Shards of Glass

[ivery 591]

Shards of Glass
⬫⟡⬫

 

 

The world has plenty of stories, Deia has learned. She knows herself now as one of them, tucked away from the world in a quaint village, the windows of her cabin rattling with a strong breeze. Her story is patched together, half-untold, but she considers it closed anyway. She has closed it herself, pressed the fable’s covers together and sewn them so tightly shut that the words within are lost.

 

As a new empire rises, she knows parts of the world worry that they will lose all but one God. That their patrons will leave them powerless, faith sapped away as nature gives way to dirt roads and progress. They are not wrong, but they have never really been right. There are gods everywhere, Deia knows. In the trees overhead, in rushing water and the sky that blankets them.

 

Divinity is never quite gone. It’s just a bit quieter than before. That’s alright- she is quieter now, too.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

Her name is Deia, now and always. She has been named other things, before she remembered that she could choose. Some are gifts, some are chains, but Deia she chooses to keep.

 

So it stays as her name, no matter what it becomes attached to.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

Here is what it means to choose:

 

Deia has been a mother for as long as she can remember. While emperors warred miles away, she cradled her sister in her arms and ran through snowy wastes, so far that she was sure no one would ever recognize them again. There were moments when she’d tripped and nearly dropped her. There are moments where she thought about not picking her up again. She became a mother when she chose to hold her tighter.

 

She is surrounded by her children now, malformed and devilish. They bear horns and fangs and the tails of beasts, her husband’s flame scorching them in every color of the rainbow, and they cling to her as they peer out at the cruel world they were born into. For the love she robbed them of, she will love them tenfold and pretend it is enough atonement. This, too, she chooses.

 

There are only two who are lost to her, far away traveling the realm on a path she has never been brave enough to take, will never let herself take. Her wayward son, the one untainted among his siblings- protected from it now, protected from it always- and her firstborn daughter. They untangled themselves from her chains and she let them, lest they choke instead.

 

Decades before, she had carried that first lost child home to her husband and watched him brand her, name her. She watched the perfect little face warped with a snake’s fangs and rusted skin, the first of many. Her Zara, who kept her mother’s eyes.

 

Like this, they are mine, he had told her patiently, through her tears. An infernal claim in place of the blood-bond she longed for.

 

She had chosen to believe him because she knew his nature. The climb of his infernal brethren was ever treacherous, the reverence of his followers born not of love, but the dream to tear him apart and take his place. Just as he shackled the Hells, he would shackle all that had the chance to oppose him. And maybe, just maybe, she had not wanted him to be slain.

 

Cradling Zara to her chest, the worst future she could picture was doing this alone.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

She has nightmares of that night in Morteskvan, laying in a pool of her own blood. Of Laelia fleeing with a bloodied dagger, of the Queen’s body being dragged away. In her dreams, she remembers the cold sensation beneath the agony, creeping up through her fingertips all the way to her sluggish heart, and the pale figure that had approached in her final moments.

 

She has nightmares that, as she is now, he would not pray for her.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

The market moves quickly today, a rush of people passing by wherever she looks. It isn’t unpleasant, she finds their laughter lovely, but she doesn’t reach out or wave as she used to. Their stories are not something she is a part of, anymore, and the next time she sees them they will be old and gray and she will be the same as always.

 

It is much safer this way.

 

Dressed in rags and smears of dirt, she has no interest in being recognized. She gathers what she came for and walks quickly towards the gate. There, she passes by a shrine to the Blessed Queen, Amaya of Venzia. They grow roses around her now.

 

The first roses had not been grown by human hands. They had sprung up while she had prayed, wearing another face but the same heart, for the guidance of the only mother she knew. When flowers bloomed with her desperation, they called it a miracle. They called the Queen holy in a way Deia knew she was all along.

 

She had lingered, then, until sharp eyes found her in the crowd. Generations later she is quicker in her retreat, giving the flowers nary a glance. There is not one ounce of regret for it, not then or ever.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

On one peaceful morning, just before breakfast, Reinhard lingers beside her in the kitchen with his scarred face twisted into a scowl. It gentles when he looks at her, though, when he struggles for the soft words that once came easily.

