***

“I’m loathe to admit it, but those Romandans have impressed me in this.” Dycedarg was curled up on the settee to one side, holding a glass of wine, regarding it as one might a skull in a theatrickal performance. “These weapons of theirs, these recovered relics, they will bring about an evolution in warfare.”

Alma had toddled in unnoticed, clutching a doll to her with both arms. She was no more than eight years old, and she remembered that doll now of a sudden, that it had also been named Alma, that she’d spent more than one sabbath day asking of anyone at the chapel who’d lend an ear after the fate of the littler Alma’s soul, for which she’d felt so responsible. There was a long ugly stitch in the back of the doll’s dress from where Ramza had tried to repair it after a hound had grabbed it from her. It had been Delita who’d rescued the littler Alma, messing his own clothes such that he’d received a whipping for his trouble.

Zalbaag was uncharacteristically further along in his own glass, though his posture was rigid in the wingback chair where he sat, tome forgotten in his lap. “I find little honor in it, firing a little ball from a distance.”

Dycedarg sideeyed him, and all but submerged his nose in his wine before taking another langorous swish. “Come now, you’re being obtuse, surely. What of it holds less honor than the stalwart bowmen we already employ?

Zalbaag made a face like he’d eaten something horrid, a face that Alma could remember stifling a giggle over. “A man must pull a bowstring of his own strength, of his own will. To twitch a finger is nothing.”

“Poetic and droll in equal measures, my brother, which suits you utterly. Tell not our mages, then.” And then a sly riposte: “Or perhaps you feel thus about those who sign orders? Does his majesty not command from Lesalia with a quill-stroke?”

But Zalbaag never answered, for Alma chose that moment to emerge from behind a desk. Had she hoped to spare Zalbaag in that moment, or had she merely mulled the word over long enough? “What’s emulation?”

“Hello Poppet,” Dycedarg said with a sigh. “What’s this now?”

“What is ablution?” She pouted. Alma was the only sister in a manor of boys, of men, and they so very often spoke in terms she did not know, a secret cipher of blood and steel that she hated, that she longed to understand that she’d not be on the outside looking inward.

“Is it time for your bath, then?” Dycedarg frowned. “Ah, I see. ‘Evolution.’ Yes.” He must then be drunk, to admit he’d misunderstood her. “Very well.” And he lifted her to his lap. His beard scratched at the back of her neck, and she giggled. She couldn’t understand then that he’d more welcomed a tool to lecture his brother than an intrusion. “You see, Poppet, men are like beasts.”

“All living things are blessed by Faram the father of all!” she recited in a sing-song tone, and Zalbaag lifted his glass in toast.

“Quite.” Dycedarg continued. “It is a governing principle of any beast that walks, or flies, or swims, that those best suited to the world shall survive longest. Those who can adapt to change shall preserve their lines for the future.”

“A whiff of heresy to it,” Zalbaag muttered, “that a hume might descend from some chimp in a tree.”

“Ramza and Delita look like monkeys when they’re in a tree!” Alma laughed, and Dycedarg actually laughed as well.

“And what better examples could we find! But alas, your Lord Brother has a point. Scripture suggests Faram did create humes ‘pon the earth, indeed.” He looked at Zalbaag. “But, Poppet, you are quite devoted to St. Ajora, are you not?” She gave a big, wide-eyed nod. “And how does scripture say the Father did this? Did He – poof! – apparate us through magick? Or perhaps sculpt us from clay, and breathe into us like some sort of golem?”

She scrunched up her face, trying to recall, and realized that she could not. Which caused a panic in her, that she did not know such an important thing. Her face flushed.

“Do not fret! For scripture tells us naught of the Father’s methods. Perhaps to evolve is a tool that he used, as a smithy might tongs.” Another glance at Zalbaag. “Or a king might a quill.”

And there was a mighty crash of thunder, and Alma looked up at the stained glass, her hands twisted in knots. Orbonne was without candlelight, and her friend was not there; there was nobody to hold her hands and tell her not to fear the thunder, to laugh and talk of the changing of seasons. The sound echoed through the commoner’s pews, where Ajora’s visage could not be seen, and she slammed her hands over her ears, though they felt like the hands of another.

But she was there, beside her, sitting in the dark; not Ovelia, but...

“She would have been my choice, had we not found you.” A voice like stagnant water, a voice that yet echoed over the sounds of thunder. The woman’s dark skin was like a ripple in the chapel’s shadows, but her eyes were bright and green and fierce, eyes that had taken in all the world and history and found it wanting. She wore a blue headscarf and her robes were red and white, like Ovelia’s but not.

There was the sound of steel on steel, and Alma turned to see what she wanted least to re-experience; Wiegraf Folles thrusting forward into the light of crashing bolts outside, running Osric through and lifting him up, and up, and Osric going limp...

“Please,” Alma whispered, and the woman at her side made a sound like “hmm.”

No, Orbonne was burning and Ramza was pacing through it, sword drawn, matching Wiegraf step for step, and they were shouting at each other about ideals and vengeance. She was outside, being tied to a chocobo, she could feel the rope coil around her wrists, ‘round her ankles, she could feel mob’s roar through her whole body as the noose was dropped over her head, but she was also in here, crying for them to stop. Stop fighting, stop talking, because Osric had been murdered in front of her and Isilud was taking her away, because Isilud would be kind and cruel in turn, and his own father would crush him with a single horrible blow, and...

“And they fight over you,” said the woman, behind her, “But do they fight for you?”

“Ramza does,” she insisted, fists tightened, even as Ramza held an open hand to Wiegraf.

“What would Milleuda and your fallen friends think of this barter you’ve struck? Dreams built on borrowed stone are defiled before they are made!”

How I wish I’d been born a man like you.

Alma wrung out the washcloth and replaced it upon her father’s head. Her hands were stained from the changing of his sheets. The smell of waste and death was soaking into her clothes; she felt damp, and heavy. She followed behind her father, so young that she was still bold, screaming and bawling. “It isn’t fair!” Three brothers and a father, the coded language of men: violence of swords, violence of words. Alma wanted to be holy. She wanted to be noticed.

Tietra hid in the shadows, Alma crawled for light, always grasping.

“I am the light, Alma. I am the holy.” The other woman took her hand, entwined her fingers with hers. “Crawl to me.”

No!

This other woman’s mouth opened wide, and from within a finger emerged, curling over her bottom lip, then another, a whole hand gripping her jaw from within, and the other, pulling the woman’s mouth wider and wider; there was a flash of green, and then a flock of white birds poured out of her, flapping and pecking and swarming her.

***

Her face broke the surface of the water and she gasped so hard for air that it was if all her ribs broke one after another. Her soppen clothes felt like heavy ropes, and when she rose her hand into the air, she saw another hand within it, moving.

Bumps dragged upward from her elbow, from below her open sleeve, like nits, raising into buboes that slid down her forearm, nails piercing through her skin as they traveled, elongated, fingers over her own fingers, twining between them, a hand around her own hand, and other things moved beneath her skin as well, elbows in elbows, knees in knees, and four lungs gasped for breath.

Something fell, two somethings, splashing to either side of her, and she screamed to find them severed, bloody hands that bobbed on the water’s surface. Hands still twitching and curling, hands that groped at her as she tried to swat them away, sinking down before kicking back up against the pull.

Ajora Glabados was a child, filthy from the desert and from poverty, when the abuna touched her for the first time. She was a child, still, when she cut the man’s hands off and dumped his bloated corpse down the wellshaft.

And when he hit the water, it was Alma whose head emerged, mouth full of flies.

She could hear Ajora’s, Ultima’s voice, saying “I am come once more.” Saying it through her.

And through her own eyes she could see her brother’s horror. Her screams were silent, her throat full of the unspeakable, and she did all she could to cease it, smashing her own face against the stone of the well, stone that felt cold and sheer, like crystal, before sinking beneath the waves anew.

***

And something else was burning, some other world, some other time, a fortress that moved, but their dance continued, Ramza and Wiegraf, blades meeting then separating, moving walls between them only to emerge for another blow. Wiegraf’s eyes clearer, her brother’s clouded. Around them at all sides were bodies, students and creatures and pale shimmering things that collapsed into sparkles in the air.

“Ideals are as nothing to them; even on opposite sides, it is the making of war that defines the hume, the man, and it will ever be thus.”

She was curtsying to Agrias, laughing. “Bien sûr, Dame Ser.”

Ramza was standing before Wiegraf in Riovanes; Agrias was standing before Leonar in Almorica. Basch was standing before Gabranth at the top of the Pharos at Ridorana, the light of the Sun-Cryst spilling out around them, igniting the Mist. Igniting all the Mist, white fire erupting from her eyes with the tightening noose.

“Preen and strut as you like! In the end, we are the same! Blood-thirsting carrion birds, Hell-bent on revenge!”

The other woman, Ajora, pulled at Alma’s arm, rotating her, as if they were dancing, as if it was again the manor in Gallionne, the ball, before everything had gone so wrong. And she could see Marche standing before Llednar Twem, deep in the heart of the rift in the Quiet Sands, the crystal to one side between them, a match for the Sun-Cryst.

And Ramza’s blade struck Wiegraf’s, and Leonar pushed back, and Basch turned to block, and Llednar thrust, and Ramza blocked, Agrias blocked, Basch blocked, but Gabranth was emboldened, strengthened by fury, and Agrias ran Leonar through and pushed him back just like Wiegraf pushed Osric, and two Ramzas were winning, one of them was hers and one was very not, but the look in their eyes was so similar...

The woman ran her hand along the crystal. “Fate is merely a word for a program reaching its terminus ad quem; soon it shall begin to execute anew, and nothing shall be learned. This is your brother’s great truth, their language bare.”

Mist coiled ‘round the crystal, and a form took shape, solid smoke and haze and ice, and then armor, fearsome and pristine, a judge’s armor; It’s face was in the woman’s hand, she cupped the chin beneath the helmet’s ugly mask. But as the woman’s grip around the helmet’s face grew tighter, Alma saw that the figure within the armor did not wear it for protection. Its frozen metal scales were pointed inward, and the suit did not end at cuffs or gauntlets or greaves, but instead at manacles and restraints.

“You have returned to us,” hissed Mateus the Corrupt. “High Seraph.”

“Patron of the abducted, the women denied,” said this woman who was Ultima, whose other hand was tight around Alma’s wrist. “You betrayed us in serving the needs of the Heretic Occurian.”

“No!” The armor trembled, even as the woman inside it moaned and lolled. “I did not know! Do not--”

For an eyeblink, Alma’s newest captor had the look of an old man, bald, as she crushed the frozen armor’s head inward with one hand, and then she was herself again, the dark-skinned woman in the blue headscarf, as she jerked at Alma’s arm and pressed her face against the ice-cold crystal, some dead aspect of a Lucavi at her feet and a million million battles behind.

The other Ramza and Wiegraf were all she could see with the tightness ‘round her neck. The moving living fortress of another world, another time, the god eidolon Alexander, burning up. “Another world, another life, another man driven by loss subsumed by obsession with knowledge.” Ajora waved disdainfully at Alexander’s majesty. “Men need not be humes to swallow their own poison. This man of the Lufaine who created this world, doomed all who came to repeat cycles of violence again and again.”

And they were in Riovanes again, and Wiegraf battled Ramza, her brother leaping through a torch’s flame to strike at him, only for Alexander to return as Wiegraf did the same through the fire of a burning bulkhead.

“What difference, in Ivalice? I have watched them all fall to the cycles of pettiness, and I float above in judgment. The Saronians, the Barons, the Palamecians, the Ronkans, the Kashka, the arrogance of men to always believe they will be smarter, be better, for no other reason than their entitlement, believed divine.” Ajora burned white. “There is no difference.”

Alma lost the strength in her legs and toppled, but at her knees she held strong. “You... you are wrong... the difference is always about making a choice.” She clutched at her heart. “You say this is my brother? You know not my brother a whit; he has endured all he has because he made a choice. He’d do all he could to prevent another.”

