It was hours after I killed the boy that my skin ceased to boil. I woke with a whimper, pain overriding every faculty. Too focused on breathing through singed lungs to hear the sound of chirping birds, to smell the morning air. And I did not have a nose now.

My eyes found the sky, due to a neck that couldn’t support the weight of its head more than anything. That sky was the most beautiful sight of my entire life.

Steeling myself with new motivation, I began a tally of which muscles worked and which had been stewed into a frothy goo.

-Burn Victim Extrodinaire

###

Seven Years Ago

Many years ago, before Joshua and Kael wrought havoc on a small northern town, a country house shook with the buzz and airborne dust of moving day. It was far down south, away from the snow and steam. A brick wedged the screen door open, letting in a gusts of floral spring air that swept through the valley.

It was moving day, and the yellowed paint and thrice shingled roof was welcoming the seventh group of tenets in the past century.

Gruff men in jumpsuits carried in new furniture and bed slats draped over with dirty moving blankets. Even a casual observer would notice that in that perpetual carousel of human traffic, something was missing: no personal effects, no age worn possessions.

And in the stampede of adult feet, one small ten-year-old boy tried to help. The men seemed more likely to trip over him than need his help lifting a two-hundred-pound armoire, yet he positioned himself under it all the same.

Joshua's curly hair had yet to become a staple and he wore it short. Whatever athleticism he would gain in the coming years couldn't be seen by a microscope as his pudgy legs carried him up the stairs. Even the knowing, cocksure smile the average passerby would swear that Joshua was born with hadn't grown in-- a sullen expression with wide eyes in its stead.

The small box he carried landed with a dull thud at the top of the stairs as child-Joshua bent over and caught his breath. Sweat trickled down his neck and he could feel his polo sticking to his back. This was the furthest south he'd ever been, and he appreciated neither the heat nor humidity. In fact, Johsua had never traveled before, and he loathed this general malaise of displacement– a feeling he'd never truly shrug off in the coming years.

With that spasm of self-pity behind, he hefted the box again and made for the nearest door. Joshua thought he heard a sniffle on the other side. When it didn’t happen again, he tiptoed forward and creaked the door open, pushing with the box clutched against his chest.

Inside, another small boy about the same age sat on a mattress with the plastic wrap still on. Tears dotted his red eyes and a dribble of snot ran from the left nostril. The boy breathed sharply and wiped his face off.

"There you are," Joshua said.

Kael looked down, his cheeks turning red. "I'll be down to help. Just give me a second."

As if the words invoked it, a sudden crash that hummed like broken glass sounded below.

"Who do you think that was?" Joshua asked.

After a pause, the boys said in unison, "Avonly." Kael's smile lasted only that fleeting instant and then he sniffed again.

"Noel would be crying if she was nearby," Joshua said. "And we'd hear Almae stomping her feet up here to yell at us, say it's our fault for not helping. And the old lady would be blaming us too. Has to be Avonly.”

“I just thought Avonly was the clumsiest,” Kael muttered. “You shouldn’t be so mean to Miss Agassa, though; she’s not so bad. She even said we can get mom a headstone and put it in the local cemetery. It would be nice, I think.”

"But there's no bod–" Joshua halted, just barely not finishing the word.

The fire was bad. Really bad. Joshua couldn’t be sure that the body was completely transformed to ash, but it seemed the more likely outcome. They watched the flames hallow out their childhood home only until they were pulled away.

The word "mother" for the boys meant the same thing-- originally. Joshua and Kael were half-brothers through their father, true, but that had never seemed to matter. Without ever being formally adopted, Joshua lived with them, considered them closer than his own blood, called the woman ‘mom’.

The distinction mattered now, though. At a time like this, it didn’t feel right to think of her in the same terms that Kael did. It was a new perspective; Joshua realized that he couldn't grieve in the same way that his brother did. What was she now?

He couldn't be sure and that in turn made his stomach ache.

Instead of untangling those emotions knotted like a mile a fishing line jammed into the tackle box, he ran his mouth: "Let me know if you want to, you know, talk." It sounded stupid, but he had heard people say it before on TV—a 99% accurate portrayal of reality.

"You've always been a good listener,” Kael sniffed. “I should be the one asking if you need to talk. You're always so quiet. I'd probably have to force you to say if something was wrong."

"I guess." Joshua played footie with the box, pushing it across the floor, making for the other side of the room. He stopped at the second mattress and threw it on top.

"But I do have something I've been thinking about,” Kael said to Joshua's back.

"Oh?"

"About Dad. Well not Dad, but a story he used to tell." Kael kept his eyes focused on Joshua, looking for some recognition in his brother's eyes. "You don't remember?"

