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imperialsea-a · 5 years

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ELIZABETH’S IN-DEPTH RP PLOTTING CHEAT-SHEET.

Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted.

Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, and repost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Template here.

Mun name: Rem (not that blue-haired anime girl or DN, it’s from my old blog!) OOC Contact: Contact me through the Tumblr IM system or my Discord! My Discord is: imperialsea#1818. Please tell me your URL if you message me there so I know who you are!

Now, onto the heart of the post!

♛ Who the heck is my muse, anyway? Elizabeth Eva Alexandria Cross, the only biological daughter of Kaien Cross, her father (a canon vk char), and Eva Liliya Cherie Cross, her mother (an oc muse)! Elizabeth is a vampire hunter by blood like all in her family before her! But, shh! Your character isn't supposed to know that . . . unless they're also a hunter . . . or a perhaps a vampire (since her family from both sides are famous hunters, but even then they don't have to know she's a vamp killer if you don't want them to) . . . or they're some sort of ally to her / the hunters association since she can't just tell anyone her actual work on a whim. Where she's from, the existence of vampires are a secret from most of humanity and it's her job to kill the dangerous people-hurty ones and keep that nice and secret so as to avoid a world war! 'Nothing about her is complicated at all', I say, lying through my teeth like Bethy does to society every day by keeping her job and true lifestyle hidden :'D

Further information below the cut, please take time to read if you’re stuck on what to plot and how Bethy operates!

♛ Points of Interest: - She was born and raised to fight against unruly beasts and composed foes alike. Despite her youth, she's a one-woman powerhouse and is not afraid to take herself down with an opponent if she deems it necessary. She's like the Smash player who hits the fake smash ball to take out an enemy on their last legs, even at the expense of her own life. She'll do it! Except in Smash she'd probably just win the match because she had an extra life and not, you know, not die forever for real in a last grand battle.

- She's got vamp genes all over the place and is rare among hunters. She's biologically immortal like a Pureblood despite not being a vampire herself and is living testimony of what her predecessors took from Purebloods both by honorable bestowal of blood from the mysterious Hooded Woman, and straight up [insert painting of Jupiter Devouring His Son here]. Her great grandparent is 3k+ years old, her father is 200+ for devouring his own twin-- it's messy as mythology, but anime :'D She herself is only 18 on default though (19 in K Crossover--), the youngest of her entire bloodline, and she can still be slain in battle even if she is much hardier than a typical human being. She's also sensitive to auras, and capable of sensing vampires.

- Things characters might notice? She's ghostly pale and kind of looks like she stepped out of The Last Unicorn. She looks cold, sophisticated, and vaguely otherworldly-- she really doesn't radiate the friendliest of vibes unless she's doing something she loves, and the calculated yet seemingly effortless grace of her movements are prominent in and outside of combat. She is descended from an ancient royal line, and those posh, stuffy mannerisms and formal speech pattern live on through her even if the Adrasteian monarchy no longer exists.

- She truly isn't a trigger-happy person, whatever the title of 'hunter' implies, and keeps a level head in most situations. Sure, Bethy looks as if she could bite someone's head off and can display some seriously threatening flashes of anger, but she's not going to do something rash and will only resort to drawing her weapons in a serious matter. She's here to save lives, maintain peace, and keep order, not disrupt it and set off a war! No pressure on her, right?

- She is also notably, NOT a high school student, though she may be mistaken for a high school senior or young college student since her age fits the bill. Elizabeth actually graduated from her high school at age sixteen and took to hunting full-time immediately after. She was convinced to slow it down by her grandparents and began preparing for college when her assignment at Cross Academy arrived and, uh, pretty tragically, hasn’t been able to attend any classes due to her work demands. Come to choose between the world and personal fulfillment? Her conscience only let her have one choice; a hunter must hunt.

♛ What they’ve been up to recently: - Work. There's hardly a time when this girl isn't working or planning what to do next, and the workload only grows after the previous president is outed as a dishonorable, self-serving traitor to the hunters. She's seriously injured after trading blows with him and is promptly benched to deal with the fallout and mental agony, but she's back within a year (and in K's crossover? Only six months later!).

- Having said that, Elizabeth does have days off and will spend them quietly with her friends, or alone with music and a rejuvenating swim.

- Depending on the time in her life? Her life circumstances vary drastically-- she can go from a young huntress travelling on her own as duty demands, or she can be a mother of five children and trusted right hand of the new hunter president, Zero Kiryuu. She lives for a long time, so she's always up to something! And of course, she's always motivated to fight for a better future.

♛ Where to find them: - Aside from work, check the beach! Or find her on methods of cross-continental transportation since she travels around the world for her job (she walks whenever possible, so it's rare to see her on a bus, but she’ll begrudgingly take one or a train)! Otherwise, a place like an aquarium, clothing store, or coffee shop, or any place in a city is your best chance.... write w me pls... q-q she is Around Somewhere.

- If not found in any of those places and your character is someone inside Cross Academy, she can be found there, helping the prefects in some way and is familiar enough with the building to help out new students if they ask.

♛ Current Plans: - Elizabeth is chained to her work as a hunter for as long as she draws breath, or until there is no need for her to end hostile vampires. Her ultimate goal is to keep the world from falling into a repeat, all-out war between vampires and humanity. Her living and family situation might change through the years, but that will always be her primary drive-- she's got an indomitable will.

♛ Desired Interactions: - please ovq

- In all seriousness, I’m up for pretty much anything. She needs more friends, more enemies, people to protect, people to be protected by, people she looks up to, people who legitimately unnerve her, everything! I just don’t feel comfortable killing her. Elizabeth fought really hard to get her future and deserves to find comfort after her entire childhood-young adult life was spent thinking the only thing of worth she had was her role as a huntress. I do really, really love angst though, so anything else goes, really c:

♛ Offered Interactions ( please sit tight for this! it will be divided into multiple sections! ) : - IF YOUR CHARACTER IS HUMAN: - She’ll assume your muse is an average civilian until shown otherwise (be it with unusual powers, whacky aura, combat prowess, or prior knowledge from a report or something-- a plot specific thing). Unless they truly know about vampires / work with the Hunters Association, Elizabeth will not be sharing any information about who or what she is without a legitimate reason (such as the human character being bitten by a Pureblood and thus is being turned into a vampire themselves). However, the other party being kept in the dark about vampires can open the door to a more relaxed Elizabeth without her professional, perfectionist mindset. She’s more likely to have a pleasant conversation with humans since they have no part in the hunt-- but in that same vein, she does aim to keep them at a certain distance and not develop a deep emotional bond (but she’s also a lot softer than she looks and acts and tends to care for others quickly, should they get along). It’s a tricky slope . . . She’s thawed out and the nicer aspects of her personality are far more prominent, but at the same time, she’s not being entirely genuine. Give her time and she’ll become more open about personal things, just, not her work.

- Applies to her K Proj. Crossover. Working with S4, Elizabeth takes some time to adjust, but ultimately loves the organization and the people within it. They’re an exception to her ‘no ties with average humans’ rule because....errr.... they’re not the average human she’s used to protecting and in that verse they’re aware of her occupation and peculiar heritage. She’s not as cold first impressions might suggest and loves Reisi’s weird af team building nights, it’s hard for her to not have a soft spot for them, even as an outsider and unofficial member (as in, she has none of the abilities the Blues have, but she has her natural abilities).

- IF YOUR CHARACTER IS A HUNTER: - Elizabeth is a known figure in hunter society; her great grandfather, grandfather, and aunt were previous heads of the organization and each are still alive at present. So, it probably makes more sense if your hunter character at the very least knows about her-- unless they’re an off-series muse in which case go wild and do what you think is best! I always did like the idea of two vampire hunters chilling together with neither one knowing the other is a fellow hunter until they’re attacked by a vamp and they’re both like ‘Oh!’

