Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

At face value, the dark is something that appears terrifying. Unattainable despite its existence as a constant in the world -- regardless of who, what, where, or why, there was always darkness. Whether it be in the crevices of a forgotten home, in hollow heartbeats of a man too many times scorned, in the grooves of the blade’s hilt between the wear and tear…

The dark is given the chance to breathe, to grow, to manifest and to cultivate. It splits and it swarms most often. Occasionally it simply simmers in the musty damp, the recesses of the mind, the cramped corners of the heart where all lost things go. Muddled, not all there, tip-toeing the line of a potential fantasy in fragments of memory.

Left alone to its own devices, it can kill. It can maim. It can twist the knife; it can cut the tendons, crack the bone, slick the blood and sup the aether that seeps out in between.

But acknowledged…

There is no horizon. There is an endless sea of greyish-blue, mottled white on the shore as it breathes. The waves push in and out and reclaim the ivory, reclaim what should have very well been red. Change was often a consequence when innocence is cleaved right through, rebranded as Sin so hungry that it devours everything until there is nothing but a few grains of sand, a few locks of pink hair, a half-broken smile that’s twisted on its axis, and the salt of the sea.

That was not the first time that the dark seeped into the cracks, nor would it ever be the last. Granson made a conscious decision that eternal day, forging promises into steel so dark that sometimes it can blot out the searing ephemeral light above.

Yet, he’s so sick of the light. Even after night has blanketed Norvrandt, even after the Warrior of Darkness paid her dues and maintained promises forced upon her in a world that was never, ever her own (and yet tasted more like what “home” was meant to be) -- he pierces the clear skies with his gaze and he takes to stalking the shadow of the moon instead, where he can find comfort in what he’s come to know.

He’s been forced to reclaim and reinstate the darkness as his own since slaying the shade of Branden, since finally laying his soul to rest, since releasing the burden held heavy on his shoulders. The coat that outlines muscle as it clings to his frame and the greaves that have been stained with the blood of both faith and sin alike feel wrong. He wears them like shamed badges, showing that he’s done his time and he’s seen his fair share of war. He keeps them pinned to his person, but the steel of his claymore is the denouement of his service and quite frankly..

Granson realizes, perhaps, he’s had enough.

The dark, however, has not had enough of him.

It encourages through gentle coaxes, nudges in particular directions and reminders that he is (and never has been, even before Milinda, even before the Warrior of Darkness) not alone. It frames his heart into a compass needle and twists him until he points north. Until he can see through the haze of loss and anger, of pain and regret, of the love that blossomed in between — until he can see the reminder.

She climbs up the steps that spill out from the maw of the Crystal Tower in steady increments. Her pace is practiced and the night sky frames the moment in shutter-click perfection. The cape she dons gently flutters to a breeze that he doesn’t recognize at first, but another push and he realizes it tastes sweet. Not salty, not spicy, not bitter like the winds he would once recognize in Kholusia.

The doors to the Ocular heave open with a weary groan, reluctant but aware of the necessity. The Scions before her have already departed back to their proper home, and for now, the Warrior must return to that which she came. Even if her heart denies her, this is not where she belongs, and her story is half-spun. Perhaps when she comes back -- maybe a different woman, he realizes as he finds his feet carrying himself after her, slow at first but then quicker, quicker, don’t lose track, keep pace, don’t let the doors slam, shove them open again and follow her, follow her—

The blue floor, the blue walls, and all the golden accents make his teeth ache in his mouth. It’s that bright color, the too-sweet rot, the bright promise of an altered future where there originally had been no future to speak of. Curves of black curb the sweetness, and frayed ears atop the Warrior’s head seem to bristle at the sound of huffed breaths, of fumbling words…

She turns, and she stares at him through the dark. She sees the burning wildfire within his soul, and the wisps of charcoal that burn warmer still. She understands what it means, and a hand extends, gloved fingers reaching out to coax that dark of his further. Closer. And closer.

Never go where I can’t follow, his says to her.
Then take my hand, and our dark will keep us whole, hers replies.

Beyond reason, beyond understanding, beyond measure and reality — he takes her hand, he steps inward, he kisses her all so he can taste that dark, taste that truth, remember how far it has taken him and who it has brought him to…

And he keeps his hold onto her dark tight as she steps through that portal home.

Chapter Text

Home could be a place. Home could also be a person, an object, a memory, a feeling. The dark is home, but it shifts and cracks under pressure to the point where it can hardly be considered something tangible. It shudders before it melts, crumbling at the edges to let that infernal light in.

He curses it in his slumber as his body recovers from the cross-over.

The Scions had recovered in varying ways but largely awoke all at the same time despite the different strains that it had on their physical forms. Their corporeal ones were given the awkward half stamp of approval. Cracks in their souls, tears in their aether, and quivering abnormalities aside, things eased back to normal in a way that makes the Warrior of Darkness (no, here she is the Warrior of Light, and in this room she is merely a sinner) root herself in skepticism. Not quite worried, but any further of a stretch and she’d breach that unusual line of emotion all the same.

But those were the Scions and this is her lover, loosened from his fatigues and dressed in simple cottons. Draped over him is a felt blanket that traps the warmth against his body, prevents her cold from sinking its fangs more than skin deep in her nervousness, and tries to remind him a little bit of home.

But this isn’t home. It could be a new one, she considers. The thought whirls around in slow clockwork rotations in her head, tick-tick-ticking to an invisible metronome, and the exhaustion of her vigil suddenly drags her under the surface. Calloused fingers curl into a fist, knuckles rubbing into eyeshadow in steady circles, demanding awakeness.

It doesn’t help much. Crossing from one world to the other is commonplace for a woman of her caliber. Her restlessness comes from making certain that nothing drastic has changed in his aetheric make-up. When they left together, she donned her blindfold. With aethersight, she could see the eternal inferno of his soul as it roiled, roared, and riveted to the steady beat of a brand new purpose. Now, she stares at him with mismatched eyes of storm and blizzard, crackling levin and whispering frost. She observes the fire in its dimmed state, and for a moment she can taste peace.

The dark rises like a warring tide once the light subsides. It swathes him in his slumber, cradles him in a surprisingly harsh hold, drags its thumb across his eyelids and wonders just how much he knows of his new reality. His mind wanes, unable to oblige the beck and call until the dark presses its touch inward. The pressure heightens. His aether chokes on its own golden glimmer of ash and it renders him upright.

That stirred the Warrior properly this time, jolting her from her half-slumber.

“Granson?”

His name hangs in the air, partly aware that his eyes haven’t opened. His knuckles bare white against the fleece lining, like he’s holding his weapon, like he’s trying desperately not to lose something else. The cold smooths over and releases the tension forged by soulfire, dislodging the scream that’s been trapped in his throat for too long now. It comes out hoarser than either of them expected, his body shuddering violently for a spell before it careens forward into the waiting embrace of his sinner.

Shadow froths over the edges of his vision. He learns how to breathe again, trying to distract himself from the ache in his eye sockets by imagining the inner workings of his body. The strong pumps of his heart, racing as he remembers who he is, where he is…

The smell of pine, of smoke, faint lavender and snow — this isn’t home as he’s known it for all of his life.

It is a new home that he regards with gratitude when his eyes open for the first time, and he begins this chapter the way he ended the last — with a kiss, with a promise, and with the darkness between them both.

Chapter Text

Dragons were merely part of folktales in the village of Wright. Old stories of princesses waiting to be saved and knights slaying these scaled foes in order to obtain their prize. Most of the stories had faded away between generations, but Granson vaguely recalls one of the tales as he’s told that dragonkind is, in fact, real. He’s seen lizard-like beasts in the wake of Lakeland, but never the dragons that the Warrior of Light claims to have seen, spoken to, and slayed.

As such, he eyes the spear that she brandishes with a curiosity. It seems too light for a weapon. He had only seen her wield a broadsword and a planisphere when she had done card readings for him once, not too long ago.

“And that spear is intended to kill dragons?” he asks, half hunched over to make his third attempt at lacing up his new boots. Either the small woman doused in pink made them too short, or he’s terrible at this sort of thing.

“Or anything else that dares to get in its path,” she replies, working the whetstone over one of the forked points that curves upward. The gold shimmer detail outlining it glints in the dim light, and she sets the material aside once she’s satisfied with her work. A faint display of azure scales trembles as the essence of a primal since laid to rest slithers and dances around it.

Granson finishes suiting up after he learns the trick with the laces (Tataru should have told him, at least; that would have been nice), rising to his full height and stepping toward the Viera with that same lilted curiosity. His claymore, the same one he had brought with him, rests quietly in the weapon locker behind the pair. Rax arches a brow at the emotions he’s trying to stifle, and after a moment she holds out the spear toward him.

“There’s more to being a dragoon than holding a dragonkiller. Just as there’s more to being a dark knight than understanding the dark itself. Try it.”

There’s a pause as scarlet roams over the details of the weapon. He had been given someone else’s blade once, but it never felt right in his hands. Not that he had much of a choice at the time, and he still wields it today nonetheless. He’s made it his own, but he can’t do the same with what’s offered to him now.

But just like then, Granson accepts it and is surprised at the actual heft of it. It’s easier to grip, although he makes an awkward show of it at first. Rax’s hands move to guide his own, teaching him where to slip his fingers and how to stand. First along the shaft, then she positions his hips and gives the inside of one of his feet a little nudge with her own to adjust his stature.

A hand cups her chin in thought.

“You look like a natural.”

“Barely feel like one.”

“Relax and start stabbing.”

With closed eyes, with a deep breath, and with a slow exhale — he obliges. The swings of a claymore are more difficult to pull off in the proper wide breadth that they deserve, but with the spear he can thrust forward in quicker succession, swing it in closer-ranged arcs, and twist his body with the movements.

Rax would be impressed with that alone, had everything else not fallen as easily into place.

The azure scales zip down the length of the weapon to dance up the hunter’s arm, over the length of his shoulders, down the other arm. It guides him in his steps. The dragon it heralds senses the strength of the wielder, and it maneuvers with him as though they’ve always been one and the same.

He practices for as long as she can stomach. She can’t bring herself to stop him too soon; she’s never seen him quite so in his element as he is now, dancing with a dragon long since passed on. When she does stop him, she steps behind him and grips his shoulder. It almost knocks him free from a trance, and his head snaps to stare at her. His eyes are burning.

“...Keep it for a while. We’ll go out and have you slay some actual dragons rather than imaginary ones, hmm?”

The flush that crosses Granson’s cheeks is slight and difficult to see in the room. He straightens the spear and balances it against the floor with something of a meek chuckle. His mind loosens the dull memory of folktale and himself in shining armor, riding atop a beast so brilliantly blue…

“Lead the way then, sinner.”

Chapter Text

The panic that pulsed through Thanalan when the Telophoroi made their first move was a shockwave in and of itself. It sent all of the Scions reeling, and it gave the Warrior of Light little time to adjust on her feet. When confronted and all was said and done, Lunar Bahamut brandished its wings and scorched the earth below as a promise of worse to come. But with the foe vanquished, all that was left was to investigate the tower itself. What pulsed with frightening energy, a bad omen swapped to a worse frequency — horrors within unlike any anyone had ever seen.

But that was all word of mouth. Arenvald had come back worse for wear, nearly dead after saving Fordola. The blame was all aimed back at her, prepared to fire from bitter tongues and weary hearts…

It was tiresome. The reckoning had only just begun, but the exhaustion that came with it seemed to apply tenfold.

There was nothing left to do but wait after a certain time. Tataru was trying her hardest to get the Scions into Sharlayan, to try and speak reason with them as the world began to tremble underneath the otherworldly pressures applied to it. War itself bled onto the horizon and the towers were its unnatural heartbeat, playing to the tune of the dead and the would-be.

Rax had told Granson to stay put while she aided the Amal’jaa. As strong as they were, there had been no mistaking the casualties. He was no stranger to death and its consequences, but the truth was that the Scions were not in full trusting of him yet as someone who had crossed over with few side-effects. All of the stories of him were from the Warrior’s mouth, and while they could trust her (they have to, after all; she is the only person that can save what is left of this godsforsaken star) it didn’t matter if he didn’t pull his weight.

He understood that to a degree, but he never was good at staying still. He did so anyway, pacified with menial tasks that needed to be done in the meantime — culling of stray monsters, keeping the general populace of Ul’dah safe… But that didn’t mean that the stressors of the situation didn’t weigh heavy on his conscience anyway.

She finds a moment to breathe in the lanes between, but rumors of another tower spiking in potential activity and warranting the presence of one blessed with the Echo rouse her attention once more.

“This time, he’s coming with me.”

There are no protests when the Warrior makes her statement. With Granson largely relieved, he asks a slew of small questions through their trek to the Dravanian Forelands, most of which Rax offers the replies she’s given hundreds of times over the past few weeks. A few miscellaneous scouts patter behind them in order to pad defenses but keep a fair distance to allow for them to chatter amongst themselves.

