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She was a good person and that was her downfall.
That was what everyone said, the old guard who remembered the Lady De Sardet when she was still human. She was kind and she tried to help everyone with every thing. She was the kind of noble woman who would bend down into the mud to pick up a child’s lost toy. And her smile...that was perhaps the most legendary part of her. Her high cheek bones, her soft full lips, her twinkling green eyes against her tanned brown skin. De Sardet was beautiful in only the way truly good people are. She was the sort of beautiful that it didn’t matter what she looked like. She just glowed.
That was not the type of person who should face evil alone.
No, no, that wasn’t fair to Constantin. One cannot call the chaos of nature evil, but the boy he was once was lost beneath his hardened stone skin. But De Sardet still saw that boy, despite everything he had done, because she was a good person. Because she still loved him.
Vasco had only pieced that together after he had confessed his feelings. She didn’t make him feel badly about it – or maybe she had, it had been two decades now and the exact conversation was a faded memory. But he had known it in her eyes. De Sardet was not rejecting him for him but because there was someone she wanted, someone she couldn’t be with, but was still loyal to.
Vasco could have been jealous. Maybe he had been for a time, but only an instant. In some other strange parallel world some sailors sang of, perhaps Constantin would have simply married his cousin – it wasn’t like any royal hadn’t done that before and at least they weren’t blood-kin. It would have been a good match, really. De Sardet of the New World and Constantin of the Old. They would have had beautiful children. They would have been happy. Vasco would have been happy for them.
He wondered sometimes what had gone through her mind the moment she betrayed everything for Constantin. She was supposed to kill him, she was committed to it. She had promised Vasco, she had promised all of them. What had Constantin said to her? What could any man say to any woman to make her give up everything to follow him into chaos? To give up the mortal realm and follow him into the great unknown?
They had all wondered, of course, as they sat around the fire that first night, unsure of how to process the end of the world. Kurt, who knew them both best, cursed and swore and said that Constantin must have forced her, must have threatened her, must have done something to her. Maybe drugged her, poisoned her, done something. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she had died trying to save them.
But Vasco was like so many sailors before him, more than a little superstitious and more than a little willing to believe in the mystical cosmos. How many myths had started with a pair of lovers? The feminine rising to meet the masculine, the light rising to meet the dark? The world was not so binary, but the spirit world didn’t follow the rules of nature. Gods were not shades of grey. Gods were beyond the visible spectrum of colour.
He did not say this aloud that night, or any other night after. But he could see the pair of them, standing before the other. In his mind, he saw Constantin offer his hand to her. The exact words, of course, Vasco would never know, but in his imagination Constantin said, "This is true love. Do you think this happens every day?"
Love was chaos. It was destructive. It could destroy just as much as it built. Maybe more.
Twenty years since the end of the world. He was the last one standing, of them five. He and Aphra had survived for so long past the others. She wrote to him often. He didn’t write back. Only when Petrus died and even then, it had been less than a page. What did he have to say to her or anyone else? But now, now that she was gone too...
That was how the girl found him. She had been looking for Aphra to join her great expedition back to the island. But Aphra was dead. So Vasco would do just as well, now that she had his last known address.
The girl. He should stop calling her that. Kellen was about the age he had been the last time he had set foot on Teer Fradee. She wanted to explore a lost world. She wanted to know what had happened to the island after the missives stopped six years before. Had the new gods been defeated? Was it safe for them to return again? Maybe this time they could find a cure, for real, maybe this time they could save the world.
Vasco had been that young once. Now...now he was the age Kurt was when he died. Kurt, full of fire and zeal until the end. Kurt, who never ever stopped fighting while he still had an inch of life. Vasco hadn’t wanted to go on this mission, but he agreed to because he thought Kurt’s spirit would never let him rest if he didn’t.
Vasco was the eldest among Kellen’s gathered companions. He was not that old, truly, but he felt a hundred years their senior. All had been children – two not even born yet – when Teer Fradee had fallen to the new gods. But he remembered the world before. It had not been a perfect one, not even fair one. It had been badly in need of repair but there had been people like De Sardet to put it together. People like Kellen. There were always those rare few that had that power, that ability to make it seem like there was always a right solution, there was always a chance to stop a fight before it started or to end one with no loss of life or dignity. Kellen was nothing like De Sardet except for faith in the ability to save the world.
On the long journey overseas, Vasco thought a hundred times of asking her a single question. She pestered him with enough, certainly, even ones she had asked a dozen times before. He wanted to know, but he worried that she’d think he was making a move on her and he didn’t want to encourage anything like that. But he wanted to ask Kellen if she had ever been in love. He needed to know if he should watch for that same fatal flaw that had destroyed De Sardet. He needed to know if another pure soul was to burn down the world because of their love of all that was spoiled.
But Vasco did not ask her, nor did he say much of all until they reached Teer Fradee. He smelled it before he could see it through the mists. Sulfur. The volcano weakly billowed out, the lava barely cooled upon the ground into new rocky paths. A disaster, it seemed, had cut the island from the continent. Was it a natural occurrence or had the gods shown their wrath?
Vasco had only seen De Sardet’s wrath once, at finding a pit of burnt bodies beneath a secret laboratory. She had nearly killed a man if it hadn’t been for Vasco pulling her into his arms and letting her beat against his chest. Her rage turned to sorrow and she burst into tears, weeping into his shoulder. He ached with her and he wanted to do something, anything to ease her pain.
Wasn’t that what love was? Easing pain?
There were a pair of natives waiting for them at the worn docks of New Serene. Vasco could see them even through the mist – vapour, not mist, vapour from the lava slipping into the ocean. A hellscape, not a crisp morning on the moors.
Kellen turned to Vasco for answers. He took his spyglass and tried to make out their features from afar. It was hard to see much, their faces were almost entirely covered by their headdresses.
They made anchor and Vasco did not wait for the gang plank to jump onto the docks. He stumbled slightly and the one native took his arm, helping him steady himself. Vasco saw past the skull surrounding her face and saw her stunning blue eyes. Constantin’s eyes. He looked to the other, a boy her age, so close in complexion and build that there was no doubt they shared both father and mother. Twins, likely, and only a few breaths past their coming of age.
Or did the children of gods ever come of age?
The girl spoke in the local tongue and though it had been two decades, Vasco understood it as if it were his own first language. She gripped his arms, determined, but not aggressively.
“My mother said it would be you,” she murmured, her voice as soft as warm summer rain. “She told me that you would protect her champion for as long as you could.”
The boy reached him, a mere moment before the others could, and his hand touched his cheek. Vasco was overcome, tears streaming down his face. He understood. He understood everything. De Sardet needed him once more, one more mission. She needed him.
Vasco promised nearly silently, “Tell your mother I’m hers. I always have been. I always will.”
Then Kellen was within earshot and Vasco pulled away, letting Kellen take charge of the situation. What she did, what she said, it didn’t matter. The world was over already, it couldn’t get much worse. But now...but now, Vasco might see De Sardet once more. See the woman who had haunted his thoughts for twenty years.
No, not the woman. The god.