Chapter Text
Through the weightless throng, and the ghosts that had received proper burial, he came to Persephone, and the lord of the shadows, he who rules the joyless kingdom. Then striking the lyre-strings to accompany his words, he sang: ‘O gods of this world, placed below the earth, to which all, who are created mortal, descend; if you allow me, and it is lawful, to set aside the fictions of idle tongues and speak the truth."
Ovid, Metamorphoses
In less than thirty—maybe twenty?—minutes, the facility will be breached. Far above, the footfalls of a hundred or so iron-clad boots will rattle their ceilings, sending plumes of dust and debris onto the linoleum floor. Retribution cloaked as justice will come thundering, announcing its presence with a hollow Come out now, and no one will be harmed. Submit yourselves to our glorious nation, and you will be spared. They will not run. There would be nowhere to go, anyway.
"Error: system malfunction."
Fluixon flickers through the camera feeds with a practiced speed. Shades of black and red blur together through the pixilated screen of digits and code: two, two, one, zero— the clattering of keys amidst the cacophony of chaos. There is shouting by his left, a hysterical cry and a crazed laugh. It pitches on madness and tickles down his spine in cold sweat. He does not stop typing. The machinery hums in comforting response, the whooshing of steam singing to the beat of motorized beeps and squeaks, the monotonous tick-tock of the world ending.
"They've taken over Ferryman. Seraphim saw them heading north already."
A swipe to the right. Collapsed bodies by the dockside, littering the water like a swath of fat fruit-flies in the summer. Their carcasses bloated and drifted across the surface face down. A swipe to the right. A pinprick of gnawing forest fire by the mountainside; the trailing of yellow and orange streaks licking the base of farmland. The blackened cinder of wheat coloring the sky a sickly, noxious gray.
A swipe to the right— President Solev's face. Contorted in quiet fury. The artful downturn of his lips barking orders to seize the entrance. His grainy voice on the intercom: Kill them if you have to, but leave the machine untouched.
"Take the ladder to the sewers, then barricade. Where's JonTrop?"
"He's burning the documents. Told him to just light the whole south wing on fire, that way they can't reach the bodies."
Two, two, one, zero. "Flux? We have to go."
A swipe. A clack. Error: System Malfunction. "Just a bit more."
There is a hand on his shoulder, wonderfully solid and warm. "It's not worth your life. We can start again, somewhere farther where they can't find us."
"They'll always find us." He murmured, gaze never leaving the screen. Solev's eyes, grave and askew with a familiar type of madness: the kind born from a desperate search for an answer. A mute hunger that grew with a dangerous glint.
A beeping sound rang overhead, before the screen in front of him flickered off. The pitch-black glass reflected Fluixon's face, and for a second, he couldn't tell them apart.
He was promptly spun around, the inertia nearly throwing him onto the ground. He fumbled in his chair, fingers already itching to formulate the next line of code. Two, two, one, three, zero. Two, two, one—thirty? No, definitely twenty by now. Tick-tock, buzz, hum, clink—
"If we don't move, then we die, and if we die, then everything goes down too." Brown eyes shone with stubborn tears under the harsh white light. Fluixon's head lolled to the side, struggling to take a good look at his perpetrator's face. "Our research. Our hopes. Our dreams. Imperia won't spare us just because we know what they've kept secret for so long— they'll kill us because we did it better."
"That's why this has to work."
Thomas shook his head. The rivulets streamed down past his chin and onto the dusty linoleum floor. "It won't. You may be a genius, Flux. The best of us, even. But it won't work."
Anger. Hot and persistent, it throbbed in his chest. "You don't know that—"
Slap! Fluixon's eyes grew wide. His hand instinctively rose to hover at the bright red mark that stung across his cheek.
"Thomas."
They both turned. The voice that intercepted them was soft, almost unnerving in the midst of bumbling machinery and insolent infighting. Dr. Briarose cut an imposing figure; her white-blond hair and delicate features did not take away from the fact that she was the catalyst of this all. The criminal undertaker who snuck out of her own Ministry and provided them with the information that would eventually herald their doom. Perhaps it was her own guilt, knowing that she had inadvertently caused the war in No Man's Land to break out, that she stood protectively in front of Fluixon, who cradled his wounded face.
"Doctor, why are you still here? They'll be looking for you first." Thomas said, his eyes flickering between her and Fluixon.
Dr. Briarose shook her head. A docile smile graced her scarred face. "Project Lazarus was never meant to hurt people…so please, don't start fighting. Not now."
Fluixon watched as a hundred different emotions all flickered at once on Thomas' face. First, indignant. Opening his mouth to rebut Dr. Briarose, who simply turned to look away, then contemplative. His eyes downcast, foot tapping against the floor as if he was personally weighing out the lives of everyone in the facility in his hands. Before finally settling on crestfallen.
For a moment, Fluixon could see the superimposed face of a distant memory layered atop his. Brown eyes prone to crying, a mouth that ran itself reckless and unashamed, a loyalty that would omen his own death.
Two, Two, One, Zero."I really can't convince you, can I?"
Fluixon chuckled. "It was a good effort."
Thomas' gaze drifted to the machine that had signed their fate, etched in brimstone and blood and brilliance. It's shifting gears and whirring cogs, the unforgiving hiss of pressurized steam. A sign of defiance. A collar of rope to be hung around their throats. Fluixon focused on the ground, unable to look him in the eye as he listened to the sound of his footsteps grow farther and farther away.
Fifteen minutes if he was lucky. He had stopped counting and decided to start measuring the seconds by heartbeats. There was a loud crash somewhere in the far south of the facility. Fluixon knew the death toll had rung out when the smell of pungent burnt plastic and paper hit his nose.
He turned back to his screens and began to fall into the rhythm of systematic rebooting.
"Please know that I truly am sorry, Fluixon." Dr. Briarose whispered. Her fingers drew faint figures onto the plexiglass barrier, spelling out the letters to their eulogies. "Maybe if we were given more time, we could have figured out the complication. I never understood why it worked for everyone else but him."
Fluixon dared not respond. His eyes were wholly focused on the thousands of numbers that flitted past the screen, the ones and zeroes all strung into words that only he could read. However, he understood what she meant to say.
Give up.
Two, Two, One, Zero.An ominous creak from above them. The ceiling was threatening to sink at any second. Fifteen, maybe ten. Without warning, the room was plunged into a brief darkness— before the red hue of the emergency lights flooded the area in scarlet haze.
A slam of the air-lock door by his right. Dr. Briarose's horrified voice: "Is that?"
"Yeah." Thomas's back was pressed against the glass. The muscled bulk of his shoulders flexed in effort as he dragged something along the ground and into the blue-tinged chamber. The tips of his hair singed with smoke. "You want to give it one last shot, right? Then here's your chance."
The body in front of him barely has the dignity to be called a body at all.
Corpses are an odd thing, Fluixon thought. Everything about him was wrong. His hair was choppily cut, brushing across his ears in uneven strokes; they had to splice it to make sure the ends wouldn't freeze to the side of the tube. His skin, even paler as it was in life. A muted pewter that still exhumed tendrils of vapor from being semi-thawed with veins translucent under the flashing cherry ripe lights. The most unnatural of subhuman preservation, and yet the most uncanny thing about his corpse is that Fluixon half expected his eyes to slowly flutter open. That he'd squint at the siren lamps and open his big mouth to start complaining.
But the corpse did not move. Did not speak. Fluixon half turned, typed another series of numbers into the system. He would not deign it the remorse that he could spare to it if it were alive.
His focus never wavered. Ten, maybe six— the syncopated orchestra of machinery falling into cadence with his heartbeat. The voices were no longer being heard through the intercom. The President's grief-ridden eyes stare directly at the camera, as if looking directly at him.
