The plane from Kanalion to West Ereachia only took an hour - one hour of a smooth trip, no bumps along the way. The train to Urashina derailed and crashed the moment it reached the border to the city.
The first sign was that the lights in the cabin went out, engulfing us in a blackness that the faraway Light could not penetrate. The academy, unlike Kanalion, was closer to the edge of the city, near training yards and emptiness meant for the quiet a student would need to focus.
This only meant that when the seruses came, death came easier.
The serus that slammed into the train was massive, something between a bear and a bison, built like a goddamned tank and with four hollow, white eyes. I had seen seruses. I had fought them. But this one was different, angry, and it toppled us with ease.
Some on the train died, the back of their heads slamming into broken glass and a rushing earth and finding no mercy. I was ironically fortunate to be on the side that the serus hit, for I was able to brace myself before falling. I landed in blood and on the body of a man that looked far too much like Jasper - long, brown hair and dark tan skin, now paler without blood in him. My hands felt dirty - they were dirty. Nonetheless I grabbed my staff.
I blasted a hole through the top of the train, crawling out and wishing that I could do something besides die. My prayers were answered with the distinct sound of gunfire, the scent of sulfur and gunsmoke filling the air, mingling with hot blood and diesel. It was nauseating, making my head swim, but I forced myself to stay upright and stay away from the military, whom was descending on not one, but the many seruses moving for the academy, circling in on us at all angles.
The younger students were screaming, running back for the halls and following the orders of their mentors, but the older ones - ones like me - stayed. Bullets were less effective against seruses, for they did not destroy them like magic or a blade. At best, they slowed them down, but it would have taken perhaps a hundred shots to truly kill one.
Which is why so many soldiers died, ripped apart or eaten or just left behind, wasted as if the seruses had a greater purpose. These attacks never happened near a Light, making me wonder if it had flickered or even gone out. The promise of a new moon against a dark pink sunset did not help, for everyone knew that the beasts would get stronger without the sun.
I managed to kill one or two seruses alone, though it was hard adjusting without a team. I stopped when I saw one of the seruses - the not-bear - slow, vines covering its legs as white mushrooms bloomed from within it. It died and became a part of the earth almost instantly, eaten alive by decomposers until the mushrooms on the earth were black. It was a magic I had never seen. It was a magic that had the soldiers cursing in surprise, backing away from something that must have been evil, forbidden.
And then I saw him.
It was so unexpected, so typical of him to show up with such an entrance, but it wasn’t him all at once. The Lumenaire I knew was a only mildly interested in the Old nature magic, but he had long since accepted that it was dead magic and turned to herbalism instead. This Lumenaire stood still against the carnage around him, his skin almost as pale as his hair, sickly, wrong. Whatever he was doing took something from him, something he either couldn’t get back or didn’t want.
Just like the old Lumenaire, he had taken something and took it to its limit, and then went too far.
I couldn’t help but to call out to him. He flinched when he heard his name, his brows furrowed. I ran to him, touching his arm just faintly.
He whipped around, green eyes almost glaringly bright as he looked at me. There was almost recognition in his face until he looked me over. “Who are you to be so bold?”
His voice was the same, only a little deeper.
“I’m-”
A soldier nearby shrieked as claws dug into his abdomen, and then Lumenaire was rushing for it, those same vines coming to envelop the creature once more. This time Lumenaire staggered a bit, breathless, until a serus knocked into him, pinning him to the ground with a hard thud.
I rushed to stop it, though the soft rumble of something stopped me. It was a sound I had heard before, distant as it was. It frightened me just the same.
Long, white claws tore into the serus, the black skin sizzling and burning as if the claws themselves had been poisoned. It was just like the child, I realized, so long ago. Luminaire toppled the serus with ease despite it being so heavy, and then I finally got a good look at the thing with my brother’s face.
Sharp teeth so large I could see them at a distance.
Bright eyes like a tapetum lucidum.
Not right not right not-
He saw the seruses and the soldiers as one - the Lumenaire I knew was lost to some sort of hunting game, for he ripped into the jugular of a soldier before I realized what he was doing. Not many noticed, too focused on the actual seruses.
