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Clive laid with his back against the sand. The echoing whoosh of the tide surging through his ears matched in tune with his heart. The sky above him shimmered and glinted with the weight of everything but Clive could focus on it clearly. The shades of blue that, even while dark, covered the sky so completely. The red and the tainting that had been done were gone. He saw the moon, the stars, everything that was returned to the way it should have been before. Metia shone down on him brilliantly and Clive felt the ache in his chest about who it was who should be here.
He had promised to Jill that they would watch the moon together. He had promised her that he would come back. He had known exactly how dangerous this mission was bound to be and he had still promised to her because everything he’d fought for had been a promise.
His oath to protect Joshua when they were young. His promise to give over his life. His promise to protect his people and to serve as a Shield of Rosaria. His promise that he would come back to Jill when this was over. His promise that they would adventure the world and they would find their peace in such a way.
Clive had promised so many things over the years that it felt like a cave ripped open in his chest.
He thought of Joshua.
His darling baby brother who he adored with every fiber of his heart. He thought of seeing him smile for the first time. How he had needed to be nudged forward to the edge of his bassinet to reach down and touch him. Joshua had been so small. Wrapped in a bundle of white cloth and fussing and crying and squirming. Clive had been afraid to touch him the wrong way and hurt him. He had been afraid that he would do something wrong and damage the new skin of his baby brother. But he had reached down carefully and tucked his finger into Joshua’s tiny hand and his brother had held him. They had smiled at each other and Joshua had laughed and in that moment he had known he would do anything and everything in order to keep his little brother safe.
He had promised to him so many times and Joshua’s faith in him had always been unshakable. It had been without any kind of fault or hesitation even when there was every reason to turn his back on him. Clive had made endless mistakes and he had hurt him. Ifrit had hurt the Phoenix. Clive had lost control and failed to see things for what they truly were so many times and their nation was destroyed because of it. Joshua was in hiding because of it. The both of them were torn apart because of it. He had wanted to do anything and everything to protect his brother and Joshua, he could still remember, would sit on the sidelines of the sparring ring and he would cheer for him. He would perch and tell the other shields of how strong Clive could be. Joshua would watch him and believe in him in every fight.
They had talked over everything about fighting a God. What it would be to take down Ultima. What he was and what he wanted with them and for the rest of the people of this world. they had discussed what it would take in order to bring him down once and for all and they knew that the chances of things turning out worse for wear were high. They knew that there was going to be a cost when it came to this fight, all three of them had.
But Clive felt the tide washing over his legs and he thought of the blood staining his chest and hands. His brother’s blood. His brother who had given everything to him. His brother who had looked at him and smiled at the end. His brother who had told him he was proud, who had thanked him.
Joshua thanked him when he was the reason he was dying in his arms. Violent and bloody. His body unable to heal beyond the damage done to him without the curse coming to exact the revenge it sought on all users of its magic. He had felt it when Joshua took his last breath. He had felt it when his body relaxed wholly in his arms. He had felt it when his heart stopped beating with the hole straight through it.
Clive had felt it and he remembered everything that was meant to be theirs when they were young. How happy Joshua had been. How he had laughed. How, despite his sicknesses, he would stubbornly play alongside him so that they could spend their time together. How he never once doubted him.
They had fought a God and they had lost. Dion had given his life to save them. Clive had been killed, he knew that much. He knew when he was falling from the sky during their battle that he was fading. He’d felt it. He remembered the feeling of it quite well.
He could feel it now.
He also remembered the warmth when Joshua had reached him. How it had felt to be held by him and the flames of the Phoenix working their way through his body to heal him and repair the damage that was done from the blast Ultima had dealt him. How it was like to open his eyes and look up and see his brother looking down at him with relief. How it was to know that once they had caught their breaths sitting there together and their banter resumed, that they would not be leaving the next stage of their fight.
He had watched as Ultima tore through his brother and he was powerless to do anything to stop it. He had watched as everything fell apart in front of him and he had to hold Joshua as he died.
Clive had failed.
Every promise he had made, he had failed.
Joshua spoke to him of faith but Clive could not carry it. He could not answer the pleas. He could not do what everyone believed he could do.
He couldn’t.
He had walked over to his brother’s body and he had knelt the same way Joshua had done to him. he had held his hand over the hole in his chest and he had focused his energy and the heat that he could find to be there against him. He had pushed it into his brother’s body and he had hoped, if only for a moment, that it would be enough.
