#hydaelyn trusts only the most idiotic cats with Her blessing

[starcunning]

Drasteria adumbrata

Happy birthday to my very favorite Leo/Virgo cusp.

Oh, you thought we were done? We might actually be less done than before.

[M/F] [WOL* (Kallisti)/Nabriales][G-rated Fluff][ARR 2.56][Shadowbringers spoilers][Erebidae][4k words]

[AO3 mirror]

The air in the cave was gelid. That might have been a problem once, long ago, but Kallisti had passed beyond such concerns in the moors of Yafaem. There was a stillness to the aether, too; much of it was likely bound up in the summoning of Saint Shiva.

That might have been a problem she was expected to address once, but to slay that false goddess would have seen Kallisti turned out from the shelter of the Warrens. She had been accepted among Iceheart’s heretics only by Nabriales’s insistence, being otherwise too recognizable a figure. And being still wanted for regicide, there was little to be done but shelter among the ice and snow while Nabriales and Igeyorhm directed events.

Soon enough, she had been assured, it would not really matter what she was accused of.

It was evening, and the wind whipped her indifferent cheeks as she strained to catch the last rays of the sun. The heavy blanket of clouds overhead dampened the sunset to something almost unrecognizable, but she did not turn her head as she felt the displacement of aether that presaged teleportation.

“Your work is done for the day?” she asked. The wordless affirmation was felt rather than heard, but Nabriales nodded. “What are you doing?” he asked after a moment. “Trying to remember what daylight looks like,” Kallisti replied. “It’s so cold here.” “You do suffer so, don’t you,” he said, tone dripping with false sweetness. “Things are drawing to a close.” “We should go to Costa del Sol,” she said. “If there’s time.” The non-sequitur seemed to confuse him. “You want to take a vacation?” “It will be time for a Calamity soon, won’t it?” Kallisti wondered. “That’s why you’re doing all this? The last one changed things significantly. It seems a shame not to enjoy it while it lasts.” Nabriales pursed his lips beneath the rim of his mask. For a moment she thought he might refuse, but when he spoke, he said, “There is another place we should visit before the Ardor. It will not survive the Rejoining, and it is past time you were illuminated on certain matters.” “My schedule is clear,” she said.

Nabriales extended one hand. The claws of his gauntlets glittered like ice in the dim light, but when she put her palm in his she was surprised to find he was as warm as ever. He drew her in, enfolding her in his own aether, his darkness blotting out her vision. She closed her eyes and leaned in against him, reaching out with her senses to feel him—not just the cloak of shadow wound around her like clouds around the moon, but the core of dark crystal at his heart. She felt it distantly, through her body and his, but focused upon it as she had learned to do when he had brought her to the Chrysalis.

She did not think they were headed there now, but dared not speculate on what might be so important to him that he would derelict his duties for it. It was easier to travel with an empty head in any case, so she focused only on the sound of her own breathing, and did not allow it to hitch as the teleportation hooked into her gut and reeled her along. It seemed to last a long time—longer than she was accustomed to, and when she felt earth beneath her feet once more it took her a moment to get her bearings.

They stood upon a stony beach—white rocks about the size of her fist dappled the shoreline. The water was clear blue, the waves dappled with golden light. Kallisti adjusted the brim of her hat, turning in a slow circle, but found no sun sinking upon the horizon. Against her better judgement she glanced up, expecting to find it at its zenith, but the firmament overhead was undifferentiated light—equal but opposite, in its way, to the clouds that blanketed Coerthas where she had stood but moments before.

She turned back to Nabriales, thinking to put the question to him, but he was cringing beneath the brilliant sky. Instead she asked, “What’s wrong?” “The Light,” he said. “It is anathema to us. Beneath the water is better, I’m told.” Then he was off, wading into the surf, Kallisti’s hand still in his own. “Where are we going?” “The Caliban Trench,” he replied. “To the last place the Light does not touch.”

He seemed eager to get there, already submerged to the waist. Kallisti’s robes billowed around her, the waves lapping at her chest. With her free hand she clutched at her hat.

“Nabriales,” she said, drawing him up short. He turned back to look at her, seeming baffled by her hesitation. “I still need to breathe.” “You had no such need when we visited the Chrysalis,” he pointed out. Her ears brushed the brim of her hat, laying back. “Why would the air of the Chrysalis be unsuitable?” she wondered. He grinned. “The moon you are all so keen to worship as a goddess is more like Dalamud than you think. It, too, serves as a prison, and at its heart slumbers Zodiark. The Chrysalis is as near as we are allowed to His presence.” She squinted, not merely at the brightness of the sky, but at him. “The Chrysalis is on the moon?” “In, rather, in much the same way the Sharlayan Antitower penetrates to the heart of the star, unto the borders of Hydaelyn’s influence,” Nabriales said. “Antitower?” she echoed. “What? I think I would have heard of it.” The Ascian’s smile broadened: “There is much that was kept from you,” he said. “The secrets of Sharlayan not least of all.” A wave broke upon his back, and he took a step closer to her. “I still don’t think I can do it,” she said. Nabriales merely shrugged, and then reached up to take her by the throat. With exacting delicacy he put the claw of his other forefinger to the side of her neck. She felt her pulse leap and then settle—surely the Echo would warn her somehow if she were in mortal danger.

Not that it would save her, she could not help but reflect. After all, Laurentius Daye had had her dead to rights, as Nabriales did then.

She could feel her blood trickle over her skin as he opened a slash in the side of her neck, so delicate as to be almost painless until the sea spray hit it, and then salt seared the wound. He turned her head by force, repeating the gesture on the other side. He reached into her, then, his aether commingling with hers and felt herself rearranged—not in the same way that Lensha might have done, straightening and reinforcing in the service of healing, but in a way that left her transmogrified thereafter. Her neck tensed, and new muscles flared—her gills gaped, for that was what he had opened in the sides of her neck. She pressed her hand to his, feeling the edge, and then dove past him into the water. The drag of the water tore her hat from her head, but she abandoned it, reveling instead in the coolness that suffused her.

The light that permeated did not warm, but it was altogether more temperate than had been Coerthas—it did not seem to be winter here at all. As Nabriales caught up with her and they broke from the surface, threading through forests of seaweed, she recalled the question that had struck her first when she arrived, forestalled by the sight of him in pain. He seemed relaxed—even content—then, so she opened her mouth to ask the question. It came out in a rush of bubbles, and she felt water fill her lungs.

When it had finished—and she could walk along the seabed—she repeated the question. “What is this place?” “This is the First Reflection,” he said. “Mitron and Loghrif had primed it for Rejoining before they … retired from this place. When we trigger the Ardor upon our return, it will be reabsorbed into the Source.” “It looked a lot like La Noscea,” Kallisti noted. “Functionally, it is,” he replied. “I was born not far from here,” he said, “albeit on a different Reflection.” “The Twelfth,” she said, remembering distant Dravania. “Do not ask to see it,” he said. “It was Rejoined shortly after I was uplifted, some time after the Thirteenth collapsed.” “Do you miss it?” she wondered. “Do you never wish to go home?” “Where do you think I am taking you?” he wondered, his lips quirking in a crooked smile.

He led her then to a place where the current swept out to sea, and they let it carry them—past the shelf break, and they sunk to the slope. The water dimmed much of the light overhead, everything dimmed to a murky green that reminded her, almost, of home. Their passing startled schools of fish, and once a coterie of Sahagin drew near, but Nabriales’s sigil flared over his mask, and they dared no closer. Soon, however, they came upon it.

There was a vast ruin beneath the sea, in a trench that opened before them. Its structures were in ruin, shattered glass in broken tracery, spires of corroded metal stretching upward toward a surface they would never reach. Even broken, she could see its grandeur.

