"Make him stop," someone said.
A low, continuous moan came to Jaxom's ears. He felt it vibrating from his own chest and would have silenced it, but he was no longer able to remember how. He had been swimming in and out of darkness looking desperately for Flaxom.
"Where's the other one? He was quiet when the other was here."
"The healer is looking at him. He thinks that one is some kind of golem and wants to see if the word will destroy him."
Jaxom thrashed beneath confining sheets, unable take sense of anything. He felt like he was swimming, but the water wasn't right. it was too hot and he felt he was suffocating, as if he had drifted to close to the noxious sulfur vents that spat out furious bubbles of gas from the sea floor.
"Stop torturing him."
Jaxom remembered that clear voice. It seemed to calm stormy waters, to make a break in the clouds.
"Tyrus wanted the other. He thinks an evil spirit..."
"Flaxom, come here," the voice of ocean breezes ignored all else. Jaxom felt a small, cool hand touch him. Then there was the familiar weight of his brother's hand on his chest. He breathed deep and descended into a more gentle darkness. The fever that had wracked him for so long broke, but he was broken for it.
Why did he take to the art of a scribe?
Maybe the pen threading out black ink in twisting patterns, the movement, spoke to him.
Maybe it was the fact that he could sit for hours in the dusty library, Flaxom a silent shadow, and be away from the strange world that was not his own.
Maybe it was because he hoped to find something in the endless texts on lore and history...
A sudden deep, wracking cough broke the midnight silence. Jaxom had developed the plaguing affliction in the past months and it would not leave him. It were as if his lungs were filling with seawater and he were drowning in the open air. The constant fits left him fatigued, but broke harshly to pieces any rest he took.
Regardless, Jaxom became a careful and expert scrivener. Since the castle library was the only one of its kind for unknown distances, copies of the texts on the shelves were in high demand. Once he made himself indispensable, the question of the twins residency within the home of the royal family never came up.
And it was a family now. Even this late he could hear a murmuring in the echoing halls, the brief chortle of an infant that refused to be lain down to sleep. Jaxom had encountered m'lady in the pre-dawn stillness more than once, a gentle eyed waif on the edge of exhaustion. During the day there were enough princely relatives around to hold a needy baby, but night was the domain of mothers and sleepless brothers.
When the disconsolateo sounds drew near, Jaxom laid down his pen, stood up and took Flaxom by the hand. He led his brother to the long walk where the infant held her mother in perpetual pacing, back and forth along the moonlit gallery. They stood until the pair came upon them where when Jaxom motioned Flaxom forward.
"Take the baby," he said simply.
Ariel's tired eyes widened in trepidation and she stepped back. Jaxom dropped his gaze to the floor. He completely lacked the ability to reassure her or make her understand his attempt at being magnanimous. Flaxom, though still a seemingly empty shell, was autonomous enough to complete simple tasks. Holding a baby as it slept seemed to Jaxom an ideal occupation for the sedate man.
"Flaxom won't hurt her," he said to the stone walls. "Lock me up, I won't come near. But I can still see..." A fit of coughing overcame him suddenly and a wail went up from the infant at the harsh echoes of the rough sound. Jaxom turned and leaned on the wall for support, pressing his forhead against the cool stones.
It took a long time for him to get air back into his lungs. Something brushed his shoulder and he shrugged it off in surprise. Ariel's hand dropped at the abrupt gesture. The babe was asleep once more, tucked in the secure warmth of Flaxom's cradling arms.
They became a strange quartet haunting the night. She did not come to the library all the time, but invariably the twins were there; Jaxom at his work and Flaxom a sentient shadow seated in a warm, dark alcove nearby. Ariel would tuck the little one into the crook of Flaxom's arm (the baby would often chortle in annoyance at being disturbed, then snuggle into her now familiar companion) and then recline on a nearby sofa. Sometimes she was instantly asleep; other times she steadily watched Jaxom fill page after page with words copied from fading and decaying texts.
Deep in the night, Jaxom's hands would begin to ache or fits of coughing would make him to weak to work and he would tuck himself beside Flaxom and wait for Arial to retrieve her child. He could rest when he was with his twin; it was as if he fit a piece of himself back together just to be near him and he was jealous and protective when it came to Flaxom. So when he woke from a fitful drowse and found Ariel touching the long strands of Flaxom's dark hair, just catching her fingers in the ends that laid on his shoulders to work out the knots, Jaxom slapped her hand away as if she were brandishing a knife against his brother.
"Leave him be," he muttered at her, leveraging himself to his feet. He suddenly had to sit down again as the weakness of one poorly rested came over him.
"Look at you," she said as he put his head in his hands. "You are barely well enough to care for yourself, let alone Flaxom in his current state. You spend all night here and then disappear like a mole into that cold well under the keep. You need rest-"
"-and do you think I would with him in someone else's hands?" Jaxom asked the floor. "Why does does the child not have a nurse? Why do you keep her so close yet preach to me, my lady," he said, speaking the honorarium in a scathing tone. He could see her though Flaxom's shared gaze as she flushed slightly from his accusations. "You too have dark shadows upon your face that bespeaks weariness.
"She is my daughter, my one baby-" Ariel began in a heated tone.
