#ll!pearl

This game was meant to be a punishment for the sun, the fickle sun who amused himself by setting mortals on each other with arbitrary rules and seeding the earth's soil with blood. It’s not that their Courts are so fond of mortals that this is a sin but more that it’s tasteless to cast yourself in such a game and emerge victorious. It’s bad enough that you would participate in such a trivial exercise. It’s worse to declare yourself winner over those of breakable flesh and bone.

So let us have a new game, the Courts declared, and let one of the Unseelie be a participant. Surely, you can still triumph, Seelie Prince, the Courts taunted. Surely, our youngest of the moon will shatter under the weight of your accomplishments.

“It’s a pity that our Kings have decided that this is my punishment and that we’re to go against each other,” the sun tells the moon. “I think we’d be quite a good team.”

The moon laughs at his words. “We would, we would,” she allows, “but that’s not how the game goes.”

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When the sun plays a game, he finds others who will stand by him, orbit around him, fawn over him in some cases. This game is no different.

“Yellow already?” he mutters to himself, and he feels the universe laughing at him. “Oh, laugh it up,” he scowls to a bush. The bush does not respond.

“Grian, are you talking to yourself again?” The sun turns to see a man who wanted him dead in a past game (incidentally, the game that ended with him being forced into this predicament).

The sun watches, stunned, as the five people who found him whip out spyglasses, train them on him, and shout “AHA!” in unison. They wait for him to react with more than just empty blinking.

“You’ve joined us at a weird time, not going to lie,” Martyn says casually, pocketing his spyglass.

The sun trains his gaze on the one who is new to the game, the one who doesn’t know of his reputation or his ensnaring words. He steals him away from another and weaves a deal with a handful of fish and a silver tongue. The mortals may think their verbal contracts are more than enough to bind themselves to each other, but the sun knows the rules of the Courts as well as he knows his own name and he draws them under his spell and whisks them away to the south.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When the moon plays a game, she finds one other to revolve around, someone whose brilliance will in turn inspire her own. This game is no different.

“Yellow already?” she asks.

“Not all of us are lucky enough to start out with more than three lives,” the mortal says, clawing into the stone.

“I suppose so,” she says idly, feeling the universe brush against her like a wayward cat as she follows him down the tunnel he carves. 

He eyes her with some measure of avarice. “Pearl, can we make a deal?”

The moon takes a moment to admire the sun. He’s found some of the most exploitable humans that she’s ever met for this silly game of his.

“A deal?” she says, feigning uncertain interest. “Like some sort of bargain?”

“Yeah. What can I do to get a life from you?”

She studies golden eyes. “What would you do for a life?”

He laughs. “At this point? Anything.”

The moon feels her grin twist into a smirk. “I can work with ‘anything’. What was your name, again?”

She barters Scott’s time for one of her lives, a shimmering polished thing that a human would not be able to discern from the bleeding hearts they offer. She wonders what a human in possession of a fae’s life will be able to accomplish.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun doesn’t realize what the Kings of the Courts have done to his game until Joel leads his court to a narrow cave and tries to drop them down a concealed hole.

The mortals call it ‘the boogeyman curse’ as if invoking the name of a childhood monster eases its insidiousness, but when the universe curls in one of them and threatens to throw him to red in the span of a single day, it’s swiftly made less a terrifying inconvenience and more of an existential threat to them all. The sun takes charcoal and scrawls on the walls of a cave by their home to note the tendencies of the creature lurking in the shadows of the world.

It feels fitting, somehow, that a world where lives are thrown around like pennies into a wishing well would hold some inky dark thing that curls up in your marrow and demands its own payment. The sun clenches his heart and sends fiery light through his veins to burn it out.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When another human deigns to infringe on the moon’s property (and Scott is her property now, by virtue of his name and his dealings), it’s easy to turn her wrath on the mortal. She’s tempted to turn him into a fish and leave him to flounder on land, scales gleaming red until he drowns on air, but she holds herself back just long enough to simply send a sword through his chest. She’s vindictive enough to make it feel like ten swords and kind enough to let his suffering end in an instant.

Scott comes to with a spray of blood out of his mouth. She grimaces. Humans are so breakable, even as you put them back together.

The moon doesn’t make Scott weave together a new deal to give him another of her shimmering, pristine lives. She waves off his grateful entreaties; when you own something, it’s your responsibility to fix it when it breaks. 

