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He looked around the little market. Statues of saints littered the place, and Aleksander wanted to sneer.
Unfortunately, in the body of the holy man he was in, it wasn’t something Aleksander could do without gaining a second, third and fourth glance. He really needed new clothes; perhaps he could subtly make Nikolai pay for some. Right now, he just wanted some fresh air - the palace got so stuffy ever since he strolled in it as, well, himself. It was almost as if they were all walking on eggshells, afraid of saying the wrong thing and setting him off. If asked, Aleksander found it funny, but his dearest little friends did not. Humorless, the lot of them.
Well, not his problem. What was his problem was the sudden, latent desire to make all those statues become pieces of useless rocks under his boots. Religious ornaments, worth absolutely nothing: saints would not help the common people out of their own free will.
Then, pause: a statue with familiar features. A girl, holding a rifle, volcra at her feet. Alina, trapped inside a statue, forever engaged in a holy war she barely knew she’d started.
He’d asked about her, in the first few days. Casual, sardonic and simple: “And where’s my favorite Sun Summoner? Has she been hiding from me?”
Nikolai and Zoya had exchanged worried glances, an entire conversation in a few seconds. Aleksander allowed it out of sheer boredom.
“She died.” A pause, dry gulping from Nikolai. He did not seem to be lying. “Soon after she killed you, Alina crumbled. We… We had her cremated in your funerary pyre. ”
Blink once, blink twice, the sound of his blood rushing in his ears.
“Dead?” So he was alone - what was the point of living, then? Aleksander pretended it didn’t affect him, let it slide over him as if it were water, but the loneliness corroded his insides as if it were a poison. It was.
Now, faced with a statue - an ugly thing, clunky and awful -, he cocked his head. The vendor looked at Aleksander. He said a price, a sum that barely registered in Aleksander’s mind before he stuck his hands in his pockets, looking around for the money he’d ever so graciously gotten from Nikolai.
They had put him in a body after his death against his will. Aleksander figured he was in the right to do some petty thievery from his friends/enemies.
It took a few clever tricks, but he sneaked inside the palace with that ridiculous statue undetected. Aleksander put it in his room, atop a drawer and near a window, stared at it for a long while, thoughtless. He hoped Alina would like the light.
Then, shaking his head at the ridiculousness of his thoughts, Aleksander left it alone, hiding it under the cover of darkness so he wouldn’t have to face it.
He returned to it later, after dinner, drunk. He missed being drunk, and this body was a lightweight, so there was barely time to appreciate the kvas properly. He’d have to build his resistance from the ground up. Again.
The statue stared at him, silent, unmoving. Aleksander sat in front of the statue, pretended the hair on it was white not because of the stone it’d been carved from, but because the girl he knew had used merzost, pretended she was still there, watching him through their connection. Pretended, that was it: she was dead, long gone while he slept.
“You were the one who deserved this whole…” A pause, collecting words slurred together into an almost incomprehensible mess that only made sense to Aleksander himself. “This second life. You deserved it, not me. You would’ve been better for this than I ever was.”
The statue did not reply. Aleksander felt stupid to even have tried talking to it, but he still kept going.
“I do wonder what you would’ve said about this cult thing. The Starless Saint...” He snorted. “Probably called it the idiotic waste of time it was. You would’ve fought against it. You’d have hated it, the statues, the adoration. You hated it already when you were alive.”
Aleksander kept looking at the statue. If he’d stopped and thought about it, he would have realized he looked like a supplicant at the statue’s feet, praying for safety, praying for whatever people prayed for - he’d never been allowed to ask for help, his own body a weapon he, himself, had been forced to forge lest he perish.
Sankta Alina of the fold, daughter of the people, the statue had inscripted on its base. What did that make him? Sankt Aleksander, bastard of the fold? He still carried the weight of the Black Heretic in his shadows: no acts of good faith would redeem him - even death had failed to do so.
Rising, Aleksander made a motion to use the Cut - to destroy the imagine of Alina from his eyes, perhaps even from his heart - but hesitated, and hated himself for it.
Perhaps he could leave it alone, staring at him in his room, to remind him to - be good. To avoid committing past mistakes. Aleksander still wasn’t too sure.
Maybe if he talked to it, Alina - a ghost, just like he’d been - would listen and keep him company.