Work Text:
“Give my sister back!”
It starts like this, always. You don’t know how many times you’ve had this dream but you know how it starts. Here. Now. In this endless, eternal field of white flowers under a perpetually dusky twilight sky, you and Aether stand before a door to nowhere and everywhere, holding hands, and push it open together.
Blinding white, blinding light. After that, what happens next is never the same.
Sometimes snow falls, only it is not snow but scraps of paper and grown men are throwing themselves prostrate on the street to salvage these pieces. Other times, snow falls, only it is ash and not snow and all you can see is that ocean of fire, that sea of flames, and all the lost souls calling for help drown you in an anthem of grief.
This time, that does not happen. This time a blonde man in black who wears part of the night sky as a cape looks at you, directly at you, and looks and looks with such sadness in his eyes until you feel he sees not only your face but the inner workings of your mind and soul as well. His eyes, his eyes, swallow you up and shrink again until they are not his eyes but the eye of another, with the same star in the center.
And even then, that eye changes until it is not the eye of a human but of a god, fierce and burning and vengeful, burning black and orange and red, with white hair like flames and bandages for slippers. She calls your names, this Unknown God does, saying that your journey through countless worlds ends with this one, then flings you down into darkness to fall without wings, without your sword, without your brother. You, the victor who walks among the stars and strides through the sky, who can raze continents and overthrow kingdoms, who knows and comprehends more than any mortal can - but then again, were you ever really mortal to begin with? How right she was, that your arrogance made you blind, that the arrogation of mankind would end with you. You were fools.
Then the stars in the sky, in the cape, in all those eyes, all return to the sky and you are floating, falling, before the world turns suddenly, jerks, upside down and you are not in the sky but staring at a pool of water while a girl with black hair reads it and divines but does not understand secrets nobody should know.
The water jiggles once, twice, before it turns dark and this is not water, it is wine. And you are in a tavern while a bard sings ballads from long ago and downs drinks like he’s dying of thirst. And those strings on his lyre are not from a lyre, but they are the ones a storyteller plucks while holding a fan and spinning tales from millennia ago, they are the fishing lines that hang off the pier while men laugh and joke, they are lit fuses in bombs that explode with a happy laugh.
Bright smiles and bouncy steps bring the smell of smoke and fish. You see a little girl with purple hair picking herbs and playing with a doll before a blur of green and black slams down on the mountainside. You try and scream, try and move, try and runrunrun run away but she cannot and does not and falls so quietly you cannot even hear her cry, for what value does the fragile life of a mortal, especially one so short and young, have in the eyes of eternity? Then her eyes open and they are no longer blue but red, bright and smiling and explosions of gunpowder captured in irises.
Those eyes are not true eyes but the glassy spheres granted by the island in the sky, and you are watching as fire and ice meet in an explosion of steam, and no longer is the blue eye that holds the stars welcome.
Stormclouds gather, grumbling low and dark in the sky. Blood splatters dark against white clth and pale skin, a slain hero dead defending the city and the son he loved. On the raging ocean, a monster tall enough to reach the sun strikes a ship. Lightning descends, streaking out of the sky and onto the wet wood, an explosion of steam marking the end of a tyrant. A woman streaming black hair behind her and welding a broken blade plants it in the deck, clutching something in her fist, steadying herself when the monster collapses into the waves, sending bloody seafoam rushing over you.
The blood condenses into a redheaded man blazing through smoke and fire, clutching a torn pennant in one hand and a bloody sword in the other, cradling a boy pierced with arrows. He stands, turns, cups a pixie of a wind sprite in his hand, and watches in silence as the tower of old falls. His hair grows, longer and longer, until he is no longer a man but a gladiator, dancing to clashing steel and howls of pain. She looks up, up, higher, until you’re flying, floating, on a platform above the ground and the man is a man once again, swinging that same greatsword to slay a dragon.
The dragon falls, down onto the platform and sends it scattering in a thousand pices to the ground, tumbling through clouds and crashing on a mountain with a peak that towers into the clouds, turning green grass into barren snow and twisted trees that grow like bones, then it falls farther, shrinking, into a funnel of dark clouds until it crashes into an altar and dies.
Stars fall, burning blue and purple and gold, condensing into a blast of frost so cold your dream feels real. A boy in green gasps, collapses, while that woman in white who wears a mask so similar to the man clothed in stars, whle she holds a trinket so small yet pulsing with divine power. Then her hair turns magenta and she lifts her leg over her head, slamming a spear down into the heart of a mage who wields forbidden alchemy with the same ease as his sword, that glowing blade that still beats with the heart of a beast, made from the dragon’s remains and kept alive by magic and cold malice.
Hands catch you, you who are falling from that platform the dragon broke, wrap around your arms - tattoos crawling up biceps, cloth fluttering in the wind. And you are no longer tumbling from a broken dragon but from a fallen palace that was once the pride and joy of a queen with white hair.
But even now, you know this palace is not the one sacrificed to save a city but the one which holds the empty throne, silent and callous in the void called sky, and you know you are seeing it through the single mechanical eye of a machine hellbent on vengeance, the eye that has long since died but still lives on through hatred. And now that boy is back, brings you back with him when he squeezes your hand. “Be careful,” he says, before his hair turns blonde and his eyes glitter gold.
“Lumine!”
You want to scream, nonono, don’t take him from me this time, please, but black obscures your vision but not your hearing, and above that all-consuming symphony of death in that sea of fire you hear him call for you.
“Wait! Don’t go!”
You wake. Cold air, wet sand, dark sky. There’s nothing here, only the sound of the waves and scent of brine to comfort you.
You know he’s not there, so why you can’t stop yourself from calling for him?
“A- Aether. . . ?”
Only the sea breaks the silence.