NOVGO.NET MOVEMENT THREE — The One Called by a Stranger's Grief
3.1 — What the Household Already Knew
"You already know this one," Eremos said, "or most of it. Vaelira told you, some months ago, on this very balcony, about the mission with the blind man and his wife." He glanced toward her, and she inclined her head, once, in silent permission to continue where she had once stopped.
"What I did not fully explain then, because I did not fully understand it myself at the time, is what actually happened to me in that tavern yard. I had already told you the shape of the grief — the betrayal, the despair, the fury that answered when the gentler part of me had nothing left to offer. What I want you to understand now is that the thing that rose in me that night was not a temporary loss of control, the way I once believed, and the way I let all of you believe when Vaelira first told the story. It was the first time, in this entire life, that the permanent pressure I've just described to you grew large enough, all at once, to force the release valve open."
"She named it herself, without knowing what she was naming," he said. "The blind man's wife. She saw, in the shape of what answered her despair, something out of an old myth from her own dying world — a destroyer who ended a corrupt court and vanished, remembered only as a story told to frighten the powerful into caution. She called what she saw the God of Destruction, and the name has held, in the household's own private vocabulary, ever since, because none of us has ever found a better one."
3.2 — What It Carries
"When I become him," Eremos said, "grief and fury arrive together, indistinguishable, and every gentler impulse in me — every instinct toward mercy, toward patience, toward the specific tenderness that defines the rest of who I am — simply goes quiet, the way a room goes quiet when everyone in it has already left. What remains is memory without forgiveness, and a single burning ember of love for whoever the grief was originally for, and around that ember, on every side, nothing but the total, clean absence of anything that might argue for restraint."
Stolen novel; please report.
"In power," he said, and here his voice took on the specific careful precision of a man describing a tool he does not enjoy owning, "he is, by a very wide margin, the strongest of everything I carry. Raw destructive force, applied without hesitation and without the specific caution that ordinarily governs how much of my own strength I allow myself to use at once. He does not tire the way I tire. He does not calculate risk the way I calculate risk. He simply moves toward whatever caused the grief and does not stop until nothing capable of causing it remains standing." He paused. "He has ended, across my life, considerably more than the eight who tormented that tavern. I have never told any of you the rest, because the rest has never once felt like a story worth being proud of, even when the people on the receiving end of it deserved everything they got."
"The ring that marks him," he added, quieter now, "is the deepest, coldest blue any of you have ever seen light behave as — a color that drinks illumination rather than casting it, exactly as Vaelira already described. I have never once summoned him on purpose. He has only ever arrived because something in me broke first, and he was the only piece of me strong enough to answer."