Chapter Text
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.
Psalm 103
Aleksander Morozov knows, on some deep level that he often refuses to acknowledge, that he is tragic.
It is written deep in his merzost ridden bones, in the shadowed, ageless blood in his veins; in the steady thump-thump of his heart that counts down to nothing so much as eternity.
Yes, Aleksander Morozov knows that he is tragic.
And even if he did not, he hears it often enough at court that he would soon become aware. The titters of generations of painted ladies and their featureless faces, hidden behind silken fans that, individually, cost more than all the clothes he had growing up. Murmurs of his soulful eyes and brooding countenance; the diaphanous air of deep sadness that clings to him like his shadows. The clothes change, the faces might too (he seldom notices anymore) but the words rarely do.
Aleksander finds that human nature is much like he is: fixed and unchanging, prone to the same predictable patterns despite the years that pass.
But Aleksander is Ravkan, and like any good Ravkan, he has a deep and finely tuned appreciation for tragedy. For toska. For that profound and illimitable sense of sadness that runs like his Fold through the country. A deep and unspeakable longing for something that no longer exists and maybe never did, a soul-deep existential melancholy that defies all reason.
Sometimes, when he stands on the sands of Kribirsk, overlooking the fathomless pitch of his own heart made manifest, he wonders if that’s all he is. Toska made flesh. His mother’s yearning for eternal companionship, his grandfather’s for power; the universe itself reaching deep into the lonely souls of man and forming him, alone and terrible, from the shadows.
It begins when he is young. It begins when he is not so much Aleksander, but Pyotr and Ivan and Yuri and a hundred other names he must struggle to remember. To the point where he wonders whether his mother ever named him Aleksander at all, whether Aleksander was just the name she picked out at random the day he finally worked up enough courage to ask what his real name was. To this day he still wonders, wonders if her name is even Baghra.
He spends his childhood learning what it means to want, what it means to be hungry and have nothing. They live nowhere and have no-one, ghosts with no names passing through in the night, living separate but parallel lives to all they meet.
Aleksander is stick-thin and starving, big dark eyes and brittle bones and shadows that eat and consume. Aleksander is hungry.
Wanting makes us weak but what happens if all you are is wants? Desires and dreams hidden and compiled into a heart that whispers its name into the darkest parts of a starless night, desperate and terrified to remember that he is a person with a name. Not just shadows made boy.
No-one touches Aleksander growing up, not even his madraya. She is as cold and distant and untouchable as the moon, pulling him along like the tides. His amplifier bones make even the lightest touch a danger; in the days where to be Grisha is a death sentence, every slightly sickly stranger could be hiding a secret. Aleksander learns to dodge touch like one might dodge flame, learns to wear his gloves like a second skin, removed only when he forgets the sight of his own hands.
It is a lesson he never forgets, not after the one time he was naïve enough to extend his trust, he was almost drowned.
He has long forgotten their faces, those Grisha children that dark night, with their own desperate hunger hidden in their skin. But he never forgets the phantom sensation of their sticky, warm blood on his pale, uncovered hands -nor the dichotomous flash of the Cut as it burned bright in his eyes. Even today, when the Grisha of Ravka bow before him, call him their sovereign as he makes kings nervous on their thrones, he rarely lets them touch his skin. He rarely removes his gloves.
Aleksander hungers for touch still, though. Hungers for what he sees in the village boys and girls as their mothers casually grab their arms to pull them in, lick their thumbs and brush unseen dirt from their mouths. As fathers toss their children high in the air as they squeal, summer air alight with their gay laughter. Aleksander stands in his shadows watching, in the darkness he can’t quite shake the fear of, for all that it lives in his skin. He watches. That strange liminal child with eyes that see too much, and he knows lack.
He feeds himself on stories growing up, his mother’s, and the ones he makes for himself in the lonely confines of wherever their itinerant existence has taken them. They are rarely happy stories, for Aleksander is not a child predisposed toward happiness, but they are hopeful, nonetheless.
Stories of the day when he can walk in the sun and not fear his shadows, when no-one else will either. When his madraya will be able to look at him without seeing the ghost of someone else, the spectral echo of mistakes he has not yet made.
