The Price of Eternity (Part 2).

At first, there was darkness, black empty darkness, without a single sound and a glimpse of light. Then, in the distance, a small faint light appeared, with each passing second becoming bigger and bigger. It was approaching at such a speed that the mind did not have time to recognize what was happening.

Hundreds, thousands, millions of pictures, as in a kaleidoscope, began to replace one after another, showing shots of the past, present and future. An immense stream of information burst into the head of a young man, like an avalanche, sweeping away everything in its path.

Unfamiliar places, people, emotions - in all this chaos of human appearance, he lost himself for a second. It seemed that there were only them, but then who was he?

He was standing on top of a mountain, and under his feet, there were countless human bodies. Whether they were dead or just asleep - he did not know, whether it was the past or the future - he did not know either. At his feet, he saw a young woman lying on her back and clutching a little boy tightly in her arms.

He saw her for the first time, but she seemed so familiar to him. The young man leaned toward her and removed a lock of brown hair from the woman's face in order to better see her. As soon as he touched her skin with his fingertips, the moments of her life passed through his mind, and her very last memory was his cold and indifferent face.

"E-le-na..."

The name itself came up in his head.

BANG!

A loud explosion, as if he were at its epicenter, hit the young man's ears, ringing in his ears and head. The crash of broken glass and falling stones followed the blast wave and his body shuddered.

Marcus opened his eyes, but the world he saw was not the same as before. Shades of yellow, red, and blue filled the air, as if he were in a vessel filled with liquids of different colors that do not mix with each other.

A rumble of inaudible sounds, or screams, or beating, someone's footsteps and someone's breathing... a heartbeat, a dozen hearts at different distances from one another - he heard all this as if he were near each of the sources.

DING!

"N-no... it cannot be..." Glass fragments scattered across the floor, the laboratory assistant with trembling hands looked at Marcus.

The scientist was supposed to take the last samples of important injections with him but dropped all the tubes when a person who was considered to be dead suddenly got up and sat on the table right in front of the man's eyes.

Marcus turned his head and looked at the man. He did not see a man in front of him, but what he saw caused Marcus a burning thirst, as if he had not drunk for many decades.

Golden waves of energy, like little trickles, came from a stranger's heart and spread through his body. This vital energy beckoned Marcus as the juiciest nectar that could ever exist.

"N-no, don't approach me! Monster!"

The laboratory assistant moved back and rested his back against the wall, his body was paralyzed, Marcus's black eyes were looking at him like a predator looking at his prey - intently and calmly, with full confidence that the victim could not get away.

"Silence," the young man said, and the scientist's mind turned off, he saw with his eyes what was happening to him, but he couldn't do anything, all the power over the body belonged to this ugly demon.

Marcus raised his hand and squeezed the throat of his victim, the golden energy began to flow to him, as from one vessel to another, until it completely evaporated from the body of the scientist.

"Haaaa, now it's much better," Marcus breathed in relief and unclenched his hand, the corpse fell to the ground with a thud.

The young man looked around, his eyes caught a few more people in space, which again intensified his thirst. Among them, he noticed a small dim light, like a church candle. Its light was smaller than the rest but was burning confidently and unshakably.

"Hmmm," Marcus smirked, "That's exactly who I need," he whispered, and with a devilish smile walked toward that little light, leaving behind a mutilated corpse of a scientist that looked like a dried mummy.

. . .

BANG!

This was the second explosion Armand heard before finally came to his senses. He raised his hands to his head, wanting to stop the wild feeling of pain that was tearing his whole body from the inside.

All his senses were unusually sharp - his sense of smell, hearing, even his sight - everything felt as if it was the first time for him. At that moment he looked like a baby who had just been born, and like this baby, at the moment he wanted to scream loudly, hoping to drown out this obsessive cacophony of sounds and smells around.

"Are you satisfied now?" Marcus's voice sounded somewhere far away.

Armand's body tensed, did it only seem to him?

"Why are you silent? Wasn't that what you wanted?" Armand heard his brother's voice again, but chaos from other sounds drowned him.

"Alive... He is alive..." Armand crawled out of bed and got to his feet. If he and Marcus were alive, then Polina could be alive... And this meant that their father's experiment was a success.

"Ugh," the young man stumbled when a sharp pain pierced his foot, Armand lifted his leg and saw a large piece of glass that dug into his flesh. He pulled out a splinter, but, to his surprise, the blood, instead of rushing with more force, immediately stopped and the wound on his leg healed right before his eyes.

"What?" The young man looked at his foot in a great surprise and even ran his palm over the spot that he had stabbed before, but there was no trace of the wound.

Armand straightened up and looked around, fragments of glass and other things lay around him, dust hung in the air and there was a smell of burning. He took a step forward and went along the wreckage, not paying attention to the pain under his legs, which subsided a few seconds after the next prick.

BANG!

The sound of a gunshot struck his ears as if the trigger had been pulled close to his face; Armand's heart was beating with greater force, and he heard his beat as the military alarm went before the final battle.

Armand quickened his pace and soon found himself in a smoky corridor, filled with the smell of mustiness and burning. Here and there, disfigured bodies of people lay, and it was difficult to guess how they looked before. The faces of horror and pain were frozen on their faces, all of them looked like Egyptian mummies, the photographs of which he had once seen in an encyclopedia.

"Sorry, but you're a little late, my dear little brother."

Armand looked away from the corpses and looked up, in front of him, at the other end of the corridor, was Marcus. His shirt was red with blood, but there was not a single emotion on his face.

Marcus raised a gun to his face and snapped the shutter, "I would like to congratulate you on your return, but I won't," he gazed steadily at the weapon in his hand, cast a last look at Armand, turned and walked away.

There was something inexplicable in his behavior that seemed to Armand unfamiliar. The man in front of him was his brother, and at the same time, it was not him. He wanted to follow him, and at the same time, he wanted to stay at a distance.

When Marcus hid around the corner, Armand felt a faint smell of vanilla among all the other stench surrounding him.

"Polina ..." The young man's heart was beating faster when with every step he felt her aroma stronger and stronger.

He went to the doors near which his older brother had previously stood and looked inside the room.

"N-no...," he whispered when he saw the girl's body in front of him, lying on the table.

She was dressed in a light white nightgown, her light curls scattered across the table, her eyes were tightly closed.

Armand went to the table, lifted the girl and pressed her to his chest. His hand slipped over her clothes and stopped on the girl's stomach.

Scarlet liquid oozed through the wound left by the bullet. Her body was still warm, but Armand did not hear the most important thing.

The beating of her heart.