“What is this?” she asked. Something stirred in her breast—some half-forgotten dream of a memory not her own. Was it his? “This was Amaurot,” Nabriales said. “The original Nabriales was born there.” Her brow knit, and she looked from the city to his masked face and back. He reached out with his empty hand. A moment later her hat settled upon the crown of her head. She tugged it into place, ears swiveling and flicking to settle it correctly. “Shall we go down there?” he asked.

He awaited no answer, only stepped from the ledge. His robes billowed around him in the water as he sank. Kallisti clutched the brim of her hat and stepped after him. There was a walkway below, but it had crumbled into dozens of rough-hewn boulders. Still, when she touched down upon it, her feet met level ground, and she looked down to find the stone underfoot smooth and unbroken, graven with an elegant, regular zig-zag pattern. Nabriales offered her one gloved hand, and she took it, careful of his claws.

She could see fish and other creatures among the ruins, flitting through the water or peeking from the crevices. Still, for a bubble several yalms wide around the pair, the stone was repaired; the facades of the buildings gleamed; even grass and trees grew in the wells in the stone. Looking back at the way they had come, however, left no trace of their passage.

“What did you mean, ‘the original Nabriales?’” she wondered. “Oh, little fool,” he laughed. “Your mothercrystal would not have told you. Before She sundered the world, there was but one race of man, and we lived free of worry or need. We were ageless beings, and given to us was the power of creation. Nabriales is not a name, but a title, and we lived here, in Amaurot.” “Your name,” she said, tail twitching sluggishly behind her, “is not Nabriales?” “No,” he said, as though this were obvious. He led her from the walkway up to one of the buildings. In one instant it was all but collapsed, the door sagging from the hinges; in the next it was pristine, lamps casting cones of light up the white marble facade. The door was heavy and paneled in bronze, and when he pushed it open they stepped into an atrium of golden yellow stone with bronze pilasters. The floor underfoot was inlaid with contrasting cream and deep brown stone. These too were bounded by gleaming metal. “So what was it?” she asked, approaching one of the empty benches there, wrought on a scale rather too broad for her. “I had thought you might like to know your own name,” he said. “You were Eris.” “We knew each other?” she said, reaching out to touch the lacquered wood. It was cold, but solid and real. “Were we lovers?” He laughed softly—not the triumphant sound she had grown so accustomed to, but something gentler, more intimate. “No,” he said. He reached out to curl his hand around her throat, tipping her chin upward. Her gaze lingered on the chandelier there, its milky glass and metal inlays reminding her of the nautilus shell motif of Sharlayan. “Who were you to me?” she asked softly. “We were rivals,” he said. “Of a kind. My colleagues and I were members of the Convocation of Fourteen, and you … were always bringing a dissenting opinion to our public addresses. Debate was something of a pastime in Amaurot, so none of us really minded. Elidibus,” he said, his tone souring, “was quite amused, actually.” “There are fourteen Ascians?” she mused. “I had assumed one for each shard, plus the Source, so wouldn’t that be fifteen?” Again his laughter sounded in her ear. “We were not Fourteen when Zodiark was made,” he said. “One of our number left after his wife, Helen, departed for one of the cities already in the grip of that first primordial calamity, which we summoned Zodiark to halt.”

“And it was her fault,” came another voice. Kallisti whipped around, her robes swirling in the water. She regarded the newcomer, and was surprised to note that he was Garlean, of all things. He wore no robes and no mask, but a dress uniform heavy with medals. He looked at her for a moment, then scoffed and snapped his fingers. The room changed around them, the details of the mosaic refining into sharper clarity. “Really, Nabriales,” he said, “stick to what you’re best at.” “What is that?” Kallisti wondered, head canting beneath the brim of her hat. “Supercilious self-aggrandizement,” the man said. “‘The Majestic.’ Well. It certainly was not architecture—and not recruitment. Do you even recall the trouble you caused, Eris?” “You knew me too,” Kallisti said, blinking in fascination. Nabriales shifted his weight, interposing himself between the pair. “Emet-Selch is of our number,” he said to her, then turned his face forward. There was a tension in his posture. “Why are you here?” “You are not subtle,” Emet-Selch said, rolling his golden eyes. “I am steward of this shard until it is rejoined, since I have no need of my mortal guise, and its original tenders sacrificed themselves to prime it. But why are you here?” “To show her the city,” Nabriales replied. “It is her birthright, which Hydaelyn has kept from her.” “Mmm,” Emet-Selch temporized. “No. I suppose, being born to the Source, she might have better claim than you, pale shade that you are. What did you think? That she might become the new Mitron? Igeyorhm has already asked me to consider elevating her half-formed pet to Loghrif’s station. But she is no Ebrietas, and this is no Eris.” “She is as much Eris as I am Nereus,” Nabriales—Nereus?—said with quiet vehemence. Emet-Selch laughed, though it sounded deadened in the water. “She actually is more Eris than that,” he pointed out. “But she is not Mitron, much as you might like to dream of her filling the seas with new life. When this shard is rejoined, we will go and find a proper Mitron. Eris was the one responsible for Menelaus’s departure from the council; it is not just that she should sit among us like she was fit to govern.” “That is Elidibus’s decision to make, not yours,” Nabriales said. “Oh, so his authority is at your convenience. I cannot imagine Lahabrea will speak for Ebrietas, and I certainly will not speak for Eris. Really, what will you do when you are denied?” Emet-Selch asked. “Put your head underwater and scream? You are already here, so I will leave you to it. Do remember,” he said, “that if things go poorly on the Source because you could not attend to the simple tasks you were given, we know exactly where to find the next Nabriales.”

It was a threat, Kallisti grasped instinctively, though she could not exactly put what it meant into words. Nabriales bristled, stepping further in front of her, blocking her view of the room beyond. When she looked to peer around him, Emet-Selch was gone. “Are you alright?” she asked. The new name felt strange upon her tongue, but she forced it over her lips just the same. “Nereus?” “He does love the sound of his own voice, doesn’t he,” the Ascian said. “Why do you remember this place and I don’t?” Kallisti wondered. “Because I was ascended, and while I can unmoor you from your mortality I cannot do that. That is reserved to Ascians of the Source—their souls are more complete and their powers greater. It is why you are stronger than me, when you remember how to be.”

She thought about that a moment, and then she pulled herself up onto one of the too-large benches, settling there with a sigh. “Elidibus knew,” she decided after a moment. “I have to assume so,” Nabriales agreed, materializing beside her. Kallisti leaned against him, letting his aether wash over her, much warmer than the seawater around them. “Who is Ebrietas?” she wondered. “She was Igeyorhm’s partner. She was not part of the Convocation.” “No, I mean, who is she now?” “Guess,” Nabriales laughed. “Who have you seen in Igeyorhm’s company of late?” “Wait, Lensha?” she said, sputtering. “The very same,” Nabriales confirmed. “She was of the faction that departed with Menelaus.”

“Who’s Menelaus?” Kallisti wondered. “I guess it would have to be Arenvald; he’s the only male Echo-blessed I can think of.” Nabriales shook his head. “We don’t always come back the same,” he said. “The other shard of Nabriales they have waiting in the wings should I ever require replacement is—you would recognize her as a Xaela Au Ra, though she would call herself something else. Menelaus could have incarnated as a woman. He has before, in eras past. But his last incarnation was shortly before the Sixth Ardor, known to you as the Calamity of Water. He usually does come back just as conditions are becoming ripe for a rejoining.” “So he could be Minfilia.” “He could, but he is not,” Nabriales said. “His absence has made us bold, it’s true; we would not have primed another shard so quickly, were he here to stand against us.”

