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There was moss everywhere. The moss that grew in Noonsa’s armpits had been this shade of green and smelled much the same.
Zelgadis could have seen it differently. He could have seen the moss stretching over the cliffs and marveled at how a few shafts of sunlight could reach so far into a gorge, the sheer scale of the cleft shaped over millions of years by raging waters. But all he saw was Noonsa’s underarms rising forever into the sky and himself at the bottom. Sometimes it seemed like he was always falling into pits, struggling and scraping and maybe clawing his way out, only to fall into another. And every fall hurt worse than the one before it.
Cool water trickled beneath him. Zelgadis blinked. He remembered the delegation to Elmekia, the first royal armada in Seyruun’s history traveling down a river. The ambush, the monsoon. Amelia’s conviction that a zeal for justice could compensate for not knowing how to swim.
Right.
(There had been another stream—water brimming over with mud and a flash in his mind quick as lightning: cholera, great. The depths again—)
An ordinary human would have drowned, or died the instant they struck their skull on the river rocks. Zelgadis wasn’t grateful. The one time he had actually died he’d come back and been disappointed that he had to go looking for his cure again. For a long time he had refused to experience anything like gratitude because to be grateful for his body was too close to being grateful to Rezo, which was unthinkable. Moreover, to be grateful was to appreciate something, and Zelgadis wasn’t good at that.
“There’s nothing good about this body! Nothing!” he had seethed, on one of those interminable desert days when they were all half-manic with sunstroke.
“You kidding? It’s so durable,” Gourry had said, as if Zelgadis were an item in an armorer’s shop.
“It’s great at trapping heat.” Lina waved off the sweltering sun. “Take your shirt off, I wanna see if we can fry bacon on ya.”
Filia had offered her own unwanted observation. “You need much less rest, food, and water than humans do. That's useful.”
“Even mazoku can be useful,” Zelgadis shot back, which had shut her up. “Useful isn’t the same as good. This body doesn’t have positive attributes.”
"But Zelgadis-san!" and even then Zelgadis knew Amelia was about to deliver the coup de grâce. "There’s somebody in there we like very much. That's positive, isn't it?"
There had been nothing to say. It was the kind of remark that made him long to grab her and fling her across the sea, or grab her and do something else altogether. More often than not these days it was the latter, but sometimes it was both at once with equal enthusiasm. Well, he'd been struggling to escape that particular pit for almost six years. Most of all Zelgadis hated that she could see so clearly how he felt on his second-worst days: that he was not his body but its hostage, trapped under layers of rock and flesh thick as dragonhide, screaming to get out.
(And on his worst days he felt that Rezo had given him a body only slightly less monstrous than what he was on the inside...)
Zelgadis sat up on a spine that cracked in three places. It echoed like snapping whips.
He rolled over and splashed water from the stream on his face, discovered it was fresh and bent over to drink. The sensation of slaking such powerful thirst was a relief so intense it bordered on agony. This body was on the brink of death too.
For a while all his raw, aching ears could hear was his own drinking, loud as waterfalls and crashing surf. But then he heard the rattle. The footfalls of padded toes broad like devil talons. Oh, God.
As he lifted his chin up from the water he focused on smelling them, counting them, sensing their shapes tensed and waiting. Four cave boulderbeests. Behemoth-sized reptiles with rattling tails full of paralyzing venom, keen on the meal that had wandered into their midst. One boulderbeest was an aggravation, two were a bad time, but four were a brass demon’s worth of trouble. And Zelgadis was still mostly dead.
Another day, another pit. Maybe he could finally stop climbing.
"Astral Vine!”
The glowing blade distracted the boulderbeests, who alternately swatted and hissed at its infernal light. Zelgadis charged, which in his current state was more of an optimistic stumble. He struck one of the monsters roughly in the shoulder, soaking them both in dark blue blood. It shrieked and the walls of the gorge rumbled.
“Zelgadis-san?!”
He might have dreamed it. He usually did. Two of the boulderbeests turned on him, tails darting stiff as spears—
“Goz Vu Row!”
“Freeze Arrow!”
His spell took out the one he’d wounded, which died squalling, jaws locked. The second one facing Zelgadis suddenly stumbled on shooting ice. Amelia touched down in front of him, only to immediately be bowled over by the sliding monsters. That was the real Amelia, all right.
“Zelgadis-san!” she cried from beneath their flailing feet.
“How long’s it been?” he said, and hurled a Freeze Arrow of his own.
“About two weeks. Fireball!”
Huh. That would explain why he felt even worse than usual.
“…we didn’t know what had happened to you.”
There was a tension in her voice he couldn’t place. “Me neither,” he grunted. His Blade Haut made the ground ripple and buckle, more hiccup than earthquake. Amelia cartwheeled over the spell as it struck and came to a stop at his elbow, where she often stayed when they fought in tandem.
Zelgadis saw her hands on his collar. It got unclear after that. But for a dizzying instant he was enveloped in a scent he’d tried desperately to forget; he tasted warm peppermint tea and his stomach lurched sideways. Before he could comprehend it he was jolted by the clatter of his sword as it fell.
