All Is Fair - Tumblr Posts

All Is Fair

This concept is not a fic, and I may not actually write it out as a fic. It's just a summary of an alternate sequence of events I had in mind that I wanted to record on impulse.

Warning: The content is dark. Comment if you want more specifics or spoilers before proceeding.

Summary: Vulcan won.

⸻

Vulcan didn't turn Rafal over to the prison warden of Monrovia. Instead, the Evil School Master was paraded down the halls in a straitjacket and locked in what was to become the "Doom Room," a name later coined by a future Dean years down the line, inspired by Rafal's blueprints for a veritable dungeon that Vulcan stole.

Vulcan kept Rafal as a prisoner of war instead of turning him over to Monrovia, and tortured him everyday, personally. Eventually, he became a lazy "fat cat" in his own right and hired Man-Wolves to continue on without him, so he could revel in his nemesis' agony.

Rafal never even had a fair chance to escape. Vulcan knew to use electrified, sorcery-resistant bonds, specially ordered from Monrovia, that rendered Rafal as powerless as any mortal.

Rhian languished in the tower over Evil, also trapped by Vulcan, and was administered drugs and various sedatives of questionable legality on the regular—all so he would agree to everything without putting up a fight and sign off on important documents to the Kingdom Council without retaining the presence of mind to read any of them.

And, to make matters worse, the Council never checked up on the Schools and assumed Rhian was spineless, like he'd always been. Or that's how it looked on paper.

Thus, Rhian lived in a haze of memory and Rafal lived in pain and obscurity—if one could call either of those states living.

And the lack of a Council fail-safe occurred because Rafal, for lack of foresight, wanted everything to be regulated by themselves, the twin School Masters. Thus, by the time handing over partial authority to the Council would've been convenient, Rafal was in no position to do so, and the oblivious Council had no jurisdiction to intervene on the Masters' behalf.

The brothers had no support system outside of themselves. How wrong they were to realize it as late as they did.

Those days, Rhian was not usually lucid, and eventually began responding to "Duckling." Though, when he was lucid, and remembered vaguely who he once was, he worried for Rafal and was consumed by guilt, overcome with nausea, wondering what had happened to his brother.

Whenever he was called useless for refusing the red "wine," a sleeping draught Vulcan kept bringing him, Vulcan pinned him down and forced it down his gullet. Rhian loathed the drink he'd once lauded.

Eventually, Rhian was killed when Vulcan got sick of his toy, and Rafal never knew.

Rafal was mentally disoriented, enough so that he could barely fathom his love for Rhian consciously and preserve his brother's life. His sense of self was slipping away.

The students greatly regretted rejecting Rafal and choosing Vulcan over him. As it was, Rafal would've been the better option over Lord Vulcan.

Fortunately, Vulcan never did gain the Pen's favor as a usurper, so he also died one day, decades later.

Yet, the Evil School Master was never spoken about and never got a tale to his own name, so he was lost to the sands of time, erased from living memory.

⸻

Since day one of Vulcan's reign, Rafal had been hanging by his wrists off a wall in the Doom Room, until he had gone numb, and his circulation had cut off. And yet, he was alive, sustained by only the Pen, the Pen that had once planned to allow him to become the One, as per its original plan, now a discarded plan, centuries old.

The damp cell grew black mold and the chains rusted, but the one who dwelled there never aged.

Perhaps, the Storian had forgotten to cancel its subscription for the one remaining School Master, in a sense, so there he hung.

Over the years, each day, or at best, a few times a week, he heard the screams of students he'd never met and had never taught and the gravelly threats of probing Man-Wolves. The screams never phased him.

Then, one day, he hears pleading, in soprano, and shortly after, a great splash.

That was new.

He opens his eyes and listens intently for once. His eyes had already grown used to the constant, endless dark.

The girl who peers in through the doorway looks haunted, lost in the labyrinthine sewers below the Schools. He senses her soul is Evil.

⸻

At first, Sophie believes she's stumbled upon a corpse, strung up on the wall, and almost runs off in alarm, until she notices it's blinked at her.

She shrieks.

Oh, it was a boy. A rather handsome boy.