Ramza Beoulve, her Ramza Beoulve, cut Milleuda Folles down before her. Ramza Beoulve, her Ramza Beoulve, watched as Tietra fell to a crossbow shot fired true.

“Show me all you wish,” Alma murmured through cracked, broken, bloody lips. “It is never too late. Damnation and redemption are not my provenance, but the will of the Father. Whatever sins for which we must answer, it is yet never too late to do the right thing, not for Heaven’s embrace but for the good of all.” And Noah was striking Vayne down even as his neck snapped back.

“Another woman willing to martyr herself.” Ajora laughed—laughed!—and all of Alexander erupted in white explosions. “Let us speak then, of martyrdom, and the Father, with which I am most intimate.”

Barbaneth led her by hand into the chapel, slowly, gently, though walking was still fresh and new. The statue of Ajora behind the altar, with arms raised in supplication, noose dangling free from her neck like a casual scarf, like Alma’s own waterlogged shawl tangled ‘round her throat, and little toddler Alma reached up, up, as if she could embrace the divine, and what her father saw was the child echoing the saint unbidden.

She clasped her hands before Simon, kept them low and in front of her, her head bowed, and his laughter was so sad (Simon branding a screaming heretic with a burning iron), he was saying she was far more pious than he, and she felt so warm...

Tietra was so often quiet, but in the choir, her voice was loudest, the most beautiful. Not even Alma could match her, in the hymns something seemed to fill up Tietra’s lungs and all but lift her off the ground as the highest notes seemed to carry for hours.

She’d thought to teach Tietra the meaning of grace, but she always instead taught Alma, without even thinking it.

And then one sabbath her father was there after the service, and her brothers, and Delita too, and they all picnicked on the grounds. A single perfect afternoon. Dycedarg put his book down with some cajoling and helped Alma identify the birds in the big tree. Zalbaag and Ramza were wrestling in the tall grass. Delita and Tietra laid out and identified clouds.

And as the sun began to set, Barbaneth took the four youngest down to the lakeshore, laughing at the boys splashing each other, and pulled some blades of grass, that he might show them all a trick.

How could she not believe in God, having lived a day like that?

She could feel the woman, Ultima’s, hand on the back of her head, pushing at her, but she dug her heels into the mud of her home and refused to budge.

But there was a cry of agony, and her eyes could not resist turning to view the tall grass again, where Ramza was sobbing, sword through Zalbaag, whose face was mottled and gray.

Lightning struck down, and Dycedarg’s book was burning.

She broke for a run, slipping from Ultima’s grasp, tripping as she ran down the hill towards the lakeshore, her dress soaked and slapping tangled against her legs, feeling the cold of the frozen lake before she saw it. The corpse of Mateus was out there, but as she awkwardly slipped down the hill she fell down to her knees before the sick and wasting form of her father, who was patting Tietra fondly on the head.

Tietra turned to her, crossbow bolt the center stem of a bloody flower across her chest, and burned away to ash.

“Why are you doing this?” Alma bit back her sob, drove a fist into the mud, not bothering to watch her father crumble to pieces.

The armored body of Mateus rose and dragged itself across the frozen lake, but it was Delita, older, his belly full of blood, crushed rose petals in his hands. And then the ice cracked, and he fell, lost to the frozen lake. She reached her hand out, but did not step forward. It was getting harder to see from the tears, or the well-water.

“I reward your faith,” the High Seraph whispered. “No greater servant have I had.”

And Alma woke up in the palms of the Mother Margrace,

And Mewt woke up in the palms of the Mother Margrace,

And Ajora woke up in the palms of the Mother Margrace, her green eyes taking in all the Ambervale as a meal to be had.

She outstretched her arms to encompass it all. Ramza was fighting Wiegraf and Wiegraf was fighting Ramza, back and forth across the plaza, but Ajora turned away from it to smile at Alma.

“You were prepared for me, from the moment of your birth.”

Alma could do naught but stare back.

“Let me show you the weight of inevitability.”

And then the sun began to spin ‘round the globe faster and faster, in reverse, as time rewound. She watched as the world rose (fell) and fell (rose)... and then as it happened again. The Kashka and the Galteans, the Aegyl, the Occuria, and further even than that, to before the Occuria were even mindflayers hiding in a cave, before the Saronians, to a utopia of steel and light and further back still, watching it disassemble back into hamlets and thatched-roofs, back to an era when the world itself was young and unscarred, a world she could not recognize as Ivalice, and back further still, before the people of the world walked as men.

And in this unspoilt land, before humes, before all the others, Ajora walked, through a beautiful forest of purple trees that were unlike any Alma had ever seen, and to a clearing, where she looked up, and Alma looked up, and there was a second moon in the sky.

***

A million million years ago, or so it goes, there was a world of great cities and great innovations and great progress, a world of captivating art and stories that moved; it was a place also of great cruelty, great indolence, prejudice and ressentiment. A world of warfare and capitalism, in which the voices of the oppressed screamed so loud that they couldn’t be heard.

You might once have heard of it.

Through their greed and their apathy and their rage, they destroyed that world, drained it of all it possessed and washed it away; and the few survivors were left to wander the stars without homes, lamenting life’s cruelty and searching for a home to begin again. Once, there were a number of ships, but eventually, there was only one, a ship our minds could not conceive, and upon that ship, the survivors slept, waiting for their problems to be solved by another, as their nature ever was.

But the device that sustained them in their foreversleep failed. They died off slowly, one by one, never waking. At last, there was only one left, a single being with the weight of history draped across their shoulders like a burial shroud. A scientist, mad with grief.

It was within that man, if man he was, that Alma now found herself; sensations of body, of mind were overwhelmed with terms and history and calculations not her own: was this divinity, to be filled with the truly alien, so large that she seemed to expand to bursting?

She’d had a set of Romandan dolls as a girl, a gift from her father; they nestled within one another so tightly that sometimes Ramza had been forced to loosen them for her. She could feel Ajora Glabados swimming within her like a creature of the deep, and within her the white flame of Ultima, that she pressed against this madman’s skin, and felt his sickness within her.

For sick he was; she felt every thought and thought every feeling as her own, a series of naught but ‘what ifs’ that he would run silently as he wandered the dark halls of his vessel, possibilities not branching in web-strands but instead ordered trees, like a naturalist’s categorization, a text, ‘if-then,’ proceeding down each level in turn and then concocting another.

What path might have led to his people being strong enough to live?

There was a hiss of static from one of his, her machines, and then she was Denam Pavel, Denam Morne, turning over the Tarot cards one by one, retracing his steps, searching for a history in which his loved ones did not, could not suffer. The sweat on his face dripped into her mouth and she was drowning.

The man in the ship placed his finger on a button and hesitated before pressing it.

From the red moon of Ivalice came a bullet fired; jagged and blue the crystal came forth, faster than sound, flames of the air in its wake as it entered the atmosphere of the world she knew, the world she didn’t know. Such speed and such force that it cracked the earth apart.

Stone flew into the air and it hung there, suspended like frozen time along a cloud of Mist that came in the crystal’s wake. Dust from the purvama’s rise clouded the sun, and the world cooled and froze over. Around the crystal, mu bunnies danced and sniffed, the first life changed by the second moon, even as other, massive creatures died of the frost and the ice.

She could hear Mateus laugh.

***

Ahnas of the Danan and Heth of the Fabar circled the room at the heart of the labyrinth. These men, not lovers yet, not friends, did circle with hate in their hearts. Ahnas with his sword and Heth with his magicks. Between them, in the room’s center, was a crystal which had come to the land in the times before men.

It was Heth who was charged with guarding the crystal here in the Palace of the Dead, the prison of Fabar, because he who would be the god of death was the only one of them to which the crystal would speak, to sing, and though the lowest floor of the Palace was cold and their breaths were visible clouds that would break apart before their eyes, only Heth’s was thick, would linger, would refract the light into a dozen dozen colors in the torchlight. Heth breathed Mist.

It controlled him, bound him, moved him about as a marionette. All the souls of the world would pass through him like blood in veins. And so Ahnas did not harm Heth, his jailer, but instead smashed the crystal between them into pieces. His sword was no more than steel, but his righteous strength was great and his aim was true. The room gagged and choked on a flood of Mist, Mist that spilled through all the floors of the Palace of the Dead and out into the skies of what would one day be Ivalice, but Ahnas held the other man and they weathered the storm together.

“He loved his enemy as his brother, as more than his brother, what greater than this?” asked Alma Beoulve, and held out her hand, though she could no more touch this vision than any other. “This is Faram the Father you show to me? Then what of my faith has been made untrue?”

It was the Mist that burned ‘cross all the world as the noose was pulled taut ‘round Ajora’s neck. Germonique cried out from where they held him, pulled at his captors as they locked his arms tighter, as all the world burned.

“It was a thing done to you!” Alma showed her Tietra shielding her brother with the last of her strength.

Ajora showed her Delita pulling Tietra over him with the last of his.

Which was true? Both. Neither. It didn’t matter. In truth all these visions could do naught but distract her, contain her, as her body was made not her own. She wasn’t sure there was even an argument to be won. The longer it went on, the harder it was for her to raise her head above the waters.

Another world, then. The Creator, the Keeper of the Crystals, pressed another button. Was this before, or after? A crystal upon one world of two. A world familiar, but different. As the world that followed the slaying of Xabaam, this Ivalice, did flourish into a world like the Creator’s, so too did this world, this Terra, two similar growths, evolution, into cities and towers, electricity and the exchange of coin, toxins dumped into the water. Always poisoned water.

“Ahnas was a man, and his love for Heth was nothing before his hate for Xabaam. Your god is that man, that Creator, who sent his crystals with a finger-twitch, an idle thought.” Ajora shrugged. “He hoped to study, he said, hoped to find the true path that had eluded his people.” The historian Stellazzio was adjusting his glasses to address Ramza. The last Nu Mou was dying in a cave, lifting his jaw to look Ramza in the eye. “His grief was nothing, a veil, for his consumption. No cruelty greater than the callous, uncaring.” Both worlds, hers and this other, consumed themselves and died. But with no crystal remaining, Ivalice continued on to repeat. Terra’s remained, and a single android with a long beard and no heart remained to walk, the Creator’s very shadow, and pressed a button of his own, entrapping his world with another.

She showed Ajora a man in sunglasses cradling her weakened body and carrying her from the desert. Ajora showed her Isilud, strapping her to a chocobo.

Ramza and Wiegraf and Ramza and Wiegraf, circling. Ajora slipped her fingers into Alma’s hair and pulled her head back sharply. “You have not yet seen my truth, you fight to deny.”

“You... haven’t seen mine.” Alma said through gritted teeth. Hob, gob, gob, hob, hob, hob, gob... “I deny nothing. You are the one who fears.”

Gobbeldygook runs his hand along the crude painting, Ultima, and looks at Alma.

Folmarv Tengille’s eyes go crazed at the sight of her.

Ultima could not harm her, not really, not when she needed her so. All she could do was rob her of her sense of self. But Alma Beoulve was stronger than all that, and nobody had ever seen it. She’d so rarely been noticed, after all.

But she was the Goblin Queen.

Her free hand found the stone of the well, and her fingers dug in.

The Creator moved on, giving war to other worlds, giving evolution to other worlds, to study and understand, or to inflict his pain rather than shoulder it. To one world, he gave four crystals, and time curled in on itself. To a world of roses, he granted others, and they locked them away in a tower. But his attention was ever after on those first worlds, the Mist worlds, and they did burden him.

Alma walked through another memory not her own, as her brother and his friends camped at the dried bed of Lake Poescas, the air whistling with the cries of the dead.

