Chapter 233: Filter the Light
Reshaping things was different each time. Putting Sibori back together had been like growing a human shaped tree from a corpse as fertilizer. Reshaping shadow was like pouring water into a glass made of water, too. When he'd changed Heath it was like overlaying two pictures and blending them until they matched.
The broken thrones were a little more spectacular, since there was something fundamentally unstable about them. Fundamentally broken. Not irreparable - nothing and no one was ever irreparable, but they needed more changes.
Yearning into Appreciation had been violent. It was the first change Mercury had made, and it was a little like burning a pile of humans and rotten wood, infested with insects. It was as much burial as it was rebirth, a cremation and a phoenix from the ash. He had taken bits of Yearning and discarded them entirely.
Joy into Happiness was different, it had been like a giant mosaic of stained glass. Piece by piece, tearing it down and bringing it back together. It was about taking the pieces, rearranging them, and some needed to be reshaped. Addiction into longevity.
All that is to say: Reforging Truth was not like any of the other courts he had worked on. Really, it was entirely unlike them, because of course it was. It was similar and it was entirely different, too.
It was, by far, the one that felt easiest yet. Easier than Sibori, or Heath, or Ciarski. Easier than Happiness or Appreciation. Easier than what he had done to Oberon. This was, on one paw, because of the amount of practice he had by now.
On the other paw, Mercury was simply really well suited for the type of modification that Truth needed. It was so wonderfully simple to him, and reshaping someone who was actively invested in the process was also rather useful. Mercury had changed during the walk to the garden of bliss and hope, and he had changed when he walked the labyrinthine halls of horror within that court.
He knew more now.
Some of that knowledge was painful, some was lovely, but in the end, it was all knowledge. And Mercury loved knowing things. Even the horrid knowledge that made his eyes bleed, even the heart-wrenching grief that tore at his insides. All of that was fine for him.
But while the Truth was something he loved, that wasn't true all the time. Some things he would also rather not know. It was fine, because he could guess and that was enough. He breathed.
All of those thoughts mattered. They were important, here, because his perspective was as important as the Truth. Because his opinion mattered. He was doing the reforging, the putting back together, redefining this court, and there were so many moving parts, and yet, they felt so easy to navigate.
Almost on instinct, Mercury made the first change.
Truth moved under his mind like liquid metal. It was a reforging, rather than a remaking, since truth was cracked. So, like Yasashiku had taught him, he turned up the heat until it glowed just right, then struck it with his mind.
Like the chime of a silver bell and the roar of waves on the shore, something changed. Mercury breathed. Knowledge was nice. He loved it, he truly did, but it needed to be kind.
Another chime.
It needed to be helpful.
Another roar.
And it needed to come from the heart. Lies were useless for the truth. It wasn't about turning the blinding light to darkness. Not about turning the sun off and darkening the sky. But, at the same time, it also wasn't about letting people stare into it unabated.
Mercury forged curtains. A filter. From wrought steel made of a hundred thousand horrible bits of knowledge, he forged bars and rings. From ethereal little bits of golden kindness, he wove the drapes. He layered them, one after another, and placed curtains in front of the window.
Woven and forged. He smiled. The truth suddenly wasn't so horribly bright anymore. It wasn't useless, either, still illuminating the world. A filter.
And that filter was kindness. It was use.
The world was alight with gently bright Honesty.
Mercury looked at what he had forged, and was glad to see the cracks gone. The horrid knowledge had been folded and reworked into something stable. An anchor for flimsy, ephemeral kindness. And it all became a lens to distribute that truth, to evaluate what should be told and what shouldn't.
It wasn't absolute, either. Mercury had purposely kept it that way. Those who wanted to see the sun, to bask in unabashed knowledge should be able to. But pulling the veil aside had to be a choice. A real choice, made honestly and wholeheartedly.
For a second or ten, Mercury basked in that light. When he left the imaginary room again, when his paws touched down on the stool and he saw the tea set that was a chessboard, he smiled. Things were so similar, but still slightly different.
The golden garden was a little more dim. A little more wispy and ethereal. The flowers gleamed, some dissolving into sparks of white-gold light and some regrowing. There were weeds there, purple and thick. Doubts and insecurities and hatred. And those weeds bloomed into flowers, too.
They were, after all, part of life.
Mercury took a deep breath. Sickening sweetness had been replaced with a fresh breeze. Truth was more balanced, more measured, more Honest.