A hand on his shoulder, the kind that lingered. "I hope you get what you've been dying for."
A latch closing behind him. The silence that followed felt more suffocating than ever.
And so he worked. Like a madman possessed, his hands following through the motions of typing, surveying, and counting through memory. The body suspended by tubes and various intersecting wires dangled like a spit-roasted pig. A disgusting oddity. A mockery of death. He must be cold. Two, Two, One, Zero—Saparata never had the internal regulation he did, the kind that lit him aflame with wicked ambition and terrifying competency. It was why he lived like he did. Foolish and unaccounted for. It is what led Fluixon to do this, picking up the shattered pieces left behind and nipping at his heels.
Even in death, he controlled him.
Two, Two, One, Zero— Six, maybe two. No, definitely two. Fluixon never hated him more.
Tick-tock, buzz, hum, clink. "Overdrive: Success"
There was an awful silence that followed. Punitive and mean. Fluixon watched in bated breath at his patchwork monster of desolated dreams and disappointments. The machines lulled to a quiet, the gears and cogs delivering their cackling finale. The screens snapped black as the last dredges of emergency power dwindled dry. The world was submerged into darkness once more, and this time, with the only thing left for the light to catch being the soft blue glow from inside the chamber.
"Fuck." His throat bubbled with a trapped sound. "Fuck. Fuck—"
A loud explosion rang out from the south wing. "Security Systems: Compromised. Initiating lockdown protocol."
He hadn't even noticed the flood of heat that trickled into the room. The crackle of slithering flames that crawled across the floor and into the main lab. Fluixon coughed. With the lockdown protocol activated all the windows and air vents were now sealed tight. Carbon monoxide poisoning was certainly a pathetic way to go.
Stumbling out of his chair, he walked on unsteady feet towards the air-seal door. The smog and sulfur began to cloud his vision as he pried open the lock. It unlocked with a pressurized pop. He quickly scrambled to shut it back closed, his lungs rasping with each painful intake of breath. Saparata still hung there. A lifeless effigy of his failures, now twice over.
"Damn you." He rasped. "This is all your fault."
Reaching out for the base of the wires that held him upright, he pulled down with all his remaining strength. Saparata's body fell like a slab of meat dislodged from a butcher's hook. Fluixon angled them both so he would be pressed against the door with Saparata's corpse lying between his feet, head pillowed on his thigh. He had already begun to leak odious fluids; the state of decomposition would only be hastened with the sudden furnace brewing from outside. Fluixon's self preservation had never been the best, really. Despite his half-thawed state, he continued to hold on with white-knuckles, letting the rot take them both.
Not like this. Not in fire, or by the end of Solev's misery-plagued sword. Fluixon was too great to go out by fate's wish; too self-made prodigal to let the Lazarus Project end with him stuck alone beneath the callous dirt. Not when it was his life's work. His dream.
Or so he told himself.
Ironically enough, he often worked with neuroscientists in this same lab. Hope, they would say, resided in the orbitofrontal cortex. One of the most confounding parts of the human brain, which somehow directs our decision-making and expectation and memory and emotional behaviors, and our hedonic experiences, which is to say, what devastates us and what makes our life worth living. It is located just above the eye, dictating how the world is seen.
He always wondered if that was why, to envision a life beyond the stone wall or to better focus on the act of making a prayer, we often close our eyes and look up.
Fluixon tilted his head skyward. I don't want to die.
He had never been the capricious type. Fluixon was a man who prided himself on being consistent, unchanging. There were a few things in life that kept people alive during difficult times, belief in fickle gods was one of them. And yet, when the fire inched closer towards their airlock and the roof sank closer to the ground, he let the primal desire to defy death take over. Wild, in the way animals are, untamed and full of teeth.
He looked down at the body in his arms. Skin slowly melting off from bone. The stench of curdling blood. If this is how it is, then I will curse you for the rest of my life.
He sucked in a shallow breath, air full of smoke and filth. But if…just this once you're listening. Bring him back so we can go together.
"Oh, hey man, what's going on here?"
If Fluixon were a stronger man, he would have held his composure and stared at the being who had just phased through the plexiglass in disbelief. But even with no one to witness it, he will forever staunchly insist that he did not jump at the sight of him.
"Woah! Sorry, sorry." The being held out its arms in feigned defeat. It watched as Fluixon crowded closer to the wall, dragging up Saparata's partially festered body along with him like a caged dog with a bone. "I didn't mean to scare you."
Fluixon didn't know who he was, and yet, there was this unmistakable feeling of familiarity that clung to him like the swaths of bygone vestige. Automatically disarming him as a threat in his fear-addled mind. Who was he? He couldn't find the answer, and yet, it was as if he had been seeing him the whole time, watching unassumingly in the corner of his peripheral vision for all this time.
It didn't matter. None of it did. "Bring him back. You can do that, right? Bring him back now."
And God— Ish, his mind supplied— simply loomed above the wet floor with an unreadable expression. Hand to his chin, looking at the mess of wires and tubes aimlessly focused elsewhere. As if he were reading something from afar.
"Ah, sorry, man, no can do." He said, and for a second, Fluixon thought he almost sounded sympathetic to their situation. A bitter thing grew in his chest. How could someone like him possibly understand what it was like?
"What do you mean, no can do?" Fluixon hissed. "You're— you're whatever you are, right?
God, Ish, or whatever the bastard's name was, shook his head. "I can't bring back someone who doesn't want to come back, Flux."
And hope, as the neuroscientists said, was a lamp. He had never known it until the light fell out, dripped down his hands, and flew up like a stone lodged between his throat. He couldn't tell if it was the smoke or the decomposition, or maybe the madness of it all finally making itself known.
"What do you mean?" He asked, his voice sounding far, far away.
Ish looked almost sad. His voice dropped to a small whisper, as if placating a child. "Souls are…tricky. It's easier for people to—for lack of a better term— come back to life when their souls actually have the will to do so. There needs to be a desire. A drive, so to speak. Saps has chosen to remain as is."
Fluixon stared.
And then, he began to laugh.
It was ugly, as most things in that place were. Full-bodied and shaking, his chest a boiling pit of paroxysms and condensed stars. He laughed. Until his head felt it had been wrapped in gossamer, and his eyes clouded with crystalline tears. A searing, feverish heat in the cavity of his open chest where his heart had been pried open, bursting at the seams in manic hiccups. He didn't know where the fire outside started and where he ended.
"This is an outrage." He said in between gasps of air. "He doesn't want to live? He'd leave me here, in this hell, on my own? That idiot— that treacherous fuck!"
Ish hovered close. Not to comfort, but rather, to observe. "I did say souls were tricky. They're fragile, and too much pressure and memory can make them fracture into tiny little pieces. And when that happens, it doesn't matter if they want to come back or not; they simply can't."
"Then what about me?"
He frowned. "You're different. Stubborn."
Why him and not me? Acceptance is a small, quiet room. And Fluixon's grief is a loud, roaring thing that demands to be addressed. In a lousy attempt to see God eye-to-eye, he stood towards him on buckling knees. The proximity to so many things that have attempted to kill him has leaden his muscles to the brink of atrophy. The creak of his bones holds more than just weight.
"Bring him back." He repeated, on unsteady feet and shaking fists.
"I already told you I can't—"
"No. I refuse to accept that. I refuse to believe that it ends just like this." If he wanted them to die, then he would have to do so with his own hands. Outside of a cruel and uncaring fate. Or in the confines of a glass box far below the ground. "Bring him back."
"That's not how this works!" Ish croaked. His eyes rapidly flicker between Fluixon and the invisible subject beside him.
"Then find a way. I don't care what happens or who gets hurt. Bring him back!" He hadn't even noticed he was screaming until Ish covered his ears with a pained look. They must have looked ridiculous. An omniscient creature, a dead body, and a petulant child stuck in a burning room.
