“The Eyes of My Brother” by Robert Luke Wilkins

This was where the dead went.

Not up above, to the clouds and the bright, high skies. Their ancestors had believed that, long ago, but Kyen hated the idea—to be lost up there, blown hither and thither by the winds. Far better to return to the earth, to become part of it and be reborn, one day.

He had followed the rope trail all the way from the cave-mouth outside the village, and in the deepest chamber, the river of fire crawled past. The cavern sweltered in lava heat, and Kyen’s bronze skin gleamed from the sweat. It was two years since he and his twin brother Jakan had come here together, bearing the eyes of their father. Then, the cave had been filled with the stink of sulfur. But today, the chamber had the hot-iron smell of a forge—a place for the making of new things.

Kyen was bare to the waist, but a satchel was slung over his shoulder, containing a water-flask and a small knife, and he wore a carved maple mask, painted white with black weeping eyes. He removed the mask, and its stiff leather strap pulled his hair. He tossed it out onto the lava flow. At first it lingered on the shifting surface, but then it smoked and smoldered, and the white paint curled. The river carried it away towards the chamber’s end, and as the first small flame erupted from the mask’s corner, it vanished from sight.

He reached into the pouch at his hip, and lifted out Jakan’s eyes.

A person’s soul lived in their eyes, and the truth of their death lived there too. A slain man carried the image of his killer in his eyes, and some of the wise folk had ways to see it—but Jakan had been taken by a sickness.

Kyen had survived it, but his brother had not.

He looked down at them, now. The lava would burn away the flesh of the eyes, and liberate the soul within so it could return to the earth. Jakan would be reborn again, to return to the folk in time—as a child, or an animal, or a tree. But he would never again walk alongside Kyen, or hold his hand when he was scared.

Kyen’s eyes burned with grief, as the heat of the chamber took the tears from his cheeks before they could fall.

“It’s time, brother,” he whispered—but he didn’t want it to be. He wanted his brother to be with him, still. Without him, he didn’t feel so brave—he didn’t feel whole.

Kyen held the eyes, ready to throw—but his arm would not do it. He lifted the eyes—familiar eyes that seemed so alien now. He turned them in his fingers until they looked back at him, pupils lost to green irises painted black by the lava-light. Impossibly wide eyes staring back—watching, waiting. Daring him.

He threw them into his mouth.

The second stuck in his throat—a moment’s pain, but it shifted, and was gone.

He heard laughter in his ears—his brother’s low laughter, it seemed, though it could just as well have been a trick, the reflected rumbling of the sound of the lava as it passed through the chamber.

Well, it’s done. Time to go.

Kyen opened his eyes, and saw Jakan sitting cross-legged on the corner chair.

“You were always too soft for your own good,” said Jakan. “Too timid, too nervous.”

Jakan was gone. But Jakan was here, now.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m as brave as you.”

Jakan laughed.

“Oh, are you? Come on, then, little brother. Let’s go to the cliffs right now, and you can prove it to me.”

Jakan climbed out of the window. Kyen tried to follow, but something pressed against his shoulder, and he could not. He pushed against it, fought, and twisted—and then, as he felt sudden cold on his forehead, his eyes snapped open.

It wasn’t morning, but late afternoon. Ma leaned over him, a cold cloth pressed to his forehead. She saw his eyes, and smiled.

“Good, you’re awake,” she said, her voice soft. She took a bowl from a nearby table, and offered him a spoonful—he let her feed him, and the familiar sweetness of chicken and carrot soup filled his mouth. “Eat as much as you can. Keep your strength up.”

He remembered now—he was sick again. Nobody caught the fever twice, but maybe Jakan’s eyes had carried it, rather than the vision of a killer—the memory of this sickness, now taking a second bite. One more chance to see if it could claim them both.

We could cross the river then, together.

The thought was a comfort—and so was the idea of sleeping forever, to never wake again to the fever, weakness, and pain. But Ma would remain—without her husband, without her sons. And that thought was unbearable.