"No? Dad wasn't really– I mean. He didn't tell us stories."

"Not like bedtime stories, or reading-out-of-a-book stories. But when he'd talk about Syches, he’d say it like he'd be one someday. Be like us."

“To be like you,” Joshua corrected.

“Sure, sure.” Kael sniffed. “But what I'm saying is, he didn’t say it like he wished it could be true. He said it like he knew it was possible. Do you know where he would disappear to, a month a time? I don't. When he'd come back, I'd sneak close by and just listen. He talked about this book once."

"I—" Joshua stopped, he could feel the back of his neck growing hot. Their father wasn't a topic ever up for discussion, and Joshua preferred if it stayed that way. It was a complicated set of emotions-- neither love nor hate. Certainly closer to hate if he was held to the fire. Joshua hesitated, looking around a room that had nothing in it and therefore no excuses to stall. "The Book of Light? You told me, that same night I think. He said—"

Kael cut in, "He said he would never die."

"Dad talked a lot and. . . It's too late to ask him what he meant. You know?”

Kael blinked twice and then collapsed backwards, staring blankly at the ceiling. Tears welled up at the corner of his eyes.

“Listen,” Joshua began, “I can’t say something like that doesn’t exist either. I'm just—Maybe I didn't pay as much attention as you did. He wasn't as interested in spending time with me. After all."

Kael cleared his throat. "And I'm saying Dad believed there was something out there that could control life. A fifth element."

Joshua put his hands up. "Okay. Okay. Wasn't arguing."

Kael rolled to his side, squinting skeptically at his brother. “You’re just saying words. You don't believe me.”

“I can’t prove you wrong. Maybe Dad is right and somewhere out in the world, buried someplace, is some doo-dad that can bring the dead back.” The words trembled in Joshua’s throat, tasting a lie. But his brother's tears had stopped. He even looked. . . hopeful? "What you do is pretty much magic. So, uh. Yeah. It wouldn't even be that weird."

“We could find out?” Kael said and Joshua nodded, inching towards the door and desperate for this conversation to end. “We might find a way to bring mom back?” Kael sat up, the phlegm cleared from his throat. "So that's what we have to do, right!" Kael jumped up on the mattress. "We have to find where Dad was looking. Find clues. Like a treasure hunt. We can bring mom back to life!"

“Okay,” Joshua responded hollowly. Please let him forget this, Joshua thought.

Kael sat straight now, looking at his brother intently. He needed more than ‘okay’ now. Joshua bit his lip and thought.

"Don't you need a map or something? I've read some pirate books. You definitely need a map." Joshua knew it was weak.

"We'll figure it out. Like you said, I’m a Syche." Kael snapped his fingers and a faint hiss of orange energy cracked like electricity in the air. "And you! You like going on adventures with me. We’re a perfect team! I can't believe I'm only thinking of this now, but Mom isn't gone for good!” Kael fell backwards on the spot, his mattress embracing him with a metallic whine.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

“If you want,” Joshua mumbled inaudibly, backing out of the room. “Dad was never around and now you want to be like him.”

By the time Joshua closed the door, Kael had hadn’t fallen asleep. Joshua opened the door again, just slightly, to look at his brother laying there, a dog-tired grin on his face. "Even if it's stupid, at least you are happy."

About to back down the stairs and help with the move, the squeak of a floorboard moved Joshua to jump instead. At the corner of the hallway, his sister Almae squinted at him.

"Were you listening?" Joshua asked.

"Of course," she answered back with reflexively no emotion. Her and Kael were full blood relatives. She looked just like him, maybe with a smaller face. Hair and eyes so dark they disappeared in the shadows.

"And?"

"I didn't listen so I could comment." She didn't speak like a seven-and-a-half-year-old. "Just wanted to know what part of my life would get ruined next."

Joshua shuffled past.

Unloading some boxes in the newly minted study, he rifled through a dictionary and found the word mania by chance. In the coming weeks, he'd remember that word and not be so keen on the idea of a treasure hunt.

“The Book of Light.” Kael was zeroed in on what he wanted. That was it. That book was the artifact that their Dad had talked about. Joshua had a sinking feeling that he wouldn’t hear the end to it for quite some time.

***

Two months after moving into their new home in southern Kidenia, Joshua traveled on a bus westward with his forehead on the glass. He enjoyed the rattling sensation shaking his brain.

This trip wasn't a treasure hunt, mind you. Joshua and Kael were still ten years old and the old lady refused– categorically– to let them walk any further than the town five miles from their house on their own until they turned thirteen. Even that may have been too much if child protective services ever got wind. Goddess forbid that one way ticket to some rigorous public-school education which Joshua had happily avoided so far.