"Alright, alright!—" Ish waved him off with a dismissive hand. "Damn, I don’t get why people love you so much." He muttered under his breath.
"What—"
"Just." He held his palm to Fluixon's face. Sufficiently silencing him. "Let me think, okay?"
A quivering sigh escaped his lips, his body nearly collapsing from the sudden pressure pulling him down. He slides onto the floor, next to Saparata's useless cadaver, and finds where putrefied remains of his hand to hold tightly.
The silence seems to stretch out endlessly. The wait settled into reality when he noticed that no more guards were banging on the door, and the fires seemed to have been halted mid-cackle. Fluixon waited, and the world paused with him.
Ish's face moved too fast to be human— a blur of frantic tension, like heat rippling over earth just before a storm breaks. The muscles twitched in sharp, fractured rhythms, eyes shifting with a fevered precision that it flayed open the parts of him that were simply too alien to explain, as if time itself stuttered across his skin. When he finally stood still, he looked at Fluixon with an almost excited glint in his eye.
"It seems an interesting option has opened up for you, Flux."
His nose scrunched at the amused tone. "Don't call me that."
Ish shrugged him aside. "Let's say I give you an offer. How about you go and get Saps back all on your own?"
A shiver ran down his spine. "How?"
Ish smiled in the way only beings outside of the narrative could, detached but entirely fond. He slowly lowered himself down onto the filthy floor, observing Saparata's unmoving face up close.
"You'll have to do it yourself, of course. Go out to wherever his soul is and bring it back with you. Then we can try to mend it back together." Ish remarked, carefully brushing aside the stringy strands of white hair from Saparata's face. "That is, if you can even get out of there yourself."
Fluixon tensed. "What do you mean?"
The godlike being's face fell into a grave expression. When he spoke, it was with an undertone of a thousand different voices layered atop his. An amalgamation of entropic litanies, and if he listened closely, it almost sounded like a choir. A chorus. "It'll be hard. You'll lose yourself again and again, but if you manage to stay on track and keep your mind in one piece, it'll be smooth sailing!"
"And what's the catch?"
Ish hummed. "There is no catch."
"Impossible. There's always a catch."
Ish's eyebrows furrowed. Fluixon eyed him warily as he began to pace around the room. "There's no catch, Flux. I am not god, and this is not a test. Sometimes, all people really want out of things is a good story to tell."
Fluixon laughed. "And I'm your good story?"
"Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?" Ish quoted with a smile. "No one likes ending on a tragedy, after all."
And in the midst of all the fire and rot, Fluixon felt the certainty in his shift. Saparata's body was still cold at his side, with eyes forever closed. Not like this. I'll make this right.
"I accept your offer."
"Wonderful!" He cheered, and with a snap of his fingers, the chaos resumed. The flames slowly started to eat away at the glass while the footfalls stormed overhead. Each deafening shake brought the sky closer and closer to the ground.
Fluixon held on tighter. Breathing in the blackened smoke, he slowly lowered himself down onto the cold, hard floor beside Saparata. Curled in and waiting. He never wakes up.
"Oh! And hey, Flux." Ish's voice thins into a distant hush. It softened, sweet and shadowed, melting into a low, trembling murmur — until it became nothing more than a warm echo dissolving into dark. "Hold on tight, okay?"
Solev never gets to catch them, not when the ceiling finally caves in and burns the last few bits of Lazarus and Fluixon to ash.
The world ends in the cold.
It’s a biting and desperate thing, killing them both slowly as their feet sank into the wet sleets of ice. Fluxion shivered down to his bones, despite the thick animal fur supposedly built for this kind of weather that sat dampened on his shoulders. Death does not truly exist in this corner of the universe. Where it seems even reality bends to the will of howling winds, shucked into the quiet of winter.
Snow trailed on for miles into the boundless distance. Despite the perpetual state of darkness that blankets them, the moon waned high in the sky— a pearl of marble spooled in spider silk, suspended in a mercurial cradle of night. Its light guided the shortsighted path ahead, of pure and unending white.
He wondered if this is what purgatory is like. A road with no end. A night with no day. The only companion are the stars and the wretched moon that hangs far above him, unreachable for comfort, silent in their observation. A world with no one in it.
Except, it isn't. The hand being held in his is the only heat in the perpetual cold. Warm, solid, and unmoving.
Fluixon trudges further. His feet began to numb, and his breath formed pockets of condensed air. There is no road without an end. No night without day. He walks, and walks, and walks— the moon is laughing. He can hear it. Snickering with the stars as they gaze upon his lonesome figure struggling against the forces of creation. Their voices melding with the whipping winds that graze past his ears. There is nothing for you here. Look at you. You reek of anger and horror. It follows where you walk.
He marched forward, uncaring of her sickeningly sweet laugh and star-dusted eyes. The instincts of a soldier are burned into his muscles and tendons; he could move even while half dead or half dreaming. He stared back into the depths of the night defiantly.
He doesn't know how long they walk in the dark. It's as if time itself has warped into the beat of his feet against the ground, the exhale of air, the drum of his heart. He could measure their journey through moments; the twitch of the hand in his, the slight gust of wind that tousled his sweat-laden forehead. It could be days, months, years, centuries into a millennium, and he would still be walking.
He measures by moments: the hand in his gripping so tight it shocks him to a stop.
Fluixon knew he should turn. Knew that the wind howling in his ear sings to the desire that sits hot and heavy in his chest. Turn, look me in the eye when we walk in together. He should, he could.
His feet stay rooted firmly in the ground. He dares not to speak, to breathe, as if a single sound will sink them both into the unforgiving snow.
"Ah, hey." The voice behind him was light and airy, unlike the pressuring surroundings; it spoke with almost a careless lilt. "Is this hell?"
It was so genuine and confused of a question that it almost made him laugh. Instead, he manages a strained sigh.
"No, I think. Maybe somewhere worse." He paused. "Why not ask if it's heaven?"
"Heaven wouldn't be so cold and empty." The voice behind him replied. "I don't think they'd let me in there anyway."
Fluixon laughed, the kind that makes his head hurt from how hard he bellows and curls into himself. If Heaven and Hell were to exist, then maybe it would be much more forgiving than what he is doing.
"I didn't think I was so funny, honestly." The voice laughed in return. "Hey, stranger. Do you think I can at least look at the face of the guy who's bringing me to my supposed doom?"
"What am I, your tour guide? Besides, you don't need to see my face to end up where we're going."
The voice behind him was silent. Fluixon almost thought to himself that the other had fallen asleep, or something adjacent to that. He allowed his feet to continue the monotonous rhythm, falling back into motion as the wind changed direction. Fluixon followed.
Cutting through quietude, the voice behind him chuckled— as if remembering a joke that Fluixon's made the punchline for. "Do you really think I wouldn't know you just by your voice? The way you hold yourself? Why won't you look at me, Flux?"
He measures by moments: the wind changes direction and the ground beneath his snow-crusted heels begins to sink. The wet droplets turn into splintering grains of sand, as the breeze shifts from gelid to a simperingly humid heat. The world tilts— and Fluixon can only watch as the snickering moon and her stars are banished from the sky, as dusk peels back the paint of night. The sun, for all its boastful glory, burns his eyes and makes him duck beneath the shade of his hand.
He took a breath— one where his lungs are no longer pierced by a thousand stinging crystals of frost and instead being crushed against the weight of another suddenly pressing onto him. The voice had pulled on his hand with such overwhelming force that it had pulled them both stumbling into the sun-warmed sand. Fluixon's eyes instinctively sew themselves shut from the sudden impact.
"Are you stupid!—" He could barely speak before a pair of hands grasped him tightly by the shoulders. Pushing him even deeper into the sand.
