God Bones

Chapter 23: A Tale of Two Brothers

Finding a window to talk to the professors was extremely difficult. I'd promised Thea I'd be back within a week and it had already been five days. Time was running out and I had no doubt she would do good on her threat and tell Rhys about me.

Fortunately, not once had I seen Rhys after he caught me snooping in the gardens and I was beginning to feel safe again.

The main problem was that I was getting too much of Arion's attention these days. He would randomly show up when I was in the library, kiss me into a puddle of hormones and mush and then leave. While I relished his advances, it was really difficult to get a window to talk to the professors without worrying about him showing up out of the blue.

I nearly slipped a note under the door asking the professors for a few more days, when I found a window. I stayed at the library for most of the day, only emerging to eat and sleep. I'd taken a look at the papers Rhys gave me to see if I could find anything about the history of the skeleton, but no dice.

The brothers, Tyr and Ionas had tried to sell the bones for decades with no luck. I think back then it did look fake to anyone who was not a professional. Without carbon dating and mass spectrometry, it would be very difficult to verify its origins.

I held the photo, The Lovers, in my hand. The quality was so crappy, I couldn't tell which one was in the library and which one was the one I was supposed to find. I couldn't even tell the genders apart, and I've seen my fair share of skeletons in my paleontology classes.

Ionas's diary was interesting to read. It was also unnerving.

Turns out his brother, Tyr was an opium addict, hooked on to the drug since his days as a soldier in the trenches, and though Ionas wanted to sell the skeleton as soon as he could, Tyr was convinced it was no normal skeleton.

Tyr actually mentioned they gave off energies. They had magic. Ionas seemed to have written it off as a hallucination caused by his drug use but I knew exactly what Tyr was talking about. Strangely, only that rib held energy that I could actually sense. I felt nothing from the other bones.

But I digress.

Tyr eventually fought with his brother and stole one of the skeletons from him, telling Ionas it should not be sold. Ionas now seemed to believe the skeleton possessed magic and decided he would kill his brother to obtain the second skeleton. Ionas's thoughts were starting to feel scattered and it was getting painful to read.

Towards the end of the diary, sentences were left unfinished, sometimes the sentences seemed complete but it was all gibberish. The writing was getting more and more disorganized until the alphabets only barely resembled English. Sentences were written over other sentences, which eventually turned into scribbles.

I could just about make out lines in which he blamed the bones for his nightmares and misfortunes, the nightmares so bad, he was afraid to sleep. Tyr returned to care for him, bringing the second skeleton along which seemed to have sent him over the edge. Ionas was terrified now that both the skeletons were under his roof.

Paragraphs and paragraphs about how Tyr was plotting his death, conspiring with the skeletons to kill him. He vowed that he would destroy the bones forever and murder his brother because Tyr had become a vessel for evil. Then there were no more sentences, just drawings and scribbles in the margin. Abstract shapes that made no sense, drawn over and over again.

By the time I was done reading the diary, my head was hurting trying to read Ionas's handwriting and making sense of his words. I flipped over to the next page, and I don't know if I was relieved or upset that it was blank.

I looked at the photograph again. All the joints were still intact, for both the skeletons, and no bones were missing from what I could tell. The skeleton in the library was in a really bad condition compared to the photo.