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i.
They aren’t supposed to dream, but Caitlyn has. She comes to Kayn in the middle of the night, pale as ice. He’d already been lying awake but she doesn’t ask why.
“It was warm,” she tells him. The last word is unholy and Kayn leans closer to hear her better. Her wrist is deathly cold.
“There was a forest,” Caitlyn whispers. “The world was snow, exactly as She wanted.” She glances at Kayn, gaze piercing blue. She doesn’t hesitate; she pauses. ”But there was someone else.”
“Someone you knew?” Kayn whispers back.
Caitlyn shakes her head, a near imperceptible toss of her long hair. “No,” she answers, hushed. And then she says, “but I could have.” Kayn has never seen her this expressive before. She stands stiffly by the door and they both stare at each other. Waiting for something to happen.
“Should you have told me this?” Kayn asks.
She pauses, or maybe this time she does hesitate. But Caitlyn never hesitates. She’s too calculated.
“I don’t—know.”
She shuts the door behind her. Kayn glances up at the ceiling, aware that the moon is floating somewhere high above him. His room is small. It’s enough space for one person but Kayn has sometimes considered the possibility of adding a few extra inches, to see if it reduces the heaviness hidden between the four walls. It lingers in the air like an invisible cloud; a weight, like learning Caitlyn’s secret.
The first time she’d stolen into Kayn’s room he’d been asleep. She’d woken him up with a cold hand pressed tightly over his mouth.
I have something to tell you, she’d said. She dreams of the moon, bone-white and pious. She dreams of the temple, the white chains, and of retribution. But Caitlyn has never dreamt of someone else. Kayn thinks about those two words put together. Someone else is what Varus had said to him not a week ago. He’d found Kayn in the middle of the night, much like Caitlyn. In the shadows of the temple’s austere arches he’d confided his secret: There’s an endless ringing in his ears, when the world is supposed to be at its most quiet. It sounds like old voices.
Old voices, Kayn had repeated, and Varus had nodded, both of them understanding the implication. Varus must have heard them before. They sound like someone else.
Kayn’s been unable to sleep, thinking about what Varus had said. And now Caitlyn’s newest dream. He doesn't know why they’ve both told him. Should Morgana hear about this then they would both be exorcized. Dreams? No more dreams. Voices? No more voices. And Kayn has no real reason to keep it a secret. He doesn’t hate either of them, but together they worship the Snow Moon; they worship bone, picked clean of all impurities. They worship the world with no face.
Deep down Kayn knows that they’re confessing their sins to him because he’s different too. He’d known it for some time, ever since he’d come to live at the temple in the mountains. Illaoi hadn’t hidden it from him. She’d saved him from the edge of a red cliff and he’d grown under the white light of the moon, far away from the demon that had been promised his mortal body. He can’t remember. There’s nothing there except the red tattoos and his unfaithful eye. Sometimes he’ll stare at himself in the mirror and he’ll feel nothing and his mind will travel to some nameless place. He can’t see any details. Faceless figures lose all color under the light of the moon.
Sometimes he debates on gouging his red eye out. Maybe that will please Her.
ii.
Varus telling him his secret: His normally porcelain face is the color of candle wax and his blunt fingers are reaching for him, crawling up Kayn’s arm like a spider. And he tells Kayn about the voices but Kayn isn’t really listening to him explain it further. Varus becomes white noise. He’s thinking about something that’s happened to him, that keeps happening to him.
Their temple is sequestered high in the Ionian mountainside, constantly besieged by weather and wind. When Kayn lays in bed the wind screams along the wall and his window. Sometimes the middle fastener breaks and both wooden shutters explode open and Kayn has to fight to close them again.
He’s started to think there’s something hidden in the noise. He doesn’t know how long it’s been there—maybe it’s always been there, but once Kayn hears it he can’t unhear it. It’s like Varus says—the ringing, except where Varus only hears it in the silence, Kayn only hears it when the world is at its loudest. The wind roars and something is undiscovered at the center of it, or Kayn will clang his scythe against steel and a stranger lingers in the sound, as if admiring the noise. He’s somehow gone his whole life without noticing, until this epiphany, like he’d stepped onto some higher plane.
(It sounds like someone yelling just out of earshot. He can’t make out the words, if they are words.)
