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Curiously, the red-haired man does not respond to the approaching carriage, nor to the sound of it slowing behind him. The young girl waits, watching him stumble and stagger forward, before starting the carriage back up at a trotting pace.
“Excuse me.”
No response.
“Sir?”
Still nothing.
“EXCUSE ME, SIR?!”
This stops the man, who goes completely still and then sharply cranes his head up and backwards to look at her. There is something strange about his gaze – it’s as though he’s looking right through her. Besides that, the way he carried himself while walking made it seem as though he is hurt, and it appears that stitches trace the hollow of his right cheek, dried blood painting his face beneath the seam.
“Is everything…okay?” she asks, stopping.
He draws himself up onto his toes and spins around to face her, surprisingly graceful despite his lack of shoes.
“Even in moments of deep hardship, when one finds themself surrounded by foes in the valley of sorrow, Idrila’s truth is enough to snuff out even the urge towards despair. Suffering is momentary – The Beauty is eternal.”
He grins, not seeming to mind the confusion that she doesn’t bother to hide, and she prods her thumb knuckle with her pointer nail anxiously. She has only just started to traverse this route without her brother or father and is surprised by how anything going the slightest bit sideways throws her for so pronounced a loop.
“Well,” she starts. “It’s, um, quite a ways to town, so…would you like a ride? I’m heading there too if that’s where you’re going.”
“My words cannot express how moved I am by your generosity,” he says, expression sagging into sudden agony. “In compassion, too, there is beauty, for love of thy fellow man drafted in her image is instantiation of worship. Tell me, young lady – in this town you speak of, could one potentially requisition the services of space flight?”
“Yeah, down by the docks they’ll take you wherever you want. It’s pricey, though.”
“Then to town I shall go,” he says, clambering into the seat beside her. “How can I properly thank you for your kindness?”
“No need,” she says. “We help each other out here. It’s the right thing to do. I take it you’re starfaring then?”
“Yes, I am a noble nomad of duty, traversing the land to serve beauty minor and massive. My spaceship was appropriated by those who would stop me from fulfilling my obligations to Idrila, so now I must seek alternate methods of travel.”
He pulls down the sun visor to expose its mirror and then begins tearing the stitches out of his face.
Even though she can hear her father’s voice in her mind scolding her to keep her eyes on the road, she can’t help but watch him, her stomach seizing into a single lump. He seems unbothered by the blood spilling from the torn open wound.
“Wh-what are you…?”
“It is a shame to present oneself before Idrila while unbecoming, and the stitching my rudimentary familiarity with medicine allowed me to achieve was….crooked.”
He is unaffected until saying that last word, the uttering upon which resolute shame consumes him just as abruptly as reverie did before it. Simultaneously, she realizes that his jangling bracelets are actually handcuffs noisily trailing the chain that was snapped between them. Tears start to press at the back of her eyes, but she knows that confidence is the only option she has for deterring this psycho from murdering her, so she turns back to the street stoically and hopes that he doesn’t notice that her hands are bloodless from how forcefully she is gripping the propeller.
The man drops his head and begins murmuring under his breath; she allows tears to roll down her cheeks but pretends that they are not, keeping her gaze straight ahead. To her enduring shock, however, they make it into town and down to the docks without him so much as speaking to her again. Once he sees the jets on the water, he begins searching his person, armor clanking against itself all the while until he finds a piece of parchment. He pitches forward, swiping his finger against his bloody jaw to gather his ink and then scrawling inscrutably on the sheet rested on his legs.
“I can offer you naught but my word and this depiction of Idrila to bring you strength in moments where it seems that all is hideous and decaying,” he says, taking her hand in his bloodied one and placing his drawing into it with the other. “And yet you may rely on my promise that I will fulfill any request you make of me as best I can. I landed on this planet only accidentally, but I shall return after I see Idrila, hopefully with material goods to compensate you.”
He leaps out of the carriage and crumples to his knees, and then rises to his feet with a bit of effort. Turning to her for the last time, he says,
“By the way, the way that you have done your hair is lovely.”
