Chapter Text
Before anything else, Aranel is aware of a scream.
But it’s not a scream, it is but a whisper on the wind that he hears, the soft hush of clouds rippling under his feet.
It is so soft, and yet it rends his heart.
Does he have a heart? Does he have a body? He’s not sure.
He tries to open his eyes. Nothing happens. There is no sensation that he has eyes to open. The screaming continues, far, far away, getting more distant even, but the kind of scream that shreds its owner’s throat, painful to Aranel despite the fact he does not feel pain.
Does not feel anything. He felt—
Terror and then nothing. Pain ripping his keiza apart, then nothing.
But he did feel pain! At some point! It is the only thing that anchors him, the idea, the memory of pain and the pain he can almost hear, echoing in his head. That is the last thing he remembers, perhaps a long time ago or perhaps—
And falling through the air, free falling and unable to catch himself in the cloud surf for the first time in years and years, falling and ripping and a scream and then right at the end all-encompassing fear and then—
Where is it coming from? Out of the nothingness, out of the blackness (not blackness, though, because that would require the color to exist).
A sobbing scream hurts him, somehow, and that voice is—
It’s Mei—
Aranel’s consciousness fades away and he hears no more.
A fog lifts enough for Aranel to think, coming out of sleep again, like the deep tide going back out to expose life on the shore.
He hears nothing. Sees nothing. Cannot see. Cannot hear.
Meizan. Meizan had been screaming.
He had only just thought, what has happened, where is he, who is doing this to him, when he remembers the scream, the feeling of falling off the nagamor, leaning back into the sky and letting it embrace him as his forehead and eyes and body burst into light and nothingness, then Meizan’s forehead against his and Meizan’s Stay with me and Meizan’s tears and Meizan’s wide-eyed realization of what Aranel had done (betrayed him again) and Meizan’s confused look and Aina’s face and Meizan saving him and Aina’s arrow to the keiza, in a way saving him too. Back and back his memory flows, like a river that has reversed its course to flow upstream, the timeline reversed, like a soul that has changed its spin.
He follows it back, caught in its current, wanting to find a spot to leave the river that was golden and untarnished, and he’s almost reached it, back in those woods where they first trained together, when his mind fogs over again and is gone.
flying falling through green mist green moss leaves cocoon you leaves enwrap you you are moss you are trees
Where am I?
Aranel, for the first time, has the consciousness to wonder this, through the haze. The consciousness to think, rather than passively receive memories as they float past.
Where am I?
It takes a long, hazy few minutes or hours to remember.
Erased. He erased.
Is this what happens after erasure? This liminal nothingness, this semi-awareness? Living like a mollusk— except even the basest creature has some mechanism of sensing the world. Even a barnacle feels hunger, filtering for particles. Even a leaf grows to meet the warmth of the sun.
It’s not life that he has, then, but simply existence. He can think. Surely that means he still exists. Not life, but existence, as a cloud or a rock, without senses. Perhaps he is a stone, physically in the world but unaware of it, at the bottom of a river, reanimated but imprisoned here forever. Would a stone be able to feel cool water, currents, the rise and fall of the river over the course of seasons?
But he can hear! He had heard screaming! Maybe. There had been screaming, and he was aware of it, somehow. Through sense or the memory of it, he can’t be sure.
Meizan screaming, he remembers now, with a horrible jolt (not to the heart because he doesn’t have a body, but if his heart still existed, it would have pounded with the memory). He concentrates hard on listening.
Nothing. Not so much as the echo of an empty room or the sound of blood pumping.
Perhaps it had only been the memory of that horrible scream Meizan had made as Aranel fell. Perhaps it is only that haunting memory of sound that Aranel carries with him into this afterlife.
He can remember the sound easily, the scream, the horrible way Meizan begged him, stay with me, don’t go, in a ragged voice Aranel had not imagined him capable of.
Aranel made the same plea to Sam. Has Sam been haunted by—
Sam! Sam had erased! Sam—
Darkness, then nothing.
