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He shares the truth once.
Her soul is a fragment so dim he can barely see it, a low-burning coal of amber hue, but to his mortal eyes she fain glows. He knows, spread to far-flung stars, Elidibus and Lahabrea still mourn and lick their wounds, and he wonders then, still early-on in their lingering isolation, whether or not they will be able to find peace in these shadowed worlds. This is before they learn how to unmake and remake; before the fall of the Thirteenth, when he can still clear as day see in his minds eye whose soul she perhaps once was.
He tells her what happened. The whole of it, holding her hands as his voice shakes. Tries to think of how to word it, fails to make it ring true to his ears, and yet speaks the words as if they are a rite that will make him once-more alive in a world whole and unsundered.
She looks upon him with pity, and she says she believes him, believes his truth, his life lived before all around him became shades and pale imitations of people and things he remembers whole. She says she believes him, of that bygone city—
But her eyes say she knows he lies.
He never speaks of it again, and his love for her dies when she does, robbed from the world and leaving him to abandon a husk he no longer thinks of as his own.
He does not return to the Thirteenth before it falls.
Elidibus often chastises him for surrounding himself with the shades of the dead. There are only three of them, after all: he should spend time with his fellows, not sulk in mortal flesh. But he finds these shards diverting, if even for a time—he can never forget the world now-lost, but he can find some solace in the vagaries of daily life, in the difficulties of finding food and shelter, in the telling and hearing of tales.
It passes time that otherwise would wear him into dust. These things have never changed. These things are as they once, always, were and will be.
Elidibus insists Emet-Selch should be with his kind, his people—those live and not simply the manifold ghosts—what precious few they can make of the shattered remnants of ten to their three. So he lends his hands in remaking, unmaking and naught more. It eases the ever-present sting of guilt, of you did this.
He naps blinking seconds as a coeurl kitten; spends two hundred years in the body of a sea turtle; becomes a farmer for a lifetime and grows learned in the ways of soil; is reborn as a king and finds his tongue grown sluggish with the vestiges of rulership and how varying their ways; in his next life he relearns that which he has forgotten in dusty decades spent in study in low-lit library rooms.
And then, when it stops being entertaining, as mortals grow old and fade and die in the span of but a single heartbeat, he goes back home.
To Amaurot.
Amaurot is a lichyard, Emet-Selch a lich, and he haunts it, as if his soul as well as his body both were buried there in a lifetime lifetimes ago. It is a shattered remnant, a shard, sundered from the whole of itself, scattered across ten and three reflections, but he can look upon it, walk its streets, and remember what it should be.
It begins small.
A tree, here and there. Fixing the sweep of an arch. Filling in the panel of a window. Even as decades turn to centuries turn to millennia it grows no less clear in his mind, these things he can remember with the unfortunate clarity of a past that is now lost.
When he is worn and weary, he comes back to Amaurot. He adds buildings. He shapes lights. He pulls from his own aether, and when that is not enough, from the aether of the First, and when that is not enough, from the Lifestream. He builds Amaurot’s spires back up to the top of the ocean. He lays paving stones. He creates flowering blossoms lost from the reflections.
Emet-Selch builds himself a coffin. He does it one nail and one board at a time, and whenever he sets another in place, he lays down within it, closes the lid, and finds the shape pleasing to his eye.
When he runs out of moulding and paving; of glass and leaves; of marble and granite and benches and upholstery; when he tires of color and light and wind; when he finds his mind stagnant in its resurrection of a long-lost weave of paper fiber, he turns away from recreating a world in miniature.
He turns to the souls.
(He is a conqueror, he makes an empire mighty enough to span the known world, and creates for himself the first war, an art that he is as gifted in as he once was kindness, and the remnants of his line in the centuries after he gave them the strength to rule tether a god to their sky and end a world.
He is a child, begging for mercy on a street corner and sleeps nights wrapped in naught but his own skin and rags, who finds fury and loathing in those whose eyes he catch, the strikes of their bootheels its own kind of grief.
He is a wife, who bears and raises children, who cradles their fragile forms in her arms, who coos to them, and kisses them, and whispers to them that they will die. That this will die. This will all die. Everything but him.
He is alone.
He is alone.
He is alone.)
Mitron says he is impressed, and Emet-Selch has known Mitron since they were not yet Mitron and also has known Mitron since Mitron was only Mitron and nothing else, and he knows when they are lying.
Mitron is concerned and confused. Mitron is overwhelmed by the enormity of his building.
Mitron is frightened by a world they never knew. By a world they knew once, and now can only taste the scent of. By a world they never will know.
But Mitron adds color. Mitron adds laughter. Mitron adds the strains of music. Mitron adds the folds of robes, and Mitron adds the lattice of iron grillwork, and stands with him in the depths of the grave he has been digging, the graves he has been digging since before the dawn of time, and lends, albeit briefly, a shovel.
He is a flower, and he opens his petals to the sun to feel it shine upon his face. He is a dragon, lives a lifetime that mortals consider without end, and grows tired of the façade. He is a stone. He is a fish. He is a vilekin. He is a soldier and fights in a war that he started when he was a king.
He looks all over, and finds everything wanting.
