That Star Might Die
Disclaimer and other nonsense—This is a work for written primarily for my amusement and that of others. Fire Emblem is property of Intelligent Systems. This story was originally written for Livejournal's fe_contest and appears there in an alternate form. I rewrote parts, and will probably rewrite this again. I am never happy with anything, lolololol. Edited again for formatting nonsense. You can suck this lamp, ff.n, I swear.
..0..
When they killed him, or the shell of him, she thought to herself, Now there is no one else left. Myrrh was inclined to believe that he had been one of them, she was not inclined to say it or say why, but she did believe. The revelation was not pleasant.
She did not go to Ephraim and say, I think he is of me and my own, and this is the legend that proves it, for men could not comprehend the scale of the legends of manaketes. A legend for a man started eight hundred years ago. Ephraim's legacies did not stretch to even before she was born. Her legends were eight-and-eighty thousand years in the past. She tried to explain it once, sitting on a smoking ridge in Nelaras Peak.
Do you see that star? she asked, pointing to the bright pink burst of what Saleh called Amirolous.
Of course. Glinting sparks flew from his hands; he was sharpening her black handled fruit knife. The knife had been Morva's, once, but Myrrh did not put her love into things.
That star might die, and men would not know it in their lifetime. Only I will live to see it.
Stars can die? Ephraim asked, innocently. Myrrh could not compare the weight of twelve hundred years to the feather's touch of seventeen, and she called herself young.
Yes, she said, stars can die. She thought of Morva, and of her mother, and of the Demon King.
..0..
She returned to the Darkling Woods. After some time, she began to grow lonely; she traveled, at to her a great pace that any man would call leisurely, to Caer Pelyn. She asked the first woman she saw, a sheepherder with a pair of spotted white-and-blue-gray dogs, to see Saleh.
Myrrh was instead brought to a man who looked and did not look like her Saleh, in the way a son or father looks and does not look like the other, sipping at a steaming green liquid in a clay cup. His hair, always a strange charcoal gray, was threaded with silver around his braided hairpiece—it had some name, she had not learned it though she was impressed by it—she remembered seeing men with that hairpiece when her mother was alive. She was no good with the ages of men.
"Great Dragon," he said, ritualistically. "You are most welcome to Caer Pelyn."
"Saleh, you have changed so much," and she touched, unselfconsciously, the wrinkles spreading from his eyes like tears. He never seemed so grave when he was a young man, and she had thought him to be very sober then.
"It has been twenty years, my Great Dragon," Saleh said.
"You are . . . eight-and-forty," she said. She held her clay cup loosely, letting the tea cool. Myrrh's knees were already pressed red with the imprint of the rushes woven together. She scratched at the packed earth with her other hand. Saleh's hut surpassed the others in size, and, she assumed, decoration, with relics and tomes strewn across carved red-brown shelves and fantastically embroidered tapestries depicting scenes that Myrrh did not recognize, they came from the human legends.
"Yes," Saleh said.
"Is that old?" she asked.
"For some men, it is two lifetimes. But in Caer Pelyn, no, I am still considered to be in the prime of life—though fading."
He did not seem to be upset, though the implication of his death worried her. She realized that she did not see Dara, who had been elder when she had retreated to her Woods. She was silent, and Saleh continued to speak for it, having grown a wisdom and a sympathy for the silences of young girls.
"I have lived well, Great Dragon. All three of my daughters are grown to womanhood, and two are married. I have a small grandson, of three years. The child of my eldest, Anrah."
Myrrh surprised him by bursting violently into tears. Saleh cast away his cup, still a quarter filled and went to her. It tipped, dribbling a murky mixture of water and floating leafy particles. He went to her and she to him, her old friend and guardian. She wept into his faded vest and tunic. He put his arms around her shoulders. When she calmed, he asked, "My Lady, why do you weep?" The tears in her eyes renewed.
"I missed it," she sobbed. "I missed it all."
..0..
She traveled then to Renais. She had to go to Renais. She had to go to Ephraim.
