She glanced back up at him, barely able to bring herself to do so; sickened, and hurting at the very sight of his maniacal smirk, the greedy, evil glint in his once-loving eyes.

He chuckled softly in a tone she’d never heard him use before today.

She looked back down. This was too much. Her heart aced, she sweated profusely, and her breaths came out trembling and labored.

He moved toward her, attempting to touch her face. She recoiled, and felt positively nauseous as the tears poured from her eyes. She was emotionally shattered, and physically ill.

“Oh, testy are we?” he said, far too haughtily.

At first, she hadn’t the strength to respond. After taking a moment to brace herself, she replied weakly, hatefully, through clenched teeth, “Don’t touch me!” Her eyes closed, and teared up on their own. She had no control over it this time.

He sneered again, laughing as he paced the ground in front of her, hands cupped casually behind his back. “Oh, but darling, I thought you loved me.” His voice positively oozed sarcasm, to match it’s arrogance.

She felt the lump in her throat get bigger. 'No' she told herself, keeping her eyes shut tight, 'This isn’t real. None of it’s real!' Yet it was. All that she had dreaded more than anything else, through her already wretched life, was coming to be. In her’s, a life where everyone had always been against her, where nothing had ever turned in her favor, where she hadn’t even the dignity to justify or sooth it all because she’d been a killer, there had been one thing that had made her keep pushing it for another day, one element in the physical cosmos itself that had kept her alive, only one person in the entire universe who she either loved or trusted. Now he stood before her, her greatest foe, having just revealed to her—quite proudly, in fact—that her only ally through all this had been nothing more than a lie, a carefully preformed act. “No!” she said. “I hate you, and I always have!”

“Oh?” he said. “Didn’t seem so to me, sister.”

'Yes' she thought. 'None of this is happening. The brother I loved died last night. This isn’t him! He was real! He died thinking of me!'

“Nope.” he said plainly. “I’m still alive.”

She couldn’t breath. Her stomach churned. She felt as if she would vomit. “No! No!!!” she yelled, holding her ears until it was physically painful.

His voice entered her head: ' "All an act...” ' She was losing her mind. No, she wasn’t, but she wished it was so. She pleaded with whatever deity may have existed in the sky to let sweet insanity take her right now, to allow her to leave this place, and enter any fantastical realm she desired.

But most of all, she wished for the void, the realm of darkness where on the brink of total nothingness, all truths about the universe would be revealed, where after all curiosity and longings for knowledge throughout life were finally satisfied, one would be spared the insanity that would surely follow this ultimate truth. Where all pain would be relieved, all elements of life made meaningless, and where nothing would ever hurt her again...

She raised her visage once more to set eyes upon the source of all her pain, the one who had brought it upon her all along, yet guised himself as the one person who had ever been against it. She blinked, and tried with all her strength to see her brother one last time. For a second, it worked. She saw his warm smile, not the horrible smirk. The sparkling violet eyes of the one she loved in place of the evil, glinting orbs of the demon. She smiled just for a moment, which seemed to throw him off guard. He looked puzzled very briefly, then returned to his evil yet casual composure.

She raised her sword, mentally bid farewell to the brother who had never really existed, yet who she still somewhat loved, ran toward her pray, and attacked.

She felt an unspeakable pain in her mid-section, and a crunching near the side of her skull.

She thought she felt herself smile, but she could never be completely sure. So, her brother had come through for her after all.

' “You’ll always protect me from the bad guys, won’t you, Concadars?”

“Yes, Tia, I promise.”

“Thanks, Concadars. I love you...” '

Darkness.