Chapter Text
The golden flask slipped his twitching fingers the moment after he drank its contents, its intricate erdleaf tracery falling undone the moment it shattered.
“Dearest?” Malenia asked, ignoring her own wounds through familiarly incalculable effort, but Alagos did not respond. She saw that he had been lacerated through his torso, torn apart by shards of Destined Death that carved up the soul as its territory, and she feared it was there to reside forevermore.
He had made his choice. His irrevocable choice, in answer to his mentor’s betrayal. There was a certain veil that lifted from the mind when one emerged from the haze of battle, and her thoughts had a way of drawing clarity to her when they were given the time to catch up with her war-worn instincts. She realised with a faint sorrow that her beloved had known he would be struck by his teacher’s vengeance when he moved for the thrust to the heart, and followed through anyway.
There was most certainly a future in which she might have avoided the touch of Maliketh’s edict, and Alagos could have remained unwounded- but it was a future wrapped up in probabilities, and her lord-to-be had chosen certainty. The fact that she did not immediately hate him for it had more to do with shock and concern for his health than any considerations of love.
At the moment, he did not even look to her. He fell to his knees, a mountain brought low by the onslaught of time, and breathed in deeply; she recognised his breaths as not quite gasps, but rather as the trained response to slow one’s heart.
He moved a shaking palm over to the Black Blade’s dead eyes. Long fingers - which she had never noticed were spindly before – shut them in a gesture so profoundly delicate that Miquella when he played with nascent butterflies would be put to shame; and then he wept.
It was not a matter of twin rivulets escaping those ancient eyes and losing themselves in their journey along his scarred face. It was not the quiet, soft, restrained display of sorrow she had seen from him when he had been driven to tears over Millicent.
For what she suspected was the first time in all his life, Alagos sobbed. He howled anguish at the four corners of the world, tore a fistful of thinning silver silk from his head and burnt it in his palm, then struck the floor in frustration.
“Wake up! Wake up, you miserable fool, wake up! Look at what you’ve done! Why did you not listen? Why did you let yourself become a victim to every bloody damned starsforsaken lie you were ever told? Why? You stupid, stupid old bastard, why?”
She tried to say something, but in some hidden part of herself understood that reason was the last thing that Alagos would listen to. She could not imagine herself being rational if Miquella were taken from her forever, after all.
“Why make yourself a prisoner to your duty? Why make me a victim of mine? How dare you! How dare you teach me all I know of- of wisdom, and goodness, and letting the better parts of oneself shine through, and then commit this manner of folly! How dare you- you teach me to be human again, only to die as a thing!”
Perhaps the worst wound Maliketh had dealt Alagos, she realised with an awful twinge, was the simple reality that he was gone.
“You were my brother, you great old tosspot! You were my brother in arms, my brother in flesh and in thought, as you were so fond of saying. You were my dear, elder brother whom I would die for without a thought, and I loved you. I still love you, in this thrice-damned hell which saw me run you through, and curse my heart and soul, but I’ll love you forever because I have no bloody choice in the matter with what you did for me. Why, then? Answer me, you half-baked loaf! Answer me!”
His breath quite left him, in that moment, and he doubled over miserably, coughing up blood at his feet. She almost made to help him; her feet restrained only by an invisible force that defied nomenclature. It was like how prosody often determined the structure of a poem, in that the verse and the meter might sometimes dictate the nature and the placement of the words. This force, an effect of grief, now told her that help meant harm if she were to approach him.
“I want to tell you to mind your place, you damned, sodding thickhead. I think of your ridiculous belief that everything ought to go back to how it was in those mythical elder days, and I want to cuff you for it! You had no business to let this happen, and I’m driven mad with the knowledge that I should never be able to tell you so, or change your stupid, stupid, stupid beliefs and bring you back. How… how dare you. How dare you make it so that I cannot think of you without being consumed with anger at you for being dead, and beyond anything I could do for you!”
