Later that night, when the hours of the day before and the day to come merged into an epoch of timelessness beneath the darkened sky, Eoran took to the stoop outside of their building. The sound of the neighborhood quelled in the hangover of celebrations lauding Kaden's achievement and the distant roar of vocal confetti fell scattered between shadowed alleys and the dingy buildings that formed them. The day burned but now its absence ushered reprieve. A breeze made mischief with a plastic bag, sending its possessed form tumbling down the drowsy thoroughfare.

Eoran perched upon the first step of the landing. His squat assumed an anuran form, head low, legs akimbo like some pitiful gargoyle. He followed the bag until it led him to his brother; it passed, but his stare lingered.

"Hey Kaden," he said after a moment that wasn't so much thoughtful as it was intrinsically preparatory, "Remember when I was six and dad took me to see Nana Rettka so she could see what my utility was because the blood stuff wasn't really working, and she said I had the gift of taking? I was thinking..." The pause was ripe with a sedition that was enriched by the punctuation of an erratically flickering street lamp.

Immediately suspicious of his junior’s tone, Kaden Toriet, first generation of his family to attend a college at all nevermind the Augustine Institute, strolled up to the stoop. He stopped in front of the baby gargoyle he called a brother, both hands in his pockets. The teen’s ears were red from a bit of celebratory drink he’d not been able to refuse from Uncle Enji and the three Aunties he called wives from the far end of the block.

Kaden’s gift was his father’s gift and his grandfather’s gift. Utility, as they called it here. The call of the blood, their father would say when they were children. He would always tell them the old tales, the parables that decorated the walls of those now forgotten temples, left in ruin by scavengers and artillery. To call the blood is our family’s birthright, it is how we send our prayers to Varonian. To pull the sacrifice from the body of our enemies, to send the viper like a messenger to Orin so that our bodies do not falter—this is old Varaket.

Their mother, on the other hand, was always of the earth, tempering the fables their father spun with her constant reminders to work hard, to always question. There are no Gods waiting around for your sad snakes to hiss, Kirut, she would say in turn, always hard, ever frugal. It’s been a century since a sacrifice was made and we still die, husband. Your stories, they scare Eo—let them rest, ah.

Kaden couldn’t help but smirk at his brother’s nervous energy, his excitement crackling like the firecrackers still shooting off on the next street over. “What were you thinking, Eoran?”

“So I have pretty much no chance of getting into Augustine without help, right? I’m not talking about the kind of help you got either, where people just give you more homework and books to read.” Schemes were always couched in explanation—that was the crux of the sell. A small finger beckoned the older boy nearer, making the picture the child was presenting complete, a peddler of word-based wares, secrets among the shadows encroaching on their stoop-space that night.

“I need real help. If I can see the work before I have to do it, then maybe I will have a better chance of understanding it. Right? Well, I was thinking you could maybe… switch an eye with me.” It was the most Eoran had ever asked of his brother. He was already beginning to show signs of crumpling under the pressure instilled by the great expectation of their parents. “So that I can learn better.”

So that he could game the system better.

Kaden almost acted like he didn’t hear the request. His shock at such an idea left him without an expression in the lamplit dark, his long hair like branches of the black barked trees that peppered the Ossan landscape but had difficulty taking root in Amstead’s clayless soil. The teen came to sit next to his younger brother, squinting into the street.

“Have you thought about this? Really, thought about it? If anything ever happens to me, what happens to you?” Kaden shook his head. “We have to talk to Nana if you want to do this. You know I’ll help you in whatever way I’m able, but if mom and dad knew you were putting your gift at risk for a shot at Augustine, if they knew I was letting you, they’d skin me alive.”

“What good is the gift if I can’t use it to help me when I need it the most?” Eoran watched Kaden to see if his reasoning was taking hold. “Of course I’ve thought about it. I’ve been thinking about it this entire time. You think mom and dad value some natural ability over all the risks they take and energy they spend to even just give us this chance of success? I can’t let them down, Kaden. I know it’s cheating, but it’s the only shot I have.” The younger boy rose from his perch, impetuous; ready.

“Besides, if I ever do lose my utility then that’s probably for the best. Then people will think I’m just a foreign piece of trash instead of a bloodwright piece of trash.” The words were blasphemous to the Ossan culture that had raised him. To speak ill of one's gift, to think of it as something so easily disposable, a thing that one would be better without, was akin to spitting upon the graves of every single ancestor in a line. Eoran was being careless with the double-edged sword life had given him—in Amstead, and its main metropolis Port Haven, the difference between the two classifications ascribed to Ossans were enormous. Foreigners were annoying; bloodwrights were dangerous.

More than anything, Eoran’s safety was paramount. To secure Eoran’s future at Augustine was, to Kaden, something that would ensure future success, future happiness, future pride. Lips pressed together in thought, Kaden’s steepled fingers were a testament to his stance that rose and fell like a sine wave.

