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A puppet clatters to the ground, strings cut.
Lloyd swears, scrambling in the dust to break his fall.
He holds Kai's face, bruised and slack, as unnatural light fades from amber eyes and they roll shut.
No, no, no—no!
His eyes burn as he feels bruised neck and bare wrist and anywhere he can reach with bloody fingers, unable to find a pulse through the buzz of his own gashed skin.
His lungs rattle as he gasps for air, like he's become little more than an accursed dusklight himself, and he begs the First, desperately pressing his ear to a blood slick chest to find a heartbeat where his numb fingers have failed.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Lloyd sobs.
The sun still burns: he feels it in the threads of his heart as it grasps at fuel, desperate to consume and desperate to destroy.
They failed.
They all failed, and his brother still lives.
His heart sings as hard as he cries, muffled by the clouds of ashen dust hanging heavily around them.
The wasteland is silent around them as salty tears drip down his cheeks sting his scratches and tenderly he cradles a limp body in a place it once held him safe.
It's dark and cold despite the molten rock that still pools slowly nearby, as Lloyd loosely grasps the blade that would end this for good. It's rough, unfinished somehow that he can't describe exactly.
It's barely a knife.
Pale ash sits like snow over the blackened earth.
He swallows it down, tasting the sickly bitter in his dry throat as the light glints across a fault line in the knife running jagged from end to wrapped end.
It was made to kill a monster.
If it doesn't break first.
If it even works.
Clearly, it hadn't in that time immemorial, the evidence all around them now. Or were they like Lloyd? Grief too strong and love too fresh to take the blade against unresisting throat and spill that love on the ground?
It's cruel. It's selfish. Lloyd knows that Kai is suffering, is in pain. That the world is in pain.
Kai would tell him to do it.
He pets filthy brown hair, feeling knots under his fingers.
Kai would hate his hair being left like this.
A bird cries over the distance, loud and harsh.
They're out of time, their hands red with blood.
First, he doesn't want this blood on him, too.
Kai's breath chokes as he struggles to open his eyes again.
Lloyd already knows it won't be Kai who sees him.
Maybe he's already gone, maybe this will be useless.
He has to try.
Please let him live.
He slips the knife through a holster not meant for it, holding Kai close in his arms as he staggers to his feet—he's too light, like bones picked clean—stumbling almost blindly through the ash until—here. His foot kicks against a rock, and he realizes in the silence that he stands before a cave.
It feels quiet.
It feels like an answer.
The rough cave walls grimly watch Lloyd's descent, gradually becoming more like the walls of a mausoleum.
The Temple of Fire, or what's left of it.
Where they start.
Where they end.
People had lived here, once. Monks or something, right? Holy people? Good people?
Lloyd hopes they don't mind someone new. He hopes they'll watch over him.
He sheds his jacket to blanket Kai, laying him to sleep in the dust of what might have been an altar.
He tries not to think of symbology, only half-conscious of the shapes he draws with the blood still dripping from his arm. If there's something he should be saying he doesn't know it, only begging for whatever gods can hear to have mercy just once, just this once.
He doesn't recognize the shape on Kai's forehead. He leaves it be anyway, smoothing bangs with a shaky hand, the way scarred hands had often soothed him.
He leaves the knife in his loose grip, like a child's favorite toy.
He should've been just sleeping. There's blood and ash clinging to him like a second skin and Lloyd can't even wash it away.
The monster simmers insistently.
So he holds his brother for the last time, crying like the child he can't ever be again. Condemning the future with a kiss to his forehead.
Here.
The night will end.
The sun will rise.
I hope you can see the sun through the dark.