Chapter Text
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.