Souls of Naradan

Chapter 2
Know Your Roots

If he hadn’t asked Beast to cover up for him then the giant wouldn’t have ended up a roasted carcass right at the foot of his tent door. The smell of his death still lingered even when the clean up crew swept away the sizzling parts. Cyan’s guilt did not let up, however he knew he had to move on and clean up before Rex came back.

It hurt to move. His sides were bruised and weeping red where excited claws raked against him earlier. His neck hurt where the chain had tugged on aggressively and his ass was a throbbing mess of white and raw red. The clan’s dragon never left him feeling this broken from the many times they ‘played’ together. But Cyan had encountered such abuse before with others, and though he hated to admit it he was used to the treatment.

His eyes felt tight and worn from the sheer amount of tears that had poured from them. Still, he forced them to look across the room and to the dark corner where he had left his damp clothes. He closed his eyes momentarily, taking in a deep breath and forced his way over. Slowly he crawled toward the wide basin settled beside stacks of towels and a few buckets filled with ice water. Shaky hands took hold of one of the buckets and tipped it over to fill the basin halfway. The child didn’t even bother to stand up since he was trembling so much. Once the water was filled halfway Cyan took one of the towels and placed it into the water. He used this as a wash rag and cleansed the sweat and blood from his aching body. It felt so cold, and it stung as he washed against the scratched flesh. But Cyan tried not to think about all these mortal feelings that threaten to slow him down.

“Brother…” a soft voice echoed behind him, and as he turned he saw a pink light wavering by the tent’s entrance. Cyan smiled softly at the light and cocked his head to the side.

“Come in Droga, don’t stand out there. The new guard might not be as nice as Beast.” He whispered and went back to rubbing the cloth against himself.

As the flickering light approached closer to Cyan it took a more humanoid form of a child hiding in a leather cloak. Droga sat himself next to Cyan and watched as his brother struggled to clean his roughly abused backside. A soft echoic whimper left the child and shook his head.

“Stop calling me that name, Silas. It’s Dray. We don’t have to use aliases anymore.”

The tanned youth stiffened suddenly and eyed around the room. He let out a small hiss and narrowed his eyes at the phantom beside him. The twins were children who carried out false names in the hostile world they were brought to; a place where they were considered one amongst the waste. However their true names must never be spoken. It was too precious to utter in the womb of corruption, and it was the only thing they were able to truly protect and keep hidden from society’s demons. Silas did not want their true names to be known to anyone.

“Don’t say that. Someone can hear!” Silas whispered sharply to his brother.

Dray shook his head. “I’m dead. I died two years ago; you saw it with your own eyes. No one can touch me. So can you please stop doing this? Please stop hurting yourself over me. Stop thinking other living things can hurt me or hear me. I can run the errands for you. I can find Engel for you—”

“Stop that.” Silas whispered out and turned to look away from his sibling. The dark shadows of Dray’s face prevented Silas from directly seeing his twin, but he still remembered clearly how it looked like and how pale it was when he found him laying in the middle of the laboratory floor.

The image of his dying brother disturbed Silas. Rage and sorrow broke his mind that day which ultimately left him without a human master and homeless. “You might have died two years ago,” Silas whispered as he dropped his wash rag and squeezed the water out of his cloths into the basin, “but you are still a target to the other spirits who can’t find their way. You are very much alive Dr—Dray… so don’t think I am doing all this with out purpose.”

“Silas! That is not the point. I am a spirit, and I can walk around undetected to the surface. I can find Engel a lot quicker. I want you to stop with this big sacrifice business and let me go on alone and help you out.” Dray growled out, restless of always being protected over, and determined to help out somehow.

“How? You are as clueless as I am and besides, what if you get caught by another spirit? I won’t be able to live with myself if I lose you again Dray. I lost you once when you were alive, and I won’t let it happen again, do you understand? I will lose the last of my sanity if that happened…” he hung his head low as he felt his hurt bottom. It was pretty clean now, and gradually the muscles were contracting into its normal state. He then eyed his brother with the corner of his eye who stared over wordlessly. Facial expressions weren’t needed to know that Dray was irritated by all this.

“Just because mom died didn’t mean you had to take her place.” Dray hissed out.

“There was no other way. I did what I had to do in order to keep us alive… and I failed. I let you die, and I am still alive living as a whore for some god damned pedophile.” Silas retorted darkly and slammed the clothes down on the floor, nearly knocking over the basin.

Dray flinched at this sudden outburst of anger Silas displayed and stared dumbly at the way the other’s breathing became laborious. Silas was shaking before he forced himself to hold his breath to prevent the sobs from coming back.

“Silas…. don’t cry.” The phantom timidly reached his hand out with uncertainty to comfort his elder brother.

