Archive of Our Own

“Mydei, do you remember sunsets?”

Mydei looks over his shoulder to where Phainon lies, head tucked under his hands. The wind blows gently over the rooftops, ruffling the awnings, muffling the murmuring of the crowd below.

“Do I remember them?”

“That’s what I said,” Phainon confirms, without opening his eyes.

Mydei frowns. The roof tiles dig into his hands, bare and scarless without his gauntlets.

“Do you think I’ve gone senile? Why would I not remember them?”

Phainon laughs. “Maybe you are senile. It’s not like you’d know if you were!”

“Not like you’d know an edge if you were sitting on it, either,” Mydei retorts, shoving Phainon’s knee with his foot.

Phainon flails. He lurches down the slope without his foot kick-standed against the roof, catching himself just shy of the drop. Phainon whips his head back, grinning.

“Mydeimos,” he chides. “If you truly don’t remember, all you have to do is say so! There’s no need for violence.”

Mydei arches a brow. “Violence? You look perfectly fine to m—”

Quick as a viper, Phainon’s hand darts out, wraps around his ankle, and yanks. Mydei slides, the roof clattering beneath him. He scrambles to a stop, even with where Phainon reels back, prepared for retaliation.

At least Mydei thought long enough to consider what might happen should they tussle on a roof. They’d both survive the fall, but Mydei doesn’t look forward to explaining how they’d crushed an unsuspecting merchant’s stall or knocked the wheels off the tradesman’s cart to Lady Aglaea. Or even worse: to Tribbie.

So, he settles for a kick Phainon can easily dodge.

“See?” Phainon barely contains himself. “Always so eager to resort to your fists.”

“You’re a menace to society,” Mydei says. “And that was my foot.”

“Hm.” Phainon contemplates this. “Fair enough.”

They sit in silence without the need to fill it, adjusting to their lower position on the roof. It isn’t truly quiet; Marmoreal Market at the second quint of Action Hour is in full swing beneath them.

“Growing up, I didn’t like them.”

“Hm?”

“Sunsets. Twilight.”

Phainon leans back on his elbows, and going by his boyish smile, Mydei expects to be met with more ribbing. But instead, Phainon looks at him steadily, his expression earnest. Searching—for what Mydei doesn’t know.

“Why?”

Mydei bites down on nothing. “Do I need a reason?”

“It’s a little unusual, is all.”

So are you, Mydei nearly counters, but he knows better than to strawman Phainon, of all people. He talks circles around the philosophers debating in the square for fun.

“The setting sun signals the end to another day. It is the beginning of the long night that lies ahead, and all that waits within it. I’ve simply grown weary of the darkness.”

Phainon half-smiles, crooked. “Have you considered taking up poetry?”

Mydei gives up on resisting the urge to roll his eyes. Phainon continues before he’s the chance to shut him down for good:

“And every sun which sets must rise eventually, right?” His shirt crimps against his chest, casts shadows Mydei could follow down, should he wish. “Seems silly to dwell on a crescent when the circle exists.”

“Now who’s the poet?” Mydei mutters. “But I suppose you’re right…”

The breeze lifts the fringe from Phainon’s brow and blows it back against his cheek. His eyes, somehow bluer against the ever-cerulean sky, cast upward, lowering to meet Mydei’s gaze.

“…I have always been partial to the dawn.”

Okhema is burning.

Mydei knows it like Strife’s own rage. He feels it before the sky parts and he sees how the once golden streets run black.

He’d lost the Flame Reaver’s trail somewhere near Styxia, and by the time Mydei picked it up again, the creature had already arrived at the city’s south gate. Mydei senses it isn’t them that caused this. They are an opportunist. A vulture. A starved hyena. Was it Aquila, then? That capricious, vindictive eye? Had the Titan despised them so that tearing the veil of the sky down tore the city open, too?

Maybe it didn’t matter who or what had thrown Okhema into chaos. The Dawn Device, after a millennium of protection, has failed.

Fear ran a rampant course through the Holy City, like a flame through dry underbrush. The air hums with it, and a part of Mydei’s heart thrums along in a contented, skipping beat. Strife revels in battle, but what they love most is the scent of blood, the thumping of a startled pulse beneath their teeth. Mydei hasn’t killed a truly living soul in a long time. The war hound in him hungers.

But the other part of Strife knows where their true enemy waits.

Dawncloud—ablaze with the setting sun. Where Kephale stood immovable still, scalded in twilight. Stoic to the very end.  

