116 | destiny; ten years gifted

Wisteria had begrudgingly allowed the three remaining, Arlo, Niklas, and Holly to roam under supervision after Niklas screamed his lungs out and irritated every dragon in the vicinity.

Looking at the charming, relaxed face that had been yelling for hours straight, Wisteria felt a murderous urge.

Sorrowfully, he resisted it.

Arlo awkwardly followed as they ducked under draped vines, intertwined with the slender trunks of towering trees, their plumage serene greens and blues.

"You've grown so big, Arlo!" exclaimed Holly, jumping up and down with happiness. "I'm so glad you're alive! I'd wondered, you know? You just up and left!"

Niklas shook his head in mock disappointment. "Abandoning us immediately... how cruel of you, kid."

Arlo scowled, blowing air into his cheeks. "I'm not a kid."

"You're still young, no matter how tall you've grown."

It was shocking; the once-malnourished child had shot up to new feats, a few centimeters taller than Niklas. This was a testament to his lifestyle in the palace. Arlo had not been mistreated.

Niklas wanted to yell some more and pull out his hair. The Crown Prince's attitude was both unpredictable and irritable. He simply couldn't make sense of it, not now, and not back then.

The trees bristled and Holly had fallen silent, stopping a few steps ahead of them. Her excitement settled.

"Niklas," Holly began uncertainly, pressing her lips together. "Can you tell me why you had to disguise yourself?"

He stopped in his step, gaze darting to Wisteria who watched with cool disinterest.

Then, he put on an exaggerated expression. "It's a tragic story. The poor pitiful me had my Blessing spirited away, stolen by time and fate. However, with the talents of a stage performer, I skillfully fooled everybody into believing—"

Holly swatted his arms, shaking her head. "No need for theatrics, Niklas. You don't have to tell me."

Niklas looked at her, his blue skin pulling into a curved smile.

When he opened his eyes in the past, all he recalled was the wrenching misery of waking. Niklas had been terribly overconfident in his ability to remain sane and the woes of living.

The Blessed were superior in physical prowess—it had been startling to realize how weak his body felt after feeling powerful for years, without trying. He never realized how difficult it was to work from nothing to become strong.

He spoke so confidently, but back then, when he opened his eyes to the life he knew but was not the same, he'd given up. Alone in a room with weak limbs and waning lungs, without his allies or support, he would have in the future.

Once, it'd been so easy to make his father proud and be levels above all others.

It was hard to explain it to somebody until they rose to their peak of ability and woke up the next day with nothing.

In the Academy, he was the weakest, without the natural talents the Blessed had.

The disparity between his previous life had been so startling, that Niklas had gloomily chosen to yield to his weakness. He sighed, scratching the back of his neck.

Had he struggled more, like Arlo did, perhaps he would've reached a sufficient level of strength. Perhaps he wouldn't be exhausted after running around for hours, with a miserable athletic ability.

He'd overestimated himself; underestimated the changes that turning back time would've brought. It was a pathetic blunder in his life that even the shameless man didn't dare confess.

They continue venturing into the forest as the healthy brown trunks fade into skeletal white. Thin, and bony branches hunched high above them, like a curved and protruding spine.

"Hey, Holly!" Arlo had exclaimed, dashing in the direction of the woman who'd chased after a strange rabbit-like creature. It had oddly long legs that soared in the air, bounding hurriedly away.

After undergoing harsh training for several years, Arlo was fast; but Holly was faster. She'd disappeared in a blink, laughing to herself.

Wisteria stared after them. "Your friends—"

"No comment. Go after them, will you? I won't be able to keep up with my poor and feeble self."

"You joke about it, and yet it's true. That your body, compared to your companions, is much weaker and more fragile. It's like you've had your vitality taken away."

Niklas squatted down by a protruding white root, playing with the little red flowers on the ground. "What's this? Worried for me, little dragon comrade?"

The skies had darkened, leeched of their light as the slender trees stood against it, whites against a black canvas.

"Hey, Wisteria," Niklas raised a fallen flower to his eyes, gazing past it at the other dragon who regarded him solemnly. "Do you think it was the right decision?"

The gloomy dragon regarded him quietly and huffed. "If you regret it, kill yourself and pray for another miracle."

"How rude. There'll be no killing of myself today."

"Then," The dragon bent down, pressing the delicate petal between sharp claws. It crumbled to the ground, juices seeping across his skin. "Behave as stupidly and arrogantly as you always do. That's all."

Pivoting, the dragon sauntered away to drag back the misbehaving humans. Niklas sighed into his hands, alone in the silence of his thoughts.

The ground rumbled beneath him, and he jerked his head up, leaping to his feet. Before he could run, his breath was stolen as his body flipped upside down, dangling by the curved root wrapped around his ankle.

