#inviolabletactica

Author's Note: so! introducing our canon/OC dynamic via arguably one of the worst possible starting points. hehe. Vayne is, at his core, too imperial for his own good ; he speaks in restraint, in implication, in the careful architecture of almost. and Kien (@oracletactica) is too distant, too ancient, too accustomed to outliving meaning to recognize love when it's standing right in front of him asking him to stay. this is fundamentally a fic about two people who misread each other completely. one who said everything sideways, and one who didn't realize there was anything being said at all. the tragedy isn't malice ; it's timing. it's two people being exactly themselves at exactly the wrong moment. some lore notes: the sarcophagus, the Oracle title, the waking-and-returning cycle ; these are part of Kien's broader backstory and will be expanded in later fics! this is not the last you'll see of him. (it is, however, the last Vayne will.) the promotional image is made in MMD + photopea + canva. the sarcophagus model by 金牛褶, vayne's model ported from DFFNT.

There was no procession. No line of attendants bearing incense or gilt-filigree standards. No orchestral murmuring of strings to lend the moment its due gravity. Just the hush of wind funneling through the ancient thresholds of the Sochen stone-mouth, and the low grind of mechanisms older than any empire still standing. The sarcophagus yawned open in silence; no ceremony, only inevitability.

The corridor that led to it had narrowed with time, choked by the sediment of forgotten centuries, and Vayne Solidor walked it now as if wading through the very marrow of the world. The scholars and cartographers had cleared away. His boots touched down soft as contrition against the dustless floor; smooth, faintly iridescent, like something polished by hands that no longer remembered themselves. He had dressed simply as usual, though simplicity for him still meant gloves and a teal brigandine. There was no gem at his collar, no regalia. Nothing ostentatious. The Oracle he was meeting had no use for it.

Kien stood already at the threshold. He had not moved since Vayne approached. A dark sentinel, the black of his coat eating what little light magicite lights provided, the black helm gleaming faintly blue along its spine. One gloved hand rested upon the edge of the sarcophagus, not as if to steady himself, not even to delay, merely... acknowledging. The way a man presses his palm to a door he's about to close forever without ceremony.

Vayne paused twelve paces away. He did not speak. Not yet.

He had rehearsed the lines in his mind too many times, discarded every version. The lofty, the pained, the cold, the sentimental. None could carry the weight of what passed between them. And Kien had said nothing. No words. Just the slow, inexorable trajectory of a man returning to his tomb.

Vayne thought of how the first time they'd met, the wind had caught the edge of Kien’s coat like a flag of mourning, and the Oracle himself had stood not like a relic unearthed but a secret finally remembered. He recalled the chill of that morning wind from the Mosphoran terrace, and the strange, unthinking ache that had lanced through him at the sight of that still figure staring westward as if watching history dissolve on the horizon.

He should say something now.

He should say goodbye.

But he did not.

Kien turned his head slightly, just enough that the gleam of the helmet caught in profile. He did not remove it. He did not need to. His voice carried, low and dry and without embellishment.

“This is the last time, Vayne.”

Not a question. Not a request. A simple clarity.

“Yes,” Vayne replied, and the sound of his voice seemed too plain for the stone vastness, like parchment brushed by fingers. “It is.”

And that was it.

No final confession. No sealing kiss or clutching hands or poetic closure. Kien did not ask for remembrance. Vayne did not offer promises.

They knew better.

The sarcophagus had no ornamentation, no sigils to invoke divinity or fate. Only the mineral truth of it; cut deep into the heart of Sochen like a vein of memory. It was not a coffin. Not a crypt. It was a return. A closing of the circle. Kien had emerged from it once already, defying centuries. He would do so again, but not in this era. Not in this time.

The Oracle stepped forward, and the coat trailed behind him like a shadow exhaling its final breath.

“I think…,” Kien said, almost idly, as if musing over weather, one foot already inside. One hand on the cool rim of stone. “I wonder what they will write of you,” he said, a trace of something unreadable curling beneath his words. “A loving brother? A great leader?” Vayne allowed himself a bitter smile. “Only in contradictions.”

