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The first thing he remembers is the moon.
Blurry vision sharpening into being, light and dark. It shines above, serene and circular. Night, he learns. Lunar.
The woman takes a washcloth and runs it over his face. Cold and clean: his first touch.
She has pale, steady hands. She moves with measured trajectory. Examines him from eye to eye, palm, carotid. Silver shines overhead as bioluminescence mirrors from the pool below. He is illuminated to the bone. She observes silently from the darkness.
She is his master. She will unravel the truth of this world.
The sky, he can't stop questioning. A miracle of anatomical engineering twists against itself as his face draws upwards, again and again. He marvels at its colors, the expanse of it. The moon, its perfect circle, leaves him. He watches it fall into nothing, watches the dark lighten and the pale disappear without moving.
His master strikes through something on a page.
The morning comes—another term he learns, a burgeoning day—and everything stabs at him. Birds serenade raw ears. Incomprehensible. There is an active feeling along his skin. The ghost of nerves, facsimiles, something he shouldn’t have the mechanisms to experience. If he had a human heart, it might tremble. Instead he is awake, lucid; his composite parts. There is a lack and then a want.
The morning comes with pale blue that spills over the sky so gently he might not notice until too late. But it is, and he does. Still in the shade, the whites of his master’s eyes reflect the hue. She momentarily looks down. He follows.
His body in the water, soil now given form. His silhouette in the water's reflection. Now: another novel hint of sensation, another wanting. Intrigue.
The morning and its pale blue, the sky gazing back at him. He blinks. The image in rippling water follows—no, acts with him. He struggles for some moment, units of time still foreign. Unimaginable, as of yet. He wants to catch the sky on his own visage as it shutters. But there is no delay. He closes a single eyelid. His reflection does the same, winking up at him with an expression of nothing.
A warmth over his shoulder. Light spreads, wavering, over the water.
His master draws golden lines that measure through space, through him. Wildlife awakens around them. She gets close enough to him, garments skirting the water’s surface without ever breaking it, that he can discern the color of her eyes. In the lifetimes later, he would not be able to pinpoint the hue. He’s certain in this moment, however, that twin moons shine at him. There is a noctilunar quality, a bounced likeness of the sun.
He does whatever she gestures for him to do. Perhaps this is a buried genomic sequence unearthed, premonitory instruction. Open his mouth, run his tongue against synthetic teeth. Curl his hands into fists then back. Her touch is never rough or more than fleeting, yet he feels hyperaware. Reactive.
Pages and pages, the paper untouched by water even as it seems to seep into his every orifice. His shoulders, bare, heat slowly as day encroaches.
He finds his attention falling skyward once again by the time she snaps the ledger shut, helps him out. Now, he notes with clarity, the moon is entirely absent and the sky screams in cerulean. There is a flaming sun in its stead. It hangs in his vision even as he is led inside.
He takes garments to his form, pacing to his days. His master speaks very little to him, and only when necessary. She tests vocal articulation. Makes certain he follows her lessons. He supposes it’s testament to her ability that he can comprehend and transcribe language nonetheless. The spoken and written word, another handful of this world’s miracles. He can begin to pinpoint these vague, previously-unknown sensations.
Wonder; the songbirds that recite their generational melodies every dawn. Beauty. Shoals of fish darting faster than his hands can catch but slower than his careful gaze. His own body, which bleeds like any animal until it closes up in self-written diagnosis.
Cold; his master’s residual haunt thousands of steps into elevated alpines. The dark which he comes to associate with absence of sun, yet the snowbanks in their daytime treks which burn a brighter cold. And her many creations, her biospecimens kept at steel-precise temperatures.
Then hunger.
Every want he has realized, every sense of lacking, concludes itself in hunger. The hollow feeling failing to conclude in any bodily system. That, having been thrust into a world fully-formed, there must be more for him to glean.
Or: he watches his master tear meat from buttered bone. Wolves hunt down the injured from a herd.
It is the very same he’s certain of in his master’s face as she flips through carefully-annotated tomes, stays up through the earliest hours of the night. The truth of which she aspires to is no small undertaking.
He doesn’t need food or sleep. Alone, he thinks of the sky. The moon, ghosting.
His master sometimes looks at him in that hungry way; like he can obtain some answer she cannot. Like she can find the truth buried inside his artificial vasculature. When his eyes are closed, his chest unmoving, her fingernails hover over his skin as if they might be able to leave a mark.
He is unable to eat, but he learns what hunger is to him. What he wants: what he doesn’t have, what she didn’t build right into his frame.
Lacking, he wants to understand this world.
He is still closing one eye then the other, chasing something incomprehensible.
She stops looking at him.
He has studied now; he understands the fundamentals of the world. The moon shrinks into another body, an orbiting maiden long-dead and unattainable. He finds his attention drifting up again, back to the sky. The miracles, he remembers. The wonder of the sunrise, the crystalflies.
He dutifully answers her questions, hands her the books and apparatuses, blinks when she commands it and watches when she doesn't.
It's not enough. She has walls lined with light, life that bursts forth the falls in ouroboros. He knows he is not the first she has created.
"The truth of this world," she mutters to herself. Her voice has always seemed like fog to him; without weight or warmth.
His photographic memory cannot hold onto the vision of her face. The hue of her gaze.
"The truth," she once told him, "is a perfect thing. It cannot be desecrated by its very nature. It is flawless, and that is why nobody can find it."
But me, her face says.
But me, he thinks.
"Perfection…"
Epiphanies do not happen often between walls steeped in erudition. But this is one, he imagines. A breakthrough.
"There is only one path to the truth. It doesn't matter how many failures lie in between."
There is an understanding, a patience which he has never seen in his master before. She faces him one more time. She is born anew. Almost kind.
"And there is nothing wrong with failures. They are inevitable."
Then she stops thinking about him.
And then he is devoured.
His brother—half-brother, created by the same hands—tears him apart.
It is an artless action. He sees red, then white, the back of his head, the slivers of Durin's teeth inside him, his ribs, his own teeth. There is no air to breathe. Pretend to breathe. There is no time to scream.
