#mbcb

  Darkness billowed from the walls and the cavernous ceiling in waves, gasping like smoke and rippling like water. Screams and shrieks and hysterical shouting bounced back and forth amid the sounds of thundering footsteps. Anger bubbled forth like the blood spilt freely, running down to the floor to puddle in unbroken circles -- in the darkness, it looked black.

  The twins saw it first, lying helplessly forgotten amid stampeding feet, somehow still in one piece. They swooped in like ravenous vultures, two sets of hands vying for a single prize. The executioner scooped it up before her sister, and crowed with delight. They huddled together, entranced by the light of the surface clasped between their small hands, eyes growing wide with amazement.

“It’s so bright,” said the reaper.

“Yes,” agreed the executioner, turning the princess’ forgotten flower around in her hands. “This is what real light must be like.”

A pain pinched both of their hearts. This was a symbol of everything that the empress had wanted, and it was this that had turned her eyes away from the twins.

“I hate it,” they whispered, only to each other. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.”

The reaper took a delicate petal between her fingers, feeling its soft, waxy surface.

“Hate it.”

She ripped it free, and it fluttered to the ground.

  The knight couldn’t rise to her feet. She stayed on her knees, her white soldier’s uniform slowly blossoming with red, like roses blooming in the spring sun. Blood slipped between her fingers, under the guards on her hands, oiling the joints. Her fingers trembled. Her shoulders shook. Her whole body tremored, like an earthquake was rooted in her spine.

In her hand remained her sword, slipping against her palm, slick with blood. Against her rested his body, and that was all there was. The surroundings seemed to be very far away.

Somehow, above the steady hum of darkness rolling down around them, and the dying sound of a riot, she heard him whisper to her, blood on his lips, before his heart stopped at last, and he died in her embrace.

Wrenching up her skirts, the empress descended the steps from her throne, rage rising in a frenzy. Enough was enough. Her guards may have fled, and every other demon may be cowering away from some stinking, blessed light, but she was the empress of the underworld, and something so basic would not scare her. She was her father’s creation. She was one of the most powerful existences in the world.

Striding across the ballroom floor, the empress raised her hands, gathering power in her fingertips, feeling the darkness all around surge through her veins.

“We’ll talk about this later, father,” she hissed to herself, raising her hand high above her head. “But for now I have some gate crashers to attend to.”

The outcast watched with horror as the princess drove her brother back with darkness, blood spraying across the floor in their wake. Fear rose in his throat like a tidal wave, and he barely swallowed it before he choked on his own breath.

What was this feeling? His hands leapt to his throat, and his body tensed so much that it hurt. What was this feeling, that pained him so much?

Somehow the empress’ regal presence didn’t mean anything anymore, lost in the melee that surrounded them. Instead what came to mind were strange memories of the surface, a soft voice singing in among the flowers of a castle garden. Sitting in shadows as he watched her tend her roses and lilies, strangely content with her unknowing company.

He’d known this feeling before. He remembered it. The time he had been flung from the underworld, sentenced to walk the earth as neither human nor demon till the end of its days. Then, he had known that feeling of sympathy. A human emotion that sprang up inside him, fleckled with a pure love that drove him to save a human girl’s soul from the underworld. Now he remembered. What it was like to be human.

The outcast’s head swiveled round. The princess and her brother were a blur among the darkness and demons, the beacon of her light flickering like a dying candle. He had to stop her. He had to remind her of her humanity, of who she was.

A glimmer of light caught his eye.

The twins seemed to vanish as quickly as he’d seen them, swept away with the crowd, but he had seen what they had stolen. Memories flowed into him, and he recalled the moment the princess had carefully plucked that flower, and the words that she had breathed to herself, hoping to cheer her brother with the gift.

He would likely never see her, the princess, or the underworld again, but he knew what he must do. Resolving himself for the final time, the outcast lunged after the twins.

