Work Text:
When you open your eyes, the pain is gone. It’s strange because you remember nothing but agony. Losing your limbs, your wings, the heat of four hundred million coreflames in your chest burning you, breaking you into pieces until you could dig your fingers into your own cracks and come away golden.
There’s none of that now. You look at your hands, smooth and pale, fingernails squared, palms soft. Your chest hidden by the folds of a simple white robe, and when you peel the fabric back and there’s no blacked tissue, no tears in your flesh leaking ichor. Just the dips and ridges of your own muscle, the thin ring tattooed on your chest.
This body is so light. You’re used to feeling terribly weighty.
“You’re here,” a voice says.
You breathe in. There’s the sound of wheat fields swaying in the wind. It ruffles your hair. Cool toned white. You’re certain your eyes are blue, but you aren’t sure where the thought comes from. Your mind is a mess of memories that both belong to you and don’t.
Water lapping against wooden supports, a stony excuse for a shore. The creak and shift of planks. Were you always on the pier? Sunlight dances across the sea, waves glimmering, the breeze fresh and salty. Something aches on your inside. You know this place, but you’re struggling to remember it amongst the flood. You see fire and a smiling man and woman at once. Growing grain and ashes. Who are they? Your parents? Where is this? Your home?
When you turn around, he’s looking at you, amber-eyed and expressionless. He doesn’t look the way you remember him. And oh, how you remember him. A thousand memories at once. The feel of your blade in his back, the taste of his smile and the sensation of his warm touch. Now, he’s dressed the same as you are. Plain white robes, though you can still see the red of his markings on his exposed limbs. His hands are bare, his hair is down, and he’s beautiful.
“Where is this?” you ask him as he steps closer. He stands at your side, close enough to brush shoulders. Even now, he’s impossibly warm. A sun to you. A star that you’ve plucked out of the sky and extinguished with your own hands millions of times. Was that you? Yes, a version of you. His memories are yours, and he was you once.
“I think this is where we go between the cycles,” Mydei says. He looks out at the sea. His hair flutters in the breeze. Your blade in his back. His bitter smile. The light leaving his eyes. He’s okay now. Does that mean it isn’t real? That you can be forgiven?
“I killed you,” you tell him. You sound so tired. So sad. You’ve never heard yourself like that. No, you have, but you’re neck deep in memories and it’s hard enough to breathe without attempting to sort through them.
“You should know by now that I never really die.”
He doesn’t look at you. Just the water, the soft waves. Another memory: yourself as a child, throwing a message in a bottle as hard as you could in hopes that the currents might pull it to a far off shore. Childhood. You remember now. This might be Aedes Elysiae, your hometown. But why, you wonder, are you here now? You destroyed it in every cycle, didn’t you?
“Are you upset with me?” you ask him. He should be. You want him to be. You want him to understand you, to understand why you did all of those things. Killing each version of him in hopes that one day, one version of him could live in a world unbound by Destruction. It got easier and easier each time you did it. A monster grows good at rationalizing such things. Was that you?
“I think you’re an idiot,” Mydei says. He’s still standing close enough that you brush. “I think you’re stubborn and insane and overly fond of sacrifice. I think you’ve made some terrible choices.”
“Do you hate me, then?”
He’s quiet for a while. Your gaze lingers on the cut of his jaw, the tail ends of the markings on his throat. His bare hands are strange to you. Too soft. Unarmored like the rest of him. You’re used to him strong and guarded, even in death. “Why do you think I’m standing here right now?” he asks.
Close enough to touch. So many of the innocent versions of you have been allowed. You know what it feels like to live in his body like it’s your own. You know what it’s like to make him happy and to take that away in equal measure. You love him more than anything, but you’d give him up over and over to save the world. How do those things intersect? Are you monster, or are you man? “I don’t know,” you answer.
He scoffs. “So many cycles, and you still don’t get it.”
You press a hand to your chest. “Do you remember them?”
“I do,” he says, “but the memories are difficult to parse.”
“I’m the same,” you admit, pushing your palm harder against your sternum. The sun is warm, but you’re cold. Where did the heat go? The coreflames that once boiled you from the inside out, always in agony, always just a crack away from falling apart. You remember being angry, but you feel none of that now. “I don’t—”
“Why do you think I tried to stop you so many times?”
“You…” Your mouth parts, closes again. “You believed in the prophecy, maybe. You didn’t want to give up your power to protect. After enough cycles, you realized that I became a monster.”
“No,” Mydei says. He looks at you now. Amber-eyed. Tired, you realize. The same as you. He studies your face. Phainon’s face. Is it yours? “It’s the same reason for all of us. Whatever you were doing wasn’t working. After a million cycles, the chance that one was ever going to work out didn’t seem worth the suffering.”
