EREBOS (4) (Patreon)

(A/N: I swear I’ll work on my other stories now for a bit. 😂 Thank you guys SO much for supporting this story.  It really makes me so glad to see that you like/show excitement for some of my creepier, plot-heavy stories.  I enjoy being out of my rom-com element and practicing in other areas that I love! Thanks for the encouragement!)

The borderlands' education institute for young, adult Scelerati lies just a breath away from Adeline's institute for humans.  There's no swooping emblems or letters, no name for either.  The humans cross ways with Scelerati daily, under the notion that they are nearly side by side.

That something about that makes them falsely equal.

During the hours they're allotted in mere meters of each other, the humans' guards slip like their campuses aren't separated from danger by a sheer threshold of grass.  Deluded, seduced into a narrative — that they're somehow comrades to the Scelerati, though they don't speak, don't laugh, don't know more than what they're told about the human-esque creatures that haunt the barren grasslands.

It's been bred in them to accept it.  To admire the Scelerati and their status, their unmatched strength, elusive and cruel loveliness.  Because every step in a human's life seems to be circling the Scelerati — or being circled by them, there's no known reason for this.  It's unclear like much has always been.  There's no sudden shock or curiosity that gnaws.

This is what they know.

Noel doesn't wonder what the Scelerati learn of — or about.  He does, however, sometimes suspect the mirrored academy; he does question if it's for appearance or order and watches the black eyes linger on his classmates a little too long, the polite flashes of smiles a bit too sharp, their bodies tense with something ferocious, hidden with the precursor of nonchalance.

Noel typically finds himself disregarding it all in the end.

He's a human.  That's what humans do.  They ignore it, blinders on, they do as they're told when they're told — and they don't question much.

Humans have little time to spend itching in the skin of any perceived unfairness.  They're hungry and lack basic necessities — they have mouths to feed and money to make.  Long hours.  Bills to pay.  Mandatory classes to attend, obligatory studies upon studies that seem unrelenting — leading nowhere, to no better employment, to no higher form of pay.

They bring more children into it — out of loneliness perhaps, longing for someone to suffer with, or a primal human desire to procreate.  The cycle perpetuates itself.

Noel stares up at the institute, muddling the formation of students trickling in behind him.  He checks to make sure he's brought an extra pencil.

Noel takes advantage of what he's offered as a distraction.  He thinks a smart mind is a strong mind, so he absorbs what he can.  He discovers all he's able to.  Not everything has to lead to something, after all.  Not everything has to be accomplished for the desire of profit or success.

And he tells himself — again, to ignore it.

As he should.

But when he sees Cyric in the blue husk of winter morning, standing in the dead, withered, borderland clearing outside of the edges of his stone academy — smoke a dull thing in his jagged smile, he thinks of paintings.

Of dark and forlorn landscapes, oil-heavy, the sort of dead-fall before winter's prettiness.  He thinks of terrains laid on thick and one-dimensional, blotted, not entirely the right pigment.   Too flat to mistake as living. Then he thinks of taking someone sinister, someone ethereal — who may be beautiful at a glance until you notice the murky parts, the bitter edges.

And placing them dead center.

Cyric stares at him with black — narrowing eyes.  He stares unblinkingly, smoke catching between them — much like the warm puff of air that leaves Noel's lips.  There's something in his stomach that coils when he sees the Scelerati. It's a lack of familiarity, an illicit curiosity — a spark of destructive attraction.

Noel urges his heart to quiet, tries to think of Cyric as before — just an oil smear.  An angry, animalistic laugh echoing off strangler fig trees in the dark. Another depraved Scelerati, a dark silhouette of a subject, or a hidden meaning, an allegory.

Noel can't, though.  He thinks of red smudges, of soot-black blood... of the Erebos heir holding him in a dream. Of his shadow. There's something about Cyric.  Something frighteningly heavy in his unnatural gaze.

Noel hasn't hesitated in his routine, hasn't broken it in the last month. He hasn't taken the time to dwell on the encounter in the woods, the dreams, or Aurelio's death. Noel has always had fragments of himself that laid to rest, hid away, ignored, but maybe, maybe he should've considered the fact — that he doesn't quite remember what happened after Cyric said the word,

"Run."

Noel assesses the way that Cyric scrutinizes him, feels the hair on the back of his neck stand up  — and realizes, with a certain horror that breaks through his monotonous routine...

That Cyric most certainly does.