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Barry is falling.
Barry is falling from a ship in the sky (and how is it hanging there? a levitation spell or some sort of suspension field or--?). The ship recedes away above him and he doesn't understand what he was doing there or how he got up there in the first place or who that elf was who just blasted him off the deck.
Barry is falling and his mind his full of static and he thinks he should probably be more scared about hitting the ground but for some reason he isn't.
Barry is falling and he is confused and angry but he is not afraid.
Then, he is not falling anymore.
Barry hits the ground, and just for a second, everything goes black.
When he rises from his broken body, crackling with magic, it takes a second for everything to come back. Then he remembers, and for a moment the bolts of magic threaten to engulf him completely.
They were forgetting.
Something was making them forget. For a moment there he hadn't know where he was, or who Taako was. Taako--gods, Taako had forgotten Lup. Barry can't imagine anything worse.
What he doesn't understand is how. Obviously Fisher is involved somehow; they know that the voidfish can erase information from people's minds, can make them forget, but how--?
Oh.
He looks up at the Starblaster in horror.
Oh, gods.
Lucretia.
It was Lucretia.
Lucretia, who had started retreating into her quarters even before Lup left.
Lucretia, who had looked so hurt when he told her, patiently but maybe a little too bluntly, that there was no way her plan could work.
Sweet Lucretia, who feels every hurt like it's her own, who wants so badly, he knows, to find some other way to save this world that wouldn't leave it and their family so broken. Who can be so stubborn when she wants to and who learned, during her cycle alone, to be so bloody practical.
Lucretia, who has Fisher's tank in her room, and a detailed record of their journey all lined up in neatly labeled notebooks on her shelves.
It's clever, he admits, using Fisher's abilities as a way to stop the war. But he knows she won't stop there; she will want to collect the relics so she can try her plan, cast her barrier around this plane. It's a plan she must have known the rest of them would never agree to (because it won't work! he shouts at her in his mind), and so she decided to find a way around them.
Barry can just imagine her, sitting at her desk in her quarters, anguished but determined, writing. He can see her holding a journal over the opening of Fisher's tank, hesitating, but finally, stubbornly, making a choice for all of them.
He remembers Taako's horribly blank face just now, his voice when he asked that terrible one-word question, "Who?"--
And Barry is suddenly filled with so much rage that he burns a circle ten feet wide in the grass around his crumpled body. How could she--how dare she? The memory of Lup is all they have left of her, right now, and for a terrifying moment, Barry couldn't even recall what she looked like. Taako has already forgotten her completely.
Worse, Lup is still out there somewhere, alone. If she's a lich, she might not know what happened at all. If she's alive--Barry has to steady himself, force himself calm--if she's alive, then she's forgotten everything. She's waking up somewhere, alone, with no idea who she is.
With no idea who he is.
The thought makes his mind stutter and stall. To take something so vital from them without discussion, without even trying to talk to them--what gives Lucretia the right?
Later, he will remember how much he loves her: his little sister, with all her inquisitiveness and her open heart. Later, he will cling to his memories of her just as hard as he does all the others. But right now, he is only glad that she is not in front of him, because in the horror and anger of this moment, he is not entirely sure what he would do.