The air gets heavy quickly. The tension in the air thickens like fog, suffocating and relentless in its hold. Energy pulses from the tower in visceral heartbeats, pounding like war drums. Perhaps, if one was to listen closely enough, they could hear the chittering of Gnath that were lucky enough to evade eternal captivity. But closer still are the sounds of the halted breathing, shuddered and gasping and choking as aether is devoured, supped upon until the very last…

An arm juts out in front of both Granson and the rest of the small squadron that accompany.

“Something isn’t right.”

Far be it for him to deny the words that pass his sinner’s lips. None of the scouts argue, either.

But the Warrior steps forward herself, and immediately does Granson reach out and snatch her wrist.

“You aren’t going in there alone, sinner. Not a chance.”

“I’m not risking you getting tempered. Bringing you with me was a—”

“Don’t tell me that it was a mistake. None of this was a mistake.”

The heat in his tone takes Rax for a surprise. He can see the dark under her eyes and the desperation that swims within them; she’s tired and she wants to get this over with, but he knows that she can’t do it alone. When he tugs on her — albeit gently — she doesn’t argue, but she does let out a frustrated sigh from her lips that passes glacial air between them.

Granson’s head turns and he’s the one that tells the scouts to leave. Call for help, and don’t come back until they’ve come. He doesn’t care who they can spare, but anyone is better than the ragtag lot they are.

“Look at me, sinner,” he tells her as he tips her chin, forcing winter and thunder to meet flame. “If all you’ve told me is true, then we have one hell of a war on our hands, and I reckon no one wants you on your knees before we get into the thick of it. We need you. I need you. Don’t force yourself head-first into this.”

The Warrior shakes her head. The chittering cry resonates louder and pierces her ears, sensitive as they are. They fall flat and she tries her best not to reel away from the arms that circle around her, clutching her close. But she pulls back, shuddering from the aftermath. The sharpening of blades, the fluttering of wings, and the soft buzzing of insects closes in. Closer, and closer…

Fear sinks its teeth in. Scarlet hues dull for a moment, and Rax realizes with barely enough time.

Her fingers secure around his wrist and she yanks his weight with her as she bolts away, doing her best to ignore the warcry as it follows in their wake…

Granson isn’t as lucky.

Chapter Text

You would have never been able to know.

The voice resonates against the black. An inky black that swirls, a veritable whirlpool of raw emotion, cut straight from the heart and allowed to soak.

Your path was destined from the beginning. Ever since she took the crystal.

In the black, gold twinkles in the distance. The rustle of armor proves that the dark itself is not alone. Or, perhaps, the dark itself has a voice. A rumbling one, painted familiar only by the warmth that bursts through the seams.

You and I have loved her from the start…

Armored fingertips descend, dipping into the font and cradling some of the liquid. The black drips loudly into a bigger font — of knowledge unspoken, untold, and unknown. The hands cradling slowly open, letting the black cascade down upon the dreaming hunter.

She cannot absolve you of your sins, and she was never built to carry mine. But ours, together...

Crimson snaps open, alert, once the voice seems to descend upon him. He stares up into the face of his fate — shimmering gold, so bright that it’s almost silver. The color reflects and rubies bleed into the sun. His lips part, yearning to ask questions, to understand, but a lone metallic fingertip rises to greet him before he can begin.

She made her choice a long time ago, before she ever stepped foot into your world. And now that she’s brought you to hers, to ours… Maybe then you’ll understand.

The ache in his muscles is suddenly undeniable. The weight in the dark keeps him held down as the voice looms, as metal cradles his cheeks stained in black, anointed by the death of a part of him that he has never known.

“Who... are you?” he struggles to ask.

My name… Our name…

The gold breaks through the dark, and his lips form the letters his mind doesn’t know. An unfair sentence plays in his mind, reeling through in shutter-click pictures. The memory is tainted with the black, and the shine halts.

Now you must carry the torch, for we are part of her legacy. Her answer.

It all comes to a splintering silence once the gold fades into smoke, and all that he is left with is a broken, heart-shaped crystal — pulsing with dim energy amidst a dark dream.

A dream from which he has not yet awakened.

Chapter Text

Marching to the beat of a war drum now far away, Granson’s mind reels back and forth. The waves crash over him, dragging him to and fro, and the dark relinquishes its hold on him as it spits him out on the shoreline. There is no horizon; there is only the beating wings of a god so engorged on bloodlust and fighting prowess that he cannot hear anything else.

When his eyes open for the first time since having been dragged away from the tower within the Dravanian Forelands, they shine gold. He gasps as though he’s been drowning, trying to spit water out from his lungs that doesn’t exist. Rax had seen tempered individuals up close and more frequently than she would have ever liked given her time in Carteneau, but to watch a primal actively twist and bend the thoughts of someone this close to her made her stomach lurch.

It was a fool’s errand, and she knew it.

An arm with strength beyond its measure grips at the Warrior’s shoulder, using her as leverage to sit upright. Heavy breaths pass his lips as he recovers from his fate. Quiet growls accompany the hefts of his chest, his head hanging low as he tries to combat the pulsing pain that ricochets back and forth inside his skull.

The gold offers an iridescent glow as he stares down at her lap — no, more like through her body, to somewhere beyond.

And she has to pause when she remembers where she’s seen that color before. But it’s impossible, isn’t it? Her eyebrows knit together as she considers the possibility at hand, and though she grits her teeth and bares the hold that he has on her, there is fear that blossoms at the hollow of her throat. It prevents her from speaking, from asking, or from calling his name — his name, one she hasn’t spoken in a long, long time.

Granson clutches something in the palm of his other hand, fingers clasped tightly around it. The veins on his arm preview the sheer force he’s using, and Rax has to wonder where the energy is going: to the fight against whatever war is howling in his head, or to maintain the shreds of memory between the haze of tempering?

Alisaie enters the room with Angelo in tow after too many bells lost to the sounds of guttural breathing and clattering teeth, nearly ground into fine dust. The magicks employed by the porxie are Rax’s reprieve; it forces his hold on her to loosen and lower, falling limp against his chest as he’s rolled onto his back. In tandem, however, it also causes the small trinket to escape his vice grip. It clinks to the floor, and the Viera makes quick work to follow the dull shine of its surface. She swipes it up and chokes once she sees what it truly is.

A cracked crystal, heart-shaped… It feels warm, almost as though it has a heartbeat of its own…

Her head snaps up to try and view her partner as he lays, but his eyes are closed and his consciousness has waned again.

Alisaie maintains her aetheric focus, but she can feel the emotional shift in the room; she’s always been rather good at that ever since she joined the Scions proper, and having spent so much time around the Warrior she reveres, she knows when things aren’t quite right.

“He’s stable, but this will take some time. Ravana dug his grubby claws deeper into him than the others I’ve seen as of late…”

Rax doesn’t believe her. Not entirely. There’s something else at play, and the chipped crystal that she’s cradling in her hand is proof of it.

The mage cracks an eye open to glance sideways at the woman, and she sighs.

“Would you go already? I understand your concern for him, but hounding over his every last breath will not speed this up. And while you’re in the commons, fetch Alphinaud for me. I may need more aether to unravel this than I thought.”

Hesitation streaks her mind, but it doesn’t fog the reality laid out before her. The Warrior only leaves after she’s certain that his breathing has stabilized, and that the gold glow from under the surface has diminished.

From the body, perhaps…

But to the stone it returns in waves of warmth in her hand.

Chapter Text

Recovery went quicker than anyone had anticipated. Most of the tempered had their own complications along the way, but Granson is an anomaly for a variety of reasons. Despite it, his mind is bogged down with the haze of a memory since tapped into. He remembers a gold shimmer and some sort of crystal, but beyond that, it’s all a blur.

He sits upright in the dark and presses the heel of his palm into his eye socket, rubbing deep and doing his best to drag himself free from the confusion that sticks in his head. But perhaps good fortune isn’t entirely lost as he hears a stifled groan from behind him, a body moving in tandem and scooting closer toward the warmth that had recently abandoned her. Aside from stifled grunts of displeasure from the sudden shift in atmosphere, all that lingers in the silence are two steady rhythmic heartbeats.

Rax’s arms wind around his waist slowly as she pulls herself upright with him, pressing her forehead against his back and leaning into him on her side. Her ears remain drooped against her head, lacking emotion in her half-slumbering state, but he can’t see her from his vantage point.

He can feel her though — every glide of her hands along his skin. The callouses on her fingers, the smooth surface of her palm, the chill that emanates from her touch. Had he not known that he was the one that had just stirred her from sleep, he would’ve marked her movements as razor-sharp and perfectly practiced. The cold radiates over smaller scars than the ones he’s given himself, mistakes from training and old wounds from old marks. Virtues had long since stained his skin, but she steeps them in sin with her ice, and the world slows its spin to a crawl.

She can feel him too — the sudden tensing of his muscles when her fingertips scrape along a particularly sensitive mark, and then the release when she finds a sweet spot to focus on. There’s some amusement found in the exhaustion between, but there are few words that she has to offer in a state like this. Her hands, tired and worn from years of molding the world into something salvageable, rest over his heart to find his beat.

It is strong, it is quick; it is a love song of appreciation, for saving whatever’s left of him and his damned soul from whatever he had been taken by.

But even so, for a brief moment, she swears she hears a secondary beat underneath the surface. One that is strikingly familiar, or perhaps a song that she’s heard before… Her mind flickers back to the crystal that rests atop the nightstand behind her, and she shakes her head. A mere coincidence to think that any sort of aetheric residue inside of it could have some sort of bearing on the small slice of calm reality that she’s nestled them both into.

One of her arms snakes around his torso to properly embrace him while the other one remains resting against his heart. Her eyes stay closed and she balances her breathing to the tune of his pulse, quicker and quicker until it slows and she’s nearly drifting again.

His palm merely presses her touch firmer against him so she can be sure that he’s still breathing, still real, something tangible that she can feel as she fades into peaceful rest.

But more importantly, he’s making sure that he’s still something comprehensible. Something that he can remember amidst the swirl of dark. Amidst the gold glow and the war drums and the promise of power found in the black.

Perhaps now, he can rest his eyes… and if he tries hard enough, perhaps he can glimpse the horizon.

Chapter Text

The days steep into one another, warmth barely cradling whatever’s left of the anxiety building. Tensions rise, oceans swell, and there is no word yet from Krile about the ongoings with Sharlayan. Every passing moment leaves the Warrior of Light more restless than the next, and for the first time in a long time does she find herself actually looking for something to do.

Whereas she should have been eager for some respite from all of the recent trials and tribulations, Rax wanted nothing more than to do her job. Being left alone with her thoughts, with the inevitable horrors of reality...

The weight of the world is a burden too heavy for weakened shoulders to handle alone.

Granson catches her at the precipice, chasing dawnlight.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Getting some fresh air.”

Not quite a lie, largely the truth. The hunter nears his partner and links his arms around her waist from behind. She isn’t fully geared; she hasn’t bothered to lace her boots nor has she completely secured the clasps on her ensemble, but she’s been eyeing the world below with some somber expression for some time. The absence of cold had led him to wander out in search of her, and it didn’t take him long, nor did he have to go very far.

“Reckon you’ve started getting up in your thoughts again if you’re out this early.”

Frigid hands slide over warmth and press them closer against her abdomen. Where there was silent appreciation for his presence, his words end up like static to her ears. Barely there as she sinks into a meager daydream. Focus crumbling, nerves trembling, she envisions the world as it intends to be: crust upending, fire spewing forth from the core within, bleeding out life and taking back what it all once was. The endless suffering of hundreds and thousands if only to appease the whims of those that had their lives stolen from them.

The end of days, the beginning of the end, the macabre theatre piece put into motion before a time she could remember.

The oceans swell, froth and shatter over the land, scattering like glass, sending a lover’s promise of death fromp breath and nurtures the good instead — the light that he carries and the promise of a new, proper dawn.

“Tell me something.”

“Anything.”

“Do you miss it there? Back on the First.”

The peace he’s come to find on the Source creeps up against him, shading his heart. There will always be parts he missed of the place he once called home, but his mind would always return to the empty mound dedicated to Milinda. The flowers he had placed there were magicked by a witch in the village — the blessing of blossoming life for her favorite of the garden. He always thought it was a little twisted, bestowing the gift of eternity onto a woman that never had the chance to make one for herself.

Granson decides to play it honest.

“Sometimes. But not for the reasons you might think.”

With his chin nestling carefully against her head, letting the fur of her ears bristle against his cheeks, a series of thought weaves through her mind. She decides not to further humor her own inquiry; the answer is enough, though it may not always be. Her head turns and she notes the features on his face. Tired, perhaps a little grim — concern glazes over scarlet, a gentle notion that she wouldn’t have noticed if she weren’t quite this close.

“Think I’m a little more… restless than I realized. Everything that’s been said and done…”

“Will be undone. Saved and spoken for. No one else can fix this better than you, and everything you can’t do, you have me for.”