“You will not tell anyone,” Varus says. He’s managed to peel away some of the bandages covering up Kayn’s left arm, revealing the red-marked skin underneath. It’s not a question.
Kayn nods. “You should tell Morgana.”
The grip on his arm gets very tight, and Varus’ normally blank expression warps, becoming forbidden. “But I know them,” he rasps.
Now Caitlyn’s gone and Kayn thinks the same strange thought. That the voice on the wind seems eerily familiar. He lays on his bed in the dark, listening for it. The longer he listens, the more obvious the voice becomes. The wind is howling, currently. There’s a blizzard going on outside and once again Kayn hears the voice carried on the wind, still undecipherable.
It’s almost soothing, in some chilling way. It should not be.
The winds pick up. Kayn’s room is on the corner so the noise becomes deafening. He stares at the window, wondering if it’ll burst open again, the way it’s rattling violently. Something loose is thumping against the walls of the temple. The wind keeps getting louder. If he opened the windows he’d surely be sucked outside and tossed to the elements. The weather beats on the stone and Kayn can’t move. His body is stuck to the cold mattress. He can’t bring himself to life no matter how hard he tries, like he’s trapped. It might be magic, or it could be judgment. Judgment looms high in the sky and Kayn should have known better than to hide from it. The Snow Moon rises in only a few short months but in the meantime it grows. A seed is planted in the mountain valleys and then it’ll swing high above the jaw of jagged peaks, hanging over the whole world. Caitlyn, it might say. Varus. Kayn—
The wind suddenly dies.
Kayn’s body tingles. A chill bleeds through the wall and surrounds him. He watches, still unable to move, as the shutters buckle, resisting the silence. It’s very quiet. All Kayn can hear is his own heartbeat, and even that is slow and still, as if he’s dead or if he’s dying. And some higher power is reaching through the cracks in the shutters, lifting the latch delicately from the inside. (And Kayn’s sure the moon is behind the window, that it’ll look inside at him, pressed up against the sill, terribly, impossibly white. There is no world for liars. It’ll see his eye. It’ll say nothing. Kayn still cannot move.) The shutters swing open gently, silent and slow. Outside it’s very black.
First comes the white horns, then the red claws, digging into the window frame to pull the rest of the body inside. Red, sharp, and not human or from any domain that Kayn would remember. It enters the room slowly, while Kayn can only stare, and it gradually turns its monstrous head, perched half in the window, teal eyes glowing bright. And without the wind Kayn can understand what it says for the very first time, in a voice that vibrates in his throat.
“Shieda Kayn.”
Kayn sits straight up. His skin is clammy and his arm hurts. It takes him a few minutes to catch his breath. Chilly daylight streams through his open window and a thick layer of snow coats the sill and the floor in patches. Kayn presses his hand over his heart. It’s practically thudding inside his chest, fighting to escape.
A dream, he thinks. It was just a dream. My first. His black hair has gotten unkempt overnight. He combs his fingers through it.
iii.
Was it?
“It was not.”
Kayn is gathering iceweed on the slopes. They’ll need buckets of it once the Snow Moon rises and he’s especially sure-footed on the treacherous crags. The weed glows in the dark, pale blue underneath the snow, and Kayn digs it up and pulls it out by the roots. He’s done it thousands of times by now, crouching along the mountain to hide from the wind, wherever the ground levels out.
Now when he reaches into the hole he’s just dug, another hand reaches down too. Kayn looks up, face to face with the monster from his first dream. It’s crouched in front of him, looming, face hidden behind a white mask, and when Kayn looks down he sees the way their hands are touching at the knuckle, reaching for the same patch of iceweed. His arm is dwarfed by the creature’s, sharp and muscular. It wears the red moon’s face.
“Do you remember my name?” the monster asks, voice irradiating, radiating, like it might cause an avalanche. Kayn stumbles upright a little too fast and almost tips down the slope, were it not for the demon snatching his wrist. He hangs on the momentum for a second, staring down the mountain, then the monster pulls him back so he can regain his balance. It towers.
“Perhaps not,” it sighs.
Kayn jerks his arm free. “Morgana will exorcize you,” he says, mind flying back across the mountain to the temple, her blank, perfect face in his head; her chains. He brandishes his shovel in front of himself like a weapon, since it’s all he’s got.
