Archive of Our Own ^beta

All his life, he has been attuned to the dark. It has responded to his call even when no others would. Even when no others could.

The dark is unending and always there, hidden behind the light of day, encircling the stars at night. The darkness is the great sea in which little islands of light shine through. It should have been enough.

He longs for the darkness now.

He has made this trek dozens of times over as many lifetimes. The swath of land, now a jagged, gray, and lifeless scar which is bleached duller and paler every year by the light of day, was once lush with trees and human life. Little farms and cottages as well as the military camps that had been a threat to his people.

There had been children, those who were Grisha and those who were not, among those who had become volcra, too.

The swath of land had once been darkness itself, as high as sight and air and the sky. It had been his testimony, his greatest failure and his greatest challenge. It had the potential for him to cleanse the world of all who would have harmed him and his kind.

As he stands at the edge of the unnaturally gray sand, observing the obscure line between it and the land which had been untouched, mingled together at their edges because of the nature of the soil, he smiles an enigmatic smile. A stranger passing by in this desolate place might not have seen the bitterness in it.

Like calls to like.

Only, this places calls to him instead of the other way around.

If Grisha are like birds, born to make flying look easy, he is like a bird flying ever more into an endless sky without ever finding a place to land.

Once again, he is in hiding. Once again, not a soul is to know who he is. It has been this way for decades, and he does not know if or when it will end.

With something twisting inside of him, caught between frustration and an ironic sort of levity, he kicks the toe of his boot into the sand, making the line between the scar and the fruit-bearing earth evermore difficult to define.

It is an ordinary, hot summer’s day; the air inside their cottage is cool in spite of this. One of the many small and steady changes to the world around them has been the creation of machines to fight the uncomfortable extremes of weather. The triumph of Fabrikators and ordinary engineers working together sits in front of a bedroom window which is opened far less than it used to be.

Goosebumps rise on Alina’s arms as she walks in front of the cool blast of air. She makes her way from the bedroom to the kitchen. It isn’t a far walk. Their little cottage is far smaller than the orphanage, but there had come a time when they’d had no choice but to leave the work of most of their lives in the capable hands of a few others who had been brought on as help in the intervening years.

Well, he had no choice.

Alina holds a glass under the water spigot and draws cool, fresh water from the tap. She looks out the window over the kitchen sink, but it is so dark out that she sees her own reflection as much as she sees the grass and trees beyond the windowpane. She looks much the same as she had when she had become a part of history, all those years ago. There are lines that had not been around her eyes when she had attended the Winter Fete, but otherwise she might have looked not a month older.

The glass overfills a little and the flow of water over her fingertips startles her back into the present. She shuts off the tap and takes a sip off the top so it won’t spill on the floor as she carries it back to the bedside table. She sets it down with a soft clink.

Perching on the edge of a creaking old chair, Alina folds one leg up and lets the other dangle over. She feels keenly aware of herself for a moment: the flexibility of her joints, the easiness of her breathing, and the way she can still take a drink of water without help.

It all feels horribly unfair.

Alina knows she should not be thinking about herself so much right now, so she blinks back her tears one more time and reaches out to touch Mal’s arm. He lies on his back, and she can see and hear the deep, choppy hesitation that rattles with nearly every breath.

She knows it won’t be long now.

Mal had insisted that he wanted to go home before the end, and this is the best she can do for him. The best she can do is sit and lie with him until he breathes his last because he hadn’t wanted to do it in a brightly-lit, sterile room that didn’t remind him of anything about their life together.

He makes a sound that she recognizes as one of pain. She does not need to ask him what hurts him. It would be easier to ask him what doesn’t have the potential to cause him pain now.

Alina has seen many of her loved ones die. She saw them die in war and at the hands of her counterpart, her greatest enemy. She has seen little orphans who came to them too sick and too late for anything to be done for them except to be soothed into their rest. Some friends who long-outlived the war have gone now, lost to illnesses, accidents, and age.

But of course, this one is the hardest.

Some of his skin is the same as it ever was, but she cannot help but notice that parts of it have dried to the point of better-resembling leather. There is a pallor to it that makes it easy to see the veins in his temples. He has not been drinking much at all for several days, and she knows that will take him if something else does not.

“Alina,” his voice scrapes out, and the rasp of it makes her wince with sympathy.

“I’m here,” she assures him, brushing delicate fingertips up and down his forearm. She studies his face and sees that he is struggling for his own voice. Her eyes ache and burn, but she puts on a smile, which is an oddly familiar, nearly nostalgic feeling. “You don’t have to say anything. Just rest.”

Mal makes an inarticulate sound that makes her laugh softly. It is not unkind but rather some kind of admiration for his stubbornness.

“I do,” he says.

She waits and wonders for a long while after that, her fingers coaxing but not insisting. Finally, she stills the movement of her arm to reach down and hold his hand.

“I’ll... wait there, for you. In the...” he says. He seems to lose the energy to speak before he can finish, but Alina does not need to wonder what he is about to say.

“In the meadow,” she says. They have returned to their meadow, time and again, and watched the orphans play across it in safety and peace. Long ago, ‘the meadow’ had become not the meadow but an imagining of peace and a place they would meet yet again after death tore them apart. A place where questions would be answered or no longer matter.

It is less of a comfort to Alina than it had once been. She looks at the sagging, bruised skin of his hand and forearm compared to hers which does not show its age at all except in a few scattered scars. The meadow, if it is indeed a place, may wait for her, but she does not know how long it will take her to get there.

Mal does not speak coherently after that, and Alina does not leave his side until he breathes his last. The warm, clammy feeling of his hand unnerves her, and she watches as his skin goes more pale than it had ever been, his heart still in his chest. She knows that even if there is science, Grisha or otherwise, to bring him back, that it would be cruel.

When she knows that there is no chance he can feel left alone anymore, that it is she who is alone, she lets go and sits back. She clasps her hands over her knees and blinks back tears. They are of grief but also of fear. What does she do now?

She thinks back to Aleksander and how he had finally fallen.

She wonders if it could be so simple as a knife.

But she knows that is not what Mal would have wanted her to do.

Instead, she weeps herself sick. She gets up and searches for a place to retch, having the mad notion that she doesn’t want to throw up on the bed. And when she cannot cry or feel sorry for herself anymore, she goes for the help she will need to see Mal to his rest.

