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Author's Notes: GOLLY GEE WILLIKERS BATMAN, is this what I think it is? You guessed it kiddies, an update… in less than two months! In roughly one and half months, if we're talking technically! Can you believe that? Neither can I! I don't know what happened, but I've suddenly become so active! I think it's those iron pills I took. Turns out I was severely anemic and didn't even know it! I'm a 'tard. But anyway, here's the fateful chapter… Rath, or hee hee, someone else, if we're talking technical. This chapter is special in it's own way, I promise. I am also not that proud of it, as there are parts I think could be dramatically better… But hey, it stays original, that much I can say.

PLEASE NOTE: After this point, my story will begin to proceed behind the scenes of the actual Dragon Knights story. Everything that occurs after this point is my attempt to tie together everything we know about Kharl, Rath, and the events that lead up to the volumes' plot. Please, please do not forget that most of what I write after this is purely my own speculation and my own personal predictions about the plot and character. If you don't believe it, completely understandable.

Disclaimer: I write for no profit.

Background Music: Soul Systems Burn (King Black Acid)

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Cloaks
By Sarehptar
Chapter 13-
Angel in Descent

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So then it has come to this. I have been wondering for some time if I would even make it so far into my own memories. How much blood can I possibly have left? There's so much of it on the floor... Maybe some of it is his; maybe in the end I didn't achieve anything at all. Maybe he was still injured, still teetering so close to the border between life and death. Then again, I doubt that. For Rath, dying must be something of an unattainable dream, a cruel joke—you see, I made it impossible from him to pass out of this world. After all, souls can't die, and in the end that is all Rath really is: a soul, a heart. My heart, in fact.

I have often thought of Rath as an end of a time in my life, a portion of my past... but this isn't the correct way of thinking at all—because Rath is, and will always be, the beginning of everything. I can't honestly say when the idea took hold me of me. It was sometime between the start of the project and my rejection by Gil... But I don't think I could ever pick out the one moment when I decided that I was going to create a child for myself. There was, in those years, a gray haze over my mind, a loneliness that made thinking of almost all else impossible. Of course I did other things –like staying alive– but my whole heart was focused on the one idea that I had to find someone, create someone, who would love me completely and fully.

It was probably in the months after Gil left the castle. There was this sort of silence that hung over the place; only broken once in a while by your shouting. It was an emptiness that plagued me more than even my failure with the Yuba child. But there was more to it than that. I think, in the end, Rath was born not just because of my own desire to have someone beside me, but from the horrible silence that seemed to hover over both us and all of Arinas. I wanted to hear something besides my own voice… I wanted to bring warmth back into my home. As I have always done, I think I was trying not only to satisfy my own wishes but correct my grave mistakes. I had destroyed the continent, allowed it to die… I had single-handedly drained my own life of light, and I wanted to fix that.

Rath did not come easily or quickly. After the failure with Gil I was much less confident, a little more aware that I could make mistakes… So it was with hesitance and care that I began the same dream in a different manner. Was there a realization there on my part? I don't recall anything of the sort. Did I realize that I could not take someone out of there own life; could not force someone with their own hopes and desires to conform to my own, to love me? I must have understand this on some level, but I am certain that I did not really believe that –did not really believe that I could not have my own way– until today. It makes so much sense now that I can look back on it without prejudice. Of course Gil could never have loved me. Of course Rath will always hate me. I ignored their hearts in favor of my own.

When the idea to forge a soul and body completely on my own really came into being, I knew it would not be simple. Making souls was easy—making the perfect soul was going to be damn near impossible. How can I explain the determination I felt? I wanted this more than anything, more than the air I was breathing. I was ready to give my entire life over for this. It was not only my magic that went into the making of Rath, but my sweat, my blood, my soul. Rath is more a part of me than he will ever be anything else—above being a Knight, above being a Dragon Lord, above being an unstoppable demon, he is my son.