To her, it was immediate, but the truth was that the journey took two years, one for her to have her fill of Caer Pelyn, one to arrange and make the journey. Myrrh did not reckon her time by the revolutions of their sphere around a star. Saleh did not take her, he must stay. It was instead his youngest daughter, Paelzad, a girl of sixteen, and a group of mercenaries that called her Polly. Myrrh did not notice at once that the red-haired leader had a familiar face, she could not see at once Gerik's features without the scars, or hear his voice without his laugh.
"He is my pa," Adon said, for that was his name. "Do you know of Tethys, Lady Myrrh?"
"The dancer," she said automatically.
"She don't dance quite as much, her joints do not agree to it nowadays," Adon said. "She is my beautiful old ma."
He struck a match and held it to the bowl of his pipe, sitting with her in the back of the jostling caravan. Myrrh smelled the pungent herbal scent of the smoke of Caer Pelyn, which she found pleasant. Paelzad was asleep on his shoulder; they were close, and Myrrh intuited that perhaps it was unclear if they thought Saleh would approve.
"You know, I was with you when you fought the Demon King," Adon noted, slyly looking at her from under Tethys' heavy lashes with her bright red eyes.
Myrrh did not know what he meant, and then she did. "Oh!" she said, suddenly. Adon laughed again, he was jovial.
"How many people can say that, I wonder?" Adon mused. He cast an arm around Paelzad's sleeping body. Myrrh could not understand how she could sleep. The road was not new or smooth. "I was with Lady Myrrh when she fought the Demon King."
"I did little fighting," Myrrh admitted shyly. Adon seemed not to hear her.
"Who was it what struck the final blow?" Adon asked.
Myrrh paused, remembering. "It was King Ephraim."
Adon nodded, pleased. "As it should be."
..0..
In armor was how she remembered Ephraim the most. He wore full armor in her mind's eye, the moment before their last great battle with the Demon King. He was crowned a helm made for him by the generous L'Arachel of Rausten with a diadem of Renais fitted to it. She never liked L'Arachel, for some reason inherent in both their characters. L'Arachel showed her due respect and Myrrh returned it, but they did not like each other. Perhaps L'Arachel sensed some trace of monster in her. This was undeniable. Myrrh, for her part, did not like the way L'Arachel's hands linger on Ephraim's bandaged shoulders, when the princess peeled away the wrapping to see and tend to a burn, a claw mark, a bruise that marks most of his strong, straight back with mottled purple.
Ephraim she never saw but he was wounded. Never gravely, but she could always smell the copper zing of blood or leather about him. He felt the pain, she knew, but he was, or pretended to be, stronger than it. Myrrh could creep about and very few would pay her any heed. It was not generally known that a little girl was the dragon, then one of the last and not the last.
Sometimes she would linger around him. She liked him, and his metallic scents of blood and oil. Myrrh did not know yet that her nose was much keener than a man's. It was Ephraim who noticed it, when she sniffed the mucous secretion of a mogull in the night and ran to warn him.
You saved us, Myrrh, he said. He ruffled her hair, and she liked that. With that nose of yours.
It turned out that many of her senses were keener. She saw farther, heard clearer, felt cold and heat with greater strength, and discomfort. She alternately liked and disliked her many differences, when she discovered what they were. She was useful to Ephraim. She was not the same as him. Myrrh hoped that perhaps he liked her more than for just her natural talents.
Do you suppose men and manaketes were once friends? Ephraim asked of her once.
I think that, she said in a small voice, men served under dragons. I think that dragons were once kings of these lands.
Ephraim grew thoughtful.
Why do you think that, Myrrh?
Morva, she stammered, unsure of how much she could tell and how much was true. Morva had told her never to impart certain secrets, certain manakete lore that must remain among manaketes. He would not tell her why, or what, measuring his words against wisdom and finding them lacking.
Myrrh?
Morva told me once that we had a great queen, the Queen of Magvel, and that there were other lands and she was queen of those too. Her name was supposed to be Lagdou. And she had a son, and her son was corrupt, and did great harm . . . .
What? Myrrh, slow down, you aren't making sense. Lagdou? Like the ruins in the east?
I'm sorry. I do not know it all. Only a little, only a little.
That's alright, Myrrh, don't worry about it.
She did. She thought if she knew, she could trust Ephraim with such secrets. She felt so drawn to him as to tell him anything.
..0..