His lips press into obsidian fringe at her temple, tousled from slumber not so long ago. The warmth of it melts away the visions of what’s yet to come, the shadowy premonition that’s planted a seed in the depths of her stomach, waiting to blossom and spiral out from her like an unruly growth. She draws a deep breath, keenly aware of her frame against his own — a loose attempt to chip away at the dread built-up inside. Her lidded eyes remain focused on the horizon as the sun slowly lifts, painting the land (intact, she notices, with no fire or brimstone, no scars nor blood to be seen) through rays of orange and purple, pink and yellow. The mask of horror cracks and crusts, shaken free from its hold as she lifts one of his hands and presses her lips to the back of it. A soft, lingering kiss, focusing cold.

“Good. I have a lot more to show you, and the skies are clear this morning…”

For the Warrior of Light finds herself all too eager to return to the life of a meager adventurer before the world goes dark, bringing her partner along with her to explore all of the cracks in the foundation. No matter how big, no matter how small — and who is the hunter, hungering for that pursuit of beast and beauty both, to deny her?

Chapter Text

It is in the face of a foreign man from a foreign land that everyone unites under the same banner. The banner of reality that is inevitable: this world is sparking, going up in flames, and when the land untouched says they will not provide succor, it is only comprehensible that everyone around him lifts their pitchforks from under their coats and dares to stab holes into him until he bleeds enough to put out those fires.

Forchenault Leveilleur is a man of well repute (or so it’s been said in these circles), but he disowns his own children in the face of the Warrior of Light and a hunter of Cardinal Virtues. Granson sees a monster in a man, and it’s different from what he had seen in his would-be wife. She had the smile of a saint and could never in her entire lifetime be a sinner and back then, it was hard to cut her down. Here, the angel flies away, having left behind nothing but a broken home and the expectancy for them to pick up the pieces.

He would have had an easy time cleaving through that sort of creature.

Kan-E-Senna has little choice but to dismiss the congregation once their talks have completed. Alisaie and Alphinaud are broken but not defeated. Their souls have been hollowed out, scraped clean from the inside, but there remains hope in the Scions they’ve made their true home with. Sharlayan is a mere memory now; the phantom that drifts back to its airship is proof of that. But the twins drift, lost amidst the turmoil, aetherically spent from their efforts on the frontlines.

Granson, of all people, knows what it’s like to be a shell of himself.

But in the opposite hand, so does Rax, and it explains how they created something out of rage and loneliness and the redefining of what “love” and its principles mean.

They had furled their hearts inside of their fists for so long, and to slowly open their chokehold to reveal themselves to each other and then to the world was to offer trust inside open wounds and scars alike.

So they know heartbreak, and they know loss.

The hunter is the first to step forward. Firm hands, not quite scrubbed clean of blood, take a hold of one shoulder of each twin. He squeezes in solemn silence. He isn’t a Scion properly, and perhaps he may never be, but he refuses to allow kindred spirits to sink too far into the dark. They’re too young and they have too much light left in their eyes. The black has never done him wrong (he knows, it’s still there with him and with her and the crystal in his breast pocket, the sacrament, the fruit of his labor and a testament to his love), but that doesn’t mean it’s the right path for everyone.

The Warrior only follows suit after witnessing the reaction of the twins, and once Forchenault has made his way far from the clearing. The Scions have never pinned her as someone affectionate, much less so on a physical level. But when her father perished in flame and was little more than ash where she once considered home, she wished that someone had given her something more than what she received — war, bloodshed, more lives lost and less lives remembered.

So her arms encircle around them, and the embrace that the four share is somber and silent. It doesn’t nullify the pain. Maybe it acts as a numbing reagent for a time. There are no tears, and there are no regrets. There is only the resonating beat of hearts firm in their purpose, their intentions, and their promises. To the living, to the dead — for those we have lost, and for those we can yet save.

When they break, it is for the sake of Alisaie and Alphinaud to have some breathing room. They leave the lovers to their own melancholy, to taste the ashes of a failed treaty, and to consider their options — or, more properly, the lack thereof.

Rax’s chest heaves in a slow, deep inhale. Winter’s fog passes on the exhale, her head canted back toward the sky before she opens her eyes to receive the stars. Her nose twitches, and she feels Granson’s fingers interlock between her own in a reassuring squeeze. Despite the storm she smells on the horizon, not so far from the edges of the Black Shroud and closing in quickly, his warmth swallows the bad omens and permeates in a slow, steady reminder.

Home, she knows. They can rebuild. It isn’t impossible.

She’s defied the impossible on more than one occasion, and who’s to say she can’t do it again for those she considers her own?

Her head shifts back again as lightning cracks across the sky, as an airship whirs and lifts, and as he offers another errant squeeze.

It’s only one more monster in the flame. One more obstacle to conquer.

Thunder ricochets, roaring through thickets of bramble and leafed canopies…

Home sinks deeper into her bones with the loss of another.

She doesn’t find this strange as she squeezes his hand in solidarity, electing to brave the storm as the rain begins to pour.

Chapter Text

In hopes of not stirring worried demons from their slumber, he does not speak a word of the music in his head.

It has seeped into his heart, hollowed out a hole somewhere in the ventricles and formed some sort of nest — no, a chamber, six of them, and the rounds within are hotwired to sing praises to a god he barely recognizes the name of. When he pulls the trigger (and the question is when, not if he realizes one night as he lays wide awake trying to swallow the gunpowder), gloria held to the highest will snuff out the dreams of tomorrow.

It’s the poetry written in the bloodline, in the war drums that rumble like thunder, but it’s missing the lightning. The flickering flash, the promise, the punchline, the…

He lies wide awake beside his lover, pale and nude and content amidst their ceremony since passed. The backs of his fingers graze over her shoulder, offering errant warmth where there is none left, his knuckles grazing over small scar chips but gently, like he’s afraid she’s wax and she’ll melt if he presses too hard or for too long.

No, her skin is wax. Waxing like the moon, hanging lower in the sky as it bleeds through the cracks in the window that they still haven’t fixed yet. The demons pry the cracks wider and it makes the warm, thick air of Mor Dhona flood the area. It sticks like a fog, heavy and not quite enough but simultaneously too much all at once, and for a moment Granson forgets how to breathe.

He can’t remember when the last time he slept was. The delirium forged by the annals of war painted against the chambers of his heart keep him awake, and partly it is by choice. He’s afraid that if he sleeps, he won’t remember waking and that’s when he’ll squeeze down on the trigger that he’s so diligently keeping his fingers away from. The hammer is pulled back, and at any time it could be her, it could be a Scion, it could be the home they’ve made burned to ashes.

He breathes in that fog, and he breathes out the cold of his lover, who doesn’t once stir. Nor does she melt with the heat in the room as it spreads its arms wide, trying to swallow it whole in one firm embrace that he has to struggle not to suffocate in as it is.

The room whirls in defiance. He won’t listen (realistically, he has no choice, but he’s pretending like he isn’t) and it rips through his defenses. He looks at the gilded spine of his lover, how it glints quietly in the heat waves, and how he swears if he looks hard enough that it’s moving. It’s eager to tear free again, to defend herself from the horrors laying dormant inside of him, and he has to grip his heart with his own bony hands and rattle it hard enough so the image stops.

In reality, the Warrior slumbers and the scar she’s earned as a result of her own time in war remains still, save for the faint glimmer-glow of light and frost. Normal. The sweat’s since dissipated off of her skin; he’s lost track of time but it’s been hours since he was inside of her, hours since she heard him say his name. Sinner, sinner, he breathed into her skin then, clutching her as she melted, dripped like wax, howled like the flickering flame and then…

His head lifts from his hands, clammed with sweat and paranoia. The cracks in the window are the same. The haze in the room, what he thought was the gloom, it had only been the moon’s wayward reflection against the glass. Crooked fingers curl inward so he can dig his knuckles into his eyesockets, trying his best to scrub away the exhaustion from his mind, but it persists stubbornly to the tune of chittering and the smell of roses and the sound of ringing steel.

Whatever has made its home, nested in that hole in his heart (maybe where Milinda is, he wonders, and then it all slowly pieces together, clicking, ticking, picking apart the pain and the heartbreak and the need to wage war), refuses to remove its teeth from him.

And as he reaches over to seek out one of the Warrior’s hands, he’s terrified as the thorns of roses pierce his skin, and the petals peel away from the nail beds.

Our dance has only just begun.

Chapter Text

And when he is not forced to dance to a tune he refuses to know intimately (because he has broken himself in half learning intimate with both his dark and his light, his love, his Warrior and his sinner), he takes a slower pace. There is no need to rush when word hasn’t passed of a solution to the overarching problem of the inevitable end of the world, the elephant in the corner of the room whose shadow is overbearing and pregnant with purpose. Instead, he minds his steps and takes the days as they come.

Her cold forgives him and her frost repairs the halo he wears, broken from dragging his blade through the viscera of another damned soul, splintered from spending too much time cracking other angels in half and hoping that the light will spare him.

His limbs ache from their tours between. He finds he doesn’t like Mor Dhona as much as he thought he did when he first arrived; he’s tired of the scenery and the gloom tastes like cremation, gritty and warm and forgotten along the way. He tells her this after he wipes his mouth free from blood that drips from his nose, and she offers an escape route somewhere else. The Scions have little say in where the Warrior goes in her downtime, and if she wants to stay somewhere else then so be it, so long as she’s able to be found and spoken to when the time comes.

She takes him to the Holy See, where the ashes are less forgiving but less vocal, where the sins of man and dragon both crack the stone and stain the glass but sink in so deep that things are starting to get better, kind of. He sees broken soldiers on the streets, knights clad in armor he vaguely remembers from Vrandtian folklore trying to peel them up off of the half-melted snowbanks, and it suddenly tastes like saltwater. He remembers how terribly the people in Kholusia had it, how they still have it, how they’re thrown occasional scraps from Eulmore and told to go fetch.

It makes his blood boil, but at least there’s active change going on around him. Workers hammering nails into fresh wooden panels, repairing walls and replacing defenses. Micromanagers redirect focus to the supplies and materials to be sorted out amongst the orphans stuck below in the Brume, barely catching sunlight with their grubby palms and hoping it’ll feed them enough to last them through the night.

Ishgard welcomes them in the only way she knows how, but at least she's learning how to be better.

But she doesn’t afford him the opportunity to linger, and when he’s brought to an apartment with a window that overlooks the Jeweled Crozier, he finds he can breathe a little easier.

“This is where you were raised?” he asks as she pulls him in by hand, knocks the door shut with a tap of her heel, and unloads into the armory resting diligently in the corner.

“From what I remember,” she responds, unlatching plates and setting all of the hefty outer layers of her labor aside in order to make room for more of him and his touch, made easier when he mimics her movements and loosens his heart.

There is gratitude in scarlet that she can see dripping from the iris inward, rippling slow and savoring. He brushes a few stray snowflakes from her hair while his hands make ruin out of her hips, offering warmth that promises to stay. Her cold yields in eternal agreement, tipping the balance and warranting a blood flush to her cheeks, staining pink while her nails drag through teal strands, down the back of his neck, over a stray scar and fabric of his undershirt, creeping down and back up over his skin.

She absorbs all of him and he gives it to her as he kisses her, molds her frame against his, forgets the broken and the beaten and the damned and remembers that this is his home now. Her in all of her dark and the dark that he drapes her in, the dark that he guides along her spine to make it ache just a little bit less, the dark that pulls everything off until there’s nothing left but his home. Perhaps a bit broken, perhaps a bit beaten, but it’s a place to stay nonetheless.

His kiss leaves a trail down, over the sharp of her collarbones and the soft of her breasts, against the scar over her heart and the other that crosses against her ribcage. His thumbs drag slow over the tops of her thighs, pressing in as his lips acquaint under her navel, lower, lower, and to the rose.

He holds her like he’s afraid that she might shatter, crack like a sheet over a lake, flood everything he’s come to know. He holds her as he tastes her, as her fingers sift into his hair and tug, as she wonders what she’s done to deserve such a sudden gift.

Nothing, he would have said. He instead paints that with his tongue. Peace doesn’t settle like this over them anymore when more often than not they’re tasked to culling jobs, but he seizes it now while his mind is clear — no, full of her, how her nails push against his scalp in a steady, eager scratch and how she inspires him to press closer, to take his fill, to give her that peace.

But he’s never been peace. He’s always been a blazing wildfire, melting her down ember by ember. Their darks had mingled a long time ago, crossing paths before they had ever known, and the ease in which he intimately explores her — that is the peace, the balancing act made easy. She bears witness to him on his knees, absolving his sinner with one eye open. He watches her and he smiles against her spiraling heat, against the roll of her hips, against the desperate push of her hand and the quiet, mewling plea for more.

He obliges. The coil tightens. It tightens and tightens until it comes undone, until the spring bursts, until she gasps out his name in trembling thighs and a grip too tight on his hair. It aches, it burns, but she eases up as she rides out the waves, using him as leverage so she doesn’t buckle.

