Archive of Our Own ^beta

    Baghra’s heart caught in her throat when she opened her eyes and immediately met pale grey ones. So she had failed. One of her son’s  abominable creatures must have caught her and stopped her fall.

    But the man in front of her took a step back and it wasn’t Aleksander. She then realised she could see again, her sight no longer covered by a veil of shadows. And the man— The man was Ilya Morozova.

“You are dead,” it should have been him saying it, but the surprised utterance came from her. She had never truly believed he died. A man who could bring a girl back to life and create eternal amplifiers killed by a mere river and some chains? And yet. Or he had survived but taken his own power to his heart later on.

    The first scenario was more comforting to Baghra. After all, if he had survived the river, wouldn’t he have looked for her?

    (She knew he wouldn’t have, not with a third amplifier left to make).

“I am,” he confirmed. “You are too,” he sounded disappointed.

    Her fingers flexed angrily at her sides. How dare he?

    He turned away from her to look at a non-existing horizon and she finally took note of their surroundings. Nothing. A great and never-ending expanse of nothing. It wasn’t black like one might imagine the void to be, rather a blinding white muted by all the colours that existed in the world. The more she tried to comprehend it, the more it evaded her.

“We are at the Heart of the Making,” Ilya explained. “Your powers will not work here. As nothing and everything exists at once in this place… Grisha powers can’t work with nothing. And yours… Can’t work with everything,”

    Her hands fell limp once more, watching the man’s back. Cryptic as he ever was. Turned away from her as he had always been. Many questions burned her lips ; to most she knew the answers already. Some she wanted to hear anyway. She stared in the same direction as him, as if he would have found an interesting spot to fixate his gaze on, but everywhere she looked was the same. Nothing. Everything. 

“I was never meant to be a Shadow Summoner, was I?”

    Silence. Then:

“Walk with me,”

    Where? She thought bleakly, but when he started walking, she followed. Like a tapestry being woven, a scene took life before their very eyes and they were soon walking right into it. The small house was one she didn’t recognize. They had had so many homes— No, places they lived in. None had ever felt like a home. Nowhere had ever felt like a home. Familiarity built as they entered a workshop, her father’s. Ever so slightly different in every house they had been in, yet always the same. A stuffy place she both loved and hated for the exact same reason: her father was always in it. Unsurprisingly, he was here once again, yet still standing next to her.

    The two Ilyas were identical. Baghra had changed over time, Aleksander had changed too over the centuries, even as they stayed young forever, a weariness settled on their features, the weight of eternity darkening their eyes. Ilya, both the dead and the— alive? Memory?— had none of that. Perhaps he had truly died in the river, after all.

“Daddy!”

    A small child bounced into the room— Herself, Baghra realised with a slight recoil. Wobbling on tiny legs in the manner of children who had just learnt how to walk yet already thought they could run. She nearly crashed against her father and his chair but he caught her distractedly, frowning. She had no memory of this moment yet her heart ached for it. She must have been too young. 

“Baghra, I’m busy at the moment,” Ilya chastised and it was already a lot more familiar.

“But I have something to show you! Just five minutes! One minute! Thirty seconds! ONE second! I promise!” she argued. He sighed but relented, putting his dominant hand down though it did not let go of the small pestle he had been using to crush something in a mortar. 

    Baghra stepped back just as her smaller self did. The child clapped her hands together before spreading them wide in a movement she knew well. 

    In lieu of shadows engulfing the room, a blinding light exploded, covering every wall, illuminating every corner until it was unbearable to look at. A pained noise escaped Baghra’s lips and she instinctively reached for the sun spilling from her small fingers but her hand went through it. The thread keeping the scene together was pulled and the child disappeared, leaving Ilya working alone at his desk. The mixture he had been working on was finished, sitting on the desk as he took frenetic notes.

“I was a Sun Summoner,” Baghra whispered.

“I was working on different methods of amplification in parallel to my search for mythical creatures to turn into living amplifiers,” Ilya droned on. “I thought I had found this revolutionary… I was sure. A temporary amplification, something that could be used when the situation called for it. Wouldn’t that have been wonderful?”

    Baghra barely heard him, still battling her desire to reach for the places where the light had been, the urge to attempt to wind the sun rays around her fingers.

“I needed to test it, of course, but where we lived at the time I didn’t know any grishas. And so…”

“Daddy!” 

    Just like before, the child Baghra stormed in, carrying a small basket of food. Unusually, Ilya’s attention immediately went to her. 

“No…” Baghra’s voice caught in her throat. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the scene even as Ilya took a piece of bread from the basket and carefully spread some of the mixture he had made onto it. She couldn’t close them even as he handed it to his delighted daughter, too happy to have his watchful gaze on her, the attention he only ever gave his experiments, to question it.

“It worked,” the Ilya standing next to her said flatly. 

    The child pulled a face when she got her first bite but still ate the whole thing. She laid a small hand over her stomach, lips curled down in a pout. 

“It was really gross,” she said bluntly.

