An older memory.

I stood in a shaded avenue. Birds sang in trees gently glowing with their own inner light along the edges of the path. They shone well as the greater moon rose, as though drinking in its glow. I moved through them, my Seydii cape whispering along the stones behind me.

I came to a moonlit pool, and studied my own reflection in it.

I’d grown my hair longer since coming to Tiir Ilyasven, tying it back to keep my face clear. It still shocked me, its hue — while the change in my eyes was more dramatic, I’d expected it. I hadn’t expected my ruddy hair to turn to gilt copper, or my voice to take on an uncanny resonance.

It’s been nearly a year. When will you get used to it?

I wore the beautiful armor the elves had given me, made of impossibly shaped plates of mirror-bright steel, motifs of gold and green vines wrought into each contour, the pauldrons shaped like beetle wings. I wore my new Sidhe dagger on one hip and my sword on the other, refashioned with a finer hilt, its nicks and scars undone by the city’s smiths.

I still remembered where each had been, when I ran my thumb over the guard.

“I didn’t take you for a narcissist, my lord.”

I glanced back, seeing the now familiar sight of black-and-white cloth as a figure ghosted from behind a tree. She’d used its light to mask her presence, rather than the shadow an ordinary tree would cast.

Clever. I’d have to try that sometime.

The nun adjusted her habit as she stepped up to my side. Beneath the black veil and cream-white wimple, her pale face looked remote as the moon above, not so much as a stray strand of hair escaping. Gray-green eyes studied our paired reflections, as though wondering what I found so interesting about them.

We made an odd pair, in the water. Me arrayed all in autumnal colors and bright steel, her with a black cape and veil over a ghost-white robe.

“Still not used to it, I guess.” I adjusted my cape. “Sometimes, I miss my old kit. This faerie armor feels too light… I’d have been happy enough with solid steel.”

“You love it,” Sister Fidei said. “You like looking gallant, even if you play the humble soldier. Just embrace it. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of vanity.”

I glanced at her, and saw no teasing in her face. She’d simply said what she’d meant to say.

“Aren’t you supposed to warn me away from vanity?” I asked, raising an eyebrow. “Vanity leads to pride, pride to sin, sin to damnation…”

“You quote the mother superior better than I do,” Dei said, the ghost of a smile touching her small mouth. “I’ve already been lectured this week, thank you kindly.”

I turned fully toward her, so I could meet her gaze directly. “Because of me?” I asked, serious.

The holy sister pursed her lips. “Yes. I believe her words were, A knight seeking God is virtuous, but a knight seeking you is not.”

I coughed, the implication like a punch in the gut. Had I been that obvious?

Fidei only sighed, though I sensed more satisfaction in it than grief. “I believe she’s grown weary of me, the poor dear.”

Which was why I’d had to meet her out in the city parks like this lately, rather than in her order’s chapel. Not that I minded. I preferred talking under the open sky, rather than in a dark box in a musty church. Fidei’s senior in her order had noticed I’d started seeking her out in particular, and had quickly taken action.

I hadn’t been much for confession, before arriving in the Blessed City and taking my final vows. However, something about the serenity of the place, and my new responsibilities, had compelled me to seek to unburden myself.

Mere coincidence the first nun I’d spoken to in the tradition of chivalric confession had been Sister Fidei. Mere coincidence she’d made me feel better, in her odd way. No coincidence I’d sought her out in particular, after a few sessions.

When the Mother Superior had noticed, she’d tried pairing me with other holy scribes, but I’d realized immediately it felt… different. Wrong. They all gave me lines of scripture and well-meaning penances, and seemed to expect it to help. They’d warned me away from wrath and doubt, and I’d seen their discomfort when I’d spoken of certain things.

Not Sister Fidei. She paced to the edge of the pool then, clasping the long fingers of her hands together and narrowing her eyes as she studied her own reflection, as though finding something to criticize in it.

“I believe, during our previous talk, we ended with the first time you were asked to slay one of your liege’s rivals outside of battle.”

I let out a breath, and nodded, feeling the familiar grim mood of these talks settle on me. I plucked a small stone from the shore, then hopped onto one of the flat stepping stones in the pond.

