Chapter Text
Once upon a time, there was a girl who lied so well her right hand had no idea what her left hand was doing. The world was an ugly, ruthless, callous place, but she was uglier, more ruthless and more callous than it could hope to imagine, so she survived.
She survived war and betrayal and lies and the endless parade of people deciding for her, what her life would be like, what she would do and when and how and with whom. She survived not by being kind or patient or utterly selfless, but by being the ugly, ruthless, callous monster that knew so well the value of a smile when it came to deliver a good lie. She was cunning and conniving and fundamentally selfish, but since the world refused to apologize for all ugly, ruthless, callous bits that had shaped her, one chipped corner of her soul at the time, she staunchly refused to apologize right back.
She could have survived everything, she was fairly sure, but she’d chosen not to.
So, once upon a time, there was a girl lying to the world, hiding inside the bones of a woman who carried a crown and her pride so convincingly, that no one had ever noticed how scared and hateful she truly was. And that girl made a choice to die, not to save the world, but – ostensibly – her son. She died so he could live, and she was so good at lying, she even believed it herself. Even if all she really wanted was the chance to break something so fundamentally grand as a god’s plan for humanity. Because she hated nothing more than being told what to do, and no one did that more than a god.
But sacrifice is only palatable if it’s selfless and no one really likes a selfish hero, so once upon a time, a girl became a Queen, and when she died, her truth died with her, because no one but herself had ever known it.
And when they brought her back, echoes trapped in the storm of magic she stole for herself, to ensure this would happen, exactly as she wanted it to, a bit of that truth came back, too.
“So?” Aulea asked, hands deep in the pockets of her pants, back slouched forward and hair a stubborn mess of unevenly cut tips sticking out rather daringly. “What’s the plan?”
She was not, Ardyn thought somewhat sullenly, what he’d been expecting. He wasn’t sure why he kept having expectations, at this point; he’d been serving his Mistress two whole millennia and She kept making as much sense now as She did when he first met Her. That was to say: not one lick of it. But then, he served decay and corruption and darkness; not evil, per se, but the entirety of things that rested on the opposite side of the scale from things that people generally found pleasant and agreeable. They were supposed to be senseless and irrational and broken, off balance. That was the whole point. That was why he’d chosen to serve, in the first place.
Aulea Lucis Caelum, he’d been told, had also chosen to serve, but the other side of the spectrum, the bits and pieces of his Mistress that had been scattered and trapped within the vastness of the Crystal, when She’d been torn asunder, so long ago. Light and life and all things good and wholesome and worth saving.
Ardyn had expected someone like the man he’d once been, before betrayal and failure and the burn of Somnus’ sword sank deep in his gut. Someone who understood the weight and importance of the path they’d chosen, in defiance of the Astrals and the Draconian in particular. Someone selfless and perhaps naïve, that he’d have to induct into the wretched, blackened truths of the world to test their determination to their cause.
Aulea Lucis Caelum was… not that.
“The Plan,” Ardyn sneered, unable to help himself as he stopped next to the car parked inconspicuously several blocks away from the tiny cemetery where he’d found Lucis’ erstwhile Queen, “spans more than two thousand years and an uncountable number of controlled disasters engineered purely to careen the Draconian’s machinations off rails and square into Hers.” He arched an eyebrow when she refused to look even the slightest bit impressed by that. “I have neither the will nor the time to explain The Plan, Mrs. Stab First, Ask Questions Later.” He snorted. “I can, however, provide you with a plan, which is frankly more than you deserve.” He nodded at the car. “Get in.”
Aulea proceeded to not do that. Which, in all fairness, Ardyn should have expected at this point.
“You own a pink convertible,” she said, eyebrows arched in a way that implied there was something at all wrong with Ardyn’s perfectly functional car, which happened to be pink, and also a convertible.
“Haven’t made up my mind if I’ll be returning it to the rental after all,” Ardyn replied, sliding into the driver’s seat without skipping a beat, “so owning is still tentative, I’m afraid.”
