Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first time Prompto sees a daemon, he’s sitting between his mother and father on the couch. His mother has her dark hair tied up in a bun, and she’s smiling with her eyes, all crinkled up at the edges, as she rubs Prompto’s back.

“There’s Mommy,” his father says, pointing to the television. And there she is, her hair down and swept about her face, gesturing to a gutted-out building. She’s talking quickly, but Prompto’s been following her and his father’s TV appearances since before he can remember, and he’s pretty sure she’s talking about the war again. She’s always talking about war, these days.

“Here it comes, Prom,” his mother says. “Don’t be afraid. I’m right here with you.”

Prompto draws his knees up to his chest. On the screen, his mother turns, gestures to the camera. The camera zooms past her, and focuses on a spot in the distance, where a massive, spider-like creature bursts from the trees and whips around, its white-hot gaze questing in the dark. From the waist up, the daemon looks like a woman, but their skin is slick and greenish-white, and the mouth that opens to hiss at the camera is thick with fangs.

Prompto screams.

And then his father is there, right in front of him, a red-brown hand pressing his lucky charm into Prompto’s fingers. Prompto clings to it, breathes, hears the clack of stone and the groan of wire. A string of stone-backed mirrors, seven in all, the only possession Prompto brought with him when he was adopted at the age of three. He doesn’t know why it’s important, but when he watches it twirl slowly from its place over his bedroom window, reflecting light onto his walls, he feels safe.

“I said he was too young for it, Marius,” his mother says. “After the nightmares he used to have…”

“I know, darling, I know.” Prompto’s dad holds a hand to his cheek. “How are you doing, sunshine?”

Prompto takes a breath. Another. Holds tight to the smallest mirror in the chain. “I’m okay,” he says. “I’m okay. I wanna watch it again.”

His parents look at each other in concern, but Prompto is adamant. His parents risk their lives every time they go out on the job to seek out the truth and bring it back to Insomnia. If he’s going to follow in their footsteps one day, he can’t be afraid.

He watches the video again, and when he lets go of his charm at last, there’s an imprint of a one-winged woman on his palm, a perfect match to the engraving on the stone.

---

“Move it or lose it, Prom! We’re wasting daylight!”

“Let me get this shot!” Prompto shouts. He’s standing on the top of a hill overlooking the Disc of Cauthess, camera in hand, fiddling with the filters as he tries to catch just the right angle of the sun glancing through the shards of the Meteor. He has to get this one right for his own sake.

Twelve years ago, his father had come back from assignment at the Disc bearing a photo his cameraman had taken of the archaeological dig that he was covering. A tomb had been unearthed, showing signs that it had been placed there at the time of the destruction of Solheim thousands of years ago, and Prompto’s father had pointed to the seven spheres that were carved into the coffin in the photo.

“Covered in mirrors,” he’d said. “Just like your bedroom!”

Prompto had rolled his eyes, but it was true. He was always collecting old mirrors and stained glass from antique stores and pawn shops, stringing them up along the walls and windows to catch the light. His mother used to joke that she needed sunglasses just to come in and wake him up in time for school.

Now, Prompto ducks down an inch and takes a shot on his camera. Almost perfect. Not up to a professional journalist’s standards—As if he’ll ever be able to follow that dream, with everything going on—but it’s good enough to make the guys ooh and aah when he shows them at camp later. He tucks his camera in his fanny pack and scrambles down the hill, where Noct, Ignis, and Gladio are waiting.

“Hope it was worth it,” Noct says. Prompto grins at him and dodges the playful swipe at his ear. “We’re heading back to Lestallum. Iris says Talcott has news of some sort of… thing… in a waterfall. I don’t know, the call dropped.”

“Wow,” Prompto says. “Sounds real specific!” He jogs ahead and lifts out his camera to take a picture of Ignis’ exhausted look of resignation, and nearly trips over himself as he runs backwards through the grass. Gladio takes his arm to steady him.

“Really, Prompto, I don’t know how you’ve managed to survive this long,” he says. Prompto winks.

“I’m naturally lucky,” he tells him, and darts out of his hold to make a run for the Regalia. To his left, the sun blazing through the Meteor sends out rays of warm orange light streaming over the fields, and Prompto can almost see it in his mind’s eye: A fiery ball of light and glassy stone, streaking the sky black as the Archaeon braces themselves beneath it, arms uplifted as though in supplication. What a picture that would have made. Prompto shakes his head at himself and jumps up onto the street. Of course Astrals aren’t around anymore, if they were even real in the first place. They’re just stories, pictures he used to draw when he was little, made-up fairytales he parroted that made his mother giggle and his father sigh.

Still, Prompto can’t help but think, Wouldn’t it be something if it were true?

Chapter Text

From the deep, the Archaean calls
Yet on deaf ears, the god's tongue falls
The King made to kneel, in pain he crawls...

"That's not how it goes."

Prompto doesn't mean to say it, but the words come tumbling from his lips all the same, stopping the strange, auburn-haired man in his tracks. It's odd, really. Prompto is usually a bit anxious and uncertain when confronted with new people, let alone people who go around throwing commemorative coins at people for no apparent reason, but there's something about this man that's almost... Comforting. Secure. The way it felt when he'd look up at the picture of the king that his father tacked onto the kitchen wall. He isn't sure he trusts it, though—The man's voice is so smug, so smooth, that it clashes with the picture that he makes in Prompto's mind.

The man turns to him now, brows raised.

"Oh?"

"The rhyme," Prompto says. "It's wrong. There wasn't a king. Sometime about..." He frowns. "Water. Titan and Leviathan making a tomb for Eos. I don't remember the words, though."

"Prompto," Ignis says, quietly. "There is very little evidence that Eos—the goddess, I mean—even existed. There are no nursery rhymes in my knowledge that imply that the Astrals were—"

"No, no," the man interrupts, walking right towards Prompto. "This is interesting." He slips his hands in the pockets of his wide jacket, and leans forward. When he speaks, his voice is low and musical.

"By Bahamut's hand the goddess lies still
Her blood the rivers, Her flesh the earth
The sun falls, the fire turns to the dark."

"That didn't even rhyme," Noct says, but Prompto is running the words through his mind, over his tongue. They feel right. Why do they feel right?

"They... did rhyme," he says. "They should. But it's like they're in the wrong order."

"Or the wrong language," says the stranger, and his wink is somehow far too personal. Prompto steps back, behind Gladio, and feels the warmth of his friend's hand resting securely on his shoulder. The stranger laughs.

"Oh, I do have high hopes for your little crew," he says. "Allow me to extend an offer of assistance..."

---

"May I lend a hand?"

Prompto is standing precariously on the top of one of the plastic chairs out by the caravan, tying up his mirror charms on the awning. It's a habit that the others don't fault him for--They all have their little rituals, small rules to follow that makes the loss of home sting less. And this is hardly as distracting as Gladio's tendency to wake up at five in the morning to go for a run.

But when the stranger—Ardyn, he claims to be—reaches up to tie the chain securely, Prompto just feels hollow and off.

"Thanks," he mumbles.

"Odd little trinket," Ardyn says. The others have all gone to bed, leaving Prompto to take first watch, but the light in the caravan window is a comforting reminder of their nearness. "Do you know, I may have seen this before."

"Really."

"Indeed." Ardyn flips the highest mirror. "Oh look, dear old mother. Mother-goddess," he explains, smiling down at Prompto's look of confusion. "The one you spoke of. These mirrors, they say, used to hang in the window of every home in Solheim. Tiny shrines to the goddess who was brought low. This one looks almost authentic."

Prompto jumps down from the chair. "Could be. Mom and Dad went... go to a lot of archaeological digs, for work. They found me near one of them, when I was little."

"Found?" Ardyn releases the mirror, which spins slowly, reflecting his and Prompto's face in turns. "You aren't from Lucis?"

"Adopted," Prompto says. It's such an old subject that he almost expects the question, now--and anyways, his parents had wanted him badly enough to go through years of nationalization certification on his behalf. How many parents were willing to do that? "I was a war orphan. Somewhere near here."

"How matter-of-fact," Ardyn says. "And found near a ruin? Very romantic."

Prompto huffs. "Right, sure." He sits properly and pulls out his camera, skimming through the day's photos. Ardyn, thankfully, seems to have lost interest in Prompto's romantic origins, and has turned back to the charm, lightly brushing it with his fingers. There's a blessed silence for all of five minutes, before the smooth, deep voice calls out again.

"You must be quite thrilled to be about to meet the Titan in the flesh," he says. Prompto shrugs.

"Still not sure if he's even down there." Ignis, Noct, and Gladio swear up and down that it's true, but Prompto's memory of the Astrals—all the fairytales that got him in trouble at school for make believe and disturbing the class—is tied into stories and nursery rhymes. Nothing substantial. And if the Titan were real, he's pretty sure his mom at least would have already jumped at the chance of running a story on him. It's the kind of reckless, dangerous job she likes.

"A skeptic!" There's a chuckle in Ardyn's voice. "A rare breed indeed, in this age. But I assure you, the Titan is there. I look forward to hearing your views after your little excursion tomorrow."

And then he looks directly at Prompto, through him, and says something very strange indeed.

"I wonder what he'll think of you?"

---

Prompto rests his arms on edge of the console of Ardyn Izunia's private airship, staring down at the crumbling wreckage of the Disc of Cauthess. The night sky is streaked with a dull orange as the fires of the Meteor reflect against low-lying clouds, and Prompto can still hear the crack and boom of collapsing stone.

He coughs, and grit rolls down his throat.

"Quite a welcome," Ardyn says. No one speaks. Noct is bandaging his arm next to Ignis, and Gladio is watching Ardyn keenly, his hand outstretched as it always is before he summons his weapon. Only Prompto has bothered to come close.

"Did you do something to the Titan?" He asks, so low that his voice is drowned out by the roar of the ship's engines. Ardyn seems to get his meaning, however, and the older man shifts to Prompto's side, making Gladio nearly rise from his seat with a growl of warning. Prompto frantically flaps a hand at his friend, and winces. He feels like his skin is one massive bruise.

"I did nothing to your king's new ally, I assure you," Ardyn says. He ducks his head close to Prompto's, and smiles as though sharing a private joke. "Why? Did your meeting with the estimable Astral not go as planned?"

"He tried to kill me," Prompto hisses, and coughs again. At first, the Astral had been focused on Noct alone, but when Prompto and Ignis joined the fray, it was as though Titan had switched gears. Suddenly Prompto was being crushed under the dome of a giant palm, knocked off ledges, thrown to his knees under the mind-numbing tremor of the Astral's scream. Ignis had to run in with a phoenix down and a whole lot of prayer, and Prompto still feels like his bones are shaking with the echo of it all.

"Truly? I wonder why." Ardyn tugs at the cuffs of his sleeves and stares out at the dark fields of Duscae.