Together. But not yet.

He shivered from the chill, but fought to stay awake. He focused on his body, and imagined the evil spirit being fought—invisible hands pushing at it, until it tumbled from his mouth as smoke. He breathed in, deep, his lungs painful—held the breath—and then blew it out in one swift go. And for a few seconds, he felt better. The pain eased, the chills a little lessened. Then it all began to creep back.

He took another deep breath, held it, and blew out. Then again, and again, and again.

Six days later, the fever had passed. That morning, the room filled with the smell of roast beef before Ma arrived, with a hearty breakfast.

“I knew you would beat it,” she said.

He ate in a fury.

“I’m going out,” he said soon after.

“Where?”

“To Burain’s place.”

“You can’t,” said Ma. “His mother doesn’t want you over there. Don’t worry, it won’t be forever. She’s just worried for her boy, since you got sick again.”

Ma tried to hide her sadness. He smiled and nodded.

“I’ll be fine,” he said, and stepped outside.

Without his friend, and without his brother, it was only him now—but he didn’t feel alone. He had always known when Jakan was close, and he felt him now. He looked up.

“Let’s go to the cliffs,” he told the air.

He walked out of the village, over a mile past the outskirts and into the woods beyond the peat fields, to where the trees overlooked the long valley. Just beyond the old stones, the floor fell away to a hundred-foot drop, and below the cliff, the trees continued as if the woods had been cleaved, and one half had fallen down below. He and Jakan had come here often. They’d swung their legs, and dared each other to lean out over the edge, to hang from the roots and see who could hold on for the longest.

Jakan had always won.

Jakan had been the eldest, only by a span of minutes—but he had been the strongest, too, and the bravest. A little more of those things had gone into him, as though Kyen was his twin brother’s shadow.

Out here, it seemed he could hear his brother—a whisper in the sigh of the wind. He strained his ears to listen, and hoped for a quiet enough moment to catch his brother’s words. But time and again, they slipped by.

It was dark by the time he returned home, and Ma was waiting. She looked relieved to see him, and though she wanted to say something, she kept silent. He went to bed, and slept.

That night, he dreamed of climbing with his brother.

“I found a nest,” Jakan said. “Let me show you where it is.”

Jakan had always shown him things, had always brought him with him. He’d helped Kyen be brave, when he was afraid. And in Kyen’s dream, he followed him just as he always had. Back up into the trees, where Jakan had shown him a nest of hatchling birds—and then back down to the roots at the cliff-edge, dangling again. Jakan called out as Kyen struggled.

“Hang on. Just a little more!”

He felt his hands slipping, roots sliding from his grip…then woke, and saw the roots above him, his fingers slipping…

His grip snapped tight, and his feet slipped from the cliffside.

He dangled in space, above the cloven forest, all traces of sleep driven from him. A whisper echoed through the back of his mind.

Let’s cross over together!

No—no! Not today!

He pulled himself up in a panic, and crawled to sit next to the tree-trunk, his heart pounding. His arms felt weak. The sun was not yet up—the twilight before dawn had not yet broken, and the shadows of pine trees within the creeping light were long, thick, and black.

He looked at the edge, but didn’t creep closer to it. His stomach felt awful.

Just nerves. A nervous stomach.

His stomach spasmed, and he bent double, coughing and gagging. He spat bile, and vomit, and something else—something oilier, something fouler. He sank to his knees, doubled up, and retched onto the ground. The taste was foul and black—not vomit, but thicker, dark, all tar and scorched molasses.

He stared down at it. The light of dawn crept up on them now, but its warm orange glow did nothing to improve this disgusting liquid thing. It was thick, almost completely black, and gleamed in the sun—

It moved.

