"Tristan, your neck is—"
"I don't give a fuck about my neck."
"I KNOW you don't. That's the problem." Lucian's voice cracked in half. The controlled register he had held the entire conversation was finally hitting the load limit, and the load was the image of his brother's neck slowly turning black, and the image was too heavy for the voice carrying it, and the voice gave.
"You don't give a fuck about anything anymore," he continued. "That's what the dark magic does. It takes the man who cared about everything and convinces him nothing matters. You used to care about your neck. You used to care about your health. You used to care about what River saw when she looked at you. When did you stop? Can you even remember?"
"You are trying to take her from me." Tristan's irises flooded black.
Lucian saw it happen. Watched the green get swallowed by the black the way daylight gets swallowed by an eclipse.