Teeth, gums, beating heart, they are of the same substances, he is sure of it. There is so little to hold onto, so little for his nails in ribbons, his mind. His skull in shards. His brain must have fallen into his throat. He thinks he can taste it. How his consciousness remains at all is—he would laugh if he had still the parts to do so—a miracle. His punctured lungs bubble.
The thread of consciousness, all that remains of the self, spills across his half-brother's tongue. Yes, they are of the same matter, the same language coded into double-helix and burning with energy. With their master's intent. He can hardly think at all.
For a while, he feels nothing. He thinks through his loosely-raveled brain that this is the truth: this silent, churning dark. In the beast's stomach, in countless ruined segments. Without sight, the artistry of his master's work no longer holds meaning. Time stretches and breaks. The truth: he and his prison are one and the same, one body. The same eternal power that keeps them from dying, from relief. The same hunger.
He doesn't know how long he festers there.
Patience. Which is greater, the unyielding passage of time, or the immortal mind forced to confront it? He used to sit without moving for hours, days; he never minded; years. He can't move at all.
He thinks of his master—he never really stopped thinking about her. Her face, or his desperate approximation of it, like a beacon through his endless torture. But it was only the natural process of things. It was only digestion, necessary, for an animal. No, he could not be hateful towards his half-brother. His mind spilled inside the dragon and its hunger spilled inside him, one and the same. He thinks of his master and finds his entrails, long shredded, now whole and twisted into knots.
How she looked. How he witnessed her endless patience from afar. He was created in pursuit of her ultimate, perfect truth. When she had her revelation—that was the closest thing he saw to satisfaction. When she realized he was a failure.
The heat seems to seep into him. Osmosis of the preternatural. He dreams about the moon. He burns, sterile.
She didn't look back. It doesn't take a genius's intuition to understand it; his master would not dwell on such useless things. But the hypothesis, the conclusion neatly punctuated—that he ends here. An object having fulfilled its purpose, a line drawn and dissolved in the sand.
He twitches with residual energy. Pieces of the self, visceral, crawling back together. This can't be right. He can't be gone already, not when the pain of living still rips at every part of his being.
She has already forgotten about him.
This is the truth. The perfect, infallible truth: his master has forgotten about him. Discarded him like the unwanted byproducts of chemical catalysis, like the very being he rots within. No, something screams, this can't be. But there is no air to beg.
How can it be, while she continues to greatness? While he withers alone?
He thinks about her face, cold. How beautiful she seemed on the eve of revelation. How ghastly hot it is here, even interpreted through synthetic, unraveled nerve endings. A failed experiment, a footnote towards perfection. It's not fair, his mind stumbles.
Perfection…
Maybe he comes back in pieces. Maybe as a mist that draws away in daybreak. It's possible he never comes back at all, leaving only the question of who remains. What remains.
He gets flashes of lucidity, or dreams, nightmares. It makes no difference. Here his eyes are gouged out, his sinuses collapsed. Here he is restored and staring straight into darkness. His nails regrow. His master searches elsewhere, beautiful, and he is gone again. Jawbone, tear duct; he suffocates until he cannot. He looks upon twilight, half-present.
Durin's body dislodges seas of snow from Vindagnyr's peaks. Buries itself with the force of the avalanche, then unearths its tomb with the residual energy, irresolute. Its blood sinks into the soil and poisons the landscape. Lingers perpetually.
Thinking back, he's not sure whether any of his dreams were his own, his memories. Durin likely shaped his fleeting consciousness through sheer exposure, flesh to flesh. Maybe at some point he had colored Durin as well. They were the same, weren't they? One and the same. Yes, all the visions of snowy peaks and beautiful green hills, songbirds, the jewels in the sun, her gaze like icebergs. And the blood, the blood. It had all diffused through skinship; the feast without hunger, pain without sense.
It seems like he should've known when Durin fell. Felt the impact of it in his soul, if he ever had one. But can the self know when a part of it dies? No more than it can see its reflection blink, he reasons slowly. His thoughts complete themselves across days, or years.
But they are the same, after all. The same decaying isotopes. And he is still alive, still dead, whatever the miracle of alchemy promises, fails to keep. Durin inhales, exhales around him, the pulse that had encircled him for centuries now soaked into the land. The shift of tectonic plates, he considers. These changes in nature so slow as to be felt over lifetimes, so gently as to be unnoticeable. Perhaps it has always been this way. Perhaps he never returns in the first place.
When he wakes, he gasps reflexively with lungs that have never wanted for oxygen.
When he wakes, there is the moon.
It's as if Durin was never there. Its heartbeat was always his own, its dreams his dreams. The sky is clear. The air cool to his raw skin. Hundreds of years drift into one another like ash, snow, on his face. He gets up, unbothered by the below-freezing temperatures. His limbs unblemished. His pain immortalized in memory.
Elsewhere, in an underground laboratory almost familiar to him, a scientist celebrates the success of her long-sought hypothesis.
Centuries beneath his bare feet, Durin's bones pulse with red heat.
All life seeks light, he once thought. It was the natural trajectory, moths to lamplight, flowers to sun. Even the moon facing her celestial counterpart.
His master taught him otherwise. There are hundreds of species which have never once seen the sky. There are colorless eels that wander, blind, the ocean floor. The microscopic plants that shrivel under direct light. Insects and subcutaneous fauna, entire planets where life did not develop as theirs did. Visible.
And their moon, who died centuries ago. Slaughtered for love.
He wondered if that made him naïve, how he also turned reflexively towards light. But she told him she had made him in that way.
"For us, illumination is the clearest way towards perfection."
Yet she always skirted the edge. Lit not by the direct beams she trained on him, but by the bounced rays.
That was likely why the moon, its carcass, compelled him in such a way. His inlaid attraction to light in conjunction with his obedience to his shadowed master. It didn't matter that its glow was fraudulent. Perhaps it should have.
The land betrays his perfect memory, having absorbed centuries of the body. Having crumbled and reformed, driven under the certainty of time. He passes serrated shapes that he knows were once fangs, the stone arcs overhead, the trails of bloodlines run dry. His brother's slumbering corpse.
The rising sun stretches his shadow over unblemished fields of snow, longer and longer. His presence cuts like a scar. He follows the tug of long-dead nerves and winds up at the base of Durin's skull.