Mydei lands just in time to catch the Flame Reaver’s shattered blade. He doesn’t turn around. He can hardly spare the attention. The outlander, ever the foolhardy one, reaches out as if to touch his elbow. Dan Heng yanks them back and through the portal without a second glance.

He hears Phainon’s steps stutter, hesitating.

“Leave this to Castorice and me.”  

Go. Mydei doesn’t look at him. You damned, irreplaceable fool.

Trinnon shuts the passage behind them. Flame Reaver’s head crooks like a dog. Mydei’s blood sings, crackles, stabs deep into his golden-veined heart.

“It’s you and me,” he growls. “Right here, you fiend.”

Flame Reaver’s ghosts split apart. Five, ten. Too many to count. Mydei plants his feet and curls his hand into a bruising fist.

“Come and get me.”

The Way of Partings, the one road still left to Janusopolis, is long and empty.

Mydei walks without rest for days, only stopping to redirect a caravan of barefoot refugees away from the crumbling ruins to the north. They were kind and desperate and hungry. Mydei left the last of his food from Okhema—a parting gift from Tribbie of hardy bread and cured droma meat—with the eldest woman of the group. She’d lost her father and husband to a pack of roaming titankin and had tasted little more than mouthfuls of water and dried fruit for days. If she recognized him, she gave no indication. She bowed deeply before accepting the bundle of food and bursting into tears.

Mydei had taken this road more times than he could count. Aglaea often sent him and Castorice to search for survivors near Aidonia, or to escort caravans lost in the labyrinthine maze of Janus’s city through to Okhema’s radiance.

A statue of Talanton marks the crook in the path. Travelers would stop to deposit offerings of fruit, flowers, stone, and coin. Their scales had toppled and dropped sharply to one side long ago, as if to spite how empty they were.

Left leads east. Right leads to where Castrum Kremnos had settled in the south, far from the coastline where it once remained, the Lance of Fury Nikador’s sharpest fang jutting above the land and sea beneath.

If Mydei goes left, he would recognize the trees as they broke to the plain beyond, the abandoned villages and shrines. Nothing changes under Oronyx’s stagnancy. It would be as they’d left it all those years ago—the ten nights they’d sweat, laughed, and bled together, unchanged as a memory fragment. At the end of it, Phainon had tapped his dirtied knuckles to Mydei’s bare chest and wheezed truce? To which Mydei had elbowed him in the stomach and said: You wish.

Mydei touches the spot at his breast where Phainon had first laid his hand. He digs his fingertips in lightly. His skin is cool to the touch, his pulse slow and heavy.

He goes right.

Mydei thinks sparingly of that final day.

Oftentimes, he can’t recall how the sun felt on his skin—the Dawn Device is not a sun nor a star, but the warmth it casts over the city is real and radiant. Motes of light drift through the branches of the trees, and the small gardens the citizens are permitted grow well with enough water and shade. In moments when the fighting ebbs, in Castrum Kremnos’s cavernous silence, Mydei feels a breeze and remembers it, in pieces. Fragments of memory—tastes, sounds, scents.

He tries not to dwell.

But the less he dwells, the more he forgets. And without his memories, what else does he have? A guardian is nothing without a place to protect. A spear is still a spear, even when its wielder sets it down.

It rises like a slowly flooding room: the weight of Trianne and Trinnon perched on his shoulders, the trinket sellers' windchimes clinking in the breeze. The same breeze that blew Castorice’s gauzy tresses from her face on the palace’s east balcony. She laughed at his expense, but Mydei didn’t mind. It was far too rare a sound to silence.

The long walk. The heat beating on his bare shoulder. Their footsteps were out of time, Phainon’s steps lighter than his.

How silly it all seems now. Their petty arguments, Phainon’s stubbornness, his own churlish tongue. How they had circled one another, increasingly warm with the friction of rotation, only for the force to sling them an unbreachable distance away.

Mydei doesn’t wear the signet ring as intended—his gauntlets don’t allow for it. So he slips a string of thickened twine through and loops it over his wrist, the ring resting on the soft underside of his pulse.

“What about…this one?”

Mydei peers at where Phainon points. He studies the amphora for a cursory amount of time before he says:

“It’s nice.”

Phainon grimaces, sucking in a breath.

“What?” Mydei dares.

“It’s—clearly a fake, that’s what.”

Mydei grunts. “I didn’t know I was being tested.”

