𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐅𝐈𝐅𝐓𝐘-𝐓𝐖𝐎 — a child's tale

━━━━━━━

 Nikolai Lanstov had done the impossible. He'd gotten Baghra to leave behind her little hole in the palace grounds. From the festering bruise on the poor sobachka's wrist, she'd set her cane on him, not to mention her stinging words... but if anyone was to drag her away and brush aside her insults with a winning smile on his face, it would be Nikolai.

 Baghra had never been one for talk. She taught and she observed... and she complained. A lot. Aleksa had spent much of her time simply sharing the silence with her... great, great, great — perhaps it was easier to simply call the old woman an ancestor.

 They were quite similar; from the shadows tracing their flesh, to the heartbreak of watching Aleksander becoming more and more of a monster as the days flashed by. They both cared for him, even after everything he'd done. After the way he'd treated them.

 But the heart was a foolish little thing, wasn't it? It drowned you in hope, it made you crave love... and when the wrong person managed to wrap their fingers around it, you were entirely at their mercy. But Aleksander was not merciful.

 The Spinning Wheel — the name of the observatory in the depths of frosty Fjerda — was surrounded by white-capped mountains sticking up like the points of a cluster of needles. Those particular mountains had certainly seen the brunt of both Aleksa and Alina's powers.

 Baghra had been the one to teach them how to use the cut. With Alina's amplifiers snug around her collar and wrist, she sliced through two at once... but Aleksa hadn't exactly fallen short on her own attempts. Even without Cas perched on her shoulder — he quite liked catching snowflakes, it seemed— she'd managed to slice directly through the middle of a broad hunk of land.

 Baghra's hands had flexed, her lips curling, and certainly not in a pleasant way. Too much like Aleksander, she had thought.

 On one particular day when Aleksa had escaped the chatter of those that remained, she'd worked her way to the top of the observatory and carved through the mountains. Cut after cut fell from her palms until Baghra tapped her cane on the ground.

 Apparently, it was time for her to understand just how their darkened blood had come to be. Perhaps it had been her use of the cut; so vicious and volatile... or maybe it had been David's loose lips talking of the Nichevo'ya she'd managed to conjure.

 Baghra spoke of a story she had yet to reveal to anyone but the little boy she had once known so well; the story of how Morozova's amplifiers came to be... the story of how her sister had died.

 Baghra had been the first to be born with shadows curling around her fingertips; she'd been deemed as nothing more or less than a monster by her own mother.

 They gathered around a small fire in the depths of Baghra's room. The shelves were lined with books, and there was a little bottle of kvas that they had soon began to drink from.

 "I've only ever spoken of this to Aleksander..." It seemed to pain the old woman to even speak his name. To think of the little boy with dark hair and wide eyes, the boy that had grown cold and callous, hungry for power, "The little boy with dark hair, a silent boy who rarely laughed, who listened more closely than I realised. A boy who had a name and not a title."

 "Morozova was the Bonesmith, one of the greatest Fabrikators who ever lived, and a man who tested the very boundaries of Grisha power, but he was also just a man with a wife." Baghra's bottomless eyes seemed to flash as the flames grew. It was hard to look at them, to know that Aleksander had punished his own mother by taking her sight from her, leaving only hollow darkness behind, "She was otkazat'sya, and though she loved him, she did not understand him."

 Baghra took a sip of kvas, "I should tell you that he loved her too," she continued. "At least, I think he did. But it was never enough to make him stop his work. It couldn't temper the need that drove him. This is the curse of Grisha power. You know the way of it, don't you?"

 "Actually... No." Aleksa admitted before her. She turned her hands over in her lap, palms up as the shadows scurried to nuzzle into her flesh, "I feel the buzz. I can feel myself growing stronger... but I just don't get that craving. I know I'm strong... but at the end of the day, the life I want doesn't depend on the shadows."

 Baghra was silent, her head cocked to the side just ever so slightly as she felt the darkness around her coil closer to the littlest shadow. She'd felt it before, the way the shadows would call to her as much as she would call to them... Baghra had never felt the shadows answer her pleas so swiftly... so readily.