“There are entire galaxies beyond us.”
He sighs. Still standing here, the wind in his hair. “And the deliverer from beyond the skies came, so I guess you were right.”
You look at your hands again. Smooth and pale, fingernails squared, palms soft. The fall, the crash. Wings and limbs gone. The Destruction’s gaze turned toward you, if only for a moment. Is that right? You bled. You died. Why are you here?
“What happened?” you ask.
“You died,” Mydei answers. “We all did, and the 33,550,337th cycle is playing out as we speak. I haven’t been born yet. You won’t be born at all.”
“Why not?”
“Where are the coreflames, Phainon?” Mydei asks. The name in his mouth sends sparks through you. Your hands shake, curl into fists. Your chest is hollow, empty. It’s so cold, though the sun is warm and shining on your skin, though Mydei’s shoulder is still close enough to brush yours. “Where is your fury? What were you trying to prevent?”
“No,” you whisper.
“You’re the vessel for Irontomb’s completion,” Mydei tells you. “What happens now is up to those outlanders.”
You’ve never liked leaving fate in the hands of others, but it’s time, isn’t it? After all these cycles, all this suffering. Where did your resolve go? Where is your anger? You remember Dawnmaker in hand. Nanook’s golden gaze and golden blood. Pain, so much pain and your limbs being taken from you one by one. But those wings were his, that power was his. You’re just— You hold it for him, that power, those memories, but does that really make him you?
Water lapping against the pier. Aedes Elysiae’s sweet-smelling wheat fields. Divinations with Cyrene and sparring with Mydei. Braiding Tribios’ hair, letting Aglaea poke and prod at you until you’re dressed how she likes. Reading Castorice’s poetry and rewriting papers for Professor Anaxa over and over again. Those are your memories, aren’t they?
You’re so hollow on the inside. The breeze through your hair, the sun on your skin. Where is the anger that kept you going? “How do you know all of this?”
“I’ll forget soon,” Mydei tells you. “I’ll be born and become another stepping stone for that trailblazer to reach the new world.”
What happens then? is a question you don’t ask. You know he won’t have the answer. Whether you all just disappear like candles blown out amidst millions of stars, or if you’ll be reborn in a world without cycles, where you’ll get to live and breathe and travel the cosmos if you feel like it. Where you’ll get to hold him longer than a few fleeting moments, where maybe he’ll hold you like he would before you became the man that killed him over and over again.
“How do you know now?” you ask instead. His bare hands, his soft hair. How can you have hurt him, but still love him too? Wholly, deeply, achingly. You’ve never been the type to want lists and lists of things. Your desires are few but all-consuming. One of those fires is gone, but this one burns as brightly as ever.
He can’t love you. Not after what you’ve done.
“You explained it in some of the cycles,” Mydei says. “The rest I’ve observed as a captive audience until my time comes to take the stage.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Mydei says. “It comes in flashes that I know I’ll forget.”
“How do I stop it?” you ask, but he just shakes his head. “How do I keep Irontomb from being completed? How do I keep my promise to the world?”
“I don’t know that either,” he says, and takes a long breath in. A longer one out. As he turns, you feel the loss of his warmth. The creak of the wood under his bare feet as he begins to walk. He reaches the shore, and then he pauses, turning to look at you. Not abandonment, then. He wants you to follow. He still hasn’t told you how he feels. You trail after him, listless and confused, and he continues. “A good warrior knows when to take the time to recover.”
“I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“Maybe.” His eyes on you. He has beautiful eyes, haunting you with their color, the way they look glassy and lifeless. Now, they’re warm and sick of you at once. “But you’re here, aren’t you? There’s something to recover.”
“I don’t know who or what I am,” you confess. Once, you would have so confidently said Phainon. Once, you would have held your sword up to the new dawn and furiously named yourself Khaslana. Now, you don’t know. Your fire is gone. You’re crumbling beneath these heavy memories.
Mydei leads you to Aedes Elysiae’s wheat fields. Gold in the sun. Swaying in the breeze. This is another one of those desires strong enough to drown you. A longing for home. But at the end of it all, in the face of the truth, is there even such a thing? You’ve grown here, laughed here, loved here. You’ve razed it to the ground. But it always comes back in the next cycle, another coded bit of data, just like you, just like every person here.
“Does it matter?” Mydei asks. His voice is strong, just like the rest of him. “You breathe, you feel, you fight. Isn’t that enough?”
“Are we even real, Mydeimos?”
He seems furious, now. His hand reaches for yours, gripping it with force enough to bruise and slamming your palm into his chest. A heart beats there, but he’s dead, isn’t he? You are too, so why do your hearts still beat? “Do I feel real enough for you?” he asks. “After thirty-three million cycles, is there really anything to doubt?”