- A simple but always reliable plot idea is two hunters on a joint mission! It’s really important to know that Bethy does not take kindly to poor performance and expects her partner to take whatever assignment they have seriously. If not? Things get tundra-cold really fast-- o-o;; People’s lives are at stake and in her opinion, if a hunter wants to mope or complain about their blood-given obligation, they’re not fit to be hunters in the first place. ‘Can’t do the job? Then finish what you started with me if you have any shred of integrity, and get thee gone’ sort of thing. Otherwise, uh :’D;; she’s highly cooperative and always aims to reach the outcome with the least amount of damage.

- As a teenager, she attended a hunter-run private academy in Adrasteia for four years. If it’s possible for your muse to attend (as in, they are from a vampire hunter family and can pass the rigorous entrance exams), throw em in for a slightly younger, less stringent Bethy? A national fencing champion at the top of her classes, and great granddaughter to the legendary hellfire headmaster, Elizabeth’s not easily missed! It could be the start to an amicable relationship to carry into future interactions?

- IF YOUR CHARACTER IS A VAMPIRE: - Bluntly put, for vampires, it’s probably better to interact with Elizabeth after Cross Academy has fallen in the large battle that took place there. Her mother is revealed to have been alive and held captive as a vampire, she’s already friends with a hunter/vamp, her two friends turned out to be Purebloods, and ‘oh....my mother and father got together again and now I’ve got a younger vampire brother’ .....and her boyfriend’s half sister is also a vampire who marries the former vamp senate heir..... so...vamps everywhere; she simply accepts them as part of the family. Prior to that, while she isn’t hostile to vampires and certainly has no intention to attack a vamp unjustly, it’s not a place she’s eager to put herself in. Depending on how threatened she feels, she’ll even swallow her pride and keep her head down-- mostly.

- If your muse is a hunter-turned-vampire, she doesn’t treat them as a vampire, rather, she still sees them as a compatriot, like in the case of Zero Kiryuu. Whether or not your muse received the blood of their keeper is up to you, but in the case that they haven’t-- she’s always there to assist in granting mercy whenever the time comes :’)

- IF YOUR CHARACTER DOES NOT FIT INTO ANY OF THE ABOVE CATEGORIES / REGARDING OTHER VERSES: - Please help me find something that works, I’m willing to try! Memes are incredibly helpful! Send one in, the tag is here, and we can go from there!

- My currently finished and ready-to-use Crossover Verse is K Proj., which can be read about right here.

♛ Current Open Post/s: Linked right here. There's no expiration date to these, and it doesn't matter if another person has replied to one, you are more than welcome to reply to one if it catches your eye at all.

♛ Anything else?: YEAH, wow I am so sorry that got so long. Please note that this post may be updated periodically!

#( blog info. )#( SUPER LONG but if you're lost on some plotting things and aren't from VK #this should hopefully give you an idea of Elizabeth and her interactions? She's a tough one q - q )

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wellhellotragic · 6 years

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Of Wolves and Lambs 8/?

Summary: Killian Jones has known a lifetime’s worth of pain. He’s lost everyone he’s ever cared about, but when the love of his life is murdered, he vows that nothing will stop him from getting his revenge. Even if it means losing his soul to do so. What starts off as a simple quest for revenge turns into a world filled with secrets and lies. Nothing is what he thought, and no one seems to be who he thought.

Rating: E (and that’s not E for everyone)

A/N: This is my last finished chapter of my repost so anything from here on out will be new material

The next nine months were a blur. Discovering that the love of his life was also the woman he had spent almost two years hunting had ruined him. Anger descended upon him and everything he had ever known to be true in his life twisted and contorted under his wrath.

He hated everyone. Milah, the woman he was meant to marry, the woman who was meant to carry his children had forsaken him for another. She had given her flesh to another man in spite of her promise to cherish their future. And then there was Emma. She had lied to him over and over. She had betrayed their friendship for a man unworthy of anything but death. She was the reason Milah had cheated on him, the reason she was dead. If he hadn’t spent so much time and energy focused on capturing her, he would have been home with Milah starting the life they had planned.

David had thrown him away like garbage for loving her. Had he known who she was too? Had everyone known and kept it a secret from him, laughing behind his back at the fool that he was?

He let the fury spur him on in his efforts to find the Alchemist. It was no longer the pain of losing Emma that fueled him in his mission, but the pure unadulterated hate that he felt for the world. He let it wash over him and drank it in.

Robin and Will did what they could, but he kept them at arms length, unable to trust anyone now but himself.

They had restarted their investigation from the beginning trying to see if they could amass any new information now that they had Emma as a lead. She had become a ghost from the moment she left Boston as a teenager though. She had received monthly paychecks from a shell corporation posing as a non-profit organization. The shell company was another dead-end.

Robin tried to reach out to Jefferson as Killian had explained that they had worked together at the non-profit, but Jefferson had disappeared as well. All inquiries into him showed that he had never even existed. His social security number had been spoofed from a child that had passed away a few months after birth. All efforts to run his fingerprints had yielded nothing. There was no next of kin, no change to his financial accounts, no leads to follow.

Finally, Killian was forced to go to the house in Storybrooke to search it for clues. When he entered the home he was met with covered furniture and inches of dust. No one had set foot in that house in twenty years. Still, he ransacked through every cabinet and drawer. He searched every inch of the stables. There was nothing to suggest that Emma Swan had hidden any information there.

In fact, the only item in the entire house that could prove that Emma had even existed was a framed photograph on a nightstand in the master bedroom. In the photograph stood a blonde woman with blue eyes looking up at a blonde, green-eyed child sitting atop a horse. The child smiled at the camera while the woman beamed up at the child with immense pride. The child looked to be around four years old.

He felt the rage build as he thought of her, the temptress that had destroyed everything he held dear in life. He grabbed the picture and lobbed it at the opposite wall as hard as he could. Glass shattered everywhere as the frame hit the ground. He was about to step over the mess to leave and search through another room when something on the back of the picture caught his eye. It was a small handwritten caption. Emma’s first riding lesson. For a moment he felt a twinge of sadness, looking at the front of the picture. For that one moment, he allowed himself to grieve her, to grieve for young Emma. His body slid down the door frame as he clutched the photograph to his chest.

He missed her. It wasn’t a thought he allowed himself to dwell on ever anymore. She was the enemy and he needed to think of her that way first and foremost, but there were those fleeting seconds that passed through his mind. Seconds where he remembered sitting on the couch with her in Ruth’s house. Seconds where he could almost hear her laughter ringing through his ears still. Seconds where he remembered whispering I love you in her ears as she drifted to sleep. Seconds that shattered his heart beyond repair. Seconds that were now pure torture.

He missed that young girl and the carefree spirit that had captivated him. He mourned for the innocence that she had lost, and for whatever had happened to her that turned her into the monster she had become. All of the oxygen left his body and he thought he might die from the void she left. But he didn’t. With a gasp, he reawaked, as did his anger, and with that, the affection he felt for her washed away in the storm of rage that poured upon him.

They were no closer to finding the Alchemist after months of research. Other specialty teams from both the United Kingdom and America had come up equally short for information.

Both Robin and Will implored him to take a few days off and clear his head. They hoped that if he could distance himself from everything, he may be able to regain control of himself, but he refused them each time they brought it up. Instead, he insisted on going over every detail once again. And that’s when he found it.

On his seventh review of Jefferson’s finances he found a small memo on the back of a check that had posted the day of Emma’s funeral. It was the last transaction made, one that was seemingly innocuous. He had written a check for a donation in Emma’s name to an organization that helped foster children apply to college. At the time, it had made sense. He knew Emma well enough to know that she had spent years in the system before Ruth and David took her in. It was the perfect way to honor her memory.

How had he never noticed it before? In the memo section he had written a note, For Pip, The greatest expectation is love. Something about that was stuck in his mind but he couldn’t quite pinpoint it.

“Hey guys, do we have any persons of interest named Pip or any variation there of,” he asked Will and Robin.

