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Deirta’s people did not know, in the beginning, of consecution. When they emerged blinking into the sunlight and cowering beneath the stars, they were like any other creature: they lived and died, and fate took no special notice of them.
But then, for reasons no one truly knows, the piece of starlight that brought them out of the dark revealed a further gift: it took fate into its hands and gave to her people an unending count of days so that they might seek the answers for its curiosity.
There is a strange thing that happens, when you become immortal: you reach bounds of feeling inaccessible to those in their first life. Even those in their second do not understand. It's only after the third or fourth life that you feel the strain and begin to realize that a finite soul stretched over an infinite expanse of time means there is less of you in each individual moment. There is less of you to give to others and less of you to retain what they give to you. There is simply less, and in its place there is infinity, vast and hungry and perfect.
Deirta learns this in her fourth life.
It curbs her own hunger; a soul stretched thin only has so much capacity for love and memory. They cannot both exist starving for the same crumbs of her mind. Each new person she brings into her heart blurs the others, melding details and faces until their presence is lost. She cannot remember her father’s name, or her sister’s. She does not know the face of her first wife. She has no memory of her oldest friend’s voice. There are people she has forgotten entirely.
Many from those early days are gone forever because they died before the star gifted her people to eternity. They live only in the memories of those who knew them. Some of them live only with her, and when the Luxon comes to ask its questions, she will take her memories to it. Know them, she would say, these people you did not care to keep.
She will keep them. Memory binds her to herself better than any new love ever could.
===
The prayer niche glows before her. Within it, a small polyhedron floats in perfect balance above a crystal bowl whose facets split the light into a radiant array. An aura of color bleeds into the dim room, dappling the walls and floor with spots of vibrancy. The pattern of the light is beautiful, and the familiar gleam of it scours away thought, which Deirta welcomes more now than she once did.
The centuries have stretched her thin, pressed her through layer upon layer of years until her soul gleams with purpose and clarity. A vessel of knowledge, a prism, perfect and clear, for the Light to know itself without flaw.
She still holds impurities, but she has tucked them away deep in her mind, her heart, her chest, safe from the scouring. There is just a seed of imperfection left now; a flicker of defiant self small enough not to refract the Light shining through her. Small enough to keep.
A stone drops into the stillness of her mind. Awareness ripples back to her. An unplanned arrival, the wards of the manor say and sharpen her senses accordingly. She listens: there is a sound in her halls she has not heard in over a century, a pitiable, soft noise that curls around corners long-unused. An intruder, she thinks immediately, and then: no, a supplicant. A son.
She rises and steps away from the light, quieting the wards as she does. She knows where this sound is coming from.
She follows it to the third floor, until the muffled noise resolves itself into hitching breaths and torn-out sobs behind a locked door.
All wards here cede to her will, so she waves her hand and twists the weave of gravity around the handle. The door opens soundlessly to reveal her second-youngest child sitting on his bed, wrapped in a wrinkled, stale robe, looking half like he wants to flee and half like he wants to be caught. More than anything he looks like he was expecting her.
“Umavi.” He scrubs his face on his sleeve indelicately, then rises and begins to tuck his anguish behind the implacable smile he learned from her example.
“Don’t.” She says it gently, and like all her words it lands with the weight of a command. He sits back down on the bed, posture exactingly perfect but for the shaking of his shoulders.
The shaking stills eventually, as she waits standing in the doorframe.
His hands smooth his robe into clean lines, spellwork sparking at his fingertips. The fabric freshens. The stale smell, which she recognizes now as a combination of healing herbs and sweat, recedes from the air.
He inclines his head. “I apologize for the breach of etiquette in not petitioning you formally for an audience, Umavi," he says quietly to the wall.
She frowns. “You are my son. You need no petition. Though it is true you have not graced my step in decades, it will always welcome you."
A stricken expression crosses his face for a moment before it vanishes beneath blankness. Something has happened. She draws upon the well of knowledge in herself until an answer surfaces: one of the Heroes of the Dynasty is ill, ailing as humans do. It was reported in passing to the court recently, and a courtesy prayer was recited in memory and gratitude of service.
