Note: Warning here for implied body horror and implied necrophilia. All the other notes are on the Ao3 version (I'm Aurumite over there).
Ephraim is a boy of so many talents that Lyon can't help but be jealous. He runs like a stag and fights like a lion, he can ride horses and throw javelins and take hard hits without coughing. Eirika is kept away from such things, nose against daily needlepoint and lap harp, but she's not particularly good at either, and Lyon sees that her strengths are the same as her brother's. She does not tire during games of chase; if anything, they bring a sparkle to her eyes. The moment they're away from chaperones she swings one leg over her saddle, guiding so well with her knees she hardly needs reins. Ephraim is teaching her the sword as nothing but a hobby, so now she, too, can best Lyon without breaking a sweat.
All Lyon has is his magic and his lyre, and he knows neither is very princely. Neither will make him strong and dependable for his people. But they are easy for him, the ancient language and music's so similar in their cadences and layers. And he feels worthwhile when he plays for them. Certain chords can stop Ephraim's fidgeting and soothe the fire from his eyes, make him pay complete attention. Perfect fourth intervals make Eirika smile without fail, and deceptive cadences part her lips slightly. They spend many afternoons out riding, and many running through the gardens until he wheezes, but just as many in his rooms, him curled in the window seat and them on the floor, resting their heads against his legs while they listen to him play.
The plague that floods Renais that winter is unprecedented.
Lyon is hardly given time to worry before the messenger from Renais arrives, bearing news of the deaths and notice of the funeral of King Fado's children.
"Both?" Father asks quietly from the throne.
Lyon, standing by his side, must grip the gilded back of the chair to keep from swooning. Of course, both. The twins share clothes and use the same comb, they eat off each others' plates. Lyon can't get air, though his breaths come faster and faster. There's something clawing up his throat and it burns his eyes and nose and he gags so hard on it that Father turns to look.
Father is to depart that night, plague or no plague, to go comfort his oldest and dearest friend. He says Lyon should not accompany him, not with his fits, how prone he is to infections. Lyon knows he should be understanding to a man so likely to meet Fado's same miserable, childless fate, but he follows him down the corridors and begs nonetheless, and when that doesn't sway him, throws his thin shoulders back.
"King Fado is a good and kind man," he says. "Let me offer him my condolences. I must try to be strong—it's what they would want of me—" He can feel himself breaking already but forces himself onward. "I have to say goodbye to them. I have to see their grave. I know the flowers they loved—"
He can't continue without sobbing so he bites his lip until it bleeds. Father hesitates in his stride.
"We mustn't tarry," he says. "What do you need to pack?"
"My lyre alone. For comfort."
"Bring a servant, too. Someone you can lean on."
Lyon knows just the man.
"My assistant," he says. "Knoll."
Slush litters the ground as Lyon forces his way outside, caking his soft boots with mud. Far away, thunder rumbles. The rain comes down hard and peppered with shards of ice.
He hadn't been able to look at Fado after all, when he and Father were ushered into the great hall. The warrior king looked so old and frail, and greeted them so quietly. There was too much of Eirika in his eyes and too much of Ephraim in his chin. Lyon began to shake and then to cry, humiliating himself before everyone present, over-aware of the clanking of armour as Father's retinue and Fado's advisors shifted uncomfortably. For his first visit to Renais, he knew such behaviour was inexcusable. Worst of all, the thumb that wiped his tears away was not Father's or Knoll's but Fado's own, comforting him over his dead children, the gift Fado had given to him, and Lyon was so ashamed that for a flickering second he wanted Fado dead, too.
(It's merciful, isn't it?) He thought it then, he knows he thought it, but he's not certain it was his thought. As he struggles to the gravesite, warmth bleeds from his pocket.
Ephraim and Eirika would not grieve so messily, were it him. They would remain noble and composed in their sorrow, perhaps holding hands when they needed to, Ephraim's back rigid and Eirika's head elegantly bowed. They would not weep for him in public.
(Would they even do it in private?)
