Chapter Text
It was exactly like Seluna Tabris to faint rather than accept a scolding from anyone else. Morrigan might have slapped her for that, if she’d thought it would bring her back to the waking world. If she hadn’t looked so suddenly fragile, collapsed on the rotted counterpane beside the body of- beside the body. It had had a name once, and Luna had tried to return it to her, with the familiar cruelty Morrigan could now see laid bare beneath all her sweet smiles and sweeter promises. She’d said We’re here now, we can help you to Jowan, to Hespith, to the corpse who lay beside her now, when perhaps the greatest mercy she could have shown any of them was a blade through the throat. Morrigan had asked her for that mercy once, had begged her to sever the web she’d woven around them both, and she’d smiled sweet and cruel and said Tell me you don’t want me, and somehow her lips had refused to form the lie, and this was-
This was her punishment, she knew that now. Her mother had warned her that this was weakness, that this was a cancer that would devour her from within, and she had never felt the truth of her words so deeply than now. Time had slowed to a crawl the moment she’d heard the crack as Luna’s weaker shoulder (starburst scarred, from where Morrigan had poured her own life into her veins) slid out of its joint. She’d reached out a hand, thrown out the spell she’d half-finished as though it could call back time, but it had already been too late. Luna had fallen limp against the blackened sheets, pale and grim as the face of the moon, and Morrigan- Morrigan had felt all her hopes, all her plans fall away with her, into the yawning abyss of terror that bindweed could cover, but never fill in.
If she was dead- if she’d thrown her life away for something so small, so pointless as bringing comfort to a woman who’d been dead long before they’d ever had the chance to save her-
Her eyes fluttered open, brief, unfocussed, and Morrigan’s fear had condensed, crystallised into sharp-edged anger. She’d nearly thrown away her life, nearly sacrificed every future she’d had no right to promise her, for nothing at all.
She hardly recalled what she’d said to her then, in frantic, feverish rage, or how she’d gathered her close, unwilling to let any other hand touch her until Wynne arrived with her sanctimonious insipidities and strange spirit magic. She’d poured life back into her skin until bruises faded to shadows and colour crept back into her blanched cheeks, but it had taken almost impossible restraint to allow even such small liberties to be taken with her sleeping form.
She wanted to coil around her like a great serpent, like the strange tendrils that had grown from the darkspawn’s broodmother. She wanted to swallow her whole and become her living, breathing armour, to bind her up in the wards that were scarcely big enough to protect the child in her belly. She wanted- stupid, she wanted to slip backwards through time, to scream at her former self that it was madness to put all her hopes of freedom and power and a future beyond the Blight on any shoulders but her own.
But she’d known that before, she’d known that all her life, and still, she’d fallen headfirst into beautiful lies and bindweed kisses and sickening, infantile dependence on a girl no older than herself. A girl who was frail and fragile and fallible as all mortal things were, without even Morrigan’s own inborn selfishness to preserve her own survival above all things. A girl with a heart so soft and so easily bruised that she’d throw her life and her child’s away to provide scant solace to a stranger she could never save.
She’d made that gamble over and over for Jowan, for Ruck, for the Arl’s son and the Dalish, and like a fool, Morrigan had let her, had extracted promises of her own, falling into the lie that she’d never break, never fall. That she could slay an archdemon and carry a god and Morrigan’s heart would stay so safe tucked between her ribs that she’d never have to admit she’d mislaid it at all. Of all the careless, stupid, sentimental-
She was furious, she realised, as she should have been long ago, in Orzammar, when Luna had pinned her down and said Tell me to leave, tell me you don’t want this. She should have lied then, to Luna, to herself. She should have laughed, cruel and scornful, said You were never more than a warm bed and a body at my back, repeated the words to herself until they’d become the truth they should always have been. She should have been able to cling to that truth now, rather than the brittle edge of rage that was all that stood between her and an abyss she had no name for. There were no words for such things in any tongue Flemeth had taught her, which was, perhaps, the greatest kindness her mother had ever shown her. Such helplessness, such dependence, was almost as unnatural as-
As whatever the darkspawn had done to the dwarven girl to make her into a suitable vessel for their monstrous young. She did not wish to think on it, hated her own mind for lingering on the images that had disgusted her enough when it had been Alistair’s imagined body moving above her own. How much viler would it be to have a darkspawn- No. She could not think on such things. That had been Luna’s mistake, the flaw in her bleeding heart. She’d felt Laryn’s pain as her own, and ignored the risk she presented until it was too late, and now…
Reconstructing the ward around her womb that kept the child in place took time, and resources. She’d been lucky, the first time, that Luna had slept deeply enough that she could place it without her even noting its presence, and the child had been barely more than a pulsing cluster of cells, small enough to easily bind up in a protective web of magic that could not hold its mother. She’d been luckier still that the first ward had held for this long. She would not, she knew, be so lucky a second time.
