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Towards an empty portion of the First Night Cemetery, just an inch from brushing against the shore, at an unremarkable enough land that would not inconvenience anyone, Illuga smoothed the dirt with his scarred hands. The soil was damp from the sea's weak waves, and he has already considered the rot that would erode his being once he had lain there.
He had already thought about it; the practicality, the people of his team and their expressions, and the words that would pick up should he be discovered. All of them were sad, and most of them had tear-glazed eyes and a shivering expression—while he understands their countenance, he was already too taken by the idea.
It was no question. The day would come for them who were Lightkeepers—only with worn out lamps, a flickering signal, and a sea of lights, were they alive. There was no pity. At this particular moment, he wanted to be selfish for once.
He leaves.
The grass fractures beneath his step—black boots, silver-lined, golden-gaze—now stilled some great and yawning distance from where Illuga had stood. Royal blue flutters at his back like a banner for some court no longer convened, framing the ghastly noble beauty that his visage carried: pale lips pressed thin and bloodless, sealing the florid of his words. The young master had not said his farewells. He simply ceased to be here—as living mortals do in a graveyard.
What remained was a headstone. A wretched, makeshift thing, carved with a name too familiar to him, and worse than the name—the future the headstone now implied. An out of tune note struck in the overture the spirits endlessly compose; a note of death-pale wanting, yet somehow, also a prelude to the thoughts the human had already been thinking, quietly, the way one thinks of where locked doors led before deciding to open them.
A lonely death. A forgettable one. Tucked into a land no mortal remembers to tend.
He is left—the fae, the one who has outlasted his own guttering of his ancient flame—turns what mortals would call bitterness upon his tongue. What he would call it, there is no word for, not in the language he had been born to utter. The taste curls there. It makes his flame shiver, though it is not the cold of the barren night in the land of dead alone that moved through him—it is the unsettled, pressing close obliging him as they always do to bear witness, to receive their murmurings of afterlife. Their voices gather like cobwebs around the actions of a man who ought not be made to lay in this very same unmarked earth, in untended grass, in a place that will swallow him whole and erode his body with sea salt with a hum as though nothing was ever there.
He recognizes the kind of intention carved there. Not the desperate kind. Not the sudden kind. The deliberate kind—the sort etched slowly, quietly, during a break; a spiral between emotions; a moment that is, in truth, all but a decision made in clarity.
He is no stranger to this terrible message. He has experienced it himself—he who has watched his own fire wither past a faint ember into something that was almost just the memory of the Azure Flame's warmth—and so he knows, without needing to be told, precisely what it means when a young man carves his name into stone and walks away.
Flins follows.
Their boots kiss the rusted steel—a bridge that shudder at each and every step, flimsy and half-apologetic, spanning the gap between the headquarters and the little house suspended just beside it. The walls are sheeted metal, bolted haphazard and bleeding rust, red as corrosion and old wounds. A pitiful excuse for a fence. And yet—in this fence nestled among the false blooms and still metal flowers—sits a pot of something genuinely blue and living. Gentle and alive in the midst of all that metal. Alone. Almost heartbreakingly so.
Above them, the sky offers nothing. Dark and heavy with its own particular dread that loomed over the land. The clouds do not move so much as wait. The echo of their footsteps doubles back to meet their ears, the sound of what is coming arrives.
And through all of it, the smile.
Refined. Small. The one that tells exactly of his exact knowledge of what the younger man was doing—and what he was thinking, here, now, being less than a thought but a promise of declaration to oneself. Nearly a threat, if threats could wear such a pleasantly infuriating countenance of a gentleman. He does not hurry. He simply follows, as a haunting, as Illuga's shadow—each step, each movement attended. Illuga was never once permitted to leave the periphery of that attending gaze.
