Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The man who had once been Cliopher Mdang was wading in the shallows collecting mussels when she came.

He had been there, on that island with the tower, for some time. He wasn't sure how long exactly. When he arrived, his mind had been freshly damaged, and time moved oddly in fits and starts. He had been much clearer-headed for some months, and marked a new day at the top of his journal page every morning when he sat down to write. But he didn't know how long he had passed in the fog.

He had seen some other people, very occasionally, once he had drunk his fill of solitude, the air and the sea and the clouds and the cries of the seabirds and nothing else. (That had taken a long, long time). Ludvic, stalwart friend, came regularly. He was always willing to sit with the man in silence, calm and patient and expecting nothing. His presence was welcome even when the man could bear no other. Ludvic would bring books, and paper, and something delicious baked by Sardeet or Jullanar; care made tangible. He would bring word of the man and his welfare back to many people, he knew. That was all right, as long as he didn't need to see them.

Eventually, others began to come along, one at a time. They were subdued and cautious, taking their cues from him. They weren't as quiet as Ludvic, but that was all right too. The man could bear a bit more noise, a bit more color, by then. Possibly he found it—pleasant. An interesting change, at least.

There was, of course, one who never came. At first, that was a relief. He had come here for many reasons, but most of all to be away from Fitzroy, from his anger and confusion and expectations and loudly, messily broken heart. He couldn’t bear any of those. He was a wounded animal, and he had crawled away to this den to hide, or heal, or die.

He was relieved that Fitzroy had left him alone, and yet. He often came to the man’s mind. So many things could do it: the feel of the magic on the island, a memory of a worked silk tapestry, a dark bird against the bright sky, a scrap of song in his throat. The lumpy scars around his neck, where his efanoa had been torn away.

Some of these memories, even the shining ones, made him shake, and choke, and curl up and hide under a blanket. The distance between who he had been, when he was Cliopher Mdang who walked in legends and was the fanoa of Fitzroy Angursell, and the nameless, shivering wreck he was now, cut deeper than he thought he could bear.

How is he?” he found the courage, one day, to ask Ludvic.

Ludvic didn’t pretend not to know who he meant. He could see him thinking the question over. “Physically recovered,” Ludvic said at last. “Trying to be useful to the community. Very quiet.” He paused for a moment. “Working on healing, like you.”

Somehow this brought him up short. He had imagined that Fitzroy, released, would be merry and free once more. His spirit was irrepressible, after all.

What did he need to heal from? A bitter voice within him asked. He had barely suffered. The man had made sure of that. Why couldn't he accept his sacrifice and be happy?

“He has no wish to impose upon you,” Ludvic said, in the same calm tone, his eyes on his carving.

That was. That was good. Wasn't it?

After Ludvic left that afternoon, the man stood on the rocky beach and watched his sail become smaller until it disappeared over the horizon. When he turned back to the tower, for the first time the silence was not an unalloyed comfort.

The next morning, he waded in the shallows, picking mussels from the rocks on the west side of the island and putting them into a makeshift pouch. The tower's magic provided food, but somehow anything he foraged tasted more real, and he was starting to appreciate that. Maybe, sometime, he would take the vaha out a little ways and fish. As he worked, he thought about nothing but the air and the water and the slick rocks under his feet and the feeling of the shells under his fingers. He developed a pleasing rhythm, grasp and twist the shell free, rise and place it in the pouch, bend over again. Some were too tightly attached to pull off; he could make a knife from one of the large shells that washed up on shore, but he didn't like keeping a sharp edge so easy to hand.

The tide was coming in, and his pouch was full. He straightened, stretched his arms above his head, and froze. Someone was approaching from out past the breakers.

She came toward him with the calm inevitability of the tide, and he knew there was no escaping her. Not that he wanted to, but he had known her power from childhood, and had maintained a healthy fear of her ever since.

Up close, she resolved into an incongruously ordinary human form. She could have been any Outer Ring matriarch, round and shorter than the man by a head, thick white hair pulled back from her mahogany face full of deep wrinkles. She wore her mirimiri wrapped around her torso, iridescent and barely-visible. Around her neck were bountiful efela: pearls and coral, stones of all sizes, tumbled glass, driftwood, kelp, seafoam, and shells, shells, shells. In her eyes were the fathomless depths of the ocean.

The man bowed deeply, Islander-style, over his hands. “Grandmother,” he murmured.

Ani stepped up to him, and pulled his face down to her own so their foreheads touched. Dimly, he thought that he should be distressed by this—no one had been so close to him since he had come to the island—but his heartbeat was slow and even as she held him there. Her breath was the salt sea air, and he felt it clearing his lungs and his head as he breathed.