If this doesn't succeed, he has to go back to Grado, and face the dry summers and harsh winters alone. He'll always be alone. No more visits to look forward to, only decades of illnesses and shaking fits stretching before him. There will be no more hard embraces, no more gentle fingers in his hair until someone is forced to wed him—and perhaps not even then. He will become Emperor without a single ally. He will feel this ragged slash of pain every time he must heft a sword or mount a horse. Every single time he plays the lyre he loved.
He's sick, too, in his own way. He knows it. The terror since the news of their deaths has been ceaseless, beating like fever in his brain. He's had countless bouts of panic and his chest pains him. But he knows what will cure him. Nothing else will work.
"Prince Lyon," Knoll says as they reach the elaborate marble tombs. They're nestled together, identical in every respect, but for the names engraved upon them. They're so small. Ephraim will never have the height he was supposed to, nor Eirika the curves she'd so wanted. The flowers he placed upon them are already rain-flattened and dying. He'd throw himself down and die amongst them, if it did not mean having to choose which tomb to lie within. "Prince Lyon, I beg you to reconsider."
"Open them," Lyon orders, and pulls his lyre from beneath his oiled cloak.
The spell is long and grueling, both invocation and litany. By the end of it, the magic they've poured from their bodies leaves them panting and covered in cold sweat. They've squeezed all the blood they could from their slashed palms. Each swallow is agony, for the powerful words have badly burned their throats and tongues. Knoll's lips have blistered. The heat in Lyon's pocket has burned his hip and thigh as well.
And then it quits, and It is in his head, rumbling deeper and rougher than the thunder:
Hundreds and hundreds of years in Grado, and never have I heard a lyre played as sweetly as yours, Prince.
"If I move you," he says, "you must grant me one single request."
Agreed.
He knows what he has to do. It hurts, balancing the instrument in his wounded left hand, but his right is whole and he's quick to pluck the strings, playing for the first time since his friends were taken. The melody is slow and meandering. It searches, wanders high and low. It pauses over an uncertain fermata. It breaks. He pours all his anguish into it, all his desire, and all he can envision is the sunlight on their hair as they rounded the garden wall, running for him.
When he opens his eyes, Knoll is crying, and the hot, heavy presence in his head is very charmed. The voice can not even try to lie. They both know Lyon feels Its pleasure.
Why come to me with this request? You're the most skillful necromancer in centuries, and still hardly more than a child.
"Because I don't want them risen as puppets. I want them back."
Then release me, It whispers. The Presence strokes down his neck, pools Its heat low in his stomach. A flash of light goes off in his head, so bright and good that Lyon shudders. Let me have you, and we can work together. I'll knit them back to their bodies and everything will be the way it was. The way it should have been.
But Lyon shakes his head. He's read the histories.
"I want their souls alone," he says, "as payment for my song. I can handle the knitting myself."
The pulse of displeasure shoots through his mind like lightning, and it hurts.
Why go to such lengths? Did you not know that if your song displeased me, I would have eaten you alive, in little bites?
"They are my only friends," he says.
No, comes the voice, discordant and baritone. They were your only audience.
Lyon's ears sting and then tickle; they're bleeding. He drops his lyre and claps his hands over them as the voice keeps on:
But I promised you a reward, and so I will return them to you.
"You will?" His voice catches, breaks, high and desperate.
There is only one condition.
Knoll stays behind in Renais to arrange the twins' journey in secret, claiming to have caught a cold from the damp weather. He does not want to risk Prince Lyon catching it, of course. He will meet them in Grado when he is well again.
For Lyon, the wait is agony. He has no real proof of success besides a hastily-sent letter in Knoll's cramped handwriting, assuring Lyon of health, vitality, and a mere week before his return. So Lyon prepares what he can: forbidding servants to enter his rooms under the excuse of beginning delicate magical experiments, making up comfortable beds in his study, setting Ephraim's by the window so he can have fresh air and piling a few romances from the library by Eirika's pillows.
On the seventh day, Knoll slips in unannounced. He says nothing. Trembling, Lyon shuts his eyes and the door closes, a swish of robes announcing Knoll's departure.
