Chapter Text
Lysithea von Ordelia knows a secret about death.
She learns it young—far too young. She learns it in sweat and tears, boiling burns and puss-crusted wounds, fury and anguish and the taste of iron in her mouth, staining her lips and teeth. She learns it against her will, and against nature itself.
She learns it, and it is the first thing that she understands, intuitively, is not something she can hope to teach others. It is the kind of secret you can only understand when you experience it for yourself.
And for her, it has come buried in her blood, engraved on her bones, seared on her soul. She cannot escape it, even if she wanted to.
But that’s how death works, after all. It takes and takes and takes—and that may not be a secret, but it’s a hard-learned lesson all the same.
—
The first memories Lysithea has are of pain, and of rules.
Do not talk back when the people in dark robes, with their strange masks and bright eyes, call for you. When they touch you, stand very still. Bite your tongue when they take your wrist, twist your arm, and push something dark and pulsing and foreign into your veins. Do not show your fear, and do not show your hurt. Use your magic only when asked, and only as they see fit.
Keep the other children in line, make sure they do the same. Behaving is the surest way to surviving another day.
Never tell the dark-robed ones about any strange dreams you have. Any whispers in your ears, or any faint figures behind your eyes. (This last one is not one of the dark-robes’ rules. It is one Lysithea makes up for herself.)
This is what it means to grow up an Ordelia. At the ages other noble children are being taught to ride horses, to pour tea, to understand their societal duties and etiquette (All things outside Lysithea’s world. All things she will have to rush to teach herself years later, after the dark-robes finally give up and leave her and her parents to their house of ghosts), Lysithea learns her own lessons—her own code.
She learns how to wind bandages tightly, but not too much so, around limbs. She learns the right way to gently nudge the others and position herself in sleep, so that if they have an episode in the night they will not choke on their own blood.
She learns there is no difference between nobles and commoners, not really. Not when she, and her siblings, and her cousins, and the servants’ children (because when they took the children of House Ordelia they truly took all of them) line up the same way, cry the same way, die the same way. Noble blood spills exactly like that of a commoner’s, and cleans up just the same, at the end of the day.
Their noble lineage buys them nothing—not a respite, not a hope, and not even extra time. The last ones left had been her and two of the cook’s children. Her siblings and cousins were long gone by then. Their natural affinity for Crests could not save them.
Those other children, her fellow prisoners, are the closest thing she has to companions, to friends. She understands very little about family, about bloodlines and inheritance and biological relation. Who is sibling and who is servant does not matter, when held in the dark-robes’ cold embrace.
They are all her responsibility. She is one of the oldest, and certainly one of the strongest. When the dark-robes come for them, she’s one of the few who doesn’t cry, she’s one of the few who can remain on her feet. She must protect them all.
She knows a small something about parents. She is allowed to see them sometimes, in the early years, when the dark-robes deem it appropriate. But only sometimes.
Her first memory of her mother is mostly of being pulled away from her, during one of their short visits. Her mother’s wailing, her reaching hands, her plaintive cries. She thinks she reached back—in one of those few, blurry moments in her early days before she learned to lock away her tears and her fear, and to feel as little as possible.
She remembers the fuzzy outline of her mother. Warm hands and a soft smile and blonde hair, maybe.
Maybe Lysithea’s hair was blonde back then, too. It’s hard to be sure.
—
When Lysithea is six, she changes the nature of the game she and the dark-robes play. She changes it for all of them, and years later she’ll look back and wonder if it was her fault, after all, that the others died. That the dark-robes pushed them all that far, until they broke.
She’s the one who gave them hope, after all.
She is six, and she is wobbly on her feet, shaking from the chill and from exhaustion. Her limbs feel sluggish and slow, and she can’t focus on the words of the dark-robes, or the faint outline of the glass they hold out to her.
She’s supposed to shatter it, she thinks. She’s supposed to use her magic—use the things in her blood they’ve been trying so hard to give her.
But the room is cold and so is Lysithea and she can barely feel her fingers and she just can’t. She can’t.
