Chapter Text
to present, dreams return
for song, clouds yield
at dawn
when the moonlight dies
will the oriole's cries
remain unheard?
The night that Mikasa is born, the moon disappears. A pale white disk, it descends from the sky and vanishes. A bad omen, the villagers whisper. Someone has shot down the moon.
The world is blanketed by an infinite shadow; the nation is thrown into disarray. The tides become erratic, a flurry of violent ebb and flow. All that is left in the skies are glimmering stars, mere specks of light that twinkle tantalizingly in the black sky.
The lunar eclipse was not set to come until ten years later, so the state astrologer is called upon by the Emperor. He pores over books with weary eyes, maps the stars under ink and brush, calls upon the heavens for an answer. The moon has fallen, he writes later that night, under the trembling candlelight, trembling hands, for the gods are angry.
Within the oppressive darkness, Mikasa comes into the world. So silent, so still, they had first thought her dead.
When the sun rises the next day, the world breathes a sigh of relief. But the tides do not calm; it violently crashes along battered shores, dashes ships against rocks, drowning any who dare test its currents. The soft daylight scatters over the earth, breaking over flowing waterfalls, sprawling farmlands, extravagant palaces, until it reaches to touch Mikasa’s face.
There is a thin mark running along her right cheek, pulsing an angry red.
Another ill omen, the village elders titter. The girl will bring ruin upon us all.
Her father frowns, moves silently to shield his wife with his body. Her mother clutches the baby tighter to her breast, but does not dare speak.
The less she speaks, the less they’ll know. And right now, they do not know of the violently red marks on Mikasa’s chest and back, both etched on the skin right above where her little heart beats.
Only when she is grown, when she becomes a woman, will Mikasa realize they look like wounds. The two scars on her chest and back, she will learn, seems to mark the path of a flying arrow.
As if she’s been shot straight through the heart.
The night after her birth, the world is covered in darkness once more. The same for the next night. And the next night. And the next.
The moon never returns.
As a baby, Mikasa wakes in darkness and sleeps in sunlight. Her mother and father fret over her erratic sleep schedule, but attribute it to her infancy. So while her parents sleep soundly, Mikasa gazes outside the window in her cradle, stormy eyes piercing into darkness.
As she ages, she learns that she must sleep at nightfall and wake at sunrise. Even though it is tiring—so very tiring—she learns to stifle yawns and hide bleary eyes, learns to force her small body up at the crack of dawn.
It must be a part of growing up, she thinks.
When Mikasa is four, while she is waiting for her father’s return as evening approaches, she asks her mother this: “Why do we sleep once the sun goes down?”
Her mother laughs, stops knitting for a second, and pinches her cheeks playfully. “What else can we do, my love? Go outside and play?”
“Why not?” she urges, pouting at not being taken seriously.
“There’s no light, Mikasa. We can’t see anything without candlelight, and we must save them for emergencies.”
“You can’t see?” She tilts her head, confused. What can’t they see?
Her mother shakes her head. “At night, what do you see out the window, then? Only darkness awaits us after sunset.”
“It’s not dark, Mother. There’s a white light,” she insists. The light illuminates everything, so bright it burns. “It comes from the round orb in the sky.”
Her mother drops the knitting needles out of shock. Her eyes widen in the orange glow of the sun. “You can see the moon?”
“Is that what it’s called? It’s pretty,” Mikasa murmurs. She tests the word on her tongue, breathes in the syllable, “Moon. Moon.”
It feels right.
But why does her heart itch? Why does it sting?
Without fire, without candles, there is only darkness once the sun sets. There are no eyes that can penetrate the night. Not those of owls, not of cats, and certainly not of humans.
Not of anyone…except for Mikasa.
(“You must not tell anyone,” her father tells her sternly when her mother frantically tells him. “It’ll be our little secret.”
He holds his pinky out.
