You are used to the monotony of solitude, spending your suns in silence and your nights whispering sweet nothings to the stars and spirits who would listen. Prayer was your constant companion, then. You spent years with the smell of incense clinging to your lungs as voices indistinguishable from your own echoed in the fathomless depths of your mind. Years passed, and you lost the line that divided you from Them.
You’ve heard others speak of apotheosis as though it is some grand and horrible ritual. You, however, know better. This practice of resurrection — of pulling your frayed edges apart only to weave them anew, erasing the scars and imperfections that made you so beautiful a tapestry — is nothing of the sort.
It begins with a quiet death.
You are a young man when you no longer recognize your own reflection. The eyes that stare back at you when you look into the sacred pools you were bound to are not your own, but they are also no one else’s. A kaleidoscopic shift of color and light belong to an amorphous face, the features too blurry for your mortal mind to parse. Even now, you catch yourself holding your breath when you pass by a mirror.
It’s the night of your bonding when you realize that your voice is no longer your own. The whispers at the back of your mind have bled into the forefront, and when your mother comes to ask if you’re ready for the ceremony, it takes you too long to recognize your own name.
You become people other than yourself. You begin to slip and crumble and break apart, and when only a scarcity of your soul remains, you must choose whether or not you wish to go quietly. It is your destiny to fall.
Unfortunate, then, how easily the red string of fate is cut.
You are older now, living in a small apartment a world away from the specters that once haunted you. You are a father; a doctor; a friend. You are many things, but the heart in your chest is your own, and when you speak, it is with certainty. Admittedly, you pray from time to time, sometimes for the soul of the weathered ronin whose body would receive no burial and sometimes for those who may soon join him. Old habits die hard.
on blue flames & funeral pyres. // riddle belizaire.
Mother once said that blue fire burns the hottest— its gluttony and esurience sending it reeling. Riddle couldn’t understand why the fire has to take. What vile hunger could spur a hearth to become so enraged, and why could it not be content with the wood they feed it?
They were a child, then. They didn’t know any better.
The rush of cold, thin air whips past their face as they trudge on into the night, away from the Voyage, and away from the memorial they’d constructed in their quarters, made up of gifts for the soldier that never came home.
They were foolish to think things could be different. Howling now, the wind bellows, and the force of it dries Riddle’s tears before they can fall. They’re grateful for that, at least.
The feeling of a staff in their hands is… strange, to say the least. Memories come rushing back, the smell of smoke and blood and white-hot metal melting into flesh, the two intermingling until they are different no more. Armor and the armored so quickly become one, and, like statues, they crumble when they fall.
Riddle grips the focus close to their chest, and they search for that familiar feeling. Was it grief that first sent them spiraling all those years ago? Despair? No, no. Sorrow makes the heart and body wither, and they have never felt more alive.
Extending an arm, Riddle points upward, and they feel their blood and aether sing. A spark flies from the tip of their staff to join the stars, burning bright before it, too, is swallowed by the black. Alight, Riddle breathes, and they relish the heady taste of smoke on their tongue.
Let fire become them.
They are unburdened. The two-step staccato of their heart skips in their throat, elated, elated to be free, elated to live and to breathe and to feel the oppressive weight of heat fling itself against them like a raging beast.
They are a tempest— a gale. They don’t need to see the blaze surrounding them to know that its color is shifting. No, Riddle can feel the temperature surge, climbing higher and higher. Red to orange to yellow to white. Still, it is not enough. They need more.
Perhaps this is what mother spoke of so long ago; this ecstasy in hunger. The hearth will protect, yes, but so, too, does the wildfire, and Riddle realizes that the fire has never just taken. It has never been an agent of greed and famine, but of necessary evils.
The forest must be purged before the infection below can claim it and turn the land fallow. Wounds that yet weep blood must be cauterized, lest they drain the body dry. Then, there is the pyre, upon which the people throw their sins and their dead; their offerings and their shortcomings; their hopes and their fears.
Fire nurtures life at the price of sacrifice, paving the way for those that follow, and, yes, it will inevitably blink out, suffocating on the absence of air and tinder already burned. That is its nature. It is an ouroboros, and it will feast until it has swallowed itself whole, leaving behind nothing but ash.
Blue flames burn the brightest. That was what their mother told them, at least.
When they open their eyes, a storm of brilliant, incandescent blue rages around them, a wild column of fire that climbs higher and higher into the sky as it reaches up for its kin among the stars. They did it. They did as they promised, crafting an azure masterpiece in his honor.
The boy from the Brume who didn’t come home; who would never see the gift Riddle had waiting for him with his name stitched into the interior seam. It was his favorite color, just like he asked. Blue.
The flames die as the aether sustaining them wanes, and what remains of the spell disperses in serpentine curls that waft aimlessly out into the night. Riddle stands long after, basking in the vacant, uncaring moonlight. They stay until the warmth they’d conjured has long since faded, and they are left alone with the constellations. Until now, they hadn’t realized just how much closer they feel here, high above the clouds. It’s like Riddle could tear the stars from the sky if they could only reach a little further.
Allowing their eyes to close once again, Riddle laces their fingers together, and they kneel as they have for all the fallen children of Ishgard before him. But a heretic knows better than to pray.
“Rest well, Percy,” Riddle murmurs, “and sweet dreams. Know that the winter cannot chase you any longer.”
