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synesthesiadreamscape · 2 months ago

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Eternal Punishment: Ideology, Performance, and Martyrdom as Sunday's Expressions of the Death Drive

“Sleep sleep happy child. All creation slept and smil’d. Sleep sleep, happy sleep, While o’er thee thy mother weep” -William Blake, “A Cradle Song,” Songs of Innocence and of Experience “So, where is my dream?” “It is a continuation of reality.” “But where is my reality?” “It is at the end of your dream.” -The End of Evangelion (1997)

Considering the majority of his development occurred in Penacony’s third act, Sunday has proven himself as a compelling antagonist who rivals both Takuto Maruki (Persona 5 Royal) and Kevin Kaslana (Honkai Impact 3rd) in grandiosity and pessimism. Although his motivations and methods closely resemble theirs, the tragic path that led Sunday to his rigid belief system began when he was still a child and is intimately related to his experience with family. Having both witnessed the suffering of others and experienced it himself, Sunday’s ideology was born with a single purpose: to shelter humanity from the pain of reality. His answer to life appears rational on its surface and is constructed with kind intentions, but in practice it would have damned the cosmos to a purgatorial world of constancy and doomed its creator to infinite loneliness. It is this tension between Sunday’s intentions and the truth of his actions that fascinates me, because it reveals a deeper conflict within him that is also at the center of Penacony’s story. Here, I’ll use some of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories to illustrate what exactly that conflict is, and why it’s so important for a full understanding of both Penacony's finale and Sunday’s arc thus far.

Cohesion not guaranteed, my brain feels like swiss cheese after 2.2

Spoilers for the entire 2.2 Trailblaze Mission (In Our Time) and a small post-quest with Robin (The Feather He Dropped).

Disclaimer: All content in this post, especially the psychoanalysis, should be taken in the spirit of media analysis and nothing more. Also, corrections and additions are welcome, whether they are about interpreting Freud or HSR. :)

To cut down on post length, external sources (that is, any reading that is not official Star Rail material) are given as numbered in-text citations and gathered in a pastebin document linked at the bottom with the full title and exact page numbers of the source.

And before we begin, a huge thank you to my boyfriend for proofreading this numerous times despite not having played any Hoyoverse games, and for talking out the philosophy with me T_T That’s love right there!

Penacony, Freud, and the Occasion for the Death Drive

“The IPC does not care about its workers! I bet you they would love it if those monsters came and killed me. That way they wouldn’t have to pay for my pension!” “Sounds like somebody could use a Sprinkles cupcake!” -It’s Always Night in Penacony Show

It is impossible to avoid Sigmund Freud when discussing the psychology of dreams, and his psychoanalytic theories are tightly woven into nearly every aspect of Penacony’s environment and story. Our most salient point of entry into his work is The Family’s sweet dream, which embodies the base instinct in human nature towards pleasure-seeking behavior and instant gratification, even at the expense of self-preservation, also known as the pleasure principle.¹ Be it slot machines, luxury cars, decadent food, or endless shopping malls, everything in the sweet dream exists to further each guest’s pursuit of pleasure—such is the purpose of dreams, Freud theorized, as vehicles for wish-fulfillment.² “Death,” let alone pain, is not allowed to exist in the sweet dream in order to preserve that pleasure:

“A further incentive to a disengagement of the ego from the general mass of sensations–that is, to the recognition of an ‘outside’, an external world–is provided by the frequent, manifold and unavoidable sensations of pain and unpleasure the removal of which is enjoined by the pleasure principle, in the exercise of its unrestricted domination. A tendency arises to separate from the ego everything that can become a source of such unpleasure, to throw it outside and to create a pure pleasure-ego which is confronted by a strange and threatening ‘outside’” (Freud, 1930, p. 4).³ “One of the twelve Dreamscapes in Penacony, and its time coincides with midnight. Here, the dream's time is forever stuck at 00:00. Tomorrow will not come, and this night of revelry will never end” (Loading Screen: Golden Hour). Gallagher: …Think about this — what would it cost to create and maintain such a lavish dreamland? Gallagher: It's people's lives. The opulent dream is built upon the decay of spirits, with a toxic elixir called "pleasure" flowing through the Dreamscape. It tempts people to indulge in the Dreamscape, and gradually their minds succumb, becoming nourishment for the sweet dream. (The Public Enemy)

Aventurine: This dream [Memory Zone] of theirs isn’t a boundless sea, it’s a lonely island. The Family used the Harmony to build a high wall and isolate them from the vast and treacherous ocean of the outside world.

But “death” still lurks beneath the juvenile fantasy and its sweet commercial lies, in the yawning chasm proceeding spiritual death. This space, the Primordial Dreamscape, is a chaotic rendering of memories and emotions that goes beyond consumerism as the ultimate form of pleasure, and the high walls of the sweet dream separate each “Moment” from its depths. It is the original form of the sweet dream, its primitive reflection in the Memory Zone’s water, and the crystalline bodies of its memetic entities are like mirrors into the past inviting guests’ introspection.

Introspection is the Achilles’ heel of The Family’s superficial paradise, because curiosity about oneself redirects the ego’s interest from external objects to the inner abyss of thoughts and desires deemed unacceptable in reality, and remembering their existence reveals psychic pain. The Family’s denial of these ‘impure’ thoughts reflects the process by which the ego represses instinctual impulses to avoid that pain:

Robin: While I was away from Penacony, the boundaries of the Twelve Dreamscapes kept expanding outward. But whenever I mentioned the anomalies in my dreams... all The Family heads refused to talk about it. Only my brother was willing to respond... Robin: Later, I discovered the secret letters from the IPC ambassador, which further convinced me that there are hidden secrets beneath the surface of Penacony. So, following the clues in the Oak Family's dossiers, I found my way here... Robin: ...The land of the exiles, concealed by The Family under the guise of "Death", a dream within a dream where Penacony's past is buried. (Small Town Grotesque) “Life is parceled in impenetrable barriers, obstructing the intrusion of the alien. But beneath that ironclad shell, there is a region both nameless and fragile” (Memory Zone Meme “Heartbreaker” Story). “We are very apt to think of the ego as powerless against the id; but when it is opposed to an instinctual process in the id it has only to give a 'signal of unpleasure’ in order to attain its object with the aid of that almost omnipotent institution, the pleasure principle” (Freud, 1926, p. 92).⁴

Freud begins Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) by pointing out the foundational assumption of psychoanalysis, namely that all psychic processes serve the pleasure principle in infantile life and the reality principle at a later point of ego development. The reality principle arises from the ego’s instinct for self-preservation, and it redirects pleasure-seeking behavior so that one is willing to wait for its payoff. Rather than relying on dangerous sources of pleasure that provide instant gratification, instead the constraints of reality (or “time”) imposed on the ego and any consequent pain (or “tension”) are endured for the sake of eventual pleasure.⁵ For psychoanalysts, this only further cemented pleasure’s importance in mental life.

However, as World War I came to an end, Freud found these principles alone were insufficient to explain the purpose of trauma dreams in veterans returning from the battle front. Their dreams would faithfully recreate traumatic memories from the war each night, with no pleasurable payoff for the dreamer, and this directly contradicted Freud’s theory of dream interpretation.⁶ If trauma dreams did not fulfill the dreamer’s unconscious wishes, then they did not follow the pleasure principle; they seemed to serve some other purpose.

Though unconsciously repeating pain in waking life was not a new idea in psychoanalysis, trauma dreams highlighted a critical flaw in its understanding of this behavior’s ends. To untangle this complexity, Freud reexamined the aims of the “compulsion to repeat,” and speculated that it is not only an instinctual behavior, but also has an earlier origin than the pleasure principle. He then proposed a dualistic theory of desire that revealed something he believed was common to all organic life—that if there are life instincts, or what he called “Eros,” that are geared towards an organism’s pleasure and self-preservation, then there is also a primary death drive, or death instincts, that aims for its destruction:

Acheron: The Beautiful Dream is crumbling, but not because of a particular Aeon, a particular faction, or a particular visitor. Its collapse stems from a certain inevitability of human nature. The Family refuses to acknowledge this, and it has ultimately backfired and become a catalyst… Acheron: As people immerse themselves in the Dreamscape, where consequences and pain cease to exist, and only ease and pleasure prevail, they draw closer and closer to necrosis. Regardless of the perceived bliss, death looms as the inevitable conclusion. Acheron: Also, this necrosis will diffuse and spread. One piece of the puzzle’s mutation will eventually cause the entire building to shake, break…and crumble. Welt: …In the end, the dreams that people built in the name of freedom became the cage that imprisoned them. (When the Sacred Ginmill Closes)

The “inevitability” Acheron refers to is one and the same with the death instincts as illustrated through the Nirvana principle, originally proposed by psychoanalyst Barbara Low and adopted by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Early on in the work, he identifies G. Th. Fechner’s principle towards stability, or the constancy principle, as a greater implication of the pleasure principle’s terms. According to this principle, the psychic apparatus (or ‘psychic processes’) aims not only to relax psychic tension to avoid pain, but also to keep tension low and constant.⁷ But this raises a problem: the pleasure principle’s express purpose is to avoid pain, but pleasure is a finite state that can only be felt as such if there is pain to reduce in the first place. If this balance is interfered with, we do not preserve the initial euphoria of pleasure infinitely, but instead find it dulled with time until it approaches ‘zero’:

“When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things” (Freud, 1930, p. 16).⁸

This ‘zero’-state is the aim of the Nirvana principle, where it is not just the reduction of excitation but rather its total elimination that is ultimately desired.⁹ In other words, its aim is stillness through the suspension of psychic processes, a state of being that could only find its analogue in dormancy,¹⁰ or something unto death. Acheron’s point is that this necrotic, empty feeling is not an accident, because “death” lays the foundation for something new.

And this, at last, brings us back to Sunday. Incongruence, fantasy, and wishful thinking are just some of what drives Sunday to create his ideal world, a paradise where every day is a day of rest. Though his methods are misguided and extreme, he does this out of compassion for the weak and a sense that he must catch them in his paradise before they crash to their death. In truth, this “paradise” was death in a different form, where reality is inverted with one’s personal fiction and conflict is transcended by removing choice. The conflict between the life instincts and death instincts is key to understanding how Sunday arrived at this answer to life’s pain, but to understand the depth of that conflict we must go beyond his facade and grasp the true meaning of his infantile fantasy. By employing a Freudian psychoanalytic reading of Sunday’s arc, I hope to open new avenues of discussion about both his character and the meaning of Penacony.

The Prison of Fate

“Is darkness equal to daylight? Are sinners equal to the righteous? If you are born weak, which god should you turn to for solace?” -Sunday, Everything that Rises Must Converge “You know, in the thick of things, people are blind to the grit in their eyes...yet they can always feel its scratch. Want the answer? I'll give it to you. The whole thing is just fate playing a cruel joke on us.” -Gallagher, A Walk Among the Tombstones

We’ll begin with Sunday’s warped understanding of society and his ideology, as these represent the first layer of his fantasy. What’s striking about Sunday’s reading of human nature is his pessimistic outlook on human relationships and the potential for individuals to change. Sunday believes that life obeys a natural law called “survival of the fittest,” a perverse interpretation of Darwinian principles of evolution, that categorizes individuals as “strong” or “weak” based on inherent, unchangeable qualities within them. This law is the foundation of a chaotic world where the strong do not defend the weak, but trample them for their own gain:

Sunday: While the Harmony holds noble aspirations, the strong will always be strong, and the weak will always be weak, even in this carefree dream... Human nature contains greatness, but it also harbors inherent weaknesses that can't be eradicated. Sunday: In the end, if people can't even secure their own survival, they won't care about the illusory future of equality. As long as the law of survival of the fittest prevails... there will always be fledglings crashing to their death. (The Only Path to Tomorrow)

Sunday’s ideology takes a page from Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, where he argues that the will to life is the reason individuals suffer, because, like the pleasure principle, “the basis of all willing is need, deficiency - in short, pain.”¹¹ Willing is a feature of individuality, which Schopenhauer further identifies as an illusion of nature—that is, individuality obscures how all life is an expression of one underlying Will, the common source of life.¹² In Sunday’s ideology, Schopenhauer’s “individuality” and “willing” are substituted by the term “self-value,” which forms the basis of the illusory prison of human consciousness. Self-value, then, is the root of human suffering, because satisfying the will to life requires taking “value” from others:

Robin: That's just sophistry. If that were true, then only the powerful would have the right to determine the future. Sunday: Unfortunately, that's exactly what happens. Another name for "the future" is "self-value." [...] Sunday: Some are born weak and vulnerable, some find themselves trapped in unfortunate circumstances, some fall victim to malice and cowardice. When it comes to survival, everyone is equal, and the weak can only watch as their value [future] gets constantly diminished by external forces. (The Only Path to Tomorrow) Firefly: So, what is your definition of living a happy life? Sunday: Good question. Human consciousness is fundamentally an illusion, a cage known as "self-worth". People lured in by this illusion, make mistakes, yet still ask that external influences bear the burden. Sunday: When one mistake after the next permeates the masses, they become impossible to trace... Thus, the amassing of these individual cages culminate to form a prison, a place dictated only by the rule of "survival of the fittest." Sunday: Nature is always accompanied by predation and sacrifice... Its antithesis is known as Order. (Beauty and Destruction)

As long as the will to life must be satisfied, “survival of the fittest” will persist; in other words, the illusion of self-value ensures the law’s survival in the future. While this tells us part of why Sunday equates self-value with the future, his statement can also be interpreted through a psychoanalytic lens, particularly as it relates to transference and the repetition compulsion. Transference is the process by which people unconsciously cast the roles of past figures onto current relationships, repeating past trauma in the present. The individuals filling the roles may change, but the roles themselves remain constant through time. Through transference, a person’s unresolved past and unconscious beliefs adopted from those experiences construct an illusion that passes for objective reality:

"What psycho-analysis reveals in the transference phenomena of neurotics can also be observed in the lives of some normal people. The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some 'daemonic' power; but psycho- analysis has always taken the view that their fate is for the most part arranged by themselves and determined by early infantile influences" (Freud, 1920, p. 15).¹³

Transference is driven by an underlying compulsion to repeat the past known as the repetition compulsion. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud found that the repetition compulsion does not solely operate in service of the pleasure principle as it was previously understood, but also as an unconscious compulsion to repeat pain. Psychoanalyst and scholar Jonathan Lear provides an example of this in Freud (2015) when he describes the nature of unconscious mental processes:

“Suppose, to take a highly simplified case, a child has an unconscious fantasy, ‘I am the unloved one.’ Precisely because this fantasy is exempt from contradiction and is presented in a timeless mode, the person will tend to interpret life’s passing events through a frame of feeling unloved. The person will focus on real-life slights; but even kind gestures will tend to be treated with suspicion, as though there must be some underlying motive (‘He was nice to me only because he wants something from me’). The world will come to seem an unloving place, thus reinforcing the fantasy. The person can come to feel that she is somehow fated to be unloved.” (Lear, 2015, p. 6).¹⁴

To put Lear’s example in Sunday’s terms, an unconscious fantasy adopted from past experiences is the underlying material that constructs the illusory prison of self-value. The prison shapes our perception of reality, and this perception then reinforces the prison’s ‘form’ by affirming the unconscious fantasy. If one’s perception or the fantasy were to change, the dimensions of the prison would change with them, reshaping ‘reality.’

The prison of self-value therefore ensures the past’s survival in the present by facilitating its repetition; through repetition, the past becomes the prisoner’s future. In other words, by materializing the unconscious fantasy in reality through actions, the prison of self-value becomes one’s fate. We can then apply this framework to Sunday’s ideology: if fantasy and perception co-construct one another to create an individual human consciousness, it follows that Sunday’s ideology, as a reflection of his perception of the world, is rooted in an unconscious fantasy too, a belief that he has about himself.

Sunday: Well, don’t forget this…. not everyone really has a future.