“But you won’t tell her,” it says back, almost taunting.
(Its question still spins in his head. A name. A name. There’s something there but he can’t reach it. His lips move but he can’t find the sound.)
“I looked for so long.” And its voice aches freely, emotions that Kayn has never been allowed. He can’t see the monster’s mouth move behind its mask, so it might be coming from his own head now too, some pit long forgotten, and Kayn’s heart is hammering so hard. His breath betrays him, escapes in shallow puffs.
“She won’t have mercy on you,” he says. He himself has killed Blood Moon cultists before. They’d been roaming in the plains at the mountains’ base, like cockroaches. The moon is steel, cold and unfeeling. He tightens his grip on his shovel.
“I know you wonder what you’re missing,” the demon hisses, voice skittering low over the rocks. “I know you cut down a body and wonder what it might feel like to stick your hands through it.” Kayn’s left arm tingles. He glances down at it. When he looks back up the demon is gone. He spins, looking around, then up. It’s sitting high on the cliff above him, on a narrow ledge, and as he watches it lifts one hand up as if to catch the moon in its claws. Kayn sees it perfectly framed in its red fingers and his breath is caught in his throat.
iv.
This is not your moon. The words follow Kayn wherever he goes.
Sometimes he hears another set of footsteps behind him, the heavy gait that he now recognizes as Rhaast. It follows him whenever it feels like, or it hides inside his head, throbbing like a vein. Sometimes Kayn thinks he has two shadows. He hasn’t told Morgana, but he still might. In the meantime he avoids her, maintaining his composure. Ahri is awake again. The Snow Moon draws near and She means to start the preparations. She wanders down the halls, tails swishing quietly, and Kayn avoids Her too.
At night he lays in bed and Rhaast sits on the sill and they talk to each other. It’s—different. Rhaast laughs and scoffs and feels things. They haven’t known each other for long, but maybe they’ve also known each other forever.
“Do you remember fear?” it asks him.
“No,” Kayn answers, whispering. He can talk as quietly as he wants, Rhaast will hear him no matter what.
“What about pain?” the demon asks, also echoing in his head.
The last time he’d gotten wounded there’d been a certain coldness to the way the dagger had sunk into him. But was it painful? “No,” Kayn admits again.
Rhaast creeps closer. It kneels at Kayn’s bedside and it takes Kayn’s arm in its hand.
“Do you remember this?” It pinches his skin in its razor sharp claws, just enough for a spark of feeling and a few drops of blood. Kayn watches them trace down his bare skin. Rhaast smears the droplets beneath its fingers before they reach the mattress.
“What’s under your mask?” Kayn asks. He reaches for Rhaast’s face, touching the smooth surface there, the jutting horns, the space under its glowing eyes. He’s always wanted to know. Cultists will wear them too, but they’re not demons. If you take off their masks they’re human. Kayn’s finger wanders closer to one of its eye holes. Rhaast’s eyes are the color of iceweed. He wonders what would happen if he poked his finger inside. Maybe it would keep going, the fire there might be just a fire; the body just a door.
“That’s right,” Rhaast coaxes, no longer in front of him. He’s vanished but Kayn can feel a warmth travel up his body, from his stomach to his mouth. “The body is a door. You do remember.”
Kayn touches the blood smeared on his arm. (His mind turns. This is not your moon. Again. This is not your moon.)
v.
Kayn still doesn’t tell Morgana. He doesn’t even tell Caitlyn.
How to describe it: If you bathe in the mountain lakes you’ll find the water reaches an unearthly level of cold, clear as tears. Kayn’s red eye has shed the occasional drop, wiped away in an instant. He’s supposed to feel nothing. If you spend long enough in the lakes then you start to feel even less than nothing, completely numb. And when you climb out you’ll feel your body tingling while necessary sensation slowly returns to your limbs. Pins and needles prickle along your skin. That’s how Kayn lives.
Something is coming back or something is loosening, becoming unstuck or freed, wiggling out or burrowing deeper.
For the first time since Rhaast’s arrival, Kayn descends from the mountain.
“Let us go home,” Rhaast tells him. It’s walking next to him, reminding him how tall it stands, clawed feet navigating the steep terrain with surprising grace. “Abandon your temple.”
