Work Text:
You are a divine gift, Veltariel. You are a blessing made flesh. In you are the eyes of Tyr’s justice made manifest.
Bloody footsteps marked Malevir’s passage down the centre of the nave. Fading screams lingered in the air, caught in the dark of the clerestory above. Ahead, the dusk light fell blue and purple through the stained glass, bathing the cowering figures of his parents where they huddled before the altar.
“That’s enough, Veltariel!” his father cried.
Malevir continued to walk. Feathers shed in his wake, crumbling to red ashes as they drifted to the floor. Not enough left of his wings to fly now, but at least they were unbound.
“Put down the knife, darling.” His mother’s voice rang out, shaking but as clear as ever it sounded from the pulpit. Words were all she had. Tyr had never seen fit to grant her or any other of this church more than that. “Please, just put it down.”
The dead and the dying lay broken behind him, Tyr’s guilty faithful, punished as their own doctrine commanded. That many were ignorant of the shape of their guilt troubled him not—the mercy of ignorance was a mercy none had ever granted him. They had plucked his feathers for good fortune; laid hands upon him in search of Tyr’s blessings; stripped him bare before a crowd so that his many eyes could watch over the justice delivered unto others.
Now justice was come among them, and it was not Tyr’s hand that would deliver it, but his.
To their credit, his parents didn’t run. They clung to the altar and to each other, hands empty of all save Tyr’s judgement, and called him by his wrong name, and thought him still their daughter.
He had never been their daughter. Since the moment of his birth he had been nothing but a divine object. A celestial gift; untouchable, incorruptible. Mortal imperfections were never permitted, yet mortal chastisements served the blunt purpose of correcting any that dared show themselves.
“Look what you’ve done to yourself,” his father barked, as Malevir reached the stone steps to the sanctuary. “You’ve made a waste and a ruin of every gift Tyr gave you!”
Malevir glanced at his hands, gloved to the elbow with blood. What skin showed, once a celestial cerulean, had faded to stormcloud grey. He looked to his parents, to the altar, then above and beyond, to the curved wall of the apse, where a skeletal shadow rose to block out the hateful hammer and scales in the stained glass. It raised a hand, beckoning. Malevir tightened his grip on the knife.
“Let me be your eyes, Blind One,” he whispered, the prayer slanted with mockery, “and cast your justice upon this world.”
Then he opened the rest of his eyes. They blazed with amber light, forcing the gloom and his parents to shrink from their terrible brightness. They had told him, over and over, that Tyr saw through these eyes; that their god watched all, knew all; that he was never alone, never free from divine observation. They said it with reverence, as if it were the greatest fortune to possess a panopticon for a body.
The eyes did not belong to Tyr. They belonged to him.
Malevir leapt up the final step and drove the knife into his father’s stomach. A grunt, a gasp of pain—a howl as Malevir wrenched the blade sideways, tearing a gash through flesh and fat and muscle. Another wrench in the opposite direction widened the hole, slick guts spilling forth to deepen the purple of his father’s robes. Hands caught at his back, tugging his thin shift, his unbound hair; Malevir whirled and descended on his mother. He slashed at her upraised palms, carving her arms to ribbons until they finally fell, leaving the way open for his blade to meet her neck.
“Please—” she begged, and that was as far as she got. Then her throat was naught but a ragged ruin as he tore the knife up to her jaw, slicing until it jarred on bone. His breath came hard. Feathers fell thick and fast around him, piles of red ash drifting down the steps. The shadow at the window darkened.
His father clutched at his ankle—crawling on his split belly, desperate to save a wife already long lost. Malevir kicked the pawing fingers away, then brought his bare foot down on his father’s wrist again and again until it crunched between his bloody sole and the stone. Wind whispered through the church, twisting around the slender columns, carrying with it praise and approval and onward-urging. Malevir rolled his father over and knelt astride him, nearly slipping in the spreading pool of blood.
