Bereft: Foretold

47 | A First Commander

The light left Aurelius' hands and struck Darius like a bolt of lightning summoned from a storm.

The Absolian grinned with delight before the dust settled, filled with silent, selfish satisfaction. Where admiration for his older brother had once lived now lurked darker, uglier emotions of hatred and an old dash of envy. He could admit part of his desire to become the King Below was driven by a base sense of inferiority given to him by Darius and Sethan, the eldest and youngest sons of their family. Even after they'd been thrown from the cliffs, Aurelius had existed in their shadows, all his successes blamed upon the power void left in their absence.

He'd thought Darius dead many eons ago and hadn't come to find him now—but this was a delightful surprise Aurelius relished in. He'd at last proven who was the strongest. No tricks needed this time.

The Absolian returned his attention to the witches, weak, quavering creatures that they were. One was dead, one near the brink, two others unconscious, and the final member of their sordid bunch was awake and dribbling with curses. Aurelius could sense the evil in her, a wrongness to her magic that had a foul, disorienting scent to it. She was what the Absolians' referred to as a spirit-defiler, a person who toyed with the weave of the universe and endangered them all. The void was not a toy for little mortal girls to play with. 

He swatted her with his wing—swearing when the bitch managed to land a talisman against the appendage before falling and his feathers began to rot. Aurelius ripped the spell off with an annoyed growl and went to pluck the woman's head from her scrawny body, when he took a breath of the magic surrounding the women again and realized he'd made a mistake.

Four witches. Not five. The fifth was not a witch. What was she?

Aurelius used his boot to roll the dark-haired woman onto her back and went to touch her. A cold, sinister laugh halted his motion.

It...can't be.

Feeble veins of lightning ate through the static clinging to the clouds of debris as the dust finally cleared. Darius remained where he'd been, prone on the filthy floor, not reduced to cinders as he should have been. Aurelius didn't understand: the spell he'd mustered should have reduced Darius to ash, be he Sin, mortal, or whatever else he could manage to become. It wasn't possible to be alive after being struck with such an ability, nor was it possible to be laughing.

Darius was unharmed, his shirt singed and smoldering, but unharmed.

What happened to the spell?

Darius used his arms to lever himself upright, and Aurelius saw that his face was flushed, his eyes remarkable in their abrupt vigor. The lines of exhaustion that had cluttered the skin about his brow and lashes were gone, replaced by a healthy sheen of youth, and all broken bones were healed once more. The Sin studied his sooty hands and Aurelius saw his tongue flash across his teeth like a content wolf cleaning blood from his fangs.

"My," Darius crooned, standing with eerie, unhurried ease. The incongruous aspects of his appearance, the flash of Absolian fangs and sharp, bladed ears, were gone. "That is an...unexpected side effect."

Blue flames split the flesh of the beast's palms.

Did...did he consume the spell? Aurelius stiffened, wings held aloft to hurl him upward and away from unexpected danger. He told himself such a feat was impossible, that Sins did not consume magic in that manner, but it seemed many impossible things were going to happen this day.

He recalled a distant afternoon spent on a garden terrace, covered in sweat and out of breath, sword heavy in his younger hand. He remembered Darius's snide voice, "Do not underestimate your opponent, Aurelius."