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.

45. Belief

Right, so, my sincerest apologies for the absolutely massive delay on this chapter. However, assuming you wish to read it, there will be a more in depth explanation in the addendum. But for now, I hope you enjoy and thank you for reading.

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"Now you are simply gorgeous! Look at those fiery red eyes, that flawless pale skin, those dark veins! And the power, the hatred! You are a fine specimen indeed! There is much that I can do with you, my exquisite friend. I will preserve your beauty for an eternity!"

.*.*.*.

"When he's scared, he seeks comfort in you."

The words echoed in and out of the young boy's mind, resounding within his head as he glanced up at his mother's kind features, the green eyes alight with fondness and love for her children. She smiled at the gaze of Alexander, before the youngster turned to stare at the windows on the other side of the room as the flashes of coruscating lighting caught his attention.

The four year old's innocent blue orbs widened in a mixture of awe and fear as they reflected the blue incandescence, determined not to let his own fright at the crackling display show, but when a roiling boom of thunder resounded loud enough to shake the entire palace he couldn't stifle a muted whimper, one that he repressed as soon as possible but would have definitely been noticed by his mum.

"How do you know?" he inquired, his voice a whisper as if he was concerned about intruding upon the rumbling song of the thunder, or adversely frightened that speaking would somehow attract the lightning into striking something significantly more tangible than the general outside.

Alexander had been through a few storms before, spending the first coupled huddled against his mum or dad and the next stoically refusing to be scared by the scintillating lighting and deep roaring of the black clouds, but this was by far the most violent tempest the child had ever experienced. Rain battered on the glass of the windows, pounding on the ground and covering everything outside in a sheen of glossy water which reflected the dazzling arcs emanating from above.

The quietness of his high pitched voice meant that it was utterly drowned out by the tempestuous fury of the storm outside, eclipsed by the wrath of the black skies before it reached his mum's ears.

He sat beside the woman on the floor of their nursery, the toys that they had been playing with earlier in the day neatly packed away in the boxes lined across the sides of the room.

A single candle between them cast eerie shadows on the walls, the faint light of the one golden wisp Emili had conjured playing across the room – the storm's power had prevented any more from being lit up, the woman had carefully explained to her four year old, otherwise she would have covered the room in the warm radiance until her children were calm enough to go back to sleep.

This yellow glow was simultaneously contrasted yet complemented by an almost imperceptible purple luminescence from the Lucerna birthmark of the youngest of the royal family, the dark blemish formed into the semblance of a star of both shadows and light which had become drastically more prominent and stark after fading significantly after the infant's Angelic Descent and the kiss of the Angel of the Black Sun emitting the haunting celestiance that it did when the tears of the baby made contact with it, as if it was a reflection of his sadness.

For some reason, mummy had insisted that they both sit in a circle of faintly shimmering light until either the storm abated or daddy got here from the important king work that he was doing, and so far because of the turbulence of this thunderstorm as well as the gentle tone of his mother's voice Alexander hadn't had the inclination to disobey her wishes. Added to that was the lethargy that he was afflicted with due to having been rudely awoken in the middle of the night by the thunder and his terrified younger brother.

"How do you know?" Alex repeated, more loudly this time but still not raising his voice to any extent, rubbing his big blue eyes tiredly with one chubby fist as he gazed up at his mummy, the woman's emerald orbs directed at the chronometer held in her left hand, either checking what the time at this ghastly hour of night was or ensuring that time still ticked at all. More lightning chased after the thunder, splitting the dark sky with a jagged crack and flashing through the windows as Emili blinked, gathering herself and smiling down at her four year old, secretly hoping that the tempest would subside soon and was of natural origin but unwilling to let her worry be imposed onto her children.

"Look at him," the woman gestured towards her sleeping youngest, shifting slightly on the soft carpeted floor (a far cry from the rough wood that had once comprised the entire flooring of the nursery before she had asserted that they should alter it when she had been pregnant with her eldest; hard materials were not suitable for a young child, especially not with how excitable and lovingly active Alexander had turned out, the four year old liable to exhaust himself through endless games and maintain his entertainment level by simply running round in circles and diving across the furniture).

Before he moved to snuggle up next to the woman, Alex quietly glanced down at the warm bundle in his arms, a perturbed expression adorning his chubby young face when he saw that the baby was no longer crying, resting soundly in the embrace of his big brother instead of bawling his eyes out and mewling at the storm outside.

Caiellis had woken up in the middle of the night, the second the thunder began coinciding with the frightened first scream that the baby had released. Nothing that mummy, who had been asleep in the chair within the nursery/bedroom that the youngest Lucernas shared, had done to try and soothe her seven month old had achieved anything. Cai had stubbornly refused to be calmed, sobbing and howling as thunder boomed ahead, and Alex had watched as Emili fretted about the small baby, attempting a number of things from rocking her youngest son to singing a melodic and gentle lullaby over his crying and thrashing, with none of them having any form of success in assuaging the baby's terror at the weather outside, the sound of which resounded throughout the palace.

Alex had got out of his bed and stood close, but not close enough to get in the way of mummy tending to his little brother, wishing that there was something that he could do to aid mum and comfort his younger sibling though not wanting to shove past his mother and help his baby brother – particularly since he knew how good mummy was at aiding both himself and Cai when they were feeling down, or were in pain, or if anything was generally amiss with either of them.

He had known for a fact that there was little that he could do compared to her almost magical ability to both comfort and ease the distress of himself and more recently the baby of the family that had been added only a few months ago.

The queen had politely asked for her eldest son to hold onto her youngest for a few moments whilst she got Caiellis a drink and also imprinted the glimmering pattern of magic onto the floor for them to sit in with glittering light that poured from her fingertips, but as soon as the four year old had wrapped the baby in his affectionate cuddle, saying words that he hoped were soothing and promising to protect his younger brother from the scary display of nature and that the storm could not get to them when they were within the palace (not that he would let it get to Cai in any case), the fussing baby had almost instantaneously calmed himself.

Alexander smiled as he gazed down affectionately at his younger brother, his tired features graced with an expression of love for the smaller boy that he knew he was going to become great friends with when he progressed out of this stage and leant how to walk and talk.

"Wow," he commented, his eyes infused with wonder at the sight as he rested against his mother; Alex's small back leaned against her chest as he continued to hold his now quiet and serene brother, "How did I do that?"

Emili laughed softly at the wonder in her eldest son's voice, her four year old mystified as to how he had managed to stop his brother from sobbing and wailing by doing little more than just holding him in his arms. Caiellis's eyes were shut, not scrunched shut – which in itself was an indication that he was bereft of stress or pain – but gently and peacefully closed, and his tiny and fragile chest rose and fell with each languid breath now that he was settled within sleep once more.

The way that Alexander held onto his younger sibling never failed to melt Emili's heart whenever she gazed upon it; her eldest had a unique understanding of the frailty of their youngest and instead of being forceful and rough like other disgruntled first borns would be when presented with a new addition to the family, one that screamed and howled for attention (although Caiellis was usually quiet, far more quiet than Alexander himself had been at that age), he was tender and gentle with the much smaller male.

Sure, relatively infrequently Emili had been forced to reprimand her first son over the treatment of his younger brother when she caught Alex being a little too harsh, but most of the time she had to repress the urge to instantly quell actions that could be interpreted as unintentionally hurtful or forceful, aware that it was just brotherly love and that Caiellis wouldn't be able to develop properly if she cloistered him away from the world and anything remotely unpleasant, especially not as a Lucerna prince.

Besides, most of the time the youngest descendant of Matalis Ortus Lucerna seemed to enjoy the playful way Alexander sometimes handled him, so there should have been little cause for concern, and she knew how contrite and apologetic Alexander would become if he did accidentally cause his baby brother pain. It was just that she had not yet managed to get over the premature birth of her second son and the month that he had spent within the neonatal incubator to protect him and allow his small and delicate form to build up enough strength to survive without a constant influx of protective mana and defence from anything dangerous outside his little cocoon of safety.

The twenty seven year old doubted that she would ever forget the longest month of her entire life, the days of her youngest tenuously holding onto life and the days that had she not been a parent possessed of the burning and adamant determination that her children would survive to grow up and become their own men she would have been convinced that they were going to lose Caiellis.

They were imprinted into her mind, along with other, much happier images, and while she was aware that little Caiellis was much stronger than the state that he had been in just after his early emergence from her womb Emili's first instinct would always be to protect her sons – a trait exacerbated by the fragility of her littlest.

"It's big brother magic," the young mother told her oldest, pushing the melancholy thoughts from her mind and revelling in the look of happiness that Alex directed at her as more thunder rumbled. Instead of reacting fearfully, little Caiellis simply unconsciously curled up closer to his brother's chest, resting his small head against it whilst still remaining asleep.

Alexander's eyes had widened before he had smiled, the blue irises backlit by more flashes of lightning, "Really?"

Emili nodded, ruffling the boy's blonde hair that was so reminiscent of her husband's but slightly darker than Marik's – tinged more prevalently with gold than that of the king's.

"I'm awesome," the four year old declared, before wrapping his arms tighter around the warm bundle of baby Cai and his fluffy and soft night time attire as the infant had snuggled closer.

Emili had laughed once more at the response, the timbre of her voice loving and comforting, and suppressed a tired yawn. Her children didn't need to know that right at this minute she felt drained despite it only being a few minutes until midnight – an almost unheard of hour for her young sons, but one that Emili wasn't usually tired at unless she had gone through a particularly taxing day as queen of the Kingdom of Light – and wanted her husband to finish with whatever task had consumed him for the best part of the day so that not only she herself would feel more reassured but her two sons would as well.

"Yes you are, sweetheart …" the woman readily agreed, assuring her eldest, "You are an awesome big brother, and Caiellis feels safe with you, see? You help take care of him, and you make him feel better."
Alexander smiled, beaming at the compliments, before his face was pulled into a frown of mixed consternation and confusion.

"So do you, mummy. You and daddy make Cai feel better, and you and daddy are awesome as well," the amiable youngster countered, gently stroking his soft fingers along the wavy hair that the smallest member of their family had begun growing, brown like mummy had said it would be to daddy even though his baby brother had started off with blonde hair like him. He glanced back at his mother, making sure that she wasn't selling herself or his absent father short of awesomeness.

Emili gazed back down into his eyes, her face adopting the habitual expression of a smile that arose whenever she talked to her children (disregarding any extenuating circumstances), though there was a hint of something there that four year old Alex couldn't identify.

"Yes. But it is different. The bond between brothers is not the same as the bond between Caiellis and me, or Caiellis and daddy," Emili explained, repeating as her eyes had clouded over somewhat, "The bond between brothers is different."

Alex nodded as though he understood what she was saying, and Emili had sighed, sounding tired and sad for a reason that the young one couldn't ascertain. He smiled up at her, always positive, always happy, and mummy grinned back, the sense that something was amiss with the kind woman that Alexander was too young to aptly describe fading away.

She brushed the eldest prince's blonde bangs out of his bright blue eyes, kissing him on the forehead before rubbing her baby's back gently.

The littlest scion of the royal family had stirred beneath his mummy's touch as his big brother switched his vision back to the baby in his arms, nuzzling into Alex's neck as his tiny hand fisted the silken fabric of the four year old's pyjama top. Alexander's face lit up at the affectionate gesture from his baby brother, his features seeming even brighter as they were illuminated by another crackling burst of lightning, "Did you see that, mummy?"
Emili's smile had returned with full force, the tiredness utterly dispelled. It was as if it had never been there, and Alex assumed that he had just been imagining it.

"Mmmhmm," she hummed in confirmation, "Your little brother loves you, Alexander."

"And I love him too," the little boy proclaimed with all the sincerity that a four year old could hold. Emili blinked against tears, knowing that her precious boys would always have one another even if they didn't always have her.

But Alexander didn't see. All that he could see was the baby that he looked down at, his little brother that he had calmed down, and squeezed his own larger, but still small hand over the fist scrunched in his shirt.

This was the point where Alexander's recollection of the events differed from the ones that played out in front of him. Instead of the storm fading away into serene silence, the thunder quietening as the lightning dimmed, it only got louder, crashing into Alexander's ears in an unholy wail of the discordant cacophony of a thousand would screaming out in anguished unison. And in lieu of the lighting's disappearance, heralding the return of the perpetual darkness enshrouding the territory of the Kingdom of Light, the streaks of jagged blue darkened, turning vivid red as if they were becoming rivulets of crimson blood that stitched across the bruised sky.

The storm howled around him as pain blossomed throughout his limbs, unfurling like a flower of torture bathing in the dark light of suffering within his body as the excruciating torment flared and radiated across his young form. There was a pervasive and repugnant stench of ash, blood, burnt flesh and death all around him, contrasting sharply with the fruity aroma of the washing shampoo that his mum had used to bathe his younger brother which he could have smelt faintly on the baby's hair and the homely and comfortable scent of the nursery that had been there only moments ago.

This wasn't how it was supposed to be. This wasn't what Alexander could remember from that night, one of the times he had first begun to learn what it was to be an older brother, the dream that he had been having twisting and lurching within the halls of his mind as the world warped around him.

This isn't right … Daddy was meant to enter the sleeping place of the two youngest Lucernas after a few extra moments of conversation between the four year old and his mummy, the weary look that had been seemingly etched into his still young features dissolving instantly as soon as he beheld his beloved wife and children.

He had ruffled Alexander's blonde hair with a form of proud endearment that only the king could manage with his eldest son, congratulating him on managing to soothe his baby brother when Emili had informed the man about what had happened, kissing his wife on the cheek and his four year old on the forehead before politely requesting to hold Caiellis. Alexander was only slightly unwilling to relinquish the younger boy in his arms to their father, as while he had liked the feeling that he would be able to calm and protect his little brother with him so close he also knew that daddy would certainly do the same, if not much better than he had.

