I had seen the Sin Tehgrair once before in Peroth's memory.
In my recollection, he was a fair-haired man of advanced height, broad through the shoulders with a heavy brow lowered over juniper eyes. His voice had been resonant, his posture staunch and threatening. From his mannerisms, I could tell he had been the de-facto leader of the Sins, though how that hierarchy had come about with people like Darius and Balthier in the group was questionable.
I didn't know how he had died, but I knew the Sin was gone. I hadn't expected this to be his fate.
I wondered how Darius could recognize him.
The revelation was so jarring, Darius and I stared without a word shared between us. The Sin hoisted me upright with his arms cinched about my middle, his torso curved in an attempt to bodily shield me from the rangy monstrosity hunched upon Sloth's shoulders. The action was subliminal, done as if he weren't conscious of the movement.
Balthier recovered his equilibrium first.
"What have you done?!" Envy raged as the smoke dispersed and he stumbled to the ward once more. I sucked in a breath when I laid eyes upon the remnants of his arm. The energy had ripped it off, leaving behind the loose, bloody tatters of his sleeve that Balthier held tightly just below his shoulder. "What is that abomination?!"
The thing that was Tehgrair pried its claws from the ward and laid them upon Peroth's chest, cutting the linen fabric of his jacket. The bare, drawn form of its skull tilted and wavered as it judged Balthier. It began to keen, the visible tendons in its skinny throat vibrating until the sound rose beyond the range of my hearing.
Darius flinched as he dropped me on my own feet and covered his ears.
A line of blood dripped from Peroth's nose.
Envy spoke a vicious statement in a language I didn't understand. The cadence of the verbiage prickled at the nape of my neck. "I put him in the ground over four thousand years ago. What have you done?!"
Peroth laid his hand upon the monster's and slowly pried its unruly talons from his chest. The wounds inflicted upon his person wept a few final tears of crimson but swiftly mended.
"I did what I had to."
"Abomination!" Balthier snarled, his anger manifesting in a physical lash of energy. It struck the ward and erupted in a fresh shower of sparks. The flora at his feet—already frostbitten or smoldering—succumbed to disease and rot. "I will return him to his death when I put an end to the both of you!"
Momentarily at a stalemate, the Sin of Envy chose the final path open to him; he retreated. Balthier vanished into the Realm without so much as a parting remark, leaving behind a thick patch of ice and a swathe of scorched, decaying vegetation.
We stood, waiting. I doubted any of us knew what we waited for. Balthier's return? The ward's sudden collapse? Only when Peroth exhaled and Darius lost the rigidity of his stance did I dare speak.
"What...." The word was hoarse and barely audible. "What is that?"
The amalgamation twisted so it bones popped and its muscles bulged in grotesque ways. It moved in tandem with Peroth's motion, fixing me with its blank stare as though it could hear and understand what I said. Its arm rose, and it pointed one talon at my heart. Blood welled and dripped from the point.
A shudder wracked Sloth's body, causing him to grit his honed teeth and groan. The monster they named Tehgrair dissolved in a film opalescent blackness, seeping once more into Peroth's skin as if the nightmare had never been real.
Peroth breathed easier with it gone, though his eyes remained remarkably dark.
"That, Sara—." He addressed me with forced lightness as he left the ward's side. "Is what happens when a shadeborn—." Peroth smacked an open palm against his chest. "Fails."
It can break their mind or their body...creating amalgamations and monstrosities beyond compare.... The words bled outward from my subconscious. He had told me this in his office after explaining what a shadeborn was. Had he...had Peroth been speaking of himself? Was Peroth shadeborn?
While his tired outburst resonated in my ears, Pride stomped nearer Sloth and jabbed a finger in his face. "Tehgrair did not make you shadeborn. The man was an arrogant throne-seeking deceiver—but he was smart enough to know you cannot make a shadeborn of a Sin!"
Peroth slapped Darius's hand away and grabbed the taller Sin by the collar, jerking him down to his eye-level. "I never said Tehgrair made me this way. Don't put words in my mouth." Sloth uncurled his fingers. The steady whispers of white steam rising beneath his feet displayed the temper his cautious voice didn't confute.
"King's breath, Cuxiel!" Darius protested without heeding the clear signs of Peroth's unraveling patience. "How did this happen? You've kept this a secret from us for over four-thousand years!"
Darius's voice rang in the marsh's void. Sloth only blinked—but Darius's expression darkened, and he took a definite step back from his fellow Original, his fists at his sides. When he spoke, his words were laden with sullen sarcasm. It was same voice Darius had first addressed me with all those weeks ago.
"Or am I mistaken? Have you simply kept it a secret from me? Tell me, Cuxiel; does Amoroth know?"
Gold highlights swirled in the murky depths of Peroth's eyes, his emotions in a hungry, fervent whirlwind. "Of course."
