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It all happens so fast. One minute they’re fighting the Recruitment Officer, trying to get some sympathy at least - then they’re sailing out on a mission of their own, hoping there’ll be resolution left - then a whirlpool sucks them all down, down, to the bottom of the Ecclesian Sea, and there was life here, once. A city. Sprawling, grand, abandoned. Or the drowned that come to greet them in waves on waves were once the people of these houses. Michela doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know much at all, admittedly. She came here expecting to be welcomed straight into the open arms of her best friend Aimee, her beloved companion always and forever, the one who’d stood up for her on the playground when the boys made fun of her for holding the teacher’s hand. (It wasn’t her fault the teacher was her mom, okay?!)
Instead she got an empty beach, and a bit of bad news that she still doesn’t quite believe. Aimee is missing. They may well be dead.
This news hadn’t held Michela down for long, of course. Nobody’s dead until you see the body, right? If Aimee ran off into the purple beyond, they might still be there, right? So she took up arms with the family of the Nightingale faction, and she set her sights on a rescue mission just last week.
No such luck. Purple petrified, Aimee sight unseen.
Michela had stood under a spray of purple particles and felt more like a hug than acid spray. Acho had pulled her back, alarmed, and told her it was dangerous. She hadn’t confessed it to star, but it had been the closest she’d come to comfort in a while.
And now…
The halls are dark and winding and cold as heck. Michela wraps one of Acho’s spare coats around her tighter. (She doesn’t know where star gets this expansive wardrobe from - it’s practically Kestrel levels of luxury. Acho frames it more as liking to be prepared. She supposes, in this situation, he was right.)
Eventually, Kyle flips a switch, and with an unnerving ring of resonance, a strange bridge of ice spans across the divide, leading them up into the heart of the city. No, she realises as she climbs, not ice. It’s see-through in some places, but it’s not as slippery as a frozen sheet would be. Some other kind of white, crystalline substance that she doesn’t have a name for.
In the centre of the cavern is a mass of pulsating purple stuff. This must be what everyone was talking about; Michela hasn’t seen it before today. Just the little purple cloud. It’s weird, is the only way she can think to word it.
Pillars circle the growths, in the space where there is still room to stand, where the purple hasn’t overtaken. And at the centre of it all -
Something, hovering, approaching the heart -
“Aimsey,” half a dozen people cry.
“AIMEE!” Michela calls, tensed up for a fight. Whatever she has to do to get her best friend back, she’ll do it.
Aimee’s voice is strange, layered, like there’s two people talking. Their face, though…
Okay, it’s…
She tries not to cover her mouth. Their skin has gone this awful sallow pale, more green than white. Dried blood streaks down it and clumps up stringy hair. Their eyes are dark, soulless, faded. They almost look like they’ve started to rot already.
But their mouth is moving, if a little stiffly, and their gaze is turning, if a little absently, and Michela would know Aimee anywhere, blind, in the dark, undone. Forever and always.
“Please help me,” they say. “I will return your friend to you, I promise.”
Shouts come from her right, and her attention turns to a pair of hooded figures at the edge of the chamber. “Back away, before the demon corrupts you too.”
Aimee yells at them, “Don’t trust them! Ask them what happened to your friend; ask them where they took her!”
“Yeah, where’d you take Guqqie?” a couple of Kestrels agree. Michela doesn’t really know who Guqqie is. She turned up in a few of Aimee’s letters, and she’s the other missing persons case. But if she’s connected to all this, and if she’s out there somewhere, Michela wants her to come home too. She’s dedicated herself to a family, after all. Family means that no one gets left behind.
The strangers are vague, and Aimee’s face is contorted as they insist that it’s all a lie. “Break the chains that hold me,” they insist, “and I’ll show you the truth.”
Michela doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. Maybe the strangers mean what they say, that it’s a corruption, a demon, taking over Aimee and using them for its own purposes. She can’t bear to think of that - of Aimee, trapped inside their own mind, a vessel for evil.
Or maybe the strangers are wrong, and Aimee’s double-voice is right, and destroying these beams of stone-grey light will do something good.
All she’s ever wanted is to do something good. All she really wants is to get Aimee back.
People start to call her name as she climbs. Acho follows her - he’s always got her back, right? He’ll help her with this?
She reaches a vantage point to scout the situation. Aimee is tied up by four strings of light, stemming from four strange crystals. Magic; it’s gotta be. Their light is white and cold. Her bow draws ready.
