Chapter Text
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“There, there, dear child. Come back, now. Come back to me.”
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Edelgard’s eyes snap open and the world returns in a burst of brilliant light.
The transition from pitch darkness to blinding white steals a cry from her chest and robs her of speech. She throws her good hand up to shield her face, but her limbs do not respond—even the effort of lifting her head is a trial, requiring her to manifest a long-dormant strength that singes her lungs as she coaxes it back to life. The burning is nothing, a familiar suffering, one far more welcome than sight or sense after so long in the stagnant dark.
Blinking, she eases her eyes open to narrow cracks, just enough for some of the white void to resolve into distinct colors and shapes. A figure looms large before her: it strikes a tall and slender silhouette, the form a muddle of white and cream and ethereal green. Her addled mind struggles to connect past and present, linking vision to memory—she remembers green—remembers her—and the world comes into focus.
The resplendent green eyes of Rhea, Saint Seiros, The Immaculate One, the Archbishop of Fódlan, now its uncontested queen, stare down at Edelgard, and Edelgard, kneeling at her feet, stares back.
An infant, animal part of her thinks to flee, but something of the hegemon’s pride yet lives, and the warlord within acknowledges there is no escape. Strong hands grip her by the shoulders, less with the purpose of keeping her pressed to her knees and more to keep her from collapse. The heavy manacles on her limbs are hardly necessary when the darkness has had her in its clutches for so long, eating away at her body and mind to leave her a ruin, the mirror of the empire she knows was hers, but can no longer recall. Though she hasn’t seen her own reflection—what has she ever looked like?—she knows she is different now. Her white hair hangs in front of her face, stringy and brittle, but clean and free of mats; her filthy wardress, bloodied and torn from battle long before it was further ruined by rats and squalor and decay, has been exchanged for a plain white shift. Her desiccated throat aches with the effort of swallowing. Without her knowing, she has been bathed and cleansed. The thought shames her, and the humiliation, too, is familiar. Keeping her head forward, she glances at the stiff, static arms holding her, making out only white robes and veiled faces. There must be others at her back—three, by her guess. She feels no heat, but senses their shapes behind her, feels the familiar sensation of a hand lurking, ready to close at her neck.
High up above, Rhea hums, a gentle, pleased tone. “Ah. You are with us.”
The comment is simple yet derisive in a way that strikes Edelgard as humorous—as if Edelgard has come here of her own volition, as if the path before her has not always been set before she decides where or whether to tread. But Edelgard’s choices have never been her own. She may sway on her strings, scream blasphemies at the looming hand all she likes, but always she will go where it leads.
When Edelgard manages to squint up at Rhea again, she is looking back at her and smiling, precisely as placid and serene as Edelgard remembers from... How long ago was it? How long has it been? It could have been no time at all with how Rhea looks. She is clad simply in a floor-length white gown—Edelgard remembers her outfitted in ostentation, in the headdress and mantle and jewelry of her office or in the winged helm of a statue—but apart from her humble state of dress, the Archbishop is still as youthful and beautiful as in Edelgard’s memory. Even her hair scarcely seems longer, flowing over her bust and down her back in cascades of celestial green, adorned with a single lily near her temple. And her eyes, with their lucent green irises and otherworldly depths—they are exactly the same as they have appeared in Edelgard’s unending visions and nightmares ever since the second coming of the darkness.
Were Edelgard slightly more dazed, had her overgrown claws not curled inextricably into the few sad remnants of her sanity, were she merely anyone else, Edelgard might believe the pretender for the saint. But she is just herself enough to remember well what Rhea is.
“Poor child,” Rhea tuts, giving Edelgard that tranquil smile, her narrow brows drawn up in a mockery of endearment. “It has been too long. I hope you do not begrudge me the absence of years.”
Years? It could not have been—but what would she know? Time ceased to exist for Edelgard long ago, moments and realities extending infinitely without reason or cycle, only dark and dark and dark. Her mouth is dry, and she realizes she’s shivering, even though she is not cold for the first time in a very, very long time. Swallowing nothing and keeping Rhea’s shape centered in her vision, she flicks her gaze around the room. It is a sparse and unfamiliar expanse, devoid of any of the Church’s usual ornamentation and lit not by wick or torch or magic, but by long, slender white bars. They are embedded along the edges of the high ceiling and spaced evenly through its center, emitting a glow that bathes the room in light bright as the sun on fresh-fallen snow. The walls and floor are of the same smooth white stone, cold and unforgiving; the light and its endless refractions burn her eyes, near useless now from unknowable ages in the dark, forcing her to squint. She understands now why Rhea seems so much larger than in her tattered memory—she looms above Edelgard from a low dais in the center of the room, a wide surface housing a long altar flanked on either side by a series of round pedestals, all hewn from yet more stone. At first glance, the altar appears plain, but she makes out the shadows of engravings upon its surface in patterns too distant to discern. The pedestals are nondescript, though varied in size, each covered with a thin white sheet. The shapes of whatever objects lie beneath are indecipherable, yet awaken a old and fearful instinct within Edelgard’s gut. She studies the room, scanning it twice, thrice, but does not see any windows or even a door. There is only Rhea and the altar and the hands at her shoulders and the oppressive, unrelenting light.
“I will grant you this, little eagle,” Rhea continues, confessionally. “You employed a wise serpent. It was his letter that revealed the identities of your conspirators—and the location of their stronghold.” Her smile widens ever so slightly, and beneath her serene visage, a vicious edge gleams. “They have been purged from this world, as with the rest of your treasonous accomplices.”
The words take a moment to resonate. Her brain struggles to match feeling to meaning; she does not remember the name of her supposed serpent, but she knows she has missed him as she does the function of her ruined shield hand. At the same time, a hot rush of unfettered relief has exploded through her veins like a dam breaking, and a single laugh escapes her chest in an aching burst of sound.
It is over—all of it—everything.
Rhea sighs, the sound a saccharine simulation of contrition. “It is a shame to have had to inflict yet more death,” she carries on, though with a trace of disappointment in her tone, as if she had anticipated a different reaction. “I regret that I could not glean more from them before their souls were returned to the Goddess. You and your confederates left much strife in your wake. There was much healing to be done across this land, and precious little time for anything else I might have wished to do. Perhaps,” she muses—and Edelgard could swear her pupils seem to narrow as she speaks—“the Goddess willed it thus to give you ample time to reflect. Have you done so, ‘Emperor’?” She spits the word, mocking, as though it has meaning. “Have you given thought to your crimes?”
