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black-body curve: an expression of the electromagnetic intensity of an idealized physical body, in which all radiation is perfectly absorbed and emitted
The lake glimmers in the corner of their eye, a glistening spark of sunlight skimming across pale glass. The grass crunches beneath their feet, icy and brittle, just like Waidwen remembers. The air is grasping, cold, hollow, but Waidwen is warm. He's always warm. His face flushes, and his heart pounds, and sometimes his head burns too. It makes it hard to think, like the haze of youthful fever has gripped him tight. Used to be, his mother would put the back of her hand to his head and click her teeth together in worry and usher him to bed.
She'd argue with his father about it too. Waidwen had always heard them, laying in bed wishing she wouldn't.
It's hard to think, hard to see the shadow of the future when everything around him is so bright, but his steps are familiar. His goal is simple, and together, they are steady.
He stumbles back home as sunlight crests, and he receives a face full of radiance for his trouble. But it doesn't hurt his eyes, doesn't make him look away, not when something else whispers somewhere in his head. He stares at the gleaming disc as it peers over the fields, a perfect circle of incandescence. If he looks closely enough, for long enough, the sky stretches and stretches and loses its blossoming color to the spread of ink. The sun moves and grows with it, like a fiery sphere cast from an arcane hand, and Waidwen sees shapes within it. Sees long fingers of light arching out into black.
Be careful, the voice in his head says, and Waidwen nearly trips over his own feet. The sky snaps back into the fading gray of dawn. The shining disc continues to rise, too slow for mortal eyes to track. It's all too easy to get lost in, particularly for a mortal mind.
Waidwen isn't exactly used to any of it yet. The thought of asking a god personal questions is... absurd, really. "Do you walk around seeing stuff like that all the time?" he ventures anyway. It isn't just the sky. The grass, thick with spring, in need of a trim before vermin take the invitation to wander into fields and houses. The crops, not what they used to be, and yet Waidwen sees life within them, within the thick grass. Sees gleaming, arching veins of something close to light, animating them and uniting them.
The presence within him doesn't answer right away. Waidwen wonders if he's given offense, and he braces, readies for retaliation. But the voice, when it comes, is only melancholy.
I have not walked this world in a long time, Eothas says.
They don't see farmhands when they arrive. Mother has not wanted for anything since this began, and the farmstead is quiet, empty, devoid of work. A single presence gleams within the house, and soft firelight fills the curtains. The sun has dipped below the horizon, but they need no light to see. Even dead grass has its own threads of radiance. Even cold ground shimmers with that gleaming lifeblood.
They used to dread this threshold. No-- he used to. Waidwen, small and young and afraid. Powerless to stop his father from laying hands on him, on his mother.
None of that, any longer.
The farmhands must think him drunk again. Waidwen wonders if it's all in his head, the way he feels unsettled and ungainly in his own skin. There's light in him too, in the corners of his eyes. If he tilts his head, tries to get a better look at it, his vision spins.
The house is just the two of them now -- him and Mother. He hasn't gotten around to repairs, but it's almost a home, these days. Father is dead. Waidwen thinks it's for the best. Mother keeps her feelings close, but he knows she doesn't find it that simple. He doesn't understand, but she's happier than she used to be, and they don't talk about it. It isn't a good life, really, with the way the crops have been, but it's easier than it was.
The sun breaks away from the horizon, and Waidwen's fingers hover just before the door.
They enter, steps unfaltering against wood. Flames crackle gently in the fireplace, and Mother sits at the dinner table, mending clothes in candlelight. She shouldn't have to, they think, pulling up short. They've ensured-- Waidwen has made sure that his mother has received more than enough to live comfortably, to live without toil. He'd sent her everything she could have needed. He doesn't see much, here in the front room. It's as sparse as it's always been.
Sciantha drops a spool and stands abruptly, pulling the chair so that it sits between them. Her eyes are wide, her breathing quick, and a chill of realization breaks through the warmth, dripping down Waidwen's spine and pooling heavy in his stomach.
She's afraid.
When he enters, Sciantha is humming in her tuneless way, bent over a ledger and scribbling. It's not one of her happier songs, but the quick, distracted glance she throws in Waidwen's direction is accompanied by a small smile. "I don't know yet," she says preemptively, like she expects him to come barging in with questions and demands. Father always had. "But maybe we'll break even. The weather's been steady, so--"
"Mother," Waidwen says.
Sciantha's pen stills. She pulls herself away from the ledger and looks him up and down, then leaves the table behind. "What's wrong?" she asks. A hand wavers at her side, like she's itching to press it up against his forehead.
