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Chapter Text

He walks beneath the salt-crusted terrace and soaks into his skin the water of an ocean so dead and old it has lasted longer than God himself. What futility, he thinks, has led me here. A place where for decades we can work on fusing souls and have all our hard and deathly work go fruitless. His brother may not yet be hollowed from the tedium but the years eat Augustine away like a fungus; he does not know how much longer he can go on day by day in this vast white castle in the vast black ocean, undertaking such small and delicate work to no visible end.

Then God comes up behind him on the terrace. Puts his hand around Augustine’s waist, warm in the cold seaspray.

“You're exhausted,” says God. “Dog tired. What can I do for you?”

There is nothing God can do for his disciple except watch and feed the endless days with the gift of his immortality. A gift which Augustine foresees as the most vicious possible curse.

“Oh, nothing, John. Unless you offered me some old world concoction stronger than what Cassy’s already got in the kitchen.”

God says, “That, man, is the one superiority of the old world.”

And Augustine says back to him, quiet: “I don't suppose you ever wish to return.”

John shifts behind him. His chest pressed to Augustine’s back so nonchalantly like they have orbited each other this closely for centuries, millennia; like they are capable of comfort in this cold crumbling place. “There are many things I wish for. To return to that old cesspool of human nastiness is not fucking one of them.”

God pulls his body away from Augustine and steps back into the space where stone from the roof above has cracked and fallen and lain dead on the balcony for eons now. “Sleep, Augustine. For the love of god. Just get some rest.” Thus invoking his own name, he leaves, stepping off into the damp dark of a hallway long past service. Gone suddenly as he arrived.

Augustine stares out past the lichen-eaten railing and down into the water. Sleep, my ass. I have slept and slept and slept all my memorable life. It doesn't take the slog away, nor the cold. Or the feeling that time is a creature of opportunity and you are a carcass by the side of a long and miserable road.

Belatedly, Augustine realizes he is wallowing.

Fuck this. I am finding Alfred, and I am changing something, anything. God knows stagnancy kills.

Disciples roam through the cavernous maze of Canaan House like deep sea fish hardly laying sunken sightless eyes upon each other on the bottom of the ocean. Some have taken up common residences - Cassiopeia in the kitchen, Cyrus and Valancy in the atrium with flattering lighting, Pyrrha on the one unbroken balcony with her cigarettes and stony silence. The rest drift. The laboratories are oft unattended these days and when the necromancers feel so inclined to go for the throat of the holy secret of Lyctorhood they do so in private places, seeking quietude in the ruins of living rooms and libraries with real paper made amorphous by water and time. Future saints of God in the making, each forging their livelihoods in the codependent loneliness of necromancer and cavalier.

Augustine hardly feels lonely in this emptiness nowadays. Not as if he is the type to seek company or god forbid honest and sentimental conversation, save with the only person with whom such conversation remains at appropriate levels of embarrassment.

He finds this man - his swordsman and brother and voice of reason - in the makeshift training room of those eight blade-trained disciples. A tall and leanmuscled body moving liquidly through the wide stone space. Gripping the rapier cast in grey light like an old picture movie. He is so pretentious with that sword, with that smirk of confidence and sure steps like a tango rather than a dance of death. His eyes unmoving from some fixed and focused point before him as he drives towards a blank and indifferent wall.

“Alfred.”

Alfred stops frozen at his brother’s resonant voice. Cocks his head in false playful recognition. Then he flourishes his rapier in a sharp flash of metal and takes a grand step towards Augustine and levels the sword at his brother’s chest with a smile.

“En garde,” he says.

Augustine huffs. He bats the swordpoint away from his heart, heals the resultant nick to his hand with flesh magic. Alfred grins a shiteating grin.

“Brother dearest,” he says. “My, where have you been off to?”

Augustine does not answer. What might he say, after all - I have been wandering aimlessly for days, drunk on burnout and smoking on the terraces which may or may not crumble into the ocean at any moment? Putting my high and mighty life to the whims of this old house? Augustine steps in a wide circle around his brother and inspects the room’s cracked expanse of wall, lying empty save for dark stains and a work of graffiti which reads, ‘Ulysses is a cocksucker’. Alfred turns to follow Augustine's slow advance. Traces his path unblinkingly with the rapier hung limp by his side and his forehead wet with sweat.

