Abelas could see the straight path ahead: flaying his lover alive, removing all that beautiful, delicate, mangled flesh that he adored so much to lay with the bloodied sinew waiting for him beneath. It was so beautiful - the thought brought a mad dog's grin to the elvhen's features as the last of his willpower quickly evaporated.
He felt the knife, then prepared to land a killing strike - he'd have his fun when this incessant struggle came to an end. Before the blade could land Abelas suddenly felt warmth from sunlight as it filtered in through the tall - seemingly endless - trees of Abelas in the late spring. He was a boy again, his hands were stained green with crushed leaves and soil as his father, Dirthera knelt beside him, his voice soft and rich:
"I will not see the man you become, Abelas. But I know he will be one who chooses not vengeance, but light. Remember, my son, if a day should come when you somehow feel disheartened, or that you are not enough, set your heart ablaze. Dry your eyes and look ahead. You may feel like digging in your heels, but the wheel of time waits for no one. So long as one leaf remains, the Laurelin yet lives. We are the Light, it flows through us."
Vallas is swollen and barely to the tree line as Abelas watches him struggle - beating his wings furiously but declining foot by foot. When he's close to the ground, he finds Abelas' waiting arms instead and the elvhen wraps him in them.
A flicker and he's standing on an outcropping of rocks as Abelas moved to smack his brother's shoulder in mock irritation, then promptly lost his footing and nearly tumbled. Ikaros caught him without even looking. The memory paused on that brief contact - steady hands, mismatched eyes, the bond between them as unshakable as the cliffs they stood on.
The cry was pitiful, ragged, and wrong. The whimpering sound was no longer muffled by the screams of the bloodied and the dead - Abelas alone the men who'd died from crush injuries sustained by their own armor. Abelas found the cage and tore it open to find the cub of the recently poached mother: his beak twisted from beating it incessantly against the bars of his cage. It took hours of Abelas sitting there with honeyed meat, but sometime before the sun came up, Icarus took his first steps into freedom.
Abelas collapsed backward, thrown off like a drunk stripped of his delusion mid-fall. He hit the ground hard, the dagger clattering to the stone floor beside him, slick with ichorous blood that tinged the air something metallic. His body jerked once, twice, as if something was trying to climb its way back up his throat - a scream, a sob, a snarl. All three in wretched one. âElris-â he croaked, vision clouded, voice the hollowed and wrung dry. He saw the torn cloth, the twisted scar of that ruined leg, Abelas' arms wrapped firmly around himself as if that might keep him from coming undone- body heaving as tears spilled over his twisted features and muddied with the bloody splatter of the dagger beside him, "Elris-" he repeated, weeping.