“Oh, it’s not a test, Mydei.” Phainon rocks on his heels, hands clasped at his back. “Next time I know to lower my expectations.”

“Kremnoan artisans were never much for pottery,” Mydei explains.

“Of course not. Do tell—” A pack of children rush by, parting around them like a school of fish. “—what were they partial to?”

“Knives,” Mydei says, allowing himself to smile. Phainon’s brow raises, blinking as he does when he is unsure how to react.

“Ah.”

“Ceremonial, mostly.”

“Naturally.”

He looks at the amphora again but sees no obvious or glaring indication. Not that he would know. This is Phainon’s specialty, anyway.

“So…how can you tell?”

Phainon looks at him briefly—surprised?— before he leans into the stall awning and says something to the shop owner, pointing once again. The merchant reaches to the top shelf and hands it to him with a nod, Phainon’s smile small and polite, but genuine. He steps back so he and Mydei are shoulder-to-shoulder once more—as well as out of ready earshot.

“They claim this is an original creation of Antigone, right?”

Mydei glanced at the small sign, parchment pasted together with glue, upon the shelf from where the amphora came. It’s as Phainon says.

“—Which would date this amphora to around, say, six-hundred years or so ago? Give or take a few decades. The shape of the amphora’s body and finish of the clay are consistent with this. However!”

Mydei’s eyes come back to the amphora itself, drawn by the flicker of Phainon’s fingers spreading over the smooth, tapered slope near the top.

“This kind of isolated, patterned border here wouldn’t be recognized by the Pephosian diocese as a standard for depictions of Mnestia until a hundred or so years after the death of Antigone and her school of craftsmen.”

Phainon’s hand is littered with marks; scars, old and new, some disappearing beneath the darkened leather of his vambrace. His fingers touch beneath the amphora border, gentler than Mydei thought possible.

“—And this red pigment wouldn’t come into use for another fifty years after that.”

Mydei realizes he is watching Phainon’s hands more closely than the topic of their conversation. He tears his gaze to further down the amphora where a lion and an oryx battle fiercely to the death.

“It is still old, then, but not as old as the seller claims?”

“Yes…” Phainon tocks his head back and forth. “But most importantly, it’s certainly not one of Antigone’s works. I swear they’ll slap her name on anything if it makes them a little extra coin.”

“Her name is that important?”

“It is if you want to catch a thief in action. A name makes all the difference, Mydei. What do we have without them?”

Mydei allows himself one last glance to Phainon’s hands, still cupping the amphora with the utmost care.

“Hmph. I see.”

He feels Phainon watching him back, but does not call him on it. Mydei never has before—what good would it do them were he to start now? Still, he hears the smile in Phainon’s voice as he breaks the quiet:

“Now you know.”

“Yes.” Mydei huffs, lifting his face to Phainon’s so their eyes finally meet. “Now I know.”

He attempts, more than a few times, to venture into the depths of the black tide himself. Mydei wades in until the air’s too thick to breathe, until it clogs his throat like mud. He kills as many as he can before clawing his way out. He stumbles from the void and into Oronyx’s Evernight, sometimes falling, other times not. If he stays long enough for the corruption to take its toll, he takes a knife to the thick artery in his leg. At least then his death is quick and painless.

Mostly, he stays close to wherever the black tide laps, shifting his position to dispatch where the waves break accordingly. The creatures of the black tide are all the same: twisted and unwell approximations of what they once were in life. They die bloodlessly, without a sound.

There is one constant in the shifting miasma of the black tide, at least: them.

The Flame Reaver’s light; not just on their feet, but in their presence. The air around them lies still and stagnant, cooler the closer Mydei draws—to plant his fist, to shatter their knee. Sometimes their movements are agile, dexterous, and speak to years upon years of training. Other times they are sluggish and erratic, and Mydei parries them as easily as he would a child.

And there lies the crux of the problem: he never knows which version of the Flame Reaver he’ll meet. A sense of familiarity grows—one he shudders to think of. Perhaps a part of him has come to expect the routine of a daily spar, but the Flame Reaver is a monster born of the tide, a nameless and forgotten soul the same as all that pass through its blackened corruption. It’s tenacity and the way it holds a sword are nothing to the identity that’s been erased beneath.

All the while, Mydei never quite shakes the feeling that he’s dancing with a ghost.

His teleslate works.

Barely.

If flickering to thready life once every handful of days translates to function—and at the end of an unending night, Mydei supposes it does.

