Chapter Text
Mizuki’s single eye narrows on the metal contraption She – she is working on.
Her hand, the one she had built out of metal to replace what was once divine and now cursed, curls around a screw.
‘You’ count the time to six o’clock, each second collected within your mind. “Mizuki,” ‘you’ say, “time for dinner.”
On cue, the ‘you’ stationed within the kitchen picks up a recipe book and flips it open to a random page. Lasagne, something that you have the ingredients for – you always have the right ingredients within the kitchen.
“Five more minutes,” your protector, the once-goddess, still so very prideful even after her fall, calls out.
‘You’ start counting once more. One, two, three…
Time and experience have taught you that she would stall for five more times before she grows tired of your repeated calls and comes out for food.
In the meantime, ‘you’ continue cooking so that dinner would be ready and hot once she cleans up and gets ready for dinner at seven o’clock.
Your name is Antigonus.
You are a demonic wolf, one of the last of your kind. Your father is Flegras, once known as the King of the Night, the Mad Wolf who ate the Stars.
Amanises, the Lady of Misfortune killed Him and all your siblings. She killed the rest of your kind and left you alive to be used as a pawn in the game of the gods.
You do not like Mizuki, she who once was the Goddess of Magic, brought low by her own pride that she refuses to cast aside even now. But she offers you a protection you can hardly find elsewhere, not without being bound to a god.
Mizuki shares the same disdain you do for the gods, without the same fear. You have seen her snap at the Demon of Knowledge, the being who tore her divinity away from her. There is no retaliation, and why should there be? Even without her divinity, it is easy to tell that she is no mere mortal.
Starlight gathers at her fingertips, and she is something more – like a star shoved into a shell, constantly bursting at the seams through cracks of abyss mixed with shimmering pinpoints of light every time she speaks. Her words are coarse, tainted by the mortals she once walked upon the earth with, but they betray the insight and knowledge she bears.
The Demon of Knowledge will protect this precious star, even slightly shattered as she is by the curse left upon her by the Moon Mother and the scars etched on her upon His betrayal, you know this well. Mizuki will protect you as long as you stay by her side. Her loyalty is an utterly irrational, idiotic thing – strange and unlike someone of her station, but you will manipulate that to your own benefit regardless. She will protect you from Amanises.
You stay by her side, multiples of ‘you’ acting as her servant, looking after her and keeping her in good health, as much as is possible with the Moon Mother’s dying curse left upon her, and with the damage the Demon of Knowledge’s betrayal had inflicted upon her mind.
Mizuki lets you run free, in a way no other god would have, even for their most cherished angel.
That is why you stay.
Despite knowing that she possesses the key to the Knowledge Moor, you have never seen her use it.
“My entrance is blighted,” she tells you when you work up the courage to ask. Her fingers lifts to ghost over her right eye, the empty socket etched with runes meant to suppress the Moon Mother’s influence. Even dead, the Outer God’s influence is a terrifying thing.
Her metal arm is an even more unsightly thing – the Demon of Knowledge once offered to restore her arm, ‘you’ were there when He had made the offer, dismissive of your presence, for what was a mere angel to a God who had risen Above the Sequence? Mizuki had rejected Him summarily, no doubt still bitter over His betrayal of her.
You hadn’t understood her – even now, she is still burdened by the lack of a flesh arm. She crafted the current system of mysticism the world uses even now, and with the Moon Mother’s curse and her ownership of Knowledge Moor, the Demon of Knowledge would be hard-pressed to implant any unwelcome imprints into her new arm.
While ‘you’ tend to Mizuki’s needs, you walk the streets of Intis. Mortals know to instinctively ignore you – you are something too far beyond their comprehension. Demigods and angels notice you but dare not come too close – you are old and experienced, your blood is an ancient thing, a relic of a time when your kind once ruled over humans, and your name carries a weight few other beings do.
They fear you, and the prideful you who once disdained your family for butchering humans like beasts, preens.
Having power makes you fear less. This is a lesson you had learnt dearly. You once bore the mantle of the Half-Fool and tried to become more in an attempt to no longer have to shy away from the gaze of the stars watching you from the night sky.
Mizuki does not fear. Her courage stems from understanding and knowledge. The Knowledge Moor sought her out, she had once told you in her rare moments of softness – not vulnerability, there is none of her scars that she does not lay bare like a prize.
She views a rational world while constrained by her own emotions. A god descended to the world and tainted by mortals.
“I don’t know of the schemes and paranoia within your mind,” she once told you, “It must be tiring, to have to spend so much precious time on worthless matters.”
Survival is not a worthless thing. Even as a pup, you had instinctively sought to live.
“To not look at the people who eye your back is the reason why you were betrayed.” You tell her, secure in your place by her side.
Mizuki cannot overpower you, not without invoking Knowledge Moor. You had caught a glimpse of that terrible, overwhelming place once before, when divining into Mizuki’s past.
More knowledge than you could comprehend, everything broken down into words. Mizuki had been there, idly flipping through an illusory book in the library she had commanded Knowledge Moor to be. At times, the words would flicker, turning into numbers before turning back again.
Mizuki, the goddess she had been in the past, had cast a dismissive glance at you and gently flicked her fingers, snapping you out of the vision before the knowledge you glimpsed at could become too much for you to handle.
That power is a far cry from the mortal shell she pretends she is now, as though divinity does not still spill out of the cracks in her eyes, as though the words she speaks cannot sentence a lesser man to death. As though knowledge, something so integral to herself, could be so easily diminished simply because she has been cursed by a goddess she killed.
With her missing parts of herself, she needs you to assist her in her daily life and fend off any opportunistic Beyonders who does not know their place.
There are thousands of ‘you’, each gathered slowly through time you were once afforded. Hornacius was your domain where too many foolhardy and weak once traipsed through in search of power before the current Fool and Amanises tore through it and ripped apart your divinity. You had never truly become a divine, not like Mizuki has, but even now, you feel its loss keenly.
There is one ‘you’ who watches the door like a guard dog and keeps time. There is another ‘you’ who stays in the kitchen to cook. ‘You’ who cleans up after Mizuki’s mess like a nursing mother. And there is the ‘you’ who stays in the main room, stationed there for any situations where an extra ‘you’ is necessary.
The rest of ‘you’ are scattered to the winds. Even promised safety by Mizuki’s presence as you have been, you have always been careful with your own survival.
Mizuki is not your father. He who ate the Stars had no qualms in eating His own children as well. When her limits, the curse of the Moon Mother, impede her, she lashes out but not once has she ever struck you. Always, she is careful not to touch you or yours. She makes a mess instead, throwing her tools at walls that you would eventually have to fix. She does not threaten your life or make allusions to your claim of sanctuary. She does not threaten you, only insult and heckle you until you do as she asks.
It is amusing at the best of times and annoying at the worst.
At times, you miss your sister. She took you from the empty fields covered in the blood of your father and ran away. You do not know why the both of you had been spared by Amanises’ massacre, but you had lived alone, hiding together on a mountain.
She is alive, you know this, just as you know that she has been locked away by Amanises. She will never be free, but she will not die, because Amanises takes care of what belongs to Her.
You do not speak of her to Mizuki. The less ties you have to the world means less weaknesses for prospective enemies to exploit.