He hasn't spoken in years, so he says nothing, and besides, he has no seductive appeals to offer her in the dense fog occluding his speech.

She musters up the courage to ask what happened to him.

His answer doesn't entirely make sense.

He says "bats."

Though, no one can expect coherence because he's been alone with his thoughts for two hundred years and has gone well off the edge of sanity. And his memory doesn't serve him as well as it once did, as, every unchanging day in the dark has bled into the next.

On his deathbed, as a wizened old man, Vulcan had ordered that the Man-Wolves keep torturing his prisoner for eternity, but eventually the Man-Wolves lost discipline without a leader, and faced with declining pay, they decided to let the prisoner alone to essential solitary confinement. They were too young to know his crime regardless.

Back then, Vulcan loved having a fresh "canvas" to bloody every session, thanks to Rafal's invulnerability. The days when Rafal still had functional nerve endings.

Not that either of them could know all that. He or the Nevergirl.

Rafal had all but forgotten, and never did truly register the passage of time, and Sophie would very much have liked to have surfaced right then instead of stare at the ghostly, hanged man.

Sophie thinks for a moment, and realizes she'd done what any prince would do. Kill the beast, save the—

The prince? He looked like a prince. Close enough. Albeit, he was a prince in a tattered, sorely outdated suit.

Thus, for once, Sophie chooses to do a "Good" Deed and releases him, as if to atone for her first murder. She melts through the bonds with her fingerglow, her magic fueled by the fear and burgeoning tension within her.

And, without so much of a bow or a "thank you," the man practically vanishes into thin air, shooting out of the sewers like a bullet, face grim.

But, Sophie doesn’t know she’s released two hundred years of pent-up fury into the Woods.

Her classmates seem afraid, not by the beast's disappearance. That's been overshadowed by something far worse. The changes in the sky.

The Coven had started to creep into the sewers to check on her since Sophie's punishment had gone on for longer than was customary, and even Hester steps back, bewildered, as a skeletal being whooshes by the entryway, up the stairs and into the blue day.

Lightning rains down from the already darkening sky.

And the Nevers all wonder what unholy eldritch being had risen from the grave? What abomination had Sophie released into their midst?

⸻

The daylight of the outside world blinds Rafal and burns him like it would a Night Crawler as he's spent centuries in the dark. His name has been lost to time, and he feels low, more base and wretched than a primal beast.

His rage and sorcery unleash themselves without so much of a command as he realizes this is a new time. Another era. And the magnitude of that starts to eat at his insides. The nearest forest is blue. The seasons have changed more than a hundred times over. His Stymphs have molted.

Then, it dawns on him: his brother is dead.

His head spins, and the sunlight doesn't provide anymore clarity than what shreds he ever might've had, and he starts on an utterly, literally blind, murderous rampage, his sight seared away, his irises sun-bleached to the coldest white-hot blue, besting even the lit sky itself.

This material world is his rival, as he's already lost his sight to it and wishes to, if not right the wrongs this world has scorched and slashed into him, to, to wrong this world. Right back.

Only the Storian remembers the archived tale it left with loose ends the day it had written itself into a dead end, but it must deal with Rafal, now that he has returned a threat.

During its first intervention of this new era, the post-School Masters era, the Pen lances through its once-last-hope for the One, and the balance resets, the two brothers laid to rest as equals in death.

With no corporeal form left, Rafal wanders the grounds, until he comes across Rhian in a quiet glade.

The two ghosts are reunited and they turn their back to the Schools for the rest of eternity, save for the rare times they return during a tale, to speculate about events that don't concern them from beyond, and to enjoy the offerings a new hire, a certain Professor Sader, leaves out for them on windowsills.

Rhian reminds Rafal of who he was, and gasps out shuddering sobs, apologizing for everything, and Rafal simply lets him, and doesn't scold him for once because he believed he was the one to fail and lose Rhian.

Occasionally, when Rafal watches the mortals below, he regrets having left Evil in that girl-in-pink's hands, but he gradually comes around to the fact that, perhaps, ruling was too precarious of a position for him.

Better to watch the mortals fell themselves to ruins. It's what they did best.