but i think again
Mythra wonders, is it enough to be beautiful? Is power a secondary nature to the primary force of astonishment?
Because she's more powerful than Brighid is, clearly. Brighid can burn through a building of the finest Tornan engineering and architecture from the bottom up, torching fear into the hearts of every occupant as she does it with her eyes closed, and clear every other Blade in Mor Ardain - in the world, really. not counting Jin.
Jin could slice one clean bisection of the structure's foundations without anyone ever knowing he was there. And Malos...well, Malos. But this isn't about him.
Imagine that same hypothetical building, a thousand stories tall and braced from its bases: Mythra can raze it from the top down, or implode it from the inside out. Just with a thought. A thousand scintillating sclera of shrapnel, cascading at will. Eyes open, mask off. It's easy to her. First nature.
And is that power beautiful?
Not to Brighid, apparently.
(Brighid, the glistening. Brighid, the fine.)
To Brighid, the whole of the world is a dog to be whipped and castigated, if it fail to please her. Her framework is clear, rigid; the path to success and adoration, for a universally applicable Jewel, has always been cut with perfect facets.
Mythra shouldn't want to be better than - even good enough for - Brighid. It shouldn't matter to her in the slightest, because she can do so much with the slightest thought and her reputation isn't exactly preceding her with any grand procession. Not like the Jewel's.
But if that's the game Brighid plays, then Mythra has to play it too. Say, tit for tat, and tit for tit.
(Haze and Lora collaborate on tatting. Beauty with no power - but intricate.)
Maybe if she wasn't so clumsy. Maybe if she murmured. Maybe if her dress swept the floor instead of her ass.
It's not that Mythra minds these things about herself, in isolation. But then there's Brighid. So Mythra thinks.
She can't apply too much effort. Can't go all out. That would be coarse, rash, uncouth.
But, conversely, she can't apply too little. Can't stop paying attention. That would be brazen, insolent, vulgar.
And Mythra doesn't mind, necessarily, being those things. Being a little...loud. Being unboxable. Being chaotic-divine.
Mythra would like herself, probably. Like, for real. More than she already does. If she didn't have...well, this. This straight-from-spawn discomfortable grappling with how everybody else seems to know how to act. What to praise, what to diss. When it's acceptable to shade someone. When you're expected to compliment or thank or apologize.
It's just that she's not sure Brighid herself is following the rules. Because the rules are that you don't have to. That people like Brighid don't have to.
Maybe that's what beauty buys you. That kind of power.
If she can't be better than Brighid, straight out, she can at least be more.
Oh, maximalism, my four-eyed friend.
When Brighid burns something, it's cinders. Gone, gone, gone. When Mythra burns something, it's a four-alarm fire. Smoke upon smoke upon smoke, without a single mirror.
Brighid's flirtations, if you can call them that, are minxy, subtle. Mythra's in your face about it.
If she went all out on me, even I wouldn't be able to hold back. And then...we'd burn this place to the ground.
But Brighid doesn't go all out - doesn't appear to, that is. Her ire at being restricted by Haze shows that much clearly.
She has more. She garners awe, for it.
It makes Mythra want to hold back as much as it makes Mythra want to evaporate her beyond a trace of competition.
If she can't be better than Brighid, then maybe she can be less.
Someday, much later, Mythra's brought about to the flaming face of Mor Ardain once again. And where before she had met Brighid in contention, hot and testy tension, now she feels...well, not nothing, exactly? But less. Much, much less.
Because Mythra herself, brittle from traumas large and small, is so much less. Not internally, no, but in her actions. It's much harder to get her to burst. She still does, though. She wouldn't exactly be Mythra if she didn't.
It honestly shocks her that she wound up confusing another's bed for her own again, because...everything else is chill, right? Even when she blew up at Rex, she did it from a place of power. A place of mystique. A place of...beauty.
Makes it doubly embarrassing, is what. But Mythra has to admit that she needs more time - to learn, to observe, to adjust. And then maybe, maybe then, she can narrow her eyes.
Mythra'll be swayed to believe in a hidden bloodthirstiness of Mòrag's much faster than the same of Hugo. What's worse, a monarch or a cop? But Hugo, by her estimation, had just the same bones and rigging as Niall, if not slightly less of them (rounder, he was). So it really doesn't track, how Brighid was a bitch then but is a belle now.
Well, maybe that's unfair. Maybe she wasn't a bitch. Maybe Mythra's misremembering, saving the impression over the events themselves.
She could check her memories, make a review, but the thought is terrifying. What if what she sees of herself is even worse than what she thinks she remembers?
Brighid's power buys her the beauty of knowing; of having a past, a history, to refer back to. Without it, even couched by the Empire's iron fist, she's as set-adrift as any of the Blades awakened by Rex and the others, pure chance. Brighid doesn't have to hope, because her future, as her past, is assured.
Except for when she says she "might have been returned to her Core for some reason or other" and Mythra realizes that the Empire has, apparently, been just as beat-around by the Praetorium as anyone else.
(Oh, and Azurda, pretending he wasn't interested in human kingdoms. Maybe he wasn't literally interested, but Mythra can't conceive of him loving Addam so much as to duck into a war he could have stayed out of just for that one puny little prince. It's certainly not how Mythra herself felt.)
Why wouldn't she know? Even if she couldn't write it down herself...why wouldn't she know? Someone could have, should have, would have - surely, right? - made an insert that explained it all. Explained why the last volume, covering their journey to the Tornan Titan's Core, was absent.