So, just what is that belief? The past holds great significance to Sunday, and he vividly remembers the consequences of each decision he made. While in his inner world, he recounts three decisions that led him to lose faith in the Harmony and choose the Order for salvation. These decisions involved a Charmony Dove he and Robin found as children, a fraudulent stowaway, and Robin’s brush with death while she traveled beyond Penacony. He then asks which choice the Trailblazer would make given each scenario—the same choice as Sunday did, or some other choice? However, the choices are limited to either-or decisions between Sunday’s choice and its extreme opposite: either support Robin’s journey, or prevent her from taking it; either remain silent, or ask the Bloodhounds for mercy; either cage the Charmony Dove, or build a nest for it in a yard of predators, and no matter the choice, it always ends in tragedy.

Sunday: I know the suffering of being tormented, the turmoil of losing your way, how sorrow… and even despair, set in when matters don’t work out. All of this causes me unending pain, because this is not what “happiness” is at all.

This is because Sunday understands the world in terms of dichotomies, where things are either good or bad, righteous or sinful, strong or weak. It’s also why Sunday’s choice in each scenario is cast as the “good” choice, because it was made with kind intentions, while its opposite is the “bad” choice because it lacks compassion for the individual. The unfortunate outcome of either decision, both real and imagined, is therefore meant to persuade the player that Sunday’s perspective is ultimately correct, because “good” choices do not necessarily result in “good” outcomes in a disorderly world. Rather, choice itself is a chaotic variable that introduces uncertainty, splitting life into infinite paths and possibilities, or “untraceable mistakes.” In order to control outcomes, choice must be removed, even if such an outcome can only be achieved through fantasy.

To see the world in this way is to inhabit the monochrome world Acheron first referred to in Act I, a world where it’s all or nothing, and everything appears black or white. This manner of thinking constructs each decision as a false dilemma, which artificially limits the available options or perspectives to two extremes. For our purposes, this is among the most meaningful hints as to what Sunday’s unconscious fantasy is, because it is born out of his intense need for control, which is both a defense against the fantasy and the primary way that he repeats it.

Acheron: The golden dream is getting restless. In the coming long night, I'm afraid you will face many tribulations and witness many tragedies. And finally...your sight will only see black and white. Acheron: But please believe me that in that monochrome world, there will be a glimpse of fleeting red, and when you make a choice, it will reappear before you once more… (The Knocking at Ungodly Hours)

With this in mind, we can use Sunday’s black and white thinking to our advantage. Upon closer observation, a common theme is repeating itself in each decision Sunday did make, with each individual cast in the same role at different points in time. Despite his best intentions, Sunday’s actions alone can’t protect them from tragic outcomes—indeed, he is powerless against their fate. According to his ideology, there are inherently strong individuals and inherently weak individuals, and the strong have the power to defend the weak, but often choose not to; by this same logic, if Sunday can’t defend the weak despite his intentions to do so, then he must not be strong. He must be weak.

This brings us to the Charmony Dove’s fate, which is undoubtedly the most significant to his character out of the three scenarios, and acts as a symbol of the difference between Sunday’s and Robin’s beliefs regarding humanity. The bird is an object that they project these beliefs onto, shaped by their individual “cages,” and its fate reflects those beliefs back at them, reinforcing their diverging fantasies:

Sunday: This place is too dangerous for a fledgling. Let's take it with us — we can put it on the wooden shelf in front of your window. Robin: Okay! A bird like that must have a beautiful singing voice. But where will it live? Sunday: I'll ask the family head to build a cage for it. Robin: A cage... but then it won't have the freedom to fly, right? [...] Robin: Even if it's small and not fully feathered, and can't sing... it didn't come into this world just to be locked up in a cage. Robin: Birds... belong to the sky. (The Only Path to Tomorrow)

To Robin, the Charmony Dove is full of potential, and its fate can’t be determined by a single moment of its life, but Sunday regards it with caution and uncertainty; one wrong move, and the bird will take its last breath. This difference becomes the central disagreement in their debate over the sweet dream’s value, and Sunday reveals the bird’s tragic fate to Robin in order to drive home his point:

Sunday: Shortly after you left, it crashed to its death right in front of your window. Robin: ...I had surmised as much. I knew you wouldn't have avoided mentioning the bird for no reason. Robin: Despite that unfortunate outcome, I still believe it was the right decision. Birds aren't meant to spend their lives in cages... They belong in the sky, even if they can't fly. Sunday: But here's the thing. If there are birds in this world that can never fly, can we really assert that they belong in the sky?

Sunday’s meaning is clear: flightless birds are no different from those individuals who are born weak, and their fate is to watch their future disappear under the pressure of external influences. While Robin came to embody her beliefs by leaving Penacony behind, Sunday stayed and rose through the Oak Family’s ranks, never leaving the sweet dream’s cage. He embodies his beliefs by denying himself a future, because to choose otherwise would contradict his fantasy—that he is a flightless bird too, and therefore has no “value”:

[Sunday]: The victor bears the responsibility of victory. Finish me... and fly into the sky. [Robin]: We were supposed... to fly into the sky together. [Sunday]: ... [Sunday]: If only... I could… (The Feather He Dropped)

Sunday's unconscious fantasy—that he is an inherently weak person, a bird that will never fly—is a reflection of his self-value. By unconsciously repeating the pain of his past, his fantasy becomes the illusory prison known as one’s future, a self-fulfilling fate.

But all of this is only a small piece of the puzzle. It tells us what the unconscious fantasy is and how it affects him, but it doesn’t really tell us why he has it in the first place. Just as the belief was hidden in the shadows of Sunday’s ideology, its origin is hiding behind something even more conspicuous—a grand performance on the dreamscape’s finest stage.

An Infantile Drama

Trailblazer: Where is the Stellaron? Why am I not seeing it? Sunday: It hides behind the curtain. Or rather, it is the theater itself. (Everything that Rises Must Converge)

Naturally, this leads us to the Embryo of Philosophy.

There is so much to talk about between the three phases of this entire fight, not to mention the mountains of references it makes to other media. However, I want to train our attention on the Embryo’s tears. Why is it crying, and why at this particular moment? The religious meaning of its tears is clear, but what is their psychoanalytic significance?

First, let’s consider their context. The Embryo’s golden tears stream down its face with each turn of “Im Anfang war das Wort” (“in the beginning was the word”), stretching its arms towards the sky with palms open in worship of Order. On the 8th turn, it reaches toward the sky to ask for Ena's blessing; Ena answers its call, reaching down to grant it power, nearly touching the Embryo’s outstretched pointer finger with THEIR own. In doing so, they create a mirror image of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, a depiction of God giving Adam the spark of life.

This artistic and religious reference, alongside the Embryo’s fetal imagery and tears, leaves no doubt that the third phase in the fight is Sunday’s “moment of birth” as an Aeon, and this suggests that birth must inform the answer to our original question. So then, why does the Embryo’s “birth” bring it to tears? The answer lies in the meaning of Sunday’s performance in Penacony Grand Theater, of which the Embryo is just one part, and how it relates to his unconscious fantasy.

In a final effort to dissuade the Astral Express from resisting his plan, Sunday stages a dramatic retelling of the Order’s Genesis story and Penacony’s history that chronicles its changing masters through the eras. As an immersive stage play, its completion hinges on the crew’s participation, which involves slaying the master at each act’s conclusion in order to usher in the next one. Through his play, Sunday argues that humans crave a master who can provide them with meaning in the face of chaos, and because of this inherent weakness, progress is an illusion. The past, present, and eternal show of human history is one of endless repetition and self-delusion – though the individual master may change, humans remain puppets by their own design.

The Past, Present, and Eternal Show

This fraught relationship between humanity and its masters was a foundational point of Freud’s theory of the death instincts, which he grounded in his observations of infantile play. While he was staying with his daughter’s family, Freud noticed a peculiar game his grandson played with his toys that further called the pleasure principle’s dominance into question. The game began when his grandson threw the toys out of sight to make them “disappear,” after which he would retrieve them with his mother’s help to make them “return.” Freud deduced that this game (Fort/Da) was a reenactment of his mother “disappearing” when she left him at home, and speculated that it played a crucial role in his grandson’s good behavior during her absences.¹⁵ If the game was in service of the pleasure principle, Freud expected that the entire game would be played to completion, where the pain of the toys’ disappearance is endured for the eventual pleasure of their return. Instead, his grandson often only repeated the disappearance – the “drama’s” most painful part.¹⁶

In infantile play, several instincts intersect with a child’s memory in order to process psychological stimuli.¹⁷ Repetition facilitates their sense of mastery over unfamiliar stimuli, whether pleasurable or painful,¹⁸ and play offers a safe, fictional space for children to make sense of reality, where they can leave behind their role as spectators of life’s phenomena and become actors on its stage.¹⁹ By playing an active part in a memory’s repetition through play, indeed by controlling it, children move toward an even grander wish in their hearts: “the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do.”²⁰ Freud suspected this was why his grandson played the game, because it offered him a sense of agency over his mother’s absences that reality could not.

The Golden Hour base model and its uncanny inhabitants, found in Dewlight Pavillion. One of the Oak Family Head’s toys.

However, Freud’s point was not that repetition in infantile play is pathological, but rather that when trauma is repeated in adult life—a time when experiences do not feel so new, and therefore do not bring as much pleasure or sense of mastery per repetition²¹—the mind is reverting to a previous state,²² namely to the way it functioned in childhood. In other words, the repetition compulsion is related to the instinct for mastery, and trauma repetition is the mind’s attempt to master a painful experience by replaying the past in the present, as it did through infantile play. In this way, life itself becomes the game, or a “play,” and fantasy merges with reality.

Now, let’s examine the conclusion of Sunday’s stage play, as humans take fate into their own hands on the Genesis story’s seventh day:

2:1 THEY bestowed upon all beings the gift of ‘meaning.’ All had been brought into existence. And then, THEY rested from all THEIR creative work. 2:2 However, once again, all the beings beseeched Ena, praising THEM, the magnificent Aeon with divine power, but with a tone of curse. 2:3 ‘With Order, you have defined all things in the Cosmos, yet this only made us realize that we are mere puppets within your grasp.’ 2:4 Thus, on that day, all beings united and cast the Aeon into the pit of destruction. 2:5 And so it was done. That marked the seventh day. (Lost Property readable)

Like a parent guiding their child, Ena imbued the universe with meaning through Order, weaving the answer to each of humanity’s questions into THEIR grand symphony. Humanity then recognized its passive role in relation to Ena, a higher being who is able to act on the universe’s grand stage, while mortals merely watch THEM. And just as Freud’s grandson casts away his toys in the first part of the drama, humanity then casts Ena into the abyss to make THEM “disappear,” rejecting their old master in a bid for control only to seek THEM out again in the eternal show. In their effort to become masters, humans seal their fate as puppets; or by another interpretation, this is the intended outcome all along, because out of the two desires at play here—the desire to replace the master themselves and the desire to submit to another—answering to a new master is far easier than becoming one:

[Tiernan]: Sin Thirsters... the obsessions of the Pathstriders. They emerge from the depths of IX, seeing themselves as masters of their own destiny, unknowingly repeating the actions of their past lives. [Tiernan]: They emerge from the Nihility and head toward it, leading purposeless lives… (And on the Eighth Day) Butler: "Either I shall be my own master, or I shall return to my former master! I shall not submit to a new master under any circumstances!" "I wish they could regain their reason [calm down] and cast away the shackles of hypocrisy," proclaimed the new master. (Tune Butler's emotion to Calm) Butler: "Without a master, who can grant me true freedom?" (Everything that Rises Must Converge)

By returning the planet to Order, its Pathstriders hope to reinstate the earlier phase of galactic history before Ena was absorbed by Xipe the Harmony. Understood through Freud’s observations of infantile play, this can be seen as a struggle between retaining the innocence of childhood, the previous state, and the “grand wish” to become an adult with agency; desires that are at once contradictory, and yet work in tandem with one another. But is this really all that Sunday’s performance is about?

For the moment, let’s return to trauma repetition and its conflict with the pleasure principle. To Freud, trauma is like a bodily wound, where unfamiliar stimuli “breach” the mind’s protective layer and overwhelm it; the repetition compulsion is a response to this breach, replaying past trauma in the present so that the mind learns to anticipate the disturbance in the future:

“The fulfilment of wishes is [...] brought about in a hallucinatory manner by dreams, and under the dominance of the pleasure principle this has become their function. But it is not in the service of that principle that the dreams of patients suffering from traumatic neuroses lead them back [...] to the situation in which the trauma occurred. [...] These dreams are endeavouring to master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (Freud, 1920, p. 26).²³

This brings us to the final pillar of Freud’s death drive. If the repetition compulsion is an instinct, then it must not only be common to all organic life, but also must originate from a shared disturbance in evolutionary history. But a disturbance of this scale, he realized, could only be found in what shaped life’s beginning—the physical and chemical processes that cultivated life on Earth, rousing the first unicellular organism from its slumber in the primordial soup, and animating what was once dead. The repetition compulsion, then, was born from this original trauma of organic life, unanticipated by that ancient sea. And if that is the case, then the repetition compulsion’s true purpose is clear: it aims to return the living to its slumber, to the death state, and it dutifully follows life’s “circuitous paths” to bring about that end:

“It would be in contradiction to the conservative nature of the instincts if the goal of life were a state of things which had never yet been attained. On the contrary, it must be an old state of things, an initial state from which the living entity has [...] departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are to take it as a truth [...] that everything living dies for internal reasons—becomes inorganic once again—then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death’ and, looking backwards, that 'inanimate things existed before living ones’” (Freud, 1920, p. 32).²⁴

The implications of this theory can be seen in Penacony’s oceanic imagery, which signifies both the unconscious memory of that primordial state and the salvation the sweet dream offers from reality. To enter the dream, The Reverie’s guests submerge themselves in a shallow pool and emerge on the “other side” reborn, baptized into the religion of pleasure and cleansed with the dream’s fiction. The primordial memory, then, is the lost childhood of organic life, a previous state it wants to return to — the unity before the violence of individuality.

Sunday: Some are born weak and vulnerable, some find themselves trapped in unfortunate circumstances, some fall victim to malice and cowardice. When it comes to survival, everyone is equal, and the weak can only watch as their value [future] gets constantly diminished by external forces. [emphasis added].

We also don’t need to stretch our imagination to connect all of this back to Sunday, who compares the weak to spectators of their own demise, just as Freud likens children to spectators of life’s phenomena, and perceives “external forces” as catalysts for change—for Sunday, they whittle away at one’s future, while for Freud they disturb a peaceful slumber.

How is all of this related to the Embryo’s tearful birth? The primordial soup was a cradle for organic life in its infancy, but it was also the “mother” that birthed it, and the death instincts compel life to return to its embrace. In Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926), Freud identifies birth as the first “danger-situation” an individual experiences, because birth requires separation from their mother.²⁵ By coming into the world, newborns are inundated with unfamiliar stimuli, like the unexpected “breach” that characterizes trauma, and these sensations in turn produce the first instance of anxiety.²⁶ Though they can’t yet conceptualize this danger as the loss of their mother, for mental life at this stage doesn’t distinguish between the self and other objects, infants soon learn the uncertainty that accompanies danger can be relieved through their mother, who “satisfies all [their] needs without delay”; anxiety, then, is a response to situations where these needs go unsatisfied, and over which they alone have no control.²⁷

But birth is only the first separation between mother and child; the final separation, of course, is death. If the former’s danger is characterized by the mother’s absence (“object-loss”), then in death this danger becomes permanent. In Mourning and Melancholia (1917), Freud writes that mourning is a process of “[accepting that] the loved object no longer exists” and of withdrawing one’s interest (“libido”) from them.²⁸ Melancholia, its fraternal twin, shares several affective traits with this process, namely “a turning away from reality […] and a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis”—that is, by living through fantasy.²⁹ Where melancholia distinguishes itself from mourning, however, is in one’s sense of responsibility for the object’s loss. In other words, the melancholic is tormented by a pervasive sense of guilt:

“In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself. The patient represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished […] He is not of the opinion that a change has taken place in him, but extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better” (Freud, 1917, p. 246).³⁰

Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it? Transference is another way of living life through fantasy, where each new actor plays the same role in its infinite drama, in this case the “lost object.” The Charmony Dove, the fraudulent stowaway, and Robin all unknowingly take on this role in Sunday’s unconscious, as objects he is trying to protect. However, this performance is always fated to end the same way: his actions fail to save them, and he blames himself and his weakness for their loss.

