A History of Iniquity

by aurillium

Summary:

Where is it written? He will burn that, too. This should be a world that no longer chains them with rules, with proclamations and prophecies. They have torn that world down, an old curtain from the wall, and unrolled their mother's glorious tapestry in its place.

So why is her blood pooling in his hands?

*

Those who have never birthed something from a forge think all fires burn the same. Messmer and Melina know better.

Notes:

a little world-building indulgence.
(it is more or less done; will come as a chapter a week if my beta is kind.)

⚕️

O my beloved mother, give me your sweet hand,
lay your cheek on my cheek.
Never again, never again
shall I look on the light of the sun.
Accept this last utterance.
O mother who bore me, I am going below.

- Euripides, Hekabe (trans. Anne Carson)

⚕️

Chapter 1: autobiography of red

 

---

 

 

 

When gods are born, the heavens open, or earthquakes strike. Great flocks of deathbirds rise, and rivers reverse course. The sun turns red. 

But he has been through the records, and none of that happened when he and his sister were born. He understands early enough they are not gods. Not yet.

In this chamber, where filaments of incense sting the eyes, they are born flesh, made a little wrong, a little skewed; pulled from their mother by her own hands when the Hornsent midwives back away in mute fear, too afraid to touch her lest they sully the flesh of their saint: white and gold and immaculate red, dripping from between her thighs. These things seem to him obvious in their contradiction. Flesh is too real, too honest to be immaculate. It always leaves evidence of its sin.

They were born, he knows, beneath the seven pillars of Enir-Ilim that hold up this house of wisdom. The records say his mother labours for a full turn of the sun, so that one child is born at dawn, the other at dusk. Being a twin is deceptive. He has always found the distance between them so much vaster than a single day. 

Before they have left the heady, fatigued air of that room, it is widely known they lack horns. In the aftermath, it is written that his mother did not utter a sound. It is also written that her cries drowned out the bronze bells of Belurat. It is written that all at once, the torches in the chamber went out, but also that they roared to life; and that finally only his mother’s sainted light remained. A yellow warmth, a shallow vibration. It is written the moon did not emerge that night, but hid behind the mountains of its worshippers. It is written that she touched her thigh and Death smiled, and that he and his sister were baptised in flame. 

A late addition to the account, he guesses. He would not see his sister cradled by fire until much later.

He could blame their mother for not keeping them apart. Surely there were signs. She must have had an inkling, an idea of what she birthed. But fear is as good as blinders on a beast, and perhaps she feared looking too closely. No matter - he will always find a way to excuse her.   

Of their provenance, nothing is recorded. Only that before she is crowned a god, the Empyrean called Marika whelps two infants. Her name is a later addition, too. Before she comes into her power, she is nameless: a lonely title in a linen dress. Millennia later, when smoke will blanket the sky, he will not let their captors forget it. He will take from them, but he will be careful to leave them with their tongues so they can choke on her name while they dangle above the open mouth of a furnace. In a measured, quiet tone he will advise them to beg her mercy before he sets their feet alight. They will beg, and he will burn them anyway. 

But that is later. 

The night they are born, when all lights go out, their sainted mother plucks from him the darkness of an abyss. The endless coil. 

From Melina, she plucks something far darker. An eye the colour of gloam. 

He imagines how his eyelids must have drooped over empty sockets. A malignant squint, so out of place on the face of a babe, marring any semblance of innocence. His birth as something fully aware of itself, cognisant of its own sin, winking up at his mother like a crude joke they now shared. Her people’s victimhood, its redemption, in a squalling bundle bereft of light. Born blue, he will learn later, with one serpent wrapped around his neck and the other tangled at his feet. 

Four emerald eyes, and the two she gifts him in place of the ones she takes. 

But perhaps such embellishment is to be expected. After all, their mother was made, not born. They say she was Numen once, but how could he have known? He does not believe it, not then. Her people are gone, and for a long time she does not name them. Would such a proud and powerful race breach the surface of this world only to let themselves be stuffed into jars like tallow for the winter? 

He remembers the first time someone asks. Boy, they say. A little derisive, as if already they doubt him. Changeling born to the shaman saint. Who is your father?

 

⚕️

 

In truth, he knows the Hornsent do not care. Their suppliant eyes roll up and back into their skulls to watch the slow progress of the tower. A thousand thousand years they have been waiting for the Empyrean who will herald the completion of Enir-Ilim, who will bless each stone as it is laid until the very last and unlock the Gate of Divinity. A thousand thousand years they have laboured bent over their clay pots and abducted creatures of all races, kept Nox and Numen shaman like cattle - flayed or ground or quartered, gory pulp or dried to powder, searching for the right recipe. To replicate the Crucible’s greatest blessing: transmutation, and the erasure of difference. For many to become one, the One, their own: for the Hornsent have never taken an outer god for themselves. They have only seen their own kind made gods, forged in the belly of the Crucible, itself impersonal but benevolent; their heroes given the wings of great birds or the strength of lions. Above them, the supreme deity of this age, the mountain that appears to them as a great stone dragon, the so-called Elden Lord, is only a creature of nature raised to divinity. And now it has retreated to some mist-shrouded kingdom in the sky and does not concern itself with them any longer, as a mountain does not concern itself with the stones at its base. It falls silent and turns away. 

The Hornsent feel their time has come, and so they toil. 

He is young when he learns the Hornsent are an old culture, their clergy educated, their records extensive, their masons next to gods: they produce rolls and rolls of treatises and histories and study the world’s machinations. From these learnings they build great structures, design systems that lift stone skyward and erect curving buttresses, measure the distance of footpaths and stairs and the girth of great spiralling columns, so that their exquisitely articulated forms on parchment continue to grow and stack, like a child’s painted blocks, at the peak of Enir-Ilim. At its base, in the shadow of Belurat’s innumerable towers, streets brim with clerics and miracle-workers on every corner, peddling jar recipes and tinctures and ways to garland one’s horns so as to close the distance to heaven. Their world is not run from counting houses but from temples and amphitheatres, in the currency of ritual displays of combat, fervent hymns and great works of craftsmanship gifted to the clergy in hopeful exchange for favour at the end of days. There is always a little blood to be drawn, a revelation, an act of worship embedded in the seal of a jar before which they proclaim, this is the one, the saint. We are gestating a god. Before his mother, every jar opening was a spectacle, every one a failure: another messiah revealed to be just a clumsy prophet who stumbled forth, muttered a few indecipherable words, and died.

Then his mother cracked her greatjar like a fresh egg and emerged, whole and splendid, and even those learned Hornsent now turn to tea leaves and shooting stars, looking for omens and portends. Their saint is born, and miracles abound. Water turns to blood. In the quivering light of their mother they follow, little flesh containers of something greater. But the Hornsent do not count the saint’s brood among her miracles. 

Shaman, they say. Woman, they warn. Know your place.  

Her place is a gilded cage masquerading as a seat of privilege: a stone chair, carved in spiralling flourishes, its back draped with gold-fringed silk and covered in braided vines, hung with blue iris and chrysanthemum that drip and drop their petals and tickle the top of her golden head. It has sat empty since the ancient texts first instructed the Hornsent to build Enir-Ilim. It is the throne of the promised saint from where she acts, both demure and exalted, in service to the apotheosis of the Crucible. From this seat she is tasked with divining the truest path to the tower’s peak, and blessing every quarried stone, every iron tool, and every bricklayer who kneels before her. Later he will recognise the glaring humiliation of it: how they live as elevated prisoners, as specimens caught and caged and mounted glittering on a high shelf, never to be brought down again. On the promised day, the day the last soaring bridge is built between their great work and paradise, she will throw open the heavens and she and her dull-eyed children will placidly watch as their benevolent masters cross over into paradise.

Or so it is written. Was, for these texts he will find, much later, and burn them, so that no record of their servitude remains. 

As a child, he does not realise how much her motherhood inconveniences the Hornsent. Melina will put this into words for him many years later, though it is something he has always felt and failed, without help, to understand. Children remind the Hornsent that their shaman saint is a thing of flesh and blood and not an idol carved from purple-hearted quartz, or an altar pierced with sticks of incense. Her body has been unruly, has ventured beyond their purview. Her motherhood lays bare her personhood, and people are fickle. Possessed of will. It would be easier, Melina will one day reason, if the Gate of Divinity could be opened by a silver key and not a conscious being - at once dominant and tender and fiercely, undeniably physical; holy flesh in a milk-stained dress.  

Children, they croon. They do not see the serpents hidden under his cloak. Where is your father?

Why should his mother, the blessed saint long awaited, need another half to make a whole? She is more than herself.  

 

⚕️

 

For them she shapes gold, bent over a candle’s flame, wielding a silver hammer. A faceted ring, an emerald stone set in a snake’s gleaming head. Sometimes she must bend to the will of gold and other times it bends to her like water, and she need not hammer and beat it. She is much the same with her children. 

They do not have titles. They are neither prince nor princess, for their mother is not a queen, not yet - as she will eventually be called when the blood runs so deep you can no longer see her feet - the queen. Little lordlings they could have been, perhaps. Little lady sounds absurd on Melina, still a babe: writhing creature, feet dangling, ribs heaving, cloak pulled askew like she is grappling with someone exactly her height and weight; little force of nature hiccuping curses echoed after attendants with loose mouths. 

In moments of quiet, free from her saint’s perch, their mother unrolls for them splendidly detailed maps of Belurat city and its surrounding territories. To have land of your own, she tells them, is to rule yourself. To be immortal. 

With her permission he runs his hands over the leagues contained in pale parchment, touches rivers articulated in a single long stroke of blue ink, climbs with his fingertips over the bumpy crosshatching of a mountain range. As if her lips could legitimise them, his mother whispers of the territories she would gift them, the settlements she would ask they rule in her name. Prince of the Scorpion River Valley. Princess of the Winter Cherry Woods, a deep orange slash across the map. A place from where Melina will one day return with a pale face and in fearful silence. Now she puts her tiny hands on the dark swathe of forest and hums in approval. She is always reaching out to grasp something, opening and closing miniature fists, seeking to join, leaning forward like a chick in a nest with an expectant beak. 

These named lands Marika would gift them when they come of age. Do saints come of age, he wonders, and are they by way of their mother, or must they be stuffed into jars, shaken and melded and covered in holy guts before they too have a right to rule? 

It is not written, his tutors will tell him. 

I will give you the world, his mother whispers from a lightless place. 

He is all angles, this strange child with his serpentine aspect and joyless eyes: all length and no width, like something stretched out, but still soft and pliant with youth. His few attendants say he has bad posture and little variation in his expression; yet when he opens his mouth it is clear he is neither dumb nor addled. He is simply fixed in a stiff, sallow obedience, a cool indifference for everyone except his sister. Blank and docile as a hen, they whisper. The son of a blessed one, they muse, should be selfish, demanding as a moonflower, mercurial as mountain weather, pretty as a handful of glass beads. He is none of these things. But he is dutiful: he stands straight and speaks softly when he is addressed. A little halting, but even that fades with time. His tutors handle him cautiously, at arm’s length, in that short distance between discomfort and disdain. The sainted mother’s bastard boy, born of nothing. No one has seen a flame-haired child for generations, and Numen are said to be coloured silver or gold as celestial bodies. Never bronze, nor its inferior sibling, pale copper. From what clay-coloured womb did she deliver this rattle-boned creature? 

For the better part of his infancy she keeps him close to her breast, and covered, while Melina is passed around from attendant to servant like a writhing sack of grain. Swathed or draped in linen and silk, it is easy to explain that her son favours winged serpents as companions, creatures known to the Hornsent as the twining embodiment of healing and renewal. Difficult to explain how they are a part of him, like a malformed extra arm, or leg. When he is grown he will speak of them as extensions of himself, like horns or wings. But it is not until the very end, when his mother demands it, that he will reveal them for what they are: keepers of the ember that seethes in the hollow of his chest.

 

⚕️

 

Like seasons, the Hornsent are changeable: their customs and beliefs grow and flower, then wither and begin again. Their laws are not immutable, not carved into stone. Not like the laws his mother will one day scratch with bleeding fingernails into the trunk of a golden tree. 

The only static belief they hold to is their own specialness, their own condition of being chosen, favoured by the Crucible and destined to ascend. How they get there is a matter of great argument, of philosophical discussions and fistfights. Their declarations bend easily to signs, weather patterns or crop failures interpreted by wizened grandams and Sculpted Keepers as moody messages from the heavens. There is no tome, no scroll, no oral proclamation that posits they must care for their prophet’s children. 

So while the clerics wring their hands over what to do with her two unsanctified whelps, Marika performs her first miracle. 

He remembers it only vaguely: she did not bring him, nor Melina - now old enough to duck and escape the grasp of her exasperated minders - down to the lakeside. In retrospect he knows calling it a lake is aggrandising: it is a stoned-walled reservoir, shallow at the surface level, connected to the monumental marble and granite multi-storey cistern hidden beneath the hillside settlement, like a hollowed-out belly. In his hooded, covert explorations of the city, he once stood overlooking the central well shaft and felt his knees weaken at the drop. 

The cistern is fed by several aqueducts, but the clay walls have deteriorated, and rather than saltwater leaking in from Belurat’s west, the once-clear water has become a murky, nauseating shade of yellow. The people cry poison: they know, for they have seen birds unable to fly after alighting to drink, the bodies of beasts floating at the thickened surface, and worse still. 

From a marble balustrade that he is barely tall enough to see over, he watches his mother. He is not alone: seeing the clerics at her heels, some Hornsent have gathered to watch, perched high on their balconies or at their windows, or milling down by the water’s sludgy edge, now thick with flies and vegetable rot. Their mother is not long born from her jar, and the Hornsent are still sceptical of this prophet, unproven, unsure she can deliver on her promise. At his side, Melina lets out small sounds of frustration. She is not tall enough to see as he does, and so must content herself in a little squat, peering through the thick spiral-patterned balusters, her hands not yet big enough to wrap around them entirely. 

From his vantage he can see how light his mother’s head beneath her white veil, how pure the yellow of her hair against the swirling muck around her. She is draped in the style of the Hornsent faithful, pale linens and a fringed caplet - both of which she removes as she immerses herself, one steady step at a time. The gleam of her creamy flesh disappears as she penetrates the dark water. 

A hush descends over the spectacle. He imagines the squelch of her feet, the loose clay between her toes. The clergy who follow her like a stench stop at the edge of the water, and wait. Later he will sneer at their cowardice, at the debacle that might have been - a drowned saint, prophecy ground to a halt, and nothing to show for it. He and his sister unceremoniously tossed over the balcony to follow. 

But when the water reaches her waist, their mother stops. She keeps both hands by her side, now submerged. Behind her, her discarded robes settle at the surface like dead skin. Her veil is just long enough to skim the water now, like a jellyfish billowing along a gentle current. At first it looks as if she does nothing. Then the water begins to ripple: slowly, until gradually it flows outwardly from her with greater force, as if something inside her were pulsing, displacing the bilious surface to reveal clarity below. The rippling  waves bring her stillness into starker relief. Whatever moves within her moves at the most minute level, a pebble’s shudder before the heave of an earthquake. 

He does not remember how long this lasts. Would the Hornsent have fetched her, he wonders, if she had taken too long? Grown weary of her little display and dragged her back to her seat on high? But they seem more afraid of the poisoned water than of his mother, and so they keep back. Above, the clouds drag themselves away languidly. By the time they clear, the sun can be seen again on the surface of the reservoir, the noxious stain pushed out and away from the bullseye of her white-gold figure until it has disappeared entirely. Then the hush of her audience becomes a murmur, and the murmur a roar. 

After, when she is back in her chambers, on her knees retching into a copper pot, he clumsily tries to hold back her hair. 

“Our people,” she says, in between great heaving breaths, “can draw poison from the wounds of this world. We can hold what is malign within ourselves.” 

He is not sure what this means. He is not sure who our people are. Melina watches from a corner, her round child’s face blank. 

 

⚕️

 

The same night he dreams of suffocating, cramped and stuffed into the skin of something smaller, fused with a foreign body. An abyss envisions godhood. It begs him to shed his skin. When the dream threatens to strangle him, his serpents wake him, and he trembles in their red embrace, mottled and bruised and sweating but at least himself, alone in the skin they share, and Melina’s little form curled up beside them. It is a dream he has had many times before, and will have many times again. 

His mother is asked - told, commanded - to remain in the solitude of her chamber at night, but the two of them cross the hall anyway, and the wardens posted at her door can do naught but cede to them. They cannot risk harming their prophet’s progeny - what if she then rains down misfortune on Enir-Ilim, because in a haste they struck down one of her brood? So they step back, assiduously avoiding the children, and look at them suspiciously from afar as one does a wild animal that should not be startled. 

Inside, her chamber is hung with blue and gold-patterned drapings that smell of rosewater and fragrant wood ash. When he crawls under the damask sheet she embraces him, and Melina clings to him in turn, a buffer between her small body and the enormity of their mother’s presence. Already the heat there is intense, gilded, so different from Melina’s cold fingers. They drink their mother’s warmth greedily, as he’s been told children ought to, and lie in the muffled silence till dawn. 

It takes their mother weeks to purge the poison from her body. Still she sits on her stone chair, shaded by modest vines, woven baskets filled with fruit offered meekly at her feet, and doles out her blessings. From behind her fourfold veil of white silk, embroidered with gold thread and seed pearls, he knows how pale her face is, how strained. When she coughs she wipes her mouth on her hand and hides it within the folds of her robes. The Hornsent do not see it. They see only the promise of more miracles to come, the proof of their faith made flesh. 

We can hold what is malign within ourselves. 

Like Melina, his serpents are both a part of him but separate, another piece of his soul. But he thinks he understands now - why there is another one buried deep inside him, who is a stranger. In a thousand years, when his mother is cursed again and again and again to bear children born twisted and malformed of her own body, he will know each one: vessels of her fear, and he will wonder why she did not strangle them all in their cradles. 

 

⚕️

 

Like himself, there is another thing that lives in Melina. 

It hides in the quickness of her clever hands. The wrinkle of her small nose. They are nothing alike. Bastards joined by their mother’s blood alone. What soft thing had lent life to his sister? There is not a hard edge to her, nothing incorrect jutting out at a wrong angle, or out of proportion. No snake lodges in her chest. Like their mother, if their mother had all the gaudy ornament of holiness scraped away, flaking bits of pearl and gold supremacy, and left only a rosy patina behind. 

Again and again his mother puts him in the sun, like a tree she is cultivating, hoping to flush him with colour. But he is always an indoor grey. She bathes him in gold, but he does not change. It washes off him, slick as oil, oozing away, pooling at his feet, glimmering puddles turned opaque in the absence of warmth. 

Melina is pale, and beside him her crepe-thin skin is luminous, like something precious kept in a perfumer’s glass bottle. Like a sugared piece of fruit one would eat in a delicate grip with two fingers. In place of the golden eyes he was gifted, Melina’s is simply closed to the world. Her remaining eye is vulnerable, liquid. Mouth soft and unsure when she is herself - and not the strange, vacant voice of prophecy that sometimes lives behind her face. A quick blankness that seizes her without warning, that flattens her features and reduces her to skin, to a thin animal hide thrown over something indistinct to give it shape. An expression that does not belong on the face of a child. 

It comes and goes faster than he can seize on it. Like a player on a stage she steps aside for it, retreats into her own body, and whatever it is that lives behind her closed eye emerges, and it knows the world in ways that frighten him. Sometimes it speaks through her mouth, but to him alone, and vaguely, so that by the time he tries to answer she is herself again. On occasion these episodes happen at night, and a stranger’s voice floats out from the darkness beside him, some kind of dire warning he guesses at but cannot decipher. When he rolls over to ask, she only hooks her thin arms around his neck and goes back to sleep. Other times she wakes and disappears from their cramped quarters entirely. In the morning he finds her sleeping beyond their door, curled up on the flagstones as though she’d been drawn out, and could not fathom how to get back in.  

As her prophetic disposition comes and goes as it pleases, so does she. By virtue of her apparent youth she is always conceptualised in relation to someone else. His kin. The Empyrean’s second. As though without reference to anchor her, she might cease to exist. 

But she does exist, and this according to her own laws and whims in that narrow, self-interested manner of a child. Not obedient, not quiet, not dignified. Even her attendants recognise that she is touched by something: she of the still tongue and darting eye, she of the swift disappearance behind skirt or vase. She of precipitous footsteps down narrow halls, of rosy-hued shadows curtained by fountain froth. She of the flowers, yanked from the ground in fistfuls and studied with eye-watering intensity. 

For what? the attendants ask, while the gardeners mourn. She keeps her own counsel.

For what? he echoes, when he catches her doing it. He squeezes her wrist, knuckles a little too white, elbows bent at the same angle of disappointment as their mother. When the eye blurs and the tears brim and the red rises in her face, he lets his fingers grow slack. His serpents wind their way around her without threat, only curiosity. Coaxing. She lets them.

For what? he repeats, now in a loosened tone. 

For whatever comes after, she says. 

⚕️

 

When at a young age he shows a promising talent for healing, his tutors sigh in relief: blessed by the caduceus, the twining snakes, undeniably a gift from the Crucible. His mother presents him with sprouts that will not grow, fruiting trees that refuse to blossom. She takes him down to the city, to the orchard in the cloisters of a splendid temple, and bids him place his hands in the soil to cure it of sickness. Dutifully, he does as he is told. When he asks if he has been blessed by the Crucible, her smile is hieroglyphic. 

Healing, she says, is another trait of our people. 

He alternates between thinking of them as her people and their people, his included. But it is hard to lay claim to something he has never known. 

In the room he shares with his sister there is an orchid: a thing of pale yellow and blushing red, bred by the Hornsent to grow petals shaped in infinitely delicate spirals. So far he has found it to be the only thing beyond his saving. He can cure a blemish, restore vitality, or mend a root torn from the earth. But he cannot bring a thing back from the brink of death.

When he comes into the room, Melina is there. She draws her hands back with a jerk, like she’s been scalded. She is bent over the clay pot, and he can read the guilt in the soft hunch of her shoulders. His last attempt had left the orchid intact, if a little pale and wilted. Now its petals fall away in black papery tufts, as though passed through a dark-coloured flame. 

“What did you do?”

She looks at her hands, confused, then back at him. Her expression is painfully young - those first few moments after a child injures themself but just before the pain sets in, when the idea is still incomprehensible. 

“I thought I could, too, as you can. Show it mercy.”

He observes the ruin of the orchid, and works to keep his voice steady. “You did.” Cold flowers at the base of his neck, and he cannot tell if it’s her fear, or his. He squeezes her arm. “Do not tell Mother.” It is meant to be a warning. 

When she nods, he lets go. It is the first time he envisions the world without her.   

 

 

---

 

Chapter 2: to deny the existence of red

 

 

Melina stops touching things. 

She has kept her silence, as she promised him she would. But she has been elsewhere, in body and mind, striving to catch up to him - to coax from herself something useful, to patch a bruise or seal a wound. When she reaches up into a fig tree for the ripest one, she sometimes pulls down a withered, blackened thing. When she drops it in horror, he lets her bury her face in his tunic, so that others do not glimpse her distress. Like her strange disposition, the dark-coloured flame comes without warning - like she has sprung a leak in the palm of her hand and death, instead of holy magic, is leaking out. 

Now when he cannot find her in the halls of Enir-Ilim, or under the cool spray of a fountain, he knows she is in the belly of a temple somewhere, sifting through rolls and tomes far too complicated for her. When she reemerges, there is a kind of austerity seared across her young features, and whatever she has learned makes her turn to their mother and demand, Why? The supreme cosmogonic question. He has never thought to ask. When their mother tries to take Melina’s hand, she shrinks away. It will be many years before she allows their mother to touch her. Marika will bear it with difficulty, and she will turn that overflow of love, and pain, on him. 

 

⚕️

 

Together they move furtively through the city. Like most of lower Enir-Ilim, the air in their shared chamber is heady, and does not circulate. It sits thick as a curtain: musk, saffron, the resin of aquilaria trees brought from faraway forests, so prized by the Hornsent. Even under those temple domes open to the sky he finds the smoke and incense lingers far below, coiling endlessly in the singular shaft of sunlight, draped around his face and shoulders like his own serpents. When the smoke gets in his eyes he takes Melina and flees for the upper parts of Belurat, near the largest amphitheatre, or the higher levels of Enir-Ilim - his serpents discreet, red hair tucked under a kerchief - where the plazas float like great gardens in the sky and dark leaves fall heavy into pristine fountains. The sharp scent of cypress and bergamot find them under towering trees of white, star-shaped magnolia. He does not know where the roots of all these foreign trees go, unearthed so far from his little world, displaced, like his mother, and hauled up the vertiginous side of the tower city all the way to their mother’s left hand, where they are rerooted to give her shade and perfume her presence before her mass of petitioners - or perhaps spare her from the masses’ own perfume. 

On the eve they crawl into bed with their mother and she smells of night-blooming jasmine, he knows something has changed. There are no jasmine trees in Enir-Ilim.

They are getting too big now, too tall and long-limbed to crowd their mother in her chambers, too old to seek comfort in her bed. Still she lets them in, gathers them around her like a harvest. Under the heavy haze of summer they shed the damask covers and crouch under draped cheesecloth to keep away the stinging insects. 

“Mother,” he asks, before he can stop himself, “where did you go?”

Instead of reprimand or denial, she shows them a work of her own hand: a piece of embroidery that at first looks like an emblem, but on closer inspection resolves into a map. The shapes are blocky, the proportions wrong and perspective skewed, but after a moment he recognises the seven pillars of Enir-Ilim in white stitch and the towers of Belurat in black; the lakes that sit adjacent to it; the temple settlement to the north and the great library at the Black Keep to the north-east. Past that, his tutors have always said, is nothing. Lands not worthy of the Hornsent. 

Here, she tells them, beside these unworthy places, are fields and fields of arable land, more of it than the great swaying sea of bronze grass. Here there is a village. Here there are ruins, too, not unlike those of ancient Rauh, the paradise elevated by the hand of some gravity-defying outer god. Here a place called Deoh, spoken of only in legend. He frowns and listens in silence. How does she go to the place where they say the gods wept, rent the earth with their hands and scattered their falling-star tears over the ground? She is forbidden from leaving Belurat. With what would she pay the silence of the sentinels at her door? She has no tender of her own, only her blessings. Her body.

Here, she continues, pointing with finality to the northernmost tip of her crude map. Here she would gift them a kingdom on a hill, a gleaming city of domes and towers under the canopy of a tree that never withers, in splendour fit for them. 

We do not want a kingdom, Melina will say. He hears it before she says it, in that strange way they know things for they are twins, though twins in curses alone; so he pinches her arm until all she can utter is a sad mewl in their mother’s embrace. In truth, he does not think he would refuse such a gift.

 

⚕️

 

Despite her miracles, not all Hornsent are assured this shaman reborn is the key to opening the Gates. Some believe her to be a stargazing witch, or a descendant of Fire Giants. They accuse their ancestral enemies of poisoning the great holy jar from which she emerged in order to defile Enir-Ilim and thwart the chosen people’s destiny. They say she rises in secret every night and under the cover of darkness dismantles every stone, one by one, that has been laid, so that the tower will remain forever unfinished. Rumours abound that she is a beastly, deformed thing with six fingers; or that she possesses a second, cruel face embedded in her sternum, with eyes in place of nipples so that she cannot feed her poor hornless children, only gaze upon them in regret. Others say her hair is made of fire, her skin is smooth and she is wingless, possessing neither tail and horns, nor scales and feathers. They line up in droves to see her, making a pilgrimage of it, to find only the latter part is true. With a gesture or word she blesses them anyway, like children with wild imaginations who must now be gently put to bed. 

When she is given a moment of respite, she takes up needlework - a saintly, appropriate activity, for their reassurance. The effect is intended to humble: a woman sewing smocks for children of poor fortune and stitching cloths to cover altars. When she is done she indulges herself, and does not care who sees how painstakingly she embroiders gold thread along her children’s sleeves, or sews into their collars rubies the size of almonds. Of her goldsmithing, and the glittering adornments she crafts for he and his sister, the Hornsent know little. Her attendants think it is a shaman ritual, not unlike the way their own people hammer gold tips to cap the edge of their horns, or put a ring through the nose of a prized beast.

So they might have done to us. For all the Hornsent’s piety, Marika has no more authority than a sow. Beasts without masters, they risk wandering off into the fields, into the night, if they are not leashed. They can be muzzled, lashed. They can be broken. But he’s heard stablemasters say that too heavy a hand kills the horse before it gets you where you need to go, and the Hornsent know they cannot risk dragging a corpse before the Gate of Divinity only to realise they have blundered their only chance to open it. So they treat Marika with distant reverence, make her comfortable as a prisoner can be in silk cuffs instead of chains. In this way, the chafing leaves no physical mark. 

Sometimes, in a low voice only he can hear, Melina wonders aloud if their father is among the petitioners, and would he acknowledge them? Seated at his mother’s side he reminds her that it does not matter. Not unless their father climbed out of sainted clay too, or can lay a holy brick. Bricklayer! He cannot imagine his mother favouring something so low, so mundane. Their father must’ve burned brighter than the stars, raised kingdoms out of dirt, been a giant or wrestled dragons to have kept the attention of their smouldering mother. 

So, his sister murmurs, where is he? 

At the end of each day, when the last petitioner leaves, Marika is brought a basin of clear, cool water scented with lavender and rosemary sprigs in which she washes her hands and splashes her face. Another clergyman gives her a linen cloth and she wipes herself gently, like a reliquary lovingly polished after a day’s worth of worshippers’ pleading fingers. The Hornsent love relics, those hidden at the heart of a monastery that work miracles: the holy bone that can stop or start the rain, a chipped tooth that may trigger plague, a lock of hair that heals the sick. All these must be denied. His mother is the relic now, and the monastery. She is all the world kept hidden, an object, a châsse that only opens with the click of a gold latch, inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver-footed; but also a thing that belongs to all - a shared breath, that of salvation, to be preserved and cultivated, left in the sun in the day, kept temperate by night, and stoked, gently but firmly, like a hearth, so that she will keep red and orange and warm the hands of those who gather around her. 

 

⚕️

 

He takes the mask from its wood coffer. “What is it?” he asks.

His tutors sniff at it disapprovingly, rustling in their robes and wringing their bony hands. Their breath smells of old parchment, like they have been eating historical records, and now regurgitate them to obediently listless children. 

“A Lamenter’s mask,” one says at last. The visage - though when he turns it around he realises it is more like a hood - is cracked and leathery but heavy in his grasp. The hair, a tangled knot of dull grey, feels real. So too the horns, chipped and uneven, look more organic than artisanal. The empty eye holes stare up at him. When he tilts it a little one way, he thinks he can see its expression change, from maddening grief to crazed enlightenment. 

He turns it over again, but the smell keeps him from putting it over his own head. “What is it for?”

He has long stopped feeling embarrassed by his tutors’ exasperation. They do not see the point in educating the Empyrean’s progeny, so they are brusque with him, full of curt non-answers. He is not like to be raised to the role of consul anytime soon. 

“Lamenters are conduits for the visages of foreign gods.”

“And?”

“And they are not fit to be discussed around your mother.”

He sighs. Before he puts the mask away, he turns it around again, bending the supple material between his fingers. It does seem malleable enough that in the hands of a talented performer, its meaning could warp, its identity shift. He knows from Hornsent myth that outer gods slip in in moments of fear and despair. They appear when you need them most - in times of great vulnerability. For what does man need a god to intercede when his belly is full and his home flourishes like the Crucible? 

The Hornsent, he learns, love masks. For all their righteous piety they are intensely devoted to unthinking vice and violence, discipline punctured by wild celebration. They are, by consequence, great lovers of theatre and spectacle. Because they believe the world is about them, so too are all their tales - edifying classics stripped and rewritten, glorious battles - from which few lessons are gleaned except that they, in past, present, and future, are justified. If you are constantly peering down into the bottom of a clay jar or up at the sky-skimming tower, there is very little time left to hold a mirror to yourself. 

To indulge their favour, Marika attends as many of these dramas as her keepers permit. Under the shade of a heavy cloth covering, fringed with gold thread, she is offered a wide bisellium of lacquered wood cushioned with embroidered silk, and flanked on either side by palm leaves and the glittering plumage of great birds fashioned into fans, which her attendants buffet gently when the air becomes stagnant. Without a place of honour her children are left to sit at her feet like pets - Melina bundled on a damask blanket to her left, and he a tangle of limbs on her right. Soon she goes from requesting permission to attend the dust-blanketed amphitheatre to requisitioning pageantry expressly for the edification of herself and her children. Already he has begun to note the difference in the way she speaks, how the steady drip of favour accumulates in her like a fountain, and from her mouth the words I should like if it please gradually give way to I want. 

In time the pageantry is brought directly to her, so that she need not inconvenience herself by descending with a retinue into the city. At the base of her great stone seat on the second level of Enir-Ilim, Hornsent clear the fountain square and create a makeshift stage. On the balconies overlooking the plaza, they gather to watch - clerics and attendants, but also musicians, alchemists, smiths, moneylenders, merchants, scribes, brewers, perfumers, and few of low birth squeezed far behind, where at best they can hope to hear snippets of the performance drift over the heads of their betters. Hornsent arts are always performed in the round - but here, for these intimate dramas, it is unmistakable how the players do not turn their backs on Marika. In the sun, the soaring tower above looks like the bleached bones of a great creature, rising up from the earth. At the base of Marika’s seat, they lay so many sunflowers that her ankles disappear. 

Sometimes they will be treated to a new dance, or a fresh tale, but soon enough he knows them all by heart. There is the foundation of Belurat, the placing of the first stone of what will become Enir-Ilim. War with the Fire Giants, and their banishment to the mountains at the hands of a bird-faced divinity. The triumph of smithscripting. The expulsion of the twin moons from their sky. Some are purely indulgent pieces of salacious or satirical melodramas, like the one in which the land in paradise is so rich it need not be plowed, and so farmers and cattle drivers spend their days in fornication. His mother’s favourite, he knows, is the one about the land where a god’s hand reaches up out of the earth to catch a falling star. 

Tales featuring serpents are conspicuously absent, and so are references to his mother’s people, and by extension, the tradition of the jar. On occasion the Hornsent imply there is a world beyond themselves, glimpses of territories far to the south-east where crystals burst from the earth, wetlands along the coast ruled by a kingdom of cruel-eyed hawks, and deserts where dragons sleep. But nothing is shown to his mother about the cultivation of the jars. These histories he does not learn through theatre: the bondage of the shaman people, daughters of the gods, cupbearers to the cosmos, reduced to rotting away below ground, broken or quartered, someone else’s heart stuffed in their mouths, their own guts wrapped around their necks. Failures, shards of hard clay still stuck to them like shells, carted off in pine wheelbarrows or thrown down into the gaol pits deep in the earth’s soft belly from which they crawled. Perhaps down there they wind up in the belly of some other subterranean creature. Who knows, his tutors say. The world is full of mysteries. But the one he fears knowing is: what else was in his mother’s jar?

Above him she drinks, and smiles, and maintains her silence. Even in the shade he can see the sheen of sweat over her brow in the bright flare of daylight, the oppressive summer beading across her flesh like a fresh-washed fruit. Her gaze is clear, attentive; eyes gleaming, a cat that has spotted some movement of interest and fixates on it now, and will not let go. She is learning, he realises. The power of spectacle. 

On occasion he glances over at Melina, who ignores his restlessness and nibbles on the overripe fruit and childish confections left out for them, dyed sugar spun into miniature towers or little button-eyed creatures, colourful bursts now sagging in the noonday heat. Mostly she watches with a kind of adolescent detachment - except for those tales about Death. About her flock and her ferrymen and her sweet demeanour. These Melina follows with rapt attention, breath held, sugar-flecked lips slightly parted, as though waiting for someone to give her permission to exhale. At times she mouths along with the players. Death is a queen, not a beggar in the streets. There is no place her summons will not reach you. By word, by poison, by blade; or on the day when it comes to pass that a tomb looks soft and inviting as a featherbed, and there will she lay your head down with her own gentle hands. 

In her immersion she forgets the marzipan lion between her sticky fingers. She is oblivious to the way it has begun to melt, bending and warping into something no longer lion-shaped. He watches her as she watches Death, borne by a strangely satisfying undercurrent of inevitability. Eternity is a thing promised only to saints. In the heat of their mother’s divinity, they are all marzipan lions. 

 

⚕️

 

The night his mother takes them to the village, there is no one outside her door. The torches and braziers of Enir-Ilim burn low, and as they walk barefoot down to the city’s arches, no one stops them. The streets of Belurat are soundless, empty. It looks as if Death herself has passed through, and asked the city to hold its breath. It seems impossible to him, to move so freely, uninhibited. It feels like a trick. He wonders what would happen if he were to ring one of the settlement’s hundred great bronze bells. 

Later, bundled in the back of a cart with Melina and lulled to sleep by its movement, he will wonder if the whole journey was no more than a dream. How improbable it seems, his mother seated at the front of a rickety merchant’s cart, reins in hand, and the steady clip of beasts in the moonless dark. 

When he wakes again the cart has come to a halt, and he is alone. A golden glow emanates from nearby, and his first thought is that a moon has emerged. He sits up, passes a hand over his eyes, both gifts from his mother. Through them everything is a little blurry, tinged with yellow, as if glimpsed through stained glass. It does not bother him so much, not when he can shift his perception to those of his serpents and see the world with a different kind of clarity. He does so now, and finds the light is not a yellow-tinted moon, but a tree at the centre of a field: a delicate-veined sapling, no taller than his mother, dripping light. Already his mother stands before it, Melina behind her. When she turns, half-bathed in its gentle glow, she looks like another person. 

He slips from the cart to join them. The wind whips his hair into his mouth and scatters leaves like parchment shaken from a book. Tall grass tickles his ankles, and by the tree’s light he can just make out a bed of wildflowers, a startling variety blanketing the wide clearing before them. Night and gold has bled the colour from them, but he knows enough to recognise such a variety is unusual. It is someone’s garden, he is sure, and they must still be in Belurat, or its outskirts. How can such a thing exist beyond its walls? Beyond the purview of the Hornsent? But when he scans the horizon for the city’s sloping hills and rising towers, its telltale spires and belfries, he cannot find them. Instead he finds the meadow crests, gently, up to an ancient tree; around it only a few scattered hovels too run-down to call homes, and already given over to nature. In better light, he would see the vines that creep out of their windows, the errant branches that burst forth from holes in the roof, as if a tree might lift the little house into the sky as it grows. 

At the centre of the meadow, their mother kneels. With Melina he stands back, watching. He cannot see what Marika is doing. He sees only the glint of a knife in her hand. The tree’s glow pulses, mirroring the light that seems to ripple from her in turn. Bowed before it, she whispers, “Would that I had died before this and become a forgotten thing.” But the wind is so strong and the chorus of leaves so loud, he wonders later if perhaps it was only the sigh of the knife. 

When she turns back to them, she clutches a thick section of her own braided hair in one hand. The knife has disappeared, into a sleeve or fold of her robe. Without the cover of hair, her left shoulder looks naked, bare against the wind, and he feels the impulse to cover it, to give her his own tunic. 

Instead he watches as she pulls forth a few strands of hair, like a seamstress preparing to spin wool. His serpents can taste it before he does: her magic, the particular scent of her miraculous power, her shaman birthright. Unmoved by the wind, she uses the gold thread of her own body to form a pattern before them.

“Imagine,” she says, and now her voice is strong enough to drown out the wind itself, “the world order. Imagine it as interlocking rings.”

They watch. There is little need to imagine - she illustrates it for them, crouched on the jasmine-scented earth in the tree’s half-light. At first it looks to him like Hornsent heraldry, the great spiral from heaven, but after a moment he sees they are not a single weave but multiple, overlapping arcs, made of the wavering strands of her hair, so thin they blink in and out of existence, scattered as sunlight over water.  

“The Greater Will divided the world into life, into infinite variety. The way each loop connects and interlaces is the order of this world - the world of the Crucible, and the Lord of this age. But it is malleable.” Here she pulls on a thread and changes the overlap of a single line. “To change the way the rings are arranged is to change the way life unfolds.” With her long nails she plucks one strand from the pattern, removing it entirely. “If you change the way life unfolds, you can remove what is wrong from the world itself.” 

She lets the strand fall, and it disappears into the lush grass. We can hold what is malign within ourselves. He thinks about reaching into his mouth, down his throat, past his lungs and into the abyss of his self, to pluck the stranger out of his skin. To discard it in the grass, a scaly outline. 

Before they leave his mother kneels before the tree once more and presses her immaculate forehead into the dirt at its base. He can tell from the shudder of her shoulders, the curve of her back, that she is weeping. 

It will be a very long time before he goes back, but he will want to, if only to see the golden light of the tree. If only to catch a glimpse of her braid, and know the night was real, and not merely the kind of vivid, fevered dream of high summer.   

Melina has already turned her back to the tree and is moving towards the cart. He cannot see her face, but he hears her observe, in that flat voice that is not truly hers, “She is a better mother to this tree than she is to us.”

He tries to hush her, gently at first, then with his long fingers around her forearm, a pressure severe rather than doting. She turns and looks up at him with that same flat, closed-sky face, something dark at a distance. Like she knows something he does not. Sometimes he sees with utter clarity the death that sits inside her, shrunken and folded in on itself, the size of a little girl with no fear. 

 

⚕️

 

To his mother one day he says, “I am leaving my skin.”

She looks down at him from where she is weaving. On her unblemished face, bewilderment resolves into a frown.

“What?”

He has come to her private chambers before sunrise in hopes of finding her in sleep’s woolly embrace, and so perhaps a little more forgiving. Instead he finds her up on the dais next to the room’s single arched window, bent over a small, modest hand loom. In the dim candlelight, he can barely see the thread curled around her long fingers. 

From under his thickly-draped tunic, a long arm appears. An iridescence resolves. The firelight lends some warmth to his sallow complexion, but also pulls the surface of his flesh into stark relief: scales, scattered unevenly over the fleshiest parts of his forearm, crawl all the way up to his elbow. The thicker ones, fully formed, are hard and opalescent, while those at the edge are pale and cracked, flaking. “They fall off,” he supplies. “But thinly. If I pull, it hurts.” 

Hard to tell if she is listening. She is gazing at his arm, transfixed. He is reminded of Melina at the theatre. As if to help her understand, he runs his left hand along the outermost scales, and their edges come away like ash. Without warning she leans forward, grabbing his forearm, and pulls him up onto the dais. She remains seated, but now that he stands beside her he is taller, and so he must kneel to allow her to bring his arm to eye-level. Her nails are long. At her touch, he is struck by the tide of shame that runs the course of his body. He wants to wrench his arm away, hide it, insist that it was never really there. That there is no fault on his skin. Shut the door quietly and go back to bed. But he cannot move. He has seen her work a jeweller’s hammer before. Her grip is hard and precise. 

To lessen the pain he averts his eyes. On the ceiling behind her, above the window still purple in the pre-dawn gloom, he fixates on a fresco: his mother, enthroned, surrounded by Hornsent. Their figures leap up and retreat in the flickering candleflame. Behind the painted procession is a background of pure gold, a cosmic nothingness. He tries to centre his gaze there, to remember what his tutors have said. Hornsent art is about glorification, glorification of the spiral, the victory, the self. The victorious spiral within the self. There is little room for allegory, or stiff portraits, bankers or merchants surrounded by their belongings, domestic scenes - these are not subjects of interest. They are private indulgences that do not elevate the glory of Hornsent past and Hornsent future. And so the rendition of Marika is just that: glorious, victorious, exaggerated. The centre of their world. 

Before he had slipped out of bed, Melina, a voice in the dark, had warned, Do not tell Mother.

He reemerges from the gilded nothingness as she gouges the last thick scale from his skin. At their feet is a petal-fall of opals. Her grip on his arm is still panicked, angry. She looks up at last when she hears the faintest whimper escape him, and finds his smooth youth’s face is warped with pain, and that he has been weeping, without a sound, as she worked. 

Her voice rises and wavers, then crests and breaks. She is sorry, she whispers, with the kind of agony that makes him afraid she will rend her own clothes in place of his skin. Only the light is too much. He doesn’t understand but he tries not to recoil when she takes him in her arms, warm flesh and the cold clink of jewels wrapped around her forearms, her neck, in twisting chain links. They press into his skin. While she begs forgiveness, his serpents demure, and in that moment he can see the two of them from above, from his serpent eyes, and now he feels he is truly leaving his flesh, wriggling from her grasp, but he will not say so. In the tableau he sees from outside himself there is something sacred, as when a god kneels from the heavens to direct the gaze of an innocent. She is still speaking. The love is too much, she insists, and when the love is too much it is like grief. 

His skin, where she has opened it with her nails, is weeping blood. The front of her silk robe is ruined. His serpents look away from the wounds and back to the ceiling fresco, to the perfect, symmetrical depiction of her, gold and lapis unsullied. At the base of her great throne there are no children. This hurts too, in a different way, though a priest or tutor might tell him otherwise, or try to reason with him. In the cosmic order, the love of children is too imperfect a thing. 

 

 

 

---

 

Chapter 3: father was a gold cutting tool

 

 

Belurat sees no winters. On some days fog wraps the tower so densely one can’t see the other side of a bridge. Labourers and priests move through the gloom like ghosts, and all of them with the same fear: that they will die before the tower is finished. Some have been known to miss a step and walk off the edge of the world.

There is a period of damp cold; of clouds and mist, when he and Melina are kept inside like apples in a cellar, always seeking to warm themselves by a hearth, or at their mother’s side. When she is not looking, he lets Melina’s hands hover over his own, the heat of his ember more than enough for the both of them. On occasion she will tentatively interlace her fingers with his. But he has never felt the scorch of her dark-coloured flame - only her cold skin, pale and dry. At times he wonders whether their curses are kin, as they are, and so they cannot harm each other without harming themselves. He is loathe to use his fire, but when Melina finally ceases her shivering, it dampens the shame.  

When the winds shift, they bring rains to the grass sea, and before long seed comes forth and trees grow heavy with fruit. He and his sister are both old enough that seasons now have a familiar rhythm to them, and none seem so endless and all-encompassing as they once did. They are conscious of being granted freedoms, of certain privileges; of being spoken to differently by their tutors and attendants. Of being acknowledged when they appear beside their mother. Of becoming, in the eyes of the Hornsent, more than decorative by-blow. 

Above them, the tower climbs. When the rains pass the labourers swarm, more than he’s ever seen, and the clink of chisels and crack of hammers make of Enir-Ilim one great instrument of syncopation. With their vellum-scented breath his tutors declare that only great civilisations can build wonders worthy of celestial favour. The stones of Enir-Ilim beg otherwise. The impulse of the tower’s spectacular climb is not nebulous and self-congratulatory greatness, but bodies. Men who labour with such single-minded fervour that when they die mid-stroke of their chisel, the corpse is almost never removed before another mason takes their place. From his perch on a tiled roof above a prayer room, a closer look at the soaring white columns reveals they are mortared with bone and blood and a zealousness that doubles as glue. Even those less devoted to their craft are driven to exhaustion and, on occasion, death by the Inquisitors patrolling the works, proselytising with their whips. No other society has built such a monument to their own destiny because no other society so obsessively thinks it deserves heaven. While other civilisations loll about their earthly existence and make peace with a fractured, nonsensical world, the Hornsent sway to Marika’s words as children do when a storyteller has them in the grips of a fable. Everything is real, now. Everything is possible. Each law can be transcended, each decree improved upon, as the tower’s highest point is never fixed but always rising. It ascends, perfects itself, as if the builders and bricklayers were only giving it gentle guidance, suggestions. It reaches up on the backs of those believers barnacled into their own temple walls, all of them striving. At Marika’s gesture it knows where to go, like an animal returning home from migration. 