"Yeah? Why is it I feel like you know?" Prompto asks. Ardyn's smile doesn't so much as twitch.

Ardyn turns from him and strides into the center of the ship, where a row of powered-down MTs are suspended by wires from the roof. Prompto's been trying to avoid looking at them the entire time, but now Ardyn runs a hand over one of the MT's armored legs, and it twitches like a puppet severed from its strings.

"Remarkable thing, modern technology, is it not?" Ardyn says, in a voice that carries throughout the ship. "The Empire seeks to bring itself to new glory, so it uses an old system upon which to model itself. A new Solheim, the Emperor calls it." He shrugs. "Not quite the same, of course. It's a fragile mockery at best. Even these MTs are based on old records dredged up from ancient texts. Their predecessors... The true MTs, oh, they were a thing of beauty."

He turns to Prompto when he says this, and Prompto finds himself shrinking against the console.

"But that would be pure speculation," Ignis interrupts. "The destruction of Solheim was nearly complete—No one can say for certain what their magitech soldiers were like."

"Of course!" Ardyn beams at him as one would upon a star pupil. "But they say that the Magitech people of that time were almost as human as you or I. They were simply... enhanced. Sharper. Adaptable. Harder to kill. The efficiency of a machine with the soul of a human. It was bred into their genes, you see. If such a creation were still alive," he knocks on the MT's knee again, "they could command these weak copies by virtue of their blood alone. But then... as you say, my dear boy, it's all speculation."

"I guess being the chancellor of Niflheim gives you access to this kind of info," Gladio says darkly. Ardyn smirks.

"How suspicious you are!" He laughs at Gladio's scowl of disapproval, and walks off to the pilot's seat.

Prompto stares at the dangling MT soldiers for a long while, watching their feet sway, lifeless, with the movement of the ship.

Chapter Text

Between the Regalia going missing, impossible divine messengers hanging out at chocobo ranches, and nonstop runs through mud-slick fields, Prompto keeps hoping that he'll be too busy to think about what the chancellor said after their fight with the Archaean. But the thoughts creep in edgewise all the same, like rain pooling into his boots, a constant presence he can't shake off.

"You're a quick study, I'll give you that," Cor the Immortal had told him, when Prompto was training under the Crownsguard. The drills and exercises came so easily to him that it felt like breathing, and Prompto had blushed and ducked his head, saving the compliment to mull over in private. He even left a note on the fridge for his parents: Cor Leonis said I'm okay!

Adaptable, Ardyn had said.

And now, they're on the way to the first mark of Ramuh, and Prompto slips on a patch of mud and goes careening into a pack of voretooth. One of them has him on his back, its claws digging into his skin, and Prompto shoots it in the neck as Gladio charges through with his broadsword. As he cracks a potion over Prompto's chest, Ignis exclaims over how well Prompto takes to curatives.

"A wound like this would take at least an elixir to heal on the rest of us," Ignis tells him. "We must have built up an immunity."

"Yeah," Prompto says, tugging down his shirt.

Harder to kill, whispers Ardyn's voice, low and insidious.

Prompto takes out four MT swordsmen within five seconds, earning a whoop of victory from Gladio.

Sharper.

Prompto rubs the barcode over his wrist, the one he's had since before his parents took him in. We don't know where it came from, Prom, his father said, when Prompto was old enough to ask, but it's nothing to be ashamed of.

The lines of the tattoo slide under the pads of his fingers, and he presses down on the bone beneath.

Enhanced.

No. It doesn't mean anything. It never meant anything. Ardyn is just trying to get in his head. So the Titan went a little screwy during the covenant? The guy spent the last who knows how many centuries holding up a giant flaming rock. Anyone would snap after that. It doesn't matter that the Archaean didn't go after Ignis or Gladio. It's just chance, that's all. Prompto's ever increasing wealth of bad luck.

They follow the last strike of lightning into a dry cave, and Prompto can hear movement behind the stone walls. None of the others notice: Maybe they're too busy bickering over which path to take or where to camp for the night, but Prompto's hearing has always been a little keener than the rest. He stops at a gap in the wall and peers down into the depths.

"Hey, guys?" he asks.

Then there's a cry, a furious, wailing shout, and Prompto is dragged into the dark.

Whatever has flung him through the hole slithers off (A face, Prompto sees a face, a woman with dark hair and beads that clack in a way that draws a sharp ache in his chest) and Prompto falls down a bumpy slope of rock, screaming and yelping and hissing as he's thrown gracelessly to a lump of... He rolls to his hands and knees, squinting down at a pile of musty, mostly rotten clothes.

Shit.

He stands, wincing at the pain of too many bruises to count, and looks around. The beam of his travel light is still going strong, and it slides over planes of rock that seem a little too smooth and straight to be natural. Prompto hobbles towards them, and looks down.

The rock beneath him is about waist-high, shaped like a perfect square, and there's a slick, black rectangle in the center. Like a tablet, maybe, or a phone. Prompto taps it with his finger, and the hollow sound echoes throughout the chamber.

He shifts, and the stone beeps. When he looks down, he sees a red line of light running along the black rectangle. It passes Prompto's wrist and beeps again. Slowly, almost completely sure that this is the worst idea he's ever had in his life, Prompto pulls down his wristband and exposes his tattoo in full.

The rectangle lights up red. So does the square. So does a map of criss-crossing lines on the floor, and most of the wall before him, which is cracked with blackness where bits of stone has fallen away. Prompto approaches the wall, and raises a trembling hand to its surface.

The wall screeches back, revealing a small dark opening, before something in the mechanism jams and the whole cave goes dark again.

"Right," Prompto whispers. He places both hands on the wall, which is warm to the touch, and climbs through.

The room within is reinforced with steel beams that hold up the cave roof, and there are long, coiling wires that hang along the walls, leading to glass cases about ten feet high. There are five of those cases, all of them with steel boxes at the bottom, each box outfitted with another black glass screen like the one Prompto had activated beyond the door.

Prompto stops at one of the cases and looks up. The glass is cloudy with dust, and he reaches up to smear some of it off.

He bites down on his knuckles to stifle a shout.

A skeleton lies on the floor of the case, skull leaning against a crack in the glass. Prompto would look away, should look away, but there's something off about the bones, something that catches the light. He forces himself to look closer, and can see a cord of hair-thin wires encasing the bones, shimmering with a light that reminds him distressingly of Noct's ancestral magic. Prompto looks to the other cases and clenches his fingers.

Four of the cases are occupied. The fifth, in the center, has been lifted from its hinges, the glass pulled back like a curved door to reveal empty space within. Prompto leans on the metal box at the base, and taps at the screen. Nothing happens.

"I can't believe I'm doing this," he whispers, and holds his wrist to the screen. It crackles and hisses, and a blurry image breaks through a web of red-lined fractures. There's a woman there, with long dark hair tied down by beads that clatter as she moves. She's wearing a strange suit of some sort, all in black.

She speaks in a language Prompto can't understand, quick and high, with the occasional click or roll of the tongue. Prompto groans and touches the screen gently. "Can't things go right just once?" he asks.

Regional dialect detected, a cold, mechanical voice says, tinny and faint from the speakers of the box. Translating. Translat. Ating. ing. ing. We are in the dark. The plague has taken... the country of the sun. We have been. been. been. Magically enhanced. Immune. May be immune. Two hundred at most. When the king comes we will. Error. Translating. The child runs the risk of. The child. child.

Prompto turns from the face of the woman on the screen, and stares up at the open case.

Behind him, he can hear the slow, heavy slither of scales on stone.

---

Prompto has never run so fast in his life.

He is aware, through the haze of terror that wraps itself around the shriek of the daemon at his back, that he's always had this strength behind his legs, this coiled power locked away while his younger self tottered through learning the right form and pace to guide it. Even when he runs with Gladio, he can feel it there, tense and heavy in his limbs, the dormant knowledge that he could go faster. Farther.

He wishes he'd figured it out before now. Maybe then he'd have some practice.

Instead, Prompto is barreling into walls, smacking into boulders, tripping around stalagmites as the daemon's wretched ululation reverberates in the ruins behind him. He finds a ledge and vaults over it--His muscles are screaming with the strain, but he pushes himself past the pain and comes out the other side still breathing, scrambling onto the ledge and running for an open cave flooded with light.

"Prompto!"

He nearly cries with relief at the sound of Noct's voice, but of course it isn't over, because a pool of blackness is spreading out before him and a hand thrusts up through the stone.

More daemons. Perfect.

By the time Prompto finally catches up with the others, he is done. He is so far beyond done that he's ready to explore the new and uncharted territories of Nope, I'm Out, just to the West of Hell No and Fuck This. And they still haven't found the tree, yet.

"My baby!"

"Oh, hell," Prompto groans, as the daemon from his future nightmares drops to the ground before the tomb, turning her massive head towards Prompto.

"She's back," he says, and Noct summons his sword.

"What have you done with my baby?" She moans, and Prompto recoils as she slips into the trilling, clicking language he heard in the ruin.

"I don't know where the hell your baby is, lady," Noct says.

"I think I do," Prompto whispers. He holds his wrist so hard that it stings, and all he can see is the open case, the woman on the screen, the red lights that shone at his touch.

He had been found near a ruin: A child wandering the caves with a tattoo on his wrist and a memory of nursery rhymes that don't match up with the world that is. A boy with a lucky charm that hasn't been used since the destruction of Solheim. A boy who picks up weapons training like he's born to it.

The daemon bares her teeth in a horrible grimace, and strikes.

"Prompto?" Ignis asks, when the body of the great naga dissolves into formless ooze on the stone. "Are you sure you’re well?"

"What?" Prompto looks up, forces a smile. "Yeah, Iggy. Just never, ever want to go anywhere near a snake again."

Ignis touches his cheek with a gloved hand, brushing a thumb under his eye. "You're crying," he says.

"Well, watching Noct get poofed into a frog was the most hilarious thing I've seen all day." Prompto backs away from Ignis' look of concern. "Come on, before we lose the others."

"Indeed," Ignis says, softly, but Prompto can feel his gaze at his back all the way into the tomb and out of the caves, still and thoughtful and far too knowing.

Chapter Text

When they emerge into the sunlight, the Empire is waiting for them.

Prompto takes a long, hard look at the empty aircraft on the slope, the lines and lines of MT soldiers marching through the damp grass towards them, and the vicious gleam of their blades and the hollows of their guns. He's exhausted, he's overwhelmed, and all he wants to do is sit the guys down and tell them everything, and let them figure it out while he sleeps for the next twenty years and hopes it all just goes away.

The soldiers continue their steady march towards the cave entrance.

Prompto Argentum is the son of war journalists. He knows what famous last stands look like, and he knows how pointless most of them can be. He was raised to think logically, to rely on his own strengths and recognize his limitations. He was raised to value survival.

Right now, he doesn't care.

He strides out into the grass, remembering the words Ardyn had spoken after the trial of the Archaean. If it's true, if Prompto is what he fears to be, then it'll work. If it isn't true, it won't matter.

