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They told her that her father never came for her. Perhaps he never meant to. They told her that Gwyn returned his soul to the flame, and thus began the firelinking that nigh consumed the world. They told her that her siblings renounced their divine birthright one by one, until at last Gwyndolin undertook to snuff the flame. Now all is dark. Firelinking is forbidden.
At first, she sought out her siblings. She wasn’t ready for that. The reality of their lost memories cut deeper than she’d imagined. Her brothers and sister were relieved to see her awake, but only in a general way. Their concern lacked all personal recognition. Gwynhael took her for a dragon ride in Leyndell, and all she could think was that his arms felt wrong around her, had forgotten how once they held her. Where was the boy who crawled beneath her bed to slay imagined monsters?
They told her none of this was her fault. Her father lied to her. She did not know, when she went to the Ringed City, that her duty would be eternal. She heard none of this. Instead she heard, I broke them. I might have ended the world.
She wept. She wept so long and hard that her healer sent her to sleep with perfumed smoke.
When she woke, she asked for a means of atonement. Her hosts assured her she needed none. She asked again.
They told her of the Ouroboros.
Now Filianore is here, in the wilds beyond Irithyll, with her cheek to the frosted ground. She is listening for fire.
The Ouroboros Order comprises residents both of Filianore’s world and the other world in which she convalesced. Some are warriors, some are not. All are sworn to safeguard the natural cycle of fire and dark. They seek signs of the new flame growing deep beneath the earth. Once they find it, they can guard it against those who might snuff it or fuel it past its expiration. The difficulty is that the flame drifts. The Ouroboros needs people specially attuned to fire to find and track it. Filianore is a child of the gods: that makes her suitable.
She lifts her cheek from the ground. Once again, she’s felt nothing. No one in the Ouroboros has, not even Elisabeth the former Fire Keeper, or Friede with flame etched into her face. Gwyndolin thinks it’s still too small to be detected. But they have to try. The stakes are too high for complacency.
Filianore dusts off her hands and lets Shira pull her up. Her body is still weak from the eons of magic she used to hold the Ringed City still. Shira doesn’t think she should be out here in the wilds yet, but Filianore likes it. The dark world has a bizarre attraction. A forest cradles Irithyll, dark-grown trees with stony bark and veins of light. Some have flattened canopies like mushroom caps. Moss beards their branches, softly glowing. Huge dragonflies with light in their abdomens hum through luminous spores. They remind Filianore of a book she read about what might live in the deep sea, beyond the sun’s reach. The author speculated that such creatures might make their own light. They certainly do in this sunless world. Theirs is a deep-sea beauty.
Filianore was never as afraid of the dark as she should have been. Perhaps that is why Gwyn sent her away.
Shira is afraid, though. She hides it with decorum, but Filianore has known her since girlhood and she sees. Darting gaze, flexing fingers. Reddened eyes. Body rigid beneath her borrowed Darkmoon uniform.
“Anything, my lady?” Shira asks.
“Not as of yet.”
A branch snaps somewhere in the trees. Shira’s head jerks around. “Then I must urge you to return to camp. You are not yet strong.”
Filianore knows she should worry more about the dangers of this new world. During her stay in Irithyll, she heard of several hazards: hostile plants, dregs of deep, ash-worms. But none of them seem real. They are like elements of a dream. Most of Filianore’s new life feels like that. She had no chance to grow into it; she simply went to sleep in one time and woke up in another. She recognizes nothing. That makes it difficult to think of anything as real - except for Shira. Shira is still recognizably herself, immediate and true. Thus, she worries Filianore more than any ash-worm.
“What troubleth thee?” Filianore asks.
“I would not burden you with it,” Shira says.
Shira always says things like that. Shira always protects her. That, at least, has not changed.
~~~
It was Shira who woke her lady. She was the only one who could, Trina said. Filianore herself erased her siblings’ memories of her so they would not grieve her absence. Now Shira alone retained the memories she might need to undo Filianore’s slumber.
Shira wanted to help - Filianore deserved life - but she hesitated. A god’s dream, a god’s mind, was no place for a dragon-born. There was also the matter of choice. Had Shira any right to awaken the princess to an unrecognizable world? What if it did more harm than good? The decision should be Filianore’s.
But of course, it couldn’t be.
We choose her fate whether we wake her or permit her to sleep, Miquella wrote in his invitation to Farum Azula. There is no avoiding it. Think of it rather as a chance. Asleep, she has no chance at all. Awake, she may shape her life as she wishes. If we make this sole choice on her behalf, all further choices will be hers. That is best, nay?
On one side, false peace. On the other, a struggle that might, in time, beget true peace. Miquella outlined that choice with such clarity. Shira wondered if he had faced it before.
He sent Shira a stony scale that delivered her in seconds to Farum Azula. There, all was still save for lightning clawing at the bruised sky. An ancient dragon hung amidst concentric rings of pillars. Even cocooned in his wings, he was at least as large as Midir, two-headed, skin like a mountainside. His amber eyes gazed unblinkingly down at the sleeping princess.
Gwyndolin’s allies brought her to this timeless realm as a precaution. Filianore's time was bound to the Ringed City; had she been there when Gwyndolin broke her egg, all those halted ages would have caught up with her at once. The storm beyond time spared her that death. After that, she lay for months beneath Placidusax’s eye, while Trina Dreamwalker considered how to wake her.
Shira’s mind revolted at the sight of her. Her princess was so small, a flower in a stony desert. Dragon jaws mere feet from her throat. A single breath might have scattered her petals.
As she approached, Shira glimpsed her reflection in Placidusax’s eyes. Tiny, wingless. Incomplete, wrong. Neither dragon nor god. And yet the growl that filled her mind was mild, like a greeting.
Soon Shira saw why Trina took so long to summon her: Filianore’s dream was a labyrinth. It was made of threads, some fine as spider silk, some thick as branches. A dazzling array of colors, all woven so tightly as to block out whatever lay beyond. Winding passages, sheer drops, great cathedrals of color. Filianore was always a gifted weaver.
Trina had no way of finding a path to the dream’s heart. Intuition alone drew Shira to a slender green and gold thread that she thought might represent Filianore’s essence. Youthful as new grass, warm as sunlight. That thread, in turn, drew her through the maze. At times it almost disappeared beneath thicker threads. At times it led to passages so narrow they crushed the breath from Shira’s lungs
(sent her back to the darkroom, locked door behind locked door, dark to soothe the undying pygmy on her spear, where she taught herself to sip air, reduce the world to the space between walls, but when she left the Ringed City her body rejected all that, rebelled against narrow spaces and refused to breathe)
and Trina had to pull her through.
At times it led to tests. A tiny thread-Filianore spun up from the floor, presenting dialogues with blanks only Shira could fill.
Art thou as skilled as my brother? Wilt thou show me?
May it warm thee when next thou goest a-wandering.
The people say vile things of me.
Dost thou not wish to be my knight?
I wish only to ease Father’s fear.
And at the end, clasping Shira’s finger with a tiny thread-hand:
I am afeared. Wilt thou stay with me until I sleep?
Shira swallowed hard and answered as she did all those years ago:
“When you sleep, and when you wake.”
She intended to keep that promise.
That last answer opened the way to a cocoon. A heart. A woven bundle with light pulsing at its core. The green-and-gold thread trailed into that glowing center. Shira knew what would happen if she pulled it.
She thought of how Filianore was always morbidly certain she would die young. In a way, she did.
Shira took hold of the thread.
Forgive me, princess. I wish you to live.
She pulled.
With a great rustle and slither, the dream unraveled.
Waking beneath Placidusax’s sky, Filianore asked for her father.
~~~
“He never meant to return,” Filianore says. She’s been repeating that phrase of late, trying to accept it. Her father, for whom she gave her life, abandoned her at world’s end.
It hasn’t gotten easier.
Across the blackflame campfire, Shira sighs. “I urge you to sleep. You are troubled.”
“Sleep will change nothing.”
As a child, Filianore loved stories of plucky young people falling into other worlds, having adventures as they found their way home. Now she is in one of those stories, and she does not love it. She isn’t sleeping well, for one thing. Her body doesn’t know how to wake, work, and rest all in the dark. Part of her is still waiting for the sun to rise. Leyndell was no better. Everything was too loud and fast. She could not keep up with others’ speech. Sometimes sounds overwhelmed her and she had to clap her hands to her ears. Her body, long accustomed to utter stillness, had forgotten how to live.
