Oh Bexley stares at him. Her eyes are wide as moons and deep as oceans churning. She is close, close enough to touch. Yet to touch each other is to touch death and mortality yawns, chasm wide between them. Raum’s words still whisper, nipping at the flesh of her ear, her mind.
 
Her golden lip curls and he watches the baring of her teeth.  They gleam bright as bone bleached beneath the sun. Raum did not sway his eyes from Acton’s ghost, not until he looked at Bexley’s sneer, at the fury curling her as though she were paper in a fire. The edges of her golden skin are burning, the Ghost thinks. She is ash and embers and Raum is there to drink in the very smoke of her.
 
When he looks back, his brother’s ghost is gone. Only the canyon stretches out before him, a lion beneath the sun.
 
But stood beside Bexley is something far worse. Yet the girl does not flinch. Does she not see him? Acton is there! He is flesh and bone, sparks and oceans deep. Acton is material enough to set the world ablaze. His mane is slick oil, rippling in a phantom breeze. Raum could embed his dagger within his brother again and pull it away bloody. Acton watches Raum with that whiskey gaze, idle as liquor slipping down the throat and ready as liquor poured out before an eager flame.
 
Raum has known magic. He knows the illusions of this world, he keeps his eyes open for them, his heart trained against surprise. Yet nothing can stop the twist of wicked shock. Nothing can extinguish the love of a brother, no matter the crime. There is a lance in Raum’s chest, a wildfire in his stomach. The lance is serrated, each barb laced with joy and anguish, horror and fear. Each serration cuts him into ragged flesh.
 
And then Acton dies.
 
A god’s hoof comes to shatter his skull and where is the echoing crunch? But then, blood fountains from a rictus cut that smiles red, red, red across Acton’s throat. Where is the splash of blood? Where is the gurgle? And when Acton has died a second time, he dies a third, a fourth, a fifth, Bexley’s magic knows no end and it plays for him every gruesome murder until Raum should be painted like a god of war in Acton’s blood and rent flesh.
 
How many of those deaths had Raum not used? He can too easily count the few. He knows the soundtrack to each and every one he has used. He knows how the earth sounds as it drinks blood deep – ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He knows the sounds of bones breaking, he knows how they feel beneath his jaws. He knows how Acton’s bones felt between his teeth, he knows the feel of Acton’s body twitching, reaching, begging for life as his brother pushes, pushes it out, away, gone. And then Acton disappears.
 
Oh there is nothingness in the wake of the departed, there is no blood but a ray of light that Bexley coils like a whip. It burns the sand at Raum’s feet. Glass gleams where it strikes. Each shard is hot and bright and lies glorious beneath the sun.
 
There is nothing where Acton stood, but there is everything within Raum. Oh something is shifting, something is flying through his veins. It burns his vessels like ozone before a comet. It is clawing to get out. It is something caged and rabid and it is not a lion’s rumbling roar, it is not the tearing screech of a dragon, it is something worse. It is worlds ripping apart, it is a soul rending – not in this world, not in the next. It is the shattering of existence, the white-hot glow of the sun swallowing its galaxy.
 
Bexley comes to meet it. She hunches forward, her head held low, the dark of her scar a rip in this world of theirs.
 
You will only be a ghost She says, and that thing inside Raum is clawing. Bexley is speaking and that thing is listening.
 
Rhoswen does not love you And she makes his skin shine as she moves like the sun descending, coming to swallow her world.
 
Sabine does not love you, And the sun evaporates the sea of her eyes. That thing within Raum is thrashing.
 
 Reichenbach left you, The air ignites and that thing inside Raum is wild. It screams like darkness, the black rising up to swallow the sun. For is that not how it always has been? The girl is wildfire and the air ripples with heat from her fury.
 
Acton is dead. Sparks land upon his flesh, it scolds him, it melts him, but darkness is rising and it brings with it something monstrous.
 
Raum’s lips part as a cry escapes like a roar. It rips through the air, it splits the sky like lightning and Raum’s skin is not enough to hold him. He shifts to black, to gold, to brown, to red. He stays red as blood, as if each inch of his flesh is sheared from his torso, as if the very air is acid. Raum is splitting and he shakes as Bexley falls still. Grey eyes watch her. They become savage, black as endless black. They are black holes, formed to swallow her sun.
 
Bexley’s magic is gone and the girl trembles with her effort. She is once again only gold, only a slip of a girl stood before a swallowing black monster adorned in crimson flesh.
 
Then: So I’m sorry… That you are really on your own now. You could have stopped it.
 
And slowly, slowly his gaze lifts to hers - it is the beast within him rising up. His eyes find her and he stares, still as stone, black eyes stealing the very air between them. He is the black of his monster rising from the deep, the shudder of water readying.
 
It comes, ascending…
 
It breaches, and Raum lunges for Bexley with claws and fangs, scales and crimson eyes.
 
This monster of his is grief and it is made to hurt, to ruin.

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@Bexley