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Empty? What does it mean?
A son lies alone: canopy calling. You could walk through the halls tonight, pass his sisters, his brothers, and not one would make a sound. For all that it matters, the Sanctuary might as well be empty. It is the last night in the capital before he leaves it for the lurking shadows, as if you could tell, in the oppressive warm white night of silence.
A son lies alone: his fingers slick with sweat, oil, clutching the great weapon, like he can’t let go, and he’ll always remember what it was like, the need to protect himself in the absence of gods. Furrows rent in black, a stone altar. The grove slides in and out of his memories, & how slippery it is makes an eel out of a leech.
In the golden capital he is haunted. He knows not which is the terror, the home that they as two once left, or the idea of it, marred by time and blood, the idea of that place, of that shame, that only he as one will return to. Dampened drenched hair, the scent of olive oil, thrown back when he looks up. Curled in on himself he thinks that the golden capital is not his home but it is the closest thing that he can lay claim to. She told him once that the last apple from the maidengrove’s trees soured long ago, but She still remembers the taste, and he thinks there’s an echo of it even now in Her mouth. Under Her tongue, bittersweet as blood.
There is silence. Under its heavy veil all Messmer hears is crackling, scorched nothings in their golden heaves, burning offerings in their deathless kingdom for their religion of trees. It’s Her hands who taught him the most. Not what made him what he was, She never made the serpents that roil in waves against his bedroom sheets, but She taught him the most, to make a weapon out of warlike saintly nothingness, to make flame like fury.
It is Her hands wrapped around his spear: She is the warbanner gold that will declare their holy war, spilling across the barren lands like a locust swarm. She is the rhythm of their prayers, She is the lance that killed the lions. Incense burns and censers sway in the Sanctuary.
If the curse is indefensible: he wonders if his worst weakness, beyond that, is a result of himself. She values willpower the most and anyone with a bearing, a clearance, glass eyes could see clearly that all of his was Hers. Prayers are burning but nothing can burn this quiet malignity churning inside him—out of him.
He rises only to his knees; would that the strain of his thighs purge all thought, the half cerebral half visceral ache in his stomach melted down in the forge. He does not lose his grip on the great weapon strewn out before him on the bed of stone, for all its length, like a second, limber body. She forged the spear for him; it is cold like starlight.
It would, or will, tear him up, split him open. Is it what She would want? She does not want for blood to be spilled in wanton ways, only for a cause, a passion, one day, She will have the death of them, the night-stalkers, black fury ticked into the realm of shadow like needles. She presses Her desire into his palm at the same time as a ring, engraved with a memorial of the Erdtree. Her candor: thou shalt sail all seas for what thou seek. His resinous heart filled, thinking to say sooth, speak only truth, saveth it, savor it. His traitorous heart filled with Her love, Her desire.
The spear melds itself to his hand. He uses it in battle-beds, and imagines to himself that it is his mother’s extension, Her arm of aching stone, Her lance of brutal metal. If he did not have to lay with the serpent he can imagine he would have been made for Her ceremonies of ritual, the way Her acolytes worship. His red hands would graft blossoms, a most tender expression of his love for her.
This is not his fate: he only watches when the masses kneel to the voice of Her, repeat Her psalms, hold Her exquisite effigies with trembling hands. What does it matter? He kneels all the same for Her.
The warped and undulating tip of it drags against his chest, sharp enough to leave a heavenly line of red. In synchronized chaos Messmer has only ever felt truly close to death once; and that is pricked skin, feathery goose, gorse and thicket. His mother, the angel hauling him back by his hair; She saved him then, once and forevermore. His life is still in Her hands.
The base of a great weapon can be such a tender thing: convalescence for where the hands touch, overlap, layer, petal by petal. He’s on his knees so he can take everything, all of it, reach light, brilliance. To fall on his sword is to die, but he’s always existed in a kind of living death in any case. Turns it so that the point sinks downwards. Brilliance is his thighs working from the weight of riding something, merciless, desperate. An instrument, a living weapon. He lifts up, down, flame like fury.
A tale as old as time is kings gaining vision through new eyes: he thinks this is what happened to him, everything She gave him. Power is cavernous, the light leading out of a cave. After all, it’s what it did for them: only God knows, only Mother knows, what would have happened to the both of them if they stayed in the place that used to be home.