Silence hit her like a blizzard when he stopped at last, and she suspected his immense strength had simply left him. A nosebleed made itself apparent, and his voice became a rasp.
“I wish… I wish you find the peace you sought, you dratted old lout.”
He tried to rise, and the fact that he needed to use his palms instead of rising directly told her all she needed to know about what fortitude remained to him. But rise he did, and he finally turned to her when his knees wobbled, then gave; he fell to the floor with a thud.
She felt like weeping herself, with a phantom itch from the pits of her eyes, since it looked as though a part of her chosen consort’s soul had simply given up. It was not as brightly incandescent as she remembered it, and this took some time to notice as her mind would unconsciously replace what she observed with what she remembered as it did not wish to believe the present. Scars of gold, red and black had lodged themselves within him and frayed his being at the edges, but they were little more than a passing thought in the reckoning of his worst injury.
For the first time, she thought him old.
She knew, from a purely academic perspective, that Alagos was far from young, and had even remarked on his age, but it had been a simple thing to decouple that age from the man himself, and treat it simply as a fact about him. She did not believe it hindered his prowess; perhaps it left him with less vitality and endurance than he would have if he were younger, but Alagos was so supremely skilful that she had thought it hardly a hindrance. What would it matter if he could not fight for as long as he should like, if he chose his battles carefully and fought with profound mastery so as to make his every short engagement a decisive one?
She had found something almost charming about the scarred and weathered face and the thin, silky hair, as they had simply been ‘matters of appearance’ and not ‘consequences of age’, and if Alagos stood in front of her, the last thing she would say was that she stared at an old man.
His face sagged, and those lines and furrows of focus were suddenly lines of age. His palms trembled, where they had once been still in perfect self-discipline. And part of him likely knew this, as he looked away from her.
Empyreans knew souls, and Malenia had good reason to believe that among them, she knew souls best. The weight that had been placed on her Alagos’ soul had nothing to do with Destined Death, and his age was not a consequence of Maliketh’s edict. Not truly.
His own stroke was the culprit; that fateful thrust through his swordsmaster’s heart. And now he reaped the grief he had sown.
“It’s over, now.” she told him, but though she tried for a soothing tone, the only feeling her words carried was a devastating finality. “It is done. All is done.”
He is gone, and now we must look to the future was what she wished to say, but she did not have the heart to. It would have been an entreaty to Alagos to be strong, and she did not know how anybody could be expected to show strength in such circumstances.
Get up, get up now, she thought to him, but he did not make any attempt to rise. Part of her insisted that he ought to pick himself up off his own strength, that it was the only correct way, but she silenced it. That part of her had been lent credence by the fact that Alagos had never seemed to need anything but his own strength, but unfamiliar as the present was, he needed her support.
He hasn’t ever given up before.
She noticed how he turned away from her as she walked closer to him, and it worsened the sudden ache she felt when considering him. Stop that, she wished to tell him. Old or not, wounded or not- and even if all your strength has been spent- you are still my Alagos, and I will always love you. But she was certain he would bark harshly in sad laughter, and keep his thoughts on the matter to himself- perhaps concocting some secret plot to fade away where she could not find him as he did- and she did not feel she could stomach arguing with him at such a time.
Actions had always served her better than words, she reasoned. She knelt, and gently placed a hand on his back. Those deep-set eyes were so terribly weary, she noticed, but he did not shrink away from her touch; perhaps he couldn’t afford to. Encouraged, she wrapped her arms around him in an embrace and lifted him to his feet, then held him against her until his knees stopped shaking.
It had felt so much like draping a heavy curtain that she felt almost horrified. He should not have felt as lifeless as he did. It felt profoundly strange to hold him, and to her senses he seemed so unlike his old self that she wondered if the heartbeat against her own did not belong to her Alagos, but some ghoul or husk risen from the dead in his place- but with those thoughts came an immediate disgust at herself for thinking them.