"Turn around," he shouts, as though admonishing a misbehaving puppy. "Go home!"

The MTs don't stop, but they do lurch and shudder, falling out of step in a rippling wave as their bodies fight against what looks like an invisible string yanking them back. Prompto raises his voice.

"Turn around!"

To his frank astonishment, a number of the soldiers do.

None of them have fired. They stand and convulse in a loose arc around Prompto, and when he steps towards them, they fall back like a retreating tide.

"What the ever loving hell," Gladio says, and the spell breaks.

The fight is over far too quickly, and when it's done, none of Prompto's friends can look him in the eye.

"Prom," Noct says, in a tentative voice. "Think you can tell us what that was?"

"I don't know," Prompto says. "I'll try, but..." He rubs his wrist again, and looks out at the distant hills of Duscae. "I think there's someone who can explain it better."

There's no getting around it. Prompto knows, no matter how hard he and the others try to sort this out themselves, there's only one man who holds anything close to a complete answer.

Somehow, he will have to find his way to Ardyn Izunia.

---

Ignis' first thought, after Prompto has finished telling the most roundabout, confusing story of his life, is that they need to go back to the cave and examine the room of cases themselves. The problem with that is, the only way Prompto will go back is if someone literally drags him there by the hair, and anyways, he doesn't remember how to get there when not being dragged in the coils of a giant fucking snake, Iggy. No one likes the idea of the new King of Lucis getting lost in an ancient ruin somewhere, and Gladio votes that they pick up the Regalia before they try to track down their oh-so-helpful chancellor.

"I mean, not that it matters," Noct says, as Prompto paces on the other side of the fire. "You're still Prompto."

"Right," Prompto says, twisting his hand over his tattoo. "Except I'm a Prompto who... what? Can talk to MTs? Might not even be from here? From this time? Maybe?"

Noct has nothing to say to that, which is almost worse.

Ignis suggests they test Prompto's theory on the way to the new Imperial garrison that has set down near Lestallum. They try simple commands: Stop. Stay. Turn. Drop your weapons. The MTs that fall from carriers overhead respond with varying degrees of success: It's easier if Prompto is close to them, and he starts to push through his fear of their lurching, shuddering bodies to walk among them like a shark through a school of fish, making a small empty space around him wherever he goes.

Fighting is easier this way, but Prompto finds himself shying away from his friends afterwards--and none of them seem very eager to close the distance.

The MTs at the Imperial garrison are too powerful for Prompto to influence, spurred by the red light that emanates from the garrison's center. Noct destroys half the base with a flash of violet magic and the intervention of Ramuh—Prompto, who doesn't want a repeat of the fight with the Titan, hides in a shed while the MTs in the open are consumed by the Astral's lightning. It's only just dying down when he emerges to find Noct, sweating and wild-eyed, warily avoiding the others.

Right. He knows how that feels. Prompto walks through the wreckage towards his friend, and claps a hand on his back. Noct smiles at him, faint and uncertain, and he smiles back.

"Look at us," Prompto says. "A pair of freaks."

"We've always been like that, Prom," he says, and shoves Prompto with his shoulder.

Noct has his arm around Prompto as they walk to the Regalia, and it's nice, it's almost normal, which of course means that some bastard is bound at any minute to fuck it up. The bastard of the hour turns out to be Ravus Nox Fleuret, professional buzzkill and terror on legs, who nearly takes out Gladio with one move and has a sword to Noct's neck in a flash. Prompto's eyeing his magitech arm, wondering if he can influence it the way he does an MT soldier, when he hears a familiar low chuckle, and Ardyn Izunia strolls into view.

Ardyn barely gets the chance to speak.

Prompto is on the chancellor in a flash—Ardyn ducks from his first blow, but Prompto knows how fast he can be now, and he's up with a second before Ardyn can recover. They both go down, landing hard on the asphalt of the garrison. Ardyn's ridiculous scarf is in one of Prompto's fists, the others are shouting, he can hear Ravus' rapid footsteps behind him, but all Prompto can see if Ardyn's smug, knowing grin, his hands raised to block Prompto's next strike.

"Perhaps," Ardyn says, "We should all... take a moment for sense to reassert itself."

Prompto feels a shift in the air, a coldness in his bones, and he turns to see Ravus, not two feet away, frozen in the act of drawing back his sword. His hair is stilled in an unmoving wind about his shoulders. Behind him, Noct is running forward, about to phase into a warp. Gladio has his hands tight on his sword. Ignis' dagger is already flying through the air, hovering a few feet from Ravus' side.

"There," Ardyn says. "That's better."

Prompto swallows thickly. "What did you..."

"Not how I would have done this," Ardyn admits, "but you forced my hand." He smiles at Prompto as though they're sharing a private, intimate secret, and carefully pries his fist apart. "Was there something you wished to say, dear one? Or would you prefer to behave like one of your mindless, unsophisticated namesakes?"

"What am I?" Prompto asks. "What... what are you? Don’t tell me you don’t know, because I am up to here," Prompto raises a hand to his neck, “in weird shit today, and you just. Stopped. Time!”

His voice rings out thin in the stagnant air.

"I told you what I was at the start, my dear," Ardyn says. "I am, as always, a man of no consequence. But you? Oh, you are something special."

"Quit... quit fucking around and just..."

"Shh." Ardyn pushes Prompto off of him and stands, disrupting dust particles that catch the trapped light of dawn. "I'll do better than just tell you what you are, Prompto." He raises a hand, and a cloudy red mist forms about it.

"I'll show you."

Prompto staggers as wind slams into him, heavy as a hammer: His shoes skid on the concrete, and he knocks into Ravus, who wobbles on his feet. When Prompto dares to look up again, he reaches out to the statue of a man for support.

The garrison is gone. Prompto is standing on a wide, clean street made of stone, shimmering under the light of a mid-day sun. There are high buildings on either side of him, alive with wildly carved woodwork in the shape of creatures he's never even seen before, dripping with flowers and shining bits of crystal. There's light everywhere, in fact: windchimes made of glass hang from shop awnings, some second floor buildings are made almost entirely of wall-length windows, crystal globes hang from lines strung up over the street like festival lanterns. And everywhere, at every window, door, and roof, are seven-mirrored lucky charms like Prompto's, flashing and spinning in a gentle breeze.

"Behold," says Ardyn, standing in the middle of the street with his arms outstretched. "Solheim, at the end of the world."

Chapter Text

Ardyn Izunia stands exultant in the center of the spectral capital of Solheim, hands upraised like he is the central figure of one of the paintings in the Citadel gallery. Prompto holds onto the frozen form of Ravus and turns round. His friends are behind him, trapped in a glitch in time, but they are already starting to fade as Ardyn's illusion solidifies around him. When the charms that hang over the doorways down the street bend and flap, Prompto braces himself for a wind that never comes. When flower petals whirl in low drifts over his feet, he takes a breath and smells oil and smoke, not perfume. He looks back to Ardyn.

"Historians do try their best, bless them," Ardyn says. He waves a hand, and Prompto cries out as a massive, translucent golden figure rises from the earth behind the chancellor. She is a woman, her thick hair curling about her naked form like fire, and when she stands upright, she raises her hands in an imitation of Ardyn's dramatic gesture, and the charms all clack and clatter, whipping about in s frenzy as she disappears into the light of the sun.

"The hell," Prompto gasps.

"Dear old mother-goddess," Ardyn says. "Solheim was a haven of art, of learning, of technology... of the gods. The goddess of the sun would rise from the center of Solheim every morning so long as the gods' favor held. Of course..." his smile softens as though touching on a fond memory, "She was betrayed. They say it was our own hubris that killed her." He twists his hand before the illusion of the sun, and the sky goes black, lit only by a blood-red moon. "Those of us who saw her fall? We know better."

Prompto hears a chorus of unearthly shrieking, sees bouts of fire light up distant rooftops, lifts his arms to defend himself as streams of black and purple flakes drift into the sky. Ardyn twists his hand again, and the sunlit street of Solheim returns.

"I..." Prompto lowers his arms. "I used to be afraid of daemons, when I was little. Because the way they screamed, they sounded like..."

They sounded like that. Ardyn watches Prompto, one brow raised.

"Yes," he says. "It was a terrible time. But out of that maelstrom of suffering came a ray of light. The chosen king, blessed by the fallen goddess herself. A healer. A gift to the survivors of Solheim, the new citizens of Lucis."

The air is suddenly full of flowers. Prompto blinks through them and sees a crowd of people on either side of the street, faces featureless but bodies leaning out with frantic enthusiasm. There's another crowd approaching from a distance: A rider stands at the front atop a black chocobo. He smiles. It's genuine, and a little anxious, and he runs a hand through his silky mauve hair and waves at the cheering crowd.

He isn't much older than Prompto.

"I know him," Prompto says.

"Yes, quite the resemblance."

"No, I know him." Prompto pushes past Ardyn, and walks right up to the younger version of the chancellor. The man pulls his chocobo to a halt and looks down at him.

It takes Prompto a moment to notice that he's fallen to his knees.

"Must be in your programming," Ardyn says, with interest. He walks up behind Prompto, who struggles to rise, and lays a heavy hand on his shoulder. "It's true that the MTs in that time were unflaggingly loyal. The Astrals despised them: They only ever fought on orders of the king, and the king was only allowed to live free so long as he behaved. A shame, really."

Prompto swallows hard. He stares into the eyes of the young man above him, and wrenches his shoulder out of Ardyn's grip. Slowly, as though fighting his way through the earth itself, he stands.

He felt something like this the first time he met Ardyn. He turns to him now, and some of that feeling rises in Prompto's mind.

"What happened to you?" he asks. "What... What happened to me?"

"Too much to tell," Ardyn says. "Needless to say, some accounts of Solheim, and what came after, had to be carefully doctored to, ah, preserve the truth. The MTs were hunted down, the king fell, and the Astrals found a new set of lackeys upon whom they may impose their divine will."

"You're handling this remarkably well," Ardyn adds, and for a fleeting second, Prompto can see the eyes of the king in Ardyn's face. Then it is gone, and his gaze is glassy and vague as always.

"It's been a long fucking week," Prompto admits. Ardyn laughs. This is wrong. He shouldn't be laughing with the chancellor of Niflheim. Who might also be the king of Solheim. Or Lucis. Or light—Prompto isn't sure of anything anymore. But when Ardyn faces him fully and raises a hand in a strange, closed-off salute, Prompto can feel gears in his mind that he never knew existed until now. He falls to his knees a second time, and the smile Ardyn gives him is nothing like that of the old king in the illusion.

"How did you fall?" Prompto asks.

Ardyn sighs, the illusion wavers, and he shows him.

