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The matters of the world do not serve as burden. I see no reason for them to do so, no less for me.
There was once a time, I suppose, where such matters were assigned my “duty”. Such was the nature of the strongholds in Ala Mhigo and Doma. Assigned to my purview – and yet, no more but busywork. There was no authority I truly held that did not belong to the Emperor. What did it matter the decisions I made? Ultimately meaningless, once left up to his word. I was simply an executor.
What meaning does a life hold, if the matter of that life is simply in managing somebody else’s burden? For performing their deeds?
The sole outlet that I may have had was combat. Proficient with blades of all types. Familiar, at the very least, with top magitek. The impetus for movement, for quickness, precision. The way a blade split into flesh and tore it from the bone. I’ve been told butchers do something similar, but I see no appetite for meal. I suppose there must be something in the act, but it is not my motivation. It is mechanical. The closest one gets to excitement, perhaps. I earned less scorn for it when it was done in the name of curtailing savages. Though even in the Reach, hiding place of resistance, I still find it nothing but a chore. What challenge is it to strip down men and women who can hardly fight back? Even the strength I can sense from some, like the Mi’qote woman with her magic, isn’t enough.
Red. Her blood. All, ultimately, colourless to me. Nothing but dark shades, a deep darkness of night overshadowing all. Nothing to draw value from.
Until I sense you.
There is no aptitude for the arcane with Garleans. I am the same. But Garleans do not lack eyes.
I heard your voice, and turned to witness you.
You glowed like magitek. More than that. Magitek, the cerulean, so often wrapped in wire and steel. Its glow was a pittance. Barely enough to light a room, often. Dim. Distant stars with no reason to chase after.
You were the moon.
Hard not to take you for some sort of “white knight” coming forth to save his people. Though, you were not Ala Mhigan. Dressed in white, pale of skin, horns parting your hair. A savage from Othard, I would decide much later. It had no matter in the moment. I was assigned to send a message in slaughter and blood. You were not a primary objective.
Except . . . you resisted me.
It took no time to send away the other two you fought with. They weren’t worth fighting. Too weak to hold me back. They stayed kneeling in the dirt – and you should have, as well.
Instead, you braced both hands on your cane, and you rose to your feet. A tight jaw. An expression I had come to associate with one in pain.
It was the first time I saw your eyes. Later, upon retrospection, would I realize your eyes were blue. Yet they reminded me once more of cerulean. No – not cerulean. Cerulean lacks a glow so impactful. It was so much more than that. Staring into a forge. Watching molten mass and flame form metal. The fire of strength.
You broke one of my swords. At the time, I believed I had done the deed. Such weak steel barely matched my skill and strength. Later, I would realize the blade had been fresh.
I have never broken a sword against a single opponent.
I do not care for reminiscing. The attempt to replay time seemed futile. Or so I thought. Witnessing you in Doma, however, forced the reconsideration. I am meant to consider any possibility on the battlefield, though I had yet to hear that your people had crossed the sea. Yet once more, while I struck down the woman who accompanied you, you were not so easily dissuaded. Then to oppose me further even on the choice of her life over yours . . .
I had assumed you were called the Warrior of Light simply for vibrancy. The ability to stand out on the darkest of nights. The impossibility of ignoring you. Your physical appearance, rather. Only in retrospect did I read the truth of it: the people saw you as a way forward. Their “light” in the dark. Something . . . metaphorical?
I do not deal in allegories. But perhaps, with the ability to tune myself, with the primal . . . perhaps I could see the fullness of you. Perhaps I could attempt to see the strength within you, and what really drove your “success”.
But perhaps the Resonance was a mistake.
You stepped into the throne room, and I was rendered blind.
Curious, the effects of the Resonance. I had never felt such a sensation. Like a thrumming of a body in its rhythm in fight. Strange to experience, sitting, standing, waiting.
It was a heartbeat – surely so strong as to be yours and mine. And yet I hadn’t even raised a sword.
A parched man, without water, will die. I had never known such concern.
A single drop sliding down the gullet. A coolness. Sensation. A drip of succor. And, suddenly, I was aware of every nerve in my body, vibrating out. I trembled.
How was I to refuse indulgence?
The battle burned in my mind, and left a scorching brand on my memory. Garlemald shirked, for so long, the notion of a primal. A being pretending to be god. Of course, I realized afterwards. Of course a primal was foolish. It had no right claiming to be anything more than man.
After all, it was not enough in comparison to You.
You were the divine.
The bone and blood at the end were nothing to me. Pain, perhaps. But my senses had otherwise been taken. All I could sense was you. Blinding, glowing. In seeing the whole of you, I was driven to madness. All I could do was offer you my head in sacrificial glut. Nothing less to sate a deity.
. . . and yet.
And yet.
My faith was punished. And so I remained.
When I reclaimed my body and fled, I was approached by Fandaniel. A pawn – too senseless, too ruthless. Too ruled by base instincts. I miscalculated then, thought him only a tool for me to use. After all, who better than an Ascian to draw you back to my side?