“H-hey,” he said, not unreasonably.
“Look out!” Amelia pushed him away as a boulderbeest tail lashed overhead. “Visfarank!”
Zelgadis dropped to his knees, scrambling to grab his sword again. “What was that?!”
“That monster nearly hit you!”
“That’s not—Elmekia Flame! What’s wrong with you?!” he demanded.
But Amelia refused to pause mid-melee. She just frowned at him as she landed a kick that exploded monster teeth into confetti. “Why are you so angry?”
“You…you can’t go around kissing people just to get them out of the way!”
“Who said that was the only reason?”
Zelgadis was certain this was the stupidest argument they’d ever had, assuming they were in fact arguing and it wasn’t some kind of hunger-induced hallucination. “That’s the only reason you gave!”
“Did you think I wouldn't be so grateful to see you alive?”
Another classic Amelia-ism. Maddening, unanswerable.
“And,” she added, somewhere between a sniff and a pout, “it's not as though you would kiss me first."
“Not in the middle of battle!"
Zelgadis furiously rounded on the last remaining boulderbeest, its tail mangled, tongue rolling between cracked teeth. And it was looking at him with pity.
“Dug Haut!”
“Blast Ash!”
Pillars of stone and vivid white fire burst out from the ground. Soon all that was left of the threat was a haze of bone dust over the charred corpses. Zelgadis felt like they looked.
“So," Amelia said, "you wouldn’t mind if I had waited.”
He wanted to scream. Yes: he wouldn’t mind if she had waited—until he was a real man, obviously; until he’d finished at least three years in service to her father; until her sister was home again and the succession secured; until he perfected the words that the moment deserved. Apparently it didn’t deserve any.
“It’s beside the point,” he grumbled, “because you didn’t.”
His Dug Haut had left three short pillars of rock shooting out from the earth in knobbly finger-shapes. Amelia leapt on top of one and sat there, cheerful but resolute, almost at eye level.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken advantage of you while you were so vulnerable.”
“ ‘Vulnerable’?!”
“It’s just that when a hero rescues somebody—”
“You didn't rescue me!"
“Would it be better to kiss you now or should I wait until you’ve calmed down?”
“I’m calm!”
It rattled and echoed over the gorge.
Zelgadis decided that he had gone mad or she had. They were deranged. This was derangement. But it might not matter here, stranded between the edges of the earth, where in shadows nobody could see the sigils on her bangles and he looked almost like a man.
“Now is—”
His lips itched. She’d already ruined everything anyway.
“...now would be fine.”
“Zelgadis-san! You could sound more romantic.”
“Is it romantic to kiss someone while they’re trying to fight?”
She seemed to take that under advisement. “All right. Again.”
And so, because the alternative was to fling her halfway across the Demon Sea and he didn’t have the energy for that, Zelgadis relented and kissed her. All the years he’d spent imagining this moment were meaningless compared to the reality of it, if this was reality, where the heat of her hands on his chest overwhelmed and confounded him. He felt as though he’d just been turned into a chimera all over again with no sense of his own strength. He could only brush her arms, trace his thumb over the bend in her elbow and think about how his body had been so achingly lonely for so long.
Amelia pulled back an inch. “Is that good?”
Everything Zelgadis wanted to say was certifiably insane, so he cast around for something else.
"...it's an improvement."
“You’re not nice,” she complained.
“No,” he agreed. But she folded her arms around his neck, which persuaded him to slide one hand to the small of her back and press her close so they could kiss just as they had always been to each other. Too nice and not nice, dirty and exasperated. Splattered in something else’s blood.
“Ah, Amelia! Zelgadis-san!”
Even Zelgadis’s peerless ears had missed the sound of another search party Raywinging into the gorge, because there was a single-digit list of things in the known universe that could have wrenched him away from the kiss. But that specific voice was one of them.
Zelgadis leapt away as though he’d been burned. He turned to face a small detachment of Seyruun’s sorcerer corps, whose magic spells carried with them two knights, the foreign minister, and Prince Phil; beside Phil was Lina, carrying Gourry under the arms. Lina had a smirk crooked like a Ragna Blade and twice as lethal. Gourry, God bless him, smiled at nothing in particular to mean that he hadn't seen anything his friends didn't want him to.
Amelia just waved. “Hi, Dad!” she said, with impressive aplomb. “Everything’s okay! Zelgadis-san didn’t drown, but he was badly wounded.”
"You sure?" Lina asked.
“Excellent, excellent,” said Phil, whose folded arms and scrupulously neutral expression were more frightening than outright rage. “It’s still three days’ journey to the capital. That should be enough time for a full recovery, eh?”
He laughed his boisterous bone-rattling laugh and waved for them to go. Amelia saluted and jumped to join them, which left Zelgadis no choice but to follow along. He decided a small part of him was grateful: for friends more stubborn than he was, for stone shoulders that might endure a Pacifist Crush, for the sunlight that waited above the gorge.