Work Text:
In one timeline, a letter, hand-delivered.
In this timeline, the Eternal Prince turned citadel ruler opens the portal down to the Forge of Spring, a corpse dragging behind him. Alyosha does not pause, his hammer woosh-clink against the anvil, until Ephrim pulls the body past the forge and leans it against a rocky outcropping, and Alyosha catches a familiar profile, aquiline nose and graying temples.
Ephrim stumbles back from the wizard Arrell, catching his breath in fits and starts, but even before he turns away and walks back through the portal without a word to Alyosha vines have begun to encircle the wizard’s outstretched legs, drawing his arms up and out and tilting his head back – so rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet, Alyosha thinks – the vines coiling over and through his pock-marked chest. Flowers burst into life above his prone form, and Alyosha watches, hammer aloft, as the magenta pitcher-blossoms explode outward, shiny and wet.
The liquid gathers on the pointed tip of the bottommost flower, hanging a moment too long, surface rippling like oil, before it falls onto the bridge of Arrell’s nose, and Alyosha watches, hammer at his side, the winding path the droplet takes down Arrell’s bruised and necrotic flesh, until the sap reaches the inner corner of Arrell’s half-lidded eye and sizzles.
Arrell moans in pain, and Alyosha nearly drops the hammer. He was alive – he couldn’t be - Alyosha had been so sure of Arrell’s death, had felt his mind dissociate itself from his body as soon as he caught a glimpse of that distinctive face, so sure of the absence of life that he had hardly noticed the inverse spark of undeath flickering deep in Arrell’s chest. And even before that he had been so long-removed from his thoughts, so focused on the task at hand, that the sight of Arrell had barely registered the fog of single-minded devotional purpose. And now he was alive.
He does not drop the hammer but sets it down on the anvil and takes a deep breath, in and out, in and out, in and out, until he feels like his hands are his own again, or as own as they ever have been, really – and turns to face Arrell in time to catch another drop roll down the curve of Arrell’s browbone into his other eye. The sharp sizzle and low moan are worse the second time around, and Alyosha flinches despite himself.
He walks over slowly, watching the spastic twitch of Arrell’s fingers and the sweet nectar that pools on the pitcher plants above the wizard’s eyes and falls, suspended in the humid air of the forge for a moment too long each time. Several steps later, he reaches Arrell and goes to grasp his hand, cup the wizard’s cheek in his newly-calloused palm, but hesitates at the small gasps of pain the trapped man is making.
Alyosha takes a second to gather his voice.
“Arrell?”
Alyosha can see Arrell’s face turn minutely towards the sound of his voice, but the vines hold him fast, wrapping across his neck and forehead and squeezing tight. He can see the thoughts beginning to form in the wizard’s mind, but his eyes stay clouded and confused, the venom dropping as his pupils twitch back and forth. He’s breathing quickly, panic setting in, and Alyosha leans in and grasps Arrell’s cheek, uncaring of the strange sap that continues to fall onto the cusp of the wizard’s eye socket.
The noise Arrell makes as Alyosha’s hand brushes the side of his face can only be described as a whimper, and Alyosha’s chest seizes at the sound. It’s so unlike any noise Alyosha has ever heard Arrell make, even in those quiet moments stolen between greater responsibilities, their letters made physical with hands and mouths and touches taken between library stacks and in solitary cloisters, and Alyosha darts his other hand up to cup Arrell’s pockmarked cheeks.
“Arrell, it’s me, it’s Alyosha.” Arrell only moans, quieter this time, and leans lightly into Alyosha’s hands, the movement so small that Alyosha barely senses it through the thickened callouses.
He never before would have described the wizard Arrell as sensible – only sensible in his ability to make his ideals reality, truly, not down-to-earth or realistic beyond his grand ideas for – but to see him so lost is…
The sap continues to drip as Alyosha holds his face, whispering for only Arrell to hear, though what use is there for such low volumes when there is only the Spring for strata upon strata above, when he is so solitary here? Still, there is a familiarity in the tone, quiet words between proud men, and so he wipes the poison gently overflowing from Arrell’s eyes and stands there, shaking.
Before long, Alyosha realizes what is so disconcerting about Arrell’s imprisonment – as if the Spring and all he has seen since he first left the safety of Velis were not already strange and unfamiliar, but this new intersection between his past life and his present here, in the Forge of Spring, has disrupted the monotony of woosh-clink on the anvil of god-blood. Arrell had always been larger than life – a powerful wizard, the wizard, and in him Alyosha had found a teacher, a mentor, an equal, a confidant, a lover. Arrell’s bold stratagem had loomed large over Hieron, and Alyosha had held his intellectual own against the wizard’s power. Even in their closeness they had both been called to greater things, two grand celestial bodies caught in the massive pull of the other.
