half/moon

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Pact Commander Yuri Six-Cants was famously killed by the God of War. It was a whole thing. The loss was inconvenient for morale and for Commander Ximone Atropos’ mental health more than anything—Yuri was only ever the personality hire of the Pact—but in the end it did galvanize them against Balthazar. I think kicking god’s ass was preferable to being alone with the Vacuous Absence. And War doesn’t wait for anyone to grieve, anyway.

By that point, Yuri had dragged himself out of the Mists with little to no memory of his former self, only a compulsive desire for revenge. It wasn’t even his desire for revenge, really, but the cumulative anguish and rage of everyone around him. It was the force animating him from beyond the pale, and he became like an unthinking instrument of it, more force-of-nature than person.

He never did get revenge. His co-commander avenged his death before he could get his hands on Balthazar, and it kinda doomed him to forever wander Tyria wearing the mantle of his killer, haunted by a sense of unfinished business. He became a folk spirit of the absence of War, shepherding the restless dead to the Mists and meting out vengeance and closure to the living. It was the closest thing to a purpose that he could find in the meaningless cycle of violence.

But he’s getting better! He’s putting the pieces back together. By End of Dragons he’s doing so well that he can make stupid jokes about his death and people actually laugh at them. And he’s different in ways that are less horrifying and more innocently unnerving now. Add in Ximone and Trahearne reconciling with their respective Elder Dragons* and he’s feeling pretty good.

It’s probably for the best that he’s feeling like himself again when he washes up at Cantha and learns that reality is unraveling in a fun new way. And somehow it feels like his fault. Encountering the Dragonvoid in New Kaineng and Arborstone throws him back—rather violently!—into the mindset of a shambling absence pretending to be a person. He seems to have some kind of connection to the Void. It’s familiar to him, and not just because he’s fought the things coming out of it before. But he doesn’t get answers until he… sigh… meets a plot-important nonbinary beau that he can’t say “no” to.

Yuri meets Engineer Yao just before the disaster at the Yong reactor. He makes a fool of himself the way he usually does when he finds someone charming. Initially, Yao is just another handsome fellow that Ximone, Trahearne, and the Lastborn use as ammunition to tease him (the laundry list of people that Yuri has an inactionable crush on is a mile long.) But as it comes out that there’s another Elder Dragon on the loose and the New Kaineng power grid is toast and Joon is pissed and reality as we know it is unraveling, Yuri finds it impossible to say “no” to the engineer who is trying to keep it all duct-taped together.

For their part, Yao notices there’s something off about Yuri almost immediately, and they think it’s fun. Is it convenient that the Commander is so easy to persuade into helping them? Sure, but Yuri has killed dragons and fought god and cheated death and shepherded people to the Mists. And he’s a grown man. He can say “no” to some smart-aleck with funny goggles. Probably.

Compelled by impending disaster, morbid curiosity, and not a little bit of Yao’s convincing, Yuri agrees to help the engineer out with their little powergrid problem. Yao is interested in unraveling how these things are all connected, the Void and Jade and Dragon magic, and Yuri is a very handy lab partner. (And hey, some of his best friends are Elder Dragons.) They soon realize that Yuri’s own magic is wrapped up in all of this, too. The fire he thought he stole from Balthazar is… not… Balthazar’s fire at all. It’s a bizarre transmundane force that refuses to be perceived**, and has more in common with the anomalies in the powergrid—and later, they learn, the Dragonvoid.

The more Yuri learns about the Void, the more he shrinks away from it. At the same time, Yao cautiously orbits it. They’re convinced Yuri’s connection with it isn’t accidental. His limited control over it is the only promising news they’ve gotten since all of this began, apart from that of Aurene’s existence. Yuri would rather go the way of his beloved Pact Marshal and brood about it, but Trahearne certainly won’t let him, and neither will Yao. Or as the Lastborn puts it, they don’t love him enough to want to watch him reprise his “highly unpopular disappearing act.”

Of course, it’s one thing to hear it from people who love him, and another to hear it from a third party. For better or worse, Yuri finds himself leaning on Yao’s cynical confidence in exploring Void magic and its interactions with Dragonjade tech. He lets Yao mess around with the cold fires of War and has them run all kinds of diagnostics and lends his magic to their jade mechs. The gizmos and bots that come out of this remind Yuri of the Forged, chillingly—all knapped obsidian and cold fire. But they lack the involuntary rage of the Forged. They lack most of the quirks of the malfunctioning jade bots, too. Instead, they have faint echoes of personalities that weren’t coded for, a verbal tic here or a stereotyped behavior there.

When Yuri realizes that these echoes resemble people he once knew—dead people, casualties of the Pact’s campaigns against the Elder Dragons—he pulls back. But it’s too late. By then, he realizes that his efforts to understand himself have inadvertently distressed his closest friends. They only see an engineer working to replace the Elder Dragon trapped in the Yong reactor with a ghost, like a cog in an unfeeling machine. Yuri knows that this isn’t true, but he can’t articulate to them why. At the same time, he can’t articulate to Yao why he’s suddenly getting cold feet when there is so much work still to be done. 

It’s a mess. He knows he needs the Greater Canthan Polycule to work together with the Greater Tyrian Polycule if they hope to stand a chance in hell at Not unraveling reality, but he can’t help feeling like he’s really beefed it now. And it didn’t even take a catastrophic loss of control over his weird void powers.

Well, maybe a little.

… and this definitely didn’t all come about because I realized the Yao/Yuri ship name would be “Yaoi.”

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* hey remember Blighted Trahearne. He and Mordy are doing better now, too. He stops having an active death wish sometime before Path of Fire. He and Mordy start to settle down during the campaign against Kralkatorrik, and they have an uneasy truce that slowly becomes unspoken acceptance, until Primordus and Jormag’s deaths. Then Trahearne finally returns home after an 8-year absence and makes a complete mess of things at the Grove. Absolutely blows it. Turns into a dragon in front of his mom and everyone. Embarrassing. It’s another whole thing. But the silver lining is that he and Mordy finally figure out that his greatest nightmare scenario—Recovering All Your Memories And Uncontrollably Turning Into A Dragon In Front Of Your Dragon-Traumatized Mom—is kind of a nothingburger. I mean, it’s definitely an international incident and a diplomatic catastrophe and personally mortifying, but in terms of causing the kinds of material harm that he’s so afraid of, it just didn't play out in the real world the way it did in his head. So he’s finally secure in the knowledge that we can all trust Mordremoth he can trust himself. Even if he can’t go home without causing an incident. And he’s staring eternity in the face with this ridiculous Dragon stapled to his brain.

** Taimi’s theory—Yuri cheating death was an early crack in the facade, the first noticeable thread to start coming unwound from the tapestry of reality, revealing the Dragonvoid beyond. I mean, duh, he’s the absence of War. He just happened to come out of the Mists with an innate attunement to what he is, and that came with control over his (carefully portioned and contained) form of the chaos. If he had let it all burn in the unexisting fires of War, we’d have figured it out sooner.

Yao thinks it’s more like he’s got “Dragon gunk on him” and he’s started to inhabit the absence left behind by all the Dragons he and his buddies have been killing. If the Dragonvoid is the chaotic nexus of all magic wherein everything is simultaneously possible, then he’s occupying the null state, the absence of magic.

Yuri just wants to go back to believing he’s a fractured spirit that assumed the mantle of a dead god. A simpler time. Somehow it got worse. But mostly he’s going through the Sinuk arc of self-destruction and complete rebirth now.