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Emet-Selch has lived a long, long life. In ages past it might not have felt like so many years had come and gone, but the mayfly lives of the inhabitants of the Source are a constant reminder that things are not as they are supposed to be. Sometimes it feels as though entire lifetimes pass if he so much as blinks.
How feeble are these creatures. He’s watched them stumble around for eons, thrashing about wildly like confused newborns. None of them remember what they should be, and so they are incapable of seeing the extent of their broken existences.They are careless. Graceless.
So why does he spend his days amongst them? Why does he lower himself to their level? Taking on a mortal form was necessary to further his plans, yes, but his days of publicly leading the Empire have drawn to a close. He could shed this disguise. It’s not like he needs to keep the truth from Varis any longer.
He could even leave the Source entirely and return to his fellows. Just the thought of it has him rolling his eyes. Before all this, when everything was still whole, if you’d asked him how he felt about the prospect of spending eternity with his colleagues he might have expressed excitement. Having now experienced thousands upon thousands of years having only the likes of Elidibus to talk to...
Sometimes he considers going the route of Nabriales just to escape.
No, no, that wouldn’t do. There are still plots to be plotted and Shards to Rejoin. His goal is worth any number of annoyances.
And perhaps it’s that goal that keeps him here, amongst these pale reflections. They’re insignificant, certainly, and wholy inferior in their current states, but sometimes he glimpses fragments of what they were. Of what they could be again.
He sees kindness in the Lalafellan conjurer, nursing her injured comrades back to health. He sees determination in the Miqo’te man’s ceaseless hunt for a bigger fish and a familiar thirst for knowledge in the Au Ra woman gingerly leafing through dusty tomes.
Even in that cursed Crystal Exarch. The drive to move all of creation in order to save those precious to him… well, he can’t help but empathise. Maybe it’s why he decided to give them one last chance.
“Hey, Emet-Selch, you listening?”
He blinks. The Warrior of Light is looking at him, their brow furrowed. He’d volunteered to accompany them on their patrol of Lakeland, but here he was letting the prospect of cooperation overcome him with sentimentality.
“Hm?” He shrugs. “My apologies, you were being so terribly boring that I stopped paying attention.”
They roll their eyes. “Didn’t you come out here with me because you were bored?”
“Yes, and you’re doing an awful job of rectifying the situation.”
They huff and give him a withering look. “Just leave then.”
Well, he’d been considering it, but now that they’ve made the suggestion he of course has to act in the contrary.
“And abandon you here, alone, in the wilderness? I could never be so cruel.” He bends in an exaggerated bow, hand held over his heart to convey his utmost sincerity.
They shake their head, turning on their heel to continue along the lakeshore.
“You know it is passably pretty here,” he calls, taking a few quick steps to catch up with them. “Not as beautiful as it would be, mind, but I understand why your kind would think something like this worth protecting.”
“What, even the trees were prettier in your world?”
“Of course. They grew in any colour, any shape you could imagine.”
“Hmm,” they hum. “Is this the part where you talk about how you pity us for not even knowing what we’ve lost?”
He laughs. “Now you’re catching on.”
“Maybe we should be pitied.” They scuff their foot across the sand, kicking loose grains into the air. “But I think I pity you, too.”
That gives him pause. These fractured worlds have shown him many things, but pity isn’t one of them.
The Warrior takes another few steps before stopping and looking at him over their shoulder.
“Why?” he asks. For once, it’s a genuine question.
They shrug. “If you spend all your time mourning what’s gone, you’ll never appreciate anything new.”
The way the light catches their eyes is achingly familiar. For a moment he’s back in Amaurot, before the Final Days, taking a walk through the city with an old friend.
“It’s just a thought,” they say. They turn their back to continue their patrol, and the illusion is gone.
He shakes his head, both to disagree and to clear the afterimage from his mind. “You don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“Sure, whatever.”
He huffs and crosses his arms but follows behind anyway. “Your kind do not have the capacity to understand the magnitude of our loss.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’re inferior. I get it.” They wave their hand as though to scrub his words from the air. “Yet here you are, wasting your time with us anyway.”
He shrugs. “What can I say? You and yours are the most interesting players we’ve had in this game for a long while.”
They hum in thought but say no more.
He finds his mind returning to that walk again and again in the following days. Sometimes, when he catches the Warrior at the right angle, he sees it again, an echo of a loved one long gone. Could it be that...
No. It is a passing resemblance, nothing more.
And then the Warrior fails his test. That’s all the confirmation he needs to know that the Rejoining is the only way forward, the only way to recover what has been lost. He’s so sure of it, so very sure, that he believes it right up until White Auracite pierces his flesh and sends agony coursing through his veins.
Maybe it’s a trick of the light. Maybe it’s his fading mind playing tricks on him but here, at the end of Amaurot, at the end of his being, he finds them again.
He closes his eyes.
I’m so glad I was able to see you… one last time.