But it took time. So much had to be done. The building of the effigy, for one – the sacrifices for another. The strength to draw into the tower, and to weld the corpse of my father’s legacy to it. Longer still to have you arrive to the cold shores, and more for you to touch the outskirts of the dead city.
Perhaps Fandaniel was a fool, but did he recognize the fervor within me . . .? I had felt joy a single time, the single drop preceding the tide of our battle in Ala Mhigo, where I had once been Shinryu. To reminisce on that battle was all I could think of. Perhaps there was work to be done, indeed. But what more can be done when the work is to wait?
The battle morphed in my mind. Shifting details, the addition of blows never made. You were a constant. Strong fingers wrapping around your cane, with the cloth of your garb flowing and flapping against your skin as the wind raged around us. But more than that, so constant you were, I began to think of our next fight. Would you choose the same weapon, the same magic that was barred from me for so long? Would you take up sword and shield, as I had so often heard you’d wielded before? Perhaps you would choose a change of form entirely. Perhaps you would learn to wield the power of a primal instead.
The thought of form within a false god was tempting, perhaps, yet there was something lacking with it. How could you let your body take on the form of a primal, when your own could hardly contain its own divinity? Then again, was a god’s form meant to remain constant? I had taken on an old body to regain my own, but that had been strategic. I could not regain my full strength to challenge you once more without having done so. It had taught me, in the process, how to better use my own body’s strengths. A moment of education, perhaps more vital than anything I had learned from that old fool when I was in my youth.
To see that you had thought the same . . . for Fandaniel to bring you before me, and you were changed . . .
Even in the wool coat you wore, I could see the effects. No less tall, no less a savage. But your hair, still as long and white as before, curled down in sweeps, with its tips grazing the top of your chest, now swollen above a distinctly changed figure . . .
Had you transcended? Had you taken on a proper form of divinity? Or was this a testing ground – the same challenge I had taken on when I sought to return? I had to know – I was compelled. So rarely have I acted on, much less felt, a whim . . . and at first, when Fandaniel had proposed I test your body myself, I had ignored such a notion. But how could one resist when so palpably close?
Your body rang with its pains. The unfamiliar gravitas of magic flowed through your veins through natural runoff. You dripped with it, left the arcane in your wake. To return to my own body was a disappointment, in the end.
. . . once, I was told, Garlemald held a captive audience through its artists. Few and far between, of course. The emperor insisted that artists held intentions in their work, manipulative, subtle. And so a script was created. No fantasy; only our people, only our land, only our pride. Only our ideals. It was said there were no pigments more than from the earth we mined.
How does one understand a “cadmium”, or a “cobalt”, when one has no scheme of reference? You can imagine a colour no more than you can imagine anything outside of a human mind. Not without seeing it, perhaps. But even in our controlled territories, even in Ala Mhigo and Doma, it was all the same. Muted. Dark. No saturation. The most vibrancy would be on our flags, the red of blood.
Seeing through Your eyes brought a perspective I could not clarify then, and cannot clarify now. Not so like looking through the glass at a painting mounted in the walls of the royal palace. Wholly unsimilar to the lens of a microscope.
Crystalline, instead. Iridescent. Kaleidoscopic.
I had never known what it was like to look at the snow and experience full blindness before.
The fervor I felt! Brimming, overflowing. The sense of your body was so far more than I had ever experienced. How did one live within it so constantly? I could only conclude that you could not – to do so must’ve been the source of your madness. The muddling of your perception, so off-kilter with the reality of the world. Perhaps that is why we became the same, for my focus has ever been on the reality – but my perception has always been too clear.
Fandaniel would admonish me if he truly knew the depths of my fascination. He would accuse me of madness, he’d say, though he could not admit he was not the same. Still, he could not grasp my simple words, even in so far as I described the fight I envisioned. You and I, friends, across the line. My blades colliding with your weapons of choice. The leather of my dark gloves burning away as I barraged against you. Your veil of white flowing around you, offset by your burning, brilliant, cerulean eyes. All accompanied by the resonant beating around us, the call to battle: the synchronicity of two hearts in alignment.
In the end, I was not interested in the power of Zodiark. No primal could withstand your might. Even so, for as mortal as I was, I could not resist the urge to bathe within that destruction. I had so long spent trying to find satisfaction in the destruction of others, yet the only sensation of life within me could only be found by burning myself alive in your light.
Without Fandaniel, without Zodiark, without a purpose beyond my finale with you – I have been lost. Even in visiting the battlegrounds of our last foray, there is nothing. The phantasm I had taken on when we had fought was no longer there. I can no longer remember the drop of succor You offered me. There was simply . . . nothing.
But as I look up at the sky, I see the strangest thing. Aircraft, piercing the veil of the sky. A first. And I would be damned if I did not believe Your presence was there.
I know not of aching nerves, but as I consider Your journey, my fingers positively twitch.
I cannot help but follow, a disciple in Your wake. But then again, what more was there?
The world matters not. All that matters is You.
I will dive into oblivion if it means I can witness Your Light one last time.