Your Bloodstained Paths, Your Bloodstained Strings

TW: Mentions of blood and physical violence

To the world, you’re a murderer. 

An insane man, stripped of sanity and soul. A monster to your lover, to your brother, to the mother you never knew. 

—Your lips are cracked. Blood trickles down a gash in your forehead, pooling into your eyes. You blink. Tears run trails of crimson, winding down your face. 

There’s a warmth in your chest, a growing, soothing, numbing voice that whispers to you. 

You float.—-

The world is sharp and yet blurry, something that has destroyed you time and time again. 

—“Do you love me?” You whisper out into open air. A voice snakes into your ear, whispering of forgotten fairy tales and heart-wrenching words. It wraps tighter and tighter around your mind until you’re floating again. 

<Do you trust me?> it hisses instead. It writhes in your mind, thrashing and wailing like the monster it is. 

You don’t trust it. 

You don’t have a choice.—

You’re the villain in their story. The brother that went astray, seeking death and destruction.

—You open your eyes, red irises suspended in a void of pitch black. You scream, and yet nothing leaves your lips but a steady stream of blood. You

cough, spraying red onto marble floors. The queen’s dead eyes linger on you. Your brother drives a sun-touched blade through you, eyes glinting with undiluted fury. The Heiress screams, falling to her knees.

Your hands are tainted a thousand shades of red. 

You feel nothing and yet everything.—

You wear full armor now. 

Your stab wound aches. The skin has knit itself together, leaving pink scar tissue in its place. If you think hard enough, you can feel the blade going through you.

So you don’t think. You breathe in, you breathe out. The mind is a volatile, malleable place. Your mind is a war-ground littered with explosives waiting to be lit.

You decide it’s best not to tempt fate.

—You remember your first true love. Sweeter than honey, sharper than thorns. Smiles hide blades, kisses hide poison. 

You hold yet another rose in scarred hands. You twirl it, idly grazing thorns over skin. A thorn pierces the soft flesh of your palm. Your mind goes static.

Your fingers close around the stem, crushing the flower. Thorns imbed into skin, pinpricks of blood forming beads of red. You drop the rose. Petals flutter to the ground, blood pooling in dots alongside them.

You see the world in a million shades of blood and roses, accented by the darkness of the void.

Love isn’t worth pain. 

What is then?—

You remember exactly how you killed your lover. 

You felt no regret. Gods, you should have mourned. You should have stopped. Instead all you felt was pure, unadulterated rage. 

You drove a sword through her.

You drove it through her stomach. Just as your brother did to you. 

You remember the satisfaction you felt. The unfamiliar, sickening joy. The voice spoke to you, whispering gleeful praises and secrets. Somewhere inside of you broke. 

You fell into slumber and someone else awoke. 

—“You’re a monster,” she chokes out, blood spilling from rosy lips. Her hair is spread out, hair glowing like a halo in the light of the falling sun. 

Something inside you shatters, never to be fixed again. You grin and you laugh like a madman. You crouch over her and kiss her on her lips. 

“You’re right,” you mummer, eyes alight with broken flames. “I am a monster.” 

Eyes extinguish, bright flames never to be seen again. Her dying breath lingers on your bloody lips. 

Somewhere deep inside of you wails and thrashes and screams, for deep inside you are merely a tormented broken soul. 

Vines slither inside you, taking root in your war zone of a mind. Bloody thorns pierce a dying, broken heart.—

Somewhere out there, a God gains a pawn, a puppet, a tool, a toy. The chessboard is set, the script written by the Universe’s will. Fate dictates the tale. The strings are pulled and cut accordingly. 

What to do, what to do?

—You’re living a nightmare. 

Fingers trace circles into pale white thighs. Dark, black veins contrast against your skin, snaking throughout your marred body. 

The fight is already won. You’ve fought armies, won against Gods. You’re high on your own adrenaline, heart pounding, head screaming.

There’s no one left to fight but your own kin. 

You grab your blade, spinning it in your hands. The runes glow a soft, pulsating red. Your mind becomes blank once again. 

You breathe in and out. You smile with a grin far too wide for your eyes, basking in unreal happiness.—

Your brother died on a sunny day. Fitting, for he was once your only light.

How the sun has risen and fallen, true to its own tale.

His brother lies on the ground, curled in on himself. His radiant eyes are bloodied and slashed, never to see light again. Blood bubbles out, lips drawing silent words and subdued cries. 

You feel guilt somewhere inside of you. You bury it, for what kind of monster feels human?

Your brother is shaking. An ancient part of you screams for you to scoop your brother up and carry him away to safety. To run your hands through sunny hair and whisper soothing promises to a heart of pure gold.

A voice claws at you, tearing at your mind. A God tugs at your bloodstained strings, growing impatient with your pathetic emotions.

You crouch by your brother. His breathing has grown labored, each wheezing breath a struggle for punctured lungs. 

Your hands grasp your brother’s chin, tilting his tear-struck face toward you. Your brother pulls away, the small movement tiring him. 

You chuckle. Defiant in his last moments. How typical of your brother. 

Your brother coughs wetly. Tears shine in dimming light.

“Why?” Your brother whispers, voice almost whisked away by the wind. He sounds so young, so fair, so pure, so peaceful. 

You can’t help yourself.

You reach down and kiss your brother’s forehead, closing his ruined eyes. 

“It was fate that chose,” You whisper back. For once you feel unsure, walking this blood-stained path. 

Your brother gazes at you with hollow eyes. 

“I love you,” he mummers, voice cracking with emotion and exhaustion. 

His eyes gaze out into nothingness as his chest fails to rise. You cradle a dead body.

You never got to tell your brother that you loved him too before he died. 

—You’re stuck between living and dying. Every step forward pushes you more towards a shuddering cliff overlooking the void. The horizon grows closer and closer, and yet more and more distant.

You don’t feel anything. Once upon a time, that scared you. Once upon a time, you were a scared little boy in a broken little world.

Now you’re a broken, insane man in a hell forged by your own hand.

You look out onto a hellscape of flame and blood and wonder if you did the right thing.—

You smile for the last time as you fall into the void of your mind. You drive the blade into your body and pull it out, the runes glistening with the metallic sheen of your own blood. 

Somewhere inside you scream for the last time.

The horizon is at your fingertips; you are there and yet you aren’t.

A God awakens amidst the ruins of a shattered horizon. The waters run a hundred shades of red, the land adorned by bloodied roses and skeletal beings.

The horizon is gone. 

You don’t wake up.