Chapter Text
Cliopher
On the day of his retirement from the Zunidh Civil Service, on the day he's meant to return home to the Vangavaye-ve on one of the monthly public sky ships, Cliopher Mdang stands at the foot of the Last Emperor’s bier for the last time.
As much as his heart is satisfied that he's done all that he can for the world of Zunidh—that the fire he's lit and passed on to others will continue to burn brightly—he swallows a lump in his throat. A heavy pang of regret twists through his stomach as he looks at the beautiful lion eyes of the man dressed in brilliant white and gold and imperial yellow.
Cliopher is nearly certain that it is magic holding the Last Emperor frozen, in place, entirely unaware, but he can't see magic and could never find any proof that such bindings existed or information on how to remove them if they did. He—and others, so many others—had kept the Ouranatha from taking control of the world, but there is nothing anyone can do to force the priest-wizards to let go of their long-held secrets.
Even now, the two high priests watch him like two birds of prey might watch a mouse. As if he would try to do anything to the Last Emperor, to the man who was Artorin Damara. Cliopher was certain that enough had happened to him already. Artorin Damara had spent fourteen years bound to the Empire of Astandalas and a thousand more bound to a golden bier, nothing more than a legend, an icon, a god.
Perhaps the priest-wizards think Cliopher will try something drastic—attack him, or kill him, or touch him to try and prove that he isn't a god.
As Cliopher looks at the lonely man on the bier that he's spent a thousand years talking to quietly without response—the same way he's written a thousand unanswered letters to his cousin Basil—his thoughts aren't on his retirement, or on his final journey home, or even on his nephew who will carry his flame onward. No, in his heart, in his thoughts, in his mind's eye, all he knows is failure.
Our fates are intertwined, he'd once thought looking at an image of the newly crowned emperor. This last visit, this last moment, this last chance to look Artorin Damara in his beautiful but unmoving, captivating yet unresponsive, magnificent yet unseeing eyes is nothing less than an admission of utter defeat. The breaking of the promise that had called him to Astandalas the Golden, the dream that had lured him back to Solaara after his long journey home after the Fall, the wish in his heart that had kept him in the Palace of Stars long after he could have retired.
The Ouranatha have always said that Artorin Damara would never wake. Cliopher has never believed it; he's always worked as if one day Artorin Damara might wake up and want to be free.
There's a wetness in Cliopher's eyes; tears slip down his cheeks. His heart aches with a sadness he'd be hard pressed to explain. But while he's done so much for so many, today he must accept the truth: no matter what he's always worked for, helping Artorin Damara will forever be outside of his grasp.
"I'm sorry," he says—not bowing, not giving obeisance, simply speaking to the man and not the Ouranatha's sleeping god. “I'm sorry.”
Fitzroy
The bureaucrat was there again.
It was strange, how some of the watchers stayed with you. So many wavered and bled into one another. All the priests might as well be one Priest, for the amount of individual interest or personality they showed.
Though there had been an acolyte, once, who looked you in the eye when nobody was watching. They had left, and not come back. Or not as themselves.
It was theoretically possible that they had merely... metamorphosed. Shaken off their initiate robes and refledged as one of the interchangeable priests.
It was even more possible that their insolence had been noticed, and carved away.
You had seen how the priests laid hands on petitioners that crept too close towards your bier. Hands and—sometimes knives.
You wished you had not seen what they did when a desperate mother dragged her sick child over the forbidden line.
The bureaucrat never stepped over the line. He came close to it, every time. He stood and he looked at you, and he spoke.
His words, all their words, were loosed like silent moths fluttering in the still air. You tried to read their lips, but their faces stuttered from shape to shape.
There was a guard. There were several guards. One you noticed. Not for being bigger than the rest, although he was that, but for the way he showed up only when the bureaucrat was there. It was as though he timed his shifts on purpose.
You saw the way the endless priests looked at the bureaucrat and were glad he had defenders.
Besides the pilgrims, besides the priests, besides the guards, there were many attendants. Only one of them handled you with care. You saw less of him, perhaps, than of your bureaucrat. Those who approached blurred in your sight, and anyway he wore the full-body protective robes your priests required. You knew: he was slight, and short, and perfectionist, and gentle.
It had been this way for timelessness: you, watching. Me, raging at your stupor. Them, bowing and chanting and binding you further and further into the strange, twisted magic.
The bureaucrat, who came to talk to me and not to plead or pray or curse.
The guard, who protected him.
The attendant.
You.
Me.
Cliopher
Cliopher stares at the Lord of Rising Stars who has never been able to rise since the Fall. At the Sun-on-Earth who has never been allowed to see the sun as emperor, or in the many years since. At Artorin Damara who has never been given a chance to be a person; the Marwn had been bound to a tower, nameless, before being given a name and crowned the One Hundredth Emperor of Astandalas.
