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Fidelio could remember fireflies and a sky full of stars. That was all.
There were vague impressions buried somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind—one shaped like a mother, and another like a father—but they were just empty spaces, odd holes intended to be occupied by warmth. There were no faces, no names—only the knowledge that somebody had to have birthed him. Somebody had to have cared for him before he could walk. That was just how it worked.
He didn’t even know where the surname “Magnus” came from. Perhaps he had simply made it up one day. That thought alone drove him mad, so he opted not to dwell on it. No matter who his parents had been, Magnuses or not, they weren’t important anymore.
But he couldn’t let go of that forest next to the rickety old farmhouse, where it was warm all through the night and the grass was plush enough to sleep on.
Basilio had loved the fireflies. The only clear image of the place Fidelio could conjure was a scene of his younger brother chasing blinking lights over amiably sloping hills, trying to take them into his hands ever so gently as they drifted languidly through sweet summer air.
Sometimes he wondered if Basilio remembered those nights. He never asked, for fear of the answer—so instead, he pondered a more realistic question: whether his brother’s earliest memories were of sleeping on sidewalks or begging for change.
He really did wish Basilio would stop with the begging. His naïveté would only get him hurt.
“Look ‘it, Del!” he tugged at Fidelio’s sleeve one day, tail swaying slightly like it always did when he was happy. “I hit it big this time! Thas’ at least… ten, twenty… Del…? Um…”
“465 reeve, Bas. That’ll feed us for a bit, but… Where’d you get all this? You shouldn’t be runnin’ off.”
Basilio looked up at him with eyes that were far too innocent for a face so gaunt. “You was sleepin’ late… It gets dark real fast this time ‘a year, had me thinkin’ that—”
“Bas.”
“There was this old clemar fellow! Proper nice, he was! Said me and me brother were all alone, an’ he—”
Fidelio crouched to Basilio’s level, placed his hands on his shoulders, and gripped them like he’d turn to smoke if he didn’t keep him anchored in place. “You can’t be goin’ off and beggin’. So you got lucky this time—there are decent folk in every tribe. But for every bleedin’ heart who will take pity on a little paripus boy, you’ve got ten more who’d sooner see you dropped from the gallows for bein’ a nuisance. Make right sure you understand me.”
“But—”
“I’m not mad, Bas,” Fidelio sighed. “You leave this kind of thing to your big brother, yeah?”
“But I want to help!”
He was pouting now, and expressions like that only reminded Fidelio of all the baby fat that was supposed to be there, but wasn’t.
He released Basilio’s shoulders and rose to his feet. “You will… But you gotta grow up first. Get big and strong like our ol’ dad was. You remember him?”
His brother shook his head. Of course he didn’t—Fidelio couldn’t remember him either. But what comfort was there to be found in the truth?
“I can’t remember much either, bein’ perfectly honest, but he was big, I know that much,” Fidelio lied. “You’re gonna get big too, Bas, and you can help then—but that’ll only happen if you eat lots and lots.”
“...Don’t you get hungry, Del?”
“Nah. Now, might as well make the most of all this,” Fidelio said, jangling the loose reeve around in his palm. “What d’you want for dinner tonight?”
His illiterate “signature” on a contract he couldn’t read—that was all it took to get off the streets.
Shelter, hot meals, a bed to sleep in, and actual pay to top it off. Slave wages or not, the promise of relative security was a siren’s song to a pair of urchin brothers too young to enlist in the army. Fidelio had his reservations, but this was their best option. A carriage ride to the outskirts of Brilehaven was all that stood between them and lives free of hunger pangs. Never again would they eat with worries of when their next meal would come, never again would they sleep with cold rain at their backs.
But Fidelio wasn’t stupid. Pain was something that latched onto paripus orphans and bled them dry like a tick—it was only a matter of time until it found them again in some capacity. It didn’t matter where they went or how fast they ran, it would always be the same story.
