"Do not mourn the wing unfinished, my Emerald. The storm is yours to weather, but the sky... the sky will always clear for you."
Past
Adric's knee buried in soil, fingers clawing at roots like a feral creature.
willow lace
Monkshood
Wolfsbane
"You're murdering the monkshood," Elias said, his shadow stretching over Aldric like a benediction which shocked adric and started hissing at him. sweat dripping from his brow, streaking dirt across his cheeks.
"It's poisonous," Elias added, crouching beside him with a smile. His apprentice robes pooled neatly around him, untainted by grime. "Unless you're planning to kill someone?"
"Why do you care?" Aldric snarled, dirt caked in his nails. "Go sing hymn or pray somewhere else."
Elias plucked a wilted petal from Aldric's hair, examining it with mild fascination. "You're terrible at gardening."
Aldric froze when Elias's fingertips brushed his temple. A warmth blossomed through his skin—gentle and foreign. The throbbing cut on his cheek, earned from the butcher's backhand for stealing broth, knit itself closed before he could react.
He jerked back. "What are you?"
Elias's smile faltered.
"well people call me the god's most beloved who descend upon this god forsaken world for their sins or someone who has too much of divine energy. Because a Saint doesn't get to choose his gifts or why he gets to be chosen," he said softly. "They bleed through, whether he wills it or not. even if other people looks through you in envy, pity or awe"
Aldric scoffed. "Saint? You? You're just some magician playing pretend."
Saints were myths—holy figures entombed in marble, not a pale boy like Elias with grass stains and dirt under their nails. Yet the proof shone clear in Aldric's newly healed skin.
That night, Aldric lay awake, tracing the now-smooth flesh along his cheek. Freak, he thought bitterly. But the next week, he found himself back in the garden again—and there Elias was, kneeling among the rosemary, humming quietly as if waiting for him.
"You're persistent," Aldric muttered.
"And you're bad at pretending you don't want to talk," Elias said. "Here." He pressed a vial of golden liquid into Aldric's hand. "For your mother. Steep it in tea."
Aldric frowned down at it. "Why? So I'll owe you? You want to feel like some kind of saint?"
Elias tilted his head, sunlight glinting off the crescent charm at his throat—a mark of church ordination. "Because you're not the only one who knows what it's like to ache for someone."
Aldric didn't ask who he meant.
By the second year, Aldric's mother stopped eating. Her skin stretched thin as parchment, translucent over fragile bones. Each breath came shallow, ragged. He'd sold his father's signet ring—the last trace of Beaumont pride—for dreamdaisy tincture. It bought her three hours of rest. No more.
"Aldric," she whispered one evening, her voice a frayed thread. He knelt beside her, dabbing at her brow.
"Don't talk," he muttered. "Save your strength."
Her skeletal hand closed around his wrist. "You mustn't... blame yourself. This sickness—it was written in my fate."
He clenched his teeth. "I'll find something better. The apothecary—"
"No." She smiled faintly. "You've already given me time. That's... a gift greater than any medicine."
Elias began leaving baskets by their door—elderberry jars, comfrey poultices, tonics that shimmered faintly gold.
"Your friend is generous," his mother rasped one dawn, touching the vials with trembling fingers.
Aldric ground the berries too roughly, red staining his palms. "He's not my friend."
Her lips twitched. "Ah. But you... watch him. Like The same way my father once watched my mother."
"Don't," he warned, voice tight.
"It isn't weakness to need someone, Aldric."
But he wouldn't let himself answer.
By next summer, heat smothered Valencrest. Cicadas screamed in the trees. Aldric returned from the apothecary to find her eyes unseeing, her chest still. An unfinished embroidery rested in her lap—a raven, one wing incomplete.
He did not weep. Did not scream. He simply walked to the church, his mother's final breath caught in his lungs like ash.
Elias awaited in the cloister, white lilies braided into his silver hair. He'd grown taller, yet his voice held that same calm gentleness. "Aldric, yo—"
He lunged, seizing Elias's wrists. "Heal her."
Elias froze. "I can't. The dead are beyond even—"
"You're a Saint!" Aldric roared. "You fix broken things like you fixed my wound! Fix her!"
Something in Elias broke with that word.
For the first time, Aldric saw fear in his eyes. His body stiffened, seized—as though pulled upward by invisible strings. The lilies in his hair blackened, and his eyes ignited with molten light, like mana stones charged by lightning.
When he spoke, the voice was no longer his own.
"Scion of darkness, heir to the hollowed throne—
Saint's blood shall sow what ancestors have sown.
By death's decree, by sun's plea,
The darkness you birth will set you free."
Elias collapsed. Aldric caught him, his skin fever-hot, trembling.
"I'm sorry," Elias gasped. "The visions—they burn. But I had to tell you. Before..." His hand, small and shaking, pressed over Aldric's heart. "You're not alone. Not anymore."
Aldric flung him back, shaking with rage. "Liar! You knew. You knew she'd die, and you did nothing!"
Elias's tears hit the stone between them—and sizzled like rain on fire. "Even Saints are pawns, Aldric. God only shows fragments."
"Fragments?" Aldric's laugh was jagged and cruel. "You spout prophecies while people die! What good is your god if it can't save one person?"
"I tried—" Elias began.
"Trying isn't enough!" Aldric snapped, turning away. "You don't get to pretend you care. Not when your hands stay clean."
Present
On the battlefield, Aldric's gauntlet trembled against his ribs. Saint... The word was poison now. Elias's prophecy had strangled him through every decision, every loss since. Yet as the darkness pressed close—whispering, gnawing—he remembered the way Elias had looked at him that day. Human. Frightened. Sincere.
The crows descended. Talons scraped metal. One landed upon his chest, its eyes black like endless pits.
"Heir of the hollowed throne," the shadows hissed. "You were always ours."
Aldric laughed, blood bubbling up his throat. "You're too late."
The crow tilted its head.
"he saw this," he rasped. "She saw you."
The shadows recoiled, and for a heartbeat, Aldric smelled incense—rose and rosemary, faint and holy.
Then the world erupted.
Light—golden, searing, alive—burst from his chest. The crows screeched, disintegrating into ash. The shadow-things writhed and screamed, their forms unraveling in the blaze.
Elias.
Somewhere, above the clamor, a single crow called back in reply. Aldric bared blood-streaked teeth.
"Come on then," he growled through the rising light.
"Let's see if your storm can outrun mine."
"I will end your being."