Waidwen hadn't actually given thought to what he would say. He stands unmoving, words iced over in his throat, until a sudden warmth brings a thaw. A presence, no longer a whisper in some back corner of his thoughts, but louder again, curious, tentative. A few hours ago, Waidwen wouldn't have been relieved to hear it. A few hours ago, Waidwen would have spit in the direction of the rising sun. But Eothas is nothing like what he imagined. Eothas is nothing like the doctrine and the sermons.
Mother has always been devout.
"I need to show you something," Waidwen says, in his voice, in another's.
"What are you doing here?" Sciantha demands, drawn up to her full height with her shoulders rigid. Waidwen stands a head taller than her. She's always been small, always been more frail than otherwise. No match for her husband. But she hasn't looked afraid, since Father died.
It's hard to think when their face is so hot. But they-- he manages to speak, to keep his voice soft for her. "We'll be setting out for the Dyrwood soon," Waidwen says. "I wanted to see you, before we left."
Sciantha doesn't move. She wears an old shawl, tattered at the edges, to keep away the cold, even though she could have bought something finer. She looks away and scoffs, drawing the shawl close. "We," she says. "You and your army? Setting out to butcher our neighbors?"
"No," Waidwen says, taking a step forward, but Sciantha takes a step back, and Waidwen stops. "Mother, I-- you don't understand." She doesn't see. Eothas is nothing like the doctrine and the sermons, but those are all she's known. "They're not... they mean to stop us. We can't let that happen. And there's..."
His tongue is thick and heavy in his mouth. His words are wrong, stammered. His face is hot. They see the Dyrwood, see the curve of copper and green stone. See a river of souls diverted, ripped away from their intended course, and mothers crying. Mother would often cry, when she thought he couldn't hear her.
"Something is going to happen," Waidwen says, his mouth full of certainty that he can't quite taste. The shape of it is too much to fit between their jaws. "Something terrible. The gods are--" He sees so many souls that his vision tilts. Sees them burning, turning, pulled deeper and deeper and deeper. He sees the march of time, quick as lightning and slow as the sun in the sky. Sees a molten sphere suspended in a pit of black so vast that his stomach heaves and twists and--
He doesn't realize he's on his knees until his mother is before him, her hands guiding him up.
Sciantha has a hand to her mouth. Her eyes glisten in the fading light, as Eothas subsides and Waidwen doesn't quite settle back into his skin. The scent of incense lingers, suffusing the room with a tang that makes his own eyes water. Waidwen doesn't know what to do with his hands, so he hooks his thumbs into pockets and tries not to bounce on his feet. It makes him feel young again, ten years old and waiting for his mother to say yes to some shared joy kept cautiously secret.
He takes a startled step back when Sciantha falls to her knees.
"You..." she says, full of wonder as she looks up at him. "My son? You've chosen my son?"
"Please don't do that," Waidwen says, and something else says, and his distress is his own. His distress is not his own. Eothas speaks too, when he does. He doesn't try to take Waidwen's voice, but something ripples uneasily through the warmth under Waidwen's skin, so much that it spills over. The tang of incense stings under Waidwen's nose. "Come on now..."
His mother takes his hand and lets him help her up. She grips him tightly and reaches out hesitantly, ghosting her fingers across his cheek. Something of him must glow still, because her brown skin looks gold as she touches him. She glows too, a light within her that's always been there. That's always been within all things, only Waidwen has never seen it before.
"I'm still me," Waidwen says. "And Eothas... I don't think he likes all of that bowing and scraping too much."
Sciantha still looks overwhelmed. The warmth beneath Waidwen's skin stirs, and Waidwen doesn't resist it, because he doesn't know what to do, when his mother looks so lost.
"I come only to liberate you," Eothas says, with something that is and isn't Waidwen's voice. They gesture to the table, to the ledger there, and for a moment, Waidwen's veins, thick like his mother's, glow gold. "You already know it won't break even."
Sciantha's eyes widen. She takes a few unsteady steps back and all but collapses into her chair. She looks to the ledger and shoves her face into her hands, her breath shuddering out of her.
The shawl slips to the ground. Sciantha doesn't move to catch it or pick it up. Her hands hover at Waidwen's side. Her face twists with emotion, but she sucks in a breath and composes herself, as she looks into Waidwen's face. "Look at you," Sciantha says, and her voice trembles. "It's killing you. This is killing you."
