komorebi (n.) scattered sunshine filtering through foliage; the interplay between the light and the leaves.
The sun freckled on the bracken underfoot; anaemic daylight filtered pink-stained through the clouds of kalmia flowers bush-entangled on either side of the narrow path which wound its way, maze-like, through the thickets of hemlock and datura clustering the western quarters. Overhead, a fragrant parasol of othalanga trees wept white flowers and lime-green apples; it was early in the season for its fruits to have blossomed, but it was no great surprise to glimpse them now – after all, there was a Selection about to begin. The Schreaves were not in the habit of taking chances. A dynasty had no hopes of standing for long if it was.
The palace was constructed around the gardens, embracing them as the walls embraced the kingdoms; the gardens answered that embrace with one of their own, threading long jigsaw-paved paths among the disparate buildings of the castle complex. One was never far from the sickly sweet scent of aconitum, which hung over Ganzir like a shroud when the wind was low. This place here was a near-centre for the palace, analagous to its heart; the lake reflected the chapel back in perfect detail, so that the water itself was pearl-white and glistened as the marble facade of the sacellum did, gold-dusted.
The dogwood tree overlooking the lake was as old as Wall Alliette; it might have even been older than the druj itself, than the kingdom of Illéa as it stood today. It hailed from another world, an older world, a world which had fallen long ago and left only dregs behind. Its petals had long ago darkened from white to grey, from pink to crimson, from lilac to violet, so that it seemed to scream against the golden pallor of the afternoon sky. Beneath its foliage, his face sun-dappled and light-streaked, Priscus Schreave was holding a mortar and pestle; the hammer-and-bowl were both streaked fustic and yellow from the potent mixture of mulberry and oleander contained within. He was making ink; his fingertips were stained from it.
He smiled to see his grandson approach, but made no motion to rise as any other person might – such was the privileges of a fellow Schreave. He was clad in his usual charcoal-grey suit, although his jacket lay neatly folded on the seat next to him. His pale grey shirt sleeves were rolled to his elbows while he quietly worked. The bench on which he was sitting was simply constructed, merely an elmwood log balanced upon two iron legs; carved into its gable end was the symbol of the Chou family, burnt into place as a paltry tribute to the matriarch who had died five years hence, sight-unseen –
(仇)
"You're up early, my boy."
It was nearing late afternoon; the sky was stitched in gold to the edge of the palace walls, and the clouds clustered in tight bales around the points of the castle spires. Silas sensed he was meant to take some degree of offence to his grandfather's sly words, but he couldn't muster much righteousness in the moment. Instead, he eased himself onto the edge of the bench, and adjusted his cuffs, and said, "I could say the same about you."
"I have an excuse." Priscus set his mortar on the bench beside him, yellow dust clinging to the edge of the wood and drifting slowly down to the ground like the physical fragments of shattered sunlight. He looked a little paler than usual, a little more tired; the Selection, and the rituals it demanded, the tithes it took, would be enough to drain anyone, let alone a man as venerable as Priscus. "I don't see you doing much work around here."
"Not much point in exerting myself until I have to."
His grandfather's mouth twitched. "May the day never come."
Silas smirked and dabbed at the blood on his lips with his handkerchief. "Something like that."
They were silent for a moment, a long and comfortable moment. The wind scuttled across the flat glass of the pond; a grosbeak was scraping out a fractured song from a branch high and deep in the dogwood. Priscus seemed at peace, Silas decidedly less so, if the crisp and stilted manner in which he folded his handkerchief and pushed it back into his breast pocket could be any good indication. It was red, the better to disguise the blood which so frequently marked it; it matched, perfectly, the rubies which adorned his thumb and ring finger, the red of the signet crest hanging from his smallest knuckle. Silas liked the colour red: there was a simple vibrancy to it.
"You seem flinty," Priscus said, at last, his voice low. This place had once been known as the spy's scourge – words carried for yards across water so flat and broad, found their ways into all sorts of nooks and crannies, where who-knew-who could be listening in. "For a man with his Selection on the horizon."
"A reason for," Silas replied coldly, "rather than a reason against, surely?"
"Your mother is a bad influence. You are a hundred times too cynical."
He smiled, slightly. If he was to be a pessimist, then he would, inevitably, attempt to be the best at it. "Only a hundred?"
"A conservative estimate." Priscus dusted his hands off one another; crumbling yellow ink clung to each line of his hands as though he had crushed buttercups between his knuckles, staining sunny the callouses on his palms which suggested some long-forgotten experience of manual labour. "I pity whatever poor girl tries to woo such a dour bastard."
"What little good it would do."
"Hmm. Yes. I suspect your sister has rather tipped the scales of the game already."
"You would be disappointed in her," Silas said, his voice sly, "if she hadn't."
Priscus did not need to say that he agreed; it was obvious in the lines of his eyes. "Do you know anything of the Selected?"
"Nothing."
"A pleasant surprise, then."
"We can hope."
"We'll have to hope that they like what they see as well." Priscus had picked up his mortar and pestle once again; his movements were rhythmic as he set to work once again, rolling the blunt club in his hands, the sound coarse and harsh after the placid silence of the moment preceding. His fingertips were precise, as he reached into the bowl and turned over the little shards which would not break down, the sharper seeds and fibres which stuck out amongst the otherwise smooth paste. "Your shyness has done us few favours. What if they all find you utterly grotesque, my boy?"
Shyness. When Silas put a hand to his mouth, it came away red and black. "Yes," he said dryly, "we do run that risk."
