#jeanthebean

He can feel Noctis’s power, he can feel Noctis’s strength: the immense magical pulse of him in the world, the bright startling flare of his power and the potential of his blood -- the gifts that could only have been found and trained and honed by his mother Aulea, and Noctis is her son and her best student and Ignis was, still is, grateful for her and for him both and the presence that they have both brought to bear onto this world.

Far below, in the clefts and the fissures and the deep verdant valleys of these mountains, live people with their hopes and their dreams and their families and their love, and these people are under their protection, too.

The thought lingers in his mind for a heartening moment and then -- flash of metal-brazed pinions, harsh scream in the bright daylight, and he can’t stop the lurch of his heart and he can’t stop the vicious oath that he hisses.

Fiends, powerful and hungry, shrieking with their hunger, and still the question remains: what is making them canter and clash rampant in the daylight, and so close to the settlements to boot? What kind of darker magic is at work in this world that is making the nights so dangerous and the days so fraught with fear?

Warmth and wash of magic running through Ignis’s veins -- Noctis is casting, or probably has been casting for a while, given the flurry of fireballs streaking from his fingertips, and Ignis bares his teeth in a joyless grin.

Bow in his hands, the supple curve of it and the tension that it needs, the tension of it that he craves and that runs through his bones and his nerves and his muscles as he plucks an arrow from the quiver riding his hip. Up, up, the tip aiming for enemy hearts, and he draws -- he knows the twitch of his own mouth and the strain in his own shoulders as he completes the movement, and he whispers in a different tongue as he lets fly --

The single arrow becomes three, three become a dozen -- a multiplication of the arrows and they turn into flames as they’re launched out, screeching fire to cast down the feral snarls clustering around and above Gladio, and Ignis nods, once, waits for the next cluster to hit.

“Look.”

Whisper to his right -- Lunafreya’s voice, torn on the wind of her passage as she streaks back up towards Noctis’s position in time to slash another fiend open.

Ignis turns to the right and sees -- nothing but greedy eyes, nothing but slavering mouths, and he drops to one knee for stability, because he needs to be utterly still, if he’s going to attack. He needs to be utterly fastened into himself, into his focus, into the world that’s still and supporting, and he closes one eye and sights -- starts shooting. Arrow after arrow after arrow, precise, carefully timed so he doesn’t have to run out of breath, so he doesn’t tire before the quiver runs empty -- and there’s the impact of supplies arriving anyway, Noctis conjuring another full quiver into the world even as he summons a storm of fire and lightning unto their enemies, and the quiver falls right next to Ignis’s foot so he doesn’t have to waste time, so he can keep attacking, and --

“Hey!”

Ignis’s blood runs cold, suddenly: because that’s alarm in Gladio’s voice -- something else is coming, a larger threat, a more immediate threat, and he swings to look in the direction of that shout and --

Even the peace of the bow in its full tension and flex in his hands shatters, once he understands that there are daemons on the move: once he understands the boiling rage of black ichor on those mountain rocks.

“Fall back,” he screams, and Gladio is already moving and that’s a good thing: but being in the higher reaches of the mountain’s slopes means being isolated, means there’s nowhere to shelter.

He shouts at Noctis and Lunafreya anyway: “You’re going to have to -- ”

“Who are you?”

Voice, new voice, strange and unknown and -- sweet high song of a cry, and Ignis glances upwards and immediately throws himself into a roll, and there are golden feathers falling onto the ledge that he’s been occupying, claws landing right where he was just standing -- golden feathers and a kind spark in beady black eyes.

A cry that he’s never heard in the world -- he’s only ever read about the great feathered beast that’s fluttering its wings for balance on the narrowness of the ledge -- it’s hard to understand that he’s looking at something real, and once he catches sight of Noctis he knows he’s not going mad, because Noctis can see this creature, too, and if any of them would know about how strange and how rare this beautiful thing is, it’d be Noctis --

Thump of bare feet hitting the stone -- the boy, he’s only a boy, his skin stippled in freckles, his hair the exact gold of the bird’s feathers, his eyes like ocean-jewels -- the wind catches on the lengths of fabric pinned to his shoulders and caught in knots on his vambraces -- catches the single magnificent feather that he wears in his hair, like it’s a jewel in its own right. Slender dueling sword on a belt at his hip.