And sure enough, pain was waiting to greet them in the desolate, sterile halls of the igniter facility, though it took a new form this time—something malignant and twisting and depraved. Unwittingly, Fidelio had traded his hunger pangs and hypothermia for a special agony, one that settled somewhere deeper than his bones and ate him alive from the inside out.
Beatings, burn scars, and the rancorous gnaw of wild magla in his veins—by all means, it was church sanctioned torture.
But for the first time in their lives that they could remember, the Magnus brothers weren’t alone. That was enough to make it all worth it.
It had to be worth it. It had to be.
That was what Fidelio told himself on the nights where Basilio got back to the barracks late.
He found himself suffering through such a night now, lying restless in his assigned bunk while luminous yellow eyes bored holes into the stone ceiling.
A street rat like him should have been able to pass out anywhere, but he couldn’t sleep. It was always challenging to let his guard down in a room so dark, devoid of windows and candlelight for reasons he had been quick to piece together not long after his arrival to the facility. The sensory stew of snores, groans, and the pungent odour of unwashed bodies didn’t make it any easier.
Not as if any of it mattered. The noises and smells weren’t the issue tonight. Casualties had been growing more common as of late, which meant that Fidelio wouldn’t be sleeping until his younger brother was curled up safely in the bunk beneath his own.
Their handlers had been keeping Basilio late recently. Later and later, later than anyone else. It was probably because he was so young. Fidelio didn’t like it.
When the door finally swung open, the space was flushed with harsh light from the corridor just outside, hellish on the paripus’ night-adapted eyes. Basilio arrived flanked by guards on either side like he wasn’t a third their size and a quarter their age, who ushered him into the barracks with all the gentleness one would expect of a pair of self-important roussainte jailers. They slammed the door shut in their wake, triggering a chorus of startled grunts as the entire room was rudely dragged back to consciousness.
With the intensity of a mother hawk, Fidelio’s eyes tracked his little brother as he limped his way to bed. Even through the curtain of inkwell black that hung over their lightless sleeping quarters, it was obvious that he was holding himself and trembling.
Fidelio didn’t say anything. There was nothing to be said. There were no words that could make it better.
Finally satisfied when his brother disappeared into his own bunk, Fidelio rolled onto his side and very intentionally allowed his tail to dangle off the edge of his bed, lashing with reserved agitation just next to where his brother had retired for the night below him.
“Bed” was a deceptive term. In actuality, it was nothing but a bare bed frame—just ramshackle wooden boards hammered together without so much as a blanket in sight. Though almost draconic to the point of self-parody, it wasn’t as if Fidelio didn’t understand. Sheets could be twisted and knotted into something akin to rope, and rope must have been a horrific liability from the perspective of their employers.
Even as he closed his eyes with intent to sleep, Fidelio strained his ears. Snores, footsteps down the hall, the stifled growls of his tribesmen as they bit back their newfound chronic pain—he could make peace with any noise, so long as it didn’t come from just beneath him.
It was something wrapping itself around the tip of his tail that jolted him from his concentration. He would recognise the weak clench of Basilio’s tiny fist anywhere, and even through the appendage’s fur, Fidelio could feel that his brother was colder than ice.
They had been rough with him tonight, then. His body temperature would stabilise naturally within a few hours, but for the time being, Fidelio knew when he was needed.
Pulling himself from Basilio’s grasp, he slid down the ladder and took his place at his brother’s side before there was time for even a lonely whimper at the loss of contact. He ducked into bed next to his brother, curling around his small body as was routine when the pain showed its teeth and the cold seeped from skin to blood.
“Del…” Basilio whispered, voice shaky and hoarse.
“Hush up, now. Just go to sleep, Bas.”
The little thing was radiating cold like it was warmth. ‘An especially cruel side effect of modern igniters, resultant from the autocannibalisation of the body’s latent magla stores’—that was how the phenomenon had been described by one of the project’s leading engineers. She had been addressing her colleagues, of course—not the dozen or so paripus mourners still within earshot, who were gathered around the freshly discovered corpse of the old man who had succumbed to severe hypothermia during the night.
