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Iron and oil, the slick sticky feeling of blood on your hands. Alear knows all of these sensations, he’s learned them well.
The village is burning around him blood and dirt. Screams and crying it’s too loud for him, he can’t focus. He can’t move. He can’t breathe.
Alear swallows, his throat bobbing as watches the horizon. Reinforcements crest over the mountains. This village will soon be lost, ashes across the wind.
Alear wants to scatter with it. He wants to give up, why was he so insistent on staying alive—on staying useful? When all he did was suffer for his efforts.
He did not understand himself.
A part of him wants to wander off, away towards the cliffs north of here. Where his body would break across the stone and blow away his consciousness before the pain set in.
And yet, he can’t move. He thinks it’s because his brothers and sisters rifling through rubble and ruin.
He thinks it’s because of the Emblem that floats directly in front of him. A red ghost in the shape of the Hero-King of legend, the Emblem of beginning had been his partner for countless years now, his ring passed onto him by his father some time ago.
At times like this, where Alear teetered on the edge of the abyss. Marth would come, he’s not supposed to. Emblems can’t move on their own alone after all.
Yet he’s here, Alear hadn’t called him. He’d never want to impress himself on the man entrapped in his presents.
But even he knows of this hero’s kindness. It oozes out of his every iota. It hurts him, at times, stoking a savage self-hate that makes Alear want to throw himself across the stone.
Why would anyone treat such a defective child-like Alear with any sort of kindness? Why would this man, who had every right to hate him treat him kinder than his own father, who Alear sacrificed so much for?
“Why?” he asks, the wind howling around them. The screams have died away, a silence will settle soon.
The emblem says nothing, of course, he can’t. His eyes are veiled, his mouth sewn shut with terrible fell magic.
If there were no Fell Dragons, Marth wouldn’t suffer so much. If Alear was dead, his body broken and lost, the ring would be scattered into nature—away from him. Away from his father.
He chokes on his ‘whys’ the ground wavering beneath his feet as a grand vertigo clutched at him. Cold fingers wrap around his wrist, and Alear is moving. Tugged along by an older brother who will die for his failure.
This village never had a ring at all, and these people died for nothing. Alear thinks they’ll all die for nothing.
“Father…mercy!” Alear doesn’t look at his feet. His brothers and sisters' faces were seared into his memory as they cower before their father, who loomed like a dark god. A terrible beast from another world.
Several of his other siblings had been killed today, their broken bodies still strewn across the floor for all to see. Examples he knew, not to punish carelessness but for their failures.
Alear hadn’t failed. He’s ripped and torn and killed, a terrible red star and his father's favored pawn. It was his only saving grace to not be where his siblings stood, familiar faces rapt with terror and agony.
His face is numb, his expression having fled him some years ago. Momentarily he recalls those days, the firm grounding touch of hands on his shoulders. The crush of the crowd, the smell of fear.
There used to be so many more of them. Their family keeps shrinking.
He wonders if Lumera, the Divine Dragon, had slain as many of his siblings as his father had. If she’d had cut them down as brutally as he did.
He wonders if it’s supposed to be that way.
His own face, staring back at him. Alear is dragging himself home, snow numbing his feet and a chill digging into his bones.
Memories echo back at him. The brilliance of that stranger's Emblem. Marth, for that's what it must be.
No, and yet.
Impossibly the person…that other him. Decorated in pretty blues and reds. Had partnered with an Emblem so viscerally familiar.
That Marth had been different. A shining star unbound and free, commanding the field with striking majesty.
It couldn’t be his Marth. His Marth whose voice was lost to him, whose eyes never opened to him. His Marth marred in red.
Red spilled across the snow, sparkling like tiny rubies in the sun. Alear was awash in this glow, it cascaded down his face, across his cheeks, and down his nose. His vision blurred as It threatened to burn his eyes.
His knees gave out, and he collapsed into the snow. Staring up in reverence at the Emblem of the beginning.
No, his Marth wasn’t the same as the other one. But Alear couldn’t shake the feeling he wasn’t worthy of either of them.
He was hiding. Tucked away in some small alcove among his father's great halls. From the shadows he watched his brothers and sisters move about, heads down, shoulders hunched.
He thinks they’re hiding too.
The corrupted also stalk these halls. Guardians, his father's followers would call them. Sickly infatuated. But to Alear they were foul creations, life stuffed inside creatures no longer alive.