When he climbs he imagines the neurons that once fired here, that must have. What might it have felt like to be living, once? To still partake in the world? He listens to the wind as it howls, seems to slice right through him. It is ready to take his voice if he speaks. Ready to return him to the soil from whence he was created.
He rests in the beast's eye socket. His feet dangle.
From this vantage point, the horizon is—beautiful. Miraculous. He stands upon his tomb. It unsettles him distantly; that he can overlook so many tiny flames and breathe freely under the stars. His brother died here. Killed him here.
He doesn't understand—
The thought itself makes something crack further in his skull. Like he has already admitted defeat. Like his master was right. A perfect being would never be so lost.
He thinks Durin's heart actively draws him in. Something buzzes in his bloodstream as he slips past rock that thaws, then melts.
The chamber—for a second, it is like being engulfed again.
Red. The walls, the ground. He cannot tell whether the lighting dyes everything the same violent hue or if the stone truly has been stained red, permanent. A heat presses right up against his skin and forgets any sign of the storm raging outside. A streak along the ceiling pulses, and he realizes it's a vein, or the ossified remains of one, carrying whatever rot that lingers. Flows in old patterns.
He follows the veins down sloping grounds until they coalesce into one form. This is where it all emanates from; light, heat. Possibly the leylines of the entire mountain. He stands before the pulsing object and feels its presence tugging at his bones.
Durin's lifeforce had never truly stopped because its heart had never been destroyed. It was beating here the entire time, waiting.
He is certain the pulse grows stronger as he moves closer. A preordained track, his mouth dry.
They were both left here, he realizes. They were both deemed necessary failures and forgotten about. Discarded. The shape of its fangs are engraved into his memory. The poison on his tongue. Durin, who killed him, and for whom it was only natural, was his isometric equal. He looks at the crystallized heart and thinks that this light passing through him is the closest he will come to divine judgment.
Consumption is a bond that does not let go. He knows this from years of hunger.
And where else could he go, now?
He wakes one evening to unfamiliar noise.
Voices.
The birdsong fades to dust. Chalk. He tastes it dry and bitter in the back of his head.
He has not seen humans in a very long time. The two who have stumbled into his cave are dressed for the weather in coats, insignias, heavy fur. They loosen their fastenings as they step—intrude—closer.
"Fuck," one of them says, "it's hot in here."
"Urk," the other one says. This is because he has pierced her through with a fang. She gurgles; falls to the ground, where her blood melds nearly perfectly with the existing scenery.
"Fuck," the first human manages again.
It's too late for either of them.
He strips their clothing, shoes, the weapons they were carrying. Divested of the objects asserting their superiority, the humans look small. Unceremonious, as they lie in a cooling heap. The neighboring animals have never come in here—instinctively, they know to keep a wide berth. He frowns. Humans have no such intellect.
He drags the bodies outside to let the storm bury them. It doesn't seem right to let them rot inside his brother's chest.
Afterwards, he curls up in his nook behind the heart and inspects the tooth. He hadn't even thought while attacking with it. It had moved through him.
It seems to be a canine, elongated and serrated along one edge. It feels cool to his touch, which is unexpected. The snow had melted in an even radius around it. He considers the radiating tracks of maroon that appeared over the humans' frozen bodies. So this is a dragon's will; the capability of harm that remains through centuries of ice.
He turns it over. It looks almost innocuous, even in the blood-red light.
Gripping the blunt base, he brings it to the palm of his other hand. His skin splits as easily as did the humans. He is like paper. And yes, there is the vivid sight of poison corrupting the wound, ink on the page. He can feel the sharp pain, but he has endured so much worse. He waits for something to happen.
Yet he is unsurprised when nothing does.
The venom might be debilitating to any naturalborn being. But his hypothesis—that they have been too entwined, that poison cannot harm itself—proven true renders him untouched. Now he has two lines of investigation to pursue: that his master had formed all her creations under the same alchemical baselines; or that something between them, his death, Durin's, had twisted the lines of evolution far enough to rewrite his material form.
He flexes his wounded hand. It no longer closes up seamlessly like it did in his memories. His body reborn from a cursed nation's soil, his veins running with venomous blood. His constituent parts, he considers, now want to destroy him.
He raises his hand and watches the light stream through, watches it drip with something too dark to be human. To even pretend to be.
There is an avalanche. Such phenomena are not unexpected in these environments, but he investigates nonetheless. He finds a bridge jutting out of the mountainside instead. The snow has snapped clean through its center. Curiosity alit, he follows the bridge down. Finds that just before the break is a gap. He was unable to see it from his cavern, though he had never before looked.
And inside—
The first thing he recognizes is the alchemy table. Symbols that glow blue, dreamlike, the same script he remembers from all his lessons. All those years ago. He presses his fingers to the inscribed surface and feels it resonate with warmth.
The entire space is an anomaly of warmth. There is a cooking pot steaming in the corner. The walls of the cave reflect with firelight, untouched by cold. Someone has eaten their meals here. Studied his master's teachings here. Slept, dreamed between these sheets.
It makes his skin crawl. It is not intrusive, not externally. The mountain was hollow here the entire time, and he had failed to notice. It is an abscess. Or its opposite—it had harbored warmth here all along, life in a decaying land.
He grits his teeth. He doesn't need anyone disturbing this tomb.
Then, behind shelves of textbooks and samples, neatly labeled in handwriting that looks like a memory—something else. A corkboard awash in canvas, ink. He steps closer. Sketches. Near-exact replicas of reality. A winter fox, a snowy owl, a solitary mint plant. A human face, another, and another. Life stares back at him from these pages, dissolving into crude gesture lines and smudged charcoal. The pursuit of it, definitive.
He has not seen a human being in a long time. His master had kept herself, her abilities, darkened in shadow. His own form only strives to imitate it. None of the study materials and anatomical dissections from lifetimes ago bring sense to him now. Countless grayscale faces blur into one another, staring into him as a collective.
Is there any difference, he wonders, between the gaze of these artworks? Are these models of any more understanding than the animal specimens they rest amongst?
For the first time in centuries he feels something that stirs curiosity, unsated, in his gut.