Maybe I should give up thinking that--after all, the entire idea of the term implies love and acceptance, two things Rath will never associate with my name. But what else can I call him? For Gil, who hated me, the sterile terms of 'experiment' or 'creation' were more than fitting, but for Rath, those words would never suffice. He was not some game, not a once used toy... I meant for Rath to be the family I'd been dreaming of forever. It's a travesty—the world I slaved to build has fallen so far into decay that there is almost nothing left of it; perhaps this is a misconception and it simply never existed at all.

I've lost the thread, lost myself in all the conflicting ideas and emotions that make up my view of him. But it's nearly impossible not to stray—Rath and Rath's birth are so complex that even I can hardly keep them straight in my memory. Even so, I want to remember everything correctly—if this is my last chance to revel in the feelings of my greatest triumph and my greatest failure, I want them to be real, not mistakes, no false memories. So I am determined to lay down the notions as they came; lay every action in proper order. Still, I know it will be a tangled mess: nothing about Rath is simple.

I never knew where it had begun, but once it had taken hold me, I was hopeless, a man possessed. I spent days on end simply thinking the idea. I'm sure you thought I had gone mad. I holed myself up in the strangest of places -the library, the kitchen, a back staircase or two- more than once you caught me pacing aimlessly, intent so completely on my thoughts that I had gone blind to my surroundings. It was because I wanted to perfect everything. I would not let myself rush in again—this time I would have the perfect soul. When I say 'perfect' you must know I mean it. I truly believed I could create something flawless. I spent fifteen years dreaming it.

Certainly it was not simply fifteen years (hardly an eye blink compared to what I have lived) of thinking—it was fifteen years of practice, of research, of preparation. I worked so diligently in that time that the alchemy of souls became more than simply second nature to me—my own unique ability had always been manipulation of youki, something that evolved completely into the creation of demons. I worked with such devotion that by the end of that eye blink I believed myself ready to achieve what all the world has been striving for for centuries--perfection. I had the ability, and I had the image in my mind.

See, I've ever forgotten to describe Rath as I wanted him to be. I had a solid image of him in my head that had come completely unbidden to me. Pale, soft skin, a bright smile... For some reason, I could never imagine him with my own light hair. It was always dark: shades of black, brown, even red—though this last I contemplated only briefly, as it reminded me so much of my recent failure with Gil. Finally, my imagination settled on a dark chocolate color, far from me but not my polar opposite: a symbol of a child completely independent yet loyal to his creator. The body itself, I knew, would begin by looking human. Without a youkai soul within it would never show what traits I would bury carefully into the heart: crimson eyes, delicate fangs, and a power both my own and not.

Can you see this child as I can? Impossibly fragile and innocent, the container for a soul that would be faultless, a mind that would rival my own in time, a porcelain doll made real with a magic deeper and more ancient than the others will ever know. This perfect body, which I wove entirely of spells, made solid with my own blood and my own consciousness… Do you know what happened to it? I spent so long working on this tiny form (hardly even your height); I gave my heart over to creating the figure that I wanted to take a place in my life… And I lost it, in the end. For so long, I assumed it had simply broken apart when he shattered. I believed it lost, destroyed, another portion of my heart stolen away in that horrible defeat. But, I was wrong.

In a sense, the body survived. How, even I am not sure, though I believe it now to be the fault (the grace) of faeries. In the chaos that was the first slaughter, there were so many lost souls… Whose ended up in the body? In the end, I can't be certain, though my suspicions are almost always correct. I have never truly had a chance to speak with this soul, this being hidden inside the shell of the child I was proud to call my own, who carries my blood and Rath's blood and doesn't even know it. He looks different now, more different than I ever imagined he would, and I can't help but picture him as he should be. Had I not made that grievous mistake, had I not stepped over a threshold I was not ready to cross... This body, this boy who should have been the physical half of my perfect creation, my flawless child—he is called Nohiro now.

