#lucerna

Father would not understand, he knew it. Children must obey. His thoughts now had seemed unthinkable a moment before, but she had returned and liberated him with her presence. What he considered was unforgivable and yet he knew; he could deny his god, his father for her who wished his freedom.

Vierna's eyes were rubies, droplets of her blood that he cherished with such fervour, just as warm as the heart that beat it through her chest. Yet when he caught them now ice glinted so coldly within them that he straightened and froze.

She leaned against him, her chin resting over the hand on his shoulder, and her touch was alien.

"Bargaining with the Lord of Murder?" she said, a mocking lilt in her cruel voice. "Your circumstances must be greatly reduced." Her body twisted unnaturally as she stood and rounded him, her skin sliding in its unfamiliarity.

"What a pathetic creature you are, snivelling of love," she said as she draped herself over his back, her arms surrounding him from over his shoulders. "What have you done to deserve it? Father recognizes now, Father sees."

"Remove her face." His growl would have forced any other to retreat. Not so Orin, who laughed grotesquely with borrowed expressions.

"Is it dear to you? Will it bother you if she bleeds?"

Lucien's hands itched to reach back, to wring her neck and rip the face she had no right to wear off in a smooth sheet, but he held them steady, fingers flexed and ready but still.

The nail on Orin's finger grew long and sharp, becoming a vicious talon. The flesh of her arm, Vierna's arm, rent easily and sent rivulets of scarlet flowing across dusky purple skin that soaked into the fabric of his shirt.

He swallowed. It did not flow from her veins. It did not, though the sight of such irreverent spilling sent fury through his chest even so.

"This meat is soft," she said into his ear. "As you have become, slaughterkin. When all were blind to your weakness I saw it and soon they will all know it."

Fingers with all of their unfamiliar familiarity trailed up his chest, perching on his collarbone, the press of their nails leaving half-moon indents that only barely broke skin. A quick twist of the wrist and he could put her to the ground and snap each bone in her body, but he would not. Orin was a fly drawn mindlessly to refuse, a pest who would leave when she grew tired of dissatisfaction.

Pressure constricted his throat as her hands slid upward and tightened around his neck, the force of it increasing with every second.

"I might have loved you once, blood-kin, if you were not incapable of it. You are ever unworthy of affection from me, from Father. You could surrender now, let these pretty hands darken your eyes into blissful murder-sleep."

Black sparks fired from behind his closed eyelids as she constricted him further. A neck was a delicate thing, prone to snapping, susceptible to strangulation, and a shallow target for a blade. He had always carefully protected his, especially from Orin.

But Vierna… he had shown her exactly how and where to plant the knife. There were no other hands he might submit to, and as buzzing filled his head he could almost, for just one moment, pretend that it was her who touched him.

The pressure threatened to crush him as he hovered between life and death. He knew their boundaries intuitively, instinctively, he who had tested them on others countless times in his past life, and drifted, drifted, drifted, remembering her real face, her sanguine eyes, her hands that asked permission rather than assuming it.

Her, he could relinquish control to.

To Orin? Never.

Ripping her arm back with indomitable tenacity he inhaled threateningly while casting it back until it let out a gratuitous pop and slipped out of joint. Lucien stood, rounding on her savagely, his mouth a snarl and eyes keen for the hunt. He pressed her dislocated arm into her chest at its awkward angle and held it there awaiting the shiver down his spine rewarding him for causing pain.

Vierna screamed.

Not-Vierna, but near enough that any pleasure he could feel was shattered and neutered.

She cried out again in a different pitch, shorter now, and then again in breathy sobs, making noises he had never heard from Vierna before.

Lurching her shoulders forward, Orin jutted her arm out and back in, snip snapping back into wholeness under his hands.

"Which one is right, Lucien?" she asked with a shrill laugh and a smile that hung horribly on that face that was not her own. "I wonder if you've heard them all, the ones that I will discover with the tongue of my blades. Oh what fun we shall have together as I learn her pain-sounds and what sends shivers and shudders down her flesh!"

"You will not touch her, Orin," he rumbled, jaw aching with the grit of his back teeth.

