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There hadn’t been time. Not at first. A good thing, too, because if there had Zelgadis would’ve broken up into a million sniveling pieces that scattered over the sea. But then Pokota snatched the jar and flew off, which meant there was no time for despair or self-pity, and watching him was a sorely needed if unwelcome reminder of how stupid he must have looked, how pathetic, and he refused to be a grown man with less emotional control than a fake rabbit. So he set himself aside to concentrate on what had to be done, just as Rodimus had taught him back in those ale-stained years, until the pressure like weights pushing down on his heart became more than he could stand.
Zelgadis set off from camp on foot as fast as the mounting pressure would allow. Against his will he heard Lina’s petty grumble about whether anybody would do something and Amelia's reply that trying before he was ready would just make it worse. Humiliated, he flew into the woods until he couldn't hear them anymore, then flew further, faster. He blasted through branches and tore vines up from the roots, stopping only when the trees became too thick around the middle to break.
He struck a tree and didn't care. With his momentum he skidded almost twenty meters before he fell into a small glade. It must have been someone else’s campsite not too long ago, judging by the sawn-off logs and stray patches of dirt where tents had been assembled. Toward the side were great mounding bushes teeming with tiny magenta blossoms that hung precariously from their stems: Dicentra formosa, bleeding-heart flowers, the kind Zolf had dried and turned to powder for toothaches.
Zolf. Zelgadis swallowed. He felt a burning shame at the recollection of the old mage, and Rodimus too, and Noonsa, Dilgear, even Eris. Had they ever been real? Or were they just colorful characters from a fairytale where Rezo had been an erratic but benevolent sage who granted Zelgadis with the body of a chimera to teach him about the price of power? In that fairytale it was only a matter of time, months maybe, a year at the absolute most before Rezo was satisfied his great-grandson had learned his lesson and changed him back again. In that fairytale the great priest led a moderately merry band of rogues, "criminals" if you were some tedious pedant, but that part wasn't important. What mattered were the things they did for Rezo, for each other, unhesitatingly and without question because they had been like family. Flesh and blood.
Zelgadis made a strangled noise like he could get his lips around the feeling. But the more he tried to dislodge it the more it grew, urgent, suffocating, forcing him to his knees. One cough triggered the hot sting of tears; it was his only warning before the monstrous feeling erupted, transforming his shaky breaths into great shuddering gasps. He howled and couldn’t hear it. He gagged on his own sobs. He retched so violently he felt dizzy. The weight of it pinned him to the ground, made Zelgadis clasp his head in his hands so the force of his own screams wouldn’t split his skull in half.
His feet went numb, and with the absence of sensation he also lost his grasp of time. He didn’t know how many lies and lifetimes went by before the sun approached. In his blind fury he’d convinced himself he was beyond its reach. But the sun it was: bright and relentless, trimmed in pink, determined to shine in his direction whether he wanted it or not.
When the sun tiptoed through the trees to gingerly reach its rays toward him he flung both arms around it and cried. The sun enveloped him, stroked his shoulders and picked twigs from his hair. And while he wept the sun murmured it’s all right, it’s all right.
Zelgadis woke to a warm pressure on his cheek. Touch was mostly lost to him, but the sensitive peaks of his ears felt something uncommonly soft against his dull skin. He pressed closer, let himself drink in softness, heat, and a smell like sweet alyssum. He lay on his stomach with both arms clasped tight around a pillow that rose and fell.
He stirred just enough for the pillow to squirm and stretch its fingers in his hair. Amelia leaned against one of the cut logs, resting with her head against one shoulder. Her legs on either side of him were bent slightly. In twilight the dark pink borders of her tunic took on a sheen like the trailing satin gowns she wore at state occasions no matter how many times she tripped (at least eight by his count).
“Should we go?” Zelgadis mumbled.
“There’s no rush.”
As if to emphasize that point Amelia sat back again, moving Zelgadis with her. Her heartbeat was so slow it seemed to wander, languid and ponderous against his jaw.
“The others…?”
“We can catch up later.”
“We should go,” he said. But the evening breeze tickled his nose, and the trees with their gnarled branches made shadows in the shape of a sage's staff.