“When the justiciars catch up with you,” his father rasped, face pale, “they’ll put you to the sword. And that will be the merest nick compared to Tyr’s fury.”
On the border of death and still preaching. Malevir lifted a loop of twitching, gore-slick intestine.
“His fury,” he said quietly, “will be the merest whimper compared to mine.”
He clenched his fist over the slippery organ and sawed at it until it split. He grabbed another loop, then another, severing in a mad, haphazard rush; plunged both hands into the cavity and tore with nails and blade, teeth gritted, until he felt marble beneath flesh, until his father stopped screaming, stopped whimpering, stopped, finally, making any sound at all.
Malevir withdrew his hands. They hung dripping at his sides as his chest heaved and the eyes embedded throughout his body rolled wildly. The whispers caressed his neck, the words they carried overlapping into a dreamy, indistinguishable wash of gentle sound.
“Are you here?” Malevir asked.
Almost, was the reply. Almost.
He looked down at his father’s slack, dead face—through his other eyes, in vague, amber-hued shapes, he could make out his mother’s ruined one. Overtop of each flickered a red skull, jaws agape in agonised hunger.
“I understand,” he murmured, and raised his knife once more.
It wasn’t a powerful blade, and it had blunted itself on cloth and flesh and bone many times this night. Still, it served his purpose, and though the effort left him panting and sweating, at last two ribcages lay broken open, and two hearts sat atop the altar in pools of thick, dark blood. Malevir stood on trembling legs before them, waiting.
The shadow billowed down from the stained glass—leaving it leached of colour, streaked with a layer of red ash—and coalesced above the altar; a skeletal figure in funereal wrappings, pale hair billowing about her shoulders. She extended a hand. Malevir took it, and the blood slid from his skin into her bones, tinting the grey with pale red.
“My Lady,” he breathed, as she drew him up to kneel between his parent’s hearts. He reached for her, and she bent to allow him to take her face in his hands. It was gaunt, but no longer the skull from his long months of dreams and visions; her eyes black pits into which he gazed with more reverence than he’d ever felt for the glowering statues of Tyr he’d spent his childhood kneeling before.
Her skeletal fingers caressed his cheeks. Her shroud fell about him, turning all beyond it to a dim grey blur. Blood that had grown tacky on his skin revived to run hot and fresh and, hands wet with crimson, Malevir raised up his offerings. His Lady smiled her corpse-smile and bared her chest to him, ribs opening one by one to expose the endless dark void within.
Shaking, somewhere near the true meaning of ecstasy, Malevir placed each heart inside her. The chill of the grave wrapped his hands; the heat of her power thrummed beneath his skin. He tilted his head up and her lips—what there was of them—met his. Sharp points of bone grasped his shoulders. She drew him closer, almost into her, as she took hold of his wings at the root and wrenched them from his body.
The agony was exquisite. He arched his back, crying out, weeping for the loss and for the freedom it granted as ash rained down upon them; ash and blood, spattering warm and welcome as summer rain over his skin and her bones. Her delicate phalanges fluttered over his wounds, stroking the ragged edges of gore and broken bone, gentle where none had ever been gentle before.
He sighed into the charnel house of her mouth. “Thank you.”
She withdrew. Her ribcage closed over the darkness and now, beneath the bone and the endlessly flowing funeral rags, there beat a strong and vibrant heart. Her hair was red. Her teeth were red. Her eyes were red; pooling, overflowing red that ran down her sunken cheeks like a waterfall.
“Rise,” she commanded, with all the sweet, metallic melody of spilling blood. “Rise, my Malevir, my Crimson Justiciar. Rise, and be reborn.”
Veltariel of Tyr was gone, as dead as the church that had raised her. Malevir stepped down from the altar, wet with gore, and walked through the ashes of his wings out into the night, a bloody shadow following at his heels. The sacred idol had been defiled, the saint of justice made apostate.
There would be no reconsecration.