"Look at me."
Fluixon sighs, knowing that he held out for this long is a miracle in itself. He knew that the path forward would be marked with trials, and sooner or later, he would meet his first one.
He slowly pried open his eyes.
Saparata had never been the patient one between them.
"Finally." The stands of his long, untamed hair fell onto Fluixon's face. Despite the sun haloing from behind his head, it felt as if he was still staring directly into a burning star.
Fluixon's blood lit like propane to a nicked match. Even with the sudden change of weather, he is frozen solid. The eyes that stared at him are the same ones that had been shut closed for so long, that he had stared at in desperate nights wishing that they would open just to grant him the chance to yell, to scream, to hurl every terrible and ugly thing he had been harboring in his chest for so long. To have a chance of letting him know just how madFluixon was.
They stared at him unflinchingly, devoid of any of the warmth he was so acquainted with. Fluixon almost choked on the words that almost came out. Even a taxidermy is better than this.
"You're not him," Saparata told him like it was a fact, a known reality of unchanging paradigms. "You're not my Flux."
Fluixon wanted to laugh. Wanted to spit in his face and curse until his voice gave out, and they bleed back into the rot they both came from. He wanted to scream: No, I haven't been for a while.
He doesn't. He sank deeper into the sand until there was nothing left of him at all.
Theria is destined to burn.
It was not fate, as he may have hoped. No, it was like every empire to fall, to be rubble and ruin until the next generation comes after to make a home out of it. To repeat the cycle. Fluixon knows this. It will come either tomorrow, or the day after, or years from now— but it doesn't change the outcome.
"The Sultanate continues to expand, but there are more reports of public outrage nowadays than growth. It won't be long before the inciting incident occurs, and everything else will follow."
Jophiel stood before him. Her hair of gold-spun thread was braided tightly into a crown of dusted laurel. Her voice, loud and clear against the limestone and terracotta of the agora. She commanded the room with a flick of the wrist and everyone, even his most stingy and uptight counselors, listened. She was magnetic in the way only ambassadors can be, and even when she spoke of such unpleasant things, she made it sound almost bearable.
"The Sultanate will not crumble just from the threat of momentary disorder. Even if something does manage to happen to the chain of command, their people have been raised to be controlled. I wouldn't even be surprised if they didn't know how to breathe without someone telling them how."
Fluixon glanced to his side, seeing his President, expression bored and wayward, he held in the urge to sigh. Instinctively, he reached over to pinch him in the side.
And because he was a dignified ruler and a graceful vessel of their gods, he only yelped a little bit.
"Listen when your council is speaking." Fluixon's steely eyes bore into him with a scathing look of reprimand. Jophiel, for all her mild temperament and curated appearances, cannot help but giggle at their display.
"My, there's no need to torment our President, Fluixon." Jophiel smiled, gesturing to the rest of the room with practiced ease. "One cannot bear the weight of our mighty city without having some sort of reprieve, yes? Perhaps we should reconvene another time. Theria will still stand tomorrow, and the Agora will open her halls for discussion when all of its speakers have rested."
The counselors all murmured and nodded in agreement, two-faced as they are, they know that the discussion will lead nowhere, as it has for all the other past discussions. The Sultanate heaved at a standstill, and the fate of the Desert was left to the wind to push whoever it favors in its direction. Theria has never been the nation to move without knowing where the gales might take them.
Knowing his cue well, Saparata nodded. "Meeting adjourned. Word will be sent out for follow-up."
As the counselors slowly filtered out of the Agora, Saparata allowed himself to marginally sink into his seat. There was a weariness that settled deep into the marrow of his bones, one not even the relief of an ended meeting can bring. The light scatters across the Doric pillars, dragging fractals across the sandstone floors and the emptied seats. The only one that remained occupied was the one with the very disgruntled Fluixon standing by its side.
"Oh my," Jophiel's smile managed to reach her eyes, as she hid her mouth behind her long, billowing sleeve. "If I had known ending the meeting so early would distress you like this, Fluixon, please know it was not my intention."
The overwhelming urge to roll his eyes nearly overtook him, but luckily enough, Fluixon has enough dignity for the both of them to wave a dismissive hand at her. "Thank you, Jophiel. However, I think our President has something he needs to hear without anyone else possibly eavesdropping."
He ignored the pleading glance Saparata gave to Jophiel as she made her leave from the Agora. Their eyes met, and for a fleeting second, she looked almost sympathetic to his situation, before she briskly turned away and let the sunbeams illuminate the specks of sand suspended in the air in her wake.
Alone with Fluixon, Saparata finally allowed his body to release the accumulated tension it had been holding. The throne was gaudy and mildly uncomfortable. It's gilded corners digging into his skin. He paid it no mind and instead, pretended not to notice the absolutely withering look his Vice President was giving him.
"You haven't been sleeping." The exhaustion made itself clear on Saparata's face.
"I know," he admitted softly. "Sorry, I'll try not to let it show in the meetings."
"That's not what I mean, and you know it." Fluixon crossed his arms. His mouth pressed into a downtrodden line. He had never been the type to be soft, particularly in his reprimand. "You haven't been sleeping, and you're not telling me something. It's keeping you up. Eating you alive."
Saparata glanced away. Fluixon continued to press into him.
"Flux," He whispered. As the sun began to make its descent into the west, casting its rays at just the right angle for them to peak in between the pillars. They danced across the hall, playing with shadows, and laid a fiery glow to the white in his hair. As if warmed by the core of stars themselves. Saparata looked at him and smiled tightly.
"It's not for you to worry about."
"But it is." His grip tightened against the stone of the armrests of Saparata's throne. His arms caged him in. As he leaned in closer, the words were bottled between the ravine of their bodies alone. "It is for me to worry about. Every day, the Sultanate gains power. Complications in the Desert are happening, and we cannot turn a blind eye for long. Power shifts, it grows, and it boils, and eventually, it'll come knocking on Therian doors."
There was an irony in that. Where their ideologies clashed so violently that it made him forget why Fluixon was his Vice President in the first place. He believed so radically in the inherent evil of others that he anticipated being hurt when pried open. Saparata, on the other hand, embraced the prospect of change, allowed it to warm his bed and lay waiting by the door. He knows this: Theria will see its end, whether tomorrow, or the day after, or years from now.
(It will never change the outcome.)
"Know I put Theria first, always," Saparata said, he doesn't know who in particular he says it to. Just that he needs to speak the words into existence for them to mean something. "I know you do as well. I don't want to fight you on this."
He'd lay his armor, his sword, and even his very life at that. Fluixon knows loyalty like a heart knows blood, intrinsic. Saparata, as he as told him over and over, should know his blind spots; to know yourself was to know your enemy.
What he does not know is this: Fluixon was that tender point of contention. That gap between the armor plates that every well-honed sword aims at. The vital artery. The crack in the wall. Where Fluixon had come from, a place of cold and cruelty, he was taught that those vulnerabilities should be kept hidden. Buried under armies and castle walls that tower to the heavens. However, Saparata is not born from the cold like he is. He has never fully believed in the old ways. As a leader, he struck the thin line between what you could and could not do. Every day, he trailed closer to what would made the kings of old sneer and remark from their graves: Overly burdened fool. Your heart will be your doom.
They will never admit it— to admit it is to understand it— and accept that it will ruin you.
(It will never change the outcome.)
"You want to tell me about the things you keep thinking about," Fluixon spoke. Saparata's eyes met his, and they are infinitely soft. Kind, in the sharp and demanding way that was uniquely and utterly his. "You should, by the way. I'm the smarter one between the two of us."
His President scoffed, settling deeper into the throne. His hands slid from underneath, unassumingly taking Fluxion's into his and letting their fingers settle against each other. "Haha, you're wrong, however. There is nothing I'm worrying about."