The king was then meant to pluck Caiellis out of his big brother's embrace, hug him close to his chest as the baby automatically snuggled back down after the brief disturbance of being lifted into the air. Marik had placed Cai back in his cot after a few moments of personal time with his youngest son, smoothing back his tufts of curly brown hair that had stuck up and sitting beside the cradle as Emili prepared Alexander for going back into his own bed on the other side of the room, turning and winking at his eldest son before soothing Alexander back into the realm of sleep also, the four year old safe in the knowledge that his parents would protect both him and his baby brother from any storms that might rage outside in the future, just as he would help them in safeguarding Caiellis.

That, as Alexander would come to learn in the years of turmoil that followed his mother's brutal assassination and the war between the Kingdom of Light and the New Empire of Passion, was an assertion that was ultimately proven false.

But this was all wrong. Daddy hadn't come to the nursery yet, and the presence of the boy's mum was swept away by the violence of the tempest that rampaged all around him.

In fact, he didn't think that there was a nursery left at all, as the room was torn away around him, ripped from his mind like his mother had been and consumed by the storm above and surrounding the kneeling youngster.

Alexander was shaking, shaking in a mixture of horror that pervaded and froze his limbs and anger that raged inside of his heart, a burning desire to murder every last one of the servants of darkness and consign the evil of the world to immolation in the fires of his fury that pulsed at the edges of his unreal consciousness. But the anger couldn't be released, it could barely be felt, the mounting sense of terror and overwhelming grief eclipsing whatever wrath might have wanted to burst out of him.

The emotions were strange, unexpected, clashing with the warmth that had exuded through his mind only moments earlier in a crashing display of jarring emotional discord that would have filled the eldest prince with confusion and bewilderment had the sheer anguish that had been jolted into his mind not been saturating all his senses and drowning out everything else.

He was on a courtyard, but it was unlike any courtyard that he had ever seen before, obsidian flecked with the deep orange of volcanic influence and the magmatic powers of hell stretching out as far as the Lucerna could see. Spires of black rock that curled inwards framed the infernal plaza, dripping with the vitae of a thousand slain innocents and arching towards a sky of psychotic turbulence and electric thrashing. Blood pounded at the slick and crimson earth around him, a constant rain of gore that replaced the far more natural downpour that had been consigned to the outside world only a few seconds ago.

It cascaded down his face in rivulets of scathingly hot scarlet, pooling at the sides of his body as it impacted onto the hard stone that the boy was knelt upon.

There was more noise as well, blaring out across the courtyard in a maddening howl that still did nothing to block out the deafening emotions that had suddenly begun roiling through the second youngest Lucerna's head.

Alex suddenly became aware of the weight that was still in his arms, his main priority thrusting itself to the forefront of his false dream state consciousness, his duty as an older brother that he had taken upon himself all those years ago allowing it to shove past the otherwise overpowering sorrow that he was under the influence of.

The mass of the younger boy had changed, his body having seemingly elongated within the span of mere moments and become heavier, although not nearly heavy enough to be too much of a hindrance to Alexander much more than holding a small body was already. The weight was almost as insubstantial as it had been before the change that had swept the nursery and their parents away with it, or perhaps it only seemed that way because Alex was able to cope with it even better than he had been.

He looked down, noticing his own hands first. They were not the hands of a four year old child; they were no longer chubby, small and tender, but larger, stronger even though they shook uncontrollably in the throes of the unknown sensations that assailed him. The fingers were long, thick but not excessively stocky, and the skin was slick with blood, hard but still soft and not yet calloused by years of holding a weapon.

They were attached to broad and lean wrists, but Alexander was quick to disregard whatever he himself looked like – what he had changed into after the cessation of the memory – when he laid bleary eyes upon what those hands were holding onto. One was wrapped around another slender palm, fragile and thin fingers clasped hard within his own, though not with any returned force from the recipient of his grasp.

The other was cupping the pale, bruised and bloodied cheek of a younger boy, one that still laid in his big brother's arms, and although there was something oddly tranquil about the scene it was anything but peaceful.

Caiellis had changed, no longer a sleeping infant clothed in warm and fluffy garments but a small adolescent suffused with teenage slenderness exacerbated by his already thin build and the lifestyle of a young prince. He was much larger than he had been, all of those years ago when the first storm had raged around the palace fortress of the Lucerna house, but was still small in comparison to the one holding onto him.

In spite of the sheer power possessed by the ear splitting noise that resounded all around Alexander, the loudest thing that he could hear was the thrumming pulse of his own heart, an insanity inducing drumbeat that did nothing to displace the sense that the silence of death had descended. A deathly chill emanated from the painfully thin body, seeping through Alexander's fingertips and leather trousers in conjunction with the physical blood staining him, its coldness and motionless frost sapping the boiling warmth from the savage demonstration of atavistic power and reducing it to a frigidity that spread through the older brother's aching bones.

Caiellis was still in his arms. Even with the crimson spilling onto his face from the bleeding sky, there was ample enough room between the gashes and bruises upon the youngest Lucerna's pale cheeks for Alex to see that the smaller boy was afflicted with the ghostly pallor of death. Caiellis had always been pale, even only minutes ago when he had been a tiny baby frightened of a storm on a completely different magnitude to this one, but now he was virtually colourless, the gore strewn across his youthful features derived from the endless rain of unnatural vitae combined with the wounds the youngster had sustained doing little to conceal how ashen he was.

It was an enigma, a violent paradox, that everything around them was so loud yet to Alexander the quietness of utter grief and loss that embodied the world around him and his little brother was so quiet that he was able to hear the symphony of his own pounding heart's thunderous hammering on the inside of his chest, the erratic rhythm of his breaths that seemed to draw no air in at all. It was so silent, hushed, that he would have been able to detect the slightest disturbance within his brother's immobile form.

And this quiet allowed him to perceive that neither the thudding of Caiellis's small but brave and kind heart nor the boy's soft breaths were present in this stormy courtyard.

A scarlet slash was drawn across the smaller male's throat, outstripping the horrible collection of bruises, broken bones and bloody rents that the youth had been fatefully acquainted with, and as Alexander stared in horror at the line of red that imprinted itself into his eyes, flaring with a raw light in the crimson lightning that burnt its image into the eldest prince's retinas for forever more, he came to the sudden, dreadful realisation that if Caiellis wasn't breathing, if his heart wasn't beating … then he was … he was ...

This isn't supposed to happen. This is not supposed to happen …

"Caiellis! Wake up!" is what he would have shouted, is what his mouth moved to pronounce, but he could not find the air for the words and the short gasp that did nothing to alleviate his breathlessness was utterly drowned out by the crashing, roiling noise of his own young heart breaking within his chest. But the sight of his baby brother so pale and hurt, so still and broken in his arms when he had been so safe and contented only moments ago was too much for Alexander to handle.

It felt like there was a suction pump within his lungs, or a vortex of mana that extracted all of the oxygen out of them and left the boy without anything to breathe with as he stared at the brutalised visage of his younger brother, a far cry from the serene expression that had adorned the cute features of a much smaller Cai.

Blood pooled within Alexander's eyes, the constant torrent of the visceral droplets pattering down atop his forehead and pouring into his blue orbs. It stung his eyes, blinding them to the observation of the world around him in a flaring spike of pain that was dull to the boy's senses. However, he couldn't even consider moving to brush the gore out of his vision, he didn't dare to break off contact with his younger brother with one hand even for just a short moment – the adolescent was incapable of blinking it away.

Nonetheless, no matter how much steaming viscera streamed down his face and obscured his gaze with its agonising touch the sight of Caiellis so hurt and coldly still could never be erased. Alexander couldn't breathe at all, the vision of his baby brother in that much peril closing off his lungs as his mouth gaped open, words that he should have screamed unable to escape it with nothing to sustain them.

And this time, instead of having his mum helping him with his younger sibling, instead of their father aiding them both every step of the way, Alex was all alone with Caiellis. It was how it had been, how it was supposed to be, but Caiellis wasn't supposed to be hurt, Caiellis was supposed to be safe in his big brother's presence and Alexander had failed and oh angels …

Alexander sat, stock still with his small brother clasped in his arms and held across his knees, unable to move or even process any other thought that differed from the predicament of the younger boy, for an indeterminable amount of time.

The crashing vortex of blood, ash and the electric sinew of the storm made not an imprint on the middle Lucerna's mind, his eyes that were blurred through the red fluid that cascaded into them fixed solely upon the youngest member of his family's discoloured and bruised face, his pale cheeks that were contused a myriad of different violent and hurt hues yet ashed and deathly all the same, the Black Sun on his right cheek that had lost all of its onyx lustre, and his eyes that Alexander could somehow sensed had been scrunched up in pain both emotional and physical before his brother had left but were now closed and slack.

The boy didn't feel the tears that were spilling freely out of the oases of raw and unfettered anguish that were the eyes that he had inherited from his father, the father that he had failed in allowing Caiellis to be so hurt. The clear liquid carved twin paths of grief down Alex's young cheeks, wending their way down to the edges of his face before splashing onto his little brother's own, the crystalline droplets that fell down Cai's innocent features making it look like it was the youngest Lucerna himself that was crying.

And that was what was meant to be.

Caiellis was supposed to be the young one, the smallest member of the Lucaelian royal family that released his emotions so that Alexander – and his other elders/members of his family (whether they were related by blood, such as his father or mother, or bonded through time spent surviving the darkest times together, most notably the boy's Uncles Tybalt and Tristram) – could help him overcome them, could assuage his fears and salve his worries.

Alexander only knew this because of his only memory in this time, the sole thing that he could remember being the occasion when both him and his little brother had been much younger, the last storm that had metamorphosed into this newer and much more destructive form. All of the broken images that lingered on the precipice of his consciousness meant nothing to him, not with his younger brother this hurt, and despite the fact that he could barely recall anything other than this and the actions of only mere minutes ago he knew what he was thinking was the truth.

Caiellis was meant to be able to show his emotions – he had always encouraged his younger brother to share any problems with him (even if he might have occasionally and teasingly belittled him for them and rarely told the younger boy to deal with them himself) so that he could solve them, as was the duty that he had placed upon himself ever since his first meeting with the baby and after … something that he couldn't remember.

But he couldn't tend to his younger brother like this, not with Cai so silent and motionless. He didn't know how to help him in their predicament, how to fix what was wrong with him and bring life back into the littlest Lucerna.

The immensely faded Lucerna birthmark emblazoned on the diminutive youth's bloodstained features didn't even react with a modicum of the somewhat haunting purple luminescence which Alexander had began to associate with his younger brother's sadness, but then they were not the boy's own tears and as such might not have interacted with the Black Sun sigil anyway, if Caiellis had been in his normal state and not laid across Alex's knees with the older boy's muscular arms looped underneath him.

Alexander's vision, already blurred by the downpour of vitae from the screaming sky and the trickling water that gushed out of his emotion-filled and bloodshot eyes, was distorted even more by the breath that he could not pull in, his brother's state preventing even that basic function.

The shock of the sudden mental agony that he had been thrust into from when he had felt safe and emboldened by happiness and brotherly pride paralysed the teenager, and he could do nothing more than stare in shock at his smaller sibling and the change that had overcome him, the mantra that this is wrong, this is all wrong, repeated over and over like a sadistic hymnal within his skull.

"No..." he whimpered, the words even quieter than a whisper and immediately washed away by the sheer volume of the tempest that split the ground below it apart with its fury, the arcing blasts of crimson lightning scoring deep into the plaza and leaving bloody wounds that seethed with volcanic and hellish lava in their wake. Alexander could feel himself breaking apart, piece by shattered piece, his heart broken and dying, trapped in the confines of his chest as it pumped sorrow through his veins, his world collapsing around him and the apocalyptic scenery fading into grey.

Caiellis was dead. Angels above, his little brother was dead …

No. I won't let this happen … I won't let him go … he can't go … he's my baby brother and I don't want him to die …

Shuddering violently in the throes of his anguished mind, Alexander felt like he was about to eject the contents of his stomach but couldn't process the thought, couldn't think of anything that was related to himself. His own wounds didn't even register on his conscience, not even with a dull background ache, and the sensation of being almost drowned in boiling gore was nothing compared to the feeling of his younger brother's blood on his hands.

He stared down, transfixed by the sight of his baby brother with eyes closed and wounds covering his abused form, the horrible, horrible slice of red on his slender throat tearing itself into Alexander's corneas, somehow brighter than the rest of the lacerations and bruises scattered across Caiellis. The crimson glow resonated with some primal part of Alexander's psyche, a form of bloody rage swelling up inside of him that threatened to brutally slaughter any who had taken part in harming his younger brother without remorse, but it could not escape the walls of the distress and misery that tightened their grip on Alexander's soul.

It manifested itself within the agonising shakes of fear, anguish and sadness that the boy was afflicted with, the only movements of the youngest Lucerna caused by that painful shuddering of his big brother. The tears dripped down his cheeks in a never ending rain of grief joined by that of the blood, the blood that fell out of the wounded sky, the blood that bubbled out of Caiellis's wounds and leaked out of the wounds and slashes inflicted upon his cold body.

"No..." he whispered again, the word the only thing that he could think of, the statute of denial the one concept that his broken and despondent mind allowed him to consider, the last salvation and the final promise of absolution, that none of this was real – that Caiellis could never be so hurt.

Anything else was too much for Alexander to cope with – anything else would kill him. His body was already rendered unable to move, rendered unable to do anything other than gaze at his deathly brother, hoping beyond the concept of hope – as that was too much for the boy to form within his head – that somehow this was all wrong, somehow his brother's awful condition was a lie and that somehow, despite how real it all seemed, this was an illusion.