Four hours later, a fellow who identifies himself as “Isaac” approaches her, talking too of beauty, demanding information about the wounded man and gesturing at his own armor as a demonstration of what that man may have been wearing. She remembers how raw the redhead’s skin looked on his wrists where the cuffs must have cut in, and how affected she had been when he complimented her first ever, clumsy attempt at braiding her own hair.
“Sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else,” she says, intentionally turning away from the man quickly enough that she does not notice how distraught that makes him.
Argenti comes to in a strangely dark room and tries first with touch to determine where he is – against his cheek and beneath his wandering fingertips he can feel threadbare linen wrapped around a mattress, a thick comforter pooling on either side of his curled up body. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he starts to make out the shabby furnishings of a low end hotel room, and a white card perched on the nightstand catches his attention. He rises into a sitting position, allowing the comforter to slip from his bare shoulders, and brings the card up to his eyeline to make out the small letters written on it: FOLLOW UP IN TWO WEEKS WITH DR. JULIUS KINGSLEY. KEEP STITCHED AREA CLEAN AND TAKE PAIN KILLERS FOR ANY SORENESS.
He reads it again, and when no context about what this could mean appears to him he allows himself to become distracted, tossing aside the card and allowing his hands to flutter up to his head to see if he managed to find something to curl his hair with despite all of his beauty supplies remaining on the stolen One and Only. At the same time, he crosses the room to the window to pull the curtain open, shutting his eyes against the sudden light beaming through the glass. With his hands slowly feeling out the contours of the cylinders of cardboard his hair has been bundled around, he imagines that the glow just on the other side of his eyelids is Idrila standing before him, and a smile tugs at his dry lips.
“Good morning, most dear Idrila,” he says, bowing his head a little – enough to show deference, but not enough that his imagined view of her radiance is obscured. “I have not forgotten the dream that you sent me – I am on my way to you, even if I must cross the desert tundra and ocean to do so.”
He smiles to himself and allows his eyes to open, feeling energized by the reflection on his goal even though the journey seems impossibly long without his spaceship. Like a starving man walking miles for food, he feels as though he is barely staving off frenzy. He wants to be with Idrila *now*, so badly that it hurts, but this too is a trial, and in the end it will all be worth it. Donning a chipper affectation, he heads into the bathroom and steps over the massive pile of toilet paper on the floor that he unraveled for his makeshift hair curlers; in the mirror, he spots the much nicer, flesh toned stitches in his skin and silently thanks Idrila.
He comes to in the dark once again, this time with his entire body sore from sleeping on the ground in his armor. There is a hint of the stench of blood in the air, and besides the sound of his own slowed breathing he can hear tiny creatures skittering around unseen. He is in a cavern of some sort.
“Isaac is lost,” one of the Triple Demons says, a giggle lurking in the back of her throat. “You saw with your own eyes that he has strayed from the path of Idrila.”
Argenti opens his fist to reveal his ocarina and starts puffing into it arrhythmically.
“He wasn’t even transformed into a beast – he’s still in possession of all of his faculties, but he must have finally accepted that Idrila is dead and gave up on all of this foolish pomp.”
He blows into it harder, but, though the demon is speaking just above a whisper, he can hear her still perfectly clearly.
“What do you think the sin was that broke his will to virtue? It was probably something pedestrian; perhaps a drunken orgy with a bunch of prostitutes. He is a creature of flesh, just like you, and flesh cannot ignore its nature – ”
He sits up, holding the ocarina in his teeth despite the pain from his jaw, and begins undoing the straps leading up his ribcage into his armor. Carefully, he removes each piece and lays them down in the proper order: breastplate, gauntlets exactly parallel to each other with the fingers’ ends pointing in opposite directions, then the vambraces with their hand ends pointed the same way as the corresponding gauntlet, his rose pauldron, his other pauldron, the left cuisse, then the right cuisse, then the left greave, then the right greave, and then his waistcoat folded into a perfect square, his regalia stole folded into a perfect square placed directly on the center of the waistcoat and then across the top of the arrangement his spear with the sharp end pointed towards the breastplate. Half of his time was spent removing the armor while the other half was spent arranging it into the proper configuration such that the same horizontal line bisected the objects through their center, a task that required careful measurement no matter how many times he had done it.