The dark-robes place the glass down on a table, they mutter among themselves. Even hidden behind their masks, Lysithea shivers at the way their frowns shape the air.
They call for another child—her cousin, the littlest one. They will try again.
They lead the boy in, a fist tight around his arm. His face is tearful, fearful. He’s smaller than Lysithea, so much smaller, and she can’t remember his name, because most days she barely remembers her own, but he has brown hair and doe-eyes and a cut on his lip and he’s afraid.
Lysithea stumbles, and croaks a refusal. She can do it. They don’t need him. They don’t need him.
They ignore her. One of them goes to coax her out of the room—or drag her, if they must, it makes no difference—and another brings the boy closer, a vial of the sludge they just poured into Lysithea’s veins in hand. Her cousin quakes, and he looks back at her, and she can taste his terror.
Her body is like ice, stiff and numb, but still she fights back, she screams and shakes—because she may feel weak right now, but she is older and stronger and it is her duty to protect the others—and in front of her something flares, bright white and pulsing with energy.
Every glass on the table shatters, the table creaks, a couple of the dark-robes’ masks break. Someone screams, maybe it was her.
When she can see again, there’s a crack in the floor, spread out from under her feet. There’s excited murmurs in the air above her, talk of power and Crests, but all she cares about is the hand that lets go of her cousin, the relief on his face.
She drops to her knees. Everything blurs, and she’s suddenly so tired, but when the dark-robes hands pick at her, inspecting her hands and petting her hair, she doesn’t resist.
She’s changed something, she can feel it, but the rest of the rules remain the same. Don’t resist. Don’t cry. Don’t let them do to the others what can be done to her.
She may not know much about being a noble Ordelia, but this is what it means to be Lysithea.
—
Lysithea grows. Some of the other children die, some don’t. The dark-robes spend more time with her now—even more than the others, even more than before. She has become special to them—indispensible, even.
The word Crest is heard above her ears often now, and they push her to recreate the bright light she called once. She tries. Occasionally, it works. Most of the time, it doesn’t.
She hurts all the time these days, because the dark-robes can’t leave well enough alone, and it has been a very, very long time since she could feel her fingertips, but there are still other children alive. There are still others to make sure the dark-robes leave be, so she endures.
At first, they’d pushed the others harder along with her, particularly those who carried her blood—the first time that blood has really mattered, in this dark place—but then her little brother had died, her tiny sister, most of her cousins. The boy with the doe-eyes had been the first. He’d breathed his last in Lysithea’s arms, made numb and warm and at peace by the power in her hands—a new ability born from grief, another thing to hide from the dark-robes—and he’d gone still with a smile.
And yet still, she could taste the judgment of his older sister, the closest child to her age. It was like metal, sharp and biting. She’d saved him, but then she’d killed him all the same, in the end.
That was when she began to understand the secret of death.
Eventually, the dark-robes learned. Eventually, they turned most of their attention back to Lysithea. Time has turned her fingertips blue, and her heartbeat sluggish, but she’s alive, and still the strongest, so she follows the rules.
Don’t fight. Don’t show your pain. Protect the others. Always. Always.
She isn’t allowed to see her parents for a very long time, visits no longer a luxury afforded to them. Their faces fade in the back of her mind, and their voices blur. She clings to what’s left of her mother, blonde hair and light eyes.
Then, suddenly, she is taken to see her parents—her mother, at least. The dark-robes bring her, up out of the black, with excited voices chattering amongst themselves, a hand heavy in hers, leading her along. They’re more gentle with her now, just a bit. She’s precious, and must be handled delicately.
A baby, they say. Her mother has had a baby. The dark-robes have been given another chance, another opportunity with a child who shares her lineage. They want to compare her to the child—wean the baby onto her own blood now, then switch to the bright, sticky sludge they give Lysithea later on. They have the ability to start even earlier than they did with her, the ability to make this baby even stronger.
Lysithea listens to them, and she does not let anything show on her face, and she does not stumble in her steps. Her hands and feet are ice, she implores her heart to be the same.
