Archive of Our Own

“Oh yes, before you leave—Architect.”

He stopped, held perfectly still as usual. It was his way of signalling that he was listening but had no intention of staying longer than strictly necessary, with his hand a hair’s breadth from the door that he had been about to leave through.

“Though not an issue today, ‘twould seem that the head of your bureau did not arrive in any capacity and none of his underlings have seen him all day, nor have they been able to reach him. Make certain that this does not happen again. Or find his body, would you?”

A cold jolt of horror shot through his body at that last thought, but he brusquely nodded. “I shall. Is that all?”

“That is all.”

He deliberately left as slowly as always, though once at the elevator he could feel the strange look that the only person to wait for him here was giving him. He readjusted his mask with a sigh and shook his head slightly. He was absolutely determined to let this topic die in silence, but as the two of them stood in that unfortunate elevator that cut off his escape, his colleague and friend nudged him.

“O wise and glorious Architect… what is that scowl for?”

It was hard to tell with the masks. Somewhere underneath that red were this one’s bright blue eyes that were not unlike the summer sky, and he could see the intrigue on their quivering lips, but he merely shook his head again.

“’Tis permanent.”

A snort. “Judging from the unnecessary scorn lacing your normally hilariously flat voice, it concerns something or someone you care about. Well, whatever it is that keeps you occupied, I hope you find a solution for it.”

He let out a long, wary sigh. “Mnemosyne.”

“Ooh. From one colleague to another, then. How may I help you, Emet-Selch?”

He so very desperately wished he could wipe that grin off their face. They were one of his closest friends, one of the few people that actually called him by his given name rather than his title still, but unfortunately for him, all his friends were amazingly good at being general nuisances. Mnemosyne, known as Persephone to their family, was a general centre of attention and trouble alike as was expected of their role. He, the Architect, was more involved with creations and infrastructure in general; Mnemosyne was a title given to a person willing and beloved enough to serve as the mouthpiece of the Convocation. Strictly speaking an unnecessary role, but after that many years serving as Emet-Selch he started to understand how important a Mnemosyne was to the Convocation. They were the voice of the public that needed to be heard yet that could not reach the bureaus. Fortunately and unfortunately that meant the for them elusive Fourteenth spent most of their time with the people to know what was on their minds. Today had been one of the days where they reported back in and told them what was currently holding Amaurot and the surrounding settlements’ attention, what was on the peoples’ minds.

They had reported that yet another major city had fallen recently. The earth had broken apart, had bellowed and screamed—and silence ruled those dead spots now. Just the other day he had overheard a discussion in the streets, animated and almost a little panicked where the group discussed what would happen if that precise city would be the next to fall. He had, of course, long made plans to counteract anything affecting Amaurot—but one of the children taking part in that discussion, a child with stern blue eyes accompanied by what looked like her twin, had crossed her arms with a hiss and said that whatever happened, that other settlement was full of people that deserved to be saved, ulterior motives or not.

Mnemosyne had reported that city’s fall.

And now the Bureau of the Architect had spent a day without its head, second only to Emet-Selch. Normally neither he nor that head were needed—but just in case. Just in case.

“Are you troubled by my report?”

He pressed his lips together. He knew his friend, after all. “No. Everything that you reported has already been accounted for as a failsafe. I do wonder—were we truly the first people you reported this to?”

There was precisely what he had been looking for. A small shift, a flex of their hands.

He let out a long, weary sigh. “Persephone.”

An offended huff as they brushed a brown lock out of their face. “I know, I know. You are going to reprimand me as a chatterbox. But, and this I do swear, cross my heart or die, ‘twas only Hythlodaeus I told! He is my friend just as you are. And besides, it could be him standing here with that mask—“

“That is beside the point! He has apparently not been in the Bureau all day.”

Persephone’s jaw went slack as whatever they had been trying to say died in their throat. “B-Beg your pardon?”

He dragged a hand down his face, careful to not drag his mask askew. “You heard me, Mnemosyne.”

They flinched. “Hades, I—”

The elevator dinged and the doors slid open—Hades himself immediately started moving. He had an idea where to look, considering what it was that Persephone had reported. “Whether you meant harm by this or not does not matter until I find him and talk to him, in any case. Be a little more considerate next time, will you? Not every person in Amaurot has two of their best friends holding seats in the Convocation.”

With that, he had reached the next door, opened it, and weaved into the crowd of visitors that were currently choking the Capitol. Likely a school from the outer districts, judging from the amazed oohs and aahs that prevented him from hearing whatever Persephone said to him.

Having grown up together, he knew immediately that Hythlodaeus was not in a good mood. He sat on the roof of this building, legs crossed—and most shockingly of all, mask thrown aside. He grumbled to himself, his normally cheery demeanour completely gone. It was something that Hades had seen happen several times over their nearly entirely shared lifetime, usually when something happened that did not sit right with the logically inclined Hythlodaeus. For all his jokes and jabs he was a serious person who thought his actions through and through to the point where he wound up settling on inaction. He was also admittedly the more coldly calculating one of the two, though Hades’ oft impulsive plans generally did not go belly up.

“I am to forward a reprimand to you from Esteemed Elidibus.”

A grumble.

“Hythlodaeus.”

Another grumble.

Hades let out a long sigh and walked over to sit down next to Hythlodaeus. He picked up the cast aside mask on his way there, and once he sat he turned to look at this all-too-familiar face. There were dark rings under his eyes. His eyes were bloodshot too, though the red of his irises still remained brighter than anything else he had ever seen. He was paler than usual and his lips were quivering.

He gently reached forward to brush a loose stand of hair out of Hythlodaeus’ face.

He half expected Hythlodaeus to start talking about what Persephone had reported, but nothing of the sort happened. Hythlodaeus merely leaned into the touch a little with a heavy sigh and closed his eyes. It reminded Hades of so many years ago that he had lost count, when he had found Hythlodaeus sitting somewhere in the dark and playing with his mask. It had been that time where he had been invited to Amaurot thanks to his unusually sharp sight, the unusually sharp sight that had also made the Convocation offer him the title Emet-Selch first.

Hythlodaeus had declined that, stating that he was less skilled at everything than Hades other than the sight business.

And indeed, up here the colours of Amaurot were a mad swirl below them. Of course someone who saw as well as Hythlodaeus would seek a vantage point to see the life below when something troubled him.

A few more heartbeats passed in silence, then Hythlodaeus exhaled slowly and opened his eyes again.

“Mnemosyne made their formal report to the Convocation, did they not, Emet-Selch?”

“So they did. Alas, afterwards I was informed that you had made your first no-show in the past century or so. He either assumed you a slacker or dead wherever you slept that night.”

“Would that I had died in my sleep—it would most certainly have kept me from feeling like this. How exactly do you manage to sleep that much, again?”

“Nice try, but you will not be able to diverge the topic onto my habits this time.”

A long, drawn-out sigh escaped Hythlodaeus, then he buried his face in his hands.

“You are a demon, Hades. Sent straight from the Underworld to torment me with that delightfully dark soul of yours.”

Hades rolled his eyes and reached forward to gently pry Hythlodaeus’ hands off his face. Up here where the public eye did not see them there was no need to play Architect and Bureau Head who incidentally happened to be childhood friends.

“If I am a demon, what does that make you? Seven demons in a cloak making up a crimson blaze that has haunted me for as long as I can remember, then. But in any case, would you mind telling this demon what troubles you?”

“Out of concern for my mental well-being, or because otherwise Esteemed Elidibus will subject you to the ultimate horror of existing as a visible part of society by having you find a replacement for your unfortunately dead or worse, fired, head of the bureau you oversee?”

He let go of Hythlodaeus’ hands and crossed them with a faux hum of thought. That at least brought a spark of the usual grin that Hythlodaeus wore back to his face—for all their jabs and such, Hythlodaeus knew the answer now. An answer that apparently made him feel a little better.

“Idiot. If I could tell O Esteemed Elidibus to shove it, mark my words, I would. But I am concerned about your well-being, seeing as you are not well.”

“Good to hear you still think as highly of your colleagues as ever.” Hythlodaeus let out another sigh and let himself drop backwards. Lying sprawled on a roof was not exactly something that he did often, and Hades continued sitting with his legs crossed. “All those cities and regions lost lately have merely made me acutely aware of two things. One, I have an explanation for how odd the Underworld has looked lately. Two…. Hades. If we were to die in one such catastrophe and somehow, somehow after all this settled and we were reborn… would you want things to be the same all over again?”

He narrowed his eyes a little. “Going by the assumption that everything else remains the same, why should I desire breaking what was not broken?”

“So you would be Hades again, would accept the title Emet-Selch and become the Architect, content not having changed the slightest?”

He sighed and shrugged. Sometimes Hythlodaeus would make these completely nonsensical statements—apparently that was what had made the people so interested in him and his skills. True, he was virtually useless in a fight because he lacked the sheer skill to be destructive about it without a proper weapon in his hands, but Hythlodaeus remained one of the most perceptive people around. It unfortunately usually led him down a rabbit hole of thought experiments that wound up with him messed up for a day or two. Hades was just about the only person capable of setting Hythlodaeus straight—doubly so because Persephone’s free spirit attitude usually made Hythlodaeus overthink. The three of them were usually called a volatile reaction in the making, considering that Persephone acted without thinking about repercussions, Hythlodaeus overthought to the point of standing still and Hades tried to plan but let his emotions cloud his judgement.

“Why break what is not broken?”

“Yes, yes you said that already. But would you be content repeating the same over and over?”

“Is that what has been bothering you? The hypothetical rebirth you might experience, and the possibility of repeating the same actions over and over?” He let out a sigh and dropped down to lie next to Hythlodaeus. “Well then, enlighten me, Hyth. Would you be content?”

A long pause. The sun had long since set, leaving Amaurot under the star-covered sky. It was a clear night for once despite all that had been happening the planet over. Somehow that made it all the more frightening, and Hades understood why Hythlodaeus was stuck thinking about these things now of all times. It was getting closer. They were running out of time, and while the Convocation had been tasked with finding a solution, there was a disagreement amongst them regarding the plan. They did not know enough about this threat they were facing and they needed to learn more, Mnemosyne argued—and Lahabrea vehemently disagreed, called to action first. Tensions were high. Unnecessarily high if one were to ask Hades, but he also did not have the sway over Mnemosyne ad Lahabrea to even the tide a little. They needed to stand together or they would most certainly fall.

“I don’t know. And that, perhaps, frightens me the most. Being eternally stuck as overseer at the Bureau of the Architect sounds like a nightmare come true to me. Yet the prospect of potentially being reborn knowing who I was before and yet not walking the same path… is equally terrifying. Hythlodaeus would not be able to do anything else, for as much of a nightmare eternally being the same is… I would not want to change a thing. Yet at the same time always being Hythlodaeus of Amaurot who declines the honour of being Emet-Selch in favour of the much better suited Hades of Amaurot whom he loves is… not entirely enticing. Is there not a chance I could be Hythlodaeus of Amaurot who just so happens to be a historian that time around? Or a prince on the run. A forlorn soldier marching onto a battlefield knowing he will not win. A person who certainly has their own life but it is nothing exciting. A farmer, perhaps. I would quite make a horrid opera singer indeed, but the prospect of being one has its own charm to it.”

“You’re overthinking things, Hythlodaeus.”

“Don’t I ever. Well then, Emet-Selch. Enlighten me—what am I overthinking?”

He snorted and shook his head. “First off, your hypothetical is ridiculous. You of all people should know that the same soul is never born twice. Certainly, some share colours, but there are distinct differences between them. You shine bright crimson when I focus, Persephone shimmers iridescent—Igeyorhm for example is icy blue, crystalline blue-white. There are several people in her Bureau that have a similar colour, but most of them lack the sheer cold of hers. One flickers and twists. One is a swirl. Lahabrea’s red is a wildfire but nowhere near as blinding as yours is. So, think about it as much as you like, Hythlodaeus as you are would never be reborn the exact same way. This thus eliminates the fear you have of retreading the same path over and over without end, perhaps knowingly or unknowingly.”

Hythlodaeus let out a displeased sound somewhere between a sigh and an exhausted groan. “Hades—“

“Secondly, you would indeed make a horrid opera singer. Every plant you have ever tried to raise died an agonising death under your care. As excellent a politician you would make, your stamina certainly would not last you long enough to sustain you as royalty on the run. It is fine the way it is—I would not want to trade you for any of your suggested roles. And besides, even if you were to be reborn, what point is there in mulling over it? Whether things change or not, whether you know or not, do you not think that a lifetime is better spent acting rather than thinking?”

For a moment, Hythlodaeus remained still. Hades knew that he was squinting, his red eyes narrow enough that they were nearly closed by now. There were so many habits that Hythlodaeus had had since they were children that Hades could easily tell without even looking at the other. Thus he merely followed suit when Hythlodaeus suddenly heaved himself back into a sitting position.

“You most certainly can act everything out; you do think on occasion but at the end of the day you run ahead as brusquely as Persephone does. Cry that you are not like them in any way as much as you like, it is a truth that remains whether you like it or not. But… well. You do have a point. Even if I were to figure out the secrets of the very earth itself, with inaction all of this would be for naught.” Hythlodaeus tilted his head from one side to the other with a thoughtful hum, then cracked one of his signature grins. “Still, if I were to be reborn in any way, shape or form, I certainly hope to find you in that lifetime eventually. Whether I oversee the Bureau of the Architect or run from those that would persecute me, whether I am of Amaurot or a nameless farmer in a mountain village, whether I am marching to my certain death on a battlefield or about to spend half of my lifetime on a stage… It would be most horribly dull without you, Hades. Whether you are Esteemed Emet-Selch or my executioner, my lover as you are now or my most dire enemy, I would not want to spend a single lifetime without you.”

“That would almost be romantic if it were not such an incredibly weird conversation, Hyth.”

“Oh, this is both a promise and a warning; I will remember you as you once lived. Should I get lucky enough to meet you again somewhere as I hope I will no matter what, I will remind you of that much at the very least. Remind you that we once lived… In any case, thank you. I shall be back at my seat tomorrow, worry not.”

