Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

When the world ended, it ended quickly and with much less respect for its complexity and wonder than Lune would have anticipated.

Those final moments moved strangely - brutally slow and too fast and all at once. It took her too long to understand what was happening on the other side of that Painted veil. What Verso was doing with the shade. Why Maelle tried to stop him. Her mind took in these variables but solved the equation too late. As the gold-flecked petals of Maelle’s gommage heralded her return to her world, a cold dread spread through Lune. They had defeated the Paintress. Defeated Renoir and all his horrors.

They would still be erased.

Movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Sciel, on the other side of the veil. Lune watched her only friend left in the world reduced to petals in the air. Why were there so few? All that fire and passion, all her bravery, her unrelenting serenity and the depth of her soul - surely that warranted more than just that handful of petals. The sight of them already half gone on some invisible wind between the worlds filled her with a fury hot enough to break her heart. It knocked something loose inside her, and for the first time in her life, Lune felt her will falter.

Lune’s eyes fell on Verso. A strange play of emotions passed over his face - relief, regret, determination, exhaustion. When he met her eyes, she thought there might be an apology in his gaze.

All she felt for him in that moment was boiling anger. She made no effort to hide it as she held his stare. Sciel may have found it within her great heart to offer him forgiveness at the end, but Lune would offer him no such comfort.

Verso’s jaw clenched as he cast his eyes downward and turned from her. Coward.

Lune stood on the edge of her world, the sole survivor of Expedition 33. As long as at least one member stood, the expedition was not over.

Seething with rage, Lune sat.

The world began to rip apart.

—

Lune braced for the end, but all she could feel was anger. Her life dedicated to this mission - a mission that had succeeded against all odds. So much pain, so many sacrifices. They had given everything, won everything, and lost everything. As though they meant nothing, were nothing.

Tears stung in her eyes as the world started to lose its form and shape. Overwhelmed, her mind had no frame of reference for what was happening - this strange removal of form and substance. She thought of her parents and their scrolls, and of working together into the late hours of the night on new theorems. She thought of Gustave and Maelle skipping stones at the docks. Thought of all the mysteries of the world she wanted to study - the Gestrels, the Grandis, the talking Nevrons. She thought of laying in the grass next to Sciel, talking to the stars. The brilliant green of her eyes as she smiled shyly at her. Her beautiful, sad, kind eyes.

Those damn petals.

Rage bloomed with new heat in her chest and ripped through her body.

The sky was gone.

Pain.

Her tattoos burned.

Lune screamed. Or she tried to. There was no longer any air to carry sound.

Everything was gone.

No, Not everything. There was something. Something that felt like wrath. She touched it.

She was burning, unraveling.

It wasn’t fair.

As the entirety of her world erased, one thought united her pain, her anger, her entire being.

No.

When Lune woke, there was nothing.

It wasn’t dark. There wasn’t darkness. Neither was there light. There was … absence. A complete absence of matter.

She tried to open her eyes, but she couldn’t feel them. Did she have eyes anymore? Did she have a body?

Somewhere deep down in her logical mind, she realized that the human brain was not equipped to handle the utter lack of anything. It would soon panic.

Pain.

She was in pain. If she was in pain, she must have a body. She focused on the pain. It was something, and she desperately needed something. It seared up her legs and the left side of her body, burned her left eye and down her cheek.

The tattoos.

Her tattoos hurt, white hot and increasing in intensity.

She wanted to scream, tried to scream. But she did not have a mouth and besides, there was no air to carry the sound even if she did.

Panic. There it was.

She was panicking. She needed the pain to stop. Needed to see something. Needed to hear something. Needed to have an experience of her physical form. Needed this vast, crushing, nothing to be anything, anything else.

The tattoos burned.

Lune lost consciousness.

—

A deep, full-body ache greeted Lune when she opened her eyes.

Her eyes. She brought her hands to her face to confirm that she did indeed have a face. Further experimentation revealed a whole body, more or less intact. A body that was on the ground. She found herself laughing to vent the relief as she spread her arms wide and savored the feeling of her body on the ground. Allowed her breath to steady and felt the rise and fall of her chest as she breathed in oxygen.