If performance is the throughline between reality and fiction, then Sunday’s “play” in Penacony Grand Theater—the birth of his paradise and near-ascension as an Aeon—is yet another continuation of this eternal show. Sunday’s greatest wish, his infantile wish, is to protect everyone, and Ena’s dream facilitates its fulfillment through fantasy. To realize the dream, Sunday must usurp the power of a master (an Aeon) for himself, and he does so by fusing the Harmony and Order together to create the Embryo of Philosophy, making Xipe and Ena its 'mothers.' But the Embryo’s birth also requires the “death” of its creators, precisely because their power had to be stolen to create the eternal dream’s foundation. In other words, the Embryo must replace its parents so that it may truly become a master like them. Sunday's full performance encompasses both separations between “mother” and child at once: the separation through birth, and the separation through death.

In their Christian interpretation, the Embryo’s tears signify Christ’s empathy for human suffering, but in the psychoanalytic interpretation they suggest the Embryo’s anxiety about its performance. And this anxiety is well-founded, for all of the reasons we’ve discussed: the primordial danger of being born into the world, of emerging from “death” and becoming separate from it, and the threat of permanent object-loss if the Embryo completes the performance as planned. But we should also remember that this anxiety is in reality nothing new for Sunday, because he has already experienced all of these losses first-hand in the past. In other words, the Embryo cries because its performance reminds Sunday of something he’s experienced before, the very memory that he is trying to control—indeed master—through repetition. This memory, and the anxiety, concerns his wish’s original failure to materialize, the trauma of which laid the foundation for each subsequent “performance.” Plainly, it’s about the death of his mother, and his failure to protect her from the Stellaron disaster.

Given how he belabored the importance of his three decisions in his inner world, this may seem like a bit of a stretch. In fact, he doesn’t directly say a word about his mother at all — but that is exactly why I am so suspicious. Instead of acknowledging her with words, her death lingers in his desperate need to control outcomes, his preoccupation with weakness, and his yearning for guidance from a master, something he lost as a child when he needed it most. Perhaps this is part of what motivates him to become that master for everyone else, to replace the parent he lost by “becoming” them.

It’s also not lost on me that Sunday cries during the Stellaron disaster, further suggesting a narrative parallel between the Embryo crying and his past. In that moment, his tears highlight the incongruence between the image Sunday puts forth of himself as Robin’s protector, and the reality that he alone was never able to protect anyone. His mother died, Robin got shot, and suffering followed his decisions despite his kind intentions. From an early age, he had already given up on the possibility of sharing a stage with his sister, and eventually resigned himself to a grim fate as the universe’s lone star. While Gopher Wood’s role in reinforcing his unconscious belief should not be understated, I hesitate to say his poison is truly the belief’s origin.

“The echoes of the memories someone once held of their beloved family. Across the long night, they will accompany him in the past, present, and future.” (Echoes of Faded Dreams story)

What’s more, Sunday tells us that his end goal is not to resurrect Ena, but rather to construct his paradise on Ena’s remains, creating a world without Aeons at all. This infantile fantasy, a world without the “adult” influence of these higher beings, is a metaphor for his search for happiness after the meaningless Stellaron disaster that took his mother away from him, and to recover the innocence he lost with her passing. He seeks to create paradise from destruction, to build a new world on her remains, and become a master of it himself. Both his stage play and his role as the conductor of the paradise’s symphony only further cement this: through his performance, he asserts that he is no longer a passive observer of the disaster, no longer a spectator of his own demise or merely Gopher Wood’s puppet, but an actor and an artist in his own right. By utilizing the Stellaron to create paradise, he hopes to master his weakness.

This symbolism goes crazy. What do you mean the Stellaron is a theater, it shines like the moon, it’s the reason Sunday’s mother died*, and it’s the site where he initiates Third Impact?

And I know, I know all of the Evangelion fans are saying “we fucking knew this already,” and you’re right! Hideaki Anno was also inspired by Freud, among many other psychoanalysts and philosophy giants, and Hoyoverse has never been shy about how much Anno’s work influences their own. It is undeniable that Shinji and Sunday share a character arc as it relates to the loss of their mother, and Sunday is far from the first and certainly not the last Hoyoverse character who will either, but where they differ is in the details of their death wish. In The End of Evangelion (1997), Shinji wishes for a world where he can’t be rejected by others, because there would be no meaningful difference between him and another person if they’re all just LCL soup, while Sunday wishes for a world where the weak never have to face their weakness, and weakness is no longer a “sin”; the outcome of both of these wishes, then, is a world where sin can never be repeated. But this tragedy’s ending was told from the beginning — trying to sever the cycle is the same as repeating it, and shedding one master means gaining another. Rather than preserving life and protecting it from pain and disappointment as he intended, Sunday’s dream world only guarantees its own end.

This is why the Embryo cries. Sunday’s performance is a reenactment of both the first and last severance between his mother and himself—his birth and her death—and the origin of the pain that would eventually justify the eternal dream’s creation.

*I say this with the huge caveat that Penacony lore, Halovian lore, and Sunday + Robin lore, are a bit (okay, very) confusing. It is possible their homeland was destroyed by a different Stellaron. Also, who am I to assume Halovian birth even remotely resembles human birth? I don’t know. Talk about how vague Halovian lore is right now in the version satisfaction survey and maybe we’ll get real answers.

Infinite Sin and the Will to Punishment

Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple. Freud did not believe that this pessimistic interpretation of the death instincts was the full story of the death drive, and this analysis, though fruitful, is full of apparent contradictions as a result of treating it that way. Though it’s not incorrect to assess Sunday’s actions from a self-destructive angle, this alone is an inadequate framework for illuminating the full extent of his hypocrisy. We see glimmers of it in Sunday’s inner world, when he admits the price of attaining his dream—“merely a personal and eternal sacrifice”—and in Penacony Grand Theater, when Himeko points out the fallacy that this could ever truly be a dignified existence for the many living under Sunday’s will. The tension between his willingness for self-sacrifice and desire for total domination is a core conflict of Sunday’s character arc in Penacony. These two aims constantly struggle to overcome one another, and within that struggle lies a truth about the nature of life and the meaning of Penacony’s story.

The seductive promise of Sunday’s paradise belies its reality, which requires the paradise’s conductor to remain awake until the end of time. Sunday minimizes the personal cost of Ena’s dream by portraying himself as a martyr for a noble cause, because to him this solitude truly is a meager price to pay for everyone’s eternal “happiness.” However, Robin is the first to point out that his role in sustaining the dream looks less like a heroic sacrifice than it does eternal punishment:

Robin: It's true that some people are born strong, and others are born weak. If the Trailblaze is the target of heroes, then the Harmony will guarantee that the strong help the weak. Only the people of Penacony themselves can be the saviors of their homeland. Robin: Their path of happiness should be forged by themselves. While I may not be a Nameless, I'm willing to instill courage in all those who need it. Robin: This includes my brother as well. Ena's Dream... is too cruel for him, and everyone else. […] Robin: Brother, you have heard their cries... This is not the paradise they hoped for. "Harmonious Choir" The Great Septimus: Even so, they don't know where they should be heading. That's why... I had to become the lone star in the sky to guide them. Robin: Even if that star... must hang in a perpetual night of solitude? (And On the Eighth Day)

And one does have to wonder: why would Sunday, who has clearly demonstrated his own desire to turn away from the pain of reality, deliver a fantasy world that promises just that to everyone but himself? To begin to unpack this, let’s return to the idea of guilt, which we briefly touched on in the discussion of melancholia.

Before developing his death drive theory, Freud attributed a wish for punishment to dreams and behaviors which, on their surface, contradicted the pleasure principle’s tendency to avoid pain.³¹ These dreams, he argued, represented a masochistic tendency in human nature, where “[pain] for one system [is pleasure] for the other.”³² But Freud’s understanding of masochism changed with Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which raised the possibility that masochism was originally a death instinct that was altered by the life instincts to serve the pleasure principle.³³ He was then able to take up masochism with a newly instructive angle in The Ego and the Id (1923), where he formally introduced not only the term “id” for the realm of the instincts, but also the “super-ego,” an omnipresent and judgmental conscience that defines the ego ideal.³⁴

The super-ego is a representation of the ego’s parents and their teachings, reborn from the ruins of the Oedipus complex and its unfulfilled wishes. The Oedipus complex is named for the ill-fated protagonist of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, who unknowingly murders his father and marries his mother, thereby fulfilling a prophecy he sought to avoid. After he is made aware of his moral failings, he blinds himself in shame and goes into exile from his former kingdom. In The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), Freud describes the Oedipus complex as an early stage of child psychosexual development where the child’s parent of the opposite sex is cast as their first sexual object.³⁵ But this nascent sexual attachment creates a dilemma for the child, because in order to fulfill the Oedipal wish (attaining a “union” with the loved-object), they have to triumph over their rival, the parent of the same-sex. The child then develops an “ambivalent” attachment to their same-sex parent, where the familial love they have for them is complicated by their desire for the other parent.³⁶ However, the child soon realizes that its options to fulfill the Oedipal wish are untenable with reality, and the price of achieving it is severe punishment at the "rival's" hands.³⁷ It then abandons the Oedipal wish by repressing it, instead developing a strong “identification” with the same-sex parent—that is, instead of trying to kill the father to be with the mother, it tries to become like him.³⁸ This identification establishes the ego’s moral framework.

On the left, Sunday crying in his ultimate animation. On the right, a photograph by Albert Greiner of actor Louis Bouwmeester as Oedipus after blinding himself in Oedipus Rex. This shit, as they say, writes itself.

Penacony’s environmental design references the super-ego through its persistent eye motif, which represents surveillance in the sweet dream and introspection in the primal dreamscape. In addition to its psychoanalytic roots, the eye motif in Sunday’s character design both furthers his angelic iconography and visually connects him to Ena, whose eye represents THEIR sovereignty over mortals through the law.

Surveillance is central to any system of government that prioritizes control like the Order does, and the resulting paranoia of such a system encourages rigid adherence to its rules. Likewise, the super-ego watches the ego’s thoughts and actions for signs of transgression and punishes it for every immoral impulse, whether acted on or merely imagined. The threat of punishment is what motivates the ego to enforce the super-ego’s imperatives, repressing impulses that fall outside the sphere of moral acceptability and casting all that is not orderly outside of what comprises it. In Penacony, the analog for the super-ego is most closely found in Gopher Wood, the Dreammaster, who oversaw the sweet dream’s descent into hedonism in order to strengthen his influence and nurture the Stellaron. This is also why he is often embodied as a raven who spies on Penacony’s scenes, acting as Sunday’s “eyes” to maintain control of all the actors.

“Something Unto Death”

It should come as no surprise, then, that the super-ego also plays a crucial role in the eternal show. The super-ego is built on the teachings and morals of the past as embodied by the individual’s parents, and these values guide the ego in the present so that the ideal may be attained in the future; in other words, the super-ego ensures the past’s survival through its repetition in the present so that it becomes one’s future.³⁹ Of course, the super-ego is not literally the ego’s father, but rather a representation of him recreated within the mind.⁴⁰ Perhaps this is why Gopher Wood is able to “speak” through each Oak Family member in the present, despite his body’s immolation in the past — his rules survive in their minds as the supreme source of moral guidance. That, and dream logic.

As both a political and religious fundamentalist leader in the dreamscape, Gopher Wood radiates the “Father” archetype, marking him as an authority not only of Penacony’s civic prosperity, but of righteousness itself. Because of this, he is a surrogate for divinity—for Xipe the Harmony in public, and for Ena the Order in private—capable of judging the ego in "God’s" place. While this relationship to some extent applies to all Oak Family members, it is especially true for Sunday and Robin, for whom Gopher Wood literally plays the role of their adoptive father. For Sunday, as Gopher Wood’s successor in the Oak Family and tool of the Order, this takes on an even greater significance. Their relationship constitutes a faithful representation of the ego and the super-ego, where Sunday is taught by Gopher Wood to uphold the Order’s ideals to be a morally righteous person, and to repress all of his ‘imperfection’:

“As a substitute for a longing for the father, [the super-ego] contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgment which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing” (Freud, 1923, p. 33).⁴¹ “It's said that the master of this pavilion suffers from severe compulsions, but this table clearly shows that he has been cured.” “Unlike a long table, round tables have no sense of priority or opposition, it is very likely that they are an Aeonic candidate for the Path of Harmony” (Conference Round Table investigations in Dewlight Pavillion) [emphasis added].

Killing the “Father”....to be with the “Mother”?

But the super-ego’s standards aren’t truly meant to be achievable for the ego, because the ego’s identification with the parents is defined by its difference from them; to disrupt that identification would be to confuse the ego’s sense of self.⁴² This is yet another manifestation of the ego’s conflict between remaining subservient to its “master,” the super-ego, or overthrowing it to become the new master:

“[The super-ego’s] relation to the ego is not exhausted by the precept: ‘You ought to be like this (like your father).’ It also comprises the prohibition: ‘You may not be like this (like your father)–that is, you may not do all that he does; some things are his prerogative’” (Freud, 1923, p. 30).⁴³

Thus, the ego creates an impossible task for itself. It wants to be seen as a morally righteous subject, and it tries to achieve this by modeling its every thought and action after the “Father.” However, the ego can never truly censor all 'impure' impulses, and for this reason it will always be deserving of punishment; this is the source of the ego’s persistent sense of guilt.⁴⁴ The tension between the super-ego and the ego is what Freud referred to as “moral masochism,”⁴⁵ wherein the ego not only fears the super-ego’s punishment, but also unconsciously desires it. Moral masochists do not care who punishes them and do not limit their suffering to sexual fantasies—instead, “the suffering itself is what matters.”⁴⁶

This desire is the result of several transformations that occur in the death instincts. Earlier, I mentioned that we were working with an incomplete understanding of the death drive—that the purpose of life is to return to death. But life is almost never this frictionless, and neither is instinctual life. In reality, the death instincts all trend toward self-annihilation and restoring the state before life, but the life instincts persist alongside them to preserve life. Taken alone, they are only capable of stagnation; together, as each struggles against the aims of the other, life can evolve and progress into new territory, ‘blazing a trail’ towards new beginnings — “life itself [is] a conflict and compromise between these two trends.”⁴⁷ To make "life" possible, the death instincts are fused with the life instincts, making it difficult if not impossible to observe any one behavior that purely exhibits the death instincts.⁴⁸

One product of these fusions is the sadistic instinct. In The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924), Freud affirms what he had only surmised in Beyond the Pleasure Principle—that sadism is an inversion of a primary masochism, where what was once a death instinct bent on self-annihilation is now a “destructive instinct” fused with Eros that seeks to 'master' others:

“The libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards [...] towards other objects in the external world. The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power” (Freud, 1924a, p. 163).⁴⁹

But a portion of that aggression is retained in the ego, attached to the super-ego (the 'master'), and redirected towards the ego; hence, moral masochism.⁵⁰ In other words, the desire to punish others is reconfigured through the super-ego as a desire to punish oneself.

So what does “punishment” mean here? Freud concludes The Ego and the Id by arguing the fear of punishment is really a fear of losing love and protection from the parents, “Destiny,” or the super-ego. If their love is only garnered through moral behavior, then immorality risks its withdrawal. Without love, the ego is vulnerable to the world and its dangers, and to the possibility of its death—thus, the fear of punishment is really the ego’s fear of death, and consequently, its desire for death:

“The fear of death in melancholia only admits of one explanation: that the ego gives itself up because it feels itself hated and persecuted by the super-ego, instead of loved. To the ego, therefore, living means the same as being loved [...] But when the ego finds itself in an excessive real danger which it believes itself unable to overcome by its own strength [...] it sees itself deserted by all protecting forces and lets itself die” (Freud, 1923, p. 61).⁵¹

Now, let’s consider the origin of Sunday’s melancholy, his failure to protect his mother. This ‘sin’ is at the center of his performance, and it is the pain he keeps repeating over and over again. He repeats this pain because he feels guilty for being too weak to protect his loved ones, and that guilt finds its source in his severe and unforgiving super-ego. Sunday suffers immensely from the responsibility he feels for everyone’s happiness, let alone his loved ones’ safety; it is strongly implied that he has obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that likely wasn’t helped by the Order’s strict rules. But Sunday fundamentally suffers for the same reason that everyone else suffers — because ‘sin’ is infinite for imperfect beings, and no amount of repression can change that. The guilt he feels for this is also infinite. One of the reasons that Sunday volunteers himself as the Order’s sacrificial lamb is because he believes the suffering of others to be of higher importance than his own, certainly, but it is also because of the self-punishment he is promised through the plan’s outcome. In other words, his infinite solitude is a form of justice for his original sin and is, by design, a death sentence.