A strike as cold as ice sent the knight sprawling backwards, her faceguard shattering. White feathers scattered into the air, and a metallic ringing deafened her. Vision swimming, copper taste on her tongue, she instantly pushed herself back up on instinct, only for her body to falter.

She had been flung away from the body of the man she knew by a force of darkness, slung from the empress’ own hand, which now hovered casually in the air as the empress looked down to them from across the floor.

Her lips moved, but the knight heard nothing, didn’t need to hear anything. Pure emotion flooded her body, and she rose back to her feet against every muscle’s screaming resistance on resolve alone.

She did not have time to mourn. She did not have time to waste giving in to the underworld’s pull. Blood ran down her face and mingled with leftover tears, and half-blind, she moved herself forward. The ring against her collarbones was a reminder. The blood on her hands was a reminder. She was here for a reason, and only that reason.

Surging forward with a mind devoid of thought, the knight raised her sword, and swung it in a blindingly fast arc.

The empress caught it between her fingers easily, movement languid, as if swatting away an insect.

“This is the best the surface can send?” she sneered. “Or is your princess that unimportant to you?”

Her lips pulled into a taut smile, and with a surge of darkness rushing through her fingertips, the knight’s sword was flung back as if met by an electric shock. The empress flinched, her hand yanking back towards herself, but she did not have time to inspect her tingling fingers, as the sword came swinging down again.

Again, light and darkness clashed, and the two opposing forces repelled each other with such strength that the two women were sent skidding away from each other, but the pause only lasted for a second. They met again, and again, the empress batting away the sword with her hands and arms, shrouded in darkness.

The knight drove onward regardless, shocks driving up her arms and into her shoulders with every impact, sparks of light and darkness flying with each meeting.

Behind her unknowing back, the servant’s body began to dissolve into seemingly nothing, wisps of light and darkness trailing up into the air. As nothing more than a soul, this death meant he was fated to vanish into nothing. No more hell. No heaven. He would simply be erased from existence. The servant began to vanish, and left the world a martyr.

When the traitor tried to speak, blood bubbled on his lips, and his voice caught somewhere in his throat. Pain seared through his side in waves of a magnitude he couldn’t have even imagined. Each beat of his heart seemed to throb in the wound on his side, sending a stab of pain through him so strong he struggled to hold down the nausea.

He called his sister’s name, broken and creaking.

The princess bore over him, looking down with eyes that did not seem to belong to her.

He called her name again, though it came out more as a whisper, almost inaudible. His head swam, and things seemed to be moving very slowly. It seemed very strange, that he was bleeding, and that his sister was looking at him in that way. It seemed very strange indeed, and his head couldn’t put together the pieces into a coherent answer.

An iron grip settled around his throat, and dragged him back up to his feet. The traitor’s breath caught in his lungs, unable to escape, blood choking from his lips. One hand flew up to the grip around his throat, to find fingers under his own, slick with blood.

Sister, he thought, black seeping into the edges of his vision, sister, I never knew you had this strength. How did you hide such strength in such a frail body?

I wonder how I went our whole lives, the traitor thought, as a new pain flared like fire in his shoulder, without knowing who you were at all.

Somewhere in the darkness, in a small room hidden in the depths of the underworld, the man staring down into his stone basin, watching the scene, smiled. He smiled until his face began to hurt. His fingers gripped his basin, knuckles growing white, chains on his wrists creaking and clinking.

“Erase it,” he murmured to the rippling water. “Erase the light from this world.”

His fingers sank into the stone with a snap, cracks forming under his grip. The light’s body was weakening, her existence beginning to waver, and in turn, his own power began to stir from a slumber centuries old.

“Erase it all,” he whispered.

“Hey, hey, is he still following us?” cried the executioner, voice shrill and excited.

“Yes, yes!” cried the reaper, whirling under the arm of one of the dwindling crowd. Soon there would be nowhere left to hide.

Shrieking with laughter, the twins danced through the crying, vanishing crowd, clashing together to fight over who would carry the flower only to dash away again. The outcast was struggling to keep up.