"Oh," the new ruler of Honesty said. Then they placed a dozen hands on their face, holding it for a moment, struck between a sob and a laugh. "It could have been so simple."
Then they did sob. "Urrraaaahg! It could have been so simple."
And then, they did laugh. "It… could have been so simple!! Kisusususu!"
A long moment passed, as the ruler of Honesty tossed their head back, holding it with a dozen long limbed hands. They laughed, and laughed, and sobbed, and laughed again. "What an idiot I was. How silly. To not see something so simple."
"Kikisu! Isn't that ironic. To know everything, every horrid Truth, every lovely Truth, and to have it all fall apart, just because some of it scares me. Just because some of it is uncomfortable. Because I wanted others to suffer like me, because I couldn't cope. What a miserable, ironic, hilarious personal failure!"
Mercury waited with a soft smile. They were having a moment. He would give them that.
For a long few minutes, the ruler was torn between laughing and crying. Slowly but surely, though, that sound abated. They became calmer, their heartbeat slower. Mercury thought it made sense that they'd have a heart. Honesty meant speaking from the heart, after all.
Eventually, it slowed down enough. The new ruler took their hands, long limbs that extended from their sides, and took them off their face. For the first time, they faced Mercury, and he deigned to see them.
Mercury looked upon a jester dressed as a victorian gentleman. Truth worse a striped suit, purple and white. It had dozens of arms, spawning from their sides and one another, each one ending in soft, black and white gloves. They wore a jester's hat in bright colours, with bells softly hanging from its tips, jingling when they moved. Their face was a mask, split down the middle, half of it smiling in radiant yellow, the other half a purple frown.
One by one, their hands tapped down on the desk. The bells chimed softly as they calmed down. There were hearts embroidered on the middle of the suit, three of them, constructed to form a larger heart. They pulsed, slowly now, rather than erratically as before.
And, the final detail was a faint veil, hanging from the Jester's hat in front of their face. It was attached to little iron rings on the cap, and fluttered faintly in the wind. Mercury smiled. "You look more comfortable."
"I feel better," they said. The mask remained the same, but Mercury heard it in their voice, saw it on the veil. A faint expression of happiness was drawn onto that soft bit of fabric, the paint made of sunlight.
With a nod, Mercury wrapped his tail around himself. He tilted his head. "Would you like a name?"
The ruler of Honesty nodded. "Yes. I would quite like one."
Mercury hummed for a few seconds. "Then I'll call you Seifes."
At that a small shiver ran down the gentlemanly jester's spine. "How pleasant. I shall wear it with pride," they said.
"I'm glad to hear that," Mercury said. Then, he brought the teacup to his lips, drinking a bit before setting it back on the chessboard. Another few seconds passed, Seifes watching him rather intently.
"What will you do now?" they asked.
"Nothing," Mercury said. "I'm content to sit with you for a little while. As long as you need, even." He looked at the sky. "I think we have plenty of time here."
Seifes nodded, the sunlight on the veil shifting. "Yes. More than enough."
Mercury smiled. "Would you play a round of chess with me, then?"
"Kisususu," Seifes laughed. "I would. But I don't know the rules!"
"That's hilarious," Mercury said.
- - - - - -
Alice had looked into the sky and seen it rip open. The thing Mercury had just repaired buckled and bent and twisted and turned. It stayed together, but it churned, it overlaid with an abyss. Eyes and teeth and tendrils and horror.
Truth had just arrived upon the domain of Happiness and Alice's felt blinding pain.
It was at odds with her
For a few seconds, when Truth descended, Alice experienced that horrid wrongness from which she was hiding.
Alice was a liar. That much was the Truth, because everyone was a liar. Alice was also a hypocrite. How could she ever be selfless, when by doing so, she was being selfish? Growing her Skills.
Was that all that being kind was to her? No, she knew that, it wasn't everything, but it was part of it, wasn't it? The insidious whispers gnawed at her minds, never in absolutes, only in partial, veiled bits of terror.
She was kind because it helped her. That was part of her kindness. And so, she was never selfless. She couldn't be. She was a horrid liar, a coward, someone who hid from the blinding knowledge that at her very core, she was rotten.
But in the face of Truth, there was no hiding. No cowardice. And so, Alice, the coward, who hated herself for the tiny kernels of knowledge, for the hundred thousand tiny betrayals in her life, turned in on herself. The world spun, twisting with red and purple as her eyes bled, and she writhed on the ground.