Gradually he comes to see people as building blocks, and buildings as blocks made of corpses. Walls stuffed with history, with blood. Doors made of flesh. A palace that writhes. His mother’s secret sapling breathes, and they are told to be grateful. Still his skin ripples with scales. She plucks them, even as she forbids him from plucking leaves from her tree of light. Is he divine, or not? The scales harden and crumble. The tree flourishes. Life on a shrinking landmass. As the tower gets taller, the world around him seems to close in. 

But that is the way of the world, he learns. Things change, something he has forgotten to observe while suspended on the precipice of his mother’s coming destiny. Arriving, always arriving, godhood just around the corner, out of sight, about to knock on the door and show itself in. 

Melina, possessed by her wandering curiosity, asks, “What will there be? How will we know we have arrived?”

He takes her meaning without needing to ask. There is only one place they can truly arrive. He thinks of the Hornsent legends, the words of his snivelling tutors, and frowns. “Light?” he suggests, a little disappointed that he is not more imaginative. “A great door? A path lined in pearls and hammered gold?” 

“I think it will look a little like Mother’s village.” 

“Perhaps.” They often have such exchanges in the floating gardens of Enir-Ilim, under the cover of a thick white bough, conversing against the whisper of moth wings and the prayer-drone of bees. She must, he assumes, picture heaven as something halfway between this and that fleeting, jasmine-scented night. Could it be so plain? So humble? Surely this never-ending staircase leads to something more awe-inspiring than a hillside meadow. 

“Is it a place we go? Or a way of being here?” She wrinkles her nose in that way she does when she is trying to remember something, obdurate and unmovable until she does. “Will Mother be done then?”

He looks up. “Done?”

“Sitting her throne. Bowing and being bowed to. Being called most gracious and merciful and hallowed and-” 

He pictures her calcified on that throne. What will the Hornsent do with the key, once the lock has been broken? When they march into heaven, will they kindly ask their mother to step down from her raised perch? Or drag her kicking and screaming from it?

Melina has a talent for finding those texts their tutors think better left unread: apocrypha, contradictory superstitions stricken from scripture, scrolls written by sects that have since broken off from Hornsent society. She says that before their millennia of enmity with the Fire Giants, the Hornsent did not shy away from fire, or its potential. He does not wish to speak of the fire that lives in him, or the dark-coloured flame that sometimes passes, like a breath, through his sister, but she is relentless: she drags him into it, juggling concepts too quixotic for her to fully grasp, dilemmas that plague the Hornsent’s great theologians and confessors - including those silenced by the Inquisitors. Fire is anathema, their mother says, echoing the texts. By which she means stifle your own. He is certain she must know what burns in them. At times he thinks she is frightened - not for them, but of them. Of what they are capable of. He has asked, and she will not show him the tools of her goldsmithing, not let him coax filaments of light into solidity the way he has seen her do with her jeweller’s silver hammer. 

To Melina he posits, would it be so bad, such a thing - the cleansing of the world by fire, to start anew? Is that not how the fields are cultivated, how the forests are cleared? 

Melina disagrees vehemently. Fire invites fanaticism. It must be controlled. Tamed. Regarded as something sacred, rather than a tool. They go in circles, far from their mother, but never bring it back to themselves: to the embers they carry. The Hornsent cannot know what they are. 

Still they find themselves lingering underfoot in Belurat’s smithies, those that will have them. Here they learn how to temper steel with fire, how to snuff out a flame, how to track sparks and swat them out the moment they land. The Hornsent are grudgingly impressed: the Empyrean’s children do not panic at the sight of fire. Molten metal flows, and they discuss in quiet tones what fantastical figures they see in its swirling patterns. 

When they are too close to each other something shimmers, like heated air, like a lie dispelled. He would touch her but his palm is solid black with soot. 

Where he can walk through fire unmarred, she veers away from it. The flame that lives in her is foreign to him. It is black, closer to a spark than a coal-fed forge. She is dry parchment left too close to an oil lamp. Ignition. 

 

⚕️

 

An interminable evening in autumn. The grass sea is bronze, like an army laid down to rest, a thousand cuirasses glinting against the black earth. They find him alone, on the outskirts of an old settlement, while he is searching for Melina. She has wandered south, again, or so he guesses, against their mother’s wishes. He is certain she has left Belurat: he knows her hideaways by heart. As twins they are drawn together, whether by their mother’s blood or the kinship of their curses, and so he has never had trouble following the curve of her spark when it escapes the forge. 

Once he found her squatting, like an itinerant, in one of the sickening harvest villages overseen by the butchers who call themselves Greater Potentates. She had only just read about these makeshift abattoirs beyond Belurat, where the unsavoury parts of the jar ritual are undertaken out of sight: fleshy ingredients prepared for clay fired in monstrous kilns, filled and then sealed by clerics with magic and prayer and wax. Clerics divine the ingredients and Greater Potentates prepare them, according to those recipes considered most holy. Relentless curiosity had led her there, where she was forbidden to wander, in hopes of peering through the crack in a jar and finding something alive and willing to answer her questions. Instead the village was abandoned, and in the evening light he’d come upon her sleeping in a broken greatjar, nestled on a filthy bundle of straw and wild grass. For her sake he’d kept it from their mother, but he’d not spared her: with a fistful of cloak he’d drawn her from the jar roughly, shaken her and accused her of behaving like a dog. You fawn over those who give you something, he’d snarled, yelp at those who ignore you, and bite those who refuse you. He’d called her wild, undignified. Unworthy of their mother. Breathless, in the churning silence of their return to the city, he’d wondered what impulse had led her to seek out a place of such cynical self-negation. The last thing he wants to see is the ignoble detritus of his mother’s birth. 

 While in Belurat he no longer feels particularly out of place, he is careful if he strays beyond the city walls, as he does now, and cloaks himself. He has always explored within the limits of what his mother allows. He is respectful, discreet. Cautious. He is not the one who scrambles up battlements, scales walls or crawls through cisterns. He does not sneak or stray in wanton disobedience. He is not Melina. 

But if he had snuck, he realises later, they would not have seized him.

As it is, they seize him. His serpents glimpse them first: taste their presence, hidden in the shadows of greatjars, the scent of sweat and loathing beneath a cloud of rank remains. When they emerge he recognises Belurat on them, the stink of temple myrrh, and by then it’s too late. His first thought is that he carries nothing - no valuables, no tender, no gold. He is barely more than a boy and two snakes. But maybe that is all they want. 

They pin him to the ground. When they cut the wings from his serpents, he cannot beg, or scream for the mouthful of dirt. There are six of them, perhaps seven - too dark to tell - and he but a boy and two snakes, a boy and two snakes and a void he struggles to keep down, a flame in his chest struck like a match. He feels everything his maimed serpents do, and it is like losing a limb. It is new to him, this kind of pain and fear, so new that he has no vocabulary for it - and when the chance comes, the opportunity to exchange the pain for a moment of oblivion, he embraces it. A split second: his arm is free, and like reaching to catch an errant ember he brings his fingers up to his left eye. Later he will wonder, How did I know?  Where to reach, how to access that black place inside him, as one does not need a map when close to home. But he has always known the patient stranger behind his eyes.

The seal cracks like glass, so loud it startles his assailants. Shards of his mother’s gift slide into his skin, into the dirt near his face. Blind with pain, he can still trace their golden arcs through the air. 

Then the void comes, and it takes the pain away. 

In the blur that follows, he will remember only how famished it was. In place of pain comes a hunger, an aching desire from a yawning abyss, the single-minded urge to fill the darkness until nothing else can fill it but all the world, and he sees it now, how it will happen, the path of its mouth: when it has eaten the world, alone in the void it will begin eating itself, the truth of it like a coil, a loop that never ends, how it will open its mouth, infinity of nothing, insatiable blackness, eating and eating and never sated, satisfied by nothing, the nothing that becomes them, which becomes the void, the void- 

In the spiralling abyss, his mother comes, and she pulls him out of his own skin.

When he emerges from the wreckage, he is on his knees. He comes back to himself slowly, then to his serpents. Through their eyes he sees the opal scales that cover his body, bejewelled as a monarch. The smell of blood assails him. He cannot lift his head, and by the single eye that remains he can only glimpse, disoriented, the outline of his mother’s white ankles against the dark earth. A halo of diamond-patterned parchment sloughs away, grazing her. He brings his hands up to his face. Beneath her gaze he is cowed, and his shock gives way to humiliation. Bare, stripped of skin and dignity, his childhood ends at his mother’s feet, the removal of polish that reveals beneath it what is marred and ugly and unworthy of love. 

“O, Mother,” he moans, his throat hollow, his tongue sewing itself back together, his mouth still filled with dirt. “Forgive me.” 

 

⚕️

 

He sees the faces of his assailants for the first time from below: they line a crowded low street in Belurat like garlands. They hang flayed and crucified, their skin spread like wings, strung above the market stalls from stone arches by flesh hooks, the kind used by butchers. In death their faces are bloated and misshapen; in the summer heat they have begun to smell. It is the same smell of old blood and offal he remembers from the village. 

No one asks after the origin of the grotesque display, nor by whom the deed is done. Most Hornsent recognise a blasphemer’s death, and they are not a soft, gentle culture. They enjoy their share of violence, of rapture at the end of a blade. It keeps them devout. Paradise is not for the easily nauseated. 

Beneath the corpses, he walks with Melina. In one hand she carries a candle, in the other a basket of doves for the temple. 

“Do not,” he says. The fountains around them are still, the water’s surface stagnant, hatching flies that leap up like fish, fuzzy and indistinct. 

She turns to him. 

“Do not look,” he repeats. “Ill luck to look upon the faces of the dead.” 

 

⚕️

 

 On some nights he visits his mother’s chamber to find she does not sleep, but weaves and watches the stars and tends her schemes as one tends a small sprout in the dirt. For all he sees and hears and tastes with the help of his serpents, he has only two, and she as cunning as a whole bag of them. 

He comes to her because despite his talents, he cannot heal his serpents’ wings. They have been broken, cut deep to their hollow bones. On her return from an orchard down in Belurat, his mother devises another way to fix him: she grafts to him the wings of another creature, as one would the scion and the rootstock of two trees. Where his wings were once feathered a deep, iridescent emerald, the ones she gifts him now are dull brown, leathery and articulated by elongated digits. With these, his mother tells him, his serpents may evoke a great and fierce wyrm, and not a decorative bird hunted for its plumage. He does not say that he regrets the loss of those wings, for what little beauty they held, how light could reveal a hundred different shades of blue and green like the facets of a jewel, like a turquoise hollowed out and filled with clear water. Obediently, he applies what she teaches him about healing deep wounds. Obediently, he is grateful.

In the privacy of their own room Melina will sometimes look at her hands, and then at his wings. He knows her contrition and her stubbornness, but she cannot bring herself to try for fear of hurting him. At times he soothes her frustration, assuring her that if he has inherited this gift of healing from their mother, then so has she, and in time she will find it in her touch. Other times he draws away and says nothing. Saying nothing, he reasons, is better than accusing, better than the closed fist of bitterness that says had you not gone to the village, I would not have let a monster climb out of my skin.    

No punishment is forthcoming, no discipline. He begs stillness of her, obedience - they are no longer children, he reminds her, though neither are they old enough to move beyond their mother’s purview. But she loves the tower at night: to wander, to search its night-bathed stones. As if certain that something is being kept from her, and the only way to find it is in shadow. 

She is halfway out the door when a serpent curls itself around her forearm. 

“Where are you going?”

Her shadow is chastened. “A prayer room.”

“Can it not wait?”

She does not turn to face him. “The one mother forbids us.”

He sits up. They are both too big now to share the narrow pallet allotted to them, so he sleeps on a pile of cushions and rough-spun wool at her bedside like a dog. 

Disgruntled, one serpent prods her. He starts, “Did she take your wits when she took your eye? Why must you-” and then stops himself. Why wonder after the nature of a thing? Little changeling, she will never be sated.  

There are a great many volumes kept at Enir-Ilim, though none of them are histories in the traditional sense. What they have learned from their tutors has come from the athenaeum at the Black Keep, a damp, belligerent silhouette on the horizon in disrepair except for the prodigious collections of tomes and natural specimens deep in its belly. There they have been given the histories of the stargazers, and the ancient people of the land who left armour inscribed with the lives of their wearers, and the knowledge shaped in mercury by the silent sisters of the Nox - all that wisdom of the world that does not directly glorify the Hornsent, kept at arm’s length. Belurat is home to more practical volumes - civic rolls and records, ledgers and legislative decrees. Manuscripts written by Hornsent and read by Hornsent alone, the sort anyone else would recognise for propaganda.

In Enir-Ilim, they keep recipes. 

Recipes of what? he’d asked, when Melina first told him. She had looked at him with that blank, knowing expression. 

You know. 

As they slip through the sepia night, he can guess. She has never stopped wanting to know. It assails her like an itch, this father-shaped hole in their world. Without him, and unable to understand their mother’s opaque origins, they are unmoored, without root or seed. They might as well be Hornsent, for all their world extends beyond this tower.     

Perhaps, Melina had said, her eyes bright in the dark, the recipe is there. The one that made her. That made us.

Were they gestated in that jar? The idea makes his throat close. He can hear them already, jeering masses who accuse his mother of laying with a beast, with a warped and hornless demon. Changeling! they crow. What monster was your father? He wants to know, despite himself. To put at last those questions to rest - are you god, or demon? Are you mistake, or intention? It is a kind of numb desperation in him, one that resurges in bouts of shame at strange and unpredictable times. Are they unworthy? Is it the curse that lives inside each of them that drove their father away? Was he touched by Death’s childlike, cold fingers, or devoured in an opalescent rage by an abyssal mouth? 

She is at the door. The lock, fortified with a holy charm, melts at her touch. A darkness at her fingertips that shudders like a tongue of flame, negating the light. A pit in his stomach; where did she learn that? For the first time since leaving their chambers, she looks back over her shoulder. She can feel his apprehension. It is the one thing that makes him believe they must have the same father: the curse-coloured thread, the bond between them. All the unspoken things shared as easily as handing someone a letter.

She gives him the small oil lamp she has carried all the way from their room. Wordlessly, he breathes life into it, the red edge of his flame flecked with black. He tries not to see it. 

As she steps into the darkness she says, “And if he is dead?”

His serpents wrestle with self-control, flicking in agitation. He stands still and clears emotion from his voice. “It will be better to know.” 

The small flame struggles to illuminate the room. Beige walls are cast in murky red, and he is cautious when he holds up the little lamp, afraid he will thrust it into a bundle of dry, crumbling scrolls and set the place ablaze. A thick prayer carpet muffles their tentative steps, twining flowers and scrollwork underfoot. Tall shelves are stacked with leather-bound tomes, tablets, and long, flat cabinets made of lacquered wood that contain a single scroll each, and are latched shut by little silver contraptions. At the centre of the small room there is a low table, big enough for perhaps three clergy to sit in prayer or pore over manuscripts. There is enough parchment in the room to feed a blaze for days. The darkness takes on a hazy quality, and he finds something unnatural, almost unwelcome, about the way the moon’s light spills through the single square window. The silence presses down, a thumb into a wound. 

Without a word, Melina begins sliding scrolls from their shelves and gingerly undoing the leather rope knotting each one to unravel their insides. Expressionless and absorbed by her work, he can only observe, oil lamp held to illuminate the angular writing. After a while he places the lamp on a low empty shelf and shifts to stand watch by the door, one foot in the dim hall and the other on the soft carpet. He gulps a quick lungful of open air. It disturbs him, the smallness of that room, the perfumed tomes, the simplicity of their form and the incomprehensibility of what they contain. It is only now he feels he might understand why their mother forbade them entry into the prayer room. Perhaps she does not wish for them to understand the jars; to look so closely at that horror. Or perhaps there is shame there, humiliation that cannot be overcome when faced with the circumstances of one’s birth. If he finds his own birth an inescapable mistake, how does his mother conceive of hers, of what she was before, remade against her will, piecemeal, a vessel for someone else’s destiny? Did she sit curled up in a greatjar facing another victim, another shaman sister, and know that only one of them would emerge? Did she devour them, as one does their twin in the womb; as he does in his dreams, eat all the world and plunge it into silence? 

He looks at Melina, at the back of her pale copper head, at her small hands sifting through a history of subjection. Whatever the consequences for this she will weather them, stubborn and unmoved, as she has every time before. A base, unwelcome part of him wants to shut her out; out from all the things they share, unwittingly, as twins. From the holy jar that is his mother’s body he wonders if out of the two, only one should have been born. 

The flame goes out.

A moment of absolute darkness, a disorienting void. It is so jarringly familiar to him that he almost cries out. The stranger inside him stirs. The endless coil is a comfort, it reminds him. A place of repose, without pain. Negation. World without end, and no world at all. 

Then, all the world: their mother. At the door, blocking the hall, with no sound of warning or approach she appears in a ripple of gold, and the void retreats. In the sudden light he catches the moment Melina turns to him. The unspoken accusation is loud in her eye, betrayal and disbelief. Did you tell her? 

He does not have time to answer. Their mother’s light fills the tiny room until it feels like there is nowhere else to move, like they are squeezed into a corner, unable to look away, unable to curl up on themselves to escape it. It feels like they will be pushed out of the world. 

I have promised you the sun, but you crawl on your knees for scraps of light. 

Is she speaking? Her mouth does not move but it is her voice, he is sure, as close and all-encompassing as the light radiating from her body. Towering over him, she grasps his face. Resistance leaves him. If she does not hold him up he will fold to her mercy. She could put her finger in his remaining eye and tell him to sing a hymn, and he would ask which one.

From behind him he hears Melina, inarticulate, panicked, resistant and frightened at once, begging her to stop.

I have shielded you, I raised you up - and you look to dangle yourselves over an abyss. 

The thing he will remember most vividly about that night is that she did not lay a hand on Melina. But the heat of her presence, her aura, reduces them to so fine and insignificant a point that she might as well have smothered them both.

When he thinks there is no breath left in the room to draw, the light suddenly ceases. As it diminishes, the darkness swells again, and she lets go of him. He slumps back with a hand to his eye. In her displeasure, the glow that to him has always seemed a soft yellow is edged in red. 

Melina huddles behind him. As his sight adjusts he can now make out his mother’s silhouette. For a moment she looks bent, used; fading along with the burst of light, her face a mask of disappointment, lit from below like she is cradling what’s left of the glow. But there is fury there, too, soundless - he is struck by how much she resembles Melina - tinged with humiliation, with betrayal: that they would go looking for something else, for something she and all her promises lack. For what an imaginary father could give them, to settle their doubts. On her face he sees the tender rage, the knowledge that she has protected them and kept them alive and even tried to raise them in the eyes of the Hornsent - and they have found her lacking. Unable to satiate, to soothe. 

Later, beyond the darkness of that room, Melina will say, we only wanted to know. 

But their mother will not hear her. Melina will try to understand, first chastened, then in a fit of childish petulance; but Marika’s refusal will be final. Her gesture small but knife sharp, as if to sever the issue. Later, not now. Later, you will understand what you have done. 

When the door to their own chamber is bolted shut, he turns to his sister.

“Forgive me,” he says. “I allowed you to forget.”

“Forget?”

“To fear her.”  

 

 

---

 

Chapter 4: two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh

 

 

A long summer ends with a funeral. 

Hornsent are ruled by three consuls, elevated to oversee in equal measure the three pillars of their civilisation - civic life, worship, and war. One of them is dead.  Drinking, dice, and fighting are replaced overnight with fasting, amulets, and self-flagellation. 

Neither he nor Melina speak openly of the prayer room, and neither of them are entirely sure their mother has forgiven their trespass. He is afraid Melina will take her silence on the matter as consent to begin wandering again, asking unwelcome questions, and oblige him to help. Instead he has emptied himself of every impulse but obedience, and bid her do the same. Since then she has reluctantly been living in his shadow, so as to be out of Marika’s glare. Behind his sister’s placidity is a lofty sense of injustice. He can feel it smouldering, on occasion, wriggling under her calm exterior. Their mother has shaped their world, and Melina, finding it lacking, wants only to push past its borders. 

Standing at the highest balcony in Belurat, above the great theatre, Marika wears red, the Hornsent mourning colour. Beside her, he and his sister look like faded copies. Beneath his tunic he wears long sleeves to cover the scars left from more scales - those his mother has removed and those he has tried to pry away himself, though the pain dissuades him. To his relief they shed eventually, falling away like crushed nacre. He does not yet understand what makes them come back.

There is a rumour come from the clergy that the men who attacked him in the village those many seasons ago are heretics, worshippers of a strange outer god: Hornsent who conjured a great serpentine beast to kill the saint’s firstborn. They say divine providence spared him. Since collecting his sorry self from the village, Marika has seized on this notion and begun to ask more of the Hornsent. Before the priests she has wept and raged and even refused petitioners, sometimes for weeks at a time. Justified in her fury, she has accused the Keepers and Inquisitors of delinquency and dereliction of duty, for theirs is to keep the Empyrean safe, and what is an attack on her son if not an attack on her own person? She declares those who seek to challenge her should announce themselves, like any petitioner, at the base of her throne. This she has the clergy write and distribute as far as the Hornsent messengers are willing to go. To compensate for the attempt on his life, the Hornsent will allow her to take part in the election of a new consul. 

It is the first time he sees her marshal her authority like this, and in the hushed tones and sidelong looks of shaded corridors, he has heard many describe it as unnerving. Dutifully, he tells her as much. She smiles like a letter in a language he cannot read.

Yes, she says. We are past shoring up sympathy. 

The procession unfolds below them in the scrolling pattern of Belurat’s sublime textiles. Inquisitors hoist enormous candelabras, rigid slashes of gold and curling ornament, and the Dancing Lions march with their heads bowed low, as though they too are subdued by the solemn news. Like the fringe of a rug, the rows of mourners are bracketed by warriors in their ochre sashes, scarlet ribbons tied around their arms. At the centre of the procession, Gravebird keepers whirl in a circular dance, naked feet kicking up dust and debris, their spiral formations expanding and collapsing in a blur of black feathers. Their carved masks are expressionless and give the impression that in this spectacle of mourning, they alone are unmoved by death. 

In the palace of honour at the very tail of this undulating train, a shaded litter is carried by the city’s most revered warriors. The two remaining consuls, mounted and wrapped in ruby-encrusted cloaks, follow on horseback. Their long golden tassels trail in the dusty streets like comets. He and his sister have not been permitted to peek under the palanquin’s crimson canopy, but he has been taught what a spiritually significant Hornsent death involves. So it is no trouble to picture the withered, shrunken creature that sits cross-legged, draped in scarlet, eyes closed as if in a moment’s contemplation, skin dry and leathery as old fruit. The Hornsent believe this fate is more akin to sleep than death, as it produces a concentration of spirit and delays the body’s putrefaction. A foul death, his mother had murmured in his ear before the procession began. The Hornsent believe those who willingly submit to this feeble slumber instead of a true death will be reawakened when the Gate of Divinity is opened. More like, she’d said, they will long be dust. 

When the ceremony is done then the long mourning will begin, and after much divinely-guided deliberation, a new consul will be chosen. Choosing a new consul could take years, the clergy had informed his mother. Incredulous, she had balked: not with the completion of Enir-Ilim at hand. Not when she needs their legitimacy. But prophets can be dangerous, and so as much as they legitimise her sainthood, the consuls are also meant to keep her in check. They taste the wind before deciding whether to stoke or throw ash over fervour and devotion, lest it overtake civic responsibility, or dissuade worshippers from settling their dues. They ensure current beliefs do not simmer and spill over into too violent an eschatology.

Eschatology? he’d asked his tutors. 

His most honest one had shrugged. If paradise awaits, what purpose in paying the tax collector?

It is not worth it, he supposes: breaking one’s back tending crops if the rapture might come before harvest time.

Eventually he will puzzle out that the city’s bottom-dwellers, wrung out by hardship and misery, are the most eager to usher in the end of all things. Those of high standing simply wish for the continuity of their abundant season without end.

Bored by the procession’s slow crawl, he scans the tiled roofs. He has read in Hornsent legends that at death’s threshold, a great dark crow alights on the highest point of a home: an envoy of the Deathbird, come to lead the soul to the river where the Mariner awaits. But today all the crows are in the streets, gleefully sifting through the food left in the wake of such public spectacle. 

He glances up at his mother. Her hair is braided with red silk and draped over her left shoulder, leaving the other bare. Gold drips from her collarbones. She is perfectly still, even though he knows they are all careening toward the Gate. Toward paradise. But she is running from something, too. He can see it in the way she recoils from the spectacle of mourning. In the hiss of disapproval when she speaks of how easily, how willingly the Hornsent embrace it, at once sombre but celebratory. 

For a long time he will think about it as death, before it resolves into something clearer, more distinct: loss. A lack, a remnant of presence. A thing more immediate than death, left in the moment right after someone leaves the room. The space they once took up. His mother puts a hand on his shoulder, and he struggles to imagine a world without her, without this fierce presence who birthed him. He would rather forget such a thing than know it - would rather hold Death’s kind hand than be left living with loss, loss with a quality larger than life, an enduring memory more vivid than the person whose shape it seeks to fill, subsumed and seen askew as a new companion: grief. But he is too young to know grief - the unsentimental kind, the kind that lurks, the kind that is violent by way of its inarticulation - so he imagines it in other ways, ways he can grasp, ways that still centre himself. Grief is the noise of a crowd without a single recognisable voice. Grief is the blank space where his father’s face could have been. Grief is an empty meadow. When he imagines his own death, he imagines a snake-shaped hole in the cosmos. Has his mother not birthed death by encumbering herself with children? Maudlin, the idea that lineage can keep one from the dust. From crossing the river. 

Beside him, Melina has been picking at the seams of her embroidered tunic. Now her head snaps up, and the abrupt movement startles him from his thoughts. She turns to look at him with blank indifference, the mask of prophecy. 

“All Gravebird keepers are female,” she says, without intonation. Between them, unspoken, there is something female about being dead. 

 

⚕️

 

Beyond Belurat, he rides with Melina. The day is grey, obscured; the sun behind fogged-up glass. Parts of the plains have recently flooded, and so their mounts must reluctantly pick their way across slick, muddy roads. Even hidden beneath his cloak and tunic, his serpents make his own horse skittish. A mist is rising, and without their vision, it is hard for him to navigate, so Melina pulls a little ahead to keep their small retinue in line. Except for the clop of horseshoes and the clank of harnesses, the world is quiet.

When they come upon modest farmland he squints over the low fences toward a squat, brown homestead, flanked by smaller buildings with rotting overhangs in progressively worse shape. Everything glistens from the rain. In the distance he can just make out pinpricks at pasture; closer, he spots the white flash of geese as they swagger through the damp earth, ungainly and lumbering alongside a single statuesque swan. The geese seem to give way to it, to step aside, if only reluctantly. Bored by the monotony of the road, he watches this curious display of hierarchy play out while thinking of dinner: of sweet, caramel fat sucked from between the vertebrae of goose neck.

A young farmhand emerges from the main homestead. When she approaches their enclosure, the fowl bobble around her in an expectant, feathered rabble. If she notices the procession on horseback, she does not show it. Mostly the hornless live on the outskirts of Belurat, and out here they have no great love for the Hornsent, who believe their lack of faith is directly correlated to their lack of horns.

Ignoring the horses, she spends a few moments scattering seed for the birds. She is young, but her hands are wide and strong - he can tell by the practised ease with which she grabs the swan, quick and fluid, and snaps its neck. The speed and precision of the gesture remind him momentarily of his serpents. His mother has told him it is wise to have one’s hands always coiled and ready. They are neither of them subject to the rattlesnake’s code: to warn before they strike.

As they ride on, he can see the bird’s neck fold like rope in her hand. She wipes the other on her roughspun apron and returns to the homestead. In the swan’s absence, the geese swarm again, lordless chiefs of their domain, and devour what little seed is left. 

  

⚕️

 

In the heart of the Black Keep, Melina paces before her blank page. She would like to write a decree, she says. Their tutors, whom they no longer regard as such, watch her with some exasperation. They are bound to wait on her decree - to read it, improve on it if they can, copy it painstakingly and have others do the same before distributing it first to the clergy and then to the general population, be they patrician or pear-seller. 

He asks, “Can we be sure they are all literate?”

She does another lap around the wide, lacquered table. “We will have a crier in the streets, if need be.” 

He looks up. From the ground floor it is impossible to see the stained glass at the tower’s peak, far too high and obscured by the cascade of preserved corpses that float from the ceilings like an organic chandelier. Prize specimens, the scholars call them. Those that best exemplify the Crucible’s gift. There is even a giant blessed by a tangle of horns, a thing that seems to go against the very order of the universe. Even Hornsent science, whether the mathematics of architecture or the investigation of nature, cannot escape the primacy of the Crucible. No wonder their scholars are so precise, yet so insular. 

“If I cannot impel them,” Melina says, more to herself, “I will ask Mother to intercede. It cannot be helped.”

“Do you think she has forgotten about the prayer room?”

She comes to a halt and frowns at him. “It is a long time now. Haven’t I been punished enough?”

“Is this what you call punishment?”

The volley of questions goes unanswered. You still do as you please, he wants to say. A great reckoning in such a little room, and still she escaped unscathed. Only now she does not tell him where she goes, or when. Whether it is to the temple scriptorium, or here in the Black Keep’s athenaeum, or the villages that have been forbidden to them. While he stands at attention, she slips away. She has not stopped trying to wriggle out of their mother’s grasp since she was a babe.   

“I see the way Mother looks at me,” she says at last.

It is not his place to say, with love, or to say, she drapes herself over us like a holy shawl to protect us. He has before, and she has said, Yes, and I am suffocating. 

He leans back. Behind her is a shelf of smaller specimens, a vast array of suspended limbs in clear liquid, hides gone leathery from dehydration or preservation, painted glass eyes in place of ones long decayed. Limbs disassociated from torsos, innards delineated like a map. A mockery of death stares back at him with the face of a long-dead lion, mounted like a hunting trophy. He relates to it, in a childish, morose way.  

“So you will hide here, in your tomes?”

“Better than under her skirts.”

He lets that go. He knows if they go any further his resentment will curdle into jealousy, and he will find himself gambling with petulant words and unable to win back his pride. That his mother saw fit to allow Melina free rein of the Keep’s athenaeum, despite her disobedience, is not for him to question. Here, buried beneath scrolls and tomes, surrounded by Hornsent scholars and out from under Enir-Ilim’s unforgiving glare, perhaps she will be humbled, and behave. Already she knows by heart entire passages from books, verses and laws alike, can recite them so quickly that she occasionally stumbles over her words, stuttering as one does when music is too fast for feet. But many of these are Hornsent histories, Hornsent almanacs and records and legends. He finds it disturbing, her intelligence wasted on the shallow culture of a people who regard them as sacrificial cows. 

Sometimes when she emerges from her tomes a great sorrow overtakes her, as though she’s been privy to all the misfortunes of the world, and all she can do is stare over the vertiginous edge of the balustrade from the loft. When he sees this he tries to pry her from it, gently, and then insistently; for he much prefers the Melina who is stubborn and challenging to the one who is laid low by the enormity of a sadness he cannot grasp. 

After a while, he asks, “And the decree?”

“I suppose it is more request than decree,” she admits. She pulls a wide-armed chair from the table and finally sits herself down. The pacing has spent her, and the page is still blank. “But I think it is possible,” she continues, “with healing magic - holy magic. Mother’s magic. To undo what has been done. There are so many jars still sealed.” She leans forward. “What if we could open them, reverse the process? Unknot the horror inside? Spare others from that fate? I would have them brought here - all those jars still considered viable - to study. At least to try. To do nothing would be worse.”

“To study.” His tone is unkind. To better understand what they are, and so what their mother is, and by consequence their own conception. Is this the plea she offered their mother? He is surprised she accepted. “The Hornsent will not like it.”

“Why should they care?” The lower her voice, the more forceful her tone. “They hatched their Empyrean. This barbaric practice should be brought to an end. It would make-” 

She stops. Would it? he wonders. Hard to guess what would make their mother happy. Risky to assume.  

When she rises again he follows, and they move from the rows of tables into the labyrinthine corridors of shelves; past leather-bound tomes, racks hung haphazardly with shining implements, flora pressed into dull beige between two panes of glass. Down another passage where they have mined tomes on the Numen and the Nox; on outer gods, patrons of the giants and the lords of this age, the ancient stone dragons. 

“They will claim insult to their gods if you try to outlaw the jars.”

“I am only trying to understand the practice and salvage what has already been done. We are not in a position to pass laws.” She walks in front, and does not turn her head to speak. “In any case, they have no gods,” she reminds him. “All their gods were once like them: raised to power by divine providence. There is no capricious creator who presides over life, doling out curses here and favours there. Only those worthy of unity.” 

“And the Greater Will?”

She shrugs. “They do not care for it, even if we do. The Crucible blesses their very skin. Why wonder after a star in the sky?” 

But the one he intends is no longer in the sky. It is the one their mother has shown them, embroidered in her crude maps, glittering path of threaded topaz that leads to the lands beyond Hornsent purview. In a brimstone dustbowl she gets on her hands and knees in the palm of a god and asks a fallen star for guidance. Something answers her, and it is as tangible as the fire in his breast and the horns that crown their gaolers. It is real. 

Or so she has said, and she has never lied to them before. 

Melina leads him to a smaller antechamber with a ceiling so low he ducks instinctively. Here he must squeeze between cabinets, each stocked with bottles. He pauses for a moment to examine them, looking for the colourful, fluted flasks he has seen perfumers and artificers carry, filled with sparkpowder the Hornsent use to great effect in their spectacles. But the Hornsent are better brewers of poison than they are perfume, and the bottles are all plain, stoppered with pine pitch. If there is any perfume it is difficult to distinguish from the poison save for those with a wax seal in dull red, clumsily stamped in an uneven circle. Some perfumes, he assumes, are by nature also poison. 

Melina ducks behind an enormous fern, a living thing somehow thriving down here at the base of the tower where light barely trickles down. Beyond the narrow cabinets, other kinds of flora mingle on tables or deploy vines that tentatively crawl up shelves, as though looking for a particular book. When he passes a fulgurbloom, he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up with a crackle of static. Close by there are dewgems kept in pails of water, glistening as their namesake. Beside them, he puzzles over a powdery gold blossom he has never seen in the wild. On the ledge before him, a red mushroom that looks like a drinking cup. He reaches out to touch it. 

“Do not,” a voice says from behind him. He frowns and turns. A scholar, unsmiling in a shapeless robe. “It is sacred.”

Baffled, he turns to Melina, who has reemerged from the little thicket of greenery. In her arms is an astonishing bundle: a little, four-legged creature with a too-large head and a bony protrusion where its nose should be. Along its back, deployed in feathery splendour, are quills of gold that wink in the torchlight. In her hands it sways and shudders, like a boat nudged gently by a river.     

He remembers this because her hands are bare. She looks up, and he is reminded of their mother - not physically, not in the soft line of her mouth or unreadable eye - but rather by the steadiness she commands. A stillness descends around her. Even the golden prickled thing stops moving. For a moment he thinks it has stopped breathing, and looks for the evidence of her gloam-coloured flame, for her touch that betrays. He waits for it to die, but it does not. No prophetic impulse seizes her. Her exhale moves through the room. 

“Here,” she says, and hands the creature to him. He takes it, relieved. His serpents retreat, low to the floor, but it does not seem to mind. It is warm, and gives off a faint whiff of holy magic. He wonders if they had to put it in a jar to breed enchantment into it. 

Melina turns from him, and pulls back a frond to reveal a pile of crushed diamonds in a glass case. Creature still in hand, he leans forward to get a closer look. The diamonds resolve into scales. Enormous and faceted, a fragment belonging to something bigger than any serpent he has ever seen. Across its fractured surface he catches the murky impression of himself, split and multiplied, red and gold. He does not remember what it is to crawl on his belly. In his grip, the golden creature begins to quiver. 

“You see,” Melina says, in the voice that something else inside her has borrowed, “snakes use scales to exert pressure on uneven surfaces, and propel themselves forward.” 

 

⚕️

 

The Hornsent bring his mother sky charts: depictions of the night sky in dizzying detail, the paths of celestial bodies. They bring her almanacs, the predictions of their sages who read the earth’s smallest tremors. They show her the currents of the great salt sea to the south, the year’s rainfall, the abundance of fish and the patterns in which they swim. Three or four together haul up the wide staircase a magnificent orrery that gleams in the sun. With a scrape of metal they place it before Marika, show her the twin moons in white agate, the golden sun, the amber starlight. A fiery comet and an amethyst meteor. At the centre of their little universe, a silver-plated horn is carved into the shape of Enir-Ilim. When the mechanism spins, it does so smoothly, without wobble or brassy clink, and he cannot help but admire the harmony of such a frictionless, well-ordered universe, and how it ignores the unpredictability of life when magnified a thousandfold. 

When? the Hornsent clergy ask his mother. They point to their scrolls, their pewter cups full of tea leaves. Which season? Where will the moons be? Before or after the river floods? 

She smiles her saintly smile, the one without guile or cunning, radiant and transparent as glass. Have faith, she tells them. But that is not the question.  

He is old enough now that she speaks to him of the rule of the land, of the balance of power, of governance holy and practical. Her keepers listen, intrigued by the promise of Belurat elevated, Belurat omnipotent. She will stamp out enclaves of those who cleave too close to old, stale rites and practices, and offer them glittering stores of candles and parchment and onyx inkwells and flocks of goats and stores of seed not yet gone to rot - if only they will write and pray and proselytise for her holiness, and hers alone. She will undermine the power of the western marches, tax their flourishing wool trade, force their merchants to come to Belurat, to speak the dialect of the tower-builders, if they wish to see profits and safe passage and laws benefitting them on the other side of the river. She will take from the country abbeys and monasteries their independence, tie them, via coin and writ, to the great temples in the city, send Inquisitors to hover over their lowly monks like long shadows. A perpetual evening across the land, and only she who can raise the sun. 

But she is only a holy symbol, not a queen. Not yet. 

Mildly, she suggests alliances to strengthen the Hornsent, to secure their hold on the land before the tower is complete. They understand she wants foreigners at her feet, and the Hornsent, a proud people, are loathe to refuse. They expect her to preach, to proclaim her favour for them, for the coming utopia. To do so openly, joyfully, her face and head no longer veiled, her skin golden-bronze from the sun. Tell the stargazers to come, the stone dragons, the lowland barbarians. His mother was born into this role, and so she plays it now with great pomp, indulging the ceremonies of hierarchy. She plays pretend. He hates obsequiousness.

Yet these visits from outside the confines of Enir-Ilim spark something sincere in her, bring her into sharper relief. She wants to spar, to debate, to hear something controversial and chew it, carefully, before opening her mouth. These encounters do nothing to diminish her, and she bids her children stand beside her to understand what manner of things live at the chafing, reluctant edges of this world.

Little lords, she wants her visitors to ask of her children, who is in thrall to whom? 

The Hornsent are compelled by her, this Marika-as-holy-legate, Marika the loquacious prophet, Marika the key to infinite possible meanings. She calls them all as witness: to the speed with which they carry her words across the city, the haste with which they fetch her fresh water, lay silk at her feet, perfume the air around her. Her audience comes - barbarian tribes surge up the river from the wetlands, the stargazers send word from their lofty cathedrals - and now she performs. She must amaze and astonish. She must put her whole self on display. She is the garlanded statue at the shrine of any rival god, carved lovingly, available to all eyes at any time, to be touched, caressed, supplicated. Flowers do not wilt at her feet; fruit does not rot. But unlike a mute slab of stone, she answers prayer, in a voice that commands as readily as it soothes, and the Hornsent fall over themselves proclaiming her supremacy. 

Melina, when she tentatively emerges from the pit of her library with another treaty on her lips, is a ghost under the shade of bitter orange trees. He stands beside her with nothing to cover his head, and the sun beats down on his scarlet crown. When was the last time he had a private audience with his mother? He cannot remember. If he could, he would push past the crowds that surround her, swim through the thick bed of blossoms at her feet, pull down the silks from above her head, and find the mother who is Mother, or perhaps was: who breathed in great heaving breaths when she ran or laughed, who swam naked in the clear river and braided dewgems and seed pearls in her hair, who birthed her children alone and held them at her breast in aching relief, who used to wake trembling from dreams and grasp their little hands in reassurance. Mother who once fell into contemplative silence when her children asked those strange, esoteric questions only children venture to ask. Mother who did not yet belong to the world.  

 

⚕️

 

The letter reads, Let me have from you my three petitions, promised saint, little bright-necked one. Sun of women, show me your holy hands. 

He finds it insulting. His mother soothes him - calls it part flattery, part political manoeuvring. No one is fooled, she assures him. The stargazers do not care about her prettily creased palms. What they want is knowledge - knowledge of the field she disappears to on moonless nights. Not the jasmine-clouded village, but somewhere further: a dusty ruin that smells of alchemist’s sulphur and brimstone where she gets on her knees and speaks to the Hand of God. 

By god she means the Greater Will, he is sure. Anything else would be the blasphemy of an outer god. He is less inclined to believe his mother a blasphemer than the conduit of a supreme deity. 

They are visited by one called Ymir, an unnaturally long-lived sorcerer who has come down from the mountain-dwellings of the astrologers and now resides in the forested hills to the east. Stargazers, Marika has said, think the cosmos owes them something. This one claims he is building a great cathedral on the calcified body of a giant; that he has found a way to tap into the current of celestial force, to slow the great clock-hand of his fate without breaking his mind; that he advises the most potent among moongazers, a promising line of witches who will be raised to royalty and usher in a new era of learning. 

Messmer stands and Melina sits beside her mother, rigid in her overwhelming need to slink off. Arrange your faces is all their mother tells them before the foreigner approaches. She does not bid them be quiet, nor invite their counsel; but rarely does anyone interject the meagre sound of their voice when the prophet is speaking. Marika is known to listen patiently, but now the gathered Hornsent audience murmurs and shifts uneasily. Astrologers are the ancient allies of the Fell God’s giants, and they in turn are the blood enemy of all Hornsent. 

But the man before them is, as he rises from a deep bow, demonstrably unthreatening. He is pale, and wears the astrologers’ blue and white, the same jewel-tones as the silver rod he carries. His gaze is respectful, even sympathetic. Despite his fleshy, downturned mouth, he looks a little amused, as if perhaps he is the smartest one here, but that is a jest for he alone to enjoy. Let the others guess at the mirth curled in his plump, jewelled fingers. 

He has scanned the stars ceaselessly, he says, and knows which have been displaced, snuffed out. Which have fallen. He wishes to take counsel with Marika, to know if she too turns her chin up to the heavens. As a gesture of goodwill, he offers her - and her children - the service of one of his sworn knights, a retainer he calls the Night Hand. The grim, faceless silhouette looms behind the sorcerer like an oversized shadow, armour so black it absorbs light instead of reflecting it. The jutting, spiked plates remind Messmer of the black inside of a maw. 

Marika smiles. “I am usually offered songbirds,” she says, her tone affable, as though this is the jest he has been smirking about. “And my children have outgrown dolls and puppets.” 

Messmer glances at his mother, but fails to hide his surprise. He has heard of this practice: the transference of a soul from an old body to a new one, even a false one. It is unclear what remains of the soul - free will, if any, and in what manner they are bound to their puppet master. The astrologer might as well have said he would like to install a spy in their entourage. He, Messmer, should like to know if the astrologers can extract monsters from their bodies as readily as they displace souls into suits of armour. 

A credit to the man before her that he does not sneer at her refusal. “In your letters,” he says to Marika, “you express curiosity over the great crater far to the east, once called the Hand of God. Deoh, in the old tongue.” 

He must know, Messmer thinks, that her pilgrimages there are kept secret from the Hornsent. 

“Yes. The Hornsent fear them, kin of giants, a greater enemy than they could ever tolerate.” 

“And you?”

She clasps her hands in her lap. “Why should I fear what claws its way from the dirt? So did my people climb to the surface, and leave the dark Numen night behind.” 

“The daughters of the Moon wished mightily to look upon the blood of the Numen. They would have come, if not for the journey, and the rigorous studies they must-” 

“Twin girls, is it?”

“Yes.”

“I am told they are beautiful.” 

“Your informants do not deceive you. When they come of age, one will remain to rule. The other will fetch a fine alliance for our people.” 

“You should bring her with you. Most monarchs wish to see the merchandise before purchasing.” 

He laughs with a self-deprecating lilt, manufactured as his silver rod. “I do not presume to have such authority.” 

Marika leans forward from her perch, graceful but coy. She scrutinises him with exaggerated effect. “Do you offer yourself? You are learned, hold a high place among your peers. No doubt you command respect. And I suppose you look ripe, still.” 

A ripple of laughter through the Hornsent crowd. They are enjoying watching her make sport of him. Even her mocking jab seems to elevate her. 

Graciously, he holds up both hands. “Never would I assume your attention anywhere but the task appointed to you by the Hornsent.” 

Appointed - a barb, but Marika does not flinch. Before he continues, the sorcerer lets his eyes wander to Messmer, then to Melina, picking at the embroidery of her fine garments. Whatever opinions he churns behind his teeth, he does not share them. Cautiously he ventures, “Your children’s obedience does you credit.”

“What do your informants say of them?” Marika leans back, and rests her hands easily on her cushioned armrests. A petal of orange blossom detaches itself and floats by her face, querying. “What does your court whisper about my progeny, blessed beyond all measure?”

A moment’s hesitation. “We hear they are gifted.” 

“An interesting term.”

“I would use another, if it please.”

“Words,” she says blithely. “What else do you have?”

“Words placed directly into the ears of the Twin Moons,” he answers, and suddenly he is cheerfully brusque again, businesslike. “A treaty. An exchange of knowledge. Perhaps of wards instead of words? We would be willing to send the younger of the two as a ward in your household, if you are willing to send one of your own, perhaps your secondborn, perhaps to examine the possibility of a match for policy-”

“No.” 

Absolute stillness descends. The murmuring Hornsent hush, and their shuffling ceases. It seems to Messmer the word stops the wind and negates the rustling of trees. The songbirds strain through the silence, as if they too wish to know what happens next. 

From his position, Messmer can see the marionette armour’s sword hand hovering at its hip. Bloodshed in Enir-Ilim is unthinkable. A war to embroil the world. The assassination of his mother would have the Hornsent march on the sorcerer’s mountain lands - a war he is unsure they could win, but would certainly be willing to die in.  

Again, softly, Marika says. “No.” Then she smiles - radiant, guileless, the kind of benevolence a child would find comforting. “For it is not my place to install a child of the Moon in the sacred city of the Hornsent, and I wish not to part with my children at this time.”

