32. Julian
Julian
Growing up our parents were not so much people as they were monuments.
Their lessons were formal, their affection clinical, and the weight of our lineage felt heavier than any textbook we were forced to memorise. But nothing defined our descent into the dark more than the summer our cousin, Thomas, came to stay.
Thomas was three years older than Cain and I and he carried a thrilling, dangerous air of rebellion that made the sluggish energy in the Manor feel new.
Our mother, a woman who measured morality by bloodline and order, despised him.
He was “troubled,” she’d hiss—a consequence of her sister’s “indiscretion.” To us, he was forbidden fruit, a glimpse of a world that bled and lived outside our walls.
The night he arrived felt like a license for chaos. We were eleven, identical in face but already diverging in spirit: Cain, intense and coiled like a spring, and me, observant and perpetually cautious. Well past the hour our parents enforced silence, Thomas pulled us from our beds.
“Come on,” he whispered, his eyes gleaming like a predator’s in the moonlight. “I have something to show you. Found it when I was digging through the basement while my mother was on a spring-cleaning rampage. I’ve been keeping it under wraps, but it’s time. It’s a secret, boys. A good one.”
We crept down the back stairs, our bare feet silent on the worn steps.
Thomas led us deep into the overgrown gardens until we reached it: an old, run-down shed, half-hidden by strangling ivy and rotting shadow.
Thomas fumbled with the rusted latch and pushed the door inwards.
The air inside was thick with the scent of rust, and something sinister, like old honey and decay.
He struck a match, illuminating a single, dusty wooden trunk.
Inside, wrapped inside a heavy cloth, lay a book.
It was bound in dark leather that felt almost like cured skin, and closed with a tarnished bronze clasp shaped like an eye. Thomas unclasped it, and the pages—ancient, brittle, and yellowed—exposed a script that looked like no language I had ever seen.
“It’s spells,” Thomas whispered. “Rituals.”
I instinctively stepped back, but Cain didn’t move.
He stepped closer, his face totally captivated.
He reached out a hesitant hand, his fingertips tracing the strange symbols as if he were reading his future.
Thomas pointed to a diagram of a human silhouette.
“This one… it’s the Ritual of Perpetuity. It can keep you alive forever.”
I saw the precise moment Cain’s obsession started. It wasn’t the rituals themselves that interested him per se, it was the power they held. The thought of escaping the fragility of human life lit up his eyes with a terrifying fascination.
“We have to learn this,” Cain murmured.
The years that followed were suffocating. Cain’s obsession grew like cancer. He was rarely with me anymore, his time was spent with Thomas, pouring over that wicked book and disappearing into the night. One evening, weeks later, I stood in the shadow of the kitchen as Cain prepared to sneak out.
“Mother is going to separate us, Cain! Please… we don’t need that book,” I hissed.
Cain took a step closer, his eyes intense. “Yes, we do. I feel it, Julian. The fragility of everything. The way things rot. Thomas can help me get it… and he could help you, too.”
He slipped out the door, melting into the night.
I didn’t sleep at all, instead I waited by the kitchen window for hours, praying for his return.
The back door swung open just before dawn.
I rushed from the kitchen, but the words died in my throat.
Cain was saturated in blood. It was splattered across his nightshirt, smeared in his hair, and glistening on his face.
He wasn't injured. The blood was vibrant, hot, and very clearly belonged to someone else.
“Oh my God, Cain. What the fuck happened?” I choked out.
He moved with a sudden burst of speed, pinning me against the cold pantry wall.
His hands gripped my shoulders with a bruising dominance.
“You tell anyone,” he breathed, his voice a low venomous warning..
“You tell Mother, or anyone else about this, and I will kill you. Do you understand? You are my brother, but I will kill you.”
I nodded, paralysed by the black vacancy in his shark eyes. He held me there for a heartbeat longer, then let go. But he didn’t walk away to clean up. Suddenly, the violence in him evaporated, replaced by a devastating unraveling.
Cain slumped against the counter, his legs giving out underneath him.
He fell to the floor, his hands—still wet with blood—clutching at his own chest as if he were trying to hold himself together.
He began to make a sound I had never heard from him before, a high-pitched wailing that sounded like an animal caught in a trap.
“Cain?” I reached out, my own terror momentarily interrupted by his agony.
He was staring at his hands, his face contorting into a mask of unexplainable horror.
He started to sob—a jarring, convulsion that shook his entire skeleton.
He was babbling, his words lost to hysterics, clawing at the floorboards until his fingernails bled.
I just watched my brother have a complete mental breakdown.
He looked like his mind was being ripped in two, his sanity dissolving in the iron thick air right in front of my eyes.
He stayed on that floor for hours, shaking and weeping, until something inside him finally just… snapped.
I watched it happen. I watched the light in his eyes go out, replaced by a terrifying, hollow stillness.
He stopped crying. He stopped shaking. He just casually stood up slowly, his movements robotic and devoid of emotion.
He wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his hand and looked at me as if I were a stranger, or a piece of furniture in his way.
He walked up the stairs, and the boy who had been my twin was gone forever.
That was the night the Cain I loved died, and the hollow sociopath I live with now, was born.
He never expressed another emotion after that morning.
Nothing remained but indifference. He buried his heart in the same dark ground where he’d left his innocence, and he’s been a cold, calculated catalyst of our damnation ever since.