Basilio was cold. So, so cold. Fidelio wrapped his arms around him and pulled him flush against his chest.
There was a moment of strained hesitation, likely born of guilt, before his younger brother reciprocated the embrace. When Basilio finally gave in, he clutched at Fidelio’s ragged nightshirt with trembling fingers and buried his face in his chest as if to hide from the world.
His back trembled slightly beneath Fidelio’s hands. The tears came not long after that.
Basilio was always stoic when he cried, more stoic than was proper for a boy so young. Small sniffles and hushed sobs died half-voiced amidst the quiet cacophony of paripus death knell.
Fidelio knew how difficult it was to keep such pained noises so soft. He never planned to admit it in words, but he hoped Basilio knew that his big brother was proud of him.
He nestled his chin atop his brother’s head, right between his drooping ears, and absently rubbed patterns into his back—beneath his shirt, so his own heat could work to melt the ice under his skin.
This was weakness. Weakness got little paripus boys kicked to death in back alleys. It was what led them to starve. It certainly wouldn’t show any mercy in a place like this.
But it was okay under the cover of darkness. It had to be.
Basilio’s tiny cries quickly warped into something more bestial as Fidelio began to stroke his hair. The brave little sniffles were soon replaced by hound-like whimpers and similar vocalisations that weren’t commonly thought of as “people noises.”
Basilio ceased to cry like a person. Instead, he cried like a puppy.
It was a vulnerable sound—deeply shameful in the eyes of society at large. A vestigial animal trait that proved the paripus were beneath the other tribes. The roussainte guardsmen, the ishkia engineers, the clemar investors—oh, how they’d heckle amongst themselves were they to bear witness to such a display. Just the thought of it made Fidelio’s blood boil.
Basilio’s cries were nauseating. They made Fidelio sick. He hated the sound of it more than anything else in the world.
This was weakness.
So, he responded to weakness with weakness. He answered the cries with a purr.
It was a self-soothing, indulgent noise—no less base and undignified than his brother’s whines. Rumbling from deep within his throat, it was a sensation as much as it was a sound, sending gentle vibration all the way to the deepest reaches of his chest.
Even in a room populated by none but his own tribesmen—people he thought of as family—it stung Fidelio’s pride. Not that he cared when it worked to comfort Basilio, who had been fond of it for as long as he could remember.
Maybe he liked the sound. Maybe it was the vibration as he snuggled into his chest. Maybe it was just the novelty of the act, given the fact that Basilio lacked the ability to purr himself. Not that Fidelio could remember their parents, but he was sure they had simply inherited different beast traits from their mother and father. He wondered which of them Basilio resembled more.
His brother pulled away just enough to shoot him a tentative glance through salt-soaked lashes. Dark and broken, his eyes conveyed a simple apology: I’m sorry for not being strong enough.
He was too young to be so ashamed to cry, but his guilt was well founded—weakness was weakness, and that was all there was to it.
But it was okay in the dark. It was okay at night. It had to be. If it wasn’t, what was the point of anything at all?
It had to be.
Fidelio held his little brother until he cried himself to sleep, and then he held him some more. He held him until the starlit sky they hadn’t seen in months went from black, to purple, to dawn-tinged pink and orange outside the prison’s walls. He didn’t let go until the routine morning rapping on the door roused the entire room from its dismal slumber, summoning them to the mess hall for a meager breakfast before another day of the usual—beatings, burn scars, rancor.
It was unfair. It was all so unfair.
It was a torrential downpour on the night they fled.
Fidelio tore over the flooded cobble paths of Brilehaven, dragging Basilio in tow by the hand. Through mainstreets and back alleys, along piers and canals, between night market stalls standing abandoned in the heavy rain—the brothers ran like the very animals their handlers thought they were.
The coastal air was just as Fidelio remembered it—thick, warm, salty. It settled in his lungs with an unfamiliar malevolence, weighing him down from the inside as if each breath were laden with leaden vapours that reconstituted into something solid inside his chest. It seemed his new igniter-born sensitivities had taken even the ocean breeze from him.
