variance of dives, stringence of lazarus

Please listen: Mr. Ralph Vaughan Williams.

The kids' cure doesn't work. Cole dies shortly after his Driver does.

Minoth had died with Addam Origo. And so if he did, then who was Cole's Driver anyway? Not Vandham. He hadn't dared to trust that much again. Even a good man falls, in this world. Cole let himself be fallen. Knees get scraped and the patella shifts out of socket. Not like he's doing so much walking anymore anyway.

Walking? Running away. It was still him, the steadily-growing blue-skinned blight on their world. He as a poor man, eating from the rich man's table. Cole'd just as soon not have.

When he reaches the shredded cloth backdrop of Elysium, the Architect is busy.

"I'm sorry. I do not have time for you right now, my child."

"That's okay with me," Cole says. "I've had plenty of it."

Cole never gets to know, if it was all worth it. If Rex and Nia and Zeke and Tora and Poppi, what a spirited invention; if Mòrag and Brighid, his- no, their- no, her ever-lovely Brighid; if Mythra, and Pyra (what inspired creations of their own, even if none of the makers would want to admit it)...if they really made it.

What a cast. What a wonderful bunch of kids. As things go, maybe Mythra isn't a kid anymore - he doesn't count Pyra like that, because she was born into a coma. Never grew up until now. Zeke is older than Addam was, then.

What the hell? They're all kids, to him. He never was one. And real poverty would do that to you, even though Iona, bless her soul, was still supplicating and sweet. He hadn't been poor, not really. Compared to Amalthus, in all the ways that mattered, maybe he'd been rich, even.

He's backstage now. Curtain pulled aside, but he's more in the lighting booth, in the stage crew, than among the hobnobbing troupe. Amalthus is there in a far-off corner. The Architect, dying himself, doesn't look upon him. He never has. Maybe, Cole thinks, if God forsook me like that, I'd be bitter too. But didn't he? To send me to you?

It's not your fault, I guess. Or it wasn't, at least, in the beginning. Indoline live long, but it's not scaled. His years and his age were the same when his mother died. Not died, was killed. Passive versus active voice, and all that. Years and age for Cole, on the other hand...a bleak thing. It didn't balance.

Passive and active. For all what Amalthus did, at least he actually did something. No, you old fool, don't redeem the villain. You know you stopped wanting to, gave up hope that he ever would himself, now stick to it. He is irredeemable. Are you irredeemable, for your falsified poorness? For your acting? You didn't have it so bad. Nobody ever killed anybody you loved.

(Vandham is persona non grata, in that way. Old fella, he was. It didn't...he didn't need to mourn that as a personal wound. He didn't need to claim the big man who gave himself out in spaded bundles to everybody he met. Vandham was Iona's, and Iona was Cole's. Roc in the middle there...eh, scratch the trilogy. It's not all poetic.)

Amalthus killed Jin. Amalthus became a killer. No, Amalthus killed Lora. Strike out that word. He'd scrawled it down out of his mind wrong. But was it wrong? He'd killed Jin when he did that, hadn't he? Not just in the way that Blades die. The real Jin. The truest Jin.

(Malos may have carved out the brunted-bracing space of a personhood for him again, with limitless, even twisted, devotion, but Cole knows, Minoth knows...that wasn't the way. Not really.)

And then Jin came back from the dead, a changed man. A reversal of redemption. From splendid soul to agitated anima. Haze...he doesn't want to think about Haze. She had no choice in what happened to her. The wind can only blow back so hard. She was never a storm, but then she became its eye, tranquil where she should not be. Who should be tranquil, in this world? With all its injustices, it was a wonder they weren't all grasping at the pitchforks each and every day.

Jin rose up from the dead because he feared - no, he knew, that heaven does not let you remember. Not for his blessed, cursed kind. If Amalthus did not believe all the prophets that were the Aegises, so wretchedly human in the end because the Architect so loved and missed his bygone people that he made them again in his children, then surely he would not believe the man rising from the dead that was the white ice's ghost.

Cole had sent those kids right to him. He wasn't remorseful that he'd done it. It was the arc that lay there. Pick it up, and run with it. He only regretted the way in which he had told them. Where is your venom? Where is your hatred for the one who caused the dogs licking at your wounds as you stand old and bent, unable to care for the child who trusts you?

He doesn't have the hate. He never did. He wasn't born human. But he dies it. Amalthus...he dies it too. And his hatred bleeds out like blue pus. The Architect didn't save good people from answering to bad men, but he saved himself, and only in rivuleted accidents was that enough. The rich man, the poor man. The one who refused to look upon the scales of it all.

This was yet another piece (sorry to the fandom page but when I enter my flop era it'll be justified) where the title and theming spoke to me, but it took a little while for me to realize how exactly to place it. I know it's somewhat important during the actual quest that Amalthus has already been defeated, but skip travel, and all...I ignored it.