“Why did he leave?” “He departed the council because he objected to our plans to halt the destruction of our very star. In pursuit of his wife he visited the cities across the sea, and was disturbed by what he saw there. That should have strengthened his convictions; instead it made him doubt. It is he that created Hydaelyn.” “Created Hydaelyn?” Kallisti sat upright. “And you summoned Zodiark … but that would make them …” “At last you see, little fool,” he murmured, pulling her in to press his lips to her forehead. “Your goddess is the very thing you sought to destroy. What did you think Her blessing was, to protect you from tempering? Only the very same thing.”

Kallisti closed her eyes, but found little comfort in his embrace. She slipped from his grasp, and made for the door of the room, which now seemed much too close, for all it was vast. Nabriales followed after, his restorative bubble recreating the stoop out front. She left the door open as she withdrew, until they stood in the middle of a grassy plaza, the bounds of the Ascian’s influence clearly visible.

Beyond them—past the crumbling rim of their circle—the door to the building hung open, not returned to its crumbling state. She could see the gleaming metal inlaid upon the floor within, and the warm light of the chandelier spilled out into the ruin. A school of fish swam through the shaft of light, glittering, and darted into the chamber. She waited for it to decay; to crumble back to metal skeleton and shattered rock, but it did not. It stood, unchanging, and she stood facing it, feeling unexpectedly defiant.

“If you were to revive Zodiark,” Kallisti said softly, still staring into that open door, “what would you do?” “We would restore things to how they used to be in our time. Part of this would happen automatically—when the sundered souls come together—but we would use the powers of creation restored to us to recreate the rest.” “As Emet-Selch remade that room,” she said after a moment. “I am surprised he stopped there,” Nabriales admitted. “He is fond of gilding the lily.” “And nothing would ever change again,” Kallisti asked, not quite a question. Nabriales shook his head. “Life … would continue, of course; children would be born and new concepts would be developed and refined, but the ideal is a complete existence in a perfect world.” “I thought you were bringers of chaos.” Kallisti scoffed. “But really, you’re more bound to order than anyone.” He laughed, turning to embrace her, his clawed gloves pressed to her cheeks. “You sound just like you did then,” he said. “You were never happy here.”

She watched the ebb and flow of water through the city—invisible to mortal sight, but her aetherial senses were awakened to the subtlest change. Fish swam through the ruins, and some few creatures crept toward the open door, drawn toward the light that spilled out into the street. None dared approach the pair, skirting the bubble of restoration. They might have, Kallisti assumed. There was no barrier that separated the two of them from the vast seas. They were merely discomforted by the sudden change in the environment.

So too was she.

“I don’t want this,” she said after a while. “I don’t want to suffocate under rules or tempering.” “I wonder,” Nabriales said, “were I made whole, and none could dispute that I owned the name ‘Nereus,’ would you remember me?” His expression was half screened away by the mask, but the way he pursed his lips betrayed some discomfort with the question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Well,” he murmured. “We need not worry on that now. What strictures bind you we can find a way for you to slip. You were not of Her party when She was made. She has little hope of keeping you under Her thumb.” “I am worried now,” Kallisti insisted. “If this city is my birthright, I want to abdicate. Would you choose me over this?” She reached for him, skimming her hands over his chest until she cupped his head between her palms, and put her thumbs to him to pry away the mask. It dissolved at her touch, and his dark eyes fixed on her. “Yes,” he said. “Then …” She paused, trying to organize her thoughts. “I don’t want to be Eris, and don’t really want you to be Nereus. Let them ascend the other Nabriales in your stead.” “You’re asking me to run away with you?” “Yes!” Kallisti said. “I think so.” “Where will we go?” “I don’t know!” she laughed. “Where do dragons come from? Meracydia, sure, but Lensha told me they were from somewhere else before that.” “True,” the Ascian said. “They arrived after the sundering of the shards, and none of the reflections have them.” “Then we have a destination,” Kallisti said.

He leaned down to kiss her, the warmth of him smothering in the cold, deep water. Something occurred to her, then. “If you’re giving up your title and your ancient name … what do I call you?” “My name before I was ascended …” He paused, seeming to think about it a long time. “It was … it was Brett.” “Hi, Brett,” she said, giggling. Then she said, “Do you think we have time to visit Costa del Sol before we leave?”

[starcunning]

Catocala sappho

Happy Friday! A little while ago some friends and I did a fic exchange (mostly out of concern our tastes were too obscure and specific for Chocolate Box, so, there is that). I’ll be filling other requests from that set over time, but today’s offerings come from the Erebidae. Because people wanted more from that setting, I guess.

“Catocala sappho” takes place approximately concurrently with “Praxis inordinata” and “Acherontia atropos.”

[F/F][WOL (Lensha Hathaar)/Igeyorhm)][Queerplatonic relationship][That good good soulbonding thing][Just a lot of metaphors and metaphyics][A bad idea, though not as bad as any Kallisti’s ever had][ARR 2.56][Erebidae][2k words]

The mortal world reeks. She, in her absence, has forgotten this; there are more pleasant reminders than fetid water and mold, but such are the circumstances. It was the confluence of aether that alerted them, the surge of light energy—Hydaelyn intervened directly but rarely, and always this was a situation that merited investigation by one of their number.

It was supposed to have been Lahabrea. Igeyorhm realizes this the moment she sees Hydaelyn’s Champion alone in the darkness. He has crowed about it enough in the Chrysalis, preening with self-assurance despite the fact that it cost him his mortal vessel. Well, Lahabrea is not here, and Igeyorhm is not minded to await him.

“Lensha Hathaar,” she names the other woman. “You are not Lahabrea,” says the Warrior of Light.

She looks like a ghost, pale as moonlight in the dark of the sewer; the only tell that gives the lie to her ethereality is the dark water that stains her white robes. Igeyorhm can see the light that strains against the bounds of her mortal form—she is untethered from Her blessings, Igeyorhm surmises at once, but she is undimmed, and far brighter than the champions of the Thirteenth.

“I am not,” confirms Igeyorhm, “but your bargain was not with him alone, but all our party.” Igeyorhm extends a hand. Lensha looks at her a long moment, and takes it only after a period of introspection marked only by the dripping of water down the dank walls. There is no sound but the Miqo’te’s breathing and the rush of water, and then there is only the latter and the pair are gone.

Lensha does not accompany her to the Chrysalis when Igeyorhm makes her report. Lahabrea is there, though, and he is not happy.

“She was to be my project,” he snarls, intemperate as ever. “You have a project,” Igeyorhm reminds him. “Yes, and you were supposed to be helping me with that!” “I did,” Igeyorhm shrugs. “Ysayle Dangoulain has abandoned the purposes of Light and seeks to enact the will of her goddess, incarnate in her. She no longer needs me.” “I had been assured the situation with the Archbishop was well in hand,” agrees Elidibus, looking loftily down at them both. Igeyorhm is surprised he is not of Lahabrea’s party; both are of the Source, after all. But that has not always meant kinship, though Emet-Selch is similarly pliant to the Emissary’s whims. “Did you require my help in the city proper, Lahabrea? I would hate for you to disappoint us all,” Igeyorhm says. The frostiness of her tone leaves the again unquestionable. His choler rises. “I do not need a subordinate that seeks to usurp me,” he snaps. “Enough,” Elidibus says. “Igeyorhm, will you not surrender the Champion?” “Not to him; not willingly,” Igeyorhm says. “She knows him, and has reason to distrust. She has no greater reason to distrust me than any one of us, and I am between projects, as I mentioned. Iceheart was a success, was she not?” “For now,” Elidibus agrees. “Lahabrea. Are things proceeding in Ishgard?” “Yes,” says the Paragon, clearly annoyed at being backed so thoroughly into that corner. “Then Igeyorhm is right. You may ask Pashtarot to aid you, if you are so sorely pressed.” “I’ll take it under consideration,” Lahabrea says, clearly having already dismissed the idea. Elidibus dismisses him with a wave, his avian mask swinging about, regard settling on Igeyorhm once more. “Any other concerns of note?” “Where is Nabriales?” Igeyorhm asks. “I had not thought you so inclined to his presence,” the Emissary notes with lofty amusement. “Do not mistake me, I am glad enough not to see him here, but he had an identity established in Ul’dah. From my earliest inquiries, Hydaelyn intervened to save one of Her chosen after assassins were loosed upon a party she attended. Nabriales should have known of this. Nabriales should have spoken of this. Thus I must ask: where is Nabriales?” “Where indeed,” mutters Elidibus. “I have my suspicions, but I should return to Garlemald anon.” Elidibus’s lips press into a thin line of displeasure, and then he lifts a white-gloved hand, dismissing her to her new duties.

