The Sun in the Wheat

[Xarkly 12922]

 

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

The air in the dungeon felt still.

 

Despite the half-dozen people gathered in the room - from Ailred’s steely expression to Tatiyana’s fiery glare - the silence was stark, broken only by faint shifts of mail, and the din of New Valdev beyond the dungeon’s doors. Villorik Patriarch Jorenus did not know for how long he stood staring down at the prisoner; all he did know was that, no matter what happened, he knew this moment would be burned into his memory until the day he died.

 

 

With red horns poking through her pale hair like a stunted crown, the Cursed Child that had been one of Villorik’s - one of the White Comet’s, and one of all Canondom’s - foremost targets stared up with anticipating, crimson eyes. Though she was flanked with Tatiyana, who held a tight grip on her arm, and Joakim Colborn, whose mace was ready to bring any upset to the interrogation to a swift end, Villorik was hardly aware of any else in the room.

 

 

Besides her - Laelia.

 

 

After all this time, he told himself as he stared down through the visor of his winged helmet. After such a long hunt. He felt blood pulse through the fingers that held his glaive. We’re finally here. His breaths seemed quick; his eyes were unblinking. Amaya can finally be avenged.

 

 

For eight long years, Villorik had hunted Laelia and her crimson eyes. From Kaethul to Nevaehlen to Celia’nor, he had expunged every lead, followed every trail. He had sliced more hands with aurum than he could count, parsed for more Infernal Grimoires than he could recall, in the hopes of finding this woman, of undoing her disguise. Of bringing her to justice.

 

 

And now, here she was. Trapped, and surrounded by more than half a dozen blades ready to cut her down. Leonid, Tatiyana, Joakin, Emma, Karl, Asif, Ailred, Caspian, and Rhys all beheld her with hard eyes, ripe with grim satisfaction, as they awaited Laelia’s sentencing - her punishment, for the murder of the beloved Queen Amaya eight years past, a woman who had only ever shown the Cursed Children love and affection that the rest of the world denied them.

 

 

“Do you seek redemption, Laelia of Hallowcliffe?” he had asked at last. He was surprised to hear his own voice, icy and stoic. He had always imagined that, when this moment came, it would be with fire that he spoke.

 

 

“ … I deny that name,” came her reply, laced with a defiant bitterness. “I do.” Something shimmered in her eyes - something equally defiant. “Towards that purpose, I will expose all the rot I know. That … that’s the least I can do.”

 

 

As the others in the dungeon grunted in dismissal. I don’t care if you gave me Sarryn’s head on a silver platter, Villorik said to himself, though his expression changed not a whit. Nor Aden’s. Not even Iblees’ itself. For what you did … there can be no redemption.

 

Unbidden, a memory crossed his mind. Faces flashed through it - another Cursed Child; a lavender-skinned Elf; a long-dead Queen. He felt something … shift.

 

 

“Did Sermi ever tell you,” he began again, then, though now his voice was slow and thick, “of the wheat?”

 

 

Something similar shifted in Laelia’s blood-red eyes. “ … No.”

 

 

And so, Villorik spoke the very words he had long ago to another Cursed Child on the roads of Waltonburg, overlooking the budding summer harvest. “Throughout one’s life … do their actions grow more wheat than they raze? That is how redemption is measured, Laelia … If you seek it, then the grain you sow must grow higher than the mounds of ashes you have left.”

 

 

 

 

 

Although they were sequestered in a dungeon beneath the Brotherhood of Saint Karl barracks, Villorik could almost feel the same breeze stir his white cloak the day he had spoken as much to Sermi - before her true betrayal. It was more than that, though; it was the same breeze from when he had stood atop the road to Morteskvan with Ilaria and spoke of redemption.

 

 

“So, Laelia.” With a faint creak of his glove’s leather, he tightened his grip on his glaive. “How will your grain be grown?”

 

 

It doesn’t matter, a voice whispered in his head. Nothing she can say will change her fate. Nothing she can say will bring Amaya back.

