Chapter Text
The high, thin ringing in his ears had finally stopped. In its place came the drips—the relentless blood leaking behind his armor, puddling from wounds that were never allowed to close. The chains held him upright, too tight for his hand to reach his face.
Drip. Drip.
He could not count the days gone by. He could only count the drops, until he lost count of those, too.
Then came a new sound.
The tap of heels against the stone floor.
A woman stood in the chamber when he opened his eyes. The heavy iron door had not groaned like it always had when opened.
She waited at the foot of his chains, her red shawl draping over a long white dress. Her hair was the bright color of sun through curtains. Her face was Mother’s face.
The amulet warmed against his chest.
“My dear child,” she said.
The word echoed through the damp, cold cell, soft, airy and surreal. As if the chamber, the chains, the dark above them were only things he had dreamt badly.
“I waited for you,” she said.
The amulet grew warmer, a steady pulse of warning against his collarbone.
“Mother,” he said. His throat was dry, and his voice broke on the word.
He had not used it aloud for—how long? He remembered saying it in the library, in the garden, from the branches where another child could never climb high enough to catch him. He remembered.
“I waited a long time,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I am here now.”
Where were you?
The question clawed at the back of his throat. He feared she would crumble into dust if he dared to push. He swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
It was correct in every detail he could measure against memory. The shape of her mouth. The slope of her shoulder. The hands folded before her. Even the white dress, the one she had worn the night the house burned. He remembered white.
She moved closer, her heels tapping a careful rhythm against the floor. When she reached him, she lifted one hand to his cheek. There should have been a small callus on her middle finger from her love for writing.
There was.
Her thumb brushed beneath his eye, wiping something away.
“My poor boy,” she said, pressing her forehead to his.
The amulet burned.
The heavy chains rattled as his legs finally gave out. He did not know whether he had crawled to her on his own, or whether she had knelt to gather him up. But his head was in her lap. Strands of hair slipped forward over her shoulder as she smiled down at him, gold falling across his face. Her fingers moved smoothly through his hair. The coolness of her skin was like a drug, relieving him of a pain he had not known he carried. He closed his eyes and surrendered.
A door the prince had promised his horde to open remained shut for thousands of years. A demon had risen to declare that it would remain shut for thousands more, proof that the prince was unworthy. After accusations came factions. After factions came executions. He handled the executions.
A revolution sparked. He went out. He returned.
A conspiracy bred. He went out. He returned.
They came in all shapes. Hulking behemoths that shook the cavern floors, shifting shadows that breathed fire, nameless things that twisted reality itself. It mattered little. They always offered grand speeches or screaming pleas when his heavy blade came down. Time smeared into a single cycle of drawing the sword and wiping it clean.
New factions rose from the corpses of the old like wild weeds, and he cut those down, too.
It felt never-ending at times. The demon blood dried black in the joints of his metal, piling up until the armor grew heavier with every step. Still, he came back.
The halls had grown lower. He stooped to clear archways he used to pass with ease.
He forced his weight forward faster. Eyes watched from the layered brick walls. Faceless giggles echoed down the corridors, tracking his haste. He heard every sound, swallowed the humiliation, and kept his eyes locked forward. Only the chamber mattered.
Because she was waiting.
The heavy iron door opened. The chamber felt smaller than the last time, and she was smaller in it. The chains lifted from the floor, slithering like patient snakes. He stood beneath them and kept his eyes forward. The chains had stopped hurting some time ago.
He waited for the dark to lift. He waited for the iron door to shut and the heels to tap against the floor, because the routine was the only thing left. When the chains dragged him down, he did not fight them. He let himself fall toward the white fabric.
In her arms, he could let the pain gnaw without having to stand upright beneath it. Lying down, the weight came back.
There had been no grand speech from the three-eyed prince then. Only a weight that pressed the breath from his lungs until his ribs cracked. His defeat had been quiet.
In the dark, before the metal was forged around him, the weight did not stop at his ribs. The dark poured into his skull, heavy and unyielding, peeling and scrubbing away all it could touch. It scraped him out, took him apart, and put him back together. All that was left was the constant ache.