They shake their head and try to reach out once more, but Sciantha pulls away. "I won't let any harm come to him," they say-- Eothas says. She doesn't understand. She doesn't see. It is a difficult thing for mortals to grasp. Waidwen struggles to hold a god in his head, and perhaps it's a mistake. But a salvageable one still, if the rest of the Eastern Reach can be breached in time, if light can be cast on its darkest corners. Other gods plan and plot and seek to stop them, but Eothas will not allow that.
Sciantha's face darkens. "You," she says. "You've done this to my boy." Her fists raise and then hang limply in the air. They see it, the way she will not lay a hand on her child, like he did. The way she wants to wring every last bit of light between her hands until it goes dark. "Get out of him."
"Mother..." Waidwen says, hurrying forward. He crouches down beside her and takes her hands in his own, gently pulling them down. Sciantha tries to compose herself and doesn't quite manage it, as she breathes in deep. Waidwen says the only thing he can, what he's wanted to say for so long. "We're going fix this."
There's a bright red scrape on one of his mother's fingers. Waidwen figures it came from wire of some sort, though farms leave their marks in all sorts of ways. He holds a hand over the injury and asks, and warmth breathes into his palm, spilling light. When he pulls his hand away, the scrape is gone, the skin whole.
"And that there is just the beginning," Waidwen says.
Sciantha manages a chuckle, but it doesn't last. Her eyes are still bright with the sheen of emotion, but they remain dry. "You know what the magistrates are like," she says, nervous. "Hel, all of them. If you raise a fuss, they'll want to kill you."
For a moment, the windows brighten with much more than the dawn's distant light. The air trembles, dust motes gleaming in shafts of morning. "I won't let them," Eothas says, with Waidwen's mouth. "They will answer to me."
One of Sciantha's hands clenches tight around Waidwen's. The other grasps at the table and pulls the ledger close to her chest like a shield. She meets Waidwen's eyes, searching for something, and then she nods like she's found it somewhere in the glow that Waidwen can't quite see within himself. "Good."
"Mother..." they say-- Waidwen pleads, and Sciantha shakes her head, stubborn, disbelieving. "I agreed to this. It was my choice. He's not--"
Sciantha turns away. Her eyes are on the floor, as if she can't bear to look at him. "Your choice," she says, and her voice doesn't sound as hard as she wants it to be, "is that you can stay and give up this madness, or you can go and fight your war. But I won't be party to it." Her voice breaks. She turns to him like she can't look away after all, and the misery in her face, the disappointment hurts more than any blow. She shivers in the cold, without the shawl to keep her warm. "Gods, love, I don't even recognize you anymore."
"I'm still me," Waidwen says, a desperate edge to it. His tongue tastes of incense. The air is chill, but his face burns hot.
"My boy doesn't kill innocent people!" Sciantha snaps, and they can't remember the last time he heard her shout. "Not the boy I raised. And no man like that is going to stay under my roof ever again."
The fire crackles and throws up tongues of flame, and Waidwen doesn't move. A dull cold creeps into his limbs, make him feel the sting of winter for the first time this year. She had never been able to leave. Never been able to get him to leave her alone, to leave Waidwen alone. He will not let his enemies kill him. He will not let anything stand in his way or hurt him anymore, even if it means dirtying his hands. And he will not-- will not be like Father.
Sciantha breathes hard and shakes her head again, taking another step back. "Give it up," she says, "or leave."
She looks so lost and afraid, underneath her trembling anger. Waidwen doesn't know what to do when faced with that. They want her to understand. They want her to see. She isn't ready, Eothas says, always patient, always understanding. Perhaps in time, she will be. But she will be safer here. Our path through the Eastern Reach will not be easy.
"I can't give up," Waidwen says, and his voice sounds distant to his ears. It carries a luminous echo. They blink and see a spinning machine. A hundred thousand souls torn from their bodies and twisted into the image of something worse, something rotten. "You'll understand one day. I've got to do this for kith. For all of us. It's got to end."
No one will hurt them. No one will stop them. So why, then, does a lancing ache twist through Waidwen's heart and make it heavy enough to weigh his feet, as if it might pull him down into Eora's black heart?
But the warmth is always there, beneath his skin. Holding him together when he might otherwise fall apart, shafts of light mending every ripped seam. Together, they are steady.
She holds his face between her hands. She wants to come with them. He wants her to be safe. Besides, she's always had a better head for managing the farm than he does. She tells him to be careful, and light flares beneath her palms in promise, slivers of the radiance of dawn.
"Maybe one day you'll forgive me," they say.
The house is at their back as they leave, the cold wind a low murmur as the light of day gives way to darkness. But the light of essence gleams all around them, its resonant hum carried far and wide on the threads that bind all things together, and as always, Waidwen's mother cries when she thinks he can't hear her.