Amends

Chapter 5: Adjust

He saw these areas in his nightmares, but as were a lot of details, they had grown foggy – blurry – over time, as though his mind attempted to purge that period of his life from his memories. He knew he was never going to shift it. It had grown the deepest roots in the darkest, most untouched corner of his mind, and every so often, it would lean into the light to shine its existence into his core, and he would remember something once more – the tingling of burnt skin on his front, the red raw sting of cut flesh on his neck, the crackling of angry energy by his temples. Sometimes, he could hear Achillean in his old self – the Achillean that he wanted back – but his voice would be cut off by a devilish laughter, corrupted, and he would be silenced like a clawed hand over his mouth. From his own short time with the Prime Songs inside of him, before he had given a part of himself to them, he knew what they were like. He would feel that part of him cut off and silenced to make room for the Whispers' demands. He could almost hear that very aspect inside Achillean's voice; but he had grown to accept that his mind would regularly play tricks on him. It was when he was caught off-guard and exploited would be when he found himself at his weakest.

A little further along the main corridor, his footsteps still light and careful, and his hand still running along the walls, one side once again gave way to bars as Ingressus reached the cells – one of which, he still felt entrapped in; the one area of the network he knew he had never truly left, despite his returns being his own conscious decisions, each time seeing a broken Nestoris in place of himself. He paused and his gaze fell as his heart sank in his chest, heavy in disappointment. Despite his anxiousness, there was part of him larger than he would admit that longed to look into the cell and once again see the golden markings of a man he had left behind. He wasn't sure how he was to feel if he looked in there and saw Achillean for the first time in four years. In what state he was to find Achillean was not his first thought.

Instead, he wondered how he would feel in that time. Seeing him once a moon for two years to check up on him – even if it was in total silence every time – gave him a sense of stability, knowing that a Prime Song no longer tortured them both; but four years of absence and four years of mental decline, the nightmares more frequent, the hallucinations more violent, casting the look on the perpetrator was not something that Ingressus had thought of. He knew that his mental decline had been as a result of Achillean's sudden unexplained absence, and the constant worrying about the what-ifs and the buts of the situation, and that was why he had ventured all this way to the place that he had once believed himself to desire distance from; but looking once more into the golden eyes that once made to hurt him after so long away from them, he wasn't sure what to expect.

Even as he looked to the corner in which Achillean would ordinarily be huddled, he didn't see the shadow of his brother as he had left him, but instead the small shell of a child that he had learned from – much like the anxious Nestoris he had encountered on the surface.

Ingressus shook his head in confusion. He clutched the threads of his cloak in one hand and balled the other to a fist as if holding a sack of supplies as he would have ordinarily done on his ventures into the mine network.

Achillean still wasn't here.

A low-shining light caught his watery glint and he looked to the doorway of the cell, still open and unmoved, and there in the same spot as he had placed it on that night seven years ago, sat Achillean's Aggrobeam Song, a duller shade of red than its usual vibrancy. Ingressus could still hear the light hum of it reverberating against the hard ground, a lonely chorus if ever he heard one, but its shine had dullened over time, lying dormant and unused, untouched. He crouched, hovering his hand over it, letting the dim light taint his palms as he felt its dying heat.