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Silence, for those precious few moments, tore it's fingers into Chauhn's guise of madness, ripping it off his person like a fragile shroud, leaving a boy in its place with nude emotions displayed with shame. He wrung his fingers into Adal's clothes, drawing him near in an almost desperate attempt to cling to him as if he would drown if he let go. He felt childish again and he also felt sick, the raw taste of earth in his mouth as he wretchedly heaved sobs and cries into the fabric of Adal's shoulder. Swirling in his head were a cacophonous mix of emotions, a cottony dizziness from the drugs in his veins as they slowly began to ebb away. He couldn't seem to get himself to do anything else but weep and weep uncontrollably unlike he had ever done before, a true and honest cry from the bottom of his gut where those kinds of emotion had remained locked away for so long. Spasms of violence still returned, like aftershocks, in fitful agonized screams that had about as much strength as a falling leaf and weak and harmless pounds of his fists against Adal's shoulder.

His family was gone. The Clemmings family was dead and Chauhn finally realized it, understood it, accepted it. It wounded him like a thousand hot fire pokers, but he understood it now. The Clemmings family was dead.

He was alive.

As was the thing crawling out of the fireplace.

Wincing underneath the ethereal display of ash and burning ember leaped out and breathed into the atmosphere of the little overgrown cabin, Chauhn dug his hands into Adal's clothes, jerking with fear as the hearth exploded into shrapnel of sparks. He would have liked to scream, somehow retaliate against the frightful display of ember, but his voice was nary the strength enough that it would take to make much more than a pitiful squeak. Chauhn was weak, but the horror that gripped him then as he clung to Adal was nothing short of colossal in proportion. He stared on in terror as the light imploded in on itself, forming, to his utter grief, a boyish shape within the hearth, a familiar and haunting image, something that was seared into the underside of his eyelids. As if in rewind, the body uncurled from within itself, folding out, building, reforming, his little brother's body reviving from when he had last seen it collapsing in upon itself into a dark and blackened shape, now breathing out into being. Chauhn, heaving between each breath, still clung deathly tight to Adal, stared on in unblinking terror, trying violently to summon up some kind of voice to speak the few words that he was struggling so hard to say. His teeth were chattering against each other, tapping out in morse code the desperate words he was trying to say, before he saw its face.

Wrenching himself out of the fireplace, forcing his dragging legs over the top of the iron bars that, very much like Chauhn's hands, tried to keep him within, Clurie wheezed for breath. Coughs wracked his skinny form as it cooled into dull colors and shapes, his body taking form from the thousands of ashes that compiled his shape, but he couldn't seem to keep himself together, too weak was he. Bits and pieces of him kept falling, struggling to reform before passing out again, and he struggled with every strained breath to steady the cottony mess that was his consciousness. Looking down, he blinked, this time with eyes as pitch as the spaces in between stars, and he could see, actually see, his hands, which used to be covered with gloves. They had since peeled back to reveal knobby fingers and claws, manifested from embers and ash, glowing and pulsing in time with his breathing, his heartbeat, which was racing at a steady flicker. He flexed them, or at least tried to, they were contorted into a monstrous clutch at the floor boards, before he swallowed his dry parched throat and swallowed again, unable to get his dry tongue moving.

From his twisted hands, the newborn Anhelo looked up with his black gaze to Georgie, nearest to him with his hands outstretched from digging within the fire for his little body, then, slowly, dreadfully slowly, as he allowed his tired and weak body to slump to the side, supported by his trembling ashen arms, he dared turn his eyes to Chauhn Clemmings.

Convulsing now in horror, digging his hands so hard into Adal, Chauhn was blinking a fitful of tears from his eyes, as open as his mouth was in gaping grief.

"...C-Clurie...Clurie Clemmings..." the wretched boy wept in whispers, his eyes stapled onto the ashen figure, "Y-you've come back..."

Clurie gave a slow shake of his head, his ashen hair falling into his haggard face from underneath the dark cowl of his hat.

"I'm not your brother, Chauhn."

"C-clemmings...Stay...Clemmings stay together..."

"I'm not a Clemmings, Chauhn."

Chauhn gave a terrible cry then, a broken wail that was stifled only by the weakness of his own tongue and throat. He was angry, weak, and overcome with grief. If guilt were a tangible thing, it would have suffocated Chauhn already. He flinched in terror of the thing that slumped before him, a terrible monster with the face of his little brother, in a perpetual state of burning away, help up by claws. Chauhn's last words, before he collapsed into a twitching slump in Adal's arms, eyes half-lidded in his slow lapse into unconsciousness were probably the most harmful things ever to be experienced by Clurie in his waking days.

"...W-what kind of monster are you...?"






"Yours."