Alina wears black to the service that is held for her husband. She wears a veil, too, not to hide her tears but the youth that has followed her here like a curse. The shrine to the Saints includes imagery dedicated to Sankta Alina, the Sun Summoner, long presumed dead. Alina keeps her head bowed as a priest recites funerary rites for Malyen Oretsev under a different name.

Hidden under the shroud of weakness and obscurity, Alina squeezes the hand of a young man who sits by her side, giving him leave to recite a short eulogy for the man who had helped raise him.

When the funeral is over, Alina turns to leave the ornate, murmuring-quiet building. In the entryway, she notices a mirror, surrounded by an engraved frame. She peers at her own eyes through the veil and recalls the first time she had worn such a thing. She sees herself, all in black, and wonders if this is how darkness claims her after all.

To start a new life in the same place, to return to the orphanage again, crosses her mind, but it is a stupid fantasy. The fact that she had gotten away with it once seems bizarre, looking back on it as she loses herself in thinning out the possessions she had accumulated for years and years. A few things are kept for sentimentality, others for their use, but almost everything is quietly sold away through a broker.

She needs money to leave her lived life behind.

Alina sets out in plain, simple clothes with her hair tied back. She carries a pack on her shoulders, and she conceals her money in more than one place. It has been a long while since she has journeyed away from Kermanzin, and the thought of doing it in any way but on foot seems dangerous.

It has been a long time since Ravka was at war, but this danger seems to be more to herself than to the world. It is instinct that pulls her away, the way a rabbit sets out bounding for cover long before any other creature would know the wolf is coming.

She wonders if it would even be possible for someone to piece together who she is, who she had been after all this time. It is not as if anyone had an exact likeness of her made, all those years ago.

Still, she feels drawn first to the river to the west. The soft sound of the water to her right hand guides her around a bend. Birds sing songs from above, and the sunlight is not so harsh through the branches and leaves of the trees. She finds a smile for the first time since Mal’s passing when she watches some waterfowl tend their young along the riverbank.

The river turns her southward as she keeps it always to her right. She has a map folded up with her, but she senses it, too. She had, once upon a time, been a mapmaker, and she had learned from a tracker, too.

The Fold is no longer depicted as such an imposing gash on modern maps. Instead, it resembles something more like a desert, soft and gray and plain. She knows, however, that following the river to its end would lead her through what had once been called the Unsea and spill into the True Sea.

She has no desire to see the Fold again, if by another name and far less threatening. After she has made a day’s journey, she makes the snap decision that she should head due south. She remembers drawing a high, snow-capped mountain range that defined the border between Ravka and Shu Han.

Her own blood muddied that border far more than Ravkans and the Grisha had liked, during wartime. She does not know much about the present politics of Shu Han except that hunting and experimenting upon Grisha is a far less lucrative trade than it used to be. Never mind that she has not been Grisha for a very long time.

She remembers nothing of her parents. If she had once recalled the sound of a voice or the scent of a shawl, she is certain that time has erased anything that could dredge it up to the surface. She is not Grisha, and she is not the daughter of anyone Ravkan or Shu. She is an orphan, yet again, in nearly every way she can imagine. Still, curiosity about who she might have been is a welcome distraction from the grief over who she can be no longer, and those mountains seem as good a place to get lost as any.

For all the power he has commanded and the many years he has lived, he is still Grisha, which means that in some sense he is still human. He has watched as the line between the two has continued to blur for most of another century. After Alina had tried to kill him – and oh, how he had wished, time and again, that she had succeeded – he had been weak in a way he had not known for hundreds of years. In the time that has followed, his being and command over what exists in the world has burgeoned and ebbed.

There is a heaviness to it now. To know that his match and equal had existed in the world and had then that she had dispersed her essence, spreading it so thin that it drowned his life’s work out and then faded into meaninglessness, makes him feel lost in the shadow he once commanded.

He thinks of her in the burning, bright light of day. He wonders if she ever looks at the sun until it nearly takes her eyes from her. He wonders if he wishes that would happen. That she would be so without a sense vital to her perception as he has been all this time.

The sun goes down once more, and he finds a place just beyond the edge of the barren landscape to sleep.

In her sleep, cold damp air settles on her face as she wrapped the rest of herself in a sleeping bag. The sounds of human invention are far away, and the sounds of birds trilling and singing is gentle punctuation to the wind and flowing water.

“Alina! Miss Alina!” a young voice calls to her.

Alina’s eyes open and she expects to see herself back at the orphanage in the room that had been hers for so many years. She frowns as her gaze sees not the clean lines of a door frame but the framing of two trees around the body of a small child, clothed in a pale nightgown. As she sits up in her sleeping bag, she decides that she believes it is a little boy.

The child watches her silently, and she can barely make out the features of his face beneath the trees and the moonlight.

She frowns. All the children she had raised and cared for had known her by a different name, left behind with her hard-won, ordinary life.

It occurs to her that perhaps she was dreaming or still is. The latter seems less likely as the night air and damp get at her skin as she disentangles herself from her sleeping bag and quickly tugs on her shoes.

“Hello?” she calls to the child.

“Can you help me?” the child asks.

“Help you?” Alina echoes to him. She blinks a couple of times. Something about the child seems a bit wrong, but she has seen so many orphans with so many awful stories that she cannot blame a child for having a haunted, hollow look in their eyes.

“I’m lost,” he explains succinctly.

Alina presses her lips together and begins to roll up her sleeping bag and affix it to her pack in its place. She remains crouched there, ready to move, and keeps glancing between her quick work and the little boy, not wanting him to feel ignored.

“How did you get here?” she asks him. “Did you come with your mother or your father?”

“I don’t think so,” the child says, reaching up to scratch at the side of his hay-colored hair which seems trimmed short but not right to his head.

She has further questions at the strange answer, but she remembers that it could be quite painful to ask a recently orphaned child direct questions about their parents. Often, they were too young to give clear answers, and she believes that this boy cannot be more than six.

“Alright,” she allows, thinking of what to ask him next as she stands up, a little wobbly with a sense of still being quite tired and heavy-limbed.

The boy steps behind the nearest tree, nearly disappearing before circling back around, his hand on the trunk.

Alina takes a small, cautious step toward him. She does not want to frighten him away.

