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Raise arms. Left swipe, right slash, feint low.
Edea counted to five under her breath, then let the familiar pattern flow and repeat.
Change stance. Raise arms. Right swipe, left slash.
Agnès had complained that she couldn’t sleep with a sword swishing around next to the bed, so Edea had been exiled to the downstairs hall of Caldisla’s inn. The clock had struck twelve, not long ago, and the innkeep had bade her goodnight half an hour before, so she had the place all to herself. Perfect.
Until now. There was a little shadow bobbing awkwardly to her rear, waiting for a pause in her routine. She ignored it.
“Um,” it said. “Ah—“
Edea huffed, and let her sword arm fall to her side. “Yes, Tiz?
Tiz coughed in an apologetic sort of way. “I just wondered if Ringabel was with you. He hasn’t come to bed.”
“Why would he be with me?” She scoffed. “He’s probably off chasing girls.”
“D’you think so? I don’t think so.” Tiz’s brows drew together in that annoying way where she could practically see the gears in his mind turning, and Edea was tempted to poke him with the point of her sword. “He hasn’t done that kind of thing for ages. Haven’t you noticed? He’s been really quiet since, well. You know. The Dark Knight.”
Edea grimaced. Yes, she knew. Alternis Dim’s mask shattering onto the deck of Grandship after their battle, and Ringabel’s face staring out. No, not Ringabel’s face. Alternis’ face—devastated, betrayed, uncomprehending.
She didn’t want to remember it.
“I tried to talk to him, but... He said he ‘wasn’t ready to confront it’ yet. I’m pretty worried about him.” Tiz fidgeted, pulling at a scrappy lock of brown hair behind his ear. “I just don’t understand. How can they have the same face?”
“I don’t know,” she said tightly. Raise arms, left swipe, right slash, feint—
“But Edea—”
That did it. She exploded, whirling on him, brandishing her sword an inch from his nose. “All right! Just stop whining and go back to bed! I’ll go and look for him.”
Tiz scuttled upstairs as she stomped out of the inn. Honestly. Why was this down to her? She didn’t want to see Ringabel lolling around the midnight streets with his arm around some Caldislan girl. Or worse, kissing some Caldislan girl. Edea screwed up her face. No, she really, absolutely didn’t need to see anything like that. Damn Tiz to the moon and back. Couldn’t he have stayed in bed and left her to her practice?
The night air was cool; time had somehow been rewound back to early autumn, a fact none of them could begin to explain. She made her way around the steep streets of Caldisla in the dark, trying to recall Ringabel’s favorite haunts. The bar at the docks where the sailors gathered was already shuttered closed. The platform with the best view of the moonlit sea—she was sure he used to take girls up here—was empty. She didn’t think he’d have reason to go up to the castle, or to the graveyard of the town’s small Crystalist church. She hoped he’d have enough sense not to leave the town entirely, gallivanting off to fight nocturnal monsters on his own. Not even Ringabel was that foolish, surely.
Edea paused on her way back to the inn, her attention caught by the flicker of a lamp in an upstairs window of the neighboring house that she had only known as a burned-out shack. The entire building was now impossibly pristine, untouched by flames. The attack on Caldisla had, seemingly, not yet occurred in this new world. Another thing they needed to make sense of.
She squinted up at the dim glow of the lamp. Could it be...? Ringabel had spent some time staying there, after all, in the days before they had all met. Perhaps it was somewhere he felt he could retreat to.
Edea walked up to the door, which swayed open under her tentative push. If Ringabel was here, he had’t locked it. She didn’t know if he’d ever had a key to this place. She closed it quietly, finding the latch.
...He would have put the latch on if he was here with a girl, right? She almost backed out of the door at the thought that she might walk in on Ringabel in an intimate moment. But there were no voices; the house was completely silent. She padded slowly up the wooden staircase, wondering if this was all a terrible idea.
The door to the lamplit bedroom was propped open, and the adrenaline surging up through Edea’s veins melted away when she saw that Ringabel was alone, sprawled on the bed, fast asleep. His jacket was draped neatly across a chair, and his boots were lined up at the foot of the bed. He had even folded his socks, she snorted to herself.
It was rare to see him so deeply asleep. He never seemed to sleep well in their shared hotel rooms. He lay flat on his back, arms spread wide on each side. Edea was always struck by how young and vulnerable he looked when he was sleeping. It stirred some long-dormant emotion in her chest, something akin to protectiveness, which bothered her so much that she had to look away.