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun first turns red when he follows the one he stole from another above where the world’s boundaries lie. They begin twisting stone to their own destructive purposes and soon forget the world they reside in. His ally is sharp but still mortal and doesn’t realize the danger he led the sun into until it’s too late. An arrow flies, and he crashes to the ground explosively, an Icarus with no wings.

When the sun turns red, he’s forced to trade his court for a single person. He awakes in the place he secreted himself away in, away from the iron that his court (former court, and the words taste bitter with realization) is now barring their windows with, and quietly imbues the pack of wolves he coaxed into the earth with his strength.

He finds his killer standing in the wilderness, staring around with a wild eye. “Hey, Grian. Do you want to be friends?”

It’s not the one he would choose but it’s the one who chooses him. The sun binds him retroactively with the life lost and whatever meager trust gained and leaves him to his chaos.

He goes back to that highest peak to find his items along with a message begging for mercy. He finds his former ally cowering in their creation, completed after his demise, and though he offers a deal (a life for a bond, as is possible here in this world where life is malleable) it’s denied and he’s forced to leave none the richer.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The moon’s champion (and he is her champion now, by virtue of his loyalty won with nothing of hers given) regales her with the tale of his infiltration into the sun’s lands, tells her that he slid through iron bars with a form not quite his own and snatched up whatever valuable he could while the sun’s former court bickered among themselves. She files away into the back of her mind that even if humans are imbued with something innately fey, they can still bypass whatever protections they themselves lay out.

“I want to invade the reds,” Scott says, interrupting her thoughts.

The moon admires what her champion has become. She wonders idly what would happen if she granted him a third of her incandescent lives as she mulls this proposal over.

“Actually, that might not be a bad idea,” she says thoughtfully. “They’ll be scattered elsewhere, trying to cause chaos, and we can easily sneak into whatever they consider their base.”

His eyes glint silver and she recognizes his grin. “Exactly.”

When they find a pack of dogs hidden in a hole in the ground, the moon coaxes her champion into pouring liquid fire on the hapless animals and while she voices upset she watches him indulge with inhuman glee.

She can’t quite hold back the cruel cackle when she finds out they belonged to the sun. How ironic, she thinks, that the hounds of the sun perish to fire.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun strong-arms his way out of red and rejoins his court, which he learns almost immediately collapsed without him. He’s not particularly surprised but that doesn’t mean he’s not disappointed. The mortals are kinder than he is, though, and they try to revive old bonds rather than finding new allies to connect with.

He narrows in on the one loosely bound to him, again. There’s a sense that in other worlds, the black-haired man who dogs his footsteps would be more than just an extension of his will, but in this world of green and yellow and red, there’s nothing else that the sun wants him to be. The two of them delve into the earth and brave hellish skies together, and he wonders if this man could be champion to him the way the moon has found hers. It isn’t the way of his Court to determine a single champion, but the moon and her own have survived comfortably enough that it’s tempting.

The choice is taken from him when the world settles into the bones of the man and whispers to him to try and blow everyone up in a burst of violently orchid energy.

The sun hadn’t thought too hard about why that particular member of his court wanted to build his cage in the sky, but before he can question him, another mortal tears him down for killing his own ally. His court does not recover.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The world makes the moon play the game along with the mortals, and when bloodlust sinks into her bones, she feels the urge to twist and warp and destroy claw at the back of her throat. She looks over at her champion and the other mortal that has inexorably begun orbiting her and they see the gleam in her eyes and trust in her word that she will not kill them.

The first time the curse fully settles in the moon’s body, she is taken so off-guard that she seizes and collapses to the ground, forcing her champion and their ally to continue their plans without her and report back the news of four fallen foes. She learns later that the creature leaked from her body and seized another’s life while she lay unaware and left, satisfied. Good, she thinks. Maybe it’ll think better than to do that again.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun finds himself cornered by two fallen members of his court and cajoled into possibly springing a trap hidden in the floors of their old strongholds. It’s ridiculous at first, to hear the two mortals attempt to snare him with their turns of phrase. The sun amuses them, allowing them to think their words are stronger than the butterfly wings they actually are. It’s when one decides to attempt to push him into the trap that the latent affection he felt for them is burned away in prideful outrage, and the sun is the one to drive a sword into the back of the man he once wished to make his champion.

He’s barely able to appreciate his endeavor when a third ally goes turncoat thanks to the machinations of the world, and he falls to the ground choking on air when his magic isn’t enough to save him from an arrow through the throat.