His attention is successfully submerged in the task until he recalls that he does not have his polishing kit.
“That’s right, Isaac has it still,” the demon says, sounding closer than before. “That is the price he levied for your devotion: every single one of your worldly belongings besides the clothes on your back. I can tell that you miss your steed, Argenti. I can tell that it fucking enrages you. You want to kill him.”
He blows into the ocarina again, cutting through the cloud the voice is stirring up in his head and drawing his mind back to the armor before him. The demons will surely descend upon him if he leaves the cave, and there isn’t anything out there that he can use to polish his armor anyway; he clenches his jaw down even harder on the ocarina, apologizing to it in his mind for his rough treatment and swearing that he will buff it as soon as he has the tools to, and then grabs his stole and twists the end of it up into a fine point that he can use to carefully sweep the sufaces and crevices of his armor for grime. He can always wash it and press it again, he tells himself. Idrila will understand.
“… –genti. Argenti.”
His entire body is wracked with pain radiating out from where he’s been slashed by swords and bitten by beasts, but still at the sound of that voice he struggles against the way his consciousness is starting to swim. He breathes deeply to steel himself, once, twice, and then plants his forearm into the ground to lift himself and raises his head.
He can only see her hair, an iridescent silver that seems to wink sky and mauve in the radiant light bursting forth from her body, as she seems to be nestled into a crater of some sort.
“Argenti,” she says again.
“I’m here, Idrila,” he assures her. “I’m coming.”
He gasps, again to steel himself, and digs his hand into the dirt a few feet from him to drag himself forward. Everything about the movement hurts to the point that tears spring to his eyes, to the point that the idea of just resting and bleeding peacefully out flashes across his mind. Defiantly he claws his way forth with the other hand and calls out to her.
“Idrila! This pain I am feeling is stripping away my weakness!” he screams, approaching little by precious little. “These sensations are fleeting, but my devotion is my totality and cannot be deterred by…by my weakness! That is all it means to think of stopping! Weakness!”
The taste of the blood streaming from his bruised nose must have made him gag, because he is not sobbing. It is not possible that he is sobbing when so close to her.
“Move!” he bids himself, seeing the way his hand rests impotently in the dirt before him. “Move!”
His vision blurs, and he cannot even keep his head up. The knowledge that he is about to die settles over him, and while he had always expected to feel fear or sadness or anger or relief in this moment, he feels nothing. His mind is totally clear. He also expected for things to get dark, but instead they are brightening so sharply that it feels like his eyes are burning.
Impossibly gentle hands, with such ease that he feels completely weightless, pull him up into a sitting position and then up against a body, pressing his face in the crook of a neck and encircling him with the other arm. He does not know how to respond to this – his mind stays blank until on inhale he takes in the lovely fragrance of roses emanating from her skin, at which point he allows himself to weep.
“In the depths of every Knight of Beauty, there is always a kernel of evil awaiting the chance to bloom and deal harm,” Idrila says, pushing his hair out of his face so that she can cradle his cheek in her soft hand. “There lies its chance in that loathing pointed inward, too; hatred of the self is hatred all the same and reaps the same misery and discord.
“Moments of weakness do not eclipse one’s glory, Argenti. You are safe here.”
She holds him tighter as his crying mounts, swiping away his tears with her thumb.
“Come and find me. You know where to look, don’t you?”
He awakens, his face damp with tears and sweat, and rolls into fetal position.
“I will never draw enough breath to describe my worship of you, how thankful I am for your guiding light,” he whispers, wrapping his arms around his body to try and remember the bliss of her embrace. It does not work as much as he would like, but that isn’t why he finally gets up.