“Well, someone’s been wallowing,” Alfred says pointedly.

Augustine turns at last to look at him. He is taller than Augustine, spryer, brighter, and in all respects a better man. One whose heart beats audibly for all to hear.

“I have indeed been wallowing.”

“Do you need me to… help un-wallow?”

“You have such a way with words, Alfred.”

“Mhm. You've always been better at that, I think. We both know. … I haven't seen you for four fucking days. Seriously, where have you been?”

Augustine lowers his head. “Walking in endless, tedious circles; you know, the usual. Pondering life, the universe, and everything.”

“That's from that book John lent you.”

“That it is.”

Alfred steps forward. Places a hand beneath his brother’s chin hung by the weight of the grey and the rain and the gravity of living beyond one’s designated years. Makes Augustine raise his head, look his brother in the younger and happier face.

“You need to sleep,” Alfred observes quietly.

Augustine does not move despite his strange discomfort at his sibling’s consolatory touch. “You are not,” he says, “the first person to tell me that today.”

“Damn right.” Alfred frowns. “Because God himself told you as well. And I really do think, when God tells you to do something, you should fucking listen.”

Augustine closes his eyes. He takes a breath, feels that cool damp air pass down his trachea and into the old lungs battered by smoke and wet. Diaphragmatic breathing. He focuses on the expansion of muscle, the ripple of flesh which though meat is not his specialty he fixates on all its workings, all the time. Augustine steels himself to say what he has come here to say. Breathes again with Alfred’s hand still beneath his chin. None of this is about sleep, my brother. It never has been and it never will be. It is about the endless loop of time and how it will eat and kill us one day even if we have already lived a myriad.

“None of this is about sleep, my brother. … We've been working for so long, I in my laboratory, you running the same exercises over and over again in your training halls. I do not think I have grown any closer in completing the work. I don't think, in fact, that there is anything else we can do, except to heal our bodies now, and to lay this grand experiment of John’s to rest. Just think: living out our days here, or in the new colony installations, free of immediate worry and struggle. Smoking and lounging and whatever else it is you wish for. What would you say? If I asked you to stop?”

What would you say (he thinks without voicing aloud the thoughts too pure and raw to bare open) to living comfortably together, to you finding yourself someone to love and rest with (unless that is not something you wish for)? To my finally being able to watch over you in the way I should like an older brother forged right so I might feel some satisfaction in being yours? I do not think we need to wrap ourselves together more inextricably than we are already entwined. Our souls may live hand in hand without fusion or transfusion in that untouchable abyss of bloodied and fleshridden water we call the River Below.

I love you. I do not want to see you dead by my indirect hand, nor the hand of time.

Alfred presses their foreheads together now. Perhaps he feels all those words which Augustine cannot voice. Messages seeping into his skin like a slow trickle of poison. He was always more empathetic - in all respects a better man.

“No need to worry, Augustine,” says Alfred, and he smiles. “The work is already finished.”

Chapter Text

The work is already finished. The work is already finished. He turns these words over so many times their spinning dizzies him. Makes him sick, almost physically so, dry heaving once over the dull cracked tiles of the dining hall. ‘The work is already finished’?

“He wouldn't tell me what he meant. Not that I am incapable of deduction, of course, just -”

“Stop gloating,” Mercymorn snipes at him from across the table, “and get yourself together. Clearly your brother is a prick who deeply enjoys riling you.”

“Call him a prick again, and you may find that I take great pleasure in revealing your insides to the world at large.”

“Oh, hush. You're no flesh magician.”

“Then I'll merely strip your soul from your body and banish it to hell beneath the River. Is that a proper trade?”

Mercymorn scowls. Her face scrunched and pungent like the rotten fruits hanging limp upon the vines climbing brown along the wall. She is tapping her fingers against the table, nails clicking incessantly - letting her infinite frustrations echo through what everyone calls the dining hall but which is in actuality a half-open shell of a room stained with water and cold with morning wind. Augustine wraps himself deeper in his soft grey robes, trapping warmth. Mercymorn smirks at him for it. The insufferable woman.

“I am just concerned,” he says, “that my brother has done something reckless, and we both know his proclivities. He follows your Cristabel around like a duckling.”

“Have you ever seen a duck?”

“It’s a fucking simile, Mercy.”

“I’m quite serious. Have you ever seen a duck?”

“... Not in my living memory.”