She supposes she will adjust with time. She has to keep telling herself that.
Then there are her siblings. She wants to see them, but she cannot bear how they look at her. There’s no spark of kinship in their eyes. Lately Filianore realized that even had she left their memories intact, they would not know her, and she would not know them. They’ve all changed so much since they parted ways. The people they were as children are long gone. Spell or no spell, they have to acquaint themselves all over again - weave a new tapestry. Filianore does not know when she will be ready for that.
And then there is her father. The unanswerable question she cannot stop asking.
Was she worth anything to him at all?
Filianore pokes at the fire with a stick. She cannot speak of this without something in her hands. “Gwynhael said Father loved us in the beginning, but in the end he loved the flame more than all.”
“I think perhaps that is true,” Shira says heavily. And then, in a bitter rush: “The Unkindled Dunstan insinuated that Lord Gwyn sent me to world’s end to rid himself of a dragon-born. ’Twas not honor he gave to me, but exile.”
To rid himself. “’Tis an ugly thought.”
And it leads ugly places. Did Father rid himself also of -
Gwyn looked sideways at Filianore ever since he caught her in a forbidden section of the library with a book of dark magic on her lap. Gods were not supposed to work dark magic. Certainly not as easily as she did - even more so than Gwyndolin, born on a darkmoon night.
Filianore puts two fingers together, as if holding a needle, and pulls. Darkness trails after her fingers like thread. It coils around her arm, smoky-silky and cool. She isn’t afraid. This feels right; it always has. And there’s no one to tell her to stop.
She retreats from the truth she knows in her heart. “If Father held the dragon-born in such contempt,” she says instead, “why did he entrust my slumber to thee? Why did he appoint thee mine handmaiden and then my knight while we were yet so young?”
Shira shifts on her log bench. One hand rises idly to her throat. “I expect he had his reasons.”
~~~
Gwyn always had reasons. On the day she met Shira, Filianore did not yet know that.
She snuck down to the training yard that evening, hoping to watch Gwynhael spar. She had to go in secret because her father said the yard was no place for a little princess. By the time she slipped her governess, everyone had already left the yard - save for a girl not much older than herself. Filianore had never seen her before. She peered over the low brick wall to watch.
The new girl was standing at the water pump, cooling her dusty face and neck. Her shirt collar lay open just enough for the bronze twilight to catch on something gleaming.
Scales. Patches of scales.
Filianore gasped and ducked below the wall. A dragon-born! She’d never seen one up close, though she’d heard about poor Priscilla. Everyone said the dragon-born were mistakes and it was unseemly to talk about them. But this girl did not look like a mistake. She was still a child like Filianore, yet she stood straight-backed like a soldier. She was too solemn, as if she’d already known hardship.
The girl must have heard Filianore’s gasp, because her voice rang out: “Who goeth there?”
Slowly, Filianore raised her head above the wall and met a pair of extraordinary green eyes.
“Good even,” she said.
The girl drew back with a hasty bow. “Forgive my rudeness, Your Highness. I knew not whom I addressed.”
“Who art thou?”
“I am called Shira, Your Highness.”
“Thou’rt a prentice?”
The girl shifted her weight. “Indeed I came here to practice the spear, but I am no prentice. My kind cannot enter this place without Lord Gwyn’s leave.”
Filianore was unfazed. She wasn’t supposed to be there any more than Shira. “Art thou as skilled as my brother?”
“Far from it, I fear.”
“Wilt thou show me all the same?”
“I do not wish to bring trouble upon you.”
Filianore was too young to know how much trouble there might be. In fact they were both taking a risk just by speaking, Shira more so. But Filianore wanted to make Shira smile. She seemed so somber.
Filianore folded her arms on the wall. The stone was still warm through her dress. “I will tell no one I found thee here tonight. Thou wishest to be a knight?”
Shira nodded. “’Tis more than I dare hope for.”
“Thine eyes are lovely, like new leaves. I am very fond of green.”
A wary smile. “As am I, Your Highness.”
They were instant friends. Their strangeness drew them together, dark-touched princess and slit-pupiled girl. They couldn’t stop the whispers - The princess is Abyss-born; Seath grew his “daughter” in a tank - but they could endure together.
Filianore returned to her bedchamber that night certain that no one had seen her. She was good at wrapping herself in shadows. But Anor Londo had many eyes, and all of them led back to Gwyn. Not a day later, he summoned Filianore to his solar. Shira stood there looking like she wanted to sink through the floor.
“This child is called Shira,” Gwyn said. “She shall be thine handmaiden.”
~~~
Shira spends the night outside Filianore’s tent. The chill troubles her little, and she can sleep with half her mind awake: her dragon blood has some benefits. She fears full sleep anyway. Lately she’s been dreaming that she is back in her darkroom and the stones are closing in even tighter. Then Placidusax’s growl fills her mind. The stones tremble, light floods in, and Shira wakes with heat in her throat.
The worst part is that the heat is real. The dragonlord unlocked something in her when she looked into his eye.
Shira shifts her cross spear on her knees, ears straining for danger. It’s too quiet out here. In this dark age the air has weight, like a blanket thrown over the world, muffling sound. This is nothing like her marches with Gwyn’s armies. Tent cities, cooking-smoke haze, snatches of music and story. Shira longs for that now. She will be glad when Yorshka and Friede arrive to join the search for fire. Shira is not fond of people, but nor is she fond of silence. It gives her too much space to think.
(That was the only thing she had space for in her darkroom. Alone with her mind, she rewrote her shame. She might be dragon-born, but at least she was the daughter of Duke Seath, not some wretched human. She was serving a noble purpose. She had not been discarded and forsaken. Lord Gwyn entrusted her with the suppression of dark - what could be more important?
Even then, she knew she was lying to herself.)
Eventually, Irithyll’s bells begin to toll. Shira and Filianore are camped close enough to the city to hear them. Shira recognizes the melody: Gwyn’s sentries sang it at the end of the nightwatch. Her breath catches. Anor Londo was not kind to her, but it was her home. Now the ancient city is abandoned. Life has migrated to Irithyll. There it orbits ex-Allfather Gwyndolin, who keeps no servants, sleeps in the barracks, and stands watch with his knights.
Shira doesn’t know what to make of it.
Heat rises up her throat. She knows by now that there’s no use fighting it. She listens for movement within the tent. Hearing none, she walks a little ways to breathe fire.
~~~
Shira never wished for fire breath. She never asked to hear the captive wyverns’ voices when she passed their pens. She only wanted to be something other than a failed experiment. And she was a failure, no matter what Filianore said. Seath wanted to create a perfect creature, a dragon indistinguishable from a god. With her patchy scales and reptilian eyes, Shira was far from that.
She spent many a night in the servants’ small chapel, begging someone - anyone - to take away what made her dragon. One night Filianore found her shivering on the marble. The princess swaddled Shira in her own fine cloak. “Oh, good Shira, what aileth thee?”
Shira swiped the tears from her cheeks. Never again shall you see me weep, my lady.
“Only a wound I took in the training yard,” she said - a lie. “I am not cold, Your Highness.” - true. Something else had made her shiver.
Filianore saw through her. She sat there until Shira stopped shaking, then took her arm and walked her back to the servants’ dormitories. Shira fell asleep still wrapped in Filianore’s cloak.
The next day, she folded it neatly and tried to return it. The princess shook her little head. “May it warm thee when next thou goest a-wandering.”
Filianore wasn’t speaking of bodily warmth. The cloak was her way of telling Shira she wasn’t alone. That was Filianore: as discreet and kind as she could be within Anor Londo’s strictures. Shira had never known such compassion. For a moment she dared to imagine she had a sister.
~~~
Filianore wakes in darkness. Her nose is cold, her eyelids heavy. Her body does not want to wake without the sun. Her tent smells of canvas and earth, foreign scents to a divine princess. Even in the Ringed City, she went to sleep on silken sheets. She fights down a wave of longing - not for luxury, but for anything familiar.
Mornings are always the hardest. This is when she remembers she isn’t dreaming. She could have ended the world. Her father isn’t here to soothe her. He never came back.