Has Sam been haunted by my voice in the same way I am haunted by Meizan’s? is the thought Aranel wakes to, and he shakes the fog away irritably so he can think.
Sam erased, just like he had. Is his beautiful brother here somewhere, in existence and trapped like Aranel? He must be! It was only logical to assume so! The Preservation must have been wrong about erasure, like they had been wrong about everything else. Everything Aranel had been taught was a lie, so why not this? With growing excitement, he focuses more energy than he knew he had, whatever life force still exists within and around whatever is left of him, on Sam’s face, his voice, his soul.
Since erasing, Aranel has not accessed his chitrons. He has no body which means he has no keiza, and therefore no vessel through which to channel.
For the first time since awaking, he remembers what channeling felt like, what channeling is, the connection he had to the world around him, the flow of chitrons through him and everything around him, the way the universe felt right at his fingertips when he had been bonded with Sherka.
Maybe it’s the memory of Sherka, the connection to his brother, or just his wishful thinking, but he feels an energy spark in him that he’s never felt before. Not only in this liminal world, but before, during his life. A channeling empty of matter, beyond matter.
It feels like breathing for the first time. Like remembering oneself. Like having a body (even though he doesn’t) and having an old muscle memory kick in on instinct. It’s not totally familiar, like channelling from a different place, a different energy, or perhaps a different host, but it is channeling, and for the first time, he is certain he exists.
It can’t be channeling, really, because he has no body to access or body chitrons to. And yet, something is there. Something has activated within his consciousness or his soul or whatever this incorporeal self is.
Sam! He shouts, like he had shouted across his and Sherka’s soul bond, but there is no path to direct his thoughts, not even any formed wilderness to tunnel through, only an emptiness, and he shouts all the same, in all directions, all ways he can think of.
Samarel! I am here! It’s me! Sam! Hear me!
He shouts until he disappears into the fog once more, and hears nothing in return. But in the shouting, he feels awake at last, and even thinks he saw—
Nothing but—
The concept of sight—
The memory of green—
stay with me don’t go don’t leave me Aranel don’t Aranel let go Sam please don’t leave me stay with me you idiot don’t leave me don’t go don’t go don’t—
Samarel! Where are you?
With nothing better to occupy his existence, Aranel continues to mentally shout for his brother, concentrating his chitrons, which cannot be chitrons, but he doesn’t know what else to call them. His nonchitrons.
He seems to be getting stronger, yet has no way to test whether this is true. Perhaps it is an illusion.
Perhaps it is all an illusion. Perhaps he is still falling, in fact. Maybe all this is not the result of erasure but the process of it, a slowing down of time, even a stopping of time, frozen forever in the moment his soul was destroyed, in the air halfway to the ground as Meizan and Aina flew upon the nagamor above him.
It is an unpleasant thought. Aranel thinks he would rather be the stone.
Tentatively, he reaches out his chitrons. Meizan?
It is not an imprint of green he sees this time, but blue.
If he had the breath to gasp, he would have. He pours more energy into the thought, into the single name: Meizan?!
This prompts more blue. Not a flash, not even a glimmer. But it is not just a memory, Aranel is certain.
He hardly has a chance to feel excited before a flash— a true flash this time— of red appears in his vision— his mind, whatever— and a slamming wall of fury.
Startled, Aranel retreats on instinct, then kicks himself when the nothingness returns with its quiet lacking.
He had been so close! To— to something, anyway. It hadn’t felt like Meizan. But he had been reaching for Meizan, and had found something, so surely there was a connection.
He thinks of Sam, feeling torn and guilty. Sam? Are you there?
He concentrates as much force, and it’s as blank as before.
Sam, if you can hear me, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I will find you. If you’re out there, I’ll find you.
With another promise made that he doesn’t know how to keep, Aranel returns his focus to the living. He channels to the point of exhaustion, a new feeling for this new existence, seeing red and seeing blue, feeling red and blue more than seeing, leaning into them, straining, until the nothing.
nestled in roots coiled in roots the earth cool and safe the grass warm and sunlit and safe a gentle hand down your spine in your fur a gentle hand curled in yours a gentle hand a gentle forehead dewdrops in your fur tears against your thumb the dripping waters in a cool damp cave watering the roots of your fur
Aranel gets right to work when he awakes.
