"Where ya headed?"

Annoyed, the Sin of Pride lifted his eyes from the battered map sprawled on the table to glare at the burly local. The man had to be six and half feet in height and weighed down by a hundred pounds of well-earned muscle. He was a mountain of a man, made to live in mountainous town.

If Darius had been a mortal man, he should've been intimidated by the local. As it was, he wasn't mortal and couldn't care less.

"Hell," Darius answered, allowing the barest sliver of energy to enter and charge his irises. "Want a free trip there?"

The man backed away from the table and left the Sin to his map and untouched ale. The rundown tavern was heavily populated, considering how tiny and remote the Scandinavian village was. The fires roaring in the hearths pumped exorbitant heat into the main floor area. Darius breathed in the scent of sweat, ozone, and the strange precipitation that preludes a blizzard. The whole settlement rested upon the slope of a gray, snowcapped mountain with glaciers crawling at its feet.

Alone in his dark corner, Darius flexed his hand and pushed just an ember of power into his fingertips. He pressed down upon the map and drew a line of soot from one red 'x' to the next. The area he'd covered today was vast, but had proved unfruitful. There had been nothing but frozen tundra and lands of ice. Nothing.

Her voice persisted in the back of his thoughts. There isn't a weapon! You're chasing shadows, willing them to take form, but they never will!

"Idiot," he grunted as he leaned on his fist and smoothed the map's surface. Aside from the sections he'd burnt off, the map was soft from being taken in and out of his jacket pocket so often. "She somehow still manages to irritate me from hundreds of miles away."

The scarf he'd taken from some traveling woodsman days earlier was swaddled about his face and neck. His breath poured into the knitting, warming his cheeks and skin against the ravages of the frigid temperature. The cold held little sway over the Sin typically, but his exposed skin easily succumbed to frostbite in the subzero chill of this clime. Continuously healing the dead flesh was a waste of energy.

The Sin charred off another section of the map before glancing out the window. What was visible of the world through the swirls of frost was dark and unwelcoming. The mortals inside had their backs turned to the waiting night, their shoulders dusted with fat white flakes, their gloved hands curved about steaming mugs of stout and lager.

Darius stared into the blackness of the coming storm. His entire body was beleaguered by exhaustion—but the Sin knew he couldn't linger through the night. He needed to continue the search. He had somewhere he needed to be.

He dropped a few krones he'd managed to steal from another village on the table before getting up. Some of the locals slanted wary looks in Darius's direction as he carefully folded the deteriorating map and replaced it in his pocket. The Sin sneered as he resituated the scarf and strolled from the tavern.

The wind instantly sliced through his attire with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel, but Darius only squared his shoulders and ignored the unrelenting cold. His breath issued from between the scarf's fold in white plumes that were caught and shredded by the turbulent air. Darius blinked to clear the ice building on his lashes and finally resorted to filling his eyes with power, letting the residual energy heat and melt the accumulating frost.

The storm had barely begun to unleash its rage. There were still spots of visibility to be had, air to be stolen from between the blustering howls of the arctic cold. Darius sank ankle deep in the snow and continued to the edge of the precarious town he never learned the name of. He had his eyes set on the steely mountains before him and what may lay in one of the many valleys carved between the range's numerous footholds.

He walked for a while, alone with his thought and miserable weather. As perverse as it was, Darius rather liked this land. The natural desolation of the mountains hewn by white storms and shifting ice giants was oddly beautiful. He wondered if Sara would have liked it, then decided the irreverent little mortal would have frozen herself solid in minutes. Or fallen through the snow. Or gotten trapped in an avalanche. Or lost.

He snorted at the thought.

The wind paused. The snowflakes whirled in the shifting current above the Sin's head like flocks of winter birds. He inhaled—and tasted something familiar, something that shouldn't be there. The Sin yanked the scarf from his mouth and sucked a lungful of air through his lips. The essence spun through his senses, the smell of it just as cold and bitter and empty as the snow surrounding him.