If I had the strength left to tell you that truth, I think you would be sorely surprised. You battled him once, didn't you? I know you must have met him, because no one but a bearer of my power could have forced such as change on the Origin, could have negated your ash magic... Oh, I'm sure you'd doubt me, because Nohiro is nothing like myself, not even really like Rath. To explain why he is the way he is requires telling a deeper story that I ever wanted to remember, a story of Rath and Ruin.

The night I began building the body that would house my child, it was stifling, an almost oppressive heat. The air itself was sticky, clinging and wet with something that was not rain but promised it in the near future. It was the sort of humidity that preceded warm thunderstorms of the worst kind. All in all, an unpleasant night--but I hardly noticed this; I was completely focused. The laboratory was cluttered; books and papers and vials of things whose names even I didn't know seemed to spread themselves purposely in all the places I needed clean.

I cleared them with a deft hand, piling and stuffing them into stacks and crowded cabinets—making an even larger mess. If I had let you into the room at that moment, you probably would have been appalled. Despite the heat, my hands were impossibly cold against the glass of the jars and the granite table top. It occurred to me briefly that my skin should be warmer, but it was just a passing thought, a weak wish. I was always cold, would always be cold. Maybe that was part of the reason I crafted the powers I did for him—I wanted him to be a way to find and burn away all my own personal faults. I had locked the door behind me, behind the birds who perched and bated in the rafters. With a rustle of my white cloak, I sat myself before the high table and began.

Crafting a body is much easier than you might imagine—it requires an ancient magic, but though it is made rare and fantastic by it's age, the spells are no more difficult than turning water into wine. Still, even with the less than strenuous nature of the magic, a working body is exceedingly complex. Every individual cell, mitochondria, every atom within those cells must fall into place at exactly the right moment, exactly the right chain to ignite the nerve synapses and start the beating of a heart. Creating monsters, freakish mixtures of animals, demons possessing no human-like form: this is easy, far simpler than the evolved, pristine mortal body. It might take me a day perhaps to build a hundred monsters if the spells are not prefabricated. But, to make the type of body I was planning -flawless, down to the atomic level- I knew it would take longer.

I ate a large lunch the day I began, large enough to make you stare for a good minute. Then, as I pushed myself back against the chilled surface of the high-backed laboratory chair, I prepared myself for the challenge creating such a body was sure to be. In the end, it took a little more than three days to complete. Re-examining the exact workings of the magic for you would be impossible—I simply do not have enough time left to go through the scientific principles. Suffice it to say, creating a body is something like the sewing you love so much. A shell, a container, whatever you might call it, is made up of thousands of tinier parts: the strands of hair, the pores of the skin, the eyelashes, the chemicals in the brain that help define behavior, the impulses that make a heart beat, a body breathe... These are all part of what makes up the outer walls of one's being. These are all like threads that must be woven, by a steady hand, together. No, forging a body is less than the action of actually sewing—it's more like cutting patterns for a beautiful outfit to come.

It is as much science as magic, rearranging air into molecules of organic compounds. It is as much art as uniform knowledge, applying taste and aesthetics to standard, book-based spells... Crafting bodies is a culmination of all the things men are slaves to: strength, weakness, talent, vanity, humility: virtue and vice. All of this goes into making a body—all these things that are as much a part of the crafter's heart as of the world are bound together skillfully to form the shell of what is to be, the physical flesh to house the impressionable soul that will follow. A body has a beating heart, but it is without feeling; a shell is beautiful only in that it has potential -pure potential- to become a full-fledged child.

For three days, I sat as motionless as a Catholic icon, palms upturned upon my knees, draped in robes that were white at my beginning but graying with the first hints of dust after such an extended period of stillness. For three days you did not dare to interrupt me; for three days I focused mind, body and magic for the task, binding each atom together with all the skill of a seamstress at her spinning wheel. In those three days, I drained myself completely, sparing nothing on this creation... I came close to failing once, a tiny tremble of my mind, the weakest of slips. Giving so much fatigued me; on the last day it was a struggle to even keep the magic up, to keep my own heart beating.

