Chapter Text
Cycle four-million, two-hundred-fifty-thousand, seven-hundred-seventy-three. It has come to Khaslana’s attention that he is, of all possible organisms, a rat. The kind you’d see on the floors of storage sheds, eating away at the drops of grain that spilled like waterfalls from their baskets; the kind that excelled in squeezing through nooks and crannies of the house; the kind that made a nuisance out of themselves, though Phainon had always felt sorry for them when he looked into their shiny black eyes.
He clearly remembers taking the coreflames of this cycle’s Imperator, her knight, and Oronyx, but what happened after is a blur. When he investigated the house of Audata and Hieronymous, he saw no trace of his split-self, but a room that was fashioned like a nursery; empty. He began living under one of the loose floorboards, where he stored the fabric scraps he stole from Audata’s sewing projects and clumsily arranged them into some sort of nest. Khaslana has not been inside the house of his parents in a very long time.
His new rat-ification poses several problems. He can still understand human speech as a rat, but he can’t understand rat speech as a rat. It’s very perplexing. The other rats in the house and in the fields chitter and squeak at him, and when he lets out a hoarse squeak of his own, they stare at him, frightened, before running away. His voice hasn’t been fairing well over the cycles, and he expects it to fade completely at some point. He is at least grateful that he can hold a stick roughly the same way he would’ve been able to hold his sword. The lack of an actual thumb is disconcerting, but then again so is everything about being a rat.
Thankfully, Khaslana returns to normal at dawn and at dusk, and then reverts back when the sun has either fully risen or fully set. The transformation is not an entirely new sensation, though the sudden change in size and perspective takes some getting used to. It’s not particularly painful either, but the lack of pain might just be attributed to his dulled senses. He is the same pale-haired man with the wings and the porcelain-crack of a body. The first time he transformed, he nearly destroyed the flooring of the house and ran out to the lakefront just in time.
He should, in theory, have all fifty-one-million, nine-thousand, two-hundred-seventy-nine coreflames currently in his body. But he feels cut off from them. When he’s human, the sensation floods his body and he can feel them jostling around in his chest as he moves, like someone’s sewed rocks into his stomach. As a rat, he is nothing but exceedingly warm. He can’t set fire to anything unless he puts some concerted effort into it. He has experimented with tree branches and bits of dried reeds, and the fire always comes in explosive, uncontrollable, painful bursts. It’s clear that this vessel was not meant for channeling such godlike power. He’s gotten a little better at managing the output, but it’s a slow-going process.
He is also unsure of where he’s going to get Dawnmaker and the ceremonial blade. Both had disappeared at some point, but he thinks it’s for the better. He wouldn’t be able to wield either of them in this state, and he doesn’t want anyone else finding them. This will make harvesting the coreflames harder. But as he is now a rat, he’ll most likely be able to keep his distance from his parents and the Chrysos Heirs, despite the fact that even after all this time, he bleeds gold.
Audata finds him fully stuck inside a small jar of sesame seeds, twisting violently and scrabbling at the clay. In one swift movement, she yanks him out and the sesame spills all over the floor. Instinctively, he lets out a burst of heat, and she audibly winces and lets go. Khaslana lands on his side, unable to move as the pain from harnessing the power of the coreflames, no matter how little he used, courses through his muscles.
She stares at her blistered hand, then looks at him.
“What kind of diseased rat are you?” she mutters, then goes outside to run her hand under cold water. When he’s finally able to move, he scoops up as much sesame as he can and runs as fast as his legs will carry him. He has not been touched, much less by his mother, in a very, very, long time.
Out of a buried sense of filial piety, or boredom, or perhaps because something like this - burnt hand, ruined sesame - was small enough in comparison to everything else he was preparing himself to do, he tried his best to make up for what he’d done. It was an unexpected and long overdue need for repentance for something that wouldn’t even matter in the long run.
In his youth, his mother often said he was the best of sons. Phainon argued that he was her only son, and that surely out of all the sons in the world there must be a son more polite and well-behaved than he, and all she ever did was laugh.
There probably are, she said. But they are not mine. You are.
Khaslana no longer deems himself their son. There’s no reason why he should start doing so now.