“As a matter of legacy-”

“But it is within my purview to establish an exchange with you, Master Stargazer. To share knowledge for our mutual benefit. I will do so openly, if you agree to my terms; we need not place spies in each other’s court or pay cupbearers to eavesdrop. Are you in a position to speak for your allies?”

Noise seems to flow back into the world. The black suit of armour relaxes almost imperceptibly. Shuffling, the sorcerer smooths the front of his robes with one hand. “I am a servant of the Moon,” he says placidly, “and if we are not given reason, neither my people nor our allies will descend upon your lands.” 

“Is that your answer?” She laughs - a gorgeous sound, the chime of smooth glass, the pluck of a perfectly tuned harp string. “Here is mine. I speak with the cosmos because I am bound to it. I have its ear.” She lowers her amber voice so that it no longer reaches the Hornsent gathered beyond her throne. Ymir leans forward, straining to hear. The air is leaden. Her children are still. 

“The stars tell me this world is molten gold, and I am a hammer.” There is a slight radiance to her voice, a bell long struck still vibrating in silence. “Do you know what my children tell me?”

The sorcerer spares them each a glance. “No.”

“They tell me this world debases them. And so I say to them, dear hearts: I will make you a new one.” 

 

⚕️

 

It is all very lofty, he thinks: the sidelong sparring, the honeyed words. Mapping out the order of the world by turns eloquent and embittered. 

“It is for show,” his sister murmurs, when they whisper about the strange sorcerer in the evening gloom of the Black Keep. “The astrologers wish to take stock of her influence. Measure her reach.” 

“They are afraid of her.”

In the dim he catches the glint of her eye, focused a little to the left of where his head is, as if seeing something just past him. Tonight he finds her voice sombre and dry, but her arguments gracious, without any of the friction of siblings. He likes it when she is in this mood: still, contemplative, slowed by her thoughts like molten glass come rest in brilliant solidity. 

“When they look up, they are used to seeing their gods from afar,” she says mildly. “They do not know what to make of it - of her, up on her throne of holy indentured servitude, looking down her nose at them. It must be frightening, how the sun chases the moons and stars from the sky. Her apotheosis is not theirs.”

He frowns, thinking of the strange sorcerer with the mellifluous voice. What are the astrologers reaching for, if not knowledge of the heavens? Why would they shun a direct passage to the firmament?

“Why would they not want a share of heaven?”

She shrugs, a blurry motion in the dark. “Is it really heaven she will create? For the Hornsent, perhaps. Who is to say their heaven should look anything like ours?”

Mellowed by the intimacy of the empty halls, they slip into old, worn debates over how life will continue once the Gate is opened. What is the meaning of paradise? Will those not blessed by the Crucible be redeemed? Will life continue as it is, only happier, shinier, more garish? Will all be forgiven, the bounty of the world endless, neither labour nor hardship to dampen their afterlives? 

When he broaches the subject of death before and after paradise, he can see how she stiffens. Her answers are longer to come, shorter in length. She stands, drifts around the table, lights a few tall candles. Among the Hornsent, some believe the dead must undertake a pilgrimage to find their way to this newly-minted promised land. Others believe death will be displaced by a celebratory return to the Crucible, a joyous melding of form at the end of one’s physical days. 

His mind drifts to the old order of Rauh, those verdant palaces of perfection; and then to the legendary cities of alchemy below the second night sky. Nothing but order and learning, honey and silk and the mysteries of the world, laid bare. Freedom to do as they wish. “Utopia,” he says.

“I do not know.” She sits down again, and the darkness wraps around her like a kindly pair of hands. “The only utopias we can name are those long fallen. Perhaps utopia is not a place one can live.” 

 

⚕️

 

For a long time, he does not tell Melina about the abyss inside him. 

She knows, of course, what he became that night in the earthen ruins of a village: from her hiding place she saw it, the great pale serpent, the opalescent rage, step into the world where he himself retreated. They have always felt each other’s curses just below the surface, each a different translation of the same concept: disappearance, loss. Negation in the form of an empty space that was once someone: known, loved, missed.

Does her curse speak to her, and promise her things, as his does? Does her dark-coloured flame beg her to touch things, to sip on life, to erase what was there? When it emerges does she wrestle it for control - or has she learned to compromise, to share power with it, as he is certain he has glimpsed her do?  

How? he would like to ask, but he cannot bring himself to. How do you open a dialogue with the monster inside yourself?

When she is absent, he sits before the clouded mirror in the dark of their shared chambers, where once his mother used to brush his hair, and stares at himself. Behind his perpetual wink of indifference it stares back: the coil, the void with whom he shares a skin. 

If his mother could, she would cleanse him of it. Of this he is certain. That she has not given him another eye to replace the one he shattered is punishment, condemnation enough. If she could thrust her hand down his throat and pull out the coil, an infinity of silver scales, then he is certain she would do it. Instead he is the cage, and she the mechanism of the lock, and if one of them fails, then they both do.

Long after, unbidden, Melina asked him, Do you remember it?  

He’d pressed his lips together and shaken his head. It is not so much a lie as an omission: he does not remember what it is to be inside the void. What it is to crawl on his belly through the dirt. To open his mouth wide enough to swallow the world. 

But he remembers the power. 

He is reminded every time the coil whispers to him, gently but insistently, to give himself over. He is reminded of how easy it is to retreat from the pain, and to be given indescribable potency in exchange. Remarkable, such a one-sided transaction, almost bewildering. It is the kind of possibility he tastes, only briefly, when he wields his own ember. But the coil is a forge, the full force of his fire without his own serpents to hold it back. It is the power to bend anything to his favour. He has come to understand how addictive it is, this kind of power. How easy it would be to give himself to it, to lean back into its embrace, to wrap himself in it, like men who wrap themselves in thick smoke or imbibe tonics to rid themselves of inhibitions; or the men who gorge themselves on blood gambling in the sand pits. 

So he lies to Melina, says to her, No. He does not remember. Yet when he is laid low by the memory of it, bent by the weight of shame, she consoles him anyway, as he once did for her when she still feared her own touch. With hands clasped around him she tells him he need not give into it. Like an outer god, it will try to slip in when he is vulnerable, bereft - but he should not let go. Not slip below the surface, and sink. He listens but says nothing; only nods, rattled by his own weakness. When he turns away, shamefaced, he is still listening to the void, one ear always tuned in anticipation of its promises. The consequences are negligible, it says. The aftermath, unimportant. Worth it, in any case, to feel what he already knows he will feel when he gives over to the beast. Worth it to escape the confines of his own self now, ashen skin and translucence, impotent child stripped of power and stuffed back into himself. 

His own serpents meet his eyes in the mirror, and it is like seeing himself fractured, repeated endlessly. When he’d given over to the abyss, his two serpents had been momentarily blinded, lost to him, as if they too were subsumed and forced to retreat into themselves. 

He would like to ask Melina where she goes when Death peeks out from behind her face. But it feels too demeaning to admit his own flight, his abandonment of self, obfuscated by the abyssal serpent’s primordial need. He does not explain that stepping out of his skin is a welcome relief. In the wake of self-erasure, nothing matters - love and loss and joy and mourning are meaningless in the scorched world of a void. The void finds no fault with him, no qualm. The void is no utopia - but it is inviting. It is clean and pure and free from all the tiny, meaningless little details of the world. It asks him to come settle, and lay his burdens down; to give himself over entirely, claim a land and a home, and so do what his mother once said would make them immortal.  

The void is a place I cannot follow, Melina warns him. Even if he does not name it, she tells him she feels it - the vertigo inside him, peering over the edge of a drop at a sharp angle. 

Later, when he has collected the scattered parts of himself, he does what he can to reassure her. He tells her that when they share companionable silence in the athenaeum, or sit by their mother’s virtuous side, the abyss falls silent. The coiled serpent’s call becomes only an itch. Its seduction, meaningless. He curls his own winged serpents around her, puts a hand on hers to calm her, uses the golden glow of their mother’s gift to heal and restore. He reassembles himself into the shape of obedience. His sister’s keeper, his mother’s irreproachable, dutiful son. The only gift he can give her in this unequal exchange - his submission for her love. He does not wish to be a burden. His left eye is shut tight. 

But he does not forget the promise of power. 

He can understand, now, when his mother is brought offerings and acquiescence, when her own masters sit at her feet and beg her blessings, when they bend to her will - it must be worth the shackles of sainthood. Clear enough he sees them give her everything, and she leans forward, glowing, radiant, terrifying. And she says: More. 

 

 

---

 

Notes:

snuck a little tribute into this one to the GOAT of contemporary gothic, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates

Chapter 5: if you persist in wearing your mask

 

 

 

Of the few nations that have answered Marika’s summons, only the barbarian tribes, united under their respective chieftains, have come with the intent to forge a long-lasting treaty. It is a sign of their goodwill, his mother says, that they have come so far inland. 

She has not sent ambassadors beyond Hornsent land - neither she, nor the Hornsent, see reason to. The Hornsent’s destiny will play out at home, while they are staring into their own hearth. They are not given to hospitality. If contact is made it is to secure their position, or bring other servants of the Crucible into their fold, whom they will nonetheless regard peevishly and with little consideration if they are hornless. Only the stone dragons, perhaps the Crucible’s greatest triumph, would be truly welcome at the peak of Enir-Ilim. 

To Melina he admits his fascination with the dragons. Their human visages are so stark as to be a reflection of their own land: cliff faces carved by millennia of wind and crowned with ice. Their earthly representative is glacial - cold, unmovable, slow to speak. Messmer is sorry to not see more of her and her kin, to observe their deformations. Their strangeness makes him feel almost commonplace. 

They have no cause with or against Marika, the dragon’s envoy explains. They are sworn to their Elden Lord, their own towers in the sky, their own affairs. Occupied by the endless cresting and churning conflict between themselves and their fleshy kin who have crowned a tyrant, a loathsome creature that sits at the top of the Jagged Peaks and curses the heavens. 

No agreement is made except to live in mutual ignorance of each other. When she departs her audience with Marika, the dragon simply walks off the edge of the tower as a woman, and rises again to the horizon on wings of stone. For all their raucous self-importance, the Hornsent watch in silence. 

 

⚕️

 

When the barbarians arrive, they install their great hoard just beyond the walls of Belurat: a sweeping sea of tents topped with fluttering banners and colourful hides, set to percussive music and booming war cries, dotted by cookfires that seem never to die. Smoke from their encampment floats out and up to the highest reaches of Enir-Ilim, and on it Messmer smells everything he needs to know about these savages: their fervour, their vices, their appetites. 

Marika speaks to the Hornsent of taming the lowlanders, employing them in the service of Hornsent interests. They have no historical enmity, and are united by a mutual respect for violence and ultimatums. They keep the same beasts sacred. In the quiet of her private chambers she tells Messmer the savages have no stake in Hornsent paradise, or divinity - they are married to blood and dirt, chained to their love of battle. They would rather die in view of their fellows on a field of slaughter than drink sweet wine and listen to the drip of water in a marble basin. 

“So,” he asks his mother, “why are they here?” 

Gently she reaches out and touches one of his serpent’s wings. It occurs to him then he has never been touched with sentimentality by anyone outside his family. The deeper he treads into the world, the more conscious he is of the shroud that separates him from it. 

“If I cannot keep the world from you,” she says, “then you must learn to defend yourself from it. You must learn to protect what is ours.”

What is ours. He thinks of a little golden tree in a meadow. Of Belurat, and Enir-Ilim. Of a kingdom waiting.  

Melina is reluctantly disgorged from the Black Keep to learn alongside him. It is hard to know them, she says. These savages. Where their loyalties lie, what their histories instruct. She describes how they are sometimes in league with the faraway storm kings, sometimes their chattel, sometimes at war. Because their movements never cease, neither do their conflicts. Condemned for their sins to wander forever with beasts, and never claim a homeland. The barbarians contest only this last point. They argue that if they did not wander, they would simply grow bored and kill each other. 

Messmer tells her the brute who will instruct them in the art of war is a chieftain, an upstart who commands over ten thousand warriors and who seeks to challenge the lion lord of beasts for supremacy of the badlands. They say he has killed a thousand men with the jawbone of a donkey.

Melina looks at him wryly. “I hope he will favour us with more practical weapons.” 

The warlord comes to Belurat’s largest amphitheatre with an axe wide enough to fell a great tree and the arms to do it in a few strokes. His own hide matches the leather of his raiment, giving the impression at first glance of a hulking, extravagantly naked man wearing nothing but a few beads and buttons. Hornsent warriors come to witness his prowess, so that at the centre of the sun-baked arena it feels as though they are at the heart of a spectacle with no script, and no knowledge of how it will end. Beneath their sandalled feet the patches of grass are dry, yellowed; the mosaics slick and glistening with grease and sweat. Men take refuge in the shadows cast by the wings of bronze birds, outstretched, emerged to take flight from the western archways; while the opposite facade reveals lions with their jaws wrenched open, from where rainwater issues to flood the amphitheatre when it became too dry, or more frequently, too sticky with blood. The air seems to grow thicker, here, oily with violence and perspiration, noisy with the heaving breath of men and the teeth-rattling clang of iron. It is the first time Messmer wields the Hornsent’s prized black steel, an obsidian ore worked only by the best blacksmiths and said to be infused with the strength of golems. Many of the visiting warriors relish in unarmed combat - they claim it is the purest form, the greatest way to judge a man’s strength. But he, Messmer, will not strip down to his tunic before these boorish creatures, no matter how accomplished they are, and risk a coarse hand around his flesh. He will not abide a stranger’s touch on his serpents, the singular part of him already naked and vulnerable to the world. His spear becomes an extension of himself, a longer arm to keep the world at bay.  

More colossus than man, these brutes lack all the grace of ritual combat, and though they idolise martial prowess, most Hornsent are dismissive of such foreign techniques. Next to the flowing shapes of the Lion Dance, grappling is ugly and undignified. The barbarians will teach anyone willing to take a blow: they hold no ranks but chieftains and warlords, and all must be ready to prove their mettle in a challenge. Wary of what such a fluid hierarchy represents, many Hornsent refuse to engage - except those who cleave to his mother. He sees them young and old, of high and low birth, hornless and not, willing to mould themselves to fit her vision of the world. Willing to take up a spear for her. The visiting warriors, who are being showered with gold and resources in return for their skills, acknowledge her, though their speech remains uncouth: they refer to his mother simply as the Saint, or the Benefactor. The Golden Woman. But he hears others, these downtrodden men of Belurat, the lowest of Hornsent society, call him quietly, in passing, my lord. No lands has he been given, no household of his own, no heraldry yet - but by proximity to his mother, he has been raised up to something better. 

The barbarian tribes will remain a long while on Hornsent soil. They will trade with the Hornsent, hunt and feast and wed their animal revelry at the base of Belurat. All the while he will toil in the ring. He will be thrown down, bruised, knocked about. He will take iron to the ribs, scrape knuckles to the bone, spit blood from between his teeth. He will learn to use his serpents as more than eyes; rather, as prophets - heralding an opponent’s next move, sensing the air shift long before he does, and using that prescience to strike. 

He is told he fights cleanly, with unblemished technique, and his size and reach are suited to a spear. But he is not listening. He is looking at his sister. They all are. Beside her, technique looks like no more than an absence of passion. She fights like an animal, like something has cornered her. Others in the ring pause to watch when their saint’s capricious little bastard daughter throws off her mantle and picks up a dagger. 

Later, the warlord examines him. “What holds you back, boy? If your sister met Death on the road, she’d slit its throat and steal its horse.” 

But he cannot say anything about the stranger inside him, the abyss that groans with pleasure at every solid strike and smarting wound. While he holds himself coiled, reticent Melina gives herself over entirely to the spark under her skin, the dark-coloured flame. He sees her in the reflection of her knife: rosewater and gold, the waxen colour of peaches in the days before the heat saturates them to ripeness; a tarnished red dye, patina thin and faceted. A sanguine amaryllis discoloured by yellow pollen - inedible confection, diluted, unsatisfying. Pale imitation of their mother. 

Still in the light of a sun not quite set her face says: look at me. I am not afraid.  

 

⚕️

 

Despite the celebratory mood accompanying the barbarians’ arrival, he cannot help but pick up on the rumours about his mother that circulate among the tribes. He cannot guess whether they originate with the Hornsent, or the savages, or the two come together, sharing wine and dagger-wounds and marvelling at the golden creature enshrined atop their world. Some are harmless, if lurid. It is said she has smugglers and thieves and blasphemers brought before her for questioning. If they can tell her something useful, she spares them. If not she takes their hands, which some argue is merciful, while others say for the Hornsent it is the cruelest punishment, for without hands one can neither fight nor build, and for them there is nothing left but to wander into the world and wait for death. 

He thinks to intervene, to dispel such hearsay. Then he reconsiders. It is below him, to act like a tutor correcting coarse children. Perhaps the Hornsent will give Marika even more leeway if they think her likely to smite them.

Another rumour worries him more: a whisper that one of her children will inherit her position among the Hornsent, or usurp the role of consul - an unthinkable notion - and turn their mother out to beg beneath the lintel of the Gate. There is no affront to him greater than this accusation of betrayal. If he hears it again, he will take the mongrel’s hands himself. He has learned how to sever a limb cleanly. He believes there is nothing in this world that can displace his mother, and he clings to this truth like it is the black iron of his spear. 

He recalls his mother emerging from beneath the amphitheatre’s stone arches and into the pit of a golden afternoon, her delicate, bare feet sinking into the warm sand. Her presence had seemed to clear the air, to soften it. She had made the barbarian chieftain straighten, like a dog to a whistle; in return he’d appraised her evidently, and with naked approval. He, Messmer, had watched as they stood, half-blinded by the glare of the sun: Marika’s sandstone-smooth splendour an arm’s length from the barbarian’s gleaming bronze bulk, rough as a chipped axe, his hair the colour of fine-spun wool. He towered over her, and she smiled. 

Will my lord not sup with us?

He’d laughed at that - a booming sound, wide as his mouth. Messmer thought, He will sup on her if she is not careful. 

The unworthy thought comes back to him now, souring his mood. The day’s aches feel spiteful, suddenly, and not the product of hard work. If he could he would rail against the coarseness with which they look at his mother: relic, tool, and now landscape. A thing to help oneself to. To be claimed and cultivated, pierced with a stake and topped with a colourful, fluttering banner. Here her golden crown threshed for its grain, there a plow driven over her bones. Her body the promise of blessings to come, of swollen clouds over sun-baked earth. They are of her, too - a natural resource. He looks up at Melina, seated across from him, the pale rose of her hair, the downward pull of her brows, so different from his own uneven features and too-long limbs. With some shame he imagines the Hornsent must wonder at these two poor by-products squeezed from the abundance of their faultless saint. And Marika is beautiful, objectively he sees this, as one sees the symmetry in a skilfully forged sword, or the perfect proportion of ornament on a temple facade. She seems ageless, tireless, brimming with life. Full. Were she not a saint - untouchable - he assumes she would have bastards aplenty filling the streets below Enir-Ilim, and he and Melina no more special than any other child born under a bad star. 

“We were not born under a comet,” Melina corrects him, without bothering to look up. 

Did he speak aloud, or does she simply know what troubles him, as one half does its other? “What cursed us then, if not outer gods who spit fiery omens across our skies?”

Now she does glance up at him: sideways, serious. “You are not so provincial as to believe that.” 

He chafes against her indifference. She ought to be mournful. They are both touched by something greater than themselves - surely she must believe so too is their mother. That she can reach into them and scoop out the dregs of their curse, wash them clean with the promise of her divinity.

A thought pierces him, like a sudden sharp pain under the breastbone. Like a stitch, needle shoved up from beneath flowering embroidery. What does Marika need a lord for? Children she has. Land she will claim. A great destiny already. 

“And if she has more - other - children to displace us?”

Melina’s brows arch, two little lines left in the wake of her surprise. “Is our position so enviable? Here all this time I have been ungrateful. I will happily cede them my place.” 

He balks and says, “And disappear where?” Another little needle of fear pokes up through his flat disbelief. He wills his serpents behind him, so they do not give him away in their nervous swaying. 

Her smile is placid. It is only a little teasing. Always he has played the role of eldest between them: to guide, to oversee, to discipline. To be an extension of his mother. But without sign of their love, he has always been the first to waver. 

“To the edge of the Crucible itself,” she says lightly. “To toss in a gold token for luck.”

He exhales loudly, no less ill at ease. Without reassurance, his serpents move restlessly in the closed air. “One day another child will be born to her under a cloudless, moonless, starless sky, and it will be a child of fortune, gold and beautiful and unmarred.” 

She shuts her tome gently, and pushes it aside. “So? I wish it admiration in place of fear. And I will give you a small sum for your foresight, if it makes you happy.” She shakes her head. The hair around her face has grown longer and gives the illusion of elongating her visage. She is losing the softness of her girl’s features, exchanging them for those of a woman. “Why does this move you? There is no question of succession. No throne to be sat, when this is done.”

Mother begs to differ, he knows. Melina does too, but she will not say it. She leans on her fundamental belief that all things have an end - that they must, because eternity is unnatural. If things do not end as they should, then they will last long enough to warp, and deform, and become something unrecognisable. As do lives, so too do lineages. 

“This is not a royal nursery,” she continues. “Let her have a squalling blonde babe if she so wishes, and give it a parcel of land on the Cerulean Coast, or an empty stronghold, or a pastoral settlement. What would we fight it for? Her love? When we are free of the Hornsent we will go far enough that Enir-Ilim is a blur on the horizon.”

“That is your wish, not mine.”

“Then stay.” He thinks she looks pained for a moment, though her expression dissolves before he can name it. But there is a pit in her stomach. He can feel its blackness in the way they have always been able to feel each other’s fears, as in the womb.  

After a while he says, “The dragons fight their own kin eternally. They say you must devour a heart once defeated, to gain its strength.”

“Is that what they have written in their records?”

“Suffices to speak to a creature to know its nature.” 

“And you know it is true?” 

He knows. Mother is always hungry. He fears she will put cities in her mouth, swallow entire worlds, while they remain to fight over what is left. 

 

 

⚕️

 

He learns late how to be with others - with soldiers, attendants, advisers; those men who will eventually come under his command. In being with them he learns that he may remove, reshape, redefine the outer walls of himself. He becomes what he never expected to be: malleable. He has been still for so long, squeezed into this role, this space, that he is sore from it, chafing against the boundless presence of his mother and the void of his father. A block of marble, all idea and no chisel. Now he hands over a hammer, so that others may carve him out of shallow indifference. 

He will abide by them, as the shape of a sail curves to the wind. As fire burns strongest where it is fed. It is too exhausting to be unmovable as stone; sometimes it is best to soften a little. To change one’s face. He suspects Melina has come to realise this. They cannot anchor each other forever. Eventually, they must both come to the surface. Already she is there, breathing the air of others: he sees how she moves among the scholars of the athenaeum, out from under Enir-Ilim’s pungent clouds. The hornless regard her amiably, and even those blessed by the Crucible respect her work and her guidance. She moves among them with an ease foreign to him, and he wonders why she has not told him this, directed him somehow, to realise the cage he has built is only big enough for himself. 

He thinks that if he contains this multiplicity of shapes, versions of himself, so too then does his mother - and has he not seen them, and known them all? But with each passing season he forgets, and she grows colder, less carnal, even in her gilt splendour. Of late she is fixed in that version of herself sharp as the cliff edge where she perches, calculating trajectories in the same way he is learning to throw a spear. Learning when to let go, and when to squeeze. But he cannot keep both eyes open. 

In the merciless daylight he watches labourers, sweating and groaning, haul up a statue. It is rough, and so difficult to make out the silhouette: two robed figures facing each other, close enough to embrace, encircled by a monumental spiralling horn. A mineral glitter in the sun, a satin sheen of beige quartz and sandstone. Beside him, Marika observes, saying nothing. But she looks pleased. 

His serpents rise; he peers through the glare. Both figures are draped, faces hidden, but no telltale horns protrude from their hooded heads. Only three hornless are held in high enough esteem to be immortalised in stone. Only his mother is worthy of a pedestal. So that leaves the other figure.

He looks at Melina. Which one of them is it?

 

⚕️

 

To glorify their burgeoning allegiances, Marika commissions new spectacles: martial music to accompany war dances, new iterations of old tales, victory processions. Sometimes she requests these be performed in the dead of night, only the bright flare of torchlight illuminating the scene, so that Enir-Ilim appears a monumental lighthouse across the land, rivalling the light of the moon. Flames from bronze-bellied braziers cast mad shadows over masked faces. The balconies fill quickly, diligently. If the prophet does not sleep, why should anyone else? 

This night’s entertainment is divided into three parts: an acrobatic, martial dance in homage to the brightly-plumed bird warriors; a wild, whirling dervish inspired by the storm-summoning barbarians; and an old tale about a long-dead heavenly envoy with the head of a bull. In the flickering lights the bird-warriors’ cloth-of-gold garments are dazzling. Beneath them the dancers wear only black, easily lost to the night, giving them a disembodied, spectral appearance. Their gilded bones seem to negate gravity entirely. In their dark camouflage, the only sign that there are physical beings beneath the regalia is the deceptively soft tread of their feet after each jump. Their flight across the stage is inhuman, almost uncanny: a flash of wings, a delicate spine of embroidered gems, a wickedly curved beak. Fractured light caught at the right angle and yolked to divinity. 

For the final piece, percussive stomping is replaced by mournful strings and the reedy breath of woodwind to accompany brief dialogue. The transition is stark: this last tale describes a humble creature scooped up by divine hands and taken to the firmament, where they are struck blind by the resplendence of paradise, their mouth burned by prophecy. This elevated soul, now masked with a bull’s head to conceal their divinity-scarred visage, is sent back to show the Hornsent how to quarry the stones needed to raise Enir-Ilim. But those who flock to hear the bull’s words cannot look upon them, for such a transmission from heaven is enough to blind mortals in turn. 

When the bull-headed envoy appears, Messmer thinks he recognises one of the bird-dancers. Under a thin beige tunic, the figure is noticeable - a pattern of controlled, graceful gestures for a body that seems otherwise ill-suited to dance. The actor is compact, his arms short for his torso, his legs thick, but despite the impression of solidity his movements are languorous, sensual. They unwind like a melody, each articulation contained in perfect time. Messmer has seen his mother carry herself in this same way, the slide of her shoulders down her back, the dignified cadence of her walk. Instead of being hurried along by the rhythm of verse and music, this bull-headed creature gives the impression that music and breath and time all wait for him to initiate the next passage.  

When the performance is ended the players are invited to linger, eat and drink at Marika’s welcome, while the rest of the Hornsent audience disperse. The tale of the bull sits at the forefront of his mind - for a Hornsent tale it is old-fashioned, and noticeably devoid of righteous slaughter. He looks for Melina - undoubtedly she will know this tale, and can unravel it for him - but tonight she has not come. Perhaps it’s her absence that emboldens him. He would like it to continue, to hear more from the soft accompaniment of strings, from the deep, haunting voice of the bull, from the scorched lips of revelation. 

The actor, when Messmer approaches, has not yet taken off the mask. Up close, he can see himself reflected, haloed by torchlight in the bull’s luminous, dead eyes. He wonders how the man beneath sees anything at all. As the actor begins to bow, Messmer reaches out and puts both hands on either bleached horn. 

“Lord,” comes the voice. The actor is bent halfway but still adroit in his surprise. “You should not. Those who look upon the face of the Bull of Heaven are blinded by its radiance.” 

He, the saint’s joyless son, almost laughs. The man is still in character. Hands raised by the actor’s head, Messmer tries to remember what is beneath the mask in the original tale as he must have once heard its monotonous recitation by his tutors. He is almost certain the envoy is supposed to be a leper, hiding his deformation.

He dredges up half a smile. “Then I have nothing to fear. I was born blind.”

He lifts the mask away.  

The man beneath blinks kohl-painted eyes and meets his gaze. He is, to Messmer’s surprise, hornless. His face and head are bare but for a matted mane of dark curls and heavy, expressive brows. For a performer he has a curious blankness to his visage - a patient mirror waiting to see what steps in front of it.

Freed from the mask, he bows properly. “My lord.” His voice still has the sepulchral cadence of the bull. Then it sinks, and to the surface rises a kind of dazed amiability in its place, soft and affable, and he says, “How may I serve?” 

 

⚕️

 

A mild night brings them both to one of the vast squares that crown the upper levels of Belurat, tree-shaded and verdant. The only sound is the murmur of prayers and the occasional rustle of expensive fabric. Boots trample noisily through the low streets; here, slippered feet whisper to the consuls and grandams.  

The young man is called Huw, and he smells of saffron oil and resin, dabbed quickly over the skin at the base of the neck and wrists to soften the sting of sweat at the close of a hot day. As a hornless, if he is not performing, he is forbidden from the upper levels of Enir-Ilim. It is known the hornless will be the last to walk through the Gate of Divinity - if they are allowed to cross through at all, a matter still up for theological debate, millennia later. He is curious, Messmer tells this man - why has he not seen him in the sparring ring with the barbarians? Many hornless have found themselves elevated, empowered by their newfound skills. 

“Are we to be ready for war?”

“Is that what you think?” He pauses. Is it disdainful, to speak to a hornless like this? “My mother is destined to bring peace. The people should know better.”

“The people I speak for are not Hornsent.”

They are seated at the edge of an ornate elevation, a marble promontory that encircles a radiant, moss-draped tree. A fountain burbles nearby, and revelry floats up from the lower city, cacophony reduced to a pleasant, tuneless hum. In the hush of evening the square is empty, intimate, but Messmer still has his serpents retreat into his dun-coloured sleeves. Huw gives no indication of minding them, and Messmer owes this man nothing; so he will not admit, even to himself, that he hides them out of diffidence. Without his serpents’ eyes, the actor’s silhouette appears to him a little blurred, bronze skin softened by a patina of gold. Out of costume he looks unassuming, and Messmer almost expects a kind of melancholy to accompany his dusky, prominent features. Instead there is nothing saturnine about him: his gaze is astute, as though every setting, including this one, is dramaturgy to be dissected. The actor’s attention lingers for a while on Messmer’s crimson head, and reminds him of how much it marks his difference, even though the only thing he wears to indicate his status is a shawl woven in silk and cloth-of gold; a piece his mother has grown bored with, and given to him. She says it softens his silhouette. 

Huw shakes his dark head. “The barbarians have caused a stir. Perhaps it is the feeling of seeing fellow hornless armed, and held in some kind of esteem. Such a drastic change invites speculation. Anxiety and superstition, too. Have you seen how the Hornsent clean their costumes after we have worn them for your mother?” His exhale is a short laugh. “You would think we are newly diseased.”

Messmer frowns. If the Hornsent were pious in place of hypocritical, they would hold all warriors sacred. Instead they endeavour to undermine those born outside the Crucible, to make pariahs of them. The man before him is competent, even pleasing - but he is also undeniably a leper in this world order. 

Huw continues, “I come from a line of yeomen who undertake the Divine Beast hunt. Soldiers or fighters is too generous a term for us. We serve warriors and keepers. Do you know the hunt? We are the dogs tasked with flushing out prey. As hornless, we are not allowed to strike directly.” 

“But you elevate these traditions - in the ring, on the proscenium.”

“Some, yes. Violence and art are not incompatible, and I believe the sainted Empyrean deserves to be exalted.” He shrugs, blunt but apologetic. “There are worse ways to earn coin.” 

“Do you believe in her destiny?”

The actor regards him keenly, like he is hedging his bets. Playing out the conversation before it happens, because merely improvising with the Empyrean’s son feels too risky. 

“My father is a true believer,” Huw says, relenting at last. “Among hunters he was renowned. But while in service to a sculpture keeper he was accused of overtaking a noble on a kill and dishonouring him. In truth I think he simply got careless. Now he is a gaoler in the jar pits, and I am still a part of his household. It is not a place of honour, you understand - though we do not dream of any kind of title.” He rubs the tip of his nose. “Well, perhaps it would make life easier, to have a seat in a place of honour. Standing room, even. My father sees your mother elevate the weak, the downtrodden. He sees her crack open Hornsent society that the rest of us may benefit from it. It scares our masters. And so he dreams of serving her.”

“And you?”

“To tell it true, I often wonder if I will live to see the Gate open. Who can say? Perhaps your mother will outlive us all. I have little more to offer than loyalty and prayers.”

 Messmer says, “I have little need for prayers.” 

“And for actors?”

“Is that all you can do?” 

“No,” Huw concedes. “The Lion Dance is a martial one, and it always ends in victory. Which means it needs victims.” He smiles ruefully. “Fall on your sword often enough on stage, it begins to feel real. So, yes, I am fair with a curved sword. I am better with a twinblade, if you will forgive the boast.” He leans back on his elbows, and his lack of pretence seems to soften his whole body. “May I speak freely?”

Messmer stiffens. No one has asked him this yet. He is not his mother - but he can see himself, as though from the outside, filling in the edges of her silhouette. 

“Yes.”

“We are useful, you know - actors, I intend. It is not all just drooling glorification and mindless hymns to Hornsent heroes. Tragedies are my favourite. They are terribly demanding, physically taxing. I have to show grief, and by extension rage - not only to convince my audience, but to keep them safe.”

Messmer looks down at him. “Keep them safe?”

“From themselves.” Huw brings a hand to his chest. “Why would they choose to witness such a thing if not to taste it from afar, armoured yet at arm’s length, open to empathy? We are easily moved to elation when we see celebratory displays, or joyful expression, because they are safe. So we reach for them. We wish to be in them. To incarnate them. But none of us reach for misery. Actors, then, are buffers. When I iterate grief, I am doing it so that my audience can feel it through me, from their safe perch; so that they may say oh, yes, this is loss taken to its logical conclusion, this is the rage that drives us to do the unspeakable, this is the grief that makes us want to lay down and die. I do not want it, but now I know.” 

He has no answer for this. His buffer against grief has always been his mother. Now he wonders where she keeps it, all that inarticulate sadness that will one day curdle into rage. 

Huw takes the silence graciously, sitting up and brushing the dust and dry grass from his sleeves. “My lord,” he says gently, as if testing the waters with one toe at a time, “I do not mean to give offence-” 

“None will be taken.”

“-but I do not think you understand what you represent to those of us who are persecuted under the Crucible. What your sainted mother symbolises.”

I do not, he thinks. In their genuflection he has come to believe they all translate her as a stone effigy, arms spread wide. They do not know her as flesh.

“She is the end of toil,” Huw says. His large, dark eyes are luminous, like the bull’s. “The promised respite. A seat in the shade of a generous bough.”

Here, Messmer thinks, is a man who knows how to summon something malign within himself and use it for the good of others. Perhaps this too is a form of healing. 

 

⚕️

 

Another autumn: he watches Huw from a seat of honour, Huw watches him from the stage. When they meet it is out of sight, out of mind. It would not do to have the saint’s firstborn sharing bread and wine with a hornless. When Huw finally comes to spar under the tutelage of the lowland warriors, they do not speak - only watch each other from opposite ends of the arena, or touch weapons before a bout. There is a dignity and grace to the actor’s movements, but also a self-absorbed ease that some of the savages find infuriating. They do not appreciate a mouthful of dirt, no matter how prettily it is delivered.

Another spring: Marika’s authority grows. So many things are written - contradictory things, things that could overflow into a crisis of faith, into doubt and schism. No one knows what an Empyrean is truly capable of. There are gospels and arguments about it. Debates over her changing place in Hornsent cosmology. Where does reverence spill over into worship? Which blessings are gifted, and not impelled? Who is she, really, to the chosen people? Under their vast, painted temple domes, they debate in heated voices. Factions emerge. As hornless neither he nor Melina are permitted to attend such debates, but rules have never overridden Melina’s curiosity, and so she stands far above along the circular balconies, hooded and accompanied by the few Hornsent scholars she trusts. After she will describe it to him derisively: so much silk and sable, so many fat gold chains assembled in one place, a cacophony of textures and grievances. One thing they can all agree upon is that the spiral is never still. It is only ever rising. Stillness drags one down, and it is a long fall from the top of Enir-Ilim. Those who back Marika’s newfound sovereignty insist she is doing precisely that: taking action to hasten their arrival. Rendering the impenetrable doors to divinity no more than a thin curtain. 

Like Melina’s scholars, the men who train by his side remain by his side. If the Hornsent doubt, his men steer their eyes away. They spread the word - look not to the holy prophet, for she yearns more than any of us for the end of days. Look to the horizon. The Fell God haunts the mountaintops. The sorcerers remain hooded and huddled as crows, secretive as the night sky. His mother laughs her amber-scented laugh. She will subdue them all. She knows what is born from the stars; has seen its faceless truth. Heard its wordless call. Her gesture of blessing is two fingers raised up to the heavens. 

Coin flows into Belurat. He knows little of trade, but at times it pleases him to price noblemen and clerics by the yard, so lustrous are they in their brocade and satin. The Hornsent had never truly thought to carve up their kingdom, to distribute lands and claim property, pensions, settlements, annuities. To move their gold, both ingots and grain, from the towns to the heart of Belurat, to lay at the foot of Enir-Ilim, so that Marika might break her fast with loaves wrapped in cloth-of-gold. She has raided their coffers and then refilled them double what she took. She has remade the mechanism of Hornsent society to work in her favour, to spin in the direction she wishes, to stop when she pulls the pin, and she has given the Hornsent just enough for them to believe she has done this with their sanguine consent. For their benefit. She has civilised them, he thinks - taught them to take from the soil rather than wash it in blood. To privilege roads and trading posts and allegiances over their own protectionist, exclusionary inclination. Such a learned people need not starve, nor dance themselves to death. Where did she master this, he wonders. Before she crawled out of the jar? Did the Numen harbour expansionist policies inherited by their shaman offshoots? Or did some god whisper in Marika’s ear, steer her hand in the manner of a conqueror instead of a slave? 

But he has watched her perform for years - only now it seems natural, innate. Inevitable. He turns his gaze and watches the Hornsent go about their lives: richer, more dominant than they have ever been, their territories stretching further and further across the land in her name, by her will, and behind his teeth he sneers, Are you not grateful?

 

⚕️

 

On occasion, Melina disappears for days at a time.

Lord, her scholars ask, where is your lady sister?

By the time he looks, she is gone. 

It bothers him, though she is grown, and he knows she moves about the land as she wills, as is her right. She is clever enough to navigate Hornsent domain, gentle enough that the smallfolk beyond the tower city acknowledge her, though they do not bend at the knee. She enjoys these travels: on horseback, with little retinue. Only the noisy, bright world.

In Enir-Ilim he misses her, and if she is travelling, he does not go to the athenaeum at the Black Keep. There is something to the quality of the silence when she is gone. He does not mind her silence if he knows where she is, or can hear the slow exhale of her breath a few feet away, bent over a tome, or scratching away at parchment. When she is absent entirely the quiet is numbing, disorienting. The walls blot out the sounds, the glow of her ember; beyond these stones laid over bones the air becomes dull, and he himself something holy, bricked up within. 

While she is away he could help sort her collections, prepare parchment, or grind ink for her as he used to when he was bored, without being asked. Ink made of soot and resin, ground to a perfect glossy black; another welcome sound to bridge their silence. But he does not. He is busy in the city, in the arena, at his mother’s side. He is busy choosing heraldry for himself: he alone, a shape he wills into being. Until now he has been dressed in his mother’s beige and gold, or madder dyes, because they are easy, common. His attendants ask, does the young lord want lapis, now? Or rare indigo? Red, he tells them; it makes of him, his silhouette and his snakes, one unified creature. If Melina were present she would say, Crimson is a harsh colour. What are you mourning? 

 He is afraid for her, and his fear tips easily into resentment. He is afraid that she rides into harsh country, where the fields give way to rocks and disturbed land, and the roads are still unpaved and unnamed. He worries she will be separated from her company, or betrayed by her Hornsent minders; accosted, thrown from her panicked horse, held down by bandits, robbed, her throat slit, or worse. He is terrified she will return to one of the condemned villages, pick her way through the ruins of earthenware and old bones to curl up and fall asleep in a jar, and never wake again. He entertains scenarios in which, ages from now, he will cross a shallow river and ride through a valley, pass among a few scattered thatch-roof huts, and there he will see her: her face in the face of a village girl, hornless, hair tucked under a kerchief, living in quiet solitude, with dirt-caked hands and skirt unravelling at the hem, the fowl at her feet glaring with their mindless lizard eyes. But he will know her for her eye, and the way it looks up defiantly. The image contracts, tightens, curls in on itself until it is a vividly-coloured needlepoint of rage and betrayal, a thing that makes his chest hurt and his serpents coil in dismay. Their mother would find her eventually, he reasons. But against his better judgement, he would not be the one to give her away. He would not begrudge her this peace, and he hates himself for it. 

 

⚕️

 

When Melina returns, she is dusty from the road, and her hair smells like blood orange and mace. In the brief light she is radiant, even jovial. He can see their mother in her, as he always wished her to be, free of shadow and guile. He would like to inhale from her cloak and keep the scent. Fresh from the road is the only time she seems happy, and clear-eyed. No shadow lurks behind her gaze. Perhaps next time he will join her, he thinks, if she will have him. If their mother permits. Lately she has been riding with bookkeepers and historians rather than wardens, some Hornsent and some not. It worries him, that she trusts a Hornsent enough to venture out unaccompanied by his own loyal blade.

He helps her dismount. “What did you find?” he asks, while a groom stables her palfrey.

“Only rumours in the dark,” she replies, the last syllable muffled when she uses her teeth to take off her gloves. “But no more than wildfires.” He can tell she has been as far south as the deep woods by the sharpness on her. Firewood in autumn, ripeness come from the wet ground at harvest, and vegetation rotting, thinning. Leaves sloughing away to reveal their lacy skeletal insides. A latticework crown for her, bursts of orange plump as jewels; fondly he remembers bending over his mother’s secret map as a child, her little hands splayed over the roughly-sketched forest. 

As she begins to unknot the front of her cloak, she hesitates. She glances around, her single eye narrowed, head swerving lightly. Her hair is the bronze sea of grass in the white sun. She lowers her voice, and suddenly they are children again, small and conspiratorial in a loud, rattling world. 

“But when I rode north-”

“You went north?”

“What I saw in the north,” she says again, barely a whisper, “I do not fully understand.”

He lowers his head to hers, waiting. An army, he thinks. He can feel his chest tighten, his skin grow cold. The sorcerers come down from their snowy mountains at last, the Fell God at their back, ready to extinguish their ancient enemies. Stars clawing their way through the night, riding on the back of an all-consuming fire. Are there many settlements in the north? He is trying to remember. They will be crushed - it will be impossible to move enough men so soon, to dig in defensively, not unless the barbarians are willing-

His thoughts snap back into place. If there are settlements in the north, it may not be an external threat. It may be the grumble of malcontents. Traitors. Rebellion. His serpents draw harried arcs through the air. The coiled void inside him stirs. 

He says nothing. His single eye has wandered, his vision grown even blurrier. Melina is lost to him in a yellow haze. Now he brings her back into focus and waits. 

If she has noticed his agitation, she does not address it. “In the north, past the ruins of Rauh, at the edge of the great plateau where offerings were once made to the Crucible - there is a tree.”

He blinks. “A tree?”

“I saw it from afar, on the horizon. It is like nothing I have ever seen.” She makes a generous, arching gesture with both hands, as if to fill in with abstraction what she cannot articulate with words. “It is like someone has removed the sun from the sky and left a golden canopy in its place.”

A warm, inexplicable elation moves through him. “What else?”

“I know it,” she says, expressionless. “It smells of night-blooming jasmine.”  

 

 

---

 

Chapter 6: coil of the hot plate starting to glow

 

Marika labours at the base of the tree: this strange bough in the north, bark smooth despite its monumental size and crowned, like herself, in gold. Melina describes it to her brother in captivated whispers, as though it is a mirage that might disperse if observed for too long. It is not yet visible from Enir-Ilim, and so remains a secret thing of their mother’s creation, visited by her in the night, covertly, when only her children know she is gone. Clustered together, stars and night-flowering jasmine wheel hurriedly through the brief dark. When Marika returns her hands are crusted with dirt, sticky with sap vibrant as molten gold. She smells of resin, and something holy. 

From sharp angles, the Inquisitors and the keepers watch. Though they do not see her make her own path in the night, in the glare of morning they sense her gaze is elsewhere, and not where they wish it: blessing their works, preparing to open the path. Feebly, they try to hound her, to dictate the hours she must sit her stone, vine-braided chair. They wish for her to turn her dove-white wrists to the sky and bleed them for blessings; to bottle and sell the Empyrean, to keep her in a little vial close to their skin, to sprinkle her fluids over crops and inspire them to grow. They wish she would retire from her midnight spectacles and bolt her door after sunset. Instead they find the days unfold in accordance with her desires, and that her allies line her throne in silk cushions, dictate who may kneel before her, and stand like sentries wherever she chooses to tread. Those who wish to clamp down on her are outnumbered by those who exalt her freedom: those she has purchased with her divine promise. Heaven is in the call that summons them by her side. In their pale Belurat towers, the two remaining consuls flounder in their texts while she usurps their authority with writ and miracle - and coin, for the clergy handsomely paid by her trade reforms, and the men she has gathered from the corners of the world and gifted to Messmer so that he might join them as a weapon in her name. 

He is certain the Hornsent must realise it by now: that this saint they have sat in their holiest seat every day moves further and further from their doctrine, further from their control. When she defines heaven, it is in her words, not theirs. On nights when the priests and keepers are restless it is Messmer himself who stands at her door, who guarantees light or darkness when she slips away to tend her tree. He does not know how she travels so fast across the land, like a gust of wind down from the mountains, like a falcon across the great sea of grass. He does not ask; only bows when she returns, dims the torches and listens when she bolts the door quietly behind her, alone with her prayers and schemes which are sometimes one and the same.

Sometimes, without warning, she will take his face in her hands. Beloved, she will call him. Firstborn. She praises his skill with a spear, his learning, the man he has become. He looks away, unable to shed the impression that he is undeserving. If he meets her gaze, if she looks too closely, he fears she will be able to tell he has not managed to quash the flickering abyss behind his remaining eye. Or she will decide, perhaps, that he is simply unworthy of her. In the clouded mirrors and clear water of Enir-Ilim he sees himself, and therein no resemblance to his mother. His limbs are long and his profile grows more hawkish by the day. It is a wonder his serpents do not have the instinct to unknot themselves from his body and soul and leave him behind.

By now, some lowland chieftains have taken their tribes and left. They are hungry to wander, Marika’s favoured warlord explains. They must answer their ancestral call to rove, to trample fields, to seize strongholds and territories and wage bloody war to glorify their own existence. To Marika they pledge to return, banners raised, if she will only give them a struggle worth their zeal. She smiles magnanimously. 

A smattering of clans remains, content to benefit from the Hornsent’s rich lands a while longer. Messmer moves among them with ease, as do many of the hornless who have come to learn from them. But he no longer feels he needs their tutelage. He has, by all accounts, men who serve him - though the term sounds wrong, misplaced to one who has never held a title until now. He is still more bastard, more changeling, more derisively boy than lord. Yet they stand by him, deferent. For the first time he is attended to in a way that is neither patronising nor compelled by obligation. Many come from lowly houses or from far afield. Most are without the Crucible’s physical blessing. In Marika they see the promise of something better, of a path to independence and ennoblement opened now by this saint neither Hornsent nor god but something else, a dislocated numinous that will carve out a place for them at the centre of a new world. These men believe in his mother’s rule, her vision of a kingdom to come, and so by extension his own. 