The sun rises, red anew, and his fury is more than enough to fuel him if the adrenaline pumping through him isn’t. He claws into the ground and unearths a long forgotten set of secrets based both in those he stole from their keepers and a treasure granted to him by the final extant member of his court. In exchange, he brings the man with him to share glory as he summons doom to the one who dared to raise an axe against his own. He fades into the breeze and traces a temporary containment circle with his blood around the white fortress he plans to decimate.

‘Wither,’ the mortals call the creature of blackened skin and wizened face that he summons with the powder of bodies lost to the Nether and skulls stolen from monsters raised from the dead. The sun thinks this name too plain for it. He would call it something more befitting its danger: leviathan, behemoth, apocalypse. 

Perhaps this is why he wasn’t tasked with naming it, he ponders.

It doesn’t take the wither too long to break through the wards that the sun built. He watches as the man he hoped to kill flees from it, summoning whatever allies he has left. It takes the efforts of almost all of the surviving mortals to take the creature down, and one of them takes its glassy heart and builds a device out of it that carves a bright white light into the night sky.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 When Scott loses his penultimate life, the moon feels the curse rip it out from her. One of the connections that bind him to her nearly tears, fraying to a thin thread, but the other holds strong even as the world dictates that he cannot serve her at her side while she glows amber. The moon watches as the yellow bleeds from him, as he blinks away golden tears that turn his eyes bloodshot. The other mortals chase him from their haven, even as he turns back to stare at her.

It feels strange, not having her champion beside her. The moon rubs her arms and winces at the phantom limb of Scott’s presence, the presence of someone who would rather allow the world to violently thrum through him than to strike down one he called ally.

The others who claim themselves ‘yellow’ don’t understand her plight. To them, Scott is simply another enemy turned red, bleeding with the murderous intent of the world, and she should be grateful that he’s been ripped away from her before his base urges overwhelm his humanity. The moon doesn’t explain to them that’s not how deals work. The moon doesn’t explain how, in that moment, she belonged to him as much as he belonged to her.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun summons his old ally through the bond he once wove with the man. His eyes are somehow far more bloodshot this time than they had been the first time the two of them were red together, and when Joel demands his gunpowder, the sun acquiesces easily.

He’s handed a crossbow primed with strange white ammunition. When the sun pulls the trigger, it whistles through the air before exploding in a burst of blue light.

He turns back to his champion (and he is his champion now, by virtue of this gift and the bond that they tied together). He grins. “Shall we hunt Etho, then?”

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The second time the curse settles in the moon’s bones, she has no champion but has a court (though they do not know) and she leads them to their death with honeyed words and promises of wealth. She rains fire down upon her court and feels the foreign presence within her tighten its grip on her throat before relenting and fading back into the universe. She runs a hand across her neck lightly, remembering the feeling of that frigid claw sinking into the soft flesh there and tearing something ineffable out of her.

“I only killed one of you? What a waste,” she says.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 The sun gazes upon the moon’s champion, who still stares wistfully into what he thinks is the horizon and what the sun knows is towards his patron. It’s almost too easy to follow the mortal’s connection back to the Unseelie and whisper to his own companion to abandon their hunt and seek her death instead.

It’s only fair that the two of them, inhuman as they are, stay equals at the end of this strange game.

When her light turns red, the moon immediately throws witchcraft at them and the sun ushers his champion away. The moon’s champion stays behind with his keeper, as the sun expected. He wonders how their next clash will go.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 So says the sun to the moon: “Do you think you’re going to win?”

So says the moon to the sun: “Well, that isn’t the point, is it?”

So says the sun to the moon: “So you’d let someone else win?”

So says the moon to the sun: “I never said  that. You know that a victory by my own is my victory.”

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 Neither of them will win. Of course not. The Kings wouldn’t have allowed that to happen, anyhow.

 ⭒☽ ☼ ☾⭒

 One of them does win, eventually. The moon through her champion strikes down the sun even as she herself readies crystallized moonlight to lance through his throat, and before she can blink he’s forced himself up with some inner strength that is completely his own and fells the sun’s champion in a second push. Vindictive glee clings to the line between the moon and her champion, for the sun’s champion had been the one who first tore mortality out of her own. Afterwards, the moon grows pensive.

It feels strange to eclipse the sun in this manner, but this is the game he wrote and she plays by its rules. 