He watches the way a predator patiently observes its prey. Waiting for the snag. Waiting for the moment the young master catches—on some small irritation, a bristling of those feathers of his—and forgets, if only for a breath, what he had been thinking. This is the game that Flins has always played. Some feigned nuisance, a performed imposition, the theatrics of being unbearable and a tease—
"Young master."
"Sir Flins," said Illuga, readily, "It's rare to see you here. It's cold out. Would you like to come in?"
"Young master." Hushed. The words land the way a pebble ripples still water. His smile withdraws, "I believe you have left something in the cemetery by mistake."
A heavy silence befalls their figures. The lock of the metal door grinding against itself as it was pushed shut. Illuga had no intention of admitting the impertinence of his actions to the man before him. Saying it, making it known would certainly kill him, more than everything already was; that he could not stand seeing others lain in earth the longer he lives; that he was faking the whelm of his position—a captain, one who overcompensates. He refuses to turn to the other man and meet that gaze of his; and more than ever, he feels himself shake.
"I don't know what you mean, Sir Flins."
"A headstone," the fae answers, each words gentle in utterance. "Inadvertently carved with your name."
"It was a precaution," Illuga answers after a quiet moment. A shabby excuse, one that would never pass, and possibly be the blade they impale themselves in. "We work a dangerous post, Sir Flins. It only made practical sense to—"
"Oh, but was it?"
"Young master," the fae chides, and there is patience in it—the practiced kind accumulated across spans of time a mere mortal could not live. His voice does not rise. It never rises. Perhaps that is precisely the thing that unsettles—that he could say anything, anything at all, in that very same register, and the words would arrive no less sharp despite his careful tone. "I have kept vigil over this land long before you drew your first breath upon it. I know what precaution looks like."
A breath. A delicately held thing.
"That is to say—I know what this looks like."
The silence that follows is a taut wire wishing never to be touched. Outside the frosted window was the gentle blue flower now still; the wind moves, but the flower does not answer, as though even the small and rooted things have chosen to bear witness, to not disturb the weary tension that hung between the air of an ancient fae and the young man he has deemed his. Below, the sea presses its old argument against the rocks—loud and rhythmic.
"They are not the same thing, Illuga."
His name. Not young master. His actual name—offered without jest, without softness, stripped of the title—landing deliberately between them.
"I'm not going to do anything," Illuga crossed his arms the same way he does when he wanted to impose his status as the man's captain rather than equal. "I thought about it is all."
"That is all."
"Yes."
"You carved your name. Into stone. And laid the ground—after deciding on a place that you thought—"
Something moves beneath the careful architecture of his words. Something that has no name in the language of composure that Flins carried himself in. It simply wavers, and in that wavering, all the laden charm of his words are lost, unraveling the way that smoke dissipated, into nothingness.
Silence.
"You have thought about this before."
The words come out shaken—Flins, shaken. A thing that should not be, a thing never witnessed by anything, a fae who has extinguished his own fire, trembling.
Illuga's jaw tightens at the sight.
"It's part of the work. I'm just accounting for outcomes," argued Illuga, a habit of his so observable under the subject of pressure; "I was only doing my job."
"Illuga." A warning frayed at the edges the same way old silk wears thin. "I implore you. Do not offer me the pitiable words you have learned to convince yourself with."
A beat. Something moved behind the gold of those eyes too dull to be readable.
"Please."
And there it is—the words that spill from his mouth that resound far too aching to be understood, by him, hopelessly.
"Answer me honestly. You must be honest—" and then the hands, those large, bony, ancient hands that have touched beings no longer standing, those hands that long the quiet passage—those hands find the young master's shoulders and hold with raw wits nearing the ends of their tethers. The grip of a fae, for the first time in a long while, with something left to lose.
"Are you well?"
Small and devastating. Three words mumbled not with his voice for the world—but with the one that shook as delicately as his flames.