No one has ever asked after the paradise of his own mind. They simply take it as a mirror of hers. The singular definition. The right one. 

For Messmer they don the snake on their surcoats, a great honour, and those more scholarly than martial serve Melina, who neither wants servants nor wishes to refuse their honest service and so receives them at a sort of impasse where they drift, like well-meaning spectres, through the halls of learning alongside her. 

He does not tell his mother that it was Huw who said to him, “They will come by faith alone, but they will only stay if you offer them a future.”

The statement had brought him to a halt. “What future do the hornless want?”

“One with a seat of honour,” the man had replied. When they sparred he sometimes became talkative, his good humour infectious. “A world without masters.” 

Messmer, later, forgives Huw’s old boast. He is as good with a twinblade as he’d claimed.  

 

⚕️

 

The Black Keep, in a state of pitiable disrepair beyond the athenaeum, is scoured clean. He knows they have been chipping away at it for years - Marika allocating what she believes Melina deserves to restore the old fortress in fits and starts. It chafes the Hornsent to see labour redirected from Enir-Ilim, and so only the hornless are sent to work under the keep’s shadow, and no material is spared: iron is hammered flat and dull in place of glinting silver, and wood goes unlacquered. White marble is proscribed beyond the tower, so black onyx and basalt pile up in the masons’ yard. By consequence a little settlement springs up within the keep’s first dilapidated ring: modest homes, smithies, an open-ceiling house of worship - even a brewery for the quarrymen and carpenters, blacksmiths and labourers who work without end, without the sacred hymns of Enir-Ilim in the air, and without the sting of an Inquisitor’s whip at their back. Flocks of sheep dot the surrounding fields like flecks of wool. Wells are dug and new roads paved, including the main one from Belurat, and another, narrower one that forks up from the south-east. Marika tasks Melina with naming many of these new roads, and Messmer recalls the map from their childhood: to share a name with a place is to be immortal. But if roads can be washed away by floods, how easily can names be scrubbed from this land?  

Marika has bid the Hornsent bring all remaining greatjars to the Black Keep, as they no longer serve. The Greater Potentates grumble: they are always crafting new recipes, forcing flesh into new shapes. Eventually, some acquiesce - first a slow trickle, and then a steady flow of cracked earthenware arrives at the main gates. Hornless and Hornsent exchange goods for payment; on occasion insults are hurled, fists are employed, and one hornless dies with a dagger in his neck. Marika, to the consuls, suggests Ensis be used as a neutral meeting point, so that the Potentates need not trouble themselves by having their men haul spoiled goods so far north. With these new routes, the old settlement of Moorth flourishes, and to the west the Ellac Greatbridge is reinforced to ensure smooth travel between Belurat and Ensis.  

It is a good pretence to keep the Hornsent from going any further north, to the great cauldron where their ancestors once offered themselves to the Crucible. To the golden tree that hangs, unspoken for, like a second sun just beginning to peek over the horizon. If it is visible from the fortress’s highest tower, he wonders how long until it will be glimpsed from Enir-Ilim, like a stranger approaching from across the realm.  

When he finds Melina she is in the lowest level of the Keep, far below the athenaeum perfumed by mould and parchment. Here a great mechanism to funnel water from the Unte lake has been built so that the rooms where jars are opened may be flooded, and then drained, to wash away the detritus. When he arrives the grey stones are slick with blood thinned to a garish pink. Yellow-white fat clumps in crevices, and what looks to be black bile is visible splashed against the rough sides of smaller jars. It smells of sandalwood and gore. 

Melina, a kerchief around her head and cloth over her mouth, is watching a Hornsent deftly open a glistening mass of gristle and flesh with a thin silver tool. Around her, like artists following the stroke of their master, scholars - hornless and Hornsent alike - scratch furiously across their wax tablets. He finds the clerics here to be the kind of gossipers who make eye contact from across the room, out of earshot, where it is impossible to know what they speak of. Like a tangle of eels in a barrel, he can watch them from above but he can never manage to grasp their slippery viciousness. 

The tallest among them is a creature he recognises - Jori, a Hornsent with a prominent crown of ringed horns the colour of bleached grain. He has been told they are a gifted cleric from a noble line of Inquisitors, and their presence gives Melina’s endeavours some legitimacy in the minds of the tower-dwellers. He would remind Melina they do not need Hornsent approval to do as their mother wills - but he knows she keeps this creature around for other reasons. When Melina cannot penetrate the veil of his disinterest, she turns to Jori. He, Messmer, pleads that he has other obligations - to the keep, to his men-at-arms. To their mother. All the while Jori strides after Melina without question, whispering in her ear from beneath oversized robes, with a voice and a disposition that seem to Messmer too fastidious for the work of a future Inquisitor. Jori rides with her south, procures specimens for her, speaks in her stead to their fellow clerics. Jori, a Hornsent of high birth, even bows to address him. But when he thinks of Jori he conjures only their first meeting, that time in the athenaeum many years ago, when he reached out to touch the splendours Melina showed him - and they, rigid and unsmiling scholar, turned to him and warned: Do not touch what is sacred. 

He acknowledges the scholar with a tilt of his head. Jori, looking chastened, detaches themself from Melina. 

“You ought to have come yesterday,” she tells him, stepping back and pulling the cloth away from her mouth. “It was still clean.” 

Barefaced, he almost takes the cloth from her. He knows he is failing to disguise his own disgust. 

“What progress?”

“We have identified numerous ingredient combinations that are not recorded in any existing Potentate’s ledger.” She looks over to the farthest end of the slanted room, where all the fleshy bits that cannot be fully drained away gather in a corner like naughty children banished from sight. “But we have yet to separate one so cleanly that it lives long enough to remember itself.”

He wants to ask her exactly what this means. Instead he says, “Are you not afraid she grows impatient with you?”

“I am not afraid of her.”

Foolish, he thinks bitterly. That is not what I taught you. 

“Come upstairs,” she says. She is looking at his serpents, winding around him in agitation. “The air must taste foul here.” 

They climb for what feels like an age. She takes him to an area open on the southern ramparts, where a breeze winds through the tall, arched passageways. Where the walls are not covered in shelves they are hung with tapestries in the typical Belurat fashion, patterned in whirling golden abstractions and kaleidoscopic rosettes fringed with ochre. A few lamps burn, though there is little need of light, but he prefers this whiff of ash and brass in place of the theatre of flesh they have just departed. In the adjacent chamber there is a small hearth, and here she shows him an ink she has newly developed with Jori: a deep, glorious black that does not disappear, even when burned. He flinches away. There is temptation there, at the tip of his fingers, to try. To prove her wrong. Fire leaves nothing behind. 

She takes his dismay as discomfort, and so after a short absence comes back with food for both of them. When she lays the glazed bowl before him he tries not to look ungrateful. It is, at least, a different colour than the odorous pus that oozes from cracked jars. 

“I have been reading about the Numen,” she says. Our ancestors, unspoken. “And our distant cousins, the Nox. It is a long and sordid history of leaderless people looking to make themselves a god. To crown their own invention. One they could control, steer as one steers an ox with a cart, or to pasture. One they could drive off a cliff, if the situation called for it.” 

He eats reluctantly. Scorpion meat is dense, the odour gamey - yet it has a rich, fatty texture that reminds him of fish. It is said a few daring epicureans allow the poison to remain in the scorpion’s liver during preparation, to enhance the flavour.

“Were they promised a paradise, too?”

She shrugs. “It seems the Nox were more interested in knowledge than utopia. The Numen-” She shakes her head. “It is still a mystery to me, why such a powerful race would allow their shamans to live among us, only to abandon them to the fate of cattle.”

“Among us,” he echoes. “If we are not their direct descendants, then who are we?”

She watches him eat in silence. After a while she says, “In the legends, the scorpion is said to be the symbol of usurpers.”

Whose legends? he thinks of asking, but a mouthful of stew stops him. A wave of affection churns in him, that she has been so long in her tomes she must have all the world’s stories saved up like silver horn tender in her pockets. 

He wonders if clever ears prick up at their exchange, or if the endless creasing of parchment muffles their voices. He should rise to shut the door, dismiss those Hornsent scholars who still linger around corners and behind tall shelves, who pretend their only loyalty is to their tomes. He sets his spoon down and swallows. “I wish you would not speak so brazenly about it.”

“About what?”

“Who is to rule.”

She gives a little hiccuping laugh. “Is that all you think about? Her throne?”

“I see her suffer for it,” he replies. “As she suffered for us. It is more than we deserve.” He gestures up to the vaulted ceilings. “All this is yours by way of Mother. What more do you want?” She reaches for you and you pull away. She loves you and you recoil.  

He expects her to be sharp, to raise her voice. She only looks away. “When you bask in her light, you are restored by it. I am drowned. Do not begrudge me that I cannot wallow in her love as you do.”

“I do not,” he lies. “It’s your hiding that shames me.”

She falters. Like a faint breath he feels her surprise, then the soreness from the blow. “Mother wields you in her right hand like a sceptre because you are suited to it. I am of more value here.”

He bristles. “Is that why you cower? Do you think if she does not see you, she will forget you?”

She stands up brusquely. The table shakes, the bowls and spoons rattle: silver against stone. In the space between them, the warmth of her anger mingles with the chill of his dread. He has laid it before her, plainly, and she has made it clear they are not twins in fear. She does not share his terror of being forgotten, out of sight. Terror that Marika might turn her radiance away, and in her absence bring night upon him. 

Melina wavers, and he seizes on it. One of his serpents brings itself close to her face. She regards it passively. 

“Forgive me,” he ventures. “But you know what lives inside us. So does she, and yet she toils for our sake. Takes apart and rearranges the world so that we may live above scorn.” He pauses. Then, hesitantly: “I think she can one day make us clean.” 

It is only because his serpent is so close that he can see the subtle change in her face. Something in the prophetic stillness laughs at him, sad and regretful. For a moment he almost believes she will open her other eye. 

She says, “I think we are lucky she did not drown us.” 

⚕️

 

Huw, who only asks Messmer to spar when he has something important to divulge, does so because the clang of their weapons foils potential eavesdroppers. It is a way for him to get his mouth close to Messmer’s ear, to impart information too sensitive to be shared over a strong cup of wine, or within the echoing confines of a public square. He crosses polearm with spear, and beneath the noise of splintering wood his voice carries, small but clear, with news from the city: more hornless have pledged, in secrecy, to his mother; a text circulates among temple clergy proposing restrictions on the barbarians’ consumption of the tower-city’s resources; coin has gone missing from a country monastery’s coffers, and found its way into Belurat in the form of augmentations for an Inquisitor who opposes Melina’s oversight of the athenaeum. Sometimes they are no more than rumours, and often there is little he can do but pass the message to his mother, and watch her work her influence. Other times he is willing to interfere himself: to oversee the redistribution of grain allocations to better favour certain guilds, or quietly engineer the disappearance of a writ crafted to undermine his mother’s growing sway. Always he is grateful, and sees that Huw is rewarded, materially or otherwise. At his direction hornless are installed as servants in high-ranking Hornsent households, and their messages move covertly from Huw to Messmer to his mother up on her shining dais: eyes and ears sympathetic to Marika, able to anticipate how the Hornsent might move with her, or against her, when she exercises her authority. Huw’s rise in favour does not go unnoticed among fellow hornless, who ply him with questions, favours and petitions. In return, a bag of coin, or bill of favour, is passed discreetly to Huw, with Messmer’s own verbal assurance: My mother will reward this. 

My lord, would you like me to sing vespers for you? the young man asks, tapping Messmer lightly, sardonically with his polearm. Messmer turns his weapon aside and replies, as he did when they first met, I have little need for prayer. Loyalty will suffice.

So there is no doubt in his mind the day Huw tells him, after a particularly rough bout, that Melina should be careful. 

“Careful?” Messmer crouches in the dirt, all pretence of distance forgotten. “Are you telling me this because it is true, or because you just took a blow to the head?”

Huw sits up and rubs the left side of his jaw. Already a welt is beginning to form, marring the symmetry of his face. He turns from Messmer to spit, and blood pools bright red against a smattering of parched yellow grass. He wipes his mouth. “Have I misled you before?”

“No.”

Messmer rises and offers him a hand, but Huw does not take it. As he gets up his gaze lingers on the Hornsent who observe from the amphitheatre’s lower cavea. Without looking at Messmer, he mutters, “They will think less of you.”

Quietly they move beneath an archway crowned by a bronze bird, taking cover under the shade of its wings. Backs to the arena, they make a show of cleaning the dust and grime from their weapons, and washing their hands in the water trickling loudly from lion-mouthed spouts. 

Messmer keeps his head down when he speaks. “What have you heard?”

“You know much of it already,” Huw replies. He is studying his reflection in a basin, wiping away the blood that has run down his chin. “Canonists have sided with the Greater Potentates, and do not appreciate your sister dismantling their sacred rituals.”

“Rituals is a generous term. My mother has made the jars obsolete.”

“To some.” Huw wets his hair and smooths it back from his face. “The Potentates feel it is they who are being made obsolete, and the canonists resent your mother for undermining their practices. To them, jars are the natural order of the world: always improving upon nature’s gift, as the Crucible does. Undoing that is insult, if not heresy.” He turns to Messmer, dark gaze frank. “They would stuff you in a jar, too, if they thought it could exalt the Crucible.”

It is neither threat nor reproach, simply observation, but it makes a fury rise in Messmer anyway: red, accusatory. A heat in the palm of each hand. Without warning he takes Huw’s face, turns it fully towards him. Unlike his mother’s, his own nails are short, blunted. There is a moment of surprise on the other man’s face, and a moment of agony on his own - the memory of scales falling away in icy, opalescent sheafs - but instead of fire, the sudden heat escapes in gold: a bright gleam from his hand to Huw’s battered jaw. He has not used his mother’s gift in so long he scarcely remembers the amber scent of her holy magic. 

The startled silence lasts only a moment. Huw is the first to break their strange inertia: he brings his hand up to Messmer’s, and with exquisite slowness, removes it from his face. “They will see,” he whispers, voice devoid of emotion. But already the swelling has diminished, the streak of red cooled to plum.  

Chagrined, Messmer plunges both hands into the basin of water. A hiss of steam rises from the surface. His serpents sway low to the earth. “Melina,” he says, when he feels his voice is steady enough. “Is she in danger?”

Huw sits down on a low wooden stool and begins to unlace his boots, while Messmer’s serpents watch. “I do not know.”

“Look at me.”

He does. Messmer almost laughs. What is he looking to find in the face of a man who can change demeanour at will, masked or not? But Huw sounds contrite when he says, “My lord, if I spoke with any certainty, I would be lying. I know what the Hornsent are willing to endure to reach the Gate. But I also know what they are capable of. What they would risk, if only to patch their damaged pride.”

“They would not dare. We - my mother - would raze the city.”

“You were born among them,” Huw counters, “as I was. You give them too much credit - my lord.” He adds the title hastily, to soften any perceived insolence. The formality does little to mollify Messmer. It makes him feel oddly distant from this man, whose subjection is not so different from his own. 

“To harm the Empyrean’s child-”

For the first time, he sees Huw moved to sincere anger. He sits up straight. “They mutilated you, did they not?” 

He reaches out to touch a serpent’s wing before realising what he is doing, and quickly withdraws his hand. Neither serpent moves, and for a moment Messmer is detached from them, their shared instinct warring with his own need to compel their complacency. He grimaces - not at Huw’s brash gesture, but at the prospect of all the world knowing his humiliation that night in the village. 

Huw continues, his hands occupied elsewhere. “To harm you or Melina is to insult your mother’s authority without confronting her directly. They still depend on her to open the Gate - only they wish they could force her hand now, rather than indulge her until that day comes.”

“They have little choice but to wait.”

“There are zealots among the clergy, those protective of the Hornsent doctrine your mother has been flouting for her benefit. Perhaps they feel they have nothing to lose. Only martyrdom to gain.” Huw sits back, but his body is still taut. “Be wary of those who keep close to Melina.”

Messmer recalls them easily enough: those few Hornsent clerics on the outskirts of society who have spent their lives maintaining the specimen library, who never wrapped themselves up in the intrigue of Belurat, chasing holy titles and brass favour. They smell of camphor and old parchment, and he has always found them tiring and pretentious. But not threatening. 

“They are scholars of the Black Keep,” he says, “stationed in the athenaeum. If they did not approve of her presence, or her interest in the jars, they would have made it known a long time ago. But they have served her for some time now.”

Huw's eyes narrow. “Hornsent have only ever served their own interest.”

Silence clouds the space between them, like heat rising from the sun-bleached earth. Calls from the amphitheatre float through the archways to their shaded refuge, riding on the clang of steel and splintering of wood. Everything smells of sweat and iron, salt and blood on the tongue, the crunch of sand between teeth. Messmer looks to the arena centre, details whited-out in the glare, where the eyes of a hundred Hornsent stare down at foreign warriors and lowly hornless training, observing, learning. Presuming to wield power. 

After a moment, he notices Huw has leaned forward, and is staring at his serpents. 

“You may ask,” Messmer says mildly. He is reticent about it, but he feels he owes Huw, who has worked tirelessly for his mother’s cause and brought him more valuable insight than he would have thought to ask for. “I will not take offence.”

Huw blinks up at him, unmoving, then shifts his gaze back to the serpents. “Are they - you? That is, are you-”

“Yes,” he says. He has long looked for a way to articulate it, though no one has asked. Melina has always seemed to understand - perhaps she is the only one who does. “I suppose they are like having another limb - something still connected to you, naturally. Or like the part of you that breathes - you do not think of it, or need to summon it. Even when you do not control it, it is there. They are pure instinct. Sometimes I struggle against that; but mostly we are aligned, so much I cannot distinguish them from each other. From myself.”

Huw nods with a kind of respectful ambiguity and remains silent. Messmer cannot tell if he is any more reassured, but he sees no need to mention the little black-edged ember the serpents tend behind his ribcage, the one they help to control, to burn low. He has managed to keep it dormant for some time now, as Melina has managed to placate her own. It is only their mother’s divinity that will free them from themselves, he knows. The void in him coils and watches and plots, he is certain - and unlike his own serpents, he cannot hear the abyss’s grievances, lest he listen too closely and they become his own.  

 

⚕️

 

His company swells to the size of a brigade; then to a battalion. But they are not at war, and so it seems useless to use such terms. Loosely he thinks of them as knights in service to his mother, though no hierarchy or order yet exists to raise them to nobility. When it does, he will make Huw a lieutenant, or a knight captain - some rank that will keep him close, as a second and as a bridge between his men and himself. At times he finds himself wrestling with revulsion at wanting this attention. Revulsion at being among them, and no better. But the alternative is to stand apart, a monstrous thing perched atop a void. And so he finds himself seeking adulation from any mouth except his mother’s, as though it might confirm his humanity, his separateness from the curse under which he was born. He throws ash over his own flame, burying it until such time may come that others no longer see it with distrust, but embrace it.  

Keepers, the most lauded warriors among the Hornsent, see this plebeian militia and scowl. Hornsent might has always been about individual prowess, warriors as both vassals and embodiments of the Crucible’s blessing. Now his mother has accomplished what has not been done since before the Hornsent settled the hills and valleys, since their ancient heroes fought gods and giants on their behalf: she has assembled a standing army. The political manoeuvres she once attempted by divinely-inspired suggestion she can now enforce with Messmer’s men. Little need for gatehouses and tax collectors if Marika’s own son roves the countryside seizing resources on behalf of the capital, with a force that spans the roadside and the river, wielding a spear twice as tall as himself, recruiting where he can and erecting statues of his mother where folk still keep to the old ways a little too closely. 

Charters and decrees are issued to ensure the Hornsent view this as protecting their own interests - and that they, in turn, are still assured the Empyrean’s interests align with their own. These military endeavours seem to please Marika in a way he has not seen before: she is reassured that he commands respect, that men stand at attention in his presence. That she will not have to fetch him, beaten and bloody, from a dirt road again. That he is no longer a charitable afterthought. 

In Enir-Ilim, the tide of petitioners no longer surges before her at the whim of priests, but is held back by her own ushers, wardens who flank her opulent seat. They are as generously paid as they are blessed, they who were once scorned for their absence of horns, who now swim in the rich red and black velvet of Messmer’s heraldry, sworn to his mother, to their god ascendant over country. Over the world. 

In the seclusion of her chambers, he tells his mother of Huw’s warning: the Hornsent will profess loyalty but may strike at Melina in secret. They are resentful of her position, embittered by her stance on the jars, even if they no longer serve, and by her sway over the athenaeum, even if the specimen library was a sorry, forgotten place before Marika let her daughter restore it. As the words leave his mouth he is moved by the sheer hypocrisy of it, by the gratitude these creatures owe his sister, and how he imagines they spit at her feet instead. 

Marika watches him from her little dais, seated motionless beside her loom; only now the table is lacquered wood and marble and the loom is a giant thing of complex hinges and cascading colours. The fresco of her glorious ascension still endures above them, painted into the alcove, presiding over the place where she once dug her nails into his flesh and wrenched glittering scales from him. Now as he stands before her, she watches him with an intensity he has seen before in the hawks that drift over the bronze sea of grass beyond Belurat, and in the wild cats that stalk the city walls at night, made of ink and appetite. 

“What do you believe?”

He is surprised by her question. He’d been expecting her to erupt at the possibility of such a betrayal and to know already, in her great prescience, how to instruct him forward. Instead, at her invitation, he takes a moment to consider. If the Hornsent act, they may do so just before, or as the Gate opens. They may strike earlier if they think it will bring Marika’s dominance to an end and so precipitate heaven. They may do so if they still believe he and Melina to be a curse, a stain on their saint, an unwelcome side-effect of their perfect concoction. Why else, he wonders, would they have attacked him in that village so many years ago, if not to make a point: we will not bend the knee to monsters of our own making. 

“I think,” he says at last, “that it is not enough to claim a throne. It must be held.” 

 

 

 

---

 

Chapter 7: a pure bold longing to be gone

 

 

A starless night when Melina next returns from an excursion. Autumn fleeing winter’s bite, already the air not as it should be, with none of the season’s damp reassurance. Only a dry hiss cold enough to numb fingers. 

He greets her at the Keep’s southern gatehouse and watches her retinue dismount. Their beasts expel great cloudy gusts, frothing at the mouth. They have been riding hard. Melina slides from her horse; stumbles. He is quick enough to keep her upright. He feels a sudden flicker of guilt, where in his chest his own ember keeps him warm as a hearth. When they were children and she twined her fingers through his, they were never anything but cold. 

She is wrapped in her cloak like a babe, though for once she does not look ready to thrash free. Up close, in the torchlight, he can see the glimmer of dew like a splash across her reddened face. She rubs at swollen eyes, then hides her fingers in her cloak again to warm them. Lost in folds of wool and lambskin, she looks as if she is retreating from something. Her scholars give them space - all except Jori, who hovers close by, their own robes and cloak tangled by the wind. 

Without greeting the horned cleric, he asks his sister, “Did you go north again?” 

She shakes her head. 

“Well?”

When her hand emerges to lower the fur collar from her mouth, it is ashen and trembling. “No,” she says.

“We went south,” Jori offers. “To the deep woods. There were wildfires.”

Messmer does not look to them, but his serpents do, all four eyes. He himself only holds up a hand, and does not turn his face from Melina. “Wine,” he says suddenly. “Warm.” The cleric echoes the sentiment into the hall. After a pause, a draught is brought in by an attendant. Messmer takes it, hands it to Melina himself. It smells as spiced as its burgundy colour suggests. She brings her nose close to it, then recoils slightly. There is mace, he realises, the same scent woven into the fibres of her cloak: same as the woods she loves so much. Beneath, something pungent. 

“I told you to take my men with you,” he says, while trying to give her space. But she does not appear injured: only shaken. Scared. “What did you find?”

Cautiously, she wets her lips on the edge of the silver cup.

“Brimstone,” she says at last. 

 

⚕️

 

 

She spends the night pacing the athenaeum by candlelight while he watches. She rips tomes down from high shelves, flips through them so quickly she might tear the pages. When she shuts them she does so loudly, and leaves them scattered across tables and low stools. A few scholars scurry about her, bringing her what she asks. When she stops to note something in ink she confers with Jori first, in a low voice, their heads together, so close he is afraid the cleric’s horns will pierce her. 

After a while he tires of it: her secretive worry, or this cleric’s privileged place at her side. Perhaps both. “Will you tell me,” he says at last, “or will I have to go south myself?”

From across the room Melina puts down her quill and looks over at him. In the trembling firelight her face is haggard, like a Hornsent mask intended for an ill-fated character. 

“Do not,” she says quietly. Pleading. 

Now that he has her attention he sits up, and leans forward across the table. “When Mother returns from the ruins,” he presses, “there is brimstone on her. When you took off your cloak, I could smell it on you. Every time you brush past me, I can taste it. It is the exhale of a star: Mother’s own.”

A hush. Melina extracts herself from the scuttling scholars and makes her way over to him, out of earshot. When he looks over to make sure her cleric does not get too close, she waves him off. “Jori knows about the tree,” she says. “But there is nothing in that forest that resembles jasmine.”  

Knows? They themselves know so very little of their mother’s creation, so what more could this blighted scholar know? He does not stop to ask, but later, in the grim silence of her absence, he will have to wonder what else Jori knows about them. 

Remaining seated, he takes one of her hands in his, and warms it with his ember. Instinctively she tries to pull away before contrition stops her. He feels her relax, but only slightly.  

“Are you afraid of my fire, now?”

“No,” she whispers. “Only my own. I have always thought it to be inescapable, but -” She passes her other hand over her eye. “In the woods I glimpsed a yellow fire. I felt it. I had only to look at it, and I knew I would be destroyed.”

Her tone is subdued, matter-of-fact. There is no hint of exaggeration. They are both such intimate bedfellows of fire that the vagueness of her description disturbs him. 

“The stirring of another god?”

“Why, then, is it so familiar?”

He grips her hand. “Mother must know. I will come with you. You need not stand before her without me.” 

She nods reluctantly, like she is struggling against a great weight. From the corner, the horned clerics watch as he rises and pulls her into an embrace. “To whom else can we turn? Trust her, as I do.”

After a moment he lets go, and holds her at arm’s length to examine her face. Her eye is red, still swollen, and her cheeks flushed. Every few seconds she sucks back her bottom lip, biting it until her mouth resolves into a cherry-bright downturn. She looks young, lost. In need of safeguarding. Affection comes, possessive and protective at once, and he does not dismiss it. “Hush,” he murmurs. “When you are vexed you cry enough for the both of us.”

She wipes her face hurriedly, resentment at the corner of her eye. “Not since we were children.” Then she angles herself carefully, so the clerics across the room do not see. “Will she listen?”

“Mother?” He frowns. “How could she not? We are her children.”

A little shudder moves through her, the colour of dusk. “I fear we cannot be her children forever.” 

 

⚕️

 

In their private audience, he has never seen Marika so sombre, so grave. Melina gives a halting, hesitant description of what she and her scholars witnessed, but her few jumbled words are enough to spark disquietude in their mother. She broods in her chair, lacing and unlacing her fingers, rings chiming softly like bells at the day’s dying. She looks as one who, having lived their entire life in glowing health, is suddenly and rudely reminded of debilitating sickness. 

When they press her, asking if it could be an outer god, she only looks past them, to the horizon. Every limb has a shadow, she tells them finally. Every life-giving impulse is stalked by death; every joy chased by the spectre of self-destruction. In her incertitude, a trace of helplessness, and it makes him blanch. There is nothing she is incapable of, and no god has yet managed to kick the throne out from under her. But whatever has stirred in that forest, it makes her weak. He sees in her the same dread he harbours: that the world turns against her, schemes to remove her, to block her from her apotheosis. To undo the utopia she has been so carefully nurturing since she broke the seal of her great holy jar. 

He says, the roads may be barricaded, the area fortified. The threat identified. But when he thinks of his own men succumbing to whatever so frightened Melina, he falters. He imagines them dispatched south, blind, unprepared. He imagines them dead on the road, bloated corpses under a carpet of brilliant orange leaves, lichen on their bones and mushrooms unfurling from their skulls. He imagines them burning. He knows that if he goes to his mother now, wounded, afraid, she will take him in her arms and comfort him, rock him as she would a babe, let him bow his head to her shoulder. It is no fault of yours, she will tell him, and other things he will want to hear but know to be untrue. And so he wills himself not to go to her. 

A missive follows Melina and Jori back to the Black Keep. The Inquisitors, Marika has decided, will be dispatched in number to study the threat. They will barricade the trade routes in and out of the territory, and push deep into the forest. They will endeavour to understand. Though Marika does not have the power of a consul, she promotes Jori to First Inquisitor and tasks them with leading this expedition. 

Melina, astonished, bereft, comes to him for solace. She will not weep in Marika’s arms, he knows, nor beg. She would rather lie down and die out of spite. When her shock begins to dwindle he comforts her; and as when they were children she thrashes, rails, beats her fists like the heavens have robbed her. She looks at him, red-faced and sorrowful, and asks, Can you not change her mind? He expects her to go to Marika in a rage, to break the blown-glass baubles that surround her throne and tear down the blue-green vines that hang above her like a perfumed halo. He expects her to open her palm and reveal there the face of Death in a little spark of black flame. 

But when she is again summoned to kneel before their mother, she is still and silent as the grave. She is outside herself, face so blank it belongs to no one. It reminds him that in Marika’s presence they are all washed of colour, of resistance. Their curses, their fires, their anger cedes to her. Even their names are derivative of hers, syllables less puissant; weak synonyms that do not convey a concept’s full meaning. He studies their profiles, side by side, the repulsion and attraction of their blood ties, and thinks perhaps children are no more than mistranslations of their parents. One-to-one meanings that, over time, change and grow to take on their own significance as they drift further from their point of origin. 

He has always known it, Melina’s burning desire to step away, leave all this behind. A red-gold longing to be gone. To untie herself like a boat from the quay of their mother’s grand designs and be carried off, a pale ship in the night, by some other current. 

 

⚕️

 

Instead she is tethered, hung with ballast, weighed down by their mother’s hand: she is made consul. 

My daughter, Marika declares, is a jewel among men. Heed her counsel as you would mine, for she is of me, and speaks with my voice. 

At the foot of her throne, they protest: she has no horns. No destiny foretold. An accident, a piece of Empyrean flesh fallen away like dead skin. 

Marika gathers them in Enir-Ilim - every Hornsent of consequence, every head of a noble household, every revered warrior, every Inquisitor, every guildmaster. The two remaining consuls, whose power stood to keep Marika’s in check, now stand at the foot of her throne. 

She looks down at them and says, These are the new laws. Let go of the old ones, the ones from an unsaved world. These are the hours of new belief, of faith rewarded.

A swell of protest erupts below Enir-Ilim, in the streets of Belurat. They are held back by Messmer’s men, and by those loyal to his mother, those willing to accept such an unnatural order if it means paradise. The violence in the low streets does not make it up to the tower, but he sees evidence of it later - tables in the market overturned and bolts of cloth trampled; shards of vases and cracked stone hurled in anger; shattered windows and split wood. A decorative fountain is defiled, its sculpted animals viciously beheaded, and water leaks from fissured stone into the muddy, unpaved streets. He scowls: even what little beauty they have, the Hornsent destroy.

On the day Melina is to be anointed and presented to the people, he draws Huw aside. “Take the men,” Messmer tells him. “Do what is necessary to keep the roads clear, and the tower entrance secure. To quell dissent.”

Huw, in the black and red heraldry of his loyalists, does not wield a weapon within the city walls. He frowns up at Messmer. “Bloodshed at this hour will not benefit your mother’s cause. Nor your sister’s. What if the objections persist?”

“The barbarians do not keep Enir-Ilim sacred. They will cleave to whoever promises them glory, and it will please them to spill blood.” 

Huw gives him a sidelong look. “You assume the hornless hold Enir-Ilim sacred as well.”

“Enir-Ilim is a tool of my mother’s ascension - and today, for this purpose, so is my sister. That is the only loyalty I ask of you.” He glances at the other man’s black-gloved hands, and hesitates. “Do not sully your hands if there’s no need.”     

In the end, there is none. The barbarians prowl the lower city, on edge, and the tower entrance is barricaded - but no riots erupt. In the upper levels of Belurat, spectacles in honour of Marika’s destiny are given freely, and those who attend sit on silks and furs, are fed delicacies long out of season, and drink the finest spirits once reserved for clerics and landowners alone. 

Above, in Enir-Ilim, Messmer is perched by his mother’s throne while Melina is presented to Hornsent society like a holy relic. There is a long and orchestrated public display of gift-giving, obeisance, glorification. Embroidered garments, looking-glasses, gemstones are laid before her. She is crowned with a circlet of hammered gold and chalcedony, hung with fat pearls that spill like water over her forehead. Her hands are weighted with rings, ripples of white gold and rubies. Around her shoulders her attendants lay a curtmantle of pearled brocade, too heavy for the kind of long, dry summers known in Belurat. Beneath it is crushed velvet in white and gold, sleeves and collar separated by a latticework of black lace pierced with little shards of onyx that give it a harsh, bright twinkle, sharp enough to pierce collarbones. Belurat’s textile merchants gift her cloth-of-gold dripping with beaded tassels. The metalworkers present her with girandole earrings of pierced silver set with flat-cut garnets. Beneath their weight she bows her head, and her circlet tilts, a burst of faceted light in the yellow sun.

In one hand she holds a celestial globe of gilt, crowned with the silver-spired miniature of Enir-Ilim, and in the other she grips a sunburst monstrance with interlocking rings. Even the barbarians offer her the rare, colourful hide of a beast, and a splendidly-carved axe said to have felled a great wyrm in the west. She stands before the people encrusted, immobile, like a jewel not yet prised from the earth, and buried under her crown and robes she visibly shrinks, as if their touch were poison. Strung around her throat like a hand is a gold pendant, and in its topaz frame is the delicate miniature portrait of their mother, her noble profile carved from pearl.  

 

⚕️

 

It goes on for a fortnight: the festivities, the performances, the effort to placate dissent. Marika has opened both her own personal stores and Hornsent coffers, and so there are fewer and fewer observers who can claim, objectively, they are not benefitting from the anointment of the Empyrean’s progeny. Most of the dissenters are the ideologues Huw warned him of: clerics and Inquisitors of rank and zeal. Some, he learns later, have abandoned their posts and left Belurat entirely, slipping through the gates in the loud confusion of nighttime revelries. They cannot abide it, and so think to return once Marika opens the Gate at last. Picturing it makes the ember in his chest leap: traitors marching back into the city triumphantly, stepping over the shoulders of those loyal to the Empyrean to reclaim their place at the peak of Hornsent society. When he thinks of them, he runs his tongue across his teeth. He does not know how much longer his mother needs to divine Enir-Ilim’s pearl-white path up to the Gate, a sliver of holiness still floating above them - but he knows if those Hornsent who deny his sister return, they will not reenter the city limits. This he will assure himself. 

“You should have stopped them at the gates,” he tells Huw, in the days that follow. His voice flickers with displeasure. “They should not have been permitted to leave.”

Huw’s response, as always, is measured. “With what would I have stopped them? Hornless cannot wield weapons within the city walls.”  

“I cannot rewrite those laws.”

“Can’t you? Your sister is a consul, now.” His tone deftly skims insolence and slides into pragmatism. “More men stationed at the main gates would do us no harm, either.”  

Melina, who has been compelled to appear beside her mother in all her consul’s gifts and trappings for the duration of the fete, is finally released. She emerges from beneath her treasures like a wraith, pale and unsubstantial, and retreats to their old chambers on the lower levels of Enir-Ilim. Even as she sheds her jewels and sable, her hair is still strung with the remnants of a wispy, ghost-white flower. Gently he helps comb the smoky petals from her head. Their residue smells sweet and powdery, and pressed between his fingers the pollen leaves a dusting pure and confectionary.  

Their old rooms, augmented since their rise in standing, still bear the stuffy, secretive quality of myrrh and silence. Seated before a clouded mirror, her reflection looks up at his. “What will happen to the athenaeum? To the specimens?”

He frowns and untangles another translucent petal from her hair. He has been thinking about the war supplies they might have bought with the value of all her consul’s treasures - there are plenty of chalices to be melted down - but he alone is planning for war in his mind, and no one else. Even Marika has been regarding Melina with uncharacteristic indulgence, like a mother admiring her daughter’s dowry. Those loyal to Marika have spread the word that nothing has changed: the Empyrean is still destined to lead them to divinity. Dissent in the city has died down. He has read those reports from the Inquisitors gone south and they are uninteresting, sceptical. The leaves have turned and the forest is calm. The world spins in her direction again, and Marika is radiant.  

“No doubt you will have to remain here more than you would like. The athenaeum once managed without you. Your scholars will do so again.”

Melina rubs her forehead, where the heavy circlet has left swirling indentations in her skin. “Jori would have been suited to it. They belong in the library, not the field.”

A great honour, the horned scholar had said stiffly, when they departed south. Whether they meant Melina’s new position or their own Inquisitor’s mission, he remains unsure. Respectfully he had wanted to turn away, but instead he had observed their parting embrace - fierce, like grappling with death. 

“You cannot undo what Mother has decreed.” 

“Jori was - is - loyal. They thought it worthwhile, what I was doing.” She shakes her head and winces, as if it hurts to move her neck. “Despite what you think of the Hornsent, not all of them despise us, or see us as a means to an end. Some scholars never truly understood what the jars meant. With Jori, in the specimen library, they learned. They wanted to undo what has been done. In the south…” A pale shudder across her features. “In the south they are wasted, or worse.” 

It feels strangely disembodied to observe her through the mirror, so he lays one serpent across her shoulders. “I need men on the road north, and you are not bound to the Inquisitors. Let them serve our interests, for once.”

“They were serving me in the athenaeum.”

His lips curl. “Hornsent do not consider us worth serving.” His serpent slides down her shoulder, and he tries to ease his tone, relax his face. “Mother let you take pleasure in your books. She gave you time. Now she has raised you to a place of privilege.”

Through his serpent he feels the flash of heat, anger. “Privilege? I will be a mouthpiece for her. The consuls do not take seriously my efforts to undo the jars.”

“But they cannot forbid you from it, either. Your position must keep the Hornsent in check - at least until her time has come.”

“She ought to have named you.”

“I already serve where she needs me. You will be closer to her than I, and have more sway.” 

“Are you jealous?”

“Do not be petty.”

Melina turns her face up to him suddenly, breaking from the mirror. The serpent around her shifts. 

“Mother knows more of the yellow flame than she lets on. The tree, the nature of the magic gifted to her by this falling star - it is different. It is not what we witnessed in the village. There is something else.”

Instead of looking down at her face, he keeps his eye on her reflection. “I know not its nature.”

“Don’t you? The love she bears for you is so great, I thought you would know all her schemes.”

“Do not insult her,” he snaps. Now he looks directly at her. “Not after she has showered you in her favour.” 

Melina laughs. It is a hollow sound. In this light her eye looks dark; overcast. 

“What is she hiding in the north?” 

In truth, he cannot say. The great canopy of gold is evident on the horizon now. At times he thinks he catches something else behind it: a tower on a hill, a great fortress in white and gold, big enough to dwarf Belurat - even Enir-Ilim itself. Yet every time he thinks he sees it, it ripples, like a shadow glimpsed beneath a veil. Sometimes he convinces himself it is nothing but a fragment of his mother’s dreams, an echo of her desires. She has manifested all other things to her, so why not this? 

He does not tell Melina that when their mother learned of the unrest in the forest, she first decided to send his men to investigate. Divine guidance warns me, she had whispered, that a corrupt god will stir if left unchecked. That fire will devour. 

He does not tell Melina that in his moment of weakness, he folded: sought out their mother alone and begged her, in a voice he could not keep steady, not to send his men to die. Not those most loyal to him, those he keeps close, his sole consolation. 

It is a work more suited, he had said, once he could control himself, to the Inquisitors and their talents. 

Gently he puts a hand on Melina’s shoulder, next to his serpent. “Whatever Mother has seeded in the north,” he says to her quietly, “we will keep safe. Do not mourn your Inquisitors, or let yourself be fooled - the Hornsent have no love for us, and we no future with them.”  

 

⚕️

 

Standing before the petitioners who crowd their mother’s throne, he witnesses, for the first time, Melina channel the golden light of their mother. He’d thought her incapable, in the end, though he would never have said so. Simply not gifted, is how he might have put it: not in the way that he is. Too heavily favoured by the dark-coloured flame, by the thing that saps life by her fingertips, that draws light out of the world and into her to extinguish it, instead of giving it freely. But now she bends to anoint the head of a supplicant, a young woman wounded in a Divine Beast Hunt and bids her rise without pain, without suffering; and he understands at last why all this time she has been dismantling the jars, been pressing her hands into them, taking their sacrificial flesh in her grasp and hoping against hope to heal what has been harmed.

Left in the wake of the searing gold from her touch is the outline of a little sapling, carved from pure light.   

There is a part of him that hardens, in that moment, at witnessing her gift expressed in the same form as their mother’s. That Melina has so long rejected this love, this destiny to live in their mother’s light even as she is given every chance at it, every blessing - while he toils in obedience on the precipice of the abyss he cannot step back from. He would blame that familiar, crawling feeling of jealousy on the coiling void, if he could. But he knows himself too well now for such a childish excuse.  

He glances up at his mother, expecting to see adoration painted across her perfect features. But as she observes her daughter, there is a strangeness to Marika’s golden gaze, something resembling anticipation. As though she believes one day Melina will place a hand to a supplicant’s forehead and strike them dead rather than heal them, even by accident - for their mother knows Death lingers in her daughter’s bosom like a sleeping dog, one eye always open. 

 

 

---

 

Chapter 8: red smoke above the red spires

 

 

 

In a gesture of favour, Messmer installs Huw’s father, once an accomplished yeoman of the Divine Beast hunt, to oversee the fortress at Ensis. From this post he will command both new recruits and the supplies that now traverse Hornsent lands in a steady stream, including weapons and armour. Messmer’s own men are well-trained and willing, but they are still poorly outfitted: little more than pikemen in boiled leather. If they waged war tomorrow, those remaining would comb the battlefield for another man’s boots. He wants his men armoured as befits their station, as protectors of the realm. A realm they all acknowledge belongs, first and foremost, to his mother.

Messmer is surprised by Huw’s father. He, Andreas, is a hulking man in shabby civilian garb, and has none of his son’s expressiveness or poise. His hornless face is worn as a slab of dark granite. When he outlines his proposals - to strengthen their position, to exploit the south’s vulnerabilities, to extract resources from the mountainous east -  his voice is quiet, reasoned. But he stands with the firmness of one trained in battle, and when finally he kneels before Marika there is a simple, brutal honesty to his pledge. He speaks like a man who has finally found a god he can serve. 

“Is he pleased with you?” Messmer asks Huw, in the privacy of a chamber requisitioned in upper Belurat. “You serve at my right hand, under my mother’s banners. You have raised yourself to a place of honour, and so your household in turn.”  

Huw, leaning over a map that traces the proposed changes in their supply routes through Ensis, straightens. Over his surcoat he now wears a red sash trimmed in gold: a symbol of his status as Messmer’s second. 

“I suppose he must be,” Huw muses, “though it is not my doing. I thought he would die disgraced, a gaoler.” Idly, he lays an obsidian marker over a crossroads on the map. “It is your hand, not mine, that has pulled him from the lowest pit and restored dignity to our name.” 

The reply is uncharacteristically flat, almost dismissive. Messmer studies his profile. “Do you resent me for this?” 

Is his lieutenant’s surprise feigned? He can never tell. “My lord, on the contrary. I am grateful.” Now Huw turns the full, bright attention of his gaze on Messmer, who wonders what actions - or perhaps favours - might precipitate the kind of gratitude to get Huw on his knees. For his second in command to look up at him from a place of vulnerability, as he once did from the stage, an enigma under heavy lashes and glossy curls, eyes unreadable. 

He buries the thought, but not before indulging in it briefly. “Your father need not abase himself before my mother,” he says, inventing some pretence to look away. He adjusts his mantle while his serpents keep their eyes on Huw. “Under her laws, the hornless need have no masters.” 

“Some can only find their place in service. Others will never submit.” 

“They have all submitted to my mother.” 

Huw smiles reluctantly. “Have they? Perhaps I have misunderstood your blessed sister, then.” 

No, Messmer thinks later, in the presence of his mother and sister. From beneath her heavy consul’s crown, Melina challenges him: what need to marshal such forces? Who will invade Hornsent lands? Before their mother she argues with icy specificity, and a pragmatism that Messmer finds impressive, though uncharacteristic. The sorcerers are more inclined to a stalemate, she points out, or even a treaty; the dragons do not care for our dirt-bound structures. The rest of this land’s inhabitants, subhuman tribes and furtive heretics, are so few in number they are easily crushed underfoot if they are fool enough - and they rarely are - to pass beneath Belurat’s turreted shadow. More to the point, she insists: while all the land bends to the will of the Crucible, impulse of the age, it is only the Hornsent who believe their tower is capable of illuminating paradise. Rendering it, in its full physical glory, for them to inhabit. Who would bother to steal it out from under them?

His mother, who has always spoken to the Hornsent consuls with distant deference, approaches her daughter. She puts a ringed hand on Melina’s cheek, sweeps the hair back from her pale face and tucks it under her heavy circlet. The air around her seems to pool with light, with gold, like a body of clear water transmuted by a shaft of sunlight. She pulls Melina’s heavy sable furs tighter over her shoulders. The weight forces Melina to stand straighter, to resist the downward pressure. 

“If we have pacified those threats from without,” Marika says with what sounds like infinite patience, “then we must turn to those within.” 

 

⚕️

 

 

From Belurat, his men flow like molten gold poured from the mouth of a crucible. They ride beneath three banners, that of the rising spiral, Enir-Ilim; his own twined snakes, red on black; and a third, new pennant, yet unseen beyond the tower city: a golden tree set against a night sky. Above its canopy, a single silver star.

They ride in brigades, each destined to shore up support, sniff out dissent, and recruit where possible more hornless to their cause. Some settlements have received word already of Marika’s ascent to power, of her daughter’s anointment. Dutifully they fall in line, as their country abbeys have instructed them, each dependent on open roads and favourable trade to stock their cellars and retain their stores for the coming cold. In other corners of the land Messmer and his men find impudence, a disregard for his mother as audacious as it is ignorant: places where, when the bells ring to remind the Hornsent of their coming apotheosis, they forget themselves. They do not lay down their scythes and kneel in the fields. They do not burn fragrant oil in the name of their prophet, or lay offerings at the feet of her stone likeness. They do not make the pilgrimage to Belurat. Instead they wallow in their discontent, and mutter about wanting the old order back, proper consuls in power, the hornless subservient to them rather than straight-backed, wearing the colours and arms of the prophet’s son.  

In truth, there is little he can do but intimidate them. It is almost humiliating, instructing these illiterate smallfolk how to pray, or count their coin before sending it to Belurat, or what to offer in his mother’s name at their small, shoddy altars. Doing the work of monks, of lowly country clerics, and being sneered at in return - for however awaited the prophet, submission to her ilk remains unpalatable.

