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1. She would know what she was.
Tyranny knew she was a demon, obviously. But she wasn’t just any demon. She was an archetype of suffering. She had a purpose.
The problem was, she didn’t really know what it was.
Sometimes, Tyranny wondered if there was something wrong with her. Cruelty was great at being cruel. Enmity sure had a lot of enmity toward Tyranny, at least. Agony was in pain all the time, and made other people feel it too. Tyranny had no idea what she was supposed to do. She was bound by her contract to serve and obey Lord Wicander, so how could she be tyrannical? Being a tyrant sounded like way too much responsibility anyway.
If you had a soul, though, you knew who you were and what you were meant to do. That’s what Lord Wicander said, at least.
Tyranny was getting Lord Wicander ready for a big public speech. It was Azgrafall today, which was a big deal both for the Candescent Creed and the city at large. She draped a cloth over his shoulders and tugged at it until it lay flat. “Why are you wearing a pattern of moths?” Tyranny asked. “That’s not one of the Creed symbols you showed me.”
Lord Wicander looked confused. But Eulalia reared her little head up from where she sat on the dresser and said, “Why, it’s because I’m to become one someday, Aspirant Tyranny.”
“Oh,” said Tyranny. She’d seen caterpillars and moths before, both as souls in the Pit and as real animals in Aramán, but she’d had no idea that one turned into the other. “Wait, but they’re so different! That’s fucking crazy!”
“Language, Aspirant,” Lord Wicander scolded.
“Are they magical? How do they do that? Oh, um, sorry, Your Radiance?” said Tyranny, bowing with her hands clasped, like he’d taught her in comportment lessons.
“Only as magical as everything else suffused with the miraculous Light,” said Eulalia. “That’s the beauty of it, you see. I contain within me the potential to become a winged messenger, drawn ever toward the Light. It is a message from the Light of what we are called to be!”
Lord Wicander fidgeted with the fringe of his moth-patterned vestment. “It’s all terribly symbolic, but no one can see Eulalia from up on stage, so it helps to wear a little reminder.”
“I’ll metamorphose when I’m ready, a-and I’m sure it will be at exactly the right time,” said Eulalia, and even Tyranny could tell she was trying to convince herself more than anything else.
“Even when you finally do, the crowd won’t be likely to see you. You’re to be a rather small brown moth. Nothing like Ellian,” said Lord Wicander.
The Photarch’s soul, Ellian, was a blue morpho butterfly, teal and blue, dazzlingly bright. Tyranny was pretty sure the Candescent Creed got its colors from him.
“I meant no disrespect, Your Radiance. I like the moth pattern. Eulalia, I hope I get to see you turn into one,” said Tyranny.
Lord Wicander sighed. “That’s what everyone’s been saying since I turned eighteen.”
“That’s when Ellian became a butterfly,” Eulalia informed Tyranny. “And I’ll be just as lovely as him, I’m sure! Brown is also a very nice color!”
Tyranny looked down at little Eulalia on the dresser. She was dark with white and red markings, and long pale hairs. The Light wasn’t real, but Eulalia was. One day she’d become a moth, winged and ready to fly toward light. That meant something about Wicander, apparently. Even if it just meant he’d throw himself straight into a fire someday.
2. She’d get to touch one.
One of the first things Tyranny learned when she arrived on this plane was that she was not allowed to touch souls.
Once she’d figured out blinking and breathing and standing up, the Halovars had sent in a sparrow-souled maid with an Aspirant uniform for Tyranny to wear. When the maid started touching her to help her into the dress, Tyranny had startled, screamed, and flailed her arms to make her back away. In her panic, she smacked the sparrow soul into a wall, and that made both him and the maid scream even louder than Tyranny. That was when Goddard Halovar came in, with no soul that Tyranny could see, and told her that she was under contract and had better behave, and that meant no touching anyone’s soul.
Tyranny really wanted to touch one, though.
A week later, she was in the garden at the Villa Aurora, learning comportment from her ward. He taught her how to walk without tripping on her dress, and how to curtsy, while she thought about how she’d run off into the city and make him chase her instead of doing these stupid curtsies if it weren’t for the fact that Lord Wicander could send her to the Pit if she pissed him off too much. But then Tyranny caught sight of Eulalia sitting on a leaf just like a real caterpillar, and she was so cute that suddenly all Tyranny could think about was reaching out with a claw and petting her.