Edelgard considers the words, their implications, the title, the histories they paint in broad, brutal strokes. Images swirl, but do not resolve—it is as if a great many creeping tendrils have slithered down old paths into her mind, leaving it a fog that conjures only outlines of events, blurry shapes of stars and scales and swords and wings and writhing masses of men. The darkness has grown over her memory as it grows over everything, occluding all with the soothing weight of a blanket; she misses it now, wishes she could return to it, to them, to where she belongs, far from the light’s cruel reach.
The comforting thought of the darkness is pulled away by the sound of Rhea sighing again. “I see you need reminding,” she says, beginning to stalk closer to the edge of the dais. “You, Edelgard von Hresvelg, have sinned.” Now her shadow is over Edelgard, her eyes ablaze with righteous rage; now she is wholly the Archbishop, the hand of justice, the arbiter of fate. “You have violated all of the Goddess’s eternal commandments and coerced others into following you down your perfidious path. You have forsaken your duties, disgraced your ancestors, and bathed this land in the blood of innocents. Your selfishness has led to the slaughter of thousands and ruined the lives of countless more. You have brought the downfall not only of the Empire entrusted to you by the covenant between the red blood and white sword, but have spread your ruin to lands beyond your own. You—a mere child!—thought yourself wiser and stronger than the very light that forged this land. You have lied and blasphemed, damning all those you misled with heresies and false promises of ‘progress’.” The word hits Edelgard’s cheek as it’s spat from Rhea’s lips like poison. “But you mistake yourself,” she says, softer now, her eyes no less violent; she stoops, extending her hand as if she might touch it to Edelgard’s face. “You are not a wheel, but a millstone around the throat of this world.”
The tip of a long finger presses into the indentation at the base of Edelgard’s neck—it does not press hard, but it burns, and Edelgard feels it everywhere. It shoots through her blood, resonating at a frequency that hums within her chest and vibrates down the length of her spine to a fever pitch between her thighs; she chokes—first for breath, and then again when she feels something less of fear; the sound grows, and just as it begins to eclipse her breathlessness, the Archbishop withdraws.
The aftermath is an agony. Edelgard reels, panting, struggling to parse what happened. Her throat feels empty, as if some of her own flesh has been torn away; she feels a damp rush, and with a sour pang of shame, she realizes she has no underclothes beneath her borrowed shift. Something in her knows it has been so very long since someone last touched her even with the indifferent cruelty of the veiled cardinals, and longer yet since she was touched like this, skin-to-skin. But this, she is certain, was more than the starving, pitiful desperation of the abandoned. There was something more, some sort of hum, magical, magnetic, laced with a feeling of calm so pervasive, so soothing, like a homecoming wrought in pain. Now, the crescent-shaped indentation in her skin merely bears the lingering sting of the Archbishop’s nail—but what explanation is there for the heat still pulsing through her blood and throbbing between her legs? She stares up at Rhea, hoping to find some truth in her face, but the Archbishop shows no sign of having felt as Edelgard did—or even that she has noticed the effects of her own touch. Her expression is unchanged, fury and loathing silently simmering behind her placid mask of office.
But just behind her, something has begun to shimmer—a strange and nebulous shape, hovering in the air inches from Rhea’s shoulder. It holds form like a shadow parted from its master, though it takes no space, floating and wavering, at once absorbing and rejecting the room’s bright lights. When Edelgard blinks, it remains; she wills her eyes to concentrate on it, but whenever they might draw it into focus, it shifts in form or flickers from view, becoming indecipherable again.
It could not be a ghost. Edelgard does not see ghosts, not in light and not in life. The veiled cardinals ought to see it easily as Edelgard does, hovering at Rhea’s back just out of her view, but they do not so much as acknowledge it—they scarcely seem to acknowledge Edelgard, standing without moving, keeping her captive in their cold, unfaltering grip. If anyone but Edelgard knows this shape is there, they are just as indifferent to it as they were to the effects of the Archbishop’s touch.
The luxury of reflection is not afforded to her now, not when the Archbishop has penance to exact. “All is done,” Rhea goes on, “yet you remain.” Her voice is a dangerous purr, edged like a knife and dripping with venom. “Many nights I have prayed to the Goddess in hope of gleaning why She would continue to push you to me, and finally, She has revealed her wisdom. You, Edelgard, are the key to all that yet remains unknown. I need only find what lock you fit.”
With an expectant smile, she rises, then turns her attention to the veiled captors gripping Edelgard’s shoulders.
“Strip her,” she commands them, “and lay her upon the altar.”
Gloved hands grasp her, hauling her to her feet; Edelgard’s world spins on all axes, her legs buckling, her ruined body too weakened to fight back. White shapes blur together as cold hands pull and tug at her—Rhea is murmuring a prayer—“Goddess, protect this child, and keep her in Your graces”—so it could not be her that is screaming—no—not again—not again—
Her shift is ripped from her frame all at once and discarded like a shell. There is no time to parse the shock of sudden exposure—five sets of hands clamp to her bare frame and bundle her to the altar with mechanical precision—it took more than that last time; another failure; what a disappointment. As one unfeeling automaton works to shed the manacles from Edelgard’s limbs, the others pin her naked form to the stone, spreading her body like a fallen star. Blind panic stokes the fire in Edelgard’s chest and wills even her most wizened muscles to resurrect—she attempts to scramble her way upright, but the hands hold her in place, staunching the flame; more of the embers finally catch and she bursts through their grip with a sound like metal tearing, only for her body to collapse in the same instant as Rhea stabs her blunt-edged fingernails into her breastbone. Her claws dig deep and the touch and the pain and the more-than-pain and the burning are too much, too much; Edelgard howls, urging her body to respond, respond, able only to lift her head enough to watch as the Archbishop moves to take hold of some sort of lever or handle at the side of the altar. The moment she pulls it, a grating noise of steel-on-steel hums below, and a series of flat silver panes emerge from deep slots engraved in the stone altar; the panes unfold, curling into round metal jaws aligned precisely to the position of Edelgard’s wrists and ankles, and with a clang that echoes in the empty room, the jaws snap shut.
A moment passes in quiet calm, and then the monster they put inside Edelgard wakes.