This leaves us with our final contradiction to untangle. The deceit of Sunday’s dream world is its benevolent veneer, which obscures the violence of its compulsive unity at the expense of individuality. Before his performance in Penacony Grand Theater, Himeko acknowledges Sunday has “a strong conviction and a desire for dominance” that cannot be satisfied through debate alone; he derives far more pleasure from demonstrating his superiority through example. We witnessed that aspect of his personality firsthand when Sunday subjected Aventurine to a trial from the Harmony and branded him with its death sentence, an outcome he took utmost care beforehand to ensure was predetermined. However, when Himeko calls Sunday on the hypocrisy of his martyrdom, he dismisses it and shuts down any further debate:

Sunday: True goodness can only be achieved through faith. Himeko: Allow me to point out that falling into a permanent slumber is not happiness, especially when those people are driven by someone else's will in their sleep. […] Sunday: My sole objective is to create a paradise free from Aeons, where the Order ensures the dignity and happiness of all humanity. A paradise exclusive to us human beings. Himeko: That's not the case. If people are to live with dignity, there must be nothing and no one above them. Himeko: In your so-called paradise, you would be the one reigning supreme. Sunday: Looks like we won't be able to convince each other. Now that our conflict has been destined, let's unveil our Paths and reveal to the universe the true path. (Everything that Rises Must Converge)

You know he enjoyed every second of this. (From Aventurine’s “A Moment Among the Stars - Inherently Unjust Destiny” trailer).

Circumstances aside, good intentions or not, Sunday is not without his own stubborn will that he imposes on others. Acknowledging this neither throws everything we’ve discussed beforehand out the window, nor does it suggest that Sunday’s martyrdom isn’t genuine. It does ask whether emphasizing Sunday’s martyrdom at the expense of his capacity for sadism is possible without disregarding his agency. In other words, Sunday did not create a dream world that excludes himself by design solely to punish himself and move closer to death; the control it offers him over others, though illusory, is just as appealing. Playing “God” in this way is an extreme and, in a sense, ‘aggressive’ expression of his own will to life, an equally fervent wish to surpass his “master,” protect the weak, and forge a new beginning.

In Sunday’s manifestation of Dominicus, we see both the sadistic instinct and the masochistic instinct represented as two sides of the same being. On one side is the confident and domineering Septimus, who, as the maestro of the eternal dream, embodies the sadistic instinct for mastery over others; on the other side is the Embryo of Philosophy, representing the masochistic instinct to return to the mother.

We’ve already discussed the Embryo of Philosophy at length, but Septimus also merits closer attention. In contrast to the Embryo’s fragile, withdrawn posture and emotional vulnerability, Septimus is towering, ostentatious, and grandiose; it makes wide, sweeping gestures that cover the entire stage, carrying itself with an authority that commands the audience’s attention. Indeed, Sunday puts on a voice as Septimus**, lowering his pitch and raising its volume so that it booms with the power he so desperately craves. Even its title, “The Great Septimus,” reads more like a character in a child’s fantasy than a threatening embodiment of Order with the means to suppress autonomy. In other words, Sunday treats Septimus as a persona, an image he wants to project into the world, or a “fictional” version of himself; plainly, it is a manifestation of his ego ideal.

The destruction of this nascent Aeon’s body therefore holds great significance as we move into the conclusion of Sunday’s character arc, at least for his role in Penacony. Dreams exist in the liminal space between reality and imagination, much like the “self” straddles the ideal and the real. Destruction and creation are rules of the universe that can’t be transcended, and the “self” is always in flux; but because of this chaos, there is always a chance to change one’s fate. Septimus represented Sunday’s infantile wish to protect everyone, no matter the cost, and the Embryo of Philosophy signified his desire to remain the same forever, as he was in childhood. Without their armor to protect him from reality, he once again faces the primal fear of life and the inevitability of one’s death. But rather than letting himself die in an ocean of guilt, there’s a chance to write a new ending to his ill-fated play.

**It’s apparent that the boss’s voice has certain effects on it that contribute to this, but I noticed something a little more than that while listening back to some cutscenes that I believe were acting choices on the VA’s part. Also, this judgment is based on the English dub.

TL;DR: someone get this man some serotonin immediately.

That’s it! I really wanted to include an analysis of Sunday’s new outfit here that ties it to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and back to The World as Will and Idea, but I ran out of time. :( It will have to wait for another post. Thank you so much for reading <3

References:

Numbered external citations with page numbers can be found here:

https://pastebin.com/2jXQGTHk

List of Freudian Texts Referenced:

Mourning and Melancholia (1917) Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) The Ego and the Id (1923). Page numbers are given from my hard copy. The Economic Problem of Masochism (1924) The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex (1924) Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Page numbers are given from my hard copy. Inhibitions, Symptoms. Anxiety (1926)

Other Texts Referenced:

The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer. Page numbers are given from my hard copy. Freud (2015) by Jonathan Lear, 2nd edition. Page numbers are given from my hard copy.

Further Reading/Watching:

I highly recommend this article series by solenestuaries of Hyperion Team 3rd on substack. The first is Honkai Impact 3rd focused, the second is a mix of Honkai 3rd Part 2 and Honkai: Star Rail 2.0 focused:

Part 1: What do we talk about when we talk about dreams?

Part 2: “Why does life slumber?”: Dreams, Entropy, and the Many-Worlds of Quantum Mechanics

I am greatly indebted to her analysis for convincing me to go beyond Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Her grasp of psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis is staggering and thought-provoking. Do yourself a favor and read all of her articles!

Destruction as a Cause for Coming Into Being by Sabina Spielrien. The inspiration for Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

Origins and Mysticism of the Death Drive in Psychoanalysis & the Philosophy of Transgression by ESTOERICA. I was wayyy too deep into writing this post by the time I discovered this video, but please for the love of god just watch it and prepare to have your mind blown.

#honkai star rail #hsr #sunday hsr #hsr meta #hsr sunday #penacony #me before 2.2: yeah sunday is cool i guess vs. me now:#this essay is longer than my graduate thesis #long post #character analysis

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slowd1ving · 4 months ago

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✦ IV. WEEP FOR HIM, I BID OF THEE

'Ratio had not been man for a millennium. He had not heard, not seen, not felt, not tasted, nor smelled, for a thousand years. It began with a faint frequency that droned in the very recesses of the stone. A buzz, or a low hum, resonated as though he could hear the very orbitals of electrons whirring in each atom. At this point, the background levels of his simulations had ceased—for this was far more important. For the first time in centuries, the sluggish pulse that still beat in his undead chest had quickened, just a little.' • . * cursed prince ratio + alchemist m reader rough design for minoan fashion ratio here warnings: video game violence, death? kind of? tyranny (are we surprised), male-coded reader (or at least the in-game avatar is) wc: 15.7k

LAMENT OF OUROBOROS MASTERLIST

HONKAI STAR RAIL MASTERLIST

MASTERLIST ・゜・NAVIGATION

On the first day came death, on the second a state of limbo, and on the third came rebirth—in the form of an idyllic meadow and the iron tang of blood far in the distance. Living was a constant skirmish; a fight amidst an amorphous crowd of not just humans, but against the nigh omnipotent tides of nature and its catastrophic ebb and flow. Every breath you took, every minute shiver of your body was all weighed against you: shivering in the frigid chill as you prayed to whatever higher existence there was that you’d live to struggle some more.

Your limbo would not come just yet.

Facing you was a man who teetered on the edge between cowardice and courage. Fear dulled his chromatic eyes, that seemed to only resign themselves to you leaving him far behind while you slipped out of his hold. It would’ve been easy. Wounds littered his arms into vices far too weak to anchor you in place, and the latent hum of the equation you’d failed to complete was still circulating throughout your body like a second respiratory system—endowing you with freakish strength.

Behind you, past the worn bark of the tree that concaved into your flesh, was the behemoth occupying the river that had produced the clay that you’d filled your pail with: now knocked futilely to the ground, mauve seeping into the earth once more. You couldn’t see it, but you could hear the massive volume of water displaced with each shift of its swaying, powerful coils of steel-like muscle. A monstrous frequency tainted the otherwise clean air—piercing right past the inked dermis of your body and painfully twisting against your very veins.

Any longer, and you feared both you and the stranger afore you wouldn’t live much longer.

You considered him, trembling like a fragile leaf while trying desperately not to show it. Despite his acceptance of whatever fate allotted him, he clearly desired to live, whether he knew it or not.

Then, you studied the river. Not visually, but rather you tasted the faint salt on the air—wetting your lips slightly, feeling its sharp brine on the roof of your mouth and then the back of your tongue. The sea was just out to the west, and the river meandered into that: freshwater and seawater mingled in this area, enough to give your clay a slightly unfamiliar consistency. From what you saw, the river was wide; perfect for the foolhardy plan slowly taking root in your mind.

In turn, the stranger studied you too; there was no matching panic in your own pupils, but a more analytical, dispassionate observation that put you into the shoes of a spectator rather than participator in this scenario. Like you didn’t belong there—and you knew it, too.

Casually, you weighed the stick in your hand. It was up to your chest—a solid, decent height—yet in the face of that grinning colossus it was no more than a twig: a toothpick for its gaping maw to use after chowing down on the two of you. But it would do.

◼◼◼◼◼ father thereof ◼◼◼◼ Sun, the mothe◼◼ Moon; wind carried ◼◼◼◼ ◼◼◼◼◼◼ with great sagacity it doth ascend◼ gently from Earth to heaven ◼◼◼◼ again it doth descend to Earth.

The soft song of the tongue of thought wove against your neurons, clearer than ever. But the stranger wedging you betwixt him and the tree was unaware of the crooning placations building a spell in your mind—he could only watch you straighten, more alert than ever.

But not to run. No, your stance looked like you were bracing yourself—not with painfully squeezed-shut eyes and a grimace for your impending doom, but rather with the disposition of a doctor armed with a syringe. There was a clinically straight set of your mouth as you gauged the usability of the primitive weapon you held.

No time to think.

The leviathan was growing impatient; and you could practically hear its webbed crown fan out as it prepared to unleash whatever toxins it had built. But something else, too, was building: a buzzing of ions that were slowly disrupting the vein-twisting frequency emitted by the monster. In a split second decision, you diverted some of the energy tracing its electronic, droning charge back into your body to fortify it.

It was risky. Your plan was risky, and you knew it. Maybe the stranger knew it too, but you had no time to care about his knowledge of weather phenomena.

Thus was this ◼◼◼ world created.

Where the tattoos glowed, your skin began to splinter in incandescent lines; and the sudden flow of charge seeping through fragile dermis of your skin caused your tentative ally to jolt back: stumbling against the tree root and falling to the soft foliage. But still you didn’t use the opportunity to run. Rather, you turned so your back now faced him—light bleeding through the clay- and blood-muddied cream shirt. It was reassuring, which he found to be ludicrous: in this situation especially, where his trust in others had been whittled to nothing.

Fuck, this hurts, you momentarily took a break from the chant—feeling your mouth taste like static charge, like the metallic blood you’d gurgled prior to your death, But this time you weren’t dying—not when you still had to fulfil the self-assigned duty of rest in this life.

Like an arcing javelin, the hands imbued with electrical power jolted the stick into the rest position of projectile motion—primed with an almost-superhuman awareness you never possessed before and probably wouldn’t possess again. Limbo had occurred; a sacrifice of your energy that had now returned back into a far more destructive form.

Above both the clearing and the river churned dark clouds that weren’t here just minutes prior. With them came the pungent scent of ozone, a homage paid to the events that were about to unfold shortly. Your mouth filled with the bitter, ionic remnants and the filthy taint of blood.

“Sa keres?” he hissed out behind you. ‘What are you doing?’ It was a garbled question, tied together only by the fact that it was his mother tongue. Each syllable from the tongue of honey was scattered with panic, inclining into a pitch that almost transcended the range of human hearing. As if to punctuate his poignant hysteria, you could hear him scrambling back as flickers of electricity began their coils down your body—beginning to char the once-soft shirt with pinpricks of a soot black.

You couldn’t reply, too focused on the continued chant in your mind, as well as the hurried assessment you were making of the pattern behind that massive, weaving head. Though it was faint, the remnants of coding were there behind the eternal loop of the monster—shaking its frilled crown, ducking slightly, turning against the banks, and finally coming to a brief pause as the sequence came to a close.

True it is, without falsehood ◼◼◼◼ certain and most true.

You toed a line with your dominant foot behind you, settling into a loose stance that would allow the perfect parabola through the air. Video game mechanics didn’t show the effects of air resistance, thus you surmised you could probably get away with bending the laws of physics a little.

Theoretical, the calculation was—written somewhere on your body, no doubt.

Ha’qal yaqina la◼◼ shaka◼◼ fih.

Its monolithic, blinking eye was lined in your crosshairs: a horrifying sight, burning aureate sliced in half by a slit pupil.

The acrid smell of ozone grew stronger.

With your other hand, you guided the end of the stick to where the pupil would end up after the sequence concluded.

The sinew in your body was beginning to slowly turn into live wires, hyper contracting your muscles as you fought to stay conscious in the torrential current that was threatening to teem from your skin itself. Not yet… Past the thrumming veins and the aorta that throbbed with pain, was the dermis that was pulsating along the etched lines of the formulae—white-hot crackles of electricity were invading the confines of each equation, and your mind was starting to cloud over deliriously.

Not yet…

The monumental crown fanned itself out.

Your hold on the weapon tightened, fingers pressing into the wood grain even as your skin fought to stay together.

Ten seconds. Ten seconds it would take, once the ruffles closed, to act. Missing wasn’t an option: never was, never would be, not if you wanted to get out of this alive. The creature blinked as its head wove this way and that, breath just grazing past the bark of the tree you stood behind—the surrounding foliage withered immediately, and you swallowed thickly.

The power thereof◼ ◼ is perfect.

Your hand no longer shook, but rather thrummed with the coursing circuits lighting up beneath your skin.

“◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼◼,” you murmured, just as the head began rising back to its neutral position. Equivalent exchange.

As above, so below.

Your muscles screamed hoarsely, protesting the quicksilver motion of your arm as it flung the stick with all the borrowed force you’d exchanged. It was so fast it hurt: flesh and sinew practically creaking in how it snapped forward. But there was no time to nurse your wounds and proverbially lick them—there was only space for watching the stick pierce into the pupil.

It was a needle in the face of a camel. For a brief moment, the massive basilisk stood stock-still, and that was when you forged past the aching hum of your body to transition into the second phase of your incantations.

If it be cast upon the Earth◼◼◼◼ it will separate the element of earth from that of fire, the subtle from the gross.

The behemoth shuddered, and rapidly descended into thrashing—attempting futilely to dislodge the firmly-stuck stick from its eye. It convulsed madly, and you prayed it wouldn’t whip its colossal neck towards you while you finished the final few lines.

By now, the water from the river was flooding from the banks as the colossus disturbed the waves in its distress—the bilious smell of its lethal breath soon filled the surroundings, but there was only ozone you tasted. Too much water. Panicked, you realised there was water sloshing around your ankles; by extension, it had soaked the man behind you.

You turned, wobbling slightly in the recitations, gesturing for him to get away with hand signs universal even as you crossed into a different one. The hurriedness of your movements left no time to observe his reaction to your ability: the way the breath caught in his throat; the strange, sharp pounding in his chest; and the tremors his hands carried—far more so than when he’d escaped from that hellhole and accidentally came across the basilisk in its territory.

It was only when you heard the scrambling sounds get more distant that you finally relaxed. Not a minute too soon. You pressed your blood-slicked palms together, feeling more of the red liquid drip from your nose and splash onto your wrist.

Uniteth ◼◼◼◼◼ in itself the Sky and the Earth.