She simply held him, and stroked his hair as softly as she could. He needed her; he needed her love and care and support, and nothing else.
A great, rumbling cough- it was an encouraging sign, since it was not the hacking, breathless cough she had feared- and Alagos was saying something in a voice so soft that even she needed to strain to hear him.
“Forgive me.”
“Forgive you? You completed the cure to the disease that had me under its yoke since my birth, and killed your own teacher for my sake. Why would I insult you, my one and only Alagos, by forgiving you for an error that exists only in your own mind?”
He blinked twice, and the ghost of a sarcastic smile appeared on his thin lips before he shook his head. “No. I- I’ve moped enough. Made much ado over something I can no longer change. Wasted too much time.”
“Alagos, if this is about your choosing to trust Maliketh, it may have been the wrong decision to make, but I do not at all blame you. Even if no good deed goes unpunished, that does not invalidate their meaning as good deeds.”
But focus returned to his brow and he ignored her, taking a deep breath before hobbling towards a newly-manifest site of grace.
“Alagos!”
Curse him, he was using purpose as a mechanism to escape turmoil. She was all too familiar with the idea, to the extent that she could be called the world’s foremost expert on it. There was only one way to force him from such a glut, even though the words would hurt to speak.
“Alagos, of all the times to be a fool, do not choose the present! I know what poisonous thoughts churn in your mind; Haligtree, if I haven’t had them myself. I would bet you are not even concerned that you were wounded by your master, which you ought to be, and are instead worried only that these wounds might come in the way of my perception of you, or hinder your ability to help me. It does not matter, and I do not care! You are and shall always remain my love, and nothing in the world can change that!”
More silence, however. Her voice had simply entered through one ear and left through the other. Alagos had stooped over the site of grace, emptied his flask of cerulean tears, and was drawing crimson tears into it, paying nothing else in the world any attention.
“Is it not that?” she asked, less concerned that she had misjudged him and more in provocation. “Is it the wounds I suffered that you are cursing yourself over? Have you somehow gotten it into your head that if you hadn’t chosen to trust Maliketh, he would not have struck me with Destined Death? We can never be certain of such things and you know it!”
Still no answer. He finished collecting tears, then tried to drink them. He managed the first draught, which brought some hope to her, but when he downed the second he retched abruptly and vomited. Breathing in deeply, he considered the flask for a long time, before painstakingly resuming his collection of crimson tears. She noticed as he turned around briefly while he worked, stealing a furtive glance at her before averting his gaze.
“Heavens, Alagos, I am not fragile, not in any way!”
“I know how painful those wounds are.” he murmured, more to himself than to her.
“Yes, it hurts; you know it, I know it, Maliketh certainly knew it, and everybody in the world knows it! I would hope, however, that you- of all people- also know that I will never let them drag me down-“
But standing suddenly took a great effort, and she retched herself, spitting bile and rot with an oath. It seemed the Scorpion had elected to strike once again, and of all the times it could have chosen, of course it would choose this one.
It did not even try to croon into her ears, as it was wont to. There was no clicking, nor any chittering. Where it would typically drive at making a plunge seem seductive, it chose instead simply to try and force her into it. There were thousands and thousands of arms that were somehow also centipedes coiling around her, dragging her beneath the surface of a red lake, and she scrabbled at a broken stone pillar for purchase.
“Say something!” she thought vindictively at the crawling beneath her skin. Even the poisoned honey of its entreaties would be better than nothing.
Everything was taken by tyrannical silence. Alagos was silent, Miquella was silent, the Scorpion was silent, Farum Azula was eerily silent, and she felt like screaming to challenge silence’s tyranny, before centuries of discipline asserted themselves out of trained habit and she focused her will.
