Dawn Is Just A Heartbeat Away Chapter Seven

The Rivenroad.

A group of sky-borne, magically-airborne islands in the Eastern Highlands of Coerthas, near the border to Mor Dhona. Not a particularly popular group, it must be said, too small and lacking in resources to be worthy of any sort of presence from the Eorzean Alliance, unlike the far larger and more lucrative Sea of Clouds.

Perhaps that was what had made it such a lucrative location for Nael van Darnus to emplace the transmitters required to pull Dalamud from the sky. It wasn’t as if anyone else was here, after all, and finding one group of floating islands amongst dozens, or even hundreds, was no mean feat.

Unfortunately for the Legate of the VIIth Imperial Legion, Aeliana had rather more information to work with than any Eorzean could possibly hope for. Information that made it a rather simple task to hunt him down with what few members of the Grand Companies of the Alliance that the three Heads of State had been willing to let follow a Garlean on a ‘hair-brained search of an obscure hole-in-the-wall without any sort of confirmation for her intelligence’.

Maybe if they had sent her with more people, they wouldn’t have all died during the hectic, desperate battle that ensued when less than a dozen grunts and a single elite tried to take on a Legate of the Empire.

Still, the Alliance members had done their part and sold their lives dearly, and as the last of them had slipped off of the gun-halberd the genocidal general wielded, Aeliana had been able to land a telling blow, a fatal blow, that cleaved the Legate’s backplate and severed the spine.

It was a testament to how strong, how enduring, that van Darnus was that the blow did not kill him immediately. Indeed, despite the lack of function in his legs, he was still able to drag himself over to some rubble and brace himself against it before removing his helm.

It was then, to her profound shock, that Aeliana had learned he was not a he at all. With her death approaching rapidly, the woman who had called herself Eula van Darnus, surviving twin of the long, long dead, had unburdened herself.

The memory was a powerful one…

                “Why…” Aeliana coughed, spitting out some of the blood that had pooled in her mouth, the crimson saliva splattering heavily on the stone. “Why go this far, why plan to kill so many?! Hundreds of thousands, millions! By the Star, your own legion would have been killed! Your soldiers, your subordinates! You would have killed your own people! For what?!”

                “I…I don’t know.” Eula responded with a hoarse, bitter chuckle, displaying none of the fervor or psychosis that she had over the course of their battle. It was unnerving, how calm and quiet she now was. “All I can remember, all I could care about, was mourning my brother. Hating my father. And wanting, more than anything else, to shatter Dalamud. But now…all I feel is fear.”

Her voice was quiet, now, her strength seeping from her with every slow, pulsing flow of blood leaving her veins, but in the strange, unnaturally silent stillness of the world Aeliana could still hear her clearly.

                “Will my brother hate me, for all the things I have done in his name, all the things I have done using his name? Will his fiancé, his beloved Bradamante, who ended her own life on his spear when he was lost, the same spear I named for her and wielded to spill the blood of hundreds? What of my father? Will I find, in the moment of my death, that my murder of him, my kinslaying, was unjustified? Will I find that the fault did not lay with him?”

What could Aeliana say to any of that? What words could she offer to bring closure or comfort to the woman she had killed, and had likely killed her, by the feel of her injuries?

Nothing, really, save something that would bring comfort to her own soul.

Singing. Singing a song of her childhood, a song that had been written by the Emperor’s own mother, legends said, to bring comfort to the children of Garlemald in the cold, dark winter nights after the exile.

                “Fear not this night, you will not go astray.

                Though shadows fall, still the stars find their way…”

Soft and sweet she sang, the familiar words rising and falling in a cadence as familiar to her as the rhythm of her own heartbeat. She sang as her strength failed, leaving her laying half-curled on her side. She sang as Eula’s breaths stilled and faded into silence. She sang as the other woman’s body turned to crimson dust, a mist that flowed and swirled and drifted skyward. Drawn inexorably towards the looming, blood-red form of the lesser moon.

She sang to the man she had always thought of as a father, as The Black Wolf tried to speak to her over a linkshell that she had kept out of emotional attachment and sentimentality.

She sang to the memories of her Naago, the woman that had finally showed her what love truly was.