He tries to send word of the black tide’s movements, of when and where the Flame Reaver appears to be lingering. It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing. Acclimating to the full force of Nikador’s power takes time, but once he feels the roll of thunder through his blood, the lightning a thin second skin over his arms, Mydei knows that at least the Kremnoans will have a way to hear him.

The teleslate is another story. His messages, no matter how condensed, fail to send regardless of any factor of time or recipient. He stares at the slew of unsent messages beneath Phainon’s name, rotting and gathering dust. They start simple enough.

It is cloudy tonight. Not many titankin left in the city.

Have you eaten yet today?

Movement from the south, mostly. Killed three hordes of those creatures before they finally retreated.

Failed to deliver.

Failed to deliver.

Failed to deliver.

Eventually, he grows tired of reading the words; of Phainon’s unknowing silence.

So, Mydei sends one message and one alone: once a day, or the approximation of it. Each death, each long drag back to the arms of the Castrum is a reminder. He taps each letter with methodical practice; until the movement is so routine it soothes his wavering nerves.

To: Phainon

You may call upon me, should you ever need me.

But the messages never go through—and Phainon never does.

They only speak once; he and the Reaver of the Deepest Dark.

Speak might be a strong word, considering that—for once—Mydei is the one who does all the talking.

He crushes them beneath a spear of red upon the cliff face, their robe the same crow black as the stone. Trapped, at least for now. They always found a way through with that portal of theirs, but Mydei had learned after so many battles that they wouldn’t use it as they pleased—which probably meant they couldn’t. In this way, the two of them played a game of cat and mouse. Mydei pursued them, defeated them—and eventually the Flame Reaver escaped, and the hunt began all over again. Usually, once he’s smashed them to a satisfying pulp, Mydei leaves the corpse to whatever fate comes to it. For all he knows, it’s just another shadow.

This time, though, his curiosity bests him.

Mydei steps over the craggy outcropping. It’s raining tonight—had pelted them for hours before letting up. Crystal rises, crackles, and shatters beneath each step of his feet, the rest sweeping out before him into a sharp, arching crescent. The Flame Reaver lies skewered, struggling almost apathetically against the shards piercing their chest.

They stop as Mydei draws closer. The two of them have never been so near without their weapons drawn. Mydei feels the breath in his lungs. Hair sticks to his cheek with moisture, his braid limp and tangled.

“Who are you?”

It’s the first thing to his lips, cold with the rain. The Flame Reaver stills. The rise and fall of their chest moves unabated, as if the crystal weren’t there at all.

“Why?” Mydei asks, too softly to be heard by any living soul. “Why do this?”

Pointless. All pointless. They are questions he doesn’t expect any answers to, and meaningless to their objective. It doesn’t matter who the cloaked swordsman is. Only that they must be stopped.

Yet to this, the Flame Reaver cocks their head.

“My…” they breathe in that ghastly timbre. “…deimos. Mydeimos…”

Mydeimos. Mydeimos. Mydeimos.

There’s a long, black cable dangling from the center of the circular room at Castrum Kremnos’s heart.

It’s nearly as thick as his forearm, soft and damp to the touch. Mydei guesses it was once woven from wool, but by that logic it should have long rotted away, and after attempting to peel the interlocked threads apart with little success, he gives up.

Pulling it, after more than a few attempts, scattered when he found the motivation, peels apart a layer of darkness that had fallen over the room’s curved walls as the years passed.

The shelves stretch overhead, disappearing into the darkness above. Many are still mostly full; slates buckled together with cracked leather belts, books bound in sheepskin and painted linen covers. Even older are the loose-leaf rolls of scrolls stacked in piles on the far dip in the tower wall. Chunks of emptiness occupy the shelves where those fleeing the city in its final days attempted to save what they could. Much had been left behind.

Thanks to the fortress’s defense mechanisms, no looters or raiders had managed to infiltrate the Royal Library—and those unfortunate enough to find a way inside likely never found a way out.

Not every night of his exile is spent pushing back the tide’s encroachment.

On quiet evenings, he spends his time cleaning the library.

“—Mydei…Mydei, talk to me—”

He coughs. Sputters. Chokes. Blood pools in his chest and out his mouth.

“—Keep the pressure there, Lord Phainon—”

The noise is garbled, every voice distorted, as if spoken down a long and winding pipe.

“…Are you sure this is enough, Hyacine?”

“It will have to be.”

