Chapter Eight

Faint is the Light that is Purest

Karacas called them all back in turn over the weeks that followed, alternating Kallista and Helion most often because Diana found, to her humiliation, that she was worse than useless against Lelia.

"Should I take one of your eyes, so we're even?" Lelia demanded contemptuously at the end of one particularly pitiful bout, throwing down her sword and stalking away. When Karacas brought her back three weeks later, it was with the cool comment that Diana would either find her guts or Lelia would personally show them to her. And one-eyed or not, Lelia fought with a new ferocity that made Diana retaliate out of sheer self-preservation.

She fought better against Kallista, and better still with her against Karacas. At the end of their bout, the two girls stripped off their helmets and staggered together toward a low rock wall at the west side of the cedar grove. Diana leaned back on her elbows, panting, while Kallista sprawled beside her in the grass, her long arms and legs making her look like a stick insect that had been trodden upon.

"You'd expect him to be more heroic," she observed, watching the enormous shape of Karacas striding toward the house for his midday meal.

"He just beat both of us into the dust, that seems heroic enough to me." Diana rolled her right shoulder, which Karacas had repeatedly smacked with the flat of his blade.

"I mean, the things he says. He's just like Skalos Grakos but with less yelling."

"Did you expect a Wuju Master?" The idea tickled Diana. "The blind grasshopper can still leap great distances, that kind of thing?"

Kallista snorted. "Well, yes, actually."

"He doesn't like to talk." Diana closed her eyes, feeling the cool wind slipping through her hot, sweat-soaked hair. It would be summer soon; she could smell it in the air, warm, green, growing things. "He just goes to the Temple all the time."

"Why?" Kallista asked, and Diana shrugged.

"I've seen him in the wind gardens a few times when I was working, but I don't know what else he does."

"Why do you go the Temple?" Kallista asked curiously. "You're studying with your father, you don't need to be an acolyte."

Diana had sometimes wondered the same. Much of her time at the Temple was sheer drudgery; dusting, sweeping, cleaning long miles of marble floor, polishing mirrors, tending the dreamlike forms of the trees in the wind gardens. Once she had even been sent with some of the other acolytes to polish the enormous four-facing sun on the very peak of the great dome of the Temple, its arching rays gleaming where the sun struck them in a thousand mirrored facets.

It was the thought of those facets that provided the answer.

"Everything about the Temple is about the light," she said thoughtfully. "The mirrors, the water, it's meant to catch the light and cast it back out again, stronger. That's what Father says a true Temple is meant to do for your faith."

"That's what Mother says, too," Kallista said, her cheeks turning a little pink. Matters of faith were seldom discussed among the wolf cubs, but it suddenly struck Diana that Kallista was the one friend who would understand as none of the others did: the daughter of an Elder. "She says it's how you can tell the truth of the Solari, when you look at the catacombs of Noxus or the old hallows of the Demacian gods. They put up their statues for fashion."

There was just enough scorn in that last word to embolden Diana to press a little further.

"Do you study with your mother?"

"Yes. She's of the Didact school, you know, so it's mostly recitation and interpretation." Idly Kallista lifted a blade of grass and blew it away, carried swiftly by the wind. "She calls it winnowing the words, separating the grain from the chaff until you can find the truth of them."

"That's what Skalos Kephalos taught when I was at the Temple," Diana remarked, and then an awkward silence fell, the truth of why she was no longer a student there dangling between them as if it had been tricked out in gilt and hung on a gaudy tavern sign.

It was Kallista who nerved herself first.

"Why don't you anymore? Is it true that you're…they say that you're…"

"Moon-addled?"

"Yes."

Neither girl looked at the other, and Diana was suddenly conscious that her shoulder was brushing Kallista's from her place on the grass, that the long, dusty copper of Kallista's braid was coiling alongside her own pale plait.

"I am," she said finally, and it came out more flat and challenging than she'd intended. "I always have been."

Of all her friends, she had dreaded this conversation with Kallista the most. Domitian had said more than once that there was no one more hidebound or conventional than a Didact; parsers of someone else's words, he said, and it was no compliment. To a theorist like Domitian, they were good for beating the required verses and canon into the thick skulls of acolytes, but little more. The canon was very clear on the subject of the lures and lies of the moon, and worse, the deceits of blasphemers.