This he tells Huw one night, covertly, on the road. He had thought to tell Melina, to write her, seeking commiseration to ease his grievances. But what would she respond? Dear brother, I told you not to be a part of this spectacle. I told you not to go. 

“We are supposed to be Belurat’s standing army,” he says to Huw. “And yet all we can do is scare farmhands and children.” 

Huw is contemplative while he stirs the fire. Messmer has allowed the world to witness his serpents, but he does not think his mother’s followers will so passively accept his flame. So he lets the other man build the small cookfire just outside the tents they have pitched, dug into a heavily forested hillside just north of the slow-running Ellac River. 

“What do the men say?”

Huw glances up at him. For all his stagecraft, he has never bothered to hide how intensely he examines things, as he does Messmer now. 

“You will not ask them?”

“How should I? They will tell me what they think I wish to hear, not what they whisper to each other under the cover of night, cold and hungry.” 

“So you are asking me.”

Messmer regards him gravely. “You have not misled me before.”

Huw gives a sombre little laugh. “And I do not intend to. My lord has been kind.” He throws rough-spun wool over a squat wooden chest and seats himself on it by the fire. Under his surcoat he wears only black, his silhouette murky against the coming night, save for the red and gold twine of the serpents embroidered at his breast. “The men consider their work divinely-appointed, but I admit I have heard them wonder.”

“About what?”

Huw gestures to the tents around them, nailed into the dark, damp earth. “Why they are here. To sit astride horses who churn mud while trumpets blow?” He shrugs with his casual grace, and begins to take off his gloves, one finger at a time. “They feel they must cement their faith through action. If you have doubts, I would advise sending them north. My father will tell you the same.” 

Messmer, seated on a fallen log adjacent to him, watches his bare hands emerge. “North?”

“To the tree.” Huw sets his gloves aside and stands to manoeuvre an iron cauldron over the fire. Some liquid sloshes out as he speaks. “My father says those men who have gone north have laid eyes on it. The tree wrought from gold. When they return they weep and tell their fellows it is a miracle.”

Messmer has heard this, or at least, whispers of it: rumours in hushed, awed voices of the potent sap that leaks from its bark, the leaves that fall like gilt foil flaking from a holy icon. Men sworn to his mother speak of arriving battered and ill-treated by the journey, then bathing in its light and being restored. Some even claim it reconciles the Crucible dormant within them: lends them power even as they lack horns or wings or tails.

“And you believe their stories?”

Huw, stirring the pot’s contents, stops and frowns. “My lord, how could you not? This is your own mother’s blessing at work.”

Messmer will not admit that he has yet to venture north, and has only witnessed the glow of this monumental tree from afar. His mother has never referred to it directly, never spoken of it with purpose, or intent. It is simply there - obtusely, undeniably hers. Dominant now on the horizon, the sun elsewhere, embarrassed by its lack. There is a sentiment he cannot quite articulate, a fear of getting too close to it and finding himself unable to look away, incapable of getting out from under its glow. Absurd, of course. He has never wanted anything more than his mother’s triumph, her vindication. But this thing, this third golden child of hers visible to everyone, makes him acutely aware they cannot go back, cannot pretend otherwise; in the same way he has never quite stopped smelling jasmine since that hypnagogic night in his mother’s village. And though he tells himself he trusts Huw, he has never mentioned the little gold sapling he witnessed a lifetime ago: lonely remnant at the heart of an empty, flowering meadow, a thing so helpless and bereft of love it still stifles his breath to think of it. He wonders if it lives still, as he wonders what part of his mother is still the woman in that meadow, mourning, a knife to her braid, and not the holiest creature in the living world. 

“I do not doubt it will lend us conviction,” Messmer says at length, realising Huw is waiting for an answer. His serpents drift toward the open fire in agitation, and he tries to steady them. 

Huw continues, “If the rumours are true, it will do more than that. Many hornless dream of possessing what has been denied to us for so long - the Crucible’s power. You must understand. You who were born hornless, but blessed.” He nods to Messmer’s serpents. Now, when they hover close, he no longer withdraws his hands. “What we would not give for the same thing.” 

“I thought the hornless wished to be free from the tyranny of the Crucible?”

In the dying day the light shifts, the sky illuminating Huw’s back in mournful blue-black and the fire igniting his face in brilliant yellow. Even in the firelight his eyes seem opaque, impenetrable. “The Crucible is no more tyrannical than a sword without a hand to wield it. One can pray in its name, but to what end? It is impersonal. You might as well pray to a copper pot.” He taps the iron cauldron lightly with a wooden ladle. “When that sword is wielded by the Hornsent, certainly some of us might wish to be far from it. But if given the chance to take it up ourselves-” He pauses to put his free hand on one of Messmer’s serpents. It is warm, and Messmer - or his serpent, he struggles to find himself somewhere between - does not pull away. 

“I admire you,” Huw murmurs, and now his voice and his gaze are disarming in their directness. “You have witnessed your mother shackled to sainthood, your kin undermined, and you have borne it with great dignity. It is why the men are drawn to you, I think. Willing to serve. The Hornsent enslave us, and then feign charity out of pity - but not you. Not your mother. There is nobility in your bondage, and so virtue in wearing your colours.”

There is a moment, at the mercy of firelight and the stark foreignness of such a touch, that he would like to tell Huw everything: that he is as much at his mother’s mercy as the hornless are, not for lack of blessing but for curse. That both he and his sister are stains on his mother’s golden person. Were he to open the ledger of his life now he would need admit everything he has done is in anticipation of being scrubbed clean of the blackness within him, his flame extinguished, the void filled at last with something or someone else so that it grows too muffled and faint to hear, too far away to crawl to the surface behind his eye ever again. 

Or he could use it. The abyss coils, unwinds, observes. He has not forgotten the power. He cannot. 

“I am not without anger,” he manages at length. He finds himself unable to say more. But Huw is not cowed - not like his men, who trust his leadership but recoil from his physical presence. Huw is steadfast, committed to the part he is playing. He will not try to soothe his lord’s rage, only redirect it, like wind over a flame. Reiterate it for him. It is why Messmer has raised him up, has weighed his lieutenant’s words and found them to be heavier than all others. He will only accept friction from one who knows when to push and when to yield, or when to get out of the way entirely. He will not bear another example of Melina, churning only to break herself uselessly against the sheer cliff of their mother’s will.  

“Anger righteous and justified,” Huw supplies. His left hand is still resting on the coil of a serpent. “Without anger, I would not believe you sincere.”

Something in him is cracking: his skin at the edge of old scales, opals long faded and dulled, flaking away, nacre under his fingernails and the intense shame of it. The need to get on his knees and be told, by one golden voice or another: Get up. You are worthy. 

“Do you doubt me?”

Instead it is Huw that slides off the edge of his makeshift seat and gets on his knees in the dirt. He leans forward, and with the practised gesture of a performer takes Messmer’s right hand between his own. Shoulders bowed, he presses it gently to his forehead. It is a gesture Messmer knows by heart - has seen it performed countless times by Marika’s followers when they supplicate for her blessing, those lucky few permitted to touch her, physically, and receive her grace.

With solemnity fit for the stage, Huw says, “My life is yours.” His curls tickle the back of Messmer’s hand. His fingers are neither cold as Melina’s nor warm as his mother’s. Messmer stares down at his second’s dark silhouette, and all he can think is look at me. He does not want him to let go. 

He does not know where his voice comes from when he says, “If you wish to be oathbound, it should be to my mother.”

Huw raises his gaze. Messmer catches the moment of query, the quick vulnerability, before Huw masters his face. He waits, as though expecting to be directed; then after a moment he lets go of Messmer’s hand, gesture smooth and steady as his voice. “If that is what my lord wishes.” 

He moves to rise, to turn away. Messmer stops him - one hand on his shoulder, another on his arm, both serpents an arc around him forming a red, mournful halo, steering him back so that they may face each other. 

“Your fealty does not go unnoticed. Ask of me what you wish in return.”

Huw looks at him a long while, equivocal from under his dark brows. When he moves at last he does not pull from Messmer’s grasp. Rather he returns it, and Messmer sees, at the back of his mind, Melina embracing Jori. A touch not impelled, not guided by blood or obligation, but sincere: a fistful of cloak, a white-knuckled grip, world-weary but unyielding. And he, serpent-shaped hole in the cosmos, remembers that he is not fixed in place as stone but may soften, may acquiesce. So he does. Huw looks up at him, dark and luminous at once. 

Softly, he says, “When you go, take me with you. To the tree at the end of the world.” 

 

⚕️

 

They are still in the east when the missive arrives. The rain is coming in sheets of mist, landing softly on wool and linen where it floats, suspended, as little crystalline baubles; elsewhere condensing in shiny rivulets that race down black armour. The men jostle each other for a place by the few fires that still burn. They are cold and hungry, eager to be on to the next hamlet, the next settlement, where they can exert some power. Make themselves big and their voices loud, and be given some form of deference in return, especially in the form of food and shelter. The villages, even the smallest, are bound to offer something to the roving brigade under the flag of Enir-Ilim if they do not want something taken forcefully instead. 

The messenger is a nondescript hornless and he has been riding hard. When he slides off his horse he almost loses his footing in the muddy earth. Once he hands the missive to Messmer he does not rise from his deep bow but stays doubled over, heaving. Messmer has him installed in his own modest pavilion, in front of a small fire pit dug at its centre and surrounded by a ring of sand. The large one outside has long ceased burning in the rain. 

Once the messenger is seated, Messmer pours a little fortified wine from an earthenware jar and hands the cup to the soaking youth before throwing some beech over the pit and, when he thinks the messenger is deep in his cup, waves an ember from the palm of his hand and lets it settle into the dry kindling. 

He is wrong. The messenger regards him over the rim of his cup with bulging eyes. Messmer can see now that he is no more than a boy, really, with broad features and a snub nose, forehead obscured under a mop of pale hair limp and still dripping. 

The thought comes, like a dazzling blow, that he will have to kill this boy. He has seen the ember, witnessed flame emerge from Messmer’s own flesh. Fleetingly he hopes the boy was fixated on his serpents - has never seen them before, and so was perhaps beguiled - but he is paying them no mind. His gaze is transfixed on Messmer’s left hand, where a single lick of smoke rises and curls to meet the exhale from the fire, entwined to escape the tent’s slitted roof with a sigh. 

The abyss behind his eye answers the question before he can think to wonder: flame, hot and fast enough to make ashes of the boy. To make kindling of his skin and fat and viscera, his threadbare coat and boots, and then tell the rest of the camp he disappeared, wandered out into the dark after delivering his message. 

Before either of them can move, Huw enters. 

“Let me see,” he says. Messmer, still rooted in place by his indecision, hands him the missive. Huw reads it with growing consternation. When he is done he hands it back to Messmer and says only, “I will rouse the men.”

The seal on it is doubled - one belongs to the consuls of Belurat, the other to his mother: the golden tree and silver star. It reads a little choppy, as though there are multiple voices dictating, some echoes and a few contradictions. But the message is simple enough. Go south, it says. A southern tribe, known to the Hornsent as equal parts feral and heathen, has massed on the road outside Prospect Town, Belurat’s largest farming settlement. Intercept them, the parchment instructs, before they can raid the village. 

He runs a hand over his face, still warm from the ember. It is a hard day’s journey from here, and it will take time to dismantle the tents and hitch the wagons. Some of them will have to ride ahead. Only hours ago he was bent over a map with Huw, satisfied by their position and their progress. Now he goes to scan that same surface for other obsidian markers, looking for his scattered brigades that might be closer and better equipped to move on Prospect Town. But the missive is clear: he must lead his forces. The Empyrean’s son stands in for the saint herself. He can hear his mother’s dictation, her smooth amber voice encouraging the consuls. The Empyrean’s militia acts to defend Belurat, and now that outer gods have come down to cause trouble, it marshals in the name of Hornsent glory. Upheaval only means they are close - close to the end, a moment from Marika’s hand at the Gate, and foreign gods are descending on them to witness this triumph. 

Huw is still beside him. “There may be time to dispatch a rider to Ensis-”

“Belurat has warriors in its ranks, yet Hornsent will not even rouse their own.” He wills his serpents to temper the heat in his chest. “The barbarians?”

“They would come, even if their numbers are few,” Huw says, and Messmer recognises the kind of tone he uses for the stage. “But it has to be you. Our forces. Under your mother’s banners.” He pulls Messmer aside, gently, so he can lower his voice. “The men need this. It is what they have been waiting for.”

Messmer stares down a long moment at the missive. Then he folds it, his mother’s wax seal bending to the heat of his hands, and tosses it in the fire. So now we must bleed to appease the Hornsent, too. 

He looks up, past the fire. He had almost forgotten the messenger, motionless on the other side of the little pavilion, lips still glued to the rim of his cup. Will anyone believe a lowly hornless dispatcher, delirious with damp and perhaps fever, if he says the Empyrean’s son is a conjuror of fire?

The boy snaps out of his stupor. “I wish to ride,” he says, in a quivering voice. He clears his throat, then says it again, a little louder. “I wish to ride out under my lord’s banners.”

Messmer glances at Huw, whose expressive brows arch. “Can you wield a spear?”

“Yes, Captain.”

Huw’s mouth twitches halfway to a smile. He is not yet a Knight Captain, only Messmer’s lieutenant. But Messmer understands he likes the sound of it. 

“What’s your name, boy?”

The boy wipes the damp from his nose and forehead and sits up straight. “Queelign, if it please.”

“It will do.” Huw tilts his chin to the tent opening. “Get out, follow the men to one of the supply tents, and get yourself outfitted in something better than a tabard if you want to live.”

The boy springs to his feet, the dregs in his cup splashing over the rim. He gives them one last goggle-eyed look before he flees, remembering to lay the cup down on a stool before he disappears. Huw nods to Messmer and follows close behind, slipping out to rouse the men and get his own armour fitted. 

Messmer grits his teeth and watches them go. He will have to wait, and hope the boy dies on the field, and his secret with him. The fire crackles eagerly at the centre of the tent, spitting a few amused sparks. It occurs to him he still cannot decipher the boy’s expression, not in the moment he witnessed the flame. Surprise? Revulsion? Or something else? If Huw learns of his fire, will he assume Marika is to blame for this curse? Intolerable, to think his own shortcomings might be used to diminish his mother’s sainthood. It is frustrating, he realises, to not know someone’s fear intimately, as he has always felt Melina’s, or believes he understands his mother’s. All these men are his, yet they are so far removed from him. Perhaps he himself numbers among the things they fear when they snuff out their torches at night. 

Still chewing on his clumsy indiscretion, he turns back to the map unrolled on the table. He knows, vaguely, about this tribe: cave-dwellers, the Hornsent call them. Fiends. Idolators of whatever god happens to strike their fancy and fulfil their brutish impulses. It surprises him that they are smart enough to organise, even worship. The Hornsent language describes them as monstrous, so lowly they are no more than animals. But animals cannot declare for a god, or decide to die for one. 

His serpents notice Huw has returned before he does. Heat moves across his face, embarrassed that he has allowed his attention to wander and so not yet stirred himself, or readied himself to ride. He is still dressed according to Belurat customs, without even mail beneath his draped tunic. He stubbornly declines to wear plate - he finds it makes him ungainly, and is impossible to move with efficiently. Nor did he think it would serve against insolent country folk.     

A gloved hand at his elbow, not yet in a gauntlet. “My lord? Will you take counsel?”

“I have never managed to dissuade you from giving it, have I?” 

Huw is unmoved by his mordancy. His face carries that reflexive consideration, the moment before he slips into a role, weighing which script he will follow. He says, “If you have not killed before, it may come as a shock.” 

Messmer, who has moved to retrieve his hauberk and surcoat, stops. “Do the men think me so delicate that I must look away from a killing blow?”

“Many in our ranks have never shed blood. They are too preoccupied by their own fear to imagine yours.”

“But you did.”

Huw gives him one of his frank, searching looks. “They will look to you to lead. And besides” - here his comely face warps momentarily with disdain - “I have seen only Hornsent so casually able to crush a man’s skull before they sit down to sup.” 

“And I have been raised among them - a pariah, and now a prince.” Messmer sneers this last word, then regrets the little frisson of rage. He does not wish to rebuke Huw, or look incapable of control. He does not wish to look as if he’d contemplated, this very hour, murdering a messenger boy for the sole crime of accidentally witnessing his indiscretion.

“And you?” he probes after a moment, without accusation. “What has steadied you for such a thing?”

Huw shrugs. He looks at Messmer with the eyes of the bull again, luminous, hiding something ravaged. “Living as a hornless,” he says simply. He smooths his hair back. His mouth is set. In black plate he looks more physically imposing than he is; or perhaps it is his manner of standing, every limb knowingly arranged. Yet in armour he seems quieter, self-contained, as if being encased in steel has made him laconic instead of loquacious. Messmer has not forgotten his promise to take Huw to the base of his mother’s tree, to offer him that light. He imagines cleansing Huw of doubt. But the flicker of his serpents and the heat in his own palms remind him it is not Huw, keen and straight-backed, who is moved by doubt. 

Huw says, “Try to remove yourself from it. Make it secondary. See yourself from the outside. It may lessen the first time.”

Fine, Messmer thinks bitterly. He is used to seeing himself from above, unsuited to his own skin. The void, if it had eyes, would wink.

 

⚕️ 

 

As children in Enir-Ilim, both he and Melina often went barefoot, exchanging the tower’s smooth sun-baked stones for the cool, tiled ceramic of shaded halls and prayer rooms. In Belurat’s amphitheatre, trading blows under the glare of the barbarians, he wore sandals in the Hornsent fashion. Now, as he slogs through a swamp of blood and decay, he is grateful for the leather riding boots crafted for him at the Keep. You will thank me when you step in a nest of hornets, Melina had said when she offered them, irritated and affectionate at once. 

Biting flies, he will say to her when they see each other again. He imagines her confusion. Not hornets.   

He would like to rub his eye but he cannot. His spear is in one hand, and in the other he is dragging a longsword recovered from the bloody mire. He must keep his gaze down as he picks his way over the corpses - in some places the mud is so deep there is barely any hint of a body below the surface. With each footfall something gushes to the surface - sometimes brown, sometimes an ugly, diluted pink. A contorted mass shifts below him, shadowy; a thing that was one of his soldiers barely an hour ago. Not so for these bloodfiends, as he thinks of them now: they rise up from the muck like mountains, remains black with flies already. If once they were men, they are no longer. The faces that stare up at him are monstrous, frozen in their last raging moments, cringing from death, teeth too big for any man’s mouth, a beastly snubbed nose protruding from discoloured skin, twice as tall as his own soldiers and thick as a castle wall. Whatever gift they asked of their outer god, it came at the price of their humanity. Outnumbered, they had fought his men with mindless savagery, heedless of their own wounds. It had taken time to separate them, to break the bulk of their force, pressed tightly together like a living wall of rough, stinking flesh, swarming with just enough room to take a swing. He has told his men not to collect the creatures’ crude cudgels, too heavy and ungainly for his soldiers to wield. On their rough surface it is impossible to tell, amidst all this red, what is a splotch of lichen and what is a piece of flesh. Some of them, he finds, are not cudgels at all. Just the limbs of their fellows, fashioned into primitive weapons.  

He stops to cough, choking on stagnant air. Everywhere the smell of damp, of old, still water: wet flesh, wet rot. His serpents have retreated under his mantle, the part around his shoulders not torn away in the skirmish. The charnel house stench is inescapable, one he recognises dimly from the tiled room deep in the Black Keep where the scholars crack open jars and rummage around for individual parts. Even this part of the mud flat, carpeted by sanguine amaryllis, cannot mask the scent; or perhaps it is the blooms themselves that smell like carrion. Something red leaks from their fleshy centres. Are they carnivorous plants? He cannot recall. Melina would know. Thoughtlessly he kneels to gather a specimen for her, before remembering she is no longer at the athenaeum, no longer doing the work she found so meaningful. For a moment he is frustrated, confused. The smell is getting to him, or the exhaustion; the bright flash of struggle, death and its aftermath. He stares at the crimson blooms until he decides the other consuls would not allow such a thing in their presence.

While his men gather their dead, a persistent sound follows them: a scrape, and a sort of grating crunch. A wet sucking like the gnawing of bones. From beneath the buzzing cloud of bloodflies and the sound of iron unharnessed from corpses, he tries to guess at the noise. Only as they leave the fetid soil behind does he realise not all those shadowy silhouettes beside him were his men, hunched and sifting through mud to recover bodies and weapons. Vultures and wild dogs have gathered, and now far outnumber them. And the chorus of their coming is exactly what it sounded like when he first heard it: the gnawing of bones. 

 

⚕️

 

 

In Enir-Ilim, he comes upon an empty throne. 

Melina, in her consul’s regalia, weighed down as if by a sea of jewels and floral-embroidered fabrics, sits to the right of their mother’s vacant seat. Somehow her presence makes that absence starker. 

“She is waiting for you at the Black Keep.”

It shocks him, how much that statement reduces him. Makes him feel small and childish. 

“I have done what the consuls asked.”

A glimmering, hard edge to her. “Bury your dead at the Keep. Belurat cannot take them.” 

He has a difficult time explaining this to Huw. They are less than a full day from the bloodshed and already the putrefaction is noticeable, despite the cooler air. Part of him wants Huw to steer him straight, to be cynical in his levelheaded, steady way - even to laugh at him. What did you expect? A prize for killing some primitives in the countryside? Perhaps a parade? But Huw is with the dead: making arrangements, sending messages to those next of kin he knows personally, ready to be cursed by the newly widowed or orphaned. Doing thankless work far below his station. Messmer is almost tempted to recall him: stand by my side. Steady me. He can still smell the ruin, the blood. The steady wingbeat of Deathbirds, following them like a cloud. 

“What was it like?”

The question, from Melina, jolts him. He imagines it pointed, accusatory. What is she expecting him to say? Glorious? Satisfying? That he carved their mother’s name on the flesh of her enemies? But he recognises the flicker of another face behind hers, the toneless voice. Death, seeking stories about itself. The abyss inside him coils, muses: it could have done better. It could have done more.

Bowed in the sun, feeling leached of colour and strength, he looks up at his sister and says, “It was necessary.”

 

⚕️

 

He rides alone to the Black Keep. In the outer bailey artificers are making fire-pots, weaving and coating sling rope, sealing sulphur into pots with pig fat. Despite the open air, it reeks. Steel syncopations echo from the smithies. Belurat knows little of what happens here, save for what he and his men report. All these forges keep the hornless out of Belurat and out of sight. His mother tells the Hornsent the Black Keep belches smoke and ash for their benefit - which is true, he reasons. Everything intended to protect his mother’s coming apotheosis, and so the Hornsent’s achievement by extension. They do not know of the monsters his men are building in the east, things requisitioned from nightmares. His own idea, to build them in the ruins of Deoh, far from the Hornsent’s prying eyes. War machines fuelled by fire, assembled away from his mother, where she does not see him weave embers as she weaves with fine silk, seated placidly at her loom.    

Hidden in an inner courtyard of the Keep is a generous garden. The roof is partially opened to the sky, half-hidden by glass sheets puckered and warped. The walls are tiled a pale green, and the floors are glazed mosaics of azure and gold rosettes, like stars spun down from an enamelled firmament. Arranged around the circular space are low beds of herbs, bookended by taller ferns and crawling vines. Moss, a soft blanket of blue-green, grows in shaded crevices and across the surface of water pooled in rocky basins. Nearby he glimpses mushrooms sprouting from decayed wood, some white as bone, glimmering with damp, and others red as his serpents. Two separate fountains provide a steady trickle of water, and a few translucent silk curtains fall from the ceiling like the wings of a giant moth, resting over the more delicate blooms to protect them from excessive sun and invasive species. It has grown, he finds, since he was last here. When Melina had first come to the Keep, the garden was pleasant, if austere. She had requested - could not command, not then, not when they still held no title, no power - Hornsent botanists and herbalists to restore it. Those Hornsent who shared her ideals came willingly and had since coaxed from the earth a variety more beautiful even than the physic gardens in Belurat, where it is too dry to maintain such verdancy. Sickened at the end of a long day by the horror of the jars, Melina would often retreat into a little verdant corner of it. He would find her sitting amid birdsong and fragrant herbs, rubbing some on the dry patches of her hands, and saving others to infuse holy water and anointing oil. Later, he will wish he had spent more time under the garden’s faceted roof. When the crusade begins and the fortress becomes a staging ground, it will be one of the first places to succumb, its glass skin shattering and iron bones bending under the unnatural heat of his own flame. 

But for now there is only the heavy verdant air and his mother. Like a prize specimen she is at the chamber’s centre, haloed by the white drapery as though she has gathered it, woven it like a cocoon, and now unravels herself for the world. She sees him and pauses, as one does when it takes a moment to recognise a face. When she speaks her voice is no louder than the silver chime of water from the fountains around her. 

“Come into the light.” 

It is only at her voice that he realises he has been hovering for some time at the threshold, waiting for her permission.  

He approaches, ducking low-hanging vines and pushing past a drooping, coin-shaped leaf the size of his head. As he does he notices she is cradling a bloom in her hand, picked from one of the herbalists’ loamy patches. Vaguely he recognises the long, violet bell-form, but cannot name any of the medicinal plants that surround them - not like Melina, who can rattle them off like any other thing the Hornsent have taught her, or that she memorised from tomes like a sponge, like a bloom soaking up rainwater. He thinks of the knowledge she hoards but cannot use under her consul’s crown, and winces.  

“You fared well,” his mother says. It is not a question. After the stench in the courtyard, he’d been hoping she smelled of jasmine. She does not.

How can he begin to describe it to her? It was - if there are words for it, she did not teach me - fast. Contradictory. A brutal slog of chaos and noise. A deceptively quick, soundless instant. A jumble of confusion, and conflicting impressions. He cannot really remember what he did, and how. Instinct took over. Without the barbarian’s training, without those patterns already known to his body - to strike, to move, to parry; without his serpents’ infallible instincts - he would have been lost. It is almost embarrassing, to admit the messiness of it had overwhelmed him. There must be cleaner ways to wage war, he remembers thinking clearly in those last savage minutes of it. Other ways to clear the field, to overwhelm the enemy, to avoid bodies and entrails and iron bearing down on him in thoughtless, uncaring daylight.

When the silence begins to drag, he says, “The losses were few.” His voice is low, thin, like it has gone unused for some time. “The settlement remains intact.” 

As he speaks, he looks down. There are baskets on the floor, half-full, blooms gathered by keepers and then no doubt left in haste when Marika claimed the space. Here and there he catches the metal glint of a blade, or a small shearing tool. The floors have not been swept in a while. Dead leaves and foliage, churned to brown muck, stick to his boots. New ones - the ones he wore into battle had been unsalvageable. His mother is saying something, but he is not listening. His mind is on the field again, submerged in silt and gore, the stink of slaughter, the din of cries and grunts and the guttural exhale of men and beasts drowning in the swampy mud, in their own blood, their own wreckage, while cold steel vibrates around him. 

She rises from her veiled cocoon and comes to him, letting the bloom in her hand fall to the tiled floor. Gently she reaches up to pull his hair back from his face. Already he towers over her, but only physically. At her touch he feels breakable, like a spear easily splintered. An afterthought, and she all the cosmos in a boiling cauldron. There is a hunger on her today, the way she moves to touch things, grasp them. Her presence eats up the air around her. 

She steers his face to hers. “You are a sullen creature.”

Reluctantly, he meets her gaze. “Will you have me put on a farce?” he asks, aware he is being petulant. He knows he should be grateful to have her full attention, to find comfort easily and naturally where others beg for blessing. But instead he finds her presence exhausting, now - a tight space in which there is little room to manoeuvre. He has always wished to feel expansive beneath her gaze, empowered rather than ashamed. Those times she watched him spar he showed himself to be quick, fluid, his movements easy and deadly, as if to say this is what I was made for. A part of him recognises that he should feel satisfied: he has done everything she asked. But here, alone except for the bright glare of her, he feels as he did the night he first showed her his scales - pursued, stripped of shade. Frozen in a slow stupor like a thing hidden by the dark underside of a rock until someone turns it over. 

She runs both hands over his face, smooths back his forehead and fills the creases below his eyes with her fingertips. The many rings she wears leave gentle, gold-dusted grooves in his skin. When he tilts his head she tangles her fingers in his red locks, and her tight fists make him flinch. He feels the whispered edge of her nails, the strength of her grip. He knows he must wait it out, this moment when the ember of her love seethes to life, before it cools again to a gentle pulse. A red butterfly flickers past them, in and out of sunlight. 

After a moment she relaxes her fingers, and her face softens so that all its brilliance, lit from within, dims. He exhales and turns only his eye to her, his serpents placid by his feet, tactful in their retreat. With sudden, anguishing gentleness she guides his head down and kisses his brow. A ghost of her holy magic, the warm lull of healing. An impulse to curl up at her feet, as he once did when he was young. A warrior reduced to infancy. With it, sudden clarity, an aching certainty that if she fails, or dies before she brings this merciless civilisation to paradise, they will break into her tomb and drag her naked body through the streets in retribution. This he will not allow. To have the only one who renders him so powerless be humiliated in turn.  

“I would not have you be so grim,” she says. She looks almost vulnerable, like a person again. A mother, and not a beacon. “I would have my son inspire loyalty in his men, and love in his servants. I would have the world look upon him and adore him, as I do.”

“You could garland me with dewgem blooms,” he says mildly, expression unchanged, “and braid my hair with seed pearls.” He lets the jest settle, unobtrusive amuse-bouche. He wonders if she can picture what he looked like emerging from the battlefield, blood-red silhouette, hunched, unnatural, filthy except for the glint of gold in his single eye. He swallows, and then quietly adds, “You did not make me to be adored.”

Her smile does not waver. “No. Open your mouth.” He obeys. She looks at him like he’s seen lords look at hunting hounds. “Do you wish to be feared?”

He shuts his mouth, runs his tongue over his incisors. Perhaps it is what he is most suited to. Perhaps it is why you made me. You and whatever shadow you took to bed. Strange, to think of his father suddenly, now that his mother takes up so much space. When he was young he imagined his father to be a great beast of some kind, a colossus; but time makes all men wither, and shrink, and reveals them for what they are: only a shadow on the wall. 

A question like a spear threaded between ribs, impossible to dislodge, to articulate. Do you love me for being your son, or for what I will do because of it?

Because she must know that he is willing. He will do it as much for himself as for her, because he knows her love will banish the spectre of his own irrelevance. It will make him necessary, despite his curse, the thing that bends him, in his inadequacy, before divinity. He will do it to banish the fear: fear of the day his men discover the abomination within him, judge that he is not fit to lead, and abandon him for some golden ideal. Fear of the thing that lurks on the horizon, always - love withdrawn from him, taken back. Curdled at the realisation of what he is. 

He will remake the world for her, as she once promised to do for him, to prove himself worthy. To wrestle against those moments, fleeting but sharp, when he is convinced that he is not really her son at all, and she does not think of him as such, but rather as a placeholder for Melina, or perhaps for another son entirely. A better, more perfect one. A muse, an ideal: to be born fully-formed in a shape he cannot fill. And he - ugly, unredeemed, ironic - will wait in narrow darkness while elsewhere flesh is sublimed to gold. 

 

 

---

 

Chapter 9: who can a monster blame for being red?

 

 

His men claim there is exultation in battle, ecstatic release. But he does not feel energised by it. Even the coiled void is quiet, observant when he walks the field, every shade of red imaginable. It does not need him to enjoy himself. It only needs to be sated.

He approaches war with a sense of detachment, with the consideration of distance and the analytical rigour of minutiae, as a scholar would a dense religious tract. He leans back: there is the battlefield to consider with broad, sweeping perspective, as one peers over a war table to examine the position to be defended. He leans forward: there is the figure before him, intimate, lashed by rain and crumpling in the mud, the sensory registers of smoke, ash, crackling flesh, the iron tang of metal and blood. The cries of the stricken. When he fights, he is careful to allow only the sharpest inhales and longest exhales. There is no time, no space to cry out or lament. Despite their frenzied ululations and obsession with glory, the barbarians have taught him that war, in its basest form, is not a science, nor a ceremony. It is a business, and one must simply be better at it than their rival. Strikes are counted, tallied, inspected for quality; wounds are deductions, except for when they are borne with exceptional strength and resilience. Victory to the man who slays his opponent while he holds back with one hand his own guts. 

He puts down a rebellion at Moorth, though rebellion is an extravagant term. They are mostly farmhands, coal shovelers and cow herders with cobbled-together plates and pikes, riding skinny horses. They put an edge on anything that can cut, tear, lacerate. Ploughshares are reshaped into swords. Sickles for threshing grain beat fruitlessly against the covered night of black breastplates. But they will not kneel to the Empyrean. She is a means to an end; her authority has no bearing on their worldview. Rebellion requires at least two things: forethought and confederacy. Here, leagues from Belurat, inventing stories about how the Empyrean will steal their glorious destiny, they have a shared grievance. When Messmer and his forces arrive, they have a barnful of iron hay forks and torches at the ready.  

Since the roads opened between the Black Keep and the southern riverlands, Moorth has flourished. It is the most surprising of these scattered uprisings. The most duplicitous, as he sees it. These are the sanctimonious grovellers who owe Marika the most, who resent her light and yet profit from her divine generosity. They are more organised than his troops expect, but he cannot find the instigators, those voices that would have risen above the rest, stood at the head of a crowd and blasphemed. He knows that among the rebels are Hornsent who fled Belurat at his sister’s anointment, old warriors and lords and landowners who thought to shore up their support beyond the city walls and return to overthrow Marika, to pull her down from her throne and return her to the place they believe she belongs: bent at their feet, as a tool of their dominion. Others, ignorant of the world beyond their homestead and for whom Enir-Ilim is only a floating mirage on the horizon, are swept up in the fervour, forced to bear arms and defend themselves. Caught between his troops and the Hornsent roiling in the countryside, many hornless flee north, or turn themselves over to Messmer’s men. There will be place enough in his mother’s kingdom, he assures them. Some hornless remain to take up arms for him, while others take some convincing - and material incentive - to betray their masters. He lets Huw work on these. There is nothing more pitiable, his lieutenant says, than a servant unwilling to turn on their liege. 

He is tired of it already: the field of battle, each unthinking thrust of his spear, the ease with which Hornsent yield before him. They have grown fat and complacent on their millennia of dominance. Their true warriors are too few, their clergy too comfortable, their civilians incapable of rousing themselves to discipline. They are cut down like saplings. While each clash is a familiar script - the same smells, sounds, blood in his mouth, steel against flesh - he is careful to negotiate the aftermath. He slaughters enough rebels to serve as examples, and pardons a handful to make the rest think twice about risking it all again. Some choose to die on principle - they wish to force his hand, to martyr themselves in an inspiring, stubborn example of Hornsent pride. His men are more than happy to oblige. He stays their hands. Here is mercy, he declares. From these traitors he takes tongue and both hands, so they can neither abase the prophet with their words nor conspire against her with their works. Here is the Empyrean Marika’s grace, he tells them. In three careful cleaves he steals their martyrdom and makes them figures worthy of pity and disgust. He makes them kneel in front of a monument to his mother and says, You shall be allowed to see paradise yet. Without hands, it is hard for them to get up from the dirt. When they do, he ties them to a horse and sends them on to the next hamlet, where they can serve as a warning for those remaining Hornsent hiding out, waiting to rise against his mother. 

When he returns to Enir-Ilim he and his men are filthy, still bloodied and exhausted from the road, their injured carted in wagons behind them, their dead under heavy tarps. Still his banners flutter darkly in victory. He drags himself up the endless stairs to the holy tower, one sordid footfall at a time, his serpents trailing behind him like wisps of smoke. In grim victory his mother greets him with open arms, and he thinks this time he will beg her to let him rest.

But when she is pleased - pleased by the slaughter done in her name, by the territory reclaimed for her schemes, the shrines erected to extol her - then she takes him in her arms. With her perfect hands she peels the armour from him like the bark of a dark tree to reveal something pale and vulnerable beneath. When she is pleased she combs the filth from his hair and washes the dirt from his face with her own silk veils, smelling of myrrh and rosewater. For a little while she is his mother and he her son, a famished beggar fed a morsel of love. And he gets up knowing he will do it again and again for her; again until there is no one else left in her kingdom, if that is what she wants.

It is the first time he thinks of her as the queen. 

 

⚕️

The bloodiest skirmish takes place on the field just south of the Black Keep. An allied group of rebels from disparate settlements think to take back the fortress he has restored. They plan to cut off the roads from where his supplies flow and his sister once toiled, where some few scholars still chip away at the insides of discarded jars. It is a folly - but he understands what it would mean to topple the realm’s most imposing stronghold. It is a symbol of hornless resistance, backed by the Empyrean. Enough authority has flowed from Belurat to the Black Keep that the Hornsent rebels understand its significance - but too late, for if they cannot get a force past fortified Ensis, where Andreas commands nearly half of Messmer’s forces in his mother’s name, then they cannot dream of doing more than standing below the Keep’s walls and shouting their discontent. 

In the chaos of battle he observes his men, their armour black as a windowless room. He notes which ones have the stomach to put down their fellows, even those hornless who have sided with their own masters. It does not escape him that many of his soldiers relish in punishing them for it. Picking his way through the field later, he is loath to think of it as a civil war - but last time he had seen her, Melina had implored him to call it what it is. Name it, she’d said, with admirable restraint. Perhaps you will feel more justified. 

The men ask him what should be done with the bodies. Let them rot, he says, and serve as an example. Any of these rebels might have been the ringleader, the first one to declare against his mother, to plot against his sister. To sow discord. The next time they must move fast: bring down the settlement before it has time to take up arms. Erase all trace of disobedience, of disloyalty. 

But his little battalion is anxious, and fractious. They do not like it, and they make their displeasure known. The hanged rebels sway in the warm winds, ropes and branches groaning in the dark, stink permeating the camp. Their bellies are open, their guts stream out like festival garlands. If he were more cruel he would tie them all together in a mockery of the jar practices; but he does not think it is what his mother wants, and he is more pragmatic than bloodthirsty. If his men wanted wanton cruelty they would have remained faithful to the Hornsent. Ill luck to look upon the faces of the dead. He would hang them with chains instead of rope, but iron is precious, and they need as much of it as they can get if there are more rebellions to put down. There are blades to forge, harnesses and horseshoes to hammer, spokes for the wheels that move carts full of weapons and supplies. He only wishes for enough left to embellish the Black Keep’s onyx walls, to create a cocoon for Melina in the one place she is happy, so that she will remain untouched in all this upheaval. 

Then he remembers, again, that she is not there. But there is nowhere safer than at their mother’s side. There is safety in loyalty. In love and its most steadfast manifestation, obedience. 

When they are done, he lets his men comb the field and retreats to his pavilion. The only velvet thing in his tent is the stool on which he sits, stripped down to the waist. The brocade is exquisitely embroidered with his heraldry, red and gold against a deep black. The fabric shimmers in firelight, like patches of the night sky that swirl and spin, lit up by the breath of the Greater Will. It makes his bruised, bare flesh look grey by comparison.

His mother has had drapery made in the same velvet, as well as a mantle, and a swathe of it to cover his cot, or chair, on a cold night. He has brought the fabric with him: it is folded neatly in an iron-banded chest in a corner, unopened since leaving Belurat. He does not wish his men to observe his station through material differences. Not here, not on the battlefield, not when the only thing they should be guided by is loyalty to his mother. If they venture into his tent they should see what occupies any other: iron braziers, a modest chest filled with utilitarian belongings, some rough wool coverings over a straw-stuffed cot - good enough for any head, especially his own crimson one. The only thing that distinguishes his tent is the large heartwood table at its centre, over which he has unrolled a map of the northeast. 

He places an obsidian marker along the rocky terrain south of the Keep. All of them are the same - little black ovals, his various brigades scattered across the parchment landscape - except this one. A sinuous line carved in its centre, painted red, in a more skilful hand than he’d expected. The marker indicating his own position. 

Satisfied, he leans back in his seat, then exhales sharply. A blow to the ribs: he cannot remember from what. Something blunt - the spread over his torso is blue and black, the kind of pain that only comes in the aftermath, slowly first, then cresting into a wide-reaching throb, a deep tremor instead of a shrill edge. He had noticed it only on returning to his tent, as the rush of battle seeped from his limbs and left him exhausted. Then the pain had surfaced, and after peeling away his mail and leather, he’d found the bright, tight pattern of chainmail embedded in his skin like an imprint, the flesh around it swollen and already darkening furiously. He knows he is vulnerable - he does not need to be told. Still he bluntly refuses to don the plate armour his men wear: it is too constricting, too heavy. It impedes his serpents. So between himself and a steel edge there is little but boiled leather and light, dextrous chainmail - threaded so thinly it looks to belong in the hands of a jeweller, not on a battlefield - worn over a padded doublet, and a tabard he now sets aside as ruined. 

He places a hand to his ribs. His palm is warm, and he has no need of his own ember now, but he cannot help the leap of it through his limbs, the way it surges when his mind wanders back to the field. From his serpent eyes he can see his skin flush in the firelight. He shuts his own eye, and theirs, and tries to keep his breath shallow. Each inhale is sharp, much sharper than whatever initial blow battered him. It is hard, he finds, to summon his mother’s golden light with such a fire raging behind his ribs. 

When Huw enters his tent, he turns away instinctively. “Beg pardon,” his lieutenant says, but there is little Messmer can reproach. Huw comes and goes as he pleases, has done so for some time now with Messmer’s implicit permission. Only now he regrets his second’s impunity, his gaze that penetrates the dim light once he puts aside his imposing black helm. 

“The dead,” he says, without preamble. 

Messmer, still seated, slips one arm into his gambeson. “Ours?” 

“Theirs.” Smoke gathers at the pavilion’s open peak and rolls out in a hazy cloud. In the heat of the tent, standing beside the fire pit, Huw labours to remove his gauntlets, and the gloves beneath. Hurtling from one battlefield to the next, he has not shaved in some time, and it makes him look older, more serious. In Messmer’s stead his serpents approach Huw, and through them he can just make out a thin, pale wound on his face, a slash already fading from bright red, running from below his nose diagonally down to his chapped upper lip. He wonders how he missed it, before realising they have been so long in hostile territory that he has barely seen his lieutenant’s face from under his helm. Could he still heal the wound, he wonders briefly, or is a scar too late? 

“Something must be done about them. About the bodies.” 

Messmer half-turns to listen, grimacing at the movement. Before he can protest, Huw is fetching him a new tabard. It is below you, he wants to say - he does not want anyone to tend him, to dress him and steer him like a child. He still has one arm bare, hand over his ribs, but no gold leaks from his palm. “Help me understand,” he says to Huw, because to appear so at a loss to anyone else would make him seethe, and already the pain will not let him unclench his jaw. Can Huw see the glint of opalescence along his elbow, the jewel-like patterning of his flesh, too scattered to hide behind his hand? He shrinks further back from the light. 

Huw returns with the tabard and lays it out beside Messmer. His blank consideration becomes thoughtfulness. “Death,” he says at last, the single syllable undeniable in its solidity. “Death is the arbiter of all - every spirit travels the same path, friend and foe alike. It is ill-luck to deny anyone a proper burial, even an enemy, lest you reckon with him on the road to hereafter, or the Mariner refuse your passage across the river. They say-” 

“They say, ” Messmer echoes derisively. A brief lick of flame from the hand still on his ribs. Do they not know his mother will cure this world of its ignorance? 

Huw stops, head tilted, waiting for a sign to continue. After a moment, Messmer relents. His serpents hang low in chagrin: it is the pain making him lash out, the frustration of it. “I know the Crucible’s death rites,” he says. “What do the men want?”

“Some have not yet come to separate themselves from the old ways. I am not saying the men believe their eyes will be plucked out by Deathbirds at the end of days. Only, my lord, that they believe certain kinds of sacrilege visit misfortune on one’s company.”

“What would they have me do? Bury fifty rebels? Say Hornsent rites over the graves of a hundred traitors who spit at the sound of my mother’s name?”

“If you did, the rebels would not fear you so much.”

“I have not come to take them by the hand and lead them kindly back into my mother’s flock. Let the dead hang. It is meant to be a punishment, not a pardon.”

In speaking rashly, he realises too late he has acted rashly as well: Huw has come up beside him, and is trying to help him into his gambeson. Gently but insistently he has removed Messmer’s hand from his side, and Messmer, still seated, has allowed it - in his brooding frustration allowed himself to be touched, to be seen, and now Huw stands over him and stares down at what he has spent so long thoughtlessly hiding beneath a high collar and thick tunic: scales, wide and diamond-patterned, unfolding along his collarbones and down to his chest like a glimmering chain of office. 

“My lord-” Huw chokes on the word. Messmer has never heard him stutter before. Even in the dim light he can see Huw’s eyes are wide. 

“It is not malign,” Messmer lies. His voice is breathy, a hurried exhale. Instinctively his serpents pull away, as if to hide. “It is part of them. I - we - are not malign.”  

Without mastery over his face, there is a part of Huw that is foreign to Messmer, unknown. Across his dark features surprise and dismay mingle with something else, something Messmer cannot parse. He wonders, does Huw understand? He must, as a hornless. He must know how humiliating it is to beg.

“I swear it,” Messmer says. Before he can think better of it, he takes Huw’s hand and brings it to the base of his neck, where the scales are thickest, as if to show him here, look - they will not harm you. Beneath his opprobrium he knows by the red cast of firelight they could, under any other circumstance, be beautiful: fire opals, the kind that swirl and change when warmed by human touch. “Please. It changes nothing. When my mother sets the world right, she will set this right too.”

He can feel Huw’s hand trembling. The shame hits him with the force of a wave: the need to hide, to disappear. To retreat to where he cannot be seen. There is a spark, a breath over embers to ignite them, from the coil behind his eye. He promised you loyalty, it murmurs. He swore an oath. It takes his entire being, every part of him that is not a black abyssal hole in the universe, to push back on the impulse to set it all alight. The pavilion, the sprawling camp, everything in it. Huw. Even himself. He has spent a lifetime being regarded with suspicion, malaise, distress. He has borne it with dignity - even Huw has said so. So why does Huw’s wincing, this little betrayal, feel like the cruelest of them all?

A split second, a pause. His serpents sense movement in the air. He waits for Huw to withdraw his hand - to jerk it away in fear and loathing. Instead Huw leans a little forward, toward Messmer, and runs hesitant fingers along the spread of scales. Downward, in the direction they grow, with the same tentative touch he has used with Messmer’s serpents before. Then he pauses and hooks a nail under one of them, lifting it up as if to check that it is real, and that there is still pale, raw skin beneath. It is thick, still held fast to flesh. Messmer flinches when it detaches. It falls to the floor intact, like the chip of a blade that has not yet witnessed battle, still polished and bright. 

Huw’s gaze meets his own, blurred and golden and filling his narrow field of vision. 

“Forgive my ignorance,” Huw says quietly. “The things I could not know.” 