He squinted as the twisting patterns on the tree trunk changed, pulling away like a thin membrane of skin as the delicate and old face of a woman pressed against the bark.

Her skin was wrinkled and creased, small eyes foretold ancient knowledge. She looked both young and old, wise and foolish, brave and cowardly.

The old woman rested her weight on a carved cane, torn from the very trees that surrounded them.

She examined him curiously and bared a smile, rows of pointed teeth inside revealing her inhuman species.

Niklas offered a charming smile, even hanging upside down with his blood rushing to his head. "Hello, beautiful lady. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

She snorted, a loud and bubbling sound from deep within her chest. "And I wondered what fool trespassed my forest today. A human. What a feast—it's been a while since I tasted human flesh."

"By my understanding, our species is not in your daily diet."

"There are many things people can live without, dear. You do not need anything and yet you covet everything."

"I'm frail and bony."

The end of the stick jabbed harshly into his rigid stomach and Niklas coughed, the dull pulse of pain throbbing. Being exposed, his smile remained placate.

"Alright, I confess. I'm actually the juciest, with the most meat on my bones. I barely exercise, see." He cupped his hands around his mouth, whispering kindly. "But that also means I'm the most foul-tasting. All I eat is garbage!"

A colourless rat skittered across the dry grounds and a tail flicked out, a jagged end piercing through the flesh as blood pooled into the ground. It rumbled in satisfaction as if absorbing the liquid as nutrients.

Niklas started, shivering slightly as he took a deep breath, dizziness making his thoughts sway.

The older woman poked at him again and he felt his stomach turn. "Tell me, my foul-tasting friend," Her face warped into something youthful and wicked. "Why do you go to such lengths for the child of your most terrible foe?"

His cerulean eyes widened. "How do you—"

"All Blessed has a unique, individual Watcher. No two have the same at once. I escaped the tragedy of a Reversal, but believing me to be dead, my Watcher abandoned me."

He listened, reworking the surprise on his face into a knowing calm. Playing the role of an all-knowing person was easy for him.

She laughed, baring her yellowed, sharpened teeth. "Oh don't do that, it's hardly any fun. I prefer fear, you see. The warping expression when I divulge a secret of the future."

"Foresight." Niklas gazed at her steadily. "You are blessed by the Watcher of foresight."

She grinned, baring sharp teeth that glinted with blood. "Imagine my surprise, dear, when one day my Blessing returned to me. After I died, my Watcher should've chosen another poor soul to bother."

The old woman hummed to herself, plucking the skewered rat from the ground. "I considered that perhaps the current Blessed died—but then another one would've been chosen. However, what if the Watcher could not move on because the current Blessed did not die, and then discovered the abnormality of my existence?"

"Therefore," She unhinged her jaw, opening it wide as she dropped the rodent down. "They returned to me. Because they could not choose you, their original choice."

She swallowed, licking her lips happily. A streak of blood smeared across her scaled cheek. "What did you do, dear? To twist the natural order of things like this?"

She hummed, wiping off the blood and licking her bony fingers clean. The skeletal trees creaked in approval. "Ah, you're not answering me. You, merely a regular child, with more worth to your bloodline than yourself. And yet, you changed everything."

Her eyes flicked up, a deadly and eerie slant that gleamed a dark amber. "All for the sake of your dear mother's murderer."

The root untangled and Niklas dropped to the ground, rolling with a groan. His hand flew to his mouth and then he was bent over, throwing up on the ground. He coughed, the blood flow heating his cheeks and making his sight blur.

He struggled to roll into a criss-cross, sitting as he looked up at her, wiping the remnants of vomit away from his lips.

One breath, waiting for his insides to settle back into their rightful positions.

Then, he smiled weakly. "See, you're right." He spoke honestly, calmly as if he weren't in the presence of a deadly beast.

"I was never a particularly motivated child, and after my mother's death, I lacked the will to do anything at all. I was useless, and I could see it in my father's stern, grieving gaze but he said nothing. I always knew that he was scared of losing me too."

Niklas smoothened the goosebumps chasing up his arms and his instinctive urge to flee from this woman who would definitely kill him the moment he became boring.

He was cowardly, really.

He wasn't anything special, although he was good at socializing and making friends, charming in certain ways. Once, he'd wanted to meet his father's arching expectations and live to the identity of that man's son.

It was his stepmother who told him gently that he didn't need to live to anybody's legacy except his own. It'd been a sharp awakening; a motivating factor that he never knew he needed.

His father had been delighted, although his face remained somber, of Niklas' sudden burst of energy and success.

Then, most unexpectedly, she disappeared from their lives one evening.

His father had seen the killer, and Niklas had not. But he'd seen his mother's bleeding body and her dimming gaze when she hoarsely called him over. With a smile, gentle as it was fleeting, she'd grasped his hand.

"Dear Niklas," she'd said softly as he sobbed, choking out an ugly wail. "I am... sorry I do not have more time... with you. May I... be selfish... this once?"