But Kallista was silent for a moment, and then recited,

Beware the path that is surest

For what is easy oft leads you astray,

For faint is the light that is purest

With faith it will show you the way.

"It's from a clay in the Archives," she explained, ignoring Diana when the other girl flipped over to goggle at her. "Mother showed it to me once; she thinks it was used to teach children long, long ago. It sounds like a child's verse, doesn't it? But we used to teach it. Didacts remember," Kallista added, in answer to the unflattering look of shock on Diana's face. The humorous curl of her upper lip told Diana that she knew the general opinion regarding the Didact school perfectly well.

"But the straight path," Diana stuttered, thinking of the countless verses talking about the sure way, the bright way.

"But not the easy way," Kallista said, lifting one tawny shoulder in a shrug. "Maybe it is easy for some, but not for Mother. She told me," she said a little defiantly, "what happened to you. I knew something was wrong and you wouldn't tell me. Mother thinks they were wrong to whip you for what you said. She said perhaps a little more blasphemy would sharpen the wits of the faithful, and I think so, too. That's why I came when they whipped you. Even if Helion hadn't asked me, I would have come."

"Thank you." It was hard to get the words out around the lump in her throat. All these months later, and the humiliation still burned her when she thought about it. The pain of the whipping was nothing compared to the look in her father's eyes, the stout, disappointed loyalty of Helion. She knew they both had pitied her, been disappointed in her, had been shamed by her. Even now it made her cringe, remembering it.

But Kallista had been there too. And Kallista had stood by her because she believed in Diana, and believed that Diana was being wronged.

"Mother almost sent me to the Temple too, instead of the agoge," Kallista was continuing, giving her friend time to gather herself. "But my father said no; he would give one to the Temple, but the other would go to the warriors." That was as close as Kallista would come to mentioning her sister, dead only three months before in the Rite. "Mother is glad now that she sent me to the agoge. I don't see how the Temple would have taught me the faith any better than she has anyway."

"And now you have Karacas teaching you too," Diana said, nudging Kallista's shoulder to push the shadow from her eyes. "Tall girl."

Kallista smirked. "How long do you think til he learns my name?"

"At least as long as it takes him to learn mine." Diana rolled stiffly to her feet, offering a hand to pull Kallista up with her. Karacas, when he had to refer to Diana at all, tended to call her crazy girl. Lelia was blonde girl. She sometimes idly wondered what descriptor he would apply to Helion, who was currently just boy, and plainly resented the slight on his manhood. Tall boy? Redhead boy? Sulky boy?

A shout from Karacas sent Kallista scurrying home shortly after, stopping only long enough to press Diana's hand with hers, a final gesture of solidarity that Diana carried with her in the lonely days that followed. There was some unspoken agreement between Karacas and her father that more time training with her friends meant less time with them otherwise, as if too much exposure might taint them with her sickness. Perhaps it was true. Even Helion had been turned away, only permitted to visit once a week for dinner, and every third week for practice.

So, battered though she was by Karacas, Diana had begun sneaking out when she could, rare stolen nights that she treasured more than anything else in her life. And while Helion had a deep and abiding respect for Domitian as well as a healthy fear of the powerful Elder, neither fear or respect were quite up to the challenge of teenage hormones.

They met most often in the grove of cedars, Diana speeding soundlessly down the path with Wilhelm bounding at her heels. The poro went straight to Domitian and started howling whenever she left him behind otherwise. In the starry dark Helion would be waiting for her on the bench, but rose with his arms outstretched to catch her when she flew into them. He had become a very good kisser.

"I missed you," he whispered, as if it had been months since they last met.

"I missed you," Diana whispered back, and once he had kissed her breathless, they sat down together wherever it was warmest and he told her all that had happened at the agoge, so it was almost as if she had been there. She told him sometimes about Karacas, who was a walking story, but while her father dominated her waking and sleeping hours, there never seemed to be anything to say about him.

Wilhelm curled up in her lap and their hands met again and again as they petted the poro. He was getting pudgy, though Diana hadn't the least idea who was feeding him. The kitchen maids denied it every time she accused them.

Those nights were too short. Sometimes it seemed she just blinked and the sky was lightening to the east, and she realized the whole night had gone again.