“Is there anyone I should take you to?” Alina asks as she catches up to him. As she looks down into his eyes, for a moment their color seems a bit strange, deep and darker than his pupils, but she blinks and her heart resumes its steady rhythm. He has dark eyes, and she decides that it must have been a trick of the light or her own sometimes grim imagination.

The child shakes his head. His hand is as pale as his gown as he reaches up to take hers. She cannot help but smile, even if there is a sadness behind it.

“If you don’t know where you want to go, how do you know you’re lost?” Alina asks with a lilt that is more cheerful than the question. As a long-grown woman, she knows that there are many perfectly good answers to that question, but the answers had seemed simpler, even when she was a child in the orphanage.

“I don’t know where I am,” he answered after a long moment of pressing his lightly chapped lips together.

“How about we look for a road, then?” Alina asks, though it takes her off the path she had intended to go.

She wonders whether she will keep him or find a place to send him off where he’ll be safe. Her heart tugs her in both directions. For all the grand destiny of being a saint might have been, perhaps her real fate is the care of motherless children.

With some bitter irony churning inside her that she refuses to let show on her face, she walks along with the child’s hand in hers, thinking about how that might be a bit saintly, too.

“Mister?” a small but brash voice calls over him. The moment he scowls against the blank, bright gray of the sky, he feels the toe of a child’s shoe hit him in the side. He exhales, not quite a cough, and sits up. At least it shades his eyes a little. He supposes from how bright the gray sky is that it must be a dreary day around noon.

The child’s hair is a fiery color, tied into the twin braids of many a little girl.

Out of habit, he smiles a tight smile at her, even as he considers how there would have been a time that the greatest statesmen in Ravka would have feared to touch the back of his boot, let alone take theirs to him.

“There ya are,” the little girl says, clicking her tongue as though there is something in her mouth. She wears a vivid white shirt and red trousers. He knows she has done nothing to earn those colors, but the vivid hue makes him feel once-more nostalgic. “Thought you was dead,” she adds.

“Ah, yes. You would not be the first,” he says with a chuckle. He gets to his feet and dusts off the dark gray of his cloak. It looks sun-faded, and perhaps it is. He takes stock of his surroundings, more clearly in the noonday light. His gaze tracks along until it centers on the child before him. She stares up at him, unafraid.

“Are you playing a game or something?” she asks.

“Perhaps,” he allows with a single crooked sort of nod.

“We play ball out here sometimes,” she explains to him, unbidden.

His eyebrows shoot up at that.

“You play ball in the Unsea?”

“The what?” she asks him.

With that, he sets his eyes to the horizon and turns to carry on his ceaseless journey for purpose.

He would have been completely at ease with leaving the girl on her dusty playing field had he not heard a high-pitched cry of alarm and the scrambling of a child’s running feet first from dust and then to dry grass. She is not an Inferni but one of their flames as she scrambles and scrapes along, fleeing from another child.

Curious and having little else to be curious about, he turns back to investigate the little boy standing with his bare toes about to sink into the silt.

“Did you frighten her?” he asks, when the boy does not so much as look at his approach. It is as if he had not noticed at all. So much so that it clenches in his stomach when the child looks up at him with eyes that are far more weary than his own.

“None of them ever want to play with me,” is the answer he receives.

He swallows down any lesson he might have had to offer the child. His own mother would have taught him that he was to determine who was worthy of his acquaintance, friendship, and love, but this child has nothing special to guard. If anything, it is as if he has the opposite of any presence.

Instead, he wonders if a pleasant half-truth might suffice.

“Can always make up your own game,” he says.

The child studies his eyes, and he takes a step back, looking over his shoulder, about to walk away.

“You will play with me,” he says.

“I... most certainly must not. Never was much for child’s play. I will be going,” he tells the child, unnerved not by the demand but the spirit it would require to give him one. He is often given a wide berth by passersby, and the children at the edge of the once Unsea seem to have done away with both their manners and their reverence, long ago.

“Where are you going, Miss Alina?” the child asks after some time.

Alina has been picking her way to the most heavily traveled path and the sounds of what might be a road some distance away. Out this far, passersby are few and far between. She glances down at the little boy, almost startled to hear his voice even though she has become so accustomed to the small pressure of his hand in hers that it feels almost as if it has always been there.

She checks her footing and the way ahead before meeting the child’s deep brown eyes again. She smiles tightly.

“Well, I was headed for the mountains north of Shu Han, I think,” she tells him.

His face does not let on that the idea scares him or repulses him at all. He has a placid look on his face, smooth and serene.

Then, the soft pressure of his hand tugs out of hers, slicked with a bit of sweat. He takes off running, down the path of least resistance.

“Wait!” Alina calls after him. “Young man,” she hears herself say, in the way she had always scolded some of the boys at the orphanage. She feels her heart call after him and it drags her legs behind her, her pack weighing her down and rattling heavily on her back. “Wait, don’t... don’t go,” she says to him.

She keeps up with him for a while, giving up on running when he comes to a path that slows down his much shorter legs. He is a short, ghostly figure head of her in his light little gown. Her heart aches and it burns. It has been a long time since someone had run from her for being part-Shu. Though, the strange thing she notices, sometime when her back and feet are weary of this drudging pursuit, is that he is definitely leading her deeper into the woods and further south.

She feels as though it is the child who has run her down, exhausted her like prey, even though she has remained on his trail. When he has led her deep into the night and dark and what should have been another half-day’s journey away, they come to a break in the treeline, a long expanse of grass that heads off toward some sparser evergreens and hills that she recognizes as the bare beginnings of foothills of a mountain range.

“How... have you...” she wonders aloud to herself. He looks back at her to see if she still pursues him. She sees a little smirk on her face that fills her with righteous indignation. “Why did you do this?” she corrects herself.

She makes a decision to drop down, to make camp, whatever it costs her. Her lungs are tired, and as she takes her weight off her feet and legs, they burn and ache even more deeply. She braces herself against her hands and shakes her head.

“Just stop,” she orders him, too exhausted to care if he will listen. She hears a rustle in the grass coming back toward her, but she doesn’t look up. Instead, she uncaps and lustfully downs some of her water. She wants nothing but to cool down and to sleep.

Then something makes her look up again, at the boy in his pale white gown. He comes close enough for her to lift her chin to see his eyes from where she sits and sags close to the ground.

This whole time, he has never stopped, never appeared winded, and never asked for or taken a drink of water.