All semblance of humanity drops from their shoulders and they scatter throughout the lands for one final battle between them all. The moon understands now, now that they’re in this last fight, why the sun couldn’t help but win in the first iteration of this game. She would want to rule this world herself, this world of choices and deals and promises broken as easily as one shatters the glass of a potion bottle.

That’s not in the game’s rules, though, and she bows out with minimal effort and a spatter of diaphanous ichor that melts into the rust of blood within milliseconds. 

Of course, this isn’t out of altruism. Why would it be?

The moon goes to her champion, whose heart pumps not-blood not-ichor through the bastardized life that she used to bind him to her at the very start of the game, and whispers to him strength and vitality. His hair is matted, scarlet crystals hovering around his head, and his eyes are wild as he chases after someone he once called friend.

“Ren!” he screams, his voice raw. “Stop running!”

“Leave me alone!” Ren yelps as Scott chases him through the treetops. “Go after Martyn! Why are you coming for me?”

“I have to— you killed Pearl!” her champion calls, and the moon smiles smugly at the sun. She wonders if Scott knows how sweet his loyalty tastes.

“If we do this again,” the sun mutters, glaring down at the bickering mortals as they slash into flesh and stumble after each other, “you’re not to be paired with him.”

“Not teamed with you, not teamed with Scott,” the moon idly counts on her fingers. “You’re adding a whole lot of rules to this mess, and just for me.”

“It makes it more fun. Surely, you’ve realized that.” 

The sun and the moon watch as the moon’s champion tears down the final mortal. He crumples in his armor, as worn and cracked as it is from the fighting he had just been embroiled in, and he gazes at the night sky, directly at the full moon over his head.

“One more thing—” he says to it.

“Absolutely not,” the sun snarls, and the moon’s champion collapses, blood shimmering opalescent on the grass as it pours from his mouth.

“Hey!” the moon says. “He was mine.” She kneels by her champion and stares at his broken form.

“Was is the operative word there,” the sun says, floating into the sky. He looks at the carnage dismissively. “The game is done. We go back to our Courts now.”

“And that’s it?” the moon says. “You don’t do anything for the mortals you used for this?”

“What is there to do?” The sun glances back at the world around them, at the sky stained orange by the sunrise. “They’ll wake up in their own worlds as if this was all a bad dream, and they’ll remember bits and pieces of it as they go about their days. Some of them are kings in their regular lives, did you know that? Others are gods. They all choose to go through this charade to remember what being truly mortal is like.”

“‘Truly mortal’?” the moon draws out. “Is that all this is to them? Some false reality, some living parable that provides a moral at the end of the day?”

“Who knows?” the sun says. “Mortals choose to think in tens of millions of different ways. The ones here aren't foolish to the ways of the world, but they are ignorant. Scott didn’t know the depth of meaning of making a deal with an Unseelie; all he knew was that he’d be one death farther from being an instrument of death in a hostile world.”

The moon stares at the sun. “But this is real. He made a deal with me, and I bound him to me with that. He and I will find each other by virtue of that oath, wherever he exists in the universe under our Courts.”

“This is real. You’re not wrong about that. It’s just not completely real to him. He doesn’t perceive this as real, even if it is.” The sun lands on the top of Ren’s castle. He stares at the glimmering amethyst that the moon had stolen and placed here as remuneration. “This was all real. This is all real. This will continue to be real, even when the Courts fall. That’s immutable.”

The moon lands next to him and follows his gaze to the cold purple crystals carefully manipulated into an archway. “Then why won’t they think it is?” she asks, almost desperately.

“Because they won’t want to.” The sun sounds tired. “Because if this is real, then the fact that they wanted to kill their friends would be real. If this world is real, then the blood they spilled and shed is real, all of the death traps and the bloodlust and the base animal instinct is real. If this isn’t just a game, then the world played on preexisting instincts and didn’t insert its own will into them. What king could survive peacefully ruling over a kingdom if they knew that they were capable of murdering all who stood in their way?” He turns to her. “Do you know why I started playing this game?”

She shakes her head no.

“I was curious. How far would a mortal go for their own survival, given the chance?” They fly across the map, past lava that still flows sluggishly down rock outcrops and TNT carelessly left primed to explode. “Turns out, the answer is ‘rather far’.”

“Do you think you’ve found their limit?”

“In the face of possible victory? With the chance of revenge for events of past dreams? Of course not.”

“So you’ll host the game again?”

The sun cracked a grin. “Of course. After all, it’s just a game. Would you play again?”

The moon ponders before a beatific smile slowly starts to curl on her face. She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t have to.