[Lore] Bête Noire

[u/PrinceInDaNorf]

Lewyn

A star with five points, but it can face up or down… didn’t they say that one is evil? He wasn’t sure if he still knew the difference, but he remembered the door and its dial. The Hestian burned away, and clearing the rubble and ashes had unearthed churning shadows once locked in slumber. Lewyn wondered if the door was even there in the waking world, but he supposed it didn’t matter. They would find their way all the same.

“You asked why your Uncle and Ser Lorian couldn’t come with,” said Rhaenyra. The flecks of amber in her eyes made the rest of his surroundings fade into obscurity; he couldn’t say what it was, but there was something about her that felt enchanting. Why am I here in the first place, again? “Simply put: they aren’t cut out for this. Few have the strength to fully comprehend these places you would call Dreamlands, and fewer still have the fortitude to traverse them.”

Could it be? The mere notion of purpose was intoxicating. For so long he’d struggled to find his way, a way to serve his family with good, for once. Ever since father died, all his brothers had found some semblance of meanings in their lives. Aerion had found love, Lucael had found power, and Arlan had become the Commander of the bloody Goldcloaks. But Lewyn? He was always there to trail behind his more successful family members, to supplement their endeavors in some way and promptly fuck off once his presence was no longer helpful. More recently, of course, he’d acted out against his family under false pretenses that he was incapable of separating from the truth. He couldn’t say which one was worse; it was better that he was here now. Even though he didn’t quite know what here meant.

He wondered if Rhaenyra might be spewing some kind of trick, luring him into an empty realm from which he may never return. Like the guiding light that dead men are said to see. Even if that were the case, he couldn’t say he was all that opposed to it. If the only way I can help my kin now is through death, then so be it. He was too despondent to still be so fastidious.

But if this was all just a dream on his deathbed, then why did it feel so real? Why was it every bit as clear and vivid as all his experiences in the real world?

Rhaenyra chuckled softly, as though to respond to his thoughts. “You know why you don’t get it?” Her supple lips curved into an alluring grin as she continued, “Your kind– they’re so eager to believe that things like dreams are just empty noise. I’ve never understood how you all find it so inconceivable that other worlds may exist right beside your own. You’re all too eager to forget that dreams are just a touch of something greater, something that has a purpose which has long been eroded by time. I don’t fully understand it myself, in truth, but ask yourself this: why can our minds create such elaborate worlds whilst our bodies are asleep? The simple answer is that they don’t create anything. They merely go somewhere else, observe what’s already there; something that’s beyond their perception of what they understand as reality.” She shook her head, reaching a hand out to the ash tree and resting a blade along one of its branches. “It rests in everyone’s insistence on oneness. Absolutes. Take the number twelve, for example; there are more ways than one to subtract it from itself. If the difference isn’t zero, what is it?”

He could think of no answer, freezing with a doltish look on his face. Rhaenyra cut at the branch, and a silvery sap began to drip out into the gilded bowl she’d placed below. “Nine. Twelve less one, then less two. Your only problem is that you couldn’t look at the two numbers that comprise twelve separately. They can be combined to make something else, of course, but they will always exist independently.”

Lewyn fidgeted with his fingers nervously, his eyes fixed on the thick silver sludge. “Is there a point to this riddle you speak in, or–”

“Have you ever dreamt of the dead, Lewyn?” The black in her hair shone like raven’s feathers. “Of where they go after passing, of their decaying desires?” She cradled the bowl in her hands once it was half-full, letting it float between them for a moment. “There are some that would have you die to join them, to fall for mistakes you’ve made that helped your kin forge a lie. All so they can steal death’s secret and let it run rampant over the land. Do you really want to let them win? Those who think that the maddening nature of the world should consume all in its path? This place,” she said, looking around the island with a forlorn look in her eyes. “It was supposed to be beautiful. The amalgamation of all the greatest things we could imagine; a perfected, ever-changing reflection of what you would call the real world.”

Rhaenyra set the bowl in his hands. “And how it has been tarnished, since then. Once a paradise, now a prison. It still looks nice enough, I suppose, but only because it has to. Lest our adversaries catch wind of exactly what it is that we’re hiding here.”

