Chapter Text
Paternal
2: received or inherited from one's male parent
lived and worked on his paternal farm
Phodovonds are used to the dark, and to being alone. I was alone once. You will be alone, someday.
Anthelme Phodovond dies in the depths when Aurelie is fourteen, his words passed to him from his father, and his father’s father, and so on and so forth echoing in the deep tunnels, as deep as their general region of the shroud gets. Dark and sinking and falling to pieces. The only way out is up, well, the only way that anyone is likely to survive.
There are many, many tunnels beneath the shroud, down in the dark. These ones, the ones the Phodovonds have slipped through for a good few centuries, only their words surviving long enough to teach the next to bear their names, though - these ones will, someday, cave in so abruptly that nobody in them will survive.
(At the time, Hyacinthe will be five, and in an entirely different flooded tunnel, dandled on his mother’s hip and blissfully unaware of the fate they have avoided through Aurelie’s need to find every tunnel and scrap of their tongue having led her footsteps away from where Phodovonds have been for so long)
You will be alone, someday.
She is. Aurelie has never learned to make friends, not truly; even by the standards in the depths she is a peculiar child, one who asks too many questions and has to be dragged from the parts where it stops being safe for anyone to tread and sings to herself all the time. But being alone is not a problem for her, she tells herself, and so it isn’t. Certainly, it’s lonely. Certainly, the dark is cold and full of terrors.
But she is a Phodovond, and being alone is something Phodovonds are supposed to be good at, so she makes do.
In the dark, if not quite so deep as she was born, Aurelie Phodovond holds an infant Hyacinthe aloft, staring into the violet eyes that do not match her own or any other Phodovond, and smiles fondly. She hasn’t the slightest idea which of her customers had violet eyes. She cannot terribly be inclined to care. Whoever he was, he was gone, and her son was far more worth her care than some stranger passing in the night.
“Phodovonds are used to the dark, and to being alone,” she says, when she parts from the women who had kept her well through the birth, the sleeping weight swaddled against her chest already holding comforting familiarity, “but you are my son, and this I swear, never shall you be alone unless by your own choice. I may have no such power as witches and mages, but I speak it, and may the gods old and new make it so: there will be no son of mine ever truly alone.”
Aurelie Phodovond will only see this become true twice before she leaves both of her boys behind. Once, in that they have each other. Once, in that there is no god nor monster nor force of nature that can stop her from walking alongside them, a shade in a world she’d always feared.
1a: of or relating to a father
He does not give thought to where his eyes come from often; they have the black sclera that run down the Phodovond line, and that is, frankly, more important to him than where the hue of the iris comes from. People love the violet. It’s striking. It is yet another flower in the garden that is the man.
But equally it never escapes him that there is a man behind his eyes that will never be known.
From his mother, he gets the plum of his hair, the black of his sclera. Her fierce love of knowledge, and a tendency to hoard it, scribed on his memory if he cannot have paper and ink - and, these things in short supply in the Gelmorra he knows, much gets scribed on his memory in his childhood.
From his line, greed, greed, although he never understands what is so greedy about a lineage where nobody has made it past their forties in generations. What is so greedy about a people whose names lie, some of their stories forgotten even to their own, beneath stone and soil? Once, before, dark hands were gilded, but that gilt lays long tarnished, those things they clung to as forgotten to history as who they had been themselves. He never questions it, though; he can feel the pulse of the greed in himself, demanding he sink his claws into all he likes and loves and never let go.
And from a man entirely likely to be dead he inherits eyes. In the few moments he gives it much thought, he wonders what else comes from a stranger.
But there is no answer. Only silence.