“Alfred does not follow ‘my Cristabel’ around like a duckling. Ducklings bumble and totter behind their parents. Alfred follows Cristabel deliberately!! Like a fanatic!! Like a worshipper.”

“So much hyperbole finessed into one sentence.”

Merycmorn glares at him. Stares him directly in the face. It might be disconcerting if he were any other man, but as it stands he has known her for decades now and stands to bear the weight of her pettiness.

“He may be up to something,” she says, “and he may well be following Cristabel, but if I hear one word of blame towards my cavalier out of your tiny mouth, I will end you.”

Augustine sighs. Conversations with Merycmorn always lead to these angry dead ends; questions full of meaning morph into argument and scorn. He does not wish it were different - he does not much like change - but some part of him wonders at the beauty of alternate universes in which he and Mercy combine their great powers instead of tearing at each other’s skin for all eternity.

He stands up. “I don’t know when we started threatening each other with death quite so often,” he says, and leaves. He feels the heat of his reluctant sister’s seething even as he steps back into the dark again.

“Alfred, what did you mean when you said you’d finished the work?”

“I meant what I said and I said what I meant.”

“You’re no comfort.”

“I never aimed to be your comfort, Augustine. I aimed to finish what we started.”

“We hardly started anything at all. We’ve worked for ages, yet I’ve hardly made progress. How have you completed a work of necromancy?”

“With some help.”

“From Cristabel, evidently.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Wait and see!”

“I do not want to watch you do something reckless and violent. God knows older siblings deal with too much.”

“Does he know? He hasn’t stopped me yet.”

“So you are going to do something reckless and violent?”

“No, Augustine. I’m going to do what’s right for the both of us. For all of us. Holy shit, relax. Just relax.”

Now the sun shines for the first time in weeks. Glasseyed and drenched they all come up from the depths of their sea-buried home and soak up its heavenly light, wondering at how something so warm and lifegiving has hidden from them all this time. They stand the sixteen of them and God upon the rooftop garden with the plants dead of cold, now watching for signs of green as the clouds move away. They stare upward.

Cytherea raises her arms to the open sky with frilly seafoam robes hanging draped over her body. Posing as an immovable goddess in the new light. She tilts her head back as if to drink; she breathes one rattling, cancerous breath, and she lets it back out again.

“I forgot how good this planet can be to us,” she says.

God steps forward in front of the company. He turns to face the silent lot of them (dumbstruck even by something so natural as sunlight) and he smiles a smile which reaches those eyes blacker than the deepest recesses of their home. Rainbow refractions from the deep irises ringed with white bright as the newfound sun.

He says, “I think this deserves some celebration.” He tilts his head up and back like Cytherea; God drinking in his earth. “Come back up here tonight, all of you, so we might see the stars. And maybe - perhaps - just take the day off. Wander about and do nothing. The works.”

Ulysses breathes an audible sigh of relief. Raises one hand draped with off-white robing to his eyes as if to better see the sun. “Well, Lord, that sounds fantastic to me,” he says, and he pushes off through the small crowd of them to head back down the winding marble staircase. Titania follows him downward as a silent ghost, ever his shadow.

God looks back at his disciples. He does not so much as wipe his eyes from staring at the blinding sky. “I trust him with the party tonight,” he says with a gesture towards Ulysses’s disappearing back. Then he turns back to the sky bluer now than the clear sea and the disciples take his distant gaze as their cue to leave. Twelve of them recede down the staircase thinking of sleep and festivities, all gone now save for Augustine and Mercymorn.

They are the closest hands of their God. The ones who even as they pray in his name feel secure in his intimate company, not as a lord but as a friend. Immoving, they watch God as he soaks in the salt air now tinged with the coming warmth of summer, as he stares off at the ocean with his mind in palaces too timeless perhaps for them to comprehend. Yet even if they cannot fully understand him, they can be here with him, his newfound hands and gestures - his confidants and advisors; his two opposed sources of undying loyalty.

“I wish I knew what you were thinking, Lord,” says Merycmorn instead of asking him. Her hair blows behind her the color of a rotten peach in the wind. She watches the back of God’s head with the intensity she so often applies to scrutinizing theorems.

“Do you really?” God mutters. He stares still out at the water. Then he says softly: “Come here.” Augustine comes up to his right side, Mercy to his left. Wordlessly they place their hands on God’s wrists where they lie stiff on the garden rail. God closes his eyes.