Darius took yet another step back, putting himself by the crumbling wall. "Do you not trust me? You trust her, that wretched, back-stabbing woman, over...me?"
Peroth went to leave, his bearing making it clear he had no intention of continuing this conversation. "I do not wish to fight in front of your shadeborn like bitter, mangy dogs," he said with an indelicate sniff. "I'm returning to my office."
"Dammit, Peroth! Answer me!"
"Answer you?! And who are you to demand anything from me?!" Peroth whirled about as the shadows began to writhe beneath his flesh once more, seeking freedom or perhaps permission to rip my Sin's throat out. I hadn't heard Peroth raise his voice before. Hearing him shout at Darius now was...unnerving. "We had not spoken in forty years before you arrived on my doorstep with your ceaseless, tiresome demands! You fling trust in my face, demanding my confidence, my secrets—and yet you didn't return that confidence, Darius.
"For forty years I worried. I called you friend—brother. I owed you everything. I was overjoyed to learn of your release from the Pit, but you didn't return. I waited, and you never sent word, never came home, and when you finally did arrive, the first words I overheard you speaking on my behalf were words of caution."
I touched Darius's arm, his skin searing beneath my touch. I crowded nearer his warmth to escape the cold woven in the absence of the energy being siphoned off by the Sins. Ice cracked below our feet and fragile chips of ice struck my cheeks.
"You told her that I wasn't your friend. That you didn't even trust me." Peroth dropped his gaze, unwilling to look at Darius or me. "I am not a madman like you brother. I am not a misguided vigilante like Balthazar. I am of sound mind, and despite what we are and despite the casual usage of the word amongst, I count you as my true remaining friend, Darius. To hear that I was so beneath your consideration after the years we have faced together was...displeasing."
Both Sins calmed as the seconds tolled and their anger fizzled. Peroth heaved a breath, then another. "Besides my frustrations and your atrocious attitude...this wasn't a secret I withheld out of cruelty, or acrimony. I withheld it out of shame. It was my failing, my mistake, my atrocity that bore the creation of this madness. Given the option, I would have gladly kept this burden to myself for another four thousand years."
Darius glared, the taut muscles in his neck twitching with restrained violence. Pride wasn't one to rant when his fists could communicate in a much faster fashion. What thoughts rattled in that ancient brain of his I didn't know, but I knew he was taking great care in choosing his next words.
"You left me there," he forced through clenched teeth. "You all left me there. I didn't expect much, but I did hope the man who named himself my friend—." The Sin's lip curled in a silent snarl. He spat the word as if the mere conception of friendship offended him. "—would speak in my defense. The Baal tortured me for some minor, inconvenient infraction drummed up by your protégé, and you all ignored my suffering. You turned away and ignored poor little me."
The taste of bile bit my tongue as I imagined what horror Darius had faced in the Baal's care. So, this was the reason behind Darius's prior absence from Crow's End. I had gleaned through various snatches of conversation that he'd been at the manor a number of years ago, and I had presumed it was before his internment in the Pit, but I hadn't been able to the account for why he'd hadn't returned preceding our contract.
It was because Peroth hadn't tried to stop his imprisonment, and though Darius shrugged his shoulders and projected nonchalance, he must be utterly furious with Peroth to this day.
"Darius, I—."
Pride slashed a hand through the air, shaking his head. "I don't want explanations or apologies. I am not a mewling human in need of placation. I am far beyond such things. You stated you were upset I didn't return to Crow's End." The mocking lilt of Darius's voice was unmistakable, as was his derisive smirk. "I'm simply telling you why. I didn't want to speak with you. I didn't want to see you. Ever."
Sloth was quiet. The monstrosity roved beneath his flesh, rippling like the incoming tide as the frost that had accumulated in his short hair began to thaw and drip. Something akin to sadness crossed his face and was gone.
Darius wasn't finished. "While you complain about my lack of reciprocal trust, understand that I had planned to never step foot in this manor again, but in my direst hour, I came to you." He sat on the edge of the wall, crossing his arms. "Take that however you wish."
Their argument came to a swift, mutual end. Peroth faced the wilds beyond his ward, the naked emotion of a hundred different thoughts beyond my human mind dwindling to a cheap mask of mild displeasure. Darius seemed to finally remember I was there, as he glanced at my hand on his arm and immediately froze.
"We are too old and too jaded to bicker in this way," Peroth muttered as he shook the dew from his hair and patted his bloody shirt. "It's probably exactly what he wants, anyway." He coughed and wiped stray drops of red from his lips. "I asked before how we are to survive if we cannot be civil with one another—and yet here I am, the ultimate hypocrite...."
