Archive of Our Own ^beta

The youngest Kazinski son is strange, the neighbors and the people who bother sticking around for gossip whisper. Not quite like his family. Not quite like anyone else on the block. 

It’s uncomfortable to look at him, even when his placid, dark gaze isn’t on you. He’s far too still for a young boy, and his shadow seems to stretch far longer than it should for his height.

Something about Zorian Kazinski is very wrong. 

It starts with a looming sense of dread. He says that like there’s a set beginning or end point for the fear always thrumming in his veins, but it’s always been there. Silent and steady, he doesn’t realize it’s not normal until much later. 

He was a fussy baby, his mother often tells him, when he’s old enough to know what words mean. Never grateful for a single thing he’s been given, she says, tutting. 

He remembers looking up at the back of her head a lot, as a child. She never looked back at him.

When he’s four he scrapes his knees against the pavement. Bleed runs down his knees, and he stares as they pool into his socks. A startling vivid red that doesn’t suit him somehow. 

His parents watch from afar, and they don’t come closer to him. Like he’s not even there. Like he’s already dead. He stares at them and wonders why that feels so right. 

Fortov cries, and Daimen takes him by the hand and leads him back into the house to tend to clumsily patch up his wound. 

It stings when he washes it out with alcohol, but it barely hurts compared to the empty ache that’s been digging its claws deeper into him every day.

“Does it hurt?” Daimen asks.

“No, doesn’t hurt,” Zorian shakes his head. 

It doesn’t, because Daimen’s touch is gentle. Like Zorian will break if he presses too hard. 

Zorian is six when Kirielle is born. The house’s stifling air doesn’t quite relax when she’s born, but something in his mother seems to give. She’s looser now. She still talks at him, more than with him, but she no longer avoids his gaze.

Zorian likes Kirielle. She’s the only one who smiles at him without it feeling weird. 

Zorian just turned seven, Fortov is eight, Kirielle is one, and Daimen is leaving for magic. The day before he leaves to catch the train, he hesitates, and then bends down to tell Fortov to keep watch of Zorian. 

“I’m not a baby,” Zorian protests.

“Okay,” Fortov glances at him, “I will.”

Seven is the year everything changes. Seven is the year he truly begins to understand what the dread means.

He begins to feel it. The thing inside of him. It courses through him, from his head to his toes. It breathes in tandem with him, intertwined with who he is. Impossible to dig out and get rid of.

There’s something inside of him, and it’s going to kill him in eight years. 

Eight years is a long time, he thinks. 

He doesn’t think about how half of his life is already over.

I’m going to die in eight years. It feels like something too terrible to say. It feels like a truth no one will understand.

“I feel like I’m going to die,” he says, to the mirror. “I always feel like I’m going to die.”

He doesn’t look very alive in the first place. Kirielle is rosy-cheeked, Fortov is bright-eyed, and Daimen always seems like he’s going somewhere, filled with something that Zorian doesn’t understand. 

Zorian looks empty. Like all the years of looming doom has chiseled him away. He feels empty. Sometimes it feels like he’s somewhere else. Somewhere no one can reach him, even though he's right there. The world feels dampened under a thick sleet of mind-numbing nothingness.

“I’m going to die,” he tries telling his mother once, on a good day. Kirielle hasn’t had a tantrum and she’s humming while washing the dishes. His courage is thin and thready, more anxious than brave. His heart ricochets, startling as his mother whips her head around with a frenzy he’s never seen before. 

She whips her head around at him, as soon as he finishes.

“What are you talking about, Zorian?” she asks. It’s not as dismissive as usual.

There’s something inside me, he wants to say. But his mother’s eyes are cold and sharp, looking for something else. His throat closes around the words.

“Nothing, I just,” he tries not to shift, aware of the way his mother is tracking his every movement, “I think I just had a bad dream.”

“Oh,” she says, losing interest, “is that all? Zorian, it’s not real. It’s nothing to be scared about.”

She turns back to drying a plate, and he leaves, feeling like she messily scooped something vital out of him. 

