YUVEN

Blood poured out of every orifice and clung to his boots when he sank into the endless crimson laced with tainted black. Bubbles popped, and an unearthly moan reminded him of the shard he carried. Decay and mold made him choke, but when the light shone, he flailed for sweet release. Palms scratched from rock, he lifted himself off the permafrost floor of King Laucan and Keeper Blackwall's chosen chamber. "So much for being able to get my memories." He spit another glob and hauled himself to his feet. Weakness swung a warhammer into his chest, but he grinned at Blackwall, who maintained control over the auric spheres with a pull around him. "So... what is it like, huh?" He coughed rust, and he wiped his lips with the back of his hand. A crimson mark smeared against his skin. "See anything interesting in my head? No?" He laughed and sank back into the prisoner chair. "Ancients, I wish I could live to see your face when you fail."

"I'm not failing, Yuven Traye," Keeper Blackwall said and leaned on the table across against the back wall. Piles of paper and quills tucked into the corner, and Yuven switched his attention to Keeper Blackwall when he shifted with his cuffs. "Your memories are filled with the taint, eeking them out of your immediate recollections, but you know that magick itself is a memory on the echo."

"Yeah, yeah." Yuven stuck out his tongue, and tasted mold. "Magick imprints the flow, and some can last for a thousand turns." His own words froze him to a complete stop, and he said, "As these are my memories you're so rudely prying open, what is it you're looking for?"

Keeper Blackwall lifted himself off the table and pushed an auric sphere closer to the rest. "I am looking for a piece of the puzzle to the Obscura Era. Quite astute of you to state the timeline of a thousand turns — the last Great Crimson Dusk. I believe the cult of Irimount found a piece of the puzzle, but I'm thinking what they didn't quite intend to happen is for a Corruptor to live. You." He loomed over him. "For a child corrupter to survive the aftershock event is impressive. It's just a pity it always ends the same way. Drowning on taintblood when the body and soul run out of room. Is that what the medication provided, Traye? It can't have been release."

"What does it matter? Yuven forced a chuckle through his sticky lips. "You didn't tell Peacock King up there about it when he asked, but he's not the one calling the shots on this operation is he?" He smiled at Blackwall, tasting victory like honey-laced soup Fenrer enjoyed but he struggled past the too sweet aftertaste. "Why? Why didn't you tell him? You would not lose anything."

"As I said, it's not of importance," Blackwall pointed out. "You're the one who decided that, Warden. Why didn't you tell him when it's your life? Your sense of release?" He drew his teeth over his lips and shook his head at him. "Is it a sense of pride? Of the satisfaction of standing taller than a king, even as chains make you kneel?" He returned to his paper and quills. "Had you just told him the truth, I would see no reason to hide it myself."

I am tired of sympathy, of pity. Gods, I would rather sooner rip out my own throat then get another look like that ever again. Yuven winced when an auric sphere expanded close to his head. Tangles of black stuck to the air around him, where his aura remained. "It was just because it was him asking the question. He claimed he wasn't stupid, so I'm going to let him chew on it. He'll forget. Our people always do."

"Our people, Traye?"

"Avaerilians. Naveerans." Yuven showed his fangs, but withdrew them and shook out another fluff of feathers to the floor. "Sooner would they die in their self-isolation, crowing about golden days and looking down upon anyone that isn't them. Rare is an Avaerilian who doesn't forget." He drove his nails into his palm, and longed for further bloodshed. "Vipers, all of them. Vipers who want wings to call themselves something they are not. I doubt true wyverns exist anymore. So, yes, Keeper, it is pride. It is the pride the Storm Wardens gave my short life. I refused the medication because you're so determined to prove you can do what Fenrer Pyren could not, I think the extra challenge would make things interesting." He laughed, but blood trails escaped through the sides of his lips and dripped down his chin. "As in life — to stand on the edge of the Echo Obscura, to look upon it and feel the fleeting life of this world. I hunger for that, the hunger the Husk gave me, but not to swallow it whole myself, but a reminder." He sighed into the release of his words. "I need no medication, Keeper Blackwall. I am what this world made me, what the cult made me."

Fallen among broken memories, burning to crimson crisps. In his reach, an answer to every ember question of his life. Of the why's, the how's, the who's. His parents before the cult took him, or whether he was handed to them. Unloved. Isolated. Every corner was made of chains and stone. A small blue lamp hung over a metal mattress attached to the wall. He rolled his neck when another auric sphere fluttered out of the largest one. "Yes, it is of no consequence, so go, get into them. Get into them and show the world what it means."

Every auric sphere converged into his sight. He spluttered at the rising acid in his throat, and he stumbled not into stone, but the same blood lake of his restless nightmares. Bubbles squirted with the drowned songs of whatever rested below, dissonant, cracked, muffled bells. He coughed and added to the depths of the crimson, and he forced himself to stand through the muck. Without his blade. Without anything except himself. He drove his fingers into his hips, pinching himself into movement as it splattered against his clothes and stained them a bright red. Tendrils of gooey substances slipped from underneath. A breath. Into the abyss, dragged downwards. Yuven walked through it all. Each small step. Every small one.

"It's just a step," Neven's voice guided him. "Just one step."

One step into the Infernal, Obscura Hells.

It ebbed against his pants and drove sharp teeth into the hems. He walked unto the dark, but stumbled to a stop at a piercing hum, created from starlight shedding an unearthly glow on the crimson goo which dogged his life. Memories, close enough for him to touch, but chewed to the last pieces of fuzz of natural degradation of creation. The first time he met Maria. The first time he saw Neven. Each first. Each last. He walked for the memory clear. A hand outstretched, and the truth of his life — that he was not a monster.

