the androgynous keeper of plushfrogs (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
crossfortune) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rainbowfic2015-01-18 03:05 am
crossfortune) wrote in rainbowfic2015-01-18 03:05 am
Entry tags:
the lives we left behind;
Name: Mischa
Story: tales from the drowned world
Colors: dove gray ("my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping / but / I shall go on living"), halloween orange (When there's no redemption to be found, there are still a few who'll hold their ground.), white opal (wandering)
Supplies and Styles: none
Word Count: 2541
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: implied alcoholism, implied death
Summary: Kyrion Taviot comes home from years of exile: nothing is the same, and he tries to fit into the life he left behind. With varying degrees of no success.
The last time Kyrion Taviot had seen his younger full-sister, she had been a child: a little girl he’d carried in his arms, promised safety and stability to, the rock that her world entire had been founded on: but now, she was a woman grown. Strong enough to challenge for the title he’d been unable to keep and claim it for her own, come into her power as First Lady of the House of Storms, and wise enough to never believe his promises again. Nothing and no one is quite as he remembers it: he’s been gone a decade and more, and everything’s changed.
He’s older, he’s wiser, and he’s half-blind: he’d been away so long, he missed seeing the changes, and only saw them now rather than the slow process. Kyrion drinks tea, sitting across from Neha in her solar, and can’t reconcile the self-possessed young woman with the memory of the little girl that he’d shared a (too-sweet) glass of rose wine with on very, very special occasions. He’d missed her growing up: he’d missed seeing his beautiful mortal mother grow old, he’d missed the slow rebuilding of Saratian.
But if he looks carefully, he can still see the scars on the city from the storm he’d summoned, especially in the poorer districts where so many had died. Avani weeps, he hadn’t meant - but then again, that was the problem. He hadn’t meant to do so many things: he hadn’t meant to channel his father, but it’d been the only thing to stop the sea-god’s avatar from drowning what was left of the world. He hadn’t meant to kill so many people trying to save them - and what would have been the worse death in the end, drowning or the storm. And he hadn’t meant to do the impossible and live afterward - because no one who had ever called upon the gods and wielded their power as their own had ever lived long afterwards.
None of the other avatars who had come before him, channeling the power of the gods to do impossible deeds, had lived: none of them had lived to see the consequences of their deeds, to know how many people they’d killed. He’d saved the world, but at what cost? Hundreds of people dead, a wrecked imperial capital, living with the guilt of all those deaths. He’d have been forgiven if he’d died but he hadn’t - and he hadn’t even saved the one person he most wanted to save. It’s almost incongruous to match the devastation that was the last thing he’d seen, watching the city disappear over the horizon with the sight new-left to him, on the ship that had carried him into exile, with the rebuilt glory that he’d seen on his return. He hadn’t seen the rebuilding, hadn’t helped with it - hadn’t been able to help with it - and can’t reconcile his memory with reality.
This life fits ill on him: he’d fit so well into it once, but it’s been ten years and more, and everything is out of step, out of sync. Ten years and more of wandering, of throwing himself headfirst at world-warping monsters from the sea half-hoping they’d kill him, five years of falling into a bottle trying to escape the memories and the loss, the memory of the moment he’d been his father Harinder, storms and war, before he was simply himself again, a loss and blindness more acute than the loss of half his sight, of his right leg never being the same again, and five years trying to crawl out of the bottle, thirteen he’s been gone. Even the clothing his sister had made for him once she’d brought him back home (the word is bitter on his tongue), court clothing in the midnight blue and silver of House Taviot hangs entirely wrong. This is the life he’s left behind and it isn’t entirely his anymore, and he’s only waiting to see why the Empress called him back when her son had exiled him in the first place.
“Lady Melantha still remembers you,” Neha says, carefully, as she takes a sip of her tea and he sits across from her in her solar, with the sun bathing the room in light, and he can almost forget the sound of the sea with the window closed: it’s become ritual, by now, a new ritual in a life he’s still trying to feel out. Kyrion tries not to break his tea cup, clutching it too tightly without thinking: they’d been betrothed, years ago, before, loved each other, he hadn’t been able to save her twin brother, and-
Melantha’s scream still echoes in his head, years later, he lies awake with her voice in his ears, just like it’d happened yesterday, the sound of her shriek and then the broken sobbing and then nothing over the sound of the wind. Twins were born together and usually die together, and he’d called the storm and fought with her limp body in his arms, holding her close, and his last thought as everything went black was that neither of them would wake up again.
