Page 1 of Mated By Twilight

Chapter 1

Sollit

“How could you?!” Sollit roared, voice breaking as tears pooled in his eyes. His hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. “You betrayed me!”

Across from him, his twin, stiff and expressionless, lifted his own sword. He faced him with unnerving calm.

“This is a cruel world,” he said evenly. “To pit me against you. But my heart, my soul, it calls to my female. Not even you, my brother, can interfere.”

“I will not let you.” Sollit raised his blade, aiming the point at his brother’s throat, jaw tightening as he held his head high. “She is mine! And I will fight for her! A disloyal traitor like you would never be able to take care of her!”

“Please! Stop this!” Further back, separate from them, Skara was on her knees, pleading desperately for their conflict to end. But, of course, it could not. Her brilliant, bright green scales sparkled, as her lovely, gossamer white gown spread around her. She was slender, strong, and beautiful, and the source of their conflict.

“You think you’re any better than me?” Sollit’s brother, Tillos, demanded to know, glaring at him so darkly, so hatefully.“You’re the one who abandoned her! If it weren’t for me, there would have been no one for you to come back to.” He held his head high. “You cannot claim to care when you would leave her so readily.”

Sollit let out a wordless scream of rage, charging him down for the insult. Their swords clashed with an impressive display of sparks.

The audience gasped and cheered as their muscles strained, pushing against each other, and the lights shifted, highlighting the lines of their faces, their muscles, their costumes. Throwing them and their bitter conflict into sharp relief.

A tale of two brothers, split apart by a female.

Sollit rather thought it was ridiculous. If they would have just shared the female who loved them both, their tragedy wouldn’t have been immortalized in the rootavin culture it came from. Were this a story from the avanava species, Sollit and Tillos’ species, it would have had a very different, much more satisfying ending.

But their species wasn’t relevant to the story being told. None of them performing were even rootavin – Skara was a ratchi, and the other various roles were played by different species. But the story, The Gilded and Tarnished Love, was a tragedy, and they were actors filling their role.

This, the dramatic climax, saw Sollit and Tillos’ characters finally come to blows after years of pining after the same female. She had loved Sollit in her youth, but when the death of his parents drove him to war, Tillos stepped in during his absence and took her heart away. Now, her punishment for loving them was to watch them battle to the death over her.

Sollit would win, but the victory was a hollow one. Unbeknownst to him, Tillos had dipped his blade in poison, and he would subsequently die from his wounds. Skara’s character would then be left all alone, with nothing but the bodies of the two males she had loved and the duty that had bound her to pick between them in the first place.

As Sollit said, foolish. But it was Corvidair’s turn to pick the play they put on and, as a rootavin, the story was a famous, and popular, one he’d grown up knowing. Nothing Sollit suggested about changing the ending could convince him to do so. There was nothing for it. Though the leading males were avanava, a species known for two males, two brothers, mating a single female, the story called for them to be at each other’s throat.

Sollit was going to make them perform a classic,happy, avanava love story when it was his turn to pick to make up for this.

For now, he and Tillos went through their dramatic, choreographed sword fight while Skara, helpless and despairing, cried for them. She dared not interfere, however. She knew that, no matter who won, she would lose.

That was really why Sollit questioned these two brothers that claimed to love her. Why, if that was true, did they cause her such pain? If they couldn’t share her, then at least they could resist killing each other and hurting her. But he supposed that was a result of the story coming from the rootavin culture. They were not monogamous either, but their mating practices were fully reversed. Where avanava were two brothers sharing a female, the rootavin mated one male to a group of females. They absolutely did not share between males.

To understand his character, Sollit had to imagine that Tillos wasn’t his brother at all. It was natural and normal for malesof his species to share their mate with their twin, but they did not share her with other males. If anything, sharing her between them just made them more possessive. They would work together to keep other males away from her.

So, to channel the right energy for the play, Sollit imagined that Tillos was an unfamiliar male daring to take his female from him. And that was enough to give him the rage to fight as a male driven furiously mad with jealousy.

The result was a glorious display of their physical skills and the technical abilities of the stage as they flew around the low gravity environment. Zero-g plays weren’t exactly done at zero-g. The strength of the gravity usually changed depending on the story and the feeling it needed to evoke, but lowering the gravity made it possible to perform maneuvers regular gravity wouldn’t allow. It just made their movements grander, more dramatic, as they crossed swords and battled to their death.

Sollit took a blow to the arm. He cried out his pain as the audience stared in strained silence. Tillos, seeing that he struck him, knowing he was victorious even if Sollit was unaware, fell back. But that just left him open to Sollit – poisoned, but not yet effected by it – who leapt towards him. He struck right through Tillos’ chest, the physical prop in his hand collapsing as the light effects of the stage made it appear to be coming from his back.

The entire stage stilled.

Skara screamed.

Sollit and Tillos both collapsed.

Tillos remained motionless, dead, but Sollit had enough energy for one last soliloquy, professing his deep love for Skara, before he passed as well, going limp in her arms. She cried for them,delivering her own monologue about all she had lost, before gathering her strength and swearing to protect the people, alone, for the rest of her life.

For the rootavin people, that was a much deeper blow than it would be to other species. Female rootavin typically grouped around a male. The bond between the females in a unit was so deep, they ceased to be a singular and became completely plural.

That was a bond Sollit didn’t really need to fake to understand. Through the bond he shared with his twin, he could feel the satisfaction of a show well performed. Tillos worked with Corvidair, the leader of the troupe and the director of the shows, to make sure everything went off without a hitch. A zero-g play involved even more technical aspects than acting, so a show going off absolutely perfectly always felt good.

Sollit, of course, was proud too. But he was prouder of how well everyone had acted. The performance was his art, and he was rather certain he and Tillos had been flawless tonight. They hadn’t messed up a single line or missed a single mark.

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