Archive of Our Own ^beta

It isn’t the Sundering that breaks them.

It isn’t Zodiark’s summoning, the Convocation voting for sacrifice upon sacrifice, using their people as fuel for a god to save them. It isn’t even their failure, time and again, to protect their people and do their duty and stop the Final Days. No, in the end, what breaks them is something- so much smaller, in the grand scheme of things, it almost feels like an insult. Just one more casualty to the calamity their lives have all become.

It isn’t supposed to happen.

With the Final Days and their burning skies covering nearly all of Etheirys, Azem spends all their time moving from place to place, staying where the beasts are thickest and the despair is strongest, evacuating civilians to refugee camps, then evacuating those camps to safer ground when they inevitably are overrun. Not everyone can or will go to Amaurot, and those that remain must still be protected. Are still Azem’s people. But the star is vast, and they can only do so much on their own, can only be in so many places, can only go for so long before they collapse from exhaustion. So Helios, their closest friend in all the world, had come to join them - promising Hythlodaeus and Hades that he, too, would be careful, that they would watch out for each other. Helios is weak and thin of aether, ill as often as not, but his inability to perform creation magicks aside he’s as clever as Hythlodaeus and skilled at anything he can pull aether from the land to fuel. His healing has been invaluable, considering that Azem themself received basic training for it during their schooling years and never again bothered to study it - a decision they’ve cursed their past self for too many times now. How many people could they have saved, had they only just- had more than the bare minimum?

But- with their long-time best friend at their side, the unending horror of Etheirys itself turning against them is somewhat easier to handle. The message crystals begging for their aid are just as frequent, just as desperate, but with two of them there’s a little more time to rest, and more people they can reach. More they can do. 

It still isn’t enough. But Azem has already begun to realize that nothing they can do will be. They just- have to keep everything together long enough for the Convocation to find a solution, even if Venat thinks any solution the Convocation finds will just lead to more death. Even after months with little-to-no aid forthcoming from Amaurot, even after all the exhaustion and grief and overwhelming desperation, Azem can’t quite let go of the belief that the Fourteen will find a way forward.

And it’s that belief that has kept them from summoning Hades to aid them for so long. The Convocation needs Emet-Selch’s voice in the meetings they’ve been having (and that Azem has been ignoring the summons to), and Azem doesn’t want to- expose him to all this. The horror, the despair. But when the calamity spreads yet again, unstoppable, and begins to engulf one of the regions they and Helios have been sending refugees to - an agrarian region responsible for much of the locals’ food supplies - well. They’re only two people, and the terror is- it’s too much. Too much for the two of them to face alone, not when the people need protecting and escorting.

So they summon him. Call him to their side in a swirl of magic, apologize for the interruption - he doesn’t let them, just pulls them into a tight hug, scolding them for too much silence and for not coming home, then turns to Helios to repeat himself with a kiss. It feels good, seeing him for the first time in months, feels a little less like the weight of the world is on their shoulders. Azem wants nothing more than to melt into his arms and let him take them home, to clean the ash and blood off their robes and mask, to sleep for a week and fully replenish their aether and see Hythlodaeus, but they know they can’t. Not as long as the Final Days wreak havoc across the star.

Instead, they take a few deep breaths and ask Helios to stick with the refugees, guide them away from the worst of the rampaging beasts - to heal them and keep them safe, as they know he can. He smiles lopsidedly at them, silver eyes glittering in his too-pale face (and they know fighting so constantly the way they have been is even more of a strain on him than it is on them; they worry about the illness catching up with him, but he’d never permit them to send him back to Amaurot because of it and they don’t intend to insult him by suggesting it), and agrees, and before he leaves to help they reach out to straighten the mask on his face and brush some of the dirt off its surface. It changes little about his appearance - his white robes, marking his status as an impartial advisor and investigator working closely with Elidibus, are smudged ashen with grime, and neither of them particularly have the aether to spare to clean them - but it’s affectionate, and it makes them feel better.

(And for a moment, when he grins at them, they see him as he had been when they were both children - ten years old and sickly but bright, wearing his first mask around with so much pride. Of course they’d stolen it off his face, put it on themself, and ran away from him as he chased them to try to get it back, laughing all the while. It’d been three months before their own nameday and they’d been so jealous of him for getting to wear a mask before they did, but the shrieking pile of giggling they’d both tumbled into when he finally caught them had completely wiped the jealousy away. Because really, how could they feel anything but love for their best friend in all the world?

They’d had to wash both their and Helios’s robes by hand as punishment, to get out the grass stains, even though their parents could’ve just made new ones in a blink, but it’d all been worth it.)

Then he’s gone, and they turn to Hades and exchange grim looks. Azem has summoned their family to their side enough times in all the decades they’ve held their seat that they have a rhythm to it now; Helios and Hythlodaeus are usually responsible for protecting anyone in need and watching Azem’s and Hades’s backs while they face the worst of the danger. Azem has yet to call on Hades or Hythlodaeus during this disaster, so they have no idea how familiar he is with the beasts, but they don’t anticipate it being a problem. He has ever been a peerless mage and deeply capable in combat even before he was bound to a seat on the Convocation and the power that comes with it.

And so they lead him in the direction of the worst of the fighting, where some few of the refugees have summoned weapons to their hands and tried to hold back the blighted creations. And so they let the glyph that embodies their seat flare to vivid crimson life over their face, its power rushing through their veins like a wildfire. And so they fight, with all the skills Venat taught them when they were young and following her around the star, Helios at their side, as they wandered and learned what it would mean to be the Traveler. With Hades at their side, it feels hard to imagine they could fail, even though sometimes they think they’ve done nothing but fail these past few months: fail to protect their people, fail to find the cause behind the Final Days, fail to stop the devastation. All they’ve been able to do is help people move out of the worst of the destruction - but what about the creations? The ecosystems they’ve so carefully guarded, the soul-bearing creations they’ve settled across the star in places where they cannot or will not go themselves to help with their stewarding…Azem is responsible for all of them, too, and they have hardly had the chance to even try to protect anything less than their people.

There is too much loss.

They face beasts all through the sprawling farmlands they’ve been called to, some of which are still heavy with crops near-ready to harvest. The creatures are savage, twisted, malformed things, with too many eyes or none at all, covered in spikes and plates and arms, with awkward proportions and grisly abilities. While many of them just flail and lash out and consume what they can, the stronger ones can do things as if they’ve been endowed with magicks of their own - can confuse minds, twisting the world around them; can draw aether from their surroundings and expel it in powerful, elementally-aspected attacks; the worst of them can even call meteors down from the burning sky, scorching the world around them, almost impossible to fight.

It’s one of these beasts that descends from on high as Azem sends a line of lightning surging from the crystal at the top of their staff through the last of the monstrosities harrying the civilians they’ve come to protect. Wings that shouldn’t bear it aloft but do anyway, a row of eyes like metallic plates, clawed limbs, and a mouth that spits out bright beams of unaspected aether that burn whatever they touch - these people they’re trying to protect won’t stand a chance. Azem just barely has the time to shout out a warning and a command for them to run before it’s upon them, and then they don’t even have the space to look to see if the few survivors near them take their advice.

All they can do is stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Hades and throw spell after spell at the beast - if they had the space for it they’d transform, damn etiquette, what does propriety matter when lives are on the line, but even for them it takes a great deal of aether and a moment of concentration and they don’t have that. They don’t have space, they don’t have support, they don’t have anything but their magic and their determination and Hades at their side. 

It’s enough, in the end, the beast falling to the ground and fading away into nothingness. But there are three dead bodies caught in the ashes around them, and the field behind them is still aflame, and it doesn’t feel like victory. It doesn’t even feel like a stalemate. It feels like an aching body and exhaustion, like the taste of blood and the smell of smoke, like failure. Like despair. And it hurts, deep down, watching everything they love - their people, their star - crumble into dust in front of their eyes.

Hades takes a moment to, as is his duty, perform the last rites and reduce the bodies to aether. They don’t interrupt him.

Azem drags themself back in the direction they’d left the refugees, after, hand too-tight around their staff. Letting it fade back into aether would be easiest, but they need the support, and they don’t want to push Hades to let them lean on him, not right now. Not when another attack could come out of nowhere at any moment and they need to be prepared to face it. Besides, Hades is likely not much better off than they are, near-bottomless font of aether or no - and two members of the Fourteen cannot be seen as weak, not if they want to keep these people calm and trusting. They have to keep up appearances, no matter how much it hurts. They have to. They have to.

If he followed the same protocol they’ve developed over the past few weeks, Helios will have retreated with the survivors to a safe distance and found somewhere to set up a teleporter to send off those who are willing to leave to Amaurot - more and more, these days, it’s the only place guaranteed to be safe from starshowers and blight and horror. Azem glances to Hades - his aethersight isn’t as exceptional as Hythlodaeus’s, of course, but it’s stronger than theirs - and he frowns, squinting into the distance.

“I don’t see-” he begins, then shakes his head. “Ah, there. His aether is weaker than usual - some of the beasts must have slipped past us.”

“Or some of the refugees lost control,” Azem murmurs, taking a few deep breaths in and letting them out slowly. “We need to move.”

Hades nods once, solemn, and picks up a quick jog, and Azem follows after him after a moment to adjust their mask. A brief glimpse into the aether and they can see a cluster of people in the distance, around the back side of a farmhouse and its outbuildings, but it’s hard to pick out Helios from them, and a sinking anxiety stirs into being in their stomach. Helios is already weak enough as it is, and they’ve been fighting - it’s been a few days since they’ve had more than catnaps and scarfed-down meals to refresh them. When he exhausts himself he could be sick in bed for days in the aftermath, recovering enough to actually function again, and if he collapses in battle against these enemies - enemies with no presence in the aether, enemies they cannot sense or predict - the idea is terrifying. If Helios’s aether is already this faint, so easily overshadowed by the others around him despite how familiar they are with him, then he must be close to that critical level.

Why didn’t he call for help?

Now more than ever Azem curses the way the beasts are invisible to aethersight. They don’t know if Helios is still fighting, or if it was just one or two, or if it’s unexpected healing that’s drained him so. They don’t know anything at all, and they can’t stand that; it’s enough to almost make them risk teleporting directly to the others, but they’re already lower on aether than they’d like to be and if there’s a fight to be had when they arrive they have to be strong enough to face it and still get these people safe. They have to see this through to the end, no matter what it does to them.

They duck through the first row of buildings, into a wide courtyard, and walk straight into the scene of a battle. The crystalline teleporter hovers nearby, a group of some twenty to thirty survivors in ragged robes with cracked and dirty masks, many carrying bags that represent all they have left of their lives, all huddling around it. Grateful cries of, Azem! Emet-Selch! break out as the two of them appear, and Azem spares a glance around to see a few bodies on the ground, some dead and some badly-injured but alive. Blood streaks the ground liberally alongside the ash drifting down from the heavens and scorchmarks left by flaring light, and there’s scattered debris from wind and stone, all telltale signs of Helios’s usual fighting style.

And at the far side of the courtyard, Azem’s best friend since they could walk stands alone before a towering creature that looks like something out of the halls of Pandaemonium. A two-headed beast with razor-sharp fangs and spikes all across its body that look like teeth, bone-white and threatening. A swath of them along one side and its too-long tail have been broken and dented, and something akin to blood but black as soot pours freely from a wide gash along the base of its skull, but still it stands, mouth open wide and snarling. Helios has his staff raised in trembling hands, aether flowing through it, radiating a bright light, and in the stark relief it casts his face in Azem can see how terribly pale he is - even whiter than his dirtied robes and the elemental Light he wields, as white as a ghost - the sheen of sweat on his brow, the glassiness in his eyes. The beasts they fight leave no corpses, so it’s impossible to tell how many he’s had to hold off on his own, but it’s clear the answer is too many. Where did they come from? How did they miss this-

Azem calls all their concentration to weave a spell, picking up into as fast a run as they can, but before they can push the aether out into the world the beast howls and lunges forward - its massive jaws close around Helios’s torso and it shakes him back and forth with all the strength it must possess, one head still growling and slavering, his staff clattering to the ground beneath it (and in the sudden thundering silence the sound it makes echoes louder than a gunshot) - and then it lets him go, flinging him away, an arc of blood trailing through the air after him. His body hits the ground and rolls away just as Hades flings a bolt of flame so hot it leaves nothing but ashes and smoke where it passes, burning through the monster’s heads and leaving a charred, disintegrating corpse dissipating into nothingness.

Azem calls out Helios’s name, a desperate, wretched shout, nausea and terror curdling their blood and leaving them reeling, and casts everything aside to fling themself to the ground next to him, reaching for him with shaking hands.

“Helios,” they gasp out, ragged, and roll him from his front to his back, trying not to flinch away from the deep punctures all along his ribcage and abdomen. His robes are torn and turning crimson and blood runs hot and slick across the ground, across their hands, soaking the trailing edges of their sleeves, but they don’t care, can’t care. All they know is- is basic healing spells, but surely- surely they can do something, surely they can fix this, they have to- they have to fix it. “Helios, look at me. I’m going to- I’m going to make it better, okay? What were you thinking, you should’ve called for help!”

His mask is gone, lost somewhere in the struggling grasses around them, and without it Azem can see the grey tint to his skin, the waxy cast of it, the dimness of his silver eyes. They suck in a shaking breath and pour their aether into him in some ghastly reflection of all the times they’ve done the same to help him recover from illness, pushing it to try to close the wounds, to stop the bleeding - but oh, heavens, there’s so much blood. They’ve seen death, more than enough of it, in their decades holding their seat, but- but never this much blood. And his body is already so cold beneath their fingers. The aether they expend barely even stems the tide.

There are tears on their cheeks, cold beneath their mask. They can’t quite breathe right.

“Selu?” Helios whispers, voice little more than a rasp in his lungs, his eyes slowly tracking up their arms to their face, though with how hazy his gaze is they aren’t so sure he can see them at all. A shadow falls across him, briefly, then Hades drops down on his knees on Helios’s other side, his hands joining Azem’s as he wordlessly adds his own strength to the healing spell. Azem can’t pull their eyes away from Helios’s braid, the ends of it fallen into his own blood and turning a rusty pink. Such a stupid detail to notice. Such an unforgettable one. “...had…protect them.”

“You fool,” Hades chokes out, tight and strained, and Helios lets out an exhale that rattles in his chest. There’s something wet in the sound - fluid in his lungs?

“Hades,” he breathes, head lolling to one side. “...you…?”

“We’re here,” Azem says, fumbling for his hand and threading their fingers through his, holding on tight. Why isn’t the healing doing anything? They just- if they can just stop the bleeding even for a few moments they can get him back to Amaurot and to a proper healer but beneath the white glow of their and Hades’s magic the blood just keeps spilling out, leaving brown-red streaks across his skin where his robes no longer cover it. That sight is almost worse than the way his robes themselves have stained. “Just- hold on, we’re going to take you to someone who can fix you. You just have to hold on. You promised, remember?”

“Seleukos,” Hades says, and there’s something in his voice - heavy, aching, resigned, and they want to snarl at him, want to shove him away, but they need him to keep trying to heal.

“No,” they say instead, shaking their head too hard, and slide their free arm beneath Helios’s back to tug him half-into their lap, cradling him against their chest. “No, don’t, it’s not- he still has a purpose, he’s not- it isn’t time yet. We promised to return to the star together.” All four of them, crowded around a table, Hythlodaeus proposing the vow with so much warmth and sincerity it would’ve been impossible to refuse even if any of them wanted to. “It isn’t meant to be like this.” Their voice cracks on the words.

There are tears on Helios’s cheeks when they look down at his face, leaned against their shoulder. He takes another hitching, shallow breath, eyes drifting between them and Hades, unfocused and dizzy. His lips are blue, they notice distantly. “...the promise…” he murmurs, slurred, barely audible, and they nod. “In the next life…I’ll keep it.”

“No,” Azem says, tightening their arm around him, and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. “Helios.” Look at me, look at me, stay with me.

“...I’m sorry.”

He breathes in, once, then again - and then he doesn’t, eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky, a last wheezing rattle in his chest before nothing moves, and it feels like all the air has been stolen from Azem’s own lungs at the sight. “Helios,” they say again, voice raw and breaking, and bring a bloodsoaked palm up to press against his cheek, skin cold and waxy beneath their fingertips. The crimson stands out in stark contrast to how pale he is, how pale he’s always been. “Helios, look at me. Please.”

“He’s gone,” Hades says, low and rough, and deep in Azem’s chest something just- shatters.  

They curl forward over their best friend’s lifeless body and scream. There’s an awful twisting, soul-deep, like nausea but worse, a lump in their throat and a seizing in their muscles, and they can feel it when their aether responds, coiling around them like a serpent poised to strangle them. They don’t care, just rock Helios’s body back and forth, holding him to them like maybe they could force life back into him if they just cling tightly enough, like maybe none of this will have happened, like they could just will themself awake from a bad dream and cross the hall to find Helios tangled up in Hades’s arms, sound asleep. There’s a yawning gulf opening beneath their knees and some part of them wants to fall into it.

Sound filters into their ears as if from a great distance, the words blurred but the voice unmistakable. “...zem. Seleukos! Look at me.” Hades? There are- hands on their shoulders, they realize dimly, digging in hard enough to hurt, little pinpricks of pain that distract from the knife between their ribs that is made of nothing but loss and despair. One hand moves to their chin, forces it upwards until they’re no longer staring at Helios’s face - and they want to look, they have to look, but Hades’s grip is like steel, unmoveable.

Azem blinks at him, slowly, and the gesture doesn’t resolve the black spots in their vision - maybe because they’re hyperventilating? Oh, no. It’s not spots.

It’s mist. Black mist, curling around them in a too-familiar sight, and there is panic written into the visible lines of Hades’s face, desperation in his golden eyes. “If you don’t get control over yourself you are going to spawn more beasts and potentially be consumed directly in front of the people who need you,” he says, rushing the words out fast enough they fade into each other. “They need you, Seleukos. I- need you. Do not make me watch you fade too,” and he sucks in a shuddering breath, closing his eyes briefly behind his mask. Softer, barely audible, he continues, “Come back to me.”

A wretched sound tears its way from Azem’s throat, turning into a sob halfway through, and even though everything in them screams not to, they let Helios’s body slip to the dirt, folding forward instead to press their face - mask and all - into Hades’s shoulder. It hurts. It hurts. The tears are too much, racking their body until they can’t breathe around them, can’t do anything but fist their hands into Hades’s robes and hold on, his arms secure around them. There’s warmth there, and steadiness, even though they can feel his own tears dripping cold onto the back of their neck, and part of them hates it and doesn’t want it, wants the screaming horror and the sickness and the pain. The rest of them leans into it and lets it leach away the twisting bile of lost control.

They don’t know how long they remain like that, crying into Hades’s shoulder. But they don’t lose control. They don’t summon another monster to destroy the people Helios had- had- had given his life to save. And eventually, Hades gently pushes them back upright, until they’re sitting on their heels again. His hands are strangely steady as he squeezes their shoulders, then turns to Helios’s body, laying him out neatly and murmuring the words and incantations of the last rites as he does so. Azem watches, numb, as Hades unbinds Helios’s hair and combs it out to lay around his head, as he snaps his fingers and with a rush of aether cleans and mends the tattered robes, crossing Helios’s arms over his chest and closing his eyes.

He speaks the words of ritual: the blessings for a life well-lived in service to the star, a life lived in peace and beauty and meaning, a purpose fulfilled. They all ring hollow. Helios’s return, his death, it is none of those things, just senseless and hopeless and wrong, leaving the bitter taste of ashes in Azem’s mouth and the smell of blood in their nose. Hades only wavers, only departs from the script he’s said a thousand times, once at the end - by leaning forward and kissing Helios’s lips, soft and lingering, and reaching up to tug his mask down so he can press his forehead against the other man’s. For a moment he stays like that, bent over Helios, his shoulders trembling with some suppressed emotion, and then he straightens and replaces his mask, holding one hand out over Helios’s body.

“Be at peace in the Underworld, Helios,” he says, and- returns Azem’s best friend’s body to aether, as the custom is, as it always has been, that he may be one with Etheirys, returned to the star in full. Azem watches the glow of his life fade away into the air, leaving behind nothing but bloodstains.

The whole sum of Helios’s life, his boundless enthusiasm and brilliance and loyalty, now writ only in the dirt and the fabric of their robe.

Across from them, Hades stands. They stay slumped over their knees, only vaguely watching him as he gathers up Helios’s staff and slings it across his back, then searches the ground for a moment before picking up a chipped mask smeared with dirt. In the burning red glow of the sullen sky, it looks like it’s been dipped in blood.

The mask is tucked carefully away. Hades walks back over to them and drops down to one knee, wrapping a hand around their bicep. “Come,” he says, firm but not harsh, and- they stand with him. It’s easier to do that than it is to formulate a response, easiest to just let him steer them away from the place where Helios’s body lay and over towards the small crowd of deathly silent survivors still clustered around the teleporter. The people Azem has spent months protecting, trying to stir into staying calm, staying together, having faith, holding steady. The people Helios gave himself to.

“...when the beasts came, he put up a barrier,” one of the refugees says quietly. “It must’ve taken so much of his strength, but he kept it up so none of them could get to us. So we had more time to escape. It didn’t fall until the two of you arrived.”

Azem can’t meet anyone’s eyes.