"You don't deny me being smarter, though." He smirked like the smart ass he was. Then, his expression quickly morphed into something serious. "You're naive, but not stupid. If that were the case, Theria would have truly fallen by now. You know the Sultanate, in its hunger, will not just stop at the Desert. If he could, StormingHell would take jungle, then plains, and even Aculon itself."
Saparata smiled back. "What a seemingly straightforward series of events. Hey, tell me, are you sure you're not the one losing sleep over this?"
"Not as much as you are."
"Still? Are those dreams still haunting you?"
Dreams were a light term to call them. It's the reason why he does his best work at night. To stave off the visions that come whenever he closes his eyes for too long. Impressions, maybe, premonitions. Phantom aches that linger until morning, prickles of heat that dance across his gooseflesh skin in the biting cold of night. When he wakes, it's always with the hollowing feeling that he shouldn't have been able to open his eyes in the first place. Dreams, they're just dreams.
Fluixon's nose scrunched. Their hands interlocked tighter, all the words that he cannot force himself to say, stay trapped in between the swell of their palms. He wants to pull him over, let the persistent gap between them dissolve and their bodies collide like the stars their nation's stories are written on. Let the warmth of shared breath banish the harrowing talks of politics and war.
He knew Saparata would give in, the soft heart he is, would fall into the ravine between them the second Fluixon let him.
Fire on his skin. An ache that permeates rest. Every time he closes his eyes, he feels a pain so deep it cannot be anything if not embedded in his very soul. The cognizant voice of cold and cruelty, filially cursing him from across the sea where it rests upon its throne of iron and snow: Foolish boy, a leader knows not to get emotional. The heart is a fickle thing.
Saparata is soft. In the way that he pets street dogs by the marketplace despite their tendency to bite. In the way that he refuses to speak of the incoming conflict as if its existence is conditional only when spoken of. Theria needs it's softness, however, leaders cannot be overly lenient or peaceful. It is not in the nature of politics to be kind. So Fluixon has scraped himself clean, let himself be hardened for Theria's sake, for Saps'.
Even if it means he would not stumble into his waiting embrace, no matter how far Saparata's arms stretch to encompass the whole of his burden. Would not indulge him in the making of softer, gentler memories. He was too stuck in the belief of boundaries that separate one from another. The borders of self-imposition, drawn by duty and responsibility.
He would not desecrate the throne. No matter how much Saparata dislikes the weight of it.
So he stood at the foot of him, waiting, almost at the brink of being whole but not quite there.
"I care for Theria," Fluixon admitted, swiftly changing the topic. His voice was barely a whisper. "I was sworn to you first."
Saparata hummed. "Oh? Tell me, Fluixon, is your loyalty to this throne, or whoever sits on it?"
The heart is a disgusting, temporal thing, he thought. Once outside the body, it's just a piece of roadkill, drying out in the sun. What differentiates an organ from the freshness of slaughter? Where was the line drawn between the rivers of veins to blackened oil slick, of loyalty to devotion?
Of hatred, and its prerequisite, love in its most shameless of forms?
"It doesn't matter. My allegiance stays the same."
(It will never change the outcome. You, you, you.)
His smile was tinged with an unmistakable sadness. "Your allegiance is a knife."
There are moments where looking at Saparata causes an inexplicable knot to form. On some days, it was a bearable bump that got in the way of his sentences, causing a stumble, a stutter. Others, it felt like he had never lived without it. The constant pressure in his sternum, a pounding in the back of his head. That if he stripped himself down to the sinews, the own underbelly of his soul, he would not recognize himself without it.
Fluixon took his hand and pressed the lightest of kisses. The kind that shies away from anything too bold.
"Don't say things like that. For fuck's sake you make it sound like I'm using you." Saparata joked. He intended for it to come out as a laugh, but it unraveled itself mid-way to what it truly was: an admission of guilt.
"If it keeps you here, then so be it."
A painful throb in his chest bloomed—it managed to bring out a real laugh from him. "If only you knew how uncomfortable this throne is."
At some point, their conversation dwindled to less heart-rending topics. They talked, and as if they had met for the first time all over again, their conversations flowed endlessly. They bounced between the upkeep of the government systems to the latest counselor escapades.
When they walked out of the Agora, the sun was already setting. They both took a second to stand and admire the same figure that proudly decorated Theria's banner. Saparata called it ironic, really; he wasn't even the one to choose the sun to be their symbol. He had simply let Jophiel and Fluixon handle most matters of the state, and when the day came that they needed to establish themselves as a proper desert nation, both his Lead Ambassador and Vice President spent hours cooped up inside Jophiel's bedroom.
In the end, when they walked out, Jophiel held a long yellow cloth in her hands, reminiscent of the table runners she embroidered. In the center, a pure white circle with orange trimmings. Hand-stitched and meaningful.
What's this supposed to be? He asked them. Running his hands across the soft fabric. The mark of their nation.
Fluixon chose it, Jophiel said. Her face was forever smiling in his memory. The sun.
When he looked towards Fluixon, he had been looking away, as if embarrassed by his own idea. Jophiel laughed, nudging him with her elbow. It represents us best, He said. The sun always rises, even when it leaves the sky every night. You know it'll come back in the morning.
Theria. The land of the sun. Saparata said with a smile. Hoisting their banner high over their young nation. Jophiel on his left, the ever pleasant, always amiable Ambassador. Fluixon to his right, his shadow, the trailblazing core of them all. Three to make a whole.
And when he looked out into the setting crest of their nation, the home they had made for themselves in the most desolate of islands, he smiled. "Isn't it beautiful?"
Fluixon, always on his right. Looked at him and smiled too. "Yeah. Yeah, it is."
When the attack happened, Saparata simply vanished into the air.
Their people screamed in the streets. A vendor's stall was trampled by the footfalls of a dozen soldiers, a mother grasping at the swaddle of her child as they pushed her aside. They aimed for the citadel first, clearing every corner and rummaging through every hall. Their glorious sun burnt hotter by midday, as if in brilliant defiance against those who dare to commit sacrilege upon its citizens. They did not stop, they did not falter. The soldiers continued to push through the crowds; the baritone of command of the Sultan's brother-guard silenced all who dared stand in their way.
In the end, they came out empty-handed. The convict had run faster than the soldiers could raid, and their efforts had proven they be purely for naught.
They did not apologize, did not seek penance at the sweltering fever of daylight's break. They had simply gathered their forces and exited the city by sunset.
The sight of their battalion's backs, illuminated by dying torchlight, does not inspire relief in Fluixon. He watches the curl of something bitter and terrible rooting deep into the divot of his chest. The world tilts on its axis, kilted by a sudden pressuring weight in his head that sings of something hot and ugly. The urge to grab his sword briefly overpowered him.
"The President— we need the President to begin the meeting." Broke through the hollow silence of the Agora. Flux, with all of his white-hot rage, feels another emotion quickly overtake.
Saps, his eyes darted towards the throne. How could he not have noticed?
"No need," A voice rang out from the back of the Agora. Saparata walked in, and it was clear that the raid, despite being contained in the citadel, had managed to defile him too. His usually wild and flowing white hair was stained, and the clothes that marked him as their leader were soiled with dirt and grime. However, his eyes are what told Fluixon all he needed to know.
There was nothing behind them. Just a detached, blank stare at the council gathered as he took his seat at the precipice. The last beams of daylight paint the room in burnt ocher.
The meeting concluded on a cautious note. The council decided that the lack of casualties brings the assumption that it may just have been a misunderstanding on the Sultanate's behalf, that the pursuit of their justice did not hold the intention to bring such momentary fear to Theria. Fluixon bit his tongue the entire time, warily eyeing Jophiel, who simply shook her head at him in return. She knew just as much as he did. That is: not enough.