She sang to herself, softly and increasingly short of breath, as the darkness encroached on her vision. As she faded away into what she was sure was death, all she felt was relief and satisfaction for a job well done. She had stopped van Darnus. Eorzea and its people were safe…

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“Pay attention on the present!” the harsh chastisement from the shadowed depths of her mind jerked her back to reality, and Aeliana swore colorfully as she darted to the side in an effort to avoid a trio of gunshots. Heat bloomed at the edge of her perception and she reacted with the smooth instinct of experience, twisting the Aether around herself to form a Hellsgate and teleporting nearly twenty yalms away. The ground shuddered, the air rent by the sound of an explosion, as a fireball detonated in the precise spot she had been standing, gouging the earth and leaving a sizeable hole.“You will get the both of us killed if you continue loosing focus! Focus on the enemies before us!”

Aeliana grimaced silently at the words of her Voidsent partner, a pulse of gratitude and apology flowing down the link she shared with the entity for rescuing her from the grips of her memories. Memories of her near-death not thirty-six hours before, a near-death that had proven, ultimately, fruitless. Though she had killed Eula van Darnus and destroyed the Transmitters calling Dalamud from the sky, it had been too late. The gravity of the star had already gripped the lesser moon tightly, and it’s fall had already become inevitable. Now, she fought alongside the Eorzean Alliance in a desperate attempt to drive back the VIIth Legion long enough for some manner of solution to be found…if it was even possible to do so.

Having wordlessly aknowledged the quite-reasonable rebuke, Aeliana flourished her scythe and regarded the small unit that had attacked her. Most of them were conscripts, and she felt a moment of grief and guilt for their imminent deaths, before charging forward to attack. Two bestarii rushed to meet her, lances thrusting and swirling in a simple, but no less effective pattern of attacks that could (and had) spelled death to countless men and women who had tried to contend with Garlemald’s might.

Unfortunately for the two men, they were contending with someone who was better trained, better equipped, and intimately familiar with those very same techniques. Blocking a diagonal strike towards her head, Aeliana sidestepped a thrust and kicked the weapon’s wielder in the chest, sending him reeling back with a hoarse, breathless shout. A flourish of her scythe knocked the first man’s lance haft aside, and she spun with the motion, cutting off his left leg. He fell, screaming as he clenched the stump, before being silenced forever as she drove the spiked pommel of her own weapon through his heart. A flick of her eyes, a pulse of aether, and an outstretched hand later sent the second bestarius after his comrade, chest smoking and cratered by the trio of aetheric blasts she cast at him.

                “Francois! No! You fucking traitor!” the unit’s hoplomachus cried out in anguish as she charged in, sword swinging wildly, grief and hate clouding her mind, what training she had been given gone in an instant of pain. A quick block with her haft and a some deft limbwork had the other woman stumbling past her, off balance, and backhand swing removed her head.

Returning to her ready stance as the corpse collapsed to the ground behind her, scythe low and shoulders back, the defector considered her surviving opponents. A signifier, sagitarius, secutor, and a centurion. Nothing that she couldn’t handle, but they would be able to cause her some issues if they worked together properly. Half the reason the Imperial Legions were so deadly was the combined arms approach that they took on the battlefield. Rather than vaguely unified groups of independent experts attacking in the same direction, as so often happened with the Grand Companies, legionnaires worked in concert. Melee infantry advancing under the supporting fire of archers and mages, not to mention the incredible power of the magitek armors under their command.

                “I ask you to retreat. What the Empire is trying to do here is wrong, and all of you know it. It is a betrayal of our purpose, our creed and duty to the inhabitants of this star.” She implored, deciding to try the diplomatic route, not that she expected it to work in the slightest. She was, after all, quite the traitor as far as they were concerned, and she had just killed several friends of theirs. Neither fact would exactly inspire them to doing as she asked, especially if they thought a coordinated attack could take her out. “Moreover, you have to know that you can’t beat me in direct combat. You are valiant, no doubt, and skilled enough to have lived this long on such a chaotic battlefield, but that will not be enough.”

                “What would a traitor to her people know about our cause, our purpose?” the centurion hissed in outrage as the conscripts shifted uncomfortably, though they maintained their ready stances even as they glanced at one another.

“I have embraced our philosophy, shown loyalty to our homeland, on a level you cannot even imagine.” Aeliana hissed back, eyes flashing in cold anger. Quite literally, as it happened, a shimmering pink sheen briefly consuming her irises.