Stepping from one stone to the other while Sister Fidei waited on the shore, I began to speak in a quiet, reflective voice. “We’d scattered Rose’s cousins, but her uncle still had himself dug into the hills south of Karles. He had an ally in the city, and Lias found out who. Rose wanted it dealt with — several of her more loyal courtiers had been poisoned, and she’d barely survived an attempt herself.”

I paused, turning lightly on one heel, then stared down into the silver-lit water. I rested a hand on the pommel of my once battered sword. “I already had a reputation as her fist. Lias did the quieter work, the schemes, but he never much liked getting his hands dirty. Rose wanted this to be a dramatic job, an example. So Lias got me a way into the lord’s keep. He had a small garrison, maybe twenty men-at-arms, some servants.”

I closed my eyes, remembering. I could smell the dirty oil they’d used in the braziers, feel the cold sweat on my brow, the rhythmic pounding of my heart as I bore deeper into the corridors, into that held breath before the killing starts.

“A page caught me. He was practicing with his master’s sword… Idiot kid tried to stick me with it. I meant to knock him out. I…” I swallowed, my throat feeling very dry all the sudden. “I used too much strength.”

“You killed him,” Fidei said.

I nodded. “He couldn’t have been older than thirteen, maybe younger. And I just stood there, after, like a fucking raw recruit on his first field, staring. Stood there long enough someone found me and raised the alarm. The job was to kill the bastard traitor in his own chambers, leave him for his guard to find. I ended up having to cut my way through his guard to get him. Still took his head, though, just like I’d been asked.”

I met the nun’s eyes across the water. She didn’t have any horror on her face, no judgment. The other sin eaters always redirected the conversation when I got too graphic, but Fidei just listened, eyes wide open and intent on me, studying my face. I had no idea what I looked like, and didn’t care to check my reflection to find out.

“How did your queen react to this slaughter?” Fidei asked.

I took a deep breath, forcing my mind away from the confused, glassy eyes of that dead page. “She lauded me for it. That was the week she named me her First Sword. Half the lords who hadn’t declared for her already did so within the month, terrified she’d send her headsman to turn their forts and manors into charnel houses.”

“I’ve listened to men speak of deeds like this with pride,” my confessor stated. “Was this not a great thing for you?”

I let out a breathy laugh, tilting my head up to the moon. “I wanted her to punish me for it. To scream at me, rage, call me a butcher… those men didn’t die in battle, that boy wasn’t a warrior. I killed them in their night clothes, and was honored for it.”

I chucked the stone in my hand into the water. It sank with a soft splash, the moon’s image rippling. The nun watched it a while, her own feelings far less readable than mine.

“Honor?” Sister Fidei asked, turning her eyes back to me. “What would have made you feel honorable? To kill those men on the field? And what if they had slain your queen because you did not slaughter them in their night clothes, but instead let them clad themselves in metal?”

I frowned, turning to face the nun. Her expression remained intent, unreadable. I didn’t hear anything like lecture in her words, though I’d momentarily assumed it.

“Usually,” I said carefully, “when I talk about a sin, the preoster just tells me to have faith or something, then gives me a penance.”

“I’m certain that’s what Mother Tempera would want me to do,” Dei agreed soberly. “But would that help you?”

I shrugged. The holy sister began to walk along the water’s edge, making a slow circle around the pond.

“War is not a pretty thing,” she said. “It is never a pretty thing. An enemy you leave alive yesterday may slay you tomorrow, or someone near you.”

“Anyone can be an enemy,” I said, following her movement from my stone in the pond’s center. “By that logic, I should kill everyone.”

She shrugged, adjusting the trailing sleeves of her clerical garb and folding her hands together. “Let me ask you this — did you kill that boy and those men because you hated them, because this queen ordered you to do it, or because you wanted to protect those you cared about? You say there had been poisonings. Your enemy did not fight honorably.”

“If we all sink to the standards of the lowest,” I said, “then we’ll all end up in the mud.”

“How quaint. But you did not answer my question.”

I thought a moment. “I wanted to protect Rosanna, and her court. Karles was my home, one I’d helped claim for us. I just… Didn’t know how best to do it, and Lias and Rose seemed to have the answer, so I fell in line.”

“And you didn’t like the answer they gave,” Dei said knowingly, having made it a quarter of the way around the pond. “How would you have stopped this plot?”

