He looks at him and his excited emerald eyes, and knows he will forgive him again and again. Because he's lost in the emerald green forests, again, and he's chasing after a little boy's neat black hair and flailing arms, small feet padding in the pines and moss. He'll never catch him. He looks at him, and thunder writhes with the sea for a moment, before the demons must come, and he's stolen once more. Even with his might and power, he cannot battle these losses that grow from old wounds and scars; He'll let the thorns and vines kill him just to see green roses bud. "Come home", he says to the lost boy, and for a moment, the wayward son's castles fall to the sea, his golden army ceases bloodshed, and he will stand, shaken, suddenly far from the abyss he has been sure he is falling into headfirst. It could never last. This feud could never end, and he could never surrender, admit defeat to the better son.

He looks at him, with steel eyes that mean it, and silently screams to him, of love and loss, and family, loyalty and betrayal. He could crush him, his frail figure, in hands of stone and voice of thunder. He need only lose it to the simpering, manipulating voice of his baby brother, to end all this, his reign of terror and pettiness. This is the unthinkable to him, though, and all he can do is hope to persuade him with the honesty that is all he knows.

Dead forests meet cold steel, twisting and binding. The fire roars with the clapping thunder, before all is silent. The sons of kings will fall to the flames, abandoned contest lingering in the road behind them. Their laughter echoes in the forgotten emerald wood.