Archive of Our Own

When Alina Starkov shatters the shadows of his tent with the sun’s own light, Aleksander’s mind draws a curious blank. It’s you, he thinks, as though she’s been a shadow trailing behind him and not the other way around. He’s been a shadow cast by nothing for so long; it’s a paradigm shift. The sun’s angle changing enough to cast him in front of the one he’s been trailing.

He understands the fear in her eyes uncomfortably well. There is always a smallness to fear. The tight voice of a child tossing a coin into a well, wishing to be anyone else. The claustrophobic press of the Fold’s shadows. He knows she is alone in the world almost before he knows anything else about her. She’d given a name, a rank, but these are nothing. A name can be changed, falsified, shed like snake’s skin. A rank can be bought. But the dark behind her eyes…

Eyes are windows, and behind Alina’s he sees a great emptiness. She is not frightened because of the power bursting from her split skin; she is frightened because she is alone with it.

He wishes the tent was empty and the world was empty of Fjerdan and Shu Han assassins who are undoubtedly speeding toward her at this very moment. If there was such a thing as peace, he would take her aside and try to explain that she will never need the emptiness or the fear ever again. But there is no peace and there never will be until she is very different from the girl staring at the light like it’s not part of her.

He sends her off with all speed. Moments after, his own horse is ready for pursuit. He pushes the beast hard on the road, his mind racing along with the rhythmic pound of its hooves.

All his life he’s cradled his hope close, like a candle in the dark. His hope had been nearly as small as his fear. He feels foolish now for the wavering flame. At last the sun has risen; he can set his candle aside. What fool would compare a candle with the sun?

Aleksander likes her. He’d loved her since the first moment he’d suspected that one day she would exist, but now, looking into her eyes, watching her deftly manage her own fears, and blaze brightly despite the shadows of doubt, of court intrigue, of the Apparat’s clinging, crafty devotion, he discovers that he likes the Sun Summoner as well.

She is clever and kind, and she has suffered enough that when she looks at him with compassion, he sees a measure of real understanding. She doesn’t know—can’t know, yet—what it is to lose everything to the slow march of time, but she does know what it means to lose everyone you love. To have nothing.

She is light is every way. It’s harder to face his complement and his opposite than he’d imagined. After all, light is revelatory; shadows hide everything. Even grief, even emptiness. Drench any space in darkness and it teems with possibility. Anything could lurk in a dark room. But illuminate it, and all that’s left is the truth. There are times, when she looks hard at him, or flashes a tentative smile, or grasps his wrist and surrounds them both with the most beautiful golden light, that he feels a terrible emptiness.

It was her shadow he loved all this time. The mere suggestion of what she might be, cast by the shape of his own longing. How he’d ached to meet the Sun Summoner.

Now he’s met her, and the ache only intensifies.

He sits under the stars at night and wonders about the tales he’s heard from priests and Durasts alike of the great dark emptiness of the universe. There are places, some say, where the darkness is so great it consumes all the light it touches. He wonders about such stories. In his experience, shadows always flee from even the weakest glow. He stares at the pinpoint glow of the stars and the vast empty black between them. He wonders whether Alina turns up her gaze too.

What is infinite? He asks himself in the dark, faithfully parroting half an old catechism.

Under the stars, he hopes.

Alina surprises him. Her kiss is sweet, but not at all uncertain. He surprises himself when the kiss distracts him for hours afterward, a persistent itch in the back of his mind. He has no peace until they’re alone again and she’s back in his arms.

He feels his own desperation echoed in the fervency of her kisses. Each one soothes the ache in his heart and sharpens it all at once, both starving and satisfying. There are plans and purposes outside her touch, outside this room, but he can’t bring himself to consider them.

He’s not sure he’s ever understood greed until this moment.

What is infinite? He clutches her close when a knock at the door pulls her lips away from his.

We are, he thinks, slightly giddy. Or will be. The distance between the present and the future seems insignificant in the face of his sudden, fierce hope.

But as the insistent knock takes him from her arms, his mind wanders to the true answer, locked into the catechism every Grisha learns as a warning about power and foolishness.

What is infinite?

The universe and the greed of men.

She’s gone. The truth of it rings through him like a struck gong, rattling him down to the bone. Worse than gone, she’s been taken. The burst of anger in his chest rages like a fire—

And burns out just as quickly. In its wake, he is consumed with a chill that has nothing to do with the frigid wind clawing at his carriage as the driver urges the horses desperately on.

He’d forgotten this feeling, the details of it, the texture. It has been so long since he built the Little Palace and gathered Grisha to himself. So long since he was truly afraid.  

It’s a tight feeling, claustrophobic and cold, like being trapped in a flash-frozen lake as a little girl with hair white as bone creeps forward with whispered apologies and a sharp stone in her hand. It feels like cold sweat on the forehead or the tang of blood in your mouth from the first blow. Like the bile that rises when your body rebels against the pain. 

Fear, his mother’s voice says across the years, has no place with you. Fear means weakness. It means you have something to lose.