“It’s my fault everything went to shit. And now Beast is dead ‘cuz of me. You died ‘cuz of me. Mom died ‘cuz of me. Master—”

“That’s not true Silas. You know that is not true.” Dray clung onto the shaking body allowing the warm glow of his aura to seep into Silas’s cold and trembling flesh. Did Silas forget who was at fault for all that has happened to them? Dray franticly nuzzled his face against the damp wet locks of brown and gold on his sibling’s head. Although Dray could not feel the wetness he felt the physical body well enough to know he was holding his brother.

“Mom died because of the bad man who broke into our home. Don’t you remember, Silas? Then the bad man gave us to Master.. Master’s lady friend didn’t like us because Master spent so much time examining us and he liked you. She was mad because Master preferred to run tests with you than be with her.”

Silas cringed at the memories. Their master, who was a professor at some local university, was a very nice man but was also very secretive. The experiments he ran on Silas since he got him never seemed to have a purpose, but the stacks of papers became thicker, and Silas’s soul seeing abnormalities intensified with each analysis. During some of these tests Silas witnessed seeing a beautiful place in his dreams. It was a land filled with nature and magic. Mystical creatures scurried about every corner, and spirits danced and ran across the colorful vegetations that covered every green nook in the forest. The sun was made of emerald and gold and for some reason Silas felt as though he knew this place. He had been here before…

But the professor never made things clear for Silas and constantly told him ‘ignorance is bliss.’ So the child didn’t question it and decided that this strange place only existed in his unconscious mind. But the professor was obsessed with Silas and his dream world, and spent just about every moment he could studying him, or researching something related to the demon child. The more knowledge the professor took in the happier he was, and Silas was happy when the man in the white lab coat was happy.

However, this happiness did not flow into others. In fact it made the professor’s fiancé infinitely jealous. Because of this and her common demon beliefs, she was convinced that Silas had caste a love spell on the professor. In consequence, Dray suffered punishment and in turn affected Silas until the boy couldn’t take it and begged for the woman’s mercy over his brother. Willingly Silas allowed the woman to abuse him however she saw fit in exchange for his brother’s well-being.

Most of her wishes consisted of him sleeping with various men to ‘wane the lust’ for her husband to be. This eventually grew into her own small business and gained profit off of it whenever the professor had to travel overseas to visit his friend and assistant, Engel Nephele. It was because of that woman he discovered other talents and abilities children his age shouldn’t have. The woman was a sick creature..

“Dray…”

“She couldn’t hurt you, so she hurt me instead, because I was the rejected specimen. But even with your sacrifices she still hurt us. And when Master left to see Nephele you cried so much because of what she always did when he left. But the last time he left he didn’t come back. Her beatings became more frequent and harsher… it got so bad that—”

“She stabbed you to death, and I took her life.” Silas cut off his brother. “For a demon to take human life means immediate death. For a demon to exist without a master present, or without some kind of legal permission means… immediate death.”

“But you did it because you had to.” Dray bowed his head down. “I just didn’t like seeing you suffering the way you did for me. I begged for her to stop being so mean, and then threatened her that I’ll tell on Master about the bad things she did. The thing is, we were specimens. We were ‘freaks’ and freaks have no rights in the real world. Even if Master knew about all the bad things she did to us, and even if he kicked her out, she would report us to the Golden Lion and we would be taken away from him…” Dray’s grip around Silas softened. “I just… wish I could do something instead of sitting and doing nothing but watch the same bad stuff happen to you...” Dray muttered out.

Silas smiled softly and reached over to grab onto the spirit’s small hand and gave it a light squeeze. “I am still alive because of you.” He whispered quietly. “That’s why I can’t separate myself from you… and that is why we have to find Engel together. When we find Engel, we don’t have to run anymore and none of us will continue suffering.”

“Silas…”

“I know, I am still a bit crazy from all this stuff. I can’t tell what’s real or what’s not sometimes, but I know you are real. When they hurt me so bad that I couldn’t move you saved me. When I get these wounds you come and heal them with your magic.”

Dray watched as his brother moved himself away and laid the clothes down on the floor to dry. Silas quietly picked up a small black box he kept beside the cleaning supplies bin and walked to the coffee table. It still hurt to move but Silas didn’t make a complaint about it. He kneeled beside the table and picked up a clean silver razor from the box. The blade glimmered against the green and yellow light the lamp gave out as he examined it.

“Droga, help me make roots. My body hurts, and I need it to calm the pain.” Silas whispered and grabbed onto the lamp. He moved the object close to his arm so that the light flooded down on him, making his arm look like some kind of radiant branch beneath the light.

“It’s Dray, Silas.”

“Sorry, habits are hard to kill.”

A weak smile formed on both of their lips before the spirit faded and reappeared beside its brother. The razor brushed lightly against the smooth underbelly of Silas’s tanned arm when suddenly Silas pushed the blade inward and sunk through the tissue. Amazingly, no blood dripped as he cut his way through; however, the purple jelly of its meat could be seen as his fingers widened the wound. When Silas did this, the spirit removed its gloves from small hands and exposed the monstrous looking claws it had been hiding. Even as a phantom Dray’s deformity stayed with him.

