If I crawled out from the dirt of my own tomb: what then?
If I stood on the edge of a sea-beaten cliff just to feel the salt spray on my skin: what then?
To feel anything besides the fire, or the ash—the way it clings to my hair and the clothes my father buried me in—or the rot that is fated to become of me; to know freedom by my open eyes and my cold hands. To know him by the sellsword’s coat he left behind on the clothesline, even if the smell of him has been overtaken (like moss atop an undisturbed grave) by wind and smoke.
To trace a finger over the soft bumps of the embroidery thread I used to mend his ripped cuff, and to maybe even say: here is where I put a bit of myself on his sleeve, so that he would always have some of me to touch on his heart. I was nearly as skilled with a needle as I was with a sword.
If I walked halfway across the world I once knew, like he walked across broken earth to find me a home, and I found what is left of him: what then?
If I got to hear my name in his mouth, even if only for the last time—mine or his, it does not matter; only the shape he made of Steorra like I was not just one star in the sky but all of them—: what then?
(Then Ala Mhigo would not be free)
(It would always be too late: too late to stop his hand, too late to stop his heart from opening great and wide and empty for something that cannot fill it)
Every time it stormed, I thought of my father’s god.
Maybe it was wrong to think of a god as his; not mine, not ours. But I knew his faith like I knew a poem or a story: something sweet, something familiar, something that was real because it took a shape that left traces—and still unreal in all the ways it couldn’t be palpable. We grew up in a place where faith was a story, my brothers and I.
But not him. His faith was real, his superstitions certainties, their stories fact. And what I believed in most was him, because he was my father, and he believed in me.
So I loved thinking of his god as his. I found comfort in the rumble of thunder because he heard in it Rhalgr’s promise, and in the lightning that flashed across the sky, he saw His hand. Like I loved seeing marigolds in a field because they were my mother’s favourite flower.
I remember one night when a storm hit right at the twins’ bedtime: how our father had stayed in their room the whole way through to tell them of the Destroyer because Balder was afraid of thunder and Nedric was afraid of Balder’s fear. My grandfather, he told me once, had no respect for fear; but my father was wiser, as sons tend to be when they strive to undo their fathers’ harm, and he taught his sons (and most of all, his daughter) how to know their own fear.
He had sat with the twins until the clouds took the thunder away. By the time I heard his footsteps on the creaky floorboards between my brother’s bedroom and mine, the rain had almost entirely subsided, such that I could open my window and let the cooling, still-wet air in. I had crawled into bed to watch the storm in the dark, so I called out to him with the blankets snug around me.
His footsteps stilled outside my door. He pushed it open, almost warily, because I had my mother’s temper and worsened it tenfold in my adolescence, especially in defense of my personal space; any man would be careful not to intrude uninvited. He called my name in a whisper; maybe he thought he’d mistaken the wind for my voice.
“Will you come in?” I asked.
He shut the door behind him, like I always insisted: with two brothers like mine, trusting an open doorway with a private conversation was a fatal mistake. All of us under the same roof knew this well; I, to this day, never managed to decode the cipher my parents used to speak secrets in our presence.
“What is it?” he asked. “You’re in bed early. Are you feeling unwell?”
“I’m fine. Can I ask you something, Da?”
“You can always ask.”
That was his way: we could ask anything. He wouldn’t always answer—oftentimes our questions were too hard, too thoughtless, too hurtful—but we could always ask, at least once.
“Do you think He’ll tell us?” I said, gesturing outside towards the remnants of the storm. “The Destroyer. When it’s time to go home.”
He took a breath that already told the beginnings of an answer: I had daunted him, and he needed a moment to think. He ambled forward to stand in front of my window.
“I don’t think He will,” he said, and I know now—maybe I knew it then, too—that it was the honest truth, because it hurt. “I think we have to decide that for ourselves.”
“Do you still want to go home?”
“Always,” he said, turning his head to look at me. His certainty, even gently spoken, was sharp with longing; it was him it cut the most. “Why are you asking me all this now?”
