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It’s Bonnie’s birthday. Their first one.
Even after all of these years, you still remember. You still celebrate.
You haven’t seen them for a long while, now, haven’t seen anyone for a while, now—it’s one of those lulls in which they don’t exist, or they’re still figuring out who they are.
Euanthe is here, though. It’s rare that they’re gone when you need them.
“How are you?” They ask, lanky legs folded on pale stone, not looking at you as they pick through the small collection of jewelry before them. It’s been such a long time, but sometimes it still surprises you—their face, that is. Being so similar to you. “Holding up?”
You breathe in, and out.
“I’ve been worse,” you say instead of anything that could truly measure it, because worse is a nebulous and terrifying concept for you. Those hazy memories from lifetimes ago.
But they look up, and you remember that they aren’t one of those twisted reflections of you. That they’re real and here and alive in a way they weren’t when you first met.
“Now, Nebula, we’ve talked about this,” they answer, voice lilting. Teasing. They know you, and you’ve heard people say it before, but—that’s what this is. The mortifying ordeal of being known.
It scares you still. But with Euanthe, it’s…
You sigh, slumping against the mosaic of the shrine. It’s one of you, you think—or the You that existed before you, the one that both is and isn’t you. Is and isn’t You. They have no eyes, this old You, and you aren’t sure how much of it is accurate, but…
It matters little. The tiles are cool beneath your fingertips, edges smoothed by time and grout. The type of grout used in shrines is more decorative than that spread over mosaics exposed to the elements—it glitters at the right angles. A part of the work itself.
“I miss them,” you mutter, your head knocking into the wall. “I miss… everything we used to be. Everything we were in between.”
“I’m not sure it’s healthy to be grieving all the time,” Euanthe hums, looking up at you. Their pupils are still that bright, bright, slightly mismatched purple, lined through with gold. “Then again, I’m not sure you can exist without, so it’s a moot point.”
You scoff, kicking at their shin. They laugh, throwing a loose grape at you—it bounces off of your cheek, but you manage to snatch it out of the air and pop it into your mouth.
It’s quiet for a while. Just the two of you in an empty shrine, because they’re always closed to the public on these days. Out of respect, or out of grief, or out of some distant sensation you still can’t understand.
Empty. But the air weighs heavy on you regardless. Euanthe does, too, their head falling onto your shoulder.
“Siffrin,” they breathe, and it sounds like a benediction, because it hasn’t been that long since you’ve heard that name peeled from a familiar tongue but it rumbles in your chest like an age.
You are Siffrin the Traveler no longer.
You are the vessel. You are the Weeping God. You are the Eclipse.
When they say Siffrin, they do not mean you. They mean You.
“Euanthe,” You say instead of voicing everything that wails and writhes inside you. Even centuries later, you remain a beast. Even centuries later, when you are more than you ever could have imagined, then. When you are a great, towering, terrifying thing coiled into a delicate shape that encompasses all that you’ve ever wanted to be, but aren’t. But can’t. But won’t, no matter how hard you try.
You are a beast caged within your own chest, and you bite, claw, shred into the flesh around you, ripping and tearing until the monster that you are resembles something like a human.
Euanthe, you say, even as you think Loop, because you will never forget what they are. What they’ve done for you. How, without them, you wouldn’t exist as you are. But their impossible eyes, just as fathomless as yours, always seem to pierce right through you. Sifting the things you don’t say like sand.
You’ve always been uncannily alike, though, so instead of speaking, they lean away to shuffle the miscellaneous offerings they unceremoniously dumped onto the floor.
Euanthe comes up with a bottle of sparkling rosé, and your brows raise at the vineyard on the label.
“Deep pockets,” you comment instead of refusing. They only nod at you, turning the bottle over to read out a list of fruits you don’t know. New variants since your last visit to Vaugarde? Hard to say.
You’re as mortal as you’re going to get right now, and you’re in good company, and you’re not really a fan of alcohol but you need something to think about other than the fact that your friends periodically die and come back as different people while you’re always the same—
And you shouldn’t. If it had anything more than a passing, distant effect on you, you wouldn’t. As it stands… you wave your hand for them to pass the bottle. Your claws will be more effective at getting the cork out. Unfortunately, it seems whoever left the wine neglected to provide a bottle opener.