“I feel like something awful is about to happen,” he confesses. He opens his eyes and Augustine observes them unabashedly: he thinks of black holes and of the night sky, of all the things John emulates in his strange grandiosity yet also with his normality, the way he is still a part of nature despite his gravitational power. God does not look back at him. Remains still staring out at those calming waters. Who knows how long ago John first looked upon this ocean - in those vile days before the Resurrection as a normal man in streets crumbled by humanity’s inexorable desire to end itself.

“Don’t trouble yourself too much,” Augustine tells him. “You’ve endured more than we can ever understand; I’m sure our trials and tribulations can be resolved.”

“Hmm. Yes. It’s just - haven’t felt like this in a while.”

Mercymorn says, “We are here to fight your demons, lord.” And God turns to face her and says, “No. You are here to learn, and I am here to teach. You aren't scapegoats, for fuck’s sake.”

Mercymorn stares back at him. God holds her gaze gently.

“I don't want to hurt you, Mercy. Nor you, Augustine. I -” He stops, clears his throat. “I'm glad I have the both of you.”

Augustine moves his hand from God’s wrist down to rest on his fingers. Mercymorn does the same as she stares with dull eyes down at the water. Two pairs of hands interlaced, finding warmth where once was a house darkened by thunderheads.

“Live freely, my brother, my sister,” says John. “My friends. My… Go with Ulysses, party with him. Don't worry about me.”

Augustine lifts his hand. “I'm afraid you can't tell me what to worry about, John,” he says. And he leaves.

Chapter Text

If God will do nothing but worry and make himself a cesspool for nervosity - if Mercymorn will do nothing but scorn - if Alfred will do nothing but gaily dodge his questions - then Augustine will go straight to the supposed heart of the problem.

He finds Cristabel reclining on a sofa eaten by something not moths, her feet perched upon an ottoman. She stares at him as soon as he steps foot into the room (warm now with the sun) and trains her icy gaze upon him as he crosses the floor to sit. He crosses his legs and draws a breath.

“You won’t gain anything from me,” she says before he has the chance to speak. She is not blinking - she stares with her usual intensity, a greater weapon perhaps than her rapier. She tilts her buzzed head and regards Augustine with that detachment she so often reserves just for him, as a gift.

“The only thing I wish to gain is knowledge,” says Augustine coolly. “That’s hardly taking anything from you.”

“If you know of what Alfred and I are to do, then you won’t let it happen, and that would leave all of us worse off.”

“He has implied it may be violent. If you hurt him-”

“I will not hurt him,” she hisses. “This is not about him. Leave me, Quinque, before I bring my necromancer in to bite at you.”

He pauses, taken aback. Not in many years has anyone used his surname to address him; it stirs some deep memory which he cannot quite place, as if from the Barathron.

“If you hurt him,” he repeats, quiet now, “you won’t have long.”

“Fine.” She grins. An awful offbeat grin too bright for the still dim halls which cannot quite catch the sun in all its glory. She shows her teeth. “Take my word, brother: I won’t hurt yours. And you make a promise. Promise to stay the fuck out of our way.”

“I won’t promise any such thing.”

“Swear it.”

“... I won’t stop you, Cristabel, I swear it. But I cannot in good conscience swear not to stop him.”

“... I can accept that.”

She reaches out a hand calloused by the sword. He takes it. It is warm. He shakes.

“I wish we spoke more often,” she says, once she pulls her hand away. “I might actually like you.”

The evening passes normally. Augustine eats dinner; all of them eat. They talk to each other and they laugh and they feel for once like ordinary people. God smiles at him, a true smile. Mercymorn ignores him.

Alfred is quiet.

Later that night when the others have gone up to the rooftop garden to see the stars as their God instructed, Augustine walks the halls alone and finds a letter on his pillowcase.

My dearest and only brother,

I have never written a letter before. Not just to you - to anyone. I don’t much like to write, but I think it’s important now, perhaps the most important thing I will ever do. Before you cast this paper to the floor, take a chance to read. Do not try and find me afterwards; you will not be able to. I will show myself to you when I am ready.

You’ve worked long and hard at Lyctorhood, throwing yourself at it like a true academic, letting it eat you. You’ve worked so hard you are sick. There are bags beneath your eyes nowadays, did you know that? I know you said none of this was about sleep, but I honestly think a good night could do great fucking wonders on you. But yes, you said this was about work. About the endless loop of time. Luckily for you, the loop will soon end.