He rolled his eyes and dragged himself over to Hythlodaeus. Rather than saying anything reprimanding, he instead leaned against the other man and stared up at the sky for a while.

As much as he did not believe in any of this nonsense, there was something that he agreed with. If souls were capable of being reborn, he most certainly would want to find Hythlodaeus again. And Persephone, perhaps—though they were a most fickle beast to catch at times.

When Amaurot burned, the sheer volume of colours near blinded him. By the time it was settled, by the time he raised his hands with the other twelve, he could but wonder if Persephone and Hythlodaeus were still alive. Persephone he knew would still be—they were, after all, fickle. Fickle enough to call their only chance at survival nonsense, fickle enough to instead run off into the burning city with a friend of theirs whose soul was a burst of light nearly as blinding as Hythlodaeus’ shining red.

He saw the dark settle in icy blue and wild red, and likely his own soul grew darker still. But it was a comforting dark—comforting as they returned to their city in ruins. The planet was saved, but there was no stone left unturned.

They pulled Hythlodaeus out of a pile of corpses, his red eyes clouded and delirious nonsense spilling from his mouth as they stemmed the stream of blood that seeped out of a horrid wound in his side. He would survive, Loghrif said quietly, but no such thing could be said of countless others. Not to mention the wretched earth still groaning. Life was fleeting, and once the temporary blindness passed, Hades could only stare around in horror. He saw better than the others. But as the shining red flickered, as the darkness settled in around him, he could only see that everything was bleached and near faded to nothingness.

In the end, they made an offering of those that volunteered. The old that survived. The ones that were dying but conscious. Those that could not consent to it they left, but their numbers were hideously reduced as the sun finally rose above Amaurot. Persephone and their friend had reappeared once the breath of life returned to the planet, and the friend seemed to be seething.

It did not take long for them to raise their voice in opposition of everything that happened, and as much as he reached out to Persephone, they took their friend’s side. There had been enough tragedy. They did not need to raise all this new life only to offer it up to Zodiark. Zodiark who had saved them all, the Convocation argued. Zodiark who would return those He had taken.

“Hades,” Hythlodaeus croaked one morning when he got up. He had survived the events they called the Final Days of Amaurot, though he had lost most of his biting sarcasm along with his sight. He compensated for it by constantly peeking into the aether around him, though the Underworld would before long consume him entirely. Every day Hythlodaeus seemed to slip more.

Having him reach for his hand like that startled him, but the grip on his hand was surprisingly strong for someone who was getting weaker with every passing year.

“Hades, I… I….” There was a desperation to his voice that Hades could not place. He tried to think of something that could have upset Hythlodaeus like that, but nothing came to mind. Those unseeing eyes were pinned on him, though more accurately they were staring directly at his soul. He felt… transparent. It was uncomfortable; for the first time in their lives he felt uncomfortable around Hythlodaeus.

The grip lightened after a moment.

Hythlodaeus let go with a weary sigh that was so unlike him. “Never mind.”

He left feeling unsettled. The entire day felt surreal from this very moment on, and as they stared into the violently shuddering skies as light clashed against dark, he could not help but feeling that something more than this thing arising to meet Zodiark in combat was amiss.

It was as if Termination had revisited them. People screamed in the streets as the buildings came down, though their voices were quieter this time. Because there were less people overall, a voice in the back of his head that sounded a suspicious lot like himself whispered, because most of them were dead or part of Zodiark now. Zodiark, who fought against this apparition of light that had risen like a harpy to drown out the dark that had saved them.

They fled Amaurot in the end. Yet there were people who cheered as light struck dark, there were people who whimpered as dark struck light. Sparks showered down upon them, all of them glimmering iridescent. Hythlodaeus’ fingers dug into the arm he had offered to lead him.

“It’s breaking,” he breathed and let out a laugh that more sounded like a cry. “Oh, what have you done? What have you done?”

It made no sense to him. As Amaurot’s streets were turned into a warzone again, as finally the tensions in the group were high enough that Hades found himself standing with the rest of the Convocation as another group started blaming them for this and that this was the only correct thing to do, he realised he had missed a detail.

As earth broke and the very foundations of everything shook, as he and Lahabrea beside Elidibus in the front of their group that had left over a week ago stood face to face with Persephone’s friend who had raised this hell upon them with the help of others, he remembered. He remembered that Hythlodaeus had gone to see Persephone. Hades’ head shot around to search for them, and they indeed stood there with a guilty look on their face. He wanted to call out to them, wanted to ask them what in the seven hells they had done, what Hythlodaeus had done—but he did not get to ask either of them. Behind him, the rest of the Convocation let out a scream that was joined by everything and everyone. A hideous cacophony rose all at once.

And with a horrid splintering sound, it was over.

Unbroken, unsundered.

Blessed Children, go forth and seek.

It was a nightmare that he found no release from.

What they sought in the end was to restore that last whisper that kept them from breaking under that intense strain of light. It was the three of them, watching the ruins of a world break further and further, into shards and pieces—they watched them drift apart. Lahabrea reached his hand out for Igeyorhm, Igeyorhm who all but burst into pieces. Emet-Selch watched in horror as power and light, as the very Underworld itself diluted, was rerouted violently. He had his hands clasped over his ears to dim the horrid wretched sound as existence as he knew it shifted so violently it nearly pulled him apart. It was all thanks to their erstwhile saviour of their own making that they did not break apart. Elidibus, his voice laced with horror, called out. Whatever shard of His power remained, he made certain that they were unaffected. Hydaelyn, that wretched creation, shattered their bodies, yes, but their souls had been torn out and safely conserved here in this world between worlds. This vast empty space of neither light nor darkness that saw the world break apart and drift apart.

At first they attempted to see what had happened to the world in that very moment. They left their names behind doing so—after all, their bodies had been broken.

But as he watched all those broken shards he felt nothing short of horror. The colours were bleached and dimmed compared to what he saw before. In this state without a body he was more than capable of seeing all—whatever they had made Hydaelyn do, She had succeeded in re-routing everything that the Convocation had given all to conserve. The constant gleam that he had seen was gone, replaced by blinding light. But in order to keep the balance, it seemed as if the people were left with naught but black-hearted darkness. Perhaps that was what the infernal Hydaelyn had seen Zodiark as, but it made the people fight over the smallest things. Murder ran rampant on this piece of the world. The ruins of Amaurot were stripped of everything useful as if they were scared of setting a foot in there for too long. The Realm where the Gods rose, they called it. Whence the Twelve were born, whence the Twelve did their bidding alongside the Mother of All Creation.

Thirteen.

Thirteen just as the members of the Convocation by the end. Yet what remained were three, albeit Elidibus quickly hatched a plan. Distraught as they were, neither Lahabrea nor Emet-Selch had much of an idea—thus when asked to find the broken souls of their comrades, Emet-Selch nigh wanted to laugh. There was no point; they were sundered after all. All ten of them gone, useless broken playthings of Hydaelyn just as these people they had observed for a mortal lifetime. These creatures lived such short lives. In the same amount of time as he had spent with Hythlodaeus after the Final Days these sundered souls grew from a newborn to an old person.

But he did as he was asked, sought those familiar flares of colour only to find pathetic shades of the people he once knew. They retained their powers at the very least, and thus it was easy for them to elevate these shades into something that resembled their colleagues. Emet-Selch admittedly thought little of it. He but wanted Amaurot back; the rest he cared little about. Amaurot under the darkened skies of Zodiark, naught else. But they would have to fight for it, and thus they decided to tally themselves.

Thirteen members of the Convocation. Thirteen shards surrounding a Source they broke off off.

It seemed the most logical thing to assign one to each.

He was given the Twelfth.

It was a dreadfully boring place to be; it was everything that he had ever known yet at the same time someone had moved everything a few inches to the side. He entered the room sensing that something was wrong but he could not put a finger on it because in theory everything was right where it belonged. He walked the ruins of Amaurot for the longest time, brushing a hand that no mortal saw across scorched and broken stone that reminded him of two times an ending to one lifetime that carried so much.

They were to sway the hold of darkness on the world, but truth be told, Emet-Selch would have rather dug up everything in this place to rebuild his home. Somewhere out in this place lay a shattered piece of Zodiark and he could feel its call, but he did not have the energy to pinpoint where it came from. Eventually, with a resigned sigh, he extended a hand towards a young man who came to these ruins atop a mountain to seek either treasure or a swift death by hurling himself off the cliff not too far beyond the ruins of a once busy street of creators.

Emet-Selch all but put his arms around that person and whispered into their ears, and then shoved their feebly flickering soul aside. It was a colour that held no meaning to him, unfamiliar and bleached to the point of being unrecognisable. Perhaps they had survived Amaurot. Perhaps they were one of these horrid creatures that were born after the Final Days. Those things they had tried to nurture after Termination, those things that the foolish ones under Hydaelyn had tried to defend. He did not see the reason behind that.

But as he wore this new persona like a cloak, forcing that mortal’s entire history and personality out of the soul in a single stroke, he realised that he had not exactly paid attention to them.

Somewhere on the shores an empire had sprung up all by itself, an empire that desired to rule the other kingdoms and empires across the star.

The name they had given this world was that of the Mother of All Creation. That at least seemed to be the constant across the stars—Emet-Selch dimly recalled that on the Source they also called the star ‘Hydaelyn’. Wretched, wretched Hydaelyn had Her claws sunk deep into these shards She created.

He paid little attention to these fools around him; somehow, somewhere, he found himself enlisted as a soldier of that empire. The names of cities and countries, continents even, were based on the languages that these mortals had developed in their all too rapidly passing lifetimes. It had been a hundred lifetimes for them and they had turned the language they once spoke into something else altogether. He understood thanks to the gift that Zodiark had bestowed upon them once upon a time. Before the Sundering. Before everything he had ever known had been torn apart, dark replaced by light.

As common footsoldier there was naught he could do to increase darkness’ hold on this shard. Truth be told, he was still grieving. This very mortal was still grieving, having lost his entire family in one swift, cruel blow. Bandits, they called it. Something almost entirely unknown within his childhood home and Amaurot, though Mnemosyne had on occasion reported something like that from the poorer regions. The Convocation then made certain to bolster these regions to quell conflict—sometimes it was enough. Sometimes it was not. Some people enjoyed hurting their fellow man for the sake of violence or perverse enjoyment. They were not that different from the mortals in that regard.

But there was something about how frequently these conflicts and bouts of violence sprung up that completely caught him off-guard.

This was a shard without control, and he was but a soldier enlisted in the nonsense of this world. He marched. He bled. He watched his supposed friends and comrades die on the ends of swords, engulfed by the flames of a paltry magic spell.

Hells above and beyond, if he did nothing then this shard would surely consume itself and return whence it came before long. He lived content with that, watched the years that once were insignificant to him pass him by. The mortal he possessed died a swift, quiet death—a sword rammed into his chest, all the way to the hilt. His opponent had broken bones, was bleeding profusely and would surely perish not long thereafter. Emet-Selch deattached himself from the mortal and let the soul take the reins in its final moments. He then watched the aether that made that soul vanish, vanish so far down that he finally understood.

The Underworld, torn as it was, remained a cycle.

But rather than cleanse everything and have it become a part of the world itself, the Lifestream as these people called it cleansed the souls and spewed them out again, reborn but not aware of who they were before. He saw the same soul reborn twice, once dead from a famine that ravaged this part of the continent, and the other it was born as the bloody youngest prince of the empire. A soldier who lost all, a child in a war-torn country, a prince in a hilariously long line of successors to the throne.

Emet-Selch took the role of yet another footsoldier, hesitantly almost. It was something he had not considered—after all, these souls were insignificant and broken, mere echoes of what he remembered. But this meant that everywhere in these forsaken worlds were cheap copies of the people who had survived the Final Days only to be beset by Hydaelyn and Her infuriating victory.

These mortals were not the people he once knew. They would never be these people.

Thus he followed along with what the emperor ordered, questioned nothing even as royal after royal perished on the front lines and he barely made it out alive every time his regiment was assigned to yet another royal bastard who was trying to fight their way up the line of succession. It sowed wonderful amounts of chaos, yes, but Emet-Selch had set out to observe, not to intervene. If they needed to upset the balance then most certainly an empire like that would be a wonderful example to follow. And follow he did, pretending to be a mortal just as the rest of them. The soul he had shooed into a corner of this body had attempted to fight back but he had silenced it swiftly; naught stood against even the slightest sign of creation magic. Perhaps that, too, could be used to their advantage in the right doses.

He lost track of the war.

He had no idea what country they were fighting in, only that these mountains were eerily familiar to him. He knew nothing about these people they were supposed to face on the morrow. They all fought with weapons and magic rather than anything advanced. Like little children play-fighting in the upper city streets, laughing and getting underfoot whenever something took him there. Frazzled robe edges were not all that uncommon when someone had to wade through those often street-filling scraps that children got into, but they also all apologised whenever something happened. These children here however were out to kill the opposing party. It wasn’t weapons created to be shiny instead of dangerous, it wasn’t playful little sparks that sizzled and shot across the ground.

How hilarious.

When the morrow came, Emet-Selch knew that the body he had taken residence in would not survive this clash. There was this air about this entire endeavour that painted it as pointless, and his entire party shared the same glum energy. He, however, found himself brimming with anger that morning as they set out in the mountains in the fog. Even children knew better than to make tactical blunders like this. They were on foreign ground fighting against a people that had grown up here. There was absolutely no way any of them would make it out alive—the princeling playing emperor they had been assigned led them all to their deaths. In that short, insignificant life he had led he had not come to learn even the most basic bit of strategy. A child play-fighting in the streets of Amaurot was better suited to lead this group into combat than this idiot, but that had ever been what he had observed on the Twelfth Shard. This insignificant world that tried so hard at conquest yet failed at the simplest things.

Admittedly he had been content to watch, but as fury surged through him while he marched along this group of soldiers resigned to death, he made a vow. He would at least guide these idiot children into battle. How the battles ended would be up to them. But Emet-Selch was not going to play a footsoldier ever again.