His other hand -- Ignis watches him keenly as he glances down the ravening mountain-side and makes a face, somewhere between a snarl and a smirk.

The boy whistles out a sharp tune and magic shimmers out of him -- not Noctis’s dusk-blue power but something like sunset-hues instead, flowing down the rocky slopes.

“That’ll hold them for a bit,” the boy declares, and then he crosses his arms and quirks up an eyebrow. “Now please answer me. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

“Can hardly trust someone like you, we got here first, we’re trying to protect those villages on the other side of the mountains,” Ignis hears Gladio say, steady mocking good cheer. “They asked us for help and we’re giving it to them.”

“He only looks and sounds ungrateful, please ignore his lack of tact,” and Lunafreya laughs, a little, and Ignis watches her unwind the dust-veils from her face and from her braided hair. “And -- do you recognize me?”

The boy nods, once. “You, yes, I’ve seen you before. You’re the girl who didn’t want to be a priestess.”

“Can you blame me? I do much better with my blades. The gods won’t listen to my words because I’m too rough-spoken for them.”

“The gods don’t listen to anyone at all,” and the boy cracks a small smile. Reserved.

He seems much warmer when his companion, with its wings and its feathers, croons at him and brushes the tip of its beak over the top of his head -- he laughs a little, and reaches out to catch its head in both hands, and he sings back the note that it’s producing, higher, fluttering in the wind. “All right. If you trust them, I’ll trust them too.”

But the smile drops off his face when he glances back down the mountain, and -- he snarls, he honestly snarls, and Ignis finds himself rushing to his side and looking down at -- the rage of hungry shadows, boiling and boiling and rushing towards them --

So he acts, because he’s been trained for this, after all, and he starts with: “Noctis, I’ll take all the arrows now.”

“All right,” and three more quivers appear next to his feet.

“I’ll watch your back,” Gladio says, stomping to his side. Shiver of magic in the air around him, and the greatsword changes into a shield, the pointed end of which he plants into the rock before his feet.

“And I’ll watch his,” he hears Lunafreya say, and she’s speeding up to Noctis’s perch and they’re joining hands for a moment, she’s whispering to him for a moment, before she draws another set of daggers and watches, crouched, next to him.

The boy with the feather in his hair -- has dropped back to lean against the mountain itself, and when Ignis looks at him, his features are screwed up in intense concentration, and he seems to be singing once again.

He’ll have to join the great feathered bird -- “chocobo” seems like such an inadequate name for its power, for the great sweep of its wings, for the bright cry that erupts from its mouth -- in protecting the boy.

And when the first of the daemons blunders through the barrier that the boy had created, Ignis calmly fires an arrow right between its eyes, and puts it out of its misery.

Through the first, and through the next, through the next -- the trickle becomes a flood -- the flood becomes a shattering storm --

Lightning flashing down from the cloudless clear sky, and each striking bolt leaves behind images of shimmering blue.

Lunafreya’s voice, clear and calm and sharp, calling out targets.

Gladio’s shield is just as effective a battering ram as it is a bulwark, and he seems to bat away a particularly large daemon with it so easily, so calmly, though the man’s mouth is fixed in a grimace.

And then another whistle rises above all the screams of the fight and the chocobo itself screams a warning.

“Everyone down!”

That’s the boy, that’s his voice, the song in it shredding away on the fury of the words, and Ignis is already covering his head with his arms, even as Gladio pulls him behind the shield -- he hopes, he assumes, that Lunafreya is, similarly, covering Noctis -- the boy sounds like all the power of winter, suddenly --

Winter -- that suddenly comes to them in a silent snow-hush, cold that sears him right into his bones for only an instant --

He peers around the edge of the shield and the boy is changing, all the golden hues of him bleeding away into winter-white, into snow and ice, and the ominous whistle cuts off -- the daemons scream defiance even as they’re frozen and stilled and shattered into bright bits --