Just a clutch, the way they were always splitting and reforming, with Ramza himself asleep by the cookfire as others talked quietly. Dietrich was slicing bits of potato and dropping them in the stewpot, laughing at a ribald jest from Kendra, who had something rolled and jammed between her lips, where it burned softly in the dark and smelled sweet.

Mustadio was sitting on the ground to one side, against a rock on which Balthier was perched, both of them listening to a story that Rem was telling them; the machinist was excited, the pirate far less.

Alma rested her incorporeal hand where it failed to quite touch Ramza’s cheek. Asleep he looked like her brother again, the one who’d left for the Akademy with puffy eyes and a mouth full of promises.

“And at the bottom of the great tomb, behind all of the giants, we found a great airship, we did.” Rem’s tone was fond, but her eyes a little confused, as if some parts of her story didn’t sit right. “Well-preserved, and powerful, and ready for flight.”

“Just like that?” Mustadio asked, and if he didn’t believe the tale, he certainly enjoyed it.

“As if it had waited for us all along.” She placed a hand on her chin. “From an earlier age, it was. In our time, most were the provenance of empires. But this was a ship powered by phantoma itself.”

“Wait...” Mustadio sat up straighter. “You say that word, you said it meant how we’d say anima.” He frowned. “You found a vessel powered by souls?”

“Are not all ships powered by the soul?” Aqua walked up, holding a bowl. “I’ve known many a ship to run on happy faces.”

Balthier rolled his eyes. Dietrich looked from the keyblade wielder to Kendra, whose eyes were clenched tight as she tried to keep her laughing silent.

“Are either of them jesting?” Kendra shook her head, winked.

Rem waited for Aqua to collect her evening meal with polite thanks and walk to another part of the camp before continuing. “It was... people will craft whatever they’re able, in the name of war. I...” She rubbed at her arms, though Poescas was always too warm. “I did not so much like the ship, in truth, but we were...” Not so different from the weapon of war, she didn’t say.

But Balthier, for his part, was no longer listening. He’d started at first to think of his father, of course, of the Bahamut and every other thing, but soon enough instead remembered another campfire, another life. A small floating island not so far from Dorstonis, but neutral; they’d laid up to scrub the vents clean of mimic-germinites and Nono had shared with them glass bottles of something bitter he’d picked up in Nalbina. He was yet new to his new name, and in the twilight and heady from liquor that was stronger for humes than Nono had suggested, he let his mask slip a bit.

“Fran,” he asked his partner, “What... is Mist?”

And the Viera had studied him, then glanced to Nono, who shrugged, and said at last, “Such is a question for the Nu Mou.”

Balthier, who still sometimes thought “Ffamran” when his focus slipped, when his guard slipped, took a slug from his bottle. Head buzzing like it hadn’t since those nights with Jules, making Alma feel hazy, swimmy, he felt hurt, patronized. “I’m rather afraid I’m not of personal acquaintance with any Nu Mou... shall I go on pilgrimage to Mt. Bur-Omisace?”

Fran, who once had made such a pilgrimage, said nothing. Because this young hume, she trusted him of a sort, but she had not told all of her own tale yet, still heard the name “Balthier” and thought of another man. Nono sighed, which sounded more like a drawn-out “kupoooo,” and stood, wobbly with drink, leaving Fran to the conversation alone. She did not sigh, she never sighed, but her lips set in a way that Balthier would one day translate to mean the same. She had pried loose her elaborate Viera heels and dug her feet into the dirt, feeling the pulse of the floating earth. The purvama was raw Mist, these islands just boats on stormy seas.

At last she looked at him. “Hume life is too short to consider death in more than passing.”

He pouted, waggled the bottle. “Because it is short, we must needs consider it far sooner.”

She would one day watch him die, withered, in a bed; having given up all chances to burn out brightly—burning Mist across the sky, noose tightening—she would huddle under the last stone, the last gift, clutching her sister, one hand on her belly, on a child that would take years and years to be born, long after he was gone.

She stands, and does not take his hand, not yet, but he follows anyway. He always follows. And Alma follows, as they walk away from the ship, away from Nono tightening bolts because he knows not what to do with himself, to another edge of the small island, with all the sky before them.

“Hold out your hands,” she says.

And because he is so often mystified by her, because her tone is gentle, not reproachful, because his walls are weak from the drink, he does, over the edge, above nothing. And nothing happens at first, but because she is patient, he will prove he can be patient, too. He can be silent, he can be still; because he thinks she respects him now, but he suspects she yet does not like him much at all. He holds out his hands and waits, even though he lilts, he tilts, just a bit in the winds of the purvama.

He can’t often see the Mist, at least not out of Jagd, or some broken-up temple ripe for plucking. What he sees is empty sky, his home. But the longer he holds still, the more he wonders if he does see it, the more he wonders if the chill his palms feel is real, even as his face is warm. And then, faintly, it’s there, cupped in his hands, a snowfly.

And Alma is holding it, too, her hands over his, floating in the air, this beautiful white nothing, bobbing in the wind, turning, dancing.

And years ahead, years past her own death and her brother’s and everyone she’s known, years after an old man writes a book, after the truth wins out, after the church begins to crumble in the face of a changing world, after the final lighthouse is lit, a man named Ashley Riot walks through the snow, face stone like a temple edifice, doubt curdled in his heart, and the snowflies are everywhere in the trees, he’s watching them, and his heart aches in a way he doesn’t understand. He runs his fingers over the rood ‘round his neck, holds onto a memory he prays to be true, and watches them circle.

She sees them in the Palace of the Dead; she’d thought them shards of crystal, or spores of the mold along the walls. She sees them born of love, of hate, with a crystal shattered, circling Ahnas as he shields Heth with his own frame.

She sees more and more of them, like dots printed in rows, like the pixels on Marche’s television screen, and they zoom out, and they zoom out, and she watches them burn.

The Mist is but stagnant souls hung in the air. The crystal a recorder.

The Creator kept trying. Two worlds, he sent to each eight crystals. And history repeated. In one, two worlds merged. In the other, a moonship escaped a dying world to re-seed a new one. All paths led to the same end. The latter exercise so infuriating, so hopeless, that he returned to it, returned to its success and its royalty, returned to the Lunarians’ colony and sought to erase its proof of his failure himself. And as his ship died, as his primal scream chased the half-moon child’s army back to his world, as his dream died, Alma watched and lived his anger, knowing that on Ivalice the pattern repeated without even a crystal, that the Salon at Giruvegan grew in power, that they would emulate their Creator’s pattern as every world had.

And she was so tired. She fought with love, and saw truth and beauty in the faces of those she witnessed, in the struggles for freedom, freedom was all any of them ever, ever sought, she was emboldened, but so tired.

Her hand yet held, but she felt so heavy.

They marched her, Ajora, through the streets to Golgollada, and she was so tired. For a moment she was Orran, instead, and she started to cry. But the gallows grew closer, and she would not let them break her at the end. She’d not let Germonique see her weep.

“You can stop this,” she whispered.

“Why would I?” asked Ajora.

“I speak not to you,” she said, “But the woman you wear; I know she lingers still; she was stronger than I, you’ve proven that time and again.”

“We are the same.” Ultima’s voice was soft, like falling feathers.

“You are not.” She shook her head as the noose was lowered around her neck. “You shared a common pain, but I do not. You seek to make our cause common, but what you show to me is not a truth of value.”

“My power cannot be resisted forever,” said Ultima, and Alma offered a weak smile as the rope pulled taut.

“You gave that power to me.” And she refused to let the Mist burn.

The experience of being hanged. It is not a quick break of the neck; it is an agonized, slow strangulation, feet struggling to find purchase, the world hazing as it contracts to a single flickering dot. It is unlike anything else. Each part of her goes numb in turn as the blood ceases flow... it feels like turning to air. To Mist.

And for a moment, she thinks that she’s made a mistake, that this fallen angel has been right, that she is yet another woman self-sacrificed to keep the wheel turning.

But her hand holds.

Her hand holds.

And she feels another hand, a woman’s hand, take hers.

***

And light did pour from the mouth of Ajora, Ajora in Alma’s flesh, a bright awful light that caused each of them yet standing strong on the airship deck to flinch back; save for Ramza Beoulve, gazing eyes open into the awful blinding flash, tear-streaked, and sole witness to Ajora clutching at her abdomen, doubling over as her back erupted in cobalt blue flames.

“What...is this?” She took a step backwards, the light flickering as her mouth moved. “What happens to me?” But Ramza knew. He knew. He struggled to stand as violent winds roared through the Necrohol. That face, caked in Folmarv’s ichor, constricted as it fought against itself.

“Unghhh... Ramza... please.” His sister, his real, precious sister, gasped out fresh blood. “Help me...”

***

She stood in a garden after the end of the world. Well-kept, growing, and smelling of life and love and home.

Alma had never grown anything. She used to watch the men of the grounds plant the flowers with envy, but Dycedarg wouldn’t hear of it, a Beoulve digging a hole with her hands.

“There are ladies of Quality who have gardens,” Zalbaag offered off-handedly in her defense.

“They choose colors to array,” fired off her eldest brother in exchange. “They do not stick turnips in the ground themselves like a peasant.”

She walked up one row of plants, letting her fingers trace along the leaves and stalks. There were all kinds of plants, but most of all there were pumpkins, dozens and dozens of them, meticulously cared for pumpkins, all but ready to harvest. And at the end of those lines was a small home, colorful and neat, with smoke rising lazily from a chimney and looking for all the world like a candy house in a story. It was, she realized with a bit of guilt, how she’d imagined Tietra’s home to be, before she and Delita had moved into the manor.

She went to knock upon the door, but it swung open at the first touch; the warmth of a baking oven and the light of candles beckoned her inward. At the kitchen was a woman in royal purple, a dress that showed more skin than Alma had ever seen of another person outside the baths, and for an eyeblink she seemed a crone before she turned, smiling, the most beautiful woman Alma had ever seen. She had a mage’s steeple-hat of the same shade, and she hustled to the dining table even as Alma sat across from her without being told.

“Goodness! You nearly caught me without my face on!” The woman winked, crossing her legs ostentatiously and leaning against the table. “It’s all right, now, you’re safe in here.”

“Who are you?” she asked, but she already knew.

Deneb Rove rested her chin in her hand. “The irony of me, the irony of you, here together; I am everything you fight against.”

Malicious spirit, haunter of the Cataclysm, seducer of the Saint King Mesa; Destin Mesa-al-Solidor, nee Faroda, founder hero, vile conqueror. She was a heart in a puppet; another girl sacrificed.

“You’re the first, aren’t you?” Alma knows what the High Seraph knows. Time was, is, nothing. “You’re Lilith of the Danan. The first fiend.”

“The Danan... a name of which I’d thought naught for a thousand years or more.” Deneb chuckled. “Humes care so much for history, when they see so little of it, and believe even less. If you ask if I knew them, We’aka and Zomal and Loemund and Matoya and all the rest, I’ll not deny it. But you should know yourself how rude it is to ask a lady her true age.” And she winked.

She wasn’t sure what she’d come here to ask. Wasn’t sure how she’d come here at all. So she asked “Why pumpkins?”

Her smile became something warmer, like a mother’s. “They are just... they look so full. And they are, full of life. I love life. I suppose that’s why I keep living.”

“But you take the lives of others.” Alma shook her head. “You love your own life, not all life.”

“You must love yourself first, Alma Beoulve.” Deneb shrugged. “Men will not love your life enough to let you live it, you must live for yourself.” And she saw Deneb, Lilith, suffer at the hands of the oldest gods, driven from paradise.

There was a peal of laughter, and she turned to find Ajora Glabados sitting at the table, between them, and it was the real Ajora, the early Ajora, whose eyes, those consuming green eyes, held as much wit and life as they did malice and pain. She was still holding Alma’s hand.

And Alma saw another world, where a different heart in a doll split her life apart and gave it away in a dozen crystals, until there was nothing of her remaining.

And she saw another, where a flower girl was run through with a sword the length of the world.