Ephraim's Renais was not as she remembered, a smoking ransacked castle full of men who loved corpses. Varsylle, the capital, seemed wholly changed, as if by magic, as if overnight. Buildings, shops and homes and homes over shops, now stood where there had been graves of bodies under coarse sheets of brown sack-cloth and rubble of thatch, tile and stone. Much of it was brick and flintwalling, now, many stories high and crowned with curved blue and mud red tiles.
As always, Myrrh was overwhelmed by the numbers, the amount of everything—people, food, animals, smells—crammed carelessly into such a relatively small space. She had been astounded by Serafew, which had been called, offhandedly, by Tethys, "a charming little town."
Myrrh wondered how she would see Ephraim. She imagined, naively, that she would simply fly into the castle garden and happen upon him. She wondered what changes had been visited upon him. She tried, but the image of Ephraim, in his armor, with the red emblem of Renais painted upon the breastplate, superseded her various imaginings.
They were halted at the gatehouse, which permitted entry to the castle. The king was apparently wary. Myrrh did not know why.
Paelzad was not known to the guardsmen, and suspicious because of her strange accent and dress, and small following of mercenaries. A few moments of unavoidable eavesdropping—she was tethered to Saleh's daughter by means of hand-holding—revealed that Saleh had not left Caer Pelyn since his quest to find her had concluded, and he had not maintained his connections with the Princess. Paelzad showed them a ring, with a symbol or crest affixed to it, which grudgingly sent one of them for someone with the proper authorities.
A blond-bearded captain in his middling thirties appeared to them at the gatehouse. He wore green-enameled armor, a cream-colored cape that was stained at the hem and wore a sword at his hip. His yellow hair was grown long, and Myrrh saw that this was to hide a mutilated ear on his left side. His cape was crossed with three stripes of red, the significance of which Myrrh was unsure. She supposed he must be a captain or something.
"By the Gods," he exclaimed when he set eyes on her. Myrrh stood stunned. She did not know this man. "Lady Myrrh!"
He bowed. The guardsmen, uncertain now, hesitated and then also paid obeisances to her.
"I do not . . . I am honored, sir," she said, shyly. Her face grew hot, she had never liked attention like this. Even Saleh, who was deferential to her always, respected her need for informality.
"Of course you do not know me," he said. "I only saw you but at His Majesty's side. I am Franz of Trall, my Lady."
"Sir Franz," she murmured, placing the name to a sweet-faced youth that now resided only in her mind. "You have changed so much."
Franz took custody of both her and Paelzad. Adon and his two peers were bid to wait in the courtyard. He took them further within the now labyrinthine castle. Myrrh was led by the hand, through grand passages and up winding unlit stairs. Paelzad did much of the talking. Her father had taken as an apprentice a friend of Franz's wife, with whom she wrote to often, and who spoke of Saleh occasionally. Franz said he never expected to meet Saleh's daughter, or Lady Myrrh again.
Myrrh's attentions wandered. It did not seem so long ago that she had stood with Ephraim atop the castle and nervously told him that she might fight alongside him. General Seth stood with them, or nearby, and spoke sternly to Ephraim afterward. Myrrh recalled the general with good favor, as she had often been handed to him for safekeeping. She had ridden with him many times, he was always respectful and companionable to her. She remembered disapproving of how bluntly critical he could be to Ephraim, the only fault she found in him. She remembered her sympathies to him, how ardently and how desperately he loved his princess.
She asked Franz how Sir Seth fared, if he had retired or continued serving.
"Passed, my Lady, these past seven years," Franz said. He spoke seriously, but without the violent emotion of proximity.
"How?" Myrrh asked, shock numbing her hands.
"A canker took root in his gut," Franz said and sighed. "Not a pretty end, my Lady, no more than being gutted by a lance. But he survived one and not the other, as it turns out."
And as if summoned, there appeared Eirika, alike and unlike Ephraim. She was a tall woman still, though heavier at the waist, breast, and arms, and grim around the mouth. She wore unrelenting black, a brocade dress of many different blacks to her ankles and her jewels were all jet, gleaming mournfully at her neck and wrists. Over her hair, none of which Myrrh could see, she wore a veil of black gauze, layered to opacity, and fastened in place by a beaten silver band that cut across her severe, uncovered brow. She displayed her age proudly, and, possibly, looked even older than she should by rights. Eirika stood in their path, having emerged from some servant's passage.
