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atypicalacademic · 1 year ago

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The Madgod Wears Patchwork

For the prompt arcane for day 1 of @tes-summer-fest

“You’d believe this storm-blue, but there is more to it.”

“Is there, my lord?”

“See here, the orrery’s bronze and black, see here the silver of an old night sky. Look here the twin moons in crescents, between this thread and that. This hint of green, the lustrarium.”

“And that grey the ashen remains of a target practice. The deep brown of the Archives.”

“The hint of violet, for ill-fitted robes.”

“And guilt, my lord?”

“And guilt.”

Leaning back far enough in her chair that it teetered on toppling over, the Arch-Mage waited. A coin’s circle of a shadow against her wrist, and on her neck that still unfaded scar she wore as a trophy from Mannimarco.

Raminus tried not to look for shadows beneath her brisk lettering, tried not to jump at ghosts as the curtain billowed. Sleep settled over him in the silence, suffocating as a shroud.These days, even in waking, the same dreams spun silver between one thought and the next. Whether they were nightmares, or the aching bliss of life rolling off his shoulders, who could say?

“It’s a fine statement.” Raminus said finally. “Neither pressing the issue nor dismissing it. I’d believe it.”

“You don’t think it’s true?”

He only looked at her through bleary eyes. Between them the quiet question hung.

Will you tell me what has happened?

“Gods’ blood.” The Arch-Mage snatched the statement from his hands. “If I can’t even convince my friends to trust me-”

“Am I still a friend, then?”

“You are. And you’d see it, Raminus, when you aren’t too busy resenting me.”

Divines knew he deserved the barb. The youngest Arch-Mage in history, and all his decrepit heart had mustered behind a watered smile was a painful twinge of envy. His quiet years of dedication had meant little in the face of the guild’s savior. The robes had been hers since she’d returned smoke-stained and shaking from Bruma. He should have been proud of her. He should have tried.

“Then tell me what’s wrong, Catarina. I can help.”

“Nothing’s wrong with me that isn’t with everyone else. We fought Oblivion. Buried two Emperors. Tore the Council in half. The guild plagued with dreams. We all still miss Traven. The usual. If you’d work with me to get to the bottom of this, and not turn every conversation into an oblivion-damned interrogation, maybe we’d be halfway to fixing this mess.”

“I am working with you. I just-”

Catarina held up her hand. Where the candlelight pooled in the shadows beneath her eyes, she’d aged an eternity in a year. “Then tell me, Master Wizard. Where do I go from here?”

Raminus fought the urge to squirm. This was it, the precipice, the needlepoint of an ask greater than a question; she was his star pupil again, bouncing on the balls of her feet and begging for a Conjurer’s appointment. We need to fortify ourselves against daedric incursions, Master Wizard. And for that, we must be prepared. For all he’d stood silent at the side of that lighted path she'd taken to be his equal, he had his wish now; he was the one being torn open to be proven. It rankled. It ached. He hoped.

“It’s imperative that you do keep them calm. The statement would be enough for that. That aside, with report of the activity being Daedric in nature, the remains of the closest Oblivion gate would be a reasonable guess.”

When Catarina rose from her seat, Raminus knew he had failed.

He was small, miniscule before the tidal wave of foreboding that swept him without warning. His ambitions but dust, no more than an insect’s breaking wing, the peeling cocoon-flesh of a greater being.

Of course he’d failed. He’d been lost the moment he set her on this course. Terror gripped the space between his ribs, washed away by salt-waves of mist. In his dreams, the roots knotted at his ankles. With the next downward swing, he would drown.

When the spell broke, he was rooted, hair stood on end, heart thudding against his chest.

The thing that could swallow him whole had deserted her frame for a moment, leaving her hollow and forlorn.

He needed to help now. He needed to help now, before the mists crept between the cracks and carried her away too. Where had he been when she’d called for him, when her father was bloodied and buried beneath a watery grave, when she scrubbed her hands clean of the grime of Bruma until her skin tore and bled?