“Here!” the reaper cackled, grasping her sister’s hands and whirling them to a stop, breathless and giddy.

“Isn’t it strange?” the executioner gasped, cupping the flower in her hands.

They huddled together over its light, excitedly prodding and probing at its petals. One came off in the reaper’s hand, and the two girls looked at each other, wide-eyed.

“Ooh,” they said together, before dissolving into hysterical laughter, the petal dropping and fluttering lightly to the floor.

Without warning, a hand lunged between them, and the twins were both shoved aside, their small bodies easily being knocked away. Both sprawled down to the floor with a shriek, and when their heads rose, they saw with terror that the crowd around them had dwindled to all but nothing, and the flower now remained in neither of their hands.

Now, it was in his.

“Give that back!” the twins screamed in unison, scrambling to their feet and diving toward the thief.

But the outcast was bigger, and faster, and he easily shifted out of their path, skittering away with only a faintly worried look written clean across his face. He stepped back once, twice, paused. The twins staggered, and looked to him, and their empty hands twitched.

In the blink of an eye those same empty hands curled around the handles of a scythe and an axe, and their small, delicate faces twisted with fury.

“Even if you’re one of us,” the reaper snarled, her voice shaking.

“We can still kill you,” the executioner finished, grip tightening.

Their play thing had been taken from them. Their mother had been taken from them. Everything was being stolen from them, and enough was enough.

The outcast swallowed hard, silently begged forgiveness from everyone he had wronged, and turned to outrun them.

The princess loomed over the man she had shoved aside again. Her body moved without a mind commanding it. All she knew was darkness, and all she wanted was darkness. This trespasser from the surface was a blemish on that darkness, and she knew he must be taken care of.

Blood ran from his shoulder, useless and broken, grasped with his other hand as if it would help the pain. He seemed to tremble all over, and blood trickled from his nose and mouth, bruises and scratches decorating his face.

It wasn’t enough.

It wouldn’t be enough until he was gone.

The princess stepped forward, power running through her body, when a white blur passed the corner of her vision. Blinking, she turned her gaze and followed it as it dropped down to the ground, and landed carefully.

A flower.

Her flower.

The flower she had picked to give to someone...

The princess flinched, her gaze flickering.

Mere feet from her flower lay the man who had stood by her only a short while ago, as a steadily growing pool of red seeped out around him. His hand was outstretched towards her feet. He had brought the flower to her.

A blur. Sight twisting and shattering into a kaleidoscope of memories and reality.

The prince and herself, holding hands at their father’s wedding to the woman who would replace their birth mother, quietly comforting each other. Her, as a child, sneaking into his bed at night when she had had a bad dream. The small smile she could draw from him with stupid gifts. The precious, small smile that she cherished so dearly, because she so rarely saw it, and so wished she could see it more.

A feeling exploded within her, and her body seemed to snap in two. A voice called to her from far away, and it was her name, and it was a voice she knew well. It echoed in her mind, fighting against itself, and she knew it was not a battle she would win.

The power coiling round her fingers flickered like a flame in a breeze, stuttering and starting, flaring and diminishing. Her muscles creaked, her tendons snapping, and her bones seemed on the verge of crumbling.

Hatred swelled within her, for him, for herself.

Kill him. Save him. Destroy him. Forgive him. Kill him, kill him, kill him. Love him.

Turning her eyes with great difficulty back to the prince, she raised her trembling hands. He could barely stand -- it seemed it was taking all the strength he had to simply stay on his feet. He bled, and tears began to stream down her face -- feeling roared back into her like a dam breaking, and she felt the wetness on her face. She cried, and she tried to smile.

Her body tried to move again, against her will, her fingers trembling.

“I...’m... so sorry,” she managed to whisper past lips that tried to refuse her.

The princess would not hurt her brother anymore. As if to repent, the princess’ raised hands turned in on herself, and drove the darkness into her own chest.