Each time, he seems to stay awake for longer, to feel the colors a little clearer, almost like seeing them even. The aware times— each session of which he has begun to call an Awareness— and the nothing times— an Unawareness— feel more distinct now, almost like day and night. Before, the difference between them had been little more than the difference between a heavy fog and a moderate mist. Now it reminds him of waking and sleeping. He can focus on a task. He can’t decide when he’s going to sleep, exactly, but he can feel it coming on, aware that he will lose consciousness again. He doesn’t know why it occurs, because aside from some chitronic fatigue after exerted effort, he never feels sleepy. Why should he need sleep? To rest a brain that doesn’t exist, a body that doesn’t exist?
The wakefulness, though, is progressing nicely. Each Awareness is a little clearer, and he makes a little more progress. It doesn’t feel hard to find the colors anymore.
He decides to experiment with a new target.
Aina?
He’s met immediately with a blackness; not the nothingness he has become accustomed to but still can’t define, but blackness, dark as pitch, darker than Meizan’s hair, darker than night.
He jolts back in fear. He doesn’t know what it means but has a horrible feeling about it all the same, and is filled with dread.
Perhaps a safer target, then. “Safer” is a relative term; there are no safe memories left for Aranel, no one in his existence who hasn’t become a memory of guilt or shame or bitterness or a combination. Mirya feels like the closest thing.
Mirya. Mirya.
Nothing. Perhaps he could be guided by color? What had he been wearing when Aranel last saw him?
He pictured Mirya, in his saffron Tahamuri garb at the palace. His charming face and arrogant smirk. Aranel tried to picture the exact tone of his skin, the precise pattern of fabric he wore, the shape of his eyebrows.
There! There was something! Channeling further, Aranel found he could feel not just one color, but a shape! The shape had movement, a blur of colors, a saffron tunic perhaps, and Mirya’s skin color, the shape of Mirya’s shoulders, so often in a swagger, but now hunched and tense.
Aranel snapped back to himself, blank again and exhausted, but buzzing with excitement. It’s like he’s unlocked a new level of channeling. This is more than he has ever seen with Meizan, and he’s so thrilled to find something new that he can’t even be troubled to wonder why that is.
Aranel can’t help but be reminded of learning to channel, learning to cloudsurf, Sam holding his hands has he shakily took the first tentative steps, then slowly grew more confident.
It’s like that but harder, because he doesn't have any idea of the limits of this power or what it even is. Without any guidance, all Aranel can do is blindly experiment.
You just have to practice, Ran, Sam had said once when Aranel tried a trick he had seen his brother do and fail spectacularly. You practice this first. Drill it a hundred times, until it’s second nature, until it’s like walking, until you’re sick of it. You couldn’t walk once either, you know. I had to teach you that because you tried to follow me around then too, and nearly fell off a lotus edge. You learn to stand, then to walk, then to run. Same as this. Same as anything. Slow and steady.
Missing his brother with an aching intensity, Aranel channels that into determination. All he does in his wakefulness is channel to Mirya. Mirya does not appear to him as intense blackness or alternating flashes of blue and red, but as himself. Or rather, a vague shape of himself, viewed from a great distance and through murky water with one’s eyes mostly closed.
But he is there. He is there. And he is becoming clearer.
Mirya isn’t weighed down by guilt. In life, Aranel had asked a terrible thing of his friend, but it was nothing compared with what he had inflicted on others. Unlike Aina, the thought of Mirya is not filled with a thousand ways he had been wronged by Aranel. Unlike Sam, his image is not burdened by the memory of his keiza being stabbed, the knowledge that Aranel’s actions had erased him. Thoughts of him are not filled with an acute misery, half betrayal and half a terrifying longing, unlike the thoughts of Meizan that Aranel has been diligently trying to keep at bay.
