[2.19] Twice-Named and Twice-Forgotten

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

I still couldn’t see Selene, but as I ripped and tore my way through the corpse-domain of a long-dead titan, I heard her voice in the distance—clear as crystal and sweet as mad honey.

“Bakkhos offered me the one thing that could withstand the weight of a heart flame’s burden alone,” she said. “A pillar that could not be broken under any pressure, even if it was the only one left standing in my soul. A column of his own creation, dug up from the depths of his own wine-dark heart.

“Impressed by my conviction—”

“A strong word.”

“—dazzled by my resolve, he offered this to me with only one string still attached.”

There came a rumbling, in the dark beneath the surface of the primordial sea.

“You’ll have to come and take it.”

From the soup of titan bile emerged a creature that could swallow cities and shatter mortal minds with its visage. It forced its way up out of the sea, not winding like a serpent, but spilling onto the stage like intestines from a disemboweled stomach.

It opened all eight thousand mouths along the surface of its sinuous bulk, turned its single unblinking eye upon me, and cracked that eye open along the ridges of eight segments, each one blooming like the petals of a flower to reveal a barbed tongue that had tasted titan ichor so many times that it had lost all pleasure in the sensation.

That barbed tongue flickered through the air, tasted my vital essence in the dark, and all eight thousand of its gaping mouths began to keen in slavering desire.

The silver-age gut worm poured over me, like it was liquid more than it was a living beast, and swallowed me up in an instant.

Through the tattered-cloth of the Raven veil, I could see even what went on inside that unfathomable parasite with perfect clarity. It was worse than being blind.

By the time I tore myself out the other end of it, dragging it across the oil-slicked marble and kicking its coils back into the wine-dark sea of clouds one pile at a time, I was more than half mad.

“He promised that no harm would come to me from any demon of his heart while I walked within his shadow,” Selene said, perhaps to reassure us. Still, she hesitated at the next line. “And yet… it may be best if what I saw in that place remains behind the curtain. His domain was not a pleasant place—even to those he wished well.”

“How cruel.”

I found her, then, as I stepped through the quivering chitin of an armored lamprey. I tossed its alien skull to the ground and crushed it underfoot.

Selene lifted her head at the same time that I spotted her, and for a moment I thought our eyes met. But her low-burning eyes slid past me without recognition, or any awareness of my presence at all, and settled on the distant audience while she wrenched her spear from the corpse of a newly risen heart demon. It was one that she had killed before—and I saw that it wasn’t the first one that she’d been forced to kill again.

The crumpled corpses of eight other demons lay scattered at her feet.

As Selene rose proudly to her full height, I realized that she couldn’t see me at all. She stared through the primordial madness that had fallen like a shadow across her heart without a hint of unease, and I knew that it wasn’t me alone. She couldn’t see anything that went on within the shadows.

All this time, she had thought we were sitting quietly in the dark, spectating from the stands—the same now as before.

Even now, she was under the Tyrant Riot’s protection. A protection she wasn’t aware existed. One that did not extend to her audience.

Ting.

Another chime shivered through the primordial dark, and I turned back to look across the short, limitless distance to the opposite end of the stage. There, I saw the hunched figure of the Tyrant Riot, raising that hammer high. In the churning shadows that surrounded him, he looked larger than he had before—his outline blurred, making it impossible to tell where the actress in the blank mask ended and the shadowed silhouette began.

“My tenth pillar of principle was a gift that was very nearly more trouble than it was worth,” Selene declared. “Unfortunately, those are the only gifts a man like Bakkhos is willing to give.”

“I can assure you, I am willing to give worse gifts than that.”

“Still, it was a gift that I needed,” she went on, “and by internalizing it, I found a way to close the incomplete circle of my soul.”

Slowly but surely, the corpse of the long-devoured titan began to fade from the world around us. The sea of clouds that had been there from the very beginning began to thin and dissipate. The scarlet glow did not return, but a new, far more vibrant source of light rose up around the edges of the platform in its place.

“I kill heart demons. By taking that ideal upon myself, I found a way to bind together all the mismatched links of chains that I had broken away from the hearts of others.”

As the last of the clouds faded, I leaned out over the edge of the platform and beheld a mad wonder.

“Nine pillars that I stole with a singular purpose. The one and only tenth pillar that I was given to consolidate them. Bound by virtue, they form an unblemished truth.”

The actress on the stage vanished, and the statue of the Saint appeared once more, perched atop her honeycomb tripod—a statue dedicated to her first heroic act.

“I am Selene,” she declared proudly, and the sanctum of her soul pulsed with the truth of her purpose. “The Scarlet Heart that deviation dreads.”

As the psychedelic curtains fell one last time on the shadowed stage of the Saint, I stared down over the edge at the total eclipse of her heart.

The curtain of heaven stretched out endlessly beneath the platform of her foundation — infinite star-bright constellations that were slowly but surely eating away at the primordial rot, banishing it back to the chthonic hovel where it belonged.