The sky tore itself asunder. It, ‘it’ being the cloud-stained firmament, split in two jagged halves as light descended from the heavens. Or, more accurately, lightning pierced through the delicate hues and straight through the eye your stick had marked.

It was a quick death, if not a painful one. The basilisk contorted and thrashed, until suddenly it didn’t—topping over onto the bank only a dozen or so lengths away from the pair of you. Dead. You might’ve felt a twinge of pity, if it hadn’t been out for blood.

Rolling waves crackled with dying electricity as you scampered back, but your calves still felt the faint crackles of voltage pressing in from the sloshing water that was now ankle-deep around you. Though, in actuality, it may have just been the remnants of the energy you’d exchanged—gone unused in the depths of your muscle and bone.

It didn’t matter, not when the light had faded from the ink on your body and blood bubbled from your dry mouth. Dimly, you registered your metal pail floating on its side just near the blond; and your eyes could only flick feebly upwards to meet his own, widened ones. Your heart pulsed, sticky and metallic on your tongue: and it clouded the words forming on your tongue weakly.

“To… umiro.” The syllables coalesced into a clumsy string in honey tongue; a futile attempt to be reassuring, when your clothes were stained with blood and charred marks and your fists still palpitated with small pulses of electrons. ‘It’s dead’. You staggered, pressing your fingers into the tree you hid behind only minutes prior to this—digging your nails harshly into the bark while you fought to stay upright.

The profile was right—transferring energy into another form was far more efficient than turning it into a material object. But that didn’t do any good when you could feel the unfamiliar energy; you were due to collapse any time soon from the fatigue that had built up—ignoring the energy sacrificed.

Still, you thought drowsily as you fumbled the thin, cold handle of your pail (the clay, miraculously, had stayed half in the bucket), the combat experiment had been extraordinarily useful to gauge how far you could push yourself in a fight. Casually, you wrung out your shirt and the rolled-up bottoms of your trousers, before you glanced at the massive snake one last time. Just like a minute ago, it was still dead.

Whatever. It no longer concerned you; as someone who dropped Lament of Ouroboros an hour into playing, you had no concept of the value of the beast, nor how rare it was. Objectively, it was a fat snake. Perhaps you could take its massive skin for yourself, or find a market for basilisk meat, or even carve its massive teeth into more suitable weapons than the damn stick you’d found to walk with.

Like a cracked pomegranate, the lightning had pierced through its body and spilled its innards onto the banks, while a fang lay chipped nearby.

“Wait!” Ah. In all honesty, you’d forgotten about the blond man who now scrambled to his feet with a stricken, almost-panicked look in his eyes. While he was in the throes of adrenaline, his pinprick pupils had allowed you to observe briefly the vibrant turquoise and magenta rings in his eyes—blue spreading into the purple in a shade you’d never quite seen so bright. Though now, they had dilated back to a healthy size; similarly, his irises were almost completely purple as he held your wrist in a slight daze. You frowned.

“Yes?” A headache began to form.

. 　⁺ ✦

In the end, you took the stranger home.

“Sorry,” he’d murmured with his teeth worrying at his lips, a habit you used to have back on Earth. Maybe that was what had made a shred of pity dampen your wizened old heart, or maybe it was the countless wounds that needed treating as soon as possible. You didn’t know what he was doing all the way in the deep of the Borderlands (you also didn’t particularly care), but it was particularly commendable to stay alive so long when he looked like he sucked at fighting. Perhaps he just had some insane luck, some you could’ve used a life ago.

Though, you thought while flexing your fingers, this life had certainly made up for its shortcomings, present just a few months ago.

His name was Aventurine, he’d told you, eyes searching your face as if you were meant to react. Great, you’d replied, but you hadn’t given him your own in return as you half-carried, half-propped him up: his arm flung over and secured firmly in place by your hand over your shoulders, while your other hand gingerly clasped his side with a metal pail bumping against him. You win some, you lose some, you’d sagely surmised. Judging by the ornate clothing, which still wasn’t given as a convenient window of your system (seriously, you had to do some serious guesswork with that massive snake!), it was evident that he could be someone important—though you lacked both the knowledge and the shits to give to treat him with whatever courtesy he ought to have been owed.

No, his name was actually Kakavasha, he’d amended hastily as he sat down in your bathroom. Maybe it was simply the brief security he felt when, upon seeing the long stairs in your house (and his face becoming a tad more palloured at the sight), you’d gently picked up his too-light body and merely climbed the rest of the way to the large bathroom that gazed out onto the forest and distant horizon. You said nothing. Neither did he, but when you held down his shoulders to wrangle him onto the wooden stool that clattered against cerulean tiles as you dragged it over to the cabinet where you kept medical supplies, he decided to finally break his silence. Alchemy, to your annoyance, could not directly be used to heal—at least not yet, when the finer points of anatomy eluded you.

Cool, you replied once more, in that same impassive tone. For someone you were going to send away in a few business hours, he sure was chatty. Peeling off the long, dark coat that had been stuck to his body by blood, and the subsequent quality shirt (that was damn near unrecognisable with how much it had been torn and bloodied), you missed the faint pink on his face whilst you surveyed him clinically.

A long gash from left pectoral to right clavicle. Bruising around the rib area. Lacerations on his lower abdomen. Bruising on his lower back, as well as many smaller wounds on his upper. Grazing on his arms with a more serious abrasion on his left bicep.

“...No broken bones, right?” It was the first sound from you that hadn’t been monosyllabic. Really, almost dying together made you practically amicable. Buddies, even. These paltry words were the most you’d spoken to anyone in weeks.

“No.” He was quiet as you pressed a ball of gauze soaked in cold spirits against the shallow wounds with nary a hiss. “...Thank you for saving my life.”

“Don’t sweat it. It was going to eat me too,” you returned. Gratitude that wasn’t mere platitudes came rarely. Gratitude was what you should’ve gotten by shouldering your runaway mother’s debts, but that never happened.

His sincere, earnest gaze prickled your skin with discomfort; too used to perfunctory nods and smiles.

“It was the most terrifying sight I’ve seen.” And for a brief moment, you didn’t know who he referred to—that basilisk, or the you so carefully wrapping his arms up with bandages. Your scent was that of blood and saltwater, tearing into his senses with an acuity that only reminded him of how easily you felled that beast.

He didn’t elaborate.

You didn’t ask further.

. 　⁺ ✦

“Are you a spellsword?”

The question was both unprompted and unprecedented. Aventurine peered his gem-like eyes up at you, while you paused in your deft chopping of fragrant onions. You could only stare back. Really, you hadn’t expected him to stay longer than three days at most, but apparently your interpretation of him being a flighty individual was ill-conceived.

This was his second week staying with you, and between his slowly accumulating jabber was the transfer of drachma and minae on a startling level. If you thought Dan Heng had been rich, this guy was on a completely different level—gifting you so much gold that you avoided any semblance of the shade in your clothes for the past few days.

Wearily, you thumbed the jade bead that felt slightly heavier despite the enchantment on it that prevented it from ever growing so. Or maybe it was your body, bone-tired from your self-dubbed ‘apprentice’; you still didn’t know why you dumbly accepted, though the wild look in his sclera that gave him the appearance of chased prey might’ve contributed partly. Although, you didn’t particularly understand what knowledge you were meant to pass on.

“They’re mages who are proficient in physical weaponry,” he clarified when you kept mum—a habit of yours that hadn’t changed even after your death. A prickle of hot oil stung your hands as you swept the root vegetable into a gleaming copper pot. “I thought you might be one. If you could take out a beast that had killed over a dozen of the knight company I’d been travelling with, then you must be a spellsword of the highest calibre.”

A beat passed, in which you considered the weight of a false identity to further mask your own as an alchemist.

“Foremost, I am a sculptor,” you murmured, feeling the drag of the kitchen chair as he padded over to you—an act graceful despite his slouching, which further reinforced your theory of him being an important figure in a far off land. It only puzzled you, to be frank.

Why?

The answer eluded you as you supped with him, as you swilled the wine you’d managed to ferment, as you sunk below the fragrant bubbles in the large porcelain tub upstairs. You didn’t probe into his origins, thus the question of your class was the limit he could ask you, too. In fact, he didn’t even mention learning the ability you’d showcased at the river—rather, he was content in merely basking in the warmth with you and working over the clay you’d salvaged. In fact, sculpting was the only profession he seemingly wanted to learn from you as your apprentice: not the strange magic you possessed, nor the knowledge of chemistry packed tightly into your brain.

“What are you thinking about?”

It became a routine, of sorts. Like some… colourful… lucky… bird, he brought back shiny things he’d ‘chanced’ upon in the forest. A pail of the smoothest clay you’d ever seen. A slab of the most luminescent rock you’d ever had the pleasure of carving. An opalescent bauble, delicately strung upon a thin chain—something you severely doubted that he simply stumbled upon.

You eyed the man who stood by your stool while you worked the clay absentmindedly with your hands. The breeze today was especially pleasant, enough that your mood was light enough to actually reply with far less hesitation than normal.

“Your abnormal luck,” you answered bluntly, gesturing to the large barrel of the soft medium that stood proud in the corner.

“Really?” His voice was low as he leaned down, melodious even as he enunciated the harsher cadence of the common tongue. He was close, too close, enough that you could smell the faint aroma of floral tea on his breath and the expensive scent that lingered at the base of his throat, bound by the transient form of perfumed oil. Your oud, in particular—the one he was adamant on using despite the wide collection you’d purchased with a mere fraction of the drachmae that you now possessed.

You couldn’t move back. If you did, it would be losing a gambit that you didn’t know existed in the first place. Some form of psychological attack, in such an amorphous shape that you could neither identify nor classify it.

“Yes,” you murmured, eyes searching his. Your lump of clay congealed on your hands, misshapen and somewhat forgotten as you mindlessly worked into its soft material.

“Was blessed by the almighty Gai’Athra Triclops at birth with it,” he offered, though that was no more answer to your question than a goose was a swan. You nodded like you knew what that meant, like the very words weren’t slipping away even as he spoke them. “My turn. Where did you learn the tongue of Avdĭn?” Honey-tongue.

[The tongue of honey: a last relic to a land forgotten and swept away by time and sand. Barely any survivors made it out of the extinction of the Sigonian wastelands, and the language remains as mere fragmented shards amongst those who crawled to safety. Though nearing total deterioration, the tongue still serves as a bastion that those of the Avgin will one day regain what they lost.]

A question for a question, though you could feel the pressing weight behind his in a way that was never present in yours. Mechanically, your fingers pressed indentations in the cylinder to make room for eyes—feeling the cheekbones slowly melt into shape, and the strong nose taper beneath your hands.

“I’m sorry,” you murmured. “I woke up two months ago with no memories of this world, and nothing but my name, occupation and New Metis remained in my head.”

“I see.”

The two syllables were embittered. He pulled away, focusing on his task once more with none of the cheer he possessed mere moments ago.

In hindsight, this brief moment could’ve been considered a turning point in your short new life. However, you didn’t and couldn’t know that; rather, your attention was honed on the face taking shape in your palms.

How strange. Furrowing your brow, you cast your gaze to your other attempts you made while growing distracted; all shared a startling similarity that could no longer be ascribed to mere coincidence. A high, arrogant brow cast a thoughtful shadow over erudite eyes, while the rough mouth shaped by the flat end of your wooden carving tool held a displeased sort of heaviness that reminded you of your peers that went into teaching. Even the wavy hair you thought you only briefly shaped held the same uniform sort of curl in the front and back, framing the sides of his face until he bore an uncanny resemblance to his predecessors. Nonetheless, they possessed a nostalgic, dreamlike quality you couldn’t bring to destroy.

Frowning, you set the new face to slumber alongside the rest.

. 　⁺ ✦

The frequency of Aventurine’s forays had begun to augment themselves. He was no less cordial and cheerful than—and no matter how hard you tried, there wasn’t any anger nor coldness that you could detect. Neither did he cease bringing you back something each time, though this time you could feel the desperation to cling to normalcy with him.

His departures felt like thought itself, wrapped neatly in a contemplative air that prompted you to press your lips together and look away.

In the end, you’d gotten used to his presence despite your reticent nature. That was your fault in the first place.

[Princo Kakavasha, of the Avgin bloodline. The only prince that survived the Katica-Avgin Extinction, the one who desperately searches for ◼◼◼◼◼.]

A prince. Charcoal stained your fingers as you absentmindedly sketched designs for new sculptures. It made sense why a prince on the run needed a place to stay, especially with someone strong enough to save his life. It made sense, but it embittered you to the same depth as he.

Staring down at the large sketchpad, you frowned once more as that familiar face took root. Though this time, the soft waves of hair were shaded a sooty black, while a finger-smudged crown of laurels sat neatly in his hair. A dull ache resonated through your mind as you tried to remember where exactly you’d seen those accusatory eyes.

Who is that?

Who are you?

. 　⁺ ✦

“Who is that?”

Another week passed. The man named Kakavasha to some, Aventurine to others, appeared to have been contemplating something very deeply—and his train of thought had noticeably approached its final destination.

He peered over your shoulder now as though there was never any distance between the two of you. In his fragrant, red-stained hands, he carried a basket of foraged fruit: something he only took the effort for when he was in a particularly good mood. The tired glare of your eyes softened at someone you’d fostered a tentative friendship with getting comfortable once more.

“I don’t actually know,” you murmured. Though you took your time sculpting birds, faceless figures and endless ceramics to both sell and use, the image inked into the sketchbook resembled none of those—but rather something your hands felt strong gravitation towards. Rich purple bled into once-ink-black locks, while sanguine lips pulled back in a sharp grimace.

Beautiful. He was beautiful, in every right, but all the media you cast him in never showed him happy.

“Maybe he’s from my past,” you lied. The hands skillfully easing the knots in your upper back paused, and when he spoke again, his cadence was significantly clipped.

“He might not even be real,” he retorted scathingly; startled, you turned to look at his face, but his expression was still pleasant despite his words. “If you want me to, I can check.”

You started at the unexpected thrum of hostility that threaded dangerously through the syllables leaving his lips. Rationally, nothing in this world was a coincidence. If you were somewhat superstitious—carefully treading around cracks in the pavement, praying for a tidbit of luck whenever sugar spilled—in your old life, the magnitude only increased now.

The pounding headache you got whenever you stared down at the man without a name only further attested his significance.

It was only logical to carefully tear the page out from the metal teeth clipping it to the rest, and hand it to someone offering to help. But just as strongly was the undercurrent that bid you to keep it safe: keep it close.

This was a mystery you had to solve yourself.

“It’s fine,” you said instead. “I have a feeling he’s not real, too.”

It was a lie, of course. The man staring up at you from the paper felt a pen-stroke away from breathing—brows carefully poised in a question.

Why did you create me?

. 　⁺ ✦

There was ozone in the air tonight. Through the open window, the draught stirring your fluttering curtains and brushing across your furrowed brow felt more sentient than not.

Tonight, your sleep didn't come easily. Hours of fitful tossing and turning had led you by the hand to a restless slumber—not the dreamless night you were used to, but something far more sinister.

Tonight, you walked past desolate fields under the pitch-tinted sky. The two suns were gone, and the moon appeared to exist only as a mirage. Just like the ever-amorphous path, it could not even keep its spherical shape.

It was the field you woke up in all those months ago, but it no longer seemed as welcoming as it had, nor did it resemble the cradle it did previously.

No end was to be found on the path you trod on. And walk you did, from one end to infinity to the other: never quite knowing why, but treading the beaten road nonetheless. The only justification you could find was the urgent beat of your heart and the taste of iron on your lips as you borderline fled this place—so filled with despair and loneliness that you needed out.

A flash of damson flickered in the edges of your vision. Wonderingly, you looked up, onto to be met by the distant view of the port of the Isle of Thassos. Except, this wasn’t Thassos, and this certainly wasn’t a very good dream either.

It was far too grey. The moon sat lonely in the sky, while you reflected the heavens and were just as lonesome.

Your feet ceased their patter, and the audible crunch of earth beneath your ragged, bare feet was the only sound you had heard so far in your solitary eternity of wandering.

Up above you, the tendrils of a small star blazed into existence; the moon was no longer by itself.