No, no—it didn’t move. Just a liquid, nothing more…but then it shifted more, and against the direction of the slope. Not a crawl, not a slither, and not a flow, but somehow all three as it shifted, leaving a sticky slug-trail residue behind it. Then, as it moved, it clumped together, rose up, and sticky lumps began to poke out from within—growing thinner, then longer, and poking out until the thing had half the look of a foot-wide, sticky black spider.

Kyen stamped down on it, hard.

He stamped again, and again—its noises only almost alive, half a squeal, and half wet and miserable noise, as though it screamed and drowned all at once. It deformed, became liquid again, and flowed as a thick trickle towards and over the edge, until only a sticky slug-trail remained.

He watched the edge for a long while. The sun was high before he left.

The next night, he didn’t remember his dreams, but he woke in the bog at the edge of the peat fields. He was covered with thick, dark mud, and in the low light he almost missed the thing he had spat out, crawling away on more legs than he wanted to count. He chased it down, and stamped on it until it died.

He hoped there had been no more.

Let me go, he might have heard a whisper say. Let me pass. But he looked around, and nobody was there—just a trick of the wind.

He washed himself clean in the river, and did not tell his mother of what had happened this night or the last, but went to the wise-woman, Magatha. A skinny woman, little older than his mother, he told her what had happened. She looked him up and down, and her sharp blue eyes fixed on his.

“You didn’t burn your brother’s eyes, did you?”

When he didn’t reply, she shook her head.

“Well, you are not the first, nor will you be the last. But I am afraid it will be worse for you than many.”

She went over to the edge of her hut, and gathered jars and pouches.

“You ate the eyes, yes you did—no point in denying it, nor any in admitting it, seeing as how I know it already. And it is done. You carry your brother’s spirit with you now, instead of it being back in the earth as it should have been, rid of the flesh it was bound to.”

She pulled out a large clay pot with a narrow lip, and into it she added a handful of red flower-petals, a pinch of dark ash, and a ruddy liquid from a small bottle. She worked the mixture with a long, rough-cut stick rounded to make a crude pestle, and spoke all the while.

“You loved your brother, and he you, but what lingers now is not him, save that it came from him. A sickness took him, lingered in the flesh, and that corruption lives on in the spirit that remains.”

A pinch of white powder, some dark green leaves, and some kind of long, stringy plant all found their way into the pot and fell beneath the whirling pestle.

“And who would guess what it now wants? This is no longer a man, driven by a man’s desires—nor an animal, nor any spirit worthy of the name. It is a darker thing. But you and it share this one body. So one of you will triumph, and the other fail.”

She took the pot, and poured the liquid out into two flasks, filling both to the brim, then offered them both to Kyen.

“Drink, a good mouthful every morning and every night. It is bitter, but it will help you. The flasks will serve you for a fortnight.”

“And what then?”

She shrugged.

“The corrupted spirit quickens into the body you share. Before the last flask is emptied, one of you will have won, and the other will be lost.”

She sat down, and shook her head.

“If I seem cruel, it is not from spite. But you must know the truth, cold and hard, if you are to face it. I know what you did, you did out of love. But what I have done for you is the extent of my skill, and none alive has more.”

She looked up at him then, her eyes sharp and bright.

“You always were braver than you knew, Kyen, and true hearted—and I believe you will prove this again. If I did not, I would not allow you to walk from this house tonight. What is within you now must not be allowed to walk free. Do you understand?”

Kyen nodded. He did.

He drank the first mouthful as soon as he left the hut. His mouth seemed to fill with soil and cold blood, and it left a bitter, acrid smell in his nose, but he drank it deep. He felt his stomach churn, as though the dark things within him wanted to spit it back up, but he fought to keep it down.

All my fault.

He had gone down into the caves—he had consumed his brother’s eyes, and brought him back out, so in time they could cross that river together. But he had damned his brother’s spirit to this corrupted hell, and now had to fight to destroy what remained—or be damned himself.

Return to the river. Cast yourself into it.

