The Eternal Dance of Light and Dark

by The King of Ravens

Having just survived a nine year long civil war, those of Lucael would be forgiven for entertaining the notion of peace. However, new threats are rising, and as the son of the king, it is Caiellis's job to combat them, despite his youth. But as the leaders of a rival nation declare war and mysterious figures pull strings in the shadows, Cai will be drawn into the fate of the world.

41. Convalescence

Tristram was breathing extremely heavily, the poisons borne from the Black mana of the malicious blade that the Master of Gluttony, Ilentia, had chopped off his right arm with rushing through his bloodstream and making him feel weaker every second. He knew he had to stay awake, and was filled with the determination to do so because he had to protect the daughter and son of Carlis from the Welkalite forces after the death of their heroic father.

Athela was still relatively strong, strong enough to hold off the self-styled Archdemon of Greed at any rate, but if the new Guardian of Capitalia Lux succumbed to his wounds then the Aegis Angel would be Unsummoned with him, leaving Leodred and Elizabex alone in a precarious situation against the ravenous demon and its mistress who was stood in front of Tristram now, glaring back at him with her baleful red eyes as the bloody rain pounded all around them.

The eighteen year old boy, his eyes still streaming with tears of loss, guilt and sheer despair at watching his father die in front of him, was pulling himself from the rubble of the sodden market stall which had trapped him in and forced him to be unable to help his father against the Master of Gluttony, aided by the spirit incarnation of Valour who had become noticeably more sombre faced with its Summoner's father dying and it being able to do nothing to help. However, its white aura blazed with a need for revenge that would be suffusing Leo soon once he somehow managed to push past the utter depression and despair that was consuming him.

Tristram would ideally like to leave the boy to mourn or to comfort him in any way that he could (as although he was nowhere near as close to the Montlea scions as he was to the Lucerna children, he still knew them relatively well as every time they had visited Capitalia Lux his eldest charge had wanted to see them if it was safe to reveal their identity and as such Tristram had talked to them a reasonable amount – he wondered if that was what parents felt like talking to their children's friends, as Alexander and Caiellis had been like children to Tristram through the nine years of the lamentable civil war) but they were in the middle of a brutal battle and the boy would have to help, to fight for his life so that no one else would suffer the same fate as his father.

Elizabex, her eyes streaming with silent tears as well, was resting heavily on her staff, but just from looking at her the thirty year old Guardian could tell that she was putting on more of an illusion of discomfort and showing all of her pain instead of hiding it. Ilentia might see through that, but if she didn't Elizabex was presenting herself as an easy target, which went against Tristram's entire way of fighting which was to make the enemies focus upon him instead. He was a Guardian, a protector of the people and someone who both safeguarded the innocents of the Kingdom of Light and ensured that the members of the Lucerna royal family were safe and able to do their duty of ruling Lucael.

And he had failed to protect Carlis, a renowned general and the champion of King Marik before Tristram had become it when he had been instated as the Guardian of Capitalia Lux, as he had been too affected by his wounds and let them slow him down too much. But that did not mean that he would not do everything in his power to ensure that his children, his legacy, would live on and survive this horrific battle that had seen both the Lucaelian and Welkalite forces decimated in a slaughter that only benefited the demonic patrons of the New Empire of Passion.

The storm above was screaming and howling in exultation and tempestuous rage, the city below it warping and rippling as it was subjected to the anger and hellish presence of the horrible thing at the centre which Caiellis and Marik were fighting together against, but Tristram couldn't pay much attention to the way that Usnaan was turning into a hellscape all around them.

A massive spire of rock smashed through the ground like a curling talon of obsidian only a few streets away, shattering apart and crashing through the most ornate and extravagant restaurants in the Glutton's Quarter, obliterating the soaring buildings like they were nothing as it rose upwards. The bloody rain from the Tempest of Craving was increasing in intensity even more, and meteorites joined the large droplets of viscera in their arcing descent towards the City of Pleasure below. Crimson and pink lightning flashed, and the blood covering everything reflected the vibrant and obtrusively intense colours as it did so.

Despite the fact that Athela and the greater demon that was solely comprised of Black mana were still brutally and mercilessly battling it out, the Aegis Angel fully willing to indulge in the spawn of the forsaken abyss's desire to fight her and her alone as it meant that her Summoner and his comrades would not have to battle against the foul might of a greater demon, a kind of lull had fallen upon the central Banquet Street as the two sides of humans stared each other down, although the only member of the Empire might not be considered one by some.

Ilentia still held herself with predatory grace in spite of the wounds that she had suffered that seemed not to be bothering her, unnatural black blood spilling out of her side where Tristram's enchanted axe had cut through her armour and into the pale flesh beneath. Her red eyes flashed with anger and defiance in the lightning of the storm as they glared at the Guardian who was panting for breath with only the movements he had executed so far, whipping around between him and the two crying Montlea teenagers like a hunter of men sighting new prey and evaluating each one of them.

It seemed that the Master of Gluttony was infuriated by the fact that Tristram had stopped her from killing Leodred after she murdered Carlis in front of him, but her anger was nothing compared to his that was directed against her, hatred and disgust warring in equal measures within the large man that was well over six feet in height. The forearm and conjoined hand of pure magic that was holding Tristram's axe along with his natural one felt extremely strange, and he did not particularly like having to move it with the part of his mind dedicated to the management of mana instead of physical movement even though the two were very close.

It was going to be strange not having a right hand, but it was something that wasn't very important right now so long as Tristram could wield his weapon and fight, and his magic was strengthened by his protective instinct as well as his righteous hatred of this bitch, all trepidation about her origins and the fact that she seemed to hate her demon almost as much as a Lucaelian would gone in the face of what she had done. The murder of the entire Spears of Justice was on her hands, as well as probably countless deaths, and Tristram was going to exact that toll upon her.

Ilentia held her two blades once again, Malice aching for more blood to slake its insatiable and sadistic thirst for torture and pain and writhing exultantly in her grip and thoroughly enjoying the sight of the pain it had already caused, though the woman knew that attributing such characteristics to a mere blade, a tool, was absurd. Meanwhile in her left hand Fire was a jealous spark ready to be released as a raging inferno of envy and lust for any form of destruction, caring not for the finer points of killing and only wanting to demonstrate its rage upon anything and everything around it.

The more brutal but less malicious and cruel weapon was resentful of its sibling's greater use this battle and the fact that Malice had inflicted more wounds and killed more of the powerful opponents, and Ilentia smiled at the enemies, promising her sword that it would get its share of the bloodshed soon enough if the way that all three of the Lucaelians had their faces contorted in different forms of hatred, even if the children had their younger features filled with sorrow at the death of their father.

Ilentia was enjoying this battle despite herself and her usual apathy towards anything that didn't concern her survival, revelling in the brutality but not to a psychotic degree like those from the Order of Violence and liking the challenge her new body had been put under. Reality and emotions were strange things to the Master of Gluttony after the few days of her dark revival, her mind working in new ways and different sensations engendering different responses that sometimes varied wildly for things that were quite similar.

The smile that she let out was at once forced to intimidate her opponents further and fully representative of her current feelings. She wanted to kill these foes and make them suffer, but at the same time she was utterly apathetic towards them and did not care what happened to them so long as it did not endanger her own continued survival. She would do anything to prolong that, nothing was beyond any ridiculous sense of morality or rules enforced by the weak to keep the weak safe, and these Lucaelians were getting in her way so they were going to die for that. And if she wanted to enjoy their deaths, then she would.

If Tradax was still alive, which Ilentia highly doubted considering she had sensed the release of White and Black mana in the Redhand mansion from here before the most powerful demon she had ever sensed had entered the city, she would kill him once she was finished with these to truly obtain her freedom. She felt no sense of loyalty towards him; the Archlord of Rapture had revived her after killing her and turned her into what she was now to simply further his own goals and for his own sick sense of amusement and by freeing herself from him she would be merely repaying the favour.

That left Arrapackxia, the greater demon that she had almost been forced into selling her own Summoning to back when all she had known was to serve Tradax because she had only just walked into this new life. That had only been six days ago, but already Ilentia had changed much from the woman she had been after her dark resurrection. The Archdemon of Greed which wasn't actually an Archdemon apparently (whatever that meant, though if anything Ilentia supposed the monstrous presence at the corrupt heart of her birth city would be one) was a powerful force that she could command and was definitely making her more powerful, but he was disobedient, hated her for the contract as much as she hated him, and she did not like the way he sometimes intentionally endangered her and would not follow her commands.

It was a very powerful asset, the greater demon, and for now Ilentia would tolerate it until she was powerful enough herself to be rid of the chains binding her to its dark essence. She twirled her blades, assessing the combat capabilities of each of her foes, the only Summoning against her the combat incarnation that she was utterly unimpressed and unconcerned by.

Ilentia grinned as sadistically as she could at the girl and the boy and then the adult when her red eyes met his burning gaze, knowing that emotion was a tool to be manipulated and that if they did not use it to their advantage then it would be to their detriment. Anger and hatred were two very unpredictable forces that could have her enemies either rushing towards her and completely disregarding their own safety or fighting much better than they had before, but sorrow was something which would mean only good things for her.

She would not be able to foster the latter in the tallest Lucaelian man, as he was stronger than that and probably not related to the other one she had killed only a few minutes ago, and the girl was most likely off limits as well, but the boy was different as he had caused his father's death. Part of her wanted to anger her enemies further so that they would be more chaotic and unstable, because it would guarantee that they would throw themselves into the fight with little regard for the own security, but another, the one more concerned with preserving herself above all else, including enjoyment, knew that while that could give her and easy victory it could just as easily end in her dying if their power levels rose through their emotions.

She resolved to say nothing, because if she tried to make the boy feel even more hopeless and guilty it would only result in the further angering of the other two, but to satiate her desire to do so anyway she stared back into the blue eyes of the tallest opponent, wondering why so many people cared about the names of those who they were fighting, she tilted her head in the direction of the boy behind him who was freed himself from the rubble and was laid at his still father's side.

Tristram bristled at that, the smirking woman in front of him trying to tell him that she could easily kill the heavily distracted Leodred within a blink of an eye so he better not blink. However, he was content for now to wait for her move so that he could stop it and place himself in front of the blows, readying his admittedly lacking defensive mana in preparation for this.

It seemed that Elizabex did not share the Guardian's sentiment, and there was a sizzling whoosh of purifying mana as a bolt of righteous detestation shot forth from her staff, the girl snarling her hatred of their opponent as she blasted the White magic at her. Ilentia flipped away from the attack, but instead of being a straight pillar of light this assault was more like a coiling serpent of light that twisted through the air towards the unrighteous and the guilty attempting to escape from it.

The Master of Gluttony batted it away with a wave of pure Black mana directed by Malice, who objected to being used in a defensive manner but was promptly ignored by the Welkalite, and then Tristram was upon her. His axe sliced out, the hand of mana that was holding it combined with his normal physical limb that was also ensorcelled with magic power augmenting the speed of the heavy weapon as it sliced through the air towards the Welkalite woman.

Tristram knew that it was very unlikely that he could achieve victory, not in the awful condition he was in with the poisons of the malevolent sabre blade running through his bloodstream and with one arm entirely dependant upon sapping his mana reserves, but they wouldn't be able to flee either and Tristram was too determined to even think of doing that against this foe – unless it meant that Elizabex and Leodred would escape, in which case he might consider it. More likely than not they would refuse or simply be run down as well, and the fact that the city was filled with hostile enemies would mean that even if they escaped the Master of Gluttony it would be unlikely that they would get to safety.

The strike was never intended to hit, although Tristram did still aim at the Master of Gluttony and if she did not move then she would be hit by the blow of the thrumming axe, the weapon that had been wielded by previous Guardians of the capital city of the Kingdom of Light reacting positively to his protective instinct that had been thrust into over drive now that he was forced to remember that Elizabex and Leodred, while eighteen and technically adults, were still young kids and needed guarding from the horrors of the world, energised by his White mana. It could cause significant damage if Ilentia allowed it to slice into her, but as Tristram expected she effortlessly leapt back into the air, somersaulting over the second youngest Guardian and pirouetting towards the downed Leodred, her red eyes lit with a predatory but also efficient and murderous glint.

The Master of Gluttony was not like other Welkalites – while many of them, the devotees of hedonistic and depraved demons that they were, would prefer to cause their opponents immense amounts of agony before they finished with them, the woman that the Montlea family and the Light-bearer were fighting was more concerned with killing her opponents and ending them as swiftly as possible instead of revelling in their pain, making her far more dangerous in Tristram's view.

"Leodred!" he shouted as a warning, his voice bellowing across the clearing at the end of the once garishly coloured but now almost completely crimson Banquet Street and slamming into the kneeling and weeping boy like the words had physically shoved him backwards. Tristram didn't intend to let Ilentia get anywhere near the youngest of Carlis's children, and neither did the Summoning of Valour that raised its spear in preparation to defend against the onslaught from the demonic Summoner speeding towards them, her agility enhanced further by enchantments of Red cast automatically around her, but simply not cautioning the mourning lad of the extremely fast approach of the Welkalite would be a sure fire way to end with him dead.

He shot towards the back of the woman as Elizabex snarled in hatred of the person who had killed not only her father but the elite regiment of troops that she had got to know reasonably well over the past month or so that she and Leodred had become honorary members of for the time being. She raised her staff, topped with glittering illumination, and tried to ignore the way that calling upon her mana sent biting pains all the way through her body like she was being eaten away from the inside by malicious creatures with jaws of venomous and spined fangs.

It had been her usage of healing mana in attempting to help Caiellis's Uncle Tristram that had caused the explosion of retaliatory and punishing Red and Black to ripple through her that had almost killed her with the amount of White magic that she had poured into the healing spell, but instead it had knocked her unconscious, dispelled Purity as the gentle being tried to heal her and met the exact same fate as her Summoning, and forced her allies to have to protect her.

Which was what had got Leodred trapped within the market stall that he had only just freed himself from and forced her to watch as she blearily regained consciousness to see her father dying in front of her eyes. The pain that she felt inside was nothing compared to the sheer agony and loss that was rushing through her at the death of her dad who she loved more than anything else apart from the only close family members she had, and she wanted nothing more than to shut herself away from everyone and cry her heart out until the pain went away, even though that was only a blind hope and the agony of loss would probably never dissipate.

Elizabex knew that she couldn't – they were in the middle of a brutal war and more would die if she gave into the anguish and sorrow welling up inside of her. If she surrendered to the grief now, then her father's sacrifice would be in vain, the Guardian of Capitalia Lux who was loved by her and her brother's best friend (though she wouldn't quite admit it if anyone asked her, preferring to let Leo call Alex his best friend instead of her) and his little brother (who was also her friend but more incidentally) would be injured further and could be killed either by the Master of Gluttony or the poison that was running through him that Elizabex could do little about.

But even worse than that was the truth that her little twin brother would also be hurt or even killed just like their father had been by the Master of Gluttony if she left the crying boy alone in all of this violence and death around them and permeating the City of Pleasure with a foul stench and a magical resonance that made the mage priest want to throw up. Leodred was the closest person in her life to her, even closer than her closest friends, and while he could be annoying or argumentative he was her twin brother and there was nothing in the world that she would rather have in her life than him at the moment.

It had been her weakness that had got their dad killed, no matter what her sibling would think to himself about it, but she wouldn't allow anyone else to die here. Muttering a prayer under her breath that would aid her in invoking the light of the angels to smite the wicked of the world and protect the innocents from their nefarious corruption, she slammed her staff into the ground, channelling White mana into it that she still had in spite of the fact her Summoning had been killed and sent back to the Mind Realm as coils of incandescence swirled around it.

Her magic was derived from what both her mother, who was one of the most powerful mages she had met and set to inherit the role of Hierarch from Tybalt Litria when he became unable to prosecute the duties that came with the position (amongst others), and her father had taught her, the ritual and powerful channelling processes of the Priesthood based within the Cathedral of Salvation mixed with the practical combat magic and instinctual reactions that her now dead father had taught her in, honing her naturally high mana and allowing her to focus the powerful spells into a more efficient form.

She would never get enough time to finish one of her more formidable and destructive rituals of purification, nor would Elizabex be able to cast a momentous spell that would gift the loyal subjects of the Lucerna line, not with how fast the Master of Gluttony was and how quickly she would notice the girl beginning to cast a spell of that magnitude. Instead she relied upon the combat magic that she knew, combining what bother her father and mother had taught her and thinking of how the Welkalite needed to be punished for what she had done and erased from the face of the earth before she could hurt any more undeserving people.

Leodred quickly shook his head, violently wiping the tears of self-loathing and anguish from his eyes along with the blood that had poured into them and was matting his short brown hair, and grabbed his sword that had been given to him by the man laid dead in front of him. He had pulled his father's body up so that the muscular man (though slightly smaller and thinner than the king and Tristram) was laid with his back on the ground, his grief stricken mind not content with him being dumped unceremoniously on the ground like he was some sort of discarded toy and that he was not worth any time or remembrance. The whole in his armour was still stark, and Leo felt a sense of numbness all the way through him, and he had wished that he had been able to know his father better.

Sure, they had been able to actually see one another during the civil war unlike Alexander and the king because Leodred and Eliza weren't targets like the Lucerna brothers, but Carlis had always been distracted and focussed on the brutality of the war at the same time as showing love to his young children. When Leo had become a teenager he had started acting up with his mother and father both, selfishly hating the fact that he couldn't spend much time with the man in spite of the fact that it was barely limited to him and many of the youngsters that were his friends also had their parents torn away by the war.

Carlis had always been concentrated on his daughter and son's fighting capabilities, but since Leodred had less mana than his fraternal twin sister that meant he should have spent more time with his dad because he couldn't participate in some of the more advanced lessons taught by his mum to his sister, and since his best friend could only come to Capitalia Lux every so often when it was deemed safe he had started to get lonely with the rise of his hormones. He and his dad had only just began to really start bonding between the two of them a year or two ago, and now Carlis had been ripped away from his son, daughter and wife before he could see them truly become adults.

Leodred was going to make sure that his father was avenged.

The boy quickly pulled himself to his feet as Ilentia sped like a thunderbolt towards him, shields of light conjured up by Tristram to help protect him smashing apart into blasts of light as she used the destructive blade in her left hand to crash through them in waves of fire and Red mana. Leodred didn't exactly know what he was doing, his mind still consumed by the anguish of seeing his beloved father sacrifice his life for him, and die because of his weakness, but his body had been thrust into adrenalized overdrive and his some parts of his instinct were screaming at him to react instead of just sitting here and letting Ilentia advance towards him at the speed the boy couldn't become used to she was that fast.

Valour shot forwards as well, twirling his spear as Tristram advanced from behind, ensuring that he did not over commit on deploying magic to delay the Master of Gluttony whilst she could blast it apart because he needed some in reserve to keep conscious, attempt to repel the poison within him that was killing him and making him extremely pale and his eyes glassy with fever, hold his axe, and use more mana when he needed it. The incarnation conjured up swords of light and flung them at the Welkalite, who dodged some by twirling her sinewy body in the air and knocked others aside with her enchanted sabres as she launched herself at it, the elemental slashing at her with its own righteous speed that left light within the air as Leodred hefted his sword.

He was covered in his father's blood and the torrential gore drenching everything in vibrant crimson, though there were clear tracks in his face where tears of hurt had spilled down them and were continuing to do so even though he knew he needed to see properly. He didn't know what he wanted to do, because no matter what he did dad would still be dead and nothing would ever change that, and without his honed survival instincts and warrior training he knew that he would have been content to give up and wait for the end to come quickly enough. He deserved to die for getting his father killed, but that would be fleeing from the battle, fleeing from his job to protect his twin sister and fleeing from his duty as a son to avenge his dad's death and make it worth something.

The boy was not going to give up or retreat from his duty because that was what Lucaelians did not do, and he had the honour of the Montlea family to hold up. He needed to make this bitch pay for what she had done already before she could hurt anyone else.

Leo knew for certain that Carlis would not have died if he had not been here, if his dad hadn't been forced to look after his failure of a son and be killed because of it, and that made the boy hate himself even more when he realised it. Leodred had never really had too many problems with confidence, though he had always felt slightly envious of his best friend Prince Alexander because of the power and respect the younger boy commanded throughout the kingdom, though he knew what almost crushing responsibility and cost that power entailed.

He also constantly wanted to be stronger, to get out of this lanky phase that he was in where he was growing taller but not building up much muscle in spite of his attempts to do so, and that was another way in which Alex and many of his other friends around the same age as them had him beaten. Finally, he had always wanted to make his father proud of him, but it seemed that he couldn't not make a mistake when he was doing combat training. Dad had often told him that he needed to be more patient, less impetuous and to assess the situation before rushing blindly into it, because if he was ever going to inherit the role of one of the main generals of the Capitalia Lux legion then he needed to be able to get a greater picture of things before committing his soldiers into the combat.

"It is reckless and foolish to risk your life by throwing it into dangerous situations with no thought of the consequences, but it is downright selfish to lead others with you and put their lives in danger as well before assessing the state of the battle," dad had once admonished as he helped his son back to his feet after repelling one of his blind offensives and knocking him over.

The man had also hit the nail on the head when Leodred had objected that Alexander fought in the same way as him but he wouldn't be criticised because he was a Lucerna, patiently telling him that while the eldest prince fought in a very offensive manner firstly he had a First Sisterhood angel, one of the most aggressive, at his command, and secondly whilst he was an extremely fast warrior that used constant aggression and pressure to his advantage Carlis had seen the two spar and knew that Alex still analysed the situation before heading in.

And now Carlis was dead, all because Leodred hadn't listened to him. The man had warned him of this, and instead of Leo dying because of not paying enough attention to the situation his father had taken the blow intended for him instead. Ilentia swayed out of the way of one of Valour's strikes, the spear tip that was coated with light flashing past her as she swept past the Summoning and towards Leodred.

Anger and anguish surged through the youngster in equal measures as the Master of Gluttony came at him from the ground, the malicious and curved blade that had killed his dad extended towards him whilst the other sabre that was lit up by impulsive and destructive Red mana was held to the side to slash at him once he dodged or repelled the first blow.

Screaming in his hatred of the woman, White mana crashed through the body of the eighteen year old, coursing through his limbs and surging into the straight edge of his Lucaelian steel sword as he leapt at the Master of Gluttony to oppose her. He wanted to make her pay for what she had done, and he didn't care that this was exactly what his father had warned him about, exactly the thing that had forced Carlis to die in protecting his only son from the formidable Welkalite opponent who had slaughtered one of the most elite regiments in the kingdom like they were nothing but untrained youths handed blades and pushed into the army. All he knew now was the need for vengeance upon the one who had wronged his family so much, and his grief-stricken mind howled at him to do it.

His blade met empty air in spite of the surge of energy that had gripped him and the speed at which the strike had been executed, and Leodred blearily looked up with a vision blurred by stinging tears that he did not know how to stop. The eighteen year old was half expecting Ilentia to be attacking him from a different angle now, to have anticipated his angry assault and completely out manoeuvred him, and he was fully prepared for a sting of a blade stabbing into him from behind or a blast of magic that would wrap around him or consumed him in an inferno of fire.

He could barely concentrate on the battle at all with the grief rushing through him constantly, the condemnations of his stupidity that had led to his father's end by his own mind drowning out every other sense as all he felt was the sting of emotion in his head, emotion that did not do that much to empower his mana without the need to obtain righteous vengeance and protect others from the fate that he had allowed to come upon his father. Leodred only just noticed the Master of Gluttony metres away from him and baring down on his twin sister who had been channelling her mana in defence of him, and his protective instinct flared in his head. He instantly began running towards her, refusing to let Elizabex be hurt as well because of him.

The eldest child of Carlis was about finished in casting one of her powerful but also relatively quick spells when Ilentia had leapt off the ground with unnatural agility gifted to her both by her demonic pact with the being fighting Tristram's Second Sisterhood angel and the Red mana running through her and was suddenly in the air above her. Elizabex quickly abandoned her offensive magic, acting upon instinct instead of any rational thought as sudden screaming eclipsed the hymnals she had begun singing, beseeching the angels above to lend her their divine might so that she could smite this monster of a Welkalite from the face of the world.

An undulating wave of twisting shadows was vomited up from the sword in the right hand of Ilentia towards the young woman, who quickly placed her staff lengthways across the ground, still gripped in her hands, and raised it up, a square of luminescence following the magical armament as she drew it upwards and focussed her defensive White mana into the staff given to her by her mother. The Black mana crashed into her shield, and she gritted her teeth, refusing to give into the thoughts of hopelessness that were running at the back of her mind – as if her dad, one of the most powerful warriors she had ever seen (although she was slightly biased considered he was her father) had been defeated by the Master of Gluttony than what hope did she have?

No, instead she had to think that now Ilentia must have been weakened in some way by the sacrifice that her dad had made so that his son and daughter could live on for longer, and though she didn't seem to be concerned by the quite prominent wound in her side that had shredded her flexible leather armour and ripped apart her flesh it was probably affecting her in some way, even if it was only slightly. Right now Elizabex couldn't see the older woman to analyse her for weakness with the darkness battering against her shield of light, the two opposing forces raging against each other in their endless battle for supremacy.

The girl was ready and waiting for the Master of Gluttony to begin using Red mana in an attempt at catching her off guard, and knew that the others in their party would probably be rushing towards her now so that they could help Elizabex, or to leap past her shield and begin to assault her. Adversely, Ilentia might keep up her constant assault, wait for the others to over extend and then target them instead, and Elizabex knew that Leodred was definitely not in any condition to be fighting right now and might charge blindly at the one attacking his twin sister if Tristram, who was most likely coming to try and help as well, couldn't stop him or if Valour didn't either.

The Lucaelian girl wasn't sure how she could keep so relatively calm (as she was anything but collected and was still distraught and sad, but not enough to stop her from thinking almost clearly) with all that had happened, but supposed that she could mourn later once this battle was won and once no one else would get hurt. She had always been the least emotional one of out the two siblings, able to push them away easier than her slightly younger brother, but that didn't mean that she didn't feel it and often had trouble showing hurt herself.

Elizabex quickly pulled herself out of her thoughts, aware that either she would become lost within them or distracted by them or that she would become consumed by guilt and sorrow to the point where she was unable to act if she let her father's death get to her too much. Ilentia shot through the shadow at that point, the darkness spilling off of her lean limbs like steam and blasting through the shield of pure mana as her swords slashed at different angles towards the Montlea girl, twin forces of death in different ways rushing at Elizabex.

Remembering her combat training and fusing that with her instinct, Elizabex rolled backwards at the same as bringing her staff round, dodging one of the sabres that seemed to hiss threateningly and sadistically at her as if promising she would feel pain soon enough as it passed over her head. The other blade, spitting with sparks of flame, crashed into the handle of her staff that she reinforced with White mana to prevent it from being sliced in half, and her own brown eyes met the piercing red orbs of the Master of Gluttony as she pressed into her.

Elizabex refused to be intimated, drawing upon her natural Lucaelian resilience in the face of the darkness and courage to oppose all foes to stare down the Welkalite and whip her staff round, pouring thrumming and blinding White mana into it in a blinding strike that had Ilentia's already tiny pupils compressed into a minute black sphere at the centre of her unnaturally large red irises that left little white at the edges of the fiery circle.

She crashed the magical equipment that enhanced her ability to focus her mana into the ground just as Ilentia flipped backwards, dodging a strike of light that Elizabex hadn't even seen herself despite facing the direction it came from which evaporated the blood slick on the ground where it landed. Elizabex had expected this from the Master of Gluttony and quickly darted her eyes round to get vision of her, Tristram cursing in anger and barely concealed agony as she launched herself at him for a moment.

Instead of attempting to hit the Welkalite with another magical assault that was likely to miss and simply waste her mana, Elizabex infused Tristram with light, giving him more strength and speed as well as helping to help the advance of the poison through him that Eliza couldn't do anything about without having access to her healing magic or medical equipment which she was trained slightly to use (though her skills would probably prove to be inadequate for a mana based toxin that potent).

Tristram battered the woman back from him, the circling arcs of fire behind her that smouldered as they whooshed through the air towards him impacting upon the many shields of mana that rose up around him. Tristram's magic was very defensive and focussed upon preserving himself and others and winning through his physical might and empowering that as well.

It had been perfect for protecting the young princes throughout the vast majority of the civil war, drawing enemies to attack him instead of them and the aged Tybalt who had provided adept magical support with onslaughts of powerful spells from the back lines along with the Lucerna boys, but it was not the best tactic against the Master of Gluttony because she was significantly faster than he was in spite of the fact that he was a very quick warrior, and could easily target others instead of him and deal damage to them as opposed to piercing through the Guardian's formidable defences.

He felt Elizabex's magic fortifying his state and silently thanked the girl for it, refusing to acknowledge the state of his wounds because he instinctively knew how dire they were and that merely paying any attention to them would make them seem even worse and exacerbate the effects of the agony that he was in. He didn't want to have to think about life with only one arm, because even if he could conjure up a magical replacement it wouldn't be the same, and instead focussed utterly on the battle and ensuring the survival of his young comrades that their father had already given his life to continue.

The Guardian of Capitalia Lux was starting to tire, and while he would have liked to be able to analyse Ilentia's fighting style it was all he could do to force himself to stay conscious and aware of the world around him, let alone battle against the Master of Gluttony who was bearing down on him once again, her twin sabres flashing in alternating arcs of fire and darkness as they swept towards the man from above. The woman liked to utilise many different angles of attack to distract and confuse her opponents, but Tristram had always been a staunch warrior used to taking punishment (because he didn't want others to get hurt and it was often the case that they couldn't get hurt as they were far more fragile than he was – such as during the civil war that had seen him mature from a young adult right at the start to an adult capable of taking care of little kids, whereby the other members of their small party had either been too old or too young to endure much pain) and stood his ground against the blazing assault of insidious and murderous shadow combined with flames of a heart's yearning to be free.

His axe whipped around after he blocked the two strikes of Ilentia on conjured shields of inviolate light that held strong even as the enchanted blades crashed into them, absorbing the magical forces behind the blows and nullifying the strength put into them, a potentially lethal riposte initiated by the shining edge of the blade that only hacked into nearly solid murk that filled the Guardian's vision before he erased it with a blast of holy light which restored clarity to the dark avenue.

"Leo! Look out!" Elizabex shouted quickly to her brother before Ilentia had even fully disengaged with Tristram and was in the process of flipping around to attack the youngest Montlea once again, as the eighteen year old male was afflicted heavily by his emotions and was early beginning to charge at where the Master of Gluttony had been prior to her effortlessly breaking away from the Light-bearer and somersaulting once again at the boy across the large street from her.

Elizabex's twin brother reacted to the warning by looking into the air, readying his sword to try and strike down the Master of Gluttony as Valour ran to his side and twirled his spear, barriers of White mana floating into life that would impede the Welkalite's progress and slow her down saturating the air in front of her. With the sudden switch of assaulting Tristram and then going to attack Leodred when he had been distracted by being about to rush her from behind, Elizabex was piecing together the Master of Gluttony's effective strategy more and more, and this was giving the hypothesis that she had already come up with more credence.

Ilentia fought by dividing her enemies, turning the greatest strength of the soldiers of the Kingdom of Light, their unity, against each other, forcing them to fight their own individual battles against her and preying upon the one that she thought was the weakest at any given time. Eliza knew that her fighting style was very chaotic, which was reminiscent of a lot of Welkalite strategies and tactics, but this one was more focussed upon not allowing the Lucaelians to attack her from every side at once because even though the Master of Gluttony was very powerful she could not hope to resist that.

The girl was beginning to see a very clear pattern to Ilentia's seemingly random and unplanned combat approach to his battle, and the fact that she had left Tristram to attack her brother now only confirmed what she had had suspicions about, though not enough until now to begin to plan her own counter to the enemy's plan of action. Ilentia targeted the weakest at each individual point in time, but she forced that weakness herself by preying upon the natural need of Lucaelians to want to help their comrades and make sure that they did not get hurt, taking advantage of the fact that they were all fully willing to sacrifice their lives for their allies to make them do just that.

She would attack the one who was the furthest away from the other two (or three, but she did not target Valour at all and it was safe to say that she would rather kill the Summoner and get rid of the incarnation without having to touch it – probably meaning that Ilentia felt a lot safer fighting against humans because they were more predictable and easier to manipulate into making a mistake than an almost perfect warrior elemental) to make the others leave the relative safety of their positions to come to the aid of their stricken friend and become more focussed on aiding the one in trouble rather than protecting themselves.

Then she would target the one farthest away once again now that they were preparing to lend their strength to help the one who the Master of Gluttony was assaulting before, utilising her incredible manoeuvrability and speed to get to them before the others could react. That would put them under pressure and potentially get them killed, but if it didn't it would therefore lead the others out of position so that she could pick and choose a new target to attempt to kill.