That summer, Daimen comes back, brimming with excitement and more occupied with the books from his school than anything else. 

He locks Zorian out of the house, mumbling something about him being too loud, which doesn’t make sense. Zorian barely speaks. 

What could be in those books, Zorian wonders, that is so interesting?

He thinks about it on the front steps, before Daimen finally lets him in again. It’s the first time he’s curious about magic.

Daimen keeps doing it. Zorian eventually learns how to lockpick.

Lock-picking, he reminisces when he’s older, has always felt surgical. Has always felt more than just breaking back into the house. 

Whenever he fits the thin wire into the keyhole, and nimbly adjusts it just so, he always imagines doing the same with his skin and bones. So that he might pick out whatever lies within his rib cage. 

It beats, like a second heart. Like something alive. Like something yet to be born. Inside him, always. A reminder, always.

The only person who can’t tell it’s there is Kirielle the baby, who is a baby and stupid.

 Her smile isn’t so gummy anymore, but it’s still the same.

Near the end of summer, Daimen puts him under a spell. It makes his limbs contort and his head swivel. He dances in a way he has never danced his entire life.

It’s horrible. 

This will be what it feels like when I die, he realizes. My body is going to move, and walk, and talk, but I won’t be there.

I’ll be dead.

He’s hit with such an overwhelming tide of despair and then the spell ends, and Daimen is there, suddenly worried, as if it wasn’t his fault. 

It doesn’t make him hate magic.

He accidentally drinks alcohol at one of his parent’s parties when he’s eight.

It makes his head fuzzy, but clear all at once. The world is too bright, loud, and suddenly present. Suddenly the thing within him feels crushing. 

He throws up, crying, and Fortov frantically pushes him out of the room as the guests break out in murmurs and their parents hide their pointed disdain under smooth smiles for their business partners. 

Daimen graduates and gets a fancy adventuring job and becomes very famous. 

Zorian watches it all happen with a distant jealousy. The kind you can’t fully feel because you don’t fully understand what you’re exactly jealous of. 

His dream of magic is nebulous and barely thought out. Mostly because Zorian tries not to think about it. He’d be dead before he graduated even if he went anyways. 

The seasons pass and the void within him grows and grows. Or maybe that’s not quite right. Maybe he simply gets better at understanding it.

Foreign, scary, and not wholly him, he had always thought of it as a separate entity. 

But that’s not exactly true. It’s part of him. It’s always been part of him. And there isn’t actually something in him. He would know if he was nurturing a future murderer in his heart, protected by sinew, flesh, and lifeblood. 

Yet still, the truth is too hard for him to wrap his head around.

He’s going to die in a few years, and the thing that kills him is something unfathomable and different and it cannot be him. 

It cannot be him. 

When he is ten, he climbs onto his bedroom window and dangles his feet over the edge. The paint of the windowsill is chipped and dusty under his hands. Looking down at the drop gives him a pleasant lurch of vertigo and lightheadedness. 

If I fall, he thinks, will I die? 

If it’s going to happen either way, does it really matter when it happens? Do four years make that much of a difference? He contemplates such matters idly as he swings his feet back and forth, and doesn’t notice Fortov until he’s got his arms wrapped around Zorian’s torso.

The resulting tug has far too much energy behind it, and they both go sprawling back against the wooden floors of Zorian’s bedroom. He knocks his head against Fortov’s chin and elbows him in someplace fleshy and soft, but Fortov doesn’t even seem to notice.

“That’s super dangerous!” he exclaims, “what if you fell?”

That’s kinda the point, Zorian thinks but doesn’t say. 

Maybe Fortov knows anyway, because he doesn’t let Zorian out of his sight for the next two weeks. At least not in places with windows and long drops. 

He also writes to Daimen about it, Zorian is pretty sure, because suddenly Daimen is there, a whole two months earlier than his next scheduled visit.

“Zorian,” Damien confronts him the night he’s due to leave, “if there’s anything bothering you, you can tell me. You know that right?”