I shrugged. Still I remember the loose thread in my blanket that I twirled around my finger, tight enough to turn the tip white, as I said, “Will you let me fight with you? When we do go home?”
Another deep breath. He sat on the edge of my bed, his back to me, and reached out to brush the hair from my face. I didn’t slap his hand away, because— because. I may not have been afraid of the storm, but maybe, like the twins, I needed his comfort, too.
“I would be afraid. Every minute, every second, I would be afraid to see you hurt,” he said, and my hopes sank with the thought that he denied me the honour of bringing him home. But then he said, with a growing smile, “But if your heart is set on it, I could no more stop you than stop myself, could I?”
I smiled back. “No.”
/
Of this moment, I have no memory; it is not a memory.
But I can still hear the storm raging around us (wrong: there was a clear, full moon in the sky, like a herald of what was to come), quieting the cacophony of death beyond. And inside the storm, stillness. In the stillness there is a humming, heavy with sorrow.
The Griffin’s mask is not my father’s face. And me? I am not the Warrior of Light—the one to whom he turns his rage.
In his daughter who stands before him, he sees a revenant.
“Banish your shade, Arroway!” he shouts, unwilling to know me; too near to madness to see anything but me. “There is no stopping this.”
“Don’t do this,” I beg. “Please. Not for me. We can go home together.”
“There is no stopping this,” he says again—
“Da,” I plead. And I know we won’t go home.
“—no stopping me.”
I read a story, once, of a daughter whose duty was to avenge her father; whose self was made up wholly of her grief for him. And I thought, one day my life may come to this.
Instead, I have come to this moment. I swallow my tears of— rage, grief, love— and draw my blade.
Either he will break the haunting of his daughter, or I will kill my father.
The Saintsmaker regarded the Masks trespassing upon their territory with barely concealed disdain.
“I thought the commander’s guard dog had done away with the last of you,” they said—and in this, too, they made no effort to appear concerned. Neither did they show disappointment; the continued presence of the sect in the Undercity was unpleasant, to be sure, but it was also an inevitability, like vermin in the tunnels.
“She can try,” said one of the Masks; their would-be leader, the Saintsmaker surmised. “She failed to bring the Griffin to heel once. I mean to make her powerless in the face of Yiazmat for as long as she shall live.”
Yiazmat was not theirs. Neither had it been the Griffin’s; he had warped its nature by allowing himself to be compromised by Ascian influence, as Blackram once had. But the Saintsmaker would waste no breath explaining this to fanatics.
“Such pretty words from one who was not upon the Wall to witness the ascent of his own god,” they said, because the Dark had whispered it to them: in front of them stood a misplaced longing, arrested, unformed. The Mask’s mouth made a pretty line. “Why must you pollute my domain so?”
“We thought to bring you an offer of strength,” said the Mask, with a sourness that betrayed his temptation to reconsider.
“I have all the strength I need.”
A sneer. “Do you? I heard your last little saint escaped your clutches. They’re saying the Liberator took him from you—didn’t he?”
The Saintsmaker’s jaw did clench at that. Sihtric’s loss was not one they took lightly—but if the Mask saw it as an issue of pride or strength, then he would never understand. The boy’s absence was like the sky losing its sun, and all hope leached from the stars.
“I tried to prepare the boy for his ascension and he chose the path of the unfit. All he denied was himself.”
“He denied you Yiazmat,” said the Mask, leaning closer to them as though to tell a secret. The Saintsmaker’s metal fingers curled into a fist. “We offer you an alliance; we want the same thing. The same god.”
Not the same god. Not the same ends.
The Saintsmaker allowed themself a smile, a cold thing from days long gone.
“What do you imagine I could possibly want from this alliance of yours?”
“Why, a saint.”
So sure of himself was this Mask. He put a gloved hand on the Saintsmaker’s shoulder and closed what remained of the distance between them to whisper in their ear, his breath smoke-heavy.
