Chapter 61 - Ending

Iris

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“It’s the end of the world.”
Caerwyn glanced to his side, sharply. His large tipped ears caught at the low, smooth voice, which had spoken as if laughing, then lost it again. The boy’s hand tightened into a fist around the staff he gripped, the dark-edged fingers thin and bony.
A rustle to his side, a flash of movement. He whirled around, but saw nothing. The looming shape of a pillar faded in and out of shadow, the crumbling ruins of the ancient citadel he guarded blending back into forest.
He heard laughter, a low, sweet chuckling. Caerwyn whirled around again, spear point arcing through the air. The stone blade’s tip pointed itself at a hunched-over figure dim in the fading light, dark tanned skin blending into the rich, deep shadows of earth.
Corryn grinned, baring his teeth.
“Well?” he asked.
Caerwyn bit his lip. With a quick, fluid motion, the boy leapt from where he had stood, four thin legs instantly taking him to where the other had sat.
But Corryn was gone, darting to the side, stirring up dried brush and snapping twigs. He shook his head once, sharply.
“Give it up, fool. You know it’s too late.”
Caerwyn gritted his teeth, fingers tightening their grip on his staff. He lowered his head, shaking his antlers out of instinct, prancing in place. Corryn ignored him, leaning back on the balls of his feet.
“What are you, dumb?”
He looked annoyed, glancing back over at the boy. Caerwyn took a half-step back, then stood still. A pause, and in an instant, he had vanished into the undergrowth, still as stone, invisible.
“Don’t bother.”
His fingers clenched around the gnarled wood. Corryn’s back was still turned to him, the scars on his skin glowing faintly, pale and twisted, over his back.
“You know the truth.”
Caerwyn’s fingers loosened, then tightened again. He saw the vulnerable, exposed neck; the curved line of the spine. Just one flick of the wrist, and…
And yet, he did not move. He remained still, hidden, silent.
Corryn paid him no heed, gazing out into the rugged landscape of the ruins and encroaching forest.
“They’re here. And they’re coming. You can’t stop them all. You can’t stop what’s been started.”
The other remained silent.
“It was started by him. Iris.” Corryn leaned back slightly, relaxing. “You know,” he continued, speaking to the silent woods, “This might not be happening, if you’d killed the boy.”
Corryn paused, then absent-mindedly scratched behind his ear. In the fading light, he couldn’t see much. But beneath his bare feet, felt through his smudged, rough hands, was… nothing. No tremors, no distant vibrations. Simply silence.
This was a place of rest; a silent, wordless, motionless plane. Different than the moving, shifting, up-heaving world that the cities, the labs, and even the wasteland was a part of. Out here, it was simply… quiet. Peaceful.
“…This is hallowed ground.”
Caerwyn had materialized out of the brush to Corryn’s side, less than a spear’s length away. But the boy’s eyes were distant, looking over the browning forest swathed in gray shadow.
Corryn snorted.
“Was,” he corrected. “Don’t fool yourself,” he muttered. “This place is good for nothing now but ending.”
Caerwyn remained silent. Corryn, after a pause, glanced over, and grinned.
“You know it.” He nodded sharply in the other’s direction.
“Those two… are here to end it all.”
A heavy pause, Corryn’s pale eyes flickering to Caerwyn’s face. “Will you allow that to happen?”
The boy’s lips drew tight. His fingers twisted the staff in his hand, over and over. In the silence, Caerwyn found himself the only source of sound, fingers like rasping branches. He stilled his hand.
Slowly, he boy nodded.
“Yes.” He spoke quietly, almost inaudibly, as if afraid of his words taking to form, solidifying into something he couldn’t take back. “I… I knew it would happen. Eventually.”
Caerwyn glanced to the other, a nameless boy with a scarred back and dirty fingernails. In the end, he was not so different.
Caerwyn tilted his head, gazing to where a few stars were beginning to show as the sun sank away. Here, clouds scudded past, wiping out small clean spaces of sky.
He was not so different. Caerwyn had entered this world alone, a foreign child without a mother, a fawn dappled by gray shadows in a secluded grove. He knew little about himself, knew less of what it was like, out beyond the crags of the mountains fringing this forest. He had lived here alone, a solitary, silent guardian, watching as the forest wilted and shrank.
Caerwyn had experienced very little. His life had been flat and bland, and somehow, he knew it.
And above all, he was tired. He was tired of his existence, of the gray world around him which he knew, perhaps from the very start, that he could never truly protect.
“Yes,” he murmured, half to himself. Caerwyn caught the other’s golden, black-flecked eye. He smiled, though he could smell the dried blood on Corryn’s fingertips.
“Yes, it is time to end it all. Because then… only when we are done… can we begin again.”

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AN: I'm so sorry. ;A; I have been doing so little for so long... Really, just lazing about... I'm such of a terrible person. I'm sorry. :bows repeatedly:
Anyway, yeah. Um, sorry. Caerwyn (the deer-kid) seems like a bit of a last-minute thought shoved in. Initially, he was supposed to play a bigger role, but... ...I forgot what. >>; And I had no time to put him in. (I've got too many characters, come to think of it... Augh, what a bother. X< )
Anyway. So, sorry if Caer-baby seems a bit flat. I hope he's still cute. :3 (

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