The bedroom lamp flickers and splutters, but Daimen doesn’t even seem to notice, doesn’t waver. He positions himself in the doorway of Zorian’s room and it’s not oppressive or demanding in the way father is, whenever he stands there like that. 

“I know,” Zorian says, after a moment.

Daimen shifts, another beat of silence passes. 

“So…are you okay? Fortov told me about the window thing, and I know you were probably just playing around, but…” He trails off, as if he isn’t sure where to go with the sentence.

I’m going to die in five years, he thinks, over and over again. It’s so loud. It’s unbearable. 

It doesn’t really feel like that long of a time anymore.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he lies, because it’s too hard to put into words. To tell someone and have them believe it too. 

The next year Fortov is twelve and leaves for school. He pauses at the train station, and then turns to Kirielle.

“Kirielle,” he says somberly, “can you take care of Zoria—”

“No.” Zorian glares.

“Okay!” Kirielle, five years old, chirps. 

Apparently Kirielle thinks “taking care of Zorian” is making him draw with her. 

He’s not good at it, but she’s not better, and also, very possibly, artistically blind, with how much she likes drawing ugly pictures with him. 

It’s fun though. Drawing is an activity that matches your pace, unlike reading. Sometimes he dedicates effort to getting the lines perfect, and he drowns out everything else. Other times, he’s too tired for any thought at all and simply puts colors on a page. 

Daimen sends expensive acrylic paints along with his next letter and they make a mess of the house that has their parents fuming for an entire weekend.

The entire year is spent drawing.

He gets a lot better. 

So does Kirielle. Almost concerningly so.

Fortov comes back from the academy and he has none of Daimen’s drive. None of that spark. He is barely not failing his classes. 

Inexplicably, Zorian is jealous of him too. In a sort of scornful, bitter way. 

Why is it that Fortov gets to live, and Zorian has to die, when he’s not even doing anything with his life? When he’s hardly grateful for any of it at all?

Then Fortov sees him and smiles.

“I see Kirielle has been taking care of you,” he says, and Zorian rolls his eyes.

“I’ve been doing real good,” Kirielle puffs out her chest, “I taught Zorian how to draw.”

“I heard you haven’t been doing well though?” Zorian says pointedly. 

“I’ll leave all the nerd stuff to you and Daimen,” Fortov just shrugs, dragging his luggage as he comes closer, “I’ve never really been that into magic like you two.”

He doesn’t even try to hide the way he does a once-over to scan Zorian. For what, he has no idea. 

Zorian lets it happen, even though it kinda makes him feel like a child. Fortov throws an arm around Zorian’s shoulder and asks if he wants to take his luggage for him.

“Obviously not,” Zorian says, and Fortov cracks a grin.

Zorian can’t hate him.

He’s one of the three people who are happy to see him. 

Daimen arrives the next day, and Kirielle spends a lot of time showing off both her and Zorian’s pictures.

“Wait! We should all draw together!” She gasps, bouncing up from the floor when she’s done and everyone has applauded her. “It’d be so much fun!”

“Uhhh,” Fortov says. “I don’t know how to—”

“Oh come on,” Daimen says, “you can’t do worse than Zorian’s first picture.”

They all look at it. It was supposed to be a picture of a cat. Instead, it looks like a very furry old man in a baby’s body. Disturbing would be putting it lightly. 

“I think it’s a great cat!” Kirielle defends, as if she hadn’t had to ask Zorian what it was just a few minutes ago.

“I’m not teaching any of you,” is all Zorian says. 

He turns twelve and he goes to Cyoria, because his parents want him out of the house. 

Magic is still something he’s too scared to fully want, but he can’t fully treat the academy like a last indulgence, not when it’s so unfathomably important to him. Not when learning magic is brimming with potential.

He has three years left, and an unreachable dream, and a distant hope that maybe magic can save his life. 

The more time slips through his fingers, the more he knows about how he will die. 

He tries looking for books on soul magic. All forbidden or sequestered to higher circle magic he can’t access yet. 

He researches golems for a solid semester, going through hypotheticals and possibilities before he realizes he doesn’t want to live as golem, even if it were theoretically possible. 

