"Into the sun,
Let the ultraviolet cover me up.
Went looking for a creation myth,
Ended up with a pair of cracked lips."
— Phoebe Bridgers, "I Know the End."
On the longest day of the year, when the sun melts into a liminal twilight, Nikolai Lantsov, heir to Ravka's throne, gives Alina an heirloom emerald ring. Even at dusk, it twinkles like the Inferni bonfires rimming the lake.
When Alina tries to press it back into his palm, he curls his fingers over hers. They're too calloused, too broad, too warm and bright for her to mistake them as anyone else's. But Nikolai's hands aren't the ones she thinks about when she drifts off to sleep that night under the midsummer sky. His hands aren't the ones that appear to her the next morning, and the morning after that, more shadow than substance.
In the spaces between light lurks darkness, always lingering, always watching. The Darkling comes to her then, in shadowy wisps that caress her boots and crawl up her thighs, wisps that should pull screams from her open mouth but instead seal it shut so no pleas escape.
Alina tells herself she doesn't want this—whatever this is—but then she hesitates to Cut their bond each time he presses too far. Maybe allowing him to stay is a kind of punishment for both of them because he wants too much and his wanting makes her weak.
When her world turns silent, all the sound in the War Room compressing like she's stepped into the Squallers' underground air bubble, she feels him arrive, clinging to their bond like the red string from Tolya's stories that ties two lovers together across time and space. This bond does not unite two lovers. Although she used to welcome his advances, time makes it clear those weren't gestures of love, but hungry power seeking its kind. Learning that hurts more than she'd admit.
Around her, the War Room rumbles with strategy, Nikolai and David crouched over their latest weaponry prototype, Mal and Zoya bickering about the newest recruits. The girl they call saint tries to bury her toes in their voices like sand, but she cannot prevent the greedy riptide that is the Darkling from sweeping her out to sea.
"Alina." His voice trembles on the last syllable, but when she musters up enough restraint to look past her comrades and meet his crystal eyes, the tremor has passed. He's turned to stone again.
"Out," she says, a harsh sound that rends the meeting like bone piercing skin. In her periphery, the Darkling cocks his head: a challenge, not a question. Then Alina's friends, fixing her with worried glances, trail from the room through the great black doors at her command, and the Darkling starts—infinitesimally, yet Alina feels it as much as she sees it, so it doesn't escape her notice.
"You thought I was speaking to you." Concealing her exhaustion from him requires effort Alina can't muster, so she lets the words drip like ash from her tongue.
He laps them up anyway like they were honeyed tea, tasting each syllable as it moves from her mouth to his. "You don't want me to leave." Too sure, like an echo of Nikolai whose emerald ring weighs heavily in Alina's pocket.
"You never really go."
Satisfaction blooms in the twist of his lips. "A thousand years alone, and thousands more to go. Someday you'll understand, moi luch, that you don't want to be alone."
His weariness makes him pitiable, and pitying this man—this monster—leaves Alina vulnerable, so she focuses on the blood staining his hands. They may be clean now, nails trimmed and knuckles scrubbed, but she knows they're coated in screams he can't wash off.
Unconsciously, her hand flickers to her pocket, tracing the stone that's not quite borrowed, but not quite given. A mistake. His eyes track her movements, just as they did when she used to trace her teacup scar.
The Darkling doesn't beg to see what she conceals from him. Yet he stares long and hard enough that Alina clamps her palm over the pocket. Her scar twinges, or maybe it's the connection pulsing between them that sends shivers down her spine. She studies him with the same fervor he tracks her hand. The longer she stares, the more she notices the hollows gathering underneath his eyes, the ridges sharpening along his cheeks.
"You're unwell." The thought bypasses her brain, flowing from her eyes to her mouth without pausing to assess what a statement like that might imply. Care, concern—feelings for him that she refuses to stoke by dwelling on them.
Over the past months, she's grown accustomed to seeing surprise shred the Darkling's carefully controlled mask, if only for a few seconds. This time, a twisted sense of fulfillment ripples from her head to her toes as his spine grows rigid and his gaze snaps from her pocket to her face.
"And you are hiding something." He smiles, but it seems to require more effort than usual. "Not just from me. From your tracker, too."