The same woman who prevented the two boys from travelling enjoyed a pleasant snooze the seat over from Joshua.

He couldn't quite place the feeling, but a knot welled up in his stomach when he heard that Kael wanted to leave. It went away at the swift and decisive denial by their. . . well– She wasn't really a grandmother. Maybe more like a guardian? Even though that description seemed inaccurate as well. She had been closer to a tutor? Or maybe a nanny when they still lived at home; when it all came tumbling down, Agassa pulled them away from the fire and into a countryside nothing a thousand kilometers away.

In turn, Joshua showed her respect by calling her "old lady." He would have just called her Agassa if he didn't like her.

Joshua sat bewildered knowing that Agassa would let them leave on their own someday, no matter how long that would take. Somedays he wanted to stay in bed. Other days, Joshua lounged about the new house and kept his nose to his chores in perfect contentment. No days did he want to travel the world. He liked to imagine living his adult life out in that very house and never facing the outside ever again.

But he would. This bus ride proved that. Kael wanted to leave and he couldn't tell his brother no, not with everything that had happened.

And as foolish as it seemed to dread something that was going to happen years from now, Joshua dreaded it all the same. Give him something that needed to be done within the hour and he twittered about restlessly. Tell him something important would happen in a year? He wouldn’t have time to think about anything else. Every morning was like waking up with the same imaginary guillotine over his head. Forcing him to contemplate the inevitable.

The bus rolled through a small municipality now, the mint shaded vines of the surrounding green-wood creeping towards pre-century brickwork. The wheels bobbled over the uneven cobblestone roads towards the center of a town of three thousand.

"This will do," Agassa said. Her eyes flicked open the exact millisecond the bus stopped. Never one to waste time.

"Where are we?"

The old woman frowned and looked out the window. "No idea. Doesn't matter. We're here."

"Why are–"

"Why are we here? Yes, yes," The woman barked, grabbing Joshua by the wrist and dragging him down the aisle. "Let me explain this little exercise in the light of day."

Said light of day apparently did little to brighten her mood. She paced the sidewalk up and back, really working out the kinks from bus sleep—the sleep where your neck was free to bob about. Despite her small and ancient frame, she bandied about as spry as Joshua. He suspected her Sychic abilities, her ability to control Blood, was the culprit. He never asked. Even without her powers, she radiated, in a terrifying fashion, that tremendous aura of staunch rigidity that every elderly woman possessed.

Women got rigid and men got more carefree. In a few years' time, Joshua would come to understand that it happened like that because the women had spent their entire lives putting up with the men.

"Do you know what the first thing I'm going to do when I get back to the house?" Agassa asked.

Joshua bit his lip and pondered for a second. "Take a nap?"

Her foot subtly moved forward and tapped him just in the right spot on the shin to really make it hurt. "I'll do that on the trip back. No smart aleck comments." She paused for a second with her eyes closed. "The first thing I'm going to do is teach your brother how to use his powers."

"He already–"

"How to fight, you muppet. How to use them. And what do you suppose that has to do with bringing you out here?"

"You think Kael's going to screw up that badly? You didn't find some coal for him to practice with did you? If that's the case, I'd like to be a bit further." He could already sense the mistake and stood straight as a soldier, eyes forward thinking the seriousness of his posture would pacify the woman.

Agassa went for his shins again but Joshua had already leapt back. She snorted her approval and continued, "Training. I might make the rules now, but in a couple of years I won't be able to stop you boys from doing what you want. Kael will drag you away on the definition of foolishness, and you will need to be ready before then. It’s why I told him thirteen. Far enough away to prepare, soon enough that he won’t run away.”

Joshua hesitantly looked around the city for anything unusual. Any reason why she brought him here. There was absolutely nothing. There may have been more nothing here than anywhere else in the world.

"You'll need to look out for each other. Protect each other. Your brother will need to rely on you, just as much as you him." She bulldozed on through, ignoring Joshua's open mouth contemplation of words. "You. . . don't have powers," she hushed her voice as a couple holding hands approached out of her eyesight. "But that just means I have to teach you differently. Teach you how to squeeze every little advantage you can out of your unblessed life."

"K."

"So, for our first little exercise–" She stopped to grin. "You're going to find your way back to the house. You get your clothes on your back, and the rest is up to you."

