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The water calls to him.
He hears its siren song all around him, down here in the fortress claimed by the waves. It echoes through the pipes, so loud he wonders that the other inmates can’t hear it. It whispers to him in his sleep, curling up around his heart in the place his Vision usually occupies. Sometimes he thinks he can hear the walls of the prison straining against the weight of the water pressing down around it, sheet metal twisting and buckling, bolts popping off under the strain, shrieking metal that sounds almost human.
Ours, our child. Our legacy. Come back.
The Sea laps up against the underside of the fortress, seeking, beckoning, prodding at the cracks in the thin membrane of reality. The fortress squats above it, inhabitants flowing through its veins, a bronze cage around oblivion. A rusted watchtower whose guards have forgotten their purpose, all except the duke that paces his office like a watchdog, snapping at his ever-shortening leash as the Sea rises around him.
Come, come. It is almost time.
Ajax dreams of floating in a dark abyss, looking up and seeing it – a shape so large he can’t comprehend it, his mind scrabbling for something to cling on to, settling on the slow back and forth motion of a single fin, large enough to sweep him away like a speck of dust.
It sings, that shape, the whale that blocks out the light of the gods. It sings a deep and mournful song that rends through Ajax’s flesh and soul, a song of memories upon memories compounded, stacked on top of one another and sent toppling like Teucer’s toy blocks, and Ajax feels something warm trickle down his cheek before it, too, is pulled into that endless song.
And then he wakes up, distant echoes fading from his mind, replaced by people chattering and machinery rattling and the prison groaning around him.
~~~
The other inmates think he’s insane. Ajax is used to this.
He works too hard, he fights too much, his gaze is as dead as the fish the cafeteria sometimes serves. Even his so-called friends, the motley crew he’s gathered to aid in his escape, follow him for his strength in the ring, and later whisper about how he spends hours listening to the pipes, trailing his fingers along rust that flakes away like dry blood at his touch.
It was the same in Morepesok, and during his time as a recruit, and while traveling abroad in Liyue and Inazuma and Fontaine. The only people who hadn’t thought him disturbing were the other harbingers, and that was mostly because they were even more insane than he was.
And Zhongli, and the traveler, but they couldn’t be counted as ordinary people either.
Ajax doesn’t mind what anyone else thinks. They couldn’t hear the song. They would never understand that the boy who fell through a hole in reality had traded his humanity for something far more precious.
The inmates scuttle around, and whisper among themselves, and try to tell each other they aren’t trapped. Around them, the prison looms. Beyond that, the Sea laps.
~~~
Rumors begin to circulate around the fortress. They speak of strange sounds coming from the pipes on cleaning nights, echoes of screaming and bones breaking and mad laughter that bounces through the aged metal. Cannibals, someone suggests. Inmates who went mad from the lack of sun and now seek out the red warmth of human flesh in its place.
Ajax listens, and sits in the wan light of the Pankration Ring studying his mottled knuckles, green and blue and yellow, like the ocean on a cloudy day. He may prefer to cut through his problems, but he’s still a Harbinger. He knows how to spin a web.
“Why do you want out so badly?” one of his lackeys had asked when given his instructions. There are three of them, and Ajax has given up trying to keep their names straight.
“It’s not so bad down here, once you get used to it,” the prisoner continues. They had been working in one of the production zones, and the inmate had paused for breath while leaning on one of the bellows. “and didn’t you say that even Iudex Neuvillette thought you were innocent? I’m sure it’ll all resolve itself soon enough, and then you can go back to live under the sky. Try to escape and get caught, though, and you’ll be stuck down here for a long time.”
In the present, a bell rings and the referee calls him up. Ajax adjusts the mask across his face.
His opponent says something, jeering. The crowd yells its approval. Ajax ignores them, bouncing on the balls of his feet, fists raised.
He comes alive when he fights, adrenaline coursing through his veins, sweat gathering under his mask.
This is what I was made for, Ajax thinks, fist colliding with his opponent’s side. To push past my body’s limits. To be something greater than myself.
Come to us. Soon. Down, down, to the source of all things.
It’s only natural that the people down here would yearn so for their eggshell-blue dome. Like moths that have mistaken a streetlamp for the sun.