(For a people with numerous physical deities, they sure tend to forget that a physical form has limitations quite often.)
You’re not sure how old this wine is. You don’t know how often they clear the offerings here. You’re not sure it matters, though, because the wine is expensive and bubbly and you take a swig straight from the bottle with irreverence that doesn’t suit the presumable price tag.
Euanthe snags the wine from your hands, giving you a cheeky wink as they tip it back—and you can’t help but wonder if this is what it’s like, having a sibling. Is this how it feels to be human, to stand alongside someone and know them nearly your whole life?
How long have I known you?
Yet another that you do not voice.
The two of you have far more history than you can remember, but you think it surfaces at moments like this. A fizzy, warm feeling that’s more than the wine you’ve just barely tasted.
It’s sweet, but that doesn’t cut the sourness of the alcohol.
“I miss them,” you say eventually, because it’s all you can say around a mouth of glass and grief and the things that rattle inside you before you swallow them back down. You are made of glass inside, and you have been worn down year after year after year after year, and you are tired, but you are still here.
You are still here.
You are the beast that wanders the battlefield after the war has long ended. You are the thing that mingles with bones and blood and that mangled, broken creature that wails at the sight of you.
It has become something like a companion to you, now, that limping, desolated animal. It has no home here, because the graveyards it frequents have long grown over. This is not a place of war, not as it understands it.
You’ve long wondered what it means, that the face of war is the child left behind in the scramble.
…
Euanthe drains most of the bottle. You’re lost in your thoughts, and that aside, you barely get more than a few mouthfuls in before your tongue rebels. Still, they’re better company than the empty shrine around you, and so you… linger.
You’ve always been good at that.
They slump over your lap, brandishing the empty bottle. Tinted glass with just the faintest purple sheen. It glitters in the light, and their face scrunches as a stray flicker flashes into their eyes.
You can’t stifle the laugh that bubbles up, but you are saved by the jingle of the charms in their hair, and their deeper, raspier voice, yammering on and on about the different forms of evolution and how each of them interact.
It’s a familiar rant, one you’ve heard a hundred times, so you tune it out as you rearrange their loose braids and shimmering beads.
Underneath it, though, you hear the scuff of footsteps—likely one of the shrine keepers coming to check out all of the noise you’re making. All of this, it’s so familiar, but not in the way of looping time.
All of these things, they feel like progress because they’re slightly different every time. It’s raining, or there’s a statue instead of a mosaic, or it’s an event open to the public, or…
Euanthe is a constant. And so are you.
Somehow it’s more comforting than ensnaring.
“Excuse me! You can’t be in here!” The footsteps are clearer, now, and Euanthe lifts their head from your lap, peering at the entryway.
The shrine keeper steps into view, and their face shifts from stern to shocked. It’s not an expression you’ve seen in these circumstances—almost as if they’ve just realized there’s an incredibly sour lemon in their mouth.
They stand there for a moment before finding their voice again. “What are you doing?” Aghast, they start to hurry over, scooping up the bowls the two of you had placed haphazardly on the floor. “Oh, the offerings, I’m going to be in so much trouble…”
You’re… baffled. But it takes little more than a heartbeat for you to understand. You can’t help the laughter bubbling up in your chest.
Maybe the wine is a little more effective than you thought. Or maybe you’re just dizzy with the atmosphere, and the unexpected circumstances, and you—
You can’t help it. They don’t recognize you as you sit in front of a mosaic of Yourself. Sure, the relief is old enough that it doesn’t have eyes at all, but you… the hair, and the hat, and the cloak…
Euanthe you can excuse. They’re always depicted in a cloak. But—
The scathing glare they give you only makes you laugh more.
“What are you doing here? All shrines are closed for the day in respect to Saint Loupetit, not to mention, just what do you think entitles you to the offerings?”
It’s then that Euanthe breaks, too. You do feel a little bad, perhaps, but with luck this will turn into a story they share later on with only a minor amount of embarrassment and mostly amusement instead.