Half a day passed and the fog only got heavier. It was unnatural, someone marching somewhere behind him muttered, frustration and fear lacing their voice. Emet-Selch himself could see naught with those damnable mortal eyes he possessed—and instead turned to see. Those colours that upset him mattered little; he wanted to know what would inevitably kill the mortal he commandeered.

Somewhere in the heavy aether-laced fog that confirmed it was some clever application of magic, his eyes caught the slightest flash of crimson.

A moment later the people living in the mountains were upon them. Or rather, their weapons were.

Arrows and spears took care of the front guard. The rear was quite literally flushed down the mountain as a wave of water hit them. Their screams echoed through the place, and for a moment he turned his attention to the ever so familiar but faint red.

Indeed, in the middle of this gaggle of mages and archers stood a young man with bright red eyes and features that Emet-Selch had seen on the Source before they found Lohgrif’s shard there. On the Source they were called Miqo’te; bright and fast for their size but limited to hunting what they wanted to hunt.

The red-eyed one gave a command. Thunder rained down upon them, and he snapped his attention back. Might as well pretend he cared for his fellow soldiers and followed them as they fled.

Surprising no one, they were picked off one by one. Seven fleeing soldiers were hit by a rockslide that the red-eyed one ordered his people to loosen. Arrows hit the ground behind them and the ominous sound of those people following them sounded through the fog.

By the time he stopped most of the others were dead. But he stopped because Red-Eyes jumped down in front of them, either through suicidal overconfidence or because he had another ace up his sleeve.

“And so arrives the remainder,” Red-Eyes said. There was a staff in one of his hands, and his ears were held upright, attentive. Even though he had the upper hand he was not going to stop paying attention to his opponents. “Your prince has fallen in your pointless endeavour, and your comrades followed suit. Would you tell your emperor that conquest of this country is naught he can achieve if we let you go? Or do you wish to join your comrades,” he flicked his tail towards the yawning abyss beside them, “down there? Either can be arranged, Imperials.”

For a moment he swore he sat on that roof again, heard Hythlodaeus’ long-forgotten voice. Emet-Selch was the soldier marching to their certain death on the battlefield that Hythlodaeus had mentioned as a possibility for himself.

Red-Eyes waited for an answer. Another soldier gave it, a woman who had family back in the capital. She nearly begged to be let back there, that she would forward this place being a death trap to the emperor.

They left. Red-Eyes let them go, but Emet-Selch turned around one last time to look at this crimson spark.

He let go of the body he inhabited for so long. The mortal swayed, confused over suddenly regaining control. They tumbled into the abyss, and Emet-Selch departed.

This shard would need some serious leading by the reins if it was to be of use. But he did not wish to remain here even a moment longer—it was nightmarish, having these reminders of times long gone by so close.

Igeyorhm proved to be too good at what she did.

He had barely reached Elidibus back on the Source when they all but received a call for help from her.

The Thirteenth was teetering on the brink, and no matter how many times she tried to reignite the spark of light in it, she failed.

“The moment I set my mind on working, Hydaelyn reared Her head and made certain I would have opposition,” she said when they arrived. “I may have… overestimated these mortals. Their light was raring and blinding, but they were… not organised. Or at least not organised enough.”

The skies above Amaurot had been a comforting dark for the longest time after the Final Days. The sun still shone during the day, but the nights were an all-encompassing dark—yet the sun still rose. The skies above the First Shard were nearly menacing-looking, with the sun long vanished and most of everything on the decline due to a lack of light.

“How much time has passed here, precisely?”

Igeyorhm was fretting. This piece of her that they had risen to stand beside them in power was Igeyorhm, yet she was also not. Perhaps a leftover from the mortal life they plucked her from by telling her a truth that she always knew but never managed to put into words. But as Elidibus stared her down, she shrunk away.

Something Esteemed Igeyorhm, member of the Convocation of Fourteen that oversaw Amaurot’s affairs, would have never done.

“R-Roughly three years.”

Elidibus grumbled something to himself as he looked around.

Emet-Selch himself was more focused on the apparent lack of mortals in this place. Back on the Twelfth there had been plenty supposedly empty places with no one living in them, only for the soldiers to run into people there. Forests suddenly were the hiding place of bandits, caves suddenly held entire family branches—and the mountains that divided one half of the continent from the other were home to the Twelfth’s equivalent to the Miqo’te, an organised and well-educated people who managed to outplay an imperial whelp with a group of a hundred versus a hundred hundred.

Here, however, nothing stirred. There were no mortals watching another mortal talk to herself; Emet-Selch and Elidibus lacked a body, after all. Mortals did not perceive that which did not have bodies, and whatever mortal Igeyorhm had taken control over most certainly looked like a lunatic talking to herself.

Still, even as he let his gaze wander about there was naught to be seen. Only the dark, but not the dark he remembered and longed for—this was something primordial that could not compare to Zodiark. Dark without a will, dark without a reason.

That seemed to be the issue here—the feeble light that Igeyorhm mentioned could never have stood against this black abyss rolling in and out like a tide of utter despair.

He claimed there was something he needed to see first before making a statement on whether this mess was salvageable or not and wandered off. This was a star on the brink, but if these pointless mortals of this shard were anything like their original selves of Amaurot then there would be quite a fight left in them. It did take him some wading through hungry dark devouring every spark of the other elements that it found before he found a settlement.

It was a paltry thing, pitifully standing where the unendingly rising and devouring dark did not quite reach yet. A small group of survivors, and as he whisked through the small place to listen in on them, he nearly started laughing. Most of them were lamenting their losses. Talk about people being caught in the flood of darkness mutating into monsters that sought to gorge themselves upon the remaining living beings’ aether. Creation out of control dragged everything into the light and made it reality—but apparently Hydaelyn’s new laws of the world meant that they stood against this imbalance without the powers to fight back. Hells, he even saw a flock of these monsters close in on the settlement, but it was merely a flock of half-grown and ravenous abominations that were easily shot out of the skies with arrows.

The people counted their remaining arrows with crestfallen faces.

They were merely stalling their inevitable demise or horrid transformation.

It wasn’t until he felt eyes on him that he truly paid attention to these mortals. It was pitifully disgusting to hear all this wallowing without action. There had to be something that could be done—he stopped dead when someone voiced that exact thought aloud and he felt eyes upon him.

An Elezen woman was staring straight at him. The child she had been patting on the head, another Miqo’te with unsettlingly familiar red eyes, drew their ears back a little.

“I know it’s silly, you always say that. But there’s gotta be something we overlooked… right? Maybe… I’ve always been good at seeing things others couldn’t, maybe… Miss Cee? Are you listening?”

He narrowed his eyes at the woman—and she squinted back.

No one on the Twelfth had been able to see him unless he took a body for himself. He had not been able to interact with anything unless he willed it to move through ancient magicks that none of these fools were able to understand. But this woman stared at him for a moment longer, a tremor going through her body as if she were shaking with rage. But it passed, and she turned back to the kid beside her, said something to them.

Emet-Selch focused. There was something wrong here, something that should not be that way. The mortal herself seemed perfectly unassuming—so he decided to see.

He was not surprised by an achingly familiar crimson flicker leaving as the child went off to do whatever it was that mortal children in a dying world did.

What nearly sent him staggering backwards was the sheer amount of light he looked at a moment later. There was a distinct colour, a gentle violet of some sort that he did not remember. But the soul this woman held was entwined with a light so bright it nigh blinded him. It ran through the soul itself, swirled about in the violet. But the edges of that soul, where it had been cleanly severed off the original soul, the light shone so bright that it hurt.

Whatever that meant, he did not know. He only knew that others with souls like that could represent a problem—it was clear that Hydaelyn had Her hands on these people somehow.

For the briefest of moments he wondered if Hythlodaeus had seen something similar looking at the Convocation after the Final Days.

In ruins beset and harrowed by a tempestuous wind, far from a world brought to the brink by Emmerololth and Altima, they met face to face again.

Whence the Twelve Walked the people called the ruins of Amaurot—the Twelve in question being names that they must have remembered from before all was torn into pieces. Emet-Selch and Lahabrea were to sow chaos on the Source while Emmerololth and Altima brought that one shard to its knees. There was still a connection between these shards, the souls would merge neatly back together where the light had torn them if only they brought these souls together. Despairing dark was not the way to go about it, and thus they had to dig their claws in deeper.

Barely a generation had passed here since his departure for the Twelfth and the Thirteenth’s horrendous demise at the hands of Igeyorhm. These were all children still seeking their origins, and though the ruins were supposedly off-limits they had ventured into them by now. Children who used broken tools, children who were so easily told nonsense about their creation. As far as they knew, mankind had merely started existing one day. They did not wish to look deeper into the issues of that—family trees abruptly came into existence with naught preceding it.

He and Lahabrea had worked hard to cause this sort of imbalance. Rousing the still winds of the earth into a tempest was in itself a horrendous harsh labour. Angering the spirits of wind that remained and turning that anger towards mortals had been even harder—after all, these spirits were just as torn as the mortals themselves. Yet they were also a remnant of a world that lived only in their memories now.

In the ruins called Whence the Twelve Walked, in the ruins of Amaurot, Lahabrea and Emet-Selch came face to face with a soul that was entwined with light. It ran across the clean severs, it nearly drowned the colour out. But between that infernal light he saw it; he caught those glimmering flashes of a colour that could not be described. The shimmering iridescence that belonged only to Mnemosyne, the shimmer that they had thought lost for no mortal seemed to bear it. Here they were, reborn a mortal, with Hydaelyn’s claws dug deep into them.

And beside them was an assortment of others. None of them had the light so intensely laced through their souls as Mnemosyne did, but it was clear that they carried a gift.

One soul stood out, and while those of the light chased Lahabrea, Emet-Selch went for the weakest link. The one soul that lacked the protection of light.

The one soul that shone bright crimson.

There was no recognition in the mortal’s face when he introduced himself. Only blank fear—this was the weakest link by lacking a boon of light but also because it was the youngest of these pesky meddlers. It had eyes that were so achingly familiar to him that he wanted to claw them out, but he did naught of the sort.

This thing barely was worthy of being thought of as part of Hythlodaeus. Red-Eyes on the Twelfth at least had had something going for them. The child on the Thirteenth had claimed that it could see and turned into a monster of hideous proportions, a ravenous creature that saw but never saw far enough to sate its monstrous hunger. This thing, however, trembled in fear while Lahabrea kept the Light Ones occupied.

The winds howled around them, tore his hood off and had him likely look like an apparition from the hells themselves.

This mortal cowered. Whimpered.

Said something about this being the rightful wrath of those who once dwelled Whence the Twelve Walked.

He cast it aside and laughed hollowly into the howling winds.

He was the Architect.

In times gone by that he longed for it meant that he constructed and took care of the city’s inner workings. He supervised creations that could impede or interrupt the usual workings of the city, built parts as much as he destroyed him. His closest advisors were the head of the Bureau of the Architect, someone who oversaw submitted creations that were not involved with infrastructure, and his fellow member of the Convocation Mnemosyne, for integrity meant nothing if it did not work for the people. Everything on a planning board could look flawless yet the people would be hindered more than served by it. That was the duty of Emet-Selch.

On the Source, the name Emet-Selch soon became a synonym for utter orchestrated chaos. Where Lahabrea struck into the hearts of mankind and brought powerful individuals under his thrall to eke out a heavy lean towards destruction, Emet-Selch planned it in detail. He raised kingdoms that would eradicate each other, he saw technology on the rise only to use it for warfare. He fed civilisations bits and pieces of Amaurotian tech and magic while Elidibus swayed the hearts of the inevitably oppressed to rise in rebellion. He even granted these creatures knowledge of creation magic—it exhausted them, they had to compensate for their lack of skill and power with aetheric energy stored in crystals. But soon the first Creations in history rose, and they were devastating. Unstable creations as if they were made by children trying to copy Hythlodaeus’ favourite birds that shone in every colour under the sky. Except they did not have a laughing and grinning man telling them how to make certain they did not combust once the birds did such.

He unleashed phoenixes that haunted him from the days where he was made Emet-Selch. This time they were truly soulless creatures that did as they were bid to do. Until the very day they gained souls, and mortals set their eyes upon them. The Rise and Fall of the Firebirds would have been a play that he would have enjoyed watching back in Amaurot, but it merely made him laugh the ugliest laugh in centuries.

He orchestrated the kingdom that ordered the birds dead’s downfall in the swiftest, most gruesome way yet. He gave the mortals a nudge, and they did the rest of the work. The world they had meant seemingly nothing to them.

Every time catastrophe edged ever closer those with light searing their marred souls rose. The power Hydaelyn gave them made them see and understand, though their sight was limited to merely seeing that which they soon called Paragons. The Echo, some called it—for Hydaelyn tried to warn Her children by letting them catch glimpses of the past. It was not unlike the understanding that Zodiark had granted the Convocation, and soon they did not bother with making a distinction any longer. For all they cared, both Paragons and Light Ones carried the Echo, though the Paragons unmistakably had the better control over it.

By the time the Source was ripe for catastrophe, Emet-Selch withdrew. He did not want to rouse another storm, did not want to stare at this hollowed out earth and the skies that were another war away from raining nature’s unholy retribution upon them. The spirits of wind stayed calm, the spirits of earth, water and ice were powerless, the spirits of fire were used and on the verge of vanishing. Nature would soon rain the only thing it could upon the mortals. Lightning seldom struck twice, but one strike was enough to bring a swift Calamity upon these lands. Another Rejoining was at hand.

He didn’t care.

He had spent so much time leading mortals about in ways that would benefit the Paragons that he had grown tired of their ceaseless conflict. It was so easy to spark violence in their hearts. The same souls that were able to smile even at their worst enemies because there was no point in physically fighting over it and battles of wit were much more entertaining now attacked as rabid animals if given enough incentive.

He politely excused himself and wished his colleagues a successful Ardor.

Emet-Selch wanted to sleep for a while despite being stuck in a perpetual nightmare.