 

 

“The White Cat,” she began earnestly, then, “she intends to undo the shackles that keep Iblees bound. If she has her way … then he will walk the world once more. I wish to stop that from happening.”

 

 

That much, Villorik had expected - a vow to undo the work of her master, and tear down that which she had built. But that doesn’t matter, he reminded himself. Nothing can undo the damage she did. Amaya is never coming back.

 

 

As his grip grew tighter on the glaive, he could picture her face - Amaya’s face - on their last day together. He could remember that shimmering look in the Queen’s eyes that saw only the good in the world; he could remember the summer sun fracture through the tree-tops, bathing the two of them in gold-slashed shadows; and he could remember the same soft breeze from then, too.

 

 

“Do you know why it is wrong for the Light to hate the Shadow?” he had asked the Queen on that day as the birds sang in the trees around them. Now, from where he stood, with the blood of Shadowspawn staining his hands, Villorik could scarcely believe he had said such a thing. And yet, he had - and he had believed it.

 

 

Beneath his visor, he closed his eyes, and indulged in that fleeting memory - his last memory of her.

 

 

“ … Value comes from contrast,” he had said as he watched a bird hop between the branches of a nearby fir. “Without cold, we would not know the meaning of heat. Without the horrors of the Shadow, there would be no comfort in the Light. And so …” He had looked to her, then, through his boyhood eyes, when Amaya had first peeled his beaten body from the Karosgrad fighting pits. “That you have lived happily … is amply evident in your sadness now.”

 

Amaya, her own eyes trained on the birds, smiled in her understanding. “To know true sorrow is to have known love. I … have loved many in this life,” she said, and, with misty eyes, glanced to where Leonid and Deia were laying out their picnic blanket some yards away. “And it has been my greatest blessing to have those who loved me back.”

 

Villorik followed her gaze, and sighed. As the sunlight dipped lower, its light became a burnished orange, filtering through the trees around them.

 

“ … That’s why, Villorik,” Amaya spoke again. “That’s why you don’t have to kill her.”

 

In that mental image, Villorik’s head snapped back to the memory of Amaya. She had never said those words - that was not part of the memory.

 

 

“Don’t you see?” the ghost of Amaya whispered softly as a wren perched in her cupped hands. “The reason I took pity on the Cursed Children in the first place … the reason I welcomed them into Haense?”

 

“ … Amaya,” Villorik whispered back to the memory. “ … They killed you. I’ve been hunting them all this time for you, so I -”

 

“Villorik,” she tutted wistfully as she stroked the wren’s neck with a ringed finger. “I cannot bear to see you like this.”

 

“Like … this?” His voice felt cracked, and hollow. “I - I’m doing this … to avenge you, Amaya! Because I couldn’t save you then!”

 

 

“... I know.” Amaya’s smile was soft, and sad. “But your hunt is in vain. Because the Laelia who stands before you now …” With a gentle motion, she let the wren take flight from her hand. “ … is not the same one that killed me.”

 

 

 

[amazing art by Ivery]

 

Spoiler

 

 

 

“Yes,” Villorik whispered out loud as the memory finally faded. The sunlight vanished, replaced by the dreary walls of the dungeon, and the creak of branches fell silent in the stead of quiet, anticipating breaths as Villorik held his glaive before Laelia. “ … I understand.”

 

 

In a swift motion, he raised his glaive, and the Lunarite edge shimmered as it streaked downwards onto Laelia’s head. The Cursed Child only sat there, waiting for the pain, and waiting for the end - but only the first of those came.

 

 

With a squelch of flesh and blood, the tip of the glaive sliced deep into the left side of her face - through the devil’s eye - and she fell to the floor with a howl.

 

 

Villorik’s stoic facade crumbled away like dust; as the wounded Cursed Child writhed on the floor, it took every fibre of his being to prevent himself from raising the blood-slicked glaive again, and finishing her off. Through blurry eyes, memories hazed in a flash; memories of golden, sunlit fields of grain.