And she opened her eyes again, and Tietra was at the table with them, and Alma’s tears began again. Not well-water tears, but real, salt she could taste and swallow. Tietra bit her lip, looked uncomfortable but alive, so alive.

“Hullo, Alma,” she said, and Deneb made a sound like “awww.”

And she saw a woman dancing, turning, her feet on the water’s surface, and the Mist moved with her. Because they weren’t only for the dying. The Snowflies gave her family. Another world, another language, a reach across time.

And she saw Ajora taking lessons. Lessons in poise and how to fake a smile. She’d never needed lessons in killing, or in dancing either. She saw Ajora teaching by the side of a lake, laughing at the joke of a child. She saw Ajora screaming in terror at her own actions, smashing an antique mirror, sobbing over Balias in a private chamber. She saw Ajora run her fingers along Germonique’s face, tighten, then release.

“Did you believe the lie before she found you?” Alma asked her.

“There is too little left of me to remember the truth.” Ajora shook her head. “We have been the same for twelve hundred years.”

Tietra giggled. At a look from Ajora, she blushed. “You’ve no idea; Alma Beoulve is the most stubborn woman to ever live.” Alma clutching Tietra’s hand, leading her into caves, into unused studies and storerooms, up hills. If she’d been so much braver, it was only because Tietra had been there with her. She’d never done so well when she was alone.

But she was not alone here; she was downright crowded. Aqua was laughing softly and telling Ramza, “You’d be surprised, how many hearts can fit in one. Our endless capacity.”

Deneb yawned, and for but a moment her tongue was forked.

Ajora swept her free hand over the table, and there was a splintering sound as the wood’s grain evened out, then split again, until there was a grid of squares between them. And then the chess pieces appeared.

On Alma’s side, the pieces were switched; she was the king, and Ramza the queen.

She moved a pawn, and then Ajora did the same, and then her, and then Ajora again. Without thinking, without control. Ajora’s pieces the Lucavi, the church. Alma sent out Ramza’s Company Zero, but she had little schooling in tactics; Ajora claimed Dorothea and Bran quickly.

“You envied Agrias Oaks.” Ajora spoke without cruelty. Ajora spoke using the past tense, cruelly. “She grew up with brothers as well, and learned the sword without them.” She moved the Agrias piece, which was of course a knight, and she saw Agrias with her sisters, three women pledged to serve. The pride made them glow; they showed Ultima for a parody. “Three women, and only one remains, betrayed by her faith and the crown she served. The sword is not the only choice for a woman to wield. Her strength is impressive, but it is not her who fends me off here, now, it is you. It is you who battles Ultima yet. You have fear on your side, Goblin Queen.”

The table cracked again, and the board enlarged. Two other armies took to the field. Deneb had at her hands Denam Morne’s, and she lifted the figurine of Lanselot Hamilton and gave it a kiss on the cheek. Tietra’s forces were obvious. But Delita’s queen was not Alma’s dear friend, but a witch of the Dark. Deneb winked at Alma.

“I never learned to play,” Tietra said, and Alma remembered cajoling Ramza, pounding her tiny fists on his back, demanding he show her the game. The language of men, she’d felt. Her father had loved her at arm’s length in that way men do with girls that they admire without attempting to understand.

“Just do as your brother would,” said Ajora, and Tietra looked at her with hate in her heart.

“Aye, then I shall.” And she swept her arm across the table, scattering the pieces that she and Ajora held both. Cu Chulainn fell off the table and clattered beneath a chest of drawers.

“Oh, I like her!” Deneb clapped her hands. “I would have worn your skin happily, Miss Tietra.”

Tietra blanched.

The table cracked again. The Northern Sky and the Southern, The council of nobles, the Corpse Brigade, the criminal syndicate of Sal Ghidos, the Dark Knights of Valendia, the Warriors of Light, so many factions that no one could discern the pieces, but they slid about on their own now, and Alma watched as they took each other off the board.

So much death. Alma grabbed Tietra’s hand with her free one, for Ajora still held her.

“Tietra... I am truly sorry. For everything.”

Her best friend, her sister, blinked, then smiled sadly. “Alma. You always wanted to be a saint for the Lord. And all these moving pieces... I do not understand it all. But even were we truly the pieces of a large infernal machine... if my purpose was to lead you here, I cannot regret my fate...” A single tear escaped her right eye, and she turned her head so that her hair fell in a veil. “I only wish... my brother...”

Alma closed her eyes. And felt anger.

“What better reason to be kind?” She heard herself ask. “If we are all we have?”

And as his ship died, as his primal scream chased the half-moon child’s army back to his world, as his dream died, and as Alma watched and lived his anger, The Creator pressed one final button. Because it was the nature of man to live on, to refuse the cycles of their own making. And one last crystal was launched. Through time and space, a bullet backwards into the origin of everything, into the space parallel to space. Not a recorder, but a memory—a tomestone, that someone would learn from his own mistakes.

And into the beginning of another cosmos it fell, a repository of all evolution, of all cycles, of violence and joys, that a new beginning was possible. That it might implore a new life to learn. That it would succeed where he had failed so often.

“Hear,” it cried, she cried.

“Feel,” it cried, she cried.

“Think,” it cried, she cried.

And Ajora clenched her hand tighter. Alma could feel the well water again. “Time grows short. We all drown together soon.”

“We do not.” Alma shook her head. The pieces on the board kept moving, eliminating each other, fewer and fewer remaining. “Open your eyes,” she told Ajora, or herself.

And they were not playing the game at all. Ultima watched as The Creator pushed his pieces, and across from him, across a table of a billion squares in five dimensions, a game of time and probability, of evolution and chance, played his opponent, with a figure like smoke and two eyes of burning embers.

And Ultima screamed.

And Venat slid Alma’s piece one square, placing Ultima in check.

The High Seraph raged, and the cottage burned, and Tietra fell to the bolt again and again, and Deneb vanished into dust, and Alma watched Ajora buckle under the weight of her.

Alma held her hand tight.

And Ajora remembered making her promises. To her teacher. To Balias. To Germonique.

“Alma.” Ajora looked at her with those piercing green eyes, the eyes that burned the world. “You must promise. I will not be able to hold her for long.”

“Have faith.” Alma smiled, and Ajora laughed, because she did. She did.

Ultima grabbed Ajora, both her sickly green hands around Ajora’s face, as though she’d crush the very mind, extinguish the very anima, that had held her for so long. And Ajora smirked at this thing that curled around her all her life, and felt freer than she ever had, free for the first time since her birth.

And with the weight of twelve hundred years, she shouted.

“I am no false saint for you to use!”

And the sky burned.

***

“Alma!” cried Ramza, and he reached out his hand.

“Ramza... No!” Ajora grabbed her own outstretched hand. “You cannot--! You must not--! NO!”

The blue flames roared, and stranger still were green flames that erupted as well, not intermingling, consuming the silver-haired distortion of Alma Beoulve, and Alma’s jaw seemed to unhinge, as a pair of hands unfurled from within her throat... and in a violent retch, Alma seemed to expunge a flickering, swelling figure. It was launched from her like vomit, in a way impossible to fathom, blood-soaked and unwrapping into a mass of wings. It curled int the air, turning in a somersault as feathers rained across the deck. Mustadio, true to form, did not wait to fire upon the cancerous hume-like projectile, but each shot burned in the air before reaching it. Alma was falling even as this other thing righted itself with a damnable grace, as Agrias thrust her free arm to one side and let off an incantation of protection on the assembled party.

Ramza was diving to catch his sister’s limp body as this floating woman, shimmering and seemingly sculpted from blood itself, did extended its own arms. Its naked figure, a sick parody of the feminine form, was wreathed in holy light and winds, and tattered sails snapped off the bowsprit where they dangled and ballooned around her, the deck cracking in twain as machine parts flew upwards into the storm.

Alma was already losing so much of her visions, they were desiccating in her hands, but a single image of Vayne Solidor atop the Bahamut appeared, then vanished, as they watched the sails wrap around her into a white dress, as the assemblage formed a platform of gears and workings beneath her feet. Ultima, the High Seraph gazed down upon her foes with surprising lack of passion.

“Alma!” He clutched onto his sister, his living sister, his very heart. “Are you all right?”

“I... I will be.” Her voice was hoarse, throat mangled with the scars of her departed possessor. “But Ajora—you must kill her... quickly...” I promised her.

Queen Louveria Atkascha's eyes instinctively went to the newborn baby in the nurse's arms as the carriage bumped hard over something in the marsh. Then, catching herself, she turned instead towards the fourth and final passenger, whose gaze hadn't left the window.

“Must they jostle us so?”

The man, whose eyes were partially obscured by the elaborate, elongated-skull shape of his dragoon's helmet, showed what most would find to be a scandalous lack of protocol in not turning to acknowledge his queen. “The Siedge Weald is rough terrain for all, your majesty. It can't be helped, save we saddle you to a chocobo directly.”

“Disgusting.” She sniffed. “If I must be dragged halfway across Ivalice on this errand, I shan't be doing it birdback.” The nurse made a little gasp, and it was all Louveria could do not to roll her eyes. The nurse was lowborn and Galgastani besides; the Queen was nearly surprised she could understand basic sentences. Now she was to believe the woman was also a believer in St. Ajora?

The baby gurgled in a way that seemed prelude to a peal.

“You seem quite entranced with the view, Ser Garland, given the Siedge Weald is naught but a damp forest at best.” And of the season, far worse. With the brief melting of the snows in the Felmarian Highlands around Gollund and a higher-than-average rainfall, areas south and downriver of the Highlands were practically swampland. The chocobo train leading the carriage kept slowing as it would moor and unmoor itself in the mud that had once been the only cleared roadway through the forest.

The captain of the Lionsguard's lip turned up slightly. “Your majesty, we have come separated from our escort.”

It had been the tradition of the Ivalician royal family for generations that the Queen herself would take her firstborn to the Church of Glabados's seat at Mullonde in person to be baptized. In the hypothetical, it was meant to signify royalty's continued alliance with the church as much as it did a celebration of the child's birth. In truth, Louveria considered it a power play by church officials, that royalty would come to them, rather than vice versa. That the twenty-seven year-old queen alone need attend was what galled the most; that it was viewed as less aggressive because she was, to be pointed, less important.

Historically, the king still did travel to Mullonde with his queen. But Louveria's own husband, of course, was quite ill.

They had left the Royal City of Lesalia in gay pageantry and a hundred strong. By Gollund, however, much of that group had peeled away. Traveling in such numbers was often harder than in fewer. Her official decree to the people had been that in war's wake, the people of Ivalice did not need to see soldiers marching in their streets, regardless of the reason; but in truth, Louveria just didn't see the point in parading for the rabble. They'd not appreciate what they saw, anyway. But they'd still kept a company of twenty in the interest of security, a half-dozen of those mounted – they, at least, had been able to keep pace with the carriage. But now they were missing.

The baby began to cry.

“We shouldn't have come through the Weald,” she muttered.

Garland Verdun shook his head; his helmet made scraping noises. “We'd no choice, if we didn't want to travel through desert.” The Siedge Weald ran through the southeast borders of Gallionne – taking the mountain pass and traveling through the Merchant City of Dorter was the only southern path that didn't wind through climes that, to put it mildly, would put the newborn at risk. They could have traveled northwest of Lesalia, through Fovoham, but then they'd be favoring the Grand Duke Barrington's hospitality over that of the Merchant's Guilds, and the royal family had just levied higher taxes upon them, so...

If she was to die in a bog, please let it not be for such dull politicking.

Ser Garland thumped the outside of the carriage with one gauntlet and it rolled to a stop. Louveria could hear the birds warking and kwehing at the sudden halt in dangerous territory. He swung out with the door and closed it behind him, his face appearing in the open window. “Tarry here, your majesty.” And then he was gone.