So, there was ground and there was air and she was whole. That was something.

She pushed her disheveled hair out of her face and paused, a few strands pinched between her forefingers. Her once black hair was white as fresh snowfall.

“What the fuck?”

She scanned the rest of her body. It wasn’t just her hair that had changed.

Lune had been nine years old when she began experimenting with chroma tattoos. She had always pushed the boundary of what was possible with etching pictos into her skin, eventually developing a method to temporarily harness elemental essence in stains to power her attacks. Ever since that very first tattoo, they were always gold.

Until now. From her feet all the way up the left side of her body, her tattoos had all turned pure white.

“What the fuck.”

Shaking her head and dragging herself to her knees, Lune took in her surroundings. There was indeed a ground, but not much more. The land beneath her was a strange, pale gray, cracked and dry. It stretched as far as she could see in every direction. Thick particles scattered across its surface. Flower petals, she realized with rising dread. Gray petals scattered the torn and desolate landscape.

Rising to her feet, she cast her eyes to the sky…if it could be called a sky. It was lighter in color than the ground - a vast expanse of sickly white with a strange corona of light that stretched across the horizon.

“What the fuck.”

Think, think. She pressed her mind to comply, work with her. What was the last thing she remembered? Maelle and Verso, fighting. Sciel, gommaging.

Oh.

Her heart contracted painfully.

Esquie and Monoco and Verso…

The canvas. Could Renoir have erased the canvas? Then how was she here?

Focus, focus.

Lune needed a job to do, something to focus on. Others. If she had survived, surely someone else had as well. She had no rendezvous points to search for, no paths, no protocols. Just an empty hellscape of gray petals and a colorless sky.

Lune picked a direction and started walking.

—

Lune walked for days. Or, it felt like days. There was no sun to give her a sense of time and no landmarks to give her a sense of distance. She walked alone through a great gray expanse of petals that swirled about her feet as she disturbed them.

At some point, the tattoos began to hurt again. It started as a dull, throbbing ache and intensified slowly as she walked. Concerning, but she did her best to ignore it and pushed forward. There had to be something or someone else here. As long as she focused her mind on that singular belief, she could keep from panicking.

She continued.

The tattoos started burning. The pain was deeper than just her skin - as it increased, it seemed to seep down into her muscles so that every step became more difficult.

With a groan, Lune dropped to the earth as her knees buckled under her.

“Ugh, fuck.”

Pain lanced up her legs, back, arm, face.

She heard herself cry out before she lost consciousness.

—

Lune dreamed of water. First, it was an ocean, vast and still, then a river with bright sunlight glinting on the surface. There was something sacred about this river, but she could not remember what it was.

Lune woke with a sudden, desperate thirst. She dragged herself up, startled to see that she sat on the bank of a wide river. She knew that river hadn’t been there before. Without caution or thought, she crawled edge and drank deeply to slate her terrible thirst.

Once her body had its fill, she sat back and cast her gaze up and down its length, something about the flow of the water catching her eye. Or rather, the lack of flow. The river was wide - perhaps eighty feet across - but it was completely still. It broke the strange landscape in two and stretched into the distance in front of her in a perfectly straight line. There was something fascinating and deeply unsettling about it.

There would be plenty of time to think about it as she walked, she supposed. Gustave rose unbidden to her mind. If he were here, he’d fret endlessly over a body of water that appeared from nowhere. She’d have to remind him of the mission, of course. They had to find other survivors.

She missed Gustave. The early days of expedition 33 seemed suddenly so far away and so much simpler. Before Renoir and Verso and Alicia.

Lune sighed.

She continued.

—

Lune walked and walked. She allowed memories of her fellow expeditioners to keep her company as she trudged through petals along the stream. Maelle-before-Alicia with her boundless energy. Gustave with his kind smile. Esquie’s peculiar sweetness and Monoco’s dry wit. It made her smile to think of the time they spent at camp, working through plans and pressure testing battle strategies.

She did not give thought to Verso, for his betrayal stoked too hot a fury in her.

She could not give thought to Sciel, for she must keep going and the pain of that loss felt like a chasm.