But then, after what seemed like an eternity, I finished. How can I describe the feeling of holding your child for the first time? It was an intense happiness -no deeper- something indescribable and pure. I think it is probably the most benevolent I have ever felt, a deep sort of peace that made all my fatigue and frustrations seem less than the smallest of concerns. The form seemed so small in my lap, weak and fragile beneath the thick folds of white cloth. A little hand, even smaller than yours, the ghost a childish smile—it was truly like holding an angel in my arms. There might have been one moment, only a moment, when looking at this perfection made me feel corrupted, as if my fanged smile and clawed touch were not meant to enclose this thing I had created—but this thought was gone within a breath, because I had created this boy, because this innocence was from me, a part of me. Fatigue clawed none too gently at my temples; unable to maintain my own mental functions, I slipped into sleep, smiling genuinely for the first time in months. In my arms, I could feel the tiny, steady heartbeat synchronizing with my own.

How many days I laid there, I am not sure, but it must have been quite a while, judging from your reaction as I stumbled out of the room. Whether you had been waiting patiently by the door for days (wracked with curiosity no doubt), or just happened to be passing at that very moment, your eyes widened and pleasant sort of admiration seemed to brighten your whole face.

"Master Kharl!" The subdued exclamation was a poor attempt at hiding your happiness and relief. What, did you think I'd curled up in there and died? Macabre as the thought was, I couldn't help but smile at the way some gathered tension and loneliness seemed to leave you, dissipating as if it had never existed at all. There was some part of me that was amazed at this, how highly you held me. I think what was even more stunning than your sincere happiness to see me was the twinge of fleeting guilt I felt when you smiled up as if I hadn't ignored your existence for more than a week. Unwilling to admit to you the sudden regret I felt at shutting you out of my grand scheme, I chose the easiest thing I could. With a weary sigh, I leaned heavily on the door frame, creasing my dusty white cloak.

"I'm hungry Garfakcy." Obediently nodding, you ran off like cooking had been the only thing on your mind for days. I watched you go, ignoring the sliver of guilt that came again—the guilt of knowing that behind the heavy oak door I'd shut as I'd come through it, a body I hadn't mentioned was breathing, a heart I hadn't told you of was beating.

The breakfast -or lunch, as it was well past morning- you laid out in minutes could have fed Nadil's entire army for a week. Biscuits and rolls of every bake and bread, eggs in at least five different forms, bacon, pancakes, a wild assortment of fruit from the garden (which, to my astonishment, was flourishing without any of my help). By choosing just a tiny bit of everything I could reach I filled my plate in seconds. The food was, as always simply delicious, and I know I must have been complimenting it quite beautifully, because you hardly took a bite. You were always like that: as soon as I said anything positive about your cooking, you'd stop eating, as if there wasn't enough to go around and you were taking my share of the excellent meal! After a while, I'd learned to avoid the topic and speak of other things.

To your credit, you never once asked me what I had done in the laboratory. I know you must have been dying to figure it out, but unlike any human I'd ever met, you seemed to always have a firm command over your own curiosity. No matter how desperately you want to look, to ask, you held yourself back. The only indication of longing to know was a dancing light in your jade eyes. At the time I was grateful, because for some reason (selfishness no doubt) I didn't want to share my achievement with you. Maybe it is simply that I had always enjoyed keeping secrets. I wish now that you had asked, had pulled so sort of confession out of me. Maybe your human practicality could have prevented the mistake.

I had fallen deeply into the project, yet I did not want to begin crafting the soul, the most important piece, immediately. Not only because I was weary but because I wanted to take the utmost care with what I was doing. I knew the consequences of creating new souls, I knew the danger. I may be making excuses—halting because of danger is not something I can imagine myself doing is not something I can imagine myself doing. More honestly, I did not want to myself feel any guiltier by ignoring you again after just returning.