Robin cross searched their databases and came up short. Will went through all of the physical files in their makeshift office and also found nothing. Killian wasn’t ready to let it go though. He knew there was something to it, it was too random of a note to have meant nothing.

He stared at the copy of the check for over forty-five minutes trying and failing to decipherer the only clue he had. It was Will who finally forced him from the room stating that it was late and he needed to sleep on it.

He was out almost immediately when his head hit his pillow. The clue haunted him through his dreams though in the form of memories of Emma. He dreamt of their first night together. He had been consumed with his hunger for Emma at the time that he hadn’t noticed it was his first time in her room. When he woke that next morning Emma was sleeping soundly at his side. She looked so peaceful that he didn’t want to risk disturbing her, so he laid on his back, holding her in his arms as she snuggled in closer to him.

Her room was scarcely decorated. The dark blue walls were empty, devoid of any pictures or paintings. Aside from her bed, she had a single dresser, one nightstand on each side of the bed, and an oversized bookshelf. There was nothing there that spoke of the room belonging to Emma except for the rows and rows of all her favorite novels filling the bookshelf. She had always been an avid reader, and all of the books on the shelf looked to be first editions, well worn around the bindings and aged in color. As he perused the books from his spot on the bed, he noticed a single empty spot, likely from whichever one she was currently reading. Emma stirred next to him and let out a small hum of content.

He woke with a start. It was the vividness of the dream that had startled him. He could almost smell her shampoo; feel her hair against his nose. The longer he lay in his bed, the faster his heart began to beat. It was if her ghost was lying next to him, taunting him with something he would never have again, something he shouldn't want again, but did anyway.

There would be no returning to sleep that night. The base they were using was small, and there was nothing to do after sunset. The only options for him were to sit in the room breathing in her spirit, or go back to his desk and try to figure out whom Pip was. The latter won out.

Going through the files was tedious and frustrating. He scoured through boxes and boxes of physical files from the adjoining storage room making sure that nothing had been missed with Robin scanned the physical copies into the computer database. Four hours later and there was no mention of Pip, Piper, Pippa, or Pipin. There were no locations beginning with Pip either, and that check was the only mention of it in any of Jefferson’s finances. Killian was right back at square one and the anger rose in him again.

He took the file he was holding and slammed it on the ground, causing a few pages to scatter on the floor. He bent over to shuffle the pages back into the folder and realized what they were.

Staring back as him was the Boston police’s crime scene photographs from Emma’s house after the attack. He had glanced at them briefly, but the report stated there was no physical evidence found implication a suspect, so he tossed them aside and hadn’t thought of them since. In the back of his mind, he also knew how hard it would be to see them. Her beating had been brutal, and he knew it would show.

Victor told him that it didn’t appear as if she had fought back, but her body had been traumatized and he hadn’t been ready to see her blood pooled on the wood floors. He needed to look them over though, for if nothing else just to make sure the police hadn’t missed something. The Alchemist was known to leave calling cards taking claim of his atrocities. He viewed it as good advertisement for his business.

The pictures were just as bad as he had expected, if not worse. The first three pictures were of random rooms in her house that weren’t considered part of the crime scene. David had made sure that everything was shown just in case though. It was the fourth picture that twisted his gut. Furniture had snapped in half. Glass vases had been shattered. There were three large red stains on the ground. He had to steady himself against the bile that assaulted his throat.

Remembering her battered body in the hospital bed and putting it with the damage in her living room brought back a flood of emotions and he wasn’t sure if the damn he built would hold. Trying to speed his way through he glanced at a few more photos of the kitchen, a bathroom, and finally her bedroom. The bed hadn’t been made, the curtains hadn’t been pulled back, and the lamp on her nightstand was still on.

The general consensus was that she assumed Killian had come back after checking on his house, so she didn’t think twice about checking the door, and the Alchemist drugged her. The autopsy had shown a paraplegic in her system that the Alice had favored. She never stood a chance against him.

He shoved all of the photos back into the folder and returned to the desk. He laid his head on the wood and closed his eyes trying to purge the images he had seen. None of them had given him any insight.

As he rested, sleep finally beckoned to him again. The same dreamed returned. It was torture on his senses. He noticed all of the same things again, but every touch and smell was intensified. He woke again at the same point in the dream. Why was he dreaming of this moment over and over suddenly after months?

Clearly his subconscious was trying to tell him something. He walked back to the storage room and grabbed the file on the top of the pile. He was careful to only pull out the last photo of Emma’s room this time. What was it about this memory that kept calling to him?

Nothing stuck out to him no matter how closely he looked at the picture. Her nightstand was empty except for the lamp. The bed was a tangle of sheets and blankets. There was still nothing on the walls, nothing to see outside the windows. What was it?

He sat back in his chair, letting his head fall back. He closed his eyes and tried to walk himself through the dream. Emma wasn’t in the photo so most of the things he experienced in the dream were irrelevant. He mentally scanned the room, and nothing was out of place between his memory and the photograph, except for the lone empty spot on the bookshelf. In the photograph it was filled, with Emma’s favorite book. How could he have missed it? She reread it once every year.

Great Expectations.

He had never read it, but he briefly remembered Emma telling him about it. The lead character was an orphan just like Emma, which is what drew her to it in the first place. It was a story of love, loss, pain, and deception, all things Emma was intimately familiar with.

He couldn’t remember any of the specifics of the book though. He logged onto the nearest computer a searched for a synopsis of the book. The lead character’s name was Pip, and he knew he was on to something. He scanned the plot of the book, but not much stood out to him. Emma was similar to Pip is some aspects, that much was clear, but nothing gave him any indication of where to search next.

As he was mulling over the new information he had discovered, the sun rose and Robin and Will joined him. He explained what he had found and the three of them regrouped.

Killian and Robin went through the plot of the book again, both agreeing that it must mean something, but they hadn’t a clue of what. It was Will’s insight that surprised both men.

“Isn’t it obvious?” He looked astonished that the two men were shocked that he may have an answer for them. “Did you both skip your basic literature courses? Pip went to Cairo to make amends after a rejected marriage proposal before finally returning home to set things right. Sound like anyone we know?”

“Wait,” Robin cut in, “are you trying to say that Emma was in Cairo before coming home? Don’t you think you’re being a bit too literal?”

Will sighed. “Perhaps, but add in the part about love being the greatest expectation. Pip was rejected, went to Cairo, and the made it home to the woman he had always loved where they were finally able to be together. I’m willing to stake my entire ration of ale on it.”

Killian rolled his eyes. It seemed like a stretch but it was the only they had. Robin searched for any incidences matching the Alchemist’s profile around Cairo in the last five years. Buried under thousands of stories of civil unrest and terrorist activities, was one small blurb about a family that died of suspicious causes. No autopsies were performed due to family wishes, but the symptoms the victims exhibited matched.

They couldn’t get any information on the incident from their current location so the three men packed up and headed Cairo West Air Base. From there they would be able to access medical records, news articles, and possibly surveillance evidence from just before the deaths.

June was not the ideal time to be spending days in the arid desert. The building they were using had no air conditioning, and all three men were sweating out liquids faster than they could take them in.

They had been there for a week combing though everything they could get their hands on. Will’s literary analysis had paid off. The coroner's report was basic but substantiated their theory that the Alchemist had drugged the family, although they still weren’t sure why.

There was no real-time video surveillance of the area to see who was coming or going just before the family became ill, but a news article had managed to capture a photograph of the front of the house after the family had passed. In the background of the photograph, a woman dressed in camel colored trousers, a cream colored sweater, and a shawl wrapped around her head, with only a sliver of golden blonde hair peaking out.

Killian knew in his bones that it was Emma. She had been there, part of the attacks. She had been with the Alchemist from the beginning, reigniting his hatred of her. Unfortunately, all clues ended there. The lack of police reports or physical evidence left them at a dead-end.

Killian was at his wits end ready to give up. Why was he even there anymore? Emma had been a villain who got what was coming to her. He didn’t need to avenge her death. The Alchemist was a horrible person, but was he really Killian’s problem? Not currently. Killian’s only issue at that moment was that he was pissed and sober.