And then his hands are being held between two sets of others, one small and soft, the other long-fingered and calloused, and his breath catches in his throat.
"Knoll told us everything," Eirika's voice murmurs. "You saved us, Lyon."
"We're sorry to have left you," Ephraim says against his ear, meaning it's Eirika's lips suddenly pressing kisses to his temple and cheek. "But we're here now."
Their arms twine around his waist, and Lyon feels he's drowning. He weeps but they don't let go, except to brush his tears away, and he reaches for their faces too. They're not crying. Of course they're not. He can hardly tell the difference between them with his eyes shut: same straight noses, same sharp jaws, same thick hair. But they're not empty husks; they're warm and alive under his hands, and he can feel their pulses at their throats, their breath on his fingertips.
Dizzy, he tries to pull away, to blindly lead them to their rooms.
"Why won't you look at us?" Ephraim asks, his smile in his voice. "Didn't you miss us? Don't you want to see?"
"I can't," Lyon says. "And I can't say why. Just trust me, please."
So long as he doesn't look at them, he can have them. It's a steep price, but one he was more than willing to pay. After all, he can still hear and touch and smell and— taste, he thinks, but stops himself.
"You're back," he says. "And that's what matters."
At first the twins ask after Renais and their father, as Lyon expected.
"You can't go home," he says, reaching carefully for their hands as they sit at his table, wishing he could see their expressions. His eyes are bound in black cloth in case they open accidentally. "Your poor lord father...I witnessed his grief in person. He had changed completely. Such a tragedy is difficult to bear, especially at his age, and if you both return, I'm afraid of what the shock and confusion will do to him."
They take the news better than he thought they would, agreeing almost immediately that they don't want to put their father's health at risk or alarm the nation that attended their funeral.
"It's just you and us, then, Lyon. We'll stay with you forever. You'll take care of us, won't you?"
That was too easy, he starts to think, but the swell of joy and pride pinches the doubt out as quickly as wet fingers on a candle's wick.
The days that follow are perfect.
He has duties to attend to, as the prince, but each time he rushes back to his rooms and binds his eyes, they're waiting for him. At first they spend his spare time simply feeling each other, making sure they haven't all gone utterly mad, fingertips gingerly tracing limbs and locks of hair, pushing past lips to count teeth in Lyon's paranoia. Once they've been convinced, everything returns to exactly the way it was, just as Lyon had worked for. Sometimes Eirika pulls a book from his shelf and reads aloud for them, and sometimes they play cards or chess against each other, one twin always on Lyon's team to be his eyes.
His happiest times are the idle afternoons he spends in the window seat, playing the lyre for them. He wishes he could see their faces, their reactions to the music. As he plucks the strings he thinks of all the things he will never know again: the shades of their hair, the slight sway and strut of their respective walks, the motions they make with their hands. Eirika's vibrant blushes. Ephraim's beautiful smile.
And he's so tempted, but he won't look. He won't lose them again.
But it was foolish to think he could keep them cooped up forever, like exotic birds. Ephraim is the first to get restless. Lyon hears his pacing in his right ear, his left, his right.
"Just a short walk?" he's asking. "What I wouldn't give for a breath of fresh air. And gods, if I could only get my hands around a lance."
"You can't," Lyon insists. "Everyone in the palace knows your face. They think you're dead. You'll frighten them."
A dismissive noise with Ephraim's tongue. "I'm tired of being stuck in here."
"Please. Ephraim." He's up now, reaching, stumbling over the edge of a rug. "Stay. Shall I play for you?"
"I'll only be gone a moment. I can stay hidden."
The golden latch clicks. Lyon dives for the sound, catching two handfuls of hard muscle under silk; not the fine Renais wool he remembers, for the twins have been wearing his clothes.
(And he imagines it often, both of them draped in the very layers that kept him warm before, Eirika's white neck with lavender and lilac beneath it, her sleeves billowing like the clouds at dawn when streaked thin by high winds; Ephraim in powerful black, cloak falling like cold rain from his shoulders, falling and falling to his nimble feet—)
—falling like Lyon as his knees thud against the floor, as Ephraim tries to pull away. He's so much stronger but Lyon clutches his leg anyway, even though if Ephraim truly wants to leave, he'll go.