The tattoos began to ache once again. This time, Lune paid close attention as the pain increased, slowly and steadily as she moved forward along the bank of the strange, still river. Once again, they began to burn.

Once again, she lost consciousness.

—

Lune dreamed of the night sky, full of stars. She looked at the stars for too long and for some reason, her heart broke.

She woke up in the night with tears streaming down her face.

The night. It was night! For as long as she had wandered, there had only been a strange, unending gray twilight. If there was night, surely there would be day. Surely this meant she was making progress.

Galvanized, Lune rose to her feet. Her body was stiff and sore as though she’d slept in the same position for too long, and she wondered idly how long she’d been unconscious. With fresh determination, she turned and put the river on her right to keep her bearings.

She continued.

—

The night sky brought with it a chill, and Lune wrapped her cape a bit more firmly about her shoulders. It contained no moon or stars to light her way, so she was forced for the first time to call on her pictos to light a small beacon.

Something about the absence of the stars troubled Lune deeply. A memory of talking to the stars pressed at the edge of her consciousness and she denied it with firm conviction. She tried to focus on memories of her life before, of her friends and her family.

“Friends are not distractions.”

Sciel’s hand had been so close to hers that she could feel the warmth of it. Her eyes had been gold-green in the moonlight, smile a bit anxious. Oh, the warmth she’d felt under that gaze as they began to mend their friendship that night.

Petals rustled across her feet and her memory. Petals as Sciel gommaged.

When the tattoos started to ache again, Lune welcomed the pain. It paled in comparison to that of her heart.

Lune doubled her speed to clear her mind, noting the pain from the tattoos seemed to accelerate as well. She stopped. Waited. The pain simmered. Experimentally, she turned and walked back the way she came. The pain began to lessen. A thrill ran through her as her experimentation gave her information, understanding.

Turning once more on her heel, she activated her pictos, picked her feet up, and flew forward at a quick hover that kicked up a flurry of gray petals in her wake. If she was correct, the pain would increase exponentially until she passed out again. And then-

The theory proved accurate before she could finish her thought.

—

Lune dreamed of sunlight. She was standing on the edge of the cliffs within the Monolith. The Paintress was defeated and the flag of Expedition 33 whipped black and gold in the wind. Maelle beamed and waved her arms at Esquie as he approached from the air. The sunlight was warm on her skin, hope wild in her heart. She spun around to find Sciel, but she was not there.

She woke and immediately sat up, body making its complaints known. She spun around to search for Maelle and Sciel.

A dream. It was only a dream.

Her mind remembered where it was; just endless, colorless nothing.

Frustration and loss gripped Lune. She brought her hands up to rake through her hair and let out a sound that was somewhere between a roar and groan. She wondered again about the time. How long had she been out here, how long did she sleep after she passed out? Why the fuck did she keep fainting? What the fuck was going on with these tattoos?

The sun was bright overhead.

“Fuck!”

It was anger that propelled her up to her feet again and helped her square herself forward with the river on her right. She focused her mind on the facts. Each instance of losing consciousness was preceded by pain from the tattoos. And her dreams seemed to be connected with what she woke up to. Each time she woke, the environment around her had changed.

Was it possible something was restoring the canvas? And the tattoos signaled some piece of her world returning?

If that was true, there was even more reason to press on and try to find someone, anyone else.

“Fuck.” She muttered.

She continued.

Time was easier to gauge after that. The sun rose and set over the gray horizon as she trudged onward, waiting for the ache from the tattoos.

—

The next time the tattoos began to hurt, Lune concentrated deeply. It wasn’t just a pain. There was a…pulling. A pulling in the direction she was walking.

She shook her head, but ultimately couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that she was indeed walking toward something, and as she did, the pain increased until the familiar burning lashed through the tattoos.

She paused. From her past experiences, it wouldn’t be much farther until she passed out. The sensation was awful, but she must concentrate. Understand what was going on.

Lune took a deep, shuddering breath.

There was something here.

Something…close, but not here. Almost as though it existed just outside the periphery of her vision. And it felt like-

“Chroma?”

It was chroma. Raw chroma. The tattoos burned, pulled her forward.

She took one more step and knew nothing else.