Her face goes slack and her mouth opens to form a question.

She hears more rustling around her, like the approach of a pack of something.

She looks up, and she sees at least one and a half dozen of similar ghostly white gowns, encircling her at different distances. She is on her feet before her brain has time to form a coherent thought about what she is seeing. All she knows is that it is not natural, that it is a threat when a handful of children had never managed to be her undoing before.

She spots a gap in the circle to the boy’s left. Without telegraphing her movements very much, she takes off running. Her pack is a heavy burden to bear, but she fears letting it go. She bounds on her aching, bruised feet and runs up the torturously slow incline of the field.

As the field’s incline takes on a sharper grade with more gravel in the soil, Alina feels her boots start to skid and lose traction at times. She looks back over her shoulder, and the eerily similar, determined, tireless little faces run after her. She remembers many a game of tag, and she had never feared being the one pursued when she had been over the orphanage. There is something sickening, terrifying, and altogether wrong about this, though.

Suddenly, she slides and loses some ground, her ankle feeling the loss. She pushes herself up and rolls onto her backside to find her footing again.

Another child, this one a little girl with deep, dark circles beneath her eyes, crawls toward her with a speed that was typically reserved for animals meant to progress on all fours.

“Miss Alina, won’t you help us? We’re lost,” she says, and her words are echoed in paraphrase all around her.

Then she sees the teeth, spectral in front of their flat and sometimes-stained little baby ones.

She realizes what they resemble, but she does not want to believe it. Instead, her body moves on a learned instinct which had been long since abandoned. She scrambles to touch her hands together, flesh-on-flesh, and at first nothing happens.

She feels like an idiot, and as she imagines her flesh rinded, she feels a strange shock of sensation, long-unknown and long-forgotten.

The children make for the trees behind them.

Darkness is silent, but this sound rings in his ears. As he approaches, trying to get through the damnable thick of the trees, he sees it light up the night sky.

The first time it had happened, he had not been there to witness it. He had needed to test for himself. This time, there is no doubt. Another of his kind has appeared, and with all the might and power of a true Sun Summoner to meet his equal.

With that, the night grows a little darker, blotting out the stars in anticipation.

The architecture is different, strange to her eyes even. There are angles and rounded places that seem out of order, but the little lodging looks like a fortress to Alina’s sore eyes. Since the children who were not children had fled, she had trudged, burning and wet eyed, all the way to the dark tree line up the other side of the foothills. Her hair has long since fallen from its tie, and it sticks to the back of her neck with sweat.

She looks around a little, at the paranoid point of exhaustion and knowing it. She realizes from some of the fixtures around the place that this must be someone’s hunting cabin. She knocks and slaps open-handed on the door, in spite of the silence, stillness, and darkness all around.

“Hello?” she calls. “Is anyone there? Anyone home? I could use some help. I promise I mean no harm,” she announces.

Nothing happens, as she had expected nothing. She drops her pack to her feet and kicks it against the door and begins digging through for anything she might use.

“... No harm to anything but your doorknob,” she says to herself and begins to work.

He begins to hear voices sweeping around him on the wind. He searches for the source of the trick, but the wind blows in sweeping currents at all directions, multiple walls of air rather than a whirlwind. He looks all around, blinking and trying to moisten his eyes. He expects to see a Squaller or a whole group of them, but he sees no one.

Besides, they are no longer obedient to his commands.

It is not command of an army he needs anymore. After all, the purpose he had once held so dear to his heart seems, in Ravka at least, forever half-accomplished and all the rest a lost cause.

No, what he needs is for himself.

He tries to ignore the voices as they rush past his ears.

Darkling, one soft whisper hisses.

Black Heretic, giggles another with a bitter turn.

Gen-er-al, sing-songs a third.

He closes his eyes, comforted by the sightlessness it brings. It helps to reconcile the strange sensation of hearing voices around him but seeing no one to give such speech.

He knows that there must be an explanation for it, but he cannot bring himself to care. He is weary of travel, weary of challenges, and eager to meet his match. It calls to him more than the darkness does. More than anything has in a long time.

He feels a tightness in his abdomen as his muscles engage, taking him up the gradual incline. He does not need to see. He knows the tree line had been many paces ahead.

He does not know what has come upon him when he feels himself fall backward, blood rushing to his head as he loses his footing and, on his back, has his cranium facing downhill. He pushes himself up to his elbows and looks around again, feeling a helplessness that, in turn, brings a rush of indignation.

“... Darkling,” speaks the form, taking shape from nothing. From the dark and from the center of everything, creation itself. “My father.”

“You are quite mistaken,” he says to the creature, because it is certainly not a human child. To his knowledge, he has never left behind one of those. He had wondered if his greatest act of creation had stripped that particular ability from him.

“No. Father. You must come home...” the child says. It manages to make eye contact with him. “Come to us. Your children and your army.”

Heaviness and emptiness both press deep down in his throat and then into his stomach. It is not hunger, but it makes him feel empty. It makes him think he never wants to eat again.

Nevertheless, he forces himself to crouch and then to stand.

“My army is long gone. All of it dead,” he says, knowing that a child could never comprehend it. He keeps eye contact. After he blinks, there is nothing but scratchy grass before his eyes. He senses a presence behind him, though. He sees them, many of them, standing there in matching formation, hands curled at their sides. Dozens of children with dirty faces and deadened, dark eyes, too full of pupil for nature.

What they see must be so bright it occurs to him.

Then he decides that the only thing to do is to walk away, close his eyes, and will his control over the darkness.

Alina manages to bar the door with the broken latch from the inside. She sets about exploring the small cottage. She smells dried meat and herbs in the air and finds quite a lot of it hanging in a room off the kitchen. She wonders if there might be more anywhere else.

The kitchen is clean but with a few items scattered along a counter top the color of tomato soup with cream in it. It looks as if someone had once lived here and felt safe.

She wanders through the almost entirely empty living room. There is a fireplace. It is cool, and she is exhausted, so after a time she sets a small blaze even if it will send up smoke. She doesn’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing anymore.

With some warmth filling the air and the familiar smell of wood smoke sending her mind into a past she can no longer reach, she opens the final interior door and finds a bedroom with a simple, messily-made bed and a hand-crafted chest of drawers. There is a tiny water closet to one corner, sharing a wall with the kitchen. Along the longest wall, there is a window, and she gets the sudden impulse to draw the heavy curtain. It looks dark out, though she seems to have lost track of time.