Aulea made a face, the sort Ardyn was used to making at stupid people, but not quite used to be on the receiving end of, and then she sighed loudly, shoulders slumping, before she gingerly entered the car with the air of one braving the inside of a behemoth’s den.
“You’re going to be a bitch to work with, aren’t you,” she said, pointedly not buckling up a seatbelt.
Ardyn considered finding out what would happen if a dead apparition died in a terrible car accident, and then decided the car was not at fault for his poor choice of passenger.
In the back of his head, he heard Her snicker, faint like a murmur, drowned in the screaming he was absolutely ignoring.
“Well,” he said, as he started the engine, “you did tell me to go fuck myself on our first meeting, my dear. That doesn’t exactly predispose someone to be amicable.”
Which was a very poignant understatement, but he was above pointing out the obvious. He prided himself in a sharper wit, whenever he had enough of a mind to remember it.
“Right,” she snorted right back, infuriating and nonchalant and still very much not anything close to what Ardyn had attempted to guess he’d be working with. And then she added, with that vicious drawl, right as he opened his mouth to inform her of this fact: “So what exactly predisposes you to shut the fuck up and drive?”
Ardyn slammed on the brakes abruptly and watched impassively as she bounced off the dashboard with a grunt.
“That,” he replied, smirking as she snarled, and then did his honest best to ignore her, as he set out towards Keycatrich.
On his shoulders, still exhausted from the effort, the fox slept on, a wisp of dark and scourge buried somewhere beneath his hair, breathing soft puffs of air against the back of his neck. Ardyn stared at the stoplight and weighted the consequences of outright willing it to green, if not straight up ignoring it. It was better than acknowledge Aulea as she threw her seat as far back as it’d go and propped up her feet on the dashboard, in a posture that looked defiantly uncomfortable.
It was going to be a long day, he reckoned, and not just because traffic was still in a knot after the Prince and his fiancé left the city with all pomp and ceremony that morning.
“Wanna take a picture?” Aulea asked, hands on her hips as she snapped Ardyn out of his blank staring at the imposing statue of the Founder King. “Might last you longer.”
He sneered, first on reflex and then very purposefully, and swept past the statue and straight for the hole in the northern rock wall that encircled the settlement.
“I’d rather not, darling,” he drawled at her as he snapped the fingers of his left hand with a flick of his wrist and caused time around them to stand still. “After you,” he added, motioning past the frozen patrol that was meant to protect the entrance to the tomb hidden deep in the ruins.
“That’s a neat trick,” she said, one eyebrow arched as she ducked under the arm of a man, frozen mid-motion as he pointed in the general direction of the main street. “Bet you could have a lot of fun with that, if you cared to try.”
“You should be grateful I don’t care to try many of the things I could do,” Ardyn retorted dryly, following her through the tunnels with a snort.
“…do you shave yourself on your edgy bullshit every morning?” Aulea retorted right back, just as dry.
Ardyn scoffed.
“Yes,” he replied, “always.”
The rest of the trek down into the ruins was done in the same testy, awkward silence that the drive out of Insomnia had had. Ardyn contemplated the rather cathartic possibility of having a meltdown and taking the entire blasted town with him, but he remembered there was a tomb somewhere in the depths they were exploring and that meant the hallowed King of Light would have to visit it at some point for this whole charade to be worthwhile. So he refrained. Barely.
He’d gotten better, really, over the centuries, at remembering himself. Selectively. When it mattered. Admittedly, Galahd had been a massive indulgence but in Ardyn’s defense, who was he to refuse the chance to tell the most judgmental of the Astrals where he could stuff his blighted staff. It’d taken the Oracle’s presence to awaken him from that particular reprieve, but by the time he’d reached Gralea, it was as if he’d never left at all in the first place.
And then… well.