The roar of her burning blood drowns out whatever noise she actually makes, though even through the blinding heat of panic, pain, her familiar friend, grants her visceral awareness of how the sound tears from her lungs and claws its way out of her throat. Her every muscle fiber screams an old scream as she does, with everything she has, writhing, grasping, pushing up, forward, straining heavenward but bound to nowhere. The monster rages; the fire blazes to an inferno within her, contorts her limbs and makes tinder of her wasted muscles, her body curling and collapsing and convulsing as the flame inside her catches and burns, burns, burns. The steel jaws groan, biting deep into yet more faded scars that encircle her wrists and ankles, reviving them, begetting them kin in parallels and intersects; the Archbishop’s holy composure breaks, hands on skin, touching, touching, the outline of the shapeless thing at her shoulder shimmering like scales—unlucky the fish caught once; foolish is he caught twice—how many times does this make; will it take?—There is a twin roar, a second flame, white instead of red, and a shadow falls over her, heavy silver solace bearing warmth and weight and pressure, pressure; Edelgard’s hips thrust upward, the sole part of her left unrestrained, finding fleeting friction that further stokes the flames. She knows now that she is screaming, knows the sound all too well, knows it is the sound of desperate rage and desperate need and white-hot, desperate longing—for freedom, for salvation, for touch, space, relief—
Something long held taut within Edelgard snaps, and the illusion of life breaks with it. The fire burns itself out, and the sensation of the stone’s cool bite against her clammy exoskeleton is yet another defeat.
Silence reigns in the eye of the hurricane. Edelgard lies slumped in her bonds atop the altar, whimpering, “No, no,” between gasps and hiccups like she’s forgotten all other words again. In her weakness, her face has grown wet, but there is no clearing the evidence away; she stares at the ceiling, the only place she can look, the light above as blinding as the darkness.
The Archbishop is still perched atop her husk. Her heavy frame pins it to the stone, and from somewhere far away, Edelgard is amused at the woman’s form, more befitting a brawler than a holy queen. The white-veiled cardinals linger, steps from the altar, stiff hands raised in unison; “Leave us,” Rhea rasps at them, her voice a grating, metallic hiss.
In synchronicity and silence, the white-veiled shapes back away, then disappear from view.
Rhea’s eyes flit back and forth as she tracks their retreat, low huffs of animal panting seeping through the cracks in her saintly mask. Her gaze then returns to Edelgard’s shell, her stare intense and unblinking. A single lock of green hair hangs askew at the edge of her face, and were Edelgard still there, she might have found it poetic.
“You are strong,” Rhea observes, “for such a little thing.”
Edelgard does find the poetry in that and laughs like an earthquake. “So like them,” she says, to herself or not—an inside joke Rhea wouldn’t get, that no one could anymore. The Archbishop doesn’t deign to try, either, easing her way back to earth to stand beside the altar without comment. She is looking at Edelgard so strangely. Edelgard’s animal brain can’t process that expression, can only lie limp, the strings broken, her wings clipped.
All that loss, that effort, that pain, yet her accursed, useless, stolen strength still falters when put to the wheel. “I tried,” she whispers to them; they say nothing, silent when she succeeds, silent when she fails.
Any amount of time passes unmourned and unnoticed. When enough has elapsed for some of Edelgard to have returned to her body, Rhea is still quiet. Her bust heaves in her white gown, rising and falling nearly in time with Edelgard’s naked chest, her green eyes again narrowed to slits. She reaches out a long finger and touches it to Edelgard’s wrist, readied for the recoil when Edelgard’s bone meets steel and can shy no further.
“Fool.” She expels the word with neither affection nor discontent, nor any acknowledgment of the obscene noise her touch evokes. “You have cut yourself.”
“Don’t touch me,” Edelgard snaps, and cringes as she does; she ought no longer be surprised at how posturing betrays petulance or how concern can sting worse than cruelty. She stares up into the light, preferring the searing of her eyes to the bite of Rhea’s laugh, attempting to ignore how her legs still quiver in the wake of such brief and subtle contact with the Archbishop’s skin.
The Archbishop’s lack of comment does not signal the end of her unwelcome kindnesses. Turning to one of the pedestals at the altar’s flank, she casts the sheet from it and tosses it over her shoulder, too preoccupied with reviewing the tidy lines of objects on the pedestal’s surface to notice how the white fabric momentarily catches and hangs in the stagnant air. From where she lies, Edelgard cannot make out what Rhea is looking at—she spots a number of ewers and basins, as well as what appear to be the handles of various unidentifiable tools that chill her blood and spike her pulse in equal turn. It is some relief when Rhea returns to Edelgard’s side, having taken only a small bowl from the collection.
“The time for your demands—and for wasting blood—has long passed.” She positions the bowl beside Edelgard’s wrist at the altar’s edge, then holds it there, watching crimson trails trickle into the shallow basin through channels cut into the white stone.
The basin fills slowly. Rhea observes it in silence, ignoring everything of Edelgard but the pooling and congealing of her life-force. Her hand is so close that Edelgard must hold her knuckles tight to keep them from brushing together, and the tension forces yet more blood from the new scar at her withered wrist. Over the Archbishop’s shoulder, the spectre shimmers, then flickers away just when it might come into focus, tricking Edelgard’s eyes into lingering on the woman herself. It is easier to look at her like this. Her pale green eyelashes are lined with kohl and slightly smudged from sweat, and that solitary strand of ethereal hair still hangs askew on her cheek. Like this, intense gaze downcast, focus averted from all Edelgard’s shame, Rhea could be something beautiful; like this, so close to Edelgard, their hands could touch with something like benevolence. Like this, she could have anything of her. Voices in the back of Edelgard’s mind whisper urgent warnings of danger, and she knows them to speak true, knows she must reconcile them with the woman who stands before her now—smaller than in muddled memory, a goddess in miniature, all too present, all too human. Her fingers are so long and slender, delicate-looking for how harshly they burn Edelgard’s skin. Edelgard suddenly can’t bear to look at them. She closes her eyes, and the silence and the darkness play their tricks: she imagines Rhea’s façade being reflected in her touch, cooling and soothing instead of burning, resting against her battered shell with the gentleness and grace of a motherly guiding hand...
But reality returns at the edge of the dream to prove what little Edelgard knows of such things. Without warning, Rhea snatches Edelgard’s wrist, leaning close and turning it within the jaws to squint at her translucent husk. “What is this?”
The fire in Edelgard’s chest seizes. She squirms in Rhea’s searing grip, for what little good it does; she is already laid bare, with every part of her exposed and at Rhea’s mercy, yet somehow she feels as if she’s been caught, as if Rhea has peeled away not only her clothes, but a layer of her skin. She grits her teeth and says nothing, ignoring her pounding pulse and the hideous, throbbing heat between her thighs, staring up into the blinding white light and resolving to endure, endure, clinging to what little she has left.
Surprisingly, the Archbishop takes no offense to her muteness—she merely sets the bowl of blood aside and leans closer, examining the hatchings of white lines that mar Edelgard’s pale skin. “How did you come by these?” Her voice snaps with a commander’s authority, but the once-emperor, ever-apostate does not flinch.
“You know well,” she responds with certainty she should not have. “Some are yours.”