“The Warden, Saintsmaker,” he said, the answer to a question the Saintsmaker didn’t care to ask.
That was one way to make them laugh.
“You would offer me Lady Blackram for a saint!” the Saintsmaker said, their voice carrying to the rest of the assembled Masks. Their hand shot out to grip the leader’s throat, metal pressing divots into pliant flesh. “Be grateful to hear me speak and listen well, sheep. The Undercity is strongest when it is ungovernable. No man nor woman shall hold dominion over the Dark—that is my promise.”
One of the Masks bared steel. “Release him, Saintsmaker.”
“Do you not hear me?” the Saintsmaker demanded, gripping harder. Fingers clawed at their hand as the Mask choked. “Your Warden would claim this place for her birthright. She would spit upon the blood of the martyrs in her own veins, the trapped life-force of the one true saint, and bring us all to heel as he once did. And thus, to traitors, I say—”
When It sees the Body, It sees it from the inside out: not flesh and blood and bone, the blood that flows through Its veins, but something perhaps stronger, perhaps infinitely more fragile: a mind, a formless soul, a broken heart.
A pulse of energy: rage. This It knows, for it is the violence the Body has given, offered up like a sacrifice.
And then the siphon of grief, cold and too-bright, and this too is familiar in its ravening and ravages.
But there is another body—another broken half to the whole of It. This one is not so familiar; immaterial. A bright, sharp shard. This body It knows as Her, with spite and disdain and a devouring, unfulfilled sort of admiration.
As the Body knows Her, so too does It know this body. And when It, too, becomes immaterial—a memory, a parasite, a haunting—It slips once into Her body, in the black soft waters of the gift that once was Hers. Before the offering, and Its birth, and Its death.
Her body is like this:
The desert heat sears her lungs; tears would sting her eyes if she had any tears left to weep. Her grief is wider than a desert, her heart greater than a city, her rage more endless than hunger.
She thinks: I have no home to return to.
She thinks: there was never any such thing as a place.
She thinks: the whole of my family is dead and so must my son learn that mother, in his tongue, means dead.
But they are not, in truth, Her thoughts—not in words nor voice. They are an echo of something unshapen and gaping inside her as she walks the desert alone, until she comes to where her home died, where the sand was once dark with blood.
She sinks to her knees and turns her face to the sky where It would be birthed and has died and she screams, she howls, and there is a harsh sting of red on her thigh—
Ilberd came to himself breathless, like a man breaking the surface halfway to drowning. In front of him, Morgana—always her, like a dogged shadow, like a precious cursed thing from which he could not be parted—; in her hand, her grip white-knuckled, a knife.
Still reeling, he registered some mild horror at the blood seeping through her trousers, at the red-blossom point of her knife. He had nothing to think of the habitual contempt in her eyes, except perhaps an unexpected sting of regret.
Was that what she had felt, on those battlements, when she had seen— when she had discovered something far more wretched than his concealed treachery?
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he hissed.
“I did what was necessary,” Morgana replied, venomous and withering. “You ought to know something of that. You had no right—”
“So you would stab yourself just to spite me?” He steadied himself upon the nearby wall and straightened, extricating himself from the stray vertigo hanging over him as Morgana glared. “It was beyond any choice of mine. You should know that.”
The weight of her grief lingered, choking; but the shape of her anger felt like breath, a noose loosening from around his throat. She glanced away and scoffed, content to ignore him. She did know. She knew precisely what it felt like.
“It worked,” she said instead, pressing her hand to her thigh, “didn’t it?”
And then she smiled, all hungry-wild, and that Ilberd couldn’t begin to understand.
He pushed an impatient sigh out through his nose and, unnerved by the sight of her blood seeping onto her skin, slapped her hand away. She didn’t protest as he crouched in front of her to bandage her thigh best as he could—himself unsure whether it was the gesture of an exasperated father, or an irritated friend, or.
“I knew you were a vindictive bastard, Arroway,” he muttered, “but I think you may actually be mad.”