The chair was nestled against a polished oak writing desk at the room’s small window. The desk held the gently flickering lamp she had seen from the street, as well as two heavy black books, both emblazoned with an identical silver “D” on the cover. Ringabel’s journal.
Ah. She’d seen him earlier, hunched over the table at the inn, glancing between the two books, frowning while he took notes. Edea hadn’t wanted to ask what he was looking for, exactly. She felt a little sick at the thought that one of the journal belonged to Alternis. And the other...
She didn’t want to admit it, but it couldn’t be denied; the other somehow belonged to another Alternis.
Worse than that, she was beginning to have an inkling about where that other Alternis was at that moment. More than an inkling, even.
Ringabel stirred on the bed behind her, and she stole a glance at him. He’d turned onto his side, his hair falling across his forehead, his lips parted. She glared at him in sudden annoyance. He had no business looking so sweet right now. No business whatsoever.
She moved silently across the room and slipped into the chair. The fur collar of Ringabel’s jacket cushioned her shoulders as she opened the cover of one journal, and then the second. It didn’t take long to work out which was which; the newly-acquired journal had more pages. Ringabel’s had several missing. She wondered idly what had happened to them. Ripped out, burned, or simply lost.
She leafed through pages of Alternis’ tight, tidy script, pausing to examine his delicate pencil sketches. Of airships, scenery, maps and people. Several of her, too. She tried to ignore the heavy twinge at her chest when both journals described how the author slept with a picture of her under his pillow. How he reached for it unconsciously as soon as he woke.
...Edea. You were ever a tomboy. Capricious. Pure and stubborn. Quick to tears... Perfect.
Both iterations of the Dark Knight had described her in exactly the same way. It tugged at her heart. At the same time, it bothered her, the way Alternis placed her on a pedestal. He’d barely spoken to her for years. What kind of person had he built her up to be in his mind’s eye?
There were a number of discrepancies, too. The two men had taken different paths. The ‘other’ Alternis had been the one to rescue Egil. That hardly surprised her. Alternis had always had a soft spot for orphans, having been one himself. She had to quickly leaf through the next section; she couldn’t bear to read it again. Ringabel had shown it to her once, and she’d read with morbid curiosity the account of how the author had fallen into molten lava, saved only by his suit of armor, and had been forced to regrow his skin through excruciating magical treatments. That was back when they had endlessly speculated about who the author might be, if the journal was fiction, or a prediction, or...
But if the notion forming in her mind was true, it meant that the man sleeping peacefully on the bed behind her had been the one to suffer all this. Had been through nothing short of hell. She could barely bring herself to let the thought rise to the surface before she pushed it away. Not him. Please, not him. The thought of him in such pain... No.
Even though the facts were staring right back at her. The two journals. The two identical faces. Ringabel’s instinctive skills with a sword. The fact that he could pilot Eternian airships, a qualification reserved exclusively for members of the officer class.
Had she been stupid, all this time? Refusing to see the man in front of her for what he really was?
She reached the last pages, pushing both journals together to compare the words line by line. Her own Alternis, on hearing of the battle between the Vestal and the Templar, had poured his reaction into his writing.
I felt as if my heart were being crushed. I have never known such despair.
She skimmed to the next paragraph, tears blurring her eyes.
Still, the knowledge that Edea was not forced to slay her own father gives me some solace.
Even in the depths of his own pain, he still thought of her. Even after all she had done... Drawn her sword against her father, against Alternis himself. Shed their blood. Taken their Asterisks. He loved her regardless. What had she ever done to earn that?
She traced his neat, black writing with a shaking finger. “Alternis,” she whispered, wishing she could reach across worlds and tell him how sorry she was.
But. But. Part of him might be with her right now. She was burning with a compulsion to look at Ringabel, to pore over his sleeping form, convince herself that he couldn’t possibly be Alternis, that it was all a mistake. She waited for a long moment before she turned around, afraid of the truth that lay in wait for her.
Ringabel was propped up on one elbow, his eyes luminous in the dim lamplight, a faintly amused smile playing across his face.
“How long have you been watching me?” Edea demanded.
“How long have you been reading my journal?” he countered.
“Long... enough.” She looked down at the books, feeling guilty. She’d read through much of the journal before, of course, but that was different. Things had changed. It was as if she was reading his private thoughts now, and it felt wrong.
Ringabel sat up in the bed, leaning his back against the wall. “Then I presume you’ve arrived at the same conclusion as me,” he said.
“...Which is?”