You’ve worried sick about me these past few days, and perhaps rightfully so. I’ve acted suspicious. I will admit, Cristabel is my partner in this matter, and you may not have had a chance to get to know her, to trust her. And I have been oblique. Of course, if I’d told you what we mean to do, you would never let it happen, which would leave us all worse off.

Now in these final hours, I will tell you - not what it is, for I don’t think I can accurately describe it, but what you must do when you find me, when I am ready.

Here is the first thing you must do: you must not panic. I will be injured, and you will be afraid, and I know you can’t help it but please, do not ruin the work. I’m doing this for you. Don’t waste me.

I will be injured. You must not remove the weapon - you will need it. Once you find me and calm yourself, you must preserve me - preserve my soul, that is. Leave me fully intact. I will not be dead to you, I promise. I will always be with you. But you must preserve me.

Then analyze the structure of my soul within the River. I suspect you have already done this, the way you scrutinize me some days, or maybe that’s just that instinctual gaze of an older brother. Once you have done so, absorb me. My body may be there, dead to you, causing you to panic - ignore it. Take my soul into yours; as I said, I will always be with you.

Then you must use the weapon. I think I will drive it through my heart - you must drive it further, pin the soul in place. This is essential; I will not last if you negate to do this. You have to cut me deeper no matter how much it pains you.

Afterwards, incorporate the soul - make it a part of you without booting yourself from the driver’s seat. At this point you may lose my voice. Don’t worry. Please, don’t worry, I will reiterate this as many times as I have to.

Then you must take a drop of my blood, and you must eat.

Penultimately you must reconstruct me within you, truly make me part of you at last. We will work together brilliantly, I expect.

The final step is Mercymorn’s contribution, unknowingly. Cris and I gathered the steps from all of you. You’re all brilliant, do you know? Radiant. And Cris and I are very good at puzzles. For the final step, you must draw power from the River, from me within the River. I will act as your furnace. You will be limitless this way - you may work in space, in the stars, on any planet. You will be closer to God. You will be closer to me.

This is Lyctorhood, Augustine. It makes us closer. You will live for a myriad, two myriads, three, and I will be there always; you won’t need the Emperor to keep you going - I will be your eternal life. I hope you will have me. You must have me. I hate to force your hand, but I’ll bleed out if I don’t.

You know the theorems for each step, brother. You have worked with them; you have seen the others work with them.

There is one last business I must attend to now, before the business of Lyctorhood:

You live in each crevice of my memory. I don’t have a childhood to remember; neither of us do. Instead, I have you. You, aging wonderfully; you, acting as an older brother should. Watching over me to keep me from stupidity. Chiding me - annoyingly, at times. You fit the books perfectly. Most importantly, however, you are beautiful not just as a brother but as a man. Your ceaseless reading, your hunger for the secrets God has so long taught you, the gift of your protection. I could not be who I am without you. I am afraid to die but comforted now, unafraid, at the idea that I will be dead in you, that you will still be there to protect me.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Please take me for all that I am.

Yours,
Alfred

Chapter Text

Preserve the soul.
Analyze the soul.
Absorb the soul.
Fix the soul in place.
Incorporate the soul.
Consume the flesh.
Reconstruct soul and flesh.
Utilize the soul.

He cant die. Please lord oh God dont let him die

Preserve the soul.
Analyze the soul.
Absorb the soul.
Fix the soul in place.
Incorporate the soul.
Consume the flesh.
Reconstruct soul and flesh.
Utilize the soul.

Where is he
Please let me find him where is he
Fuck fuck fuck fuck

Preserve the soul.
Analyze the soul.
Absorb the soul.
Fix the soul in place.
Incorporate the soul.
Consume the flesh.
Reconstruct soul and flesh.
Utilize the soul.

No.
No no no
Live please live
Where are you
Where are you

Preserve his soul.
Analyze his soul.
Absorb his soul.
Fix his soul in place.
Incorporate his soul.
Consume his flesh.
Reconstruct soul and flesh.
Utilize his soul.

I dont want you I dont want to use you
I want you to live
For me
Live for me
You are not a furnace youre my fucking brother
Please for fucks sake stay alive

Preserve his soul.