He touches nothing, leaves without a trace. His mind lingers.
The mountain is nothing to him. It is a collection of matter like any other on the planet. In the universe. He stays here only to survive, and he survives only because—
Here the thesis falls apart.
Here he wakes to dawn, lets day break around him. He learns the notes of the turtledove's call. He extinguishes any improbably-lit torch he comes across. He tries his best to maintain tranquility over Durin's rest. The hilichurls have learned to keep their distance, though humans remain thoughtless as ever. He has amassed a wardrobe for himself, all metal-buttoned coats and green fabrics stained dark. An armory.
He has traced the dragon's outline with his ceaseless pace, familiarized himself with every posthumous ecosystem. He is certain he knows each grain of soil, its history.
Then he finds—himself.
At first he thinks it's a reflection. Which is an impossibility because at this elevation, no body of water stays liquid enough to resemble a reflective surface.
But there's something about the stranger, not-stranger. An air carried that distinguishes from himself. This is something he has been unable to properly examine in wildlife: behavior—does a creature's actions result from design or natural reaction?
He can't imagine his master knowingly coding this into him, a metallic feeling that fills his mouth. Something nameless and so sharp he almost misses it.
In these mountains, there is always a sense of being watched. The stranger doesn't seem to notice him at all. He steps calmly through dead grass, patches of ice. Picks at pieces of exposed ore, humming something winding and unfamiliar. The stranger doesn't lose his balance once.
He watches.
A magnetism tugs at him, drives heat through layers of snow. This should be familiar to him, but it creeps over him like a shadow instead, hundreds of years away. He remains affixed to the stranger as he leaves, the back of his neck.
The stranger's hair is slightly longer and pinned up, somehow, a pattern both intricate and orderly. His strides are shorter, slower. He wears something that is both like the garments of the soldiers before and different, gold glinting at his shoulders, waist, the edges, turnpins.
He bites around nothing. He bides his time.
The stranger retreats uphill. It is somehow no surprise at all when he ends up in that cove of warmth. The mountain does not belong to him, but it is—known. Has withstood contact.
The stranger settles by the alchemy table and empties his rucksack.
He hardly breathes. Here is the answer to everything and nothing at all. Here is his own face awash in chemical blue. Might he have looked like this before?
The stranger's brows knit and he rubs at his face. He sighs. He pushes a chunk of silver ore to the ground and seems pleased when it breaks in two.
No, these actions—no. The stranger is like him but not like him. His airs. His behavior so strange, so human. But what right does any mortal have in this field—of alchemical study; of his brother's bones?
The stranger strikes something through on a page. The pieces are joining together and he can only watch.
He slinks through after the stranger leaves, traces his footsteps despite knowing the snow will cover them soon enough. Nudges the broken piece of silver with his boot and wishes he hadn't.
Scattered across the engraved surface of the bench are failed clusters of ore, colorless dust. But in its center—something with form, intent. He touches the cylinder and finds that its white surface rubs away to reveal blue. Both hues stain his fingertip.
Paint, he realizes. Transmuted oil, pigment, animal elements derived from the inorganic. Then again, the earth is the accumulated memory of the land, of time. His master had taught him this: by nature, matter absorbs its peripheral history. The basis of alchemy; those who wished to master it should learn to listen. Find the lines of past life and tug.
All matter had been something else once. All matter has the capability, still.
Metamorphosis is attainable only through purification. To separate first the entangled threads of history, the elemental compositions of life, then to bring order to the newly crude. Soil, dust, he recalls—the basis of all complex life. After that, chalk. The whitening, leucosis.
It is the white substance spilled between each marking on the benchtop, like connective tissue. It looks almost like snow.
From chalk is birthed new life. His reflection ripples. Breaks. To be human, or be like it, the pinnacle of creation—
His master's magnum opus; she has found it.
The stranger returns. Something cannot be parted from its reflection, after all. He paces Durin's spine, jotting notes in quickhand, mumbling to himself, quicksilver theorems, hypotheticals.
The stranger's studies have progressed far, far beyond anything his master taught him. Anything his mind still retains, like water of a wrung washcloth. Chalk, the purification of matter. Soil, storyteller of the land, prima materia.
Albedo, he learns. Chief Alchemist of the Knights of Favonius.
His documents are bound and waterproofed, the handwriting small, close-spaced, strokes straight and neat. It is parallel to his master's writings, imitation that develops into itself. How can a reflection have an identity?
Venom churns beneath his skin.
If he looks up, there is a city in the sky, white and untouchable, which his first brother yearned for. If he looks down, a city in the lake. It has windmills, turrets, a fairytale scene that reflects right back at him from the water. Which Albedo incubates within.
Calendared days burn page by page. Tomes within the Favonius-knighted library tell of the land's tectonic shift around him. How Durin has been reduced to the sum of its parts, Vindagnyr now dragon's spine. How five hundred years have been pressed into his joints, have been slipped between the minutes.
It takes him weeks to get used to the climate.
Albedo carries the teachings of his—their—master between envelopes sealed with the institution he now belongs to. Pretends to. Kreindeprinz, someone addresses him as. Chalk prince, capstone of this fairytale. Soil tells the story of the land, ink its contracts, though there is nothing to translate the memory within these summer winds; the people, the words, the laughter—
(He is woken to terror once, the sound of laughter fading away beneath the beat of Durin’s heart. It is emotion unknown to him.)
But as he shadows Albedo through his days, his life, he hears it more and more. Humans have gestures, tones, variations apropos for every occasion. It astounds him with excess. It makes him feel hollow by contrast.
He watches him pen letters, some sent via raven and others balled up and burnt. He watches him receive them. Regards, Albedo. What must it be like, to speak and be heard? To be regarded? He remembers the roost within his master’s facility, the fowl plucked and opened cleanly up; reconfigured. He thinks about the sweet madame Albedo buys from Good Hunter.
He watches him sleep, face paper-lily, brows unfurrowed, lips parted. Door ajar. The sound of his even, peaceful breathing fills the room and the air feels dense with flower pollen. Love. It presses into him. It leaves Albedo's window cracked open in a land whose wars have been flattened into the pages of children's tales, dreams of fiction.