 

“Mother, are you-.. happy?” he manages at last, barely heard above the clink of metal on wood from her stirring.

 

She remembers years and years ago, a face twisted with anger. “The truce is off. Verena’s child has been cursed.” She remembers running from that anger and being found again. Finding another child lost in the muck and, truce or not, keeping a watchful eye over him until she was sure he would survive her mistake.

 

She sets the spoon down on the edge of the pot and turns to cup Reinhard’s face in both of her hands. Examining the worn features there, she tells him, “I am perfectly content.”

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

It is the eighth year when Deia feels the first crack, the splinter of something terribly close to dread in her gut as it marks the longest she has weathered this alone, and so she calls out for help.

 

The trickster that arrives has made mistakes of his own. It’s there in his weathered features, the bite of his lazy grin. Each bead in his hair might as well be a story like hers, clattering against each other in the same manner as her own chains, but when he waves his hand there is something lighter on his wrist to level the burden. When Malik drops down to sit beside her, he is free and whole and careless. If he notices how the sun feels warmer on the part of the rock he’s chosen to doze on, how the flowers curl and bloom a bit brighter than they ought to, he does not mention it.

 

“How do you survive it? The waiting?” she asks amidst his insistent elbowing. The cloak around her shoulders softens each of them, her prim posture swaying in a strange rocking back and forth. It is an easy sort of comfort that makes her feel young instead of ancient.

 

He knows her too well, has been there for each crucial piece of the puzzle, and- most importantly- he is utterly shameless. “You mean Villorik?” he asks towards the sky, and she can only nod. “..You just wait. It’s all you can do. Wait and remember. Try to survive, try to distract yourself-” It’s a jumbled mess of advice, as nonsensical and frank as he always is. “-Hell, focus on this place, and the stupid demon brats here if that keeps you sane.”

 

The look on her face must say something, because he stops there. He listens to her whispering and lets the breeze carry it off into nothing. One doesn’t often associate him with wisdom as they ought to, but it shines through in the little things.

 

“You know I could level this place?” he muses off-handedly, like he’s discussing the weather. “If it gets too bad. Give up on it all, be free.”

 

She does know. The offer makes her heart feel a bit warmer, a bit steadier, and she turns to face him properly. The sun on the rock spreads, regardless of the canopy’s shadows above them. Unnatural. Warm. “They’re my family,” she reminds him in a tone both fond and exasperated. “I could not stand it. Living this without them.”

 

“Listen, Deia-..” Something biting hits his tone, something bitter. He turns to face her with a scowl she focuses on parsing. “I get it. Okay? I mean- let me tell you a story. I had a bleeding heart once too, and there was this kid. Sick as a dog, stuck in a chair. He wouldn’t make it. So I saved him.” Cold eyes turn towards the sky, and hers remain where they are. “And I stood by him, and he got darker and darker and darker until a lot of people died. And I mean a lot, Deia, Gashadokuro killed a lot of people and it-” Broke him. His teeth grit with his bright smile.

 

She thinks on that for a long time, her hands curling over her knees, curled up beside where he lay star-fished. They couldn’t be more different. She thinks of her children, twisted into hellish beasts one by one. She thinks of her husband, who was gentle once. She thinks of her promise.

 

“..If you could do it again, would you not save him? Knowing.. Knowing what he would be.”

 

Malik stares up at the sky, his grin cracking at the edges until it breaks. He turns to look at her thoughtfully. “No,” he muses there. “I’d save him again.”

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

There is always a lapse of a few weeks between a child being set in her arms and them being torn away again to be blessed. In those few weeks, she paints their faces with scales. She finds that makes it easier to accept the inevitable, to spare them the pitying gaze of any who might remember what they should have looked like before it was robbed of them.