Lensha watches the Floating Isles with impassive eyes. She does not move, does not even flinch, when Igeyorhm materializes at her side. Her aether ripples; that is all. Its wan white humming tendrils stray a long way from her corporeal form; she is half out of her body, nearly a ghost in a living body. Igeyorhm was not aware she still had a heart, but something in her throbs with sympathy.

“You are back,” Lensha says, and there is no emotion attached to the notion. “I could have fled while you were gone.” “Yet you did not.” Lahabrea would have treated the situation with less subtlety; were he called away to Ishgard or elsewhere, he might have poisoned her and left her to sleep until his return. Deudalaphon would have called upon the Lessers to stand by and attend her. “You could be far away on wings of aether by now,” the Ascian of the Thirteenth notes. “Nowhere so far gone that you could not follow,” Lensha says. “This was your cohort’s doing.” “I had thought so, but Nabriales is absent, and not likely to be involved.” “Nabriales,” the Champion of Hydaelyn echoes. “I had been assured he was no longer a threat.” Her annoyance bristles, the spines of a great leviathan breaching the surface of placid waters. Like that fin, her emotions stretch, spread, and sink once more into the murk. “Would you know if he were dead?” “Eventually. Perhaps that explains his absence, though Elidibus did not seem to think so.” “And Lahabrea? I had been told he was not dead.” Igeyorhm smiles. She settles beside Hydaelyn’s Champion, who shies from her—not bodily, but her aether shrinks, withdraws, so that shadow does not touch light. “He is not,” Igeyorhm admits, “alas.”

Lensha turns then to look at her, fixing her with luminous eyes. They are the color of the First, flooded with light, even her pupils made bright by chatoyance. “Why you?” she asks. “It was thought that I was better suited for this particular assignation,” Igeyorhm says. “Lahabrea can be … volatile.” “And you are steadier,” Lensha says, tone flat with disbelief. Igeyorhm sifts through the reasoning in her mind: Lahabrea is stronger than she is, being of the Source, and put to better use elsewhere; Lahabrea is more objectionable. These things answer the question why not Lahabrea? but speak nothing on the matter of Why Igeyorhm? There is, of course, the simple fact that she arrived first; there is also the fact that she treated successfully with the champion of the Thirteenth. Too well, in fact. Igeyorhm puts the memory aside. It has been a long time since that place—and Shemhazai—became something other than what they once were.

She is seeking redemption in the eyes of Zodiark, she admits to herself. She must do now what had failed her before, and redeem herself thereby.

“Ah,” says Lensha. “So it’s penance.” Their aether has not intermingled; Igeyorhm can feel no such violation. “Your goddess told you this?” “People are not so difficult to figure out,” Lensha says, turning her face away. She delivers this judgment with disdain—with scorn, even—but Igeyorhm cannot find it written in the skeins of white that trail from the Warrior of Light’s body like a shroud. “What happened to the Thirteenth?” Igeyorhm looks to her, trying to discern cruelty in the shape of her mouth, the white folds of her gown, the twitching of her tail. Igeyorhm is familiar with every tell—with Mitron’s stolid judgment and Altima’s lofty superiority—and she looks for them in Hydaelyn’s Champion. There is nothing of the type written there. The question is merely the question, born of curiosity and not the desire to reopen old wounds. “It would be easier to show you,” Igeyorhm says, because even to unhostile ears it seems such a task to tell. “I cannot compel that,” Lensha says. “I can offer it to you,” the Ascian tells her, taking down her hood. Lensha nods. Her bright eyes rest upon the dark crystal that glimmers at Igeyorhm’s throat.

Igeyorhm reaches for her—not with hands or body, for the flesh is the merest nothing, but with all her being. Shadow brushes light for the first time and Lensha gasps. Igeyorhm hushes her, but she too is hesitant. “Your Goddess grants you insight,” Igeyorhm says, “and you pass the boundaries of another’s soul. Reflexively you have a way to return to yourself, something of your own being to anchor you. Focus on that now.” Lensha nods, placid as the pale moon, and Igeyorhm reaches for her once more. Lensha is so exposed, her aetherial being extending so far past the boundaries of the flesh; it is so easy for Igeyorhm to reach into her. She has practice, and with it, finesse; her darkness is not overwhelming, but trickles slowly into that vast whiteness. Similitude interlinks them, and they commingle slowly. There is more to Lensha than light and ghosts; her bitterness is the bitterness of brine. She is the sea and the tides, and Igeyorhm the storm that stirs the waves, darkness shot through with light in flashes that only illuminate the beauty of the tempest. Igeyorhm is not of the Source, and can never compete with the Source’s power, but she can bolster it, commune with it. It is and is not like mingling with Shemhazai, who was like the breath on her cheek. This is an intimacy so long foregone that for a moment Igeyorhm loses herself in it—and Lensha has a natural ability; without instruction she reaches for Igeyorhm. Moonlight through clouds, white spray on a black sea; water and wind and lightning whirl and combine in the stillness between them.

Then they are one landscape with two histories. The Champion of Light, sore-pressed and forgotten, bargaining her very being to save friends who may be dead anyway. The Champion of Darkness, too easily victorious, obliterating all she once loved.

The Thirteenth was her home and her heart and her doom, too ripe with umbral aether to ever be saved by the lantern-lights of Hydaelyn. All that had been was lost but its champions—one of them taken from that place by Elidibus, subordinate to the Emissary’s will. And the Warrior of Light that had failed to oppose her—the Warrior of Light whom she had loved, and defeated just the same—had been twisted by Calamity. Shemhazai could not recall the very concept of live, much less her beloved, and yet Igeyorhm had never been able to bring herself to eradicate this lingering trace of her failure. Sooner die than kill, and repent forever of her victory.

Lensha relinquished her hold upon her crystal, pouring the last of herself into this joining. Igeyorhm, too, let go; in the commingling of light and darkness the Martyr found compassion as deep and wide as the oceans. Sorrow like rain, tears like seawater; impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Her purpose accomplished, Igeyorhm began to withdraw, remembering who she was—the place she had been born, the first time she heard her God’s voice, the oddities that set the Thirteenth Reflection apart from the Source it derived from.

Lensha did not move, did not reel away in turn, and it fell to Igeyorhm to rebuild herself, to sort her own being from Lensha’s so that the Champion of Hydaelyn could collect herself by process of elimination. With the last spark of darkness in a heart of light, Igeyorhm reached out for her, and saw there the trouble: Lensha’s identity was crafted of a thousand nos and no yeses. Hers was a being of negation, and Igeyorhm longed to weep, but she had long since forgotten.

Her tears were on the Warrior of Light’s cheeks anyway; Lensha’s pale aether hung unbound around her. Igeyorhm reached for her, setting a hand upon her shoulder and pulling her against her side. “It is overwhelming, I know,” Igeyorhm said gently. Lensha only blinked, as though oblivious to her own weeping, but she did not lift her head from the Ascian’s shoulder. Those silver eyes closed, and her tears dried.