Albedo will occasionally meet up with others. On Saturdays he offers salad to a witch with eyes like plaustrite, over which they discuss star patterns, cosmogony; the impossibilities of the world. On Sundays he clears out camps of monsters with an outlander lacking any insignias, after which they have tea, pastry. Other days of the week he lounges before an easel and recreates any likeness on his canvas with chalk, paint. The impossibilities of the world. When Albedo speaks they listen. His voice is quiet. Calm with years of familiarity.
All this time, he realizes. Centuries of hunting after the truth, of watching hunger without knowing it. These years of wanting have been in vain for him. For Durin; for all of his master's abandoned sons.
All these years, and Albedo is the only one who received that love.
How can it be, something still asks. Uncomprehending.
Albedo has tied himself to every soul of this golden city. Everybody knows the pulse of his name. Albedo, the purest form of matter, reflecting all light—
To name something is to express dominion over it; he had drawn this conclusion lifetimes ago. Naming something says I understand you from beginning to end. It says I have denoted your shape. It says you are a story devoured and concluded.
He thinks the devotion to names, taxonometric, is why humans cannot fully master Khemia. They believe the universe is within their grasp, subjugation possible if only they have enough syllables. But existence cannot be pinned down in this way—he is proof, after all. Without understanding that matter is always in flux, one thing also another, how can anything change? How can one possibly initiate it?
(But his master had a name. A face. He could not forget her unsmiling face if he wanted to, and he wanted—
Only to see the moon again. Durin had a name, too, tarnished though it became near the end. That corrupted dragon had been something she deemed finished enough to title; her first masterpiece.
To be subjugated. To be seen.
Durin, who sleeps now without rest, burns without ash. Albedo, her finished creation, framed and irradiant.
But the story has not ended, he wants to plead. If he is nameless, if he is not the light, not the water's surface—if he is looking only at a broken silhouette, without distinction, without recognition—)
He watches the humans smile at him—at the one who wears his face. All white teeth and crescent-moon eyes, faces glowing with contentment. He can hardly tell them apart. There is a painting of three sunflowers in Albedo’s study, the one within the walls of the Favonius Headquarters. He thinks often about binary fissure: dividing a flower from its stem, a head its shoulders. He wonders what Albedo’s artery might hold. It’ll be different from him in this aspect, at least. Though he can’t recall what his own blood looked like before the corruption.
The name that Albedo constructs for his master is mother.
Maybe Albedo notices in pieces. A shadow grows out of place along the garden wall; a clock falls three seconds out of time. It's possible Albedo never notices at all, and his mind is only mirror to itself, its wide eyes and ever-hollow mouths.
He can't explain why he stays. Why he observes Albedo for nights that do not end. He has never thought about anything in this way, not even his master, whose face has etched into his memory too deeply to ever smooth out. The moon only reflects the light of the sun. A scientist only seeks to focus the truth without consuming its radiance.
But somewhere beneath the trajectories of bent photons, the prisms of glass, the years and years of illusions, reflections—somewhere, somehow, there was an original form. There had to be.
For Albedo, there was only ever one life.
His brother, successor, prodigal son, must have noticed him. The same object cannot occupy the same space without dissonance. Albedo wears his face, but he can almost see the perfection, golden, humming beneath the skin. Aching to get out. This is the part that he's certain blindly senses him watching, the part that has been tied since before birth.
He has never known his own shape so closely.
Albedo surrounds himself with mundanity, sweet flowers in glass jars at the meal table, ice cubes in his water. He pares his pencils into points with a razor blade held between his knuckles. Albedo asks the blacksmith's son about forging with foreign alloys and smiles as he waves goodbye.
He knows what will happen next; he has his theory. He was created, after all, in pursuit of the truth.
Alone at the campsite, Albedo compares his materials to the diagram left in his master's handwriting. Khemia bends matter like candlewax to his will. Albedo picks up the purified blade and dusts off the chalk, holds it up to the daylight. Dream before rebirth, he thinks. Solar dawn. The blade resonates with colorless justice, every wavelength of photometry colliding in tandem. The cut of such a weapon would be almost kind.
He watches. Follows through the shadows, breaths bated, baited.
Albedo's gaze meets him. It is nearly unbearable. It is, he thinks, inevitable.
They do not greet each other, the same way glass fails to greet the light passing through it. He has no name, after all. He was discarded before the story was even drafted. Meanwhile the consonants of his successor's name have lodged in his throat, metallic.
Here is the sword in Albedo's hand, his glove black with palms like welling incisions. Has Albedo come to end him? Was it the other way around?
“I don’t hate you,” Albedo says carefully. He sounds distant, like fog. Albedo sounds like her, and then he is overrun with fury.
"Of course not."
Because she had deemed him worthless, after all. Once disposed of, there was nothing left—not even a trace of memory. His master could not have sent her golden son. She doesn't even know he exists anymore. Yet he still thinks of the moon. He still waits like a child.
Look at me, he thinks. Look at me.
But Albedo doesn't even know what he's looking at. How can he? Light is a stranger to its shadow, its mute reflection.
The sword hums patiently.
The truth: no matter how many times his flesh bruises, rots, they still share the same silhouette. He was made in the shape of perfection, and it is too late now to be anything else.
The truth: no matter how the light bends, he has still been replaced, atom by atom. The gap between love and rage is filled by his master's imagined smile, razor-clean.
His reflection blinks. When his mouth waters, he knows, it is without purpose.
He is perfect. He is a failure. The truth has him plunging a bare hand through Albedo's chest, through the muscle, the bone, up to the wrist, forearm.
Albedo's eyes widen, just barely. The fractional expanse of the sky.
Blood coursing through his entire body overtakes the sounds of meat tearing, ribs snapping one by one. There is no resistance. He feels liquid dripping from his forehead and thinks momentarily that he has become truly human, sweating, until he snaps from Albedo's face to find scarlet everywhere. It's not his own unbearable heat, he realizes. Just the closeness of a body that he has never experienced. The blood spurts around his hand and ruins his clothes. He doesn't even know why he's so furious for a moment— look at this, look at me, you've ruined me.
But it devours both of them. He forces his fist deeper, the rest of his body closer. He has Albedo pressed against the wall now.
