Two Burning Worlds

prologue

I remember that day as if it were yesterday. 

One moment I was entirely sane, brimming with pure, undisguised happiness. Though my inner conscience held a nagging feeling that I wouldn't stay in that state forever, it was nice to get carried away by my pathetic naivety. 

That lasted for a total of seven years. We never saw it coming. 

They came, taking my life and wrapping it in chains, their malicious assurances twisting around my soul until it yielded, daring to break. My skinny, weak arms were bound by indestructible fornth and held roughly behind my back; my wrists still bear the scars made from those white, iridescent ropes even to this day. 

Rough words battered past my ears as my seven-year-old self looked at my mother, who had been watching helplessly with tears pouring down her beautiful face. She could have done nothing. The Council's actions, rules, and regulations, were law. Everyone had to abide by them. 

Even so, my mother had fought, and had fought them bravely. She had lasted only a few seconds before the Council pressed the Button. Nowadays, I see it so often that it's hardly worth mentioning, but to a seven-year-old boy, seeing the fabled Button was like seeing a hologram come to life. Black as a starless night, it seemed to absorb the very light from the apartment, the  strange ribbons of colors rippling across its surface giving the semblance of it somehow being alive. 

And with just one click of that small Button, the very Button controlling my mother's actions and Life Essence, they prompted her to collapse, unconscious, onto the tinted-glass floorboards. I never forgot my mother's limp form, her chestnut hair spilling about her like a waterfall, as I was silently led away by the two burly-armed men, tears to match my mother's coursing down my young face. 

The only comfort I felt as the men wrapped my eyes in a blindfold and shoved me in the back of a hovercar was the fact that my little sister, who had been in lessons, had not been there to witness it.

I found solace in the fact that she was not there to see what monstrosity the Council would make me into through their experiments, and later their words. That the only brother she would remember would be the one who loved her more than himself. 

She would never see the boy with one red eye and one blue eye and powers to rival even the gods. 

She would never see her brother again.