In another world, he could have been top of the class. 

In this one, magic is a tool first and a dream second. He’s on a time limit, and long-term investments are for people who have futures. 

The only person who talks to him regularly besides the librarian is Fortov, and the rest of his siblings who send letters and art progress updates.

Every day, he makes time to paint, sketch, and draw, and send letters back. It’s probably a waste of time, but it’s also the only thing in his life that feels like it's worth anything.

There’s a boy in his class named Zach Noveda. He’s one of the few people who doesn’t seem to be unsettled by Zorian’s general presence. 

He’s the only person that disturbs Zorian on a fundamental, instinctual level. Like he’s the void within him given human form. 

Sometimes Zorian finds himself staring at the back of his head, wondering if Zach is involved in his murder. 

He seems too nice to kill someone. 

But then again, a lot can happen in three years. For example, apparently Zorian kills himself in three years. 

He has dreams that he doesn’t remember. Only lingering tastes and feelings. Often laughter, sometimes panic. Joy, achievement, or frustration. Emotions that feel too bright for him. Unfamiliar. 

Every morning he wakes, feeling deeply shaken. The void pulls taunt, scraping its serrating edges against the rest of him. 

The more he researches, the more he understands there is nothing he can do unless he resorts to extreme measures. 

There is no way to run or hide from yourself. 

It becomes clearer and clearer by the day. It’s going to replace him, take everything he’s ever had, and end Zorian as Zorian is. 

Not a single person will know.

One day Zorian will no longer be Zorian, and not a single thing in the world will have changed.

Is there some way to escape? Does he even want to? Where would he go? 

What does it even mean to live, if everything you’ve ever had is violently ripped away from you?

What does it even mean, to grieve yourself?

In the blink of an eye, he’s fourteen. He still studies magic, mostly for self-satisfaction more than anything, but he draws much, much more. 

They don’t have enough space in the house for all of the canvases he’s filled, and his parents have taken to wrinkling their noses anytime they even smell paint, so he looks around for a place to put them.

“But I want to be able to see them,” Kirielle had whined in the summer when he was 13, when he had told her he would throw them away. 

“They’re not that much to look at,” especially compared to hers.

“I like them,” she pouted, a much cuter seven year old than he ever was, “and they remind me of you, when you’re not here.”

Her choice of words sends a pang through him, but he doesn’t outwardly react. 

“It’s not like I can leave them here, you can’t see them anyways,” he points out.

“Then I’ll just go to where they are, it’s not that hard.”

Or you could just find me, if you miss me so much, he couldn’t say. 

He wouldn’t be anywhere to go to. 

“Okay,” he had said, “I’ll find a place.”

She beamed and he tried to sear transience into his memory for eternity. 

The librarian takes them. She waves off his concerns about how amateur they are, or storage space, and handles each piece as if it were priceless. 

“Are you sure you have space?” Zorian had asked for the 3rd time, because even if she didn’t mind how they looked, logistics were logistics. 

“We wouldn’t be much of an elite institution for Magic if we couldn’t finagle a dimensional spell or two,” she had said.

Zorian doesn’t know how to express how grateful he is, so he just swallows the lump in his throat and steps forward to help her unwrap the canvases.

He is pretty sure Zach kills him, in some way or form. 

He is also pretty sure Zach is the one always in his dreams, or at least someone with a really similar laugh. 

Zorian continues to ignore him like the plague.

Zorian turns fifteen. 

He still doesn’t have any answers for what living or dying is, and he has no plans, and he is going to die.

There is no way to prepare. No one he can bring himself to tell. Nothing to write or leave to anyone, because no one will know, and the only person mourning is him.

He’s been mourning for his whole life, he thinks.

It’s rather morbid, but in a way, he has been waiting all his life for this.

Zorian is fifteen, and it is all going to end in 27 days. 

It is summer, so all his siblings are home. As usual, they are drawing together. They’re in a spare room that used to serve as a guest bedroom. It’s been refurbished into a small studio at Daimen’s behest, and today they’re using oil paints. 

