of years. He hated it. He didn’t want to look at Caleb when he wore her emotions on his sleeve. He wanted his brother back. Not Arianna Clawthorne’s husband.
Yet, he couldn’t drag himself away.
He’d missed Caleb.
He didn’t end up finding his words; they found him, barely threading water.
“I couldn’t bear the thought of losing you,” he confessed, “And now I have nothing left but this.”
“I… you always hoped for more, from me. And when you’re not hoping for anything, you can’t despair. You can’t be hurt. I couldn’t… I couldn’t watch you be disappointed in me. I couldn’t watch you live a life without me, either. I can’t hurt you like that. I can’t make you hope for me to be better because I know I can’t be. I know I’ll slip up. I know this is all I’m good for. I know I’ll fall again.”
Standing in front of his dead brother, he’s not the righteous hand of God. He’s a young man who should have seen his reflection as someone more precious. He doesn’t know who’s saying that in the back of his mind, but he knows it’s not him.
Something wrapped tightly around his waist, choking more words from his lips. He closed his eyes, his tears falling and burning his cheeks as he imagined Caleb stringing him up, gentle fingers curling across his jaw, barely touching and yet able to ladle everything out of him.
It quickly morphed into the cold expression of barely-held-back rage, and his feet burned from how quickly he’d ran.
Arianna’s disappointment became his mother’s resignation, became Pyre’s knife, became Caleb’s blood never washing off his hands, burned away into nothing but Arianna’s flaming wrath. His felt his eyes stinging, his heart peeling apart.
“If I stayed… how I was, if you stayed here, with us, if I didn’t promise to become something I can’t—you could have found your own happiness after this. Without all of this. I only get in the way, with my half-promises that I never know how to keep. You could have had a good life, with a good wife.”
I wanted this!
You took it from me!
Phillip took a choking breath.
“You think you have any right to know what’s good for you? She corrupted you! Like she corrupted me! Like she corrupted the portal, like she—”
He collapsed to his knees, and all Caleb did was raise his chin a little higher, exquisitely arrogant, breathtakingly cold.
“You’re…” his breath fled him, blue fingers slipping from his grasp, a burning shriek. He took a shuddering gasp, “You’re the only good thing that ever happened to me. And I never deserved it.”
Tears boiled in his eyes. He clenched his jaw against them, but one escaped and seared his cheek. He flinched. And Caleb’s tears answered.
His smooth brow—the one he’d only seen as aloof or angry for years—creased minutely before cracking as a surge of tears rose and overflowed from his eyes, like water from a swollen river. Desperate, laughing, shimmering, ancient eyes carrying ancient grief. They swelled with tears, becoming unnaturally and disturbingly wide—Caleb’s silent anguish consuming the sharpness of his face, bleeding through everything else.
They shone so brightly it hurt to look at, but Phillip didn’t turn away.
He owed his brother at least this much.
As the tears continued to gush forth, streaking down Caleb’s face and wrapping around his neck, staining it red, Phillip felt like someone had a fist around his insides, clawing at him. He couldn’t help but clutch his middle, collapsing to the ground as he did. His shoulders hunched and folded in on themselves like clipped wings.
His hair drooped pathetically around his face—a drowned man about to be consumed by the sea. He tried to retreat behind the strands, but he was still looking at Caleb. A fountain of sorrow flowing into age-old, burning wounds.
“Caleb…” he tried, but his voice came out as a small whine of air. His tears were angry, vengeful. They were sweeping him away.
“Brother!”
He couldn’t feel the floor beneath him. He couldn’t breathe. Caleb’s cries were cutting into him, searing him—was this what it felt like when—
“I…”
Caleb looked at him with the same raw agony as a knife wound when the blade had just been wrenched out, blood dripping onto his shoes and hands.
“I love—”
The torchlight rushed and Caleb was swallowed in a kiss of fire.