Kien chuckled, an exhale, more felt than heard. Then he lowered himself into the hollow. It received him like a lover reacquainted. The obsidian stone adjusted to his weight without groan or creak. One arm folded over his chest, the other at his side. A knight unmade, a relic laid bare not for veneration but forgetting.

Vayne approached. Slowly. His shadow fell across the pale of Kien’s throat where the black helmet dipped away from the collar. In the gloved palm of his hand, he held nothing. Nothing but the space where a touch might have been.

“You didn’t have to go back.”

“There is nothing left here.”

“Then stay,” Vayne murmured. “Stay and watch it all rot. With me.”

Kien turned his head minutely. The narrowest tilt of the helm, faceless. “I’ve already seen one Galtea end, Vayne. I won’t watch another.”

The mechanism engaged. Quietly. With the soft precision of centuries made mechanical gospel. Stone slid against stone, and the lid began to descend.

Vayne did not step back. He watched. He let the stone crawl down, inch by inch, until only the faint blue line on the helm remained visible. A closing eye.

“You’ll be forgotten by history,” he said, not as threat, not as plea. Not as a bargaining chip.

Kien's voice came back muffled already, stone between them: "Then let that be mercy.”

The seal met stone. There was a hiss. A long, drawn breath expelled by the sarcophagus as if the earth itself had exhaled around it. Then, a hum. Subtle at first, low and steady, like a pulse hidden beneath bedrock. Not violent. Not mechanical. A lullaby of stasis. Timelessness encapsulated. The sound of an Oracle preserved beyond the measure of generations.

Vayne stood over it long after. Minutes. Maybe hours. He stood over a sealed stone and stopped tracking minutes. The sarcophagus gave off no heat, no light. Only that low, even thrum; the suggestion of heartbeat without body, breath without lungs. A reminder.

Eventually he stepped back. Gloved fingers adjusting the collar of his brigandine, as if it mattered. As if anything did now.

He did not cry. Not for the Oracle. Not for himself.

But when he turned, the movement was too slow to be deliberate. His profile remained precise as always, the cut of his brigandine immaculate, the tilt of his chin level and imperial. He walked back through the narrowing corridor without looking back, the magicite lights passing across his face in intervals of pale and dim.

No one waited for him at the exit. No honor guard. No priest. Only the corridor narrowing before him, swallowing the last echo of his steps.

And in his mind, the thought, not in words, not even shaped by language, just the weight of it:

He will never see him again.

Not in this life.

Not until time itself forgets Vayne Solidor, and the stone hums awake.

And by then, who would be left to remember either name?

—-----

The hum ceased.

It did not falter, or crack, or gasp, it simply stopped, like breath held too long giving out in silence. And the lid slid open.

Stone split clean along invisible seams, the sarcophagus unfolding itself like a long-buried flower yielding to light it no longer trusted. Pale, dry air spilled into the tomb. Kien’s eyes opened in the dark.

He rose without sound.

His limbs moved with instinct, not memory. There was no pain. No noise. Just the hush of his own breath echoing faintly against the shell of the helmet as he stepped out, armor folding like cloth, the long black coat settling again around his frame as if no time had passed. But the stone beneath his boots was wrong.

This used to be the cave palace.

The ceiling was unfamiliar; jagged, worn with age and neglect, not the deliberate mineral craftsmanship of the underground palace. Moss crept along the walls in lazy curls, and above him, shafts of light bled down through broken stone. Not electricity. Not magicite.

Sunlight.

He stepped forward. The chamber was half-collapsed. One wall had caved in. Ivy and wild roots tore through stone. 

Outside, the land unfurled in foreign silence. Hills soft with grass he did not know. Ruins sprawling like a carcass picked over long ago and forgotten. No banners. No imperial crests. No sound of airships overhead.

The wind carried only birdsong and the hush of far-off bells.

Kien walked.

He did not ask questions. There was no one to ask. The towns he passed were small, low-wooden, medieval, asleep in their own mythologies. The language was similar; but the dialects were new, thickened by centuries, twisted into provincial drawls. Romanda, Ajora, the names meant nothing to him.

Kien, who had emerged from his sarcophagus not with purpose but with the quiet confusion of breath after centuries asleep, had chosen not to seek meaning, only context.