"Remember what you were saying," she would say, exchanging final kisses with Helion that were no less eager than their first. "Next time we'll finish the conversation."

"I love you," he told her, and kissed her again, then tore himself away, going straight from her to the agoge. Diana herself went back to her room to dress and make the long run to the Spear.

Those nights were few, too few, but she hugged them to her like the night, like the stars, like the moon.

"The diminishing angles of the winter sun." Father, sitting in his chair behind his desk, looked at her expectantly. "Explain your logic. Omit nothing."

The refracted spectrum.

The diffusion of light as measured by the concavity of a mirror.

The radial angles of the mirrors for the Salutation ceremony.

Explain your logic.

The effect of Runeterran magic upon the gravitational force of the sun.

The effect of same upon the moon.

Omit nothing.

Omit nothing.

Omit nothing.

It was like being squeezed slowly under a boulder. Every protestation, every contradiction, every errant thought she had was wrung out, examined, cross-examined, and dismissed. At the door, Wilhelm scratched and snuffled anxiously, then settled down to pant as the minutes and hours and days went by. Her chair had no back and her spine got stiff, the back of her neck began to ache, and still Father's quill scratched on.

It was much the same as her training under Karacas. He could have battered her down with his sheer size, but instead he outmaneuvered her, he crowded her, he drove her back until there was no choice but to lash out with the tricks he had taught her. He drilled her until it was muscle memory, her shield and spear snapping out in flawless form. Diana dreamed of practicing in the grove, in the courtyard, sometimes on the windy clifftop past the Two-Faced Stone. And when she dreamed, more often than not, she could hear Father's voice like the wind saying explain your logic. Omit nothing.

She could understand how both her teachers were going about their instruction. Karacas built a foundation of strength and reflex so she wouldn't even need to think about how to move, whether her foot should be placed so and her weight distributed thus. She slipped into her positions as easily as breathing. And when she erred, a quick swipe with the butt of his spear into her helmeted head usually set her right. If she felt like a child, copying him with all the credibility of a little girl with a willow switch, at least she was a strong and graceful child who knew where to put her feet.

With her father, it felt less like building a foundation than building the walls of a prison.

A geometrically perfect, inescapable prison. She helped build it herself, every stone another argument in which she had omitted nothing. Father's logic was unassailable. The equations and magic he taught her were far beyond anything she could have imagined, and in such perfect balance that it actually took her breath away when she understood, the pieces of the puzzle falling together with an almost audible click.

"Science is sorcery," Father said. "Or so they believe in Zaun. Some say they are synonyms for each other, different explanations for the same phenomena."

"Did you ever go to Zaun?" she asked, surprised.

"No." Father let that lie there for a moment, as if he were deciding whether or not to explain further. "We do not permit outsiders to come to the temple, but we do correspond with other scholars. This," he said, poking a narrow book with the tip of his quill. "This one is from Corbin Stanwick, in Zaun. There are others from Piltover, the Royal Academy in Demacia, and a few from Shurima."

"Do they all study the sun as we do?"

"No. Tinkerers and magicians, most of them. Only in Shurima do they contemplate the heavens."

"What do they say about them?" She asked, feeling some inexplicable hope well inside her. But Father, as ever, seemed to read her thoughts.

"All they have is sand, and the past," he said, and looked at her with piercing blue eyes. "Would you want to know what they say of the sun and the moon?"

"Yes," she said, a little defiantly. He would know if she lied. "Isn't all knowledge worth something?"

"We believe only what we can prove," he said, with finality, and picked up his quill.

It was the evil in her that made her wonder. The suffocating, panicking claustrophobia she felt in Father's study was the moon-sickness, and she had to purge herself of it. Like Karacas, Father drilled her, making her repeat the principal, the rebuttal, the conclusion. It was a mental reflex no less than the physical reflexes she was honing. She learned to argue as Father did, with structure, clarity, and irresistible, dispassionate reason.

If it hadn't been for Helion, she would have been deeply, desperately unhappy.

Maybe her love for Helion was amplified because the love of her father was denied her, like the invisible sun on the winter solstice, caught by the mirrors but invisible to the naked eye. Diana herself never thought it through in those terms, but she felt it, as much as she felt denied the light on the nights of the full moon, locked lonely in the cellar. Some part of her argued that Father did love her, of course he did, but there was another voice in her that whispered how she had shamed him, that now he was only attempting to undo the damage she had done to him in the Temple. And he wasn't her real father.