When he was just a boy, his young uncle told him how to stay safe – don’t walk near alleys, because insurgents may be waiting there; know that silence only comes when many have been killed, so hide and listen as carefully as possible; and then, when he died and there were only parts of him to hastily bury in a tiny grave with no coffin, only cheap burlap wrapped around them to consume the gore into obscurity – then he taught Argenti that there was no predicting death, that it awaited you in the eaves independent of your hopes and wishes and dreams. He could die right now and never get to meet Idrila.
So as he rises to his feet he is careful, watching the ground for any signs of trip wires or false boards, and then takes up his lance. There are enemies waiting to carve him up, he knows, to keep him from Idrila as they tried to in his vision. Pre-empting their strike is the only way to be certain that he will succeed in finding her.
He checks everywhere, under his pillows and beneath the fitted sheet on the bed and in the wardrobe and inside the ironing board and in the air conditioner vents and in all of the drawers and under the bed and in all the cupboards and in every single tea sachet in which tiny true stings may be hiding and in the microwave and the fridge including the ice tray and in the bathtub spigot where he finds disgusting mold and scrubs it out with his toothbrush and in the toilet tank and then inside of his own armor as he puts it on, unassured that he is safe just yet, that someone else won’t try and take things from him like Isaac did.
He awakes with a startle because he is not sure when or how he went back to sleep, and then is hopping to his feet and bracing his polearm defensively before he knows it. He startles again upon registering a shriek from his opponent (a waif in plainclothes).
“Argenti?”
“Yours, truly, madam,” he says, bowing but keeping his head upright enough to hold her in his sights. “I do not wish to harm you. Renounce your hatred of beauty and admit her supremacy as the pinnacle of aesthetics, the most beautiful being to ever be, and I shall stow away that violent comportment I will soon have no choice to visit upon you.”
“N-no need for violence,” she says, holding up both hands. “I just came to check on you. There’s a bit of a mess in here.”
Cautiously, she draws one hand away from herself to gesture to the overturned dresser, the dismantled coffee maker.
“Are you alright?”
“Renounce and admit,” Argenti growls, squinting.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“First: ‘I renounce my hatred of beauty.’”
“I renounce my hatred of beauty.”
“I proclaim that Idrila is the most beautiful being to ever be.”
“I proclaim that Idrila is the most beautiful being to ever be.”
Unconsoled, he wrings his hands on the shaft of his spear and gently groans beneath his breath.
“What happened in here? Is everything okay?”
A long silence ensues, her watching him glaring sullenly at her feet.
“Argenti….?”
“It is not entirely clear to me how this room came to be in such disarray,” he says. “I can deduce that it must have been a measure I undertook to ensure my safety. Worry not: I shall right things before I depart.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just tip housekeeping extra. You’re not thinking of leaving, are you?”
He nods.
“You know…” she starts. “Earlier today I saw someone posted a missing person notice about you on the IPC bounty submissions board.”
“Yes, it was undoubtedly my colleague Isaac,” he says, speaking quietly but finally raising his eyes to hers. “Who would have me abandon my quest for Idrila. How such a foe is among the ranks of the Knights of Beauty is beyond me, but the potential for succumbing to heresy is within us all.”
“Hmmm.”
She has something more she would like to say, but she seems to be hesitating to do so. He is not sure why that would be the case, until he realizes he is still gripping his spear in both hands, his body still at the ready to jump into combat as though it could happen at any moment. The woman is half his size and her skin is slightly colorless from malnutrition; even if she were not perfectly nice to him, it was not as though she stood a chance against him. It took him a few more seconds to banish the anxiety that has nestled its roots in him, but eventually he leaned his spear against the empty wardrobe and placed both now free hands on his chest one over the other.
“I deeply apologize for my uncouth behavior, young lady. I see that I have unduly put you ill at ease, breaching the tenets of even basic chivalry. Should you find it within the reaches of your good will to forgive me, I hope that you will speak freely what is on your mind without fear of my taking umbrage.”
“Well. It’s just that I’ve seen you before. You visited before the meteor strike and stopped in for dinner.”
“Pleas–”
“It’s alright, I don’t expect you to remember every random tavern wench you encounter. It’s just that from what little I know about you…you are not yourself.”