“No, tell me yours first.” She began to protest, but Ringabel raised a hand and said firmly, “Humor me for a moment, my sweet Edea. Tell me what you think.”
She ignored the epithet, even as it brought a flush of color to her face. “Well, I suppose I... Now that we know that ours is not the only world...”
“Indeed.”
“...We can assume that there are other... versions of people in each world. Yes?”
“Yes,” he agreed. He patted a space next to him on the bed, and without thinking, she rose from the chair and joined him. Edea tried not to notice how close they were now, their thighs almost touching, and how his crumpled linen undershirt had the top three buttons undone, revealing a glimpse of smooth pale skin over tightly-packed muscle.
“Edea?” he prompted.
She flinched away, mortified. This was hardly the time to be noticing Ringabel’s chest.
“Er. So. If,” she continued, “somewhere out there another Alternis fought us, and fell from the ship in the same way... through the pillar of light into another world...”
She didn’t want to keep going, but Ringabel nodded her onwards.
“...It might have damaged him so much that he woke up without his...” She swallowed. Should she really say it? Could it be better to leave it all unsaid, pretend none of it had happened, let him stay as Ringabel and...
But he was looking at her so keenly, and she felt as if he was pleading with her to confirm his own train of thought. “...His memories,” she said, and there it was. Out in the open, forever.
Something unidentifiable passed across Ringabel’s face before he eventually broke eye contact. “Mmmh,” was all he would say.
“You don’t remember anything?”
“No. Not yet, but... Sometimes I feel as though I’m on the cusp of it, and it—“ he cocked his head, considering his words. “Slips out of my grasp. But I know it’s in there.”
They sat in silence for a little while, and at some point she noticed that his fingers had curled around one of her hands. Normally, she’d shake him off and tell him to keep his wandering hands to himself. She didn’t, this time. She didn’t know if it was because his hand felt nice there, or if it was the feeling that he was seeking comfort from her. If so, she didn’t want to deny him of it.
“Do I remind you of him?” he asked quietly.
“No. You’re nothing alike.”
“I wondered why you never mentioned my face. Our,” he winced slightly, “faces.”
“I’m sorry, Ringabel. I am.” She’d been half-expecting him to ask. She felt angry with herself for failing to see it. “I never considered it, until... it happened. The truth is, we were children when I last saw his face. I was eleven when he earned his Asterisk. He wore the armor every day from then on.” Alternis had been so proud of becoming Eternia’s Dark Knight, she thought with a stab of guilt. And we took it from him. The Dark Knight Asterisk lay glinting at the bottom of Tiz’s knapsack, ready for any of them use in battle. One day, she vowed, she’d make sure to return it to Alternis. It was his by right.
If... if he was even alive. If they ever returned to their own world. Edea closed her eyes. This was all too much. She returned her focus to Ringabel’s unspoken question.
“And I was sent away to train with the Swordmaster after that. Alternis and I barely spent any time together since we became teenagers. Whenever I came home, and he was around, he always seemed so... angry. I thought he resented me.” She knew now, from the journal, how wrong she had been. Alternis had only ever loved her; had been utterly lost for words around her.
“A man’s face can change a great deal between childhood and twenty-three,” she concluded. “And the expressions you and he make are so different that I never even thought... that you might look like each other.”
“But we do.”
She nodded, unsure what to say.
The silence stretched on again. They weren’t holding hands any more, she realized, wondering which one of them had let go first.
“What do you think?” she asked him.
He mulled over his response. “I’m... finding it hard to accept. The idea of it. Even if the facts indicate otherwise. I’ve spent so long reading his journal, these past months. Both journals, now. I feel I’ve come to know him from the way he writes. It doesn’t feel like me.” He shrugged. “It never has. I think he’d hate me, in fact.”
“Oh, he would,” said Edea vehemently. She suppressed a smile at the idea of how disgusted Alternis would be after an hour in Ringabel’s company. He’d hate it all: the silver earrings, the cologne, the perfectly coiffed hair, the easy charm, the inability to be serious, the gleam of lust in Ringabel’s eyes whenever a woman came into view.
He surprised her with a strangled groan, rubbing furiously at his brow. “If only I could make sense of it all,” he said. “I wish...”
Whatever his wish was, she never got to hear it. Ringabel’s gaze drifted off to the two journals, then down at his hands, and when he flexed his long fingers, she could almost read his thoughts. Did I write those words? Are those really the pages of my own life?
“Ringabel...” she said, helplessly, and her breath caught when he looked back at her, his eyes solemn and blank.