The Rot, this time, had struck in adversarial intent. Her struggle, therefore, became a duel between it and herself by definition- and few had more experience at winning battles than she did. Spared the exhaustion of needing to frame it as a duel by force of argument, she immediately thought of Miquella growing flowers and speaking excitedly about his experiments. She thought of her master, laughing and jeering with his unrefined sake, and how she had joined him in laughter when she saw that he was sitting next to a prim, proper, and entirely miffed-looking Radagon. She thought of Uncle Miriel nuzzling her in appreciation for the garland she made him, and of the tournaments held at the Haligtree in which she would duel five of her knights at a time, of Finlay, of Loretta, of Ala-
“Drink.”
She drank.
Crimson tears could not dull the ache left by Destined Death, and the Rot had only been able to strike at her due to the wounds Maliketh had dealt her, which ate away at her strength. The Rot itself, however, could still be attacked, and its incessant writhing subsided.
She hated that Alagos was still trying to fight her own battles with her, timely as his aid had been.
“Wasted too much time.” he nodded to himself in affirmation. She noticed that he had a few scrolls in hand. “Perhaps desperation will do the needful.”
He tried- something, there was a shift in his thoughts- and he tried that something thrice, before golden light enveloped them both, and she felt aches and pains fade steadily away. The world still seemed duller, and her strength felt undercut, but Destined Death’s effects could only be cured by time and by divine blood- but cuts were cuts, and wounds were wounds, and healing was much appreciated either way.
“He would like to know that, I think. Second time I’ve cast Blessing’s Boon. Both times too tired to think about it. That may well be the trick.”
“Alagos, don’t speak like that.” It sounded, shamefully, like a plea. He was usually so eloquent, and so averse to curtness, that listening to him speak simply hurt.
He smiled- again, that awful, sad smile- and said ‘As you wish.’
She sensed that he wished to be left undisturbed, and acquiesced against her better judgment. He worked for what felt like hours, healing them both again and again, before summoning flame to grant him strength. He held out his palm for her, and she somewhat absent-mindedly took it before she could realise he meant to transfer some of that strength to her, even if she felt he needed the might of his flames far more than she did.
He drank Cerulean Tears in short sips, murmuring constantly that he had ‘developed a resistance to these things’. She thought she should have said something, but couldn’t. Perhaps the horrible silence had infected her, right when she fought off her Rot, and it was only when he asked her an egregious question that she managed to break her silence.
“Your needle, please. To begin gaining, it must be placed away from contact with the Scarlet Rot for a time. I promise you it shan’t take long.”
“Alagos, no.” she said firmly, when she registered that his feet were going somewhere. “Not now. Come back to the Haligtree. Let Destined Death wear off from both of us-“
A harsh, rasping cackle.
“Well, from me, at the very least!” she shouted defiantly. “You need rest, and you need further healing which is beyond your skill to provide. Come back with me, and let us both recover our strength. This is the only rational choice. You have a scientist’s mind; if you had kept it, this would be clear as day!”
But when turned, he did not assail her with an argument based on reason, or rationality.
“You wish to save… whatever is left… of me, don’t you?”
Her heart threatened to burst from her throat. She tried to speak with her usual authority- “I will-“
“Then do not make me return without victory.”
Fire had returned to his voice and spirit, and his eyes were burning with the same madness that had driven his sword through Maliketh’s heart.
Malenia knew that fey madness very well, and she knew that he could not be reasoned with.
“Alagos!” she tried, letting some of the grief she had hidden show, “Do not do this. Do not do this to yourself. You are… you…” -it was a pain even to admit- “you’re hurting me-”
She felt a flash of sympathy from him, and forged on. “Return with me, my dearest. Nothing will happen to me, and I swear to you that I will not be overcome. I am Marika’s daughter, and I have all the time in the world to see to what ails me- but I will let nothing happen to you. I cannot let anything happen to you. If you’re worried that you cannot live with yourself, remember that you are not alone. I will not let you tear yourself apart. I will catch you if you fall. I will love you if you hate yourself- and I am not the only one who cares for you. You saved Miquella’s legacy, after all. Let Miquella save you from your age-“
“MIQUELLA!” Alagos roared suddenly, and the renewed strength behind it was vicious.
