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Mydei is everything he is not. The sunlight frames him, skids off his jewels. His eyes are closed, head leaning against a pillar. Phainon nurses his heart and watches, gaze somehow stuck on him. It’s not a particularly grand sight—he’s been privy to it many times before. When Mydei is awake, his eyes are sharp, intense. His face hard, tense, body rigid like stone. He’s almost always braced; Phainon has tried many times to try and understand why.
When he sleeps, this all melts away into something so different that Phainon can’t help but stare every time. His face is smoothed out, soft and golden. Somewhere buried in his memory is this same scenery—so intimately familiar that he wonders why it is this memory that always stands out to him the most. Deja vu strikes him at this point in time, every time.
His hands twitch. He’s sitting in front of Mydei, barely two paces away. Even someone as strong, as hot-headed as Mydei basks in the peace of the grove, even surreptitiously falls asleep in front of him, who he makes sure to claim he cannot stand everyday. He half-smiles.
He shifts forward, closes the distance to one pace. “Mydei.”
Watches him mumble something incoherent. The sun is in his eyes, and he can hardly blink. Time runs anywhere but here. If he blinks, he might start the clock again. He tries again, “Mydeimos. Wake up.” He’s slowly returning to him, from a dream about Castrum Kremnos. Maybe. “I need to tell you something.”
Mydei’s eyes flicker open. His voice is rough, face scrunching up into annoyance almost immediately. He watches him squint in the sunlight. He’s more awake than he’d have expected. “What?”
Phainon falters. “We should get back.” Mydei is looking at him, then around them. He has known him too long to not see through him, and it sends Phainon off balance in a way he has never known how to cruise. Mydei sends Phainon off balance in a way he will never know how to compartmentalize, even if he had all the knowledge of their world.
“What were you going to say?” He presses. “Before.”
“Oh,” Phainon scratches the back of his neck. “Nothing important.” It’s one thing to see him softened by sleep. It’s another thing to see him have it linger even awake, while talking to him, sitting so close to him. Countless more memories flash by him. He’s the brightest in each of them. There is so much Phainon wants to say. Needs to.
He doesn’t expect Mydei to laugh. “Did you hit your head? You’re being stranger than usual.”
He leaves it at expectant silence. Phainon knows it makes him look weirder, with the lack of retaliation. Mydei is looking at him, eyes stripped off their intensity and warmer. Way warmer, softer. Phainon’s hands are shaking. He wants to tell him. Wants to. He’s holding his eyes like he knows, and then suddenly he’s terrified that he does.
The distance between them reverts to two paces. In front of his eyes flashes Nikador’s trial. Mydei is everything he is not. Mydei strides through life like he’s made of flames, his immortality this shining dagger he has learnt to wield. Even now, looking into his eyes, the fire burns so bright he’s already singed himself.
He can tell him another time. The Flamechase journey is long and unyielding; if Mydei was the one to trust him with his weakness, then Phainon trusts him with staying by his side forever. In that trust itself he expresses his desperate wish to have him all to himself, and he knows nothing can take him away. Mydei will return to him over and over and over, even with his last dying breath, he knows. They have too many unfulfilled promises.
Okhema is the land of dreams, the land of forever. And as he looks away, laughs abashedly, and tells Mydei he’ll tell him another time, he knows he has an eternity ahead of him.
Drenched in golden blood, Phainon dreams. Honey cider runs rivulets through every crevice of him. One more, he tells himself. The ground beneath his feet is soft, so soft he sinks. He rips apart head, limb, bone. Flesh, guts, blood. Red blood, brown blood. Wreckage of his own doing; he's not entirely sure that it's even blood he's drenched in, apart from his own. Skin almost burnt to ash, gold everywhere.
The heart is a muscle, he read. At that moment, he realizes the full meaning. His heart beats like it's going to rip itself out of its chest. His heart beats like it’s going to erupt in golden blood, drench this land and cleanse it so that Phainon could stop running till his limbs rip and finally rest in strong arms like his every regret makes him dream of.
One more. One more time. One more head. One more limb. One more time. One more time, he wishes there was one more time. He wishes there was one more time he could do everything over again. One more time he could feel the bare threads of his humanity. One more time he could taste and drink and feel. Love in the same way his heart pounds at that moment, like he could bleed. Be loved back in return without the twisted words and layered affection. One more time that he can be.
Chrysos heirs are puppets till the day they are born to the day they are inevitably swallowed by the Era Nova. Millions of times, billions of memories, and Phainon still wishes—selfishly—that there was more. That he could savour every moment without knowing none of it exists in reality.
The memories are fleeting. They are a tumour in his head, millions of cycles blending into each other till he mistakes vitriol for love. Till he forgets if anything ever was, till his wishes tear through memories. None of it ever real, he now knows. If he could tear out his own heart from his chest, he would. To curb the ache. To not feel; to gracefully receive the knowledge passed down to him. To be a machine, passive, programmed for behaviour. To never love.
To never have been human.
When Phainon falls, his flesh is burning, cinders and ash flying out from him. Trying to pull him up. Searing heat surrounds him, his heart beating like a mad beast, like it’s trying to pound out of his chest and fight Nanook himself. And throughout all this, Phainon falls, and as he falls, he asks: why?
Amphoreus worships the titans. Mighty beings with unfathomable power, cosmic scale, countless wars and sacrifices in keeping their world safe. When the previous Phainon passed his memories down, reality had broken down; what never even was. He is blind now. Nothing but heat engulfing all his senses. And he thinks about Agalaea, and her fraying mortality. She dies like she was always prophesized to, and Phainon lets himself fall.
If this heat is what he perishes in, then let it remind him of the warmth of humanity. Of shared drinks over a successful coreflame retrieval, of the time spent in the grove, of his homeland. Of Mydeimos, with his sharp tongue and harsh affections. Strange, this heat is starkly similar to what the battleground would get transformed into after sparring with Mydeimos. He would ascend to become the Strife titan. How fitting, he thinks. Mydeimos, he thinks, I want to go home to you. One last time. Once more.
The world has erupted. What he called Amphoreus no longer exists. Nanook has cast his gaze, and with all of the human left in him he scratched the Aeon of Destruction. All is done. What was called Phainon will vanish like it never existed. Millions of coreflames have burned his flesh from inside out; every single cycle has made a shell of him. A long, broken sound erupts from him. He falls, this wounded howl echoing around him. It wasn’t enough. It would never have been enough. Phainon could have split himself into thousands of pieces and gone through the cycles a million times more, but it would never have been enough.
How foolish they were to believe their golden blood meant anything. The millenias Amphoreous suffered by virtue of this so-called blood; it never meant anything. What has been written to occur, would have occurred. When the sky shattered and they learnt of the titans’ true nature, when he sought revenge blindly enough to challenge Irontomb, he forgot he was never meant to be king. There are no kings in this grand game of chess that the universe has played with them. They were never meant to deviate from the predetermined path the simulation had set them on, never meant to evolve enough to love.
After all, that’s the root of everything, isn’t it? They weren’t meant to be human. How ironic; he who was designed to swallow Kephale’s coreflame, whose characteristic trait was love. So much hatred in his veins stemming from that love, resentment big enough to scratch Nanook. If it meant he could go back, and do everything over again; trap them in a loop of just one afternoon where the sunlight looked like a halo on Mydei—Phainon would destroy the cosmos, if he could.