Chapter Text
“Relax, kiddo, I’m here.”
Prompto barked a nervous laugh and very carefully didn’t twitch as he held the bike steady, flanking the Regalia as they sped down the highway. He tilted his head to the side and caught a glimpse of Crowe, helmet down so he couldn’t see the smirk he heard in her voice, flanking the other side.
“I know, I know,” he said, shrugging and turning his eyes back to the road and, most importantly, the ridiculous pink convertible speeding ahead of them. “I’m chill.”
“You’ve never been chill a day in your life, and you know it,” Crowe snorted, “and I’ve known you long enough to make that statement with absolute confidence.”
Prompto’s grip on the handle tightened on reflex as he snorted back, startled, but he managed to control the bike so the little twitch in his driving was probably not noticed. Then again, everyone in the Regalia was focused on Noct and the way his unconscious body was sprawled against Luna’s side.
They’d been on the road three days now, one night spent at the caravans in Burbost waystation, and one night in the small hotel in Old Lestallum, both paid for by their guide, who smiled entirely too much for Prompto’s comfort and who Luna clearly didn’t like. Luna liked everyone, in Prompto’s experience, so that was a definite red flag. At least they had Crowe with them, though. Crowe was strong and powerful and eminently reassuring to have around. It wasn’t that Prompto didn’t trust Gladio and the others to keep Noct safe, really. But if the Stranger leading them was someone Luna didn’t like and was intimidated by, well… it was time for heavy-handed solutions. If worse came to worse, Prompto knew Crowe could level a small city if she put her mind to it. Hopefully, that would be more than enough to deal with their smarmy guide if he turned out to be… well, something else.
“You’ve ever been this close to Ravatogh?” Prompto asked, instead of acknowledging Crowe’s ribbing.
Their communication line was secure, and it kept them company during the long stretches of road. Sometimes Prompto felt terrible about it, having someone to talk to freely while he knew everyone in the Regalia was stuck in terse, wary silence. Then he reminded himself he was literally just doing his job, and reckoned Noct could judge him for it, once he was feeling better.
Because he would be getting better, obviously.
“Once,” Crowe said, in that carefully casual tone of hers that made Prompto realize he’d stepped on a nerve. “Back when you were a little snotwad, and the war ended the first time. Your dad took us all the way to the summit, guarding the Oracle. Then, you know. Fan. Shit. Usual results. I do remember seeing the valley of volcanic pools that Mr. Creepo was talking about last night, but I couldn’t tell you if there was really anything else there.”
“You can’t call him Mr. Creepo,” Prompto snickered, desperately trying to keep himself from laughing outright. “Crowe!”
“If he doesn’t want to be Mr. Creepo, he could share his name. But you know he won’t.” She paused, significantly. “Because he’s a creep.”
“He’s a creep endorsed by Luna—Princess Lunafreya,” Prompto corrected himself, studiously ignoring the snicker across the line. “Royalty commands, we obey.”
“Not Queen yet,” Crowe pointed out, “though she doesn’t much care about that, does she?”
Prompto licked his lips and kept his eyes on the road.
“She’s worried about Noct,” he said, almost conciliatory. “We all are.”
“Still not the King I serve,” Crowe insisted, “but I guess dire times require dire sacrifice… shit.” She revved her bike loudly. “Arbas.”
“Shit,” Prompto echoed, as he accelerated to match her pace, overtaking their guide and roaring their motors loud enough to announce their presence.
Arbas were a common sight in Cleigne, giant, lumbering herds that mostly minded their own business until they decided to stick right in the middle of a road and make themselves a nuisance. Prompto didn’t like them for the same reason he didn’t like anaks and other four-legged, long-necked animals that populated the Lucian countryside: they were unrepentant assholes most of the time, and he still somehow felt like shit if he ended up killing one. Hopefully, he and Crowe would be enough to scare off the herd away from the road. He was having a tense enough day to add ‘murdered baby animals for obstructing the road’ to the list of reasons why he was going to have a glorious meltdown the moment Noct got better.
Prompto had the sinking, terrible feeling that it was easier than normal, to scare off the arbas, but he didn’t tell Crowe so, because he didn’t want actual confirmation of that fact.