She was halfway through the painstaking ring of runes painted onto her stomach in lyrium that burned too bright and faded too quickly for anything less than perfect precision when Seluna broke free of the healing sleep Wynne had cast upon her, with a gasp like drowning. It was a too-familiar sound to Morrigan, now: she always rose from the black waters of nightmare with an inhale like a silent scream.
The move to comfort her came almost automatically now: the hand flat against her sternum, to slow her frantic heart, to remind her she was still breathing. What an unnatural thing she’d made of Morrigan, who’d never learned to seek comfort, or been asked to provide it. Then again, Luna had never yet asked for it, and even so, her pulse slowed even as her eyes fluttered open and focussed, a furrow appearing between her brows.
She was angry. Good. That would make it far easier for Morrigan to recall that she was meant to be angry herself. Anger was helpful. Anger was the cleansing flame that burned the bindweed down to its roots. Anger was the last ledge she could cling to before the great abyss of whatever void Luna would drag her to, given her way. Easier to stay angry, than to give into the fear that had come so close to consuming her at the thought of losing the woman on whom she’d placed far too many of her fragile, foolish hopes.
She opened her mouth to say something foolish and obvious like “Finally awake?” or “Planning to leave the rest of the Deep Roads to us while you sleep the day away?” but before the words could escape her, Luna choked out:
“Wynne. I need Wynne.”
Something in her sudden, urgent desire pricked jealousy into Morrigan’s withered heart, but when the pregnant woman asked for the healer, she was not fool enough to deny her. If she’d made a mistake with the warding- if she’d hurt her, or the babe-
No time to think of such things, not now. She called for the old woman with Luna’s own urgency, and gripped her lover’s hand tight in her own. It was cold, her pulse rapid and shallow — shock, perhaps? She had plenty of cause for it-
Wynne was knelt beside them in a flurry of stained red robes: “Seluna, your ribs-”
“Fuck my ribs, I’ve had worse bruises,” she grit out, which was such a blatant lie Morrigan wanted to shake her for it. “Wynne, you said- you said in Brecelian- can you show me the child?”
Wynne blinked, momentarily stupefied by the question. “I can, but I thought you-”
“I need to know,” she interrupted. Her grip around Morrigan’s fingers was a vice. She felt her knuckles come close to cracking. “If the Blight in my veins can affect my child as it did Laryn’s- if it’s going to be some sort of monster-”
“We have no cause to believe-”
“I need to know.” There was a desperate finality to her voice, and neither of them could find it in their hearts to argue with her, despite the waste, despite the futility. What could any of them do for her now, if she carried a monster in her belly, that wouldn’t have been better done months before she ever knew she was with child?
There was an answer, she realised, as Luna looked up at her with a desperate plea in those bruise-coloured eyes. There was an answer she did not wish to countenance, and still, at that silent, awful plea, she nodded, and squeezed her hand in silent assurance.
Wynne smoothed her hair back from her forehead, as she’d likely done with a hundred children who’d woken from nightmares of Harrowings they would never survive, and said, soothing, gentle:
“Calm yourself, child. Fretting will not help you, or the babe.”
“But if it isn’t-”
“Your fear will not help the spell, either,” Wynne said, with more ruthlessness than Morrigan might have expected of her. “Deep breaths. Close your eyes, if you must, and we will see what- there is to be seen. Have you felt any movement yet?”