Aleksander’s heart has been numb for so long. He is distressed to have it wake again, only to realize that he’s spent centuries learning nothing. 

Alina left on her own. It’s a sharp truth, wielded like a blade by a boy in an alley. A petty criminal, but brave despite being an Otkazat’sya, and a limping one, at that. In other circumstances, he might have wondered why a thief would take the trouble to commit such an elaborate and seemingly impossible crime. He might have asked questions and wrung every bit of truth from the Ketterdam gutter rat who was frightened but nearly successful at hiding it. But as the shadows pool around him at his call, he finds he has only one question, and he knows the criminal won’t have the answer.

He aims the Cut, but a blinding flash fills the alley—

For a single, suspended moment, his heart lurches as he wonders, foolishly, if Alina is here after all.

The flash dissipates and the alley is empty. Somewhere in his chest, a candle wavers in the dark.

Let the gutter rat run, then. He has no use for him. He needs to find Alina. He wants to rip her decision into shreds and read the torn pieces. He wants to understand. What precisely was it that had compelled her away? At what point did she look around her and decide that braving the wilds was better than what he had given her?

When had she looked at him and decided he was not enough?

It would have been easier, he reflected, if she’d never kissed him. Easier still if he’d never kissed her. No, more than that—if he’d never shared pieces of the truth, of himself, driven by the haunting thought the one day she would have every piece, know every truth, and together they would face an endless future. 

Hope is the greatest cruelty, boy. Don’t give what you don’t have. 

Baghra’s voice, like always. It was her voice he’d heard all his life. But he’d always had hope for the Grisha and for himself. He’d passed it to Alina, all to her—and now his hands are empty and aching. The long-burning candle is weak, far-off, cold. Outshone by the sun, itself too distant for warmth.

It was a cruel trick for Fate to play, sending him all that he could ever have wanted. A Ravkan girl who glowed with the sun’s own light, who shone no less brightly with every smile and every daring kiss, a flint sparking a flame in his eternal shadows. But no light comes without destruction, be it the swift consummation of fire or the steady, wasting burn of the far-off sun. 

Aleksander thought he’d learned every shade of cruelty, every possible means of torment. But, with Alina, he discovers something new: the agony not of burning, but of burning alone.

He’d hoped to present the stag to Alina as a gift. He’d hoped to give her the truth in pieces until she was ready to join him, and together they’d finish in triumph what he’d started in anger and in grief so long ago.

He hunts the stag alone, now.

Or not precisely alone. Ivan, Zoya, and David are with him. They are Grisha, but they are like all the rest. Precious, powerful.

Brief.

He remembers their arrivals at the Little Palace as though it were mere days before. Their lives are such bright, fleeting things. But somewhere in these woods, two eternal flames burn, one seeking the other. Morozova’s stag, and Alina, tracking it. He will find the stag first. He must.

Snow gathers on their clothes and hair as they trek through the bare trees in silence. Aleksander thinks, not for the first time, about Morozova standing in these woods, wielding his dark magic. Pressing the blade against a hand already missing fingers and bearing down until blood dripped thick in the snow. He’d wondered, once, about what kind of man could cut off his own fingers to make animals into amplifiers catalyzed by their own death. At last, he sees.

He’d cut off his own fingers to cultivate power—because what other hands could he trust? 

He finds her again. Of course he does; he has never once failed to accomplish what he wants. But she is frightened of him now. He sees it in her eyes like a compact, obsidian thing, gleaming in the dark. He wonders what his mother said to inspire it. Or perhaps it was contagious; he’d caught the glint of fear in his mother’s eyes, too. He doesn’t recall when that began. Perhaps with the Fold. But he’d also been frightened that day. They’d been frightened together. He wonders when that changed.

Alina, her eyes cold with that lonely, borrowed fear, accuses him of lying.

She thinks she would have listened to the truth and weighed his words with compassion and wisdom. They all do, until the moment comes. The weight of time is heavy, and bends everyone before it. The mind isn’t meant to hold centuries. But Alina is so sure she would have listened, would have been able to bear the truth. Foolish girl. She would have run, like anyone else confronted with something beyond their capacity for imagination or forgiveness. She did run, when granted the truth. He wonders, not for the first time, why she didn’t run to him instead.

Otkazat’sya and Grisha with less power and fewer years think they understand forgiveness. They think it means releasing anger, elevating love or righteousness over it. They grow old and die without ever understanding. It takes centuries to understand what forgiveness really means. To live and live and live under the weight of actions taken, mistakes made, and to accept a person anyway. He thinks of his mother, her eyes full of pain, but still living now, despite taking the hope for all Grisha—and his hope, too, she knew Alina was his only hope—

Yet she lives.

Alina will learn. She will learn that she will feel things and experience things and yes, even do things that no one else in the wide world will understand. And he will forgive her for all of them. In time, she will forgive him as well. He’d thought time would be stronger than love as a young man. But time reveals the truth of everything. It wears away everything, even pain, even betrayal. In this respect, and this respect only, time is kind.

Poor Alina.

She will learn. 