Divines save him, she was only so young when her grief had robbed him of his protege, replacing her with wild eyes and a knife-blade smile and shoulders aching to carry everything. He didn’t deserve her then, when she’d wept for help and he only pushed her to the arms of demons and necromancers, and he didn’t deserve her now.

She folded the paper, waving the door open. “It’s alright. You don’t even know, do you?” Her light touch against his shoulder was a yawning ravine. “I’m sure you did what you could. You poor man.”

“Rose for an arrow’s tip, and death.”

“Death of a father?”

“And of a child.”

“And the red, for the flames-”

“For my mother’s hair.”

Letitia Philida awoke to a splintering ache in her leg, rolling off the sideways tilt of a nightmare. Adamus’ body, bloated with poison and bleeding from the head, filled the space beside her with soft complaints.

Oh for a cup of tea, my dear. Oh for some incense.

She ignored him, as all widows do when their lover stands guard by the doorway. Don’t bother. He whispered as she removed the dagger from her nightstand. She slept with three now. One by the carafe, one beneath her pillow, and one by the lamp. It hadn’t been enough, that first time.

Neither armor nor dagger nor the heavy Blackwoods mist had guided the Gods’ hands to shield him.She had loved his mission and taken its toll. And he’d met its natural conclusion. An arrow from the shadows, piercing his skull and lodged in her own heart since. Grief as precise, as bloodied as that.

She followed the noise down the emptiness of the hallway to the emptiness of her daughter’s room. She stopped short at the open door when she caught a stirring beyond the curtains.

“It’s me, Mama.”

“Catarina? What are you doing here?”

Her daughter was still in her University robes, her hair dripping small water-spots onto the worn carpet beneath her feet. Adamus, and a stray breeze, quietly shut the door behind them as they left the room.

“Can’t I come home when I please?”

A thin film of dust caught the light and glowed golden. Filaments flickered in Catarina’s bright red hair. Her face was drawn, exhausted.

“Of course you can, love.” Letitia set the candle down to sit by her bedside. The sheets had stayed the same since she’d last come home, for Adamus’ funeral. Since then, the felicitating luncheon at the University, the letters of promotion.

Stendarr alone knew where she went in between. “Are you looking for something?”

“Oh, nothing. Thought I’d put some things away.”

Picture books stiff with age and embossing, a primer of magic gifted to her by the first tutor, an ancient Altmer she’d impressed with her passion at barely the age of twelve. A copy of A Pocket Guide to The Empire marked with fading scribbles, a small stuffed horse with its threads coming askew.

In her hand, The Art of War Magic, with Adamus’ clean signature congratulating her on her admission to the University. I’ll make a battlemage of you yet, my darling Catarina.

She’d hardly the need for books on Destruction anymore, and by then, hardly the need for her father’s praise. Catarina turned it over, thumbing the moth eaten corner of a page.

“Was he still disappointed, in the end?”

“Disappointed? Never. The Master Wizard had nothing but praise for you, and your father knew it. He had no doubt you were meant for great things.”

It was a white lie that slipped easily off her tongue, dripped from her fingers to the letters she’d sent.

There’s no good that’ll come out of this unhealthy obsession with summoning, mark my words. She should be by my side, bolstering the Legion. She should be treading the lighted path to the righteous.

“He was worried about you. As am I.”

It mattered little now. She was her father’s daughter, beholden to a calling, bound to her nature.

Catarina smiled. She sat cross-legged on her childhood bed, laying an old Wizard’s staff across her lap. Everywhere were the marks of her being, as skinned knees and the scars of childhood.

“Strange, isn’t it Mama? These things that were mine aren’t me any longer.”

“Isn’t that the nature of life, my dear?”

“What about this house? Do you ever think of moving?”

“Why must I?”

“It’ll be good, I think, to get away from all this grief.”

“My grief lives with me. Better to be anchored to it here than left adrift elsewhere.”

Like you. She didn’t say. Like you. You who seek absolution in the space between worlds.

“But I miss you.” Catarina said.

Letitia pushed past the books to brush back her daughter’s hair. Her sweet green eyes, the darling freckles on her nose. These things that were mine but are me no longer.

