Chapter Text
And I soar up high into the haven
Of the starless night
Borne by black wings of dawn
I fly away from the bygone
As I crossed alone
The gold turned into dead stone
And I did not look back
Nor did I mourn
The end had come.
Sothis closed her eyes. She would need rest, after this moment in her time. There was no removing her daughter's wails, as she locked her away in the Holy Tomb. Seiros was beginning to reach to her own power, and Sothis could not bear to see her use it here.
Agartha.
Such insolence. Such arrogance. And yet...
Sothis' bare feet sunk into the rich soil of southern Fodlan, knowing that crops would not shoot up in her place. Too much blood had been spilled here, the ground ripped up from stomping feet and deadly steel. She had seen it, after all. Sothis knew what was to come. She was the beginning. And this battle was the end.
She bent to her knees, clasped her hands together, and began to pray.
She sent out a call to all life, the trees and the birds and the deer and the forests and the sea. She cried out to her blood, the Nabateans, all who could hear. The enemy began to emerge above the hill, magic not of this world sparking at their fingertips and weapons augmented with cruelty and death. A misuse of her gifts, a sight that always made Sothis turn inward.
No one should have this power.
She was the Goddess. She was the hope of so many people. And she was so, so tired.
Someone like her was not meant to walk the earth, to walk among the people of Fodlan. She could see that now.
Her hands began to glow in the thick of the night, hurting her eyes and revealing her location. No matter. That was the point.
She began to hear the crest of wings above her, their scales whipping through the air like an axe through the bark of a tree. She would need her children. They were as powerless to stop humanity as she was, but she needed them for her plan.
She channeled herself inward, until the grass scratching at her knees and the chill on her bare shoulders began to dissipate. A numbness folded over her, like a frozen dream, and she squeezed her eyes shut. The light in her hands intensified until she could see the sun behind her closed eyelids. She slumped.
Sothis was gone before she hit the ground.
The Nabateans would find their goddess on the ground. They would retreat with her prone body, accepting casualties from the Agarthans as they did so. These people used technology forged from the progenitor god's gift, and turned it against their children.
Such was the gluttony, the pride, the greed of humans.
Sothis was not yet dead, although she soon would be. She had seen it, after all, as clearly as she saw the sun set in the place that would, one day, be called Gronder Field. With all of her strength, she sent her consciousness forward in time.
She was the beginning. She was the beginning.
When the world stopped spinning, even in her other form, the first sensation she noticed was blistering heat.
She could see through a pair of young eyes. The breaths she took were shallow and blunt. She did not feel pain, she couldn't in this state, but Sothis could detect the scent of blood.
Seiros, what have you done?
But that was wrong, too.
Her daughter was not here.
They were not born of endless sand dunes and brightly covered flags reflecting the glare in the distance. This was not her domain. This was wrong.
Before she could panic, the girl she inhabited turned her head. Doing so, she met a pair of startling, verdant eyes.
The boy who possessed them had one arm reached toward her, struggling to reach her. Sothis softened, and she commanded the girl to reach out for him. Her tiny hand was streaked with blood. His was covered in cuts. The girl beneath Sothis swallowed, and then touched his skin.
Sothis felt it. She felt how all sensation narrowed to this touch, the way the world fell away. This would have to be enough. It had to be. She channeled all of her desperation, all of her grief, all of her hate in between their touch. She sighed in relief along with the girl when she was scooped up into strong arms, arms that she did not know but recognized as familiar and home regardless, and looking over, the boy was collected by the people of the desert.
Gods are not meant to walk among men, she thought. But perhaps this would be enough.
The boy still stared with an open kind of awareness. His eyes constantly shifted, unsettling behind so much forest green, not like the sea green of her people. He saw everything, with whirling calculation and insight unnatural in his age. Sothis knew this, as much as she knew the girl beneath her, a thoughtless, unfeeling void. A vessel for what was to come. But this girl struggled now, reaching towards the boy again.
You will not remember this, Sothis thought, and willed this towards the two of them. They stilled, listening, and with the last of her strength, Sothis sent her hope into the sky.
When she came back to herself, she was surrounded by stone. The Holy Tomb's smelled musty and damp, from where she lay in her slumber, but the wood ceiling shifted and gave way.
Fear hammered with her pulse.
Even though she knew, she knew, she endured a childish hope that it was Seiros opening her tomb, some kind of divine intervention even on the Goddess's behalf. It was never meant to be.