Her mother screams when she sees her. She scrambles across the room, ignoring the dark-robes and their masks and the ever present tickle of their eyes, and throws herself to her knees in front of Lysithea. Her mother pulls her into a hug, head buried in her hair, one hand curled in the short strands and the other around her back, whole frame shaking.
“Lysithea,” her mother sobs, uncertain and afraid, and Lysithea cautiously squeezes her mother back. The heat of her body burns Lysithea’s fingers where they touch.
Blonde hair and light eyes. Warm hands. Her mother smells like honey—she’d forgotten that part.
Her mother picks her up, cradles her like the infant she hasn’t been for a long time, and tucks their heads close together. She snarls like a wild animal when the dark-robes step closer, as if they might snatch Lysithea away at a moment’s notice—though, Lysithea supposes, they probably will.
Just this once, however, they let them be. Perhaps they understand Lysithea and her mother will both be more pliant, more willing to cooperate, if the dark-robes give them this.
Her mother crosses the room with her, imperiously ignoring the dark-robes, to a bassinet in the corner. It is wooden, laden with soft blankets and carved with a Crest on the headboard, and Lysithea wonders if she slept there, a long time ago.
As her mother walks, she presses her mouth to Lysithea’s ear, in the facsimile of an embrace. She whispers secrets to Lysithea—the things the dark-robes would never think to say.
The year is 1173, her mother tells her. It is Lysithea’s birthday two moons from now. She will be eight. Her full name is Lysithea von Ordelia, oldest child of her line. Her brother is named Wilheim, her sister is Ramona (But they’re dead, long dead, Lysithea is well aware—does her mother know the same?). This baby is her littlest brother. His name is Avon. Lysithea is his big sister.
His only sister.
They reach the bassinet, and Lysithea peers down in her mother’s arms. Avon is small, so small. His eyes are closed, sound asleep, but Lysithea wonders all the same if they share an eye color or not. She’s forgotten her own. It’s been a long time since she’s seen a mirror.
There are wisps of dark red hair on Avon’s head. Not like their mother’s soft blonde at all. Not like Lysithea either, she thinks, as her mother brushes her too-long bangs from her eyes. What few strands she can see are a dirty off-white. She’s watched them fade over time, what glimpses she can catch. The dark-robes keep her hair short. It’s easier to manage.
Lysithea carefully reaches out a hand, and her mother leans in closer. Avon’s cheek is warm against her fingertips, and he stirs, breath puffing out softly. She can feel his pulse, firm and alive, and more worryingly, she can feel his Crest. No wonder the dark-robes have taken such immediate interest in him.
Behind her, she can hear the dark-robes’ voices again, muttering amongst themselves as they speak of experiments and blood and promise. Her mother tenses as she holds Lysithea. She can no doubt hear them, too—she knows what will become of her son. The kind of short, painful life he will likely lead.
Protect the others, this is Lysithea’s code. She can’t protect Avon, not when he carries her blood, and not when he carries a Crest.
Her mother stifles a sob into Lysithea’s hair, and she sees her cast a furtive glance back to the dark-robes, watching them speak to one another, attention diverted away from Lysithea and her mother. One of her mother’s hands lets go of her, strays to a spare pillow at the base of Avon’s bassinet, and hesitates.
Lysithea thinks of her cousin with the doe-eyes. The way he’d drifted off, finally free. No more suffering.
Avon will suffer, of that Lysithea has no doubt. And, eventually, he will die. They all die.
He may survive some short time, because of his blood, and his Crest, but it will only be a delay. This Lysithea knows, because she has learned the way death tastes on her tongue, and the way it feels in her bones, and she knows its secret.
You can’t outrun it.
And if the dark-robes take him, he will know nothing but pain, the numbness and cold Lysithea has grown into, every day until death rescues him.
Her mother’s hand hovers over the pillow, fisting and unfisting anxiously. Her mother understands what needs to be done, but she’s too frightened, and they will not have much time.