Afternoon sunlight filters through the blinders, a dozen tubes of paints are scattered between all of them, and canvases that Daimen had convinced their mother to buy all distributed to each other. 

His siblings silently dip their brushes into palettes and the sound of brush strokes fills the gaps between conversations. 

“You’re cheating!” Fortov squawks.

“How is using magic cheating?” Daimen says, painting a dozen areas at once with floating brushes.

“Can you teach me that?” Kirielle asks, sparkly gaze glued to the pirouetting art supplies. Fortov looks at her in askance, scandalized. 

“I thought you of all people would understand the sanctity of art," he accuses.  

“I mean,” Kirielle takes a moment to think about it, furrowing her brow, “magic is also a kind of art, isn’t it?”

“Ha,” Daimen says, smugly, “I win.”

Fortov looks like he wants to fling his brush at Daimen’s face. 

Zorian stares at his brother, 22 years old, engaged, and very successful, actively antagonizing a teenager. He sighs. Some things would never change. 

“Hey,” Fortov points at him, “don’t act like you’re above us when you were fighting with Kirielle over the Titanium white yesterday.”

“That was different!” he protests, but Daimen and Fortov just snicker like the assholes they are.

“Titanium white is serious business. ” Kirielle nods, but backup from a nine-year old is barely better than no back-up at all. 

Zorian pledges to ignore their heckling, and return to his painting. Still, in the background, their voices rise and fall, and colors are passed and exchanged. 

His entire world in one small room.

Everything he cared about would be taken away. Even this. Especially this. He paints another streak across the fabric of the canvas, imagines paint covering and drowning his own face.

It would all be gone. 

“I like your painting, what is it?” Kirielle asks, having snuck up on him. 

Zorian carefully doesn’t startle and takes a moment to look at it. He’d been mindlessly applying strokes for their entire session so far. 

“Self-potrait,” he eventually answers, because he’s only just realized that’s what it was.

“Gods Zorian,” Fortov says, peering around his canvas to sneak a look, “I know you’re like, disturbed but wow. ”

“Thanks.”

“I love it!” Kirielle exclaims, “will you hang this one up in the library too?”

That depends on the person who takes over his body.

“Of course,” he says instead, and she twirls with exuberance. 

“What did we say about spinning in the studio?” Daimen asks, but there’s an amused smile quirking up his lips. Kirielle makes some sort of retort Zorian doesn’t hear. 

He’s looking at his self-portrait. It’s him. As he is, right here, right now. Every stroke, every line, drawn by him.

It would all be gone so soon. Everything would. But right now, this was unmistakably his, and this canvas was a frozen moment in time. His and no one else’s. 

Sometimes, the sadness is overwhelming, and yet still not enough, because the tears cannot come. Refuse to. As if all of them have been siphoned out of him already. As if he has nothing else to give.

Spitefully, he contemplates killing himself. If he can’t have his life, no one can.

Then he pictures Kirielle, and Fortov, and Daimen. He remembers sunlit evenings, paint smeared on throw-away clothes and watching Fortov and Daimen argue how to properly paint a flower. He remembers a gentle hand cleaning the blood from his skin. Small fingers gripped around his fingers and a gummy smile. Thin arms dragging him away from the window frame.

He’s never been brave. He’s spent most of his life running and not dealing with anything head on. 

But just this one time, this last time, when it will matter the most, he will be. 

Not for himself, but for the people who always were there, to drag him back from the ledge.

He doesn’t sleep when the time comes.

He stares at the blank piece of paper in front of him. His will, even if he will never call it that. His hand is frozen, pen still stalled above the paper, waiting for the first line to come to mind.

He has nothing to say. He has too much to say. He has been running all his life, from something inevitable. He doesn’t really know what it means to live, because all he’s thought about is dying.

He writes, “I don’t want to die,” but it feels too raw. Too desperate. He stares down at the words and feels nothing at all except humiliation.

His fingers mercilessly crumple up the sheet of paper, before discarding it into the waste bin. He sits for a moment, letting calm settle over his mind, before his hand is reaching forward unbidden and pulling out his paints, and a brand new canvas. It feels like this is the only thing he’s ever known how to do properly. The only way he knows how to leave something behind. 