She shook her head. “Is that- Could that mean-?”
“If you were human, I would be worried, but elven babies usually take a few more months to cook. This is your first?” What a question — but then, Morrigan could not have told her the answer with certainty. If Luna spoke of her past, it was of her childhood: her parents, her cousins, never a mention of whatever faceless lover (or slaughtered monster) she thought had fathered the child in her belly.
But now she nodded, face screwed up as though calmness took all her effort. Her hand was wrapped around Morrigan’s, so tight it might leave bruises, and for once, Morrigan could not pull away, any more than she could have let go of Melia, when she’d found her hand within the cage of rocks.
“The little one’s a good, healthy size, at least,” Wynne continued, “It’s as well we haven’t had cause to let you go hungry, or they’d be stripping the fat from your bones. They’re selfish creatures, with little care what they take from us.”
“But it’s elven?” she insisted, “It’s not- not Blighted?”
“No more than I’d expect, though I’ve seldom had cause to serve as midwife to Grey Wardens. There’s no sign of abnormality, a good, strong heartbeat… They’re a little larger than I’d expect, but that’s hardly a bad thing for now, and if it comes to a point of danger- oh, child, don’t cry!”
Luna had dropped Morrigan’s hand to scrub at her eyes, a soft, half-swallowed sob breaking from her throat. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “It’s just- it’s real? It’s alive, it’s healthy, it’s- mine?”
“I could have told you that months ago,” Wynne clucked, but offered her a grubby handkerchief. Everything they owned was grubby and damp now, as if the moisture that clung to the cave walls was slowly soaking through to their bones. “If you were so worried, you could have come to me sooner-”
“I wasn’t worried.” Luna gulped, and ducked her head, letting her hair fall around her face like a veil. “I was- I didn’t want it to be real. Not- not like this. This is no place for a child.”
“I understand,” Wynne said, gently. “I- I felt much the same, when I realised I was carrying my son.”
“Did you?” Likely it was not her place to talk, but Morrigan felt too raw to care, as though something had flayed her heart open while Luna lay still beneath healers’ hands. “I did not think you ancient enough to have born a child during the Fourth Blight, but my mother has made more impossible claims. Tell me, do they make pregnant mages fight archdemons and trudge through the Deep Roads-”
“Enough,” Luna said, reclaiming her wrist, as Wynne rose to her feet. “Wynne, I’m sorry-”
“You have nothing to apologise for.” There was a frosty civility to her words which would doubtless have had Melia quaking in her boots, but made no impact on Morrigan’s awful, implacable anger. She was simply glad to have driven the old woman away now that she’d served her purpose, and finally have Luna to herself again.
Luna who’d stopped sniffling. Luna with eyes wet with tears and burning with rage. Luna who had wheeled to face her with all the wrath of an oncoming storm.
“How dare you-”
“How dare she? She can hardly claim kinship with you, having bourne her brat in the Circle’s gilded cage-”
“You don’t get to decide that! You don’t get to decide anything for me! I had to pin you down to make you admit to something as small as wanting me-”
“And you got what you wanted there, didn’t you? You practically had me tie the leash around my own throat!”
“Why is it always leashes and chains with you? I’m not the one holding you here! If you’d said you didn’t want this, I’d have left you months ago!”
“I told you to leave me!”
“And I told you to leave yourself, coward!”
“Don’t you dare-”
“You are a coward!” Luna’s cheeks were flushed with rage, her eyes sparking like stars, and even so, Morrigan wanted to slap her, to watch deeper colour bloom beneath her fading freckles, to bite down until she left a mark that no amount of healing magic could erase. “You’ll barely admit you want me, but you think you get to lay claim to my child?”
Here was the root of Luna’s anger, then, that half-forgotten sentence spat in a moment of rage and terror, and Morrigan- Morrigan’s anger cooled, and crystallised to something like fear. It was all well enough to lay claim to the child in the confines of her mind, to dismiss Luna’s connection to it as a temporary thread soon severed, but this-
It had been so much easier to picture them as separate in her mind, until Luna laid claim to it so plainly.
She scrabbled for the nearest lie: “You misheard me-”
“I did not.”
