In place of the scorching white light I'd grown accustomed to, red fire engulfed my consciousness, sending me flailing and tumbling into the past.
Images of maroon carpet and smooth marble danced in the flames around me, and I rifled through memories of tactical maps and demon soldiers as my power clawed through the king's mind. Digging, scrounging, mining for clues.
I pushed, pushed, pushed through his resistance until I found the childhood memories he'd stashed away. The moments he'd forced himself to forget, lest his humanity persevere.
I peeled back his early years like dried-up rose petals. The first we shed, a fuzzy memory of little Regulas sitting atop his father's shoulders, waving at his soon-to-be subjects. Then the day Asa took his first steps, proudly stomping toward his brother's open arms. And later that year, when Regulas received his custom-made sword from the blacksmith and, much to his mother's chagrin, brought it everywhere with him—even the dining room table.
And who could forget meeting Lucy for the first time? When Sora finally allowed him and Asa into the nursery, and he experienced a surge of love, adoration, and protectiveness overcome him. A breed of compassion and gentleness only a baby sister could elicit.
Until it all came to a screeching halt.
The smoke burned my nostrils as I peered closer to the torn and blurry memory: the moment that changed the young king's trajectory forever.
"Regulas," Sora Sterling said from her deathbed, her pale, delicate hands folded over her lap. "My love...don't be angry."
"Don't tell me what to feel," he hissed, and judging by the awkward pitch of his voice, he had to be in his early teens. "This never should have happened. Coming after you...they crossed a line. And they'll pay for it."
A solemn beat passed as she watched him stand there, stiff and agitated, in the doorway. "It breaks my heart to leave you, Ray," she said, carefully mulling over her final words to her child. "But I need you to—"
"I don't want to hear it," he snapped. He traded those perceptive dark eyes for the carpet. "I know what this means for the family. I know I'll have to take on more responsibilities. Don't talk to me like you're already dead."
"Regulas," she sighed, patiently waiting for him to look at her again. "All I wanted to say is...don't swallow the hatred."
He glared at her, even as mournful tears slid down his cheeks. And Gritz, how he burned inside—like a pot of boiling water foaming at the lid. "How can I not hate the people who did this to you?"
"You can, if it helps you grieve. But then you need to spit the bitterness out, before it stains your throat," she told him. "Don't let it inside. Don't let it darken your heart." Like Godric, her defeated expression said. "Trust me; you cannot lead with hatred. It's a sickness disguised as a crutch."
He wiped his eyes. "Father disagrees."
"Your father is blinded by pain," she pressed. "I raised you to make honorable choices. Don't poison the boy I love, Regulas." She fixed him with a pleading stare. "I beg you."
Angry flames ripped through the memory, reducing it to cinders, and I coughed as toxic smoke swept up my consciousness and transplanted me in a colder, darker setting.
A setting I'd experienced before.
Above me, portal light collided with stained-glass windows, dousing every inch of the throne room in reds, golds, and violets. No cobwebs clung to the vaulted ceiling yet. And no dust blanketed the hardwood.
"I don't understand," Regulas said, his metal crown digging into his hairline, suddenly too small and uncomfortable for his head. He was older now, a grown man forced to fit the husk of a young adult. A prince sentenced to a life of genocide.
"And you may never," a hollow voice answered from the center throne, and I couldn't tell whose shivers it induced—mine or my host's.
But I didn't have to peer into the shadows to behold its owner. Only one man could instill such fear and anxiety in Regulas. Only one man could speak with such ease to a monarch.
With his chiseled bone structure, square jaw, and symmetric features, I could tell Godric Sterling had once been a handsome man. But his looks, along with the passion and charisma I'd witnessed in Will's memories, had long since faded.
His skin was now the color of parchment, peeling off in flaky strips like the demons he'd recruited. His blue eyes resembled the icy pond I'd nearly drowned in, and his brown locks and facial hair had turned a ghostly white—the same shade as mine.
He looked like a man who'd died ages ago, preserved and frozen in time. A man missing his soul.
"I've given everything I have to this war, Regulas," he said, and those weathered, tattooed fingers curled over stone armrests. "I've asked too much of the netherworld, and because of that, I will pay the ultimate price. Soon."
