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I’m alone, far away from the horror, standing weightless and clean on a road that smells of moss and earth. My feet touch ground that I cannot feel underfoot, like I'm floating along lighter gravity. To either side stretches the red grass of wind beaten moors. The sky flashes with lightning. At first I think it’s the shift of light in the heavens that causes the grasses to shift in the windless plain. Rumbling thunder drags its notes along the horizon. My hands are without sigils. They drift along the cobbled wall that meanders on ahead on either side. When did I start walking? Somewhere in the distance wood smoke dances into the sky. I smell fire. I follow the road I feel I have no choice but to allow myself to be carried along its path by the song that refuses to go unheard again.
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It is the familiar strain of the zither forced to play elegant sonatas for too long. It groans under excess pressure and expert fingers, before bouting out a jovial tune. I opened my eyes to dance at Laureltide, my legs carried away by the electric current run through them by the ant sized nodes. Pulled from golden fields and the red walled Common to a cave littered with medical equipment.
I look around the darkness. A man sits hunched over a metal zither as if meaning to rip it apart for proper sound. He looks up. His eyes are big and golden, glowing like a cat as he catches mine. He slows down again to a harmonious composition of Eo’s song. Grand, but gentle as the zither obediently hums under the fingers of a gold. The music speaks a million words while he only voices one.
“ Reaper.” The toothy grin splits the scarred flesh of his face in two.
I remember the hooded figure that jumped off the bridge for Trigg’s body. Kept the olympic knights at bay with the glint of his razor and smile. I was surprised he didn't start whooping or howling when I got up with Victra and Harmony in tow. Three lancers of house Augustus aboard the ship. All headed to the core to meet their fates. Only the dead had been left in peace.
I shudder, recalling what I had asked of this man after Lorn left us to bleed into each other. Tactus Au Rath, my blood brother. Punished for my lies with the same fate I subjected onto my friend.
I remember too, sitting next to Roque and Mustang. The grand shows that were on display at the opera houses of Agea. The Poet’s flushed cheeks. Mustang’s tears. Even Victra dined in with us at times. Only the true artist among us never showed his face. I now know he’d been mastering his craft with my gift.
“ Quite the sonata,”
“ ‘He who was never fed love from spoons, licks it from knives’,” he snorts, “ That was but a crumb compared to what I had in store for you.” He pointed his finger at me as if he held a bow before drawing it back. Pulling his hand through the air to mime with closed eyes.
“ How’d you learn?” I nod at the zither. Thinking of uncle Narol who had been able to seduce the sorrowful instrument into joyous bouts. Tactus had compelled it to play more.
“ What else does a poor, sober corpse have to do for months? Nothing to distract myself but compositions and sounds from thinking.” He taps a long nail at his ear lobe. “ Normally I'd ask for a pink and your entire supply of stim shots but I'll settle for a wooden instrument.”
“ I dont think you'll find many pinks available here…” I wasn't sure where my rescuers had taken me or who was alive. How long it has truly been.
“ Barbaric society you have here.” He relaxes into the chair as if I'd given him a cup of cream to lick. I paled. Wherever this place was, it was undiscovered.
I shelved that line of questioning for later. When others show their face and I'm not cornered prey alone. He watches like a pit viper. At any moment he could strike. So unlike the boy who wept into my shoulder. We had all changed and dread filled me. I who had become the light went out and left my friends in darkness some of them found all too familiar.
“ Thank you for the music.” Tears well in my eyes. The last notes of Eo’s song still echoes in my heart.
“ It is time for the reaper to wake. For the sun to rise and cast great shadows of man.” he gestured at himself. I choked. My heart was too big for my chest when it dawned on me.
“ So, you know?”
“ I developed keen ears.”
“ More than that,” Fear glistened in his wet eyes at the implications of change. We dance around mousetraps. Pretending we did not want to eat the poison.
“ I'm not the same either.” It was only fair to admit. His shoulders relaxed. Cocked his head with a lazy grin and went back to tying the millstone around his neck.
“ Truly? It was not all calculated recompense for the hell you’ll now rain?” Tactus purred.
This was a creature who has yet to finish learning. A part of me knows I can't teach him when I do not know where I am going. Broken, pitiful thing I have become.
“ And you’ll rain hell with me?” When I rise from the dead went unspoken. Power is what Tactus respects even as he wants to lean into warmth. The fire at our hearth does not burn like the blaze of his home. Yet heat is all the same. Pain to take as pleasure to drown in. I do not know all that has befallen him. The open wounds hidden under his sarcastic demure. To disparage my suffering would be to disparage his own. He still does not see me as weak. He who wanted to be me but has no inner guide.
“ You owe me a legion.” Proof all my words echo forever in his mind. They echo in the hospital cave, the mines, the system like the song of a hanged girl. Augustus said it true. ‘Steel is power. Money is power. But of all the things in all the worlds, Words are Power.’