“Then I misspoke. A slip of the tongue-”
“Do you think I’m stupid?”
Morrigan had, for much of her life, found most mortals to be unbearably stupid, unbearably small, when compared to the ancient titan she’d called Mother. But for all that Luna Tabris was her little fool, she was not an idiot.
She swallowed, and let half the truth slip free of her lips: “Do you think you have kept your child alive through no will but your own? Have I not fed you when you were hungry, healed you when you were sick-”
“That doesn’t mean-”
“Which of my actions gave you the idea I was less than invested in keeping you and your child alive?”
It was the truth at the core of their relationship, the secret Luna had unknowingly clawed towards since the earliest days of their journey. Luna was brilliant, and Luna was lovely, and Luna was the means to an end that Morrigan would have been far less willing to consider if it had been her own body on the line. Luna was her lover, and Luna was the vessel by which Morrigan would bring an Old God into the world, and in this moment, Luna stared at her as though she no longer knew her.
“You- you wanted- why?”
Morrigan could not answer her, so she kissed her instead, and hoped she’d take that as answer enough.
There was a moment of agonising hope, where her lips parted and she melted into Morrigan’s embrace as though she’d always belonged there. Then she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled blindly back to the light of the camp, hands folded over her belly as though she’d taken some grievous wound, and Morrigan knew she’d misstepped, somewhere in her blind, panicked anger, but could not have said where.
They found Branka, the next day. Oghren begged for her life, or for the life of the brilliant girl he claimed to have married. Morrigan would have told him not to bother, if she’d had any mercy left for him at all. Branka had been dead from the moment Luna had seen what remained of her House, of her lover, of the girl she’d whored to the darkspawn to feed her children into a gauntlet of traps. She just hadn’t realised yet. She didn’t seem to realise, even as the silver of Luna’s blade went through her throat. Her lips continued to form words that nobody would ever hear, but none of them seemed to be for the husband she’d left behind, the man who let out an agonised, animal wail at her death, at the ruin of all they’d come down to the Deep Roads to achieve.
Fate had a sense of humour, at least. They’d spent a month in the damp and the darkness in search of a Paragon, only to find two at once. Perhaps one day, she’d be able to laugh at the irony. Now, though, laughter felt like a half-remembered dream, drowned out by Oghren’s terrible, animal grief, by the low, rasping speech of the golems, by the lyrium-bright hum of magic that sang against her skin. They had slipped through time, somehow, into this place of ancient myth and long-forgotten enchantment, but for all the questions that so quickly bubbled to the surface of her mind, Shale’s seemed to take precendence. From the first moment their golem companion spoke, Caridin’s focus narrowed to it alone.
For all its glowing, granite form, its adamant strength, there was something almost childlike in the way Shale looked up at the Paragon-Smith. Not childlike, exactly, not as most children seemed to her now — squalling, sticky, dependent little creatures — but as she could dimly recall feeling herself, once, when she’d looked up at Flemeth with the mingled awe and fear and adoration that she could hear now in the golem’s voice.
“Was it you who forged me?” the golem asked, and there it was, that terrible innocence she recalled from her own childhood, when she’d still been young enough to cry out for Flemeth the way pious northerners called upon their god, to believe anyone would answer her childish prayers. “Was it you who gave me my name?”
Perhaps, such flaws were inevitable, even in hearts of stone. In Chasind, her first tongue, the words for mother and maker were the same.
The Paragon’s voice was distant and echoing, but there was something almost gentle in the hesitance of its reply: “I made you into the golem you are now, but before we ever met, you were Shayle, the pride of Cadash Thaig, the finest warrior to serve King Valtor, and the only woman to volunteer for the Legion of Steel. I laid you down here, on the Anvil of the Void, and reshaped you into the form you now wear. Your rebirth was my Paragon’s masterwork, and my greatest regret.”
The light behind Shale’s eyes dimmed a moment in confusion, then flared brighter as it spoke: “My form is perfect. I am a greater warrior now than I could ever have been as a fragile mortal.”
“But you live as you are now because that fragile mortal was sacrificed. The Anvil is powerful, but life cannot be created from nothing. It must always be taken from elsewhere. And you screamed- even now, I can remember how you screamed.”
