He creates the sun anew each day, for the world would be too cold without it.
It is always a little thing in his hands. He permits the shape to vary, depending on whichever mote of inspiration arrives first. In his palms, Azem's engraved crystal warms slowly as he breathes it back to life. Its facets gleam with the same amber luminosity as a honey liqueur. It serves as the focal point for Emet-Selch's craft, a secret center around which all the fractured shards circulate their orbits.
As the skies gradually lighten outside whatever chamber or bower he has found himself in this time, Emet-Selch dutifully cocoons aether into a pearl above his hands. Then, he looks within to discover the newest form his memories will take.
He never minds when concepts repeat. He has brought the sun into being so many times, after all. A stray memory of the Akadaemia Anyder had once appeared as two golden rings, which Emet-Selch had slid promptly upon his fingers, hiding them beneath his gloves. There had been a variety of glass spheres, made different only by the scenes inscribed upon their sides. Stray images of Amaurotine buildings have manifested as hummingbirds with sigils blazoned black upon their wings, pollen shedding from their feathers. Other memories have taken form as metal handmirrors, reflecting back not the world around them, but the laughing face of someone long dead.
He crafts a diamond of mercury, a monocle of lead. A butterfly with Azem's voice, so full of optimism, so full of dreams. Flittering away - just as Azem had - on currents of untested hope. Ignorant, it was free to believe in empty promises, for it had not endured the millstone of time and the hungry mastication of souls. It bore all that he had lost upon two wings which were as fragile as dried rose petals, so delicate that each downstroke threatened them to crumble.
Regardless of the form it takes, Emet-Selch always keeps the sun contained. No mortal can be allowed to witness it. The span of its aether remains small, precisely caged. Safe.
It is no bigger than the size of his mortal fists together. No bigger than his mortal heart.
He makes the sun, and because of it, warmth is allowed to exist in the world once more. Fire aether rages in the heavens, and that is what mortals point to and worship - but Emet-Selch knows the truth. Simple flames do little against the chill that follows him around from shard to shard. The heat of the desert is only that: a scorching, simmering inferno, fit to boil a body from within.
It is a cold place for Emet-Selch, even at noon.
But he rubs his fingers against the golden rings that he forges, spins the glass baubles until their pictures come to life. He lifts the monocle to his eye and sees another person standing there, looking back at him with their smile boisterous and merry - and the frost retreats.
For a little while.
There are times when Emet-Selch travels between shards, of course. Where there are either no natural cycles of day or night, or far too many of them. Even when his feet are planted on a reflection, there is no assurance that time will perform as expected. The skies of the First are blown out like improperly frosted glass. The Thirteenth knows no dawn. At the extreme poles of many shards, each night can last for half a year. In others, springtime only arrives in legends.
Such concerns are mortal limitations. Emet-Selch's clock beats in his chest, drumming eternally. The pulse of his immortal aether is his metronome. All of the Ascians have methods to track time; they would never be able to operate otherwise, since none of the shards bother to acknowledge the calendars of their kin. A blink of an eye would see the Convocation's plans set permanently off-kilter. The Eleventh offends with each hour it dares to call a year. The Ninth has given up on seasons, along with common sense.
The rift is too bleak; if not for his magicks, his borrowed flesh would have perished the first time that Emet-Selch flung himself into the darkness. Little loss it would have been. His soul would have dragged along the withering remains like bones inside a burlap sack, forcing the decaying shreds onwards to their next destination.
But with his light beside him, Emet-Selch can feel warm again. He clings to each temporary keepsake as it keeps him company through the darkness, singing to him of a dawn that he dares not forget.
He does not know how the others mark their losses anymore. Correction. He does not know how the others mark their emptinesses, save for one: Elidibus does nothing at all.
There was a time after the Sundering when Emet-Selch could read every uncertainty churning in Lahabrea's head simply by watching how badly their Speaker's creations were being distorted. He had watched Lahabrea's mighty dragons spawn dozens of limbs like centipedes, wriggling at odd angles from their swollen bellies. Birds, which bore the faces of Akadaemia students on their breasts. Now, it has all become fire, where elegance arrives as a mere accident of combustion. It is clunky. Raw. In it, Emet-Selch reads something else instead, which has little to do with the past and everything to do with agony.