It blurred with the bubbly rumble beneath him, following his movements, a twisted creature who never left him alone even when it was ripped out of his being. A layer of fog settled across them, and burned them to ash the moment he touched the bubbles of his life. A hard pop of death. His heart hammered at the hazy sound. Starlight gathered, and bound him to the one soul who mixed their magick.

"Yuven?"

A memory. A construct.

Not the reality he left behind, his hand slipped out of his.

Fenrer stood there, solid, not a corpse. "Fenrer," Yuven said his name, and the sheer power within it, the first time he spoke it, it resounded through worlds. He hesitated on the edge, and examined him. "No... You have a cruel sense of humour Keeper Blackwall. Cruel, and ironic." He hissed through his nose, then chuckled at the falsity of his Oathbound. "What? Was it not enough to remind me of this? Of his good heart? Of everything he was?" He threw his arms out, and Fenrer stared at him, cold.

Relentless.

Unyielding.

"That stings, Yuven, that you think I am just a mere projection of a Keeper that I outpower. I've wanted to talk to you since you let go of me," Fenrer whispered, the same soft tone of the calming sea. "Since I drowned in that abyss, trying to figure out why, but of course, I knew. I always knew. Duty always comes first." He tipped his head, where the wolven braid clinked with stained blood. He inhaled, and it tugged at the crimson colours. "Always. Forever. If you do not have faith in what you see, take a good, long, hard look at what is in front of you," Fenrer's voice dropped into a growl of pure conviction.

Yuven stared at the Fenrer born of crimson, of the blackest night.

Fenrer held his hand out at his side, and a crescent blade dripping with blood materialized from green sparks. It dropped into his fingers, and sliced the air with a whisper of the starlit truth between them. His knuckles tightened around the hilt, with his oath glittering without a sun when he walked through the lake of Derelict goo without struggle. Without cease. Without rest. "Tell me this," Fenrer said as the memories gathered into a field of white, and the lake turned to stone. "We've sworn to die for our convictions, no matter the cost, a light in the dark." Green steel fluttered across the frozen spirals, and Yuven tripped on shattering cobble, where crimson tendrils slipped through growing cracks in the buildings. "To lie about the reasoning, about why you let go of me." Fenrer glared at him, hardened by life and undeterred by the starlight tangle keeping them together. "Oh yes, Yuven, I'm alive. You can see it."

No.

A deep red bubble grew around the cradle of a mountain. Screams pierced the air.

Fenrer lunged at him, and he, helpless when he tossed him across the stone with righteous strength. "For Turns, you've slavered over this. You've told yourself that you wanted to remember," he snapped, and Yuven grunted when Fenrer beat him down to the stones of his memory with a check of his shoulder, and he dodged a slice from his crescent blade. "A test of my words, because you couldn't believe in me." Fenrer sent a shockwave of blood-red vines through the buildings, and Yuven gasped through crimson coughs when it pierced his temples. Sharp. Screaming. He widened his eyes when faceless people ran for the red bubble which swallowed the city whole.

"No! Wait!" He reached his hand out.

In a moment, black claws lashed out from the bubble. It sliced at their faces and flayed their skin to the muscle. Their song, dead. Some crumbled. Others writhed. He drove his fingers into his face. "No!" He screeched out his own blood-soaked song. "No! You are not a part of me anymore!"

It chewed and groaned with the same eerie smile.

Yuven screamed with it when the pain rattled his bones, straight to the marrow, and he collapsed in front of Fenrer, who stepped for him with steady footsteps. Golden light pierced his mind, and terror bridge the abyss. He clawed at the ground, where dark tendrils tore apart his skin and sewed it back together. "No!" He sobbed and tried to tug himself free of the inching claws of the husk. "No! I am not turning into a monster! Not again!" His entire body scattered, trapped in a flesh cage as he tried to tug it out of his hair. "Stop!"

Marble shattered above his head. Debris fell around them.

Others ran to the barrier for a fleeting hope he barred them from.

It cracked along his spine and made all his bones no longer fit his own body. Each one, broke, become anew.

Just finish me, Molvisaliz. He resisted another pained scream lodged in his throat as he tried to keep himself still, as steady as Fenrer was standing in front of him, crescent blade ready to purge a Derelict monster. "I'm sorry," he rasped out to the faded shapes. "I didn't want this. I don't want to be a monster."

It longed for freedom.

He released it from its chains, and in return, it stole his own.

It fractured him when he looked up at Fenrer.

He stared down at him, no longer cold, no longer a slave to his pure conviction.

His eyes widened, a glitter of starlight, the bond tightened further. Alive.

Fenrer was alive.

Yuven panted through the pain, through the agony of the husk eating at his soul. "Finish me," he begged.

I do not want to be this thing again! Finish me! Finish this! End this!

Instead of the crescent blade, Fenrer's free hand raised against an unseen pull from the way it trembled, with the shell fighting against the truth. He overturned it, bringing his thumb and forefinger together. Auric swirls danced in his eyes when he winced. "What are you doing?" Yuven pleaded. Can you truly be so capable of such merciless fervor?

Fenrer grimaced. "You must look upon the horizon, look upon this life," his soft, sure voice whispered, a different tone and texture from the unyielding nature of before. "Look upon it. You have to. I can still help you."

The husk screeched with his voice, but Yuven forced himself to gaze upon the horizon of light when Fenrer raised his hand into the fatal air. It gathered. It chewed. It came closer to his best friend, who stood in his unwavering belief, and snapped his fingers without falter or fear.

Mirrors shattered, and darkness engulfed.

Through the connection of stars, Fenrer tossed him into a writhing abyss, but freed him of the tormented soul stuck in Irimount.

Into endlessness.

Into inky nothing as the colours drained out of the world and bubbles lodged in his ears.