Hades’s hand tightens around their arm - and he breathes in and out, straightening his shoulders. “You will all return to Amaurot,” he says, too clipped, clearly trying for the voice he uses in meetings with the Fourteen and not quite managing it. He doesn’t acknowledge the refugee’s words. “We do not, at present, have the resources to maintain a presence in this region. The Convocation will see to it that your needs are met. Continue proceeding through the teleporter as you were before the attack.”

There are a few murmurs, but no one argues back, and one by one they lay their hands on the floating crystal and let its aether currents bear them away to the capital. Only when every single one of the civilians have gone through does Hades reach out to command the teleporter to return with them and pull Azem through the Lifestream, the brief feeling of being enveloped in his cool, dark aether almost a slap in the face after the heat of the farmlands. (He must be as tired, if not more so, than they are, but he doesn’t make them teleport on their own. They love him for that.)

And then- they’re appearing in Amaurot’s central aetheryte plaza, and unlike the silence of the wind and the sky, it is- bustling.

Not just with the refugees they’ve been sending through the teleporter, but with citizens of the city itself, some assisting the displaced and some just watching. Of course there’s a crowd, Azem thinks; they summoned Emet-Selch from the middle of a Convocation meeting, something they would only do in this time of crisis if it was absolutely necessary, and the transport back to Amaurot was interrupted. The former must be why Elidibus and Lahabrea are standing near the aetheryte in a small pocket of calm. Lahabrea because of the meeting, Elidibus because of Helios’s association with his office.

“Emet-Selch, Azem!” Hythlodaeus’s voice is equal parts relieved and worried as he pushes through the crowd towards them, and the call of their titles draws attention to them, too many people turning to look. Azem wonders what they must think, looking at them, seeing the blood and the dirt across their robe, staining their hands, their fallen cowl and the way Hades has yet to let go of them. Hythlodaeus comes to a stop in front of them, eyes slowly widening and mouth parting as he looks them both over, gaze landing on the staff slung across Hades’s back. “...where is Helios?”

Something ugly claws its way up Azem’s throat. They swallow it down with difficulty, lowering their head instead to stare at the blood all over their hands, their sleeves, their front. Hades doesn’t look much better, they think, his own hands stained red, and with the staff he’s carrying - it has to be obvious. They don’t want to say it. They don’t think they can.

Hythlodaeus lets out a breath, heavy and shaken, and Azem looks up again in time to see him- crumple. He closes his eyes, his shoulders curling in, and they want to reach for him but they can’t find the energy to. There’s just that hollow numbness instead, like ice has replaced their blood, and they don’t- they don’t want to think around it. They don’t want to feel what comes on the far side.

“...I see,” Hythlodaeus says after a moment, aching and quiet, and presses one hand over his mouth like that could hide the tears they hear in his voice. “And- are the two of you alright?”

“Minor injuries, nothing more,” Hades says. His voice is cracking. “I need to take Azem home.”

Both of them, holding on so tightly in public, trying so hard to keep from losing their composure, as if it matters anymore. As if the people won’t hear the story of Azem nearly birthing an abomination soon enough, as if it isn’t already clear, as if- as if there is much morale left among those who have been forcibly relocated to the capital. As if it does any good to pretend they aren’t breaking in the face of despair such as this.

“Of course,” Hythlodaeus whispers. Clears his throat. “I will… damn it,” and he chokes on something that sounds suspiciously like a sob. “I will join you.”

Hades nods, then turns to look at Elidibus and Lahabrea, standing a short distance away and simply watching. Watching like most of the aetheryte plaza’s inhabitants are, in some way or another. Elidibus looks pale, they think, and Lahabrea tired. “I will not be returning to my duties for the rest of the day,” he informs them, almost sharply. “Pray convey my apologies to the Fourteen for the interruption.”

“We will,” Elidibus says, then hesitates, glancing over at Azem. The soft concern in his eyes is more reminiscent of their friend than the Emissary, and they would appreciate that if they could appreciate anything at all, but it’s also clear that for all his political acumen he has no idea what to say. Of course he doesn’t. To return to the star is meant to be a joyful thing. No matter that Azem has witnessed the rare occasions where it isn’t - has faced death countless times in their travels - few in Amaurot proper have, and even for them it’s never been like this. And Helios was of Elidibus’s office and- and his own friend; he must be struggling with the weight of this news himself, trying to find the impartial words his seat demands. “Ill circumstances they may be, but the people will be gladdened to see you return to us, Azem.”

Azem almost wants to laugh, if that was something they were capable of. Elidibus means well - Themis means well, they know that. He must be hurting too, and trying to keep up a front, because there are too many people watching and the Convocation must be strong. But how could the people be anything but sickened and horrified to see their counselor like this? How could it represent anything to them but more tragedy?

“Do remember the people still need you, Traveler,” Lahabrea says, voice low. He almost sounds like he’s trying to be sympathetic and can’t quite manage it, too worn to the bone. They can understand that. “Your duty is not yet completed.”

Their duty. Their duty. They’ve clung to it for decades, since the moment they were first named to the seat, made it their life’s purpose and nearly the whole of their self, save for in the privacy of their family, as one of the Fourteen is meant to do; they’ve dedicated everything they are to the people, and they have no regrets. How could they? But- the red mask on their face feels heavier than it ever has, right now, and at the same time like such a hollow lifeline. How could their duty alone be enough to keep them moving forward when the person who has been their other half since they were children is gone?

They don’t have a response for either Elidibus or Lahabrea. With the way everything feels dizzy and distant, they aren’t sure they’d be able to give one even if they did.

“Azem. Are you capable of teleporting home or must I do it?” Hades asks, turning towards them in a way that quietly but very pointedly excludes both members of the Fourteen from their conversation. Azem swallows, looking from him to Hythlodaeus - pale and stricken, still clinging to the shreds of his composure even despite the tears dripping from beneath his mask - and tries to dredge up enough of something to respond, but it’s hard. It’s hard when all they can think of is the feeling of Helios’s cold skin beneath their fingers.

“I…” they start, thin and slow, and then it’s too much effort to say anything else, especially when they don’t know what they want to say. They just tilt forward to lean their forehead against his shoulder, even though they shouldn’t, and he sighs and lets go of their arm to slide his own around their shoulders instead.

“Come along, then,” he murmurs. “Hythlodaeus, we need to go.”

“Yes. Let’s,” Hythlodaeus agrees, shakier than they think they’ve ever heard him. Anything else he or anyone else might say is swallowed up by Hades’s aether as he unceremoniously yanks them into another teleport - there’s no real smoothness to it, a jagged edge to the magic that they can’t blame him for even if it’s uncomfortable. He’s got to be getting tired, and it takes no small amount of aether to teleport a second person along with him, especially somewhere undefined by a shard. The fact that he doesn’t complain, even jokingly, about using his aether for someone else…

Things- blur, after that, for a while. Azem remembers, distantly, arriving in their apartment; they remember Hythlodaeus dropping down to sit on the couch, pulling his mask off, and burying his face in his hands as he cries. They remember Hades leaving them for a moment to hug Hythlodaeus and say something to him in a low voice that they don’t catch. They remember Hades getting out a set of their sleep clothes and pressing them into their hands, telling them to clean themself up.

They don’t remember showering, but they must do it, because the next thing they know, time has passed and they’re wandering back out into the living room, arms wrapped around themself and skin still a little damp, hair sticking to the back of their neck. The light coming through the window is the warm gold of sunset, a color they’d almost forgotten the shade of, and it spills over Hythlodaeus, still sitting on the couch, his head in his hands. He looks up at their approach and wipes the tears from his cheeks, offering them a thin, strained smile.

“Come here, Seleukos,” he says softly, holding out a hand, and they do. He wraps an arm around them as soon as they sit down, tugging them into his side, and kisses their forehead, then leans his cheek against the top of their head and holds them close. Neither of them say anything. There’s nothing to say.

Azem watches the sunlight and shadows drip across the floor, fading into dusk, and wonders what, exactly, they’re supposed to do now.

Eventually, Hades emerges into the living room. He’s wearing a clean set of robes and he’s washed the blood from his hands, but his eyes are red-rimmed and swollen and his face patchy from crying. From his set expression, he seems determined to ignore it. Instead he crosses the living room to lean into both of them briefly, then- then makes dinner, pushing them both into eating even though food is the last thing Azem wants right now. All they can taste is ash and blood. But- it is hard to refuse Hades taking care of them.

There’s an empty chair at the table. They don’t want to look at it. They can’t stop.

That night they fall asleep in a tangle together, all three of them, Hades pulled into Azem’s and Hythlodaeus’s bedroom at Hythlodaeus’s suggestion, that he might not have to sleep alone, tonight at least. It should be a comfort for all three of them. A lot of things, Azem thinks, should be comforts, but how can they take comfort in anything? There was no peace in Helios’s death, and with the Final Days rampaging across the star, there might not be peace in anything ever again. And Azem- they’ve already failed to stop this. They failed and Helios died because of it.

Azem has never been Seleukos without Helios. They- aren’t sure they can. They will try, for Hythlodaeus and Hades, but-

Perhaps Lahabrea was right after all.

Without Helios, the apartment feels empty, even with all three of them in it. Azem doesn’t know what to do with themself now that they’re back in Amaurot - participate in the Convocation’s meetings about the Final Days? Pick up the creations they’d been in the middle of before they’d left on their last circuit? New research? All of those require the ability to think, and in the grey haze that is their grief, Azem doesn’t feel very capable of that at all. They pace through the rooms of their apartment instead, stand and stare out the windows at the city for hours on end, letting themself drift on the nothingness and numbness that fills them. 

The first few days after Helios’s death, Hythlodaeus and Hades stay with them, and they live in that grief together. But then Hythlodaeus returns to work, desperate to keep his mind off things, and Hades is called back to the Capitol, and so Azem spends the days alone, watching the star move on without them. The Convocation continues to request their presence, of course, but answering would require more effort than they can find it within themself to give.

They should be outside the city, doing their duty, protecting the people still suffering under the burning skies. They know that. Helios would want them to. But heavens, they’ve already barely kept from losing control of their creation magicks already, and they don’t- they don’t know if they could fight like this, with lethargy heavy in their muscles. Even if they could, how could they keep their people calm? How could they ask people to believe in them, trust them, when they can’t manage that for themself?

Hades isn’t likely to allow them to leave Amaurot right now anyway, and it’s probably even for the best. They can still remember how he’d looked when he begged them to stay with him, and the last thing they want is to make either him or Hythlodaeus lose another part of their family, especially so soon. (To think that not so long ago the four of them had been discussing the potential of moving into a bigger home and raising a child or two together. Now the star itself is dying and Helios is dead and they will never have that chance.) Once the Final Days are over, if they’re ever over…they’ll have to remember how to do their duty then.

When Hythlodaeus gets home from the Bureau to find them standing silent at the window again, he doesn’t fuss, although they’re fairly sure he’s worried about them. He just walks up and wraps his arms around them, leaning his head against theirs and holding them close.

For a while Azem lets the silence hold, then they sigh and curl their hands around his wrists. “...what are we going to do now?” they ask, very soft, and he hums thoughtfully.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “We…we move forward, though I truthfully have little idea how. Even when the Final Days first began, I never expected…”

“Neither did I,” they whisper. “We made a promise, one we were meant to keep. How do we move forward with such an important part of our lives missing? How do we move forward when everything we were supposed to do, to be, has just been broken?”

“I don’t know, love,” Hythlodaeus says again, and this time the words are pained. “I have been trying very hard to believe there must be a way, but I’ve yet to find one. But I have faith in you and our dear Hades, and we will lead each other out of this darkness. We must.”

Azem turns around in his arms to hug him properly, leaning their chin on his shoulder, and closes their eyes. “What if we can’t?” they ask, the words cracking down the middle, and it feels like the ice in their chest cracks along with them. “I’ve never- I can’t remember life without him, Hyth,” and the nickname, one they rarely use, sounds almost plaintive. There are tears in their eyes again, burning. “I don’t know how- he was my best friend. And every time I close my eyes I keep seeing it-”

Hythlodaeus hushes them gently, running a hand up and down their back. “We can,” he promises, so gentle it hurts. “I swear it, Seleukos. If you are unable to find your way on your own, Hades and I will find it for you. Do you trust us to do so?”

“I love you,” Azem says, which isn’t the same thing, but it is an answer. “But- it hurts.”

“I know. Heavens, I know.” He tugs them closer still, tucks their face against his neck. “I wish I knew how to make it stop - this is…I don’t believe I’ve ever felt sorrow like this before. And I wasn’t the one who watched it happen. He deserved the chance to return to the star with dignity, peace, and fulfillment, the way it should have been - but if I dwell overlong on that I think I might drown in it, and you and I both know that isn’t what he’d want.”

“I don’t know what he’d want,” Azem bursts out, pulling back enough to shake their head and stare at him, swiping at their cheeks with one hand. “We never exactly spoke about what to do if one of us died!”

Hythlodaeus doesn’t let them pull away any further, instead reaching up to cup their cheek, leaving his other arm loose around their waist. “I like to think he would want us to remember to smile,” he says softly, and they let out a shaking breath, tilting their face into his palm. “To hold onto the light he brought us and show it to others in turn, the way he would have. To…” and he smiles wryly, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “To continue engraving lines in Hades’s forehead through our incorrigible and inappropriate behavior. Just think of what a disappointment we would be if we simply ceased pranking him.”

Azem manages a small, watery laugh, closing their eyes. “He would ask if the honorable Azem of the Convocation of Fourteen was too good for jokes now, just like the rest of their coworkers,” they say weakly, and Hythlodaeus hums.

“Exactly. And I, for one, couldn’t bear to see my dear Azem’s reputation descend to the same depths of sobriety as the honorable Emet-Selch’s.” When they open their eyes he’s smiling again, and this time his eyes are warm too, no matter the dampness in them. “How would you feel about taking our dinner down to the park at the end of the street tonight? This is our home, not a cage, and the skies over Amaurot are still blue.”

“...alright,” Azem agrees after a moment, sniffing quietly. They aren’t entirely sure they want to - leaving the apartment means potentially being around people, people who will look at them and see them broken and fear what that might mean - but they have ever found it difficult to deny Hythlodaeus, and perhaps the touch of nature as-yet unsullied by calamity will help them find some kind of footing. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Become as dour as the honorable Emet-Selch,” Hythlodaeus teases, and despite it all they find themself smiling. “Speaking of, why don’t we surprise him and catch him on his way home?”

They don’t have the energy to join the scheming, not really, but they can help and let Hythlodaeus carry them forward, and maybe that will be enough.

They return to the Convocation, after. The rest of the Fourteen are involved in meetings with all the top researchers and scientists they can gather, deep in discussion as to the nature of the Final Days, what might be causing the phenomena reported across the star, how it might be prevented or at least defended against. Fandaniel has some theory, apparently, about a form of energy known as dynamis that is counterbalanced by aether, and stagnating celestial aether currents, but as clever as Azem is they have no idea what he’s referring to and are well-aware they don’t have the knowledge base to do more than get in his way.

They could learn, probably. But even if they’ve returned to the endless meetings they still find it nearly impossible to focus; it’s so much easier to just let their attention wander and stare into the distance and think of nothing at all. Hades is busy, in any case, being rushed about between meetings where his expertise is needed and his own responsibilities as Emet-Selch, and there are more of the latter with each passing day. Civilians arriving in Amaurot bearing the bodies of loved ones lost to the Final Days, desperate for their last rites, are becoming more and more common, and no matter the risk the Final Days pose, he has to tend to them. To put aside his duty now would be unthinkable.

Almost as unthinkable, Azem thinks tiredly, as them putting aside theirs to sit through debates they don’t hear a word of, as if they’re truly shepherding the star by pretending Lahabrea doesn’t exist.

Elidibus sits with them most days. Terribly skilled at magic he may be, but he’s still a politician first and foremost, and so like them has less of a place in the ongoing debates - and Themis is one of their closest friends, who has suffered the same loss as they have. Who better to sit with them, to quietly pull their attention back when it’s wandered for too long, to engage them as best he can in a conversation that will keep them in the present?

They truly are so grateful for him.

But then the skies over Amaurot turn crimson, chaos reigns in the streets, and everything comes to a slow, horrified halt. Debate and discussion are ended and they call a full meeting of the Fourteen, because the time for theories is over - the time for nearly anything is over. They are out of time.

Lahabrea pins each and one of them with a heavy look and informs them all that given the state of the star, the time is now to begin considering solutions previously thought unacceptable, and Azem swallows and exchanges a glance with Hades, a few seats down from them. They haven’t paid enough attention to the proposed plans before to know exactly what’s been considered unacceptable, but from the look in his eyes - grim, exhausted, determined - it can’t be good.

They don’t think they’ll like the result of this meeting. They’re too tired to care.

Fandaniel looks at Lahabrea, then at Elidibus, and when both of them nod, he launches into an explanation of the research he’s been doing on the celestial aether and on dynamis. If it is indeed dynamis causing the calamity - dynamis from a source other than Etheirys, as he suspects - they won’t be able to stop it, he explains. Their aether is far too dense to manipulate dynamis effectively, or even at all, in most cases. “It’s possible someone born exceptionally weak-” he starts, then stops, casting a nervous look in Azem’s direction.

Azem thinks of Helios, frail and sickly as a child because of his thin aether, incapable of creation magicks, but no less skilled at manipulating aether for his lack, and wonders just what he could have done for their star, had they been quick enough to save him.

They have always believed he would have made the better Azem. 

They miss the next part of his explanation. With the way the building occasionally shudders around them, rocked by what must be falling debris, it’s hard not to be back in that moment, watching a two-headed beast shake their best friend like a ragdoll. They couldn’t stop it. They should’ve stopped it. The two of them have always watched out for each other, from the time they were children and Azem was standing between Helios and schoolyard bullies who thought it acceptable to pick on him for his inability. Don’t worry, Helios, they’d told him once, small and bright and determined, we can make the concepts together, and I’ll create twice as much for the both of us! And when they and Hades had worked together properly for the first time as students to find a way Helios might use crystals to augment his aether, helping him develop his own unique way of doing the magic as instinctive to Azem as breathing - they had been so happy.

They still remember when Venat had taken the two of them under her wing, bringing them along on her trips across the star, teaching them and observing them in turns. They remember when she’d finally explained she was looking for a successor, and that she had seen potential in the both of them, not just for their gifts - Helios’s skill at seeing through the walls of one’s soul, of reading the past in the ambient aether, had been unparalleled, and Seleukos had always been powerful, though they were outstripped in every way by Hades, save for their summoning spell - but for their personalities and attitudes. They’d put forth the recommendation that she should choose Helios to take her seat, but in the end, after several years of mentoring and the Convocation’s long deliberation, it’d been decided that given the risk inherent to the seat of the Traveler, Helios’s inability put him in too much danger for his other skills to make up for it. And with their summoning invocation, their ability to call aid to their side no matter how far away they are, they were the obvious choice.

Even decades later, as dedicated as they are, Azem still thinks Helios would have been the better choice. Maybe if he’d had the power of the seat to draw upon, he wouldn’t be dead. Maybe if they’d summoned a healer, maybe if they’d just-

“Azem,” a voice says, and they blink and startle out of the near-spiral, eyes refocusing on the Convocation chambers. Elidibus is the one speaking, and the rest of the Fourteen are all watching them - they’ve missed something, then. Fandaniel’s proposal. “A motion has been presented to the Convocation. Will you speak before the voting begins?”

Azem swallows and looks down at their mask, resting on the table in front of them. There are chips and scratches in its red surface, in the silver that curls across it, and they trace their fingertips over those blemishes as they think. They could, they suppose, ask Fandaniel to repeat himself, or Lahabrea or Elidibus to summarize, but they don’t want to think, even to do their duty. They don’t want to move beyond the numbness, to step fully back into their body and be present in this moment, in which Helios is dead and gone and they have so utterly failed their people.

“I…am not currently fit to perform my duties,” they say quietly, clenching one hand into a fist in their lap. “In light of that I believe it best that I abstain from the voting.”

“...you will not like this solution, Azem,” Hades warns, and Azem looks up at him again, shaking their head. Formless dread churns in the pit of their stomach at the way he looks almost poised for a blow, but- but they stand by their decision.

“It was my duty to protect the people,” they say. “I failed. I found no solution of my own, and- the people keep dying. What right do I have to protest the Convocation’s decision?”

They are so, so tired. And if Helios was still alive, if they had come back to this meeting after spending all their time out fighting, maybe their answer would be different - no, they’re sure it would be. But they don’t- they can’t  fight this fight anymore. Not when they’ve failed to protect one of the people that means the most to them.

And thus- and thus does the Convocation of Fourteen unanimously vote to ask half the population of Etheirys to sacrifice themselves in a ritual to create a being to govern the laws of nature and strengthen the celestial aether currents as a shield against the Final Days. Even Hades, who they would’ve expected, hoped to disagree, votes in favor, and if they weren’t so cold inside they think it would hurt and enrage them in equal measures. Half the star - it’s an unthinkable, unconscionable sacrifice to make, even in the name of protecting all the rest, even in the name of the duty the Fourteen carry, maybe especially in the name of that duty, because what is Etheirys without its people?

And yet-

When they have failed to effect any meaningful change, when they haven’t touched their duty to the people and the star since Helios died, what could they really do differently? They certainly don’t have an answer, and with starshowers over Amaurot, they don’t have time to look for one.

They don’t have the energy to look for one.