It was forcing them into a reactionary game where none of them could get used to the state of the combat before it was changed and reversed on its head, and Ilentia would remain almost immune to any form of retaliation because individually she was stronger than any of them and could evade their retaliatory counter attacks with little effort.

She was slowly weakening them all to the point where one of them became far too exhausted and wounded to continue on with this type of warfare and make a mistake, which would compromise all of them as they scrambled to help their stricken fellow Lucaelian and give her full reign to force them into heavily risking their lives or even sacrificing it to ensure that others would live on.

Much as it hurt her to even think about it, Elizabex knew that what she had just figured out would have been the reason for her father dying, that her slightly younger brother by a few hours would have either over extended or been hurt enough by the woman to allow her to go all out in attacking him and trapping him in the fallen wreckage of that market stall which he had only just freed himself from, and making Carlis have to choose between his son's life or his own – which had been an easy decision to make for the loving father of two.

Ilentia would attack her if Leodred didn't let her get close enough to hurting him or somehow open himself up for more attack, which, judging by his enraged and anguished expression, probably accentuated by the malevolent effects of the Tempest of Craving above that was currently screaming in its endless thirst for blood and undying rage, though she could not pay attention to that now or the way that the Red and Black mana levels suffusing the entire city in hedonistic magic which heightened every sensation to exquisitely painful intensity, not with Tristram and her twin brother who knew her more than anyone else in grave danger.

As Tristram, grunting in pain that he attempted to hide coming from his wounds and the horrible poison which would have killed a lesser man, began to run towards the twelve year younger male, Elizabex hoped that Leodred wouldn't expose himself enough so that Ilentia abandoned her plan and went into the second phase of attempting to kill him instead of going to attack Eliza which the girl was certain the Master of Gluttony would do next.

She wished that she had some way of communicating her thoughts with her allies without having Ilentia know that she had figured out parts of her strategy because then the Welkalite would adapt and change it as she was clearly a very cunning fighter (also evidenced by the way that she had organised her forces across the Glutton's Quarter which was the first one to come under attack by the Lucaelians, delaying and splitting them up with clever yet extremely callous placements of troops), but since she didn't all she could do was look like she was going to rush towards her brother or begin to cast a spell which would leave her right open to attack.

She began, starting to pulse huge amounts of mana into her staff, but instead of using as much as she could Elizabex discreetly enchanted the ground around her with traps that would flare into life when she activated them and the Welkalite targeted her – they were very powerful, but they did not last long and if Ilentia's plan was different to what Elizabex had predicted she would end up wasting huge amounts of mana when they ran out and then the Master of Gluttony could capitalise upon that instead to attack her.

Reacting quickly now that his sister had warned him of the attack, Leo snarled in a way that he didn't care if it was intimidating or not as he launched himself at the woman, his sword shining with a blinding glow. He no longer cared whether he would be hurt or not, all he wanted was to make this bastard face justice for what she had done, and to avenge his father's death which should not have happened, and his sword slashed through the air towards the woman as she lanced a kick out into Valour, fire exploding from her foot and rippling into the elemental that quickly rose an aegis of White mana conjured up onto its left forearm.

Elizabex poured mana into the two spells she was casting at once, knowing that she was taking an immense risk because if the Master of Gluttony saw through her ruse then she would be achieving nothing apart from putting herself – and consequently the others who would rush forwards to help her – in even greater peril. She hoped beyond any rational hope that this would work, because if it did they could win and get out of the danger that they were deep within now, if only for a brief moment because of the climax of the Lucaelian/Welkalite war contained in this sprawling city of hedonism and horrors.

Elizabex would never get to see if she was right or not.

A massive pillar of combined light and darkness in huge amounts blasted up from the centre of Usnaan and into the heavens, piercing through and utterly annihilating the Tempest of Craving which shrieked as it died. However, its howls of pain were nothing compared to the undulating death scream that rippled out throughout the entirety of the City of Pleasure, the dying roar of a fallen god as it was killed by the gigantic amounts of mana released in the vicinity of it and targeted against it making Elizabex's skull pound and her teeth rattle with the intensity of it. Ilentia quickly broke off from her attack, Leodred even his enraged and almost frenzied state pausing and his eyes widening at the sheer release of power that crashed through the storm above and destroyed the heart of corruption in the centre of the Welkalite capital.

"WHAT IS THIS?" a demonic voice bellowed, though to Ilentia's ears Arrapackxia seemed more concerned and incredulous than genuinely distressed that its true master which Tradax had brought into Usnaan and had been the most powerful thing the Master of Gluttony had ever sensed before had been slain. The greater demon smashed the angel it was battling solely against away with a wave of screaming and hungry shadow surrounding its pale forearm and swooped down next to Ilentia, its foetid and ravenous presence reminding the woman of the darkness within her that she couldn't care less about.

Athela, instead of capitalising on this distraction to strike from behind, raised her circular aegis and blocked the attack on the ornate shield embossed with the sigil of Iona, and then landed next to her Summoner so that she could protect him and the other two Lucaelians from any further attack. She felt like she had failed Tristram in allowing him to sustain such horrible wounds, but Athela was a practical angel and knew that it would be much worse if she had let them fight the very powerful demon she had held up and delayed as he played his games with her.

"Your master, the foul Lord of Riots, has been slain by the might of the First Sisterhood and the Lucerna family!" the Aegis Angel shouted back, pretending not to be concerned by the fact that it had been the traitor of the First Sisterhood, the Summoning of her Summoner's youngest charge during the civil war, who had provided all of the power to kill Rakdos. No, that wasn't true – while it had been very similar to the Angel of the Black Sun's magic of heavenly light and abyssal darkness, it had been Prince Caiellis himself who had annihilated – not just banished – the unholy Defiler, the young boy who called her Summoner his "Uncle" who was sweet and innocent releasing that much haunting energy because of his Lucerna heritage a reminder that no matter the size or age of the Lucerna they would never fail to protect the people.

Arrapackxia's contemptuous eyes opened up wide in exaggerated shock, though the greater demon was truly surprised that his creator had been utterly destroyed in the time of his ascension and the true beginning of the Festival of Bloodshed, before he started laughing. Derisive sniggers and snorts burst forth from the self-styled Archdemon of Greed who could easily have the opportunity to descend to that rank now that his master was gone which were warped into malevolent laughter by its dark tongue as it cackled almost hysterically.

"It does seem that that is the case, doesn't it, little seraphim? Oh well. It seems that the conclusion to our fight will have to come at another time. Now then, Ilentia, since your master Tradax has failed and my "lord" Rakdos has been slain, there is little point in me remaining here, is there? Ta ta, my sweet Summoner. I will see you in hell," Arrapackxia snorted, his lips curling into a hungry sneer as he beheld the slightly surprised yet somewhat apathetic woman. The demon quickly Unsummoned itself in an opening portal of spiralling tenebrosity which devoured its physical form, returning to the Master of Gluttony's Mind Realm in preparation for her death so that it could claim her soul and refusing to be Summoned once more.

Ilentia glanced back at her five enemies, including an angel which had managed to hold of her demon, albeit Arrapackxia had been playing with her in lieu of defeating her quickly and coming to Ilentia's aid like it had been capable of doing, and all of them glared back at her with their endless determination and endurance. It was an admirable Lucaelian trait, Ilentia had to admit, but it was borne from their irritatingly arrogant sense of self-righteousness and unquestioned belief that everything they were doing in their slavery to their angelic overseers and their scions in the Lucerna family which made it so they did not know when they had lost.

There was no way that she could defeat all of them, not now that some of her power was leaving her in tandem with the departure of her demon, and she would not be able to flee either as they would chase her down and kill her. However, it was sharply clear that Arrapackxia paid little attention to her activities in the physical world when the demon was not Summoned, and she pulled out the device that Eras Stormwind, Master of Wealth, had given her in the very early hours of the morning of this day.

She did not know where it would take her, or if it would even work, but that did not particularly bother the Master of Gluttony. Nor did she feel any inclination to stay within the city of her birth the capital city that she was supposed to be leading the defence of, because this battle was lost and she refused to die here. She would make her own life from here, be able to do what ever she chose to with no masters controlling her or forcing her into wars that she did not care about.

Ilentia wasn't even annoyed that she wouldn't be able to finish this battle, in fact she didn't care at all about these Lucaelians, as while it had been enjoyable she did not feel much at all towards them and would rather survive and keep living. The Master of Gluttony, if such a title existed any more as the capital city of the New Empire of Passion was perilously close to being over run and conquered, did not know what she wanted to do with her life, as there were endless possibilities, but all that mattered was that it was her life now.

With no hesitation at all, she pressed down on the button of the strange teleportation device, and Tristram and the Montlea twins watched as foreign and swirling Blue mana engulfed the pale woman who was covered in blood, no longer weakened by the influence of the Tempest of Craving now that it had been destroyed, and suddenly left without a trace. The Guardian was left feeling hollow inside at the victory in spite of the fact that they had won, and turned to look up at his angel who swiftly glanced back down at him, her warm golden eyes suffused with concern for her Summoner.

"I am sorry, Tristram. But I have to go back to the Mind Realm now so that your mana can be conserved," Athela told the man, who nodded back and then regretted it as the world spun nauseatingly around him in tandem to the Second Sisterhood angel leaving this realm of existence and returning to his mind in a solemn flash of concentric white luminescence. Leodred stood still for a few seconds, swaying precariously as he stared daggers into the spot where Ilentia had been stood, and then collapsed to his knees, dropping his sword with a splash of blood from the torrential rain which had abruptly stopped and starting to cry his eyes out in wracking sobs that exacerbated the feeling of emptiness Tristram was experiencing.

Victory had been achieved, in this area anyway and probably across the whole city, which was a good thing as now the innocents of Welkas would be able to be free from dictators who would willingly invite demons upon their people and sacrifice their souls to them, but it had come with a great cost. Tristram turned round to Leodred, starting to step towards him and wanting to comfort him in any way possible even though he knew the words would be hollow, because he had experienced the same when woefully attempting to lessen the pain of an eight year old and a four year old who had lost their mother and been pulled away from their father, but the second he moved pain shuddered through him.

He grunted at the sudden, stinging agony rushing through his veins, pushing back a scream of pain that almost slipped out of his lips which were clamped shut, blood and bile threatening to rush up his throat from the effects of the poison that now had nothing holding it back. He staggered, falling to one knee as the world blurred around him and torture ripped through his muscular body, the stump of his right elbow the source of his pain as the man could feel the progress of the poison through him.

"Tristram! Let me heal you," a concerned but sad voice that was moments away from tears and broken by the events of the battle went into his ears, though Tristram ignored it for the moment as he pulled his body onwards, about to turn around and tell her not to before she added, "The blood from the rain is still here, but since the Tempest of Craving has gone I can heal you without what happened earlier. Although I suppose you didn't see that."

He tried to move forwards before a strong hand gripped his shoulder and soothing light began to spill into him, though he growled at the pain as the felt the purifying magic rushing through him and burning the venomous magic away from him.

"Hold still," the voice of Elizabex rang out as the Guardian stubbornly tried to pull away so that he could go and help the sobbing Leodred. He turned back to the girl, hoping the tears in his eyes weren't showing because his own pain would be nothing compared to their emotional agony – he hadn't even been there when his own parents died during the civil war, finding out from his cousin when he had been planning to take the Lucerna children there and he wanted to see his mother and father to ensure that they were alright, so he knew the sting of losing a parent intimately, but he had not been there when they had been killed so could only imagine what that would feel like.

Tears were spilling unimpeded down Elizabex's young cheeks as well, but she stoically refused to give into them like her twin brother and concentrated on healing Tristram and erasing the poison from his veins.

"Go see to your brother. I'll be fine," Tristram ground out through gritted teeth, trying not to let the true extent of his pain show to the eighteen year old who smiled sadly at him, a haunted twist of her lip that the Guardian was all too familiar with in all of the years of grief and sorrow that had preceded this war. Elizabex rolled her eyes, though the fact that she was feigning being alright did not mean that the sadness in them was erased from the daughter of Carlis, who replied, "And leave you to die from the poison of Ilentia's blade or any other infections that you might have? Not a chance. Sit down so it is easier."

Tristram complied, not muttering profanities under his breath like he would have done in any other situation because he could hear how close Elizabex was to breaking, how close her façade of tending to him instead of giving in to her tears was to shattering in the flood of sadness. Elizabex's eyes didn't stray from his wounds as she ripped off some fabric from the priest clothing above her armour, infused it with mana and bound the wound of Tristram's arm. The Guardian hissed in pain and had to consciously stop himself from jerking away from the girl's soothing ministrations, Elizabex accommodating for his pain by the way she used spells that would reduce it as well.

The man was reminded of earlier times when he would have to be patched up by his mother after his over-eager stupidity of doing daring things that his older friends bet that he couldn't, and more recently during the civil war where he would be healed by Tybalt or the Lucerna children (mostly little Cai because he was much better at healing than his older brother, though Alexander was still good at things like stitching or patching up wounds without much magic) if the Light-bearers were too wounded to tend to one another. They sat silently, Tristram giving Elizabex the privacy she needed and pretended he couldn't see her crying quietly, looking over to Leodred who was leaning over his father's corpse, his dad's hands clasped in his as Valour watched sombrely above him and kept guard for any potential enemies.

Tristram didn't know what, if anything, he could say to Elizabex that would help with emotional wounds so freshly inflicted, and so stayed quiet instead, letting a mournful silence descend that was only punctuated by the wracking whimpers of Leodred and the occasional sob that Elizabex let out as she efficiently dressed and healed Tristram's wound to the point where the pain was still there in a large amount but it was far more numbed than before and it was only that part of him hurting, the poison within him much less powerful with the cowardly departure of the Master of Gluttony reducing its effectiveness.

He knew full well that Elizabex was spending lots of time rejuvenating his wounds and ensuring that he was perfectly fine because that was something that she could deal with, something that would delay the coming swell of anguish within her and something that she had the power to change. She wouldn't know how to confront the sadness and loss that would be within her, and she didn't want to cry like Leodred or fall into the embrace of the despair like her twin brother because she wouldn't be sure if she could escape from it or not and she didn't know if there was anything she could do to handle it. Tristram knew this because he had seen it from other people, most notably an eight year old Alex who had thrust himself fully into caring for his baby brother so that he did not have to think about the loss of his mum and the fact that the perfect life he had known was now nothing more than memories and dreams of a new one.

The Guardian closed his eyes so that he could focus his sixth sense on the city now that the Tempest of Craving was gone and the Lord of Riots which had been slain was no longer distracting and obscuring it with its sheer power, the adrenaline draining out of him with his deep breaths as the girl sat next to him refused to give into her tears and kept at healing him. He could sense Alexander, that was one of the first things, though the boy's magical presence suddenly became massively diminished which meant that the Warleader must have returned to his Mind Realm. He could sense Hierarch Tybalt and Guardian Lelia finishing off their own foe who had been the Master of Wealth if their location and what he remembered from the fateful "negotiations" that had led to this war was anything to go by.

At the centre of the city he could also pick up on the quite faint presence of King Marik, but much more disturbingly was the utter absence of Caiellis – his mana presence wasn't even extremely weak, it was just not there at all and that scared Tristram, though such a thing was understandable with the amount of mana he had released killing the greatest demon in the City of Pleasure. What was equally as frightening was the amount of sheer despair and sorrow the man had detected in the mana discharge of White and Black magic coming from the thirteen year old which had slain the Lord of Riots as Athela had called it, the fact that Tristram had felt his youngest student's sheer pain and anguish from here and the truth that it had led to that much mana generation indicated something was very wrong.

"Don't push yourself too hard, Elizabex," he gently admonished the girl who was pouring her mana into him, and she shook her head, tears spilling out of her brown eyes and trickling down her bloodied cheeks as she did so. "I'm fine, Tristram."

The Guardian didn't comment further that she wasn't and was pleased when Elizabex heeded the fact that she didn't have much mana left and reduced the amount she was using to heal the thirty year old before she hurt herself. After another few seconds of mournful quiet, Elizabex's voice piped up, caught halfway into a sob that made it shaky, "W-was t-that … ?"

"Caiellis," Tristram replied gravely, knowing the question before she finished it, and Elizabex's eyes widened slightly in awe and more sadness as she nodded back at the Guardian. The light faded from her hands, and Tristram quietly thanked her for the healing, but she wasn't listening. Her eyes were fixed upon her twin brother, and the eldest living member of the group didn't impede the girl as she slowly trudged towards Leodred, staring down at her dead father with haunted eyes and kneeling beside him and her brother, her own hands reaching towards the clasped ones of the male members of her family.

There were no words that could be said that would do anything to help Leo, so Elizabex stayed silent at his side, crying as well but sharing the burden of the grief with him, making sure that he knew he wasn't alone in this. She would ensure her brother was aware that it wasn't his fault at all for their father's death, but saying it now would accomplish nothing and only make him hate himself further. She put an arm around his shoulders, wondering when the day would come when she wouldn't be able to do that any longer because he would broaden more than he had done already, and Leodred couldn't stop himself from burying his head in his sister's shoulder and crying his eyes out.

Eliza put her chin on her brother's short brown hair that was matted down with the blood from the sky as the heavens opened up for a second time, but instead of torrents of gore pouring out of the clouds it began to rain normally, clear liquid droplets raining down from the sky and washing away the blood that had drenched the City of Pleasure, though it would never wash away the horrible events that had occurred here.

Elizabex didn't bother saying anything to comfort her brother who was slightly taller than her now but still knelt on the ground like she was, because it wouldn't do anything and she couldn't get it out past the sobs she so desperately wanted to give into. Leodred pulled himself out of her shoulder, pushing her head back as he did so, and then wrapped his sister in a hug, both of them still crying at the fact that their beloved father was dead. Tristram left them to it, tenderly touching the fabric that was binding the stump of his right elbow and thanking the angels that he was left handed in anything but wielding his axe as the cool but not freezing and refreshing rain spattered onto him. He would stay here and protect these two from any other potential enemies, even though a very large part of him wanted to rush to the centre of the city as fast as possible to check on the condition of the two boys that were like children to him.

Tristram shook his head sadly as he watched the two twins in their sorrowful embrace, drawing comfort from one another and providing it freely to their counterpart to get through the initial onslaught of emotional pain, reminding the man heavily of another pair of siblings who meant a lot to him. He had to be sure that whatever had happened to Caiellis, his father and brother would be able to take care of him – Alexander would undoubtedly do everything in his power to do so, and he only hoped that Marik would look past his youngest son's disobedience and risky attack against the Master of Rapture to do the same and provide the comfort, the loving father, that the kiddo would need.

He idly fingered the stump of his arm, knowing that it would be a while before he got used to not having a right forearm but also aware that he had escaped massively lucky – far luckier than poor heroic Carlis had been. Elizabex had done an exemplary job of healing the Guardian.

It was just a shame that there were no spells that could repair a broken heart.

.*.*.*.

"Are you sure about this?" Meri's voice rang out within the empty corridor, loud at first before Annia clamped a slender hand around his mouth and made an exaggerated shushing motion with the other. There was no one else in sight, but that did not mean that caution wasn't paramount if they didn't want to get caught.

The sixteen year old's light red eyes flashed with annoyance and the girl glowered at him for a moment before releasing the older Yentarian, who took the hint and lowered his voice to a hushed whisper before continuing, "I mean, what if we get suspended doing this? This is way too risky. There is a reason it says not to enter down here."

"If you are just going to complain then you may as well not be here, Yentarian," Leleth Barkbite, a tall Erian student who was fifteen years old, hissed back caustically, taller and more muscular than the boy in between her and Annia as they held back in the shadows of one of the off limits corridors within the Scholaria Magnus academy. This was one of the few areas besides potentially dangerous training zones that were off limits to the students, as it was the place where the staff and teachers of the international school resided, though Sergeant Tarkos of Welkas and Miss Gloria of Lucael had departed at the same time as the students from the Kingdom of Light were pulled out as a safety precaution.

Annia found it interesting that while King Marik, her brief friend/acquaintance/classmate Caiellis's father, had taken out the students from his nation when his sons were abducted by the Welkalite delegation to ensure their safety, but the pupils sent from the New Empire of Passion had not been – apart from Kaled who had joined Sergeant Tarkos in his venture back to Welkas. It spoke a lot about the cultures of the two different nations, as from what she knew the Lucaelians would never think of targeting the Welkalite teenagers within what was supposed to be a project to maintain peace within the nations whilst obviously the New Empire wouldn't hesitate to do the same.

She turned back to the older Yentarian who was only slightly smaller than her, her hazel eyes glancing over him as he bristled at the Erian girl, wondering if it had been a mistake to bring him along. Annia and Meri had been friends when they were younger and their parents had collaborated on projects, but back then they had only been three years old and the friendship had not continued since then. The son of one of the most prominent chemisters from the explosive and experimental League of Xechun scowled, hissing back, "It wasn't as if I had much of a choice! I mean, you told me that you would "give me enough bruises to make a man eating troll look like a pampered princess in comparison"."

"That's still a choice," the tallest amongst them replied icily, seeming to Annia like she was enjoying taunting the smaller student despite the fact that what she had seen from Leleth, a shaman like Freya, so far had shown her to be relatively quiet and not one to antagonise others. "And that's what you deserve for listening in on a private conversation."

Leleth had confronted Annia and Freya (well, mostly the latter one of the two but the Yentarian had refused to leave and knew about to) about the growing darkness that the living creatures spoke of, as well as the fact that they could sense something strange in the heart of the Scholaria Magnus academy. The sensory powers of Green mages were certainly something to behold, and Freya had spoken to her room mate about her growing concerns about the power of death she had mentioned only two days ago.

Now that Leleth, who Annia had been defeated by in the team battles the day Caiellis and Alexander had been abducted and the war between Welkas and Lucael had begun, had shared her suspicions with her fellow shaman and the fact that one of the plants had told her of some strange activities and magical power within the private quarters of the academy, the Yentarian girl had decided that she was not content to simply sit here and wait for something bad to happen, not while other people were risking their lives to free the Welkalite people from the tyrannical dictators which had taken over their empire.

Jenna, while obviously not wanting to worry her younger sister, had informed Annia of how bad the situation was going, and the last time they had spoken the twenty year old had been making sure that everything was organised for Caiellis one last time before the siege of Usnaan began that Jenna would understandably not be participating in – though it did disturb the younger girl that a thirteen year old like Cai would be just because he was a prince and the son of the king and could wield great power. Jenna had also told her about how the small boy had lead his army to victory on two occasions, flawlessly in one battle seeing off ambushers from a faction which Jenna hadn't been able to tell Annia about as the information was heavily classified (meaning that the Republic knew a lot less about Lucael than it thought it did).

However, the leaders of the New Empire of Passion, the cunningly named Masters of Passion, were far worse than had originally been envisioned according to Jenna, as while the Yentarian Republic had very limited dealings with Sancturia demons the Lucaelians were quite familiar with them and apparently they were the most evil things in the two worlds – and the Masters of Passion had contacted them and traded their old Summonings in for them in something which Jenna had been told was called an Infernal Bargain. Annia wasn't sure what she thought of Black mana, as while it seemed evil she reasoned it was the mana type that those who were evil would gravitate towards so that they could achieve their goals, but these demons could have links to the darkness that Freya and Leleth had sensed.

The type of mana that Annia used was not at all opposed to Black whilst the Green mana of the girls was and detested the colour that was linked closest to death, but Jenna had told her that she had seen a demon that Caiellis had fought against and slew the Summoner of and that even though Black mana itself was not evil demons were the very definition of the word.

Annia was not content at all just to sit here whilst two people that she knew, two shamans from Eria who were connected strongly to the land itself, spoke of a darkness that was being aided by forces in the centre of the academy. And that was why they were sneaking around in an area off limits to students of the Scholaria Magnus in the evening of the ten days after they had arrived here when they should have either been finishing their meals in one of the many places to eat from within the dormitory halls or back in their rooms, completing work or generally relaxing if all the work was done

She peeked round the corridor, ignoring the two bickering students for a second and glad that they had heeded her warning and were being quiet as discovery, while at this stage wouldn't be punishable, would be suspicions and it would reduce the chances of their plan succeeding. The door at the opposite side of the courtyard was locked with a traditional Yentarian rune seal which would require decoding in a certain manner to allow them to enter, but also done in such a way that did not show their presence and did not indicate that the seal had been temporarily broken.

"Maybe I will leave then," Meri replied, defensively and sullenly, and Annia turned back around to him. So far they hadn't seen any form of security devices or observation networks within the areas they had traversed, though that didn't mean there weren't any and Annia was fully aware that while her detection powers of Blue mana were quite powerful that didn't mean that she would be able to reveal the concealment magic potentially used to hide any form of camera by mages more formidable than she was. But if Meri wandered back the way that they had come and was spotted by a teacher or a member of the support staff then they would be very suspicious and the girl didn't trust the other Yentarian to keep quiet about it. "I mean it's not like I care about the ramblings of two insane shamans and your stupid mission."

For some reason Meri had been eavesdropping on their conversation when they had been talking in hushed tones about it in one of their rooms – Annia's and Freya's next to the now empty room which had belonged to Caiellis and Kaled -, stood listening in through the doorway that had been accidentally left slightly open, but since both Leleth and Freya were Erians who had been trained to hunt and hear even the slightest movement and could employ their Green mana in sensing life the former had opened the door and yanked him inside when they detected him.

It had been agreed that he was going to have to come with them, because otherwise he might tell someone of their plans and get them into trouble which would prevent them from completing their strategy to just have a look inside of the private location of the academy. Now Meri was here, pouting like a three year old denied chocolate by a parent who refused to listen to their whining, and before Leleth could react to the thoughtless words the youngest Bylae cut in, looking into the boy's eyes.

"You can leave if you want, Meri, and we won't do anything to stop you," she began, ignoring Leleth's suppressed snort and the way that Freya was still stood silently with them, and making her voice slightly soothing towards the three month older boy. The other Yentarian looked back at her, stood awkwardly and nervously intimated by the tall Erian girl at the other side of him as she continued, "But the evil isn't just going to leave because you refuse to acknowledge that it exists. And I want you here because you are the only person in our year that is better than me at breaking runes and decoding magical ciphers."

Meri blushed at the compliment, rubbing the back of his sandy blonde hair sheepishly and suddenly avoiding Annia's gaze. The Yentarian girl knew full well that the somewhat shy sixteen year old in her year was attracted to her, though she wasn't trying to manipulate him into staying with them because of that as she had eyes for another, even though she wasn't sure about anything that she couldn't use logic and precise mathematics to solve and often ignored her emotions because she didn't like not to understand them and did not like most things that she could not quantify.

What she had said was true – Meri was the only person better than her at the tasks that she had outlined, and Annia would be very glad to have him helping her in breaking the runic seal on the door whilst ensuring that no one would be able to know of it. Annia felt sorry for the older Yentarian because it seemed that while he was very talented he had never had any acknowledgement of that until now when the teachers marvelled at his skill. He had obviously lived a very lonely life, because his mother had died in a laboratory accident before he knew who she was (he had been less than one year old at the time) and his father, a brilliant but obsessed scientist from the League of Xechun who was only interested in expanding his research and was probably unwilling to confront the grief created by having his wife die whilst carrying their second child, had no time for those who could not help him in his experiments.

Meri had little to no talent for explosions and mixing chemicals despite the fact he could wield both Blue and Red mana, and despite the fact that he had many skills in other areas such as this one that wouldn't be valued at all by his father and as such the boy barely valued them himself. It was clear to Annia that Meri just wished that his dad would see that he had other talents and was a unique person instead of only caring about a specific set of abilities which the boy did not possess. He evidently was not sure how to react to being complimented after only ever really being given disappointment from his father, especially by the girl that he was currently attracted to.

"I … I," he stammered blushing in embarrassment again, his relatively pale complexion caused by living in one of the more northern islands of the Yentarian Republic that stretched across large amounts of different climates lit up bright red in his nervous bashfulness, and Leleth sniggered and clapped him on the arm in a way that was normally only reserved for other Erians. She smirked, "I suppose that means you are staying with us then, right?"

Meri nodded, and Annia turned away from him and back to the one who had passed her in being the front of the group, the fifteen year old Yentarian having once again elected herself the impromptu leader because no one else wanted to take it up instead. Freya was stood silently and solemnly in front of her room mate, the smaller girl shutting her eyes and placing her palm to the wall, feeling the opposition of life that the plants had spoken of emanating from further within the off limits area. Annia asked her, "Can you still sense it, Freya? Are we going the right way?"

The mysterious and quiet Erian girl nodded sombrely, and Annia felt a little tingling of excitement and anticipation warring with anxiety and nervousness at the base of her spine. She did not even know what she intended for them to do once they got into the locked area of private rooms belonging to the teachers of the Scholaria Magnus, or what they would do if they found something like a monster in their, but she couldn't say that she wasn't enjoying this, enjoying feeling like she was doing something right, something to help the world. The Yentarian felt a bit giddy with the possibility of breaking the rules that she had almost always adhered to throughout her life, though she was still apprehensive of what would happen if they were found out and suspended from this opportunity or worse.

"Right then. Meri, I need you to help me with the door. Keep it quiet and keep down in case some one walks past. Freya and Leleth, you keep a look out and warn us if anyone is coming," Annia ordered, trying not to sound too forceful and the others nodded, the other member of the Republic having composed himself now as they quietly made their way to the other side of the courtyard. Before attempting to begin in decoding the runic locks on the door in front of them, Annia analysed the enchantments woven into the fabric of the wood, intuitively knowing that they would have to employ a multi stage unlocking process to open the door.

Meri looked over at her for guidance in whether or not to begin, his slender hand ready and waiting to begin channelling the mana that would be required to activate the opening mechanism built into the door so that they could see the puzzle that would be needed to be solved if they were to open it. Annia and Meri would have to work as a team to do it, and that would require them to actually verbally communicate with the other.

"We can start whenever you are ready," she told her fellow student, who nodded, his thin fingers becoming suffused with twinkling Blue mana that played along it as the door responded in kind, the auras enchanting it springing into the life with the mana infused onto it and instantly sending out a message to other security devices to tell them that someone was beginning to unlock it. Annia quickly intercepted the automatic mechanism before the mana pulse left the door, as while it would only inform any other enchantments that the door was being opened – a regular occurrence – if they didn't unlock it quickly with the pass code that would be known by anyone who should have been going here or if they failed then the teachers would know and she didn't know what would happen – though it was certain to be detrimental to their plan.

She efficiently cast a small counter spell to quell the mana message wriggling within her magical net, motioning to Meri to continue whilst she checked for any other potential security measures that would be deployed by the runes upon the door if it detected that the first one had been halted. A relatively large – for the unlocking mechanism as Yentarian runes did not require much mana at all, just the precise usage of it – surge of mana almost caught her off guard for a moment before both Annia and Meri stopped the hundreds of messages that would suddenly released, identical to the first one but in such a quantity that anyone who received them would know that someone who was opening the door had stopped the first message and probably did not want to be found out.

"It is a triple cipher. This could take a while," Meri admitted, his brow furrowed in consternation as Leleth turned around at the sound of the voice, took one look at the door, raised her eyebrows and turned back away – she had been taught a bit of the magic and the techniques of using it by Doctor Argyle, but only the very basics and this was very far from that. If she didn't already know that it would fail she would have used her Green magic to remove the enchantments and render the door back into a normal entrance once again.

"Perhaps," Annia replied, her hazel eyes narrowing in concentration as she solved one of the runic puzzles on the door that would be told to anyone who knew the pass code, glad that it flashed happily instead of failing and wondering if she should have asked Meri first before initiating it as any mistake would wipe out all of his effort as well as hers. She was about to use her mana to press down on another symbol before Meri's interrupted it, the boy quickly saying, "No, that's not the right one. See, the total amount of mana to unlock the one that you just solved was thirty percent of the one I did before that, which should mean that instead of the answer to this rune being fifty it should be seventy."

Annia nodded, impressed and wondering where the shy and nervous boy that they had brought with them who wouldn't stop complaining had gone. She had thought that the runes she wasn't quite familiar with had indicated that the correct result would be fifty due to the question that was asked, but Annia hadn't seen the link between this one and the other cryptograms written in magical letters onto the door whereas Meri had. To prove his point, the boy pressed on the symbol he had identified as being the correct one and grinned widely like a child in a sweet shop when it flashed as being the correct one.

Meri was quite clearly in his element with this, and Annia wondered whether his father knew how exceptionally his good his son was at Yentarian runes (as there were two types that the Republic knew of, the one that wizards and mages of the old kingdoms had invented that had evolved over the ages and based upon solely Blue mana which was the type they were currently decoding, and then Lucaelian runes as well of White mana that functioned in a very different way and only reacted to certain mana types instead of being decodable by anyone if they knew how) or if he would even care if he did because the man had a reputation for being extremely cold unless he was in the midst of one of his experiments, though eccentricity was almost an entry requirement for the highest ranks in the predominantly Blue and Red League of Xechun.

