Protege Moi - Part One
My Dearest Brother...

To my dearest brother, of everything in my life that I have done, I regret only one thing: that I could not save you.

They tried to tell me it was some sort of accident, you must have tripped over some stone or root and -- unable to catch yourself -- tumbled into the water and, having hit your head upon the rocks beneath the lake's surface, fallen unconscious in the water and drowned. They tried to tell me that it was not my fault, that no one could've predicted that your evening walk would prove so disastrous as to end in the loss of your life; but I know -- God damn it, I know -- that it was not an accident which took you from me. For I had seen it in my dreams for weeks before that evil day; your body laying dead upon the shore of that lake, lips turned blue and skin a paler white than ever it had been in life -- with weeds tangled in your silver hair and your waterlogged clothing all a mess and I knew, for I had seen it in my dreams, that the moment preceding was not a trip and a fall into the water... I knew that you had thrown yourself into that lake, that you had sought out the outcrop that overlooked the rocky shore with that very thing in mind.

And of course, I know that it is my fault, for we never should have been separated, my dearest brother, for we are two halves of the same whole -- two pieces of the same soul split into two bodies -- and is it not inevitable that should one half leave the other behind, that the other should be consumed by so great a sorrow that death itself should seem a reprieve from that melancholia? Why should you not seek out death when the other half of your soul is so far away? Yes, it is my fault that you are gone -- the result of my damnable self-absorption, my regrettable desire to pursue the upper echelons of Academia, seeking to learn more than what could be found in the meagre libraries of our parents' estate -- Lord, that I had not left you there alone and at their mercy -- or rather, should I say, at their neglect -- this should not have happened!

I am beside myself, such that I now write such a missive to a man who lies dead and buried but God, my dearest brother, I now know the pain that you felt in your isolation from the other half of your soul. You are gone from this world and I feel nothing, nothing but the pain of emptiness in my chest, the great chasm there where you had been, the ruinous loneliness of loss -- a grief that I can scarce imagine that any other man has felt and endured -- for no man could endure this pain.

But unlike you, my darling brother, I will not give in to despair, I will not give in to this darkness that reaches out to claim me and pull me from this world. For even if I were to follow you, I know that we should not end up together, for though we both would be Damned by our suicides, we would not find each other again in the Abyss. And so help me God, I would have us be together again, no matter what the cost and I shall, indeed, see it happen that we should be reuinted in this world, as we cannot be in the next...

There are powers beyond either of us, my beloved, and I will bend them to my will so that I may drag your soul up from the depths of Tartarus and return you to my side where you belong. Never again will I leave you as I did before, never again shall you be alone -- even if I have to sell myself to Satan himself that I may have the power to do so.

-Laurent DeFantome, Eighteen Hundred And Ninety Eight