“What would happen if I touched you?” she blurted to Eulalia, mid-curtsy.
Lord Wicander squawked in outrage. “Aspirant Tyranny! That is not an appropriate question!”
Eulalia had squinched herself into an upside down U shape. “Oh, it would be awful, just terrible! I’ve recently developed stinging hairs on my back, as eggar moth caterpillars do when they’re closer to metamorphosis. Even Wick can only touch my underside now. Oh, he got stung so bad when the hairs first grew in!”
Tyranny snorted. That must have been so funny.
“Stinging hairs or no stinging hairs, it is a very intimate act to touch a soul,” Lord Wicander went on. “A sacred act, reserved for the bond of marriage.”
“Oh,” said Tyranny. “So like sex, then.” She’d learned about that on the second or third day, when she’d scratched an itch on her crotch and noticed it felt kinda good. The Lady Zebani saw her in the bath feeling around to find out what had been so nice, laughed at her, rolled her eyes, and told her to be more discreet. Tyranny had asked what exactly she was supposed to be discreet about, and proceeded to learn some really interesting stuff about mortal sex, and some really disappointing stuff about what the Creed had to say about it.
“Sssshhh!!” Lord Wicander started to turn the same color as Tyranny.
“I can say the word sex, right? Your sister never said I couldn’t say sex.”
“Zebani talked to you about…” Eulalia said faintly, trailing off into horrified silence. Tyranny congratulated herself, because she’d completely distracted Eulalia and Wicander from the stupid comportment lesson.
Six months later, in an apple cart halfway to Sloak, Tyranny stared at Eulalia in the curve of Wick’s sleep-slack hand. Now that she had time and privacy to just stare at her new body, Tyranny could see that Eulalia’s thorax and head were so fuzzy she wanted to die. But first, she wanted to touch Eulalia’s adorable fuzz, right before she died so she’d never find out how much Eulalia would hate her for it.
3. Her soul would get to walk the Old Path.
The moment Tyranny saw a floating dolphin outside Halandil Fang’s house, and she said she was the soul of someone inside, Tyranny knew there’d be at least one really cool person at this funeral. She’d been so right. Thaisha was amazing.
Hearing Thaisha explain the whole history of her and Hal scratched some kind of itch in Tyranny’s brain. She didn’t know why she liked hearing these kinds of stories from people so much, but she did, so she kept asking for them. This time, though, she also had something else she wanted to hear from Thaisha.
“What is it that your deer is chanting to Thjazi? I mean, his soul’s gone, right?” Wick wasn’t around, so Tyranny didn’t have to say anything pious about Thjazi’s soul becoming one with the Light.
“Zhasav won’t have gone far. Not yet. We’re helping her find it. The Path.” Tyranny liked talking to drunk people more than she liked being drunk herself. Thaisha sounded half-awake, and her eyes seemed to see dreams as much as the world around her. There were so many ways to be drunk, and almost all of them were funny.
“What’s the Path?” asked Tyranny.
“It’s in the Ten… the Teneb… the underworld,” Thaisha said. “The Old Path. Souls can go there, go down the Path, and then they come back as something new. She could be anything next time. Maybe a falcon. Thjazi’d like that.”
“Whoa,” said Tyranny. “Do the souls remember? What they were before?”
“Not really,” Thaisha slurred. “Sometimes, if a druid guides you down the Path, you remember… a purpose. A feeling about something that mattered t’you. Thassit.”
“So you get to, like… start over.” The Candescent Creed was always talking about redemption, but really, it was just like Yanessa said to Wick earlier today: nothing was ever actually forgotten here in Aramán. Nothing was ever over. You didn’t get to start fresh. Not unless you walked the Old Path. Then you became something totally new, and nobody remembered who you were or what you’d done before, not even you.
Thaisha lit up. “Yeah! That’s what ‘m always telling people. Issa good thing! A new start.”
“Not me. I’m a demon. I’ll just be the same old Tyranny forever.”