The afternoon after I awoke was probably one of the most pleasant I have ever spent in the castle. The heat of mid-summer had dulled into the crispness of an early fall, and a gentle breeze ruffled everything it could touch. I spent the hours before sunset helping (or hindering, depending on whose opinion I am to believe) you in the garden, pruning (mangling) every plant in reach. When I finally tumbled into my mountain of plush pillows, I failed to notice just how much of a mess I'd made of myself—my hair, face and arms were covered in smudges of dirt, and my clothes were simply a mess of dark with occasional white spots. (It was around this year that you started to make me outfits of deeper colors, grumbling all the while about mess-magnets.) I finally feel asleep, with a smiles and dreams of gardening and souls.

When I began the preparations for what I knew would be my greatest achievement, I began them in earnest. I sealed myself away again, ensconced with the hollow shell of my child, the empty white eyes and heartless heartbeat. I knew what I wanted, who I wanted to create—and I knew how it was to be done. That night, with a full orange moon perched on my shoulder, I severed my ties with consciousness and gave my body over to the impossibly powerful magic that would need to flow through me. Creating souls is twice the chore of creating bodies because it does not deal with physical elements but with spirit—the powerful, indescribable energy that gives eyes their light, smiles their warmth, living creatures their behavioral attributes. It is not something modern science can hope to explain; it is something I can easily manipulate but never understand. Like hope, guilt, Heaven and Hell, soul simply is. It is this outside force that I manipulate, twisting and molding it into exactly the shape I require of it, the exact level of complexity I desire.

Drawing the magic is simple—it requires only the barest of sacrifices. Creating a drone is nothing: the birds alone are enough power to create a legion of such creatures. But to forge a truly complex creature, a true child, the power needed is something unlike anything else in world, greater than the birds could ever manage alone. The sacrifice required to bring such power under my own control was no small thing—nothing less than pouring my entire body into the spell could have sufficed. Can you see how important this was to me? With this power, I ran the risk of not only of losing all my work but damaging myself as well. When I began I believed this was going to be only succeed or fail—I never imagined that there were options worse than simply dying; that near success could hurt me more than losing everything.

I wanted this soul to be my finest, the strongest, purest magic I'd ever forged. I wanted this child to be warmth, a flame to my impenetrable cold. I could feel the brightness of crimson eyes and delicate fingers tugging my own long before they existed. As I channeled and wove life gently I imagined a crystalline laugh, a cheeky grin, boiling over with an inner blaze that I myself would always lack. This dark-haired child would be forever my opposite and forever my reflection—Yin and Yang; dark and light, locked together, separate yet inseparable; so far apart that they cannot help touching, back to back, blending into each other, nothing without the other. I dreamed of, I made a companion, a son, a brother, something indescribable, the other half of my heart. Ruin, I wanted to call him, my red flame.(1)

I had such strong convictions, such stable unwavering visions of what I was going to achieve... I never imagined that I could have miscalculated. Every drop of magic was perfect; every tiny piece was flawless, stable and working. In the end, the mistake was not the fault of outside forces but my own heart. I was nearly through creating the soul, so close to finishing it that I could have almost wrapped my fingers around a completed child—and then I lost everything. I had wanted this companion to share my feelings, my experience, my heart. I wanted him to be not only a carrier of my blood, but someone whose deepest levels could understand my own—so as I gave over my blood (feeling the loss as a slow dizziness), I tried to impart my love, my power, the truths I held and dreams I entertained... I gave everything; it was meant to be an impression, but I nearly gave up my whole soul.

Suddenly, I wasn't myself, no longer in control, wavering, buffeted, frightened and unsure of what was going on inside me. It was the barest of seconds before I understood: in trying to gather part of my own heart, I had overstepped the boundary between my body and the spirit I was creating. I was being devoured! It wasn't conscious thought, simply a primal knowledge—if I did not force a separation now, I was going to die, to end up like the shell breathing slowly in my lap. But to pull back now... I took only one breath, had enough time to take only one breath, and then I ripped my soul away. It was a physical movement too; I pushed myself back from the grand chair. Unable to control my own body, I collapsed, Ruin limply hitting the stone ground beside me. I was gasping, simultaneously feeling a reluctant reconnection with my body -a hollow feeling with the barest of tingling in my fingers, splayed out on the cold stone under me- and the feeling of knowing I'd just damaged, destroyed, lost the most precious thing I'd ever made.