And he lets her, gently pulling her from the tightrope, tugging on her waist to bring her down to his level. He cradles her, he kisses her, he lets the supernova of frost take its toll. Her breathing normalizes as her forehead nudges against his own.

The aftermath is peace.

He realizes he can’t hear the drums. But his heart is a cymbal, clashing hard and fast and loud in his ears; it’s an unintelligible sound, it’s an angel beating its wings, it’s a yearning that crackles like firewood.

She kisses him again, again, and again. Biting frost.

It goes quiet.

Quieter than he’s ever known.

And their darks circle one another as the sun dips below the horizon, barely caught in the cracked window pane.

Chapter Text

The storm is a wolf, maw wound up tightly as it snarls, as it breaks across the sky, as the spittle from between its teeth loosens and sputters to the ground as snow. Rain never needs to fall when the cold is eternal here, a consequence of a tragedy that no one could have broken free from. The once-green lands of Coerthas lay in a grave crafted formally by a crimson cocoon in a deadened sky, and Bahamut sends his regards before the world breaks under his might.

His tears are the snow now, wreaking a gentle sort of havoc on the good days and on the bad days, his memory is a sawtooth blade that can never cut clean. They find bodies in the heavy snowbanks on the bad days, frozen in their sorrows, lips pried open to try and tell whoever finds them their story and how to bring it back home.

Home — a relative feeling, not a place, not somewhere to be but someone to behold.

Rax sinks her teeth into her home, links her arms around the endless fountain of warmth that is Granson’s body, and she listens to the storm.

Whether it’s the storm within or the storm outside, there’s no one who can tell — her ears are pinned low against her head, black bangs clinging to the sweat on her skin while her braid has come undone at her collarbone. The strands hang loosely and sway gently with every deep inhale, every cold exhale, every little sound. She is behind him, tired and dirty and worn from the work they’ve done today and yesterday and all week. It’s been a slaughter in more ways than one; blood stays crusted under her fingernails and she’s scrubbed relentlessly every time she gets the chance but sometimes, the blood is so desperate to stay with you that it will not budge.

And Granson understands that. He knows the feeling. He lifts a hand in his exhaustion (and gods only know when he’s last slept, she’s never seen dark circles under his eyes like this) before his thumb runs gingerly over the scar, over his christening of the dark, over his promise to a love now beyond. He split his face in half just to make sure he’d understand the pain of living, of loving, of losing. And while he is thankful that the feeling is no longer hollow, he’s afraid of the thunder in his head, how it’s crept through his veins and cozied up in those revolver chambers that make up his heart.

They wait out the storm. They settle in a shoddy settlement while the wolf yowls, bringing with it slapping winds and wet snow, piling up against the door and forcing them inside for a while.

Their linkpearls are quiet and it’s a blessing and a curse in equal measure.

On one hand, there’s a desire for an escape. Part of her feels as though he likes Coerthas less than he does Mor Dhona; she can feel the cold bite into his bones, and it’s not because of her. Conversely, this is a hideaway; it is a place where they can wisp between the trees and the stone and the death that haunts its halls and they can be.

But now they are.

Rax’s fingertips trail slow patterns into his stomach, against fabric recently stitched for him, like she’s trying to spin the thread of his warmth around her touch so she can keep it for a while.

Granson recognizes the motion, and in between clashes of a rattling door frame does he grip her hand, run his thumb across her knuckles, fight the sleep and play it patient.

The wolf smells blood in the air, on the horizon even as it’s drowned by the tears of a beast long gone and it screams. It leaps, it bounds, and somewhere not so far from where the lovers nest, a boy dies looking for his father after he had been sent on an expedition to gather supplies for the very thing that takes them both. Another sacrifice for the storm to feast upon, gorging itself full of despair only so it can swell into something bigger, something monstrous, something that seems like a threat now but will become a mere whisper rather than a rattling of bones and caskets and tombstones and dead fathers without proper remains, only ashes, sitting alone on a hill overlooking a frozen lake that they danced upon once and—

Rax is shaking.

The thunder is too loud. Too much. Her quiet is disrupted by the war drums, and had she only known that they were not the storm and instead the hunter she cradles, trembles against, gives herself freely to — perhaps she wouldn’t have brought him here.

There is an apology on her lips that refuses to come out; he grips her hand tighter because he understands what it’s like.

Once upon a time, the light that washed over Kholusia, lapping over the sea and surging into the poor villages made him sick. Once upon a time, he found himself numb whenever he brought his blade through someone that was tainted. Once upon a time, the only moment that he felt anything outside of his violent homesickness was when he found the Fangs of Orthus and the memory of finding that ore with Milinda tore through his chest like hailfire.

Granson knows the storm. The feeling. The threatening pressure, boiling over, frothing and then melting down defenses, insides, emotions, hearts.

He lifts her hand. He presses a kiss to her knuckles. She doesn’t stop shaking, but he doesn’t blame her. Not once. Not ever.

“We’ll leave when the blizzard passes.”

Yet the wolf devours the moon as the grey sky drips into the blackest night.

Only when the sun rises does its hunger wane, and by then, she is asleep in his arms and the storm is all but a whisper.

Chapter Text

By daybreak — proper daybreak, not something that’s in a distant dream but the sun actually rising and painting the sky over in proper blues rather than a slightly different shade of grey — the lovers have their things packed.

Some curious Ishgardians preen and wonder why they’re leaving so quickly, why they haven’t spent their time learning the ins and outs of the ghosts that roam in between the rocks and the occasional flowers that have somehow managed to sprout under flickering lampposts, why that apartment is so cold and why the Warrior doesn’t often show her face in her home anymore.

But these questions never receive answers because they don’t need to. They’re written on their faces as they tug their hoods over their heads a little tighter. Granson isn’t accustomed to being eyed the way he is when he’s with her, but he doesn’t necessarily mind the curiosity. It’s merely a different flavor of attention, and he squeezes her hand when it gets to be a little bit too much.

On occasion through their journey out of the biting cold and closer to the shoreline, where Aldenard breaks off into Vylbrand and Limsa Lominsa isn’t so far away, he recalls the light-catching tides of Kholusia and his heart squeezes fierce in his chest. It feels as though it’s about to burst, but he recognizes the homesickness and knows it isn’t what most would say homesickness is.

By history and by nature was he born and raised in that tiny little village, a mere blip that was blessed by a falling star once and then was of little more use than making a damn fine ale. It had brought him one of the best things in his life, but she’s little more than viscera and ash. What’s left of her remains six feet underground, and that wasn’t much. But it never needed to be much of anything. Not then, not now.

Rax learns about his thousand-yalm stare and its subtleties on the sea. The waves lap against the hull and she’s been on this ride a thousand times in equal measure beforehand. The Kholusian sea could never handle a vessel like this, not with the depths of the Tempest churning below and creating unstable converges of seawater and sea creature alike. So she watches as he basks in both the scenery and his own thoughts, only offering meager squeezes of his hand as he begins to slip six feet deep.

The captain calls to anchor and the crew set out to finalize the voyage. They gather their things — he overcomes his brief bout of nausea once they’re stabilized and she guides him with a hand against his lower back, letting him take the first steps off of the vessel and onto land.

“Nearly thought I’d never glimpse proper stone again,” he manages, his tongue thicker in his mouth from inhaling all of the saltspray.

“You knew you’d survive. You’re not rid of this mortal plane yet.”

The hunter offers her a half-baked smile, the type that pulls one dimple on the side as he heaves his few belongings over his shoulder and begins the step inwards.

Limsa Lominsa bustles as it always does. Chittering folk trying to sell their wares, entertainers looking to make quick coin through clean and dirty means, Yellowjackets pinning a thief under a boot and prodding him with questions. All in a day’s work. It generates money, it keeps the people talking, and the life within the port town hasn’t seen better days. Merlwyb had certainly made her mark known, by word and by flintlock.

“Everywhere we go, it’s triple the population from Norvrandt.”

“We didn’t have a Flood that wiped out half of the living population. More to see, more to inhabit.”

And inhabited it is. In the nooks and crannies, in the spaces between; seamen make their livelihoods tucked into the corners, over and under planks, in the alcoves of the shores. It isn’t like Ishgard with starving children begging with their eyes, but there’s knives in them instead — glinting in low light, seeking opportunities. Unguarded pockets, open zippers, smoke and mirrors.

They blend in almost well enough had the Warrior herself not been an obvious mark. Her greyish skin coupled with the frayed ears atop of her head, perked and wary to any of Limsa’s typical culprits, are enough of a clue. But most know better than to attempt small talk, save for a merchant who juts his leg out in front of the pair as they stride, intent to make their way to the upper decks and settle in for a drink or two at the Drowning Wench.

“Just a word, miss,” the man drawls, a scraggly Hyur with a face mottled by dirt. He’s blind in one eye with half of his hair tied into a braid that drags behind him. He looks more Doman than he does La Noscean, but she’s seen her fair share of those who liked to gamble with their own life and play the Joker in an unshuffled deck.

So the Warrior and the hunter stop. But the merchant’s teeth chatter. He’s shivering, sniffing, and then his head suddenly jerks forward. He’s squinting through a kaleidoscope of another’s creation, the bad eye along with the good. Combined, their powers of scrutiny are unmatched. At least, that’s the business he touts and it hasn’t done him wrong yet. He lifts a grubby finger, swivels slowly as though he’s thumbing through a remarkable book collection, and then he stops when he sees what he wants to see.

“S’pose I should have said sir instead. Apologies, but…”

It happens too quickly for neither Rax nor Granson to react, and by the time it’s done, there’s little else to do but… look?

The merchant had pinched something off of the hunter’s garb. No, it was his skin — he feels stinging pain and a buzzing in the back of his head, something he’d been ignoring for the past few days. The lack of sleep may have done it to him, but as they were getting further and further away from the likes of Dravania and its pulsing, beckoning tower, the more confident he felt in his recovery. Alisaie said it would take time, and he wanted so badly to believe her.

He doesn’t anymore.

“Not every day you see a pretty little insect flutter its way into this parlor, you see.”

Between his fingers does he flick his spoil. It’s a small scale, or perhaps the beginning of a wing…? It looks like he’d taken a butterfly apart and taken a partial piece of its stained glass. It breathes as though it lives, azure into scarlet, mixing lilac and then back apart again.

Rax’s heart sinks, but Granson’s hits the floor first.

Gold teeth glint, decayed by seasalt and forgotten promises. Raising up the prize, he digs it between two of his teeth and closes his bad eye before he rocks free one of the nuggets. It’s grit and pulp and blood, but it’s real, and in exchange for what he’s stolen from the hunter he plants the tooth into his palm and closes it up, patting his knuckles with the meat of his own.

“You’ll find it’s equivalent exchange. Oi, miss — pardon my manners, miss Warrior of Light? Miziere, is it? Your name’s always on the tip of my tongue after we all heard the news about Damian… Right. Bring back more of those if you find them growing on him again, yes? Toss the teeth to Baderon, and he’ll know what to do with them.”

The two are forced into silence. The merchant offers a sweeping bow before he limps off, twirling the blood-speckled scale in between his fingers like the pick of a guitar. The crowd swarms, devours, and makes him disappear before they can ask questions.

Granson’s hand raises to the back of his neck where he felt the pinch, and he dabs blood away with his pointer and middle fingers.

“Wicked white,” he snarls.

Forcing his palm open, Rax swipes the tooth and doesn’t bother to inspect it. Instead, she forces their feet loose from the concrete emotion that keeps them there amongst travelers and natives alike that are simply trying to get by. In his chest, the war drums quicken with his heartbeat, and he swears again under his breath as she takes him up the spiraling pathway, toward the Drowning Wench proper.

She stops him once they reach a table and once she sits (more like encourages by roughly shoving) him down. Eyes of ice and storm search his face, his tired eyes; his heartbeat is a rhythm she’s heard before and she’s trying her best not to look back and see the spot where the surprise had been taken from him.

“I’m getting that wing back.”

“Sinner, wait—”

The Warrior raises the tooth in his face. It’s rotten from the inside, but the mineral coating is real despite the viscera still clinging to its grooves.

“And we’re going back to Dravania to finish what I started.”

Chapter Text

The time has long since passed since you started loving him.

Cradling his heart in your hands, feeling it pulse and rejecting the instinct to crush it into a pulp because you have been bred to do so with everything that is a potential hindrance to the grand scheme you have been forced into — you handle it carefully like it’s something fragile, something foreign, or maybe like something you’re afraid of.

You find familiarity in the taste, something that looks like salt but tastes like sugar; you see the gold specks in his heat haze and you wonder why you feel so at peace.

When the killer instinct inside of you swells, tormenting and torrenting and thrashing and thistling, every bone in your body threatens to creak and crack. It isn’t him your unabashed fury is directed to. I have taught you better than the sins that drip from the corners of your mouth. Your anger is not anger but it is too much love — love that cowers in the dark, love that has been taught that it requires light to nourish, love that’s been reaching out for so long but has only been scorched by the reality of the world.