 Baghra continued, "They spent over a year hunting the stag in Tsibeya, two years sailing the Bone Road in search of the sea whip. Great successes for the Bonesmith. The first two phases of his grand scheme. But when his wife became pregnant, they settled in a small town, a place where he could continue his experiments and hatch his plans for which creature would become the third amplifier. They had little money. When he could be pulled away from his studies, he made his living as a woodworker, and the villagers occasionally came to him with wounds and ailments —"

 "— Aleksander once said that Grisha never used to see a divide in power. I know the stories say Morozova was a Fabrikator, but from what you say... I assume Aleksander was telling the truth?"

 "Yes. Morozova did not draw distinctions. Few Grisha did in those days. He believed if the science was small enough, anything was possible. And for him, it often was."

 If the science was small enough, anything was possible. Aleksa couldn't help but think of the possibilities, the chaos that would ensue if Grisha began to tread those lines once more. If Healers could spout fire. If Squallors could control the heart. What if she reached for the shadows one day, only to feel sunlight calling upon her even without a tether between herself and Alina?

 Perhaps it was best that such a divide was drawn between them.

 "The townspeople viewed Morozova and his family with a combination of pity and distrust. His wife wore rags, and his child ... his child was rarely seen. Her mother kept her to the house and the fields around it. You see, this little girl had started to show her power early, and it was like nothing ever known." Baghra took another sip of kvas while Aleksa easily finished her open-ended sentence.

 "She could control the shadows? You mean you could control the shadows."

 "You know? Good. Yes, I am Morozova's daughter, and for a long time, I believed the Darkling to be the last of Morozova's line... Yet here you are. The littlest shadow" She emptied her glass with but one final sip. "My mother was terrified of me. She was sure that my power was some kind of abomination, the result of my father's experiments. And she may well have been right. To dabble in merzost, well, the results are never quite what one would hope. She hated to hold me, could hardly bear to be in the same room with me. It was only when her second child was born that she came back to herself at all. Another little girl, this one normal like her, powerless and pretty. How my mother doted on her!"

 The hurt in her voice shook Aleksa, it was always how things seemed to go, wasn't it? A Grisha born with such power was either cast aside out of fear or used for the whims of their parents. They fought a war alongside their fellow Grisha, or they fought their own war, all alone within their own homes.

 Aleksa swallowed a gulp of kvas; returning to Ketterdam to be a simple thief was sounding better by the minute.

 "My father was readying to leave to hunt the firebird. I was just a little girl, but I begged him to take me along. I tried to make myself useful, but all I did was annoy him, and eventually he banned me from his workshop."

 Aleksa filled her glass to the brim with kvas; with the way her story had begun... Aleksa could only imagine the ending soon to ensue.

 "And then one day, Morozova had to leave his workbench. He was drawn to the pasture behind his home by the sound of my mother's screams. I had been playing dolls and my sister had whined and howled and stamped her little feet until my mother insisted that I give over my favourite toy, a wooden swan carved by our father in one of the rare moments that he'd paid me any attention. It had wings so detailed they felt nearly downy and perfect webbed feet that kept it balanced in water. My sister had it in her hand less than a minute before she snapped its slender neck. Remember, if you can, that I was just a child, a lonely child, with so few treasures of my own." She lifted her glass but did not drink. "I lashed out at my sister. With the Cut. I tore her in two."

 Many would have shuddered at that. Many would have gaped and gasped and judged... but Aleksa stared at her in silence because she too, had been a lonely child. She had no family at all, no swan carved for her even for an annoying sister to snap in half. Loneliness was fuel to an already burning fire, and once somebody began to trample on the small things that brought even a spark of joy... that fire would spread.

 Aleksa couldn't count the times she'd secretly harmed the other children who had bullied her. How the shadows would knock them off their feet as though they'd merely tripped on the rug or an unsteady floorboard.

 She'd never killed one... but... but maybe if she'd stayed and let them continue to bend and break her, she might have snapped.

 The silence was grating as Baghra waited for any kind of response, but Aleksa only sipped and asked, "What happened?"

 "The villagers came running. They held my mother back so that she could not get at me. They couldn't make sense of what she was saying. How could a little girl have done such a thing? The priest was already praying over my sister's body when my father arrived. Without a word, Morozova knelt down beside her and began to work. The townspeople didn't understand what was happening, but they sensed power gathering."

 "Did he save her?"

 "Yes," said Baghra simply. "He was a great Healer, and he used every bit of his skill to bring her back — weak, wheezing, and scarred, but alive."