Hades joins them on the way out of the chamber once the vote has been finalized and Elidibus has gone to prepare an announcement to the people. “We’ve had the rituals for this finalized for almost a week,” he admits to them. “I had hoped for more time, for another way - any other way than this, but there is naught we can do, and our duty to the star must take precedence.”

“I don’t agree,” Azem says quietly, adjusting their cowl. “...Helios wouldn’t agree. But what can I do? I am a failure of an Azem.”

“You are not,” Hades says, with a surprising amount of fervor in his voice. “You have never abandoned our people or turned your face from your duty.”

“But I am right now. By allowing this vote to stand,” they whisper, and he doesn’t seem to have an answer for that. They’re almost glad for the fact - they don’t have the energy to argue.

Hythlodaeus will understand, they think. The- pain of the vote, the horror of it, and Azem’s utter inability to do a damn thing about it, the way they would’ve a few months ago when they still had something approaching hope. There’s been too much death already, and more hardly seems a solution at all - and some part of them fears, too, what further doors this might open. If one sacrifice is acceptable, what stops the next one? They’d like to believe their fellows on the Convocation better than that, but they aren’t sure they can anymore. Perhaps not even Hades, as much as they love him, because his ideals have ever been the good of the star before all else just as the rest of the Convocation. He might be kind - and they know he is, they remember summoning him to help them time and again, when traveling with Venat and on their own, and though he’ll deny it for the rest of his life the people he aided when at their side are the reason he has his seat to begin with - but what is kindness in the face of duty?

What indeed.

They walk in silence next to him the entire way home, head bowed so they don’t have to look at the screaming sky or the scattered rubble or the marks of fighting, though things seem to at least be somewhat under control for now, and they try not to wonder what will be left of any of them when this is all over.

Blue sky falls in through the apartment’s windows for the first time in several days, though it’s stained by smoke from the last few fires that haven’t been contained. Azem stares out at it, running their thumb over and over the crystal in their hand, and tries to think of the city as it was, not as it is now, a hollow shell. Their own apartment building was spared the worst of the damage, meaning they can still, at least, live here, but even along their street rubble chokes the sidewalks, soot covers the buildings, and the plants and water features are dry and cracked. There’s little of Amaurot’s soaring beauty in the sight they’re faced with. And the emptiness…

They can feel it beneath their skin - the pulsing, overwhelming Dark that is Zodiark, manifestation of the will of the star as granted by half Etheirys’s souls, born from their aether and their desperate desire for salvation. They can feel it in their aether, the way invocations that draw on the Light are almost painful to cast now, the way their balance has been skewed. They can even feel it in the way they feel almost compelled to pick up their mask and their duty again, that they might serve the people. Serve- yes, the people.

Azem shakes their head slightly to try to clear it. They were present in the aftermath of the summoning, as a member of the Fourteen, even though they have hardly acted in that capacity since- since returning to Amaurot. They have seen Zodiark with their own eyes, witnessed His power - watched as He wove immutable new laws of creation and a shield of aether against the onslaught of the Final Days, banishing the fire from the sky and preventing the further twisting of their creation magicks. And they watched as, after, Elidibus stepped free from the god he’d become the heart of and looked at them with a disquieting hollowness in his eyes. There had been very little of Themis left in that stare.

It was in that aftermath that the Darkness first touched them, and in the two days since they’ve barely slept, even wrapped in Hythlodaeus’s arms with their head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. Not that they’ve slept well since- since Helios, but this has been different, somehow, leaving them restless in their exhaustion.

They think Hythlodaeus can tell something is different. He’d taken one look at them and Hades, when they returned, and gone pale, but he hasn’t said anything about it, just taken to holding onto both of them whenever he has the chance. Hades has stopped sleeping in his and Helios’s old bedroom entirely; after all, it was a simple matter to magick the bed big enough for three to fit comfortably, and it’s been better than leaving him alone. Last night, when Azem had been sprawled across Hythlodaeus’s chest and Hades had been curled around his other side, both of them awake, they’d exchanged silent looks of understanding and determination - to keep him safe, and to let him soothe himself however he must, and to not speak of whatever it is that summoning Zodiark has done to them.

But Hythlodaeus is at work right now, and Hades has been called away to speak with Lahabrea and Elidibus, and Azem needs- needs to take the time to make this record. All of the Fourteen have been asked to do so - to record their memories and their magic in crystals to be kept as an archive and in case of some further terrible emergency. And considering that there are only a few people on this star who have been taught their summoning invocation, preserving it is something they care about, but…the memories, too? Is there anything of worth in their life now, as broken as it’s become?

They think, reluctantly, of their childhood with Helios. Of meeting Hythlodaeus and Hades for the first time, slowly bonding with them over their years of study, until despite Hades’s awful attitude there was no one else in the star they would rather be around. Of watching Hades finally getting fed up with Helios and kissing him for the first time, while Seleukos and Hythlodaeus hid in the nearby bushes and tried not to laugh and give themselves away. Of the first time Venat took the two of them out beyond the tamed land around Amaurot and they saw Etheirys in all its wild glory. Of when they’d summoned Hythlodaeus and Hades halfway across the star to help and discovered that no one else could summon the way they can, and also discovered that Hythlodaeus loved them and had been patiently waiting for them to notice for almost fifteen years.

They think of all the years since they and Hades were elevated to seats on the Convocation, the laughter and the warmth of the family the four of them built in this home, even if it was a home Azem only spent half the year in. Of the time Hythlodaeus had brought a concept for a plant-creature that’d been dropped on his desk home and Helios had goaded Azem into creating it, only for it to summarily get loose and nearly destroy the entire apartment before a very unamused Hades managed to catch it in aetherial shackles. (Hythlodaeus had seen the devastation and laughed, then brightly proclaimed that he could consider this a successful field test and he’d be certain to approve the concept the next day.) Of the promises they’d made each other, the ways they’d bound themselves together, the love that has been the brightest thread of Azem’s life since they met.

As painful as those memories are now, tinged by the knowledge that Helios is gone and the world will never go back to that warm place, as much as Azem doesn’t know if they’re capable of being the person who lived them anymore - capable of being Seleukos - if they aren’t worth being preserved, a crystal-cased reminder of what the Final Days destroyed, then what is?

They go about the ritual of imbuing their life and magic into the crystal with a tired sigh, eyes closed in grim concentration, and when it’s over they record a small message to preface it all: This crystal contains the compiled memories and magicks of Azem the Traveler, as recorded in the immediate aftermath of Zodiark’s summoning. Let it stand as a monument to all we have lost, and a reminder of all I will not lose again. And then they tuck the crystal away - they’ll need to return it to the Capitol. Probably they should go and do that now; there’s no reason not to. Nothing gained by hiding away in their apartment.

And yet - they are so tired, in a way far beyond physical.

Before they can muster up the energy to put on their mask and properly adjust their robes and leave, though, there’s a knock at the apartment door, and they frown. Who would be coming by to see them? With half Amaurot’s population gone most of the civilians have been reeling at the emptiness left behind, and with the city shattered by the beasts and the meteors, socialization isn’t exactly on anyone’s minds. It could be a message, they suppose, but the Fourteen would just send a crystal.

On the other side of the door, when they open it, is Venat. Her white robes are mostly neat, though ash has gathered on the hem and sleeves, and she’s wearing her mask and cowl as is proper, though she lowers her hood as soon as she sees them, offering a small smile that doesn’t hide the tension in her eyes. She’s been- hardened like this every time Azem has seen her since that incident in Elpis that stole Hythlodaeus’s and Hades’s memories (and left Azem with a great deal of paperwork centered around a soul-bearing familiar they’d supposedly sent along). It just looks worse now.

“Hello, old friend,” she says gently. “Hythlodaeus told me I might find you here. May I come in?”

For a moment, Azem just stares at her. She hasn’t been back in Amaurot since they spoke after that incident, from as far as Azem remembers, and with all the death and destruction - with Azem having abandoned their duty, the duty she passed down to them decades ago - with the Convocation’s decision she cannot have agreed with, they hadn’t expected her to return any time soon. And yet here she is, having gone to Hythlodaeus specifically to find them. Why? “...yes,” they say finally, stepping aside to let her through the door, and she inclines her head in acknowledgement, taking off her mask as she steps inside. “I can…tea?”

“Please. Refreshments are in short supply these days,” Venat murmurs, already moving to sit at the dining table. This is hardly the first time she’s been by to visit in all their long years of friendship, but there’s still something surreal about their mentor being here, in their kitchen, after the end of the world.

They fill the kettle and put it on the stove to boil, though they could heat the water instantly with magic if they so desired. The few moments it takes for it to reach temperature give them the space to dig out the tea they keep in the cupboard just for Venat’s visits, to fill two strainers with the leaves and set them into the mugs, and to lean against the edge of the counter and try to find some semblance of presence. It’s likely she’s not here for no reason, which means that either she has just heard about Helios and has come to- to speak about that, or something important has happened, or both. Or perhaps it’s about Azem abandoning their duty as they have. None of the options are good ones, but all of them will require them to think, and  so- they need to pull themself together.

They take a few deep breaths and pour the water once the kettle whistles at them, the sound shrill enough to make them wince. At least it’s- clarifying, if not grounding, and they try to blink away a bit of the exhausted haze as they carry the mugs out to the table, setting one in front of Venat and the other at the chair next to hers. She smiles as they sit, leaning forward to inhale the steam rising off the water’s surface. “My favorite blend,” she remarks. “I should have known you’d still keep it around.”

Azem nods slightly, watching the steam trail in puffs through the air. “Why are you here?” they ask, then furrow their brow, lifting their gaze to look more directly at her. “...Venat. When we spoke after Elpis-” Her face shifts slightly, her eyes falling closed for a moment, and the breath leaves them in a rush. “Your foreknowledge. It was this, wasn’t it?”

A question they haven’t even dared to wonder about since the last time they saw her, out in the wilds during the Final Days, when she’d spoken to them of the Convocation and how likely it was they would only be able to end this with death. She wasn’t wrong, but-

“Did you know about Helios?”

“We can never truly know what will come to pass until it does, Azem,” Venat says quietly, wrapping her hands around her mug. “I knew there was a chance. Just as I know the long path it seems ever-more-likely I must walk - but that future is not yet fixed, and I would do all I could to see it averted.”

“But you knew.” Azem doesn’t quite recognize their own voice, something tight and hoarse, mimicking the awful, painful tension in their chest. “You knew - and you told me to trust you when I asked-”

“What would telling you have accomplished, besides giving you secrets to hide from those you love most?” Venat asks, too-steady, and- and they can’t do this.

“I could have saved him!” they snap, slamming a hand onto the table in emphasis, hard enough to rattle the mugs. Venat doesn’t flinch, barely reacts except to sigh, sorrow in her eyes, and they want- they want to scream, they want to cry, they want to summon their sword to their hand and lunge at her just to feel something other than the black hole of loss. “You had no right. No right to hide that information from me.”

“Would you have believed me if I told you?” Venat asks, and they pause, halfway out of their chair, as the implications hit. She sighs and takes a small sip from her mug, shaking her head. “I had no idea what my being in possession of foreknowledge might change - would my actions create an entirely new future, or had a conjunction between our time and the future been formed, and every step I now took was on the path pre-ordained for me the moment I heard those words? I did not know. I still do not know. Whether the tragedy we’re living through occurred despite my knowledge…or because of it.”

Azem swallows hard, then lowers themself back into the chair. They still- believe what they said, there’s still that tumultuous anger making it hard to breathe, but the exhaustion in Venat’s voice, in her eyes, speak to the turmoil she’s been in herself, and they…they cannot imagine having to make that decision.  “...I wish you’d told me,” they finally say, far less energy behind the words, and she reaches out to rest one of her hands over theirs on the table.

“I grieve his death too, Seleukos,” she murmurs, the rare use of their name a testament to the sincerity of the weight in her words, and Azem slumps forward, closing their eyes. “He was as much my student as you were.”

“...he was protecting refugees from the Final Days,” they whisper. “He exhausted himself to keep them safe, and had nothing left to protect himself. He learned that from you.”

“I was never responsible for his kindness,” Venat says, shaking her head. “Neither was I responsible for yours. All I’ve ever done is give you both the skills to spread that kindness to the rest of the star.” She sighs again, tapping her fingers against the mug. “I only wish I could have told him how proud I am of you both before the end.”

And that, Azem cannot stand to hear, not after the way they’ve- all but abandoned everything she taught them. “Why are you here?” they ask again, retreating a little into the icy distance in the hopes that it will close over the rawness of their heart. “It can’t have been for this.”

“...no,” Venat admits after a moment. “I came to speak to you about the Convocation’s recent actions, though upon seeing you I find myself concerned. Your aether feels corrupted, Azem. Surely Hythlodaeus has noticed?”

…of course Venat would see it too. And the way she asks about Hythlodaeus rather than Hades, even though Hades has plenty of aethersight of his own, implies that she has her own suspicions about what caused it. Is that why she wants to talk about the Convocation? “We haven’t spoken of it,” they say, fiddling with the chain on the tea strainer in their mug. “Is it relevant?”

For a moment Venat is entirely silent. The expression on her face is carefully neutral, but her eyes are guarded in a way they hadn’t been a moment before. “I believe the corruption of one’s aether is always relevant, yes,” she says. “I taught you better than that, Azem. Why not make use of the ward?”

Because I didn’t know it would happen until it did, they don’t say. They’ve agreed not to say anything to Hythlodaeus about the Darkness, but…Hades isn’t here right now, and Venat has always been their mentor, even when they were angry at her. “I was- not involved in the summoning,” they say instead, “only in the aftermath. I had no direct interaction with His power.”

“And yet it has done this to you,” she says, more softly, shaking her head. There’s another minute of quiet before her face shifts into resoluteness, like she’s made some kind of decision. “I know you must have opposed the decision, and you are not the only one. There are many who fear the power Zodiark holds, including the fervency with which too many of our people believe Him the answer to all our woes and our suffering. I’ve returned to Amaurot with the intention of forming a faction to stand against any potential misuse of that power and sacrifice, and I’d like to ask you to join me in doing so - not only as my friend and student, but as Azem. Your knowledge, experience, and influence would be a great boon to us.”

And- maybe if Helios was still alive. Maybe if Venat hadn’t kept her knowledge from them, especially when it could’ve meant the difference between his life and death. Maybe if Azem had had the hope, the determination, the energy to stand against the rest of the Fourteen when Zodiark was first proposed. Maybe if they didn’t feel like their soul was made of shattered glass.

They still have their duty. Soon they will shoulder it again. This new restlessness demands it, even if they are still so exhausted they cannot think properly.

“I don’t think I can help you, Venat,” Azem says tiredly, watching as Venat’s eyes widen - she hadn’t expected that response. Is she disappointed? Azem has a hard time telling.

“...I see,” she says evenly. “Might I ask why?”

They shrug one shoulder heavily and turn their mug around and around in their hands. “Helios is dead. I- failed our people. I am not…the person you remember.” And standing against Zodiark would be foolish, now of all times, when they must cling to their unity.

“Your failures do not overwrite my faith in you, friend,” Venat says gently, but they shake their head at her, and she sighs. “Very well, I understand. Should you change your mind, the offer remains open - and I’ll see if I can learn anything about the aetheric corruption you now suffer from. Anything that might aid you I will send your way.”

“Thank you,” Azem says, because it’s polite, because it’s expected, because it might genuinely be helpful, because they know they should feel something other than apathy and vague discomfort about a change to their aether, but…they aren’t Helios. They don’t cast spells that draw on the Light often enough for it to matter.

They’re too tired to worry about what else it might mean.

Venat stays for long enough to finish her tea and thank them for it before she says she needs to move on, and Azem escorts her to the door, watching as she puts on her mask and pulls up her cowl, adjusting herself for the public. Before she leaves, she turns to them again, and the look on her face is all soft steadiness as she reaches out to squeeze their shoulder.

“Remember, my friend,” she says. “Suffering is part of life, and we cannot simply pretend it doesn’t exist. Only by learning to live with it, live through it, to choose to hope despite it, can we truly be free.”

And then she’s gone, leaving Azem staring after a trailing white robe in an empty hallway.

(And they will never see Venat again.)

The thing about Zodiark is - He saves the star from dying, but He does not restore it to life.

Even without the burning skies, the twisted magicks, the constant spread of rot, the land is lifeless and barren. Fires have scorched much of it, more is blighted by disease, and even with concepts and creation they cannot force the land to flourish again. It could take years, decades even, before the damage is undone enough for the star to begin to thrive, and though they can create everything they need to sustain themselves until then - what will happen to all the life’s work of so many people now gone? How are they supposed to live in a dead world? They are meant to nurture and build up the star, to care for it, to make it beautiful. There is no beauty in the aftermath of this calamity.

Some part of Azem thinks that they should be responding to this differently. That they should- be focusing on rebuilding with what they have left, finding new ways to shepherd the people forward. That- that they cannot attribute this shift to Helios’s death and the apathetic hopelessness they’ve felt since alone.

But Elidibus steps forth to inform them that with enough aether, Zodiark could easily restore Etheirys to full, blooming life, and for some reason - even though it means sacrifice - they agree. 

The Convocation puts forth an announcement of their plans to perform another ritual for Zodiark to bring the star back from the brink, requesting volunteers for the sacrifice, and Azem wordlessly does what they are ordered to to prepare. No one argues the necessity of it, not even them, not even Fandaniel, not even Hades; there’s hardly even any discussion. As if they all, all at once, recognize that this is the only path forward and move to take it.

It’s not the usual way Convocation meetings go. Azem can’t quite bring themself to question it.

The night the announcement is made public, Hythlodaeus comes home late. He looks tired when he walks into the living room to greet the two of them, sitting quietly on the couch, Hades with a book in his lap and Azem reading bits of it over his shoulder, but he smiles as he always does when he sees them, bending over to kiss first Azem, then Hades on the forehead. Hades grumbles ineffectually at the affection, which makes Hythlodaeus chuckle softly, and even Azem manages a tiny smile at the familiarity of it. No matter how much Hades complains and fusses, he’ll never actually tell Hythlodaeus to stop - he’s always been this way. Azem, for their part, has always luxuriated in how free Hythlodaeus is with his affections; it’s part of why it’d taken them so long to realize what he felt for them. He’s always been soft with them, always been eager to take any opportunity to care for them, and it’d taken Hades reluctantly pointing it out for them to realize it’d been because he’d been drawn to them since they met.

Not…exactly their finest moment.

He reveals that part of why he’s late is that he’d stopped to pick up dinner for them at their favorite little cafe on the way home, one of the rare places still open for business with all the tumult that’s been happening. They gather around the dining table with its empty chair to eat it, and he makes a- greater effort than usual to pull even Azem’s attention away from Helios’s abandoned spot, warm and bright and relaxed. But as cheerful as he is, there’s a tired tension around his eyes that never quite eases. Maybe it’s because of the announcement, maybe it’s just from the effort of trying to live when so much has been destroyed, Azem doesn’t know, but it worries them a little.

It isn’t until after dinner that Hythlodaeus sighs and sits down in between them on the couch, his face sobering. “There’s something I need to speak with the two of you about,” he says, taking both their hands in his. “The other reason I was home late.”

“Well, don’t keep us in suspense,” Hades says, a little bite to the words despite their outer dryness. When Azem looks at him he’s watching Hythlodaeus with a narrow look that can only be because he thinks he knows what’s going on and doesn’t like it. Coldness settles into the pit of their stomach.

Hythlodaeus sighs again and closes his eyes, and when he opens them a moment later his face is set, though his eyes are soft. “I made a detour to speak with one of the attendants at the Capitol. To put my name down as a volunteer.”

It takes a minute for the meaning to register. A volunteer - a volunteer. For what, for the ritual? It has to be - it can’t be. What else could he mean? But if he volunteers- if he gives himself to Zodiark- that’s returning to the star. No, it’s dying, worse than that, because the souls given to Zodiark don’t return to the Underworld to be born again, and- and it would mean- another empty space at the table, emptiness in their bed at night, no more laughter and warmth and wit and schemes, no more seeing his kind smiles and bright eyes, no more visiting each other during the middle of the work day and distracting each other from irritating paperwork. It would mean Hythlodaeus, who they have loved for so long, being gone. Hythlodaeus, who was the first one to suggest they swear the vow to each other, the vow that was meant to ensure they would live their whole lives together. They had hoped, once upon a time, that by living together and returning to the star together they might be born again together, to find each other in every life they might live.

Hythlodaeus has always been the one who most strongly believed that his life’s purpose was to support them until they fulfilled theirs. And now he wants- now he wants to change that? To walk away? What about them? What about Azem? What will they do without him and Helios?

Hades is saying something about going to the Capitol and having it removed, but Azem can’t really focus on it. “You promised,” they say instead, and despite how quiet their voice is Hades falls silent the moment they speak. The hollowness that’s been their constant companion since Helios died is back, yawning wider than ever now, sucking them down and in, their whole world swaying. “Hythlodaeus. Don’t- don’t leave me.”

It isn’t what they mean to say, but it’s what slips out anyway, small and plaintive, and they have to blink against the tears in their eyes - fruitlessly, the urge is too much to swallow down. “Not you too,” they whisper, and Hythlodaeus’s face falls.

“I’m not leaving you,” he says, wrapping both his arms around them and tugging them into his chest. They bury their face in his robes and let him hold them close where they don’t have to look, at him or at Hades or at themself, and he rocks them gently back and forth and leans his cheek against the top of their head the way he’s done so many times. They want it to soothe them but all it does is hurt. “In joining with Zodiark, I pave the way for our people to move forward, to rebuild - and I will be watching over you all the while, safe in the knowledge that with my sacrifice, your lives are assured to be what you deserve from them.”