Perhaps it had been the wrong question. Or perhaps it had been precisely the right one—only that he had carried it clumsily, the way one carries something fragile across uneven grounds, overstepping, presuming a path that had not been laid for him. Overestimating the space he occupied. Hoping. Wishing—which was a dangerous thing for a fae to do, wishing, for the simplest concept of being understood by his dear human.
He thought he had a place there. In his heart.
And yet.
They were not so different in this—the human and the ancient thing that followed him. They shared the same quiet enduring, the same shape of coping cursed by their measly purposes, the same cruelty turned inward like a blade. He knew this course of action. Had done it himself across more years than the young master thought he's aged—the long expanse of the gray of it all, the wait it becomes, eventually, indistinguishable from self.
Depression, the mortals called it.
That old and unwelcome feeling—the weather that withered his fire, and the enduring called living.
Illuga sighs. Short, like he had grown tired of it all, and evidently he crumbles. Even just for a moment; he would crumble—and he is simply the ever kind-hearted young master; and he would fake his strength, the entirety of his mental constitution at the face of even Flins.
"I'm fine," he answered. "Sir Flins—"
"Illuga," Flins begs—and the name is tired, each syllable a different shade of it, a different depth.
"I have watched men grow tired." Quietly. Recounting. "I have lit their way to rest—held the guiding flame at the threshold, and watched them."
His hands do not loosen.
"I know what tired looks like, my dear young master." The address lands soft—dear, costing something of him the more it was spent. "And I know what it does."
What it does. Not what it is—what it does. The slow and patient erosion and what it takes, what stood after it in the dark thereafter.
"Then you understand, that I just need to set my feelings down?" asked Illuga.
"Not like that—no."
The human blinks. The absurdity of it settles over him—the understanding, the pull back from it, the protest rising and then catching. Clinging to the honey of the fae's words the way a small and frightened thing clings to the only warmth it can find. It hangs there, unspoken, threading itself through the breath of Flins' wishes like a quiet dread that does not know how to finish its own sentences.
"You are not fire, Illuga."
The force behind it is perceptively low—not loud, never loud, because how dare he be angry at the young master? He is present the way pressure is present, like the air coming hither to announce the arrival of storm as it meets skin. His hold does not dare loosen. "You must not exist only to burn for those who can not. To spend yourself as light for other darknesses while your own—"
A pause. The barest one. Suspended.
"You have been doing this. For time and time now, young master. Again and again, I have watched you."
"Someone has to."
"Must it be you?"
The words come undone at the edges. His nails find the cloth of Illuga's coat—not grasping, not precisely, but pawing, pressing in, indenting the material with the small and wordless marks of everything he does not wish to say aloud. The fears made tactile, Made real. Left in the fabric like a signature rather than a play of words that spill from his lips.
"It has to be someone and I know how to do it, so yes. It has to be me." Illuga's voice does not crack, he does not meet the gaze of the fae who clung to him oh-so-very desperately, and that was what made listening to the words harder. "I have been doing it since. I will keep doing it, Sir Flins. Until I can not."
"And when you can not?"
He does not wait for an answer. Perhaps he already knows the shape of it. Perhaps that was the worst of it all—that he already knew.
Flins folds himself inward, hiding his face in the crook of his young master's neck, and the expression that crosses his features is a terrible and foreign thing—hurt, open, and unguarded, wearing itself plainly on a face that was designed for composure, for the refined remove of something noble and untouchable. It does not belong there. It is incongruous in the way that the blue flower was something incongruous with the metal ones—alive, and soft, and entirely out of place.
"You planned to simply—disappear." The words fall like the world dropped onto his shoulders. "Into unremarkable ground. To let the sea take you, quietly, the way the sea takes all things in its murky depths. And tell no one."
A breath against the young master's neck. Shattering at its core.
'And yet—you chose the First Night Cemetery." Something shifts in his voice, something adjacent to brokenness. "You came to the very land I have kept and called mine across all the long years of my keeping—you walked into the ground of my vigil—and you laid your name down in it—"
He chokes.