The crown to that celestial kingdom was a ring of fire a thousand-thousand leagues across, burning far below the platform of Selene’s foundation. The surface of that sun loomed larger than it had ever had in the real world—close enough to make ashes of every peak and valley on earth. Close enough to boil every sea down to salt.

The only thing that stood between that sun-crown and the world within Selene’s heart was the shadow-shield of a moon that had eclipsed it perfectly, such that only the burning halo of its majesty could be seen leaking out around the edges.

It was an awe-inspiring vista. And if that had been all there was to it, it would have been astonishing enough for any first-rank Heroine.

But what drew my eyes in wonder wasn’t the curtain of stars, or even the Total Eclipse of the Heart. It was what those lights had illuminated, directly underneath the platform of her foundation.

I leaned out over the edge of the platform and beheld nine more below it, each one the same size as the first, and beneath them all, a tenth that was as large as the rest of them put together. Each scarlet stage had been hung in the shadow of the one that came before it, joined to the one above it and the one below it by a single unbroken pillar of shadow-tainted adamant that ran through all eleven and supported their combined weight on its own.

Each of the nine lesser platforms carried nine pillars, plus the one that connected them all. Looking closer, I saw that every pillar was different not just from the others in its circle, but from the pillars of the other circles too.

There was more. Those lower levels weren’t empty.

Broken, sun-bleached bones overflowed from every circle beneath the first— skeletons of heart demons that the Saint of Scarlet Hearts had murdered, piled so high that the lesser platforms couldn’t contain them all. I watched as they toppled over the edges in their multitudes, tumbling down to the greater circle underneath.

That final platform was large enough to fit the first ten inside of it, exactly large enough, and it held dozens of pillars. I couldn’t count them all, not from my vantage, but something told me that if the number wasn’t an even hundred, it was close.

There were no mountains of sun-bleached bones in that final circle, despite the fact that all the lesser circles above were letting the bones of their dead fall like rain. The moment that a heart demon’s remains reached that final platform, it shattered into pieces, and every one of those pieces burnt to ash before they could hit the marble floor a second time, cremated by roaring heart flames.

It wasn’t just pillars of principle that proudly decorated that greater stage.

Statues of Heroes and Heroines alike stood sentinel all across its surface, heart flames spilling out of the hollow sockets of their eyes and licking up at their heels from the burning hearths they stood in. Some of them guarded individual pillars at the edges of the circle, one hand pressed protectively against the column, the other held tight to their chest. Others stood ready in the center of the stage with weapons in their hands, their empty, burning eyes gazing up at me.

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They were relics of the Heroic souls that Selene had saved. At the outer rim of the circle stood the ones that she had saved in full, guarding the same flawed pillars that she’d stolen from their hearts to save them. The ones standing center stage were the statues of Heroes and Heroines that Selene had only granted a reprieve with the temporary murder of a heart demon, the ones that had dealt with the root of deviation themselves — or died trying.

I recognized two of them, and though it was undoubtedly just a trick of the light, I could almost believe that the statues of Dymas and Scythas recognized me in turn.

Saint of Scarlet Hearts, indeed.

I crept quietly back across the stage as the tenth act gave way to the final curtain call, moving with the receding shadows. As I stepped past the fountain, I pulled the Raven cloak off my shoulders and drew from the dark an ivory lie told in my own image, planting the statue at the edge of the pool and draping the Raven’s mantle over it.

I continued on, not looking back even when my mentor began her closing monologue, tying the lesson all together.

“I am what I am,” Selene explained, “because I cultivate a virtue, one that I’ve known by its face since I was a girl, but not by its name until I laid down that tenth pillar.”

Her heart beat once, and the scarlet sun flared—briefly outgrowing the total eclipse of the heart—before starry night reasserted itself.

“I have explained what a conventional cultivator’s path to providence looks like, and you have seen for yourselves the mess I made of it,” she explained quietly, the scarlet flames behind her eyes burning brighter and pushing back a bit of the dark, illuminating the small circle of her saltwater fountain.

Griffon moved instantly into that light, and some of the furious, rabid tension drained out of him when he did. My ivory lie stayed put at the edge of the firelight, and the Raven mantle it wore drew the shadows closer to it, making a convincing suggestion of the real thing.

The statue of Selene paused, raising an eyebrow at Griffon’s ivory cloak. “Oh? Where did you pull that from? I don’t remember keeping anything like it in my combs.”

“A Raven gave it to me,” was all that Griffon said. He didn’t speak of what he had seen. I’d have wagered a month’s pay that he harbored the same suspicions I did about what had happened in the tenth act.

The statue of Selene glanced at my shrouded lie, sitting at the edge of her heart light. Though she seemed puzzled, she shrugged it off easily enough.

“It suits you,” she told her brother, only half-teasingly, and then returned to her point.

I kept moving. A resonant chime rang out, and a spark of adamant light flew.

Ting.

“In the end, because of that virtue, I not only survived what should have been a catastrophic failure of cultivation, but I thrived.