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I stared down at my reflection. “I’ve thought about that a lot since then. I…” I sighed, and admitted the truth. “I haven’t thought of a better way.”

“It is good this boy’s face haunts you,” Sister Fidei said, causing my eyes to shoot up to her in shock. She met my gaze, her own stern. “It is,” she insisted. “That pain is strength. It is a lesson. What matters isn’t whether what you did is wrong, Alken, but that it made you consider right and wrong, however you want to define those words. How do you wage your battles? What do you fight for, and what are you willing to do to protect what is yours?”

She waved a hand, as though tossing me something. “Suffering is the fulcrum upon which we decide these things.”

I watched her walk a moment, then stared down at one vambrace. Between the lines of golden ivy, the metal caught the moonlight. A beautiful thing. Art, made for war.

“I do not feel I’ve earned this,” I said. “I don’t think Rose understood what it means, when she gave it to me.” I clenched my fist, listening to the tiny metal plates click together. “I’m not a lord, not really. I’m just a clerk’s son from a backwater who got swept up in all of this.”

Rosanna had put me here for more power. Power to keep herself safe, certainly, but for power all the same.

“I’m an imposter, Dei. I worry every day everyone will find out, if they don’t already know.”

I’d toyed with the thought a year and more, and saying it made my heart quicken.

The holy sister’s lips twitched into a mysterious smile.

“Swept into it?” She laughed softly. “Or did you ride the tide to get to stranger shores?”

I folded my arms, frowning.

“There are two types of killers in the world,” Fidei said, holding up two fingers without stopping her pacing. “Those who see the faces of the dead in their dreams, and those who sleep soundly. I promise you, every single chair in the elf king’s hall is filled by one or the other — which would you rather be?”

I closed my eyes. “I tell you of doubt and butchery, and you make it sound like a small thing.”

Again, Dei shrugged. “It seems a small thing to me. Just a bit of pain. Just a bit of doubt. Would you rather feel nothing? Would any of this have even a scrap of splendor if it was not also full of painful memories? It is, Alken, this place. This immortal kingdom is old, and very, very tired.”

She stopped her circle and smiled up at the gilt towers above us, at the cold moon, breathing deep of the night air. “That is what gives it depth.”

Her smile faded then, and she looked at me out of the corner of her eye. Her lip curled up again, very slightly, but no less full of fondness. A firefly made a lazy path between us.

“Your suffering is why I felt drawn to you, you know. I never told you that.”

Another firefly, burning dim yellow, flitted between us. Another followed, and more.

My eyes remained fixed on the woman across the water from me.

She hadn’t said that. The memory was wrong.

***

I stood on a battlefield. Corpses lay across a vast plain beneath a smoldering mountain. Mire pools stinking of sulfur belched smoke into the gray air, like the maws of subterranean wurms.

I wore my armor — my armor, from my time as a soldier in Karledale. Good, hard steel and a red cape, the Silvering Sun hewn to the heart-shield fanning from my left pauldron. I had my claymos, my Sword of War, in hand, dripping blood. I sucked in ragged breaths, taking in the stink and the glory of that moment.

Beneath me, Rosanna’s uncle — the eldest traitor, the leader of the usurpers — lay dead.

Victory. After four years of civil war, victory. I was twenty-three that summer, and I’d just slain a famed warrior twice my age, and won my princess a throne.

Not a princess anymore. Rosanna Silvering was Queen of The Karledale, now. We had won.

“You can’t hide from this. No matter what memories you escape into.”

I caught my breath, squeezed my eyes shut, and opened them again. The scene hadn’t changed. I turned, finding the nun’s pale green eyes staring at me intently from within the white frame of her wimple.

“I’m still beneath Rose Malin,” I told her. “You’re not really here, Dei. You’ve been gone since…”

”Since…” She tilted her head to one side. “Go on. You know when. Remember it.”

The scene did change then. I stood in the streets of Elfhome, and they were aflame. Recusant soldiers flooded through the streets, clashing with Ardent Bough loyalists and those Sidhe who hadn’t lost their wits when the Archon had died.

Hideous shapes flitted through the smoldering rooftops, laughing and crying in piercing voices, slaughtering indiscriminately.