She tried to argue those thoughts down, presenting evidence and counter-evidence, but since the day of her whipping all those months before, there had been little evidence, to Diana's mind, to present for the argument that Father still loved her.

"Father," she said as he locked her in the cellar on the night of the full moon, catching him as he was turning away. She always seemed to be stopping him as he left the room. "Father, is everything…is everything all right?"

"Yes," he said, lifting his candle to look through the barred window of the cellar door at her. There were heavy bags under his eyes.

"I was wondering if we could have breakfast together tomorrow," she said awkwardly, and felt stupid for saying it. She had never asked before, but she had never needed to.

"I promised Karacas that I would not interfere with your training," Father replied, turning away to the steps. "Go and sing your sleep-songs, Diana."

She watched the light vanish up the stairs, clutching the narrow bars in her hands as if she would push them apart and squirm through the tiny window. She didn't want to sing. She wanted out. She wanted to go after Father and shake him until he went back the way he had been before.

But if he had changed, whose fault was it?

Barefoot, she knelt in front of her altar, carefully pulling her long hair back from her face as she lit the small white candles. Her hair was long now, nearly to her waist, and she shook it free. She rarely let it loose, and it was her one point of vanity: fine as silk and gleaming silver-blonde, shining in the candle light. When she became a warrior and joined the Rakkor army, she would have to cut it.

Diana could see it in her mind as clearly as if it were a vision in the candle flames. She and Helion and Kallista and Lelia in the army, the battles they would fight, the places they would go. The Rakkor army most often fought in the wars between Demacia and Noxus, but those battles were everywhere, from the jungles of Kumungu to even the shores of Bilgewater. Noxus had ambitions of empire, and though Demacia would never explicitly state it, so did they; better the protection of a benign Demacian hegemony, they would say, than the filthy tyranny of Noxus.

Well, the Rakkor bent the knee to no one.

Helion wanted to sail to the Shadow Isles, but for Diana, it was Ionia. The stories she heard made it sound like a garden, and she wanted to inhale its strange spices and see the Plum Blossom Festival with its thousand points of light. And she could; she had no false modesty about her abilities. She and Helion could go anywhere they wanted, be anything they desired.

Except for the nagging certainty that there was something else. Something she couldn't explain, and certainly couldn't argue. Father had left her with no arguments. There was only the inexplicable surety in her blood that there was something beyond the beautiful and perfectly balanced Solari faith. Something else. Something more.

It was a choice, she thought, bowing her head, her forehead pressed against the cold golden heart of the Four Faced Sun on the altar. Helion, the army, and the world, or the questions that seemed to have been built into her bones.

His human girl was finally asleep.

He waited another few minutes to make sure, his little hooves clipping dully on the stone floor as he cautiously nudged her, then waited for her slow, even breaths. On the nights they spent in the underground place, he had learned it was best to let her be while she knelt, glowing in the candlelight.

Wilhelm didn't like those nights. Even now his horns were low on his head from the weariness and unhappiness that radiated from his girl, that radiated from his home. But she was asleep now, so the fuzzy little beast clipped toward the locked door at the cellar entrance and then stood a moment, listening. The house was silent, the servants gone, but far away he could hear faint stirrings of life: the scratch of quill on parchment and the slow breathing of an old man.

In a blink, the poro was on the other side of the door and bouncing up the steps without any real effort or even realization of what he had done. He wanted to go see the man upstairs, and poro magic was rooted in their own simple, fuzzy-minded desires.

Passing down a long hallway, Wilhelm moved through two more doors as if they weren't there, trotting through the old man's bedchamber and study. On the nights when the moon was full, the old man slept as poorly as his girl did, and Wilhelm had learned to correlate the two. He could feel the pull of the moon as if he were water, as if he were waves, though a poro had no words for gravity and no idea at all of science. He just knew that when that pull was strongest, the girl went down to the dark place, and then the whole house was in shadow in Wilhelm's heart.

