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All of these people, punished for his mistake. For his weakness. For his failure.
Desperately, he searched. He dug through the rubble of a village whose name he did not know, through belongings once treasured, through livelihoods and treasured memories, braving fire and smoke and ash. He ignored the way his muscles ached, his lungs burned, his wounds, sustained in so fierce a battle, persistent in trying to demand his attention.
He found none alive.
He searched regardless.
Truthfully, Alberic didn’t know how he heard a noise so small, so quiet. Mayhap ‘twas the fact that, since the flames had exhausted themselves, an eerie silence had settled over the village, now so devoid of life. Mayhap ‘twas the work of the Fury herself, granting him one small chance to atone for so monumental a failure. Penance, for what he had done and failed to do.
He did not know how, but he heard it. From a small house reduced to naught but rubble on the outskirts of the village, one of the few he had not yet checked, he heard a whimper.
‘Twas not a happy sight.
There, on what remained of the house’s floor, collapsed on his knees before the spot where the roof had fallen in on itself, was a child, small and slight and fragile. He was covered in ash and dust, snowy white hair turned grey and dirty; he looked as if he had not moved in hours.
But he was alive. Alberic could have wept.
“Child,” Alberic called from where he stood, a few paces away in what remained of the building’s doorway, adorned with his armor and his lance, as though he could still call himself a dragoon. The child’s head whipped around, startled, and a young elezen boy gazed up at him, pale eyes bloodshot and wide in fear. Tear tracks trailed down his soot-stained face; his clothes were filthy and torn, spotted with blood and fraying where falling embers had caught in the fabric.
For a small blessing, he did not appear physically injured—the thought of where the bloodstains had come from, Alberic did not linger on.
When the boy made no further effort to move, seemingly frozen in the spot he had fallen, Alberic stepped forward, dropping to a crouch beside him. Producing his canteen, he offered it carefully to the child, who continued to stare, as if he did not understand his purpose.
“‘Tis just water,” Alberic said, his voice low and rough, throat raw from dragonfire and dehydration both. For a relief, his words seemed to reach their mark, and the child—Fury, he could not have seen more than thirteen summers—took the canteen in trembling hands, bringing it to cracked and bloodied lips.
“Slowly,” Alberic warned, though the boy heeded him not at all, and ‘twas not long before he was sputtering and coughing, his body trying to expel whatever poison had gathered in his lungs as water spilled down his face.
Alberic would need to take him to the chirurgeons, when he was able.
When the boy could breathe again, chest filling out shallowly, he slowly offered back the emptied canteen, blinking owlishly, mayhap guiltily, even as his hands continued to waver. Alberic took it, keeping his gaze level with the child’s as he considered his next words. Eventually, he made to speak again.
“My name is Alberic,” was what he settled on, willing his voice to remain steady. “I am one of the Knights Dragoon.”
I’m sorry, he did not say. ‘Tis my fault.
For Alberic was not brave enough to admit it, even if the boy before him were capable of understanding. Not brave enough to admit that he had failed in his duty as the Azure Dragoon, that he had nearly given himself to Nidhogg’s terrible influence, that he had chosen to sever himself from the source of his power rather than fall victim to it, and fate had been cruel enough to spare his life in return. To admit that he was hardly here to help; rather that he had now been made to face the consequences of his inability to stop the Dravanian Horde, forced to stand among the ashes of the people he had sworn to protect and behold the sole survivor.
He would not look at what—who—the child had been weeping beside. Halone preserve him, he would not look.
Alberic swallowed, and his throat burned.
“I’m going to take you somewhere safer,” he finished, a quiet declaration, one he hoped would be believed. He would take the boy back to the Holy See, where he could be cared for. ‘Twould not be a normal life, Alberic knew, for the child would never forget what had happened to his home, and he would never forget what he had lost. Bitterness would make a home of his heart, and Ishgard would nurture it, as it had for so many others, and twist it to vengeance. Mayhap it was selfish, to all but inflict such a life on the unfortunate soul before him.
But what else could he do?
The child—this poor, Fury-forsaken child, who had been cursed to live on when likely every soul he had ever known lay dead in the dirt and rubble around him—simply stared. And then he nodded, a tiny, broken thing.
Alberic would not leave him here. He could not.
“All right,” Alberic affirmed, somehow far more confidently than he felt, and it was an easy enough thing, then, to reach out and gather the child in his arms, as small as he was. It surprised him, the way the boy clung to his armor, burying his face in the crook of his neck despite the drachen mail that adorned it.
Alberic wasn’t sure what he’d expected—a bit more fight, mayhap. For the boy to yell and scream, to refuse to leave his home, his family, the shattered remains of his life. Instead, he stayed silent, acceptance in the face of what he must have known was not truly a choice. He was exhausted, surely, hungry and thirsty and hurting beyond belief. Mayhap he would have agreed to anything.
Halone, but he was still shaking so badly.
Alberic rose, then, holding his orphaned charge close to his chest and steady in his arms, before he made to leave—though not before he cast his gaze at last to the ruined floor, and he knew for whom the child had wept.
It would be a long walk back to Ishgard.