—

Lune dreamed of mountains. She dreamed of foothills. She dreamed of the way the rivers wound like snakes, cutting through the terrain on their way to the sea. She saw all this from above, from Esquie’s back, as they sailed towards the Monolith.

“Take a card?”

She turned to the voice, expecting to find green eyes glinting with mischief.

There was nothing but a pile of petals.

Lune gasped and clutched at her chest as she shot upright, breath ragged.

“Shit.”

As she caught her breath, she looked around to find that the land had changed. Where once there had been only a flat waste, there was now topography. The river was still on her right, but now cut through rolling hills that reached into something that looked like a mountain range in the distance.

She pulled out her journal and immediately began to record her thoughts.

Pattern emerging. Tattoos hurt, I follow the pain as it increases. When they burn, I pass out. World state has changed upon waking.

This time I felt…something. Chroma. Are the tattoos somehow restoring chroma? Am I doing this?

Lune found herself suddenly focused. If she could use the pain from the tattoos to lead her to chroma, could she help restore the canvas? Could the world come back?

She had a mission.

After all this time, it felt good to have a mission.

Her heart beat wildly as she put the river on her right and pressed on with focus, waiting for the tattoos to ache.

But they…didn’t. Days passed, and then a week, but the pain didn’t return.

Two more weeks passed. At least, she thought it was two weeks. There were a few days she forgot to mark in her journal.

She just had to keep moving. Eventually, the pain would come.

Lune passed the days by walking through the sea of petals and working through theories, diligently building explanations and playing out possible futures. She passed the nights by making camp. As she still had access to the items she’d kept stowed using pictos before the canvas had been erased, she had a bedroll and basic supplies, and could make her own fire.

She never let herself rest for long, however. Staring into the fire meant fighting the return of her memories. Gustave and Maelle throwing stones over the water. Sciel coming to sit next to her, invading her personal space. Even now, she could almost smell the scent of the soap she used - clean and herbal. Lune had loved that smell. It surrounded her as Sciel leaned into her, tucking her head against Lune’s shoulder and-

Lune let out a small sigh to vent some of the ache from her chest as she brought a hand up to rest on her shoulder where Sciel’s head should be.

If Sciel were here, she’d tease Lune for her abundance of theories. She’d probably be a bit irritated that she wasn’t taking enough time to rest. She’d say that it was going to be okay, and Lune would believe her.

She cast her eyes to the sky, but there were no stars to talk to and no Sciel to calm the storm in her heart.

Why did it hurt this badly? She missed everyone. Missed her friends, her family. Missed them dearly. But when she allowed herself to miss Sciel, it felt as though something vital had been torn from her. Something she didn’t know she needed and was only starting to understand now that it was gone.

Lune crawled into her bedroll and closed her eyes before the tears could come, wrapping her arms about herself and driving the smell of soap and the memory of warmth from her mind.

--

The next morning, Lune rose and stared down her path - the strange river was so still, the water seemed like glass. It stretched into the hills and disappeared. She suddenly wondered if she’d made any progress at all yesterday, or the day before that. Was it possible that she walked in a circle? Vertigo gripped her momentarily and she dropped to her knees to take calm, steadying breaths.

She’d kept the river at her right since it appeared. Unless it looped back on itself…no, it cut through the land in a straight line. It was obvious.

She breathed, stood, and clenched her jaw. Reminded herself that it was perfectly normal for her brain to begin struggling with this strange reality. If she could find more land with enough chroma to restore, that would help.

She continued.

It was several more days of pushing forward before the hallucinations started. The day had grown long and she went about setting up her meager camp for the night.

“Lune, attention.”

Lune froze, breath caught in her chest. Her heart may have actually stopped in that moment as all reality came to a halt.

“Sciel?” She finally managed to move her body, spinning in the direction of the sound.

Sciel was not there. Nothing was. Nothing but petals and fading light.

Dread gripped her. She’d heard that voice. There was no mistaking it. There was no other noise in the eerie wasteland - not so much as a breeze.

So then, she was finally losing her mind.

How long had she been out here? The answer to this recurring question was suddenly very important as she finished setting up camp and assessed her mental state. There was no way to know, not really. She didn’t even know if time passed the same way it had before everything had been erased.

