Note: You should probably be familiar with Doves in the Ashes before reading this as this deals directly with some of the characters in it, although it is not absolutely needed.

Contained within is a depressing story with a depressing ending, some depressing stories with hopeful endings, some hopeful stories with depressing endings, and a hopeful story with a hopeful ending. Enjoy.

---

It is a tragic thing and oh, where his footsteps fall and leave behind no went nor bend of soil but the merely the print of wetness, black on black.

The boy walks between trees bowed of storm and bough, his limbs shaking with the weariness of that a thousand times his years. The head passed down from select generations of bloodline is lowered groundward. It is from his chest and hands, swaying in the moonlight, that the blood flows down from--very little of it is his, so another bloodline, not as well marked and remembered, is granted brief haloed status. He is the killer in this forsaken night, or so they would have you believe.

His eyes hold everything in the world in nearly a passing literal sense. He knows all and naught, only that which is and betrays, the family that he didn't realize he had who has destroyed his last grasp on life.

They will call him mad, because they judge with an eye fair clouded by dark as he is, with glimpses of alabaster skin but not nearly enough of the picture available to pass word on. The tresses that breach his crown to the dip of his shoulders are black; the shirt in old used blood is black; the two crests of the world mounted in the ivory face are of the lightest, crystalline gray. Tracts of water from the sky fall and marr the color in one; one could say the reflection, as water is wont to do, conforms black.

One eye still shines light, however, despite the night and its cold horrors. Light, the gossiped symbol of hope, although he would not have called it such now. It is his pale skin, uncovered mostly by cloth, that had shown in the reflected sun and had allowed hallowed steel to aim true his way. His movement had been by accident, and he was spared; her movement was made of surety, and she was not. A vampire turned vampire hunter. An angel, in the truest sense of the word, performing God's bidding without confirmation, when the whispered words from the sky and soil were silent with cold unyielding answer.

Commandments. Set by humans. She turned to those, because what's writ on stone is forever, when statues crumble by the day. The boy's muscle and bone will leave mark of this ideal, where her words had been carved in with her knife and lips when they who had betrayed him had left behind no room for forgiveness and yet had hollowed out one space still deeper, in exposing his blood to the sky. She will leave mark of it, too, where his terrified answer holds quietly in her chest. She is not the first whose blood had marked the leaves this night. The tremor runs through the boy and does not stop.

A morn ago, he was a creature of heaven, the new hope of a proud and subservient species. Three bodies in his wake in scant few hours and now the children of God will hunt him down, with beautiful hemlock and oaken bullets, because they need a reminder of what they are here to do and surely, surely the sacrifice of one unwilling innocent is worth the salvation of a people.

It rains and he continues on but we do not, because the path before and beyond him holds blood, and it is best not dwelt on.

---

One thing differs and cities rise and fall. This is a common, known fact; it serves as the basis for many a tragic tale in history and story alike. One horse stumbles; one man sleeps; one step pauses, untaken.

It wasn't the case with us. I know this, because I was granted one wish before the jaw closed over my neck and I begged for another chance, for a million more chances to make this right.

This is the eighth, and not for much longer, because he lies shattered in my arms once more. His beautiful, beautiful golden eyes watch me, still remarkable in their shade; my people are known for their vibrant colors, but gold is a unicorn's right alone. They are unremarkable only in their pain and desperation, because this is something I have seen eight times before.

“Again?” he whispers, and I nod. Amazingly, astoundingly, despite anything I have ever heard, it hurts the same amount each time. Unremarkable does not mean unshocking. Looking down at him as he stutters and gasps air from unhealed lungs or watching the expression in the gold as my vision closes around me never gets any more bearable. They have never known and do not understand and so accidentally lie, when they say your mind scabs over and you start to feel less. What are we, but the embodiment of feeling?

So I will take my life and try again, number nine. It is cats who have nine lives but sadly we, a Pegasus and unicorn, ancient rivals and predator and prey, are no cats. It is still something to give hope, just as I hoped at third time the charm, and lucky number seven, and will continue hoping through bad luck thirteen.

Seven was lucky in that it made me understand, a little. Ameno and her impish, vibrant ways, Ameno whose left arm lays behind me, had solved the mystery in one offhand comment.

“You two are boring,” she said, and we had looked over, mystified, for we had been called everything in the book—abomination, hope of the worlds, too strange to believe—but that. “It's just like Romeo and Juliet.”And since she had said it, our friends agreed, because it is apparently typical among humans for such obstacles to be overcome, so typical as to become, as quoted, boring. We were reduced to mediocrity.

I, who have no great love for literature, picked up the book and read it. We followed the tale true enough, although it had by no means taken us a night and it seemed there was never any danger of Juliet taking her beloved for dinner. Classic tale, it appeared, of lovers overcoming adversity.

And then they died.

And then he died.

And then I lay him down, and died, and when I woke, I was five years old. I was five, after all, when they enrolled me.

One of the teachers called us into like and then there was roll call. He must have recognized my name because he gave a jump, and our eyes met: the first introduction of the prince of Pegasus and the prophesied heir to the unicorn throne.

My enemy.

