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The demon of beauty

W hen she is six years old, Singix goes missing for three nights.

She’s a curious child and wanders out of her nursery because a flash of lightning seems to spark greenish, and she’s heard that the demon of obedience’s favorite color is green.

It doesn’t occur to her that sneaking out of her rooms in the king’s manor is hardly an act of obedience.

But the manor is a terraced open-air building of mostly balconies and lanais tripping down the smallest volcano on the first island of the Ceres Remnants, and if they don’t want curious children wandering off, they might have built more walls.

Singix climbs a trellis with the help of hearty blue jasmine vines and lands in a cluster of water clover at the edge of a royal spring. Barefoot, she follows the green lightning.

By accident or luck or the blessing of the god of courage, Singix leaves the compound and skips, slides, crawls toward the sea.

On the islands, every direction eventually brings one to the sea, but Singix chooses a fast route and ends up on a rocky beach just as the great storm lands.

Wind howls and thunder shakes the thick trees.

It rains, hot and cold in waves, curtains of water so thick Singix cannot see her hand stretched out at the end of her arm.

But she hears the water churning hungrily at the island, so loud Singix claps her hands over her ears and thinks of the legends she’s heard, from when the moon was not fixed against the northern horizon, and the ocean breathed in tides.

Through the night she stumbles, shocked, until she kicks the knee of a cloud-eye cypress and crouches in the shelter between its massive roots, face pressed to the knotted bark. It smells of home and moss and the rain that streaks down her scalp, pulling her hair.

Dawn arrives, or maybe it’s the second dawn, and the wind and rain don’t abate, but the sun lightens the air. Suddenly a stretch of silk is pulled across her little shelter and the water stops piercing her.

The storm echoes, and Singix hears her own breath in this little silk shelter. She hugs herself tight but peers out through waterlogged lashes. Someone kneels beside her, and Singix is unafraid.

The person has seven big eyes arcing across their face and forehead, each starry and bright like a different hour of the night sky between twilight and dawn.

A nose like a rabbit and a mouth like someone’s loving mother.

Hair blue-black is like the dark predawn sky, roped with jewels and salt stone. They smile, and Singix smiles back.

They share the shelter and Singix sleeps, dreaming of stars and shivering waves and strange glowing fish. When Singix wakes, birds chatter furiously and drops of water fall heavy from the broad-leafed fruit trees and slide down vines.

The starry-eyed companion smiles with teeth of every kind, sharp, long, blunt, chewing, and holds out their hand.

Singix takes it, and the person leads her through the forest, past springs and waterfalls, past fallen trees and torn roofs.

Directly to the king’s manor they lead Singix, and when they reach the front gates they let go.

They whisper, “Do you know my name?” while winking three of their seven eyes.

“Yes,” Singix answers, and the companion vanishes.

After the ruckus of Singix’s return, she solemnly tells her father the king that she sheltered with the demon of beauty.

“Es Sun,” the king says, and Singix smiles.

Though she’s only six years old, the council of avatars gives her the epithet, naming her for her friend.

Her father, who rules on behalf of the god of strength, decides that when she comes of age and marries, her consort will rule the Remnants on behalf of the demon of beauty.

That changes, of course, when Singix is engaged to the Vertex Seal.

The Ceres Remnants came to the islands many generations ago, refugees and survivors of a brutal, elaborate, far-reaching civil war couched as a war of religions.

They arrived from across the ocean on strong ships filled with people, animals, seeds, and books.

The archipelago of seven inhabitable islands curves around what had likely once been a supervolcano, long fallen beneath the waves, and now only its children remain.

The islands are lush with forests, fruit trees, almost no fauna that threaten people except for a few venomous snakes and a spider or two.

They don’t even have deadly lions or a plethora of mosquitos or annoying leeches.

There are flesh-eating fish in several of the springs, but they are the holy pets of the demon of family.

Both clear freshwater springs and hot sulfuric springs abound, gifts from the god and demon of hierarchy, respectively.