However, the issue had passed, and the current one weighed heavily on his subconscious. Saparata had allowed him to escort him to his quarters. He let Fluixon guide his head into the prepared basin and washed his hair with deft fingers. Once he was changed into a simple tunic and pants, he swayed towards the direction of the window's ledge that overlooked the city at large.
"Saps," Fluixon called out.
"Flux," Saparata responded. Theria in the night, despite being ransacked and pillaged, continued to move. The people below still pick up the fallen wares from uprooted carts, gathering them together in the central square to hand out to those who had been most affected. They take the night that came after as a blessing for the day they survived; the smiles on their faces illuminated by moonlight.
Theria will continue to breathe. For as long as the sun rose and the moon watched, their nation would hold steadfast.
Saparata was as silent as he was during the meeting. Fluixon paced the room. There was a fire under his feet that threatened to swallow him whole if he stopped moving.
"We will need to do something, you know that— of course you do." He started. "We need to plan. The Sultanate has acted, and we can't just remain reactive any longer—"
"Theria will not survive a direct attack," Saparata said, as if it were a known fact. Fluixon bristled at his words, knowing deep down they stung true. Their nation of peace had never known war nor conflict, and it was once their honor. Now, it came rearing the ugly side of complacency.
"That's why we need to start now. Our armies are inexperienced; they are unprepared for any future invasions. We need to start sending them out on patrols. Enforcing our borders and—"
"I shouldn't have run."
Fluixon's words suddenly failed him. For all his quick wit and sharp mouth, he found himself unable to reply. Saparata's figure was shrouded, his back towards Fluixon as he watched their people continue to pick up their lives.
He stopped by the foot of the bed. The divot in his chest gaped, stretching and pulling at skin until it unraveled completely. He did not dare acknowledge it, barring the ability to let it consume him until he saw it for what it truly was. It rested in his belly, hot and heavy. Tense at his jaw until he even realized he had been grinding his teeth. His palms began to sting, and when he opened them, he saw the pink indents of crescent moons, stark against the supple flesh.
"You did what you could. It's over now. No one blames you." His words felt stale in his own mouth. Fitted uncomfortably against his molars. An unkind and uncaring misconstruction of the truth.
Saparata did not respond. Instead, he turned around.
There was something holy in him; he knew it. Swore by it. By the throne, he could feel the tangibility of divinity, or something akin to it; so near that he could grasp it fully in his hands and cradle it against the tenderness of his own soul. However, even now, when Saparata looked at him, his still damp hair illuminated by moonshine with his vacant stare carved from marble and limestone. Fluixon found himself at a crossroads. He had never heeded the words of acolytes, yet now, he can understand why they are bound to reverence.
Saparata stared. Then, before his mind could even process it all, he leaned back.
There was a whisk of air, a step too loud, then suddenly— he was gripping onto the front of Saparata's tunic. Clutching it tightly as the other hung limply over the window's ledge.
"What are you—!"
"Would you blame me?" Saparata's eyes searched into his with a terrifying seriousness. He continued to speak, as if he were not dangling by Fluixon's hand. Below them, the street was plunged into darkness, a yawning open drop.
"Not Theria. Not our people. You."
And Fluixon—
(His heart held his fingers. The moon as their witness. So, so terribly easy. The kings of old, cold and cruel. His father's disapproving tone: Foolish. Foolishness is the way of weak men.)
"You make me so fucking mad." He says. The divot turns into a hole, and that hole eats away at his very being. "You don't get to ask me something like that."
His eyes began to burn. "You don't get to make decisions like this, so talk to me, please. Just tell me what I should do."
What should I say to dissuade you? To get you to plant your feet beside me and see this out to its bitter end? The stars watched giddily at their pitiful figures wretched in their light, the moon diverted her own loving gaze onto Saparata's unreadable face. Fluixon could see it clearly. His eyes—the same ones that used to look at Fluixon almost constantly, trailing him at every meeting, glancing at him from across the room; the corners of his cheeks always reaching whenever they would meet— were agonizingly unfamiliar. Sunken and unmoving. Fluixon had felt as if he was staring into the burnt core of extinguished torches, like soot at the bottom of the brazier. We don't need blame; we just need to stay alive.
He pulled him back. The sudden inertia sent them both wobbling backwards. Saparata's arms found their way around his shoulder blades, pressing them together firmly as he backed them against the wall. Fluixon felt his legs give out, as they both collapsed against each other. His hands shook from how tightly they squeezed the fabric, threatening to tear, trembling in what could either be rage or exhaustion. Either seemed fitting.
Saparata's hands tentatively began to fiddle with Fluixon's hair. He smoothed down the wild mess of it, letting his fingers rest against his nape. "Some leader I am, huh? Still having you save me."
He wanted to rip his hands off. He didn't. "You're giving me too much credit."
"I don't give you enough. I can't even stay when it matters most. Theria is weakened by having such a coward to lead her. Who knows where I might steer us?" Saparata let out a harsh laugh. Fluixon reached over with his free hand to pinch him in the side as he normally would do in meetings, causing a sharp hiss from the man underneath.
Fluixon forced him to meet his eyes. The gaze that befell him was so ripe with unprecedented anger that it rendered him speechless. To be held so directly by his Vice President was novel enough, but the possibility of being hated by him was something inexplicable to him entirely.
He found that he did not like being on the receiving end of his dear friend's ire. It warmed him to the point of burning.
"That's the whole point of democracy, idiot. We chose you to steer us. This nation was built by you, directly or not. There is no one else who could lead Theria." He hissed. The conviction in his voice was enough to silence the thrumming in the back of Saparata's head, just for a second.
"I'm here to keep you steady. To pull you back." His hand twisted the fabric of Saparata's tunic, pulling him up even nearer for emphasis.
Their mouths were separated by an unsympathetic distance. Saparata thought this may just be it. The thrum in his skull returns full-force, descending into a maddening crescendo that lit every vein on his body on fire. The pressure in his sternum unfolds in beat with the nauseating apotheosis of his desire. He was sick with it, so terribly plagued that it struck his whole body with a longing that could kill him. All he needed to do was lean closer—
"No one else, huh?" Fluixon's angered pants warm his own lips. A tilt, a shove, a jump into it all— and yet.
Fluixon stared. So sincerely silent in his fixation on Saparata. He looked at him as if he were a puzzle to solve. An argument to be won.
(Maybe, he finds himself at a loss before they have even started. Will I ever truly know you?)
"Saps. For fuck's sake, look at me." There was a mortifying second where Fluixon's voice cracked, and Saparata's resolve crumbled in an instant.
"You said before that my allegiance is a knife, right? Then use it. If you can't tell me what is bothering you, then let me handle the meetings with Jophiel. If you think the Sultanate is going to cause a senseless war, then put me out there to fight. If you want to run—" His eyes shone bright with fury. "If you want to run, then at least go somewhere where I can follow."
Saparata's hand twitched. "I can't let you do that to yourself."
The enormity of his ambition would end them both. He knew this. Fluixon knew this.
Saparata knew Fluixon was not the kind of man who would desperately hold onto a burning paragon for the sake of baseless affections; he was smarter than that. Than him. It had ended greater men than them both, and Fluixon was the greatest man he knew.
"I'm not asking you for permission. If you cannot want me, then I will be needed. And if I cannot be needed, then let me be used until there is nothing left of me."
He wanted to scream. "Flux—"
"No. No, you don't get to disagree with me, not on this. Just… Just stop talking." His body deflated in Saparata's arms, as if the fight had been sucked out of him completely. His head lay directly above Saparata's heart. Listening.
Let's not fight anymore. He could almost hear. And Saparata, with ears only tuned to him, understood.
