Chapter Text
The frost was never new, not like the moon - although its phases were a thing of splendor more than nature.
He raised his hood, hair iridescent in the light. This form was not like the one before it. Escaping fate had been no easy feat, after all, though the measure surely had its boons: a realm of his own, to rule as he was born to. Sorcery, to be practised as he was born to practise it. All without guise. That strange and bright mask... heavy with the weight of his lineage… gone, but not forgotten.
The linking of the fire had always been a mistake. Gouge after gouge into the flesh of destiny, of prophecy. Any mortal would curl at the thought of such folly, but it turned the deity into stone, cold and hard, as he looked upon the capitol of the Sunless Realms with eyes that, in the firelight, seemed almost serpentine.
Slender fingers passed over something soft and old. A note preserved from a reality that was, now, lifetimes away. The writing was fine enough, rough in the way of someone for whom calligraphy was not a natural talent. The words were… charming, in their own right. The deity permitted himself to utter them, just above a whisper: “I look once more upon the surface still… to see the moon again in hallowed light.”
His voice sounded odd in the quiet, too jarring to press on. The rest was recited in the confines of his mind, in a voice deeper than his own, and more robust. Lo, do readily give their hearts to spill, the beasts and men alike that roam the night.
After this long, the poetry did not tighten his chest as it once did. Since the passing of that great knight, the word of it… well. Such was the way of things.
The rest of the sonnet was burned from his mind, and the world. Indeed with fire, most ironically.
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The body dragged. Coils of itself, for centuries, eons, reconverging. Memories twinkling in the dark... so vulnerable, so easily devoured, and yet, so very hopeful.
Hands were searching. Eyes could not see. The feel of cold earth and stone beneath and above and around… the sound of bones. Chattering. Falling. Stalking.
What lay just above the Abyss? One wondered…
Suddenly, after lifetimes, there was the feel of air - of cold, biting air, slipping through cracks, reaching and reaching and reaching. The body was compelled forwards, out of the dark and into a soft, amber light. On the wall. Visions blurred and focused and blurred once more, back into obscurity. There was a darkness that was unlike that of the past. It could be cut, now, by light - firelight - and perfumed with the smell of sorcery and dust. Many aged things, shelved in the walls, shelved in the ceiling, shelved in the ground.
One could only push forward.
There was a small doll on the ground, which skittered forth, but not too far away. It called with a voiceless cry. It pulled without a form.
The doll and the body. On and on and on. Into the light, and into the jagged arms of a life-bringing, soul-stirring cold.