Someone shouts dissent. Michela pauses, still aimed. If anyone wants to stop her from getting her best friend back, they’re gonna gave to get through her first.
“We need to leave,” says Kuervo.
“We can’t have come this far, just to leave without Aimee and Guqqie though, right?”
He growls in frustration. “Look at them! Pick up a spyglass, take a look! Aimee is gone.”
“She’s right there,” Michela argues, she doesn’t need a spyglass to see that. Her bow does not waver.
“Looks like a puppet for some… demon heart thing,” Kuervo says. She takes a step towards the crystal, feet brushing up against the edge of the ledge. “You get away from there. I’ll kill you before you touch it.”
“Michela, no,” comes Beky’s voice from behind her - of course all the Kites think they know what’s best. They haven’t known Aimee as long as she has.
“If we break it,” she says, slow, clear, “we’ll get our friends back.”
“It’s just some fucking cloud saying that!”
“You could kill all of us,” Kuervo insists.
“But if I do this, we’ll get our -”
Someone yanks her back. Someone stupid enough not to flinch at the sight of a readied arrow pointed point-blank at their chest - yup, it’s Martyn. “I get that Aimsey’s your friend, but that is not your friend any more. That’s not Aimsey, and you know it.”
“What about Guqqie?” she asks him. He’s a Kestrel, right? Doesn’t he care about her too? Doesn’t he want her to come home? “What about both of them?”
“Guqqie we’ve got no sign of!”
“This could fix everything.”
“Or it could DESTROY everything,” Martyn throws his arms out, like he’s not used to being disbelieved.
Acho - Acho’s got her back, right? - Acho puts a hand on Martyn’s shoulder, guides him to step back. At least someone feels threatened by her weapon.
“It could kill all of us,” star says, gently, but it breaks her heart.
God. None of them understand.
“Listen,” she tries. “Aimee wouldn’t lie to get us killed. Not all of us, at least.”
“It’s talking through Aimsey,” Acho says.
“But we don’t know that! That was still their voice!”
“It’s using Aimee as a puppet,” says Kuervo, “that is not them.”
“Something’s not right.” Graecie. Please, Graecie, please. Please believe me. Please understand how I feel. Nobody has my back, I need you to take my side.
She holds something out for Michela to take. Haltingly, reluctantly, Michela loosens her hold on the string, takes the arrow into one hand with the grip of the bow.
Graecie is holding her spyglass. She must’ve dropped it.
“Michela, here,” she says, “just look. Just look.”
So she takes it, and she looks.
Aimee looks even more upsetting up close. They’re sick, they’re hurt, they’re suffering, and the light behind their eyes is almost gone. There’s something glimmering there, but it’s faint and flickers purple. They don’t have long. She needs to do something, now.
“Please,” says Kuervo, soft, behind her.
He doesn’t understand.
“I’m sorry, guys.” Michela nocks the arrow again.
It all goes quiet in the second that she shoots the crystal out. Like they weren’t watching - like they thought they’d called a bluff that was never not true. It splinters an iron cage like glass, and the lines of light that string up Aimee to the air all vanish, and they’re -
And they go.
So they’re free.
They got out.
Right?
“So do we get them back?” she asks the air, smiling.
“Michela, what have you done?” somebody says.
The ground begins to shake. “I think we should really go now,” Acho says, and everyone starts moving, and he’s leading her by the hand towards the ropes that take them down again.
“Do we get them back?” she asks again.
Graecie has started to cry.
… Oh, god.
A walk turns to a jog turns to a run, and the earth is still rumbling, like the whole place is going to blow if they don’t make it back the way they came. Michela stumbles over spikes along the not-ice bridge, following the sounds of everybody’s yelling. What did I do?
“It’s fine,” says Owen, and when did Owen get here?, “everything’s fine, we’ll talk about this later, Michela. Right now we should be focused on getting out of here.”
She must have been talking aloud. Right. Okay. Getting out. She can do that.
Somebody shouts at her, takes her to task, and she shouts right back, but she can’t remember what she said. She’s crying too. She just wants Aimee back. She just wants Aimee. She misses Aimee. She loves Aimee.
She’s messed up.
They’re all going to hate her.
Somehow, she makes it back to the surface, and Acho is here. He must have been leading her, still. The ground is still shaking, even out here. They’re separated from most of the group, but not from Kyle and Owen.
When the tremors finally quiet, she turns to Owen, regathering her hope.
“So when do we get them back?”
“Get who back?”
“Aimee and Guqqie.”
