Center of Attention

Rivalry Between Siblings

     You're getting slower, your hands are becoming numb. The black cracks that are appearing in your fingers are all because you can't catch a break to heal yourself, and there's no way to stop the Enforcers from coming. All of them were innocent. They didn't know anything of Dittas. However, if I didn't keep up I would fall to their bullets and blades. It was so hard to concentrate. It was so hard to keep the cracks from taking me over.
     "Give up!" one of them shouted at me, hands coiling around my throat.
     No. I couldn't. If I let this continue, let others be manipulated the way I was, the world would fall apart before our eyes. I had to stop the genocide of the humanoids. That was my job.
     "Norgaim!" I shouted. Something akin to wind had pushed him back, but it hurt me worse than it did him. I dropped to my knees, clutching my chest as I coughed. There was a part of me that knew my limits. Of course I did. Despite my ability to used black magic, I wasn't strong enough to know how to use it properly. If humanoids were banned from a lot of things, black magic was banned from everything. Blood spewed from inside the edges of my mouth onto the cracking asphalt. My fingers were now completely covered in a black substance that stuck to the white pages of my book. Ugh... Those eyes were starting to regurgitate.
      "Give up," one of the Enforcers had stated to me, kicking me with their heel to keel me over onto my stomach. "You're clearly losing."
      I coughed. "That's what you think. I have to help Firstien..."
     "Why? What's the point? You're not strong enough, you idiot black magic user!"
     "I had plans... to kill him..." I got up just enough to be on my knees. The blood ran as quickly as water. "Fucking Hell, I think everyone wanted to kill him because he was the Center. Is the Center. Even if we all have different ways to save the world, it all boiled down to killing Firstien Istinti. He won't die. I won't let him!"
     "So you're going to kill yourself? A Center isn't worth the sacrifice."
     I knew that. Fuck the fact that our world runs on a person to keep it together. "You're right." I drifted to my feet until I was steady enough to stand up tall. The black gunk dripped endlessly from my burning fingers. "But my father is worth every single dying breath. Ollai visigar nattaboi!"