He cocks his head, not understanding.
“I don’t know what’s wrong. But reading that post that ‘Isaac’ put up, I could tell that he is really, really worried about you. And I can see why. You don’t seem well.”
“I admit that not all is right with me,” he says thoughtfully. “My thoughts do not assemble correctly. Unfortunately, I cannot tend to that now.”
“I really think you should. I already told Isaac that you checked into a room here. Why don’t you wait for him to come? He said it should take only a day or so.”
“The Beauty calls me,” he says, shaking his head.
“It doesn’t seem like….you don’t seem like you can keep searching for her.”
“For lack of fortitude?”
“No, I didn’t mean like that. I meant that you really need to take care of yourself now. Look at your feet. You can’t go on like this.”
He examines his feet, which have been bare for a few days now. He and Isaac had been journeying together when he’d first had his vision of Idrila, and when he had told him of it, Isaac first attempted to dissuade him and then forcibly restrained him and commandeered the One and Only. The odds were in Argenti’s favor, though, as Isaac did not know about the escape pod. Maneuvering himself out of the restraints did involve his removing his shoes (and spraining one ankle when contorting his feet out of the manacles that had been affixed around them), and he had not had time to buy more since his escape pod landed.
The sheer amount of dried blood on his feet is surprising to him, because he can’t feel any pain in them. Much of it is caked between his toes, as though he was standing in blood, but he can’t recall having done that either. Besides the blood, there is a large bruise on the front of his right big toe, darkening most of the skin around the black nail, and some sort of rash running along the top of his foot into his armor. There is dirt, also, omnipresent under the nails and caked onto the blood in places where grime stuck before it dried.
“I ought to die,” he murmurs.
“Oh,” she says awkwardly. “Um. Does it hurt? I have a first aid kit and a bit down the road there’s a midwife I could get over here like super quickly. Obviously she’s not a typical doctor but I’m sure she – ”
“I thank you, but that won’t be necessary. I just did not realize that I was going to appear before Idrila while looking so unsightly. It is a complete disgrace.”
She helps him find a merchant who can replace his sabatons as a temporary measure, though they only passingly match with the rest of his armor, and urges him to wait. He tells her that he cannot, tips the cleaning staff most of the money he has left, and sets out again on his journey, his heart heavy with the fear that Idrila will reject him as too blemished. As too ugly.
He comes to in the dead of night. Not a sound interrupts the churning emptiness of his mind, and he has to inhale deeply to feel his chest expanding against his armor and know that he is alive. It takes an hour of him lying there, breathing rhythmically to try and lull himself back into sleep, before he gives up and cautiously rises to sitting.
Beneath him is a sleeping bag of decent quality that he does not recall seeing before, and all around him trees with massive trunks too large to wrap one’s arms around rise interminably into the dark sky, crowding out almost all of the light of the moon. The leaves and grass are motionless in the windless, lukewarm air and even the bugs do not buzz aloud. He holds so still that he can’t even swallow until his hands start to shake because in the swarming shadows he knows there could be enemies hiding.
Though he knows that is true, there is another fear clawing its way to the surface and causing him to rattle so hard that his hair trembles before his eyes: he feels that his solitude is expansive swallowing this planet and solar system and all of the cosmos leaving it empty but for him and the slivers of distant stars crowding into the canopy above, undoubtedly abandoned by all life. Everything has died and that is why he cannot hear even cicadas in the middle of summer.
“Idrila,” he says, clambering onto his knees. “Most divine of them all, object of my ceaseless worship. I know that you are punishing me for allowing myself to become unkempt, for cultivating hideousness; just as always, as there is beauty too in the symmetry of consequences, I would not dream of denying that I deserve to be so completely alone.
“But still!” he cries, pitching forward and pressing his face into the dirt. “I am but a worm before you, so I cannot help begging for your mercy. Please, return life to the world around me. I will renounce my belief that I have achieved anything that even resembles beauty enduring enough to be worthy of heralding your name. I wholeheartedly apologize for my sins.”
When he is met with more silence, he clasps his hands together, fingers interwoven, just above his head.