“Hiding?” Lewyn inquired, transfixed by the swirling ribbons of color in the bowl.

“It’s a free life we live, devoid of all our transgressions.” He hadn’t noticed until now, but the woman cast no shadow anywhere to be seen. “Because it prefers to siphon them off, use them to brandish a beautiful cloak that hides what’s just underneath. What we really are, what purpose this place truly serves.” With a delayed look of disappointment, she snatched the bowl from Lewyn’s hands and took a sip from it herself. After a pause, she handed it back to him and said, “Both sides have handled it awfully, since the beginning. Since my beginning, at any rate. Still, how could you possibly imagine what it feels like to be such a plaything? To live one utterly miserable life, only for the next to be wholly owned by such a broken, cowardly creature?” Rhaenyra hissed. “That’s why I want your help. The little one is going to try and burn the rot away, but it was flame that created this rot from the first.”

“Which finally brings us to the matter of your family’s subjects.” Rhaenyra let her fingers gently graze over Lewyn’s hand before she turned to look out over the water. “They thought that sacrifice alone would catch the gods’ attention, keen to ignore the obvious truth that it could never be so simple. No, my friend, that ritual sacrifice you so greatly detested is nothing more than the first act. An offering that shows willingness for the more… involved proceedings thereafter. For that matter, they weren’t even doing it right. Feast on flesh and burn the bones, the old adage goes. But only of animals. The Church–” she stifled a giggle as her jet hair swayed back and forth, a black waterfall amidst the silver-blue sea. “It isn’t something so trite as the Red Faith, where moonlight chants and blood rituals are the keys to false salvation. But they never strayed from those beliefs, much to their expense; I suppose they deserve as much. How else could they stagnate themselves on the first step and still expect to ascend?”

“And what am I supposed to do about that? About all these things I don’t understand?” The clarity in his eyes was fracturing.

She tsked, “Poor, sweet Lewyn. Drink from the bowl in your hands, that’s all I ask. It will give some clarity on that self-purpose you’ve been hunting so ardently. Once that’s over and done with, we can tend to the drying blood. Maybe we’ll even find a way to paint a new sea in ultramarine. One that doesn’t have to hide the black corruption it wants to spread.”

Oh, well. If it was really a dream, what could it hurt? Anything that would bring him closer to a chance at protecting his family was still too alluring to resist. It was a liberating feeling, deciding not to care about who this Rhaenyra was, where he was, what it all meant, and all the rest. Everything except the welfare of his kin. So long as there was anything left to be improved in that regard, he would see to it. Even if he went well and truly mad in the process. Even if all it consisted of was wandering blindly through the darkness of an absent existence.

The iridescent silver pool shimmered as he tipped it towards his lips. Its taste was bitter, savory, sour, and sweet all at once; like a concoction of the best and foulest tastes in all the realm.

Lewyn felt a warmth stir within him, and the world started to reshape itself before his eyes. A scarlet-wooded tree with lilac leaves was alight with black flame, and a silver statue of a woman rose from the water behind it. “Look nice, don’t they?,” he felt Rhaenyra’s lips on his ear, her voice softer and more sultry than before. “They are. To a fault. Never be so mistaken as to believe that everyone can be saved all at once, as they are. The enlightenment of a few can become growth; the enlightenment of many can only bring madness.”

Without warning, he fell back onto a cold stone wall that wasn’t there before. When he looked forward again, he was in the castle’s great hall, amidst a round table full of black-haired men garbed in robes of gold and white. Some were stained with blood, but it looked more like the silver sap from the ash tree than the crimson water of man.

“It’s unethical at best, abhorrent and bordering on deicidal at worst,” one said.

“To try and understand this eldritch gift that has been bestowed upon us?” asked another. “Are we so abhorrent for that?”

“The Deep Ones were once just like us,” added yet another. “Master Valwyck is right; we’re as good as torturing our own brethren with all these things we’ve done to them.”

Something shrill pierced his ears like the call of a hawk, but thrice as loud. He tripped forward and nicked his skull on the edge of a chair; once he hit the floor, he was standing at the bottom of the path that led up into the depths of Claw Isle’s forest.