But he chases the other rats away from the sheds, and he turns away from eating grain to eating locusts in the wheat fields. He keeps the oil lamps in the house lit long after the wicks should be burnt out. Audata misplaces her needle and he retrieves it, nudging it into her line of eyesight before disappearing.
When he’s back to his humanoid form, he tries to cut wood with an abandoned axe, but it only melts into a slag heap. He contemplates pulling weeds from the soil, but decides to stay far away from the fields lest he set them on fire too early. He tries his best to hide in small caves or among rocks that dotted the shoreline. This apparently doesn’t work too well - he’s heard rumors floating around of an imposing ghost hovering near the lake.
Hieronymous catches him gnawing on a locust one day. The two of them look at each other, both equally surprised. Again, Khaslana finds himself unable to move.
Slowly, with his hands outstretched, Hieronymous lowers himself to the ground until he’s eye-to-eye with him. Khaslana nibbles on the bug.
“I’ve seen you eating the bugs, and I’ve seen you chasing rats,” he says unhurriedly, in that low, rolling tone of his. “My wife says the lamps don’t stop burning, and she also says that she pulled a diseased rat out of the sesame jar a week or two ago and it left her with a nasty burn. Are you that same rat?”
He speaks in the same tone he used when asking Phainon where he was hiding the tools he broke on accident, or why he decided to push the kid who made fun of Cyrene’s fortune cards into the water. Khaslana gives a jerky nod. Hieronymous’ eyebrows shoot up.
“Can you understand me?” he asks again. Khaslana nods again, unwittingly.
His face flits through a series of emotions before he suddenly breaks out into a bewildered smile. “I suppose this must be a blessing of Georios. My wife has decided to forgive you for the incident, and, well, I can’t believe I’m saying this to a rat, but you’re free to join us for dinner. As thanks for all your hard work.”
He rises, knees cracking, and leaves. Khaslana belatedly realizes that the insides of the locust have been dribbling onto his fur, leaving it all tacky. He stuffs the rest of the insect in his mouth and goes to clean himself up. Going to dinner seems like a terrible idea.
Two farmers and a rat sit at a table. He has been given his own miniature plate, which has been filled with bits of salad and bread and meat from the main dishes, and a miniature cup, which is filled with water. Audata and Hieronymous are awkwardly looking at him while making frantic eye contact with each other. Khaslana grabs the first thing he sees and starts eating.
“The miniature dishware was intended as an accessory for a little straw doll,” Audata says, breaking the silence. “I lost the utensils since they were far too small, but I suppose a rat doesn’t need a fork and knife.”
He shakes his head, as if confirming her statement. She laughs.
“The straw doll hasn’t been touched in a long time, anyway.” Her voice trails off, and her eyes go unfocused as she looks at something outside the window. Hieronymous gently taps the back of her hand with his knuckles, and she jolts back to awareness.
“You have very good manners for a rat,” he says. Khaslana licks the crumbs off his paws, pretending like he doesn’t have the urge to preen. “You’re so kind as to clean up your own mess rather than leave paw prints around the house.”
“Some of the children would do well to learn from your example,” Audata adds.
They eat the rest of the meal in silence. Khaslana finishes eating, drinks the water, and bolts. His parents don’t call after him.
This is highly irregular, he thinks to himself. He’s cowering in the dirt near the pier like a child, watching the waves. He’s been sitting here all day, even when he transformed back. He has thoughts he shouldn’t be having and emotions he shouldn’t be feeling. His chest cavity hurts, not in the deadened, burning way, but like the tearing and aching of a fresh wound.
He won’t be going back, Khaslana tells himself firmly. He has a job to do.
He can feel footsteps behind him, and instinctively ducks back into the protection of his burrow.
“I can still see you ♪.”
A fresh wave of horror rolls over him as he catches a glimpse of a blue eye peeking through the hole. Strands of pink hair fall into Cyrene’s face, and she brushes them away.
“You must be the blessed rat that everyone’s talking about,” she says cheerfully. “I have to say, you don’t look like much.”
There is that age-old instinct within him to protest, to tease, to engage in their usual back-and-forth. It was always easy with Cyrene. Instead, he hides his face with his paws.
She giggles, the sound carrying like wind chimes. “Aw, are you shy? I’m sorry if I scared you. I promise that you still look very handsome for a rat, as far as rats go.”