“I am home,” Kayn says. He can’t leave. He’s needed for the ceremonies. The idea of running off to some occult Blood Moon gathering feels inherently wrong. It goes against everything he’s ever been taught.
(All the same, he concedes. Rhaast is so familiar. It’s only been weeks and it’s felt like months. The Snow Moon might have even come and gone already, somehow Kayn doesn’t miss it as much as he should have. Last night he’d nicked the inside of his cheek just to taste it, and he’d set his tongue between his teeth, wondering what it might feel like to bite down.)
They need fresh bones. Ahri requires them for Her rituals, so he and Rhaast go down to the distant villages. They were once full of people, but now there are fewer. The markets have died. Travelers don’t come here anymore. Bodies are picked clean.
“We could keep going,” Rhaast tells him, as they near the turn in the road. “You could see the coast.”
“The coast is days away in this direction. I know what you’re doing,” Kayn says. The sea is where the Blood Moon casts its longest shadow.
“Red is the ocean,” Rhaast growls, and Kayn’s so certain he’s heard that phrase before. It’s night, but he refuses to look up.
They find a man asleep in his bed, a single room shack on the outskirts of town. Kayn levels the scythe above him, prepared to make the easy, clean kill. Rhaast watches, eyes bright as he impales him in the heart. Blood bubbles up, dim in the lantern light. It seems to go on forever. (Kayn wonders if Rhaast is disappointed. The Blood Moon likes hard, filthy kills. They like suffering.)
“Do you feel that?” Rhaast crows in his head.
Kayn doesn’t know what he’s talking about. There is no feeling.
“There is.” Rhaast is by the body now. Kayn yanks the scythe up and even more blood pools in its absence, rising like oil from the dirt. He watches the demon dip its claws down into the cavity he’s created, pulling them out dark and sticky. “Do you remember what it’s called?”
“There’s nothing,” Kayn says. He takes a step closer to the body. Blood is starting to collect on the floor. It doesn’t matter, they just need bones.
He blinks and Rhaast is gone, and then he blinks again and Rhaast is next to him, and his hand is still red and sticky when he raises it to Kayn’s face.
“It’s called desire,” it growls, and it mushes fresh blood on Kayn’s cheek. The liquid burns on his skin. Kayn can feel his face heating up. Despite the claws, Rhaast doesn’t puncture, only paints. He remembers that about the Blood Moon. Ink is important to them. Their calligraphist; the master of ceremonies, a tall, narrow man. The knowledge slots back into place, or he’d always known it. He’s near the cliff again, Rhaast’s hand wrapped tightly around his wrist, and this time Kayn feels himself slipping. The ground is sinking. He can feel himself changing, he can feel Rhaast pulling his hand down to the body, gently—he can feel fresh blood on his wet fingers and he can feel the surface of the mask when he touches it, runs his finger on the wood. What’s under there, he thinks, and recognizes the feeling for what it is: curiosity. Also forbidden.
“I can’t show you yet,” Rhaast answers, mask now smeared with red. “We have to go home.”
“You could just make me go,” Kayn tells him. “It’s within your power.”
The demon leans down, so that their foreheads are almost touching. Kayn doesn't pull away. They know each other. “I want you to want it.”
vi.
After he brings the body back, Kayn lays down. Everything is moving too fast. (Or maybe everything is catching up. He’d patted his face clean with wet snow before he’d hauled the body over the temple’s threshold. It’ll be boiled down and robbed of all its bones. Some will be ground down but most will be etched and arranged by Ahri Herself. The rest of the corpse will be thrown out.
Kayn identifies another new feeling: disappointment.
When he breathes in, he might smell salt; the ocean. He thinks this must be what mottled caterpillars feel like, when they bury themselves in soft drifts and begin to change. They crawl out of their cocoons by winter and then they fly away.
vii.
Caitlyn enters his room that night. She tells him about the moon again. Kayn can’t make himself listen. It does something to his brain, having to hear about it. She reveres the Snow Moon but for Kayn it’s taken on a different, colder light.
“You seem different,” she tells him evenly.
“I’ve had a dream too,” Kayn lies. It’s a spur of the moment lie. He shouldn’t have done it.
“Oh,” she says. “What of?” He can’t detect a hint of emotion in her tone. Rhaast is around so much and when it feels things you can hear it. You can hear the way it’d said, I want you to want it.