 

When it is just the pair of them, though, just her and the monstrous shadow with its arms held out, she washes the paint off. She stares at their faces and memorizes them for what could have been.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

Jade-green hands clasp hers. They are gentler than they once were. Alistair is gentler. She likes to think it was always there, only hidden away.

 

“..How can I make you happy, Deia?” he stammers, reeling from her quiet words. He has so much life within him, a future he only now knows how to write. “Tell me. Please.”

 

Her heart aches. He is so, so gentle. “You do plenty, Alistair. Surely you see that?” A soft assurance, a truth. His eyes are still wild and searching when she looks up. She thinks of a field of red and white, and even now feels their tug like a piece of her untethered. “..I do miss Valdev’s flowers, sometimes.”

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

There are pieces of the world that are not yet understood. Shards of memories made manifest, history frozen in time, people that are not quite gone. The walls between their realm and the ones they worship are so very thin. Deia can feel it, the Divinity in it all. It matches her own, it remembers her. She knows if she reaches, it would reach back.

 

These are secrets she has never had the chance to tell her children. Secrets about the world and about her. There are too many barriers between them, too many risks that keep her from speaking them aloud.

 

High atop a mountain, far away from them all, there is a grave.

 

It should not be as pristine as it is. She cannot help herself. The engraving of his name is gouged of snow and decay every time she lingers.

 

She knows in her heart he would not have chosen a grave. His bones are so close to the surface, so easily stolen and marred and puppeted. So too does she know that she would not survive watching him burn away into nothing, ashes swept through the breeze beyond her reach.

 

So she buried him, and honored him, and sits beside his grave for the sunrise. She carries locks of silvered black hair against her heart and a cloak of white furs against her shoulders and a ring whose pair is encased in snow and swears, swears, that she will not break. Not yet. Not until he tears through the seven skies to sit beside her.

 

⬫⟡⬫

 

Deep, deep below her peaceful home, a forgotten cave gives way to something darker. Ice dangles from the ceiling, draws tight around the stone floor, and in the middle, there is a deep red gouge like a wound. It bleeds sluggishly and taints the snowy footsteps she left before. When she looks down, there is nothing but the mangled, half-melted bodies of everything thrown in and a dark hole in the middle. Perhaps that wound goes to the very bottom of the world.

 

Deia has stepped close to the edge of it when the rotten flesh writhes violently, twisting and pulling until a mangled arm pushes out. It clasps onto the sinew - never the edge, it tried that only once - and drags itself up.

 

“Hello, husband,” she whispers.

 

The beast’s sunken eyes, unused to light now, turn to peer at her. “DEIA!” it bellows, cringing at the glow that wreathes around her. She has draped herself in chains that would poison it. “Free me from this-..”

 

She tosses the dried carcass of a rabbit down to it and its words cut off, monstrous jaws snapping around its middle. For a moment, the only sounds are her heartbeat and the crunch of bones. When it finishes, it is quieter. She isn’t fooled; its limbs quiver with rage. “Deia. Wife. Release me. Free me.”

 

If she wanted to, she could release it. Its bindings were accidental, but they are hers. They glimmer in the pit of flesh as wiry white veins, mistaken for a great ribcage of bone at a glance. It knows that too. It knows that the bindings that have doomed it to this are the power of the one it thought to be powerless, a power she always knew better than to tell it about, and so through its rage it tries so hard to be saccharine.

 

“You’ll hurt them again,” she knows, and its newly bloodied jaws snap around nothing, trying to reach her as its rage returns. The step back she takes crunches the ice and it stills, knowing well that if it spooks her here, she might not return. Instead, it shudders and lapses into a silence of labored breathing.

 

What would happen if she stopped bringing it food? Would it starve like that, delivered back to the hells as a husk? Would it stay like that, barely moving, unable to die? Neither of them know. A King has never been made low enough to starve. It might free it, but it might also die for good, and she can see the fear in its eyes. She knows it won’t take such a chance. “You’ll hurt them again,” she adds, steadier this time. “Won’t you?”

 

It can’t help itself. “They are my soldiers,” it hisses.
 
“They are my children.”