“No one likes a mirror, hey?” she said, and she nudged his cheek with her knuckles. Never an open hand; not for him. “Misery does love company.”
She sits looking for the part of it that is still connected to her, like pressing a finger against a wound; he turns away from its withered wings and splintered bones because he is afraid. Clinging to what is his, what has become hers -- better in her hands than belonging to his monster.
"Stop prodding," he says. He can smell what will come, cold and putrid, when her hand presses too hard into sloughing flesh and it breaks apart into carrion. He does not want to see her skin crawling with beetles and flies and worms.
She breaks off a piece of bone that crumbles away to dust in her hand. "No," she says simply.
"Then you need to be prepared for what you'll find."
This time, she buries both hands inside the god's carcass: it begins to throb and tremble as she disturbs the life that takes shape inside its death. Bile rises burning in his throat. The flesh-eaters crawl under his skin, too, a thousand deaths racing to make a home inside his body.
He wonders if she realizes what it does to him, her digging. She is red-black and brown and yellow up to her elbows with it, but she endures -- perhaps because his horror is preferable. Perhaps there is intention in her persistence, or perhaps only ignorance. The empty place in her skull has not made her more attentive to what is outside of it.
"I'm going to take it apart," she declares, so single-minded that it makes her shake. "Until there's nothing left. Until I can sleep."
She means to kill a withered corpse, but not even rot will be enough to kill a god.
He lowers himself to his knees and crawls across the broken blades, tearing at his flesh until his legs are mangled and bare, but he reaches her even through the slick of his blood. He pulls her body against his, and for the first time since long before they were ever chained to the god together, she does not fight it. Her fingers merely twitch at the crawling of a scarab over her knuckles.
"I am sorry," he whispers, taking her face between his bloodied hands as though they were kin. He cradles her head and shoulders; he holds her chest to his so that her heart will drum the counter-beats to his own; he presses his brow to her cheek like a child, penitent. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
She makes him taste the god's death on her skin, feel her haunting on his tongue. She has shared his long enough; it is only fair that their terrible intimacy sees its bounds dissolved. He welcomes it, and the god's voice shudders in a thousand whispers.
"I forgive you," she says, and they know it is a worse sort of pestilence than the god's carcass because it is true.
When he wakes, he finds their bed empty; the sky before dawn is grey, balanced on a knife's edge.
He finds her, in that bloated, cold quiet of barely-morning, in the empty armoury. Her hair is braided for battle, tight against her skull, and her burned arm bandaged in linen wraps to guard against the buckles of her pauldron.
She ties the bright silk sash around her waist -- a splash of colour, a furl of sunset oranges and reds trimmed with indigo; a memory -- with her gaze turned up to the violet standard at the end of the room.
She stands framed by the talons of the griffin rampant and readies for war.
"I haven't given the order yet," he says.
She takes a breath and reaches for her sword belt. "No," she says, only pausing at the touch of his hand crossing the path of her own. "But you will."
"Aye."
They both stand in silence, joined where his hand has not let go of hers, fingers curled against the belt.
"Two years ago," he says, and does not place his words at a more precise time -- she will know, and remember the feeling of unraveling under a cocoon of light, "you told me that you couldn't do this anymore."
"I didn't mean fighting."
He smiles at that, gentle as can be. Of course not, it says; I know you. He goes on: "And when the Resistance became an army, when it stopped being a resistance, you told me that you were a sellsword; not a soldier."
"Where are you going with this?" she asks -- knowing, too.
"From where I stand now, it seems as though this is you stepping into a role you had forced to release its hold on you, and that of a soldier."
She shrugs. "It doesn't matter, does it? Champion, hero, sellsword, soldier," she says, and turns her eyes back to the griffin. "If I decide to stand back and watch for the sake of roles, what am I?"
He shakes his head because he does not know the answer. He has never done well with standing back and watching. What can he say? This does not have to rest on your shoulders.
A blunted weapon, easily turned against him. Then why should it rest on yours?