Rhea’s eyes narrow. She rises to her full height, and her frame blocks some of the blinding white light from overhead, casting an approximate oasis of shadow over Edelgard. “Sinful wretch. You earned your every battle wound. But these...”
One of her long fingers reaches toward her, and for a single delirious moment, some ravenous, long-repressed part of Edelgard thinks it will touch her misshapen breast, that it will pinch her foul flesh between blunt-edged nails and roll and twist and pull until the old and ugly need within her is met, until an ancient pressure is finally eased. Instead it traces the length of the thorn-edged scar between Edelgard’s breasts—the worst of them all, the most indelible proof of Edelgard’s sin, the one that traverses the break of her ribcage, just above where the fire dwells within her—and when she touches it, it burns just like before, burns white and burns hot, blazing all the way down Edelgard’s spine, stealing her breath, her sense, so much of her restraint; she writhes at the touch—no, at the burning, and whimpers from what must be pain. If the display affects the Archbishop, she makes no show of it: she merely regards her, unblinking, and digs her blunt-edged nails into Edelgard’s sternum again, all four fingers driving deep into the silver ridge of knitted skin hard enough to make Edelgard writhe and cry out again in pain and pain alone.
“These,” Rhea notes with cold familiarity, “are blasphemies.” Her countenance is blank, but her wide stare is imbued with a ferocity Edelgard remembers from—somewhere, sometime, but when?—“Is this the work of your conspirators?” she asks; again, she stares at Edelgard; again, she scoffs when Edelgard does not answer. “Where has the hegemon heretic gone? I have yet left you your tongue!” Without fanfare, she withdraws her fingers, her plush lips pursing with an amused hum. “Perhaps it is for the best. If you did speak, you would only lie, and as it is, I would recognize such barbaric work across ages. For all these slithering wretches hide, their truths are easily revealed. The same shall be true of you.”
She falls silent again, circling the altar with felid intensity. While Edelgard lies there, panting, Rhea prowls in slow circuits, taking a disaffected inventory of the horrors carved into Edelgard’s corpse. Occasionally, she traces the outline of an old wound with a fingertip or brushes away a lock of damp white hair to better study a specific mutilation, humming sounds of interest or disdain, either infuriatingly indifferent or utterly unaware of how every touch sends a firebolt through Edelgard’s veins. Between the chill of the room and the fever of Rhea’s touch and the fear of what Rhea might find, Edelgard’s every muscle is shaking; the effort of hiding herself steals so much energy, leaving her exhausted and ashamed, scarcely cognizant of where Rhea’s hands and eyes rove. This is defeat, she reminds herself, this is the consequence you have earned, though by what means, she does not recall. All she knows is fire and fallout: how a lingering heat throbs in her miserable, wet cunt, how it pulses hard enough to choke the breath from her lungs even when she lies untouched, how the movements of Rhea’s long white sleeves pimple Edelgard’s flesh and draw her nipples to coarse peaks, putting all her piteous profligacy on display in an uncontrolled, unheeded plea for succor. Surely, with how closely she is studying all that has been done to Edelgard’s body, Rhea can tell which effects she has wrought herself. Surely, with her shell spreadeagled upon the altar, Rhea has seen the swollen, seeping mess of Edelgard’s cunt—has seen the sheen of cyprine, if not smelled it, has heard how conspicuously Edelgard labors at suppressing her desire. And even if her need has somehow, miraculously, escaped Rhea’s notice, then surely the shame and desperation radiating from Edelgard’s every pore cannot be missed. But if Rhea knows anything of these humiliations, she says nothing of them, too busy inventorying so many others.
“They made meat of you,” she says without pity as she prods at Edelgard’s skin with her blunt fingernails, her harsh consonants dripping with disdain. “They desecrated your body.” She’s silent a moment, pensive. “I would have done better.”
You have, Edelgard recalls, uncertain of why; as if the lights above and the strain on her body and the effort of remembering did not tax her mind enough, the shimmering thing behind Rhea’s shoulder is making Edelgard’s head ache. Still it goes unnoticed—Rhea is possessed by contempt, seeming to see nothing but the profanity prostrated upon the altar. Some of her hair has shifted with the regular disgusted shaking of her head, and the pale, pointed edge of an ear peeks through the celestial curtain like a dressing room window.
“This is filth,” she sneers, gesturing at Edelgard’s corpse. “It is sacrilege. Why have you done this? To what end?”
The question drives the final crack into Edelgard’s composure, and the vicious, grieving thing within her reawakens. A howl of rage tears from her throat as the fire roars back to a blaze, refueling the urge to fight, to scream, to strain at her bonds until she makes her escape; when it proves itself to be as futile as anything else, she does what she can, and seethes. “I didn’t want this,” she snarls through bared teeth, but it is mere defensive posturing, a pitiable attempt at stealing back armor. Rhea sees it for what it is and scoffs.
“Of course you did. Humans have always lusted for power beyond their handling. As though you are any better! You, who spit upon your blessings and grasp at all that evades your reach!” Her jaw hangs open, but rather than spilling more vitriol, she suddenly stops short; for a moment, she remains posed, still and statuesque, and when she lowers her head again, her mask is back in place, calm and cold where Edelgard is still seething and burning, burning. Before any of Edelgard’s spite can spill from her tongue, Rhea abruptly breaks her gaze and circles to the other side of the altar.
“When you began your rebellion, I wondered if you truly held the Crest of Seiros,” she says as she casts the sheet from another of the pedestals. “You look enough of Wilhelm’s daughter, though to think his blood could become so tainted with cowardice is insult to his memory.” Her body blocks Edelgard’s view of the machine set into the flat plane atop the pillar, but when she leans to retrieve the bowl of blood, Edelgard catches a glimpse of the device and realizes she knows it—she has seen one before. She racks her brain, struggling to place it; Rhea, meanwhile, continues to mutter to herself, holding the basin of Edelgard’s blood in one hand and configuring the machine with the other. “I grant, you are remarkable. There is a chance you do bear his blood, and are only further evidence of how far humankind has strayed from the Goddess’s light.”
A sudden rush of panic boils through Edelgard’s veins. “Wait—Don’t.”
The pointed tip of Rhea’s ear twitches at the words; the spectre at her back shimmers and disappears from view. The Archbishop blinks, then turns her head, fixing Edelgard with her intense suspicion. “And why not?”
Edelgard does not know. She has no memory, only instincts and association. She knows to fear, knows she has reason for shame, knows that machine will cut her through and reveal her to Rhea better than any knife, but her emotions are absent of evidence or experience. As her silence molders on, Rhea’s eyes narrow, her deteriorating patience punctuated by a dark growl.