While the base didn’t have an official bar, as visiting American soldiers weren’t allowed to drink, there was a building at the rear of the base that flew under the radar.

The building was originally one large room, but had since been partitioned separating it into two ones. The smaller room was understood to be reserved for higher commanding officers, so most of the people were milling around in the front area. Killian walked up to a makeshift bar made of crates and minifridges, and grabbed an ale, dropping a few dollars into a silver bucket.

He sat on a stool in the corner of the room nursing his drink, trying to decide whether or not he should walk away. Everyone he knew had turned his or her backs on him. There was no one counting on him to bring justice to Emma’s killer. Emma wasn’t the innocent victim he originally thought she was. It was all on him now. Did he want to continue, or walk away and start over somewhere new?

As he sat there, contemplating his options, he completely missed the man who had approached him.

“Lieutenant Jones, your presence has been requested in the other room.”

Killian looked the man over. He was wearing an American army uniform, with not a hair out of place. Killian hoped that if he ignored him long enough, that he would go away, but instead the man stood at attention. He groaned internally before standing and moving to the smaller room in the back.

There was nothing different about that space. Nothing fancy that set it off from the room in the front. The only difference he could see was the lack of bodies. In fact, there was only one body present. Colonel French.

Fuck he thought to himself. Everything started falling into place in that instant. Jefferson had been a partner of sorts to Emma. Colonel French was in Cairo. The alchemist and his team were going after anyone who had knowledge of him. It only stood to reason that Jefferson had spied on them talking in the hospital and sent a hidden message to the Alchemist telling him where he could find Colonel French.

“Jones, please.” The colonel motioned to Killian to take the seat next to him. “I have to admit, I thought you’d arrive here sooner.”

Killian furrowed his brows at him. Had his team already discovered the threat to his life? “I’m sorry?”

“We have access to the same information regarding your girlfriends death. I assume we followed the same trail.”

Killian tensed. “I wouldn’t call her my girlfriend. Just someone I once knew, or should I say someone I once thought I knew.”

“Ah, so I take it you know of her other identity then?”

Anger began simmering inside Killian. The colonel had known all along and was playing games with him. “How long have you known?”

“To which part? How long have I known about Cairo, or how long have I known that Miss Swan also went by Alice?”

Killian could felt his jaw muscles clenching as his fists balled up on the tabletop.

“Since the beginning, for both questions.”

“And you’ve just let me and my team run around in circles for your amusement?”

The colonel took in a death breath sensing Killian’s tension.

“No. I’ll admit, I thought you would decipher to clue faster than you did, but to your credit, you are the only team so far that had figure out even this much.”

“You mean aside from your team?” Killian took a swig of beer hoping it might dull his emotions.

“Not exactly.” He saw Killian’s look of confusion so he quickly continued. “My team was ahead of the game, so studying the clues to find the next avenue of action wasn’t really necessary.”

Killian thought on that. His team had been leaps and bounds ahead of every other team out there.

“I told you once that I had intended to invite you to join my team, but that you weren’t ready at the time. Are you ready now?”

Not ten minutes earlier Killian had considered walking away completely, and now he was being asked if he was finally ready to take the next step. The irony wasn’t lost on him.

“If I were, what would that mean?”

Killian could see a spark of hope in the colonel’s eyes. “Unfortunately, your current clearance level prevents me from discussing it with you. It’s a catch twenty-two I’m afraid. You have to agree before I can brief you, and if you agree and I brief you, there’s no walking away. So you’ll have to decide now, are you in or out.”

“And I don’t suppose I get time to think about it?”

“Sorry, Jones, but I’m flying out tomorrow morning. It’s now or never.”

Screw irony. How was he supposed to make this life altering decision spur of the moment without any information? He stared at the table, trying to will an answer to pop into his head. He had already spent the better part of three years chasing this man. Was it worth giving up more of his life to catch him, or was he already so far in that giving up now would have been the waste?

His thoughts drifted to Emma. As teenagers she had been the lone ray of sunshine for him. What happened that sent her down such a dark path? If he had just summoned up the courage to tell her how he felt, would she have left, would she still be the innocent girl he fell madly in love with? Every question lead to another question, and in the end he realized that what he needed most was answers so he could have closure.

“And if I say yes, what happens to my team?”

“That would be up to you. You seemed to believe in them when last we spoke. Has that changed?”

“No.” That answer was easy. If it hadn’t been for Will, he wouldn’t have even made it this far. “Then you’ll speak for them. You’ll decide, but again, I need to know now.”

“They’re in.” Killian hoped he wasn’t damning his team. He knew that if asked they would follow him to the end of the world, but making such a call without their consent felt like a violation. He could only hope they understood.

“Very well. Have your team pack up all of their belongings and information. Meet my in hanger four at oh five hundred hours.”

“And where, might I ask, are we going.”

The colonel stood up and walked to the exit.

“That’s classified for now. I’ll make sure you all have upgraded clearance by the time we land.”

And with that, the colonel was gone and Killian felt like his soul had been sold away to the highest bidder.

When the team landed, green fields and trees greeted them. It was a far cry from the desert they had just left. There were a few scattered buildings that looked as if they were in ruins, and a high fence with a barbwire top acting as a barrier. Nothing about it screamed high security.

“Gentlemen,” the colonel gestured outwards, “welcome to Serbia, where it all started.”

The men grabbed their packs and hauled them in line behind the colonel, stopped abruptly when they came to the entrance of a crumbling building.

“I know what you’re thinking, but don’t be fooled. There’s no better to place to hide than in plain site.”

The colonel continued into the building to the back wall, where a small thermostat box was fixed in place. Killian thought it odd as he didn’t remember seeing any air conditioning units outside, but perhaps they had been picked off. The colonel walked up to the thermostat and lifted the cover off. He turned the temperature dial up and down, before turning it back up again like a combination. When he finished, a portion of the wall slide into itself reveling a set of elevator doors.

The colonel stepped up to the door where he was greeted by a retinal scanner. The elevator doors opened and all four men crammed into the elevator before he continued.

“According to one of our agents, this was the first site he used. The agent in question managed to discover that the Alchemist had been born here, but that his family was run out of town for something his father did. His mother was humiliated and left him alone with his father, who later abandoned him as well, so when it came time to find his first test site, he couldn’t resist getting back at the people that destroyed his family.

My agent came here to investigate and see if there was anything else to be learned, but as you can see, there wasn’t much left, but I saw the opportunity. We built a base down below the ruins, in the once place we knew meant so much to him, but that he would never return to.”

The elevator came to a halt and the doors slid open.

“This way gentleman.”

Killian, Robin, and Will followed him taking in the enormous scale of the base. From the outside, he never would have guess that anything was there. As they walked down corridors they passed a gym, a dinning hall, and a medical office. As they turned a corner, Killian could hear mumbled voices coming from a room at the end of the hall.

The colonel lead them into the room and Killian stopped in his tracks just before the doors, at the sound of a woman’s laughter. Will had to push him forward and he felt his stomach flip.

“Jones, I believe you already know all three members of my team, but for the rest of you may I introduce Agent Humbert, Agent Hatter and Agent Swan.”

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endeavorsreward · 7 years

Text

June 20th is Tactics’ 20th Anniversary

[The following excerpt is more of a draft than usual; I’ll repost it on the 20th, but everyone will be busy with Stormblood by then. It likely needs heavy edits. As a draft of part of the ending, it is subject to heavy changes - some of these sequences may occur earlier in the book or in a different order. This sequence draws from the adaptation’s context. Comments are appreciated.]

And with one single, sharp backhand, she sent Ramza flying backwards to the blood-drenched deck.

“I am come once more.”

Ramza watched through eyes swelling shut as his sister’s hair rippled in a wave of silver, until it was all gray, whipping about in wind that did not exist in the necrohol’s still air. Alma—Ajora—Ultima—all of her smiled thinly, and an explosion of white fire, holy light, erupted forth, knocking everyone back, ripping the airship’s mast loose and flinging it to the sky.