Needles. Darkness. Scalpels and Screams. Unnatural. Evolution. Advancement.

                “Let’s see what secrets I can wring from your flesh.”

                “We are meant to free the people of this star from their primals, from the petty conflicts and worthless prejudices that choke the life from this world. We are meant to guide them to a future free of servitude to false gods, false gods that if left unchecked will be the end of all life.” She continued, forcing the memories back into the abyssal depths of her mind where they belonged. “We can’t do any of that if we destroy an entire continent. It is madness, and I will not allow it to happen if I can do anything to prevent. Now, I will ask you one more time: surrender or retreat.”

They responded by attacking together, as she had expected them too. The centurion was never going to accept her words, and the conscripts wouldn’t have dared heed her with their officer still alive and the rest of their legion around them for hundreds of yalms. Two minutes of whirling metal and the sickening sound of flesh and bone being rent later, Aeliana stood alone surrounded by corpses and the bitter iron scent of the blood that soaked the earth. More Garlean blood to soak her soul, more men and women she would have once called comrades dead at her hands in pursuit of her idealistic, and likely futile, treason.

Shaking her head, she cast her gaze about for the next group of Eorzeans that might need her help. They seemed to be faring…tolerably, thanks to the edge that their magic and their chocobo cavalry provided them, but she very much doubted things would be going quite so smoothly if the VIIth Legion was at full strength and had airships supporting it.

Aeliana's eyes narrowed as she spotted a group of Gridanian archers pinned down by heavy magitek fire, their infantry support either dead or desperately trying to fend of a pair of enemy platoons. With a thought, she channeled aether into her legs and leapt, soaring through the air in a graceful arc. She landed amidst the beleaguered Eorzeans, her scythe -trailing aether life starlight in it’s wake- swiping through the air to form a ragged barrier.

"Make ready!" she called to the startled archers, grimacing slightly at the minor pulse of sensation that washed over her as the barrier buckled under the sub-cannon barrage that hammered into it a heartbeat later. "I'll draw the armor’s fire and deal with the pilot! Support your infantry!"

Without waiting for a response, Aeliana charged towards the magitek armor, her form blurring with preternatural speed. The pilot, caught off guard by her sudden appearance, swiveled the main body of the weapon in her direction. A deafening boom echoed across the battlefield as the weapon discharged, but Aeliana was no longer there, having vanished in another swirl of aether to reappear crouched atop the cannon’s cowling. The pilot had half a heartbeat to realize that she was there before most of his upper half went tumbling away to splatter on the ground at the unit’s feet. Deftly shoving what was left of him after it, Aeliana slipped into the blood-stained cockpit and retargeted the machine’s weapons onto the next nearest unit. Blindsided and attacked from its more weakly-armored flank, the other armor promptly exploded in a dazzling, roaring inferno of cereuleum that -between the flames and the shrapnel- likely killed another two dozen legionnaires.

“Good work! Let’s put it to use!” an Immortal Flame, one bearing the rank of Captain she thought, shouted, jogging up to her and pointing at a cluster of Garlean field artillery pieces that were busy hammering the far-less numerous, but admittedly far heavier, Lominsan guns. “That seems as good a place as any to start.”

Aeliana eyed it for a long moment, eyes flicking back and forth as she examined the cluster’s defenders. Three magitek armors, perhaps a hundred troops, and of course the artillery themselves.

“We can do it, but I don’t know that we can do it alone. Three to one isn’t the best odds for an armor, and I’m not exactly a world-renowned pilot. Not to mention all those troops, and if they turn those guns on us before we can close in, we’re fucked.” she returned bluntly, getting a grunt and a frown before he lifted his hand to his linkpearl and started muttering quickly. After a few moments, he grunted again and looked up at her.

“Another unit will attack from the far side. Our priority is to destroy those guns, regardless of cost.” he informed her, voice tight, and Aeliana could only nod in understanding at the semi-spoken words. It didn’t matter if any of them made it out alive, as long as those guns were permanently silenced. The arithmetic of war, especially when facing a force far superior in numbers and armament.

 "Understood. I'll draw their fire and create as much chaos as I can. Have your men focus on taking out those guns." she said aloud, tightening her hands on the armor’s controls and checking the read-outs. The unit was down to half fuel and armament, which would either be enough for this or it wouldn’t, and there was no point at all about worrying over things. Shaking her head, she shot another glance at the captain and gave him a decisive nod before urging her captured mount forward. It lurched into motion, moving slowly at first but accelerating steadily, and within a half-minute it was thundering along, it’s massive stride devouring the distance separating her and the target with almost frightening speed.