A few minutes later, the two finally cracked the last cipher and grinned widely when the door opened in front of them, revealing an almost identical corridor on the other side of it. The teachers at the Scholaria Magnus academy had taught their students very well, though the Yentarian was sure that they had never envisioned the students in question using their lessons to break the school's rules. Annia only hoped that no security measures managed to get past her to alert anyone inside this building to their intrusion as the two Erians followed the Yentarians inside the quiet area.

"The death is stronger here," Freya commented ominously, her soft voice breaking the silence that had descended and making Annia glance at her worriedly. Now that the elation of finally making their way in here had dissipated, Annia was just beginning to come to terms with the fact that if this evil was as dangerous as Freya and Leleth both thought it was then they could be putting themselves in immense danger. She wanted to send the others back, well, the more heroic part of her mind did, but at the same time she did not want to go alone and was more comfortable with the others around them.

But it was only now hitting her that if they did uncover the darkness, if they did find the evil festering in this private area of the academy that the plants and a few animals had told Freya of, then what would four teenagers do about it? None of them were ridiculously powerful even if they were strong mages and may become that in the future, and if this evil was as hazardous to the world's safety as Freya maintained that it was they could be walking into a death trap.

"Are you alright, Annia?" the Erian girl's voice broke her Yentarian room mate out of her reverie, Annia shaking her head imperceptibly and refusing to give into her inner demons and her sudden desire to turn around and leave while they still could. Jenna was out risking her life to try and bring peace to two warring nations, Kaled would be helping the Welkalites be free from the tyrannical Orders of Passion and Caiellis would be fighting against the ones who had abducted him and his brother with the Lucaelian army. She couldn't be cowardly now, not with other people's lives potentially at stake and with her friends and sister risking their safety to help the world as well. "Yeah, I'm fine. We need to keep moving. Lead the way."

Freya nodded in response and her and Leleth began to walk through the corridor, Annia trying to ignore the thumping of her heart because they hadn't even found anything out of the ordinary yet and pushing down the part of her mind that told her that this was the most stupid thing she had ever done and that even if it didn't get them killed it would get them suspended from the Scholaria Magnus. The corridors were made from the same pleasant materials on the other side, with no need to make this area any nicer than the student dormitories because the dormitories in question were almost luxurious they were that good.

She saw an empty room on the right of them with the door slightly ajar and assumed that it had belonged to either Sergeant Tarkos or Miss Gloria who had now left, but didn't have much time to check if anything was in there at all as Freya kept moving through this part of the academy none of them had ever been in before. Each of the rooms they passed was a bit bigger than one of the student ones, though that made sense because the teachers would have to plan their lessons within there, until the Erians walked up a small staircase at the end of the corridor that had a mahogany door at the end of it, a door that happened to be locked with a conventional key.

"That's the headmaster's room, isn't it?" Meri asked, his eyes lit up with equal amounts of trepidation and excitement at their antics of sneaking through a restricted area. Annia nodded her head, wondering how they were going to get in here without smashing the door open, and also surprised that the senses of the Erians had led them here considering. Annia had been in Headmaster Colae's office only once before when he had personally asked her how she was finding the school and that he hoped she wasn't disturbed by the fact that two students had been abducted whilst they were here, especially since she knew one of them.

The fifteen year old had been touched by the sentiment and thought that the headmaster was a kind, affable and understanding man who ran the school very efficiently considering what a logistical nightmare it would be to organise an academy full of students from four different nationalities, many if not all of whom would never have been outside of their respective nations before and would have never met a member of another in their lives. It had been customary of the man to ask to see a large number of the students individually to make sure that they were getting along fine and so that he could know all of the protégés in his academy, and was probably intending to do it for all of them, but still.

To say that she was slightly shocked that both Freya and Leleth had decided that the headmaster's room was the source of the evil which scared the plants that they had been able to speak to was an understatement, and raised her eyebrows as Leleth approached the door. Green mana pulsed out of her outstretched fingertip, a vine made from her magic reaching out and entering the lock. Annia's eyes narrowed in incredulity that the Erian was going to pick the lock with a vine of all things, but soon changed her opinion when the mundane defence clicked and the door to the headmaster's personal room swung open.

"I hope no one finds us while we are snooping around in Mr Colae's room," Meri muttered, and Annia agreed silently, though the boy seemed uncomfortable with the fact that no one else was talking. Annia was still thinking to herself, for once not feeling the need to speak because she would rather focus upon her own thoughts, and couldn't help but feel that they were being extremely disrespectful and intrusive to enter the private room of the man who had made this brilliant school (which hopefully the Lucaelians would return to once the war finished if King Marik deemed it safe otherwise they would be missing out on a massive opportunity to interact with the other nations).

This was not something that she would normally do, not even if her curiosity for knowledge had been motivating her in the past to want to do something like this, but the fate of other people could be at stake here and Annia refused to do nothing if she knew that the evil existed and that there was something she could do about it. Annia didn't particularly believe in there being a clear cut distinction between evil and good like many Yentarians, with many acts on the grey areas of the spectrum that was morality, but some things were definitely what she would consider evil and these were the things that she hoped to somehow stop by doing this.

They all lingered on the threshold of the unlocked door, knowing that even though they had broken into here they could leave and no one would know, that entering there was transgressing into someone's private space and that all of them had been taught better than that. Then suddenly, unexpectedly to Annia, Freya walked up to the door and pushed it open fully, slipping past Leleth confidently and entering the room, showing the most self-assurance that the Yentarian had seen from the nervous and quiet girl so far, and Annia nodded her head to no one. Was she really stood here, ruminating upon whether or not getting into trouble was worse potentially saving people's lives? That was quite petty even for some of her standards of superficiality, and knew that even if they were found and there was nothing there she could get Freya and Leleth to explain to the headmaster what they thought had been wrong. Hopefully he would understand and forgive them, even if Annia had to admit that she probably wouldn't in the same situation.

She entered the room after Leleth, shooting a quick glance over her shoulder to ensure that Meri was following, and heard a couple of muted gasps. Annia quickly spun around, her eyes alighting on a table with a map of the known world stretched out across it, locations that even the Republic didn't know of (such as some Lucaelian or Erian cities or tribal encampments respectively) marked clearly, such as some place known as the Sonelth Letharda which she had never even heard of stamped at a place within the Erian Conclave's deep forest. Another that she recognised was the Court of Oaks, said to be secret to all but the highest ranking shamans who chose initiates to be brought there.

That was obviously what had captured the attention of the two other girls, but what Annia thought was a bit strange was that what was known of Lucael was only slightly more advanced than what the Yentarian Republic itself had been told by cartographers from the Kingdom of Light whereas Eria was covered in markers.

"How has he got all this information?" Leleth asked in awe, and Annia noted the way that there was a line of white indicating Lucael surrounding the Welkalite capital city of Usnaan, suggesting that they knew of the siege of the capital.

Annia had to drag her eyes away from the wealth of information on the table, noting another couple of doors leading out from this room into different chambers, most probably a bedroom and a bathroom. There was a china saucer of half-drunk and aromatic tea on the side of the table, which was not yet completely cold and forgotten about, suggesting that the headmaster couldn't have left that long ago. There were pictures on the wall, pictures that she felt were private but pictures that she nevertheless looked at, such as a photograph of a relatively younger headmaster with a smiling young boy who couldn't have been more than four or five years old sat on his shoulders and one next to it of the boy again with a loving woman, presumably the child's mother.

"What is this thing?" Annia moved towards Meri at the question, the boy pointing towards some form of artifact device, and Annia glanced at it for a second, her mind beginning to work in overdrive at the amount of information that she was finding out by going in here. It was obviously of Uverian design, that much was for certain, but at the same time it had elements of what Annia would associate with belonging to what she had seen from brief mentions of the League of Thrazek. Well, there was only one way to find out. Annia pressed on a button at the top of the elegant metal contraption with her mana, and gasped in sudden surprise as it lit up with light, filling the whole room with a hologram conjured from mana.

Is this what I think-

The hologram abruptly shut off with a flash when Annia accidentally removed her hand her mind was that shocked with what it had shown as it overlayed the map and the walls became covered with pictures and images, all four of them stood with their mouths gaping open at what they had seen until they spun around when the door opened again.

"Excuse me, children, but what are you doing in my room?" the headmaster asked, stood in the doorway with the light of the corridor spilling into the dimly lit room that none of them had bothered to turn the light on for. He seemed more amused and perplexed than annoyed, but his face that was set in a half smile suddenly turned into a frown that showed some sadness within it as the man of medium height turned his wise eyes upon Annia with her hand still pointing towards the device she had activated and inadvertently allowed to close.

"Wh- what ..." Annia struggled to regain her composure as her eyes were wide open with what she had seen, stuttering the words as her shock overcame her, "What is this?"

"Oh. So you pressed it," Hadan Colae replied, his voice slightly sad and weary, and all four of the teenagers nodded nervously in reply, the other three too shocked to speak or answer their headmaster's questions. He stayed within the doorway, his medium frame wearing the grey robes of neutrality that he was habitually seen within, "And evidently you saw what was within the device. That is very regrettable. I apologise profusely for this."

The man's voice was grim and filled with a sorrow that did not show in his body posture but did in his grey blue eyes that were so old, older than Annia had ever seen before and older than the headmaster's middle aged body. Annia was about to ask him what it was again, her mind alight with what she had seen, before the man raised his thin hand and light spilled out of it, White mana that was very powerful wrapping around the students in chains of gold that held them down and ensured that they would not move anywhere, hieromancy in the form of enchantments that restricted the students and chained them to the floor.

Annia was about to shout at him to ask him what he was doing before a golden chain from the ground went around her mouth and muffled her cries. The spell was not in any way uncomfortable or painful, though it could have been if the headmaster had chosen it to be harmful to his student's, and Annia's eyes were wide as she tried to use mana in an attempt to escape and found that the numbing sensation of the restrictions were preventing her from calling upon her magic.

"I am truly sorry that I have to take this unfortunate action with you youngsters," the voice of Hadan really did sound genuinely apologetic and sad that he was doing this, and panic rushed through Annia as she tried to pull away from the suppression bonds that were holding her down, her breathing increasing in speed to the point where she was hyperventilating because she felt that, with the headmaster's grave tone and what they had seen, she was in great danger. "Do not try to struggle, Annia, Freya, Leleth and Meri. I am not going to hurt you, I promise."

Blue mana joined the White that was suppressing Annia and the others, and the girl felt a gentle but foreign presence in her mind that nevertheless calmed her down, even though she knew that the tranquillity it had created was utterly artificial. She felt a tender touch looking through her memories, what she remembered of her past, and tried to fight it off with all of her might, but her mind was utterly powerless against the headmaster's probing influence. The girl had never considered that the headmaster of the Scholaria Magnus was a telepath, though she had sensed that he could use White and Blue mana, and if she hadn't been in this situation her mind would have been alight with the implications of having the headmaster of this school able to delve into any of the student's minds.

"Do not worry, my students. I will only take what you have seen since your entrance to this room. And Annia, while my assurances may mean nothing to you, I do not employ my powers unless they are completely necessary. I do not look into your minds, nor do I use telepathy of any form in any but the direst situations," the headmaster told them, his words coming from both the man stood in the doorway with light wrapped around his outstretched hand and his eyes lit up with a dazzling sapphire luminescence and inside of their heads, speaking from within their minds in a way that was not as intrusively as Annia had experienced from a telepath once before who had forced her way inside her head with none of the precision and gentleness of the headmaster.

"I am sorry about this," the man said again as the adolescents from the Republic and the Conclave felt small pieces of their mind being taken away from them, more peaceful than Annia had expected as her eyes began to roll back in her head and slumber beckoned because of the memory erasure, "But it had to be done. The things that you have seen were not suitable for children at all, and you do not need to know of them. Rest assured that the darkness that you have sensed, Freya and Leleth, will be extinguished soon."

Even as Annia's vision faded to black and she fell to her knees, stopped from hitting her head on anything by the White magic suppressing her mana and her movement, the headmaster's kind but also mirthless and regretful voice spoke into her mind as she plunged into unconsciousness.

"Do not worry. You will not be harmed. Once the erasure has finished, you will return to your rooms and continue on with your school lives, with no memories of what you have seen here or even your venture into this private area."

Hadan watched silently as the students in front of him each fell into a peaceful slumber, wishing that he had not had to do this to them. He hated messing with other people's minds, especially destroying their memories, because even the most expert and the lightest touch could leave irrevocable and unforeseeable damage on a person's psyche, and it was particularly lamentable that he had been forced to do such a thing to bright young children with their entire lives ahead of them, but nothing unexpected had occurred in the removal of what they had seen here.

It was just another section of the long list of regrets that comprised the headmaster's life, though it was at least good to know that the results of doing what he had done over the course of his life would ensure that others had the chance to earn bright futures.

With a wave of his hand he undid the enchantments holding the teenagers after gently placing them on the ground as to avoid anybody being hurt, and the pure golden light surrounding his fingers became Blue on his command. An illusion that looked exactly like the headmaster rose up beside him, which would take the students to their rooms with the abilities of concealment magic that he gave it, and it would function perfectly well as him during his absence from the Scholaria Magnus. The illusion nodded to its creator, possessing the same memories of the man, who walked over to the other side of his room, pushing the door open to his bedroom and staring at the framed picture on his bedside cabinet for a long moment before turning to what was laid on his bed.

The mask was simple, an unadorned and white piece of fabric that was not infused with any mana or anything to make it other than a normal mask with eye and mouth holes, but it was what the mask represented that was important. Purity. Innocence, though Hadan did not feel at all innocent. Righteousness, and the willingness to do what was right for the benefit of the world, the willingness to do anything and everything in the name of the one thing that defined all that Hadan had done ever since he had been given the mask and the identity that it carried.

He hated removing the memories of his students that he genuinely cared about, but he hated almost everything that he had done in the past few years, even if all of the activities that would forever stain his mind had been towards one specific goal.

Everything that he had done, and everything that he would do in the coming days in the culmination of years of planning would be for one thing, the most important thing in the world: the greater good.

.*.*.*.

"It's going to be alright," Marik murmured, loud enough for both of his sons to hear the words but still quiet enough for them to be mournful and full of shock, though he did not know who he was directing the reassurance to.

Maybe it was towards the limp and bloody little boy in his arms whose breaths were short and painful.

Perhaps it was targeted at the older boy running behind him who was distraught at what had happened to his younger brother.

Or possibly Marik was saying for his own benefit, to assure himself that they were going to get help for his fragile and broken youngest son soon, before he was pulled into death once again, that he wouldn't have to watch another member of his family die in front of him without him being able to do anything, that Alexander wouldn't be deprived of the younger brother he loved so much and Marik wouldn't have his second son die before the boy knew how much he was loved by his father.

They ran through the dark abyss behind the Angel of the Black Sun, Orzhova still pulsing in and out of existence even with this greater connection to Sancturia and threatening to return to the Mind Realm inside of Caiellis at any moment, although none of them mentioned anything like that or complained about it as they were going as fast as they could possibly go within the murky nether and with the wounds that all of them apart from the First Sisterhood seraphim had sustained.

Occasionally as they passed some form of checkpoints that seemed utterly arbitrary to the king as all sense of distance had lost all meaning within this shifting world of shadows, a faint source of illumination could be seen in the distance, emanating from some form of crystalline lantern that dissolved into twinkling particles of light as they passed them. They had evidently been placed within the abyss by the Angel of the Black Sun so that they knew where they were going, and if Marik hadn't been so utterly focussed on his youngest son he would have thought that such a way of travelling by ignoring large distances in the formless nether realm that defied all quantification was extremely efficient for those who wielded the darkness and would be a massive asset for the armies of Black mana.

Even in the dim, almost non existent luminescence within the abyss that was only conjured by Orzhova and the markers she had placed that would lead them to Civitas Sol, the limp thirteen year old in the king's arms still looked dead. The blue hadn't faded by much at all, though at least the grey had given way slightly more, but not all the way and it was beginning to frighten Marik even more that they were taking too long and that the boy was going to give out before they got to the hospital within the City of the Sun. Because Caiellis should be looking better, at least, with access to oxygen now, he should be breathing more, becoming stronger, gaining colour.

It was a testament to how awful the teenager's horrific wounds were that he had not woken up yet, even if such a way of gaining consciousness would have its awareness blocked by the haze of pain and the fact that he had only just been pulled up from death. Marik was already pushing his limbs as far as they could go, with Alexander hot on his heels, though the pain in his stomach was becoming burning and if his son hadn't been in so much danger than he would have succumbed to it by now. Both Alexander and the king's breathing was ragged, though not as bad as the youngest member of their family, and their limbs were on fire with the exertion of trying to keep up with the increasingly ethereal angel, her solidity worsening in synchronisation with Caiellis's condition getting worse and worse.

Marik wanted to look round and make sure that his eldest son was alright, wanted the seventeen year old to be between him and Orzhova instead of behind the king and his younger brother's guardian angel, but with Caiellis dying in his arms he had to be ready to leave this place as fast as possible because even mere seconds could be the difference between life and death for his vulnerable baby boy who had an extremely tenuous hold upon the life that had only recently be given back to him by the dark angel who had pulled him back from the brink.

The king of Lucael had to trust that Alexander would be alright because he couldn't carry both of his sons with him, the first born amongst them was too big though Marik had proven that he could still carry him easily enough back only a single weak ago when he had been horribly wounded by Aksua as well.

He knew how determined the seventeen year old was in general, but when it was with his younger brother in any form of danger that determination became unstoppable. Alexander would give his life for Caiellis, and that was reciprocated by the younger boy as well, and even though he hated it Marik knew that even with his uselessness as a father and the fact that he had done absolutely nothing good for either of his precious children his sons would give their lives for him as well. It went without saying that he would do the same without hesitation for either of them.

Marik was a complete disaster as a father, and he wondered how bad one had to be to get to his levels of carrying his both of his extremely wounded and close to death sons to a hospital because of his negligence and failure to protect them within a week of one another. Being a Lucerna prince was very dangerous, and they were constantly the targets of the darkness who wanted to either end the royal line or attack the most vulnerable descendants of Matalis Ortus Lucerna at any given time, but that did not excuse anything and it meant even more that Marik should have been able to guard them.

The forty year old was immeasurably grateful to the Angel of the Black Sun which he did not distrust any longer, as she had gone to all lengths to save his son whilst Marik had been too weak to do the same, protected him from his father when the man had wrapped his large hands around his youngest child's throat, and brought him back from the precipice of death's door as the king had been crying over his corpse and unable to stop Alexander from following his lead. At first, thirteen years ago, he had been mistrustful of the dark angel, wary of her motives in choosing the youngest Lucerna to be her new Summoner even with what she had explained to the king and that the man hadn't quite thought she was evil when he had seen her – though he had never watched her in Xarius's reign and knew that his opinion would change if he had.

The crystalline spheres that Orzhova had placed upon the journey somehow must have been created when she had alerted the doctors within the Ordo Medella hospital of Civitas Sol that had also saved Alexander's life (meaning that they were extremely dependable and had already proven themselves in saving lives, not that they wouldn't have before that incident as only the best doctors would be allowed to operate on one of the exalted Lucerna line), and as the Angel of the Black Sun efficiently swept her glowing scythe into the fabric of the twisting warp Marik thought that they had arrived at Civitas Sol.

He was immediately disappointed and agitated further when, past the First Sisterhood seraphim, they were presented with the image of the Medella tent within the camp situated outside Usnaan that was already filled with orderlies packing up equipment and ready to be sent into the City of Pleasure to find the wounded, and some soldiers who had been taken back into the camp prior to this as the battle had obviously almost been won already. The king had forgotten that Orzhova had wanted to stop and get Choirmaster Esmelde first, even though the short journey to the outside of Usnaan through the abyss had seemed to take years with Caiellis worsening in his grip every single moment.

They didn't even step out of the nether realm, as Caiellis's guardian angel stood in front of the king and his eldest son who almost ran into the back of him and took that moment to stroke the pained and unconscious thirteen year old's brown hair that was sodden and sticky with blood and sweat, moving the strands that were plastered onto his forehead out of his eyes and whispering softly to the stricken youngster, more softly than Marik had ever heard from his often gruff eldest who had a soft spot for his younger brother.

"He's going to be ok, Alexander. We are going to get him the help that he needs," Marik told the seventeen year old as Orzhova quickly and efficiently spoke in front of them to a person they could see every time the angel's light faded for a short moment. He wished that he could have put more conviction into the words, that he actually believed the words himself instead of feeling like he was lying to his eldest son, but it seemed that the boy was hanging onto every single thing that his father said and nodded in agreement as he kissed Caiellis's forehead unashamedly.

The Choirmaster stepped inside of the shifting abyss without a second's hesitation or any trepidation whatsoever, moving through the angel in a slightly disconcerting way that only reminded them how weak Caiellis and therefore Orzhova was. Her eyes lit up with sympathy as soon as she regarded the youngest prince in the arms of his father and being comforted by his brother, though in her soft blue orbs Marik saw that there was hardness as well, that this would definitely not be the worst that she would have seen despite how bad it was and how close to death the youngest Lucerna was.

Even with all that however, there was determination and resolution to never fail the Lucerna family, the royal line that had led the people of Lucael for more than a thousand years, and Marik's distraught mind was reassured slightly by what he saw despite the fact that they still had to go to Civitas Sol through the abyss to get Caiellis proper medical aid and that he could easily die even with that.

No, don't think like that. Don't give up on your son now, not after all he has been through. I'm not going to let him die if it is the last thing that I do!

The expression of shock on the woman's face was quickly masked, though it was clear to all that she felt immensely sorry for the young prince who was probably the youngest person she had ever had to help in the condition that Caiellis was in now.

"We need to keep going," Orzhova told them, her voice impossibly distant for how close the Angel of the Black Sun was to them, and Marik nodded to the Choirmaster, reminding himself that this woman needed some form of reward for her bravery as she had stepped into the abyss that she would have been taught was the most dangerous place in the two worlds without a second thought if it would help the youngest Lucerna.

"I won't be able to help your son much whilst we are moving, my lord," Esmelde told the kingly solemnly as they began to run in pursuit of the Angel of the Black Sun once again so that she could lead them to the City of the Sun, the crystalline sphere held in the Choirmaster's hands that must have informed her of what was to happen dissolving into particles of twinkling light that were soon consumed by the vast and endless yet claustrophobic and clammy darkness around them that seemed larger than any mortal comprehension yet pressing down on them at all sides.

Marik would have replied, but he could barely force any words out himself as they started sprinting again, the wound in his stomach baying for the attention that he wasn't giving it with flares of pure agony that were nothing compared to the pain in his mind. He knew that he would have looked awful himself, nothing like what a powerful and strong Lucerna king was supposed to appear like to his subjects, but he couldn't bring himself to care even if he had wanted to. There were far more important things, and he was only managing to keep himself from breaking down in more tears as he ran for Alexander and Caiellis's sake. His eldest son was hooked onto his every word and action and if he started showing how hopeless and powerless he felt the seventeen year old would begin to worry even more.

As she ran alongside the tall king who dwarfed her in both height and bulk, covered in blood from multiple different sources and suffering from wounds that the man would kill her for if she tried to touch them before seeing to his sons, Esmelde held her hand next to Caiellis, a soothing orb of warm light pulsing forth from it and making a calming humming noise as it interacted with the prince. It wouldn't actually do anything pro active about the small boy's wounds because Esmelde wasn't able to examine them in more detail and they were moving far too fast to use any of the small scale medical equipment she had taken with her, but even if the only effect it had was to soothe the prince's pain it was something that she was going to put her all into.

"Check his breathing, my lord, and tell me what it is like" the Choirmaster quietly commanded the eldest Lucerna, her desire to save her patient and her medical training overriding any notion of etiquette and nervousness at ordering the king of the entirety of Lucael around. She would have rather held the boy herself so that she could check out his wounds more closely as they ran and assessed his condition better, but the king was holding onto the frail body of his youngest child with a grip that told her he would rather die than relinquish it until they got Caiellis to safety.

She wished that they could have stopped so that they could operate on Prince Caiellis properly, but that would probably end in the boy's death as they didn't have enough equipment or trained professionals here to save him and that was not a risk that any of them were willing to take within this surreal darkness around them that Esmelde paid no attention to, her mind fixed on her young patient that she had left the Ordo Medella presence in Usnaan for. She would also have liked them to slow down, unsure about whether or not Caiellis should be moved at all in his current condition that looked awful but would undoubtedly be worse when she was able to truly examine it, but Esmelde pushed aside these concerns because she knew that the only way the prince could be saved was if they got to Civitas Sol and a proper hospital and even then it would be a hard battle.

Marik listened to the words, half glad that someone else was taking control so that he could not spread any more failures to his youngest son, though that short relief didn't do anything to quench the agitated sadness that he felt. He held in his own breathing despite the fact that he was still running at full pelt after the dark seraphim who led the way through the infinite shadows, his lungs burning as he listened to the sound of his son's short and pained and weak breaths.

"He's barely breathing at all," the king reported with a long inhale of breath, and Esmelde nodded efficiently as she had expected that with the amount of wounds that the smallest prince had sustained. She could also tell that the king was trying to reign in his panic from the broken and desperate note to his normally strong and unstoppable voice, trying to keep his worry at bay so that the seventeen year old who ran behind them would not panic even more than he already was doing.

But Caiellis was breathing, and Marik figured that at this point it was all that counted. It was all that they had, Caiellis clinging to life with all of his slipping might, and it had to be enough because there was nothing else.

"Do you know how long he was unconscious for before this?" she asked in between breaths as they ran, not bothering to think about how dangerous the situation was for all of them. Despite knowing that the doctor needed to know about his brother's problems so that she could help fix them and inform the other Medella operatives when they arrived in the City of the Sun, Alex wished that she and dad would keep quiet even though their voices were barely above a whisper. He was afraid to even murmur comfortingly to his brother himself as he ran along the left side of the two other members of his family, Choirmaster Esmelde taking up the right of the monarch. Afraid that if he spoiled the silence, he would miss the unsteady intake of air that would signal his baby brother was in trouble again.

Well, more trouble than he was already in at any rate. Alexander hoped that Civitas Sol wasn't too far away, because even though this journey was only taking minutes when days would normally be required to get from Usnaan to the City of the Sun without any form of transport it still felt like it was too long, that they were taking too much time to get his little brother to safety.

"I don't … I'm not sure," the king replied, more uncertain than Esmelde had ever seen from him before, and she nodded again, keeping up the front that there was still something she and her fellow operatives could do even though deep down she was beginning to doubt that herself with the state of the boy. They would never give up, however, because even though he was only thirteen years of age and in spite of the fact that he was still a small and thin boy Prince Caiellis had risked his life multiple times for the kingdom that partly distrusted him for his Summoning, and abandoning the Lucerna family after all it had done for her and the nation she lived in would be akin to leaving her own relatives in peril. "And has he woken up yet at all ever since he … was made like this?"
"No, he hasn't. It has only been a few minutes since he came back to life," Marik answered, glad that there was a question that he could reply to properly even though the answer to it was another simple reminder to the direness of their situation, as if he needed any more.

He stroked his son's clammy, cold and sweaty forehead again that was still covered in blood, and as he held the back of Caiellis's head his hand stilled as it made contact with something warm and wet that hadn't been there before. He yanked his fingers, bare instead of covered in metal after he had dumped his artificer gauntlets back on the plaza that Caiellis had died upon, back, and stared at the crimson dripping down his fingers again.

Caiellis's head was bleeding once more from the wound that had been inflicted after Marik threw him against one of the last remaining walls of the ruins on the courtyard they had been fighting within when he had been under the malicious influence of Aksua's horror. It had stopped, but obviously with all of the movement and the thrashing the wound had re-opened, and Marik carefully put pressure on it as he held his youngest boy tight in his arms, never wanting to let go of him again. This just kept getting better and better.

Esmelde nodded for the umpteenth time, knowing that when she was dealing with patients who were in shock it was good to appear certain, calm and collected so that they could draw upon her resolve, and even though technically King Marik and Prince Alexander were not her current patients they were also quite significantly wounded themselves and were the only ones who could actually hear what she was saying to them. Despite the reality that she would never be very close to the Lucernas because of their station compared with hers, the Choirmaster considered herself relatively familiar with the Lucerna family as people instead of just royal icons and inspiring figureheads.

Ever since Prince Alexander had been brought into her care and the care of the other doctors that she worked with in the City of the Sun, Esmelde had seen a different side to the rulers of her nation, a side that showed them much more like actual humans rather than aloof and almost infallible demigods with the blessing of the highest ranking angels and the divine right to rule. Instead of disappointing her and making her feel that perhaps the Lucerna family wasn't anything special, it had simply made the woman love them even more because they were still human, still almost normal people that needed the same things as their subjects – love, acceptance, kindness and friendship.

Her belief in the line of queens and kings that could be traced directly back to Matalis Ortus had been solidified by seeing the side to them that was not shown to the public often if at all, that in essence they were just a normal family with their own problems and arguments but still dependant on one another for love even after all of that. She had seen Caiellis talking to his stricken brother, calming down the thrashing and terrified teenager who had been releasing mana all around him in an attempt to make the doctors get away from him by reminding them of their past, watched the younger boy sleep in the same bed as his older sibling so that the two could draw comfort from one another and so he could make Alexander seem safe.

She had observed Marik and his youngest son shouting at one another like a normal parent and their teenage child, but adversely healed the thirteen year old Lucerna in the fit of a pained nightmare (though at that time his medium burn wounds which had soon healed because he was a Lucerna were nothing in comparison to the damage he had sustained wiping out the greatest foe the Welkalites and their demonic masters – or demonic master, as that was who the prince had killed – could muster up in defiance of Lucael) as his father held his hand in a way that the woman had never seen him do when his son was awake.

Esmelde was aware that there was a lot to this small family that she did not know and had not seen, but she felt like she had witnessed something amazing these moments of solidarity and family, felt like she had somehow seen and even stronger side to the Lucerna royalty in spite of the fact that other people would see it as being much weaker.

It was good to be reminded that Marik was not just a king, but a father of two teenage sons who probably struggled to connect with his youngest after the horrible civil war that had ripped them away from each other for nine years when Caiellis had only been four, that Alexander and Caiellis were not just princes who had an equal chance of one day becoming the king of the nation but brothers who had been through pain and happiness together.

With every family that she had seen in her career of helping and saving people's lives, Esmelde felt like she was able to see another side to people, to have a brief glimpse into the many stories of those who were within the Kingdom of Light and help to make sure that as many of those stories that were in peril could continue on until their natural end. It was only ever a few pages that she got to read into the many families and friendships within Lucael, but Esmelde wouldn't have it any other way.

It was the same here. Marik wasn't a king right now, he was a stricken and distressed dad holding on to his youngest son who was dying in his arms. Alexander wasn't a prince, a scion of the Lucerna family who could inherit the throne when his father passed away, but a panicked and shocked big brother with his little brother slipping further away from him every second as he did everything that he could do to comfort him whilst he was in his father's arms.

And that was why Esmelde was going to make sure that Caiellis would survive this, not because he was a prince and it was her duty to do everything that she could do to save one of her rulers, but because Caiellis was a (young) person who had a family that needed him so that they could keep going and still had a life to live through.

Alexander gripped onto his brother's small and cut hand tightly, though careful not to cause even more pain to the younger boy by hurting the torn flesh. He wished that his brother would have squeezed back when he gave it a reassuring squeeze himself for a moment, though he still kept held onto it. Caiellis's squeezes had never been strong, even when he had tried to make it like that to reassure his big brother, but it was the thought that had always counted, the notion that Cai would always have his back just like Alexander had his and was safe and sound.

The boy's limp hand that would have been hanging listlessly by his side if Alex hadn't been holding onto it even while he ran (though he made sure that it was not awkward nor impeding their movements in any way as they sprinted through the dangerous nether realm) was too small, too thin, too young for anything bad to happen to him.

The fingers, while still small in comparison to other, larger thirteen year olds and tiny next to Alexander's bigger digits, were long relative to the size of the hand, which made them seem even thinner. They would have been perfect for playing a piano, and were great for wielding a pen and writing. They shouldn't have had to grip a sword handle so tightly that the skin almost chafed off of them, or to wield said sword in the defence of people exclusively older than him.

Just hold on, baby brother. I'm going to make sure that everything will be alright for you. I'm never going to let you go alone in the middle of a battle ever again, so expect to see a lot of me soon. You're going to be alright, Caiellis, you have to be alright. I'm not going to let you die, you hear me, runt?

Alexander belatedly realised that he was speaking the words out loud to his unconscious little brother who was making more pained noises, but no one was paying attention to him or cared about his distressed rambling to his younger brother. All of them were focussed on getting Cai to safety, and that was their main priority right now. Their own pain could be ignored when faced with what had happened to the youngest and most innocent member of their family, and Alex wished that he could do something more constructive for his little brother instead of just talking to the unconscious boy.

