He walked through the house they lived in. Once it had held the entire family, once being a couple hundred years ago when times were still raw and primative. He remembered those days with a relish. He and his brother, along with their first cousins made life living hell among their family members. Their ways with charm and pranks made the house a bit more lively, considering the starch that they'd suspected had ridden up some of the elder's bottoms.

He looked around the house as he went in search of Kaleb. Basically in search of small clues as to where his lovely brother went. Often these clues came in the guise of small holes in the cieling, furniture moved across the halls to barricade the floor; as though he was playing 'war' with someone whose age was significantly younger. An hour had passed, and he knew he should be getting ready, and his man servant will be livid, but he had caught the scent of his brother, and he was not to be dissuaded.

The sound of something crasing into the room in the minor Hall made him wince, and he made his way there doubling his speed. Pearing in through the doorway, he spied a young man at the middle of his prime. Dressed in the starched clothing of Court, and with more than just powder dusting his fair head. Ice blue eyes peered around the room as though suddenly aware that he was not alone.

"Dolan?" Can his rich barratone voice, strong and without fear.

"Father?"

Silence greeted him. Dolan watched with a certain glee in his eyes that threatened to bubble up and choke him. With his craft, he silenced his footfalls, and entered the room. Chose a clean spot on the wall, and watched as his brother clumsily manouvered the tortured hall table to and fro in the room. He steadily got better, and eventually managed to move the thing about two feet into the air, which was quite the achievement; considering that it was a table that could seat 24.

"Well brother, it seems you've been practicing."

"Yes well, we all can't be born with natural talent darling."

The table landed gently ont he ground, and Kaleb turned and walked over to his youngest brother, embracing him in a choke hold hug.

"So... I see you're not ready for Court."

Dolan shrugged, an insolent smile playing on his lips.

"Get going man! Pierre is already up there waiting for the grand doors to open. He's been ready for an hour!"

"I'm sorely tempted to walk in as I am now. Oh, and how is Pierre?"

"Stiff and starchy as ever, now go!"

Kaleb catapulted the smirking Dolan off the floor and floated him up to his room, not two feet behind him and following to ensure that the youngest brother didn't sneak off again.

"You know... They're expecting to hear of a woman from you."

Dolan's smile faded. "Then They're to be sorely dissapointed."

The young girl lying innocently like snow-white in her glass coffin within the room-sized tank of tourquoise water couldn't have been his mother. She seemed too young, to have ever birthed him...

He spun in mental circles, questions he never asked tugged gently at his mind until he pushed them away. For a moment, he thought he saw a movement in his mother's face, then dismissed it as a trick of the lighting.

He allowed his gaze to become disfocus, and turned his mind to other things. Later, he would have to dress himself in cloths better left for stiff-necked occasions, powder himself, his hair to make sure he looked ridiculous for the Court. For too many years, he'd come and gone, returning only to wait for his mother's few waking moments. For the gaze of the woman who had once soothed his crazed heart beat as he awoke from the grip of a night terror, for the touch of the same woman who had held him in his childhood's darkest hours. He missed her terribly, and hated the forced that condemned his mother to his lonely and isolated existance. Hated.

He glanced at the clock hanging high in the sterile room he stood within. Two hours before he was due for his meeting with the Court. He grinned sadistically, allowing him the imaginings of him, waltzing into the court dressed as casually as he did now... his once crisp shirt partially unbuttoned, and his pants crumpled beyond repair of a good wait for creases to settle.

He looked at the body within the glass... and thought about his day's work. He'd been reviewing the files that had condemned his mother... everything he could get his hands on. Public and private files, government files. As son, he had a right to view them, and a few times they had tried to deny him this right. Still... after looking for the past 3 years, he could find nothing.

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and leaned on the glass for a moment. Frustration creasing his brow, and making his eyes grow dark in the dim lighting. For a moment, he thought of all the years he'd been forced to live without a mother's infinite love, that is, waiting for few chance moments when his mother would awaken, and he could spend a few deleriously happy childish moments with his mother. He could count all the times on his two hands that he had seen his mother awake and animated between the ages of his first memory and puberty. Frustration deepened into the edge of a crisp anger.

He left the room, leaving explicit instructions for them to notify him of any chances no matter how small.

On the way to his chambers, he looked around... noting the differences that had accumulated in is absense. His father had going traveling again, leaving only his eldest brother in charge. How did he know? Simple, he and his eldest brother was the member of an exclusive club, one might even go so far as to say it was a cult; but even that would have been too insulting. His brother had a habit of practicing the skills that had gained him access to the 'club' in the recieving room, which happened to be their lobby at the moment.

The bits of ceramic dust that crunched beneath his shoes told the tale of his brother's practice, beneath the deceptive illusion of the undamaged room.

A smile played upon his lips as he probed the house in search of his destructive brother.

*Kaleb?*

Let me see... let me be...

Wordless anger, wordless emotion, a heart caged within a cosmotose body. She's silenced ineffort to keep the world as we know it alive.

His mother... she lies in her crystal coffin. Tears that sometimes grace her cheeks. Eyes that gaze at him ever so lovingly, and yet... he could never hold her. Never tell her that he loved her, though he never knew her.

One gentle flower, that remains unfree.

When he was a child, he used to believe that he could hear her. Through the fragile glass within which his mother lay. He once told his father, but soon learned what that would lead to.

Caged like oblivion in the sanity of one's mind... 

Its not like she meant to, but she had the power most hellspawn only dreamed of. With the ability to heal, come the ability to kill.

With great power, comes great responcibility. And hers, was to remain within that coffin, until she died. Until, all that remained of her was dust, and even then, they wanted to burn her body. To ensure that she was dead.

I am only that which comes after the seed.
Let me see what must be seen.
I am not the power, I am not the one,
I was only the carrier... the sky behind the sun.

"Dolan." The man at the doorway called him, a sense of serenity had crept into the room while he'd stood staring through aquamarine fluid into the face that seemed too young to be his mothers.

"Sir." He replied, "If you don't mind, I'd like a few moments alone with my thoughts."

"Of course, however, don't forget that its your first day back. You need to present yourself to the court."

Dolan tore his gaze away from the mirror, and looked steadily at the man leaning against the doorframe. His father was surely ages older, but they looked like they belonged in the same generation. "Father, I'll be in the hall by four."

The man nodded and dissapeared.

Dolan sighed and ran a hand through his hair. Of all things his mother's gift had to be... it was the ability to destroy and heal...

Where others have failed, you shall suceed,
And you shall be guided by the voice, the strength and the will,
Let your gift rise from the depths of the soul,
And free the fragile flower from death by cold...

| It Begins |

Though they don't often do it, they'll always tell her the same thing. When she wakes, which is not quite often at all (the drugs take care of that)... they convince her, like a fragile babe, that she needs to sleep. And the way they do it... they way they break her mind and spirit in every segment of thirty minutes, is unremarkable.

All they have to do, is show her that her child still breathes.