Years ago, Cliopher learned the truth. A young acolyte of the priest-wizards, one of the half dozen who maintained a vigil at all times, had seen his monthly visits to the Shrine of the Last Emperor and reached out in friendship. The acolyte—Ileaya, he remembers now—had been more like the shamans in the Vangavaye-ve than the typical priest-wizards of the Ouranatha. She'd been pleasant and kind and open. When she'd asked why he visited so often, she'd been surprised at his response—at his worry that the bound Sun-on-Earth might want to be free.
“The Sun-on-Earth is not a man,” she'd said, giving him the standard response to such questions. But she'd known him well enough by then to know that wouldn't be enough to satisfy him so after a moment she'd offered, “He's never been free, dear Cliopher. Before he ascended to become the Sun-on-Earth, he was nothing more than the nameless Marwn, bound to a tower on the Long Edge of Colhélhé, entirely an instrument of the empire. His life has always been one of service—and he continues to serve the world now.”
She'd wrapped an arm around him then and added, “You should be glad for him. Not many are given the chance to become gods.”
Cliopher shudders at that memory, at the recollection of her fervent belief. He’d never seen her again after that conversation, but he'd also never forgotten her words.
He stares into the unseeing limpid gold eyes of Artorin Damara. The lump in his throat swells. His breath comes in short, sharp gasps. He should turn away, Cliopher knows. What more can he say to the man who he can't save, to the man who is the last prisoner of Astandalas? He shivers, thinking of the people he'd once heard screaming from his office next to the imperial torturers.
At least those prisoners had been given the chance to scream.
“I'm retiring,” he says to Artorin Damara—to the man who is no god, to the prisoner who will never be free. His heart aches fiercely at the admission. “I can't do any more here in Solaara—no matter how much I might want to.”
He heaves in a breath, staring at the man lying in glorious splendour. He doesn't want to leave Artorin Damara alone, but he has no other choice. He can't stay in the Palace of Stars now that he's retired. “I'm going back to Gorjo City. Perhaps, I'll do better at holding the fire there than I have here in Solaara. Not that I haven't helped make the world better than it was, but—”
Cliopher stops before he says something the high priests will not appreciate. “I invited my closest friends from Solaara to come with me once they retire. They've been alone since the Fall too.” He winces at the too, but the high priests don't catch it, or perhaps—for once—they let the treason go. “I wish I could—” offer you a home too.
A hand falls on his shoulder—Ludvic's; the guard's hand is a warning as much as it is a support. Cliopher shuts his eyes for a moment, brushes his tears away—although they are replaced in mere moments—and takes another deep breath.
“I didn't want to go without—without saying goodbye,” he admits to the man on the bier. Without thinking, Cliopher kisses the tips of his fingers like his father had done the day that he'd left to go fishing and never returned. Like his father had offered to him and his mother, Cliopher offers his kiss to Artorin Damara.
Fitzroy
You didn't move, you could not move, wrapped in the magics. But your attention—my clarity—sharpened whenever the bureaucrat visited.
He was of an average height, stocky, his hair trimmed to the regulation length. It had changed, wavered in your vision, over the timelessness. Silky darkness growing lightly peppered with white, as if the stars were slowly emerging from the midnight sky. His robes changed too, from the sandy linen of the lower ranks (which did not suit him) into darker and finer colours, belted and braided with the bands of one department and grade after another.
I had never learned to read the subtle variations of the Imperial Service uniforms and so I had no idea what these signified, save that this decidedly non-Shaian man had reached the upper echelons against all the odds. His soul, such as I could glimpse it, had the taste of Zunidh. His bearing and manner were broadly correct, but not refined. He was, undoubtedly, common. Common and ordinary, I whispered to you.
The room wavered around me in the heat-haze effect of the magic. You could not shape or taste or test it, but I could see enough through your trammeled senses to understand that it was somehow a leech on mine. The old bindings of Astandalas, turned inwards to hook into my trapped power with infinite and near-indistinguishable individual barbs—each one a prayer, a dream, even an imprecation—made in the name of the Sun-on-Earth.
Every time a priest chanted. Every time a petitioner knelt. Every time a wretched outcast cursed in your name. All the mean and measly scraps of reverence and disgust that clung to you—to me—as their object of desire and divinity. All the claws of apotheosis, buried into the plump swollen distortion of my soul, tying me into the golden icon on the bier.
You could scarcely see through the thicket, unless someone stood aside from it and saw me.
The bureaucrat wavered into view. He was speaking but it took some time to track his face.
Oh. He was crying.
You could not cry. You could not even blink futile tears away. Your tear ducts were gummed with magic, the surface of your eyes dusty with disuse.