Lune ignored the dreadful instinct in the back of her mind that she had been walking for a very long time.

She tried to run a hand through her hair but found it too tangled to work through. She sighed and sat down on her bedroll, drawing her knees up to her chin and wrapping her arms around them.

Focus. She started a familiar exercise that helped calm her mind. She reminded herself of the facts. She’d been wandering the remains of her world for an indeterminate amount of time, looking for survivors. Though she’d found none, there were signs that the canvas may be regenerating, somehow. It had been some weeks since the last of these events or even the barest hint of aches from the tattoos.

Lune resolved to change direction tomorrow. She would decide where to go in the morning. That would help. Changing her tactic would help.

Tomorrow will come.

She wasn’t sure if she heard it or just remembered Sciel saying it, but she wrapped her arms tighter around her legs and buried her face in her knees.

“No, no, no. You aren’t here.” Her voice was husky with neglect.

If Sciel hadn’t stepped across that damned barrier to comfort fucking Verso, would she still be here? If she’d just stayed with Lune, could she have survived?

The pain that blossomed in her chest was becoming familiar, and she battled against it with a familiar ferocity. Sciel was gone - she’d made her choice. Lune didn’t have to understand it to accept it.

Unbidden, firelight glinting in the green of Sciel’s eyes flooded her memory. The curve of the scar over her nose. Her smile. The way she’d smiled at Lune. That smile had sometimes felt so-

No.

Lune pushed violently at the train of thought clambering for her attention and slid into her bedroll, closing her eyes against the starless night and the empty world and the weakness of her heart.

Tomorrow would come, and she would continue.

--

The countless, colorless days that stretched behind Lune had been spent in pursuit of survivors. Then of chroma.

She now fled from ghosts.

She kept the river on her right to maintain a sense of direction, but found her original mission increasingly eclipsed by the necessity to keep her mind intact.

“First White Nevron: Jar. Request: Find a light. Status: Successful. Conclusions: Nevron does not appear connected with the deaths of former expeditioners in the area. Appears harmless. Concerned with its purpose. Recommend further investigation upon completion of primary mission.”

Lune recited old journal entries to herself as she walked. Hearing her own voice seemed to help, as did keeping her mind focused on something for which she had much more context.

Occasionally, she stopped to write new entries. She started from the beginning of her walk, detailing the strange emergence of the sun, the river, and the cycles of day and night. As she reached more recent days, she struggled to describe her experience.

Possible issue. Heard Sciel’s voice. Absolutely a hallucination. Sciel gommaged. Began to self-monitor mental state.

As she read the words back to herself, she shook her head and slammed the journal shut.

Thereafter, Lune made an effort to write every time she stopped to rest. Her descriptions of the day were the same, so she endeavored to write at least one observation on her internal state for the purpose of tracking more troubling symptoms.

She admitted to her journal when she saw Sciel out of the corner of her eye and when she heard her voice.

The night she felt the warmth of her sitting at her side in the dark night, she confessed it on paper. Rather than the tears that seemed desperate to be released, she let words spill from her pen until the emotion was spent.

As was her practice, she re-read the entry to assess its tone and content, concluding that she would soon need to devise a different exercise to protect her mind from the damage of prolonged isolation. Before closing the journal to pack up camp, she lingered a moment on the final line of this entry.

I miss you.

The words flooded her and caused a small, pained sound to rise from the back of her throat.

She continued.

—

Lune followed the river, on and on. She began to tell herself that it made sense that she had walked this far but found nothing - the world had been large. If the waste she walked now was the same size, it stood to reason that it would take some time to traverse it.

Surely though, she should have encountered more chroma by now.

“You put so much stock in reason. You sure that’s a good idea, just now?”

Familiar dread lanced through her chest as the voice she longed to hear rang so clear through the terrible, absolute stillness. She picked up her pace.

“It would be okay to rest. You’re tired.”

“You’re not here.”

“I’m as here as you are, mon ami!”

Lune rounded on the voice to prove herself right and was horrified to find she was not.

Behind her stood Sciel.