Louveria turned to the nurse, who was trying to quiet the newborn. Until he was baptized in the name of the Great Father Faram and St. Ajora, the baby boy was nameless: a quaint tradition no doubt spurred by the number of children lost in the birthing.

“There there, wee one.” The nurse rocked him. “Your mum's just worried for your pa, that's all, no need to weep so.” The boy showed no signs of ceasing. In his wailing face, Louveria could almost see his true father's eyes, and she shuddered.

“There are goblins that have encamped in these woods before,” Louveria offered. “The Order of the Northern Sky has been trying to weed them out for years, but with so many at war all this time...”

The nurse, whose name was Eilonwy, rocked the boy. She had the darker skin of the Galgastani people, but something hawkish in her features suggested Romandan blood as well. She'd been plucked, apparently, from a kitchen somewhere. “Perhaps it's the moogles.” This to the child. “Long, long ago, these woods were full of the wee flying little beasties. Yes they were!” Louveria didn't give this faerie tale more attention than it deserved, smoothing out her dress and taking deep breaths. If it was going to happen, it'd likely happen... now.

There was some muffled shouting outside the carriage. She tried to see what there was to see from the window, but there was naught but a bubbling circle of what looked like gray mold, beneath a hunched tree resembling a gallows. How auspicious. Ser Garland was a celebrated veteran of the Fifty Years War, having served some degrees beneath Barbaneth Beoulve himself in the Order of the Northern Sky. She knew he would not fail her. But that sight from her window did give her pause.

“Your majesty?” The nurse, apparently quite scared, forgot her place. “Would you like to hold him?”

Before Louveria could reply, a man in the night screamed in what could only be his death.

They both looked to each other, then to separate windows. There was nothing there but the sour haze of the Weald, but they each of them kept squinting out, trying to catch a flash of steel. Because it had certainly come upon them now. There were men warring in the muck. The grunts and crashes carried. It didn't sound like magick, which was blessing enough – a stray fire spell was like to ignite the gases swimming in every popped mold bubble. It was said there was fungus in these woods that could kill with a breath.

“Is it bandits, your majesty, or the goblins?” asked the nurse.

“I can see no more than you, Eilonwy.” Most importantly, the fighting was still in a single direction, and those sounds moved no closer. She sat back and closed her eyes, thinking and counting.

“I am quite sure Ser Garland will protect us.” The baby seemed less sure, as he was howling. Her little minotaur. “T'isn't fair.”

“There's little 'fair' in a bandit's design, Eilonwy.” She said the woman's name the way that one might idiot.

“No, your majesty, I just meant...” She looked down at the boy. “That they'd hate you so, just for St. Ajora placing you above us all.”

Queen Louveria's mouth opened and closed, but no sound was forthcoming.

And then a corpse attacked the carriage.

Eilonwy shrieked and Louveria lurched backwards as a man's body slammed hard against the side of the carriage, rocking it and (in the moment) making Louveria believe it might tip. Its face was pressed against the window, or at least... half... was. She could see the man's skull, part of it, from where the flesh had been peeled back by blade, and the empty socket seemed to swallow her.

The boy had, oddly, stopped crying. Queen Louveria Atkascha knew that were the dead to rise, they could find worse targets for their rage than she.

And then the corpse was falling backwards, and Ser Garland was standing at the carriage's riding board, slapping again the outside, and the chocobos were moving, at a much faster, more frantic pace despite the uneven footing. Eilonwy clutched the boy closer to her bosom, and Louveria's nails gripped the fabric of her seat.

“Your majesty, we are betrayed!” From his place riding alongside, Garland called in to her. “They were of our own company!”

“Our escort?” She asked.

“Over half, bought by some unknown enemy!”

“They smell blood in the water.” Louveria crossed her arms. “Fools to a man, they are. The king's health improves by the day.” Eilonwy brightened at this, and offered her a smile and a nod. “But who in the kingdom could even offer the coin to turn members of the Lionsguard?” The Lionsguard, naturally the personal guard of the Ivalice royal family, was not merely a prestigious position, but one appointed only to war heroes like Ser Garland; and ones in noble families not well-enough connected to be threatening, at that.

“Perhaps we should indeed have gone north through Fovoham after all,” Garland muttered, but something in his tone of voice caught Eilonwy's curious attention. Louveria almost smiled. Then she saw the boy looking at her, and something in his gaze was like the dead eyes of the man who'd hit the carriage door.

***

The beginning of the Fifty Years' War can be traced to the death of Ordallia's King Devanne III, and his failure to name a successor. His cousin, Varoi VI, was next in line for the throne; however, King Denamda II of Ivalice—the uncle of Devanne III—proclaimed himself the rightful heir and declared war on neighboring Ordallia to the east.

However, this was merely a pretense to justify the invasion of the Ordallian province of Zelmonia, which bordered Zeltennia—of which it had, centuries earlier, been a part. Long an independent state, it had been annexed by Ordallia nearly a century prior. Ivalice had since been aiding the province in an effort to weaken Ordallia—an effort that ultimately failed. Tired of Ordallian rule, the Zelmonian leadership and nobility secretly petitioned Ivalice to take a more direct hand in their liberation.

After a victory in Zelmonia, the Ivalician armies marched on the Ordallian capital of Viura. As fate would have it, Denamda II succumbed to fatal illness on the road. The momentary confusion amongst Ivalice's troops gave Ordallia the opportunity it needed to regroup, and Varoi VI succeeded in pushing the Ivalicians back as far as Zelmonia. The resulting impasse would not be broken until the Romandan army's invasion two years hence.

Romanda, a powerful military state to the northwest lying across the Rhana Strait from Gallionne, marched on Ivalice at the behest of Varoi VI, a blood relation of the Romandan nobility. However, Denamda II's successor Denamda IV was a fearless warrior, personally leading his men into battle against the combined might of Romanda and Ordallia. This, along with an outbreak of the Black Death in Romanda, forced the Romandan army to withdraw after only three years.

Two military orders worthy of particular mention in this conflict are the Order of the Northern Sky, led by Knight Gallant Barbaneth Beoulve, and that of the Southern Sky, led by Cidolfus Orlandeau, known also as the Thunder God.

After countless victories at home, these two orders had been poised to advance into Ordallia. However, the protracted conflict had begun to take its toll on domestic morale. Peasant uprisings and revolts throughout Ivalice and Ordallia forced both countries to send their troops home to pacify their own citizens, resulting in another stalemate.

It was Denamda IV's sudden death by malady that broke the stalemate, although some claim that he was murdered. His successor, Ondoria III, was ill suited to the throne, and left the governing of Ivalice to his queen and retainers. Without Denamda IV's leadership, the armies of Ivalice had little prayer of preventing Varoi VI's successor, Prince Augustus Lennard, from defeating the troops stationed in Zelmonia and advancing into Ivalice proper. Despite the valiant efforts of the Northern and Southern Orders, Ivalice's leaders soon began looking for a peaceful alternative.

***

1995 OV / 1232 ZA

Month of Gemini

Mullonde Cathedral was the figurine at the center of the confection that was Mullonde itself, a small island in the south of Gallionne, where the Black Coral Sea opened up into the Bugross. The entire island was taken over with what they called the “Holy City,”  a series of tiered pavilions and hanging gardens that hid away the Glabados Church's infrastructure. From the causeway where Queen Louveria stood holding her newborn son, it looked like a sliding-tile puzzle that she'd been gifted as a child, an image scrambled into tiny squares.

It was a labyrinth, or a fortress, in architectural evening wear.

The rest of the ride to Mullonde had been uneventful. When they'd reached the Magick City of Gariland, they'd had an evening to rest before the few hours ride to Port Asyton on the coast, where they'd boarded a ferry that had been prepared and waiting, gilded and festooned to make of great import its toted cargo: two women, one important; a half-score of tired men; and one wailing infant. She'd taken the child from Eilonwy then, so that onlookers would see the queen bring her own son before Faram the Great Father with her own hands – and so that the rattled nurse could find wherever it was the poor people hid in the City of God to tell them of their great adventure in the forest.

A change of clothes later, and she now waited in the open air, looking over the one part of Ivalice that held itself to the authority of no kingdom but heaven. Since she had taken him, the boy had not cried. He was not as heavy as Louveria had suspected, and warmer. So warm.

Ser Garland stood by the door in silence, but it would not do for the queen of all Ivalice to enter the cathedral proper on the arm of an unknown guardsman. And so it was that her escort arrived in gleaming silver armor, a single line of sweat running down into his goatee.

“Your majesty.” Zalbaag Beoulve, Knight Devout of the Order of the Northern Sky, knelt low before her. Zalbaag was not unattractive, but his countenance was more noble than handsome. He was tall and his red hair was cut too short, out of a no-doubt misguided sense of battlefield necessity. His armor, however, was far more ceremonial than whatever he no doubt wore when he was cleaving heads at the Ordallian border. It was, in fact, his father's armor – she'd seen it often enough before – and it was perhaps a size too large for him, though that did not prevent him from moving gracefully as he swept his cape behind him on the way to his knees. It did make him look younger than he was, though – she was struck by the absurd thought that he was a year her elder, and yet had done more to win the people by age eighteen than she'd yet managed at all. Following in the footsteps of his father.

“You may rise, Ser Beoulve.” Louveria offered a gracious nod of her head. The previous king, a far more martial ruler, had been grandiose in his claim of Zalbaag as “the savior of Ivalice” after some skirmish or other, but he came from one of the best-bred families in the kingdom, and was known to be a man entirely without guile. “Until it is time, we give you leave to be at ease.” He stood, but did not relax. She'd expected little else. “Please, join us here at the edge of the causeway.” She took a step aside so that he'd come up to the edge and look out, as she had. “We were just admiring the hanging gardens, as we so rarely have chance to visit Mullonde. It is all so much more ostentatious than our cathedral in Lesalia.”

Zalbaag did not take the bait. “It is said the step formation represents the path upwards to sainthood, your majesty, and the winding spread suggests the temptation to stray, that each of us must avoid.” His word choice was careful, in that he did not contradict her. She graced him with a small chuckle. The baby rustled against her bosom.

“We would hear of your father.” Louveria found herself bouncing the boy a bit without even thinking about it. “Fathers and sons are very much of our mind of late, for quite obvious reasons.”

Zalbaag's head bowed, and he suddenly looked more tired. That spoke more honestly than what he offered in dialogue. “Lord Father is often ill of late, but he serves you without cease even from his bed. As Count Orlandeau meets with Prince Lennard's general Lanselot, letters exchanged between he and my father serve as his counsel at the peace table, or so I am told.”

She graciously offered Zalbaag a nod. As Knight Gallant and commander of the Order of the Northern Sky, Lord Barbaneth Beoulve should stand as her escort this day in the stead of the king. She idly wondered if he suffered the same malady as her own King Ondoria Atkascha III. And as for Count Orlandeau... “We are to understand some of the court think it less a peace than a surrender, Ser Zalbaag.”

Zalbaag's mouth opened, but something caught in his throat. Ah, how cruel of her!

In truth, after the sudden death of King Denamda IV, much of the spirit left Ivalice's forces, despite the charisma and example of its two leaders, and all the kingdom knew it. If so many of the knights had not needed to be recalled to deal with unrest at home, who was to say how the conflict would have ended? But of course, Zalbaag could not say so to the queen, certainly not without insulting the current king, who was so often ill that the burden of rule fell to Louveria herself.

Zalbaag's face finally restored some of its color. “I remember, your majesty, when I was younger, my father brought my brother and I to your grounds and we all made sport of a hunt together.”

She smiled. “We remember as well, Ser Zalbaag, and think on that day fondly. Though we admit surprise that you do as well, for as we recall, you did not enjoy that day as we had.”

He looked out to the hanging gardens. “I only mention this memory, your majesty, to provide context for my claim that I'd not known you one to surrender anything.”

And on that puzzling remark she'd be forced to dwell, as a page swung open the doors. It was time to be announced.