Two years ago a blade cleaved his back apart. The blow was so powerful it drove Zelgadis into the mountain, propelled his broken body through solid rock and filled the bleeding hole with rubble. Had he not been preoccupied with dying he might have been amused that he’d somehow managed to wind up with more stone inside him. There had been a shocking rush of air through his suddenly exposed torso, the ineffable pain of his spine tearing loose from muscle like a plant yanked from its stem; the life ebbed out of him in dark, sticky waves that smelled of iron.
If that had been the end he wouldn’t have minded. Lina would finish things as she always did. But then new life surged in him, unwelcome as the sun. The blood boiled in his fingertips, made him jolt with an impossible itch beneath his skin. And that sun, that intolerable sun burned him with its holy rays, patching together the lungs that lay punctured under the gaping canyon of his back.
He’d thought: I didn’t really want this.
Bit by bit the world came back. Clusters of perceptions and new itches. The terrible realization that being alive meant having to do things. Zelgadis could hear the whizz of spells from somewhere nearby, Gourry’s humming blade.
Beneath the din of battle was some other crisis happening in whispers. At first they were too low for his fresh ears. But after a while he could make out a frantic plea to breathebreathebreathe, please, please, was it working, why wasn’t it working, if the gods would only spare him she’d spend the rest of her life alone in the Desert of Destruction, anything, she’d do anything, just please let him come back.
It had filled Zelgadis with a tangling shame so intense it bordered on grief. Nobody, her least of all, deserved to be so affected on his behalf. He’d resolved to keep his distance from her and part ways as soon as the situation allowed.
Then he’d opened his eyes and saw Amelia in a tunic soaked through to the skin, hands still glistening with his blood. There were pale red pieces of him on her face.
It might have been midnight. Every so often the breeze picked up and rustled the ends of their capes to remind them they should have been sheltering in tents. Above them treefrogs sang lusty, longing songs with their woodblock rattle.
“I’m still going to smash that jar. I’m just waiting until I’m sure there’s nothing left to lose.”
“I know.”
“You don’t believe me."
“I didn’t say that.”
“I can tell,” Zelgadis grumbled, shifting in her arms. Amelia’s arms were small but sturdy and made sounds like snapping birch when they broke. She had been the one to teach him Recovery, even encouraging him to try it on her injuries; he’d frozen, fearful the spell would sap too much of her energy, but Amelia urged him on and held his hand over the splintered bone that jutted out from her forearm. He had barely been able to remember the spell, focused instead on the sticky webbing of veins and tendons clinging to the bone like rosy lace.
“Would it really make you feel better?”
“To throw him into the ocean, drowning forever but unable to die…or smashing him into a million pieces and stomping on them…it sounds pretty good to me.”
“I don’t think you mean that.”
“You don’t know what I mean.”
"Well, you haven't wanted to talk very much since we got here."
"It's...hard to know what to say."
"You can try anyway."
Amelia had a secret. In retrospect it was hard to believe it was secret at all, given the noise, yet she'd kept it for years. Even Zelgadis might never have known had he not caught Lina outside their room too late at night. At first she kept her mouth shut, but Zelgadis knew how to be persuasive, and Lina would trade her whole family for a bowl of chicken stew with peanuts and yams. Amelia sometimes had nightmares when they crossed into Seyruun, Lina explained. Real ugly ones. Things that made her violent, things she wouldn't explain. She'd begged Lina to just cast Lafas Seed or some other spell to keep her still until it passed. Lina, who kept her own weaknesses hidden under lock and key and surrounded by spring-loaded traps, did her best to honor that.
The next nightmare happened after they'd defeated Dark Star, at a border town between Seyruun and Ralteague where they were preparing to part ways. They'd stopped at a hillside inn with views of Seyruun's capital to the northeast; the palace minarets rose high over the city, white glowing beacons under the full moon. Zelgadis had been staring out a window when Amelia began to scream.
He barged in over Lina's objections, yelled at her to go blow up some crooks in the meantime, not that she ever needed the encouragement. Inside the room Amelia was thrashing and kicking, tangled in the sheets, so flush with sweat that her hair stuck to the sides of her neck. For an instant Zelgadis recoiled, as if she were the one intruding on him in his helplessness. Then he set it aside.