It was killing the seventeen year old that he could do nothing for Cai in this situation that they were in. His little brother always (well, not always – he was cutting himself and felt awful about the Summoning trial and didn't tell me about that at all, and sometimes in the past he has tried to hide things because either we argued and I said something that I shouldn't have or he didn't want to bother me) came to him with his worries and his questions and when he was hurt either physically or emotionally, and in the past almost every single time Alexander had known what words to say and the right things to do to make the younger boy feel better.

Now he could only watch as his brother stayed still within their father's embrace, his young and bruised and bloodied face which had very clear tear tracks smudged into it that were stark despite the blood screwed up in pain, worse pain than the seventeen year old had ever seen his baby brother in before. Now he could only watch as Caiellis struggled to breathe.

Alexander longed to pull the kid into his own arms, clutch his little brother to his chest like he should as an older brother, but he didn't dare even asking the question to his father. It would be a waste of time transferring them anyway, but he wanted Caiellis next to him where the younger boy would know that he was protecting him and making sure he was safe, and even though he disliked to think it he knew that his sibling would rather have him holding him instead of their father.

He wanted to feel the puffs of his brother's pained breaths for himself, to feel the thudding of the weak heartbeat that Alex could barely sense even when clutching onto his brother's too thin wrist. He wanted to know for himself that Caiellis was alive, because in his father's arms it was hard to tell whether the boy was still living or not even though Alex knew that he definitely was – he could still feel the immensely weak and paradoxically simultaneously sluggish yet racing pulse that signalled his brother's gentle heart was still pumping blood around his body and out of his wounds.

The middle Lucerna only hoped that his little bud somehow knew that he was here, that through his unconscious he would feel the presence of big brother and know that he was there to guard him as they got him to safety.

"How much further is there to go?!" Marik gasped out, his voice a mixture of the pain that he refused to acknowledge that was rippling up and down him from his internally bleeding stomach and concern combined with desperation for his youngest child whose pained breaths were becoming even more agonised. He was making more noise, and the breaths were getting louder, but that wasn't a good thing at all as the way he was breathing told everyone around that Caiellis was barely getting any air at all. Orzhova didn't reply, didn't want to waste her energy that was being drained every second answering a question that she truly didn't know the exact answer to, and Marik exhaled loudly in anger and annoyance that was heavily exacerbated by his son's pain that he could do nothing for.

Caiellis choked out a small, gasping whimper, and the forty year old feared that he was going to go into another seizure once again which would be extremely bad – as the best thing for the boy if that happened would be to be placed flat on the ground but that was not feasible at all. However, trapped in his father's arms, the seizure could be worse because the worst possible thing to do to someone convulsing like Caiellis had been was to restrain them too much apart from ensuring that they wouldn't damage their head.

Marik didn't say anything more, though he was tempted to scream at the Angel of the Black Sun who had not replied to his question, wondering if the healing that Choirmaster Esmelde was in the process of completing was actually doing anything to help Caiellis or if it was only there to look pretty.

Any other time he would have admonished himself for the brash thoughts, knowing that the younger Lucaelian was doing all that she could to help the prince without access to the equipment or stability that would be given to them by the Ordo Medella hospital in Civitas Sol and that Esmelde was risking her life coming through the abyss (that luckily enough hadn't been as dangerous as he had anticipated, though he attributed that to Orzhova's guidance throughout the nether realm rather than it being less deadly than it was supposed to be), but right now he didn't care. All he did care about were his sons, and the one in his arms more at the moment.

After what seemed like days, Caiellis worsening every second but fortunately not devolving into a seizure once again, Orzhova suddenly stopped, Marik wondering why the angel couldn't have given them any form of warning before abruptly halting in her path. Another one of the crystalline glass spheres that were actually quite beautiful if the king had been able to pay heed to meaningless things like aesthetics in this time of great need flashed and pulsed in front of the seraphim, who reached out her free hand and touched it with her slender fingers that were also suffused in light, though this luminescence was the haunting purple of Caiellis's sadness that the Lucerna patriarch had seen before, before pulling back and hacking her scythe vertically down into it.

"We're here. Get Caiellis in. Now!" Orzhova practically shouted at the king after her belated statement, and even though Marik heard the barely repressed fury in the angel's divine yet distant voice he was nothing but grateful towards his son's Summoning. The king did not need telling twice, and he ran past the angel and into the light of the world that rose up around him and consumed him in its glow.

Or in this case it was the oppressively bright surgery that had been the site of Alexander's life being saved and the vampiric corruption of Aksua being purged from his veins. Marik stood, dazed for a second by the brightness after his eyes had adjusted to the unnatural shadow of the abyss all around them, before a voice broke him from his stupefaction.

"We need to get your son on the operating table now!" shouted the familiar harsh and gruff tones of Surgeon-General Mortan, pushing Marik back into action. He was glad that once again the grizzled doctor had dispensed with pointless pleasantries when someone's life was on the line, and meekly held out his youngest son.

He almost didn't want to let go of the boy – no, that was wrong. He didn't want to let go of the boy at all, but he had to if Caiellis was going to live through this. He was being pathetic thinking that he was making sure that Caiellis was safe by holding him tight to his chest, and the second he held out his son, relaxing his grip on him enough so that the boy could be taken off of him but not enough so that Caiellis would fall, his vision still blurry as his pupils contracted inwards from their heavily dilated state in the face of this bright light, the thirteen year old was plucked – near yanked – from his father's arms.

Marik blinked, moving further into the operating theatre that was very large as a burly orderly who he remembered was a doctor who had helped Alexander (although most of the faces were fresh and new, the vast majority of older doctors having gone to help the war effort back in Usnaan that Marik had just abandoned) quickly transferred Caiellis to the clean bed in front of them that was surrounded by all sorts of equipment and doctors who had prepared them, a seemingly ubiquitous crystal orb floating around them and making sure that it wasn't distracting them before Orzhova recalled it to her quickly.

Alexander panted in a breath as his body burned from the almost constant running, as he had sprinted from the Champion's Quarter to the centre of Usnaan after fighting for his life against that bastard brute Arendus Draal, not had time to regain his breath crying over his brother and being shocked when he revived and had to breathe for the kid, and then ran through the abyss alongside his father and behind the Angel of the Black Sun. Alexander knew that he was a fit teenager, but that would have been pushing it even without the wounds he had sustained and the fact that his ribs had been broken once again in the violence.

He watched as his brother was gently but still unceremoniously shoved onto the bed that seemed way too large for little Caiellis, a sense of vertigo almost overcoming Alex as the doctors and assistant operatives swarmed around the youngest Lucerna. One of them pulled out a pair of clean scissors and began to cut open Cai's shredded vestiges of clothing, and Alexander had to physically stop himself from pushing through them and stopping the woman, wanting to preserve the last remnants of dignity that his little brother had left.

Caiellis's mouth fell open, even though he was still unconscious and his eyes weren't open, just moving beneath eyelids that were clamped resolutely shut, and a strangled noise made its way up from the back of his throat. Alex wasn't sure if his brother was trying to speak or scream, but one thing he was sure about was that the thirteen year old couldn't breathe at all as red bubbles overflowed past his blue lips and spilled down his chin.

The Ordo Medella operatives were a hive of buzzing activity, medical jargon and terminology, some of which Alexander recognised but most which he didn't, spilling from them as they worked quickly and efficiently around the youngest prince. Although they seemed calm and collected enough, despite being terse and brusque with one another as they set about saving Caiellis's life, it didn't take an expert to see that this was the closest the professionals could get to panicking over their patient.

Esmelde blended seamlessly within them, rattling off what she knew about the boy's condition and the little information Marik had been able to tell them to the others as they started working, looking to Alex like each of them had different ideas about how to go about saving Cai even though he knew that they were merely approaching the many aspects of the problem from multiple different angles all at once.

Alex did not miss his brother's thin fingers begin to curl into a death grip upon the sterilised white sheets of his bed as an intravenous therapy pole was attached to his arm through the veins in his left arm, though it seemed unnecessary to make another puncture hole with the needle when there were already numerous wounds scattered across the boy's left forearm alone. The seventeen year old stayed close to his brother's bed, feeling his father at his side as the doctors worked around them for the moment, the thought that they might be in the way occurring to neither as Alexander gripped his brother's small hand reassuringly again, feeling the pain that Caiellis was in from the force of his grip that latched onto Alex's hand.

"You're going to be fine, baby brother. You're going to be fine. I know you're in pain, but you've just got to get through it," the boy murmured, though his words were lost within the hubbub of medical activity all around them. More needles attached to different machines were being hooked and inserted into his little brother, and Alexander could have smiled sadly as he remembered Cai's fear of needles that he was sure was probably down to his older brother being scared of them as well, though both of them had sucked it up when it mattered and he was sure that Caiellis would do this time as well.

More waves of guilt were assailing the middle Lucerna as the surgeons strapped an oxygen mask to Cai's young and innocent but bruised and bloody face that instantly began to be stained with flecks of crimson from his breathing of blood, the makeshift bandage that Marik had put around the wound on his neck that had killed him quickly replaced with a clean one that was already starting to turn bright red from the crimson vitae bled out of it, but not as severely as the tsunami of regret and accusation that was assailing Marik.

Oh angels … Caiellis … I'm so sorry son … all this is because of me … all these wounds …

"Oxygen levels are perilously low," a voice rang out, and the king winced painfully, grasping onto the same hand as the one that Alexander was holding onto as the boy's right arm wasn't being inserted by needles, touching the two hands with his larger one that was still bigger than Alexander's even though the boy's was racing after him in size. He made sure to hold both of his son's hands in his, not pushing Alexander's out of the way nor being too distant for Caiellis to know that he was here even as he repeated a frantic prayer for his baby boy's safety over and over again in his head.
"Heart rate is too fast and too weak," another answered, clipped and clinical, confirmed by the dangerously fast pinging of the monitor, though there was an underlying note of something close to fear that Marik picked up on within his tone. The king swallowed a sob, knowing that he had to be strong for both his family members, and hated how pale his youngest son was even under all of the blue purple bruising and crimson and bloody wounds. He placed his other hand on Alexander's shoulder after a thought, clenching it firmly in a way that he hoped felt reassuring to his eldest son.

"Mana is virtually non-existent and being drained every second," the hard voice of the surgeon-general made itself known to the occupants of the room, and all of those who were not occupied turned towards the Angel of the Black Sun still stood in their midst, watching over Caiellis from a more clear area so that she wasn't in the way.

Orzhova returned Marik's brief look icily, and if the king hadn't already been frozen and cold, only ready to be thawed when Caiellis was saved and pulled back into the life that was begging for him to live it, he would have felt shivers of the winter outside up and down his spine. The gaze of those onyx eyes, their terrifying nature only mildly reduced by the angel's current weakness, told Marik that she would not hesitate to rip him apart and destroy his soul if he laid a finger on his youngest son with the intention to do harm once again, and the king knew that he deserved her anger for what he had done to Caiellis. It was a testament to how insidious and vile the horror was that a First Sisterhood angel hadn't been able to see its malevolence seeping through Marik's Mind Realm, and though he longed to explain himself to the angel it wasn't the time and the possession wasn't an excuse at all for his actions.

He only wanted Caiellis to know that it wasn't him, didn't want his son to die thinking that his father hated him, and everyone else apart from Alexander was secondary – including the boy's guardian angel. He gulped inadvertently as he stared back at the Angel of the Black Sun, who ripped her gaze away from the king when Surgeon-General Mortan asked her, forgoing any form of pleasantry for a being that he would probably have worshipped had it been any of her sisters though the king didn't know about the cynical man's religious identification, "What are you still doing here?"
Orzhova glared down at the man, her physical form fading in and out of the world like she was a mere illusion, though her black eyes still conveyed the intensity of her gaze that the man held without even being a Lucerna or having an angel of his own. She snarled back "I am staying to look after my Summoner."

"No you are not. Caiellis needs you to leave now. You are draining his mana every second, which is killing him before we can save his life," the man replied, evenly and clinically, only thinking about his patient and not caring if he offended a functionally immortal angel from the heavens above, and the Angel of the Black Sun, whose mouth twisted into a growl of rage. The seraph responded, her voice rising to a furious and desperate shriek, "I need to stay! I need to make sure that you humans do your FUCKING JOBS!"

Her voice pierced across the room even in its weakened state, causing all of those who were within it to want to run as far away from her as they possibly could. It was the first time that Alex had ever heard an angel swear or profane, even with how angry Aurelia got when they were battling against the corrupt forces of the darkness, though for some reason it did not come as a surprise that Orzhova would break that unspoken rule. Marik felt another spike of guilt welling up within him, knowing that that scream of fury was almost entirely directed towards him and his failure to protect his youngest son from the danger of the world, putting Orzhova's Summoner in more danger instead of that.

The room was almost silent for a moment, though many of the doctors still commendably carried on with their work as if nothing had happened, the loudest noise the high pitched whine of the machine monitoring Cai's heartbeat. None of them missed the choked whimper that Caiellis let out seemingly in tandem with his angel's words, nor did Alex fail to notice the way that the boy's small fingers moved and stretched out before resuming their grip in time with the pained noise. The young adolescent was already making a supreme effort to breathe with the oxygen mask around his face, though his breaths were still strangled and wheezed out through broken ribs and an abused throat that was being healed the most as it was the worst wound on the plethora covering the poor kid.

Alexander hated to leave the contact with his little brother, but for his safety he would do it easily as his chest cramped up tight with anxiousness for his best friend and younger brother. He slipped out of the grip of his sibling easily, turning towards Orzhova as he gulped nervously in the face of the angel's wrath as he walked towards her.

"Orzhova," he started, hating how weak and shaky and young his voice sounded, knowing instinctively that Caiellis thought the same in the past about his even more than Alexander did now. He cleared his throat quickly, wasting no time for his little brother's sake as the whining of the heart rate monitor suddenly changed to an unsteady beeping and Alex could swear he felt his own heart arresting in tandem with his brother's, and wiped away the tears that were blurring his eyes. "I'm not going to let him get any more hurt. I'm going to make sure that he is alright. Please, Orzhova, if you are draining his mana then you need to go so that he starts regenerating it and can being to heal. You know that I will protect him as much as I can, because I am his big brother. Please, you know you can trust me."
The angel's black eyes became inscrutable as she stared down the bloody seventeen year old who was pleading with her, and then turned back to the unconscious Caiellis who was writing in his almost silent pain and whimpering as his father held his hand. The anger dissolved from her eyes, and even though she was not corporeal enough to touch him she placed her hand on Alexander's shoulder – the gesture was all that mattered, not the contact itself.

She looked deep into his imploring and expressive blue eyes that were filled with guilt for allowing Caiellis to get like this even though it was nowhere near Alexander's fault at all, sadness that Cai would be as hurt as much as he had and shock because of the same that had his pupils dilated heavily and his breathing almost as erratic as his brother's, the desire to protect his younger brother that was evident within them, and a spark of hope, a faint glimmer of belief that his sibling would get through this without any lasting harm and that his brother would stay alive.

She remembered looking through the fractured lens of her Summoner's mind into the world around the youngest Lucerna, able to stare into the world around the boy before he had unlocked her as his Summoning, though the images were often unclear and fragmented, exactly like the boy's thoughts that she was able to detect across the barrier of the lonely Mind Realm. She remembered watching Alexander, the person that little Cai spent the most amount of time with after their young mother had been killed, watching him cheer up her young Summoner as well as fight with him, though they always made reparations afterwards and never stayed mad at each other for more than a few days at most.

She remembered Alexander saving her Summoner's life on multiple occasions, she remembered being forced to watch horrific nightmares that her Summoner was suffering through, then being able to see the broken reality again as Caiellis snuggled up to his older brother and Alexander would always be able to comfort him and assure Orzhova's host that everything was alright.

She remembered watching Alexander protect Caiellis from monsters that were hunting them, watching him protect Caiellis from the guilt of killing another human being (even though the human being in question was a vile, corrupt one who was a servant of Johnias), watching him guard his brother from children that wanted to bully him despite the fact he was a Lucerna because of the Black Sun on his cheek that made him an outcast and naturally evoked distrust from others. She remembered the events of only a few days ago when her Summoner's self harming had been discovered, when Alexander had fought against their uncaring parent for her Summoner's sake and had even hurt and scared the youngest Lucerna to make sure that he would keep himself safe (the fact that tactic didn't work and Cai had killed his mental form to pass the Summoning trial) did not matter now.

She had watched him give Caiellis a place in his heart where almost everyone else had pushed him away, watched him make sure that his little brother always felt welcome with him and always came to him with his problems and troubles, watched him freely give his sibling a best friend, a mentor, an obstacle to overcome, a rival. A big brother who would love, protect, teach and accept him.

And then there was everything that she had seen clearly in the time after Caiellis had passed her purposefully extremely difficult and emotionally agonising trial.

Finally, she remembered that time thirteen years ago when she wasn't Caiellis's Summoning yet, when her Angelic Descent had only just begun and the four year old Alexander had even then placed himself in front of his fragile baby brother who he hadn't known for more than twelve hours yet. Alexander's eyes, even though they had changed so much in the thirteen years that passed, moulded by loss, sadness, war and maturity, were the same as they had been then, filled with the need to let nothing hurt his younger brother.

Orzhova would be perfectly fine leaving Caiellis here in the protection of his older brother who had done so much for him in his entire life, the older brother who was pleading with her to leave so that Cai could start to use his mana to attempt to heal himself instead of having it forcefully taken away so that he could sustain her. Her eyes were filled with gratitude for Alexander who had loved her Summoner ever since the moment they first met eyes, and the boy's blue irises reciprocated that as he knew that Orzhova was responsible for giving Caiellis this second chance at life that Alex was going to make sure lasted as long as it was supposed to instead of being cut short artificially.

She shifted her gaze to Marik, who looked up from his youngest son into the angel's onyx orbs, and glared at the man. She had definitely been wrong about the king hating his youngest son, that was for certain, unless he had undergone a sudden change of heart and hadn't actually wanted Cai to die after all that he had done to the boy but still detested every fibre of his being. However, these actions were not of a father who resented the mere existence of their second son, and even though Orzhova still mistrusted him heavily she was willing to admit that dark forces had probably been at work in the manipulation of the king and that she should have been able to expunge them from him.

Nonetheless, she persisted in glaring at the king for a moment longer, hardening her gaze and subjecting the man to the most terrifying glare she could muster up in this fleeting state. The Angel of the Black Sun still felt hatred for him, it just was not as strong as it had been when she had been forced to observe Marik choking the life from her fragile Summoner, and she was perfectly ready to change her opinion of him if he could prove that he did love his son whilst the boy was awake and able to speak his mind to his father.

"I shall take my leave then. But I expect you all to do the best for my Summoner," Orzhova told them, tempted to make some sort of threat but knowing it would accomplish nothing apart from make her – and by extension Caiellis – the subject of more animosity and mistrust. The Angel of the Black Sun closed her eyes and disappeared in a flash of melancholy purple that was in the vague resemblance of the birthmark imprinted upon the current occupant of the medical bed's cheek, but instead of becoming more peaceful Caiellis's raised heart rate became even faster and more desperate.

"What's happening?" Alexander asked, though his words were either lost within the noise and unheard by the healing professionals as the fought to save the youngest Lucerna or ignored by those who had better things to do than answer his question or more likely both. The movement of the surgeons somehow became even faster as the boy in the bed began to thrash, his heartbeat a rolling tremble of insane drums as the eldest prince quickly returned to his little brother's side. Marik replied for him, guessing at what was going on, "I assume that with Orzhova gone, before Caiellis's mana begins to regenerate he will be suffering from the sudden disappearance of his Summoning – like when you Unsummon Aurelia and feel weaker after it."
Marik wished he felt as assured of that as his words suggested, though even then they were still panicked and broken and he was unsure as to how Alexander could take them and be as satisfied with them as he was. Caiellis dug his nails into his father's hand, not drawing blood from the calloused skin because the fingernails were not sharp, though occasionally he stretched out his fingers out like he was trying to reach for something that would help end the pain he was in. He wished that he could do something more tha just stand here and hope that the agony his baby boy was enduring through would fade away before it consumed him.

Another alarm, one which must have recently been attached to surveil the youngest's vitality, began screaming loudly, echoing what Marik would have done in the situation if it would have achieved anything and he didn't have another son that he needed to look after, joining the loud beeping of the cardiac scanning system in a chorus of desperation and danger that howled around the room. The boy's entire body starting flailing again, telling them all that he was in a seizure once more, and the burly orderly from earlier rolled the potential heir to the Lucerna throne onto his side in an attempt to alleviate some of the pain he was in, making it so that he was facing Marik and Alexander even more.

The supreme human authority within the Kingdom of Light could see the increase of blue in Caiellis's face as the blood spilled over his barely breathing lips as he was turned towards his father and brother. He felt himself wanting to give in once and for all to the rampant panic that he had barely held at bay ever since Alexander had arrived to see his dead brother and had managed to push away when Orzhova gave him the gift of his son's life. Marik and Alexander were shoved back without ceremony, the king placing a simultaneously comforting and restraining arm around his eldest son's shoulders to make sure that he wouldn't get in the way further as he stared forlornly at his baby boy who was too small with all of the adults running around him, swamped in the bed that had been big for Alexander when he had been in it.

The Ordo Medella healers used words that neither one of the conscious Lucernas understood or remembered, although Marik couldn't help but think he was sure that had his youngest son been awake he would have been able to rattle off the definitions for all of the complex terminology without even batting an eyelid.

He had barely been able to see much of his apparently geeky second son (according to Alexander at any rate, though judging by the quality of Caiellis's written work and how intelligent he was for his age of just thirteen Marik might have been inclined to agree) apart from when he had told the king a comprehensive definition of the Sword of Glass (which had detonated in the killing of the Archdemon Rakdos, a worthy end for such a blade), instead pushing away his intellectual talents and trying to make him into a better soldier, trying to change Caiellis instead of accommodating for him. But it was something that he would definitely talk to his youngest about when the boy recovered, chat to him about what he liked and make sure he knew how proud his father was of all of his talents, not just the ones that made him a good warrior and prince.

Marik focussed his gaze upon his youngest son once again after his vision became obscured by a sheen of stinging tears borne from his self-loathing, regret and sadness for his baby boy.

Caiellis's face was so pale where it wasn't covered with blood or the black contusions of bruises, bruises that Marik had inflicted and blood that he had spilt, and his son didn't deserve the pain that he was going through. Seeing Caiellis like this reminded the king how young his son was, not that he hadn't been reminded by everything that had happened in the battle for Usnaan and the aftermath of the engagement with the Lord of Riots.

Nothing had changed. They still had barely any idea what was going on or how Caiellis was doing past what he looked like to them. They only knew that he was in good hands now, that he was getting the help that he needed. It had to be enough. It had to be enough, because it was all that they had to go on now. The king was immeasurably glad that no one had decided to look at his own wounds yet, although they would have to be seen to and there was no denying of that fact, because he needed to stay in the same room as Caiellis at least even if there was not enough space for him to keep contact with his boy.

Alexander would be healed before him however, Marik wasn't so focussed upon Caiellis that he hadn't seen or noticed the seventeen year old's wounds, but right now he couldn't bring himself to force his eldest son away from his youngest.

As the doctors laboured over the small boy who was covered in awful wounds (although luckily there seemed to be no corruption because the Lord of Riots was now dead), Marik wanted to give his first born son some encouragement, to remain strong for Alexander, but it was so hard when his youngest child was thrashing painfully on the bed, the oxygen mask on his face almost entirely obscuring his mouth and nose it was covered in so much blood from Caiellis's breathing.

Alexander's eyes kept turning from his flailing baby brother, to his father who stared at the boy in the operating theatre and surrounded by Medella doctors, and then back again to Caiellis. Then he was looking up at his father who was four inches taller than him once more, his eyes pleading and distressed. As if Marik could do anything. He was just as out of his element here as here as he had been dealing with the youngest Lucerna after the civil war, and he could do nothing to help his smallest son now.

Caiellis's mouth gaped open, claret liquid still bubbling out of it in spite of the best efforts of the doctors, his eyes still scrunched shut in the pain and refusing to open, although even if he had done he wouldn't have been able to know what was going on through the pain and the substances that were being pumped through him that were supposed to be helping him. He lifted both of his hands, the first proper movement that he had done seemingly of his own volition so far ever since his father had found him, his small and thin fingers instantly beginning to scrabble desperately at the edges of the oxygen mask around his face, frantic to get it off of him as he made more whimpering noises that were some of the most painful and heart wrenching noises Marik had ever heard in his life filled with darkness and sorrow.

Caiellis's efforts barely dislodged the mask, but he was getting more and more desperate to pull it off of him. One of the doctors, one who neither of the Lucernas recognised, was about to react. Alex beat him to it, running towards his kid brother as if to comfort Caiellis, as if to try and save him through the force of brotherly love alone as he slotted himself into a gap at the boy's bedside. It was simply second nature to the eldest prince, and Marik was sure that his son wasn't thinking anything through at the present moment.

His large hands immediately shot out and encircled Caiellis's wrists like they had done many times in the past when he was messing with his younger brother, pinning both of his arms above his head and to the bed behind him as the doctors, too busy trying to save their young patient to move the seventeen year old out of the way, swarmed around the boy.

"No, Caiellis. You need to keep that on, ok? You need to breathe, little brother. Stop it," Alexander told his brother sternly, though he still made his tone as comforting as possible, admonishing the boy like he had done in the past without any malice or anger behind it. He hated the way how Cai weakly thrashed his arms in his brother's unrelenting grip, hated how fragile and feeble his little brother felt even though it would have been the same if he was awake and Alex knew he could restrain both of Caiellis's arms by holding his wrists in one hand. The boy kept trying to somehow rise up and push his brother away, prompting Alexander to say, "It's alright, Cai, it is just me. It is just your big brother, and I am not trying to hurt you. You need to breathe with the oxygen mask, not against it. You need it on, trust me little guy, because otherwise you won't be able to breathe."

His heart broke at the pitiful moans and weak and muffled gasps that his brother was letting out, feeling like he was hurting the younger boy as he struggled and writhed in his grip. Eventually, Cai's arms fell still, tears spilling out of his closed eyes and running down his face in a way that made Alex want to join his younger brother in crying. He smiled, more for himself than the boy who couldn't see him, trying to be gentle and not let the unconscious kid hear how sad and broken his older brother had become in his next words, "You're doing great, kiddo, just keep being like that. The mask will help you breathe, short stuff, so when I let go I want you to stay like you are, alright?"

Caiellis had almost stopped moving completely apart from the way his fists were clenching and unclenching in a way that Alex knew his brother only did when he was in extreme pain, and the way his legs were buckling and writhing in the agony he was subjected to. Alex experimentally weakened his grip on his brother's wrists, knowing that even though he had intentionally not gone full strength his forceful grasp would definitely leave more bruises, and there was no movement on Cai's part. The middle Lucerna was blind to the world around him and his younger brother, and, sensing no motion and knowing that he had to make more space for the doctors trying to save his younger sibling, he let go of his brother.

The mere instant he did so Caiellis's hands returned to his face and he started hyperventilating even faster, whimpering through his pained panting as he tried to pry the mask that was supplying him with life-giving oxygen off of him. The boy's thin fingers immediately began to fumble for purchase at the edge of the mask before Alex dragged them away again, feeling more tears misting up his vision at the sight of his poor brother thinking that the oxygen mask was choking him and not the thing that was helping him breathe.

"No, Cai!" he shouted at his brother, his protective voice loud and inflected with his anger at the younger boy that was only reserved for when Caiellis did something to endanger his own safety – the special type of anger that rose up when he had discovered his brother cutting himself and when Cai had wanted to throw himself into Orzhova's Summoning trial twice in one day after almost dying during the first and being so exhausted that he could barely stand on his own. The smaller teenager thrashed underneath his grip again, whimpering and crying out in choked gasps as the oxygen mask misted up with more blood, and Alexander wanted to burst into tears and cry his eyes out because of what was happening to his younger brother.

He felt utterly useless, holding Caiellis's arms down as the boy weakly tried to push upwards with his forearms and force him off, his fingers curling round to try and grab hold of the thing that was pushing his arms down but too small to reach Alexander's large hand. His baby brother hadn't reacted to his presence at all, and that hurt Alex more than he would like to admit to someone else out loud because it meant that Cai was in so much pain he couldn't distinguish the identity of his big brother from all of the torment and turmoil roiling within him.

Caiellis always calmed down when Alexander was there without fail (though not when the two were arguing because then the older prince wasn't trying to comfort his sibling), and in the past even if he had been in immense pain the mere presence of his big brother would assuage him and make him feel protected. Now Cai couldn't even sense Alex or hear his words, and the boy hated the feeling that his little brother would be thinking that Alexander was trying to kill him by holding down his arms and stopping him from wrenching off the thing Cai's unconscious mind would believe was preventing him from breathing properly.

"Get out of the way!" one of the surgeons, Alex didn't know who, shouted at the boy as Caiellis began to seize painfully again, no better than when they had been back in Usnaan and in fact much worse, the cacophony of the machines surveying the kid's status blending with the voice to become a background noise to the eldest prince.

All the boy could hear was the sound of his brother's pained breathing, the noise of him choking out screams and whimpers of pure pain and terror breaking the seventeen year old's heart piece by piece. What was killing him even more was that he could do nothing to help his brother apart from hold his arms down (which made him feel like he was only hurting the boy, not helping him), that he could not repay Caiellis's kindness in helping him through his own wounds and making it so that Alex himself could recover from them both physically and mentally.

When Aksua had wounded him, he had tried to fight against the treatment of the Ordo Medella operatives as well, believing them and their equipment to be the vampire herself because of what the machines were doing to him in the procedure to purge the corruption from him, but Cai had calmed him down, taken his attention and been there to provide support and comfort to his older brother through his time of need. Why couldn't Alexander do the same? Why couldn't he help his brother even in his unconscious state, get him to calm down and realise that the mask was saving him?

"You need to keep the mask on! It is letting you breathe, little brother! Listen to me, Caiellis!" he yelled into his brother's face, his voice one of many raised and shouting over the screaming of the machines as Cai died. His heart hurt in his chest and fresh tears were welling up in his eyes that he refused to get into as he watched his brother struggle and cry, and there was more shouting, the burly doctor from earlier almost pushing Alex out of the way before the boy held his ground and stayed with his brother, still holding Cai's arms down so that he wouldn't remove the oxygen mask. "No! You can't make me go! Caiellis … my little brother needs me! He is going to take off the mask!"

There was more of a commotion as someone screamed at him this time to get out of the way so that they could have more space in order to save Caiellis's life, but Alexander was completely incoherent to it all, because Cai had never been hurt this badly before, because he had never messed up so much in not protecting his little brother from the danger of the world and the predation of those who longed to see him dead or hurt, and there was just not enough oxygen in this room at all for all of the noise and screaming in it. Alexander refused to leave his brother's side even though he knew that rationally he could be of little physical help and that he was in the way of the people trying to save his younger sibling.

Cai needed his emotional support, that much was certain, and the seventeen year old was never going to leave his brother, he would be with him every step of the way through this because it was the only thing that he could do to help his baby brother now and he would be damned if he left him now. He needed to be with his brother, it was his job as an older sibling to protect him and with Caiellis's condition getting worse and worse Alexander did not have the capabilities to step away from his side and break off contact with the younger boy who he had been through so much with and was dying again in front of his eyes.

Marik watched up until this point, the feeling of being detatched from reality and being a mere observer that could do nothing but mentally rail against this (like when he had been trapped within his mind) dissolving. He wanted to reach out to his eldest and youngest son again, to touch them, to hug them, to make it all right and make everything better like he had been able to before Emili had been killed, but he couldn't move no more than he could fix this mess that he had put his sons in with his negligence towards them, especially Caiellis. He didn't start the war between Lucael and Welkas, but he dragged his boys in there with him, and this was all his fault.

For the second time in this horrible day, Marik felt himself being separated from his physical body once more, but this time it was not because of the control of a malicious creature inside of his mind. He could see it all – he could see Alexander fighting to stay with his younger brother and protect him, trying to stop him from pulling the oxygen mask, and he could see the doctors shouting at him to move as they injected things into Caiellis and pulsed healing magic in his direction. And he could see himself, stood back from the operating bed, not nearly close enough to either of his sons.

It was enough to make him break free from the reverie. This time he was not going to ignore the plight of his progeny, this time he was not going to simply stand by and pay no attention to one of his two sons. He couldn't help Caiellis right now, that was only something that the Ordo Medella operatives fighting to be his salvation could do, but he was able to help Alexander and by doing so he would be indirectly aiding his seizing youngest son.

