((art credit: ashen falls firewood by gilles ketting. a few of these lines were written by @gorgagne-viperidae and shamelessly stolen from our discord conversations. urien belongs to them.))
The days after Urien’s fall are bleak. The manse is full of shining white tiles, blank white walls, pallid white faces coming and going with the subtle murmur of white noise. Soft-pitched voices and shuffling feet make a dull impression in a house that has become a crypt. There is no color. There are no highs, so there cannot be lows. Landon exists, but why?
His body goes through the motions, fueled by the sliver of Urien’s fire that still burns with a febrile flicker in his own chest like a lit candle growing jumpy as it nears the bottom of its wick. Landon sleeps. He eats. He dons his armor like a heretic wears an iron maiden: with great conviction and few regrets. Landon dies gradually, in a slow trickle not of blood but of feeling. Nevertheless, it is a loss.
What remains? The clockwork knight still roams the manse’s halls in his burnished brass armet, faceless and without a charioteer. He runs his programming, walking a familiar path from Urien’s chambers to the library, but there is no reason for it, and no one at the helm.
He stalks past the orderly rows of tomes, sorted in a catalogue that made sense to none but Urien himself, and smells the sluggish rot of paper, the picante dust of leather. It is more sensation than he has felt in two days, and maybe this is a sign.
Something is coming, Landon. Do you hear it?
A susurrus like pages turning, like crisp leaves crackling as they burn. Behind you, my knight.
The Knight turns, a slow process of creaking leather and screeching iron, an autonomous machine turning its cheek into the open palm of its maker. Nothing should be there, and nothing is. Naught, save for a ghost. Urien is ephemeral, a vision sprawled on the library desk in opalescent silks and braided ashen hair, with both hands outstretched in a grand sweep of flowing sleeves; a benevolent prince waiting for an embrace from his most loyal knight.
Urien.
Urien, Urien.
The ache as his heart stops beating is that of a sudden absence. Once, there was something, but now there is nothing. No light, no meat, no fire, no blood. A void sits in Landon’s chest where once there was a flame, a sucking hole that nevertheless still throbs with the memory of a heartbeat. Thud, thud. It pulses heavy in his ears as Urien spreads his arms wide, as Urien spreads his legs open under the robes in a silent beckoning. Come to me, my knight. Thud, thud.
The Knight removes his helmet and underneath is Landon’s face, as blank and open as an empty dinner plate but somehow still starving for the meal that isn’t there. Thud, thud. A step forward, halting and jerking. Thud, thud. Another step, stilted as a mammet. Thud, thud. Against all inertia, he is pulled forward by the promise in Urien’s arms, by the heat between his lord’s legs, by the salvation like no other that he finds in both.
Thud, thud.
Landon blinks, and when he opens his eyes he is in a roaring furnace. No. No, he is on his back on a low cot in the utility room that he and Urien had once turned into a blazing chapel. Now husked of his armor, Landon is unable to move, petrified by the weight of his absent lover and held in frozen stasis despite the dry heat that suffocates every drop of moisture from the air. Landon gasps, and a long trail of white hair falls over his shoulder. Urien.
His prince, his lord, the phoenix: a man shattered into shards of himself hovers over Landon and gazes down at this scared little knight like stained glass layered over itself in triplicate. A viera with braids and silks, grey as ash; a man in fading robes with eyes still so bright but somehow sharper, somehow seeing so much more and so much further; something behind them that burns and burns and burns like an effigy set aflame. All of them Urien.
All of them gone.
Thud, thud.
The spindly hands of this gestalt being flutter like birds to cup Landon’s square jaw at the same moment that Urien opens his mouth to speak, but what sits behind his teeth is not his tongue. It’s not even flesh.
Like the opening of a kiln, it is only fire; a great roiling inferno that deafens all else and spills molten hot over Landon’s upturned face, anointing him with a phoenix fire that melts through his very soul like so much brittle wax.
As his body caves into itself, Landon could swear he hears something under the crackling of flame against stone. Urien’s voice, struggling to form words through the bubbling of magma that flows out through his spectral being and straight into Landon’s dreams.
Save me. Love me. Read to me, Landon. Won’t you read to me?
Thud, thud. The burbling of lava becomes a crinkling like foil crumpling in a campfire.
Wake up, my knight. Your trial awaits.
Thud, thud. The crackling of metal becomes a shrill singing like glass turning hot enough to shatter.
