How to Make a Sinner Sleep

63 | hold; the hand that pleads for warmth

Skye Chauvet had been dreaming lately.

It was odd, normally greeted by a brief of pitch black, a memory non-existent before waking. The dreams had started as blurs of colours, the outline of shapes he couldn't recognize or decipher.

He'd woken in a confused state, staring at the empty wall as the dream slipped from his mind, long forgotten. His fists curled in his ivory blankets, frightened by his own waking.

Recently, he could remember them. The terrible snippets of a Kingdom—his Kingdom—and its streets riddled with rotting bodies and a crimson that ran through the streets, polluting the water.

The stench of violence and a murky fog that rested over the lands, a despairing time for all those living.

Then there was the body—

—Kaden's body.

Familiar pale pink hair mottled with clumps of dried blood, sunken cheeks and open green eyes that gazed at a sky he could no longer see. It was vivid, every line that made his face too real to be anything but.

It was strange, because in those dreams, Skye wasn't sure if Kaden were alive or not. Was he dead, or was he living in a dying body?

Skye, curious and intelligent as he was, knew that under Reed's hands, the Kingdom would likely fall to ruins. He didn't understand really, certain that at one point, his eldest brother had been kinder, softer.

Although from the beginning, their relationship had been strained. Skye was like dirt against a white backdrop, he was different in a way that people could tell.

To the baby that never cried, Reed had been kind, but his eyes looked at Skye with the same distance of looking at something strange, eerie. As if there were something inside of Skye that was disturbing.

That's why he didn't care what Reed did, or how far he fell.

If it was merely the Kingdom that ended up falling, a miserable heap of rubble and corpses, then he wouldn't care.

But it was more than just the Kingdom.

It was Kaden.

A poor, miserable child that had been pulled from the streets—Reed had treated him with a gentleness that he gave no other, before their relationship abruptly changed.

Kaden had been pathetic, foolish. A stray pulled from the streets that Skye had watched with indifferent blue eyes. Skye enjoyed his solitude—it was easier existing without those surrounding judging.

The young child had gazed at Kaden's shivering body from the railing of the staircase coldly, watching as Reed walked a careful distance near by, smiling softly.

It wasn't any of his business, whatever strays Reed had chosen to pick up.

And then things changed, in a jerking twist nobody predicted.

Reed and Kaden's relationship collapsed, spinning their bond from found siblings to master and servant. Skye didn't know the reasons for the change, watching the abuse that begun on the child from a distance.

It was better not to be involved in the tricky business of relationships. It was better to live from a distance, never involved.

The young child had slipped into the library, a grand thing filled to the brim of its towering ceilings with bookshelves and knowledge. With a bland expression that only knew how to smile when asking for something, the blonde-haired boy wandered to a ladder leaning against one of the shelves.

A small foot carelessly stepped up, and then another until he was high and stretching for the book he thought looked interesting.

He couldn't reach it.