#au:wol

“I don’t know. It feels like a trespass. Like saying your name, or you saying mine.”

Intimacy isn’t a transgression.

“Intimacy.”

Yeah. It feels good.

“It’s not… me. I don’t know that I’m made for it. Maybe it’s why I can only dream of it.”

I thought you dreamed it because I was gone. Because you could have it if I wasn’t, couldn’t you? We’re all made for it.

“Then why did you stay so far when you were still here?”

Ha. Now that’s the question.

I didn’t know I could. I didn’t think I deserved it.

“Funny you should lecture me, then.”

It’s easy to lecture you. Who else do I know like I know you?

Hey.

If I could put your hand on my heart, I would.

Would you let me?

“

Aye. I would.”

See? Maybe you are made for it.

“I think you might be making me better than I was on my own.”

Don’t say that like it hurts.

"It does, though."

I was already dead and gone and lost. You were always enough on your own.

“Once, maybe. It doesn’t feel like that anymore.”

I’ll be with you every step of the way. Don't forget that.

“You don't have much of a choice.”

I already made it. I'd make it again.

I was alone for so long. The silence, it gets so bloody loud, you know. But your kind of quiet—it made everything bearable again.

“I wish… I wish things could have been different.”

I know. But I’ve made my peace with death a long time ago.

"Maybe I should start, too."

Not yet. Not you.

“What if I’m already tired of fighting?”

You don’t need to fight. Living’s enough.

That was always what you were before you ever started fighting, wasn’t it? The balance in every living thing. The balance in you.

“Did you find that in my head or in my heart?”

Maybe I always knew.

“Promise me you’ll stay. You’re the balance in me.”

You don’t need any promises from me. I’m here.

From the desk of Pavane Altos Dionys of House Malichar

Radz-at-Han

Grand Steward Riot,

Let it be known firstly that I am not in the habit of reading the private correspondence of any under my roof regardless of their age; however, I could not help but glance at the letter my young charge left on a chair in my study when I very nearly sat upon it. Therefore, I must assume that he has no great concerns regarding its confidentiality, and so permit myself to comment upon its contents.

You may rest assured that the boy’s needs and comforts are seen to with the highest care under my roof. In fact, I am told he haunts the kitchens at all hours of the day, and sometimes late at night. He sleeps in a warm bed, wears clean clothes, and washes daily—all improvements upon daily life alongside an adventurer whose nature you are evidently familiar with.

I have also taken upon myself to give him informal lessons on geography, history, literature, calligraphy, mathematics, alchemy, and theoretical thaumaturgy. He is an apt and eager pupil; in spite of the hardships of his childhood, he retains well the learning that was previously imposed upon him, inappropriate as it was for his age. We continue his physical training, as well, and there is not a night where he does not retire contented. His spirits are high, though he sometimes misses wandering; we have made plans to go exploring the city and its environs together to remedy this.

I was not asked to make such reports to anyone when the boy was entrusted to my care, but I hope this missive will ease your concerns and unburden you to continue your usual responsibilities. I imagine there is much for you to attend to; the management of a free company and a seat on Ala Mhigo’s council surely must leave you little time to pine for the return of our mutual friend.

Cordially,

From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers

Keane House, Ala Mhigo

Thank you for your detailed report. I admit I was surprised to see you even had time to compose something so lengthy for my sake, what with Sihtric’s education and care taking up so much of your daily life, but it was nevertheless appreciated. It’s good to know you are both enjoying each other’s company.

Though, between you and I, I would not say I am the one who pines for Sairsel.

From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers

Keane House, Ala Mhigo

Remember, you’re welcome at the Sandsea or at the house any time. Stella misses you.

So do I. And I miss Sairsel, too.

From the desk of Sihtric not-Salt

do you think he’s all right?

From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers

Keane House, Ala Mhigo

I would be lying if I said I didn’t worry for him, because I love him, and that’s what you do when you love someone. 

But yes. I think he would let nothing stop him from coming home to you.

From Sihtric

Thanks, Ashe.

The desert heat sears her lungs; tears would sting her eyes if she had any tears left to weep. Her grief is wider than a desert, her heart greater than a city, her rage more endless than hunger.

She thinks: I have no home to return to.

She thinks: there was never any such thing as a place.

She thinks: the whole of my family is dead and so must my son learn that mother, in his tongue, means dead.