“We need you here,” they rasp out, the words muffled by his robes. “Why? Why break the promise now?”

“...there is not a person alive on Etheirys now who hasn’t lost someone,” Hythlodaeus says slowly, running fingers through their thick curls. “Save for my sight, I am ordinary in all other aspects - my skills in combat utterly lacking, my ability to manipulate aether mediocre at best. There are many who could replace me, and I can best serve the star by ensuring none of them need sacrifice themselves - and protect the two of you in so doing.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Hades snaps. “Does this look like the reactions of people who believe you replaceable?” For all the sharpness his voice is cracking.

“Hades…”

“Don’t Hades me. Look at them.”

Hythlodaeus’s shoulder shifts slightly under their face as he moves, maybe to do as Hades says, and Azem sniffs quietly and adjusts to keep their face hidden. It hurts too much just to listen; they think whatever last vestiges of personhood exist in them would shatter entirely if they had to watch him say all this with a steady face.

He won’t really- go through with this, will he?

They think they know the answer already. He has always seen himself as lesser than them, and he loves the star just as much as they do. He has faith in the Fourteen and the path they’re trying to chart here amidst calamity. Why wouldn’t he volunteer? But- but surely he’ll realize they need him. In many ways he’s their guiding star, he and Helios the lights they lived by, and without Helios- what would the two of them be, left alone? Azem doesn’t want to find out. Please.

“Oh, Seleukos,” Hythlodaeus sighs. “Don’t cry. I have to do this.”

“You don’t,” Azem whispers, but they know better than to think he’s listening.

For a while they don’t say anything else. Hades keeps talking, pushing several different logistical reasons Hythlodaeus’s sacrifice would be a bad idea, and for each one Hythlodaeus has a rebuttal, delivered in a tone that’s quiet and steady and entirely resolute. It’s as if he’s already anticipated every argument either of them could have, and as clever and thoughtful as he is - it wouldn’t be a surprise. He must’ve known they’d try to change his mind. Finally, though, with even that store of arguments exhausted, Hades lets out a heavy sigh, and there’s a rustling sound as he tips his weight sideways to lean into Hythlodaeus. Azem turns their face out of the robe just long enough to see him drop his head on Hythlodaeus’s other shoulder, closing his eyes.

“Hythlodaeus.” Hades’s voice is a quiet rasp in his throat. “Please do not ask this of me.” It’s the closest they’ve ever heard him get to begging.

For a long minute, Hythlodaeus doesn’t say anything at all. Then: “I’m sorry. Remember that I have always had the utmost faith in you both and that I love you dearly. You will survive, and the star will be a brighter place for that simple fact.”

“I will not forgive you for this,” Hades says raggedly, and Hythlodaeus exhales heavily, tugging both of them more tightly into his sides.

“I know.”

And Azem feels the last fading connections they had to the life outside their mask slip away.

The ritual works as Elidibus said it would. Overnight, Etheirys bursts into riotous life; color and light return to the flowers, the trees, the grasses, and all the animals and other creations that’ve been so rare to see since the Final Days reached their zenith are once more to be found in their proper places. The ecosystems they have spent so long nurturing are once again stable and can be tended to properly. The ability to grow has been returned to a star rendered barren. New life, new souls, flourish, all across the world.

At least, so the reports say. Azem has not seen the effects beyond what can be found in Amaurot proper. That would require leaving the city, and duty or no, they have yet to be capable of taking that step.

Hythlodaeus is gone now. The morning of the ritual, he’d kissed them both goodbye, tender and warm, and reminded them both of his love and faith, and promised that even as part of Zodiark he would always be watching for the color of their souls. My favorite colors in all of creation, he’s always had a habit of saying, and describing what he sees in flowery enough terms to make Hades roll his eyes. Even though Azem has always been the only one of them unable to see the color of souls, that’d never stopped him from speaking - or the others from listening.

Now he will never describe their soul again.

Azem had taken part in the ritual this time, standing next to Hades and not speaking but offering their aether anyway, tears dripping silently down their cheeks the entire time. (Tears that, thankfully, none of the rest of the Fourteen mentioned. Even Lahabrea had looked surprised and somewhat askance at the news Hythlodaeus volunteered.) They’d felt the need to do it - to have at least some semblance of performing their duties - dragged along by the restless hooks in their chest that’ve been present since Zodiark was first summoned; it’d still felt like walking over every line they’ve ever drawn for themself, like turning their back on every moral they have. With their own hands they sacrificed their people to a god, and they and the rest of the Convocation deemed it right.

It isn’t right. It can’t be right. It has to be right. Saving the star is their duty. Zodiark…

They dislike being in Zodiark’s presence. He makes it even harder for them to think than it already is.

In the days following the second sacrifice, Azem no longer hides in their apartment. They can’t bear to be within its familiar walls, to see the empty spaces, the untouched items belonging to two of their favorite people - the coffee mugs left unused, the chairs tucked neatly under the table, the half-finished books and small stacks of concept crystals and other research materials. The clothes and pictures and other small knickknacks left to gather dust in their bedrooms. Just as Hades has not touched a single thing of Helios’s, not even in their shared bedroom, Azem cannot bring themself to do more than stare at Hythlodaeus’s belongings, as if by leaving them exactly where they were left he might come home again. As if the things might lure his soul back to them the way they weren’t enough to do.

Instead, they trail Hades through Amaurot, like a familiar or maybe a ghost. They help him with his duties, when he needs the aid, and spend much of the rest of their time either standing silently in the background while he speaks to people or assisting in the rebuilding efforts across the city. The Convocation has put aside meetings for the moment in favor of ensuring Amaurot and the surrounding areas are made properly livable again, and that the much-reduced number of their people who remain still have access to everything that they need; Azem supposes that in doing this, they are, at least, somewhat fulfilling their duty. Counselor to the people, shepherd to the star. They do not particularly feel like either of those things anymore.

But anything else they were, anything else they could be, died when Helios did. When Hythlodaeus did.

They will need to remember how to speak to the people enough to mediate for them again.

They can’t. The people cry out in the streets, begging for their beautiful, perfect world back - a world untouched by tragedy, by loss, by pain and grief and suffering. They beg Azem and Hades to beseech Zodiark on their behalf, to bring back their loved ones. Amaurot is so, so empty and its survivors cannot handle that fact.

Some of them are children. 

One of those children, a little girl barely old enough for her first mask, with pale gold hair and red eyes, takes to following Azem and Hades around the city, skulking out of sight behind buildings and rubble and trees at first. Her robes are tattered and torn up around the edges and her mask is dirty, and her hair is tangled and only seems to get worse the more they see her. After a couple days of this, Azem starts leaving Hades to do most of the work and sits quietly a ways away from everyone else, trying to draw the girl out the way they would a frightened animal. If- if she’s on her own she’s probably hungry, maybe thirsty, so they create some basic food concepts and a bottle of water with a snap of their fingers and leave them out for her, and slowly she creeps closer until they’re sitting there together, watching Hades rebuild a building.

She doesn’t speak much - doesn’t even give her name, only murmurs that her parents died in the fighting before Zodiark - but Azem doesn’t either, so that works out alright. When they have to get up and move on, she follows them again, and they let her, some dulled part of them warming just a little. Hades pretends not to notice, of course, but they know he does, because when the girl follows them all the way home that night, he simply tells her she might as well come stay with them.

And for a week, she does - trailing around behind them during the day as they do errands, curled up quietly on their couch at night. She doesn’t get much more talkative over time, but one night she says, Mother told me Azem would protect us. Because it’s your duty. So when I saw you, I decided to follow you, because I know she was right. It hurts to hear, because Azem has not protected anyone - they’ve failed Helios, they’ve failed their people, they’ve failed the star, they’ve lost and lost and lost - but maybe…maybe there is something they can yet do.

Hades, for his part, smiles very slightly when he sees them with her, and that makes them want to try.

But then Venat summons Hydaelyn, and the whole city grinds to a halt. The whole star, maybe. A ritual like that, even one far smaller than the scale of Zodiark’s creation, leaves ripples in the aether, and given that Hydaelyn is Light embodied - everything Zodiark isn’t - Azem feels those ripples all-too-keenly. All the Fourteen do, and none of them are quite certain what to do about it; Venat had gathered a fairly-large faction of followers who opposed Zodiark, and she’s been speaking both at the Anyder where they’ve made their headquarters and at various places across Amaurot, but this is- more than any of them had expected from her.

Azem remembers the last time they’d spoken, before the second sacrifice, when Venat had declared her intent to form her own faction. She’d been against Zodiark’s summoning from the beginning. The thought that she would be willing to make the same sacrifices as the Fourteen, to act in the same way she condemned them for, to turn herself into a god…they should be angry at her, probably. Half the Convocation is. They cannot quite make themself be, even though they want to be for her hiding Helios’s death from them, because she is still their mentor, and they remember- they remember the way she’d looked when she’d spoken of the strain of carrying that foreknowledge. If she and her followers truly believe - believed? How many of them were spared the sacrificial ritual? - Hydaelyn is the best path forward, it must mean something, and it likely isn’t anything good.

Hydaelyn and Zodiark clash. The aetheric disturbances their fighting leaves behind are almost painful to feel, the Light a burning ache that leaves them wincing even from a distance, but there is little even they of the Fourteen can do to intervene either way; they do what they can to soothe the people and they make plans, instead. Because the cries for salvation have not stopped. Etheirys is alive again, the skies are blue again, they’ve begun to rebuild the ruins of Amaurot, reconstructing their most beautiful city, but the losses have been so horrific and the emptiness of the star hurts nearly as badly as the destruction itself. The people pray - and how could the Convocation ignore their prayers?

Some distant part of Azem - the same part of them that stood against the first two sacrifices and has been drowning in Darkness and despair - hates it when the Convocation, as a whole, agrees to begin guiding the new growth into abundance, that they might portion pieces of it, including the souls newly-created for their lesser creations, out over time to reclaim the lives given to Zodiark. There’s hypocrisy in it; they called the people to save the star and now they want to use the star to save the people instead of rebuilding with what they have? But Hythlodaeus is one of those people they could get back, and even knowing that he would hate them for twisting his sacrifice, they want him back anyway. And the greater part of them is more and more certain that this, too, is their duty - to save the star, to save the people, to protect them and counsel them, and they can do none of those things if the people are all dead. Lahabrea has already reminded them multiple times that they still have their duty. They cannot forget it.

They cannot abandon their people again, not the way they have been since- since Helios died.

The fighting stalls after some several days and Elidibus returns to the Convocation, pale and drawn beneath his mask. His eyes are dull and distant in the same way he’s been since the creation ritual and he stepped free from Zodiark; Azem can’t help watching the man who used to be their close friend and seeing their own exhaustion mirrored back at them. He informs them that Zodiark remains more powerful than Hydaelyn, but that power alone will not defeat Her, not as long as She commands stasis and peace - that Zodiark will need the fervent prayers of their people to strengthen Him if He is to overcome Hydaelyn’s enervation.

“We must encourage them to see Zodiark as their savior,” Elidibus says. “It is, after all, the truth; He has saved us. He will continue to do so. I will do so.”

They are still in the middle of speaking with him - finalizing their plans, discussing with Elidibus how such a sacrifice might work, what needs Zodiark might have for it - when the Light- ripples. Elidibus’s head snaps back to stare at the sky and he clenches one hand into a fist, face twisting, before a strange serenity drifts over him and he turns back to face the rest of the Fourteen.

“An interesting strategy,” he murmurs. “Hydaelyn has…created a shackle, I believe, to imprison Zodiark’s physical form. She cannot hope to hold Him for long, but I dare not return to Him while He is restrained.”

“You’ve said Hydaelyn is capable of draining Him,” Hades says, and Elidibus nods. “Damn that woman - she could never leave well enough alone.” The words are muttered; Azem doesn’t think anyone else hears them. They only do because he’s right next to them. Louder, he continues, “Our best recourse, then, is to spread word of our plans, that the people know we have heard their pleas. Ask them to empower Zodiark with the promise that He will return their loved ones to them and restore our perfect world.”

The world was not perfect, Azem thinks, though they don’t say it. The world was never perfect; away from Amaurot the people still faced difficulty and the uncaring hand of nature. But compared to what it’s become-

Compared to the half-destroyed Amaurot they see whenever they leave their apartment, compared to the emptiness in their lives where two of the people they love most should be, compared to the awful buzzing in their chest that doesn’t let them sleep and tinges their magic dark, compared to the numbness that invades their every waking moment and makes it almost impossible for them to feel anymore - compared to all of that, how could it not be perfect? And Zodiark can bring that back, can save the star the way He was meant to, can- can fix this. He might not have the power to restore Helios to life, or all the people Azem failed, but at least it would be something. A second chance. And when Helios’s soul reincarnates and they find him again, the world they’ve made will be one he can love just as deeply as he loved the one the Final Days destroyed.

So- yes. They will do their duty, even if it feels wrong, and they will just- have to hope that they never find themself face-to-face with what Venat has become. 

The rest of the Convocation agrees, and after a brief discussion of the logistics inherent in the announcement they adjourn for the day. It’s decided that Lahabrea, Emet-Selch, Azem, and Elidibus will remain in Amaurot, and the other ten will cross the star to the other main cities to answer questions and manage their efforts more directly. Azem knows they should be among those who leave the capital, that they should be traveling to the smaller towns and villages and outposts to spread word and aid the people who remain in the wilds as best as they can, but they cannot quite bring themself to leave Hades, not yet. They don’t think they are capable, yet, of being on their own.

And not to mention there’s still that little girl, following them around, watching them, trusting them to take care of her even if she doesn’t want to speak yet. They can’t just walk away from her.

For three days, nothing changes. During the day, Azem follows Hades as he speaks with people and aids them, and helps him with rebuilding; at night they cling to each other and don’t speak at all and pretend they can sleep. If Azem wakes up in a cold sweat gasping Helios’s name - well. Hades doesn’t say anything, just lets them lay their head on his chest and listen to his heartbeat the way Hythlodaeus would, and they lie to themself that that’s enough. Their mask hides the deepening circles under their eyes.

And then - and then.

They’re standing on a street corner conferring with Elidibus and Lahabrea - or rather, Hades is conferring with them and Azem is only half-paying attention to the conversation, keeping their eye out for their little follower, who they last saw skulking in the shadow of a nearby residential building half-destroyed in the Final Days and yet to be reconstructed. They should try to get her name out of her when she follows them home tonight, Azem thinks absently, and maybe some paperwork to establish their apartment as her current residence. If- if she wants to continue staying with them. Someone will need to have guardianship of her if she’s to be properly taken care of, and she at least seems to allow Azem to help.

The first sign that something is wrong comes from Elidibus. He stops speaking abruptly, turning to stare up at the strange white satellite that’s been visible in the sky off and on since Zodiark was imprisoned. “What is She doing?” he says, voice low - and then his eyes widen behind his mask and he almost sounds like Themis again, younger and far more present, when he says, “No, don’t!”

And the sky fills with Light. There’s a sound, more felt than heard, like shattering glass, like a crystal cracking down the center, and the world warps around them - ripples on water, wind through leaves, sunlight on windows, a reflection that shifts and morphs and grows, the very ground beneath their feet folding in on itself and then stretching apart on a spider’s web of a million invisible fractures. Against the glaring brightness of a magic just as if not more powerful than Zodiark’s creation, a brightness that sears Azem’s very aether, a bitter burn they can feel all the way to their soul, all they can think of is the child, and they sprint in her direction, ignoring the way Hades cries their name.

They barely make it to the building before there’s a grinding sound that seems to come from everywhere at once and the Light turns so bright they can’t do anything but close their eyes and cower away from it, away from the blade that passes by them so close they can feel the wind of its passage against their skin. It isn’t a real blade, it can’t be, but they feel something cleave anyway, and there’s that awful noise like the star itself is tearing apart-

Then all at once, it stops.

The silence in the air is absolute. Azem opens their eyes, slowly, and- and still they stand where they were a moment before, just inside the main entrance of a residential building’s lobby, but there is something inexplicably wrong about it, as if everything around them has somehow…diminished. Become lesser. A drabness, like the haze of grey they’ve lived in since Helios’s death has manifested over the star itself, all color dimmed and the sunlight shading in through a window weak and thin as if it’s falling through a heavy layer of water. And the aether, when they look at the world through that second sight, drifts past in pale streams so faded as to be nearly intangible, like motes of dust in a sunbeam. One spell, were they to cast it by drawing on the star itself the way Helios has always done, might drain those currents entirely dry.

Horror builds in their throat like nausea. This is wrong. This is wrong. Sickly and feeble and empty, a distorted shadow of what should be-

They suck in a shaking breath, turning in a slow circle, and everything is as it was but nothing is as it should be. They- they can barely feel Zodiark’s presence anymore, His power a muffled pulse that echoes across some unimaginable distance, like individual droplets of water where once there had been a raging river. Not long ago they probably would have been glad for the space between them and His overwhelming Darkness, but now they just feel cold.

Footsteps draw their attention and they turn to see- golden hair, red eyes, their little follower, drifting across the floor towards them. Her mask is gone and there is something- different about her, a dullness to her eyes - and in the aether, in the aether she is nothing but a shade, less present than the weakest animal, more a ghost than anything living. She’s not- she’s not a person anymore - the tiny, fragmented soul they can sense would barely elevate her from the classification of ‘arcane entity’. There is no life in the empty gaze she casts briefly over Azem, unrecognizing, before she simply moves on, a spirit borne on the wind.

She looks exactly as Helios had, when he laid there unmoving on the dirt, unseeing and unhearing and gone.

Azem gathers their aether and pulls themself across the aetherial sea to the aetheryte near the Capitol, something desperate clawing its way through them, as if- as if they can prove that this is just an outlier, as if the world will suddenly change - but everywhere they look they see dead faces somehow still walking, empty-eyed husks shuffling through a fragmented reality, all of them walking away as if driven by some echoing impulse. These- these are not Azem’s people, who they love, who they have given their life to shepherding. This is some ghastly mockery, puppets being drawn across an invisible stage, except they recognize the barest traces of aether left behind in many of these bodies. 

They can’t- breathe. The air is too thin, the aether is too thin, the star is too thin-

Hydaelyn did this, they think numbly, and it feels like ice freezing slowly over the surface of their soul, sealing them away within. Not Venat - Venat is gone, has to be, if there was any shred of her left she would never have struck such a blow, would never have broken the star and the people the way Hydaelyn has. These faded and frail reflections of life - why would She do this? Light lingers still in the air, a persistent sharpness that sinks into their bones, and they stare up at the sky, at the satellite that mars its even curve, and wonder if Her blow had missed them so deliberately as some sort of punishment.

Bear witness to what your failures have wrought, they can nearly imagine Her saying, with that hardness in Her eyes that Venat had developed the moment she learned about the future. It feels apt. One last lesson to the wayward student who has ever been the lesser choice for their seat: abandon your duty and it will be taken from you.

Perhaps Etheirys should have burned, if this is to be its fate.

Some indeterminate time passes around them. A breeze stirs up; it blows right through them. They are not here. They are not anywhere, adrift on the ice floes of their soul. The sky darkens, the stars spill across it like pinpricks of fire against an endless expanse of ink, and Zodiark and the souls He is made of remain frustratingly out of reach. They do not need to look to know that Amaurot is empty.

A warm hand on their shoulder brings them back to the ground, eventually. They blink away the static and lower their head, wincing against the crick in their neck, almost afraid to turn - but then they do, and standing next to them is Hades, his mask loose around his neck and his cowl down. His eyes ache with unshed tears, but they are alive - he’s alive. Hydaelyn’s blow missed him too. That simple fact - that they are not alone - makes them want to cry, though they don’t.

“...everything is dead,” Azem says, as hollow as the rustling leaves. “I’ve seen the people. What is left of them, the shades they are. But…” They swallow, gaze drifting away from Hades’s face to the silent street behind him, and whisper, “I do not know if they are the condemned ones.”

Hades makes a soft, choked sound almost like a sob and pulls them closer, wrapping his arms around them, and they let him maneuver them until he can rest his head on their shoulder, his face tucked into the crook of their neck, his tears cool on their skin. For a long moment they just- stand there, eyes caught on a faded lavender leaf swirling in little circles over an embossed sidewalk panel, caught in the grooves in the material, and then they slowly let out a breath and slide one arm around his waist, tilting their head sideways to lean their cheek against his temple.

When Lahabrea and Elidibus find them later - the last four living things in all of Etheirys, spared the blade of Light in what cannot in even the most twisted sense be called a mercy - Azem does not let go.

The Sundering, they call it.

In its aftermath, existence changes. It is Elidibus and Emet-Selch, working together, who discover the means with which they can become Darkness entirely - unkillable souls set adrift from a body, capable of moving from form to form and not only traversing the rift between the reflections but living in it. Their aether has already been irreversibly corrupted by Dark; it is no terribly great sacrifice. The body Azem shapes for themself when the rituals are over looks exactly like the one they were born with, down to the glow in their eyes these myriad shades that now inhabit Etheirys lack - that light is one of the only things that reminds them they yet live.

For- some definition of living, at least. Azem does not particularly feel alive - they have survived the Sundering with their soul untouched, but what of them is left, in the weight of all that grief? They were supposed to see Helios return to them, at some point, new eyes in a new face but the same soul; they were supposed to restore the star and save it. They were supposed to return to their duty. Instead they have lost- not only the people they love most but everything and everyone, because even if Helios reincarnates…with Etheirys as it is now, he would be better off in the Underworld.

