Dusk of the Realm

7

It took a long while for him to become aware of the voices after she vanished. There was one voice in particular that overwhelmed the rest, that sucked him further into the abyss growing inside of him.

It's your fault. You're hurting me. I will never forgive you.

"Sir! Sir, snap out of it," Birches beseeched him, but he seemed to speak as if from a great distance, his grip on Tarin's shoulder wholly insignificant.

"Do you think he's losing his mind?" Dallin whispered to someone, sounding uneasy. He clearly did not realize that Tarin could hear him, which made the general wonder how long he had been unresponsive to their calls.

"He saw something, obviously," came a female voice, and he was fairly sure it was Vice; her voice was slightly deeper than her sister's.

"There was nothing there–" Alcern began heatedly, but Vice cut him off.

"Nothing there that you could see. Really, Alcern. It does you no credit to be this dense."

There was a brief silence, and Tarin felt the weight leave his shoulder. Birches' attention must have been drawn into their little circle of conversation. Tarin briefly considered taking off – he knew that he could outrun even his elites and make it to the base before they had even a hope of stopping him. But he had a feeling that they were still watching him, waiting for any change in his condition.

"You think the princess was really there?" asked Alcern, and though the question was full of doubt, he asked it in a hushed tone that suggested he was not entirely convinced of the truth of his previous assertion.

Vex was the one to speak this time, her voice a few pitches higher than her sister's. Vex did not speak very often, but Tarin had always thought that whenever she did, her voice commanded attention with its clarity like the ringing of a bell. "Like Vice said, something was there. Pretty powerful magic was at work, and if it had been harnessed in a phantom spell, it would explain both the energy Vice and I were sensing, and the reason the general was so convinced someone had come to see him."

"But..." Alcern sounded frustrated. "I don't understand. Was the princess just here talking to him, or not?"

Another pause, and Tarin's mind filled with an image of the twins glancing at each other. It was something they often did, one of those actions that reminded people around them that they were, indeed, twins: a bond since birth that could not be broken. A bond different than the one he had with Serena, but magical in its own way, he was sure.

"We don't think so," Vice replied, slipping into the plural, another common habit with the twins. "I mean, look at the state of him. Far be it from me to assume anything about his relationship with the princess, but from what I have heard and seen for myself, I cannot imagine any circumstance in which the princess would hurt him like this."

"But he seemed awfully sure that he was speaking to the princess," Birches chimed in. "It seems to me like the general would be a tough one to deceive."

Vex responded with a quiet sorrow that nevertheless seemed to permeate the whole space and drag everyone's auras into distress. "Anyone can break if hit in the right places."

Tarin could not listen to it anymore; could not hear whatever his elites were going to respond to that statement. The statement that terrified him now that he realized how true it was, now that he felt like he was indeed beginning to lose his mind, now that he felt like his heart was made of delicate china rather than the steel he had always imagined and hoped for. Never in his life had he felt so fragile, and his newfound weakness was not a thought that he enjoyed giving any leeway.