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It starts with a few words.
Rosetta is explaining the occurrences of a few months ago, before you joined the crew of the Grandcypher. They had returned to Lumacie and found the primal beast of the forest, Yggdrasil, in desperate pain. Dark essence, someone says. You feel dizzy. Is it the heat? The fireplace? It was fine until now. It was taking over her body. She wasn't powerful enough to withstand it. Warm voices around you, in low tones, saying more words. The Empire, experimenting with Malice. And then, like an alarm going off, shrill and undeniable in your brain: something horrible has happened.
Something horrible has happened.
Something horrible has happened to you.
Something you’ve kept buried in the sediment of two thousand years. Something indescribably terrifying has happened. Something— something—
A strange, tingling sensation creeps over your body in the shadow of the glaring table light. What’s happening to you? You feel cold, then hot, as if the heat is freezing you, frostbite and frostburn. The shackles on your wrists cut into your flesh. Keep him restrained. Then slowly raise the levels. Just until we have enough data. Someone is speaking. Hard and emotionless. Your head thrashes back and forth, your sight blurred, trying to figure out where the voice is coming from. But everything looks like a blur of glinting metal and light, and you can’t focus long enough to identify one source, one place, one person. He’s going to start reacting about… now. You close your eyes, then open them. You immediately regret it.
Something black and liquid moves across your bare skin. It sears you everywhere it touches you, and every synapse in your body lights up with excruciating, mind-numbing pain. Your mouth falls open, and you struggle to breathe, and your body spasms in a choking cough. As if you are trying to bring something up from inside of you through your throat. The lines of darkness spread, forming webs of interconnected patterns, almost as if it’s mimicking the networks of veins. The net encircles your body, expands over most of you, growing ever larger. And then your mind whites. Your vision gives out. The pain is… indescribable. There are termites eating their way through your flesh. Building their castles and sanctuaries in your body. Creating repositories for the darkness to gather, to pool and continue to spread.
A scream. It rips through you like a serrated dagger. Pierces through you then spreads its tendrils within you where it has lodged deep in your chest. Is it yours? Is that you? It doesn’t sound like you. You thrash within your restraints, and you know they’re cutting you open as you do, but you can’t tell, you can’t see or feel the blood when every inch of your body is already lit up with a thousand new agonies. Your lips move— they mouth something on their own, disconnected from your will. Somewhere, you hear a bark of laughter. You try to find comfort in the light, but it burns your eyes. You can hear voices, but they’re almost indecipherable past the bulging, swelling noises in your ears.
…at’s 40 …ts— we s… stop n…
No. Keep in…ng it. W… nee…o know the up….mit.
Something— something happens. There are no more words. Just sensation. Then something else. Someone is prying open your ribcage. Their hands are rearranging your organs. Then your eyes— gone. No more light, nothing left but jumbles of blood and fat and guts. Unmake my flesh. Disassemble this body. Destroy the rest of me. I don’t mind. I don’t mind. But tell him first. Tell him I'll be useful.
He… osing consc…ss… Th… eeds to e…
…can take m….
N… e can’t… you’ll… stroy h…
Then everything is silent, save for the scoff— the words.
Does it matter? He’s useless anyway.
(unmake me unmake me unmake me use me until i am something worth using take my every limb my every breath and at least at least let him know i have done it what i have done what i have)
—You rise out of your body.
Or rather, your body falls away from you, and you are somewhere outside of it, watching you— watching Sandalphon— his eyes sliding shut as the rest of him is slowly invaded by veins of darkness. You know that if you stayed any longer in that vessel, you would no longer be you. He doesn’t look conscious, but his body is still responding to the pain, shaking so hard that it rattles the metal restraints, arching and writhing and spasming in agony, his lip split from biting down on it, and you notice the blood that flows from it is a more purple shade of red. Polluted, infected. The traces of dark essence branch out across his chest, then burn scars into the skin, which immediately begin to fade from white keloids to deep purple bruises to entirely blackened, necrotized lines— the accelerated process of dying skin. The eating away of flesh. His wings, pinned down like a butterfly specimen to the metal lab table, are beginning to lose their feathers. The very bones of him are becoming dark. His eyes open, dragged back into consciousness, and stare fixated at the ceiling, and you have the horrible feeling he’s looking directly at you.
You can hear his scream resonate throughout the facility. It shakes the walls and rips through your core. Sandalphon is gone. Something takes his place. His wings are halfway to skeletons. His skin has gone mostly grey. You want to reach out. You want to make contact with the body he is, the shell he has become. There is anger in you, slowly rising from its reservoirs in your core, where it has been dormant. It becomes wrath, then fury. It twists within you, forming a blade, a knife. Hate, deep hate, boils within you, tempering it. Then you— you are unrecognizable, and—
“Stop it. Stop the experiment, now.”
