He thought that maybe he had been confusing his memories of dreams and reality. It was not much of a surprise for his whole life seemed like a whole dream – mixed with bliss and nightmare.
Everything felt hazy from time to time, but he still managed to be with his brother.
Looking at him morphing day by day, with some incomprehensible spirit, it almost felt like Coen had forgotten everything.
Centuries might have been quite a long time than Toren had perceived it.
He realized that he might also have overestimated the capacity of human emotion and that it somehow softens through the flow of time. A very, very long time. All that remained, it seems, was hatred. Residues of hatred and desire for vengeance.
It was dark and hurtful and mad.
Toren thought that the details may have, little by little, condensed and faded away. Yet the hatred had been etched until he bled that it became a part of him already.
Toren would still wonder by then why his brother was burdened with such a heavy thing. He knew that it was intended for him, but he could not think of a reason himself to anger that person.
Deep inside, he was fond of him.
And they seemed to have gotten along then. But something changed with a kind of intervention. What has changed?
At the underground room where Coen would frequently come down to, his demonic spirit sometimes lured in concubines and elves. Sometimes, he would just drive them away depending on his mood.
He would seldom be kind, but often vexed with their presence.
And in his rarest and loneliest nights, he would make love with the concubine to somehow relieve his tension. And afterwards, he would send her away silently.
Toren's paintings had mostly vanished somewhere else he probably would never find anymore, but one of the million sheets he painted on would be seen inside Coen's cupboard.
It was one of Toren's oldest artwork – the portrait of their family where Coen stood in the middle of their father and mother.
In that present, Toren did not know why he was not included in that portrait, but it felt like he decided it to be that way.
He was there too. His fingerprints, his brushstrokes, and his colors.
He was more there in that painting than the three who were actually painted.
The longer he sees them, the more his desire to paint grows.
It got nurtured every time his brother would go down his secret room and glance at the portrait.
Soon, Toren decided to drift to his slumber and fabricate in that dimension his own painting materials. Whitened the canvas sheets, neat up the brushes and colors, and arranged his wooden stool. And there, he would paint.
He dissolved all the moving hours and flowed in that frozen world. He painted some insignias from across history. The icons and images that remained throughout the modern era from the youngest time he could cast his memory back.
He witnessed the world progress with his own two eyes.
The millions of images that an ordinary person may have seen in his whole lifetime would just be a quarter of what Toren had seen.
He was loaded with pictures and symbols and lost memories.
The emotions that he could not comprehend and the idea of immortality were all seething out of him, finally, getting materialized in a large paper in his dream.
When he brought a deep blue flower that was shaped like a rose into life, he thought it would not be a good idea to pluck it out.
But when it bloomed into reality, he saw that it was already plucked out even before laying a finger on it. It had been claimed long ago already.
And then, there was a mellifluous song.
A beautiful voice singing like a mythical mermaid beguiling a sailor.
Toren finally deciphered why the singing voice was so familiar to him and why it felt like he had heard it a thousand times already.
It was exactly because he already did.
He finally knew that the beautiful voice and heavenly song belonged to Airen.