"-and he is my brother, my twin from the same egg be it eel or human!" Jaxom choked out. "He won't speak to me, he looks without seeing, he does not return my embrace, but I cannot be apart from him ." Jaxom began to sob. "Do you know what it feels like to have something that is so much a part of you torn away?" The words coursing forth before he could stop them.
She needn't have said it, but did anyway. "You know that I do."
He took a breath to say more, but a fit of coughing suddenly overwhelmed him. By the time he could draw breath again and sit up, Ariel and the baby were gone.
Perhaps it was her absence for many nights, the relief from distraction and the uninterrupted, lonely silence that caused Jaxom to finally notice of what had been staring at him from the dusty records the whole time.
A brief entry of so many "goats sent to the hills" in one volume with no explanation as to where they were bound.
The description in a tome of local legends of a young boy seeing trees walking when he became lost far from the village.
The tradition of young brides receiving two rings at their weddings, one for them and one for the old mother.
Somewhere in the vicinity lived a witch.
Jaxom waited a long time before he set out. He needed a clear, moonlit night that would stretch out for long hours - a night when the castle and the village would sleep deeply and comfortably in the mild weather and never mark a lone figure skirting the shadows bound for the highland.
Setting Flaxom in his usual place, Jaxom looked into his brother's slack face and felt purpose dig deeper into him. He switched his sight so that he looked at himself through their shared vision and saw the careworn figure he had become.
"We won't go on like this," he promised Flaxom and walked into the night.
He stuck close near the shore, the sigh of the ocean waves a comfort in the uncertain darkness. Jaxom climbed a hillock to avoid a dense growth of seagrass, then stepped quickly into the dark shadow of the same when he heard voices.
"...weak-minded creatures. Why did you take them in?"
A chill ran through Jaxom's frame. It was the voice of none other than The Sea King.
"I have a soft heart, daddy." Ariel's reply carried up to him from where she met with her father in the same reedy tidepools she had shared company with Eric not so long ago. "I came to let you visit your grandchild, not receive another lecture."
"And why is the little one awake so late?" The other asked as if he'd not heard.
Jaxom could feel the shrug in her voice. "If I told you who I kept company with in the late hours, would you change them back to cure my bad habits?"
"No," King Trident said with more resignation than anger in his tone. "Besides, I cannot undo what has become of them since that time. They would not survive..."
Jaxom heard little more than Trident's declination. He had already hardened his resolve and struck out once more.
When it was all done, Jaxom was almost to weary in body and spirit to make the journey back. But the picture in his minds eye of Flaxom abiding in the dusty dark compelled him to go on.
He made it back to his brother's side just as the sun peeked above the horizon. Unable to do more, he merely collapsed on the seat next to his twin and, leaning against the other's solid warmth, let oblivion overcome him.
Ariel said nothing of his disheveled state the next evening, nor the fact that it looked as though neither he nor Flaxom had quite their place on the bench for many hours. Drowsy as she was, Jaxom wondered that she took so much time to settle the child before dropping into a stupor on the couch.
True, he had only quite Flaxom's side for a short while while. But it had been time effectively used as was evidenced by Ariel's deep slumber.
Now he rose from his place, collected charcoal and ashes, and began tracing runes in the moonlight.
It was near dawn when he finished the full, complex preparations as he'd been instructed. Now he sat in front of Flaxom, leaning into his brother and stroking the soft fuzz of the baby's hair as she slept soundly, comfortably cradled in Flaxom's arms. Trembling with fatigue, a blade clenched in his hand, Jaxom watched with uncertain foreboding as the gold faded from his brother's left eye.
Then, he felt a wave of sickening vertigo as a strange buzzing filled his head as another took Flaxom's place at the other end of a shared perception.
"All this will end soon," he said softly and kissed his brother's cheek. The soft warmth of the infant called to him and he drew back
Soon, Jaxom's hands were filled with blood that brightened the runes, and hot ash and sand that guarded him until the deed was done.
Ariel awoke full out of a deep sleep as if something had snapped the thin line between consciousness and wakefulness. She blinked a the dawn light, wondering that she had not roused before dawn as was her want to take herself and the baby back to their chambers. She blinked in the hazy light and looked around, her settling on the confusion of dark patterns strewn across the flagstones.
Realization hit her as her gaze followed a certain, bright stain.
The first light of the sun through the window touched the floor at the same time as her feet. She fled the the library as the brilliance of the new dawn seeped across the boards and set the runes on fire.
Racing through the castles stone court, she followed an uncertain trail as it led darkly through the sparse marsh grass outside the walls, over the bolder strewn border of the beach and into the sand.
She was far to late.
Jaxom's life-blood had long soaked away and left only a scarlet stain in its wake. He hadn't even made it to his beloved ocean; the strongest wave only just brushed his fingertips.
Ariel fell to her knees beside Jaxom where he lay face-down in the sand. She pulled his shoulders so that he faced the sky and brushed the sand from his features. Half-lidded eyes no longer saw the golden dawn or the gulls winging on high, and he no longer struggled to draw breath into a body, not his own in the first place, that had turned against him from the start. It was in that fixed gaze that she found the price he had paid for those runes.
The right eye, which was doubled on the left in Flaxom's continence, was strangely bloodied and distorted, marred by soot as if he had ground out his sight with sand and hot ash.