---

They say he is the most gorgeous person any of them have ever seen, and they have seen beautiful people, because magic forms in the image of its own choosing, which is beauty. They say there could have never been any better.

They say he loves everyone, in many ways, more than some of them would like but they deal with it. He loves women, loves to make them smile and dance and later gasp in bed or cry on his shoulder, whichever they prefer. He loves his friends, whom he dotes on and lives for and patiently lets ignore him. To those who mean him harm, he smiles at, and they know they are loved in the worst way possible and leave in shame.

They say that no one could bring him low. The occasional person tries. There's been threats on his life, and women who seek to break him, and friends who hurt through accidental carelessness. He laughs, simply, and all is well. They say he is unstoppable.

They say he is a whore, and he is, because he sleeps often and for pleasure, just not his own. The occasional person calls him this title to his face and then they must face his friends, who do once in awhile try to pay back their debts. He doesn't mind on the outside, because logically it is simply a true name for him. On the inside, he hates it as much as he hates lying with those who move and kiss and forget, because he knows if just one person remembers him, he could do it—and yet, there is no one there.

Then he sees Moren, the boy of blood, and forgets everything they have said. He follows the boy as the story of the swan who has fallen in love with the swan boat, oblivious to all and all to him. His friends notice, but do not remark on it, because surely he knows what loves is and does not need telling—they say that he is brilliant, after all—and because no one else needs to know.

But Moren's fate is cursed through and through, and a year later finds him among the trees, blood on his hands once more. It wasn't his fault, it rarely is, but he cannot bear to face Asher and so he is gone, because the one they say is perfect did not heed directions to not dwell on his story.

They say Asher was inexplicably not the same after some random time in the fall, after the lightning storm that lasted for hours, when they imagined they could hear screams in the woods. Perhaps something happened on that cold night, they wonder, then drift away to think of more pleasant things.

Asher realizes that he is not perfect, because he is consumed with grief and all else ill in the world as he can't remember having been before. No, he amends after some reflection, clarity brought out by the blood around him, he isn't perfect in this time around. He heals his self-inflicted wounds because there is one last sin he must commit before the final one.

When his best friend cries out for help, he sends the Pegasus in the wrong direction.

---

The boy watched as Leo picked up their youngest brother, carefully prying the broken ball out of the boy's hand, and was rewarded for his efforts by a toddler punch and a wave of tears. Moren hid smile as Leo, already reckoned beautiful and three inches taller than his oldest sibling, distracted Jakob with a pinwheel, casting bright colors over the room and the two-year-old's fascinated gray eyes.

"Moren," the boy called out, heading over towards the window seat after carefully placing the occupant of his arms onto the rug, "was I such a bother at that age?" He was dressed in blue, because he hoped to be a water mage—Moren saw ice in his future instead but it was close enough, and thought it too odd to believe anyway that his witty, loving brother could change enough to embody the emptiness of winter.

"You were worse," Moren told him with a smile, and laughed as his bright-haired sibling blushed. "You were as fiesty as Jakob, and would never sleep when put to bed. You kept the whole household up with your crying."

Leo frowned with lips they would write odes to someday, as beautiful as any in the family even in distress, except maybe young Peter with his predilicition to scowling. "I did not cry," he said firmly, and Moren let him have his lie if it comforted him. Leo never cried, now, even though Moren knew the children at school teased him on occasion, when his older brother was out of earshot, for the loner attitude he rarely showed at home. Leo believed that those above a certain age should not cry, and Moren wasn't sure how to convince his brother otherwise.

The screech of the schoolbus resonated through the windows, and all four brothers, even scowling Peter, looked up to smile through to the sight of Sheena dashing madly towards them, arms outstretched and backpack flopping wily-nily at her back. She disappeared briefly through the front door, then ran in, tugging off her shoes as she went before Ms. Gretchen, the housekeeper, could complain at the sight. Sheena greeted the younger boys with a kiss each, as was her custom, then Leo, before throwing herself down on the bench beside Moren, her favorite.

"Guess what!" she piped up brightly, basking all with a bright smile. "We went on a field-trip today, to the zoo!" Leo and Moren indulged her enthusiasm, congradulating her while Jakob happily chirped "ZoooO!" and Peter informed them solemly that he wanted a cookie. Sheena chided him on his poor health choice, telling him that he should eat an apple if he wanted sweets, which set the boy to crying. He was quickly joined by the younger Jakob, always eager to add to his beloved sibling's qualms, and Moren smiled as Sheena attempted to get them to settle again. Finally, admitting defeat, she kissed Moren's cheek in greeting as well before trotting off to the kitching, Leo following behind her diligently with his arms full of squirming, yelling boys.

Moren would have followed them, but he took the time instead to remove the letter from his pocket once more, scanning over the contents within. Out of all of the applicants, those that had been deemed acceptable, he had been chosen somehow as one of those to, as they put it, try for his teeth on his birthday. After all of the studying and training, he only had the formal ceremony left and then some sort of test—Moren wasn't technically supposed to have been warned about the test, his mentor had told him, but sometime within the next few years or so they would spring something on him that he would have to respond to, different for every angel trainee ever admitted. He feverently hoped that he wouldn't embarrass himself too badly as his mentor had, feeding the starving dog that had been placed in her path her last bit of food, a bar of chocolate, and having to reapply for a test as the rather amused vampires took the poor creature to get its stomach pumped.