I had to turn away to fight a serus that was approaching a younger student - barely sixteen and barely wielding a wand, though she was shaking in place, terror-stricken.
I turned back not ten minutes later to the sound of a scream I knew.
A monster leaned over a boy, his teeth bloody as the fledgling soldier clutched what was left of his leg. A serus could have ripped someone’s leg off with ease but this monster was smaller.
Instead, he bit straight down to the bone.
The moment I realized it was Jasper crying and it was Jasper begging to just be killed instead of left alive. He fought anyways, desperately pushing Lumenaire away from him, the bloody saliva dripping on him burning his skin.
“What the fuck-” Jasper muttered, his voice cracking as his shaking hands uselessly tried to stop the blood. “What kind of-”
What kind of serus. What kind of monster. What kind of idiotic boy who willingly lost himself to old magic he could never control.
I used my magic to topple Lumenaire, and then I used it to slow Jasper’s bleeding, though I had no talent for healing. Jasper almost instantly fainted. Lumenaire snarled at me, rushing for me as I tried to both hit him and keep from hurting him. I wanted him to be saved - from whatever the hell he had done.
He was far stronger than he should have been, grabbing the staff I wielded and nearly ripping it from my hands, though my magic burned him at the touch. White magic glowing just like Lumenaire’s, long before this happened. Just like our creation, our magic had been almost identical, but now-
Now it reminded me of the Shadowmaker, how he had gone too far with his creation and lost himself. This was Lumenaire, now. This too would be permanent. But this was not shadow magic.
I knew what he now was - what the closest word was for whatever he had become. Fengári, our ancestors would whisper over the campfire, scared of their own tales. Aldreda’s Children of the Moon who weren’t children at all - except this one. An effort to stop the Shadowmaker ends up corrupting the hero herself, making something far, far worse than any serus. Maybe she wasn’t so good after all. Maybe we erased her magic to protect the Guardians. To protect us from the truth.
Whatever we are, brother, you and I are the same. Cut from the same cloth, cut from the same sin.
Were I to decide to go too far, to forsake everything I learned and try pushing my own magic, would I become like him?
He crashed into me and managed to bring me down. I only just barely had time to wedge my staff against his chest, keeping his teeth from me. When I pushed out, he couldn’t reach me with his claws, but this was no solution. If he had ruined Jasper’s leg, he could do far worse to me now that he was angry.
“Lumenaire,” I managed to say over the overwhelming noise of everything around us. He didn’t react to his own name. He didn’t even look at me, only through me, wordlessly wanting nothing more than to spill my blood.
If this had not happened, if he had never left, would he still not recognize me as the sibling he grew up with? I looked at the eyes that did not see me and was more terrified than anything else around me, because it told me that there was no saving him.
He broke through my grasp and in a wild desire to live I twisted the staff as best I could, closing my eyes as I-
The snarling broke off into silence, a stopping of breath that sounded overwhelmingly human. Something was dripping onto me and I dared to open my eyes to see the curve of the staff, sharp wood like a sickle, stabbed through him.
He fell to the side before I could even think of healing him. And then his magic was fading into dull teeth and human nails - all the while I could feel his magic untethering from the earth, dying. Cyclictic.
Permanent. An ending. There were no mushrooms around him but the grass was stained black.
My ears were ringing but it was not from the gun firing from right above us. It was from the last glimpse of Lumenaire’s eyes, looking up at me with realization just before he died. The first part of my name died on his lips with him.
The fengári, the only one I wanted to save, was gone.
I wanted to imagine that he was saying he was sorry - or that he forgave me.
–
The doctor said I was unconscious on the field, likely from stress because I had very few minor injuries. I woke up beside someone lying so still that for a moment, I thought I was beside a corpse in the morgue - until the doctor moved to address him.
“We couldn’t save it,” he said frankly to the patient. “The serus attack went straight to the bone and then some. You would have died if you kept it.”
