Work Text:
There was a burn in the halls of dawncloud that had nothing to do with Amphoreus’ new sun.
Instead, it came from the worldbearer of Kephale, from the Dawn itself - Khaslana - as he stalked the corridors enroute to the latest council meeting.
The heat should have been the first warning. Khaslana’s golden, narrow-eyed glare should have been the second.
But the corridors were sparsely filled and of the few traversing the same space, no one paid any notice to the warrior with white hair who had walked said halls time and time again. And though sweat clung to the back of everyone’s necks and the heat continued to bake them, the warmth of reality following the Era Nova was so new that no one paid the heat any additional thought.
By the time the third warning was cast, it was already too late.
Khaslana did not burst into the council chamber but the door still swung open with enough force as if he had. The frame rattled with the force of sudden movement, the handle caught against plaster with a deafening crash and the group of gathered council members swivelled to catch the cause of the commotion.
“Deliverer,” Caenis said, half-standing from her seat, tone wholly mocking. “How dare you—”
“Kindly bite your tongue, Lady Caenis, or I will remove it for you.”
Perhaps on any other day, Caenis and the other council members would have continued speaking. Perhaps, even, there would have been shouting demands or caustic hisses designed to tear into the Chrysos Heir standing before them. But not on this day. Today, they wisely closed their mouths and waited.
The silence had most likely been caused by the fact that Khaslana had strolled into the room with Dawnmaker to hand, steam rising from the steadily burning fabric of his coat.
“Good,” Khaslana said, once they were all quiet. “Now, I will only ask once. And I should hope you answer in truth. Which one of you ordered this morning’s attempted assassination of Lady Aglaea?”
“What assassination attempt?” Elder Callictis asked.
He sounded genuine enough but there was a flicker of satisfaction buried deep in the man’s eyes that sang of malice and deceit.
Khaslana took one step forward. Then another. On the third step, he lifted Dawnmaker high. On the fourth, it descended with a crack of bone.
“I did say,” he said, without emotion, as the body of Elder Callictis slumped across the table, red staining the scrolls that had been brought into the meeting. “That I had hoped you would answer in truth.”
“You—”
“I have very little patience these days,” he continued and wiped the smear of blood from his blade. “So do be prompt with your answer.”
Nothing but silence.
It was deafening. The room was saturated with it, hostility and fear intermingled together with panicked expressions and the gleam of sharp metal. Elder Diogena opened her mouth, managed no sound and promptly closed her mouth once more, gaze lingering on the corpse slumped opposite her. Elder Etro looked like he’d rather run than speak at all.
Even Caenis, usually so ready to speak, could not seem to muster any words in her own defense.
“I see,” Khaslana murmured as the silence continued to trickle between them. “You must have all been complicit. Very well.”
He raised Dawnmaker once more. Slow. Calculating.
The tension that had been building broke into sudden movement. Council members struggled to their feet. Others began to beg. Their executioner stared with empty eyes, uncaring to the pleas that met him.
Each strike was a thing of art. Of beauty. The room: a painting of blood and bone, followed by a kind of silence that was only ever followed by execution.
“I knew the Goldweaver would send her dog eventually to do her dirty work,” Caenis hissed, from where he had left her until last. “And yet, I never expected her to be such a coward when the time came. She should have faced us herself.”
“You misunderstand,” Khaslana said, foot pressed against rib, forcing Caenis against the tiles. He pressed the blade against her throat; watched the blood trickle from where dawnmaker sliced into flesh. “I sent myself. I will not allow your council to ruin the Era Nova that we all worked so hard to reach.”
More pressure. The blade no longer dug against flesh but ripped through it. Wet breaths caught against dying lips until Caenis’ eyes dulled entirely. When he pulled Dawnmaker free, her body lifted from the pull before falling to the ground with a thump, limp and lifeless.
Wiping blood from his sword, Khaslana sighed. It was not a sigh created by the fact that blood had been spilled, or the fact that the situation had led to the death of the council, but rather by the fact that, at the edge of his vision, he could see thinly spooled threads of gold.