"You have my thoughts," Myrrh murmured, instantly.
"Thank you, Lady Myrrh," Eirika said. She had never been as close to the princess as the prince. Eirika was kind. Myrrh liked her as she did not like L'Arachel, or Princess Tana, though she could not love her as a sister like Ephraim once bid her. "General Franz. I will take our guests from here."
A thousand unspoken words flowed between the two humans. Paelzad shifted uncomfortably behind Myrrh.
Franz economically bowed his head. "As you will, Your Highness."
"Lady Myrrh, it is so good to see you," Eirika said, as Franz's cloak swished in retreat around a stairwell beyond sight. "You have not changed."
There was no good response. Myrrh smiled weakly, and tried to curtsey like she had once been taught, by Eirika herself. Paelzad spoke behind her.
"Your Highness, you knew my father," Paelzad piped behind Myrrh, clasping her hands, pushing up the band across her unusual gray curls. Eirika examined her briefly, with one heavy-lidded stare.
"Saleh," Eirika said. "He would have a beautiful daughter, with that wife of his. How do they fare?"
"My father resides in Caer Pelyn with my sisters, and occasionally my mother returns there."
They exchanged words as Eirika herded them ever upward. Myrrh fell silent, let them talk. Men built their castles to the sky, it seemed. Myrrh had nothing to say to Eirika. She swallowed a wad of nervous energy and dread. She did not know yet what she would say to Ephraim. It was all happening so fast.
..0..
How do stars die? Ephraim asked her one night, as they rode together.
Their inner gases collapse and they implode in anguish, Myrrh said with the authority of a well-taught student.
But that's foolishness, Myrrh.
She tried to turn, to look upon his face in the moonlight. Her keen eyes determined his disbelief, his stunted human knowledge of the world, of the worlds around him.
Stars are but light. The concentrated essence of light. He said this with equal conviction. Father MacGregor taught us that. Even Lyon thought it was true.
I do not know Father MacGregor, Myrrh said. But he and Lyon are wrong. The manaketes once had a device by which they studied the miracles of the heavens. Morva was once apprentice to the grand astronomer, and he taught me these things.
What device, Ephraim demanded.
It was once at the top of the Valni Tower, Myrrh said. She did not say, men destroyed it. She did not know that for certain. Morva would never tell her the whole of anything.
Ephraim did not speak for a long moment.
Myrrh, he asked, so quietly. What secrets do you keep from us?
Myrrh took her turn of silence. The hooves upon packed earth were the only sounds for an hour before she had crafted her reply.
It would take a lifetime to explain.
I see, Ephraim said neutrally. She could feel him thinking of Lyon, his dear friend, who wanted to pry the secrets of the world from the hands of the Gods.
He did not question her in that way ever again. Myrrh did not know then, and knew not now, if she had been grateful for his tact, or saddened by his willing embrace of ignorance.
..0..
Eirika pushed open a tear-drop shaped wooden door, with black metal fittings. They passed from the shadowy stairs into a warm, well-lit study of some kind. Seated at a desk, was a narrow shouldered man, his hair silver at the temples. A blanket was laid across his lap, thickly embroidered with red and teal threads.
He glanced up from his writing-desk, covered with parchments and emblems. Recognition sparked across his face, and his smile flickered like a candle's flame.
"Myrrh," he said, and his voice had not changed so much.
"Your Majesty," Myrrh said. "Ephraim."
Eirika, now a solemn matron, took Paelzad's hand and bid her to follow. They closed the heavy tear-drop door behind them. Ephraim remained seated, so Myrrh slunk to him. She reached for his hand and he squeezed hers as he once did. Her advanced perception collected all his various differences from the armored youth of her memory. He was irreparably altered. She knew he was not yet forty.
"Your leg," she said.
He peeled back the blanket and showed her his leg, half gilded prosthetic starting from the knee. A maimed king, she thought, privately. She thought of her manakete legends.
"Infection," Ephraim said and shrugged. "I was not careful. I am lucky to have lived, Myrrh."
