Wildfire Riders

“Listen to me, there’s not much time. You’ve got to-”
“No! We have to go find Mother and Verilius! They’ve got to come with-”
“Mother isn’t Mother anymore!” Sha’tuan snapped, his voice harsh but his eyes pained. “There’s something wrong with her, I don’t know what, but she’s sick. She’s not herself. If you go near her she’s… she might try to hurt you. And whatever’s wrong with her is even worse with Veri.”

“So then, what?” Ulthanon yelled back, tears starting to sting his eyes, “We just leave them here? We run away and let those things overrun the whole damn city? If we’re leaving those two, we have to go find Father! Go fight with his men! He’ll know what to do.”
Sha’tuan shook his head, casting a nervous glance behind him. In the distance, another green comet slammed into a building, but it was far enough away that all that could be heard was a rumbling through the ground, soft and deep.
“No. Father is…” he trailed off, searching for the words. “Father isn’t going to be able to help us with this.”
“So then, what?!” Ulthanon repeated, now screaming, as he grabbed his older brother and shook him by the shoulders. “You want us to just run away?!”
“No!” he shouted back, his face now completely given over to a deep sadness. “No, we’re not going to run.”
“Then-”
“You’re going to run.”

Ulthanon blinked, utterly confused. “What?”
“Listen to me very carefully, Ulth. I can’t protect you from Mother or Verilius like you want me to. If I stand up to them, I’ll lose, and then I won’t be able to protect you at all.”
“No, they wouldn’t- Veri’s angry at me but he wouldn’t kill me. And Mother…?Azshara’s tits, Sha, how could you say that?” The tears were starting to run down Ulthanon’s face despite his best efforts to calm his emotions.

“They can’t ever find you,” his brother continued, and a pale blue glow began to eminate form his index finger. Even in the chaos both around and within him, he had to admire the fact that Sha’tuan’s magic was still untainted. “If you cast, ever again, they’ll know you’re alive. You’re gonna have to go dry for the rest of your life.”
“Go dry?” Ulthanon’s mouth said the words, but they were disconnected from him, somehow. His head spun at the very concept of never casting again- easier to keep yourself from breathing, some said, than to attempt to forsake magic. His eyes saw that his brother was starting to draw runes of power, but he felt like someone else was doing the watching for him.

“I don’t expect you to quit on your own,” he continued, drawing out the symbols as fast as he could, “You’d fail. Anybody would fail. But this… this should work.”
“What is it?” Ulthanon asked, the pain in his heart momentarily replaced by curiosity.
“Well… I haven’t really tested the theory, yet, but if I’m drawing it correctly… it’ll make you forget.”
“Forget what?”
“Everything.”

Another explosion, this time much closer to them- they could hear the hellish flames jetting out from the stone as the comet broke through another building’s walls, the frantic screams of the people that had been hiding inside… the roar of the beast that emerged from the rock. Their building shook from the impact, casting a light rain of crumbling stone and mortar from the ceiling above down on their heads.

“What do you mean, ‘everything’?”
“If I’m right, this’ll make you forget everything about and related to casting spells,” Sha’tuan said, putting the finishing touches on the last of the hanging symbols, “…And about all of us.”
“What?! No! You can’t-”
“LISTEN to me, Ulthanon, it’s either this or your death! I don’t have time to fine-tune the spell, and I’d rather have you alive and amnesic than dead!”

The two men, only boys really at heart, stood and regarded one another for a long moment.
“I won’t remember anything?”
Sha’tuan shook his head slowly, voice soft. “Not a thing.”
Ulthanon pursed his lips and looked away, pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth- he’d found that doing so sometimes helped him avoid crying. This time it did not. “How long will it last?”
“It should begin to fade in a few hundred years, when you’re not a child anymore. By then it should be long enough that you won’t feel a compulsion to cast.”
“Are you… are you going to be ok?”

Sha’tuan Kaidos touched his little brother’s chin with a smile, bringing his gaze back to his own. “Hey. It’s me, remember? Have I ever let you down?”
Ulthanon considered this for a moment before nodding his assent. But in doing so he lost the last of his self control, relinquishing himself to the tears he’d been fighting so hard to dam up. He threw himself into his older brother, hugging him as tightly as he could.

“I’ll miss you,” he said, his voice a choked sob.
Sha’tuan returned the embrace, running his hand through his brother’s hair.

“No,” he whispered, “You won’t.”