A golden light bloomed, harsh, molten. I winced, and when I turned I saw soldiers parting. A knight in beautiful gilt armor decorated with autumn leaves stumbled drunkenly down the street. His eyes blazed with golden fire. It spilled from between his teeth when he opened his mouth as though to scream.

Fire cascaded over Recusant and Bough fighters, incinerating them into smoking piles of burning armor. The insane Alder Knight lifted a beautiful sword, stumbling toward me through the men he’d killed, or his broken magic had killed. I lifted my own blade, what was left of it, to defend myself, stumbling back in horror.

In the gathering smog behind the knight, a mighty voice bellowed with laughter. The voice had a beast’s growl in it, savage bloodlust, whimsical mirth, and hatred all wrapped together into something terrible.

A maned shadow fell over me and the mad paladin. The Alder Knight raised his sword, his eyes and mouth widening into flaming hollows in his flesh, an expression of silent agony. He swung, and—

I stood elsewhere again. On the rooftops now, the dying city spread around me like a scene out of Hell itself.

And Dei still stood there, on the roof with me. She looked weary, even slightly amused.

“You’re just a ghost,” I hissed, pressing my hand to my eyes to get the burning city out of my sight. “You’re dead.”

She lost the smile, her expression becoming serious. “I think you mean banished.”

I blinked, and again I stood on the pond. A firefly drifted past, the scene peaceful again.

Fidei’s pretty face became thoughtful. She frowned, curling one forefinger in front of her chin. “Or perhaps I should say dissolved? Unmade?”

Another firefly flitted over the pond, this one meandering into my brow. I winced and brushed it away, and only then realized—

They weren’t fireflies. They were embers. The city still burned around us, but the garden where we’d had so many private conversations remained untouched. Distant from it all.

The stinging sensation over my left eye expanded, rapidly evolving into a gnawing, scalding pain. I traced it with the fingers of my left hand, feeling four long wounds running from temple to just above the corner of my mouth. Beads of blood began to form along them.

“You…” I pulled my hand back from the wounds slowly, feeling a cold dread rising in me even as fire ate into my flesh. “You’re really here.”

Dei laughed softly, covering her mouth with one hand. She still paced along the edge of the pond, framed by drifting embers. “Have been a while. I wondered when you’d notice. I get so few chances to whisper into your dreams with that wretched talisman you carry trying to trap me.”

“How long?” I asked. My words sounded hollow in my own ears.

“Difficult to say…” she frowned, tilting her head and pondering a moment. “It took me years before I became aware of… Anything. Reforming is a painful process, but I’ve done it many times. Lucky it didn’t take centuries this time. I’d left a bit of myself in you, enough to whisper from afar, but I needed a stronger link.”

I realized the truth in a moment, and silently cursed myself for my stupidity.

No, I’d suspected. I’d just held onto it anyway, because my foolishness went beyond the pale.

“The medallion,” I said. “My knight’s mark. How in all the Hells did you keep hold of that?”

“Sheer will,” she said seriously, no humor in her voice now. “It can be a power to rip through reality itself, Alken. You’ve no idea how… well, never mind that. I fought hard to keep it, but that burnt monk insisted quite… firmly. That was a hard day. When I realized they’d take it no matter how I resisted, I put a bit of myself inside… Ah, but I didn’t think he’d actually give it to you!”

She shuddered, almost lustfully. “I could reach you then, Alken. Oh, I could reach you.” She threw me a flirtatious smile. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. Did you not once share your dreams with me freely?”

My hand was trembling, and not just from the burning agony eating into the left side of my face. “I didn’t know what you were.”

“But you’ve known these last eleven years,” she said, turning to face me fully and clasping her hands together, as though in prayer. Still pretending to be a priestess. “And you still indulge in such bittersweet dreams of me, my knight.”

My hand dropped limply to my side, the plates of my armor clicking together with the motion. The fire rising throughout the towers of Elfhome brightened as I tried to find words. The first flecks of ash began to drift through the air over the garden, settling with the embers in the black water.

When I found words, they came out hoarse with pain I’d tried to bury.

“I didn’t want to remember—”

“The truth?”

We were suddenly inches apart, close as lovers. Her eyes were wide, pale as moons, and full of a smoldering anger.

