nothing to do but sigh
Everywhere he looks, bodies are holding bodies.
Mikhail has Milton. Addam has Hugo. Special Inquisitor Greathelm, or whatever his station may be, has Brighid and Aegaeon. Such unrobust bodies as they are, now.
The names of the scattered townsfolk that made it onto the escape vessel escape him now. It seems that every person he actually knew, every character he made a connection with, was one who elected to shelter underground, and now, to all horror, undersea. Under clouds. Under and beyond hope.
Of course the pragmatic, the overprepared, have nothing left to show for it. Of course, all best-laid plans...
He doesn't see much crying, however. Torna has done all the screaming and rending anyone will need to hear for a very long time.
Jin has Lora...that's one whole mind operational, even if each will suffer distraction on the part of the other. They have been built, and built each other, for ongoing piecemeal struggle, not acute sentient tragedy.
Haze must be with Flora, while Pyra sunders alone.
And Minoth, who finds himself as ever holding nothing and no one, trips into his own state of shell-shock when he goes to Flora, and Haze is not there.
"She's not with you?"
"Who's not?"
"Haze, she's not- she must have--"
Flora winces, but it's not purely on the part of emotional frustration.
"She must be down on the Titan, still. Maybe there'll be another ship...?"
Head shaking, Minoth rejects this feeble hope. "No more ships. Everyone who could pilot one is either up here or in the inn shelter."
"Then..." Flora's eyes squeeze shut again. "...she'll be lost."
So much of heaving, doubled-over, the most motion to be spied in this galley hall of foregone corpses. Maybe they're all muttering to themselves. Maybe they're hearing the screams in stereo, rank and file for systematic flesh separation.
Malos did not truly kill the people, did not even tempt to torture them. He only slew the Titan. It was Mythra who saw this fallout caused.
"We have to go back."
Flora's eyes sharpen, seize up, steady. "We can't go back!"
Of course, this. "Flora, it's Haze!"
She had already been plucked sharp to attention at the mere thought of returning to that forsaken place (which she had once loved so, so, oh--), but the implication that she should need such reminders is what really sets Flora's passion for order into play.
"Yes, I know, it's Haze, but she's as good as dead, just like all the rest of them. Were you thinking of going back for the people of Auresco?!"
And she's snapping everything through her teeth just to get the words out ahead of the choking breath that follows fast behind.
"No, I wasn't. And neither was Amalthus."
"Amalthus-? I don't-- Minoth, she's DEAD!"
"She is NOT dead."
"Oh, I hate to put it this way, but it's like I said, she's as good as!" snaps Flora. "Her Core could be cracked, she could be irradiated from the Core of the Titan, any number of things. We are none of us beyond the scope of this. We are none of us in a position to bargain."
Minoth is just as torn to seethe at Flora as she is to censure him, but it borrows none from his conviction.
"The Haze we knew may be gone, but the Blade remains."
Somewhat petulantly, he himself is ignoring the realities of fatal damage to temporarily independent Blades. Blades unlike him. Pure. Rare. Powerful.
"Amalthus was a salvager. He never stopped fishing. He is still hungry, and he WILL be back for her."
"But you can't go back," repeats Flora, brittle. "You can't-- There's nothing there."
Torna is not there. It is gone. We cannot save it. We cannot even so much as mourn it.
There's nothing down there, just as there never has been anything beneath the clouds. Right? What graveyard could possibly be worth the raiding?
Don't we all, with such immediacy, know this so surely to be true?
"Maybe so. But there's nothing up here either."