He wonders sometimes, who she sees. Is it his father? A man he knows nothing about and sometimes doubts is real? Or perhaps it is his grandfather, Ilya Morozov, the Bonesmith, the sankt led to his own death in chains. A man who stretched his own power so far it blurred the lines of life and death into nonexistence. Who stared so deeply into the Heart of the World that it looked back into him and brought with it only ruin and madness. Does Aleksander look like him?
He never gets an answer, and as the years march by, endless and exhausting, he starts to care less and less.
The never-ending centuries are their own exercise in scarcity.
Aleksander grows from boy to man and stays that way. He never changes, never ages; stays somewhere indeterminate between twenty-five and forty for as long as the sun sets in the sky. He grows his hair, he cuts it; he grows a beard, he shaves it off; small, ultimately meaningless cosmetic changes that prevent him from growing sick of his own frozen face.
His mother is much the same -their matching black hair and blacker eyes, their oddly perfect faces and Grisha beauty. At some point they go from being mother-and-son to brother-and-sister; it’s easier that way, easier to stay unnoticed. Sometimes he wonders if his madraya might care more if he was her brother, not her son.
Sometimes he grows endlessly tired and endlessly miserable of the unceasing parade of lies that make up his life.
They never stay in one place too long, not just because they are Grisha, but because they are unageing. Healthy Grisha live long lives, but none as long as them. Aleksander is many things in his long life, partially because he is hungry as ever, partially to stave off the boredom. He is a poet, an artist, a scholar, a blacksmith, a farmer, a weaver, an architect. He is a soldier more times than he can count. He learns; he devours, much like the shadows, all the knowledge he comes across. He speaks every language in the known world, and others beside. He has seen all the faces of man in their perfect imperfection, and still he hungers; still, he grows bored.
It is the nature of the darkness to spread, to devour and consume. Aleksander consumes everything in his path.
He loves many men and women, sometimes he marries them, sometimes he is but a breath on the wind. Mostly they are otkazavshiysya, for he is hesitant to let other Grisha touch his skin, the sensation of ice water in his lungs lives forever in the depths of his memory. He has children. He watches them die. There are none like us, there never will be, his mother’s voice whispers to him out of the aether, in the dark of the night as he stands by one of his son’s graves’.
The people are endless, and less real with every generation. Flickering embers in an eternal night, momentary sparks of brightness that flash in his eyes, burn his skin. They are here one moment and gone the next: fleeting as a sunrise, slipping through his fingers like smoke. They become to him nothing more than a collection of personality traits, the same eyes on different faces; they live, they laugh; they grow up, they grow old. He stays. Forever on the side-lines, forever that liminal child with big, dark eyes hidden in the shadows.
Living parallel. Threads that meet but do not touch.
Somewhere in his third century he takes to dressing in all black. He mother scoffs at him, thinks he is being endlessly dramatic, tells him to stop being a child and grow up. The people in the cities, towns, villages he lives in, passes through, mutter about his morose style of dress, tell him he looks as though he is always dressed for a funeral.
Is he not though? Is he not at the funeral of everyone he ever meets? Forever mourning a world that dies around him.
He thinks, sometimes, when he is alone his quarters, in his war room, staring at a map that changes more often than he does, that this must be why he loves his Grisha so much. Grisha are a people, but they are also not -they are an idea.
An idea does not grow old and die, an idea remains as long as there are minds that cultivate it.
An idea cannot leave him, it will not sicken in the winter, find fresh love and disappear come spring. An idea does not succumb to the march of time, its hair does not silver, wrinkles do not crack its face like an aged painting, fading in the sun. Its form does not weaken, bones brittle, cracking, eyes rheumy, pale, unseeing. It will not forget him as age takes memory, he will never have to hold its hand as grip slackens and colour fades from skin.
Never will he stand at the side of a grave that reads Grisha, deep in the night and mourn, mourn until even he forgets where the body turns to dust.
It is safe to love an idea.