Still seated, Messmer reaches up and allows himself to take a handful of Huw’s tousled curls between his fingers. Strange, he thinks - he has wanted to do this for some time, and now it feels unreal, like the sensation will go up in smoke in his grasp. He realises he would like to lift the bull’s mask from Huw’s head once more, as he did the night they met, and see him again for the first time: to find what he has missed, what skipped by him in the ebb and flow of shadow and torchlight. But the light swells and ripples here, too, and Huw is opaque to him again, inscrutable. He searches his second’s eyes for something to be revealed to him. Doubt, or that cruelest of physical reactions: revulsion. But even with their hands on each other, Messmer cannot tell. He cannot see to the bottom of Huw’s dark gaze. The tremor and the warmth are indecipherable to him. If the fear is there, he cannot find it. And he realises it is easier not to know. 

When he speaks, his voice is barely audible above the rustle in the fire pit, the noise from beyond the tent. His whole being feels slowed, hushed. “I promised, did I not? To show you my mother’s kingdom.” He runs his fingers through Huw’s hair down to the back of his neck, damp and matted with traces of blood, evidence of the ruin they have left in their wake. “Stay by my side, and I will take you there.” 

Utterly still, Huw waits until Messmer lets go. Then he resumes, with movements slow and easing but without words, helping Messmer into the linen padding of his gambeson. Carefully he takes Messmer’s other hand, the one hovering over his wound, and threads his arm through the second sleeve. Messmer watches him arrange the garment’s front laces, the tentative way he moderates his grip so as not to pull too tightly. Bent over the awkward sliding of his own plate armour, Huw helps Messmer drape his chainmail back over his shoulders and chest, serpents weaving out of the way, down to his waist; then the tabard - red, as the previous one, lined with the twining serpents emboldened by black thread. Each one has two green agate eyes sewn into its sharp, triangular head.   

When he is done, Huw hands him his helm. Messmer rises. Without his helm he can stand up straight in the tent; with it, he must stoop. He stands a head taller than Huw, throwing his shadow over the other man, extinguishing the reflections swimming across the surface of his black armour. 

He puts one hand on the map spread before them. He settles his breath before speaking.

“I will not abase myself doing the work of the Hornsent. If the clergy cannot keep their subjects in line with prophecy and adulation, then I will do it with fear.” 

Can you not see, you who stands close as my own reflection? It is what I am suited to.

“Desecration of bodies is a crime in Hornsent scripture,” Huw says. Precisely, like it is taking him effort to enunciate. “If you want them to rally to your mother-”

“Are these dead all Hornsent?” he interrupts. 

Huw meets his gaze, frowns. Then he nods. 

“Then what does it matter if their corpses are defiled?”

Through his serpents he tastes the air, looking for the pungent smell of uncertainty, of heady rebellion; feeling for the tremor of deceit. He needs Huw to understand, to bend to him in this. He needs to believe in Huw’s loyalty, for it to flow from his mediator’s mouth to his men, and stir their loyalty in turn, a kinetic empathy from one able-bodied man to the next. 

He means for the words to come forcefully, callously, as if proof of his conviction. Instead they come flat as the unvarnished truth. “There is no more Hornsent scripture,” he says. “There is only my mother, and she is the beginning and the end. Hers is the word, the only one that matters. I know you believe this.” And you will be rewarded for it. 

Now his serpents are close to Huw’s face; they can sense the heat radiating from his body, wrung out from the day’s work. Through their eyes Messmer can see the individual drops of sweat on his lieutenant’s skin, the slow path they carve from his brow to his chin, the damp sheen that plasters his heavy curls to his skull. But Huw’s eyes do not leave his own. 

“There are some archaic practices considered cleansing, when body and soul are not prepared, or entombment is not possible.” Huw licks absentmindedly at the droplets of sweat when they reach his lips. His voice is even. Blaspheming is easier when it is done nonchalantly. “The Hornsent will not like it, but the men may come to understand. Perhaps they will thank you.”

“Tell me,” he says, but he already knows. The ember in his chest is so hungry. 

Huw takes his own helm in both hands, and before settling it back on his head he says, “Burn them.”

 

⚕️

Recalled, Messmer returns to Belurat, but leaves small brigades stationed strategically along the territory’s most consequential roads. Before they quit camp, he dispatches the order to deploy what they have been building for some time out of sight, hidden away under the creeping, grasping shadows in the ruins of Deoh: burning colossi, monstrous titans ablaze with a devouring flame. They are animated by an ancient force, Nokstellan magic once used to imbue their mercurial creations with the barest of sentience. It is an inexplicable, murky impulse that scholars of the Black Keep have deciphered from dense tomes. But to him they have made it sound awfully simple - as long as the iron-wrought core of the creature burns, it will serve. At his mother’s request, the astrologers have given them the heads of long-dead giants to affix to these furnace golems. Their march across the land becomes a thing of Hornsent nightmare, perpetual immolation at the hands of their ancient enemy. In exchange, Marika has offered the stargazers a permanent peace in whatever land they choose to dwell if it falls within her kingdom. An alliance is proposed. Take one of our Moons, they offer; and let the other rule the ancestral mountains and claim new territory in the coming age. Give us plains to cultivate our crystals, a river to reflect the stars, and we will call it even. 

His mother smiles into the blue-tinged missive. She wishes to lay eyes on them, these beautiful Twin Moons, to hold their lucent pale hands and pull them into her embrace, into the golden harmony of her new world. 

When he is not in the field shaping the world according to her desires, he spends his days in firelight. He visits the foundry and witnesses the birth of another monumental bronze bell, as though Belurat, city of towers, does not deafen its citizens already at every sunrise and sunset. He glimpses his reflection swimming through the mercury of a gilded mirror; is stung by the steam rising from a freshly hammered sword; observes the glowing, minute details spun into existence at the end of a glassblower’s torch. Accompanied by the firemasters he tours the powder tower, a walking wick in oiled leathers. Everywhere he treads through fire. He wants to understand it, to tame the singular thing his mother fears: to remain in her graces by virtue of his mastery over it. To prove himself as effective as Melina, neat little jewelled container for death, subdued. He has his men parade captured rebels up and down the city streets with bundles of kindling strapped to their backs, to remind them of a traitor’s fate: one he is willing to exercise. Marika does not favour fire. But it does not bother him. 

Still his mother stands adjacent her own flames, hammering the new face of the universe. Her brilliant yellow silhouette is a pulsing star in the night. This is a different fire: gold. He can feel its heat. On his mother’s skin it runs in drops of yellow sap that bubble and steam off her in great billows of mist, rising from her liquid perfection. It is hotter than anything he has felt before, even the fire that sits caged in his breast, furnace of the abyss. It would bend even the black iron of his own spear. Those who have never birthed something from a forge think all fires burn the same. He knows better. 

 

 

---

 

Chapter 10: she neatened his little red wings and pushed him through the door

 

For a time, there is a lull in the violence after Moorth. The Hornsent rebels seem shocked into quiet, subdued by the prospect of fire. It has been so long since they have seen it on the battlefield that now it seems to them obscene. It goes beyond strategy, beyond the morality of engagement: put simply, it is understood that those who resort to fire are cursed. Fell things incapable of redemption, irreconcilable by the Crucible. It is a fundamental part of Hornsent doctrine. Even children know it. Even the hornless, despite their victories, are made uneasy by these new war machines that spew flame and stalk the horizon with deadly purpose. His soldiers will have to get used to it, he thinks - fire is the one thing that makes the rebels tremble, the single weapon they refuse to raise in retaliation. It is the sole force he can truly control on the battlefield without revealing himself, if he is careful and calculating enough. 

His mother says nothing of his methods. Everything Melina wants to say is already written so clearly on her face that she need not open her mouth. 

In Belurat he gives his men, the hornless who make up most of his battalion, the time they are owed to rest and regain their strength. They go where they please, drinking, dicing, whoring, attending spectacles and sparring with the few barbarians who still remain. Those laws preventing them from climbing to the upper strata of Enir-Ilim have been struck down by the consuls at the urging of his sister, Marika’s words from her mouth. Now, when their mother receives petitioners, she is often seen flanked by her favourite chieftain at one hand and Andreas at the other, like two pillars holding her throne. If her Hornsent faithful are resentful of being displaced, they do not show it, but flock to Melina instead, and attend her while her days and nights are filled with decrees and debates and the slow bowing of her shoulders under the weight of her regalia. Messmer, when reunited with her in Enir-Ilim, embraces her. In his grasp he finds her painfully thin, depleted. 

In the streets he sees his men roam with a certain arrogance - one in truth he does not share, but does not mind, either. He feels they deserve their freedom. He, too, was an afterthought. He knows what it is to go from an unpleasant thing underfoot to the right hand of a saint. Some, he notices, now choose to wear his mother’s golden tree on their surcoats and shields rather than his serpents. Even Huw’s father, Andreas, does not don the same heraldry as his son. Over his black plate the commander bears Marika’s arms, and declares everything he does in the prophet’s name, for her coming glory, for the heaven she will unwind from the sky and pull down to their feet. At Ensis he flies her banners, and covers the walls with her pennants. Huw had been a little apologetic about it, before - forgive an old man his stubbornness - but by now Messmer has let it go. I, too, serve my mother. She is all that matters. Of late it is something he says without thinking. A prayer recited since childhood, the rhythm of the words always at the back of his mouth.

Still, he prefers Huw in the black and red of his own heraldry - it suits his bronze complexion, his inky silhouette. Crass, but it makes Messmer feel like the other man belongs to him, and it is reassuring. Once he feared his troops would be unwilling to wear the serpents, too disgusted to bear monsters in bright thread as he does in flesh. There is still a part of him, made cynical with dread, that believes his men see him as a usurper. When his mood is dark he imagines revolt, mutiny, chains: the accusation brought forward that he has spread falsehoods about his serpents, claimed them as blessings of the Crucible when they are simply another limb of his curse, the blight that coils inside him. Perhaps he should renounce his heraldry altogether, he muses. Wear his mother’s golden tree and silver star. That some of his men should prefer to serve under his mother’s banners rather than his own does not bother him. It is only their doubt that rouses him to indignation. Has he not done everything for the glory of the Empyrean? Is he not of her blood? Do I not deserve to be cleansed, just like this land? In truth he does not know. All he knows is that in solitude and uncertainty, the power inside him, the abyss, is still eating him from the inside out.

In the end, rather than forsake his emblem, he makes other concessions. He allows his forces to be split further; many come under the command of Andreas who - though the Black Knights are his in name - answers directly to his mother. In his own ranks he raises the hornless to positions of honour and encourages them to make the pilgrimage north, to embrace the light of the great tree. He begins again to liberally employ his mother’s healing gift, the spark of gold nestled in his palm, so that those around him associate the benediction of the Empyrean with his own serpentine nature. A benediction untouched by the Hornsent, who hoard power and favour for themselves. To wear the serpents, his hornless men murmur, is to make up for their lack in the eyes of the Crucible. He listens and lies through his teeth, his palms, his hidden monstrosity - and finds the adulation of his men makes it easy. 

He decides he will spend some time prying among his soldiers, inquiring after those who claim his mother’s tree has helped them harness the Crucible dormant within them. If even this cosmic force bends to his mother, the Hornsent will have nothing left to reproach her. Perhaps then they can rest. He goes to Huw for this. He will ask the other man to pluck the strings of his many connections, ply them with his player’s charisma in order to trace these tales through the ranks. Messmer is under the impression no rumour escapes his lieutenant, and no ear is deaf to his voice. 

Instead he finds Huw a little more subdued than usual, almost wan. Those times he dismounts his horse he is unsteady, and pliant under his armour. Clean-shaven again, his face looks drawn. He, Messmer, is ashamed he did not notice sooner. The fighting has taken a toll on all of them - only Huw is better at hiding it. 

“We could ride to the tree,” he says impulsively one morning, surprising even himself. “It may do us both good.”

“You were recalled by your mother,” Huw reminds him. “There are things she must need from you here.” Messmer watches him straighten, lift his shoulders back and push his hair from his face, as if suddenly self-conscious. Today he is out of plate and mail, finally; only the tabard and sash of his rank. Even so his movements are at times strained, like he is still compensating for the armour’s weight. When he looks at Messmer, he unknits his brow. “I can wait.” 

Huw’s vulnerability makes Messmer oddly sheepish. He tries in vain to dismiss the other man, encouraging him to retreat from his duties for a time. “Do not feel compelled to be my shadow,” he says, though there is no great conviction in his voice.

Huw gives him that look, the one he likes: candid, but always obliging. “I do not mind,” he says, tone noncommittal. He speaks matter-of-factly, as if they are friends, or equals. No trace of reticence, or shift in his demeanour that would imply he is still troubled by what he saw in the dimmed heat of Messmer’s war tent. “If I am not your shadow then I will be expected at Ensis, to act as my father’s.” 

It is like meeting at a crossroads - to be a father’s shadow, to have a shadow for a father. He has never asked after Huw’s mother. If he did he would expect a cagey response, or perhaps a sardonic quip, in that overfamiliar way he tolerates because it comes from Huw: Marika is all our holy mother, now. 

⚕️

The astrologers’ forces arrive on a bright, dry morning. The air is so clear he can see their approach from leagues out. In their silver-blue armour and robes they sweep across the sea of grass like a school of fish, scales glittering in dappled sunlight. 

Like the lowland chieftains, the mass of the modest host is left to pitch their camp outside the city’s main walls. He is told the bulk of the fighters are mages, and it makes him uneasy. He has been long enough in the field to know the sting of magic from a cleric or Inquisitor of low rank, but he knows that once disarmed, they are the most vulnerable targets on a battlefield. Perhaps it is his training, the barbarian sensibility, that has imbued in him an appreciation for something heavy and physical to swing. 

But with the Moongazer’s royal envoy come her knights - those who bear arms instead of staves - and their armour is a thing of beauty. The cosmic order is hammered across their breastplates, articulated in rings dotted with prismatic gems that resemble an impenetrable constellation. He imagines a battlefield scattered with them, stars winking up at the victor from bloody dirt. A pity for such fine work to be marred in a skirmish. He wonders how these knights, their azure capes immaculate, their swords sharpened to starlight, their leather unworn, keep themselves fit for battle. They have not had to mass against a hostile force in an age. But when they approach him on the parapets that circumscribe Belurat’s highest temple, their countenance looks martial enough. They are here at his mother’s request, and perhaps they need not fight at all, but only share in the spoils of the land she will make pure at ascension. 

Like her knights, the woman leading the delegation is in full armour. Her bulky silver silhouette is softened by a thick cloak of lapis arranged across her breastplate, the lush fabric gathered around her waist and flowing in heavy folds down to her knees. It is not unlike the Belurat style of draping, and he wonders if this is a part of her diplomacy. 

His own men stand far back, though not out of respect. The stargazers are secretive, his mother has said, again and again. Both Marika’s loyal Hornsent and hornless are leery of them, for they draw no power from the Crucible, and do not fear fire. Most of his men have never seen one in person: their snow-pale complexion, stark against their typically dark hair. They have none of the robustness the Hornsent prize so much - tall and sun-bronzed and inclined to physicality, it is no wonder the Hornsent developed a superficial kinship with the barbarians. To them the astrologers, with their elongated, delicate features, must seem like another race entirely. He does not wish to insult them, but he intends to keep their exchange discreet.  

When the knight greets him she takes a moment to examine his serpents, while he takes his own to study her face. Her helm is tucked under her left arm, and now she hands it to the knight hovering like a shadow behind her - her second, he guesses, by the flourish of heraldry particular to their armour. The lustrous black hair he’d admired briefly is in fact bound to her helm; beneath it, her own hair is the same but cut short, reaching only the nape of her neck. Against its brilliant darkness she is pale, angular and alabaster-bright. Her features are refined but not prominent, as if outlined by an artist with a too-hesitant hand: arched, sparse eyebrows, a straight nose, thin lips and a narrow mouth. She bows in the manner of her people, stiffly, with one hand gesturing to the sky. 

“Your Grace.”

He inclines his head, frowning. He is no prince, and has never been called one. Even lord still rings oddly to his ears, like a mispronunciation, emphasis in the wrong place. But if she is addressing him as such, she must think of him as an equal. She is royalty, he reminds himself. She is not here to pledge her sword to a pauper. It would be an insult to serve anyone lesser than a fellow monarch. The astrologers must already see Marika for what she is becoming: a queen. 

He clears his throat. He wishes, not for the first time, that Huw could speak for him in matters of diplomacy. Messmer has none of the other man’s easy manner or appeal. The woman before him carries herself almost rigidly, feet apart, shoulders square. The tilt of her chin is at the obvious angle of nobility. It makes him acutely aware of his own lanky, slope-shouldered stance. His serpents keep a respectful, wary distance. He is not even sure how to address her, how to arrange himself before her. As a lord? As a fellow warrior? As another child of a force beyond their understanding? 

“How is the Count?”

She laughs. It is a pleasing sound, deeper than he was expecting. “The old worm? An inch away from excommunication at all times, which is what makes him a valuable advisor. Ymir is no puritan.”

“He spoke highly of you and your twin, I recall.”

Her smile fades a little. “We are not twins. Deceptive, I know, to be called the Twin Moons. Our court is divided by Conspectuses - sects, if you will - and my elder sister has been named by House Caria to stand for the Full Moon. She may even be named queen, if the stars favour her. Ymir and his ilk advised a political union for me, to make myself useful.” She pats the decorative pommels of the swords hung at either hip. “But I do not think this is the kind he had in mind.” 

As they speak he leads her along the parapets. Their conversation is polite, tentative. She will present herself to Marika later, but for now he takes the time to point out the entry to Enir-Ilim, the ways in which Belurat is defensible, and where it is not. Vaguely he alludes to the turmoil he has quelled in the past, here and across the plains, in narrow, forested valleys and down in the riverlands. He says with some forced assurance there is likely no fighting to be done in the city proper. Bloodshed, at the base of the sacred tower, is almost unthinkable. She is to be stationed at Ensis, he tells her: well-provisioned, easily defensible and strategically critical. 

“It is trusting of your lady mother to put such a fortress in the hands of a foreigner.”

His men will be there too, he reminds her. It is to allow the commander of his forces to retake the field, and move at a moment’s notice between Belurat and the north. 

She slows, and here he expects her to ask about the north - the golden bough creeping across the horizon - but instead she raises a gauntleted hand. 

“Certain rumours have reached my ears, and so I must ask in all sincerity - Your Grace, whom are we fighting? And whom do we serve? My forces do not know whether to defend against Hornsent or engage them. I understand those who remain in Belurat claim loyalty to your mother still, while others plot in cellars and monasteries far afield. Some rally against you in plain sight. I do not question your duty to keep the peace. If these forces only serve to put down rebellions, then I should like to ask after those still haunting the northeast, where rumours of your Black Knights terrorising Hornsent settlements for their own divertissement do not sound like idle chatter.”

His throat is dry. As she speaks his first impulse is to cut her off - my knights would not. Huw would not - but when she is finished, he licks his lips in chagrined recognition and remains silent for a time. He knows these rumours. Ones he has tried and failed to ignore, failed to address with his mother, failed to act on and bring his men to heel. The soldiers under Andreas’s command, it is said, sometimes grow violent outside of conflict. They have been known to burn storehouses and farms across the countryside for the sheer, brutal enjoyment of it. They target Hornsent on the roads and steal from them, mutilate them, cut the horns from their heads; or follow them furtively back to their modest homes before descending on the defenceless hamlet like demons. Melina has asked him, insistently, every time one of these stories has made it to the consuls’ high tower: Where is your shame? Control your hounds.

He has mentioned it to Huw, in passing, with a deafening absence of the words your father. The answer comes with neither justification nor condemnation: the men think of it as retribution. It is always the men, never we - but of course Huw means the hornless. For a lifetime of servitude, of always being lesser. 

Messmer says, “My mother does not seek to rule with cruelty.” 

The moongazing knight looks at him quizzically. “I am told those forces answer directly to your mother.”

He wonders if loyalty to his mother is why Andreas’s men staunchly refuse to use fire, as weapon or tactic. Only Messmer’s own forces set the horizon alight when they burn corpses, or crops. How do they churn it, their fury, these men who do not bear flame under their skin? 

“Do not concern yourself,” he says at last, careful not to sound dismissive of her. “You will be under my banners, not my mother’s. Our objective is to defend Enir-Ilim, and to restore order to the territories beyond. Including those lands the astrologers stand to gain.” 

She holds his gaze for a few seconds before turning to look over the parapet walls, down the jumbled slope of bronze rooftops.

“Of course.”

He exhales, grateful that she is nobility. All monarchs must know there are things one must look away from to maintain power. It is a job for two hands - a generous open palm, and a closed fist. 

“Can you wield fire?”

She turns back to him without surprise, as if she has been waiting for this question. “My people’s legacy is the Night and Flame. If you ask for fire, I shall wield it.”

She puts a hand to the sword at her left hip, and he nods. As she draws it light emerges, the ripple of a bright moon over water, a silver so pure it seems impossibly to be without surface, without edge. She lays it flat across her other hand and presents it to him. The blade is frosty, unwelcoming; it appears to repel the air around it. Even so, if his hands were not bare he might have risked offence and touched it, so beautiful is the enamel ornament along its fuller. Just above the hilt an enormous lapis is set in a triangular cut. The stone, a deep oceanic blue, is speckled with starry imperfections. 

There is a second, thinner blade at her right hip, but it looks almost faded by comparison. It occurs to him quite suddenly how extraordinarily things have changed: to have a foreigner, a being born outside the Crucible, carry and draw a weapon at the foot of Enir-Ilim. At the back of his mind, his mother smiles. We are past shoring up sympathy.

“How do you conjure it?”

“It is not glintstone magic, so I cannot summon it myself. It is channeled through the sword.” In one smooth movement, she sheathes the blade. “My forebears taught the giants to read the stars. In return they lent us the flame of their fire-eyed god. It is the sort of exchange that has kept us at peace for millennia.”

“Your people do not fear it?”

She scoffs. “Only the unlearned are afraid of things they do not understand.” Seeing his expression, she gives a little tip of her head. “I do not speak against you, Your Grace. At court they declare your sister an accomplished scholar. But we are told the Hornsent allow old myths and forgotten grudges to stalk their daily lives. They seek to make enemies of everything outside themselves.” She rests her hand at her hilt. “But this flame is no more sinister than a cookfire. No more good or evil than the primeval current itself. It is simply one more force to be wielded.”

He can feel the abyss inside him uncoiling with interest. A forge is neither friend nor enemy. It is only power.  

“I was afield when the treaty terms were made.”

“You wish to know what was agreed upon? What we will receive in exchange for this alliance?”

“I know the territorial stipulations.”

She blinks. “Ah. You mean me. Peace of mind, I suppose. Many a secondborn are left outside on a cold night if they cannot be made useful.” She glances over her shoulder, towards her home, the mountains so far to the northeast they are not even a blue outline on the horizon. At this angle, her profile is striking. For someone so young, there is a dignity to the way she holds her head. After a moment, she turns back to him and says, “My sister will receive a kingdom.”

He smiles ruefully. “Then we are not so different.” 

“Perhaps.” Her demeanour suddenly becomes quite grave. She gestures to his serpents, but without the accompanying aversion he is used to. Her hands make a vague, unbothered motion to indicate them, as if she were referring to any object in a room. It is markedly impersonal. “Their stature was greatly exaggerated.”

He tries not to look stupefied. “Oh?”

“Ymir’s spies.” She says this so brazenly, so casually, it is hard for him not to laugh. “They described you as inhuman. Monstrously deformed. But it seems to me you are just a man.” 

He nods, hoping she does not pick up on his incredulity. He is not used to such indifference. It is almost refreshing.  

⚕️

For a long time, they climb. 

Of what their mother shows them that day, no record remains. Not in the Keep, nor in those tomes that survive the eventual burning of Belurat; not in the land that will gradually detach itself, peel away like the shedding of skin, and drift into shadow beyond Marika’s holy beacon. 

But he does not know that. Not yet.

He only knows that as they climb those stairs, ascending this impossibly thin spire in a corner of Enir-Ilim he has never explored, something changes. Beside him, Melina notices as well - senses it before him, perhaps, before it becomes visually evident to both of them. She reaches out to steady herself. The train of her consul’s robe is long, and she must hold it up with one hand and look down at her feet while she climbs. He lets her hook her arm around his, and one of his serpents perches lightly on her other shoulder to steer her. 

Still they climb. It is disorienting, like losing one’s sense of direction. Like being underwater and not knowing which way is up. There is a moment when his vision blurs, and he sees double - odd, he thinks; he has never carelessly crossed his own vision with that of his serpents. His steps become jerky, hesitant. The width of the stairs shifts beneath his feet. He cannot tell if it is real or imagined. He wills his sensations to retreat into his serpents, but even they feel strangely unmoored. The air tastes different on their darting tongues. Around them, the walls fade in and out of detail, as if passed under something translucent. 

The more they climb, the more those familiar shapes and colours of Enir-Ilim fade, and are replaced with forms unknown to him, a visual language he does not recognise from any tome or ruin. Sculpted shadows emerge, like those in a temple from behind a cloud of incense. Like passing from one room to the next, and this one is suffocating, shrinking, space squeezed out of it. Something dark gathers above them in stillness. 

Marika walks a few paces before them, up the endless coil of stone stairs. She is upright, her pace measured and even. Her long, thick plait swings like a metronome at her back. On occasion he glances to Melina, and each time he looks back up at their mother she seems to have pressed further ahead, stretching the distance between them. She does not tire, or slow; beneath her dark silks he cannot make out her footfalls. She appears to float without physical effort, the gentle sway of her hips no more than the impulse of whatever invisible wave carries her. In her wake she leaves the smell of jasmine, and something else, sharp and burning. He is afraid that if she gets far enough ahead she will turn a winding corner and disappear entirely, and they will be trapped here without her, on this endless spiral to nowhere. 

He loses track of how long they climb. Towards the end he must strain, but it is Melina beside him who makes him uneasy. She is bowed, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, and her grip on his arm is beginning to loosen. It seems to him the more they ascend, the more something saps her strength. At his side she looks faded, empty. He wants to tell her to cast off her heavy mantle, the livery that chokes her. But he is afraid that if he speaks he will break something: disturb the glasslike quality of the silence, the low sound of his voice enough to crack the foundation of wherever they stand and send it tumbling down to earth. 

When he thinks Melina can endure no more, when he thinks he will lose sight of that last flaxen glint of his mother’s braid around a corner, they reach the top of the tower. 

After the narrow passage, the light is blinding. Together they stumble onto a circular platform open to the sky, ringed by repeating stone arches that run the length of the tower’s edge, a pattern broken only by the small entry from which they emerged. Through each archway he can glimpse the sky beyond in all its twilit colours - burnt umber and blood orange, transfigured by darkness into a rich, velvety indigo - but the tower is so high the ground is no more than an abstraction, the horizon a blurred line. All his life has been spent at the vertiginous edge of Enir-Ilim, and yet even here he feels his gut weaken, a sickening sense that he must get down on his hands and knees so as not to be tossed off the edge by a whipping wind. But there is no swirling, screaming gust. The air is calm but for the gentle snowfall of gold leaves, so delicate and bright he thinks at first they must be sparks, the living embers of some unseen fire. He watches them land on his arms, his hands, though they do not dim or blink out. It soothes him to observe this, to look away from the vast nothing and instead at the immediate details around him. Like the unending staircase, here there is architecture both familiar and foreign. Writhing roots burst from the tiled floor, and gilded leaves are etched in spiralling rosettes along the stone columns. Embedded in each one is a strange hunk of resin. He squints, reaches forward with his serpents’ eyes, and realises they are faceted, uncut chunks of amber. Their insides roil with starlight. 

Then he notices Melina is looking far out over the horizon. The fear on her face makes him follow her gaze. 

Below them, it is not Belurat. It is not the land he knows on the horizon; not the onyx spires of the Black Keep, nor the wavering orange of the southern woods. Not the same kind of blue as the Cerulean Coast, a glittering speck in the distance, nor the toothy, soot-stained outline of the Jagged Peaks.

Above them, it is not the tree: not the monumental sapling, young and unabashed in its radiance, that he has come to recognise on the horizon. This is a version of that tree expounded, accelerated. A pillar of the earth, a canopy so vast the real sky seems like a cheap replica of this gilded mosaic above them. 

Melina lets go of him. She straightens to face their mother, who has moved to the centre of the strange, ethereal space. He exhales, brings a hand to his mouth.

Behind Marika, towering above her, is a stone effigy from the ruins of Deoh. Except now he can see it is not stone at all: not the swirling, calcified fists that reach over that wasteland where his mother once worshipped in the dark. This thing that throws its shadow over her is flesh: grey and sallow and pockmarked, wrinkled at every joint and sprouting tendril-like hairs - but unmistakably flesh. It is a crude imitation of a palm, but only two fingers remain. Raised to the sky, it looks like a monstrous exaggeration of the gesture his mother makes to bless her petitioners. In the stillness it quivers, as if it is breathing, a subtle expansion and contraction of its leathery, visceral form. There is a kind of magnetism to it, a gravitational impulse, as if it is trying to draw them in. He realises suddenly that it reeks of brimstone.  

His mother puts a hand on it. 

“An envoy,” she says. She is beaming, undisturbed by his and Melina’s fear, if she sees it at all. There is a queer, sickening kind of affection in the way she touches the thing. “A gift from the Greater Will. It will protect you when the time comes.”

With some effort, he manages to tear his gaze away from it, and look to Melina. He could not say why. Something in him is hoping she will know whether this deformed creature is divine. What to say in the face of it. What to do - or what their mother wants them to do. But something in her countenance is disturbed: her eyes crease, and the corners of her mouth pull back. He waits for prophecy, for dark-coloured flame to spill from her lips. But in the face of this grey colossus, cast in gold beneath a titanic version of their mother’s sacred tree, she cannot speak. 

So he does the only thing he can think to do. He reaches out. He puts a hand on her, feeling the way his own fire negates her black flame. Very gently he exerts a pressure between her shoulders, and brings his own forward. He bows, and at the mercy of his hand, the weight of the air, their mother’s gaze - so does she.    

They remain like that until Marika steps away from the envoy. She approaches and lays a hand on each of them, gently straightening them up. Golden light bleeds from her palms. She gathers them in her arms - she, infinite, all-consuming, and they small and bowed, curled as little children in her incomprehensible embrace. 

Once, she promised her children the sun. Now she whispers to them, “I will take the sun and replace it with one of my own devising.” 

⚕️

At night he sits with Melina in the lush gardens of Enir-Ilim’s lower strata, the way they once did. The air is heavy and fragrant, without the cloying embrace of incense. From somewhere in the foliage a single bird announces itself mournfully. Because of the vegetation there are few torches out here, and so Melina, seated beside him, is half-lost to the dark. If he closes his eye he might convince himself they are children again, on a night like any other, conspiring in hushed tones. Pretending they know something about a future they cannot imagine, and the people they do not know they will become. 

But unlike when they were children, now they are not alone. He can hear guards shifting on the balconies above them, the drag of their cloaks over marble floors. They are his mother’s, or Melina’s minders - it does not really matter. There is nowhere she can go where she will be truly isolated, and yet she is starkly, wretchedly alone. He looks for her childlike annoyance, scratching against the bars of her gilded cage. But her posture is changed, bent. Her head hangs heavy, as if she has lost a fight. 

“Do you still imagine it a privilege?”

He looks away. She is rooting around through his fear, he knows. Reading the concern in his serpents, who lay both their heads in her silken lap.

“You are safe here,” he says. “I am only sorry-” He stops. He sounds maudlin, and he hates it. But he hates her despondency more. “I am only sorry the mantle is so heavy.”

He listens for the reproach in her curt laughter, but does not hear it. Perhaps he does not want to. Her head is bare now, but he can see her reaching from time to time to part and pull the hair around her ears, as if to readjust something. He knows she wants to rip it off, the crown that bends her neck even when she does not wear it. If she could she would disappear beneath it, reappear elsewhere, further away, the tower a blot in the distance. Safe. Head without all that weight, out from under the sun beside her mother, her mother who is the sun. She brings her hand away from her head and he is reminded her fingers are long, like his, suited to a quill. He misses the Melina who was always reaching,  grasping, wanting things she should not have. He wants to provide for her, offer her something from the palm of his own hand. He wishes to lure her back to the athenaeum. To herself. But what she wants now is distance, and this he cannot give her. Like him she has found herself pressed between two panes of glass - another specimen in their mother’s kingdom.

“As of late I dream all the time,” she says quietly. As she speaks she trails her fingertips absently over his serpents. “I dream of a golden house crumbling, a thunderclap that fragments the world. A plague comes, and the sickness is stillness, stagnation at the heart of something perfect. At times I cross paths with a girl, a star in her eye. She looks like me, and yet not.”

The images leap behind his eye. He can feel her unease, cold water seeping into his boots, a chill up his flesh. “What does Mother say?”

“I have not told her, and I will not. They could be meaningless. Childish fears, nightmares.” She fixes him with her pale eye. “But I do not want it listening. I do not want it to see what is unknown to me in my own mind, where it reaches already.”

It? He squirms a little in his seat. The two of them are so inextricably linked that he expects to feel something tickling the back of his own neck. 

“The envoy,” she says, the words lingering between them. “The fingers.”

As he listens he feels her fear move through him, the tight pinch, the rope burn of the thread that binds them. It is almost nauseating, the way she describes it. It is worming its way into her mind, she says. Squeezing. Brimstone up her nose and in her mouth. In the south, she reminds him, she encountered something similar in the deep woods, where Jori and their Inquisitors are now. Something that burns the eye: ripe yellow-orange, scorching. A twitching, grasping hand that reaches into her, sifts through her fears and leaves its fingerprints on her. It covets life, covets servitude, covets obeisance. At a certain point he no longer knows whether she is describing the envoy or the yellow fire glimpsed in the forest. Both want to smother the world, be it in gold or in flame - it does not matter. Two sides of the same coin. 

“Palm up or palm down,” she whispers, “a greedy hand can still grasp.”

She lets go of his serpents and sits back, melting into the darkness. Through their eyes he can vaguely make out the heat of her as an outline in the dim. It flickers in and out, swathe of stars blinking at uneven intervals, fading to pinpoints before pulsing back into brightness. Her eye, a pale radiance that matches his, is the same colour as their mother’s tree.  

Her hands clench and unclench. After a time she reaches out to take his. It is a long time since she has been physically affectionate. 

“What do you dream?”

For a moment he thinks she is trying to distract him, to veer away from the dread that pools between them and spills across the stones at their feet like moonlight. But that is not her way. She only wants to know. She is still straining for some truth, though not in the way she did as a child, disobedient, testing the barriers of their little world. He looks down at her hand draped over his, chill as a night breeze.  

“I dream I am sitting at a gate,” he begins, “but this is not the Gate of Divinity. On the other side is a precipice. A blank space. I dream I hold the key to it in my hand: a perfect circle, light as glass. Sometimes it is made of pure gold, and other times it is occluded, and I cannot see what it contains. Even if it does not look like a key, I know what it is. What it does. In my dream I sit there and roll the key away into the darkness, to be rid of it - and every time it rolls back to me.”

His voice settles over them thinly, without warmth. Another mournful cry comes from the canopy of magnolias around them. Abruptly he thinks, the songbirds from the athenaeum’s gardens will need to be brought here. When all this is done, when Enir-Ilim becomes no more than a transitional space, a little walkway between the land and the heavens, he should like to abandon the Black Keep and have a seat up here, in the gardens. Unimaginable, suddenly, to leave something so familiar behind. The new world is still clouded in his mind. Here, with a little effort and a blurred, golden squint, he can pretend nothing has changed. 

Melina stands up brusquely. The golden fringe of her shawl falls in a shimmering cascade across her shoulders.

“Forgive me. There are things I must attend.” His serpents lose sight of her momentarily, the warmth of her silhouette too murky for detail. Only a dark-coloured outline remains. “For what happens next.”

He is still seated, but before she can walk away he takes her wrist in his hand and holds her back gently. He wants to ask. But he does not wish for Death to answer. 

Instead he says, “What happened to the recipes in the prayer room? The ones from that night - where we were forbidden.” They are young again, barely more than children, trespassing on the ground of their mother’s secrets. “Where we thought we could find her. Know her.”

Standing over him, Melina leans forward. Gently she takes his face in her palms and kisses his brow. Obscured, the shadow of their mother makes him recoil. But there is nothing of their mother’s hard possessiveness in Melina’s gesture. Only fondness. Love, shaded by melancholy. Her hands are cool on his skin. 

“Oh,” she whispers, “she seized those long ago, dangled them over the edge of the world, and let go.”

 

 

---

 

Notes:

Published this while abroad (and so not on my normal writing software) and only just noticed Jori was autocorrected to Jory??? My beta, for all their work, did not catch this indignity either. As if Jori hasn't suffered enough ):

Chapter 11: from opposite shores of the light

 

 

 

Betrayed.

It is the word the bitterest among the Hornsent use. Those who have fled Belurat, which has so thoroughly bent to the Empyrean that even the bells ring to the tune of her name. But those who stay, too, sometimes whisper the word when they think no one is listening. Betrayer. Usurper, they name her, pretender. 

To what? he wonders. Divine right is sketched into her flesh. 

As once the hornless kept their heads down and their mouths sealed, now the Hornsent who remain are compelled to bend the knee in public, even if they plot in private. The mustering of Messmer’s men in the streets, long claimed a temporary measure to quell unrest, is now a permanent feature of the sprawling cityscape. Dissident voices are shamed, cajoled, threatened for not acknowledging the need to keep the Empyrean safe in this time of strife. There has been compromise, there has been mollification. Hornless have served, well and with great dignity. They have borne the Hornsent’s disdain. Now it is time for the Hornsent to acquiesce, to truly accommodate Marika and her loyalists. If they do not step aside willingly, he will not be gentle when he must remove them himself. 

It goes like a hymn. The crown on your head we placed there. And so heaven we demand in return. 

It is what the self-proclaimed insurgents say when they are caught. They should have fled when they had the chance, he thinks, watching his soldiers strap bundles of kindling to their backs. They should have had the nerve to wage civil war as it is meant to be fought: out in the open, where he marches them now in the streets as a warning, and not whispered in backrooms or concealed like blades under heavy shawls. They should have taken up arms themselves, and died fighting. Not begging and wailing, as they do when they burn. 

He never burns them in the city proper - only at the main gates, in the low streets, where their sludgy ash can be left to remind all those who have turned on his mother what awaits them at their homecoming. Beyond the walls, scattered across the bronze sea of grass, the barbarians still fly her banners. No surprise, not to him - she has promised them a kingdom, a new territory if they wish it, under her reign. They are not moved by fire, not as the Hornsent are. They watch the struggle play out like it is a spectacle, the reenactment of a grand myth, and they are captivated by it. Intrigued by how the hornless have risen from nothing, how the top of the tower now disappears beyond the clouds. They observe the colossi marching across the horizon like a blazing sunset and note, with an appreciation for death in all its forms, the screams and the smell of cooked flesh as it rouses the city. 

Marika does not see the pyres. He, Messmer, has made clear they are not fit for the eyes of one so holy. But from her throne, now carried to a higher stratum of Enir-Ilim, she reminds the Hornsent: so heaven you shall have. But it will be made in my image, not yours. 

Some Hornsent have begun to doubt what is on the other side of the Divine Gate. Theirs was meant to be an exalted future, a coming golden age of the Crucible shaped for them, the chosen people. Now, they are not so sure. Now they panic at the forceful words of their priests, spread in quiet, poisonous tones: the Empyrean is a thief, and their destiny is being cut like a purse-string before their very eyes. Perhaps the false saint has already deceived them, changed the lock of their promised door. They moan, they weep, they rage in muted voices. They have been waiting so long for a paradise. For a home. 

To him Marika says, they need not ask where their home is. He tells her, as he has always done, everything he knows about those who move against her, and those who would pretend to serve her with treason in their hearts. He is unflinching in his loyalty. Intent on carving this path for her. When he is at her side she bathes him in her love, her liquid radiance, and soothes him with her amber voice. He is at once reduced and elevated: a doubtful child and a weapon of war. When he is spent she lets him lay his head on her holy lap. But she is something more, now, and so the light over his sallow skin is the harsh light of the cosmos, and not the warm glow he remembers of a mother. Still, he kneels. 

If they are true, she says, they will all come home to me. 

In the north, fed by her own blood, the tree grows. On sacred land she builds her own kingdom. Witch, they murmur, when they witness what she has conjured on the horizon. False prophet. Whore of an outer god. Seductress, strumpet queen - though she takes no consort, no king. The throne is hers, legitimacy is what she defines it to be. Her bastard children wear crowns of rubies and tourmaline brilliant as the dawn sky. Melina has pearls woven into her pale copper hair. They make her look older, more fragile, and he is afraid for her. Afraid of what she will do. 

 

⚕️

 

To his surprise, she asks to ride north. At first he is inclined to deny her, but soon realises the shade of their mother’s bough may be safer for her than the streets of Belurat and even Enir-Ilim, broiling with tension, with Hornsent eager for martyrdom. Both consuls still bow to Melina, and she remains Marika’s principal conduit to Hornsent society; though with brigades in the streets, her position is largely symbolic. When challenged to rewrite laws or doctrine, the clerics of rank no longer chafe openly and push back, or call upon the other consuls to support them. They stretch their vellum, take up their quills, and write what emerges from her mouth. They push their discontent below ground, into the streets and shadows, where it festers. 

Preoccupied, his mother gives them her murmured blessing to depart the city. She is turned in on herself, as if summoning something from the base of her own being, and her fixed attention sets off in him the thrill of anticipation: the Gate is close, and it is only a matter of time. The tower has grown taller. This is the precipice.

Like a forest in winter Melina sheds her consul’s regalia, exchanging her starry silks and jewel-encrusted mantle for faded colours and plain wool. He watches her spectral hands disappear into her riding gloves and assumes this request to go north is to get as far away from the envoy as possible. They have not seen it since their mother led them up the endless stairs of a strange, displaced tower in Enir-Ilim, where they emerged under a different sky; face-to-face with a creature that had none, and claimed to be an envoy of the Greater Will. He does not ask Melina whether she has seen it again. He himself has looked for the entrance to that spiralling stair and never found it, as though it were something his mother conjured from nothing. As if they climbed it only in dreams. At times he wonders whether the queer sensation at the back of his mind is a golden, probing touch, or simply his own misgivings. But as of late, he has become better at burying those. 

When Messmer tells his lieutenant they are departing for the north, Huw makes a show of becoming pensive. 

“Is it wise to leave Belurat at this hour?”

There are times Huw’s caution feels more like a challenge, a cavalier change of pace to rival his insouciance. He knows as well as anyone the bulk of Messmer’s forces are in Belurat. So Messmer only says, mildly, “I have made you wait long enough.” 

“My father will ride with you. You can spare my presence here. It would please me to stand by your lady mother.”

“And you would be worthy of it, as my lieutenant. But my Knight Captain belongs with my brigade. With me.”

“Your - ah.”

Admittedly, he enjoys it - watching Huw’s mouth open, then close; the arch of his brows and the way he tries to hide the deep flush of pleasure spreading across his face with an equally deep bow. 

When he comes up for air Messmer hands him a new mantle, symbol of his increase in rank, and a richly ornamented baldric, crimson embroidered with a black serpent winding itself around a flourishing tree picked out in gold thread. It comes to him then how much he prefers Huw garbed in fabric instead of armour: it allows him to see how sinewy Huw’s movements, despite the density of his compact frame, his musculature. He can observe the way drapery falls soft, organic across the contours of Huw’s silhouette, marking those instances of tension, of momentum and release, the square of his shoulders and tilt of his hips, the promise of movement otherwise hidden when he is trapped in steel. The way a shrug becomes intimate, the drag and pull of his cloak along the ground like the tail feathers of a peacock. Somewhere along the way, Messmer has become more apt at reading Huw’s gestures than his expressions.  

Still, the other man’s forthright gratitude, the colour of his face and the flash of his grin, please Messmer. He offers his hand and Huw takes it, bows again and touches it to his brow in the traditional gesture of fealty.  

“My lord,” he says, “where you go, I will follow.”

 

⚕️

 

They depart on a foggy morning with a small contingent, so as not to attract attention on the road. They are accompanied by Melina’s minders, both hornless and her Hornsent loyalists, those who have followed her from the athenaeum, though he still finds it difficult to trust them. So too do some of his mother’s men, it seems - Andreas, reluctantly prised from Marika’s side, rides close enough to Melina to reach out and steer her horse. A little ways back, Huw is beside him.

As they ride, the tree is a beacon on the horizon: a mountain, a guiding star, a column at the end of the earth that holds up the heavens. Clouds stack grey as the stones of the holy tower, covering it, but still its luminous pulse is visible. It seems the closer they get, the less his men can utter under its stretching shadow: in his small retinue, only Andreas has been north to see it. The hush is heavy, reverent.

“We have stood under it,” Melina reminds him when he sidles up beside her. At their mother’s beckoning, emerged at the top of the envoy’s tower, out of place and time. That tree was grander, he is certain, and more lush than this one - but undeniably the same, as if this tree is but the sapling, the young shadow of what they witnessed. Thinking about it still unsettles him. If it was a dream then it was a shared one, and vividly so: he’d emerged with the smell of brimstone following him. Disoriented, he remembers brushing gold pollen from Melina’s shoulders while she picked gilt leaves from his long hair. 

Rather than pass through Ensis, where the astrologer’s forces have been stationed, they take the valley south of Rauh. A foggy canyon rift, the terrain is challenging but offers cover, and less chance they will be accosted or ambushed than if they instead crossed the vast, open plains around the Black Keep. Here, the once-narrow path is frequented only by merchant caravans and Marika’s own forces. It brings them through those settlements that have not risen against her. Elsewhere Messmer’s men have closed the roads through villages known or suspected of harbouring rebels, choking their supplies of grain and oil, starving them until they are willing to turn over the traitors he imagines hidden away in their cellars, reeking of damp and sedition. 

Not so in Temple Town, where they stop to rest when night pulls its heavy cover over the sky. The sprawling village is prospering: its walls have expanded, grown to encompass more of the pleasantly shaded lakeside. Its people look well-fed, their tools polished, their garments clean and well-cut as any he might see in Belurat proper. The visit is partially intended to make sure it remains that way. It would be inconvenient to make another Moorth - wasteful, to turn a perfectly serviceable settlement into another smouldering ruin of stones and subjects. He had thought it inevitable, some moons ago: Temple Town is second only to Belurat in houses of worship, and so he expected their flavour of disobedience to be particularly dogmatic. But though the Hornsent of Temple Town are devout, they do not interpret their scriptures the way those who zealously plot against Marika do, and so their retinue, especially Melina, is greeted with a genuine reverence that seems to him almost performative. Despite the welcome, he finds himself frustrated, embittered by doubt. Here, too, he cannot separate those who turn their faces up to him in loyalty from those who do so in fear.   

With Huw he makes a round of the town on horseback. Residents tell them those Belurat landowners, moneylenders, and guild masters who fled the tower-city came first to Temple Town. A diplomatic effort, or so they claimed. But their delegation preached against the Empyrean’s ascendance, and implored them to raise banners on behalf of rebels. Despite their gifts and honeyed words they were chased out, hounded as traitors and blasphemers. Temple Town keeps the saint’s days sacred, they assure him. They take him to a little niche carved into the grey cliffs at the town’s southern border, and there show them the shrine they have built to his mother: a solemn, austere cavern lined with glazed blue tiles. At its centre, a wide stone altar overflowing with offerings of bread and fruit and oil in glazed jugs. Blooms, so fresh they are still swollen with water, are arranged like a shawl around the stone likeness of his mother. Her arms are outstretched in a gesture of gentle offering, and her slate visage bears an expression so tender he struggles with the intimacy of it.