The gentle attendant, an indistinct gauzy shape, had put drops in them this morning. I could see more clearly than usual. It helped, no doubt, bring me to focus for this moment.
The attendant was long since gone. The other guard, the lithe sardonic man who accompanied him, was gone too. I noticed them because they noticed me, but neither of them spoke to me. Neither of them wept for me.
Petitioners wept before you all the time. For themselves, for fear of the priests, for your pity or your favour or your spite: I could not help them, any of them, and all the river of tears smudged down into the magic and washed away any hold for my stumbling feet.
The bureaucrat was weeping for me, not for you. I could tell because I could see the tears—the individual tears, trembling in his eyes, shining on his cheeks. I could tell because the priest-wizards tensed, seeing how close this brought me to the surface, because the big guard placed a warning hand on the bureaucrat's shoulder.
It had been so long since anybody wept for me. I wanted to be close to him. Wanted it enough to strain against the bindings, to let them tear into me as I forced my attention between them, past all the clinging threads and claws.
His face wavered into view, more clearly than I had ever seen it. His eyes were light brown, glinting like a highland stream in the mountain sun. He was so deliciously textured, hair tufty, face lined, his mouth wide and set. I wanted to see what it would look like if he smiled.
There seemed little chance of that, but he was offering me this gift—this hand, held out to me, through all my enchantments. There was no magic in what he was doing. There was, I thought, no magic in him at all. Perhaps he hadn't realised he was doing it. He was seeing me. He was seeing me. And that was enough to cut against all the foundations of my curse.
I hung there above you, stretched out to him. One great arc of hopeless longing. The unseen aether was shivering with the tension. The interchangeable priests were responding, chanting prayers, tightening the bonds slowly but surely—I felt a tiny thrill of fear. If they had noticed, the bureaucrat would be—I fought again, harder, still in vain.
The bureaucrat was looking at me as though his heart was breaking.
He shut his eyes and brushed his hand across his face. The tension sagged, slightly, and I sagged with it. I could not see the priests, but they would—If they—here, in front of you—I would not recover—
And then his eyes opened, and he brought his fingers to his lips.
He kissed them, looking at me, and lifted his hand.
His fingertips crossed the line.
You were immobile but I was already stretched as far as I could, extended out to the very edges of myself.
My intangible fingers brushed across the tips of his—I touched him—accepted his kiss.
There was no fluttering in my perception now. The world had grown crisp and clear and pitiless. I had, all at once, another path.
My magic showed it to me in a set of pictures: a star, rising over the horizon. The tiller of a small boat that I could seize. Another hand folded over mine, helping set the course. A voice singing, the sound showing a narrow route through—a reef? a briar hedge?—the metaphors were all muddled but the way was clear.
I followed, lightning finding its route to the ground.
There was a snap, a hiss, a cracking sound. My bureaucrat shuddered all over as my soul rolled into him. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I babbled at him, even as he made way—was pushed aside—as I slid like lightning through his body and his mind.
From here I could feel his grief, heavy and weary in his heart, erupting into confusion, even welcome—denial of my apology—all too fast for words.
All my senses were flooding in at once. I could hear the chanting, smell the incense, and I could see—The bier, your shining emptiness. The big guard, pushing us behind him. The priest-wizards, closing in, knives in hand.
Cliopher
A tidal wave of emotions crashes through Cliopher, flooding his thoughts with desperation and fear and fierce hope. He shudders under the onslaught, reels against the agonizing sensation of being caught in a forgotten oubliette—unable to even blink—only to have a path to escape wedged open a crack by a kiss held out as a gift.
Behind the desperation comes a guilt so sharp, Cliopher tries to gasp—except that he can't. He can't. He's no longer where he was, who he was; he's simply a passenger within a body that is no longer his but rather a channel for a being, a man, a prisoner desperate to be free.
Cliopher knows without asking whose consciousness has rolled through him—by accident, he understands immediately, the realization and dismay and apology coming as a cacophony of impressions suffused with a dense, heavy shame. The person in his mind, in his body, in his soul is Artorin Damara, is the Last Emperor of Astandalas, is—
Fitzroy Angursell.
Cliopher can’t blink, can’t breathe, can’t make a sound without a shape, a form, a body. He—the emperor—Artorin—Fitzroy—recoils from his (their?) realization, sending new waves of guilt and humiliation, embarrassment and outright panic rushing through him (them?).
Without thinking, Cliopher softens the bitter emotions from their entangled—not thoughts; thoughts are too distinct for what this is—being, transforming them into warmth and welcome, acceptance and joy. He (They?) are glad that Fitzroy—and with his name comes flickers of memory: three boys huddled over a book, people singing around a glowing campfire—is no longer caught and trapped and pinioned by the Ouranatha—
Fitzroy
The brief glimpse of the throne room from my new perspective was swamped, at the speed of thought, by the excruciating awareness that I was known.