He tries again.
"—Thinking I would not notice."
"I wasn't going to—" defended Illuga, miserably, not deigning so much as to admit the lapse in his judgment, much less try to look at the fae's expression.
"You have thought of all but me, Illuga."
The silence that followed was a verdict without appeal. Complete. Final.
Illuga had not been honest. He had built the wall himself, laid with the particularity of someone trying to convince themselves that this was protection rather than cowardice—and it had failed, as walls built from the inside with no foundation always did, failing to keep anything out and anything in, serving only as a foolish proof of the futile attempt. And yet here they remained, on the same side of it. As they had always been.
Like a foolish moth. Like the oldest story there is—the one that ends in tragedy and burning, and the moth who would not say whether it had been worth it—
"You shouldn't have followed me here."
The human pulls away—pushes away, more truly, albeit weak, with the urgency of something that has remembered the danger of their actions. As though the longer their touches lingered, the more certain he was to scorch in the brightest of flames. As though their proximity was the very kindling of sacrifice.
A beat.
"Perhaps not."
The next words come as a farce, coming slowly—with deliberate care—from a vocabulary of an ancient being, trying to see which words worked, and which did not return correctly—this one, no; this one, perhaps—catching at the terseness of the atmosphere that enshrouded the both of them. He is trying. For something as old as he is, careful, a little clumsy, and painfully sincere.
"Young master, is there no one—" the fae's words fall short. "No one at all, whose company makes the weight different?"
Perhaps this is the closest Flins will ever come to unraveling the kind that almost looks like a put together composure if one was not listening carefully enough. Beneath the question lives something he has not dressed in the right words, could not dress in the right words, only circling at an ironic distance: a confession, forlorn and long-kept, offered in the only manner he knows of. If you would still have someone like me. If you would hear me—even a fool's musings, even the clipped and halting tales of my life too long to tell properly.
The question was, if one listened for it, also an answer.
Too bad.
His dear human was not listening for it.
"That's really not how it works for me, Sir Flins."
He means comfort does not solve their problems. He means he did not wish to become someone's burden. He means a dozen practical and selfless excuses.
Flins hears no.
"I see," he said.
And just like that—his voice returned. Full. Composed. Settling back into the distance of something old and accustomed to outlasting of everything he had come to love. As though the last few minutes was a mere drizzle of rain that had come to pass.
He straightens. He becomes—again, entirely—the gentleman. The Ratnik. The thing he was before he crossed that shuddering bridge, before he stepped into this small lodging of rust and borrowed warmth and tried, in the only halting language available to two miserable creatures such as themselves, to reach across the particular darkness that had grown between them, and say something; to name something.
"Then I will not keep you."
He steps back. One step. Precise.
"Flins—"
"I shall depart now, young master."
The incline of his head is slight. Exact. The forgotten nature of a court that no longer exists performed by a body that has never forgotten its roots—too correct, too formal, too carefully restored to its proper remove. Every inch of him returned the human's sentiment; every inch closing a door, every inch with the practiced face of something that has, once again, remembered how not to want.
Illuga's hike to Kipumaki Cliff made sense on paper. The Wild Hunt was a constant there. A flood of reports, ones that he held clearance over, the skill, the equipment. It was well within the scope of his post.
Compared to the lines of mountains, it had made him feel small.
The Wild Hunt moved through the Abyss-infested air at the cliff's surface. He tells himself he is here to work. That he was simply clearing his head.
He is strong enough. He has Aedon to accompany him.
Sure, the argument lingers at the back of his mind. He swings his polearm and thinks about the exchange.
The Wild Hunt loves to play its mind games.
It fed off of human emotions.
The tenuous moments that surface.
He pushes the bitter aftertaste of the argument deep into the place where he kept everything he did not have the time for. He could mull over them later.
