#f:xiv

The commander of the XIVth Legion came shadowed not only by his tribuni, but by soldiers in uniforms Saskia had never seen before. Imperial black plate showed on their torsos and arms, but the arrangement was piecemeal, reminiscent of a mercenary’s mismatched armour; the colourful sashes and fabrics they wore as accents reminded her of the Arroways, which brought on a sickening lurch of her stomach. They were not helmed like imperial soldiers; their heads were covered by beautifully adorned turbans, and their faces hidden by horrid, beaklike masks. Ala Mhigan colours and fabrics corrupted by imperial austerity.

She scarcely heard the specific words with which the viceroy introduced his new force, comprised entirely of young Ala Mhigans who had traded service for citizenship. A fresh sort of panic underlay her shaken state: she was meant to listen, not to lose her cool like some frightful little novice.

The commander of this new Crania Lupi was just a slip of a girl, but her gaze was cold as stone.

“Van Baelsar is certainly eager to make us forget his little debacle with the Agrius,” said goe Tullius amusedly in her ear. Did he feel her shiver? “A bit late on the draw, perhaps, but cleverly done nonetheless. Obedience comes easier when loyalty is instilled from a young age; and what good is insurgency when one’s children wield His Radiance’s authority? They will only break themselves.”

Saskia simpered and watched the young commander and extinguished Morgana’s memory from her mind every time it welled at the sight of the girl’s hard eyes. She envisioned, distantly, punching holes with the blade of Neesa’s needle into the Censor.

It wasn’t right, that he should recognize Fordola’s mother from her memories, but it was the way of things. And maybe it was right enough because they were equals in it; likely she had seen his mother in his memories, too—more than once, knowing the strength of her Echo and the ragged hole his mother had left inside him.

“What’s her name?”

Fordola bit hard on the inside of her cheek. “As—Astrid.”

That knocked something loose inside Arenvald, if only for an instant. It was his mother’s name, too. But he swallowed hard, and pulled his focus back to Fordola. 

“Do you want me to stop her while you catch your breath?” he asked quietly. “So you can say hello?”

Again, Fordola shook her head—this time, almost frantically. “I can’t,” she said, so vulnerable it ached. “I can’t, I can’t let her see what I’ve—”

—become, something in Arenvald’s mind whispered when she couldn’t finish. Not the Echo, but something. He could only look between Fordola and her mother’s retreating back, fearing he might lose her in the crowd.

“But all the things she must’ve heard…” he said. “Doesn’t she deserve to know you’re all right?”

“I can’t,” Fordola snapped, her voice hard with grief.

“It doesn’t have to be you,” Arenvald said, and decidedly turned the corner. Maybe Fordola hissed his name; maybe she said don’t; maybe she said please.

He hurried down the street, dipping a hand into his pocket for a coin. It was an old trick, one he’d used for drastically different purposes, but it would work for this, too.

“Excuse me, Astrid,” he called, and crouched down as though to pick up the coin already in his hand as Astrid turned. She looked tired and not a little wretched, carrying a basket on her hip as though it weighed a tonze. Arenvald held out the coin in his palm. “You dropped this.”

The hard wariness around her eyes reminded him of Fordola, in a way, but maybe even sadder. “Thank you,” she said, carefully taking the coin; her eyes never left Arenvald’s face. “Do I know you?”

“Er, no. I’m sorry,” Arenvald said. He pointed to himself. “My name is Arenvald. I’m an adventurer, with the Scions of the Seventh Dawn,” and Twelve, that always felt so reassuring to say. “I’ve been working with the Resistance. With your daughter.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Astrid said immediately, and made to walk away. She hid her flinch well when he touched her arm.

“Wait, no, it’s—I don’t mean any ill by it.” He held both hands up. And he wished he’d thought it through, worked out what he was going to say beforehand instead of just opening his big mouth and babbling. “I just wanted you to know she’s doing well. I’ve been… I haven’t been assigned to do it, really, but I’ve been looking after her, sort of. We’re of an age, you see, and we’re— alike.”

Astrid said nothing; she just let him talk. But something settled on her face as emotion overtook her glare: something Arenvald didn’t know how to name. It wasn’t relief, really, or acceptance. Nor even appreciation of what it was saying. But it was something, and it almost made him waver.