I dont want your soul

Analyze his soul.

I know it like my own

Absorb his soul.

You were already a part of me

Fix his soul in place.

I cannot hurt you please dont make me hurt you

Incorporate his soul.

More than we are already entwined

Consume his flesh.

I dont want to fucking eat you I dont want you

Reconstruct soul and flesh.

I dont want you

Utilize his soul.

I will not.
Fuck you fuck you fuck you
Fuck you
You cannot make the choice
To die
For me.

He finds Alfred in the hallway.

He knows where Augustine would search, where Augustine would flee in panic. Where Augustine would end up. Alfred kneels there now in the hallway on the west side of the house. Beside him kneels Cristabel. She holds a knife to her own throat, eyes aglow. Alfred holds his rapier poised atop his chest. He looks up at Augustine. He is crying.

“You found me,” Alfred says.

There is a moment then, the worst moment of Augustine’s long and miserable life, where he reaches for his brother, where he runs for his brother, where he dips into the unreachable River for his brother to try and grab him, to grab him, to stop him, and in that same moment Alfred takes the rapier and smiles and plunges the blade into his chest, and his blood comes down into his shirt and onto the floor.

Augustine kneels beside him.

No. No no no no no.

Augustine clutches his brother’s hands where they grasp the rapier hilt. They are still warm. He begs them to stay warm. He uses flesh magic - he cannot heal the wound. The wound is in the heart, buried deep. Cristabel watches beside him, impassive.

His blood. I do not want to see his blood.

Mercymorn comes into the room. Kneels before Cristabel, as if she knows what she is doing. She looks over at Augustine; he is completely fucking wrecked. Tears and blood smearing his hands and a wretched wretched face. Mercymorn takes her cavalier’s chin in her hands. She kisses her. She then takes the knife from Cristabel’s hand and slits Cristabel’s throat and lets the blood and viscera coat her like adornments, like jewelry of a body.

He has no pulse there is no pulse I am not a flesh magician where is John where is God

Augustine cradles his dead brother’s head in his hands. Leans down over him, shaking with sobs. He presses his forehead to Alfred’s. Begs him to be alive.

Please. Please. Please.

Mercymorn twitches. She falls onto her back and spasms upon the floor as if some great ghost has taken her. She is taking the soul; she is taking the soul of her cavalier. Cristabel will be dead in her. But Alfred will be dead in Augustine first.

He will be gone. He will be gone forever if I do not take him.

In his daze Augustine begins the process. Alfred will not die, he knows; Alfred cannot die. He will be with him forever now. He preserves the soul - he knows the theorems. Alfred was right, he knows all the fucking theorems; they have worked on them for decades, they have existed for so long now. Yet no one pieced them together. No one knew. No one died.

He analyzes the soul, understands its structure. Alfred is speaking to him now - “Yes, you’re doing it right. You’re doing it well. You’re very good.”

“Come back,” Augustine begs of him, voice choked.

“Absorb me now. Come on, you have to keep going.”

“I cannot live without you. I cannot be myself.”

“You can be better.”

Augustine absorbs the soul. Takes it into himself. Feels his brother’s heartbeat there within his chest.

“Now fix it in place,” Alfred says, and his hands are Augustine’s hands now, and he lifts them from beneath the dead body’s head and takes the rapier up and drives it deeper beneath his clavicle, souring blood pooling around the entry wound. Soul pinned in place, Augustine thinks distantly, insofar as he can think. He incorporates the soul next. Alfred speaks. Very good, Augustine. You’re getting closer now, closer to the end.

His voice grows more distant with each passing second.

“Come back,” Augustine gasps. “Please.” He takes Alfred’s body back up in his arms. Blood soaks through to his skin. Consume the flesh. He presses his mouth to Alfred’s forehead where blood has splattered. He is trying to reconstruct, now. He is trying to make him and Alfred one. Lord God how he does not want to, but he is trying.

“Alfred,” he says weakly.

Alfred is there inside his head if only to say one last thing. He says, use me.

I won’t.

You must.

I…

What is the point of me, if not for you?

I won’t I won’t I won’t

I’m gone already, brother. I’m useless if you do not take me.