Silas watched his brother’s hands with awe when Dray caressed the stretched out flesh and felt within the wound.

“Why do you still hide yourself?” Silas asked as Dray rubbed the wound, causing the veins to emit a blue and green glow from within.

“I feel weird not hiding myself. For a long time I used a cloak. I just feel real naked without it.”

“Even if no one else sees you?”

“Other spirits see me,” Dray corrected. “But I stay out of their way. Speaking of spirits, I saw Beast earlier.”

Immediately Silas looked away when the topic was touched. The guilt was still there, but Dray did not stop speaking as he worked on Silas’s arm.

“He kept looking at his body for a long time before it was taken away. It sort of reminded me of when I died. It was a little hard to accept.” The wound was now shining brightly and thin smoky branches slithered out. Dray allowed for the threads to coil around his fingers.

“The new guard, Zeeve, turns out to be his little brother. He looks a lot like him only smaller and not as sick. Anyway, Beast kept trying to talk to him, but Zeeve can’t hear him. I had to tell him that the living can only communicate with the dead through dreams… or if the person was gifted to see beings of the other realm.”

Silas then looked over at the tent entrance and wondered if perhaps Zeeve blamed his brother’s death on him. Or if Beast was angry at what happened.

“Where is he now?” he asked softly.

“He left, like the others in search for the origin.”

“A place where the souls go after the body dies.” Silas muttered out and looked over at his little brother with a sad expression on his face. If he weren’t so attached to his brother, then perhaps Dray would have found the origin and rest peacefully with the others. “Do you want to go there too?” he asked.

Dray smiled down at the leafy threads that clutched hard on his small fingers. “When we die we immediately are overwhelmed with a need to go to the origin. You kind of feel it calling you, but we don’t know where it is. More and more of us die, and more spirits wander around aimlessly. I mean, I do want to go to that place someday... But I don’t want to leave your side just yet. You need me.” Dray then grasped onto the thin branches that had taken a firm grip around his fingers and tugged on the translucent plant. The elder child clenched his teeth and watched as his wound widened and allowed a tiny bulb to pop out of him, along with tiny transparent roots.

The strange plant was then dropped on the table and turned into an opaque solid matter. The plant’s bulb was glowing gold with hair-like fibers propping out of its top. Beneath the plant, there were dark red roots which Silas grinned at. While Dray rubbed the throbbing wound closed, Silas used the razor with his free hand to chop the root away from the plant. He slipped the crimson root into his mouth and franticly chewed on it. A sweet tasting juice leaked from the roots making his tongue feel tingly and numb. The more he chewed the more the anesthetic liquid burst from the root and leaked down his throat. In no time the pain through out his body dulled out, but the world was becoming a blurry haze. He took the bulb on the table and placed it in the box where other bits of plants were being dried and kept in small baggies. Silas hid everything away after Dray patched up his arm with his magic and made his way toward the sheets on the floor.

Lazily, Silas dropped himself onto the filthy fabric and curled against it. The pain that once had a hold of him had reduced into a distant throb. His guilt was being replaced with a disorienting sensation due to the root he ate.

He didn’t bother to turn off the light as he pulled against one of the red sheets and hid beneath it. Although pain was fleeting the cold was stubborn and stayed with him. His feet felt like ice, as did his nose and hands.

“I’m going to be stuck in this tent for a while. Stupid Rex…” Silas grumbled while Dray sat himself right beside him.

“He wants to mark you, right?” Dray asked.

“Yeah...”

“But you aren’t going to let him, right?”

Silas nodded. “I don’t want to be part of this place. I don’t belong here. We have to find Engel, that way we can be with Master, and he can help me answer some questions...”

“Silas… we have been looking for him for two years, in so many towns… what if we don’t find him?”

“I’ll keep looking. We have to find him Dray… I want to be with him. I don’t care if he doesn’t answer my questions… I miss him so much..”

Dray sighed softly and laid down beside the body beneath the red satin sheet. “I miss him too… and Mama…” He watched as Silas’s hand slithered out and grabbed onto his clawed hand.

“I’ll try to dream about him and Mama for us.” Silas whispered. Dray couldn’t dream, because he couldn’t sleep. He was a spirit after all. But as a spirit, Dray was able to enter dreams, although he was a bit anxious by this. Silas’s dreams usually turned into nightmares revolving around the time he died, or when their mother was killed. Tonight Beast was killed and it was likely a nightmare would brew up in result to the misfortunate event. But even so, Dray only nodded and watched as his sibling closed his dark eyes that flickered emerald the moment his thick lashes laced together. Maybe Silas would be able to dream. The goodies they both created usually made Silas very relaxed and happy despite how depressing things were. Dray could only hope.

“Sweet dreams Silas.”