The enemy spotted her approach quickly, and though it took them longer to realize that she wasn’t an ally of theirs, realizing that the Alliance troops in her wake weren’t pursuing her, but following her. Shouts of alarm rang out, and the three defending magitek armors began to turn to face her, their proximity horns whooping warningly. Aeliana gritted her teeth and opened fire with her armor's main cannon, the thunderous boom drowning out all other sound as the massive shell streaked towards its target. It didn’t hit, unsurprisingly given that she was not only moving but was doing so at high speed, but more than a few charred infantrymen went soaring through the air none-the-less. The three opposing armor’s took aim, their ‘mouths’ dropping open and their gun-barrels beginning to glow, but before they could fire, tendrils of lightning came arcing in from their far side and went crawling across two of the armors.

“Yes!” Aeliana shouted, grinning wildly in relief as the two struck units -and a full half of the infantry- turned away to react to the sudden approaching threat to their rear, as the other Alliance unit suddenly appeared out of the scrum to launch their own assault. Startled by the sudden flanking maneuver, the third armor -the only one still engaging her- missed it’s shot, and she slammed the brakes on. Her mount swayed dangerously, not built or balanced for such sudden deceleration, but kept it’s feet, and she took careful aim even as her enemy did the same, both of their units hurriedly charging their heavy gun.

Her’s finished first, the blast taking the enemy unit directly to the barrel, and the resulting explosion took out three of the twelve artillery pieces.

“That’s the way! Come on, lads! At them! Cold steel! For Ul’dah! For Eorzea!” the Flames captain roared from beside her, having finally caught up, hefting his greatsword skyward and charging into the reorganizing legionnaires.

All turned to chaos after that, Aeliana wielding the armor to the fullest that she could to support her new allies against her old, blood and fire and death in every direction as the world faded into a blur of timeless violence.

 The battle raged on, a maelstrom of steel and magic swirling around Aeliana as she fought to destroy the Garlean artillery. Her stolen magitek armor groaned and shuddered under the strain, systems failing one by one as enemy fire pounded its weakening frame. She gritted her teeth, forcing the machine forward even as warning klaxons blared in the cockpit.

"Just a little more," she muttered, lining up a shot on one of the remaining guns. The main cannon boomed, and another artillery piece erupted in flames.

Suddenly, a massive impact rocked her armor, nearly throwing her from the cockpit. Alarms screamed as multiple systems went critical. Cursing, Aeliana realized she had no choice but to abandon the dying machine. She grabbed her scythe and leapt clear just as the armor exploded behind her, the shockwave picking her up and carrying her, turning her landing into an ungainly tumble that had her snarling in pain. Kneeling amongst the dirt and blood and bodies, she poured aether into her injuries as she searched for her attack, and her breath caught in her throat.

Tall and broad enough to match even Rhitahtyn, clad in fine armor and wielding a pair of elegant longswords. Longswords of an exquisite, and distinctly non-Garlean, design. Surrounded by corpses. Uncaring of the battle around them. Body language that spoke of nothing less than glee and a hunger for violence.

“Zenos!” she snarled, more to herself than anyone else given the sheer, deafening cacophony of war made it impossible for her voice to carry more than a few feet unless she screamed and shouted. Neither of which she was in any condition to do. Yet despite that noise, despite that distance between them, she could see the moment Zenos realized that she recognized him…and she could see just how much he enjoyed that fact.

“Twelve forfend, what was that? Who is that?!” the Flames captain breathed as he and his surviving subordinates crowded around her, their sole surviving healer -a girl that looked barely enough to drink, never mind fight in a war- kneeling beside Aeliana to examine her wounds. “He destroyed your magitek armor like it was nothing, from range!”

“Zenos yae Galvus. Varis yae Galvus’ son.” she ground out, shaking her head slightly in both emotional upheaval and an attempt to clear the ringing from her ears. “The Emperor’s great-grandson, and an utter monster. You need to fall back. He’s here for me, and none of you are a match for him.”

“You? What? Why?” the man squawked, eyes widening as it began to sank in just who the man across the field from them was. “What the fuck does he want with you?”