But they’d both lived, impossible as it should have been, though it had been a close thing: but Melantha had not and would not ever be the same. When he’d still received letters from home, before he’d stopped writing back, he’d fully expected to hear that she’d died: twins were not meant to live without each other, would not live long after the other’s death, and those unlucky few who had would never be whole again. He hadn’t wanted that fate for her, to live as only half a person: Kyrion hadn’t been able to save Myca, who he’d loved as much as her, and he hadn’t-
But she had. Lived, that is. The last letter he’d gotten from his older half-sister, Esen, the High Lady of House Taviot, had told, very bluntly, that Melantha had married, some younger son from the House of Rivers, a plain-faced milksop who he’d only met once and disliked on sight (and hadn’t even bothered to remember his name), and called him a fool. He hadn’t written back.
“You should have married her,” his sister’s rebuke is gentle, but steel is layered beneath her tone. Even after everything, even after the Emperor had banished him from the capital, never to return, House Valeth would still have honored their betrothal - to brighten the short days of their favored daughter- but he had broken the betrothal before he’d taken ship. Let her go.
“What kind of life could I have given her?” he growls, the excuse he carried with him for all those years, in his heart, when the memory of Melantha’s broken sobbing had grown too much. What kind of life could he have given her, far from home, far from the best healers who he’d hoped could have helped her. What could he have given her? He’d given her back her ring, but given her a pendant - to remember him by. More fool him: she might have been happier forgetting him. All he’d wanted was the best for her.
“You made her happy,” and he almost flinches: how could he have made her happy, he’d wondered at the time, and hadn’t understood. Hadn’t understood, and now it’s too late. “Visit her,” Neha urges, more gently this time, and Kyrion knows that he is a coward. He isn’t sure that he can face Melantha - the last thing from his old life - given how much he’s failed, how much he’s failed her. He still loves her - he’d loved both of the twins, equally, carried them in his heart for years - but isn’t certain if he can bring himself to see her again, knowing how much he’s failed her. He loves her, loves her enough that perhaps it would be better to let her go.
He opens his mouth to begin to say that he can’t, when Neha turns her eyes on him - and for a moment, in her blue eyes, he sees an echo of the little girl he’d loved so dearly, had made promises to that he couldn’t ever begin to fulfill, and swallows.
“Please,” is all his sister says, and Kyrion surrenders. He’s never been able to tell her no, whether it was teaching her to fight with steel before their mother had thought her ready to learn, or whether it was agreeing to visit the woman he loves most in the world and never wants to hurt again. But he hurts everything he touches, every life that intersects his: he’s realized that long ago.
“Fine.” he says, and looks away from the window, looks away from the sea. “...make the arrangements.”
Neha’s betrothed - and it’s still strange to realize that his sister is old enough to marry - is one of Melantha’s half-siblings, another direct child of the Walker of the Broken Path, who is nearly as prolific as the Watchful Sword in the matter of half-god children. It’s been years since Kyrion has had to consider the matter of inter-House politics, but he knows, with stark clarity, that with his own broken betrothal to Melantha that another equivalent arrangement would have to be made. He hadn’t known the boy who had grown into the man she would marry, but he will have to meet him, to know whether he is worthy of his sister or not.
But that is a matter for the future. In the shifting shadows of House Valeth’s home - and that at least hasn’t changed - Kyrion finds himself strangely nervous. He had been welcome here, once, but that had been years ago, before everything: years ago, when the Valeth twins had been his closest playmates, then closest friends, then his most beloved people in all the world...before everything.
He doesn’t know what to expect, standing in front of Melantha’s door: he should raise his hand to knock, but he hesitates. Hesitates, before he finally raises his hand to knock, and the door swings open. After another moment’s hesitation, he steps across the threshold, to see the slender woman - still barely more than a girl - sitting by the window, utterly still. Lost dreaming silence, and he isn’t certain that it is his right to disturb it. To disturb her.
“Kyrion,” she says, her soft words breaking the silence: but it hurts all over again to hear, her voice like a music box in a too-wide room. “You came back to us,”
He’s never been a man of eloquent words: not like Neha, who chooses her words carefully and wields them as precisely as she would a sword or dagger, has never been a man to trust with delicate things. He doesn’t know what to say.
“I did,” he finally says, crossing the room towards her, and doesn’t say ‘years too late’. There’s so many things that he should have said, could have said: I should have taken you with me. I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have-
But where everything else has changed, Melantha still looks the same, or mostly the same. Her long black hair is pulled up beneath a sheer veil, in the looping braids and complicated hairstyles of a married woman, but other than that, it’s as if time hasn’t passed, because her appearance hasn’t changed at all, and she’s still wearing the necklace he’d given her, silver and crystal teardrop against her throat. Her smooth skin and dark luminous eyes are still the same as the young maiden he had loved in what feels like another lifetime, still slim as a youth beneath her layers of silken robes. It’s as if he’s stumbled forward in time and left her entirely behind.
