Ok, review-gaming. The first thing I want to comment on is your pacing. While I don't entirely agree with the choice to put 9,0 words in one big lump, your story was well-paced--you knew when to hop from one character to the next, and you have a good feel for suspense. Lots of great "buttons"--those short sentences that summarize the action or introduce twists--in this story.

I disagreed with a lot of your word choices, though--for dialogue and description. I found them to be very contradictory, to the point where I had no sense at all of the universe in which your story takes place. Your characters don't use contractions and say "alas", but they eat organic bacon and go to casinos? The former are indicators for a historical-type setting or a "ye-olde, dragons-and-princesses" type fantasy, the latter are definitely indicators of a more modern setting. I feel like you decided that not specifying an era would allow you to throw in whatever elements you wanted for this world, and even if that's not true (hell, even if you just went with the world this other author gas created) it comes off as lazy writing.

That feeds into the style issues that I came upon. Some elements of your writing come off as very cliched (isn't every fanfic dreamboat always flicking hair back in a single, smooth motion, and gazing at things with their strangely-colored eyes?) I wasn't a fan of Cyril's mood-rings-for-eyes, either (this I'm sure came from the prior author's concept of the character, but I felt that you could have done your reimagining of her story without them.) I'm not surprised by them, and aside from the moment the brothers have in the library, his mood eyes really don't contribute much to the story.

Likewise, you could lose an adverb or two. I started noticing them the minute that you said that Cyril did something "tiredly" and proceeded to describe him reading furiously and doing something else adverbily. Try--just as an experiment--taking all the adverbs out of one paragraph and then re-inserting those that are crucial. It's like that Coco Chanel aphorism, that she'd get all dressed up, look in the mirror and take two things off before leaving the house. You want your writing to be well put-together, tight and enjoyable. Try going over it with a red pen, with the determination to cut, say, one hundred words. Where are there redundancies? Where is there dead wood I can cut? I'll give you two to start with: "oak wooden door" and "pondering his thoughts".

Please don't think that I'm dumping all over your story because I think it's bad. Your characters are layered (although making them more so could only improve your story, and increase a reader's attachment to the story), your plot is interesting and raises great philisophical questions,and you have an innate sense of how a story should be told. All your organizational choices are top-notch: choosing to break up the action with Cyril's letters, ending the story with a split-in-two flashback as you did--those were great choices. I think your style could be improved in this story with some tightening; choosing to cut dead, cliched or redundant wood, as it were. Keep writing and working and changing--I'm excited to see the results!