***

Augustus Lennard was not an exceptional martial mind himself; he was instead a gifted orator, who won his people with talk of liberating the “holy land” of Zeltennia and Lesalia, at the border of which lay Bervenia, the city where St. Ajora was said to be born. It is believed the stratagem originated with his general, Lanselot Tartaros, who hailed from what we now know as Valendia, far to the northeast of Ordallia. Concern that Ivalice had no right to St. Ajora's birthplace was met with fierce opposition from the Church of Glabados's Knights Templar, but the people of Ordallia in that era were ostensibly Reformed Pharist, and viewed St. Ajora not as a redeemer, but as an important prophet, and did not recognize the Church of Glabados.

In our own era we may find something quaint in the thought of Reformed Pharism, that one might well claim as easily that Kiltia sects had turned the world's stage to this new face. However, historians have of late unearthed records suggesting perhaps a tenth of Ordallians in that era actually practiced the outdated religion. Prince Lennard's accusations of the Church of Glabados were instead a means of projecting Ivalicians as the Other; he might as easily have said that they were practitioners of the Dark, for that is how his people took it.

In the sum of world events the concerns of faith are mooted by the politics of faith's influence. For while faith moves man, life everlasting exists only for the remembered. Faram's power is absolute, but man's is transient. The body is but a vessel for the soul, a puppet which bends to the soul's tyranny. And lo, the body is not eternal, for it must feed on the flesh of others, lest it return to the dust whence it came. Therefore must the soul deceive, despise, and murder men.

***

1995 OV / 1232 ZA

Month of Gemini

For the son of the queen, no less than the High Confessor Marcel Funebris—the leader of all the church—could perform the rite of baptism. At his side stood Cardinal Alphonse Delacroix, who himself had served in the war with distinction in earlier years. Delacroix handed the baby from Louveria to the High Confessor, who took him gently and looked right through her. Funebris was a very old man, and his sunken eyes were dimmer than the candlelight dancing across his high forehead, but his grip on the boy was firm and strong.

“Queen Louveria Atkascha, we receive this child into the arms of the Church of Glabados, that he may know the gift of life everlasting. Have you chosen a name for this child?”

“Yes, he is the Prince Orinus Atkascha, named for my father's father, named for the disciple of St. Ajora, for the Zodiac Brave.” Louveria daren't turn or look away from the High Confessor, but she knew that the cathedral was full of nobles judging her every breath and action. And she could feel her brother's eyes boring into her back.

“Queen Louveria Atkascha, do you believe in Faram, the Great Father, creator of heaven and earth?”

Louveria knew that at this moment, in Lesalia, as her husband the king slept in his room, attended by white mages and chiurgeons, a man was strolling through their courtyards, running his hands softly along the leaves and branches of the plants in their gardens. Divari and Hedychium, Leucojum and her precious Prima and Moon Bloom flowers. In one corner there lay one of the last known Agathis trees, and this man liked to sit beneath it to meditate and divine.

“I do,” she said, and High Confessor Funebris anointed her son with oil. Behind them was the cathedral reredos, an altarpiece depicting the infant St. Ajora, floating above a well with arms stretched out – the Miracle of the Warding. There was someone behind the reredos. She couldn't see them, but somehow she knew. Someone listening, or waiting.

“Queen Louveria Atkascha, do you believe in the blessed St. Ajora, who drove the demons from our world and then died as our redeemer?”

This man in Lesalia beneath the Agathis tree, whose name was Stark, was the Court Astrologer. An adept whose powerful magicks could read the Zodiac and seemed to make the stars themselves move in his auguries. He was the keeper of all the secrets. But his powers were of no consequence to pollen of the Faren flower, which was virulently poisonous even mixed into the midday repast. It was known as a sudden killer. An old man already, Stark would seem to have suffered an attack of the heart as he fell to the ground beneath his beloved tree.

“I do,” she said, and High Confessor Funebris consecrated her son and lowered him into the shallow water. The figure that she could not see behind the reredos did not move, did not seem to breathe. She assumed it was one of the Knights Templar; the guardians of Mullonde, the strong arm of Glabados that punished the heretics and asserted the church's authority. She assumed it was such because in Mullonde, it was assumed they were everywhere.

“Queen Louveria Atkascha, do you renounce evil in all its forms? In man, monster, or Lucavi?”

Louveria knew at this moment that in the Grogh Heights, the farmlands north of Lesalia that provided the royal city with its food, a healer was walking the well-trod path to Yardrow, summoned to a noble's home for treatment. Tall wheat and rice and corn to each side, he walked uphill without another soul in sight.

“I do,” she said, and High Confessor Funebris raised her son to the Great Father, and to the ecstasy of the congregation. She no longer sensed the presence behind the reredos, but her brother's gaze remained.

“Queen Louveria Atkascha, do you accept the waters of baptism to walk in the path before your son in St. Ajora's name?”

Were bandits to murder this healer, named Barzini, nobody would notice it happen in the act. They could strike him quick, and again in the soft dirt as he hit the ground, and drag him prone into the rows of crops before a wagon or a band of discharged knights were to come across them. He could be buried in that ground then, returning life to the soil, and the total of it would be a richer harvest.

“I do,” she said, and High Confessor Funebris raised a wet and withered thumb and drew it across her forehead.

Cardinal Delacroix was handing Orinus back to her now, and she was shocked to realize it was over. The worst of it though was to come, though, she knew, in the accepting of the celebrants. Her son reached for her with one hand and found the pendant that had been her king's betrothal gift. He was smiling.

***

Consider the forgotten casualties of the Fifty Years' War: the people of the lost nation of Galgastan.

Lying north of Fovoham, Galgastan was once the seventh province of Ivalice. However, Galgastan's liege lord Duke Leundar Balbatos refused to aid King Denamda IV's military push. Claiming that the previous king's invasion of Zelmonia was a matter of pride at odds with his people—as drought had laid Galgastan low, and its people were starving—he declared Galgastan an independent nation, and petitioned Romanda for aid.

Much of Ivalice was happy to let them go—the Galgastani people possessed a darker skin, and the nobility often called them “goblinkin” in correspondence. Balbatos himself, who had dubbed himself “Hierophant” and “Lord” in the act of independence, was an exception: a distant relation of the Goltanna family of Zeltennia—Duke Druksmald Goltanna himself being able to trace his line to Denamda II—his skin was an Ivalician pale.

Romanda, seeking a beachhead in its campaign against Ivalice, welcomed Galgastani independence with open arms. However, in its aid it only brought the black plague. Without food, dying of the plague, and subject to Ivalician raids and banditry, the people of Galgastan dragged Balbatos from his seat in Coritanae Keep and put him to the guillotine.

There are few records of Galgastan following the War of the Lions. Much of the former province was a wasteland for decades, only eventually being overtaken by population increases in Ivalice during the golden age.

***

1995 OV / 1232 ZA

Month of Gemini

Louveria endured the effusive praise of feckless nobles for the better part of an hour, but when her brother, the Duke Bestrald Larg of Gallionne, chose his opportunity at last to approach, she announced that she'd take the air, and trusted Ser Garland—or Ser Zalbaag for that matter, or even the invisible Templar—to bar the door to the causeway. What she did not expect was to find that she and her child were not alone.

“Your majesty.” The pear-shaped man offered an insulting parody of a bow. “Did you and your dear child also come in search of the beauty of Mullonde? I find it rests a weary spirit.”

“Duke Barrington.” The liege lord of Fovoham was not an entirely unexpected guest – Grand Duke Gerrith Barrington was one of the church's favored sons, celebrated for his work in establishing orphanages throughout Ivalice. That did not, however, make him a welcome one, for—as anyone in the royal court could tell you—Barrington's generosity of spirit was not matched in the social graces. He was, plainly, a boor of the highest order. But better this than Larg. Queen Louveria stepped forward to join Barrington at the railing. “In truth, we sought solitude.”

“Not much more of that to be found, with little Orinus there.” The duke chuckled. “But of course, you have the nurses for that, I'm quite certain.” And there it was, right out the gate. Barrington was not a subtle man.

“We have indeed a young Galgastani with whom the young prince is properly enamored.” She waved it off. “We wish to express our appreciation, Duke Barrington, for your understanding in the matter of our processional.”

“Hm? Ah, 'tis nothing, your majesty, I assure you.” He did a sort of copy of her own gesture. “I think the peoples of Gollund and Dorter, being oft lowborn, were given a rare jewel in chance to see the royal prominence as it passed through.” He cocked his head. “It's only a shame that the route proved so dangerous.”

“Oh? Had you heard of our adventures in the Weald, then?” She smiled beatifically. “We had the pleasure of Ser Zalbaag's company before the ceremony, and had gathered the people of Gallionne were as-yet unawares. We expect the young knight would have saddled a chocobo on the spot to ride out in our honor had he known.”

“The Knight Devout, for all his martial cunning, is perhaps predictable in that way,” he allowed. “It's true that the nave's attendance was quiet on the issue. I'd actually heard before joining the celebrants.”

“Had you.” The duke had little right to criticize the Beoulve second son's predictability. While Louveria had not desired a confrontation on the causeway, the content of this meeting was exactly according to design. For his part, Barrington was smirking at his own cleverness. It made one whole side of his fat face look like fresh bread as the knife entered it to slice.

“It is in a way apropos that you mention your little Galgastani, your highness.” Barrington laid a hand on the railing. It was adorned in dozens of little rings and baubles and looked vulgar to her. “Before coming here to the event, I was actually in visit with some of the children, now grown, who had found home in my orphanages. Many come under the boughs of the Church of Glabados as they come of age, you see.” She didn't rise to the bait. “The Galgastani are truly fascinating people. Marvelous breeding stock. I spent time with them during the war.” Barrington hadn't fought himself. He'd hired a company of outland sellswords who had marched at his command. “So many of their villages burned at that time. There were many children cut loose from civilization overnight.”

“It is a wonder that more weren't brought to Coritinae Keep,” Louveria offered icily. “One might think Lord Ronsenbach would shelter his own.”

Barrington harrumphed, picking a piece of lint from his robes. “The late Lord Balbatos's footman cannot even keep his working vassals fed, I fear.” A state that Ivalice itself was all but destined for, no matter the heroic efforts of Count Orlandeau and his partner in correspondence. It was said that army deserters often broke for Galgastan first, but the country was in ruins following its failed alliance with Ordallia. “But of course, St. Ajora teaches us to love our neighbors before ourselves.” Not that Barrington had ever missed a meal in his life himself.

“You were explaining how you learned of our fright in the Siedge Weald, Duke Barrington.” Explaining, rather, how he was not responsible for hiring the traitors in the Lionsguard of St. Konoe. Queen Louveria had known that he would race to place himself above blame, the first act of any guilty conscience. In her arms, Orinus fussed and pulled at her gown.

“Yes! Quite. I can't imagine your majesty ever concerning herself with the whispers of the lowborn, but in walking those halls I heard so many fables and misapprehensions! It's quite striking, the credulity of the uneducated.” He leaned in and stuck his tongue out at the baby. “Can you believe, some even think this little angel was the result of swapping pans, like some little changeling?”

Orinus sniveled. Louveria's eyes narrowed. “Duke Barrington, you forget yourself.”

“Hm?” He looked up and saw her expression. “Ah! Quite right, your majesty, I humbly apologize.” The duke was nearly fifty, and had held higher favor with the previous king. He had often made habit of speaking as though he were of higher station, even when he wasn't pretending to an advantageous position. He dipped his head, but swiveled it back around to her. “I mean only to say that so often, their nonsense is only just; but I did hear a tale of surprising consistency, and of such recent vintage, that I wondered if it might not be true.”

“One half of my coterie yet lives.” She bobbed her son. Below, commoners and the lay were jockeying for positions where they could view the nobility who were already filtering out of the cathedral. “The other does not.”