Joshua’s body, unmarred, had remained still.
It was a strange feeling, the curse.
Clive had spent so long now fighting against it. He knew it and its impact. He had watched countless bearers pass to its ministrations by now and still he didn’t expect the way it would feel in his own body. For all accounts of it, it was painful. It was agonizing as it would petrify every ounce of flesh and turn it into stone that would never move again. He’d heard some suggest that it was only petrifying the skin on some of them and that they were still alive inside the shell of a statue. Others had said that they could feel their insides turning stiff long before it showed on their skin to the world.
For all the heat of the flames he coursed into his brother’s body, Clive had felt it. A ringing pain that seared around the nerves of his hand and into his arm. He could feel the magic and while he could not yet see it, he knew.
Ultima had warned him that the world was going to die. That the blight had spread too far already and that nothing would grow. They would be all surviving out of the deadlands and they would have nothing to continue on. The world they fought so hard for would die. The world that Jill and Gav and Mid and Tarja and everyone was relying on him to save.
He had absorbed the power of a God.
The last God.
He could fix it.
And now he was here.
The sand under his back and the sky clear above his head. The tide rushing around his lower half and while he could dimly feel it, he could see the curse now taking its hold on him. The tips of his fingers turned gray and stiff. He tested the lengths of what he still had in him and when his hand fell to the grit of the shore, he could not feel it.
Clive felt it as it climbed up his arm. As it spread from his palm to his wrist. Wrist to his forearm.
He wondered if Jill could see the sky clearly. If she was watching. If something had happened at the Hideaway and it had taken her attention. He wondered how she would fare when he didn’t come home. How it would be when she had to know he was gone. He was purging magic from the world and watching it fade and give. Part of him wondered if this would dissolve the curse as well. if it would give the bearers who were afflicted with it a chance to survive and have a normal life. It it would repair their skin or they would simply be living with parts of them stone as a reminder to the world that had been before.
He wanted to see it.
The world that he’d fought so hard for. The world that he was dying for.
If it would be good for them. If they would enjoy it. If they would take advantage of the freedom they held within it.
His vision was blurring. His body was exhausted, Clive knew it.
It reminded him in part of his times out in the training yard when he was younger. How it felt to push himself against shields who were so much older and stronger than him. How it was to be taught how to fight when the enemy was larger and stronger than he was. He wondered if they saw him now, dying after bringing down a God. If they knew that it was because of them that he had the strength to do such a feat.
His brothers and sisters. The weight of everyone he had ever suffered and fought beside. Everyone he had ever tried to protect and defend.
They would manage.
He smiled at the thought of it. The peace they would get to have now. The ways they would get to explore it. The lives they would all get to have now. With any luck the world would begin to heal and grow again. it was going to take time but they woudl figure it out. Mid had found ways to purify water in the deadlands, she would be able to figure out how to help the world rebuild itself. Their botanists had learned how to grow food through soil without the crystal’s influence. They had learned in the Hideaway the foundations that would start this new world and rise it to its feet.
They would be alright.
His eyes found the moon again.
Clive imagined Jill beside him.
What it might have been, in another life, if they had gotten the chance to be here together. If they had been afforded the opportunity to lay with one another on the soft sand and gaze up at it beside each other. If they had been allowed their own chance to live the lives they wanted.
“Can you see it too, Jill?…”
Her name on his lips.
The final breaths he would take of this world.
Clive let his eyes close. He let his mind drift. Detached from his body and the weight it held, the pain ringing through it.
He let the world muffle.
Time without end. Time without consequence. Time that meant nothing to no one and nothing at all.
Until he felt, dimly, a hand against his face. A bit of glass against his lips. Shouts that muffled and seemed too far to be as close as he thought they truly were.
“Drink now, Ifrit.”
His head was being lifted.
“Jill!”
“Clive!”
“Clear a path! Someone fetch Tarja, now!”
The words were spinning above his head. They didn’t make sense. None of this made any sense.
“It’s a potion, Clive. It’ll help.”
The liquid splashed against his lips and he felt then, a hand, working at his jaw and opening his mouth for him.
“That’s it. You saved us, let us save you.”
His eyes were too heavy to open.
“His hand.”
Jill.
“It’s stopped at his forearm. It’s stopped.”
“What happened up there?”
“We died.”
Joshua. Gav. Dion.