Still, at the heart of her, Igeyorhm could taste the salt sorrow of the sea.

[starcunning]

Praxis inordinata

Happy Friday! Today I will be speedrunning the Eighth Umbral Calamity*. Stay tuned for part two.

*Eighth Umbral Calamity not guaranteed but strongly indicated.

[M/F] [WOL* (Kallisti)/Nabriales][The plot actually arrived? There’s no porn in this; there’s just plot.][Blood CW][Mild gore][Just a spectacularly bad idea all around][*technically Lensha Hathaar is the WOL; Kallie is one of her Echo-blessed companions][ARR 2.56][Erebidae][3.4k words]

Riol was a cheater. It had taken her some time to notice, but he won too often. The stakes were low enough that she had to assume it was merely ingrained habit—he had no obvious tells, which only cemented this perception. Kallisti resolved to mention it to Moenbryda only if it continued to agitate her—there was no sense in risking her tearing her stitches over what was meant to be a friendly game.

It had been a poor distraction up until that revelation; even afterward part of Kallisti seethed with resentment that her presence had not been requested at the Sultana’s banquet. Lensha Ravenfeller was a more palatable morsel, and had looked so in her gown of ivory when she had left with the others on wings of aether.

Kallisti thought of Ul’dah and she was there, in the Fragrant Chamber, though the scent of spice and the sound of gentle music she had anticipated were absent. The place was an abattoir, stinking of blood, and she heard steel strike steel and screams of fright. She felt the fear welling in her own throat, the terrible surety that the Sultana was dead and the Bull’s retribution was merciless—one of his fellow members of the Syndicate had paid a blood price for his grief already. Her gaze fixed at last upon the Highlander and she saw, impossibly, that his foe was Ilberd Feare.

The realization jerked Kallisti out of her Echo-blessed vision. She had fallen from her perch to land on the stone floor, and gazed up at Moenbryda’s ceiling. A figure loomed over her—Daye, she recalled after a moment—but rather than offer her a hand up, he pointed his spear at her throat.

Kallisti lifted her head to glance around the room. In the instant before the butt of his lance struck her forehead, knocking her skull against the stone, she noted the presence of two other Crystal Braves. One was doing his best to menace Moenbryda, though she had a yalm of height on him and a hellacious tongue undulled by her injuries. The other was patting Riol down for weapons; a half-dozen blades already dropped to the stones.

Kallisti closed her eyes, bitter annoyance prickling at the nape of her neck. Some help that vision was, to have left her in this position. “I know you’re awake,” said Laurentius Daye. She had seen the way Lensha’s eyelids twitched when she was in the throes of the Echo, and briefly tried to imitate it while also casting her aether back toward its anchor point, thereby to escape. Heat seared her shoulder, bright and blooming, and she smelled blood again, real this time; hers; his lance had pierced her shoulder, disrupting her focus on both tasks. She gasped. “Don’t try that again,” Laurentius cautioned.

She was going to die on the floor of Moenbryda’s bedroom, which was not at all what she had imagined for her ending. Oh, she’d imagined this locale once or twice, but the circumstances were vastly different. Kallisti tried not to panic. She had a great deal of practice wrangling her fear of death, but usually she at least had her staff. “Well?” said a voice. “Go and retrieve it, then.” “Nabriales,” she said, eyes snapping open. At the same time, Moenbryda said, “What is he doing here?”

Nabriales turned to face the scholar. Laurentius brought his spear up. Almost casually, Nabriales swiped his claws over the lancer’s throat. Crimson stained his blue uniform, beaded on the black leather of the Ascian’s robes, and spattered upon the stone floor. A moment later, Laurentius fell, too, dropping his weapon to clutch at his neck.

In the fracas, Riol had slipped a knife from his boot and pinned his Braves minder in the corner of the room. Nabriales pulled Kallisti to her feet and toward the door. She yelped at the tug on her injured shoulder, then planted her feet. “Them too,” she demanded. “Really?” the Ascian groused, and the shadows of the room seemed to coalesce into sprites of pitch, the umbral energy sparking from them quickly subduing the Crystal Braves. Moenbryda did not move from her perch. “I said, what is he doing here?” she repeated. “Saving your miserable lives,” he drawled. “Who are you talking to?” Riol asked. “Don’t worry about it,” Kallisti insisted. “An Ascian,” Moenbryda said anyway. “A what?” “Don’t worry about it!” Kallie said, still more forcefully. She clasped a hand to her shoulder, trying to staunch the bleeding.

Nabriales flicked a claw, and his shadow sprites darted out in front of the group, floating down the hall like ball lightning in negative. “I do hope you have a plan, Kallisti,” he muttered. “To the armory first,” she declared, “and we fight our way out.” “I will hold them here,” he said, and she could feel the aether gathering around him even as the Crystal Braves at the end of the hall turned to charge. Kallisti turned away, sprinting ahead, the other Scions running after. Riol hustled to the fore, ducking into the next stairway and clearing the first landings before waving Kallisti and Moenbryda after him.

“Do I want to know?” Moenbryda asked. “I don’t think I could explain it if you did,” Kallisti admitted. “Are you that intent on dissecting a gift?” “Yes. How did he know to come here?” “Put it down to opportunism if you like,” she hedged. “Something’s going on in Ul’dah,” Kallisti continued. “That’s what I saw.” “You think it’s related?” “Raubahn and Ilberd were swordfighting, so I have to assume—” Riol hushed them both, stepping out into the hall. Kallie heard the sounds of feet scuffling on the floor and peered out of the doorway to find the Hyur with his arm wrapped around the neck of another Crystal Brave. The other man made a series of choking, gurgling sounds that were only half-muffled by Riol’s fingers. He dragged the limp body into the stairwell and stripped the blue jacket from his compatriot, shrugging into it. “If the Braves are trying to hold the Rising Stones,” he said, “my best bet is to pass among them. I’m willing to bet this has to do with Wilred’s disappearance …” “What?” Riol looked at her, brow twisted in pained confusion. “Wilred,” he said. “One of ours. The best of us. You didn’t hear?” “I was off dealing with the Isle of Val,” Kallisti said. Riol shook his head, ushering the pair out into the hallway, pretending to hustle them before him. Kallisti didn’t bother to meet the gaze of any of the Braves they passed. She could feel the blood trickling down her arm, droplets falling from her fingertips, spattering on the stone. Her trail of crimson wound from the dormitories to the armory, and as they ducked inside, Kallisti took a deep breath. She repented of it as her shoulders rose, coughing it back out in a sigh a moment later.

She found her staff, and took it in her bloodied hands, feeling her aether flow into it, into once-living bone and wood as though it were her own body. It was a strange sensation—and a new one, having come to her only since Sharlayan, since she had slipped the moors of her mortal flesh for the briefest moment. Kallisti let out another breath, more measured, and turned back toward Riol and Moenbryda.

“Can you get out of here?” she said. “Even if you can only teleport outside, Slafborn should be able to help—” “It would send me back to Sharlayan!” “And I’d end up back in La Noscea.” Kallisti’s tail lashed behind her. She wanted to shrug, but her shoulder stung. “I’m not actually hearing a negative. If you stay here, you die.” “What makes you so sure?” Moenbryda pressed her. “The Sultana’s dead,” Kallisti said. “Gods, they’re trying to pin it on us,” Riol replied a moment later. “That’s the best I can figure,” she agreed. “So go back west or stay here and hang for a traitor.” “What about you?” Moenbryda asked. “What about the Ascian?” “I’ll deal with him,” Kallisti said. “Why did he save you?” “I don’t know,” she admitted. Oh, she had ideas—hopes, perhaps—but she had expected nothing to come of that little tug on the thread of aether that wound between them across whatever distance she could conceive of. “I’ll deal with him.” Moenbryda put the white auracite prism into her hands. “You’ll need this. And the staff.” “I have the staff,” she said, forcing the white stone into a pouch at her belt, marring it with blood. “Minfilia left it with me when she and Lensha went to Ul’dah.”