Perhaps that was the right way. They could cross together. His brother’s spirit would be free of its corruption, and they would both be free of this evil, twisted thing. But the idea of leaving Ma behind made Magatha’s concoction seem almost sweet by comparison.

He could hear Jakan’s voice, still on the faintest edge of hearing—but it no longer felt like his brother. It no longer spoke to him, but tried to creep in at the edges. Sometimes, the voice of Jakan—sometimes, his own.

He drank again that night, fought with his stomach, and slept fitfully—but woke, this time, still in his own bed. He had dreamed of dark things, violent and unpleasant, but only the smoke of them lingered. And he knew they were not his dreams at all, but the dreams of this thing. It no longer whispered, but chittered at the edge of thought, barely human at all. More, he thought, it reminded him of the spider-thing he had stamped to death.

But what, now, if it seized him while he slept?

Strength of will was one thing, but this corrupt spirit was growing, with inescapable intent. If it seized him here, with Ma in the next room—

Violent images flashed through his mind’s eye, and he shook them free. No—that would not happen. He would not allow it.

He drank again of Magatha’s concoction, took his satchel, and left the house before Ma woke. He walked first around the trees—back to where he and his brother had sat, and looked down one more time at the valley, to see it, to remember it, just as it had been the last time they had sat there together. He climbed down, and lowered himself from one of the roots, his hands grasping it tight as he leaned his head backwards and looked out at it all, upside-down.

“Hang in there, Kyen,” he said. “Just a little longer.”

The whispers inside him clamored, but they could not reach him, not here, not now. He hung there as long as he could, as long as his muscles allowed him to—and wondered, once, what would happen if he fell. Far from any trail, they might not find his body. And what might happen to the flesh then? Would this corrupt thing inside him die along with him—or would it linger, and find a new form of life, as it had when he spat it out onto the ground before?

He did not know. But he knew it did not matter. He climbed up, and glanced askance at the sun—still low in the sky, but rising.

It took less than an hour for him to reach the cave. Nobody was there. Nobody had died, so there was no reason for anyone to be.

He swallowed one more large, thick mouthful of Magatha’s concoction, took a torch from near the entrance, lit it, and slipped through the entrance. He followed the red and white braided rope down into the caverns below. The light of day was lost, and the cool caves soon grew warm, and then hot as he took steps steadily, on and on, towards the river of fire.

The whispers in his mind fought him now, and strange shadows danced across his vision as the thing sought to dissuade him from his path. The chittering was wordless, but he understood. We could coexist. But he continued into the swelling heat below.

You will fail. We will make you suffer.

Black spots danced across his vision, and the whispers in his mind became pointed fingers, trying to take a grip and hold him down.

He walked on.

He followed the rope guide, past the forks and turns in the caves, until the walls lit with the river’s glow. He cast the torch aside, and hurried into the chamber.

The heat beat against him as he entered, as though it sought to turn him away—and though he remembered the low, quiet rumble of the lava flow, he could not hear it now over the voices in his head. The chittering had become a growl. Pleading, promising, threatening.

He walked up, close to the edge of the lava-flow. At the edge, its glowing beauty, and in the heart, a shifting, scorched-black shadow. The earth lived, here, and waited to carry them home.

He took a deep breath, reached into his satchel, and drew out his knife.

“I know you’re with me, brother,” he said. “I can be brave now.”

A person’s soul lives in their eyes.

He turned the knife, stared at it for just a moment, and then placed the point beneath his left eye—felt his hands tremble as fear pulsed through him.

Pain doesn’t last.

He pushed the knife.

He heard himself scream as he twisted it, took the hilt, and pushed it down—the eye popped out of the socket, but dangled, still connected.

Gods, it hurts! But it’s just pain. Just pain.

He grasped the eye with one hand, yanked—and screamed.

He sank to the ground, and let the pain flow from him—the eye rested wet and sticky in his hand, but he barely noticed it. His head burned with a fire beyond fire, as though a hot poker had been hammered into the eye-socket.