Filianore’s chest constricts. Is this what it feels like to be impaled?
To calm herself, she looks through the tent wall at the figure outside. The blackflame campfire is casting a silhouette: Shira, methodically cleaning her spear. Yorshka, Gwyndolin’s chosen sister, and her guardian Friede have not yet arrived from the painted world. Gwyndolin insisted they accompany Filianore’s first Ouroboros outing. “Not for thy protection,” he said, “but for thine healing. My sister is a gifted healer in all ways, and Friede… Suffice to say she is acquainted with sudden changes. She will understand thy plight, and perhaps counsel thee.”
Filianore hopes they’ll be here soon. She could use some more company to distract her from the empty place inside her. Though Shira would never admit it, she probably could too.
Filianore lies on her bedroll a while longer, watching the darkness coil around her wrists. For so long she suppressed her dark magic, studying only light. Now the darkness won’t be denied. It wants her, and she wants it - but what can she do with it? Can it help her pay the debt she owes her family and the world?
She sheds her blankets and bundles up her long dark hair. Then she washes her face in the bucket by the tent flap. The water is freezing, of course. She wills the cold to clear her mind and make her real.
It’s all right, she tells herself. Canvas and freezing water will serve. Silken sheets never did her any good.
~~~
Filianore had many silks and jewels in her youth. Managing them was one of Shira’s most important tasks as handmaiden. It was she who made the princess look like a jewel herself.
She was nervous the first time she dressed Filianore for a ball. It was the princess’s first revel since coming of age, and she had to be perfect. Filianore’s reputation depended on it - and that was already shaky. Dark magic aside, the people had noticed that Filianore alone among Gwyn’s children did not bear his name, which could only mean she was illegitimate. Folk made wagers as to her parentage. Gwyn denied all the rumors, but that didn’t stop them. Some said that Filianore’s mother was an Abyss-born witch who’d seduced the Lord of Sunlight. Others preferred to say Filianore was a changeling, slipped into Anor Londo to destroy it from within.
Shira knew how it felt to hear such things.
That evening she brushed Filianore’s hair until it shone and threaded it with pearls. As she fastened pearl-and-silver chains around the princess’s neck, Shira felt her trembling. Filianore was breathing hard, as if the necklace were a noose. Shira’s heart ached for her. The princess must feel like a lamb led to slaughter.
Shira knelt beside her chair. “Tonight you go into battle, Highness, and I am your armorer. Let these jewels be your breastplate and gauntlets. Let your beauty be your shield. You will win the people’s hearts. They cannot fail to be charmed.”
As soon as Shira spoke, she knew she’d said too much - cared too much. Servants weren’t supposed to care this much; knights weren’t either. But how could Shira help it when she spent so much time with Filianore, listening to her, waking her, dressing her, learning her every need?
Servants, Shira concluded, were set up to fail.
Filianore clasped Shira’s hands. Her eyes were wide and dark above her ivory gown. “I am afeared. The people say vile things of me.”
“You are armored, Highness,” Shira said. “None can harm you.”
They could, and they did, but Shira’s metaphor did the trick. Emboldened, Filianore charmed the courtiers enough to turn malice into pity. She returned to her chambers victorious. She also knew - they both did - that the war was far from over. Filianore would have to repeat this performance every time she attended a ball. If she made a mistake, the people would be merciless.
Still, Shira was glad. She tried not to think about how she herself had no conventional beauty or royal birth to shield her. Good service was her sole defense, and the gods could take that away on a whim. Dragon-born had no standing in Anor Londo. At least Filianore’s father was the king.
Surely that would protect her.
~~~
Filianore emerges from the tent looking a bit more solid than yesterday. Shira is relieved. Her lady has seemed so rootless of late.
“Good morrow, Highness,” Shira says as Filianore sits down across the campfire.
The princess’s brow furrows. “Thou’rt hoarse. Art thou unwell?”
Shira clears her throat and almost tells her.
She has been breathing fire since Leyndell, where her dreams began. In sleep Placidusax’s growl of greeting cohered into words: Draw new breath. The first time was terrifying. Shira woke with heat in her throat that she mistook for bile until smoke curled from her lips. Some visceral part of her knew what was about to happen.
She walked out of the Erdtree Sanctuary, out of Leyndell, out to the plateau. Sweat beaded her skin and her gut burned and spasmed. She fell to her knees at a pool not far from Leyndell’s outer wall. Her abdomen gave a last savage lurch, and a gout of flame spilled from her mouth and fell steaming into the water.
I must learn to swallow it, she thought, and since then she has.
She knelt there for a long time, shaking, throat raw. Pouring handfuls of water over herself until the burning faded.
Shira did not think anyone had seen her, but the next day Morgott the beast warrior waylaid her as she crossed the sanctuary foyer. He said she looked unwell. Shira said she was fine and started to walk away. Behind her, chanting arose from another part of the sanctuary, hard voices spiraling above guttural punctuation. Then Morgott said something that stopped her cold:
“’Tis a song of fire, the deepest part of the Crucible’s great current.”
That could not have been a coincidence. “Hast thou set spies upon me?” Shira demanded.
“Fire is auspicious in this new age, as are the dragons that wield it.”
“I am no dragon. I am…unnatural.”
“As am I. My birth was cursed.”
Shira bristled. How could he call himself cursed when he fought Midir as a lion with wings of light?
Morgott fixed her with a piercing stare. “Whatever dark art engendered thee, that is no sin of thine. Yet however many voices may tell thee so, I daresay thou shalt not believe it until thou speak’st it with thine own.”
He had guessed rightly. Shira hated him for it.
Now this is her chance to put it right. She could tell Filianore that Placidusax woke the long-repressed dragon within her, that she has been breathing fire every night for weeks, and despite the terror, part of her wants it. Every time she swears never to do it again, a voice whispers, Try just once more. What would it be like to live without shame?
“Save thy shame for deeds thou hast or hast not done thyself,” Morgott told her. Easily said - but how long did it take him to act on it?
Shira draws a delicate breath. Her throat is still rough from this morning’s fire-breathing. “I…”
Just three words, that’s all.
“…’tis the cold air.”
Filianore does not look convinced. She folds her arms like the stubborn girl she used to be. “Think’st thou I will not understand? Remember’st thou what my people once said of me? I know what it is to be thought strange and wrong.”
She has hit close to the mark. All these years, and she hasn’t lost her perception.
Shira looks into the fire. “Of course you do, princess. I do not fear to lose thine affection. I am unready to tell thee, ’tis all.”
“And prithee do not call me ‘princess.’ Thou may’st address me as ‘thou.’ I am thy mistress no longer. Remain my knight-protector if thou wilt, but ’tis affection that bindeth us, not duty. We are only Filianore and Shira now. Is there not freedom in that?”
There is, and it’s frightening. Shira prefers to keep everything in its place, even if her place is subordinate.
Filianore reaches for Shira’s hands. “When I met thee, I rejoiced, for I gained a new sister.”
“I…” Shira swallows a sudden lump. “I thought that also.”
“Then let us be as sisters to each other. There is no one to forbid it. And do we not need each other now more than ever?”
“We surely do.” Shira does not think she could bear the darkness without Filianore beside her. “But to forsake my duty, the only duty I have ever known…”
“I know ’tis no small thing I ask of thee, good Shira, but I have only ever known duty to be a prison. I am told Lin remained an age alone in Anor Londo, holding his sun aloft. My sleep was well-nigh the ruin of all. I do not wish that fate - or Lin’s - for thee, or for any I love. Wilt thou try for me?”
Filianore’s dark eyes are flinty. She looked the same way when she gave Shira her cloak all those years ago: compassion girded by steel. This is the will that stilled the Ringed City - softer now, but no less firm.
We will be all right, that look says.
Shira wants to believe it.
“I will try,” she says.
She swallows “Your Highness” like her fire.
~~~
Filianore always had steel, but she did not know how much until Gwyn appointed Shira her knight.
She caught wind that it was to be a perfunctory affair, no ceremony, just two Silver Knights to administer Shira’s vows. A deliberate insult to Shira, though Filianore did not know it then. She only knew her friend deserved better - and she was young and reckless enough to do something about it.