This has to be enough, he thinks, careful to brush the sweat off his brow before it drips onto the canvas. This is all I have.

He paints and paints and even when the time ticks ever closer, to that dreaded time, his head remains clear and focused. His hands are steady. Concentrated.

He pours everything he has into it. Every thought he’s had. Every step he’s walked. Every time the sunlight blinded his eyes. Every inhale and exhale. 

It isn’t a gravestone or an obituary or an autobiography. It’s alive. The closest thing he can get to not dying. The culmination of a life spent by Zorian Kazinski.

When he sets down the brush, he knows it’s over. It’s here. 

“I’ve been waiting for you, for a very long time,” he says, and then he closes his eyes, because it just feels appropriate. It won't hurt, he's known that since he turned 14. It'll be just like falling asleep. Drifting off until the strings holding everything together snap, and everything vanishes.

Disconnected, dissociated, dead. He can’t smell the paint anymore, or feel the chips of paint drying on fingers. It feels like being siphoned through a needle. It feels like becoming as boundless as the universe. It’s indescribable. 

And then it ends.

He wakes up, which is weird. Dead people aren’t supposed to be able to do that. He doesn’t feel quite right, and neither does the world. It’s all white. There’s nothing else around him, except a door. Basically floating in the middle of nowhere.

Actually it’s more of a picture frame, but somehow he knows it’s a door. It’s golden, with fancy metal vines sweeping up the sides. 

Underneath it, lies a plaque.

[“Untitled,” by Zorian Kazinski] it reads. There is nothing in the frame. Only empty air.

For some reason, none of this feels terribly alarming. 

He steps through it.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the thing that stole Zorian’s body says, on the other side of the door. “Not for very long though. Only a month.”

“Wow, he really came out of a painting,” Zach says, because he’s there too, of course he is. They’re in the studio, where Zorian had died.

“I don’t understand,” Zorian says, looking down at his hands. They’re still flecked with dried paint. “I thought I died.”

“We don’t really get what happened either,” the Zorian who took Zorian’s body says, “but for all intents and purposes, you’re a painting now.”

“A haunted painting,” Zach adds. Zorian looks behind him, and sure enough, there’s the painting he had drawn before he had died. It’s framed on the wall, golden with fancy vines sweeping up the sides. He could go right back through it, he knows. There’s a silent tethering he has to it, like the canvas is his heart and the paint his blood. 

“This is very…weird,” he settles for. 

“You don’t say,” the other Zorian says, dryly. 

“...So I’m not human anymore?”

“You’re kinda like a lich, except less bony and way better,” Zach says.

Zorian eyes him. He still doesn’t know how to feel about the guy.

“You’re not human anymore,” the other Zorian confirms, “and you probably can’t be Zorian anymore. It would get confusing.”

“But…I’m Zorian,” he says.

“You’d still be yourself, you’d just have a different name,” Zach points out.

It’s still weird to essentially give up the name he’s had all his life. 

“You didn’t even really like being Zorian,” the other Zorian says, “his entire life was just one giant existential crisis for you.”

“And that doesn’t apply to you?” 

“I spent more than a decade in a timeloop learning to be a person, so. No.” 

It’s strange talking to this version of himself. He smiles for one, and it actually looks okay on his face. There’s a certain brightness in his eyes, even in a dim curtained studio room, achingly similar to Daimen’s when he’s learning magic. It’s so different from what he’s used to seeing in the mirror, nothing like light skimming off of dull glass.

He looks whole.

“...Fine.” The painting hesitates, “but I don’t really know what to name myself.”

“You can worry about a name later. Our siblings are waiting for us,” Zorian says, “I’m sure Kirielle will have some great suggestions for you if you really can’t think of anything.”

“Wait, I’m not ready—”

Not ready to live yet. 

But Zorian doesn't care, and the painting nearly trips as he’s pulled forward out of the room and into the light where familiar voices wait for him.