The breath in your throat lodged itself inside, while your eyes traced the path of the two heavenly bodies that ambled their way towards the horizon. When you focused on the line of precarious cliffs kissing the firmament, there was a figure amidst the bleak backdrop. Though as soon as your pupils honed in on the person in their solitude, their garb rippled and you could only watch your company slowly drift away.

“Wait,” you tried to call out, but your syllables warped and scattered in the vacuum between you two.

Nonetheless, you thought you could see a flash of damson as he turned—a pale face framed by rich locks, lips pressed together in displeasure—before he ceased to exist in the intransient space of your mind.

You knew him.

Despite the leagues separating the two of you, you knew him.

. 　⁺ ✦

On the day Aventurine’s luck went to shit, it was a brilliant July day—almost qualified to be completely perfect.

Nobody could sense the slight change in the winds: not the prince himself, nor his teacher. In fact, the lot that Fate sent him today was so similar to all the rest that no one thought to scrutinise the strand further.

Kakavasha had always been lucky. Fortunate. Clinging to life by the skin of his teeth and miraculously, miraculously surviving; even when he let go of the narrow precipice with the express wish of slipping into death.

This is perhaps why it was better to describe that particular July day as a lapse in his destiny, rather than it totally going haywire.

Of course, like all days, he naturally assumed his golden, shining thread of life would remain unbuckled by the pressures he exerted on it. Like a tightrope, he had long gotten used to uncaringly placing his weight on it—one foot after the other. After all, it had never failed him before.

But, alas, today the thread binding him to fortune loosened somewhat.

It started as all days did. He woke up bathed in the comforting scent of your home, yawning as he ambled downstairs to where you already lounged with a thick book and a cup of tea that had notes of bergamot wafting from the rim. He felt refreshed, like he always did—a lack of nightmares plagued him in the sanctuary of your home, where you reigned over it like a god would their temple.

At least, out of all the gods he prayed to, you were the only one who saved him with tangible hands. With fingers stained with mauve clay, and messy, loose clothes that were a far cry from the stiff cuts of the city, you did what a dozen spellswords couldn’t. Save someone, and stay alive yourself.

It weighed on his mind as he saw the long rib bone from the dracon carved into a curved blade that you kept by the fireplace. There was light dust on its gentle slope, yet Kakavasha had never felt more secure even if you barely held the thing. After all, you had felled its source material with nothing more than a branch and strange, brilliant magic which he could never hope to replicate with the Avgin arts.

It was something other.

Perhaps it was his pensiveness that led him deeper into the forest, past the cold thrum of the river and into the Borderlands proper. He’d ventured here enough to know where the miasma liked to frequent: shadowy monsters who still cropped up despite the tales of the glorious Hero those over the South Sea liked to spout.

If there was anyone to herald as the anointed one, it was you.

Soon, the wind turned sharper and saltier, and he could taste the chalk in the air.

The cliffs of the Borderlands.

There was something strange in the atmosphere. As though someone was watching him, but upon turning there was nobody there. Aventurine shook it off, deciding to walk further until he saw pitched tents in the distance, where he could distinctly see workers mining into the sides of the cliffs.

“Hoy,” one greeted in a thicker Southern cadence as he wiped the sweat off his brow. “Fine day we’re having, y’think?”

Aventurine studied the man’s naive, friendly expression. It was clear he was on break, chowing down on some fruit and swilling something he could identify as a sort of cloying mead, threading honey-sweet through the air.

Just to be safe, he’d employed one of the glamour arts, changing the harsh neon of his eyes to a softer brown. He’d done the same when he first stumbled in your vicinity, but he had the feeling none of his enchantments worked around you. There was a pressure greater than his whenever he began the soft weaving of prayer around you, something he didn’t think you were even aware of subconsciously. Like a coil of electrified wire, you were constantly live, overriding any magic and rationality the blond had.

“Y’mining?” His lips pulled as he slipped into the accent with ease, suddenly remembering the ease with which you spoke both common and honey tongue. There was a third language, too, one you sometimes donned when performing your strange arts—the same one that had decimated the dracon on the river that day. No matter how his ears pricked to hear it and try to understand exactly what you said, all he could comprehend was a faint, ozone-like buzz—something that warned him to not go any further.

Thus, he gave up on ever learning this strange magic to help restore the Avgin back to their former glory.

There were times when he deemed it unwise to push his luck, after all.

The worker’s expression convoluted into something sour, then finally into a sort of contemplative wince. “Err, not exactly. Our tools won’t cut the damned stone, but every year the cliff erodes through leaving blocks of itself that we then haul off and sell.”

His brows raised in a perfect picture of surprise. If there was anyone who was up for the challenge, anyone who could work their magic on the immoveable stone, it would probably be you.

“How much?”

“I’m… sorry?” His syllables stumbled over themselves, thinking he had perhaps misheard the blond’s question.

“How much for a block?” Aventurine gazed at the smooth rock cuboids that eclipsed his height, eclipsed even yours.

Dumbly, the man listed a string of numbers that would’ve made your eyes grow wide in disbelief. Don’t do it, Kakavasha, he almost heard you say. He smiled, a small one that nobody ever saw but you. Your words of financial caution were heard loud and clear, but he was already thumbing the edge of his space-sealing charm that hung off his belt.

“Who do I speak to?”

. 　⁺ ✦

How endearing. The man named Kakavasha crouched by his teacher’s slumbering body—on the flagstones by the yard, you snoozed peacefully while your tattoos flickered in and out of existence. Out like a firelamp, he thought, too used to your exhaustion after performing massive conjurings that would’ve taken at least five spellswords and five times more time to realise into the material realm to truly panic like he did the first time.

This time, it was an extension into the lush gardens; there was now an outdoor workshop that merged the clean, open air and the delicate marble architecture. It was circular in shape with a stained glass roof covering all the materials within, which drew intricate patterns on the large block of stone that stood proudly in the centre.

It will be my magnum opus, you’d mused, and he was too fascinated by the excited gleam in your eyes to truly dwell on the two strange words that had followed your winding voice.

Carefully, he brushed the small twigs and flowers off your shoulders, propping your head to rest gently on his legs. Leaning back on his palms, he closed his own eyes to the steady rhythm of your breathing, as you slept the magick off—imagining this as every day for the rest of his miserable life.

It was a pleasant dream.

There were bags under your eyes that belied the nightmares you denied: strange landscapes rolling off the disturbed cloud that seemed to follow you with each step. But in slumber, you looked utterly at peace.

With trepidation, he leaned down: ear to your face to make sure you still breathed.

Don’t leave, he commanded, though he knew if anyone could break the tenuous bonds of his enchantment, you could.

Nevertheless, it didn’t stop him from trying.

. 　⁺ ✦

“Will he succeed? That is the question,” the youthful girl murmured. HER hands fumbled somewhat on HER spindle, as if SHE hadn’t been spinning threads since the very universe woke up in his cradle.

“There is only one fate that hangs in the balance,” the matron insisted. HER face was drawn together in a scowl that marred HER elegant face: brows pinched together, mouth pressed into a thin line. “He must.”

“I bade you to consider the existence of the other fate,” the hag croaked. As always, HER wisdom was not initially clear to the other two women; Clotho’s hands ceased in winding thread onto a spool, whereas Lachesis put down HER gleaming ruler onto HER lap.

“The golden child?” the mother queried. HER voice contained a sharp shock of disbelief. “The boy whose fortune will always be solely his own?”

“I do feel quite bad for the boy. He will never keep who he truly loves.,” Atropos defended. In HER hands, the scissors continued callously severing the marked lines of fate, finally freeing a mortal from the endless suffering life brought.

“Please,” SHE scoffed. “You were the one who got us into this mess in the first place. Don’t get us into another one.”

“Hah,” the hag snapped. “As if you weren’t anxiously waiting for this to play out.”

“This was mere curiosity. Rethreading the tapestry of time is no easy feat, sister,” Lachesis seethed.

“We have never tampered with probability like this,” the youngest added; a distinct trepidation wavered HER syllables.

“We are saving someone innocent from the same limbo we are stuck in,” Atropos replied flatly. Despite HER weathered cheeks and aged voice box, HER words were steadier than they’d ever been. “Don’t forget we judge what is fair and what isn’t.”

Both the maiden and the matron went quiet, with only the sound of thread against thread and the sharp sounds of a metal ruler cutting through air seeping into the endless cosmos.

. 　⁺ ✦

The dreams didn’t cease. Nights spent tossing and turning while that pitch-tinted landscape unfolded afore you became so common that you began sleeping off the exhaustion in your studio: nestled against the cold side of the massive block in the middle, with nothing more than a tarp covering your body,

It was frigid, and uncomfortable, and left you with a profound ache in your bones—but the dreamless cleansed your mind and filled you with nothing but the insatiable urge to draw. That man who’d faced you briefly at your slumber’s conclusion only exacerbated this effect: damson, scarlet and a rich gold flowed from your paint palettes, while your tools collected dust.

Seven days after Kakavasha gifted you the stone, the first rough draft of your sculpture had materialised in your sketchpad. Countless renditions had swept over your hands: page after page was filled with the smudged body of the man in your dreams. Not once had he smiled at you, thus each face appeared troubled with the weight of the world.

The sketches began with the elegant planes of his body—a light step combined with rippled muscle supporting his bones. Then, eyes blinked up at you—irritated at his materialisation on the page, but there was something so entrancing in the cold glare he levelled you with. A strong nose gave his face some structure, extending and tapering into two brows that cast a deep shadow over his eyes. Finally, a mouth stained rich with graphite tensed at your ministrations: pressed together disapprovingly, like he was disgusted by the pixels that made up this very world.

The dreams still hadn’t ceased. You still woke with sweat dampening your face, reaching out for a man who lingered for no longer than a second in the plane of illusion.

But some things had changed. The sketches you pinned to the corkboard above your workbench had grown softer.

He still didn’t smile, but the shadows above his eyes no longer looked as deep, and his mouth was more of a tranquil line than a frown.

Fourteen days after Kakavasha gifted you the stone, the final sketch was ready: a life-size model of the man who eluded you. Just like you in your dreams, his hand reached out to an entity that did not exist in his own plane (you). His forearms gleamed with soft grey bracers, while his body was draped in delicate robes that looked like the ones you woke up in—but older. His garb was not of the glitzy New Metis, though you could see intrinsic similarities in the cut and how the garments were worn. Nestled in the gentle crests of his locks was a half-crown of laurels: something you saw him wearing night after night but couldn’t pinpoint the significance of.

It consumed you.

Every day had been spent in the warmth of the studio that you’d hastily put up just a fortnight ago. From dawn—when Aventurine left for his daily excursions—you pressed your stick of graphite into paper and drew, weaving together the image of a stranger until he meshed into something almost-tangible. Though Aventurine tended to stay out of your business, he had definitely noticed; your apprentice made sure to leave you food at the foot of the studio door, and when you stumbled into the villa at dusk, there was always a pot of food already simmering away in the kitchen.

Your dreams merged into reality; the trance only broke when your palm pressed against the cool stone of what would be your magnum opus.

Cold. It could only really be described as cold, but you swore you could feel something stir within—as though it were the faintest pulse, light as gossamer.

You shook it off, and picked up a chalk stick to mark the preliminary shapes to cut.

Drawing on the stone was easy. Like a child doodling on the sidewalk, the chalk pressed thickly into the ore. Perhaps it hummed beneath your thorough hands, but that was neither here nor there.

After all, you had gotten used to the strange nature of this world.

Tracing your fingers along the grooves, you surveyed the stone wonderingly—how the hell were you supposed to actually begin? Forget the pressure that you felt from who-knew-where; Aventurine had told you that tools couldn’t cut this stone, but the slight sparkle in his eyes indicated his faith in you.

Why?

Why, you contemplated, staring at the deep colours that tentatively traced the limits of what would be your sculpture. Absent-mindedly, you pressed your palm on the circles that marked where his hand would reach out. Like your fingers were reaching past the vacuum of reality into imagination—past the stone and into a state of spaghettification, like you were reaching deeper than his desperate hand and into the black hole of his heart. Something so heavy it couldn’t help but draw others into its reality.

It seemed to shiver slightly.

Running a blunt chisel along the plane of the stone, you weren’t surprised in the least when it neither chipped or cracked. It was not like the yielding marble you’d carved small birds into—cold, but soft when you knew how to work it right. The rock that Aventurine found was immoveable. You knew instinctively that your chisels would be about as powerful as tissue paper against how densely compact the atoms no doubt were in the rock.

Muttering a quick incantation, you could feel the latent flow from your tattoos envelop your chisel and warm your hammer; the tongue of thought strengthened the materials you would use, imbuing them with the abstract of destruction.

Equivalent exchange.

You could feel a faint wave of exhaustion ebb into your bones—not enough to knock you out, but enough to indicate the transfer was successful. Yet, still, the rock didn’t budge; a painful scraping sort of sound traced the air, but there were no other effects.

He was right, you contemplated pensively. Tools really did not work, but from what Kakavasha had relayed, there was a periodic sequence where the cliffside of the Borderlands dropped these massive chunks of stone. It was too strong to be naturally eroded, and neither could the best equipment of this time cut it.

This indicated some other force at work here.

Your chisel hadn’t worked, but there seemed to be some reaction when it was just your bare hands. With careful, trembling fingers, you reached for the stone once more. Something that couldn’t possibly be pliant like your clay, something that hadn’t been cut by the heavy duty cutters you used for your marble busts.

Nothing.

Your hands couldn’t work miracles. By themselves, your hands could not possibly do what a good old hammer and chisel couldn’t.

Nevertheless, there was a pulsing thrum in the material that only intensified the longer you pressed your palms onto it. It was as good a time as any for the system window to show you exactly what this block of stone was made of, but alas, fate wouldn’t be that generous. Disappointed, you drew back to make a note to research the Borderlands cliffs, only to pause.

There, imprinted every-so-faintly into what you thought was a stone impenetrable, were the traces of fingerprints.

. 　⁺ ✦

Deep in the heart of the Borderland colossus that guarded the straits leading to Metis, something was stirring.

Coalescing.

The cliffs had been a symbol of strength for centuries: a last bastion of defence for Metis against the hordes of shadows that still roamed the dense forests. Those interested in geology, a rather niche field for the hub of philosophy and orthodox sciences in the city, had published papers remarking on the unnatural way the monsters seemed to agree on a specific rule when venturing through the Borderlands.

The most primitive of laws, this avoidance was described as: the law of the jungle. Strength won over all—in this case, something was off about the cliffs. Those large blocks that made up the ‘off-cuts’, as geologists liked to put it, could not be analysed in any conventional methods. Smaller samples were impossible to gain, while outside observations yielded little.

Simply put, there was and had been a flow of energy that thrummed like Ourosboros’ heartbeat for the past millennium or so.

And now, that energy was gathering. Not all at once, of course—more like a very large hourglass that only now had been turned. Slowly, but surely, the thing that had laid dormant for so long was waking. It was growing aware of one of its pieces that it had discarded after so many humans had hammered futilely at its walls.

For the first time, one of those pieces had been pushed back by an energy far greater than the energy it constantly pressed outwards. Something so ancient it could not be defeated by mere human tools.

And thus, this energy was slowly being siphoned off. Granule by granule. Piece by piece. Particle by particle, the entity stuck in the Great Wall of the Borderlands was being transferred—for no energy was ever created or destroyed. And particle by particle, that block of stone was gaining more of its fragments.

Bit by bit, the workers at the cliffside witnessed the beginnings of a tidal wave in geology.

Bit by bit, their tools finally sunk into the white stone and embedded inside the giant’s slumbering body.

Bit by bit, the geologists would come and analyse their samples, only to come back with even more questions as it turned out to just be ordinary rock that made up the cliffside—that had formed one of their largest conundrums for the past centuries

The wall of the Borderlands was growing weaker—there was no doubt about this—but in turn, there was something else gathering its strength.

. 　⁺ ✦

Like most of his previous relationships with his fellow humans, Kakavasha noticed the stark difference between others’ fortune and his own. He noticed: the unlucky stumbles he never seemed to come across himself, the fatigue wearing down on someone’s bones, and how one’s actions often seemed to consume the person initiating them.