“Mother,” Lysithea says quietly. It is the first word she has spoken in a long time, and the sound croaks and snaps in her throat. Her mother startles. “Mother, let me.”
Her mother stares down at her, wide-eyed, and Lysithea stares back, unflinching. Slowly, hesitantly, her mother lowers her into the bassinet with her brother. She fits easily. Lysithea may be the biggest among the other children, but she is still small enough for this.
She takes the pillow without pause, fitting it between her hands. She can do this for her mother—her mother, who cannot bear to watch another of her children turned into a monster or reduced to a lifeless husk, but is also too fragile to cut short their suffering herself. Her mother, who has warm hands and honey-blonde hair. Lysithea is not like her. She has white in her hair and ice in her heart, and her fingers feel nothing when she fits the pillow over Avon’s face.
She does not pray for his soul, or for his peace. She does not yet know that there is a goddess to pray to. She only hopes, fervently, that he will not struggle. It will alert the dark-robes, and then there will be nothing she can do to save him.
With everything she has in her, she holds the pillow steady, and she calls her magic alongside it, wishing her brother quiet, and still.
Avon, still asleep, squirms just slightly, and Lysithea envelops him in her magic, smothering any cry that might escape with feather-down and with the power the dark-robes have cursed her with. Her brother twitches once, twice, and then goes still. She keeps the pillow firmly on his face regardless. His heartbeat hasn’t given up yet—she can still feel it, same as she can his Crest.
Eventually, it slows, even slower than her own, and then stops. She takes off the pillow, and sits back, and her mother sobs—in relief, or in horror, Lysithea doesn’t know—and collapses to her knees in front of the bassinet. The dark-robes startle, and cry out, running across the room. They yank Lysithea off of her brother, pulling her away as some of them try frantically to revive him, and Lysithea watches them with impassive eyes.
They can’t do anything. She used the power they gave her to make sure Avon will never wake again, and like the fools they are, they’ve made her so much stronger than they are in this regard. For all their experiments, she understands death much more intimately than they ever can.
In this moment, watching her screaming, crying mother be dragged away from the corpse of her youngest brother, as other dark-robes hold her apart from them both and frantically ask her what she has done, Lysithea adds one last rule to the list.
Don’t scream. Don’t cry. Don’t resist. Protect the others.
Free her parents.
They have lost all of their children but Lysithea, and she is not as they made her. The dark-robes have warped her—body and blood—and her parents deserve more than this pain and a daughter who is empty inside, who can suffocate innocence without hesitation.
They are still alive—still warm and bright. She can save them.
She must save them.
—
Lysithea is nine, and she understands that the kind of power she has was not meant for any mortal child. She can feel it singing in her veins, thrumming with her pulse, and is starting to learn how to call it at will. The dark-robes teach her magic, pushing the limits of the Crest power they gave her, and Lysithea exceeds their expectations each time.
They teach her of the nature of flames, and she calls blazing wildfires. They teach her of snow and frost, and she conjures them blizzards. She conquers the power of darkness, and learns to call blight and famine and catch them between her fingers. One day, they bring her a rabbit, small and pale and silken to the touch, and she finds its color ironic when she holds out a hand and her now snow-white hair flurries around her head as she calls a swarm, a pestilence with wings. It devours the rabbit whole, white bones left behind, and she thinks her skin might be almost as pale as she picks up a leg bone, studying it.
A part of her wails inside, but she does not shake, and she does not cry, and she does not throw up, no matter how much her throat burns—and she’s not sure if that pain is from her Crest, or from the tiny piece of her still capable of horror, but it matters very little.
The next day, the dark-robes inject her with a new sludge, a deep red, and she bites back a single whimper that wants to escape as a scream as her body twitches and she learns how to open a black hole above her head. It sucks and sucks, drawing everything in, and she almost wishes it would consume her, too.
Almost—but she is needed here. Other children still live, if not many. Her oldest cousin. The cook’s two youngest. She must keep them safe.
She must keep the dark-robes' eyes on her. Not that it’s hard.
She is nine, and the dark-robes are quite sure. She has two Crests.
