Chapter Text
I will await you, in the beyond.
So said the Adagium, bane of the Six, savior denied his purpose and a victim of the whims of Bahamut the Kinslayer, when he was struck down by the Astral’s King of Light. They met one last time in the Astral plane, where the King paid his blood price, and took his legacy and the Astrals with him.
So too the Adagium died.
Humanity began to recover, and all that remained of those that ruled over the world were the Great Mother Eos and Etro, the one who oversaw life and death - the inevitable and inescapable Goddess, the end and the beginning. One who remained indisputable in a world that had tired of empty gods and absent kings. They didn’t need either, really. What they needed were guardians who could guide them back to civilization. Ones that could help them heal the ravages of war and plague. Not a king.
A healer.
The Adagium perished late in the year 566. As the first breath of spring 567 breathed life into the world and plants began to grow in abundance through cracked pavement and thick ash, Ardyn Lucis Caelum opened his eyes.
Ardyn had always had conflicting feelings about death. As a healer, he had accepted that as part of the cycle of life. Oh, not always, some deaths were premature and they were mourned. But sometimes… it was a relief from a ruined life and how could he begrudge those that were suffering the mercy of Etro’s touch?
At the same time, mortality in and of itself, that they were guaranteed to die at some point by design, very nearly made him bitter and always made him angry.
How ironic, that he had spent so much of his later life angry and wanting to have those burdens of life taken from him. When the end came, he embraced it, closed his eyes and went into darkness.
Darkness, where no warm hand should light upon his brow, no gentle voice call his name.
“Ardyn?”
Especially not her voice.
“How is one of the hardest workers I know such a lazy thing?” Her voice teased him, and his eyes burned traitorously.
He couldn’t look.
Then he was pinched and his eyes flew open with a gasp but — but he looked. And it was her. It was her in ways he couldn’t have articulated, only for once in his life since her — since she —
“My Aera,” he breathed, and scrambled up to pull him to her, knowing in his soul beyond his ability to explain with words that this was the woman he loved.
Aera threw her arms around him, and for a moment there was nothing else but clinging to each other, immersed in a moment of near sensory overload, hearts pounding, her hands splayed on his back and his arms around her with the gentleness he’d forgotten how to give.
Be it a cruel trick of the gods or an unwarranted boon, he didn’t care. Not now. Not with her in his arms.
“Aera,” Ardyn breathed, his voice husky and shaking and his eyes burning in a way he’d thought he’d forgotten how. “Aera, my love, what…?”
Aera took a breath, just as shaky, and exhaled just the same. “Ardyn, my beloved, we are to receive reparations for that which Bahamut stole from us; a debt incurred… long ago. Blood prices demanded without right.”
“I’m so tired of gods,” Ardyn whispered into her hair, his chest aching, throat threatening to close around the words. It cracked, at the end, a pained break that he felt down to his soul.
Aera made soothing sounds, stroking his face, fingertips working past his hairline into his hair. Her rings were on the warmer side of cool as they brushed his skin, but he barely noticed. It was enough to try and cling to the moment. To her. To reality.
(It had been a long, long time since Ardyn had been on speaking terms with reality.)
“Ardyn, my love, listen to me,” Aera asked, and had she asked anything different he wouldn’t have managed to make the effort. “Reparations. We are owed, and so the debt will be repaid. As once there was a blood price extracted… So is the life robbed now renewed.”
Ardyn finally managed to lean back, confused and too ragged, too tired, to hope. “I don’t understand.”
“There are no gods but Eos and Etro, as it ought to have been,” Aera said, reaching to pet his hair. “It’s safe now, Ardyn. The Starscourge is gone, the line of Somnus, of kings, has been laid to rest. And the Hexatheon went with them.”
Ardyn was silent, thinking, and leaning into her petting hand. “The Age of Kings is over.”
“Yes, my dear,” she agreed, pausing in running her fingers back through his wildly untamed hair to just cup the side of his face, smoothing the skin beside the corner of his eye. They remained a luminous gold, like rich honey or a gilded page read under the warm light of a candle. And they held such tentative hope now, after everything, that her heart ached.
“And with them, the Six,” Ardyn said, as if testing the words as they came off his tongue, to see if they rang true. They must have, as he leaned forward, looking at her intently. “And the ‘scourge is… it’s gone? How do you know these things?”
How could you be sure it wasn’t another lie?
“Tell me yourself Ardyn, my Sage,” she said, voice light enough to tease but at the same time serious enough to catch his attention. “Do you feel the plague?”
He opened his mouth to say something, something sharp, the way he just didn’t speak to her — born of millennia trapped with nothing but the voices of the damned and his own pain, fear, and mourning to keep him company. Ashamed by the reflex, a poison tongue honed in his second lifetime, he reeled himself in. “Feel?”
“You have always been the finest of mages… and more than that, I would wager that the healer in you is not yet gone.” She smiled, gentle and warm as she ever hand, taking his hands in hers. “Feel, Ardyn.”
Ardyn closed his eyes and went for the nearest source of ‘scourge — himself.