“He and I have a history.” she ‘explained’ shortly, gently pushing the healer away and shakily rising to her feet. “You should run, get your people out of here. He won’t hesitate to slaughter all of you to get to me. Regroup with your…no!”

The denial flew from her throat as she saw the surviving members of their allied unit, the tattered remnants of the force that had assaulted the artillery position with them, emerge from the smog of war to throw themselves at the prince of the Empire. It was brave, it was heroic, it was beautiful…and it was futile. None of them had a chance of beating an Imperial elite, and certainly not a man like Zenos, a threat equal to -or, perhaps, greater than- any Imperial Legatus.

Aeliana watched in horror as Zenos cut through the allied soldiers like a scythe through wheat. His movements were fluid, graceful, and utterly lethal. Swords, axes, and spears shattered against his armor as he danced through their ranks, his own blade flashing in deadly arcs. Men and women fell in droves, their screams cut short as Zenos effortlessly carved them apart.

"No..." Aeliana whispered, gripping her scythe tightly. She knew she had to act, had to try to stop this slaughter, even if it meant facing Zenos herself. Something she had spent a great deal of time, and effort, to do since that night in the Imperial Palace.

"Stay back!" she shouted to the remaining Flames as she surged forward, channeling aether into her legs to propel herself across the battlefield, pushing aside the pain and burying it beneath determination and hate.

Zenos turned to face her, his masked visage betraying no emotion. But she could sense his excitement, his eagerness for the coming clash. He was dripping with bloodlust, as much as his sword was dripping with actual blood.

“Finally. I have spent the whole of this battle search you out, Quirinus. I knew you would be here, and how could you not? A hero such as yourself could not resist stepping onto the battlefield to safeguard the innocent and the helpless from oblivion." he drawled, sounding as pleased as his near-constant monotone could sound, spreading his arms wide to gesture to the horrors around them. “Is it not beautiful? Thousands, tens of thousands, desperately scrabbling amongst dirt and blood and fire for their very lives! Animals, one and all, raging against their fates! Living, truly living, in the moments before their deaths! Beasts, meagre as they are, embrace violence for the most base purposes. To eat, to breed, to live. Only we, men one and all, have the strength to live life as it is meant to be lived: by fighting for the sake of fighting itself!”

“You’re a monster, Zenos!” Aeliana snarled in response, void-tainted aether blooming around her as she settled into her stance. “I may not serve our homeland any longer, but if there is one last service I can perform for our people, it’s making sure that you don’t leave this battlefield alive!”

“Haha! Such righteousness! Such fury! This, not the doll doting on The Wolf and the old man, this is what I wanted to face! This is the face I wanted to draw from you. The beast that hungers for blood so deeply as me.” he chortled, lowering his arms abruptly to meet her eyes through the lenses of his helm as his tone abruptly turned level. “That’s why I ensured you found out about Darnus’ project.”

“What…?” Aeliana had enough time to hear the words, eyes widening in shock and confusion, and he exploded into motion. With inhuman speed, he closed the distance between them, his massive form seeming to blur as he moved, and by some instinct she lifted the shaft of her scythe diagonally across her torso. It was the only thing that saved her life, stopping his slashing blow from bisecting her at the waist. The impact was still a jarring one, shaking her down to her bones and driving her back several feet with aching arms.

“Oh yes. I knew that you wouldn’t be able to tolerate something like this, hero that you are. You would be forced to treason, removing yourself from the protection of your masters, devoid of safety. Huntable. It wasn’t hard to make sure you heard what you needed to.” he continued, darting forward again to land another punishing strike that was likewise barely deflected.

Aeliana's mind reeled at Zenos' revelation, but she forced herself to focus on the immediate threat. She pivoted, using the momentum from his blow to spin and bring her scythe around in a vicious arc. Zenos easily sidestepped the attack, his sword flashing out to nick her arm.

"You manipulated me?" Aeliana snarled, ignoring the sting of the wound to focus on what was, to her, a far more important matter. "All of this death and destruction, just to lure me out? Just to get me to fight you?"

Zenos laughed, the sound chilling in its lack of emotion. "Oh come now, don't be so self-important. This glorious carnage would have happened regardless. I merely ensured you would be here to partake in it with me, in the fashion I desired of you."