Crowe stayed behind with their eerily smiling guide, when they reached their destination and he insisted he could not accompany them further.
They left the Regalia behind, as well, considering the mountain trail towards their actual destination was far too narrow and unpredictable for a car. Their grinning, creepy, annoying asshole of a guide made a cheerful quip about the fact they’d only be able to take the car with them, if they could figure out how to make it fly, and only Luna’s terse reply thanking him for his guidance so far managed to prevent any of the others from saying something unwise.
Sure, they had spent almost four days following the man all the way to the feet of Ravatogh, because Luna said they should and it would lead them to understand what was wrong with Noct, but it was also very, very clear that Luna did not like their guide one bit. More than once, Prompto had caught her staring at him in a way that made him worry she was one bad twitch from flinging her trident at his head. And the fact she didn’t was what worried him, really. Because the way she looked at him that that edge of animal panic, of fight because flight is not an option anymore, that wasn’t particularly encouraging. Prompto was probably the only one other than Ravus that knew what Luna was actually capable of, if pushing came to shoving, and that knowledge, combined with her clear apprehension when it came to dealing with their guide, sat awkward and uncomfortable in the pit of his stomach, waiting for the chance to break out into full-blown panic.
When Noct got better, Prompto decided, he was going to cry for an entire week, as a treat.
There were a lot of monsters they had to fight through and that made progress even slower, considering Gladio was stuck carrying Noct, which meant Luna and Ravus were focused keeping them safe and out of the way. Prompto knew better than to imply Ignis was anything less than lethal when he needed to be, and he knew he had enough explosives stashed away to really bring in the heat if necessary, but that wasn’t what either of them were best suited for. It was somewhat sobering to realize they just… weren’t well-prepared to function in Noct’s absence. They had plans and contingencies if something happened that incapacitated him momentarily, but this… Noct was essentially in stasis from what Luna had managed to explain, awkward and unsure. He wasn’t asleep or unconscious, even though that was what he looked like.
Prompto reckoned that once Noct got better – and of course he was going to get better, they weren’t going to stop until he was – they had to sit down and have a good, long strategy session and figure out how to handle this kind of thing long term. It was embarrassing how badly they couldn’t really function without their Prince greasing the gears, metaphorically speaking.
It was partly because of how slow they were that the four-mile walk had stretched so long, and the sun had started to sink in the horizon, yet they still weren’t anywhere near close to their objective.
Not that anyone but Luna seemed to know what their objective even was.
But it was getting dark, and fast, and they were all starting to get antsy, because night only meant one thing, and it was the one thing they had somehow managed to avoid fighting at all, thus far: daemons. Prompto knew from experience that fighting daemons sucked. They were sneaky and vicious and nothing really worked the way it should, so it was always a chore. It was always a gamble. As crippled as their fighting prowess was at the moment, with Noct completely out of the picture, and how awkward they all were handling it, Prompto dreaded to find out how exactly they would fare against a proper daemon fight.
So of course, because nothing could ever go right, apparently, the thing that eventually crawled out of the ground wasn’t a black giant or some bombs or even a red giant. All of that, he reckoned they could take if they got their shit together in time. No.
They got an Aramusha instead.
“Oh that’s bad,” Prompto said, as the creature assumed its powerful stance, swinging its sword threateningly and dispelling the sulfur fog all around it, like it was creating its very own fighting arena. “That’s real bad,” Prompto giggled manically, and caught from the back of his eye the precise moment Gladio pressed Noct’s near boneless body into Luna’s hands.
Well, that was something, he supposed.
The Aramusha leaped and they braced for impact: Luna held Noct close, as Ravus stood before her, ready to shield them from the incoming threat as best he could. Gladio and Ignis fell into position, running straight ahead in a well-practiced pattern, ready to intercept. Prompto fell back, putting distance to get into a good snipping position and exchanged his handgun for something bigger that packed a bit more of an overkill, like his favorite bazooka.
It wasn’t a Yojimbo, which Prompto was almost sure they could take more or less on their own, and the thought sat heavy and awkward in the back of his throat as his mouth filled with panicked spit, wishing keenly he hadn’t asked Crowe to stay back with the pink convertible creep.
However, the monster’s katana met resistance far too soon.