Later, Melina confers with the Hornsent clerics while Messmer allows Huw and Andreas to speak with the settlement’s small hornless population. Wide-eyed and disbelieving, they ask if it is true that hornless have seized power in Belurat, and now walk the streets freely, free from bondage to a Hornsent household. There is a pervasive sense of awe, and though Andreas is not inclined to entertain smallfolk, Huw amasses a crowd of them while he describes Belurat like an exotic land: barbarians in the amphitheatres, sorcerers on the battlements. Hornless like himself, stepping foot in Enir-Ilim, armed and shining in the symbols of the faultless saint, born from the holiest jar. Messmer, watching from afar, is struck by the easy mingling of Hornsent and hornless here. It is the capital city’s hornless, he realises, who suffer most their master’s boot at their necks. 

Pleading fatigue, he retires early. He is still acutely aware he is ill-suited to diplomacy, and so content to be alone in the rooms they have requisitioned in the town’s largest chantry. To his surprise it is Melina, not Huw, who walks in on him unannounced.

“You are brooding.”

He is gazing out the window, taken by the perpetual light of the tree. At her voice he turns to look over his shoulder. Strange to see her in such simple garb after so long. The only part of her that glitters is the ruby clasp of her cloak, modest compared to the ones gifted to her, fat as apples, on her anointment as consul. He is reminded of the little gemstone shards his mother once hoarded from temple offerings and sewed into his garments, his and Melina’s collars and sleeves, when they were children. 

His serpents reach for her, but he remains fixed at the window. “What shall I do instead? Feast with the temple Hornsent?”

“They are not Belurat’s bishops,” she says. “Only monks. They bear us no ill will.” 

Parasites, he thinks, with sudden and surprising vitriol, who spat at us when we were children. “I will not remove the guards from your door, if that is what you have come to ask.”

“You do not have to. I dismissed them myself.” She is unmoved by his glowering indignation. “These people are not trying to murder me. They are trying to survive.”

He scowls. “Survive what?”

She lifts her eye, makes a gesture to the space above them. “Mother’s ascension, and whatever comes after. If you bothered to listen you would know the tone of their religious tracts, the timbre of their preaching, has changed. Even the faithful have become apocalyptic.”

“What does it matter?”

“It means they still believe Mother is the saint who was promised. They hold fast to their faith, but they fear the future she represents. They fear what they cannot control.”

“Good,” he mutters. He turns back to the window. “Perhaps they should.”

Her tone becomes reproachful. “Did you miss it, brother? That moment we rose above them? The moment we became the knife in the dark?”

Before his serpents can touch her, she leaves him to his brooding. 

In the morning they depart, but not before a gaggle of residents swarm Melina. Out of the chantry they follow her, carrying thick, succulent dewgem bulbs and waving stalks of rana fruit strung with feathers - a traditional blessing for luck, someone explains to him. In the streets they swing their enormous baroque censers like great silver pendulums. White smoke trails behind them, and by the time Melina mounts her horse, her wool cloak reeks of incense. Andreas helps her up, his big armoured frame like a shield keeping the smallfolk from getting too close. A few manage to touch Melina, to skim her riding boots with their fingertips, or brush the flank of her mount. Some offer up what he recognises by smell as pickled liver, wrapped in little cloth bundles. 

Part of it is familiar - the rabble of petitioners at his mother’s feet when there was still some semblance of order in Belurat; when the Hornsent touched her possessively, appreciatively, as one caresses a stunning piece of jewellery they are about to purchase. But Melina has nothing. Like him, she is nothing - no celestial cradle, no saintly birthright. She has offered only her honest work in the athenaeum. As a consul she has been little more than a pulpit and a puppet for Marika. But here, where the smallfolk have struggled to keep the peace but remain faithful to the Empyrean, there is no mistaking their gratitude for her stewardship. Neither hornless nor Hornsent have suffered at her hand.    

He tugs at the reins of his mount and turns away from the fawning mob. Open mouths, pleading voices, grasping hands. It makes him uncomfortable, this kind of awe that produces obsequiousness. From what feels like a great distance, Huw’s words ring in his ears: some can only find their place in service. He has always found grovelling pointless, useless and undignified, overindulgent in its display. It is proof of neither fealty nor faith, only the ability of one’s mouth. It is more akin to servitude than service, and he does not trust the devotion of whipped dogs. It is why he allows Huw to challenge him on occasion; why he does not mind Andreas’s stony countenance.

As they leave the hubbub behind, he glances at them, at the weapons strapped to their backs, elongating their black silhouettes like false horns, or wings. He wants his men for their strength, their steadfastness. Not their fearful prayers. Above all else he prizes loyalty, but he needs it to come from them: from the blade taken up by choice. The hand must be steered with purpose, the wound made willingly. He does not want them to think that, free from Hornsent rule and sworn now to his mother, they have simply exchanged one master for another. 

 

⚕️

 

There is something of his mother in the golden city. 

Not in the symmetry of it. It is true the columns that hold up the porticos and grand, rosette-tiled arcades are works of mathematical perfection, wider and more intricately carved than even the seven holy pillars of Enir-Ilim. It is true the arches repeat endlessly down the avenues with the same rhythmic sway as his mother’s long flaxen hair, and they are decorated, as she is, in glittering scrollwork and floral arabesques. It is true the flowing, veined marble of an interior wall and ceiling resembles her flesh, and a facade’s speckled porphyry her eyes; the soft hue they were once, before everything bent to the impulse of gold. 

But this is not evidence of his mother. Only gentle imitation. 

Where he truly sees his mother is in the way this place seems to have sprung from the barefaced rock of the earth, from a place where he is certain there was once nothing, a nothing more profound than even the one he names the void. Here this city on a hill rose up, fully formed at the peak of all things, to assume its destiny. Doused in the light of the great golden tree, it cut its own shape into the universe and made a throne for itself. 

He looks at Melina. She nods, almost imperceptibly. She must understand.

Later, away from his men and her attendants, he will pull her aside and ask how long she has known about this. He will demand to know how their mother has raised this miraculous place from nothing while she also claims to trace, in her crystalline mind, the tower path to the Gate. Are they one and the same? Is this the paradise destined for the Hornsent, here already like a meal prepared, a table set and untouched, waiting? Why was I not told? He would allow himself to be petulant with her, to sound childish; but he knows the answer already, and if it comes from Melina it will hurt all the more: You were too busy fighting her wars. 

Flatly, she will tell him, “This is the reward at the end of toil. Where she will take her people once the Gate is open, to gift them land and titles and peace - peace in exchange for the horror they have birthed in her name.” Before he can answer, she will fix her eye on him, and he will know the one that is closed is looking, too.  

“This is the utopia of her mind,” she will continue. “The place death cannot follow. Do you think all this time she has been idle?”

But for now as they canter down the sprawling avenues, his questions go unanswered. The echo of hoofbeats seems to go on without end, bouncing from wall to wall down increasingly narrow streets and alleys, disappearing into the orderly maze of buildings. On occasion one of his serpents looks over his shoulder. Now, somewhat elevated, he can see the golden plains above the valley extend far to the west. A forest, blurred canopy of autumnal saffron, rises beyond. All around an undulating countryside flows, dominated by sunflowers and strange, tall blooms with triangular heads of powdered gold. The landscape melts from vibrant ochre to blue in the distance, except for the northeast: here they are close enough to glimpse the ancestral home of the Fell God and the stargazing astrologers. It hovers behind the great tree, a pale outline of mountains like a many-tiered cloud. 

Before them, golden rooftops emerge at sweeping angles and in thin spires, presided over by an immense cupola. Above it all a miraculous structure dominates, its form wrapped around the tree like pale fingers, leading the gaze up and inviting the eye into the tree itself. He has never seen anything like it. His world has always been Belurat, Enir-Ilim, the greatest structure he has ever known. In this place he senses Belurat’s heart - its core, its skeletal frame - only enlarged, sharpened to perfection. The great white tower exchanged for a holy sapling. Verdant and not sunbaked, a garden watered and not forgotten. He feels like a man emerging from a desert, stepping over a threshold of scorching sand and onto the cool, wet marble of a baptismal font. 

Like children, the men of his retinue hold out their hands and catch the falling leaves, coating their black armour in gold, and he can hear the murmur of whispered prayer, their awed breaths. At every turn onto an even higher vista, Huw’s exhale is sharp beside him. He pulls back, steers his mount a little behind Huw’s. From this angle he can watch the leaves alight in Huw’s tangle of dark hair and dissolve like gilded smoke. He remembers the same gentle snowfall from his mother’s vision, standing beneath the full splendour of some future canopy, anointed by its sigh. Perhaps he had only imagined them to be leaves, and they are living fireflies after all, made of gold.

He takes a deep breath; partly to search the air for anything familiar, partly to soothe his serpents, who are becoming fretful. Here the avenues are lined with linden trees and it smells faintly sweet beneath them, like honey and lemon. Below that, always jasmine, subtle as a background noise, as the sound of water when one lives by a river. There is a kind of miraculous, crystalline glow to the air. Not the heated shimmer of Belurat, but the sun’s light filtered through a drop of rainwater, glazed and vitreous as the surface of an eye. Yet he cannot see the sun. If it is behind the canopy then it is diminished; a sleepy, half-closed gaze, unable to compete with the light of his mother’s creation. There are no torches in the streets, no giant iron braziers or brass sconces affixed to stone walls. There is no other source of light but the great golden canopy. A world without the glow of a sun or a moon, without fire. A world without red or its twin, black.

As they approach the inner walls, the buildings become more opulent - many-storied, palatial homes twice the size of those belonging to Belurat’s nobility, circumscribed by sprawling grounds and lush but orderly gardens. No two are the same, but each is delineated in perfect proportion, a harmony of light and form, no shape flimsy, nor too heavy or domineering. The silence of it all makes the gushing fountains around them sound like an orchestra. Their march is accompanied only by the rhythmic pace of rattling armour and warm breath. Below that, he has begun to pick up on something subtle but persistent - a rumbling, or groaning of the earth, low as a throb, as if beneath them an enormous beast still moves, newly turned and settling into place. He does not share Melina’s imagination, but now he cannot help it: he recalls the little beast she once showed him a lifetime ago, in the specimen library, creature curled in its own holy light and covered in spiked, luminescent frills. It had fit neatly in the palm of his hand. Now he imagines it beneath their feet, the size of a city, and each thin, golden spire before them is a single one of its shining quills.

It is here, pausing in one of the immense plazas, the uncanny truth of it strikes him: the pervasive, overwhelming sensation of absence. Every deserted stretch of avenue, every vacant bench and balcony yawning like an empty mouth. A hollow world he can see through, and between here and the other side there is only silence. It seems impossible, such a vast city, ready and waiting, without a single soul in it. 

He looks again to Melina, as though to confirm it is not a mirage, not another dreamlike place where the unbearable envoy of the Greater Will waits around a corner. But it is not an illusion: the shadows are knife-sharp and the marble flagstones are a fireside white under the light of the tree. Fleetingly it reminds him of what Belurat felt like the night his mother took them to the meadow, to the sad remnants of her ancestral home, reeking of loss: unadorned testament to mourning, gravesite of a thing that once was. He can feel this place straining in opposition. Charged with anticipation, arrival. Not the decay of ruin but the emergence of something hitherto unseen, fertile and clean, ready to be seeded. A newborn world, swimming in a golden afterbirth, still murky and sorting itself out. 

Every surface around them appears utterly untouched. He can find no evidence of the act of building - no piles of sand or high-stacked stones. No beasts of burden with bricks in their saddlebags. No column is cracked, no gardens trampled, no monuments lay broken. No monuments at all: there are plinths and pedestals that look fit to receive them, but they stand bare, as if waiting for a living person to climb atop and strike a pose. Vines tumble down walls in a way that looks meticulously planned, each bundle of leaves purposefully massed and every thin, gleaming tendril artfully curled. Nothing seems haphazard, organic - even in poor imitation. It is starkly precise. The thought comes to him that something so large should not be this perfect. It is a treasure, a thing of wonder from stories, a secret encased in a little diamond bauble set in gold, so minutely precise it must be seen through a loupe, breath held, because a single exhale risks displacing the perfect slant of a rooftop, or marring the curled acanthus of a lintel. An overflow of divinity coalescing, hardening into shape like glass removed from a forge. First into a palace, then into a city. Finally, a kingdom.

It is Andreas who leads them down the lengthy ochre sprawl below the vast trunk, and up to the foot of another palatial structure. Of all the men he is the one most at ease in this place, and makes a point of guiding Melina along, accompanying her like a knight-errant. Messmer, despite himself, is left feeling out of sorts. This is his mother’s creation, her coming kingdom. He should feel more at home here than he does in Belurat, at ease to go where he pleases, to command his men with certitude. Yet he finds he cannot look where he is going because he is gazing up, always up and around at one more magnificent thing as it unfurls, sprawls, rises into another pleasing shape. A few times he must close his serpent eyes, for they are warring with his own instincts and have stopped peering in the same direction. Each time their gazes divert he becomes dizzy, the world around him fragmented and confused. His dismount is ungraceful. The rest of his company are too overwhelmed to notice.  

From the stables they are herded along through a gated cloister and into an enormous residence, too refined to be considered a fortress, with connecting rooms of gilt-coffered ceilings and walls hung with tapestries he does not recognise. Here the light comes from ornately-wrought candelabras, spindly and brassy-bright; but instead of candles they are mounted with pale yellow crystals that pulse with a molten heartbeat.  

When they enter a high-ceilinged rotunda, he feels oddly clairvoyant: at the centre of the room, mounted on a monumental round table inlaid with silver and ivory, there is a scale model of the city on display. He manoeuvres past his men, past Melina, though he does not need to elbow his way through; obediently they cede for him, so that he may bend forward and examine the not-so-small miniature. It is as elaborate as the real thing, down to the little painstakingly painted trees installed along the avenues. If he looks close enough he is sure they will resolve fresh with buds, some blooming, others heavy and dripping yellow nectar. 

In another corner of the room, on a table by the roaring hearth, food has been left out in tightly-woven baskets, ceramic bowls and embossed brass plates: loaves half-wrapped in white linen trimmed with cloth-of-gold, as if each little loaf were wearing a fine tunic; mounds of fowl-feet preserved in gelatinous rowa; red rice from the wetlands, a rare luxury so far north. He can smell meat cooking - something gamey - and does not need to glance into the enormous iron pot to know it is Belurat’s traditional scorpion. At the end of the spread a bowl of glossy, chilled fruit reflects the warm light of the room in jewel tones. Already his men are helping themselves to drink, and he recognises the pungent but not unpleasant smell of spirits distilled from rana flower, favoured drink of Belurat’s common classes. He has yet to find the courage to voice his enduring disapproval: I raised you all from nothing, and you still drink like beggars. Yet they have not brought it themselves. It is here, waiting for them like a gift. 

Again, he must wonder at how empty the city truly is. There is something else at work - someone has laboured here, and still does. These stones did not stack themselves, and the avenue’s towering magnolias and noble oaks did not spring up overnight. As he listens to Andreas speak of the city’s layout, gesturing to where they are now in miniature, the adjacent temples and manors, his own attention wanders to the spiralling structure wrapped around the city’s golden heart. He cannot fathom how it was built. Part of him imagines it as Enir-Ilim, conceived in his mother’s mind by her singular divine gift, hammered into existence as she once shaped gold with her jeweller’s tools and touch. A kingdom crafted at a secret forge, while her hands were folded neatly behind her back, instead of the generation of builders it would take to raise such a place.  

His men straighten, stand back from the table, and he realises he has lost focus. He looks at Melina, her countenance impassive. Has Andreas pointed out the athenaeum? Has he indicated the library to where he, Messmer, will need men to deliver the archives and specimens and rolls from the Black Keep? Will it be large enough, equipped so that Melina may carry on with her work? Will this new seat be worthy of her?

In the end, he does not ask. Try as he might, he cannot picture her here. 

⚕️

 

Later, when he wanders back into the chamber, it is only by accident.

He had remained for some time in his rooms - royal apartments, the attendant had called them - as though waiting for someone to walk in unannounced. Though beautifully furnished, he found himself stifled by the room’s drowsy air, restless. In the end he’d been left alone, and so stood for some time at the chamber’s tall, glazed window, watching the leaves rain down and thinking that if they do not all dissipate, there must be a mighty pile of foliage somewhere, a carpet of desiccated gold - and who will sweep the streets of this city, as the hornless did in Belurat? 

He’d not remained long before setting out for Melina’s chambers, only to find them empty. So he followed the winding halls, the rooms that flowed into one another through arched passages and soaring, vaulted ceilings, each emptier than the last; past thick, slanted windows overlooking lower parts of the sprawling manor, the kitchens and breweries and cold rooms; all quiet as the grave. Then voices had drawn him back to the brightly-lit rotunda, its sparking hearth and curving chandelier mounted with saw-tooth crystals. Only now, standing at the threshold, does he notice the gallery of glittering lights above like an audience; how tall the candelabras, how elaborate the single tapestry over the mantel, gold and black figures threaded together, tumbling through the room’s quivering glow.  

Huw and Andreas, facing the hearth, turn to him in unison. For the first time, he glimpses a shadow of resemblance. 

A brief moment, a query of intent: a lord may interrupt his subjects. But standing here, now, with their attention on him, he is no longer sure what he wants. Or he is, but in his moment of weakness he has been seeking Melina’s company - their wordless bond, the comforting confluence of voiceless fears, a meeting of waters between them. Selfishly, he wants her to ease his disorientation. But he also wants to apologise for Temple Town, for being churlish. She will have choice words for him: they will be firm, and sting. 

Huw, on the other hand, is always willing company - the kind who can cajole him across a threshold and onto soft ground, where Messmer knows he will slip. 

It is his glance at Huw that makes Andreas step back. 

“My lord,” the commander says. Always formal and of few words, he bows himself stiffly out of the room. Messmer watches him go, his black tabard embellished with the frills of his rank. They seem out of place on him - too showy, overly glossy. Garish on a man with such wintry demeanour.

He turns to Huw. “I did not mean to interrupt,” he murmurs by way of apology.

Huw gives a tilt of his head, then looks at him askance. “My father asks that I return with him to Belurat in the coming days. He says we should not be too long away from the throne.” He turns back to the hearth, hands folded behind his back. “Unwise to leave the capital so many days without a man of rank.”

Messmer thinks of his other brigades, stationed at strategic crossroads around the tower-city, and those high-ranking knights ordered to remain in Enir-Ilim: immovable Garrew, recalcitrant Edredd. He is not particularly concerned. “We left the forces in a position of strength.”

“Foreign troops are stationed at Ensis. Have the astrologers won your trust already?”

“I trust my mother’s judgement.” He comes to stand beside Huw, to watch the firelight play over his face. “As will you, when you meet the Moongazer. She is nobility - I do not believe she will jeopardise her position in her own court. Betraying us would bring her no advantage.”

Huw looks up at him, expressionless. “The men say she addresses you as Your Grace.”

He is taken aback. “Does it matter?”

“Shall we do the same? Is that all it takes to earn your faith so quickly? A noble title?” Huw turns back to the fire, smiling. “Then I was always at a disadvantage.”

Messmer cannot tell if there is bitterness there, or if he imagines it. Careful, he wants to say, but the word does not make it to his mouth. The flame in his chest rises, and he must wait for it to dwindle before speaking. 

“If Andreas wishes to reevaluate our position, or recall you to Belurat, he will need to address his concerns with me.” 

“He is your mother’s Lord Commander.”

“And you are my Knight Captain. I will decide where you go.”

In the pause that follows, he senses his serpents struggle to place themselves. They reach for Huw, then pull back with a waver of indecision, swayed by his own need to remain unmoved. 

Huw dips his head. His body loses a little of its customary ease. “Of course,” he intones. He does not sound chastened, but neither does he sound as bold as he did a moment ago. “My prince, I am sworn to follow you.”

“Huw, I am-”

“Aren’t you?” Huw raises his head, brazen again, something insistent to his voice. He turns from the hearth and moves to the centre of the room, to the round table and the little city in gold, layered like an elaborate confection. “Forgive my insolence-”

“I always do.”

“-but you are no fool. You see it, just as we do - better, perhaps. Your mother has crowned herself queen.” He motions to the miniature city, the tapestry, the room itself: this world so far from Belurat. “What is all this, if not her kingdom?” 

He looks as if he will say more but stops, and brings a hand to his face. Messmer is aware there is, for once, nothing theatrical about his gesturing. For a moment, he looks overwhelmed. Then he leans forward, hands on the table before the miniature city, as if to study it closely. When he speaks again he is composed, placid. “It is more than we dreamed.” We, hornless.

Messmer approaches, not quite beside Huw but near enough to pick out the details of the city’s little agate cupolas and travertine columns. The cobbled streets and manor walls glisten with a wet, mineral sparkle. He finds the palatial structure where they stand now, observes the roof of this exact room, imagines lifting it, peering down and finding the smaller, more precise versions of themselves - a secondary existence, trapped where time moves at another scale, or perhaps not at all. Where no light penetrates, for this replica is only attached to a roughly-shaped trunk, with no golden canopy to illuminate it. A lavishly decorated orrery with a hole at its centre, where the sun should be. 

He has no desire to reveal how little he knows of this place - how much he feels as though he has been shut out by his mother, and by Melina with whom he has always taken their shared sentiments and conspiratorial whispers for granted. Already he is half-blind, and his narrow vision has been filled by the war table, the map laid out on it, the scattering of red and black markers across the field, little click of stones that stand in for bloodshed. In Belurat he drifted as if through a lucid dream, always leaning over the parapets, ready to step over at any moment and back into the fray. He stopped asking after his mother’s secrets, the canopy on the horizon. Allowed nothing but mustering orders from his mouth, and so could not query, or question. Now he feels a fool. Why did he not come sooner? Why were Marika’s own children not the first to step foot in this marvellous but opaque place? He should have secured the north himself and been the first to kneel beneath her golden bough. Not Andreas, not his fellow soldiers. Embarrassing, to have someone else’s ear better tuned to the music of his mother’s desires. 

The frustration brings a lick of fire to his palm, and he closes it quickly. He tries to phrase the question so that it skirts his own ignorance. “What did your father tell you of this place?” 

Huw glances up at him. There is still something clouded in his gaze. “He called it your mother’s triumph. A nation for those denied paradise by the Hornsent. Once the Gate is open we will depart Belurat permanently, under your mother’s banners, to settle here. Kingdom of plenty for those who have worked in her favour, uplifted her cause. A home for her allies.” Now his tone is eager, as if they are discussing a strategic approach, a deployment of troops or supplies. As he speaks he runs his hands over the little avenues of the city, stopping at the various gates. “We have treaty-bound allies in the mountains to the northeast. The barbarians may keep their hinterlands and take the badlands far to the south, but have agreed to answer her call in times of need. Here - she has even built a coliseum in their honour.” He interrupts himself to point it out, and abruptly he laughs, as though it is something surprising, delightful. “The land is fertile, the city walled and defensible. On the western plateau, Rauh is all but abandoned, and the Black Keep controls every road that leads from the south.” His soliloquy ends with a crescendo, then a long exhale. “What better place could we choose to make a life?” 

He is right, Messmer knows. For the hornless, for all those shunned by the Hornsent - this place feels conceived in their image. A prayer answered. If Huw wonders at the impossibly swift rise of the city, how such a structure could assemble itself into perfection in the blink of an eye, he does not voice it. There is wisdom in not questioning a miracle. Or inquiring after its price. 

Huw steps back from the table. “We will be given land, holdings, titles in exchange for our service. Who will we be, here? I never thought of myself as a tower-dweller, despite being from Belurat. Hornless have always existed outside the order, without even claim to the city we were born in. What will we call ourselves now? This place does not yet even bear a name.”

Now he turns his gaze, and moves from the mock-city to the tapestry above them. Messmer watches. Unlike most of the hangings in this palatial manor, he recognises parts of the story in this one: the great bronze bird warriors of Rauh, the first of all horned warriors to attain divinity. These stories he remembers well, told and retold ad nauseam in Hornsent spectacle: like all who attain divinity, the bird-headed warriors are driven to give up their humanity, their personhood, in exchange for their power. In the tapestry, a figure garbed in splendid golden plumage triumphantly drives a spear through the heart of a cowering flame-eyed giant. It is a role he had seen Huw perform many times on stage, mesmerised by how he seemed to float without effort, yellow-gold wings stitched to his sleeves in a cascade of knife-sharp feathers, gold plating and ochre drapery, bright and sewn tight against the soft black fabric he would eventually come to exchange for black plate. Before an iron helm came to replace a curved beak. 

“It is not just a home,” Huw murmurs, with such softness he might be speaking to himself. “A title is dignity. Acknowledgement, justification in the eyes of another. To not belong - to be forbidden from belonging - is pitiful. It is debilitating.” He moves from the tapestry to the other side of the round table, to face Messmer when he speaks. “I think you know this. Or you would not wage war on someone else’s behalf.” 

Of course Messmer knows. The prophet was only ever meant to exist as a tool, a means to an end. She was never meant to possess personhood, or produce by-blow shorn of light. Attuned to the blackness of such a thought, the abyss inside him uncoils. He closes his eye, tries to drown out the noise of it knocking at his ribcage. His serpents watch Huw turn to the candelabra beside him. With a distracted sort of curiosity, he plucks one of the pale yellow crystals from it.

“Sometimes,” he says, rolling it between his fingers, his face softened by its glow, “I think it does not matter that your mother was born from a ritual jar, by Hornsent design.” He completes his circle around the table, returning to Messmer. “I think somehow she was born for us, for the hornless. To deliver us from servitude.”

Huw holds the crystal out to Messmer, who opens his eye to take it. He closes his palm around it, then slips it from one hand to the other. Warmth moves through him - not the warmth of his own ember, but something velvety. Smooth and yielding despite the crystal’s hard, faceted surface. It feels like mercy, like unbroken sleep. His mother’s graceful touch, the glimmering clink of her rings when she holds his face; jasmine, white-soft, soporific-

“Are you wounded?”

Huw takes one of Messmer’s hands in his own. Messmer lets him, watches him turn it palm up and splay it open like a tome. A sudden pang of reproach - his nails are long. Since that night in the pavilion, he has been letting them grow; has used them, for as much time as he can take the pain, to carve the scales from his own body, as his mother once did. 

If Huw notices, he gives no indication. He is looking down at the surface of Messmer’s palm: at the blackened ring in its very centre, the charred halo of flesh like a fistful of soot. He has not worn gloves in some time - covertly he has come to rely on his flame so often that he has burned through them all. He did not expect to bear the evidence of his sin so prominently.

Cradling Messmer’s hand between his, Huw runs both thumbs over the blistered skin, kneading it, as though he could remove the stain. Messmer has seen him drive his blade through a Hornsent’s gut with less consternation than he shows now. For a man with whom Messmer has sparred, from whom he has taken blows, his grasp is unusually gentle. 

Messmer gives the weight of his hand over entirely. What can he say? I have burned through the world. Through myself. 

Instead he watches Huw’s fingers make circles in his flesh. “My mother’s blessing,” he murmurs. When he lies, his serpents turn their heads. Exhaling, he summons his mother’s gold from the centre of himself. It pools in the creases of his scorched palm, the same shade as the little yellow crystal still held in his other hand. He knows he cannot heal himself - he has tried. His smile is a faint line, without mirth. “Perhaps I have overused my gift.” 

There are four different entries to this room, and so four different angles from which someone might observe them. Through four different doorways someone might peer and see his Knight Captain minister his hand with a softness unbecoming of a soldier. Might see him, son of the promised saint, lie through his teeth to one of the few men he trusts, because all this time he has been a spear that keeps the world at a distance, when in truth he has only wanted to reach for something outside himself: a shared breath, a warmth that is not his own. A sympathetic hand through the bars of his cage.

Like a wave over the land, they have been so long in constant motion that if he does not move now, if he does not pull his hand away, then he is certain they will be rooted here, the two of them trapped in place, tied together inextricably. How can he ask Huw to steady him, to anchor him, when it feels as though Huw is always moving, or being moved by something? But here is the answer - the reassurance in the palm of his hand, the swirl of a fingertip, the lax shoulders, the heat of closeness: the full bright attention, lucent gaze, caressing, inquiring. My lord, how may I serve? And he is - as Huw said - no fool; he knows this is part of the role, the performer’s trick, and if Huw had not caught Messmer’s eye that night he might’ve fallen in with another patron - a wealthy Hornsent with ugly taste, or a lecherous Inquisitor, or some other garlanded noble - to seduce, to serve, to survive. Yet Messmer has never been more convinced that his Knight Captain belongs here, a pillar of black in a golden hall, bound to him, touching him without reticence, and the hunger he feels is not his ember’s but his own. How it woke in him like molten glass, clear and warped by heat: watching the other man on stage and revelling in the knowledge that all these eyes could not have Huw as he does. Alone, mask off, come down from the proscenium and into Messmer’s shadow; as Huw answers only to him, bows only to him, bends only to his word. 

“Your Grace.”

A rush of warmth. He has never fantasised about a throne, not really. He knows well how a crown can double as a shackle. But those words, from Huw’s mouth, he will not refuse. 

Gently, he takes his hand away.

“Come with me.” 

⚕️

 

When they emerge from the manor and into the late afternoon, they are alone. Above them the canopy has dimmed, though he still cannot find the sun behind it. He finds it strange to be out here, in the empty streets, unmolested as he would be in Belurat by his men, by hornless and Hornsent alike, by another one of his mother’s minders come to remind him of this or that missive he must send, order he must issue, patrician he must discipline. At any moment a messenger might surface from the lower city and beg him to subdue squabblers in the antiquities market, or quell a riot at the gates over the extortionary price of bread. 

But not here. There are no slums in this golden creation to interrupt its purity of line. No seedy underbelly, no corners for begging alms, where the worst of the hornless, regarded as untouchable, live shoulder to shoulder with disgraced Hornsent in resentful, shadowed squalor. It could not happen here - not in this city without shadow, without even ghosts hanging from the trees, or waiting to be blown in by a breeze through an open window. Here, they can pretend there is no civil war at their doorstep, and they have not butchered half the countryside. Like the avenues, they are scoured clean.   

It is the sort of quiet that is almost disorienting. 

As they pass beneath the manor facades, he glances up at the windows. He feels observed, vulnerable: his colour, the crimson and black he wears, is garish against the city’s warm, muted complexion. He feels he must look like an ashy, unswept hearth. Even Huw, gold-fringed mantle draped over his tabard in the Belurat style, resembles a shadow who has forgotten to retreat from a flood of sunlight. 

They come to the end of a long, verdant road, where those who will become the foremost families of Marika’s new kingdom are to have a home. Here the manors have walled gardens, and the stone plinths wear oakmoss and creeping vines like a shawl. Through iron gates he can see blooming arbours curling around white walls, and hear the hush of a watercourse running alongside them. One building has a pond by the entrance, surrounded by pale stones the same colour as the golden fields beyond the city. Its surface anticipates them, like a mirror. 

“This one,” he says. In truth, he is not sure which of the empty structures are reserved for his men of rank, which for his knights and which for his mother’s attendants. Perhaps Melina knows, or someone else privy to his mother’s designs. But he does not care. His ember surges a little, recalcitrant, combative. He is the Empyrean’s son, and he is owed this. He will reward those loyal to him as he pleases, as his mother has done with her own generous hand.  

Beneath the porte-cochere, the ornate double-leaf door is open. Inside is a large, generous space; luxurious compared to what he knows most hornless have in Belurat, even those few with their own private quarters. The ceilings here are high, and the mouldings ripple with vegetable motifs, painted with a light touch and a muted palette. Along the walls are sconces in porcelain and ormolu, each decorative branch cradling those same scintillating yellow crystals. The hearth is clean and swept, the mantel carved in pale stone, awash in undulating streaks of gold. Above is mounted a warped mirror, and he catches them both, their passing silhouettes in the dying day: carmine and ink. But there are no tables yet, no cushioned chairs. The walls are bare, and the floor-to-ceiling windows are open to the avenue, without drapery. Late afternoon leaks in, pooling over the tiled floors, interrupted by the skittish shadows of leafy trees just outside.

Huw’s gaze traces an arc, from the high ceilings to the warped glass of the windows. For a time he is very still. His face seems to have shed layers, and at this angle Messmer can read his solemn, honest wonder. 

Messmer closes the door behind them. 

“Do you wish to perform again?”

Huw turns to look at him like he is a stranger; an exotic thing. “Why this, now?” 

“I am thinking about after,” he says. He intended for the query to sound flatteringly curious, not interrogative. Huw is solicitous by nature, and has drawn him out before. Now he wants to do the same. In truth, the shaded benches and quiet, verdant corners of this place remind him of Enir-Ilim as he knew it in childhood. He is missing those sun-dappled discussions with Melina, in greenery beneath the stone terraces, hidden from watchful eyes. Questions about life after the Gate: banal as whether there will be seasons in paradise; pointed as what the end of their mother’s duty will mean for them, and those freed from the yoke of Hornsent servitude.

He clears his throat, and looks at Huw evenly before continuing. “If there are no rebellions to quash and no threats to confront, then there is no reason for you to stand about in armour or march across the land. Will you hunt again, like before? Or perform?”

Huw makes a pained sound. “You have only just promoted me, and now you want me out of armour?” Then he gives Messmer a lopsided smile, more astute than it pretends to be. “I am bound to perform whatever role you ask of me.”

Messmer clicks his tongue in disapproval, but plays along. The honeyed air has softened his demeanour. The lingering warmth in his hand has taken his mind elsewhere, far from the doubt that sleeps at the foot of his heart. 

“A role, is it?”

Huw replies, “Everything is a role.” He is relaxed again. He has eased his body into the space, and now moves around as if looking for the right angle from which to speak. “You have only to sit before a mirror and decide whom you will play. Everything you choose to do is constructed for that part. The performance of yourself. Then you do it well - or not.” 

“So you will perform again.”

“Perhaps I will have a jewel in my hat, to match this handsome estate.” He caresses the flourish of marble over the hearth. “Perhaps I will bask under this tree and do nothing.”

Your hat, Messmer thinks, or your mask?  “How coarse,” he says, allowing for the lilt of sarcasm. “You would grow bored. I see you fidget, when you think no one is looking.” 

Huw glances to each of his serpents and grins, wide and careless. “Death by rural ennui. I suppose I must perform, then. But only roles I choose for myself. I was only ever assigned parts. In the end I grew tired of being told which mask to wear.”  

What Huw thinks of as an end, Messmer realises, he himself considers a beginning. Before I invited you off the stage and onto the battlefield. 

Huw continues. “My father will tell you that to make the Divine Beast Hunt a spectacle is to insult the real thing.” He gives an ironic little laugh. “You can see why Hornsent society does not suit him. I told him that after his disgrace, I had little choice. Coin does not make itself, and so on.” He runs a hand through his hair, considerate. “But he does not know I prefer the stage to the hunt.” 

“You are suited to it,” Messmer says, without thinking. Only after does he realise his intonation did not sound any more like a compliment than it did an insult. 

But Huw only raises his eyebrows. Then he shrugs in a way so self-effacing it somehow manages to look preening. “A poor legacy for an old man who was once a champion of the Divine Beast Hunt, the highest a hornless can rise. But I think he is pleased you stripped me of my sequinned costumes, fit me in armour and put a blade in my hand.” 

For the thousandth time, in the theatre of his mind, Messmer lifts the bull’s mask from Huw’s face. For the thousandth time he reveals kohl-painted eyes, charcoal smudges in the creases; the sheen of sweat across Huw’s visage, his neck, his collar; his black, soaked curls. A flush of high summer on his cheeks. A mark on the broad bridge of his nose where the inside of the mask pressed down and chafed his skin. 

Messmer asks, “Will you play the Bull of Heaven again?” He sounds, to his own ears, overeager. He colours and adds, “Melina did not see it.” 

Huw bows with a mocking flourish - not a formal bow but a stage reverence, one hand on his heart, the other acknowledging an audience with open palm, heels of his boots together and toes apart. “If my prince wishes.” He straightens, provocation in his amusement, and turns back to the window.

Messmer could not look away if he tried. This, he knows, is his problem with Huw. He is only a little too bold, too self-assured, too congenial. He is a performer, as Messmer must constantly remind himself. It is what he is good at: standing at just the right angle to be noticed. Drawing attention to himself without justification. Even the shaft of sunlight seems to elevate him, swelling to encase him, pooling at his feet, penetrating the black folds of his garments. 

Like moths, Messmer’s serpents reach for the light, looking to bask in it. Golden motes, a rainfall of them, settle along Huw’s shoulders, down his back, and for a moment the gossamer current gives Messmer the impression of halcyon wings, like the ones Huw has worn on stage. Messmer can almost hear it: brightness, like the rushing of water over stone, silky and effervescent. Magic radiates from Huw like a sound, vestige of a force Messmer knows, but not his mother’s. A trick of the light, he thinks; a fluctuation of air. Then understanding comes: a manifestation of the Crucible, its brilliance piercing as a pair of horns. No wonder Hornsent grow appendages, he thinks. The Crucible’s power, this exaltation of its blazing life-force, overflows from their bodies. Huw does not turn, and Messmer, for fear of shattering the mosaic of light, does not speak. After a time he observes the feathery halo around Huw dim, and then dissolve in a whisper like a flare. 

The light beyond the room begins to fade, but Huw remains standing. He faces the window as though perched, ready; a minute sway to him, gentle as breathing. All the balance of his weight is at the front of his feet, over his toes, so that it would not take much to spring forward; barely a bend in the knee, the twitch of a muscle and he could float on the lambent air. Huw has always stood like this - his training, Messmer knows - but now there is something else in the quivering air. The veil of a great distance, as if Huw is already far from him, too far for him to reach now.

Messmer crosses the room. 

A short time ago he’d thought to cover his hands again, to hide the charred centre of his palm. But his bare hands allow him this impulse, too - the impulse to stand close, to turn Huw’s face to him and raise a hand to Huw’s mouth, to where a scar still traces a path from below his nose, down and across to his lips. He has known Huw long enough to recognise there is some vanity to him, some regret at the marring of his symmetrical features. For a moment, he hesitates - perhaps if he touches Huw, the blistered centre of his hand will leave a mark, a glimmer of golden ash. He could ask. But he has not before, and he will not now. 

Huw watches, waits. When Messmer touches him, he is perfectly still - he leans neither away nor into it. Only a slight tremor, the flicker of his eyelids, gives him away. The exhale comes from deep in his chest, his belly. Messmer knows the feeling of his mother’s holy magic, the succour it provides like a warm cover of consolation. A comforting lull impossible to resist. He could be truthful, for once. It comes from the same place as my flame. It is neither good nor malign. Only power. If Huw can accept the diamond patchwork of his scales, the inhuman surface of his flesh, could he not accept an ember cradled between forefinger and thumb, too?

But it is easier not to know. 

So he remains silent. Gold flows from his palm and washes over Huw’s mouth, illuminating his face. In the glare of it, the scar loses its definition. With his other hand he threads his fingers through Huw’s hair, cradling the back of his head. Still it startles him, how much he relishes in it. Closing this distance. Of all the things he has denied himself, he cannot seem to deny himself this. 

He waits for Huw to stop him, to recoil. It would be easier, he knows. If Huw were lying. If his dedication were not sincere. If he did not shudder so subtly that only Messmer’s serpents could feel the air displaced. If his lips did not part slightly when Messmer touched him. Are you lying to me? He imagines Huw’s confusion. Is your touch lying, the weight of it, the warmth? Would it even matter? 

Huw reaches for him. 

He would like to keep this. This, an imprint of it, the feeling more than the sight. The dense, glimmering air around them. The leaves, immolated in gold, that dust the world in yellow. The heat. Outside, the waft of bitter greenery and heavy, indolent jasmine; inside, the smell of earth unsettled, of varnish. Leather and saffron. The silence that quivers, a gently stricken crystal, from the vacant city around them. Huw seems to hardly breathe. A hum in his throat, barely audible. The holy light has long faded from Messmer’s palm, but he keeps his hands on Huw. He could step back, fade into the dim, leave Huw here to settle in the light he has asked for; and when Messmer returns perhaps he will be gilt as a statue, nothing but the gleam of gold and his dark, striking gaze. But he does not step back. He keeps his hand on Huw as he keeps the moment, as best he can. 

 Shadows resolve on the walls. A whinny comes from outside; another retinue on horseback arriving. The echo slips into their space, but only in passing, like another cloud on a fine day when the wind moves promptly, courteously, to reveal the light. Nothing they must answer for, not now. Another touch, a hand, a sigh of silk, undisturbed, a kind of earnestness to it, a camaraderie he invents by forging the scattered instances of their intimacy into something solid. He is suited to sowing fear. He is not suited to this. But here, it does not matter. He would like to keep this until it is time to peel away titles and roles; to lay down the spear and live a life, one that leaves behind his doubt and malaise. 

And so he will keep this for a long time. Past the next touch, and the one after that. Right up until the Gate, until the civil war becomes a crusade. Until the world is torn down and a new one strung up in its stead. When the fires have not stopped burning for an age, and traitors and rebels and all the souls who have spoken against his mother curl and dissolve into smoke, he will still reach for this like a fluttering spark, luminous mote kept in a corner of himself. But it will feel like a different place, and a different time. A different version of himself, a road not taken, a thing not suffered. Eventually he will snuff it out; bury it, reluctantly, and gold will never leak from his palm again.

But until then, his touch is warm and steady, his breath even, and like the canopy beyond this room, each exhale is made of gold. 

 

 

 

---

 

Chapter 12: a house of bitter days

Summary:

⚕️

But God will come, God will come, he will not tarry long away. He will come upon such a day as we nothing look for him, and at such hour as we know not.
He will come and cut us in pieces.

- Hugh Latimer, Sermon before the Convocation of the Clergy

⚕️

 

 

 

In Belurat, every surface is used to tell a Hornsent tale. Each wall is wrapped in myth, or ribboned with history. At the keystone of a vault, the two may converge: warriors battle their way to godhood in bas-relief;  the Hornsent march up to heaven across spiralling columns; scorpions defy gravity and hang from cornices to escape the talons of Deathbirds. Incense burners, in the shape of vessels conjugated by beast heads, sail into the afterlife. They do not divulge where Death the is humble mariner who steers the boat, or the flock of crows that follow in their black hoods.

Frescoes fade and are restored. The mosaic of heaven, a smooth gold emptiness, is littered with lapis stars. As they turn across the ceilings of great temple domes, they tell millennia worth of tales. It is the one thing missing from these dappled loggias and smooth beige colonnades of his mother’s new city: a story. The only scrollwork here is the eternally vegetal, the roots and leaves of the unending tree, as though it has no history, no birth and thus no death. City in amber, it simply is.  

Into this city of blank stillness, the hornless come. 

A few at a time, at first, and then in waves. They come escaping settlements that have turned on Marika, or all the way from Belurat proper. Trains one hundred strong, entire villages dragging their beasts and caravans laden with belongings. The stories have spread, the rumours abound:  in the north, below the golden tree, a secret paradise is risen. A kingdom to rival old Rauh, and its livery is gold. A hidden utopia, safe under the benevolent eye of the saint and the iron blade of her son. 

They bring with them their trades: stonemasons, gardeners, smiths, poultry keepers, apothecaries, cooks.  They bring life into the city, trade, and will be paid for it; Belurat’s coffers have seeped coin to the Black Keep, and from there it has been brought to Marika’s city. Some of these emigrants will be steered beyond the walls, given acres of land and all its incomes for themselves. Many have only ever cultivated that which belonged to their Hornsent masters. A piece of parchment will be handed over: a deed in the hands of a hornless, in their name, the first they have ever encountered such a thing. If they have not already wept at the feet of his mother’s likeness, they will now. 

Among these arrivals, there are no Hornsent. Only a few horned scholars, those who still claim loyalty to Melina, breach the golden city. The rest remain in Belurat where they watch and wait, consulting their scrolls and their priests, reading fate in the shape of tea leaves and curled smoke. Interlacing their hands, loosening them to pick up a blade and caress it over a whetstone. 

Or so he envisions when he is restless. Or when he wakes in the night, imagining a knife at his mother’s porcelain back. When he begins to hear more and more noise, an increase of voices in the palatial hold where he remains, he wonders - is there one come to betray me? Who will shield his mother, when he is a corpse on the floor and no longer the Empyrean’s son? When he is no more than a man and two snakes?

Let it be, he is told in a gentle voice, a hand at his brow. Lay down your spear; your weary head. 

Missives are delivered to him with deep bows, reassuring gestures. They all read the same: Belurat’s innards become less turbulent. Those Hornsent who seek retribution have been driven out, and a hush has fallen, like a holy silence before the start of a prayer. They are still waiting for the saint to fulfil her duty, to open their Gate. They have nothing to gain from venturing north. Perhaps, he reasons, they fear a trick on the horizon: no kingdom but a wasteland. A giant tree from which a rope hangs, and at its end a noose tied with all the Empyrean’s promises.

In a room with no windows, Melina stands beside him. She embalms herself in stillness, arranged and prepared, like a body made ready for death. She observes a landscape he cannot see. 

“She is still searching for Numen blood. For what remains of her shaman people. She cannot find them.” 

Her voice is a dark-coloured flame. He does not look at her. 

“We cannot be the last.” 

He hears the smile in her voice. “I thought I knew what we were, once. Now, I am not so sure. She will have to try again.”

For a long time, these words do not leave him. The prospect follows him like a frightened child. His blood runs red, like his mother’s. Are they not of her body? Can they not hold what is malign within themselves, and turn it over, like new soil, to reveal what is gold and benevolent? 

He will not ask the question, crass and low as it is. Is she looking for a lord? For a king? 

No cloud covers the light of the canopy, only a bit of mist. Nothing hides or despoils it, and so he must paint doubt across the world himself. Fear roils in him like a disease. He discards scales from his body, wrenches them away and leaves bright, throbbing wounds in their place, holes in his flesh. In the throes of his pain he imagines himself discarded in turn. Replaced. 

Huw, in the intimacy of firelight, dresses his wounds. Why do you claw at what is not malign? Why do you recoil from yourself?

Because I am not yet cleansed, he wants to answer. Perhaps if he digs deep enough, he will find the abyss in his chest, wrench it out and crush its diamond scales to powder. 

But he will never grow warm, pale skin in place of his scales, never smooth his jagged flesh like the coursing of a river polishes a stone. Always they return: pearlescent, thick, held fast to him. He, Messmer, wraps his long fingers around Huw’s wrist, steers his hand in the same way he takes the other man’s face and steers his gaze away. Of his knights and his minders, no one else has seen the true pattern of his being. In his quarters, the dove-white surface of his bed is scattered with opals and gore. 

You would recoil, too. If you knew.  

When his nails are deep and he grimaces, biting the inside of his mouth, groan at the back of his throat, there is an anger, a tremble of panic: he is running out of time. How will he, half-monstrous, be allowed to remain in the world of his mother’s making? He imagines himself blocked at the threshold of her triumph. Imperfect. She enthroned, no children at her feet, and he erased from her mosaic of radiance. Forgotten.  