Lahabrea is a man who has burned off his hands because he fears his own yearning to reach towards the sky.
Similarly, Igeyorhm never shares her private thoughts with anyone - at least, not that Emet-Selch knows of. Instead, she crafts buildings which she promptly disowns afterwards, mansions which sit empty like ransacked dollhouses, lurking for future civilizations to discover and panic over. Emet-Selch had once discovered an ice palace that she constructed on the Fourth, hewn directly out of the side of a glacier. He had walked through every hall, searching for Amaurot within its spires - but all of its walls were plain.
There is no proof that his Ascian kin truly remember what they mourn. Emet-Selch can find no signs to reassure him that they have not lost the beauty of their home. Their rage is everywhere - but their griefs are as hidden as his own. They are too busy dying to express anything save the horrors they are being ground through, lifted up and struck down like a solar cycle, perpetually resurrected for the sole purposes of sacrifice.
Only on rare occasions does Emet-Selch allow himself to ask the Sundered directly, and it is always a mistake.
"What do you recall most about Amaurot?" He cannot identify the impulse that keeps compelling him to try, even when he knows the pointlessness of it. "How do you recall it?"
Fandaniel - the only one who has lingered behind after this particular Convocation meeting, while the others have skittered away - answers Emet-Selch without hesitation. He smirks, his tail swishing impishly. "Give me my crystal, and I'll show you."
Emet-Selch instinctively draws his arms closer to his body. He can feel the traitorous presence of the fourteenth stone in his collection: an illicit addition that he has told no one about, for they would demand for it to be destroyed permanently.
Fandaniel's attention is fixed on him as if he can already spy it. The man's hunger is the same as that of a rabid hound, willing to gnaw through its own body in pursuit of freedom. It is sharp enough to sever.
"They're for our use," Emet-Selch lies. "Ours alone."
Fandaniel's gaze slides up and to the right, in the direction which mortals like to claim is proof of deception.
"Pity."
One day, he makes the sun when it is already dead.
It appears in disassembled pieces, a crumpled pile of white, hard clay. Each contour is as smooth as a riverstone. The entire mass is like a handful of coral that has been vomited out of the ocean, bleached of all life and sanded down by careless visitors seeking pretty ornaments for their shelves. Something soft to touch, that will not harm them with any ragged edges.
Something innocent. Something gentle.
He presses the mass together, squeezing it like curds after the whey has been drained. No matter how tightly he compresses it, the aether will not fuse. He cannot make it stick together.
Only after he opens his hands uselessly and watches the lumps fall apart for a fifth time does Emet-Selch realize what is wrong.
This particular manifestation did not fail midway. This is the best it can ever be in its current condition. Its brokenness is its natural state; there is no path to wholeness.
Even in his other form, he does not have enough hands to cover his shame.
"I didn't mean to," he says aloud to the empty room. "Venat. Venat was the one who did this to you. This was never Lord Zodiark's plan."
His creation does not answer him. Its aether remains inert. It stubbornly refuses to react to his words, as though it can hear the second accusation brimming within his voice, the one that screams: you did this to yourself. This fate is your fault. Not mine.
You chose self-mutilation by leaving us.
You chose destruction by leaving me.
One by one, the shards topple. Emet-Selch does not stop his habit. Like an addict, he turns to its comfort whenever he needs it, without care for how frequently that might be. Once. Twice. More. It is always a new dawn on some shard or another; he does not need to be stingy.
A new sun for each calendrical sun. Both repeat too often to be of any value: one is born, one dies, and eternity demands a replacement.
The weeks line themselves up to be threshed. His is the hand which churns the wheel.
But where there are beginnings, there must also be endings - or else Emet-Selch will leave a trail behind him of objects just waiting to be discovered, prodded at by oafish, gawking strangers who do not appreciate their value. He must do this. It is the only way to protect Azem's memory from harm.
Each night as the skies darken overhead, Emet-Selch takes his conjurations into his palms like newly-hatched cloudkin, cradling them so that they will not fall. Slowly, he wraps his fingers around them, crushing the aether completely.
The heat vanishes. The night comes in.
Emet-Selch holds his hands shut as the seconds tick by. His skin smothers the light. He keeps his knuckles tightly clenched until the very last gleam surrenders to oblivion, and he feels its flame snuff out - sailing into nothingness, and abandoning him to solitude behind.