Activity

Our eyes were locked dead on each other, staring through the chaos that ensued around us. It was an unblinking bridge of pure, numb hate.

Histories of bloodshed and violence could not sum up against the antipathy channelled in this single reciprocated glare.

The background noise lowered to a hum, drowned in the ocean of hatred that crashed between us, swallowed by the waves of anger that slowly began to turn our cognitive gears anew.

Osløn’s ice-blue eyes.

My sea-green eyes.

The stare of enemies.

The stare of brothers.

I suddenly found my feet carrying me towards him. Osløn did not blink; neither did I.

Then only two feet separated us, even though we were worlds apart.

“Brother,” Osløn wheezed, his once silky voice now rattling in his throat like a maraca. He had to tilt his chin up at a rather uncomfortable angle to look me in the face from his place on the ground

“Do not,” I quavered. “Do not … ever … use that term to address me.”

“Then shall I address you as your title demands?” he sneered. “As King Rúan MacAodhàn Pyrestone?”

His face met my boot, rather hard.

“Don’t mock me!” I roared, snapping my arm down to grasp his collar.

I yanked him up, and our noses touched. They were the same, our noses.

Because they were my mother’s nose.

“What are you going to do, Rúan?” Osløn hissed, his lip curling up and disfiguring the lovely pink print of my boot’s underside on his face. “You’re not going to kill me, are you? You wouldn’t kill the spawn of your mother Fernya, now would you?”

“Shut that chilly trap of yours, Hvítur.”

Would my mother grieve the loss of her firstborn?

The question nagged me like an attention-seeking child tugging at my clothes.

Oh for Sheol’s sake, we didn’t even have the same father. And Osløn’s nasty father had been of Glacia, the clan of ice with which we were currently at war.

It was my mother’s fault she chose surrogacy to help support her family …

Osløn seemed to have known what I was thinking — HE ALWAYS DID — because his sneering smile turned into a full-blown grin, and his shoulders were shaking with suppressed laughter. “Always running into the same dead ends, aren’t you, brother?”

“Silence,” I growled, sucking in breaths through my nose and making my nostrils flare dangerously.

But he ignored me. “Always the same mistakes, over and over—”

“Silence.”

“—just like your father. Because I know you. You’re just like him. That is why he fell in that assault on your castle, because he was trying to be noble in letting my mother and her second unborn son escape—”

“I said silence!” I howled as I threw him against the wall. The crash of his body against the stone was muted by the intense ringing in my ears. The way he crumpled to the floor in a pathetic heap was blinded by how red the world had gone.

_____
@denali-christianson — okay, bye! We’ll miss you! Have a happy, holy Lent. <3