"I'll kill you," he promises.
Albedo's knees wobble. The force of the ruptured pulse has speckled his perfect face, like an eggshell.
A ragged breath. "You can't."
Something acidic twists inside him. He had aimed for the heart, wanted to rip it out of his brother still-beating. But he'd only punctured the lungs. Lost in the blood, all this filthy fucking blood, he'd fallen short again.
"Do you know how long I've been waiting? For this. For you—" the words scrape at one another, vocal cords having lain unused for centuries. "Five hundred years beneath this land—I have patience."
Blood still steams at their feet.
"I'm sorry," Albedo gasps.
Pity. It's pity that glints in his eyes, his tears. How dare Albedo masquerade as human at a time like this? How dare he have the luxury? He clenches around viscera so tightly he thinks his nails have cut his own palm.
"Don't you dare."
"My friends," Albedo begins, face white.
"This isn't about your friends. It's you, it's always about you." Even now, even after all those years of sunlight, all the laughter. Years of miracles. His eyes. Gods, even now Albedo doesn't see him; he looks right through him. "Don't you understand?" he spits. "It had to be—you."
Albedo's eyelids flutter, blood smudged unceremoniously across his face. Dirty; pristine.
"Please don't do this."
"I'll do anything," he snarls, "and you can't stop me."
Both hands digging into Albedo’s chest tremble with rage. What makes him extraordinary? What deemed Albedo fit to keep while he was forgotten? His nails are rust-darkened crescents of filth. Gods, it makes him sick. The skin curls at torn edges, the flesh blanches upon exposure to air, the blood bounces in warm droplets against ice. Albedo is just as obscene inside as any other animal.
He grits his teeth. “Where are your friends now?”
Albedo’s eyes fly open. Why them? Why not me? And he will scream, and Albedo swallows—
There it is, how could he have missed it? The star flickers from Albedo's throat, still radiant beneath the blood, the grime. One would only notice such a thing if intimately acquainted with its shape, its symbolism: her golden mark.
His head swims. This four-pointed star, its closed circuit, its story overwritten beginning to end. He had forgotten. Overlooked, maybe, or willfully blind; he had been searching for a heart when there never was one.
The star, sole proof of his synthesis. Of imperfection. The only difference between them.
Albedo’s blade slices past his neck, forcing him backwards. He feels numb.
“I’ll—”
“I’m sorry,” Albedo says again, and he really does look apologetic.
The air feels thinner, colder with the newly-formed space between them. He seethes. Sated, lush with company his entire perfect, painfully-short existence, Albedo has never known anything. Life has always been golden and untouchable. The dragontooth appears easily in his hand. He only wants to show Albedo what it feels like to be ripped apart.
His mouth stings. He bites his tongue as Albedo cradles one hand around his ruptured torso, the sword still clutched, a threat, in the other.
Albedo's organs knit back together layer by layer, dreamlike. Membrane, muscle, chipped vertebrae. The lungs smooth over and re-inflate. Blood vessels spiderweb back into place. Then the wound of his raw fury has been closed up and cleanly sealed. There was never a heart in the first place, just her cold, golden glow.
Then Albedo pushes himself off the wall, sword in wary position. He is acutely aware of how the cut on his own neck has not stopped bleeding.
"So her little toy can fix itself."
"You cannot kill me," Albedo says, "just as I cannot kill you."
His own traitorous heart burns a crater into his chest. Even now they are the same. Even now, impossibly different. Albedo's blood is more visible with him no longer crowded against brick. It is so nearly human, that brilliant, blooming red, it screams against the snow. Only out of the corner of his eye—and he cannot afford to take his gaze off Albedo for a second—can he spot the hue that keeps him from perfection. It's the same violet that echoed in Durin's dreams.
Albedo's blood keeps him tethered to this sunlit side of Teyvat. His own, long darkened into the bile-black of corruption, leaves him nowhere.
"Can't I?" His palm tightens against the tooth's edge. "Our forebrother got close." It hurts, but he's endured so much worse. "Who knows what I would be after another few hundred years?"
He lunges, claws in his back, teeth inside him. Albedo whirls around and parries him. His blade sings, aureate, lethal.
They dance, spar. It's the same language coded hundreds of years apart, the same muscle memory. But he was starved and Albedo was always loved, loved, loved.
"What is it like, to lie amongst humans?" he spits. "Do you sleep restfully—knowing one day you will end up like all your master's creations?"
—Knowing one day you will end up like me?
"You can't hurt me," Albedo gasps for breath, almost pleading. A begging to be believed. "Just—what do you want?"
He scorches.
Somehow they've swapped. Albedo has that shining sword this close to his throat, where the same star once rested. His skin buzzes. He feels its absence more clearly than ever, the shape of a void beneath Albedo's blade. Despite engineered survival instincts, he feels the urge to surge forth. A lifetime of lacking begets a posthumous wanting.
They are millimeters apart. Symmetrical. There is a smudge of his own blood by Albedo's lip, a gaping space between them, a burning ache. He has an answer now: they share the same immunity to Durin's venom. They have parallel bloodstreams.
The sword falters. "Please," Albedo says. He smells of mint.
He doesn't remember whose blood is on his tongue. Only the hunger.
"Alchemy is never what the masses imagine it to be," his master once says. "It is not an art, nor a science."
"What is it, then?"
"Art seeks for oneself, to bring meaning to an individual's life. Science seeks for others, to better the lives of the masses." She continues as if he hadn't spoken. "But alchemy seeks for nobody. The truth does not serve, it simply is. It is a selfless practice."
Selfless, he ponders. Is that not antithesis to creation? To life itself?
Behind him the wall is slick with dead moss.
He is aware of every sensation needling at his body. A previous lifetime’s instilled attentiveness, analysis. How cold these concepts seem pressed against stone and flesh, these twin forms imitating warmth so well. He's burning. No, he remembers, the heat is from Albedo. It is only unbearable because his own body lacks the capacity.
One of them is panting. Or it is the howling wind, the cold that he can't feel.