A terrible face greeted her, with beady eyes and deep scars and grizzled skin. He held a dagger, which he held high above his head. The point aimed toward her chest.
Farewell, my daughter.
How fitting that the end washed red and exploded like stars in the sky.
Khalid knew all too well he was lucky to be alive.
He knew his half-brothers, his cousins, the sons of the high priests could honey their words with rot, turn play into a dangerous game. He should had known that when the group of them ventured past the walls of their city, he would be far from any kind of help. The desert was relentless. It had no mercy for those lost, even less for those who did not belong.
He did fight back. Not much passed boy, even at ten years old. He knew how cruelty could spin in young minds; he could calculate how the differences between him and the rest would end in blood. It didn't stop him from noticing among them, either. Basir was shorter than the rest. Farrokh had a crooked nose, most likely from a fight. Shayan had speckles in his eyes. It did not matter. Khalid was the outsider.
A coward's son.
The thought of leaving the city with them, out in the dry wilderness, was naive, even deadly, but Khalid was not a coward. And he did not accept the terms of an outsider.
His knuckles split as they ganged up on him, lashing out with fists and teeth. He lost count of the black eyes he gave, the shouting of his conquerors. They left him in the sand, bleeding but breathing, and he began to laugh. He won. They could not leave him any less but intact, and whole. The world swam. The sun shone bright and noxious above him, and Khalid closed his eyes. The desert could take him, but not them. Never them.
His memory stopped there.
He knew he was rescued by his father's Immortal Corps, and rescue missions were generally not their task. It was because of them he now lay in bed, surrounded by oriental rugs with a plain white sheet spread over his small form. His mother sat on a chair beside him. She barked something in rough Almyran, the accent never being something she could master. She called for a servant.
Tea. Tea did sound nice.
"Mama, why were the Corps there?"
She sighed. "They had reports of targeted killings. There's a renowned mercenary from the west. They think it's him."
"From Fodlan?"
Tiana's mouth thinned, but her eyes softened. "Yes, sweeting. From Fodlan."
Khalid nodded, too tired to question much. One of the servants - a young woman with rare, kind eyes - set a cup of pine needle tea on the nightstand. She sipped at the cup, testing its heat, before nodding at him and set at her task of closing the drapes.
He wanted to tell her to stop. He loved the night sky. The stars were hard to see; Almyra took lighting the royal palace very seriously. Torches, paper lanterns, braziers, stained glass lit up from within. He once asked his father to turn off the lights of the palace for his birthday. He got laughter for his efforts, before a light tug on his hair.
"The light will keep you safe, my son," his father had told him from his perch on the ornate throne. "One day. One day, you will see."
At age ten, Khalid still didn't. But he did know that one star shone brighter than any other, and it was in the wrong place to be the North Star. In fact, he was quite certain he had never seen it before, and that, well, that was saying something. He would spend all night with the night sky if he could. It disappeared from the servant's work.
"Drink," his mother urged him. "You were out on the sands for so long."
Khalid reached for the cup, before the world whited out.
He blinked, and pieces of the room came back into focus. The rugs' colors shone dull in this new light, except for the red. Red, as vivid as blood. The silhouettes of his bed posts stood out like charcoal drawings. Overhead light... overhead?
Khalid wasn't in his own body.
He stared at the body that he knew, he knew was his own. He lay with his head rolled to the side, blood pouring out of his mouth, green eyes staring at nothing...
He tried to wretch, but there was no stomach to pull from.
Then the edges of his universe blurred, and he was back in himself.
"Sweeting." His vision began to blur. "Sweeting, where did you go?"
Where did you go? It was his mother's question when he wasn't paying attention, when he was lost in his thoughts, staring into the distance at inopportune times. But this... this was different.
Khalid swept out his arm. The tea cup and saucer tipped onto the ground. The fragrance of pine filled the air as ceramic shattered and scattered across the floor.
"Khalid! What has gotten into you?"
Tiana shouted in Fodlanese, but her voice was muted compared to the roar in Khalid's ears. He trembled, holding his arms close to himself. He knew, but how?
His mother's scolding turned into a scream.
The servant Khalid always liked collapsed to the ground, clutching her throat. Her chest seized in caving, unnatural convulsions.
As the tea burned a score on the rug, Khalid thought of the star.