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Ignasse dons his dragoon armor once again after what feels like a lifetime out of it.
It hasn’t been that long, a mere two years since he joined the Heavens’ Ward, and yet. He has forgotten the once-familiar surge of his blood, the way his lips curve into a snarl, fury seeming to seep into every pore of his body.
A voice in his head, lilting, more song than speech, telling him to kill, to rip and tear, to bathe the Holy See in a sea of flame.
A deep breath. Once, twice. His pointed canine teeth sinking into the inside of his mouth, not quite enough to break flesh, but enough to taste copper when he runs his tongue over the abused area.
I will not turn my lance upon my kin, just as you shall not turn tooth and claw upon yours.
A mantra repeated in his heart, over and over.
Then, silence.
He isn’t quite soothed, every muscle in his body still tensed for combat, but at least his mind is quiet once more.
He has not donned his old armor to hunt dragons. It is simple practicality that spurred on this perhaps foolish decision.
For when Ignasse leaps heavensward from the Vault, he does so seeking a specific residence, a specific window, where a certain girl must be sleeping peacefully.
Unlatching Odeline’s window proves more problematic than reaching it, but he gets the latch eventually, slipping inside the room with nary a sound despite the armor he wears.
And he—
Cannot help but admire his newest protegee’s sleeping form in the moonlight.
She is a beauty. He can admit this freely, wholly confident in his vows. It is a sentiment not born of desire, but objective fact.
It’s just—
He wonders when he began to think this. When she first approached him to teach her the ways of the dragoon, he had reminisced on his first knee-jerk reaction upon seeing her unveiled in the Tribunal. Rage. Betrayal. Her scales and horns an irrevocable sin.
Disgust.
She was beautiful even then, but all he could feel toward her was disgust.
Lohs. Ehs.
A short song that played within the confines of his mind when he looked at her, over and over. It made him feel sick, like he’d been cut open and his guts torn out, hollow and never whole.
He avoided the girl, even after the Fury had absolved her of her sins.
He looks at her fondly, now. Hardly dares to breathe as he gazes upon her sleeping countenance, as if to break this moment of peace would be akin to heresy.
And then he realizes it. The rancorous beating of his heart is at peace. Without a mantra, without pain, without bloodshed.
And then, in the quiet, a different song. Herrn al.
It’s a song that makes his heart ache. Does not make him hollow, not like before, but torn, his edges frayed. He wants to lean forward to place a kiss upon her forehead as he did on the training grounds. Thinks of that moment, how it had felt right, and how Vellguine had reminded him of his place. How it made his stomach turn to have been made to feel guilty over something that felt like coming home.
He can’t feel like that again. Won’t.
Instead, he touches her cheek gently with the back of his armored hand. She stirs briefly, still sluggish, weighed down with sleep, before her good eye snaps open and her mouth opens and—
“Shh,” Ignasse hushes softly, and flips his visor up to reveal his face. “Calm, Odeline, be calm.”
“Ignasse?” she asks incredulously. He notes that in her surprise she has not addressed him as ‘ser.’
He likes this.
It feels close. Comfortable.
He opens his mouth to explain himself, and realizes he hadn’t thought that far ahead. He just—
Wanted to see her.
“Come with me,” he says, desperation making his voice tremble. “Please.”
In the end, she does come with him.
Ignasse takes her from her room to perch upon one of the Vault’s many flying buttresses, on dark side of the massive structure, where the moon does not shine, the shadows hiding their clandestine meeting.
“A beautiful view,” Odeline comments softly, breaking the silence that had settled between them as Ignasse continued to search for some sort of explanation, some excuse as to why he had done this. “But surely you have not taken me from my bed for the view alone?”
“I wanted to show you what it means to be a dragoon.” Ignasse finally chooses his words. It isn’t a lie, not exactly, but he doesn’t know how else to convey how he wants to share his world with her. That his heart aches and aches and has ached since he donned this armor.
Perhaps even before.
“We’re so far away from the ground— from everyone, everything,” she muses.
She is right. Perhaps that is why he was fated to become a dragoon. To walk this lonely path.
“Does it scare you?”
“The height? Or—”
“Both.”
She hums to herself softly as she thinks, the tune barely audible as the wind whips around them.
“I don’t like it. I’m not scared. I just don’t like it.”
“That’s good.”
No one should like it. The aching heart, the loneliness.
“Do you like it, Ser Ignasse?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I think I do.”
“Do you miss it?”
“Always.”
This is the truth of the matter. It is an honor to serve the Archbishop. It is. But—
He is a bird that has had its wings clipped. A thing to exist in the cage that is the Vault. And the voice inside his head sings its sorrowful hymn, always.
Odeline laughs, suddenly, but it doesn’t quite sound like a laugh. It sounds more like—
A song. A dirge. A requiem.
“You are a cruel man, Ser Ignasse.”
He says nothing. He knows he is. He knows.
He knows he has shown her the wide expanse of the world and how small she is in comparison to it; has made her touch the firmament itself, has put her high upon a shelf that none other may touch. And he knows she will ground herself, just as he has, to pretend she is like anyone else, her soul meant for the heavens and locked in the cage that is her body.
“Do you despise me for it?”
Instead of answering, she simply laces her fingers through his, both of them looking upon the icy Coerthan expanse, the softness of their breaths a duet smothered by the howling wind.