The ethereal reverberations of his voice are unmistakable.
“I said now!”
You’ve never heard him yell before. You watch as the scientists step back from their positions. Your core reaches out to him. The body of Sandalphon below you stops its ceaseless convulsions. Someone turns off some machine, and the whirring noise that permeated the room dissipates.
“What data could you possibly obtain from this that you haven’t already? Do you want to watch him suffer? Leave him.”
Lucifer kneels next to the lab table where Sandalphon lies motionless. He rests one hand on Sandalphon’s cheek. You see his face twist in agony as he touches him— you want to scream stop it, stop it, I’ll ruin you, I’ll hurt you, I’m too tainted, please get away. But he keeps his hand there. Little branches of darkness try to creep their way into his perfect skin, but they falter and wilt. Instead, Sandalphon’s face regains flesh. The other scientists leave the room.
You feel a hand on your cheek.
You watch as Lucifer runs his hands over Sandalphon’s surfaces. Everywhere he touches, there is light. His face is still pained, but the veins of darkness crumble beneath his fingertips, leaving gentle, almost invisible white scars behind. Sandalphon’s wings fade back into mottled brown. A delicate shiver runs through you. You lean into his touch and sink back into flesh.
The body is still… confused. In here you lose track of time, of memory. You fade in and out of consciousness. Gentle fingers brush your hair from your face. A glimpse of light, of a murmuring voice. Sandalphon. Body weightless, lifted. Greenery. A heated discussion; anger, somewhere. I cannot abide it. Vision fogging over. A familiar smell. Tears— whose? Sandalphon. The warm press of a body against your back. Featherlight brush over your cheek. Someone lifts a cup to your lips. You drink. You wake.
“Sandalphon!”
Lyria’s shriek opens your eyes.
You blink the fire from your vision. Her blue hair, as always, grounds you. The color of that sky. Her hands are pressed against the middle of your chest; the core. When she sees your eyes are open, she lets out a tearing sob and flings herself around you, trembling and clutching at the back of your shirt.
Your mind feels as if it’s moving through mud. You don’t think to push her off— she’s warm.
“Sandalphon,” she wails, pressing her head against your shoulder. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Oh, Sandalphon...”
You raise your head and look past where she’s nestled against you— you’re in the crew living room, the fireplace crackling nearby. Gran, Rackam and Rosetta are on the couches surrounding you, their expressions various degrees of concern. “What... why are you on me? Why are you crying?”
“Aaah, I’m sorry!” Lyria just sniffles again and bursts into another round of sobs. You look between Gran and Rosetta, bewildered, asking silently for an explanation.
“Lyria and I were telling you the story of our journey so far. Remember, darling? We come down here for coffee and talk to you about what’s happened recently...”
Ah. You remember something like that. A few words rise into your head, like secrets from the bottom of a well. Empire. Malice. Forest. Yggdrasil.
Yggdrasil—
You snap forward, nearly throwing Lyria off you. She yelps, and you instinctively wrap your other arm around her back to keep her from falling onto the floor. “Yggdrasil,” you say, your voice a gasp for breath, a sudden revelation. “Yggdrasil. That’s right. I... I need to talk to her. I need to see her.”
Lyria mumbles a bit, then loosens her grip on you and pushes your shoulders back so she can look you right in the eye. “Not until you tell us what just happened to you,” she says, firmly, her little voice taking on an air of authority you didn’t know she was capable of.
“Can you at least sit next to me rather than right on my lap.”
Lyria’s eyes widen, and she blushes a bit and casts a glance to the side. “Um... yeah. Sorry.” She slides off your lap and plops herself next to you. But she doesn’t stop keeping physical contact— her hand is on your forearm, and she’s leaning against you. Rosetta chuckles goodnaturedly.
“Oh my. Lyria, sweetie, I know he’s quite a catch but you’re too young for him,” she teases. Lyria pouts, not nearly as embarrassed as you expected her to be.
“I’m keeping in contact with him because that keeps him calm! If I let go of him it might get bad again!” she protests, and then lets go of your arm and moves away. Immediately a swelling of uneasiness begins in your throat, and you take a sharp breath in to keep it down— and then Lyria leans her head on your shoulder again, and it’s gone. “See? You forgot my whole job is calming primals!”