His heartbeat roars in his ears. Durin’s. Not Albedo, who only pretends to breathe. Perhaps his deception has sunk into the skin, become second nature. If Albedo only pretends to be human, and he only pretends to be Albedo, what is left between them? Beneath the surface there is nothing left. It is centuries of hunger.
He licks his lips. He is emptier inside than he’s ever remembered.
Albedo slowly, so slowly, presses his thumb into his jugular.
"Don't you see what you've done," he says hoarsely.
Albedo is almost kind. "I think you've done this to yourself."
Suddenly he's certain they're nothing alike at all.
Kreideprinz—prince of chalk. How perfect he looks. How Albedo might give him anything he asks, if only he does. His own blood now smears across Albedo's mouth, and even this looks radiant. On him it glows with intent.
Something wracks through his body that he cannot name or explain. Something insatiable. He has never asked for anything, only watched or taken; been taken from. There's nothing else left, he realizes. He will take what he wants.
He must.
"You can't stop me," he repeats.
"But I have to," Albedo murmurs.
His brother is pleading with him, still, like his sword isn't sharpened and gleaming in his grip. Like his teeth aren't enough to puncture paper skin. But perhaps this is what domestication does to a machine—whittles it down to softness. The pity that he hates so, so much.
He sets his jaw, knows Albedo sees the way his breathing hitches. Knows Albedo will do nothing.
He kisses Albedo again. Tongue, thirty-two teeth, every piece of anatomy in symmetry. The same body hundreds of years apart. There is no space between them at all. He slips his hand beneath Albedo's shirt and his brother gasps; such a human reflex to jerk away from his sudden, cold touch. He hears the blade drag against stone.
"It's always you." He feels lightheaded with hate. "Her magnum opus."
Albedo's perfect face wavers. "I understand why you—"
"You don't understand anything!"
Without thought, he shoves Albedo—whose grip locks around his jacket. He doesn't have time to stop—
Inertia, stars falling. The sword clangs. The snow scatters in a halo around them.
"You never understand anything," he repeats, breath barely in his lungs. His knees dig into his brother's sides. "You and your drawings—all these years of imitation. Your goddamn friends. You called her your mother. You think this is a family. You think any of this can be a family."
The word stings in his mouth. He kicks the sword away.
Albedo squirms beneath him. Hair disheveled, pulse rising, he seems wholly human. But his eyes are still nuclear fissure through the tears. The blue is nothing like the sky above Durin's tomb. This body, he thinks shakily, is a work of fiction. This family.
"None of this will last, I promise you."
His hands, aching for violence, have found their way around Albedo's neck.
"No, Rhinedottir created me. She gave us—life—"
Albedo ruts upward, the heat of desire choking his words better than the threat against his throat.
"Hypocrite," he hisses. Durin's venom curls in his veins.
"Please," Albedo groans once more, and irritation spikes painfully enough that he shoves dirtied fingers in Albedo's mouth.
"Do you think life is some kind of gift? Do you think any of this is a blessing?"
Bite down, he almost wants to urge. Feel how he festers.
"You know you're not the first she's created. You've deluded yourself into thinking this is life—your miracle, your little fairytale. How can creation be so sacred, then? If you're so special, why are the rest of us living at all?"
He can hardly hear himself. He hasn't ever spoken this much at once. And Albedo hasn't said a word, only watches quietly, mouth wet around his fingers.
It sparks through him—heat. Humiliation.
"Why is it you?"
Albedo, who has never wanted for love in his life. Who has never been unraveled past his flawless, inhuman facade even though he bleeds the same as anyone else. Even with the hollowness in his chest, Albedo can still pantomime desperation to perfection.
His master has designed an actor, he thinks. A star.
He needs to be closer. He leans down again, tastes alkali; himself. They are of the same substances, the subatomic dreams, the same electricity. If he just digs a little deeper, he'll understand. He'll make Albedo understand.
He rips through the shirt, relishes in how Albedo shudders at the cold air. How vulnerable a reaction, how Albedo's head turns desperately away as he drags his touch further south. As if the hole in his chest was never there.
Maybe the freshly regenerated nerves are more sensitive. They must be, as Albedo's newly-freed hands only clutch at his hips, as his open mouth only takes labored breaths. The sounds, ragged, seem to cut through the winter. For humans, he realizes, the act of breathing is violent enough; how oxygen immolates. And Albedo's swelling cock is as human a reaction as any.
Humans always cover some part of their body. The constructs on their hands make sense, as to not interfere with the objects they handle. As do the shoes atop their feet, for the ground is often rocky and injurious. But what of the cloth around their torsos, between their legs? Nobody keeps something hidden away unless it holds importance.
The seat is cold, clinical beneath him. Almost everything in the lab is in tandem with the winter outside, so he has long grown used to temperatures that once left him on edge. He watches his master, who watches him breathe. Watches his bare chest rise and fall.
"What is the purpose of these?" he asks.
"For natural life, two purposes must be achieved." His master steps closer and stretches his mouth around her thumbs. "The first is to sustain it—through consumption. That which turns other life to a digestible form." Her finger passes over his left canine.
"The other is to continue it. Reproduction, new life—the miracle of alchemy is that it reduces creation to its base elements. One needs no partner, for alchemy has no equal."
His master dries her hand against her blouse, then grips his face by the chin. "You are no reproduction," she says neutrally. "I have created life alone."
Something twists.
"Although," she muses, "this is a reasonable point. Perhaps the function of recreation is wasted on a product of Khemia. After all, it might defeat its purpose. I shall keep this in mind."
Her withdrawn touch burns in his memory. This is the first time, he thinks. This is the beginning of the end.
Evidently his master had changed her mind with his replacement.
It's possible that the act of recreation is doubly miraculous—that life independently birthed might beget life again. Then again, it may just be for show; like everything else about Albedo, a brilliant imitation from every angle.
Every angle but this one, spread shivering on the dirty ground.
His own desire burns through him. Makes his hands nearly shake. He snaps Albedo's waistband, hears him take another sharp breath. The sight of Albedo exposed like this, drooling from the tip, utterly indecent. He drags over his cock, once, twice, and his palm grows filthy with precome.
"Stop," Albedo moans.
An incandescent fury flashes, to hear his own voice without shame. Without defense. He had been created first; he had a tongue first. How dare Albedo take everything—his voice, his words, his face. His touch.