He charged forward and tried to grab her swinging fists. When that didn’t work he went for a rough grappling hold, only to discover she could still out-wrestle him in her sleep. She lunged for his back and he unfastened his cloak so she had to scrobble at the fabric. While her hands were occupied he reached for her waist and held on tight. He didn’t let go when she lashed out, not when she stopped, not even when she collapsed into sobs.
At some point Amelia had explained herself, or tried to. With so much blubbering it was hard to understand. All Zelgadis could make out was something about so many people crowded in a stuffy room for a portrait for hours on end, days and days, two cats named Sunbeam and Pancake, parties where everyone was unhappy, the finished portrait that was never displayed and fifteen years later only six of them were still alive. If Amelia went home she would be killed—she was blotchy pink in the cheeks, crying so hard she hiccuped and choked—she would be murdered like everybody else was murdered, destined to die to sate someone else's greed. Nobody in the royal family could escape sudden and violent death. Not even Sunbeam and Pancake.
Zelgadis didn’t promise she wouldn’t be murdered when she went home because he couldn’t do that. He didn’t try to comfort her because he couldn’t do that, either. But he stayed with her until the sun rose slow and foreboding from behind the minarets of Seyruun Palace like seeping blood.
So late at night the bleeding-heart flowers surrendered their color and the forest hummed with lively frogs and insects and all kinds of ugly things. That included Zelgadis, who flourished in darkness. He was most comfortable when no one else could see.
“I always thought he knew the cure and was just withholding it from me. At first I assumed it was because he wanted me to learn something. Then, once I realized he didn’t have anything benevolent in mind, I thought it was a manipulation tactic. If he held the cure over my head I’d do whatever he asked.”
Amelia was quiet, her bare skin dimpled with goosebumps.
“I’d never once considered that…that he knew there was no way to undo it and did it anyway.” Zelgadis swallowed around an unwanted hitch in his throat. “He didn’t care what I turned into as long as he could use me for his own ends. I was…I was a tool to him my entire life. He didn’t care that my parents trusted him to take care of me, or even that he was my great-grandfather. It—he—he was a charlatan from the very beginning. He was never good.”
The words themselves were trembling, unsteady things, walls without foundations. Orphans left to fend for themselves.
“He was never good. Ever. I…I don’t forgive him.”
“Then don’t.”
It wasn’t the answer he was expecting. “You don’t think so?”
“Punishing evildoers is justice,” Amelia said, sure as steel, which quelled the sudden irrational fear that Zelgadis was in the arms of some impostor-Amelia. “But so is focusing on the good you can do rather than someone’s wicked deeds! The fires of justice have to shine brightest in our own hearts. Sometimes you're not the one responsible for punishment and retribution. You let go and move on to the next righteous cause.”
“Why would you let go?”
“Because…” Amelia moved one hand away and without meaning to Zelgadis moved with her, chasing what little firm but patient pressure he could feel; she seemed to understand, and when she brought her palm back again he leaned into it like a cat.
“…there are so many people who can hurt you. So many," she repeated, soft, sighing. "Even if they’re terrible you can’t hate them all, or hold on to it forever.”
“I can,” Zelgadis said stubbornly.
Two days ago they almost died. It was worse than when they had died, since there was no shame in mortals losing to Death incarnate. And whatever stray spark that first kindled into strange flames when he watched Amelia die was nothing compared to the fire now, brighter than the sunset over the hills and more vast.
Even Amelia’s scream was worse. This time it wasn’t the life inside that shattered. Zelgadis heard the crunch of bones as they broke, the slippery wet squelch of muscles squeezed so tight they were pulverized into paste. Gduza lashed her hair like whips around Amelia’s neck and limbs and wrung the pink out of her skin.
The screaming stopped. Zelgadis, forced to his stomach by thunderbolts that skewered his physical and astral forms, tried desperately to keep crawling forward. He had called Amelia's name through a mouthful of blood, not because he would reach her, but because he knew he wouldn’t. All he could do now was reassure her that she hadn’t been alone in the end.