His mother had never asked anything of him, quietly and seamlessly fitting into his and his father's life as if she'd always belonged. Niklas had nodded furiously.

"There is a child... poor child... he deserves the light and not the darkness he lives. If you find him... if you think, as I did... he could be family—" She coughed violently and his father rushed forward, cradling her body as his jaw tensed. She smiled, lightly brushing her soft hands against them. "Please save him."

Niklas' father had tensed further, closing his despairing gaze without a response. Niklas had nodded, clutching her limp hand, and begged for her to keep breathing.

His mother's dying wish.

And a child that he did not know.

The one he did know; the identity of his mother's murder; the dog of the royal family. Niklas had discovered that truth and remembered the seething rage that tipped the top of his fingers, boiling his blood, organs, and everything that was him.

He would kill that obedient dog, and ruin those who ordered him.

Consequently, he remembered his father's beating, a strike across his face that sent him skidding across the ground. The man had glared at him coldly, furiously, and hesitantly.

"Before you seek vengeance on that child," said his father quietly, his voice drowned in sorrows and pains that Niklas could not understand. "Fulfill her last wish."

Niklas had tried, burning with revenge but obedient to his father's desperate wish. He felt as if he could not reject that, or he would lose his father forever. But no matter how he searched, with no clues on hand, he could not conjure the identity of that child out of nothing.

He was lured by vengeance once, applying for a role in the royal palace without his father's permission. As a result, he sparked the order of the Crown Prince who ordered him to be fired.

Who would've expected that the palace was a battlefield, and the hierarchy of servants birthed a sharp cruelty?

Before he was sent his merry way, the head butler had beat him black and blue for his silly actions of taking the wrong road. He'd never known if it was under the Crown Prince's orders.

He spent a year recuperating and only attended the Academy a year later.

Then, there in the Academy, Niklas encountered the dog of the royal family, Kaden Chauvet.

A chilling, indifferent green gaze, both beautiful and haunting. An expression that would fix into disdain or twist into snarling and mocking jeers.

He was gaunt and bony, sickly and pale, all the things Niklas wished he weren't.

If Kaden was a strong, healthy man living life happily and obliviously, then it would've been easier to kill him.

Niklas was not a killer. But he was a son, and his mother was murdered. For years, in between his cheerful chatter with his classmates or bantering with the teachers, he would watch Kaden.

Niklas did not know what he was waiting for. Perhaps for a slight of inhumanness, proof of that sinner's cruelty that would permit him to murder.

But Kaden Chauvet, for all his facades and snarling threats, was one of the most miserable people Niklas had the displeasure of observing. He'd encountered many people within many conversations, learning their darkest and ugliest secrets.

Yet there was something about Kaden Chauvet that was so undeniably pathetic and lonely that could rival no other.

They graduated and Kaden remained living, and Niklas remained human.

Without his vengeance and his mother's last wish, he'd lost sight of himself, reduced to a reclusive man living by his father's orders, participating in everything half-heartedly. He followed the flow of life, ruining all potential for the things he could've become.

Then came the case of Noah Bellamy.

Niklas participated in the surge of angry civilians that stormed the palace in search of evidence of Reed Chauvet's misdeeds.

That day, in that cold basement cell, everything had changed.

That was a story for Kaden Chauvet to learn, not this elderly dragon that ate humans and rats. Niklas scrunched his nose at the thought, repressing the urge to throw up again. He fiddled with the butterfly wing around his neck and smiled faintly.

Then to his pockets, where the other half lay. He'd found a second in the chaos to snatch it up.

Kaden didn't remember the necklace clearly, tucked in a corner like a saving grace. It was likely Kaden relied on the necklace, but his memory disassociated anything related to his time in the Room.

"There are two halves of this charm. My mother wanted another child, although her body was frail. She told me I was already her first, regardless of our blood. The other half, she told me once, would be around the neck of my brother, the child whom she wanted to nurture."

"I made a wild guess and prayed it would be false." Bitterness seeped into his smile as he glanced up at the frowning dragon elder. "Do you want to know who has it?"

The dragon approached him slowly, towering over him. She squinted and then a wonderful smile bloomed on her face. She cackled, throwing her head back as her frizzy hair tumbled around her. "You want to save him, dear."

His thumb traced over the charm adoringly. "I—"

"Even if the dead are fated to die. And you are far too insignificant to overturn the reality of life and death."

The wind whistled around them, a scraping and screeching sound that made Niklas' ears numb. He stared at her, bewildered and horrified before he stumbled forward, slowly reaching to grab her retreating dress that billowed before him.

"What do you mean?" he gasped as she lightly jumped back, laughing loudly.

"What do I mean? Why, that the fool you hopelessly wish to save, can not live! Even if you kill all his enemies, even if you somehow teach him how to love himself! His lifespan is simply destined for death!"

