Eternal Sins

•Chapter Eighteen•

~A few months ago~

He had spent his whole life bleeding. Skin, teeth, breath.. wasted. How happy were the good moments to justify all of his pain? How long could he wander until he forgot every small pebble that blanketed him from the waves of his torment? He couldn't understand it, not here. Not when his world was frozen over, glazed in agony, candle wicks smoking in his chest. He'd raise to meet it, the remembering. The slap of fate that told him, there was never a chance. He had not yet learned to be grateful, his bones were still raw, bowed with the weight.

She was gone. She wasn't here, she wasn't home, she was somewhere he could not reach no matter how far he pushed himself. No matter how much blood he spilled from hands, his face, his chest, it wasn't enough to get there.

A cycle of darkness, Cedris befell.

The wave of a man only vibrating in chunked bursts through this inbetween realm, the air crowded, minds busy. Chatter roared to low hums as he passed the small jagged tears that floated. Oddly shaped, they littered the ground, the air, the sky, all doorways into other places and people. Ripples in time, extensions of fate and it's records.

He had once again wondered too far, lost in his mourning.

There were moments he needed rest, falling to his knees in the path lit by the jagged pieces and his lantern, resting it aside his knees as he heeled over. His face cresting into the woven branches of the ground, tears mingling into the roots.

She was dead. They were dead.

It was a moment similar, with his body caving over into a breath of defeat, that he heard it. The distorted buzzing, angry within, wrong, like him. He dimmed his lantern, focusing.

When he caught it by ear, he was drawn to it. Finding the source, he found the illuminated piece next to a sprouted trunk. It was glitching, blinking in and out, fading. Darkness had interfered here, just as it had on his own door. He had seen it, the way the pool to his world appeared less bright than the others. It flickered and groaned, like a gasping damp flame.

The doors were not supposed to be like this, not any others he had seen. Only this one and his own.

With precaution he let his finger tip graze it causing a rainbow of ripples across the top, a still bath disrupted and split.

His eyes burned in their sockets as images played before him.

Another Eva.

He had known they would exist, not that they were her. No, definitely not. But it was still aching to see for a moment, an Eva with her family around her, dressed as farm commoners. Then a dark shadow crowded the slit of water, focusing in on a matured version of this Eva on Samhain. Darker the water became, as dark veins protruded from her skin, eyes blackened over.

Sparks filled his brain. She was of legacy. This world had chosen Eva as the Lucia's lines White Witch. Quickly, he saw why.

A king's crown atop a sorceror, not a White Witch. The aura around the man gave it away, the angry red lightening that circled his skin. This Eva was tied to a king, a king unworthy of her. And it was clear they were far from cordial, if not hating each other half the time.

It was when Cedris saw this King's soul trapped in a crystal around Eva's neck, the hairs on the back of Cedris' neck stood. There were imprints left, murky manipulations fabricated and woven into the story before him. Fate had been altered, tampered with, by someone and it had left behind a disgusting sludge.

It was then he saw her on the battlefield, eyes empty, soul leaking from her palms, that Cedris felt compelled.

She was strong, aggressive and sure of her abilities. That was what he needed.