Brother complex
I exhaled slowly, the turmoil of emotions roiling within me threatening to sunder the fragile threads of composure remaining.
My elder sister Elysia's trembling fingers caressed my chiselled features with a tenderness I had not known in over a decade of torment.
"I..." The words burned like shards of glass in my throat. "I was on my way to the abbey."
Relief washed over Elysia's porcelain features, causing her radiant visage to glow with renewed hope. "You're coming home, then?" Her voice quavered with bittersweet joy.
I could only nod mutely in response, the ponderous gravity of that simple affirmation nearly bringing me to my knees. Home...such a strange and unknown concept now after walking the endless paths between realms.
That man, whom she held on earlier, loomed up beside her, dark eyes narrowed with guarded suspicion as he scrutinised me. "Elysia...who is this?"
His gruff demand broke the spell of our tender reunion.
'Now, who the fuck is this?' thinking inwardly, I stared at him with an indifferent expression.
My sister blinked, as if abruptly remembering herself and the impropriety of her open display before her husband. "Ah...this is my youngest brother, Jagnar."
Comprehension flickered across the nobleman's craggy features. "The one you've so often spoken of? The youth who went missing over a decade ago?"
Elysia nodded sheepishly, colour tingeing her cheeks as she averted her gaze from my impassive stare. For a fleeting instant, I saw her not as the serene woman, but as the sweet-natured girl who would sneak me candied fruits from the castle kitchens whenever she could. And there were a lot more things rolling through my mind, but, they will have to wait.
A ghost of a smile ghosted across my lips at those memories.
Seeming to register my silent approval, Elysia rallied herself, turning an expectant gaze on her husband.
Aldren grunted, passing one hand over his sweat-slicked brow as he absorbed all that had transpired that night in the forest.
"Very well then," he muttered, casting a withering glower around the blasted and scored clearing surrounding us. "We've lingered here quite long enough. See that this...mess is cleaned up, and we can resume our journey. I want to quit these cursed woods by daybreak."
As the dishevelled servants and soldiers hurried to obey, I turned my full attention to Elysia once more. Her wounded doe-eyes shone with open adoration and fear in equal measure, desperate to pierce the veil of malice and power I had so effortlessly brought to bear just moments earlier.
"Jagnar..." she began, testing the syllables of the name like an incantation, warding off some lurking evil. "What...what became of you these past years? We scoured every trail and village for word of where you'd fled, but there was never any sign."
Her delicate features pinched with anguish, fingers coiling in the fabric of my shredded tunic as if to anchor me to this plane before I slipped irrevocably back into the unknown once again.
"Please, let me understand what turned my doting little brother into such a being of...primal power and fury."
For an endless, protracted heartbeat, I could only gaze down at her with lips pressed in a grim line—crimson eyes swirling with indecision. To impart even a fraction of the realities and spiritual awakenings I had transcended would be to doom my only remaining blood relation to the same plumbless depths of madness and ecstasy that had remade me.
I didn't want to recall all the details of my entail all these years, so I just came up with a made-up story.
Well, I didn't have any grudges against her, and it was not like I had any affection for her to say the truth.
At last, I drew a fortifying breath.
"I was taken, elder sister," I began in a measured tone. "Snatched from the training grounds during one of my naive wanderings beyond the walls. Slavers, pirates...I know not what directed their malign intentions towards me."
Her tiny intake of breath was a knife in my chest, but I pressed onward, weaving a fragile fiction around threads of cold truth.
"For years, they kept me shackled, their vile clutches dragging me across the realms like chattel. Until at long last, a mercenary company swept through whatever hovel they'd been keeping me in and slaked their thirst for battle with the offal of my captors."
I could feel the revulsion and denial rippling through Elysia as she imagined every parent's worst nightmare visited upon her beloved little brother. Still, her fingers remained locked white-knuckle around mine, silently urging me to purge the poison from this decades-old wound.
"I won't recant the indignities and sufferings inflicted upon me during those dark seasons," I rumbled, allowing a pall of grave somberness to leach the inflexion from my words. "Let it suffice to say that by the time those sellswords hauled me from the offal, I had become... unmade and remade in ways no mortal vessel should rightfully withstand.
They saw in me a weapon forged from inhuman torment and the boundless hunger for revenge. I became an apprentice to them, learning the bloody craft of arms and tactics under tutelage that made my captors' tortures appear merciful by comparison."
Elysia shuddered, though her gaze never wavered from mine. I pressed on, each elaborately woven lie seeming to pilfer another infinitesimal mote of the hope and innocence that had once imbued her whole being.
I had to be careful weaving such a story; after all, this would be the tail my said family would hear and run on the lips of everyone present in the abbey for a while.
"Ten years, I walked that path of the exalted mercenary brotherhood. Ten years of battles and savageries that cauterised any remnants of the old Jagnar you once held dear..." I continued while looking at both husband and wife. They seemed to be without a doubt until now. "The boy died long ago on the slab of his tormentor, Elysia. What stands before you now is something Else remade in those charnel rites."
It was a little bit dramatic, but I had to add something to make them believe me. The reason I came back was to make them pay for what they did to me.
The silence that fell between us then seemed to span the chasm of a dozen eternities. All around, Aldren's servants and men hurried to gather the grisly remnants from the clearing, though I barely registered their paltry movements in my peripherals.
At last, Elysia blinked back glistening tears and managed a wavering nod of understanding. Her words, once free-flowing and unbridled, emerged in a hoarse, hollow utterance.
"Then... be welcome home regardless, my brother. My door shall ever be open to the essence that has transcended death and terror alike to return to me, no matter the form you wear or awaken within."
She hugged me, close to her heart. And I could tell that she had never forgotten about me.
What a bro-con!
Yeah, she was a total freak for him. Her brother complex had actually started when I was young, although I thought she might have forgotten about me. Well, another thing to look forward to in that damned place.
No one would be aware of what the bro-con term was, because the term was actually from my previous world. Well, I am not of this world; I was actually reincarnated into this world.