It was the oldest story in the world: nothing lived without something else to feast upon. Flemeth had taught her this well: the desire to survive, at any cost, was the most natural thing in the world.
King Valtor had clearly agreed with her, if Caridin’s ‘river of blood’ had any truth behind it. Why not lay a few unwilling heads upon the Anvil, if it kept the darkspawn down with an immortal army? Why not take the Anvil now, and use whatever power Caridin had imbued it with to reshape the world, reshape herself? Would Flemeth still lay claim to her body, if she had transmuted flesh and blood for steel and stone? If she’d set aside softness and sensation for an impermeable, unbreakable wholeness, if she’d made her body truly hers for the first time in her life?
Perhaps Caridin, in his tomb of traps and stone, had forgotten the hot, fearful rhythms of mortal hearts, or perhaps a thousand years of immortality had broken what remained of his mind — Morrigan could see no other reason for destroying an artifact of such power, such beauty, simply to assuage an old man’s bruised conscience.
Luna, though, she could see the fire catch behind Luna’s bruised eyes, lighting the spark within her that had burned to ash and ember the moment she’d seen the darkspawn broodmother. “If we destroy this,” she said, “there’ll be no more control rods? You swear it?”
“I swear it,” the Paragon echoed, and Morrigan wanted to scream.
“Are you both mad?” she demanded. “The Deep Roads are full of darkspawn, the south is already fallen to Blight, and you want to destroy the only way we could create an army to hold them off?”
Luna wheeled on her, blazing blue fire, bright enough to match any of the golems, brighter than the distant, half-forgotten sun could ever have been. “At what cost?” she demanded. “How many lives would one Thaig be worth? How many people do we sacrifice if it ends the Blight?”
“As many as it takes!” Morrigan snapped, and her mother’s words echoed in her ears. Whatever it takes. If it took her body, her will, her life- “Do you have a better alternative?”
“There is always an alternative to this!” Luna’s voice was almost a snarl, feral and lovely, and still, Morrigan wanted to shake her until her teeth rattled.
“Will you say that when the rest of us begin to fall to the Blight as Jowan did? When the darkspawn reach the gates to your home? When will you realise that sometimes ruthlessness is the price of survival?!”
Something went very cold in Luna’s face, as she said that, and very distant. “Do you think Branka told Hespith that, as she sold their people to the darkspawn?” She did not wait for a reply, only wheeled back to the Paragon. “It’s done.”
“Once we have your blessing, for the new King of Orzammar.” That was Leliana’s interjection, as if kings and crowns mattered at all in the face of the waste, the destruction of a power that even Flemeth could not have imagined. What did it matter, what Aeducan or Harrowmont sat the throne, when in a few weeks or months or decades, the darkspawn would rule their halls as they had the hundred abandoned thaigs they’d passed through on their journey?
The worst of it was that nobody else even seemed to care. Leliana would get her crown. Caridin would get the death he so obviously craved. Shale had the keys to a past that it might have been happier leaving undiscovered. And Luna…
Luna was still burning, and, mothlike, Morrigan had never quite been able to resist that particular flame, not when her rage had already been simmering after their abortive argument the night before, and was now close to boiling point at this fresh idiocy her little fool had wrought.
Luna moved to set up her bedroll as far from Morrigan’s as she could manage, in the close quarters of the cavern. She could not be permitted to escape so easily. Morrigan reached for her shoulder, only to find her wrist caught in a vice-like grip.
“If you’re planning to scold me about destroying the Anvil-” Luna began, and that was more than enough for battle to be joined:
“Scold you? Do not tell me I have no claim to you, or the child you carry, and then cast me as the nagging shrew!”
Somewhere in the far distance, the others were already gathering up their own bedrolls to leave them to a fight that had clearly been weeks in the making. Morrigan didn’t care. Let them sleep among the traps, the imbeciles-
“You really think my objection to all you’ve done today is that you nagged me? Do you think the worst of it is simply speaking the wrong way?”
“If the worst I’ve done is argue for the pragmatic solution-”
“The slavers’ solution!” Luna snapped.