"Don't try to talk me out of this fight," she says before he can think it. "You'd be a fool for turning away volunteers for this one, and especially me."
"I know."
He could sooner talk the sky into changing colours -- and he would not do her the dishonour of trying to keep her from this out of a desire to see that she does not come to harm. It will always tear his heart to ribbons, the fear of losing her, but he loves a warrior.
"But I do not wish to see you fighting because I have commanded you to."
"Would that be such a terrible thing?" she asks, unwittingly testing his balance. She can still surprise him -- stubborn and fierce and independent, and she says this. "Honestly. Would it?"
"I thought it might."
She huffs. "Then you're a fool," she says. "That suicidal little cock put my city to the flame. His master would burn the world down for the pleasure of killing my son. I was going to fight regardless -- I know you know this."
At last, she slips her hand out from under his, only to switch her sword belt to the other. She presses a half-formed fist to his chest, just above his heart, and looks into his eyes.
"I'm devoted to you -- you must know this. Command me, and I will. I'll follow wherever you lead."
Even if it is to the end.
He feels them, the strips of his heart, of flesh torn apart and put together. He cups her cheek.
She leans into him, face tilted up, and her fingers touch his jaw. When he bows his head to her, she touches her brow to his, and he closes his eyes.
Dawn breaks.
The palace was still in disarray after the chaos of the last few bells; Saskia knew she would not have been able to stride in uninterrupted as she had otherwise. In any case, she had no desire to let herself be stopped by any of the Commander’s men—not after today. She was making straight for the infirmary, and no one would dissuade her from it.
Her anxiety and frustration only increased tenfold when she finally reached the right hallway—which should not, by rights, have already been familiar to her—and nearly marched straight into the wall that was Raubahn Aldynn himself.
Saskia stopped herself just short of colliding with him and briefly looked up, too proud to meet his eyes. “Commander,” she said coolly, in a tone Morgana would have been delighted to hear from her twenty years ago—perhaps not now that it was directed at her lover.
She made to walk on past him, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm. Her body’s first instinct was fear: a man of his bulk, of his martial fame, and her with nothing but Neesa’s needle in her boot; even with only one arm, the objective danger he posed was evident to every part of her that had survived the occupation. But quickly enough, fear gave way to renewed defiance; the contempt with which she looked up at him was enough to make him release her at once.
“The chirurgeons will allow no one inside,” Raubahn said in a calm voice that belied his distress. “Not even I.”
“Will she live?”
Almost imperceptibly, his jaw trembled; Saskia could feel the exhaustion coming off of him as though his aether had been made material, but she refused her natural impulse towards sympathy. “It’s too early to tell.”
“Well,” Saskia said, and found no other words she wanted to say to him. She was about to turn on her heel and blindly head back to the theatre and the comfort of Neesa’s arms when Raubahn spoke again.
“How did you know to come?” he asked—only to answer his own question. “Let me guess: your elusive Resistance contact.”
“If you must know, it was Grand Steward Riot who told me of Morgana’s condition. And before you start doubting Ashelia’s devotion again: it isn’t like she tells me of everything that goes on between these walls. She only contacted me because she understands that I still care deeply for Morgana’s well-being.”
Raubahn’s eyes narrowed at her. “Before I start doubting her devotion again?”
“Perhaps if your council had actually listened to Ashelia instead of casting doubt upon her every move regarding the Undercity, it wouldn’t have come to this,” Saskia snapped, “and Morgana wouldn’t be on death’s door having protected a man so desperate to prove himself still strong enough to lead he forgets his own duty to her!”
Raubahn looked as though he had taken an unexpected blow—the sort that only made a man fight harder, angrier. It was the first Saskia saw of the hot-tempered man who had made his reputation as the fiery leader of the Immortal Flames.