The thoughts were not the centre of his mind, nor did they even make any impact whatsoever on his grieving state. But they were present nonetheless, and some small regions of Alexander that were unnoticed by the rest overcome by the wounds of his baby brother desperately gripped onto this half formed idea, anchoring Alex to reality and ensuring that, for now at least, he wouldn't completely lose himself to the emotions that roiled inside of him, that he didn't succumb to the utter lack of purpose corresponding to the loss of his brother.

Alex was afraid to move, unconsciously and instinctively frightened that if he shifted his grip on his brother, or if he adjusted his position to do anything to help Caiellis, that his younger and only sibling would fade away or break apart like infinitesimally fragile strands of shimmering gossamer. His mind refused to have him move, the dire knowledge that his baby brother was dying – or the unspoken and unthought of suspicion that he was already dead – in his arms whilst he did nothing to help making no impression upon the boy.

He sat there, shuddering and shaking in the embrace of his emotional pain, for an unknown amount of time, the storm becoming more and more turbulent and ruinous by the second as it tore apart the ground around Alexander, strikes of coruscating electricity impacting into the barren earth and scoring demonic patterns into the land.

It was too much for him, too much for his young mind to comprehend at once, the possibility of so much loss – the loss of the thing that he lived for – breaking him apart more and more.

No … Caiellis …

What am I doing? The thought was sudden, but not unwelcome, breaching the roiling ocean of anguish and raw emotion and thundering into Alexander's head. His heartbeat thudding in his skull, the shaking teenager rocked backwards as if slapped, spontaneously breaking out of the reverie that had encompassed his thoughts and staring down at his still brother. The younger boy shifted with his sibling's movements, his position changing but not of his own accord as he was limply pulled backwards with Alex, his head rolling to the side when the eldest prince's grip changed.

He gazed once more at his baby brother again, taking in the extent of the wounds laid upon the bleeding adolescent, near mesmerised by the damage that had been done and fatefully enraptured by the thought that he could ever lose Caiellis, before his mind screamed out in anguish.

A primal scream was torn loose from a throat already raw from howling, a mixture between a cry of desperation, a defiant shout of pure anger and a wail of emotional pain that split through the air and joined the shrieking of the whirlwind of forsaken souls and demonic force in a peal of cacophonous noise.

WHAT AM I DOING?! The mental words rose to a scream of their own, one which pierced through the fog of sadness that had been clogging up the teenager's thoughts, though it did nothing to erase it.

It was the understandable variation of the boy's unintelligible scream, the realisation that no matter the shock of suddenly having his younger sibling change from a calm and safe baby to a small adolescent that appeared as if he had been tortured by a score of sadistic individuals at once and gone ten rounds with a monorail train, nothing, nothing, excused Alexander's inaction.

He jolted upright, though his blue eyes did not move from their position, his vision remaining transfixed upon his younger brother and best friend, scanning the boy's wounds at the same time as he stared in horror at the younger male's closed eyes and bloody visage. The boy exploded into action and noise.

He had just been sat there. He had just sat there, with his little brother in his arms, the smaller boy's condition worsening every moment that Alexander had wasted away.

He had been unable to act, unable to even move, to hold his dying sibling closer to his chest. He hadn't been doing anything to help Caiellis, nothing at all, and the desperate thought that his brother would pay for that mistake streaked like a bolt of crimson lightning through his brain.

Why couldn't I move?! Why wasn't I helping him?!

"No no no no..." Alex's horrified voice made the words, oxygen and air flooding into his lungs once more as he managed to get his breathing partially under control, mitigating his hyperventilating to the point where he would be able to act and form impulses within his mind – not quite think, not in the traditional sense of the word, but grasp onto his big brother responsibilities and instincts and channel them through his limbs.

Mana was not accessible to him, for whatever reason, but the middle Lucerna paid no heed to that indistinct realisation. Panic coursed through his shaking body, the anxiety and grief making him vibrate as he pawed at his brother's cheek, hopelessly aiming to obtain a response from the still youngster in a way that he had always been able to, tears still running down Alex's face and splashing onto the boy's bruised cheeks.

"Come on Cai … Wake up for me … Wake up, little bro..." the words spilled out of his lips impatiently in between hitched breaths, half formed and broken but no less genuine and heartfelt because of it. He shook the thin boy, this time out of his own accord, gripping onto his slender and gaunt wrist with one hand and stroking his thumb over the jutting bone, still under the impression that he might somehow elicit a response from the motionless Caiellis.

He felt around the base of the thin hand, desperately searching for any faint vibrations that might constitute a pulse, a heartbeat, his brother's skinny wrist slipping in his blood slick grip as he tried to grip hold of it tightly, Cai's own bloody wounds and lacerations at the end of his bony forearm making the job even more difficult.

The older brother wished that he didn't have to touch the burn marks and cuts surrounding Caiellis's wrist, knowing that it would cause him pain and not wanting to be the source of any more, but there was no other way to ascertain whether or not his heart was beating.

There was nothing, not even a near imperceptible throb – the only throbbing was the resounding pulsations of terror and distress within Alex's skull.

Alexander's voice had almost always been able to rouse his younger sibling, even when the youngest Lucerna had wanted to ignore him and pay no heed to his big brother, his ability to calm Cai within a nightmare or to awaken him from a concussion induced unconsciousness often coming in handy and reminding the elder of the two brothers of their strong bond – a bond that he had once thought was unbreakable, a bond that he would do anything to protect.

A bond that was quickly slipping away from him.

But now it seemed that such an ability refused to work, that his brother was too hurt to hear the words in his state. If Alexander had been able to think properly, he would have resolved to continue speaking, repeating the encouragements and pleading like a mantra to make sure that any chance his brother might latch onto the words or somehow find reassurance within them was taken, but as he couldn't he talked without even knowing, automatically trying to find a way to get his sibling back into the world of the awake.

He shook his head, blinking the stinging tears from his eyes so that he could better look at Caiellis, but the torrential rain of gore kept his vision blurry enough so that merely moving his head wouldn't clear it. But Alexander refused to break off contact with his little brother even with one hand, the implications and symbolism of letting go – of giving up on the youngest Lucerna – too horrifying to comprehend.

"Come on come one come on … don't you leave me … come on, wake up..." he cried, the words broken and quiet but nevertheless infused with a form of big brother authority that might have made the hitched sentence seem less desperate and distraught to any outside observers that didn't know the eldest prince well enough to detect the prominent tinge of anguish and heart wrenching misery in his tone. He shook the younger boy hard again, not caring that such actions would have hurt Cai had he been conscious, but there was no response from the incapacitated teenager.

The never ending rain of tears from the boy who barely ever cried, not even when in extreme pain other than the watering of his eyes that he couldn't stop, could have drowned both him and his younger brother in their wretched depths. The fact that Caiellis was seriously hurt was the only thing that could cause such sadness, one of the very few things that could force Alexander to break out of his shell of strength and the walls that surrounded any form of weakness so that it was hidden from others.

Think. He needed to think. Mindlessly shaking his little brother and wishing for a miracle to happen was doing nothing for Caiellis, nothing at all. Since Alexander couldn't tear away his gaze from his stricken sibling he couldn't get a sense of the place their old nursery had dissolved into, couldn't look to see if there were any individuals close that could help them, he instinctively knew that he needed to get an inventory of Cai's wounds, start fixing them in any way that he could.

He sloppily pulled his brother back onto his lap, the blood that had drenched them both making it seem like Caiellis's body would slip away any second – just like Alex knew without giving thought to the awful prospect that Cai's tenuous hold on life was too.

Shakily, he moved his eyes back and forth across his brother's broken form, defiantly refusing to let the viscera that was streaming from the storm into them disrupt this task.

Bile rose to the back of his throat as he took in his brother's injuries, or at least those that he could see that weren't covered by the torn and shredded light armour that the boy was half clothed in or those internal punctures hidden underneath the pale skin of the youngest Lucerna. He wasn't aware of how he had obtained this information, but he knew how to fix certain wounds, knew what he had to do to reduce the debilitating effects of some and salvage others, and tried to grasp onto that information within his head.

Alexander focussed his determination that the youngest member of his family would survive this turmoil into a lance that would strive to clear his thoughts, allow him to fixate on certain ones and at least subdue some of his powerful emotion that threatened to tear him apart from within and was welling up inside.

He baulked at the condition of the smaller Lucerna that was strewn across his lap, the desire to tear apart and brutally obliterate any who laid their hands on his precious baby brother with the intent to do harm and channel the guilt that was devouring him from within into a potent force only eclipsed by the desperate want to save him and cure him of his ailments, to whisk him away from the danger.

To get his little brother back and to see him smile again.

The boy had already zoned in on Caiellis, his concentration on him and him alone, the cataclysmic hellscape of the world around him as dull and unremarkable as stone grey now that he had much greater priorities. Alexander pushed through the seething fog within his mind, the oceans of despair and the grasping arms of heart-wrenching guilt at letting Cai get hurt to such a degree, trying to find the instinctual knowledge of how he could aid his sibling in this situation.

The adolescent knew that every second he delayed was one where his brother's perilous hold upon life was weakening, but he could barely breathe himself and the snaking tendrils of the shock and horror of what had happened were still pierced into his brain and refusing to relinquish their hold upon him, though they were not paralysing him in terror and blinding him to the rapidly heightening degradation of his brother's health.

He couldn't think clearly no matter how hard he tried, the thoughts and knowledge of dealing with certain injuries half formed and blurry within his head when he endeavoured to pull them up and act upon them.

There was just so many wounds scattered over his little brother that he didn't know where to start. He couldn't evaluate which ones were the most important to fix first – he knew deep down that he probably couldn't even see the some of the most potentially fatal, hidden as they would be within Caiellis's clothes that he didn't want to strip off the smaller boy, affording him a measure of dignity even in this moment.

The leather armour that Cai wore, too small and weak to be able to fight clad in the heavy plate mail of the Lucaelian military or even the chainmail leather combination that Alexander was equipped with now, without heavily restricting his mobility, would be stuck to his body with the blood that he had shed, especially in the regions where it and the soft skin underneath had been torn open and the macerated remnants had been soaked in crimson.

"I-I won't let you g-go, Cai. I w-won't let you go," Alexander growled the promise to himself and his grievously hurt brother, the stuttered yet snarled words mangled by his anguish and breathless panic, anger and defiance of the hopelessness of the situation mixing with grief. Every breath he took hurt, pain that he had not noticed until now blossoming within his ribcage, but it wasn't going to stop him from helping his brother, it could never stop him from saving Caiellis.

He held his brother further away from him so that he could better see even though it went again every basic need to keep Caiellis close and safe that he had followed ever since the time of peace that had long passed. The boy needed to do something, anything, the fact that he seemed utterly useless and unable to salvage his brother's state tearing ta his mind.

His ragged breaths through an open mouth filled with the bile inducing taste of copper blood did not supply him with enough air to be able to cope with the severity of his brother's situation, his instinct and mental obligation to protect the smaller boy the only thing keeping him teetering at the edge of insanity instead of falling fully into its psychotic depths.

Caiellis's wrist wasn't showing that he had a pulse, and Alexander hadn't felt the puffs of air that were reminiscent of his brother's breathing like he had when the much younger, infantile version of the littlest Lucerna. He knew that he needed to fully ensure that the heart of his sibling was still working, so let go of the back of his brother's mop of sodden brown hair that was matted down by the crimson rain.

As soon as the only thing that was keeping Caiellis's head from falling backwards was removed the boy's skull lolled back, his messy hair falling away from his face as his head bonelessly flopped.

Alexander pressed slippery fingers to his brother's wounded throat, aghast at the amount of sticky scarlet blood that covered the boy's neck, desperately searching for any indication that Cai might still be alive, that the older boy wouldn't have to start with heart compressions and breathing for the younger male – as even though Alex refused to truly come to terms with it, the fact that neither his heart nor his lungs were working to keep him alive and sustain him would have dire consequences should the older brother not be able to act soon.

A cry of desperation was wrenched from Alexander's lips as violent shivers wracked his lean form, the shaking borne from fear and grief, not any cold around him. There wasn't any indication that Caiellis was still alive; no vibrations inhabited his cold body other than the quivering of his older sibling that held onto him.

"No … no no no … d-don't l-leave … I'm s-soryy … so so s-sorry … d-don't you l-leave me … I w-won't l-let y-you g-go ..." Alexander whimpered, the pathetic hitching of his breath filled to the brim with a form of defiant sadness that overflowed into his bright blue eyes. Alex stared at his brother, squeezing him tighter in a way that was sure to leave bruises that wouldn't be noticed on the boy's already abused skin as if holding onto his physical body would somehow stop his soul departing into the next realm of life.

Caiellis wasn't supposed to go first. That had always been Alexander's mindset, his modus operandi. Even though his memories were broken, those of the time minutes ago where he had been a little boy talking with his mummy interspersed with shards of another life where he and Cai were at ages slightly younger than they were now, he still knew for certain that he and his baby brother hadn't lived the best life but that such should have changed.

Caiellis deserved to live the best life that there was, he deserved to be able to live without fear and danger, not die within his older brother's arms as the middle Lucerna tried hopelessly to save him. Caiellis was supposed to have so much more than this, live so many years

Words spilled from Alexander's lips just as the tears slid down from his eyes, incoherent and incompressible crying that nevertheless still carried the emotion that was flooding his body.

He shook his brother again, clamping shuddering fingers over the gaping rent in his throat in a feeble attempt to stem the flow of blood out of it even if it was only slowly pouring free in a tide of scarlet that covered Alexander's hands in red stains that he knew would never wash away instead of gushing from the wound like it should have been.