It also smelt of rot, of something alive but decaying, like a rosebush chocked by the mottled buds of dead flowers left unclipped on their stems. He turned, searching for the source in the seemingly endless canvas of white drawn in every direction.

Sethan stood not ten yards away with his bony shoulders hunched and his hands folded before himself. The Sin of Wrath was staring at Darius.

Darius hadn't seen his brother in over a century. Sethan was stretched thin, his skin drawn taut to bones that couldn't quite shake their Absolian definition. His carmine hair was short but greasy, as if Sethan had gone without washing for several days. He wore the casual attire of a graduate student—a plain white t-shirt, a cheap blazer, and faded slacks. The t-shirt was bloody and sweat stained, the slacks torn at the hem.

His mouth was full of sharp teeth, and his eyes were an unearthly crimson.

Darius mourned the sight of those eyes, feeling sorrow carve new furrows in the old scars plastering his heart. Sethan had once had eyes of cyan like himself, and Darius knew exactly what had caused the change.

Clenching his jaw, the Sin of Pride straightened his spine and glared down the length of his nose at his long-lost brother. "Sethan," he said, pausing on the last syllable to draw it out between his teeth. "I should have known you'd pick up my trail once you learned I'd left the manor, I just didn't expect you so soon. Tell me: who told you I'd left?"

"Brother," Sethan said as he kept his eyes averted, unable to look at Darius. "I'm not supposed to be here."

Darius's sniff of disgust went unheard in the blizzard's moaning. The Sin of Pride had spent decades trying to spare Sethan from his imprisonment—decades of maneuvering, killing Balthier's hosts, languishing in the Baal's care. He'd fought bitterly to save his brother, and now that he stood before him, Darius only wished for the Sin of Wrath to be gone. The pain of his failure was too great to behold.

The bitterness of the coming winter had stolen all heat and energy from the landscape, leaving the two Sins with no power but for what they could summon from their souls and Seats. Darius guessed that was a blessing. They would be on equal footing—two starved creatures lost in a frozen hell with nowhere to go.

That wasn't true. The Sin of Pride had somewhere to be, and he wouldn't be delayed.

"What is it you want, Sethan, if you're not supposed to be here? I'm not in the mood for touching reunion." Darius's power bristled as it coursed into his hands, the molten fire within his bones igniting his flesh in an astonishing agony the Sin had spent years learning to ignore.

Wrath stared at the flames, enraptured, then spoke. "You resent me." Sethan nodded, exhaling as if relieved. "That's good. It makes this easier." 

"Of course I resent you," Pride spat in return, holding his hands very steady as fire blackened his skin and heated the air. He cannibalized the energy excited by his own flames. "You gave in. You gave in to him. You surrendered to madness, when I did everything to try to save you from it. I am disappointed and...resentful. I resent wasting my time." 

Sethan's teeth flashed like unsheathed blades. "I spent my time in that darkness trying to fight the madness—until I realized you cannot fight what is already inside you. It is an exercise in futility to believe we are anything but crazed, doomed things feeding on filthy parasites in this unclean world."

"Kings above and below, you even sound like Balthier. You're nothing but an unleashed mutt now."

"He sent me after her," Sethan continued as if he hadn't registered what Darius was saying. He moved fitfully and suddenly began approaching Darius. The Sin of Pride leapt backward and used the Realm to put needed space between himself and his brother. "He tasked me with finding a way to her!"

The wind tore across the tundra but failed to steal Sethan's words. In the distance, the nameless village was a solitary spark of color in this dying place, the only discernable landmark left as the blizzard sank its fangs into the mountainside.

Darius's fingers ached with the need to strike Sethan, to do something to force him to take back his statement. "I will breathe my last before you lay a finger on her."

Sethan laughed and the sound was breathless, hungry. "That's the point, my brother. I may be mad and I may be Balthazar's best dog—but I have come here because I must kill you, Darius. I must! I must save you!"

"Those two agendas are contradictory, you fool." The ground beneath his sneakers groaned as he shifted. Darius chanced a look downward and found that, under the quilts of sleet and snow, he stood not upon ground but upon a river encased in ice, and the ice was melting below his hellish temperature. "Fortunately, I don't plan to die this night and I don't require you to save me."