Filianore had never knighted anyone before. Gwynhael and Gwynevere had, and they practiced with her until she was perfect. Then, wrapped in shadows, she slipped into the cathedral and took the ritual sword from its case. It was a great bejeweled thing, too big for her to lift. She needed all her strength not to buckle under its weight. She rested it on the altar and waited for the Silver Knights to arrive.
They were surprised to see her there, dressed in her finest gown with pearls in her hair. They asked if she had her father’s leave to do this.
“Shira is mine handmaiden, and she is to be my knight,” Filianore said, “not my lord father’s. Why should I not bestow the honor?”
They didn’t argue after that. Filianore was ill-begotten, but she was still Gywn’s daughter.
Somehow she managed to lift the sword, though her arms shook all the while. Her voice did not. Filianore administered Shira’s vows in the clear, ringing tones her singing master taught her. Then, hesitating, Shira pulled down her sleeves just enough to bare her shoulders. She shivered as Filianore touched her skin with ceremonial steel. At the end, Filianore anointed her new knight’s brow with oil while chanting a blessing. They caught each other’s eye and smiled.
~~~
They break their fast with the mushroom skewers Siegward packed for them in Irithyll. Toasted on the fire and sprinkled with Siegward’s pouch of spices, they’re quite good. The spices warm Filianore from the inside out. She can’t remember eating anything better in Anor Londo.
Afterward, she and Shira take baskets from their tent and enter the encircling woods. Since there’s little chance of finding the new flame here, Filianore asked if she could help Gwyndolin in some other way while she is out in the wilds. Reluctantly, he agreed to her collecting some household provisions. Siegward showed them which types of mushrooms were edible, and Gwyndolin gave them a cutting of a weedy-looking plant to gather. “We call it rot-ward,” he said. “When crushed into a poultice, ’twill keep wounds from souring. We have much use for it in this new age.”
Many healing herbs grow in these woods. Gwyndolin said Yorshka calls them her cathedrals. Standing beneath the trees, Filianore sees why. The trunks rise like pillars, and the canopies bend together into vaults. They shut out sound as sure as stone. Filianore steps lightly, reluctant to disturb the hush. Why did her father always describe the dark as angry? Certainly it was angry in New Londo and Oolacile, but it isn’t now. Perhaps anger was not its natural state, and it only grew wrathful when suppressed.
The darkness coils around Filianore’s arms like a cat’s tail. It follows when she lifts her wrists. She could almost weave with it.
Hail, thou beautiful night. Let us be friends.
They choose a tree, kneel at its base, and set to work. Siegward’s mushrooms grow in clusters amidst ropy roots. Their spores drift up to mingle with those falling from the moss above, glittering snow. The mushrooms themselves are pale, plain, and unappetizing. Filianore would not believe they were so good to eat had she not tried some this morning. The dirt is cold and soon her hands are chilled through her gloves, but she doesn’t mind. It feels good to sink her hands into the earth. It makes her believe she is solid. Rooted. Not a leaf at the mercy of the wind.
She imagines she is an ordinary person without a massive fissure running through her life. Someone like Gwyndolin’s companions in Irithyll. When they sat at table, they spoke easily, acquainted with every reference and gesture. Time flows for them. Their loves, hurts, and joys are ongoing. How long before Filianore’s new life is seamless like that?
After a while she starts to sing. Shira harmonizes just below, as Filianore taught her. The thick, damp air holds their voices close. There’s no echo. They sound small, like children again. Perhaps that is not a bad thing.
“You - thou” - Shira forces out the informal pronoun - “seem’st more thyself just now. Sir Siegward said ‘twould do y - thee good to dig in the earth. Thou wert ever fond of growing things.”
“Sir Siegward is wise.” Filianore dusts off her latest mushroom and drops it in her basket. As she does, memory strikes. “As a girl I often gathered flowers for Father. I roamed our gardens seeking colors he favored: white, gold, and red.” She remembers standing before Gwyn, trembling with need for his approval. He always gave it. “He put his hand upon mine head and placed the flowers in a vessel of water. Once he put a white bloom in mine hair.”
Those moments were brief. Gwyn’s displays of love were rare and all the more precious for it. Afterwards he always told Filianore to run along. As a child, she thought this was because Gwyn was busy. Now she wonders if he was afraid to be in her presence.
The basket blurs to liquid. Her eyes sting. “Was it all as naught to him? Naught but a deceit?”
Filianore’s breathing hitches. The woods swallow up her sobs.
All at once Shira is gathering her up and holding her tight. “Oh, princess - Filianore, Fili…”
Filianore sinks into Shira’s arms, shoulders shaking. Fili? No, Fili was the girl who went to sleep to ease her father’s fears. Filianore doesn’t know who she is now. Maybe no one. Her kin cannot remember her and her only purpose is lost.
“I shall armor thee,” Shira murmurs.
How can she? Shira cannot even armor herself against whatever it is that is making her voice hoarse and her eyes red. But what else can she do but try? They are each other’s only defense.
Shira holds Filianore until she cries herself dry. As she calms down, she realizes what an effort this must be for Shira, who still believes she could be struck down for touching a god without leave. Filianore loves her for trying.
She eases out of Shira’s arms and puts her cheek to the ground, listening for fire. Her father is in the fire. Perhaps if she finds the new flame, she will hear him answer her questions.
~~~
Filianore sealed her fate on the day Oolacile fell.
She did not know exactly what had happened, only that the Abyss had struck. Poor Lin was in mourning, and all Anor Londo was tensely subdued. No one said it; everyone thought it: This is the beginning of the end. Filianore felt somehow responsible. She was an ill omen, after all.
Vague guilt brought her to her father’s chambers that night. Gwyn was sitting by his window, greatsword across his knees. He looked wrong. Gwyn’s big hands were never so still.
When he saw Filianore, he put the sword aside and beckoned her into his lap. She was almost too big for that, but he did not seem to notice. He was trembling: more wrongness. Gwyn was a solid, forceful man; he did not tremble.
He held Filianore to him like a shield. “Vereor nox,” he whispered hoarsely. “Fear the night, child. Always.”
“But I do not fear it,” Filianore said. “I will fight it in your place.”
She said this with a child’s innocence, and it was years before Gwyn sent her to the Ringed City. Nonetheless, Filianore made her choice that night. She knew she would do anything to ensure her father was never afraid again.
He knew it too.
~~~
By Irithyll’s distant bells, it is afternoon when Yorshka and Friede arrive. They are dressed practically in gray and black woolens: clearly they have made such expeditions before. Yorshka embraces Filianore and Shira both. She looks into Shira’s face with clear blue eyes that say, I know what thou art and what troubleth thee. Being dragon-born herself, she could not have missed Shira’s reptilian eyes.
Shira and Friede appraise each other coolly, with the understanding that they are allies, not (yet) friends. Shira knows Gwyndolin entrusted Yorshka to this woman’s care, but that means little to her. The fact remains that Friede once served Kaathe, and Gwyndolin…well, he is not the person Shira thought. They will both have to earn her trust.
“Have ye sensed aught of fire?” Friede asks.
Filianore shakes her head. Her eyes dart warily to the scythe on Friede’s back. “Not as of yet.”
“Nor did I, when I searched here - but more eyes and hands will do no harm. Perhaps ye will sense what I did not.” Friede casts back her hood and breathes deep. “I well recall these woods. I broke here. I had to lose my footing ere I could find it again.”
The rest of the day passes peacefully. Filianore and Friede put their hands to the ground now and then, but they sense no fire. Yorshka guides them to large patches of rot-ward. She also points out plants for cooling fevers, clearing lungs, and soothing joints. For such a childlike little thing, she knows her work.
When evening comes they retire to their camp. They make a stew of root vegetables they’ve brought along and the meat of some furry creature Shira caught in a snare. The work makes a fine distraction. Shira almost forgets about the heat in her throat.
Yorshka tells stories as Irithyll’s bells toll nightfall. The girl has much to say of Arianova, the painted world she oversees. Then, as she grows drowsy, she drifts into a different kind of tale.
“Morgott said unto me,” she begins, “that all life was once alloyed in a great spiral current. Within every living thing lie multitudes of smaller spirals. They contain the whole of a creature’s essence: miniature worlds. No two beings bear the same pattern. Each of us is the only one of our kind that is, was, or ever shall be, and thus also the little worlds within us.”
