Part 2When Celestial Blood Spills

And now, here I stood at the gates of my home, candy apple in hand, completely lost.

The ground was littered with the corpses of my kin.

My brother, who had looked up at me with a smiling face just that morning, now lay in pieces on the ground, his head separated from his body. His skull was cracked open, his brain spilled across the dirt.

With trembling paws, I pried open his tightly clenched fist.

Inside was the pearl of night I had casually tossed to him on his hundredth birthday.

I stared at the pearl for a long time before speaking. "You silly thing. You're dead. Why were you still holding this?"

"But… the pearl is warped. It must have hurt a lot, didn't it?"

I sat there, from sunrise until the dead of night.