Chapter Text
She wakes hours later, barely able to open her eyes until a soft rag clears the sleep off of them. The healer’s bay blurs back into her field of vision.
“Ez’he-” Even two syllables prove too harsh for her throat. The physician hands her a canteen of water with a suckling straw attached, as if she is an infant. She can barely drink even with that help. The healer talks while she drinks.
“Lord Mortarion is still recovering, but he is now able to stand without assistance. Calas is eating his second meal since awakening. Your own weakness should recede within a few hours.”
They haven’t been moved, she realizes, feeling the heat of a body far too large to be a standard person. Or, they have, clearly, because her arm is bandaged and she is dressed fully in the medbay’s covering uniforms, but then they were permitted to stay together.
The physician waves to the side, and Sendak comes into her field of vision, already reaching to help her sit up before she has to ask it of him. She squeezes his hand in thanks.
A quick glimpse to her right shows both their Reaper and Calas watching her, the latter pausing in the midst of a bowl of soup to do so, resuming as she nods carefully in his direction. They are both also, thankfully, fully clothed in the pale grey garb. The only flesh she sees is above the neck and at the hands.
She wants to ask about the green magic, about how their Reaper is feeling, check if Calas’s legs or lungs are still burning, but she’s handed her own soup and the pointed look from the healer says she’s better off eating first and asking questions after.
Calas finishes his meal before he speaks.
“Don’t speak, just nod or shake your head for now. All of our gear was retrieved and disinfected. Zaliki had to heal your arm with witchcraft to prevent infection and amputation, but your throat and skin have been treated with traditional methods so far. Do you understand?”
She nods.
“Do you need more rest?” No, no, she’s tired but the buzz in her fingers says to move, to be awake if she cannot be weaving or spinning. “Good. Magnus asked them to avoid using any witchcraft without your consent where they could, but Zaliki believes that they could have you able to speak easily within eight hours, fifty if you refuse the artifice.”
She nods. Even the motion hurts. Maybe healing magick would be nice.
Even with the soup, her throat burns, and she’s too tired to relay much beyond exhaustion through the bracelet. Sendak would have read that in her eyes anyway.
Scope, she knocks out instead, trusting him to translate.
“Zaliki, can you summarize damages?”
The healer nods, reciting without even needing to look at notes. “Damage to the throat and lungs in all of you, but you should recover in a few days, lesions all over -except the hands, good job with keeping the leather gloves on, we disinfected them a few hours ago-, and your arm may be sore, but the skin is healing steadily under the bandage, it just needs some time to restore all of the layers.” She’s allowed to hand back the empty bowl before they add, “The facial paralysis is old but we can tr-” They cut off at the sudden rapid beeping of some monitor or another as Irmaya feels her heartbeat spike.
Sendak interprets.
“She’d rather not, but thank you for all that you have done.” His hand against hers is grounding, letting her calm again. It had been one thing to have an injury healed but her face- Her face is her own.
She’d almost forgotten that she is resting against the Reaper until the warmth to her right moves and a hand twice the size of her own moves in front of her.
“They will not do anything you do not want.” His voice is quiet, calm, and impossible to argue with. Even more than knowing Sendak would enforce that limit for her, no one on this ship can argue with either of their leaders on this sort of thing. She’s somewhere between grateful for the reassurance and ashamed of needing it.
Zaliki bends their head, a silent apology. “In regards to the skin and throat, you can decide later. Lord Magnus wanted to speak with all of you once you were all awake.”
After several months, the teleportation that Prospero’s ruler utilizes no longer startles any of them. Magnus is shorter than usual, a good head below the Reaper but still looming above everyone else. Zaliki leaves and, after Irmaya gives him the signal, so does Sendak. Both she and Calas had witchery to shield them from the effects of the green mass. She does not want to know what it would do to someone without.
Magnus, too, has changed out of his exploratory outfit. His robe now is of a finer cloth, with elegantly flowing sleeves, and the leather belt has been swapped out for a beaded one. His eye is changing colors again. She’s not sure when that became a comforting thing to notice.
“All three of you are recovered now,” he asks, somehow making it feel more like a declaration.
“Aye,” Calas responds, “But Zaliki has made it clear we are all to remain on bedrest, and Serra cannot speak easily.”
Enough interactions have rendered her more sturdy against the gaze of Magnus, enough so that when he turns to address her directly, she manages the same motion she’d seen Prosperans make to shoo away well-meant concerns and demand to either work or be given the relevant information.