He considers how to kill the tracker. He can’t remain, of course. All Alina’s thoughts are bent on him. Which is a problem.

He will have an eternity to earn her forgiveness for his actions now, but he thinks of her bright smile and warm kiss and finds the prospect of a long estrangement daunting. 

And just at the edge of his mind, he can feel her. Her anger, her heartbreak. My Alina, he thinks. We are more alike than you know. When he thinks of cutting the boy down, he stops to consider how her heartbreak will grow, frayed and bloody at the edge of his mind—the seam where the two of them touch—and finds he is not eager to bring such a fate on either of them. 

But even after he has decided, he sees the implacable distance in her eyes, and seethes. But the fire never seems to last when it comes to her. It always turns to cold ashes and the slippery grip of fear. Something to lose, Baghra’s voice scoffs at him. Something to lose, something to lose.

He sits alone in his tent long after arguing fruitlessly with her hard face and damp eyes. Her heart seems as immovable as stone. The shadows of the night are held at bay by a single candle, burning low. Long after the noise of the camp has fallen into the deep silence of the late watches, he allows himself to wonder if, perhaps, she won’t be able to forgive him after all.

If not you, he thinks, then who? 

No one, a thin, small voice answers him. It sounds like the voice that asked Baghra about a missing father centuries before.

If not her, then no one at all. 

They are wrapped deep in his darkness on the skiff, and Alina is trying not to weep. She knows everything, at last, and expanding the Fold isn’t what she wants. 

He sees the tragedy in her eyes, weighted nearly into a killing blow by her youth. 

She doesn’t yet realize that on the continuum of all her possible fates, he is a kinder shade of the spectrum. To suffer or to cause finite suffering isn’t the worst tragedy. 

She hasn’t yet learned that loss is both relative and cumulative. Her measure of loss is still so shallow; she has yet to live and feel the loss of lifetimes. If he has his way, she will never feel the pain of unmitigated grief. One day she will look back on these moments with him, and if she remembers their sting at all, it will be outweighed by all the triumphs that come after. They will be outweighed by the fact that she never has to lose him.

He thinks of the countless moments in his life when he felt the tear of loss in his chest, and comforted himself with his hope—that single candle in the darkness. The thought that one day, he would find her. And never lose her.

Alina has so much to learn about eternity. 

He would spare her if he could, but he knows better than most what is inevitable. She is in the midst of her first lesson, and one that he knows painfully well: in the making at the heart of the world, sorrow is woven tightly alongside joy. 

He can’t control her, despite the collar, despite his ownership over the stag’s death.

As he watches his ship and her light shrink into the distant shadows, he barely registers the pain of the volcra’s teeth and claws. He wonders, uneasily, whether she isn’t like him at all. Perhaps she’s better than he is. Perhaps she won’t harden under the relentless press of the years. Perhaps she will still love the people close to her—or at least she might want to. He has loved only her since before he knew her. The one who had to be, who must be, or else the universe would be unbalanced. He would be unbalanced.

Her light disappear into the shadows of the Fold, of his mistakes, and he finds himself clutching at his candle again, guttering in the dark. Tipping back into the shadows—

Alone.

He wonders about Alina’s heart, Alina’s capacity to love what is temporary and changing, what will become ash long before she ages a day… but his experience of the human heart is deep and vast, and all the fouler for it. If he has learned anything, it’s that darkness isn’t a choice.

It’s an inevitability. Every light must eventually go out.

He tears himself free from shadows and teeth and claws that he made once upon a time. Screams like he hasn’t since the Fold burst out of him, body and soul. He tries not to hear the shades of human voices caught in the volcra’s answering cries. Tries not to think of how he and countless others had all screamed together in pain on a dark day, long ago. It was, he thinks suddenly, the last time anyone cried out in sympathy with him.

All the shadows fall still and silent. Even the volcra have stopped shrieking and are listening in the dark. He smiles, joyless and tight, and his torn face stings. They are his. It’s all his.

He’s limping like the boy from Ketterdam when he find the sun again, blinding and merciless in the sky, as it has been for the past millennium, as it will be for the next.

When he grinds out a single word, shadows rip themselves free from the Fold.

“Follow.”

He was a boy once, walking behind his mother. Follow, Aleksander.

He’d held out his candle’s light, followed it like a flaring beacon before him, held aloft only by his own hands and his own hope.

He’d found Grisha wherever he could, and led them to the safety of the Little Palace and the power of the Second Army. All he’d asked was that they follow.

But when he’d turned to Alina, pleaded with her not to hurt herself, not to hurt the Grisha, not to hurt him—

Oh, Alina. Why couldn’t you follow your heart and mine?

He can feel the hulking shadows like scraps of his own flesh. Perhaps more than that: like scraps of his own soul. They are roughly man-shaped, but tall, and faceless. Only a mouth is visible; they can only consume. These came from him, too. He thinks of Baghra’s hard voice and hard eyes, glinting with determination and fear. He thinks of apples and the trees they don’t fall far from. His smile is a torn, ragged thing when he turns to trail after Alina like a shadow. He knows what he must do.

Follow.