Mikasa nods solemnly, and hooks her littlest finger with Father’s. A promise must be kept. This she knows, engraved in her bones.)
Mikasa learns how to sing when she is five. She sings of the sunlight, of the skies, of the earth, of the stars. And most of all, she sings of absent moonlight.
The moon falls
And darkness bounds
Who was the god
That shot it down?
She sings when she wakes, sings before she sleeps, sings while at her mother’s side when they go visit the village.
No matter how low her status in the eyes of the other villagers, no matter how foreboding her scar may seem, no matter the misfortune she is foretold to bring, everyone stops to listen. There is no one that remains indifferent to her sweet, clear voice. No one.
“Mother, Father,” seven-year-old Mikasa asks quietly in the darkness. “Why am I not allowed to play with the other children?”
Their home lies on the fringe of the small, mountainous village. Not by choice, she understands, but by force. Because of her birth. The Ackerman family lay together on straw mattresses as the cold wind batters on their small hut. Her mother on one side, her father on the other, and Mikasa in the middle. It’s cold, but her family makes her warm.
Her father speaks up with a sleepy voice. “It’s best that way, dearest. You’ll suffer no hurt that way.”
“Why would I hurt?” she asks curiously.
Her mother strokes her hair gently and hums a soft melody. “Because children can be unknowingly cruel, my love.”
Once, while her mother isn’t looking, she strays from her mother’s side and tries to approach the villagers’ children.
They push her down. Pelt her with rocks. A harbinger of death, they chant. The girl of calamity. The words are too complex for their mouths to say properly, and it’s clear they’re simply repeating what they’ve heard.
Mikasa doesn’t go near them again.
She lives on. Quietly. Silently.
As cold as moonlight. As unseen.
Mikasa loses herself in her mother’s stories. There are tales of gods and goddesses, of immortals and mystical beasts, of the divine court in the sky, of the Celestial Emperor and his Celestial Empress.
Of the many, many stories, there is one that is her favourite.
It begins like this:
Once upon a time, not so long ago, the Celestial Empress gave birth to nine sons. And these nine sons lived in the skies, illuminating the earth.
(Sons? Like daughters?
Suns, her mother explains. The Celestial Sons—the children—that she gave birth to were suns.
Sons. Suns. Mikasa giggles. Were there no daughters?
There was one daughter. The moon.)
When the first sun came into being, the earth flourished. Nature thrived.
But when the second sun came, it became hotter. Crops began wilting. Water began evaporating. People began dying. And when the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth sun came, one after the other, the earth burned.
It was a waking inferno. Forests razed to the ground. Oceans dried up. Piles and piles of corpses, strewn over cracked earth.
(Is the sun that powerful?
The sun brings us light, doesn’t it? Just one is enough to sustain the world.
But not only the sun, Mikasa murmurs. The moon also brings light.
The moon is no more, my love.)
The people below prayed, the heavenly court above begged, all looking to the Celestial Emperor to resolve the situation. At this rate, there would be nothing left alive in the mortal realm.
But his sons refused to listen their father. The sky is our domain, they cried. We are free to rule it.
Unable to personally reign them in, for fear of hurting them with his great powers, the Celestial Emperor had no choice but to call upon a demigod—half divine, half mortal. This demigod, he was said to be the most skilled archer in the world.
The Celestial Emperor told him, You must subdue my sons.
The demigod agreed.
With a quiver of nine arrows, each made of delicate silver, he climbed up the tallest mountain in the world, Mount Mitras, and stood at the boundary between heaven and earth.
Will you yield? he shouted at the suns.
No, they shouted back. We are free to fly in the sky.
The archer notched an arrow, aimed, and then said, But you are taking away the freedoms of the mortals.
Even with this warning, the suns did not relent.
So the archer let the the silver arrow loose.
It flew through the air, a blinding white arc, and pierced the breast of one of the suns. So the first sun fell.