“She did bad things, but so have I. Hurt people. But everything I’ve been doing for—for years, it’s always been just to be better. And I think she feels the same. It won’t erase what she’s done, but I think she deserves to try, if there’s goodness ahead of her. Don’t you think?”

“What do you want me to say?” Astrid asked tremulously.

“I— I don’t know.”

Arenvald’s lips parted without sound. 

Astrid hoisted the basket higher on her hip, her other fist clenched tight around Arenvald’s coin. “Then I can say nothing to you,” she said. And for a moment, all he could do was just watch her leave.

“She’s saved countless lives, you know,” Arenvald said to her back, not wanting to raise his voice too loud. The stones in Ala Mhigo always heard too much. “Just in the past few moons. The imperials did something unspeakable to her and she’s been using it to save people. One of them was a father, and that’s one that I know of— all because she knew that somewhere, there was a little girl who needed him.”

He swallowed hard again, unsure of why his throat was so tight. “I don’t care who she was; only that that’s who she is now. And so should you.”

Astrid had slowed her steps to listen, at least; Arenvald saw a tremor in her shoulders, running down the line of her back, but it was gone in an instant as she straightened and went on her way. Still pressed to the wall, Fordola was listening, too: a hand clamped over her mouth, the other a shaking fist, as tears streamed incessantly down her cheeks.

She was wiping at her eyes with the heel of her gloved hand as Arenvald returned, feeling battered and drained in ways that had little to do with their earlier confrontation with a primal. But he had meant everything he said, and he hoped Fordola knew that. Not that there was much he could do to lie to her from the inside.

And neither could she lie to him; not with her face a blotchy red around the nose and eyes, and her cheeks still pale. Arenvald wanted nothing more than to wrap her up in his arms and force her to let herself be a person, but she would just push at him and maybe even bite.

“It’s all right,” he said gently, without touching her. Fordola’s mouth was pinched tight, and she wouldn’t look him in the eye—and even though he’d just stopped himself from reaching out, all the reasons why he shouldn’t seemed pointless and stupid.

So he pulled Fordola into a hug, right there in the middle of the bloody street.

“Don’t,” Fordola said, muffled by his chest. She didn’t shove at him; she just stood there, her body ice against his, and all at once she was clinging to the back of his shirt and gritting her teeth so hard he felt the muscles of her jaw harden against his shoulder.

There was nothing he could say to her, really. He didn’t know if his own mother was alive: he hadn’t dared to ask around, because he didn’t know what he would do with the answer. But if she was still somewhere, he did hope she could make some peace with the suffering she’d endured at the hands of the Empire now that they were free to rebuild their lives.

It didn’t mean he knew whether he would want to stand in front of her again, or be brave enough for it after all the fear he’d felt, at the end.

I remember one night when a storm hit right at the twins’ bedtime: how our father had stayed in their room the whole way through to tell them of the Destroyer because Balder was afraid of thunder and Nedric was afraid of Balder’s fear. My grandfather, he told me once, had no respect for fear; but my father was wiser, as sons tend to be when they strive to undo their fathers’ harm, and he taught his sons (and most of all, his daughter) how to know their own fear.

He had sat with the twins until the clouds took the thunder away. By the time I heard his footsteps on the creaky floorboards between my brother’s bedroom and mine, the rain had almost entirely subsided, such that I could open my window and let the cooling, still-wet air in. I had crawled into bed to watch the storm in the dark, so I called out to him with the blankets snug around me.

His footsteps stilled outside my door. He pushed it open, almost warily, because I had my mother’s temper and worsened it tenfold in my adolescence, especially in defense of my personal space; any man would be careful not to intrude uninvited. He called my name in a whisper; maybe he thought he’d mistaken the wind for my voice.

“Will you come in?” I asked.

He shut the door behind him, like I always insisted: with two brothers like mine, trusting an open doorway with a private conversation was a fatal mistake. All of us under the same roof knew this well; I, to this day, never managed to decode the cipher my parents used to speak secrets in our presence.

“What is it?” he asked. “You’re in bed early. Are you feeling unwell?”