A mockery. Alear was also a mockery, just like any other of his father's creations.
Marth’s light is dimmed now, hiding of himself what he could. The Emblem stands silently as he ever did, watchful despite his shut eyes.
Something changed between them. Marth, always too kind had been coming out of his ring more often now, and staying much longer. It scared Alear, but also made him 'happy'.
He can feel the world changing, the ground tilting beneath his feet. He wonders when it began. When Lumera had opened her arms to him? When fought himself in the snow? When is he contemplating throwing himself from the Elusian cliffs? Long before then?
When his father, on what had been his proudest day, entrusted him with his Emblem ring?
Alear is hiding, his mind a whirlwind of crisis. Lady Lumera’s kind voice bounced around his skill like a bell toll. He curled up, fingers tugging at red strands, his scalp hurt, the pain a reminder of the gravity of his choices.
He was scared.
He could make away, leaving in the dead of night. Whisking the ring off to someone better—strong, worthy. He could save someone.
“Help me.” his voice shook, eyes raw and swollen as salt stained his pallet once more, the taste of tears long since familiar.
The Emblem stands impassively.
He shouldn’t ask. He has no place, no right. He’s already taken so much. The Hero-King, famed for his deeds, was probably known as a villain to the people of Elyos. His dashing reputation is buried under the years he spent under his father.
Under him. A butcher—a weapon.
Alear knows he’ll die. Should his father hear even a whisper of his thoughts, of a breath of the words Lumera spared him with, he’d be cut down. His usefulness was eclipsed by the risk of defection.
“Help me.” Alear does not cry, despite his heaving belly and wet cheeks. His screams are locked firmly in his body, destroying his innards, shaking his bones, and breaking his heart.
Fingers digging into his arms, nails breaking through flesh. He can’t help but chant it, a plea for anyone to answer “Help me. Help me. Help me.”
A tiny touch, which Alear nearly assumed was fear invoked delirium, touched his knee. Alear stared, his thoughts freezing all at once, looking down at Marth’s shiny dark boot.
Emblems could do little without command. Even appearing pushed the boundary. Under the bondage of fell magic, one could neither laugh nor cry, let alone walk or talk. The magic so dominating it twisted souls and erased wills.
And yet, the Emblem was there. His light miraculously dimmed, standing beside him, nudging him with his foot. The motion painfully small, Alear wondered how much he was fighting by doing even this much.
He marveled, a frothy feeling bubbling up in his gut. Marth had already helped him.
He helped him every day, didn’t he? Simply by being. When was the last time Alear helped Marth? For a moment, a vicious kind of self-hate ate at him, Alear never helped Marth. He was too weak, too scared to disobey.
But was he now?
Yes, no doubt. Alear is a fool, a whipping dog. A tool and a slave. He’s terrified. Yet there is little for him here. Only monsters and ghosts fight in the halls of Gradlon.
What was the point of fighting for a life that pained him? He recalls that other him, who also looked scared. A flicker of envy stoked his heart.
--Looking scared, he’d be whipped for it. Fed to the corrupted for the merest breath of it. Alear had killed that part of himself to survive— and yet, that other him stood tall and free, he’s even bested him!
What did he cling to?
He was hiding, here under his father's nose. His father who would strike him down, whose might was far greater than his own…or…
He could leave, run away.
Why did Marth always have to help him? Why couldn’t he help Marth? Free him, both from his father and from Alear.
Alear was worthless, he knew. A horrible son, barely a person, and a broken-useless blade. Yet for so long he’s fought for his life. Was his life worth the countless he’d killed for his father?
For all the souls in this world?
Alear didn’t think so, not really. But maybe he could trade it in for Marth’s freedom. He would be hunted and killed if he were found. But Alear didn’t need to live for Marth to be free.
He wiped at his eyes, his heart pounding in his chest. “Marth…” he shuffled upright, till he stood just adjacent to his partner.
“I…” he didn’t look at his feet. Staring right into Marth’s face “I can’t do anything.” his chest constricting. “I’m scared and pretty weak.” lights danced on the edge of his vision, weights falling off him, burdens from eons passed.
“But even still—even still—” he stumbles over his words, “I’m going to do right by you.”
They’re runaway together that night, the tides of corruption on their heels like hounds from hell. Alear races for the future, tearing across the wartorn world around him, guided by the Emblems.