No, not quite Sciel. What stood before her was specter of Sciel that was part woman, part petals. Dozens and dozens of petals danced gently on a breeze Lune could not feel. As they moved, they formed a simulacrum of Lune’s lost companion. Her short-statured, athletic body was clad in the expedition uniform she’d mangled into a style of her own liking. Wild hair bound in a messy bun framed a face that wore a mischievous expression as it regarded Lune. But her eyes…her eyes were cold and gray and petals, not the brilliant green of a spring morning that Lune remembered in such painful detail.

Lune stumbled back as the ghost took two steps forward.

“Mind yourself, now. If you stray too far from the river, there’s no coming back. You don’t want to get lost.”

“What?”

“I’m only looking out for you. Isn’t that what I’ve always done, Lune?”

“Stop. You aren’t real. I’m not seeing you.”

Sciel doubled over laughing, as though Lune had just delivered the most hilarious joke she’d ever heard.

It was a cold and terrible sound.

“Well, if you aren’t seeing me, why are you talking to me?”

Lune’s heart began to pound violently in her chest.

“I’m not talking to you. I’m not. I’m talking to myself. After a long period of isolation, it is common for the human mind to experience cognitive changes and hallucinations.”

“Sleep deprivation will cause that too.”

“I have been sleeping.”

“Have you? How much?”

Lune paused and found she could not answer.

“How long have you been walking, Lune?”

Lune began to feel the edges of panic close in.

“Do you think of me?”

“Think of-”

“I miss you, Lune.”

Sudden, intense anger ripped through her body like a wildfire, burning away the fear and replacing it with the same white-hot rage she’d felt at the end of the world.

“Oh, fuck no. You don’t get to go there. You don’t get to say you miss me. You chose to leave. You chose to die. You fucking left me.”

The words tore from her throat, anger adding volume and intensity until she was screaming at Sciel’s ghost.

“You were the only person I had left in the fucking world and you went to him and left me alone. Do you have any idea what that felt like?”

The petals that were not Sciel’s face shifted until there was no expression on it at all. She remained silent as Lune screamed.

“I watched you die.”

Lune was sobbing now as the truth she’d worked so hard to avoid these long days in this nothingness rose gently to the surface of her consciousness as her anger burned all that stood in the way of her seeing them for what they were.

All at once, she was no longer screaming at Sciel, but for her.

“I fucking loved you.” She screamed.

The ghost lost hold of its shape, petals drifting apart and floating away on a wind that did not exist.

“Oh. Oh. I-. I loved you.”

She dropped to her knees and wept.

Lune was no stranger to grief - behind her lay a life lined with loss after loss. But as she curled on her side in the blanket of petals, the full meaning of her pain over this particular loss opened in her heart like a fresh wound.

She had fallen in love with Sciel. And Lune had nothing left of her but memories and endless, endless petals.

She cried until sleep claimed her broken body and brought some temporary relief to her broken heart.

—

Lune woke next to the river, her silent companion. Her face felt strange and swollen. She didn’t need to try to move to know that her body was stiff, and knew that the heavy ache in her chest had nothing to do with sleeping curled on the ground.

Three truths occurred to Lune almost at once.

First, she was losing her grip on reality. Too long alone in this strange environment was deteriorating her mind.

Second, her tattoos hurt. It was the barest pain - she might even have missed it had she been moving, but it was there.

Third, there were petals in her hand. She must have grabbed a handful as she slept, and released them as they sat up. As they fluttered slowly to the earth however, she turned all her focus on them. After countless days in a desert of gray petals, to see vibrant crimson made her breath catch in her throat.

Chroma.

She focused on it. Green eyes and a lopsided smile flashed through her consciousness.

Lune did not want to hope. She desperately fought the flood of it that crested within her. But as she stared at the delicate petals her certainty grew. She held a small fraction of Sciel’s chroma.

With a deep, slow breath, she tapped the pictos Maelle had used to gather the chroma of the fallen expeditioners and used it to slowly draw the chroma out of the petals. Once stored safely, a sense of wonder filled her.

Could she find the rest? Was it possible to bring her back?

