And so true was the All-God’s love for humanity that it freed us forever from the prisons of our flesh of dirt, and gave us instead flesh of starlight, through which we could live infinite lives in infinite worlds. And to every one of us, its children, it said “I have made a path for you to follow, and if you do this thing you will become as I am, with the powers I have, and shall make worlds of your own.“ And then it compelled some amongst us to commit its will to words, so that we might have a lantern in the darkness. So that we might find our paths.”

-The Book of All Realms

Song of the Phoenix, 1:20-22

 

Sister Nix makes me watch as she applies the paint and powders, explaining  yet again the best way to use kohl and pigment to change the shape of my eyes, to alter the planes of my face. The steam from the hot spring helps to soften and obscure my pale, foxish features—but I won’t have its help when I face my new master.  

The flickering lanterns set our shadows to dancing across the rough stone walls, distorted and ethereal. I try to focus on them. To clear my mind of all thoughts, all feelings. 

“This will let them see the person you are now,” says Sister Nix, and I can hear her unsaid words hanging in the silence as she cuts herself off.

Rather than the monster you were. 

I don’t remember much of my previous life—or any of the ones before it, for that matter. It’s all hazy and dreamlike, snippets of images, scents and sounds. That’s normal for children, but I’m no child. I’m Reset, and the Reset aren’t allowed their memories. Not past puberty when we’d normally recover them, not ever. I’m thankful for it. I don’t want to know the things I did to earn the names they gave me. The names they often call me still, even though I’m supposed to be a new person now that I’ve been cleansed. 

When my true features are adequately hidden and my long hair is woven full of snakestone beads, Sister Nix anoints the moon mark carved just beneath the point of my hairline with binding oil. The intermingled scents of juniper, lavender and mint immediately sooth my nerves, though not by much. But on a day like today, every little bit helps. 

Once I’ve slipped out of my robe and into my silvery Binding Day dress, I’m ready. Or at least, as ready as I’ll ever be. 

Together we climb the spiraling stair from the Chamber of the Spring beneath the tower all the way up to its open top-most level. There, the domed roof is held up by pillars twined with nightbloom vines, open at the center to let the celestial bodies shine down onto the circular pool full of lotuses and silver koi at its center. 

My master awaits at the pool’s other side, with the sun rising resplendant behind his back. A backdrop of gold and fuchsia blooming beneath a wall of building clouds. I pause at the top of the stair, partly to catch my breath—and partly because my entire body has frozen on the spot of its own accord. Stricken by the sight of him.

No, it’s more than that. It’s that thing everyone else can recognize in one another, but which I never, ever do. His Ithos, that core of self that carries over from life-to-life, that shines through regardless of what face and body a person may wear in any given Realm.

Our first meeting had been blind, with each of us on either side of a thick black curtain. I had been given a sample of his blood to drink, while he tasted my energy from the other side of the veil. We had not been allowed to speak, and I wasn’t told his name. I’d felt such a strong pull to him, and it terrified me then as much as it does now. 

This is a person I’ve known before. And not in just one life, either. Our souls are too tangled up for that. I can feel it. But his face when he sees me is almost impassive, though something twists behind his expression. Something that turns his lips the tiniest fraction downward for half a heartbeat, draws his dark skin tight around eyes the color of a mounting storm. His coiled hair is the black of a crows wing—the kind that shines blue and teal and violet, depending on the light—shot through with threads of auburn and silver and tumbling down just past his shoulders. His beard is thick but close-cut. About his shoulders he wears a mantle made of white lion’s mane, and his otherwise gray clothes are woven throughout with threaded sunlight, rendering him radiant. Godlike. 

And somehow he doesn’t say it, doesn’t make the comment I’ve come to dread but expect from anyone who obviously recognizes my Ithos. 

“She looks just like she used to.” 

I’d like to think that perhaps the make-up’s done its work, but I can read the truth in his eyes. He sees it, he just doesn’t say it. His energy chills the air as I step up before him and kneel, a wall of ice between us. 

Sister Nix anoints the sun mark carved into the man’s forehead with the binding oil. Then his black-gloved hand disappears beneath his cloak, and when he withdraws it he holds coil upon coil of cord. Most of it is ironsilk, as thunderhead gray as his eyes, but twisted in with that are bits of threaded moon and sunlight. 