Filianore is listening raptly. “How fortunate we are,” she says, “that we exist. Of all the countless spirals that might have been, ’tis ours that chanced to be. How beautiful.”
Yorshka nods. Her eyes find Shira’s. “Aye. How rare and beautiful indeed.”
Filianore looks at Shira to see if she has absorbed this message. Shira wants to, but the words bounce off a wall of shame years strong. She also remembers what Morgott told her: she will not believe she is not a curse until she says it for herself.
Again Shira almost says it: I breathe fire. Again she stops herself.
“I shall bear it in mind,” she says, and tries to mean it. Perhaps if she tries often enough, she can trick herself into believing. What would it be like to live without atoning for her existence?
~~~
At the end of her first day of knight’s training, Shira looked in the mirror. Watched her slit pupils dilate. Pulled open her shirt collar and touched her patchy scales. She did not see a knight. She could hide beneath armor, but she could not change herself.
Filianore sensed her discomfort as Shira readied her for bed. “Dost thou not wish to be my knight?” the princess asked. “I thought our ceremony pleased thee.”
“It did, my lady!” It was, in fact, the most beautiful moment of Shira’s life. “Yet I… You know what I am.”
Filianore turned in her chair and looked straight at Shira. “Aye, I know. Thou’rt my good Shira. I would have no other by my side.”
That night, Shira went to the servants’ chapel and made a new plea:
If I must be dragon, may it give me strength. I cannot fail to protect her.
~~~
Shira rises early the next morning and goes to the woods to breathe fire. The princess would see only beauty in me, she thinks. The fire still hurts. Swallowing it is worse than letting it out.
When she returns to camp, Yorshka is sitting by the campfire. Shira observes her. The girl has a tail - a tail! - scales on her cheeks, horns girdling her neck. If Shira looked like that, she would have exiled herself to Ariamis. But Yorshka is quite at ease. She is spreading her gathered herbs by the fire to dry, humming as she works.
Shira’s words burst forth, more desperate than rude: “How canst thou…be?”
Yorshka looks up. “Be, Spear Shira?”
“How canst thou walk about singing to thyself with thine head high and thy tail in view?”
“I know no other way.”
Shira’s heart sinks. “No one taught thee shame?”
“Not my mother, who was dragon-born as I. Not my father, whom I did not know. Not Lin, who raised me in love and gave me standing amongst his people.”
“Then we are not the same.”
The compassion in Yorshka’s blue eyes is depthless. “We are not our birth or blood, but what we choose to make of it. If my mother was Seath’s creation, I am unashamed. With her cold blood I have borne harsh chills. With her tail I dove into Ariandel’s waters. With her strength I endured that death-touched lake, retrieved her scythe, and cut Ariandel’s last threads. With her kindness I govern the new painting. Priscilla was my mother above all, and I bear the best of her within me.”
Shira thinks of Yorshka’s talk of spirals, every creature its own tiny universe. “Thou sayest that this body - my scales and eyes (and fire) - are my spiral. They are part of me, no more or less.”
“Precisely.” Yorshka reaches across the fire and puts her hand on Shira’s arm. “I was born in exile. I saw my mother slain when I was yet a babe. I know what it is to begin one’s life in hardship. Yet mine hurt made me a healer, and thine, perhaps, made thee a protector. We who are born cursed need not always be so, Spear Shira. We can grow.”
Yorshka passes Shira a mug of tea she’s been warming on the fire. Shira takes it, more touched than she can explain. It’s the sort of gesture shared by companions - equals.
Shira sips the tea and tries to see herself through Yorshka’s eyes. Dragon-blessed with resilience and magical aptitude. More than an experiment and a painful past. It’s difficult. Shame has shaped Shira’s whole life. Small wonder it took Morgott an age to break free. If Shira manages the same, she’ll have to reinvent herself. She cannot imagine becoming a lion with wings of light. Seath did not give her wings.
Yet she keeps trying to breathe fire. Why does she keep trying?
Yorshka seems to know what Shira is thinking. “Come with me when thou’rt ready. I know a place that may aid thee.”
~~~
At times Shira’s darkroom felt especially crushing. She hoped deliriously that a falling stone might break open her chest and let her breathe. She thought about planting her spear in the ground and setting the undying pygmy on fire and walking out into the wastelands beyond the city and howling curses at Seath who made her.
Instead she taught herself to sip air, sip pride. I knew the glory of fire. I guard Princess Filianore. I am the daughter of a duke. She had so many ways of pacifying herself.
Maybe she should have raged.
Maybe her fiery breath is her long-buried hurt, refusing any longer to be silent.
~~~
Yorshka convinces Friede to remain behind. “Spear Shira will protect me if need be,” she says with all the faith in the world.
Shira is not so certain. Friede doesn’t look convinced either. All the same, Shira straps her cross spear to her back and makes sure Friede sees that she is not weak.
Yorshka leads Shira into the woods, further from camp than she has yet been. Yorshka hums as she walks. She tries to step only in the pool of light from her blackflame lantern. She is so childlike. How can someone who has known such suffering choose joy?
“Dost thou never weep for all the pain thou hast borne?” Shira asks.
“Of course,” Yorshka says. “I weep for my mother and father and all the folk I cannot heal. I weep for my part in my brother’s capture. ’Tis good and proper: it cleanseth the heart. Didst thou weep in thine exile, Spear Shira?”
“Nay.”
“Sir Vilhelm, Lady Friede’s knight - he is stone like thee.”
“And doth it serve him well?”
“For a time it did. Then he well-nigh went hollow. Stone is brittle. ’Twill crack.”
Is Shira cracking now?
Deeper in the woods, the trees grow thicker. The light from camp disappears. The sole illumination comes from trunks with veins of light. Soon they are scrambling over roots so thickly grown they conceal the ground. It reminds Shira of Filianore’s thread maze. She keeps one hand out to steady herself and the other to catch Yorshka if she falls. Whatever else, Shira is still a knight: she will not let a lady stumble.
Further still, and the natural light all but vanishes. The veins in the trees are too faint to see by. Yorshka’s blackflame lantern throws sinister shadows. It’s very quiet. The night-born birds are muffled. Nothing rustles in the undergrowth. Shira begins to wonder if they are going anywhere at all, and if they are, how did Yorshka ever find this place? All the trees look the same, and they’re pressed too close to see anything between them. Shira’s breath quickens. The air is too thick and there isn’t enough of it. She’s forgotten how to take small breaths. Her body demands more.
Yorshka squeezes Shira’s hand. “’Tis not much further.”
Shira is sweating when they break through the trees. The clearing before them is small, almost round. Save for a thin grass verge, it is occupied entirely by a hole. Its blackness is impenetrable. There’s no glimpse of earth lining its sides. It’s as if the world has simply been erased, leaving a lacuna in reality.
Then Yorshka lifts her lantern higher. Light glints, and Shira sees that the hole is in fact a pool. The water is glass-still. Shira cannot tell how deep it is. The water swallows Yorshka’s lantern-beam after a few inches. If Shira fell in, would she sink to the center of the earth?
A primal urge grips her: Try. Swim down and down, water chilling, direction dissolving, pressure compressing her to her essential self, time slowing, stopping, reversing. Then cold turning hot, water shimmer-boiling. Morgott’s Crucible fires smoking up from hadal depths.
“’Tis a mirror,” Yorshka says.
“What use have I for a mirror?”
“This one is peculiar. ’Twill show thee as thou art, as thou wouldst be couldst thou see thyself with sight unbound.”
Shira’s spiral: that’s what it will show. And what will she see? A malformed failure neither dragon nor god? A mass of bones crushed by duty?
Shira turns away from the pool. “I am not certain I wish to look.”
“I too feared to look when first I came here. I thought I might see a bird with broken wings, or a puppet wielded against my dear ones.”
“And what didst thou see?”
“Myself, much as I am, but with hands to embrace all the wounded.”
“I shall see nothing of the sort.”
“Thou knowest not until thou lookest. Yet I will understand if thou wishest not to see. Some do not. Dunstan did not look for fear he might see the Lord of Hollows who, in one future, condemned the world.”