“I doubt Shale would take kindly to being called a slave-”
“She doesn’t have to like it! You read what that mage did to her, what anyone with the control rod could do to any golem-”
“It has made it infinitely clear that it prefers its new form to a ‘squishy tube of flesh’,” Morrigan retorted. “Do you think it would return to being a dwarf if it could? That it would choose weakness, frailty-”
“She’s a person!” Luna said it as though it was the end to every argument, as if she’d struck the final blow. As if she even knew the fight they were having.
“It was always a person!” Morrigan retorted, and left Luna, for once, silenced. “We all knew that, long before we knew its origin! Stop playing the moralist and think for once, Seluna! We have walked the corpse of an empire that fell to the Blight long before either of us were born, an empire more peopled, better armed, in possession of enchantments I have never seen the like of-”
“Enchantments with a price nobody should pay!”
“All power has a price, little fool! It might be paid in gold or blood or loneliness, but it must be paid nonetheless! Did you think defeating a Blight would come to you easily because you are kind and clever and lovely? No, because you are not a child. If you want to live your life in peace and freedom and all those other pretty lies you sell, that price will be paid in blood, whether it’s an army’s or a golem’s. At least under the Anvil, your soldiers would be offered an eternal life under your banner.”
Luna turned her face away, then, as though she could not bear to look at her. “An eternity of slavery is no life at all.”
Morrigan took hold of her shoulder then, the scarred side, the side she always favoured, and dug her fingers in until she cried out, desperate to make her listen, to make her see.
“Listen to me! You talk of slavery and freedom and justice so much, you have blinded yourself with your own lies! Freedom is an illusion, justice a children’s story, but the Blight is real. Survial is real, and every refugee you ever cooed over on the road knew that a hundred times better than you do! Any one of them would sooner sell themselves as slaves to Tevinter than die in the Blight.”
When Luna spoke next, her voice was too familiar — the same flat, dull affect that crept into her voice before she put a knife through someone’s throat. That might have scared Morrigan, if she’d had any space left for fear, beneath rage and grief.
“If you think that, you know nothing of slavery.” She said it with certainty, but Morrigan could match her for that:
“I have learnt plenty of it, since we left the Wilds. Do you think that the serfs of Redcliffe are free, living beneath a castle which set their dead against them, too frightened to leave in case the world beyond their walls is cruel enough to send them running back? Do you think the Dalish love their wanderings more than they fear humans destroying any permanent home they try to build? Do you think the thugs and whores of Dusttown choose those who buy their bodies?”
“Just because there are cruel people in the world-”
“Stories again! We both know better, Luna! I am not trying to teach you of the world’s cruelty-” We both know it well enough by now, “I am reminding you that you might believe in freedom and justice and true love, but the only things every living creature believes in are power and survival. And you refuse to hold the first, and will give the second away in a heartbeat, for any cause that begs you for it!”
“And that makes me a fool?” Luna was looking at her again, now, eyes burning with that blue fire that would devour the world, if Morrigan let it. “Perhaps I’d rather be a fool than a monster.”
“Perhaps I’d rather be a monster than see you dead!” The words slipped out before she could bite them back, but they sank into Luna like an unexpected blow. “You cannot make me- want you, and then throw your life away as if it means nothing!”
“I don’t- I want to live, Morrigan.” The words escaped her in a sigh, a sob, an admission of guilt for the most natural thing in the world. “I just- I don’t want my life to come at the cost of anyone else’s freedom. Using someone like that, as a golem or a shield or- or giving them over to the darkspawn- my life isn’t worth that. Maybe nobody’s is.”
Morrigan felt her shoulders collapse, felt an awful, infantile scream building in her breast. The world- Seluna had never been fair, and still, she wanted to scream at the unfairness.
“Open your eyes, Seluna!” she demanded — or meant to demand. It sounded far too close to pleading. “You can lie to the others, but you know as well as I do that sometimes survival is paid for in blood! I’ve watched you pay that price often enough by your own hand, why is this so different?”
“Because it’s not my blood I’d be paying with!”
“And why does that matter now, when you’ve killed to survive before?”
“When I had no other choice!”