Like this, arrow after arrow, one by one, each of the suns dropped out of the sky. As they fell, their true forms were revealed—beautiful, fiery phoenixes. In the end, only the eldest son was left—the sun you see now, nourishing the earth.
In sparing the last, the world returned back to its fertile state. And that, my love, is how the archer saved the world from the nine suns.
(Why did the archer have nine arrows, if he was going to only use eight?
I don’t know. Perhaps he felt mercy for the last sun. Perhaps, at the last moment, he realized that one sun was needed to keep the earth alive.
Or…Mikasa softly whispers, perhaps someone begged him to stop.
Her mother shrugs. Perhaps. The tale ends there.
And what happened to the archer after? Mikasa asks curiously.
No one knows. He disappeared from the world.
This story…Mikasa pauses. It feels so familiar. Like I’ve seen it before. The suns spiralling down.
Perhaps you felt it from within my belly, her mother muses with a small smile. The blazing heat as they crashed to earth.
Mikasa’s eyes widen. What do you mean?
This is not a myth, her mother says gently. It’s real. I’ve lived through it, the heat of the nine suns. On the morning—before the night—of your birth, eight of the suns truly did fall.
It did?
Yes. Beautiful balls of fire. And soon after, on the night when you were born, the moon fell.
Wasn’t the moon the Celestial Emperor’s daughter?
Yes.
Why did it fall?
No one knows. The wrath of the gods, the astrologer says.
Mikasa clutches at her pounding heart. It aches. Burns with the intensity of a thousand suns.)
Mikasa learns how to dance when she is nine. Along the sandy shores, she spins and twirls to the docile tides lapping at her small bare feet. She offers her song and dance as a prayer to the gods, the goddesses, the Celestial Empress, the Celestial Emperor, the archer who fell the suns.
The suns fall
And glory awaits
Who was the god
That ended their fate?
She dances when the sun rises, dances when the sun sets, dances for her father while he works in the fields.
And just like her voice, there is no one that remains indifferent to her graceful figure. No one that can tear their eyes away.
When she dances on the shore, pale white dress fluttering in the breeze, it’s as if she’s dancing on water. As if the moon itself has descended from the heavens, to fall once more.
It seems her ill reputation—harbinger of death, girl of calamity—is nothing compared to a pretty face and a sweet voice.
When Mikasa is sixteen, suitors come for her hand. She recognizes some of them. They are the boys that pelted her with rocks, so many years ago, though now all grown up.
She glances at them, sees the dark hunger in their eyes, and shakes her head. Refuses them all.
When Mikasa is twenty, villagers begin falling ill. She consoles herself with the fact that at least her family remains safe from the disease running rampant in their little town. Living on the fringe has its benefits.
But then her mother begins coughing.
“It’ll go away in a few weeks,” she waves off, as Mikasa rubs her back with worried eyes.
It doesn’t. Instead, the coughs come louder, harder. Bloodier. Her already-too-slim mother loses more and more weight, day by day, night by night. Wakes up in cold sweat, skin burning to the touch. Mikasa’s stormy eyes pierce through the darkness and sees the moonlight illuminating her mother’s pale, sallow face.
Sharing a nervous look, she and her father scrounge up what little money they have—farming, singing, dancing—to invite a doctor.
The masked doctor takes one look at her mother, her body-wracking cough, and shakes his head. He doesn’t even take her pulse. Consumption, he tells them. No saving her now.
Mikasa should have known that death’s reach is boundless. It’s an oddly familiar feeling, the wait for death. The unsettling silence.
The quiet, before the fall.
But before death comes for her mother, her father falls ill. The same symptoms. The same bloody coughs. The same wasting away.
Mikasa works in the fields, day and night, trying to afford enough money for medicine. If only to delay their end, she thinks desperately. But no matter what drugs are prescribed, the disease runs its course persistently, consumes them until they’re nothing but skin and bone.
Consumption indeed, she thinks grimly, biting her lip so hard it breaks, bleeds like their coughs.