Fuck you. Fucking hell shit goddammit

Augustine hooks up the batteries and he drinks. Alfred’s voice is dead now, gone to the world. Yet he will never die in memory. He cannot die. He is too good - he was too good. Augustine uses him, finally partakes in that last act of concession; his brother is his furnace, and he is a Lyctor, the first Lyctor to ascend, ascend not for God but for Alfred. He tilts his head back, bares his throat to the room. He feels the power. The thanergetic transition.

It is glorious, and he wants nothing more than to die.

Mercymorn finally comes into herself as if hurtled back into physical being. She stops spasming; she closes her eyes, laid there upon the floor. “Cristabel,” she breathes.

Cristabel, Augustine thinks, blearily. Cristabel. Cristabel. Cristabel.

Mercymorn pulls herself over to Augustine - drags herself across the bloodied tiles. She grasps Augustine’s wrist; she squeezes her eyes shut.

“I cannot see you,” she whispers. “But…”

She opens up his arm at the seams of his skin, exposing muscle beneath, veins, capillaries. She peels strands of protein down to the bone. Augustine somehow feels the pain and does not feel it at all. He welcomes it where he can. He should be stabbed too, he believes, so he and Alfred might match.

“I can feel it,” says Mercymorn. She exposes nerves, tendons, up to his elbow. “The power. The battery. She’s alive.”

Augustine closes his eyes. Maybe she will strip his entire body apart; maybe she will grant him that peace. His own blood flows down over his hand now, pooling with his brother’s on the floor. But Mercymorn closes his arm back up, melding muscles to bone and vein to vein, artery to artery. Seals the skin as if she had never opened it. Presses her fingers to newly knitted flesh.

“We couldn’t have stopped them, Augustine,” she says. “We must take the gift as it is given.”

Augustine stares at the floor. “The gift,” he mumbles. “The gift. The gift is, my brother is dead. He killed himself. The gift is…”

He looks up at Mercymorn as she stands; he despairs.

“The gift is Cristabel. She drove him to death; she killed him.”

“He killed himself - you just said it!!”

“But how can you live with any of this? You cut her throat, you killed her - you did it yourself. What are you?”

“We talked about it!! She told me!! She would not have it any other way. I let her have dignity.”

“Fucking dignity… Fuck dignity.” Augustine grasps his brother’s wrist, cold now. “This is not dignity. Look at him.” He turns to stare into Alfred’s dead face. “Look at him,” he says hoarsely.

“He is dead, Augustine. He is part of you now. You must accept this, or you cannot live.”

Augustine stares back at her. At last, he stands. He lowers his head so as to glare into her statuesque mask of a face betraying no grief at the death of her swordsman, perhaps her lover; he glares at her and the glare is empty, devoid of anger. He can feel nothing.

“I do not accept it,” he says. “I can’t.”

“Then wither,” says Mercymorn tiredly. She takes Augustine’s hands in her own; she presses her head to his empty cavern of a chest.

They kneel again. They kneel, and they hold each other, and they wait, and the waiting makes the emptiness no less fruitful.

Days later he sits with John in a common space. He still cannot move his face - cannot form expressions. He is of stone, of the walls of Canaan House. He sits before God on the floor and he bows his head and he speaks.

“What do I call myself now?”

“My first saint,” says God. “Augustine the First. Saint of…” He pauses, wonders how to immortalize Alfred. “What was the best thing about him?”

Augustine thinks. All of him was the best part of him.

“He was patient,” he said at last. “Never tired of me, not even at my worst.”

God stands. Places a hand upon his disciple’s shoulder as if beknighting him. “Then let you be the Saint of Patience, so he lives with you by more than just his name.”

Augustine shudders. Then he looks up at his God and asks - “Did you know it would end this way?”

“I suspected,” John says. “But you… needed to figure it out for yourselves. If I had told you…”

“Then we would never let it happen,” says the Saint of Patience bitterly. “Why did you let it happen?”

“Our worlds are in peril; you know this. I need warriors who aren’t limited to thanergetic planets.”

“Do your warriors need hearts as well?”

Augustine’s eyes are wide. He pleads with them; they shine as they have never shone before. He has never cried in front of John and he will not now, but he must make John understand that he is very close, very close indeed.

John takes him in, reads the crack in his soul. His two souls. John kneels down with Augustine and draws him into his arms and hugs him almost as he has never been hugged before.

“I’m sorry,” says God. “I’m so very sorry.”

And Augustine listens, but he knows, he knows:

Sorry is not enough.