Marik pushed through the doctors towards the seventeen year old prince without much force, somehow grabbing him through the frantic hustle and wrapping an arm around the waist of his eldest son who was crying out without even realising it to his little brother. Alex struggled for a moment against his father, struggling with a ferocity borne of his primal need to protect his younger brother and be there at his side, before breaking down his tears as the man practically dragged him towards the chairs that he and Cai had sat on only a week ago when they had watched Alexander in the same bed that Caiellis was in now.

One of the doctors pulled out a couple of restraints from a box of equipment placed next to them as Caiellis's hands instantly went to his face with Alex no longer holding him down and stopping him from trying to remove the oxygen mask, roughly shoving the boy's slender arms either side of him (below his head this time) and strapping the restraints around the wrists as the boy struggled against them, the burn marks already around his wrists chafing even more as he thrashed against the new restrictions on his movements.

Cai probably thought that these restraints were whatever was holding him down before, and Alexander only just managed to repress a surge of nausea that filled his stomach and the inside of his mouth with acidic bile before he swallowed it back down at the thought of his baby brother being held down by magical chains that had cut into his arms, legs, waist and neck, choking him and cutting off his air as the other wounds were inflicted upon him by the Lord of Riots he had fought against, before a blade was drawn across his throat and he was almost killed by it.

Marik hauled his son back towards the chairs, turning them both round so that he was pushing Alexander instead of dragging him, though his son wasn't resisting with any real strength at all as all of the defiance left him and he gave into the tears that the boy had held back for so long. Marik wanted to break down too, after having seen his youngest son like he was currently, but that wouldn't solve anything so he pushed back the tears. He scrunched his eyes shut for a second, and though when he reopened them the wetness of the welling blue orbs was not gone it was no longer about to take form and pour out of them.

Because tears wouldn't fix this problem. They never have been able to help the king. He cried and mourned for weeks after Emili's death in between the violent battles of the civil war but that didn't bring her back, didn't fill the hole in his family that was widening every second Caiellis plunged further and further down into the pit of death that there was no coming back from this time. It didn't give his sons a mother again, and crying now wouldn't suddenly make the precious youngest Lucerna happy and healthy once more. He failed that, failed Emili and failed Caiellis, and he didn't even want to think about failing either of his sons again. He didn't want to think about anything other than them at all – not about being a Lucerna king, not about the war with the New Empire of Passion, not about the destruction of an Archdemon or what Johnias might have been doing in his absence. Just his sons. That was all he could think about now, and it was time for him to finally embrace his duty as a father of two young boys and be there for them.

Alexander stumbled backwards in blind obedience of his father, sobbing his heart out as tears spilled down his young cheeks as he refused to tear his eyes away from his dying younger brother, gorging upon his despair and growing larger to the point where they were fat and thick droplets that the king had only ever seen from Caiellis before even when his eldest son had been dying in the vampire's curse. He forced his weakly struggling boy, his not so little boy when Caiellis was now still his little boy, into a chair, before he remembered to breathe himself and took a good look at his son.

Alexander stared back, his eyes wide and the pupils dilated to the point where barely any of the crystalline blue within his irises could be seen, hands weakly clutching onto his father's wrists connected to the large hands that were on his shoulders. With Caiellis as young and as innocent as he was, it was often very easy for Marik to forget that Alexander was still only seventeen years old himself, a young teenager who needed support, reassurance and love just as much as his younger brother, and with his his eyes wide like they were the king was reminded heavily of a mixture of his youngest son when he had been scared both in the distant past and the events of only a few days ago, but instead of looking at his father in fear of the man Alexander gazed at him like a puppy that had just been kicked by violent drunks and found by its master again, wanting guidance and strength from the only person who could provide it now.

Marik didn't know how he could be strong for his son when he felt his own insides being wrenched apart by Caiellis's gasping whimpers and strangled howls of pain as he seized, but he refused to leave his eldest son to deal with his emotions alone now. He remembered the night of Alexander's own near death, when he had almost completely ignored his comparatively unharmed young son (and though Alexander was wounded himself in comparison to his younger brother he was in pristine condition – which didn't make it any better, but it would be an injustice to pull the boy away from his sibling now in this desperate time where Caiellis could leave them at any moment) and only paid attention to him when he himself had been forced into the seat that Alexander was now in and decided to comfort the crying thirteen year old.

So consumed by the pain inflicted upon his precious eldest son, Marik had forgotten about his second child and would probably have ended up leaving him back at the abandoned village that Aksua had ambushed the Lucerna princes within if not for the attentiveness of Guardian Tristram who was much more of a father to the youngster than his biological parent (something that Marik was definitely going to change if – when – Caiellis recovered from this enough to be conscious). He was not going to repeat that mistake with his eldest son, it was about time he realised that Emili had not just given him the gift of one child, but two amazing young boys that he wouldn't trade anything in the world for, and he pushed Alexander's chin up so that he could see better into his eyes as the oppressive lighting of the surgery shone down into them.

Alexander blinked, tears still streaming out of his young blue orbs and reflecting the luminescence of the mana-powered lights above, the dilation reaction of his pupils delayed and not as Marik would expect from a perfectly functioning human. But then, of course Alexander isn't a "perfectly functioning human" right now! He is watching his younger brother, the closest person to him in the world not that I know anything about them, know anything about my sons, die right in front of his eyes whilst he can do nothing to help him!

Marik saw the very visible symptoms for shock in his first born son, and the boy's chest was heaving in a way that was very redolent of hyperventilation which would not be helping his shock at all. Alexander was more wounded than Marik had originally thought, which meant that the seventeen year old's treatment could not be delayed for long, bruises and bloody wounds smattering the eldest teenager in the room and finger shaped marks around his throat, suggesting that much like his younger brother Alexander had been strangled in the battle for Usnaan as well, though with the shape of the neck bruising the king had a very large suspicion as to who had inflicted the wounds and fought his eldest son.

"Get … off me … need to … need to help … Cai … need to help ..." the boy sobbed and panted out, making Marik even more concerned about him as he cried. Alexander struggled against his father's unrelenting grip, the man's hands on his shoulders increasing the strength at which they were holding him down against the back of the chair as the seventeen year old tried to stand up and gave up with a dejected sob.

Marik moved his hands round to the back of his son's head and pushed it in between his knees, trying to balance out the emotion inflecting his words to make his voice comforting but not broken and firm but not cold or emotionless, "Just breathe, Alexander. You won't be able to help your brother at all in the state that you are in now. Just focus on breathing normally, ace, because neither I nor Caiellis want you to have a heart attack yourself because of your hyperventilating. Your little brother is in safe hands, Alexander, just focus on keeping calm and breathing."

Alexander honed in on his father's reassuring words, the man glad that he was beginning to break out of the shell he had placed upon his emotions again and just wishing that he could act this way to his youngest son even though what he was doing now was nothing compared to what a proper father would do for his sons. The words were partly forced, and Marik hoped that they would start coming naturally to him fully, because currently they were half formed ideas from a time before war and loss rising up in his head that he had to grasp hold of and complete himself before saying them, but he had always found it easier with Alexander after the civil conflict ended on his youngest son's ascent into teenage adolescence and this was no different.

Alexander's breathing slowly but surely began to relax, the boy pulling in longer inhalations and exhaling at a slower rate, though the rhythm of his breaths was still hitched with sobs of misery as he let the tears he had held back for Caiellis's sake streamed out of his eyes and cascaded down his face, his ribs that had broken again protesting at bending his body like this. Marik started to rub soothing circles on his back, unknowingly replicating what Alexander had always done to comfort Caiellis because the king had done the same to Emili and his sons before the civil war had ripped them all away from him, forcing himself to keep talking to his eldest son to distract the boy from the whimpers and sobs of his stricken younger brother, "You're doing great, Alexander. Just keep breathing like that. In, out, in, out."
Obviously deciding that he was done with following his father's orders and that his breathing had relaxed enough, the seventeen year old's head rose up again, locking eyes with his father's blue eyes that were trying not to transmit how terrified he was of losing his youngest son, the boy looking at Marik desperately and pleadingly once more, still hoping that his dad could fix all of this like he had been able to do with anything up until the day when his mother had been murdered.

"I n-need t-to b-be w-with h-him," he protested, his voice breaking in between wracking sobs that the king had never seen from his eldest son before who was finally showing how old he was. Alexander hadn't ever been so distressed before, not even when he had been dying himself, and it only served to remind Marik how selfless his eldest son was, how kind he was. He had inherited Emili's compassion, that was for sure. "H-he's m-my l-little b-brother. H-he's m-my r-responsibility. I-it's m-my j-job t-to p-protect h-him."

Alexander stared up at him, almost like he was looking straight through him, and his mouth quivered before the boy took breath and visibly tried to steady himself and halt the rain of tears he was pushing back down within him.

Marik felt his chest breaking again for the millionth time that day as his eldest child tried desperately to look strong so that his father would let him go back to his baby brother's side and be able to comfort him, a new pain striking through his heart at how Alexander was only seventeen years old but trying to be strong for both his father and his little brother and he loved his son so much, he loved both of his sons so much and he wasn't sure how he could ever have acted like he did in the last month with them.

"You are my sons. You are both my responsibility and it is my job above all to protect you," Marik told him, his voice quiet and filled with pride but loud enough so that they could be heard by the boy in front of him, the only one of his sons that he could help at the moment. Keeping his hands on Alexander's shoulder and hiding a wince of pain at forcing his wounded body to move, instead of towering above his seated son the king crouched down in front of him, one of his hands moving round to his son's face to tilt his head towards him again – he of course didn't want to stop Alexander from looking over at his brother, but he wanted his eldest son's full attention right now. "And I have failed at that, failed at my duty as a father. I have failed so badly, but I am going to make it up to you both. I am going to make sure that you never get hurt again."

Alexander shuddered for a second, the tears straining at the edges of his vision before Marik stood up again, making to sit beside his eldest son before the boy burst into more sobbing and crying. Instead of sitting down, he pulled his son up and embraced him, only able to rest his chin on the boy's bloody and sticky blonde hair because he pulled the youngster in so that his head was on his father's shoulder.

Few things bothered Alexander. Few things made it past the sometimes rough exterior he had created for himself, that they had all created for themselves so that they were not too affected by the act of fighting against those who broke every unspoken moral and killed without thought of the consequences. Marik knew this even having missed out on nine years of his son's young life. But Alexander had seen too much over the past few days, especially in the siege of the Welkalite capital of this day.

From finding out that his precious little brother had been cutting himself for just less than a month, to being abducted and captured by the Welkalites, almost dying himself in the clutches of the last vampire and being consigned to a bed as the already strained, awkward and stunted relationship between his father and younger brother deteriorated into something nasty and full of pent up resentment as he recovered from wounds that had nearly killed him. He was forced into throwing himself in between horrible shouting matches between the other members of his family, almost torn in half as each one of them tugged him a different way, and then thrust into a brutal conflict that had led to him finding his baby brother dead and his father crying over him.

All was all too much for the boy, and while Alexander was usually the one giving out the hugs to crying teenagers (or reciprocating ones that his brother initiated with him, secretly happy at Caiellis's desire for comfort even as he teased the younger boy about it, though that had only happened because of his wounds as before that when his brother became a pre-teen he was reluctant to give any out as he matured, unless either of them became wounded or they had survived horrible engagements with the forces of Johnias) this time it was his father pulling him into one.

"W-why d-did i-it h-have t-to b-be h-him?" the boy cried, speaking like he hoped that this was all just a nightmare, that he would wake up soon and his brother wouldn't be dying with nothing he could do to save him, that this tragedy would turn out to be not so real. Marik wished that it was, but nothing could come of simply hoping that everything was a dream – he had done the same when Emili had died and as expected it accomplished nothing. He hugged his eldest son close, effortlessly ignoring the unpleasant smell of blood and sweat because he knew that he would be coated in it himself and it did not matter at all, feeling his love for his sons breaking out of him again.

Marik didn't have a good answer for Alexander – yes, he had a lot of suspicions as to why Caiellis had been hurt like this, but none of them were appropriate at all for the traumatized seventeen year old. He wanted Alexander to know about exactly what had happened so that they could be ready when their younger relative woke up, but right now telling the boy would finish him off for sure and emotionally hurt him even more. Instead the king did the only thing that he had managed to do ever since he had been given the chance to save his son once more by the Angel of the Black Sun – make a promise that he wasn't sure he would be able to keep but one that he would do his damned hardest to ensure that it didn't break.

"Caiellis is going to be alright, Alexander. Caiellis is going to recover from this, and he is going to be alright," Marik assured his eldest son, wishing that he could make all of him believe the words he had just spoken. Part of him, the part of him that was a father and would do anything for his sons, was hooked upon the words and refused to allow anything other than them to happen, whilst another, the more rational part of his psyche, knew that it was such a ridiculous lie that he almost felt guilty for telling it.

Almost, but not quite, as while it could be perceived as a lie by part of him, the part of him that was colder and more objective and viewed everything through the lens of realism that was not distorted by emotion at all (the part of him that he had inherited from his own cold father, though it had less power over him than it did over the previous ruler of Lucael), because he knew how bad a state that Caiellis was in and that it was very unlikely for the youngest Lucerna to survive the horrible wounds inflicted upon him, much less get through this without any form of permanent damage, the rest of him believed that his son had to get through this and live on because he would not let Caiellis die thinking that his father hated him and had never wanted him. He would not allow his mistakes to deprive Alexander of the little brother that he had endured through so much alongside, the younger brother who always made the older son of the king feel happier.

But Alexander believed him anyway. He didn't know how or why but the seventeen year old believed every single word that his father said. Alexander believed him. Not because he was factually right because none of them could predict what would happen to Caiellis. Not because he had earned it as while Marik had reaffirmed the bond he had with his eldest son much more than he had strengthened the infinitesimal one that he possessed with Caiellis he still was not a proper father to Alexander and had failed both of his sons.

He believed him because there was no alternative, because if Alexander didn't listen to and take his father's words as the truth then he would be lost to despair, because he needed someone else to tell him that his belief that Cai would survive this was not stupid or the desperate need of a big brother for his little brother to come back and stay in the world with him, that he wasn't alone in hoping that his sibling got through this pain and suffering in spite of all that had happened and the niggling feeling at the back of his mind that told him Caiellis would die before he screamed at it to go away.

They stayed like that for a while, locked in the embrace of father and son as Marik forced himself to remember that Alexander was not his second in command, his more obedient son who he could always count upon to deliver, but his eldest son and someone who he loved more than anyone apart from the boy on the bed in the room with them. The seventeen year old was shuddering violently, helping to mask Marik's own smaller tremors that rippled up and down his six foot seven frame even as he tried to stay strong for his son, to provide the reassurance that Alexander definitely needed if he wasn't going to give into the sorrow flooding through the youth and be a bulwark against his sadness and fear like he had been in the past before treachery and murder pulled them away from one another.

It was something that the king was perfectly willing to do once Caiellis woke up and would need all the emotional reassurance he could get from his family, especially from his father who had to convince his son that he did love him and had always wanted him after all that he had done to the boy because of the nefarious dominance of the horror or otherwise.

Alexander pulled away from his father after a moment, wondering whether he should ask what happened to his little brother but not wanting to know yet, not wanting to know why his father hadn't been able to protect him against the might of the greatest demonic threat in the City of Pleasure that they had been in only minutes that felt like hours ago, and gazed into the man's strong but scared eyes again. He had never seen his father so scared before, even though Marik was doing a commendable job of hiding it under the veneer of being strong for his son, and the boy knew that he had to suck it up and do the same so that they could focus upon the one out of the Lucernas who deserved it at the moment.

He couldn't quite suppress a gasp of pain as he pulled away, his ribs having been screaming in protest all through the father and son embrace, and Marik narrowed his eyes as Alexander's arm automatically wrapped itself around his upper abdomen and broken ribs before he could stop himself, aware that his dad would already want him to leave and get his own wounds checked out. A wave of vertigo washed over the boy, mixing with the nausea within him at the thought – the reality – of his thirteen year old brother being hurt so much, and it was all he could do not to scream out in pain or vomit up the contents of his stomach as he bit down on his bottom lip.

Steady hands prevented him from falling over, and a strong grip directed him back to the seat as he got another look in at his younger brother who had stopped thrashing as much and was almost still, though the machines around him were still screaming and the blood spilling out of the bottom of the oxygen mask dispelled the image of peacefulness. Alexander knew better than to try and push past his father who had seated him as the waves of nausea began to abate, but he tried anyway and was rewarded by his father's firm prevention of his movements. He was still crying, angels damn everything, he couldn't stop the tears from falling, nor could he repress all of the pathetic sobs that would make anyone think it was him on the operating table, not his baby brother who was making less noise than he was.

Marik's hand ghosted over his ribs, prodding and poking the broken bones as the youngster hissed in pain and tried to push his hand away, and the king's mind was made up as he looked his eldest son up and down again. Alexander was hunched over, curled over trying to hide the state of his own wounds so that he would be permitted to stay in the same room as his little brother. His face still had faded tears upon it that were joined by more, tears that the father of two knew would never go away unless Caiellis recovered and could receive the love that they all had to give him. He couldn't stop moving, couldn't stop shuddering and twitching occasionally as he stared straight through his father as if he could see through the man in front of him to his little brother who was still making some noises of pain and was still in a desperate situation that neither of the older Lucernas could help with.

But he believed that Caiellis was going to be alright and it was written all over his tall form – in his face, in the way that he was holding his ribs tightly and trying to hide his pain so that he would never have to leave the same room as his younger brother, and in his jitters of shuddering sadness and fear.

"Alexander," the king began, before the addressed almost instantly interrupted him, coughing painfully as he did so and blowing his nose on his sleeve so that his voice was less blubbery and filled with sobs, though the occasional one did slip out, "I'm not leaving him, dad. These wounds are nothing. I'm not hurt, not hurt badly enough to leave him. He wouldn't leave me in the same situation, and I'm not going to leave my little brother either. You can't make me."
Marik paused for a moment, aware that he could easily make his son leave if he forced him to but didn't want to have to resort to that. Instead he tried a different tactic, knowing from the panting of Alexander's breathing and the way that his eyes were still wide that he had suffered some form of concussion in his fighting alone against the Welkalite defenders of Usnaan, as well as many bruises and scrapes that needed seeing to, though he was aware that he would be hard pressed to convince him to go and have his wounds checked out by another doctor (one of those that there was not enough space in the room for) even if Caiellis's wounds had been a quarter as bad as they were now, "In fact, your brother did have to leave you after he had finished making sure that you were alright during the purification and you fell asleep again. He almost fell unconscious, like you are very close to doing, before Guardian Tristram took him away and even then he fainted in the man's arms because we – I – ignored his wounds for too long. I am not going to make the same mistake with you. You won't be able to help or be there for your brother if you can barely stay awake yourself."

"I'm not leaving," Alexander replied again, more forcefully and desperately this time, his voice perilously close to breaking once more as his wide eyes beheld his father's stern gaze that was trying to be parental and comforting. Marik sighed, expecting that sort of response from his stubborn eldest son, particularly when it came to Caiellis.

He didn't want Alexander to leave either, because he wouldn't be able to go with his eldest son and while he hated having to choose between them he knew without a doubt that he would have to remain with Caiellis because that was undoubtedly the right thing to do. He wanted the boy to be able to stay with his younger brother as well, loathe to tear his sons who had a brotherly bond stronger than he had ever seen apart because of what might happen if Caiellis did wake up or get worse without Alexander being here, but it was a simply fact of physics that there was not enough space in the room for the seventeen year old to have his own wounds examined and healed.

"I know that you don't want to Alexander, believe me I do because I wouldn't in the same situation," Marik told the boy, hoping that Alexander didn't see the pain that his father was in as he sat next to him instead of remaining stood in front of him, putting his arm around the teenager's shoulders after a moment of indecision as to whether that would be the right thing to do or not and resolving to trust his instincts.

The youngster would think that he was a complete hypocrite if he allowed him to see how bad the single wound he had sustained, the holes in his stomach caused by Enforcer-general Fraetus Etin that were causing internal bleeding and were probably infected by now considering the amount of pain that it was causing which the king paid no heed to, was affecting him, but Marik was a father with a duty to look after both of his children (if only he had realised that a few days ago instead of letting his youngest get more and more distant and taking out his anger on him) and Alexander's wounds were quite bad, though the boy was putting on a commendable effort to ignore them and not let them show.

"But you won't be able to do anything for Caiellis in the state that you are in now, and I have a job to look after you both and I am not going to let either of you get more hurt than you already are. Besides, it was only a week ago that you were on that bed yourself, and I know that you can't possibly have recovered from that fully. Son, I do not have to want to force you to get your wounds seen to, but I will not hesitate to do so if you refuse," Marik stated, trying and succeeding to keep his voice as stern as possible without giving into the pain in his eldest boy's wide eyes that seemed to widen even more with his father's words.

He drew upon his authority, but this time it was not his authority as a king that he mustered up – no, it was his authority as a father, as a father who wanted best for his children more than anything else in the world. Alexander still looked unconvinced, so Marik tried one more thing, "Caiellis would be agreeing with me right now if he was awake. Your brother would also want you to get your own wounds seen to."

"Maybe what Caiellis wants isn't the right thing!" the boy suddenly hissed back, the emotional pain within him lighting up at his father's insistence that he leave, and Marik sighed again, too distraught and distressed to get angry with his teenage son now. He wasn't going to make the same mistakes twice, he wasn't going to let out his anger at what had happened to one son at the other as Alexander continued, "Caiellis wanted to go to the middle of Usnaan all alone because he wanted to impress us – to impress you – and make you believe in him!"

The king flinched back from the words, though he knew they were true and not nearly as much as what he deserved – they didn't even tell half of the story as to why Caiellis was hurt because of him. Marik exhaled loudly, wearily sinking back in his seat, his son's defiance draining him as his eyes left Alexander and went back to Caiellis, ensuring that he was alright for now and wishing there was enough space to go over to him and clasp hold of one of the boy's slender hands. The boy's blue eyes, still filled with stinging tears, were glaring at him, but there wasn't any anger in his eyes. None at all. Just pain, emotional pain that he shouldn't have had to feel, and Marik wished that his son was more angry with him – though there would be time enough for that later.

"I know, son … believe me, I know the extent of the mistakes that I made with him," Marik murmured, his voice unusually quiet as he watched his youngest son thrash in the bed, though the motions were weak enough to be ignored now and the agony he was in was catching up with the boy, as well as any sedatives that would be delivered by the medical equipment inserted into him. The exhaustion of the day coupled with the awful night's sleep he had had the night before was catching up with the ruler of Lucael, but he would not let it stop him from making sure that his sons were as safe as he could make them.

Alexander frowned for a moment at the display of raw emotion from his dad who usually kept it bottled up inside unless it was strong enough to force its way out (such as when he was monumentally furious or anguished), and Marik decided that he was better off speaking to his son as a person rather than as his father, "And the amount of mistakes I made with you both ever since the civil war ended. I know that I am not the perfect father, and that it is my fault for what happened to Caiellis because I should have been able to protect him. But that does not mean that I cannot try to make reparations for what I have done, that I will not become the father that you need and the father that I am supposed to be. I do not want you to be hurt, Alexander, and I want both of you to be recovered from this battle. You need to have your injuries seen to, and I will not ask you again."

The forty year old's voice became stern at the end of the last sentence, the grief within it replaced with a father's adamant will to ensure his children were safe and sound. The middle Lucerna stayed silent for a few seconds, his eyes still filled with grief and pain after his father opened up to him, and it suddenly hit him that Marik was trying all he could to not break down himself over what had happened to Caiellis, trying to do something to get Alexander the help that the boy didn't think he needed because otherwise, if he focussed on the youngest member of their family, he would realise that he could do absolutely nothing and be swallowed up by the hopelessness.

Alexander didn't know what it was like to be close to losing a child, but he assumed it would be a similar feeling to what he was now experiencing in being dangerously near to losing Caiellis, his little brother, and Marik was doing the only thing he could to abate that and still feel like he wasn't failing at being a father. He couldn't help Cai, but he could help Alex and that was what the king was concentrating upon right now.

And Alexander understood that, just as he understood that Caiellis wouldn't want him to be hurt either. He also couldn't help but think, just through the sadness in his father's eyes as he stared over at his thirteen year old son, that there was something to this that he didn't know, though obviously he didn't know what it was. However, he hadn't been there when his younger brother had coded and almost died the first time around before Orzhova brought him back, he hadn't been there when Caiellis was being ripped apart and killed by the Archdemon whilst his father had – just like he hadn't seen his mother die like Marik had witnessed.

He didn't know what it felt like to see his brother being killed right in front of his eyes, though he did know what it felt like to see the horrible aftermath of Cai's fatal heroism that had ended with him here, constantly teetering on the verge of death. The hollowness in his father's eyes told him everything that he needed to know, hollowness that he never wanted to see again but hollowness that he also felt within, where a tear in his heart was beginning to make itself known and would consume all of him in frozen emptiness if his baby brother died here.

He didn't want to leave Caiellis at all, because anything could happen and Alex would be damned forever if he wasn't at his brother's side the instant he woke up, even if that awakening would come with Cai being unaware of his surroundings and flitting between states of consciousness. And even though the boy didn't even want to consider the awful possibility in his mind, the seventeen year old knew at the core of his being that he wanted to be there if his younger brother's body couldn't defy the pain any longer, although that isn't going to happen!

But looking into his father's pleading eyes, Alexander couldn't defy any longer and a part of his mind supposed that the sooner he got his own angel-damned wounds seen to the sooner he could return to his brother and not have to be concerned about his own condition. Dad sounded so tired, exhausted by having to look after both of his Lucerna sons at once, and Alex realised that he was being quite selfish in directing the man's attention away from his younger brother and towards him instead – because Marik wanted to take care of both of them and even though the seventeen year old hated the fact that his dad would even pay any heed to his eldest son when there was barely anything wrong with him he knew he would have done the same if the situation was reversed.

He didn't want to have to make his dad force him to leave either, because even with the usually detached man's slight emotional release the boy was under no illusions that his father was perfectly willing to make him submit to having his injuries scrutinised and rejuvenated by one of the spare doctors and that he wouldn't be able to fight off the stronger man – not that he wanted to. He glanced over at his younger brother once more, his heart aching for the innocent kid and wishing that he was the one who was dying, not him, even if he had already been on that operating table/bed and almost died himself. He would go through it again in an instant if Cai wouldn't have to suffer through this agony.

Alexander turned back to his father as the man broke the melancholy silence that had drifted down between the two, though the room would never be silent with the sounds of the shouting doctors and the endless beeping of the machines. That was preferable to the silence because at least it meant that, no matter how much pain he was in or how bad his condition was getting, at least the thirteen year old was still alive. When true silence descended, Alexander and Marik would know that they had failed in their respective responsibilities to defend the well-being of the youngest member of their small family.

"I am going to go and call over some of the doctors who aren't doing anything so that they can take you into a nearby empty room and see to your wounds. So please, Alexander, just get them checked out, for my sake if not for your own," dad seemed resigned and defeated, exhausted by what had happened, and Alex nodded.

"You'll come and get me if …?" Alexander asked nervously, unwilling to finish off the sentence, though his dad already knew what he had meant. The boy would have ended the question with if Caiellis wakes up or if Caiellis gets any worse. Concern for his younger brother was etched upon the dark patches of fatigue around his eyes and the slump of his shoulders. Marik patted his son as reassuringly as he could on the shoulder, knowing that the boy needed one final confirmation before he resigned to getting his wounds seen to. He replied, his voice full of warring sadness that he tried to suppress and a father's love, "Of course I will, Alexander. You know that you can trust me with that, son."

"Promise?" the seventeen year old boy sniffed, wiping away tears from his eyes. He knew that was childish, but he still believed in promises never being broken and he needed reassurance at this time of need. Marik smiled sympathetically, though the emotions transmitted through facial gesture did not reach his sad blue eyes, and replied, "I promise, son."

Alex nodded. He really didn't want to leave Cai, but he had to, at least for now, and followed his dad as the man stood up to walk towards some of the Ordo Medella staff who stood attentively but awkwardly at the doorway to the room, not illuminated by the brightness as they had not crossed over the threshold and seemingly too dark without the scrutinising examination lights glaring down at them.

The presence of Lucernas always drew attention, especially since there was no current violence going on within the Kingdom of Light meant that the hospital was a lot more empty than usual as many of the doctors trained in war healing and not left behind in case of attack from Johnias or his traitorous compatriots like Hierarch Aretis and a portion of the Civitas Sol legion.

Alexander looked over at Caiellis again, his eyes landing on his baby brother's innocent face that was screwed up in pain, silently promising that he would do anything in his power to prevent him from being hurt again and he would not fail him again. The boy would like to say that he felt a connection pass between him and his younger brother, but truthfully he didn't think that he did as the amount of pain Cai was in coupled with how exhausted and close to death his body was prevented him from knowing his big brother was there – which was in itself something that also attested to how bad of a state the little man was in, as Alex couldn't remember a time where his brother wouldn't react in any way to his presence, despite the fact that it was often too small for him to notice it – even when the boy was asleep or in a nightmare.

I won't be long, little dude. Stay safe and just focus on your own recovery, and I'll be right back before you even notice that I have gone, ok, Caiellis?

Alexander lingered just enough to see his father return to where he had been sat, slumping backwards and wincing at the state of his own wounds, forlornly gazing at the frantic operation upon his youngest son and placing his head in his hands, before the boy turned away and hoped that he could be healed as quickly as possible so that he could return to be there for his brother and dad.

.*.*.*.

Pain was the first thing that rushed through him, all different types of pain singing together in a discordant harmony of agony that raced up and down his body, but it was torment that seemed distant, seemed far away even though he could still feel every single excruciating sensation all around him.

Shadows danced with blazes of light in his vision, though they didn't match what he felt was happening around him, and he felt disconcertingly numb yet attuned to all of the pain and the feeling of the world around him, the world that he didn't know if he was truly in or not. The back of his head ached with an intensity that made him want to cry, but the tears wouldn't come. Or he couldn't feel them past the riotous display of agonising sensation that had him writhing in pain.

Both of his hands throbbed in time with his thudding heartbeat. That same heartbeat echoed in his ears, ricocheting through his skull. The beat stuttered, failing, and he clutched at his chest.

His hands refused to budge.

Where … where am I? What is going on? What is happening? he thought, the twirling arcs of alternating light and darkness in his eyes flaring in response to his pain, and his body tried to scream without his permission, a reflex action to the torment it was in, but nothing came out. His lungs felt so heavy and it was like his throat was full of grainy sand, making each breath a tortuous venture, a fruitless escapade. Because each intake of air yielded no results – no relief to the burning in his lungs – and his exhalations were an exercise of wretchedness that brought tears to his eyes – or he was sure that they would if he could feel them, but he was in that much pain the sensation of tears trickling down his cheeks – if it was even there – was eclipsed by the agony he was in.

He had to be drowning, drowning in an endless sea of sand that had consumed him, because that was what it felt like.

And then it hit him, the sudden realisation of one terrifying fact that overrode all the other pain he was in and made him truly think of how much danger he was in even with all of the other metaphorical nonsense his probably delirious mind had waxed about the pain. The coming of this simple truth spread fear throughout the boy, flowing through his body and eclipsing the rest of the agony that he was in.

He couldn't breathe.

I can't breathe! Why can't I breathe?! Someone help me! I can't breathe! I can't see!

Caiellis instantly started to panic, and would have began to heave in desperate breaths in the frantic confusion and terror that suddenly gripped him if he had been able to. Instead his mouth, which was wide open in horror, couldn't get any air at all, not even a trickle of life-giving oxygen that would help him at least stay conscious. He couldn't see what was stopping him from breathing, what was obstructing the flow of air into him, as all that was in front of his eyes was the dancing darkness that seemed to taunt him with the illusion of slumber and freedom from the agony and the fact that he wasn't breathing at all.

He managed to break out of his paralysis, the fear thrusting his body into frantic motion.

He thrashed, kicking out his arms and legs desperately in an attempt to fight off whatever was stopping him from breathing, whatever was making him re-live one of his worst fears. He could hear voices, shouting words that he couldn't understand all around him, but their meaning was lost and their sounds seemed stretched out across the fabric of existence to the point where Cai could no more hear what they were saying than make himself breathe again.

He was dying. He was going to die, and these people were just running and shouting to each other around him without even helping him?! Panic gripped him in its cold hand, squeezing around the boy like a hand on his neck. Maybe he was still in the middle of a battle, the middle of the battle for control of the Welkalite capital if how how terse and frantic the shouting was.

Caiellis pictured himself on the streets of Usnaan, trapped underneath something that was crushing him down and smothering the breath out of him, the flickering fire of the burning city masked by the darkness of whatever was laid on top of him or stabbing into him, but soon forced himself to dispel what he knew was a hallucination because he knew that he was not on the streets of Usnaan.

