Wildfire

Eighty Nine (18+)

Watching my shard of starlight as he slams Xiang into the wall over and over again... A nearly destroyed eye deflated and just as ill-looking as my father's soul must be, lying on the floor where it landed after being flung away from their wrestling bodies staring as the person who produced it writhes in so much pain against the hold of my wife's talons as Rayne lays into his flesh with a vengeance I assumed he would never be capable of... A vengeance I am so proud of him for...

I've been so terrified to leave my sweet wife alone, even before we were married... I was so fearful that someone would try and hurt him once more and that the delicate shard of starlight that has lit up my life so much more than any great fire or pyre of flame could have ever done would be wiped away from the plane of the living, and that my soul would be destroyed over the loss of his life leaving me in the same shoes as the King before me... My mother's passing less violent... But still... If her passing was enough to drive my father into this level of madness I had been horrified over the thought of what fate might befall me being predisposed to grief-induced madness... The thought of falling mad and further distressing the people my family was supposed to support... And ruining the Kingdom we were meant to protect... 

It is not as though I have not been able to imagine why my father took the long, winding path that he did... That he let his soul rot from the inflammation losing his other half caused him internally and does not know himself well enough to understand how far he's fallen from the man my mother had thought him to be... I understand it quite well now that I've met and bonded with the carrier of the other half of my soul... I know that it's not something men can always recover from... 

But I still have no intention of keeping Xiang from the consequences of his actions... 

And I have no intention of assisting Rayne unless he needs help doling out his justice... Unless he finds himself unable to continue on with his slashing... I shall stay my course and simply witness the release of the pain and fear that my wife has been carrying so heavily on his shoulders... I shall stand here and support him for the time being... 

Or at least that is what I intend until I hear a groaning sound from somewhere behind me, a body I had thought lay unmoving from loss of life starting to move much to my own displeasure... Cho raising his head from where it had been resting on the floor, blood dripping down past his brows from how heavily he had fallen... And as I catch a glimpse of his shoulder I am surprised even more that he is even conscious, much less alive... For it seems that it was not every time that Xiang missed his targets... 

If Cho had not shown his true colors in aiding the monster that has plagued our people for much too long I would rush to the man to try and prevent him from causing more damage to his burned left half... His arm reduced to not much more but smoldering chunks of flesh and charred tendon and bone... All of it oddly weeping... But the liquid that is flowing from him is one that is clear instead of drenched in his lifeblood... 

And for a moment it seems odd to me that he even survived at all... Until it dawns on me that while Xiang's flame created the wound... It also sealed it preventing the man from bleeding to death even though he deserves to... The colorless blood perhaps a byproduct of the flow being stopped so suddenly... 

I consider pushing the man back down to the ground so that he might know and see where his place is before I do what my father was unable to do and end his life for swearing fealty to Rayne and I and then turning around and making himself the worst kind of traitor... A liar... We had trusted him and he had thrown that trust right back into our faces and for that, he deserves the pain he is in at the moment... And he deserves to struggle to his feet knowing that the pain of his injuries will kill him before he even makes it far enough into the main chamber to actually be of help to the poisonous man he had struck such a backstabbing deal... He wanted to trade his help to a monster for my wife. He had thought to try and own the Queen of his Kingdom when not even I have the audacity to imagine Rayne being nothing more than a beautiful warm body to occupy my time and bed chamber and the way he spoke of the deal... It had certainly seemed like he had nothing innocent in mind. 

It takes a moment... For him to realize that I've noticed him... 

The look in his dazed eyes doing nothing but irritating my rage towards him even more than him simply still being alive when he should be on the floor as nothing more than a lifeless husk ready to be burned into ash and disposed of... But as I start to approach... 

His moans start to take the shape of words... Words that halt me and drown out the sound of my father screaming as Rayne punishes him... The rage in my stomach evaporating only to be replaced by a feeling of sick so strong that I have to pivot on the spot to look at the elegant golden beast currently splattered with blood so dark that it looks like dead rubies... And I find myself comparing my wife's glittering scales to the memory of what Cho looks like in shifted form... Trying to make sense of it... Trying so desperately hard to make sense of what on Earth Cho means when he mumbles, "M-My son.."