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The meandering breeze carried with it the scent of sliced apples and pine needles, winnowing through silver hair that had grown long and shaggy. Like the First, Shasi reflected, Elpis seemed a place out of time. It was only the length of her hair that told her how long had passed.
That and the depth of her husband’s tan, she amended, cracking one eye open to peer at him.
The apple she’d smelled, she discovered, was in Eros’s hand. With a pocket knife in the other, he had cut free a slice, and paused in the lifting of it to his lips, suddenly aware of the force of her gaze. He turned those golden eyes upon her, and Shasi found herself thinking their color was at that moment just the same as the gilt tracery of the windows in their villa.
“I had not meant to wake you,” he said, glancing away a moment.
Shasi shook her head: “You didn’t,” she assured.
“Pleasant dreams?” He cut free another slice of apple and offered it to her.
Shasi pushed herself up to a sitting position and took it, pale apple flesh sliding over silver steel. “I dreamed of Elidibus,” she said.
“Themis.”
“No,” Shasi insisted, “Elidibus. Our Elidibus.”
She did not like to think of the Crystal Tower; of its Ocular; of its keeper and of the entity that had been consigned to imprisonment in its spires until he spent the coin of his life fueling the spell which had first brought her to this place. And yet the picture would not go from her mind of her last visit—enclosed by walls the same blue as her eyes, the figment in white had appeared before her.
“I’ve been thinking about what he said,” Shasi continued. She scrubbed a hand over her face, blinking the sleep from her eyes. Motes of manifold color glimmered on the wind as it wandered over the isle, and Shasi found herself blinking again, because for the first time, the moon had risen above the horizon.
The trackless days she had spent here, investigating Pandaemonium—aided by Eros, Erichthonios, and Elidibus; the youth need not admit his identity for her to know him—had never been so marked before. The night skies over Elpis were rich with stars, but she had been born under two moons, and to find none at all appeared night after night had made her wonder …
Garlemald was only Allag writ anew—and it did not take much thought to connect Azys Lla with Elpis—but had Dalamud, too, been crafted in the image of an older prison? Perhaps Etheirys had known no moon until the Sundering. But no, there the evidence stared her in the face: the moon had been a convenience, not a creation, when it came time to bind Zodiark.
Why had it not appeared before now? She made a note to ask Erichthonios. If he did not know the answer, he could surely point the way to one who did.
“Shasi Galvus,” Eros said, with the sort of tone that implied it was not the first time.
She allowed a crooked smile to tug at her lips, reaching out to wind her arms about his bicep, pressing her temple to the curve of his shoulder. Eros canted his head to one side to press his cheek to her hair in turn.
“What did he say?” Eros prompted her.
“A thousand things, for ten thousand purposes,” Shasi murmured. “I wish I could tell him his name,” she said then. The pity sat strange in her breast, where once she had held nothing for the man but rancor. That had not been true even when she and Eros had met—indeed, they had first chanced to cross paths not long after her final return from the First, and his very name had caught her ear, echoing as it did the appellation of one of her Lightwarden foes.
And now they were wed, and Elidibus was gone, and Shasi lamented that loss.
She cleared her throat. “When he sent us here,” she said, “he told us that even if we were able to make ourselves seen and heard here, we could change nothing. Not as a warning, I think, but as a truism. But … he’s wrong.”
“Oh?” Eros seemed amused. That dimple teased his cheek as it had not in some few moons, and Shasi tipped her head up to kiss it. “Well, wife,” he continued, “tell me the rest.”
That made her laugh—and his smile broadened in response, like he cherished the sound. “The Exarch,” she said then. “’Tis true that, bereft a host, he will fade in time, as the Scions might have done, but … he should have disappeared the moment I turned back the Light for the first time. Or when Estinien destroyed the first Black Rose facility. Or at a thousand junctures before and since, when the river of time was diverted by the weirs and dams of my actions. You met G’raha Tia,” Shasi added, modulating her tone to blandness.
Eros extricated his arm from her grasp so that he could gather her against his side instead, stroking one broad hand down her bicep in turn. He sensed her agitation, then; she had little way of hiding it from his empathetic insight, and in truth she hoped she never learned the knack. “I did,” he said.
Of her many Echo-induced gifts, her husband’s manner of emotional insight had never numbered among them. But even she could tell he was hedging in like manner to her—though like as not it was more to do with the matter of their separation during that time, and whatever had found him in the rift between worlds as he pursued her to another shard.
“Well,” Shasi said, finding herself nuzzling against Eros’s side, “he cannot then be dormant in the tower for Cid to discover and awaken after a Calamity that will never come to pass.”
“Whatever it is you’re talking yourself around to, you can just tell me,” Eros reminded her.
“There’s absolutely nothing stopping us from changing the past,” Shasi said.
“And then what? We live out our natural lives here? If you wanted to escape to paradise, I’m told Tataru bought us an island.”
“No,” Shasi said, “we go back to Garlemald, as we planned, and finish the work we started there. Or … we spend our lives with the work, and hope our children’s children might finish it, more likely.” She looked up at Eros’s face—so like his grandsire’s, she found herself thinking for the thousandth time. As she often did, she hoped his brow would never grow so lined with worry as had Solus’s. “Tempting as it is to stay here—and maybe the only thing more tempting than watching your skin grow tan while we’re about our work here is watching you work on your tan deliberately on a remote isle where we should scarcely find ourselves interrupted—I can no more live a life of idleness than you can.”
“Will that life still exist to return to?”
Shasi pursed her lips, then nodded. “The tower could send us back to the time and place whence it came, if I but understood how to command it to,” she said. “I suspect we should still find a world to greet us, else the Exarch should have disappeared.
“It isn’t fair,” she said at last.
“Very little is,” Eros murmured, and for three small words they bore too much weight.
“It isn’t right; it isn’t just. It’s far too late for me to make right what went wrong so long ago in Ktisis Hyperborea. And that would create some other stream of causality, one which you and I could never see. Never visit, never cross to. But Amaurot could be saved—they could all be saved, if I could only make them see—”
“See what, kitten?” Eros asked her. “That the end of the world was caused by one of their own?”
“No,” Shasi said, looking up into those struck-coin eyes. So like his grandsire’s; so like those of her soul’s oldest friend. “The same thing you taught me to see. That they’re not alone.”