 "It was too much," Baghra said. "The villagers knew what death looked like — that child should have died. And maybe they were resentful too. How many loved ones had they lost to illness or injury since Morozova had come to their town? How many could he have saved? Maybe it was not just horror or righteousness that drove them, but anger as well. They put him in chains — and my sister, a child who should have had the sense to stay dead. There was no one to defend my father, no one to speak on my sister's behalf. We had lived on the outskirts of their lives and made no friends. They marched him to the river. My sister had to be carried. She had only just learned to walk and couldn't manage it with the chains."

 But nothing had changed. The world still punished Grisha for the very same things. Should a Healer be caught mending a wound steadily bleeding out — A druskelle would seize them and send them to their death in the very same shackles. Should an Inferni spark a flame in Ketterdam, they'd be carted off as a slave...

 Aleksa's glass was empty now, and only enough for half a glass remained within the kvas bottle. Instead of swallowing more, she tipped the last of it for Baghra, who sipped and continued with her story, "As my mother wailed and pleaded, as I cried and fought to get free from some barely known neighbour's arms, they shoved Morozova and his youngest daughter off the bridge, and we watched them disappear beneath the water, dragged under by the weight of their iron chains." Baghra emptied her glass and turned it over on the table. "I never saw my father or my sister again."

 Aleksa blinked, "You never saw your father or sister again... Morozova was powerful, the strongest of us; you say you never saw him again, do you think he died?"

 "No." Baghra sighed. Perhaps it was in the nature of their blood to have such ill will against truly dying. Perhaps it was the curse of the Shadow Summoners to live and live until they couldn't even stomach it, "No otkazat'sya steel could have held him."

 Aleksa looked to the flames as the shadows continued to whir around them. It was strange, whenever the summoners were near, it seemed the shadows loved to sprout a life of their own, as though finally able to reunite blood long since lost to one another.

 Aleksa swallowed the conversation, pondering; it was easy enough to believe that Morozova survived. If he was capable of reviving a life, of bending the warth to his will, why would a fall kill him? His work was his life, and if Aleksa knew anything about her own family... it was that they didn't stop until they got what they wanted.

 Aleksa's fingers drummed atop her knee, "What did the villagers do to you and your mother?"

 The rasp of a chuckle that escaped the old woman was a rival to even that of Kaz's stone-against-stone grit, "If they'd been wise, they would have thrown me in the river too. Instead they drove my mother and me out of town and left us to the mercy of the woods. My mother was useless. She tore at her hair and wept until she made herself sick. Finally, she just lay down and wouldn't get up, no matter how I cried and called her name. I stayed with her as long as I could. I tried to make a fire to keep her warm, but I didn't know how." She shrugged. "I was so hungry. Eventually, I left her and wandered, delirious and filthy, until I came to a farm. They took me in and put together a search party, but I couldn't find the way back to her. For all I know, she starved to death on the forest floor."

 Aleksa was rather glad for the kvas somewhat numbing her to the conversation; it was a bottle of Nikolai's finest, a little ploy to get Baghra to stop jutting her cane towards his handsome face.

 "Ravka was different then. Grisha had no sanctuary. Power like ours ended in fates like my father's. I kept mine hidden. I followed tales of witches and Saints and found the secret enclaves where Grisha studied their science. I learned everything I could. And when the time came, I taught my son."

 "But you had two, didn't you?"

 It was the first time Aleksa had seen something akin to mourning on Baghra's stoney features, "Yes. My boy... my Otto."

 "Otto..." Aleksa repeated. The man born without the darkness in his blood. The man that married his love and sprouted a son until more and more boys popped up through the generations... all until Aleksa had broken the chain. She'd been born an anomaly, a female Shadow Summoner after four centuries of otkazat'sya boys, "What was he like?"

 "Soft." But Baghra didn't spit the word, she caressed it, coddled it, "He was a soft boy. Always dreaming of the day he could become a husband and father. He looked up to Aleksander, and Aleksander never paid him any mind. He was too busy flooding his head with power... I treated them equally. I love them both... I didn't want the past to repeat itself... And yet..."

 Baghra looked tired now. As the flames continued to flicker, Aleksa could truly see the way she hunched, no longer straight-back like the day they'd met. Still, the older woman trailed a stray finger through the shadows scrambling for Aleksa, "Aleksander began so well. We moved from place to place, we saw the way our people lived, the way they were mistrusted, the lives they were forced to live out in secrecy and fear. He vowed that we would someday have a safe place, that Grisha power would be something valued and coveted, something our country would treasure. We would be Ravkans, not just Grisha. That dream was the seed of the Second Army. A good dream. If I'd known..."