Shira’s feet tense within her boots. Part of her wants to know, like part of her wants to breathe fire. What if the pool shows her as Filianore sees her, full of light and courage?
“This mirror will tell no lies?” she asks.
“I have never known it to be false.” Yorshka holds up a hand. “But good visions are quite as sharp as ill ones. Do not look if thou’rt unready.”
“I shall never be ready.” Shira has never once been sure of herself, even when she thought she was. Self-loathing lay ever beneath her loyalty. Perhaps that is why she shouted her war cries so loudly when she led the Spears of the Church in battle.
Yorshka nods. “I understand that too.”
Shira senses this is more than a platitude. This girl left her home for a new world, with former enemies as her companions. She could not have been any readier for that than Shira is now. Morgott told her something similar: The readying is in the beginning.
Shira steps to the edge of the pool. Counting heartbeats. Four beats in, hold for six, four beats out. She thinks of her reflection in Placidusax’s eye, so unfinished. The sword Filianore lay on her shoulders, cool metal on her skin. Was that when the walls first began to close in - long before the darkroom?
In a way, she has never left.
Shira opens her eyes. Yorshka has lifted her lantern again. It casts just enough light to reveal Shira’s reflection.
The Shira in the pool is bent double beneath some great weight. She is bleeding. Her clothes are torn across her back. Stumps emerge from the rents, bloody and flickering iridescent in time with her heart. Golden chains bind them tight. Yet they grow. They grow, and the blood sloughs away until only light remains, light in the shape of scales, feathers, all the colors of life. The chains hold. The wings stop growing.
Shira falls to her knees. Her reflection does too. The light vanishes and she is just herself again, doubled over, throat burning. Grief or fire? She cannot tell. She hardly feels Yorshka’s hand on her shoulder. Now she knows what the girl meant by a “sharp” vision.
“What didst thou see?” Yorshka asks.
“I…I hardly know.” Shira swallows hard. “I had…I believe I had wings, yet they hurt, they were bound…”
Her bonds and the gods’, impossible to separate now, harder still to undo.
Shira waits for Yorshka to say, “Change cometh always with pain” or “Bindings can be broken.” But she doesn’t. Instead she sets her lantern down and takes the reflection away. She puts her arm around Shira, offers a waterskin. Shira drinks. Coughs, swallows down fire. Yorshka pats her back. Shira drinks again. The water is cold and clarifying. She wants to tip it over her head but it isn’t hers to waste. Sip by sip she comes back to herself. She looks up at Yorshka with a strange mix of grief and hope.
“Are these visions set in stone?” she asks. Her voice frays. “Or can they yet be changed?”
~~~
Filianore wakes again in darkness. She is ready for it this time. She slept better last night. Now, in waking, she feels present. No longer watching life go by through a spyglass.
The first thing she notices is that the silhouette outside her tent is not Shira’s. Concerned, Filianore quickly washes up and steps outside. Friede is sitting by the campfire. Her scythe rests glinting at her feet, no less fearsome in its idleness. Friede, too, has a latent ferocity. Her stillness is that of a wolf: capable of lunging at a moment’s notice.
She looks up. “Good morrow. I thought it best to let thee sleep. No doubt this is a wearying ordeal for thee.” She pats the log she’s using as a bench. “Come, sit. Warm thyself.”
The scythe holds Filianore’s eye. She does not move.
Friede follows her gaze. “Ah, I see. Be not afeared. This blade is for thy defense and mine.”
Friede takes the kettle from its makeshift frame over the fire and pours Filianore a mug. Filianore waves the steam away and takes a sip. The tea is mild, fragrant. Like so many foods in this new age, she has no idea what it’s made of.
“I thank thee. Thou’rt most gracious to join us,” she says.
Friede half smiles. “Nay, not gracious. I merely require a distraction. My former knight, whom I hold dear, is away. He took a post as a caravan guard in the Lands Between.”
“Will he return to thee?”
“That is for him to decide, and I wish him to do so of his own will. I owe him that, after all he suffered for my sake.”
Another stark reminder that while Filianore slept, time went on. Friede has lived - is living - a full life. How much time I have lost! Let it not be too late.
“I hope thou wilt see him again,” she says.
Again a half smile. “Didst thou know me, thou wouldst not be so kind.”
“Why is that?”
“I hid the flame of painted Ariandel, for I am Unkindled and thought there could be no worse fate than burning. My 'protection' caused the painting to rot. Many suffered sorely, my knight among them, until Yorshka and her companions released the flame. Had I courage, I would have done so myself. I did not. I feared fire, and I denied its necessity - to the ruin of all.”
“As my father denied dark.”
“Quite so. I have learned to my cost that thy folk are not so different from mine.”
“I was my father’s seal upon dark, as thou wert as a seal upon fire.”
“‘Tis not quite the same. Thou didst Gwyn’s will. I did mine own.”
“I did it for love of him.”
“Then thou wert naïve and tender-hearted at the worst. And how much was thy will thine own? Couldst thou deny Gwyn’s command without reprisal? I sense dark in thee, and I wager it disfavored thee in thy father’s sight. But I had no such strictures. By my will alone I imposed my fears upon a world not mine own. Father Ariandel feared no flame until I taught him so.”
“And after all that, how didst thou begin anew?”
Friede laughs softly. “I had no more choice in it than thou: change was thrust upon us both. Above all I began because I must. Beyond that, I owed Lady Yorshka a debt, and for her I wished to be better than I was before. I am still beginning. Perhaps I always will be.”
Better than she was before. What might that mean? Should Filianore be braver, wiser, less trusting? Louder in defense of the shunned? Would that pay the debt she incurred by loving Gwyn too much?
And speaking of the shunned…
“Where is Shira?” Filianore asks.
“She went off with Lady Yorshka earlier this morn. They did not disclose their purpose, but knowing Lady Yorshka as I do, ‘tis a healing one.”
“I do wish Shira would share with me her troubles.”
“No doubt she wisheth not to distress thee. My knight is the same. I see much of him in thy Shira.” Friede looks at the dark wrapped tenderly around Filianore’s arms. “‘Twould seem thou hast thine own troubles. A child of Gwyn wieldeth dark magic… Forgive me, I will not pry.”
“Please do pry. Thou couldst help me.”
Friede eyes her thoughtfully. “The dark is fond of thee. Was it for this affinity that the old lord gave thee thy duty? He knew thou wouldst endure the dark where thy kin would not?”
“Perhaps.”
Friede’s explanation may well be true - but it is not the only truth. There is another. Filianore has been muttering it to the campfire every night, trying to accept it. It hollows her out.
“If my sleep was of such importance,” she goes on, “why entrust it to a dragon-born? All in Anor Londo believed the dragon-born were treacherous by nature.”
“I suspect I have an answer. Be wary: ‘twill pain thee.”
It cannot be worse than Gwyn’s abandonment. “Tell me.”
Friede sets her mug aside. “The knight of whom I spoke - I raised him up from the gutter. He was a serf and a mercenary when he came to me, and later mine hangman. ’Twas no small scandal when I ennobled him. Much later he said to me that I made him, and for that he was fiercely loyal.
“Now, thy Shira: the gods raised her up from nothing. They might have cast her out, yet instead they gave her knighthood and the honor of serving a princess. They made her. She owed them all; she could not betray them. Who better to guard Gwyn’s seal upon the dark?”
The question settles like a chill. “Then Father appointed her mine handmaiden in our girlhood…”
“…so that her affection would grow with time, and further increase her loyalty. ’Twas a grim duty the gods gave her. For that they required utter devotion.”
And Shira had it. She would have lost everything otherwise. Anor Londo offered her only two choices: perfect service or banishment. Gwyn must have been considering all this from the moment Filianore and Shira met. He could accomplish three things at once: seal the dark, get rid of the dragon-girl, disappear his strange daughter too. Did he hope he would never have to enact such a plan?
Filianore’s mug trembles in her hands. “Did my kindness to her only tighten her bonds?”
“Nay, thou couldst not have known thy father’s scheme. He used thy kindness for his own ends.”
It all makes terrible sense. Filianore sets down her mug and bends double, arms around her stomach.
Friede touches her shoulder. “Forgive me. I have upset thee.”