     "Stop!" Smallik peeled me away from his collar, and pushed me against the wall. My back slammed against it and ricocheted just enough for me to drop spit from my mouth. "You don't know who you're dealing with here!"
     I glowered at the man. "A relative. Someone with an attitude."
     "He's my brother, the fucking reason why anything like this even happened." Smallik leaned in real close to my ear. "He's a Center. He stole that title from a Fae back in 4025. If you kill him, the world will fall apart just the same as if it would if you died."
     Sivill. Sivill was a Center. "And who is he to you?" I asked in a low voice. Sivill just seemed amused by our suddenly hushed voices.
     "My brother. My crazy half-brother. You can't stop him even if you wanted to."
     "So, when we first met..."
     "Yes, I was pretending to be him. Not the point." He dragged me back until I was standing right next to him. "You can't fight him."
     Can't? Or was he just afraid that I'd win enough to punch him right where his heart would stop?
     "Sivill," I called out to him. He lifted his head with a creeping grin stretched across his face.
     He smiled. "I knew your wife, believe it or not," he said.
      I gulped down all of my anger. There was no reason to get mad because I knew that he was doing it purely out of spite to get me to hurt him. He was that type.
      There was a part of him that grimaced a little when I didn't react. "She was quite the beauty. Had unnaturally blond hair with a pink tinge wrapped around it when it shined in the morning sun. It smelled of peaches, too. It was strong, especially when you had gotten close enough to press it against your cheek," he teased. Smallik gripped my arm, which was tensing up from everything he was saying. He continued on. "She had a sweet voice that rang through the air like a misty rain that had started hours ago. I remember her voice when she would tell me things. Things about you."
     I know the one thing that Mavara hated most. Violence. For the longest time, she would tell me to take on a much more peaceful career, saying that stopping violence is just as scary as being violent. There were nights when I would come home and barely say anything to her because of how... wronged I felt about what happened at work. I should have listened to her. God, I should have listened to her so many times, but I didn't because I thought about what I wanted first.
     This wasn't making me mad at him. I was getting mad at myself.
     "What you're doing? It won't work," I sighed, pulling away from Smallik with one slip of the wrist. I approached Sivill. "Mavara doesn't condone violence, not even in death. Thank you for reminding me that she had beautifully blond hair, that her green eyes had shined a light so bright into my soul that her death was the deepest darkness I had ever felt. Thank you for reminding me that my bedroom smells like her after fourteen years of her being gone, peaches stagnant in the air because I kept every bottle of perfume she ever gave me. I'm sure she knew you. She knew a lot of people, loved a lot of people." I stood taller than him, and I stared deeply into his eyes. "Using my family to intimidate me won't work. Using my friends as bait won't work. Don't you understand? The only way you're going to beat me is to take on me. But you can't do that can you?"
     He slipped away from my eyes to stare at a plank on the floor. My fingers wrapped around his grey wrist until I was hold him up by it to see me eye level. "We'll take the world with us if we fight, and no one wants that."
     Actually, everyone wanted that, but there was always the question that was hanging in the back of our minds. We didn't know what death was going to feel like until we experienced it at the end of our lives. The fear that was in his eyes- it was that. Sivill, just like Smallik had done, was hiding behind the fear of death.
     "You kill me, all of the Dittas will be after you," he spat.
     "I don't have to kill you, and I can't anyway. I just have to beat you."
      His fist landed against my cheek, taking me off guard as I lost my footing. I fell back into Smallik for a minute, but it wasn't long until I was pounding on him. My fist collided with his cheek in the same way he did to me. He was younger, so his recovery was much better than mine. Damn it. Damn it all to Hell, I really didn't want to do this. I knew that I started it, but my back was starting to hurt, and I was probably going to be the one to keel over.
     My fist collided again, much slower than the first. Blood started gushing from the top of his brow, but he didn't stop. He laid one on my chest. I stumbled and fell back into the wall. The wood started to shake, and I gripped a plank to keep myself steady. It didn't work. The plank chipped away from the wall, and the floor started to break apart. It stopped our fight as the floor started to fall apart, and Smallik gripped me by my arms as his wings took flight. The blackening planks all fell below onto the staircase. It also started to fall apart as the weight landed on it.
I heard a whisper in my ear. "Divine intervention."
     That sounded like... Giartt. I whipped my head around to see if I could find him. There was no sign of his stagnant pink skin, just the sound of his voice laid hot upon my ear as his breath smelled of mint. Smallik and Sivill both didn't seem to notice. They just floated above the crackling mess with their black eyes shining the reflection of the mess underneath. Scary. Why would Giartt get involved in my fight? Did he not want me to hurt Sivill?
     "Shit. Firstien! Firstien, I need you immediately!"
     I slowly turned my head. It sounded almost like Mavara for a minute until I saw the blue skin that had etched up the staircase. Viobin had something in her arms as she struggled on the last of the stable steps. Whatever it was happened to be too heavy for her to fly with. Smallik slowly descended downwards with the struggle of his own wings in flight as he held me, slowly taking me towards her without a moment's rest to look back. Sivill just floated there, confusion on his face as we were there helping each other.
     I noticed what she was holding almost immediately. His body was covered in some black goo, covering everything but circles around his eyes. They were wide open, carbon copies of my own as he seemed motionless. Despite the disgusting black substance covering his skin, I pressed an ear to his chest. His breaths were shallow. Very shallow.
     "What happened?" I asked Viobin.
     She gripped the black book that Ogillitiy had always held. It was cracking around the edges.           "Black magic," she said. "He overused his powers. He was being attacked, didn't have the time to recover."
     "We have to help him! If nothing works, we can give him the immortality thing that you gave us!"
     She shook her head. "That's not possible. I don't have the resources that I had back in 4025. Everything I had is depleted."
    Ogillitiy grimaced with every movement. I gulped. "What can we do? He's covered in this, and that doesn't account for what's happening underneath all of that. If there's nothing we can do-"
     The fluttering of wings from above suddenly came down next to us. It was Sivill, his eyes glowing as he stared at Ogillitiy's struggling body.
     Sivill cleared his throat. "I... may have a way to fix him."