Of course, it is much easier to identify something from an outside perspective—namely, that his master’s time was so merrily occupied with sculpting that he barely had time to eat. Aventurine did what he could. He chopped onions into neat cubes, made matchsticks out of the root vegetables that you’d planted painstakingly, and carefully made sure you had at least two meals a day. Despite his efforts, however, your passion appeared to be gnawing at you from the inside.

Your misfortune was clear as day to him. The wonder he felt at your ability to indent the rock with your hands (oh-so-human they were) was overshadowed by his worry over the gauntness in your face. You were extraordinary. There was no doubt about that, and he had come to expect it. This misfortune, for it was every sense of the word, was due to him bringing that cursed stone in. As always, he was the cause of despair in others.

But just as humans judged a situation from the outside easily, it was much harder to do so from inside it. Aventurine’s fatal error was in assuming he was absolved from bad luck. After all, his very birth was a golden one; where those born under an ill-omened star languished in despair, he was positively mired in fortune. The name Kakavasha and the adjective blessed could not be easily distinguished; this was a fact he long knew.

Thus, Aventurine was dangerously reckless. As his thoughts of you began overriding the thoughts he had of an ordinary future, he, too, failed to gauge the situation from the inside.

Your passion was not the only all-consuming one.

. 　⁺ ✦

August arrived with no more than a whisper. Silently, it had crept its fingers alongside yours, and you found yourself staring at the abstract shapes that composed your preliminary statue with something akin to wonder.

He was to be your height, but the vast stone made him seem like a colossus. Something that you created, something you actively shaped to remove the damson-hued figure from your recurring dreams. He was to be your height, but already the bearing of the lines was far more regal than yours. In the night, he shone like gold—eyes and skin luminous in the lone moon, yet utterly reproachful when he stared at you. He was to be your height, but you felt cowed whenever you felt the thrum of a pulse in the stone.

You were sure you were imagining it. A side effect of the hum of your tattoos. Perhaps it was merely the reaction of a stone said to be unyielding.

The stone could not possibly be alive.

. 　⁺ ✦

August was once named Hekatombaion, back when the city of New Metis was simply called the centre in the old tongue. The month ushered in a new year: a herald of possibility, a harbinger of all omens. And like all things, it started at the very beginning.

A day to mark all days henceforth—the Day of Silence. Millennia of traditions had homogenised under cultural pressure, creating a day of festivity that absolved one of all suffering and sin from the previous year. It was a chance to cleanse the mind in an environment where thought was always encouraged. Silence. In the modern era, it no longer possessed the same ritualistic heaviness it once did, but nonetheless, it was a day for reflection in Metis.

The first of August.

The beginning.

Germinating in the very centre of the stone was a consciousness that had been sleeping for a millennium, yet one that never fully slipped into slumber. The seconds had turned into minutes as he counted them to prevent himself from losing his mind; into hours as he recounted all the knowledge he had learned from his extensive studies; into days as he slowly compartmentalised his memory into a shelf of segments. Months. Years. Decades. Centuries.

Each day was longer than the next.

He held on by mere fingertips, envisioning the evolution of science and humanity through simulation alone. On the precipice of madness, it was no surprise that his lucid being was slowly becoming binary. Zero. One. Zero.

One.

Ratio’s existence was a computation. Abstract. Immaterial. He was theoretical in all senses, and he had long lost all feeling.

Except, it was the first of August once more, and the seventh prince of Metis had just felt a brief pressure on his incorporeal body. Something so absurd, so inconceivable, that he simply brushed it aside in the endless matrice of his mind. He had lost all sense of physical touch at the very end of his physical life, therefore phantom pain was computed as an anomaly every few decades or so.

There was no other evidence to suggest otherwise, after all. He could not see, so he could not check for any disturbances. He could not hear, so he could not listen for the sounds of hammers or beasts careening into his form. He could not taste or smell, thus any chemical erosion causing the faint twinges was not based on observation.

In any case, the faint pressure that occurred on the first of August was well within his margin of error: a mere blip in the fabric of his binary. Veritas Ratio, once descended from a mad god, carefully chalked it in the vast amphitheatre of his mind as just that: a remnant of madness. A rather contained, controlled sort of insanity, for which there was no other output than input.

On the second day of what was once Hekatombaion, however, the pressure happened again—and this time the entity known as Veritas Ratio noticed. It was not the harsh clang of tools like he’d envisioned in his simulations of civilization; from the final image that replayed of Aha leaving THEIR son in the cliffs, he had documented and painstakingly predicted the wear in the environment. The climate, the evolution of species, the flora—and finally the use humans had for natural resources.

He had imagined that, should he ever regain physical feeling, he would awake to the harsh beating of hammers and chisels.

But this pressure was an anomaly within an anomaly. He wasn’t supposed to feel—and the striking of tools did not follow. Rather, the faint resultant force still held traces of firmness, but it did not have the painful impact of a hammer. This wasn’t enough to draw a conclusion—Ratio had no corporeal form, therefore his evaluation of this force needed more data to shape an analysis.

Thus, the entity Ratio brooded in his imprisonment; for he felt a nagging curiosity for the first time in a millennium at the prospect of data from outside.

On the third day a pattern was bound to emerge—and so it did, in line with the previous two forces he’d felt on his being. Something softer than metal, he noted in the vast bank of his mind. Like a hand that had simply reached past the covalent bonds and into the cliff itself, something was carefully grasping and twisting the energy that made Veritas up. He could feel the slight shifts: could imagine the pull of what he thought was a magnet.

Slowly, the mind of Veritas Ratio was regaining the human sharpness he once prided himself on. Man rather than algorithm.

The simulations became background noise; rather, the entity placed that ticking clock in the forefront of his brain once more. Each second was carefully counted down until he could predict the periods of when he’d feel that pressure. Perhaps it could be earthquakes, he mused. Seismic activity could certainly cause such shifts.

Yet, the wavelengths he registered weren’t the sinusoidal pulses of plates shifting; no, they were irregular, yet filled with a consistency that pointed him to fauna once more rather than flora and the shift of nature.

A monster? Sightings of giant beasts had been ever-so-rare when he was still the seventh prince, but Ratio had included a possible population rise—a smooth exponential if he ever saw one—in his simulations of Ouroboros. He was no fool.

But the longer the ebb and flow of force continued, the less it resembled the territorial marking of a beast.

It resembled a human.

Yes, the hands slowly pulling and pushing at the rock were utterly incomprehensible—but they were just that. Hands. They couldn’t be anything else, not when Ratio could feel each finger gently curl around his incorporeal soul. It was not the sharp strike of a mallet, nor the blunt scrape of a chisel boring into him. Hands: kneading him back into place as if he weren’t rock.

It was a lie to say he believed it, but data was all he could rely on.

. 　⁺ ✦

Metageitnion was the month of thanksgiving, and by the time autumn crept in, Ratio could hear the merest whispers of sound. The tiniest of frequencies—of which he clung to with gratitude, with such desperation it would’ve shamed any greater man.

But Ratio had not been man for a millennium. He had not heard, not seen, not felt, not tasted, nor smelled, for a thousand years.

It began with a faint frequency that droned in the very recesses of the stone. A buzz, or a low hum, resonated as though he could hear the very orbitals of electrons whirring in each atom. At this point, the background levels of his simulations had ceased—for this was far more important.

For the first time in centuries, the sluggish pulse that still beat in his undead chest had quickened, just a little.

With painstaking care, he catalogued every murmur—every brush of something against stone, for the force that periodically shaped his vessel had sound. Everything had sound: its very own natural frequency it followed. And there was sound. By the second week of Metageitnion, Ratio had begun to discern someone’s voice.

(Like all things, it had a beginning.)

Starting off with a mere brush of air, the first words he heard were nonsensical to his bleeding ears. The first sound in a thousand years was song. It was an absurd ditty—a melody of no particular rhyme nor reason. Someone sang for the sake of it while hands prodded and kneaded at him; for by now he could feel what appeared to be a body materialising into existence. A body, just for the prince who had lost his own so long ago.

What appeared to be a rough thumb pulled and pinched at his right lobe, rolling the stone between two pieces of flesh that could not possibly be human, yet were painfully so. It dug a shallow concha into the rock, creating a very preliminary vessel for sound, but a vessel nonetheless.

A human. A human, twisting stone for a whim as though it were clay.

A human, who had given his hearing back—at least, some rudimentary version that seemed to be improving by a few degrees whenever those hands sculpted the rock he resided in.

He found himself filled with anticipation.

Who are you?

. 　⁺ ✦

“Truth, certainty! That in which there is no doubt,” were the first proper words the stranger said to Veritas Ratio. Or, more accurately, those were the first words he’d overheard—slightly deeper, more mellow than the singing the voice had been cheerily repeating. To be even more precise, these weren’t exactly proper words to his half-formed ears either; the inflection of the words was far more different than the common tongue he was familiar with, while the intonation was more of an under-the-breath murmur, followed by a static buzz of something that might’ve been a word yet he could not place it.

If he had autonomy over his limbs, though, he would’ve clung to each word until his fingers bled and his nails formed crescents in each syllable.

No matter how absurd they were.

“...then I told him, are you stupid or what? Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever…”

His voice. Every word, every flux in the language Ratio once knew, every syllable—those were carefully compounded into memory. The common tongue was no longer quite what he knew, but the prince found that each small change was eagerly discovered and rectified in his own simulation of speech.

A hand cautiously worked some stone out of his outstretched arm, and it was warm.

Ratio liked warmth.

The frozen walls that kept his time stagnant and in limbo were melting due to it, after all.

Occasionally, his words made no sense to Ratio. The prince was well-versed in etymology and language, therefore the occasional sentences in what he presumed to be the language of the Avgin (and snippets of something he could barely put his finger on, but sounded familiar), weren’t all that surprising. What was surprising to him, however, were the small sentences that possessed none of the linguistic developments of any language he’d heard before.

“Shit—” followed a muted thump; “Oh, fuck—” followed a small crash, and “What the hell—” seemed to be murmured at times of lull. The sharp, irritated cadence of the syllables suggested to him that the man was using colourful expletives; but the language shared no roots with anything he knew. Though, with each gentle press of fingers across his body, he came to accept the oddities of whoever had given him back two of his senses.

Over the month of Metageitnion, Ratio learned a great many things about the person slowly casting away his prison. The thumb that gently worked his lips was accompanied by a tale of a school in a far off land (what sounded like it, anyway)—the hand that pried his fingers apart, by an anecdote of a laboratory experiment.

A scientist, he carefully noted—one who clearly just viewed the prince as a sculpture he was labouring over. Although this was the case, it was also the case that a murmured sorry graced his ears whenever the man bumped up against him: a dignity afforded to a mere piece of rock that Ratio incredulously observed.

If it were a millennium ago, Ratio would’ve been irritated by the constant, spontaneous chatter. The conversations were utterly one-sided, yet the man appeared accustomed to casually talking about this and that: his apprentice, what he ate for breakfast, the progress of his vegetable garden, the weather. Really, the only useful things he got out of the banal talks were that this was a residence he was sequestered in; far removed from the cliffs of the Borderlands, but in the area nonetheless.

Still, he found that he didn’t dislike the talking as much as he might have a thousand years ago.

. 　⁺ ✦

Boedromion ushered in his sense of smell as the sculptor began working on his face in earnest, smoothing and kneading the material like clay while his words ghosted past Ratio’s stone ears.

He first realised it when the faint scent of perfume oil—a woody scent, with sweet, rich undertones—cut through a rather chalky smell he attributed to his environment. A studio, perhaps, he’d documented; a background slowly materialised in the artist’s wake. The warm smell of sunlight. A breeze, stirring and rustling the clothes of the person before him even more. Birds, chirping and singing with such honesty that he could feel himself ache with bittersweetness, just a little. The aroma of grass and plants.

All these things were sensations he clasped eagerly, each more precious than the last.

Of course, there was the sculptor as well, who still managed to stand out against the vibrant backdrop. Decadence mingled with the powder-fresh scent of clean laundry, but one could tell a lot from the deeper undertones that lingered beneath. He could feel a sleeve flutter against his body, before the warm pulse point of a wrist allowed for a faint profile of clay to seep into the air.

At the very centre, twining with the cool breeze, was a distant ozonic scent. Lightning, he noted, half-wonderingly. It seemed to be a constant—only growing stronger when the sculptor’s hands pressed white-hot into the stone, as though the creator of the body was less human than he’d imagined.

He’s something far wilder, Ratio mused.

A deep, fluctuating energy was concealed with utterly human anecdotes: a crackling core of lightning, with laughter masking the high frequency.

. 　⁺ ✦

Naturally, the emergence of his olfactory sense occurred tangentially to hands granting him a mouth. He could not speak, he could not scream—for his lips were only stone—but he could taste the salt of regret.

Sophos Nous’ words rang in his mind once more.

For all knowledge one must pay equal price.

Alongside the bitterness of his pride was the bite of tangerines that trailed behind with each motion the sculptor made—such a deep scent that he could compartmentalise each and every aspect of its profile. It was sweet, as if it were offsetting the grief that rested heavy on his tongue.

The notes of flavour, of scent only expanded his questions: data that only complicated the picture further.

Who are you?

. 　⁺ ✦

Who are you?

He found himself focused on every single detail of his creator; Ratio’s thoughts centred on unravelling exactly why this person could do the impossible. Every passing comment—every slip in the language he began to identify as the long-lost tongue of thought—started to intricately inscribe the sculptor with various adjectives and titles. Even scholars—revered in his time—struggled with even preliminary translations, as material to access the tongue used by people millennia ago were far and few between.

There was a certain bated breath with which he listened to the man’s fluency in the language; part of the reason that leads were so hard to access came due to the language’s ties to alchemy (though he had only learned this due to his trips to the palace library all those centuries ago).

The question that shaped his thoughts for the past few months became more poignant once more.

Who are you?

Based on the cumulative senses he’d regained, he would be an imbecile to not realise that his sight would be next to return; in due time, he would finally be able to put a face to the entity before him. A method, to try to explain the madness that he had been experiencing.

His investigations on governmental corruption (and indirectly, alchemy) had doomed him to limbo; would alchemy save him, after he already spent his life in hell? Had he finally paid off the price of his knowledge?

Who are you?

Even if he was doomed to hell again, the possibility of getting an answer to his question consumed him more than anything before.

Thus, the once-seventh prince of Metis patiently waited for his creator to give him back his eyes.

He could be patient.

Hadn’t he proved that already?

. 　⁺ ✦

Ratio endured.

He had held out for the past millennium; waiting another three months was nothing in comparison. Still, he found himself itching to claw out of the confines of stone; every brush of warm skin against his, every calloused touch of his skin and tentative shaping of his body ignited in him an impatience uncharacteristic of his previous assumptions about himself.

Managing to stay sane was a miracle, and it allowed him to appreciate the fruit that the month of harvest brought.

Pynopsion had come with the telltale signs of fallen leaves crunching underfoot, with the small imprecations that left lips right before a brush began sweeping the floor, with the scent of warm honey and spices enveloped in milk. When he was a youth, he would’ve felt the warmth of the harvest fires and tasted the pynopsia stew that was traditionally offered in the temples.

But, he found that he didn’t mind the low heat of hands fleshing him out instead: feeling all the effort the sculptor put in beginning to show. Sinew, muscle, skin—all were painstakingly pressed into shape, with stone robes carefully draped on top. In fact, Ratio could feel the once familiar feeling of bracers weighing on his arms—garments he thought he’d never wear again.

The eagerness that was slowly growing into a fervent madness was abated by the continued voice, with the mundane tales of the world outside. He listened to stories of pickling exploits with fascination, of foraging with an apprentice for berries and nuts with enrapturement, and summaries of novels with considerable interest.

Yet he still didn’t know the sculptor’s name.

There were too many things he didn’t know about him, but Ratio could wait.

He could wait, especially as those warm hands had finally begun working on his eyes—smoothing and pressing and pulling eyelids into position, then gently opening them. The first rays of light were in the form of a flickering candle: bound to waver behind the thin layer of stone that made up a tentative iris.

His sight had been the very first thing to start deteriorating: blind for a millennium, with nothing to guide him.

In this sense, perhaps he should’ve been the most accustomed to the loss of his sight, but in other ways it had been the most painful to recreate in his simulations of the world. Forgetting the faces of the old woman who sold him basyniai dripping with honey, the victims of the Elation, and the Sophos had been painful enough—but in his simulations, he could no longer recreate his own face.