A tidal wave of heat and sound boomed throughout the room, and everyone was forced to struggle to stay on their feet.

The twins, hovering over the outcast’s body -- already beginning to disintegrate into the nothingness his soul had been resigned to, and already, he was simply the forgotten -- dropped their dirtied weapons, and clung to one another, turning their faces away from the source with screams that were lost in the engulfing silence.

The knight and the empress were stopped mid-blow, hair blasting away from their faces, squinting against the assault, knees bracing against the pressure.

The traitor was knocked from his unsteady feet with the final cry of his sister’s name.

The wave receded, and those left in the room opened their eyes again. Around them all, the room began to shake, like an earthquake rumbling not just underneath them, but in every wall and the ceiling too. Darkness rolled off the walls like a flood, drips and drabs dropping like plaster shaken from an old building’s innards.

The twins, almost weeping with fear, fled from the scene, reduced to the children that they were.

The empress looked about in terror, her voice rising in a confused swell.

“What are you doing?” she cried, her hands dropping. “Stop it! Stop it right now---”

A breath.

The knight saw the opening and lunged forward. She drove her sword through the woman’s chest.

More blood ran down onto her hands. The light in her sword began to burn so bright it scalded her hands, but still she held on, driving it deeper. The empress choked out a sound, the battle of light and darkness sparking like a thunderstorm inside her chest. She looked down at the blade protruding from her chest, the wound leaking blood and tiny shafts of light, up to the knight.

At last, unable to bear the resistance, the knight pulled her sword free. Blood sprayed in a neat arc following the blade, and the empress gasped, hands flying to her chest as she doubled over. She would not die. She was a creation of her father’s, and a fraction of light was not enough to kill her.

Even still, pain racked her body, and she coughed blood onto the floor, as a great pull on her existence dragged her backwards.

“You... You wi---”

The knight never heard the end of her sentence before she vanished from before her very eyes.

The stone basin cracked, and shattered. Water like liquid glass scattered, streaked with shadows. The shackles, binding the man’s wrists broke clean in two, and he laughed. He laughed, hysteria building inside him, as the darkness on the walls began to seep downward and pool on the floor, snaking towards his feet and seeping into him. He felt his strength soar, and finally, after so long, his prison fell to pieces.

The traitor crawled forward, his face hot with tears he wasn’t aware of. His hands dragged him forward, blood smearing his story across the floor he left behind.

He reached his sister, prone and cold, a gaping hole of darkness in her chest, and a sob racked him so hard he almost passed out from the pain it inflicted on his broken body. With the last strength he had, the traitor reached out to her, his shaking fingers brushing over her hair. Her face was peaceful. The remnants of a smile lay across her lips, and somehow, she looked so terribly peaceful.

The traitor closed his eyes and wept, and finally, he remembered that he was a brother.

The knight sheathed her sword, her hands red and blistered, looking around desperately. Her mind was a painful haze, but she knew the room around her was shaking of its own accord, ready to collapse in on itself. She turned, frantic, looking for the princess, and only saw bodies lying strewn across the floor.

Her heart surged into her throat, and she staggered across the room toward the halo of light surrounding the other two she knew from the surface. It didn’t cross her mind to question how the prince had come to be here. He was simply there, lying by his sister in a sea of blood.

There was nothing left of the knight’s world to upturn, and when she came to a grinding halt, and the sight of the princess’ body seared into her mind, everything that was left simply disappeared. She was no longer broken. Simply empty. There was nothing left and she was a mere hollow shell.

She had failed. Failed to save her princess. Failed to save her friend. Watched her lover die for the second time, and then failed the one she had sworn to protect.

The prince still breathed. The knight grasped his wrist without feeling pain in her hands, without feeling anything, and hauled the man to his feet. Her princess would want her to save him. No matter what happened between them, the princess loved her brother more than anything. So, if there was one thing the knight could do, it was at least save him.