“Minfilia,” the Roegadyn woman repeated. “Is she alright?” “I didn’t see her,” Kallie said. “Almost everybody … almost everyone went.” “Urianger stayed behind,” Moenbryda supplied. “I have no idea what’s going on at the Waking Sands,” she said. “Is Arenvald with him?” “I think so,” said Riol. “Start with him,” Kallisti said. “Moenbryda, get out of here.” “But—” “You’re injured,” Riol reminded her. “Go.” “I’ll watch the door,” Kallisti said, adopting a ready stance. She clutched her staff with both hands, trying to ignore the pain radiating from her shoulder. The old wood had grown slick and swollen with her blood, drinking it in. “Riol, you go too.” “No,” he said, posting up beside her. “When she’s gone I’ll go find the others. They have no idea what’s happening here.” “Good luck,” said Moenbryda. Kallisti did not look back, but she felt the void in the aether, the rush of currents to fill the empty space, a moment later.

“Now you,” Kallie said, and Riol slipped back out into the hallway, striding stiffly onward, as though he was simply on patrol. She waited until he was out of sight, and thought of a crimson sigil—an insectoid pyramid. The aether around her rippled again, and she felt warmth and darkness at her shoulder. “Are you ready to go?” Nabriales asked. “Yes, but we’re going the long way,” she said. He scoffed. “Why ever so? I could take you to the Chrysalis now.” “Because Riol will need the distraction,” she said, “and I didn’t come for my weapon so that I could not fight.” “Meddlesome little fool,” he scolded her. “Then abandon me to my follies,” she said, already pushing open the door to the hall. “I will not,” said the Ascian, sounding genuinely affronted.

Kallie sprinted down the hall, rounding to find a party of Crystal Braves flanking the doorway. She laughed as she ran, and they hurried after her. So easy to lead them into a narrower passage, where she could round on them and gout them with flame. Nabriales caught them from behind, muttering in his dark tongue about the coming of the end, and crackling black energy speared down the hallway. They fell and he rose, an unhallowed being, his cloak rippling like dark wings, and then she was off again. Her shoulder ached. She let it drive her.

The pain seared still more brightly as she rounded a corner and was faced with a sword in her face. She brought her staff up to block, catching the weapon on the wootz plating. Steel rung against steel, and she shoved upward before the blade could slide far enough to catch her fingers. She could see stars on the edges of her vision, and channeled her pain into astral flame—not a hungry gout as she had done moments before, but an unassuming ember, notable only for where she called it.

She burned the air from the soldier’s lungs, and he died breathing ashes. Nabriales smiled, stepping over him, and led. To the right, the solar, and he turned that way before she shouted for him to follow, and went left, back toward the antechambers where her fellows often gathered.

She mounted the stairs and saw dozens of cobalt uniforms, turning to regard her sudden advance. She backpedaled, stumbling into Nabriales, who put her behind him. “Run,” she urged him, and dove back into the labyrinthine halls of the Rising Stones. She did not hear his footsteps behind her—but she heard the advance of booted feet a moment later, soldiers of the Crystal Braves in hot pursuit.

The earth trembled underfoot. She staggered, stumbled, went down hard—on her injured shoulder, barely keeping hold of her blood-slick staff. Kallisti scrabbled to her feet, passing her staff into her right hand, clutching it with numb fingers so that she could press her left palm to her oozing wound.

She never thought she could miss Lensha so much.

Kallisti looked back as she ran, and saw Nabriales moving through the rising crowd of soldiers, as unconcerned with them as they were with him. His face was masked in the crimson glow of his sigil, but for all the darkness that seethed from him they were still outnumbered. She ran, dimly aware of how difficult it was to climb stairs.

Her hands were cold, so it was ice next, freezing in place the soldiers in blue she saw awaiting her up ahead. The hall stretched onward, no other set of stairs that she could see, so she shouldered open the last door on the left, because she could lean on it with her good side.

It was a dormitory—disused and dusty. Its window overlooked Revenant’s Toll. She was several stories up. “Jump,” Nabriales said, his voice at her ear. She glanced back at him. He was bowed over her, a hand outstretched behind him, as though he could—without even looking—cover the doorway. He reached past her, throwing open the sash of the window. “What?” “Either you jump or we fight our way back out, the way we came, and there are still more of them on the way.” “I’ll die.” “Do you think I would allow that now?” he asked, sounding genuinely annoyed by the possibility. She could hear the approach of boots, the raised voices of the Crystal Braves as they cleared each of the rooms in turn.

Kallisti slung her staff over her back, pulled herself up onto the windowsill with a cry of pain, and tried not to look down. The heights were dizzying. Her fingers were blood-sticky against the leaded casings of the window, and a fierce wind moaned through the canyon. She closed her eyes, let go of her perch, and leapt, pushing off with her legs.

It was cold, a night wind rushing over her face, through her hair, tearing away her hat. Then it was warm, and she got the sense that even with her eyes open she could not see through the complete blackness that surrounded her. All sense of gravity failed her. She knew her head from her feet only by orienting herself around her pain—that must be her right shoulder, she told herself, which meant she must know which way her head was facing. She did not breathe, and she was sure she must be dying. She thought of an ocean she had never seen.

Then she thought of the salt marshes of her home, of the sea crashing over the breakwaters and flooding the estuaries. She could smell them, she thought—although perhaps the salt that filled her lungs was merely the scent of her own blood. Then she felt rain upon her cheeks.

Kallisti opened her eyes, and found herself in Nabriales’s arms, her legs dangling freely as he clutched her, chest to chest. “I told you I could float,” he reminded her, and set her down among the sedges. “I had other things on my mind,” she said. She leaned on him, no longer feeling strong enough to stand. “This is Yafaem,” she said after a moment. Even in the dim night, it seemed obvious to her. She knew these trees, the reeds and grasses that tickled at her calves, the scent of peat. “It seemed best to allow you to decide,” Nabriales said. “What is this place?” “It’s home,” she said, sagging with relief. He reached out to catch her by the shoulder, and she hissed in pain. “Careful,” she said. “That still troubles you?” “Of course it does,” she snapped. “It’s a wound.” “Hm,” he said, pulling her in, clamping his hand over her shoulder. She yelped in pain, looking up at his face in agony as though she might find there some reason for this torture.

He was not smiling sadistically, as she could not help but to have imagined. Instead, his mouth was set in a grim line of focus, and she imagined the frown that bent his brow behind the mask. The searing pain of contact ebbed after a moment, and she could feel the blood trickling from her wound reverse direction, flowing upward, back into her body. Her agonized flesh knitted, slowly, pulsing with pain for several minutes. She fought past it to watch as the damage she had done to herself in her desperate flight was mended, leaving no scar, even the skin around the wound free of blood—though it still clung to her fingers. When he lifted his hand, the cloth, too, was mended. It was like nothing had ever happened. “Oh,” she said. Her head swam. “There,” he said. “How fragile your mortal body.” “I still lost a lot of blood,” she said, lifting her hand to regard it. He curled his palm around her own, pressing her fingers to his lips. It stained them crimson, darker than his mask. “Little I can do for that now that we’ve left it in Mor Dhona,” he said, tone sardonic. “I need a place to rest. There’s … I think there’s a cave near here, we would use it when we were hunting in this area …”

She listened to the falling rain—pattering on leaves, splashing into the waters of the marsh. The wind blew through the grasses, and she could hear the call of frogs. “We’re safe,” she said. “No one … no one comes here but my clan, and … they’ll know me. If they find us.” Still it seemed an impossible task to reach the foothills, and she staggered through the mire until they found its mouth. It was cool and dry inside. She fell to her knees immediately, putting her back to the stone walls and sliding down. Nabriales crouched beside her. His hood had gone, sometime since their arrival here. His mask, too. He looked at her. “Are you staying? It isn’t much, but it should be safe. Or are you going … wherever Ascians go?” He shook his head. “There are things that require my attention, but these are eventualities. My window of opportunity has not yet closed.” She hummed out some acquiescence, letting her eyes close. The outer layers of her clothing were damp with rain, but the cloth against her skin was dry, and it seemed too much effort to undress now. It took most of her concentration to focus long enough to ask a single question.