Damn.
Aglaea must’ve already replaced the threads he had melted. That didn’t necessarily lead to the most favourable of outcomes.
…Eh. It was whatever. It just meant she’d scold him at dinner instead of later on. No big deal. Khaslana had gone into this knowing that she wouldn’t necessarily approve.
He’d figure it out.
For now, he had corpses to burn and dinner to prepare for.
After cremating the remains of the Council of Elders and taking a shower that ran a little too cold for his liking, Khaslana donned himself in his newest Aglaea-approved outfit - midnight blue shirt, black waist coat - and made the walk towards the dining hall on the eastern edge of Marmoreal Palace where the Chrysos Heirs had all agreed to meet for their evening meal.
(He dipped outside of the palace during his travels to consult a nearby flower stall on the Okheman language of flowers and, after helping replace the half rotten sign with a new, much sturdier sign with painted hyacinths in the corners, found himself in the possession of a bouquet of fresh daffodils.)
The hall was blanketed with silence when he arrived.
It was the kind of quiet that bled in drips from the walls and tore at table cloths. Heavy not due to an absence of life - like that which had bathed the rooms of dawncloud after his latest visit - but from the forceful halt of conversation.
…A forceful halt of conversation that had occurred as Khaslana stepped into the hall.
Aglaea, sat at the head of the table, turned sightless eyes towards him. Beside her, Tribios lowered her hands and let out a breathless sigh.
Alright, so he’d definitely needed the flowers. Everything could be solved with flowers.
He wasn’t going to openly announce that they were an apology bouquet announcing ‘sorry for killing the council without running it by you first’ but hopefully Aglaea would be able to read into his intent easily enough.
Khaslana adopted his easiest smile - not to be mistaken for his sunniest smile, which would be too much for such a situation - and made his way up to his fellow Chrysos Heirs. The smile wasn’t even that much of a lie. He really was happy to see them both.
“Lady Aglaea,” he said, “Lady Tribios. You’re both looking well. I brought flowers. Must be early if it’s only the three of us. I thought I was late, actually, but I guess I got my timings muddled up. And, oh, Lady Tribios, is that a new dres—”
“Phainon.”
He cut himself off almost immediately.
Aglaea’s voice had practically demanded it. It wasn’t a tone she’d often used with him as Phainon, though he’d definitely heard it many times throughout the cycles whenever he had met her as the Flame Reaver. Not quite combative but definitely erring on the edge of…
Hm.
Well… Khaslana wasn’t too sure what it was erring on, actually.
He just knew that it wasn’t the time to push. To explain himself.
(Though, of course, there was little to explain. His actions spoke for themselves.)
Instead of speaking, he came to a stop nearby, placed the bouquet on the table and nudged it towards the two women. Tribios, currently unwilling to look him in the eye, reached out for the offering and cradled the flowers in her arms in much the way one would a small child.
“Oh Snowy,” she murmured.
Aglaea rested her hand over Tribios’. A small gesture of comfort but a gesture nonetheless. She did not turn to her teacher, keeping her focus on Khaslana, who now stood, awkwardly, at a tension. Awaiting her judgement.
“Phainon,” she repeated. With her steadily returning emotions, he could hear a crack in her voice bordering on grief. Or was it a different form of distress? He wasn’t wholly sure. “As far as I was aware, we agreed not to bring any harm to the Council of Elders.”
She wasn’t lying - when Khaslana had first brought up the idea of… removing… the current counsellors from their cycles long service of murder and deceit, he had received an almost unanimous response that he should not, under any circumstances, do such a thing.
(Almost unanimous but for a single vote from the Imperator, who had calmly agreed with him and stated that her Dux Solaris should go ahead with uprooting such poison from the state of Okhema.)
He hadn’t agreed with said decision but for the most part Khaslana had agreed to go along with the group’s desires. Though he had seen the council fall into the same pitfalls of plotting, cycle after cycle, he could turn a blind eye to their continued existence for the sake of his fellow Heirs.
