☆ from gold, i am undone
{☆} characters tsaritsa
{☆} notes cult au, yandere, drabble, gender neutral reader
{☆} warnings blood, implied self harm, implied suicide attempts
{☆} word count 0.9k
You weren't meant to be here.
You can feel it in the marrow of your bones– it weighs you down like heavy shackles, gold bleeding from your pores until it is all you know. The taste of ichor on your tongue, the warmth of its invasion beneath your skin, that gleam of gold that lingers in the color of your eyes like specks of dust.
You are changed, and you are whole.
But you are so unbearably broken.
A shattered piece of porcelain hastily put back together with gold to fill the cracks.
Decoration, in the end, for you are not fit to walk as "mortals" do. This gold had filled every empty crevice of your body, spilled the red into your frantic hands and made you bleed so it's callous gold could make room inside your body. It has taken from you many things, given many more, but you scratch and bite and tear until it drips onto the floor and even then it never leaves. It stains the floor no matter how hard you scrub– a permanent reminder of the sickening gold that molds you into something that used to look like you– that does look like you. Desecrated, yet so horribly divine.
All you see is a monster.
Something new, something old.
A hollowed out shell, wounds left to rot and fester until you suited the image of the Creator they bore upon statues and murals, the Creator worshiped in prayers spoken in hushed whispers and joyous chants praising your magnificence.
But what magnificence is there in detachment? What joy is there to be found in carving a God out of a human? They kneel like lambs before the shepherd, but the flock has made you– and you want to unmake them. Unweave the tapestry of their being stitch by stitch until it all falls apart and the world knows the cost of casting molten gold into the shape of a human, knows the price that has been left unpaid.
You want to take it from them. Watch them squabble and pray, blind sheep stepping into the wolf's open maw– to tear the seams of their being until the world is unwound by your heavy hands.
But you know it will not satisfy you.
Nothing does anymore.
You are no wolf. Only the shepherd who guides.
And with every drop of blood spilled, they ripped the humanity from your very bones until your body was the cast in which they made something anew– something gold, something horrific. A monster as much a God, a beast as much a man.
There is nothing left but absolute authority.
You try again and again to mend this act of desecration, to peel back the outer shell and rend the gold from your marrow– but your body cannot, will not, die. It mends itself back into place no matter how damaged, and all you feel is the uncomfortable tug of your body forcing itself to live. You cannot die, but were you ever truly alive at all?
Yet with every cycle, you know only one constant besides the thrum of golden ichor in your veins– cold.
Ice that burns, ice that spreads and festers and devours. Claws that pull you apart until the gold runs thick, teeth that burrow into your bones and rip it out from the source..eyes that witness the fall of a God with reverence– hungering, all consuming reverence.
You welcome it.
It is the first time you felt pain since you were cast into an image of a being you were not meant to be. The sting of cold upon your skin makes you shiver, your body tries to reject it, but you want to welcome it– for a brief moment that lasts only as long as it takes for you to blink, you see the glint of something familiar in the reflection of her empty eyes. Something achingly, horribly familiar– something human, all the more terrifying for it.
Even when Teyvat itself crumples like paper beneath the weight of her sins – of this desecration anew, this wretched heresy – you allow her hands to do it again. You grasp her hands in yours like chains, willing her to shackle you, willing her to pull you apart and make you whole again. To break you until the gold cannot put you back together again.
You long, each time, for those eyes like spears that lodge into your skin– burrow deep and sting deeper, making gold flow like water. You long for the biting tongue, the cutting words and those teeth like weapons– long to see the spite and anger and impure disgust aimed at the woman of silver who leads you down a hall that ends only in damnation. You follow each time like the lamb led astray by the wolf, but you do not wail in betrayal when she sinks her teeth into your throat and devours you whole.
For is it a sin if you welcome it? Has their God sinned, in the eyes of the flock, for welcoming such heresy with open arms? For allowing the wolf into their home?
Is it a sin to be broken beneath the only hands that have loved you?
Is it a sin to want to love, too, those hands and teeth stained in gold?
Then you shall be damned, you swear it. Damned, but gold no more.
For death is the closest you have ever felt to being human.
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the quiet tragedy of verin being the one who never quite made it out.
for most of their lives, essek was the one who was entrenched in expectations, in the politics of their den. while verin was stationed far from the heart of the dynasty, ostensibly free from the eyes of his elders, essek was sitting beside their mother in court and speaking before the queen. and it made sense, because essek had always been better at all of it — the posturing, the sweet-talking, the ladder-climbing. his brother the black sleep was still his brother the prodigy; his brother the heretic was still his brother the shadowhand.
but then, essek meets new people and they get through to him and change him and make him softer, make him better (and why them? what is it about them, that they could do what verin never could?) and he runs. he gives up the title and the status and the power and leaves it all (leaves verin) behind.
suddenly, verin is the lone newsoul of den thelyss, the one with all eyes on him, with the expectations meant for two brothers falling squarely on his shoulders and only his in the absence of their other target. he is still the youngest of his den, the one they all watch and wait to be disappointed by, but there is no one to share that burden with anymore and all at once it becomes painfully clear that distance never really was freedom.
essek has a family, then — not a den but a family, with love and trust and care and warmth and all the things essek once called verin childish for craving — and a welcoming home to go to with someone who loves him waiting there and a garden in the front yard, and verin is left still fighting demons under the banner of a god (of a family, of a home) he only half-believes in.
and maybe they see each other more often then. maybe bazzoxan is remote enough that it’s safe for essek to visit in disguise. maybe essek’s friends come too and are kind enough to offer a taste of what essek has now and verin can almost believe it’s his too. maybe essek doesn’t even fight it anymore when verin insists on hugging him. but how much can that really fix? how much can it really change?
an unloved man leaves no one behind when he finally makes a better life for himself, but essek was never an unloved man. not really.
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whoever says dallas liu isnt the best zuko to ever possibly zuko needs to rewatch the original atla series ASAP.
YES he's whiney YES he has the survival instincts of a drowned fish YES he is an angsty teen.
BUT THAT'S WHO ZUKO IS.
my guy lost to aang, angrily doodled him, smacked him on a wall, and burst into flames. he is the embodiment of >:(
LOOK AT HIM. and im talking season 1 zuko here. that man is the DEFINITION of angsty teenager. he is a soggy wet cat. he is hopelessly incapable of social interaction and we love him for it. look at that dumb dumb man and tell me dallas liu does not perfectly encapsulate what an absolute idiot (/aff) season 1 zuko is.
thank you for coming to my ted talk.
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