He’s beautiful angry. You’ve always thought so. You’ve always loved his scowl after a lost spar. His back in the dirt, his teeth clenched, his eyes alight. Oh, but you love him happy too. You love every form he comes in, even now, with the memory of his blood on your hands.
Your palm on his chest. His still crushing around your wrist. You wrap your arms around him, and strangely, he lets you. He relaxes, and his arms wind around your waist like he needs this too. You can’t make out the scent of his hair, but you can feel his warmth, enough for two, enough that you forget the chill inside you, if only for a moment.
“Aren’t you tired of me by now?” you ask him, small and fragile and half-afraid of the answer. His mouth presses against your shoulder.
“Thirty-three million versions of you I’ve loved,” he murmurs. His hands tangle and tighten in your robe. “Thirty-three million versions I’ve hated. But they’re all you. They’re all in there somewhere.”
Your chest caves in. You cling to him like you never thought you would be allowed to again. “Can you still love me, knowing what I am, what I have been, and what I could become?” After everything you’ve done, can he really forgive you? Not just for all the death, but for giving up on him. For deciding, after hundreds of thousands of failed cycles, that it would be easier to become a monster than to try again and again to turn each Chrysos Heir to your side. For sacrificing not only yourself, but all of them too, for a near-futile future.
What happens if all of your efforts fail in the end? What happens if the rage and suffering and the four hundred million coreflames contained in your body become the catalyst for Destruction to destroy things bigger than all of you combined? What’s left of you then? What happens to the rest of this crumbling world?
But Mydei only laughs, a rough sound, raw, and crushes you to him. “You’d be an idiot to think I ever stopped,” he says, and it’s as simple as that. After all these cycles, this overwhelming flood of memories crashing over you both, at the end of the line, what is he supposed to do but cling to you too? You’ve always needed each other like nothing else. You’ve always been stuck at the hip. There’s little point in fighting, when this might be the last chance you get to see and hear and hold each other.
Maybe that trailblazer will succeed and you’ll be reborn to see it. Maybe the new world will be kinder. Phainon would’ve smiled and said so. He was always an optimist. Khaslana wouldn’t bother hoping; he’d try to carve that into truth with his own hands. But you’re helpless here, aren’t you? You’ve died and you won’t be reborn in the next cycle. Your body waits to become the vessel of a being with the power to destroy gods. You think of Cyrene’s deliverer card. Her hands passing it into yours, always a little bit cold, so much smaller than your own. Now you’re the one passing that mantle on. After a long, weary existence, what more can the spirit do but wait? Recover, like Mydei wants you to. You can’t even begin to imagine what that would look like for you, cracked and broken as you are, with nothing but your own bared teeth to hold you together.
“What happens now?” you ask, breathing him in, squeezing your eyes shut as you hold him. He’s always been so warm, so solid. Rigid with muscle but soft in ways he’ll pretend not to be. In so many cycles, you’ve loved him for this. You’d be an idiot to think you could ever stop.
He draws back. You wish he wouldn’t. You wish you could stay here for another cycle or ten, listening to Aedes Elysiae’s wheat fields sway in the wind, smelling earth and salt in the air. Loving without fear or worry for the first time in your too-long existence.
He takes your face in his hands. Your eyes are blue, you know this. He looks at them and almost smiles. “I’ll be reborn,” he answers. “I’ll pave a path, and then we’ll wait.”
“Together?” you ask.
“I’ll forget,” he reminds you.
“And after?”
He laughs at this, a fond, tired thing. You have millions of memories of that exact sound. They play back now. He could rip your heart out and you wouldn’t even blink. It would only be fair. “What?” he asks. “After I die?”
“You don’t know if you’ll come back,” you say.
Whatever hint of a smile sat on his face slips away. He nods. “It’s the last cycle, regardless of the outcome. None of us can be certain of anything, but…” He brushes your hair out of your eyes, studies you like he hopes to remember you in a cycle where you don’t exist.
“They need you, don’t they?” you whisper.
He nods, pressing his forehead to yours, and you’ve already given up so much for this journey. You can afford a little more. You can afford to lose him one more time. Your sigh takes all of you with it. “Carve a path, Mydeimos.”
“With you as the dawn, we’ll reach the new world,” he says. You can feel him fading from the place, just like you can feel the way you’re stuck. Phainon would believe his promise. You’re long-weary and afraid to hope. But he needs that faith, that smile, that version of you he fell in love with thirty-three million times, even if it’s not quite you anymore.
“We’ll meet again,” you tell him, trying to smile, “at the end of the west wind.”
“Until then,” he says, and when he’s gone you blink your eyes open to wheat fields and ocean, and with your burden on the backs of others, you can do nothing but wait for the true end to this story.