He reached for his sister, grasping at nothing. “Alma, no!”

***

Alma Beoulve was drowning.

Her head would rise above the brackish water, dark and freezing cold, and she’d taste the oil and the blood of it, and then she’d be beneath it again, fingers clawing at the stone surrounding her. The way her nails split and her knuckles scraped, she couldn’t know how much of the blood was her own. It had been minutes and months, and every muscle of her groaned and split like rotten tree trunks in the worst of the storm. Her mind was numb of the struggle of it, she just kept kicking and grabbing out of instinct and impulse, a faint flicker of candlelight in her soul that pulsed live, live, live, live...

But that heartbeat’s rhythm kept skipping in the face of the other chanting, louder, echoing up and down the stone column, bubbling in the water, hob, gob, gob, hob, hob, hob, gob, hob...

When her head was above the waterline, when she could feel the hands grasping ‘round her ankles and pulling, she’d open her eyes to take in the single disc of light at the well’s mouth above, no larger than a gilcoin, and at times she’d see the woman’s silhouette gazing back down at her...

She’d heard, read stories that had said “a smile like a knife” but couldn’t ever get the vision to make sense, had even held once a dagger of Zalbaag’s in order to frame the idea of it, but only now, in seeing that grin form across a face she couldn’t make out, was it ever so real. The gasps of air and of light and of self were marred with that smile, like a scratched lens.

And when her head was below the waterline, she was instead somewhere else.

***

“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.

Ramza eased her to the deck and readied his sword.

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wendynerdwrites · 7 years

Text

Recovered Jonsa Fic #16: Ya’Aburnee

Another fic repost!

The crypts seem warmer these days. In fact, they’re perhaps the warmest place in the castle now. At least, they are to Jon.

In his youngest days, he sought out cold and solitude to think and find comfort. But that changed when the two of them found one another again. It didn’t matter where they were. They could be lying naked next a roaring fire in the royal apartments. They could be huddled up in his war tent during one her surprise visits, a layer of canvas being all that lay between them and the roaring, icy winds outside. But when she was with him, things were warm, cozy, and clear. He could think better after having spent just a few precious moments with her after an absence.

Jon sighs as he descends the steps of the crypts, carrying his lantern past the various monuments of past Starks. The war. Gods. The first several times Sansa would steal away to the Wall and even beyond to see him, he’d scold her, beg her not to do it, not to risk her safety again. The third time, he even swore he’d not share her bed out of anger, hoping it would deter her. But he broke that vow of course. He’d been a fool, and desperate. Somehow, Sansa always seemed to show up when he was at the very end of his rope, at the brink of giving up. But she’d appear and things became clearer, he was reminded of what he was fighting for, and inspiration would come.

Most of his best ideas, battle plans, tactical maneuvers came to him either in the middle of the night or the morning after he lay with Sansa. Even his men picked up on this. It became a running joke among the army. The secrets to defeating the Others lay within the Queen in the North’s cunny.

The only time she didn’t come at a desperate point, she sent a letter to him, informing him that she would not be able to visit him for a long while, and bid him instead to journey back to Winterfell when he could. “I want you to meet your firstborn.”

It was all the inspiration he needed, really.

Jon gives a groan of relief as he reaches his destination in the crypts, bends his aching knees and sits upon the stone bench in front of the newest statue in the hall. Arya, bless her, had proposed the idea of installing it. It wasn’t customary, but his second-eldest had insisted. “So our Father can visit Mother for as long as he likes.”

A good thing, too. At three-and-seventy, Jon’s legs are not what they used to be. The wound in his leg that the wildlings gave him all those years ago began troubling him again around his fortieth year. His hips were good, but his knees ache easily. His left shoulder is often in agony. It’s why whenever he carries something--- at the moment, a writing board, parchment, quill, and ink--- it’s slung under his right arm.

He takes a few moments to adjust and wait for the strain on his joints to ease, then sets up his writing supplies. He looks up at the face of the marble statue. It did not depict his wife as he’d seen her last: grey-haired, with lines about her mouth, brows, and eyes. No, it showed Sansa at the height of her youth. Lyanna spared no expense in the commissioning of this monument, having the artist combined stone of different hues to match the burning auburn of her hair, the red of her lips. Even the eyes of the thing had gem studs of sapphire and onyx.

It was easily the most extravagant tomb in the crypts.

Not that she’d been particularly keen on an extravagant burial in life. The construction of her tomb began before her death, when Maester Torwyn tearfully informed her that despite the amputation, the growth which began on her breast had migrated to other parts they could not reach and she had no more than a year left.

Sansa, being Sansa, had responded by being the most composed in the room, and promptly began preparations. And, by preparations, preparations for a pseudo-abdication in Lyanna’s favor.

Lyanna had refused to let her mother abdicate fully, though she was more than ready to take on the responsibilities of queenship. “You should spend your last year without the burden of rule on your shoulders. And I am more than happy to assume that weight in full,” their brilliant, beautiful, resilient daughter informed her mother, “But if you are to die, I will not let you die as anything but a queen.”

Lyanna was Princess Regent for a year while the entire family devoted their matriarch’s final year in this world to making it the very best it could be. Jon and Sansa traveled, they hosted banquets and balls, they indulged themselves. Sansa didn’t involve herself in too many of the burial arrangements, allowing Jon and their children to take care of most of it. But when Lyanna informed Sansa of the lengths they were going to honor her, Sansa had protested about the expense.

“I don’t deserve a tomb any finer than Jon or Father,” she insisted. But this was one matter where her family did not let her have her way during that final year.

If anyone deserved a tomb like this, it was the queen who restored the North, House Stark, got it through the winter and wars, and revolutionized the structure of the kingdom. One of the best decisions Jon ever made was abdicating his rule in her favor. At the time, he’d done it out of a combination of guilt, his new knowledge regarding his origins, and the affection for her that eventually blossomed into the love they shared for fifty years. But under Sansa’s rule, House Stark and the North went from famine, poverty, and near-death to unprecedented prosperity. She is the reason her family can afford such a monument to her, and will likely be able to afford such things for generations to come.

He’d said as much. Jon can almost hear her now, replying that he’d done just as much, that he deserved just as much, if not more credit, for the North’s success as she did. “None of this would have been possible without you. As a queen, I’ve only ever been as great as my king.”

Jon wasn’t a king. He was prince consort. He’d insisted on that himself when they wed. Given Robb’s will and his title prior to abdication, he wanted no doubts placed on Sansa’s authority and position. But that didn’t stop Sansa from calling him her king in private. Though he’d certainly done his part in aiding her rule--- Jon had many accomplishments, before, during, and after the War for the Dawn, to be proud of--- Sansa overstated his contribution. She was the queen, and all he did for her, he did with her. And she did yet more. His greatest accomplishment, in his mind, was giving Sansa the support and inspiration she needed to discover her own greatness over the years. They’d done that for each other.

Not that the matter of whether he deserved just as fine a tomb as she was too great an issue. Sansa’s grave has an adjoining, half-finished chamber, specifically so that when the time comes, he shall lie beside her. She even went so far as to insist that, at the very least, when he died and his own statue was erected, that it would be constructed to hold the hand of hers.

Everyone agreed.

Jon looks at the partially-constructed tomb beside his wife’s resting place. He sighs again, dips a quill in the ink, and begins to write.

Sweetling,

I sit at the bench now, as I have now three-hundred-and-sixty-four times before. I look at the place set aside for me by your side, and there’s a selfish yearning there. The only thing that keeps me from willing myself to die is the thought of the pain it shall bring our family. I will not betray them by leaving them before I absolutely have to. But I want to, so badly. I miss you.

Robb’s son is still thriving. When he’s not draining his exhausted mother’s breasts, he’s asleep or howling like a beast. The lungs on that boy. I can already tell that a special bond is developing between Little Torrhen and his big sister. The moment Kitty gathers him into her chubby arms, he quiets. It’s adorable.