Her heart is set racing before she quite understands that she is sat up on a bed. Her racing heart breaks and rings a sour note through her nerves when her first instinct, to jab her arm across the bed to aim to wake another, meets nothing but empty air.

Alina’s mind is brought back to the present, then, searching desperately for clues as to why she has awakened on the strange bed, breathless as if from a long foot-race.

Then she hears it again, consciously this time. The loud screech of a volcra.

She knows that all of the volcra have gone by now, and that if any where left they would be far from here and closer to the Fold. There is another familiar sound and then another, and she looks down at her hands, unable to escape the memory, the impulse, from earlier in the day.

She gets up, her spirit lackluster but a determined, grim look on her face. She steps back into her boots, bedraggled hair and creased clothes hanging in an ill-fitted way on her body. It is a familiar feeling that would be nostalgic, had she anything she wanted to be nostalgic for about being a Grisha.

The door swings open at her hand, and she immediately gestures again,ready to call the sun. Ready to try. Perhaps earlier had been the last, vestigial trace of something long-gone. She wants to hope for that, except she wonders what good being ordinary has done her after all.

She takes an instant to take and feel a deep breath. Her shoulders drop and the expression on her face adds a layer of confusion to itself. Instead of volcra with their gnashing teeth, she sees the children, so many of them, clinging and climbing the frame of a man until he falls to his knees. It would be comical, except she can sense that there is something very terrible about it. There are cries coming from their throats which are note human, and she thinks she sees some of them trying to bite him.

Her mouth opens to ask them questions, but then she notices the way the dark moves around and between every bit of space between the writhing bodies, and a defensive instinct comes upon her. Without making a sound, a brilliant arc of light expands from her commanding gesture, and the dark is dispersed, leaving ordinary night-blue behind.

Some of the children seem to have dispersed with the shadow, but there are others, all in dingy and sometimes-dirty, stained white sleeping gowns. Those that remain have fallen to their knees, have caught their balance on trees, and they look to her in unison. It is not the familiar wonderment she had known long ago. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be anything. Their gazes seem dark, strange, full, and not quite human at all.

“Come on!” she orders the man who is struggling to get to his feet. He wears a cloak, which she thinks is strange by this decade, especially before the bitter cold of winter. She approaches him to reach for his arm, to try and drag him to his feet in spite of her lack of stature. For her size, she certainly has not allowed herself to become weak.

Then she sees the man’s face. The exact shape of his hair and cut of his beard have changed a little, but she would know his dark eyes anywhere.

“Aleksander,” she says.

“It’s you,” is all he can manage to say.

Anger courses through her like blood instead, but her hand is so tight on his sleeve and arm that she cannot bring herself to let him go. She glances back behind him, and there is something burgeoning among the children with their terrible, inky-black eyes.

Even if she had seen him dead once, she would not see his power fed to them.

She does not know if it is a good enough reason, but reasonable or not, something compels her to drag him, as roughly as her hand can, inside, where she closes and bars the door behind them.

“Do you suppose that will keep them out?” Aleksander asks, conversationally, as if time and allegiance and war and betrayal have never passed between them at all.

“They haven’t come through so far,” Alina finds herself answering in much the same way. She braces both her hands and bows her forehead against the door. She does not wish to look at him. If he has reason to kill her or to even try, she has no immediate inclination as to how she’ll respond. Even so, destroying her had never seemed to be his true goal.

At least, he had never wished to see her destroyed completely.

Finally, she gathers her balance, straightens, and looks back over her shoulder at him.

He stands there, his lips slightly parted. He reaches up to his neck and releases the tie of his cloak. Beneath, there are slightly more modern clothes.

“No uniform?” she asks, not really knowing why.

“A uniform of what?” he asks, voice so soft it makes something crawl up the back of her neck. She checks the door. Nothing has come through.

“You know them?” he asks.

“Friends of yours?” Alina accuses. It would be a more practical approach now, to infiltrate by compassion rather than international war.

“I had never seen them before I got close to you.”

Alina rounds completely on Aleksander, then.

“You have been tracking me?”

“I believe you must have me confused with someone else,” he says pointedly.

Alina does not even realize how close she has come to him until the sound of her smacking him across the face resounds and startles her. It doesn’t seem to startle him at all, though he reaches up to rub the redness on his pale skin.

It has been hours since she struck him. His cheek no longer remembers the sting of her touch. Instead, all he knows is sitting in a wooden chair, watching the window, as she has taken residence in the bedroom and seems uninterested in coming out.

‘Aleksander,’ a name he has not spoken, heard, written, or given in any way since last he had seen her, finally grows weary and bold enough to rise to his feet and rap on the door.

“You cannot stay in there forever,” he suggests.

“I believe you’ll find I can,” Alina says in a challenging tone.

He gives her a moment.

“Might I come in?”

“Why would I let you?” Alina asks. A few seconds pass, and he hears movement behind the door. Abruptly, she is there, standing before him at her full height. Her glare is enough for him to let her pass. After all, he had believed Alina Starkov as dead to him as she had become to the rest of the world and to herself, as dead as he had been to her. He cannot help but gawk at her face.

“Thank you,” he says simply.

She doesn’t acknowledge him. Instead, she passes quietly to the window by the door. She pushes back the curtains and peeks around, searching for strange black eyes. Instead, she sees perfectly ordinary green ones, staring from a short distance where the child attached to them is toying with a dry, fragile stick.

Alina’s heart begins to gallop again, and she jumps back from the curtain, hoping those eyes had not seen her or even noticed the movement. It seems an impossible wish, though. She takes a deep breath, not knowing why she would allow that to frighten her, given who she is in the room with. Given that all this time and her own efforts have killed neither of them.

She gathers all her practical decorum and looks Aleksander in the eyes.

“Who or what are they?” she asks.

“I am unsure,” he says.

Violence tempts her. She glances at the fireplace and at her own fingers. Oh, how she had once hoped the light had gone out of them forever. She knows violence won’t help free them from this place, and she knows she wants anything other than being trapped until she starves, or feels like she’s starving, or until she must learn the art of pleasant conversation with him again.

“That’s a lie,” she accuses.