She rose to her feet, considering her next steps. If she wanted to take on this new mission, to search the land for Sciel’s chroma, she wouldn’t do that by continuing in a straight line along the riverbank. The chroma would likely be scattered. She would have to leave the river.

Anxiety clutched her. The river had been her only landmark all this time. It almost felt like a friend.

Lune took a breath. Sciel could be out there. Sciel.

God, when exactly had her heart shifted?

She clenched her jaw, hardening her resolve as she looked out over the waste that lay in front of her. “I will find you.”

She strode away from the water, following the pull that was as much in her heart as in the ache of her body.

--

Lune followed the pain, letting the ache from the tattoos lead her through the wastes. Her whole mind, or what was left of it, she set to her task; following the trail of Sciel’s chroma scattered across the empty remnant of her world.

After leaving the river, she lost track of how long she wandered and marked her journey by the shape of the land.

She found a second sliver of Sciel’s chroma nestled in a series of rocky gray hills. When she picked it up, she heard her laugh, warm and clear and full of mischief.

The third she found in the middle of a flat gray plain that stretched for many miles. As she extracted the chroma into the pouch, Lune saw a flash of her messy bun and her crooked smile as Sciel turned to look at her.

Another she found at the base of a canyon littered with steep spires that rose into the sky. This chroma held a vision of one of her explosive gradient attacks as it brought low a powerful nevron.

Lune wandered the wastes and gathered a few petals at a time, with time indeterminate between each. The promise of the accompanying visions, even brief, made each discovery feel like a balm.

Each day, she traveled until her legs could not meet the demands of her spirit.

Each night, Lune curled her battered body around the satchel etched with the pictos that held all that was left of her own heart.

When she slept, it was fitful and brief, for Sciel’s ghost was a cruel hound that cried out to her from the dark beyond her fire.

“Poor Lune, always trying so hard.”

“Go away.” Lune curled her body tighter, squeezed her eyes shut.

“Just never quite enough.”

“You’re not there.”

A laugh, so like the one she missed, rang out from the night.

“And where am I then?”

“Everywhere. I-I think I’ve found most of your- her chroma now.”

“Why’s it here, there, and everywhere anyway?”

“I don’t know…maybe because she gommaged in that strange…in between place?”

“Very smart theory, Lune. You’re so smart.”

“Go away.”

Lune rose and stowed her supplies, extinguishing the fire before stomping away from the camp.

“Leaving so soon?”

“You aren’t real. I’m talking to myself.”

“That’s silly.”

“Fuck off.”

“You need sleep, darling.”

“Fucking fuck! No!” Lune roared into the soundless night as she rounded on the ghost.

The ghost was not there, of course, though she noted the ache of the tattoos sharply increased when she turned.

With a sigh, she pressed on.

—

The land flattened out again after another stretch of weeks, making it a bit easier for Lune to press on a bit harder. The chroma she’d gathered felt very nearly sufficient.

“How do I know I have nearly all of it? I’m not sure. But I feel it. Not much more now.”

“Now you’re talking to yourself.”

“Yes.”

That was fair. She had been.

She was so tired.

Where was she? What had she been doing before this?

How long ago was that?

Oh, the tattoos hurt. But that was good, because-

Chroma. But it wasn’t on the ground, it was…deeper, in the earth.

With a precision that came with a lifetime of practice, she called on her magic and commanded the ground to fracture. It buckled under her will, disintegrating into gray ash and leaving nothing but a crater behind.

Lune strode into the cloud of dust and knelt to collect the small sliver of chroma at its center. It gave her a flash of Sciel performing a card trick.

“Cold, Lune. Didn’t even flinch. All you wanted was the return of the world and here you are destroying it without a thought.”

“Shut the fuck up.” She muttered.

“Who are you angry at?”

There was a sneer in the ghost’s voice that felt wrong. It sounded so like her - more like her every day. But Sciel would never be cruel. For all her ferocity, Sciel’s heart was gentle. She was the best person Lune had ever known.

“Too good for-”

“Stop.”

“Who are you angry at, then? Is it me, mon ami? Is it me?”

The voice was a sensual purr so close to her ear that she could feel her breath. The earthy, herbal scent of Sciel’s soap filled her senses.