He did not know where he was, but if anything he would still be at the remnants of the Redhand mansion with the Archdemon still taunting him, Orzhova having abandoned her useless Summoner to his fate. Perhaps this was the Defiler's way of torturing more, but he couldn't feel the demon's foul touch, though he wasn't sure about its corrupt presence.

Help me … somebody help me … can't breathe … can't get it off …

He could feel an obstruction around his mouth, something that was clamped shut over his lips and nose and stopping him from taking in any breaths, suffocating him and making him feel light-headed and making the world slip away from him. Caiellis would have whimpered in fear as the thing clenching and squeezing down on his airways suddenly became a hand, a hand that was stopping the air from getting to him. A hand that belonged to one person in particular.

Why don't you do us all a favour, and just die? The person whispered to him, the person who hadn't been able to crush his throat and choke him to death before Orzhova arrived to save him but was now instead suffocating him. Caiellis could see his dad stood next to him at the corner of his vision, one large hand enough to clamp around his son's mouth, finger and thumb squeezing his nose shut and allowing the asphyxiation to begin as Cai tried to flail and desperately thrash to get him away from him.

His brought his hands up, pulling desperately at the single hand that refused to budge even a centimetre off of his face, fingers scrabbling against the much larger digits of his father who sneered derisively at his son's attempts to pull him off. The darkness swam around him, drowning him in its endless depths of tenebrosity that looked strangely redolent of the kaleidoscopic unlight patterns Cai would see if he squeezed his eyes shut really tightly, though he couldn't be doing that because he could see his dad stood right by his side. Even though he was using two hands, his slender fingers could barely find purchase on even the thumb holding his nostrils shut, panic flooding through him and making his heart beat echo within his skull.

Dad, please … let go … I don't want to die … I'm sorry … I'm sorry …

Caiellis could barely remember what had happened, all of the events of the battle blending together into one carnival of unrelenting pain, hatred and sorrow that blared out to him in his eyes and distorted the sounds of the shouting around him into the noise of lost souls, souls that had been torn from their bodies and thrust into an abyss of infinite torture because of him, because of his failures and his weakness, screaming out their hatred and their accusations of him.

Then a voice pierced through the howling of forlorn spirits who raked the boy with their claws made from pure fiery pain as they tried to latch onto him and drag him down into their endless torment with them, a familiar voice that didn't do anything to dispel the tortuous trauma of the souls thrusting their claws into him and ripping his skin, his soul, wide open so that they could feast upon his agony.

It called out to him through the embrace of the spiteful and sadistic darkness, through the hand of his dad pressing down on his mouth and nose and killing him faster than he souls were as he tried to pull him away with all of his might. He couldn't hear the words over the pounding in his skull from the suffocation of his father who hated him and wanted him dead more than anything else, and they all blended together and lost all definition by the time they reached his ears to the point where he couldn't even distinguish what they were trying to say to him, but relief still surged through him.

Alexander! Alex, help me! Please! I can't breathe, big brother, I can't breathe!

Cai knew that he had to stop relying upon his older brother to get him out of bad situations, but at the moment, with no air coming to him at all, he couldn't care less about that. All he wanted was to breathe – freedom from the pain could come after that. All he wanted was to feel the rush of air through him, no matter how painful it was, no matter that it might only last a second before his father's hand clamped down around his airways again.

Strong hands, much like the one that was around his mouth and nose but softer, less calloused and worn by years of war and strangely more like hands than the one suffocating him, wrapped around his wrists, pulling the hands away from pitifully endeavouring to remove his father's from his face and pinning them to something behind him.

Alexander, please help me! Someone is holding me down! Dad is trying to kill me, and I know I deserve it, but I don't want to die!

Alexander's voice made its way to him again, the words the auditory representation of an image of the world blurred by tears and loss of vision from lack of air, and Caiellis struggled pathetically against the thing holding him down as he felt himself giving out. He kicked and thrashed frantically and as violently as he could in his hurt state, desperate for even a single breath of air for his burning lungs. He tried to scream out to his big brother, the only person who could protect him from this, but nothing came out of his mouth apart from a sticky and wet liquid that tasted like blood and must have been. He had coughed up blood numerous times in the battle, especially when his dad had tried choking him to death with hands around his neck instead of his mouth and nose, so that was no surprise to him any more.

The hands around his wrists didn't remove themselves, they didn't let go of him, pressing into his already chafed and cut wrists hard and making him want to scream out in panic and pain and confusion and terror and thousands of other horrible things. He couldn't breathe. And that wasn't changing, especially now he couldn't even pull away his father's hand with his own restrained by others.

Help me, please, big brother …

Why wasn't Alex helping him? Couldn't he see that his little brother was being throttled to death? Why is he just talking to me like nothing is wrong when everything is wrong and he couldn't breathe and oh angels I just want to breathe! Alex! Please!

The hands holding down his wrists were suddenly removed, giving the boy free range of motion with his arms once again as his father laughed contemptuously in his ear, still resolutely clamping down on his son's breathing and stifling any of his attempts to get air.

Your brother isn't going to save you, Caiellis! It is about time you stopped relying on him and stood up for yourself against your enemies! He can't coddle you forever, and I am going to make sure that he never has to again!

The boy instantly resumed the unfruitful attempts at pulling his much stronger father away, still bleeding out of his mouth and nose as his body was wracked with painful sobs during his fight for his life. He didn't know why someone – or something – had stopped him from doing that, but he assumed that Alexander had managed to find a way to get them away from Cai and was currently battling him off. That explained why he wasn't helping the thirteen year old with their dad who was trying and succeeding to smother him with one hand, tears dripping down the boy's cheeks as he tried to get his last remaining parent away and suck in a breath.

The hands wrapped around his thin wrists again almost the second he began scratching and pulling at the hand choking him, pushing them back once more as he screamed and whimpered in pure terror. Or at least he would have done if he would have been able to breathe, and instead the noise that came out sounded completely alien to Caiellis, who carried on making the strangled shrieks of fear anyway because they might get him some help.

Please … Alex … I'm scared … please help me … I know I rely on you for everything … but please just help me … I promise I won't ever annoy or fail you again …

I'm so scared … big brother … I know you can save me …

We both know that he cannot. Alexander is fighting against his own enemies, remember, you worthless brat?! My only true son is dying in the middle of Welkas, far away from his family and friends all because you tried to be a hero and ended up putting us all in danger, you little shit! Have you forgotten what the Lord of Riots showed you?! Don't you think you deserve to die for what you have done?!

Yes … but … I can hear him … I can hear my big brother … He is here … He doesn't hate me …

You think that, do you? You really think that Alexander doesn't hate you after all that you have done to him?! You made his mother die when he was only eight years old! You forced him to risk his life coming with you to Welkas when you were captured by Arendus Draal! You abandoned him when he needed it most for a pathetic dream and left him against the wrath of a vampire who almost killed him!

And to top it all off, you, my second son who neither I nor Emili ever wanted, ran away from your brother and I after I specifically told you not to and now he is in danger – now he is dying – all because of you! Now do you see why I want to kill you?! NOW DO YOU SEE WHY I WILL NEVER LET YOU LIVE?!

No … it's not true … Caiellis tried to rail against the horrible words, just as he tried to rail against the hands firmly pressing his arms down, tried to rail against the fingers clamped around his mouth and nose and stopping even a small trickle of air getting to him. But, just like he failed to even move his arms a few inches as he thrashed them in the strong grip of the one holding him, much less remove the hand killing him from his face and suck in air, he couldn't battle against the truth of the words that pressed him at him from all sides.

He could hear Alexander's voice alright. It was shouted into him. It sounded angry, defiant, but also broken, desperate and hurt, just like it had been when Aksua had almost killed him, and Cai knew that his big brother was in immense danger because of him.

Let go of me! I have to save Alex … I can't breathe … I'm so scared … I can't breathe …

I'm not going to let you go! I can't let you put any more lives in danger, Caiellis, and I am doing now what we should have done when you were first born! Alexander was perfect, all we ever wanted, and then you had to come along and kill Emili and put my only true son in danger!

Stop it … please dad … I just want to help … I don't want to die … Cai protested weakly as the hands around his wrists were replaced by ropes and chains that he violently thrashed against, cutting open wounds that were already inflicted upon his arms as the darkness became even more black and streaks of pure shadow pulsed through the dying colours of asphyxiation in his vision. If Caiellis had been able to think clearly through the terror of the suffocation, he would have wondered why what he thought was his dad could hear his thoughts, as he certainly wasn't able to say the words through the blood that was coming out of his mouth and nose and the thing that was stopping him from breathing and reducing all noise that he made into different forms of strangled shrieks and choked whimpers.

Someone help … want help … want big brother … want Alexander …

Are you sure about that, brat? Are you sure that you want your older brother? Are you sure that he will even want to help you after everything that you have done to him, even after all that he has done for you to help your pathetic existence continue on to this point?

Yes … yes. I am sure that Alexander will help me … Cai protested mentally, his mind not allowing for the possibility that his big brother could hate him to take root within his head, even though he could already feel the poisonous claws of such ideas and thoughts spitefully clawing their way throughout his mind and digging their painful talons in deep. Caiellis had relatively often thought in the past that his older brother resented him and hated him, often enough that it wasn't really rare but not with enough frequency to be considered common through the years of him growing up alongside the older boy and only having someone who was four years his senior as his real friend.

After their arguments, the youngest Lucerna almost always wondered if his brother meant all of what he had said, if he actually hated being with Caiellis nearly all the time because of the way that they lived and would rather be an only child than have a little brother to look after. Nonetheless, nearly every time that he had begun to think the thoughts his older brother would make sure to apologise for what he had said to Cai and make it all up to him, just like the younger boy would try to do the same if he wasn't so emotionally distraught by the fights (particularly if they started getting physical and ended really badly, like both of them getting hurt as they threw punches and kicks and both of them saying things that neither meant) that he was scared to approach his big brother for fear of what he might do.

That meant that it had usually been Alex who had extended the hand to his sibling and reaffirmed their brotherly bond again, wiping out the malice between them over stupid arguments and making sure that Caiellis knew that he was wanted because the younger boy would often turn to self-loathing after their fights as he had only ever been able to measure himself up to a boy four years older than him and naturally bigger than him even if they had been the same age, thus making him feel inferior and that he was the weakest one amongst them (which was factually true but that was because he was also by far the youngest and smallest).

However, now that he was entertaining the thoughts that his father's words had placed in his mind, he was beginning to think that perhaps they were right, perhaps Alexander couldn't forgive him over this like he had done over everything else. Caiellis's mind was muddled by the darkness, lack of oxygen and the pain fulminating throughout him, his body a living and feeling lightning rod for electrical blasts of agony which shuddered up and down his fragile form and made him want to scream, but he couldn't with the hand clamping down hard over his mouth and the blood that felt like it was pouring out of his mouth instead of air.

He had caused the older boy to almost die by abandoning him, and his mind was too scared and confused to remember whether or not Alex had forgiven him for that, if his brother would ever truly recover from the near death experience at the hands of the last vampire whilst Caiellis was enjoying himself in a dream realm and did nothing to help him at all. He had seen how broken the seventeen year old had become even as he tried to hide it from his friends and family, trying to hide how much it had affected him from the little brother who had caused it.

And now he had just put Alexander in more danger by abandoning his wounded brother again, hoping that with his reckless attack on Tradax that he could solve everything but instead allowing an Archdemon to be Summoned within the City of Pleasure and placing everyone in even more danger by forcing his father to come and try to save him – or punish him for his disobedience, his failure at absolutely everything, as it turned out.

And yet … No. Alex does love me. He wouldn't do all these things for me if he didn't love me. You can't fake this form of kindness, you can't pretend to love your younger brother if you don't.

But do you deserve his love, Caiellis? Alexander does foolishly love you because he has been forced to protect you, taught by others that an older brother should look out for his weaker sibling, because that is the only thing that he has known and he does not know that you were the one who made his beloved mother die.

But you do not deserve that love. You betrayed your brother's trust, left the only son that I ever wanted for dead while you grasped onto the straws of a fantasy that could never be true because me and your mother, my beautiful, precious, compassionate, perfect wife, never wanted you. You forced him to protect you from me, from the proper punishment for your crimes against him.

Alexander may want to protect you, and he may well love you, even though I doubt that because who could love a younger brother as pathetic and worthless as yourself? But I am not going to let my perfect son risk his life time and time again for a son that I never wanted to be born, a son that I should have had smothered as soon as I laid eyes upon him.

Caiellis's could feel his struggles getting weaker as he unsuccessfully threshed against the restraints chafing against the already burnt and cut skin of this thin, stick-like wrists, the chains slicing into his skin and adding more pain. He had to help his brother. He couldn't leave him alone against the Welkalites, and he had to push past his fear of dying to aid him. No … no … he weakly protested as his body became slacker and slacker, more tears spilling down his face that he couldn't feel and more pain flaring across his entire body as his dad's resolute hold on him refused to budge and he began to die again. And this time Orzhova wouldn't be able to save him from his own weakness, from what he knew he deserved but didn't want to face.

His heartbeat galloped like a nightmare horse with hooves of sparking brimstone and eyes of deepest shadow in his ears, faster, then lethargic and extremely slow, then erratic and thudding once again.

It didn't matter. He had to help his brother. Even though it might be the case that he didn't deserve Alexander's love, the older boy at least pretended to show it and tolerated being in the thirteen year old's presence. He knew deep down that Alex didn't want to spend time with him anymore and had only been doing so recently because of the discovery of his pathetic self-harming that had been a temporary release from the crushing pain that was getting so heavy that he felt he was suffocating underneath it. Well, he was suffocating, asphyxiating as his father held his hand over his youngest and unwanted son's mouth and nose and stopped him from getting any air, but that was a literal death and not a figurative one, even though the two seemed interchangeable and the weight of the youngest Lucerna's failures was killing him just as much as his father's hand.

Caiellis pushed the hurt of that realisation down often when the world was quiet enough that he could actually think about it. He understood why. The war was over, so that meant they didn't have to spend much time with each other unless they were thrust into more danger like they had been after the Scholaria Magnus abduction that had also happened because of Caiellis. Alexander was older, seventeen years old now, and Cai was still just a little kid. A stupid, pathetic excuse for a brother.

He didn't deserve Alexander at all, but that was why he had to save him, had to free his arms from the restraints that they were in and push his father off of him. Dad could kill him once he had saved his big brother, and surely Marik would prefer to save the only son he ever wanted rather than wasting time murdering the one that he didn't?

Please … let go … have to save Alex … have to save big brother … let go … let go … please … help me …

He could still hear the frantic shouting all around him, the screaming of the damned souls that reached out to him to try and wrap him in their malicious arms and drag him into the bowels of hell where he belonged with them, and he kicked out his legs as he felt more claws of unadulterated pain being raked up and down him.

It is too late for that. It is too late to save your older brother now, Caiellis Noctis Lucerna. Not that you are worthy of having the name of the royal family, let alone having your mother's maiden name as your own middle one. You killed her, and now you have hurt my perfect first born son as well. No more. I will have no more, child that I never wanted, worthless brat who dares to think that he is a part of my family. You are going to die so that you can not hurt anyone else, you are going to die because you deserve it after all that you have done, you are going to die because you never should have lived in the first place.

The youngest Lucerna could feel his resistance faltering even more as the unkind words were whispered into his ears, condemning and damning him to more suffering and death as he cried. He knew it was pathetic, and knew that he deserved this fate for what he had done, but he couldn't stop the tears or the muffled whimpering that somehow escaped his mouth even with all of the coppery blood and the hand clamped firmly around it.

The pain was immense, almost worse than he had ever experienced, but he remembered pain like this when he had been fighting the Archdemon Rakdos which he had allowed to be Summoned into the world of man, the Defiler inflicting him with such suffering that he had never felt before that paled in comparison to the amount of emotional pain that he had been forced to go through as he realised that his life should never have begun and his mother had died because of him, that his older brother and two non-biological Uncles were in danger because of his weakness and stupidity.

Stop it … dad … please … I don't want to die … I'm so scared … I know it is pathetic … but I'm scared … I don't want to die …

His hands fell limply at his sides, barely moving and responding as he tried to push them up against the restraints around his slender wrists once more, and he could feel the reverberations of his beating heart, the thudding of his disgraced heart echoing through his cowardly body and blocking out all of the noise apart from his father's intimidating voice that spoke to him as he died again.

Is that so? Is that why you cut open your throat trying to escape from the world, trying to escape from the punishment you have earned?! Are you sure that you don't want to die, you worthless, good for nothing brat, because I am quite certain that the reason you sliced your neck open was because you didn't want to live any more?!

Caiellis remembered, and it all came back to him. The snivelling, the crying. The unrelenting and unstoppable sadness that was coming back to him and instilling him with the same emotions again. It was true. He hadn't wanted to live, and now that he realised that he also realised that he didn't want to live now, either.

I may as well stop resisting. I know that I am scared, but I killed the Archdemon, and I was scared then. I am worthless, I don't know what is happening, but I don't want to live any longer.

Good. I'm glad that you understand what is happening here. You don't deserve to live in this world, and I am going to make sure that you won't any longer. I hope it hurts. I hope that you are scared.

And Caiellis found that he didn't have a problem with that. He didn't have a problem with death, because he had sealed his own fate. He knew he was scared, he knew that it was pathetic, that he was running from his punishment and the mess that he had made of his life, but there was no going back now. He had chosen this path, chosen the cold embrace of death over continuing on in his life of pain and hatred, and there was no time for any regrets.

The boy's limbs fell limply by his sides, his struggling gone apart from a few thrashing and desperate flailing as his body refused to stop trying to kick away the pain that was consuming him and holding him tight within its simultaneously cold and fiery embrace. He had given up, because he knew that he did want to die and there was no point trying to fight against the things in his head that were so real to him, shutting eyes that hadn't opened and stopping pulling up at the restraints as he felt more contact with horrible claws that speared into him and sent blinding bolts of numbness and torture through him.

He just had to get through this, and then he would escape, be able to leave this world of hurt and cruelty that he never should have been born in in the first place, and couldn't do anything to stop the thing clamped round his only airways from squeezing them closed and blocking them up. Everything hurt, and his hands felt like they were twitching of their own volition as if in response to the pain as his father said again what he had at the beginning, the fact that Caiellis was resigned to his fate making the horrible words no less painful.

Why don't you do us all a favour, and just die?

Cai wished he could have lived, he really did, and he was scared about what going into death would bring to him, but there was nothing left in him now, no desire to keep on going or fight against the agony of his continued existence where the man who had created him hated him and never wanted him, the mother who loved him in spite of what dad might say had died because of him and never planned for him either, and the big brother who had loved and protected him was being hurt thanks to his useless younger sibling.

He didn't see much in the world that would make him want to stay, but he was still hesitant to give up, to give in and surrender to the darkness and coldness, and he cried silently as he died again in the worst way possible for him. Part of him did not want to just succumb to the plans that cruel fate had in store for him, part of him wanted to fight and rail against it but he had expended all of his defiance and he couldn't oppose fact any more than he could push his dad's hand away from clenching around his face.

The boy whimpered in fear and misery, wishing he could be stronger, wishing that he had done differently, that he could do something to atone for his mistakes, that he could face the pain like his big brother would and work through it, but it was all too much.

He was all alone, with everyone he had ever loved in danger because of his weakness, and the expanse of nothingness was becoming for him to join it in its eternal slumber, away from the pain and the suffering but also away from the brief sparks of happiness within his life.

Alex … help me … someone …

Even if Caiellis had wanted to fight against it, he couldn't stop the numbness from taking him again, the man that he could see in the corner of his eye fading away as the thing around his mouth became a lot less akin to squeezing fingers. Some bits of him, the bits that had protested against him drawing a knife across his own neck to end the pain, thought that he should fight against the darkness wrapping around him, that he should battle his way out of this sleep and fight his way back into the world again like Alexander would want him to, but he couldn't listen to the voices telling him to keep going.

His ears and head were ringing with all of the noise around him, the high-pitched screaming of demons come to take him away, drowning out the words that told him to keep on fighting and never give up as all of his emotional agony began flowing around him again, blending with the physical pain to the point where the boy couldn't distinguish between jabbing bolts of real agony and lancing arrows of mental torment and anguish. The extremely loud squealing and howling was no bed time lullaby, but it lulled Caiellis into an even greater sleep despite that.

Alex would want him to fight against this. Uncle Tybalt and Uncle Tristram would want him to fight against this, just like they had wanted him to fight for his survival in the civil war and fight to help them against the forces of the eternal night.

His mum would want him to fight this, as though he knew he was only four years old at the time, an age too young to be able to distinguish between carefully constructed lies and truth, so he might have mistaken what his beloved mother thought about him more than nine years ago before she had died, in spite of whatever his father said the woman that he remembered had loved him (just like the daddy he remembered had done so as well, but Caiellis had concrete, unavoidable evidence that he did not now whilst his mum was dead and so he had never been able to see if she did truly love him or not) and the mum of his childhood that he had been forced to grow up out of only four years into it would want him to live and have a happy life.

And finally some of him wanted to keep living, to keep fighting against this end that he had caused himself, even though he knew that he put everyone who loved him in danger. Some of him wanted to remain within this life, to be able to snuggle up against his big brother and feel protected and safe again, to have Alexander and Uncle Tristram ruffling his hair fondly in affectionate pride of him and to have Uncle Tybalt smile in the way he did when his youngest student completed academic work of a calibre that should have been far beyond what he should have been able to achieve.

But what was one more failure? What was one more failed order, one more unsuccessful endeavour, one more disappointment, one more inability to live up expectations, one more failure to protect what was precious to him amongst so many others?

The pain and anguish of the world tainted all of these things, all of the happiness of his life completely eclipsed by the agony and the grief that living caused, and Cai knew that he did not deserve to live any longer.

Some of the pain was far away now, and so was the shouting of desperate voices and the screaming of high-pitched creatures shrieking at him in their rage that he was living whilst they weren't. And so was the sensation of tears spilling down his cheeks, though he knew for certain that that would be there, destroying any last vestiges of pride that he might still possess and showing the world that he wasn't a heroic Lucerna prince, he wasn't a leader, he wasn't a warrior with the power to slay an Archdemon – he was just a child, a cowardly, scared little boy who would rather run from the pain than confront it.

The world was becoming dark again, the maddening and psychedelic patterns of unreal light that danced behind his eyelids fading away as they were replaced by the true blackness of slumber, and the agony was distant. Caiellis only cried for a few more seconds before, once again, he knew no more.

.*.*.*.

Alexander quickly pushed back into the operating room that would hopefully have had two Lucernas saved within it, the fifteen minutes that he had been forced to be gone within stretched out over the tense hours, and if he had enough mental power to direct his thought processes to anything other than his immeasurably cherished family he would have been thankful that the spare doctor who had tended to him, binding his ribs and healing his wounds had been patient enough not to become annoyed with his constant fidgeting and uncomfortable agitation and hard-skinned and sympathetic enough not to be offended by his terse barbs that the seventeen year old didn't really mean.

The woman had clearly realised that she wasn't going to be able to detain the eldest prince in the room next door to the one where his baby brother was being operated on for long in spite of the fact that she believed that Alexander shouldn't be moving around at all with the state of his own injuries so that he did not damage them wrong, and had told him quite frankly that she would need to heal him more later but for now he was free to go and see to his brother again.

The desire to be with his brother and continue to make sure that he was safe enough for now and in an acceptable condition for his wounds had burnt into a raging inferno within his chest that made him unable to stop running the short distance between wounds in spite of the Ordo Medella doctor's insistence that he should try to take it easy.

How in the name of the holy angels was he supposed to take it easy when his little brother was dying in the room next door to him?

How was he expected to take it easy and not put himself under much strain when he had had to watch his baby brother struggling to draw breath and seizing in his arms, when he had been forced to breathe for the younger boy and had tasted Cai's blood in his mouth?

How could he try to relax and not damage his wounds knowing that he had seen Caiellis dead in their father's arms, knowing that his fragile and innocent younger sibling had been cut, burnt, bruised, crushed, strangled, restrained and murdered by the most powerful demon he had ever sensed before?

How could he stay calm and remain in that room much longer when the last time he had seen his thirteen year old kid brother that it was his job as a big brother to protect and nurture unconsciously crying and whimpering from the pain he was in as he seized and tried desperately to pull off the only thing that was letting him breathe because he thought that it was suffocating him?

As he made his way into the room as fast as he could, Alexander began to worry about the state of his younger brother, that something might have happened while he was gone. He knew that his father had promised that he would be informed as soon as either his brother woke up or got any worse (though the words had not been said the information had transferred between the parent and child), but despite that he wouldn't put it past Marik to try and protect him from something if Caiellis did get worse. He was aware that this was extremely paranoid of him, that if he hadn't been fetched by anyone then it was likely that nothing had happened, but his primal fear for his younger brother would not be briefly satiated until he saw the thirteen year old, and even then it wouldn't be truly satisfied until Cai recovered fully (though after that Alex would still be scared for his safety after all that had happened). But didn't he have an excuse to be paranoid after all that his family had gone through?
Besides, he needed to be with Caiellis whether the kid knew he was there or not, so that he could react instantly if anything happened, so that he could offer support to his baby brother irrespective of the younger male being aware of it or not, and so that he could just be with the boy no matter what occurred and stay with him until either he recovered, or the unthinkable happened which Alexander refused to even voice in his head no matter that the grim possibility was becoming ever more likely.

The second he laid eyes upon his younger brother again, the doctors still moving about him and cleaning him, healing spells murmured from their lips as their mana was poured into the boy as they bound and saw to his many wounds, Alex stopped in his tracks, the light of the operating theatre shining down upon him, though no one noticed his entrance even with him inhaling sharply at what he saw.

Alexander had been Caiellis's older brother for over thirteen years of happiness and sadness. He had seen him sick, feverish and sweaty, vomiting up anything he had eaten agonisingly painfully, snoring heavily, surrounded by used tissues and panting for breath in pained sleeps. He had seen his little brother wounded and hurt, bleeding from horrible scrapes and injuries as Tybalt and Tristram saw to him with the help of the middle Lucerna.

He had seen his brother be forced to stay in bed for days as his body regenerated from the worst wounds he had sustained through the civil war, the pain caused by a greater demon Summoned by the Hierarch of Vectura before Tristram (as Tybalt had also been heavily wounded) managed to hold it off long enough for help in the form of the Guardian of Scientia Mos to arrive when Cai had been eleven.

Back then the younger boy had looked bad even after the threat of death had been staved off, bruised and pale and extremely uncomfortable even in his sleep, though that was mitigated slightly when Alexander agreed to snuggle up next to him, that part of him breaking out of the teenager state of mind the fifteen year old him had been in to comfort his hurt sibling, though he had barely ever hesitated to help his brother before as he had a soft spot for the younger boy.

That had been bad, though not worse than the other three members of their party had been hurt as well during the violence of the civil war, and both Alexander and Caiellis had small scars from that time (though Tristram had picked up many more and Alex's most prominent ones were those that had been inflicted by Aksua that would heal and fade in time).

Alexander had never seen Cai quite like this.

Caiellis was quite a lively sleeper, especially when he wasn't nestled up to his older brother in the times of stress that made that the way they had slept. He thrashed around, mumbled occasionally, even rarer cried out when he was in the grip of a nightmare so horrible that he couldn't help but yell, and usually woke up with the bedding half on the floor and his feet on his pillow. Even in the rare moments of relative calmness he sprawled on the bed with his arms and legs flung out either side of him – which made it a good job he was so small otherwise he would have taken up all of the beds that they had been forced to share over the civil conflict, although Alexander knew he did the same thing and had often been faced with his brother complaining about it in the morning (or the middle of the night if it was that bad).

Now he was almost completely still, the only movement of the small boy the small breaths that Alex couldn't hear over the general noise of the surgery. Cai had curled slightly onto his side, as much as he could with the restraints that were no longer digging into his arms but still holding his wrists to the bed in case he tried to take the oxygen mask off again, looking like a discarded puppet with his strings in the form of numerous medical attachments trailing everywhere around him.

Alex could see IV lines (a relatively recent invention that was based upon Yentarian technology but with many changes better suiting the Lucaelian method of healing with both magic and medication) in both arms now (as obviously one in the left had not been enough) that fed the boy treatment and more healing, leads to the heart monitor that pinged weakly in the background, large tubes away snaking from the oxygen mask around his face. Caiellis looked even more small and vulnerable than ever, wearing no clothes apart from a modest white cloth that ensured his modesty was kept after it had been checked, and if the doctors hadn't still been operating on him in a desperate attempt to save his life Alex would have pulled his baby brother into his arms.

The boy looked utterly helpless, at the mercy of the impersonal machines powered by thrumming mana surrounding him and the kind doctors who were still in the agitated state from earlier which instantly alerted the seventeen year old that despite his brother's stillness he was nowhere near safe or healthy yet, and that it was possible that he was even worse now than he was when he was seizing. It reminded him of when he and their dad had carried him through the abyss to the room that they were now in, but there was even less movement coming from Caiellis currently than there had been then.

At least the boy's chest was still moving up and down, no matter how slowly and softly to the point where it was almost imperceptible with the amount of movement around him, because that was better than it not, but the sight of his brother like this, with so many wounds unobstructed by dirt and blood, shocked the older sibling.

When Alexander had reluctantly left him, steeling himself against his baby brother's whimpers, Caiellis had been writhing in the agony of his broken body. It was a mild relief now to see that some of the pain had smoothed from his pale face, though there were still lines of torment that persisted through what looked like a slumber. But the stillness, the motionless limp fingers curled into the sheets beneath him that were stained crimson by his blood as the Ordo Medella doctors and healing worked to repair his wounds, was just as worrying – if not more so. At least when he had been weakly thrashing it had shown that he had enough energy to do that.

Now Alexander couldn't tell if his brother was asleep from all of the tiredness of the battle or simply unconscious because his body could no longer sustain even the weak but desperate movements of earlier. And he hated not knowing what was happening with Caiellis. He grimaced as he saw a doctor plucking out shards of obsidian rock that had buried into his brother's waist, wincing at the sheer size of some of them and hoped that none had penetrated to the vital organs underneath otherwise Cai would be suffering from even more potentially fatal complications, and swallowed down his sick again as he watched Choirmaster Esmelde's hands clasped together above a large slice in the unconscious thirteen year old's lower abdomen.

The hitched breathing of his younger brother informed Alex that he had broken ribs, which was something that the seventeen year old had somehow managed not to realise yet through all of the stress and pain of bringing Caiellis here and watching him seize. Their dad sat in the exact same position that he had been in when he had almost forced Alexander to leave, his almost emotionless eyes inflected with heavy amounts of both sadness and fear that make Alex ache in empathetic pain for him – dad would almost certainly be blaming himself for what happened, just like Alexander was now as well, and he hated to think how much worse it must be for the king because he had been there with Cai and unable to stop this from happening to his youngest son.

To anyone who had barely seen the king before he would look like a stoic and resolute statue that was bravely watching over his second son as the doctors tried to heal him and save his life, but anyone who had ever laid eyes upon the man before would be able to see the emotional pain of a father's worst nightmare colouring all of his movements, his posture and his blue eyes that Alexander had inherited from him, although sometimes he was sure that Cai's green eyes were more like their father's despite being the colour of their mother's. The man wasn't slumped like Alexander had been in the same situation, sat rigid on the seat as his fingers played an anxious drumbeat rhythm on the armour of his leg that was stained with blood, and not just the blood from the Rain of Gore.

Alex blinked for a second when he saw that the crimson trickling down his father's leg was human blood, and very fresh, stark against the now dried viscera that had splattered upon it, and followed the pattern of the scarlet to where his dad's other hand and arm was wrapped around his waist, more droplets of blood spilling out from the gaps in between the man's large fingers that clutched what must have been a horrible wound.

The seventeen year old didn't know what he should do about that – on the one hand, it was extremely hypocritical of Marik to send his son away to have his wounds healed when he was suffering from ones that were far more threatening and painful (as now the teenager could tell that the ashen colour of the older male's face was not just due to the fear of losing his youngest son's life), but on the other he completely understood why their dad would rather stay here than go and leave his son, even if he had made Alexander do the same.

He could try and convince their dad to leave, but that would be an almost impossible task and suspected that the king wouldn't listen to him or follow his own advice that he had given to Alex when attempting to persuade him to do the same, as Marik would say that he was the father and that it was his duty to ensure that his sons were safe and healthy, not the other way round, but Alexander didn't agree with that and thought it was his job to protect both of the members of his family as much as possible even if the age differences meant that he would guard his little brother more often because he was the youngest Lucerna whereas Marik was the eldest loyal one.

Alexander, who still hadn't entered the room fully yet past crossing into the light, turned back to his younger brother, feeling a sudden surge of anger and pain at seeing Caiellis as desperately injured at he was, a fury borne from the fact that he knew he had failed to protect him and make sure the smaller boy knew that he was loved and wanted – because it was obvious that he had gone to the centre of the city to try and impress them and show that he wasn't a failure, not that any of his family members thought that he did.