The prayer had passed beneath her orbit at the time, but now she remembers that they’d had an association, those Heroes and her son. There had been a spark in him when he'd spoken of them. He is not one to set aside something which has caught his interest, and even now she hears reports of him in their company, so perhaps this illness is why he has run here smelling like grief and desperation.
She receives her confirmation in the fractured countenance of her son's face. Despite his calm smile, his breath stutters on every inhale, and his eyes are red and wet with despair. His hands twitch as if they are looking for something to do.
Several other facets quickly align in her mind: it is more than an association. These Heroes are his greatest, most cherished impurity, a seam that runs through his being and cracks him open. It is too big for him to hide within himself like she does hers. A small part of her misses impurities like that; merely a tap of grief and you shatter. Not in many years has she known such a thing. Not in this life, certainly.
And yet he sits before her, seeking succor. He is still so young. The wick of his life has not burned for even two centuries. Barely a flicker.
The final facet aligns: the wick of a human life is barely a spark in its entirety. That is what this is.
She crosses the threshold and waves a chair over to her, then sits in front of him and gathers his hand in hers. His fingers stiffen, but he lets her, too worn by heartbreak to do anything else.
"My son, I am sorry," she says. He freezes utterly in her grasp, and she continues, drawing the pattern for infinity onto the back of his hand. He does not meet her eyes. “This is part of the road to understanding. Loss refines us, burnishes us. Makes us who we will become." It is the beginning of what she tells to all those who seek her counsel in such a way, but it is true.
He considers her words until his smile sharpens at the edges. "I loathe it," he sneers. Red-rimmed eyes meet hers in a challenge. Amusement threads through her; an Umavi’s child, heretic to her own teachings. There is something in his tone of the schoolboy who was shoved to the ground and decided to master gravity, as if grief was something so easily controlled. He points it at her, as if grief is a new edge to cut her with.
It isn't. Grief is one of her own impurities, one of the last and most precious.
"I know," she agrees wearily. "I loathe it as well." This she does not tell to supplicants.
The honesty surprises a chuckle out of him, though it catches into another sob he tries to smother without success. The fight bleeds out of his frame. His grip on her hand tightens almost to the point of pain. He is so alone, her son.
He has his friends, these Heroes, and she is glad of it. They have softened him at the edges, burnished him in their own way. But she can give him something none of them can, for they are limited to the bindings of one lifetime. They do not know how to persist after the cycle of centuries has hollowed you out.
"Remember him, your wizard,” she says quietly, recalling the report in full. She holds his gaze. “Remember them all. They will keep you leashed, bound, and tethered to your soul, and you will need it. You will need it. Perfection has a high cost."
My soul will never be perfect, the mulish set to his face says, and that is unimportant. He is not consecuted and thus will never burn the impurities out of himself, but she has created the paths into which his years will fall. He seeks perfection in other ways.
"Essek,” she chides softly. He starts a little, sitting straighter and brows furrowing sweetly. She has not called him by name in many years, she realizes. Too long, perhaps.
“There is life after it all. After what you wish to hold is gone.” Her son’s gaze falls away again to pin itself to the instruments on his desk. They glitter and move in the dim light, refracting the arcane into new understanding, and they are a distraction.
She reaches out with her free hand and guides his chin until he faces her. He flinches at her touch, but doesn’t resist. A broken-bird softness peers out from his eyes, mixed with the bitter ache of grief.
“Time moves on, heedless of the pain in its wake,” she says, taking his hand once more. “We do not follow a kind god. There is no gentle healing on our path; the Light wished to know itself and the radiance of its curiosity can be cruel. What healing we obtain we scrape together ourselves in the dark and hold safe in shadow. The Light has no part of it.”
Shock paints itself into his face, and she thinks, good. Perhaps he will listen now that she has dropped a heresy cousin to his own. He must have forgotten that there was a time before she knew the Luxon, a time before she was perfect.