Her lovely dark eyes are fixed on him - lovely dark pools of nothing, staring halfway into eternity, and his heart aches, remembering how they had been lit with laughter. But her laughter is gone, and her songs stilled: she still looks unsettlingly exactly the same, as if she hasn’t aged at all, but the girl she had been had died with Myca and only left this woman, who was halfway no longer here. But he loves her still, and always will, until the Dreaming Princess awakens and the circles of the world fall to nothing.
“I’m here, now.” he says, closing the distance between them, sits on the windowseat with her, and her delicate lips quirk upward in a sad, broken imitation of a smile, just before he takes one slender hand in his, fingers tightening as if she’d slip through his grasp. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, though apologies will never be enough, he’s left her here more than alone. Without her twin, and with a husband who had only loved her brother (and Myca had never paid the man any mind, had never noticed him).
“You’re here,” she says, and leans into him as he reaches for her, wraps his arms around her as if he can protect her though he’d failed, and he feels the lack of presence of the third who should have been here and wasn’t and would never be again. “Everything is falling apart. We can see it. There’s so much that we see and cannot say. I tried to say it but no one could hear.”
Melantha buries her head in his shoulder as he holds her, arms around her slender, delicate frame. “We lived and died and lived. We died and we lived,” she whispers. “What is time for us anymore? It passes and doesn’t pass, and there is no difference in the silent kingdom beneath the river. Death and dreaming and stillness, forever stillness, until there is nothing. We saw nothing for you but darkness and the sea, but you’re here. And they’re here. Father told us a secret, but no one understands when we try to say. Not even you, love. And we’re drowning, still drowning, always drowning, and the tide is rising.”
She shivers in his arms like she wants to weep, but doesn’t remember how to cry: Kyrion finally does, instead, weeps for both of them, for the lives that they’d left behind, for everything lost that will never be found.
“Will you stay with us until the end?” she asks, her voice heavy with the weight of true prophecy.
“Always,” he says, and holds her, because that is the one promise he can keep.
Story: tales from the drowned world
Colors: dove gray ("my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping / but / I shall go on living"), halloween orange (When there's no redemption to be found, there are still a few who'll hold their ground.), white opal (wandering)
Supplies and Styles: none
Word Count: 2541
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: implied alcoholism, implied death
Summary: Kyrion Taviot comes home from years of exile: nothing is the same, and he tries to fit into the life he left behind. With varying degrees of no success.
The last time Kyrion Taviot had seen his younger full-sister, she had been a child: a little girl he’d carried in his arms, promised safety and stability to, the rock that her world entire had been founded on: but now, she was a woman grown. Strong enough to challenge for the title he’d been unable to keep and claim it for her own, come into her power as First Lady of the House of Storms, and wise enough to never believe his promises again. Nothing and no one is quite as he remembers it: he’s been gone a decade and more, and everything’s changed.
He’s older, he’s wiser, and he’s half-blind: he’d been away so long, he missed seeing the changes, and only saw them now rather than the slow process. Kyrion drinks tea, sitting across from Neha in her solar, and can’t reconcile the self-possessed young woman with the memory of the little girl that he’d shared a (too-sweet) glass of rose wine with on very, very special occasions. He’d missed her growing up: he’d missed seeing his beautiful mortal mother grow old, he’d missed the slow rebuilding of Saratian.
But if he looks carefully, he can still see the scars on the city from the storm he’d summoned, especially in the poorer districts where so many had died. Avani weeps, he hadn’t meant - but then again, that was the problem. He hadn’t meant to do so many things: he hadn’t meant to channel his father, but it’d been the only thing to stop the sea-god’s avatar from drowning what was left of the world. He hadn’t meant to kill so many people trying to save them - and what would have been the worse death in the end, drowning or the storm. And he hadn’t meant to do the impossible and live afterward - because no one who had ever called upon the gods and wielded their power as their own had ever lived long afterwards.
