Work Text:
Mother
If Cstheio were born mortal, with the deep desires that mortals have, she might have wished she had something warmer than cold clarity to offer her devotees. She could not mend broken bones or breathe life into the dead. Her miracles were strikes of insight, not a lightning bolt from the sky or an arrow shot true on the battlefield.
And never was it more apparent than when Chenelo, fifthborn child of the Great Avar of Barizhan, came to the Untheileneise court to wed the Emperor. Cstheio saw her discomfort, heard her endless prayers, knew the loneliness in her heart- and could cure none of these things.
This is what she could give: the knowledge in the deepest of Chenelo's meditations that her pain was witnessed. I see you, she said as Chenelo walked the halls of a foreign court alone, with nothing but the spiteful whispers of courtiers as company. I hear you, she said as Chenelo stared at her travel valise, trying not to cry in front of her child as her husband's jailers escorted them to a prison even more remote. I know you, she said as Chenelo coughed wet phlegm into her handkerchief, too weak to left the pillar of her neck from her pillows.
Chenelo knew from her own insight, not Cstheio's, that she was dying. It was the bone deep weariness of a body worn too thin. Cstheio watched as the knowledge furled and took hold in Chenelo's mind, swaddled in a terror as old as the first stars: that of a mother for her child. When she was gone, what would happen to her son?
This is what Cstheio could give: the silent certainty, as Chenelo’s eyes closed, that Maia would survive her passing. She wove a vision as Chenelo’s lungs filled and her heart stopped beating of what will be: not Maia in white silk on the throne, but Maia smiling, Maia living. The woman beside him and the daughter on his knee whom he would call CHE-ne-lo, whom he would kiss on dark curls under starlight.
There were mortals that found Cstheio’s clear sight cold or useless. But it put a smile on the face of a dying woman, and no lightning bolt had ever done that.
Maiden
It was written in Cstheio’s holy texts that the Careizhasan and the Ethuverazhasan were to be mirrors of each other. Opposite numbers, as it were: one to rule the heavens, one to rule the earth. Cstheio saw both fore and aft, and knew from the moment she first spied Csethiro of the Ceredada that the coltish girlchild with the weak chin would sit at the right hand of the Emperor one day.
Three hundred years hence the scholars would write that perhaps the union was meant to be, for the names Csethiro and Cstheio shared the same root word, a hissed mess of consonants in the language, now forgotten, of the first settlers of the Elflands. The meaning was hard to capture outside the bounds of its original tongue, but might best be described as “vast.”
Yet when Cstheio first saw Csethiro, the goddess could not help but think that the connection existed in name only, for Csethiro was nothing like her.
There was a hotness to her, a quickness even, that would have endeared her to Anmura’s shieldmaidens of old. He fierce kindness would have been most appreciated by the priests of Csaivo. But there was none of the stillness nor the clarity that Cstheio cherished. And so Cstheio Saw but did not Speak, and if she had been mortal might have felt the faintest glimmerings of disappointment.
Until the girl-child grew longer of limb, and first picked up the sword.
It so happened that Cstheio knew this particular sword, had known it since its birth in an age long over. ‘Twas forged by Harenet, last master smith of Thu-Amar, in the dying light of the Empire's second golden age. The steel was folded ten times ten until the blade blazed with marbled ice. And it had been a custom in the old times for the swords to be baptized in starlight for nine nights, that the steel might be cold enough to quench the hotness of blood in battle. See me, Hear me, Know me, the sword had sang, and Cstheio had answered.
Csethiro’s first lessons were nothing of note: the stumblings of feet and protest of muscles forced into a dance neither had learned. But the fire of the girl and the ice of the blade were a combination that, once mixed, were not easily separated. And a year and a day after she had begun her lessons something clicked into place like a gear in clockwork. She moved in the motions of the sword dance, and on the second turn of the pattern she fell into the space that swordsmen dream of, the crystal clarity where the world falls away and there is only the steel.
And Cstheio leaned back in her starry bower and smiled.
Crone
If anyone asked Vedero Drazharan about her religious leanings, she would label herself a nonbeliever. "Atheist" was the word in vogue, whispered in that quiet but passionate way only the most delicious of scandals merited.
Professions of belief or nonbelief were of little concern to a being that had watched suns born and planets die in the endless dance of the universe. And thus no bolt of heavenly ire came to smite the nonbeliever, and Vedero continued to scandalize the nobility, dachen and michen, not only with her atheism, but with her trousers and her publications, not to mention her stubborn state of spinsterhood.
And yet. On any given night, after Vedero had excused herself from the presence of the court, her expressions of contrition dutiful but utterly unconvincing. After she had returned to her quarters, changed silk for a worsted dressing gown and mittens. After she had washed the lacquer from her nails, rinsed the paint from her face, pulled the tashin sticks from her hair.
It is to the stars that her eyes were drawn. Again and again and again.
It was a rare thing, for Cstheio to see herself reflected in a mortal’s eyes. Vedero traced the patterns of her nebulae the way a one might trace a lover's freckles. Her breath caught at each comet; she gasped as the aurora flowed down from the north to meet her.
For a rare and precious moment, Cstheio Careizhasan was Seen. And to her, that was the truest form of worship.