“Why would I lie about such a thing? They were quite succeeding in overwhelming me in numbers. It’s quite embarrassing, but I believe they are somehow tireless.”

“If you’re trying to be funny, know that it was never one of your talents,” she tells him. She shakes her head, trying to get back on task. “The volcra attacked you, too. Why should I believe that this is not some kind of trap you laid for me now that you have the opportunity?”

“The opportunity,” he echoes in such a way that she might actually believe that he has no idea, no special knowledge, if she did not know he were such a masterful liar.

“You know exactly what I mean, or there is no possible way we both end up on this foothill of this mountain range in this hunting cabin,” Alina insists.

“Like calls to like,” Aleksander reminds her.

“We are nothing alike,” Alina says firmly even more tempted to find a way to bring him great pain even if she cannot kill him. He dares to reach up to brush just his thumb over the apple of her cheek. It makes her flinch when she wishes she had not given him any reaction at all.

“Then why do we both look like we last met yesterday when all those who were so important back then are gone?” Aleksander asks, much in the tone of a teacher.

Alina backs away from him with a rattle in her throat like a savage animal.

“If I cannot truly kill you, I can cause you great pain,” she tells him. Then, driven by bitterness, she acknowledges what she knows brings him such levity and hope. “And I’ll have you know that I never plan to call the sun again, even if I can, once I manage to leave this place.”

It buys her a long moment of silence. One long enough to make her feel successful in wounding him, for a moment.

Then he maddens her once more.

“It may be the only way you can leave this place,” Aleksander says. She lets him get the last word, for now. She takes up a place to sit beside the fireplace, sliding down to her backside against the wall, staring away from the fire and at the flickering shapes it makes on the wall.

Aleksander savors her presence even in the silence.

He knows what she says now, all the bold proclamations about what she will and will not ever do. He knows because he has made similar vows before. He has fought or his people. He has murdered. He has repented, begged, betrayed, ruled, and groveled his way across centuries. He understands that a human mind, which he has inherited at least a form of, is only meant to stay in one form for so long. Their long lives simply refuse to allow them perfect consistency, even if he had the desire to wish it so now.

He paces a bit. He gets a drink of water, which feels casual enough to make his skin grow goosebumps at a kind of awkwardness he does not care about but can still sense.

“How long?” he asks.

Alina bristles, but she looks at him from her position that reminds him of a child pouting as it endures punishment away from the others. It is a strange metaphor to imagine, given the form of the non-children outside. He knows they are still there. The atmosphere is thick with them, though the cover of true night makes it difficult to discern if they share any of his powers of bringing darkness.

“Since what?” she asks.

“I could be asking you ‘how long’ until we decide our next move,” he explains to her. “But you want to tell me the answer to the other question. How long has it been?”

The look of disgust on her face seems like progress. He has become a solid shape to her again, and even that is hope. He has lived a long time without much of anything to hope for.

“Less than two months,” she tells him with a hurried, bitter tone. Getting it over with.

“I... must tell you,” Aleksander announces formally, softly, “that I had no idea. I have known only that, if you were alive as I suspected, you were in Keramzin.”

“If you did not know I was alive, how did you know that?” she presses, looking away with a snarl still on her face.

“Because I knew you,” he says. He chooses to use the past tense carefully, because for all the familiarity he still holds in his heart, he knows that she has not lived as Grisha for many years. He knows that he no longer knows her as he once did. The Alina he might have known is gone.

She goes silent anyway.

“If you do not wish to challenge me or enact some kind of violence because I asked, I suggest we get something to eat and consider ‘how long’ we intend to wait to do something about what’s outside,” Aleksander says.

Alina does not give him a verbal response, but eventually they both go into the store room and select rations from it. She is always careful not to come even close to touching him.

Alina did not speak to him during their first meal together. It was only together because they both stood at the counter on either side of the kitchen sink. She only saw his eyes when she happened to catch their reflection in the window. That just reminded her to draw the curtains there, too.

In defiance of his commands, if only out of spite, Alina decides that she will go back to bed before she even considers having a tactical or philosophical discussion with him.

She insists that she will take the bedroom, as she already has. She rummages through the drawers and a closet until she finds him a handmade blanket and a poorly-sewn pillow. She shoves them both into the center mass of his chest, forcing him to take hold.

He opens his mouth, either to catch his breath or to speak to her.

She doesn’t want to hear his voice.

“Rest,” she says, giving up hers instead before closing the door firmly behind her.

She is exhausted, more in her heart and breath than in her body now.

Aleksander is supposed to be dead. Someone else is supposed to be in the empty space to her left hand. She sighs a ragged sigh and squirms into the center of the bed so there won’t be sides anymore.

The air is cold, but after a while it soothes her tight chest. She cannot get comfortable, beneath the blanket or on top of it. It occurs to her that the fire in the next room might have been more soothing than the enveloping darkness in the bedroom with the heavy curtain drawn. Or otherwise, it might have been more suited to him and the light more suited to her.

She refuses to budge, anyway, irony be damned.

“Good morning,” Aleksander says. He has prepared a glass of water for Alina but nothing more. He pushes it toward her when she emerges from the bedroom.

He notices a crinkle in her face that suggests she might refuse it. Instead, he takes the opportunity to move past her to take the opportunity to clean himself.

When he reemerges, hair damp and skin less gritty than before, he notices that she has taken the glass offered to her. It’s as good a sign as he is likely to get.

“Is there actual daylight out there?” Alina asks.

“Some,” Aleksander admits.

“The children?”

“I saw a few figures here and there. Down in the field, past the trees,” Aleksander reports. He speaks in a steady tone, but the thought of them gives him the same feeling the monsters he had once created who had turned on him had. He tries not to accept it, but he knows he may have no choice. “Had you seen them before?” he asks again.

“A child came to me in the woods a day’s walk away from Keramzin,” Alina says. She meets his eyes with a glower in hers. He believes she is trying not to give him more than he needs, anything he could use against her.

He considers the answer with all due weight, but he decides that another clarification is needed.

“I have far less power than when you tried to put me out of my misery,” he says.

“As a Grisha or as a man?” she asks with a bite.

“I suppose as both,” he says, allowing her the distinction and the conflation, having little with which to make an argument anymore.

Alina decides to venture opening the door and stepping outside at dusk. She wants to observe them. She feels the return of a familiar impulse: the desire to help them. They look like helpless children. She wonders if there is something wrong with them, if they are human after all.