Clive forced his eyes to open despite the weight pulling them down. He could make out the sky bright and clear above him. The sun high above and the clouds that moved across pale blue. He made out faces looking down at him. A crowd of people there. The sound of the ocean. The feel of sand under his back.
Jill’s eyes filled with tears when he met hers. She reached for him but he lacked the strength to reach for her back.
“You’re alive.”
He didn’t understand how. A small turn of his head to the side revealed Joshua sitting there. His clothes stained in his blood. His chest sealed shut without a scar.
“It’s over, Clive.”
“How you managed to revive us, I do not know.” Clive turned to his other side to see Dion watching him. Blood still showed. The marks on his clothes and his skin still streaked with the red that came from wounds he could no longer see. “But I am eternally in your debt.”
He spotted Gav and Otto standing a bit ways off. A ship behind them. He could imagine Mid at the sails. There was a whole group of people. Cursebreakers, he realized, standing nearby. They looked like they were a search party.
“We weren’t going to just leave you out here. Dead or alive. We were bringing you home.”
He was so tired.
“We’re just glad that you’re alive.”
He didn’t know how. He didn’t understand how that could be. How, after everything, he wasn’t already dead.
“Clive?” He opened his eyes with Jill’s hands on his face. “Say something?”
Every word felt like too much and not enough. He had said her name to be his last word spoken into the air and now he was here. Looking up into the blue of her eyes instead of the shining silver of the moon. He was looking at her with her here beside him on this beach rather than imagining her. She was real. She was here. This was real.
He was alive.
“I love you…”
She laughed. Tearful and so full of hope that it made something soften in his chest.
“I know,” she repeated exactly as she’d done before, “I love you, too.”
He worked his jaw to cooperate with him.
“How did you?…”
“Metia guided me.”
He looked to his brother. Joshua smiled.
“Dion and I weren’t far. He found me. We knew it was you so we found you. We’ve been trying to wake you all night.”
All night. How long had it been? How long since he defeated Ultima? How long since he thought he had died here on this beach?
“Whatever you did,” Tarja’s voice was full of demand as much as it was her concern, “you are never doing it again. Do you understand me?”
He wanted to laugh.
“Your body is weak. You need rest. No swinging your sword around. No quests. Nothing. Just rest.”
He didn’t even have the strength to nod.
“All of you, for that matter, I don’t know how you’re alive.”
“Neither do we.”
He looked to his brother.
“I had to…I had to try.”
Joshua’s grim smile told him he understood. He’d done the same after his fall, after all.
“I know.”
“We need to get them back to the Hideaway. They need to be treated and beds to rest on. I want to check on his arm.”
“The curse—”
“Others with milder cases saw it receding before we left. If..Whatever he did, it might have saved them. It might save him too.”
The curse was leaving. Without magic to feed it, it was freeing them. Some may not be able to be saved but others could. He’d heard it. He knew now.
“Clive, stay awake.”
The world was too bright around him but he could see the crowd that had formed. The teary eyed smiles and the joyful faces. People were celebrating. They had come here looking for them and they had found them alive when all the odds pointed over to their deaths. They had survived the impossible.
They fought a God.
They won.
“All three of you need your rest. And you will listen to me this time.”
Joshua laughed.
“As you wish.”
Even Dion bowed his head to Tarja’s order.
“It will be welcome.”
People were moving then. Helping them both to stand and to make way to the ship. He should be joining them but any attempt to make himself move was met without response from his limbs. He could feel everything but he was too exhausted to garner results. Right up until Gav and Otto came to his sides.
“We’re going to lift you under the arms, that alright?”
“Yes.”
He hadn’t expected for it to hurt. The rushing pain that shot through his body and made him nearly cry out with the force of it. Both of them froze the moment he reacted but Jill was there. Tarja was there and checking on him. He didn’t want them to worry.
“Keep going.”
“Not if we’re hurting you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
Clive let his eyes close.
“Jill, can you help me with his legs?”
“Of course.”
They carried him to the ship. They carried him until they could secure him and Clive heard the joy from the people on board that they were found. The talking and the celebrating. He was awake for Mid to hug him and cling to him. He was awake when they told him thank you one after the other.
He was exhausted but he could count his family and the worry on their faces.
They’d left for Origin expecting that they would die and now they had a chance to a new life. A new world. Something that they’d all been working toward. A world where everyone was equal.
They had fought a God.
They had won.