The soul was almost palpable in the chill of the dark room -for a still second there was nothing but silence, when even my shaking breath seemed dulled or nonexistent- then in the next moment the entire room shook with a ear-splitting howl. The sound was terrible, fierce and completely untamed. If I could have lifted my hands to my ears, I would have, but I found myself frozen, in vast amounts of pain. The entire room seemed to boil with the heat of the unseen presence. I couldn't breathe, I must have hit my head because blood was running into my eyes, I couldn't think clearly, couldn't utter a word... I remember blinking back darkness, tasting the bitter blood and defeat in my mouth, desperate to end the sound, weak and hollow. I was missing part of myself and numb, willing to do anything to undo my own mistake.

But the howl continued, endless and impossibly powerful, the unfiltered sound of a soul, and I felt the noise not only in my ears but in my mind, my entire body, my unwhole heart. I felt something break, a cold trickle of blood wormed itself out of my ear and the pressure, the heat became simply too much for me to withstand—I lost control of myself. My youki plummeted and spiked uncontrollably, I felt my wings spill around me, rustling against the stone, and I truly thought for a moment that I was going to die—worse still, I wanted to.

As if that thought had power, the screaming ceased—there was a whisper like feathers against feathers, and then I felt the shift like a horrible lurch in my stomach. The damaged soul was still trying to reach the body it was intended for! Barely able to lift my head, I desperately tried to blink red from my eyes. The air was alive with the oppressive humidity of demon power more powerful than I'd ever expected—with jerky movements, the empty body rose to its small feet, white cloak spilling around pale shoulders, and the thin fragile neck.

Ruin rose, staring into my with eyes hollow and white, irises blank, expression slack and terrible to gaze on. I could almost see the soul trying to enter the flesh, and prayed it should -though I understood that without my help it would fail- I felt suddenly a horrible helplessness, inevitability, I was shivering. For a moment, I started, the body's eyes flickered, leaking into the barest hint of red, the barest hint of a heart beneath the surface—as if trying to reach me, pleading with me, crying for me, the soul attempted to lift the child's hands in my direction desperately, tiny fingers clawing to close the distance between us. I shut my eyes, I could not look at it.

In the next moment I forced my eyes open again, I knew I had to see—it was not morbid curiosity but morbid fear, fear that if I did not keep my eyes open, I would lose even more, would cause even more damage. But everything was already lost! I felt my heart breaking, and this time it was not failed magic but something deeper and far worse. I took a breath and it felt like my first, my last. Can it even be called that? It was really a gasp, weak and wet as blood found its way between my lips again. It was nothing more than that -only one gasp!- and everything shattered.

A violent wind ripped through the room, tearing papers to pulp, sending hundreds of bottles ripping off the shelves, hitting the floor and exploding into many tiny poison coated pieces. I felt the shrapnel dash across me, ripping feathers, pale skin and paler cloth, skittering across the stone in a perverse and mocking melody. There was an echo of the horrible scream, and I felt the soul, the creature, surge upward. Far above, the enormous pane glass window burst, raining mirrory silver shards like blizzard snow down on the room. The standing body -Ruin!- wavered, eyes going blank as a blind man's once again. For a second I watched that tiny body crumple... and then there was no body to see. Another breath, and all that remained of the creation I had given my blood, my power and my heart to make were a few slowly descending black feathers.