They spend a long time drifting, at first, not particularly aware of what’s going on on Etheirys or with the remnants of their people. For a time, the four of them remain in the ruins of Amaurot, fading slowly into obscurity - as if kept away by some spell the shades that now inhabit Etheirys stay far away from the capital and its wealth of information and what little beauty is left in it. They preserve what they can, in the pocket of the rift they have claimed and manipulated into their own space, and the rest becomes memory, left to fade into myth. (The shades of this star remember Hydaelyn, know Her as the star’s will; Zodiark, who saved them, is forgotten. Amaurot is forgotten. All their beauty and history and life is forgotten. It is sickening.)

Eventually, Lahabrea proposes a plan: that they abide by the Convocation’s last formal decision and work towards the restoration of Amaurot as it was by finding a way to rejoin the shards and free Zodiark. If they seek out the shards of their fellow Fourteen’s souls, putting them through the same process they’d all gone through, and use the memory crystals left behind to awaken their memories, they will have a full Convocation, capable of serving Zodiark, doing their duty, and saving the star. Azem- isn’t entirely sure on the serving Zodiark bit, because He is less a god and more the collective hopes and souls and dreams of their people, even fragmented the way He is, and they- they are not meant to serve Darkness but the star and the people, right?

But…if Zodiark is the people, if all that remains of their people is in Him, then serving Him- is their duty, is it not?  The same duty they failed and abandoned so deeply Hydaelyn tried to take it away from them - the same duty that is all they have left, now, with Etheirys in ruins despite everything they gave to save it. They cannot counsel the people if the people are not alive. And if they bring everything back, then Hythlodaeus will come back, then Helios can reincarnate properly, then- then they can restore their life too, and have another chance. Another chance at the vow they all swore, another chance at being alive-

So they have to do this, no matter how hopeless it feels. They have to do this.

It is…difficult, though, to be present enough to actually aid the planning. Much easier to simply sleep (even if their dreams are dark and disturbed), or to stare into the distance and not feel anything at all, letting the days and months and years pass them by without touching them. Time passes, and the rest of the Convocation are brought into the rift. They call themselves Ascians, because ‘Amaurotine’ is too painful when Amaurot is in ruins and its restoration is the long, long goal they’ve set for themselves. Even when ascended as they are, the other ten members of the Fourteen are difficult to look at - faded shadows of themselves, no matter that they possess their own memories and plenty of power from Zodiark and from the rituals they’ve gone through. They are still incapable of creation magicks. They are still only pieces of a soul.

Lahabrea assigns each of them to a shard, at first, with the intent of having them manipulate the worlds into chaos they can take advantage of; there has to be a connection between them, he explains, one they can use to knit the shards back together. Experimentation will lead them to an answer. Azem is the only one not given a shard of their own - instead they’re sent to shadow Emet-Selch and aid him however he needs. They aren’t a fool; they know it’s because Lahabrea believes them too broken to be useful on their own, more of a liability than anything else, but they are still of the Unsundered. They are still one of the most powerful beings to exist in all Etheirys, whether they are- present or not. They don’t argue with him, though, because they would rather be with Emet-Selch than be on their own - if they have to exist properly, he helps. It’s too difficult, otherwise.

They don’t mind following him, even if they aren’t so certain they approve of his methods. The chaos, the scheming, they would have been unconscionable in the Amaurot-that-was, but does it really matter when these Sundered shadows are hardly even people? Azem could revert them back to their base aether with barely a thought. And…and how much do the means matter, when restoring their people is the end? When this is their duty, what little is left of it, and to give that up would be to give up the only thing they have? They will not abandon it, not again, not again. 

Then Igeyorhm destroys the Thirteenth with her overzealous actions, flooding it with Darkness and twisting the souls that remain irrevocably, leaving it a useless, aether-starved void that is best sealed away and left untouched. Lahabrea is displeased, to say the least, but the failure highlights the nature of the connection between the Source and its shards, and it isn’t long after - in their terms, at least, which really means that Azem sleeps for much of the leadup to it and only intervenes when directly asked - that the Fifth is successfully Rejoined. Admittedly, the phenomenon is- damaging. All life on the Fifth itself dies out, and the Source is racked with horrible storms, a cataclysm that shatters much of the empty ruins left behind from the Sundering and destroys what scraps of ‘civilization’ the shades have managed to scrape together, leaving them scrabbling for scraps.

The deaths…should horrify Azem, they think. But it’s hard to care when they remember the beauty of the world lost in the Sundering - these people don’t even know about magic. They don’t know about the flow of aether. They don’t remember Amaurot, or the perfection they’ve lost, or the beauty of Etheirys - they don’t even remember that it is Etheirys, that name just as lost as Amaurot. And the Rejoining works, exactly as it should, strengthening the Source and the souls of those who survive - Azem watches the aftermath with Emet-Selch and finds themself thinking that perhaps this plan of theirs might actually succeed. Maybe…maybe they can restore Etheirys, and through that restoration bring back Amaurot. Maybe there is still a reason to exist in the present, tied to the ground and a body and the rhythm of the star.

They still feel frozen over in every sense of the word. Zodiark’s power is stronger for the Rejoining, but still weak compared to what they remember from before the Sundering, and all their goals suffer for it. The souls within Zodiark are Sundered just as He is, and though His imprisonment makes their work more difficult (especially for Elidibus, who is meant to be His heart), none of them want to free Him - and thus those souls - until their work is nearly complete. The thought of seeing Hythlodaeus like the Sundered shades inhabiting the shards sends the kind of nauseous, broken terror crawling up Azem’s throat they’d almost thought themself incapable of feeling after the Sundering. Seeing his vibrant purple eyes empty and vague…

It’s enough to give them nightmares of a new kind to accompany the ones of Helios’s death.

Lifetimes pass, dragging along with exhausting slowness at some points and passing in the blink of an eye in others. They facilitate another Rejoining, this time using the Twelfth, and it is- easier this time to participate. Easier to ignore the damage the newest calamity causes - damage that destroys the last remnants of Amaurot entirely, sweeping it beneath the sea to crumble in the depths, beyond even their reach - and all the death and horror left in its wake. Azem stays distant from their Sundered brethren, avoids Lahabrea when they can, sleeps when their agenda allows it, follows Emet-Selch around when it doesn’t. Sometimes Emet-Selch tells them to stay away, for reasons he never elaborates on and they never ask, and they stick with Elidibus instead.

There’s… an understanding there, though they don’t speak much of it. Elidibus lives with all the souls in Zodiark clamoring at his senses, slowly eating away at his memories and his sense of self; it’s why he hasn’t been Themis since Zodiark’s birth. He understands, more than Lahabrea, more than any of the Fourteen besides Emet-Selch, Azem’s struggle to exist - and they were friends once, though both Themis and Seleukos were lost in the Final Days. (They still remember, if distantly these days, Themis putting down the mask of the Emissary to complain to them about Helios’s antics - especially his habit of disappearing on their circuits outside Amaurot with them with no warning, leaving him entirely unavailable when Themis needed him. They had been friends, and coworkers, and he’d mourned Helios’s loss too.) Between that and the fact that their duties have ever been slightly at odds with the rest of the Convocation, albeit in different ways, Elidibus is the one person besides their partner that Azem can stand to be around.

Unlike the others, Azem rarely appears to people. They could do it well enough if they had to, they think; once upon a time, after all, they traveled the star and mediated disputes and aided wherever necessary. Pushing these half-people into bringing about the conditions needed for a Rejoining would be a perversion of those skills they developed, but it would be for the same duty, for the same people, to save and rebuild the star, and with as cold as they feel all the time now it wouldn’t be hard to live with that. But- it’s hard enough to exist when around the only people who could still be considered alive, and setting foot on Etheirys, walking among the shades who think themselves real, who have only just begun to rediscover the magic that should have been their lifeblood, it all reminds them of the horror of the Sundering and the grief and loss all over again. The easiest way to handle it is to retreat ever-further into the ice around their soul. And doing that often leaves them struggling to speak at all.

But they are not useless, nor are they little more than Emet-Selch’s hanger-on, no matter what snide comments Igeyorhm makes when she thinks no one else is listening. (This shard of her soul is insufferable, especially after her failure in the Thirteenth, and it isn’t helped by the fact that Lahabrea - one of the few people she has ever listened to - has entirely distracted himself jumping bodies and scheming.) They are still an accomplished mage more than capable of engineering conflict, ensuring that Emet-Selch’s plotting isn’t interfered with, and working their creation magic is almost easier when they’re cold like this - less risk of a passing thought or fleeting emotion twisting the end result. They are still- Azem, in whatever way is left.

(They don’t like to think about the fact that the invocation the Fourteen have begun teaching these broken shades - the concept of summoning their own false gods with aether and crystals and prayer - is a twisted version of the method Helios found to overcome his inability to create. They don’t like to think about the fact that in this shattered world, the summoning of primals is the closest thing to a legacy he could leave. They’re under no illusions; they know that if Helios was still alive and whole, he would likely hate what they’ve done, at the very least for the way the Rejoinings wreak havoc on the star. But by now he has been dead for longer than he was alive, and they still do not know how to live without the other half of their soul, and they’ll face whatever hatred he has for them when they’ve saved Etheirys and their people and he’s able to reincarnate into an unbroken, unblemished world.)

In the wake of the third Rejoining, accomplished after a significant amount of time and effort despite Hydaelyn’s interference (and they will not think of Her as Venat, not anymore, not after what She’s done), as the survivors of the Ardor begin to rebuild, Emet-Selch decides to take a more active role in pushing the realms towards further chaos, declaring himself bored with Lahabrea’s shadowy machinations and Elidibus’s aloofness. In the wake of that decision, he passes himself off as vaguely mortal, returns to Etheirys, and summarily founds the nation of Allag.

It’s impressive, Azem does have to admit, watching quietly from the shadows as this new empire grows. They make advancements in magic and technology almost to rival Amaurot and the days of eld, though much of that is due to Emet-Selch (and Azem, to an extent, when he asks) surreptitiously supplying Allagan mages and scientists with theories from those long-forgotten days when mankind lived in and shaped paradise. The brutal subjugation of other nations and peoples drives conflict which gives them more space to act, and from both the spotlight and the shadows Emet-Selch orchestrates all of it, drawing Allag into the heights of civilization from which they will so easily be able to produce an existential threat.

It’s uncomfortable, still, to watch, even if Azem knows none of these people with their pale aether and paler souls are alive. So they avoid the main population centers of Allag when they can, carrying out their duty and returning to find Emet-Selch when they’ve been alone too long and everything starts to fray.

Sometimes they come to look for him because they miss him. They would never say it aloud, but he is all they have left besides their duty, and though so many lifetimes have already passed them by being away from him too long hurts more than just their ability to exist the way they should. They…they just miss him.

It’s why they’ve returned now, when they likely shouldn’t have, when the city is busy and Syrcus Tower gleams under the light of the sun and there are fewer shadows to hide themself in than they’d really like. They’ve never been particularly stealthy, but command over Darkness gives them some measure of safety in the shadows, and they’ve gotten better at staying out of sight over the long lifetimes since the Sundering. That developed skill lets them sit in the darkness on top of a roof overlooking a square, watching quietly as the midday crowd bustles through the market stalls and swirls around the other businesses lining the open area.

Emet-Selch will likely find them soon - and probably scold them for being so far into the city instead of simply sending him a message or waiting in the private rooms he keeps for his public face - and until then they will wait and watch these fragmented beings and pretend it doesn’t hurt a little to see them this way.

They used to travel among cities like this. For a moment, as Azem watches, their vision shifts and unfocuses, and they see black robes and masked faces, bright and warm and welcoming. In the smaller towns and research outposts it’d always been a cause for celebration when they arrived, everyone from the children to the adults greeting them by title in the streets and so eager to share hospitality with them, an attitude found somewhat less in the bigger cities - but that never meant the cities were unwelcoming or unappreciative. Welcome back, Azem, the people would say, and some would ask if they’d designed any new concepts recently; there were always researchers who followed their work with flying creations eager to discuss it with them in person. As much as they loved their home, loved being home with their family, their travels and the work they did were their life’s purpose. What was more fulfilling than that?

Now…now there is only the duty, none of the fulfillment, none of the warmth, but they still remember. 

A loud shout from down below shatters the illusion and Azem blinks away the distant memory of their people - the people they must restore - and peers down at the square with vague interest. A few members of the city’s guard are moving in on a young- man, it looks like, not Allagan from his attire; he must not be an equal citizen. They’re too far away to hear exactly what he’s saying, or what the nearby shopkeeper is accusing him of, but the threatening gestures the guard are making at him are unmistakable, as is the defiant set to his shoulders. Azem frowns, leaning forward, and watches as one of the soldiers cuffs him across the face, sending him stumbling back and turning in their direction-

The breath leaves their lungs in a gasp that feels like it’s been torn from them with all the force of a boot to the stomach. Because- that face. A face they know despite how poorly they remember it. White hair tumbles down to frame silver eyes wide with pain and for a moment- for a moment all they can see is blood spilling out onto white robes, crimson streaking a grey face, eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky. Something jagged and cold stabs through their chest, chokes up their throat, and they can’t breathe, can’t move, gaze locked on the man as he’s shoved to the ground and roughly beaten for- they don’t even know. They’re too far away to tell. They remember the sound of his last breath leaving his body, they remember the sound of him hitting the ground, they remember - and they can hear it, see it all over again, like a painting they can’t turn away from, as the soldiers take their time punishing the man for whatever it is he’s been accused of. It hurts. It hurts. His face looks the same, pale and pained, his too-dull eyes wide-

“Helios,” they whisper on a rasping exhale, so faint they can barely hear their own voice, and reach out a trembling hand - but he’s dragged away anyway, limp and bloody, out of their sight.

They still can’t move.

Sometime later, a flare of Darkness behind them alerts them to Emet-Selch’s arrival. They haven’t quite been able to pull their gaze away from the spot Helios - not-Helios - the man had been, even as the crowds pace past it over and over again before slowly dispersing with the afternoon, even as the shadows shift and their perch becomes less safe to hide in. They should move - they can’t make themself, icy horror freezing them through.

Emet-Selch’s steps are near-soundless as he crosses the roof and drops down to sit next to them, letting out a tired sigh. “You should not be here, Azem,” he says, and despite the irritation on the surface of the words they can hear the concern beneath.

“I saw him,” they say tonelessly, instead of responding like they should, and he sucks in a breath. Out of the corner of their eye they can see him turning to look at them, brow creasing. Once upon a time they’d teased him for the lines in his forehead.

They don’t know how, anymore.

“You know that’s impossible,” says Emet-Selch quietly, resting a hand on their arm. “These people are not truly alive, their fragmented souls little better than the beasts they lord themselves over. This empire, these heights they believe they have climbed to, are but a fraction of the world we must restore. Even if you did see him - it was not Helios.”

Azem lets out a long, shaky sigh and tilts sideways to lay their head on his shoulder, careful of the sharp pauldrons on his robes. They know - they know. Helios cannot come back to them until the star has been restored and rebuilt, even if his soul were to reincarnate now he would have no idea who they are and the person he would be would be- not a person at all. And yet-

“It was his face,” they whisper. Emet-Selch slips an arm around their shoulders and they burrow into the touch, a shiver running through them that won’t quite stop now that it’s started. “I saw- they were beating him and-”

He hushes them gently and they swallow down the near-hysteria, trying to summon the easy detachment they spend so much of their days living in, but the memory of Helios’s face stained with his own blood won’t leave them be, and- and it looked like him. What if-

“Azem,” Emet-Selch says, in the soft tone he used to say their name in during the rare moments he was being openly fond, back when they still had a name and were more than their mask and their duty. “Come back to me.”

They have not- gone away the way they usually have when he says that, but the familiar phrase is a comfort anyway, soothing a little of the rushing static in their skull, and they let out a shuddering breath and scoot closer to him, sliding their arm around his waist and holding on. “I know,” they say, the words hoarse, and he hums an acknowledgement. “...if it was him, or a shard of him, could we not- explain it all to him and raise him up the way we have others?”

It’s a foolish, futile question, and they know that even as they say it. Emet-Selch does them the dignity of not pointing that out, just asking, “Do you truly believe he would listen?” without censure or sharpness - as though, could they answer with a yes, he would agree. Maybe he would. He misses his lover just as much as they miss their best friend.

But- they can’t. “No,” they murmur, because- Helios loved Etheirys, just as much if not more than they did - not just the people but the star itself. The plants, the animals, the lesser creations, all its boundless life; he grieved what the Final Days did to the ecosystems just as much as what it did to their people. He would never understand or accept the calamities the Rejoining causes, both in the shards and the Source, even if he did understand that the not-people who die in them aren’t really living. If they can barely accept it, as exhausted as they are, with their duty as heavy as it is…

Helios was not there when Zodiark was summoned. His soul is not bound to Zodiark’s the way all of theirs are. They know, in their heart of hearts, that he would look at everything they’ve done in Zodiark’s name, in Amaurot’s name, and weep.

So they will just- have to not tell him. When Amaurot is restored and the world made whole, there will be no need to record these long broken years - that’s why Azem has not added to their memory crystal since the Sundering. When they’ve saved Etheirys, properly this time, and Helios comes back to them, there will be no need for him to know the star was ever anything but perfect.

“I do believe I’ve found another shard of Fandaniel’s soul,” Emet-Selch says, after a few moments of silence, conversationally, and though they’re too tired to do anything more than listen, they nod once. “A promising young scientist. I will need to continue observing him, of course, but with the previous shard’s rather untimely dispersion…”

“Elidibus will be pleased,” Azem says quietly, closing their eyes. Pleased is the wrong term for it, of course - they aren’t so sure there’s enough of Elidibus left to have that kind of emotion anymore. But the loss of one of the Convocation is always an irritant, and there are only so many shards of their souls to replace them with, and it can be difficult to track them down. “What do you want me to do?”

“Stay with me tonight.” The response is immediate, unhesitating. “I will not send you back out in this state. We can discuss the matter with Elidibus - and Lahabrea, should the man deign to be of use for once - tomorrow. There is hardly any need to rush.”

That much is inarguably true. Given the rituals they’ve gone through, their ties to Zodiark, even the Sundered among their number are in no danger of succumbing to time’s ravages, and patience will serve their agenda far better than rushing and disrupting a delicate situation. And…they don’t want to be alone, not when they know sleeping will only bring back the nightmares they can’t escape, not when they’d come to find Emet-Selch out of a desire to be near him to begin with.

“Alright,” they agree softly - and soon they will need to get up, to move, to step out of the light where they might be seen, but for now they can remain held in Emet-Selch’s embrace and let their awareness of the broken star fade away, until all that remains is his touch to tether their soul to reality.

If they float far enough away, even the grief doesn’t hurt anymore.

In the aftermath of the fourth Rejoining, the Allagan Empire crumbles into dust, its magic and technology fading from common knowledge. Emet-Selch retires from his theater for a time to sleep away the centuries (or the millennia, as is more likely) until the next shard is prepared, and the new shard of Fandaniel takes to his ascension with no small amount of bitterness.

Azem wants to sleep too. Wants to forget, to stop, to disappear into ice. But for the first time in- how many thousands of years now, they can feel more than a whisper from Zodiark’s bound form, and some instinct compels them to return to His side, to see His prison with their own eyes. Elidibus has held court on the moon before, they know, and visits it often, but they have never followed him there; they can’t quite explain why. It should have been a comforting thought to be as close to the hum of all those souls, the last remnants of their people.

They used to dislike Zodiark’s power. The thought comes to them distantly, as though on the currents of the wind, and they turn it over and over in their mind for a few moments, curiously. Why had they disliked it? They don’t remember.

…because of the sacrifices?

Maybe.

It’s easy enough to step through the darkness and the rift and emerge on the moon’s cold white surface, their aether swirling around them. Less easy is standing there and not flinching away from the harsh Light the satellite was created entirely with, but they force themself to breathe through the discomfort and get their bearings, and after a moment it settles to a background hum of discomfort.

They will have to be careful, here. Careful not to be pulled into the magic Hydaelyn has shackled Zodiark with, careful not to alert Her servants to their presence; they are here to observe, not to fight. Freeing Zodiark now would only condemn Him to a Sundered existence, and they will not be responsible for inflicting that suffering on their people. They are not Her.

So instead of teleporting again, they walk, footsteps soft but the dry ground crunching beneath their boots, their long robes swaying in a barely-felt wind. They walk in the direction they can feel Zodiark’s power emanating from, the direction that pulls them along like a magnet, until they crest a tall hill and see, spread out before them, a wide valley scored with deep trenches, a massive pit in the center of it - and in that pit Zodiark’s physical form flickers like a hologram, outlined in vague crimson. Giant blades mark the points of power on a sprawling magical seal thrumming with a power that rattles Azem’s teeth in their mouth and sends shivers down their spine, inscribed into the ground in pale blue and faintly glowing with Light, and they take a cautious step back, wincing at the strength of it. The physical manifestation of Hydaelyn’s stasis magic here hurts to look at for how similar it is to Venat’s.

