Lyr admires the man in his devotion. He has always found those at prayer to be beautiful; beautiful in the way their faces pinch and soften, the way their eyelids dance with images Lyr could never imagine. Does he pray for retribution? Forgiveness? Strength?
Does he know the only way to get what he wants is to seize it himself, and never let it go?
The prayers are melodic, rhythmic, nearly hypnotic. Lyr does not press the man. He lingers and admires, taking great stock of a declared enemy. Despite the warmth the summer night, this stranger is marked as if by winter’s cold breath. He is grey and luminescent white, the white not of the first snowfall but the second, when the whole world is waiting. He is flecked as if with stars, or more snow, with sigils on his shoulders shaped like Caligo’s crescent smile. There is another upon his forehead. Lyr takes particular account of the puckered lash-scars that mar the muscles of the devout’s back.
The monk speaks of festivities, and where his focuses lay. Lyr’s expression remains placid as untouched water; despite the mild expression, his eyes are hard as tempered steel. They do not miss much, from the rose offered Caligo, to the shadows that dance at the man’s feet, to the glow of his irises, to the puckered scars of punishment. Still he subjugates; still he offers; still he does not rise.
At last, longer after than what is socially acceptable, Lyr has chosen his words. “A monk is only a man.” Magic be damned. Lyr has seen those more Touched by it than this monk.
Eventually, he rises. Lyr in his admiring must admit the man strikes a formidable figure; corded muscle; devout intensity, more an effigy than a man. The thing of effigies? They are meant to burn.
The Disciple begins to extinguish his candles, one by one. Lyr watches with those same hard eyes, expressionless. He says, “I am not one for crowds.”
The last candle goes out. They are lit by silvered darkness, by the moon and nothing else. In the near distance the festivities can be heard; bright, raucous laughter. Embers charge into the night sky from bonfires, and the smoke lingers in the dip toward the sea where the ocean breeze rakes it back. They sit in a hollow of noiselessness, of—
Pause. It is the pause between one inhalation and the accompanying exhalation.
Then, he says: “I am Lyr, from Terrastella.” The introduction is awkward, but Lyr wants to learn the man’s name; after all, names have power. It is the reason Lyr never gives his full one, the reason his name has been barbarically cut in half. He adds, not conversationally but stiffly, because there is no other way for him to speak. Lyr is one of mechanised civilities; everything he says is overshadowed by the greater knowledge that it never matters, overshadowed with the memories of long and wild nights and the abandoned gods of the north: “Have you always been so devout?”
He almost adds,
Do you know, monk, what happens to gods when we no longer need them?
Does he know they become pagan, ritualistic? No amount of praying brings them back? Makes them merciful? They go to the ends of the earth and become other, become the point where heaven and earth touches, where Atlas's skeleton rests with the sky still on his shoulders.
Lyr remembers praying to Caligo among those old, dead things. He remembers Frasier's conquest further and further into the reaches of limitless space, of the plane where death and mortality collide; the ember-eyes of war gods, the whispers of immortality, of power. The hunt for greater and greater novelties.
He remembers it at vividly at the breath he takes in that moment, in the breath he lives through.
Caligo hadn’t answered.
In the cold north, their misfit goddess had been too afraid to answer.
In a land of endless night, she had not even shown her face.
If the monk has his scars of worship, so too does Lyr.
"Speech." || @Tenebrae
this was the difference between ichor and iron
the universe made you closer to itself than us