He's steady enough to keep fighting. Still a clear head, the very same clear mind that urged him to smooth other the dirt of his makeshift grave with careful hands, the same thoughts that would give practical answers to Flins' impossible questions, and he finds himself with no problem. This was a task. He had been assigned harder things than this on less sleep, hell, even injured.
Alas, Illuga is but a weak fledgling. He doesn't notice when he fails himself over caution.
He refused to acknowledge it. Then comes the accumulated rage.
His boots edged closer to the cliff's edge than they need to—he took a hit he normally would have read. He is angry. It rumbled low and carelessly.
He thinks, it will probably be fine. Right now, it doesn't matter if they wouldn't.
He failed to realize his thoughts. A stumble of his mind. It was normal, sure. But that was only when he was deprecating himself outside of work. It was the wrong thought, in the wrong moment—
Something goes wrong.
The Wild Hunt clawed at his arm.
An unaccounted for wave. The number of enemies drawn far too many for a single person, with no reinforcements. With poor decisions, Illuga gives slightly.
A bad judgment.
The cliff's edge fractures. Old stone, sea-eroded, a misstep.
His steps lingered with an offhand hesitance.
A mere stroke of bad luck in its ever unremarkable arrival. A consequence worth his actions. He goes down.
It felt.
The argument resurfaced with a heavy clatter, loosening his resolve. He thought of his measly orders, the way his words would waver and recede.
Like he was being made to turn from the lighthouse's guiding light. Visible, barely.
Illuga thought of his grave. He had smoothed its soil.
The argument, the way Flins' coat was. The exact shade of black, the way it rustled with each move. He can not remember what they said.
He thinks, this is fine. That somehow, he will recall later, but he was no seer.
Distinction did not matter here.
Not when the people here were left to die. If they even lingered as souls, rest was but naught. A disgusting purple glow, crawling at the seams. It ate, and ate, the skin beneath, eaten, marked with the Wild Hunt and urged to keep fighting long after it should have laid to rest.
Not a warning; not a benediction.
This was a mirror. Of what would become of him, if no one finds him.
Illuga was not afraid.
He tried to recall what exactly was there to be so afraid of.
The Abyss? He has fought the abyss.
The Wild Hunt? It was his everyday work.
Death? His grave was already measured. Was it really worth preventing?
He is very cold. He is very cold and the cliff is very high and below him is the same sea that would have eroded him in his unremarkable deathbed.
Illuga wondered, who it was so upset about the headstone. They said his name in a particular way—maybe they were hurt. He felt a little sad, but an unremarkable end was fitting enough for someone like him.
He was already going blank.
He can not remember the exact occurrences.
There was something—a conversation.
A small metal house with a lone pot of blue flowers in front of frosted windows.
Ah, it was too far away. He's tired.
He thinks, it is fine. Illuga no longer thought after that.
The sky bled its deep indigo dread over the Cliffwatch Camp. Not the honest dark of a regular night in passing, but something heavier—a dread worn like a second sky above the first, pressing down upon the makeshift lodgings and the firelight and the small human sounds of people who paced, unsure what they were waiting for. No stars. Not a single one. As though the real sky had turned to face away from the mangle that this night would come to be.
The Night Orioles moved without their captain.
They felt like a flock of chicks with the absence of direction—not purely lost, but unmoored, circling the edges of their own anxiety in low voices, gathering and dispersing and gathering again under the command of the Starshyna and Flins, the way unsettled things did when they couldn't quite put a finger on what was unsettling them. The fires were tended. The watches were kept. And still, the unease moved through the numbers like a current between deathly still water.
Illuga. Young-faced and formidable—the sort of leader who teaches not by proclamation alone but by surviving, by meeting his own shortcomings plainly and rising from them, in front of everyone, always, even when he believed himself to be weak. He had become the kind of person that holds things together without meaning to, woven into the collective of Lightkeepers—invisible until taut. Indispensable in a dozen quarters across the breadth of Nod-Krai. Valued—quietly, and entirely.