He was angry at Miquella.
Why would he be angry at Miquella?
“He cannot reach you here, can he?” her betrothed asked, glancing left and right like a thief caught red-handed. “No, the Ancient Dragons’ transformation of the metric ought to take care of that- but I wouldn’t put anything past him-“
“Wh-what?” She asked. She should not have stuttered.
You knew? was what she had meant to ask. Her Rot struck at her with vengeful glee, and she grit her teeth in pain.
“Yes, I know; never mind that I know; and my thoughts on it are immaterial at this juncture. He cannot perceive us now, can he?”
“No.” she gasped with effort, “No, he cannot- accursed scorpion…”
He looked at her for all of a second, arbitrarily coming to a decision about her which she was too preoccupied to dread.
“Well, if I do not trust you now, I fail to see the point of living.” Then he limped over to her, and held her as she shuddered, and she hated herself because she ought to have been the one comforting him.
She decided to do him the same courtesy, and resolved to accept whatever he would say with an open mind instead of dismissing it outright.
“There is so much that has been kept from you, my dearest.” he told her in an alarmingly gentle voice, with a hand on her forehead. “There is so much that I have been forced to confront and acknowledge, and you should have been privy to all of it from the beginning.”
“Miquella… kept things from me?” she unscrambled, in a soft and plaintive tone nobody would ever have associated with her.
It was unbelievable; so much so that blasphemy seemed- for the first time in her life- an appropriate term to invoke. There were no secrets between them, and the nature of their partnership was such that none could be kept. Even now, she wanted to shove Alagos away from herself for daring to suggest such a thing, but she stopped.
This is the man who killed his brother for me.
That, however, did not make the thought any less ridiculous. Miquella only ever kept information from her if he felt-
If he felt that there were more pressing matters which demanded her undivided attention.
“I am afraid so. I do not know how far I can trust him, but since you love him, I will assume his reasons are honourable. The only interpretation of events in which his reasons for keeping so much from you are honourable requires that he sought to cure your Rot first, before he revealed all. But while he may have kept his silence, I cannot. I can’t any longer. Do not make me return without victory, Malenia. Do not make me return before I could tell you everything.”
There was something slightly off about his thoughts; something that did not quite make sense. He had presented them with a remarkable sanity that belied his madness, and there was something artificial about the artist’s flourish that accompanied their presentation which told her they were not entirely from the heart.
“You… aren’t trying to be generous in your appraisal of him, are you, my dearest?” she asked.
Not even against Maliketh had she felt truly scared.
“Perhaps.” he answered cryptically. “In fact, I don’t know what to feel about him. You know me rather better than I know myself, my love.”
His feet were pointed in the direction of the greatbridge, and at last their alignment made an awful, sickening kind of sense.
“Be free of this. Be done with this, and let me have my victory as you have yours. Then all can be brought to light. Let me prove Gurranq wrong. Let it be made certain that he truly died for nothing.”
She shivered, and made to weep before she realised she could not. She had been struck with a quandary that strength could not solve, and she found that she lacked the tools to confront it.
She loved Miquella. She loved Miquella to the ends of the earth, and he deserved every bit of that ocean of love, but Alagos did not lie to her. Her duty was to both of them- and if Miquella had done wrong, it was her responsibility to correct his course.
The Goddess carefully drew her needle from her chest, and presented it to Alagos before burying her head in the crook of his neck. He held her there for as long as his sense of time allowed him, stroking her hair and healing her pointlessly so that she could use its warmth as a shield against her curse, but time caught up with him, as it caught up with all mortal-kind, and when his endlessly weary feet began the trudge to the Dragonlord’s court, she followed.
In the Realm of Shadow, on an outcrop of a jagged peak lit by flame and lightning, Bayle the Dread lifted his nose from a recently felled Drake Warrior’s corpse.
He sniffed.