Metal chirred against metal, clashing loudly against an unyielding force as it was caught against the edge of an opposing blade. The blade attached to the sword held by the hand of the woman who warped into its path and stopped it in its tracks. The crystal residue of the warp was a frighteningly familiar blue, caught in her hair as it settled down her shoulders, a very familiar shade of black, albeit much longer than Noct’s.
She looked over her shoulder, just long enough to place the pieces on the board, and then shifted her wrist in the same careless way Cor did, forcing the opponent’s blade sideways and away, and it unbalanced the Aramusha the same way it always unbalanced all of Cor’s opponents, leaving the Aramusha wide open for her fist to slam into its chest. There was the residual glimmer of a spell caught in her fingers as she shook her wrist, watching impassively as the Aramusha was violently thrown back by the seemingly simple attack. She then ran her index and middle finger along the edge of her sword, spreading that glimmer along the blade, before she threw out an almost playful slash in the direction of the recovering Aramusha, and they could feel the force of that, almost see it in the way the fog was cut as it advanced like an invisible freight train straight at the Aramusha.
She turned away from it before it hit, ignoring the quiet pop of the magic making contact, and smiled down at them as she twirled her blade back into a terrifyingly familiar black sheath. Behind her, lightning hammered down upon the Aramusha, but without the familiar purple echo of Ramuh’s power, or the lilac hues of the King’s own brand of magic. It was white and bright and terrible, and it consumed the screeching daemon as it writhed in place, almost like it was begging for mercy. But the light was unrelenting, over and over again, until all that was left was faint soot on the rocks where the Aramusha had stood, not even the iridescent dust that usually followed a daemon’s demise.
“You’re late, children,” she said, blue eyes pale and sharp and frighteningly familiar, as she threw her sword away into the void with the casual flick of wrist that implied deep familiarity with the use of an armiger. “Don’t you know it’s dangerous to travel at night?”
The smile really was not reassuring at all.
“Who are you?” Luna demanded, before anyone could say anything.
There was something very dangerous in her voice, not the least helped by the fact she laid Noctis down on the ground and stood up to full height, summoning her trident to her hand.
“A helping hand,” the stranger said, smile melting into a taunting smirk. “Mostly I’m here to make sure you don’t fuck up.”
“So you know about—” Luna began, and then stopped, looking back at Noct.
“The seal on him?” The stranger laughed. “Kid, I put it on him. Of course I know.”
“Why?” Luna asked, fingers clenched tight on her trident, until her knuckles were white and Prompto wondered if they were about to witness that temper Noct insisted she had that no one had ever actually seen in public.
“Because he is The Chosen King, and he would have been claimed by the Astrals, forced into their covenant without it,” the woman replied, raising a hand up and conjuring a ball of light into it. She clenched her fingers closed around it, and then flung her arm back and away, as if to scatter the light. Dozens of lantern-like lights appeared, framing a road across the sulfur pits and up towards a hill in the distance. “The One I serve would rather he knew what he was getting into, first.”
“If he is the Chosen King,” Luna began, swallowing hard.
“Which he is,” the stranger interrupted, amused.
“Then it is his duty to forge the covenants and lead us all unto light,” Luna went on, shifting her hold on her trident into something more overtly threatening, holding it with both hands. “As Oracle, I am duty bound to support him in his task.”
“That you are, little girl,” the stranger agreed, sticking her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She was wearing torn jeans and a sleeveless red shirt, and it looked strange for how mundane it was. “You can choose to do that, you know? My Employer is pretty big on Free Will and all, but the point is that neither of you were given a choice about it, much less explained why you’re being asked to do what you are.”
“The Gods—”
“—are assholes, mostly,” she went on, grinning. “But don’t take my word for it.” She raised her hand and showed three fingers, wiggling them significantly. “The lost history of Eos is preserved in three remnants of Solheim. I want you to go into them, and witness what truly happened, two thousand years ago. What precipitated the coming of the Scourge and the need for Bahamut’s Crystal prophecy. Only then, after you’ve learned the truth of things, I will release the seal on him, and you will be free to choose what to do next.”
“And if we don’t?” Luna asked, eyes narrowed.
The woman shrugged.