When time unfolds, Prompto is straddling Ardyn's waist again, but his hands aren't raised to strike. Ravus sheathes his sword and turns in time to avoid Ignis' dagger, which clatters uselessly on the concrete. Everyone stares at Prompto, whose head is bowed, gazing down on a smiling Ardyn Izunia. Ardyn speaks, but his voice is too low for any of the others to hear.

Prompto's hands are shaking.

They're still shaking when Gladio drags him off of Ardyn. He graduates to a full-body shudder, and his boots scrape on the pavement as he's pulled into his friends' arms.

Ardyn stands, and says something to Ravus, who is looking from Prompto to Noctis with open concern. Prompto stumbles into the passenger seat of the Regalia and fumbles with his camera. It drops to the floor of the car.

"Prompto," Ignis says. "Your camera. Prompto?"

Prompto doesn't move. In the end, Ignis retrieves the camera for him, and gently pushes Prompto into his seat.

"The hell did he say to you, Prom?" Noct asks. "Specs, let's go before he changes his mind."

Prompto draws a knee up and leans against the door. The others sneak him wary looks as they roll their way out of the fortress, but Prompto's mind remains in the streets of Solheim, in the dizzying silence left behind after the tale of Ardyn Lucis Caelum's fall from grace.

Ardyn had gripped Prompto's wrist, fingers curling around the barcode that lay hidden behind his wristbands, and his voice had cracked in a way that made Prompto feel a twist of sickness in the pit of his stomach.

"It's been so long," Ardyn had said. "So long since I've seen one of my own."

And that was when Prompto understood. All those times Ardyn had stared at him, watched him, leaned in to curl fingers under his chin or smile knowingly behind the others' backs: Prompto finally knows the name behind the darkness that flashed behind Ardyn's eyes then, sliding in and out of view like the fin of an ancient creature.

Hunger.

Chapter Text

They’re halfway to Lestallum when Prompto turns off the radio. Ignis eases off the gas, Gladio sets down his book, and Noct stops trying to make himself one with the car long enough to look up into Prompto’s pale, anxious face.

“What’s up, sunshine?” Gladio asks, in that soft, quiet voice of his that he reserves for Iris and near-death situations.

“There’s something you guys need to know about Ardyn,” Prompto says.

Five minutes later, Ignis pulls the car into a rest-stop parking space. He carefully turns off the ignition. His gloves squeak as he unbuckles his seat belt. Then he slowly, deliberately, rests his forehead on the top of the wheel and closes his eyes.

Gladio sinks into his seat. He’s staring up at the clear sky, absently chewing on his tongue.

Noct has his face in his hands.

“And, uh.” Prompto looks from one of his stricken friends to the other, and fiddles with his gloves. “Uh, then his friend, who wasn’t his friend, but was, um. Your ancestor, Noct? He said that, uh, that Ardyn was the Accursed, and he—“

“Oh my god,” Noct murmurs.

“So the chancellor lost his mind,” Gladio says. “That’s nice.”

“No, you don’t get it,” Prompto says. “He stopped time. He can make illusions. He has magic, and he looked just like the old king—“

“One revelation at a fucking time, Prom,” Noct says. “I’m still trying to deal with you being an MT puppet-master, okay?”

Ignis’ head slips, and the horn on the Regalia blares out into the woods, startling all of them into a wide-eyed panic. “Perhaps,” Ignis says, shakily adjusting his gloves. “Perhaps we should… put Altissia on hold, and… see if these rumors are true.”

“Yeah?” Gladio’s eyes have to hurt by now, he’s been staring at the sun for so long. “How do we do that?”

“There are books,” Ignis says, and Noct groans faintly. “Murals in some of the ruins we’ve passed. The hunters have a collection of oddities they’ve picked up over the years, and I believe if what Prompto says is true, surely there will be evidence left behind.”

“Sorry, guys,” Prompto says.

“I’ll write to Luna, I guess,” Noct says, detaching himself from the seat. “Tell her someone roped me into studying.”

“Gods forbid you crack open a book,” Gladio mutters.

The four of them head to the Hunter HQ close to Caem, where an elderly woman with a thin shawl and a look of deep suspicion shows them her “library.” Noct has to step outside before he starts screaming: Books lie in untidy heaps throughout the room, yellowed and musty and smelling vaguely of mold and cigarette smoke. Prompto’s pretty sure he sees movement in one of the bigger piles, and quietly resolves himself to send Gladio after that one.

The first wave of cockroaches sends both Noct and Prompto outside, where Prompto sits on the railing and tries not to imagine fat palmetto bugs skittering up his pant legs. Behind them, the old woman lights a foul-smelling tobacco in her pipe, glowers at Noct, and flips open a magazine.

“Look, Prompto,” Noct says, after the sounds of feet-stamping in the library starts to fade. “Even if this shit with Ardyn is real—“

“Which it is,” Prompto says. Noct’s makes a face and shrugs.

“Sure. But what gets me is Ardyn thinks you’re… You know. His.”

Prompto drums his fingers on the wood of the railing. The air of the woods around them is sweet, too clean after years of living in Insomnia and their frequent trips to Lestallum. He wonders what the air of Solheim would have tasted like, and remembers the face of the old king, the compulsion that brought him to his knees. It’s a terrifying thought that Ardyn can still operate that dormant part of his… programming, did he say? The fact that he’s been programmed at all is disturbing. In light of that, the way he’s been directing the MTs in their fights since the cave feels wrong. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to do it again.

“Maybe I wouldn’t mind if it was a good king,” Prompto says, and Noct looks at him. “If it was my choice to be loyal in the first place, I mean. If it was someone like you, or like Ardyn used to be—“

“I’d never use you like that,” Noct says, and the heat in his voice is startling. “You’re my friend, not a…” he waves his hands helplessly. “I don’t want to own you.”

“Aw, you do know how to sweet-talk a guy.” Prompto ruffles Noct’s hair, and Noct ducks out of the way.

“Shut up.”

“Processing order,” Prompto says, in a mechanical voice. “Beep. Shutting up not in system. Beep boop.”

Noct’s laugh is tangled up in a groan of horror. “Too soon, man.”

Prompto is about to lift his arms in a jerky imitation of a robot when the library door slams open, and Gladio makes an exaggerated bow.

“The enemy is dead, princess,” Gladio says. Noct opens his mouth to reply, but Prompto jumps down in front of him, blocking him off.

“Don’t have to call me princess,” Prompto says, and Gladio snorts as he strides into the dark room. Noct follows him, grinning, and the mood lightens even as they start to pick out promising tomes from the disordered piles. Prompto whistles the chocobo theme song until Gladio throws a book at his head, mouths Beep beep at Noct whenever his friend looks like he needs a horrified laugh, and after a while of this, even Ignis risks a smile.

---

By morning, they’ve found half a map, a poem, and the limits of Noct’s patience. Noct creates a bed out of the cast-off books from Ignis, Prompto, and Gladio’s weary search, and lies out on it as though it were one of the massive feather mattresses in the Citadel’s residential wing. Gladio rolls his eyes and keeps going.

Noct is awake by the time Ignis has found something of worth: A chronicle of one of the first kings of Lucis, the Accursed. He reads it aloud, halting now and then to do a quick translation of ancient Lucian, and stops at the king’s name.

“Arren Lucis Caelum,” he says, and everyone looks to Prompto warily. “There’s an end-note. Sometimes known as Arran, Adden, Arden… Ardyn.”

Gladio curses, and Prompto sets down his book. “Told you guys.”

“The Accursed,” Ignis continues. “Otherwise known as The Dark, a manifestation of the Scourge, The Fallen. See…” he looks to Noct, who sits tense as a wire, watching him. “Hm.”

“See what, Ignis?”

Ignis rifles through the pages. “It’s cross-referenced to a section describing the prophecy. Noct. I believe this darkness that you’re meant to destroy may be—“

“The former chosen one?” Gladio says. “Ardyn? Why would the Astrals…”

Noct rises and lifts a foot to kick at a pile of books. Gladio makes a low noise deep in his throat, and Noct steps away.

“Perhaps we can ask Luna,” Ignis says. “She’s an expert on the prophecy. There’s clearly more to this than we know, and you can’t walk into this unknowing—”

“If she knew, she would’ve told me,” Noct says. There is a long, pregnant pause, and he grits out, harsh and pained, “She’d tell me.”

Ignis carefully closes the book. “Noct.”

“No, I…” Noct makes for the door. “I’m calling Gentiana. She’s her messenger. Sure, I can’t understand half of what she says most of the time, but she’s an in-between for the gods, right? She basically raised Luna after she became Oracle. There’s no reason for her to lie to me.”

Prompto looks at the book in Ignis’ hands. “I think we’ve all been lied to, Noct,” he says. “By everyone.”

“Not by Luna.” Noct barks it out too quickly, and his hands tug at his hair. “And it… it doesn’t matter. I don’t care what Ardyn was. He’s still a fucking creep. And you’re still Prompto, and I’m still…”

Chosen. He doesn’t say it, but the word hangs in the air, heavy and stifling. Ardyn was chosen, too, Prompto thinks, and the Astrals got it wrong. What if… what if they messed up again? What if this time, it’s Noct who has to pay the price for their mistakes?

Prompto’s parents were practical, logic-driven people. They didn’t put their faith in gods, and Prompto supposes this is why he finds himself thinking, even while Noct struggles not to, that maybe the Astrals don’t know what they’re doing.

He makes the mistake of saying it aloud. Noct glares at him, a look full of betrayal and fear, and swings the door open.

“Shit,” Gladio hisses, and gets to his feet.

They follow Noct into the woods for a good fifty yards before he even acknowledges their presence. Then he rounds on them, digs his hands into his pockets, and calls for Gentiana.

And calls again. And again. His voice echoes under the thick canopy of the trees around them, and there is no sound in the sparse underbrush save for his own voice calling after him. Prompto stares into the green distance, and shivers in a cool wind from the slope behind him. He turns to face it, and finds himself face-to-face with the Oracle’s dark-haired messenger.

“Holy hell,” Prompto squeaks, and reaches for Ignis as he scrambles backwards.

“You have asked for a cessation of the covenants, King of the Stone,” Gentiana says, in her whispery voice. Her head tilts, and her silky black hair pools over one shoulder. “The Oracle demands an answer.”

“Yeah?” Noct says. He steps forward. “So do I. What do you know about the Accursed? About the prophecy?”

Gentiana’s lips part for a moment, then close, and her voice rings in Prompto’s mind.

“All will be made clear to you at the proper time.”

“Well, that time’s now,” Noct says. “Why was Ardyn chosen? Why is he still around? What else…” He takes an unsteady breath, and holds it.

“What else aren’t you telling him?” Prompto asks for him. Gentiana turns, and a shudder of revulsion runs down his spine, an unnamed wrongness that coils in his gut and refuses to let go.

When Gentiana first appeared to them just a few days ago, her eyes were closed.

She opens them now, and smiles.

