ꙮ Back at the shelter, because Aurelius elected not to let Salme out of his sight in the Temple. Did you remember to bite him, at least?
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#saint
absolutely did. He bitched about it too.
ꙮ Good for you.
ꙮ Anyways, what’s your plan now?
has the Mask in her hands almost in an eyeblink. She curls up on the bed in their room—Aurelius had better things to do than babysit her, and as much as she wants to go back to the temple just to prove a point, she realizes that would be exceedingly childish, even for a bit.
: “Answers. Maybe. Not much, but I think there’s more I can find out.”
ꙮ It’s okay, you can be committing light heresy in your heart. I think that counts.
actually doesn’t, really, he’s good to sit in the common area and make sure you only get up to Officially Clan Approved Shenanigans.
: “Are you literally babysitting me and guarding me to keep me from going out?” she yells through the doorway.
: “What else am I going to do, work on my tan?”
ꙮ Probably not, he just doesn’t have a Yazhn to mill around waiting to have coffee with. Anyway.
tucks the Mask away. “One moment, silmät.” She uncurls off the bed, goes into the common room, takes the opportunity of Aurelius sitting and her standing to nip one of his ears, and then flops down next to him, pulling the Mask out again.
ꙮ Priorities, I understand.
looks at it. She hasn’t been wearing it as often as she probably should. She wonders if there’s a way to—write her memories into the Mask after the fact with the same vividness as when she wears it. That is, of course, neither here nor there. She closes her eyes, and she falls.
ꙮ If you think of them, after the fact, with the Mask on. Sword-Saints tend to have good memories, good enough that no small amount of what the Mask contains has been written in after the fact. It’ll never be as vivid as in the moment, though, no. But that’s neither here nor there - you fall, and it still feels like flying. How deep are you going?
is going first, to the bottom. To Bahamut. The longest fall, the greatest flight. She finds it exhilarating, now. Maybe she always did.
ꙮ It’s hard not to. It’s hard not to think about that first jump into the Void, also, holding hands with the others. You slow, more and more, rather than land, and there’s soft warm breath tickling your hair.
: “Hello, Bahamut. How are you?” she says, a bit of warmth in her voice.
: “I am remembered.” This pleases it. Or, it exists, at all, in this moment, to be pleased by her presence.
: “You are remembered. As long as both Wolf and I draw breath, and perhaps even after, you are remembered.” She turns to look at it. “I was wondering if you could help me with a couple things.”
does not flinch from her gaze, any more. It does not try to hide the ruin of its face; it knows she has seen it for what it was, and is, and loves both things. It rumbles, softly. “If I may aid you, I would do so.”
: “They are not kind or joyful things, for the most part.” She reaches out to bury her hands in the ruin of its fur. Her touch is gentle. She reaches for it like she’d reach for a sleek cat. “I wanted to know if you could show me … some of your memories. Zosimos. The first end of all things. And if you’ve ever seen any words in the language of those who the Samudrans call the Ancients.”
lets out a soft snort, and it is not a joyful snort, but it is a kind enough snort to compensate, and it gently presses itself into Salme’s hands. “I will summon forth from the depths that which I can summon forth. Will you share your mind with me, then, as you did before?”
nods. “And if you wish I will share something joyful at the end, if there is something you might like to see.”
closes her eyes, and invites Bahamut, first Sword-Saint of Almachadta, sky-leaping, song-soaring, into the house that is herself.
- Salme used their techné Methexis (Salme has recreated the Ancient technique by which they can link their mind and experiences with that of another person and can do so effortlessly with a willing participant.)
ꙮ The great beast lets out a low, soft ‘hrrrrf’, and opens its mind as if it’s done this before, and in a moment, you know that it has, in fact, done this before. In life, long and long ago. Much like this, in fact. Hands buried in his fur. You feel it, in the memory, you feel how strong you were, in a brief and glorious moment there you are, bounding up the umbilicus of the Centrelight itself and leaping off of it, wrestling with a cloud, tumbling through the air to land in the shallows of a river with a splash, fur soaked, roaring in laughter– you were so bright and so powerful– and standing at your side, an aged man in a simple tunic, with long white hair that’s been braided in a way they still braid hair in Almachadta, today, and a long white beard, and wood-carved bangles on his arms.
is Bahamut, and as Bahamut she looks at this man with his tunic and long white hair and beard, and wonders if not Bahamut, but she, Salme, recognizes him at all.
ꙮ He is a man of a certain age, with eyes beginning to dim; his hair is long and his beard is well-kept but slightly unreasonable and his facial structure is just so and you think, you can imagine, that perhaps he is a somewhat distant cousin to he who wears the face which you’re recalling. There is some resemblance, to be sure, obscured by age and Bahamut’s memory and the exigencies of the Mask. But, you think. There is some resemblance, perhaps.
thinks, perhaps. Thinks, maybe. As it always is. When he spoke, what did he say to you, she asks Bahamut. Wonders.
ꙮ And you remember that he told you so many things. He told you of the world that once was and its wonders and its beauties; he explored the world that now is with you, as long as he was able. He told you to stop and sniff every flower and poke your nose into every cave and climb every hill on Almachadta and pretend that they are ‘mountains’, which is like a very very very big hill made out of stone and snow and danger, and you think that that sounds grand, that you would very much like to climb a mountain, one day, and jump from its peak into the sky itself, and then he told you that here, in the world that is, that we have but these hills, but that they are lovely, and also good for climbing, and he was right, they were.
thinks that she, as much as she would wish for answers, could never begrudge this—the truth, maybe the truest thing she knows, that the world that is is as beautiful as any world that was. She is grateful, she is moved—not, perhaps, to tears, but to something like it—and she shifts the memory to her, to the face of a man with sad eyes and a sad smile and lies on his tongue, with horns sprouting from his head and a quest for them, and asks if Bahamut has ever seen him before.
scrunches up its nose.