Of course Cai would also have wanted to reduce the amount of pain that others would feel by cutting off the head of the serpent as soon as possible into the battle, but that wasn't his responsibility no matter that he was a Lucerna. Caiellis was one of the people, one of the innocents, who the warriors of Lucael were fighting to protect, too young and gentle for war irrespective of the fact that his powers and intelligence and courage allowed him to excel in it. It shouldn't have been his baby brother who had chosen to make the sacrifice for the crusaders of the Kingdom of Light. It just wasn't right at all, and that made Alexander even more angry with himself that he hadn't been able to stop him – both physically when he left them as they had just penetrated into the Glutton's Quarter and mentally stifle the idea that he had something to prove after what had happened to his big brother with Aksua and the arguments with their father.

He was still angry with his dad for all of that somewhere, but right now it was completely overridden by the emotional pain and sorrow of seeing his younger brother in this state and knowing that if Cai got even a bit worse then he would probably die. It was a miracle he had survived at all, Alex knew deep down, but what he knew even more was that the thirteen year old should never have been hurt that much in the first place. He couldn't be angry with his father though, not after all they had been through, not after seeing the utter horror and grief on the man's face as he watched his youngest son come closer and closer to death.

Things would have to change with the way that they operated as a family, that was for certain, but Alexander was sure that dad knew that as well, knew that Caiellis was their first priority to be protected because he was the youngest, the most fragile and the most innocent out of them, the one who had lived the least amount of time in happiness and with the barest touch of normal before war and death ripped them away from that.

Caiellis had suffered the most out of all of them, Alex decided, because he had known mum the least, he had only been able to have four years, through most of which he was too young to know what was actually going even with his intelligence and remarkable cognitive ability from an extremely young age, because he had lived the greatest proportion of his life within a war that he was far too young to fight within, because he had seen the least of his own father before the man had been changed by Johnias's betrayal.

Alexander would make his dad change the way he dealt with his youngest son, using force if necessary, because Cai had been hurt due to the fact that he thought he was inadequate, because he thought that he wasn't good enough and thought that he needed to prove that he was after what dad had said to him and how Alex had inadvertently humiliated him in the sparring session in front of their father. Caiellis had probably thought that his family, or at least their dad, hated him at the most and resented him at the least, and while that could not be further from the truth it hurt the seventeen year old to admit that he could see where the squirt was coming from with that if that was what he thought.

Dad would definitely change though, he could see that, even if he kept that change to himself and continued on normally once Cai had recovered from this. Alex wouldn't put it past the man to be extremely harsh on their youngest family member once he recuperated enough to be ready for censure (even though it would still hurt him, that was undoubted), because dad was scared of his son doing something like that, because Marik wouldn't know what else to do and would be terrified of Caiellis dying and so vent that on the thirteen year old, but Alexander would not let that happen. Cai deserved the best when he got better, he deserved to have happiness, a loving family and a touch of peace and joy now that the war had to all intents and purposes ended, and if the seventeen year old had to physically fight and break bones to make that happen then break bones he would do with no compunctions.

Realising that he had let himself drift into thought in a way that he didn't often to but knew that he would have to get used to until his baby brother recovered, Alexander walked slowly across the room again, repressing the urge to punch a hole (or multiple) in the wall because of what had happened, and sat down with a weary sigh next to his father, ignoring the fact that his ribs hurt despite the reality that they had been bound (forcing him to put on new clothes usually reserved for patients as well which were clean and to be honest felt a lot better than the bloodstained outfit he had been wearing even if he had thought it was a waste of time as it had stopped him from getting back to his brother for longer) as they were broken and would take a few days to repair properly even with his Lucerna vitality.

"You … you should get that seen to," Alex said in a small voice, stammering slightly in a way that he was not used to because he didn't want to distract his father from staring at Caiellis's operation with old and sad eyes. Marik jumped back, flinching away from Alexander for a second before he brought his body under control, having not noticed his eldest son (who only looked slightly better as the emotional agony was much worse than the physical wounds he had suffered, lines of worry and grief still on the boy's pale face) arriving in the room once again. His mind then processed what the boy was said, and even though it went against what he had told his son to do he shook his head slowly.

He wasn't going to leave Caiellis until his youngest child's condition improved enough so that he was satisfied enough to be able to tear his eyes away from the small, thin boy, even though he knew that the wound in his stomach would eventually kill him and leaving it too long with the internal bleeding could have disastrous consequences. He would have it seen to and healed in time, and he could appreciate his son's concern, but he couldn't leave Caiellis because it was his fault that the boy was in this state in the first place for numerous reasons, most prominently that it had been Marik that inflicted many of the physical and mental wounds, the latter much worse than the former.

If he was being honest he had no idea how long his eldest son had spent out of the room. The silent vigil over Caiellis was lengthy, interminable and of an indeterminable amount of time as his son was healed of wounds that easily could kill him if they were left untreated for too long, but the king could have sat there forever even with his wounds. His eyes flicked to Alexander for a moment, checking on his condition which was much less than good, but the wounds were ones that neither Marik nor the doctors could help with. He sighed, then repressed it, because he had no right to sigh, not when his sons were like this because of him.

Alexander slumped back down in the seat next to him, and Marik wished he could offer up some form of comfort, but he had expended all of his words to his eldest son and he couldn't find any more that would repair the emptiness within them both, emptiness that would only be filled when Caiellis recovered and they could see his smile again, something that the king had barely been blessed with at all though that was none of the thirteen year old's fault and all of his father's.

"Angels above … dad … why did this have to happen to him?" Alexander murmured, almost breathless from fear for his brother eating away at him from the inside, though he wasn't really expecting an answer and Marik did not know one that he could give him so he stayed silent. He turned back to his youngest son once more, watching him with such an intensity that he hadn't given to the boy a while, not even after the battle of Fort Egetau when Caiellis had been hurt then, not even in his arguments with the boy because then he paid more attention to the insolent words his son shouted at him and the way that he would respond.

If only he had paid more attention.

If only he had wondered why he was so, so angry with his youngest son, as while it had been understandable to be angry with the boy it had been turned into something violent and nasty that Marik wouldn't have believed himself possible of with one of his precious little boys by the horror infecting his mind from within, and if he had thought more about that instead of how he could curb Caiellis's defiance and make him into the perfect little prince then he might have been able to purge it from him before it made him do what he had done.

If only he had pondered more about why Caiellis always fought against him so hard, why his son was angry and sullen with him but nobody else, if only he had thought to ask his son why he was like that and what he could do to genuinely make himself better in the boy's eyes. If only he had communicated with his youngest son who had only recently entered his teenage years and was on the verge of leaving them already as the boy's father instead of a commander and ruler, as a man that Caiellis could trust and respect instead of one that didn't understand him at all.

If only he had made his son understand how much he loved the boy, how much both him and Alexander meant to him, and that Caiellis's defiance and his inability to interact with his son hurt him precisely as much as it did Caiellis, that he reacted so badly to his insubordination because he loved him and was scared for him. If only he had been willing to admit that to himself instead of putting it off as him being unable to interact with his son because of a nine year gap in seeing him, if only he had been willing to confess to himself how damn much he loved both of his children before he ripped apart Caiellis's self-esteem and sense of self-worth and drove him to cutting himself to relieve the pressure.

Then none of this would have happened, his youngest son wouldn't be attached to what seemed like tens of medical machines powered by healing mana and surrounded by doctors who had an almost impossible job of repairing nearly insurmountable wounds. Caiellis's blueness had barely faded even with the oxygen mask, still tingeing his lips as well as the blood that had at least stopped fountaining and bubbling up from his mouth instead of exhalations of air, and that scared the king more than the most powerful demons he had faced down and fought against.

He wanted to go to his son's side, to rip away all of the medical equipment and push aside all of the doctors, to haul his weightless son into his father's arms again and embrace him close once again, to make the contact with his youngest son and to be able to feel the small tremors of his heart beating once again, but quickly pushed down the ridiculous notion because that would be a certain way to ensure that Caiellis did end up dead. He wished he could do something, anything, to help his youngest son, even if that help was superficial and only good for making him feel more comfortable, even if that help would only end in Marik feeling slightly better himself no matter how selfish that was.

He angled his gaze slightly at his brooding eldest once again who was clearly traumatized by seeing his younger brother like he was, tempted to pull the boy into his arms once again but unable to move and do so, wanting to say something to help Alexander as well but nothing he could say would do anything to stave off the sadness. Words were pointless, promises that he couldn't keep and assurances that he knew deep down were meaningless platitudes because Caiellis's life was out of his hands now.

As he simultaneously watched both his sons, it hit Marik again that he easily could have lost both of them thanks to his inability to keep them safe. Alexander chewed on his bottom lip, nibbling at it nervously like some form of animal, and Marik thought he should probably do something to stop that before the boy made it start bleeding but knew that if he was going to break the thick silence that had descended it would have to be with something important.

Marik knew he couldn't put if off any longer. Alexander had to know, before Caiellis woke up, and there was no better time to say it because it was horrible news no matter when he revealed it and it would be easier for the boy to digest it now and to have mulled over it before Caiellis awakened or got any worse.

Placing a hand on the boy's shoulder to get his attention, feeling how Alexander's shoulder was muscular and broad but still had a hint of teenage boniness to it that would fade in a year or two, reminding the king that he was still not yet an adult, still very young and tender himself, he cleared his throat, coughing up blood that he tried to mask with his hand that was already red with it, and said, "Alexander. I need to speak with you. In private."

The boy was about to object, to tell his dad that he had only just left the room that his little brother was in and that he would be damned if he was going to do that again now that he had returned to stay with Caiellis for as long as possible, but all his protests died in his throat when he turned and saw the look in his father's eyes. It was grim, determined, and very, very serious, and Alexander would have quivered underneath such a piercing stare if his brother hadn't been so wounded and he had seen much worse on this day to have a gaze rattle him.

"We can go over there in the place usually reserved for the observation of patients by their family members and friends," the king told the boy who looked like he was going to loudly yell that there was no way he was leaving Caiellis for a second time and needed to be able to see what was going on with his little brother. There was an area to the right of the room that Alexander and Marik should really have been in already with glass separating them from the doctors and their patient, and the king continued, "We do not need to stop watching your brother or leave him. I only need to speak to you in private."
Alexander felt a sinking feeling in his gut as he wondered what could possibly be so bad that the doctors couldn't hear it even in small snippets because for one the chairs at the back of the large room were quite far away from the operating table, too far away for the Ordo Medella operatives to be able to listen in on their conversation if it was spoken at a normal volume even if they wanted to, which they wouldn't considering they were utterly focussed upon saving Caiellis's life. Something that required them leaving a room full of people who wouldn't be listening to them at all was definitely something that the boy should be worried about, and he instinctively knew that it would have something to do with his baby brother.

"Alright," he murmured, not that his father needed his confirmation or permission to drag him out of his seat and into the familial booth that served as a form of private waiting room which none of them had used yet, and stood up, his eyes not leaving his little brother who he would have to leave the room of once again, although he would be extremely close by still. He wanted to brush Caiellis's hair out of his eyes like he did when he was feeling particularly affectionate or it was annoying him too much, as the brown hair that had blood and sweat crusted on it was the least of the doctors' concerns and was covering one of the boy's shut eyes, but that was ridiculous and Alex had to content himself with internally hoping for his younger brother and being able to comfort him when the direness of the situation died down enough so that he could be beside the younger adolescent.

The seventeen year old followed his father to the small space that also had a few chairs in it, non of the surgeons noticing their seemingly random departure to that section of the surgery, too intently concentrated upon the fragile hold upon life their young patient had – and even if they did it wasn't their place to question their Lucerna rulers. The boy followed his father's gaze to the window, watching his younger brother again and wondering how badly Cai was in pain, how long it would take him before he woke up, how long it would take one of the doctors to tell them what exactly was afflicting his younger brother and what they could do to help him.

Marik elected to remain upright in the room, which indicated to Alexander that either this would not take very long and they would be in there with Caiellis once again or he was in too much pain to have to sit down and stand back up again, and when Alex finally managed to pull his eyes away from where his vision was glued upon his thirteen year old brother to look into his father's eyes the man put two large hands on his shoulders, squeezing them gently and comfortingly but firmly and reassuringly in a way that only a father or a big brother could do (or an "Uncle" if Tristram counted as well, though Alex had only used the nicknames for the current Light-bearers of Capitalia Lux to get his younger brother to be more comfortable with them because the boy really had only been a baby-toddler at that time).

Alexander could still see the same look in his dad's eyes, but this time it was saturated with huge amounts of guilt and self-loathing, the sort of thing he had only seen once, when he had confronted the man over him putting his hands round Cai's neck after he had duelled against his younger brother. This was much, much worse than that, and the boy gulped anxiously before the man started speaking because he knew that if any emotion made its way into his dad's blue orbs then it was extremely strong and he couldn't be bothered repressing it.

"Before I begin and tell you what I am going to, I want you to know that absolutely none of this is your fault, my son," Marik told the eldest prince, who would have verbally objected if he could have mustered up the courage within him to tell his father that. Instead, he kept quiet, knowing that while it was nice of his dad to be thinking of that all of this was his fault and nothing Marik said could change that simple fact. "And I do not want you to ask any questions at all until I have finished and told you everything. Is that understood, Alexander?"
The boy nodded, his mouth incredibly dry like a miniature sandstorm was swirling around within it, but it had been this way for several hours now and the doctor who had tended to him for as long as she had been able to before he got too agitated hadn't had the time to give him a drink of water, so he pushed the sensation to the back of his mind. The prince was sure that if he focussed intently on the sensation, he could still taste his brother's coppery blood in his mouth, and that made him want to throw up and pour acid down onto his tongue to burn the flavour of bloody iron away.

He was dreading what his father was going to tell him, because down in the depths of his psyche he already had an inkling of what it could be, but what was even worse was that he knew that it would be much more severe and grievous than what he could imagine in his darkest dreams.

Marik nodded back, completely disregarding the feeling of light-headedness and nausea that poured through him, the latter because of what he was about to say that made him want to vomit until every single thing in his body was retched out of it, and kept his gaze firmly focussed on his son's eyes to make sure that this would not be too much for him, that this would not break him even more after being almost snapped in half by the injuries his younger brother had sustained. Alexander was only seventeen, and for a moment as he stared into his son's young eyes that were scared and traumatized by what he had seen and what he had been forced to do to get his brother breathing again but trying to stay brave for his dad, he considered simply hugging his son and telling him another time, maybe never.

No. I can't do that, because he needs to know for everyone's sake. If Caiellis wakes up before I have told him and immediately tries to get away from me, which I am sure he will because of what he last saw from me, what I last said to him and what I have done to him, and then Alexander doesn't know what is going on it could easily be extremely traumatic for both of them. My son needs to know, he deserves to know, and I am sure that he can take it. He is strong, bless his soul, and honestly I should probably be more worried about myself than him when I tell him what truly happened.

The mental joke was a complete failure and Marik resolved to try and interject no more humour into the situation even if it was silent and grim.

He looked down at his hands, hands still stained by his son's blood, clenching them into fists of anger and then relaxing them. These were the hands that had punched, hit, choked and damaged his youngest son, and knew that he needed Alexander to know the truth of what had happened to Caiellis.

"Alexander. I will start by telling you that it was not the Archdemon Rakdos that killed Caiellis. Your younger brother completely destroyed the demon in a burst of power that was stronger than I have ever seen from him before. No, Caiellis survived the battle with the Lord of Riots, though he was extremely wounded as you already know," Marik began, keeping a close eye on his young son to see how he was reacting and satisfied that he should keep going as the boy's eyes widened in shock, though they would be expanding even more when the forty year old said what was coming next. "Your brother woke up a few minutes after killing the demon, and chose to take his own life."

There was no easy way to say it, and the king had delayed too long, made it too dramatic with his earlier wasting of time by talking about the Archdemon that Caiellis barely managed to slay but did something that would be impossible for some of the greatest warriors on the planet. Alexander's eyes instantly grew to at least twice their size, tears gathering at the corners of them as his face went even more pale, the news reverberating through him like an earthquake of emotional distress. The boy would have fallen over, perhaps even lost consciousness completely, if not for his father's hands gripping his shoulders firmly, and the shock that Marik had barely been able to dispel returned fully.

"W-what?! Are you sure?! Why would he do that?!" Alexander shouted in panic, shuddering in his dad's strong grip that kept him upright as his eyes instantly went to his little brother, then his father, then his brother again and his breathing immediately turned back into hyperventilation as the news crashed through his mind that failed to process it. His heart pounded in his head and in his chest, and if he had been able to think clearly he would have been worried that he was going into cardiac arrest.

He tried to push away from his dad who kept a firm hold on him and prevented him from moving away, though not painfully, to get to his younger brother and somehow do something, although he did not know what because the boy was still unconscious. Fear, pain and anger flared in his head, and the boy suddenly felt the urge to be sick greater than he had done before. Alexander found himself being pushed into a chair on the second time that day, his vision blurring up as his mind considered the awful implications of his brother not actually being killed by the Archdemon like he thought.

But … why? Why would Cai kill himself? Why? I can't … I don't … why would … ?

It took a moment to register within the boy that he had gasped the words out loud, that his dad was rubbing soothing circles on his back in an attempt to keep him calm, but this new revelation was almost too much to handle with all that they had gone through already. To think that Cai had been how he was when Alexander found him, unbreathing and with his heart making no movements to pump blood around his broken body, because he didn't want to live in the world any longer and had tried – and almost succeeded – to kill himself was just too much for the seventeen year old.

"It's alright. It's alright, Alexander. He is safe now. Caiellis is safe now," Marik found himself murmuring, though whether it was for his benefit or the benefit of the boy he was speaking to or both was currently unknown. If only he could be this automatic with comforting Caiellis or responding to his needs, as while he was far from perfect with his eldest son he at least had some knowledge and experience that was the light which led the way for him whereas with his youngest son he was blundering around in the darkness. He shut his eyes for a second before reopening them, refusing to give into the exhaustion that was tenderly brushing at the back of his mind with lullaby tendrils or the temptation to block out the world and imagine that everything was different like he had done in the past when he had been the same age as his youngest son, or in the brief time he got to himself after Emili's murder.

No, he was a father now with a duty to make sure that his sons were emotionally sound and had to be strong for them no matter how bleak the world was becoming – pretending that Caiellis hadn't tried to end his life because of the pain of it, pretending that Emili wasn't dead, pretending that he didn't have two sons broken in different ways and to varying degrees to take care of was not only foolish, but immensely selfish and Marik refused to be that again, not when his sons were involved. Selfishness had been a big factor of getting them into this mess in the first place, and selfishness was not going to get his sons – or any of them, including himself – out of the grave that he had dug for them.

And he had to get them all out quickly before they were buried alive underneath the anguish and grief.

Why my little brother? Why would Cai kill himself? I know he has tried to do it once before … but why now? Why at all? I know his life has been pretty bad recently – let's be real, completely horrible and terrifying – but he should know that … he should know that he is loved … he should know that we all want him … he should know that he has so much to live for …

But then, of course he doesn't. He already risked his life going to the centre of Usnaan … and … and he … so he obviously thought that he wasn't worth anything … that he had things to prove … but … but that doesn't explain … Why, baby brother? Why would you do that to yourself? I don't understand … I don't understand … I'm so sorry, Caiellis … I'm so so sorry … I failed you, little bro … I should have stopped you … I should have been there for you … ANGELS DAMN IT! WHY?!

Once again the boy didn't managed to keep his thoughts to himself, incoherently mumbling the words as he hyperventilated again, breathing in and out so fast that he was going to put himself into a seizure at this rate, and managed to scream out the last few words in between pants for breath. Marik stayed with him all the while, trying to comfort him and get him to calm down by soothing him, but he had never been good at that in the first place and it was clearly not working on his eldest son so he switched his strategy for getting the boy back under control and safe to be more stern. He certainly did not want to end this day with both of his sons in surgery beds, and it was a good job that his first born son was so weak at the moment so that his thrashing didn't cause too much pain to Marik's own wounds.

"Alexander, I need you to listen to me. I need your full attention my son. Look at me. Look at me. That is an order," Marik told him sternly, gripping the boy's chin in one hand with the other on his shoulder and forcing him to stare into his father's eyes. Coddling him and indulging him in his panic attack would get nowhere even if Marik wanted to do it, which did not mean that he had to be harsh and couldn't be gentle at the same time as being forceful. Scared and confused blue eyes met his own resolute gaze, and Marik continued, "I know that this is hard for you, son. It is hard for all of us. And I know that it is a lot to take in right now. But I need you to understand that you cannot blame Caiellis for this at all, alright? Caiellis is not to blame at all for what happened."
"Why didn't you stop him?!" Alexander questioned, his young words halfway between a furious howl of anguished outrage and a child mournfully asking if their dead parent would come back (something the king was sure that his children would have done after Emili was taken away from them). Marik knew that he deserved the feeling of pain for failing to stop his son killing himself as the words lanced like a serrated barb through him, threatening to drag everything out in a bloody spray of emotional agony, and also knew that he had no words to say to his son that would be anywhere near adequate or acceptable for a father. He had failed, and he had no excuses, but he needed his son to listen to him before he hurt himself by panicking.

Perhaps it had been wrong to tell him this now, only less than two hours after they had arrived in Civitas Sol, but then Marik was awful at being a parent and judging other people's moods and had selfishly wanted to get it off of his chest, to tell someone else and his eldest son was the only one that he could. No. Alexander needed to know. If Caiellis had woken up and started screaming at his dad to leave him alone, started having another panic attack and became terrified before he had a chance to explain to Alexander what had happened, then they would all pay for it – especially his youngest son who couldn't be hurt any more.

"I couldn't," Marik replied back as evenly as he could, trying not to let his own emotion seep into his tone, his self-loathing and anger at what had happened. He couldn't stop his voice being frustrated from what they had gone through and terse because of the fact his precious youngest son was still in immense danger due to him, his carelessness and lack of ability to be a good parent. The words came out similar to a growl, but Alexander was calming down enough so that the king could let go of his chin and move further back onto his own seat, hand still on his son's shoulder and eyes still piercing into him to ensure that he was in an acceptable state of mind for them to resume.

Alexander paused in his ranting, taking a deep breath and releasing it as slowly as he could manage to try and get himself back under control. Knowing that Caiellis had been hurt so badly by a demon made him want to smash his fist into a wall until either his hand or the wall was crushed into a pulp, but knowing that his baby brother had tried to take his own life and would have done it without Orzhova's aid in bringing him back from the brink of death made him want to rip apart anyone who had ever laid a finger on his brother with the intent to do harm (including himself and his father) and throw up his insides until everything was dry and empty within him.

It was just so wrong that his kind-hearted, empathetic, gentle and soft little brother had hated his life so much that he wanted to end it. Caiellis didn't have the perfect life, in fact he had a pretty awful one, and it was obvious that something had happened whilst he was fighting the Archdemon Rakdos that had pushed him over the edge completely and motivated him into trying and almost succeeding at killing himself. Alexander had felt the sheer sadness and hatred in that final blast of mana the kid had emitted which hand ended the Lord of Riots and destroyed the Tempest of Craving as well, and knew that he had not had Orzhova Summoned at the time because he could only sense his brother's mana and not the Angel of the Black Sun's.

His heart had ached for the little guy even then, and now it was being wrenched in half because of all that had happened to him. Alex knew which wound it was that his little brother had used to end all of the pain and the anguish of his life, the one on his throat that was by far the most clinical and painless out of all of the injuries, but that did not matter at all because the boy had chosen to end his life. It hurt Alexander to think that even with how he acted towards his brother it hadn't been good enough to stop him from doing what he had done, which just went to show how inadequate of a big brother he was.

"I'm sorry … it's just ..." Alex gave up at trying to speak, wiping tears from his eyes that had sprung up and then brutally brushing more away, determined not to cry in front of his father as he looked over at his smaller sibling once again, the pain in Caiellis's features reflecting what must have been going on in his heart. Marik's expression softened again, and he blew out a sad breath that was full of heart wrenching guilt which even then failed to encapsulate how much he hated himself for what he had allowed to occur and had a gigantic part in causing. "I know. I know it is hard to take it all in. But you have to understand that you cannot blame your brother for this at all. Not with what happened."

I'm not blaming him, angels damn it! Alexander could have shouted at his dad if he had been able to muster up the anger, but now that the rage had dissipated to coldness and a hollow feeling that increased the likelihood of him being sick even more. He knew that his father was only trying to ensure that he didn't take out the anger that he felt on his younger brother, but surely Marik would already know that?

Surely he should already know that Alexander wasn't angry at Caiellis at all (well, he was, at the boy not talking to him more about his worries and his concerns, but he understood that his quiet younger brother who had once worn his emotions on his sleeve and had always been willing to ask for help had developed into a shy and introverted teenager, but that wasn't Cai's fault), not after what he had seen his brother go through?

Surely he should know that if he was going to be angry at anyone, it was going to be himself and his father? Actually, thinking about that, Marik hadn't said anything about Alexander not being angry at him, probably because he understood completely that he had had some part in making his youngest son commit suicide, and the hollow look in his dad's eyes that was infused and dripping with self-loathing confirmed that. Of course dad was going to start treating Caiellis differently once he got through this, although Alexander was sure that a stern lecture in not committing suicide and that his life was worth living would definitely be in order.

Instead all the seventeen year old could do was nod meekly in agreement, glad that his father had made him sit down in these seats in the official waiting room (probably when the cases of the patients weren't so bad, or perhaps the room had been expanded over the years to accommodate having seating inside so that the relatives of the patient could be in the same room without getting in the way of the Ordo Medella staff) because he knew that he wouldn't be able to stand up the way that his vision was blurring and his head hurt again.

"Alexander, there is no easy way to say this. I was possessed by the horror of Aksua that managed to get inside of me when I killed the vampire bitch after she had wounded you," Marik stated, trying to control the trembling of his voice and stay strong for his eldest son who rocked back slightly, "It didn't manifest itself much or influence many of my decisions at all, waiting and festering in my mind until it could take over the second I arrived in the centre of Usnaan to help your brother against the Archdemon that had been Summoned there. When I awoke I was in the Mind Realm, and the bastard creature forced me into my memories as it controlled my body and turned it against Caiellis. I couldn't break out from its hold upon my mind. I was too weak. I ..."

Marik had to remove his hand from his son's shoulder his fist was beginning to clench that hard, not wanting to hurt his eldest boy, and took a deep breath to try and stop himself from shuddering in anger – something that he did not succeed in at all. He continued, his eyes drifting over Caiellis once again as a lump that must have been the pieces of his close to completely shattered heart rising up out of his chest made its way into his throat, and he couldn't stop the tears from welling up in his blue orbs again, "It showed me what I did to him, how it forced me to try and kill him when he was already exhausted and terrified by the Lord of Riots. It manipulated my anger at him taking off like he did into something horrible, and made me aware that it had controlled and heightened my rage before – when I put my hands around Caiellis's throat … and made the arguments worse, though at that time it was not strong enough to possess me completely like it did only a few hours ago when we were still fighting."

Alexander panted out his pain, his eyes searching his father's face who was looking over at the stricken form of his youngest son who was almost completely motionless apart from the weak and painful rise and fall of his small chest that was too fast as his body tried to compensate for the abnormally low amount of oxygen inhaled in each short breath. The teenager tried to process everything in his exhausted mind, his wounds still hurting quite a bit though it was negligible when balanced out against the torture in his young heart, a particle of weightless dust measured alongside the combined mass of a thousand worlds.

"How … I mean … Are you sure that is what happened …? Are you that is what it showed you? We know … we know that the forces of the darkness lie ..." Alexander stuttered, his voice uncharacteristically stammering and hesitant, and his father nodded his head with grim sadness, grief saturating his every action. "I am sure. I know what I saw, Alexander. I … I did this to Caiellis. This is my fault, my burden to bear, and I will not have you blaming yourself for what happened to your younger brother. I hurt him. I was possessed, too weak to root out the corruption before it was too late … and by that time …"

Marik's sentence cut off, the man unwilling to voice exactly what had occurred despite the fact that the evidence of it was plain to see through the transparent glass of the window into the surgery in the adjacent room to them. He steeled himself, Alexander deserved to know what happened to his younger brother, even though Marik was sure that he wouldn't be able to tell the middle Lucerna everything.

He wasn't willing to repeat what vile damnations of his second son had been forced out of his lips by the parasite inside of his mind, perverting and corrupting everything and making him hurt his own son emotionally as well as physically. There would be time for that later, once Caiellis was safe and in a stable state, but right now Marik couldn't bring himself to make his eldest son even more distraught and hurt than he already was, couldn't bring himself to say the things that he had told his youngest son as his hands inflicted many of the bruises upon the thirteen year old and killed him.

With what he had done and said, he could understand perfectly well why his youngest son had gone as far as he had done, even though he hated the fact that his son had listened to him and believed him as he strangled him. Marik had considered ending his own life before in the distant past after a particularly brutal argument with his own father which had ended in the thirteen year old him picking numerous bruises and being told that he was a disobedient little brat and unworthy of the title of Lucerna, and that had been nothing at all compared to what his youngest son had gone through – and he hadn't even been allowed to see what the demon scum had shown the boy through the dark magic it had cast as they had simply looked like displays of dark letters to the king but obviously were not otherwise they wouldn't have provoked such a response from Caiellis.

"I saw Caiellis draw the blade across his throat after killing the Lord of Riots," Marik murmured quietly after a few seconds of a silence in which the tension and anguish was thick enough to take a bite out of, thick enough to feed an entire metropolis for a week on a melancholy diet of suffering and guilt. Alex inhaled sharply again as his father remembered the scene that would remain with him until the day he died – his precious and vulnerable youngest son, badly hurt but alive and in immense pain, crying his eyes out even with them shut, distressed, injured, and all alone with no one to help him or take the sadness away. It only happened a few hours ago, and it was miraculous that Caiellis was still alive now, but Marik didn't think it was a miracle, he couldn't after all that had occurred.

He needed his youngest son to survive through this and recover, because he knew that he wouldn't be able to live with the thought that the boy had died not knowing truly how much his father loved him, that the thirteen year old had cut his life short because of his dad, and he was fully aware that he wouldn't be able to continue being a father without his youngest son.

"And I couldn't do anything to stop him," Marik growled, his voice full of frustration and hatred directed towards himself, and he felt like smashing his fist into the chair below him but giving into the rage that had sprung up because of how wounded and hurt little Caiellis had become would accomplish nothing, neither would letting tears run down his face again help anyone and if anything it would only harm Alexander more. Marik's voice was furious with himself and hollow, terse and scared for his youngest son that he had barely been able to spend any time with but couldn't live properly without, and even though the way he was saying it could evoke that sort of response from others the king did not want his son's pity.

He turned round to Alexander, sensing the boy tensing up again and hearing his pained and angry and terrified breathing, feeling old and weary and completely exhausted but unwilling to give into any of these things whilst his sons still needed his help. There was a flash of fury in the boy's wide blue eyes, but it wasn't enough, Alexander was too tired and shocked to be truly angry, and Marik almost wished that it was more, that his son would be so furious with him that he would shut his father out or even physically attack him.

He wanted Alexander to blame him, because it was his fault and it would give his eldest son a release, an outlet, something to direct his brotherly fury at instead of bottling up inside and directing it at himself because he knew for certain that Alexander would be blaming himself for what happened as well as that was how the seventeen year old worked, particularly when it came to the sweet spot of his smaller brother being harmed, but it seemed like past being angry at him for forcing Caiellis to think that he was useless and believe that he had so much to prove that he would leave the relative safety of his family's side to end the Tempest of Craving alone Alexander did not blame him for what had occurred.

The forty year old hadn't intended to make the horror's dominion of his mind into an excuse for what had happened to the youngest member of his once perfect family, because it wasn't at all, he had only wanted his eldest son to know so that he would be prepared for Caiellis's reaction when he woke up. But instead of anger in his son's eyes there was just pain and sorrow that was far stronger than whatever fury he may have felt, and the king hated seeing his son this way, because it meant that he could do barely anything to help.

He could have taken Alexander's anger, endured his rage that would have been released upon the king, but he could not erase his sadness more than he had already done through his attempts at comforting and soothing the boy's woes – the only one who could do that was Caiellis, who was currently unconscious and recovering from wounds that had killed him before Orzhova brought him back prior to his soul entering the paradise it deserved to go to and meeting his mother once again, and would have definitely had him dead before they even arrived at the City of the Sun's Ordo Medella hospital if he didn't have the blood of kings running through his veins and making him able to cling to life when all hope seemed lost.

Sudden clarity exploded in Alex's mind, and while it was hardly evocative of relief nor was it something that made the pain of seeing his younger brother so hurt, it was something that had only just occurred to him now when he managed to think past the awful reality that Cai had commit suicide because he couldn't bear to live any longer as his father had apparently turned on him. He scanned his father's face again before saying quietly, "So, dad, this wasn't your fault."

