Chapter Text
1/
In the sweltering summer, Aedes Elysiae becomes unbearably hot, enough to sweat your body weight’s worth of water out through your pores. The last harvest of the winter wheat marks the coming of the solstice, the first of longer days.
The sun is still up when they finish working the fields, and the heat hasn’t dissipated in the slightest. Phainon swipes his palm across the back of his neck, and it comes back drenched in sweat. He lifts up his tunic to wipe his face and plops down near the shocks of wheat with a grunt. His body is burning up from the inside, enough to make him dizzy.
Something cold touches the side of his neck, making him jump from the temperature difference. When he turns around to see who it is, he makes a wry face.
“Drink up,” says his father. “Then you can go back first.”
“I’m fine,” Phainon protests, but Hieronymus shakes his head.
“Don’t push yourself,” he says. He flicks Phainon lightly on the forehead, earning a pained hiss. “You know that you run hotter than the others. I’ll finish up here. You go ahead.”
Phainon sighs but doesn’t argue. He watches his father amble back to the far side of the fields; then he looks up at the sun with a faint squint. In the winter, he could last for hours out here, from sunup to sundown, but summers are more painful than he’s willing to let on, though it doesn’t escape his father’s watchful eye.
He drains the waterskin dry, but the burning still doesn’t go away. He closes his eyes to breathe in, but the soft scent of wheat doesn’t lift the heaviness from his shoulders anymore. He gets to his feet and drags himself to the lake to bathe alone.
2/
By the time he’s finished washing himself, the sun has finally ceded its place in the sky, tucking away its angry rays to make way for the night stars. He emerges from the water fresh and clean. The fire within has died down enough that he no longer feels like a living furnace.
His father is still not home, but his mother has prepared dinner for the two of them.
“You eat first,” she says. “Your father can eat when he gets back.”
“What’s the occasion?” he asks curiously, seeing his favorites spread across the table.
Audata smiles faintly at him, combing callused fingers through his damp hair as he starts eating. “Well,” she says, “the mail carrier leaves tomorrow morning for Okhema.”
Phainon grunts in acknowledgement through the food. When she drops a cloth over his head and starts toweling him dry, he makes a noise of mature adult protest.
“Have you decided what to write back?” she says.
He swallows down the suncake after nearly choking on it. “I…haven’t.”
She hums in response and leaves the long cloth over his head. She heads back to the living room, leaving him to sit alone and ponder what to pen back to Cyrene, who had written him a letter just two weeks ago from the Eternal Holy City. He still isn’t feeling particularly inspired by the time he’s finished eating and washing his dishes.
“Don’t fall asleep out there,” Audata tells him on his way out.
“I won’t be long,” he promises.
The path from their house down to his secret spot kisses the curve of the sea, glittering prettily under the moonlight. He follows it to the gentle low rolling hills of unharvested summer wheat, tall stalks waving as he walks past, Cyrene’s letter fluttering in his fingers against the night wind. He has the entire road to think of a reply, and yet nothing comes to mind except that the darkness feels nice and cool against his skin.
For starters, Phainon isn’t even really sure what he wants to do.
He’s spent his whole life in the wheat fields of Aedes Elysiae. There are rivers and lakes, mountains and forests, and beneath the sun, the land turns to gold like alchemy.
His parents are as healthy as ever, and the village is prospering in trade. There is nothing more that he could ask for in this idyllic world where all of his loved ones are happy.
But sometimes, when night falls, he looks up at the twinkling cosmos and thinks that something’s missing. Nights like these, Phainon lies down, pillowed by wheat, pinned to the earth under the weight of the vast sky, watching the stars slowly and imperceptibly change, above him and without him.
He presses Cyrene’s letter to his chest and draws in a tremulous breath, curling in on himself like a newborn in the womb. He screws his eyes shut and waits for an answer, a sign, to come. He lies there for what feels like thirty million heartbeats and sighs, no closer to clarity than he has been for the past few years.
His parents have been worried, even if they’re cautious about showing it. Piso and Livia keep inviting him to play in hopes of cheering him up. Cyrene’s letter is clearly an act of intervention to get him out of the village. Even he thinks he must be going through some kind of quarter life crisis that he has yet to overcome.
But no one can seem to show him how to make it easier to breathe.
He cracks an eye open in resignation.
At that very moment, a bright streak of white and blue dashes across the sky, running west to east, splitting the night. He sits up, head tilted back to follow the motion, eyes wide with awe, his breath catching in his lungs.
It’s the first time he’s ever seen a shooting star. He basks in the wonder of it, forgetting everything else to marvel at the sight, to stand witness to a miracle. The dusk breeze picks up, urging him to his feet.
If Cyrene were here, she’d tell him to make a wish.
Phainon looks down at the barely legible scrawl on the parchment in his hand, inviting him to come visit her in the city.
He can’t really think of a wish, but he does have a tentative answer to her letter. After all, that shooting star fell in the direction of Okhema.