The first is easier to call to her. It flares brighter, stronger. She’s learned its shape, memorized it—she’s not quite sure what it means, but based on what the dark robes say, she knows it means something. One day, she’ll understand it.
Major Crest, they tell her, pleased when she calls it forth for them on demand. When she uses it to make her magic so strong the walls shake, and her body trembles to hold in all that power.
The Major Crest of Gloucester, another says, and she files that away. Perhaps her mother would know what that means, if she asked, but she can’t. She has not been allowed to see her mother since Avon. The dark-robes blame her mother, and they are still punishing her, using her daughter’s absence as the only thing they can still take away.
She has seen her father once in that time. He’d held her hands in his, trying to warm up her stiff fingers. He’d whispered he didn’t blame her for Avon, not in the slightest, but all Lysithea had been able to do was stare at the red of her father’s hair, and remember. Despite how fervent her father’s words were, she wasn’t sure if she could believe him.
Her second Crest is not as easy to call as the first. She is told that is because it is a Minor Crest, the Minor Crest of Charon, and those are less powerful, more difficult to activate. Still, the dark-robes push her to master it, to learn to call it as easily as her Major Crest.
She tries.
She measures time in the magic she learns, in the burn of the dark-robes’ Crest mixtures in her veins, and in death. She is the dark-robes’ greatest success, but they still wonder if they can’t do better, and they still make use of all the test subjects available to them.
Two major Crests, they agree over her head, over her cousin’s head as they drag her away, over the heads of the cook’s children as they cower, would be better. Lysithea has successfully taken on a second Crest, and all the others now host one. Perhaps there is room yet for more success.
Lysithea explores the intricacies of her Crest of Charon. She learns how to use it to master storms, to turn her frame into a lightning rod and bring thunder and wind to heel under her command. The dark-robes attempt to give her cousin a second Crest. The girl flares bright, then fades, and then she dies slowly, with Lysithea using her magic to bring enough snow into her palm to cool her cousin’s overheated forehead as she burns up. The fever ravishes her body, too much even for the ice of Lysithea’s touch to conquer, until finally she slips away.
The dark-robes task Lysithea with learning to use her two Crests in tandem, and under their watchful eyes she pushes her body to the limit, trying and failing to carry the crackle and howl of Charon’s storm in one hand, and the current of Gloucester’s gravitational pull in the other. Despite all her rules, the mere attempt brings her to her knees every time, and while she does not—will not—scream, the dark-robes still seethe in disappointment.
They attempt to give the cook’s daughter a second Crest. She develops the chills, body shaking every night, and Lysithea can do nothing, unable to bring warmth to her frozen, frost-stained fingers, when her own body is slowly collapsing under the strain of thunder and black holes struggling to coexist inside her. The cook’s daughter dies, lips blue and eyes glassy, and the girl’s brother buries his face in Lysithea’s shoulder and howls his grief, the air around them crackling with the promise of tar and decay gifted to the boy by his stolen Crest of Gautier.
Then it’s just the two of them—the last, the strongest, the only ones who could survive the toll the Major Crests take on their body—and despite her best efforts, Lysithea learns the boy’s name.
He is Francis, and she is Lysithea, and they are not siblings—in another life, they would be servant and master—but they sleep curled next to each other all the same. He hugs her hands to his chest, trying to breathe life back into them, and she counts his heartbeat under her palms, wills him to survive. Charon rages, and Gloucester pulls, and Gautier bubbles and boils, and Lysithea sometimes wonders if between the two of them, they might have the power to tear this entire place down, if only they weren’t both too afraid to try.
Lysithea knows they’re stronger now—stronger than any individual dark-robe will ever be. But this world of fear, pain, and obedience is all they’ve ever known, and they are small, and they are outnumbered, and their parents are hostages in everything but name.
She wants to save Francis. She wants to save her parents. She does not know if she can have both.
