as we forgive those who trespass against us
Saccharina fic for the soul... this being my first fic makes sense
Warnings: child abandonment/abuse/neglect, religious guilt
Summary: “The first time Saccharina met The Bulb, It passed by so quickly that she forgot to ask It if she would ever be good again. She was eleven years old, reciting a prayer of repentance by rote. She was experiencing visions from the Hungry One that the nuns said were a sign of permanent ruin.”
Thank you @drinkingdeadpeopletea and @nonbinarywithaknife for the inspiration here and here
Interact with this work on ao3!
Saccharina did not know many facts about Catherine Ghee. She knew Catherine was her mother, she was of the Dairy Islands, and she had married the Prince of Candia. There wasn't much on which to judge her parenting skill, for Saccharina remembered little else. Though she had been brought to the nunnery when she was nine, she couldn't recall any memories of her mother. There was a sharp Voice ringing in her mind, something breaking a heavy silence that she did remember from her past. Saccharina decided that she forgave mother. Catherine must have been given her to the nuns as protection. She put her in the nunnery to escape whoever the Voice was, and The Voice was definitely a horror beyond comprehension if the nunnery was better than it.
One time she forgot to say her grace before dinner, and the nuns locked her in her room for five days without food. She only had a quarter of a cup of cola to tide her over. She made it last. She deserved this anyway; grace was too important to be foolishly forgotten as she had done. She made it through the punishment and never forgot to say her grace again.
Through those first days of extended hunger, Saccharina held onto a small painting of her mother. It was a little bigger than two of her hands put together, and it was the only thing she truly owned. Her bed was the Church's. Her food was the Church's. This little painting was only hers. Even on the lonely days, Saccharina could look at the painting and remember what was waiting for her once she got out: her mother, her father, and a family.
Her family would welcome and wrap her in a hug. She'd meet her sisters and play games with them in the castle. Her mother would tell the story of how she escaped the Voice over a feast. Her father would tell her how he met Catherine. The Bulb would shine brightly, and all would be well.
She knew that last fact above all else. If nothing she wished were to come to pass, at least The Bulb would shine. Saccharina could find another happiness in its light.
She hadn't even met It yet. How naive.
The first time Saccharina met The Bulb, It passed by so quickly that she forgot to ask It if she would ever be good again. She was eleven years old, reciting a prayer of repentance by rote. She was experiencing visions from the Hungry One that the nuns said were a sign of permanent ruin. If the Hungry One was talking to her this way, then she surely could not be saved except by the strongest of interventions. She was praying for this intervention, for some mercy from The Bulb. Even in her single minded chanting, some remnants of the Voice in her vision would haunt her. Saccharina tried to drown it out with a steady looping stream of Saint Arugula's prayer:
"Bulb forgive me and my disgrace. Bulb forgive me and my faults. May The Bulb make my spirit fresh and clean again, and so save my soiled soul from the Hungry One's maw. To The Bulb do I devote my entire being, now and for eternity. I offer this to you in my greatest sincerity. May Your light forever shine over us, and may we forever be made holy in Your love.”
For a moment the Voice was gone. In this pew of the chapel she found a sanctuary. It might have been a little too hot, but the warmth that bathed her body was calming and comforting. It was like a hug from the universe and herself simultaneously. She leaned into it.
Then Saccharina received a vision. A scream, the silence, a crashing, more silence, lonely lonely lonely and the Voice, but the Voice had a mouth and the mouth was on a face and the face looked a lot like her painting she had on the desk in the room in the left hall of the nunnery she was left at because—
The warmth was gone. The Bulb receded into the stained glass and relics of the room. Saccharina jerked up from the pew and quickly sat back down, knowing she would be scolded more harshly if she left. One of her arcane visions had attacked her again. It forced The Bulb away. Rather than give in, she kept praying. She tried to clamber back to the place she had been, but it was to no avail. Saccharina had never been so angry before. She thought she would never reach that level of anger again.