“I’m fine. Can I ask you something, Da?”

“You can always ask.”

That was his way: we could ask anything. He wouldn’t always answer—oftentimes our questions were too hard, too thoughtless, too hurtful—but we could always ask, at least once.

“Do you think He’ll tell us?” I said, gesturing outside towards the remnants of the storm. “The Destroyer. When it’s time to go home.”

He took a breath that already told the beginnings of an answer: I had daunted him, and he needed a moment to think. He ambled forward to stand in front of my window.

“I don’t think He will,” he said, and I know now—maybe I knew it then, too—that it was the honest truth, because it hurt. “I think we have to decide that for ourselves.”

“Do you still want to go home?”

“Always,” he said, turning his head to look at me. His certainty, even gently spoken, was sharp with longing; it was him it cut the most. “Why are you asking me all this now?”

I shrugged. Still I remember the loose thread in my blanket that I twirled around my finger, tight enough to turn the tip white, as I said, “Will you let me fight with you? When we do go home?”

Another deep breath. He sat on the edge of my bed, his back to me, and reached out to brush the hair from my face. I didn’t slap his hand away, because— because. I may not have been afraid of the storm, but maybe, like the twins, I needed his comfort, too.

“I would be afraid. Every minute, every second, I would be afraid to see you hurt,” he said, and my hopes sank with the thought that he denied me the honour of bringing him home. But then he said, with a growing smile, “But if your heart is set on it, I could no more stop you than stop myself, could I?”

I smiled back. “No.”

/

Of this moment, I have no memory; it is not a memory.

But I can still hear the storm raging around us (wrong: there was a clear, full moon in the sky, like a herald of what was to come), quieting the cacophony of death beyond. And inside the storm, stillness. In the stillness there is a humming, heavy with sorrow.

The Griffin’s mask is not my father’s face. And me? I am not the Warrior of Light—the one to whom he turns his rage.

In his daughter who stands before him, he sees a revenant.

“Banish your shade, Arroway!” he shouts, unwilling to know me; too near to madness to see anything but me. “There is no stopping this.”

“Don’t do this,” I beg. “Please. Not for me. We can go home together.”

“There is no stopping this,” he says again—

“Da,” I plead. And I know we won’t go home.

“—no stopping me.” 

I read a story, once, of a daughter whose duty was to avenge her father; whose self was made up wholly of her grief for him. And I thought, one day my life may come to this.

Instead, I have come to this moment. I swallow my tears of— rage, grief, love— and draw my blade. 

/

“I feel like I’m doing some kind of wrong,” Gawain confessed.

“To the boy,” Avis asked keenly, ripping up the last of the bloodstained floorboards, “or to Wulf?”

“I— Both? Wulf? I’m worried he’ll see it as a betrayal. Like we’re getting rid of…”

“I don’t know about you, Gav, but if I died in a tavern, I wouldn’t want a bunch of drunk bastards trampling and spitting and spilling ale over the place I died. And if I owned a tavern—which Wulfric does—I wouldn’t want to have a blood-covered floor welcoming folks in.”

“I know,” Gawain sighed.

“And maybe it isn’t fair to say, but if Wulf wanted to have a say in what we do up here, he’d have stayed,” Avis said—a remnant of bitterness, of hurt.

Gawain met this with a dark look. “No, it isn’t fair.”

“Well, it’s done. We’re all going to have to live with it.”

He considered the pile of blood-dark wood a moment, then said, “Best burn them. So all of him can rest.”

Avis nodded as she rose, dusting her hands off.

“We could ask Wulf if he wants to be there. He didn’t even show up to the funeral.”

If he hadn’t even been able to get himself up a hill, Avis had no high hopes for Wulfric crawling out from whatever hole he’d slunk into in his grief now, but she didn’t say that. She just put a hand on Gawain’s shoulder and said, “Let’s put them outside while I finish up here, yeah? Then we’ll go look for him.”

Gawain helped her carry out the old wood into the alley, and they laid the new floorboards together, clean and quick. The new wood was far paler than the old, unworn and untouched by years of sun; once Gawain pushed himself up to stand and considered their work, he took the sight in with growing unease. Maybe the blood was gone, but the place wouldn’t let go of the boy Marco’s death. It would not let it be forgotten.