Lysithea turns ten—she thinks she does, maybe, maybe—and the dark robes succeed in giving Francis a second Crest: a minor Crest of Cethleann. They seem frustrated he did not pick up a Major Crest, but pleased he managed a second one all the same, and he becomes as much a subject of their study as Lysithea does.
But the strain of the second Crest is too much for Francis, and when the dark-robes press him to learn to use it, it begins to pull his body apart, like the first rip of a seam slowly splitting a bag open entirely. The Crests struggle for dominance in Francis’s body, slowly destroying him, as Lysithea watches.
Like her siblings, like her doe-eyed cousin, like all the other children, she can do nothing to save him—only hold him in her arms, soothe his fever and his pain with her magic, and hope to some higher power she doesn’t believe in that it will at least end quickly.
It doesn’t.
Francis’s Crest of Cethleann—built for a healer or nurse, someone with kind hands and a peaceful smile—keeps trying to save him, repair his body even as its power combined with Gautier destroys him from the inside out. Lysithea can feel it, can trace the Crest at it lights up under his skin. It frantically keeps his heart beating, his blood pumping, as his other organs slowly give out. It takes days, and every night as Lysithea watches, Francis’s head in her lap, she thinks of Avon in his bassinet, and realizes this may be the one thing that can haunt her more.
“Lysithea,” he says to her on the final night, breath shallow and eyes glazed. “Lysithea, please.” She smooths a hand over his forehead, and begs her heart of ice to feel nothing, show nothing. He does not need to see fear on her face as he dies. “Please, make it stop.”
“I can’t,” she admits quietly, her rarely-used voice raw.
“Like you did for the others. Please.”
Hesitantly, she nods, and calls her magic to her, her gift born from death—the only kind of healing she knows how to offer. She wills him silent, and warm, and still, peaceful for his final moments, and Cethleann screams back against her, fighting to save its host. The numbness in her fingers crawls up her hands, biting at her wrists, and she hisses.
“I can’t,” she says, and the edge of a sob catches in her throat. “It won’t let me.”
“Then don’t heal me.” Francis’s eyes search her face, and she tries to remember how old he is. Her age? Younger? They’re the same size, but it means little. Ever since she learned to tame Charon, she’s stopped growing. Her Crests take up all the energy her body can offer, none left for anything else. “Just end it. Any way you can.”
A pillow, she thinks. Right now she’d give anything for a pillow. Something she could use to make it quiet, and gentle, like she had for Avon. But the dark-robes had learned their lesson with her brother—had figured out what her heart of ice is capable of. There have not been pillows here for years.
“Please,” Francis begs her one last time, and Lysithea swallows down her hesitance, her horror. She counts the rules back to herself. Be still. Be quiet. Be obedient. Protect the others.
There is only one thing left to do for him.
She grits her teeth, and calls Gloucester to her. Charon is too violent, too rough-edged. She needs the finesse of control here. Francis smiles, so much relief written on his face, and something like affection. Lysithea does not shake, and she does not cry, and she does not close her eyes. He deserves this much.
Darkness whispers to her, singing its sorrow as it has to her for years—just as the figures and shadows that have haunted her dreams all this time have, as well—and she forms it in her palms, shaping it into a shard. She drives it through Francis’s heart.
Francis chokes quietly, blood bubbling out of his mouth, and seeping from his chest onto Lysithea’s hands. Its heat burns, prickling against her dead fingertips, and as the first drops of blood hit the ground, Francis goes still.
The darkness dissolves, leaving an empty wound behind, and beneath her palms Lysithea can feel Gautier and Cethleann fade as they die with their host.
And then there is nothing.
She is the only one left, and that somehow makes the room colder—too cold for a living being. Perhaps it is just as well Lysithea has rivers of frost under her skin, and has always been more dead than not. It might be the only reason any piece of her has survived.
Her limbs are sluggish and numb, and her lips are blue, and her hair is white—a perfect mirror of Francis’s own when she dips her head low, forehead resting tiredly against his. He looks more like someone who could be her brother than any of her siblings, marked in bright reds and soft blondes, ever did.