He opened his hand, and his eye tumbled onto the stones.

His remaining eye fixed on the lava, but its glowing beauty was masked by the shifting, desperate shadows of the thing inside him. It was afraid, now—he was winning. Its chittering had changed, and alien half-human words whispered to him in the voice of his brother.

He took the knife to his other eye, pushed, twisted, and pulled down—his world turned bright red, flashed yellow, and then turned endlessly black, as he gasped and groaned with the pain of it—reached, took the second eye, and pulled it from his head.

The whispers fell silent.

The low, relentless rumble of the lava flow filled the chamber, cloaking his gasps, moans, and sobs. He felt as though the pain would kill him, if he let it—as though nails had been driven into his skull—and he wanted to let go, pass out and let the pain vanish beneath the warm blanket of sleep.

No. Not here—not yet. It’s not done.

He had expected perfect blackness, but his blindness seemed confused—flashes of color danced in front of him, born of nothing, meaning less.

He scrabbled around, and his hands found the eyes. To his left he could still feel the warmth, and hear the lava flow. He knelt square, turned his shoulders to face where he felt the heat, and took one eye in each hand. One last thing to do, then he could rest.

“Jakan, my brother—I return you to the earth to be reborn.”

He cast his hands forward, and heard the hiss as the two eyes landed upon the lava— for a moment, thought he smelled them burn—then heard his brother’s laughter, faint in the chamber. Kyen sat still, and silent, in the dark.

“Goodbye,” he whispered.

He lay back, and collapsed onto the stones—heat, pain, and the endless black his companions. All color was gone, now, but the darkness seemed almost familiar, a penance owed for his mistake.

Time passed, unfelt.

But he could not remain here. He had to return.

He turned, and tried to find his way, tried to picture the floor he had seen. But it was all wrong, all out of place as he crawled. Too many stones, too big—gaps too large, the shapes he expected not there at all.

Then his hands found the braided rope.

He seized it, gripped it tight, and held it for a little while before he followed it, a slow, clumsy, climbing crawl, with no sense of time. He stumbled, fell often, and his hands blistered from the rope—but it was his only friend, all he could trust. And as he followed it, at last he felt the cool outside air kiss his face, and soothe his hollow eyes.

He collapsed to the ground. What now? He could scream, cry for help—but before he could, a voice close and familiar spoke.

“It was well done,” Magatha whispered, and Kyen felt her hand rest on his shoulder. “You have done right by your brother, brave heart. Now, drink this.”

He couldn’t see what it was, but she poured something into his mouth—cold, and sweet, and he felt the burning pain subside to a dull throb. He laughed at the relief.

“Now, stand—hold my arm, and come with me. I will take you to your mother.”

Kyen took her arm, and let her lead him. His head no longer burned, but felt spongy, like it was made of pudding.

“The soul is…in the eyes,” he said, as he stumbled, hanging onto her. She was stronger than he had realized, iron muscles on a slender arm. “And mine are gone. What of mine will they take, when I die?”

“That is something I do not know,” she said. “But in time, you will, when you learn where your soul now lives. Because it would be a strange world indeed if the soul of a blind man lingered in his eyes—though from all your questions, I would guess they should take your tongue. Now, come, no more questions. Your mother will be waiting.”

But she didn’t know I left—and yet, somehow, he knew Magatha was right. He clung to her arm, and let her lead him on.

---

Robert Luke Wilkins was raised in the North of England by a mad painter-poet and a voracious book-hound, with a French smuggler for a family friend. These days, he calls Nevada home, where he lives with his wife and their two surprisingly mellow cats, Teddy Logan and Mochi Luna. His fiction has been published by PodCastle, On Spec, and Stupefying Stories amongst others, and you can find him online at www.robertlukewilkins.com, on X as @RobertLWilkins, and as @robertlukewilkins.bsky.social. on BlueSky.