Each kind deed was suddenly a twisted reach for growth. A tiny reach, but a reach nonetheless. A desperate grab for power. Another selfish grab for freedom, for love.
The world loved her already. The wind, the grass, the oceans and rivers. The earth she walked on, the trees she walked under and each of their leaves, the entire world loved her. And Alice had looked upon it all and it had not been enough for her. Wasn't that right?
Because, deep down, Alice knew that it would never be enough. She would want more, and more, and more. And when each person in the entire fucking world loved her, it would still not be enough. She was insatiable, she was so selfish, she was so desperate for even that tiniest shred of approval that she would lie and delude herself into being kind.
What a pathetic thing. Manipulative and wretched. Forever unsatisfied. Where would she draw the line, where was the boundary of the Kindness? If someone asked her to kill for them, to protect them, would she? Be reduced to nothing but a tool for murder and cruelty?
Alice felt as deep within her chest, that twisting of her heart intensified, became physical. It was trying to turn into an eye rimmed with teeth, to twist and churn into an abyssal maw and eat her up from inside. And she was rapidly losing the heart to fight against it all.
Her eyes bled and she cried, but she couldn't close them, couldn't blink the tears away, despite the horrible pain, she had to see more of the eldritch light. Because it was right, at the end of the day, wasn't it? She wanted it so desperately, and she would manipulate and be a hypocrite to earn any shred of love.
And-
Mercury stepped into the sky.
The heroine blinked. What? For a moment, the blinding light abated, just a little. For a moment, Mercury cast a shadow on her, and the horrible knowledge abated. The cruelty of Truth was tempered.
She looked upon him. Upon the mopaaw. He had worked for a week straight, slept for only a few hours, and now, he already moved again. Alice cried. She was selfish, she was twisted, she just wanted to be loved, and she was so very, very, tragically grateful to be in Mercury's shadow.
And his shadow fell on her like a warm blanket.
- - - - - -
What a fucking monster!
The Truth crashed into Titania like a brutal, terrifying sledgehammer. It was the most terrifying of the broken thrones to her, because it was entirely ruthless. There was no care or consideration, not a moment's hesitation.
It came down and her domain was easily dug into. There was no defending against Truth, because none of it was deemed harmful. There was no way to keep it out as the words dug into her brain.
And it hurt.
Knowing that the realm was dying, that she had contributed to this death. Knowing she could have stopped it if she was just capable enough, if she wasn't such a failure of a queen. That she had played the game of feuds and hatred, that she had undermined her own people.
She had treated them as toys as much as most fae did humans. She had treated each and every one of her subjects as expendable, as an enemy to be eliminated. As someone to beat over the head and outmanoeuvre.
Tragically, she had been amazing at it.
By far the most skilled fae at that horrid dance of lies and betrayal that had ever been borne. She had taken the court of Blossom, dragging it up in her roar of success. She had raised prodigies like Lady Whisperblossom, who were hungry and wickedly skilled.
Step by step, decision by decision, she had dragged herself to the very top of the fae realm. She had loved Oberon, and when he backstabbed her, she had driven him to ruin, too. She had broken Mellow so thoroughly that her once-husband was forever shattered, only his pride to his name.
And now, it was all falling apart. Because of her.
You only knew what you loved once you lost it. And Titania had fought so very hard to own something that could never be owned. It was so pathetic.
Which is why she had had to discard all that pride, all that desire for ownership, and reach out for help. It hurt her, it went against her desires, but it was necessary, and she accepted it. It was why it hurt to see someone else do her work, because she wanted to rule the fae realm, but she was simply not good enough.
Then the shadow descended upon her, and her mind cleared.
What a fucking monster!
Mercury. The hope of the fae realm, the person she was so horribly jealous of and so tragically thankful for, took a step into the sky.
He was such a monster. So relentless. His will was unlike hers. She new she was a higher level, she knew she had more points in the stat, almost certainly. And yet, he was unbroken, not even bent.
She had withstood Truth, she had remained standing despite seeing her twisted self, seeing the horror within her, because she knew she was terrible. But he? He stepped forward. He cast a shadow on her. And with that, he protected her, and stopped the faint itching in her skull, the faint disgust at herself.
What an absolute monster.
How much did it take to be like this? Why could he so easily do things she couldn't? Why couldn't she be like him? How did he take that little mind of his, look at Truth, and stay sane? How did his body not twist in on itself, when he should have broken so long ago?
