CHP36

Briel and Zaien bent low over a table in the dark-haired boy’s apartment. Zaien had developed, as he grew older, his grandfather’s taste for drink and snuck out with a few fine bottles of whiskey to share. Zaien poured their first round and cheered up to the halfhearted boy and drank. Briel distractedly lifted his glass and set it back down without sipping, eyes focused elsewhere.

“Come, you love liquor!” Zaien pleaded.

“I love her more, Zaien. It is not a matter of loving liquor and life. I love being drunk because it takes my mind away from the monotony of life and imbues me with the life I live now.” Briel’s head turned as something strange registered with his senses, a mana that he recognized. He’d sensed it many times before, the Acerraien king, Sael.

In years previous, he’d caught glimpses of the king in passing attending events for the crown and felt the familiar tug of his black fire and spirit. Briel’s fires were not new, per se, but he hadn’t yet had them a year, and he learned quickly how to smell the different fires on the wind. This, he thought, was a black fire if he ever smelled one, a fire of the seraph’s line.

His eyes traveled to his open window, and he stood. “Zaien, we have company that we might not be ready for.”

A black moth flickered through his window and flowed up to him with an erratic gesture. Briel caught it in his fist, then held it to his ear and turned to Zaien. “The Afryth is here.”

“Chakt.” Zaien stared down at the table before them.

“I’ll take Coarselight to the palace. Now that it’s unlocked for me once again, it should be easy to just sneak him in the back.” Briel said. Acryan hadn’t dominated him today, but it wasn’t as easy as that anymore.

Briel moved to the window to watch and listen, to make sure that Sael stayed safe.

Zaien rushed outside with all the hurry in his step he could muster. He had barely a sip of liquor on his breath, but he approached the king with the scent lingering on him still. Being relatively the same age and close to the courts, they knew one another in passing.

“You know why I’m here,” Sael said, and he surprised himself at how cool and collected he spoke. Unfortunately, though, anyone with an ounce of mana could feel his rage and anger, his longing aura.

“I do.” Zaien shifted nervously. “He… He wants to talk in the palace.” Zaien gestured across the courts to the lovers’ palace, and Sael stared at it impassively as he thought.

“I am not the one who did this or decided. Be it best you speak to him first before taking out your rage, Afryth,” Zaien pleaded.

“Whose decision was that?”

“King Taluk at first, then Whitewind… Please, come before you’re seen.” Zaien gestured for the King to follow, and Sael stepped in tow, the two circling the palace.

Briel took coarselight into the palace, unlocking the doors to his studio while lighting the mana lamps.

They slipped up to the great glass doors of the patios that faced the outskirts of town and gazed out on isolated plains and empty moonlit skies. The palace, while surrounded on three sides by opulence, pomp, and buildings, that beautiful view would never be taken from them.

Sael’s form moved towards the lamplight across the back patio. Then, he stepped across the white marble and led himself easily up to folding white doors with inlaid glass fractal and splintering out from ornate patterns. They offered privacy while letting in all the light. The lovers were not chaste or discrete things by nature; thus, all who designed their opulence and life offered that modesty for them. Zaien pushed the doors open and stared into what had once been Acryan’s studio.

“I knew you once as Tuval, did I not?” Sael asked. “And what would I call you, now?”

“Brother,” Briel said quietly, and every bit of anger that Sael had, every pitch of his aura, silenced in the presence of the familiar boy.

He’d seen the halfbreed child skirting the edges of the palace on occasion when he’d been in meetings. He seemed hollow and distant, filled with the dejection of his peoples, but never once would Sael have assumed that Kael had sired him.

Yes, he had glimmering blue eyes, bright, soft things, like Kael’s pallor. His eyes fit his face, half-caste, and disappointingly, he bore no similarity to their mother, Niala.

Then he saw it, something in the posture. Briel held a book in his hand and carefully peeked beneath its cover, trying to distract himself enough to calm his aura of unbridled and encompassing joy. His fingers, for being such thick and strong things, delicately picked at the edge of a page to turn its slice over with such slow delicacy, and it brought him back to his first memory of Niala, of her reading the tragic love story. He didn’t see it before, but now it was obvious, and his heart shuddered in his chest. “What name did they give you?”

“You gave him his name, Sael.” Zaien reminded him. Sael’s tanned skin went ghostly and pale as his stomach bottomed out.

“You… You are Briel,” Sael whispered. The boy glanced at Sael with a nervous posture and nodded.

Sael had so many thoughts of this moment on his way over, from the shouted words and death he wanted to the demands he held in retribution, but not once had he thought of his brother and what he wanted to do. Sael didn’t show much affection by nature, but he couldn’t help himself as he took one step, then another, and rushed up to Briel so fast that the boy flinched. Sael’s arms embraced him and squeezed tight. Seventeen years of anger melted away in this boy’s aura of joy and the relief of finding something left behind.

Briel stood stiff and patted gently over Sael’s back. He towered a fair few inches taller than Sael, and Briel found it a mix between awkward and oddly reassuring. Sael took a deep breath to say something, opened his eyes, and before he could draw his eyes to Briel’s face to speak, a familiar face stared back up at him from a countertop… a drawing… a drawing of Seneya, sketched in perfect pose and angle.

“Sorry, I assume you know that I’m… I—I inherited the soul of, A—the warlord,” Briel spoke in quiet tones. He placed his hand on the edge of the drawing. “I haven’t found her yet.”

“Her?” Sael couldn’t stop staring at the image.

“Sai.”