The traces of its flaming trail are like a raw, still-burning slash across the sky. He feels that same heat in his chest, like a fiery gash mirrored over his own heart, as he runs home and tells his parents that he’s decided to travel.
The mark in the sky is gone in the morning when he bids everyone at the village a tearful goodbye and hops onto the hay cart with the mail carrier to Okhema. But that feeling doesn’t disappear, still smoldering, and for the first time in his life, he leaves Aedes Elysiae behind.
3/
Okhema is in the southerly lands, surrounded in all cardinal directions by mountains. Its position as a defensive stronghold is third to only the Sky Temple and Castrum Kremnos. Everything about the city feels elevated, and above it kneels the colossal stone visage of Kephale, the Worldbearing Titan.
Phainon is more intimidated by the city locals who brush past him brusquely when he gets off of the cart in a daze.
He doesn’t know where to go, and he basically has nothing to his name except the clothes on his back, the rucksack over his shoulder, and the small pouch of coins his father had given him before he left. He’d split the bread his mother baked with the old mail carrier in exchange for pointers on how to navigate the city on the way there. Now, he realizes that the old man’s tips were a little too vague to be genuinely helpful.
Okhema is way bigger than he expected. And he has no idea where to find Cyrene. In the letter, she mentioned she’d recently moved out of the temple grounds, that her new place is in front of a fountain, on the second floor above a diner.
He feels daunted, but he came all this way, and he can’t turn back now. He marches into a giant plaza with murals on all sides, taking his first step into the new world.
Three hours later, he’s forced to admit that he’s lost.
Triangulating the coordinates with a fountain and a diner would have been trivial in Aedes Elysiae, which has one communal well and no diners, but a metropolis is really on a different level. Okhema has at least twenty-five fountains of varying sizes, and he’s still not clear if all the street stalls with customers eating at the tables count as diners. He’s never been in a place with more people than wheat stalks before.
Phainon checks Cyrene’s letter one more time, hoping that the words will rearrange themselves magically into the exact location he needs to get to.
Nothing.
He groans and slides down against the wall and tries to come to terms with how dumb it was to arrive without letting Cyrene know in advance.
An impulse had sparked in him from the shooting star, setting his heart aflame. Now, his whole body is burning under the daylight, perspiring from the heat in misery and remorse.
“Would you like some water?” a cool voice asks, piercing through the hustle and bustle of Marmoreal Market.
Phainon looks up in the direction of the voice. A blonde haired woman clad in embroidered ivory is leaning out of the window of her shop, peering at him curiously and unblinkingly with glassy green eyes.
“Please,” he says meekly. “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Come sit under the shade,” she says.
Phainon moves underneath the cotton canopy and gratefully accepts the proffered chalice of water. The vessel looks more expensive than anything he’s ever owned. He hopes that she won’t charge him for drinking out of it.
“An unfamiliar face,” she muses. “You’re new to Okhema?”
He nods. “I came to stay with a friend for a while. But I got lost trying to find her.” He clears his throat. “I’m Phainon of Aedes Elysiae. Thank you for the water.”
“Aglaea,” she replies, as he takes another careful sip. “And if you plan on staying in the city for a while, I recommend that you buy some new clothes.”
Phainon chokes and coughs. “Is… Is there something wrong with my current ones?”
Aglaea falls silent, which is scary enough considering her face is already expressionless. Without warning, she retreats into her store, leaving him sitting there in trepidation, sweaty palms cupping her chalice.
He looks up at Kephale in the distance before bowing his head in repentance. In a daze, he wonders if Cyrene had to go through this her first time in the city too. Although, she has always been smarter than him, so probably not.
“Should I just go home?” he mutters to himself.
If he went back to the city gates now, he could still catch the last caravan westward to Attica. From there, it’s three days on foot until he reaches Aedes Elysiae, with his tail between his legs. He’ll wait for Cyrene to send him a message back before coming to the city next time.
A shadow falls over him. He looks up again and meets Aglaea’s eyes; then he blinks at the robes in Aglaea’s arms. Though he doesn’t have an eye for fashion, even he can tell, from the regal white overcoat to the deep blue mantle with gold accents, that the aura about these clothes is different. And that there’s no way he could hope to afford them.
“Here,” Aglaea says, offering them to him.
Phainon shrinks away, eyes wide. “Miss Aglaea,” he says, trying to reason with her. “You could tell that I’m not from here just from my clothes. So you must also know that I couldn’t possibly afford these…”
Aglaea tilts her head to the side, assessing him. “You have a sensible head on your shoulders if you were able to think that far ahead,” she says, not unkindly. “So let me give you another perspective.”
She all but drops the clothes onto him and takes a seat on the steps of her storefront next to him. He gathers the pooling fabric up into his arms so that it doesn’t touch the ground.
“If I were a store owner looking for customers to maximize my profits,” she says, “I’d pick the customers who would pay the most for my wares.”
Phainon nods, so she continues.