There was too much, Caiellis was too hurt, and Alexander knew even if he refused to believe that his younger brother was too far gone for him to pull back. This nightmarish land was only a backdrop for the ghastly scene that was playing out between Alexander and his harmed brother, only ever a small blip within the older Lucerna's combat attuned senses that were completely focussed on his sibling.

He couldn't stem all the bleeding – he could barely even prevent Caiellis's life leaking out from where he was pressing his fingers into it in a pathetic attempt to close up the rents – and the realisation of that was more icy claws of despair that sank into his fractured heart.

The boy's eyes were open, half-lidded crescents that had greeted the world when his head had been tossed backwards and the residual force had shunted the eyelids upwards. Alexander's own eyes flicked to the minute showing of green within the expanse of paleness and red that was covering everything else around him and steeping it all in crimson blight, his gaze automatically drawn to that of his brother.

There was no light in those eyes, none of the intelligence and brightness to them that even as a diminutive infant his emerald orbs had shone with. The curiosity, the wonder for the world that shone through the younger boy's evocative and expressive eyes, was replaced by the dullness and lifelessness of a barren wasteland of bloodshot green mostly hidden by eyelids that drooped with no tension of their own.

There was nothing to remotely suggest that his younger brother still remained within the lifeless body that half-gazed up at the older adolescent, but Alexander refused to take the eerily vacant eyes of Caiellis as a sign that there was no hope left for him. There would always be hope as long as Alex was with the younger boy, the big brother that he was wouldn't allow it to be any other way and would never let him give in.

The larger teenager gently but quickly placed his younger sibling upon the ground that was saturated with blood that peeled back like a scab from a wound when Caiellis touched it, exposing the rotting and infected core of the stone that the fragile youngster was laid upon. Alexander paid no heed to the nightmarish landscape swirling around him and crackling with painfully bright and impossibly jagged parabolas of scarlet lightning, as it was of a secondary concern to him and would only become pertinent once he had managed to save his brother's life – only then would it requite his attention, as only then would he have to carry Caiellis out of this hellscape.

Pressing two fingers next to the bleeding rent within his little brother's neck in a frantic search for anything resembling a pulse yielded nothing. Heart rending, trembling in desperation and anguish, Alex was leaning over his younger brother, tilting back his head with a hand once more on the matted hair of the smaller boy, tugging him closer, pinching his nostrils so that he could begin mouth to mouth, all the while ignoring the endless rain of gore around him and the blood of Caiellis that stained him, its coppery tang that revoltingly rippled across his taste buds filling him with a wave of revulsion that hearkened the boy to something strangely familiar.

The sensation was soon subsumed, overwhelmed by the excess of stimuli raging throughout Alexander's sense receptors and the screaming wails of emotion in his skull that were in turn pushed aside by the desperate need to be his little brother's salvation.

He started chest compressions in the moments where he was forced to pull away and suck in a few painful and hitching breaths, his body aching and stinging with the air that shuddered through it, mentally silencing the childish wailing within his head so that he could call out the timings that had been taught to him by a face he couldn't remember on a day that he couldn't recall.

It gave purpose to his voice, and while it would have been more efficient to simply imprint the numbers into his mind it was too full of anguish for anything to overcome it without giving verbal substance to the thoughts. It stopped him from blubbering and sobbing violently, something that was helping neither himself nor his baby brother.

Calling out the timings into a world that refused to listen, burning the number of breaths into his head, the compressions … it all became a desperate mantra to save Cai's life. But the kid showed no sign of coming back, the only movement made by his cold body came when Alexander harshly thumped his chest, linked, fisted hands attacking Caiellis in earnest and the older boy felt his heart sinking further into the bottomless pit of despair eating up his chest as the infinitely precious seconds inexorably ticked by.

Seconds that were constantly counting down to the point where the youngest Lucerna slipped away permanently. Caiellis was drifting further and further away, Alex could feel it even if rationally he had no idea whether or not his baby brother was still alive in the abused form of his. His eyes kept up that cold dead stare, green irises glinting in the vibrant, gory illumination of the violently crackling thunderstorm.

But still Alexander didn't, couldn't, give up on him. Caiellis was his little brother, a bright glow of innocence within a world of darkness and war, an intelligent and loving little boy that didn't deserve any of the punishments heaped upon him by the cruel reality of their life, and if there was one thing that Alexander would do above all others it would be to secure a happy future for the youngest Lucerna.

If he somehow could have, the elder adolescent would have sacrificed his own life to save that of his younger sibling's, even though the time that he spent with Caiellis when both were well and safe was the happiest of his young life fraught with peril and the danger of the darkness, and he had no illusions as to how his brother would always despise living on without Alexander even if in time he would come to accept it as reality.

Alex would do that without a second thought or a moment's hesitation, give up his chance at a life filled with protecting others and enjoying time with his friends, family and those of the fairer sex that he was certain he would frequently consider when not in a time of need, so that Caiellis could have the same instead of him.

But those thoughts, that impossible sacrifice which he would be willing to take if it only spared Cai from more pain and suffering even if it deprived him of his big brother, were nothing. They would not atone for his failure, his failure to prevent whatever it was that had occurred to finish with his fragile sibling unbreathing beneath his hands and motionless apart from his desperation fuelled attempts to restart the younger male's heart.

He was supposed to be the protector, the youngest Lucerna's bulwark against harm and the one that kept him safe above all else; his ultimate prerogative was to have Caiellis unhurt and secure (and, simultaneously more and less important, to have the smaller boy happy and content, as while that was a goal in and of itself and it featured heavily upon Alexander's modus operandi, Cai couldn't be happy if he was dead or harmed), and in that he had failed – a fact that was clear for all to see.

"Come on C-Caiellis ..." Alex panted out between every rescue breath, pushing himself well past the point of being safe with the amount of energy he was expending in his attempts to revive his brother, "You can do it … don't leave me..."

"Caiellis please..." the boy was openly sobbing again now, his breathless assurances and encouragement of his sibling dissolving into worthless crying once again. He had stopped keeping a mental track of the time since he had begun the resuscitation process; Caiellis was the only thing of importance to him, begging his little brother to come back as he certainly refused to notice that the smaller boy's ashen pale skin was slowly but surely turning the grey of muted corpse, his lips deep blue, what scant warmth was left in the teenager's body seeping out of it along with his blood.

"P-Please p-please p-please … P-Please come back. P-Please come back. I promise I won't let you get hurt again … I-I w-won't l-let you … I'll protect you, I promise. Just please, please, please wake up, Caiellis," Alexander's voice, which had started off jumbled and stuttering in the wake of sadness, a shattered mosaic of emotion that's raw edges of unfettered emotion cut into the tone of his words, suddenly became clear, like the fractured shards of a crystal of sadness, loss and regret combining together once more into a strong proclamation wading through an undercurrent of guilt combined with confusion.

He took in a long, shuddering breath that felt like it was slicing at the inside of his throat and pushing hard on his lungs as it eked its way through his own injured body, acutely aware of how long it was taking – every half-second punctuated by more grief (both internal and external) and more blood spilling onto the ruined courtyard and joining the crimson already congealed there.

Alexander stared down at Caiellis, before launching himself back into the near hopeless endeavour to revitalise the youngest Lucerna even if a damned part of him that was formed from the waters of the wellspring of grief in his chest which he was desperately trying to drown told him that it was too late – that Caiellis was never coming back.

You have failed, a voice, although it could barely be called that and was only aligned loosely to the definition, sliced like a rending dagger of murderous guilt and self-directed anger into his head. Alexander drew in a sharp and pained breath at the icy shiv that rammed through his mind, the rancid blood of the gory rain filling his vision with red as he refused to divert any time from tending to Caiellis to removing the crimson stains from his eyes.

As the droplets spilled like bloody rents in the fabric of reality in front of his sight, pooling at the bottom and rising up in a tide of red that splashed more colour onto the world that had all but turned monochromatic grey with the exception of bleeding Cai, Alexander paid no heed to the statement – if the boy even understood it.

The blood was pervading everything, pouring into Alex's open mouth when the briefest of respites from filling his little brother with his own air were taken, but this time instead of being eclipsed by the horrible, revolting taste of his small sibling's lifeblood and simply fading into another dull nothingness with the rest of his sensations, it amplified the disgusting irontaste to the point where it filled everything, drowning Alexander in the vile flavour as more voiceless words cut into his head.

You have failed. You have failed, the words told him, repeating over and over and over in a maddening cycle. But this time they weren't just the barest imprints of voices; this time they were recognisable as belonging to people that Alex must have known even if he could barely recall some of them.

Caiellis is dead! You were supposed to protect him. You are the eldest son, the firstborn, and you have failed in your duty to keep your younger brother safe. It was your job, your responsibility, and now my little boy has paid the price for your inadequacy.

Those were the harsh tones of his father's censure, the king's words a hammering bombardment of disapproval that ripped the air from Alexander's stomach like the voice was a brutal mace of ice ramming into his stomach. He had always looked up to his father, always admired him as a strong and invincible hero of the Kingdom of Light, utterly infallible in his ways. He had tried to emulate him, tried to echo his bravery and indomitably, to follow in his footsteps so that he could continue his father's reign if he became king.

Marik was Alexander's idol, and to know that he had failed his father as well as his baby brother made him weep even more, the cold anger and hatred that was on the precipice of exploding in volcanic fury combining with everything else in being far too much for him to take. He could imagine the

But he had to keep trying. He had to keep going.

There was still a possibility – a chance that the teenager was going to ensure that he seized and never let escape – that he wouldn't disappoint his dad. There was still time, he told himself, refusing to believe that there was any alternative to that fact, still time to save his father's baby and his own little brother.

How could you have let this happen?! How could you?! How am I supposed to live in a world without my youngest son?!

His hands thumped down on Caiellis's fragile and already damaged chest, the boy nauseatingly aware of the horrible movement of his brother's bones underneath his strong hands (not strong enough to protect him, only strong enough to hurt him) that broke after being subjected to too much pressure for too long, and the cracking noise that punctuated the thunder of the storm, impossibly loud within Alexander's mind and only eclipsed by the sound of the words inside of his head.

Alex didn't care how hurt his brother might be, only that he lived. All else was secondary to him now, including the condemnation of the mental representation of his father that he was desperately attempting to ignore now even if he knew he deserved it, deserved so much more shunning and pain for what he had failed to do.

Alex, why has this happened? I thought you said that you were going to protect him … I though that you made a promise my baby that he would be forever safe with you. You knew that Caiellis was fragile – you knew that he is much more delicate than you, much more of a thinker than a fighter like you – and yet you didn't guard him from the darkness.

This was a voice that he had heard only minutes ago yet hadn't truly experienced for years of his life.

Mum...

I loved you both … I loved you both so much … You were the lights of my life, the twin stars that twinkled so brightly within the darkness of the world, the pride and joy of your father and I …

Her voice began melancholy, but almost compassionate in the same instance, drenched in misery and regret that seeped through Alexander's core as he tried to shut out the voices – anything that was not related to the resuscitation of his baby brother was something that he could not afford to dwell on, could not afford to even listen to in spite of the reality that blocking it out was all but impossible.

But despite that resolution to let nothing stop him from bringing Caiellis back into the world and facing his punishment for allowing the younger boy to be so drastically hurt when he was supposed to be under Alexander's guarding, the words of a woman that with sudden clarity he knew hadn't heard in years could never fail to leave a grief stricken imprint upon his mind.

I would have given everything for you … I gave everything for you and Caiellis, so that you two could live out the lives that I and your dad had dreamed for you since the moment we first laid eyes upon the two of you together … and now...

Tears streamed down the teenager's face in cascading lines of pure sadness that blended with both the vividly and obtrusively crimson ichor of the eternal rain and the rich dark red of his little brother's blood that covered him, drowned him in its stench of failure and the pain of an innocent little boy too young and kind to leave this world and all that it held for him.

All he could taste and smell was the blood of Caiellis that covered everything in its redness, a stain of guilt and negligence and desperation that would never wash away as the voice of his beloved mother continued, its sombre notes filled with increasing amounts of anger and disbelief that complemented the grief instead of warring with it, her melodic tones like a euphony of sadness, disappointment and fear blended together into a harmony of negative emotion that Alexander had only ever heard once before in his young life – once before this fateful moment, that is.

Now Caiellis is dead. Now my baby boy is lying dead on the ground. And … I don't know if I can love you any more, knowing that it was your fault this happened...

Alexander choked back tears, a primal part of him that was utterly concerned with repairing the damage wrought into his little brother's body futilely attempting to force the emotion out of his distraught form and silence the combined voices of his parents' anguish borne scorn within his head and surrounding his mind.

He knew that he needed to curb the feelings that had wrapped him in their embrace of darkness and sadness, throw off the chains of grief and sorrow that bound him and made him constantly shake in the throes of his sobbing desperation, aware that any mistake he might make whilst shivering and slipping on the blood that drenched his younger brother could result in even more harm being dealt to the smaller male.

He didn't want to hurt him any more than he already was, didn't want to be the source of any more of Caiellis's pain, and to do that Alexander was as certain as he could be in a time of distress that he needed to focus fully on his brother instead of any of the endless and awful ramifications of the wounds he had already suffered through.

But such a task was impossible, and the grey and colourless images of a future without Caiellis flashed behind the boy's eyelids in every coruscating lash of lighting that split the blood red sky with its crimson electricity, crashing into the ground and releasing crackling lines that spread across the sodden ground like jagged veins of destructive power. Like the veins that had been split within the youngest Lucerna's young form, the vessels that were releasing their vital cargo of blood onto the ground around him even as Alex continued to try and restart his heart.

Why did I even bother training you, you snivelling little bastard?! The accusatory tones of Tristram accompanied the anger-ridden and anguished diatribe of the boy's parents, not eclipsing them nor being overridden by Emili and Marik's words. Alexander had only ever heard him this furious before when he was directing his rage against the foul enemies of the Kingdom of Light, never before targeted at one of the young princes. While the king's scorn was coldly seething with hatred that could never truly be repressed, Tristram's anger was a fiery lash of aversion and hostility that tore into Alexander's back.