Wilhelm tapped one hoof on the last doorway, and with the absentmindedness of long habit, the old man let him in and went back to his work, his long robe sweeping the floor ahead of the bounding poro. Wilhelm could feel the man's pain in his twisted gait, the way his strong leg ached and his lower back twisted with the effort of limping all day on his staff. When the man sat in his chair, Wilhelm leaped instantly into his lap and curled up close, a silky-soft bundle of warmth to be pet. And in so doing, he felt some tiny measure of unhappiness depart the old man, just from the simple comfort of a loving presence.

Among poros, this was considered the greatest of their magics. Everyone knew shadows collected like cobwebs in unhappy places, and left to spin, the place would slowly strangle on them. Dispelling that darkness was a mighty magic.

This room was a smaller one behind the main study, closed and windowless, just a desk, chair, and shelves laden with scrolls, books, and candles. Wax streaked and dripped and ran in runnels, but the man was archivist enough that not a drop touched any of his papers. It smelled of beeswax, ink, and dust; no one else was ever permitted in this room, and the man rarely had time to tidy it himself.

Wilhelm chewed on the man's beard absently, his dark, limpid eyes scanning the room. To a poro, color was less important than magic, life, and potential. Most things in this room were useful, and the desk and shelves gave off a faint silvery utility-light to show they were wanted and in use. The scrolls and books on the shelves glowed brighter, some of them almost blinding, and brightest of all was the book the man was writing in. Wilhelm had tried more than once to get at that one, and even now positively itched for it. He had chewed through more than one of the books and had once worked his way through half of a scroll cubby before the man caught him. Useful things, especially magical useful things, were irresistible to a poro, and the potential-lines wound around the man's book made it glow like a star.

The man muttered as he worked, sometimes to Wilhelm, sometimes to himself as he paged through his books and rattling papers, writing, always writing. Sometimes his voice was tinged with excitement, sometimes with anger, and sometimes even with fear. Sometimes he would stop abruptly and stand, stumping brusquely from the tiny secret study to kneel at the candle-place in his bedroom, and press his seamed forehead to the golden metal sun there. His breath came fast and his old heart raced, and he would whisper in the dark, may the light increase, lighting his candles and waving their glow toward his face. Some nights he never went back to the little book-room at all, painfully pacing the floor until dawn.

Sometimes, without knowing it, the old man spoke magic from the papers and scrolls, ancient words that made the very air glow with potential thick enough to chew on.

It was a dark, cold magic.

Even Wilhelm, a creature of the bitter Frejlord, shivered when he felt it. There was a perceptible shift when those words were spoken, a sudden, dark pull on the world that was like dead hands clawing their way up through the earth. They were dangerous words. The man was right to be afraid.

The man shouldn't say those words. He should be feeding Wilhelm treats.

On a tray in the room was a endless supply of poro snacks with their crystal-blue topping, and all night the man's hand went back and forth absently, feeding him. It was the most benign of their rituals, and the most powerful of them all. The man liked Wilhelm for himself, for his warm, comforting presence, but it was also a ritual, a magic, a spell that wound from the man to Wilhelm to the sleeping girl in the cellar below, a thread that unspooled in glowing streamers of gold to the poro's eyes.

It was magic, bright and sorrowful, clear as music and bells and filled with regret enough for weeping. Every treat, every stroke of the hand, even the meaningless chatter the old man directed at Wilhelm was magic, for the poro was a simulacrum for the girl downstairs, and all of it was for her. It was magic, and it was love; love poured from the old man like tears, like blood, love ran like a tide down the stairs to the girl, sleeping in her dark prison underground.

The possibility-lines from the man to the girl strengthened, rayed, became spirals, fractals, thousand-faceted arms that wrapped them both.

And the light increased.

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Author's Note: Well, it has been a really really long time, and real life intervened, the way it does. I want to say thank you for the reviews. Those are what pushed me to come back. I read them, then I reread the story, and it struck some sparks. So here I am, sitting down with a new chapter. To answer one question, no, this will not incorporate the new LoL canon, which in my opinion is terrible. It's a shame because I'd managed to wind everything together so neatly with the old canon, pulling together the myths of several different locations, so I'm just going to pretend the new stuff never happened. Anyway, I can't promise how fast I'll get it done or that I'll be able to finish, real life again, but I'll go as long as the inspiration is there and there's story left to be told. Thanks for your kind words!