Mirya is safe. Aranel supposes he always had been. He had been a rival, pushing Aranel farther than he ever would have gone without him. Something like a sibling. In a way, he was more of a sibling to Aranel than Samarel was, as least in the way Aranel has heard siblings talked about. Siblings who bickered and competed and loathed each other at least half the time but would, at the end of the day, understand each other without equal.
With Sam, Aranel had worshipped the ground he walked on. The ground Mirya walked on was usually the ground Aranel was also trying to walk on, and ideally push Mirya out of the way to do it much better.
With each passing Awareness (Aranel couldn’t call them days, as the times he was awake felt much more close to several hours at a time, although who knew how far his sense of time was off, if indeed time was passing), Aranel sees Mirya more clearly. And from his movements and the tone of his colors, Aranel is growing more and more sure that time is passing. He would visit with all his strength and find a brightly colored blob that was Mirya— well-lit and with high energy, chitrons buzzing. The next visit, he would find darkness, not in energy but coloring. The shade of Tahamuri bedspreads in the cover of night, for example.
Of course, he has no idea how much time is passing, because he cannot know for how long he spends in each Unawareness, each big sleep. It could be minutes, hours, days. It could be years. Years of time spend unconscious as the world turns and those he knew grow older, and he is aware to see only brief glimpses of their movements.
It is extremely maddening. But with no Meizan to spar with, no Aina to tease, no Sam to seek comfort from, nothing to break and no eyes to shed tears, Aranel continues to do the only thing he can do.
The Awarenesses grow longer. Aranel trains as hard as he can, and after he’s gone as hard as he can go, there’s nothing to do but retreat to himself while his chitrons revive.
In between channeling sessions, the stretches of Awareness when he’s doing nothing feel endless. There is nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to feel, nowhere to go. Nowhere to go but back in his memory, back up the twisting river of time.
The morbid game he played back in his jail cell, choosing between this decision and that, imagining scenarios playing out, is as tortuous and inviting as it ever was in life. It takes on a slightly more detached sense here, since he has no more decisions to make, no more paths to walk. It’s comforting, really, in a twisted way. He’ll never have to add to the long list of regrets, but only learn to exist with those he already has. No fear of disappointing anyone anymore. Just blessed, blank, inconsequential existence.
Well, there is one to add. He has not yet played his game with his final decision, his final miserable act.
Tell Seirem to switch the arrows. Don’t tell Seirem to switch the arrows.
Stay still. Move an inch to the left.
Let the arrow land. Let the arrow miss.
You came, he remembered thinking when he saw Meizan’s face. You both came, when he felt Aina’s arrow, perfectly placed, as he knew it would be.
They had come to save him. All right, not just to save him, but to save the realm, to disconnect him from Sherka. Still.
It was a new and twisted method of torture, thinking about what would have been if the arrows hadn’t been switched. He would have been taken to the forest, waking up from the kapizer venom to Aina’s glares and Meizan’s glowers. That was the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard, Meizan would have said, and Aina would have followed with, This doesn’t make us even, you worm. Once we figure out how to get that dog out of you, I’m out of here. And they would both say it with so little conviction that even someone as stupid and gullible as Aranel wouldn’t have believed them. Aina could grow to tolerate him, even forgive him, even befriend him again. Mirya would have come to find them, and the four of them would figure out how to break Aranel’s bond with Sherka in some other way that probably didn’t exist, but that they would have figured out together, and they would have figured out everything together, and fixed it all.
And Meizan would have been there. Scowling half the time, but looking sidelong at Aranel, tracking his movements. Wanting Aranel by his side, as the had, inexplicably, over the past moons. Wanting Aranel’s counsel despite himself. Sharing those rare, tiny smiles that Aranel had lived for. Maybe even…
He stops himself before he can think any farther.
“…don’t know…"
Aranel nearly loses his grip on the chitronic sight in his shock. He had heard something! That had been Mirya’s voice, uncertain but strong, warbled as it traveled to Aranel, but it was Mirya.