It's a low blow, more hunch than substance, a stab in the dark. But the master of the dark never misses. Alina hopes his accuracy doesn't show on her face. Judging from his expression, however, she hasn't mastered his impenetrable facade.
So she hauls out the ring, just to see him crack open like he does to her so easily with just a word. It glimmers like the sea in her palm; the diamonds, shimmering whitecaps atop green waves. At first, he doesn't react save for the curling and uncurling of his fists.
When he speaks, his tone remains bland. "A pretty thing."
She doesn't know what prompts her to say it. Later, she blames it on their bond, which slices them open and lays their innards bare for each other to examine. But in the moment, the secret weighs too much for her to carry on her own.
"Nikolai wants to make me his wife."
Rage. Mockery. Anger mingled with lust. Any one of those reactions Alina would have expected, but the Darkling gives her none of that, just a sharp intake of breath as though he has forgotten how to breathe after centuries of practice.
"You want a ring? I'll give you rings." His laugh is wild, untamed like the Unsea that blossomed from his hands. "I'll give you the throne next to mine and enough rings to fill your fingers, rings fit for the first Grisha tsaritsa."
"I turned him down." The admission silences the Darkling as good as the Cut. Alina has to look up from the table in order to confirm he's still there. His face is crystal again, sharp angles that warn her against touching him if she fears splitting her skin. Underneath the crystal flickers the barest joy, mirthless and black, but solid and real.
"Why?"
She lets his question hang between them. It bursts in her mouth like a cherry. When she bites her lip in a bid to stall, she doesn't miss the ravenous look that the Darkling refuses to conceal.
"I'm no queen."
"Once you said you were no summoner." He doesn't have to say it; she already understands the question implicit in his observation: why must she yearn for the ordinary, settle for nothing instead of conquering everything?
Once she would have protested at his characterization of her world as ordinary. Today she steps into his soft leather boots, tries on his grey quartz eyes, and examines her world as he sees it: a ragged band of Grisha and otkazat'sya bound together by fledgling faith and foolish hope, led by a girl who'd rather swallow her power and sicken than blaze like the sun and rise. In a hundred years, both of their armies will have turned to dust and memories, and what will be left? Two creatures with an eternity sprawling at their fingertips and the power to tear the world asunder.
Shadows herald the Darkling's return to Os Alta. They skitter over the Little Palace, reclaiming it in his name and slicing open those who stand in his path. No matter how Alina flames, she cannot drive them back on her own.
Grisha stand alongside her, and whatever Nikolai can gather of his army, bolstered by grenatki and gunfire. It's not enough. Against the Darkling, it never will be.
They seal themselves into the main hall. Not secure enough, so they run. The sun soldiers coax them into the chapel, swinging open a secret passage and urging them to run through it. Not fast enough.
The Darkling descends and Alina memorizes Mal's face: the bent of his nose, the pleading in his eyes. They're blue like the sky, blue enough to swallow shadows, and for a moment, she wonders why she ever craved the night. Then her connection to the Darkling calls her, beckons her to join him, shivers in delight when her hands nest in his hair. This is right, it croons. This is like.
"My power is yours," she whispers and when his lips meet hers, she contemplates a future with him, a future solid enough to hold and deep enough to drown in. He senses her thoughts, for they have become his own, and the deepest parts of his peeling soul wriggle against hers at the same vision: two twin thrones, black as night and shot through with gold. Two ebony keftas and gleaming gold circlets that glow like beaten stars.
His darkness sparks deep inside her, somewhere behind her breastbone. Her light coils around his heart, faint but unwavering, a piece of her in exchange for a piece of himself. A small price to pay for an alikeness that no one else can ever achieve. He's her monster, and she's his salvation.
"My power is yours," she whispers, and he runs cold under her fingertips like snow and bone. "And yours is mine."
In the Little Palace chapel, they become one, a rippling beast with two heads and four arms and enough power to call forth the night. In the chapel, creation sets a price: a hundred clicking nichevo'ya in exchange for Alina's brown hair, a hundred more for the Darkling's crimson blood. Terrifying, limitless, and intimate beyond measure.
Before the world turns to blue plaster rubble and a flayed bond, before Tolya and Tamar drag her to safety, Alina sees a golden door, cracked across the middle like an egg big enough to hold the world. Then she sways and the gold fades to black.