“Nay, nay, I had to hear. And if Father rid himself of Shira in this way, then he…he also…”
She clutches her cloak. Beneath, her heart hammers. This is it: the truth she has held in her heart since she woke, and which she came here to confront. She needs to say it. She won’t have a new life if she doesn’t. She’ll still be her father’s sleeping beauty.
“Yes, I believe so,” Friede says softly.
She doesn’t need to clarify. Filianore already knows.
~~~
Gwyndolin told her.
They met before Filianore departed on her Ouroboros outing. Of all her kin, she was always closest to Gwyndolin, who was most like her in temperament and magic. Of course, that person was long gone. When Filianore left home, Gwyndolin was still suffocated by the rigidity of male and female. In Irithyll he’d written his own terms. He inhabited the in-between, and he looked right. He wasn’t making himself small anymore.
Filianore rejoiced to see him grown into a self-assured leader. She also mourned, for she saw hardship’s mark upon him. His happiness had not come easily.
They spent a lovely evening in Gwyndolin’s chambers, making illusions. Filianore was nigh as skilled as he. She could wield both light and dark, but of course she was only allowed to study the former. Irithyll’s many luminous plants provided just enough light to work with. Gwyndolin wove a flower to adorn Filianore’s hair. She hung lanterns from the bedposts. He made a dragonfly perfect in every veined wing. She set a miniature deer trotting around the room.
At the end, Gwyndolin walked out onto the flat roof beyond his window and threw illusory lightning into the sky. Purple-white, not gold like Gwyn’s. (Filianore suspected that was deliberate.) People far below jumped at the bang. Filianore and Gwyndolin fell back on his bed laughing like the children they had not been in ages.
Then Gwyndolin asked, “What was thy first illusion?” and Filianore remembered that he did not remember.
His face fell. “Would that thou wert not sent away! We would have been strange together.”
“Forgive me. I left on Father's command, for I believed ‘twould make the world safe for our kind. I loved you all, and I loved him, and I wished him to love me.”
Gwyndolin’s eyes hardened. “I remained in Anor Londo for those very reasons. I nearly burned the world for those reasons. Father ruled our hearts, Fili.”
“Why did he not simply love us?”
“How many times have I asked myself thus? Fear and love ever warred in Father’s heart. When he saw his order crumbling, the former supplanted the late. To me, his omen of nightfall, he gave a duty he knew would be my prison. He sent thee, his dark-touched daughter, far away to seal the darkness. We two imperiled him most, thus he bound us to his order. We whom he feared became his weapons.”
Filianore’s insides ached. She had thought all this herself but never articulated it so clearly.
“But he praised my weaving before his nobles. He watched me play upon mine harp.” She sounded like a child. “Was he false?”
“I do not say he never loved us, only that he -”
“ - loved fire more than all.” Gwynhael’s words. They burned her throat like poison.
“Or rather, he feared darkness more than all.”
~~~
“Breathe, child. All is not lost.”
Filianore tries to recall how breathing works.
“Thy father did not love thee as he ought, but others do. Thy kin delivered thee from world’s end although they know thee not.”
In. Out. Expand ribs, contract. This moment has been coming since Filianore woke. Now it’s here and it will pass.
“If Shira beareth any likeness to my knight, she will guard thee to the death and beyond.”
Dear faithful Shira, always here. She deserved so much better than she got. For her sake Filianore must endure.
“And thou shalt have new kin. Gwyndolin’s companions are a kindly lot. They will welcome thee to their fold.”
Filianore knows all this is true. She knows also that her father tried and failed to love her. He withdrew from her by degrees until the day he sent her away. That thread is cut beyond repair.
And that is not as surprising as it should be.
Filianore picks up her mug for warmth. “I always dreaded to begin a new tapestry.” Her voice wavers. “The blankness frightened me. Such unformed potential! Yet once I chose my colors, ’twas never long ere I recalled the joy of creation. To be blank is to be empty, but also to invite becoming.”
Friede looks at her like she’s gone mad, then nods. “I believe I understand thee.” Hesitantly, she touches Filianore’s hand. “Lady Yorshka once said to me that when we welcome in the things we fear, we teach ourselves that we can endure them. Thereby we strip them of a portion of their power. That is what thou doest in this moment. Thou’rt laid open and bleeding and growing strong.”
~~~
“The visions can be changed,” Yorshka told her, “but it is difficult.”
When has Shira’s life been anything but?
They are walking back from the pool, picking their way over roots. Shira sees her chained self behind her eyes. She imagines wings pushing through her skin, halted in mid-transformation. Does she want to realize that potential? To fly, one must fall.
“How can they be changed?” Shira asks at last.
“Only Lin ever achieved it. When first we came upon this place, his reflection was clouded. He took this to mean that his true self was yet unformed and growing. In time - ”
A low creak runs through the roots.
Yorshka stops. “Get away.”
A louder creak. The dragon-girl picks her way off the root-covered path, onto higher ground. Shira looks around for an approaching foe, but her eyes cannot pierce the gloom.
“Spear Shira, the roots have wakened - ”
The loudest creak of all cuts Yorshka short. The roots shudder beneath Shira’s feet. Then they groan open and she falls into blackness.
~~~
Friede leads Filianore to a clearing where the trees stand in a perfect ring. In the center is a bed of spores shed by hanging moss. Filianore kneels in the shining mound. The dark around her arms mingles with the glow.
“Welcome in thy fear and hurt,” Friede says. “Permit it to dwell with thee. ’Tis not thy foe; ’tis but a part of thee. ’Tis proof that thou liveth. Thou shalt endure.”
Filianore closes her eyes.
Father loved fire more than all. Father loved me no more than he feared me.
She imagines scissors snipping a gold-and-white thread. Her father’s? Her own? A pit opens in her stomach. Her coiled shadows whisper, agitated by her pain.
But I am not forsaken. Never was I forsaken. There is one who never ceased to care for me.
She shudders but does not flee. In her mind she knots her thread’s frayed end to one of vivid green.
~~~
Shira has been having dreams like this. Her darkroom collapses, entombing her, but neither she nor the pygmy can die.
The roots press close around her. She sees nothing, feels nothing but wood. She can just make out Yorshka shouting. The girl sounds muffled and very far away. Shira’s ragged breathing is much louder.
A weight is crushing her chest. She does not know if it is roots or panic. How long can a person live on so little air? Remember how to nip the air. Take small tastes. She cannot. Her body refuses anything less than gulps.
Shira thrashes against the roots. They do not yield. She is going to die, and the forest will absorb her.
Think, she commands herself. Thou hast dreamt of this. How did it end? It seems important to remember that.
It ended with a growl that became words, and they said
- - -
No.
Shira almost said that - should have - the only time she and Filianore argued.
They were ready to depart for world’s end. In a rare breach of etiquette, Shira muttered, “How can the great lord give his daughter to the pygmies?” And Filianore, raw with nerves, snapped, “He is afeared! I wish to ease his fear. Is that not my duty?”
And Shira almost said, No. Not this way.
She was colder after that. She had to be to put the princess to sleep. Watch her breathing slow and almost, almost
- - -
“Stop.”
Filianore opens one eye. “Why?”
Friede has gone rigid. “Hearest thou not?”
Filianore does hear something: a faint slithering, like fabric sliding into place. Until now she assumed it was in her mind. She has been adding threads to her knot. She began with green for Shira, then bronze for Hael, honey for Vere, silver for Lin.
Friede cries out. Blackflame flies past Filianore’s head, and something wraps around her wrists. Fibrous and obscenely strong. The next second she is jerked off the ground, strung up high above the forest floor. Vines wrap her arms and waist and creep towards her throat. She tips her head back to avoid them. They only press closer. She cannot scream. Soon she won’t be able to
- - -
Breathe. Placidusax said that in the dream: Draw new breath. The very thing Shira cannot do!
Unless
She thinks of her chained self in the pool. Filianore, adrift in a new world. The darkroom’s confines Shira never really left behind. If she does nothing, she won’t leave these confines either. Any of the confines.
What choice does she have?
Shira releases her grip on the heat in her belly. It roars up like an eager tide, rushing through her stomach chest throat. It isn’t like bile. This is clean.
Shira rounds her lips as if to blow out a candle. The space beneath the roots turns
- - -
red, blood beating frantic behind her eyes. The vines tighten on Filianore’s throat every time she moves.