"Yeah," Saparata whispered, his lips against the crown of Fluixon's head. "Yeah, okay. I'm sorry."
Somehow, they managed to arrange themselves off the floor and onto the bed. Fluixon, either from embarrassment or the soul-crushing fear he had just experienced, continued to listen intently to the sound of Saparata's heartbeat where it was pressed against his chest. Saparata, ever the indulgent leader he was, allowed for this moment of weakness from the man who holds their whole city together.
The world, despite all that had happened, was achingly calm. Here, in the hushed corners of their man-made universe, Fluixon held on a bit tighter, one of the few liberties he's allowed to have. He gave in to the fatigue, letting it rest heavily on his eyelashes as they kissed the skin of his cheeks with each drowsy flutter. The rise and fall of the man's chest underneath him, dragging him somewhere kinder.
"Hey," he murmured, already halfway unconscious. "I know you won't tell me what you're thinking, but—will you just—say that you will. Even if you don't anyways?"
Leaning closer into the warmth, he wanted to meld their bodies together. Let the star stuff of their cores amalgamate into some mimicry of agency. An autonomy. He let himself imagine a reality where he could settle inside the sinews of him, entangle their veins, and merge their souls into some abomination written in the same lines as devout. For what else could be their folly, if not the belief that they could make something good out of this damnation?
Somewhere far above, there was a force greater than the story they had been cast into, watching. Shaking its head before turning away. Giving them at least this. A grace for one quiet night.
"I'll tell you tomorrow, Flux."
"Look up."
Here is something important to know. History books will not tell you the full extent of it all, at least not the details that people want to remember. The experts will write of differing perspectives; they will analyze the scene a hundred different ways, a hundred different times, and they will all be correct. To some degree, the reality of it never truly settles until the last person who remembers it dies. Human memory is only so infallible— the mind can only take so much before it begins to eat itself.
Here is what they won't say: the morning was exceedingly normal.
The moment Fluixon woke up, he was greeted by a missive from the councilors. Before he could even properly get dressed, he felt the weight of the weeks prior weigh heavily on his bones. His muscles ached from exhaustion, and his mouth was uncomfortably dry. He attended a full morning of meetings. Talked endlessly with senile advisors who think they can talk over him just because he's one rank from the top. He barely held back his bite, nearly tore someone's head off, before Jophiel glided into the conversation with a disarming smile and prevented another near-court murder.
By midday, he was patrolling with his guards. Pointed out plans for borders, held out the blueprints in his hand, and nursed the persistent throb at his temple. The sun glared down upon them. As if in warning.
"Look up." It said again, and he began to grow annoyed. "It's about to happen."
Fluixon was talking to a merchant, a small and eager woman who went on and on about the recent dispute between her and the neighbor. He listened, half-dazed from the heat. Her hands in pantomime of a vicious brawl, clashed in a shockingly gruesome reenactment that leaves him vaguely impressed. By the time they conclude, he has managed to make them compromise with only a minor blood debt and several poultry peace offerings.
His guard approached him cautiously, as if expecting Fluixon to bite. In his hand, he held a sheet of parchment, daintily wrapped with a humble twine. He eyed it warily, slowly, he took it from the soldier's hand and read the message. Heart dropping to his feet: Davarit, Brother-Guard to the Sultan, found dead.
"I don't want to." His mouth moved to form the words, but no sound escaped.
"You have to."
"It won't change anything."
Then, the first scream rang out. The sharp, ringing wail that cracked through the citadel like the screeching boil of a kettle. His neck nearly snapped with the sudden whiplash. A bow pulled taut and released at the apex of its tension. His body moved instinctively towards the howling.
"It doesn't matter." As the sky began to descend. "It happens anyways."
They will recount Theria in wistful breath. Historians will speak of their cultures, vibrant in their shared devotion for celestial figures and engagement in simple pleasures. Archeologists will find their courthouse, baths, citadels, and towers. They will run their palms against the wickers of sandstone and terracotta, the encased laughter and conversations preserved in cracks will thrum underneath them. They will write of its glory, a beacon of the desert. The only nation in the sands to have lived past the fall of Aculon, proud and celebrated and infinitely loved.
And when they reach the chapter about their leaders, they will read of Saparata, the first President of Theria. With his date of death right before Fluixon's entry. The second.
Tragedy, he thinks, feels awfully like being watched.
Saparata is on the floor. His long white hair, the same strands that find themselves home in the cracks between Fluixon's fingers, was splayed out on the ground in a perverted motley of red and white. The unnatural curve of his back, all sharp angles and ragged lines jutting out of skin. It reminded him of coyote trails, spliced skin caught on barbed wire, or the offerings left at the altars during feasts. Unaware of their gutted flesh or the reasons for greater than their own existence.
Wrong. The mark of wrongness written all over— the beginning smells of decay left out to dry in the sun hit his nose.
Fluixon had not seen it happen. Was that a blessing or a curse? Perhaps a kindness from whoever was watching to spare him from the actual fall.
"You wouldn't have been able to do anything anyway." It tells him. "I locked the doors, remember? Left everything in that chest near your bedroom and waited until the citadel was clear of enough people. You wouldn't have been able to save me."
Fluixon ran. Each step sank deeper into quicksand until he was stumbling forward on his knees. How silly, he did not kneel for anyone. Even Saparata, when he was still not a pile of spoilt marbled flesh on the floor. Yet all the world's gravity seemed to have pressed down on him all at once. His kneecaps silver poons clattering with each uneven step, until he is collapsing and—
He dies with his eyes open. Fluixon was on his knees, cradling his head in his lap, and Saparata's bloodshot eyes stared back at him. A haunting vision of cracked ribs and split ends. A horror made out in the sun and cradled gently under his hands. His trembling fingers were trailing against the tear-stained lines on his cheeks. His pupils never move. They do not follow Fluixon's movements like they have in the hushed conversations in the Agora, or the fleeting glances by candlelight.
A forlorn lump rose in his throat. I never got to say it to you. I thought we would have more time. I'll say it when you wake up. I'll say it in the morning. He pinched him softly in the side, in the part where his ribs don't stick out like jutted mountain peaks on skin bruised hills. When he doesn't react, that's when he knows Saparata was truly dead.
(His eyes stayed stuck in a perpetual state of wild fear.)
"Oh, that's ugly." It remarked. White hair falls over his shoulder as it crowds over him to get a better view. Fluixon does not need to turn around to know the face that is frowning over him.
The world is awfully quiet for the horror that has played out. Maybe he just doesn't care for any of it anymore. Doesn't remember Jophiel by his side, and the screams that he heard continued, and the punched-out howling sound was coming from her. Her dainty fingers meant for embroidery, digging into Saparata's robes with a viciousness unbecoming of her placid nature.
"Why did you do it?" He asked. The figure behind him shrugged. In the corner of his eye, it had stepped back from the shadows and stood over the bloodied carcass. The same wild eyes, dark and unmoving, stare back into his.
"I don't remember." It told him. But it is a rather mean way to refer to a ghost wearing his friend's face. "I just know that it hurt. I remember it hurting. I didn't know it would look like this, though."
He wanted to laugh. Like what? Like roadkill splattered on the side of the street? Public and brutish, not even sparing them the decency of intimacy? How indecent, how shameful.
"If you can't answer me, then why are you here?" He smoothed out the hair from his face. He never kept it tied, always letting it get tangled so he would have an excuse for Fluixon to comb it.
Saparata tilted his head to the side, as if confused. "You're here."
"That's not a reason."
"It is."
He wanted to jump. To maim him and shake the reason out forcibly. Why? Why haunt me even now?