Alysanne and Brandon now come up to my waist. Alysanne wishes to leave the nursery room and get her own proper ladies’ chambers now. Not that she says so. She knows that Litsa is still too young to make it through the night without her big sister sleeping beside her. Alysanne is as considerate and thoughtful as she ever was. But I see it in her eyes. She’s growing up, and wants that acknowledged. And I expect she may finally broach the subject some time around Litsa’s fifth Name Day.

Gods, they’re all so beautiful. Litsa’s name is prophetic, since she looks just like you. She’s getting to the age, though, where she wants to be a “big girl” and is starting to rebel against her nickname. I’ve asked her to forgive me, but I cannot quite bring myself to call her “Sansa” just yet. But I appease her in other ways. If you told my young self that I’d spend many hours a day playing with dolls, I’d have laughed in your face. But I’m sure you’re laughing now, just as you laughed at me when Alysanne and Arya were young. Yes, I am once again spending many an hour sitting on a rug, dressing up and holding little wooden and porcelain people in dresses and acting out the stories of Jenny of Oldstones and Queen Rhaenyra. In fact, I’m doing it more than I did even when our daughters were girls.

Though I did resume many of my state duties after you left, I’m not performing as much as I used to. By choice, I assure you. I prefer to spend as much time as I can with the little ones. I don’t feel too guilty. We’ve trained our girl well. She doesn’t need me. I think she just pretends otherwise to humor me. She doesn’t need me to help with matters of state. I assume any need she or any of the others have for me is more emotional than political.

Not that I mind. My brain isn’t what it used to be. I mind that. Up until the very end, you gave me bursts of energy and inspiration. But with you gone, I don’t have them anymore. Coming down here, writing to you each day certainly helps, but it’s not the same.

Do you miss me, as I miss you? Or are you so busy, wherever you are, with Father and our brothers and your mother and Jeyne and Beth and all those we lost that you don’t have time to miss me the same way? If those Seven Southern Gods are right, you’re in one of those Heavens they speak of, and they say there is no unhappiness there. I don’t blame you for this. Especially since you can probably see and hear me in a way that I can’t see and hear you.

But I do hope you’re able to set aside a place for me beside you, wherever you are, for when we reunite, just as a place beside you has been set aside for me here.

What do you look like, wherever you are? You in your youth is how they depict you here in the crypt, of course. But I’m not sure that I hope that’s the case in the world beyond. Some aspects of your youth, I hope, are with you. That you have both of your breasts, that your ankles, back, and neck do not ail you anymore. And of course, you know how I always felt about that red hair of yours.

But I found your grey just as beautiful. Your lined faced just as lovely. I know you spent a good thirty years or so lamenting your “fading” beauty, but you were always as stunning to me, from the day we wed to our last night together.

Can you change how I shall see you when I join you? So I can see you as you were at any and all points in your life? Would you want me to do the same? Do you want me to greet you in the next life looking as I do now--- stooped, greying, balding, wrinkly--- or as I was in my prime?

What do you want me to say, when we meet each other again?

I miss you so much, Sansa. I have these letters. I have the children and grandchildren, and I see so much of you in them. But there’s no replacing you.

Sometimes I’m upset with you, Sansa, especially late at night, when I’m truly alone, and the cold envelopes me. When you made that request of me. Perhaps if you’d not done it, or not done it in the godswood, you’d be here now. I’m not a superstitious, even a pious man, but these days I wonder. You were so considerate most of your life, Sansa, but this was perhaps the most selfish thing you ever did. Did it ever occur to you that living without you would be as painful for me as it would be for you?

I don’t think about that day as often as one would expect, despite the significance of what happened that day in the godswood. Despite the joy I felt then, I think the reality of all that was said only really hit me the morning after, when I knew for sure that it wasn’t a dream, that you would really be mine. I remember that day more vividly, more often. I remember how proud I was to lead you on my arm through the Great Hall, the frightening issue of telling our siblings having been accomplished the prior evening. How excited I was for us to announce our joy to the court. The first day you were mine, officially, eternally, publicly, and I knew no one could take you from me or lay claim to you.

I didn’t consider the implications of the other thing you said. That little Valyrian request and all the things that making that promise to you meant. I wanted you so, so badly. And I never thought it would come to be, that I’d keep that promise. Or that you expected me to, that it was anything more than a passionate endearment on your part. We were fighting a war, after all. I was on the front lines. The only times I feared that it might happen back then was when you made your little visits. And you just had to whisper it to me beneath the furs. “Ya’aburnee”, “Ya’aburnee.”

With all that you did just to survive, you were ready to die if it meant not living without me.

So much love, so much beauty, but so much pain in that strange, foreign little phrase.

There were times it made me feel like I ruled the world. Gods, Sansa. No one, not one person had ever expressed such a thing to me. That I was just so needed, so wanted, so valued, so loved. Whenever I was needed, it was for whatever practical use I had for others. I was needed as a ready blade, a willing laborer, a spy, a leader for the army, sure. I was needed as countless other men were needed. I was needed as a political pawn to solidify the powers of others, as a supplier, as a defender.

At home, as much as you, Robb, Arya, Father, Bran, and Rickon loved me, I was far from needed. I was in many ways unwanted, and not just by your mother. If I were lost, surely you all would mourn, but you didn’t need me. It’s why it was so easy for me to join the Watch. As much as you loved me, none of you needed me. Not even Arya.

That I was one of many, needed thanks to a lack of options and men, but still disposable and unimportant ultimately, even as I was groomed for leadership, was impressed upon me. Even when I was Lord Commander, I was murdered and replaced.

As great a team as we were together even before we confessed our feelings to each other, I wasn’t sure then that you needed me. As often as you decried yourself as stupid and weak in those days, you were truly dazzling. It was bewildering for me to witness your own blindness in regards to all that you were. And as much as I did to try and build you up, I was sure that if I were lost, you’d find another to help you. You were the indispensable one, as far as I was concerned. Countless people needed you, to lead, to inspire, to save. Not me, despite what any prophecy might have implied.

But that day, in the godswood… “Of course I’ll marry you,” you’d said, snowflakes melting on your soft lips. “Under one condition.”

I remember expecting your condition to be of the same political precision you always conducted. You wanted me to understand that I’d be your prince consort, not a king. That I’d lost a crown for good the day I handed it to you. Or I expected that you’d ask that I not march to the front lines and stay behind, commanding the armies from the safety of Winterfell’s walls. That was the only condition I feared.

But still I asked, “What?”

“Ya’aburnee,” you replied. And, not having taken up an education in Valyrian dialects as you had, I of course had to ask for clarification.

“Bury me. Outlive me. So I never have to live without you.”

There was a part of me that wondered if this was your way of saying that you wouldn’t marry me if I returned to the battlefield, so I hesitated. And you reassured me.

And I never felt so loved, so needed, so ready to take on the world. You needed me, couldn’t fathom living without me. Me, as I was. Not as another man, who was willing to stay behind as armies fought for him, commanding from safety and comfort as other men were slaughtered on the field. You couldn’t ask me to do that, because you knew who I was, understood who I was, accepted it. Accepted me, and needed me.

Loved me as I’d never been loved before.

And somehow, whenever I was in the middle of the fray and ready to give up, sure we would all perish, wondering what the point was of continuing to try, you’d suddenly appear. It didn’t matter how many times I railed at you for endangering yourself. When I reached my lowest point, I’d return to my tent to find you there, reminding me not only of all I had to fight for, but all I had to live for. Whispering to me beneath the furs as I moved within you, “I love you. Ya’burnee. I love you. Ya’Aburnee.”

You never stopped saying it. Even the letter you sent, telling me that Alysanne was coming. “I love you. Ya’Aburnee.”

It’s not fair. You were younger, and healthier. Until that bloody, leeching canker appeared.