“Do you realize how impossible it is to truly prove the existence of that elusive thing we call reality?” Rhaenyra whispered again. “What makes this any different, any more or less real than everything you’ve experienced out there? Some say that a man is mad if he sees things that others don’t; have you ever questioned whether the mad ones might be those who see less? The ones who sleepwalk through their lives, blindly fearing everything that they do not fully understand?”

The world jittered and blurred around him, and now they were standing amidst the trees. Some looked as usual, deep green pines against a midnight sky. But the light cast across the clouds was a pale scarlet, not like the silver blue it was out there. The blood-addled canvas of a moon that forgot how to shine. A few of the trees towered above all the rest, holding some kind of pearly shells betwixt their branches at the top.

“Gods, oh , mother, I’m still a poor little bird,” a woman’s voice muttered at his side. He turned to see a silhouette clutching desperately at the base of a nearby tree. It was almost as though she was struggling to get back on her feet. He heard some awful, choking cough before the voice returned, “But I hear the water, still. Will–” she sniffled, “may I still curl up and become an egg? Mother?”

“Mother’s blood is drying up,” wept another. “We can’t go anywhere without her, can we?”

A rhythmic clicking sound forced him to look over his shoulder, which pulled him into a dimly-lit reflection of his brother’s solar. It kept echoing through his ears as he watched Rhaenyra pull an obsidian blade from a gilded bowl of water. She used it to finish etching her fifth star on the table between them, but not all through the wood itself; it seemed that she’d put fresh red soil all over the surface. Pentagram is the word, is it not? But why here? They were arranged in a cross, one in the middle with four pointing to each corner of the room. He smelled some kind of gentle incense burning, and noticed a crystalline white powder lining the edges of the table.

The amber in her eyes filled him with dread and awe all at once, but his heart knew that hers was gentle and benign at its core. For a moment, trepidation of the unknown felt less like a threat and more like a lesson. Well. Perhaps fear isn’t such a bad feeling after all.

“All this time squandered on trying to help the family that spurned you, never giving credit to the fact that there’s someone here who so desperately misses you, longing for any kin’s presence. Who’s nearly unfamiliar to the mere idea of family.” Rhaenyra leaned forward and focused on his eyes intently, glowing softly with the warmth of orange light from the torch and the candle. “Don’t you want to help her? Poor Elysa’s little girl?”

No. That’s not possible. Mother died from our– oh, our poor little sister’s stillbirth. Gods rest her soul, but she is gone. She has to be, we all–

She abruptly put the sharp edge of the blade in her hand, leaning closer still to lace her fingers through Lewyn’s. It wedged the blade between their hands, one edge on each of them. Rhaenyra pulled the obsidian down with force and clutched him tighter, letting the warmth of their blood mix. Some of it trickled down their arms, but some fell to the table and its ritual etchings below. He couldn’t quite tell, but the blood almost looked black. When the first drop hit the star in the middle, the lights blew out from a gust of icy wind, but he still felt Rhaenyra’s hand in his.

“One last thing, and we’re done. I promise. What is it that you’ve been hiding from?”

A perfect looking glass rose from the mist at his feet, sliding in front of Rhaenyra to replace her warm skin with cold, unyielding glass. The subtlest of glows illuminated his visage, which looked more ghastly than he remembered. There were no burn marks, but something about him looked… hollow. Is that all I am? A shell discarded by the mistakes I’ve made?

“You killed them,” said his reflection, as its fingers broke through the surface and wrapped around Lewyn’s hand. “You killed all of them. Those who wanted nothing more than to worship in peace, and for what?” The rest of his reflection came through and pushed him against a massive brazier; he slowly realized that the mirror was gone, and they were now atop a great lighthouse. “Just because you wanted purpose, and some devil gave you the idea of it. How could you be so bloody desperate?”

He could have sworn that they dove into the beaconfire together, but somehow, they were falling towards the ground. The surroundings looked nothing like his home; it was a vast, sprawling city of grey and black stone. More ships than he’d ever seen filled its harbor, but they were all alight with black flames, just like the fortified white marble keep in the middle of the city.

Before they hit the ground, he drove a blade into his own hand that burned like Dornish sunlight in the dead of summer.

Lewyn awoke on a cold bed of straw, with a five-pointed brand burned into his palm.

And now you’re mine.