Silence. His breath, ragged, sounds far, far away. Above, the shadows creep like a hand over Phainon’s face, sinking into the creases of his worried brow. Right—they’d been ambushed. The titankin had poured from the broken road above them without warning.

“Mydei? Mydeimos?”

“M…Mhm.”

Phainon smiles, but it doesn’t stick. There’s dirt all over his pale face. “Still with us, right?”

“Uh-huh.” Mydei clenches his jaw so hard his teeth hurt. “You should’ve…taken the shot.”

Phainon stares at him in silence before he barks a disbelieving laugh. “You are not gonna let that go, are you?”

“You keep hesitating, Deliverer—” He spits, the blood thick and metallic, dribbling between his teeth. It stains Phainon’s sleeves, spills from between his fingers pressed hard to Mydei’s abdomen. “It’s a bad habit—gh—”

An iridescent mist springs and spreads behind Phainon’s snowy hair like a halo.

“Perhaps we save this conversation for later, Lord Mydei?” Hyacine chimes.

“Had I taken the shot, the whole walkway could’ve collapsed!” Phainon’s in his face now, leaning over him. The pressure at Mydei’s torso increases. “What would you have done?!”

“Lord Phainon—”

Mydei chokes, wheezes. “Let me die already—”

“No,” Phainon grits. “Oh, no, no. You aren’t going anywhere.” His frown deepens, flowers into anguish. “I held that shot to keep you from harm, and then somehow, you—you found it anyway! I refuse to add your name to the list of casualties, Mydeimos. Lady Hyacine—?”

A pause. “Yes. I believe he’s out of the woods for now.”

Mydei wants to laugh at him—the Deliverer, of all people, lecturing him on recklessness. But Mydei can’t even do that. There’s too much blood in his lungs.

All Mydei can do is close his eyes at the resolute line of Phainon’s mouth and accept his absolute, singular defeat.

The war rages. Whimpers. Rises and rages once more.

The black tide’s corruption isn’t unlike any other ocean’s erosion, the salt eating steadily at the land. The only difference between it and the sea is what comes out of the waves.

Mydei fights. Dies. Rises and fights again.

He wakes in the same place he fell, his body whole but his soul weary. Hours slip into days and fall into weeks, months, without his notice. He’s still here. Still alive.

Krateros had told him once, as a boy: a shield, no matter how battered, will hold until it splinters.

Most places Castrum Kremnos lands are surrounded by fallow fields.

Where once fig orchards shaded the hills, there is nothing but barren branches. Olive trees, long dead and churned over by thousands of marching feet, lie with their roots upturned like spilled ink against the moonlight.

Some days—or perhaps weeks—after meeting Castorice in the Sea of Souls, small white flowers begin to bloom in patches.

Mydei finds them in the cracked foundations of Castrum Kremnos’s abandoned streets, discovers them hiding under the crumpled bodies of titankin in the shallow hills beyond the entrance to the city. He doesn’t know their name; for all he knows, they do not have one. Their delicate petals are white as bone, oblong, like teeth. He doesn’t dare pick them. Even as the nights grow colder, and the flowers wither beneath the Evernight moon’s uncaring stare—he cannot bring himself to do it.

Castorice had told him of Anaxagoras; his hypothesis, and subsequent gamble. Something had collapsed within him at the proposal, however absurd others might’ve called it. The God of Strife, holding one softened place in their heart for a moment in a garden, on the road, sprawled across the sparring courtyard stone. It was fragile, this something, whatever it had been. Shaped suspiciously like Phainon’s smile. A careful structure Mydei had only just begun to piece together, as a form of shelter.

But in those flowers Castorice’s words linger, despite his acceptance, and Mydei knows without seeking confirmation:

There would be no library. There never was.

Mydeimos no longer sleeps. Nor does he dream.

He does rest, from time to time. In the empty state rooms where his mother held court. In the old royal stables, despite the mildewed hay and floors stained red with clay. Mydei would rest his untiring back to the wall, or the columns in the grand hall, or atop the porticos looking out across the ruined land. He read, in a tablet left by one of the King’s Aegis, that the view of the sea from the castle’s west window was unparalleled in its beauty. Sometimes he goes there to survey the black tide’s ebb and flow across the plain.

One night, he curls atop the Throne of Bones, where Eurypon had nearly breathed his last. In truth, he’d died some few steps away after Mydei frightened him off the seat. His father had tumbled backward, scrambling and hissing. Spitting at him, as if in a frenzy. Only when Mydei drove the blade in a second time did his hostility crumble, and he began to spew his nonsense under Mydei’s boot.