How could you ever be sure that you could not live without me, Sansa? I never thought I could, yet I am. And I don’t much care for it. And I’m not sure I can do it for much longer. The rest of the family is the only thing keeping me here, but it’s not complete without you. You’ve never met little Torrhen. And I fear Cat, Litsa, Neddie, and Jonny are too young to remember you when they get older. It anything, that makes me even more eager to leave. It doesn’t seem right for me to live longer enough to be remembered when you haven’t.

I need to stop with self-pity. It was a nasty habit that only you managed to completely break me of. But you’re gone now, Sansa. And as much as I want to do you proud, I need to be with you even more.

I… I need you more than they need me.

I’m glad you made sure that a tomb next to yours was started. I suppose you weren’t entirely selfish. Sure, you left me, but you started the hole, the resting place for me beside you. Ya’aburnee. Or something. I never did manage to master Valyrian, High or otherwise.

We bury each other.

This is the last letter to you, Sansa. I think I am ready to go. Everything else, I’ll say in person.

I love you, Ya’aburnee,

Jon.

Jon Stark Targaryen, Prince of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Prince Consort of the Three Realms of Winter, Hero of the Dawn, former King of the Three Realms of Winter, former Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, Lord Consort of Winterfell, Hand of the Queen, Council Advisor, Lord General of the Winter Armies, Husband and Consort to Sansa of House Stark, First of Her Name, Queen of the Three Realms of Winter, Lady of Winterfell, and Protector of the Realm, Father to Queen Alysanne I of the Three Realms of Winter, Prince Brandon of Winterfell, and Princess Arya of Winterfell and grandfather to the successive issue, died on the Day of the FIfth month, Year 356 after Aegon’s Landing, the night of the one year anniversary of his wife’s death.

Every day from her passing to his, even on the day of his death, Prince Jon wrote Queen Sansa letters, depositing them in a small hole built into the wall of tomb for that use. He was buried a week later beside his beloved wife, a statue of him at the height of his legendary military victories, erected atop his grave, joining hands with his wife’s monument per the instructions of their will. Though entry to the famous Winterfell crypts have been closed to the general public since their creation, the painting of their tomb by their great-great-great grandson, Prince Jon ‘the Dreamer’ of Winterfell, has gone down in history as one of the most romantic and well-beloved historical pieces of art in the North and all of Westeros, with prints and copies of the painting a popular, mass-produced piece. The letters which Prince Jon wrote to his wife were excavated from her grave a century later (and returned and preserved within their tomb shortly after once they were copied) and, along with the rest of the royal couple correspondence, have been published and become timelessly popular reading among each generation in the Three Realms and Beyond over the seven centuries since the royal couple’s death.

The romantic phrase of ‘Ya’Aburnee’, originally only a popular endearment in Eastern countries of native Valyrian speakers, has become a widespread expression of love within Westeros thanks to Sansa and Jon, with the phrase becoming a customary addition to wedding vows all over the world.

#Jonsa #Jon x Sansa #Jon Snow #Sansa Stark #fic repost project #long post

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vampireadamooc · 7 years

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Reposting one of the most interesting vintage vampire clippings I've (so far) come across in honor of World Dracula Day.

Seriously. It’s so much cooler and interesting than the clipping everyone’s seen suggests. The full text of it is amazing.

Yes, it’s vintage satire, a bit of humor and fun (Swamptown City / Sodom?) but it’s a damn fine bit of spooky fun that fits amazingly well into ALVH.

BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES. Boston Daily Globe 1872; Jan 27, 1896; pg. 5 _____

BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES

Rhode Islanders Who Are Sure That They Do Exist.

Instances Told of Where the Living Have Been Attacked and Preyed Upon by These Representatives of an Unseen World.

{A MEMEBER OF THE ANTI-VAMPIRE PARTY}

SODON, RI., Jan 26 -- You will not find this place on any map. But if you leave the railway at Wickford Junction and follow the Ten Rod road westward through Exeter until you come to Robbers Corner, and then go south a mile or two over Purgatory road, you will come to Sodom.

The chances are that you won't know Sodom when you see it. for even in the days of its highest prosperity its population was only about 19 or 20, and now it is a great deal less. There were once four or five houses here, but now there are nor nearly so many.

Like Swamptown City and Escoheag, and Noose Neck Hill and Usquepaug, and Skunk Hill and Exeter Hollow, and Gomorrah and many other once flourishing hamlets in southern Rhode Island, Sodom is a back number.

In spirit, however, of its present insignificance, Sodom may be called the geographical center of the vampire district of Rhode Island. Now a vampire, as everybody knows who has seen one, is a blood-sucking ghost - the soul of a dead person which quits the body by night to feed upon the blood of the living, especially of it's relatives and dearest friends, it is has any.

When the vampire's grave is opened the corpse is always found to be fresh and rosy from the blood which it has thus absorbed; otherwise it is not a genuine vampire.

There are several excellent ways of putting a stop to the vampire's ravages. First, you may pour boiling water and vinegar on the grave. This remedy is generallt sufficient for the milder forms of vampirism, but if more energetic measures are required it may be necessary to drive a stake through the body or to cut the head off, or take out the heart and liver and burn them and eat the ashes. This last precaution, as will be seen, should not be neglected.

The persons who become vampires are generally witches, wizards, suicides or persons who have come to violent ends, ot have been cursed by their parents or the church, and in Rhode Island those who have died of consumption. But any upright, well-meaning man is liable to turn into a vampire if an animal, especially a cat, leaps over his corpse or if a bird flies over it. That is said to be the reason why undertakers do not keep cats.

All for which, and more, may be found in that entertaining work, the "Encyclopedia Britannica," and is here given only as a preface to the following chapter of belief in vampires which still obtains among the certain of the natives throughout southern Rhode Island. The foreign-born population do not cherish the belief. It is found only among some of the descendants of those who settled this part of the state in the 17th and 18th centuries.

And not only in the country places, "where the old plain men have rosy faces and the young fair maidens quiet eyes," remote like Sodom from the outside world, but in the centers of population along the railway and along the shore you will meet plenty of men and women who take it as an insult if you speak lightly in their presence of the belief in vampires.

At lease that was the writer's experience - he discovered that vampires should be discussed in a serious tone and without any elevation of the eyebrows.

"Are the folks around here rather intelligent?" he asked of a native who lives on the outskirts of Sodom. "Well, fairish," was the reply.

"And are they quiet religious?"

"Some be, and some are Seven Day."

Although the Seventh Day Baptists, who are numerous in southern Rhode Island, are really very pious, and just as good citizens as you can find anywhere, yet in the popular mind their custom of praying on Saturday and working on Sunday takes them out of the category of "religious."

Perhaps the frequent intermarriage of families in these back country districts may partially account for some of their characteristics.

"If they don't marry each other there don't be nobody else fo 'em to marry," said the Sodomite, "and they do say hereabout if a woman marries a man of her own name that all the bread she makes will cure the whooping cough. There many be something to it, for what I know. Leastwise I've heard tell on it many times, and some old women round here would you goudy if you said it was foolishness."

To give "goudy" is about the as "ragooing" or "ripping up the back."

"And then, too' said the Sodomite, reflectively, "have lots of natural remedies that the doctors don't know nothing' about. For instance, when you are touched with the rheumatic, and feel kina mauger like, they say there aint nothing' better than the bile angle-worms will all the juice is out, and then mix it with some hog's lard or mutton taller ad rub it on to the jints. Unless I {?} it" - an expression, by the way, which the writer has not hears outside the vampire belt, and which means "unless I'm Mistaken" - "There do be a good many real cures of rheumatic with angle-worm juice."

Slowly bur surely the conversation drifted to vampire. The smoldering interest int he subject has been revived by the recent publication of a newspaper syndicate article over the signature of a rather well-known writer, who borrowed the article almost word for word from an essay by George R. Stetson in the Anthropologist.

Since Mr Stetson made his investigation, some years ago, there has been no case of the Resurrection of a body for the sake of burning the heart and liver, the last instance being in March, 1892. A firm belief is not practiced is that no one has recently died of consumption who had surviving relatives afflicted with the disease.