He doesn’t respond, and she carries on anyway. “Your new caretakers were a little worried when you suddenly ran off. They asked the other villagers if they had seen you. They wanted to leave you a plate of food outside, but were worried that some other animal would get to it before you.”
He’s not meant to be listening to this. He’s not meant to be here.
“I would be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous,” she admits. “I don’t have anyone who cares about me like you do. The kids think I’m weird and the priests only call for me when they need me to perform a ritual. I spend all of my time out here.”
Cyrene had always spent her life on the outskirts. She was unsettling; you’d look into her eyes and they’d feel boundless, like this little girl had seen infinity and back, timelines jumping and overlapping and terminating. Too quiet for adults. Too distant for children, who certainly respected her status as priestess, but thought she was too strange and mature to be a friend. Always wrapped up in those cards of hers. It was Phainon’s job to pull her into activities, to act as the buffer between her and the others.
He had taken Phainon away from her, this cycle. Not that it would matter in the coming years.
“I was hoping we could be friends?” she gives him a small smile. He doesn’t look up. She sighs, the air filling the burrow.
“Well. I’ll be here anyway.”
Phainon rips through the want with surgical precision, severing it from his chest.
The destruction of Aedes Elysiae was done so that Cyrene would die, Phainon would be spurred on by a hatred previously unbeknownst to that little farm boy, and the secluded paradise of a village would fall into obscurity. Nothing left behind. Nothing to carry forward.
The black tide will come again, despite there being no Phainon to embark on an empty journey. Khaslana would be a fool to think anything could change. He will soon find himself in cycle four-million, two-hundred-fifty-thousand, seven-hundred-seventy-four in the blink of an eye. He just has to bide his time.
He continues eating locusts and and chasing away rats and keeping lamps lit. He has started to pull weeds. Audata and Hieronymous catch him in the act, sometimes. All they do is smile and turn away. They seem to have figured out where his hiding spot was, because they leave him offerings of food scraps on that miniature plate meant for the straw doll. He pretends not to notice their looks of relief when they find an empty plate. The calendars flip onward.
Piso’s book falls out of his bag on his way to the schoolhouse. He doesn’t notice until he sits down in the classroom, only to panic and enlist Livia’s help in combing the area for his book.
“You probably dropped it or something,” she scolds him. “You need to learn how to organize your things and not be so absent-minded.”
“You have no room to talk,” he protests. “You’re the messiest person I know!”
The two of them keep bickering. Khaslana sees that the book had flopped into a bush, and it was unlikely the two children would ever reach it unless they removed the bush entirely. Theoretically he should be able to pick up a book without destroying it, but the last time he ever had one in his hands was when he burned down the Library of Garbaniphoro.
He gingerly pokes at it. It does not burst into flames. He picks it up with his teeth, marveling at the smell and sensation of used parchment, and drags it out into the open.
“Hey!” Piso shouts, pointing at him. “It’s the rat!”
Khaslana quickly runs away, but he feels the slight prick of annoyance at being recognized. He’s the rat, now? Is he so recognizable at first glance that the villagers could pick him out of the other dozen brown-haired, beady-eyed rats? He will concede that his fur has a golden sheen to it, especially when it hits the light, but he’s currently in the shade of a bush. Piso runs towards him and he scampers away.
“There’s my book!”
“You idiot, I said that you dropped it.”
Snowy the puppy refuses to even look at him. He just puts a paw over his nose and whines, even when Audata tries to coax him closer to Khaslana.
“He’s usually very playful with the other rats he’s encountered,” Hieronymus says, bewildered. “It seems that he’s scared of you specifically.”
Good. Khaslana, as the much smaller rat, doesn’t appreciate having a dog that could easily eat him.
Being a rat is often extremely boring, which is a convenient excuse for Khaslana to cling to whenever he performs an act of goodwill for the villagers. Galba misplaces a thing of rope. Khaslana drags it back to him. Miss Pythias loses a stylus. Khaslana places it back on her desk. He is no longer simply the rat, but the resident assistant in finding lost things, apparently.
Pointless, he thinks. A complete and utter waste of time. As if he has anything else to do other than wait for the inevitable.