“No matter,” she remarks flatly as she whips back to the machine. “Even such a heretic as you should know that the Goddess sees all. What you will not tell me, I will yet learn.”
“Wait,” Edelgard says again, urgent this time, but there is nothing she can do: she can only lie in the jaws as Rhea pours the bowl of Edelgard’s blood into the basin atop the pillar, can only watch as the device hums to life and casts Edelgard’s guilt in fervent light.
At first, the image is a muddle, a mess; gradually, though, the picture clears, and something begins to take form. At the heart of the projection, a series of foliaceous curves push through the occluding fog, reshaping and solidifying into the teardrop form of the Crest of Seiros. For a moment, it is suspended there, all aglow, bright and proud and recognizable. Rhea’s lip curls, but before she can speak, the image becomes obscured again as a nest of dark veins begin to twist around it. The veins encroach, growing over it like a tumor, corrupting the shape into a mangled, feathery mass; when the malignant figure finally solidifies, the symbol of Seiros remains stubbornly visible, though its glow is faded, its curved frame woven deep into the flickering purple wings of the Crest of Flames.
The bowl slips out of Rhea’s hand and clatters to the stone floor. “This is not yours,” she says, blunt, witless. “It’s not yours.” She reaches toward the projection, though she doesn’t touch it; Edelgard cannot bear to look at it herself. “I’m sorry,” she whispers to them; they don’t look at her; they never do. “How did you get this?” Rhea demands. “What did you do?”
“I told you,” Edelgard responds pitifully. “I did not ask for it.”
Rhea does not seem to hear her—she is frozen, stock still and staring at the projection, the flickering flames reflected in her wide eyes. “This is not yours.” Her voice is small, like that of a frightened child. A tremble grows in her lower jaw, and her breast begins to heave, her head turning back and forth with small, automatic motions. “How could this be? How could you—? What have you done?”
“I didn’t want this,” Edelgard says again—as if it is all she can say—and tastes copper as Rhea’s hand cracks across her face.
“Of course you did!” There is an immense crash as Rhea shoves the heavy stone pedestal with enough force to send it rolling across the dais; the device within shatters at first impact, and the projection vanishes. “Of course you would find yet more to take from me! My home, my lands—the last of my family! My mother’s body, Her vessel, Her heart, Her very blood! What you cannot steal, you destroy! What you cannot destroy, you desecrate! When will it end? What will be enough?!” The serene mask has shattered: she is weeping, deranged, crazed as she was—somewhere—but when? but when?—Her voice is high and brittle, riddled with rage and pain, the collective agonies of eons: it is a rage Edelgard knows, a pain she recognizes in sense but not in shape. “You break me!” she shrieks, aggrieved and inconsolable; she tears at her hair, clawed fingers gouging trenches into her own cheeks. “I showed you mercy! I allowed you to live when I should have killed you and the traitor both!”
She babbles on in grievous shrieks and wails, but the sounds fade to a high whine in Edelgard’s ears, independent of the ringing shock of her strike—Something has caught in her addled mind, and all else has fallen away—the traitor—who is she?—who is she?—Her chest aches, and her brain is on fire, straining to assemble fragments of images within their shattered frame—the shape at Rhea’s back flickers, taking on the malevolent glow of the projection—
Logic and feeling and memory suddenly collide in a rush of realization, and the past returns all at once.
Everything comes back, a torrent of yesterdays enumerating years, all leading up to the end. The last hours surge back into her mind in vivid color: the plains of Tailtean, the carnal cacophony in the cold gray damp; finding forgiveness in the eyes of the last king of Faerghus, grace that turned to terror and then to emptiness in his agonal breaths, as all do. The exhilaration of victory, staunched by the hard, frantic march to the capital; sunset on the western coast through the gray of ceaseless rain; the first glimpse of the skyline on the north horizon; the battle in the city streets, the final chapter, the bitter end. When Edelgard finally gets to die, whatever comes after will look like Fhirdiad did that day—corpses afloat on red seas of mud, cobbles outlined in bloody moats, once-familiar shapes of buildings crumbling in explosions of dust and glass, blinding rains that do not touch the fires, thunder that peals loud enough to rattle teeth but not to drown the screams of innocent masses burning alive. The close-quarters chaos had erupted into the open war zone of the city square, then coalesced into the final push to the steps of the empty palace: the Beasts, the Golems, the corrupt Immaculate; the Almyran boy who threw himself into Edelgard’s axe, Thunderbrand’s last strike. By strength alone, they’d pushed through, had come so close, so close, right to the cusp of victory—
Just behind Rhea’s shoulder, the unknown ghost takes form, solidifies into muscle and bone, and all at once, Edelgard can see her, can see her and remember her—
Her—
“My teacher,” she whispers, just as long fingers close around her neck and squeeze.
It catches Edelgard by surprise: she wastes some of her precious air in a gasp, finds even more pointlessly given to throttled screams. What little oxygen she manages to retain stays trapped in her lungs to burn with everything else. It should hurt; it should kill her; it does and doesn’t, her embrace inciting agony and ecstasy at once, disparate sensations dueling for control of Edelgard’s shell. For all they should do, they scarcely register, not when the spectre is there, right there, just behind Rhea’s shoulder. Edelgard pleads with the ghost in silence, but the shade remains still, face impassive, gaze idly focused on Rhea’s hands. Look at me, Edelgard begs without begging, look at me—to be ignored is yet another agony, but to see Her, to have Her at all, even like this—oh, it is joy, it is enlightenment, it is bliss. She stares and stares until the water pouring out of her eyes forces her to squeeze them shut, and that lapse in her defenses is all it takes for the competing sensations to overpower her will and bring her to ruin. Her body quivers and shakes in the restraints, entirely out of her control; she clenches her every muscle as she tries to ride out the waves that reverberate through her again and again and again, harder and harder the more Rhea’s grip constricts, but her body is caught in the current and being dashed against the rocks to break, and break, and break. She can’t breathe, doesn’t want to, doesn’t need to, just needs Her here, those fingers there, blood to blood against her pulse, just like that, just like that. Her desperation must be too obvious, for Rhea’s face contorts even further into fury as her hands tighten around Edelgard’s neck.
“Disgusting, vile creature!” Tears stream down her mauled face, her unblinking eyes blazing like foxfire; her voice is distorted, yet familiar, like a borrowed mask, a forgotten friend. “Abomination! Thief!”