Magnus smiles and either reads it or guesses the meaning, pulling a chair modified for his current size and sitting down next to Calas. From the beaded satchel by his hip he pulls the cage out again. The weave of the cage is easier to see this time, although surface sight shows her the extruded mass unobscured. Whether it is due to the cage, repeated exposure, or any other factor, the repulsion she feels is less visceral the second time, more like the discomfort she’d felt passing by an animal rotted from disease than something buried so deep that biology rebelled against it.
“The few tests I’ve been able to run so far confirm its origins as outside of the physical realm, and it looks to have been implanted later in life, rather than present from birth."
“Who made it?”
Magnus frowns. “I wish I knew. All I can tell you definitively is that it keeps replicating this symbol.” He pulls a piece of paper from his satchel, placing it by Mortarion so they can all see.
Three circles, lines drawn between each one that point outward.
The same symbol her village, and so many others, held as one of safety, a reminder of the endurance they would have in the wake of both Overlords and nature.
The same symbol she’d embroidered into their clothing for identification, under the permission of their Reaper.
By the unburied, this does not bode well.
“This is not something which grows on Barbarus.”
“No, but the symbol is familiar. Serra’s village is one of many that uses it to forge a better fortune for themselves."
As if fed by their dread, the mass stirs again, albeit doggedly slow. It can't break through the cage, but it leaves the symbol on its walls as it slams against the magick, each a perfect copy of the one she’d carefully put on her sleeves. On Sendak’s.
What have they been invoking with it?
“Grandfather,” the title falls from the Reaper’s lips. It does not feel like a title, however, so much as a presence of its own. She tenses. Calas does as well. “As I was making my way to Necare’s fortress I could suddenly bear the toxin with greater ease than ever before. On the fall down, I heard a voice. Grandfather provides, it said.” His frown deepens. “At the time, I thought the former was simply adrenaline and the latter delirium.”
A picture forms with those inputs. Not a good one.
“Then,” their Reaper continues, turning to his right hand, “when I awoke, it took months for me to breathe easily without your help. You said my lungs had started to rot.”
“Aye, Reaper, and they had.” Calas’s eyes narrow sharply. "Caipha himself confirmed this to you.”
By the cold and thrice-damned, let them all be wrong. Let this all be a hallucination.
“More than that, you’d suggested a form of modification the day before. One that would have turned our warriors but allowed them to breathe without fear.”
“That day- when I brought you Volcral, it said it served- it was-”
“This Grandfather gave the Overlords their powers, Calas,” Mortarion finishes for him, something harsh growing in between the words. Irmaya can feel the way his hand curls into a fist.
“Enhanced, at least. It said the ‘boon’ was already in my blood, that…” Calas, already paler than most children of Barbarus would be, turns as almost as white as the scoured wool she’s worked with countless times.
“And was it? Have you already turned against me, Typhon?” The Reaper’s voice is cold in a way she’s never heard.
“No, brother, I swear-”
“How much of their thrice-accursed magick have you spread to your students?” It feels like watching an old argument replayed, too tight and wound, Calas unnaturally reactive from the unprocessed shock. “What have you done to our people?”
“Mortarion, I have done nothing. I swear to you by all that’s cold, by the world we’ve helped bring freedom to, I turned away from that monster the minute it said that!”
She shrinks in on herself, that combination of desperation and anger not one she’s ever seen from her mentor. They’ve both raised their voices, piercing and declarative, and still there’s the faint whispering from the cage and a different one that she tries to latch on to.
Counting the stitches in the blanket’s embroidery does not drown them out. Back in the village, back with the angry shouting deciding her fate and the fate of her brother and sister, as though she’d infected them with her witchery the way the Reaper accuses Calas of being infected by Overlords.
Their Reaper looks ready to say something neither of them will forgive, but Magnus shouts “Enough!” and slams his hand down on the table, and as much as Irmaya remembers the sound of a thrown pitchfork barely missing her head, she’s grateful that the shouting stops.
“The deity you’ve both interacted with is older than humanity,” the Prospero-born says. “It is powerful enough to have devoured planets. And yes, it likely has laid claim to Calas the same way it has to you, Mortarion. Given the nature of Barbarus, this is unsurprising, if depressing.”