She sat on the floor, at his feet. "You cannot know how that frightens me, Ephraim."
"How what frightens you, Myrrh?"
The words scattered when she tried to form them together, disappeared as she chased them.
Instead she told him how happy she was that she had made it in time.
..0..
Paelzad departed after a brief seven months, with a letter from Eirika to her venerated father. She was nervous, and Myrrh supposed that it had something to do with Adon and how his own leather-and-oil smell clung to her hair now.
Her life flowed into the constant activity of Renais Castle. She hated it. She could not stand to leave it. Ephraim had little time, but granted her the great gift of an hour, in the early evening before the sunset, when they would sit together in the gardens and speak of whatever pleased them. On occasion, when his strength permitted—often, he was yet a strong man—they would walk the length of the garden, and the orchard which Eirika's efforts had schooled into an Eden of heavy boughs of fruit and flowering.
"An Eden," Ephraim repeated, testing the word. Myrrh flushed, with the shame of someone having divulged a secret she did not mean to share.
"In the old days, Morva told me," she said. "The kings of the manaketes kept gardens which bloomed and fruited throughout the year. There was no winter within the boundaries of an Eden."
"And by what sorcery was this miracle made possible?" he asked from his stone bench, a platform supported by two fanciful nymphlike creatures. Myrrh plucked at the grass, sitting on the warm summery ground at his feet. He held in his hands a fruit knife and a peach; he cut it into glistening, fragrant thirds and offered her two of them.
"No sorcery," she said, having gone this far. "The miracle of glass walls, and irrigation. You have them. You have seen them, the arches that criss-cross the land."
"Could they be restored? And glass is so costly," Ephraim wondered aloud, but Myrrh did not know.
The first peach third was sweet, but she tasted a mealiness that proved to ruin the second third. She disliked, inexplicably and unkindly, when Ephraim thought of his people. She did not like, for whatever petty reason, that her knowledge was only a tool, that if only it could be prized from her, would be used and used and herself forgotten except as the source of it. She did not like Lute, the Archlibrarian, who tailed her doggedly for this knowledge whenever the King was not at hand.
Ephraim had no child. His heir was Eirika's only child, a nervous boy named Absalom that Myrrh was pleased to associate with while they were of the same size and apparent age, though he was no substitute for Ephraim's company. Myrrh was more pleased that Ephraim had never taken a Queen. Myrrh, in the two years preparation in Caer Pelyn, had dreaded that; a Queen Tana, a Queen L'Arachel, a Queen whose name, face, and beauty were all unknown to her.
She could not imagine loving any wife of Ephraim's, "like a sister," or feeling anything but inflamed, swollen jealousy. She imagined the pain of that to be like a splinter, inserted under the fingernail and impossible to retrieve. Myrrh understood how unfair it was to feel thus; and she found that she did not particularly care.
..0..
Morva had once told her, Living amongst men will destroy you, for you are neither one of them, nor are you not of them.
Is there a solution, then? she asked, not insolently but truly curious. Is there any way to exist amongst the living of this world? We cannot always hide here, among the evils and the dead.
Her guardian, her adopted and faithful father, appeared to contemplate her question with appropriate gravity. When he spoke, there was an aspect of sorrow in his words. His face was always sober, but true sadness pierced his inhuman eyes, and Myrrh could not, at that time, comprehend why.
When you look upon the night sky, you admire all the stars and heavenly bodies, he said. There is no one star you enjoy viewing most, nothing that a solitary star, singularly, can tell you of the heavens that cannot be learned of any of the other, endlessly identical stars.
Love the vastness of heaven, not a star. Love men, Myrrh, not a man. Though that star might die, the true glory and beauty lies within the grand whole of the universe, and not, never, your insignificant, single star.
..0..
Myrrh brooded. She resented much of her life, now, in Varsylle. She had no function here, there was nothing she could do or learn to do. Franz offered to teach her to wield a sword, but she refused, unreasonably afraid of being cut down in her fragile human form. Many feared her, and called her a monster. It was true that the lands circling Varsylle were more inhabited by monsters than in the past.