“We did,” he allowed and lifted his gaze upwards. “That was definitely a conversation that happened.”
“And you remember having such a conversation?”
Khaslana smoothed away the beginnings of a frown and said, “I do.”
“Then why,” Aglaea said, “are the current counsellors dead, Phainon?”
He knew that it wasn’t the wisest to point fingers and say that the council had started it and thus, he had set to work on finishing it. That was the kind of response one expected from a child. Not a man who’d experienced a hell that outlasted time’s very existence. He wasn’t about to start pointing fingers when said pointing was at who brought up the idea of massacre first. It would’ve been uncouth.
Instead he said, “They made an attempt on your life, Aglaea. And I was not willing to overlook such an act.”
Aglaea shook her head. It was a gentle movement and yet, somehow, it carved through him like a knife. Not because there was disapproval in the press of her lips but because past that, he could see that on some level, she understood where he was coming from and still could not bring herself to condone the act.
“Snowy,” Tribios started, finally looking up from the bouquet. She faltered, sighed and tried again, “Phainon. I— You—” Another pause. A third attempt at words. “You already carry enough. Carrying the guilt of this as well…”
…Oh, right. Yeah. He supposed he should’ve felt guilty, shouldn’t he? That would’ve been the correct emotional response to something like this.
He probably should have felt something about the fact that he’d slaughtered a room full of council members. That he’d brought a permanent end to a group of people that could never be erased with the backward flow of time and the beginning of a new cycle. There were no more redos - they wouldn’t ever be coming back. There was a permanence to this death that had never existed during the eternal recurrence.
And yet, after 33 million cycles, there was nothing. Each new cycle had continued to carve the emotion free from his chest until all that was left inside of him was empty indifference.
Over time, killing had become a task that took little effort. Next to nothing. It had gone from an act that required mental resilience to something that he no longer had to steel himself to complete. Once, he had been forced to collect himself across a series of half-drawn hesitant breaths. Now, his breathing no longer shook whenever he raised his sword.
The act had become something he viewed as mundane.
It was almost like… peeling an orange. At times, tedious. And yet mostly it was simply a means to an end that he neither cared about nor found himself thinking twice about.
“It is a guilt that I will readily carry,” Khaslana said, gaze flicking down to the dining table. It was best not to admit that the guilt was a weightless, imaginary thing that lived only in their minds and not in his own heart. “If not me, then who else?”
“That’s not—!” Tribios’ voice pitched high, dismayed. The words caught in her throat.
“Teacher,” Aglaea said. Her voice was gentle. “Perhaps you would not mind retrieving a vase for this bouquet.”
The legs of Tribios’ chair scraped the floor and before Khaslana so much as had a chance to blink, she was on her feet. The holy maiden of Janusopolis sighed, long and tender, before nodding with such force that her hair covered her face and hid her eyes. “That’s a good idea, Agy. Ciphy probably has a few really beautiful ones squirreled away that we could use. I’ll go ask.”
“Lady Tribios—”
“I’ll be right back,” Tribios said, and without further delay, darted from the room.
Khaslana stared after her back, not quite wide-eyed but certainly approaching it. He’d known that his fellow heirs would be upset when he’d set himself upon this path but the knowledge hadn’t been enough to halt his blade. Lady Tribios needed time to realise that though she did not like the act in of itself, he had not been wrong in his judgement.
Cruel, perhaps. But never wrong.
She would not remain upset forever. They had, after all, forgiven much worse acts.
His stare remained on the open archway long after it had emptied. Contemplative.
“Phainon,” Aglaea said, “come sit.”
There wasn’t much of a reason to deny her, so he did. Spine rigid against the back of his chair, hands folded in front of him as he continued to think. Aglaea watched him as he settled. Picked up on all the sorts of details that he couldn’t begin to fathom picking up on in others Or perhaps wouldn’t have cared to notice.
He tilted his head towards her in retaliation to her narrowed focus.
“You weren’t too injured, were you?”
Aglaea shook her head. “Not gravely. Between my threads and Castorice’s scythe the assassin did not have a chance to leave anything but superficial wounds.”