"You mustn't! They'll take you away!"
"Brother," Eirika urges from behind him, "listen to Lyon. He knows what's best."
A heavy sigh. The latch clicks again. Ephraim shakes his leg free and Lyon senses him sit beside him.
"Someday?" Ephraim asks with longing in his voice. "Their memories will fade in time, won't they? And then Eirika and I can go out into the sun again? Promise me, Lyon."
"Someday," Lyon says, so fervently that it's nearly a spell, and he can almost feel its heat in his mouth. "I promise."
"Not like that. Look me in the eye and tell me, man to man."
"You know that I can't look. I asked you not to question that."
"He asked us not to question that," Eirika repeats.
"You always take his side," says Ephraim, a little sulkily, but his shoulder leans against Lyon's after a moment. "All right, then. I'll behave. Will you play, like you said? And can we leave the window open?"
"The window open?" says Eirika.
Lyon breath quivers as he sighs it out. "Yes, of course."
The blindfold becomes harder and harder to keep on.
At first it's only for tiny reasons, twins calling "Lyon, look!" like they used to and gigging together when they realize their mistake. He laughs too but doesn't mean it. Eirika is reading to them from a very ancient epic, these days, and she stumbles over some of the older words. He can't help her, though her attempts make him set his teeth. Ephraim would enjoy the story more if it went faster. Lyon feels his knee bouncing, a constant tremor across his mattress.
(He grips it with his hand to still it, firm flesh and solid bone and he insists embrasure, not embouchure and she repeats ah, embrasure, embrasure, ah)
Eirika mentions one morning that she misses her old clothes, her skirts and golden jewellery. That evening Lyon brushes the must from one of his mother's finest gowns—red, with cut sleeves and gold embroidery—and sneaks it back to his rooms for her. It hurts that he can't see her face when he presents the gift, but her lips against his cheek are enough.
"May I wear it now?" she asks. "Ephraim, turn away."
There's a soft rustle of cloth dropping to the floor, a second, a third. His breath catches and he reaches for Ephraim's hand, so they can hurry for another room.
"Lyon, stay," she says, laughing. He hears the click of the twins' door closing. "A lady can't get into her dress alone, and you've given me no handmaid." He stammers but her voice goes low and husky— "You can't see, so there's no harm in it."
He hears her pull the gown on. She takes his hands and guides him and he finds rows of tiny hooks at the small of her back. He's clumsy but learns to fasten them eventually, sweeping her hair over her shoulder as he works.
"Am I beautiful?" she teases before he's finished, while her neck and shoulders are still bare beneath his fingertips.
He wants to see the hue on her, how well it fits her little waist, the expanse of her skin, taut, soft, smooth, healthy, whole, his doing; he could tear the blindfold off and tell her the truth
(The truth. Knoll mentions a pale pallor sometimes, perhaps greenish and Lyon silences him with a look. They aren't ill any longer. The truth is)
He keeps his trembling fingers on the hooks, murmurs, "Always, Eirika."
"Always," she repeats, just a whisper.
Unsurprisingly, Ephraim is even more of a trial.
Eirika retires early one night, eyes tired from reading, but Lyon and Ephraim remain on his bed, tossing old memories back and forth and laughing together. Lyon can't see the candles guttering out but imagines it well enough. He lies on his back and wonders if Ephraim is doing the same. When he casts his hand toward his voice he meets the curve of his ribs: Ephraim is lying on his side, facing him. Lyon smiles.
For a moment there's silence, and then Ephraim murmurs, "All the candles have died."
"It makes no difference to me, but you can re-light them if you like."
Another pause. Ephraim shifts.
"You've done your best for me and Eirika. We've wanted for nothing, while we've been here. But there's one thing I really miss."
"Your spear. I know."
"Besides that. I just can't stop thinking that...since we've been reunited, I've never once seen your whole face. Your eyes. It's a silly thing, isn't it? But it makes it hard to tell what you're thinking."