When they returned outside, the bloodstained boards were gone.

/

“See?” says the Saintsmaker, both hands on their little saint’s shoulders. They stand together on the edge of the Saintsmaker’s territory, watching as the martyr’s blood returns home. “It is as I said.”

“How did you get them to find it?” asks the child.

“I did nothing of the sort, my dear; my hands were still, and did not toil towards an end. I only knew he would come back to us.”

“How?”

She had a way of easing his nerves. 

Though he prided himself on his ability to be in command of most situations, there were two things wrong with that belief: the first being that it had only been hammered into his mind since tender youth by a man whose word he wished never again to live by; the second that, of late, his life had been a veritable unravelling of any control he might have ever had over himself and his own fate.

It was as though he’d constructed the very circumstances that were sure to make him nauseous with dread. This was not Radz-at-Han, but knowing his family’s reach, he may as well have been standing right at the heart of it. He could have picked any place—distant Kugane, some miserably dusty point in Thanalan, even drab freezing grey Coerthas—and instead he had wandered so close to home, like a lost little boy running to the last place he had seen his nursemaid.

He was halfway through regretting his choice of locale for, oh, the eighth time when the Merlose touched down at a careful distance. Nairel, bless her heart, caressed the hilts of her knives as the captain approached.

To her credit, the Merlose party only outnumbered his by one—and their third member didn’t seem a fighter at all. She was slender, slighter than the aging captain—still strong with corded muscle, and no doubt as deadly as her reputation made her out to be—and wore a complicated loupe on a threaded silver chain about her neck. Most likely the captain had preferred an appraiser to a killer for these particular dealings.

It was the long-limbed Elezen at the captain’s right hand who concerned him, but Nairel at his back lessened his fears. Even with a mess of Void churning inside him, he could still bash heads in without magic, and he had the most vicious five-fulm-and-then-some(-she-insists) forestborn in Eorzea at his side.

“Pavane Malichar,” said the captain, as though the name meant something to her.

“Captain. I trust your journey was—”

“You’ve brought the payment?” asked the Elezen, no-nonsense, eyeing the very conspicuous coin pouch at his belt. Then, evidently critical of its size: “All of it?”

Pavane untied the laces, but didn’t part with the purse just yet.

“I understand and empathize with your wariness—in fact, I very much share it. Mine is a difficult package to conceal without glamours, and I neither see it nor sense its aether.”

The aether part was a bluff, but normally, it wouldn’t have been. And that was the reason Pavane had been grinding his teeth enough to ensure they’d be worn down to nothing by the turning of the next era.

“I am not in the habit of robbing downtrodden nobles just standing on a beach,” the captain said with a dangerous smile, and paused long enough to give power to the sound of waves breaking onto shore. “Not much challenge in it.” She turned her head to the Elezen: “Bring it over, Madelaine.”

Madelaine cast him one last dark look—a pirate’s trade-tool, he supposed—then turned on her heel. Pavane tossed the captain his coin pouch, but she didn’t hand it to the appraiser until her right hand had returned with a long coffer under her arm.

Already Pavane could feel some whisper of power stir within him, stoked by a boyish excitement for the relic that was so close to becoming his.

“I understand my first mate’s apprehension, lord,” the captain said, keeping her eyes on him as she passed the pouch to the appraiser. “That purse seems quite light.”

“Yours was a steep price, Captain. I’d have broken my back carrying the full payment if it was only in coin.”

He was confident in what the appraiser would find when she opened the purse, nestled among the absurd amount of gil that was only a portion of the price. The medallion had been forged, it was said, in the stone-heart of Mhach in the last days before the Flood—the first of House Malichar had made herself, then, the inheritor of her city’s great legacy. And it had been passed down through the generations, from heir to deserving heir, to wear her two-headed serpent upon their chest and signify their birthright.

Never had it been lost. Pavane, as a student of history, knew that it had changed hands outside of his family a number of times—but any thieves that stole it had only ever met gruesome ends. That was House Malichar: his ancestors had set a horrifying precedent for the exercise of their own power, all to the singular end of its preservation.