“A servant of the Fallen King,” she says, and the stiffness in her movements is gone. She sways as she walks, and her form shifts, twists, breaks apart like one of Ardyn’s illusions until she’s a slim blue shape that Prompto remembers from the storybooks his father used to read to him.

Shiva the gentle. his father had said, tracing the circlet over the pencil-drawing of the goddess. Shiva the kind. Strange thing, Prom. Ice never struck me as being very gentle.

In the flesh, her smile is welcoming. Her hands extend toward Prompto as she approaches, and only the sudden chill in the air warns him in time. He falls back, and Shiva laughs, high and tinkling.

“Hey,” Noct says, and he succeeds at looking just shy of intimidating. “Cut it out.”

“That is my objective, Oh King of the Stone,” Shiva says. She ducks around Ignis, who has placed himself between her and Prompto, and her fingers come within an inch of Prompto’s nose. He feels a sheen of ice crackle over his skin, and yelps. “The magitech of his time are pernicious weeds. They must not take root. He will draw you from your chosen path.”

“So?” Noct asks. “What if the chosen path is wrong?”

It would be better if Shiva were to frown. It would be better for her to scowl in anger, or clench her fists, or scream. But instead, that smile remains on her lips, that crinkle at the corner of her eyes, and she drifts to Prompto with a playful air.

Prompto summons his gun, and her smile widens. She darts forward and grips Prompto’s hands in both of hers. The chill in her body starts to lace through him, cracking his skin, and Prompto struggles to break free.

“The King of the Stone must accept his calling,” she says. “Just as you must go the way of your master.”

“I don’t…” Prompto sucks in air so cold that it stings going down. “Have a master.”

“He’s in your mind,” Shiva says. “His mark is on you, profane as the mark of the goddess on him.”

Prompto can hear shouting through the wind and frost that swirls around Shiva’s body. “The goddess?” he asks. “Eos?”

“There is an echo of her in you,” Shiva whispers. “Through him. I can taste it.” She is too close. Her lips are over his, and Prompto can barely breathe, it feels as though his lungs have frozen solid, it feels—

There is a hiss of a flask breaking, and fire blooms at Shiva’s back.

“I said, get the fuck off!” Noct shouts, and Prompto can’t even comment on how ridiculous it is, watching his best friend since high school stare down a goddess like he has a chance.

Except… He kind of does, doesn’t he? Shiva’s smile falters as Noct prepares another flask, Ignis’ blades erupt with sagefire, and Gladio hefts his massive broadsword. Prompto’s hands are fused together in a block of ice, but he can finally breathe again, so he’s laughing even as he falls to the grass in exhaustion. Shiva glances his way, and the humor is gone from her eyes at last.

“You will bring the world to ruin,” she says, and disappears with a pulse of magic that sends the others to their knees.

“Yeah?” Prompto calls out. “Fuck you, too, lady!”

“There’s your answer, Noct,” Gladio says, as Noct rushes over with a fire spell to melt the ice around Prompto's hands. “There is more to this than they’re letting on.”

“The Astrals are supposed to be our allies,” Noct says, and only Prompto is close enough to see the wetness in his eyes. He leans forward to bump their foreheads together, and can hear Noct’s breath, shaky and uneven. “They’re on our side.”

Prompto thinks back to Ardyn, looking up at him with all the grief and yearning of two thousand years, and sighs.

“Only if you behave,” he says.

Kneeling on the frost-covered ground of the wood in the wake of Shiva’s departure, no one can bring themselves to argue.

Chapter Text

Umbra arrives that evening, breaking out of a clump of bushes by their tent with a yowl that has everyone scrambling for the canvas door. They stop at the sight of the dog cowering behind the fire, and Noct creeps up to him, hand out. Noct’s boots scrape on the stone, and Umbra’s teeth snap dangerously close to the young king’s fingers.

“Hey, boy,” he says. “It’s okay, it’s me.”

Umbra hunches himself towards Noct, wriggling into his arms. Noct looks back over his shoulders at the others, and Prompto feels rage building in his throat. Umbra never gets frightened or tense, and the way he whimpers and licks at Noct’s hand has Prompto seething. Ignis places a hand on Prompto’s shoulder, and Prompto tries to breathe.

“You guys should stay back for a while,” Noct says, as Umbra tries to climb onto his lap. He scruffs the dog behind the ears and digs in the sling that’s wrapped around his chest. He hisses when he pulls out what’s inside, and a ragged journal drops to the stone of their campsite.

“Noct,” Ignis says. He takes a step forward, then another, and Umbra nuzzles close to Noct’s chest. “Is that the journal you share with Lady Lunafreya?”

“It was.” Noct’s voice is cold, and he reaches down to flip it open so the others can see. Prompto curses. There’s nothing left of the journal but its bindings: The pages have been torn out in a large clump, leaving only one or two blank pages to crackle as Noct’s fingers clench over them.

“It’s my fault,” Noct says. “I wrote to Luna this afternoon. Shiva must’ve…”

Prompto nearly chokes. “Shiva did this?” Noct taps on the top of the journal, and frost crackles under his fingers.

“Need I remind you,” Ignis says, “that she tried to kill you a few hours ago?”

“Yeah, but this is…” This is personal. Whatever Shiva tried to do with Prompto before, that wasn’t about him. It’s all tied up in that weird ancient bullshit that Ardyn and the Astrals can’t seem to let go of. This, though… She’s ruined Noct’s only chance at contacting Luna, and she’s sent Umbra into hysterics—which to Prompto, who would risk wrecking the Regalia to save a stray puppy, is unforgivable.

“We need to get to Luna,” Noct says. He’s breathing hard, and even in the dark, Prompto can see a shine to his eyes that wasn’t there before. “Who knows what Gentiana—what Shiva’s told her. What she’s making her do.”

“We’ll head to Caem in the morning, then,” Ignis says, and Gladio scoffs, crossing his arms and peering into the dark.

“Just like Shiva wanted in the first place.”

Noct insists on letting Umbra stay with them overnight, and so Prompto ends up with a wet, snuffling nose pressed to his shoulder, and twitching paws at his side. It reminds him of when he unwittingly looked after Pryna for Luna, back when he was a lonely, awkward kid who spent most of his days taking pictures of roadside flowers and interesting birds. He’s come a long way since then. Now he’s best friends with a prince, a future advisor to the crown, and the prince’s shield. He’s an ancient magitech soldier with Ardyn fucking Izunia—no, Caelum, Ardyn Caelum—as some kind of daemonic puppetmaster. The Astrals are real and they want to kill him. And Ardyn. And maybe even Noct.

“This is what I don’t get,” Prompto says.

“Prom.” Noct flings an arm over Prompto’s neck, and Umbra whimpers. “Please.”

“No, I’m serious.” Prompto tries to wriggle out from under his friend’s hold. “If you’re supposed to kill the Dark, and the Dark is Ardyn, then why didn’t Ardyn kill you at Galdin? Why does he keep helping us?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Ignis’ voice was soft. “Perhaps he wants Noct to succeed.”

A cold lump of panic lodges in Prompto’s throat. “He wants to die?”

“I can’t imagine what it must be like,” Ignis says. “To become what you were destined to destroy.”

“I don’t want to,” Noct says, shoving a pillow over his head. Ignis shrugs and rolls over in his bedroll, but Prompto can’t relax. He stays up, staring at the tarp of the tent, listening to Umbra’s wheezing breaths, until the dawn comes.

Prompto can’t get the Astrals out of his mind. It doesn’t help that Ignis has to stop the car every half mile as yet another carrier full of MT troopers drops down on the highway before them. By the fifth fight, Ignis actually drives through the MTs, taking advantage of a gap in their ranks while Noct shouts for him to watch the fucking paint, Iggy! But every time Prompto takes out another MT, every time their glowing eyes sputter and die like a faulty wire, he can see Ardyn. Ardyn as he was, young and radiant, touched by the goddess and blessed by the Astrals. Ardyn as he is now, grinning even as he guides Noct towards Ardyn’s own death. Two thousand years, and he’s still obeying the Astrals' wishes.

It doesn’t seem right.

Prompto remembers being twelve, and finding out that his father had come up against King Regis in an interview on migrant workers’ rights that had his station manager calling the house at eleven at night just to complain. Prompto was sitting on the couch in the living room, listening to the tinny screeching coming through the receiver, his calm, ever-composed father turning a deep shade of red under his brown skin.

“He might be the king, but that doesn’t make him infallible,” he said, in the tense voice that was his way of losing his temper. Prompto had jumped in surprise when he slammed the phone down on the received and stalked off, and had turned on the family computer to find out what infallible meant.

It does no good to think of gods or kings as perfect beings. Prompto brushes the barcode on his wrist and silently curses the kings of Solheim. It isn’t right, programming people—MTs—to be loyal. Loyalty should be earned.

Overhead, yet another MT carrier ship roars into view. Ignis nearly screams, and Prompto… Prompto gets an idea.

It’s a terrible idea. Probably the worst he’s made since that time in tenth grade when he and Noct snuck out of a school dance to get drunk, and Prompto had to call Gladio to explain why the prince of Lucis was stuck up the school belltower after having warped out of his pants.

But they can’t just go to Altissia and assume that they can fix everything themselves. Not when Ardyn’s in the background, doing the Astrals' work for them. Not when Prompto can’t get Shiva’s smile out of his mind, or the way her eyes gleamed when she spoke of the goddess. There’s too much they don’t know, and Prompto is pretty sure that there’s only one way they can get a straight answer.

He jumps out of the car before Ignis can decide whether to stop or just barrel through again.

“The fuck, Prompto!” Noct shouts, and Prompto holds up a hand.

“Trust me!” Prompto shouts back. “I know what I’m doing!”

Gods, if that isn’t the worst lie yet. Prompto can hear the others climbing out of the car, and he picks up the pace. The MTs give him a wide berth, like always, but he walks into the center of them, bracing himself.

“Take me to Ardyn,” he says. This close, he can hear the hiss of the machinery at their cores, the creak of metal and synthetic leather. He isn’t sure if they understand, so he tries again. “The chancellor. Take me to the—“

The ranks close in around him, and it strikes Prompto that maybe Take me is just another way of saying Please, dude, go ahead and stab me with those ridiculously sharp axes while I stand here with my arms up. But it’s too late to worry about semantics when there are hands on his arms and glowing eyes boring into him from all sides, and the heat of their skin and faulty wiring makes the air ripple and shake.

He comes to on the floor of the carrier ship, which rattles like the windows of one of the old buses Prompto used to ride back home. It’s comforting, almost—If he doesn’t look at the unblinking rows of MTs sitting at their stations along the walls, he can pretend that he’s on the way home. He’ll step off the bus and dig the house key out from the plant beside the door, and maybe he’ll see his mom at the kitchen table with a laptop and too many notebooks, glancing up at him with the vague look of someone mid-way through an article.

“Hey, sunshine,” she’ll say. “Want to hear the latest?”