“Well, grandson,” Ani murmured. She had a low voice, resonant with the crash of the breakers. “Haven’t you been through the typhoons again.”

The matter-of-fact understanding in her statement took him out at the knees, and he sat down hard on the large, flat rock behind him. He stared up at her silently for a long moment. She stared back, infinitely patient. At last he shook himself and asked, awkwardly, “Will you sit?”

“Aye, don't mind if I do.” Ani plumped herself down on the rock beside him, and patted her hand on its damp brown surface in apparent appreciation. “It's due to you that I am able to come up out of the depths at all.”

The man closed his eyes against the phantom pain. She was looking for the man he used to be the one who had walked in legends. Everyone was.

He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, that he couldn’t help her with whatever quest or adventure she had in mind this time, that she would have to seek out another hero to assist her. That he could direct her to a place where there were several to choose from, if she liked.

But instead, perhaps because of that understanding, which he had never thought to expect from the ocean, he looked at her and said in anguish, “I’m not him anymore. He's gone, grandmother. It's all ashes.”

“Is he?” Ani asked, without a change in tone. Somehow, her question did not make the angry despair rise in the man's gorge the way it had when….others….had asked the same question. He felt nothing but grief, pure and somehow cleaner, bringing tears to his eyes and sending them flowing down his cheeks. She didn't doubt him. She knew.

“Yes.” The cavern of his deepest heart rose before his vision. Blasted bare of its soft moss, the fire in its hearth of pearls dead and cold, the pearls themselves pitted and ruined with ash. All of his deepest loves, deepest griefs, dearest memories, destroyed by the—Eritanyr’s focused, expert, playful cruelty. The pointlessness of it struck him anew, bringing with it a fresh burst of tears. He had worked so hard—so many people had worked so hard—to make him who he had been. And for what?

“And so you are here now—why?”

“I don't know,” he said dully. “I needed to be alone. Away.”

She nodded, accepting that.

“Do you want to stay?”

He looked at her in incomprehension. Want? “I can’t do anything else.”

“Because of the ashes.”

“Yes,” he whispered, and bent his head to let the tears fall.

Ani sat silently with him as he wept, offering neither comfort nor judgment. After he quieted, and wiped his face with the back of his hand, she nodded at him again.

“When my fanoa brought me back my mirimiri that allowed me to leave my dark lonely place, it was some time before I was able to go. It wasn't easy, after being so long alone.”

Very little astonished the man, after all he had been through, but at this he stared at her, open-mouthed, until she smiled crookedly.

“You’ll catch flies that way,” she said, and he shut his mouth with a snap.

“I never thought—” he began, then cut himself off, flushing.

“Never expected sympathy from the ocean, did you?”

He blushed harder, but nodded. “You are not known for kindness, grandmother.”

“No,” she agreed equably. “I destroy, yes. You know this well, grandson. I am not gentle. I can smash down at once in a great blow, or little by little, wearing away the hardest rock until nothing is left. Isn’t that right?”

He nodded.

“And yet,” she went on, as thought to herself, “that is not all of my nature. Sometimes I feed, and rescue, and create new life. And sometimes I might return a treasure that was lost, just as you returned mine to me.”

And as the man watched, Ani reached for the vast rope of efela around her neck, and separated one strand from it. It was a twisted dark cord that looked to him like seaweed, and from it hung a single cowrie, white shading to crystal, with a white-gold ember burning inside it.

“Here,” she said, holding it out to him. “Tanaea-te imalo. A fire for your hearth.”

Chapter Text

The man couldn’t take his eyes from the glowing shell, nor could he speak, for a long moment. The small white shell for which he had climbed and dived and struggled and wept, to bring out of the deep caverns of his heart, a gift for Vou’a to give to his fanoa.

The best of you, Vou’a had said, and he had replied, It is the best of what I have been, not who I will be.

“That was for you,” he said, numbly.

“Aye, and I have treasured it. But you know well that I can share a fire without losing it, grandson. If you wish to have it, it is yours.”

Did he wish to have it? He could barely consider the question. What would happen if he accepted it?

“It's your choice,” she said. “It always has been.”

His breath was coming fast and uneven, making him lightheaded. “I don't—if I can't keep it—” he didn't know how to finish the question.

Ani quirked an eyebrow at him. “I’m sure you know the answer to that.” At his silence, she continued slowly, as if to a small child, “Do you think I am the only one who holds a fire that you lit?”