But that was all many years ago now. Mydei barely remembers the mad king’s face anymore. The throne is ice against his cheek where he rests on its arm.

He had always thought of Castrum Kremnos as a place that cared for him but never loved him. On the throne of every Kremnoan king of old, Mydei realizes it to be true.

Mydei shuts his eyes. He allows the stream of whispered prayers to swell within his mind. Prayers for protection, for safety, and most of all, for mercy, all given in the unfamiliar voice of a stranger.

When he opens his eyes again, a blue glow cuts through the gloom of the room’s cavernous maw.

A nymph. Its opaque wings glint as they flap, idling. It made its landing a breath from where Mydei’s hand curled—a loosened fist, for once. Mydei watches it for a moment and wonders distantly how one of Aglaea’s golden threads had made its way out here. For what purpose?

Mydei reaches out a hand. The nymph bats its gossamer wings, startling Mydei’s breath away when it forgoes his hand and lands lightly at his cheek. He hardly has time to react; before Mydei can move again, the nymph is gone, the warmth of its touch lingering like the lightest parting kiss.

He’s walking the windblown battlement near Kremnos’s peak when a familiar voice calls his name for the last and only time.  

“…Mydeimos…”

Mydei stops, the heel of his foot lifted. He rocks it back down with a click.

“…Lance of Fury, Wound of the World. I offer you this prayer in the hopes that…”

The parishioner sighs. Mydei doesn’t dare move. He doesn’t breathe for fear of startling him.

“Hah…who am I kidding? I don’t even know if you can hear me. If you’d even want to listen to a paltry prayer such as mine.”

It had been so long—exactly how much time had passed Mydei doesn’t know, but even his divinity couldn’t hide how his heart beat harder, climbing into his throat.

“Mydeimos,” Phainon says again. “I don’t know if you’ll hear this, but…my messages still won’t go through, and there’s something important I think you must know. Something I…more than anything, wish I could tell you, face-to-face.”

Mydei’s weakened leg wobbles, sinks down. He steadies a hand at the wall, the granite cold through the soft underside of his gauntlets. When had he last removed them? He no longer recalls.

“Aglaea is dead. Hyacine has confirmed it.” Phainon pauses. “She was killed by Caenis.”

The nymph. The prophecy had finally caught up to her.

“She…Lady Aglaea has left the leadership of Okhema to me in her absence. I’ve tried to rally the people from this tragedy, but—the fact is that they're…terrified. And I can’t blame them for that. Hyacine makes her final preparations to confront Aquila with such resolve, and even Lady Cipher has agreed to aid us in protecting Kephale’s coreflame should it come to it. And I…”

…I keep wondering what you’d do, or what you’d say. Not that I expect you to have all the answers—you’re not that clever—but…you certainly have more than me.”

Mydei nearly laughs out loud at that. Nearly.  

“So…” Phainon says, softly, as if somehow even further away: “If you can hear me…”

Mydei closes his eyes. Strife’s power swells within him steadily as a thunderhead over warm water.

“No way.”

He’s so hard to hear over the clamor. Mydei opens his eyes and strains to catch him again.

“Thunder…” An awestruck whisper. “…with not a cloud in the sky…ha…”

Silence. So quiet, Mydei thinks to leap from the palisade and onto the ledge far below. It would be a quick death, in all likelihood. Maybe, in those brief moments before the River of Souls came to claim him, Mydei would recall Phainon’s voice once more, and he would not lose it so inexplicably.

But then, Phainon speaks:

“Bet you can’t do it again.”

Mydei does it again. Phainon laughs, and it is an arrow piercing his heart. Mydei tries to picture him, face upturned to Okhema’s ever-sunny sky. Even after all this time, Mydei sees him as if they had visited yesterday.

“You know you were in my dream last night.”

Mydei huffs, smiling, disbelieving.

“And before you send down the Lance of Fury to smite me, it wasn’t like it sounds. I promise I would never do anything…unbecoming of your station, even in the realm of dreams. Although maybe…you wouldn’t mind. I guess I don’t know.”

Somewhere, beneath the cold casing of divinity dulling his senses, Mydei’s heart aches, as if squeezed by an invisible fist between his ribs.

“You know what you told me?”