"Eirika's eyes are the nicest. You can look at hers anytime you like."
"But I liked yours best."
Lyon stills. Ephraim shifts again and suddenly there's a knee between his legs and palms pressing down on either side of his shoulders and his breath hitches and his hips—
"It's very dark," Ephraim says quietly. "My eyes have adjusted, but yours haven't. If you take off the blindfold, just for a moment...I can see you and you won't have seen me."
"It's a poor idea," but his voice carries no conviction. A strong hand eases under his head, pulls loose the knot of his blindfold, peels it from his face. He keeps his eyes screwed shut.
"Just for a moment?" and Lyon can hear the smile in his voice, that arrogant smile that always gets its way and Ephraim's brow is pressed to his, "a moment," and his breath is on his face, "a moment," and
(Something's off, Prince Lyon, something's just slightly wrong
Hold your tongue or I will cut it out
and Knoll's ringed eyes widen and Lyon hastens for him
I beg your forgiveness, I don't mean it, it's just been—
—stressful, Prince Lyon, of course, of course)
He jerks, shoves Ephraim off him. Ephraim laughs like he's staged some elaborate joke while Lyon fumbles for his blindfold in the blankets and re-ties it tightly.
It almost feels deliberate, like they're testing him. But no, his friends would never
Days pass. The little games ebb, make way for more amusements
(Prince Lyon of Grado, lose this battle of wits? Hardly)
He arrives to the basement spell room tardy and with swollen lips and can only imagine the state of his throat, like patches of violets on the roadside, like plague rash
His assistants are silent. The experiments and research continue as always, the soft flicker of turned pages, hiss of sand over stone tables to mimic the flow of time, scratch of quills. The air wavers, heady incense; he reads the same sentence of his tome over and over and over and over and and over and
"Your Highness" Knoll's mutter in his ear, "please listen. You can not see them, but I can."
(Oh, his eyes are useless but there is so much else left to him—) Knoll clutches his elbow—
"They do not eat. They do not sleep. I beg you—"
Lyon shakes him off, hard
This was not necromancy. They're alive
They're so warm.
It's the smell he notices first. It's faint, but dark and overripe. He checks again and again that day, nose pressing to Eirika's hair or the crook of Ephraim's neck.
"Lyon," they laugh, "what are you doing?"
"You both need to bathe." That's it. That's all. "Knoll will draw us hot water."
Knoll is silent when he's summoned.
Lyon closes the door to their room while they wash, shutting them off. Can't remove his blindfold even when alone. Just in case.
He crawls beneath his covers, huddles, judders, shakes his head into his pillow
They slip beside him when they've finished, skin heated and shirts soft, sighing
They smell of fine soaps and light perfumes and beneath it all, the stench, very slightly, still.
"Scrub harder next time," he orders.
"Yes, Lyon."
"Yes, Lyon."
Eventually the smell can't be ignored. It makes Lyon bite his cheek every time he re-enters his rooms, though the twins bathe twice a day. Knoll complains of it when he brings the water and their meals.
"They do not eat," Knoll says again, voice low, but when Lyon asks Eirika and Ephraim later, they laugh.
"Don't be silly. We ate everything. Everything. Everything."
Lyon can't deny, now, that something's wrong. It brings a sudden clarity to his thoughts, beats back the fever, the frenzy he's waded through since the day of their death—for a few days, until he catches a real fever, and his chest aches with every breath, and the world feels foggier than ever.
He ignores his assistants when they tell him to rest, for their research is vital. He ignores Knoll when he insists (soft, so soft, cowering, slavish) that something must be done. For the first time,
they need him.
This is his duty, and he must bear it. He is the one who brought Ephraim and Eirika back, and he must be the one to take care of them. He can handle the reeking, for what student of dark magic is not accustomed to the grotesque? His stomach is strong.
