Dear Ms Lady Demigod: Twelve Days To Doom

6 1 The Death of A Brother

Something changed after that spring morning. It was summer and the grass was the grass surrounding them as they laid the sheets up for drying in the sun. Sylvester threw some water on Nataniel's face and he ran, holding the lavenders in his arms. To Nataniel, it almost seemed that he could love something not monstrous. That he could plant white lavenders on snow. And he did. 

He slipped them down everything he could touch or reach. The willowing boughs, the table vases, the windows, the bed, into his hair and Sylvester looked at him working in the gardens. They squeezed their hands into the warm earth, his golden skin brushing against the pink leaflets, fragile spring, twittering, fleeting and flying away from constantly not its light, but darkness. Dark but light, warm hands and cold skin.

Nataniel watched him breathe as they slept on their lavender beds, in a lavender fever and watched his skin turn red in the salty air of the baltic sea. The fields of green gold seemed to stretch endlessly. And as the bedsheets flowed like rivers separating two bodies, he watched his eyes. It was a gentle smile. And the joys of summer seemed eternal. 

"Nataniel,"
He heard his name in the dark and opened his mystique blue eyes. It was cold, dark and dry. He saw a pair of shining blue eyes under the dark blue sea. He opened his eyes and that white face became clearer, it was Beth. He touched his face, "Beth?" And he got closer, "Beth, is that really you?"

Beth grabbed Nataniel's hand, "Make haste, no noise,"
Nataniel quietly walked out of the meadow of flowers that were beginning to wither under the cold. He left Sylvester laying on the dead flowers and the poison ivy. 

Beth, bare feet, ran through the warm, summer water, distorting all the water lilies growing in it. Nataniel, clasped in his grasp, ran after him. He felt the water turn cold and slowly freeze. All the flowers began withering and the fauna froze to death, "Wait, we are murdering everything," Nataniel stopped and Beth looked back at him, "Nataniel, I said make haste,"

Nataniel stooped down to look at the dead plants and animals, "We did this..."
"Nataniel, we have to run,"
Nataniel looked up and saw how the entire forest had frozen. All the little flowers were dead and so were the little insects and animals. He looked down at his freezing hands, "We are monsters,"
"Our existence isn't a subject of the question, Nataniel," Beth moved closer to him.

"But we end everything we touch," Nataniel turned towards him. And it was at that moment that he realised how tender Sylvester had made him, how warm and life-giving, "We are cold, destructive and monstrous beings,"
"We aren't, Nataniel. We are winter bearers. We are not monsters,"

"We are," Nataniel clutched his arms and scratched them as he moved away from Beth, "I want to be tender, virile and live-giving. I want to be a god,"
"But you're not a god, Nataniel!" Beth was losing patience with him.

"Neither am I a harbinger of destruction,"
"Nature is destruction! It is destruction that brings construction and regeneration. And that is beauty. And that is us,"
"No, that is you and the rest of your kind,"
"My kind?" Beth looked like he was holding back tears. They stood worlds apart and stared at each other like they weren't each other's world...When they were. 

"We are the only ones left, Nataniel. I came for you..."

"What? Where is everybody?" Nataniel asked.
"There is no everybody," Beth shook his head as his cold tears made his dry skin wet. He covered his face and fell to his knees, half-submerged in the freezing water, "He killed them all,"
Nataniel was surprised. All this time, he believed it to be a fire that took away his family. He believed it was an accident. He believed it to be fate's will or destiny's underplay to leave him forlorn and abandoned. But now, he took the narrative and swallowed it whole, who was it?