Of course, he’d say yes. He’d pour them both a cup of water and listen to the first half of her article, and then he’d stop her and say, “So ma, it turns out I’m thousands of years old, my best friend is supposed to kill the king I was programmed to serve, everything’s terrible, and I think I just fucked myself over.”

She’d purse her lips the way she always did when faced with a problem that seemed insurmountable, and say, “Now, tell me the truth.”

The truth, Prompto thinks, as the ship starts its descent. Shiva wont let Noct talk to Luna, which means she’s hiding something. The books on the prophecy all seem to stop right before they get to the part where Noct is supposed to kill the Accursed, which means they’re hiding something, too. And it goes without saying that Ardyn has two-thousand years’ worth of secrets. Everyone’s lying, and I have a horrible feeling that the Astrals are trying to make Noct into a second Ardyn.

“So?” says the spectral form of his mother. She doesn’t even speak in her own voice anymore, just a higher version of Prompto’s own. “Where’s the root of the problem?”

“The Astrals,” Prompto whispers, as the ship lands with a crunch amid a tangle of mangroves.

Prompto feels a rush of warm, muggy air as the bay doors slowly crack open. He’s only just getting to his feet as a soldier steps out before the doors to meet them, raising his gun in a defensive position.

"Hey," Prompto says, as the soldier opens his mouth to shout the alarm. He raises his hand in a gesture that would have Ignis groaning in despair. "Take me to your leader."

Chapter Text

Ardyn’s private carrier looks more like a small apartment than a ship. There are plush chairs along the walls, a jingling case of wine bottles, and even an ornate rug shoved under the pilot’s seat. There should be a space for MTs as well, but the suspension wires that hang from the ceiling and the hard chairs that line the bay doors are empty and gutted. Prompto stops as the wires creak and sputter, and Ardyn waves a hand.

“I found that it wasn’t quite the same,” he says. “I must say that I expected your friends to come with you. The material you need to head to Altissia is—“

“I’m not here for that,” Prompto says. He remembers the way his father spoke in an interview with Cor the Immortal, trying to get him to answer for the deaths of Crownsguard soldiers in the Tempering Grounds years before. There was something in the way he held himself… Prompto straightens, lifts his head, and looks Ardyn in the eye.

Prompto may have been programmed to be loyal, but his parents taught him how to question.

“You said the kings of Lucis were the Astral’s lackeys,” Prompto says, and a shadow crosses Ardyn’s face. Eyes front, he thinks. Don’t blink. “So what does that make you?”

“Pardon?”

“You’re working with them,” Prompto says. “Or for them. You helped us out with the Titan, back with the Regalia, maybe even at Galdin Quay. And you’re doing this to help Noct fix the Astrals’ mistakes. So what are you? Their ally?”

Ardyn goes still.

“Maybe ally’s wrong,” Prompto says. “Maybe you’re just their tool.”

The world goes sideways, and Prompto lands hard on his left shoulder. He barely has time to register the sting of the blow on his jaw before a booted foot presses down on his chest, holding him in place. Ardyn is staring down at him, his face a mask of fury, and Prompto lets out a hoarse bark of laughter.

“The hell, man,” he says, as Ardyn shifts his weight to the foot on his sternum, “Thought killing MTs was the Astrals’ job.” Ardyn lurches back, but Prompto doesn’t move, shaking with laughter on the floor of the carrier. It isn’t funny. He knows it’s not funny. But gods, he’s so out of his depth that he can’t even tell which way’s up anymore, his phone won’t stop buzzing in his pocket, and he’s trapped on a ship with a monster wearing the face of an ancient king.

“Two thousand years, dude.” Prompto can feel tears trailing down his cheeks as he gasps for breath. He covers his eyes with both hands. “Two thousand years, and you’re just gonna let them kill you.”

Ardyn sighs. It’s a long sigh, a weariness that sounds bone-deep, and Prompto flinches at the touch of a large hand at his back. Ardyn helps him sit up, and that hunger is back in his eyes, sharp and almost desperate.

“When the Magitech of Solheim learned of the Astrals’ plans,” Ardyn says, in a voice that’s too soft for comfort, “they, too, thought to turn on the gods. In truth, you are as like them as a starling is a phoenix. The same basic shape, perhaps, but nothing more. They would have never raised a hand to me as you have.” His fingers clench on the fabric of Prompto’s vest, and Prompto can feel his heartbeat pulse in his throat.

“I’m no good at the royalty thing,” Prompto says, quickly. “Haven’t called Noct highness since I was fifteen.”

“But you’re his man, now.” Ardyn’s hand slides up to cup the back of Prompto’s neck.

“I don’t…” Prompto has to be careful. He can tell that Ardyn is on a knife’s edge, and the scrape of his fingers through Prompto’s hair is less of a warning than a promise. “I’m not his.”

He doesn’t have to say, But I’m not yours, either. Ardyn knows.

“I can almost feel his influence on you,” Ardyn says. “Nothing remains that the Astrals have not corrupted.”

His hand slides around to the front of Prompto’s neck and squeezes tight. Prompto hisses out most of his breath before he can think to hold it, and uses every ounce of strength in his arms to drag at Ardyn’s wrist. It strikes him, through the pain that builds in his lungs like a live flame, that despite the Scourge that boils through Ardyn’s veins, they are evenly matched. If Ardyn were his true self, the king he was before, Prompto could snap his arm out of joint with his bare hands. It’s almost laughable. Only now, as Prompto strains to gain leverage and catch a few hurried gasps of air, does he realize that he’s always been the strongest, the fastest. He’s always been useful. There’d never been reason to doubt.

How strange, that Ardyn should try and kill him with nearly the same words as Shiva.

There is an echo of her in you, she’d said, smiling, as Prompto spoke of the goddess.

Prompto’s mind starts to shift sideways, giddy with fear and adrenaline.

Should there be an echo? How long does a goddess have to stay dead before the last of their blessings fade?

If Eos was the goddess of the sun, why does the sun keep rising?

Ardyn places a knee on Prompto’s belly and forces him down. Prompto isn’t sure if he’s weeping or bleeding—black, viscous liquid trails from his eyes, curving down to the corner of his mouth. His expression is cold and dispassionate, and Prompto tightens his hold on Ardyn’s wrist enough that his fingers twitch, allowing him a second to gasp the spots from his vision.

“Ardyn,” he says.

“Too late for that, my dear.”

“Your Majesty.” Prompto draws up his legs, knocking a foot into Ardyn’s heel. Something flickers in Ardyn’s eyes, and he stops pressing down. Without resistance to hold him back, Prompto flings his arm to the side.

“What did we…” Prompto lets his head thump on the floor of the carrier as he tries to remember how to breathe without sobbing. “What did the Magitech call you? Before?”

Ardyn speaks slowly, in that strange, lost language from the ruins. Prompto tries to repeat the word. Says it again, louder now, not so hoarse and hesitant.

He says the name a third time, and then, “If Eos is dead, why’s the sun still rising?”

He can hear footsteps as Ardyn crosses to the other side of the carrier. “The world can still spin without the gods to turn it,” he says. “If this is you trying to beg for your life, dear heart, you’re having a poor go of it.”

“But in your vision, the world went black. Why’d the sun… why isn’t it still like that?”

“Someone,” Ardyn says, bitterly, “thought it would be a fine idea to use the goddess’ blessing to turn himself into a walking host for the Scourge.”

“She could fix that,” Prompto says. “The goddess. If she were. If she were around.”

He sits up, and sees that Ardyn has collapsed on one of the ridiculously homey chairs, legs crossed as though he goes around strangling people for fun on the regular. Which he might, Prompto admits. It’s not exactly hard to believe.

“You know what’s funny,” Prompto says, leaning away from Ardyn’s touch. “Shiva… She, uh, she kind of tried to kill me earlier.”

“Yes, that is a nasty habit of hers,” Ardyn says, sagely.

“Well, she said something about the goddess. She said she could sense her on me. And on you. She said she was killing me because I was leading Noct down the wrong path, but when it was happening, she talked about the goddess. Like that was the real reason.”

Ardyn simply stares at him. Prompto has the impression that Ardyn is still trying to make up his mind whether Prompto is worthy of a quick death, or amusing enough to keep around.

“I don’t think she’s dead,” Prompto says. “Why do the Astrals care if Noct goes off the right path? They can start over, like they did with you. It doesn’t matter. But they were willing to make Noct hate them so they could kill me. So they can make him kill you.”

“Then no one’ll know what they’ve done. No one’ll be left to… to save her, if she’s still—“

“This will go nowhere.” Ardyn stands, heading for the case of wine. “If the goddess were merely trapped, the Astrals would have needed to build a dungeon of immense power just to keep her from assuming her incorporeal form. They wouldn’t…” His fingers brush the top of a bottle, and his brows lower. Prompto stays seated, watching him. “No. Surely not.”

“Your Majesty,” Prompto says, and Ardyn’s mouth twists in a grimace.

“The Astrals built a shrine to her,” he says at last. “In the heart of what had once been Solheim. A useless gesture, I thought, another way to change history to suit their own ends.” He turns to Prompto, and for a second, there’s another flash of familiarity, an echo of the ancient king for whom Prompto had knelt without question. “These days, the locals simply call it Pitioss.”

Chapter Text

When Ardyn’s ship takes off out of the warm swampland of the Vesperpool, Prompto ducks behind a row of abandoned MT containment chairs and pulls out his cell phone. He winces. Twenty-seven missed calls and nearly twice as many texts drown his notifications, and he hurriedly skims past walls of capslocked screaming to tap out a quick update beyond his initial, I’m alive, don’t worry from three hours ago.

Noct immediately responds.

N. Gar
ARE YOU INSANE

Prom
No. I’m rescuing goddess? Maybe? Tell u ltr.

N. Gar
THE HELL PROMPTO
NO
STAY THERE
WE’LL FIND YOU

Prom
Sorry reception breaking up bro

N. Gar
THAT DOESN’T WORK OVER TEXT, ASSHOLE

Prompto turns his phone on silent and slips it into his vest pocket. Ardyn is at the control panels, muttering softly, his hat perched precariously on the arm of his chair. Prompto leans against the wall. His hair really is almost purple in this light, and it makes Prompto think of the king in the vision, riding through drifts of flowers with the grateful crowd at his heels.

Alone in the low, uncomfortable chair bolted before the controls, Ardyn looks strangely small.

Even his jacket looks the same, Prompto thinks, and something about that fact gives him pause. He feels for the lucky charm in his other vest pocket, and runs his fingers over the engraving of the goddess, watching the sun slowly sink along the darkening window of sky.

They land before Pitioss at sunset. The path to the shrine—or dungeon, which Prompto thinks is more likely—is crawling with monsters, and Prompto pauses in shock when Ardyn summons a sword in a flash of red light.

“Oh, surely you don’t think that your dear Noct gets to have all the fun?” he asks.

“Dude, was that a joke?”

