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Chapter Text

Arrell,

Ah, how indulgent this ritual has become— I am no semiotician, but perhaps there is a shade of magic in the way a pen can become a honeyed blade that I use upon myself.

I know you will not open these letters. I knew it when you walked past me as the second moon hung low like a heavy fruit in the night sky. I can laugh at it now, but at the time I felt some childish urge well up in me, Arrell, to pull on your sleeve. Or trip you. Move you in some way to loosen the moss-covered boulders behind your gaze. But what cold brook would babble forth if I had managed to lift my hand, Tutor? Would it be one of loathing? Longing? Would it be anything at all?

I remember feeling the same desperate desire to shift the lines of your face into a scowl or a small smile, back during the first time we were strangers. But then I did not have this intimate fear that something brittle in me would snap if your gaze stayed vacant and brushed my hand aside, after all these years.

So I stood there, as I tend to do, arms to my sides, and let you pass me by.

Perhaps this is my revenge, then— and if I ever pretended to be above such pettiness, it was only to satisfy your gleaming idea of me. I will have the last words, Arrell, though you, prideful, arrogant, so righteous in the pursuit of your pyrrhic victory, will never see them.

It is almost morning, I think, as that can be nothing but a feeling these days. Fog drapes over the snow-covered field ahead of me like a memory. I wish that the sun would rise and tear it to pieces, but we have only the dulled light of the moons now.

Yours, foolishly—
Alyosha

Chapter Text

Arrell,

I dreamt of your apartment in Rosemerrow last night, or perhaps this morning— without the edge of clarity His blessed light provides us with, hours are viscous things, ink spilling into ink. 

We had our longest day of travel yesterday, and it seems my time serving in Velas has made me less accustomed to this kind of itinerant lifestyle, (and I am getting older, Arrell, though I can almost hear your laugh like the ghost of birdsong as I write those words). As soon as our camp was set up and our rations digested, I let myself be swallowed by the bone-buzz of exhaustion.

The dream was simple. The greyed walls lit by candlelight, the familiar sight of you at your desk, the crooked horizon of your shoulders hunched over your papers, were all the same as memory.

But then, as if the flow of time picked up to a torrential pace, sprigs of various plants and weeds began to weave their way through the gaps in the wood flooring. They crawled up the sides of your beloved bookshelves, the bed frame, the legs of the side table where I would sometimes keep my book of prayer. I believe I tried to call out to you, as certain as one can be in dreams, but my words were nothing but a rush of color washed away by light. Blue, yellow, green; suspended in the air like dandelion seeds. I woke as soon as your head began to turn.

You talked often of alternate worlds, I remember, Tutor, possibilities spiraling off into infinity. Do you think there can be a world where we are still there, in that apartment? Perched atop Wistful Peaks, beyond any ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing; the smell of magnolias in the air, ink smudges on the tips of your fingers and my cheek, as you keep to your books and I to my verses. Our shoes left abandoned by the door as dawn paints the walls with a flickering tide. I wish—

No, forgive me these selfish thoughts. This world is enough, however dark and blurred and marred by time. It deserves the faith of a tired old man, at least. I would not be able to raise my head and greet the people of Hieron during my travels, who you have left behind, if I did not believe that.

Ah, it's fortunate that you are too consumed by your mission to read these clumsy ramblings. I can tell my parchment things that I would never be able to tell you, and leave dreams under the vermillion vow of a wax seal.

The wind has picked up now. I write this in the shadow of a low stone wall, still blooming with a flush of blood-colored lichen even as frost and freezing wind batter against it. The color is so striking against the pallid landscape it lends itself to my imagination, that perhaps if a traveler or wild animal passed through our camp during the night, they would think it the aftermath of a great violence.

In that crystalline moment of uncertainty, my red scarf would be a wound across my throat, and my companions’ sleeping forms, silent offerings left to the elements. And that would be the truth, for a single pulsing beat of Hieron’s heart.

Given the tenuous nature of death these days, I wonder if there is much difference now. I hope I do not dream tonight.

Yours, in weariness—
Alyosha

Chapter Text

Arrell,

Did I ever tell you that old saying about seeking dawn’s counsel, Teacher? I must’ve groggily recited it, I think, on one of the nights that you would bang upon my door, demanding a differing opinion on something that you had arrived at during your studies. You would not leave until I contradicted you with proper reasoning and citation, before picking up like a sea breeze, with only an open door and a half-finished cup of tea left in your wake.