“This coming from a woman who has done nothing but obfuscate in service to a game of subterfuge she no longer needs to play,” he replied harshly. “All this to thwart the very same council you accuse—which, so very recently, accused you of abetting the Empire. When Tibost’s people began to clamour for retribution, who do you think argued for your contributions to the Resistance? Whose voice joined Ashelia’s to give credibility to your Undercity contact in spite of your continued refusal to name your allies within my ranks?” His voice rose, resounding within the hallway: “Bark at me again about the sort of man I am, and I may finally give you reason to doubt that I could be anything but an ally to you.”
Saskia flinched again in the face of his anger, but she was her mothers’ daughter, and she stood her ground.
“Is that all? Because you defended me against that farce of a list, I should be grateful that Morgana again has been grievously wounded in your service in spite of your duty as a man to protect her?”
“Morgana chose this position. I would never disrespect her by acting as though my duty to protect her supersedes her duty—”
“‘She chose this,’” Saskia repeated scornfully. “How many times will you tell yourself this before you find the words wanting? Or perhaps you already do. Perhaps your anger towards me is only a shade of your anger at your own failure—”
“Enough, you two,” said Ashelia as she quickly strode from one end of the hallway to them, commanding as though she were not two decades younger than them; this was the Grand Steward speaking. She drew near, keeping her voice quiet so as not to carry. “I know this is a difficult time,” she said, giving Raubahn a meaningful look, “but there are better places for this conversation, unless you want the whole palace to wonder whether all this isn’t much more personal than it seemed five minutes ago.”
“Isn’t it?” Saskia asked, not tearing her gaze from Raubahn.
“Believe it or not, this is bigger than you or me or Morgana Arroway. If we weren’t certain when we woke up this morning, this attack proves it,” Ashelia said seriously. She jerked her head back towards the direction she had come, away from the infirmary. “The old Riskbreakers’ offices. We need to talk.”
Morgana’s fingers stilled on the straps of the armour. Intimately, she knew his discomfort as though it were her own: to face her back in this moment, to stare at the cloak upon her shoulders. Hers was no tattered flag of a broken nation; the pair of griffins rampant on her back, swords crossed, told another story entirely. A story of her own choosing, thick with echoes of the past.
The dull black of the scales on her chest took on a blade-sharp gleam as she turned to look at him.
“Do you?” she asked, her derision so much like his own. He did not move from the shadows, not yet, to step forward into the biting of her light. “Are you going to do something about it?”
He opened his hands, showing them empty; there was no blade at his belt. There might be one, hidden in his sleeve, waiting for her to be near enough to plunge a dagger into her belly—and wouldn’t that be some irony? Him, of all people, deciding her end in this moment. Would he hold her as he did it?
“We already know how that story ends. Swords will never be enough.”
“You could try words. Try and conjure the reality you desire just by speaking as you did then,” Morgana said, as though handing him the secret to her own destruction could ever be so easy. “If anyone could ever know what it takes to make me change course, it’s you.”
“Are you asking for a way out?”
Morgana smiled, hardened by purpose. “No.”
“Then I’ll say nothing. I won’t speak of your madness, or of his heart,” Ilberd said, and finally stepped forward into the cold light of the full moon. “But I will say this: you had better be prepared.”
In his hand was not a blade, but it felt like a sacrifice. She took the mask from him in silence, holding it in both hands as she considered this, her last step before the abyss.
“It was never just for Ala Mhigo,” she said at length, “or your family, or our people. Was it?”
“Why?” Ilberd replied, turning it on her. “What is it for you?”
Morgana smiled again at that, and went on. “The actions, perhaps. The purpose. But the Griffin—that was for you.”
He did not need to speak his answer aloud; she already knew.
“Maybe you were right,” Morgana admitted thoughtfully. “Maybe we are the same.”
Ilberd watched as she put on the mask—as she pulled on the hood of her cloak and wholly disappeared inside the Griffin. He was as powerless as she had been then: his only purpose to witness, and to untangle the pieces of his soul from hers out of what would remain of Yiazmat.
“This will hurt, when it happens,” she warned him. “But know that I will make Zenos pay for the last time.”