Kaden could’ve been their parents in this moment. Told Eoran to keep his eye, to focus up and work hard. He could have told him all the stories their parents told them both before—about hardship, about trouble, about failure, about pain. He could have been responsible, he could have made the choice that was, objectively, better.

But instead, Kaden chose to be the elder brother whose duty was always to protect his younger brother: no matter the cost.

The bloodwright prodigy, heir to the Toriet’s bloodwright burden and their archaic blood God of mercy, closed his eyes and sighed. “What do I need to do?”

"Keep track of the blood," Eoran replied bleakly, briefly looking back to his brother as he started down the road. "Just kidding, I already scoped out a place. Follow me."

The feasibility of scooping out one's eye with a grapefruit spoon was part of a much, much earlier stage of contemplation the boy had run himself through. Its cancellation came just past inception—Eoran, inept at his own anatomy, knew that there was stuff connecting his eye to his head but he wasn't sure how much there exactly was, or if he had the wherewithal to endure its severing without waking up the entire neighborhood. So, while the parties celebrating his brother had been raging during the dying breaths of day, Eoran had been out hunting; searching for just the right back-alley surgeon cum body-modder who'd be willing to see things from the youngest Toriet's precise (and precarious) perspective.

The path he took was convoluted, but calculated to be the shortest. Eoran possessed an uncanny grasp on the geography of the urban Ossan landscape in which they lived. He knew exactly which avenues to prioritize over others, depending on the amount of sketch contained therein at any given point of the day, and the shortcuts employed to connect them. Their destination was not terribly far away from the family’s tenement. Eoran skittered through the darkness as though he was allergic. He didn’t want to lose his brother, but any abatement of pace would have been a chance for him to catch cold feet.

Rounding the last bend, they were spat onto a street whose window-lined walls were violently splashed neon, chromatic cascade emanating from a single source: a parlor, in the dead middle of that dense assemblage of buildings, whose services fit for public consumption were touted by the frenetic collage of glowing-gas signs. Eoran ducked inside.

“Shit, kid, you do not give up,” the pretty brunette behind the oblong counter commented without looking up from her magazine. Following a barely perceptible tilt of her head, she shouted into a space obfuscated by a black velvet curtain, “…ORIKA! HE’S BACK.”

The owner of that place was lumbering and loud. She emerged from behind the curtain and sat meaty knuckles atop her wide hips. The bend of her arms highlighted muscles that seemed too large for a simple tattoo and piercing artist. A wifebeater, combined with a long, scrolling epithet in Ossan script wrapped around a bulging bicep suggested that maybe she enjoyed some sort of wrestling or martial arts on the side.

“Damn. I didn’t expect you to actually bring your guardian,” Orika said, eyes lifting to meet Kaden. “You okay with this? He’s not holding you hostage, is he?”

Kaden looked at his younger brother in alarm, stunned that he’d managed to accomplish so much in the brief time between the letter opening with their parents and the celebrations of his Augustine admissions. If Eoran applied the same capability to his schoolwork, maybe he wouldn’t need Kaden’s eye to begin with. “No, I’m not a hostage.” Not having much background or necessity for flesh crafting, he’d only ever been to these sorts of places when there had been accidents—then his father usually came and, after a time, it was Kaden himself who came to call the blood back. The teen stepped forward, standing tall. “Orika, right? I called blood for you a few years ago, didn’t I? A fight broke out at the Llamella and you were fixing someone’s face.”

Kaden warmed a little to the shop, having a bit more bearing now that he remembered where his family stood in this room.

Orika's expression softened from that of a butcher appraising the cuts of meat before her, to one of friendly recognition. As she stepped around the counter, she smiled, lips parting to show big lines of ivory teeth interspersed with reconstituted and slightly malformed shards of metal.

"OH YEA! Yea, yea. I remember you now!" Her giant hand slapped Kaden's back fondly, oblivious to her power. "Ay, Lep, check out this guy right here. Remember me talking about him? Skinny guy with the long hair? The pretty one?"

Stolid eyes, radiantly lavender and thickly rimmed with kohl, briefly peered over the top of the magazine she was reading before retreating. "…Uh-huh."

"Phew, I can still see it clear as day. That kebab skewer jammed into that one guy's neck, that other guy’s face all out of order. You were a lifesaver—not to me. Them, haha!" It wasn't that good of a joke, but Orika seemed to enjoy it. Her arm looped around Kaden's shoulders to drag him toward the back room. Eoran followed.

“So your boy tells me that you guys are looking to switch an eyeball,” Orika continued, leading them past rooms marked private, down a cinder block-lined stairwell illuminated by a red bulb suspended from a crimped, half-exposed wire. “I can do that for you, no problem. You know, it’s funny, at first I thought he was trying to hustle me, but I guess he was being honest. Said that you were being shipped away and he couldn’t stand the thought of losing touch. I get that, being alone’s tough—”

“Hey, come on!” Eoran protested, like there was some vulgarity in revealing his methods despite the underlying truth at the heart of his persuasion. Orika just laughed again.