Why did you just leave him to die?! Why did you fail to help him when he needed you most?! WELL?! What excuses have you got for yourself this time, you pathetic brat?! The Guardian's voice was like a thunderous boom of rage filled noise, not identical to the atavistic roaring of the corrupt storm howling overhead but more akin to the reverberating crash of a pillar of annihilating holy light slamming into the guilty of this earth and erasing them from the sight of heaven's firmament.

Your younger brother was always there for you, Alexander, always there to watch your back and protect you from the horrible danger of the threats of the darkness that were perpetually hunting for you there! At least one of you took my orders to always try and stay by the other's side. Although it was not as terrifyingly loud as before, Tristram's brutal timbre still rippled and surged upwards with the force of his fury.

Now that he was quieter, the full force of the contempt that the man's voice within Alexander's head held the adolescent could be displayed, intertwining with that of the detestation exhibited by the words of his and Caiellis's parents that cursed him for his lack of foresight and his failure to keep his little brother away from the terrible harm that had befallen him.

Now, as you can fucking see, Caiellis is dead. It is all so wrong, so damn wrong. You should be the one dead, not him! What did he ever do to deserve this, Alexander?! What did he ever do to deserve your negligence?! What did he ever do to deserve dying alone with the person he trusted most out of anyone else in this entire world never there to help him in his direst hour?!

In spite of the attacks lancing into him from the incriminating and condemnatory words of those who he had admired and adored all of his young life, the guilt that was pulsing throughout Alex's hurting and shaking yet numb body didn't get any worse, couldn't get any worse as there was no way that the eldest Lucerna prince could experience any more of it with his younger brother drifting into an eternal rest underneath his hands.

Instead, the guilt became even harder to fight, harder to resist it taking over him and plunging him into an endless abyss of despair from which he would never be able to rise up out of and provide the aid that the youngest Lucerna desperately needed.

And now I will never hear him call me Uncle Tristram again … I will never see my "nephew", happy and laughing any more … You have taken that from me, Alexander. You have taken that from us all.

The seconds and the words blended into one another yet remained distinct, a mural of sorrowful inks distilled from the paints of a psychotic and sadistic artist of the mind that flowed around the teenager, and each pump of his hands on Cai's fragile chest that was breaking further than it already was even as he tried to save the boy and force the courageous and compassionate heart within the cage of his bones to begin working once more, each breath that he intermittently blew into the younger male's motionless form threw lips soaked with blood in the constant endeavour to get his brother to breathe once more, became one and merged with once another.

Alexander, you have disappointed yourself and your family. This you already know, but I care not for that – I care not for whatever pathetic excuses you might muster up, nor for the punishment that you so clearly deserve for allowing this to happen.

Never far behind Tristram in the lives of the two princes that flashed behind Alexander's eyelids, Tybalt's customarily strict yet reserved and calm voice was contorted in a similar manner to the other important figures in the boy's life. It was suffused with both the righteous castigation that surrounded his words whenever invoking the divine power of the heavens to smite the enemies of the angels and the people of Lucael, but this was wrapped in a chain of grief and misery that the austere Hierarch barely ever displayed.

The second mentor of the youngest Lucernas, the one who had first imbued his little brother with the passion for knowledge and reading alongside the boys' mum and had given Caiellis pride in himself and his abilities, spoke alongside the other voices inside of Alexander's mind. Like all the others, it was damning him, eroding the last vestigial walls against being utterly subsumed by the ocean of emotion inside of him and the cloying taste, smell and sensation of Caiellis's blood covering him.

No, instead all I care about is how much the world will suffer because of Caiellis's death. He was brilliant, your younger brother, a phenomenally intelligent mind combined with a kind and courageous heart that would do anything for the people he loved and for the citizens of the Kingdom of Light that it was his duty to protect.

The melancholy shone through more prominently in those few sentences, the woe at the near death of the Capitalia Lux's Hierarch's youngest student blooming like a malignant flower throughout his words more strongly than the thorns wrath that punctured Alexander's lungs and made every single breath a difficult endeavour – one that he had to take for the sake of his brother, a near impossible trial that he sacrificed the fruits of to Caiellis each time he succeeded in forcing his own wounded body past its natural limits.

Caiellis had so much potential, so much to live for, and you have stripped that from him, Alexander. You have taken his life from him in your vile neglect of what he needed – your laxity in irresponsibility have led to this, and nothing you could hope to do can ever make this right once more.

Caiellis – your little brother – is dead because of you. The brightest, most intelligent and empathetic mind – no, person – that I have ever encountered, ever had the pleasure to teach and impart my knowledge to, has been ripped away from a world, a father and his Uncles that had so much more to give to him.

Every second that slipped by screamed out Alexander's failure of his younger brother and made the voices that howled within his skull ever louder, their euphonious accusations and constant reminders of the guilt that had already swamped his ragged and bloodied form and was centred on the singular object of his vision.

More voices joined the throng – the living grandparents of the two youngest Lucernas, Alexander's closest friends Leodred and Elizabex that condemned and damned him for not prevented the horrifying wounds inflicted upon his little brother, Lucaelians from all across the forlorn Kingdom of Light who had a connection to the two princes adding their words to the chorus of hatred and anguished anger that assaulted the teenager with blades sharper and more agonising than any sword.

Caiellis's own soft and young voice that hadn't quite broken yet but remained much less high pitched than it had been in the past of the boy's childhood was noticeably absent from the choir of vilification. It kept him in the constant knowledge that Cai was hurt really, really badly, that if Alexander didn't do enough to save him then he would never hear the younger boy's voice ever again.

But despite how badly the censure of all those who knew the two heirs to the Lucerna throne caused him to react and tore at the edges of his already fraying mind, they were nothing in comparison to one voice on its own. They could never hope to eclipse this one, no matter how much they reviled him, no matter how much they reminded him of his brother's awful condition right in front of his eyes.

It was his own voice, twisted and contorted in a hatred of himself that he had never experienced before in his short life, that hurt the most. It strove to break him, shatter the already shattered pieces of his mind and heart into fragmented dust that could never hope to be repaired, repeating the same damning words over and over again.

Caiellis is gone, Alexander. Your younger brother is gone, and it is solely your fault! Face up to the truth, you pathetic, whimpering little dog. The words hissed, his own mouth too busy with supplying the broken body of his only sibling with the life giving air that he would gladly sacrifice forever more if it meant that his baby brother could breathe again to make the sounds echoing out inside of his rumbling skull.

The malign syllables dripped with venom, the spaces between words punctuated with crackling blasts of lightning and the psychopathic screaming of the unholy storm above.

Shut up! Shut up! Another part of his psyche railed against it, the desperate part that still clung to the slowly dying hope that his younger brother would emerge out of this and recover to be the same as he was before – or even just endure this pain without permanent damage – fighting the assertion, howling inside of his head as well.

Caiellis is dead. There is nothing, nothing, that you can do to save him from that fate, to bring him back no matter how much you try, no matter how defiant you are of the harsh reality of life. You can't save him now.

Alexander fought against the words with every breath, every pump of his fists on his baby brother's still heart, but the effort was not achieving a single thing. Caiellis's heart refused to start again, his blue lips refused to move and breathe for himself.

No no no! Shut up! Be quiet! Cai isn't going to die! HE ISN'T! I won't let him … I won't let him go! The challenging voice in Alex's head screamed, so unbearably loud with the strength of his conviction behind it and yet so quiet, a mere splash of water within a torrential downpour of ever rising condemnation – a splash of scarlet blood upon a charnel house of gore.

He's already dead, you idiot, waste of an older brother! How many times have I warned you, warned myself, and yet after all of the signs Caiellis is dead at your knees barely into his teenage years! You've let him die! You've let our little brother die! He was so loving, so kind – he always looked up to us, and we – YOU – have let him down! I HATE YOU! HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME!?

All of the voices within Alexander's skull rose in volume, the chorus climbing to an ear splitting crescendo as the teenager pulled away from the cracking of his little brother's chest, his hands clasping over his ears in an incredibly futile attempt to block out the noise, silence the words that screamed his best friend's and younger sibling's passing from a life that had held so much more for him.

He sobbed and screamed in the same instant, pressing his head into his little brother's chest, his tears splattering onto the blood that drowned him in the guilt and failure that it carried.

He cried onto Caiellis, something that he had never done before in his life, the words pounding into him like the drops of bloody rain crashed into the desecrated ground all around him.

"No … no … no ..." the boy whimpered, unable to make any other sound, unable to do anything to help his brother after what had felt like hours of excruciating emotional pain attempting to breathe life back into Caiellis's young form and give the smaller boy the life that he deserved.

He was utterly breathless, the sobs emanating from a throat raw from anguished screaming choked and stilted. The scent that he had grown used to of his baby brother was replaced by the all too familiar aroma of coagulated blood and sickening viscera that clogged his nostrils.

The blood was everywhere. It was filling Alexander's mouth, drowning him in its awful taste as he gagged and spluttered. It was filling Alexander's eyes, a tide of red rising in front of them once more and stinging like the crimson tears of guilt that they were. It covered everything in its scarlet paint, marking the ground of Caiellis's pain forever more and eternally staining all that was underneath the storm that howled in rapturous applause at the youngest Lucerna's still form. The boy wanted to vomit, to violently expel the contents of his stomach, but even as he gagged and retched in horror at what had happened to his younger brother he knew that to befoul Cai's body with his sick would be only adding to the degradation and agony that had been heaped upon his small form laid down in the blood saturated ground.

He couldn't breathe, and he couldn't think, couldn't live without his younger brother. He couldn't act, the voices screaming endlessly in their wailing repetition of Caiellis's death, Caiellis's pain, and Alexander's failure to stop either of the two.

Why did it have to be him?! He is my little brother, I am his big brother, and I failed him so much! I SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE TO SAVE HIS LIFE! WHY WAS I NOT THERE?! WHY DID CAIELLIS DIE ALONE?! WHY WAS IT HIM WHEN IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME?!

He's dead. Dead. Dead. Dead! Dead! DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! The words rose up around him, forming a never ending barrier of sheer noise that entrapped Alexander, entangling him like thorns of guilt that pierced both his mind and his skin and only heightened by the insanely amused rumbling of the unnatural tempest overhead.

He buried his head in his brother's chest, desperately trying to do anything to block out the voices, block out the reality of what had befallen Caiellis, but it couldn't be done. Alexander was on the verge of giving up, as the one word that had shattered his entire life and represented so much more sadness and grief than its single syllable, its four letters could ever encompass.

DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! DEAD! DEAD!

"NO!" Alexander howled, raising his head up to the infected sky and screaming out his anguish, a final, desperate plea to the uncaring heavens above and whatever gods might be listening to spare Caiellis from this fate. He cried, screamed, releasing all of the emotion and defiance that had been seething inside of his skin, but none of it made any difference. "NO! NO! NOOOO!"

"Alexander..." the words were weak, soft, quiet, barely making any imprint on Alex's distraught mind. Had he not been intimately familiar with the sound of the voice, the speaking of his name would not have registered with the Lucerna prince at all. The blood poured down Alexander's cheeks. The relentless drumbeat of damnation that had pounded within his skull to the point where he thought it would be split open from the inside instantly ceased, leaving behind a yawning chasm of silence that was barely filled by the eternal trickling of gory rain onto the blasted land.

Caiellis!

The boy abruptly and swiftly sat up, his gaze locking onto the face of his younger brother and his hand instantly wiping the stains of blood that blurred his vision. His heart ached, the need to see his little sibling alive and well fuelling his actions with a vigour that belied his pain and desperation, his connection to Caiellis that was close to being forever severed.

But the boy's eyes were still almost shut (that half-lidded gaze carrying none of the emerald intensity that Alexander had become used to), his chest remaining unmoving and his face still paled by the grey hue of necrosis. Fresh tears swelled in Alex's tortured blue eyes at the sight of his baby brother unrecovered, more sobs strewn with haunting anguish building at the back of his throat at the mere notion that he had imagined Cai's gentle voice, a phantasm of thought that cruelly taunted him in its realness.

The larger male quickly moved his hand to the youngest Lucerna's slit throat that he didn't have any mana at all to close, fingers slick with his brother's blood once again seeking a pulse that just wasn't there. He had heard Caiellis's voice, he was undeniably certain of it even in his maddened and hysterical state. The edge to the words had been just too tangible, just too intimate, to be a conjuration of his shattered mind.

Yet his younger brother still lay on the ground, still in the wretched repose of merciless death that had been his companion ever since Alex had first laid eyes upon the wounded boy.

"Alex..." his name danced upon the boiling, scalding hot yet indescribably cold air once more, this time the shortened version that had been coined by his loving mother and spoken most by his brother. Caiellis's lips had not moved, but Alexander knew with a certainty that he hadn't felt for a long time that it wasn't his distraught mind trying to reach out to any pieces of memories involving the younger prince.

The words had a direction as well, and the teenager titled his head in its direction, rubbing the visceral detritus of the unusually quiet thunderstorm above from his eyes so that he could see. The firstborn son of Marik's breath caught in his throat as he laid his eyes upon the speaker of his name, his tearful blue portals widening in shock when he beheld the figure only a few metres away from him.

There, stood upon the crimson sea of congealed blood and viscera that was the horrifically defiled landscape around them, was Caiellis. It was his little brother, though he appeared remarkably different to the flood of images and memories that poured through the adolescent's mind at the sight of his brother across from him. His face was suffused with an ephemeral glow, his skin infused with an ethereal quality that only seemed to emphasise his fragility and strongly exuded the impression that he could be snatched away at any moment.