For in Rhode Island no one becomes a vampire after death unless he has died of consumption. And not even them unless he has next of kin, or heirs and assigns who are consumptive. Thus, for the present, the vampire industry is stagnant.

It was not always so, and these pleasant hills and valleys are full of legends and traditions. This once busy and populous region is now but sparsely inhabited, and you can travel for miles through the "south county" without seeing a house.

There are plenty of ruins of mills and factories and homesteads, but they are about the only remnants of a former active industrial life. For a few hundred dollars you can buy a great deal more land here than you can attend to. The farms are not abandoned, they are only neglected.

But sportsmen are acquainted the game in the woods, and fishermen say that there are trout in the "south county" than anywhere else in New England. Hence in the spring and fall this is by no means a deserted country, even without the vampires.

The Sodomite was quite unable to give the writer any connected history of the theory and practice of vampirism in southern Rhode Island, but he was well stocked with authentic traditions on the subject, and here are a few of them:

About 100 years ago there lived two families on the western slope of Pine hill in Exeter. They were prosperous farmers for those days. Jonathan Brown and Ezekiel Nichols were the names of the fathers.

Jonathan's daughter, Mehitable {?}, and Ezekiel's son Isaiah, fell in love with each other and were betrothed. Before they could get married, however, Mehitable died of consumption. It nearly broke Isaiah's heart, and he too fell victim of the disease.

One night, not long before his death, his mother heard a peculiar groan coming from his room, and what was her horror on entering to see Mehitable, who had turned vampire, sucking Isaiah's blood. Caught red-handed, or rather red-mouthed, in the act, she could not deny it, but she gave the mother a half-piteous, half-reproachful look, and then went and sat on the mantelpiece. She said not a word, and when the mother came out of her swoon Mehitable had vanished.

But she had staled log enough to settle once and forever the disputed question of the existence of vampires.

"You see," said the Sodomire, "them two young folks had probably been kissing each other a good deal, and Isaiah caught the disease from his sweetheart. Contagion, they call it, don't they?"

{THE NATIVE OF SODOM}

There was once a man named Godlove Arnold, who lived on the southern shore of Yaweoo pond in South Kingstown. He was a notorious skeptic in regard to vampires, but by and by his wide died of consumption. He and his spouse had not always been on the best of terms, and after her death, for which Godlove did not grieve too long, he begun to look around for another partner.

But Mrs Arnold became a vampire and began to pay off some of her old scores against her recent husband. She made life a burden for the unhappy man. She was far more importunate as vampire than as wife.

She chased him one afternoon all the way to Bald hill, and finally he had to give in. They found his body about a week later on the hillside, and the expression on his face was something ghastly.

"Probably died of heart disease," said the Sodomite, as he finished the story.

Over around Kteele hole and Goose Nest spring, in the Pork {?} hill district of North Kingstown, there once lived a man by the name of Isaac Harvey. It was a good many years ago, and they said Ike died of consumption. Mrs Harvey was rather glad of it, for he had seldom contributed anything but advice to her support. It was just like Ike to go into the vampire business after death and to turn his attention to Mrs Harvey.

He tormented her by night and by day, following her around in the shape of a ball of fire until she finally hit upon the happy thought of wearing a horseshoe around her neck. The horseshoe was rather heavy and cumbersome, but it was better than being singed by a ball of fire.

For this legend the Sodomite had not explanation.

Coming down to historic events, which are matter of record, and omitting a score or more of authentic cases within the memory of any middle-aged man now living, the most important vampire incident of recient years was the celebrated Brown case.

George T. Brown is an honest and industrious farmer and horse jockey who lives on the road going south from Exeter hill. He had lost two children by consumption - there's no help for it," said the neighbors, "so long as his brother and sister prey on him."

And they kept at Mr Brown until he as almost distracted. He didn't believe in vampires, but at last he yielded to the entreaties of neighbors to have the bodies exhumed and the hearts and livers burned. "But I want it done decently and in order," he said, so he sent a young man over to see Dr Harold Metcalf of Wickford about it. Dr Metcalf, being graduate of Brown university and of Harvard medical school, and medical examiner of the district, was not at all prepossessed in favor of the vampire theory, and told the young man who came to see him about it that it was all a mistake. Bit the neighbors still kept at Mr Brown, worrying the life out of him with their importunities. So the young man was again sent to Dr Metcalf to beseech him in God's name to come and perform an autopsy on the bodies.

In a moment of amiable weakness the doctor consented to go.

One afternoon in March, 1892, he went over to the Shrub Hill cemetery in Exeter, and there Mr Brown's neighbors opened the graves of his two children. The doctor found the bodies in a perfectly natural state of decomposition and not fresh and rosy, as they should have been if the souls were vampires. In the hearts however, was a little blood and that was quite sufficient to corroborate the vampire theory in the minds of the neighbors. One old woman present was exultant. She knew they would find blood, and where should it have come from so long after death but from the bodies of the living?

So the hearts and livers which the doctor turned over the little assembly of neighbors were burned there in the cemetery.

But it did not save the life of Mr Brown's son. He died not long after and since then two other members of the family have passed away with the same disease.

"It was all because the ashes were not taken care of" said the vampire experts.

Since them, however, the belief of the community in vampires has been rather wavering. A great many of the leading men in Exeter do not believe in the theory at all.

For instance, there is Hon Edward P Dutemple, state senator from this town, who is a good legislator and a still better blacksmith. He is too much of a politician to make enemies by discussing the subject, but his private opinion on the vampire question is known to all his friends.

Then there is the good elder Edwards, town clerk, librarian of the public library on Pine Hill, farmer and preacher. He is one of the most pronounced of the anti-vampirites. Among the laity, the hard-headed farmers of the town who work early and late coax a living from the reluctant soil, there are plenty who are outspoken in their disbelief in vampire.

If you walk with Reynolds Lillibridge, the successful farmer, gunner and trapper of Pine Hill, you will discover that he is much more interested in minks and otters and muskrats, and the trout in his fine pond, than in the vampires.

"When a man's underground, he hasn't anything more to do with anybody that's above ground - that's my theory," he said.

{MRS HARVEY AND IKE}

"Still, I can understand how a man like Brown must have felt. When you are in trouble you will grab at straw, and when you are in a good deal of trouble you will grab at a whole bundle."

The lonely telegraph operator in the station up on Pine hill is too busy looking after his wires to bother about vampires. And then, too, he has just brought a charming little wife there to share his solitude and his salary.

Mme Douglass, the lone clairvoyant and business medium, who lives on the Ten Rod road, hasn't any doubt about the existence of vampires and lots of other things, seen and unseen.

When you take this community "full and by the way" or "by and large" you will find it pretty evenly divided on the vampire issue. But it is strongly republican and so the issue has not yet crept into politics.

Over the North Kingstown and up in West Greenwich, Coventry and Foster as well as in Hopkinton, Richmond and in South Kingstown, the vampire belief holds extensive sway. There have, however, been no recent resurrections of bodies of consumptives.

As to the origin of the belief there is no satisfactory explanation given. How could it have transplanted from the old world and found a lodgment only in Rhode Island, among an otherwise very intelligent and enterprising and wide-a-wake population, is a mystery. It is not an English superstition, and yet the settlers of this region were all English.

Mr De Jongh of Wickford, who has devoted some attention to the subject, is inclined to think that it comes from the old voodoo superstition, as there were formerly many negroes in Rhode Island.

It is to be hoped that with better sanitation and a closer observance of the rules of hygiene, consumption will gradually disappear and that the vampire will retire from business and leave the good folk of Rhode Island in peace and security.

_____

#BELIEVE IN VAMPIRES #folklore #vampires in folklore #full text #World Dracula Day #Boston Daily Globe #1872 #Jan 27 1896 #newspaper clipping #clipping #vampire #vampires #vintage satire #SATIRE

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