And yet.
Gone. Suddenly. Without a word left behind, so Nikita says.
What could the young master have been thinking?
The question hung over the fae's head, unanswered, while the starless sky held its infuriating silence and the Night Orioles kept their vigil as the darkness went on being.
Flins swallowed what he had been thinking.
The young master rose with an arch that did not belong to anything human—spine curving wrong, curving beautifully wrong, the way cursed things moved when the body has been made a vessel for a monster it was never meant to contain. Wild Hunt. Unmistakable. Rotting at the edges with abyssal scourge, the taint spreading through him like fresh ink through water, like the billow of winter snow to an unlatched door. Those blue eyes found his gold ones and in them—
Nothing.
Already too late for denial. Already too late for pretending.
The young master did not blink. He stilled, and Flins held his gaze long enough to watch that lopsided confusion falter across his features—the faint and devastating naivete of his humanity still flickering, still persisting, like the last warm light in a room swallowed by the dark. And in the loud thrumming of wherever a flame keeps his heart, Flins walks forward. The sand crunches under his heavy steps, honest and indifferent to the danger.
The facts arrange themselves simply: if he left the young master to those weak and well-meaning Lightkeepers, they would carry out a pitiful dissolution that would sadden his beloved human. And could he trust them? To not hurt what was already broken? He doubts them. He doubts himself more. He spites himself for the words he had chosen, those careful and costly words, played at high stakes without knowing their worth—and now that claim of his had curdled into something worse.
The Azure Flame.
Keeper of vigils. Witness to the passing of countless Lightkeepers long before. The one who lit the paths they trekked and remained thereafter, in the dark, alone—
Chooses.
Not to let this one pass.
It was not a threat. It was not comfort. It was older than both, older than the human-speak for both, old as the particular madness of the Snowland Fae when they love—which is to say, completely and obsessively, which is to say without the need of asking, which is to say: you are mine, and mine remains, and remaining is the only vow I know how to keep until rot.
It was not right.
He knew it was not right.
Carrying Illuga—Illuga tainted, Illuga unmade by the Wild Hunt—back to the lighthouse had the particular character of a fae's worst nature made to manifest: the hoarding instinct, the hiding-away, the ancient and abhorrent impulse to take the things most precious and place it somewhere no one else could reach. His treasure. His young master, stripped of his consciousness, carried across the threshold of that scrappy and offensive excuse of a dwelling.
He could keep him here. Lock the door with old words and older intention. The young master would live—would be tended, and sheltered, and loved with the totality only something as ancient and terrible as he could love—and he would carry no regrets into whatever came waking next, because Flins would be there. Flins would tell him the tales of his past, all of them now, every clipped and halting story he had kept short so that the young master would have reason to return—none of that careful rationing now. No more excuses. No more measuring out what he could give.
It was an abhorrent idea.
It was the only idea he had.
His dear Illuga. His dear, broken Illuga. He would keep watch. He would tell no one—not the Lightkeepers, not Nikita, not his good friend who did not know what his son had become tonight in a cliff's edge beneath a starless sky. They would not know. And so thank whatever gods listened to a fae like him, for his elusiveness, for his silver tongue, for the particular eeriness of his nature that had always kept the curious at a comfortable distance—he would lie, and keep lying, wearing haunting like a second skin, just like the very nature of his graveyard friends.
The headstone stood just outside the lighthouse.
His young master's. The makeshift, wretched, named one—and it stood there in the periphery of his vision and mocked him, as he deserved to be mocked, for the horror he had performed on a whim: the way he had reacted, the way he had felt, the way he had let himself do. He had used the tragedy that followed with cold and practiced selfishness—let it be understood that no body remained, that the Wild Hunt had taken what it took of Illuga and left nothing—while in the warm walls of his lighthouse, groaning softly in the only room that had ever been kept warm for a single person, was the caged nightingale.
The young master is safe.
He tells no one.