I tilt my head back and he kneels before me, the two of us equals again in a way as he loops the cord about my neck. The pattern he knots is intricate, and from the glimpses of it I catch reflected in his eyes—beautiful. As he finishes, he leaves a lead of about two hand lengths and a half. Then he stands and takes a single step back, holding the end of it in his left hand. 

I have vague memories, or perhaps dreams, of rituals with words. But we don’t have those here. Here, in this part of this Realm, we have a saying. Words are wind. That’s why we carve the important ones into stone. To ground them, to manifest their meaning. It’s the same reason we carve things into our skin. 

And so our ritual is silent. Spoken with actions, with carvings. Sister Nix summons her moonblade first, in proxy for me. It shimmers into existence in her right hand, dagger-like and silvery white. The Solarborn man proffers his wrist and she takes it, carving a bloody crescent at its top side just above another one, long since healed. 

The scent of his blood bursts across my senses like Phoenix Day fireworks, golden and glorious. I can’t compare it to anything else—no flower or resin or woodsmoke. It’s sheer brilliance. Nothing more, nothing less. 

But as the Moon Priestess cradles his hand and lifts it up to press his wrist to my lips, a thousand flavors dance across my tongue. My small fangs extend and I have to fight the urge to bite—instead lapping at the delicious ichor as it oozes from his wound.

Its flavor had been a faint shadow of this, when I’d tasted it from a chalice at that first veiled meeting. But now I know that if gold were a fruit, it would taste like this. If honey were made of sunlight, it would taste like this. If total and absolute devotion were rendered liquid, this is what it would become. 

And I’m glad I’m on my knees, because I’d have fallen to them otherwise. 

His wrist drops away all too soon, and it’s hard not to grasp for it, to beg for more. 

But now it’s his turn to summon the light. He draws it from the rising sun, orange and blazing white, forming it into a curved blade. Sister Nix helps me to my feet and holds my lead out of the way while he carves the sun symbol first, just beneath the hollow of my collarbones. Then, below that, he etches the sigil of his house. Hard edged and angular in turns, an abstracted representation of a lion’s head with wings to either side of it. 

My eyes squeeze shut and air hisses through my teeth. The pain is almost as delicious as his blood, but I do well—holding my body still, remaining silent beyond that sudden intake of breath. 

I don’t bleed. The blade works like a branding iron, cauterizing my flesh on the spot. He works quickly, fluidly—and again it’s over too soon. Sister Nix ties the end of my lead about his wrist just beneath the other he wears, then he cuts it free from me with the sun blade. Where it’s been severed, the cord glows like molten metal…but it doesn’t scorch my skin. Doesn’t fade or dim. The lead falls against my fresh brands and somehow soothes the burning tissue. I sigh, unclenching my teeth as the pain drains away. Relief and regret, mingled together. 

With the sun now risen to glow just above the crown of my new master’s head, the ritual is complete. We are bound, and I am his. He releases his blade, the light melting from his hands. 

We’re silent as we make our way down the stair. Sister Nix stays behind, her small form silhouetted against the ever-rising sun as it edges up towards the clouds. We say no goodbyes. An acolyte awaits at the bottom with the satchel that contains all of my worldly possessions, and they carry it out for us to my master’s carriage. 

This will be my first time leaving the lands of Blue Serpent’s moon tower since my parents first sold me into its service seventeen years ago. I’d been six years old, just coming out of my baby features—and my Ithos had begun to make itself known. By some curse of the gods, it showed itself on my traitorous face. In my big fox-eyes that lightened from brown to gold. In my pointed arch of a nose. In my high cheekbones smattered with freckles and my corpse-white skin. Even in my scrubbed-raw essence—all that was left behind when the corruption that festered like a rot in my soul was torn away. 

They couldn’t get rid of me fast enough, and exchanged me for a pittance.   

By the time the solar man and I step out onto the circular drive, the sun has hidden itself behind a darkening veil of clouds. A light rain begins as the man’s carriage rolls up—pulled by fine elk-like constructs made of wood and metal and animated by sunlight. Striding ahead of me, the man steps up into it. And then he extends a hand towards mine. For a few heartbeats, I just stare at it, confused. Then I take it, and he helps me carefully up to sit in the soft furs of the seat across from him. 