Deirta knows what it means to lick wounds in silence and fear, beneath dusty webs. She knows, too, what it means to lay your loved ones to a final rest, cowering beneath a starlit sky. She has made sure to remember it. The ascent under the Luxon did not eliminate the shadows, merely shifted them. It was a preferable yoke. It still is.
“The Luxon is our saviour from the clutches of the deep. But it is not the only light that will guide you. You have found your own light, in recent years. I am glad of it."
She untangles a hand and cups his face. He cannot hide the lost look in his eyes, so he closes them. It is no matter; he is a lens of her making, and she knows how to see to the heart of him, her hungry, proud son. She strokes his cheek.
The next words she says are harsh when the hurt is so fresh, but she is not a kind person. She is an honest one, when it suits her, and honestly endures longer than kindness.
“All lights you find will dim in time, as the light of your wizard is flickering now. But if you are clever and patient, you can find new lights. They will not replace the old ones; nothing ever will. But they will anchor you, just the same. Time is inescapably cruel, but we find our own path through it. Our own light, unholy, but ours to keep." She can give him this gift. He is blessed with a finite life, which is a kindness in its own way. Love and memory will never compete for the scraps of his mind.
But he is too young to see the kindness. His jaw works, as if there are words that wish to escape past his teeth. She has seen this expression before in many faces and wore it herself long ago. There are no lights I wish to hold but the ones in my hands, he might say. I would give up anything to keep them. I just need them to stay.
The problem is not that these words are wrong. The problem is that there is nothing in the universe that cares to hear them. Essek knows this, as she knows this. He has always been one of the brightest of her children. Selfishly, as much as she can feel selfishness now, it comforts her to see rage in the face of someone who inherited her hunger.
It is wrong that we lose them, she had once cried out, so very long ago. It is cruel that time steals from us, and crueler still that we aid it by stretching ourselves across infinity. I will not leave behind the kith and kin I pulled from the dark. I will have an end. That plea had not mattered then, and it does not matter now. She had been barely more than a girl pressed into an unwanted honor, and infinity has since changed her perspective. Still, the thought tinges her memory while Essek soothes himself into silence.
He opens his eyes and looks at her eventually, an even gaze leavened with understanding and regret. "I am sorry for what time has taken from you. And sorry for what I have done to help it."
It takes her a moment to locate his meaning. The loss of her husband was not so great an impurity to her as the loss of this wizard to her son — for her it was a small fracture, chipping away an unnecessary part of herself, which has happened hundreds of times — but it pleases her to see him reach for understanding. "Your father made his choices, too. But thank you." She strokes his cheek again.
They are quiet save for Essek's shuddering breaths. He leans into her hand on his face. She stays, eternal and present, for as long as he needs.
Sometime later, his brows pull together again. “You say I am always welcome," he says softly, "and I am here now, but-” Words cease, so he uses his free hand to gesture between them, a loose informality that is new to him. “I, you did not-” Words fail him again.
He swallows, and his jaw tightens. His eyes slide away and down. “You did not have such an attachment to myself, when I was young. Verin and I, we were not your lights.”
"No," she says gently, for there's no point in lying. "My own lights are long dead. It is my duty to remember them and carry them with me. There is no one else to do it." She drops her hand from his cheek back to where their fingers are twined together. His free hand immediately wraps around hers, holding tight. "But I cared for you when you were a child, and I care for you now. I will care for you until you are gone, and then I will remember you, my son."
He holds her gaze steadily, even as a storm of thoughts rolls across his face. She can read him; they are too much like each other.
Something breaks and settles in his expression. He bends down and presses his forehead to their clasped hands. His shoulders shake once more. She disentangles one hand from his tight fingers and lets it drift softly over his hair, once, twice, again. He does not flinch after the first stroke.
She does not love him, and he does not love her, but for a moment they are together. That will be enough, she thinks. The Light passes through her freely after so long, but there remains enough of her tucked safely into her chest that she can cast a small shadow for her son. She can shield his impurity from its cruelty until he has pulled the pieces of himself back into his skin.
And when her son leaves, she will return to the vibrant glow of her prayer niche and let its light scour through her once more. There, she will contemplate the answer she will give her god when it is time.
It will be enough.