Joshua sucked in air like a fish. "I don't even know where we are. I don't even know where we live. I don't–"

Agassa held up a finger and Joshua obeyed. "You need to learn self-dependence. You need to learn how to make do with nothing. And more than anything you need to learn how to fail. If you can learn how to fail, you've already mastered half of what life has to offer." Agassa's eyes narrowed. "No police, no government goons on my doorstep. You get back home on your own two feet, without asking for help, and with no problems for me. Especially with no problems for me."

Joshua chewed on his thumb. "No police?" he asked and she nodded. And then: "But that doesn't mean no crime."

"Now you're getting it." She patted him on the head and strode past, plopping herself down on the bus bench hard enough for anyone else her age to fracture a hip. "See you when I see you kid."

Joshua waited with her at the bus stop for the next half hour.

***

A week later, Kael lay belly down on the carpet in the room that had come to be known as the study. The process by which the room came to be used for this was a deep and mysterious one. It started with some boxes being left in a back room, behind the staircase. Then someone, perhaps one of the sisters, unpacked a box of new atlases, looking for something unrelated. Too distracted to clean up, they left the books on the cold, information laden floor. Next, another sibling saw the atlases and went to find more books to stack in the room. And so forth. Of the six people living in the house, each one had directly contributed to making this room what it was, without ever deciding that it should be a study.

So it became the room where Agassa would sit in her chair and sleep; where Kael could sit at the desk and read through mythology books rented from the library five miles down the road. The scratchy rug somehow became the place where the youngest sibling, Noel (on Joshua's side of the family), would come to lay down on dreary Sixt days.

And it had a fireplace. The fire wasn’t roaring today, but the heavy thumps of rain against the window sure made it seem like a good idea.

Allowed to obsess with the occult and the weird as of late, Kael begrudgingly skimmed a chemistry textbook. His torture went deeper than Agassa merely dragging him into the woods forcing him into drills. . . . He had to learn.

Explode the same type of rock every which way. Bigger. Now smaller. No, angle it up. Now contain it. Now read about science so you can do the same thing you’re already doing. Elements (the scientific kind). Periodic table. Specific weight. Kael could see how a Syche whose entire arsenal was whatever was around him could use this information, but he also didn't care. Making things go boom came naturally.

Combusting inert gases was hard, he got that. But he'd probably never be in a room full of neon, so why? And he didn't need to learn about carbon to understand that wood burned real good. Oh yeah it did.

Actually, as he looked at the diagram in front of him, carbon wasn't very good on its own at all, so that just made his understanding of wood more confusing. Which wasn’t even to comment on crude oil. There was a billion to one chance he’d see a drop of that in his lifetime. It was the imaginary numbers of chemistry—never going to use it in real life—yet he studied it all the same.

Kael slapped the book closed in defiance as Agassa came in and sat down with her steaming cup of paline sprinkled with orange zest. Joshua loved the stuff, as did most of the world, but Kael could never get over the nutty, earthy smell.

"Any news on Joshua?" he asked.

"Ah, no." Agassa sipped at her drink dismissively. "Why don't you go up the hill and practice a bit. You haven't been outside today."

"In the rain?"

"Guns work fine in the rain. If you need to use your abilities to protect yourself, I don't think your enemies will let it factor in."

"And if it's a Syche. . . ."

"Oh yes. If it's a Syche, they'll be chomping at the bit to catch you soaked and all the ammunition around you moist. Especially us Blood Syches. We can still control blood that's up to fifty percent diluted."

"That's a weird word: Moist." Kael said it again and held the inflection on the "T".

Agassa gave a cold stare over the brim of her reading glasses. Why don't you take your sister up with you? She's feeling left out and wants to spar."

"Really?" Kael furrowed his brow as if he had just heard a completely vulgar joke—it seemed more likely. "Almae said that?"

"No, Avonly."

"Well, half-sister then."

"You're all related, living under the same roof. I don't want to hear about any of this half-sibling nonsense. This is what we chose, so it's our family. Honestly boy, you've gone around calling Joshua your brother since you could speak. It shouldn't be an unfamiliar concept to you."

Kael grunted.

And then the front door echoed with a strong series of knocks in return.

"Speaking of Joshua. . . ." Kael said, springing to his feet and jolting down the hallway. He yanked open the front door and then fell back defensively.

A large, overweight man with an uneven shave and a yellow policeman's uniform stood on the front porch. Next to him stood a woman who had the soft face of someone wanting to help people with their lives but the vacant glare of someone who had worked in government too long. Wedged between them, with their hands on either shoulder, stood Joshua.

"What in the–" Agassa said catching up, huffing more in annoyance than from the effort.

Joshua smiled, regarded Kael and Agassa, and then threw his arms out wide in pure showmanship as if it would make this farce somehow better. "I have learned how to fail."