He wanted to catch up.

He wanted to know what had happened while he slept, what centuries had done to the spine of Ivalice. No one remembered his name. That suited him. He’d long stopped expecting memory from anyone but Sarcophagus stone.

He found a city, eventually. A real one. Tall buildings clustered against a river, pale stone and copper roofs, winding bridges over slow water. There was a library.

Kien moved between the shelves like a ghost among relics, trailing his fingers over cracked bindings, scanning the spines without expectation. He read out of sequence, drifting from century to century, gathering the shape of this new Ivalice through treatises and travelogues, memoirs, papers and military records.

He was not searching for anyone.

He was not searching for anything.

At then, one passage. One mention. A fragment tucked between pages of military tactics and noble genealogy. He scanned down columns, gloved finger trailing ink-faded vellum. He saw the name.

The rest of the line blurred away. He read it again. Just that name. It wasn’t even the subject of the sentence, just a clause, a footnote in the margin of history. Vayne Solidor, the twelfth Emperor of Archadia—

What a strange, familiar name. The shape of it scraped something in him loose. He mouthed it. Vayne. 

Familiar...

And then he remembered the hair.

Long. Black as lacquer. Wavy. The ends curling where wind caught them on high balconies. The one dark curtain of a bang that covered half his face and which Kien had once, half-consciously, thought he'd like to move aside.

Vayne.

The memory came not in a flood, but in shards, each one sharper than the last.

The voice ; calm, ever poised.

The brigandine, imperial-cut, always unwrinkled.

The pristine white gloves.

And then it came to him; not a flood but a knife, sliding slow beneath the bone: Vayne’s last words. That soft, quiet pleading, wrapped in politics, masked in rhetoric, clothed in restraint. You didn’t have to go back. Stay. Stay and watch it all rot. With me.

It hadn’t been diplomacy.

It hadn’t been statecraft.

It had been love.

He didn’t say it then, because he didn’t know. Because he had been too old, too distant, too numb to recognize what that moment truly held. The longing packed into every breath of that voice. The way Vayne had lingered, not to speak of power or legacy, but to stretch time ; to keep Kien in that room for just a few seconds longer.

And Kien had left him.

Left him alone, left him mortal. And now he was dust. And Vayne had spent the years after that in the palace's eastern wing, which faced the wind, which was where Kien had stood once without meaning anything particular by it, only watching the horizon dissolve.

A good friend of mine liked the wind here.

That line swam somewhere below the passage about the Emperor's legacy. He found it before he understood he was looking, a footnote, barely a footnote, six words in the margin of a biographical note that was otherwise concerned with policy. The handwriting of the original recorder was careful and impersonal and had preserved the words with no idea of what they cost.

A friend of mine liked the wind here.

Kien wept.

Not with drama. Not loudly. But with the quiet, shuddering breath of an Oracle undone not by war or time or prophecy; but by love, recognized only in its absence.

He had not known it when it was offered.

He had not understood it when it was asked.

He had not named it when it reached for him.

And now;

Now there was no one left to speak it aloud.

Only him.

Only silence.

Only the memory of a name mouthed in a dead library beneath a dead banner in a world that no longer remembered empires.

Only the truth he had learned too late, that the man he had once turned away from had loved him, absolutely, wordlessly, without return. Had reached out in his final moment and asked; not to be remembered, not to be glorified, but to be seen. To be stayed with.

Kien knew that now with the specific certainty of retrospect: Vayne had spent the remainder of his life in rooms where the wind came in right, because once someone he—

Because once someone he loved had stood in the wind.

He had thought he was only a ghost in Vayne’s orbit, a relic returned and unneeded, a duty fulfilled by one man and sealed away by another.

But he had been loved.

Quietly.

Endlessly.

And he, Kien, the immortal, the oracle, the myth, the wandering relic ;

Had waited too long to understand what had been given.

He wept because it was too late.

He wept because Vayne had loved him.

And he had loved Vayne ;

Too late.

motion: seto, sega, minmode

effects: ikeno, haToon

motion: mobiusP

camera: mobiusP

effects: haToon, IKclut