"'I will not,' dear sibling says with such imperiousness! But have I already, they do not ask." She cackled and the blood pounded through his veins, thundering so loudly between his ears that reason was on the point of fleeing. "We will be holding court with Father, where I will take my place as his chosen and you will die, die die!"

Intuition struck his arm out toward her throat, folding one hand around her neck as he slammed her back onto the ground, lifted her briefly and let her drop once again, never letting go.

"Do not lay one treacherous claw upon her or I swear that the death I would have given you cleanly will be long and you will watch as I lick the marrow from your bones until one by one I pluck the eyeballs from your skull."

"I would never presume," she said hoarsely through strained vocal chords, "To take what is yours if you would like to do the honours."

Her skull thumped against the ground and Lucien's vision tinged with red as he pictured Orin's neck snapping just enough that it could never snap back, the light leaving her eyes and Father's pride that he be the last to remain to take his place as chosen. The straw-blonde of her hair would be caked with her own blood as he delivered her to the temple.

He took a breath; the mist dissipated.

Below him, nose streaming blood, lay Vierna. Gasping for breath, caressing his shoulder even now as she pleaded with him to make a different choice, her eyes shut fast.

He did not loosen his grip and yet, looking down, his hands were open, shuddering unsteadily, bereft of the wave of peace and holy ecstasy granted by his lord father after a kill.

His hands had never shaken before.

This was Orin. It had been, surely. Not a creation of a mind in ruins, lost and misremembered like the others. It could not be.

Had he forgotten? Could he have forgotten, when she was buried deeper into his soul than the worm into his decimated brain? When had this dream begun, how much time had he lost?

He breathed and it came out ragged, a beast's anguished cry in the wilderness, as he sat back on his heels and stared at her precious blood upon his hands.

Not like this. Not now. Not without memory.

Father asked for her death, Father asked for all deaths, but he would have saved her for last to feel her heartbeat slow as his own veins bled out. To barely remember her murder, to feel no joy, no warmth, no divine pleasure but only this emptiness, this despair, this grief - he could not.

Leaning over her still form, he brushed the reddened, coagulating hair from her face. She had not begun to cool yet. There was nothing peaceful about her, only a grotesquerie of his own creation, a mockery of the woman he so nearly had defied his Father for, now dead by a hand that should have been kind to her.

Lucien had come into this world, unborn and yet bloody, for this monstrousness that was his birthright. Murder's ecstasy should have overcome him and yet… That delicate shoulder he had leaned down to kiss had been twisted from its socket with the force of his arm. The soft skin of a face that had stared up at him with confidence — with love — was bruised a deeper purple by his thumb-prints.

The hollow ache in his chest screamed for release and the shudder in his hands stilled around his knife handle.

Lucien was violence, murder incarnate. It was the only path left to him now.

Before him, Vierna's form shuddered. She twisted painfully, shoulders and hips bursting in and out of joint as his sister's pain-cackles filled the air at her gratuitous contortions. Orin's smile grew over her face as her empty scleras blinked back from her eyes until only Orin remained. He reached for her, to crush or to stab he could not say beyond the misty red that filled his vision, but she clambered and rolled, shortening her limbs away from his grasp until she stood before him just beyond easy knife-range.

"Luci, Luci, Luci, your knife-hand grows as slow and dull as your poor, addled brain-matter," Orin taunted in her own voice, drawing her red, curved dagger.

He would carve the grin to her face, that jeering, mocking grin, and she could laugh her derision while he fed her her entrails. At least she would be dead and Vierna…

Lucien staggered savagely toward Orin, ruminations repressed by each predatory stride. Somewhere in the hollows of her eye sockets that old fear lurked and every steady, inevitable movement would draw it further to the surface. He was Chosen of their Father and she would recognize it.

Each of his steps were two of her small ones backward. He drove her back for a time, until she planted her feet and stood her ground to let him come, always playing her games. Would she laugh when the next embrace they shared as siblings was her heart crushed in his hands, as she had toyed with his?

"You know where you will find us, Lucien," she said, her tone sickeningly saccharine. "You would not want to be late."

Lucien was quick but Orin was nimble and as he lunged for her she twisted from his grasp with a wrench of her spine, slipping into the shadows and leaving him to his ruined prayers, his wavering faith, and his lost love.