One day, he finds one of Cyrene’s fortune cards in the sand. It’s the Servant card. It nearly flies away in the wind before he catches it in his teeth, but he ends up swallowing a mouthful of sand in the process. He quickly grabs the card with his paws so he can spit out the sand. He spots other cards, their edges lifting with the breeze, and he has to awkwardly toddle over on two legs while holding his newly acquired card. He does this with each of them until he’s got a stack of twelve in his possession, with three in his paws and the remaining nine in his mouth.
“Oh no,” Cyrene says loudly from behind. He freezes. “It seems I’ve misplaced my fortune cards. If only a rat-shaped savior could find them and bring them back to me.”
The word “savior” and all other synonyms trigger some kind of Pavlovian response that makes him flinch. He turns, and there she is, sitting by the river with her knees drawn up. She winks. Khaslana dumps the cards onto the ground and, to both his and Cyrene’s surprise, lets out a scratchy, indignant squeak.
“Oh don’t be mad,” she chides. “I was only having a little bit of fun. It’s not like they were actually going to get blown away.”
He squeaks again. She crosses his arms. “Have some faith. And maybe you ought to see a doctor, too. Your voice sounds terrible.”
He pointedly refrains from squeaking, and simply looks away. He turns back to leave, but Cyrene’s voice, panicked, cuts into the air.
“Wait,” she calls, looking ready to chase after him. “I’m sorry I said your voice was weird and I’m sorry I made you pick up my cards. I just wanted someone to talk to, that’s all.”
He needs to leave, but he can’t even lift a paw.
“I think I had to apologize the first time we talked as well. For scaring you. I hope you can see that I’m not all that scary.” There’s a helpless little smile on her face. He needs to leave now. “It seems that all I do is apologize. And now I have to apologize for even having to apologize in the first place. I think you can tell that I’m just not very good at this sort of thing but I keep talking and talking regardless.”
Once you got her going, you couldn’t make her stop. They made for a poor match that way - both of them liked to talk a little too much, and often ended up talking over each other. Though, on some days, he was content to just listen.
“You can talk to me too. I’m sure rats have their own grievances when it comes to finding food and building a nest and whatnot. But Mrs. Audata says that you live under her floor in their unused nursery and that you eat what she gives you, so you’re clearly living a better life than most rats,” Cyrene babbles. “I guess that makes sense, since you’re not like the other rats. You can understand people. And you don’t eat any of the grain from the sheds, but so much fruit from Sacrament Courtyard has gone missing in the past couple weeks. The priests aren’t naming names but they do suspect a certain rodent. Do you have some kind of vendetta against them? Or perhaps against Oronyx themself?”
Of a sort, he wants to say. It comes out as a quick squeak.
“If that was a yes, then I’ll be a little disappointed,” she reaches over to put the cards into her bag. “You know, priestess of Oronyx and all that. And look. All that time we were conversing and none of the cards have disappeared. I don’t particularly like how they have teeth marks on them though.”
You were the one who dropped them, he wants to point out. I even got sand in my mouth as I was picking up those cards. And we weren’t having a conversation, you were just talking at me like you always do. In actuality, he doesn’t say anything. His imagined response is nothing more than a fleeting thought, drawn out from some unknown source.
In the distance, someone calls out Cyrene’s name. Even though her expression remains placid, her annoyance makes itself known through a twitch of her eye.
“I’ll have to go now. The priests need me for something.” She shoots him a hopeful smile, like she did when she first encountered him. “Maybe we can talk later?”
Khaslana needs to stop bobbing his head to every single request. But he always has been, by nature, the type to fulfill every wish that’s been given to him.
Years pass. He continues his hovering, his small acts of kindness. The children make little crowns of wheat during the harvest and chase him all around the village, making a game out of trying to put one on him. Audata and Hieronymous have cornered him into accepting more dinner invitations, even though he always runs away when he’s done eating. Cyrene has taken every opportunity to start up a conversation with him whether he wants to engage or not. Some of the children and even the adults have taken to pointing him out when he’s scampering around the village.
He's also done some more impressive things. Once, he prevented the spread of a plague by killing the diseased rats, then holing himself up in a cave until he was sure the sickness had been burned away from his body.
Thousands of cycles in and that desire to be the hero is still within him. Even as a rat.