On her brother, she would have guessed that look means shame. On the Reaper, she’s unsure. Calas speaks again, anger replaced with a paranoid sort of fear.
“Does that mean that- that there is something growing in me as well?”
“Possibly.”
“Get it out.” He looks -cruel to say, she knows, but she gets what they mean when they say the Reaper’s right hand is- visibly half-Overlord. “Get it out of me now!”
Magnus says nothing. Calas turns back to the Reaper.
“Mortarion, I- I swear I did not know,” her mentor pleads, and she hates how weak his voice is.
She grabs at the blanket, feeling each and every imperfection, each bit of fray in the weave, anything to try to shut out the sudden spike of fear she feels. Calas’s witchcraft allegedly came from the Overlord blood in him. Her parents had enough evidence that she had been born of them both, that she was fully human, to sway the hearing that decided her fate. Had that been wrong? Proof of taint in her students as well?
Magnus’s voice is gentle as he pulls the scattered bandages back in order and says, “I think we should tread more carefully for now,” motioning to- her hands?
Oh. The once-white blanket is bleeding a dark orange from where it’s twisted in her grip. How embarrassing to lose control of herself like that.
She pulls the color back, back into her fingers, letting the fabric turn to the pristine white that nothing on Barbarus could have stayed for long, but the damage is done. Three sets of eyes still watch her, even if one is patient and one is as frightened as her.
She’s never been the best communicator, but it’s not made better by the knowledge that the Reaper sees them as risks again. No words are going to make it out of her throat, so she settles for pointing at Calas, then herself, then drawing her finger across her throat to ask the question.
The Reaper’s eyes widen, and the tension in his shoulders bleeds out.
“No. Of course not, witchweaver, merely-” There is a darkness in his eyes that speaks of something from the rebellion.
Her battle-sign is clumsy, particularly when the jargon for trade and the way she ‘talks’ with Sendak in gestures do not align with it, but she manages to throw out ‘Advancement, Risk, Death?’ and trusts that at least one of them will interpret it.
“No one will die.” The Reaper looks exhausted now, but at least no longer furious or suspicious of her mentor. “You have my word.”
She signs Gratitude, and is again grateful that only so much of her face can give away the pain she feels from the motions.
“If I may,” Magnus steps in again, an undercurrent of his magick sweeping calm under his words, “We held off on using any more of the arts to treat you once it was clear that neither of you would die without them. I can’t guarantee there is nothing else there, but if there is, it does not appear to have infested you as badly. I’d suspect Mortarion’s case to be the worst at present.”
If not happy, then at least the information appears to have placated the two men. Their Reaper reaches for the cage, rolling it in his hands, watching the thing leave the three-point symbol each time it falls to the bottom panel.
“How could I not have noticed this growing inside me with every breath?”
“The immaterial is not usually so solid outside of the Great Ocean. Think of it more as made forcibly manifest by the planet's chemistry, but it likely did not take up any real space until the moment we began trying to heal it, at which point it adjusted its physical presence to match our perceptions.”
It looks so strange in its cage now, far duller than before. Mangus’s experiments must have taken a toll on it. She feels a stab of vicious satisfaction at the thought.
“How do you know about any of this?”
Magnus’s smile drops, something more artificial taking its place.
“When we first began trying to traverse the Great Ocean,” he begins, uncharacteristically somber, “We heard the call of a similar being. But unlike this one, it promised us the control over change, the exploration of things beyond our ability to imagine. It had been looking for me, I suspect, but the effort we’d put into camouflaging our ships meant it could only speak to where it thought we were, and only if we lingered there long enough for it to notice us.”
Even five minutes ago, shorter than the Reaper, Magnus had felt like the biggest presence in the room, always the one drawing their eye by sheer boldness. Now, he looks small. Irmaya’s cousin had been a trader before his leg rotted. He’d told her about how, by the oceans, the small boats of the brave fishermen were barely visible against the rotted seas and mist. She can imagine now, having been through Magnus’s Great Ocean, what it must be like to do so alone, without even a stranger to guide you. Even a hint of a whisper had been enough to turn her stomach. What had it been like to hear such a creature call for you?
The Reaper’s voice, rasped as it is, is even when he asks, “Are there more of these creatures able to hunt us?”
Magnus’s eye ripples between a purple and orange, the way it had when he’d told her about the scope of Prospero’s artisans. Passion, restrained by their circumstances. “The Great Ocean is full of many creatures. Plenty would be nothing to us, and plenty more pose a significant threat. The ones we speak of now are rare, from what we’ve observed, and act as rulers of their parts of it all.”