The Remnants claim in tones of innocence that the islands were uninhabited by people, which seems unlikely, and nobody believes them, but nobody challenges them about it, either.

After several generations, the Remnants adapted completely, establishing themselves and their culture and architecture and beliefs as if they’d always been there.

It is easy to forget—or ignore—that they had not.

The most useful and lucrative discovery they made was the unique silkworms living on the second and fifth islands, whose silk spins quite durable and, in the right conditions, glittering.

On the islands, they use the silk for anything and everything, but especially tightly woven cloth they stretch between godgrass stems or willow whips into spiral hats or painted and embroidered shades that can be stuck into elaborate hairstyles to keep the rough sun off the pale faces of their people.

The shades can be slipped out of hair and used like a fan against the sticky air on those few rainy afternoons when the wind stops.

As Singix Es Sun grows, she remains curious and learns the art of silk making and painting shades.

She reads every book in the vast royal library—at least the ones in the sections allowed for women and non-avatars.

She is satisfied and good-natured. There is so much to observe and appreciate on her islands, it doesn’t occur to her that she might go elsewhere.

She earns a reputation for having an encouraging wisdom in addition to beauty, and her opinion is sought by those who need—or simply like—to feel better about themselves.

She never thinks about the great empire of Aharté.

Why would she? On the islands they don’t fear the empire, for it is known the strict magic of She Who Loves Silence cannot cross the water.

But never let it be said the empire doesn’t greatly discomfort the Remnants.

The power of Aharté, while obviously they would never think it surpasses the power of their seven gods and seven demons, is too strange, too frightening, because it is so very joyless.

Only the god and demon of obedience, the most likely to agree with each other, might say the empire is all right.

Singix Es Sun is twenty when her father begins earnestly seeking a consort for her, inviting proposals from the various islands, from the cousins of those serving on his council of avatars. But it’s the empire of Aharté that answers.

On the shore of the mainland, a two-day sail from the northernmost island, a great party of miran and priests arrives.

They camp there at their southernmost steeple, arrayed with flags and pennants, and an envoy in a burnt-brown mask waits.

It seems they wait for seven days straight, though probably several of them trade off with the mask shared between them.

When the Ceres captain allows the envoy and eight soldiers onto his flagship, the envoy speaks in crisp Ceres and immediately claims that it would be to the benefit of the islands to accept the offer of the Vertex Seal to marry into his family rather than face the inexorable momentum of the empire’s conquest.

Though it is known—isn’t it?—that the power of Aharté does not cross the sea, that assurance isn’t necessarily enough of a reason to gamble your entire nation of islands. Especially when you have a daughter who will make an acceptable trade.

The Ceres Remnants welcome the empire onto their third island. The envoy is feasted and traipsed around, and when he leaves it is with a proclamation from the king that the Remnants will welcome a personal proposal from the Vertex Seal.

It comes in the form of a letter, which is delivered to Singix without being opened.

Even as far north as Moonshadow, I have heard of your encounter with the demon of beauty. We do not have such beings here, but the god we do have, Aharté, I strive to meet every day, in every breath.

It is not the opening of his letter, nor the end, but part of the middle when Lyric mé Esmail His Glory attempts to woo, which is not an inclination he is naturally prone to.

But Singix reads it, and considers it, and thinks this is a man she can appreciate.

A partner she might be able to love, and create a better world with.

A man worth the terror of leaving home never to return.

Because to her the nights she spent missing when she was six, when she met the demon of beauty and earned her unearned epithet, were inexplicable. Ephemeral, awesome, terrifying. To seek such a vibrating moment with every breath seems a thrilling way to live.

She leaves her home island with hope, a book of devotions hand-transcribed, and that first letter written by the Vertex Seal himself. It is a prayer, and a promise.

For a little bit, in the hope and fear of pre-wedding nerves, in the touch of an apostate, in the laughter of a god’s mistress and friends, Singix understands what it means to breathe with god.

She would have been a wonderful queen.