Supporting his weight, she moved as quickly as she could back to the ballroom doors. They passed through, and began the ascent back up to the surface, her mind clearing with every step upwards.

A heavy weight seemed to take root in her stomach. She had failed her princess. She had failed everyone. Nothing seemed real, yet, at the same time, it seemed to be far too vivid.

Emerging with a gasp to the sunlight and the air, the gates of hell slammed shut behind them and disappeared without a trace. Screams echoed all around, and frantic, worried hands relieved the knight of the prince’s weight.

Those of the royal court were frantic. They hurried here and there, screaming for healers, for nurses and medics. The prince remained unconscious, but breathing.

In the frenzy, the knight slipped away without a word, and ran for all she was worth, nothing more than a coward and a deserter.

In the depths of the underworld, in a bird cage that had once been used to house the light of the princess, the empress sat surrounded by the tatters of her gown. She sniffed, unable to cry. Father’s creations could not cry. They did not know how to. They were not made with the ability.

She gingerly touched the wound on her chest. Her brothers and sisters would laugh at her mercilessly for such a scar, and it would take her years to recuperate her strength. The empress sniffed again, a feeling like human misery washing over her.

“Empress,” came a small voice.

“Mother,” came another.

Raising her eyes to find two small faces peering in at her through the bars, fear etched into their expressions, the empress sank even further. She had nothing to say to them. Instead, she reached forward both hands, one to each of them, and small fingers grasped eagerly around her own, desperate for the cold, underworld warmth of contact.

“What’s going on?” the executioner whispered, holding her mother’s hand to her cheek, small body pressed against the bars of the cage.

“What will happen now?” asked the reaper, squeezing the empress’ fingers with both of her little hands.

“I don’t know,” was the honest answer the empress gave with the heave of a sigh, her voice quavering. “I don’t know, children.”

“My, you always were the sentimental type, weren’t you?” A voice rose from the other side of the room, deep and languid. The empress’ skin prickled from head to toe, the hair on the back of her neck rising. It was a voice she hadn’t heard in centuries. “Still, I can understand wanting children, so I shan’t punish you.”

The twins pressed against the cage closely, wanting to sink inside and be protected by its bars, and their mother.

“Father,” the empress said, unable to read her own emotion.

“Yes.” The man smiled. “I’ve returned. Are you happy to see me?”

“Yes,” the empress answered automatically. And she was. The misery cloaking her seemed to swell away from her, pushed up and outward by a love so strong she could barely recognise it.

Her father, her creator. He who had made her, and her brothers and sisters, in a human image, to remind him of the surface world he had been born to, though lacking in the colours that only the surface could possess. Her father, who possessed the antithesis of the light that had belonged to the princess. Her father, the Darkness.

“Welcome home, father.”

-- Epilogue --

The world has a delicate balance. Light cannot exist without darkness, and darkness cannot exist without light. The light is a gift from the goddess, but because it can only exist with its twin, dakness is also a gift from the goddess. Light is bestowed upon a chosen child, born into the world with a pure heart. Darkness is bestowed upon another, cursed from the moment they draw breath. They never disappear from the world, only move to a different container.

The man possessing the darkness had known the light in previous lives. The light had sealed him away to suppress him, so his power would remain in one place and not pose any threat to the surface. He was unable to reincarnate to a new body, only remaining a constant with his power dwindling, for centuries, when the light had chosen new lives over and over. All he could do was watch, locked away in his prison with nothing but murky scenes played on water’s surface.

With the light’s body destroyed and his prison bars broken, the time had come where he could finally reincarnate. He could finally be reborn to the surface world, and relearn how it felt to be human.

But now, he could not die.

The princess and her light had disappeared from the world, but still, he could not die. There was some fragment of her, some tiny shard of light still left behind. He could sense it faintly, the flipside to his own power, fleeing alongside a coward to some unknown place. That one, small, shard of light stopped both of them from finding new lives.