Edelgard hears her, feels her and feels nothing. The insults, the pain, even the apparition’s apparent indifference—none of it matters, not when She is here. Some delirious generosity overcomes Edelgard’s mind; Do you see Her? she asks without asking, but the Archbishop is absorbed in her vengeance, too much so to understand—or even to realize that something is happening to her own body. She is panting and snarling with the effort of wringing the life from Edelgard’s throat, her plush pink lips stretched wide and curled back over teeth that have elongated into twin lines of savage, pointed fangs. Across the ivory expanses of her exposed skin, patches of red rivulets are breaking out, forming blunt ridges that grow to taut peaks and finally burst through her flesh in scattered arrays of glittering, silvery mail. Even in the dizzying white light beating down from above, she seems to glow, exuding an ethereal green fog that swirls like smoke and flickers like flares of white magic. The veneer is cracking, the veil between the human and immaculate tearing with Edelgard’s windpipe, fracturing faster the tighter those clawed hands constrict. Edelgard remains present—the pain is nothing; any agony can be endured, even the primal panic of suffocation—but passion and persistence are not enough to stop the darkness that encroaches, clouding the edges of Edelgard’s vision, coming for her once again. She seizes whatever air she can through wretched whistles, chokes out sounds that would be moans, feels her body convulse in pain and pleasure as her pulse sings beneath Rhea’s claws; she’s overwhelmed and overwrought and the fog is coming in and it’s warm, and it’s welcome, and she wants it. How pleasant it would be to finally surrender and lie still; it would be so easy to let go, to find the peace that could never be hers within the familiar comfort of violence, to stop trying, to see them again, though she only sees Her, offering a hand, silently showing the way. Edelgard wants to follow, wants nothing more to be shepherded home by the lamb she led to slaughter; the darkness encroaches and she welcomes it, feels pulse after pulse of pleasure sparking faster as her own slows; she comes close, looks into the dark abysses in Rhea’s eyes and says without speaking, asks without asking—pleads to her—begs—prays—
But the Goddess has never heeded Edelgard, and neither does her remaining saint. The precipice approaches, and just as Edelgard reaches for it, Rhea lets go.
Air rips back into Edelgard’s lungs, the fire in her chest reigniting into a blaze. She blinks the darkness from her vision, fills her lungs with gratitude and grief, the oxygen only serving as fuel for seeking. The spectre has vanished—She was just here—where is She—?
The muscles in her lower lip spasm, and a long, ugly cry grates from Edelgard’s throat. It shouldn’t hurt anymore, with how well she knows it, but she has never borne the anguish of abandonment as well as she would like.
Her weakness goes unremarked; Rhea doesn’t even seem to notice it, too focused on Edelgard’s body, looking at her like so much meat suspected of spoiling. Behind her, some long thing is thrashing back and forth on the ground—Edelgard can’t see it, can only hear the hiss of it scraping against stone and feel the dull buzz of grating textures in her molars. This, too, escapes Rhea’s notice. Her holy brow is furrowed in concentration, her face still pink with exertion. A silence passes, and then her serpentine eyes suddenly flare even wider, pupils expanding from their slits into hollow round abysses.
“She must be in you,” she says with the euphoria of enlightenment. “You must have stolen Her heart from the traitor vessel—that’s why it was empty, and why it betrayed me. It wasn’t Her. She’s there, in you.”
The terror of asphyxiation does not compare to the chilling timbre of the Archbishop’s voice. Her speech is atonal, and her words make little sense—even if Edelgard were whole and hale and in her right mind, she doubts she could follow. The long thing below drags on the stone as Rhea stalks circles around the altar, scrutinizing Edelgard’s husk; the gouges on her cheeks are no longer bleeding, but now ooze a foul-looking ichor, and her wild eyes somehow seem larger in her elongated face.
“You could not hold Her,” she rambles, less to Edelgard than to herself. “You thought to steal her soul, and had the first children make you ready. But you were not worthy—no, you were broken like the vessel, and could only be a prison. But She lives, and has come back to me, so that I may set Her free.” She licks her thin pink lips with a forked tongue, nodding in unechoed concordance. “I’ll take what’s left of Her from you,” she says, resolute, “and rebuild again. And you—you shall go to the flames and join the last of my failures.”
A cold rush of terror chills the flame in Edelgard’s blood. “No,” she tries to say, but her voice is broken, destroyed with her airway—she whistles a breath, tries to inflect the exhale to no avail, attempts to shake her head with muscles that don’t respond. In desperation, she resorts to pleading with her eyes, but Rhea doesn’t see her—she is busy casting sheet after sheet from the pedestals, searching for something. The long thing behind her thrashes against the stone in a frustrated staccato, the rhythm ending abruptly with Rhea’s hum of triumph as she returns to the altar, a dagger in hand.
“Do not fear, Mother,” she murmurs, her serenity resurrected. “I am still here for You. Always and forever.”
The gleaming metal disappears into the blinding white light. Edelgard stares up at the inevitable, and for a moment, just before Rhea’s hands plunge down, she imagines she can see the strings, can see the silhouettes of the hands high above, can see Her and them there; for a moment, she indulges herself, plays at pretend and allows herself to wonder.
Then the dagger punctures her shell and the world recenters.
Time slows to a crawl as it always does in these moments; Edelgard’s life is ever too short and too long. But Edelgard knows pain, and knows this pain from years of war—knows the cold shock and distorted velocity of the bloodrush all too well, knows better than to try to keep her breath through the gut-punch of a stab wound, knows to tense her abdomen and exhale just before impact in vain hope of mitigating damage. She lets what remains of her air hiss through her lips and teeth as she waits for the echo, for the brief bliss of the blade being pulled free before it’s plunged in again—but the hand doesn’t lift. Instead, the Archbishop adjusts her grip and pulls, and it’s been so long since Edelgard felt this sensation—this tearing, cleaving, the rending of a deep new fault line into her broken surface—that it catches her off-guard. The novel nostalgia takes her breath and steals a hideous, vulnerable noise free from deep inside of her—one of agony, with some level of astonishment, perhaps, that there were pains she did not remember, that there were yet more ways she could suffer. It cuts deep, and it takes everything. Edelgard chokes, moans, gasps and wails as the dagger moves up, up, the new faults finding old, splitting the last layers of her armor, ripping open her cavities and laying all of her bare.
When steel inevitably meets bone, the dagger finally pulls free. Edelgard’s vision is swirling; shock has rent Rhea a blur, her shadow somehow looming larger, wider, unfolded and reshaped into something awful and true. Her gown is a covenant of stains, her sawblade maw agape, her lucent green eyes penetrating the haze to burn into Edelgard’s, the pupils again narrowed to slits. She looks down as Edelgard does, and they both watch Edelgard’s blood rush through the open seam to flow out of her like a dark ocean, a red altar cloth draped over white stone. The Goddess’s last daughter looks at Wilhelm’s last child, looks at the canyon she has rent in Edelgard’s flesh, runs her long fingers along the lip and stares, and sobs, and laughs.
