Chapter Text
They had won.
Soldarius thought it again, letting it settle more fully this time the way things settle when the emergency has finally, actually, ended.
They had won.
And Sapiro could be rebuilt. The people who had followed them here through this, the soldiers who had held the line when it was barely holding, who had kept standing when standing was the only victory available, could go home.
He breathed.
Around him, others were beginning to do the same - the slow, disoriented gathering of people who have been running at the limits of themselves for so long that the sudden cessation of necessity feels like its own kind of shock. People were looking for each other. Voices calling names. The sounds of a force remembering it was made of individuals.
He scanned the field. He was still doing it. He was not sure he would be able to stop.
There. Flamarra. Deia. Adamus. Terra. Their bodies weighed down by the sacrifice of the older Sang’gres, already moving toward each other with the ease of people who know how to survive a victory as well as a defeat, who now share the same singular loss.
Lira. Mira. Daron. Chedruk. Little Gaiea. His second.
And Armea. He found her, the way he always found her now, without searching. The way the eye goes to certain things before the person has decided to look for them. She was standing at the edge of the gathering. Not injured, or at least not visibly.
He did not move toward her yet, and she did not move toward him, and for a moment the field existed in the suspended quality of an aftermath that had not yet decided what it was going to be - whether it was simply the end of the fight, or whether it was the beginning of something else the war had been standing in front of the whole time.
The lull holds.
And then he felt something. Or he felt it more than he heard or saw anything.
Movement. Not the movement of the people before him regrouping. Different in quality. Coming from the shadows at the far edge of the field behind Armea, where the battle had not reached and the light did not yet quite extend.
He turned toward it. His hand was on his sword before his mind had finished the thought.
---
It happens fast.
That is the thing about the moments that change everything: they do not announce themselves. They arrive in the ordinary speed of seconds, indistinguishable from all the others until they were not.
He registered his Ashti Tabun before he fully saw her.
The movement in the shadows at the edge of the field, the quality of motion of someone who had been waiting still for a long time and was now moving with the decisiveness of a person who had identified their moment. His body responded before his mind had fully processed the image. Hand on his sword. Turning.
Then he saw she was holding something, and where she was looking, and the geometry of the next three seconds arranged itself in his mind with horrible clarity.
Armea.
Daron saw him move toward where Armea was and realized the same danger. He heard a shout - Daron’s voice - carrying over the dying noise of the field, a single note of warning that cut through everything else the way only genuine alarm does. Heads turned. Bodies moved.
Soldarius was already running.
The distance between them compressed in the way distance compresses when the body is running at the limit of what it can do, when the ordinary increments of space collapse into a single urgent tunnel between where you are and where you need to be.
He was aware of others moving toward Armea. He was aware of his Ashti’s hand completing its motion. He was aware of something in her hand and the direction of her throw, and the arc of it, and the fact that the arc will end at Armea.
He reached her. His left shoulder connected with her right and she went sideways. He stepped into the space she had just occupied and that something hit him instead, full and direct.
---
He had been hit before. He had been wounded in more ways than he could easily count, over a life spent in the service of one throne or another. He knew the vocabulary of pain, its various dialects, its peaks, and its aftermaths.
This was not pain.
This was something he did not have a word for. It moved through him like a current, cold and total and deeply wrong. As if something fundamental was being interrupted at its source. He heard himself make a sound that was not quite a sound. He felt the field under his feet become uncertain.
He was aware of faces around him. Aware of the change in the quality of the air, of a cry that he recognized as Flamarra’s voice, high and jagged with a fear he had never heard from her before. He was aware of the light changing in a way he could not explain, as if the world was becoming less substantial. As if the distance between him and everything in it were increasing by some measure he had no instrument to read.
He feels a hand grab onto his arm.
He looks down.
Armea.
She had grabbed his sword arm and she was looking up at him and her face was-- he could not look at her face. He could not afford to look at her face and also manage anything else at the same time. And there were things that needed managing, things he needed to say, but the feeling of thinning was accelerating now and the words he was reaching for kept receding and he could not-- he could not--
He looks at her anyway.
Her eyes were wide and dark and she was holding his arm with both hands now, and he could feel her grip. He could still feel it, even as everything else was becoming difficult to feel, even as the world continued its terrible recession.
He wants to tell her something. He has been wanting to tell her so many things for months. He has been practicing the not-saying of it for so long he is no longer certain he remembers how to say it. And now the moment has arrived in the worst possible shape, in the shape of a disappearance rather than a conversation, and all the things he did not say are still unsaid and there was no time--
---
The pull was violent at the end.
One moment he was there. The next he was not.
He was gone like something shot backward through the world. And Armea was left standing in the space where he had been, her hands out, holding only the vambrace that had come with her and nothing else. The weight of it. The metal still warm.
The silence lasted exactly one pulse of a heartbeat.
Then she made a sound that was not a word and was not quite a scream and was not quite a cry and was all three of those things at once. The sound of a person whose body has received information that the mind is refusing to process, that the chest is refusing to hold.
“Hindi,” the word tore out of her as a sob. No control, no measure. Everything she had been holding in careful suspension for months, the distance, the not-saying and not-knowing and all the things she has been carrying without a name for it. All of it collapsed into that single word and the word collapsed into movement and she turns.
Tabun was on the ground. Dying, already, from Flamarra’s strike. But dying was not dead, and the distance between them closed in three steps, and Armea’s hands found the front of Tabun’s dress and she held on to it as if holding on to the woman could reverse the last few seconds, as if demanding answers from her could restore what had just been taken from her. From them.
“Siya’y iyong hadia,” The words came ragged, in pieces, barely assembled. “Inaruga bilang isang anak.”
She did not know if it was grief or fury. She did not know if there was a difference. She holds on. The vambrace was still in her hand. The metal still warm against her palm, the only thing left of him that she could hold, the only thing that had not gone.
Around her, she was dimly aware of the others converging. Flamarra, Daron, the other Sang’gres, all of them moving toward her or toward Tabun or toward the space where Soldarius had been, trying to understand what had just happened, trying to determine what it meant, trying to find the edges of the thing so they could begin to deal with it.
Someone had to know what was it that Tabun threw out. Someone had to know what it was meant to do. Someone, somewhere in Encantadia, must have an answer.
She clung to this the way one clings to things when the alternative is freefall, when the only thing between her and the full weight of what had just happened was the belief, however fragile, that it could be undone.
She looks at the vambrace in her hands. At the place where he had been. She looks at Tabun, dying, eyes vacant, past the point of answers. Her secrets going with her into whatever came next.
---
Armea stands up.
Her hands were shaking. She made them stop, the way she made everything stop when she needed to be the queen and not the person. The old, necessary discipline of it. The compartment she had built over years of practice that could hold anything, if she pressed hard enough against its walls.
She looked at the others. They were looking at her. Waiting, as people always waited, for whoever was going to tell them what came next.
The vambrace was heavy in her hand.
She breathes.
“Kailangang mabatid natin kung ano man iyon,” she says to no one in particular. Her voice does not shake. “At kung ano ang sadyang layon nito.”
It was not a request.