‘I’m bleeding, brother. There is pain.’He stared down at his fingers and rubbed them against each other, teasing the cut open further until his blood flowed freely.
‘I smell it.’Galan lifted his head and leaned over Sundamar’s hand, awestruck, knowing what they saw could only belifeforce.
Galan took his bloody hand between his own and bowed his face over the palm, running his pointed nose through the sanguine. Sundamar shivered, experiencing a sensation he didn’t know what to call.
And when his brother licked the blood from his wound, they both let loose a groan.‘I feel your... exhilaration. Your blood tastes good.’
‘I don’t know what I feel,’Sundamar admitted, overwhelmed.‘Exhilaration is not what I would call it.’
‘You are the Creator’s first. It is known. You’ll feel him before I do, before our other brother does.’
‘Yes.’He would.
Galan drew back with lips clean as day. Sundamar looked down at his hand and found the blood gone, the cut healed. He flipped his hand over and inspected it while Galan watched him. It was as if the pain, the lifeforce, was an illusion all along. A dirty trick.
He stiffened and pulled out his broadsword. Galan followed suit and lengthened his wings, hardening his feathers back into daggers.
‘What do you sense?’
Sundamar gritted his teeth.‘My pain is gone and so is the blood. We’ve been tricked, it’s an illusion.’He felt it in his bones. Even now, the flood of emotions from minutes ago ebbed.
‘Then it is a grand illusion. One we’ve never faced. It could be Psion, but we haven’t seen their kind in ages. Not since Lusheenn. Or the Shadowed, but it is daylight and they have no power here in the sunlight.’A brilliant ray of light hit the giant spherical orb at the center of their throne room, cascading rainbows all around them. Sundamar feasted on the power flowing through him in beautiful bursts. He and Galan ate the light, absorbing it before his brother continued.‘I don’t know... this power, this... feels too pure to be a trick.’
Sundamar turned away. “Then it is a trick of the light,” he said aloud. Galan fluttered his wings and the cool breeze from their flaps hit his back.
“I’ll find Quist.”
“Don’t bother. He’ll only join us by choice. He’s evaded us for centuries, finding him is easy, catching him is another matter...”
“He would have felt the Creator’s presence as well.”
Sundamar shook his head and looked back out over the lush and wild world that the Divine of Light had given them. It was beautiful but empty, and had been when Lusheenn had vanished, along with the other Creators who’d invaded Sonhadra.
That final day replayed in his head every hour, those last few moments when his city and that of Noon and Middling lost its laughter. The day when all the joy faded.
“Joy,” he said aloud.
“What about it?” Galan stepped up to his side and flanked them with his wings. They surveyed the land and the light companionably.
“I... feel it.”
Sun streams blasted through the top of the throne room, through the giant diamond that always caught the light. Galan moaned at his side. “It cannot be a trick,” he said through husky breaths.
Sundamar eyed his brother in a new way. The ruggedly young look of him, so similar yet so different than his own. Galan was the first aerial warrior created by Lusheenn and the second to Sundamar himself.
But Sundamar, with all of his perfect imperfections, was the first light valos brought forth by their Creator. He was made in Lusheenn’s image, golden and strong, created from the sun. It was how he got his name.
He continued to watch his brother and second. The joy, the worry, and all else he felt was pushed aside and replaced by something else... thatelsehad no name. He had felt it once before, he knew, whenever he was within Lusheenn’s presence. But like the long millennia of stasis, his memory of that time had grown dim.
These feelings...Galan looked back at him, his eyes smoldering and his bronze wings reflective. They perused each other in silence.
“I don’t feel joy,” Galan spat out. “Looking at you, Sun, is like looking at the Divine. It feels good but it doesn’t feel like joy.”
Sundamar broke their connection and turned away. “Only because I resemble Lusheenn. I’m not him.”
“You’re better than him. You’re still here.”
Heresy.Although Sundamar felt the same way. “If he is truly back, it’s best you keep those thoughts to yourself.”