Satin, white flakes, scraps of snow and memory. Love can be enough to make you bleed, to suffocate you. He will never see Her again but he will chant Her glory into the night sky. God is a city, She is the capital. Once upon a time Her hands, free of Her armor, slipped into his hair, rippling: thou and thine heart will be true, turned north. Running red threads, Her holy lips kissing his forehead, over that veil of tears. Follow the stars. Above all, to thine self, keep thine honor, thine loyalty, thine love.
He wants for Her touch, Her fingers, and imagines She would gore him open, an assault of brilliance. Because She has always been a cross no one but a God could bear.
The tangible becomes myth, becomes legend, like his mother. She has the vastest soul, he thinks, She is his beacon of the dark, the tower on the coast beckoning sailors home. I’ve so much to give, he thinks, is he weeping? Eroticism becomes an inky black ribbon slipped around his throat: he watched the capital pray to Her, knows that there was no one day, when She turned from mother to God, and She simply was.
He remembers no soft breasts or sweet nectar: first and foremost he remembers the sinews, the tawny muscle, curled very small, very tight, skin stretched over bone, where the strength had not yet grown, her throat parched-ash, curled very small, very tight, hiding under the willowy trees, and the purple flowers. Flowers can grow from blood. A grove, a garden, a village can be a place of horror. She hid from the making of saints, the yawning moss draped over her, for fear of something worse than death.
Messmer thinks to himself that all else can be stripped from them but in the marrow of their bones, the hunger will always remain, the kind that comes with being raised in a place like this & that. Mother hasn’t let go of Her weapon since then. Mother remembers what it was like to be hunted like beasts.
Neither has he, for he too remembers.
Here is a question, an answer he does not know, nor does he want to. Was she happier even before him, in that grove? Before the hiding, wine-ground, eaves drenched in crimson and white. Memory flies away on feathery messengers like grains of gold in sand, and that veil of tears has been tucked away like a trinket, a grandmother’s necklace of vine, or an old letter, crisp and burned at the edges. Velvet curtained, and lacelike moss drips over the arms of her statues, a place of shame, and perhaps the flowers will grow if none are trampled.
She simply always was all-mother; this is the story they wish to tell, so he will tell it too, the way his mother’s mother would have — perhaps? The veil whispers in a sigh of mist. He does not know his mother nor grandmother’s language.
He could laugh, he could cry, his hips twisting, brutal, as merciless as anyone has ever said of him, weeping from the want, to be upon Her, to give Her everything, to have himself at Her most lovely of mercies.
The stars shine above him now but will no longer: he leaves to a Hell that he will never leave. A glass gaol he could beat his hands bloody upon. His sun will shine upon him no longer. He has a weapon, has fury, has a flame, but to himself he wonders if he will always be that small child, that son hiding in the maidensgrove against his mother’s night skirts.
Their village was culled like wheat to a scythe, and here is the only time he has heard his mother pray, or weep: her blacksmith’s arm carrying her hammer, that they were the only two things this one could carry, that blood can also run as slick as water, oil & sweat, that they were the only two things this shrine maiden had left. A weapon & a son but both of those things ended up becoming the same in the end. She took a bite of the sourest of apples in that grove, and left it all behind, with her ascension, when she tangled her hands in the breadth of sunlight.
The serpent coiled around her ankles and only now has she been able to untangle them, him from herself, like he could be anything without Her. Mother is the lighthouse but he can’t remember the feeling of her arms around him. Amidst it all he prays like hell that he will be able to see her light from underground. All mother but her children cannot even drag at the hem of her skirt. Between mother and God one eats the other alive.
Fear works at him like moths to delicate lace. Preamble for the future works its way behind his eyes: visions like those of a prophet are the only thing he dreams of. He prays he can prevent it, even if he knows he cannot, the cauldron, the maiden burning, the kingdom in flames.
Worst is the last of all things, and he goes forth to the realm of hellish shade as a prayer that it will prevent the cataclysm, the eclipse of the final sun. She who lies like a cross. He is rendered witness to a crucifixion, God split through by a red lance like Love.
At the end, of course, for how could there not remain anything but the most violent feeling of love: as catastrophic as the brutality, if not more. He shudders, riding out the finality, the sun shattering. Her voice is silken satin concealing the edge.
Disappoint me not, my son of sons. And he will not, would never, son of Eve and the serpents, he will have nothing if not the guts & grace to raise a second coming of Hell itself.