Mikasa herself does not fall ill. In fact, the villagers whisper behind her back in menacing words, she’s positively glowing. Healthier than ever. Like she’s sucking their life away.
They do not see her panicked eyes, her bloody nails, her suppressed tears. They do not hear the stuttering of her terrified heart. They only see a young woman, healthy and radiant, while the rest of them are not.
It must be her, they mutter, she’s the one that’s brought this calamity upon us. She’s spreading this illness to steal our life force.
The villagers, they don’t know what to do either, about the death running rampant in their midst. Their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, everyone they know, dying left and right. Other than waiting, what else can they do? So they do the only thing they can: dig out the root of the evil that’s plaguing them.
With pitchforks and accusing eyes, they storm her house in broad daylight, drags her by the hair, all the way onto the cliffs, right above where the waves are crashing violently into the sharp rocks below. She’s scratching at the hand in her hair with untrimmed nails, drawing blood, whimpering at the sight of her mother and father begging for them to stop.
“My daughter, my daughter,” her mother sobs out, even as she’s coughing up blood. She clutches at the legs of the man with his fist in Mikasa’s hair, bony arms trying to stop him in his warpath. “Please stop! She hasn’t done anything, I’m begging you!”
Her father—so gentle, so afraid to use violence—is fighting back, weak fists banging on unmoving bodies with unmoved eyes. Pleading. Screaming. “Let go of her, right now! Please! You can have anything, my land, my house, my life! Just leave my daughter alone!”
“Your life?” The village leader sneers. “You thought we were going to let you go? For giving birth to this—this monster?!”
The fevered whispers gradually grow.
“Yeah! Toss them off too!”
“They should have strangled that thing in the cradle!”
“It’s their fault too, that this pestilence came for us!”
Mikasa sobs. “Stop,” she croaks out, ceasing her struggle in the hopes that they’ll calm down. “It’s me! I’m the only reason this happened! It has nothing to do with them!”
The angry villagers looks at her, disgust twisting their faces.
“She’s lying!” One of the men—she knows him, he’s come for her hand before in marriage, had stomped away when she’d shaken her head—points a finger at her, snaps, “She’s trying to protect them. They must be evil too!”
The murmurs grow more frenzied in agreement, and her parents are now the ones grabbed by the collars and dragged to the edge, while Mikasa watches with horrified eyes.
“Stop!” she wails. Her throat feels rubbed raw. This is the first time she’s ever been so loud, and her voice sounds scratchy from the effort. She pleads, “Let them go, please!”
“This is what you get, monster,” the village leader spits out, before kicking them off with his boots into the violent waves below. First her mother. Then her father.
“Please…” she trails off with a hoarse voice. Stares, eyes wide, as their limp bodies drop into the rapids, as their screams fade into the void of the deep waters.
She hears it. This is it.
The quiet before the fall.
She rubs her eyes roughly. “No,” she denies. “They’re—They’re still alive,” she tells herself. “They’ll swim.”
Lies. She knows the feeling of death. Like a stab to the heart.
Her vision blurs up. It’s the first time she’s allowed her tears to fall. She can’t hear anything anymore. The quiet leaves, and there is only the sound of the waves, dashing itself on the rocks, dragging her parents’ bodies under.
She blanks out. Doesn’t notice anything. Not the way they’re sneering at her. Not the way a foot slams itself roughly into her back. Not the way her comatose body flies through the air. Not the way she crashes into the waters.
There is no resistance in her, as the rough ocean water pulls her deeper and deeper within its embrace.
As she sinks, there is only the sound of the violent tides.
There is no quiet.
The tides recede, docile once more, depositing her heavy body onto sandy shores. The same shores along her home, the same shores that she’s danced to her whole life.
There is the rushing of water, there is stillness, and then there is life. Mikasa violently coughs, seawater spat out on the ground, as her body wakes. She struggles to pull herself up, glancing at the familiar surroundings.
