Lurker (DODO MUST DIE)
Chapters
Chapter 01: Addam & Lora
Chapter 02: Jin & Haze
Chapter 03: Hugo & Aegaeon
Chapter 04: Brighid & Flora
Chapter 05: Mythra & Malos
Chapter 06: Milton & Mikhail
Chapter 07: Amalthus & Minoth
They can't change it. They know they can't.
Deep down, Addam and Lora know they are simply far, far too human for what this new paradigm, full of Paragons and Aegises and honor over family, loyalty over love, will bring.
So they look to each other, siblings in arms, and prioritize those things anyway. There are, oh, dozens of questions they want to ask, learn, know, but the agitation of time makes that session an impossibility.
They're all too pretty, too perfect for war. Overcoming poverty, or pretending it, will buy them the answers they need, in the meantime.
And after that? Well.
They're all going to die, in the end.
The routine is inmitable. The routine is inevitable.
In the morning, they wake. They scout the surrounding area for monsters and palatable, potable sources of food and water, breath and life.
They absorb scenery and scenario.
Jin looks to Haze for optimism, and Haze looks to Jin for pessimism; put another way, one needs freedom, and the other needs guidance.
Then again, they provide these things in the opposite order to Lora: Jin frees her, and Haze sets her on her way.
They work together. They believe they are glad to.
It is their duty. Within this system, it will always be their duty.
Right? Won't they always be so alive?
With appearance and armaments nearing those of a colloquially-dreaded Common Blade, Aegaeon assimilates far too well; he is all in his character and none in his colophon.
Hugo, too, has face none too distinctive from that of his brother but heart completely askew of the trademark Ardanach hardness that Domnhall has helped to cultivate.
Their problems? Never personal ones. Only matters of state. Aegaeon's devotion is unfielded, unfounded, as Hugo fails to express his own woes.
Of course. Driver and Blade are one and the same.
If you were able, when you pulled a Blade like Aegaeon, you'd probably toss him back. Hugo knows better how to appreciate such a catch.
Ladies sit primly. Ladies take care, give and dispense of it, are so proper and so potent.
Indeed, sometimes Brighid feels like the only adult woman in their group, despite Lora's presence and Haze's stumbling after.
It is the folly of men that brought on these unwieldy things, these artifacts of a god who himself is known as masculine.
The feminine soul would never stoop so low. Or would it? Would Flora really have been so much better than Addam, as the convenient home-kept secret replacement, to clean up all of their acts?
Brighid, warrior, is perfect. Flora, teacher, is perfect.
They are lost without any error in their own ways.
The Aegises come with such a commotion - white fire, black light, smoke like no burned meal by campfire could ever generate, with all of that contraband propaganda brouhaha they are here.
They have arrived on the earth. No more than that. Innate, preternatural knowledge though they may have, there is yet a show to put on.
So they watch, but they don't wait. So they osmose humor and make it far brighter and more brutish (don't say dark, because then we'd have to say light) than it, well, should be.
The Aegises should not be. The Aegises were not meant to be. But they're here now. And it's not their problem.
Milton's body makes it onto the evacuation ship. There's no way in hell or heaven or whatever the heck Alrest is that Mikhail would have allowed it to get left behind - would have allowed himself to leave it, because of course no one else cared.
Did it matter? Milton was just one boy. Was, is, just one lost soul, among dozens, hundreds of others.
On Gormott, he tugs at Jin's arm and gestures to the sloping bay by the port. Morytha can be burial.
He can't carry around a dead body, the fragmented, dormant remnants of someone else's soul, forever.
He's already dragging enough of that dead weight on his own.
"What are you?" asks Amalthus, boredly. It's the kind of dull, insidious conversation he can make all too easily by way of cadence, pinning Minoth as he is between the sanctum and Zettar's about-facing back.
Minoth gulps, grits his teeth. He knows what Amalthus is. Amalthus is a Quaestor, a supposed "holy" man. He is the man who made Minoth what he is, all those years ago. Before.
Addam is the man who made Minoth who he is. Even far away, mourning, his presence is felt, and that's all the difference Minoth needs.
"I don't know," he answers at last. "But I'm sure as hell never gonna let you tell me."