You summoned me?"

Amara had dressed carefully, choosing the gown she had worn that day so, so long ago when the Earth had been new and Chuck had created the waterfall for her. At the sound of his voice, Amara turned to face him, filling her smile with all of the love she would eternally feel for him, and wishing desperately that he would answer her smile in kind, take her into his arms, and be her brother again.

"You should not be out here alone, especially so close to the edge of our realm," Chuck said, striding around the Wishing Tree to stand on the patch of red earth that was the Otherworld's entrance. When he finally looked at her, his amber eyes were hard."

"Has my warrior completely defeated my brother?" Amara asked him.

He blinked in surprise. "I do not know what you mean." He approached her, obviously meaning to guide her back to the palace.

Amara shook off his hand and walked purposefully to the hard-packed dirt at the edge of her realm. Chuck simply crossed his arms over his chest and watched her.

"Do you understand that I love you, brother?" she asked him.

Again, surprise flickered through his amber gaze. He nodded, not speaking.

"No. Let there be no more silence between us. Answer me, son of the light. Do you understand that I love you?"

"Yes," he said. Then he added in an emotionless voice, "You love all of your subjects."

"And you truly think there is no difference between what I feel for you and what I feel for others?"

"Which others are we speaking of? Your yokai or your pantheon?"

"I see my answers in your questions. You do not understand that I love you, and that my warrior has defeated my brother." Amara bowed her head, steeling herself.

"I do not understand you at all anymore," Chuck said.

Amara lifted her head and met his eyes. "Chuck, my warrior and brother, I have not changed. You have."

"No! I am as I always have been!" He almost spat the words at her. "I have never wanted to share you with our creations. I was content to be in heaven, writing, alone."

"Chuck, your mind is so filled with jealousy and anger that you can no longer think clearly."

"Have you ever considered that perhaps I have only begun to think clearly?"

"Oh, Chuck, no. Can you not see yourself? Where has your joy gone?"

"You killed it when you chose those creatures over me!"

"I have never done that," Amara said. "Tell me what I can do to help rid you of the anger that is destroying you and to find your joy in the Otherworld again."

"Get rid of the Earth."

Though she had been expecting Chuck to eventually ask that very thing of her, still Amara felt the shock to the core of her being. "We created the Earth together. You loved the humans."

"I cannot bear this any longer. I will not share you!" Chuck went to Amara and dropped to his knees, his emotion overflowing as tears washed his face. "As your brother, I beseech you. Choose me. Destroy the Earth so that you and I can spend eternity together without this Darkness between us. If you do not, I vow that I will leave this realm and the despair it has caused me."

Amara stared down at him with equal measure of sadness and resignation. "Chuck, I will not destroy the Earth. Not now. Not ever."

Chuck's tears dried and his expression went to stone. "If you think I merely threaten, you are wrong."

"I believe your vow. I know you have made your choice," Amara said. "Know that wherever you are, whatever you do, I eternally will love you, my brother, but I have made my choice as well. I love what we have created and will not destroy it. By your own vow, Chuck, you must go."

"Don't do this! You are my sister!"

"I do nothing, Chuck. You have a choice in this. We were the first to have free will, and yet you do not use it wisely." Tears coursed down Amara's cheeks, soaking the gown she'd picked with such loving care.

"I cannot help myself. I was created to feel this. It is not free will. It is preordination," he said, his voice spiteful.

"Yet as your Sister I tell you what you are is not preordained. Your will has fashioned you." Though her shoulders shook with the force of her heartbreak, Amara was filled with the unflinching power of a Goddess.

"I cannot help how I feel! I cannot help what I am!"

Amara's words were choked, but the command in them was not diminished. "You, my brother, are mistaken; therefore, you must pay the consequences of your mistake."

Flooded by regret and tears and despair, Amara gathered her Divine Energy and hurled the consequences of his own choice at him, knocking him backward with such force that he was lifted from the ground and flung down, down, into the black of the ether that separated the realms.

Chuck fell.

Slowly, sadly, Amara made her way back to her palace and all the way to her bedchamber before she collapsed onto the floor, sobbing as if her soul were broken."