Niflheim was hardly the first or the largest empire he’d brought down to its knees, in his long career as locus of the scourge. He had a system, well refined and perfected over the centuries he’d spent roaming the land and trying to score something approaching balance with the ever growing tumor of light nested deep in Somnus’ walled heirloom of a city. Some he’d enjoyed greatly, others had been a chore. But for all Niflheim had crowed about its history and legacy, claiming ties that ran as far back as Solheim, they never mentioned the charred wastelands bordering West, the places Ardyn had roamed first, when the wound was flesh and he couldn’t hope to keep his wits about him, if he was within sight of Lucis and all its sordid lies. The brighter the light grew, at the heart of the Crystal, the deeper the dark Ardyn sowed across the barren fields, on and on, because She commanded it. But also, because he felt like it. He had no pity for the lives he took, cut down like ripe wheat wherever his corruption spread, no second thoughts spared for the men, women and children that invariably fell into the pit, fuel to the fire of his revenge. And he did so because he understood, deep down, that all tragedies in the world, big and small, his own not the least of them, had only one thing in common there, and it was the fact people were and remained forever the same. Selfish. Cowardly.
They deserved what was coming, every single one of them.
Aulea was a testament to that. Queen of Lucis, Mother of the King of Light, Sacrifice for the Grand Plan… And she was just as hateful, as unpleasant, as ruthless as the rest of the world.
“Can we both agree that this is the dumbest place to put a tomb?” Aulea asked, exactly in the hateful, unpleasant tone that punctuated Ardyn’s meandering thoughts perfectly. “And a secret sealed evil maze, too.”
“There’s the sewers,” Ardyn retorted, somewhat amused by the unamused expression on her face. “And the abandoned mines.” He paused in delight, watching her glare sharpen by degrees. “And there is in fact a tomb inside a volcano, though I understand you will be spared that particular visit?”
“I hate this fucking family,” Aulea snarled, throwing her arms up in the air. “Everything has to be skulls and death and melodramatic stupidity with them!”
“And yet,” Ardyn taunted, watching her slide through a shadowed gap in the rocks, and into a claustrophobically small tunnel going further down, “you married into it.”
“Not by choice, I didn’t,” Aulea singsonged back sarcastically, heaving herself back onto her feet.
“One always has a choice,” Ardyn pointed out, if only to bask in her increasing frustration.
To his surprise, she snorted, rather than attempt bodily harm again.
“…fair, but my choices were to marry the Crybaby Prince or to kill myself,” she said dryly, one eyebrow arched firmly. “Regis Lucis Caelum was not worth killing myself over.”
“But Noctis Lucis Caelum is?” Ardyn asked innocently, eyebrows arched in surprise.
“That,” she replied, utterly unmoved by the taunt, “and telling the entire Astral pantheon where they could stuff their stupid prophecy. That was worth killing myself for.”
Despite himself, Ardyn found himself chuckling. She was a hateful, monstrous thing, of course, but then, who was he to judge in that regard? He was, in point of fact, contractually obligated to be worse.
“Shall we, then, Your Majesty?” He asked, as they came to stop before the tall, imposing door that sealed away one of the great terrors buried deep beneath Lucis in the age before the New Wall was raised. “The seal is holding strong, but you and I should be more than enough to break it.”
“Or,” Aulea said, “hear me out, what if we use the key?”
Ardyn stared as she pulled out said key out of crystals and light, much the same way she did her sword; buried in an armiger built on magic from the very family she claimed to despise as much as he did. He’d point out the hypocrisy of that, but he’d spent as long as that blasted key had existed looking for the damn thing, in preparation to the fact that… well, they were going to have to deal with said great terrors at some point, and it had stubbornly eluded him.
“How in the world–“
Aulea wiggled her fingers significantly before she turned her back to him and used the key to release the ancient mechanism. The creak of machinery almost obscured her reply, but not quite.
“Got nimble fingers and the right name,” she said, vanishing the key back into the void with a shrug. “It’s a surprisingly effective combo.”
“I didn’t give you the keys.”