 Aeliana's eyes narrowed, rage boiling in her veins. With a roar, she charged at Zenos, her scythe a whirlwind of steel. The prince met her assault with calm precision, parrying and countering her frenzied attacks. Their weapons clashed again and again, sending sparks flying with each impact.

"Yes, that's it!" Zenos crowed, his voice thick with excitement. "Show me your fury, your passion! This is what I've been waiting for! A forbidden fruit, ripe with rage!"

But even as Aeliana fought with all her might, she could feel herself tiring. Zenos was inhumanly strong, each blow threatening to shatter her guard. She knew she couldn't keep this up forever, especially after hours of fighting and more than a few injuries, not against a rested and uninjured enemy of his ability. If something did change, soon and significantly, she would be overwhelmed and killed in short order.

The thought had barely left her mind when a flicker of her danger sense had her flinching slightly, just in time for a quartet of well-aimed arrows to flit past her from behind. Two of them glanced off of his armor, the third missed wide, and the fourth was cut out of the air long before it could strike him, but it forced him to back off a handful of steps as both combatants looked for the source of the interruption. It was the survivors of the unit she had fought with, the unit she had told to flee. The unit that was trying to save her life.

“Attack! For the Alliance!” the Flames captain roared as he lead the charge, lowering his left shoulder and letting the tower shield strapped to it lead the way like a battering ram. His subordinates followed him, full of courage and determination, faces set with grim acceptance of death and the desire to make their deaths have meaning. To lay down their lives in pursuit of a worthy cause. It was incredible, but it was also pointless. They stood no greater a chance than their allies had earlier, and they knew it. Knew it, but were doing their duty nonetheless.
She could do no different, and so she charged as well, heart full of grief and gratitude alike.

 Aeliana charged forward alongside the Flames, her scythe raised high. She knew their chances were slim, but the bravery of these soldiers had reignited her determination. If they were willing to lay down their lives, she would fight with every ounce of strength she had left.

Zenos met their assault with what could only be called disdain, his sword sweeping in wide arcs. The first two Flames fell instantly, cleaved nearly in half by the prince's inhuman strength. But their sacrifice bought precious seconds for the others to close in.

The captain slammed into Zenos with his shield, the impact actually staggering the armored giant for a moment. Aeliana seized the opening, her scythe whistling through the air towards Zenos' neck. But he recovered with preternatural speed, ducking under her strike and lashing out with a vicious kick that sent her stumbling away. Time that the man-skinned-monster used to kill another another Eorzean, but she was on him again swiftly, preventing a follow-up.

They raged back and forth on the blood-soaked ground, injuring and being injured, killing and being killed. Victory and defeat in increments, life and death in fractions of moments, reality a blur, until they were drawn from the trance of battle by a colossal cracking sound. Every weapons paused, every blow and block faltered as every eye turned to the great looming crimson orb above them. An orb, they could now see, that was fissured and rent through, crystal-blue line pouring from within. Then the world quaked, as a great black blade dropped from Dalamud to strike the earth like the blade of a wrathful god, sending the whole of Cartenau to it’s knees, and all could do nothing but watch in horror, in dread and confusion and helpless, instinctive rejection of reality, as the top of Dalamud burst like an eggshell. And from that eggshell sprouted two vast draconic wings.

With a roar that could be heard the width and breadth of the continent, the entity she would later learn was the Elder Primal Bahamut, Dreadwyrm and Wyrm of Dawning, announced his awakening. And in that awakening, Dalamud was shattered, a shattering that turned all to fire and ash, sending all of Carteneau -those that still lived, at any rate- to flight. Weapons were abandoned, flags forsaken, and any notions of nationality or loyalty were thrown to the winds as the soldiers of the Eorzean Alliance and the Garlean Empire were united in one searing moment in their desperate attempt to do but a single thing: live.

Yet even as their comrades, their countrymen-by-birth and countrymen-by-choice alike fled in any and every direction, Zenos and Aeliana only stood and watched the dragon vent his rage upon Eorzea. Watched as bolts of fiery magic rained down across the landscape, explosions blooming and blossoming like deadly flowers, the world trembling in their wake. Watched, and realized that another Calamity was upon them.

And in that moment, both felt. One, despair. The other, excitement. One, resolve. The other, hunger. One was consumed by a serenity never before felt. The other, for the first time in his life, felt truly alive. Together, they stepped forward.