“You could have reasoned with Branka. You could have spared her lover-
“That was different-”
“The difference was that you decided the world would be better off without them. Now, apply that same lens to the Anvil, and tell me again how the world would be the worse for an army of soldiers as unbreakable as Shale.”
Luna was silent, then, and for a moment, Morrigan thought this victory might be hers.
Her stomach sank when she heard the forced calm that carried beneath her next words: all the force of a raging river in flood, held back by the most fragile of dams. “Alright,” she said, with poisonous sweetness, “why even bother with the golem army, if you’re so worried about keeping me safe? Why not hold me down on the Anvil yourself, and lock me up in a carapace of stone? Maker-” She laughed, and it was a caustic, angry sound, “you could even make a control rod, given that I clearly can’t keep myself alive without you pulling my strings!”
Morrigan did not know which idea was more painful: that Luna thought her capable of such a- a violation, or that Luna thought the idea she’d actually do it so unlikely as to be laughable. The first washed over her like a wave of darkspawn ichor, all the rancid, burning hate she’d felt towards Luna’s unnamed noble attacker turned inward at herself. The second- the second struck like a knife between the ribs, piercing a gap in her armour Luna had only learned from the months she’d spent memorising Morrigan’s every weakness at close quarters.
“Because-” Because I’m already doing it. The third revelation crashed down like the cavern roof had, days or weeks ago, trapping her in place, in her body. As she’d trapped Luna, concealing her pregnancy until it was too late for her to be rid of it, keeping her fed and healed and protected, keeping her bed warm until she trusted Morrigan enough to believe that she’d never truly turn that ruthless pragmatism on her-
And she could never tell her, she realised, with sudden, awful certainty. Luna had a burning ember for a heart, but all the warmth and softenss and pity in the world had not saved Hespith from her blade, would not save Morrigan from the same.
“Because I am weak, Luna. If I were truly my mother’s daughter- if I had even a drop of her blood or her will in my veins, and I cared for you half as much as I pretend, I’d chain you to that Anvil myself and ensure you’d never die.”
There was another silence, and then, Luna said, with that accursed gentleness that had eaten her heart by inches: “I don’t think that’s weakness, Morrigan.”
“It is worse that weakness.” Her mother had told her once that love was a sickness, a cancer. If so, this was something far more monstrous than love — it was as though Luna had carved her out from within, eaten her alive, and she had not noticed how much of herself had been lost until far too late. “My mother would never have let something so foolish as-” She could not say the word, she choked on it as if it were bile or poison, or the last breath her lungs would ever hold, “as sentiment get in the way of survival.”
“And that,” Luna said, still slow, still soft, still gentle, wrapping her bindweed fingers around Morrigan’s hands, “is why when you asked me to kill her, I said yes. Flemeth is a monster, Morrigan. You are-”
“I am a fool.” She still didn’t understand, but then, how could she? Morrigan had not found it in herself to explain it. “My mother- her grimoire, it was not- I have no sisters, Luna!”
It was a nonsensical, garbled, mess, but how was she to explain what she’d found, in the maze that Luna had made of her mind?
It was, perhaps, a kindness, that Luna did not look up at her, instead, carefully unrolling the bedrolls they’d discarded. She did not want to know what those sloe-dark eyes would have read in her face.
“You said you didn’t believe Zevran’s stories,” she observed.
“Nobody with sense would believe a word out of the Crow’s mouth, but- there are Chasind stories I heard, when I was younger. Of other witches, other daughters of Flemeth. I thought- I dreamt, sometimes, when Mother seemed particularly vicious, that perhaps they never came back, but they all escaped, so I would, too. I should have known better.” She realised her voice had cracked to a harsh whisper, and took a gasping inhale. Why were her lungs burning? Had she forgotten to breathe? “She- when she grows old, she- births, or steals a daughter. A mage, it has to be a mage. And then, when the daughter is old enough, powerful enough, she- she takes her daughter’s body for her own.”
Luna’s hand rested on her spine, her heartbeat a slow counterpoint to Morrigan’s own panic, and that was another humiliation. So small a comfort should not have felt so great, so necessary, in this moment, that she could not have shrugged her off if she’d wanted to. Luna’s slender hand should not have felt like the only steady point in a world that was shaking to pieces around her.