“Then I’m not fixed.” I had never heard Jasper’s voice so flat, so angry, but I knew it was him. I turned to see him staring at the ceiling, not looking at where the blankets flattened where there should have been a leg.
When the doctor left, I dared to speak. “I’m sorry,” I said. A thousand apologies could not have fixed their fight, his leg, Lumenaire’s death.
“Don’t be,” he said unconvincingly. “I - what kind of serus was it? I only remember it being kind of small for a serus. Fucking pathetic that a supposed soldier lost.”
He did not remember, then, the green eyes staring at him. “I don’t think anyone could have won against it. It was - it wasn’t a normal serus,” I finally said. It was strange - the instinct I had to hide it, as if it had been a betrayal when Lumenaire had tried to kill him. “You won by surviving.”
“I was told you were the one that saved me. That killed it.”
I was saved from answering by a rough knock on the door, and then two men in the same uniform were approaching us. By the look on their faces and the way Jasper swallowed, I knew these men were from the military.
“This doesn’t happen often,” the tallest one said, looking down at me with an unwavering gaze. For a moment I thought I was in trouble - perhaps I wanted to be. “We saw the thing you were against, and we saw you topple it and survive. Hell, you even saved Ariza. What’s your name?”
“Lavinia.”
“Lavinia, I’d like to offer you a position with us. It would be an honor for someone like you to be in the ranks - we can put you above the normal cadets or even higher. It’s better money than being a Guardian.” He almost looked sly, as if he thought he had won me over.
If Guardians had been there, Jasper would have still had his leg.
“Go fuck yourself,” was my answer.
The room was quiet as they blinked, and then the smaller man was approaching Jasper like he was a bomb, slowly, nervously. He placed a letter on his nightstand when Jasper wouldn’t take it, nodding to him once. “I’m sorry, Ariza.”
Jasper only hummed in response, bitter like he knew what the letter would say. The other one gave me his card in case I changed my mind. I threw it away instantly.
“What does it say?” I asked after a moment of Jasper reading. His hands weren’t as pale as during the fight, and they thankfully didn’t have the bloodstains. I looked at him and thought of how close death had been to him.
“‘Military Discharge’,” he said. “Not honorable because I didn’t actually fight. All I did was nearly die.”
“Is losing a limb for them not good enough?” I asked, suddenly furious and fighting the urge to not run down the two men that left. “Fuck them."
Jasper finally laughed, quieter than usual but still real. “Fuck them,” he agreed.
–
I stayed with Jasper until he had healed - nearly two months after I had first left Kanalion. He had told me time and time again that I could - and should - leave, but I couldn’t leave him. I didn’t want him to be alone as he adjusted to the rest of his life, knowing that he was too dumb to admit that he was terrified.
I called Astra a week after the attack and told her what had happened with Jasper. She was quiet the entire time. Finally, she said, “I’m so glad he’s okay. I’m glad you’re okay! What if it had gotten you when you saved him? What if you-”
“What matters is that we’re both fine. I would do anything for him - for you, too.” I turned, making sure Jasper was still out of the room. “How much do you think a prosthetic is?”
“Shit. It’s a lot. Like, more than our tuition. Probably more than double that. But-” Astra stopped. I knew she was thinking when I heard her nails click on the table. She muttered something to either Cithrel or Viscryn. “There’s the smithing professor. They’re an engineer too, I think.”
“Would they do that for him?” I asked. “For free?”
“I think anyone would.”
–
When I returned to the Academy with a now-quiet Jasper, Astra finally dared to ask the question that had been on her mind for at least a month. She waited until we were alone, to which she slowly said, “When you were gone, did you find him?”
Bloodied teeth. The bladed staff that I had now filed down to be dull, unable to stop thinking of the killing blow.
“I-”
My eyes blurred and suddenly she was pulling me in, saying something about serus attacks, but I wasn’t entirely listening. I wanted to tell her the truth, that Lumenaire had left Kanalion to become someone else, and instead became something else. Instead, I just let her believe that he had been killed.
I just didn’t say what killed him.
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