BROTHERS TOGETHER: US AGAINST DOOM

Living The Life Of Another In A Dream

Constantine felt like he had been dreaming for a very long time. He clearly remembered the night in the storm when he and his friend had been struck by lightning through a stroke of bad luck. But after that, the only thing he could remember was living the life of another person.

This life he lived where he was someone else seemed like a really long dream to Constantine, one that was extremely real, like he had truly become that person. But Constantine was still able to differentiate both lives from each other.

He knew the life where he was Constantine Cleveland, a normal teenager on backwater Earth. And he knew the new life where he became Ruger Whitebrook, a powerful evolver in the fantastical world of Ascended Firmament Star.

In the dream where Constantine became Ruger, he followed the life of this powerful Evolver from the moment when he was born and discovered to have an extraordinary talent in the path of evolution to the moment of his death.

Who was an Evolver?

An Evolver was any being that transcended the limits of his original self to become something more, something extraordinary, and something unique and individual.

There is a saying in the Ascended Star Firmament, Ruger's home, that life was in a constant change between four forms of birth, growth, evolution, and death.

Any life that is born, in order to avoid death, must grow, in order to accept change must evolve and in order to be reborn must first die.

These are the maxims of life that everybody in the Ascended Star Firmament believed in, so in order to continue living, one must continue to grow and evolve.

The life of Ruger Whitebrook was very different from that of Constantine. He was born very talented into the powerful Whitebrook family of the Wisteria Kingdom. His father was the Duke of the kingdom and his mother was the first lady of the Dukedom.

Ruger was the first prince and his birth was a blessing to the whole Whitebrook Dukedom because an auspicious phenomenon appeared in the form of a lightning constellation formed by thousands of small lightning stars in the form of a crown. This proved Ruger's aptitude as a king, and it brought joy to his parents and family.

Right from birth, Ruger had awakened his ability to control the Constellation Lightning... a very rare and powerful form of lightning that drew power from the stars in the universe and possessed incomparable destructive might.

The constellation lightning was incomparably blinding and mighty!

But in this story, Ruger Whitebrook was not the only protagonist. There was also his life-bound page, Vader, who was equally as talented as Ruger was.

In the Wisteria Kingdom, every royal heir had a life-bound page whose life was bound to them from the moment of their birth. From among the commoners, a few families would be selected to be nurtured following a secret technique so that each child born in that family would possess special qualities that made them fit to become bound by life to their masters.

These life-bound children were supposed to be eternal companions of their masters, who would grow together and traverse the journey of evolution with each other until that journey came to an end for the both of them. The process of raising a life-bound page was expensive and torturous and while there were a lot of disadvantages to this system, the main one being that the life and death of both master and page were linked together, there were also many more advantages to this.

One of the advantages of the life-bound system was that both master and page would share the same talent. This advantage was actually most enjoyed by the page. Because it was only powerful nobles and members of the royal family in the wisteria kingdom who had naturally powerful bloodlines and talents who could practice this method. The commoners that were chosen would eventually get to possess the same level of talent as their master so that they wouldn't be left behind in their evolution path causing one to die and the other to follow.

Due to the virtue of Ruger, his life-bound page also possessed powerful talent and also awakened the equally rare and powerful Soul Destruction Lightning. This was a form of lightning that could strike and annihilate one's soul directly.

Its power was cruel and punishing!

Having their lives bound together from birth, Ruger and Vader grew to become the best of friends who would be together forever and would never betray each other. With their powerful talent, the two of them shone brightly as the twin stars of the wisteria kingdom and they became heroes and role models for the younger generation. Everywhere Ruger and Vader went, they elicited the envy and jealousy of their peers and the admiration of their seniors.

Together, Ruger and Vader could have conquered the whole firmament.

As Constantine waded through the lives of these Ruger and Vader in his dreams, he was surprised at how similar their lives were to his own and Baron's.

In their case, Ruger was very similar to Constantine's friend Baron, who was the son of one of the wealthiest men in Boston. In a sense, Baron's father was just like the Duke of Whitebrook, and Baron was the prince of the Dukedom.

As for Constantine, he was very similar to Vader, who was destined to follow Ruger his whole life.

Constantine's father was the assistant to Baron's father, and he had assumed that post from his own father, who had been the assistant to Baron's grandfather. This relationship had been going on for many generations and Constantine himself was expected to take over as Baron's assistant when he inherited his father's assets and company.

In a way, Constantines' case was just like Vader's. The two of them had no choice in who they would serve and they could only continue being with the person they were meant to be.

It was their fate...

Naturally, it wasn't as if Constantine had not tried to fight against this fate. There were times when Constantine considered running far away to another city or country so that he wouldn't have to follow in the footsteps of his father and his father's father. There was especially a time when Constantine and Baron had been kidnapped by the enemies of Baron's father. After Constantine had realized that he might have to deal with things like that often in the future, he had wanted to run away and live a different life... one of his own choosing.

But just like how Vader could not deny the life-bound contract he had with Ruger, Constantine was not able to fight his family's arrangements. Constantine could only obediently do as he was told and take care of the traumatized Baron, who refused his help completely.

Unfortunately, this was as far as the similarity between the four of them actually went. As it was with life, not all things were meant to be exactly the same and even things that were very similar would also have their own points of divergence.

Vader, who was very similar to Constantine, actually started to diverge in the same direction as Baron had.

Nobody knew why Vader did what he did or what had pushed him into acting the way he eventually did. Perhaps he had been disillusioned by the direction in which his life was heading. A life where he had no choice but to stay with the same person for an eternity and where his life was constantly threatened because it was tied to the life of another.

It could have been because of the above reasons, or maybe Vader had simply gone mad. In the end, this genius Evolver finally snapped and rebelled against his masters.

Without care for his life, Vader had declared war against the Whitebrook Dukedom and especially Ruger Whitebrook in particular.

He had slaughtered the people of the Dukedom, both innocent soldiers and civilians, as well as members of the Whitebrook royal family. In the end, the Whitebrook family could not bear to do anything to Vader because his life was tied to their heir... should anything happen to Vader, then Ruger would also be affected.

This situation had put the whole Whitebrook family in a royal bind, and their enemies had taken advantage of this to deal a heavy blow to them.

Immediately, Vader became a public target who everybody hunted. Because people knew that by killing Vader, the most talented heir of the Whitebrook would also die. This caused Ruger's life to constantly be in danger every time Vader was in a near-death situation.

In the end, the only one who could stop Vader was Ruger himself, and so he had set out to hunt him down.

The two of them had crossed countless realms in the universe and many firmament stars before eventually ending up in the void outside earth. There, the two of them had battled with all their might, which affected the small planet at their feet. It had caused a storm to tear through Earth and disaster to happen everywhere on the planet. But the two evolvers cared not for the innocent lives that were affected due to their battle.

In the end, Ruger and Vader fought until both of them were almost at death's door. That was when they both did something risky and highly dangerous.

With their lives at an end and death on the way to claim their souls, both Ruger and Vader had chosen to use a secret technique to possess other individuals. They had set their sights on two young boys who had been struggling on a beach on the planet below them and the two of them had sent their souls into the bodies of the young boys to possess them.

Those young boys were naturally Constantine and Baron.