“Ehe, sorry. I couldn’t help but tease. You’re doing a good job,” she reassures. “Sandalphon, love, what’s going on with you? I mean, I could make the arrangements for you to meet Yggdrasil, but first I want to know why.”
You pause. Gran and Rackam both look at you expectantly. “When you started talking about Malice, and dark essence,” you begin, but your throat seizes before you can say any more.
Lyria prods your shoulder, and you turn to face her— her eyes are soft in a wordless question. You tsk once, but nod.
“Like other primal beasts, he was created by the Astrals,” she says, her hand still resting on your forearm. You do nothing to stop her. “When we started talking about Yggdrasil and the dark essence, he froze up, and I could hear him screaming. He must have been...”
Even Lyria has trouble saying it. Gran’s eyes widen in disbelief— in sorrow. Rackam looks down, and nods, somberly.
“They experimented on me with it. I don’t know how many times. But I nearly lost myself to it.”
When I was in the lab, they...
When I was in Pandemonium, they...
When I was anywhere but at Lucifer’s side, they...
For two thousand years...
I... I was...
The thoughts are unfinished; you don’t let yourself finish them, much less voice them. Thankfully, everyone seems to understand. There is still a silence, though— lingering like a scar.
“I see. Since you and Yggdrasil share a similar experience, you want to... see her?” Rosetta finally says.
“I want to... Yes. That, and, I want to apologize to her. If she’d let me.” You look down at your hands, turn them over in your lap a few times. These destroyer’s hands. These hands that nearly ruined the world Lucifer loved so much, just so he would look at you. How can you be forgiven?
But your heart reaches out to her. Your memories link together, form a thread from which a tapestry is beginning to spin itself into being. You want to know— you want her to know, neither of you are alone in this.
Rackam, who has been mostly silent until now, finally speaks. When he does, his words make your heart sink.
“Hey, Sandalphon... Don’t ya think you’ve done enough apologizing?”
“Not enough,” you murmur. “Never even close to enough.”
Rosetta leads you and the others through the winding forest. You assist with dispatching the monsters, and with Lyria’s help, you gather some edible mushrooms to snack on throughout the hike. The whole way, you feel the foreboding presence of the forest, the gnarled thorns and flickering lights and glinting eyes of monsters in the dark, and it doesn’t do much to ease your nerves. If Yggdrasil guards this forest, you think, she must be angry with you.
Rackam notices you’ve gone silent and claps you on the back, right between the wings. You give a startled yelp and turn around to glare at him.
“Easy, easy,” he says, cheerfully. “Geez, what did I do to deserve that death glare? I just wanted to check on ya.”
“If you wanted to check on me, you could have called out to me like a normal person,” you huff. “Don’t sneak up on me like that. It’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous for you or dangerous for me?”
“You never know how I might react,” you deadpan. Rackam whistles.
“You Primarchs are pretty intimidating, I tell you what.” He laughs, but it’s not his usual hearty laughter; it’s a simple chuckle, as if he’s trying not to wake the forest. “I’ll mind myself next time. But really, ya don’t look too good. What’s on your mind?”
You scoff. “As if I would tell you that.”
He gives you that suspicious, narrowed-eyes look. The one that means hmm, not convinced. You turn away and pretend to look for a nice mushroom below a nearby tree.
“Ya worried about meetin’ Yggdrasil?”
“I suppose.”
You don’t find anything.
“I’ll tell ya somethin’. These Primals, the guardians of the islands... I don’t think they’re good at holdin’ grudges. So ease up a bit.” He ruffles your hair. You bat his hand away, but you don’t ignore his words.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You’re a good person, ya know.”
Rackam says this quietly, as if he’s talking to himself. As if it means nothing in particular. But it scares you. Your heart drops, nevertheless.
For a while you forget to reply. You almost want him to think you didn’t hear it. But the words burn in your throat until you spit them out.
“That’s debatable,” you say, and your gaze wanders past him, into the forest, into the flickering phosphorescence of the mushrooms and the fireflies and all the little lights, all the pinpricks of stars, your sputtering, broken light just another one in the sea of it all.
You arrive at the lake. Lyria gives a little “hurray!” and immediately sprawls out on one of the cleared patches of grass. This place is relatively peaceful, a place for travelers to rest, to stop and admire the world from where they are, drowned otherwise in this ocean of trees. Gran sits down on a rock near the side of the lake. The surface glows, gently, like something is asleep under it. A nightlight.
Rosetta approaches your side as you stare down into the lake.
“I’m going to wake her up,” she says. “She’ll respond to me easily, but it might take a few tries for you to reach out to her. I just need to make sure she knows she’s not in danger.”