She wills herself to feel nothing. She steels her face, and curls her hands into fists, and counts back the rules. Scratches the last one off the list. Counts them again.
And then, for the first time in a very long, long while, Lysithea cries.
—
The dark-robes who come the morning after Francis dies do not startle at the scene before them when they arrive to collect her. They stare, gazes impassive behind their masks, and Lysithea stares back blankly from where her head rests on Francis’s chest, white hair stained red on the side pressed against him.
One of them goes to her, yanks her off of Francis, and smacks her hard across the face. A punishment for crossing a line that was not hers to breach: the only things that had been allowed to take Francis to death’s waiting arms had been time or the dark-robes themselves. Unlike with Avon, they do not ask her what has happened, and she does not attempt to explain herself. It would be a waste of words on both ends.
A boy is dead, but it changes almost nothing about the dark-robes’ plans. All that differs is one stays behind to remove Francis’s body, and another takes her to wash her hair before the day’s scheduled events.
After her hair is clean, still dripping water onto stone, she’s brought before the dark-robes in the room they’ve tested and tortured her in for years. She does as she’s told, as she always has. She follows the rules. She sits still as they pour their poison into her body—still seeking, it seems, to give her even more Crest power than she already carries—and she does not cry, and she does not speak. She runs through the warm-ups silently, and perfectly. She lets them measure her, weigh her, manhandle her.
Then, as always, they ask her to use both her Crests at once. They watch her closely, waiting expectantly. Every time before this, Lysithea has made her best attempt. Every time, she has given them all she has, and followed the rules, and pushed her body to the breaking point, in order to keep their attention on her.
Only now, she realizes, there is no one else to deflect their gaze away from. There is no one to protect, no one to save. Everyone is dead. The only people left are her parents, whom she has not seen in years—and who, she realizes, if things continue as they are, she may never see again.
Everything Lysithea has known since she was aware of her existence is meaningless now, the last fragments left behind with Francis’s corpse. The rules are meaningless now.
Be still. Be quiet. Do not let your face betray you. Do not fight back.
For what?
“Child,” one of the dark-robes says firmly, calling her back to the task at hand. Not her name, never her name. “Your Crests.”
Almost without her permission, Lysithea feels her head nod. Her mind is stuck somewhere else, caught up in the tangled fractures of the rules that she built her life around.
She is stronger, she knows. She has been stronger for a very long time. They made her that way.
All that has kept her back is the rules, and her fear. Her belief that she must be the shield between the dark-robes and the others, until her last breath.
Lysithea is a dead girl walking, cold to the touch and numb inside and out. Her heart is ice, and her blood is poison, and she does not feel enough—not enough to be human, not in the slightest—but for this moment she does feel, she feels so much it eats through her body, and speeds the sluggish beat of her pulse.
Hatred. Anger. It tastes like feather-down and cotton, like honey and sweet rot.
“Child,” the dark-robe reminds her again, and automatically, she lifts her hands in front of her.
She calls Gloucester with one—pull and power, darkness and despair. The sheer force of it is her oldest friend, and though it chills her, she welcomes it as it surges under her skin.
And then she puts it aside, and turns to Charon. This has always been the struggle—her more troublesome, if less powerful, Crest: the storm that doesn’t want to be conquered. But this time, she seeks not to tame it. She reaches out to the lightning buried in her bones, blows wind into it with her rage, and the maelstrom shapes in her mind’s eye as the Crest responds to what it knows best. Fury, and thunder.
Charon lights up in her other hand, Gloucester still pulsing in time with it, and in front of her the dark-robes light up, murmuring around themselves as the record keepers scribble notes.
One goes to give Lysithea her next instructions, but she cannot hear him over the storm around her, in her. The crackle of Charon and the tide of Gloucester, pulling her along, urging her forward.
She thinks of Avon. Francis. Wilheim and Ramona. The doe-eyed boy. The cook’s daughter. Her oldest cousin. All the others, whose names are long lost, but whose faces never left her.
Lysithea screams, pulling her hands back to her chest and forcing Gloucester and Charon together, and around her she feels the world implode.