It was Caiellis. Yet the boy was still laid across his older sibling's knees. Alexander looked down, gazing at his unconscious brother, and back up at the one who had called out to him with that sonorous, emotion-filled voice that he was so used to, that he had heard a thousand times before and was as familiar to him as the motion of his own limbs, the mere act of breathing that he still found immensely difficult. He repeated the movement, his mind unable to understand what he was seeing, why his brother was in two places at once.

It could have been an imagination, a trick of his mind attempting to salvage anything it could and show him Cai so that he could avoid coming to terms with the younger boy's pain, or an apparition conjured by this nightmarish terrain to distract him from the plight of the smaller teenager and seal the youngest scion of Matalis Ortus Lucerna's fate.

As soon as the thoughts violently shuddered through his distraught head like a spear of clarity, the slightly, almost imperceptibly insubstantial (had Alexander not known the junior male so closely he would barely have noticed, what with the terrible nature of their vile surroundings) form of the boy stepped forwards, seeming to do nothing in closing the distance between them yet allowing the older male to gaze upon the youngster's face and see into his brother's eyes.

Despite the fact that they should have been lacking the usual colour which imbued them because of his awful condition this Caiellis's eyes were veritably shining with the emerald lustre that projected all of the emotion that roiled around within his little brother's breast as they reflected the pink and red light of the streaks of madness from the tempest above.

His youthful, gaunt features were pale and ghostly, blemishes of black and blue contusions alongside the rivulets of blood that ran down his white cheeks like crimson tears. The Black Sun birthmark which had been pale and faded upon the face of the Caiellis that had been laid discarded upon the ground was virtually non-existent, a darkened mark that appeared no different to lesions scattered across the skin that was left bare by torn clothing.

He looked so young, too delicate and small for the violent brutality of the world that Alexander had meant to protect him from but had only succeeded in allowing him to be exposed to the full extent of the cruelty.

His wounds were starkly visible upon his pale form, the horrific red incision drawn across his throat which should have rendered him unconscious or should have been profusely bleeding throbbing with a red light that emphasised Alexander's anguished guilt. The boy's face was bruised and bloodied, but more than that it was so, so sad, his eyes soulful and hurt.

He was innocence personified. Undeniably, indubitably, Caiellis Noctis Lucerna. And Alex's heart soared with a mixture of crippling grief and desperate hope that his younger brother was returning to him, that in spite of his mistakes Cai would be preserved and beside him for forever more.

"Cai..." he choked out in response, the strangled sob of his brother's name inflected with equal amounts of sadness and love. He made to move towards his little brother, scraped knees sliding across rotten ground sodden with blood, but the younger boy's haunted viridian eyes held him in place, transfixing him to the spot.

Had he been able to consider the reason rationally, he would have known that he dared not move towards Caiellis due to how frail and intangible his upright sibling seemed, that his touch might shatter all of his bones or that merely by approaching the youngster he would disappear like an evanescent gust of wind – he had already failed his brother enough – but with his mind utterly consumed by the youngest Lucerna's arrival he had not the focus of thought to ponder such things.

"Alexander … Why didn't you help me?" Caiellis's voice was no louder than a whisper carried on storm borne winds, but they still scored themselves into Alexander's mind like a blade formed of thoughts. They made more of an impact than the loudest shout ever could, and the tears that sprung to Alexander's eyes matched those which began to well up in those glistening green orbs that the older boy had his own gaze fixated upon.

He had no answer to that question, and gulped, disgust with himself warring with his desire to wrap his baby brother in his arms and keep him safe from the world. Alex shook his head slightly, not enough to disconnect himself from his brother's doleful stare. Caiellis seemed on the verge of tears, mustering up his own courage in a way that made his big brother so unspeakably proud of him, so proud to have a little sibling that always tried so hard.

But in turn that pride brought on more guilt, more sorrow, as instead of nurturing that bravery and using his own to protect his brother Alexander had let it be the death of him, let Caiellis sacrifice himself instead of stopping him and safeguarding him from the danger that only a loyal older brother could have saved him from.

"Why weren't you there, Alex? Why … I needed you ..." Cai sobbed, the whimpering edge to his words dislodging the fragile resolve that Alex had built up and sending it tumbling in a cascade of emotions down to the ground. "I needed … my big brother … and you weren't there … you weren't there ..."

The worst thing about the voice was that besides a hint of accusation that Alexander almost gleefully lapped up, there was no anger present in the tone, no fury nor hatred directed against an older brother that had failed him. He wanted – no, needed - Caiellis to be wrathful with him, for his little brother to detest him and release all of the rage that Alexander deserved at the senior Lucerna. He wished for punishment for letting his younger brother down, wanted to feel the stinging bite of hatred and angry pain from Caiellis so that he could have the sentence that he had warranted.

But there was only sadness and fear in the youngest prince's voice, no loathing, no rage, just sorrowfulness and misery that Alex wished he could erase from his brother's form forever – along with the wounds and the torture that he had suffered through. The heavy inflection of fear interlaced with desolation not directed against the elder adolescent was more painful than any angry assault because it showed that Caiellis still loved him, still trusted him and wanted his aid even after all that Alexander had failed in giving to him.

The boy could feel his heart clenching in his chest once more, and despite the fact that crouched on his knees he wasn't that much smaller than his younger brother stood up he felt minuscule, smaller than he had ever done before.

"I cried … I called for you. But you never came. Why didn't you come, Alexander? I needed my big brother to protect me … wasn't I worth it?" Caiellis wasn't accusing him, wasn't condemning and damning him like so many of the voices of his family and friends that had pounded within his skull only moments ago in a choir of madness, just asking the question.

Alex wished more than anything else that he had been there, that he had been able to provide the help that his brother had so dearly required, or that he had been the one so damaged instead of young Cai. He couldn't answer the smaller boy's heartfelt inquiry, because he didn't know how, didn't know what words that could be said to soothe his brother's pain or make up for his failure to be the one thing that Caiellis had needed.

The world behind Caiellis flickered, darkening as an unnatural shadow spread out from the landscape to the back of him. A jagged bolt of lighting too close to his brother for Alex's comfort split the air, shrouding everything in a bloody, visceral red that seethed with unrelenting rage and the berserk fury of lustful psychosis.

Alexander cried out a warning to Cai, whose saddened eyes widened in fright at the sudden expansion of darkness behind him, the shade that blackened the blood at his feet and pulsed red in the unholy light of the crimson bolts arcing around him. The thunder, which had quietened to nothing more than a whispering susurration of rumbling as the apparition-esque Cai had began to speak to Alexander, roared once more, howling with contemptuous and terrifying laughter at the at the two young boys underneath its swirling insanity.

The scarlet hued darkness that pulsated in front of Alexander's eyes spoke to him of violence, of attacking those weaker than him and revelling in the rapturous agony inflicted upon their fragile flesh. It urged him on, goading him to give into the rage that had flared up inside of him, to smash his fists into his younger brother's frightened little face, to rend and tear at his skin with his short nails, to wrap his hands around his thin throat and drive a blade into his neck, watch him choke and splutter on his own blood as he …

Stop! NO!

A jolt of fear and concern for Caiellis split through the vermilion haze, and Alex used a surge of strength that came from seeing his brother in danger and being able to act upon it to rise to his feet, shaking off the violent impulses with a resolve that he hadn't felt for an eternity in this hellscape. He shrugged off the violent urges like they were a garment, viciously forcing them out of his mind so that the only thing he could countenance was saving the younger of the two.

Finally, he could act. Finally, there was something that he could do for his little brother as an older sibling should. Finally, he could put his wrongs to right, save Cai from the fate that should never have held him in its sadistic embrace.

"Alex?" the note of fear that had undercut the prince's words ever since the boy had appeared bloomed like a flower of terror, petals of dread unfolding within the tone of his voice and twisting the name of the older Lucerna into a question without a clear answer.

The just teenager's already big green eyes widened even further as the carmine shadows played over his ethereal skin, but he did not turn around. His gaze remained locked with that of Alexander, the utter trust diluted with an uncertainty created by the betrayal of his brother and the older boy's failure to save him from the predations of the mad filling the elder Lucerna with a certainty of purpose which imbued his aching limbs with strength.

He sprang forwards, the body of his brother beneath him forgotten and discarded as it disappeared into the pools of blood, his mind honed in on the fateful sight of the diminutive form of Cai darkened by the malfeasance. The younger boy's fear was evinced by the surprised expression his innocent features pulled themselves into.

"Alex! Help me, please," the child cried, though his voice remained quiet, muffled by the tendrils of fear that had wrapped around his chest. To Alex, Caiellis appeared as if he couldn't raise his volume as that would be acknowledging that there was something behind him. His desperate eyes pleaded with the older boy, imploring him to come to his rescue this time, a demand that Alexander was only too happy to acquiesce to.

Jagged streaks of coruscating red crackled at the peripherals of the elder royal's eyesight, but he paid them no heed, his vision honed, as it was, upon the slender shape of his brother.

I'm coming, I'm coming, he thought, not wanting to waste breath and precious energy on speaking the words to his sibling despite the reassurance that they would offer, the reassurance that the petrified and distressed adolescent clearly craved.

With his gaze fixated upon his younger brother, Alexander hoped that the determination in his eyes to protect Cai would convey more than the words which he couldn't spare air on ever could. His trembling friend took an almost stumbling step forward, hesitation defining the action bathed within the bloody shadows.

It was as if he was tentative to move towards Alex because of the reality that extricating himself from the tenebrosity seeping out of the land like the pus of a weeping sore would rouse whatever force was causing the intensifying of the shadow into action.

Whilst Alex would have preferred his brother to run towards him, throw himself into the arms of the taller boy and let him whisk him away from the peril, he could fully understand Caiellis not wishing to move, not wishing to aggravate the dark power surrounding the back of him. It was up to Alexander to rescue his brother, to take him away from all of this pain and suffering and bring him back into safety.

Desperation flashed through his mind, a thousand images of what would occur should he fail his little brother again imposing an even greater sense of urgency upon him as he ran forwards. The sanguine drenched ground squelched beneath his pounding footsteps, the resounding beat of his shoes on the encarmine saturated mud and rock nothing compared to the crashing inside of his head.

The noise was starting again, the painful thumping that almost drowned out all else, but Caiellis's little sniffles and breaths of fear managed to pierce through it. Nothing could eclipse the sounds of need coming from the younger boy, nothing could stop Alexander from getting to him.

I'm coming, Cai! I'm coming, little brother. Just wait a few more seconds, and I'll be there for you.

I'm so, so sorry for leaving you alone the first time, but I promise you that I will not make that mistake again. I won't make it again!

Yet no matter how far Alexander seemed to run, no matter how much he pushed his already over-exerted body over its battered limit in his frantic charge to his fragile sibling, the sprint seemed to be stretched out into an eternity of coldness and sorrow.

The distance between himself and his baby brother, a distance that had once only been mere metres that Alexander should have been able to close in seconds, was not consumed in the slightest by the run. He seemed to be getting no closer to his brother, who shouted out to him now.

"Alexander, please! Help me, big brother! Please don't leave me! Please..." his pleading voice cut off, breaking in emotion that curdled within the older boy's own breast, "Don't leave me, Alex. Please stay with me. Please..."

The tears that had been gathering within eyes welling with fright entwined in dolour began to cascade down once pale cheeks stained red with blood, twin rivers of emotion that dripped down his chin as he cried.

Even with that display of fear, the youngest Lucerna still attempted to put on a brave face, still tried to mask his utter despair so that his older brother wouldn't be hurt as much by it. Such compassion and bravery made the senior teenager even more disgusted by himself, by his own inability to properly conserve it.

The claret hued gloaming billowed around the skinny male, a foul presence that clawed at the edges of Alexander's already tortured yet determined mind just as it tore at the landscape around them. It saturated the air with malefic energies, Red and Black mana coalescing into a more solid shape behind Caiellis, who wiped the glistening tears from sparkling green eyes with one hand whilst reaching out towards his big brother with the other.

Alexander's heart, battering at his bruised ribcage within his chest, was being torn apart once more as he beheld his brother in such a degree of danger again. He forced his burning lungs to keep supplying him with air as he ran as fast as his aching legs could take him at the location of his brother. His feet sank into the pools of blood that reflected a debased and violent version of himself, one that sprinted at Caiellis with the intent to harm instead of aid, but Alexander paid no heed to the perverse images.

Yet, no matter how much he tried, the eldest son of Marik couldn't get closer to his younger brother. His limbs propelled him across the bloodstained mesa, but the figure of Cai barely became any larger, barely got any closer. But the malignant thing that was forming behind the boy grew with every second that he wasted running, a formless mass of pure and unadulterated excess mixed with evil that was beginning to take tangible shape.

It was a tenebrous mass of carnal carnage, bloodthirsty lust, the screaming of thousands as they were roasted alive on a pyre lit by the fires of dark pleasure, the howling of millennia old civilisations as they were consumed by the blissful ecstasy of violence and hedonism, sacrificed to this capricious lord of overindulgence that was extending to over fifty feet tall, towering over the youngest Lucerna that quailed beneath it.

Its laugh, joined with the peal of thunder from the storm above that spewed out lighting onto the tortured world below, was an atavistic cackle that bellowed above all else in ecstatic celebration. The already abused world around the youngest Lucerna contorted and buckled, like it was thrashing in tortuous seizures at the appearance of a creature so evil that the land itself quaked beneath its arrival.

Black shards of rock soon covered in the stinking and steaming blood pierced out of the ground, shuddering and cracking into place as they lanced towards Alexander. Swerving and juddering to the left, the older royal avoided the rupturing spires of gore drenched obsidian, his feet almost slipping on the near sheets of visceral fluid that lined the rock beneath them before he managed to use the superlative fighting reflexes driven into him and honed by years of brutal training to regain his balance, limbs aching in protest of the actions.