Her mother on one side, her father on the other, and Mikasa in the middle. She chokes out a sob. A family, together once more, lying on their death bed. It’s cold. They’re cold.
Fate is cruel, and death crueler.
Mikasa should have known.
Cruel to leave her parents dead, and crueler to leave her alive.
That night, under the moonlight that only her eyes are privy to, she buries her parents. Lays them down in the cold earth, their arms wrapped around each other. Together, even in death. There’s dirt under her nails, a ringing in her ears. Tears and sobs savagely rips out from her eyes, her lungs. Unwittingly. Uncontrollably.
She cries and cries and cries, until there are no more tears left. Only anger.
Mikasa stares at the moon. It is blindingly bright.
She drags herself back to the shore.
With sore throat, with bloody feet, with a dirtied dress, under the moonlight, standing on water, Mikasa sings, dances. With death howling in her lungs, vengeance rattling in her bones, she chokes out a prayer.
The moon…
rises…
The ocean…
sings…
Whose divine…
wrath…
Will this prayer…
bring?
On that day, the tides rise, rise, rise. Taller than fences, taller than houses, taller than cliffs. It violently floods the banks, bursts into the village, drags everyone underwater. It comes so quick, there is nary a scream as the waves swallow them.
As Mikasa dances, finally, there is quiet.
By the time dawn arrives, there is nothingness.
Mikasa limps back to the graves.
Takes a ragged breath.
Closes her eyes.
Lays down.
Sleeps.
All is still.
Minutes pass. Hours. Days. A month. Two months. Three.
Under the cover of night, a man approaches the grave, a bow and quiver of arrows slung across his back. His eyes brush over the sleeping woman, illuminated softly in the dim moonlight.
He exhales shakily. When he reaches for her, his hands are trembling.
“Here you are.”
There is silence, there is coldness, and then…
There is warmth.
Mikasa’s eyes fly open.
She turns her head. Bites back a scream.
Under the moonlight, lying besides her, there is a strange man. He’s sleeping.
Her arms automatically swing at his body, trying to push him away. But before her hand makes contact, he moves quicker, fingers snapping onto her wrist, with just enough force to stop her movement.
He opens one eye, emerald irises glowing in the moonlight. She gasps. Glowing!
“I was just about to fall asleep,” he grumbles, hand still on her wrist. His skin is so warm it burns. “Be careful—” He hesitates. “What name do you go by now?”
“Who are you?” she whispers. For some reason, there is no fear, even as she lays here, with a stranger. A man. He is…familiar. Like a warm embrace. Like safety. Like…
Her heart jumps. There is an echo of pain.
He frowns. There’s a rough exhale of breath as he says with a strained voice, “You don’t remember?”
She stares into his green eyes, acutely aware of how close their faces are. Close enough to feel his chest rising and falling with each deep breath. “…I’m sorry.”
“Why should you be sorry?” he says flatly, letting go of her wrist. She rubs at where his fingers touched her. He had been gentle with his grip, but it left behind scalding heat. “I should have expected this. Don’t know why I thought you’d remember. A fool’s dream.”
“I’m Mikasa,” she offers, upon seeing his disappointment.
He barks out a bitter laugh. “Yet, it’s still the same. Ever so polite. And how’d you get that name?”
Mikasa closes her eyes. There’s a stab of pain as she remembers. Her mother…It came to me in a dream. It must have been a deity, she had always joked. “My mother had a dream,” she answers.
“Of course.” He snorts. “Always meddling, that one.”
She moves to sit up, wincing at the soreness of her body. “Who?”
He follows her movement, one hand on her back to support her. His touch burns. But pleasantly. “Don’t worry about it.”
Mikasa glances at him. He looks…scruffy. Long, unkempt hair. Patches of facial hair. He looks worn out. But his eyes. They’re piercing. Gleaming.