“You can always come home.”

Catarina swallowed hard, then kissed her mother’s forehead.

“No wonder Father was so twisted up in knots, huh? To be made of one thing alone is a heavy price.”

“For what, my dear?”

“For love, Mama. For love.”

It flashed before Letitia as though her life were running out; Catarina throwing herself upon the bed, hands ink-stained and glowing with magic, eyes twinkling like emeralds and I love it, I love it, I love it, Mama, fashioning old curtains into makeshift wizard's robes, gripping her tutor’s elbows to say it again, I love it, I’d do anything, go anywhere my magic takes me. It grew her, as water does a river, that love dressed as a need a mission an aberration, that love that wears no human face.

I wish you loved me that way, my dear. I wish it was me you were made of.

Butterflies burst behind Letitia’s eyelids, brilliant as the sun.

“And the gold, for a golden prince.”

“Buried in our backyard.”

“Green for the tomb, and white for the marble.”

“White for the lies.”

“White lies?”

“A golden lie. Fit for a king. Fit for a champion.”

The end of a year of mourning came on the wings of the first rains. A sweep of laymen and acolytes busied themselves with clearing the Temple of the last vestige of the memorial ceremony.

Beneath the towering statue of that short-lived Emperor, with drizzle still clinging to her lashes and tusks, Garvi Gra-Shub turned to the Arch-Mage. It was me, she wanted to say, it was me, it was me, it was me. The arrow was mine, the bow was mine, and mine was the shadow by the river.

Instead, coward that she was, she said, “Martin would’ve hated this.”

Catarina shrugged. “He’d have preferred to live, but here we are. Being the chosen of the Gods takes little of your wants to account.”

It wasn’t the Gods who saved us, it was you.

That was her doing too. It was she who had led him here, every step from the confines of Kvatch to Bruma to the heart of the Empire, led him here to be taken and wrung out and ruined and killed, and killed.

“I heard,” She changed the topic, “That you declined a place on the Elder Council.”

“I have responsibilities elsewhere, as Ocato well knows. Besides, Cyrodiil has a Champion already.”

And still the lies were as thick and sweet as nectar. “I’d prefer a quiet retirement now.”

To where no questions would follow her, no eyes in the shadows to watch as she failed. To excavate the last of grace from a grave of herself.

“Don’t tell me you’re sick of the public eye already, Garvi. The paint on your statue’s barely dried.”

“They need me less than they need you. Less things to kill, for a time of rebuilding.”

Catarina glanced at her, for once holding her tongue, waiting.

Come clean. Confess. Pull out the blade you’ve buried in the backs of everyone you’ve cared for.

The silence was taut as skin around a fresh wound. How the words in Garvi’s mouth so festered, and spoiled, filling the cavity with the taste of decay. Her rotten heart. Her rotten soul, born steaming from the deadlands and fostered in blood.

Better to case herself in stone and plaster. Better to sink to the same mask she’d struggled so much to shake away. Better to find her grace there, in the quiet.

Garvi lied again. “All I mean is, the public eye might like less what it sees now.”

Catarina had turned away, her palm on the statue, her finger on one damp dragon claw. “I wonder if it hurt in the end.”

“What?”

“When the soul tears in half against something vaster than the world. The mantling of a God.”

“Oh.” The relief was a knife in Garvi’s chest. “It only took a moment. I’m sure it was a quick death.”

Like a wildfire’s blaze. Like the sun exploding before her eyes. One moment the world had been the inside of a forge, and the next it'd turned bone-pale and muted green. No slit throat, no blood pooling from a torn stomach, no muscles turning stiff and purple with poison.

Dear Martin, the most glorious of all her executions.

Captain Philida had blackened where the arrow found him. He’d floated, bare belly up for the fish to feast on his toes. If Garvi were a better woman, an orc of honour, if her parents hadn’t charred themselves behind Kvatch’s collapsing door, if she hadn’t turned all she loved in life to pain, she could tell Catarina of another quick death.

But this was good as any confession. She could cloak one death in another. So long as she said the words, she could escape the weight of them.