I will not bore you with the full verse, but it is said that it is at the darkest moments of the night, with dusk’s velvet curtain drawn on His greatest invention, when the soul is weakest. It encourages those who find themselves consumed by thought at some odd hour, to leave troubles to be looked at again, with new eyes, under His blessed light.

Yes, Arrell, the irony of this phrase these days does not escape me. But it does give me insight on why my hand seems to reach for a pen and ink during the long, restless hours that I am meant to watch over my companions.

Hadrian, the man you met on the hill outside of Wharfhurst, kept me company tonight. I had just finished composing letters to Rosemerrow when I heard the heavy masonry of his body shift anxiously behind my place by the fire.

It is no wonder that they call him the Sword of Samothes. He carries his faith like it has been pierced through the small of his back and left there, to fester. I think he thinks it necessary, that it gives him the proper weight to plod through anything laid upon his path, but I can see the blood tracks on the snow.

You were much the same, Arrell, now that I think of it, though it was not faith that made you so miserable. Your wound was so much older, my friend, and that blade stuck so much deeper, skin and sinew cradling it like a second heart. I never dared to take something like that from you. I don’t think you would know how to go on without it.

Hadrian asked me if I had a family. His fur cape was as white as exposed bone in the moonlight. I thought of the prelate that raised me, of the community we had at the university, of you, and this winter between us. The Creed is my family, I said, as a chattering cliff of darkness loomed beyond the edges of the fire.

He nodded and the flames crackled and I remembered that old saying, and how we no longer have the luxury to wait for the light of the sun to give us guidance. I thought of those first years in Rosemerrow, singed and sooted, after the fall of the University, and of how we clung to each other so tightly in an unfamiliar city. I was frightened of so many things, back then, but I do not think I was ever happier.

We are unmoored in this longest hour. We must simply walk the roads in front of us, with those who wish to walk them with us.

So I began to talk, of his wife Rosana and the time we had spent together in the Velasian church, and I talked of Benjamin, young and earnest, who had so proudly shown me the wood carvings that his father had taught him. And as I talked, I watched the harsh slopes of his profile, backlit by longing, break apart like warm soil. And perhaps to ease my own guilty conscience, of what I failed to do for you, I placed my hand on his back and traced the sword hilt of his spine with my thumb.

The last remains of a fire reflected in a companion’s eyes. Another kind of dawn, perhaps.

So I will continue to walk. I will follow where the light hits. I hope that someday I will see you on that path, and I can finally lift my hand to you, if Samothes allows it.

I will carry that hope like a lantern inside me, Arrell, and I think that I will call it faith.

One last thing, as my hands are getting too numb to write. Do you know what I miss most about life before the snow? It might be frivolous to think in times where livelihoods are in peril because of this prolonged and unexpected cold, but Tutor, I miss the grass. I remember there were warm, slow days at the university when I would skip class to lay out on the lawn and sleep in the sunshine. Sometimes I would wake, bleary-eyed, morning dew against my neck, and peer back at the landscape behind me, upside-down, like it was some kind of bright new world.

There is something to be said about the loss of something so fundamental. It knocks the wind out of me so much more— like climbing stairs in the middle of the night and anticipating another step, only to have your foot fall through the empty air. I think I am still trying to catch my breath.

Yours, patiently—
Alyosha

Chapter Text

“How?”

The question almost startles Hadrian out of the quiet lull of a pen scratching against parchment and hail rattling against the window. Arrell had been silent for several minutes, and Hadrian would’ve thought he had forgotten that he was there— several paces away from the other man, hunched over a desk in the cheapest inn south-east of Rosemerrow. But he knew better.

Hadrian can’t remember the last time that he slept. His skin feels heavy on his bones.

“What?”

“You said Alyosha was lost. Dogs are lost. Battles. Where—” Arrell pauses, pen hovering over the page. “Where was he buried?”

Hadrian shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “There was no body.”

There was only the small, slightly crude wooden carving of a headless owl that Hadrian had left behind in Samol’s garden. When he had asked the Exarch about the totem during an evening prayer, weeks before, Alyosha had laughed under his breath and said that he had no talent for embellishment, but was just trying to recreate something from a dream. The left wing was still uncarved when Hadrian had gently laid it under a bush of bright yellow flowers. It was the closest thing to a burial that Hadrian could give him.