Your father still haunts the remnants of your home. Your father — I would say that I’d hope he roams Halone’s halls learning of every morsel he can gorge himself on freely without restriction, hesitation, persecution, but we all know they robbed him of that opportunity the second his flesh caught flame — was not entirely collected after his passing. His ashes are steeped into the thick slabs of stone; his ashes have been blown across Ishgard and to the depths of Coerthas and perhaps even beyond, because you know the winds have been strong enough to carry.

Your father’s love was light.

But “Stella” is not the name that he knows you by; it is not the name of your true soul or the body that you have since come to inhabit. You’ve stolen your opportunity back from those that robbed you of it. Your hands are stained red, and they have been since before you became the monster you were bred to be.

But he presses his lips to your palm, he licks clean the blood that stains, he is the meaning of love in the dark and finally, you understand that it can blossom even where the light cannot touch it.

I’ve shown you the fundamentals to being. You had been without them for so long that you tried to rediscover them through the deaths of those responsible for taking everything from you, but they only left you empty. And when you swallowed the light for Norvrandt, felt it bleach your insides and creep up your spine, shouldered every burden by force and never once by choice — you lost them even then.

You could have torn the world asunder trying to rediscover yourself, ripped apart skin and muscles and veins and feasted on everything, everyone if it meant finding your place.

Stella, my christening of your dark came with a blood price. You may never pay it in full, but you will always be full — you will always rediscover your home within the palms of his hands, the kiss of his lips, the way he coils around you and rebukes your frostsworn existence.

You see him awake at night and you wonder what it would take to get him to run away with you. The world could crash and burn, and in a moment far away from the destruction that threatens the very star you inhabit, you would have no regrets. All you would have to do is say the word, and he’d come bounding after you. You know he’s tired of trailing the heroine; you imagine he wants to be let free of this burden, and somehow you can’t see the irony of wanting to do so for him and not for yourself.

The reality is that you wouldn’t run. You’d think about it, let the thought simmer over the low heat of anger and frustration, but you’ve become so ingrained in the routine that running now is impossible.

And as he turns over, his back to you and his eyes finally closing for the first time in what feels like weeks, months, you can’t remember — you know that he wouldn’t run either.

You reach out. You run your fingertips against his spine, cold like the corpse you are, tracing out where your scar would be. You catch yourself and your heart sinks.

Why is it that you can never stop thinking about yourself? Is it how badly you wish you could scrape whatever’s truly left of you together into something tangible? Something worth loving, something comprehensible? The monster you’ve become is something you’ve lost track of, and you feel the ache. The way you could dig your nails into him and pull out chunks of flesh. Filet him, keep him with you forever—

I bring down the blade and I shatter it.

You tire of feeling like the beast that you are, and I tire of playing games to push you back onto the right track.

Should you wish to bring destruction to something, let it be the war that has formed in his veins and the drums that make up his heartbeat.

The journey to Dravania is not so long, and you have a score to settle with the war itself as it beats its wings and protects its people.

You sink into the sheets once you’ve realized. But not before pressing a kiss to the base of his spine. It’s an apology. To him. To me. To us.

Sleep, creature of the dark.

My vigil will not end until his last breath.

Chapter Text

“Were you ever going to tell me that you’re growing… wings now?”

“Not as though I knew it before the bastard tore it off of me.”

Contention broils in the hazy La Noscean morning. More like the break of dawn as it yawns across the sky, but it was neither here nor there. Rax nurses a mug of tea while she leans over the railing of their room’s balcony, and Granson sits at a table not so far behind her poking at a muffin.

It wouldn’t be amiss to say that all the talk about his affliction has made him lose his appetite.

“You could stand to tell me why you’re sleeping once a week, if that.”

His chest tightens. He swallows thickly, but his throat is dry and it makes him fumble. She doesn’t look back at him as she’s too preoccupied witnessing the routine begin its cycle anew below, merchants opening their stalls and pirates privy to it digging into their pockets for coin that’s probably been stolen six different times over.

“Alisaie said it would take a while.”

There’s a long draw of the tea at his response. Rax is dissatisfied, and he recognizes it by the waft of cold.

“And your solution is to stay awake? Risk yourself on the field because you’re exhausted?”

“It’s less of a solution and more of a—”

“Placeholder? You don’t know how deadly this can be. Between not sleeping and growing wings, it’s like you’re part of…”

The ears atop her head bristle briefly. Her nose twitches in the way it does when her anger builds, and she releases the pressure with a near whistle from her mouth. The tea doesn’t work to calm her, but it does pick away at some of the glaciers in her mind, blockading common sense.

Granson swats at some crumbs on the table. It’s too early to argue.

“You brought me there to begin with, sinner. You’d witnessed the towers firsthand.”

“You wanted something to do, to make yourself useful. I didn’t want to keep sitting around and…”

“When will you swallow your pride and accept that your decisions aren’t always right?”

There’s an edge to his voice that seems to shock her fully awake. The Warrior turns to face him then, but his eyes don’t burn. His aether doesn’t either, at least not as brightly as she’s accustomed to. He’s tired, and she winces at the thought. With a few wary steps inward, she closes the shuttered doors behind herself and sits herself down with him across the table. The mug remains cradled in her hands as though it’s a form of safety; it can only stay so warm for so long.

“There’s a lot we still don’t know. But the towers, they’re not tempering toward primals. It’s for Garlemald. We didn’t get close enough to the tower for that.”

There’s a chittering in the back of his head. It happens like clockwork, like drones working to four-four time, following something. His fingertips tap in tandem for a moment before he catches himself, and he looks at her properly again.

“Then why are you taking me back there?”

She finishes off her tea, nudging the cup across the table before she pulls herself to her feet. Morning fatigue clings to her like static from a thunderstorm, trying to guide her in numbing shocks back toward the bed. But she persists, slinging a bag over her shoulder and glancing toward him in the meantime.

“We could go back to Mor Dhona so Alisaie can spend another twelve bells draining her aether for your sake. Or we can go back to Dravania and kill who’s really enthralled you.”

Granson weighs his options. They sit heavy on his shoulders. The war drums have only become louder over the days, and truth be told, he’s not so sure how much longer he can handle it. The clicking and the tittering is static in his head, filling it with idle sound and he’s not entirely sure he can understand the hivemind but it tries to understand him.

And being understood by something unknown makes his stomach twist.

Rax pauses by the frame of the door, turning her head over to look at him. He swipes the muffin off the table after a moment, and the way he moves is too slow. It makes her jaw set and her lips press into a thick line. It had been what felt like an eternity since they had last step foot in Dravania, but the changes had been mostly subtle and unspoken. Now, they’re too difficult to ignore — but at least there’s a comfort in the way he grips his longsword and hefts it onto his back for transport.

Familiarity. Good. He’s not all gone yet.

Briefly, she leans in to kiss him. His muscles tense. Rejection of anything that isn’t part of the typical droning cycle is an instinct he’s suddenly become intimately familiar with, and he has to swallow it down to return it. The hesitation is a warning sign, a flare in the dark, shooting higher in the sky with rose petals and flakes of gold.

The hunter wants to offer some semblance of comfort, but his heart is replaced by the throes of a battle he’s not physically part in. His soul is woven around a distant spindle, the thread slowly being picked apart and driven thinner, thinner…

The Warrior laces her fingers between his own and guides him with what strength she has left to share, moving with urgency and swearing under her breath at the fault of her own. The docks aren’t so far from their lodging, but the clouds looming overhead bring ill fortune. It’s not often that the ships won’t sail due to a storm, but her heart clenches in her chest as she remembers the last one they had waited through.

One who fells gods for a living often doesn’t believe in them, but she hisses a prayer to Halone under her breath and squeezes his hand so she can hold tighter to the ache in her chest that wants to make things right.

“Tip the war into our favor, o Fury…”

The sky roars in reply, and Granson lowly chuckles at the irony as they board.

Chapter Text

The storm is their shadow as they part the sea. The sails do well to break wind and rain. Whether by force or by admission, it wouldn’t have mattered — Granson is unconscious inside and Rax is watching over him, counting seconds in her head, adding them up like grains of rice and wondering when they’ll crash through the mountain.

When they break through the fog that lays heavy over the water, blanketing over and swallowing the stars up above, the undeniable pulse of power that is the Telophoroi’s tower in the distance remains true. It pumps like a heartbeat, pulses like a dead man’s final prayer, and somewhere in the lines between does it bleed the ground beneath it dry.

But it smells like what home should. It’s a faint misting from the sky now as they arrive back where the fresh cycle had begun. Pain following like the seasons, varying in type and perhaps magnitude, but never in the visceral feeling and how it cuts across the scars and makes new ones.

As Rax nudges Granson awake, all he can think about despite the heavy ball rolling around inside his skull is that he wishes he had the strength to break the circle.

The green of Dravania has an ethereal glow to it. As the storm recedes, the dragons awaken, even in the dead of night. They coo across the skies and they stretch their wings, sharpening the razor blades tucked inside their maws in anticipation of the hunt. Heavy rainfall often pushed their prey into hiding, and with the earth below sated by the heavens above there is no better time for them to strike.

Were it true for all living beings, things may have been a little easier.

“We’ll set up camp for the night. Somewhere safer. Tailfeather is a ways away, but…”

Granson offers a grunt. His exhaustion wraps him together too tightly in all the wrong places; he feels as though he’s being pulled apart, muscles spreading thin and twisting as he’s drawn to become a different man than he’s being told to be. But less of a man and more of a drone, an existence, beating wings and buzzing…

Stability comes in the form of chilled lips against his skin. Over his knuckles, across the top of his hand. She guides him through the forest, pretending as though it’s blind and treating it with caution. She can’t see his back from here, not with his weapon hefted upon it, but if she squints properly she may be able to catch a glimpse of a glittering scale reforming where the merchant had chipped the last one off.

And she swears under her breath, because this one’s bigger than the last, and if she chooses to believe her eyes then it’s crawling up his neck and straining him further.

The tower feeds from the land that has just been fed; the trees and the leaves and the grass below have had their sigh of relief, and now it is their time to scream. It all falls on deaf ears, but there is a noticeable way in how the plants wilt as they make their steady trek toward the encampment. They are not the same as they once were, and the cries of the dragons that shrill through the clouds are different, too.

They wish for absolution, and they had received it once when she had put an end to the Dragonsong War. Rax is aware that this is a fresh war waged, but its extent puzzles her, if only because the common denominator should be to eliminate the tower as it looms over like a bad omen, rising like a tree with its roots buried so deep underground that it’s sucked its full of blood and still yearns for more. Bloated, round, thick and heavy with the despair of the world as it creaks, cracks, crumbles and cries…

The Gnath had been taken by droves, planted into the walls and made to be avatars of a darker fate. Crystals could only offer asylum to a particular degree, and yet…

When the Viera’s head lifts and stares back toward the tower, then toward the sputtering plumes of emerald smoke that puff from the Smoldering Wastes, realization strikes her. The putrid scent is overwhelmed by the potential held in what plant life hasn’t succumbed to the might of the tower, which never seems to change size no matter how far they get away from it.

“They didn’t summon Ravana on purpose...”

Rax’s voice rings out suddenly as she picks up the pace, all grave, gravel, gavel. Granson can barely match; he’s hardly awake, slithering slow, his mind still drifting at sea despite the greenery around him, lush around his ankles, butterflies amidst the mud.

“...He’s a defense mechanism to protect what little is left.”

Chapter Text

Within the hive, drones chitter and clum as they click from one end to the next. Materials pile up, forming a society as a means to an end. They crowd under the might of their savior, the one that they had unwittingly summoned from the depths of their dread. Ravana’s wings are large enough to shield them from the storms that rumble overhead more nights than not, but along with his worshippers, he too has lost something of his own and he yearns so desperately to get it all back.

Their fear and their loss, the hundreds of bodies that now puncture the walls of the tower not so far from here are less of a message and more of an announcement. They call forth anyone who dares to raise a weapon, twisting their thoughts toward none other than the glory of Garlemald. Praise be to the Empire and may it reign forevermore.

Granson considers himself loosely lucky. Alisaie had said the same thing when Rax told him that he woke up — it didn’t look like a good situation and it was best to keep him under house arrest until she could muster up the aetheric courage to treat him further. But he’s never been one to stay still for too long. Whereas he was once satisfied to rot where he grew up, filling up the space that his bones grew into — nothing more, nothing less — killing his angel granted him anxious wings and now he’s forced to fly.

But now, so far away from his birth and his rebirth (anointed by blood, by light, by love, by sacrifice) — it feels as though the power has been flayed from his bones. Rent asunder, picked clean by the god that cradles him between his claws and clutches onto him as a champion for the cause. Feathered wings, imaginary but there and trying to flutter so he can prove himself useful in the wake of the world’s end, creak and crack. The scale that the merchant had plucked off reflected in his mind’s eye now, a stained glass pane depicting the need to fight.