“Why did you know to come for me?” “You asked,” he said. “Nnnn…no, I didn’t, I never said your name until you were already there.” He laughed, the bombastic sound of it filling the cave, redoubled and echoing around them. “Is that how you think this works, little fool?” he mused. “That you can speak my name and summon me, like a bound voidsent?” “When you think about it,” Kallisti said, “I am Mhachi.” “Even the ancient sorcerers of Mhach could not command our kind,” Nabriales said, bristling with pride. “No. You cannot compel me.” “Then why did you come?” “I felt your distress,” he said. She felt aether prickle along the nape of her neck—distantly, as though through a haze of black felt. Kallisti realized then how drawn she was. “I thought you understood this.” “I didn’t realize …” “I could be banished to the most distant star and I would still feel you,” he said. “It was not my intent when I branded you, but in what came afterward …” “In Sharlayan?” she supplied. “We are entangled now,” he said. “A change in your aether is a change in my aether,” he said. “I can sense your soul as though you had laid it bare before me.” “Spooky,” she said. Then, “Isn’t that a weakness?” “Perhaps,” he admitted. “So that’s how you knew,” she said, “but I couldn’t compel you to act. That means … it was your decision.” “Yes,” Nabriales said.

“Isn’t that unusual?” she asked. “Yes.” Then the rising darkness swarmed up around her, and she let it claim her. Her struggle had wearied her. It was so much easier simply to let go.

[starcunning]

Acherontia atropos

Happy Friday! Today I will be speedrunning the Eighth Umbral Calamity*. Part one was earlier.

Technically, this is the last scheduled update to Erebidae, but I’m doing a fic exchange and two of the requests therein pertain to either this universe or these characters. So please look forward to those in February after the exchange concludes.

OH AND I MADE A REQUEST TOO BUT IT’S ABOUT PASHTAROT. YOU’LL SEE WHY THAT’S FUNNY LATER.

*Eighth Umbral Calamity not guaranteed but strongly indicated.

[M/F] [WOL* (Kallisti)/Nabriales][If you’re looking for traditional-ass sex in here you will be disappointed.][If, however, you are subscribed to that Starcunning Soulbonding Bullshit package, you will be delighted.][This song is called: it’s a metaphor, fool!][Consensual snuff][Yeah, that’s what we’re doing in 2019.][Just a spectacularly bad idea all around][*technically Lensha Hathaar is the WOL; Kallie is one of her Echo-blessed companions][ARR 2.56][Erebidae][2.6k words]

Nabriales neither ate nor slept. As the days passed, this became obvious; he shared none of Kallisti’s concern for these needs. She could spear fowl from the air with lances of ice or call a levinbolt to stun the fish and frogs in a pond, cooking them over a fire of her own making, but for all that he sat by her hearth he never partook.

He could eat, and perhaps could remember how to sleep, he admitted; he simply had no need to do either. Sometimes he would touch her, the darkness of his aether spilling into her, as though into her very veins. And he would let her rest her head against his chest, leaning on the confines of his mortal frame—but when she looked upon him with anything other than her sight, she knew she was well past the bounds of his being. Slowly, the weakness of blood loss ebbed.

Through it all, her linkpearl remained silent.

“We should return to Mor Dhona,” Nabriales said one morning. It was crisp and cold—the sea tempered the teeth of winter somewhat, but Kallisti could see her own breath on the air when she answered him. “We?” “Yes, we.” “I have no idea what the situation is there,” Kallisti said, “and they haven’t called for me. What I’m more interested in is why you want to go.” “Your mortal fragility troubles me,” Nabriales said. “It was a nearer thing than I thought. And I yet require the Key.” “What? What key?” Nabriales looked at her, running a gloved hand through his hair, sweeping it back from his brow. “Do you recall the circumstances of our meeting?” “Minfilia? She’s the key?” Kallisti asked, feeling a flare of some hot emotion in the back of her mind. The Ascian only laughed at that, claws brushing her cheek, his aether stirring her own with that simple, possessive gesture. “Don’t be jealous, little fool,” he said. “Especially over a misunderstanding. Your Antecedent is of no interest to me. It was the staff I came for.” His thumb skimmed over her throat, stoking her pulse even as he pressed his fingertip to it. “Tupsimati,” she echoed, remembering at last. “What would you do with it?” “Solve the troublesome problem of your mortality, for one,” he said.

She looked at him, trying not to shiver from the cold, her breath a plume of white on the air, every puff of steam precious heat escaping her. Soon she would build a fire; she had not entirely forgotten the ways of her clan even after years of “civilizing” influence. “I didn’t realize that was a problem to be solved,” Kallisti said. “In most cases it is not,” Nabriales admitted. When he said no more, she reached for him, spilling her light into his darkness like a piercing ray. Perhaps this was not Hydaelyn’s purpose in granting her the Echo; Minfilia and Lensha had lamented often enough how little control they had over it—and even now she could not completely master it. Or else she should never have awoken to find herself at Laurentius Daye’s mercy. Nor could she compel a vision from Nabriales now—but there were other paths to understanding. She pressed against the boundary between them, and felt his surprise as her own.

It was the first time she had managed it without his prompting and guidance. The pride that swelled in her chest belonged to both of them. Nabriales still pressed a hand to her cheek, insofar as the distinction between them mattered; it was as true to call it her hand and his cheek, in moments like this.

He was afraid—they were afraid, and at the heart of that shared fear was the realization that Kallisti was the only thing Nabriales had been allowed to claim for himself since his ascension. She felt the fragility of her flesh-bound existence, the weight of mortality that seemed poised to snap the aetherial tether between the pair of them. She probed deeper, reaching into the core of him, that kernel of black crystal that maintained his sense of self even when they commingled.

He did not experience the world as she did. That much had long become obvious, the distinction made still more stark in that first communion in Sharlayan. Nabriales drew no distinction between aether and form; their shared sensation was unbounded by flesh. It was dulled by the layers they both cloaked themselves in; without that simple armor the ebb and flow of energy in the world might prove a distraction. She moved; he moved. As he had said. But he moved and he moved the world, all of reality bent to his superior perception.

They felt seconds as a lifetime; they felt eras as days.

She was such a small thing; a speck of light in a storm of darkness. Her life was like the flickering of a firefly. How could it matter? And yet it did. This had ceased to be a casual dalliance the moment he had joined his aether to hers—an impulsive decision made when Elidibus threatened his dominion, its consequences compounded ever since. From then ‘til now, her light seeping in through the cracks. Even when she withdrew, some part of her remained; some mote of light in a heart of darkness.