One day, he takes one of Audata’s needles, one that was too small for her aging fingers to work with. The eye made a good handle, and the point was still sharp. He also steals part of a broken ceremonial blade from the priests, the moon-shaped one like what he always used to kill Cyrene at the start of every cycle, and uses his fire to melt it into a suitable shape with the needle as a reference. It takes multiple attempts for him to shape it into something usable. He ends up having to sharpen it into a point with a whetstone. It’s not the same exact weapon, but it will have to work.
He strings a bit of thread through the eye to make a little necklace. The black tide always comes at night. He won’t be humanoid, but if he’s careful and chooses the right spot, the girl will die.
“I saw you take one of my needles before putting it back,” Audata raises an eyebrow. “Have you decided to dabble in a bit of sewing?”
Khaslana has yet again acquiesced to their invitation for dinner. He squeaks in surprise, then returns to chewing his bread. Audata and Hieronymous exchange amused looks.
“Come to my sewing room after dinner,” she says. “I have a blanket I’d like to give you.”
It’s not the first blanket she’s woven. The first one she gave him was far too large and drowned him in fabric, and he had to wrestle his way out while she laughed.
I know you run hotter than most, she had said. But I can’t bear to think of you shivering away under the floorboards during winter.
The second was far too small, and didn’t cover his stomach. The third was too long, the fourth too wide, and so on and so forth. Khaslana had to refuse some of the blankets because he was running out of space, and some of them he secretly burned while he was human. Hieronymous had created a little rat bed and filled it with the rejected blankets. Khaslana almost never slept in that bed, but it never got taken away.
After dinner, he follows her in. There’s a table, a chair, and a basket that held all her supplies. It’s perpetually drafty. Audata digs through the basket until she emerges triumphant with a tiny blanket.
“Here you are,” she dropped another blanket on his lap. “I think I got it right this time.”
He unfolds it. It is, like all the others, made of wool. She’s dyed it a bright, saffron yellow. He goes onto his hind legs so he can hold it up to his body, and it’s a little too long in width and a little short in length, but it’s perfect. He squeaks his approval.
“I’m glad you like it,” she smiles. He shoves away the idea that this will be the last blanket she will ever give him.
It’s becoming harder and harder to slip back into Khaslana’s original role. He’s watched “Phainon’s” journey so many times over, but it’s different when he’s reliving it.
Sometimes it feels like he’s testing himself. How much care can he allow himself to feel before pulling himself back? Is he capable of completely shutting off his emotions at a moment’s notice? These are questions that should be explored for the sake of future cycles, so that he may be prepared.
He almost makes a game out of it. He goes to dinner with his parents, then refuses to even acknowledge them for the next two weeks. He enthusiastically replies to Cyrene’s attempts at conversation, then ignores her the next day. He climbs onto Livia’s shoulder, then runs away whenever she calls for him. Though, he doesn’t ever shirk his self-mandated duties.
They still wait for him despite it all. It’s ridiculous. All he does is take their time and energy and throw it back into their faces. They don’t exactly welcome him back with open arms, but he is welcomed, and he just can’t figure out why that is.
It would be easier for him to push them away entirely. Even he knows that there’s no need for this cruelty. But it functions, again, as an excuse - he can stay with them for a bit, as an indulgence, but only if he punishes them and himself for doing so.
Excuse after excuse after excuse. Khaslana has never been good at admitting how much he wants.
He slices deep into the girl’s artery as she sleeps, right before the black tide comes. He wouldn’t be able to do it while she was upright and running away. She bleeds out, her blood golden. It sticks to his paws. Finally, the cycle is running as it should.
The black tide overruns the village. Khaslana waits on the outskirts. He thinks time and time again of going back to save his parents, only to remind himself that sparing them while dooming the entire rest of the village is far too cruel a fate. Better let them die with everyone else, and he can put Aedes Elysiae to rest once more.
He can see the tiny figures of his parents desperately searching for him amidst the chaos and the fire that, for once, he didn’t cause. They shout and gesture wildly at each other. They follow each other into the house.
It’s clear that they won’t be coming out. Khaslana’s dead heart flinches, just barely.
When the carnage ends and there’s nothing but ash and soot, he forces himself to look to the horizon. The sun is about to rise. His eyes begin to flutter, then shut completely from the exhaustion.
Onward.