Because in that moment, she could see it. A fragment. A faint, yet undeniable, echo of the feral little soul her father had scooped up from the backstreets of Florem. The scrawny boy with the haunted eyes who had always watched her in silence, following her from room to room, listening to her talk, meekly doing her bidding, sitting mutely at the Lee dinner table for years until eventually finding his voice.
...Alternis. It wasn’t possible, he couldn’t be, yet— yet he was.
Then his eyebrow arched, his lips twisted into a familiar smirk, and the spell was broken. He was Ringabel again, and she felt herself exhale in a swell of unexpected relief.
“Edea, my darling. You really have to stop gazing into my eyes like that,” he chided. “You’re making it exceptionally difficult not to kiss you.”
She turned away, scowling, cheeks hot. Why did he always have to do that? Whenever a serious moment arose, whenever she came near to seeing him in a different light, he had to fall back on the stupid quips and exaggerated flirting. It was almost pathological. Like a—
—a defense mechanism, she realized with a jolt. Like his mind is trying to protect him from getting too close to his lost memories.
But that would mean that everything she knew as ‘Ringabel’ wasn’t even... real. Only a collection of desperate distractions thrown out by a shattered mind, in an attempt to protect itself.
Edea screwed up her eyes. She didn’t want to think of him like that. It wasn’t right. He was a person. He was...
“Forgive me,” he said, and she looked up to see him contrite, no longer smirking. “I was expecting you to slap me, but it seems I’ve genuinely upset you.”
“Have you ever considered why you say things like that?” she challenged.
Ringabel blinked. “But you must know the reason. I hardly need to tell you that I’m in love wi—“
She cut him off. This wasn’t the time for... that. “All right, I get it.” An ill-advised thought struck her, and the more she pushed it away, the more it tempted her. “So what would happen if you did?”
“Did what?”
“Kiss me.”
That took the wind out of his sails, she noted with satisfaction, as he gaped and flailed like a goldfish. “You— you mean you want me to...?”
“Ringabel. You know I can’t stand people who are all talk and no action. You’ve been telling me for months how much you’d like to kiss me. Well, here we are, finally on our own, so now’s your chance to show me what I’ve been missing. Don’t you think?”
He peered down at her suspiciously. “Are you going to slap me after all? Is that what this is all leading to?”
She made a noise in frustration. The man was maddening! “Can’t you trust me? Just for once?”
He looked at her as if waiting for the punchline, and when it didn’t come, he nodded with a kind of grim determination. “All right, then.”
She stared at him, and he stared back at her, and neither one of them inched any closer. Edea willed him silently to make a move, but he was immobile.
“What?” she demanded.
“I always planned on it being more... romantic than this. Could you at least stop glaring at me?”
“Fine.” She closed her eyes. “There, I’ve made it easy for you.”
Edea wasn’t sure how long she sat there with her eyes closed. Only that she was ninety-five percent sure that Ringabel had lost his nerve, and was about to open one eye to taunt him when the odd sensation of his lips brushing agains hers took her by surprise.
It was strange, unfamiliar, but she soon realized that she liked it. She liked the way his lips lingered on her mouth. She liked the way they tasted, like... him. One of his hands was in her hair, and his fingertips were caressing her temple, and she liked that too.
He pulled back, sooner than she had hoped, and slid his hand out of her hair.
“Well?” he said, without a trace of a smile in his eyes, bright and oddly hard in the lamplight. Perhaps he was nervous that she hadn’t enjoyed it, she thought, and decided to put him out of his misery.
“Keep going, and I’ll let you know.” She leaned forward, eager to to taste his lips for a second time.
Ringabel placed a flat palm on each of her shoulders. “No.” He pushed her slowly away from him. The tight set of his jaw made him look so much like Alternis that her mouth fell open. “Unlike you, this actually means something to me, so... no.”
“You— You think I’m just messing around?” she spluttered. “For my own entertainment?”
“Aren’t you? Because you’re acting like it.”
Edea bit down on her lip, incensed. Yes, she’d challenged him to kiss her on a whim; but so what? That didn’t mean that this was all some cruel game! Did he really think her that shallow?
“Maybe you really are Alternis.” She almost hissed the name. “You’re just as oblivious and wrapped up in your own feelings as he is. It honestly hasn’t occurred to you that I might...” She trailed off.
“Might what?” he said, and she mentally kicked herself at the painful glimmer of hope in his eyes.
Even so. No, she couldn’t quite say it. She wasn’t ready to finish that sentence to herself, let alone to him.