“Oh, Michela, you didn’t see?”
She blinks. All three of them - Kestrel, Heron, Nightingale - regard her with uneasy silence. Something horrible builds in the pit of her stomach.
“I think maybe you should sit down,” Kyle says at last.
“... Are they not coming back? Is that what you’re…?”
She sits. Acho stands the closest. “So after the demon purple thing was freed, Aimsey’s body just… dropped… to the ground, and… I don’t think they made it.”
“What do you mean, dropped to the - they were right there! Like, they were in the air, talking to us!”
“Yeah, and,” star looks so deeply uncomfortable, “and then they weren’t in the air any more.”
“They fell to the ground,” Kyle adds, a little redundant. It’s not like she can’t hear. She just can’t… make sense of it. Aimee was there, Aimee said she could set them free, and she did, so they’re free now. That makes sense. This…
More pirates join them. Beky barges in. “Hey,” says Owen, “we’re just breaking the news to Michela.”
“What, that when you shot a random bomb-chain thing, Aimsey died? What were you thinking?”
“I was trying to get Guqqie and Aimee back!”
“Well, you trusted the purple-cloud-Aimsey that was not Aimsey, and it lied to you, so it’s your fault at the end of it, isn’t it?”
“I wanted our friends back,” she tries to argue, but it’s a little useless, and Bek’s already preoccupied with some other business.
She heard something else, when she was freeing Aimee. Another voice not their own.
I’m sorry it had to come to this. One day this will all make sense. Please know that there was nothing I could do.
She heard it come from Aimee.
She heard the crunch.
It didn’t - it hadn’t processed, at the time. Aimee was free - that was all she’d needed to know, and then she’d walked away.
Now, in the light of day, she remembers.
One day this will all make sense. There was nothing I could do.
They lied.
It lied.
It used Aimee’s face, and then it lied to her.
And now -
And now it’s - whatever it is - it’s gone.
And Aimee’s body, rotting, in a cave that she can’t reach any more -
Kyle scoops her onto his boat and brings her back to town.
There was nothing I could do.
She vomits off the starboard side.
She feels cold. She can’t speak. Kyle doesn’t bother making small talk.
Martyn starts accosting her when they make port. He tells her that she killed them. She tells him that they’ve been dead for a long time.
Kuervo pulls them apart. There’s no use in arguing, he says; what’s done is done.
“Take a breath,” says Scott.
Michela steals away.
She finds a storage building to camp out in. No one will find her here.
When she opens her diary, she discovers with muted surprise that she actually already wrote something down in the last… half hour?
I don’t have words, says her own recognisable scribble. You CAN’T be dead. I found you.
You can’t be gone, she adds, now, underneath it, I refuse to believe it. I’m going to get to the bottom of this. You’re my best friend. Always and forever.
… And then, because it feels rude to leave her out, Guqqie, I will find you.
Ros finds her on her way back home. “You okay, Michela?”
“Hmm? Yeah, I’m - I’m fine.”
Her tone is soft, untenably sweet. “I’m glad.”
Ros just has that kind of way about her. Even at a time like this, she can make you feel a little less like death.
It’s just…
It’s hard. Maybe she should have asked Ros for a hug.
She doesn’t want a hug from Ros. She wants a hug from Aimee. She wants her best friend back.
Just as she was finally making friends - now everyone is going to hate her, and all for trying to save Aimee’s life. There’ll be bounties on her head. Blame will never be spared.
Even now, she doesn’t want to give up hope. She can still find Guqqie, right? There’s a chance of that, if nothing else. She doesn’t want to stop believing in the life that Aimee promised her. She doesn’t want to let that go.
The sound of it keeps coming back to her. The visceral snapping, bones breaking, cavities collapsing.
She found them, and they were already a decaying corpse.
Acho’s coat, still draped across her shoulders, feels wrong around her.
There was a time when Aimee used to lend her their coat, when the winds blew fierce back home. They were always the one to jump in front of the danger, to declare that they weren’t scared of nothin’. That’s probably why they ran off to Ecclesia when they did.
Michela, hopelessly, followed, pulled by love.
Aimee loved her. That’s why they invited her, right?
And they liked Guqqie. They used to bring her up in the letters, vaguely, cryptically, so that Michela couldn’t quite tell what their connection was, but she was always there.
So she’ll find Guqqie, and she’ll make things right. She’ll do it for Aimee. She’ll never give up hope, even in the face of desolation.
One of these days, she’s gonna figure out the truth, even if it kills her too.