And he was giving his birthright away for another piece of Mhachi power—to make, on his terms, his own legacy.  

The appraiser fumbled her loupe twice in her haste to inspect the medallion. She took a moment, her expressive eyebrows shifting, then whispered something in the captain’s ear; and, finally, dropped Pavane’s whole life into her weathered palm.

“This is a precious thing you are treating as currency, lord,” said the captain of the Merlose, weighing the precious metal in her hand.

“It more than covers your price.”

“To be sure. Even melted down or hacked to pieces, which would be the safest way for me to dispose of it.” Her grave eyes met his. “Are you prepared for that?”

Pavane didn’t waver, though it seemed to him she spoke from some deep place of knowledge for precious, irreplaceable things. He put on his best, most charmingly twisted smile. “Not to worry. I’ve another,” he said, pulling back his sleeve.

The black scales of the snake wound in ink around his forearm shivered and writhed, a mirage of badly-rendered aether. Even when it was wrong, it was precious. It was his alone.

Nothing showed on the captain’s face; her dark brow furrowed no more than if she were merely trying to read something in a viciously small script. Surely a woman of her age—a pirate, a liberator of immeasurably rare weapons; an Ala Mhigan, by the newly-familiar shape of her words—had seen her share of strangeness. With a small gesture of her head, she ordered her first mate to lay the coffer at Pavane’s feet.

“A deal well-struck, then,” she concluded.

Pavane crouched down with wonder coursing up and down his hands, weighting them as he opened the coffer to reveal his prize: a long-bladed scythe, unadorned in the Mhachi style he had come to know from his family’s archives, brimming with power to harness the Void.

“Indeed,” Pavane said as he rose with the scythe in hand. In his breathless appreciation for the weapon, he felt a twist of envy for the captain and her crew—and the adventure they must have had finding it. He pictured ruins, ancient knowledge, a dark thrill of threat.

The captain nodded to him, satisfied with their business, and said little else before she turned back towards her ship with the appraiser in tow. But Madelaine, the first mate, lingered. 

“Thinking of all the harvesting you’ll do, lord?” she asked with a smirk. “Grass? Wheat?”

Nairel, who until then had been so utterly quiet, said, “Or the one it will protect,” in a tone that gave nothing away. “Do Hearers’ daughters know much about harvesting, actually?”

A flash of irritation passed across her face, barely noticeable, before her expression settled into something else. Curiosity, perhaps.

“You’re Nairel?” she said, with an air like she was almost entirely sure of the answer.

“I am.”

A pause. Madelaine glanced over her shoulder at her retreating captain, then made half a step towards turning before stopping to look at Nairel again. “Is your brother well?”

“He’s alive. For now.”

“Aye,” said the first mate, nodding. She turned to walk away. “I knew he would be.”

Pavane blinked, trying to piece together the familiarity that had just passed between her and Nairel. Why had she asked about—

“Wait, what the fuck?”

Nairel stroked his arm. “Let’s go. I’ll tell you once we’re in the shade; my head’s bloody spinning in this heat.”

/

Morgana’s expectations were, to say the least, low. She knew Feo Ul meant well, as a child might mean well upon deciding to wrap the sword of a parent in ribbons and bells to make it prettier. Their kindnesses were simply… culturally misplaced.

She figured their gift would be something wildly impractical that they would insist she take back to the Crystarium and make frequent use of. Like some gigantic bowl endlessly filled with fruit punch. Or a water slide pinched from Lyhe Mheg. Or a whole stained glass window from somewhere deep in Lyhe Ghiah that would allow her to glimpse herself in the form of a pixie—anything someone more freely frivolous than she might genuinely appreciate.

What she was not prepared to see as she climbed the top of the hill that made up Lydha Lran was Raubahn, flesh-and-blood and horribly out of place in a paradoxically peaceful sort of way.

She would never have done it in Ala Mhigo. Even in the Crystarium, among the strangest of strangers, she might not have dared it. But here, under the pastel sky and surrounded by dream-pink flowers, she ran to him like a lovesick maid and launched herself at him, arms flung around his shoulders with such force that he stumbled backwards.

That rumble in his chest—she had missed it more than she knew. And the scratch of his stubble on her skin, and the warmth of his breath in her ear, and the mountainous solidity of him.