“I would have killed her for you anyway,” she said, low and rough-edged and tender, in her true voice, the voice she could never lie in. “This- this just gives me a more pressing reason to.”
“You don’t understand!” It was almost a wail, a plaintive, childish sound, and Morrigan hated herself for it. “She isn’t- This is not personal, Luna! Survival was the only law she ever taught me, and this is- this is how she survives. I- I should not begrudge it, any more than I begrudged that bear in Lothering the cattle you fed it!”
Luna held her shoulders bruising-tight, keeping her in this place, in this body that refused to be as strong, as invulnerable as she needed it to be. “So you should play the obedient daughter and go singing to your pyre?”
“No! I- I cannot let her do this. I will not, but-” There were no words for what she felt. Flemeth had broken no promise, told her no lie. You will be a vessel for a power you cannot imagine, girl. It was practically a confession, for all that she’d spoken then of an Old God reborn, rather than an ancient witch avoiding death.
It was simply the latest step on the endless road her mother had walked to immortality, as natural to their kind as a bear devouring a halla. If she’d thought herself the cub rather than the doe-eyed prey, she could only blame her own childish naivety. And yet- And yet she felt like a stumbling child, the pain white-hot, brand new, inexplicable, unending. Even her voice sounded infantile to her own ears: “Why does it hurt, Luna?”
It should not have been a relief, to be pulled into those wiry arms, half into her lap, pressed against the slight protusion of her belly. She should not have needed to bury her face in the crook of her neck, until the world narrowed to the warmth of her body, the smell of her sweat, the sound of her breathing. She should have been self-sufficient, independent, rational, but in this moment, she was a needy, helpless creature, and Luna’s arms were the whole world.
“Because she betrayed you,” Luna said, simply.
“I never believed-” But that was a lie, wasn’t it? Once, she’d thought she and Flemeth were the only real people in a world of empty shells. Luna had disproved that, had forced her eyes open until she could see a person within Shale’s shell of stone, but even so, she’d thought… She’d thought her mother had seen her as a potential equal, a potential rival. Anything other than something to feed on. “She never said she wouldn’t,” she offered, feebly.
“She shouldn’t have had to. You called her mother. She should never have been cruel enough to you that you’d believe her capable of this- filth.” She spat the last word as if it were bile, as if she knew of no curse vile enough to bestow upon Flemeth’s ritual.
“If it is vital to her survival, it is no more monstrous than striking the first blow in self-defence.” She wanted to believe her own words, the foundational rule at the root of everything Flemeth had ever taught her: that sometimes, the price of survival was paid in another’s blood. But now that foundation was cracked and crumbling, and Morrigan felt herself slip into empty air.
Luna hummed, and then said, too-calm, too-casual: “Would you do it to me? Or- to Melia, say?”
The answer should have been obvious, clear-cut and ruthless as crystal. Her mind should not have been clouded by the feel of Melia’s hand in hers, the last person at her side in the crushing prison beneath the earth. She should have said: Yes, easily, but somehow, she could not make herself form the words.
And Luna, curse her, Luna understood that too well. She pressed a kiss to the top of her head, as if Morrigan had given her the answer she’d been waiting for, rather than empty silence.
“You can call finding a line you can’t cross weakness, if you like. I think it makes you stronger than Flemeth can imagine.”
“Don’t coddle me-”
“You don’t think it’s proof of your strength, that you’ve broken free of the mold she cast you in? That you can admit, if only to yourself, that she was wrong?”
She did not feel that strength, not now, not curled in her lover’s lap like an infant. She felt kitten-weak, pathetic in her sudden helplessness, but she could feel the path fork before her in her mind. She could accept her failure, and carry its weight with her, know that however long she lived, she would never be a match for Flemeth. Or- or she could accept Luna’s story of her strength, and bury Flemeth’s lies along with her mother.
Morrigan knew which Flemeth would have encouraged. Perhaps that was why it felt so natural, to close her eyes, and let herself fall headfirst into Luna’s beautiful lies.