But they are not, in truth, Her thoughts—not in words nor voice. They are an echo of something unshapen and gaping inside her as she walks the desert alone, until she comes to where her home died, where the sand was once dark with blood.

She sinks to her knees and turns her face to the sky where It would be birthed and has died and she screams, she howls, and there is a harsh sting of red on her thigh—

Ilberd came to himself breathless, like a man breaking the surface halfway to drowning. In front of him, Morgana—always her, like a dogged shadow, like a precious cursed thing from which he could not be parted—; in her hand, her grip white-knuckled, a knife.

Still reeling, he registered some mild horror at the blood seeping through her trousers, at the red-blossom point of her knife. He had nothing to think of the habitual contempt in her eyes, except perhaps an unexpected sting of regret.

Was that what she had felt, on those battlements, when she had seen— when she had discovered something far more wretched than his concealed treachery?

“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he hissed.

“I did what was necessary,” Morgana replied, venomous and withering. “You ought to know something of that. You had no right—”

“So you would stab yourself just to spite me?” He steadied himself upon the nearby wall and straightened, extricating himself from the stray vertigo hanging over him as Morgana glared. “It was beyond any choice of mine. You should know that.”

The weight of her grief lingered, choking; but the shape of her anger felt like breath, a noose loosening from around his throat. She glanced away and scoffed, content to ignore him. She did know. She knew precisely what it felt like.

“It worked,” she said instead, pressing her hand to her thigh, “didn’t it?”

And then she smiled, all hungry-wild, and that Ilberd couldn’t begin to understand.

He pushed an impatient sigh out through his nose and, unnerved by the sight of her blood seeping onto her skin, slapped her hand away. She didn’t protest as he crouched in front of her to bandage her thigh best as he could—himself unsure whether it was the gesture of an exasperated father, or an irritated friend, or.

“I knew you were a vindictive bastard, Arroway,” he muttered, “but I think you may actually be mad.”

“No one likes a mirror, hey?” she said, and she nudged his cheek with her knuckles. Never an open hand; not for him. “Misery does love company.”

A’zaela gave him a bewildered look, which Sairsel answered with a look of his own that was equal parts insistent and mortified. She glanced down at the book in her hands, studying its nondescript binding and would-be innocent title—Freedom’s Cries—before opening at a random page. By the flustered expression that flitted across her face, Sairsel surmised bleakly that she’d stumbled upon one of the book’s more damning passages.

He considered hiding his face in his hands. Or perhaps leaving the Riskbreakers altogether. He’d had a good run of it; surely Ashelia wouldn’t mind if he disappeared into the aether for the rest of his days.

Sihtric frowned at Sairsel. “Can I see it, Miss A’zaela?”

“No!” they both answered in frantic unison.

“Why? What’s it about?”

“War,” Sairsel said quickly. “Now finish making a mess of my pack.”

“As if the Saintsmaker didn’t make me read half a thousand histories on war when they were all ‘you have the power to alter the course of Man’s fate on this star,’” Sihtric said, taking on a moaning voice that mocked the Saintsmaker’s, waving his hands menacingly all the while.

“And I’m supposed to abide by the logic of some mad bastard who kept a child locked away underground, am I?” Sairsel retorted as A’zaela slowly slipped the book under her knee and out of Sihtric’s sight. “It isn’t suitable reading for a boy your age. Leave it be.”

Sihtric heaved a great, world-weary sigh and resumed his search for the whetstone. Sairsel, overcoming his embarrassment, met A’zaela’s gaze long enough to communicate gratitude, apology, and no small dose of unabated mortification.

‘Burn it,’ Sairsel mouthed before Sihtric plopped back down next to him with stone in hand.

A’zaela did not burn it.

For nigh on a week, Sairsel comforted himself in pretending that she had, at the very least, gotten rid of the book if not by fire. It was a pleasant lie, and one that allowed him to avoid thinking A’zaela’s opinion of him changed by the embarrassing tripe in his possession.

Because she was discreet, A’zaela waited until they were alone. She waited, in fact, until one night after the Sandsea had become empty of patrons, and Sairsel had returned inside from avoiding the crowd to have a drink while Sihtric slept in his room. It was a perfectly peaceful evening; even Ashelia had gone to bed, and Hickory napped by the warmth of the hearth.

