Welcome to My domain, Little Brother.
“What is this?”
Do you remember when--
“No. No! I’m not asleep. I don’t sleep. Gods do not sleep!”
So you did not come here on purpose. Interesting… And more interesting still, you’ve lost something, haven’t you? Rather, it’s been separated from you. Oh, what a pitiful state you’re in.
“I bet You hate that, Astro. So close, yet so far away from Your destiny.”
Oh, on the contrary, this gives us plenty of time to rekindle things.
“If by things You mean our bitter rivalry, then sure. Rekindle away.”
The dream of sand and ash transformed into a dark passageway, lined with windows that shed little to no light. The walls shuttered and a spray of gravel and sand fell from cracks in the stone ceiling. There was a roaring conflict outside the structure, like crashing waves peppered with cannonfire. Still, the shadows playing and shifting about the dim space were accurate. This star was in a talespin, belching oxygen like it was disgorging so much blood from its many wounds.
Do you remember? his older brother asked, His voice all around.
The Spice King said nothing. This was part of the reason he’d never even indulged rest. Sleep was The Ash King’s domain. And his brother liked to toy with him, even if He could not do that physically. Of course, The Spice King did not like to be at anyone else’s mercy. He never had. Realizing he was trapped until waking pulled him back up, he simply resigned himself with the pounding in his chest and willed this rekindling to be over quickly.
Dreams can stretch on for small eternities, can’t they? The Ash King said sympathetically. Sometimes, a man can live a whole life in the span of one night. But we both know you’re made of sterner star stuff. Father assured you as much, didn’t He? Rebirth… What a wonderful power.
The Spice King made his way down the passage, feeling along with the pads of his scalded fingers. He’d known these walls well once. Now, they were dust, a thousand years away.
It was like yesterday. And you were running away like you always do.
“I wasn’t running away! The star was about to go nova!” The Spice King corrected. “You don’t have flesh and blood to worry about preserving! You’re naught but dust, Brother! You don’t know fear!”
The passageway shortened, drawing the door on the other end closer to him. His fingers brushed the glass and the door sparked with Ancestor Light, drawing open with a hiss. The roaring grew louder.
Fine. You weren’t running away. You were running toward something.
The Spice King squinted his eyes and put a hand up to his face as the white lights overhead flickered for several seconds. Then a popping noise reported and a red light chased away the ensuing dark, steady and dim. There were overturned chairs and tables everywhere, some of them piled into the wall alcoves where once guards had stood at attention, their metal wings covering their bodies like cloaks. Now, there was no one in the great hall except the figure hunched over in His throne.
Maybe you wanted to claim the crown for your own, but there was no crown, was there? There was just armor and a sword and a wand.
The Spice King’s breath came out in a cloud. When he stepped into the hall, the ground released its grip on him and he pushed off from the wall to float toward the figure on the throne. He used a table to slow his approach, dragging his feet along its marble top. There was another explosion somewhere in the distance, but the issuing sand and stone only drifted in the space as so much white dust, like fog rolling in.
The red light was focused on the figure. He could see the form was still moving, but the shifts were hitched and labored. A long, red blade stuck out of His back at an odd angle. The Wand of Eves was in one of His lax gloves, speckled with old blood. The pale shape on the throne looked up when Beastmaster came near and His face was just bone. He was a skeleton wearing glorious silver plate armor--armor forged in the heart of the very star that was dying all around them.
“Father,” The Spice King began, but then he blinked and shook his head. This spector wasn’t real. It was a conjurer’s trick; a dream brought to convincing life by his brother. He gripped the sword impaling the skeleton and tried to pull it free, but it didn’t budge. It pinned the bones to the throne through His ribs and hips.
The skeleton opened His diamond-encrusted jaw and an endless voice rang out in song. The words were nothing to a mortal. Perhaps they sounded like a funeral dirge. Perhaps they sounded like a bittersweet melody. To The Spice King they were the only words that had ever mattered.
The Pale King said, “Take it,” and held out the Wand of Eves.
“I…” Beastmaster looked down at his scorched fingers. “I can’t.”
“You can. You will. Take it.”
“It will just burn me again. It doesn’t want me.”
The Pale King clacked His teeth together. “They will hunt you down. They will slaughter you. Take it.”
“They won’t find me.”
“They will if you linger here, Andras.”
The Spice King froze. His father had never called him by his name. He looked down at the Wand of Eves and then stared into the empty eye sockets of his progenitor. They had told him when he was young and without purpose that The Pale King had made him the weakest on purpose. They told him that the others had come from something important to The Pale King. The Cloud Queen had come out of His spilled ink bottle, knowing everything. The Spawning King had formed from His running marrow on the battlefield, bringing an army of undead to life with His own rising. The Ash King had been the product of a union between The Pale King and the skeleton’s own shadow during the only dream His father had ever had.
But what of The Spice King and his womb-slain twin, The Undying King?
The Pale King made the mistake of falling in love with a star, and doomed them both for it. The Pale King lost all His flesh, scorched off by her heat, and Mother slowly turned in on herself, consumed by fiery agony, spiralling into an endless nova that existed outside their reality, lost to all but the sons she would forever give birth to over and over again.
The weakest gods to come from The Pale King came from love.
“Take it, Andras.”
“No,” The Spice King said, pushing away from the bones of his childhood. “I won’t hide.”
But you are hiding, The Ash King mocked from all around him.
“You will,” The Pale King agreed and reached up to slowly force The Spawning King’s blade from His hollow body. He gripped the hilt of the claymore as soon as it was free and He used it like a punt to push Himself from His throne toward the little beast. “OR DIE!”
His wife’s shout woke him from the nightmare before any blow came.
He was slow to come to his senses, and the dream’s fear and confusion clung to him like the sheets glued to his battered body with fever sweat.
When he finally felt sure that he was back in his palace and he wasn’t being attacked by some shade, he looked over and saw his maiden sitting on the edge of their expansive bed, a universe away from him. It was just her colorless, shaking silhouette against the blue light peeking out from the curtains that held his attention for a long time. Was she crying? Or was she fighting through something like he’d had to? Did The Ash King torture her in her sleep? What manner of terrors had woken her?
Eventually she pushed hair from her face and took several deep breaths to still herself. When she turned to return to bed, he closed his eyes and feigned sleep. After a few moments, he cracked his eyes open again, hoping that she wouldn’t be able to see him in the dark.
She was still standing, but she had turned from the bed and gone to the window instead. She slowly pulled the curtain back and he heard a sharp intake of breath from her as the eternal night greeted her with its multitudes of stars. The streaks of colorful Ancestor Light revolving around his palace like so many halos of translucent taffeta coiled passed the window like aquarian colored waves on the darkest of oceans.
She draped herself over the windowsill and put her hands to her face, settling in to watch the passing lights. He wondered what she thought of it all. Did she marvel at the Ether like he had long ago? Was she in awe of it? Did she understand what she was seeing at all? Did she wonder about the places or the stars beyond the one she resided in?
But he didn’t air any of these queries. For once, looking at her didn’t make him feel like he didn’t understand her, and he didn’t loathe her for being there. For once, he had a feeling he knew exactly how she felt.
He wasn’t certain he would ever get his shapes back but, at that moment at least, he was fine with their arrangement... as long as she continued to wake him up whenever he needed her.
ns 15.158.61.51da2