“See,” she says, voice pitched with euphoria and childlike wonder. The edge of her too-wide mouth is curled upward, her clawed hand red with Edelgard. “You bleed like Her.”
Edelgard sees, but doesn’t care; she has seen enough of blood, but what she craves to see, she still can’t find—she stares at Rhea without looking at her, straining to parse the shadows making her up, searching the darkness—She should be there; they should be there; why is she still alone?
Rhea has cast her dagger aside and is rolling up the bloodied sleeves of her gown. “I’ll find You,” she mutters to herself in her ghastly voice, manic, half-intelligible at best. “I’ll find You, and free You.” Stumbling closer as if on fawn’s legs, she takes a panting breath, then bares her pointed teeth and reaches for Edelgard, and reaches in, pushes her long fingers through the peritoneal veil and presses and presses and oh Goddess she’s in her she’s in her she’s in her and it’s glorious—
Salacious sounds spew from Edelgard’s ruined throat in a cacophony, a hell, her body shuddering and shaking in euphoric convulsions as Rhea claws through meat in search of bone. Through the delirium of the all-consuming pleasure-that-should-be-pain, some last vestige of sense and duty fights its way forward, resurrecting her voice just enough to rasp a single word.
“Don’t,” Edelgard says—not a plea, a warning—“Don’t—”
But the Archbishop doesn’t heed her. She roars, and her shadow above shifts and expands with the sound of flesh and fabric tearing as she cracks Edelgard open, twin pairs of wings unfurling in time.
Of course it doesn’t kill her. For years, Edelgard has invited death and retribution to her table and only ever supped alone; they will come to her eventually, but not by her command, no matter how she clamors for their attention. She marvels at the sight of the open, steaming maw of her chest, always beautiful, always unique. The last she’d seen was Byleth’s in the filthy streets of Fhirdiad, also rent by Rhea’s hand; Edelgard has made her own eagles in similar likeness on the red canvasses of battlefields, though she was too young and addled by the novelty of torment to appreciate the last time this was done to her. From this angle, convex instead of concave, the perspective is humbling; still, there’s some pleasure in finally finding herself Byleth’s equal. The Archbishop, looming above, surely can see how that thought nearly pushes Edelgard over. The humor of it all is too great to leave unacknowledged. Here lies Edelgard, butchered and dressed for vivisection, wondering only if Rhea would first be her absolution. She lets her head fall back to clack against stone and laughs like a fire catching.
Rhea is ignoring Edelgard in favor of squinting at her vile cavities. “I see it,” she gasps, jubilant, so breathless, so wrong. Edelgard is equally breathless, once again close to deaths great and small, remade and undone by yet another pair of reptant hands.
“Don’t,” she says once more, because she must, but the end comes, as it always does, without her.
Yet again, Rhea’s long fingers sink into her, and sink deep, spreading, probing, seeking, and Edelgard feels her, feels her within the hot sanctum of her ribcage, hallowing and hollowing and touching, touching, touching, and even where she’s not touching Edelgard feels her, feels her low in her stomach, in the meat and marrow of her muscles and bones, in the blue of her veins and the red of her arteries and the foul yellow fat of her flesh, in the webs of nerves that send meteoric bolts of silver fire exploding down her spine to blaze between her legs. Her thighs quake in the restraints, her breaths hitching in her open chest, and Rhea must be able to feel every frantic expansion of her lungs—she must, for her unveiled face is flushed, aglow, triumphant, slitted pupils dilated into immense black voids rimmed with celestial green, once-pink lips curled around a shock of pointed white teeth that grows wider, wider, serene smile stretching into a sublime, serpentine grin. Edelgard stares at her, jaw slack in awe of the truth; like this, Rhea is holy, Rhea is unearthly, Rhea—Seiros—is divine. She is proud and perfect and possessive, a conqueror, a queen, and her divine hands are in Edelgard, and every twitch of her fingers feels like a blessing, like exaltation, like ecstasy. Edelgard cries out, drooling, obscene, making pathetic attempts to rut her hips upward in search of friction she doesn’t even need, not while the Immaculate One is inside her and making her holy. Rhea must be feeling everything Edelgard feels, must be able to see Edelgard’s orgasm approaching—Edelgard knows she can see it, knows because she can see the glint in Rhea’s eye, the focused sheen of lust, of victory, of a thrill, of someone getting something they have wanted for so long they have forgotten all but their wanting. Edelgard has it; she offers it; Rhea need only take, and her fingers flex within as she reaches
—and reaches
—and reaches
—and then—
right there—
time stops.
Rhea’s hand freezes inside Edelgard’s chest. The light of triumph in her eyes flashes and dies, pupils contracting back into slits. Edelgard is panting, chest heaving, Rhea’s scaled knuckles scraping her lungs with every breath. Her offal squelches and shifts as Rhea draws her hand out, leaving empty hollows like handprints where squamous palms had tread. Each movement makes Edelgard moan pitifully, missing her, but the Goddess has never heeded her and her daughter doesn’t, either, just draws back and draws back until something catches, the ache of loss replaced by sudden, sharp pain—a new pain. Edelgard works up the nerve to look down, just as Rhea does, and there, just outside of her, is Rhea’s inhuman hand, shining and slick with Edelgard’s blood and something else, something black and tar-like, thick and oozing strands of sludge, the sebaceous surfaces shining in the harsh overhead light. Rhea raises her hand to inspect the mess, but it stretches with her as she moves, and when she pulls her wrist sharply in an attempt to tug it free, Edelgard’s gut heaves and the cold numbness in her muscle fibers converts instantly into pure, ugly agony. Rhea looks at her hand, looks down at Edelgard; her serpentine gaze first follows the foul strands to where they emanate somewhere inside the crimson hollow of Edelgard’s chest, then flicks up to Edelgard’s face, her holy brows furrowed, thinned lips curled, all her radiant pleasure and triumph decayed into disgust.
“I’m sorry,” Edelgard’s ruined voice whispers.
“What is this.” Rhea draws her hand back, draws more of Edelgard out; Edelgard heaves, cries, moans all at once, ugly and animal. “Where is She? What have you done?”
“I’m sorry,” Edelgard says again, too broken to explain, to tell the truth of what she is—that she is rot, rot, filthy, putrid rot, vile and disgusting and tainted, corrupted to the core, the portrait of sin, so impure and far from holy that the Goddess’s divine light has never reached her, can find no reflection in her even at this distance, even this close, this deep inside of her. Hers is the rot of a millennium, of ten long mourned and dozens longer buried, of thousands sacrificed and yet more unnamed, the rot of the emeritus’s issue and all that would never come after—and now her rot is Rhea’s, too. It is on Rhea’s fingers, curling around her wrists and oozing down her arms, sending the crimson slick of Edelgard’s blood and viscera sloughing off Rhea’s skin and onto the floor as the black rot encroaches.