A’zaela slid quietly onto the stool beside his. “Um,” she said, taking up very little space, “Sel?”

Sairsel swiveled to better face her, blissfully unaware of the cause of her shyness. It wasn’t exactly outside of the norm for either of them.

“What is it?”

“I read your book, and…”

Sairsel tensed. “Look—” he said quickly, “I know it’s horrible, and it looks like it’s about me—which is absurd—but I was curious and it isn’t like having Sihtric around leaves much time for… you know—”

“It’s not that,” A’zaela said, avoiding his gaze. 

Sairsel struggled to believe that she had nothing to say of the fact that he owned a debauched novel—a thinly veiled fictionalization of uncomfortably recent history—about a dashing Doman lord and an Ala Mhigan hero partaking in all sorts of buggery in the midst of a revolution, ostensibly inspired by his own time in Othard during the liberation campaign.

Not that buggery had ever been a part of it, in reality.

“I… What?”

A’zaela blushed fiercely. “G’raha,” she said to the bartop, slipping her thumbnail in a crack in the wood, “used to have a boyfriend.”

“I see,” Sairsel said—though it was rather more like making out a vague shape in a very thick fog that might be a tree or a mountain.

“Do you think he—” A’zaela tried, making a vague gesture with both hands that Sairsel hoped he interpreted correctly as he jumped, for some reason, to reassuring her.

“Not necessarily. Doesn’t matter who the people in the bed or their parts are, yeah? There’s not just one way to—”

“I mean, do you think he would like it if I did it?”

Sairsel’s mouth fell open. A beat passed. A’zaela looked as though she would rather slip through the floorboards and stay there.

“That’s,” Sairsel said in a miserable attempt at stringing words together, “that’s something you should ask him, isn’t it?”

“I know he would.” A’zaela paused, her brief moment of certainty in the man she loved overtaken by clumsy embarrassment. “But I don’t— I don’t know what I’m doing. I bought a… the lady called it an ‘aid,’ and she tried to give me advice, but I think she thought I had a girlfriend and I didn’t have the courage to correct her.”

Sairsel did his best to move past his astonishment—mostly at the idea of A’zaela alone in some curio shop for this very specific purpose—and laid a hand on A’zaela’s shoulder, looking gravely at her. “Zaela,” he said, and her ears twitched back under his attention. “Are you asking me for advice on how to fuck your man?”

“I can ask Ashe if—”

Sairsel shook his head and grimaced. “And tell her where you got this stroke of inspiration? I’d rather rot in a bog,” he said, and began to pat the pockets of his coat until he found the pencil he kept in case Sihtric lost his—which happened about once a fortnight—and set it down on the bar between them. “Have you got something to write down on? I’m going to tell you everything I know.”

Any discomfort he might have felt ebbed away completely at the way A’zaela’s ears perked up. Her face was still flushed, but she had a focus to her that spoke of both determination and trust—and Sairsel used up the time she took looking for paper dwelling upon how touched he felt to know it. As she rounded the bar to sit beside him again, A’zaela spoke, her words growing easier, if yet nervous.

“I just— I don’t know how this goes, you know? I mean, there’s the book, but…”

“It’s filth, not a guide.”

A’zaela laughed a little. “Exactly. And he knows, Sel—he’s rusty, but he knows.”

“Look,” Sairsel said seriously, and tapped the papers as she set them down. “I’ll tell you this—and you might as well write it down, because, first lesson: the best way to go about this if one person doesn’t know what they’re doing is for that person to be— well, doing the buggering. Trust me.”

A’zaela did not write it down, but she nodded intently, somewhat comforted.

“I was you once, A’zaela. We were all you. He won’t notice if you swive him silly.”

Sairsel then proceeded to tell her, in consummate detail, exactly how best to achieve such lofty ends. 

Before long, he had spoken more words in one evening than he had for the last week, A’zaela’s page was full of helpful advice, and the adorable blush on her cheeks had faded to be replaced with an expression of determined focus.

And gratitude. Perhaps even a bit of wonder—and genuine excitement. Sairsel felt oddly proud.

“Thank you,” A’zaela said earnestly, looking down at her notes.