Phainon pauses, as if waiting for Mydei to answer. Mydei sends another roll of thunder, gentler than the last.

“Remember how, before you left for Castrum Kremnos, we said all that stuff about the next life? Well, dream-you has since informed me that plans have changed, and we’ll see each other again in this one anyway. It’s a shame, really. My Kremnoan is getting better, but not as good as I hoped. I thought I’d have a little more time to prepare, you know.”

Mydei snorts.

“You’re probably laughing at me now, aren’t you?”

Mydei is—but this time, he lets the silence hide him.

Phainon sees through it, regardless. He laughs, too, hard enough that Mydei hears it fade to a chuckle, then a hiccupping huff, then nothing at all.  

“Mydei…”

He waits, throat closing. Phainon doesn’t say anything for what feels an eternity. When he does, it’s barely a whisper, breathed like a secret into the wind.

“I miss you.”

Mydei looks out over the surrounding sea of darkness, the city utterly still beneath him. His eyes sting. The wind howls. He forces himself to breathe again.

“I…”

The word’s nothing more than a pathetic, hoarse syllable. He doesn’t remember the last time he spoke aloud—when what passed his lips was anything more than a cry into a titankin’s crumbled visage around his fist, or a whine of dampened pain as his life slipped away.

“I miss you…too…” he rasps, every other word breaking.

Phainon can’t hear him, of course. Mydei knows this.

“…I have to go.”

“Deliv…erer…”

He knows this. And yet…

“I know I’ve said it before…probably more than once, but…try not to die too many times.”

“…Deliverer…wait…”

His throat burns, as if on fire.

“I’m holding you to that promise, alright? Even if it was only made in a dream.”

“Phainon…”

He calls his name again. Again, and again. As if in this moment of weakness, the laws of the universe would reverse, and Mydei could summon Phainon back to him, instead. A god, begging for one worshipper’s attention. Every Nikador before him, surely, would laugh in scorn and shame.

But it doesn’t matter. The only answer Mydei receives is silence.  

Phainon stares at him, one foot in the grave. His blue eyes, tinged by the bleeding sky, reflect a hurt Mydei has never seen before. In all their years at each other’s sides, Mydei thought he’d seen every facet of the Deliverer’s wavering heart. He thought he understood.

What he doesn’t understand is why Phainon remains before him now. Their dice have all been cast. The last formations of fate are moving. The moment’s hardly more than a held breath, but Mydei wants to shout at him, curse him. I believe in you. Damn you. I’ve always believed in you. How dare you hesitate now?

But the last, selfish corner of his heart remembers what divinity should not: the warmth of Phainon’s thigh pressed to his, the balmy scent of sunlight, fingers tugging at the braid by his ear. There’d be no more days like those in the garden or the markets. Every afternoon spent in the bath belonged to another world; one that, soon, would no longer exist. And now, they’re all out of time.

I am glad to have met you, Phainon of Aedes Elysiae.

I was happy, Mydei wants to tell him. I was happy just standing at your side.  

The last glimpse Mydei steals is of the sun mark on Phainon’s throat, flickering as he turns away.

Become the hero you are meant to be, and do not look back.

“Go.”

On its side, the pillar is wide enough for a phalanx to march across without breaking rank.

It’s ridged and broken in the middle, crumbling off the side of what he guessed was once an aqueduct to the city lower in the valley. Black tide gnaws at its pulped insides, like scavengers to a severed limb. When upright, the pillar would’ve reached higher than one could see with the naked eye. A spear, intended to poke at one of Aquila’s many heavenly eyes.

It marks the edge of Mydei’s self-drawn border, on the fingertip of Castrum Kremnos’s reach. Beyond the pillar lies the darkened, shifting wasteland of the tide’s corruption. The Evernight’s inky sky bruises a muddy puce, and the blackened ground bleeds, bursting in pustules of fractured red.

But at Mydei’s back, the wind still blows.

The scent of grit and fire. The acridity of the forge, embers that have burned for a hundred, hundred years. Fire. Marble. The nursery, lichen-eaten and green, where Gorgo once held him in her arms. Home.

The wind gusts roll home even further away.  

The undying sun. The sweetness of bread smeared with figs and honey. Water carving veins through the stone. A roof in the markets from where the sky stretched forever, and his name became two syllables instead of three, where he bruised but never bled. Him.

Mydei stands at the edge of shadow until the west wind dies. He draws his last breath of uncorrupted air and, without hesitation, steps into the boundless dark.