How dare he want this.
"It's all your fault," he says, venomous. "Kreideprinz."
There's nothing elegant about this. The blizzard, the bitter iced-over skies. How their blood intermingles and pools beneath them, stains both their shirts, pants. The back of Albedo's tights.
It seems like Albedo can't help but rut into him. And this same hunger drives him to roll his hips down, chasing friction, light that borders on shadow, closeness that borders on pain.
"Ah, please—"
Albedo falters, perhaps because he realizes there is no name to call. Perhaps because he has wrapped stained fingers around Albedo's length, tugging rough and impatient. Each drag sparks through his nervous system. Familiar territory; they are identical.
He spits into his palm.
"It'll tear," Albedo breathes.
"Shut up." He jerks his wrist viciously and Albedo makes a choked sound.
So what, now his brother relearns control? He sees red, gold. Red. He presses into himself, feels every vertebra in his spine shivering; burning. Every atom in his body is hungry, but he no longer has the luxury of control.
He raises up on his knees—the ground bites into his skin, the stone, the dirty glass—and for once is above Albedo. Prince of chalk, prince of truth.
This is the truth: he and his prison are one and the same. The same body.
Braced against Albedo's chest, he can almost imagine the heartbeat. The pulse that overruns him, body to body. Its rhythm is the only thing that cuts between them.
"I'll do anything," he says. "Anything I want."
He lowers, and then Albedo is inside him.
It forces something out of him, a breath, choked, a fraction of his consciousness. A being and its shadow, a thought and its mind, they are—close enough to overlap. Breathe the same air.
Or pretend to breathe. Pretend to moan, because surely that isn't his own voice in shambles, his own naked hunger. The heat sinks through his skin. They're touching at every point but it only simmers, scrapes him raw from the inside. It's not enough.
His brother—
(He thinks about claws, bones inside him. He needs this like—like what? He can't finish the thought. He needs this like nothing he has ever needed before. Or everything, his lifetimes of want. This is uncharted territory. This is the same sky he has lived under for five hundred years. The same body, remembered and forgotten. How can something be two at once? His reflection shakes, shatters. Breaks like ice rind.)
—tears him apart.
The heat, the sounds of it, slick amidst the bitter cold. He bleeds. Of course he does, neither of them gone enough to be wrong about this. There is no time, no kindness, not even its imitation.
It hurts, gods. It feels like Albedo is pressed against the very core of his being. Split open, a raw wound.
He doesn't care, or cannot bring himself to. The blood, the resonating pulse, unbearable; these are the only signs that he is living at all. His stomach curls with need, palpable.
Albedo's hair fans out as he keens, throws his head back harshly. Golden silk spills across stone. He thinks about brain matter, putrefaction, purification.
"Do you—really?" Albedo manages, with effort. "Hah, do you want this?"
His entire body is drawn, bowstrung, lightning bolt. His muscles burn.
"Look at me," he says in place of an answer. His mouth burns too, his gums. "Look at yourself."
The way Albedo shudders beneath him, cheek crushed into the snow, limbs long and contorted, can't be comfortable in the slightest. But nothing about this situation can be. His own face in pain, in pleasure. His reflection wears every emotion he has not been able to stomach.
He leans down, loose-brained, dizzy. Yearns to wrap his mouth around Albedo's true heart, plunge his teeth through his windpipe, expose his nucleus as it glows.
But Albedo's hands are cold, clean, desperately fisted at his thighs. Is this, too, calculated? Albedo is falling apart. No, he has always been untouchable.
Do you really want this?
He doesn't want anything, he thinks, a slice of clarity that makes him shiver. He wants everything.
Nothing is as easy as Albedo makes it.
He tastes rot before he mouths at Albedo's jaw instead, the perfect columns of his throat. He digs his tongue into the hollow, which tastes of nothing. The body of dark matter. And Albedo gasps again, because it's obvious, it's so cruel, nobody has ever touched him here. Humans respect what animals cannot.
A lifetime he's spent searching for the rest of the thought, the rest of the truth. The angle that ruins, heat to the core—he bites down hard to prevent another moan from escaping.
All life in the universe comes from a single moment, he thinks. His master had taught him that. And there is no time between them, no air. No distinction between their outlines. Nothing to reveal his ruin.
"Please," Albedo says again, shifting to his elbows. He sounds wrecked. Please, stop? Please, more? There is no difference between hunger and slaughter. It is so pointless that it takes his breath away.
He licks into his brother's open mouth. Tastes the burn of nothing, of miracles.
A gloved hand thumbs over his chest and he gasps. He feels like the entire mountain is melting around them. Heat rings through his body. It takes all his effort to keep his eyes open, his shameful mouth shut. Albedo pulses inside him, or maybe that's Durin's heart, still; he can't tell.
Panting, Albedo moves his legs, securing a deeper angle. He will surely split apart. The touch burns at the inside of his thighs. His bloodied palms.
Skin to skin with perfection, and still he aches with want.
"More," he chokes, "I need—"
But they are the same, and Albedo knows his desire without him needing to say it. Those sky blue eyes seem to shimmer with fever, mirages in the desert. Capable of harm.
His insults devolve into pleas, his pleas into meaningless noise. He claws at the ground. At Albedo's back. It was all the same body, anyway, bleeding red with want, lifetimes of it. He grips onto the scraps of Albedo's jacket so tightly his knuckles whiten.
"Please—"
He thinks Albedo spills over first, or maybe he's bleeding too much, overcome with wet heat, but a second before or after he is crashing down too, seeing white, seeing the back of his head.
Can perfection bleed through skin? Could anything possibly stay with him, he finds himself hoping, like the blood and touch might somehow anoint him. Make him worthy again.
Why you?
They are face to face, a moon to its morning. The likeness of god. Why had his master loved Albedo and not him? Perfection, that shining, unattainable concept. The truth that nobody could find. The truth was supposed to be impossible and infallible, like a star hanging overhead. But he has tasted it, held it beneath his nails.
Why not me?
It's too late now, the thought comes unbidden. Whether he wants anything. Whether he ever did. They are already superimposed onto one another. They have always shared a silhouette.