“Most of the people here are locals. They know the market price because they know where to source their needs from competition. But a newcomer to the city wouldn’t know any better.” She glances at him meaningfully. “And some newcomers even come identifiably new.”
He runs his hands over the soft fabric, feeling the cloth catch over the calluses on his hands. He gets her meaning well enough. He figured it was strange to be charged just for asking for directions, but he’d been desperate enough to pay up. All the more reason why he couldn’t buy these clothes even if he wanted to. He smiles wryly.
“Then, Miss Aglaea, are you a store owner looking for customers to maximize your profits?” Phainon asks her.
Aglaea laughs, low and pleasant. “I am looking for inspiration,” she replies, her eyes molten gold and green with certainty. “For somebody that will bring my designs to life. Everything I make is one-of-a-kind, Phainon of Aedes Elysiae. There is no competition.”
He swallows, feeling the score over his heart pulse.
“Try them on first,” she urges.
4/
After she finishes adjusting his collar, she steps aside to let him check in the mirror. His eyes widen when he sees his reflection. The clothes fit him as if they were tailor-made to the exact measurements of his body. He feels a bit weird with such an unrecognizable version of himself, but the giddiness wins over at looking so cool, like a hero fresh out of a legend.
“Miss Aglaea,” he says in boyish wonder, beaming at her.
She smiles back at him. “I knew they would fit,” she says calmly, yet somehow also quite smug.
She gathers up the clothes he’d laid on the chair next to the mirror, folding them over her arm.
“Let’s burn these then.”
“Wait!” he cries out. “I only just bought those!”
Aglaea waves a hand at him. “I’ll take it off of the price of what you’re currently wearing.”
“I didn’t even agree to buy them,” he protests.
“But you’re wearing them,” she points out. “Now I couldn’t possibly sell them to another.”
Phainon pales. “I… I can wash them for you,” he says, hands fumbling at the complicated buckles over his front, barely managing with the pauldron. He follows her light, quick-footed steps deeper into the store, and probably could’ve caught up if he weren’t struggling to strip at the same time.
“What in the world,” says a bemused voice from behind them both, “is going on here?”
“Cifera,” Aglaea greets with Phainon half undressed next to her. “You’re back early.”
The cat-girl named Cifera standing at the storefront gives Phainon a dubious look before turning back to Aglaea. “Am I interrupting something?”
Aglaea shakes her head. “This is Phainon of Aedes Elysiae. He’ll be staying in Okhema for a while.”
“Oh, so that’s what this is,” says Cifera with a haughty sniff. “You’ve picked up another stray.”
“Play nice,” Aglaea reminds her. “It’s his first day in the city.”
“…Hmph,” she says sourly. “Well, he’s sleeping on the floor. I won’t give up my spot.”
“There’s some kind of misunderstanding here,” interrupts Phainon. “Miss Aglaea only helped me because I was lost. I’m actually staying with a friend. Who I should really go find now. Miss Aglaea, if you wouldn’t mind giving me back my clothes?”
Aglaea looks at him wordlessly. He gives her a beseeching look, supplicating to the kindness that prompted her to call out to him in the first place. She answers him by mercilessly tossing the ocher yellow shirt and dromas purple pants into the flames.
5/
“You’ve always been like this,” says Cyrene fondly.
Head hanging low, sitting on her guest bed seven thousand balance coins in debt while arguably looking the best he ever has, Phainon doesn’t meet her eyes.
“An idiot?” he supplies morosely.
She shakes her head, giggling. “Quick to act,” she corrects. “Once you decide on something, you always go full steam ahead.”
Fortuitously passing by, Cyrene had found him pretty close to tears. The fact that she lived right across from the Goldweaver shop was his only stroke of luck today. First day in the city, now owing a monetary amount greater than he’d ever see in his whole life, and his new clothes had been incinerated under Aglaea’s divine will. At least she hadn’t gotten her hands on his other set of clothes. And, to her credit, she didn’t leave him without a way out.
He still hasn’t figured out if she was scamming him. But the robes she gave him were definitely higher quality than the ones he’d bought earlier in the market.
“What a day,” he says, holding his head in his hands. His stomach then growls. “Ugh.”
“The day’s not over yet. Here, I’ll treat you to dinner to compensate you for your long and arduous journey.”
Phainon peeks up through his bangs at her. “I’m really not being a bother by crashing here?” he asks.
“Hardly,” Cyrene says. “Once I got your letter, I was over the moon. Remember back in the old days? We both wanted to travel the world, learn new things, and take them back home to show the others.” She beams at him. “That spark in you was missing for a while. But I can tell that it’s back now.”
She nudges his side and guides him to his feet, the same way she used to when they were kids and he couldn’t tell north from south in the Membrance Maze.
“You’re ready for change, right?” she says knowingly. “That’s why you came all the way to Okhema.”
“…Will I change?” he says hesitantly. “In Okhema?”
Cyrene taps her cheek thoughtfully and then winks at him. “Whether you’re ready or not, something's about to change.”