He was roused for another round with the mortals. This time around he attempted to be less vile—after resting for that long, he had started to wonder if there had not been a point in what those that inevitably summoned Hydaelyn had said. These new living beings that sprouted up after Zodiark saved them… perhaps they were deserving of life, of the legacy that Amaurot left.

The Source had quite changed between then and now. On the rise now was a country called Allag which had driven the majority of the Seeker population out of the central continent. There were still those families that roamed the forests and hunted but they were perceived as less of an issue as the entire tribes that were driven out and into the mountains.

A hilarious mistake, considering what had happened in the Twelfth. Thus he wormed his way into the royal advisor’s body and immediately started correcting the mistakes that this first king with his eyes on world conquest in this Astral Era made. Yes, the Miqo’te were driven out but Emet-Selch as advisor ensured that the would be conscripted into the army of Allag either way. Most of these were women, as strong as every other conscript about. Rarer still, the men. Some of them plain saw it as a possibility to get stronger. Others cared little. Those that did not care usually made it home in one piece and then made it to the family head position. One of the roughest diplomatic smooth-over campaigns he as advisor led was trying to reason with a tribe’s furious three leaders—all of them talented mages who had lost their children in this supposedly pointless war of conquest. He eventually soothed these tides over by promising this tribe’s Tias would be spared conscription, and as he left he realised that he had only seen one Nunh and two Tias of age in a tribe that numbered half a thousand.

Allag he granted more than ever before—it was a glorious empire on the rise. After the first advisor died, he made certain he took over as the next prince. That prince became and emperor, and Emet-Selch led them to more main continent victories.

All while he ensured that the next in line would set his eyes on greater things.

Allag flourished, grew exponentially and ridiculously. It was reminiscent of when thunder had rained down upon the heads of people except this time nature mostly came out unscathed. Mostly.

It took a few generations before madness set into the hearts of the conquerors but it was an inevitability he had counted on. Amongst the gaggle of scientists responsible for it, he too marvelled at Azys Lla in the skies, ignoring the gaping hole they had torn into the earth. Re-routing the aetherial flow into making certain that Azys Lla never sought to reconnect with its original place meant that this would inevitably turn into a bland dead wasteland.

But a bland dead wasteland was useful once the people forgot what it was for. And between the Primals that arose semi-regularly only to be put down by an entire gaggle of mortals not afraid of death or on rare occasions those that Hydaelyn had already tempered to Her will gouging themselves on aether, he knew he had managed to create something that would be useful for later. In a few generations, after the decline following a catastrophe, Lahabrea or Elidibus could claim that this place of Hydaelyn had been ravaged by repeated Primal summonings. It could drive a nation against the beast tribes.

But for now, he was an Allagan scientist. And he was an Allagan scientist again, and again. Every lifetime was different. He was best friends with the monstrous mortals that saw the Primals Sophia, Sephirot and Zurvan locked away as an experiment. He was a father of four who got involved with the military and sailed off to far-off shores to ensure the death of one dragon and returned as Paragon to sweetly whisper to the other that she could have her beloved back. He was the sole voice of reason in a room full of madmen who called for Primal Bahamut’s imprisonment. He was the one to place bindings on Tiamat who stared at him with eyes full of despair. She asked him why, why was he doing all of this when all he ever cared for was long gone. She asked why he did not help prevent the tragedy that befell his home from ever repeating—and he was not sure if she meant this mortal’s life of being conscripted against his will after losing everything, everything, or if she saw the Paragon beyond.

He did not ask her.

Azys Lla would be set adrift before long and no one would ever find her again.

There was a rumble in the earth that spelled destruction by the time he was so tired of mortals and their pointlessness that he simply stopped being involved. Whatever this clone of Xande did, he did not care. Whatever idiocy his advisors suggested, it was perfect for the coming storm.

He instead took over a royal servant to see if the royal children here were less idiotic than they had been on the Twelfth.

Indeed, the two eldest ones noticed something amiss. Their bright red eyes shone with intelligent wit and until a few turns of the sun ago they had played at architects. Hells, if he were not the Architect himself he would have been impressed by their clever application of infrastructure in regards to energy output of this facility or the other. But once more he merely saw children being given a puzzle to solve by someone from the Bureau while their parents waited in line for something or other. These two were not much different than that, and compared to the children of then they were quite lacking in intellect despite everything that Allag had to offer being in their little heads.

It was clear that this Doga and this Unei would be spelling some sort of trouble if Allag continued. They were reasonable, with the best of the people in their minds.

Alas, the clone of Xande had been less than involved with other mortals.

There were others with a claim to the throne, many of them power-hungry and violent as Xande himself was. Intelligent like Doga and Unei.

He eventually kept his attention on a princess who repeatedly made trouble not by being violent or intelligent but because she was a child with boundless energy. So much of a child and so far from the throne was this girl that they assigned a conscript to her safety—a conscript from the far-off mountains that they had driven his tribe to generations ago, a conscript who was by all means still a child himself.

The conscript did not interest him—greenish blue eyes and red hair gave him away as member of the least interesting tribe exiled to that region. It was Princess Salina who caught his interest.

No, not Princess Salina.

The soul she bore interested him.

It was a brimming, lively crimson.

So intrigued by that was he that he took over her servant for a while. The servant he had been posing as died of old age not long thereafter anyway, and suddenly instead of raising an empire from the ground up without being the emperor more than once, Emet-Selch found himself as G’desch Tia, though here in Allag he had to drop the tribal name and was merely Conscript Desch. What he had mistaken for a child doing what children did he was near immediately taught was sharp wit. Sharp wit coupled with a sarcasm that seemed wrong coming from a ten-year-old who just so happened to have royal blood.

“Your Highness,” he began once they were out of the palace that night, trying to copy Desch’s more fretting nature, “is this truly wise?”

“Wise? No. Would anyone care? Also no!” She twirled through the empty streets. “But I’m not allowed to leave the Crystal Tower, and there’s so much more out here than in there! The blue and gold gets kind of choking, you know? And no, please. Don’t give me the speech on safety again—this is the capital city! It is as safe as can be, Desch.”

An overglorified point of view. The capital street were perhaps safer than most others thanks to the numerous bits and bots checking for hostile elements, yes, but there were more than enough dark and blind corners one could drag her to to keep her for ransom. Yet at the same time he understood where she was coming from.

Desch had in fact let him take over with nary a protest; in the last few attempts of taking over a mortal they had started fighting back violently much to his surprise. It meant that their souls were getting stronger thanks to the Rejoining, something that he both loved and hated at the same time. Desch on the other hand had fought back to ask a single question.

“I care not what you do with my body, but should any harm come to Princess Salina because of you, I will fight back, Paragon. So tell me, do you mean harm to her?”

It was a baffling loyalty towards a girl who lived in the bosom of wealth, who was technically the daughter of the oppressors that had driven Desch’s ancestors out.

It took another handful years before he finally understood. Salina, now sixteen, kicked him out of his bed in the middle of the night. Her face was screwed up, a bag slung over her shoulders, and most shockingly of all, she was wearing a commoner’s clothes. For 22-year-old Desch this would have been a scandalous thing to behold and thus he faked horror, but as he opened his mouth to ask what in the seven hells was going on, Salina put a finger to her lips.

“Get up, Desch,” she hissed and tossed him something that looked like street clothes. “We’re getting out of here.”

“M-May I know why, Your Highness?” He still immediately did what Salina asked of him, because that was who Desch was in the end. Her servant, her only friend, the supposed voice of reason behind her actions. In the end Desch was the emotional fool and Salina his surprisingly cold foil.

“Drop the Highness. I only need you to get me to the outer city limits, and then you are hereby relieved of your duties and free to return home.”

He flattened his ears against his head in a show of false horror. “B-But….”

Salina let out a long, exasperated groan. “Please, Desch. It is not wise. No one would care. But I need to get out of here.”

He played the compliant servant who did as he was asked. Salina had found yet another way out of the Crystal Tower—the ones she had used in the past had all been sealed off. As he followed her through a ridiculous series of climbing up and down the jagged outsides of the Crystal Tower, as he watched her open windows and disable roaming patrolling bits, he swore that if she were but a little taller and a lot harsher with her words, she would be a spitting image of Hythlodaeus whose still-torn soul she bore. It burned crimson, brighter than it had since the Final Days but still so disgustingly pale compared to the original. When they finally made it to the streets he let out a breath that he had been holding for the last minute as they made their way away from the Tower. There were plenty of soldiers around, and the conscripts knew another conscript on the run when they saw one. But now as they edged closer and closer to the limits of the city that Salina had been making a beeline for ever since they were out of the Crystal Tower’s shadow, there was a question both burning on his and Desch’s tongue.

“Wait, please. Wait. What is all of this about, Your H—Salina?”

She stopped. Kicked her feet against a wall once or twice before she turned around. Those red eyes of Allagan royals were so close to the same red that Hythlodaeus had had that he was surprised it had taken so long for his soul to crop up in a royal brat. Salina’s were brimming with an anger he had seen countless times with mortals. It was the desire to do something they were not supposed to do, something that might endanger not only them but others.

“Be quiet and follow me. I cannot tell that to a servant of the empire, but once your service ends I can.”

And with that she continued her running away as the sun slowly set above the Allagan Empire he had helped build. Desch in the back of his mind was immensely worried about the princess who was running away, Emet-Selch was more concerned about the fact she was clearly going to meet someone. With a Catastrophe on the horizon, there had been surprisingly little opposition from Hydaelyn. Her champions had to be somewhere, and he had a feeling that he would be meeting these tools of Hers sooner rather than later.

Indeed, it came as little surprise to him that there was a flicker of light in the souls of the people Salina met with. They eyed Desch, raised their weapons at him. A simple pull of the trigger and the Miqo’te would be dead on the ground and neither he nor the Paragon controlling him would have gotten an answer.

Salina stepped between him and the people she had been desperate to find.

“In place of His Everseeing Benevolence, I relieve you of your duty, Conscript Desch. You may do whatever you please now, and you have no duty to report to anyone but yourself.”

“Unwise, Salina,” one of the people hissed. “Letting him go when he has been a conscript for so long? How can you be sure that he won’t go crawling back to the Crystal Tower to report us?”

He understood who exactly Salina had gone to.

There was a rumour going about that an underground movement sought to stop the Crystal Tower and Dalamud from siphoning even more energy out of the sunlight. It was true that this very connection was Emet-Selch’s carefully constructed way to immediately cause enough damage to force a Rejoining, but he was not going to let these fools know. Instead he played who he had played for the last six years—Conscript Desch who held no love for the Allagan Empire but served its least likely to ascend the throne princes because she treated him like her equal rather than her servant. He might not be the bravest around, but he most certainly was roaring somewhere in the back of his head. Therefore Emet-Selch shot a glance at Salina, then turned to look at these rebels in the making—and straightened out his back. Even though the light they carried spelled trouble down the line he was not going to get himself shot without much fanfare.

“The day I go crawling back to the Crystal Tower to report Salina is the very bloody day I intend to upheave this very empire with my bare hands. But go ahead. Remove the undesirable element.”

For a moment these people stared him down.

Then they laughed.

“Well, colour me surprised. An imperial with a backbone. You sure that’s your Desch, little Salina? He always sounded and looked more a fool than anything else.”

And with a cold jolt of horror, Emet-Selch understood. Leave it to Hythlodaeus or a vain reflection of him to take part in revolution from the tender age of ten onwards. With a mind as coldly calculating as his, surely there was something going on that unsettled that part of Hythlodaeus that most certainly remained even in this girl. And indeed, her soul was flaring as brightly as these useless shards could when she crossed her arms.

“Doga and Unei said that I could trust you because you, too, oppose Ultima. So I will. But perhaps… perhaps let us make Desch part of our merry band?”

How… bold.

She likely knew that either Desch was going to get killed by her new allies out of fear that he might talk after all, or he was going to be hunted down by the empire for likely kidnapping a royal heir to the throne.

Indeed, one of the people with light woven into their soul let out a long sigh. “We are hardly a merry band, but that would be up to him.”

Any other mortal would have run away in terror. The empire cared so little about where their Miqo’te conscripts came from that most certainly no one would pin him down as G’desch. Which in turn meant that returning ‘home’ was a safe bet for Emet-Selch if he wanted to observe this conflict from afar. But at the same time he could not help but wonder what exactly these mortal fools were planning; there was absolutely no way that they had figured out Xande. Hells, Emet-Selch himself had but recently turned his nose up at that man. Consenting with the void was something that only Elidibus would suggest; those souls consumed by primordial darkness hungered for the light that the Source had to offer and there were plenty of mages dumb enough to draw their powers from places that they did not know. The void in turn was one such place, and the connection between the Source and the Thirteenth made it ridiculously easy to call upon.

While he mulled, he heard a feeble voice deep down ask him to make a decision. Desch was as timid as a mouse, but now that soul that was unfamiliar to Emet-Selch roiled with an anxious energy that he had not seen in quite a while.

He nodded, whether to the people Salina had wanted to get to or to Desch he was not quite sure.

Feeble as these mortals were, there was something interesting about this pair. What sorts of fools got involved with their servants?

Then again… then again, that was quite literally something that Hythlodaeus would have joked about. Plenty of stories penned in Amaurot were written like that.

Salina and Desch were an element of danger on the same level as those with Hydaelyn’s claws inside them.

He would disengage as soon as those Echo-bearers let him out of their sight. Elidibus and Lahabrea needed to hear about this, and as intriguing as Hythlodaeus’ soul was in grand design of things, he had a bad taste in his mouth. Allag was a pet project, one could say. There was no way that Salina would live to impress—imperials were all rotten to the core. And as much as he tried to find worth in her outside of her being interesting to him because of the colour of the soul, there was nothing. She lacked the magical skill of Doga and Unei. She was a bloody child with wide eyes playing at rebel. This was doomed to fail and there was no telling how much pointless blood would be shed.

Goodness, those mortals had nearly managed to make him think of them as people.