The boy kept running, even as molten veins of lava filled to the brim with the dark energy of ruinous desire split the earth around him and his near hyperventilating younger brother.

The magma seeping out of the rock as portions of it were split open like ripe fruit formed an impassable ring around the littlest Lucerna, the baleful red glow painting the already gore strewn boy a vivid scarlet. The irregular circle was wide, too large for Caiellis to leap over without damaging himself, but not large enough to prevent Alexander from reaching him with his longer legs and more powerful stride.

Caiellis shouted his name again, the words infused with the boy's renewed desire to have his big brother protect him from the fallen god that had begun to haul itself into this barren and bloody world in which Alexander had found himself and Caiellis.

Despite all that had happened, despite all of the older adolescent's failures, underneath the terror and haunting sorrow was a hint of hope, not the shining streak of belief that Caiellis had once possessed in Alex but rapidly expanding in potency and faithful incandescence every second the danger increased. He still believed, more than anything else, that Alexander could save him from anything, could destroy any foe that dared to lay a finger on his precious little brother, and the eldest son of Marik refused to let that trust be dashed upon the sharp rocks of desolation and betrayal once more.

"Alexander! Alex! Please, help me! Please, do something! I don't want … I don't want to die …" the poor kid sobbed, his Lucerna confidence and bravery instilled by an evident wish to not appear weak in front of his sibling overwhelmed by the sheer presence of the being bloated with horrible energies tearing its way into the once lonely landscape, his tear strewn visage fixed in Alexander's sights.

He didn't know how he could protect his brother against the force of the abomination the began to take a more defined form around Cai. But he knew that all that mattered was that he knew he could, the certainty that he would not let down Caiellis once again a tangible thing within his mind, a concept that he could no more discard than he could stop his body from breathing until he died.

All he needed to do was get to his brother before that thing did. The rest would work itself out from there, Alexander's plan to extricate his best friend and younger sibling from the pernicious situation that he had been thrust into not requiring details right now. He just wanted Caiellis in his arms, and then he could discern how they would escape or kill the malefic presence coming to them – or, more precisely, arriving at the youngest Lucerna's location.

And now he seemed to be closing on his brother, whatever evil physics that had worked against him to impede his progress falling against his unstoppable will to reach Caiellis. He was tantalisingly close, almost near enough to reach out and touch his brother's already outstretched thin digits, to clasp his hand in his and heave him away from the fusing mass of darkness, blood and howling atavism.

Alexander was almost certain that he could hear Caiellis's panting and short breaths, pushed nearer to one another because of his panic.

He could ascertain the splashes of the younger male's scintillating tears as they splashed on the earth after leaving his gaunt cheeks, even over the shrieking and roaring emanating both from behind and from the tempest above Cai and the perpetual splattering of the claret droplets rain of gore.

Alexander's body could feel the heat rising up from the circle of steaming lava entrapping the youngest Lucerna, but more prevalent than that was the waves of unnatural force expanding forth from the sinews of shadow whirling and spinning in a jagged maelstrom of atrocity and inhuman desire that slammed into Alexander.

They buffed him, attacking from different angles like the brutal punches of a mob of psychopaths, hammering into the boy, but they were nothing compared to the hammering of his own heart, nothing compared to the crushing power of what would happen to him if he let Caiellis be hurt again. He dug his heels into the sodden ground with every step, drawing on reserves of power that he didn't know he had but were definitely held back until his brother was in significant peril to keep himself moving forwards.

Despite the risk that continued motion entailed, Alexander kept going, maintaining as much of the pace that he had sustained in his headlong charge towards his little brother as was possible.

Without both the strength that he had built up through years of persistent and gruelling training and the determination that nothing would halt his progress in reaching Caiellis it was entirely possible that Alex would have been whisked off of his feet by the violent squalls that drove the bloody rain into him, as one would have to stand still and hunker down to the floor to avoid most of the whirlwind of darkness and flame's effects and even then if they didn't have the right combination of strength and mass they could easily be sucked into the vortex of darkness.

Calling upon every ounce of strength that Alexander had at his disposal, the boy ran at his little brother, reaching out an arm towards him in a desperate mirror of Cai's own actions. His lungs and limbs burning with the exertion, alight with the fire to save his sibling, he grabbed outwards, a singular motion imbued with all of his determination and resolve as he extended his fingers towards Caiellis's slender hand already angled towards him.

Caiellis's eyes were large portals of despair and fear, though there were trembling inflections of hope and belief in his big brother that hadn't been shaken by the older boy abandoning him in those wide green orbs that seemed twice as huge in his distress. Sparkling tears cut lines of sadness through cheeks stained with blood, sweat beading his brow at the unnaturally hot magma pulsing with malice that lava had no business feeling that surrounded him.

"Cai!" Alexander shouted, wishing that his brother could leap forwards. He was so close. So close to his brother, almost touching, almost able to latch onto his too thin wrist and pull his light body over the barrier of bubbling and bloody molten corruption.

The lacuna of unholy desire and charnel addiction, dark lust and an insatiable bloodthirst and so many more terrible, terrible things, things so violent and sinful that Alexander couldn't define with simple mortal words that would never capture the pure evil, unadulterated craving, present within the fallen god, rose up to its full height.

It towered over the two boys, expanding as far as the eye could see, but instead of obscuring the hellish landscape of blood and abused rock, blocking out the tempestuous storm above that flickered with hankering pink light, it became it. The blood and the lighting, the darkness and the fire, all joined together, a discordant cacophony of malevolence shaped in the form of an atavistic deity who lorded over a domain of violence and pleasure in all of its debased forms.

I'm coming, Cai. I'm coming. Angels above, let me reach him. I can't let him go … I can't let that thing have him. Get away from my little brother! He's mine! Mine! He's so near … I can almost touch him...

Alexander's fingers brushed against those of Caiellis. He wrapped his hand around the boy's bony digits, not caring in the slightest that he squashed them together with a grip that would leave finger shaped bruises, and pulled, pulled with all of his might to drag his brother into his arms. Cai's own fingers squeezed around his sibling's wrist, not even large enough to reach all the way round and connect to one another.

The contact sent a galvanising bolt of hope shuddering through Alexander's veins, and he wrenched his younger brother off of his feet, dragging with a force that could easily dislocate the youngest Lucerna's arm from its socket – but it wouldn't, because even in his frantic desperation Alex would not hurt his little sibling.

"ALEX!" the boy screamed, as a huge hand of leathery, blood red flesh with sinews of darkness and debauched passion with impossibly large and vicious claws wrapped around his waist – or, more precisely, his entire body, the thumb curling around the youngster's face. Caiellis's hand was snatched away from that of his brother's, short nails that he had dug into Alex's skin ripping it open as they were violently torn away.

The pain of the blood-drawing abrasions was nothing compared to the agony speared into the older brother's chest as he gazed into Cai's terrified eyes when the boy was pulled away from him with a strength that was beyond impossible. Alex enclosed strong fingers around the jutting bones holding on as hard as he could, but his hands were slick with the endless blood and slippery on the bare flesh of his sibling's forearm.

He had to keep his brother grounded. He couldn't let go, couldn't let Caiellis be dragged away from him again, not when he had come so close to saving him, not when he had seen the price of failure and had it seared into his blue retinas forever more.

The image of his brother dumped unceremoniously on the ground and covered in pools of his own lifeblood with horrible wounds etched like primitive sigils across his fragile skin lingered, a haunting ghost on the edges of his vision, but no matter how terrifying or poignant it was it could do nothing to distract him from the events playing out in front of his eyes now.

The older boy used all of his strength and muscle that he had built up for years in the twin efforts of bolstering his own pride and ability and becoming ever more able to protect those who in need (most notably his younger brother) in holding onto Cai. He would rather be yanked off of his own feet instead of having his baby brother taken away from him again, even if it would force Caiellis to have to endure the hefty weight of his muscular older brother on his already strained arm.

"Alex..." the smallest son of Marik cried and gasped out, sobbing his big brother's name, voice tainted by the pain that must have been fulminating through his body as his fingers desperately scrabbled for purchase on Alex's arm again. Alexander tried so hard, gritting his teeth as the seconds unfurled out into what seemed like years, but it was never enough, it never could be enough. Caiellis was pulled contemptuously out of his big brother's grasp.

He reached out for his brother again, his hand groping at empty air as more of the hot blood splattered onto it, unable to comprehend that Cai had been taken away from him once more. Confusion addled his mind, incomprehension and a refusal to believe what he knew to be true, but that was soon dissolved by a haze of red that pierced through the fog, all of his grief and fear for his little brother was turned into a fiery rage that exploded through his form.

His scream of anger was incoherent, mere words unable to encompass the sheer ferocity of the desire to rend and tear at this demon that had snatched away what was rightfully his from him.

But it was effortlessly drowned out by the rumbling peal of howling mad laughter that boomed out in an explosion of sheer diabolical noise that burst forth from the demon holding Caiellis several metres off of the ground. The power resonated out through the very earth itself, cracking the stone as the malice and anger far darker than a billion humans in violent harmony could ever hope to muster up crackled in red lines across Alexander's vision.

The massive creature reared up before him, leathery wings drenched in blood opening wider than the world itself, encompassing all of Alexander's sight as burning infernos of unrestrained desire fixed him in their malevolent gaze.

It was pure evil. It was Red and Black mana made manifest, lust and the carnality of carnage personified, a countless number of unholy passions and all consuming bloodthirst embodied into a single form that seethed with power that Alex had never laid witness to before – a single form that currently held his baby brother in one clawed hand.

Caiellis's eyes were desperate, his face streaked with tears and blood, one arm crushed to his body by a single massive finger whilst the other scratched for purchase on his captor, little fingers scrabbling and clawing to no effect.

Alex could see the bottom of his dangling feet kicking and squirming, trying his damned hardest to free himself from the grasp of this brutal avatar of slaughter, but they stilled and fell near still when the demon – Rakdos, the name burning itself into Alexander's mind along with a thousand other terrible meanings of those two syllables – visibly increased the pressure of its grip, writhing in pain in lieu of resistance.

Even over the crashing and rumbling of the abused land and its bruised sky, Alexander's ears were attuned to the horrible muffled scream that slid free from Caiellis's covered mouth.

The blood that was expulsed from what the older boy could see of the youngest Lucerna's mouth trickled down the gargantuan thumb, and that in combination with the way that the motion of his legs became stiffer and writhing was a testament to both the pain afflicting his undeserving little brother and the strength of the affront to light and life that was crushing him.

"Hahaha! He's mine, little princeling! Your brother is mine to use and abuse as I see fit, pathetic Lucerna!" the mass of bloody sinew, violently serrated bone and forbidden magic bellowed, its voice and the words it carried scissoring into the young male's mind and hurting more than any other. The crescendo of sound washed over the older prince like a tide of blood and failure, his own face twisted into a fearsome visage that was only a lacking caricature compared to the spiteful gluttony given form and warped into an expression that leered maliciously down at him.

He had lost him. He had lost Caiellis, let him be taken out of his brother's embrace once again, let him be dragged kicking and screaming out of the arms of safety and into the maleficent grasp of danger once more.

Atavistic pleasure incarnate had claimed his little brother as its own. The muscles and skin of the demon swelled and rippled, huge veins that traced thick patterns of alternating vibrant crimson and deepest black pulsating and wriggling like the malignant blood had a life of its own.

Having never laid eyes upon the beast before – ever, ever, never – its exultantly sadistic form was indistinct, a wound of the bleeding material world itself that expanded with Red and Black saturation ever moment that passed, rivulets of flickering scarlet and tenebrous fires dripping across its skin. It was a creature of the foulest nightmares, a god given form by the unholy cravings of man and demon alike, a being beyond mortal comprehension and yet so recognisably, distinctly corrupted that it made each and every one of Alexander's senses hurt to be in the presence of such malice.

He felt as if talons of passion and rage were scratching at the inside of his eyes, the world contorting and warping in tandem with the clawing in his mind. Cai remained a constant even as the avaricious demon that had taken him from Alexander and definitely caused the wounding of the other Caiellis shifted around him, the hurt world unable to contain the extents of its power and buckling at the seams as it tried to force itself in.

The whimpers of his younger brother, amplified to a near deafening volume by the malicious aura shrouding the boy's captor yet somehow in the same instance kept quiet as to tauntingly remind the older Lucerna of the distance between him and Caiellis, sliced at Alex's mind.

The older sibling within him that defined who he was screamed at him, shaking at the inside of his psyche in defiance of the enraptured reverie that held him to the spot.

He knew that he should be helping – that he should be launching himself at the Archdemon and tearing at it with fingers, nails and teeth, anything to liberate his younger brother from its compressing hold that was squeezing the blood from his body and causing the fragile bones contained within to crack and fracture, he could not move.

Alexander was transfixed by the smouldering, infernal pits of the demon's eyes. Within those flickering depths, he saw figures borne of fire and blood cavorting and whirling in a maddening dance that encapsulated both violence and orgiastic carnality. Although some of the sybaritic silhouettes were faceless humans were features of crimson gore, others were people that he recognised, albeit horribly distorted by the Archdemon's aura.

His vision was filled with awful images, things that he knew were irrevocably wrong but could not tear his eyes away from, but there was one scene amidst the fire, corruption and blood that stood out to him again.

It was the horrible visualisation of Caiellis, with Alexander's hand clamped tightly around his small throat and a straight edged dagger embossed with the golden-white wings of the Lucerna emblem pressed into his neck. He had seen this before, before he had been greeted by the other Cai's broken form, though he could not remember from where.