“A quick death?” Quiet tears streamed down Catarina’s cheek. “You were there? You saw?”

“I was.” The river shining silver in the mist. The swamp’s hot breath. The rain. Your father was so afraid, you know. He looked as though he slept in armor.

“A fragment of a God- I wonder if he sees us still. If he can ever return.”

My own father looks on me as I sharpen my arrows by the sunrise. I turn away. My mother laughs as I tiptoe into my empty kitchen. I couldn’t bear to listen, couldn’t meet her eyes. On some days I’m glad nothing of my home remains.

Garvi shifted her weight, awkward now. She couldn't remember the last time she'd seen the Arch-Mage cry. “There’s no return from some things.”

Clinging to the curve of Akatosh’s wing, Catarina wept. Garvi watched, despising herself for long enough that the raindrops turned iridescent to her tired eyes.

“I’m so sorry.” She said. “It was my fault.”

I stood for half an hour in the water. By then the dead had all blurred to one. My father and yours. The shrieking dremora and the laughing, dancing dunmer girl.

Catarina wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “Don’t be ridiculous, Garvi. You did what you could.”

Did you know how much harder it was to saw his finger off for me to take? His hand was curled, just as yours are now, as though he still clung to something too. He must have loved you. It was my fault. He must have loved you.

“So did you.” Garvi said. “For- for everyone.”

Catarina straightened, and as though a curtain fell away from her face, Garvi flinched. The air around them pulsed with a power she could not name. This is it, she thought. She’d seen her for what she is. A scandal, not a crime, if the Arch-Mage struck down the Hero of Kvatch at the Temple for what she’d done. Maybe she’d make a better confession there, in the peace of the Void.

But her voice was even, her eyes dry. “You’re right.” Catarina said. “There is no return from some things.”

“Magenta, for this one sunset.”

“My lord?”

“For the sky of my dreams, and yours.”

The robe was resplendent now, woven as though every color bled. It’s silken thread came together so snug that Catarina wondered if there was ever a time she never had it at all. Another year was past, and it was time to go. There were reasons for which she’d bided her time and had this realm endure her dreams. But now, the Isles beckoned. Its beauty spilled through the door, an apprentice bursting into her room to fall at her feet.

He sat across her with his shining face and his eyes like the ocean, unravelled at the center, as if he too were a fluttering thread to be closed between her palms. A surge of love threatened now to drown her. Why had she resisted at all?

“But my dreams tell me another story, my lord.” So penitent, the boy, so sweet. So frightened of the straight lines interlaced between stone and tile. “Where’re the boughs, the cross-road villages? Where’s the formless trees, the golden Saints? Where’s the green that parches my throat and the desert to quench it?”

The Niben wind caught the scent of home.

Catarina lifted her hands.

“Here are the golden wings of Mania. And my feet are the roots of Crucible. Do you see these teeth? The cobble-stones of Bliss. These even ribs the bare ground of Split. Turn my skin inside out, and my heart is every lining of the Gatekeeper’s key, stitched to my insides and yours and his. These bones the mists of Dementia. This hair? The paranoid feathers. These lips the thorax of all elytra, every word a life. Each eye an amber, waiting for the taking. From these knees come the grummite, knobbled and spindled. Do you see? The Isles of your dreams are all of me.”

He gasped. “And the robe, my lord? The robe?”

She stood, and slipped it over her skin. Supple as water, it took the shape of her. “The robe is the woman I’m made of. No escaping her.”

Water ripples, and rain pours. A little girl buries her face in her books. A hand with a missing finger closed around her shoulder. A home with a door open. Stone and plaster. An old friend’s voice like a bee buzzing in her ear.

No weeping of it. No half-way promises. No running.

Between the skin, and the silk, the expanse of the world. The Never-There.

The Madgod took the boy’s hand.

“It’s time to go.”

#tes oblivion #raminus polus #garvi gra shub #hero of kvatch #what a weird little thing i have written lol #anyway godhood is a kind of grief #catarina philida #or is she #tesfest23

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