Something in the way her voice had shifted into calm acceptance of the situation began to grind against him. It started in his teeth and filtered into the way that his finger bones cracked as he curled them into fists.
“I warned you that they would try to kill you again.” Aglaea lifted a brow but did not speak. She did not even blink twice in the face of defense and rising ire. “It’s too routine for them. The council always fell into enacting the same plan. They never changed.”
There was no rush to respond to his words. Aglaea simply let them sink in, just as considering as when he had watched Tribios flee from the dining hall in search of a home for the new flowers.
“Teacher would tell you that everyone deserves a chance at life within the Era Nova.”
“Lady Tribios is wrong,” Khaslana huffed. It was hard to keep the bite from his voice. In its absence, his tone fell into something far more bitter. “There are some people that don’t. They’re only capable of ruining the tomorrow we worked so hard to reach.”
Aglaea hummed. “I suppose after everything, I should not be surprised to hear such a statement from you. And yet.”
Khaslana set his gaze back onto the table.
“And yet,” he replied, bitterly.
They returned to uneasy silence. Aglaea seemed to be waiting for their previous words to settle before returning with more. Or, perhaps, she was simply waiting for him to speak first. Perhaps waiting to see if he would relent and admit he had been wrong. For him to bow his head in apology.
…Khaslana had never bowed his head before. He was not about to start now.
“I won’t apologise for it,” he said.
“And yet,” Aglaea’s lips lifted into a thin smile - a thing of muted grief. Perhaps she was looking at him and just now realising that her protege was a monster. Or, maybe, she simply saw too much of her previous self in him. “You bring daffodils.”
“The apology behind them isn’t for the act,” Khaslana said. “It’s for not having warned you ahead of time.”
“Ah, I see. You brought flowers because you’d rather ask forgiveness than permission, is that it?”
Khaslana huffed. “Something like that.”
The smile wilted in much the way the bouquet he had brought would. Drooping second by second, motionless and unable to withstand itself.
Aglaea said, “Do you remember the first thing that I taught you when you first found yourself under my care?”
“...In which cycle?”
“In every cycle.”
It took time to define the set interactions in his mind. It wasn't as if he'd always been Aglaea's successor in every cycle. In some, she had not lived long enough to meet him at the Flamechase's end. Or she had been a distant ally, the pair of them serving under the Imperator's banner, unspeaking but for shared tactics before setting off for war.
In others cycles, the Goldweaver’s dying emotions had been unable to coalign with the Deliverer’s rage and they had developed a dislike for one another that could only ever put aside for the sake of politics. Not conversation.
But that was only in some cycles.
In most, Aglaea - with her lingering empathy - had taken one look at Amphoreus’ deliverer, at crusting gold dried beneath a broken nose in the aftermath of another burst of anger-spurred sparring - and simply warned him to think twice before lending himself to the fickle wants of vengeance.
“I don’t want to be scolded and told that revenge isn’t the right response in this situation,” he huffed.
“That is not what I was referring to,” Aglaea said. “Though, of course, it would not be remiss for you to remember such things. No, child, I was referring to how you mustn’t let your anger consume you so thoroughly.”
“It wasn’t because of anger, Aglaea,” Khaslana said. “It was an act of protection.”
“I see,” Aglaea murmured. “I wonder why such protection concerns me more than the idea of such acts being spurred by rage.”
Khaslana couldn’t say.
He didn’t know.
“I suppose all I can do is reiterate my previous advice,” she continued, “but under a new source. Do not let your wish to protect us consume you so, Phainon. There is a fine line.”
“I will bear it in mind,” Khaslana said.
A lie, of course. He had spent so long torn between protecting them and executing them that now, in the Era Nova, he had decided to merge the two. Protection as their sword. Their eternal executioner, finally pointing his sword outwards, willing to commit any act to keep them safe.
Aglaea must’ve seen the lie but she knew not to push. Not on this. Not yet.
Instead, her thin smile returned and she said, “Of course.”