Nabriales was panting when she looked upon him again. It was such a curiously mortal reaction, she could not help but smile at it. She leaned in, kissing his slack mouth, awakening him from his daze. “I see,” she said. “Will it take long?” “No,” Nabriales told her. “Once we have the staff, I await only your readiness.” “Why do you need it?” she asked. “You don’t know what it does, do you?” he said, brow knitting in consternation. “No.” “That staff allows its bearer to gather vast quantities of aether from the surrounding environs and bring it to bear.” “And that will … make me immortal, somehow?” Nabriales scoffed, seeming annoyed. “You are already immortal. It is the flesh in which you reside that makes you fragile. You must renounce it.” “I have to die, you mean,” Kallisti said. “Does a tree die when it drops its leaves in winter?” he asked. “I wish only to unmoor you from the bonds of your mortality.” She considered that a moment, and found no reason to doubt him. Not when she had felt in her own breast his feelings for her.

It seemed foolish in retrospect to have ever questioned them in the first place, she had to own. “Alright,” she said. “The scholar gave you a prism of white auracite,” he said. “I will need it. And I will need your athame,” he said. “If it’s aether you need, there is a confluence in the old ruins,” Kallisti said. “Mhachi ritualists would use it. I remember …” She lifted a hand to her chest, stroking the smooth surface of her violet crystal. “You’ve done this before?” “It was done to me,” Nabriales said, “in eras long past. I am familiar with its workings. Are you prepared to return to Mor Dhona?” “No need,” Kallisti said, retrieving her pack. At her feet she cast the sword, the stone, the staff. He bent to collect them with reverence. “You had it all along?” he mused. “Yes,” Kallisti said. “Then you were always the answer, little fool,” he said, tipping her chin up with his fingertips.

The sky was a featureless plain of light; its blanket of clouds diffused the sun to undifferentiated silver. The stone against her back was cold. Kallisti could feel the runes carved into the ancient plinth against her bare skin, subtlest voids in the chilly sensation. Her Crystal of Light—called forth in preparation—rested against her chest, its crimson glow the brightest color in the bleached ruin.

Nabriales put one hand against her cheek. In the other, he held the rectangular prism of white stone. “It’s time,” he said. Kallisti said nothing; there was no need of speech between them now. She lifted her hand to curl her fingers around the cool white stone, and let it leech the heat from her palm. The auracite was a thirsty stone, greedy for her aether in the same way her mage’s staff readily called it forth. But its intent was not to focus her will; no, instead it leeched her aether from her and held it.

The already-dim world grew more distant. The stone’s cold seemed less pressing; the feeling of Nabriales’s clawed gauntlet against her face no longer filled her with smothering warmth. She felt exhausted, as she did after a taxing battle or a number of long-range teleports. It was a familiar sensation; a life in service to the Scions of the Seventh Dawn was neither easy nor comfortable. Kallisti tried to call the sustaining, infusing power of ice, but she could not focus long enough to form the spell. Her hand fell from the stone. Nabriales’s naked face swam in her vision. She reached for him; her grasp fell short. her fingers burned against the black crystal at his throat.

Then she saw no more. The pain wracked her, squeezed her eyes shut. She had so little left to give, and he wrung it from her anyway. She would have called it cruelty, had she the faculty for speech. But she had been robbed of it long since; she was a kernel of self awash in a sea of agony. How easily a candle in the darkness could be snuffed.

Somewhere, far away from here, a knife slipped through her ribs. The last burst of aether from the ritual dagger allowed her sensation enough to feel the blood well and pour, the searing pain of her pierced heart. Hydaelyn’s little fool breathed her last.

Her agony was not ended then; the breath of her soul was the first captured by the staff and channeled back into the crystal. Kallisti felt herself stretched across insurmountable distance, but the aether caused her Crystal of Light to flare still brighter, power welling in its hallowed lattices. She had felt every bit of her being torn apart; she felt every bit of her being put back together, drawn from the auracite prison by the staff and poured back into the Crystal. She was flame and light; she could feel the world dying around her. Mosses and mushrooms that had seen the turning of a thousand years gave up their energy unto her; the chill upon the air and the levinbolts that crackled unborn in the clouds above joined the maelstrom of energies at her heart. Even the Ascian gave up some part of himself, as he had long since done.

In marking his supremacy he had given himself to her.

She did not need to breathe, but gasped all the same. Still the power flowed into her, rising like a spring to the surface, threatening to spill over in a thousand rivers. The Source, she recalled at once. Like its endless waters she flowed back into her body.

Kallisti could exist without it, but the vessel was useful. At the very least, it shielded her from the raw currents of aether that still flowed over her. The auracite was tapped, the staff pumping an empty well; all the energy it could collect had been given unto her.

“Nabriales,” she said, and felt the way his name rippled through the air. He oriented himself toward her—not merely looking with the blinded eyes of his vessel; she could see that now, could truly see him now. Every mote of umbral aether that comprised him reached for her, darkness rising up to meet her light.

Was this what he had felt all along? She no longer concerned herself with cold stone or gelid wind; she cared only for the way the aether flowed. They had deadened this place to make her live, but already the currents were bringing life and energy back to the ruins. She reached out and pressed her hand to his bare face, and watched the way he reacted. Had he been mortal, that simple touch would have made him gasp. But that was a mortal reaction, and so she saw instead the way that his aetherial form bristled, her overwhelming power finding ground in him.

It made her laugh. She stripped him with nothing but a thought, unmaking the simulacrum of his robes so that she could press her skin to his. It felt no longer like a boundary, a membrane between them; it was as ephemeral as a shaft of light or a cast shadow. She could reach into him without effort now, could commingle readily with him.

They were one. Not in the same way they had been one when she had been mortal, where his sensations, his thoughts, his history were hers to explore; they became at last a single entity of radiant light and deepest darkness. An estuary was neither the sea nor the river; it was both, and so were they, until she withdrew.

He was in awe. She did not need to see his expression to know that. “I am of the Source,” she said. He laughed. “I have not forgotten,” he said. He leaned in as though to kiss her, in much the same needy fashion she had lifted her mouth to his once. She felt the kiss as mortal sensation and as a much more immediate touch, and then she felt the rising tide of aether that presaged teleportation.

Elidibus was winter’s darkness, cold to her even at a distance. “What is this?” he said. “You cannot truly have believed this would escape my notice.” “No,” Kallisti told him, drawing her light about her like armor, making of it a shroud against his influence. “But it is too late for you to intervene now.” “What an amusing pet you’ve chosen, Nabriales,” the Emissary said. “Bring her to the palace. Now.”

She could feel the darkness at the heart of the moon—Zodiark slumbered beneath her feet, Nabriales had told her. There was no air to convey the words, but they made themselves understood to one another just the same. It was cold, she noted, in much the same way she noted that the walls around them were tinged with violet. Both facts had become remote to her.

Elidibus seethed, though Kallisti could not yet guess at the cause of that. It could not be that he was angry at being robbed of her, for he was soon joined by his own flickering light. His face was none she knew.

But there were aetherial signatures that were familiar to her—Lahabrea she knew at least a little, and there was another Ascian who seemed familiar somehow, though when she cast herself out to reach him he swiftly rebuffed her. “Who is that?” she asked. “That,” Nabriales said, “is Pashtarot. Why.” “I think we’ve met,” Kallisti said. “Unlikely,” he advised her.

Her concentration was stolen a moment later by a disturbance upon the empty platform to their left. Kallisti could not help but turn her head and watch the shadows coalesce into the last robed figure to arrive—a woman, she realized, with blue hair and a bifurcated mask. She stared a few seconds longer, forcing herself to see past aether that whirled like snowflakes in a winter squall and down to the mere physicality of her. Even so, it was nobody she recognized.

Not so the second figure that appeared a moment later, the third light to flare into existence in this benighted realm. She knew her by face and aether both, for such overwhelming brightness could belong to only one other person.

Lensha Hathaar noticed her staring, and scowled back.