“Are you real?” she asked, muffled against him. “Or are you just—”

All at once, her throat tightened as she pictured him lifeless like the Scions, wasting away in soul-empty slumber—

“Real enough, aye. It feels like a dream, but your friend was adamant enough that I lose weight for the next time they’re forced to carry me across worlds that I’m certain I haven’t fallen. Mostly certain.”

Morgana pulled away to look at Feo Ul over her shoulder for confirmation.

“I will have to return him before he’s missed,” they said. Then, their voice turning to a lament: “How my kingly arms ache! Ah, but there is no need to thank me, my beautiful sapling.”

“Thank you all the same,” Morgana said earnestly, smiling in a way Feo Ul had surely never seen as she looked up into Raubahn’s eyes again.

“Now go on and frolic before these meddlesome pixies decide to keep you!” Feo Ul said with an urgent gesture of their hands, spinning around to hiss helpfully at the residents of Lydha Lran who were presently gathering to watch with great interest.

Morgana mostly ignored this. She lifted a hand to touch Raubahn’s face, to feel him leaning into her touch, and smirked as she fingered the petals of the flowers crowning his head.

“They entertained themselves with you while you waited, I see,” she said.

“They mean to make me stay. Apparently, as your consort, I am to be their May Prince,” Raubahn said. Then he added, in conspiratorial Ala Mhigan: “Whatever that means.”

Morgana snorted. “Well, they’ve made you rather handsome.”

He grinned and bent his head to kiss her, more unburdened than he had been in… far too long. There was no weight on his shoulders, here; only him and his easy smiles, his loving touch. His hands on her waist, and—

The realization gave her pause. Morgana pulled back again, flashing him a perplexed frown, and lifted his cloak: in place of the now-familiar absence of his left arm was a new limb attached to the vestigial, made out of what seemed to be unnaturally supple bark and twined ivy. And from that would-be flesh grew flower buds and sprouting leaves, as vibrant as anything in Il Mheg.

Morgana turned stormily to the clutter of pixies hovering about them.

“What the hells, you lot,” she said, “you can’t force a limb on someone! And him too bloody polite to say anything—take it away. Now.”

A number of pixies cowered; others insisted that it had been very hard work, and it was so very pretty, and her consort had not protested.

“It’s all right, Morgana,” Raubahn said pacifyingly, running his hand down her arm—the flesh one. He flexed the fingers of the pixie’s gift with a pleasant creak of bark. “It’s only for a few hours; I can at least try. Besides, I’m sure it will come in—”

“Do not.”

“—handy,” Raubahn finished, eyes crinkling.

Morgana shoved at him, then turned her head towards Lyhe Ghiah, calling out: “I’ve changed my mind, Feo Ul, you can put him back.”

The king did not bother to peek out from their castle, for Morgana had pulled Raubahn to her by a fistful of his cloak and kissed him very deeply, smiling all the while.

/

“Are they pollen-drunk?” asked Uin Marn as they watched the mortals, hanging upside-down from the branch of a very fine pine. “All they do is grin and stare at each other and barely even frolic.”

Iala Tyr, sitting in their favourite bough with chin in hand, considered this with mild disinterest. Things had been altogether very quiet since the unpredictable Feo Ul had taken Titania’s crown and scepter—and it was not that they disliked the king, but they were so irritatingly possessive of their favoured mortal. And Iala Tyr had promised their bush court some mischief, and a May Queen.

A slow smile spread across their lips. “My gentle Uin Marn, I have something far more interesting in mind for our beloved Titania’s sapling than pollen.”

/

Uin Marn returned from their mission quite satisfied, presenting themself to Iala Tyr with an exaggerated bow. “The deed is done, your dear friend has had their fun!”

Being a pixie of some pride, Iala Tyr did not cackle their joy, but it was a very near thing.

“So you put the petals on their eyelids like I asked?” they said joyously, already imagining the animal-rutting romp that would overtake Titania’s mortal and her consort—and so near to the Fuath’s waters, too! It would fall out better than they could devise.

But Uin Marn only gave them a worryingly blank look. “... The petals?”