“That is a choice, so the Big Honcho is willing to let you make it, but spoilers, you’ll die.” She shrugged again, harder. “The time is ripe for the coming of the Chosen King, the Endless Night is not far behind and you of all people should know, girl, what comes with it.”
“Who, rather,” Luna said tersely, licking her lips. “He’s been… almost helpful, matter of fact.”
The woman laughed, a loud, cackle-like laugh that made Prompto’s hair stand on end along the back of his neck. And from the look of Ignis and Gladio, they shared the sentiment.
“He’s not so bad as long as you remember he’ll get his job done, nothing personal about it,” the woman said, eyebrows arched tauntingly. “He’s like you and me, really. An idiot who made his own choices and now has to live with them. If you can call that living, anyway.”
“He’s not exactly glowing endorsement of this choice you keep talking about,” Luna ventured, voice dry.
“Not gonna lie to you, girl,” the woman replied, “he chose a pretty shitty lot, and you could too. But at least he knew exactly what he was choosing, when he made the call.” The smile turned mocking again. “Instead of being groomed from birth to take on a role that someone else chose for you.”
The silence stretched, long and tense and terrible.
“So what do we have to do?” Luna asked, jaw set and expression fierce. “To dig out this history you mentioned?”
The woman grinned.
“Happy to show you the way.”
“So you’re Cor’s kid, huh?”
Prompto missed his step, choked on spit and then fell into the void.
Then he felt the nauseous feeling of a hook digging into his bellybutton and pulling him away, and the next thing he knew, he was sitting at the start of the room, looking dazed. It made the woman laugh her obnoxious, terrifying, cackling laugh.
Pitioss was the worst.
The structure had a spell built into the very foundations of it, that prevented them from summoning any weapons or using any magic. It also fucked with gravity and perception, and it was dark and eerie and not great. Their guide – they’d asked for a name, well, Luna had demanded it, but all she’d done was smile – informed them what they sought was buried in its depths, at the end of the labyrinth. On the upside, at least, no matter how much they failed the runs, they couldn’t die. The same magic in the air caught them and delivered them back to the last solid ground they’d stepped on.
Prompto was having a really hard time not comparing the whole thing to those stupidly hard platformer video games that Tredd liked so much, and he only refrained because the others were having a worst time of it than he was. He was nimble and half his job depended on his ability to make dumb leaps of faith and parkour his way around enemy strongholds. Pitioss was challenging, but not impossible. But Gladio had gotten stuck at the beginning jumps, and Ignis had made it as far as the giant skull room – there was a giant skull room, Prompto wanted a pay raise and possibly enough rootbeer to put himself into a coma – so now he was the only one left still trying to get through the labyrinth. Ravus and Luna had stayed at the entrance, not willing to leave Noct unconscious and alone in a creepy goddamn maze like this.
“He talks a lot about you,” she said, sitting with her legs dangling off the edge of the platform he was trying his honest best to get to. “About you and your sister. Never would have peg that idiot to have kids, mind, but hey. Here we are.”
“You don’t look old enough to know Cor,” Prompto pointed out, standing up and shaking his arms to release some of the tension and prepare for another attempt at crossing the chasm before him. “You’re what… twenty?”
“Flatterer,” she replied, laughing, “I’m a bit older than that. But I suppose the old lion looks worse for wear than I do. It’s what happens when you have a conscience.”
“Huh,” Prompto said, but then, before he could keep up the line of inquiry – he was a saboteur, he dug out the truth from things, kicking and screaming if he had to – he took one good look at the next room. “Aw, fuck.”
“Yep,” his companion said, and then showed him where to go. “It feels like that, sometimes.”
Prompto promised himself another extra week of crying, once the whole thing was done, and then took the leap.
There was a dragon in the bottom of the abyss.
Prompto was sure it had a proper name – in the back of his mind, he heard Harit’s voice, dry and unimpressed, explaining what a Jormungand was – but he was a bit busy trying to escape from the fire it kept belching at him.
“You’re not fighting it,” his companion pointed out, clearly unbothered by the dragon and the fire and the panicked scramble out.
“Saboteur,” Prompto squeaked as he rolled into a landing, well aware that the time it would take the spell to reconstitute him back on solid ground might be enough to get him punted in the face by the dragon, and not sure the spell would even protect him from that, the same way it did the spike pits.