She creeps silently about twenty paces from the door. She looks around.

“You can come out,” she says.

Nothing happens for several moments. Alina is acutely aware of the natural, slow darkening and twilight of the sky. She glances up at the purple hue, shifting from pink to blue. When she levels her eyes with the horizon, there are five children emerging from different points all around her, one approaching her in periphery.

She takes a single step back, looking each of them over.

“Hello,” she says, trying to learn if diplomacy is at all at option.

The children move with eerie unison and accord, but she notices that up close they do not move in the exact same motions. At least, they aren’t right now. Their breathing is a bit discordant at times. She have free control of their eyes, which are a normal range of colors at the moment.

“You are...” one says.

“... the Sun Lady,” another finishes, almost shattering the illusion that they are not under some unnatural sway.

“I... am Alina,” she corrects them. Her own name feels a little strange on her tongue, but she is relieved at the same time. These children are too young to remember.

“You sent me away,” a little boy says, and she recognizes him at once.

She frowns, feeling convicted but also frightened.

Then, she glances back over her shoulder. The door of the cabin had opened. Aleksander steps out, silhouette less imposing without his cloak. Alina forces her eyes back along each child’s line of sight.

“What do you want?” she asks them, pretending to have ignored the door.

“We want our father!”

“We want Papa!”

All five of them have something similar to say, and it seems to echo back from the trees.

“They mean me,” Aleksander clarifies lowly.

“I believe I understood that,” Alina replies tersely. She holds her ground, studying them. “Are they yours?”

She thinks she hears him snort softly. It sets her teeth a little on edge.

“Certainly not by my own effort,” he says.

“Then why do they think you’re their ‘Papa’?” Alina presses.

“I do not know,” he says. She thinks he also means, ’I do not care.’

“... If I couldn’t kill you,” Alina ventures, “and if time couldn’t kill me... why are we afraid of them?”

“Do you want to be chased by a horde of spectral children for the rest of our existence?”

Alina looks back at him, wanting to insist that their existence is not theirs, even if they are both to live indefinitely. When she thinks better of it and looks back to the children, there are a dozen where once there stood five. She had not heard them approach, and she would have needed to hear them running for it to make any sense.

“Alina, come inside,” Aleksander requests.

Alina keeps her eyes on the group of children.

“Wouldn’t be that different from the life I chose,” she says defiantly. He tugs on her sleeve and she rounds on him to push him back. He refuses to let go of her, and even in their struggle he pulls her back through the door.

The moment he pushes it closed, the sound of many slapping and clawing little hands press against he door in a wave. In their numbers, they are strong enough to begin to push it against Aleksander’s full strength to push it back.

Disoriented, Alina still uses her back and legs and helps push back against the door until Alexsander manages to bar it closed.

She looks up at him when the task is done, sagging a little.

“Why didn’t they rush me when I went out to see them?”

“I believe they fear, or at least respect, that you are the Sun Summoner,” Aleksander says.

Alina sets her mouth and jaw, but she finally pushes away from the door and goes to get more water.

As the sky darkens and as the night draws a blanket around them, the sounds move from the door all around the house.

The children seek entry, and Aleksander cannot help but follow the sounds with his eyes, his ears, and a knot of defiance within him that has never let him go.

“I never imagined that I would fight a battle against an army of eight-year-olds,” he finally remarks, trying to cut the tension.

He can tell that Alina still has her attention on them, but she seems far less frightened. She had taken her turn to clean up and has better-fitting clothes than he does now.

“Their eyes turned black,” is the only thing she says, as if she is trying to convince herself that the children are a genuine threat, even as Aleksander thinks he hears some of them testing the roof and the window glass. He doesn’t know why they haven’t shattered it yet.

Aleksander makes a sound of acknowledgment, glad she speaks at all but too concerned to sit or compose a better response.

“You never had children?” Alina asks, looking at him across the room.

Aleksander’s heart nearly stops at the question. It is not that it troubles him but rather that it brings him such joy that she would ask him at all.

“I’m not sure if I did, but I doubt it. I’m not sure I can,” he says.

“Your mother did,” Alina points out as if she feels nothing, one way or the other, about the prospect. She seems distracted, nostalgic. He thinks he sees a bit of a shine to her eyes as her gaze goes distant. “I had more than I would care to count.”

After some time and a broken window pane or two, Alina was persuaded to push them back with sunlight again. They sit outside in a while, hoping the maintained glow of day around the cabin will drive the children further away from the house. It feels like the terrible opposite of a fairy tale.

Back inside the house, it feels much less safe than it did.

Alina goes to pack her things.

That done, she sets her pack in the sparse living room. She does not say much to Aleksander. Even if some force at the Heart of the World or one she does not know at all had brought them here, it doesn’t mean they have to depart together. He still stands within a short distance of her, hands in his pockets and eyes like a lost dog.

“I would suggest you find your way out. If you want me to light the way, it’s the only favor I’ll offer,” she says.

Aleksander breathes out, and she can’t quite identify what it expresses.

“There’s nothing for you to be frightened of.”

“I know that now,” she says.

She feels a hand on her shoulder.

“I mean of me. You were always meant to be safe at my side.”

She jerks away from him and leads the way out. Dawn is gray and dusty in the sky.

“I don’t want to fight them,” Alina insists as they walk along, uphill. She sees strange shapes out of the corner of her eye, resembling small people, but tries to ignore them. “Sometimes they act like real children. What if they’re being controlled?”

“If they were real children, I don’t think some of them would disappear like the dark,” Aleksander says.

There is more silence. The canopy of trees thickens into a deeper dark than the sky itself. Alina is keenly aware of their presence now, to either side and behind.

Black eyes and vicious, sharp teeth.

Alina recalls a story from long ago. She glances at Aleksander and remembers the feeling, just before and right after she had known the truth.

It fastens together in her mind.

“They are volcra,” she says with horror and confusion.

Then they are beset by tiny, soft, innocent hands and baby-tooth sized mouths full of gnashing teeth.

Bursts of light obey her, but Alina starts to become overwhelmed. It has been too long since she has called the light to her. She does not even know if she had been able to for years, hidden beneath belief and doubt alike. They get close enough, and there are gashes on her neck and her temple and her arm.