“Pray consider your return to Lesalia, your majesty.” He bowed, and made a slightly better effort this time. “The roads of Fovoham lie open to you, and my own forces all too willing to bolster your own.”

“Best to keep your own working vassals fed, Duke Barrington.” She turned away from him and allowed herself a smile, for her – for her and Orinus – alone. “If Ser Garland requires aid, I can petition the Knight Devout's company. For many would say to approach the queen and her young prince when they are alone would be a treasonous act on its own.”

When she turned back, the large man was gone. His only wise move that day.

***

Ivalice only just had better love for its Crown. King Ondoria III's malady left a woman issuing proclamations that she claimed were of her husband's design, and those who still harbored grudges with Ordallia placed on her the coward's mantle. Though many proud and heroic women served in the Fifty Years' War, many in Lions' armies still viewed the hearth as woman's home.

Noble families oft sent their daughters for religious instruction, but Louveria spent few years within a monastery’s walls. Like Goltanna, the Larg family could trace their line to Denamda II, and Louveria's father the Duke of Gallionne often took her to Lesalia from even a young age, hoping to marry her to someone in Denamda IV's line. They found a love match in the offing with Ondoria III, a frail young second-born son who found himself the rightful heir when his elder brother died in the war.

By the time Louveria's father had died and her brother Bestrald instituted as the White Lion to Goltanna's Black in his stead, she was married to the new king. Ondoria III would be thirty-five at the time that the hero Delita made his entrance into the historical narrative.

The aforementioned birth of Louveria's son, the Prince Orinus, was met with some relief in the royal family. Two sons had already died in the birthing. Until that time, the only heir to succession was Princess Ovelia Atkascha, trueborn daughter of Denamda IV and half-sister to Ondoria III, whom they had adopted as a daughter when it appeared there would be no living sons.

***

1995 OV / 1232 ZA

Month of Gemini

“Ser Garland, we are much afeared from our travels. Please secure our chambers, that we may know peace of mind.” The guard nodded silently and entered the suite of rooms prepared for her, and then she closed the door behind them. Passing courtiers, pages, and assorted clergymen of Mullonde would assume only what had been rumor for a year's time now – that Queen Louveria had been having an affair with the captain of her guard.

When they'd allowed a moment for the hall outside to clear, she settled into a chaise and shifted the weight of her sleeping son. Eilonwy would no doubt be catching up with them soon enough. “Everything proceeds apace.”

Ser Garland removed his helmet and sat it upon the stone sill. His hair was damp and matted. If Louveria was the sort of woman who curried loyalty and affection in the manner the court suspected, she'd still find no place for the dragoon in her chambers when the meetings were adjourned. But Ser Garland was a smart man, a man whose loyalty was to leadership and power. He'd discerned early that as captain of the Lionsguard, his best role was beside the queen, not nursemaiding the man eight years her senior who already looked twice that when he was able to rise from his bed.

“Why Barrington, your majesty?” He pulled the hair back from his face with one gauntlet. “He is a viper, and the box in which Denamda kept him now lies open.”

“When I was a girl, I accompanied father on his hunts from time to time on the grounds.” Louveria held up Orinus and bounced him on her knee. “I had the taste for it even then, I suppose. But he taught me then that there's little to fear in a serpent, because you know it will strike. A hound is different, because it is loyal until it is angered. The grand duke's hungers have made of him a fool. Are you certain that you have carved out all the rot?”

“Those remaining are those loyal, your majesty.” Of the Lionsguard assigned to her, only some could be trusted to keep their loyalty to her and their mouths silent. The rest, Ser Garland and his men had fell upon in the Weald. There had been no bribery; but Eilonwy had told the story within minutes of their arrival in Mullonde, and Barrington's name would be on her lips. The lie would be in every noble's ear by the next sun-up as far as Zeltennia. “There is one other matter: the Princess Ovelia requests an audience with you.”

She frowned. Speaking again of boxes left open; she should have expected that Orbonne would give leave for her to attend the baptism. “I am weary from my exertions, the travel and the attack and such.” She made a vague gesture. “Express the due regret.” Pause. “Add something of the Queen Mother asking after her, perhaps that will placate.” The Queen Mother, who sat yet at Lesalia, who who yet lived, who left Louveria with fingernail grooves in each palm that drew blood.

“Yes, your highness.” He did not mention her brother the duke. “May I ask of you a question?”

“Speak.” Orinus's hands wrapped around her fingers. She smiled at the boy.

“Why the healer, Barzini?” He shook his head. “I understand the sense of Stark's killing, the threat he posed, but not the other.”

She frowned.

“I express no regrets in my service, your majesty. I seek only to know the way of it, that I might aid you further.”

She sighed. “To replace an inconvenient lie with a convenient one.”

“I do not understand.”

She looked at her son, and in that moment, found herself moved. This was the miracle at war's beginning. “Tell me again of your family, Ser Garland.”

“I... yes, your majesty.” He turned to the window. “Our nobility is slight, and young. My father served with distinction during the earliest years and was awarded a house. Before that, we were a line of knife sellers. My grandfather used to carry a massive whetting stone upon his back, up and down the streets of Bervenia. I have an uncle still, with a small but respected parish there, not far from St. Ajora's birthplace. With no family of my own, at times I send some gil-coppers to him when I'm able.”

“You should marry,” she offered, “Have a son of your own.”

He shook his head. “Harder then, to protect yours.”

Orinus giggled as though he'd understood. Ser Garland knew that she'd been poisoning the king; did he know that she'd poisoned the previous one, as well?

“I am weary,” she decided. “You command the Princess's hound, do you not? Send them back to Orbonne, Ser Garland. I must rest for our travel back to Lesalia.”

“Yes, your majesty.” He fixed the helmet back onto his head, hiding his expression. And then he left.

Louveria eased Orinus into the cradle the Church of Glabados had provided them, and watched him fidget. Eilonwy would return soon, to handle the changing of him and the feeding. In looking at his large eyes, she found herself shocked in loving him.

Ser Garland was not of risen nobility enough to understand why the rumor of the child's bastardry could not harm her in the way the truth could. Ivalice thought her barren from complications or possessed of a poxy womb; that Ondoria III had smuggled a mistress's spawn into the birthing room. When the midwife had died of old age shortly after, it had been her one stroke of luck; the rest she'd had to make herself. Barzini was the only living soul who had seen the baby's head crown.

Something fell in the other room of the suite. Her head jerked, and she spun, finding herself immediately snatch little Orinus into her arms to protect him. But there was nobody there. A shade, at best, of the many she had made herself.

***

The economy of Ivalice was brought to the very brink of ruin as it struggled to pay reparations to its former enemies and to repay the loans taken from neighboring states to fund its war effort. The loss of Galgastan's laborers and farmland caused further shortages. Soldiers returning from the front found themselves without pay, and entire orders of knights were summarily discharged from service, stripped not only of livelihood but also their fealty. The swelling ranks of the unemployed did little to relieve the people's distrust of the Crown and the nobility, whose tables never emptied. Many became rogues and traitors, men donning the thief's cloak and plotting treason against the Crown.

***

1995 OV / 1232 ZA

Month of Gemini

Queen Louveria again rode in the carriage through the Siedge Weald. The sun had started to set; leaving Mullonde had been a more trying task than arriving. Confessor Zalmour, a self-satisfied inquisitor, had set about blessing their travels, and some spare few nobles had lingered for a last chance at petitioning her. They'd sent a few riders ahead to secure adequate lodgings in Dorter; they'd never manage to climb the mountain at night.

Eilonwy was carrying the baby, and Louveria found she ached for him. The baby's every giggle sounded like shattered glass. How had this occurred? How could one half-day have been enough?

Ser Garland seemed lost in thought. She turned her gaze to the window and saw the same gallows tree. She blinked. “Stop the carriage.”

Garland signaled the driver, and they rolled to a halt. She allowed Garland to help her out so that she could view the stagnant pool of mold collected beneath the gnarled trunk, and nodded to herself. “Let it be here.”

“Your majesty?” asked Eilonwy, as she was helped out of the carriage. Louveria held out her arms, and the nurse handed her Orinus. Ser Garland led her over to the bubbling marsh, which seemed almost perfectly round. It was like the set of a stageplay. The nurse was shaking, until Ser Garland drew his sword, at which point she collapsed to her knees.

“Wh... your majesty, what... I'm so sorry, whatever I've done, I...”

“Shh.” She held Orinus close. “You'll scare him.” And when she really did quiet, Louveria felt a pang of regret. The dragoon raised his blade. Eilonwy would sink into the mold, vanished without a trace.

And then the carriage exploded.

With a searing flash of yellow, the entire forest seemed to swell and constrict as the wooden carriage erupted. Splintered wood flew past her face, and Louveria dropped to the ground, cradling her infant son and sheltering him from the sudden shrapnel. The chocobos were shrieking – one had already taken off into the forest, and another had fallen to the ground with a shard in its head – and when she called out for Ser Garland, she could not hear her own voice.

It was an explosion without heat, lightning without thunder—magick, certainly, but of a kind she didn't know. Her ears rang and her shoulders shook; she looked up to see their attacker standing on the gallows-branch of the gnarled old tree.

It was a fifteen-year old boy. His Galgastani skin seemed to make him one with the treebark and the darkness. He looked like he could be Eilonwy's son. Eilonwy... As Ser Garland rose to his feet, sword at the ready, blood caking one ear, she turned her head to find that the nurse had fled.

There were shouts in the dark again as the rest of her convoy came at last to their rescue. The boy stared at her. She found that she was crying; not for herself, but for her son.

“I come bearing a message.” The boy's voice was deeper than it seemed a body his age could allow. “When the crows feast upon your king, they will again upon Ivalice.”

One of her soldiers was at her side then, lifting her up as another nocked an arrow. But when it flew, there was nobody there to receive it. The boy was gone. The leaves rustled only, the sound of a crow's wings in flight. She rocked her sobbing child and prayed the young of Ivalice would not eat their old.

***

Zalbaag Beoulve was offering a bow to Duke Druksmald Goltanna, though he looked peevish. “I admit to surprise,” he was saying, “As I thought Baron Grimms would be in attendance. I’d thought to discuss the connections between these bandit groups, else I’d be still with my own men in pursuit.”

“The commander of the Blackram Knights pursues an urgent lead in Zeltennia, I’m told.” Goltanna scratched at his belly, which strained against his doublet. Goltanna was still solidly built even at fifty-six years of age, but he was keg-shaped beneath the layers of finery, and his mustache, which dropped below his chin, was always uncomfortably damp. His were the only eyes in the room that kept glancing towards the frieze, unapologetically. The Black Lion was a man of secrets—if the Northern Sky had its numbers, the Southern surely had its subtler arts—and he wanted her to know that he was full aware of her intent. “I shall have one of my attendants convey any message you’d like. Communication and cooperation are surely key in unearthing these rats before they nibble anything more of value.”

Her eyes slid to one side, where Confessor Rousseau was meeting with one of Goltanna’s sizable entourage, whose absurd hat of station marked him easily for Bishop Haimirich Canne-Beurich, who was the highest church representative in Zeltennia and also fully in Goltanna’s pocket. He was older even than the Duke, and clutched at his crook like it held him up as he nodded at some report that Rousseau gave. She scowled.

And further back were two of that wretched Council of Nobles themselves, talking to Goltanna’s Galgastani pet. The one pointedly not looking at the dark-skinned Baron of Bolmina was the Earl Carston Sovlique, who was of little consequence—he was there only to give the benefit of numbers to Baron Etgar Minadette, who was laughing at some jest, standing with the posture of a man for whom all the world turned.

Her fists crushed into her gown. She stood up straight, checked herself and her crown and marched towards the door that would admit her. She heard Ser Garland’s spear tamp the floor twice. “Her royal majesty, Queen Louveria Atkascha.” And she entered with all the imperiousness at her disposal, looking at none of them, sweeping in like a thundercloud. She commanded all of their attention, which was as it should be, as the sun would wilting flowers.