And so he does, he pours himself into it. Aleksander is a hungry thing; he is starving, and he devours but he is also a lack. He is darkness, he is a void. He spills himself like ink into spaces and takes shape in the places he fills. He needs to need things; he needs to be needed. He is a hundred different names plastered over an unchanging face living a thousand lives. He is like the dark, formless and ill-defined, until light casts a shadow and gives him shape.
The plight of the Grisha gives him a reason, something to work toward and feel, even as the ennui of the ceaseless years drags at his mind.
It helps that that it is the same story wherever he goes: Grisha hated, Grisha killed. Grisha burnt, stabbed, stoned, tortured and torn apart. It angers him, like few things do. It makes him furious, burning bright incandescent with rage; it tastes like poison on his teeth and sets the monsters within him howling for blood. He is immortal; his anger is great. It shatters countries. It is sublime.
He decides early on that the Grisha are his. Possessive and hungry, Aleksander is a child of scarcity, of dearth. He is the son of poverty, contemptable and foul, he is the product of concave stomachs and nights fed on dreams; of threadbare clothes as he shivers in the Ravkan winter. Aleksander knows what it is to have nothing. He takes care of his things.
He frees Grisha when they are captured, feeds them when they are hungry, helps heal them when they are sick. He builds sanctuary after sanctuary, watches again and again as they crumble and fall. Can do nothing but sweat and bleed and grow steadily more furious with every burnt-out pyre, every tiny child he finds stoned to death in a town square.
These are his people, his. And he can do nothing for them as they are hunted like animals, put down like dogs. What good is eternity if he can change nothing? What use is forever is nothing he does sticks?
The Grisha are the most real thing in the world for him, they have colour while the otkazavshiysya sit in the periphery, watery and indistinct. Pale imitations of life; mayflies and ants that live and die. Grisha, at least, remain somewhat distinct, remain able to touch him even as time, destroyer of worlds, gradually destroys what makes him human.
Maybe it is the Making at the Heart of the World that sits in all of them. That ill-defined thing that the Shu search for on their dissection tables, that makes the Fjerdans set them alight.
To be Grisha is to know the world and be of it, to touch the heart of forever and make it sing, bristling and brilliant through their veins. Aleksander is never as alive as he is when summoning, when he sees others summon. The shadows wrap around him in a familiar embrace, the only constant one since childhood, and when he sets them on his enemies, they tear them apart.
In fighting for the Grisha, he fights, too, for Ravka.
When he was a boy, Ravka was a vague thing, a collection of disparate fiefdoms, tribal lands and cruel princes, held together only by the haziest sense of a shared culture. A hundred different peoples living a hundred different ways. The language varied from place to place, the means of living; the worship of saints was but a far-off thing, glimmering in the distance and one was not so much ‘Ravkan’ as they were a member of a dozen or so tribes.
Aleksander, in his many lifetimes as a soldier, carves out Ravka with his bare hands.
He fights in nearly every border war: a soldier, a commander, a spy. To be Grisha is still be a monster, a witch, so he is many other things besides. He is the most accomplished archer in all of what will be Ravka, the most talented swordsman; he has killed more men than most will see in their lives and knows, like a lover, the unlovely face of war.
Aleksander builds Ravka in a way that no prince, no chief or tsar will ever match. It is his -much like his Grisha. He has sunk his blood, sweat and bones into the soil of his country, fed the hungry earth with the flesh of his body, carried the songs of its rivers and the silence of its forests deep in his heart.
Aleksander knows what it means to want and be left wanting, and so too, does his country. Beautiful Ravka, with its ripe valleys and lush grasslands; his glorious motherland, that has raised him better than his own mother ever could. The caves that sheltered him, the woods and plains that fed him; the frozen dirt that kept him warm at night.
He watches, from the shadows -through his many lives- as leader after leader, knyaz after knyaz abuses and despoils his Ravka. Takes what is his in their unworthy, dayfly hands and pollutes it, makes it profane. He sees as they take the tales of his people, their pain and suffering and murder and make it holy. As if by suffering they are cleansed, as if in death and terror they are forgiven for being more. Being better.
His shadows roil, terrible and ravenous in the darkness as his soul burns with all the awesome coldness of his rage.