The bell rings. The referee leads his stumbling opponent out of the ring. People mutter as money changes hands.
Ajax sits back down to wait for the next match. Something warm trickles down from his nose, broken sometime during the fight. It mixes with his sweat. It tastes salty, like a half remembered dream, like the Sea waiting patiently below.
~~~
Before, there was the Primordial Realm and the Abyssal Realm, before they clashed together to make the Mortal Realm.
Skirk had told him as much, in between sparring matches that made his very bones ache.
She had said that someday, in the far future, when the world ended and was remade anew, everything would split and be dissolved once again, to be molded into the next world.
It seems that that end might come sooner rather than later for Fontaine.
The snarled mess of a court, more opera than justice, the Oratrice that spreads in a web of veins beneath the surface of Fontaine, the heart of the nation powered by belief in itself, with the Archon dancing over it all.
Yes, Ajax can see how the heart will fail, how the nation will be drowned by the Sea.
A part of him, the part that fell into the Abyss, the part that has boxes of little toy mechanisms to send to his siblings, worries for the doomed people of Fontaine.
The other part, the part that crawled out of the Abyss, pulls him ever down, towards the song.
~~~
He’s been losing more and more time these days. He sits down for breakfast and gets up from lunch. A guard tells him to move along and he realizes he’s been standing in a hallway for hours, and the lights are starting to dim. The ba-doom ba-doom of the machinery follows him long after he’s finished his shift, an echo of his own heartbeat.
You’re only alive when you’re fighting. You’re only awake when you dream.
…
Was that the Sea talking, or him?
~~~
The plan is almost ready. The call grows ever more insistent, pulling him down, down, down. The fortress tries to close like a vice around him, but he’ll slip through its jaws soon enough.
Everyone avoids the pipes on pipe cleaning nights. His lackeys have done well. If only he could remember their names, or their faces.
~~~
The last night before he leaves, he has another dream.
He dreams of the pipes as gaping maws, swallowing failed escapees, their blood mingling with the water, dripping from leaks in the walls. Their bones, ground down into dust, become mortar, and their flesh returns to feed the other prisoners, who marvel at the taste.
He dreams that the Fortress of Meropide expands to house the entirety of Fontaine, one living, breathing, eating entity, rotting from the inside out.
In this prison far beneath the waves, where do they put their dead? Are they sent out into the waters, for their bones to litter the seafloor, surrounding the fortress in the weight of their dead? Or are they buried beneath the floors, almost touching the Sea itself? He dreams of skeletal hands and bloated green faces rising from the depths, clawing at a lone ship desperately trying to ride the flood.
It will be unraveled, the song whispers to him, we will wash it clean, and start it anew.
When a house is burning down, the flames will be washed away.
When Fontaine consumes her citizens flesh and soul to keep her farce going, the music will stop eventually.
And what about the people inside the house? The little boy inside Ajax thinks. Will they be unraveled as well? Dissolved into an echo of water?
The walls of the prison will be broken down, the song answers, and we will all be free.
~~~
The night Ajax escapes at last, he wonders about his siblings.
Teucer, Tonia, Anthon, and the others. Do they know where he is right now? Probably not. If they’ve heard anything, it was about a Fatui Harbinger, not Ajax.
What will become of Ajax, if he follows the beckoning voice?
That doesn’t matter anymore. He lost something irreplaceable when he fell through the world, and ever since then he’s been living on borrowed time.
~~~
He had asked Skirk, only once, why she bothered teaching him to honor his opponent, to bow before the start of a match. The practice had seemed too sentimental, too painfully human, for one such as his teacher.
The next sparring match had made him feel like he was dying, and he never asked again.
And still, he clings to the honor she taught him.
~~~
The pipe is easy to get to. The three prisoners wait for him there, and he says some words of thanks. And then it’s time.
“Something is calling to me. I have to go.”
How much they believe him, Ajax doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.
They are trapped here, and he is not.
And yet, some part of him envies them, even though they’re shoring up a burning house with corpses. At least they’re wholly human.
Ajax wishes he could have had one more fight.
The Sea calls out to him, a giant shape twisting in his mind’s eye.
He steps forward to answer.