In the beginning, there existed nothing but a black sea and an egg bobbing in its currents. When the egg cracked, it spit out the divine creator, the father of all mankind, in a blinding beam of light, the first of its kind. On its tail drifted the first shadow, morphing into a devil bent on dominion.
The longer Alina wastes away in the White Cathedral, which has become more prison than refuge over the course of her stay, the more she contemplates the world's origins as the Apparat recounts it to his congregation too often for her liking.
The Apparat maintains that when the world-egg split, the divine creator first separated the oceans from the skies and then truth from deceit. He conjured the sun from his face, the moon from his chest, and the stars from his silvery eyes. He tricked the devil into helping him produce land and struck him down with lightning, cursing him to a fiery underworld existence. Only after did the creator generate gods and Grisha, otkazat'sya and animals.
But Ana Kunya used to tell Alina and the other Keramzin orphans that as soon the divine creator crawled out of his egg, before engaging the devil, he created a help meet. "Mother Lada," she explained. "The goddess of love. With her power, the divine creator broke through the darkness and set to work shaping our world."
As a child, Alina glossed over Mother Lada's origins in favor of the underworld with its gold powder that the divine creator stole to spark life. Now she wonders if the goddess resented the divine creator for awakening her just to use her power to shape the world. She wonders if he whispered into the shell of her ear cold truths which curdled her blood: "There is no ordinary life for people like you and me." She wonders if Mother Lada longed to swallow her light and return to the depths of the sea from whence she came.
Where the Apparat and Ana Kunya's accounts agree is on the subject of division. Their divine creator is a god of duality, cradling contradictions in the palms of his enormous hands. Under his jurisdiction, opposing forces—earth and sea, sun and moon, life and death—are doomed to a relentless, futile struggle for dominion. Whenever the divine creator forms angels to rule the skies, the god of darkness spawns demons in pursuit of balance.
If Alina thinks about these legends too long, her head spins. Like The Lives of Saints, truth and myth have long ago merged. She can't discern where one begins and the other ends. Light, night, truth, deceit—contradictions that formed the world and define the tether linking her to the Darkling.
Trapped underground, her hair and skin leeched white, Alina cannot conjure the sun. She longs to release its power pulsing faintly through her veins; she sickens when she cannot find release. While her energy wanes, the Darkling's connection vibrates at the base of her skull. It needs no sun to thrive.
At night, she dreams of sprawling starlit nights and ships with canvas wings. She dreams of fox princes draped in emeralds and firebirds with fervent blue eyes that could track her across the True Sea. She dreams of heretics ensconced on stolen thrones and eclipses wreathing the kingdom in the kind of nothingness the Apparat preaches about.
From the Grand Palace ramparts flutters a flag embroidered with a solar eclipse, glimmering gold thread and inky silk that promises to blot out the sun. Under its watch, the kingdom falls dark, but from her perch under the Spinning Wheel's glass dome, all Alina sees are almond paste clouds and a blinding blue sky.
The Darkling's call grows stronger. Fighting it demands too much of Alina's regenerating strength. She takes to the stairs coiling around the mountain, two at a time, letting the snow and the wind numb the connection reverberating at the fringes of her consciousness. Sometimes she passes Mal, head bowed and pack heavy. They don't say much, just a grunt in greeting before the fog engulfing the cliffside sweeps him up.
Below the mountains, autumn turns Ravka red and gold, but up here, winter reigns supreme. On the stairs, snow seeps through Alina's boots, no matter how she tries to keep them dry. Heating them is simple enough once she returns to the Spinning Wheel, but then she returns to the stairs, steps into fresh snowmelt, and must dry her boots again.
Fighting to keep her feet warm is like fighting to keep the Darkling's presence at bay. Flickers of his emotions billow through their connection, announcing his arrival seconds before Alina's world crackles and reforms to accommodate him. It's not really him, she reminds herself when he stalks toward her down the zig-zagging stairs. Just a shadow of him amplified by a stag's bones and a nichevo'ya's bite.
As he nears, the wind howls in protest. The cliff's edge looms underfoot. One misstep and destruction will swallow Alina whole. Just like engaging the Darkling. Still, Alina's never known when to step back.
"You can't be here," she snaps.
"If I can't be here" —he leans closer, sewing shut the gap between them with Fabrikator-deft fingers— "why do you let me in, Alina?"
