#*ronan

The reminder that time has continued since it all happened, and will continue on yet, nearly collapses him.

Eris keeps walking.

He will never be able to say for certain how he knows that the clearing he comes upon is the one. There is no stench of blood on the air, coppery and violent, familiar in itself as it is of their bodies. No overt trace of conflict mars the land. Any snapped branches have swept away or mended themselves, and any fallen trees are covered in lichen and moss, such that they could have been that way at the conception of the land. Even the small shrine the forest constructed seems a thing of natural order, meant always to be this way.

But of course it is not. It is not meant to be this way, and it will never be the way it was again.

Entering the clearing feels no different from stepping into a tomb. The stagnant mourning sweeps the breath from him, and he feels the rageful beast stir in its place, lip pulling back, canines glinting.

Then his gaze falls upon an oak sapling sprouting proud from a verdant, body-sized patch of ground, and that brief reprieve flees him. His lungs stutter. He swallows against them.

Marius carried Silas home. Or so Eris was told afterwards. He had not been conscious to see it for himself, the terrible way his brother clung to the body of his twin, both of them covered in gore, both of them empty of life. He wishes he had been, if only to watch Marius unleash himself on their father in his demand for a bloodprice to soften the loss of Silas, though that battle was forfeit before it began.

Too much blood had spilled here to find its match.

As he must, Eris walks beyond the sapling and over to the shrine: a bowed latticework of branches and foliage, curved around like hands. The forest parts its palms for him as he nears.

There is nothing in his stomach to expel, so he heaves only bile onto the ground. It stings the back of his throat and up into his nose. He spits, but the sensation remains.

The land tried to make Ronan presentable. It arranged him on his back so that his empty gaze could marvel always on the canopy overhead, and it drank down his lifeblood so that none remained to mar his skin, and it kept the insects away, and the animals, and the creatures so that his pallid flesh would not be eaten. There was nothing it could do for the yawning gape of his chest or the split of his jaw but to patch them over with moss.

Again, Eris feels his stomach heave, a cramp in it that refuses to ease. Nothing more comes up, so he lowers slowly beside his brother, moving with the caution of a youngling who does not wish to be caught peering wonderingly into a cradle.

Eris stares for a long while. He knows this only because of the dappling of sunlight arcing steadily across them both: time happening to them, inexorably. All else has fallen away, save for this brother of his and the gaping wound of him.

"Come," Eris says, pulling this biggest of their skulk into his arms and holding him close, "I have you now." He cannot bring his voice above a rasp, torn through still from his own screaming, choked around by something else besides. A final lie: "Everything will be alright."

It seems, as Eris smooths at Ronan's hair, that there is life in his brother yet. His body is moving in his embrace—heaving, as though with breath. There is noise between them, gasping, shuddering. Tears, too, trickling down his broken face and gathering in the moss like dewdrops. Blurry-eyed, Eris stares at him and wills it true.

But there is only so much the forest can do.

"Take him," Eris asks more yet of the wood. "I don't want him seen like this." Softly, cracked down the middle, "He will rest easier, here with you."

Their mother will loathe him for this, he knows—for even this, the closure of a last look, taken from her. But he knows, too, that it will ruin her more to see yet another of her sons damaged beyond hope.

It is better for her to remember him whole.

The forest opens its arms without expectation or urgency. It alone knows what an agony it is for Eris to lay his brother down into them, to accept, with such astounding finality, a truth that he has never been able to before: there is nothing more that can be done. It waits patiently as Eris runs his dazed fingers through Ronan's hair, the clumps of filth in it impossible to unknot; for him to recall himself from his shock and magic away the grime, the rends from the clothes, until Ronan almost looks only to be in repose; for him to plait a lock of Ronan’s cleaned hair, sever it off, pocket it away. It waits.

And when at last its heir cedes the body of his kin to its keeping, it wishes its vines might be fingers, that it could wipe the sorrow from his cheeks. The best it can give him is another oak, just beside the sappling, this one grown full and strong with the might of the offering.

Often, in the time that comes after, Eris makes the long, wending walk along the river, following the opposite bank until he reaches a clearing, where he is the closest to his fallen brothers that he will ever be again.