There are moments, long hot seconds (of decades, centuries) that he steals between mortal breaths. The Amaurot he departs from and the Amaurot he returns to are always different in the smallest of ways. More mundane, less facetious—scents that he had forgotten the shape of, masks that had been long-lost to the endless wear of time, the simple realities of daily existence. Footsteps. Voices.
Together, they have reanimated a corpse.
For all the good it does them.
(And, one day, he finds even that words have come back, the shape and tone of voices as different as the waxing and the waning of Zodiark in the sky, and perhaps, there is still something in Lahabrea other than fury and the cold, growing stain of loneliness that discolors his soul one drop of water at a time as does wear down a stone.)
He becomes emperor of an empire that will fall and fade, leaves it to fail with its only legacy the memories he locks in forgotten stone. He tells its protectors only promises, even when before them hang the unkindest truths.
What if you could live forever?
He asks it of a dying friend, who holds his hand as she chokes on her own blood. He asks it of kings when he comes peddling honest secrets they can believe are naught but lies. He asks it of mothers who hold babes in arms who soon will breathe their last. He asks children at play, their too-short lives not even yet shaped before them.
He asks Midgardsormr, and the great wyrm laughs, Emet-Selch in the guise of the smallest of sparrows. It is not unkind, not in its meaning, but the fury it blinds him with sees Tiamat to generations of torture and agony, and it is a small, unkind reparation, for a small, unkind kinship.
Emet-Selch builds a coffin. His companions dig a grave. His brothers, if they can truly be called that, mark a headstone.
His friends are the long-dead ghosts whose number he wishes he counted among.
Elidibus sneers over it, when he looks across the lovely bones of the ribcage of their childhoods in nascent days. He can only see the lost, not what precious little they have gained or grown. Emet-Selch cannot, either, but he can at least pretend that the mirror of his soul is more than mere reflection.
He watches his people, from days unknown, relive the last loops of their lives. He sits with Hythlodaeus and they laugh over the idea that someday statues will be built to commemorate the Thirteen, and he feels raw and empty over it. He creates visitors wandering lost upon their city streets, and gives them directions, as if he is simply an anonymous mask in the crowd.
He traces the shape of his face, and wonders when it stopped feeling like his face; when he stopped thinking of a mask as him and instead as the idea of him. When his body became flesh and heartbeat and blood and not aether and hope. He murmurs names to himself, and finds that Hades is just another name upon a ledger, another lost Amaurotian, and not some part of himself. Like the skins he wears, it never fits.
When did he become Emet-Selch? When did names from countless lifetimes grow dearer to his soul? When did Hades stop feeling like it belongs to him, and instead, belongs to someone lost?
Hades died in Amaurot.
Emet-Selch will die in Amaurot.
He is no longer sure if there is any difference.
Architect. One who builds.
Emet-Selch has built cities, empires, graves, families. Emet-Selch has built worlds and castles and oceans and corpses.
Angel of Truth, they called him. Architect is to build, yes. In Amaurot, an architect was as much a builder as they were a destroyer, and he has blood on his hands, enough that it should make his mask look pristine in comparison.
It discomforts and reassures him in equal measure.
Gaius Baelsar holds anger like a blade, and his eyes are ageless. The time is gone when Emet-Selch could easily look upon a soul and see the shape of it when whole, and he cannot see who this man once was, before he was sundered—but he can see the potential. He needs no title and no name beyond his own, no afterimage of a faded reflection.
Given half a chance, the world will bow to Gaius Baelsar.
“What would you do,” Solus asks, lazy and enjoying nothing more than the passage of sleep, “If you could live forever?”
Gaius Baelsar is all frantic energy and frenetic fury; he sleeps no longer than three hours at a stretch, he conquers everything he touches, his eyes see further ahead than a mortal should possibly know, and there is a lack of compromise to him that is no gentler in its give than steel.
“Why?” Gaius replies at last, not turning, his dark hair fallen over his face. He is unashamed in his nakedness, hand propped on his hip, revealing the hard lines of his back. Solus hums a noncommittal sound, drapes his hand across the side of his bed.
“Indulge me.”
“I wouldn’t.” He turns to look at Solus, a half-smile on the curve of his lips. “What of you?”
He has been asked before. He has lied before. He has heard answer after answer, all of them lacking, all of them not the right shape.
He has never heard this answer before.
“It,” he says, with words that are strange shapes in his mouth, “Seems like to get lonely.”
Gaius returns to his side, leans over, and kisses him silent.
Solus knows better than to put stock in trust and love, in the bonds of mortality, as ephemeral as breath and heartbeat. Emet-Selch knows better than to risk anything to unlucky fourteen, that long ago did render all for so much naught.
But Gaius Baelsar will have a legion.
(Their would-be hero is just the wrong shade of red; just the right shade of violet; just this side of blue; just that side of green. Almost. So close that were he to think too hard—
He cannot bear to look with anything but his sightless mortal eyes.
How ironic, that he, that which can only tell the truth, should have to learn to lie solely to spite himself.)
In the silence of the tomb of Amaurot, Hythlodaeus tells him: “I fear you will run yourself to death.”
Hythlodaeus should not know the shape of such things.
“Would it were so,” Hades replies, smiling, knowing that he has given too much of himself to the shade of his friend.
Naught but the truth. Always the truth.
Here is the truth: standing in Amaurot's long-empty grave, Emet-Selch dreams of going home.