“What is this?” Rhea says again, scratching at the rot with her free hand, but it only spreads, the sludge sticking to her clean palm and encroaching there, too; Rhea snarls, panicked, drawing her hands back, and something of Edelgard’s guts and foul rot goes with her. Edelgard heaves, moans, the noise gurgling through the blood in her throat, spewing over her broken lips in founts of florid sound. “Stop,” Rhea hisses at her, wild eyes aglow with genuine fear; she struggles with herself, claws fruitlessly at the strands, then growls, shrieks, “Let go!”
“Touch me,” Edelgard begs—she’s sobbing now, a mess of blood and bile and phlegm, truly hideous, truly pathetic, humbled and humiliated and barren, empty except for the all-consuming rot; Rhea draws her hands back, and more of Edelgard’s guts and foul rot go with her. “Don’t leave me,” Edelgard pleads—she still has so much to say, so many questions to ask—did you see Her? did you see me? are they still with me? will you forgive me? will you deliver me? will you let me come? look at me—look at me—do you see me? do you see what i am?—but the Goddess has never heeded her and her daughter won’t now, too preoccupied with herself, with the rot that clings to her and winds its way around her, that webs the distance between her and the blackest parts of Edelgard’s core, that consumes her surface and frames a lattice across the white of her gown and cream of her breast, stained red already with so much of Edelgard’s blood and now becoming black with her rot. Rhea flails and scratches at herself, shrieking as the rot encroaches—it eats away at her gown and burrows, bestial, through her chest—look at me, Edelgard sobs, look at me—do you see me?—but neither the Goddess nor her daughter pay her heed.
When the rot finally permeates, the Archbishop staggers, stumbling off the dais, and Edelgard’s guts and foul rot go with her in a dizzying, protracted chain of tripe and decay. Through bouts of retching, Edelgard wills her head to turn, awestruck at the sight of her unfurled entrails, at the sensation of being made truly hollow. The rot encroaches, overtaking the Archbishop’s exterior inch by inch just as it took Edelgard from the inside long ago: it hardens like tar on Rhea’s hands and chest, calcifying her fragile wings, slathering itself over her mouth to seal her screams behind black sebum. It encroaches and encroaches until it engulfs her, becomes her; it grows over her just as Edelgard grew around it, as a blanket, a chrysalis, molding and shaping anew. Beneath its hand, delicate veils of skin necrotize in apotheosis, all the ugly scars of life healed and smoothed and reborn in the sleek, perfect sheen of chitin. Look at me, Edelgard sobs urgently, just before the rot occludes Rhea’s lucent green gaze—look at us—nothing can hurt us now; this is beautiful, too; it’s beautiful, too. The rot encroaches, consuming them in the sway of rebirth until the desecrated saint and the unworthy dissident are inextricable, a single grieving shell, one orphaned daughter, one
and one
and one.
The world is spinning, growing dark. Edelgard’s slack mouth feels ashen from her panting, too dry for the base relief of saliva, the metallic tang of blood overwhelming her tongue. She squints up into the white light, thinks of the stones beneath and daydreams of condensation, closes her eyes when they start to burn and longs for familiar darkness. They flutter open on their own eventually, and when they do, She is there again.
It can’t be, she says without saying, overcome with emotion. Is it really You?
It must be; she wants it to be; some tense and distant thing within her needs it to. The image is ideal: chest intact, spine unbroken, looking just as she remembers, just as she wants to remember.
Do You see me? she asks without asking, but the ghost does not heed her—does not so much as look at her. Hands grace the altar, drawing so close to Edelgard’s tattered armor and foul rot; gratitude and grief duel on Edelgard’s tongue when they draw away again before being made unclean. She cannot speak, and would not dare, not when her influence might shatter the dream.
The vision wanders, taking a languid lap around the altar, observing the wreckage in silence. The chest, though healed, does not move no matter how Edelgard wishes it would, and the eyes, green and unclouded, neither seek nor find hers. Nearing the edge of the dais where the Archbishop’s half-transformed husk lies like a broken statue, the hand grasps the hilt, adjusts the blade so it does not touch the floor when kneeling beside the ruin. Edelgard watches as the spectre’s fingers hover over Rhea’s calcified brow, skimming just above her nose and lips without touching them; when they reach Rhea’s chest, they finally lower, phantom palm pressing to petrified skin. The hand lingers, then lifts to Rhea’s face, finding the crusted gouges there and brushing against them, smoothing the skin like clay until it is pristine and unbroken once more. Leaning in close, She kisses her cheek, strokes a crooked finger along the still-askew lock of hair still immortalized there. Then the wraith rises and strides out of view.
Time passes unknowably in limbo, seconds or eras drifting without aim or purpose. The husk of the Archbishop is still; the lights above are ever as blinding; the millstone grinds on, all as it is and will be, immutable and unchanged. Through it, Edelgard remains, trapped within the jaws, tethered to the corpse of divinity. Each agonal breath seems to echo in the open cavern of her torso, the room’s stagnant air caressing her exposed lungs and miserable cunt, still slick and twitching with unmet desire. She lies there, resigning herself to eternal death, and just as she does, she feels it—
th-thump
—a pulse, not hers, resonating through the fetid umbilical; the pulse is weak, but it comes again—th-thump—and she feels it, feels it within her, the beat of divinity, and again—th-thump—and again—th-thump—and she laughs, or would if she still could, because of course she feels it now; of course this is the only way she could be holy; of course the rot and dark were so much more than the light, were inescapable after all. She looks at her twin head, marveling at her outstretched wings, at the wicked tail immortalized in mid-thrash; she looks at the slight hollow in the placental pitch where Rhea’s eyes had once been, and she laughs, because now Rhea will never see her; no, now, it doesn’t matter who sees her. She lies there, relishing what it is to be free of the hands and the strings, to be still for just a while longer; she lies there and waits to feel the pulse again; again, it beats, and she feels it in her every nerve, her body half-obliterated and half-contorted in brilliant, perfect ecstasy; again, it beats, and again, and again, always and forever, and as the world fades, she laughs, and this, too, is release.
.
From somewhere in the distant dark,
a voice familiar
calls her back,
calls her home;
so many times,
she’d cried unanswered,
clawed her way back alone,
and now,
for her,
She calls,
“Come back,”
“Come back to me,”
“Come back to me, El. I’ve got you.”
.
The rot cracks the veneer, and the world returns in darkness.
.