None of the other avatars who had come before him, channeling the power of the gods to do impossible deeds, had lived: none of them had lived to see the consequences of their deeds, to know how many people they’d killed. He’d saved the world, but at what cost? Hundreds of people dead, a wrecked imperial capital, living with the guilt of all those deaths. He’d have been forgiven if he’d died but he hadn’t - and he hadn’t even saved the one person he most wanted to save. It’s almost incongruous to match the devastation that was the last thing he’d seen, watching the city disappear over the horizon with the sight new-left to him, on the ship that had carried him into exile, with the rebuilt glory that he’d seen on his return. He hadn’t seen the rebuilding, hadn’t helped with it - hadn’t been able to help with it - and can’t reconcile his memory with reality.
This life fits ill on him: he’d fit so well into it once, but it’s been ten years and more, and everything is out of step, out of sync. Ten years and more of wandering, of throwing himself headfirst at world-warping monsters from the sea half-hoping they’d kill him, five years of falling into a bottle trying to escape the memories and the loss, the memory of the moment he’d been his father Harinder, storms and war, before he was simply himself again, a loss and blindness more acute than the loss of half his sight, of his right leg never being the same again, and five years trying to crawl out of the bottle, thirteen he’s been gone. Even the clothing his sister had made for him once she’d brought him back home (the word is bitter on his tongue), court clothing in the midnight blue and silver of House Taviot hangs entirely wrong. This is the life he’s left behind and it isn’t entirely his anymore, and he’s only waiting to see why the Empress called him back when her son had exiled him in the first place.
“Lady Melantha still remembers you,” Neha says, carefully, as she takes a sip of her tea and he sits across from her in her solar, with the sun bathing the room in light, and he can almost forget the sound of the sea with the window closed: it’s become ritual, by now, a new ritual in a life he’s still trying to feel out. Kyrion tries not to break his tea cup, clutching it too tightly without thinking: they’d been betrothed, years ago, before, loved each other, he hadn’t been able to save her twin brother, and-
Melantha’s scream still echoes in his head, years later, he lies awake with her voice in his ears, just like it’d happened yesterday, the sound of her shriek and then the broken sobbing and then nothing over the sound of the wind. Twins were born together and usually die together, and he’d called the storm and fought with her limp body in his arms, holding her close, and his last thought as everything went black was that neither of them would wake up again.
But they’d both lived, impossible as it should have been, though it had been a close thing: but Melantha had not and would not ever be the same. When he’d still received letters from home, before he’d stopped writing back, he’d fully expected to hear that she’d died: twins were not meant to live without each other, would not live long after the other’s death, and those unlucky few who had would never be whole again. He hadn’t wanted that fate for her, to live as only half a person: Kyrion hadn’t been able to save Myca, who he’d loved as much as her, and he hadn’t-
But she had. Lived, that is. The last letter he’d gotten from his older half-sister, Esen, the High Lady of House Taviot, had told, very bluntly, that Melantha had married, some younger son from the House of Rivers, a plain-faced milksop who he’d only met once and disliked on sight (and hadn’t even bothered to remember his name), and called him a fool. He hadn’t written back.
“You should have married her,” his sister’s rebuke is gentle, but steel is layered beneath her tone. Even after everything, even after the Emperor had banished him from the capital, never to return, House Valeth would still have honored their betrothal - to brighten the short days of their favored daughter- but he had broken the betrothal before he’d taken ship. Let her go.
“What kind of life could I have given her?” he growls, the excuse he carried with him for all those years, in his heart, when the memory of Melantha’s broken sobbing had grown too much. What kind of life could he have given her, far from home, far from the best healers who he’d hoped could have helped her. What could he have given her? He’d given her back her ring, but given her a pendant - to remember him by. More fool him: she might have been happier forgetting him. All he’d wanted was the best for her.
“You made her happy,” and he almost flinches: how could he have made her happy, he’d wondered at the time, and hadn’t understood. Hadn’t understood, and now it’s too late. “Visit her,” Neha urges, more gently this time, and Kyrion knows that he is a coward. He isn’t sure that he can face Melantha - the last thing from his old life - given how much he’s failed, how much he’s failed her. He still loves her - he’d loved both of the twins, equally, carried them in his heart for years - but isn’t certain if he can bring himself to see her again, knowing how much he’s failed her. He loves her, loves her enough that perhaps it would be better to let her go.
He opens his mouth to begin to say that he can’t, when Neha turns her eyes on him - and for a moment, in her blue eyes, he sees an echo of the little girl he’d loved so dearly, had made promises to that he couldn’t ever begin to fulfill, and swallows.
“Please,” is all his sister says, and Kyrion surrenders. He’s never been able to tell her no, whether it was teaching her to fight with steel before their mother had thought her ready to learn, or whether it was agreeing to visit the woman he loves most in the world and never wants to hurt again. But he hurts everything he touches, every life that intersects his: he’s realized that long ago.
