In Zelmonia, the arrival of Denamda II was greeted with cheers during the Fifty Years’ War. Many had always considered themselves Ivalicians unfairly conquered and separated from their motherland, and were in truth entirely unaware that most of Ivalice itself did not feel the same for them. As the Ordallian front was pushed back, back eastward, back across the border, back through Dhalikar Pass, the king himself did tour the liberated nation from north to south, soaking in the adulation of those who had called to him for rescue.
The final stop of this parade was a small island town just off the southern coast, named Golyat. It was a town of honest men and strong women, hard lives but fair. Ships were boarding, including the one that would take him back home, and he knelt in an old broken chapel which failed to drown out the sounds of market-callers, the shuffling of his Lionsguard, a wailing child. He tried to pray, and found himself failing.
O Ajora, make of me a vehicle of thy will, he thought impotently, even knowing that he’d not repent any deed. For what king had right to be humble? Especially he, whose men were golems at his command, whose domain near-stretched the known world? And yet his wife trembled at his approach, his hands still held a pink shade in full sunlight; he was an Ogre of myth.
Maybe it was this that prompted him to, for but an instant, seek atonement in the eyes of God. He left a set of rings, one by one, atop the altar, and walked out with head bowed. Not a man saw this, but one boy did, an altar boy hiding just out of view in terror of the conquering king, and shaken by what he saw then as a symbol of great faith, rather than a passing whim.
So it was that this boy, this Prancet Pavel, would one day name his son for the late king, even after Ordallia took the nation back, even after Prancet ascended to become the abuna for that selfsame chapel, even after being old enough and wise enough to understand that the rings were as nothing to the old king. To understand that there were poisons running deep in the royal family that bubbled up through all the realm like bad well water.
To Denam Pavel, however, it was just a name. A name called out by shopkeepers who needed an errand, a name for his sister to chill like ice as she stomped her foot. A name that his father called out as they dragged him away.
He was hearing it again, his name, swallowed up in stomping of chocobo feet, as he sat on the stone steps of the chapel basement, watching his sister Catiua make stone soup. The building above was still hollowed out by fire, but this was where they lived, often enough at the mercy of those left who couldn’t give up the remains of Golyat, what little the Ordallians and their Valendian dogs had left them.
Catiua was humming a soft song as she chopped the scraps of vegetables, little boons that they’d gathered from those who remained. She smiled at him, dropping them in the pot, and he smiled back, but couldn’t manage sincerity. Only a year his elder at nineteen, and she comported often enough like a mother that he and Vyce...
The calling of his name grew louder outside, and of course it was Vyce calling, but Denam was looking at his sister, and so remembering the Valendian dark knights as they dragged his father away, as Catiua held onto him tightly at the church’s doorstep, lest he follow and make of himself a sheath for Valendian swords.
Catiua stirred the soup with a chipped wooden spoon, watched it begin to bubble ever so slightly in its cauldron. Vyce burst into the cellar with a slammed door, out of breath. She kicked dirt over the cookfire.
“It’s as we heard, Denam.” Vyce descended, wiping his damp hair out of his face. “Lanselot’s returned.” The leader of the Valendian Dark Knights himself, on inspection of the Golyat shipyards, just as the rumors had claimed. The man who’d ordered the town burned. Who’d taken his father away.
He looked up. Tried to ignore that his hand was shaking. “Then it’s time. Right, sister?”
Catiua was not looking at them, but at the cauldron. In the dim church cellar, she was like the witch of a faerie tale. “Time to end this madness.” Her fist was tight and hard around the spoon handle. “We can’t beat him. You know that.”
Vyce laughed, soft but fast, almost manic. “What are you saying, Catiua? You’d have us pass up a chance like this?”
Denam watched his sister’s face tighten, her eyes shut, her head hang. Her arm was tightening, pushing the spoon slowly into the cauldron, which moved with the full weight of her. “It’s foolishness to think the three of us might defeat the Dark Knights.”
For his part, Denam stood, if only so that he didn’t appear to jitter. “They’re the ones who’ve been foolish. And we stand to gain.”
“Don’t tell me you’re scared!” Vyce Bozeck snarled. Handsome, Denam’s age, in light blue plate that he’d salvaged from a corpse a year back or more. “If you’ve lost your taste for blood, I’ll do this myself.”
“That’s enough, Vyce.” Denam pushed past him towards the cellar door. “Let’s go.”
The cauldron broke free from its hook, and scalding soup exploded across the room. Denam watched his sister, who watched him. They breathed at each other for a long minute, and then she reached for her sword.
Denam said a short prayer to himself as they ascended. O Ajora, make of me a vehicle of thy will...
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