Marik sighed, this time letting it happen instead of holding it back even though he didn't deserve it, wishing that his eldest son wasn't so selfless and didn't believe in him so much because he had done nothing to deserve the devotion that Alexander showed him. He instantly replied, "Yes, this is my fault. Caiellis killed himself thinking that I hated him whether you want to blame me or not, and I was not strong enough to force the horror out of my mind and come to his aid when he needed it the most. His wounds are my fault, Alexander, and there is no disputing that."

"But the horror made you do that to him. The vampire bitch's horror made you angry with him even before that as well," Alex replied, protesting against his dad blaming himself for what had happened now that he knew the true root of the problem between his father and baby brother, why dad had acted so violently towards Caiellis and done things that the seventeen year old had never thought that his father would be able to do to one of his sons even with him changing over the course of the civil war like anyone would when faced with the death of their beloved wife, the evacuation of their children to places where even they didn't know for their safety, the betrayal of the twin brother they had trusted and loved and the harsh reality that nothing would return to the happiness that it used to be filled with.

Besides, Cai himself had been trapped within his head by Aksua's Summoning that was apparently able to survive as an Unbound without returning to Sancturia to regenerate its essence, and while Alex would like to believe that he was stronger than that, the grim fact that his dad, the strongest person he knew, hadn't been able to force it out of his mind even while it was showing him attacking his second son in a rage "The horror-"

"The horror latched onto a conflict that was already in place," Marik ground out sternly, his harsh voice brooking no dissent from his eldest son who was already picking at straws to try and blame someone else but his father for what had happened so that he didn't have to come to terms with his family being torn apart again, "A conflict that I should have put down by showing love to Caiellis instead of censure and anger. I should have held him close and comforted him after you yourself almost died instead of blaming him for what had happened and letting my anger get out of control, which was before the horror would have been able to do much about it. This is my fault whether you like it or not, son, and I will be the one to take the blame for what has happened to Caiellis, not you."

The two stayed silent for a moment as Marik let that sink in, hoping that it had worked but knowing that Alexander would probably continue to think as he was already. But he would not have the boy blame himself for what had been done to his younger brother when there had been absolutely nothing that he could do to help him, and while if Marik had been inclined he could have disciplined the seventeen year old for running off into the City of Pleasure after his brother and leaving his father as well now was not the time nor the place for that, not after all that had become of his family. Not after how hurt Caiellis had got.

"The fact that the horror infected my mind does not excuse my actions before or during the battle," Marik told the younger Lucerna, staring over at Caiellis once more to make sure that nothing had gone any worse – and while that may have been the case it wasn't reassuring at all that nothing seemed to be better, machines and magical light surrounding him and cocooning him in a shell of things that would hopefully save him from the horrible wounds he had sustained, although none of them could repair his emotional state and that would be his dad's job once he woke up. "But it is true that I would never lay a hand on either of you with the intent to do harm normally, and I especially wouldn't wrap my hands around Caiellis's throat for any reason at all."

"Did Cai …?" Alexander asked anxiously, pointing at the horrible wounds on Marik's lower abdomen which the king knew would look much worse without his armour being worn on them and concealing a lot of the damage, and the king shook his head. In any other situation he would have smiled ruefully, proudly and grimly, but right now his lips didn't even curl slightly upwards at all.

Caiellis had had the chance to hurt him in defeating him, which if the situation had been between Marik and his own father the present king of Lucael would definitely had done after being strangled near to death, told that he was a failure, a burden, a weight around all of their necks and should never have been born (which he was sure that was how his father felt even though he never said the words – as if Marik had not been born, if the king's mother hadn't had twins, then she would never have died in giving birth to not one but two Lucernas and having all of her mana drained out of them in the pregnancy and birth of two incredibly powerful boys).

But Caiellis was so gentle, so innocent, and most of all believed his dad's words so much that he didn't want to hurt the man any more than he had apparently already done. Marik had seen the look in his son's eyes, the hollow, lost sadness that had barely been repressed through the second stage of their fight now that the sheer terror had dissipated somewhat, the hurt of what his father had been forced to say to him that could not be further from the truth of his thoughts, and he knew that the boy had taken everything to heart instead of railing against it and fighting against the words.

He had given into them because his self-esteem had already been reduced so much that it was utterly believable for him that his dad would say such things and try to kill him even as it hurt, and it showed that Caiellis did now blame himself for his mother's death if he hadn't already which was utterly absurd because he had only been four at the time and Emili had chosen willingly to die protecting him and Alexander.

It made the king ache inside to think that his baby boy believed that he was to blame for what had happened to his beloved mother despite his own age, because even though Marik had never been directly told it by his own father he knew that the man had blamed him, the second son that he had never expected to have because twins had never happened before in the Lucerna line, he had always thought that Garius held him at stake for the death of his own mother – but that was much better than this because he hadn't had to watch her die right in front of his eyes and be able to do nothing about it like Caiellis (and Marik himself) had with Emili and been traumatised by the images.

Caiellis hadn't deserved any of that, he didn't deserve any of this, and his son hadn't even hurt Marik at all in subduing him peacefully even with all that the king had done to his youngest child, even with all that he had hurt the boy. The timbre of his voice took on a mournful tinge interspersed with shame and self-loathing as he responded, "No, Alexander. Caiellis didn't hurt me at all even when I was being forced into attacking him as the Archdemon watched us. He dealt with me by casting a spell that forced me into a sleep and protected me from any potential attack so long as it lasted before fighting the Lord of Riots again. I sustained these wounds – which are nothing – when I fought against the Enforcer-general Fraetus Etin on the way to your brother."

"Caiellis wouldn't ever mean to hurt any of us," the younger male replied softly as he gazed at the cherubic but pained visage of his little brother in the operating bed as the white-clad doctors (some of whom had their outfits now covered in crimson blood from their young patient) moved around him and tended to him. Marik agreed with a nod of his head, wondering what he had done to deserve such wonderful sons given to him by a truly amazing wife and pondering how he could have ever not cherished them as much as he had done before the civil war and before this point. He was going to make sure they knew how precious they were, that was for certain, and while Marik had always found it hard to show love, especially after the betrayal of his brother when dealing with his children again, and would never be as happy as he had been and may revert to being as cold as he usually was he needed to ensure that Caiellis and Alexander were aware of how much love he had for them and how valuable they were to him, as his sons and people not just as potential heirs and princes.

You are going to know just how much I love you, Caiellis, the king thought, resting a hand on his son's shoulder after a moment's hesitation as tears welled up in both of their eyes, and Alexander turned back to him, looking for guidance once again as he murmured, "I just … I just can't imagine what must have been going through his head when he … when he … it must have been horrible..."
Marik nodded his head sadly once again, feeling what his eldest was himself, though he had seen his youngest son in the most vulnerable position of his young life when he had taken it away from himself to try and free himself from the grief and anguish that was flooding him and drowning the little happiness within him. He knew why Alexander would be struggling to visualise it, and he hoped for his first born son's sake that he would never know or have to think the same way as his little brother, that he would be kept from that forever like Caiellis should have been, because he knew that his eldest son would have been in an even worse state if he had been in Marik's position and had seen the boy crying and sobbing as he tried to hold the knife in his hands steady. Marik was honestly surprised that he was managing to keep control of himself knowing what he did, knowing that he had caused this to happen to his beloved youngest son and knowing that the boy had chosen to end his own life rather than live on in a world where his father hated him and thought he should have never been born. If only he had told Caiellis how wrong that was beforehand, if only he had shown love to his son, but even then the king wasn't sure that would do anything.

No. That wasn't true at all. It would have done a lot, because Caiellis wouldn't have believed it was his father doing this to him.

If Marik hadn't been so harsh on him, so admonishing, so angry with him whenever he made a mistake or chose not to follow orders (what had possessed him to humiliate the boy in front of the entire strategium party when he arrived late with the armies of Scientia Mos because Caiellis had believed and been told that his dad was fine with it? It might have been the horror, but even so Marik hadn't felt the feeling that he had any other time the mind invader controlled him and he could still remember the reasons that he thought had been good enough at the time – though he had been planning to embrace his son after that, but when Caiellis had reacted like any normal teenager would that had been thrown out of the figurative window), then Caiellis might have had a glimmer of hope that it hadn't been him whereas in reality he had had no hope at all, no reason to believe that past memories he had been told were false because he had only been four or younger at the time.

"Come on. We should go back into the room," Marik said, not wanting to break the silence but wanting to return to being closer to his youngest son, and Alexander nodded, his eyes almost blank apart from the sadness within them and the boy more withdrawn than Marik had ever seen him, pulled inside of himself by what he had been told and the awful truth that his baby brother had found life not worth living any longer. He followed his father meekly, sinking down in the chair behind him, thinking about how horrible things must have been for his younger brother and hating how he had been too weak to protect Cai from it, before he heard a voice that was calling out his name.

Startled, he blinked, clearing his vision from the tears that stung as they blurred it and the fact that he had sat for an unclear amount of time as the seconds blended into the minutes and passed over him without him realising with his eyes open, unblinking and fixed upon his younger brother. He looked up, not wanting to tear his eyes away from Cai as he was convinced that if he gazed away from his brother any more he would be tempting fate to ensure that something bad happened, wiping his eyes free of tears because only one of them here had the proper reasons for crying and he was currently unconscious, and met the sympathetic face of Choirmaster Esmelde stood in front of him and dad, who had also risen to his feet.

"How is he?" Marik asked instantly, not giving the woman time to open her mouth and say what she had been going to, and Alex's anguished mind concluded that dad must have said his name to try and rouse him from whatever distracted stupor he had fallen into while staring at the wounded form of his younger brother as the doctor came over to them. Esmelde tried to smile, she really did, but what her lips curled into was more of a grimace and there was only grim determination in her eyes as she gazed upon the two Lucernas. Alexander got to his feet as well, energised into action by the prospect of hearing about what his younger brother was like, what was currently affecting him the most and how fast he would recover. He felt he should stand up, because his brother deserved it and he wasn't going to stay sat down when there was news about Caiellis.

Alexander looked at the Ordo Medella doctor almost in fear, his eyes lit up in desperate hope as she coughed, wanting her words to be as clear as possible after driving herself to almost hoarseness from her constant singing of the words of healing and salvation as they healed the boy. She turned to the king, a question in her eyes, and the man quickly said, "Whatever there is to say, Alexander can hear it as well."

The boy felt the icy pit at the bottom of his stomach beginning to grow in size as he heard the words, knowing that if the information that was about to be divulged from the doctor had been considered that something the distraught big brother might not be able to listen to then it was almost certainly going to be bad. If the woman was feeling any discomfort from having the two pairs of transfixing blue eyes piercing into her from the Lucerna relatives of her patient then she didn't give away any visible signs of it. She steeled herself, and told them, "Well, he is stable for now."

That was a start, but it was not really reassuring and honestly it wasn't meant to be, Alex knew, as Esmelde continued, "But I am afraid that Prince Caiellis had slipped into a restorative coma. When deprived of oxygen for as long as he had been, the body makes choices and begins to shut down anything inessential for its survival."

She looked at Marik and Alexander both for a few seconds each, watching them carefully and intently scrutinising their facial expressions until she was sure that both of them could handle the information before she would continue. The king nodded, and he was listening carefully, but he wasn't sure that it made sense to him. Of course, he understood the words, understood what they meant on a factual level, but he wasn't sure his mind could process truly what was happening to his youngest son. Part of him refused to believe it, but he kept nodding numbly until the woman carried on.

"The wounds he has sustained are awful, and while we have cleaned and healed them as much as we can any of them could develop further complications and become a real concern in the future. There was also to be damage to the liver and perforations in the large intestine but we have already dealt with these and shouldn't be a concern any more. In addition, because of the wound on your son's throat it appears that he has aspirated some of the blood into his lungs, which we are trying to remove now but it is unlikely that we alone can do so because any invasive surgery would damage him even more. Some of the particles may have settled into his lungs, and he still has trouble breathing which is why we have him on the oxygen mask."

Both of the two older Lucernas rocked back in shock, but there was still more to come and Esmelde hated this part of her job the most, apart from failing to save a patient. "Furthermore, we know that he has suffered several seizures, which is extremely worrying because it tells us how much trauma Prince Caiellis's brain has been in from the oxygen deprivation. We have cast warding spells in an attempt to prevent further ones, but that does not eliminate the potential of more seizures which would be very bad for the prince in his current condition. We are of course watching him very closely, and we have also put him on medication through the machinery to aid in the power of the warding spells. Lord Caiellis's mana pool is extremely low to the point where his body won't be able to help the spells at all or heal over time with White mana unless his body regenerates naturally and his condition improves. There is only so much mana we can pour into him before it starts to cause damage."

"Prince Caiellis was hypotherminc when you carried him here, but on the bright side we already have his body temperature returning to normal levels, unless he develops a fever which is quite likely in which case it could increase past that point. In fact, the hypothermia probably saved his life, as the cold would have slowed down his brain and body enough to the point where not as much damage has been inflicted on it as would have been the case if he was at normal temperature."

The woman's voice was tense and professional, and while it was sympathetic to their misery and the way that they were reacting it also had a hint of clinical detachment within it that would have told the two Lucernas that Esmelde had shut off her own emotional response to better deal with the doctors' young patient and ignored the fact that not saving the prince would not only have a young teenager die but would deprive the Lucerna family of another heir to the throne and make the whole nation go into mourning – as well as have untold consequences if the soldiers still in Usnaan heard that their young prince Caiellis who had slain the demon at the heart of the city died and decided to unleash their wrath, exact their righteous vengeance upon the Welkalites still remaining there, if Marik and Alexander had been able to listen to the cues of her voice properly.

She wished that she didn't have to say this, especially in front of the traumatised eldest prince who was staring into her eyes like she was his salvation (which, she reflected, was partly true) or she was some sort of angel like the one inside of him, though both pairs of blue orbs carried large amounts of fear for their youngest family member in the sapphire irises and large pupils. But there was no point in lying, and it couldn't not be said. Esmelde was trying to be as sympathetic and gentle about it as possible, particularly for Prince Alexander's sake, but there was only so much she could do and the royal family deserve to know about Caiellis's condition.

When she paused again, though didn't finish off her statement, Marik felt his insides go even colder, knowing that there would be more news and wanting to grip Alexander's shoulder reassuringly before it was delivered, but his arms were leaden and numb by his side and he couldn't move them to comfort his eldest son. He wanted to pull the boy into a hug, pull both of his sons into a hug and tell them that everything would be alright and that they would all get through this and that he loved them more than anything in the world, but he couldn't move and all he could do was stand as his world fell apart around him again.

"My lords, the fact that Prince Caiellis has been unconscious for so long and went without oxygen for such a large amount of time means that even if he does recover and survive brain damage is a very real possibility for him," she said, her voice comforting and gentle in spite of the horrible words that it spoke into the air, "We have only run preliminary tests so far, and while they haven't resulted in us finding out anything conclusive the seizures he had earlier could be indicative of damage. The brain can only survive so long without access to oxygen, and if it is deprived too long parts of the organ can start to die. We need to run more tests than the ones we have done in the past two hours to try and see if there is any damage."

Alexander processed the information that he had been sat staring at his brother as the world rushed around him for at least a whole hour since his and his father's discussion in the official waiting and observation room since that was about how much time had passed since they had brought his brother here to that conversation. It hadn't felt like two hours since that time. He didn't know how long it had felt, because until his brother woke up time wouldn't regain any meaning for the seventeen year old.
"When will you know?" Marik asked, his voice dangerously close to breaking into another sob as Alexander repressed his own, his eyes drifting from the doctor to the little teenager on the bed who was being healed and helped as much as possible. Marik had considered brain damage, but his mind had pushed it out of the way when it was focussed on saving Caiellis's life and ensuring that the boy kept on living, and now it was rising up again alongside the possibility of the thirteen year old dying.

To think that even if Caiellis did survived this ordeal, there might be permanent damage to his brain, that the intelligence his family was so proud of, the intelligence that Marik had scorned because it meant that he wasn't a perfect soldier and made him question the king might be irrevocably destroyed because of the actions of his father … it didn't bear thinking about, but Marik had to do it anyway because it was his job as a parent to think about things like that. The fact that Caiellis's brightness, his curiosity and his brilliant mind could be damaged permanently with nothing powerful restorative magic nor advanced technology could do about it was almost as bad as the reality that he could die – and perhaps worse, because the king would know that his son would rather be dead than unable to care for himself if his brain was injured that badly, and the Lucaelian people could not have a cripple for a king.

But that didn't matter as much as the fact that Caiellis could lose something that Emili and Marik had always loved about him, something that had defined their baby boy and something that his father had barely been able to see from him. Even worse because Marik had did that to him, and if his mind was damaged so much that he couldn't tell what was happening around him the king wouldn't be able to make sure that his son knew he was loved and cherished.

"We won't know for definite until Caiellis wakes up. And we have little to no idea when that will be, but it is certain that if he does not improve than it may be never," Esmelde's voice cut into Marik's thought, tender and lyrical despite the information that it conveyed that she obviously hadn't wanted to voice – though Marik was glad that she did, because he didn't want any knowledge about his son's state, no matter how dire it was, to be hidden from him. Perhaps he should have had this discussion with one of the doctors away from Alexander, because his son was now ashen pale once again and had suffered too much in this day, emotionally far more than physically but with a substantial amount of the latter as well, but the seventeen year old deserved to know. For better or worse, he deserved to know, and there was no point in keeping Alexander in the dark about what was happening to his little brother.

Still Marik sucked in a painful breath, sure that he was swaying slightly as parts of the world blurred around him and his stomach screamed in pain that wasn't nearly as significant as the agony his heart was being tortured by. He knew that this was even harder on his eldest son than it was on him, because of the boy's much younger age and his greater connection with Caiellis, but with Marik it was arguably just as bad because he knew that what his son had done to himself was motivated by such horrible sadness that was his father's doing. He thought that he should comfort his eldest, but there was nothing that he could do even if he had been able to move his own limbs.

Alexander could barely process the information himself, shaking his head softly as if in defiance as what was said. But the doctor wasn't telling him anything. Yes, while she may have been informing them both on exactly what was wrong with Cai so that they could prepare for anything, and Alex did care about that, he really did, but right now he couldn't. It was still too early for him to be able to be bogged down in all of the wounds his brother had and could have sustained, and these words that Esmelde were speaking were pointless words to the eldest prince at the current moment – all Alexander cared about at the moment was one thing.

"Will he be alright? Will Caiellis be ok?" the boy asked, interrupting his father who had just been about to say something. Choirmaster Esmelde's gaze softened even more, something that the boy hadn't thought was possible, his eyes reminding him of his mum's, although they were the wrong colour and could never be as good as calming him down as those emerald orbs that Cai had inherited.

Her voice was like a parent's when she spoke to him, which Alex hated because he didn't want to be patronised, he just wanted to know and he wasn't the one who needed their pity, "We cannot be certain, Prince Alexander. I'm not going to lie to you and say that your brother will be just fine, because we do not know yet and it is still too early for us to be able to tell. But Prince Cai is a very strong boy; he has a very strong heart, and I am sure that if he has the support of his big brother and his dad then he will find a way to get through this."

"Can we sit next to him now?" he questioned, almost a demand because the ambiguous response of the Ordo Medella operative who had helped to save his own life had irritated him and made him even more agitated for his brother's sake, even though rationally he knew it wasn't her fault. He just wished that she, and to a much lesser extent his father (though with him it was much more understandable considering that he had almost lost both of his sons (and still could lose one) within the short timespan of a single week), would stop treating him like a child, like he was too soft to be able to know what was happening to his baby brother, because he wasn't the one who was hurt, he wasn't the one who had almost died despite being only thirteen years old.

"Of course. While we are still operating on him, there is enough space for you both to stay by his side as we have done almost all that we can do for him at the moment," Esmelde replied, and the seventeen year took that as his cue to drag over the seat behind to his younger brother's side and instantly sit there, brushing his brown hair out of his eyes and clasping hold of one thin and small hand. Marik stayed stood up for a moment, mind still processing what the words of the doctor meant as his son sat down next to his youngest and the other Ordo Medella professionals worked around him like he wasn't even there, although the activity was a lot less urgent and frantic and much slower (though no less efficient) than two hours ago now that Caiellis had stopped moving and all of his wounds that could have been seen to had been seen to.

It was like losing Emili all over again, though even worse this time, and the king made a silent promise to his dead wife that he would do everything in his power to help their sons get back to the healthy and happy state they had been before the civil war. It wasn't a promise that he hadn't already made to himself a thousand times since seeing his youngest son dead, and it wasn't one that needed to be made because Marik was already sure that he could do nothing else but that, but he hadn't made it to his wife yet. However, he needed to focus on the living much more than the dead, and didn't even hear Choirmaster Esmelde when she told him that his wounds really needed repairing and healing before they forced him into unconsciousness or got infected.

She asked again, and he replied quickly, "Later. Please. Just let me stay with my sons." The Choirmaster couldn't deny that, even though it seemed like Surgeon-General Mortan was about ready to force the stubborn king to go get them seen to in spite of his weary words. The man effortlessly carried the chair over to the other side of Caiellis's bed as to not take up too much space on one side even though he would have preferred to be by his eldest son (though if his youngest recovered enough to be moved into the same room that Alexander had when the threat to his life had disappeared he would be able to), gazing at the slumbering and unconscious visage of his youngest son and wondering how it was humanly possible to make as many mistakes as he had in caring for his baby boy.

He remembered Caiellis as a younger baby, when he was born, like what the horror had showed him as it relentlessly forced him into his memories of a happier time to curb his dissidence and nullify his attempts at fleeing or combating its control of his body. He remembered, as he slid into the seat on the left side of Caiellis, his eldest son on the right, the first time he held his youngest son about a month after his premature birth, around when he should have been born had everything gone to plan. Caiellis had been so delicate, so perfect, and his face had been scrunched up in a cry of discontent after being passed from his mother – who had been given the chance to first hold him when he was taken out of the neonatal incubation unit – to his father who had never touched him before (as Emili had when he had been born and had obviously carried him for the eight months before that).

To think that all these later that was still the same, but instead of crying now Caiellis would shout back at him – though the arguments had not been his youngest son's fault even if he did have a part in causing them due to his teenage angst. Marik had rocked the baby soothed him gently, and at the back of his mind the king could still hear the promises he had whispered to his youngest son, those that he had told him whilst he was in his arms and those that had been spoken when Caiellis had still been isolated from the world due to his fragility and those that he had told his son – both of his sons – the night Emili had died murmuring like a rustle of wind at the back of his psyche. They were promises of protection, of love and support. Promises that every father owed their children.

Caiellis shouldn't be able to remember them now, though even if he did recall some they would be fragmented and broken, distorted by the passage of time and the lens of growing up, and Marik knew that he hadn't really followed up on any of them throughout his son's young life. That was going to change, and for once Marik was going to be a father to his son – if it was the last thing that he did.

The king silently and tentatively reached down for one of Caiellis's hands, listening to his eldest son quietly whispering reassurances and support for his unconscious younger brother, probably not even aware that he was saying them out loud. They were comforting words, words that Marik thought were perhaps private and not meant for his ears but words that he digested quietly nonetheless. He had the urge to take off the restraints around his son's thin wrists, not enjoying seeing him strapped down like some sort of rabid animal or raving lunatic, especially now that he was in a restorative coma like Esmelde said, but he was unwilling to disrupt anything much more than simply holding onto his son's only free hand.

The small, thin hand in his two was dwarfed by even one of Marik's own, and the king tried to hold it in a way that would not cause pain nor detriment the gauze that was stuck to it and augmenting the healing process of sealing the cuts on his hands. The king tried to feel the warmth and life that he knew was within the slender and lax fingers. He thought about how the hand held a sword, or how it had grown over the years from being tiny and thicker even thought it was still small now, how it had held his back before the civil war, tiny fingers clutching round his father's larger ones and filling him with love, and how the hand had unconsciously curled into the fabric of his shirt after the first migraine that Marik had ever heard about.

He thought about how small and bony it was, how the fingers stretched out limply, and the way in which it was symbolic of youth and purity as well as representative of how much Caiellis was hurt when one considered the amount of plasters and gauze was placed upon it which one kind soul had taken the time to do, leaving no wound untreated to and attempting to give the youngster the most help and comfort they could.

He thought about how, after the civil war, he had never seen that hand holding a pencil or ink pen, he had never seen it clasping hold of his own willingly, he had never seen it gripped hold of a book and turning the pages with the enthusiasm of an excited scholar despite knowing how much his youngest son liked to read, he had never seen it playing the piano like Caiellis could apparently do to some limited degree (as Tristram had told him after the battle of Fort Egetau for some reason), though of course he had never had much time for that at all.

It was not the hand of a warrior. It was not the hand of a general, a leader of armies. It was not the hand of a demon slayer. It was not even the hand of a Lucerna prince that may be destined to one day be given the throne and rule over the Kingdom of Light like his ancestors before him.

It was the hand of Marik's son. And he didn't ever want to forget that.

It's going to be ok, little brother. You're going to be fine, Caiellis, and I'm going to make sure of that. I'm not leaving you until you wake up, and you'd better wake up. It's all going to be alright, I promise you, little brother. Alex couldn't care less if he was saying the words going through his mind out loud or not, and he certainly didn't care if anyone heard him. This was his younger brother was hurt, and at the moment no one else mattered to him. The room could have been empty, or it could have been filled with people mourning over the state of the youngest prince, but so long as no one was attempting to hurt Cai then Alexander would not pay any attention to them. He hated the thought of his brother being brain damaged with a passion, but it was infinitely preferable to him dying – which was still also a very real possibility even if he didn't want to admit it.

I'm so sorry, Cai. I should have been there for you. I should have listened to your concerns about the Tempest of Craving. Damn it! If I had just listened to you, then not as many soldiers might have died, and this never would have happened to you. No more, alright? Next time, I'm going to make sure that both I and dad listen to your concerns about war. Angels above, I'm going to make sure that you don't have to fight any more, not now that the Welkalites are defeated after your heroic murder of their main demon master. Alexander vowed that he was never going to fail his younger brother again, even though at the back of his mind he knew that he could not keep Caiellis safe for ever – as many things over the past nine years had evidenced.

As Alexander stroked his brother's cold yet sweaty forehead gently, the boy shifted slightly and whimpered in pain, the first movement he had made in a long time – though it was not a good one at all. Alex pulled back his hand for a second, scared that somehow he had damaged his brother as he felt almost all the eyes in the room on the youngest Lucerna, but after a few minutes he resumed the soothing motions with the hand that did not have Caiellis's small right hand clasped gently in it. Evidently some of what he had thought he hadn't said, although this time he made sure that it was all vocal because even if he occasionally seemed like it his younger brother wasn't a telepath.

The seventeen year old didn't even know if Caiellis could hear him or not – before all of this he would have been sure that Caiellis would be able to know his big brother was talking to him whether or not he could distinguish actual words even in his sleep, but now Cai was deeper than he had ever gone before into a slumber from which he might not awaken, and he wasn't reacting at all to the soft tones of his older brother.

But then, it didn't matter if he could hear Alexander or not, because the words needed to be said and even if there was only the slightest, most minuscule possibility that Caiellis could perceive his older brother's voice then Alex would speak to him, whether it helped him or not.

"You're going to recover, baby brother, whether you like it or not. I'm going to make sure that you will be alright. I am going to be with you all the way through this, and I'm not sorry if you get bored of me. I'm so sorry for letting this happen to you, Cai, and I'm going to make it up to you when you wake up. I promise," he whispered, Marik's heart filling with love as he overheard words not meant for him. He turned to his youngest son, who looked no better even with his brother pouring his heart out to him, and found that he himself couldn't say anything. He could only think the words, because he knew that promises to the boy would mean nothing until he awoke and Marik could truly show the love that he had for him.

Alexander wished that his younger brother would wake up, flash his trademark dimples and let Alexander and their dad comfort him and fix everything, but he had heard what the Choirmaster had said and knew that his brother was unlikely to wake up in at least a day's time at the very earliest, and never at the latest. He just wanted his baby brother back so that he could be happy knowing that Caiellis was safe and protected, and wanted to fix what had been broken between the youngest and eldest members of the Lucerna family, especially now that they knew there had been darker forces involved. He wanted his family to be as perfect as it could be now that dad had rediscovered his parenting skills and the constant arguments and fights could stop.

It was several hours later, the three Lucernas in the exact same position as the doctors silently worked around them, disturbing the familial and melancholy silence only when necessary to respect their patients – and not because they were royalty, when Alexander's head finally drooped on his shoulders and his eyes shut, though his hand didn't leave his brother's and remained holding onto it as the arm attached to it half-rested on the bed as well (as Caiellis's hand was on the bed and unable to be moved far from it by the restraints around his slender wrists).

Marik almost smiled when he saw that, not having wanted to tell him to leave and go to bed because Alexander would have almost definitely protested and fought to stay with his younger brother. Caiellis was still too wounded and hurt to have Alexander curling up next to him as well, so Marik was willing to let his eldest son sleep in the chair that he was in currently. He nodded his head in thanks to one of the doctors who passed him a spare blanket, quietly walking over to the other side of the bed and draping it over his seventeen year old son, brushing his blonde hair gently before returning to his own seat.

He remembered a time where Alexander had always vehemently refused to go to bed, insisting that he could stay up longer and play for longer, before falling asleep on the spot if his parents indulged him in that or falling asleep the instant he was tucked into bed. Then again Caiellis had seemed to have that trait as well, though he would never protest against being sent to bed because he didn't want to test his parents.

He wondered how often throughout the civil war Alexander and Caiellis had been forced to sleep in uncomfortable positions, as while the king was used to sleeping in a chair by now (because he slept pretty awfully in normal circumstances anyway) his sons probably wouldn't be. He also knew that Alexander, when he hadn't been suffering nightmares because of Aksua, was a simultaneously lighter yet heavier sleeper than his brother in the way that he could wake up near instantaneously if his body detected a problem but otherwise didn't often awaken during the night to random disturbances or dreams. Apparently, according to Tristram and Tybalt who he had talked about his sons with a reasonable amount (though not nearly enough) in the times he was more open to discussing what they were like, it hadn't always been that way because Alexander was a teenager and liable to want to remain in bed instead of getting up when he wanted to, but he had always slept easier than his younger brother.

In part, Marik attributed that to the fact that his eldest had been in the grip of an induced unconsciousness when his mother had been murdered whereas Caiellis had been awake to watch it all.

"My lord," a voice broke into his thoughts, "I am going to heal your wounds now."

The king turned, unsurprised when he met the stern visage of Surgeon-General Mortan who glowered down at him like he was a delinquent apprentice who had injected their patient with the wrong substances or mumbled the incorrect words to a healing spell. However, his clinical eyes were coloured with sympathy and empathetic pain for the man, and Marik recalled that Mortan had mentioned having children as well. The king was about to protest before the man cut in, "And no, you stubborn so-and-so, you don't have to leave the room. You only need to take off the pieces of armour that are covering it, though I would advise removing it all."

Sighing like a man twice his age and feeling like it, Marik stood up, his vision blurring as he did so and forcing him to cough, wet and sticky liquid that tasted like iron coming up and out of his mouth as he did so. The doctor rolled his eyes for a moment before he called over one of his companions, knowing just from that that the king was bleeding internally. Mortan would ideally have liked to take the younger man into another room to check him out because of how long the wounds had gone untreated – they could present significant health complications – but he knew that the king – the father – wouldn't agree to that at all.

He resolved to silently curse the stubbornness of the Lucerna family when it came to getting help and admitting they were in pain (as it made his job that much harder), muttering insults under his breath, "You're a damn fool, my lord, letting these wounds stay unseen to for so long. A lesser man than yourself without your exalted blood would have passed out or even died by now."

Marik normally would have smiled and joked at the cranky old doctor who had tended to him before, but right now he wasn't in the mood at all and when Mortan gazed into his eyes he saw that and instantly shut up. His eyes strayed to his sons again, their hands still together (though it was only due to Alexander's grip on Caiellis). He hadn't been a good father at all, in fact he had been a complete failure who thrust his sons into dangerous situations and even hurt one of them, no matter that he had been controlled and turned against the boy.

But that was going to change. Marik had realised how much these two youngsters made to him, the last pieces of Emili in this world but so much more than just that, and he was going to protect them and start treating them like they were the most precious things in the world to him instead of just thinking it.

He knew that he wouldn't instantly become the perfect father, that it would be awkward, difficult and downright frustrating at some points, that his family would stretch to breaking point again, but eventually he would prevail and give his sons the happy lives they deserved. And if anyone – man or demon, traitor or external enemy – tried to ruin that, then they would face the wrath of a Lucerna king - one that was fresh out of mercy.