Fight for what? To defend? To protect? Isn’t that the entire point?

With Ravana’s soul empowered by the fears of the Gnath and now with the blazing heart of a strange man from a stranger land, there lies a hesitation on the part of the Warrior. Strategy had never been her strong suit, as she preferred her pursuits spontaneous. Making adjustments as she went along had always been preferential, but this feels like staring at two sides of the same doomed coin. One may be better than the other, but the ending result is the same.

And while she remains up-in-arms about what to do, the hunter stares at the ceiling and desperately grips with whatever is left of his strength. He isn’t dying although it feels like he’s swallowed butterflies, choking on their wings and suffering to the sound of their wings flapping incessantly in his ears. The closer he is to the dance, the louder it all becomes. She would say that it was a mistake bringing him here, but he would have found a way regardless, even if it meant giving seedier merchants more of his unfortunate treasures that sprouted forth from his skin.

Flickers of gold pass over his fingers. Rays of sunlight perhaps, or a mere trick of the imagination. Granson tries to reach for his claymore and fails, half-dangling off the cot and swearing under his breath at the fatigue that curves his spine and weighs him down like an anchor. Sink deeper into the ocean, so there’s no place yet to go. But his feet disobey, swinging over the side. He pushes himself upright and sways, a cough catching in the hollow of his throat like he’s trying to spit up buzzards. A terrible feeling that makes his skin crawl, but that’s all it’s done in the past twenty-four bells.

The gloom of Mor Dhona was suffocating. The ghosts of Ishgard offered empty promises in the bellies of blizzards. And Dravania has given him nothing but splintering migraines, a hot hammer against a hotter forge that explodes into flying sparks that drone in his ear, fill his lungs, prick his veins and suck him dry of all free will.

Granson’s fingers wrap tight around the hilt of his weapon. Where his own strength denies him, the stained glass wings flap in his mind’s eye and make him lighter. They carry him, they guide him, and he drags the blade behind him. It creates a rift in the floorboards in tandem with a horrible scraping sound; it alerts his lover and she bursts into the room from the chamber beside only to watch him leave in simple fatigues with a slack jaw.

“Granson? Where are you going? Hey…? Hey!”

The air is humid. The moisture from the storm rises up and locks in place. It still smells fresh, but his nose crinkles; his mind registers rot and decay, recognizing the bodies of the Gnath thrown from a perch, no longer serving their purpose after all of their aether has been depleted. It’s a familiar scent. Reminds him of home, of the sea, of Milinda, of the light…

Gods, he’s still so sick of the light.

Rax bounds after the hunter without delay. Her hand reaches forward and clamps onto his shoulder, using strength he lacks to twist him around, to have him face her.

His weakness forgives him. War forgives him. It placates his mind and she doesn’t see the apology reflective in crimson eyes before he suddenly, without warning, heaves his blade at a diagonal angle.

The cut is clean.

Granson struggles with the weight on the downswing; it nearly knocks him off his feet. He staggers while she crumples, knees buckling, blood pearling before it drips. From her hip, across her stomach, up her torso, under her breast and stopping just beside it. Flimsy fabric yields to the sharp edge, staining scarlet.

Her aether flares. Defensive measures. Her blood frosts, slushing to the touch, doing its best not to spill over.

“Granson…?”

The shred of him remaining hears his name, hears the plea she makes through the croaking sound, and his heart breaks. It’s Milinda all over again. There was no choice then, but neither was there now.

Was there? No, just… Just the march of war, the oncoming cataclysm. Protecting, defending…

He stumbles away with his blade in tow, dragging against dying greenery and toward the emerald smog pouring forth from the Smoldering Wastes.

He hears his stained glass wings cracking from the center.

He feels them crumble away from behind him, and so too does he meet the earth.

Chapter Text

It blossoms red before it fades dark.

The dark blooms like a rose, petals unfolding, consuming, scattering until it covers all pretense of love and of light.

You remember he was sick of the light. You remember the night, (yes, the night, that thing you brought back through blood and memory) how he clutched onto you, how his hands made ruin of your hips. Your skin bruises easily but it bruises pretty, blue and purple against the pale grey and briefly, you wonder if you were created to mimic a corpse.

It doesn’t occur to you before now that you may already be one.

I follow in his shadow as he leaves you, desolate and destitute. But you keep part of me furled in your fist, the one that’s clutching across your heart as it pumps and cycles what blood is left inside of you.

You reach out to me and I answer. My hands cradle you as you go gently into the dark, your ears pinned back against the slick, resting silently in my lap. You see the golden glow of promise between pendulum swings, and I veer the axe away from your throat.

It is easy to stay between you two. Interconnected and interwoven, you’ve since made peace with your angels and welcome him in between your breasts, sinking into your ribcage. He stretches his wings wide and he was the aching breath in your lungs that you didn’t know you needed. I had not returned to him until you greeted him in your frigid silence, only seeing him as a vengeance ignited rather than a hungry lover, and now you have tightened the chains.

The chains do not break after he kills you.

No — they are your lifeline, the chain links extending for every heartbeat you manage to reclaim.

My fingertips drag slowly against your cheeks, maintaining warmth, kindling for the fire. Your mind remains suspended in disbelief as you simmer into the dark, into me, into the memory of pain, and love, and loss.

His breathing is shallow. War still clings to him, forcing his heart to pump to the scraping of swords and the determination to protect. But he is shaking because somewhere, he knows what he has done. And where his liege can forgive him, he cannot forgive himself.

Can you? Do you? Will you muster up the courage it requires with your last few breaths to forgive him for your own mistakes?

Your mind swims in the dark, wading through waters too deep. I pull you back before you drown. I offer the dark to your wound, mending slowly lest you lose it all — namely, your ability to make things right.

It feels like absolution. Judgment day.

You see the light, golden and glittering before the sun smolders red. Your heart clenches in your chest. Your fingertips reach up, trembling, grazing across my skin, flipping through memories burned so deeply into your mind, etched into your heart. A reason for living, a reason for fighting, something beyond being the monster that your peers have molded you into; your nails dig into me, your breaths quicken, your fury unfolds and bristles and your cold supernovas before—

You calm once I kiss your knuckles.

It’s a familiar feeling.

You open your eyes, blinking away tears, pressing at the fresh bandages someone’s wrapped around your frame.

He is your first thought, more than mere kindling and more than the anger at your own shortcomings.

And your face burns when you rub your thumb across your knuckles, remembering our heat.

You still owe us a dance.

Chapter Text

The pyre burns.

It’s more of a low-flickering smolder in the way that it settles over the coals. It crackles and it offers a few sparks to prolong its own lifespan but nonetheless, it burns.

The den of the one they call the Lord of the Hive is less of a den and more of a tomb: it harbors the bodies of the Gnath not so fortunate to serve, carcasses stacked in the depths and the bleeding reds of the catacombs serving as a resting place for the remaining. Those that yet offer their hearts to Ravana chitter quietly so as to not disturb him; his slaughter is eternal, ephemeral, and he requires focus to maintain the shields he’s been unwittingly summoned to maintain.

The body of a Hyuran thrall maneuvers in clicks and jitters. He looks less like a man and more of an unhinged beast that’s crawled its way out from the dirt and the muck. Blood stains his face and the fatigues he dons; the hunter emerges victorious over the obstacles in his path and his tongue slithers free from his maw to lap at the idle flicker of viscera over his lip. Sunken eyes skitter over the cocoon gates, forcing them open with his shoulder as he focuses the rest of his strength upon dragging his signature longsword behind him.

The sword is symbolic. He has killed the only two women he’s ever loved with it. Cleaved them in half. In comparison, his world — a mottled and warped reflection of whatever Hydaelyn is meant to be — is held together by sinewy strands of promises upheld and the lack of conviction left inside of him. The chambers in his heart are fully loaded, six shots as gifted, but he cannot find the trigger nor does he want to.

But the creature that’s taken him under his wing notices his devotion and the blood price he has paid, and he welcomes him in as the sole acceptable distraction for his focus.

“I had thought thou a man stronger than the hollow before me.”

The hunter grunts quietly. Standing still in one place is difficult; he struggles on his haunches. Power doesn’t wash over him and empower him; he is what breaks the waves that come forth, emanating from the god, and there is no choice. His arm shifts, digging the tip of his weapon into the dirt before kneeling into it to spare him what little shreds of consciousness remain.

“But not so strong as to resist the pull of war and the purpose of our waltz. Thou hast slain thine own heart.”

Ravana tips one of his blades toward the hunter if only to push his chin up. To bear witness to the fire in his eyes is to confirm that all of his work has not gone to waste. He sees the faint flickering and though he is unsatisfied, he lets the limp thing before him go with a quick, subtle flick of his wrist.

His wings bristle. He finds distaste in the transformation that is happening before him. Even with the kaleidoscope carapace that lines along the nape of his neck, blooms forth across his cheeks and over his collarbones...

It isn’t a metamorphosis; it is self-immolation.

“May thy baptism in blood afford thine wings to cut as the sharpest of blades.”

Two arms cross above the Lord’s head, swords glinting in the crimson haze. The chittering gets louder for a brief moment, but it never once drowns out the war drums. The thrumming heartbeat, the clicking of a safety, the sharpening of fate.

To die like this is to be reborn — to flutter across the moon’s surface like a butterfly, light and carefree. The highest honor that Ravana can bestow upon a faithful man (by force, a voice hisses, not once was this by choice) is the chance to serve his duty eternally as a flaming spectre he can twist at his own beck and call.

“By my will, thy dance has concluded!”

The pyre glitters.

The dark slits the air in two. Seeping from the open wound, the shadow of a man long since laid to rest drips to life and swings his blade upward in order to parry the blades that reap in a downward crescent. Golden eyes narrow before they scald scarlet — the symbol of a soul’s refusal to lay down and die.

It returns a flicker to the eyes of the hunter, who lifts his head and moves a hand to wipe at his mouth. He can still taste her blood, he can still smell the storm, but here he witnesses a fragment of himself defending the last shreds of what’s left.

Ravana is pushed backward, hands twisting the hilts of his blades as he readjusts. A new opponent? A different fight? Buzzards choke within his neck before thunderous laughter trembles through the den.

“A new champion has arisen...? Come then, shade! Show me thine might!”

The dark spirals around the shadow’s fingers, congealing into tangibility. It’s hurled forward in a flicker before he follows suit. His time is ticking as he feels the flames burn lower, shrinking smaller, shying against the coals that grow colder, colder, and colder still—

A bolt of black charges across the arena.

A blitz of frost, a reminder of the past, and a dead ringer for the future.

A broadsword cleaves the Lord of the Hive in two with a scream that rips from the depths of her soul, mimicked by the shade at her arrival.

The drums beat louder. The throat rips open. The finger trembles against the newfound trigger. The hunter’s head cants back as he tries to garner the strength. Wobbling fingers rise, straining, struggling to find his place…

For the first time, he can see the spark.

The pyre blazes.

He rips his free will free from the open chasm of the god before the ice expands, bloating, muffling garbled protests and the scraping of blades and the desperation of a colony that’s ill prepared to lose its footing again—

Ravana dies with a screech that’s drowned out by the dark that consumes him, swallowing all that’s left of his twitching frame until it shatters into glacial fractals of a wartorn soul.

The shade rises to his full height. The crimson of his eyes as they peer through the slit in the helm seem to simmer back into their glowering gold. The Warrior sputters on blood and ice as she shivers, crumpling to her knees, slinging an arm around the hunter.

Not the hunter — no, Granson as he is again.

“Sinner…”

His hand falls from the hilt of his blade and it wraps around the buckled form of his lover. He reels her in and presses his lips to the crown of her head, only listening to the rushing heartbeat. Listen now. Breathe in deep. Slower, slower…

Their herald is flickering slow. Candlelight seconds away from snuff. He bends before them and cloaks them in their flavor of shadow, making the catacombs crumble and decay into ash until there is only dark.

Dark so she can see his crimson burn,
dark so he can see her azure freeze.

The pyre melts.

Darker still, so that the knight can complete his vigil.

Chapter Text

The months creep by.

Recovery has never been a linear process.

Alisaie tends to Granson again once their mangled bodies are found, while Y’shtola takes to mending Rax’s clean-cut close call that could have sliced her completely in two if the hunter had the strength at the time.

They do not speak for months.

Other Scions and their miscellany take care of the Warrior’s jobs while she is in recovery, being scolded for her mistakes and being reminded that now is not the time for hapless adventure. There are hundreds and thousands of lives that require saving, and this is the “saving” she intends to do? Trying to take a tower into her own hands, crush it into dust before anyone can figure out what’s going on? And then what?

And then what?

The title “Warrior of Light” has been tainted by blood for so long that time becomes inumerable. It drips from the crown they’ve forced onto her head, down her pale cheeks, from her chin and to her palms. It paints them red, stains so deep that they can never be scrubbed clean, and on the dim occasion that she is afforded her own streamlined thoughts, she thinks that sometimes her savagery is confused for passion.

