Day 4
This is a take on The Fall of the House of Usher by Poe, so as the character has pretty much lost it in the original, so has Cyno.
TW for muder and death
Part 1 of 4 Part 2 of 4 Part 3 of 4
The wind of the storm that night was a song that begged Cyno join it in its reverie. Sethos bore witness to Cyno’s eagerness to disappear into the storm that as the lighting struck so close that the bedroom held a momentary, artificial sun, he watched as Cyno sprang to his feet and threw the rattling windows open wide to invite the wrath of the rain and wind in.
From the second floor, there was a small possibility of surviving the drop into the forest valley below, but Sethos knew not to take chances with the state Cyno was in, so he crawled to his feet to lunge at his cousin before his grief could carry him into the storm's rage.
"Cousin! Let me go! Let me--"
Finally! Finally Cyno had obtained enough awareness to perceive his presence!
"You mustn't! Stay, Cyno! Stay!" With limbs too long ago used, Sethos struggled to contain his cousin and move him over to the chair between Collei's bed and the window. From here, he was at least out of the rain, but Sethos knew it would take more than pleading to keep him seated.
Grabbing the first thing he could find to distract Cyno from the siren's call that beckoned from outside, Sethos picked up the diary on Collei's nightstand.
"I'll read to you, Cousin. Hear me!"
He opened the diary to a page in looping cursive and read hurriedly without concern for the dead. “I couldn’t get out of bed today, but Father carried me to the piano so that I could play together with him. The keys are always so cold, but I love the way the ivory feels beneath my fingertips. Even when I am suffering, that I can make music fill the house with a press of each key makes me feel strong once more. Papa argued with Father about me being in the music room instead of in bed. They only ever argue about me. I hope that when I die, they never have anything to argue about again. Papa was right in the end. I could only play until noon, and I spent the whole afternoon into evening with a headache back in my bed. I feel less pain in bed, but I also feel less alive.”
Sethos looked up from the pages at the open doorway of the bedroom. He could hear it. From downstairs a longing tune from the piano floated upstairs to their ears, but when he looked in Cyno’s direction to see if he, too, could her the music, he saw his cousin’s eyes still yearning for the blackened sky outside.
He would continue reading.
“Father told me some new jokes today, and I laughed so much that I cried. Papa never laughs at them, and I didn't when I was little, but now I know it's better to laugh than not to. If I can laugh enough that Father can remember my laughter after I die, then I'll endure the pain in my ribs, back, and jaw as long as I need to. He always smiles brighter when he hears my laughter. I haven't heard Papa laugh in a long time. Maybe he'll laugh again when he no longer has to take care of me."
And he could hear it, too, like a wind that swept through the room and filled the space floor to ceiling. It was a young woman’s laughter. It was Collei’s laughter. Still, Cyno did not appear to notice. Sethos was unsure if his reading was even what kept his cousin seated, but he’d continue to try.
"Yesterday, Papa left. Papa was gone for a long time, and he only returned as the sun set today. Father was really upset. I haven't seen him cry in a long time, but today, he did. I think he thought Papa had left us, but I know Papa would never do that. Papa gave me a new medicine just now. He'd left to get it. I like that I don't feel any pain. It quiets the sounds in my head, but it also makes me feel like I'm floating like I can't be sad or happy. I don't know what will happen to Father after I die. I'm trying to give him many things to remember me by. I try every day to smile for him.
But, I'm not sure what will happen. Papa will be okay at least I think so, but I worry about Father."
The sounds of the piano and laughter mixed, and Sethos refused to look up from the diary. Was he reading to keep Cyno sane or himself?
"Today, Papa said something that scared me a little. I get to be honest with Papa. Because he's always taking care of me, I have to tell him what hurts and where. I have to be honest about my symptoms, my feelings, and my thoughts. Today, he said something that made me regret all of that. I'm in so much pain that I feel ready to die, but now I'm getting more scared than ever that Father isn't the only one I should worry about.
Papa might be hiding more than I thought."
"I saw Death in the form of a little girl yesterday. She visited in my dreams before, but today, she was in my room. She had so many Nilotpala lotuses in her arms that I could barely make out her smile, but I could tell she was smiling. I didn't need to see it to know. I think I've known her a very long time even though I have never met her. When she smiled at me; I smiled back. I think that was the right thing to do."
It was too much. Not even a day over sixteen years, and she had already accepted death. The howling of the storm, the laughte of a girl, and the signing of the piano came to a crescendo, and finally, he had to know.
Yelling over sounds he thought only he must be hearing, he asked, "Do you hear it, Cyno!?"
His cousin looked at him. He waited, silent.
"Her laughter?" he clarified.
"Yes." Life returned to his eyes.
"The piano?" he pressed.
"Yes." He moved to the edge of the chair with a smile to his lips.
"Her voice?" he trembled because only now could Sethos hear that, too, reading the diary back to him without his eyes to the pages.
"Yes." Cyno stood. "Always! I hear it always. Everywhere within these walls, she lives. I can see her, too."