ꙮ You, also, scrunch up your nose, in this moment, feel a pang of distaste, for this face which is beloved-yet-not, not at all the man who sung you awake, this man looking at you as if he owns the room he’s looking at but feels a way about it–
: “Hhffff. No. But I feel your–“ -it sniffs deeply like if he sniffs hard enough he’ll catch the man’s scent, which is not how Salme’s memory works, at all, at any rate, and it scowls and rumble-grumbles. “He who woke me did not mention having a resentable cousin.”
laughs, despite all her nose-scrunching, because ‘resentable cousin’ is precisely the word for it. She gives the flow of memory back to Bahamut. She asks. “Did he ever call our world ‘Alsos’? Was ‘Almachadta’ always the word used? Has it had other names?”
paws at the moss underneath his feet and then leaps, and bounds, straight through a forest; you let the trees rasp against your bark and you laugh and breathe in the resin-scent and you run and you run until you’re panting and out of breath in a grove which Zosimos loved to visit, with a crystal-clear pond at its heart, and before you respond with words you lap at the pond thirstily, and you remember that he called the world entire a sacred grove, a proving ground, a place of holy and beautiful struggle, of life and death, the ‘Alsos Machedatos’, and you remember these words rough on the tongues of the men whom he taught, and even before he was buried in the soft ground, it had become something else, which became something else, which became something else.
savors the cool water of the crystal-clear pond, savors the sharp, clear resin-scent, savors sound of the name of their home that is not quite the name any longer but is still a name.
lets the moment stretch out like the stretch of their muscles as they push into a leap, and then she asks in her voice, “show me the end, please.”
ꙮ Bahamut leaps again, and leaps again. You run through the forest into a clearing, just like the Sundered Grove, back in your own Almachadta, and you both look upon the Canker-Galls you see there with recognition– and joy and fire and want, drool slicking down the side of your face as you catch their scent, you engage in the Rite and it’s over almost the moment it’s begun and you’re tearing it APART, you’re gorging yourself on the nectar and it is. It is. Oh, Light, it tastes even better than the wine the Awoken was gifted, it tastes better than warm, soft, fresh-hunted prey and it thrills you to every nerve and it is right and good but there are more of them, there are always more of them, you could eat your fill and suddenly there are more Canker-Galls than there are people living, and then, oh then, then there was fire streaking through the sky, and a chasm yawning open halfway across the world, and there was fire, and you fled through the air, and the trees burnt, and the rivers burnt, and the air burnt, and with smoke-clogged lungs you dragged yourself bodily into the Shrine as the world you love broke with a hideous crack.
: “I’m sorry– I’m sorry–“
knows the satiation of the Canker-Galls now, knows the fullness of it, but their pain keeps them grounded. Their pain and their sorrow and their—no, it was not failure. This is not a thing that needs an apology. They did not fail. They did not fail.
still, though, needs to know, so she shifts the memory, takes Bahamut to the Cathedral on the Beast, where they are fire, light flickering under skin, hair netted with gold and rubies, reaching, striving, touching, sharing—is She familiar to you at all, she asks. You might not have known. There was little chance to know. But she tries to connect Bahamut with Her, the δωδἔκτρωμα, with the song she cannot help but sing. Tries to find a level of knowing beyond words or memory to ask her question. Did you meet, on that day?
thinks, first, that She is beautiful, that She is magnificent, that Her song echoes in its ears; its human hands and human forehead pressed against the soft warm floor as Salme’s were; secondly, it thinks that it knew, and met, only fire on that day, fire and ruin and desolation, and a beast great enough to tear the world asunder whose visage and form it could only guess at. It must have claws, it thinks, claws and fangs, greater even than its own marvels of the type, before the fire claimed all from it. It must be strong, strong enough to rend the land. It must breathe fire and hate the living and surely this rainbowed eye could not be the eye of something capable of such catastrophe? Surely it could not be She. But it did not see that which broke the world with its own eyes, and so it cannot say that they met, and it also cannot say that they did not meet.
hears it and thinks that things which destroy do not only hate; that She is made for love even as she fears her own capacity for destruction, and then because there has been enough suffering, enough of this, she shows Bahamut a moment when, perched on her finger, She was a wren, singing a little wren song, and they sang the notes sparrows sing, and there was a glorious mountain that was home to fiends, holy and breathtaking and impossible, but how in that moment the only thing that mattered was the braided song of two small brown birds.
thinks that this is, perhaps, even more beautiful, indeed; it would be brought to tears by the beauty, if the fire had not dried its tears forever.
ꙮ Bahamut did both of those things, of course.
lets Bahamut cry through her then, a kaleidoscope of moments that have brought her tears—not the ugly, heaving kind, but the kind where the beauty of the world is too much, and the only thing she can do is cry. She grants it that catharsis of her human, as-yet unburnt body, and then slowly lets the link between them fade.
: “Thank you, friend.”
says, “Hhrrrff,” and gently nuzzles at her with its fire-rough nose.
nuzzles back. “I will come see you again. And I will remember you always.”
flies out of the depths of the Mask; or, perhaps, she falls.