Arrell says nothing, again, while continuing to write and shuffle papers around his desk, and Hadrian is suddenly, violently, too tired for this conversation.

“What business did you have with him?” he asks, trying not to raise his voice. “You didn’t seem close when we met in Wharfhurst. You barely spared him a glance.”

Arrell finally lifts his head to meet Hadrian's gaze. His eyes are dark, the bark of a willow tree after rain.

And then, suddenly, Hadrian remembers the sketch that Arrell kept on his desk in Rosemerrow. The letters heavy in Hadrian’s pocket, the hours Alyosha would spend folded into himself with his pen and paper, his quiet answer by the fireside, the look in Arrell’s eyes, all align in a brutal constellation.

“Oh,” Hadrian says. He loved you. “Oh.”

The bookcase in the corner trembles.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Arrell rasps, and Hadrian can hear the shrill echo of Phantasmo in his voice— a third person in the room, for a brief second, before falling away. The distance between them in the cramped room seemed to open into a wound. Hadrian hadn’t realized how much blood was in the water.

He clears his throat. “It was a corrupted form of our Lord, I didn’t realize at the time-—”

“You, Sword of—” Arrell interrupts, pushing the back of his chair out slowly. “You did not even know your own God?”

Hadrian’s back straightens.

“Tell me, did you even lift a finger to save him?” Arrell asks, stepping closer to him. “Or were you too busy grovelling at his feet, so spineless in your faith. I knew Alyosha was a fool in his love for Samothes.” Hadrian almost flinches at the way he spits out the name of his God like a bitter seed. “But you, Hadrian,” Arrell continues, “are an entirely different beast.”

“I tried."

“Did you?”

“You sound just like Phantasmo, you know. When you pretend that you know everything. I’m sick of—”

“It was one man, Hadrian. One man to save.”

“You weren’t there.”

Arrell laughs like a jagged knife pressed against Hadrian’s throat.

“Yes,” he says, almost wistfully. “I suppose I wasn’t.”

Arrell draws back slowly. None of the muscles in Hadrian’s body can seem to relax, even as he sits back down in the cushioned seat, now turned slightly away from him. He watches as Arrell calmly pushes the inkwell off the side of the desk with one finger. It doesn’t shatter, but Hadrian wishes that it had.

“I asked you once. You answered poorly. Why should there be something instead of nothing?”

The ink creeps like a shadow across the floor.

Hadrian opens and closes his mouth several times. Because of Rosana. Because of Benjamin. Because I would rather love a world worthy of grief. Because at least I can carry something with me if the Dark takes us all. Because I don’t know how to do anything else but believe.

But he says nothing, and reaches for the inside pocket of his coat.

“Our mapmaker found these letters in the bottom of his pack. They’re addressed to you. I would always see him writing—”

“Get out,” Arrell says, and his voice sounds so young.

Hadrian takes a step forward to lay them on the corner of the desk, and does not look back.

— — —

The Dark Son leave Arrell’s body behind, bleeding out like a stuck pig, in one of the dark, twisting corridors of their hideout. Perhaps there were more important things to attend to, he wonders distantly, as he slowly drags himself to the closest wall and props himself up against the stone.

The knife, black with golden leaf, is still protruding from his abdomen, but it won’t be long until they can retrieve it. A sickly damp heat has replaced the soft familiar buzz of magic under his skin, and is slowly rising, cresting around the edges of his vision.

He listens to the sound of his own ragged breathing for as long as he can stand, before slipping under the surface.

The torn fabric of his robe, stained deep with blood, ripples into the pages of splayed-open books, scattered papers around his desk.

A memory. Grey walls. The rustle of sheets behind him. A quiet voice. Steam from a mug placed by his hand. The soft pressure of a kiss against his temple.

He begs himself, bleeding out in the hallway, to turn his head. Ignore the book. He remembers that morning. It was raining, a late-spring thunderstorm, the thin hair of Alyosha’s bangs had curled slightly and clung to his skin. Arrell had spent the previous night watching the angle of his neck articulated in the flashes of lightning before retreating to his study. Turn your head, you coward, before he leaves. Turn it.

But he knows he doesn’t. The books begin to bleed, the walls darken back to stone, and he is alone again.

Arrell lifts his hand up to the dim light of the lantern on the opposite wall, watches as the light moves through his shaking fingers.

“Under the sun, then,” he gasps around the blood in throat, and closes his eyes.