In retrospect, that was probably in the top five of the dumbest things he’d ever said in his life. And his life included two millennia worth of drunken proclamations – drunken on alcohol, rage or madness, he was a connoisseur of all three – and frankly poor life choices, so that was really saying something.
Sitting behind the wheel, Aulea looked over to give him a pointed look, and then went back to staring at the road ahead.
“The fact you actually thought I didn’t know how to hotwire a car is almost adorable enough to make up for the bit where you went and exploded on me.” Ardyn could hear her wrinkle her nose. He wasn’t entirely sure how, but he did. “Literally. Into a screeching mass of scourge, fury and black ooze that I had to wash off my hair and my clothes and scrub off from underneath my nails. You asshole. You ate twenty nine people when they came to investigate the ruckus you were making, Ardyn. What in the fresh fuck was that and who do I kill so you never do it again?”
Ardyn considered answering the question sincerely.
For about an entire tenth of a second.
Then he shifted to lay more comfortably across the backseat of the car, until he was sprawled as long as he was, and he pulled his hat down to cover his face.
“One down,” he said, instead, ignoring the fact the sky was dark and the perfectly serviceable and not at all objectionable pink convertible did not, nonetheless, possess the high potency lightbulbs required to brave night without risking daemon encounters. And yet the road was surprisingly daemon free. “Four more to go.”
One disaster at the time, he decided, was the best way to survive them all.
“…I was sort of actually hoping you were kidding about the sewers,” Aulea said, two days later, when Ardyn was recovered enough from his… little episode, and they had made their way to the abandoned Crestholm ruins.
He peered down into the – seemingly – bottomless pit and wrinkled his nose at the stench.
“I wasn’t,” he replied, and then walked off the edge with a resigned little shrug.
Aulea followed only a second later.
She was dead and he was beyond that; whatever was nesting in the depths, and beyond the door… well, it didn’t really stand a chance.
That was sort of the point.
They got lost in the mines.
The less was said about the mines, the better.
After Daurell – and respectfully and in full confidence, fuck Daurell – they sat atop the massive stone ring and Ardyn found himself sharing a lit cigarette with Aulea – a cigarette she pulled out of a crumpled old carton taken from who knows where – and watching the sun rise in the distance.
“Only Greyshire left, now,” Ardyn said, watching the light bounce off the edges of each shard of the meteor in the distance. “Lest you’ve changed your mind about the other three.”
“I haven’t,” Aulea replied and blew out a smoke ring high above their head. “It’ll all be worthless, if they can’t handle even that.”
“You’re really willing to bet it all on them being strong enough to survive it?” Ardyn said, because even now, despite it all, he still hadn’t managed to wrap his head around her and it annoyed him every time he admitted it.
“Strength has nothing to do with it,” Aulea said, shrugging. “If it took strength to fix this mess, you’d have fixed it on your own a long time back. No, it’ll be desperation that’ll make a difference. Sink or swim, that’s all there is.”
“How motherly of you,” Ardyn muttered sarcastically, if nothing else because he still hadn’t found the edge to peel back the façade of rude impertinence and drag out the screaming little girl beneath.
There was always an edge, and a screaming girl, and he refused to believe she was any different from the literal million stories he’d swallowed up over the years, devoured by scourge and fear and dark and all those indulgences and duties he devoted himself to with equal fervor. He knew people, that’s why he hated them. And she wasn’t special.
“Dragons build grand, remote nests to protect their brood,” Aulea said, a wry smile tugging at her lips. “Lions teach their cubs all they know, prepare them the best they can. But hyenas…” She snorted. “Hyenas cackle and eat their young in the same breath. Just because. Always get the last laugh, too. Incidentally.”
“Not very popular though, are they?” Ardyn replied, though the taunt felt, like most taunts against Aulea did, slightly off tilt and not very effective at all. “Incidentally.”
“That’s the best part,” she laughed, and there was the edge of that mocking cackle there, too, sharp and poignant and terrible. “We really don’t fucking care.”
“I hate Ronin.”