“How much further must I humble myself?” he asks. “Would debasing myself as punishment please you?”
He undoes his hands and digs his fingers into the dirt, scooping a mound of it into his mouth, and presses his jaw as tight as possible to prevent himself from gagging and spitting it out. His hope is to feel something writhing against his gums, a beetle or slug announcing that Idrila has relented and repopulated the dimension.
Instead, he hears rapidly approaching footsteps and raises his head, letting the soil pour out of his mouth. The entire forest around him seems like it is gently humming, and the purest white he’s ever seen flickers in his periphery here and there, too quick to capture. After he sits up, it takes him a few seconds to finally see what has materialized: adorable, fat, fuzzy white rabbits, cavorting about gleefully like some sort of shattered choreography of celebration. There are only 3 of them at first, but soon there are dozens of them.
He is crying again, but this time they are tears of joy: Idrila has sent the rabbits as a sign of her mercy, to show that she has been touched by his remorse, that she still loves him despite his ugly feet and inability to play even a child’s lullaby on his ocarina and the way he fears that he will not succeed in finding her. It is warm like her embrace in his dream again, and he can’t help but giggle happily and try to touch the rabbit that is now staring at him, twitching its nose. It thumps its foot in rebuke, and he nods in understanding, putting his hand onto his lap.
The approaching footsteps mount in volume until they produce Isaac, trying to control his heavy breathing and looking down at Argenti with an unreadable expression. Still, Argenti grins at him, not minding that he probably has dirt all over his teeth.
“Isaac!” he cheers, getting to his feet. “Were you frightened?”
“Frightened?” he asks, cautiously taking a few steps forward.
“When you died, or perhaps just dematerialized. Were you afraid?”
“I’m sorry, my friend; I do not know what you mean,” he says, beginning to sweep his long, dark hair up into a ponytail. It warms Argenti, too, the strands of hair that Isaac misses, streaming down his temples in inky straight lines. He has a habit of forgetting them, and the familiarity is intoxicating.
“I was all alone. Everyone else in the universe had disappeared. No, I misspeak: I killed every last one of them because I am deeply unworthy.” Argenti says, closing the distance between them, his wet eyes glittering with happiness. “But Idrila, she – um, I begged her” – here he gestures to the grime he can still feel in his mouth – “and she sent the beautiful rabbits to tell me that she brought everyone back.” – here he gestures to the bunnies hopping about – “The Beauty’s mercy is incomprehensible. I am awestricken.”
Isaac has begun to frown, his eyes scanning the woods around them.
“Now even you cannot deny that she is alive, and she visits us, and her power is without contest,” Argenti says, brushing away tears. “You have been cured of your sinful doubt, haven’t you?”
“It brings me relief that you may not grasp at the moment that The Beauty has kept watch over you,” Isaac says, his tone measured and even and soothing.
“Deep down I knew that your faith must have remained,” Argenti says. “Perhaps I need not slay you.”
“As I always have, I pledge allegiance to the most beautiful of them all, The Beauty Idrila, and all she stands for.”
“I’m so happy, I could kiss you.”
“I am grateful that she has kept you safe with her guiding light, but I would now like to care for you in her stead.”
“I need to go to her.”
“She sent me to help you.”
Argenti ponders that.
“Let us return to the One and Only,” Isaac says, placing a hand on Argenti’s cheek. “I’m sure you miss it.”
“I do.”
“Then, we’ll go to see a doctor.”
“And after that we’ll go to see Idrila, yes? I know where she is.”
“Yes. Once we get you checked out, I’ll take you wherever you like. It was wrong of me to get frustrated and lash out at you. This time, no chains.”
Now Argenti is really crying, bowing his head and holding his face as his tears drench his hands, because his quest has been riddled with the pain of fear and distrust and betrayal but now in Isaac’s redemption and companionship and refusal to trample the bunnies and hand stroking his red hair and mutual love of Idrila Argenti once again peeks into the splendor of his own life, the unbearably lovely beauty that he can approach freely and without dreading that it will someday run out.