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What felt like days later, but could only have been tens of minutes at most, what was left of Aeliana rem Quirinus lay in a crater, as shattered as the earth around her. Her limbs mangled, her organs ruptured, her scythe in pieces and every ounce of aether she could channel -far more than she had ever consumed and wielded before, likely in the whole of her life combined- spent. All of it fruitless, all of it accomplishing nothing more than causing the titanic beast to have to spend some fraction of it’s attention to dealing with what amounted to a particularly persistent gnat buzzing around it.

“Haa…haaa…to think such a mighty beast was hidden within Dalamud for all this time.” Zenos rasped from where he lay a few feet away, his condition worse than her own, though his swords at least remained unbroken. “Glorious…such magnificent devastation. That I should bear witness to such a thing…”

“Oh, by the Star, shut up already. I do not want the last thing I hear to be your insane rambling.” Aeliana growled, not remotely interested in hearing a dying man wax eloquent about the beauties inherent to death and destruction on such a massive scale.

 Zenos chuckled weakly, a wet, gurgling sound. "Still defiant to the end. How... disappointing. I had hoped our final moments would be more... profound."

Aeliana turned her head with great effort, fixing Zenos with a glare. "There's nothing profound about senseless destruction. You're just a madman who never learned the value of life."

"And you... never learned to truly live." Zenos retorted, his voice growing fainter. "To embrace the thrill of battle, the ecstasy of violence..."

"I've lived more fully than you ever will," Aeliana spat. "I've known love, friendship, purpose. You've known nothing but your own twisted desires."

Silence fell between them, broken only by the distant sounds of destruction and their own labored breathing. Aeliana felt her consciousness slipping, darkness creeping in on her as she looked up at the fire falling from the sky, and she whimpered as a great lance of pain throbbed through her head. It pulsed through her body, thrumming and burning in time with her heartbeat, and she felt tears gather in her eyes. Was it too much to hope, that she could at least die in peace, feeling little and just…slipping away into…

Hear.

Her breath caught in her chest for a reason that had nothing to do with her injuries as a woman’s voice filled her mind, the word a whisper that was somehow echoing, deafening, all-encompassing. It filled her, resonated in her heart, and for a moment the world around her changed. No longer was she lying on the bloody fields of Cartenaeu, but on the streets of a city, a vast city with towering buildings that burned and crumbled as fire rained from a cloudy, smoky sky.

Feel.

The gem of her necklace burned with a searing heat, hot enough to draw her attention as it blazed like an ember in the heart of a fire, the symbol at it’s center shining bright like the sun, and she felt energy, vitality, pouring into her body from…somewhere. She felt, inexplicably, more whole than she had ever felt, which was strange, given that she had never felt broken. How can you feel more complete without first having realized that you were missing something in the first place?

Think.

She rose to her feet, something that mere moments ago would have been impossible, as if she were in a trance. Spotting Zenos’ swords, she reached out to them with every intent of taking them up to continue the fight, and with a thought that never came to mind, they leapt into her hands and sang. A clear, high note, a crystalline song the filled the air and filled her heart, and as she looked up at the monster that wanted to ruin everything and everyone she had ever known and loved, and everything and everyone beyond that, she felt nothing but determination.

I am entrusting this, the mark of my most beloved friend, to you. Perhaps, with you, some fractured portion of her shall wander the world once more, banishing its evils and bringing Light to it's people.

She wrapped a hand around her crystal, a hero’s crystal, and remembered the charge that she had been given. A vow she had made, a sacred oath. That she would, in all things, honor the name and the deeds of the woman who had once worn it. To live up to her name, to live up to her legend. To carry on her ideals, no matter what the cost might be.

Aether bloomed, white-blue light filling the sky, twisted nails surrounding the beast, which roared and thrashed in it’s rage, and Aeliana took to the sky with shadow-formed wings, swords held high as she rose to fight once more. And so the battle raged once more, and so the sealing failed, and so she once more was cast down to the earth. And as she raged against her failure, raged against the loss and the futility of her fight, the world seemed to slow around her.

Herein I commit the chronicle of the Traveler. Shepherd to the stars in the dark. Though the world be sundered and our souls sent adrift, where you walk, my dearest friend, fate shall surely follow. For yours is the Fourteenth seat - the seat of Azem.

And so the world faded. Not into darkness, but into Light.