He had spent the whole Awareness focusing on Mirya’s lips. He had slowly been working up to the face, which seemed to be the most complicated part of chitronically looking at someone. Aranel had, through many Awareness-hours of effort, pretty much solidified Mirya’s body. He could almost, if he concentrated hard enough at one spot, see the fibers of his tunic. That was enough; it was time to tackle the next. I’m ready for the next challenge, Sam.
The eyebrows had been first. Mirya had expressive eyebrows, and they moved a lot, making them difficult to follow. Then his eyes, which Aranel had been surprised to find filled with tears more than once across only several Awarenesses. Now, this Awareness, he started on the lips. Each subsequent realm of Mirya’s face had been easier to master, but Aranel was still surprised by how quickly his lips took shape, at least compared to the concentration it would have taken at the beginning.
But this is something else entirely. Hearing! Well, not exactly. Just as he is not seeing as much as feeling with nonchitrons the colors and shapes, he is not hearing, not the way he had used his ears to hear when he had a body. Not sound, but the feeling of words.
He concentrates his entire being on listening to what Mirya is saying, and promptly loses his grip and contact entirely.
Burning in frustration, Aranel restarts. Mirya, his chitrons call forcefully, and he finds the saffron tunic, finds the furrowed brow, the intense eyes, serious and focused on something, and finally down the slope of his nose to his lips.
Aranel remembers the day he tried to teach Meizan cloudsurfing, during one of his happiest memories of the last few moons of his life. Meizan had been too focused, trying to channel his chitrons in much too high a concentration and too thick below him. He had tried to be aware of every molecule of air around him. Concentrating too hard will ruin many chronic techniques, cloudsurfing included. Apparently this is no different.
Aranel tries to relax. He focuses on the image of Mirya's lips and instead of concentrating on trying to listen, he just allows the words to come, an equal balance of listening and watching.
It comes with ease before slipping away, but he catches a few words. “—if Meizan and Azyaka won’t—”
Meizan! Aranel shouts in a panic as soon as he snaps back to himself, Mirya vanishing. Meizan!
It’s amazing, the results of hard work. Just as Samarel once promised, his practice has paid off, and what was once difficult now comes as easy as walking. The longing he has been telling himself not to feel is at once satisfied and intensified as flashes of Meizan’s features appear before him. A glimpse of dark hair, gray boots, brown eyes that had once looked at him in turn with irritation, annoyance, fondness, helplessness, trust, exasperation, friendship, guilt, grief.
Aranel forces himself to relax, but his nonchitrons are responding with a desperate passion, and he tries to use the energy to his advantage and channel the way he did with Mirya. Not to hear and to see, but to see a full picture in crisp detail for the first time, because he cannot bear these glimpses any longer.
He imagines the sensation of a deep breath of air before a cloudsurfing race, and tries to both widen and focus his view.
Meizan is right there, clear as day, as if Aranel is standing right next to him. The space around him is garbled and clouded, but Meizan is not. Aranel can see him breathing. He can see, no feel, his chest moving up and down; he can feel his breath. He can feel his heart beating. He can feel the spin of his keiza— the backward spin, Aranel realizes with surprised dismay, but it was hard to care about anything but the fact that he could not let the balance of the image slip away for a moment.
Blue light glimmers in Meizan’s face (his perfect face, Meizan’s face, Meizan’s eyes, why do they not have life in them?), and he looks up, reaching for something. Concentration flickers across his face. Blue, everything is blue, and the shape of scales reflect in the black of his iris.
The sinking feeling Aranel has had ever since hearing Mirya’s words is confirmed. Azyaka, he thinks. He’s bonded with Azyaka.
There’s a mist coming over his existence, once again. Not now, he wants to scream, but there’s no stopping the fog, the big sleep, the Unawareness, and he tries to drink in Meizan’s image as much as he can before he goes.
Meizan, he shouts in desperation, and there’s a flash of green and the last thing he sees is Meizan stumble back, face a mask of shock, and look directly at Aranel.