“Bonnie would have hated to see it all go to waste,” you point out, one hand resting on your sibling’s shoulder so they don’t manage to laugh themself off of the altar.
Which is true—they’d complained about it, once, when you were traveling. In one of those rare moments that you were all united once again. You’d needed to explain that the perishables were distributed at the end of the night. They hadn’t grown up Astreian that time, after all… you wonder what it’s like, relearning all of those memories again and again and again.
You’ll never know.
The shrine keeper seems to be building up steam for a proper lecture… at least until they turn their eyes to the mosaic behind you. You catch the beginnings of a prayer for patience, more of a brush against your awareness than anything. And you know the exact moment the realization sinks in, because their eyes go wide and their face pales.
“Oh, stars above, I am so sorry,” they gasp, covering their mouth with both hands.
You can’t help it.
You start giggling again. Euanthe is really not helping—their fingers clutch at your cloak as they cackle into the dense fabric.
“It’s alright,” you say, once you’ve managed to catch your breath. Their face is flushed dark, and you feel a little bit bad for laughing, but… well. “We’re just ferm-essing around,”
Euanthe rolls onto their back specifically to glare at you, and can barely keep your expression straight for a couple moments.
“Okay, that one was pretty bad,” you allow, and your cheeks ache a little bit from smiling so hard, but it’s not really your fault.
They stare at you for a bit longer, thinking so hard you can practically see the evil thoughts brewing in their brain. “I am going to have you executed. Im-mead-iately.”
“That wasn’t even mead! It’s like! Halfway champagne!”
“But it’s myyyy… champagnion.”
“You say my puns are bad but that one doesn’t even make sense—”
And, just barely, you catch a strangled snort and another, more deliberate prayer for strength. Oh, you like this one. That was cheeky.
“In that case, I apologize for the intrusion.” The shrine keeper interrupts before you can retaliate with another pun. They clasp their hands before them, and bow to you before turning to leave.
“Oh! Hang on!” You scramble off of the altar, ignoring Euanthe’s squawk as they go tumbling to the floor. It’s a simple thing, really, pausing to grab the freshest pomegranate from the top of the fruit bowl, and they… step back when you move towards them.
It takes a moment to remember that you’re not the small, strange thing you were at the time of your birth. That you were in the short and long time after.
And you study their features more closely for just a second or two.
They’re Vaugardian, you think. Their hair is pale but not quite darkless, and they lack the subtle gradation of color that island-born Astreians tend to carry.
Not to mention that they’ve yet to flash even a hint of fang at you.
That all aside, it’s easy to pick a foreigner apart by the way they stiffen as they notice something not quite right. Their eyes go slightly wide, and their gaze settles firmly on the anomaly, and so long ago you thought it was a failing of your own that you would see this and think prey, but…
Even before you, as you are now, Astreia had long been a nation of hunters. And this shrine keeper, though more well-adjusted than most outsiders would be, still goes still like a deer at the glint of eyes in the trees.
You’re taller than you used to be, both by choice and a result of all the power that your old paper disguise could never fully house. You’re far from shreds of cloth and Craft, now, a fully-fledged being that edges the line of too inhuman.
Besides. Vessels carry a particular sort of air that simply unsettles people that aren’t your own. Still, you hold out your hand to offer it to them, and do your level best to smile in a way that’s kind.
“Thank you.”
And at their bewildered expression, you have to tamp down a realer smile, one that shows off all of your teeth.
“This shrine is one of the most welcoming I’ve ever felt, even on a day like today. That takes a lot of earnestness and care that cannot be instilled by one person alone—but we can tell, you’re far from an insignificant factor in that equation.”
They’re silent for a moment. Then they step forward, taking it with a quiet reverence that you’ve long since known from this place. And yet, this is more personal, more intimate somehow. The smile on their face is small, and their eyes lowered, fixed only on the pomegranate and the hands that offer it.
“Thank you,” they murmur, finally meeting your eyes for the first time since they’ve realized just what you are. There’s a flash of indigo there, a glimpse of something stranger, and you know that they’ll survive this place.
Perhaps they’ll thrive and make your home all the better for it.
Astreia is a place that loves to be Changed, after all.