Sairsel put a hand on her shoulder again. “You’re very welcome, Zaela. And so is he,” he said, more smugly than he usually found he could be. Perhaps the charismatic Ala Mhigan hero from the book had rubbed off on him. “And if he doesn’t make you come at least three times the next time he sticks it in you, he’s not worth the bother.”

A’zaela flushed once more. “Sairsel!”

“I’m only saying you ought to know your worth! And so should he.”

“He does,” A’zaela said, her gaze falling to the bartop to shift into something dreamy and sweet that might have been nauseating had Sairsel not felt so bloody happy to see it on her. A silly smile pulled at her lips, but when she looked back up at Sairsel, it shifted into something purposeful and attentioned. “Do you know yours?”

He hadn’t expected her to turn the tables on him—but that was A’zaela. A’zaela, who understood things about him without either of them speaking; A’zaela, who saw because she gave a damn. It was Sairsel’s turn to grow flustered.

“Ah, well,” he said quietly, with a small smile meant to be dismissive of himself.

A’zaela watched him carefully, then bent to stuff her notes into her own pack where it sat beside the stool. She paused, ears flicking at attention at the sound of someone stirring somewhere down the hall from the bar, then straightened up with the accursed book in her hand when nothing came of the noise. Her way of setting it down on the bar was careful, as though she worried about ruffling his feathers somehow.

“He really did remind me of you,” A’zaela said, tipping her chin towards the book to designate the man living between the pages. It isn’t you, obviously, but he’s… solid. The way you are.”

Sairsel thoughtfully set his hand down atop the cover. “Thank you.”

“Anyway, I thought I should give it back,” she said, and blushed again as she added, “I think I’ve more than enough to go on for now.” 

Sairsel laughed. “I’d tell you to keep it, but I do spend most of my nights sleeping on the ground with a dog and an eleven-year-old.”

A’zaela gave him a smile and patted his shoulder with great sympathy and solidarity. She then shifted on the stool, uncomfortable with her own curiosity. “I know it’s clearly not a history, but did you and Lord Hien ever…?”

“Oschon’s balls, no,” Sairsel said, and his rueful chuckle covered up the sound of the hall door opening. A’zaela had bared enough to him in one evening to warrant him making an admission to her, if only in the spirit of fairness—and so he did: “I can’t say I wouldn’t have said yes, but… it was better this way.”

They both jumped at the sound of Ashelia’s voice. “You two are up late.”

She dragged her feet over to the bar and bent behind it to fetch a bottle and a glass. Her troubles with sleep were no secret to the two of them, but they still managed to look like two children caught at mischief, and they both reflexively made to cover the book with one hand.

“Can’t sleep?” Sairsel asked idly. He felt A’zaela try to slip the book away from under his hand.

Ashelia narrowed her eyes at them. “No,” she said slowly.

The weight of her stare whittled away what little determination Sairsel had for keeping face. He sighed and took the book from A’zaela’s hand, setting it down in front of Ashelia like an offering.

“Someone wrote a book about stolen moments of, er, passion during the liberation campaign. It appears to have been inspired by my time in Othard,” Sairsel declared, throwing himself upon the proverbial sword. Ashelia’s eyebrows lifted in clear interest. “Sihtric found it in my things and almost read it.”

She looked at Sairsel in silence, covered her mouth with her hand, and began laughing until her shoulders shook. Sairsel glanced at A’zaela—smiling at her crestfallen expression—and gave her a wink.

“Is this not glorious?” he hears Zenos say, too close, in a low growl that would make him recoil if he could. “Do you feel it? The rush of blood?”

Blood is all Sairsel can feel.

“You are a hunter,” drawls Zenos’ voice in his ear. Sairsel’s hands tighten—twitch—around the blade, trying to force it away, but he only succeeds in cutting himself deeper. His sob chokes around the blood that fills his throat, thick and wet as Zenos whispers to him. “You know blood. The quivering of the beast under your hands as you take the life that was yours from the moment your gaze claimed it. How does it feel to be the prey?”

Sairsel coughs, filling his body with near blinding pain. Dark red splatters down onto the blade.

Zenos lets him—lets him—fall to one knee, directing the sword down with his body as the strength drains from him and leaves him shaking. A gauntlet frames Sairsel’s face, burning against his skin.

“You will be my greatest loss, my friend.”