But first, the ceremony. He smiled, refolding the paper and slipping it back into his pocket, and then looked up at the clock.

Three hours and counting until Moren turned sixteen.

---

With repetitions numerous enough for even the least math-minded to comprehend, as I am, I realize that we have never made it together past twenty-five, and firmly believe that if only I get the combination right, we could do it and that would be the end.

Refuse the rose, take the bus, ignore the teacher—he dies, in a freak accident in the chemistry lab.

Take the rose, avoid the alley, go to the warehouse, don't find my crystal—I am shot, inexplicably, crossing the street.

Get the toy, study for the test, refuse the rose, don't take the bus, push that guy—I am killed when I cross the path of a dark-haired boy with a smile as mad as anything I have seen and blood on his hands.

I thought for awhile that I was improving at least a bit each time, unti I don't go drinking and he is raped to death at thirteen. I am the one that finds him. I go so numb with shock that I can't even bring myself to push him Day One, something I had found had to occur for any timeline at all to work, and am killed by an accidental werewolf attack. I nearly don't ask for another chance, that time, wondering if maybe I am doing nothing but ill in this endless repetition, but Daiei at least does not remember dying or hating me or falling in love with the basilisk from previous lives and I can't bear to stop, not really.

Eat the cake, don't push the button, make the call, don't say you love him, punch Asher, don't leave for spring break—he dies of alcohol poisoning at the vampire's birthday party.

Don't eat the cake, pick up the doll, flunk the test, take the rose, find the crystal, don't bring your sister to the Force—I commit suicide, finding out only afterwards what I have been doing and facing the absolute horror of having ruined my chances for yet another cycle. This time, I find a way to leave knowledge with my next reincarnation, and it never happens again.

It was a rather unremarkable time around, this cycle, without nearly any kidnappings or worlds needing to be saved or killers thwarted, but we celebrate Daiei's twenty-sixth birthday without incident and I can't bring myself to tell my fiance why I have to go to our room and cry in desperate, aching sobs for a full two hours.

Walking across the street the next day, I don't see the bus until it's too late. The so-called 'deer in headlights' look can also apply to Pegazi, and I see Daiei's mouth open in panic as it comes—and then the light changes, and it swerves away just in time. We continue on.

But I know, walking with him, that it isn't over. There is always going to be the fire we didn't see, or the rabid dog, or the train. I know my chances are up, and that from here on out it's the normal dice roll of life that will let us live together--and I look at him and smile and wonder if this is the worst thing that ever could have happened.

---

They say... well, they don't say too much anymore, because they only see him at the class reunions, but time seems to have treated him well. Vampires age unlike humans of course, growing older without tissue damage or cells dying, and he is as young and hearty as ever.

But sad, they remarked, so sad. Sure, he laughed and flirted and seemed to find genuine enjoyment talking to those he had known in the past, but after every conversation was over, every drink finished, his eyes would fade and grow distant. They hadn't seen him really happy since, oh, what was that kid's name again, the beautiful one with hair like the night? Since him, and that was so many years ago.

His two guard-dogs were there, as they called them, making up the famous troublesome trio; the two had unexpected wedding bands on their hands, bright dawn and cool twilight. They joked and bantered and insulted, the three of them in high spirits. And when everyone went home, they parted ways. Asher, the prince of whores who had given up his throne so long ago, left alone, the way he came.

He entertained at his house sometimes, and everyone liked his parties, mature and refined unlike those in his past, with tea served in his beautiful gardens. There was a stone bench in that garden where he liked to sit and watch the stars, he told them, and if the party went late the guests did just that; the views were always breathtaking, the sky always clear.

One night he sat out there, long after his guests had gone, until clouds darkened the moon and stars alike, and he looked to the woods, wondering. It had gone silent as it does when it is too late as to be early and he could hear just the faintest sounds, a scuffle, a soft yelp.

He inhaled, and the smell of hyacinthe mixed with that of blood. Asher rose and followed it.

And there, expression just solem, asture eyes just as lovely, was the boy, cradling one hand in the other. "I didn't expect roses to be planted this far out," he whispered, and showed the vampire his hand. Asher picked out the thorn expertly, then pulled the boy towards him and planted a kiss on his lips, sweeter than any of the blossoms in all his garden.

"Do you plan to run away again?" he asked, and Moren shook his head. He had lost his way entirely back there in the woods, trusting his night vision to make it through the trees that had turned quickly to lilies and goldenrod and one solitary rose that had caught his hand and blessed it. He did not think he could make it back even if he wanted to.

"Might I stay with you for a little while?" the boy said, and Asher laughed and cried and realized that, while he was not perfect, he never needed to be, and that things really can be all right sometimes.

"Of course," he replied, "but we'll have to be careful. There isn't a path back from here to the house."

"Oh," said Moren, "I think I've had enough of paths." So they went, and lived happily ever after.