Favored Son

Malcolm Almagro was a terrible force. He was a plague that sought domination over the only people that could match his influence. He wasn’t cleverer or more suited to power; he simply got it first. He had time to mature and crystallize in his belief of deserving and superiority before the others. When we arrived, he had already made up his mind that he would take the world, and that meant my brother and I. He was a hungry and parasitic creature who spread his influence by breeding desperation and isolation. He would kill or imprison anyone he needed to achieve his goals. We were victims of his greed and his conquest. These were all things we knew implicitly, we were simply mistaken as to whom we should apply our knowledge. After all, we had only ever met his thrall.

Harrison Vaughan was the man that saw us through our childhoods. I avoid using the word raised for good reason. My brother, he trained. I, he ignored. If I were to allow him mercy, something I did only twice, I would say that a boy his age could not have raised anyone if he had tried. Unfortunately for the reality of the situation, he made no real attempt. He closed us into a tall tower above a small island. It was close enough to civilization, purely for the boy’s own convenience, but a body of water is separation enough for two children. I was sequestered in the tower, alone most often but joined every night by my brother. He, unlike myself, would spend the day outdoors. I believe it was to teach him discipline and loyalty. Like he was training his own replacement, making a stronger thrall. He would have done well like that, eternal Preservation makes for an irreplaceable soldier after all.

He stands in the sand across from the man who guided his growth, stood in the hot sun across from his captor under a winding tower’s shadow. Sharp cracks echo out and upward as he batters at a log with a blunt training object. He doesn’t talk about it with me, so I don’t know its name. He doesn’t want to hit it, that is clear, but he does. He doesn’t want to be outside, but he is. The watchful eye of his caretaker stares him down from across the dunes. From towerside I grip my pen I do not write with lest I tear the page. I watch and lust for outsideness and rage at his unhappiness with what I envy most greatly. I stain my hand with ink from the burst pen, it ruins the paper I spared and trickles down my wrist. My rageful eye stares him down from above the dunes.

My brother despairs at his regimen. He tells me he makes no progress because he feels hopeless. He sits in the field and plays with the grass and lets sand flow through his fingers because he has no power of his own. We cannot see eye to eye because he cannot recognize what he has. His caretaker doubles down on him, demanding more. He can’t take it and he refuses to leave his bedroom. It makes me hate him. I have a seed that has been maturing within my being since the day I was born. The stains of ink burn away from my skin. I break and breach my prison of envy and stone and wood in burning Purifying grasp after burning Purifying grasp. I am manifest. I wrench my brother by the hair on his head and slam him through the now shuddering tower walls and he yelps and he screams and I do not care and I want him to pay for having what I don’t. I storm down the winding tower staircase and every step leaves charred footprints split in splintered halves and thirds and fourths behind. I pull tie from beam and brick from mortar and I rip apart the tower that cocooned me and coddled him and I clean the world of it. I throw hunk after hunk of charred stone and brick and ashen wood at my brother and for one foolish moment my captor steps in and I recognize my true target.

He sees my eyes shift and the fear in his sick ochre eyes becomes painfully clear and I need it to continue. He runs and I follow and I leave my brother bleeding and unbalanced and afraid and I seek to make my captor the same. I will be his son and I will break him for not making me. I leave the weak boy behind and I pursue the caretaker and he is not faster than I but he knows the world in a way he has ensured I do not and he is gone from my sight and I must learn to find him. I leave behind my me and I seek to do away with his him.

I am his son I am his fury that pursues him I follow him because I will him to be made nothing. I follow him for spans I do not count and find the sickness he leaves behind. For a long time all I do is burn. I start to find sickness I cannot burn because it is alive and it is a child or children and I must learn to be careful and measured. It does not come natural to me. I have to. I do not allow myself to stoop to his level. There are things I have to do that are gentle; I have to learn to pull the sickness out of someone with warm hands and focus. I still fuel it the same.

I find him. I find him in his home. I wait until his wife is away, she is not involved and I have learned not to hurt the people on the fringes. I do not break down his home. I approach him and I hate him because he is older and he has lived without consequence for what he did for many too many years. I strike him and I grip him by the forearm and the shoulder and I let myself burn him and it feels cleaning. It has been so long since I burned I had forgotten the catharsis of not being afraid to hurt. He yelps and he screams and I smell the sick breaking from him and it keeps flowing and I keep burning but it is not his completeness. More and more sick burns and I realize he is the same as any other person touched by impurity. He was when he began a sick child like the many I learned not to burn and I have to be gentle. It feels too good not to be, but I have to be.

I take my gentle hand and I press its warm palm on his shoulder and the other on his cheek. I draw out the illness injected into him, more than I’ve seen anywhere before. He coughs and he wheezes through the pain and the sobbing. He thanks me and he apologizes and he thanks me again. He will not stop crying. It takes me too long to understand why.

I know who the true man behind the sickness is. I feel the same heat driving me, but there is duty as well. There are many people to protect. This duty means that I must do things right. That requires moving slowly. I study him. I recognize that much as my own piece of power has matured his has as well. He has more in place to protect himself than I have to breach. So I wait and I work to undo what I can. I am not patient, but I have to be. I watch my brother’s daughter break him down from up close. She weakens him in a way I never had an eye for. We keep close. She tells me what to do. I clean her of sickness when it is safe, but she is too close to him too often and a piece of him matures within her. She asks me to watch over her children. I take no action. I watch her daughter die because she has the power my brother carried. I recognize that I am like him in all the ways I despise. I let her rot while I stood about outside moping. I am not born for protection.

I work and I plan and I study. I watch Malcolm’s daughter as closely as I may. I watch him send her through trials. I see her in isolation that I recognize, it is his usual handiwork. He seeks to undo the mistake he repeats. We refuse to leave our family behind any longer. I recognize the threat in the black glass he gives her. I will make myself a protector. I must.

August 28th, 2021.

Spawn 6

Hell 7

Favored Son