What was so disconcerting, then, was the smallness of Arrell, now, how the vines held him tight and reduced. He had always treated his physical body as an asset, something to be used and discarded as the situation demanded. And now he was so physical, so contained, his stillness unintentional, and if his mind was still churning what could he do with the results? The Spring was here, Arrell was trapped. And Alyosha knew for certain there was no hope for escape, not this time. Whatever was left of Arrell would not come back from this.
The vines have begun to crawl up his hammer arm as he stands lost in thought. He brushes them off and resumes his unrelenting progress. Woosh, clink.
Drip, hiss.
Once, Arrell draws closer to lucidity, and calls out to Alyosha in a familiar cadence, the teasing formality of old titles long voided, a lilting “Exarch Alyosha?”
Alyosha stops his hammering and turns towards Arrell, who beckons with a lone loose finger. Once, Alyosha might have kept his distance, waiting for the situation to tilt in his favor, savoring the games they played, but now he hastens over to Arrell’s thicket, clasping Arrell’s free hand (the other subsumed by vines some time ago) with both of his and squeeze lightly.
“What is it?” he asks, hushed. Arrell exhales, the act straining, before he answers.
“Whose punishment is this, do you think?” he coughs, the fit interrupted by a drop of the vivid nectar into his left eye with a hiss.
“Yours, of course,” Alyosha replies, mind jumping into nostalgic preparations for the witty back-and-forth they had long enjoyed (so long ago), “whose else would it be?”
The ghost of a smile twitches at the corner of Arrell’s decaying lips. “I meant, merely, who has chosen my place here? Surely you know who has decreed my fate, oh Exarch?”
“I thought you placed yourself beyond the reproach of petty gods, oh Wizard,” Alyosha sighs, stroking his thumb against the back of Arrell’s wrist, “and besides, no god put you down here with me.”
“Then who? Or what?” Drip. Hiss.
“I – it is not me, Arrell, holding you here. I have no power over the life I mold with my hammer, no command of their movements. That sort of control was always your area, really.”
“So you are saying the Spring wants me here, then?” Arrell coughs, grunting as chartreuse-violet droplets fall onto his broad browbone.
“Perhaps,” Alyosha sighs, moving a hand up to cup Arrell’s cheek.
“Much as it holds you here, too?”
Alyosha shakes his head for a few seconds before realizing Arrell cannot see it, so he squeezes the wizard’s decaying hand in his muscled palm instead. “I am not held here, Arrell. I have a task that I have set myself to, and I intend to see it done. Surely you understand that impulse. You were always the one who completed the grand projects you set out to finish.”
Arrell smiles then, the corners of his decrepit mouth pulling up ever so slightly. “Truly, the fate of the world rests upon it. But you hear me say that with every project, don’t you?”
The wizard’s cheeks spasm in the way Alyosha has learned is laughter. He squeezes Arrell’s hand again and lets the silence sit, notices how both their lungs continue to expand and contract in the warm air of the Spring forge. They stay there for a second, a moment, a lifetime, until Arrell clears his throat to speak again.
“Then I ask again, Exarch: whose punishment is this?”
Neither sleep. Neither really did before, nor need to now, and so time moves not in days and nights or months and years but in hammer strokes and poison drops, asynchronous heartbeats for two beyond the reaches of conventional death.
Sometimes, Arrell is lucid, and Alyosha lets his mind slip back into the company he enjoyed in another life. He is glad for their serious banter, a third instrument in their poison-and-anvil symphony. But mostly Arrell is lost, unaware of his surroundings or self, fearful existence narrowed down to the spot between his eyes where the pitcher flowers aim, the drip… drip… drip… of sweet liquid his whole memory. The places where his body had been eaten away by the Heat and the Dark – the story of his final fight drawn out over the course of several sober moments, to Alyosha’s taciturn amusement – have begun to flower, his missing chin a patch of sprouting yellow daisies, and Alyosha cannot bear the sound of his terrified moans, hammering louder and louder until his back aches like it did in the beginning and his shoulders go numb from the force of his blows.
This is not his punishment. The plants of the Spring seek only to grow, without vengeance, their simple malice the violence of neutrality. They are not malevolent gods or petty tyrants. They simply grow, removing all in their way. Perhaps Arrell was just that – a barrier to their expansion, best kept below the surface where the Spring had already overgrown all else. For a second Alyosha wants nothing more than to set his hammer down and study the new logic of the not-life he has crafted with godly blood and mortal strength, but he has a task to fulfill, so he raises his hammer and brings it down on the anvil.
This is not his punishment, he reminds himself, but still he curses the twists of time that led him here, hammer in hand as his lover cries out behind him, a craftsman unable to make anything that would relieve him of his pain. Sometimes, Alyosha is grateful that Arrell does not seem fully present.
They had always worked separate worlds, their paths rarely crossing in public, their studies never contradicting each other fundamentally, but the Spring is the most concrete manifestation of his philosophy he has ever been successful in creating, and the thought of his work hurting Arrell all too often becomes unbearable.
They have never been people that put something so fragile and emotional as a relationship over their intellectual goals. Hammer aloft, Alyosha wonders if he made the right choice.