“You experimented on me?”

“Only this time. I was so sure of the result… And it did work, as I said,” he lifted a finger up to scold her. “The temporary amplification was beyond my wildest expectations,” Sunshine uncontrollably escaped the child’s hands, then every pore of the skin. None of the awe from before could be found on her face as she panickedly reached for her father who did not see her, shielding his eyes from the light. All over the walls of the room, out of the windows— The door flung open once more and the last thing Baghra saw was her mother’s horrified expression before the scene changed. Rapidly, more images wove themselves from the void, all of her unable to stop the light from pouring out of her. All of it, all of it, until— Nothing. She could see herself trying to summon, to no avail, the only things she could make were tears.

    Baghra had always taught her students at the Little Palace their power was not a finite source. Had she been wrong?

“I did not think of side effects. It had been too much for you. Perhaps you had been too young? I never tried that product again. It corrupted your powers. Shadow Summoning is a most interesting aberration. You had been the first Sun Summoner I had seen but I had heard of others existing before and elsewhere. Shadows, however? That was unheard of. Unsurprisingly, even our own kind shunned us after you started summoning darkness,”

    The small child cried and cried as ink-like shadows leaked from her hands, unwieldy and resistant to her will unlike the sun she had been born with had been.

“Calling you a summoner was a typological shortcut, of course, shadows are merely the absence of light, you are never summoning anything, you’re… Smothering, destroying… Going directly against the Making. It should have been… A good indicator of how things would go,”

    He waved his hand dismissively and the scene changed once again. Gone was the bubbly child, replaced by a surly little girl who knew something had been done to her, something unforgivable, but didn’t have the words to put on it. Who tried to accept her new powers even as they resisted her. Who worked and practised until she completely forgot she had ever been a Sun Summoner and the unease in her guts at wielding shadows had a reason behind it.

“Your temperament became fickle. The amplification lasted over time, not as strong as at the beginning, but you were still considerably more powerful than the average grisha. Your mother and I could not control you,” As it stood, Ilya didn’t even show up in most scenes where their child lost control and lashed out, leaving her otkazat’sya mother, frightened and helpless, to deal with it. Baghra’s hand mindlessly went to the places on her body where the child was struck by the stick.

“Your mother warned me of what would happen… I did not listen, I thought your temper would settle eventually… But you killed your sister,”

“ You killed her,” she snapped back, venom seeping in her voice. She turned away when a painfully familiar scene started playing out, the memory not needing any refreshing in her mind. A wound that had never closed. Ilya did not look away. His face contorted into a grief-stricken expression, as if he had any right.

“After I died, I kept watching over you, Baghra. I hoped your anger would finally die down. And it did,” he shook his head. “But not before you passed it on,” Disapproval etched itself over his features.

    Aleksander rose up from the great expanse of nothing, his face lacerated from the volcras’ attack in the Fold, rage and grief incarnate as he breathed life into his shadow creatures.

“Unstable,” Ilya spat. Baghra turned around to see Ulla, tears running down her cheeks, madness in her eyes, as she sang to the mirror, her reflections a choir of fury. “Powerful,” she recoiled as a monstrous wave soared, only to find herself pinned in the middle as a crawling wall of shadows rushed in from the other side. “And born with an ache for warmth,” Ilya whispered as they were engulfed. In the heart of the storm, she saw Ulla, afflicted with longing as she wove eternal fire from her songs for the love of Signy. In the deep of the darkness, she saw Aleksander’s face illuminated by Alina’s light, a hand reaching out for her. “In your image, you have created abominations so consumed by the desire to leave a mark on the world they dug funeral pits for centuries,”

    Everything dissolved as she tried to reach for her son and daughter, Ilya’s words echoing the last she had told Aleksander. Her fingers grasped as nothing and she whirled around to face her father. He seemed contemplative of her expression, perhaps considering how alike her children she was with long-since dried tears running down her cheeks and her lips contorted, and she charged at him.

“And you ?! What mark have you left on this world but misery?!” for an instant, she thought her fingers had found purchase around his neck, but he slipped through them just like everything else. She wailed in rage, striking through him and stumbling forward to her knees. Collapsed down, her forehead to the ground that was both there and not, and screamed. She screamed until her throat was raw. She screamed for an instant and for all of eternity. She screamed until she couldn’t.

“Baghra,” a timid voice called, so small she looked up to make sure she hadn’t hallucinated it. For a second, she thought her child self had appeared again, but upon looking closely, it wasn’t her. This one had pale grey eyes like their father, not Baghra’s black eyes. She was smaller, neither bubbly nor surly, looking guilty. 

“Marfa,” she murmured.

    Her sister held a small object out. Her breath caught in her throat, Baghra picked it up. A small wooden swan.

“I’m sorry I broke it,” its head was stuck back on, though backward. “I tried to fix it,”

    Numbly, Baghra nodded. She stumbled to her feet and Marfa offered her a hand, which she took, cradling the damaged swan to her chest. 

“We can go, now,”