He had forgotten what he looked like.

In his recreated worlds, he wandered faceless; no mirrors existed in his imagination, for any reflection would be blurred from the centre, features morphing into others.

Ratio’s anticipation of his returning sight was therefore tainted with dread—mired in a fear that should he see the statue’s reflection, he wouldn’t recognise himself. Or worse, that he’d wrongly accept the image of whoever the sculptor carved him as.

Though, this was forgotten on one Pynopsion evening. The hands chipping away at the irises were particularly gentle and slow that night, and though he could not feel pain, he appreciated the thought nonetheless. There was an orange glow backlighting the shadowy figure in front of him, which only grew clearer as the suns began hiding over the horizon.

The man was silent as he worked, but Ratio didn’t mind that either. He, too, was focused entirely on making out the details registering in his optics.

Ratio’s first view of the world as it was now was of symbols inked into the sculptor’s palm. They gradually focused as his stone retinas adjusted to the world—fixed in shape and place but seeing nonetheless. Lines that ranged in colour glowed incandescent as the sculptor worked, and though Ratio impatiently waited for the hands to move away, he catalogued each symbol as they appeared nonetheless.

Some of the images—like the scales, the geometric progressions, the sequences—he recognised, though he had not seen them decorating human skin ever before. As the sculptor’s wrists moved across his vision, his gaze jumped from the shapes to long strands of formulae written in a language that he could not comprehend: twisting and moving with each movement.

He’d never seen something quite like it. Every time the palms chilled somewhat, the sculptor murmured something in the tongue of thought and the tattoos on his hands glowed white-hot. There was a faint ozonic smell that lingered in the air after every chant—and suddenly, Ratio realised the exact reason that the sculptor was able to break through Aha’s enchantments.

THEY were revered for THEIR powerful sorcery: achieved by crude extractions of alchemists’ powers in an utterly terrifying, amorphous amalgamation of strength. That had partly been why royal supremacy had been so strong; against an omnipotent lord, who could possibly question THEIR rule?

But this was something different. Ratio, in his study of ancient magic and his secret studies on alchemy, recognised these chants for what they were; verbal conversions of energy that perhaps could never have been achieved by anyone else. This was undoubtedly alchemy, though with none of the orthodox tools that alchemists would ever use.

No, his sculptor was using themselves as a medium; a thing utterly forbidden and stupidly reckless. It was a sign-off on one’s soul, effective right after the alchemist got their wish. He’d researched it, seen the effects in back-alley streets and never observed a case of success.

Except for now.

For months, he’d heard him manually transfer energy into presumably his hands—judging by the latent glow of those tattoos—yet nothing had happened. In fact, there had been many times he’d heard a specific phrase uttered in the tongue of thought, before the distinct scent of a food or beverage filled the air. Wish after wish, yet his sculptor was still alive.

This was, perhaps, the most foolish and most practical use of alchemy he’d ever seen.

But more importantly, he knew that it could not be recreated by anyone else. There was none of the malevolent energy that came with a demonic pact; rather, it was a clean sort of buzz that filled his sculptor. It was a chaotic sort of ebb and flow, but clean nonetheless.

Still, the power that had been flowing into him for the past few months had been incomprehensible and completely unique.

He digested the information with a sort of wonder he last felt a millennium ago.

It was not fate, nor him finally paying the ‘price’ for a knowledge too heavy for him to bear. Aha had simply been too powerful, yet this sculptor was breaking him free from the prison he had been sequestered in for a thousand years.

Nous was wrong.

A quiet hum cut through his aghast realisation; he had paid a price that was never fair in the first place.

Just as suddenly, his eyes opened; the hands that had covered his eyes while the sculptor worked on him were lifted, and he could finally see.

A rush of lamplight delayed his vision for a few more brief moments, and he might’ve gritted his teeth if he could move. But when the flare faded, all he could see was his sculptor’s face in front of his own, so close that he could feel his chest rise and fall, each warm beat of his heart, every breath that ghosted his lips.

Ratio stared at him, though he wasn’t quite sure if he wouldn’t have decided to do the same had he been able to look away. He was so close that the prince could count every eyelash, every small crease in the man’s lips.

Before him was a human in the flesh and blood: not some demon like he’d half expected when he hypothesised on who was behind the pressure. A human. The gods had not granted mercy to him, but one of his fellow humans had, albeit by accident.

He found it incredibly ironic: trying to save more people from the Elation and paying the bitter price for it, and being saved by another human in return. An alchemist, nonetheless.

The sculptor didn’t notice his return of vision, it seemed—choosing to work on his under-eye, appearing utterly focused on his work. Ratio took the opportunity to keep watching: though for some strange reason, he felt the faintest agitation crawling under his skin as the man continued his light ministrations, chipping away at the stone with only hands and discarding it at his feet.

How strange.

A face had finally been put to the stranger, to his creator.

He memorised the man’s gait as he swept the room, his height, the exact shade of his eyes while they bored into his own. Down to the way his brows furrowed in concentration, to the wispy strands of tangerine that clung to the ozonic scent of him, he compartmentalised it all—the profile of his sculptor was complete.

An alchemist, gaining victory over Aha.

The thought was absurd, and if he weren’t made of stone, it would’ve brought a smile to his face.

How ridiculous.

. 　⁺ ✦

Perhaps if he hadn’t been committing you to memory, he would’ve noticed the mirror propped up against the window sooner. As it were, he only noticed the shining reflection of the lonely moon in the sky when you left the studio for the night and his vision was forced to tear away from you.

Well, the first thing he noticed about the room, regardless, was the size of it. He was far from his cliff, evidently, if the views of the forest that he faintly saw from the moonlit landscape was anything to go by. A colossal window framed it, and his eyes trailed to the workbench that could potentially give him more clues about you.

What he saw would’ve made him freeze if he weren’t already stone.

Pinned to the board above the dark wooden desk, littering the surfaces of it, and even piling up beside the bench, were sketches upon sketches that made his heart skip a beat.

Every drawing, every small doodle was of the same subject: some in vibrant colour, others in graphite and charcoal. No matter the medium, they were all of the same man. Carefully, he traced the features slowly to not skip over any.

Dark hair, coloured a lustrous damson and cascading down his shoulders in waves. Gold leaves twisted up the side of his head like a crown, and Ratio felt his own head twinge with a familiar sensation. The status of a prince, he thought feverishly. A strong nose was shadowed by proud brows, though the sketches pinned had made the man look softer, ever-so-slightly lowering his eyelids in a pensive look. Those lips in some drawings were a disapproving line, but once more in the pinned drawings, there was the barest hint of a smile on them—

If he could draw breath, the rise and fall of his chest would’ve been extraordinarily shallow: rapid beyond belief.

His focus snapped onto the drawing directly in front of him; a full-body, coloured image that detailed the robes he could feel on his clothes, and the outstretched hand that mirrored his own, reaching one.

Yearning.

Instinctively, Ratio recognised the emotion that the expression portrayed. Though it was regal, there was the clear wistfulness in the slight furrowing of his brows and his stare at the vacuum his hand reached for. But there was something in the drawings that made him uneasy.

It was only when he finally caught a glimpse of the mirror slightly off to the side that he finally realised exactly what it was.

It was a full-length, sturdy mirror: evidently meant for his sculptor to check for consistency in the reflected image. Against all the sketches that drew his attention, his vessel’s own, ghostly reflection hadn’t captured his attention instantly.

There he was: a vision that matched the sketches almost exactly, albeit with a few, less-detailed accessories and robes that marked him as unfinished. He had the same locks, the same strong brow and wistful gaze, the same yearning hand—everything, down to the very lines of his muscle and sinew, were identical as in the drawing.

Unbidden, his mind raced as he compared the blurred image of his simulations to the sketches and his reflection that stared back at him with what now appeared as regret. He searched for the generated figure, yet he could no longer find it.

That was him in the sketches. It was not merely his current vessel, nor was just some vague imagining of somebody.

It was him, before he lost both his body and his mind.

It was him, back when he was still a naive prince mired with hubris.

It was him.

In the studio beneath the lonesome moon, the lonesome statue felt his pulse thrum for the first time in a thousand years.

. 　⁺ ✦

Finally. Wiping sweat from your brow (despite the December chill that had settled in the air, though you couldn’t be surprised with the heat your hands radiated when sculpting), you took a step back to survey your sculpture.

Almost done, you mused. It had been a long five months, but the stone had yielded better than you expected. Shaping the rock had been like shaping buttery clay of the highest quality, not the impure type you’d found at the river. No, this piece of cliff had practically shaped itself into what you drew—an almost exact replica of the man in your dreams, save the few small details you still needed to fix.

Carefully observing the minute folds of cloth draped upon him, the way the muscles rippled over bone and sinew, the sorrowful way his face looked, you concluded that the strange feeling you got when you gazed at him was due to how realistic he looked—down to the slight crease at the left side of his mouth.

Working on him had felt like standing over a live specimen in the lab you worked in. On some days, there had seemed to be a second heartbeat syncopating with your own pulse: one you chalked up to the buzz of energy from the continuous alchemy you’d applied in order to be able to carve that damn stone. Naturally, this was only exacerbated by the intricacy of the statue—in fact, he was so realistic that you often found yourself telling him about your day.

It had become a routine of sorts. He was a statue, thus you told him things you couldn’t tell Aventurine, and never got the chance to regale anyone with in your past life. He was a statue, therefore he couldn’t spill your secrets—though you did keep any confessions of your death to yourself. Those things would stay buried: unacknowledged by even yourself.

You had left such scars far behind.

It was comforting, in some ways, being able to let down your guard in the presence of the statue. It was hard, in front of your apprentice, to keep up the facade of someone ordinary when your house appeared filled with seemingly unlimited resources despite your infrequent trips to the city. He wasn’t stupid—he’d also seen you fell that monster and make a sword out of its ribs—but at the same time, you prayed that he’d stay oblivious to the intricacies that made up your alchemy.

With the statue, you didn’t need to worry about mental incantations, nor the panicked look in his eyes whenever you sat against the wall and closed your eyes like you did for Kakavasha. No, this sort of distance was what you had preferred back in your old life, and were still accustomed to.

You reflected on how bleak this mindset was as you busied yourself sweeping up the offcuts of the statue—half-tidying, half-watching the first snow of December fall. It was… peaceful, you mused, a peace that you’d never truly felt in either life until now. In some ways, this was the perfect paradise that made up for your life before you crossed over.

You were so lost in your thoughts, in fact, that you jolted abruptly from where you leaned on the broom handle upon the sound of Aventurine knocking on the door. Startled, you realised that he hadn’t actually seen the statue in its almost-completed state—though it wasn’t a big deal, right?

“I brought you some spiced wine.” His voice came muffled from behind the towering mahogany doors of the annex studio, as if he were wrapped tightly in a scarf to combat the frigid weather. A smile involuntarily broke out on your face at the thought, and you swore a small draught swept through the studio even before you opened the door.

Really, you could’ve conjured a warm glass of it yourself, but you appreciated the care he treated you with. He’d settled into your life with an ease you didn’t know what to make of; the faint heaviness that traced his eyes whenever the two of you conversed in honey-tongue had faded, though when you could, you bought resources to help him search for his fellow Avgin.

“Avav,” you called back. Coming. Recently, he’d taken to teaching you the finer points of his language—sitting side by side on the couch in front of the fire, his shoulder pressing into yours as he leaned over your notebook, snorting at the mess of your handwriting while you scowled with mild petulance. Though you could read the scripts fine, it was a different story altogether when writing them—that stupid system of yours could not give you better handwriting, it seemed.

It hardly was your fault, though; even in your past life you were required to write quickly and type quickly, and it seemed you’d used the latter more over the course of your career.

Shouldering the door open, you pulled him into the warmth as he stared up at you: taking in the loose work garb that you wore in the studio, the faint smile playing on your face that seemed to simply appear one day and never faded, and finally your hands still resting on his upper arms. Like you’d expected, a scarf had wrapped around his face—but you could still see the flush from the cold air nipping at his cheeks and nose. Or at least, that was what you assumed had caused it.

He was close enough to stare at the tattoos on the hollow of your throat, and he swallowed briefly before handing you the warm mug with hands that shook slightly.

“Nais tuqe,” you murmured, and he mumbled a ‘you’re welcome’ back, wide-eyed. “Come look at the statue.”

His eyes seemed to become more flinty, somewhat, upon shifting his gaze from you to the large sculpture. “It’s… nice.”

“Really?” you teased, swilling down a large mouthful of the wine. The taste of cinnamon and star anise lingered in your mouth beneath the fuller, warm drink. “Just nice, after I spent so long on it?”

“Fine,” he sighed exasperatedly, his lilting accent growing more pronounced with his seeming irritation. Gazing at the statue like it had physically hurt him, he briefly glared at its face before he stared back at you. “You’re extremely skilled, with such exquisite technique in capturing emotion that you’d become a household name even in Metis. You—”

“Stop, stop,” you hid the lower half of your face in your palm, both in the face of such an onslaught, and to hide your laughter. “Such sweet compliments, yet such a bitter voice.”

“You’re neglecting your apprentice. I can’t help but be bitter,” he grimaced, petulant. “Five months, and I see you maybe two hours a day.”

He clung to your arm, and you could only suppress your laughter some more, missing how his eyes glared daggers at the sculpture with almost murderous intent.

“I’ll be done soon,” you reassured him. “I’ll be able to teach you sculpting properly then.”

The techniques in question that you’d used to sculpt the man from your dreams, after all, weren’t possibly applicable by anyone else. Once more, you missed the glare your apprentice levelled at the statue.

“I’m holding you to that,” he smiled, sweet as the strawberry aftertaste of the wine.

You placed the glass down on the bench, ruffling his hair with your free hand affectionately. Really, these past few months had brought you out of your reclusive shell—like some bristly cat that had finally settled in at home.

“Take a break and come see the snow with me,” he insisted, hiding his face in the scarf. “You’re overworking yourself.”

Reluctantly, you looked back to the statue—alone with the snow settling behind him in the background. You’d been planning on finishing off the final details decorating his clothes, and maybe touching up the curls of hair that rippled down his shoulders, but Aventurine wrapped his long fingers around your wrist.

“You’ve been here from dawn till dusk the past few months,” he muttered, unwinding his long scarf from his neck and wrapping it around yours with his free hand. There was a faint bitterness in his voice, offset by the vague traces of pine and oud on the garment. Wordless, you let him tighten it, lingering on the knot on your chest for a few more seconds than necessary. He seemed to be staring carefully at the jade money-bead at your neck with a pensiveness he only got when he was planning on buying something again—but it passed just as quickly, and you wondered if you imagined it. “You have time later today to work on it—it’s almost done, anyway.”

Unbeknownst to you, he’d occupy your time today as he saw fit, until the suns finally entered their slumber beyond the horizon.

Swayed, you allowed the latent heat in your palms to dissipate.

“Fine,” you acceded, dusting your hands off on your working trousers. Once more, you could feel the draught chill the air behind you, but once more you ignored it. It must’ve been the windows not being closed properly.

Moving to the cupboard that functioned as an area to store spare garments, you rummaged around for a clean shirt, trousers and warm boots, as well as a surprisingly supple coat you’d got off that one snake. Casually, you pulled the dusty shirt over your head, missing the surprised cough Aventurine let out. He whirled around with such speed you might’ve been concerned if you’d seen, but you were too busy figuring out the strange fastenings that some of this world’s clothes had.

You did the same with the trousers and shoes, and though Aventurine had turned, he could distinctly hear each piece of clothing hit the floor. He swallowed.

Folding up the work clothes, you settled them on the bench as you picked up the warm mug of wine once again. “Ready.”

“Right,” Aventurine couldn’t seem to hold your gaze. As he held open the door for you, you swore you saw the stone hand that reached in your direction move, just a little.

Upon looking back, however, nothing had changed.

“What’s wrong?” Aventurine asked from your side, forcing your gaze back to his face to answer him.

“Nothing,” you shook your head. Really, maybe it was for the best that you took a short break from the endless sculpting, if you were beginning to hallucinate things.

Statues couldn’t move, right?

. 　⁺ ✦

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