Or perhaps, she thought darkly, as meat would hungry sharks.

She gave them a moment’s pause to judge the degrees to which they bowed. Rousseau offered a perfunctory bowed head, but Canne-Beurich did not even bother with that. The rest, however, showed the proper deference. “You may rise, gentlemen. We would see as always good works performed here in the name of all our lands, Ivalice.” She’d rather hold meetings such as these in the throne room. In that space, the differences in their stations would stand in relief. But this was how things were done, and to suggest the move would raise ire, would suggest she... well, that she was making a statement of power, which is exactly what she wanted to do. But she was only acting as proxy for the ailing king, and to push too hard would not secure her position, but rather the opposite. Some of these men were hungry. But she did not sit, so that they could not sit either. “We thank especially our cousin for making the long journey from Zeltennia.” She afforded Goltanna a nod. “We hear that the roads are less safe these days, explaining his decision as always to come bearing larger entourage.”

Goltanna’s look was dry, save for that wet-wick mustache of his. “Your majesty’s compassion is endless, and so I speak with pride in informing you that the roads grow safer daily—indeed, both Skies fall upon the bandits who have been ungrateful in the face of your largess.”

“Oh? We are gratified to hear that these traitors to the crown are put to rout, as we’d heard quite the opposite.” She looked to the Knight Devout. “Is your success greater than my hearing?”

Honest, honest Zalbaag Beoulve shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking uncomfortable. “It would ne’er be my place to correct Your Majesty in any matter.” Goltanna glared at him.

“As always, Ser Zalbaag, you do your family’s honor proud in the realm of loyalty, though perhaps less so of late in that of results.” She waved her hand, casting the matter aside. “Surely, Lord Goltanna wishes only to reassure us of your mutual further endeavors. But we would remind you both that it is the leaders of such rebellions who most concern us, for examples must be made. My husband our king has saintly patience for much, even in his illness, but little for the act of treason. Folles and his ilk must be made corpses for true for the safety of our citizenry. We’ve a mind to let them swing from ropes at Golgollada itself for high- and low-born alike to witness.”

“As in the tale of Balias and the demon Leviathan,” offered Rousseau with a grin, “to fell a serpent, the head must be removed.”

Her nostrils flared. Zalbaag coughed. Goltanna’s eyebrow raised. Canne-Beurich looked like he was asleep.

“Mayhap the Confessor has dealt for too long with heretics and not with people of Quality,” offered Etgar. “Else he’d consider that speaking in those terms to a ‘head’ of state might be considered... inappropriate.”

Chastened—or faux-chastened—Rousseau looked down. “I assure you, ‘twas only mine intent to affirm Her Majesty’s edict. Indeed, the site of Ajora’s own death by hanging might be too good for bandits of their sort.”

“We shall take your... advisement into consideration, Confessor Rousseau.” Louveria’s lips thinned. “To return to matters of import, we understand that the Marquis de Limberry meets with our brother to the west.” She did not know why, but she did not say such. To admit that she and Larg were not communicating would be a sign of weakness.

“He did separate from our caravan at Dorter and continued on west,” Goltanna admitted. “He bid me pay Your Majesty all respects, but hoped that you’d find it no insult, as he was not himself the party summoned to this chamber.”

“The Marquis is a never-ending font of humility,” Louveria said. “One suspects it comes from being ground under Ordallian boot-heel.” Goltanna took the comment in stride, but behind him, the Baron of Bolmina tensed. She couldn’t remember his name, and didn’t care to re-learn it. At the Baron’s side, a dark-skinned scribe with his hair pulled back scribbled notes on the meeting without ever looking up. Likely the man’s spawn.

“I’m likely to blame for the Marquis, Your Majesty.” Etgar Minadette bowed. He was frustratingly handsome, young features under a mop of brown hair and possessing a rogue’s eyes. He held a majority stake in Zeltennian trade and he had the charisma to leverage that coin into a significant seat on the Council. He had a reputation for being noble in more than title, but that reputation didn’t stop him from raising his star higher by the day. “Duke Larg did offer me of late some measure of support in matters commercial, and the Marquis hopes to finalize some agreements of trade, that he might increase the coffers for rebuilding Limberry.”

She raised her chin. “It is often that “matters commercial’ are beneath the crown, when they do not pertain to taxies levied.” She tried to look thoughtful and curious, despite knowing the answer to her inquiries before she asked them. “But we hear the whisper of rumors in the halls of Lesalia, that it is your hope to open a corridor of trade to the east where there yet is none.”

Etgar’s face fell.

“We hold the Council’s enterprising nature in esteem,” she continued, “For it keeps our kingdom not only solvent, but thriving, a hub of commerce and culture that does past generations and present proud. But though Ivalice has ceased hostilities with Ordallia, we shall not open trade at this time. For with the king’s ill health, we cannot allow the possibility of open borders, that spies might enter in the guise of merchants in a time of weakness. And indeed, these uprisings trouble us, that they divert our knights away from the borders, where they might serve as a source of security and properly investigate traders of that sort. As ever, the safety of Ivalice must be our prime concern.”

Etgar’s mouth opened and closed a few times before he managed a “Yes, of course, Your Majesty.”

She faked a yawn. “Mayhap mon cousin could lower the tax by... hm, no, one percent is enough. You shall recoup some cost, and the people will see that Lesalia does not forget them.”

“As Your Majesty wishes,” grumbled Goltanna, “Though I’d point out that this will slow the rebuilding effort. Sal Ghidos is in much the same state it was the day the war ceased, and Limberry...”

“Bishop Canne-Beurich.” She rolled her eyes as Rousseau prodded the old man. “Could not the Church of Glabados send some aid to those poor souls of Sal Ghidos? The good Duke has left them to poverty and ruin.”

“Hm? Oh, well...” He dabbed at his forehead with a handkerchief. “Your majesty, Mullonde is leery of sending its agents to close to the border when matters are so fraught...”

“Come now, Bishop.” She clucked her tongue. “We speak not of Templars and Confessors, but rather some charitable abunas with a mind to feed and clothe the less fortunate, as blessed Ajora himself would have done. Unless you suggest that the Duke has let the town fall to inquity?”

Goltanna was turning purple.

“I commend Your Majesty in turning to the church.” Zalbaag said without irony. “Those only recently liberated from the Ordallian heathens could use the return of the light of Ajora.” It was refreshing to have Ser Zalbaag there, a man with virtually no guile. She should make greater effort to point his sword-tip in directions to her benefit.

The Baron of Bolmina leaned forward, whispered in Goltanna’s ear. Louveria’s eyes fell again upon the little scribe, no more than sixteen, who continued to scribble at a pace possessed... even when none were speaking that he could hear. Curious. Goltanna, for his part, seemed to find himself and cleared his throat.

“Since Your Majesty is “shining the light” of your own compassion at present, I wonder if we yet might appeal to your more beneficent instincts in another, not wholly unrelated matter.” He rubbed his belly through the straining clothes. “A matter of housing.”

“Do you not let the Baron sleep indoors, then?” She jested, but other than a wan smile from Zalbaag and a muffled chuckle from Sovlique, nobody seemed much amused. “Very well. We shall hear your proposal.”

“Mm.” Goltanna puffed up a bit. “Your Majesty is well-familiar with the stated grievances of the banditry, regarding owed funds. And all assembled here agree with the crown’s assertion that such grievances are falsehoods, truly.” She glanced at Zalbaag, but he was merely listening intently. It had been the Council’s assertion, in fact, but when she had agreed, it had become royal decree. “We do allow, however, that some of our loyal soldiery did suffer hardship upon war’s end, returning home to lands that had suffered Ordallian looting and destruction.”

“Our heart bleeds as ever for the loyal knights of Ivalice,” she offered, “though to suffer loss in war is inevitable, tragic though we may find it. How are you proposing to redress this ill, that does not draw from coffers we know to be less than full?” For in truth, there was next to nothing left. Reducing the tax a single percent was a symbolic gesture she made in compromise, but the war had left the kingdom with nothing but the unburnt fields west of the Algost and the private stores that men like Minadette and Sovlique were sitting upon. And she could not afford to take a loan and fall into the Council’s debt.

“I have met with the Council upon this matter. The Marquis, as well, was most insistent that we provide for the welfare of his land’s liberators.” He gave a nod to the Knight Devout. “Begging pardon, those liberators of our own territories.”

“They fought no less bravely,” said Ser Zalbaag, and bowed.

“Just so! And so we think to offer them not coin, but opportunity.” Goltanna’s mustache twitched. The Camp Groffovia established just east of Bervenia, in order to protect that holy land, now lies all but empty with the border secure. But it need not lie in waste, as ‘tis all but settled land. We think to offer the land as the site of a new village, under my provenance and responsibility, for the families of knights who seek a fresh start at war’s close.”

“We have never halted the movement of our citizenry,” she said dourly, already suspecting where this was going.

“The land will need new leadership. We, the Council and I both, think to ennoble—or further ennoble, that the land can be governed justly.”

“Mullonde views this proposition favorably,” said Canne-Beurich unnecessarily. “For those who defended the place of Ajora’s birth to find new, honest lives at its borders is a path that walks in line with the faith.”

So: enrich the Council of Nobles with further numbers, and allow Goltanna to amass knights at Lesalia’s border. Else, denounce a plan whose details would and will filter out to the commoners, and raise further rebellion, embolden the Order of the Ebon Eye and the Grounded Doves—and make a further enemy of the Church of Glabados, to say nothing of the Marquis, who was a loyalist at his core. It was no decision at all.

She gazed over to the Council members in attendance, and saw Etgar whispering fiercely in Carston’s direction. Which meant that Etgar had no idea, that he’d only been brought before the court as a patsy, a voice she could shout down so that Goltanna’s actual plan would be a compromise.

...Which meant Rousseau had known all along. She did not look in his direction.

The people of Lesalia already spoke of her in hushed tones as a tyrant. They already spoke of hoping the illness of the king would spread to his son.

She closed her eyes. Goltanna had the grace not to smile. When she opened them, she looked at last upon the Baron of Bolmina’s stoic expression.

“Baron, forgive us, as our memory is oft-distracted by worry for our husband of late, that we forget your name.”

He bowed low. “Ulric Navarre of Bolmina, Your Majesty.”

“You are modest indeed, to only whisper your idea to your lord the Duke.” She nodded to him. “Your proposal is accepted. We shall receive a list of names to consider the addition of further peerage to the realm.”

Sovlique gasped. Goltanna flinched.

Whether it was his idea or not, let all of Ivalice know it was the Baron’s idea. Some would not care for matters of race, but some would. And Goltanna would not be the hero of the people for his maneuver. It was no victory, but it was the only play she had remaining.

She favored the Earl with a look. “Lord Sovlique.” A rat-faced man with a thin mustache, his earldom included the aforementioned Sal Ghidos, and yet he’d not seen fit to speak up regarding its fate. “In the matter of our Southern Sky and its valiant knights, we rely often upon the wisdom of Count Orlandeau, yet he could not appear before us this day.”

“Er...” He looked to Goltanna for aid.

“With Baron Grimms on the hunt for banditry, the Count stands watch over Besselat, as ever in service to the crown,” the Duke mumbled.

“We suspected as much.” Did he even know of this plan? Or had he approved it? “We task you, Lord Sovlique, with relaying to the Count what has occurred here.”

Puzzled: “I serve your will, Your Majesty.”

“Indeed.” Her hand found the arm of the chair by her side. Let them puzzle over that decision. “We grow weary, and must relay this news to the king, that he may affirm that we speak his intentions.” She stood, and everyone bowed. “Ser Zalbaag, you’ve no doubt matters martial to consider, but at your earliest opportunity, we bid you relay the decision to your brother and mine, that the Northern Sky knows the movements of the Southern.”