For a moment they do nothing but watch. In the distance, a tower overlooks the shackle, and Hydaelyn’s observer will likely be watching from that perch; to get much closer to it would be to invite confrontation. They close their eyes instead and focus on the feel of all that magic, Zodiark’s and Hydaelyn’s both - the former bolsters them, the latter is enough to almost drive them away. But they want- they want to feel it. Something. Their duty, their charge, the only thing that matters anymore-

There’s a faint ripple in the aether, a whisper of a breeze, and a terrifyingly-familiar voice murmurs, “...am I dreaming, seeing you here like this, Seleukos?”

The sound of their name - the name they have hardly heard in lifetimes, the name they’d all-but left behind in the aftermath of the Sundering - pierces through them with just as much if not more sharpness than the Light itself, and they stiffen, breath catching in their throat. They don’t dare to move, don’t dare to open their eyes, caught in place as surely as if they themself have been shackled by Hydaelyn’s spell. This- this has to be a trap, a lure to draw them in, because he- he’s gone, he went to Zodiark, there’s no restoring him until they restore the star itself-

They open their eyes anyway.

A shade flickers in and out of view in front of them, drifting black robes, the suggestion of an ivory mask and a pale purple braid. The clearest thing about it is its eyes, vivid amethyst and staring at them with some soft mix of sorrow and pain and confusion. It can’t be real. They refuse to search the aether to look.

“Ah,” they say instead, quietly, the familiar old ice creeping over them as the shock starts to fade, the dullness of it slipping into their voice. They cannot- this cannot be real. He cannot be. They don’t want him to see. He’s gone, he left them and broke his vow for some abstract sense of a duty he has never had to carry. “I’ve lost touch with reality again. How reassuring.”

There’s almost a clarity to the way the world looks, when they retreat from it. Everything is hazy, but in stepping away from themself they can see their own actions with an awareness they wouldn’t usually have, an awareness detached from the endless swelling ache in their chest that never goes away. Emet-Selch doesn’t speak to them, when he recognizes the distance in their eyes, not unless he’s worried they’ve gone too far to come back; instead he likes to sit with them, if he can, a quiet presence to tether them to something, a line they can grasp onto when they need to be real again. (It’s different if they’ve gone away so much they no longer quite remember when they are, past and present mixing together. But they don’t like to think about those times.)

“Oh, love,” Hythlodaeus says too-softly, the grief in his eyes more pronounced, and they wonder absently what he sees with his ever-sharp gaze. Not that- this is real, not that he’s really seeing anything, not that he’s there - but of course any image of him they would conjure would have his sight. “What has been done to you?”

They swallow hard and look away from his face - maybe his features are so vague because their memories are too, time and exhaustion marring the lines of his face in their memory until he and Helios are nothing but purple and black, silver and white, seen and heard clearly only in dreams and the crystal they have not been able to bring themself to use in a very long time. How exactly did their laughter sound? How did Hythlodaeus’s face change when he smiled? They only remember that it was warm and bright and loving and that it filled them brim-full with a joy that was stripped from the star with its Sundering.

“I came to see Him,” they say instead of answering, gaze landing on Zodiark’s prison again, tracing the barrier of Light and blades that spins eternally through the air around Him. “I don’t quite know why. Duty, perhaps…I should have told Emet-Selch. He’ll worry.”

If they’re imagining Hythlodaeus, he would be right to worry, they know. Their clarity might fade, and this close to Hydaelyn’s magic, they cannot afford to be anything less than fully aware. They are of the Unsundered. Sane or not, their loss would be a great setback to the Convocation’s plans, to the Ascians’ plans, and they are unsure how Emet-Selch would take it.

They ought to leave now, before this spirals further. They can’t quite make themself.

For a moment Hythlodaeus is quiet, and they begin to wonder if he’s proven his non-existence by disappearing, but then they hear his voice again. “I will have faith that you will heal from this,” he breathes out, and it sounds almost like he’s trying to convince himself of something. “I must. You must.”

“Heal,” Azem echoes, slowly lifting their gloved hands to look down at them. All other details have faded over time, but they still remember what their skin looked like when it was covered in Helios’s blood. What healing could there be from that loss? From Amaurot’s loss? They can only hope they will still recognize their best friend when he finally returns to them. “...I don’t know. But we will fix what She did to the star, Hythlodaeus, no matter how many thousands of years it takes. Four shards Rejoined, nine left - and then…then we will free Zodiark and restore Amaurot. I will- I will not abandon them again.” They let out a shaky breath, close their eyes again, and - and he isn’t real, so they can whisper this into the wind: “And maybe I’ll get to see you again.”

They hope they will recognize Helios, when Etheirys is whole and he can come back. They hope Hythlodaeus will recognize them, when they bring him back to life.

Something, a twist of the wind maybe, a gentle breeze, brushes over their bare cheek and vanishes again, leaving behind a trace of aether too faint to identify. Hydaelyn’s Watcher, perhaps, sensing their presence and marking them, or just the currents from the distant prison - there’s something almost familiar about it. Perhaps it came from Zodiark; perhaps He senses one of His servants.

“I know you’ll find the best way, dearest Azem,” Hythlodaeus says, his voice warm and heavy with his sincerity, the same as it always was, because he has always, always- “I have faith.”

He has always had faith.

“Faith didn’t save us,” they whisper, but there’s no response, no sound besides their own breath and their own stolen heartbeat, a silence that weighs down on them with all the heaviness of absence. “...Hythlodaeus?”

They open their eyes to the craggy, pocked surface of the moon, the distant thrum of Hydaelyn’s magic, Zodiark’s chained form, and emptiness. The barely-there shade they’d seen before is gone, not a wisp of essence remaining for them to trace if it was ever even there, and despite the way they’ve withdrawn some cold horror grips their chest. He wasn’t real, they remind themself, he wasn’t real, Emet-Selch would say the same, he wasn’t real-

“Come back,” they say anyway, plaintive and small, and wrap their arms around themself, huddling into their robes. They should never have left the rift, should never have come here. “Please,” they whisper. “You promised.”

Hythlodaeus doesn’t answer, because he was never there to begin with.

For too long they just- stand there in the emptiness, shuddering and trying not to crumple, hands gripping their sleeves as though they could hold themself together - as if they’ve ever been capable of that. The ice is cracking, cracking, and it hurts-

They want to go home. 

(Home does not exist. Home is dead and gone and buried beneath the rock and the ocean. Home is an Unsundered star and the people they love unburdened by loss and a sky on fire. Home is Helios’s laughter, and Hythlodaeus’s arms around them, and Hades scoffing and rolling his eyes like it could hide his smile. Home is warmth and love and a brilliance that does not hurt when it shines over them.

Home is untouchable, only in their memories, that faded perfection they cannot return to. They do not know if it will fit them anymore, when they finally bring it back.)

Emet-Selch is waiting, when they finally muster the focus to return to the rift - pacing a line back and forth across the floor in a small room off the main hall they built to sleep in. He doesn’t speak when he sees them, just reaches out and gathers them into his arms, tucking them against his chest, and they let out a shuddering breath and press their face into the side of his neck, reaching up to tug their mask down so they can nose closer and feel his skin against their own.

They don’t tell him what upset them. He doesn’t ask.

It’s better that way.

They sleep through most of the preparations and execution of the fifth Rejoining. They don’t entirely mean to, but there’s little use for Emet-Selch’s empire-building and they are so, so tired and missing home and no one comes to wake them until the last hundred or so years, when everything is at the most delicate stages and Hydaelyn’s interference is at its peak. Lahabrea is frustrated and angry, accusing them of not caring and not being committed to Zodiark’s empowerment and the true world’s restoration, and while for the most part they’re too tired to care about his attitude, it does sting somewhat. They’ve never quite gotten along with Lahabrea, not since they were raised to their seat, but before the world was broken, before they were broken, he used to respect them the way they respected him, even though they spent most of their time disagreeing. Now-

Now his soul has been fraying since he first began his habit of changing bodies whenever it suited him, and what respect Azem once held for him has faded over the millennia, eclipsed by some kind of derision for what he’s become.

Well. They’ve all become something else in these long, long years, this endless hell of their lives, but at least Azem still has their duty. The people they have to save so they can counsel them again. The world they have to bring back so they can shepherd it. So that Helios can reincarnate properly. So that they can see Hythlodaeus again. That duty means something to them, it’s all they have left, all they are anymore, this shell of Darkness behind a mask, broken and grieving and empty, and so no matter what else they’ve become, what they’ve done in Zodiark’s name that they never would have before, what the isolation and the abyss have made them - that at least still ties them to the person they were before the Sundering.

Lahabrea hardly even has that. And that makes it worse, almost, that he’s one of the only Unsundered left, one of the only ones truly alive, whose memories are whole and real and unbroken unlike the shards they elevate. He was once the man who oversaw the ritual to create Zodiark; now he schemes and changes faces and his soul is unraveling beneath the strain of it but he doesn’t seem to care.

Elidibus had looked up to him once. It is…probably a good thing, in this case, that he no longer remembers that.

But at Elidibus’s request, to keep some semblance of cooperation between them, they agree not to sleep for so long again. They help survey the remaining shards, looking to see which ones have a climate suited for a push towards Rejoining; eventually they settle on the Tenth. The pale reflections that inhabit the shards are so weak as to be utterly unimportant, faded fragments more akin to projections or poorly-formed creations than the real thing; they’re so far from the people Azem has sworn to protect (the people they abandoned, and will not do so again) it doesn’t particularly bother them to use them like this, especially when it means Zodiark will be strengthened and the souls within Him brought closer to the way they should be.

The Source, though…

They are still- shades. Echoes of what they should be, what they could be, what they were. But there’s more weight to them now, their souls denser, brighter, their aether stronger, and it makes them harder to look at. There is less wrong with them to the naked eye, less to so-obviously set them apart from the people Azem once walked among, and it is…it pulls at them, sometimes, tangles their thoughts into spirals. Zodiark’s influence, likely, to keep them focused on their true goal.

As Ascians, they’ve been encouraging and directly facilitating the summoning of primals to destabilize the Source and the shards and to create further chaos for thousands of years, since the people in the Source first relearned to influence aether. The phenomenon of tempering had been an unexpected consequence of the first few summonings, one it’d taken them some time to realize would happen consistently - once they’d determined the mechanisms of it it’d been confirmed to be something they could use to their advantage, to further sow the seeds of calamity.

But beyond that, discovering tempering had answered other long-lingering questions as well. The wave of Darkness at Zodiark’s summoning, their corrupted aether, both are signs that He likely did something similar to them, though given the differences in His purpose and creation and the weak primals the current peoples of Etheirys summon it must be different. They have no desire to evangelize, and their will seems to be their own, isn’t it? Well…they’d disliked His power once, they remember distantly. So perhaps their will is not their own after all, where He is concerned. But that’s a line they cannot find when the only thing that fuels them anymore is the same duty Zodiark was made for.

Still, there is something…vaguely uncomfortable about the concept of being tempered. Even if it has little tangible effect on them besides how completely their aetheric balance is skewed. Though they suppose it shouldn’t bother them at all - they can do their duty better if Zodiark is the one pushing them to. There’s no risk of them abandoning it the way they did before and it being taken away again. No more faltering.

(When all is said and done, when they finally achieve their goal and bring Amaurot back, what will become of them then? Creature of Darkness, failed member of the Fourteen, bound inextricably to Zodiark’s will and power, with thousands of years of emptiness in their soul - will their people, their star, still want them? Will the family they are trying to bring back recognize them as the person who died during the Final Days or see them as the shadow they are? 

…when they see Helios and Hythlodaeus again, will Azem even be able to look at them?)

(They have thought of themself as one of the last four living things in existence for a very long time. But the longer they spend in the abyss, the longer their life drags on, the more some small part of them wonders if they are truly alive at all. Seleukos isn’t; Azem is. Are they?)

On the Source, they’ve refined magic into an art, though they’ve lost a great deal of what they were capable of when the Allagan Empire existed - the side effect of such civilizations being destroyed. It could almost be impressive if Azem didn’t know so intimately just what heights they were once capable of. Instead, it just aches to watch these mages develop their skills - not in the least because the ones who call themselves white mages, who tap into the Light and other umbrally-aligned elements and have delved into the healing arts, use their magic in a way so similar to Helios he’s all Azem can think of when seeing them. His magic had been unique among the world as it was - they remember that still, remember watching him cast, the way he took spells learned from Venat and twisted them to fit his own abilities. It follows, of course, that these half-souls would stumble upon the same methods Helios had used to overcome his own lack of aether, adjusted for their even thinner existence - but that does not make it any easier to see.

(Some part of Azem is almost tempted to give them advice, pulled from their memory of how Helios fought. They doubt Elidibus would appreciate it even if they were inclined to have to speak to others, but it would be amusing, they think.)

Their counterparts are capable of impressive destruction by harnessing the forces of fire, ice, and lightning, reminiscent of Azem’s own magic long ago, before they became a creature of Darkness and the elements still came easily to their hands. Manipulating them and those mages binding the corrupted denizens of the Thirteenth into a war, once all involved believe themselves at the height of their powers, proves surprisingly easy, and then there’s little left to do but watch them destroy themselves and siphon the aether from the land around them as they do. With the element of water brought to ascendence in the Tenth, the sixth Rejoining is poised to play out perfectly.

Back in the rift, they meet to discuss the Rejoining and the war and the state of the Source, their next moves forward, the future. Hydaelyn has weakened over the millennia, but Her interference remains an annoyance even at its weakest - though She has not yet managed to completely halt a Rejoining, She has successfully delayed them. And the eleven millennia they have lived since the Sundering are far more than they expected restoration to take (it has been so long, so long, and if they think too much about that they think they might go mad, or break down in tears, or lose hold of themself entirely). All of them have begun to fray apart, even if none as badly as Lahabrea and Elidibus, and some part of Azem wonders if they can even truly survive long enough to finish their duty. The Sundered shards don’t matter, they can be replaced, but the four Unsundered? They have to hold on, they have to see this through - there is no one else. They must reduce Hydaelyn’s pull, Her ability to slow the Rejoinings so much, or they risk Her succeeding simply by outlasting them.

They had known Hydaelyn would oppose them, but that She could, even at Her lowest point, turn this into such a war of attrition…

They will need to work harder. As Elidibus said, no more sleeping away the centuries.

After their meeting concludes, most of the rest of the Fourteen take their leave to return to their various duties. Azem remains behind, waiting for Emet-Selch to finish a quiet conversation with Elidibus - one neither of them is particularly pleased by judging by the expressions visible beneath their masks - and Lahabrea does as well, drifting closer to where Azem stands.

“One could almost find it impressive how easily they orchestrate their own oblivion,” he remarks, and Azem gives him a brief look before turning back to watch Emet-Selch. “Don’t you agree?”

Azem shakes their head slightly, even though in some ways it is - they don’t particularly want to give Lahabrea the satisfaction of agreeing with him. Though at the very least they have to agree it’s a sign of how far these people have fallen from their Unsundered selves, how easily they allow themselves to be manipulated. How easily they fall into war. (They have to hold onto that. Have to remember it. If they don’t-)

“We ought to consider ourselves fortunate Helios was the only mage of his kind,” Lahabrea continues. “Imagine if this devastation had happened to the true world. Yet another example of how these shades are unfit to exist - their aether is so thin they cannot help but consume the star to fuel their vanity.”

Azem stiffens, turning to face him, something flaring sharp enough to crack their frozen heart open again and drag forth a proper response. “Don’t bring him into this,” they hiss through gritted teeth, and he tilts his head to one side, regarding them coolly. “The thinness of Helios’s aether had nothing to do with anything, and you know he had more respect for the star than all of the Fourteen put together.”

“The thinness of his aether certainly contributed to his untimely return to the star,” he returns, all calm logic, but there’s a sharpness to his voice, an undertone of cutting cruelty, and for a moment all they can think of is the blood on their hands, the utter horror of Helios’s last breaths. That crack in their chest widens into a gaping pit of loss and anger, sudden and blinding, a lightning strike against the apathy of their grief, and they snarl soundlessly.

Before they can think too deeply about it, certainly before Lahabrea has a chance to react, they flick their wrist and knock him back across the recreated Convocation chamber with a burst of aether that has his eyes widening behind his mask. “How dare you,” they say too-loudly, voice shaking with the force of the horror-fury-nausea tumbling through them on a roiling wave of turmoil. Lahabrea grimaces slightly as he rights himself, but there’s something that looks almost like triumph in the curl of his mouth and- and they want to wipe that look off his face. They can’t do anything to hurt the force responsible for Helios’s death, can’t hurt the people responsible for Hythlodaeus’s (not when the person responsible is themself), can’t face Hydaelyn Herself to demand justice for the Sundering, but Lahabrea is here in front of them and he was the one who told them, once, to remember their duty, this duty of theirs that has dragged them on and on through a life they cannot stand for eleven thousand years-

They clench their fist and the Darkness coalesces around them, something they can turn into a weapon to make him bleed, and then- and then Emet-Selch is grabbing their wrist in an iron grip and stepping in front of them. “Azem,” he says sharply, though they know him well enough to know it is more concern than anger. They don’t particularly care.

“So you do yet remember your spine,” Lahabrea drawls, rolling his shoulders back and taking a few steps back towards them, and Azem hisses and shoves against the arm Emet-Selch has across their chest. “Were you to turn that conviction of yours to our cause it might proceed more quickly.”

“Enough,” Elidibus says coolly, stepping in between them before Azem can reach for more aether or break free from Emet-Selch’s hold. “It is not your responsibility to discipline them, Lahabrea.”

Azem grits their teeth and pushes against Emet-Selch’s arm again, but he doesn’t let go, just steps fully in front of them and slides one hand to their shoulder. “Let me go,” they say, voice cracking. “He insulted Helios.”

Something ugly and angry flashes across Emet-Selch’s face, but he doesn’t let go. “You are both better than this,” he says instead, and Azem clenches their jaw but can’t argue. They do know better than to turn their magic on one of their own, especially on Lahabrea - one of the only ones left - but- well. But nothing. “Have you both forgotten that we are meant to be a government entity?”

Lahabrea scoffs, but it’s Elidibus who responds, as steady as ever. “Emet-Selch. It is not your responsibility either.”

Emet-Selch opens his mouth like he wants to say something, then shakes his head, instead tightening his hand on Azem’s shoulder. “As the Emissary says,” he murmurs. “Come, Azem. Leave him be.”

They don’t want to. He doesn’t give them a choice, pushing forward until they are forced to move with him or fall, and after a couple awkward steps they give in and let him turn them around, wrap an arm around their shoulders and guide them out of the chamber. In the background they can hear Lahabrea speaking to Elidibus, making some justification for his comments most likely, and fury simmers through their blood along with the pain, but the energy it gave them is already beginning to fade and they have no desire to be disciplined.

It’s easier to let the anger die too, to let Emet-Selch lead them away into the further areas of their fortress, to let everything go quiet and cold again. Lahabrea’s words ring in their ears: the thinness of his aether certainly contributed to his untimely return to the star. Over and over again they hear it, and- and.

And too much of their past is a grey haze now, but there are moments that stand out clearly - the first time they met Hades and Hythlodaeus, becoming Azem, the promise the four of them swore, the Sundering…and Helios’s death. His blood on their hands, his white robe torn and stained, his last breaths rattling in his lungs, the way they utterly failed to protect him - some things are just seared onto their soul no matter how many lifetimes it’s been, and how can they forget? How can they not live in that moment, the sky raining fire down around them, the horror and the exhaustion of it that has clung like fog to them since it happened?

Azem wraps their arms around themself and retreats away from the world, trusting Emet-Selch to guide them away as they’ve always done, and lets the empty hollowness yawning within them swallow them whole. They will not forget the failure that led them here.

After all, how can they forget that which killed them?

(Azem sleeps, and they dream:

It’s late summer. The trees are heavy with violet leaves, the grass bright, faded wildflowers dotting the park at the end of the street, a riot of color and life. They have a blanket laid out across the grass to sit on, but Helios has sprawled out in the grass itself instead, on his back with his arms and legs thrown out. His white robe is going to end up stained from this, Azem thinks, and they’ll probably be the one to clean it, because he’s only just recovered from his most recent illness and the last thing any of them need is for him to overuse his aether again and end up back in bed. Not least of all because Azem has to leave Amaurot again soon and poor Hythlodaeus deserves better than having to deal with the absolute terror that is Helios confined to his bedroom.

Hades can handle it just fine. He deserves it for dating the man to begin with.

They’d brought their dinner outside with them in a hastily-created basket spelled to keep the food warm - it’s a little early for an evening meal, the sun still high in the sky, but the Convocation’s duties had let both Azem and Hades go early for once and Hythlodaeus had immediately arranged to pass his own work onto someone else so he could meet them. With Helios finally feeling well enough to leave their apartment again, the choice of a picnic had seemed obvious, even if the park was sure to be populated by some of the other families in this particular residential area.

A few children run around chasing each other through the grass and up onto the ledges of a play structure nearby, their shrieking laughter carrying on the breeze. Some adults, probably their parents, have clustered around a bench near to where their picnic blanket is spread, talking amongst themselves - but every now and again someone will glance over at the four of them, and Azem doesn’t need to be able to see their faces or hear their conversation to know why. It’s not just the presence of two red-masked members of the Fourteen or Helios’s white robes that mark him as the rare impartial advisor to the Convocation.

It’s- well.

“Do you have even a single shred of decency?” Hades asks, sighing heavily, and Azem has to bite back a laugh. “This is not our apartment, you two, and we are being watched.”

“Are we not always being watched?” Azem returns, and behind them Hythlodaeus laughs softly. “You and I are of the Fourteen, oh great and honorable Emet-Selch, every single step we take in Amaurot is scrutinized.”