She grabbed my right hand, my sword hand, by the wrist and pressed it to her left breast. I felt blood seeping through cloth, spilling over my fingers, dripping down into the water. It spread in the pond, those few drops miraculously turning the whole of it to deepest red in seconds.

“You didn’t want to remember how you broke my heart?” Dei hissed, baring small, white teeth. “You didn’t want to remember how you drove a sword through it? I showed you truth, and you rejected me.”

I tried to pull away, but she clutched my arm tight and I only ended up pulling her closer. She’d become paler — corpse pale, her flesh taking on a faint blue tint. Dark veins ate across her skin.

“I never knew you.” I said hoarsely.“You weren’t real! None of it was!”

“We could have lived in a dream,” she said. Her eyes had changed now too — the whites darkening to blood red, the irises fracturing, the pupils narrowing to horizontal slits like a beast’s. Her skin had begun to darken, the blue tinged now with stony gray.

Where the veins had formed, her flesh cracked like clay.

“A lie,” I said.

“I did not lie when I came to you that day! I warned you. I told you who I served, why I was there, what your comrades intended to do. I gave us a chance to stop this city from burning, to stay in the dream.”

Her nails had turned hard as iron and sharp as a hawk’s talons, punching into my armor and sinking into the skin beneath. She lifted her other hand and pointed to the burning city.

“You just wanted a patsy to free you of your master.” I bared my teeth against the pain in my wrist and around my left eye. “I had no reason to believe you. This is what you do, what you are. You’re—”

It had just been another plot, another conspiracy. It had just been another master, seeking a strong arm and a thick head to throw at their problems.

It had never been real. None of it had.

Dei’s fell eyes narrowed, smoldering with rage. Strange, how I’d never noticed the rage all the times we’d talked. But it had always been there, under everything. She was practically made of it.

“Go ahead,” she hissed through her teeth, flashing sharp canines. “Say it.”

We matched glares. The fire reflected in the tainted water where the false city hadn’t, so we seemed to stand on a surface of blood and flame.

And I said the words.

“You are a demon. You are Abgrûdai. Sister Fidei never existed. I was just the last in a long line of your dupes, succubus.”

The corpse-pale face became remote. Her eyes closed and she shuddered, almost as though in relief. The cloth of her black shroud rustled. Membrane and twisted muscle stretched with a leathery crackle, and two great shapes slowly spread out behind her to shadow the pond, soon revealing themselves as a pair of enormous, clawed wings.

With the fingers she hadn’t sunk into my flesh, she reached up to brush my hair back. Her claws traced the wounds on my face, matching them perfectly.

I didn’t bother pulling back anymore. I didn’t control this dream — she was its master.

“You will always be someone’s dupe, Alken.” She smiled, and it was Dei’s smile in that dead face, soft and affectionate. “I at least knew your heart. I could have made you happy.”

“You’d have made me a monster. Or a pet.” A tear escaped my left eye — physical pain or heartbreak, I couldn’t say. Maybe both.

She scoffed, thumbed the tear away, then brought it to her cracked lips. She shivered.

“My dear heart. You wanted so badly to be the gallant protector, and you let them convince you to play the blackguard. Now that mob of sheep you’ve spent your whole life fighting for, convincing yourself you belong with, are going to torture you to death… or execute you in front of a crowd. And both will be justice, O’ Headsman. If you want to believe in justice.”

She let out a dry laugh, and the shift in muscles made more of her dry-clay face crack. Her fingers, blackened now as though with frostbite, curled behind my neck. She pulled my head down, so she could whisper in my ear.

“However you die, however it ends… that will not be the end. I’ve marked you as mine, my knight, and there is no escape from me now. When you die — and you will — there will be no safety in any of the half-baked afterlives the so called gods and their ilk have tried to fashion. You are mine, forever, just as you promised me that day I tasted you.”

Her breath was death’s ice on my ear. “The Zosite have me in their iron gaols now, but they are weakening, just as your masters are. Many of my brethren have already escaped. Yith is very near you… I sense him, even through this shadow. It will not be long before I, too, am free again.”

Her dry lips glided down to kiss my neck. She murmured her last words softly against my skin. “I have spent these years dreaming of how I will make you pay for running a sword through my heart. I will share some of these dreams with you, in the nights to come.

“Sleep well, my knight.”

image [https://i.imgur.com/djBcGHm.jpeg]