"An ability with waning control. Immense fear and hatred towards himself. He is simply a perfect specimen to become a Distortion!"

She danced, twirling underneath the skeletal branches that curved and twisted around her, moonlight streaming from their bare branches. Niklas' azure eyes remained frozen in horror.

Delighted, she winked at him. "The most fascinating thing is that, had all of you not made the choices that you did, he would've had many more years to live. What a dilemma! Seeking to save when you've all cursed him instead! Oh, pitiful fools!"

"Then," he sucked in a breath, grasping onto the fraying lines of sanity. "What do I have to do? You know, don't you?"

His voice cracked.

"He's barely lived—he lived one year and we only just found him again."

The woman paused, lightly balancing on a protruding root at the tip of one toe. Her head slowly turned towards him and tilted curiously. "I can offer one solution, youngling. Perhaps, as I cheated death, I can give him ten years. Ten more than he is destined for."

"Tell me!" Niklas exclaimed immediately, scrambling forth. His brown hair was mused around him, wild and chaotic. "Please. What do I have to do?"

There was a light, eerie hum that seemed to pulse in the space around them. Then, she swept her hands in an arc across the air and when her hand lowered, a scaled blade rested in her palm.

Her smile was ecstatic and intrigued. "I simply need to obtain ten years of life to give him. See, dear, this is a blade carved of my scales. And our scales are rather useful, serving all sorts of purposes that humans can barely imagine when they dissect our kind."

The blade gleamed sharply under the moonlight, an unyielding and untainted white. "One graze and it ensures unbearable agony. One stab," her bony finger pointed at his chest where underneath, his heart pulsed rapidly. "And perhaps it can reap your life."

"In ancient hands of wisdom, perhaps the years it steals can be controlled." She clapped her hands together, twirling. Her body continued to shrink and expand, flickering between young and old. "All these possibilities! And no guarantees save for his demise!"

Standing before Niklas, she raised the curved point to his chest, her grin malicious. It easily sliced through the fabric, hovering against his skin. "Now. Your answer, dear?"

The dragon had a particular penchant for cowards.

She loved watching the despair fill their faces when she foretold their destiny, crushing all hopes and dreams. She loved their conflict at her proposals, their hesitation, their hideous self-preserving natures.

Thus she waited, for his eyes to drop to the blade slowly piercing his chest in horror, scrambling back as his body reacted honestly.

Honestly to the knowledge that he could not risk death for his sworn enemy.

Instead of horror, the cerulean gaze dropped and flicked up again. Then, he smiled. "Dear dragon lady, I've acquired quite some talent at reading others."

His hand reached out carefully, gently hovering around the blade.

"Allow me to tell you something about myself too. I really do love annoying and betraying people's hopeful expectations."

In the art of pissing people off, Niklas Astors was a master.

He grasped the glided edge and plunged it straight into his chest.

The dragon's relaxed expression contorted into horror and Niklas laughed, blood dribbling from his mouth. "Would you..." He coughed, pain blooming in his body like he'd never felt before. "Look at that! I'm guessing you're not used to having that expression on your face?"

"Have you no hesitation?" snapped the elder as he groaned, wrangled gasps choking out of him. "For the trickery that may lie in my words, for the pain you must bear? For the life of yours, shortened to prolong your enemy's?"

Niklas laughed hoarsely, clutching his chest he was oddly not bleeding, despite feeling as if he were being drained of blood. But save for the dribble fleeing his mouth, the sword remained plunged in his chest without a mess.

It was entirely obscure and horrifying that Niklas laughed again.

"You have one thing wrong," he rasped before the pain splintered his body and he tumbled sideways. "He isn't my enemy."

"He's my dumb little brother."

———xxx———

Lukiyo says,

Regarding the volumes, volume 4 might be omitted and combined into this one because things are progressing in a different pathway than I originally imagined, but I also don't want to drag it out for the sake of another volume! We'll see, everything is undetermined.

What is for sure is that the end approaches.

Also, look at that. Kaden's seriously collecting brothers left and right like pokemon (what skill!) if you ever read anything I write, you will notice they all have brothers. It's just a must. A sibling of some kind.

After this novel, I may go into seclusion for a little or long while, I haven't considered it yet. After all, this hasn't ended. I've been writing for almost three years, posting almost every week, twice or thrice. I am nothing without words and writing, but I've been thinking a lot. Maybe I'll read a lot more (I've been slacking the past year) or maybe I'll write something to self-publish, or maybe I'll do nothing at all.

It's very obscure and strange to think of the future.

Just a penny of thoughts! All the appreciation and love to you all, today, tomorrow and forever. May all the happiness and wishes come your way. (I'm replying to stuff tomorrow, semester is ending and everything I haven't done is due ahhhhh!) See you on Sunday ^^