 

“So as every month, your goal is to taunt me.” She watches as it fumes there, anger so curdling it threatens to tear its weakened body at the seams. “It was not enough to betray your vows- you torture me with rabble as well.”

 

“Every month, you are no less terrible.” That notion makes her own anger rise, heavy as a hot coal behind her ribs. “I have betrayed none of my vows.” Her foot comes out to kick a small piece of ice forward, watching as it tumbles down past it. There’s something satisfying, through her ire, in the way the mere glint of light makes it flinch. “However miserable you made them. However much-”

 

“-you wanted to,” it finishes in a lower tone, accusing. Mocking. Its grotesque features twist with a similar emotion. “Right?”

 

“..Right,” Deia murmurs, because they have long since passed the point of denying it. Not when it only took one wrong word, one hint of a cruel plan to finally bind it irrevocably. Flashes of light, fear and heartbreak and a prayer she could not repeat if she tried. “..But I have not. I have taken care of you, and stood by you- and do, still.”

 

“Stand by me where? In this ruinous hovel you’ve sequestered us to?” it snarls. “A hut? A cave? You had a place of honor in my court, and now you betray me. How far we’ve fallen!”

 

Deia’s face twists without her bidding, and she presses her foot to another piece of ice just to watch it brace for impact. They have made some progress; it used to stop at nothing, trying to attack her. “I have taken care of you, and stood by you..” she begins again. “..and I will, for the rest of this life. For the rest of your life. Because I swore, before your god and mine, and we-...”

 

She can barely make herself say it, looking at the mangled mess that was once her husband, is still her husband, might always be her husband. Its teeth are bared in a snarl. “..And we are not so old that we can ignore our oaths. Not yet.”

 

Claws scrape on the sides of the pit, cutting through matted flesh for purchase. “This power is new, Deia. You’ve convinced yourself that it will save you, that it is certain, but tell me- how many years has it been?”

 

The cavern trembles.

 

It knows well what that means, how the chains that bind it in place will soon tighten to drag him down again, bright enough to blind, harsh enough to cut with an anger wholly unnatural to her. They crackle and splinter like shards of shattered glass, digging into its skin and pulling it towards the abyss below. It is not the Hell it recognizes; just darkness, and so its roar soon echoes with fear. She might have found it satisfying, years ago, when she was afraid and unbroken. Now she can barely hear it through the ringing in her ears.

 

One year. Two years. Twelve. Eighteen. Twenty, and onward.

 

“Deia! Deia!” it shrieks and caws, scrambling for purchase as half of its monstrous body is consumed in void. It stares up at her eyes, pale and unfocused, and nearly releases its grip at what it sees.

 

She takes a breath. In and out it comes, slow and temperate. The cavern stops shaking. “..You should be kinder,” she whispers in the ensuing silence. Its head is just barely visible now, stewing in the worst of the gore. “I am gentler than your pyres will be.”

 

Even now, those beady eyes peer up at her with hatred instead of belief. It doesn’t have faith the way she does. Optimism and pessimism have sunken into their bones, filling the marrow with their sickness. She wonders how many times it will burn before its convictions erode.

 

Deia drops the other carcass she has brought well out of reach, letting it sink into the snow and dye it red. Its eyes follow the motion, jaw strained to catch whatever fresh blood dribbles into the pit within reach, but nothing does.

 

“..Goodnight, husband,” she says as she steps away, thumbing at the cloak on her shoulders like a comforting blanket. She will return. Over and over again, until their home is nothing but fire. Her retreat muffled beneath its bellowed curses, gurgling through the flesh and sinew it drowns in.

 

She has forever to wait, and a promise to keep. She will not break.

 

 

Spoiler

Some personal writing to summarize an arc of rp on Deia for the past few months, which I've had a blast with. Not gonna tag people because it'd be a lot but thanks for reading :)

 

[Bethinwonderland 2213]

Spoiler

I shared this on Discord and wanted to share it here
This was a delight to read. You did a fantastic job on it.
Thank you for sharing part of Deia's story with us