Then Gduza and Duguld had disappeared---sucked into the sunset as abruptly as they had come.
At first Zelgadis was so dumbfounded he assumed it was death adrenaline, a hallucination of one last victory before it was over. But the mazoku were gone for good. Zelgadis was left bleeding and stranded at the brink of death in an open field with someone who was in all likelihood dead already. That seemed like a valid reason to surrender, but he decided he owed it to her to die as he had lived: at her side no matter how much he complained about it.
He hauled himself forward a few halting inches at a time, up what had to be the largest hill on the continent, until he reached the spot where Amelia lay slumped and helpless and trembling. Not cadaveric spasms. Real shakes. Zelgadis forgot about dying. If she was alive, if she stayed alive, if she could cast Resurrection exactly once while they were close enough together, they might survive a few more hours at least.
Amelia looked as if her insides had been whisked away with the mazoku, leaving her skin behind in a crumpled puddle. The waist where his attention sometimes lingered too long had been sliced open and two ribs protruded in prongs out from the flesh. Her eyes were closed, either since they couldn't open or she didn’t want to look any more than Zelgadis did. He realized she had stopped screaming because the last strangling grip had torn most of her tongue from the root, and now she was struggling not to choke on it.
It would have been simplest to maneuver from on top of her, but he bled so profusely he feared she would drown. Zelgadis tipped her into his arms so they lay side-by-side, facing each other, legs twined. He held tight around the leaking gash under her ribs with his left hand and reached for her mouth with his right. There was no time to wish his fingers were less clumsy or apologize for causing her more pain. Amelia clung to his sleeve as he thrust into her, guided him deeper until he grasped the spongy flesh of her tongue and forced it up her throat again.
And when despite her best efforts she could still barely choke he cradled her jaw in his palm, puppeted her mouth against the plane of his thumb to shape the syllables until he felt something warm and sacred beneath their stomachs and the wounds like plunging arrows in his back began to close.
“Lina’s been complaining about me since we got here.”
“She’s worried, that’s all.”
“She says I’m being an asshole. I heard her.”
“You haven’t been yourself lately.”
Zelgadis couldn’t help a sneer. “I admit I wasn’t enthusiastic to discover I was just another one of the tens of thousands of puppets Rezo abused and threw away. And then I learned there was officially no cure for what he did to me. That I might as well die because the only thing that matters doesn’t exist.”
Someone flinched. Maybe they both did. Zelgadis bit his lip like he could clamp down on the words in midair and swallow them. He shrank further into Amelia's chest, tried to hear anything but his own endless guilt. But the treefrogs were quiet and the tickling breeze had died down, and the Zelgadis who had told Valgarv he didn’t want to lose the person he’d become seemed very far away.
“You don’t know that,” Amelia said.
“What?”
“Rezo-san never found out why he was blind, did he? There must be lots of things he didn’t know. And that jar is only a piece of him, anyway.”
She was right. She was right and she was warm and it was infuriating. “I’m not a good person,” he told her. “I can hate Rezo forever, I don’t care what anyone thinks.”
“You shouldn't listen to how you feel so late at night. Wait until the sun comes up and decide if you want to be angry forever then.”
“I won’t change my mind,” Zelgadis insisted, mostly to the dark blue emblem of Amelia's necklace. “I’m not weak.”
“No one thinks you’re weak.”
“Lina thinks I’ve been weak. And stupid.”
“Zelgadis-san,” Amelia refused to indulge him on that point, “there must be at least two more hours before it's really morning. Don’t you want to rest?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“I don’t," he said, stifling a yawn against her chest before it could rat him out.
There was a mild pressure on the top of his head his muted senses couldn’t place. “All right.”
Amelia settled back against the log and was asleep in minutes. Zelgadis tried to resent that too, but her breathing was proud and persistent as her voice, and for a while he imagined some other conversation where they weren't hiding in the dark and he didn't say idiotic things. If he glanced up he could see the edge of the glade with its bush full of bleeding-heart flowers. After a while he closed his eyes and dreamed of Zolf's powders and old bandit folksongs, of bright valleys and rivers and days full of sun.