Ardyn shrugs, and Prompto fires a shot into the middle of a swarm of giant wasps—Of course, his favorite.

Fighting with Ardyn is nothing like fighting with Noct. Prompto finds himself having to push just to land a monster in his sights before Ardyn is upon them. He has to run faster in order to be there when Ardyn needs backup. He’s out of breath at the end of the third fight, and entirely winded by the fourth.

Maybe this is what it would have been like to travel with the old kings before the end of Solheim, he thinks, and keeps his gun drawn even as they reach the front of the shrine.

“So magnanimous of them,” Ardyn says, and touches the wall of the ruin. He flinches back, hissing air through his teeth, and Prompto is embarrassed by how quickly he runs to his side.

“I think…” Ardyn holds a hand out to Prompto, who steps back. “I believe you may have been correct. There’s something here, at least. Something that repels daemons.”

It takes a moment for this to sink in. “You mean I have to go in there alone,” Prompto says, in a dull voice. His hand moves to his phone, trying to figure how long it would take for Noct and the others to find him. Ardyn cranes his neck to gaze up at the sloping wall beneath his hand, and shakes his head.

“No, I can bear it,” he says. He walks along the wall, and his face lights up as they reach a grate cordoning off a strange, glowing circular panel. “Lovely. This, Prompto, is about as old as you are. Observe.” He gestures Prompto through a hole in the grate, and presses his hand on the center of the panel.

Prompto jerks as the floor shudders, and reaches out to hold onto the wall as they start to descend. Ardyn tuts and pulls him back just before he loses his fingers against a rough patch of rock.

“Great,” Prompto says, as the makeshift elevator descends with a screech of grating stone. “Another dungeon with moving walls. Just what I always wanted. You sure this isn’t gonna be full of daemons?”

Ardyn makes a face. “Trust me on this, at least.”

“Oh. Is that a thing you can do? Like a… daemon-sense?” Prompto backs up, hands raised, when Ardyn gives him a dark look. “Hey, you gotta get something out of this deal.”

“Indeed I do, dear boy,” Ardyn says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “The Astrals’ unending gratitude.”
Prompto snorts, and Ardyn’s lips twitch in a half smile.

When the elevator grinds to a halt, both Ardyn and Prompto stand there for a long, breathless moment, blinking into the dark. Then Ardyn steps forward, slowly, and sinks to one knee at the edge of the platform. He lifts up the delicate armor encasing the skeleton of a human being, and Prompto lurches back at the crack of a skull clattering to the ground. Ardyn prevents the skull from toppling over the edge beyond the platform and into the emptiness that surrounds them, and places it roughly where the collar of the armor should be.

“One of mine,” he says. Prompto can’t read his voice at all. There’s no grief, no fury, just cold, unfeeling acceptance.

“Maybe they knew something,” Prompto says. Ardyn doesn’t speak. He simply stands, head turning as though questing the air for a scent, and walks along the only path available to them.

They find the bones of another MT further down, stuck in the grooves of a spiked column that glows with red magic.

“I think I might hate this place,” Prompto says. Ardyn chuckles, and raises his hand. Then he is on the other side of the spikes, smiling down at Prompto with an indulgent look. Prompto grumbles and slides under the column before it can fall.

“Is this the kind of thing you’d get in Solheim?” Prompto asks, as he nearly falls into the bottomless pit and has to cling to Ardyn’s legs for purchase. Ardyn yanks him up by the collar and deposits him on what, for now, counts as solid ground. “You know. Shrines full of death traps, big glowing… purple things?” He points up, to where a mist rises before a block in the shape of a man’s face.

“I was young when the goddess fell,” Ardyn says. He grabs Prompto around the waist and warps with him onto a rusted metal ledge. “Much of my childhood was spent in the dark.”

“Wait.” Prompto inches along the rail, trying not to focus on the yawning darkness beneath him. “Does that make us kind of the same age?”

“You were likely made a few years later,” Ardyn says, and drops to a walkway below them, a little to the left. Prompto groans and tightens his grip on the rail. “You knew the nursery rhyme, so that places you close to the fall, but the last Magitech soldiers were made when I was, oh, nine or ten. You were likely made to be one of my personal guards as I, ha, cleansed the Scourge.”

Prompto nods. He holds on so tight that he can feel his bones creaking.

“Have you lost the use of your limbs, dear?” Ardyn adds, with a pointed look at Prompto’s trembling arms. “Afraid of falling?”

“Not really,” Prompto says. “It’s the landing that gets me.” He pushes off the rail, but he misjudges the force needed to reach the walkway. Ardyn takes two steps back and braces himself, and Prompto reflexively grips his arms like he would Noct’s during one of the link strikes they learned at the Citadel. They swing dangerously close to the edge, but Prompto ends up on his feet, shaken but steady.

Ardyn releases him and walks up the slope, leaving Prompto’s arms stinging at the contact.

“So what would I be,” he asks at the top, sliding under yet another row of fucking spikes, “if I didn’t wake up when I did?”

“Dead, certainly,” Ardyn says. He doesn’t have to crawl under spiked blocks and time his descent down the next makeshift corridor—Not when he can stop time. “But… Ah, even then, you would not have received proper training. I was on the job, so you might say, from an early age. My guards trained with me in the field. No great halls like we used to have, no specialized schools.”

“So you’re saying,” Prompto says, while Ardyn slashes through a stone face that dissolves in a flash of purple magic. “That I’d end up the same.”

“Oh, I can hardly claim that. Time to jump again, I see.”

“Motherfucker.”

“Quite,” Ardyn agrees, and the two of them drop onto the massive shoulders of a copper statue of Ifrit. Prompto waits while Ardyn activates the next set of traps, and runs his hand along the curved horns of the statue.

“What’s his deal?” he asks. Ardyn’s face is unreadable from this angle, cast in shadow.

“Not every Astral agreed that the death of a god was the best way to claim godhood for themselves,” Ardyn says. “But you could say that Ifrit has always been a contrary bastard, of sorts. Come along.”

Prompto can tell that Ardyn doesn’t want to talk. He stands with his shoulders hunched slightly, his fingers flexing, and the constant shift of the Scourges presence under his skin makes Prompto wonder if the pain isn’t getting worse. But the further in they go, the more remains they find: Skeletons in thin, still-gleaming armor lie heaped before a glowing rune that Ardyn makes Prompto turn his back to before it is activated. Some remains still have hair-like wires wrapped around their bones, and when Prompto looks at them closely, he can see the glimmer of magic in the spots where they’ve frayed over time.

So he keeps Ardyn talking. He asks him about his other guards, the first of what Lucis would call Shields. He learns about the combat training they undertook in warded havens, lessons imparted by older MTs and Ardyn’s mother, who guided them through the first ten years of Ardyn’s journey. He learns their names, their rivalries, the way they responded to the revival of the sun.

He doesn’t ask what happened after.

But no amount of talking can distract Ardyn for long, it seems—just as they reach what has to be the most horrifying aspect of this hell-scape of a shrine, a giant rotating sphere full of suspicious holes and gaps just perfect for yet another MT to die in, Ardyn’s knees buckle. He holds on to the side of a wall to keep himself up, but his arms are shaking, and there’s sweat staining the collar around his neck.

“If she’s here,” Ardyn says, in a strained, tight voice. “She’s close.”

Prompto risks placing a hand on his shoulder. “That’s good, right?” He’s using the overly-peppy, slightly panicked voice that always makes Gladio roll his eyes and Ignis sigh, but works pretty well at keeping Noct from going into a sulk. It’s his default mode when things get rough—Well, except for the time he punched Ardyn in the face, but he doesn’t think that will work in a dungeon made up of the void of space with a dash of burning spikes.

Ardyn’s fingers grip his right arm hard enough to bruise, and Prompto tries not to wince as he hauls himself upright.

“Okay,” Prompto says. “Ready to jump to our death?”

“To yours, at least,” Ardyn says.

“That’s what I like about you, buddy,” Prompto tells him, through the roaring tide of fear and desperation that overtakes him with the slow turn of the sphere below. “You sure know how to stay positive.”

Chapter Text

Falling through a narrow hole in a death-sphere, which is floating in the center of a bottomless hell-dungeon, is not Prompto’s idea of a good time. In terms of good times, ranging from having Wiz appear before him with an offer to work full-time as a baby chocobo cuddler and being covered in bugs forever, Prompto’s pretty sure this is as close to eternally covered in bugs as he can get. He holds onto Ardyn’s shoulders and screams as they warp through the air, appearing and disappearing in bursts of magic that make Prompto’s stomach lurch and his ears ring. When they land on solid stone at last, Prompto rolls onto his hands and knees and retches weakly.

“Stop that,” Ardyn says, his voice gone short.

“Oh,” Prompto gasps, between heaving out nothing but air and spit from his pathetic, miserable stomach. “Yeah, I’ll just… do that… won’t I, dude?”

Ardyn grabs the back of Prompto’s collar and shakes him, which definitely doesn’t help with the way his stomach is trying to crawl to freedom through his throat. Prompto considers throwing up on his shoes before he’s lifted up, and he sees what exactly he’s been coughing and drooling on.

Or, more accurately, who.

“Gods,” he whispers.

“Goddess,” says Ardyn. It’s hard to tell in the darkness of the shrine…dungeon…whatever it is, but Prompto can see the shadows deepen under his eyes, like someone has sloshed watered-down black paint on his cheeks and let it run. Ardyn lets go, and Prompto looks up into the stone, immobile face of Eos.

There’s no getting around it. Even Prompto can feel it, now that he isn’t focused on trying not to die. He can feel the magic in the stone in the same way he can feel the magic in his own body: The little push that tells him he can run faster, be stronger, go further than before. All his limbs feel like they’re about to fall asleep, the kind of pins and needles stinging that makes even walking painful, and he can tell that the worst of the magic is centered on the massive stone collar around the goddess’ neck.

Fine, hair-thin cracks run along the collar’s surface, glowing violet.

“Look down,” Ardyn says. Prompto thinks that’s probably the worst idea he’s heard yet, but he glances down anyways, and nearly chokes.

“Huh,” he says, in a weak attempt at his cheerful voice from before their dive into the death sphere. “At least we know where the other MTs are.”

Remnants of Solheim magitech armor litters the platform at the goddess’ feet. There have to be hundreds of them, Prompto thinks, so many that even in this darkness he can see the brittle, wire-covered bones peeking out from beneath plate armor and chain. There’s none of the magic that he’d seen in other MTs, though, and something about the dull, lightless mass beneath him stirs a deeper fear in Prompto. It isn’t the fear of spiked-death that has dominated the past who knows how many hours that he and Ardyn have been navigating the shrine-turned-dungeon. It’s something more, a low dread that sinks into his bones, fizzles among the wires that probably thread through his own body.

He looks to the collar of the goddess.