He does, to be fair to him, have a point. Azem is still wearing their mask, of course they are, they aren’t that scandalous, but they’ve pushed their cowl down to let Hythlodaeus weave flowers into their hair, wide gold-petaled things he’d meticulously gathered earlier - they’d asked him why these particular flowers and he’d responded it was because they so closely matched the color of Azem’s soul. They like the feeling of his hands in their hair, like the affection and the intimacy behind the gesture - one he’s had a habit of doing since they were students together, which really probably ought to have clued Azem in sooner to his feelings. Yes, it’s- an unseemly display of public individuality, but it’s quite nice, and they aren’t the only one with their hood down - he’d lowered his own too.

“I can’t braid flowers into Azem’s hair with their cowl up, unfortunately,” Hythlodaeus says, tapping their shoulder with one finger, and they obligingly twist a little of their aether into the form of another hair band to hand back to him so he can tie off his latest braid. “And I certainly should be appalled to allow them to be the only one of our number with their hood down.”

Hades lets out another irritated sigh, but before he can say anything Helios sits upright and scoots himself back onto the blanket, a glint in his silver eyes that Azem is all-too-familiar with. Fast as lightning - impressive considering just yesterday he was still stuck in bed - he reaches out and yanks Hades’s cowl down, ignoring Hades’s undignified yelp (which just draws more attention to them, and that is clearly his own fault) to push up on his knees and kiss him squarely on the top of his head. Hades splutters, Hythlodaeus laughs, and Helios grins smugly and very carefully tugs the black hood back up, adjusting it neatly around Hades’s face.

“Better?” he asks cheerfully, and the glare Hades favors him with is withering.

Helios just beams at him, because he has ever been irrepressible, as Hades likes to call him, and leans in to steal another kiss. From the way Hades’s face softens, Azem suspects the bribery is being well-received.

“I don’t know what else Hades expected,” they murmur to Hythlodaeus. “Taking Helios out in public is always going to lead to more gossip, somehow. At least this time it’s just our neighbors.”

“Honestly, if this is surprising to them by this point, I shall have questions,” Hythlodaeus answers, and they laugh, the sound as bright and warm as the air around them.

“I can still hear you,” Hades says, and Azem looks back over at him - if he’s speaking again at least they won’t have to watch the two of them kissing with tongue - to see Helios draped over his shoulders, pleased as punch. The lines around Hades’s mouth have softened somewhat and he’s smiling slightly despite the annoyance in his voice.

“Of course you can,” they say, and he rolls his eyes up to the heavens but doesn’t argue back.

Eventually, Hythlodaeus finishes his braiding, and Azem tugs their hair carefully over their shoulder again and scoots back to lean against him; he wraps an arm around them and kisses their temple just past the edge of their mask, smoothing his hand up and down their bicep. Across the park the children start to settle down - one of them waves at Azem and they smile and wave back, watching with amusement as the child, too young for a mask still, brightens and tugs on their friend’s robe. The two kids whisper to each other for a moment, still watching Azem, then start actually walking towards them with no small amount of hesitance; they can’t help smiling more, glancing over at Hythlodaeus to see his reaction only to see him already watching them, gaze warm and fond.

It- is really not a secret that they want children of their own. Hythlodaeus is amenable, and neither Hades nor Helios has any arguments, but the timing just hasn’t seemed to be right, between Helios’s frequent illnesses and Azem’s traveling. But they have all the time in the world, and for now they can content themself with engaging these two children in conversation, learning their names and answering their myriad questions, and pretending they don’t notice the way Hades too is watching them with softness in his face. He doesn’t like being noticed like that.

They leave the flowers in their hair when Helios starts to tire, as the sun finally sets, and they pack up their things to walk home. It means leaving their cowl down, but they don’t particularly mind too much, not when Hythlodaeus smiles to see it and runs his fingers lightly over the braids, a tender fondness in the touch. And it’s hard to mind the way the few people they pass on the street stare at them, at the individuality they’re so carelessly flaunting for the whole city to see, when their arm is linked through his and their best friend is cheerful on their other side and everything is so lovely. They are Azem; some strangeness is expected. The people will get over it.

Helios smiles at them, once they’ve taken the lift up to their floor and entered their apartment again, tugging his cowl back and his mask down and flopping onto the couch. He looks tired, but his eyes are bright and there’s a healthy flush on his cheeks again instead of the sickly paleness they’re too-familiar with. They sit down next to him and he adjusts to put his head in their lap, acting for all the world as if it’s just as comfortable as a pillow.

“I can’t remember life without you, you know,” he says to them, quiet enough that Hythlodaeus and Hades, who are busy putting away the picnic supplies in the kitchen, won’t hear. “Thanks for looking after me.”

Azem strokes a hand over his hair and returns his smile. “Always,” they promise easily. How long even have they been friends now? Since they both could walk, probably; they don’t even remember the first time they met Helios, just that every single one of their important childhood memories had him at their side, or them at his, from moments playing together to early school days to their tenth namedays to practically everything they’ve done since. “You are my best friend, Helios, I would never do anything else.” They smile, shake their head. “I’m glad we won’t ever have to live without each other.”

They swore an oath, after all, the four of them, one of the most sacrosanct of vows to exist: to make their life’s purposes one, to return to the star together. Once Themis had asked Azem if they were ever going to marry Hythlodaeus, assuming that Helios and Emet-Selch would eventually do the same, and Azem had just been- confused, almost, at the question. Why would we need to? they’d asked him. We’ve already sworn to return to the star together. What could a wedding mean that that oath doesn’t?

Themis had looked- surprised, and then a little bit longing, at that answer. And he hadn’t brought the question up again.

But it’s the truth. Besides, no one in Amaurot would ever question their commitment to each other, the four of them, whether there’s public ceremony involved or not. They know what they mean to each other, and that’s enough - it will always be enough.

Azem has a purpose they love, for a people they love, and a family that will always be by their side. What more could they possibly need?

Helios makes a face at them. “Except when you leave and Elidibus cries at me that he needs me and I can’t go with you,” he says petulantly, and Azem can’t help but laugh, reaching down to grab the end of his braid and gently tug on it.

“Be nicer to Themis,” they say. “We’re both fortunate he lets you leave with me as often as he does.” Helios likes the traveling almost as much if not more than they do; they’re just glad not to be alone when they wander the star, doing their duty. It would be so much worse if they were always alone, no matter how much they love what they do.

Their best friend just wrinkles his nose and smacks their hand away from his hair instead of responding. In the kitchen, Hades says something in a low tone that makes Hythlodaeus laugh, vibrant and warm, and Azem smiles to themself and basks in the comfortable familiarity of it, this home they will always carry with them.

They close their eyes, leaning carefully back against the couch so as not to crush the flowers in their hair, and let the world carry on around them.)

(When they open their eyes again, everything is dark and cold. Zodiark’s presence pulses at the edges of their thoughts, an aching reminder of everything that’s been taken from them, everything that’s been destroyed, and not even Emet-Selch’s arm draped over their side can chase away the ice in their bones, the way it’s sunk its teeth into their soul.

There are no flowers in their hair.)

The city of Garlemald, far in the north, is a cold, dark place. Azem doesn’t much like it; it reminds them of the rift, though less lifeless and in some ways even more frigid. The icy winds and heavy snows that fill the long winters are near-unbearable, though at least the ceruleum technology Emet-Selch pioneered makes them manageable enough while indoors. During the short summers the land is, almost, beautiful - they look at its plains and mountains and some small part of them misses traveling. They’ve been many places since the Sundering, across so many of the shards, but they hardly remember most of it.

They don’t like being back on the Source. Six Rejoinings mean everyone they see has half a soul, and though the Garleans’ inability to manipulate aether makes it easier to remember they aren’t real people (as much as thinking that reminds them uncomfortably of Helios with his inability to create and how he had been treated poorly for it at times), it’s still- they doubt, sometimes, and the doubts leave them too tangled up to think properly, torn by their duty to the people and their duty to Zodiark. Their duty to Him is to the people, so they cannot be truly alive. Half-living shades, better-formed than the ones that populated the shards immediately after the Sundering, but shades all the same. They are not Azem’s responsibility to shepherd towards anything but Rejoining.

Whether that is Zodiark’s will or their own, they no longer care.

The city and its surrounding areas were known as the Republic of Garlemald until very recently. With Emet-Selch’s successful conquering of Ilsabard in this new identity of his, they’ve transitioned into calling it the Garlean Empire - Azem can’t help but be reminded of Allag, watching him work, except this time he’s become the leader himself. Emperor Solus zos Galvus, beloved by the people, who will lead them to victory against those who once oppressed them for their inability to do magic.

Azem hovers in the background of his empire, acting as an enemy when needed and an ally otherwise, and does their best to stay unnoticed by everyone outside the royal family - not quite possible, but enough so that no one questions them.

They don’t really like Solus’s family. It’s ungrateful of them at best, they know, but these people aren’t real and they aren’t jealous of Solus’s wife, not really, but of the way Emet-Selch looks at his son - like he really is real, like he matters, like he is anything compared to the family they should have gotten to have in Amaurot. The children they should have been able to raise. They were going to, they were meant to have all the time in the world, and instead everything went wrong. And yet for some reason Emet-Selch smiles at his son and means it, and tells Azem in quiet undertones that he wonders if perhaps there is some strength in mankind after all.

How can he say that, after everything? When he is the one who has always been so quick to remind Azem that these people are not alive and they must stay focused on their duty? It makes them wonder if he, too, has begun to fray apart the way the rest of the Unsundered have, soul wearing away at the edges under the strain, losing some of his hold on his duty (they would say as well as who he is, but really, Hades and Seleukos were lost in the Sundering; there is nothing left of either of them but their duty). He reacts poorly the one time they challenge him on the matter, though, and so- well. They don’t really have the energy to be angry at him, the only person they have left.

They avoid the royal family as much as they can instead, which is easier than it seems - there are plenty of places filled with shadow where even Emet-Selch would be hard-pressed to find them. And no matter what he accuses them of, they aren’t sulking - just…distantly disappointed he’d choose to spend his time with shadows instead of with them. Not that he could in public, but-

He comes to find them one evening when they’re sitting on a wall surrounding the small palace garden - populated mostly with evergreens and other year-round plants - in a spot of shadow that mostly obscures them. There’s a light layer of snow on the ground, occasionally stirred up by a faint breeze, just enough to tug on their hood but not enough to dislodge it. It will be Garlemald’s short spring soon, meaning the weather is simply cold instead of frigid, and though it’s still uncomfortable they don’t feel frozen enough to go back inside yet.

When Emet-Selch steps outside, some part of them is almost amused - he’s wearing a long, heavy coat, a scarf wrapped around his neck and chin, his arms wrapped around himself and his hands tucked under his arms. The expression on his face is all displeasure and petulance, especially when he walks under a tree and the wind drops snow onto his head. (And they appreciate that his face is still the same, even if his eyes are too pale and his hair is short and dark with only a streak of white in it and he’s kept the Garlean third eye. They can still look at him and see Emet-Selch.)

“Could you not have chosen to skulk around somewhere inside?” he asks, leaning against the wall next to them and brushing the snow out of his hair with one hand, and Azem shrugs one shoulder, looking down at him. Perched up here like this as they are, his head only comes up to their chest.

“You chose Garlemald,” they point out quietly, and he huffs, rolling his eyes heavensward.

“And there were a great many geopolitical factors involved in that decision, as you well know,” he returns. For a moment he’s quiet, letting the rustling of the trees and the distant sound of magitek fill the air, then he sighs. “What are you doing out here?”

The real answer, avoiding the royal family, would just start another argument, so they just shrug. “The Emperor shouldn’t be seen with me,” they say instead, which is true. Though the Ascians are mostly unknown to the common man, those who study the history of the Umbral Calamities in enough depth will know of them, and besides even that, the Emperor of Garlemald being seen with a suspicious dark figure is problem enough.

“Then perhaps you ought to come inside,” Emet-Selch says, narrowing his eyes. “I happen to know several places we might speak undisturbed, if that is truly your concern.”

“Places near a heater, I presume,” Azem mutters, and he raises a sharp eyebrow at them. “Did you need something from me?”

“Am I now only allowed to speak with you to further our agenda?” He’s almost drawling the words, leaning into the dramatic persona he’s begun to play up more and more - they don’t really like it when he acts, but it has been amusing to see him annoy Elidibus and Lahabrea with it.  “You wound me, Azem.”

A shadow stirs near the door to the inside, catching their attention, and they frown, tilting their head and looking into the aether - but it’s just one of the cleaning staff going about their work. “Fine,” they say with a sigh, “inside, then you’ll tell me what you want?”

…perhaps he truly doesn’t want anything at all, they have to admit to themself, seeing the look on his face. They have spent the past several days making themself scarce, so as to not have to see him with the mortal family he’s made for himself - and it isn’t the first time he’s done this, of course, nor will it be the last, not when his empire-building has been such an effective strategy for manipulating the star into Rejoinings. They really ought to get over themself about it. Except that if he decides, because of his son, that these people really are people after all, what will that mean for their duty? What will that mean for their service to Zodiark and their people?

“Yes, yes,” he says, waving a hand dismissively. “Walk with me. Today’s meetings were intolerably boring and I require intelligent conversation the likes of which none of these people are capable of.”

Azem slips through the veil of Darkness, off the wall, and steps out of it on their feet a few fulms away, turning back to face him. The sharpness, they know, is his way of saying he’s missed them - something he would only admit in those words if he had already been pushed to extreme emotion. “You formed this empire,” they remind him again, instead of pointing out what they both know he’s not saying, and he throws his hands out in an overdramatic gesture of irritation. “Stop it.”

He doesn’t apologize for the acting, but he does link his arm through theirs to walk back through the garden to the door, and they can accept that - apologies are a rare thing, from him, one they usually don’t expect. The cleaner has already left by the time they step into the hallway, which makes it simple enough for Emet-Selch to teleport them both directly to a private sitting room, a fire crackling merrily in the hearth and a meal laid out on the table in front of the couch. Azem raises an absent eyebrow behind their mask at the effort, taking a seat, and after a moment they pull down their hood and take off their mask, too. They don’t do it often anymore; between their general dislike for the immodesty of it (the fact that the people of Etheirys now feel so comfortable brandishing their faded individuality has to be a product of how weak they are, or something - they don’t like it) and the fact that there is only one person still alive in this world they are still that intimate with, it’s easier to just keep their mask on at all times. Even, these days, when speaking with the Fourteen - given that most of the others no longer remove their own masks either, and the increased antagonism between them all, clear communication is no longer as…pressing a desire.

Emet-Selch sits as well, leaning back against the couch, and gestures at the food, and for a few minutes Azem obliges his clear desire to share a meal with them by picking out a plate and eating as he details his day - which does, they have to admit, sound rather dreadfully boring. It has been a very long time, but they remember avoiding basic housekeeping meetings when they could, and finding ways to make them more interesting when they couldn’t. Helios and Hythlodaeus had helped-

No. If they think about that they won’t be present, and Emet-Selch clearly wants them here, so they need to be.

It isn’t until after their meal that he sighs and holds out a hand to them, his expression shifting into something more serious and focused, like he’s finally done dancing around whatever actually brought him to seek them out. They take the offered hand, letting him tug them to lean against his side - carefully, they have to pause to remove the pauldrons from their robe first - and he drapes his arm over their shoulders.

And then he sighs. “I am not blind, Azem,” he says quietly. “I’ve noticed you avoiding me. Why?”

…they don’t want to talk about this. Emet-Selch doesn’t want to hear them- bringing his own arguments back up against him, doesn’t want to talk about the conflict between his duty and whatever it is he’s seen in his son. But- admittedly, that is only part of why they dislike this all so much, only part of why it hurts, really, to look at him with these people that aren’t (can’t be, can’t be) real, and they…they haven’t mentioned the rest of it. Part of them thinks they shouldn’t have to, but it’s been thousands of years, so many lifetimes, and the people they were have been dead for so long- it would be hard to blame him for not realizing.

“When I see you with them,” Azem starts, too-quiet, “all I can think of is the family we were meant to have. As Seleukos and Hades, before the Final Days. You look at him and I…I remember…”

They remember how badly they had wanted to raise children with their partners in a home filled with laughter and love. How they had been so eager to pass down their magic and their knowledge from all their travels to those children - to raise them, even if it meant taking time away from their duties, even if it meant their duties sometimes pulling them away. They remember Hythlodaeus promising they would as soon as the time was right - a promise he meant, a promise he couldn’t keep. Because of the Final Days. Because of the Sundering.

They have to fix it. They have to.

Emet-Selch hushes them gently and leans his cheek against the top of their head, tightening his hold on them. “When we have completed the Rejoinings and, by Zodiark’s grace, restored our world - brought those we love back to life and truly saved our star - then we will build that family, I swear it. Hydaelyn’s power weakens by the day, and we are not so very far from the next Rejoining. I will not allow Her to delay us so long again.” He says it with utter certainty, as if any of them could actually stand face-to-face with Hydaelyn Herself without their souls being erased by Her Light - and it’s more than a little ridiculous, but there’s something reassuring about it too. Reassuring that- he means it, that he has not set aside their duty or the people they both love, even if this son of his makes him wonder about the Sundered’s capabilities. Reassuring that they are still-

He is all they have left. Him and their duty.

“I know,” Azem says, sighing and relaxing into his side, letting their eyes fall closed. The heat of the fire is a welcome warmth against their face. “I don’t truly doubt your dedication to our duty or- or to me, or them. But I… the Emperor is not Emet-Selch, and you enjoy being him. Without me.”

“Azem…” His voice trails off for a moment and they can feel him shake his head slightly, like he wants to refute them but can’t. “You are safest in the shadows.”

They know that too. They may be one of the Unsundered, nearly as strong and skilled a mage as Emet-Selch, more than capable of defending themself and acting as necessary, but they are…not good with people the way they once were. A long time ago they could have found ways to appeal to anyone they met, but they’ve spent so long speaking only to the other Ascians, save on the rare occasion, that the idea of holding a conversation with one of these Sundered souls for a reason outside necessity is- uncomfortable. They can best shepherd the star towards the Rejoinings from the darkness that has become everything they are.

And yet-

“I still don’t like it,” they say finally, and he tugs gently on their curls in response. “But I- know. That it is necessary.”

“I have made less time for you than I should,” he admits. “Perhaps a more formal introduction to the royal family is in order - they will, after all, be essential to our plans moving forward. I would rather you be able to appear to them directly, and it may yet ease your dislike.”

They can agree to that. Even if it means speaking to people, and having to be actively around the family that pains them so. Maybe he’s right and it will make this- easier - but even if he isn’t, at least it means no longer being excluded, or excluding themself. They can live with being a secret from the entire rest of the Garlean Empire easily.

They can’t live with feeling like Emet-Selch will leave them.

The seventh Rejoining happens, leaving the lands in, admittedly, less chaos than hoped, and Emet-Selch lets Solus zos Galvus die without an heir six years later, after the city-states of Eorzea come together and push the Empire out of their borders. Lahabrea’s plan to unleash chaos is foiled by Hydaelyn and Her new Chosen, who has strength enough to drive him entirely out of the newest body he’d possessed - Azem isn’t involved in that bit of scheming and neither is Emet-Selch, and considering how it turns out they rather think they should have been. Even they could have done a better job with van Baelsar.

Lahabrea’s pride is wounded by his failure, so it’s little surprise he picks up a new body and brings Igeyorhm back to the Source to resume pushing the realm towards chaos. The First has been leaning closer and closer towards the Light, thanks to the efforts of that shard’s heroes, which is an annoying element for a Rejoining, but if they can push the eighth one through this close to the seventh then perhaps Hydaelyn’s strength will be exhausted entirely and they will be able to finish their duty and go home. They still so badly want to go home, even if they don’t- don’t know if they will be able to. If it will still fit them.

(It had been- disconcerting, seeing Emet-Selch’s body age and wither, even though this isn’t the first time he’s let a mortal form grow old - they’ve never liked watching it. And this time they’d been far closer than usual as it happened, observing from their position in the imperial palace, the only one other than him who knew exactly when the Emperor’s sudden death would come.

They’d known from the beginning that Varis would probably win the succession war certain to follow. He’s as strong as his dead father and a solid leader, commanding the loyalty of his men with ease. But there will be chaos across the whole of the Empire until he succeeds, and in the meantime, they will pursue their own agendas.)

Emet-Selch leaves the Source in Lahabrea’s and Elidibus’s hands and retires for the moment, and Azem follows him as they have for the past twelve - thirteen? They hardly even know anymore, so much time lost to a blur of emptiness - thousand years, watching from the rift as the First’s heroes defeat Mitron and Loghrif (impressive, for these pale shards) and the balance in the First is undone. And- well. With two of the Unsundered remaining in the Source to prepare it, and the care required in pushing the shards without breaking them the way the Thirteenth was, their path forward becomes clear.

Push for the Rejoining. Save the star. Bring the people back. Do their duty. Save them.

They can’t see Helios and Hythlodaeus again until they save Amaurot.