I watched them drift, shivering against the stone, and something in my mind curled in on itself, something disappeared—I felt not only cold but alone, abandoned... The thought of standing up, of picking myself out of the growing puddle, looking at what had happened with a clear mind, living on... It was unbearable, more even than the howling of the soul, more even than the shards of glass in my side. Trembling, defeated, I wanted only for the tiny remaining bit of my demon power to cease, to stop congealing the blood sluggishly dripping from my wounds. For a few minutes I wavered in the dizzy world between unconsciousness and waking and prayed I'd bleed to death. Ironic, considering that is exactly what is happening to me now.

Maybe I would have died then, exhausted, stripped bare of my illusions and lost... But I was saved. Rescued by a tiny human with too much emotion and a cloudy future. I was seeing the world only blearily through half-lidded eyes, but I hear my heart, and then suddenly beyond that, footsteps pounding, racing. Closer, closer. The door burst open, but I could not turn to look. It was all right, I knew already. A breathe, a sharp intake with the rattle of fear rent my silence, drowning out the sound of my own heart... Then you were beside me, kneeling in the slivers of glass, shouting. For a moment, the words were unintelligible, just so much sound and lips moving and I didn't try to even listen, because I was caught by something entirely else—your eyes were so wide, horrified, bright, dark, something I had never seen, and wet. I could see what I had never seen before in your orbs, smell the hint of salt... In your gaze I could see frightened -angry- tears threatening to spill over.

"Lord Kharl!" It was a shaking voice that did not suit you, and it bothered me, enough to rouse myself from the weighing pity. I forced my fingers to move, more difficult that I understood; it seemed the greatest chore in the world to wave my hand dismissively. "Why are you-what happened-answer me-who-how!" Whatever you were crying I couldn't make any sense of the words. I couldn't help but watch your hands instead—because you had reached out touch me, and all of your small fingers were painted in my blood. My head pounded, my whole form seemed remarkably slow to react to the orders my brain was sending. Like some sort of dying bird -dying angel- I forced myself to my knees, ignoring the crack of glass beneath my palms. A sharp wave of nausea overtook me, and things swam in and out of focus... And then it was past, my body systems thoroughly shaken but healing.

"Lord Kharl!" You looked like you wanted to help me, half-sitting there, unsure and moving like you suffering a nightmare and not reality. I don't know what stopped you. Fear maybe, pity? I didn't care then, I wonder now in retrospect. I steadied my gaze, reached a stained red hand, and pulled a single black feather from the floor. You knew it was not mine. You said nothing. It was flawless, as beautiful as I'd dreamed, and it was all I had left—a sore reminder of my own failure. It was not anger, it was not desolation, but I let the feather fall again, watched it sink into a splash of my blood, and felt that I would never be the same. "Master Kharl... Are you going to be all right?" Your voice was tiny, frightened, pleading to me as Ruin had done before he'd shattered... "Are you going to be all right?"

"No," my voice was almost as unintelligible as yours, "I won't be."

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Notes:
1 – Ruin is Elvish for "Red Flame". Many of the Dragon Knights characters bear Elvish names, including Gil, Laamgarnas, Robal, Rath and Rune. I just saw that word and couldn't help myself… I mean, come on, look at the double meaning! Rath and Ruin…

Author's Notes: Blah, blah. This chapter was written in a record 43 days. I'm so proud of myself, hee hee. So yeah, there it is, what do you think? Please review!

Review Responses:

Lumikuu: Ha ha.. I'm Kharl! (Cutting the hair in a 'fro now!) Nyaa, but thank you so much for saying that. I tried really hard to keep all that in character, so I'm glad you think it went well. What about this chapter, crazy or?
RandomRathFan: I wrote this fast just to prove your review false! No, I'm kidding. But heck, 43 days is A LOT shorter than six months. I now have made a nice little deadline chart for myself… I believe the next chapter is due in about thirty days! Ehhh, I better get to work! T.T
Yami-chan and the Unrealistic: I'm very glad you liked the last chapter. I like to believe that with Kharl and Gil there's a lot of emotion that doesn't get talked about in the manga. Thank you for reviewing as always, and I hope this chapter wasn't a disappointment. It came pretty quick though, right?

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