In time, she would. The second time Saccharina met The Bulb, she was fourteen years old, prostrate in front of the altar of the chapel. She was the only one in the area, but she silenced her sobs nonetheless. There were evil ideas in her mind. Though the nuns' methods had lessened them over the years, the visions from the Hungry One would not stop. Their ceaseless chastisements flooded her thoughts. An emptiness sat in her stomach, hot and vicious. Even for someone made broken, this wrongness was too much to handle.
A desperation overcame her as she begged for some reprieve. She thought of Catherine Ghee and what she knew of her. She thought of her Voice. She thought of the silence. She thought of what possible reason there could be for being left as she was. What reason was there for her mother to—
Catherine Ghee must have known. She must have known how the Hungry One claimed Saccharina from birth. Why else would she have left her in that silence and the lonely and that Voice cutting into her?
Her stomach growled, and it became too much. Saccharina let herself cry. Her gasps and heaves echoed around the chapel, a chorus of defeat and a testament to her hopelessness. Once she had no more tears to shed, she layed shuddering on the floor.
She couldn’t recall how long she stayed on the floor, but after quite a long period of quiet, the warmth came back. It was distinct in its relaxing shine. She immediately fell into it. This time, she swore, she wouldn’t let go. As she melted into the heat of The Bulb, an ambient humming took over any thoughts she had been trying to escape. It filled every piece of her and soothed all her aches, but still she dove deeper into that light.
There was something underneath she needed to reach. It was calling her through this hum, and some hopeful piece of her thought this was it. She would be cleansed, made whole, forgiven. The answers were at her fingertips as she reached the pure essence of The Bulb, where she found—
Nothing.
There was power. There was heat. There was a kind of magic burning brightly, but there was no… being. The Bulb was raw energy, nothing more. The contact ate away at her flesh as she stayed to find more, pleading.
“Where are you? I’m sorry! Forgive me, savior, creator, protector! Show me where you are!”
And The Bulb continued to glow.
When she snapped away from that state, her body was burning. The smallest portion of her hair, hands, and chest had melted onto the floor. Without thought, she sopped it up with her robes and retreated to her room.
Her painting was staring at her from the desk. She couldn’t– she slammed the fruit roll up canvas down on the desk and immediately heard yelling from a room over.
What was this? Any of this? This heavy, empty burden Saccharina has been protecting? Did— no…. Did the Hungry One already win? Maybe she was taken already. Maybe she was too dirty and rotten to—
Saccharina paused for five seconds, listening for people nearby. When she sensed none, crouched down in the center of the cold, barren room, and created a small candy cloud threaded with lightning. It crackled lowly in the shadows of the nunnery. Arcane light briefly fizzled and glowed an icy blue.
Her mind was calm after a some time watching the miniature storm, and facing what she had learned, she knew that she needed to get out.
“This is true, then. Your strength.”
A tiny crack of thunder sounded in the room, and Saccharina whipped around to face… a woman? She was gone as quick as she arrived, but Saccharina caught enough of a glimpse to register blue, marbled skin. This was not Bulbian magic. This was heresy.
Saccharina knew in her gut that she would be seeing a lot more of this person. She would come to know even greater heresies.
She ran from the nunnery one week later, on the eve of Frostdawn. She took only some extra clothes, a few containers of cola and candy apples, and her painting. The sharp winds of the winter pushed her feet forward until the warmth of that place was dispelled from her body. Saccharina had never left so alive. She had never felt so alone. She was not as alone as her mind and her heart insisted, for every so often she would see a glimpse of purple hair.
Saccharina did not know many facts about this new woman. She knew that she was her aunt, she was a magic user, and she was the source of her visions all this time. What Saccharina had been judging her on was probably all junk spewed by those brainwashed Bulb lovers, so she would have to throw all of it out. The flashes of fine robes and soft smiles occasionally showing up in ice around her seemed kind enough.
While she was walking through the world, the woman would send her visions. Now that Saccharina was cultivating her own magic away from the nunnery, the visions came with less anguish, but they never came as often. The strain of that last connection with The Bulb did something to the link between her and the woman. They could take nothing more, she reminded herself now that she had left that place.
The scarce amount of visions that could go through would help her find food and places to rest. Some were warnings against other untrustworthy magical beings, and some were helpful in learning the magic within Saccharina herself.