“Alina,” Aleksander says, and she wishes he wouldn’t. He cannot help when they are creatures of the dark. Creatures of his own creation. His children.

Aleksander finds what he can and uses the strength of his hands, his long-ago military training, and cutting through space itself to try and defend her. He only means to carve a path for them to escape, but the volcra-mouthed children keep coming.

The first time he manages to cut one of them through while it still holds its physical form, it seems altogether like a real human child falling to the ground.

Even Aleksander is stricken with disgust at the sight.

All those centuries ago, this had not been what he had wanted.

He sees little choice but to keep fighting as his mind and heart race, but by the time Alina gathers herself and draws on her anger - seemingly at watching children fall, real or cursed or not - to create another huge dome of light for a brief moment, Aleksander knows the only thing he might do.

He steps into its center, close to and before Alina. He ignores her suspicion and holds up his hand, requesting that she not speak to him or sway him from the one new thought he has had.

“My children!” he calls to them, though he only half-believes it. It sounds wrong and pathetic, even. He still says it with all his chest. “My children, hear me. My children... the children I wrought from tender bones and flesh, long before you could know what the world would be...” he says.

He waits for a moment.

Even as the dome of light dims, there is silence.

They seem to be listening. Whatever they are.

“I am no longer the man who created the Shadow Fold that took your young lives and ate them whole. And yet, I am. I know that I am murderer and solider and general. I am also... weakened, deposed, and weary. So... do with me what you will.”

Bracing himself for great pain and even a final weary death, right after being near Alina again, the one true complement to his being, Aleksander lifts his chin and his arms, showing his hands empty. But no great blow comes. No more cuts and bites and claws come. Instead, there is a soft rustle before him. He waits still, leaving himself as helpless as he has ever known how to be.

He does not know exactly why he does it. Only, he knows that there is no new Sun Summoner. He is satisfied in seeing Alina again but disappointed that time has not fully cooled her anger. He does not know if she will walk at his side, and even if they could, he does not wish to see one more creature of his own making make her bleed.

“Aleksander,” Alina says to him. It is a quiet, prompting tone.

He opens his eyes, and before he can look around at her, he sees the child before him. A blond boy with bare feet. The pattern of his nightgown seems simple and handmade, old and familiar.

“Father,” the child’s voice says.

“Yes?” Aleksander asks in an even tone. He feels a nudge beneath his ribs and realizes that it had been a jab of Alina’s fingers. He looks back at her and sees her nod toward the child.

Perhaps she means to offer him as sacrifice. He smirks but takes a few steps closer.

When nothing violent happens still, he frowns, and some sudden impulse draws him to his knees before the child to meet his eyes.

“Father,” the child repeats. He reaches out and puts his hand against Aleksander’s face, rubbing with the grain of his beard.

“So I see,” is all Aleksander can admit. “Though, I believe you once had another. That all of you... had mothers and fathers. Were one another’s sisters and brothers.”

He expects a greater indictment. Instead, the child looks up toward Alina, past Aleksander’s shoulder. He tries to look around too, but the child catches him by the cheek before letting go, flexing his fingers as if the facial hair had bothered him in retrospect.

“Father,” the child says, looking down toward his dirty but strong little feet. “May we go home now?”

“You... wish for me to return to the Fold?” Aleksander asks after a pause to consider the question.

The child shakes his head ‘no.’

There is another sound in the trees, all around, and the dozens of children are there again, one and singular at once.

“May... we go home? All the dark is gone, and night cannot show us where we belong anymore,” the child says. There is a faint echo behind him.

Aleksander is confused. It seems impossible that it could be so simple.

“Of course you may... go home,” he says.

Wind blows through the trees. There is the smell of wood smoke sharp upon it. An early morning rain begins falling, and in all the movement of the droplets, Aleksander finds the forest empty save for himself and Alina.

Alina allows Aleksander to help put plasters on the wounds that need them. Cool stream water had washed away the excess blood. Now she sits beside him, their shoulders barely touching whenever either of them breathes.

Occasionally, the thought of moving away from him, of proving another point, dawns on her. Each time, she feels the shiver of weariness run through her. Next to the tiny fire and the flowing water, she stares ahead, addled, battle-worn, and a little satisfied in a way that she cannot quite make peace with.

“Do you think we’ll ever follow them there?” she finally asks.

She expects some deflection. An answer like ‘Where?’ when he damn well knows what she means. Instead, he gives her silence, and then:

“I don’t know where they went.”

Alina looks up at the sky instinctively. She isn’t sure why. It just seems as good a place as any.

“I don’t know what it’s like, but I think it’s the place orphans meet their parents. If their parents deserved them,” she explains.

“Maybe it is,” Aleksander allows. She thinks he doesn’t like the idea. She levels her gaze forward and then looks over at him. A heaviness drapes on her shoulders and breath as she realizes why.

“Do you think we ever get to die? To... go home?”

“I don’t know. If... there is a way, we clearly haven’t tried hard enough yet,” he says.

Alina feels that he has said something perverse, but there’s a strange smile on her face. One that an Alina from long ago would have despised to feel. The self-condemnation seems like it can wait.

She breathes in deep and feels him at her side for a moment longer. The last person in the world who knows Alina Starkov.

She gathers her courage and then her pack on her back, rising to her feet and only wincing a little.

“Where are you going?” Aleksander asks her. She can tell her hasn’t risen to his feet, as if he doesn’t quite believe she’s leaving him alone again. She doesn’t look back, but she finds a good footing and pauses to answer him.

“Further up the mountain,” she says.

“... to Shu Han,” he concludes. His many years alive ought to have given him some reasoning skills.

“How could you ever guess?” Alina asks. It’s nice to have someone familiar enough to be sarcastic with.

“Alina,” he says, “don’t you know how they have treated Grisha in Shu Han? We still don’t know how much has changed across the border.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Alina asks. She finally turns to look at him, wondering how long she means to entertain this conversation with the only man left who knows her.

Aleksander seems to have missed the point a little.

“While I have been an exile in my own country, again, I have not been entirely ignorant.”

Alina’s lips tug a little. She doesn’t know what it means. She shrugs at herself as much as him, with one shoulder beneath the weight of her back. She turns and starts her trek again at a slow and easy pace.

“If you don’t want me to find out, I guess you’ll have to try and stop me,” she says. It doesn’t surprise her when his footsteps follow, and she does nothing to stop him.