Peroth spoke, but I was the unlucky recipient of Darius's full and undivided attention. The weak effluence of the mire stressed the eerie quality of his crimson eyes.
I gulped.
"What are you doing out here?" he asked, clearly tired as he plucked a wayward lock of hair from my shoulder. He drew it taut between his thumb and forefinger. "By the ward. Idiot."
"I thought the ward was farther out than this," I answered truthfully. On further consideration, given the distance of the road and the odd shape of the graveyard, I should have known the ward lay near the spooky boundary. I hadn't thought Anzel would walk right through it without a care.
Darius twined my hair about his fingers and gave it a sharp downward tug.
"Ow!"
"Why are you here?" His knuckles rubbed together in a threatening manner, one brow quirked. "Well?"
"I was helping Anzel," I grumbled as I pulled free of his ministrations, earning yet another unpleasant tug. "He went back inside before me. Don't touch my hair."
"The Vytian," Darius breathed. I was worried he would be mad at my mention of Anzel, but the Sin only hissed "Of course," into the wet air as if he had expected as much. Sins were capable of detecting lies, if they were in the mood to try. I could have dodged the issue and tried to fabricate a story, but nothing I could imagine in place of the truth would placate Darius, though I didn't mention that Anzel had left me here.
I shivered. Lack of adrenaline coupled with the presence of the Sins had left the mire colder than ever and I was still without a coat. Where had Anzel gone? Was he safe? Had he come near enough to hear the arguing Sins and had thought better of appearing?
"Let's go. I haven't the wherewithal to handle this aggravation. You are honestly the most exasperating woman I have ever met, Sara."
Darius dropped his legs on the other side of the wall and began to cross the cemetery with quick, even strides. He didn't turn to watch me follow, so I knew I needed to hurry or else be left behind.
I yanked my feet from the stubborn mud, casting my eye over the Sin of Sloth. He hadn't left the barrier. His hand was loosely held against his chest, his fingertips brushing the bloody holes left by Tehgrair's talons.
"Peroth...."
I wanted to say something, some flippant remark that would mend the wounds inflicted by Darius's caustic words—but my mind was empty and my thoughts were grim.
What was there for me to say? The man was a shadeborn like myself, but was somehow incomplete, broken. He claimed to be ashamed of the monster, and yet he didn't try to rid himself of it, and I had seen Sloth feed the creature energy manifested out of his own soul. He held his burden close to his very being, as though that incompletion defined who he had become.
A Sin. A shadeborn. A broken Absolian. A man. A person.
Once broken, you can never truly be whole again, Peroth's memory recited in my ear, almost audible on the slow susurration of the wind in the bracken. He should have known that...he should have told us.
"Hmm...?" Peroth blinked as he registered my appearance and his eyes settled on my middle. "You're bleeding, Sara."
I was. Throwing myself into the wall had busted Darius's stitches yet again. The warm rivulets of blood were seeping into my shirt, giving the fabric a sticky texture.
"If you're lingering for a lecture, I've none to give. I think having Balthazar scare the wits out of you was enough of a warning, don't you?"
My answering laugh was awkward and ill-timed.
"Go on, Sara." Peroth faced the mire again, turning his sight to the little garden beneath the willows. His lips pursed in silent musings. "Darius needs you."
"What—?" I began to question what he meant, but I spotted the Sin of Pride in the mist between the rows of the tombs. I was surprised he had waited.
"Would you have left him there?" Peroth asked the distant garden, his voice soft as the rustle of old autumn leaves. "There in the Pit? Knowing you would have had to join him in his punishment, knowing nothing you said would free him—would you have left him there?"
An odd question. I tucked the lock of hair Darius had touched behind my ear. "You know my answer already."
Peroth sighed, his eyes easing shut. "I do, don't I?" His eyelids flickered. "It makes me wonder when a frail mortal woman became braver than the Sin of Sloth."
I scoffed as I balanced my hip against the wall's grooved top, ready to sling a leg over and hurry on. "You say that, but Darius always tells me there's a thin line between stupidity and bravery. Guess which side of the line I frequent."
The Sin's gilded eyes sparked with repressed laughter as he peered sidelong in my direction. "And yet, I believe he loves you all the more for that stupidity. Darius is correct; we all left him in the Pit and allowed our dark father to make an example of him. I haven't earned the right to name him my friend."
I choked, slipping on the dissipating ice. My cheeks burned with color as I waited for Peroth to elucidate—but the Sin only stared into the whirling fog, my presence discarded and forgotten without further regard.
"Sara!" came Darius's peeved call. "Let's go already."
Love? I shook myself as I hopped the wall and picked my way through the treacherous terrain. Peroth says some very odd things sometimes, but that is certainly the oddest thing he could ever accuse Darius of.
Pride and I headed toward the hidden manor, leaving Peroth to the mercy of the roving mists.