I felt that ugly hole open up inside of Regulas once more. The one he'd never sewn shut. The one he'd fed and nurtured with hatred instead of its proper antidote. "But...you can't die," the prince got out, shaking his head as his world shattered all over again. "What am I going to do? The Order's gone! Asa's...gone. I don't know how to—"
"The Otherkind will assist you," Godric said calmly, as if he weren't leaving his son behind with an insurmountable task. "Stay alive, stay informed, and everything else will fall into place." His dead eyes drifted to the portal outside. "Stay here in the palace where you're safe."
Regulas paid a wary glance at the Pans guarding the entrance, their pale eyes shimmering like purple moons in the window light. "But..."
"You're the key to our victory, Regulas. From the day you were born, that much was evident." Slowly, as though the action caused him great pain, Godric lifted the crown off his head and fixed his gaze on his son. "With this title, seek justice, shed your greatness, and save our people. That is your duty as the next king of Rhea."
Panic seized the prince, and he fell to his knees. His voice cracked as he gasped, "Father, please—"
"That is your duty as my son."
Regulas sucked in a breath at the sound of his father's approaching footsteps, his eyes widening at the crownless shadow growing larger and larger on the hardwood. Trembling, he removed his own crown from his head, and after an unbearable pause, a heavier, colder ring took its place .
"Do not fail me, Regulas."
Centuries-old encumbrance fused to his skull, and it was nothing like he'd imagined as a boy.
Nothing at all.
The memory evaporated, and I staggered backward in a tunnel of flame and misery, watching Regulas pass by Asa's empty bedroom over and over again, until he could no longer bear the sight of it. Until he lit the room on fire to kill the pain.
He'd preferred charcoal to Asa's traveling gear strewn across the floor anyway.
Next, I watched him distance himself from Lucy, because she looked too much like Sora, and she wouldn't stop asking for Onii-chan. What she needed from Regulas, he couldn't provide. The questions she asked, he couldn't answer. So he pushed her away, isolating himself to the point that she no longer recognized him as a brother.
And just before I escaped the king's hellish inferno, I caught a glimpse of him wiping at the gashes on his naked torso. Fighting exsanguination in a bathroom littered with bloody rags.
He cursed as he hastily scrubbed at his skin, unable to dry the wounds his father inflicted.
Unable to stop the poison.
I opened my eyes, and my company released a chorus of weary sighs.
Before I'd even grounded myself in this dimension, Will's hand had already found my cheek, his thumb wiping away the tears I'd shed exploring his brother's inner vault.
"Well?" prompted Mason, sweat beading his forehead. His magic was taking its toll, and after feeling what that power had done to Regulas, to his mind, I wanted nothing more than to free him from it. Immediately.
Pain radiated from the crescent-shaped mark on my palm, and I shook out my hand, ignoring Eagan's wide-eyed stare. "Godric called him the key. He told him he had to stay put and stay alive...but he didn't say why."
As they chewed on the implications, Will cursed beside me. "Regulas never left the palace," he murmured, his pupils haloed in two rings: the red glint of the portal and the white ether doming our party. "All these years, he's been cooped up here, hiding. I thought it was cowardice, but..."
"But he's been preserving the portal's existence," Torian finished, and again, the group dissolved into heavy silence.
My gaze traveled to the sleeping demon king once more, a king now missing the core parts of himself.
Godric's firstborn was a cruel man with a horrifying agenda; there was no doubt about that. But—if I could grant him one concession—he'd also suffered as much as any victim of war, and his life was my very idea of torture.
As eerie as it was, the two of us shared similar conditions growing up: robbed of a mother's love, chained to a childhood home, abandoned by the brothers we needed most, sentenced to the futures our fathers concocted for us, and cursed with unimaginable power. We were shaped by the same pivotal forces, and deep down in my bones, I knew we were also made of the same destructive ingredients.
The only reason I'd turned out any differently was because I'd found friendship in my time of need, while he'd been thrust into villainy without a Nova, Harmon, or Siren to guide him. The young royal hadn't stood a chance—the Fates had stitched this arc into the fabric of his being. He'd been destined to torch the earth.
And that was why I pinched Will's sleeve as he slipped his knife out of his boot, cold intention written on his face. "...Are you sure?"
He closed his eyes, but his grip didn't slacken on the weapon. "We have no choice."