Do not be afraid, the high dark had told him. You are just a dream the living boy had when cowering under a bridge.
The three glowing eyes narrowed into crescent slits. Let us dissect that miracle.
Something was taken then. He did not know what. He only knew the ache had a new place. Later, another.
But the dark could not wash away everything cleanly. Beneath the cool relief of her fingers in his hair, fragments survived.
A red-brick roof.
A patch of green grass.
A glowing figure, with fair hair and fairer skin, kissing his forehead. Mother. His mind supplied.
A joyous shout somewhere, calling his name.
He held onto the shout, but it came thinner each time before dissolving into static. He tried to remember the face it belonged to. He reached for the library. The heavy leather chair. He tried to see the book in his hands, to read past the endless blank pages.
These thoughts were as confusing as they were soothing. He always hated himself for reaching for them.
The lap he rested his head on was real. The white dress was silky under his fingers. She was there every time he returned. He reached for the thoughts less and less. Sometimes, he wanted to drown them out when they tried to emerge.
He whispered against the bony knee. The words felt heavy and rusted, but it was the question he had wanted to ask her for so long. He hoped it was quiet enough. He didn’t want to hear the answer.
“Are you really here?”
The kind eyes looking down were filled with disgust, and the amulet burned.
The answer never came. His questions stopped forming.
First came a black dress. Then a red one he had no name for. Then there were strangely fitted leather pants.
The white dress came less often.
The heels changed, and the rhythms changed, and he learned the new rhythms the way he had learned the old.
One day the heels made a rhythm that was not for him. She was turning in the middle of the chamber, the shawl swaying with her. It caught in her chains. Her face twisted. Her nails went long, lightning snapping at her fingertips. She tore the shawl apart, and the pieces stayed tattered on the ground.
New dresses kept coming. No new shawl ever arrived.
Some days there was nothing in her eyes. Her hand kept moving through his hair, and her eyes did not follow it. He lay and stared until she came back.
Some days she told him he had been good. She would take his face in both hands and pepper his cheek with kisses, even when demon blood had dried black across it. Mother had kissed him there, and on the forehead, and the crown of his hair when it was matted with mud. So he let her, and closed his eyes and basked.
Our secret, she said. He had no one to tell. No one would listen.
The claws stopped going away. She picked the dried blood from his cheek with them, flake by flake, when the mood took her. Some days she did not bother with words. A snap. A crook of one claw.
Still, he bent lower, nearly in half, to meet her hand. Low enough for her claws to find the nook between his head and neck and tip his face up. He had learned that this was the way she liked it. He had gone to his knees once. She had pulled him back up by the jaw before his knees touched the floor.
“My dear,” she said. “I will leave soon. I might not come back.”
Her fingers kept moving on his cheek. He leaned into them even as the cold sank into his gut. His hands twitched—he could hold her there, demand to know why. He killed the impulse before it could move. She liked him docile, and he wanted to be what she liked.
She watched him for a long moment. Her mouth was frowning now.
“I could die,” she said.
The terror rose inside him. He held still.
“Or your other half would be such a darling that I wouldn’t want to come back to you.”
He held still. Her frown deepened, and he went through what he knew—the stillness, the bending, the quiet—and found nothing out of place.
This was her test. It must be.
“You are so hard to love,” she said, her breath on his face as she leaned in.
Then she pressed her mouth against his. He turned his head away. He couldn’t hold in the small tremble anymore.
When she pulled back, she didn’t look angry anymore. Her eyes widened, then crinkled. She was smiling—a lovely smile. Something at the back of his mind stirred toward it. Her thumbs brushed the wetness from beneath his eyes, and it settled.
It was the last time he saw her.
He waited for the clicking heels. The door stayed shut. He stood beneath the chains with his eyes forward. What came next did not come. He waited for it anyway, and then he was not waiting for anything. He was only standing.
The high dark came down once more. It had kept a name for him.
Rise, Nelo Angelo.
He went out.