"You don't understand!" Sethan snarled as he approached again, the uneven distribution of his weight causing the ice to groan more. Darius held still. "I must save you from him! Brother, I must save you from what is to come!"

Darius cast a furtive glance at Sethan's feet. Sins were capable of mitigating their mass, adjusting the density of their own molecular structure to be either lighter or heavier. He'd always found Sara's attempts to understand how he didn't break or tip over furniture amusing, so he'd never explained it to her before. With a bit of concentration, they could be quite light—light enough to balance on the edge of chairs—but if they lost concentration, they'd revert to being heavy once more. The effort to control the phenomena was minimal and innate, like breathing, but it could be disturbed if one was injured or distracted.

Pride's gaze flicked to Sethan's twisted face. Or mad.

"From whom? Balthier?"

Sethan paled, pausing not five yards from Darius as he began to claw at his own pale, skinny throat.

"No," he whispered above the keen of the coming storm. "No—not Envy. Him. Compared to him, Balthazar is a neophyte at an altar to a false god, praying for a salvation that'll never come."

"The Baal?" Darius didn't have a clue who Sethan was referring to. He guessed, as the Baal was the only person he knew who dwarfed Balthier's strength.

"No." A sharp, inhuman note of distress left Wrath with the first sibilance of Gehen. The ancient language disturbed the natural balance of this realm and tore through the night with a lash of twisted energy. The ice cracked further beneath the Sins and Darius did everything in his power to keep himself light, his feet spread to distribute his weight.

"The Dream-Eater, brother! The mad King!"

Darius's brow lowered. "Who in the hell are you talking about, Sethan?"

Wrath clawed himself bloody and healed the damage almost instantly. Darius knew Sethan's ability to heal was an Absolian throwback like his ability to displace pain. Sethan could tear himself to ribbons and the damage would heal in seconds. It made him devilishly difficult to kill.

"You left me there!" Sethan screamed. "You left me there in the dark, in the silence—in the nothingness and everything of that timeless, shattered place. So dark. Always dark. Always quiet! Until he came for me. Until he forced his words upon me and I had to listen! I had to listen to it all!"

Sethan was only feet away now. His unchecked power smelt rank, having decayed like the Sin himself during his imprisonment. He was near enough to touch, to hit or to embrace—to kill. Sethan was mad, ruthless, and uncommonly severe—but he was also Darius's brother. And beyond help.

"A hundred years with naught but the voice of the Dream-Eater in my ear! Nagging, nattering, and whispering his wiles. Forgotten. Forgotten. This existence, forgotten!" He grabbed Darius by the front of his jacket, his talons slicing the worn skin of the leather. Sethan's pupils were engorged by an imagined terror Darius couldn't understand. "I must save you from what is to come. You, my brother, I must kill you before I find the girl. Before I save her too."

Darius steeled himself, taking one acrid breath as he glared at Sethan. "You may have languished in the dark for a hundred years, my brother," he muttered, leaning nearer Wrath as he squinted with anger. "But I burned for thirty."

Twisting out Sethan's grip, Darius reached up and grabbed the other Sin's face as the Baal's flames continued to pour forth from his ruined hands.

As expected, Sethan shrieked and tore free of Darius's tentative hold. He stepped back, distracted, and his unproportioned weight—combined with the accelerated heat of the fire coming out of Pride—split the ice. The slow gurgle of the bleak waters met their ears as Sethan screamed and the river rose to rush atop their feet.

Darius struck Sethan in the chest, tipping him fully into the river. "I'm sorry, Sethan," Darius seethed as he quieted the agonizing fire within himself. "You should be put out of your misery, but I simply haven't the will to kill my own brother."

Infuriated, Wrath snarled, clawing and kicking as he slipped under the thick bulk of unbroken ice and disappeared.

Using the slim window of opportunity, Darius threw himself into the Realm and fled before Sethan could escape the river.