“Your eyes,” she breathes out, one hand reaching out toward his face, forgetting herself. “They shine.”
“You can see the glow? …Of course you would,” he mutters, but he does not stop her. In fact, he leans into her touch, lets her fingers trace over eyelid, over the corner of his eye, as she peers into those strange irises.
Suddenly remembering where she is, with this strange man that she’s caressing, she snaps her hand back. He frowns, but says nothing. “You still haven’t told me your name.”
“…Right. You don’t remember. Eren,” he sighs, more disappointment lacing his voice. “Eren Jaeger.”
“Eren,” she repeats the name, tests it on her tongue. It…sounds right. Somehow. Like some old forgotten prayer, tucked away in some dusty shelf in the back of her mind. “Eren Jaeger. Where is this?”
“You tell me,” he replies. “I found you”—he gestures in the distance, and when Mikasa squints her eyes, she can make out where her parents’ unmarked gravestone is—“sleeping on a grave.”
She sighs in relief. They’re not far away from her family.
He observes her carefully. “You know them.”
She slowly nods, biting her lips.
Thankfully, he doesn’t pry. “Any more questions?”
“Why am I here?” She shakes her head. There was something biting at her, at the way he moves in the darkness. The way his eyes glow. “No. You can see during night? Without light?”
Eren smirks. “Perks of being divine.” He pauses, mulling over his words. “Well, having the right connections,” he allows. “It’s you.”
Mikasa furrows her brows. “…Divine.” She mulls over his words, brain trying to process the information. Once the thought finally catches up to her, her mouth opens. “Divine!”
“Not fully,” he says wryly. “Demigod.”
“Demigod!” she breathes out. “Like in that archer, the one who shot down the suns!”
He scratches his neck. “Not like that archer,” he says quietly. “I am that archer.”
Mikasa sputters and coughs in surprise, feeling like there’s still residual seawater left in her lungs. He pats her back gently. “What?! But you’re so—” she sweeps her eyes over him. “Young.”
The suns had fallen twenty years ago, after all. He doesn’t look past thirty.
“Another perk of divinity.”
Her head hurts. “…So why is the mythical archer himself here?”
“To find you.”
She points to herself, trying not gasp again. “Me?”
“You,” he confirms. “The moon goddess.”
“Moon goddess,” she repeats. Her mouth opens and closes. “Me?”
“Yes. You,” he confirms again, a tinge of sadness creeping into his eyes.
“I-I,” she stutters. “I’m not. I’m just a normal girl.”
“A normal girl.” He raises an eyebrow. “A normal girl who wiped out an entire village? Judging by how old you look, you must have been born when the moon fell.”
“Maybe I have an affinity with the divine. I…I only prayed,” she says guiltily, her fingers reaching for her mouth.
He reaches out and grabs her wrist gently. Stops her fingers in their tracks. “Stop biting your nails. Again, with the same old bad habits,” he sighs. “Don’t worry. I’m not here to judge you for what you did.”
She bows her head in silence. Now that the incessant demand for revenge is gone, all that’s left is a hollow sadness.
“Knowing you,” he says, so easily, as if he really does know her, “They probably deserved it. If it was me, I’d have done worse.”
She stays silent.
He shakes his head and moves on. “Anyway. No prayer could wreck that kind of devastation. The sea doesn’t just move like that for anyone. Even the deities of the sea. Certainly not the ones I know.”
“No,” she gasps out, head hurting at the thought. “It’s not me. I only—I only prayed—if they deserved it, then it was the gods’ wrath, not me—”
His hold on her wrist tightens. It burns. His green eyes gleam, an eerie radiance in the dim moonlight. “Enough,” he snarls.
She shudders under his intense stare.
“You are the moon goddess,” this man, with his piercing emerald eyes—half divine, half mortal, Eren Jaeger, the archer who fell the suns—rasps out, “who was promised to me, long, long ago…And the promises of gods must be kept, dear wife."