“‘Snot so bad,” said Thaisha. “I like you. Keep being you.”
It was nice of her to say. But Tyranny wasn’t good. She was a demon, and she’d never get to be anything else.
4. She’d always have someone to love her no matter what.
Tyranny didn’t know much about love. Maybe that was why she was always asking people about who they loved. Or maybe not. She didn’t know much about herself either, after all.
Mortals did seem to know about love, though. Tyranny figured pretty early on that it was because of their souls. The first loves she ever saw were that kind of love. She saw Wick hold Eulalia carefully in his hand and sing her a hymn, so sweetly. She saw Yanessa pick a flower in the garden and put it in a vase for Ellian to perch on. Later, she saw other loves: Wick practicing a sermon in front of Yanessa and beaming at her praise, the easy friendship between the actors in Hal’s troupe, the stars in Wick’s eyes when he watched Armas on stage. But the love for the soul came first.
Tyranny probably wasn’t capable of love, since she was a demon and all. And nobody loved Tyranny. If she had a soul, then her soul would love her, right? That would be cool. Tyranny thought about that, sometimes.
But once she and Wick left Dol-Makjar with Thimble and her friends, Tyranny started to wonder.
When they traveled at night, Teor was always looking at the stars, when he wasn’t scanning the road for danger. Tyranny noticed the emblem on his belt, with the lion head and the constellation. Beastfolk were different, she knew. Their souls weren’t shaped like animals, maybe because they already were animals. Instead, their souls were all bound up in something in nature. It seemed like Teor’s soul was bound to a star.
That seemed so lonely to Tyranny. There was a whole part of Teor that was impossibly far away. He couldn’t touch it. She didn’t even know if he could talk to it. But he could look. Every night, he looked.
Then there was Kattigan. Tyranny wasn’t exactly an expert on mortals, but something was up with him and Aster.
It seemed unfair that Aster had these huge wings for flying all around the world, but she couldn’t fly out of Kattigan’s sight. Or maybe she was better off that way. Sometimes it seemed like Kattigan was running away from her, or her from him. She would fly too far ahead, and Kattigan would shiver, find her shadow in the sky, and run to catch up.
He touched Aster less than Wick touched Eulalia, and Aster wasn’t even covered in spines. Her feathers looked smooth and nice to touch, even if an albatross wasn’t the cuddliest animal. Kattigan talked to Aster about as much as he talked to Wulferic, and wolves didn’t even understand mortal language.
Maybe Kattigan didn’t like himself so much.
And the thing was, Tyranny didn’t always like herself either.
5. Souls are beautiful.
The glade filled with light.
It came from Wick’s tattoos, but not only those. It was like he and Eulalia were made of light. Eulalia floated up out of his hand, and Wick’s feet left the ground. Eulalia changed from a squiggle of light to an orb. A moth’s wings erupted from her—and from Wicander.
A set of glowing moth’s wings beat at Wick’s back. And Eulalia—she was a moth made of light. The moth and the flame, one and the same.
In front of Wick, the shuffling plant monster bowed down in awe. Tyranny wanted to do the same.
The metamorphosis of a soul finding her true power. Tyranny was going to live for a long time, probably. She was immortal, after all. But she was pretty sure she wouldn’t see anything quite like this again.
+1. Demons are beautiful.
Tyranny was pretty sure that she and her sisters were summoned to Aramán in bodies that were meant to look good to humans. Humans held their contracts, after all, and the Halovars cared a lot about appearances. Tyranny had heard so many lectures about how to keep herself clean and her uniform clean, she could recite them by heart. The Photarch wanted the Candescent Creed’s contracted demons to look like pretty human women with horns and tails, but no souls, more or less.
But all of that was a human idea of what was beautiful, not Tyranny’s. She had almost forgotten, until she met Tsul’rekshi.
It wasn’t just her height or her patchwork chimeric body or her total disregard for mortal clothing. It was the giant paintbrush she wielded, something she made for herself that had nothing to do with her purpose. It was her total confidence in who she was, most of all. She didn’t look incomplete, the way Occtis did now without his soul. She didn’t look like someone you would try to compare to a human in any way. Tsul’rekshi was just herself, whole and complete, and so, so beautiful.