The betrayal that welled up alongside glistening tears in the youngster's bloodshot eyes rooted the elder boy to the spot, before a heart-wrenching screamed snapped him out of the hellfire portals that were the demon's eyes. His gaze fell back into brutal focus, the stricken form of his little brother centring itself in his vision and the malefic visage of the unholy being near crushing him blurred in the background.

The malicious smile cut across the demon's face leered down at him, before, in a sickening cracking of bone and sinewy flesh it began to move, and its vile voice clawed into the world once again: "You can't save him, Alexander. You never could. And now I will have my first taste of a Lucerna's soul!"

Alexander reached a hand towards his little brother, still held to the spot by the sheer terror flooding his limbs at not being able to save Caiellis both from death's door the first time and from the appearance of the dark creature on the second. His mouth gaped open, blood and spit from all of his screaming drooling down his lips, but no sound left it.

Caiellis's arm spasmed, the boy's bones cracking as he somehow, impossibly managed to wrench himself partly out of the demon's grasp with a strength that Alexander hadn't known he possessed. He grunted, gasping and coughing at the effort of merely moving one arm from underneath the squeezing fingers of his malicious captor, the lower half of his face emerging from the leathery and blood-slick skin that it had been held underneath.

The boy's bright green eyes, alight with fear that Alex would have gladly given his life to expunge forever from his little brother's gaze, instantly met his. Although there was a hefty amount of the desire for the older Lucerna to abandon him and save himself from the capricious predation of Rakdos, the brother within Alexander couldn't see that.

He could only perceive what was more prevalent – the plea for aid. Despite the relentless thudding of the crimson rain and the discordant noise that clothed the Archdemon like a shroud, a sort of tense yet clear silence had descended between the three entities.

It was the calm before the storm, a seething quiet that preceded momentous violence that extended out longer than the seconds it occupied, stretching out across the hellish landscape until all noise faded away. It was the calm before the storm – but it was not eternal.

"Help me, Alex," the words were nothing more than a whisper, weak, faint tremors on the fabric of the twinned realities. And yet they were more than enough to utterly snap the middle royal out of the reverie that had entrapped him, enhancing every single feature of Caiellis and the demon that had taken him.

He reached towards his brother once more, as if by merely extending his arm towards the boy he could extract his little brother from the grasp of their most terrifying enemy yet.

"Caiellis!" Alexander shouted, his voice a mixture between a strangled shout and an anguished cry. It was quieter than he would have liked it, almost drowned out by the sudden resurgence of demonic rumbling from across him. If there was anything, anything at all, that he could do to save his brother, then he would.

Snarling with malicious laughter that had been the harbinger for the deaths of thousands of undeserving innocents, the Defiler raised his trembling captive higher, even further out of the limited reach of the older male.

It opened its mouth wide, atavistic tendrils of bloody smoke and infernal fire snaking up from its gaping maw before encircling the petrified Caiellis. Alexander's eyes were locked with those of his terrified brother, bloodshot green and blue entwined throughout the Red and Black, and he could feel every pin-prick of pain inflicted upon Cai's delicate body amplified a thousand times over his own – though he knew that even with that it came nowhere close to the agony that the youngest Lucerna was suffering.

Caiellis held out his own hand, thin fingers outstretched and ready to be grasped by his big brother. Blood dripped from his lips, staining his teeth red as his mouth was twisted in an expression of pure fear and sadness.

Alexander began running, pumping his legs as fast as they could go, feet slipping on the sodden mud of this corrupted place.

"Caiellis!"
His brother was everything to him, everything. Caiellis filled his vision and filled his mind. Caiellis was everything, the only thing that mattered to Alexander. He couldn't lose him. He wouldn't-

Then the Lord of Riots squeezed, gargantuan fingers caving inwards. Alexander's entire world exploded in fire and blood, the silent scream of his little brother as his body was crushed by the monumental and malevolent forces exerted on it howling in his ears just as the youth's death flashed over and over again in front of his eyes.

The blood consumed his mind, subsuming and painting all in the crimson of his little brother's death, the crimson of his failure, the crimson of a life without ultimately the only thing that had made that life living. He was drowning in it, drowning in the endless tide of claret droplets. But they did not stop him from screaming.

"CAIELLIS!"

.*.*.*.

Alexander thudded upwards, the red draining from the centre of his vision like he was surfacing from an ocean of blood. It did not leave completely, coalescing at his peripherals and shading everything in a deep scarlet hue that refused to depart.

Thud, thud.

He thrust forwards, the silken blanket that had been laid atop him and restricting his movements roughly shoved off of him. Sweat dripped down his brow, heat bursting through his veins and pounding inside of his head. Caiellis, Caiellis! Where's Caiellis?!

Thud, thud.

The seventeen year old ground his teeth together, the edges of the dim but still lit room pressing in on him, still stained red from the blood of his younger sibling. His vision refocussed, his disordered mind instantly honing in on what he needed to protect, the violence that Cai had just been the victim of resounding around in his abused psyche.

Thud, thud.

Languid beeping, quiet but unable to be ignored, somehow pierced over the sound of his heart thumping, and the frequent cyclic whirr, click, whoosh of some strange device coupled with the weak pinging notes brought a sense of systemic calm to the room that couldn't dislodge Alexander's panic.

Where is he? Where is he? The frantic thoughts crashed around within Alex's skull, his eyes darting from one place to the next as they adjusted to the light levels of this location. Sensation as he knew it slowly returned to him, the feeling of sticky blood coating his skin fading to levels where he could push it aside and not feel sick to his stomach.

Thud, thud.

For some reason – be it the undying faith that the youth possessed in the bond between him and his younger brother, or the sheer refusal to believe or comprehend the horrific brutality that he had just borne witness to – he could not countenance that Cai would be dead. That he would be left without a little sibling, that he had been saved from the being that had claimed the thirteen year old and that this dusky world was what had greeted him after resurfacing into consciousness.

No no no! It can't be! He can't be gone! NO!

To this end, Alexander's eyes swept what was now clearly a hospital room for any sign of his brother, his confusion and desperation at another savage transition between tranquillity and barbarity near too much to handle and making him feel sick to his stomach once more. Only the thought of having to find his brother his again allayed his nausea and concentrated his mind on a singular objective. Walls painted in grey dusk were hued red by the blood still coating Alex's peripheral vision, revealing nothing to his prying eyes despite how much he internally implored them to.

Thud, thud.

Alexander looked down, suddenly realising that the object of his concern was in the room after all – just much nearer than he originally thought. The languid rhythm that he had previously believed was the thumping of insanity within his head was resonating from a point clasped within one of his hands.

It was his little brother's wrist, the weak pulse emanating from it a testament to the life contained in the boy's body. Alexander stared down at the hospital bed in front of him as his vision adjusted to the lack of light, Caiellis's face illuminated by the flickering beams that washed over him, his closed eyes dark crescents against his gaunt features.

The smaller boy was sleeping, his face a mask of purity, a quiet slumber far removed from the rictus of pain and terror it had been contorted into the last time Alex had laid eyes upon it. He was peaceful, a serene figure laid on the bed in front of his big brother and seemingly unaffected by the cruelty and violence of this uncaring world.

Alexander felt his once pounding heart melting in his chest, relief flooding through his mind and happiness welling up inside of him as tears pricked at the corners of his eyes. In any normal circumstance he would have quickly erased the display of weakness from his currently part-defective eyes, but right now he couldn't care less.

It wasn't real … It wasn't real! It was all just a dream … Caiellis is fine … Caiellis is safe, here with me and away from anything that could hurt him … He's alive...

Alexander gazed down, swiftly unclenching his hand and recoiling his fingers back from Caiellis's wrist as if it had been scorching hot. He had only just realised how tightly his grip had been clamped down on his brother, and winced with guilt when he saw the red blemishes dug into the thin wrist.

The boy's arm slowly fell back to his bed, the motion thankfully not disturbing the sleeping youngster. Alexander beheld the thirteen year old, suddenly cognisant of all of the injuries that were heaped upon Cai, littered across his body in a patchwork mosaic of a discarded teddy bear. And the striking bruises that the older male could see were nothing in comparison to the wounds concealed by the clinical bandages and gauze that wrapped up a huge proportion of the youngest Lucerna.

Alexander's eyes dragged his vision across his brother's body, following the distressing pattern of wires carrying both natural and magically synthesised nutrients into Caiellis's bloodstream as well as some transferring pure mana itself to replenish that which had been lost to his little brother.

He was fragility encapsulated into a single small form, the oxygen mask strapped to his face that was the source of the puffing symphony Alex's ears had initially picked up on misting up with every contraction of the boy's thin chest.

While Caiellis dying in the hands of one of the most corrupt beings to ever taint the might have been a false torture, the abuse that he had sustained in the horrifically desecrated City of Pleasure had been very real.

Scratchy images of his precious younger sibling laid still in their father's arms as the usually stoic man wrenched cries of sorrow from his lungs, of Caiellis awakening in the bed he was now situated in with eyes wide and blood filling the mask keeping him alive, and of less visceral but no less terrifying sights of his unmoving brother slowing fading into the paleness of death with nothing Alexander could do about it flashing like faulty holographs around what his eyes showed him now.

The brutally real memories returned to him now. The seventeen year old only just choked back a sob, blue eyes moistening with tears that threatened to cascade down his cheeks at his abject failure to help his brother.

Oh angels … Goddess ... why … why must he have suffered like this? Why did this have to happen to him?

He knew that Caiellis had been awake, that he had talked to him and the king, making what limited amends he could with both the former and latter, and was in an infinitely better condition than he had been only a day or so previous.

That didn't matter. Even if his brother had been strong enough to speak coherently, strong enough to stay aware for longer than a few minutes and strong enough to cry into his family's arms, that still didn't mean he was safe.

Despite his seemingly stable condition and Alexander newly renewed optimism that they would manage to survive through the war between Lucael and Welkas, he was under no illusions. Caiellis's state was in no way absolute, and his current stage of stability – or even recovery – could be as transient as their sojourn to the Scholaria Magnus had been.

He stared at Caiellis's hand, the one that had landed back on the soft yet firm mattress of the hospital bed. Alexander reached out for it, gentling clasping it back into his own grip, a physical reminder that the youngest Lucerna was still there, still with them in spite of all that the darkness had thrown at him.

His gaze instinctively flicked up to the place on the opposite side of the bed where he recalled that his father would have sat. The seat was vacant, but Alexander didn't care – so long as he was with his younger brother, he could protect him, and he didn't need anyone else to do that job for him.

Their dad must have left without waking his eldest son, either attending to some of his kingly duties in the wake of the war, speaking to the doctors that had been both his and his brother's salvation or going to fetch something to aid any of the three royals.

It didn't matter. All that it meant was that Caiellis and Alexander were alone, like they had been many times throughout the years fraught with peril that they had endured – thrived – through. He looked back down at his baby brother, rubbing a soft circle over the marks he had left with a gentle thumb, swallowing down his nausea at how thin the younger boy had become. The seventeen year old felt that he could snap the bones with a simple flick of his own wrist, sickened by the thought.

He felt his heart melting in his chest at the sight of the piece of him that had very nearly been ripped away. The weakness that had afflicted him soon turned to love, and with that love came a resolute determination to safeguard the life of Caiellis with everything that he had – no matter the cost. It did occur to him that he already tried his damned hardest to prevent his sibling coming to harm, but that just meant that he had to become stronger, faster, more able to defeat those who strove to prevent his intervention in Caiellis's fate.

He'd wasted enough time already in his depression at what had happened to Caiellis – though that was admittedly understandable, as the youngest prince was his reason for fighting and without that he could find only a few things worth continuing to live for. Alexander had lost weight, not as drastically as his sibling had, but his unwillingness to eat in combination with the destructive caress of Aksua which had almost killed him only a couple of weeks previous had noticeably reduced his muscle mass and with it his strength. That could not stand.

"I-I promise to protect you, little brother," he whispered, his voice still harbouring that raw note of sadness which had accompanied him throughout his nightmare. His voice was still loud enough that Cai, if awake, had the ability to hear it, and Alexander ensured that it was inflected with a confidence and resolution that was an assurance to his brother that he would be safe here.

Alex removed the frailty from his voice – though of course the emotion remained, that was something that he could never just force away – and continued, "Believe me, Cai. I'm not going to let anything like this happen to you again. I promise."

His only response was silence periodically punctuated by the beeping signifying his brother's continued existence, but that didn't concern him. It would be worse if he did disturb the boy from his restorative slumber.

Alexander leant forwards and slowly, gently, planted a kiss atop a spot on Cai's forehead that wasn't covered in gashes or bandages. He usually wouldn't be partial to such displays of outright affection, preferring to let his brother know that he was fond of him through tormenting and teasing, but this was no normal situation.

"I love you, Caiellis," he murmured, before smiling at his younger sibling. It was a miracle that his brother was still with him. Even though it disgusted him to admit it, he had, at one point, given up on a future with the littlest Lucerna. Such could never happen again – he couldn't ever just sit, idle, whilst others tried desperately to preserve the life of his best friend.

The older adolescent felt the pull of his exhaustion once more, beckoning him into another restless sleep. Whilst he would prefer to watch his brother all night and keep an eternal vigil around Cai, such wouldn't be feasible, not in his current condition. Caiellis was constantly being monitored, his state perpetually observed by both trained professionals and the machines that he was attached to like a mannequin to puppet strings.

All Alexander could provide was emotional support and additional physical protection, and, right now, that had to be enough.

---

Again, my deepest apologies for the unreasonable length of time it took me to release this chapter. There has been a lot going on in my life recently that has pushed writing the Eternal Dance of Light and Dark near to the back of my list of priorities. I am truly sorry to anyone who has been waiting for this chapter since the last one. Hopefully with the onset of the summer holidays I will be able to get back into writing properly.