Aleksander is immortal, and his fury is as everlasting as he. It builds in him, like poison, spreading and befouling, oil-slick and endless, branching out from his body like the arms of a great spider to encircle all that is his.
His mother feels none of this, distant and untouchable as she is. She is ancient even to him, unfathomably old and as constant as the stars. He looks upon her sometimes and thinks of the old gods, of the spirits and demons and capricious things that the people of his boyhood worshipped. He thinks of stories of beings primeval and other, so dark and powerful that some dared not speak their names. Epithets encircling their head like crowns, around their necks like fetters.
He thinks of all the names that he has worn, the identities he has claimed. The titles won and lost over the ages; the dominions left in the dust.
He wonders if that’s what they are, old gods bound in unageing bodies, terrible and other, growing more distant by the day.
He is twelve and staring at a statue of Veles in the woods, trying to fit his features to the god of the underworld; he is over five hundred and staring at the Fold, thinking he has finally made them match.
But for all that he rages, for all that he burns, time moves strangely for Aleksander. Days, weeks, years stretch into nothing, into oblivion; sometimes he spends decades simply watching, watching as the same families work the same lands under the same lords. Change is slow in Ravka and it makes time fluid.
He wants to make a better Ravka, he wants to make his people free. But sometimes the endless march of eternity sits thick on his skin, a grey textured boredom that claws at him as he remains trapped in an unchanging form. What is time to the timeless? When your own story is unending, where is the onus to advance the plot?
His loneliness is a living, breathing thing in his veins, an everlasting rainy day that washes all colour from the world, from him. A dullness in his chest, the slowing of his heart; it turns him to stone.
His fury for the Grisha, for Ravka, drifts from him too, in and out of focus as the years slip by. Some days it is the realest thing in all creation, others it is naught but a hazy fever dream. A fairy-tale narcotic hallucination, where for a moment, all the colours are bright and vivid, and he can touch the sky.
Grisha have been suffering for centuries. They have suffered yesterday; they suffer today, and they will suffer tomorrow. Aleksander is here today, but he will also be there tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that. Why fix a problem now when he can do it later? It’s not going anywhere, and neither is he, there is no deadline for a solution, his time will not run out. Yes, people are dying, but people are always dying. Everyone dies except him. Why do the lives of today matter more than those of yesterday? They do not. They will live and die, and others will take their place. An endless cycle of rebirth that he is removed from, cleaved from the whole like an ill-fitting part.
Any changes he makes will not last, they never do. Again and again history repeats itself; progress that fades with living memory, lessons that are never learnt.
Nothing is permanent but him.
This must be how his mother feels, he realises one day, when he is sat in the monochrome world of his own isolation. This impassable divide between himself and the rest of the world, the unbridgeable gap. Knowing deep in the darkest parts of your being that you will outlive everyone and everything, that nothing and no-one really matters, because in the end you will watch it all die.
Why change anything? Why exert any effort? Why care at all?
What is the point of trying when you live long enough to watch all your successes fail?
Aleksander laughs himself stupid the night he comes to this realisation, laughs himself hoarse, laughs until he cries. The night is dark and forbidding, the snow hungrily swallows all sound; his shadows mix with the shadows of the trees in an inky tapestry as they spill, uncontrolled and violent, from his bleeding heart.
This is Aleksander’s toska, the melancholy that has no name. This is the thing that breaks him, on a moonless winter night. This is what drives him sobbing and ugly, to his knees in the forests of his beloved Ravka, alone in the dark.
He cries and he cries and he cries, as he never has before, as he never has since. He bares his bleeding and broken immortal soul to an audience of no-one and lets the nameless agony of his existence fill him, just this once.
It is a wretched grief, a mourning, a longing for something he never had and never will. It is his hunger; it is his lack. It is the starving thing in his chest that calls out and will never be sated, the lone voice in the darkness that no one else will ever hear. No gold could ever satisfy him, no wealth ever will; he could wear a crown every day for the rest of his life and still hunger, still want more.
Aleksander is still a big-eyed boy in an alley, watching the other children with a longing he can’t name.
It is in this period of weakness, this ephemeral moment where the void in his being grows and eats at him like never before, that he meets Luda.