(and when it isn't, when he retches into the porcelain washing bowl at his bedside, when one twin holds his hair and the other rubs his back, he knows, he's quite sure it's only because of his illness)
They aren't faring well, either. They speak less, sometimes spending entire days uttering nothing more than Sister or Brother to each other. They make little groans in the night that wake him. Once Eirika murmurs, "It hurts," but when Lyon begs her to tell him what, where, she does not speak again. Once Ephraim whispers, "I want to go outside," and when Lyon reaches to squeeze his arm, to reassure, once-firm muscles give like wet clay beneath his hands.
"I will never let anything happen to you," he promises as he pats powder over their damp faces, "I will never," Ephraim has dislocated two fingers and he pops them back with great gentleness, "let anything," Eirika bubbles when she breathes and he tenderly swipes thick fluid from her lips with his thumb, "take you again."
(don't leave me alone)
He tries every magic he can think of: spells that wick moisture and stir blood, spells that animate limp bodies, spells that strengthen bone and heal skin sores. He even sneaks past Father MacGregor and into the sanctum where they keep Grado's Stone and reaches for its aura, sucks it deep into his lungs, and brings it back to his rooms, shining like gold over his teeth and tongue, to try the miracle-spell that healed the dying girl in Serafew.
It helps for a little while, but never for long.
He's not strong enough.
He hears the sanctum calling
"I want to take Ephraim outside," he tells Knoll that night and the man's breath grows ragged.
"No. No. It's impossible now."
"But I promised, I promised him..."
He can comfort Eirika, at least, while he thinks of something else, anything else, anything
but the tug the aura left between his ribs
On the edge of his bed he calls, "Bring me your hairbrush, dear friend. Let me dote on you."
She sits on his knees and he tends to her tangles, using the bristles, using his fingers. Ah, she says, relaxed and melancholy, Ah, ah. But then there's extra weight in his lap and his hand meets flesh and he realizes there's almost nothing left to play with, she sheds like a sick bird.
Am I beautiful, she whispers.
Always, whispers Lyon, and then Ephraim from the doorway, quietest of all,
Sister
and Lyon presses his forehead to the bare nape of her neck and weeps until his blindfold is soaked through.
He knows what he has to do now.
The stone pulses as he enters the sanctum that night, harder when he reveals the lyre beneath his cloak. The summoning spell comes easier than the last time, crackles and bursts through his mouth even before his blood splatters on the stone floor, and as if there needs to be any more incentive, as if It doesn't already know why he's come, he plays rapid and shivering, desperate runs and dissonance
So you've come crawling back, It says.
"You lied to me," he whispers
A rush, pure excitement
You got exactly what you asked for.
"That's not true. This is the opposite! They're abominations, still dying on their feet. Clever ones, yes — oh, you took me for a fool — but I know them better than anyone. Eirika and Ephraim of Renais don't copy the weak, stupid prince of Grado like obedient parrots. They can do and say anything. Why would they do and say what I want?"
His voice has grown too loud but he can't calm himself. It slides down from his brain and is poking around in his chest cavity (wet, vulnerable) and he wants to hide his face.
For such a gifted boy, you hate yourself so terribly.
"I didn't want to do this to them," he insists, raggedly. "I asked for their souls! Their real, true selves!"
So self-loathing, and yet so arrogant. What good are a body and soul without the gift of life to propel them? You knitted them splendidly, but it is only natural that they should still be monsters. You sought to join two parts when you needed three.
"This isn't fair! I paid the price—I didn't look! I never once looked! But if you are so miserly, then tell me what song will buy them real life."
Its laughter thunders through his chest until
Crack —
He wheezes for breath, sinking to the floor, prodding his side, at least one rib broken
No matter how much magic you know, in the end, you are mortal. Only a god can bestow life. I offered you my help before, but you refused me.
"I made a mistake."
Every breath a sharp flash, leaving cinders smouldering in his lungs,
he's on hands and knees, fingers clenched, head bowed, begging, "I see that now.
Please. Fix this. I'll do anything."
There is only one condition.
Lyon knows it, he remembers the price first asked for, his own body and soul in exchange for the power of life, of freedom, and with this could he not finally save them,
save Father, save Fado, keep everyone with him forever?
There's no hesitation before he surrenders,
sweet as plucking a string, swift as it snapping.