“Never mind. But...” Edea balled up her fists on her lap. “But that was my first kiss.” She hated how small and plaintive her voice sounded. “Don’t you dare decide it didn’t mean anything to me. Don’t you dare.”
She blinked furiously; she wouldn’t, couldn’t give him the satisfaction of crying now. Ringabel’s crestfallen sigh made her glance hesitantly up at him. He looked like he wanted to sink down into the floor.
No, she thought, he looks like he’d rather sink into the Great Chasm than face me right now. That bolstered her, and the tears that had threatened to fall dried away.
Ringabel still couldn’t look at her. “Apparently I have an uncanny ability to mess up the most exquisite moments,” he said.
“You certainly do.”
“I’m sorry, Edea. You deserve better.”
“Yes, I do,” she agreed.
He offered his arms for a hug, rather unexpectedly, and she found it easy to melt into them. He was good at hugs; she already knew that. Ringabel held her close for a long while, keeping his hands admirably still. When she peered up at him, he braved a weak smile. “Might we start again? Or have I ruined it completely?”
“Well. You did ruin it,” she began, noting the pained resignation on his face. “But maybe we could pretend for now that you’re not an utterly inept disaster of a man, and act as though the last few minutes didn’t happen.” She put a finger to his lips before he could speak, and added, “If you’re nice this time.”
“I will be nice,” he said against her finger, and his face was beginning to regain that cocksure look that secretly thrilled her as much as it annoyed her.
She took her finger away, and nodded her consent.
“Darling Edea, I think I might have to kiss you. May I?”
She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Go on, then. If you must.”
The second kiss was a world away from the first. Ringabel was no longer reticent; he was out to impress. He cradled her face in his hands, stroked her cheeks and her neck, opened his mouth to her and pushed and explored with his tongue. It made her tingle all over. He tried to come up for air, but she clung onto him, and he welcomed her own tongue when she attempted to repay the favor.
Edea broke away, her heart hammering. This was—Was this what it was like? No wonder he was always talking about it. Warmth and sweetness threatened to overwhelm her. She had to protect this, keep it safe from whatever was to come.
“Promise me,” she said suddenly.
“What, darling?” he murmured into the edge of her mouth.
“Promise me that even after you remember, you’ll still be Ringabel.”
Ringabel drew back, and looked at her seriously. “I don’t know if I can promise that.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Whatever happens, even if you are him, you’re not the same anymore. You’re Ringabel, and I don’t want you to lose that. I need you to hold onto who you are now.”
“Why? Found yourself getting unexpectedly fond of me?” His breath tickled her ear, and she could feel the curve of a smile on his lips.
“Shut up,” she said, burying her face in his shirt, her hands sweaty as they gripped the fabric. He didn’t understand, not yet, that ‘Ringabel’ was an artifice, and she knew it would devastate him when he did. His mind was at risk of shattering for a second time, perhaps irreparably. If only she could communicate to him how important it was for him to hold onto the new parts of himself, to let himself believe that he was real, to make himself real—
Edea reached up and kissed him as passionately as she could manage, and when she broke away, panting for breath and wondering if their tongues were really supposed to move like that, Ringabel was staring at her in a dazed kind of awe.
“Promise me,” she repeated. “Because I definitely won’t kiss Alternis like that. Ever.”
He rubbed his jaw, still shell-shocked, then winked at her. “That settles it, then. I promise, my love.” He took both her hands in his, and his touch was gentle and warm. “I promise to stay as Ringabel. How could I not?”
She clutched at him in wild relief, winding her arms around his neck and pulling him close. If she could just keep him like this, keep him as he was in this moment...
“Besides—” he started to say, from above her head, his voice making the scrap of bare chest hum under her cheek.
He’s going to say something smug and stupid now, she thought, and it was oddly reassuring when he did.
“—Who would willingly go back to a life of meatballs after experiencing the finest lean steak?”
She punched his chest weakly. “If you go around calling the Dark Knight Alternis Dim meatballs, you’re going to end up with a sword through your ribs.”
“You wouldn’t go back either though, would you, my darling? You prefer the steak.”
“Shut up, Ringabel.”
“Oh yes, you definitely do.” She couldn’t wriggle out of his next kiss, and by the time it ended, she couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever wanted to.
Neither of them noticed when the lamp sputtered out, nor when the dawn light came, or when the morning breeze turned a page in the open journal; both journals, their words identical.
The time is come, then. This may be the last entry I am able to write.
I’m removing Edea’s picture from its frame and placing it within these pages.
I want her by my side...