Chapter Text
What is the thing in the well? Is it you? Is it what’s left of you? Is it the real you? How did it get there?
Your head hurts.
It’s an awful, wrenching feeling, being near the well.
You grit your teeth at the flood of pain and rage and despair and memory to stare down into the dark water. There’s something staring back.
They murdered you, ate you, drowned you in lacre, and buried your bones, but you haven’t died yet. Part of you still remains. This must be why the light of the Judgements doesn’t burn you. You think there isn’t enough left of you to truly die.
Turn. Stare blankly at the rough stone.
I don’t know what you are. Are you part of me, something left behind when I-
You swallow. Press closer to the stone. Are you trembling? Breath . . .
Are you something I created? I tried so hard not to die. I did everything I could to stop what was happening.
Or am I something Candles created, and you what’s left of the real thing?
No answer from the well. Only ragged bubbling breaths, hissing from far below.
Or is Candles dead and buried and we’re both left behind?
If you were real, you’d be rubbing the fur off your own forehead. You press your head deeper into rough stone. You tremble.
“I don’t know,” you whisper, “I just don’t know”
Your voice echoes down the well. When it comes back to your ears - you don’t have ears, not really- , you swear there’s a second voice, echoing yours.
You fold yourself into a nook between shelves in Pages’ room. You have no substance, but habit overrules your own sense. You hold yourself up and out of the way, balance on hand and wing, burns and weakness and defect and all, watching Pages work.
It mutters to itself, sounding out unfamiliar terms as it looks over a human book? Codex? You forgot the term. You thought you had time to learn the Third City and its customs and people.
You thought you had time.
You know Pages will soon have mastery of the strange human language. It will be creating its own words, playing with grammar and etymology. You lost patience with it sometimes. You never enjoy having to parse out every new word, breaking it down to the components. Sometimes, you just asked the humans for help. You made friends that way.
(Didn’t Pages used to read in candlelight? Where did these lamps come from?)
Iron is working with it’s weapons, sorting and arranging. With a new city comes new weaponry. Iron will have them all catalogued and sorted, develop new ways to fight and new ways to maintain. It’s the kind of work you expect the armorer to already have done, but it’s collection of Third City weapons seems strangely incomplete.
(It can’t bear to touch them)
You remember the ritual knives. Back when you or Candles were naive, when you thought they would only take a little, when you just tried to distract yourself from the pain, you remember thinking that Iron would have loved them.
You try to fight back the flood of memories. Lose your grip and flee back to the void, where you can rage and grieve until you are spent.
(You won’t know this, not for a long time, but Iron pauses in its work, pricks its ears, sniffs the air, and is suddenly alert. Its vigilance prevents Veils from burning to death in its own bed.
You laugh when you realize that you got the workbench again.
When you’re a ghost in the void, you take what you can.)
When Candles was alive, it never had human assistants, like Fires and Pages and Irons.
Candles did have lab partners. Small hands and flat nails made humans perfect for working with fine materials and machines. And, if something went wrong, they were small enough to toss out of the way.
You don’t know what to think about these ‘Seekers of the Name’.
What they do to themselves. What they do to others . . .
Watching them is watching Candles die. Over and over and over.
You dream of fire.
The Third City dreams of fire.
Your former associates are sick of putting out fires. They think it’s deliberate. They wonder why the curator they destroyed so thoroughly won’t sleep.
The God Eaters dream of their mouths and throats and stomachs burning with strange blinding golden light. They burn to charred skeletons every night.
Remember, the creature in the well/the Seekers/the Void croons, A reckoning will not be postponed forever . . .
You spend a lot of time in the void, trying to calm the panic, trying to stem the flood of memories.
You do things in your panic that you never intended to. You will never fully quantify what you’ve done.
It makes you sick. You never liked collateral damage. It was a sign of lazy planning, it complicated things . . .
You saw Axile burn in the crossfire of a war the curator could never understand and the Judgement never wanted to.
Your scars ache. Your eyes burn.
Candles was the light on the edge of sleep and the solar storm that strips flesh from bones. It was never safe. But Candles was careful. Candles had won control over power no curator should possess.
When Candles was new, clumsy in a strange body, its twin watched over it as it learned how to be a curator.
A Runt Judgement who gave its power to its twin.
An abomination of a curator with blinding white fur, born in charity, who carried light in itself.
But Candles had a sibling. Then Candles had friends . You have nothing.
Breath . . .
Listen to the thing in the well, raving in hunger.
Listen to Fires and Iron, stumbling and losing concentration as their minds battle against irrigo.
Listen every time a human pauses in conversation, trying to remember something buried under the Neathbow.
Pity the strangled shells of humans who reenact Candles’ murder over and over again. But . . . they’re trying to bring Candles’ name back.
It wouldn’t hurt so much, being dead, if people remember who you were, what you did.
But they drowned your memory in irrigo. Feel the bitterness rise. You won’t forget. You can’t forget.
No matter if Wines and Spices battle over your domain, dreams still answer to your call.
Even as a Judgement, you had some power over the forbidden. Going against the Chain. Always, always. A moth to folly’s candle.
You have all the time in the world to regain your mastery.
Candles had dominion over dreams. Let’s take a peek into the mind of a dreamer.
You are dreaming about drowning. You are dreaming about your home. Everything you’ve missed is around you again. You can see the moon begin to rise, full and beautiful and red. The air doesn’t smell damp anymore.
The air smells like . . .
Smoke?
Salt?
Blood?
Your stomach starts to growl. You start to wonder why. There’s something strange about this situation. And you have always had a natural curiosity.
Something flickers on the edge of your vision.
It looks like one of the mysterious hooded lords of the city. It shakes its head at you, not quite human in motion. Something bright glints under its hood.
“Don’t pursue this any further. You won’t like the consequences. Trust me.”
The voice is high and sharp, but echoes metallically, as if the speaker is at the bottom of a well or pipe. Your eyes itch. Something purple (irrigo) glitters in the distance.
You wonder for a long time after you wake up.