Erebos had always believed he and Rikyn were two sides of the same coin. No matter how many times someone flipped the metallic bits, they’d land on a smirking face, a glowering, somber son, an interchanging web of boyhood dreams and silly, jovial persistence. Either one would’ve granted a multitude of wishes, ambitions, and aspirations, and there’d be nothing to it – one day, they’d cast their spirits into regimes, into empires, into kingdoms and sovereigns, and become more than boys born from the Basin, stepping out of their parents’ shadows, invoking eldritch abominations and sacrificial arts. They would’ve allowed anyone else to become a means to an end, except one another.
 
The prince wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong, where they’d been so skewed and altered – perhaps when Rikyn had gone with his mother, down other lanes and paths, corridors and halls, and he’d stayed, strayed, within the icy chasms and the cavern lantern-lights, bearing witness to decaying, ruptured friends and ruthless calculations. They’d grown in separate branches, boughs reaching other eaves, roots unsettled and shifting to another patch of sun. He stared at his friend as he remarked about the world being pain (like Erebos didn’t know? Like he didn’t realize?), as he barked into the hollowed channels of the heated caves, as he finally noticed how much of Rikyn he’d truly lost. “But it doesn’t have to be,” he uttered, cool, persistent, furrowing his brows, layering all the cycles of vengeance he’d stored in his smoldering, seething lines, incapable of recognizing the truth in Rikyn’s statement. Eventually, he too would cause the realm to feel agony, misery, woes, and afflictions – because they’d dared to wound and scar what was his. The boy was too stubborn, too headstrong, too obstinate to comprehend the heavy, cumbersome oath of his brethren’s words, fighting against them even when he’d already delved too far into the assurance, even when all his moments of triumph were labeled and lacquered into conquering the immoral, the wretched, the goliaths and titans. Causing them pain was just another renewal of the cycle; sweet, vehement vengeance, toxic, vibrant indulgences – and he deigned to swallow every one.
 
The echoes were all bitter, surrounding him in a noxious fume, in a riotous act of calamity, so acrimony spit against his senses and tore along his frame, and he looked to his brother in audacity and impudence, bearing his boldness along the crackling plumes. His carefully constructed walls imploded around him, bearing a rotten, decrepit soul, eager for havoc, for requital, for revenge. “You haven’t made your own enemies?” Could Erebos’ rivals outnumber Rikyn’s? The notion was absurd, and he snorted at the assertion – the other boy had always been capable of riling and ravaging another. He was even doing it now, to him, a little cretin who fostered the composure of his father, the gallantry of his mother, on a daily basis.
 
Then, it came, like a wave of crumbling strength, disjointed and tired, fatigued and listless, languid and wasted: Is it worth fighting at all even if the winners lose? Frustration boiled in the boy’s mind, jaw dropping for a moment at the defeated layers swarming, bristling, scathing and scaling on the walls, across the molten backdrop. “Then why bother doing anything at all, Rikyn? Why don’t you just stand around and wait for the world to crumble around you?” Anger unsettled him, and he breathed, restless, agitated, irritated and exasperated by the way they’d clambered along. On a growl, on a brilliant, blistering opus (because those final words opened up a wound, opened up a layer of spite across his tongue, daring him to bleed, daring him to cry, daring him to reach across the void and shake the rancorous shell his friend resided within), he narrowed his eyes and hissed one more set of vocals. “You’re the last creature I ever thought would give up.”