Briefly she considers lying, but the Darkling has always possessed an uncanny ability to read her and their bond might betray her intent. Already she can sense his eagerness thrumming against their tether and his anger, too. It simmers underneath their every interaction, a reminder that light and dark were pulled apart at the beginning of the world and will be pulled apart until the world crumbles back to dust.
So she dodges the inquiry like one of Botkin's blows, a feint to ward off dangerous lines of questioning. "You're killing yourself, bit by bit. Keep creating those monsters and soon there will be nothing left of you."
She expects him to bluster or to quiet, but he cuts her off with another question. This time it connects with her gut. "Why do you care?"
"I don't know."
His mood calcifies from lightning to thunder. Storm clouds scud across his brow with the wind. "Does the tracker know?"
"I have nothing to hide." The lie tumbles from her lips before she can muffle it.
Laughter should be golden like the wildflowers that grow along the Vy, weightless like song. The Darkling's laughter, though, is gloam and rock salt, scraping through the untruth that coats Alina's tongue. He brushes back her hair and rests his hand on her collar. Always the collar, never her skin after their confrontation in the chapel. She tries not to recoil or let herself long for more.
"You're ashamed of who you are." His voice is a breath, a hiss, so quiet that she almost wishes he would shout instead. "You make yourself small so that your friends don't fear you. You can't bear the thought of being orphaned again."
His assessment smarts, but Alina has grown up on the receiving end of Ana Kunya's switch, has tolerated Baghra's canings and Botkin's drills, has turned her insides molten to light the Fold. A little more pain can't make her flinch.
Then his voice drops, quieter and fiercer than he's ever spoken. "But don't make yourself small around me."
Her undoing stems not from his words, but from the unshuttered earnestness that slips down their bond. He may be able to twist his words, his face, to manipulate every situation to his advantage, but he cannot hide his emotions from Alina. Not when like calls to like through their connection.
In the end, she touches him first, a gentle brush of fingers against his beard that quiets them both. It feels right, his skin against hers. Their bond hums in approval. It hungers for more.
When she pulls away, he sighs, then catches himself with a scowl. Wanting may breed weakness, but Alina's never felt as powerful as she does in these moments when she wants.
In the beginning of Ravka's last stand against the Darkling, the world shrinks to a black Unsea and a glass skiff bobbing through fog. When the invisible warriors attack under Alina's protection, they split the skiff in a blinding beam of light. Provoked, the Black Heretic lashes out, bent on protecting every inch of ground he has claimed.
If merzost is making, then battle becomes its antithesis. Bodies thud from light into darkness, lying motionless on the cold sand that crawls between the gaps in Alina's boots. Smoke from the Inferni fires singes her lungs and tangles in her hair. Shrieks from the volcra set her alight her throbbing temples.
Since war is the antithesis of creation, no wonder the Darkling wears it poorly. The grey of his eyes spreads across his face as he consumes himself to pump out nichevo'ya that pour from his glass skiffs in great, battering waves.
In the end, light and darkness meet, their underlings brawling in bursts of flame that go unnoticed the moment their eyes lock. In the end, it comes down to a boy and a blade and a luminescence that splits into a thousand beams.
In the end, Alina still glows, her collar still chafes, and the Darkling lies still in a pool of blood with his hand caught in hers. She says his name once more. It's not enough to bring him back, or make this right. But it's enough to win the war. Their bond stutters, shudders, and goes silent.
The soldiers burn the Fold away.
The Grisha teach of the sacrifice required to make, but not of the sacrifice required to unmake. Alina learns of this sacrifice as the Darkling's army disbands and the Lantsov sigil replaces its black and gold banners. Unmaking a divided Ravka demands a strong tsar, a blazing saint, and hopeful people. But resources are scarce after a war so long and all the country has to offer is a cursed tsar , a battered saint, and wary people whose hope takes longer to resurrect than Mal.
Mal's the one who urges Alina to accept Nikolai's offer to join his court in Os Alta. He agrees to commandeer a portion of the First Army. She agrees to teach young Grisha what little she knows, but leaves the Second Army rebuilding in the Grisha Triumvirate's capable hands. She has drunk her fill of war.
As autumn dessicates into winter and the Little Palace's ghosts bear down upon her, Alina moves with Mal into the small hut by the lake. It's dark and runs far too hot no matter the season, but it becomes their home. For now.