He was trying to forget about the spike pits, actually.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said, like they were taking a stroll in a park, not running for their lives, “you’re Lyra’s kid too.”
“Incoming!” Prompto screamed instead as he realized he was right above the starting area, with death close on his heels.
“Don’t drop down,” his guide advised, pointing at the circuit that lead further up into the room. “Let them handle it, or you’ll have to redo the whole thing again.”
“Fuck,” Prompto hissed, and took another near blind leap into a too-thin platform up ahead. “Lightning and broadswords work well!” He added, yelling down as he saw Ignis and Gladio come together to face the threat. “I think!”
The entire structure shook with the force of the clash. It looked way too mean to let only Ignis and Gladio deal with it – Ravus could help, but whether he would depended on whether Luna would bully him into it or not, really, the big lumbering jerk – but Prompto reckoned he could collect the treasure at the end and then double back to offer support. The last stretch of parkouring was significantly less taxing than what came before, so he did it mostly on reflex, focused instead on racking his brain for anything he might have lying around his armiger that could help take down a giant angry dragon of fire and spite.
“And that would be it,” his guide said, pointing at a sapphire the size of Prompto’s fist, propped up in a little pedestal in the center of the room. “Don’t touch it with your bare hands.”
“Wasn’t going to,” Prompto replied, grabbing a spare grenade bag and turning it inside out. He used it like a glove to grab the gem, and then hung it from his belt, like he would another bit of ammo. “Right. Dragon time.”
“Have fun,” his companion said, waving a hand dismissively.
“You’re not helping?” He asked, eyes narrowed.
“It’s an overgrown worm that ate one too many spicy dinners,” she said, looking utterly unruffled by the sounds of the fight echoing in the distance. “If that’s all it takes to take you lot out, you weren’t going to make it anyway.”
Prompto gave her a look, as long as he dared, and then ran back to where the others were.
Her laughter followed him, as he went, and to be honest, it didn’t feel great.
The giant carcass slid off the edge of the platform into abyss below, landing onto the large statue they could barely make out in the depths with a resounding crash.
It had been a grueling fight, with far too many close calls to count, but between Ravus’ natural affinity for lightning-based magic, Ignis’ near bottomless supply of spell flasks and Gladio and Luna’s hard-hitting strikes, they had managed to overcome. Prompto’s primary contributions to the fight were grabbing Noct and pulling him out of the danger zone and taking potshots at the dragon from behind cover with an experimental magic grenade launcher that Luche had once told him was straight up unnecessary. Went to show what Luche knew, Prompto thought, as he made his way back to the others, Noct thrown over his shoulders. Parkour while carrying his best friend’s best impression of a potato sack was a bit harder when he wasn’t drunk on adrenaline, but he managed.
“Well, I’ll be damned, you actually survived that.” Their guide laughed in the face of the disgruntled looks they gave her, a loud, unrepentant cackle. Prompto thought she sounded like a hyena when she did that. “Show the Oracle what you found, kid,” she added, before anyone – mostly Ignis, Ignis looked like he was reaching boiling point and was about to snap – could say anything, nodding at Prompto. “She’ll know what it is.”
“Oh,” Luna said, as she opened the bag Prompto gave her, expression shifting. “It’s a soul stone.”
She tipped the bag open, but rather than fall into her hand, the sapphire stopped an inch above her palm, floating in place as if by its own volition.
“Your Highness,” Gladio said, in a tone that Prompto knew meant his temper was fraying at the edges, but he was infinitely better than Ignis at keeping it in check, at least while they were still under threat.
“A soul stone is a lost record keeping art, from the age of Solheim,” Luna explained, tilting her hand and causing the gem to spin as it floated above it. “It’s… it’s someone’s literal soul, crystalized and left behind to preserve their knowledge and their memories. There’s very few of them left.”
“But most importantly,” the woman who’d led them there said, eyes serpentine, “they cannot be falsified.”
Luna swallowed hard.
“You promised us the truth,” she said, staring up at her. “But you will not share your name?”
She smiled.
“Ardyn,” she said, after a moment. “You can call me Ardyn Lucis Caelum.”