But her breaths are less hollow now. The scar that the former Crown Prince gave her during their battle in Ala Mhigo rises and falls between her breasts, and it is a smaller mirror image of the one that the enthralled hunter had offered her all that time ago. When? She can’t entirely recall. The days bleed together, blurring to a line incomprehensible; it reminds her of her time in the First, where all she could see were colors amidst the dark.

Give it another month and they’ll forget this ever happened.

However long it takes for Krile to secure their way into Sharlayan, using her wiles to convince the Forum of the dangers. The dangers that the Warrior has openly ignored and nearly had herself killed over, but the dangers nonetheless.

Was it restlessness? Eagerness to do something while the clock ticks as a silent reminder of what is to come? No, what has come, and what will happen again, and again, and again…

Amaurot blazes in her mind’s eye. Buildings crack and crumble under the trembling of the world’s core as it cries out for relief. It never comes and the souls that shatter upon impact scatter amidst the lifestream, splintering into parts that will never become whole again. She grasps onto the one that extended his hand out to her and sometimes she can hear his voice echo in the chambers of her heart, affording them bullets when she needs it.

But the hunter, the man who had no rhyme or reason to be here outside of a new adventure — a new home to make, a new place to discover, and a lover’s shadow to follow… He’s taken hold of a piece of him too. He manifested in shade, dripping darkness to offer salvation in his dire time of need, and he can see those golden eyes staring back at him before his frame melts, and simmers, and offers a vague reminder that he is still alive.

And I will keep him alive.

Rax flexes her fingers against the edge of her bed, cracking down her knuckles with her thumbs. She counts how many bones creak and how many don’t; they match the number of times she heard stained glass wings break on the way down.

Granson digs his knuckles into his eyes as he’s done for so many months only to realize that his exhaustion has been heaved off of him, like dirty tears wiped from water lines.

Both breathe in deep.

Both exhale slowly.

And where they both rise to get their bearings on their feet, both doors open and footsteps carry before they meet each other in a bleak and empty hallway.

He, a hunter of Cardinal Virtues and a mercy killer for his bleeding heart.

She, a monster of light and darkness both, an anomaly that should not breathe.

Their force-fed pretenses melt away.

And their arms wrap around each other as a reminder that they are not yet too lost in their own mistakes to love.

Chapter Text

Only moments after their embrace, or perhaps during it, do they realize how hungry they truly are. Their stomachs are open chasms, yawning and then snarling for something more; no, not their stomachs, it’s their hearts as they grow teeth and tongues and lap at whatever morsels of affection are offered in between.

He cradles her cheeks like he’s really seeing her for the first time, holding her like porcelain that he’s terrified to break, and her hands move to grip his own, praying to Halone, goddess of war and mover of glaciers, to let it rage and to not move her from this very spot.

She listens.

A silver lining.

Perhaps unrealistic from a nonbeliever’s perspective, but Rax would never ask Granson to fish for faith.

The Fury does not move her, but he does; his footsteps push her into the open room as he guides her backwards, mindful of the frame and the walls, all the way up until he has her there in the center of what was their room at some point. Their room and the numbers of separation that filled it in the meantime. Loneliness had snaked its way into the corners and painted the walls a slightly different shade of grey, but his warmth peels it away, wraps around her, chokes the cold from her in the way that only he can, even has his fingers curve around her neck and offer a testing, hesitant squeeze.

His fire hesitates. It had burned so quickly and so suddenly that he almost forgot how to breathe, or how to ask permission, or how exactly he could wrap his love up and present it to her.

Relief floods when she grips his wrist, pushes him against her, keeps him there. He beheld her with gentleness then in the hallway. Now, in their collected loneliness, his edges roughen and the crimson drips from his eyes and the desire to devour only intensifies. Hotter, hotter — his flames roar, and through his body’s exhaustive recovery period he savors her with wandering fingertips moving lower and a bruising kiss.

It doesn’t hurt.

When she thinks about it, neither does the new scar she dons underneath the bandages that he seems afraid to regard.

He is all brimstone and hailfire, smoke aching to escape. It whittles down her cold, melting before it ever has the chance to burn, and it would almost be too much if not for the fact that she needs this, too.

A reminder of how to feel.

Physical versus emotional — separate sides of a colorful spectrum, but just one completes the need for the other at times. His hand roams, easing away from her neck only to glide along her back, across her glowing spine. He counts the vertebrae with his fingers, mouth moving with the list. He stops at the bottom before his fingertips drag to hold her waist.

Wait.

Her hands struggle to find their proper place. One settles against his chest and feels for his heartbeat (listen now, listen) while the other links around his neck if only to keep some leverage. Her vision blurs before she can recognize that the swell in her chest is too much. The waves crash over and sweep away everything else. He’s reacquainting himself with her body after so many months of being away, and she’s…

A sob breaks.

A silver lining.

His head snaps up immediately. His fingertips quickly usher to her face, catching tears as they drip. For a moment, he worries that he’s done something wrong. In a way, he has — he knows that look in her eyes when he’s made a mistake or done something she doesn’t care for. But that’s not what this is about, and his gaze softens as she leans into his touch with sweet desperation.

It’s the most emotion she’s been able to offer in months.

Some tears slip to dribble down her chin; he catches what he can with both swiping fingers and calm kisses. Her cold bristles as an apology hangs on her lips. But there’s nothing to apologize for. A hundred things they could say, but the silence in between hiccups and cries seems to soothe the pain more than words could.

He sits her down and pulls him into his chest. Her ears flatten against her head before she pulls back. How many cracks before she spills open entirely? She tries to repair them so that everything inside doesn’t froth over, and he can see she’s trying too hard.

And so he kisses her. Slow, steady, sweet albeit brief.

A silver lining.

It’s a reminder wrapped in an apology.

When his hand finds hers and laces their fingers, he lifts them up and kisses at her knuckles.

She forgives him. Love forgives him.

Light peeks through the drapes behind them to acknowledge the dawn. He soaks it in before she’s the one that tugs him down into the bed with him, sheets tangling amidst limbs and small smiles.

A silver lining.

It offers one more tomorrow.

Chapter Text

offload an anchor
let love sink into the depths
christen the sea floor

it’s a reminder
the deepest dark, capable
something beyond life

the light absconded
so the dark can bear witness
scatter, fear, oblige

warmth bubbles in gold
flaked in his eyes, in her hands
the anchor dredged sin

wake to algae bloom
wading fish, lurking shadow
the weight lifted, free

the past, the future
they blur into the present
weightless, sin soaked, soar

when emotion sinks
you give it a safe harbor
it, too, carries on

depths do not forget
they are built to remember
their shade undying

a sea swallow's song
icarus, who loved the sun
may now behold her

Chapter Text

The irony in one corpse visiting another is not lost on the subconscious.

Recovery of a rotten body is one thing, yet thriving in it is another.

Rax awakens in her tidied complex, frame nestled against warmth that has yet to wake. The dead stirs, sits up, blinks the black from her eyes and allows a few stray tears to drip onto pale palms facing the ceiling. It protects them from the snowfall and the hailstorm that scratches like a vinyl record, skipping pieces and restarting through etches.

It is not the sound that wakes her. Just another morning.

Her feet nestle into bedside slippers, scuffing against unpolished hardwood and dragging toward the small kitchenette. Boiling water whistles after some preparation, and she douses tea leaves, steeping them and stirring idly with a spoon. Thoughts spin adrift as her motions slow, breathing easing through her nose, eyes lidding as sleep refuses to leave her…

She jolts awake once she notices that her lover is out of bed and instead knelt before her, his arms linking around her waist.

“Chair’s over there,” Rax blearily offers.

“Need a softer place to rest my head,” Granson grumbles to counter.
Bowed into her lap, he rests. If she focuses close enough, she can hear the thrum of his heart as it pulses strongly, reflecting reinstated vital signs and notable ambition. His thumbs drag across her skin in slow strokes, back and forth, contrasting the pale. Her cold doesn’t bother him; it counteracts the occasional hot sweats from the more occasional nightmares that are a consequence of his tempering and his recovery.

Recovery in the arms of a dead woman walking.

The soft scoff that passes Rax’s lips is almost sickeningly stereotypical.

Frigid fingertips reach to pass through teal strands streaked grey, nails scratching along his scalp in gentle backs and forths. His breathing hollows out; he unloaded the chambers of his heart in the hours before sleep claimed him, and so when she listens they seem almost too empty. Like part of her wishes she could fill it with something, anything. Words, music, fighting — no, he’s had enough of war and so has she, and for once, they deserve a break.

A break.

“We can go back to bed. Just wanted some tea.”

“Mm.”

A chilled breath works too well to cool the surface. Porcelain meets a forgotten layer of rouge smeared across her lips and she flinches inherently at the texture. It’s bland with the faintest draw of honey and pine. Her father’s favorite and his remedy for homesickness, written acutely on a doctorate’s notepad for when she first left home to seek out mercenary work. It’s since burned to cinders and likely scattered somewhere in the rotten stones of the Holy See, but she remembers nonetheless, even as she sits in her home.

Or, perhaps, as her home rests upon her.

“Come on.”

Her hand pats at his cheek a few times before the backs of her knuckles drag against his skin. He fights back a shiver, grunting from both exertion and exhaustion, and then he yields to her idea. His head rises, sleepy eyes blinking away the dark, blinking away specks of gold flakes in his eyes.

It’s a neatly-wrapped treat that’s devoured too quickly. She doesn’t get to savor the beauty before his eyes reflect the usual crimson, burning dimly.

His hands grip her own as he hoists her from her seat, effectively ghosting against the floor until his back hits the mattress. It creaks and squeaks in protest of his weight, the wood groaning as it adjusts to the weight of two. It settles after they scoot around; he takes to curling up against her back, not minding the glow of her spine as it eases against his chest. It’s a particular everfrost that he’s not so sure he’ll ever adjust to, but hundreds of nights (mornings? dawns, dusks? Hazy afternoons?) like this and he can adapt. One more to add to the list of changes in his life. His head dips and his nose briefly buries into her hair between her ears, taking a deep breath as his arms squeeze her, behold her, keep her.

It is her calm. Her tomb. Her death. A yearning and a satisfaction.

Often, she thinks passing on like this wouldn’t be such a terrible thing.

But more often, she realizes that being unable to wake alongside him would be worse.

Amidst the irony of laying to rest with the living, her fingers tiptoe across the surface of his hand before her fingers lace among, belonging, between.

“Rest, sinner,” he mumbles amidst a kiss into the obsidian strands in his face.

It warrants a shiver and a flashbang in her chest — the emptying of her chambers, until all is silent and she dances, drifts, dives into her living again.

Chapter Text

The invitations are hand-delivered by an unknown messenger wrapped in a simple cloak. With names simply scripted on the front, they appear unassuming despite how they’re handed off. Questions nearly let loose from closed lips but the person is gone when Rax looks up. A slow exhale passes from her nose before she flips the envelope over and nudges a nail against the seal, popping it open and withdrawing the note within.

She returns to her apartment and kicks the door shut with her boot. Two outfits are carefully slung over an arm with the patterned letters held in the other — one open and one sealed.

Granson’s eyebrows raise slowly as he sips from his mug of coffee he’d brewed when she left to do errands.

“What’s the occasion?”

One envelope and one of the outfits, protected in plastic, are offered out to him. She taps her foot impatiently as he hesitates.

“What? What is it?”

“We don’t have time. Read the note, put on the suit, and let’s go.”

“Like it’s so simple…”

The grumble falls on deaf ears. Rax is already maneuvering toward the washroom in order to put on what looks like a freshly-pressed dress. He carefully peels off the wax seal in order to read the invitation proper, hoisting the suit against his body so it doesn’t drag against the floor in the meantime.

Granson frowns at it. It doesn’t give any information outside of a location, a time, and a vague concept. A banquet? And how did he receive an invitation dedicated to him specifically? He carries himself and the items of miscellany with him, pushing open the washroom door.

“Who gave this to you, sinner?”

The Warrior basks under steam and water, quickly scrubbing at her skin. She’s careful about the scar that’s cleaved her torso; he finds himself looking away from it after a moment, eyeing his reflection in the mirror instead.

“A mysterious benefactor that wouldn’t give me their name.”

“And we’re going to this?”

The knob squeaks as she shuts off the shower, stepping out and yanking a towel from the rack beside. She dries her face first, followed by her ears with quick pats and slow rubs to wring the water completely free. Shaking her hair out, she scoots beside him and flips open the mirror cabinet, in search of something within.

He’s gawking at her in the meantime. “We’re going to this? Do we have the time? Does anyone? Who all is invited to this?”

A hand juts out and she presses her pointer finger against his lips. “Less talking, more dressing up.”

Against his better judgment, he obliges.