He flushed with shame at the idea. Had he not leaned on his friends so much already?

She gave a snort of amusement, rolling her eyes. “Just as stubborn as Vou’a told me,” she said.
Then, before he could figure out how to respond to that, she put one calloused finger under his chin and lifted it to meet her eyes, all amusement gone. “You have not been idle, all this time, you know,” she told him. “You are strong enough to hold this flame, if you wish. It’s up to you.”

Ani lifted the efela with its glowing shell over her head, and dropped it softly into his palm.

The warmth pulsed in his hand, in time with his heart. He couldn’t seem to stop looking at it, turning it this way and that to watch how the light changed.

Ani stood, settling her mirimiri around her. “My tide’s turning. Time for me to be going. Until we meet again, grandson.”

He rose hastily, the shell clutched tightly in his hand, and leaned in as she touched her forehead to his in farewell. “Thank you, grandmother,” he managed.

Ani patted him lightly on the cheek. “You’re a good boy,” she said, unmistakably fond, and turned away from land once more. He watched as she strode off into the waves, until her form became indistinguishable from them.

He went back into the tower. The shore felt too exposed, somehow, for this. Inside, out of the view of sea and sky, he settled himself in a comfortable corner and opened his hand to examine the shell once more.

He could accept this fire, his fire, back into himself. He did not doubt what Ani had told him. Why, then, was he hesitating?

The best of what I have been, he had said. That man could never have imagined how far he could fall. Who was he now, this shattered wreck, to claim that fire? What if it made living with himself now unbearable? Or, worse: what if nothing changed? What if not even a gift from the gods themselves could make him into anything more than the Emperor's pet?

He turned these fears over and over, as the daylight faded and evening gloom filled the small room. The shell glowed, its warm even flicker playing over the gold on his hands and forearms, and gave him no answers.

He could put it down. He could be as he was, for the rest of his natural life. But he had to admit, he was tired of being no one, being nothing. Tired of the exhaustion and the grief and the pain. Tired of the emptiness and silence that he had run away to. He was—a wave of vast irritation arose in him, and he recognized it with amusement—he was bored of it.

Well then. It was time for something different, if not exactly something new. He picked up the efela and put it on.

At first, it seemed like nothing happened.

He was no mage or seer, and all of his experiences with the mystical had occurred when the mystical had intruded upon him. He didn’t know how to encounter his own soul from the prosaic world, not the god’s isle in Sky Ocean. Surely Fitzroy would know how, but….

Feeling faintly ridiculous, he closed his eyes and breathed, slow and deep, trying to think of nothing but his breath. Trying to let whatever would happen, happen.

He breathed, in time with the warm pulse of the fire against his chest, and it seemed as though the fire melted into him. Fascinated, he followed that warmth down into himself, as it seemed to settle into his veins, and warm them. Another breath, deeper than he had been able to take for so long, and he was following it down into the dark, down the narrow, crooked passages of his soul, all the twists and turns and blocked-up corridors, until at last he found himself in the large, open cavern with the stream running through it.

He didn’t think he was present in the same way he had been, that first time. He could tell he was still sitting on the stone floor in the tower room, in one sense. And yet, he was in the cavern, not in a memory of it, for it was different. No moss, but hardy, springy tufts of akulikuli were covering the ground where it had grown. The hearth was cold and dark as he approached it, but it was not in the state he had last envisioned, either. It was swept clean of ashes and debris, and new firewood and kindling laid. The stained and pitted pearls around it were placed back into their pattern. Someone had, it seemed, been at work here.

All this he noticed in a breath, as the pulse of light that he followed settled into the bare hearth. He watched avidly, as the kindling caught with a crackle.

It was not the great bonfire it had been on his previous visit. But the wood caught, and the fire blazed up brightly, then settled into something small but present. The flames put out a steady warmth that he leaned into. He felt his muscles warm and loosen in its glow, unlocking from a tight crouch that he hadn’t realized he was holding. He raised his gaze to the cavern roof and its faint brightness of glowworms or stars. Once more, they were singing faintly, all the names of his ancestors. And in that pattern, at the right moment, he heard his own name once again.

Cliopher was weeping as he became aware of himself again, sitting on the floor in the tower. He buried his face in his hands and let himself sob, in release and grief and gratitude. He had his name back; more than that, he had the Lays again. He had pushed away all of his ancestral wisdom, knowing he did not deserve to claim it. Knowing he could not harden himself to survive Eritanyr while he held it. He had not realized how much of the emptiness inside him was the dry riverbed where the Lays should be, until they ran through him once more.