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Two bodies lie in the mountains of Rivendell.
Long fled are the people of the kingdom, if not killed by the sudden and violent eruptions, earthquakes, explosions flinging shrapnel across a continent of empires. Nobody is there to find the dead.
In the place where they have fallen, crumpled marionettes with cut strings, snow meets a pocket of warm air and hits the ground as rain. Rivendell has not seen rain in millennia. If he had still been standing, the body with the bleeding gash across its chest might have been pleasantly intrigued. Instead, he hadn’t noticed. (Bigger things to be concerned with.)
The body across from him is his brother’s. It has no similar wound - no wounds at all.
One spirit traps itself in a heaven of false perfection. It builds the world anew, flawless and uninjured, and hands itself a husband and a brother who have never sinned to be eternally amused with.
The other spirit is damned for its corruption, and so it remains, contemplating.
It remembers a youth that its brother cannot, which might have been funny if it wasn’t so bleak. It remembers mirth and wonder - it remembers those decades of childhood and change they had spent together. Sometimes, it feels like the late King of Rivendell burst from the aether fully-grown, stern and studious already, with nothing to tie him to having been a boy once. It supposes that that makes some amount of sense. Only childhood as the heir apparent to the throne must have been a lot less fun to look back on.
It remembers church; it remembers prayer. Being nudged by its brother who, irritated, whispered that it ought to be paying attention.
It remembers trying to reach out to the grace of Aeor and finding nothing but ringing silence to answer its call.
(Perhaps the almighty stag had already known its fate. Perhaps he had just wanted to make it clear from the beginning exactly where he stood in this discussion.)
Things had changed, of course, as it grew. Whispers in the hallways of the palace turned to an insatiable curiosity - didn’t it make no sense? Didn’t it seem odd, that only a god of the ordered reigned above their parents? Where was the balance in all this? - that its brother had been frankly affronted by. (You shouldn’t say things like that, it remembers him insisting.) But that curiosity could not be stayed by a pious insistence to look to Aeor in all matters of doubt, and so instead it had looked to the library. To the oldest books of history they had, and then to the restricted section, by authority of the prince, where it had found the dramatic works of King Alinar, or rather what remained of them.
Immediately the true nature of Exor had slotted into place as evident and unshakeable. Far from just being an evil boogeyman that had once been dispatched, Exor was Aeor’s other half - the necessary darkness to temper the unbound light. Chaos where Aeor’s rules were strict and unforgiving; warmth against the biting cold of Rivendell’s eternal chill. And, of course, the silver to Aeor’s gold. Exor knew the pain of its eternal second-place. How could it not be tempted?
If it had known then what it knows now, that its moment of empathy was a crack in which the black mould of jealousy would germinate and fester…
No. It probably wouldn’t have let the question lie.
Exor’s voice is faint, but his emotions are strong. Where Aeor’s cold and undifferentiated light spreads even across the kingdom, offering its protection as long as his traditions are upheld, Exor roils with suppressed rage and indignation. Exor sees injustice and cries to be heard, unbound, revered as his brother always has been. And Exor had promised it freedom, in exchange for a freedom of his own.
The rest is corruption. Decades blur. Now, it looks at its own body on the ravaged ground and finds its face unrecognisable. Warped into a twisted facsimile of a face that used to match its brother’s, with eldritch light behind it that has since gone out. (That face is a mask, almost fungal, grown over what still remains underneath. Years of forging itself in the flames left it far beyond breathing. All it had known was the chorus of power, ever-growing, ever within reach.)
The thing on the floor is a casualty of a holy war.
So is the body of its brother.
Looking back, it wishes it had taken more opportunities to watch him. It spent so much time on plotting that it rarely felt the need to seek its brother out in the latter months. Even so, it knows what he was like, what he’s always been like - the late King of Rivendell was a creature of habit. As according to his lord and master, he stood steadfast in his faith and stuck to his schedule like a tick. If it had wanted, it would have been able to find him, whenever it had been so inclined.
Perhaps it might have been able to do more, then. Might have been able to save him from the undertow that was inevitably dragging him towards his fate.
In those early days, it had been engrossed by King Alinar’s writings. The man was said to have gone mad in his later years, driven to invent a brother figure who was generally argued by scholars to represent Alinar’s own temptations towards corruption and madness. The mythical figure of Cohnal seemed too dear to Alinar to have been a latter fiction, though. In later years, it would come to realise the truth: the same spell that sealed Cohnal’s memory away from the people of Rivendell was the one that had erased the name of Xornoth from its legacy.
How had its brother felt, it wondered? Suddenly alone, the other half of his life wiped from existence in a heartbeat, retroactively the only son? He might have known some nameless grief, mourning for a past and for a future he couldn’t form an image of. Or he might have carried on the same routine as always, not even pausing to shiver at the loss of warmth. There’s no answers to be gleaned from this side of the snowglobe.
It knows that he spent the end of his life afraid. It knows that the weight of prophecy, of destiny, had dragged him under and into the maelstrom.
It knows that, in his final moments, he had reached out to Aeor for redemption, and Aeor had answered.
And here it is, left behind amid the Rapture.
It’s not sure whether this is the worse place to have ended up in.
Maybe this is pointless. Maybe it’s just playing stupid games, trying to one-up its brother like it always did, endlessly competitive, sour about losing.
… But for Exor’s sake, is that heaven really the better ending? What had its brother learned? Not to ask questions, not to defect; to follow Daddy Aeor like a blind soldier, stabbing and slashing at anything he didn’t understand, and die nobody’s hero? Xornoth would have offered conversation, if he had stopped to ask for it. It knows that he was scared - he couldn’t have felt that he had any alternative than to kill himself and his brother, to let the gods continue shoving against one another in their eternal clash. A century of propaganda wouldn’t have led the two of them anywhere else.
Even his body looks saintly. The antlers would have made a pretty picture, but that’s convenience for you - instead, the crown of Rivendell sits like a wreath of icicles or pointed teeth around his pointed ears; his wings splay out behind him, a snow angel against the igneous ground that had burst from beneath him at a surge of Xornoth’s power. Snow boots, which is ironic.
His expression is relaxed, for once. It can’t remember the last time it saw him like this, without that perpetual set to his brow, the purse of his lips as he tried to figure out what was out of place, because something always was. Even sleeping, he never seemed to dream sweetly.
It finds, very abruptly, that it wishes more than anything it could start over.
That’s what he’s getting right now. Smajor. In his afterlife, in the pretty little snowglobe of Rivendell that his immortal soul has been bequeathed, he’s starting all over with a loving husband and a virtuous brother and he’ll never want for a thing and Xornoth wants to be part of it so much that it feels sick.
It knows that it would hate it there, of course. Static eternal perfection is deadly boring and it would have found the cracks in the façade almost immediately. But it’s not about the plastic facsimile of its childhood home, it’s about Scott, and it’s about the fact that Xornoth didn’t get to appreciate the time they spent as brothers while it had it, and Scott will never realize that what he’s getting isn’t what his memories would have affirmed.
And here it is, a ghost with rubble to haunt, and two dead bodies going cold.
Fire and ice make water, make the rain that falls upon their corpses, made the river of fate that flowed inevitably downstream towards their deaths.
Xornoth envies Cohnal. At least his brother lived to tell the tale.
For the first time in a very long time, it shivers.