“And this thing controlled the Overlords?"
“Based on what you’ve told me, it’s likely so.”
Their Reaper has yet to put back on any replacement for his respirator, so she sees his mouth twist into something dour but calm as he breathes out. “I owe you an apology, Calas. You are not one of them. You do not deserve to be compared to something so vile.”
Calas looks down. Irmaya can’t see their hands, but she has the feeling Calas’s are still too tensed.
“I did not know then, Reaper,” he forces out. “I did not.”
Their Reaper bows his head.
“I am sorry, brother. Tell me how I can prove my remorse to you.”
It would be presumptuous to think the Reaper does not see the gesture she makes, but she has no need to hide signaling faith in either of them. Calas nods in response.
“Serra, take care that you don’t destroy your own wrist as it heals.” It’s harsher than how the two of them usually talk, more similar to the things she’s heard exchanged by him and the other Death Guard, but enough like him that she can trust he will regain his usual confidence soon enough. “As for your offer, Mortarion,” Calas pauses, turning his head to make direct eye contact with their Reaper. “There is a harsh matter we will have to discuss soon. Not now, not until we have all rested, but it can’t be avoided for much longer.” In a move that only he would have been allowed to make, Calas puts a hand on the Reaper’s chest, right where the heart would be. “I want you to swear you will hear my piece in full, no matter what you feel at that moment.”
“By my oath, whatever the matter, I will hear all of what you have to tell me.” A far larger hand landing atop Calas’s, then, “And on as many other issues as I can, I will endeavor to do the same.”
The peace feels like a warm yellow, one that she resolves to make samples of as soon as she has access to her part of the laboratory again. She catches Magnus’s eye, noting absently that it’s a shimmering blue now, and he looks as relieved as her for the agreement.
“In any case, I can perform further scans of all you. We can return to Barbarus, investigate the matter properly.”
“And if the problem is rooted within Barbarus itself?” It’s a tired, almost pointless question. Even if there was another planet they could move to, so many people would refuse to. She wouldn’t have boarded Tidebreaker if they hadn’t promised her the eventual return to Barbaran soil. But Magnus has yet to see how the denizens of Barbarus think, and his hope filters through his reply.
“In any case, we can try to fix it. So long as we live, we can fight it.”
The rebellion’s survivors talked about how the war had felt hopeless until the Reaper of Men came along, and suddenly victory was not only possible, but inevitable.
There is no equivalent to filtration in any of their codes, but she can reach the yarn left by Sendak, twist it into the word awkwardly for them to see.
Calas raises a notched eyebrow.
“Elaborate.”
Even if she was able to speak, Irmaya’s never been the most eloquent. Her work speaks for her.
She holds the yarn vertically, letting the bottom turn a rich green, fading until it’s the same rotted grey at the top as it had been in the cave. Another twitch of her fingers has the yarn shape itself more like the slope of the mountain she’d grown up by.
The Reaper’s eyes narrow. “You think the air is tainted by this force?” She nods. “Filtration will take time.”
It will, but Irmaya has known since she was permitted to sell her cloth that she would be allowed to live only on the merit of her work. If the Death Guard were able to give their lives for the freedom of Barbarus, she can certainly give hers for their planet to breathe more easily.
She’s doubtful she’s conveyed all of that in her shrug.
“We can plan once we are healed,” Calas says, signature confidence returning to his voice. “And I assume Tidebreaker’s security can hold this abomination, seeing as Lord Magnus has yet to dispose of it.”
“Indeed.” The cage vanishes, teleported most likely back to the lab. “For now, I ask you to indulge me in an old tradition of Prospero’s, if only for the sake of practicality under the guise of culture." None of them react, waiting to know what the tradition would be.
“A toast.” Magnus pulls four cups out of the satchel, pouring all of them water as clear as none on Barbarus could ever hope for. “Clear water for pure intentions, shared with allies for a stronger bond.” She holds hers with both hands. The Reaper raises his glass.
“Against death,” he intones. Calas echoes.
“Against death.”
“To life beyond it,” Magnus offers, and she nods, pushing the right side of her face until the muscles ache, but her smile can be clearly seen. Their Reaper hesitates for a moment, then nods as well.
“To life beyond.”
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Fin