Sometimes Mal talks about leaving with Alina, about packing up their hut and hiking across Ravka with no destination in mind. When she asks where they'll go, he responds with a different city every time: Arkesk, Weddle, Ketterdam. He's still the same steady Mal whom she's leaned on for the last decade, but sometimes the urge to wander calls to the tracker blood that used to course through his veins.
Empty. Silent. That's how Mal described waking up after Alina killed him. So when he imagines wanderings they'll never take together, Alina doesn't remind him of their shared responsibilities that bind them to the crown. She doesn't dwell on the unnatural lifespan a summoner of her caliber might possess. She learned long ago that sometimes she must look the other way in order to survive.
Nikolai still jokes about Alina making a fine queen whenever she can protest loud enough for Mal to hear. He refuses to let Alina return the Lantsov emerald ring when she offers again. Mal grumbles goodnaturedly at these japes, tightening his grip on her hand, and the new tsar chuckles—always rueful, always jesting, careful to avoid a fight among his friends.
As his first reigning year bleeds into two, the twin throne next to his remains empty. In it, Mal sees a joke; Nikolai, an opportunity; Alina, a reminder of a man who eclipsed the country and turned it umbral.
In the second year of peace, rumors of the Darkling's rebirth filter in from the countryside. Alina dismisses them all so firmly that Nikolai dares not broach the matter in her presence again. Later she catches him whispering about the Cult of the Starless Saint with Zoya and Mal in the repurposed War Room, and she knows that she can't outrun the specter who shaped her.
She thinks of the Darkling as the faint black scars tremble across Nikolai's hands, as he unites Grisha and otkazat'sya as Zeroes in his hidden Gilded Bog workshop. The Darkling would revel in their equal partnership even as he'd fear their craft, modernizing and distributing power among all Ravkans rather than hoarding strength to be woven into keftas worn only by the worthy. He'd worry that such technology would render the Grisha defenseless and obsolete.
He'd have good reason to worry, Alina grumbles on her gloomiest days. She's seen what grenatki can do, revolving rifles and great swooping airships that imitate birds and rain down fire. In her heart, she trusts Nikolai to unify their country so that distinctions between Grisha and otkazat'sya matter less. But sometimes that shadowy part of Alina's soul, borrowed from the Darkling even in death, balks at the faith the First and Second Armies place once more in their new ruler. Stylized as a saint, she's seen firsthand the havoc misplaced faith can wreak.
The mantle of a living saint requires all her strength to bear, yet it's never enough. She trips on its hem, sweats under its weight, and chars its sleeves when she has no fuel left to burn. This visibility, and the misplaced worship that stems from it, wears her through until she's whittled to borrowed angles and flickering flames.
Mal listens to her grumble, watches her consume herself to illuminate a reborn Ravka, and so often pesters her to rest that Alina almost concedes. Every time she sits still long enough, the ghosts of the Little Palace start to gnash at her feet. So as Mal urges her to rest, she reminds him that the work of reconstruction never sleeps. He grows stiff, uncertain, folding his arms like he's squashing a protest, and they're off again to the War Room or a dignitary banquet or the Gilded Bog.
The streets of Os Alta may throng with people scrambling for Alina's blessings, the palace may seethe with courtiers who both applaud and fear her demonstrations, but the Gilded Bog swarms with scientists and soldiers too wrapped up in their play to pay much attention to her. Their disinterest leaves her free to roam the compound and tinker alongside David and Nikolai.
With time, Alina discovers that although Nikolai may occupy the body of an otkazat'sya, he possesses the spirit of a Fabrikator. Rather than bending elements to his will, he coaxes his thoughts into blueprints that take flight or unleash fire under his capable craftsmanship. He may not wield the Small Science, but his inventions, these acts of creation, complement the Grisha power thrumming throughout the Gilded Bog.
Sometimes Alina longs to create instead of summon. No matter how often she calls forth the sun, the itch persists to draw life from herself and make something in her own image. She thinks of the Darkling then, how their powers had linked in an endless cycle of amplification. How he tore bits of himself to generate the nichevo'ya just as she today, in the pursuit of peace, chips away the bits of herself that pine for him.