 She shook her head. "I gave him his pride. I burdened him with ambition, but the worst thing I did was try to protect him. You must understand, even our own kind shunned us, feared the strangeness of our power."

 There are no others like us. Aleksa understood it well enough. While Fabrikators and Healers might have stayed under wraps in Ketterdam, they could still work. They could blend in with the crowd and pass cash under the table... Aleksa couldn't do that. If somebody saw the shadows around her, they had to die. It was that simple... it was death or the possibility that somebody squealed.

 "I never wanted him to feel the way I had as a child," said Baghra. "So I taught him that he had no equal, that he was destined to bow to no man. I wanted him to be hard, to be strong. I taught him the lesson my mother and father taught me: to rely on no one. That love — fragile and fickle and raw — was nothing compared to power. He was a brilliant boy. He learned too well. Otto, despite his lack of power, became a shadow. My little shadow. He followed me wherever I went with a book in his hand..."

 She shook her head, ridding herself of that image. The boy with strength and a thirst for power had lived, while dear Otto had grown until his own son became a man... then, he died. It was how the otkazat'sya lives worked.

 "Do you —" Aleksa fumbled for a moment, feeling so very similar to the lonely little girl she'd been for the first few years of her life, "Do you know what happened to my parents?"

 "Little shadow..." Baghra whispered, and she sounded nothing like the woman telling a gruesome story. She heard him, Otto. For just that moment, Baghra had forgotten it was a girl of eighteen before her, and not her dear little boy.

 "Aleksander killed them." That had Baghra returning to the present, "He said he followed them all, our family. Otto's son, the next boy and the next... until me. He knew I followed the two of you with the talent for bending the dark, and he wanted me. He chased my mother and father when they tried to protect me... right into the fold. They died there. I escaped him for four short years." Aleksa scoffed, picking at the pretty shimmer Genya had smothered atop her nails, "Then he swooped in like a hero, he saved me under the guise of a blubbering big brother. He took me from the children that scorned me, the ones that hit me and kicked me, the ones that called me names... then he did the very same. He locked me up. He hurt me relentlessly when I didn't quite meet his expectations."

 Aleksa swiped Baghra's forgotten glass of kvas. There was little amber liquid left, but it was swallowed all the same, "I ran away. I thought that if I grew stronger on my own, in my own way... he would understand that I just don't summon the way he did. I thought he'd see me... and like a child, I thought we'd step up to the fold and banish it hand in hand." Aleksa set the glass back down, watching as a little droplet trailed the length of the glass, seeping into the wooden table, "When I found him again, he was slaughtering a city. He was drowning Novokribirsk."

 "Yet you care for him."

 "So do you, I suppose we're both still under that spell of his. You picture him as the little boy you once knew, and I see a big brother who had sworn to give me the one thing I'd always wanted; family." Aleksa paused. Perhaps it had always been a child's fantasy to long for such a thing... and yet when darling Inej had spoken of her parents, of the treats her mother would bake, of the flowers her father would bring home or the way her little brother saw stars in her eyes... Unconditional love, why was it so hard for her to attain?

 "Tell me, because I know you've been dying to say something," Aleksa spoke once more, "You know I've tapped into merzost, yes?"

 Baghra tapped her fingers against the wooden handle of her chair. her feet shuffle beneath her long robes, crossing over one another, "You feel no pull."

 "Nothing. No hunger for more. No desire for power."

 "It'll come. It always does."

 "No." Aleksa said as she stood, boots thudding against the ground, "I'm not going to let this continue. My shadows follow me willingly, and merzost comes to me like the sun to Alina. It may drain my life... but we both know that once this is over... I'll be the only one left anyway," She swiped her hands over her trousers, ridding the clamminess that had gathered. She plucked the empty bottle of kvas and shook it, "I'll get this filled for you."

 Then, unable to stomach the darkness within Baghra's eyes, unable to even think of the man coming to hunt them all down... Aleksa left, and the door slammed behind her.

━━━━━━━

27-07-2024

:･ﾟ★ you know, I really love how this turned out, i've been wanting a proper conversation between aleksa and baghra soooo badly. 

oh, and if you're interested at all, i picture Charlie Rowe as Otto <3

please remember to leave feedback & comments. i require a certain number of comments before i publish the next update. please give me a follow to keep updated. do not leave 'update' comments, you will be muted.