They had lived their whole lives for this day; he had waited ten grueling years of his life for this moment to come. He had done everything in his power not to get himself killed and now he stood before his brother in their rundown basement, burnt decades before his birth, with his left arm raised and knife pressed firmly against his wrist. He stared into the icy blue eyes of his brother, desperately wishing that he would give the signal so the heart inside him would stop its erratic beating.

“Stop shaking. Hold it steady,” his brother hoarsely whispered at him, who extended his right arm adjacent to his younger brother’s left. His brother pressed his own knife deeply into his own arm, “like mine.”

The boy never broke eye-contact with his older brother, but he could tell that his brother was scared too. He saw through his brother’s steady, unwavering facade each and every day of his life; he just never had the heart to mention it. We have every right to be scared. They were putting everything that meant anything into this. With their heart, their soul, and their memories on the line, they could not afford to fail and had everything to lose. This was the only way, the scriptures and the books that remained after the burning and shredding wrote of nothing else. This day, this hour, this minute, this second — this one moment could solve everything.

They wouldn’t have to smear their faces with dirt and coal in order to cross what remained of the streets safely. They wouldn’t need to run from one burnt shack to the next like sewer rats and would never find themselves huddling in fear from the earsplitting cries of falling missiles again. They would not have to change their names every other week, or at least, what they thought was about a week. No one had known the correct date and time for decades, not since the Reversal had begun. No more running from the malevolent and corrupt government that had miraculously sprouted in the midst of disaster and confusion. The world had the Apocalypse, they had it in their hands and they didn’t take it.

Both boys took deep breaths as they waited for the moment to come, counting each drip of rain leaking down from above as a second. They felt their arms warm from the pit of fire that they had built between them, watching as the King’s Seal and the Empress’s Pearl glowed brightly below. The boy did not as much as blink his eye, unless he saw his older brother do so. He believed in everything his brother told him, the mere thought of distrust would void all that they had worked for and to do so would be worse than treason against the gods. But he couldn’t hold his curiosity in any longer.

“Is it really gonna wor-”
“Shh!” his brother snapped, brows furrowing so deeply they could have killed flies, had their been any left after the burnings and volcanic eruptions.

Silence, as the boy finally broke his eye contact with his brother and stared down at the fire.

“Sure?” he tried once more, not bothering to raise his head.

More silence as left-over rain continued to drip onto the muddy floor.

“No.”

He continued to look into the fire, knowing that if this was not their chance, then there would be no other for them to take. He remembered his brother digging him out from underneath the books of their parent’s hidden library and carrying him back out to see their servants’ severed heads, the mangled body of their father in the middle of the living room floor and their mother pinned onto the wall with a spear through her stomach. They would never forget the vengeful stare of their dead mother’s eyes, nor the smell of gasoline drenching their home. To this day he felt his brother’s tight grip on his little body as he carried him outside, running for their lives.

Scientists. Researchers. Their parents were intellectuals that had been accused of treason, plotting against the government. A government that people knew were corrupt without scientific research. They were not plotting to take over the world or overthrow the Royal Court, simply because there was nothing worth taking over and not much to overthrow. But they did have resources and these resources were a threat. Their efforts towards returning the world to its original dimension would ruin everything, apparently. At least they could have allowed them to bring back sunlight.

He remembered returning to their home, digging through volcanic ashes to find the latch to their underground library. His older brother had taught him to read and together, immersed in their parent’s research, began to understand the mechanics and origin of the world they lived in. They read what they could salvage and began their journey towards home, a home that the world had not seen in centuries, millennia.

The government had long banned the education system and commenced in burning books, and the intellects who had written or even read them. The boys learned that this was a cycle, a pattern of events the world met with every couple of centuries on various lands called continents, in places called countries. This was not the first Reversal, but it was going to be by far the most successful turning of the pendulum ever to be recorded. Everything was banned. After technology came magic and after magic came free speech, or rather, thought.

Magic. Sorcery. Witchcraft. The two brothers read about how humanity had come to leave such prohibited methods behind, replacing them with something called technology. And they read about how it was going to take them home. It was going to stop them from being hunted, hunted for the crime of carrying scientists’ blood in their bodies. The boy remembered breaking into the Royal Court to steal the King’s Seal, alone; the first and only time he had been separated from his brother, who was busy braving the perils of the Old Queen’s trap-ridden tomb to dig out the Pearl from what remained of her dead carcass. They had scoured the lands for a map of the old world, searched every book still in existence for the location of where the Sun first hit the Earth, and asked every living individual to teach them to create fire.

Suddenly, the boy’s heart skipped a beat and he whipped his head up to stare at the crack in the ceiling above them. His eyes wandered over to his brother long enough to see him nod, and pressed the knife deeper into his skin like he had been shown. Time seemed to slow as the ray of light, something he had never seen in his life, worked its way down from the crack in the ceiling to their fire.

“NOW!” he heard himself yell, unsure of whether the echo he heard was his brother or his imagination. He gripped the knife tightly and sliced, allowing the blood to pour into the fire.

Darkness.

***

“And that’s how you got here?” his savior asked, lightly patting him on the back to soothe his now shaking body.

“Heart-breaking,” the hazel-eyed girl echoed with little to no emotion. “Now if you’ll excuse us Lia, Kay will fix him right up.”

The boy raised his head to see his savior pushed aside and froze, not at the end of an ice-cold flaming blue arrow being pressed against his forehead, but at the sight of the malicious smile on the face of the girl holding onto the opposite end of the strung arrow.

“Don’t worry Yan, I won’t miss this time.”

The boy braced himself, searching the room for an escape.

The tattered face in the sky ticked four, grinning it’s ominous grin down at its faithful citizens.

—> Chapter 3