He may be gone, but his spirit lingers in his private chambers. Here Nikolai assembles his most trusted advisors—the Grisha Triumvirate, Mal, and Alina. They've grown accustomed to conferencing in the War Room, but each time she steps through the door, Alina braces herself for a connection that never crackles into place.
As Nikolai's monster grows more uncontrollable with each passing month, he struggles harder to hide it from those around him. In the privacy of the War Room, David reminds him that every time Grisha power breaches the limits of manipulating matter in order to create life, there are repercussions which fall beyond the bounds of his knowledge. Alina stops listening after that.
After the Fold split, she couldn't bring herself to burn its creator. It seemed wrong to reduce four centuries of matter to ashes. Instead she ordered two sun soldiers to dispose of the Darkling's body, no grave and no map. Now she shudders at David's reminder that creating matter, while dangerous, is not impossible. The countryside cult rumors about a reborn god leach the air from the War Room until Alina's head spins. She wonders what repercussions a violation of that magnitude might exact and shudders when the smallest, darkest part of her longs to find out.
When a band of would-be assassins accosts Nikolai's carriage on the road from the Gilded Bog, Alina uses the Cut to dispense them all. When she steps back inside the carriage, wiping splattered blood from her hands and stinking of charred flesh, Mal inspects her with something closer to irritation than respect. Nikolai thanks her, even Zoya spits out a compliment, but their praise evaporates as Alina watches her partner flush.
"Was that really necessary?" As Mal's hands fist and his throat bobs, Nikolai and Zoya turn studiously to the windows. Mal pays no mind. "My job is to protect you, Alina, not sit while you leap into danger."
"Our job is to protect the king," she says, hoping her friends don't notice the tightness in her throat. "I took care of it, Mal."
"You need us," he hisses. It smacks of concern and beneath, bruised pride. "You might not think so, but you do."
Maybe that little piece of shadow has sunk its roots so deep within Alina's soul that it could withstand its creator's death. Maybe that's the part of her that speaks up now, barbed and rusty like her shrug. "I did what I had to do."
His eyes narrow and she longs to clap her hands over her mouth before any more borrowed excuses slip out. It's an echo of another conversation by another carriage along the same road to Os Alta. Just as Alina shied away from the Darkling as he halved the bandits keening for her flesh, Mal begins to pull away from her. Or maybe they've always been straining apart since he drew the first breath of his second life and Alina's just now noticing it.
They argue. They make up. They fall silent more often than they talk. It's like a connection gone quiet all over again.
In the third year of King Nikolai's reign, Mal finally turns away from Alina, her power a curse too weighty for his soldier's shoulders to bear. When he leaves, she howls until her throat matches her heart: swollen, aching, ripped to shreds. The sea whip's shackle sparkles around her wrist. The Darkling's warning glitters in the hollows of her bare neck: Your otkazat'sya could never understand you.
It's only then as she splits into grief and resolve, shame and longing, that she understands how a being like the Darkling lives in a thousand moments. Tonight, Alina finds herself caught in a kaleidoscope of memories, twisting and turning with no end in sight: squeezing through Keramzin's secret passages with Mal, reaching for his hand on the frozen tundra, clinging to his chest in a quiet orchard hothouse. She sees suns etched onto soldiers, a boy becoming a blade, a stag stumbling in the snow. The images grow dark, but the copper tang of loss lingers in her mouth.
It threatens to drown her, this all-consuming pain that soaks through her soul. Mal is gone, having set sail for Ketterdam last sunrise with only a farewell note to mark his passage. It says nothing and everything in a handful of scribbled lines. His apologies sting like accusations, and Alina crumples the page only to smooth it out minutes later. It's the only thing she has left of him beside a half-moon scar etched across her palm.
Loneliness settles into her bed, curling around her quivering body like an old lover. It doesn't mind the power that beams from her fingertips. It kisses her forehead and lulls her to sleep.
That night she dreams of Mal, but his eyes are too grey to be called blue and his hair too dark to be called brown. She wakes with a name on her lips that she hasn't spoken since the Fold dissolved.
Ben Barnes' tweets inspired me, so here I am, 8k into a one shot on my work laptop instead of, you know, doing my work. :)
The myth referenced in this fic is loosely inspired by a few Slavic creation stories (and implemented with the sort of fidelity that Leigh Bardugo brings to her canon *cough*).
Check back next Monday for the second and final installment!