You nod. There’s not much left to say.
“All right. Be gentle with her, okay?” She winks, and then kneels next to the surface. “Yggdrasil? It’s me. Will you wake up, for juuust a moment? There’s someone who wants to meet you.”
A ripple across the glasslike surface. Fireflies light up over the lake, little glowing stars. Then there is a chime, a curious tinkle of bells. Countless motes of light rise from the water and coalesce, gently, quietly. Yggdrasil wakes, formed by the light, rising like a sleeping giant and looking out onto the shore.
She is peaceful. Maybe a little groggy. But Rosetta’s presence by the lake, and Lyria close behind, seems to have a calming effect. She cocks her head, in a gentle question. Rosetta laughs.
“He’s right here,” she says, gesturing to you. Yggdrasil’s gaze wanders, before it settles.
You close your eyes. You reach out to her.
A spark. A thread of connection. Your ears pulse with energy. The rest of the world is a blur— she is there, and she has made contact.
You can hear her voice. It is much softer, much younger than you had expected. For such an old soul, the sacred tree herself, she is, for lack of a better word, quite childlike in her demeanor. She speaks in fragments, in gentle bell noises, in melodies.
You, she says.
You freeze up. Suddenly unsure, suddenly afraid. The thread frays. She pulls on it, a question.
Why are you silent?
I don’t know what to say.
I have met you before.
You purse your lips. Caught in regret. I know.
Why are you sad?
I hurt you, you say. I made things difficult, for you and for everyone.
But I can see your wings. They are your wings now. You have healed what you hurt. Her voice is light. As if there is no question about it.
They don’t belong on my back.
I know you are sad. I always knew, she says. When I saw you first, you were angry. Hurt. You wanted to be loved.
That’s not... But you know she can tell, either way. Still, it wasn’t an excuse to do what I did.
You saved the world you used to hate.
I did it because Lucifer would have wanted me to. At the time I didn’t really care about the world at all, you admit.
But you do now. This world is for you— for us— to love. To protect. You... and I... are the same. She whispers it like she already knows.
I know. More than you think, we are the same. I remember...
You open yourself a little more, and she reaches further into you. Her gaze brushes over something hidden and dark. You feel her breath catch, and she freezes. You remember you remember you remember you—
(freesia. mouth wide open. boils of hate. burls on my tree. filled with dark. eating me away. my arms restrained. my legs twisted into one. i became the wound. the dark became the tree. you know. you know. you know)
Her memories wash over you like saltwater. They sting your eyes. You are an open wound.
They nearly broke you, she says. Her voice wavers. I see you. You were in pain. So was I.
Yes. When I heard what had happened, I... I knew I had to meet you. I wanted to apologize.
You have already apologized, she says. You feel her smile. And I have already forgiven you.
Even though...?
Yes. I see good in you. Always. Even then. Her hand rests on your head. Do not run away. You are worth more than you think.
Thank you, you say, and you mean it. You should sleep. I’m sorry for waking you.
Do not worry. I am happy for it. I was lonely, I think.
I can come visit, if you ever need me, you offer, and immediately regret it. But she smiles, warmly, like she’s actually planning on taking you up on that offer.
Please do. I want to talk more. But I am very sleepy. Tell Rosetta that I miss her. Tell her I will let her know.
I will.
Oh. And...
What is it?
Thank you. For saving us. Sandalphon.
The way she says your name, foreign on her tongue, as if she has only just learned it, as if she is savoring the way it sounds— it will stay with you forever.
The thread snaps before you can reply. You fall backwards, a bit stunned by the sudden disconnection. Rosetta looks down, her eyes bright, expectant.
“She says she misses you, by the way,” you tell her. “And that... she’ll let you know, when she wants us to come back to visit.”
“Us?” Rosetta raises one eyebrow, teasingly. The corner of your lip twitches into a smile. Softly, as if not to wake her up.
“I’d quite like to talk to her again soon,” you say, to no one in particular, as you pick up your satchel and stand up. The rest of the gang rouses— you don’t know how long your conversation was, but apparently it was long enough for Lyria to take a nap on Gran’s shoulder. “We’re done here,” you tell them. “If there’s anything else you want to do on Lumacie, speak now.”
Everyone offers their own version of a no thanks, I’m good. You move on, ducking under a branch into the tunnel of trees that leads back into the heart of the forest. Before the foliage closes the exit off behind you, you look back.
Millions of fireflies, winking in and out of the darkness, cover the lake surface with a tapestry of stars— the sky in the middle of the forest, the world in the palm of a hand.