 

⚕️

 

In the golden city, one moon slides into another. Hornless flit around him, nursing the kingdom to life, filling in the outline of its beauty. It is their dedication, finally, their blind faith, that shames him. They are not plagued by doubt, or haunted by the prospect of something wrong with what they have gained. They are too busy revelling in its very existence.

At last he pulls back the heavy cover of sorry self-pity and rouses himself: back into the field, back to Enir-Ilim. Now he comes and goes with more frequency, his brigade at his side, fortifying those scattered farming settlements beyond the city’s sun-baked walls. From further south violence comes in fitful spurts, like a wound at one’s throat, each heartbeat a little sputter of blood. But now it is harder for the Hornsent rebels to muster: harder to march a force across the valleys where the furnace golems blaze in the dark; impossible to cross a river where his Black Knights, mounted on blacker steeds, prowl across narrow bridges. They flood roads, raid caches, starve villages. In one hilltop settlement, his men watch from afar as disease festers, warps and mutilates every inhabitant down to the last child, before wiping it from the map in a single sweep of cleansing fire.   

East of Ensis, he rides to the aid of the Twin Moon Knight’s forces. It is a particularly gruesome skirmish, and he underestimates the maddened rage of the rebel Hornsent they face: among them Curseblades, those most reviled warriors. He long thought them gone, their beliefs stamped out, their asceticism forbidden. But on the field they are unmistakable. They move like liquid, with the force of a rushing river, silver and cold, and his serpents are barely able to keep up, to move him, presciently, from out of their deadly path. There is something hypnotic about the way they glide through the fray. An unnatural magnetism at work, so that a few of his warriors, those caught up in it, suddenly stop their assault, lower their weapons, and simply watch the dance unfold before them - until they, too, are cut down. Even as the curved blade descends, those spellbound soldiers do not move. Confused, they blink through their own death.

It is here and now the astrologers’ magic pays its dividends. The Curseblades are bound, frozen. Impaled by starlight. It is the only thing fast enough to track their tumbling charge through his ranks. He is side by side with the Twin Moon Knight when she fells the last one. Standing over the creature’s writhing body, her second sword, the pale one wielded in her left hand, shatters with a final cleaving blow. 

Later, he will gift her a new one, shaped by the hornless who work the smithies of settlements far to the south, at forges fed by the heat of the great lava pits of legend. It was made for him, he confesses. He opens his ruined hands as if to show his regret: they have grown too suited to a spear. It pains him to condemn a work of such mastery to idleness. 

To his relief, she accepts the sword. It does not glow with the same boreal brightness as her other blade, but she only laughs dismissively at his presumption. It aids her nascent ability to channel flame, to draw it from the air around her. She is grateful - he can tell by her transparent manner. She wears the naked face of the moon on a cloudless night, too proud to lie or deceive. She accepts even the silver snakes that wrap, incised with diamond scales, around the sword’s ornate hilt. 

 

⚕️

 

While Melina remains in their mother’s nameless city, Marika herself does not take to her new seat. When he travels again to Belurat he finds her intent on Enir-Ilim, eyes on the tower. Power seeps from her like a volcano stirring to life. Not the Crucible’s power - not her own gentle holy ichor, the one he and Melina have inherited - but something else.  Brimstone chases jasmine. Gold, beaten into a shape he does not recognise, a blinding glare that slices through his vision. She is always enthroned, she is always untouchable. She is always too beautiful for words. She is fixed at the holy tower’s pinnacle, as if she might point to the space above her at any moment, and say: there. There is the Gate. Now the key. 

At each departure, when he has assured all is in order, he returns to see her before leaving. Where the golden city is well-mannered as a courtesan, he has begun to notice every fault at the heart of Belurat, all the ugly defects marring its storied beauty. Like a veil pulled from his eyes he now sees it is mediocre, unworthy of his mother and her grand designs. Each time he intends to ask her to come with him, so that she may take her place in this new amber world, away from Hornsent soil, from the jars ground into the city’s dust. But he bites down and holds his tongue. He does not wish to interrupt her destiny. 

Only when he stands beside her does she glance away from the sky and take him in her arms. She brushes his hair, strokes his face where his helm has left dark bruises and angry indents in his skin. Her light washes over him, restores him; she unwraps the torn mantle from his shoulders and anoints him with a new one. He is careful to hide his few remaining scales from her. He bows his head, and does not meet her eyes. Tries, as much as he can, to arrange himself as he imagines she wishes, as a part of her, an extension of her will. An ideal. 

In these moments it is always easier to shed the person he is: like skin the sheafs of his fear fall away, the opals of his desire are tossed into firelight. Easier to be inside instead of out; a footprint, a hollow, the negative space where she was a moment ago that he tries, with all his being, to fill. An heir-shaped hole in the cosmos. Perhaps one day he will be defined by the way he chooses to arrange himself. But in her presence he can only shrink from that future. Here he clings to the hours, to a version of himself conjured by her love, one that does not cast a shadow: turned inside-out, emptied. Made clean. 

One day, in a cadence so honest it’s painful, he tells his mother, “Melina is far from me.”

Her smile, in all its gracious brilliance, is only a little placating. “She will come to understand,” she says. Then she looks at him from a place he cannot fathom. 

“Are you happy?” 

He searches for an answer. I am waiting. On the precipice. Hand at the door. Unsure of what is to follow, and strangled by not knowing.

He bows his head to her shoulder. 

“Yes,” he says. “If you are.” 

⚕️

 

In the nameless kingdom, there are four rooms that lead from the stunning rotunda of the manor, where the scale model of the golden city glimmers like a crown jewel. 

One leads into a modest sitting room, made in the distinct style of this place, austere compared to Belurat and Enir-Ilim. It appears to be for record-keeping, though he is certain nothing of any significance has yet happened here, at least not fit to be recorded. A short set of stairs by another door leads out to a gallery overlooking the manor’s great hall, where banners sway from the rafters alongside a cascade of iron and brass chandeliers. The third passage leads to the chamber of some attendant or other, he is not quite sure, and branches off through a stone hall and into smaller, spartan rooms where his men have begun storing supplies for the newborn city, like tallow and parchment, but also, to his surprise, armaments. He supposes if they really wanted something to fight, they could fight each other. 

The fourth doorway does not lead from anywhere. It leads to a chamber with no other entrance or exit, no other hallway through which to veer off. The furniture is dark and heavy - it is an intimate council room, though not one where all parties would stand equal round a table, as they would just outside. Here the chairs sit facing each other, creating a single alley to a dais upon which a larger, more noble chair is set. Not a throne, but a seat of honour - a seat at which decisions are reached, declarations are made. Sentences are passed. The splendid carpet is just wide enough for a single person to kneel, at the mercy of such a gaze and that of their peers in the adjacent chairs, from which they might judge with mouths pressed together in thin lines. 

But no one occupies these chairs, and no one kneels. The room is empty save for the opulent, raised seat at its centre, where Melina waits for him. The wall behind her is draped in a curtain of ochre and cloth-of-gold that depicts the grasping branches and interwoven leaves of his mother’s heraldry. Its fringed edges spill across the floor, the brightest thing in this room otherwise stifled by lacquered wood and dark velvet. 

When he enters, Melina does not look up. A little wooden table is beside her seat and she is bent over it, writing furiously. It strikes him how this living image of her - vellum stretched over a tablet, ink and quill, crystalline light sputtering beside her - resembles an icon on a temple wall: floating against pale yellow, singular and symbolic in what she represents, and no room to exist outside of that. 

“You look well.”

She folds one hand over the other, quill still held between two fingers. He can see the ink drip from where he stands. It is not true, not really - she looks worn, jaded. Hounded, her gaze hooded with suspicion. Her single eye flits to the door, as though searching for a thing she expects to have walked into the room behind him.

“I still feel it,” she says. The envoy, he understands, from the fear that gravitates between them like a star. “It is here, somewhere. It tries to listen.” 

He stands before the dais, looking up at her. Let us go elsewhere, he should say. Walk the cloistered gardens, the great southern wall. Take the circular lift to the very top of these ramparts and idly pick the leaves from their mother’s tree. 

“Why do you fear the envoy?”

“For the same reasons you do, though at times I have trouble separating your fear from revulsion.”

 “She offered it to us as a blessing. It serves her will.”

“Does it? I cannot tell if it bends to her, or if it compels her in a way she does not fully comprehend.”

“You speak in haste.” He stands straight and tries to modulate his voice into something open, reasonable. His serpents hang limply by his side. “Belurat has been calm for a time. Will you not return with me to stand beside her, on the eve of her triumph?”

“Oh, yes.” Melina puts the quill down and sands the surface of her parchment. “Mother’s side is a very sweet prison.”

 She blows the last grains away before standing up and tucking the parchment neatly into a fold of her robes. Before he can reply, she presses on. 

“I have made you a gift. Something to keep you safe.”

He frowns. “What should I have to fear?”

“You fear what is under your own skin so much it drives you to mutilate yourself.”

“That is not-” He stops. He would let his mother heal him, if she offered. He would not refuse Melina, either. But it is easier to keep distance. To remain disciplined in his devotion. 

Melina examines him. “There was a time I thought Belurat was the kingdom she desired to remake for us. And it is hers, now, in its own way - you have made it so. But this…” She lifts her face to the ceiling. “This perfect city. How do you think she built such a thing? Do you think she shaped every stone with her own two hands? What kind of power can gift an entire kingdom? What was she compelled to offer in return?”

There is no point in denying, in dissembling. She knows he has asked the same question, examined the city skyline with the same gnawing incertitude. 

Carefully, he says, “It is all we could have hoped for. When the Gate is open, the Hornsent will have their place-”

“Their paradise, you mean.”

“-and we will have ours.”

Her disappointment is evident. “You are more clever than that. But you do not wish to see it.” She takes her mantle from the seat behind her and drapes it over her shoulders. He glimpses a little bundle of cloth before it disappears into an inner pocket. It looks heavy. “The Hornsent will not suffer another, holier thing on the horizon. When she takes her throne, Belurat will not stand against the might of this place.”

He says, “And what was Belurat, before Mother? Full of ignorance. Overrun by self-important conjurors who still believe they are owed mastery over the realm, and declare the circumstances of their birth justify their reign.” His indignation is a hiss in the dark, but the warmth in his chest, the edge of his ember in his throat and at his fingertips, feels undeniably good. “The horns on their head do not make them any more holy than you and I.” 

Still standing up on the dais, she waits. He knows she can feel the surge of his flame. Before he continues he takes a moment to master his serpents, who now coil around his shoulders in agitation. 

“They will have their paradise, and they will no longer be our concern. Then you will have whatever you want - Belurat itself, if that is your desire. The Black Keep’s athenaeum. A hovel deep in the south woods with your Inquisitors, if you so wish. Mother would teach you to rule it all, if only you would have the grace to sit still at her side.” 

Melina steps down. For a moment he thinks she will go to him. Instead she walks around him, to the immense, iron-banded doors still open on the bright rotunda. When she is close the air between them ripples, her dark-coloured flame brushing up against the heat of his own. 

“Do you know why the Nox lived under a false sky?”

He lets the question simmer in silence while she shuts the door, sealing them in a dim hush. She turns back to him with a flicker of her pale, crystalline eye. “To hide from the real one. From the gaze of the Greater Will, a force they could not stand against. And so they did as the Hornsent have done - laboured, all their history, to make their own god. If only to have the power to kill it, should it come to that.”

“Melina-”

“They know gods are as good as tyrants.” 

He wants to shake her, to rattle her and dislodge the doubt inside her like a loose tooth. Stop blaspheming. Godhood is Mother, now. It echoes in his head like the cry of an unhappy child. We are not tyrants. We could never be. 

“You dishonour her.”

“Yes,” she says dully. “A thing you have not ceased to mention since we were children. How can I honour her? As you have? By slaughtering an entire people in her name?”

The flame surges back, incensed. The abyss coiled at the base of his being rattles, thrashes its tail. It will not bear these insults.

“Only those who rise against her,” he says through gritted teeth. “Do not make saints of them because of your misplaced love and sympathy. To the Hornsent we are cattle. Tools crafted to fulfil their aims. But we are done with that, now. I have seen to it.”

She takes his right hand in her own. The blackened ring, imprint of his flame, is still nestled in his palm. He has never seen the like on her own skin. Or perhaps it is somewhere not visible to the gaze, hidden on the inside, lining her ever-closed eye. A charred empty socket where she carries her curse. Jealousy comes like a splash of cold water: her curse is nothing like his. She is not forced to wear her sins on her skin, visible to all, and suffer for it as he does. 

Melina says, “You have done all she asks, and more. You will see this through to the end. Do you believe she will sift through your bonfire of bodies when the time comes? Or perhaps you will do it in her place: have each Hornsent kneel before you and count their sins.” 

His hand still clasped in hers, she gets down on her knees before him like a petitioner. Her touch is cold, and when she continues her voice is so raw as to be unrecognisable. 

“Will you sit at her feet and weigh how gravely they have spoken against her? Release those who bow their heads meekly and renounce the jars? Her capacity for forgiveness is not so great as that. And my lord brother” - her tone is biting as she brings his hand to her face and kisses it - “dearly I love you. But you are not so merciful either.”  

Abruptly, he jerks his hand away. Her expression flickers, familiar and not. He can see it, hear it: the little death that hides inside her, black ember biding its time. 

“Once,” she begins, still kneeling, and now her voice is low, gaze faraway, “I opened a holy jar and found a single person become two. Divisible, yet not meant to be divided. Whole for a moment: together, then separate. Can you imagine how this is possible, to make two from one? That is not how the Crucible is said to work.” 

Up close, he catches a glimpse of the distress she is trying to keep in check. Suddenly he regrets recoiling from her. He bends to gather her in his arms, and pulls her to her feet. She does not resist, but her weight is limp, heavy.

When she is standing again she leans against him and whispers, “Are we all just shards of whatever squirmed in there with Mother? Perhaps we are, perhaps it explains-”

“Peace,” he begs her. His voice cracks. “I do not wish to know.”

“You did, once. Do you not even wonder at the nature of what is inside you?” She looks up at him. She draws aside the heavy-draped shawl from his right shoulder, pulls his sleeve back far enough to glimpse the few scales still speckled above his elbow. 

“She has done everything to elevate us.” He is pleading with her now, as she runs her fingertips over his scales. His serpents shudder and retreat. “When she is divine, the love she bears for us will sear through this curse. She will cleanse us both.”

She seems to contemplate this for a moment. Then she lets her hands fall by her side and steps back.

"I think she loves the absence of whatever is inside me. This husk she has fashioned and I have animated for her benefit. Only a part. A careful slice. Here.”

She reaches into her cloak and pulls out the small, carefully wrapped piece of cloth. She hands it to him without a word. It is hefty, something solid hidden in the folds. While he unwraps it, she speaks softly. 

“She will never let our territories sleep beside each other like this. She will never forget what they have done to her people. Look at us. We have not suffered as she has. But we are angry.”

The cloth falls away. A strap of black leather, followed by a flash of steel: a small, lithe dagger, beautifully curved, simmering as the horizon after twilight. He runs a hand over the silver surface, where two sinewy points emerge from its base. The multiple, undulating edges remind him of his serpents. 

She says, “This kingdom will not bring back her village. It will not unmake what she is. What she has birthed because of it. I ask you, must the flame devour forever? I think we are the answer.”

He slips the buckler around his waist and hides the dagger under the fold of his cloak. Its weight is as oppressive as Melina’s final words. She glances at his serpents and smiles thinly. 

“Do not fret. I have made one for myself.”

“Melina,” he says, quiet as ash. “This will end in bitterness.”

Melina looks at him as though he has not spoken. “Mother told me once. I think perhaps she forgot she was speaking. For a moment she was elsewhere, almost in trance. Perhaps she looked at me and thought I was another. I think she looked right through me. I wish you had been there. I wish you had not left me alone with her.” 

She pauses. Now she is looking at him like she already knows what he wants to say, and what he is going to do. She is looking at him like none of it matters. 

“Mother said, in the jar, there was only red.” 

 

⚕️

 

The day that follows is red, and the one after that. Melina comports herself with utter clarity, irreproachable as a marble surface, but her words are weighted around his waist in a black sheath. 

Look at us. We are angry. 

Discreetly, he asks Huw to keep an eye on her Hornsent scholars, those from the athenaeum who remain close to her. Her sympathy for them is undeniable, and he is not the only one who notices it. He can see it in the cold shoulders of his hornless men, in the glare hidden under their helms and visors. They are not in a mood to share the spoils of what they have attained. They are hesitant to live alongside Hornsent, as though their very presence is a constraint on hornless independence. He is acting out of caution, he reasons, keeping them safe, even while he is not sure who exactly he is expecting to slip up, waver and reveal themselves faithless: those Hornsent, or Melina herself. 

If it is a kingdom his mother has birthed, then there are matters of legacy to attend: titles and successions and the unmentionable fact that for all Marika’s holiness, she is still mortal. Before the saint shook off her shackles and exchanged them for a crown, her brood had no value. Now they stand to inherit the world, and the world clamours to know - where will she place them? He imagines his mother shaping them like tapestries at her loom: one to be hung from the wall in all its majesty, the other a little discoloured, a little off-centre, and only good enough to walk on. If one argues that dawn precedes dusk, then he is the elder - but he has never imagined himself suited to a throne. He is suited to the field, to blood on his greaves, spear in his callused, blackened hand. To the throaty sigh of a bonfire after it has eaten everything offered to it in tribute. 

He can already guess how Melina will rule. He knows intimately the weakness of her compassion, how she bends to the Hornsent. How she will allow them, in a misplaced gesture of goodwill, to retake from the hornless what they have been gifted in this new world. 

What of you, my lord, prince in all but name, general of the Empyrean’s army? Will you submit to your lady sister’s reign?

Of course, no one asks him. To inquire about the death of a sovereign is not so far removed from treason, and if the hornless are born with anything, it’s the instinct to survive. 

In the red intervals between moons, he busies himself with statecraft. Though they hold no true court in the golden city, he tries to show himself merciful, and able to preside over a kingdom at rest. He tries to arrange himself like his mother: adept at being seated, patiently, and listening. Capable of more than just churning mud and bodies under the weight of his army. With the help of hornless once indentured to Belurat’s aristocracy, he establishes a court of augmentations to oversee the distribution of properties and incomes to his foremost knights, first of the golden city’s new nobility. It is a shaky, complicated operation in its infancy. The hornless have never shaped civil society, he is reminded. They have barely participated in it. 

In the end, it is Melina and her scholars who help incorporate these new families into a hierarchy of their own invention. Presiding over the small, embryonic shadow of what will one day be a sprawling court, he tells his men the Empyrean has not forgotten their service. Their lineage names will be elevated as patrician households, and receive those privileges that accompany heraldry of consequence. 

After, only Huw has the temerity to speak.

“Your Grace,” he says, impassive. “I thought you knew.”

Perhaps he did, once, and he has forgotten. 

“Hornless do not have lineage names. We are given the name of the Hornsent household we serve - that is, until we are sold, or given to another.”

Perhaps he has forgotten what it is to have nothing.  

 

⚕️

 

It is Melina who summons him, by way of a messenger, from the golden parapets into the windowless room where she has come to take audiences.

“The realm thanks you for your services rendered,” she is saying when he enters. “But if it is fire you seek, it is not me you should petition.”

He shuts the door behind him. The small chamber is, for once, brightly lit. Up on the dais by Melina’s side is Huw, garbed in leathers instead of armour, black cloak off one shoulder. He stands in as both a minder for her and an ear for Messmer.  

Bowed before her, four figures now rise and turn to him. Alchemists, he guesses, from the looks of them - hornless, they wear the livery of his forces, but not that of soldiers. Two appear young and vigorous enough, and there is a woman with hair the colour of mustard seed who seems a little older, more composed. They gather, almost protectively, around an elderly man with watery, heavy-lidded eyes. One eye is blind, clouded over entirely; and the other looks milky enough that Messmer does not think it will be of use much longer. They look, the four of them, overworked and underfed. 

Melina says, “My lord brother can speak for himself.” 

For a moment, he wavers - these are servants of Marika who are still in the fields, building his war machines, moving his supplies across their territories, growing food destined only for the mouths of knights, and never their own. He is in part responsible for the state they are in, and everyone in the room is fully aware of it.

Then a fifth figure resolves from behind the tight group, and he balks. Immediately he recognises the pale, snub-nosed messenger who, on the eve of his first battle, witnessed by careless accident Messmer’s own flame. A cold fear heaves through him. How long has it been? Surely he is a different person from the one who thought, with leaden certainty, that he would need to silence this youth before he could take the evidence of his own eyes beyond that tent?

He is not: for the urge is still there to murder the boy for what he is about to do. 

The messenger kneels, shoulders quaking. He keeps threading his hands to stop their quivering. 

“My lord,” he manages to sniff, and Messmer must refrain from correcting him. You might address me as Your Grace, he thinks, before I hang you. “I have known - I have met - others. Others blessed as my lord. I bring them here, before you, as a show of fealty - faith - fidelity.” The boy’s tongue runs on ahead before he catches up. “To serve.” 

 Still on his knees, he brings his flat bowl of blond hair to the carpeted floor, a bow so deep Messmer thinks he will never make it back to his feet. Among the others, older and poised, there is only a heavy, respectful silence. A resignation on their faces: that they have come to say their piece, and once they do, whatever follows is beyond them. 

When it is clear Messmer will not speak, the old man steps forward. “Your Grace,” he says, “show Queelign your mercy, for his intentions were good, and he means no offence. He came to us with the miracle of what he witnessed in your presence. We are your alchemists” - he gestures to the three behind him - “and we have long laboured to bring your colossi to life. We are no strangers to flame. Once, fire was exalted by the Crucible. In its molten belly life was forged, and sanctified. Our ancestors knew how to use it. It is only now, in the age of Hornsent plenty, that fire has lost its meaning.” His voice is like water over pebbles. Despite his clouded gaze, he seems to meet Messmer’s eye easily. “Your flame is a blessing from the Crucible, the forge of life. Share it with us. Let us serve you.”

He can feel Melina’s gaze on him from her seat. It takes everything in him, an iron grip on himself and his serpents, not to look at Huw. 

“It seems to me,” he says in a colourless voice, “that you already serve.”

“Indeed. But we can do more than stir the heart of a furnace.” He looks over his shoulder at Huw. “Sir Knight, would you return the harmless little blade you confiscated from my apprentice when we entered this chamber? It is only for show, and I am but an old man. Should I point it the wrong way, I am sure you can strike me down without trouble.”

Huw frowns, as though perhaps he has misheard the man, and does not move. 

“Huw.” Messmer’s voice carries easily in the silence. “Do as he asks.”

Huw, incredulous, looks at him. In the familiar obstinacy of his black gaze, Messmer is certain he will refuse  - but after a moment he rouses himself and retrieves a small, worn sheath from a table behind him. He hands it to the old man. 

With an ease that defies his age, the elder slides out a dull, rusted blade.    

“Pray, Your Grace, offer me your flame.”

It comes without bidding, without coaxing. It comes from the abyss, uncoiling to its eternal length, exalted by its summons, by the acknowledgement of its presence. It slides from his palm in the shape of a serpent, mote of red tinged at its edge with black. For a moment he thinks it will seek out Melina, to meet her black flame. Instead, the old man makes a small, undeniably inviting gesture with one gnarled hand. The undulating spark hangs suspended for a heartbeat before writhing, circling on itself, and making its concerted way to the blade clutched in his other hand. 

“A remarkable trick,” Melina breathes. Messmer can feel her unease tumble down the bones of his spine. 

“Not a trick, my lady.” The old man observes the lick of flame as it curls around the blade like a curious animal. “While we cannot invoke this gift ourselves as your lord brother can, we here all are conjurors in some capacity. Salza, my apprentice. Kood and Hilde. Even young Queelign. Myself, Wego.” He runs his hand gently over the weapon, and the flame melts away. Messmer can feel it dissipate, like a sudden cold gust come in from an unseen window. “Our vision is not clouded by superstition, and we recognise a benediction when we see one. We are free from doubt.”

Later, Messmer will remember that moment for how it changes the field of battle in his mind. How it turns every one of his soldiers into a weapon. Nightmarish caricatures of what the Hornsent fear most. His flames bathe all of Belurat in red, and every injustice done to them is eaten away by a thousand fiery serpents wielded by a thousand more of his knights, all of them armed with an inferno. 

He will also, with piercing clarity, remember Huw’s unreadable gaze, and realise something immutable has lodged itself between them. Scaly, jewel-warm, crawling on its belly in the dark.

When he looks back to the motley group of alchemists, they are all kneeling.

“Your Grace,” the old man says, “fire is power, and power is a gift. Here is what we offer.” 

 

⚕️

 

“Is it true?”

Messmer bolts the door behind him. “Lower your voice.” 

They are in one of the rooms adjacent to the rotunda - small, intimate. The only exit is the one they entered through. A bed, unmade, haunts the corner. Two damask-cushioned chairs are set before the dwindling glow of the hearth. 

The room is stifling; or perhaps it is the ember in his chest, still radiant. He removes his shawl, the heavy fringe, unbuckles the blade given to him by Melina, and hangs both across the ornate back of a chair. He does not sit. Huw, before him, paces in tight circles like an animal. His footfalls make no noise, and his black cloak drags along the carpeted floor. 

“Is it a conjuror’s trick? Sleight of hand? Are you mocking them?”

“Mind yourself,” Messmer says with more venom than he feels. Huw is a dark blur before him. Stand still. “I will not be addressed in this way.”

“And I will not be lied to any longer.” 

A mirror, twice as tall as any man, leans against the far wall. Silhouetted against the room’s drapery, Messmer’s red outline is a bright splash of blood against a pretty piece of cloth.

“You have never misled me, and I have always repaid you in kind.” He grabs Huw’s shoulder, forcing him to a halt. “I have not lied to you.” 

Have I? Have I simply left him in the dark by omission? Have I preferred ignorance and hiding, and so have I not misled him in my own way?

“Would you have told me?”

No, he knows. He does not let go of Huw. Even now there is doubt, the air like teeth between them. He is suited to fear. He is the kind of creature whose monstrosity is tolerated until it is not. Huw’s face before him is like a wound, and it reminds him the other man has never wavered, nor crossed a line: never spoken against Marika, never disobeyed a direct order. When he is overfamiliar, or speaks out of turn, it is only to better steer Messmer, to nudge him from complacency. He has never presumed to command, nor taken more than his share. He has not invited himself in and sat with his boots on the war table. He has instead slipped in unnoticed and seated himself by the hearth of Messmer’s confidence, as though he’s always been there, waiting to be acknowledged. And now he is the only figure illuminated in the room.

Is it cruel, he wonders, that his men will now know they’ve pledged fealty to a monster?

“This curse,” Messmer says, and despite the softness of his voice the word comes like a blade. “I have only ever drawn from it to aid my mother. To serve her cause.” He brings his other hand to Huw’s arm, to try and draw him closer, force him still, as if a steady grasp could prove his sincerity. “You must trust me.”

Huw shrinks back, and Messmer can tell he is expecting a fevered, incandescent touch. There is something disoriented in his expression, unable to settle on outrage or incomprehension and so trapped somewhere between. His mouth pulls back into a grimace, and his eyes do not leave Messmer’s.

“Trust you? How can I? If I misled you, you could hang me. You have risen so far you forget what it is to be at someone’s mercy. As your vassal I must swallow your truths and your lies, all the same. Like all hornless. What choice did I ever have?” He speaks through clenched teeth. “I have served you in all the ways I can, and more. But how can I trust you, if all this time I have not even known what you are?”

If it were not Huw standing before him, Messmer could, with a little effort, conceive of those words from a distance. Insolent, but indefinite. A treasonous muttering directed at his leadership, not himself. But Huw’s gaze is as direct as his words. So they slide, deeply and absurdly personal, under Messmer’s skin, to prickle, and pierce, and swim beneath his golden vision. It is an exchange for the stage: a glance shared between performer and viewer, a juncture where the story is intimately private, embodied only for the two of them. A moment he recognises from the battlefield, those protracted seconds before a killing blow. A slit of humanity behind a visor, mutual recognition. The shared knowledge of what comes next. 

From the table beside him, he reaches for his discarded buckler and slides out the thin, curved black knife. Regret, blinding, and heavy between his fingers: that he may not get the chance to see Melina again.

He takes Huw’s bare hand, moving quick so there is no resistance, and forces the dagger into Huw’s grip. Then he presses its silver-black edge to his chest, to the soft surface of his tabard and tunic. To the place where he bears a serpent instead of a heart, where his flesh is new and raw and his few remaining scales lose their brilliance, flaked and cracked at the edge of his sallow skin.

Huw jerks back, face contorted with alarm. Messmer holds him fast with a strength he fetches from somewhere outside himself. The heat in him subsides, suddenly; as though he is freeing himself from a burden. The void within him goes still, contemplative. It, too, is watching the spectacle unfold. 

“If you believe your fear is justified,” he whispers. “If I am the monster you think I am - then do it. I will not stop you.” 

It is a long, brutal moment. As it drags on he finds himself losing strength, leaching resistance. Giving in, leaning forward into the prospect of it, into the fixed point of the dagger. Go on, he thinks. Prove my doubts. If your oath means nothing, break it here and now, before it really matters. Is it his voice that speaks, or the abyss? He is outside himself, in his serpents. They arch up and around him, around Huw, a corkscrew of shuddering red, poised to squeeze. Through them he can taste dread in the air, and the opaque, iron tang of regret. He has pulled Huw forward, and so their faces are close. Even as he sees himself from afar he can feel Huw’s exhale on his face, the tickle of curls that tremble against his own skin. There is something heraldic, he finds, about how they are entwined: red and black and arched in mutual destruction. 

With a sudden shudder, Huw breaks. He takes a stumbling step back, and then he laughs - curt and bewildered, like he has come to a great understanding.

“This is madness,” he says. The sound is too sudden, too real, and it startles Messmer back into himself. His perspective shifts, gold and blurred again, and for a moment he is cold. He releases his iron grip on Huw’s hand at his chest. 

Huw, freed, hands the dagger back to Messmer, hilt first. As he does so he tries to straighten, but a great tension seems leaves his body then, and his shoulders slump so that he looks diminished, smaller. 

“Forgive me,” Huw whispers, voice subdued as his stance. “In my fear, I forget myself.” He bows, nothing reverent to it. When he rises, his dark gaze slides away from Messmer. “The closer we are, the more I falter. I dread losing it.” 

“Losing what?”

“The freedom promised by your mother.” 

Messmer lays the dagger aside and takes Huw’s face with one hand. Subtle as it is, he feels the flinch. It is not loss you fear. It is me.

Out loud he says, “It was not deception. Only, I did not wish to burden you with this.”

Compelled, Huw looks up at him. There is a give to his shoulders, bowed at an angle. Less proud, less easy than they always are. Messmer lets his hand come to rest at the nape of Huw’s neck, but now the touch is commanding rather than apologetic. 

Do not weigh your words so long, Messmer thinks, or I will think you are lying. But perhaps he has been curled in his deceit for so long that he owes Huw this little hypocrisy. 

Huw turns his face away deliberately. “You called it a curse.”

“Yes.”

The ember flickers. Where does the curse end and he begin? At what juncture, in which limb, is his base nature no longer an external feature but simply a part of his whole?

Huw remains still, but there is no challenge in his body, no resistance. “Your mother knows?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else?”

Anything else I should know, Messmer understands. More than his unnatural inheritance. The serpents who share his heart and mind. The scales that cover his body like diamond-woven chainmail. The hungry fire that finds a home in his hollow centre. Any other hideous secret. Any other curse.

The abyss uncoils, gleeful, exulted.

Anything else?

He says, “No.” 

 

⚕️

 

A jumbled life spent waiting for repose, for belonging, and now he is out of time. I have done what was asked, he wants to say. Played my part. Offered everything. In his mind he takes off his mantle, his helm. He opens his palm wide. I have burned the world. So give me what I am owed. 

He does not know to whom he prays, but it is not his mother, nor her falling-star god. Not to those around him, who look at him with equal parts unease and admiration. 

The abyss inside him lifts its ruinous head and says, I am listening. 

For once, he does not bother to turn from it. He lets it stoke him, lets its cruelty goad him on. The anger serves to hone his focus. There is less and less space for doubt and little time for incertitude when he is bent over a blistering corpse, or elbows-deep in the cinders of another colossal furnace golem while it crouches like a child, smouldering, waiting to be fed by his fire. 

He dismisses without prejudice those soldiers who find his flame irreconcilable, and no longer wish to serve him, given what he is. He lets them exchange his livery for that of his mother, and prove their loyalty in other ways. Some return to Belurat to reinforce Marika’s position, while others remain to fortify the golden city. In their place emerges the silver and red silhouette of these newer strangers: alchemists-turned-knights, ennobled, given a fistful of his embers and his blessing and told to bring the world to heel. He thinks they will need time to adjust to the realities of battle and understand the tense, shifting landscape of his mother’s struggle against Hornsent resistance. He is wrong. They take to it with near-mathematical brutality. 

Many of the Hornsent taken prisoner know his reputation. Exaggerated versions of it. They understand, to a degree, what is coming. They know their bodies will be emptied of sense and filled with terror. Still he thinks he recognises the look in their eyes: Hornsent fear dredged up from his childhood, horror of something outside their cosmic order, looking at him now as they did when he was no more than a boy and two snakes; only now he is a lord, and no Hornsent has emerged from the black void of his Keep or his encampments still breathing.

There are ways to make use of them, these prisoners. To gather information by persuasion; to do so diplomatically, in a reasonable tone of voice. Huw does this well: loosens tongues, commiserates, makes one comfortable until they realise they have spoken too much and too frankly. Melina still does as she did when they were children: she cajoles or bribes with affection, offers mercy in her palm like a piece of fresh fruit from a temple offering, if only these rebels will renounce their aggression. At times he wishes he could be as his mother, and convert with the trickery of her whole being, perched on her throne. A gesture offered: hand she opens to reveal half-truths while the power rests in a closed fist behind her back. 

He has neither the time nor patience for any of these approaches. Not when prisoners are hauled before him. Not when it is a question of loyalty.

“Put me in a room with them alone,” he tells Huw. Embers circle his fingers like rings. “And close the door.” 

In his few moments of solitude, when they stretch into merciful hours, he wonders if this is why he was born cursed. Was he always destined, by way of his mother, to bring the Hornsent’s greatest fear to their doorstep? Each day he finds it is easier to take the shape his mother intended for him. It becomes more difficult to entertain that notion of after - the golden city secure, named and baptised in his mother’s glory. His spear gone to rust. A life to live as he chooses, and not as an all-consuming flame. 

Before the end, Melina is the one to show him. On one of the vast, sprawling levels of the great structure that embraces the tree, she finds him. It is cupped in her hand. He does not understand how it survives: it, creature of flame, and she cold as death. 

Pyrefly, she names it. She says there is no record of it in the athenaeum, no mention of it in any Hornsent natural history. He is inclined to believe her. He has never seen anything like it. But he knows what it looks like: a product of his destruction, an afterthought of fire, a wandering ember with a hint of something unnatural. Not the Crucible - it is too familiar. He tries not to look too closely as it burns itself out, and eventually blinks from existence. Later he will learn it is not uncommon for a pyrefly to attract a moth to its blazing body, only to set it alight. Does it mean to, he wonders, or is it just an accident? Does it set alight anything it brushes with its wings, even the flower it means to land on? Perhaps it does not even know it burns the thing it intends to caress. 

 

 

⚕️

 

Somewhere, a glass shatters. A latch unlocks. A door swings open.

 

⚕️

 

He would have thought it a Hornsent attack, or a violent shifting of the earth, had the sky not ripped open.  

As it is, a great light lances across the horizon like a spear. It is visible from anywhere and everywhere in the golden city. Tremors come in waves, and though he cannot be sure, there is a part of him convinced the south, Belurat, Enir-Ilim, his mother’s finespun crystal heart, is the centre of it. 

Even as he deploys his men, urges them ride to Belurat to confirm what they already know is happening, he is searching for Melina. Go without me, he insists, as calmly and coldly as he can. Protect your queen. From what, he does not know. If this is apotheosis, it should not end in violence. But one can never be sure. 

By the time he finds her, half the city has emptied, and he has lost track of the men he has deployed. From this distance she is so small, almost insignificant against the vast tiled plaza in which he finds her, the canopy looming above. Beside her a fire burns, though he cannot tell the kindling. The flame is brassy, golden, like the pale crystals that serve to light the palaces, pleasantly lulling. The smell of it mingles with jasmine. This is the place he thinks of as the entrance to the tree: to his mother’s heart, her desires and the part of her still cloistered in shadow, unknowable. At soft intervals, the earth murmurs. Light continues to streak like a comet overhead, and the tree pulses, like a newborn talking its first breath.

Melina is crumpled, folded in on herself. When he crouches down beside her he cannot see her face, but there is a sheen around her, gold spilled bright and thick. He pulls her cloak back, moves her hand, and in the other he sees the dagger - a twin to the one she gifted him, curling black blade. Past that, she is - he exhales - open. There is a cleave from the centre of her chest, where her collarbones meet, down to her belly. Gold spills from the wound in silken threads and she gathers them up like a weaver. With the black knife she is cutting them, one by one, like one severs loose threads from a tapestry. 

It hits him on a sudden, gentle waft of air: brimstone. He looks up, follows the glint of gold thread from Melina’s body to where it stretches a little ways behind her, hidden in a shadow cast by a monumental branch. There, collapsed like a statue knocked from its plinth, bent at each leathery knuckle, is the envoy. The threads she severs from herself lead to its still form. 

“Forgive me,” she says. “I wish you did not have to see it.”

He puts his shaking hands around her torso, her ribs, feeling suddenly like he has forgotten how to channel his mother’s healing gift. Her blood is a gold ichor. She takes his hands and, with some tenderness, pushes them away. “No,” she says. “Not this time.” 

Only then does he see there is something dark around her, as if her entire being is doused in shadow. Her eye - her left eye - is open. It is the true colour of the sky, the sky at the hour she was born. A sky he has not seen since the dominion of his mother’s tree usurped dawn and dusk. A black mark is forming around it, tracing the lid and under-eye as if to emphasise that it has always been there. He has simply not peered close enough.   

With a pale smile she says, “I am leaving my skin.”

He shakes his head. I do not understand. He cannot speak. 

“This is the price she must pay. To have her kingdom, she must give something up in return. To banish death from the world, she must also banish love.” 

Where is it written? I will burn that, too. This should be a world that no longer chains them with its rules, its proclamations and prophecies. They have torn down that world, an old curtain from the wall, and unrolled a glorious tapestry in its place. So why is her blood pooling in his hands? Is it not, gold and unmarred, proof enough of their destiny? We have become the firmament. 

The last threads that tie her to the envoy fall away, their edges flickering. She is like a wisp, diminished. She reeks of holy magic, of gold resin. Beneath, the sting of something cleansing and acerbic: the dark-coloured flame.

“You slew it,” he says, barely audible. Even articulating it makes him stagger. “It belonged to the Greater Will.”

“An envoy of a god, yes. But come, let me tell you.” She beckons him close and suddenly she is young again, whole, fervour and mischief in her voice, prodding the world if only to anger it. He leans forward. She puts her lips to his ear and says, “Any blade will do, if Death is the one to wield it.”

He feels his flame lift to meet hers. There is still life in her, divinity. “She has opened the Gate,” he says hoarsely. She must have, or the earth would not tremble, heaven not spill its afterbirth. Their blood would not run, as it does now, a different colour. 

Melina nods. She is bent, leaning against him. “Empyrean flesh,” she says. “Godhood. This is what awaits us on the other side. But I think…” She hesitates, then looks up at him with devastating honesty. “I think I cannot leave. I think I am tied to this place because of what is inside me. Because I walk with Death. And I think Death will be needed here, to walk the world for a long while yet.” 

Even as he stares into the great black chasm of numbness, he catches its glint: jealousy. Little blinding treasure. She has always had a purpose, a destiny. He has not. She was supposed to rule beside their mother, be the left hand to his right. Instead she has severed herself from their triumph, knocked herself loose from their mother’s floating world. From him. Did he not love her enough? Did Marika not? Did they not give enough to warrant obeisance? He searches her face for contempt, loathing for the world that will only grow more perfect without death. But she does not have it. She does not hate this world. Only mourns what it has become.

Her gaze floats past him, up to the severed sky, the trembling beacon to the south. “A long time ago she offered us a kingdom. Still I find I do not want it. I do not want to be a vessel for her desires. I am sorry, brother; beloved of mine. Her utopia is not a place I can bear.”

“You must.” His serpents wrap themselves around her. “It was made for us.”

She drops the dagger by her side and returns the embrace, threading her arms around his neck as she did when they were children.

“When will you stop living like a celestial body, dominated by her path through the sky?” He can feel her shaking her head, the weight of her weariness. “The kingdom needs someone who does not love it like a child.”

There is a faintness to her now, smoky and unsubstantial. He is afraid she will slip from his grasp and be taken on the wind. Sister-shaped hole in the cosmos, schism through himself. Suddenly, he is staggering into it: loss. Not grief or sorrow but absence, pure empty space. When he cannot find her, when she is gone from the room, in the silence he will strain for her exhale, for the scratch of a quill, for the scent of mace as rosy and pale as copper, a splash of light. And she will not be there; and her absence will cause in him a deep, inexplicable panic, a fear that if she is gone then in fact she may be anywhere; and he fixed in one place, living out the term of his life observed in the writhing of his guilt, in the regret of things he did and did not do, and never again will she lay a hand on him and tell him, hush, peace, look at me: I am not afraid.  

“Please. Do not leave me.”

Above them, the tree seems to blur, and for a moment there are two - twins, echoes of each other, merging and separating like something seen at a distance through the haze of heat. His own heat, he realises - a fire around him is spreading. Melina is coaxing it out of him. 

She leans back from his embrace to look at him. The shadow over her has grown. She takes his face in her hands. If he had tears, they have been boiled away by the forge beneath his skin. 

“O brother, where is your flame?”

He rests his head against her hands. “I thought I could be rid of it.”

“But we are the same, and now I come to call on it. Lend me your flame. Let me give up my death. Let me shed this body, the threads that bind me, and so live as half; sheathed by fire and unreachable. But let me live. For Mother’s sake, and mine.”

He takes her in his arms again, serpents twined around her, the ichor of her godsblood pooling between them. Her black flame gives way to his, brilliant red, everything he can give. When she burns she smells like a meadow of jasmine. 

He lets go. So begins the world without her. 

As her voice goes up in smoke she says, “Love her in the ways I could not.” 

 

⚕️

 

He rides south through an empty world.

The land rises, shakes itself out like a beast. Shadow flies from it. It sheds darkness in great diamond-patterned sheafs. He crosses no living being, but he can feel Death, at times shuffling beside him like a wanderer, at others taking flight and casting its winged shadow over him. 

Like a great ring around the land, a fire burns on every horizon. In the distance, a furnace golem heaves across a field. He cannot distinguish what he hears on the wind - voices, or the sound of life giving way to flame. 

He expects his hornless still stationed where he left them in Belurat: patrolling, watching the spectacle, waiting for the city to empty and for their shackles to fall away at last. Instead he finds them assembled in a bright concentric ring, an entire force massed around the tower-city. They look painted, unreal; utterly still. Banners snap in the wind. He sees his knights, his battalions, his alchemists and his foot soldiers. They are all staring up in awe at the tower: blank, holy terror and jubilation. 

Belurat is burning. 

At the top of the tower-city, he is expecting crowds: Hornsent in the temple plazas, massing along the steps, clamouring to reach the spiralling stairs that lead to Enir-Ilim, to the Gate itself. 

Instead, when he reaches the tower entrance alone, he finds the ingress of Enir-Ilim completely covered in black, gnarled roots, thorny and wrapped tight around the gates. In a muted whisper, he begs forgiveness of his mother: all trees are hers now. All living things. He sets the blackened boughs aflame and passes through. On the other side, he grows cold with understanding. 

Bodies at his feet. A sea of them. A crush of Hornsent who rose, like a wave, to reach the Gate at its opening, only to crest and turn back, falling, stumbling down the stairs of paradise to escape whatever thing perched at the top. 

The path is lined in pearl, pearl that he cannot distinguish from bone. 

As he climbs the world spills around him, losing its shape like hot wax. Starlight thaws and pools at his feet, sloshing around his ankles and pouring down the stairs to mingle with the blood of a thousand Hornsent. Reality tugs him back. Who is responsible for this sea of dead? His own forces? He did not give the order. Did he? 

He reaches the top. 

In those last steps, a different sort of climbing: a passage through the narrow waist of an hourglass, pulling himself up through a veil of sand and dust to emerge into a monumental nothingness. He knows where he is. The gold mosaic, the little fresco above his mother’s alcove in Enir-Ilim, depiction of her glory made real. Throne without children. 

Cradled between soaring gates of flesh and bone, she is waiting. She has found the seam that holds up the sky and torn it open. Words he cannot understand drip from her in gold and harden at her feet over the bodies, a carnage of sunflower-yellow. He is taken back to the first miracle she performed - removing poison from the water of Belurat’s reservoir. Now too she discards her cloth-of-gold, her mortality, and removes poison from the world: shadow. A death-shaped hole in the cosmos she will fill with a brilliant, flat eternity. 

Before her, the silhouette of the golden city on the hill hovers like a crown. He can already feel it careening away from him. Below its radiance he sees devastation: a flame, all-consuming, himself like a red-hot needle threading through the world his mother will leave behind, scorched earth beneath the fertile victory of her divinity. He sees the horrors he has wrought, and the ones he has yet to unleash in her name. He sees the horizon break, the land shatter and split from the glorious future she has imagined. The tree before him, blinding and straight and domineering, shakes off its shadow. What’s left in its wake is bent, gnarled; its bough is pierced, an edge dragged through it, splitting skin so that it bleeds the same golden ichor he watched issue forth from his sister. Two sides of the same coin: one in bloom, the other in flame. What is, and what has not yet come to pass. 

He sees what she has built for her children, her apotheosis, and with utter, devastating clarity knows that because of what he is, because of all he has done, it is a kingdom that will never be his. 

His mother is holding up the sky like a babe in arms. Light races around her, circles her, howling, chasing the shadows away. The world tilts and only she is still, sure-footed. Around her, pillars of bodies hold the shuddering, rent firmament. She is completing the passage in flesh. All those Hornsent who once clamoured for the Gate are now embedded in its lintel. On her face, vengeance and victory in the form of breathtaking serenity. 

The void uncoils, the abyss vindicated. A part of himself lets go, falls away, gives in to it. Everything a golden blur. He cannot speak, he cannot weep. The scales itch, itch terribly - he no longer has the will to tear them away. Let his mother rip them from him. Let her dismantle him, peel him back to reveal his monstrousness for what it is. He will not fight it. Not any longer. 

But in his mind there is Melina’s voice, and only he can hear: Death’s gentle hands come to lay your head down soft.

His mother, newborn god, queen of the world, turns to him. A thousand things, each one unfathomable, pass over her face. Love, so bright it hurts him; then, alarm. 

O, Prince of the world, she says. Where is your sister?

 

 

 

---

 

Notes:

thanks to all those who stuck around and left a kind word <3

i need a breather before part 2.
find me on tumblr in the meantime.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of O Mother Of My Misfortune