"But curiosity is a powerful attraction also." Priscus smiled thinly. He was an eccentric looking man at the best of time, all grey hair and grey beard and grey suit. He usually didn't show his teeth when he smiled; it made the expression seem somehow more sardonic, like he formed it only because he thought that he ought. "And desire for power more potent again. If it worked for your father, it can work for anyone."
Silas ran his tongue along his teeth. "You know what they call me."
"I do."
"Then I think," Silas said, "that we will be fine."
"In that regard." His grandfather drew the words out slowly.
"Yes," Silas agreed, "in that regard."
"Then we will, indeed, be fine." Priscus reached out, and took Silas' hand in his, turning it over to inspect the streaks of red and black that marked his knuckles. Silas remembered his grandfather scoffing in a moment like this one, that a Schreave man should have his own blood on his hands rather than the blood of another. Now, however, he merely dipped his little finger into his mortar's yellow paste and smeared it across Silas' skin, tracing out a broad shape that the younger prince could not quite discern.
It burned, hot and piercing; where he could still glimpse his skin beneath, it was raising slowly in a red welt.
Priscus said, calmly, "but see that you do not share your father's hamartia."
He needed to say nothing else; there was not a single Schreave unaware of the fact that Aviram's Selection – Aviram's choices in that Selection – had threatened to be the downfall of their entire dynastic order. Love was an ideal, heaven-lofty, but family… family was the duty, paramount-on-earth.
"I'm almost hurt," Silas said, "that you thought I needed a reminder."
He rose. If he tipped his head right back, and looked directly at the sky, then he could glimpse the tip of a long finger of smoke, rising slowly to the north, splitting apart the clouds like a needle parting cloth. It was joined by another, closer again, a little paler – the colour of burning bodies. They were too far away to hear the bells, if there were bells, but Priscus seemed utterly unconcerned by it all.
Silas said, "do you ever actually pity them? The girls?"
His grandfather's voice rumbled low. "Never."
And so Silas nodded. He put one hand to the back of the other, feeling the way the yellow paste pinpricked his fingers when he touched it, like the barbs of a rose digging deep under the skin. "I should go. I'll be late to see Txori."
Priscus smiled indulgently. "Don't let an old man keep you."
"It's good to see you again," Silas said, and meant it. "I am glad for it."
"You know me," Priscus said. That thin smile of his again – it was an expression that Silas and Asenath had both inherited, more a smirk than anything else, suggesting mirth where there was none and cruelty where there was plenty. "I wouldn't have missed this for the world."
From his cousin's bedroom window, he watched it fall still – at last, mercifully, still. The enormous stone druj had come to a stop at the boundary of Wall Szymańscy, where Vanth was divided from Aizsaule, where an adjunct district became a middle ring. One enormous concrete hand rested, for a moment, on the stone battlements which lined the fortification; it could have torn it down with a single, simple movement, could have moved through it as though it wasn't there at all, could have swept one gargantuan stone limb across the wall and sent the entire amassed tagma corps screaming to the ground. Instead, it hesitated, and froze, and then rocked backwards, two long steps to bring it out of the immediate range of the cannons. And then it fell still – at last, mercifully, still.
Bartolo watched it from his cousin's bedroom window. It was a small farmhouse in rural Vanth, and he could hear the adults downstairs stressing about when it would fall. He could hear through the floor that his mother was still in tears; she had started crying earlier the morning before, when the red-coated Watchers had threatened not to let them out of the district under siege, when the golden-garbed paqudus had tried to turn them back into the massacre. She had started crying, and she had not stopped. It was night now, deepest and darkest night, and she had not stopped.
The sky outside was inky dark and utterly starless; the titannic druj at the edge of Wall Szymańscy was lit only by the torches that lined the fortifications, which painted its enormous head and torso in red-and-black shadows. Its golden eyes were the only things approximating stars in the sky; but for that, it was utterly shrouded in shadow and indistinguishable from the gloom which surrounded it. An awful, enormous omen, watching over them all as though in reminder of how easily it could put an end to all of them, to their lives and livelihoods and survival. They lived only by its mercy.
If a druj could be merciful.
Most of the refugees from Aizsaule – those who had actually made it out of the district – had initially amassed in tight clusters below, where the staff of the viceroy had gathered to greet and process them. And then, even as night had fallen, they had continued to ford their way deeper into the district, further from their homes, as far away as they could get from the breaches in the wall and the piles of the dead now rising as smoke into the lightless sky, heedless to commands by soldiers and guards alike that they should remain where they were. Even now, Bartolo could hear his uncle gathering supplies for a journey of their own; they could not stay here, Uncle Lénárd would be saying, they could not stay when the druj were still swarming only a few miles away, when the ammunition for cannons ran so low, when the tagma corps ran thin and corpses began to outnumber moving bodies.
Perhaps things would be better now. Now that the golem had fallen still – at last, mercifully, still.
Bartolo could barely tear his eyes away from it. Even if the lines of its body were unclear, even if it was shrouded in gloom, even if he could only see its golden eyes glaring out of the clouds of smoke which choked the air above the wall. And those golden eyes were paling now, vanishing into the dark, like a star winking out of life when the sun began to rise. Smoke was rising, not only from the cremating of the bodies beyond, but from the druj itself, like it was burning up from the inside out. Smoke was pouring from its eyes and then, when it opened its mouth, from its mouth as well, like its very heart was on fire.
It vanished behind the sooty smog and was gone.
A silhouette was moving on the wall now, and then it vanished, and the enormous stone golem – the ruin of Mønt, of Tiamat, and of Aizsaule alike – was gone.
Gone, as though it had never existed at all. Gone, as though the world had ended of its own spontaneous accord. Gone, gone, gone.