“Be still!” Friede calls from below. “Dire-vines tighten with struggle.”
“Wilt thou…not help me?”
“I will teach thee to help thyself.”
Filianore would have laughed if she had the breath. “Perhaps now…is not the time…for a lesson.”
Not now when I am going to die - trapped, much as I lived.
“Now is precisely the time,” Friede says. How can she be so calm? “Thou hast dark in thee, nay? Dark is feeling. Grasp it. Grasp thy grief and bid it do thy will.”
Filianore opens her eyes. The dark still wraps her suspended, aching arms. It is smoking thicker than ever. Filianore imagines a needle at the end of it, with her mind as the guiding hand. She knows how to do this. As a girl, she often cloaked herself in shadow to explore forbidden places.
She directs the dark out along the vines, down to her waist, up to her throat. Black coils around deepest green.
Friede nods. “Just so. Now rage. Rage is grief made hot.”
Filianore thinks, Father never came for me.
The dark begins to smolder.
Father rid himself of me.
I do not need him to come for me.
I am awake.
Her darkness bursts into
- - -
flames devour the roots and lick them to ash. They eat away a red-hot hole that singes Shira’s clothes as she clambers free. Yorshka tugs her upright. They stumble to solid ground and collapse. Heat bathes Shira’s body, leaving sweat behind. Her skin tingles with the after-touch of fire. Her chest heaves. She wants to be sick.
Then Yorshka says, “Oh, Shira!”
Shira opens smoke-stung eyes to find that she is glowing. She can see her scales through her clothes. Red heat outlines them.
Yorshka clasps her little hands. “Thou’rt a dragon indeed, and full of light. ’Tis thy spiral.”
- - -
Spiraling out along the vines, black and silver flame. Heat flashes on her skin, just enough to hurt. Then Filianore falls. Sudden, terrifying release, stomach in her chest, weightless and too weighty. She crashes into Friede’s arms and knocks the breath from them both. They tumble, gasping, to the spore-shining ground.
Friede picks herself up first. Her burn-scarred face is no longer fierce. “Art thou injured?”
Dazed, Filianore touches the faint burn at her throat. She works a heal. “Nay,” she says, “not sorely. I feel I have…split my cocoon.”
Friede grins. “Thou’rt a poet and a gifted dark-worker.”
“Didst thou know the dire-vines would take me?”
“Nay, yet I am pleased they did. Thou didst burn more than one binding this day.”
They look at each other, sprawled on the ground. Filianore laughs for the first time in ages.
I have mine own fire. Father, what think you of that?
~~~
Shira has heard of monks who believe beauty lies in imperfection. They piece broken ceramics back together and paint the cracks with gold. That is what Shira looks like when she returns to camp. Her scales are still glowing red, her cracks painted with heat. Her fissures let the light through.
Filianore greets her scratched and bruised, but her spirits are undimmed. She gives Shira no chance to ask what happened to her. “How beautiful thou art!” she cries.
Shira is less certain. A voice inside her calls her monstrous, and she doesn’t know whether to listen. At this moment she is not a malformed dragon. She is a creature emerged from a kiln.
“I breathe fire,” she says. No use denying it. “These woods sought to snare me. By my fire I set myself free. Such is my spiral.”
“This is thy spiral,” Filianore affirms. Her voice wavers on the edge of tears. “’Tis beautiful not because it protecteth thee or me, but because it is thine. Thou’rt our Shira. There is no other in all the worlds.”
Propriety fails. Shira pulls Filianore close. Her head finds the princess’s shoulder. They stand there for a long time, shaking. Then Shira lifts her head and takes a long, deep breath.
“How rare a chance.”
It is a start.
~~~
They do not find the new flame on their expedition. They find other precious things instead.
~~~
“Be still, good Shira. I am nearly finished.”
Filianore threads a last strand of dark through the crest at the base of Shira’s neck. Shira insisted on it: a trefoil, Filianore’s old sigil. “What better to embolden me in battle?” she said.
Filianore steps back to survey her work. Shira’s new armor shimmers inky in the heat of Andre’s smithy. A cuirass of shadow encloses her torso. Its base is Andre’s plate, through which Filianore has threaded her darkness. When tightly woven, the dark acts as a cushion, dampening the force of a blow before it reaches metal and bone. Filianore hopes to make Shira a full suit. If it works, the Ouroboros and Darkmoon Knights could wear it too. It will give them extra protection with less weight. Anor Londo would have called her a witch for this. Irithyll calls her ingenious.
Her dark can be a cloak, a breastplate, a flame. She knows her potential now. For the first time, she has no limits.
The burly smith shakes his head. “I’ve never seen anythin’ like it. The folk o’ Lothric work marvels with humanity, but it’s loose. One blow and it scatters. What you’ve done, lass, that’s something else entire.”
“Filianore is gifted,” Shira says. She does not smile, but her words hum with pride.
“Wilt thou wear it to Leyndell?” Filianore asks.
“Perhaps I should. Morgott will be pleased to test it.”
“Wilt thou test thy wings also?”
“…not just yet.”
That evening they go to Leyndell, where Shira spars with Morgott. Filianore takes her usual seat on the lowest tier of the colosseum. Friede sits beside her, waiting her turn to spar with Eira.
“Thy knight is not yet returned?” Filianore asks her.
“Nay. I hope Lord Eira will strike the worry from me. Never mind me - how farest thou?”
“Well enough. I…still hurt.”
“Of course.”
She’ll always have that unhealable ache, the knowledge that Gwyn cast her away. It will always run her through and leave her gasping when she least expects it. It’s worst in the morning. Sometimes she wakes and cannot breathe. But then she leaves the room that once was Yorshka’s and has breakfast with Gwyndolin and Siegward, slots into their stories, their family, and the pain recedes. She helps the Ouroboros. She practices dark magic with Friede. Bit by bit, she builds a life - weaves a tapestry.
“Whene’er I work my magic,” she says, “I think to myself, Father would not approve. And then a small voice sayeth, ‘Tis good.”
Friede laughs. “Then thou hast found thine atonement - and, I hope, thy joy.”
“Joy will come.”
They turn their gaze to the colosseum floor, where Morgott is tutoring Shira in aspects of the Crucible. They have been meeting since the Ouroboros outing. Shira isn’t sure what keeps her coming back. Her dragon aspects still feel wrong; that will not change overnight. But now that they’ve hatched, she cannot put them back in the shell. She might as well learn to use them. And perhaps part of her wants to see herself limned with heat, as she was when she escaped the roots. Not unfinished but patched together with light.
Shira burned more than the roots that day. She burned a bridge, too. Collapsed her darkroom. The only way is forward.
She cannot see her scales through her dark-woven armor. She feels them, though: red-warm patches all over her body, the largest just beneath her trefoil crest. Morgott is circling her and throwing incanted daggers for her to sear away. Her aim is improving. Her throat hurts less each time she breathes fire, as if it’s callusing. Her heart hurts less too.
Recently Shira went back to Farum Azula. When she looked into Placidusax’s eye, she did not flinch from her reflection.
Join us, kinswoman, the dragon-lord rumbled.
One day, Shira said.
One day she will look into Yorshka’s pool and see her reflection unbound.
Morgott tosses another round of daggers. Shira conjures a dragon’s tail made of light and sweeps it in a circle. All three daggers fall. The tail is Shira’s newest aspect of the Crucible, and she isn’t used to it yet. A voice hisses abomination every time she uses it. Another voice replies, But see how I shine.
Every conjuring is another letter in the sentence, I am not a sin.
Strange new thoughts.
Shira lets Morgott’s last dagger hit her to see how her armor responds. The blow knocks her back a pace, but the dark absorbs the rest of the impact. She does not lose her breath.
Across the arena, Morgott nods. He is proud of Shira in his gruff way. “Wilt thou attempt wings?”
He asks her this every time they spar. Shira wants and does not want to. Wings will make her a dragon entire. She isn’t ready to leap from that precipice.
“One night, sir,” she calls back, “but not this.”
Shira looks up to the tiered seats and sees Filianore smiling. She has that old look in her eyes, the steel-bright one that says, We will be all right.
They have a long road yet to walk. Tonight they believe they will reach its end.