Not you. Not the glorious emperor of fallen Astandalas. Not the drifting disconsolate spirit trapped by his own unwanted cult. Me, the person they had attempted to entirely erase. Fitzroy Angursell.
I knew as well as being known. This man had reached out to me, had chosen to welcome me—had not known my name, but had been looking for me, the mortal person lost in the golden apotheosis. In doing so he had permitted me to invade his mind, his body, and his soul.
He had no magic of his own. He was utterly free of it. And yet he was a natural anchor for the magics of the world. The immediate crashing together of our selves did not teach me what he had done to earn the favour of the gods, to earn the devotion of Zunidh herself—only that he was held so closely beneath her paws as to allow time and space to spin about his person.
What I could see was him. Cliopher Mdang of Tahivoa, whose island was Loaloa, whose dances were Aōteketētana.
He was so beautiful.
I was in his body. I was in his mind. I was in his soul.
From the first instant I recoiled, feeling his body start backwards under my shock and shame. Somehow I had pushed—or, no, he had retreated to make space for me—he was behind me and beneath me and all around me, but I was the one breathing raggedly with his lungs, staring wildly from his eyes.
He felt the torrent of anguish pouring through me. The blast of my anger at myself, of my horror at his perception, whipped through both of us. The wind whipped up the inner ocean, sending spray sharp as a shower of arrows hissing across my face. The sky had darkened and the deeps were rising—we would be engulfed—
The waves broke showily against the rocks and sand of an island I did not know. I battered against that rootedness, that solid core of him, and then—dropped, exhausted, into his embrace.
He welcomed me. He welcomed me. His—our thoughts were one confused welter of memory and association, but rising above all of them was the gladness, the assurance of that welcome. It was as though I sank back against another body, cradled in his lap, my legs and arms supported by the firm substance of his limbs.
Only this body was under my control. This body was not bound.
His eyesight was worse than mine had once been, I thought, but infinitely clearer than I had been able to see from the frozen amber of my bier. His legs stumbled as I lurched in reaction. I tripped over his feet—shorter than I was used to—and stumbled into the sturdy guard. Ludvic, my host supplied, together with associations powerful enough to cut to the core of us both: Ludvic the powerful, Ludvic the patient; Ludvic who wrote shy verse and cared for the survivors of the great necromantic plague that had its origins on his island of Woodlark.
Grief, grief, loss and bitter regret. And then Cliopher pushing that train of thought aside. Later, he said, grimly, keep Ludvic alive now.
Oh. My mind crashed back into focus, following Cliopher's urgent concern. There, the three priests who had been attendant on the bier: two acolytes with knives, and Ludvic unarmed had just kicked one aside. The third was swinging a censor and chanting the start of a spell.
Waking the wards, I told Cliopher, who couldn't see any of this. But I could. I could, because I had slipped the trap entirely. I was out, I was free, and here came my own power to my hands. Magic that welled wild and free and furious—more gold, but I would make this fire, not gilt.
I felt Cliopher's alarm spike and sent back reassurance—my anticipation—my fierce joy. The fire kindled in the dry and dusty wreckage of my soul, on the welcome shelter of his being, and roared to life.
Cliopher
A tide of furious fire flares red-hot through Cliopher's thoughts—their thoughts—borne on the wings of the no-longer-sleeping Fitzroy Angursell's power. Flames, unleashed in fear and protection and retribution, tear through Cliopher's mind, burn pathways that never existed before through him—through his head to his toes, his heart to his fingertips.
While he has never known it, or seen it, or sensed anything but the impact of it before, he knows that what he is feeling is magic; he knows it from the upswell of joy coming from Fitzroy. It's his magic, Cliopher realizes—magic he hasn't felt for a thousand years, magic that was lost to him even before that, when he was bound and crowned and placed at the centre of the Empire of Astandalas.
Cliopher understands his fear and his anger and his hate, and in the same moment understands that Fitzroy is overwhelmed by the return of his own magic; he’s not feeling Cliopher’s shock, or pain, or—Cliopher curls inwards, even within himself, pushes the little he can sense of his body away in an effort to give Fitzroy everything he so desperately wants and needs and deserves.
The rebellious poet's fire continues to surge across the dark expanse to which he's been relegated—the flames bright, and brilliant, and beautiful in shades of gold and gold and gold.
A thought snaps through him—his thought, his realization, his worry that he's scaring Cliopher. But Cliopher holds the fire, just as he holds Fitzroy Angursell's spirit within him—he's not afraid of its burn.