~GABRIEL~
Those scorching golden eyes widen, and for the first time in centuries of borrowed existence, I witness true fear mixed with genuine regret in a living being's gaze.
Not the performed emotions I've observed through my sister's eyes—those calculated displays of vulnerability designed to manipulate or survive.
This is raw. Unfiltered.
The kind of honesty that only comes when someone realizes they've made a terrible mistake milliseconds too late to correct it.
It's difficult to distinguish my reaction.
Centuries of magic flow through my soul—inherited, stolen, earned through surviving what should have killed us both. That ancient power wars with something smaller, quieter. Something that dares to carry a hint of human emotion, whispering about mercy in this moment of crystallized choice.
The world slows around us.
Not metaphorically—literally. Each particle of ash floating through the infernal air suspends mid-drift. The bubble of lava below her falling form freezes mid-burst, captured in a moment of violent potential. Her hair—that golden cascade that marksher as everything this realm despises—fans outward in a corona of arrested motion.
Her hand shoots out instinctively, fingers grasping for anchor that doesn't exist.
And there it is. The answer I needed.
Does she truly wish to perish by her own hand?
No.
The reaching speaks louder than any words. The body's desperate attempt to survive even as the mind had chosen surrender. She wants to live—she simply doesn't know how to anymore.
I understand that feeling with intimacy that makes my chest constrict.
I've always been the silent observer. Even before the merging, when we were three separate children playing in shadow-meadows, I watched. Elena with her desperate need for acknowledgment. Gwenivere with her easy assumption that love was renewable resource. And me, cataloging every micro-expression, every tell, every sign of the storm that would eventually tear us apart.
Watching from afar became my nature. First by choice—someone needed to see the patterns others missed. Then by force, when Elena's jealousy wove the spell that should have killed us both but instead created something unprecedented.
One body. Two souls. An abomination that shouldn't exist but does.
I remember the moment of merging with clarity that time can't erode. The searing pain as our essences were forced together, oil and water trying to become one liquid. Elena's laughter echoing through dimensions as she claimed what she thought was her birthright. The throne accepting her even as it burned her from within, corrupted power eating away at whatever humanity she'd retained.
And then—silence.
I woke in a cage that wasn't made of bars but of bone and breath. My sister's body became my prison, her consciousness the walls I couldn't break. For years—decades—I could only watch through eyes that were mine but not mine, experience through skin I couldn't control.
Do you understand what it means to be passenger in your own existence?
Every breath calculated by another's rhythm. Every word spoken in voices that never quite matched my thoughts. Every touch—intimate or violent—felt but not chosen.
I became the whisper she'd attribute to instinct. The sudden certainty that made her turn left instead of right, avoiding the blade meant for her spine. The inexplicable knowledge of which herbs would heal versus poison. The rage that erupted when someone threatened what we both considered ours.
She got used to those instincts saving her. Made her reckless in ways she wouldn't have been if she'd known each one cost me fragments of already-fractured identity. Every intervention drained what little independence I'd maintained, bleeding me into her until sometimes I couldn't tell where she ended and I began.
It gave me purpose when I, too, felt like perhaps it would be better to dissipate into nothingness.
Maybe that's why I understand Nikki.
The thought arrives with uncomfortable clarity as I watch her suspended form, inches from death that would solve nothing but create new wounds in people already bearing too many scars.
I know the feeling of devastation in an environment that doesn't want to see you transpire to greatness.
The Infernal Realm accepts me only because it must—I carry the blood, the power, the birthright.