It takes the better part of a bell for the two to finish. Rax briefly struggles with a strap upon her heel, nudging it into place. Granson’s fingers fiddle with a deep red tie as he checks himself once, twice, three times in the mirror to be certain. His hair is pushed back from his face, streaks of grey weaved into the teal, and he feels ridiculous as he exits in order to meet with her near the door.

She’s beautiful. The dress clings to her curves in the way his hands do; there’s envy for a moment. He calms as her hand raises to fix his hair, freeing the grey to fall over his eyes once more. A cold thumb grazes his cheek and his brows knit; the corners of her lips twitch into a half-hearted smile before she kisses him, and things melt away around them as they tend to do.

Nothing but the cold, nothing but the dark, nothing but the heat chaser.

The affection is meant to be brief, but the hunger bears its fangs. His arm links around her waist and pulls her into him — hook, line, sinker. One kiss turns into two. Three. Four. Longer. All the gloss on her lips smears against his own, and she tastes like mint. Like snow. Like light, but one he can stomach.

“We need… mm… to go,” she manages in between, although the hand that grips into his hair speaks a different story. Her body refuses, even if her mind flicks back to the robed messenger. Strange. Stranger still. “No time…”

“Stay,” he murmurs against her. He squeezes her, holds her like her dress does, keeps her molded together. “Reckon if it’s important… they’ll come find us again.”

Instinct casts its sweeping gaze over them. The hearth crackles and plants sparks in those empty chambers. It’s an electric feeling, and the next kiss that follows leaves her breathless. Her forehead rests against his as she weighs her options; her hands smooth against the skin at the nape of his neck until she pauses, feeling a glass surface. She recognizes it immediately — leftover scales. Some had flaked off on their own once the tempering effect had been broken, but there was still a reminder under the collar of his three-piece.

Granson tenses. He thinks about how he killed her. It would be the second time. Once in his dreams, once in a muddled memory…

But Rax shakes her head and cups his face with one hand while the other adjusts his tie for him into the perfect spot. He cleans up well, and the feast of her eyes outplays the concern.

“I’ll stay,” she begins, footsteps beginning to shuffle against the floorboards. She’s backing him up slowly as her thumb moves from skin to lip, dragging over the lower, peeling back. “But you keep the suit on.”

Sparks burst into flame. He presses her in closer, and his head dips lower for the promise of another kiss. “Just means you keep the dress on.”

They smile as his back meets the bed, as her hips fit against his, as the fireplace illuminates their profiles, and as the banquet begins without their imperative presence.

Chapter Text

The banquet continues. There are two empty seats where the couple should be, but not even their ghosts deigned to show. There’s no apologies and even less countenance. The piano plays, the guests murmur, and they continue without the two that they needed there the most.

What for? What could be so important that it required a banquet as the world was on the brink of collapse? The last banquet Rax went to involved corpses and a severed arm, empty promises and false hope. The importance of this one, hand-delivered by a different ghost with maliced fingertips, there and not all at once, had risen like a pinpoint pressure headache in the center of her brain. Hammerpoint. Instinct told her no, and her better half agreed.

All that’s there is alcohol that Granson can’t drink, stories that have nothing to do with him or his time here in the Source, and more fighting the good fight for his partner that he doesn’t care to even pretend to entertain.

But here, in her apartment that overlooks the Jeweled Crozier — here, in the bosom of the Holy See — here, in the prison made by fearful tongues amidst the eternal midwinter — there is something that he can get intoxicated with. Specks of glitter smear from one corner of his lips beyond the other. It’s mint, it’s the snowfall, it’s the blizzard that’s turning over. He cradles the cold, worships it in his kiss, one after another.

At some point, some witch in Wright told him that love may as well be as potent of a drug as anything else. Any tinctures that could be made or strange toxins mixed into meals could never compare to the magic of love. Back then, he didn’t believe stories like that. Milinda was living proof at the time of the witch’s claims, but love couldn’t stop her from turning and love couldn’t keep him from ripping through her.

Love, the witch told him, is also mercy.

He clamps down on her waist, buries his head into her neck, sinks his teeth in to leave a mark against the grey. Heat stifles underneath the suit that she bought for him, prim and pressed properly; he creates wrinkles in her dress as he drags his hands up her leg, across her thigh, between. He feels her pulse shudder against his mouth before his fingers sink in. A slow test, remembering how she feels, how she reacts, how she…

The gasp catches him by surprise. It’s startling but it doesn’t stop him, even if he inches slower against her, into her. One of her hands, chipped paint on her nails and all, tugs on the tight of his tie. It restricts him and his mind shudders back to the release of old ghosts, the efforts to usher in the new, and the blinding white that accompanies.

“Stay,” she whispers, but his fingers only slip deeper.

His head raises from its resting place against her throat. He could have torn her to pieces by then. Some distant war hymn tells him to. But the sparks in his heart burn. They burn low yet hot, and relief comes when her fingers maneuver down, fiddling with buckles and zippers and fabric. It’s a more pleasant heat that’s replaced with the sudden spike of a cold touch; it always makes his body hitch, a quiet grunt rolling, pointer and middle curling.

They melt again between kisses, shuddered breaths, eager rolls of hips and shuffling of clothes.

The tie wraps around her fingers, knuckles white as she pulls him in. He maneuvers her with the strength he has to settle her on her back rather than on top of him. It reminds him a little too much of back then, where it was less about love and more about exorcising phantoms that simply did not want to leave their months-old wake. Like this, he can look down at her and appreciate how the fire from the mantle paints her skin in pastel, how the gloss smear shows between parted lips begging for breath, how mismatched eyes write him a story.

She loosens her hold. She gives him a chance. His free hand finds her wrist and pins it above her head instead. The slick between makes it easier, and with the nudge of fabric aside and a hovering promise of a kiss, he sinks.

It’s not like an anchor or a brick; it’s slow and steady, methodical, focused. Eager embers flicker in his eyes, brief specks of gold, and she pulls him down closer. Closer, until there’s no room left.

“Stay,” he manages when he’s within her in his entirety, but one leg hooks around his waist and kills the negative space remaining.

Crashing waves, striking the shore. But it’s nothing close to the nightmares or the dreams he has of where he came from. It’s bliss in the dark, quickened breaths and machine gun heartbeats, unloading the chambers and surrendering to the feeling. His body tenses against her own, as he braves the cold and sets her glacier on fire. She arches into him, paint-chipped nails of her free hand ripping at the seams of his blazer, forgoing its perfect smooth press and instead making her own mark.

All the gil wasted be damned.

High tide sweeps them both, one after the other. It drags them out to the middle of the sea, and he sinks first. Not like an anchor or a brick. It’s quicker. His voice raptures over the crackling of flames, but she silences it with a kiss and a stifled whine, pitched in the hollow of her throat. He can picture it, picture himself inside it, inside her, giving her everything and wondering what it would be like to stay inside, bloom from within, forsake her frost and replace it with nothing but his heat.

He doesn’t have to wonder. Not really. Not when he loosens his bruising hold on her wrist — to which he apologizes for with a weary chuckle, bringing it to his lips, pressing that glittered kiss to it and passing the sweet ichor back to her. His head swims and hers whirlpools, a low laugh rumbling in her chest, letting the smoke from her heart pass through.

He stays inside as her fingers rake through grey and teal.

He stays inside for as long as she’ll let him.

And she remains the perfect home for him to bury himself within all the same.

Chapter Text

“I had worried for him after what he had done. I couldn’t find him after some time, and…”

“Yes. You thought you had lost him forever.”

“Yes! And… I’ve heard all of his words. I’ve felt everything he had for me and more. I know that it’s selfish to want him to have held onto me for longer, but…”

“There is a time that comes after death where the memories have rotten to sweetness and the energy is healing. But that time often comes once they have learned to move on.”

The conversation is warped into a language neither knows yet only they seem to understand. It’s a back and forth between spirits. They do not have proper forms; they’re corporeal energy glinting and glittering in a plane between life and death, nestled into the veins of the Lifestream. They have both been dead for a long time now. They have made their peace with the living, but they cling onto the same thing.

Or, rather, something so similar that “the same” is subjective.

The pink light shudders like it’s sighing. The yellow light remains strong and warm, like a permanent sunset that hangs on the barely-there horizon. Someone might call it hope.

“I had heard horror stories. I didn’t expect them to happen to me. To us. To the family we wanted to build.”

“I had accepted my demise years before it happened. Where I hailed, the stars were often hidden behind clouds, but they spelled out the truth of the world if you could see them. Scholars scribbled them onto cards with crude drawings and peddlers made money off of it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do not apologize for the dead.”

“Do you have any regrets? Anything you weren’t able to finish before…?”

“I had made a promise to my daughter to tell her everything that I had done. I wanted to keep the only thing I loved dear for as long as I could, and I could not accept her death at such a young age…”

The pink light pauses. It dims. It seems afraid of what it will hear next. The yellow light stops and floats a little further away, inching down the theoretical line, deeper into the limbo. Into the dark.

“My regrets seem silly in retrospect.”

“The burdens will weigh heavy regardless of their reality.”

“Can I ask your name?”

“Damian.”

“Where did you come from?”

“The Holy See of Ishgard.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that. I was raised in a small village near the shores of Kholusia.”

Curiosity claims the yellow light — Damian as he is now known. He veers closer, away from the edges of the dark and closer to the blushing pink.

“And your name, miss?”

“I’m Milinda.”

The pink light — Milinda as she is now known — flusters. She is the blushing bride she was never able to be. Damian can faintly make out specks of white in her energy, and loosely he wonders what his daughter’s would look like. He’s thought about it for many years, and he knows the answer. At least, he’s fairly certain, should the blessing of the Sun in her veins not paint her otherwise.

“She is angry with me. For leaving her. A break of trust that I can never amend.”

“...He hates me, sometimes. Not as often as he used to. But sometimes. He doesn’t blame me and he’s projecting, but even still…”

“He loves you, Milinda.”

“W-Well, yes, but…”

“He loves my daughter, too.”

Milinda takes pause. Her color doesn’t bleed through as confidently. But she resigns anyway, the wisps of white dancing along the blush. It’s the corruption that remains. And she remembers how after he had killed her, he hated the light.

“I know.”

“Losing the person you love the most will tear apart any soul. Finding someone bearing the same pain is the easiest way to open a new door for these feelings. Through the anger and the sorrow, a new beginning.”

Damian’s words are profound, or how he presents them is. He speaks fondly of the couple in the living plane as though they’re his pride and joy, although he lacks the rights to claim them for his own. He is eternally proud of his daughter for what she has done and how alive she has become, and it shines in his yellow. In his gold.

He drifts along the vine and seems to turn downward, as though he’s watching something over the proverbial balcony. His energy wanes if only because he isn’t accustomed to holding a conversation with someone for so long. But he feels lighter and it reflects as his color pales despite its saturation. He fades amidst the pinks of the horizon.

“Damian?”

“Yes, Milinda?”

She scoots closer as if to look at what he’s witnessing. Their loved ones are curled up with one another in a creaky bed amidst inner warmth and the beating cold outside their doors. Whereas there may have been a pang of pain or perhaps a drop of energy, she seems content as her soul hazes.

“May we talk like this again some time?”

“All we have now is time, little light. Find me again when you are ready.”

Damian embraces Milinda in a sudden swathe. It’s warm despite its unfamiliarity. Up closer, she notices licking flames swirling about in the center. She notices that he is an ephemeral funeral pyre. It breaks her heart not because she understands what it is like to be known for how you die, but because she doesn’t know anything beyond what she can perceive. Who he is. All of what he wanted.

His energy passes after a few more lengthy heartbeats. Time perceives the exchange but does not write it down. She takes one last long look at her murderer and his lover in their bed, in a place unfamiliar. Her light dims and dims and dims until it is a mere speck in the dark, a weak contrast to the brilliant shine of Damian who has taken his focus elsewhere to rest.

There is a brief pang of pain in Granson’s heart. A squeeze, a thorn, a pricking pain and then nothing. It is gone as quickly as it comes. He blinks his eyes open and squints, brows furrowed in confusion. Rax’s hand rests over his chest, feeling over the drumbeat and the tune it plays as he sleeps. It’s racing now, and for a moment he believes that feeling is what wakes her.

She stirs for a different reason, albeit similar to his own. Warmth strangles her heart and forces a bloom of a sunflower between her ribcage. It’s a familiar ache and it burns when she swallows. Her nails unwittingly scrape against his chest and he flinches visibly, giving her frame a squeeze as though to afford her the knowledge that he’s also awake.

“Did you…?” she asks in a tired croak, applying some of her aether to soothe the sudden scrapes.

“Yeah. Yeah, I did,” he sighs, and he witnesses her ears fall back.

They calm after some time. They melt together amidst the sheets, somewhere between exhaustion and death. They rest although the feeling lingers in the air around them. They drift as the souls of the departed do — peeking through like sunbeams through the Lifestream, taking their time, playing their own soothing tune.

They fill the chambers of their hearts, and they carry them home together.