Chapter Text
In the city of Buyan, the Country of Life, Marya Morevna’s inhumanity was slowly being woven into her. There were many things around her that the blame could be placed on for such a change. Perhaps it was the strange beings she hung around - the rusalka who slept in bed with her, the cosmetics-fond witch who spoke with her in the cafe, the wood sprite who she smiled at. Perhaps it was the city itself, crafted with bone and sinew and bubbling blood. Perhaps it was even Marya, who stoked the change’s sparks herself, who called upon them without words and begged them to catch fire inside her, to burn her humanity away until she knew nothing but the life of a chyerti - a devil.
It was a mix of all of these things.
But most of all, the blame for Marya’s alchemical transformation could be placed at the feet of her elegant, brutal tsar husband, the man who stole Marya’s breath from her tongue and the words from her mind - Koschei the Deathless, who knew no ruler but himself and his dearly beloved wife.
How Marya adored and cursed her strange paramour, night after night. They fought a war with Death, but in those days, the larger scale of Death did not matter to them. It was the little deaths they stoked between themselves, the ones they had control over - the little death of fear, the little death of restraint, the little deaths in the bedroom - that they used as weapons in the war against Death itself.
In those days, the Tsar and Tsaritsa of Life ruled like thunder. They were winning the war against Death, the days of peace more wild than Death could have ever imagined. Each day, Marya Morevena learned new ways to rule, new ways to desire, new ways to become inhuman. It was in their continued victories that Marya Morevna committed the ultimate slight - the one that helped her tear the last shreds of humanity from herself.
Her husband and her consorted with one another, on a night longer than the sky itself, and came to a decision. Marya stood above all others who had tried to vie for Koschei’s heart and failed. She alone had completed the three tasks to marry him, she alone had sworn that she would take more from him than any of those empty girls could have ever given him. Koschei admired that hunger in her. It was so very much like his own. As such, he broke from the way he typically did things, the way the story went. She deserved such a thing as his equal.
He decided to raise his wife to a level as hungry and savage as his own, to make her a devil like himself. A chyerti to rule above all other chyerti, his Tsaritsa of Life in earnest. And so they set about the process of making Marya Morevna deathless, the same way he himself was.
Three nights Marya Morevna set out into the hungry darkness, underneath the moon.
Three times Marya Morevna had to make her fingernails sharp, unyielding blades.
Three pieces Marya Morevna clawed out from her chest of her death, piece by piece.
Three nights that Koschei challenged his wife, to prove that she desired deathlessness as much as he.
Three books Koschei the Deathless filled with new tales of Marya Morevna.
Three folktales he had his subjects spread in the human world of Marya Morevna.
The process was sacrosanct in all regards. Nothing like this had been done before, and nothing like this would ever be done again. As the death was clawed from her, Marya Morevna could feel the sparks of inhumanity set alight. The pieces of her human life began to fall away in the wind. First it was the memories of the mother who had raised her, and then it was the memories of those who had scorned her at school, and then it was all those memories that did not serve her falling away.
She tore her way through the world in those three days, clawing and snarling and howling. The rebirth of Marya Morevna was not silent by any means. She cursed her husband’s very being - she resented him for even considering making her deathless, making her forget all that did not serve her. He would always smile, and wrap a lock of his wife’s black hair around one of his thin fingers.
“You have crafted of yourself a revolution, my dear little wolfling,” he would hiss, his voice crackling with its usual soft cruelty. And she would look into his eyes, and find her own grandeur there - all that he saw her as, and all that she could be. Her lips always drew back in a merciless smile.
They encased Marya’s death in a series of threads, to correspond with Koschei’s needle-threaded death. Her death was woven into something that even now remains unspoken. When the process was completed, she was more macabre than all the Country of Death. Her dresses were stained with streaks of crimson, bits of flesh and red dug under her nails like eyelids that would open any minute.
She burst forth into the world with new ways and new tricks. Marya Morevna fought through the war with her own fire, now. She would tear into the necks of firebirds with her sharpened nails. She would not tire in battle, fighting with the strength of twelve men. She wielded magic as only a horrific chyerti like Baba Yaga could, and she would never be denied.
This vexed their enemy, the Tsar of Death, greatly. Deathlessness was defined by stasis - for Koschei to change their story showed a new kind of deathlessness, a new sort of revolution. Marya Morevna had burst through, a new creature of viciousness and desire, and what she had learned from her life once spent human had made her a devil to fear wholeheartedly.
Yes, the Tsar of Death thought. Something would have to be done about this. Both her, and him - for if she was removed from the picture, the Tsar of Death was sure that the Tsar of Life would go down fighting and end the story forever more.
He went to three of his servants. Three suggestions were given to him.
“Let them both die for once in the Country of Death.”
“Let their allies perish and increase attack until they surrender.”
“Turn them human.”
That third suggestion was what the Tsar of Death ended up taking for his own.
It was then that he crafted a ritual, delving into the very bones of the world.
Let the Tsar and Tsaritsa of Life be reborn, he hissed, into bodies anew, into lives anew, into a world anew. There they would not trouble him, and the war would be won.
So did it come to pass that Koschei the Deathless and Marya Morevna were rewoven into bodies anew, lives anew, a world anew.