Set into the carriage wall above and to the left of my head, a construct in the shape of a raven’s head quorks.

“General Khavad. You’ve been summoned to High Rook, a convening of the war council.” 

My blood turns to ice in my veins. I know that name, and I know his other name, too.

The War-Eater. 

Perhaps the only person in this entire Realm with a reputation more rotten than mine. But unlike me, he earned his moniker in this lifetime. 

His eyes catch on mine and he raises an eyebrow as he responds to the construct. 

“Tell them I’m on my way.”

The wood-and-metal raven head caws in ascent, and when the general speaks again I know he’s speaking to me. 

“It seems I’ll have to just drop you off and leave you,” he says. “I apologize for that. But there will be others there to help you acclimate.”

I nod, wanting to cast my eyes downward but finding that I can’t. His gaze has me shackled.

“You’re afraid,” he says. “You recognize my name.” 

Again, I answer only with a tiny dip of my head. 

General Khavad settles back into the furs of his seat. He conceals his emotions well, but not well enough to hide them all from one who’s been trained all her life to recognize them. There’s satisfaction settling into the lines around his mouth, sparking in his eyes. And surprise, too, in that brief flare of his nostrils. 

But it’s the peaked interest in the subtle shifting of his gaze as he studies my face that really concerns me. That holds me in place like a rabbit under the eye of a wolf. Or a lion, I suppose, eyeing the mane mantle. I feel a smile twitching for release at the corner of my lip, and allow it to show. 

“Why do you smile, then?” he asks. His voice has a depth to it like a great river at night. I don’t know where it’s leading, can only see flashes of what lies beneath the surface. But I know that if I let it, it’ll drag me under its power in an instant. A shudder runs through my body as I imagine the chill of cold, deep water.

“Do you enjoy being afraid?” he presses. 

“Yes, Your Brilliance” I say, in the soft tone I cultivated back in the tower. Be the timid rabbit now, so they’ll forget the rabid fox you were. I repeat the lesson to myself for the thousandth time, the hundred thousandth. I cling to it, like sister Nix with her make-up, though I know people can see my efforts for exactly what they are. Desperate attempts to compensate for the sins written across my face. 

His gray eyes search mine, and this time I have absolutely no idea what he’s thinking or feeling. Outside, the rain picks up—a chaotic drumbeat played across carriage rooftop and iron-latticed windows alike. 

“Don’t call me that.” He’s quiet again for a moment as he considers. “Call me Khai.”

My eyes widen a touch, and again I don’t bother to suppress the reaction. 

“That…that means ‘teacher’ in the Tusk dialect, does it not?”

“It does.”

Does he think me inadequate? That he has to teach me the ways of my own kind? I don’t dare ask. 

The raven construct interrupts our silence moments later—more urgent correspondence from High Rook. I stare out the windows, drinking in the scenery as my tiny world rapidly expands around me. After a time the low swamps and occasional slimy rock-islands of Blue Serpent’s lands give way and we begin to climb up into the steep, verdant foothills of the Dragoncorpse Mountains. 

My master and I don’t get a chance to speak again until we roll up to his manor’s towering iron gateway. Winged lions carved of stone flank the entrance to either side, staring down on our approach—eyes radiant with sunlight. A moment later, the gates swing open of their own accord. 

“Welcome home,” he says as we cross the threshold onto his lands. He’s not looking at me now but out the window, and for a moment his muscles relax, his cloak settling differently around him. 

“Ah, right,” he turns from the view reluctantly. “You must have your new name, before stepping foot on the grounds.”

I dip my head, waiting for him to tell me what he’s chosen.

“Well?” His gaze is steady, but his hand twitches toward the carriage door.

He actually expects me to choose my own name, and he’s impatient. My thoughts turn to melting splotches of abstract chaos in my head. This isn’t something I’d ever expected or prepared for. But I have to hurry. 

“I…um. Vi. My name will be Vi.” I stammer the first thing I can think of that feels vaguely right. 

Vi, short for vilai—a Blue Snake word for “rabbit.” 

We come to a shuddering stop on the wet cobblestones outside the main entrance to his manor. General Khavad helps me out of the carriage into the pouring rain, where one among the small group of householders is waiting with an umbrella. The armored carriage is already halfway back to the gate by the time I remember that vi means “fox” in at least three different dialects…including Tusk.