Myrrh did not know if this was because of her. The Demon King, she was now sure, had been one of them. She petitioned, and received, the escort for an expedition to the ruins in the east. She asked specifically for warriors of light, having a suspicion of what she might find. Prince Absalom asked to accompany her, he was now seventeen and aching for a moment to prove himself to be other than a shy and nervous boy, to be worthy of the crown that was to befall him.
She agreed, and told him she was pleased to know he would be at her side. He favored his mother in looks, and if asked Myrrh might not have been able to find a trace of Seth in him if she had not known it was there. She glimpsed the old General in flashes; she recalled the certain shape of his knuckles, his propensity to cracking them loudly before doing any trivial thing. He was tall as his father, though slenderer like his mother, and the spear that he favored. Absalom was fond of her, first as a "big sister" and now as a little one. As he grew older and taller, he seemed more and more aware of her strangenesses, her long silences, her agelessness and gravity of manner.
The journey there was uneventful, or would have been save for the monsters. The knights, at first, instructed her to stand down. It was only when they saw her true aspect, her dragon's body, that they understood why she did not fear the monstrous. After that first battle, they formed a tactic that served them well, Myrrh leading a devastating charge, her little party clearing away any survivors. She did not feel excitement or anxiety over this. Absalom asked her if she was ever afraid of the ghouls and ghasts that they faced at ever-increasing interval.
"No," she said honestly. "I do not. There are many such in the Darkling Woods. I would compare them to lice, or fleas."
"Lice and fleas are devils to rid yourself of," Absalom said. He said it to make her smile, and she did.
"So they are," Myrrh said in reply, before retiring to her own little tent, attended by her own squire, Franz's fourteen year old daughter. Absalom trailed after her, asking if there was anything he might do to make her more comfortable or the journey more pleasant. He was not easily dismissed, but she assured him that all was well.
She rode with him, when she rode. Horses needed firmer hands than hers when she was present; some scent of the monstrous about her made them skittish. She leaned easily against his back, her wings making it impossible to ride before him in the saddle. Myrrh always enjoyed Ephraim's nephew's company, but she learned again how interesting he was, his thoughts and worries. He hated speaking before masses, fretted over decisions, lost sleep over disputes. He was sensitive to the emotions of others. She liked that about him, but he was no Ephraim.
The ruins of Lagdou appeared on the horizon one morning. Though the men felt an evil presence, Absalom rallied them forward. The ruins, at first, appeared just that, mossy and destroyed by both man and nature alike. The walls of eroded sandstone, carved and embedded with long-since pillaged gemstones, gilded doorways with absent gold, paved with broken slabs of marble, all made for a picture of ancient splendor that passed into decay long ago. Myrrh commented that it looked much the same as when she had been here, almost thirty years hence.
She addressed her party before the descent, shy and stumbling over her words to so many in her care. "I . . . know not what it is we will find," she said. "I have not been but a third . . . or less . . . of the way down. I know there is treasure . . . if you find it, take it. It will be . . . better loved by you and yours . . . than what is down there guarding it. But we must—we must—"
"We cannot stop," Absalom supplied, sympathetic to her nervousness. "We must reach the limit of this place, and bring its secrets to the light! In the name of Renais!"
There was a huzzah, and a forward movement of purposefulness. She did not say to Absalom, "there are secrets within that will never see the light of day, even when I bring them from their graves, not when I will bury them again inside of me so deep you would not even know of their existence."
..0..
The great empress Lagdou was loved by her loyal son, Formortiis. This was what they found, in runes which only Myrrh could understand.
Here are the guardians of the body of Queen Lagdou. It was a warning, inscribed in magic glyphs over an archway of impossible proportion. They fought and destroyed those creatures, aged into walking nightmares. Myrrh's heart wept. Their blood was blackened and viscous, oozing from the jagged stripes that the swords of men cut into their wrinkled flesh. She could not bear to think of them as "her people." They were too far gone. She recalled the corpse woman Monica, whom Ephraim had not let her see.
Formortiis, the last prince of the dragons, whose heart was ruined by ambition and abused the labors of men, upon which his empire was built. Those wretched creatures, which slaved beneath the manaketes, whose bodies were strong, whose minds were brief, and could not command the full breadth of knowledge and power of the manaketes.