“The magic holding her is too strong,” Ardyn says, as Prompto drags himself up the belly of the goddess. “It would take the combined force of the Astrals to break. This was folly.”

“Or…” Prompto can feel his hands shaking. He shoves them in his pockets, keeps walking. The Goddess creaks alarmingly and they fall a few yards through the empty air. “Or it takes more than the Astrals.”

Ardyn frowns down at Prompto, who is almost at the collar. His nerves feel like they’re on fire, and when he takes his hands out of his pockets and holds them over the stone, they twitch away like opposing magnets.

“Ardyn,” he says. “Shiva said I have the mark of the goddess on me.”

“Ah, yes, to an extent,” Ardyn says. “The magitech were bound by her to the king of Lucis...”

“Who has her blessing,” Prompto says. Ardyn’s shoulders hunch forward, but he doesn’t come any closer to the collar.

“I suppose, but my dear, that isn’t-“

“Then maybe that’s what they were doing,” Prompto says. He tries to push his hands closer to the collar, and it feels like he’s moving through a solid wall. “Maybe they were giving that magic back.”

“Pardon?”

Ardyn watches, brows raised, as Prompto gets to his knees at the hollow of the goddess’ neck. He looks down at his hands. It isn’t right, really. He’s spent his whole life running to catch up with his friends, trying to be worthy, to draw even with them in a fight even if he couldn’t do it socially. And then it turns out he’d had this all along, that he’s always been a few steps ahead. It’s still so new. The other magitech of Solheim, the ones who got to train with Ardyn and follow him on his journey, the ones who turned at last to this shrine, who died in droves just to get here… They knew what they were doing. They had the memory of Solheim to drive them, a king who might’ve still deserved loyalty.

Well, Prompto does, too. He has Insomnia, smoking and wrecked after the fall, fires too strong to die out in the early morning rain. He has Noctis, probably still sending him frantic, angry texts, a king who worked as a line cook and knows all the words to the worst pop songs in the past ten years. And maybe… maybe, Prompto has Ardyn.

He looks back. Ardyn’s face runs with tears he doesn’t seem to notice, sticky black as oil. There’s so much rage in him, so much bitterness. But he’d called Prompto his, so maybe there’s something left.

“We have to give it back,” he says, and holds his hands to the widest crack in the collar.

It’s the worst pain Prompto has ever felt: Not just burning, but somehow cold, like ice water sluicing down electrical wires fitted to his nerves. He can’t even cry, can’t retch, can’t scream. It’s as though he’s being held in place, the magic in his body draining from him, sinking into the crack.

There goes his strength. There goes his ability to run faster than Gladio, faster than the beasts that whirl through the underbrush of Duscae. There goes the magic that called to the tablets in the cave where the naga was, the heightened awareness in the midst of battle, the sureness of his hands and the keenness of his eye. There goes everything that makes Prompto special, makes him important. He thinks of Noct laughing at the railing beyond the library at Hunter HQ, of the two of them skipping class to play at the arcade in their senior year. Of Ardyn as he was, young and unknowing. All the kings and queens who died early to sustain the ring that Noct will have to wear one day. Shiva, smiling as she tries to snuff out the last relic of a dead civilization.

When it’s done, Prompto is shaking, his hands clammy and slipping on the stone, and the crack in the collar has widened by an inch.

His voice comes out hoarse. “Ardyn. You have to.” He swallows. “You have to put your own magic in.”

There’s only silence. When Prompto turns his neck, he sees Ardyn standing there, staring at him in what looks strangely like horror. It’s an odd look on him, hardly fitting with the typical smug grin and cocky swing to his hips. He’s younger, like this. Weaker.

“Ardyn, you have to do it,” he says. “My… my magic isn’t enough. Wasn’t enough.”

“No,” Ardyn says. He falls back a step.

“She can kill the Scourge, right?” Prompto asks. Ardyn doesn’t speak. “She’s the goddess of the sun, isn’t she? Your goddess? The mother goddess?”

“Two thousand years,” Ardyn says. “I’ve waited for the chosen king, and you tell me…”

“I thought you were the chosen king!” Prompto can hear his voice echo, which is strange, because the darkness around them feels absolute. “You’re still following the Astrals? After all this? After seeing her?” He pushes at the collar, trying to widen the crack through his own painfully human strength. “She isn’t even…” he pushes. “My goddess. She’s yours. And you’re too fucking weak to make a sacrifice—“

“Weak?”

“Look down,” Prompto says, with more vitriol than he ever thought possible. “What do you think these MTs were trying to do for you? Fuck, they probably starved here, didn’t they? Probably couldn’t get out. Probably I can’t get out. I’m gonna die here and it’s not even gonna matter. And it’s not like I’m gonna get reception to talk to Noct again! So thanks. Thanks a fucking lot.”

He digs his fingers into the crack, trying to yank it open that way, but the magic burns his fingertips and he yelps, pulling away. But still, he could almost feel a give…

He hooks his fingers in again. He repeats the process so many times that he can feel blisters forming on his hands, and it takes him a moment to note the pressure of Ardyn’s palm on his shoulder.

“If this doesn’t work,” Ardyn says, “I reserve the right to kill you first.”

“Be my guest,” Prompto says. Ardyn scowls and kneels beside him, knocking his hands out of the way to grip the crack in the stone himself.

It strikes Prompto, as Ardyn opens his mouth in a soundless scream, as light pours from his hands into the crack in the stone, that two thousand years of absorbing daemons into one’s body can create… a lot of daemons, can’t it? Just one would be too much for an ordinary person. And without the goddess’ blessing, wouldn’t Ardyn be, well… ordinary?

Prompto stares at Ardyn, locked in place by the draining magic of the goddess’ collar, and sees blackness bubble at the base of his neck, just under his skin.

“Uh,” he says.

He glances down at the MTs below him. How strong is he on his own? Even without his enhancements, even without the magic, he has been running for half his life, hasn’t he? He’s trained with Cor. He knows how to fight.

Can he fight two millennia worth of daemons, though?

He summons his gun. Ardyn can’t move, but his body is jerking, like his bones are trying to reform into something new. Something inhuman. The collar cracks by about a foot, and Ardyn closes his eyes. The blackness drips like sweat from his skin and sizzles on the stone of the goddess’ body.

Prompto trains his gun on the back of Ardyn’s head.

The crack widens further still. There’s a horrible screeching noise, and the stone under Prompto’s feet starts to slip and shift. He grabs at the only stable thing he can find—Ardyn’s jacket collar, which tugs back to reveal the chaos of daemonic ichor rising up between his shoulder blades to pour down his arms.

There’s a soft, low sound, like laughter, like thunder, rolling beneath them. The collar snaps open and breaks apart in a spider-web of violet light, and Prompto and Ardyn fall back as the statue of the Goddess tilts forward, her outstretched arms shivering.

Stone falls from her body like shattered glass. In his hold, Ardyn howls in a voice that Prompto’s heard too many times at night, beyond the safety of havens and hotels. The daemons within him roar, threatening to break his body apart even as the stone over the body of the goddess drives them to her feet, even as light begins to emanate from the spot in her neck where Prompto had knelt.

The last of the stone falls away, and as Ardyn writhes and growls beside him, Prompto looks up into the heart of the sun.

Chapter Text

Far in the depths of the Pitioss ruins, the goddess Eos wakes.

When she opens her eyes, the sagebrush for three miles around the ruins burn to ash in the space of a breath. Every piece of metal at the Hammerhead garage burns red-hot, and Cindy, the resident mechanic, runs for the hose as the air ripples around her. In Lestallum, the woman in charge of monitoring the output of the power plant pushes back from her chair as all the dials in the security room shudder and break.

In Tenebrae, where seeds lay dormant under banks of snow even in the height of summer, the ice that spreads forth from the Glacian’s body melts. Green sprouts emerge from the earth, packing decades of growth in seconds, choking oil drills and Imperial weapons testing mechs in branches and tree trunks. The Glacian herself begins to melt, ice sliding off her body to crash to the river below.

Standing next to Lunafreya Nox Fleuret, who is trying to call Umbra to no avail, Gentiana screams.

Noctis drops to his knees as the Astrals flee his body, one by one, breaking the covenants with great pulses of magic. The Titan tries to sink into the earth, but the goddess has spent two thousand years underground, and nothing is free from her grasp. The cries of rage as the Archaeon is swallowed by the earth itself send flocks of birds taking to the sky, blotting out the light like frantic, screeching clouds. Ramuh streaks towards a thunderhead forming in the distance, but it falls to wisps as rays of light stream out from behind it, wrapping around Ramuh’s body like ribbons, lovingly, gently.

In Altissia, the seas boil.

The crystal in Niflheim shatters as Bahamut, the greatest of the Astrals, fades from the mortal plane. Emperor Iedolas stands amid the broken shards of the crystal and wonders what brought him there. Why he has left his estate in Gralea, why the soldiers around him shake and scream with voices that no longer sound human, why his mind feels clear for the first time in nearly forty years.

The volcano of Ravatogh heaves and rumbles, threatening fire, and the hiss of smoke rising from its caves and faults is high with triumph.

The goddess brushes aside the top of the ruins that have held her with a sweep of her hand, and laughs. There are small creatures at her feet, trembling and shaking, and she cups them in the palm of one hand, bearing them up. They are familiar. The bones of one are old, but she can feel the mark of her own thumbprint like a ghost in their skin, and she finds she likes the way they sob and cover their ruined eyes, bowing at her feet the way her people used to, so long ago. The other is wretched and small, sick with a darkness that shouldn’t exist. She knows this one. She saw them when they were smaller still, pink and screaming, and she covers the both of them with her other hand, banishing the dark. There is no room for it within her, and she can feel it leave her little one with a weak twist, battering against her hands.

She sets them down. It’s a shame, she thinks, that her little one’s companion cannot see her, so she fixes his eyes for him. He weeps before her, forehead to the ground, and she smiles. This is good. This is right. She stands in the open air, holds her arms out to the sun, and sinks into it for the first time in nearly two thousand years.

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Prompto doesn’t want to stand. He doesn’t want to move, or think, or do anything but breathe and hold his body to the baking earth. The sand where the goddess stood has turned to glass, bare footprints large as craters that reflect the merciless sun. Prompto can see it all so sharply, now. He can see a bird lighting on a rock miles away, count their feathers. He can see the dust that rolls across the stone.

He can see the sun, hanging heavy in the sky. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but Prompto lowers his gaze anyways, turning back to the shadow his body makes on the sand.

When someone touches his back, he realizes that his clothes are gone, burned in the fire of the goddess’ hands. He twists his head round, and Ardyn is there, human and whole, no darkness behind his eyes. When he smiles, it’s tight with pain, but Prompto can see it, finally, the shape of the man he was taking root.

“Your Majesty,” Prompto says, and, with no more magic to compel him, no loyalties to honor, rises to his knees.

Ardyn’s laugh is caught by a warm wind, thrown high and far into the bright blue distance.