Yes. But that didn't mean he had to execute said choice. We all had limits. Even a hardened, resilient Will.
"I can do it," Mason offered before I could interject, and when the five of us gaped at him, he swallowed. "You shouldn't have to kill your own brother, Sterling." He shook his head back and forth, as if he couldn't stomach the thought. "No one should have to live with that pain."
I nodded, well-aware of how utterly devastating it was to hold your sibling's life in your hands—and to recognize how much safer the world would be without them in it.
"It would be painless if I did it," I said quietly. "And quick."
I'd fought the instinct to kill Regulas the first time we'd met, mostly because I didn't feel it was my place to annihilate Will's brother and the leader of his divided kingdom. At the time, we didn't know what such rash actions would sow, and I'd loathed the callous, god-like nature of my power.
But today, the demon king had reached his end—one way or another—and if the man I loved asked me to extend mercy to his dying brother, I would. Even if no one else thought he deserved it.
Will's gaze was tender. "I can't let either of you do that. Regulas...he's my responsibility." His forehead creased as he looked upon his brother. "He's my fault."
Cinder, who sat in the corridor, watched on with devastated amber eyes. But she didn't interfere, and I wondered if she'd foreseen this ending long ago. If she'd always known it would come to fratricide.
Dragging his bad leg behind him, Will positioned himself to the left of his brother's shoulder, the knife pointed downward in his fist.
I struggled to watch him battle his reservations, to fight off his ingrained loyalty to a man who despised him. But as the seconds passed by, his hand didn't budge.
"Alex...?" he whispered at last. There were tears in his eyes, and it killed me to see him in this state—to be stripped to the bone before our inner circle. "He hasn't left...he hasn't seen." He frowned at his own incoherent words. "Can you...show him what we're fighting for? As he dies?"
My throat closed up at his request. Because of course Will asked that of me. Of course he wanted his brother to see that he hadn't spat upon their family's legacy; he'd simply forged a better path.
Nodding, I lowered my hand to the king's tunic, and beside me, Will took a long, shaky breath.
On his exhale, he slid the blade into his brother's chest.
Dark eyes snapped open, polluted with hatred and misery and betrayal.
Eagan retreated a few steps, and I too shared his fear of this remorseless killer. But as I played my memories back for Regulas, his anger diluted to an indistinguishable pigment of pain, and something shifted in his livid expression.
From the safety of my own mental landscape, I fed him memories of our people collaborating, cohabitating, and breaking bread together. Memories of clan members welcoming Will into their midst. Memories of Harmon coaching Mason on his animal traps, Siren overriding the Command's battle strategies, and Torian healing federates.
Ambivalence stirred in the king's eyes as I shared the time my brother presented Will with Ellsian armor—begrudgingly—in lieu of sending him into battle with bottom-of-the-bin scrap metal. And then wistfulness, as I showed him the time I comforted Will after a nightmare, whispering sweet reassurances into his neck as we burrowed into each other's nexus.
Eventually, I felt his soul grow thin in my mind's grasp—thin and irretrievable.
In his last moments, Regulas folded his fingers over Will's, helping him push the steel blade further into his breast. And as fresh blood pooled over the king's sodden tunic, Will's knife snuffed out the Order's lingering magic.
And with it, the tragic life it preyed upon.
The king's final breath left his lips—forming what, from this position, looked like an ironic grin—and the six of us turned to watch the portal fade and flicker out of existence.
Except it was not death that greeted the Order's creation, but inflammation.
Enormous bolts of lighting flashed through the swelling portal, tails of electricity feathering into the tumultuous sky. And as the door to the demon world slammed shut, the portal itself drained to a streak of white energy—absent of crimson flames, absent of heat, and absent of evil.
But it did not die.
Instead, every stranded, bodiless nightmare merged into one mass of churning darkness, gathering above us the way storm clouds coalesce atop a mountain range. And then, like a murmuration, the unbound demons dove straight for Mason's shield and the foolish mortals beneath it.
***********************************
So long, Ray! Here's an old (short) animatic I made about the broody villain.
I apologize for the delay on this one, but I'm officially moved into my new house, and I finally have my evenings back again to wrap this baby up!
Thanks for the patience.
Much love! <3