 

 

“ … Amaya won’t rise from your blood.” His voice sounded foreign, and he knew the only person who could ever recognise the emotion was that young Colborn girl who had picked him up in those fighting pits when they were children. “ … and she won’t awaken from your bones. She is … never coming back.” He barely felt a tear roll down through his visor, through the grooves of the scar made by King Ivan, and drip onto his boot. “She was … a kind of good that I have never seen in this world. She did not just grow wheat; she was the sun that turned it golden.”

 

 

“Never forget what you are,” came the icy quip of Leonid from behind him, his own voice bubbling with rage. In his hands, he threw down a horned-skull - of another particular Cursed Child - and crushed it underboot. “Never forget what you stole.”

 

 

Villorik watched the shards of bone mingle with the blood that seeped from Laelia’s wound. “ … So, that’s why. You will spend every last minute of life you have left to bring a fraction of her light back to this world, until you are spent and dead.”

 

 

Even as he spoke, Villorik could feel the eyes of the others on him, and he could hear their silent pleas. She will betray us. She will kill us. This is not mercy. This is foolishness. They were the same voices that droned in the back of his own head. But there was something else in his head - something that muted all those voices, all those doubts. Something golden.

 

 

“ … and if you ever abscond from this duty,” he finished as he twisted the glaive, and flicked Laelia’s blood onto the floor, “I will kill everyone you have so much as smiled at.”

 

 

As Villorik turned, his white cloak swaying behind him, Laelia managed one last retort through a strained throat as the blood oozed through the fingers covering her slashed wound. “I … won’t …. Run.”

Villorik glanced back one last time, through his winged visor. “Good. You will lead us to Sarryn, Aden, and whatever other parasite of the Shadow dares to blot the Light.” Then, with purpose, he marched towards the door, but he was hardly aware of his surroundings.

 

 

… I pray, then, that I did right by you, Amaya, he thought as the barred doors opened, and the faint warmth of the Haeseni sun bore down on him as he trudged out into the streets of New Valdev.

 

You did, she whispered back.

 

[Herod 808]

"A confessed heathen who goes back to the faith can live, yet one who returns to malice must die." The temperate one-eyed Templar-Knight said upon exiting the cells.

[Unwillingly 11437]

A languished, exhausted soul lingers in the penumbra of a blinding light.

Perhaps once, in another life, I told you something I didn't truly intend. A promise I knew couldn't be fulfilled.

But I've never regretted it all as much as I do now.

[sarahbarah 5037]

A soft breeze rustled a nearby tree, stirring her from her sleep.

Amaya arose, beckoned by the chittering of anxious birds and troubles brought forth by the mortal realm.

 

Amaya had never relished fighting or bloodshed, and Villorik knew this. 

 

If only he could hear me, she thought.  If only . .

 

. . . and suddenly, somehow, in a burst of golden light, Amaya was in that summer field again.

 

Spoiler

 

 

"You don't have to kill her." — "There is peace found in redemption, Villorik, and mercy found in peace,"

uttered the long-dead Queen. 

 

"Choose peace."

And when he did, Amaya's soul could truly rest.

[sam33497 3061]

Spoiler

bro what i unironically cried reading this this is insane

 

[ivery 124]

There is shouting in the dungeon.

 

Deia stands by the door, amidst the blood and muck, and watches as it stains her shoes, stains her. The breeze brushes past to the cells and back out against her spine and she’s so very cold. Everything is cold without the Queen.

 

In the shadow of her death, they call her the White Flame. They call her venerated and a Queen of the people (what is left of the people) and they speak of her kindness, her generosity, her love, as a mistake to learn from.

 

Red pools at her feet like water and she feels the brush of fingertips against her ankle, the first of a trail of corpses that will lead her to her sister. She doesn’t have to look to know their wounds, nor that they will ever flow, an endless fountain from a slit throat, a pierced heart, a skewered eye. She doesn’t have to look to know there are dozens.

 

For her. For them.

 

For love.

 

The gruesome sound of a glaive against flesh makes her open her eyes. When she turns towards the wail that follows, the dungeon door is stainless, there is no weight in her hands, and Amaya is still dead.

 

Look, a voice demands, at what she has wrought.