Titania felt a miserable torrent of emotion. Raging hatred, warm hope, acrid jealousy, and desperate longing. It was a mixture that swirled in her chest as her eyes focussed in on his way across the sky. As he walked up to Truth, so calm and collected.
She wondered, hatefully, hopefully, whether he would return. What would become of the writhing sky? And then, there was a whisper. It was the Truth, after all, that Mercury would return. And it was the Truth that he would remake that writhing sky.
- - - - - -
Alice looked onto the sky, feeling the knowledge of herself abate.
Purple writhing horrors withdrew, curled in on themselves and fell apart. No, that wasn't quite right.
The heroine watched as another reshaping took place. Truth had halfway manifested within Happiness, and Mercury had walked up to it like he was taking a casual stroll. One foot in front of the other, facing the sky, staring at it.
She had watched as tears of blood trailed down, and he clearly was not immune to its terrible effects, but he still walked on. Facing the horrors, step by step.
Strangely, then, was that the shadow he cast seemed to be growing bigger, rather than smaller. If he was getting closer to a burning light source, in the way Truth masqueraded itself, as a writhing, blindingly dark abyss, then his shadow should become smaller.
It didn't.
Each step took Mercury further, and took the edge off the knowledge, off the self hatred. Each step took the world a little closer to an eclipse.
Alice cried, and her tears became water rather than blood. Orin writhed on the ground next to her, fur laced with purple threads, but slowly, the fae stopped shivering. The world grew more dim, and Tivo walked next to them, a cozy sense of comfort wrapping around the two.
The new ruler, back in the form of a kitten, rubbed themselves against Alice's arms, against Orin's face. They were affectionate, sweet, and seemingly entirely unbothered by Alice's inner turmoil.
She breathed a shaky breath in the darkening world, watching as the abyss threw every bit of light at Mercury. Like a laser of horrible knowledge and tormenting truths, it honed in on him, seeking to dismantle and destroy.
And he walked on, into the sky. Unshaken, unbroken, unbent.
When the horrible light of the Truth crashed into him, it splintered. Malevolent knowledge tried to infest him, twist him, and it all broke apart upon contact. Nothing changed him, nothing fazed him and he took step after unyielding step.
Then he vanished.
One second to another, the sky turned to normal. The light of knowledge disappeared, the cruel sun pushed aside. When Mercury had entered Truth, he'd closed the way back. There was no need for one, not for him. He'd find his way if needed, apparently.
Alice waited with bated breath. She was afraid, honestly. So afraid that he might lose himself, that he might shatter. A minute passed, then five.
The sky opened up again. It was pulled aside like a curtain in front of a window, bunching up. Three hands held it aside, each one covered in a white glove. Alice breathed a sigh of relief when Mercury came back through on the other side.
He took a step in the air, then transitioned to free fall for a moment, before catching himself with that strange telekinesis skill of his. Softly, his paws touched down on the grass in front of her.
"Hi all," he said. "Hope you didn't mind the wait too much. I wasn't too long was I?" The rascal had the audacity to grin.
"You surprise me each time," Titania replied through gritted teeth.
Mercury calmly tilted his head at her. "How so?"
Then, suddenly, the unoccupied space next to Mercury was occupied. Someone in a suit and a jester's hat with a veil and entirely too many arms. They were tall, but not monstrously so. Just kind of a little too lanky, too slim. Not, at all, human.
To be fair, what had she expected in the fae realm? Alice breathed, watching the newcomer. They looked around with a sad and a mirthful eye, sunlight painting little smiley's on the veil.
A heartbeat passed, and the stitching on the newcomer's suit pulsed in time with it. That was the part Alice found really rather bizarre. She blinked. A moment later, the jester bowed. "It is my pleasure to meet you all. Tivo of Happiness, heroine Alice, faerie queen Titania of Blossom, and, of course, Orin, yes?"
Alice blinked again, slowly standing up from the grass she had been laying in. How did they know her name? She did not know- it clicked in her head. "No way," she whispered.
"I am Seifes of Honesty," they introduced themselves, bowing again.
"No way," Titania echoed. "Mercury was gone for barely a few minutes."
"Time flows differently in my garden," Seifes said with a soft voice, waving a few of their arms in a sort of cascade. "But, yes. It did not take very long. Only an hour, perhaps two."
At that, Alice genuinely felt a shiver run down her spine. Terrifying. Brilliant. She looked at Mercury, at the smug smile he wore. And she found herself really rather glad to be on his side.