The cold steel of the blade against his throat was just another point of hilarity. He so very desperately watched the Source after he slept through a Calamity, sought to see anything resembling general intelligence. But no. In the wake of devastating earth splitting the people all but turned to bloody murder. The already driven out tribes were driven away further, and even if he had desired finding whether Desch had survived and returned home, that had been three lifetimes ago by this point. Someone or something was gathering the people’s strengths again, and nigh immediately these shining souls cropped up.

This was not one such soul.

Hythlodaeus never was.

He had played this man’s childhood friend for the longest time. In fact, he once again was his childhood friend—a mad rush of folly, as Lahabrea would call it. Hubris, even. But seeing these two children had roused an almost petty jealousy within him, and after the grandiose rise and fall of Allag he thought he had more than earned the right to be idle and engage petty little projects.

The man was a far cry from the Hythlodaeus that Emet-Selch was starting to forget more and more as time went by. He had long since forgotten the little things and no matter how desperately he tried to recall them they never came back to him. All he remembered was that Hythlodaeus was a surprisingly picky eater—this man had been to, to the point that no one but his friend knew what he truly liked to eat. Hythlodaeus had had a hand for spinning tales with words, had enjoyed a civil battle of wits with the occasional sarcastic quip. But Emet-Selch did not recall what exactly had driven him to Amaurot, only that it upset him. He did not remember what Hythlodaeus did when he was upset.

“I truly, truly wish that things were different. Alas, you force my hand, old friend.”

Mortals did as mortals did. There was no sense or compassion in it, all they did was murdering one another. This incarnation of Hythlodaeus was no different than the pointless mortals, and Emet-Selch was most certain that even if they reunited these bits and pieces into a whole there would not be much of his once beloved left. Just as he forgot little by little, Hythlodaeus seemed not to remember. Every mortal that carried this crimson splash of colour that stood out even in a group of them remained what they were—mortals.

Of course Lahabrea had attempted silly experiments in the past. Alas, only those that had been in the Convocation, only those that Zodiark tried to protect from Hydaelyn’s last blow and failed doing so, were able to withstand an Ascension. All those that Lahabrea wanted to see succumbed to utter madness long before their memory was restored. Thusly they were limited to those that had directly worked under them rather than family or friends or other acquaintances. Those lesser Paragons were most useful in helping sow the seeds of chaos.

But the seeds of chaos was all they needed.

Childhood friends that oft talked about travelling the world became involved with murderers.

He cracked a lopsided grin at this mortal that bore a soul they did not deserve.

“You are always the same. Always running in circles, chasing your own tails, finding naught and then turning to bite another’s head off instead.” A confusing statement, but one that apparently pierced something or other in that mortal’s hide judging from his expression going darker. “It is a most vicious cycle you repeat over and over and over again. When will it end?”

He got no answer.

This incarnation of Hythlodaeus beheaded him unceremoniously, without a single flash of regret over killing his supposed childhood friend.

On the Fourth, crimson shone next to a colour that was seemingly all yet none. But through that soul a hideous amount of light snaked and left swirls of bright that made the already incomprehensible colour even worse. Mnemosyne fought Emmerololth and Igeyorhm at every turn—Emet-Selch continued watching from afar. This Hythlodaeus was a mage, perhaps one of the most talented on this shard.

Hilarious, considering Hythlodaeus’ general dislike for brutish strength without any flair to it. How come that was something Emet-Selch remembered about Hythlodaeus when he did not even remotely remember his voice or how tall he was by now?

Brute strength did not win a fight.

This shard bled out in agony, aether wildly out of control and the plan he and Mnemosyne, Warrior of Light, had hatched together went up in flames.

On the Ninth, he took the mantle of a researcher once again. A researcher of the Lifestream, the name that mortals had bequeathed that roiling mess that Hydaelyn had split and divided and infused with infernal light. Aetherology was what they called his research field and in theory it was not unlike that of a sorcerer with a connection to the Underworld.

He was soon asked for assistance by a scholar of what these people here called Magitek. It wasn’t unlike what he had taught Allag to use and when asked about it, Nabriales admitted that these mortals were so soul-crushingly boring that he had to considerably mess with everything to even create a spark that they could fan into a flame.

It had piqued his interest for a while, but soon he realised that these mortals, while not outwardly or easily driven to violence, were the same as ever.

The scholar he worked with had a most peculiar name, one that had nearly made him double over laughing.

Deus was, as far as his more and more spotty memory permitted him, rather close to his original. There was an annoying smile on his face every time the Miqo’te walked in or out, he was focused on planning everything in excruciating detail whenever he doubled over on the machines that he tinkered with at Emet-Selch’s specifications, yet he always managed to put on a professional air whenever someone else was around.

As soon as everyone else was gone, the professional air dropped immediately. Emet-Selch learned rather quickly into meeting this mortal that he was hopelessly infatuated with the role he played. And though his temper was fair from pacified after the last few attempts at causing the Ardor failed spectacularly at the hands of Warriors of Light, he decided to play his role to perfection. Infatuation that the shard thought not reciprocated the slightest—and while he was working towards tipping a balance he had deliberately worked to undermine bit by bit, that did not mean that he had to make this torturous existence any worse by causing unnecessary tension.

Aetherology and Magiteknology went hand in hand on this shard just as it did on the Source. Thus, one evening into this mess, they had both been hunched over plans. It was clear that Deus was on the verge of figuring out a solution to this issue, and Emet-Selch needed a suitable distraction. Deus was wholly devoted to the good of this world, and while Hydaelyn continued ignoring the pieces of his soul and did not even grant him the Echo in reincarnations, he was a factor that most definitely would wind up a problem in the long run. It needed to happen within this mortal lifespan according to Elidibus, and while Emet-Selch was loath to do as his fellow Amaurotian said, he really did not have a choice in that matter. It was do or let another Ardor wither away and die and all his hard work would have been for naught. Thus, while Deus brooded over the plans, he needed to find a distraction. Fast.

Perhaps in yet another attempt to find worth in those mortals across the Shards he moved, grabbed the mumbling Deus by the shoulders and pulled him close enough to kiss him. Something about that situation as a whole was familiar, but hells be damned—he did not remember why.

At the very least it proved to be enough of a distraction for Deus. The professional front meant that there were no issues about the research suddenly going slower.

Emet-Selch on the other hand, as unfortunate as he thought that fact to be, had to admit that Deus proved quite a few misconceptions about mortals wrong. It was true, he did harbour the same spark of violence that everyone else did, but there was something about that researcher in particular that managed to harness that restless energy and used it for something constructive instead of destructive. Even with his lopsided grins, the red-eyed man continued being as friendly as he could be—the scathing humour that he used to make fun of everyone else only came out once the front dropped. But despite all of that, Deus proved to be intelligent yet caring.

It seemed so incredibly stupid—Emet-Selch had spent plenty of lifetimes across the Shards rearing entire families from the brink to supremacy, had brought entire dynasties to its knees. In one attempt to watch whether mortals had improved some between his last bout of fitful sleep and then he had watched an orphanage of all things. It had burned to the ground. He had burned with it, and he had only been left steaming in anger as he withdrew once again.

Salina and her rebels had attempted to and failed at saving the world they knew. They had fallen into disarray once Doga and Unei vanished without a trace and Salina and Desch followed suit not long after. It took a few years then before Salina washed up somewhere dead, a content smile on her still abysmally young face that had wanted her people happy even if she would never be empress. Desch silently vanished from the annals of history, never seen again officially after his disappearance from the Crystal Tower.

But the people of this Shard all seemed to at least try to quell the confusion that sparked violence in their souls. It was peaceful.

Of course there were murders. But compared to the utter chaos on the Source, this place was quieter, more controlled. So much easier to manipulate towards inevitable doom.

Though, perhaps, he stopped one evening to think, this place was so peaceful because it had no need for deities, had no Paragons dictating their every step. Perhaps mankind truly had a worth after all.

But alas, that was a foolish thought. He instead drew his fingers through Deus hair and the man let out a content hum in the bed they shared.

A week after, he knew something was wrong the moment he woke up to find no one in the room. He rarely woke by himself these days—and the door was left ajar. Deus was most peculiar about the doors. The doors, and the fact that Emet-Selch apparently slept like the dead. A decade or so Deus had joked about Emet-Selch likely being able to sleep through a murder.

“They wouldn’t have. They couldn’t have,” he muttered as he finally got up and left the room.

The entire main space was trashed. Someone had most certainly looked through every drawer, every nook and cranny for something of value. He had definitely not heard a thing of that.

Deus had.

The front door was slammed shut. Beside it, leaning against a shelf, sat Deus. He had a role to play, he still had a role to play, but Emet-Selch knew a dead body when he saw one. Whatever had happened here, whoever had broken in to find something, judging from the mess in this part of the room, Deus had not wanted to let them get away uncontested. And he had paid for that, dearly paid for that.

Another glance around the room told him that every bit of research was still here. Scattered, yes, but it was still here. Someone had broken into this place for money. Money, and they had killed the only witness.

Gouged his bloody eyes out and stabbed a blunt weapon into his side. That blunt weapon was still there, and judging from the way Deus lay there he had died in utter agony.

Emet-Selch had worked hard to subtly lead this Shard towards destruction. Hells, he was given a while to work on his own, and time here passed quicker than it did on the Source right now. This quarter of a century he had spent here would barely be a month on the Source. Surely the rest of the Convocation would understand if he returned to the Source to demand another period of rest or another Shard entirely. Yes, they would understand.

Mortals.

The one worth he found in them, and they had to break it all over again.

He left the place making it look as if both researchers had at least died together.

He kind of wished they had.

On the Source, not a bit of the ruins of Amaurot remained. It had all been ground to dust, had been swallowed up by the very earth itself, had burned again and again until the wind carried the ashes into the sea. He found himself restless after inciting yet another kingdom into an attempt to take over its neighbours, finally growing utterly tired of the Source and its machinations. Lahabrea’s more violent approach was better suited to these pitifully partially rejoined jokes, and thus he gathered his bearings and departed for the First. He had completely forgotten who was supposed to take care of this place, seeing as it was so close to the Thirteenth. The Twelfth and the First were the closest to the useless void that had been the Thirteenth, and the general consensus was that perhaps drowning one of the surrounding Shards in Light would make the Dark return to the Source as well.

On the First, he found Amaurot. Or at least part of it, buried underneath the restless seas near what the locals called Kholusia.

There were sunken ships crammed in between broken spires. Schools of fish shot out and about, and further up the Norvrandt Slope an entire settlement of Ondo had set up their home in what he dimly remembered as an important place once. Perhaps it had been the centrepiece of something relating to infrastructure once. Perhaps he had helped set it up the way it wound up; he was the Architect after all. But all he had been building lately were things that were meant to break rather than withstand even the tides. And though most of it here had been swallowed up by the shifting tectonics of the undersea, even if coral and rock and other matter had grown together with those broken spires and bare foundations, it was still here. In theory, at least. The people had been replaced by fish. It was deep enough that the Ondo had not extended their hunting grounds to this deep sea trench, but it would not take long for them to come here. Time in this Shard was accelerating to a ridiculous point compared to the Source; by the time he finished looking how far these ruin stretched several mortal instants had come and passed.

He was a being completely without time, and these ruins had stood tall ever since.

He was the bloody Architect, part of him cried out. Though the memories were ancient and raw and faded and frazzled and so very dear to him that it hurt, he could still rebuild it the way he remembered it. Incomplete, certainly. Incomplete but before the Convocation had had to rise to the occasion to imbue the planet with the will to fight back. Before the nights turned inky black with none of the dazzling stars that accompanied clear nights before the Final Days. But there was no right amount of stone in this place. Everything was paltry and weak and crumbled under his hands—the material composition was all wrong. Entire chunks of it had been taken away, had been assigned to another Shard as Hydaelyn divided all after Her apparent victory.

But one thing that She had not managed to take from them and those that they could bring to Ascension was control over Creation. It overpowered all and everything, could crush these shards in an instant if they so desired—but they had seen the outcome of Creation running rampant in a world that was not made with this at its centre. The Thirteenth, the hungry abyss that waited for something or other.

He tore a chunk of a half-crumbled spire apart. Watched the rock sink into the deep, dark abyss that reminded him so much of Zodiark that it made his heart ache that yawned below. This trench on the First housed the remnants of Amaurot; on the Source it had been the peak of a mountain. What other Shards still held ruins of their home?

He closed his eyes for a while and thought, floating bodyless in an abyss so deep that not even the local deep sea creatures with the ability to speak dared venture that far.

Eventually he snapped his eyes open and pulled at the memories that had been buried under countless mortal lifetimes. He pulled them from the brink that was buried underneath seething fury on behalf of Zodiark who had saved them, and violently jammed the unmatching pieces together. He could not recall the upper city districts—fine! Fine, he would only recreate the lowest district then. The Bureaus and the parks, and he still attempted to reconstruct walkways that he dimly remembered standing over with Hythlodaeus and Mnemosyne by his side while Mnemosyne pointed out the parts of the blueprint that interfered with the general population. He tore the civilisations he had built as Emet-Selch apart and dug deeper, into something that he had buried after the Final Days except when he was around Hythlodaeus. He pulled out Hades, kicking and screaming, and tore through the figments of what that man remembered to recreate what he recalled.

Here, deep in the seas of the First, at least the darkness of the surrounding seas would leave it as it had been after the Final Days. But the city itself looked as before Termination befell them. He raised familiar spires, wove an intricate net of street lights and windows that remained lightless as he continued. Plants that had died out so many aeons ago that not a single mortal would remember them sprouted under his guiding hands as he redrew the city streets where his memory started lacking. Perhaps this had been a building once that connected to the upper levels. It could have been something else entirely. He instead connected more stairs to a walkway nearby. He raised buildings that had no designation and nothing attached to them. He recreated the Bureaus, and only once he stood in the middle of the Bureau of the Architect once more after rising an entire city behind him did he take a moment to breathe in. Breathe out.

The fish had all been scared away by what had happened. It would not take long for the Ondo to find this place.

He haunted the streets of this city built upon memories like a ghost—and in theory he was. A soul without a body, a body that perished long ago during the Sundering. And now all that was left were these torn souls and the rest, and he stopped dead with anger flaring up deep within him.