“I was laying in bed,” Kayn explains. “And I couldn’t move and then my window burst open. That’s all.”
“Oh.” Caitlyn tilts her head. “You are not disturbed, are you?”
“No,” Kayn says. “It doesn’t matter.”
“You could tell Morgana.”
“So could you.”
Her brow furrows, ever so slightly.
“You sound different.”
So Kayn steers his voice towards the unforgiving cold. “I’m the same.”
After a pause she nods.
As soon as she leaves, Kayn lets out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. He’s been inexpressive for years but suddenly it’s become difficult. Once he’d tasted an emotion he’d become addicted, like his window to the wind. The numbness lets go of him, doesn’t want him anymore because he’s turning into a heretic, a liar. The high priestess Illaoi experiences nothing. She’s made of stone. And Caitlyn is made of ice, and Varus is a damp fog. They must’ve felt emotions a long time ago too, they just can’t remember.
“And there are so many to remember,” Rhaast murmurs in the back of his mind. “Do you remember rage? Joy? Lust?”
Kayn tosses his head. “I don’t,” he mumbles back.
“I’ll show you,” Rhaast reassures. “I’ll teach you. Let’s go home.”
He recognizes the tone. Rhaast taught him that already. It’s desire.
viii.
Kayn packs his things. He doesn’t have much. Rhaast is behind him, sitting on the bed that sags under his weight. For once Kayn doesn’t wrap up his left arm. Anticipation flutters in his chest. He laps around the temple one more time. It’s very quiet. Varus is probably hearing things.
His plan is to go the opposite way down the mountains; the shorter but more treacherous path north to the shores. The crisp air makes Kayn feel things. Cold nips his skin and he pulls his robe tighter. Blustering winds chase them down the rocky cliffs. They move carefully, Kayn testing the ice underfoot.
Running away is exciting. He can feel it in Rhaast too, boiling inside him. Home. Kayn pauses to yell. He howls at the mountain just like the wind, and he looks up at the night sky. He imagines the Snow Moon reaching its pale hands up over the mountaintops. Soon it’ll be here, but Kayn won’t be. It will not find him.
The mountain rumbles. Kayn adjusts his balance, frowning. He probably shouldn’t have yelled, but he doesn’t want to hold back anymore. It feels wrong. Just a little while ago the idea of abandoning the temple had made his skin crawl. Now it seems impossible to stay.
The ribbon tying his hair up flaps in the wind. Kayn looks back the way he came, towards the peak. He squints. The mountain growls again. He’s very sure the snow is moving.
“Damn,” he hisses, and starts to go faster, scooching along the steep incline, half running, half stumbling. The next section of traversal is almost a straight drop. He pauses on the edge of it, glances over his shoulder again, pinwheels his arms around to control his balance. The avalanche is fast approaching, kicking up a white cloud ahead of it.
“Here,” Rhaast says urgently, and Kayn looks at his demon, standing on the edge by his side. Its hand is outstretched. (Something else loosens inside of him.) Kayn takes it.
Rhaast hauls him over its shoulder like a corpse and he jumps off the ledge. Kayn feels the landing in his teeth, jaw clicking together painfully, but he doesn’t mind. They land on a flat stretch of land at the bottom, maybe twenty paces down, and Rhaast sets him on his feet. They both lean against the cliffside as the snow cascades down, like they are hiding behind a waterfall. It pours and pours, sounding wet in an oddly quiet way, and Kayn impulsively reaches up to slide his fingers under the bottom edge of Rhaast’s mask. He withdraws his hand a moment later, blood beading on his stinging fingertips. He licks it off.
“You are mine,” Rhaast tells him, eyes trained on his own. Its voice shakes the mountain and Kayn’s breath. “I looked for so long. You have always been mine.”
“You make it sound so romantic,” he says without thinking. The words had just come to him, emerging from their cocoon. They know each other.
Rhaast grabs his bare shoulder. It bites into the skin with its claws and it laughs. Kayn laughs too, hoping he sounds just as bloody.
The avalanche finally ends. Snow has piled farther down the mountain and a cloud has drifted in front of the moon. Kayn doesn’t spare it a single glance. He takes Rhaast’s hand and together they continue down the mountain.