They have to do it. They have to, whatever it takes - Zodiark demands it, their duty demands it, what does it matter if Hydaelyn has raised new champions? What does it matter if-

They’ve spent too long in the Source. Spent too long at Emet-Selch’s side as he ruled Garlemald and they guided things to help him, acknowledged by his family, who believed in the perfect world he promised them. (It wasn’t a lie; Emet-Selch hates lying outright. The fact that he never specified what would happen should they all survive the remaining Rejoinings- he would call it their own fault for not being clever enough to work it out. Azem…they don’t know. They don’t know.) The people- they feel like people there, with lives and loves and magic and history, even if it’s weak and imperfect and ugly, Azem knows, they know they aren’t, but-

But they can’t be. Azem’s people are the souls still kept contained within Zodiark, and their duty, their duty…it is to the Rejoinings now. They have to stay steady and true to it, or they won’t be here when Emet-Selch needs them.

So they travel to the First. It’s painful to be here, with primordial Light seeping into the world, just as cold as the rift but sharper, like a thousand piercing needles against the fabric of their soul. There are less shadows for Azem to hide in, meaning they have little choice but to walk at Emet-Selch’s side as he takes control over the First’s fate, ensuring the Light gathers and pools and slowly builds into a wave that rises up to wipe everything clean. They cannot let it completely overwhelm the world, or it will be as useless to them as the Thirteenth is - which means, as annoying as it is, carefully guiding this Flood forward in slow increments, keeping it from fully consuming the shard until the Source can be prepared.

Hydaelyn’s champions are angry, disillusioned, struggling to fight back against the calamity they’ve unleashed. Azem watches them from a distance and…understands it, the horror in their eyes, the exhaustion in their voices, the desperation to protect their people from the star turned against them, a force they cannot hope to stay. How can they not understand it? The hopeless agony, the unacceptable defeat, the taste of ashes-

These people are not people. The Flood of Light is not comparable to the Final Days - it is a means to an end with which they will restore a star untouched by that burning sky. None of it is the same as what broke Azem and destroyed their people. And yet they cannot help but think of those terrible months, of Amaurot in ruins, of their futile and failed attempts to save their own. None of these shades will remember this, when Amaurot is restored, it harms nothing - and yet. And yet.

When Elidibus comes to them directly, the Flood has consumed some half the shard, leaving endless Light-aligned wastes in its wake that Azem hasn’t dared to approach. Being on the shard as the Light swallows it is a risk, as the Flood is more than enough aether to overwhelm even their Unsundered souls - that Elidibus would come, leaving his post on the Source, means he has news of no small import. Time passes differently between the shards, though the wax and wane of it means they all stay relatively close to each other, so it is hard to know how long it has been since the last time they spoke with him; Azem has to wonder if it means the Source is already prepared.

They meet on a hill in an area far from the Flood’s encroaching edges, a forest of lavender trees and grasses that remind Azem of Amaurot and Hythlodaeus both, a painful twinge in their chest somewhere beneath the ice. Elidibus is in between convenient bodies at the moment, draped in his white robes, and beneath his mask there’s something heavy and grave written into his face.

“Emet-Selch. Azem.” He nods at them both, and Azem returns the acknowledgement quietly, tucking their hands behind their back. “Hydaelyn’s Chosen has moved against us. Nabriales and Igeyorhm have been killed at his hands - killed, not merely dispersed. We will need to seek out their replacements.”

“Of all the-” Emet-Selch lets out a breath through gritted teeth, shaking his head. “What impeccable timing, as ever. Azem and I will handle it once we have seen to matters here in the First.” Hunting down new soul shards will be a time-consuming and annoying process, but at least it can be done while appraising the state of the other shards for Rejoining, and it- if they cannot sleep, at least it will give them something to do that doesn’t involve being on the Source. 

“There is more,” Elidibus says, and Azem stills. What else could there be? The Source had been fairly well-contained when they left in the aftermath of Solus’s death, and new champion or not Hydaelyn is too weak to push things that far out of balance that fast. “Lahabrea’s scheming has destroyed him - he is gone.”

“...gone,” Azem says slowly. It doesn’t quite make sense. “His soul has frayed beyond use?”

“He was returned to aether and every mote of his essence consumed to fuel a summoning.” Elidibus’s tone doesn’t change, and it takes a moment for the words to register - consumed. Consumed to fuel a summoning - every mote of his essence? But that would mean-

They do not like Lahabrea. Have hated him, in fact, since he insulted Helios to their face, though they rarely have the energy to do anything about it, or even much think on it. But- he is one of the few Unsundered, one of the only ones left to truly remember, to have lived through the Final Days and the Sundering and those first early years, and they cannot replace him. There are no shards of his soul scattered around the reflections to uplift. And there is nothing of him set aside in Zodiark for the eventual restoration.

If he has been consumed - then it is as Elidibus says. He is gone, and there is nothing left.

“I see,” Emet-Selch says, clenching one hand in a fist at his side, his voice tight. “It was inevitable his arrogance and foolish habits would cause him problems eventually. What happened?”

Elidibus explains what he knows of the events that led to Lahabrea’s…loss, somewhat difficult to recount considering the only surviving witness of the events is the Warrior of Light himself - but it is clear that Lahabrea and Igeyorhm confronted the Warrior, only to lose to him and be outmaneuvered by the mortals they’d been attempting to manipulate. The chaos Lahabrea had been attempting to sow in Ishgard has been almost entirely thwarted, thanks to the Warrior of Light and his allies, and his connection to Hydaelyn seems to have strengthened - and with an apparently reliable method of destroying Ascian souls that elevates him from a minor annoyance to an active threat.

They will need to remove him from the board, more than likely, if they are to succeed - and they have to succeed. Azem refuses to imagine a future where they fail, where Zodiark and Amaurot and their family are not restored. Where they abandon their duty once again. It cannot happen.

Emet-Selch is- unimpressed with the explanation, pacing back and forth across the violet grass as he listens. “The Source is your responsibility, Emissary,” he says finally, when Elidibus is finished, his voice clipped. “This should never have progressed as far as it did. I would not presume to dictate your actions nor claim you are not holding to your duty, but at the junction we are at now in the First we cannot afford such failures.”

“I am aware,” Elidibus says steadily. Does Lahabrea’s death pain him? They were friends too, once. Maybe he has forgotten that. Maybe Azem just cannot see his pain. “I have my contingencies.”

“Then allow me to offer an additional one.” He waits for Elidibus to nod before continuing. “This reflection’s heroes believe themselves cheated and abandoned by Hydaelyn. They are desperate to find a way to save their world from the Light, and I believe it quite simple for a man of your talents to put that desperation to use.”

For a moment Elidibus just considers him. “...yes, I see your suggestion. Yes. Balance must be restored - Hydaelyn’s influence, through Her champion, grows too strong. I will do what I can to redress the issue. Continue on here as you were.”

“As you say,” Emet-Selch murmurs, bowing his head in acknowledgement. Azem turns to him, expecting Elidibus to take his leave - he’s never been in the habit of staying around any longer than necessary, driven endlessly forward by his duty - but he remains, gaze fixed on them, and Azem blinks and looks back over.

“Stay in the First, Azem,” he says very intently, and then Darkness wraps around him and he’s gone.

Azem frowns, shaking their head a little to clear the perpetual haze from it, and looks back at Emet-Selch, who is watching the empty space Elidibus left behind with a set look on the visible part of his face. “...why would he say that?” they ask quietly. The only real rule, of sorts, that Azem has ever been given as to where they can or cannot be is that they should not be alone on a shard; never before has Elidibus attempted to control their whereabouts. It would’ve been disrespectful to their position as one of the Unsundered, no matter- everything else. That he would bring it up now implies that he believes it important, but it grates that he didn’t give a reason. Emissary or no, they…

They understand that in some ways they are a liability. But they have ever followed Emet-Selch closely while maintaining some independence, never causing problems anywhere near the scale Igeyorhm had, or even Lahabrea himself on occasion, and all of it managed without insulting their capabilities. They aren’t a fool, just- broken.

“I…have no idea,” Emet-Selch admits. “It was in poor taste, whether he has the authority or no. However - for now I suggest we hold to the Emissary’s bidding. We have no reason to disobey, and we are both needed here in the First.” For now, he says.

They…agree with that, they think. They wouldn’t have been particularly inclined to leave the First without a reason anyway, not unless Emet-Selch also left, so unless something comes up they have no desire to disobey - but. If something happens- they are still capable of using their own judgement, however thick the ice has grown. They would have thought Elidibus would know that, considering the understanding between them; he must. For all that he has forgotten the long millennia of their work together must still be clear enough, right?

Well. As Emet-Selch says - for now they will stay here, and do their duty, watch and wait and shepherd the star towards Rejoining. And should a reason to leave the First arise, then they will make their own decision, and Elidibus can live with what they and Emet-Selch decide. After all, the Emissary only delivered a judgement for the current situation, not any future ones.

And if- if Nabriales, Igeyorhm, and Lahabrea are truly all gone, at the hands of the Warrior of Light, then Azem can no longer quite afford to be the frozen wraith they’ve been since the Sundering. They have- even if it’s just a shell of a mask, even if there is nothing behind it but their duty, even if they are still hollow and dead on the inside, they have to act of their own volition, for their own determination, not just aiding Emet-Selch’s goals. There are only three of the Unsundered in existence, and one of them is Elidibus, who is more a manifestation of Zodiark’s will then himself anymore. (Though- in some ways, isn’t that what Azem is too? Their duty to Zodiark keeps them moving, their duty to their people what they cling to, the promise of seeing their family again the only light at the end of this awful millennia-long tunnel. But it is their duty and their duty alone that keeps them from sleeping.)

Emet-Selch promised the Rejoinings would go more quickly now, that he wouldn’t let it be so long between them again. It’s Azem’s time now to step forward and- actually help make that a reality.

Just before the Flood swallows Norvrandt, the last remaining region in the First, everything goes sideways once again. The Oracle of Light, the people call the golden-haired woman radiating Hydaelyn’s magic who appears in Nabaath Areng and turns the wave of Light into crystal, saving those few cities that remain and halting the Flood’s progression entirely, though the act does nothing to shift the balance any towards the Dark. In some ways, truthfully, her appearance is useful - Rejoinings are a delicate process and were the Light to consume the entire reflection before the boundary between the First and the Source could be cracked fully, it would be as great a failure as Igeyorhm’s disaster with the Thirteenth had been. But from the descriptions passed around in rumor, Emet-Selch recognizes the woman as an associate of the Warrior of Light, and a single terse message from Elidibus confirms the failure of his plan to induce the Rejoining and correct the Source’s balance by killing Hydaelyn’s favored new champion.

It is…frustrating, to say the least, even for Azem and their distance. The Oracle’s actions mean they themselves have more time, now, to orchestrate matters properly in the Source, but the fact that Hydaelyn is even capable of this kind of interference means She has found strength somewhere that none of them expected, and Her champion continues to triumph when by all rights he should have fallen. It makes one thing quite clear: Elidibus cannot handle the Warrior of Light, and to leave him alone to manage their affairs in the Source will be a risk. The Emissary is not in the habit of communicating his actions unless he feels it absolutely necessary - and perhaps the two of them deserve that, since they have ever worked at a distance from the others, but not when the eighth Rejoining is so close at hand.

Stay in the First, Elidibus had said, but he had not given them a reason, and ensuring the Rejoining goes smoothly is everyone’s highest priority. And Azem may be- lost, often, but observation is something they are more than capable of doing. Observing and intervening, should the situation call for it.

When they make the offer to Emet-Selch - to return to the Source, to find the Warrior of Light and watch him, to report back as needed and act as necessary - he sighs and slumps, the lines on his face deepening. “You are absolutely certain of this decision?” he asks, and after a heartbeat they nod. “Then be careful, and keep your distance. The famed Ascian-slayer will surely not hesitate to bring his Light to bear against you as well, should he get the chance, and we cannot afford another loss so soon.” He hesitates for only a moment. “Do not make me perform your last rites, Azem.”

“I won’t,” they promise quietly, and he closes his eyes, exhaling heavily - then leans forward and presses a kiss to the top of their head, where their mask meets their hair. The softness behind the gesture, and the emotion it conceals, leaves a lump in their throat, and they swallow hard. “Emet-Selch…”

It is rare that he initiates affection with such an open gesture, though he’s gotten far more free with his touches over the long millennia, more than aware that they often rely on him to ground them. They- understand, though, they think. Though they’ve often been away from his side to give him space to do his own work and to aid him as best they can from the shadows, they’ve almost never taken themself to an entirely different shard like this. The concept is a daunting one but…they need to act. They are of the Unsundered. Being away from Emet-Selch will not kill them, and they can always summon him to their side if they need. Should the Warrior of Light try to destroy them, he will find himself facing two of the most powerful beings in the Source, excepting of course Zodiark and Hydaelyn.

“Just go,” Emet-Selch tells them, shaking his head and stepping back, hands falling back to his sides. “I do expect you to call for me should you need aid.”

That is easy to agree to, and after another moment Azem takes their leave, stepping through Darkness into the rift, and from there back to the Source - the Source which is populated by those almost-alive enough to make it difficult to think. But they are not here for the almost-people, not here to intervene in their lives or drive them further towards chaos, not this time.

Instead they hide themself in the shadows and they listen to rumor. The Warrior of Light is affiliated with an organization known as the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, a politically neutral Eorzean group with strong unofficial ties to the nation of Sharlayan, who have as of recently involved themselves in a fight against the Garlean Empire. Given that the Eorzean Alliance has recently moved forces into the edges of Gyr Abania, Azem starts their search for the Warrior of Light there.

It’s almost a beautiful place, if not for the Garlean structures dotting the peaks - Azem spent long enough in Garlemald to find their blockiness familiar, but out here among the rocks and the wind and the brush they look glaringly out of place. They’re there for- expansion and occupation, not to better the star, and Azem hates that, too - but. The Garlean Empire has already brought about one Rejoining, and will likely be leveraged for the next, and so what does the damage it does to Etheirys matter in the meantime? They will heal it all, when they restore Amaurot. They will. They will make the world perfect again.

But even imperfect. It is still beautiful.

They travel through the fringes of Gyr Abania on foot, rather than teleporting - a waste of time, maybe, but it lets them get a feel for the area better, and it reminds them of distant memories nearly forgotten in the haze of grief and emptiness and Darkness. Memories of exploring the star with Helios and Venat, when she was still Azem and they were both still young; of crossing continents on their own feet or on the wings of their familiar and watching the rich tapestry of life play out around them. Sometimes noticing holes in the ecosystem that needed to be filled, and reporting those back to whichever seat was responsible for them. Though the majority of their work was with the people, they were the only member of the Fourteen to travel extensively, and thus sometimes the only one to notice such things before they became an issue.

It…it had been nice. Once. They’d loved their job, hadn’t they? They’d even liked the Convocation, to an extent, though they hadn’t gotten along with everyone on it. Why…it’s been so many years. So many lifetimes. When was the last time they traveled just to wander? When was the last time they thought of anything but the gaping hole in their chest, the loss that no time can extinguish, that only the ice of distant non-existence can numb? They don’t know - they can’t remember. Maybe…maybe when they’ve saved the star, when everything is whole and perfect again, they can- try again. Try to remember that once upon a time it wasn’t just a duty but a purpose, too.

They walk through the thinning forests past Baelsar’s Wall with their hood down so the breeze can stir their hair, gloved hands trailing over the trees as they pass, and for a moment, for just a moment, they think it almost feels like being home.

It takes two more days to find the Scions. The Ala Mhigan Resistance in this area has a cell hiding in a small outpost in the mountains, the entrance to which has been glamored off with fairly innovative magic - easily seen through with Azem’s aethersight, the weave of the spell near-blinding against the backdrop of the world around it, but the magic itself is clever, in an age where such sight is rare. Azem slips through the boundaries and makes their way up the mountain paths, keeping to the shadows and avoiding the occasional scout, until they find the encampment itself - tents and buildings all bustling with people, built into the shell of an old monastery. There are plenty of nooks and crannies for them to hide in, as well as several higher-elevation perches it’s unlikely these people will look to to try to find intruders, if they even realize there is one here. Perfect places to observe from.

They see the Warrior of Light in stages. From behind, first, standing at a long table underneath a tent, meeting with what Azem assumes to be the leaders of this place. He’s a small, slight miqo’te man with white fur and a long white braid down his back, a greatsword almost the size of his body secured to his long coat, with a calm, steady bearing that befits a servant of Hydaelyn. They can sense Her magic clinging to him like gossamer spiderwebs, little glowing lines of Light forming the ward protecting his aether from corruption, the telltale sign of one of her Chosen.

Azem has…wondered about that, at times. That the sign of Hydaelyn’s calling comes in the form of protection from tempering, rather than in being tempered, as it is with every other summoned being (though certainly some of that is because the summoning methods they teach are meant to cause tempering). She more than has the power to do it, and it would ensure Her Chosen would be not only protected from primals but wholly attuned to Her will, best able to serve Her even when She is at Her weakest. And yet instead She chooses to leave them free, not tied to Her in any tangible way - the lingering remnants of Venat, perhaps.

Hydaelyn has ever been a mystery to them, in many ways. They do not know what went into Her summoning, or what drives Her beyond keeping Zodiark imprisoned and the shards Sundered. They think, perhaps, that She too might believe Herself saving the star, though She would be wrong. In the end all they truthfully know is that She spared them for a reason, and still, still the only reason they can think of is that it was punishment for abandoning their duty. That She was disappointed in them. And Hydaelyn may be their enemy, may be someone they will never forgive for what She did to the star and their people, but She was once their mentor too, and even after so many thousands of years the thought of being a disappointment to Venat burns.

They wonder if She regrets letting the Convocation give them the seat instead of Helios. He would not have broken the way they did.

Across the outpost, under the tent, the Warrior of Light finishes his conversation and steps back from the table with a small nod, turning towards them and walking in their general direction, his companions falling in alongside him, and all the breath leaves their lungs at once. Because they- they know that face, the planes of it, the bright silver eyes (still too thin, too pale, without the glow they should have), the way his hair frames his cheeks. His skin is tanned rather than wan and he has triangular blue tattoos curling around his eyes, but they would know his face anywhere. They knew it when they saw it in Allag thousands of years ago. They know it when it appears in their dreams, even if the recollection is fuzzy and faded when they wake.

Helios.

It can’t be. Helios can’t come back, not until the world is whole again - he deserves better than the half-lives these shadows live, he is better, he wasn’t supposed to- these people aren’t alive. How can he come back into a life that isn’t a life at all? (And these shades aren’t alive, can’t be alive, can’t be, Azem’s duty is to the people, to shepherd them and counsel them and protect them, to know them, and if they’re alive, if they’re people, then Azem has- has been- and they can’t. The Rejoinings are- how they will save the star. They have to save the star. For their people. For Zodiark.)

So the Warrior of Light looks like Helios but cannot be him. Cannot be, no matter the similarities, no matter the way he smiles at his companions and it’s the same old lopsided grin they’d forgotten the shape of, no matter the way their chest feels like it’s shaking and shattering and splintering apart into a thousand fragments, like maybe Hydaelyn finally has struck them. The ice that’s been their constant companion for so long - the coldness that keeps them apart from the world, letting them look at it like it’s through a pane of glass - just hurts now, and they wrap one arm tightly around their ribs and press the knuckles of their other hand into their mouth, uncaring of how the sharp back of their glove digs into their skin. It’s barely enough to muffle the wounded little whine they can’t seem to stop themself from making. 

Stay in the First, Azem. Did Elidibus know? He cannot see the color of souls, and neither can they, and Elidibus has so little memory left of Amaurot they doubt he remembers his friend and coworker who so often both inspired and frustrated him in equal measures. He hardly remembers Azem themself, after all, their friendship long-since eclipsed by the distant almost-antagonism that exists between most of the Ascians - but. But. Instinct can be a powerful thing.

…what if it is, somehow, Helios? 

He can’t be - but they’ve been replacing their Sundered fellows with shards of their own souls for ages, and the dead continue to be reborn, the cycle of life unimpeded by the Sundering, uncaring that the souls it spits out into fragile bodies are incomplete and barely alive. And like that long-ago day in Allag, they can’t help but wonder - what if this is a fragment of his soul? Seven times Rejoined, bearing Hydaelyn’s mark, because of course Helios would never- he wouldn’t understand, they’ve always known that. He wouldn’t see it the way they do, not unless they brought him to Zodiark, and that is tempting but- breaking Hydaelyn’s ward would be difficult. Azem was never able to undo Venat’s magic, and She’s only grown more powerful as a god.

They need to know the truth. They need to know, need to see, because without the ability to see souls they have no way of confirming that he isn’t and they cannot call Emet-Selch back from the First for this - and they said they would observe. They would come to watch. Doing so is, they think, even more important now - they need to understand. They need to know.

(What will they do, if he is Helios? He must not remember, of course he won’t, none of the shards ever truly have before those memories were awakened. Even if he is Helios, he won’t recognize them if he sees them - won’t know them as anything but an enemy. He is, after all, the famed Ascian-slayer. So- what will they do, what can they do?

They don’t know. But- something. They will figure out something. They will.)

The Warrior of Light walks past them and away, off in the direction of one of the campfires, and Azem watches him go - it’s a little easier to think when they’re no longer staring into his face, when he’s just a braid and a sword and a pair of white ears flicking back and forth. It is- a very good thing they’ve spent so much time honing their ability to hide in the shadows, they think, because if they were to be discovered now- well. They could fight their way free, very easily, but Helios…

They will watch, and they will wait, and they will not be seen until they desire to be. Thirteen thousand years has made them very good at that, at least - at observing, at shepherding events from a distance. And they will find out what they need to know.

And if- if it truly is their best friend, the other half of them - they will not fail him again.