Mortals.

Those that squandered their endless chances time and time again. Those who frolicked across the earth that had been bent out of shape into something else. Their souls were torn, their bodies long forsaken. They cared little about what happened as long as it benefitted them, and with seething hatred raging in his mind he remembered all those faces that said they would give themselves to summon Zodiark. All those agonised faces of the survivors as half of them, the dying and the injured, the brave and the cowardly, all set their fears aside to offer more to keep the remaining half save.

No mortal would offer the same.

Yet they were the ones alive and not those that he had sworn to bring back with the rest of the Convocation and their assistants that day as Zodiark breathed life back into the star at their behest.

And so he reached for those faces he recalled, most of them frayed, many of them without features altogether, and roused them to life again here in this Amaurot. This Amaurot that was not quite right but that would be a home again eventually. They would live awaiting a Termination that would never come because that was all he remembered about daily life, but at least they would live, one way or another.

He shoved the image of Mnemosyne away as it came up. He did not need someone who would cause unnecessary trouble. No, he would not need anything or anyone like that, he angrily thought and went about recreating it. Only when he reached one final face, only when that person looked at him with blank red eyes did he stop for another moment again.

He barely remembered a thing about Hythlodaeus. But he could feel his disappointed gaze on him. Hythlodaeus would immediately see this city and its inhabitants for what it was—after all, there was no one in Amaurot with a keener sight than Hythlodaeus. No one with a more annoying smile, no one with a more patronising voice. No one that he wanted to see again more than that person.

This shade… was a shade. It would play its role.

He answered its greeting and said that unfortunately he was busy and would be out of the city for a while, citing Mnemosyne requesting his assistance.

He missed the long, worried glance this shade of Hythlodaeus shot him as he departed from a city that was his yet was not his at the same time.

Upon his return to the Source, his nap was soon interrupted by Lahabrea and Elidibus. A Shard was ripe for the picking, suffused with darkness but not drowned in it like the Thirteenth. For a while time would pass faster on the Source than there, and thus something or other needed to be done.

With a weary sigh, he looked for another target. Another empire created by his own hands. Preferably something akin to Allag, Lahabrea mused, or at least something obsessed with the glory of that empire. So, something built on conquest. Something that had an excuse to seek out other countries.

Something… as pushed back and useless as Garlemald.

An annoyed hiss escaped him as he dug his fingers into that country. Eventually his eyes landed upon the ridiculously huge Galvus family—and then upon Solus. Yes, Solus Galvus, a historian in the making, about to depart for mandatory military service. Certainly, Garlemald had barely a military to speak of, but that could change soon. After all, Solus Galvus was the same age as Princess Salina had been. The same age as Desch when he had been forced to leave the mountains somewhere nearby. The same age as the first Xande when he had been crowned emperor.

In other words, perfect.

He but needed success under his belt, and he could ignite the indignation these people felt, and as mortals always went without thinking twice, they would resort to violence. First they would punish those that had shoved them out and about in their own country. Once that was taken care of it would be so easy to set them on something else—after all, the Burn was not far from here. Enough time had passed for rumours about this place to start up. Given that Primals consumed aether in excess when they arose through failed attempts at Creation, the Burn was rumoured to have been the site of countless Primal summonings in a row. Thus Solus Galvus would have a reason to turn his eyes towards unnecessary expansion; after all, who in Garlemald could fault a man who but wanted to save the world from the plague of Eikons that beset it time and time again?

In a sense he was trying to purge this world of an Eikon. Hydaelyn and Zodiark were, by any means, Primals. Which meant he in turn was tempered just as much as all Her heroes of light were. He did not care. Heavens above and hells below, he did not care. After all, somewhere beyond the dark tide waited Amaurot. The fake Amaurot as long as the First stood, and the real Amaurot at the end of the Ardor, at the end of all the Calamities that befell mortals.

He went from a useless child interested in Allag to a commander, to the one who led his small troop to victory against those that had oppressed them for so long. Solus Galvus rose through the ranks of the army, was given title after title after title, until finally they reached an impasse at what to name him next. King, perhaps, some mused. Especially his relatives who wanted a share of the rulership. Solus van Galvus, highest-ranked officer, thus reached into his bottomless vault of knowledge and cited his interest in Allag as a foundation for the inevitable next step.

Emperor.

His Royal Radiance, Solus zos Galvus.

It played out exactly as he planned it. His relatives made certain to stay in his good graces because if His Radiance remained without an heir then surely the crown would go to one of them. He married out of convenience, a woman who remained on the front lines first and foremost for the most part. If it weren’t warfare only she would have made an excellent addition to a Bureau in Amaurot. Perhaps she had been someone under Hythlodaeus’ direct command. Perhaps she was not. He wilfully kept his eyes closed to the sight of these paltry, infuriating souls that did nothing but infuriate him further.

Admittedly, perhaps it was that willed blindness that made him grow somewhat attached to another mortal. A son, but as mortal lives went it was spent all too soon. And that son’s son… well.

Varis was intelligent. Too intelligent perhaps, but it was nothing compared to what a child his age would have known if the world had not been torn to bloody pieces. Solus zos Galvus was not someone who had a good relationship with either of the most likely candidates for the throne. Some relative, perhaps his nephew or grandnephew, and his own grandson. As Solus zos Galvus aged, Emet-Selch grew more and more impatient. Every meeting with Elidibus and Lahabrea was a hissing match from his side—something that Lahabrea engaged in willingly and happily, whereas Elidibus continued the completely emotionless facade that he should have had.

“I have had enough, Elidibus! Enough, I tell you; I have raised empire after empire, razed kingdom after kingdom—I tire of this! These mortals offer nothing new, ever!”

In the past, Elidibus had led them with a vigour matched by none. Perhaps not the most emotional of them, but certainly the one with the most spirit. He had rallied them when Termination had near broken the half of Amaurot that marched with them to see Zodiark arise no matter the cost. He had reached out for the ones that cried in the aftermath, he had soothed the utterly devastated Igeyorhm after she turned the Thirteenth into a useless void in her last desperate attempt to rekindle the light in that place. Hells, Elidibus had reached his hand out to the failed Warriors of Light from that world and offered them Ascension as an out.

This man here had nothing of that fledgling compassion or energy left. He looked too tired to say a damned thing.

“Perhaps you ought to retire, in that case. Making an Architect build things meant to break is not exactly the most constructive approach, but I too fear that after this the Source is not liable to fall to an empire ploy again. See your plan to its end, then, and you may take your leave for as long as you like.”

“Fine.”

Oh, he made certain that Garlemald would either explosively take over Eorzea by the end or collapse in itself in a power vacuum. Either situation would cause enough strife for a Calamity as time passed. As his wife passed.

He laughed as this imperial brat called Gaius had the gall to point out severe strategical issues with the latest great plan by Something van He-Did-Not-Care. Any other impudent whelp would be shot at dawn for that sort of insolence, but he was amused by a mere child outplaying that nuisance that was this Something van He-Did-Not-Care.

He pointedly ignored all the danger signs with his darling great grandson. Wretched little beast, that Zenos. Worse than his father in every regard.

No matter where he looked, it was a perfectly wretched empire he had raised. Eventually it would conquer all, or it would collapse. Then this would be over. It would be over, as the Black Wolf sat on the throne of Ala Mhigo awaiting the perfect moment to strike. It would be over, he whispered hoarsely to himself every time Lahabrea came in to report on something or other. It would be over, as Nabriales complained about some element in Eorzea causing unnecessary trouble. Some weapon or other in the hands of some old man. Old men would inevitably die, he rasped, this body under the effects of some sickness that might not kill him now but would kill him within a decade. Finally, an end. Nabriales removed the mask so Emet-Selch could see how his fellow Paragon, Ascian as they were called now on the Source, scrunched his face up.

“This mortal business has made a mad wretch out of you, Emet-Selch.”

“And unlike wine, you did not grow better with age, Nabriales. Was that all of your report? Then begone if you would be so kind—I have an empire to run, and you have old men with weapons that concern you somehow to follow.”

A moment passed in silence, and Nabriales put the mask back on. “I stand corrected; you are not a mad wretch. You are a hopeless lunatic who sounds like his dearly departed lover.”

Nabriales was gone before Emet-Selch could gather his bearings.

He felt as if his fellow member of the Convocation had kicked the floor into pieces below him. He had forgotten that. He had forgotten so many things, but most of all that Hythlodaeus was the one to tell people to chase old men if they were so concerned about whatever weapon they carried. He had forgotten most details about Hythlodaeus by now, and the only thing that clearly stood out still were the bright red eyes. Bright red that matched his deep crimson soul that shone like a light in the dark.

Garlemald did not fall before the balance tipped. Dalamud, the very prison that he had helped build and that he had long since forgotten about, came down and unleashed a monster of his own making. Dully, distantly, he recalled standing in Azys Lla securing the locks on a containment prison for the last time. He remembered the dragon whose despair they had used. Her voice was low, quiet, subdued and soulless as she asked him why he was doing this when all he ever cared for was long gone. Why he did not reach out to prevent that tragedy that befell his home from ever repeating.

He mulled over those words for the longest time, not hearing from anyone but Elidibus in the next passing years. Mortal lifetimes were so agonisingly short that he had no idea how five years stretched into an eternity of trying to remember things.

And only when this body was on its way of giving in, when the physical pain was starting to get to his soul and he knew he would have to evacuate the body before he took any sort of lasting damage, only then did Lahabrea storm in. He was without shadow—for Lahabrea to go somewhere without a vessel under his control was a rare occasion to begin with, but the furious expression he wore as the mask slid off his face and as his long hair fell into his furious grimace of a face told Emet-Selch that something had not gone according to plan.

“Hydaelyn,” he rasped, half a question and half an observation.

“Delightfully on time as always,” Lahabrea hissed back, all but slamming the mask back into his face. “You are required. O Esteemed Elidibus has called for a Convocation Meeting, the first in however many bloody mortal instants have passed.”

Emet-Selch let out a dry laugh.

“No, I think not. You go to your little meeting out of yet another Warrior of Light throwing wrenches in your plans. I will not involve myself any time soon, as I was promised I would be allowed to.”

Emperor Solus zos Galvus passed away as Eorzea celebrated the fall of the Ultima Weapon and the end of the Black Wolf.

Emet-Selch quietly departed for the deep sea trench that held his own little vain creation and played the role he had had there for a while.

The shades did not change. The Final Days they feared never came.

He was almost content there, even as the light in this world near swelled to a torrent that could have washed all of this away.

He tried reaching for the shade of Hythlodaeus as it departed wherever it went to do whatever it usually did in the Final Days, but he held himself back. Of course the damned Shard they would usher into oblivion was the one Emet-Selch had chosen. Elidibus always managed to make the worst decisions.

He rested for a long time.

It wasn’t until he felt the sparks of his fellow Paragons be snuffed out and that the very crust of the earth itself started rumbling as if something or other was happening that Emet-Selch paid attention to the First again. He knew this region to be called Norvrandt, in the rough seas surrounding Kholusia. Somewhere not far from here stood the city Eulmore on the shores, with Mt Gulg rising on the horizon beyond the Bright Cliff. He watched the Flood of Light advance.

He watched that infernal woman stop it. She whose fate was so entwined with Hydaelyn that she was likely a reincarnation of Her summoner. It did not take long for Elidibus to appear out of nowhere, face scrunched up in distaste.

Emet-Selch still bowed. “Welcome, Esteemed Elidibus, to the vaunted ruins of Amaurot.”

“You have taken some liberties with this.”

“What do you want.”

“The situation on the Source has changed. Nabriales, Lahabrea and Igeyorhm have fallen to its Warrior of Light.”

He raised an eyebrow at that. The Ascended Ones fell. Normally they merely looked for another shard of them—but Lahabrea?

“If we do not stop their march any time soon, the Source will ricochet into a direction that will make this place a void of light. We cannot afford to lose another Shard.”

“And whatever would you need me for?”

“Garlemald. Unfortunate as that may be for you, but in the scant time that passed on the Source since your departure as Emperor, your vessel’s grandson has since taken the throne. Fortunately for us and you especially, considering your general distaste for seeking out new vessels—said grandson has also taken to reviving an ancient Allagan technology that but recently re-emerged. And his first cloning subject is none other than his grandfather. Unresolved issues, one would think, given that he has taken to shooting them for fun.”

Emet-Selch closed his eyes with a long, weary sigh. “I suppose I have no other choice in the matter. Do tell me that you will be at least assisting to some degree.”

“I have my eyes on something relating to your, ah, delightful great grandson. It will not be long before he inevitably sets his eyes upon Her champion, hungry a beast as he is. If he fails to kill them, so be it, but I will not hesitate to take over a corpse should the need arise.”

Varis was… less than pleased about having his grandfather back. In the course of an hour, no less than seventeen clones fell before Emet-Selch finally tired of the nonsense and squeezed the firearm shut with aetherial pressure. That at least made Varis listen, and he watched Varis’ expression derail almost in delight as he revealed his reasons for creating the empire. The empire that Varis had worked so hard to take over once the unloved element was gone.

Admittedly, Emet-Selch was less than pleased about being back, and he made it known at every turn and twist. No matter the amount of bullets that pierced the disposable clone bodies, he was back an instant later to continue the verbal lashings. He crushed Varis’ belief in the empire bit by bit, dug his heels into the gaping wounds, and started talking about things that they had not told other mortals yet. It was delightful to say the least to see a mortal try to comprehend the true scale of what had happened, and it was utterly delightfully hilarious to see Varis struggle with revelation after revelation. It did not make him any less a vile mortal, but Emet-Selch almost felt for his darling grandson.

Harassed thus, Varis could only watch as the Warrior of Light managed what many thought unmanageable. The quiet and broken rose up to finally bite their oppressors back, just as Garlemald had under hi guiding hand. Emet-Selch watched with mild annoyance, departed then and time again to revisit his creation of Amaurot. Upon returning he decided not to immediately crawl back to Varis for further edging him on towards using truly despicable methods.