Only it wasn’t…. He reached for it, pulled, and… nothing came.
It didn’t come because it wasn’t there and it wasn’t there because… because…
“I’ve been healed,” he realized, voice hushed with awe. “I don’t… did you?”
“If only I could have my love, I would have,” she said. “A hundred — a thousand times over, as many times as it took, I would have, if I were able. But no, when the Starscourge burned away I was in Etro’s cradle. This was done by the sons of Lucis Caelum, as it was always meant to be.”
“Noctis,” Ardyn said, somehow without all the venom that he’d seemed to think belonged there, not so long ago. “Heir to Somnus’ legacy. He looked more like my brother than his own father. I often wondered if that in itself wasn’t meant to goad me.”
“I wish I could have the faith to say no,” she said quietly, squeezing their hands. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. They’re gone now. And we are free of their demands.”
“The Mighty Etro had nothing to say?” Ardyn asked, too tired to sound mocking and instead coming back around to the sheer exhaustion this all had brought him.
“No,” Aera admitted. “No more than that. ‘The price has been paid,’ she said. ‘Do not return to me until it is your time.’”
“…dearheart that is something,” Ardyn said, arching a brow as he considered all this. Do not return until… disbelief slackened his jaw and widened his eyes. “…Aera. Are we… am I,” he broke off, heart thundering, voice getting small. “Are we mortal?”
“I don’t know what immortality feels like, to compare,” Aera said helplessly.
“No, of course, but…” Ardyn settled back, a hand splayed on his chest. He fancied he could feel the rapid beat of his pulse through the layers of fabric. “But I do.”
She watched him, blue eyes wide and her lips barely parted and it was a fight not to get wholly distracted with her. But no… no he had to find the truth of the matter. Had to know what it meant, and if for once in the mess of his life there was a real, actual no-strings-attached gift from those on high.
Life was like a thread. To say so, of course, was terribly cliché — and yet clichés in themselves existed because the thought came again and again, didn’t they? They were relevant. So life was like a thread. And that thread, tied to one’s soul, would unravel with time.
Ardyn’s had knotted. The thread was there, but the flow, the passage of time and the inevitable slide towards death simply wasn’t. He had been nearly killed, yes — should have been killed, Somnus had…. Well. It didn’t matter, did it? Between the exposure to the Crystal and other factors, his soul had started to descend to the Astral plane and yet as it had been forcibly rejected by the Crystal, he was swiftly removed from Death’s embrace. In the speed of it, his soul had torn with the mortal, ‘acceptable’ part being left behind, ready but unable to pass on while still tied, however loosely, to the rest of him.
The rejected portion, tainted heavily with Starscourge, was what damned him. He looked the part of the daemonified, and even Gilgamesh, his deeply faithful friend, had to have thought it was a mercy to kill him.
Not that it’d stuck, not that it had ever stuck, time and again but —
“Ardyn?” Aera’s soft voice cut through too-clear, too painful memory. “What is it?”
Ardyn swallowed thickly. “Just… memories, my love. Pay it no mind.”
Her expression said she knew there was no ‘just’ about it.
Before she could try to tease it out of him, Ardyn sat up and looked around thoughtfully. “We need to find out where we are. Even with the daemons gone, there is danger in the night away from civilization.”
“Nothing we can’t handle, I don’t think,” Aera said, though there was an edge of caution in her optimism. “But perhaps it’s not best to test that before we know what dangers there may be locally…”
“No,” Ardyn agreed, getting to his feet and marveling at the lack of the pain that had plagued him since he was just beginning to use his powers, a breath shy from twenty. He had roamed the world performing his miracles at cost for the next fourteen years — nearly half his lifetime back then. The lesson to be cautious in the wilds had stuck throughout, and never really faded completely even when he’d been the most dangerous creature in any given area.
It was hard to say if that all encompassing power had remained… he supposed he’d find out over time. He wasn’t sure he’d miss it. The power had been handy, but no mark of pride. That belonged to his earned skill.
He helped Aera up and pulled her into a hug. He’d meant to be gentle, soft, like she deserved, but the fact that she was there to hug in the first place hit him in the gut and he found himself clinging with a sound that might have been a sob if he’d had the air for it. As it was, he touched his forehead to hers and felt distinctly lightheaded and breathless, tears stinging his eyes and his hands shaking where they gently gripped her gown. “Aera.”
“I’m here, my love,” she whispered, kissing his face, his tears, with a warm but tremulous smile that said she was just as affected by this unexpected miracle. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“So may it be,” Ardyn whispered. “This world has just escaped ruin, it thinks… It will not know true ruin unless it takes you from me.”
Aera smiled softly, stroking his unruly hair. “And is that a vow or a curse?”
“It is a promise,” Ardyn said quietly. “Whatever is asked of me, I will do, so long as you are at my side. I think that’s very clear.”
“We’ll do our best to keep that from being a problem,” Aera soothed.
Ardyn wondered, in the moment, if she was aware of the atrocities he had committed. Of the dark things he was capable of.
And ultimately, after a moment, he decided he hoped not.
“We’ll do our best,” Ardyn promised her.