Sairsel wants to scream and growl and tear his throat open. He wants— he wants— 

His hands fall from the blade. Zenos is all that is left to keep him upright; all that keeps him from lying down, closing his eyes, and taking his peace. Inside him, the Light rages, and he wonders like a man half-drunk if the Mother is all that keeps his heart beating. He never wanted to be Her champion.

He never wanted to be Ala Mhigo’s champion, either. He was never worth it. A real champion wouldn’t be on his knees before that animal, halfway between the mercy of the sword piercing him through and the hands cradling him like a lover or a child.

My friend.

Sairsel has no strength for his own rage; too deep in the abyss of drowning in his own blood. His fingers twitch at his side. Like a flash of lightning, he thinks of the Griffin: of his rage, of his pain, of the sacrifice that saw him dying with power between his fingers. The power should never have been Zenos’; that enrages him, too. And all he has is empty hands, weak and bloody.

As Zenos breathes—willing himself to end the hunt, to end him, to face the emptiness that will follow—the pad of Sairsel’s forefinger touches the tip of the arrow wedged into his boot.

He made it on the Steppe. A memory of the greenery fading out from the center of Dotharl Khaa fills his mind so vividly that it may very well be his death-sight, but his fingers curl around the shaft like breath filling his lungs. It isn’t over yet. It isn’t over.

If he can only reach.

“Zenos,” he says through the blood. He doesn’t say it like dripping venom, doesn’t let his tongue shape his revulsion; he says it like begging, reaches his empty hand up with every last ounce of his strength. Trying to push himself back up, or pull him down. He opens his mouth, lips forming a whisper and a lie that cuts him deeper than the sharpest steel: “I accept you.”

And Zenos is close enough, like he wants to hear it again. Close enough to reach.

Sairsel spits blood in his face for lack of strength to say what he truly means—this is for Ala Mhigo—and thrusts the arrowhead into the side of Zenos’ neck.

And Zenos laughs: pain and surprise warps his voice into breathless elation. He lifts a hand to the blood.

“Only you were ever worthy of me,” he says, his twisted fondness coloured by melancholy, as he rips the blade out of Sairsel's body.

A scream tears through the air and seems to shake the very skies, all pinks and blues staring down at him. Sairsel can feel his body shake, can feel the pain burning away what remains of him, his blood seeping into the earth of the garden below him. And he hears that scream, as though all the furies in all the legends inhabit the same body and howl for vengeance with the same voice.

His mother’s voice.

“BASTARD!”

Morgana’s sword, its bright violet flashing like the griffin standard in Sairsel’s eyes, clashes with the blade still dripping with her son’s blood. She fills the silence with her growls, with her fury, with her relentless assault—and all Sairsel can do is stretch twitching fingers through the dirt and the flowers. He wants to call out to her; tell her to run while she still has her life.

He wonders if anyone will ever speak the irony of the insult: the heir to the imperial throne of Garlemald killing some half-blooded bastard boy and earning the curse of his life. Sairsel can hardly hear his own thoughts over the raging winds of that fight, over the white-hot flash of pain that has him gasping and choking on his blood again as hands drag him away.

Loving arms cradle him, this time—warm and kind and desperate.

“Do something,” snaps Alisaie, her voice raw with the begging, right on the edge of screaming. Her arms holding him. “You have to do something.”

And panic permeates Alphinaud’s words, his shaking hands, his magic that rips through Sairsel worse than the blade. “I am trying,” he says, and Sairsel aches for the tears in his voice.

“He can’t die,” Alisaie says through gritted teeth. Her hand touches his face, his skin too pale and too cold, and her touch burns. “You can’t die. You said you would come— when all this was over, you said you— with me and Lyse and Y’shtola— you said you’d pay for the bloody cakes.”

Sairsel’s lips almost form the words of an apology, or perhaps some jest—stop yelling at me, Alisaie, I’m dying—but he can barely breathe through his own blood. 

Then comes the slash of a blade catching the nick of the arrowhead, the dripping of blood, the infernal noise of metal plate as Zenos falls to his knees.

Morgana does not open his throat cleanly. She knows how; she slices through what matters, but she doesn't finish it. She circles him like a hawk and grabs a fistful of his hair and viciously pulls his head back. And, with all her strength and all her rage, she kicks his body away.

Sairsel only sees her silhouette like a vengeful shadow against the sky: bloody sword in hand, head in the other. The voice dripping poison into his ears is silent.