Sometimes they would help her find allies that believed in Saccharina's own new cause: bringing magic back and destroying the Bulbian Church.
Fifteen and already gathering a following, Saccharina toured around Candia and the Dairy Sea. She kept her painting at the bottom of her bag the whole way. Perhaps it would come in handy one day. She was only keeping it for practically. She found that if she carried herself well enough, people would want to listen, and the Bulbian Church had made more than enough magic users deviant. She had collected a few makeshift titles for herself before her eighteenth saints day.
Her final direct vision was in a dream. Arriving when Saccharina was seventeen, she saw the back of a man on a ship. He was carrying something she couldn’t entirely see. A crown flickered in her vision, followed by a rabbit, a pig, and a small blue sprinkle. The sprinkle danced around the man’s head before zooming off towards a woman. The woman, in her entirety, was already the subject of some of her current research: Lazuli Rocks.
When Saccharina left the vision, she knew the late Archmage Lazuli had been guiding her. The woman who was scorned and sneered at in the halls of the nunnery was helping her take back magic for Calorum. Sure, she could get with that. She definitely saw more research in her future.
And the man… the king. King Amethar. Her father was shown to her with… some animals? Oh, well, some visions were better interpreted after some rest. Perhaps this meant they were going to reunite soon and that those were her sisters’ favorite animals.
When she stopped receiving visions and dreams, she was already working with a larger network of marauders and had scoured the vast majority of Candia. The Dairy Sea was foaming under her fleet, ready to meet the true magic of its waves again. Her allies stood by her side even when she was shaken by their intense fealty. It was not to her, she reminded herself. They were loyal to the cause, not to her. This devotion was a tool for bigger things that she would have to wield wisely, prudently. Gooey may have helped her impress a certain Dairy Islander captain, but that was just a small favor.
Saccharina’s studies of Old Sucrosian magic had taken her down another path: the manners of the court. Though her building magical prowess was formidable, she couldn’t solely rely on it for her cause. She was royalty, so she would act the part. Plus, she knew she would meet her father and sisters someday; it wouldn’t be pleasant for them to meet someone with no tact. Her swordsmanship could work wonders on anyone diplomacy couldn’t reach.
Every so often, when she was resting in her quarters, Catherine’s Voice crept into her head. She would get up and start working again until she was practically falling apart from exhaustion, but at least the Voice would shut up. Its screeches of dirty, awful things would be drowned out by reports and strategy.
She embraced her magic. Saccharina held the storm in her heart as a sacred sort of friend, and it flurried at her whims in return. Every surge of arcane energy through her spirit bolstered her more and more.
Still, there was the Voice and its cries of damned eternity. There were times she would visit the Order of the Spinning Star and the Hungry One’s stench would send her into a spiral. There were moments where Gooey looked at her so gently, it felt like absolution that she could not deserve.
"High Priestess, there's urgent news from Comida."
Saccharina Ghee did not need to be forgiven. Saccharina Rocks only wanted to be forgiven. Saccharina of House Frostwhip was dealing with too much to bother with things like being doomed to the Hungry One’s Stomach. If she still mumbled a prayer under her breath before eating, well, that didn’t mean anything. There was a coup she had to handle.
And so, almost ten years after she fled, Saccharina did not know many facts about these Candians. She knew they were related to her by blood, they were in great danger, and she should have known them her whole life. There was a lot to judge them on within the first moments of meeting. Their words and manner and presence seemed to disregard her without even trying.
"Now, I hope you don't mind. As soon as I heard what the nets dragged in, I prepared a little feast for you. I assumed you would all be hungry."
She was trying so hard to keep from screaming. She deserved better than this. She deserved a feast thrown for her. She deserved gaudy titles and a royal welcome.
These Candians, they deserved…. They certainly deserved…. Well, she did not know them. She couldn't know them. How could she know what they deserved?
"Oh, wow, I'm… pretty hungry…."
The Count of Freezyburg did look pretty hungry.
"Uh, forgive us, um, Lady Saccharina—"
These people were her people, and they had come this far. If they hadn't come before, then at the very least they had come now.
And, she supposed, at the very least they deserved to be:
"Forgiven. Moving on…."