The Source, for its status as the Source, had changed a bit while he had been away.

Taking the guise of a traveller he noted that the Crystal Tower had returned to Mor Dhona. But it was unresponsive, shut down. Likely disabled by Garlond. The city states, previously in a scramble or involved with their own nonsensical warfare, had united under the same banner for once. Ishgard’s endless war with the dragons had ended. Ala Mhigo rose from smouldering ashes like a phoenix. Truly, had he not given up on the Source’s people, he would have been impressed.

But what truly interested him was the Warrior of Light. Yet somehow he failed to meet them proper, and he returned to the First just at around the time that Elidibus, by now having taken possession of Zenos’ corpse, issued orders to some Doman rat.

After all, the light there had only been stopped. The world as it was there was grinding to a standstill, but something or other needed to be done. For a world at standstill was not a world on the brink that could be topped. On the Source, he ensured that Black Rose made its unexpected return as a sort of secret weapon to stop the war from going south. On the First, however… quite a while had passed.

And something had changed in Lakeland, just as it had changed in Mor Dhona. He rubbed this clone’s eyes a few times and wondered if he should resort to pinching himself. But no.

Under the unrelentingly and unpleasantly light skies of Norvrandt the Crystal Tower stood as a beacon of near alien architecture.

And an entire small city had cropped up at its base. There were people building there, harrowed faces but not faces full of despair and hopelessness.

For the first time in a long while he needed to see what was going on there, and near immediately backed away with a hiss as he slammed an arm across his eyes. The Crystal Tower reflected something that was so bright that he could not look at it. He watched from afar as the people chattered and built, as they recovered from Sin Eater attack after Sin Eater attack. He observed them for a while, watching an Oracle of Light appear and die and reappear all in the short span of years. He saw a man with an arm of crystal order another thing built, watched a magical shield erect itself when flying beasts attacked.

He could not make sense of it. But it could not stand.

Thus he approached the weak link that was ever there. A mortal hungering for more, for something else. He sowed the seeds of chaos, though this time they were to tilt the world towards careful stagnation.

He returned to the throne room on the Source just in time to watch Elidibus depart. He did not even care about the bullet Varis lodged in his vessel’s skull after a tired tirade about Varis’ failings being the reason why he had been forced back into action.

Elidibus ordered him back to the First to take care of matters there. It soon would be time to tip the balance and reunite the First with the Source.

In another version of these events, he succeeded. He drove the First to the brink and ushered in the Ardor together with Elidibus. The Warrior of Light fell in the proceedings, a bothersome gnat and its hive of villainy that called themselves the Scions felled.

In another version of these events he found himself face to face with Gaius Baelsar once again. Try as he might, the Black Wolf proved to be a thorn in his side, and souls eight times rejoined started showing signs of strengths that were not theirs but rather their originals at long last. Emet-Selch, exhausted of trying to see what the mortals could do, decided to sleep once the Black Wolf fell at last.

He slept through mankind’s last hope setting out across time and space itself.

Perhaps that it was better that way, in this other version of these events.

The Warrior of Light was blinding. As blinding as the Crystal Tower itself was, though he did see something rather interesting in that radiance.

There was a crack.

Much like all the others from the Source, the Warrior of Light was seven times rejoined. They had been summoned here by the Crystal Exarch who hid himself in the Crystal Tower’s light as part of it, but the Warrior of Light themselves was affected by the Lightwardens. The Scions talked of the light being negated—but Emet-Selch saw. He saw the cracks that had formed under the light of two.

He had approached them not because he wanted to initially offer them to work together. But for the first time since Salina, a mortal intrigued him properly, had his attention. If this one managed to pull through without losing themselves to the primordial light that was swelling up and cracking their soul from within then maybe, maybe mortals had some worth after all. An Amaurotine soul under that influence would have long shattered. But this… this was interesting.

And though he could not forget that it was thanks to them that Lahabrea was gone, he entertained them for a while. Told truths without a context because he was interested in seeing the Scions react. They were less fragile than others, though likely they owed that to their souls being seven times rejoined. He could chalk up so much to that.

The other thing that caught his attention was the Exarch. Whatever soul that one bore, he was unable to see it thanks to the cover that the Crystal Tower provided. The Exarch and the people of the Crystarium claimed that he had merely sent a prayer out and the Crystal Tower had answered him, but there was something to unravel here. Something very likely related to the fact that the Exarch kept his face hidden under a cowl.

On occasion he caught a glimpse of small canines—which gave the Exarch away as part Miqo’te. Or Mystel. Whichever it was. He tried so very often to get under that man’s skin to glean something, anything from him. But much as the Crystal Tower refused to answer to his calls, the Exarch remained calm and collected. And infuriatingly smug about something or other. Whenever Emet-Selch got more heated, the Exarch put on a wide grin and jabbed another finger into it. Whenever he tried to stay calm, the Exarch near immediately got under his skin in turn. Only one person had ever managed that, a person whose face he barely remembered and whose voice had been long lost in the endless myriad calls that he had heart over the course of all those mortal lifetimes he had spent.

By the time the Warrior of Light returned from Amh Araeng, Emet-Selch had to admit he was enthralled.

He hated not knowing better than the mortals around him, and the Crystal Exarch and his mysterious power to call the Tower across the Rift made no sense whatsoever. Thus he started mentally eliminating things one after another. But no matter how many harebrained theories he rolled around, he always came to the same conclusion.

Calling the Crystal Tower without the blood of Allag was impossible.

But the First did not have that bloodline. That bloodline died together with Salina, Doga and Unei after the Calamity back then. But… as he paced about his Amaurot to think, he realised that the Crystal Tower back on the Source had been shut down. Only royal blood could order a shut down. He had assumed that Garlond had been responsible for that, but something did not add up there as well. A pile of impossibilities, and the man with the crystalline arm stood in the centre of all of it.

It took him until watching the Warrior of Light and the rest of accursed Norvrandt working together in Kholusia that he finally managed to catch the Exarch by himself once again.

The man had been walking for a while, and now his stride had turned uneven. When Emet-Selch appeared before him, the man finally made the grave mistake of craning up his neck to look at the Ascian before him.

He stared into eyes that shone in Allagan royal red.

“Perhaps you ought to rest, lest you tumble off a cliff.”

The Exarch deliriously let out a wheezing laugh as he leaned against a rock. “Would that it would kill me. Alas, it will not, but I shall take the rest regardless.”

Even out here in distant Kholusia the Crystal Tower overshadowed the man’s soul as he all but collapsed against the rock with a strangled wheeze. A considerable amount of energy went into keeping that shadow over him; being dependent on its energy or not, it was an odd thing to do. Mortals could not see souls. But the Exarch went through lengths that were plain ridiculous to keep his identity obscured.

Try as he might, as he watched the Scions depart for Mt Gulg and the Exarch following at a safe distance, he did not recall any one individual with red eyes ever playing a role in the bigger happenstances on the source that Lahabrea furiously but dutifully reported. Nothing of the sort in what Elidibus observed.

Why then was this one mortal calling out to him like a siren song?

He tried to find a reason as he slowly began his own ascent. Well, the easiest answer to his question was the fact that the Exarch clearly hailed from the Source as the Scions and the Warrior of Light did. But unlike the Scions he retained his mortal flesh—and unlike the Warrior of Light, there was no light woven into his soul even before the Lightwardens came bearing down upon it. The only thing that likely was interwoven into that soul, just as it was on his flesh, was the Crystal Tower. Gilded cracks, if there were cracks at all; it seemed symbiotic. A thinking, feeling expansion of the Crystal Tower in exchange for the same unfeeling, unyielding longevity as crystal. Xande had done the same, the clone that sat upon the throne and yearned for a way to make it forget death.

Without that blessing of light or a direct Call, there was no way that the Crystal Exarch was a Mystel who but turned his prayers to the heavens as the Sin Eaters came bearing down upon Norvrandt. The Crystal Tower had arrived here for a reason.

And the Miqo’te who called himself the Exarch most certainly arrived along with it.

He eventually tossed the thought away, annoyance slowly replacing it. The Warrior of Light was certain to have started facing Vauthry by now. One last Lightwarden to extinguish, and then Norvrandt would be safe. A world would be driven from the brink and towards balance once more. Their work on this world would have come to be for naught, but first the Warrior of Light needed to withstand the light in the first place. Hydaelyn’s grasp on this world was barely even there after the heavy imbalance and stagnation—if the Warrior of Light’s own strength proved to be too little, then there was no point in even entertaining these mortals any longer. The Scions were more intelligent than the rest of their mortal ilk, yes, and he genuinely had been interested in them only to be let down.

Lahabrea’s vessel was all-around unpleasant, not unlike Lahabrea himself. There was certainly a reason that Emet-Selch had slept through there, but other than that all that man had were issues. Issues that made him lash out. Violent as mortals were, and unusable in the long run.

The blind magician’s soul would simply not withstand an ascension, frayed as her soul was after willingly throwing herself into the Lifestream twice. While her soul had a shining colour that was more than a pale imitation there was naught to be had from a creature that would die the instant he told the whole truth instead of feeding them morsels of it.

The twins were useless in the short and in the long run. They made for an entertaining bunch of children, very much not unlike the children that oft roamed the lowest floor of Amaurot in search of answers. But there was nothing to be gained from them.

The liar from the faerie kingdom on the other hand was most interesting. There was an unmistakable air about him that painted him as a talented liar and actor, and there was something he still refused to mention. Besides—was that not the man that Elidibus had mentioned at some point or another? A dangerous element of treachery, then.

The Oracle of Light, her soul now her own instead of a dangerous patchwork of some child and the hesitant Word of the Mother, was useless overall. After all, Hydaelyn had Her claws hooked into that one just as much as She was hooked into the Warrior of Light, and the child looking like Mnemosyne’s friend who opposed Zodiark at every turn did not help the slightest.

Overall, a complete bore or disappointment. But as he climbed further with the idle calm of a man with an ace of his sleeve, as the skies violently churned to give way to comforting dark with stars splattered across the skies that Norvrandt had not seen in so long, he knew that one way or another, this entertaining skit was about about to end.

And he was not going to let it end the way the Exarch wanted it to. Listening in on that conversation, he understood. The Exarch had done what not even the so-called Paragons had managed. Finally, finally once again a mortal worthy of his attention.

The Warrior of Light writhed, their soul shattering piece by little piece, like brittle glass being weighed down by a rock.

Emet-Selch pulled the trigger. The Exarch stood still for a moment, his spell disintegrating.

As he collapsed soundlessly with a look of agony on his face that Emet-Selch did not see, the Crystal Tower’s protection vanished for but a moment. Emet-Selch saw a flash of crimson as the Exarch went down.

He did not remember Hythlodaeus’ voice.

It had been so long ago since he last heard him that it might as well have been the same voice as the Exarch had. The same voice that tried to beg through agonising pain to be let go, to let him finish what he started. Emet-Selch merely told him no. Restrained and far from the Crystal Tower as he was, the Exarch had no power whatsoever. His staff was just out of reach, and Emet-Selch soon tired of the silence that fell over the man after he gave up the begging approach.

He walked over, bent down and half considered a gentler approach. Perhaps tilting the Miqo’te’s face up and talking to him like mortals talked to one another when they tried to threaten another into submission. The urge was strong, he had to admit, but he swallowed it down. The Exarch grit his teeth as Emet-Selch forced him to look up with a swift jab under his chin.

“Now then, Exarch. With the end of this world on the horizon, how about instead of punishing the victor with dead silence you start singing? After all, you can still escape this unscathed as long as you talk.”

There was a defiant glare in the Allagan red eyes as he narrowed them, then shook his head. He had his lips pressed together so hard they were barely more than a thin line, and Emet-Selch sighed deeply.

“Defiant to the end, and for what? Your death wish means nothing to bodies that cannot die—not that you could not have cut the cord that connected you to the tower all along. If you so desire death, why not end it all right here instead?”

A crooked smile that spoke of more than a mortal lifetime of agony spread across the bound man’s face. “Alas, much as I would love doing that right now merely to spite you, you unfortunately ensured that I cannot. Ease your hold on my connection to the tower and I will give you a spectacle of death.” He coughed, blood splattering on the ground as Emet-Selch backed away. “Not that you will. Thus, alive I remain.”

“Your defiance serves nothing by this point. Your hero is on their way straight to a hell where not even the Mother can protect them.”

“Yet I have something you desire, and mark my words, Emet-Selch, I intend to take it to my grave. You will not have me spill my proverbial guts on your ground—the literal ones, however, feel free to spill. I will not talk, and even if you tortured me for an eternity, to the brink of utter madness—not a word that you desire will leave my lips.”

“Stubborn, aren’t we.”

In an age so long gone that he did not remember it, he would have snorted at the defiant glint in familiar red eyes as a smile spread across the Exarch’s face. It was so similar to Hythlodaeus’ smile before he verbally shoved Emet-Selch down the well in the past that he should have recognised it as one such smile. He did not. Much like this mirage of Amaurot, he had long since forgotten and the missing pieces had been replaced by exhausted yearning. To him the Exarch was but another mortal holding pieces of a soul that did not belong to him—and unlike the Warrior of Light this fool did not have an excuse. Hydaelyn did not have a grasp on him, Her eyes ever on her chosen warrior. The Exarch, meanwhile, now that his soul was exposed to Emet-Selch, had the gall to be eight times rejoined. He came from a time where the First had fallen and Black Rose had likely ushered in an era of decline on the Source.

This immortal mortal whose heart could still stop beating at the drop of a needle. This useless thing that had been reborn a hundred hundred times. It had stood against an army as Red-Eyes. It had been a child in a world on the verge of collapse. It had been a researcher, it had been no one of consequence. A soldier. A princess. Everything yet nothing.

And now it was someone who had constructed an elaborate ploy to see the Rejoining fail. Someone who had deliberately and carefully built a city in a net of despair and then made certain that the people were safe enough for hope to blossom.

An architect.

A bloody architect. The very role that Hythlodaeus had refused claiming that he was not powerful enough to properly fill the seat.