Ardyn laughed, the same drunken, hiccup-y laugh that followed after he devoured the flecks of iridescent dust left behind the ancient daemons they were slaughtering. He always meant to abstain, to refrain from falling into the same pit of madness and hysteria that came with being overwhelmed by the scourge and the torn bits of howling lost souls stuck in it. But he always forgot. And he’d long given up pretending he was good at restraint. He’d had someone, before, who did the restraining for him. He was almost sure, but then, he didn’t always remember.
There was so much to remember and so little time to care about it all!
“That wasn’t a Ronin,” he said, after a moment, blinking away the black ichor that dripped down the corner of his eyes after a good feast. “That was– “
“It had a sword and it was a fucking asshole,” Aulea interrupted, “it was a Ronin.” She paused, letting her sword slip off her grip and vanish into crystals. “Whatever, it was Ronin-adjacent. Close enough for me to hate it, so there.”
“You hate everything,” Ardyn said, more marveling than accusatory.
She did that thing she did those scant few times that Ardyn had managed to get within the remote proximity of striking a nerve: she tilted her chin back, jaw set defiantly, and stared him down – his eyes were golden on black, he was sure, corruption and sludge oozing out of every pore, every broken, monstrous shade of him on display – with a sneer, as if daring him to judge her for it.
“I hate everything worth hating, they all had it coming,” she replied, and then, without warning, reached out to grab a fistful of his coat and used that to haul him back to his feet. “Let’s go.” And then she smiled, just enough to show a shadow of teeth. “I hate the cold.”
“What,” Ardyn asked, reaching out to hold her hand in place, and not really caring about the miasma slowly pooling at his feet, “pray tell, the fuck, is wrong with you?”
It was an honest question. Very fair, too. They’d been on the road for over a month now, driving across Lucis, destroying the secret pockets of evil that slumbered in its depths for the sake of the events to come. He should have figured it out, by now. She was just… she wasn’t special. He must have encountered someone like her, before, often enough he’d long understood the simple gears that turned her mind.
And yet.
“My brother was 98% of my impulse control,” Aulea admitted, almost candidly, except her eyes were clear and Ardyn recognized a great liar when he met them, because it took one to know one. “And then I died, and he didn’t stop, I just stopped listening, because he’s a fucking idiot who doesn’t know when to stop. Or how.”
Ardyn licked his lips and felt a semblance of himself returning, settling in, except not fast enough to prevent him from blurting out an awkward truth, as if to challenge such an outrageous lie.
“My brother tried to kill me,” Ardyn said, factual and underwhelming, almost apropos of nothing. “Once.”
Aulea snorted that same mocking cackle of hers that was going to honestly haunt Ardyn for however long he lived yet.
“I mean, rough,” she said, and slipped free of his hold with a flick of her wrist and an indolent shrug. “But you’re also a shit, so you probably deserved it.”
Ardyn snarled a laugh.
“Let’s. Get out of here.”
The smug lack of arguing only meant she knew she was right.
It was maddening.
They could tell the precise moment Titan awoke from his slumber and began calling for the Chosen King.
They could tell because the fox on Ardyn’s shoulders awoke with a loud, feral hiss and every wisp of fur stood up in sharp, erratic waves before it disappeared. They felt the echo of fury stretching past themselves, past the shell of themselves, all the way into that dark, scattered void where their Mistress resided.
“And so, it begins,” Ardyn said, leaning on the railing of the lookout, staring at the valley below, where the Chosen King and his darling friends were surely about to wake up to an unpleasant surprise. “The beginning of the end! I admit, I expected something more poignant.”
He turned to gauge Aulea’s reaction, and perhaps get one last taunt in, before they parted ways, but she was already gone. Coincidentally, Ardyn realized, so was the very nice blue car that he’d parked next to, earlier that morning.
If people around him thought it strange, when he broke down laughing at the absurdity of it all, they were too polite to point it out. He decided, on a whim, that when it came time to swallow the whole world and flood it with darkness and despair, he’d leave Lestallum for last.
It was only polite.