Wasn't it in their history? Didn't everyone know when and how Hugo had died? What other use could that Special Inquistor of old have been?
"Brighid, I wanted to tell you..."
"Yes, Mythra?"
So receptive. So docile.
Mythra doesn't feel contempt, irritation; she feels a strained brand of pity that Brighid doesn't deserve, not because she doesn't deserve sympathy but because she's stronger than all that.
"Actually, I wanted to ask," Mythra admits, gaze front.
Brighid gazes back at her through sparkling lids. Even the neutrality on display is a kind of respect. That Brighid is even willing to stop, momentarily, to listen to what Mythra "wants" is as astonishing as the gazes of four who don't even have it in them to admonish her for turning up in their room.
Mythra changed, but didn't. Brighid didn't, but did.
"How come you don't seem to know what happened to you, at the end of the Aegis War?"
Brighid blinks without blinking, without so much as a flutter. Smooth.
"I wasn't awake at the time," she answers, just as before. "What isn't in my journal doesn't really concern me."
"But...but what about Hugo?"
"Which?" Brighid asks mildly, and Mythra realizes that there might well have been a dozen other Hugos born throughout the Ardanach line on the way to Niall, today, and Mòrag, his cousin. Each one just as similar? Perhaps some undeserving of the noble callback?
But she's spared from having to clarify by Brighid continuing, "The emperor of five hundred years ago? Yes, he would have been the Driver of the imperial Ardainian Blades during his reign."
She's so calm. So nonchalant. Mythra wants, now, to hate her for it, but she can't.
It's a love, tender and complex, she harbors for all Brighids, past and future, alive and dead, storied and immaterial.
She's not so soft, now, as to be able to reach out and take Brighid's hand, make affirmations with a confidence that Pyra yet doesn't have. She still wants to cross her arms, shut it out; she's still Mythra.
Instead, a bare stutter escapes her: "You know Hugo died protecting Addam."
Addam, who didn't need it, because Mythra wouldn't have died (and she doesn't know when he disappeared but she wagers it wasn't the difference of a Tornan-Leftherian's lifetime to that of an Indoline) and they didn't know that the king was going to die and Zettar wasn't, they didn't know anything.
Addam had known for a whole year going that he'd much rather the Aegis be entrusted to some far-off future where these holy Blades could be employed to achieve utopia, rather than mutual destruction.
To trifle with Brighid and Aegaeon's lives, just as Niall had (arguably) done...
Brighid replies flatly, "The official accounts record his selflessness."
And the Mythra of five hundred years would have goaded, would have tried to tease out that little flare of anger. But Mythra doesn't want to see Brighid (her Brighid, this one isn't, but neither had the last been, either) in that kind of pain, so she nods, swallows, backs off.
Actually, she wants to know more. Wants to have it laid out in something other than implication. Wants Brighid to communicate the information she can understand implicitly by way of it being said explicitly. But what does it gain her, actually?
Would Brighid's anger be so ugly, so helpless? Does Brighid ignore what happened to her (the other her) because it is itself a weakness?
Or maybe Mythra's making a mountain out of a Riikhill.
"As long as you're happy. Really."
She stares at a corner of mangled, snow-covered stone (how many years has it been here, untouched, unregarded?) until Brighid catches Mòrag's watchful and ever-attentive eye, doubtless shrugging off the odd conversation, and walks away.
By the time they reach Morytha, Mythra's successfully shelved the moment from the Memorial Ruins, but she's also wandered into revisiting quite a few scenes from Torna, because she knows what's down here. She knows what she put down here.
Even if she didn't destroy all these buildings themselves, she's no fragile maiden walking among wonder.
Maybe Brighid doesn't have the same foresight into what lies ahead, from up on the cliffs to down below, but she's been paging through her journals about it anyway. She reports to Mythra what she gleans: that she was rarely the victor in their bouts, but there was a time...
And Mythra, being Mythra, decides to stick to her guns. "I guess I've just got certain attributes," she says. Doesn't name them, doesn't elaborate. Obviously it's true.
She does, doesn't she? She's Mythra. Aegis or no Aegis, no one else could ever be. Thank goodness, Pyra is her own.
So what if Brighid didn't write down the reason why she'd managed to eke out a win? So what if vanity preserves everything in its own way?
Maybe there's something in the argument itself, anyway; the words that come charged with light fighting fire.
Not power or beauty. Not necessarily. Just people.
It's enough just to be. It's enough to stand in this place where people once stood, thought, lived, loved, and talk to Brighid about what once was.
That's bull. Fantasy trash-talk.
Childish. You just don't want to acknowledge your defeat.
You want a piece of me?
Not civilized, like Dromarch may want, but real. Them, despite the centuries.
Mythra revels in the old codes, the old rhythms. Her perfect memory, that she can extend to Brighid, even if it's batted away by a belligerent, bellicose, beautiful cat.
Flinging her sword's bleeding edge at Brighid to block the furl of whips pulls a grunt from her chest, but it comes with a ragged, heaving smile. Imagine Mythra, twirling around in that ballgown. Imagine Brighid, bare-kneed and blistering.
There'll never be out-and-out approval; confirmation of admiration or rivalry. No honest conversations, brutal or otherwise. Maybe it's a lack of communication, or maybe it's a lack of will. But there will be this, forever. As long as Mythra knows a Brighid, she can see.
And hey, seems like Brighid did take her to heart, all those years ago. She really did make sure to note how great her opponent- nah, how great her friend did.
Well. Maybe "friends" is still a bit too strong, to say nothing of family. But they're getting there...eventually.