He struck the man in the face. The Exarch wheezed, blood rolling out of his mouth but the infuriatingly confident smile remained.

“You are making this harder for yourself than strictly necessary, dear Exarch,” he hissed holding the vain hope to wipe that grin off the man’s face.

It only made the Exarch’s grin widen, the Seeker of the Sun’s small but noticeable canines giving the smile something feral on top of his red eyes that did not look right on a mortal like him. “Oh, I am known for taking the hardest path without thinking twice about it. I can plan en route to my doom, after all. You on the other hand are also not quite making this easy for yourself, Emet-Selch—I may but be a pointless mortal to you, but I can see the murderous intent in your eyes. I may be pointless but I am not stupid.”

“Murderous intent? Don’t make me laugh. That would imply I consider you to be a living being.”

Finally the infernal smile was wiped off the Exarch’s face as he moved his face to his shoulder to wipe the blood off on his robe. When he looked up again there was a tiredness in his eyes that Emet-Selch had never seen on a mortal before, yet somehow it felt hauntingly familiar.

“One would have thought an Ascian would be faster to kill a pesky meddlesome mortal at their complete mercy.”

Emet-Selch rolled his eyes. “Believe it or not, even the architect of countless bloodthirsty empires can have their thirst sated after a while. Besides, you have something I most certainly desire. Spit it out, and your end can at least be painless—or I can toss you to your beloved hero when they inevitably appear near mad and on the verge of turning into a monster, if you desire having yourself torn apart by the fool you love.”

The Exarch grimaced at that, ears pinning backwards as he struggled weakly against his restraints. There was something on his mind, something that he wanted to say, but he remained silent as he pulled weakly.

“Well, it would seem you have made your choice in that case.” He kicked the Exarch for good measure before whirling around. “If you do change your mind, you need but call my name and I will come to put you out of your misery once you give me what I desire. Till then, I bid you farewell as you suffer in solitude.”

Sometimes he thought he saw a spark of awareness in that shade of Hythlodaeus’ eyes.

He brushed that thought aside every single time, and every single time missed the forlorn, oft despairing look it gave him as he departed for yet another place where Mnemosyne called him to allegedly.

There was no Mnemosyne in his Amaurot.

He did have a real and a fake Hythlodaeus here now, however.

After what felt like an eternity compressed down into an instant, blinding light approached his Amaurot at last. It moved slowly and Emet-Selch dramatically set everything up. If they wanted to find him, surely they would jump the extra hoops. If they turned into a monster in the middle of his little city at least no people would come to harm in any way. He did, however, kick the Exarch awake.

The man was pale, dehydrated and completely out of it. Whatever fire had burnt inside him had given way to a deep-seated exhaustion as his energy ran thin enough that a normal mortal would have died but Emet-Selch left just enough of a connection to the Crystal Tower there for him to not perish. Bright red had dulled, though of course it compared nothing to the sightless gaze of Hythlodaeus after the Final Days.

“Alas, it would seem your time is up. Do you have anything to say ‘ere I help your beloved hero turn into the monster they are?”

For a moment, silence.

Then, heavily, the Exarch breathed out and closed his eyes.

“It’s breaking,” he whispered, and even though he did not remember why, what remained of Emet-Selch’s heart constricted painfully. “What have you done?”

Emet-Selch dropped down to roughly pull the Exarch forward. The man didn’t even look at him as he undid those restraints, just slumped into a useless heap of flesh, bone and crystal once the restraints were removed properly.

“Oh,” the Exarch mumbled, and it sounded not like him at all. “Had I but stopped you. Had I but stopped them. Had I but borne the title, perhaps it would have… never….”

He fell silent and his entire body sacked forwards. Emet-Selch backed away as the Exarch crashed to the floor in this room where he had kept him.

He fled. For the first time, he fled from a mortal.

Anyone else would have long since keeled over and given up to die. But even now, even as their companions fell one by one to Emet-Selch barely even attempting anything of value, they kept walking. Worthless mistakes they were, these mortals, and even the one standing strong over its misbegotten ilk would eventually fall.

They retched horribly when their legs gave in for the final time. Choked sobs and strangled cries escaped them for a moment when they collapsed. Then, silence. After all, a mortal turning into a Sin Eater was a silent affair. The aether violently mutated and was devoured by the light, and Sin Eaters were still compared to the Voidsent’s violent loudness.

Their soul was in utter shambles, flaking off as light hissed and seared through it. Seven and the Source, but they were not strong enough to withstand this primordial amount of light. Hydaelyn did not reach for Her little plaything to save it one last time.

Nabriales had underestimated this mortal in particular and paid for that arrogance dearly. Igeyorhm had been deemed the greater threat between her and Lahabrea. This mortal had watched as Lahabrea was devoured by an aether hungry creation. Hells, Warriors of Light had struck down Mitron and Loghrif on the First and ushered in the Flood of Light. How many still remained after countless light-kissed warriors sallied forth against the Paragon menace? Not many. In a month on the Source Altima had perished to Warriors of Light over the span of half a millennium. And now at last the Warrior of Light of the Source would fall. Fall and help him directly ushering in the Rejoining, and perhaps he could finally sleep.

For a moment he was the victor. For once, Zodiark triumphed over Hydaelyn.

And then the light broke free. Blinded by the sudden radiance, he tried to see what on good earth was going on now—he had half expected to see the infernal Hydaelyn Herself jump to this mortal’s defence. But as his eyes adjusted to the violent brightness as it subsided, he caught a glimpse of colour that flared up as if someone had stoked a flame. There were still cracks running through that colour, cracks that were filled with light that all but poured fourth like a bleeding wound. But between these cracks there were colours that had been drowned out by light beforehand. It was something he had not seen in ages, something that he had expected everywhere but here. A colour that was all yet none at the same time, something indescribable—something familiar.

For a split moment as the light died down, he thought he stared right at Mnemosyne, the same defiant look they had had on their face when they said that they would rather step back from their position than do something as foolish as the Zodiark Concept that would see them all doomed rather than saved.

But the moment passed nigh immediately, and all that remained was a broken husk. An infernal shard that but held this same colour, with light laced through the wildly flaring soul as the cracks mended bit by bit. New cracks broke open in that violent bloom of colour as he spat words at them.

From behind, another voice joined in.

The red was subdued this time around. It did not violently lash out as it had in the past. This was a calm that Hythlodaeus had had, this was a calmed soul that had made its decision and would pay whatever price it would have to pay to see its plan to its conclusion.

How precisely the Exarch had dragged his body that was reaching its hard limit here, he did not know. Why he had run away without making certain he was bound again was beyond him, but as the staff slammed down with a finality as the Exarch reached for the Crystal Tower and begged, Emet-Selch finally, finally, found the mortals that were different from the Amaurotians that he had longed for for so long.

Seven different voices joined in, all of them saying something or other about stopping him, about challenging him, about being glad to see him again one last time, but through that chorus of similar voices he did not hear what the Warrior of Light said. Finally, mortals that were faced with the end of one world of the past and two worlds of the present and they made the active decision to sacrifice all they had for the people who still lived.

Back then the Convocation had been backed by countless volunteers who gave life and soul to the Concept that roused Him. More still had given all for the world to be returned to a living state. And many others did the same to call forth Hydaelyn with a modified summoning.

Ah.

Ah.

Suddenly, it all came back to him as he reached for a power he had so long refused to wield properly. That strange guilt that seemed to radiate off Hythlodaeus and Mnemosyne not long before Hydaelyn’s summoning. That most baffling morning where Hythlodaeus had tried saying something and decided against it. Mnemosyne had been involved with the summoning, Hythlodaeus knew more about its theoretical application—one was guilty of knowingly or unknowingly supplying information, the other was guilty of the summoning.

Then again, he was as well. The Architect had built most of the groundwork that saving the world was built upon. That much rang true in distant Amaurot, that much rang true even here in Norvrandt.

Esteemed Emet-Selch, Architect of Amaurot.

The Crystal Exarch, Architect of the Crystarium.

For the first time in countless mortal lifetimes he remembered Hythlodaeus’ voice. How he, when the Creation’s hysteric cycle of death and rebirth was quelled, quietly thanked the then newly appointed Emet-Selch for taking the honour of that title. How he said that he was just not made for leading people, for as much as he tried, he got too invested in his own little schemes and grand plans. And even if it would stand soundly after tragedy, there was always a power vacuum when he removed himself from the equation. An Architect needed to work with the Voice of the People, but he and Mnemosyne usually engaged in less than productive verbal battles. Their personalities clashed despite the fact they normally got along—but work made mindlessly furious creatures out of them rather than a possible Emet-Selch and Mnemosyne.

He had left Hades in the ruins of Amaurot. He dragged Hades back out and laid the name out in front of this reflection of Mnemosyne and Hythlodaeus.

The Exarch, dragging himself off somewhere, pinned his ears back. The Warrior of Light on the other hand kept their ready stance as he called upon those powers that he had so long left untouched.

The Underworld had become the Lifestream and was suffused with light, but where there was light there was always the dark. He dragged it out and it rejoiced at his call after so long. The Warrior of Light was the Warrior of Darkness on the First, but they were nothing of the sort here in Amaurot. The ruins of Amaurot that twisted and churned as he recreated Termination once again. The very platform that had seen Zodiark rise into the skies to darken them, to throw the heavy mantle of silence over a world tearing itself apart.

It was not Emet-Selch who stood there with the rest of the Convocation sans Mnemosyne now.

It was Hades who rose after an eternity of resting, furious and his heart full of violence as if he were a mortal.

It was freeing, somehow, to finally bring that seething hatred to the front instead of belittling these infuriating mortals. The Warrior of Light deserved naught else, for somehow, somehow… even as the darkness became too much, even as it slowly choked the light out of their still fractured soul, they stood as tall as they could. They writhed, they fought back, even if one of their reflections all but uselessly thrashed about. Amaurotian defiance from this fractured soul against mortal rage from his still united one.

Damned infernal Blessing of Light.

He all but heard Lahabrea speak through a mortal’s mouth that the hammer of darkness needed to be brought against the shield of light. Thought he heard arrogant laughter from Nabriales, heard Igeyorhm beg for help. Altima and Mitron, Emmerololth and Lohgrif… but even as Hades’ all-consuming darkness and the very Underworld itself failed to shield him from the piercing light, he swore he heard that one argument that had risen up so many times during the very last days of his home bubble up from the light abyss he stared into.

Hydaelyn’s summoners had asked time and time again if it would not be wiser to leave the world to those that had survived Termination. Those that walked after, rather than those that came before digging in their heels and sacrificing more and more to Zodiark. Back then he had furiously argued that this was not the right choice. After all, Zodiark had saved them. His will was what the planet needed. As long as He was given enough recompense he would return the people He had claimed.

Countless lifetimes he had spent seeking something that mortals plain did not have. Spend aeons agonising over the question of what the hell the point of this endless cycle of death and rebirth was.

He had an answer now.

Clarity, one could say, as he slowly raised a hand to where he knew naught remained. He was a bodyless entity, after all—and souls seldom recovered from having a hole torn into them. But mortal souls were swept away, stripped clean of the mistakes they made in that lifetime and were given another chance. Or as Hythlodaeus had wondered, they were given the chance to see their hearts led them down the same path unknowingly again. If it did not, it did not. Hythlodaeus himself had been a researcher, a soldier, a princess, an innocent soul in a world on the brink. Hades breathed out slowly as he dropped the hand for a moment before raising both to the hood he wore.

Mortals lived such pathetically short lives. He understood why now. They could make the most of it without stagnating that way. And all those souls that he, Elidibus and Lahabrea had decried torn and defiled and that they needed to be reunited were unlikely to face another Termination. They had overstayed their welcome back then. Their longevity had been a curse. A curse that got those that understood how terrifying it was to live that long and fade into oblivion to think about a world where souls reincarnated over and over, free to try things as much as they desired.

And he had slaughtered these reborn souls without a second thought, without even stopping to consider them living beings unless they proved their worth through one way or another. They had to live up to an impossible standard or face annihilation.

By the gods the mortals believed in, they had become the very catastrophe they had set out together to stop. Lahabrea had already paid the price for it.

Emet-Selch was paying it now.

The illusion of a battlefield had shifted as he clung to existence for a moment longer. It had turned into the ruins he recalled, the ruins of Amaurot that were home to droves of dead people by then. Districts they abandoned to keep the living people safe.

Mnemosyne did not remember him in the end, but his memory returned to him in those final moments. He looked at the Warrior of Light, their soul blazing in that colour he could not describe with light woven into it. It was woven into it, not forced into it, after all. Hydaelyn’s blessing was blinding even now that his eyes had been opened, but it was a lot less virulent to look at.

Behind the Scions’ equally shining—they were dimmer, yes, but they shone now rather than weakly flickered to drive him mad with longing—souls, he caught a glimpse of familiar red. The Exarch had survived being starved and dragging himself through a violent recreation of the End Days unscathed; he was still alive and in control of his bearings. Hythlodaeus could not boast an achievement like that.

He shot the Warrior of Light and the Exarch none saw behind them a smile.

He could have cursed them, could have reared his head in ugly defiance one last time. But as he realised now, mortals only did that when they were slain before their proper time was up. He had killed them in droves, had made them kill each other. Of course one would get violent if violence was all that was expected from them.

Instead, he opened his mouth one last time.

“Remember us.”

He himself had declared that the victor of this battle would be the hero and the loser the villain. Except he had been the villain all along and had not seen it through the dark veil that Zodiark had put over his eyes. It did not mean that he wanted to be forgiven or deserved to be forgiven—he would not have, as he still would not forgive Hydaelyn and Her summoners right now—but after searching for mortals worthy of Amaurot’s ruins and legacy both for so long, he had found them at last.

Those that defied his expectations.

Those that defied his expectations being those that held the legacies of Hythlodaeus and Mnemosyne was just a way to close the book, he presumed. He was content with that.

“Remember that we once lived.”

And with that, he finally closed his eyes. Finally, rest. Finally an end to the nightmare.