Basilio was sobbing.
“Del…!”
Fidelio didn’t slow down. Fear nipped sharp at his heels, spurring him on with a torturer’s cruelty and a predator’s persistence. Shadows warped at the corners of his vision, and he couldn’t tell if the pounding sound was from blood in his ears or the hurried footsteps of pursuers, so he ran even harder. He ran until the rough stone roads ripped his bare soles to shreds. He ran until his breaths came in pained, asthmatic wheezes. He ran until he couldn’t tell up from down or sky from water and the pursuers were so far behind that he might as well have been running from wraiths. Maybe there had never been any pursuers in the first place.
The dazzling gleam of city-life seeped from every candle lit window and bounced from raindrop to puddle, ricocheting through the night and lancing his eyes with the harsh contrast of light against dark wherever they fell. Through the storm of overwhelming sensation, he realised why the igniter facility was kept so drab and grey. It helped to distract from his little brother’s anguished wails—that was the only small comfort.
He ran until Basilio couldn’t anymore.
“Bas!”
“Stop it, Del! It hurts! It— I can’t, I—”
He collapsed in the middle of a puddle that was wider than he was tall, almost pulling Fidelio’s arm from its socket as he went down. He looked like a rat drowned in rainwater, crying and hacking, no doubt choking on the outside world just the same as his older brother.
He was in so much pain. Fidelio could see it in his trembling shoulders, in his pupils blown so wide the irises ceased to be visible. God, just the thought of it twisted his stomach into knots.
His baby brother. Only eight summers old.
He was on his knees in an instant, gathering Basilio in his arms. “Don’t give me that shite, Bas! No talkin’ right now! Your Del’s got you, Bas, just leave everythin’ to your ol’ Del…!”
Fidelio wasn’t a strong boy, but Basilio had been a runt for as long as he could remember, and he currently weighed less than he had in years. As he lifted him from the puddle and held him to his chest, he wasn’t just light, wasn’t just fragile—his body felt like a long-since-rotted log, ready to crumble in on itself at the slightest touch.
“Just a little more!” Fidelio had to yell over the downpour. “It’ll only be a little longer now! You’re not givin’ up on me—don’t close your eyes! Not yet!”
A church. They needed a church.
The irony of it all was the furthest thing from his mind—he could curse fate and seethe with rage when Basilio wasn’t moribund in his arms. His visible wounds were superficial, but igniters left deeper claw marks than the average beast. Fidelio’s baby brother was septic from blood to bone with a cancer that lived deeper than either one of them could even fathom. He needed a healer, and he needed one now.
With the fervour of the dying, Fidelio flew down the deserted streets with Basilio clutched like he was about to turn to ash. Pelted by rain on all sides and soaked so thoroughly he felt he’d never be dry again, he was utterly frigid despite the muggy night air. The only warmth came from his burning lungs, the little body in his arms somehow even icier than his own.
Basilio cried until sound stopped coming out. After a while, the only reassurance that he was still alive came from the jerky movements against his chest as he wept mutely into his shirt.
With the last of his energy, Fidelio attempted a purr. It was scratchy and uneven, but it would have to do.
When he finally spotted a church, it could have been mistaken for a sun in the midnight sky.
‘It’s over, Basilio. It’s all over now. We’ll be gettin’ home real soon.’ Too exhausted to speak, the words died in his throat.
So, they were going to get through this after all. The Magnus brothers would live to hurt another day.
Fidelio could feel the rain in his bones, lodged in right next to all the wild, autocannibalistic magla. It hurt like hell, but by God, he could feel it.
Pain was proof that they were still alive. He and Basilio would suffer like this again. If he had to, he’d rip open a thousand Sanctist throats with his teeth to make sure of it.
Fidelio looked up for the first time in recent memory. The stars were hiding—drowning in a sky full of rain.
That was okay. The stars would come out another night. He could admire them then, with Basilio at his side. Besides, he had missed the sky as it was. It was nice, even when it was pitch black.
Fidelio kept running.
He never looked back.