"You've seen Collei?"
"There." He was looking in the direction of the bedroom door, but Sethos feared what he’d see. To hear the dead was enough to admit, but to see the dead could only spell insanity. Four days, and he’d lost himself in his house, too? Dare he look? Dare he know?
With a sharp inhale, he turned to look at the figure in the doorway. A teen of thin bones and green hair in a nightgown of silver and moonlight stood waiting. She wasn’t laughing, wasn’t smiling, but her expression wasn’t blank. Instead, she looked sad, pale, and quiet.
Instead of stopping her, Sethos took a step back as she crossed the room to Cyno to stand stone still for seconds before he crumpled to the floor.
The dead did not live. Together with her father, Sethos had buried her beneath the house. A stone slab kept her sealed within her casket. Her skin had been covered in scales and yet here it was smooth and human and unharmed.
And yet, here she was in flesh and blood. Crawling over Cyno to reach for his neck, Collei’s claws wrapped tightly around Cyno’s neck.
Claws? No. Sethos couldn’t breathe.
“I’ll end your suffering, my love, just as you ended hers.” Tighnari gripped tighter, picked up his lover's form by the throat briefly before slamming him back forcefully into the tiles below causing his head to bounce against the marble, but Cyno didn't cry out. He didn't fight back, and instead, he raised his arms up to reach his hands out to Tighnari's face and caressed his cheeks so delicately as though not to create ripples in a still pond.
The storm was beckoning. The flames were catching. Sethos was trembling. Only Cyno had gone still.
Upon closing his lover's eyes by his own hand, Tighnari leaned down to kiss the lips of his beloved, and when he pulled away, he leaned back far enough to reveal the tears that stained his face.
"Tighnari, what did you do?” Sethos still hadn't moved from the floor as if the curse had shackled him there to burn along with the rest of the room.
Careful not to step anywhere that would wake Cyno's silent sleep, Tighnari leaned in close to a breath's distance from Sethos's face.
This close, Tighnari looked like he'd lived as many lives as he could in his time in this house. He was clean as glass but no more a mirror than the surface of water blackened by a moonless night. Clear, but contaminated, he held his mind together firmly with the final judgement that love had surpassed its limits and in doing so had taken with it the singular reality neither himself nor Cyno could accept.
“Leave. You won’t get a second chance."
A second chance.
He ran, his feet stumbling over flower blossoms and wet tiles, and upon a fall, all he caught sight of was a phantom in white dragging a corpse away into the depths of stone and flame. The house changed shape. The stairs grew long, and even as he dodged piano strings, candlesticks, and ivory keys, he kept his eyes forward as he bolted for the door.
The storm that was once so fearsome from the inside, was now but a whimper under its wing. The air carried the mist of a just-fallen summer rain, and the Earth sunk under the weight of Setho's feet as he ran from the house for his life. The mansion was wet with the tears of so many, but it did nothing to abate the fire that roared from within, and when Sethos finally turned back to behold the House of the Contagious Death, he realized that there would soon be nothing left.
Past the iron gate, he collapsed to the street that led only to the house that once held three. Surrounded by forest, he feared the fire would catch and place a plague upon the whole country, but instead, as if Death had claimed precisely what it meant to, it spread no further and the flames reached up for the sky instead of stretching their arms out to the treetops around them.
The flames were an orchestra that consumed the lives and histories of the home. Within it notes on the piano were played, a child's laughter was heard, and somewhere between the whips of wind were sweet nothings that fell from one's lips like love overflowing.
Collei died, and with her there had been several deaths after her, but Sethos, he'd escaped it, right? The curse that had been placed upon the house had ended in its transformation from stone to ash, right?
The galloping of a horse from behind was made real as the sudden neighing brought Sethos from the theater of flames and howling winds back to the reality before him. For fear of a truth he did not want to face, he stared ahead as footsteps on gravel traveled closer and closer until they stopped, just behind him.
The unnamed traveler put a hand to his shoulder, and it was all he needed to know before Sethos had enveloped the man in an embrace too tight to confirm that this was no apparition, no spirit, no demon, no ghoul.
"Sethos?"
Snapped.
Broken.
The tension of the last 4 days melted into the arms of the one who returned his embrace. "How are you here?"
“Tighnari sent for me."
Sethos pulled away enough to revel in the indigo eyes of his lover's concerned expression, one meant only for him. "What happened these last two weeks?”
His lover looked tired but cautious as if he knew that whatever Sethos had just escaped, it was not something that had easily let him go. But, the question didn't make sense. “It’s been 4 days.”
Sethos, knowing his lover was not one to jest in such a way, stared back at him in horror. Though mischief was not beneath him, his lover would never jest regarding something as gravely serious as this.
How had so much time been lost? How long had Collei been dead for? How long had Cyno and Tighnari suffered?
Instead of arguing, his lover looked at the flames before them, put his hands in his, and slowly helped him to his feet. “The house is gone, and the curse with it. It’s time to go home.”