Everything moved sluggishly around him; time streaked molasses that dripped down into syrupy seconds. Someone pulled him up. They had to physically break his fingers away from Fluixon's, with how long they had tightened in his hand after the rigor mortis set in. Someone undressed him. Removed the bloodstained tunic and sun-warmed armor from his back and settled him onto a chair.
From the window, the sun set over Theria for good.
Saparata watched the whole time. He never spoke when prompted. He simply stood by Fluixon through the motions. His fear-struck eyes never moved.
Theria, because it is his city, does not mourn for long. They get back up, on skinned knees, and they gear for the incoming change in the wind's direction. Fluixon leads. He is appointed almost immediately into the position by the same councilors who once feared his fangs and now bare their necks for the jugular. Jophiel still smiles, and Fluixon just assumes it's because her face is naturally positioned to put up a farce to survive. Her strength is a humble one. She has stood by him in every meeting, even when the nights seemed too long and he would stare listlessly at the window. She never faltered, never took the same leap.
It's what convinced Fluixon that the choice he's making is the right one. Saparata was right. The throne was oddly uncomfortable. Jophiel will make a good third entry.
He was staring at the tower the night before they stormed out into war. Aculon's foreboding Iron Torch on the zenith across the sea. His hand against the sandstone drew outlines of where the impact had been. They were never truly able to scrub off all the blood. The girt of it is still somewhere underneath Fluixon's fingernails, forever staining him.
Tomorrow, the world will be changed forever. The day of reckoning would befall upon the lands, and the price of freedom shall be paid tenfold. For what it's worth, Fluixon was right. As he is most of the time, anyway. The Sultanate was dissolved, and the Allies gathered towards a common enemy. The world had never been more united, and yet, Fluixon couldn't care less.
So he runs.
"Leaving me with your work again. When am I not fixing your messes?" Fluixon's body rocked with the eager push of the nightly winds. The biting chill that mired in the air caressed his dried lips as he spoke to the ever-lingering wraith that followed him.
Saparata, if he was humored, did not laugh. Instead, he kept his head hung low, falling into step behind Fluixon. His half-raw figure stood stark against the moonless sky. Pasty, waxen skin with his unnerving eyes of splattered tar. The wispy strands of his ashen hair danced in the cold wind, reminiscent of tessellated comas in the backdrop of yawning darkness. An afterimage, burnt into the reticles of Fluixon's eyes like some fucked-up spectacle trying to be a ghost.
"I'm sorry." He said, and the words fell out half-formed in syntax. Fluixon wanted him to stop staring.
"You're not. If you were sorry, you wouldn't linger like this. Sticking around like some kicked dog with a bone." Fluixon spat out.
"I'm sorry."
It was bound for him to snap sooner or later, after all, he had been carrying this for far longer than before the fall.
He was breathing heavily, the condensed air of his warm breath bloated up like flotsam into the gray sky. His skin began to prick uncomfortably, like there was something that rested underneath the muscle and bone that wretched itself with a desire to escape. His feet moved unconsciously, dragging him further and further away from the city and into the expanse of sand and wind.
"This is unfair." He muttered, and the urge to pick at his flesh grew feverishly. "You don't get to apologize and just not remember any of it. Some bastard you are. That even after going off and killing yourself, you still find it in yourself to terrorize me."
A heat pooled in his belly and sent shivers down his spine. He wanted to turn, to face him head-on and let the rabid instinct of a wounded animal consume him; to bite and tear until there was nothing left— but there was nothing left. Just a smoke-colored illusion of someone he once cared for and something deeper he couldn't name.
His hands, shaken and bloodstained, began to fidget. At first, to distracted himself from the dizzying hunger that ate at him. He can't look. If he looks, he doesn't know what he'll do.
Crack."You won't let me save you. You won't let me help. Then you go off and die thinking like you're some kind of hero."
Saparata does not respond. He does not breathe, nor regret, nor even mourn what he has left behind. How could he? The twisted tale of theirs woven into the entrails of their existence has designated him the lamb, and Fluixon, the shepherd who leads them to the slaughter.
"You leave— it's all you're good at doing. Thinking that none of this affects you. That you're some sort of martyr that can wash the blood off your hands with a selfless sacrifice to absolve you of guilt." Crack. Crack."And I'm the stupid one in the end. Thinking that you're somebody who stays."
He thought he knew this hunger before; perhaps it had a different name. When he looked towards Saparata, caught in the fleeting rays of light, the urge to reach out became unbearable. To witness. To want. A desire that was ugly. Incessant.
Shaped like two hands wrapped around a throat.
"You asked if I would blame you, and I do. I blame you for dying. I blame you for coming into my life and dragging me along with you. I blame you for making me care for you. It's all your fault."
Crack. Crack. Crack. A truth said too late, a confession to a ghost.
"Sometimes I wish I just killed you myself."
The pain doesn't register at first—could they even experience pain in this degrading halfway to purgatory? The answer comes sharp and hissing. It ran up his arm and all the way to the back of his neck, nearly sending him to his knees.
Saparata's hand came into his peripheral view—and Fluixon, like the wounded, whinging thing that he is—shoved him away with a pinched cry.
"Stop that." His voice is warbled and floaty. Fluixon keeps walking, a mimicry of a soldier scraping past a battlefield on his last bits of strength.
"Shut up. The dead don't talk." The tips of his fingers began to grow numb. He could only dangle them by his sides as the stabbing winds sank into his open wounds.
"You're hurting yourself."
"You hurt me first."
With a sudden, decisive action, Saparata grabbed Fluixon by the shoulder and spun him face forward. For all his ghostly presence, he certainly struggled like he was alive— hands thrashing to counter the uncoordinated punches and scratches thrown his way. Fluixon flailed, like a warm-blooded fish thrown out of water, as he was subdued into the grainy floor.
He held him there for however long, until the winds began to sweep the other direction and the stars realigned across the orbit. Saparata stayed. Not even struggling as he had. Just simply watched as the exhaustion and pain rendered his body limp and useless.
With his feigning strength, he raised his hand to throw a last-ditch effort punch, only to realize that his fingers could barely form a fist. The skin around his knuckles cracked and was dull blue-black. The rest of it was a gnarled stump of twisted bone and throbbing muscle. Saparata caught the useless, broken limb and held onto it gently.
"Let's not fight anymore." He whispered, cradling his splintered fingers in his. And Fluixon, who knew those words were stolen from him from bygone time, laughed coldly. Every memory relived is a finger worth breaking so long as it meant wanting to refuse his hand again. Fluixon, betrayed by his own worthless body, wished he could strangle him with whatever was left of his ligaments, his tendons. To hold onto him was to be struck down and beaten.
"You're the worst friend ever, you know that, right?"
"I know."
"You're a fool. Played into the Sultanate's trap. We built Theria as a nation of peace, and you went behind our backs for some noble cause that ended up useless. You died for nothing."
"I know."
"I think I'll hate you forever."
Saparata smiled. Lips hovered over the exposed nerve endings. "Then why did you come back for me?"
Fluixon's mind melts into a puddle of mismatched scenes; all playing out at the same time. The sickening squelch of rock against innards, the flash of a diamond axe, the buzz of flickering sodium lamps over sterile operating parts. They blur into a disorienting puddle of unfinished sentences, lines cut too short. When he thinks too hard on it, all he can see is Saparata's face. In blood. In tears. And the same thrum, ache, and splint that binds them.
Whose memories are of the boy who watched his leader fall from that tower, and whose was the man who so desperately bargained with death to have him back? He doesn't know.
I don't know. He wanted to say. The sand that brought him to this haunting slowly crept up around his eyes and vacuumed into his open mouth. To return from whence he came, stillborn and defeated.
I don't know .And with ears tuned only to him, he had seemed to understand. Of course he did. Saparata smiled.
(It will never change the outcome.)
The ground swallowed him whole.