“I told you to give them some of the purple flower,” Iala Tyr insisted.

“Make them cakes,” Uin Marn said slowly, repeating what they had understood from Iala Tyr’s instructions. “With the purple flour.”

“Purple flower!”

“Purple flour!” said Uin Marn, distressed.

“Useless moon-blind pixie! Now they’ve awoken and the chance for secrecy is passed—” grumbled Iala Tyr. They shook their head. “We will have to find another way. Aye, we will surprise them both with the flowers, and Titania shall know their mortal is not theirs alone to amuse themself with,” they said grimly. “Now, find the consort!”

“I go, I go!” Uin Marn said, by now quite irritated by Iala Tyr’s reprimands. They twirled sarcastically. “Look how I go!”

Iala Tyr followed closely behind to supervise Uin Marn’s second attempt. It was near the banks of Longmirror Lake that they found the mortals; they approached from a distance, carrying sundry branches and shoreside plants to mask their presence.

The sapling was astride her consort, both mostly unclothed and entirely unaware of their surroundings. It was the desired outcome, and it should have greatly amused Iala Tyr, but at present it greatly confounded them.

“I thought you said you didn’t give them the flower,” they said. “What have you done now?”

“I did nothing!” hissed Uin Marn in return.

Before they could argue further, Titania was behind them both, pinching them by the wings to pull them away from the bank.

“They are mortals,” they said, ignoring Uin Marn’s meowing whines and Iala Tyr’s grunts. “That is what lovers do when they miss one another.”

And so were Iala Tyr and Uin Marn both unceremoniously flung back towards Lydha Lran, so that Feo Ul might leave their beautiful sapling to her deserved furlough from loneliness.

/

“You mean to tell me,” said the Crystal Exarch, in that slow pondering old man way of his he used when he was trying to make sense of something particularly intricate, “that you pulled someone from the Source, whole and without prior prompting, and then sent them home with little more than the memory of a pleasant dream—all this within twelve bells of time in the Source?”

The king tilted their head, blinking innocently. “Should it have been harder?”

The Exarch’s mouth opened. He couldn’t think of a single thing to reply, which, to him, was neither a familiar nor comfortable feeling.

“Might you, then, agree to lend your talents in assisting me to send the Scions’ souls back to their bodies before they have no living vessels to return to?” he said at last.

It was not out of any ill will that Titania gazed at their nails and smoothed their skirts with an evident lack of interest. It was simply in a pixie’s nature that they should reply, “I cannae un-fuck your fuck-up, mate.”

“I don’t know. It feels like a trespass. Like saying your name, or you saying mine.”

Intimacy isn’t a transgression.

“Intimacy.”

Yeah. It feels good.

“It’s not… me. I don’t know that I’m made for it. Maybe it’s why I can only dream of it.”

I thought you dreamed it because I was gone. Because you could have it if I wasn’t, couldn’t you? We’re all made for it.

“Then why did you stay so far when you were still here?”

Ha. Now that’s the question.

I didn’t know I could. I didn’t think I deserved it.

“Funny you should lecture me, then.”

It’s easy to lecture you. Who else do I know like I know you?

Hey.

If I could put your hand on my heart, I would.

Would you let me?

“

Aye. I would.”

See? Maybe you are made for it.

“I think you might be making me better than I was on my own.”

Don’t say that like it hurts.

"It does, though."

I was already dead and gone and lost. You were always enough on your own.

“Once, maybe. It doesn’t feel like that anymore.”

I’ll be with you every step of the way. Don't forget that.

“You don't have much of a choice.”

I already made it. I'd make it again.

I was alone for so long. The silence, it gets so bloody loud, you know. But your kind of quiet—it made everything bearable again.

“I wish… I wish things could have been different.”

I know. But I’ve made my peace with death a long time ago.

"Maybe I should start, too."

Not yet. Not you.

“What if I’m already tired of fighting?”

You don’t need to fight. Living’s enough.

That was always what you were before you ever started fighting, wasn’t it? The balance in every living thing. The balance in you.

“Did you find that in my head or in my heart?”

Maybe I always knew.

“Promise me you’ll stay. You’re the balance in me.”

You don’t need any promises from me. I’m here.