“Fine.” he says, and looks away from the window, looks away from the sea. “...make the arrangements.”
Neha’s betrothed - and it’s still strange to realize that his sister is old enough to marry - is one of Melantha’s half-siblings, another direct child of the Walker of the Broken Path, who is nearly as prolific as the Watchful Sword in the matter of half-god children. It’s been years since Kyrion has had to consider the matter of inter-House politics, but he knows, with stark clarity, that with his own broken betrothal to Melantha that another equivalent arrangement would have to be made. He hadn’t known the boy who had grown into the man she would marry, but he will have to meet him, to know whether he is worthy of his sister or not.
But that is a matter for the future. In the shifting shadows of House Valeth’s home - and that at least hasn’t changed - Kyrion finds himself strangely nervous. He had been welcome here, once, but that had been years ago, before everything: years ago, when the Valeth twins had been his closest playmates, then closest friends, then his most beloved people in all the world...before everything.
He doesn’t know what to expect, standing in front of Melantha’s door: he should raise his hand to knock, but he hesitates. Hesitates, before he finally raises his hand to knock, and the door swings open. After another moment’s hesitation, he steps across the threshold, to see the slender woman - still barely more than a girl - sitting by the window, utterly still. Lost dreaming silence, and he isn’t certain that it is his right to disturb it. To disturb her.
“Kyrion,” she says, her soft words breaking the silence: but it hurts all over again to hear, her voice like a music box in a too-wide room. “You came back to us,”
He’s never been a man of eloquent words: not like Neha, who chooses her words carefully and wields them as precisely as she would a sword or dagger, has never been a man to trust with delicate things. He doesn’t know what to say.
“I did,” he finally says, crossing the room towards her, and doesn’t say ‘years too late’. There’s so many things that he should have said, could have said: I should have taken you with me. I shouldn’t have left you. I shouldn’t have-
But where everything else has changed, Melantha still looks the same, or mostly the same. Her long black hair is pulled up beneath a sheer veil, in the looping braids and complicated hairstyles of a married woman, but other than that, it’s as if time hasn’t passed, because her appearance hasn’t changed at all, and she’s still wearing the necklace he’d given her, silver and crystal teardrop against her throat. Her smooth skin and dark luminous eyes are still the same as the young maiden he had loved in what feels like another lifetime, still slim as a youth beneath her layers of silken robes. It’s as if he’s stumbled forward in time and left her entirely behind.
Her lovely dark eyes are fixed on him - lovely dark pools of nothing, staring halfway into eternity, and his heart aches, remembering how they had been lit with laughter. But her laughter is gone, and her songs stilled: she still looks unsettlingly exactly the same, as if she hasn’t aged at all, but the girl she had been had died with Myca and only left this woman, who was halfway no longer here. But he loves her still, and always will, until the Dreaming Princess awakens and the circles of the world fall to nothing.
“I’m here, now.” he says, closing the distance between them, sits on the windowseat with her, and her delicate lips quirk upward in a sad, broken imitation of a smile, just before he takes one slender hand in his, fingers tightening as if she’d slip through his grasp. “I’m sorry,” he finally says, though apologies will never be enough, he’s left her here more than alone. Without her twin, and with a husband who had only loved her brother (and Myca had never paid the man any mind, had never noticed him).
“You’re here,” she says, and leans into him as he reaches for her, wraps his arms around her as if he can protect her though he’d failed, and he feels the lack of presence of the third who should have been here and wasn’t and would never be again. “Everything is falling apart. We can see it. There’s so much that we see and cannot say. I tried to say it but no one could hear.”
Melantha buries her head in his shoulder as he holds her, arms around her slender, delicate frame. “We lived and died and lived. We died and we lived,” she whispers. “What is time for us anymore? It passes and doesn’t pass, and there is no difference in the silent kingdom beneath the river. Death and dreaming and stillness, forever stillness, until there is nothing. We saw nothing for you but darkness and the sea, but you’re here. And they’re here. Father told us a secret, but no one understands when we try to say. Not even you, love. And we’re drowning, still drowning, always drowning, and the tide is rising.”
She shivers in his arms like she wants to weep, but doesn’t remember how to cry: Kyrion finally does, instead, weeps for both of them, for the lives that they’d left behind, for everything lost that will never be found.
“Will you stay with us until the end?” she asks, her voice heavy with the weight of true prophecy.
“Always,” he says, and holds her, because that is the one promise he can keep.
no subject
no subject
He probably doesn't entirely regret it...until he finds out why he's been recalled.
no subject
no subject