The word 'homunculus' appeared several times; Myrrh did not know it and at the same time could hazard a guess at its horrible meaning. The tragedy, of Lagdou's death, the unlikely seizure of five Stones that had been the engines of progress, one of which had been the heart of Morva's observatory at Valni. The heroism of her valiant son, who destroyed his body with power to avenge her, and then lost himself to that abyss.
In the murals, she saw the demonized image of the leader of the slaves, Grado. He wore a braided band across his brow, as the other slaves did. The schism between the dragons, the traitors who had aided him and called it justice. Among those reviled names, those who had been executed, Myrrh saw her own mother's name.
Absalom and his men found much gold and gems, the vestigial treasures of the past. Myrrh feigned and pleaded ignorance, when they asked her what she saw and what she took from that miserable place, as Morva had pleaded when she had begged him for a full measure of their history. She knew now, and she knew that she must bear the knowledge now, all alone.
..0..
Their return was much celebrated. Absalom was hailed, in particular, for finding the means by which Grado, the southern, and greater half, of his nation, might be restored. Myrrh's journey had taken the space of six months to complete fully. She felt weighted by its result, even as burdens were lifted away from the people. She withdrew, taking comfort only in the presence of the Royal Family. The monsters, from which Varsylle had enjoyed a reprieve, returned in force. Absalom made great strides defending the land against them, too. He was much loved. Myrrh thought of him affectionately, and when she had nothing else to think about.
It was one wintry evening that Ephraim and Myrrh sat together, accompanied by two flickering candles sent into an alcove a few inches above the plane of his great kingly writing-desk. They spoke of nothing subjects; the food at dinner, the increasing frequency of Eirika's "scenes."
"I have been thinking of Lyon," he said, suddenly.
"Have you?" Myrrh replied, unsure of this conversation.
"Yes," Ephraim confirmed. He shifted in his chair, arranging the blankets and wrappers that wreathed him. He was heavy and old. His face had nothing of the smoothness of youth, and he was not the handsome prince that had saved her over forty years ago. She loved him still, she confessed that much to herself. "I have been remembering his love of history and science. I was such a poor student. Do you remember when you told me about the stars?"
He did not wait for her to respond.
"I felt so unknowing. I wish I had bothered with all that. If I had . . . If perhaps we had shared that love of study, maybe I might have preserved him from the Stone."
"No," she said, fiercely. Ephraim jumped, surprised by the outburst of feeling. "You would have been destroyed too. He sought knowledge that he shouldn't have. Knowledge that destroys is not worth knowing."
He did not speak. Myrrh recognized the silence as the time it took for her aging love to craft a reply in wisdom. He was not naturally wise. She loved him for it, because of it. She cherished the image of him, in full armor, righteously striking down the Demon King, Formortiis, beloved of his ancient mother, in full blessed ignorance of that love and history. She had come to believe, what Morva had believed, that men could not know certain things; they would be tempted, un-understanding of the far-reaching consequences, and bull through the delicate mechanisms that protected them.
"Our people have the right to knowledge, too," Ephraim said, slow and measured. "Men are not so susceptible to destruction. One day, Myrrh, we will uncover what is hidden and knowledge of it could be what little thing that saves us. If Lyon had known what you know—what you have asked me never to ask—"
"It would not have saved him from the earthquake that shattered Grado," Myrrh said. "It would not have saved him from Formortiis and what once was. You do not know what it is he fought, and lost against."
"You will not tell me," he said.
The tear-drop door opened suddenly, and Absalom stood within it. The gust caused one of the candles, the shorter one on Ephraim's side, to extinguish suddenly.
"Lord Uncle," Absalom said, quickly bowing. "Please—mother is, she is asking for you. She thinks I'm you, Lord Uncle, you must go speak sense to her."
Ephraim rose, slowly. He did not wear his prosthetic, so Absalom took his arm over his younger shoulders and half-carried him.
How quickly they diminish, Myrrh though to herself, as Ephraim and his nephew struggled out of the door.
..0..
The night of Ephraim's death was cold, bright with snow on the ground. It was not long after his plea for her knowledge, which out of love she could not grant. The king succumbed, at the end, to pneumonia, a little more than fifty. Absalom ascended; Myrrh was asked to place the crown upon his brow, though she refused, shyly preferring to watch from a distance.