“Lune…”

Lune let out a frustrated sob and stumbled to her knees, gently cradling the chroma pouch against her chest as she fought vertigo and panic at once.

It took several attempts to rise until she stood on unsteady feet and continued.

—

Some time later, the ache in the tattoos led her to the center of a vast, flat desert. Here rested a larger cache of chroma than she’d come across in ages.

“Here. That’s it, that’s what I need?”

It was. How did she know that?

“Okay, focus. And just…think.”

Lune joined this last bit of chroma with the rest from where she’d stored it using pictos, and-

And? What now? She wasn’t a Painter, she didn’t know what to do now. She held up her left hand, tattoos stark white against her skin.

“Work!” She commanded.

“Ju-just…fucking work.”

She was so tired.

“I can figure this out. Think. Regroup. Need a plan.” She muttered to herself and sat down heavily.

“Okay, focus.”

And for the first time in Lune’s life, her mind failed her utterly. She sat for hours, trying to devise some kind of method for restoring the chroma, but all her mind had for her were the disparate thoughts of something beginning to fracture. There was too much gray, there was no sound. There was no one, no one. There was only her, and the gray, and the ghosts.

She had tried so hard.

She was such a fool.

Had she believed she could Paint?

Lune was possessed by a fit of laughter that, once ignited, seemed to go on for an hour. Perhaps it did, and it didn’t matter. Time had lost measure and meaning long ago.

With mirth came a strange clarity, and Lune suddenly found herself desperately missing Lumiere. She missed the streets and the boulangeries. She missed the way the lanterns lit the cobblestones at night. She missed the sounds of milling people.

She missed expeditioners, always so hopeful and hopeless at once. She missed Gustave and his easy smile. She missed Maelle and her impetuous energy.

She missed Sciel.

Lune summoned her guitar. If she was going to lose her mind, perhaps she should lose it remembering the woman she had grown to love.

As she plucked at the strings, she thought first of her eyes, gold-dappled green, like a spring morning. Kind and beautiful and sad, and so full of warmth. Thinking of them made her feel the song she wanted to play, as clear as if she’d played it a thousand times.

Lune remembered the night they met, what they shared in that little room in the Crooked Tower. Sciel’s lips brushing hers as their sighs mingled. Lune’s heart contracted with regret as she thought of the hurt in those eyes when she pulled away and cut her out. She’d been so young. All those years, she thought she’d been prioritizing her work, her parents work, the mission.

The price of that decision felt quite high now.

Her fingers moved absently along the strings as she remembered Sciel’s laugh, her sharp wit, the way her body never seemed to still. The way she seemed to fit perfectly into her side as she leaned into Lune in front of the fire.

Sciel had forgiven her, of course she had. The ocean itself could not hope to compete with the depth of her heart. After that conversation under the stars, a steady healing had bloomed between them. Even as they maintained focus on defeating the Paintress, the ease with Sciel grounded her.

And after Maelle brought them back, it was the only thing she could count on. Sciel, her only friend left in the world.

She played her song for Sciel, the tattoos began to ache with a terrible ferocity.

She wondered again when exactly Sciel had slipped passed the careful walls she’d built around her heart? Lune been so focused on the mission, she hadn’t noticed the light her friend lit in her. The way she made her smile or the way that smile followed her into sleep at the end of each day.

As she strummed, she remembered the way Sciel had danced the night they discovered Esquie’s wine. Drunk, laughing, their eyes had met across the fire and in its light, Sciel was like the sun. There was a force, a pull, like gravity, that Lune had not the will or want to resist. Sciel had sauntered up to her, full of her mischief and her wild dark magic and Lune had felt alive as she gathered her up in her arms and swung her in carefree circles around the clearing.

Lune remembered her calm wisdom and the depth of her soul and their sharp contrast against her brutality in battle.

Tears stung in her eyes as she thought of Sciel dancing, Sciel swinging her scythe, Sciel peacefully accepting fate.

Grief washed over Lune, and she finally let it in. She played and she loved what she lost, and the love was a tidal wave that became a song.

She paused, suddenly aware that the tattoos no longer ached.

At all.

A shuffling of boots on cracked earth sounded behind her.

“Lune?”