She supposed now it was time for her to go. In Caer Pelyn, Paelzad's sons were learning magic, and Saleh was the Elder. Humans died all around her. Franz went out ranging one day and returned, three weeks later, with a festering wound that took his life at last after two excruciating days in Sir Artur's Hospital. The General now was someone she did not know, one of Absalom's devoted men.
Eirika was not herself, she suffered fits and bouts where she called any red-haired man "Seth," and begged him to save her father. Absalom was often chastised as if he were Ephraim, young, alive and whole, with no true Ephraim to counter her wild claims. She did not seem to remember she had a son, or had wielded Sieglinde and defeated Formortiis the Demon King.
Myrrh longed for the silence of the Darkling Woods. She knew that when she returned, she would not be remembered, she would not see a face she recognized ever again.
..0..
Myrrh traveled, by herself, quietly, to the Darkling Woods. It was as she remembered it. She tended to the Dark Temple, and repaired what little she could. A dragon had the strength to move mountains, but Myrrh was no mason. Her hair grew, and she became fertile. She did not grow taller, though she had hoped she might. She had no method by which to reckon the year. She was a silent guardian of her knowledge, living nearly untouched by the passing of time.
The Darkling Woods were silent too. No animals dared enter this part of the wood. Myrrh was forced to range wider and wider for food; and beside that, most animals disliked her to begin with. Monsters gathered close, though, gaping as if awestruck. They would not attack her, singularly. She though perhaps, being the last dragon, they were drawn to her as they were drawn to Formortiis.
She tilted her face upward, to see the moon, a silver slice in the sky. Almost new again, she thought.
If she had blinked she would have missed it. Through a gap in the heavy yellow-green canopy, she saw a pink speck of light. Myrrh had time to think to herself—of Ephraim, and of Saleh and Paelzad, of the Demon King and of Morva—of all her secrets and lonelinesses—before it vanished, flickering away as if she had never seen it there.
..0..
Absalom asked her the night before her departure, why did you come to Renais?
They stood together on the wall, facing the mountains that ringed Varsylle in loose spiraling ranges. The night was clear and warm. Stars spattered the sky, distributed in great handfuls in places and thinly in others. She recalled Morva's words, and wondered if that was why she felt so little grief. Her Ephraim was dead. She remembered once imagining that her breath would stop with his, one day, she loved him so much.
I loved your uncle, Myrrh said without hesitation.
Is there, he said, timid as always. Is there anything else here that you love?
Myrrh began to shake her head, and then realized how badly she had just wounded him. Absalom was shyer and more touched by emotion than he appeared. She knew that he wept often, alone and in secret, over his mother's madness and his own loneliness. He had not married. She turned to him and took his hands in hers.
It cannot be, Myrrh told him. I am a dragon, remember this.
I know, but-
There is no but. I am a child in appearance.
You are no child, Myrrh!
I am. I am a child on a scale that you cannot imagine. My people civilized these lands before yours were even crawling in the mire! I know things that you cannot conceive of and even I do not know it all! Remember that I am no girl. I am a dragon! I am a creature that you cannot even hope to understand!
She grew, for her, hysterical. Myrrh sniffled and pointed roughly to the sky.
Look at those, Myrrh commanded. That star, that star might die right now and I would be the only one who would live to see its light vanish from the night sky. You might die, and I would never know, it would be like blinking my eyes. My life can be measured in stars. Your life is so slight, it is as if it is measured in seconds. We are so different. We are so immeasurably different. I cannot stay. Not any longer.
Will you return? Absalom, King of Renais asked. Her keen eyesight saw that his own eyes were heavy with tears. She could not bear his sorrow. He asked and did not ask, Am I nothing to you, but one amongst many? One star among millions?
Yes, Myrrh said, to both questions, asked and unasked.
Absalom's lips pressed inward, sensing the unspoken, tightening with such bitterness that Myrrh was forced to look away. He dropped her hand, and turned. His steps resounded in her ears for hours afterward, almost louder than his final words to her.
Return, then, when that star dies.
..0..
She decided, the next morning, that it was time to return to the world of men.