don't look at me, i'm not your kind

Blades get the name of their true Driver imprinted somewhere in the back of their Core. That's not something Amalthus found out; everyone knows it. Not that Amalthus had nothing to do with it.

The inscription of encryption, the secret message the Architect hashed out and threw as salt over his shoulder without knowing why, really, except that he made Blades to have partners, and it had been frustrating to know that back in the world he had come from there was no guarantee...a divine revelation, indeed.

Divine or not, it was what it was, and what it was was scoured from the back of Minoth's Core when he became less a Blade and more a fork off of the intended repositoried path. After all, if a Flesh Eater can have whoever they want as a Driver, then certainly there's no need for that information, it simply gets in the way!

Did Amalthus think that far into it? He and Stannif did plenty of preparatory work, but they didn't find out the real truth of the atrociously expansive spin until after, years after. Until they'd taken a different Blade's Core and shoved it into Lora's father or adjacent questionable relation with no regard to its own best use-cased placement.

An accident, then, that Minoth was left not only having his last lifetime stretched painful far out in front of him with no end but a crumpling one in sight, but not even knowing where he'd been supposed to walk in the best of them. What would the Architect say? No accident.

He saw Jin, with Lora, and their bond sang with something perfect only an exception from even further on high could hope to throw in their path. He saw Haze, the most perfect reflection of Lora's charm and spirit, and even if that wasn't where Haze was meant to be, there'd be no Haze without Lora. Proves itself out. He chose to see it, there.

Brighid and Aegaeon...there was no point to puzzling deep into it. Highly unlikely, even as the imperial treasures that they'd come to be, that they shared a soulmate in that way. What battle had they been collected from, individually or together? What history had brought them here? Would they have gotten to know if Brighid had not taken it upon herself? What kind of history did the Empire keep for its makers?

And as for the fable, Minoth believed it of Aegaeon, the way the Water Blade's constancy seemed so eloquently tided in Hugo's compassionate shores, the way even his bumbling expressions of devotion in the form of promised indentured service were scions of the truest loyalty. Brighid he didn't think really wanted to bow to a man. Brighid was the crowning Jewel, flames peaked up without anything ever daring to tamp. Perhaps she would never bow to anyone in absolution.

Mythra...Aegises weren't meant to be awakened as Blades, he'd gathered. Certainly not by Amalthus and Addam, whether as paired parallels or separate stumbles. Really, that was evidenced by the fact that no human could ever have been chosen in singularity to be painted clear across the crossbar of the crucifix. No one human would or could take on all the sins Malos and Mythra pitted against each other, even if there were some holy spirit in absentia to shore up the solvence.

They all looked back at him with varying brightnesses of smiles, luminosities alphaed and betaed and so on down the line. Who was there to check them? Why didn't they make a whole inquisition out of it? Why did they accept him so blithely, so simply? Was it because he'd blamed Amalthus, and that prohibitor, that cancellor, was so easy to draw?

Wish I hadn't come here. Then you wouldn't need to look at me at all. But if I hadn't, then he couldn't, and I'd take a million spying eyes for that wobbling, wandering, seaglass amberbud alexandrite-precious stare.

What color are your eyes, Addam? Forget your heritage, forget Malos, forget Khanoro, forget your mother because he tried to and it made him forget you, I think I see a rainbow, a galaxy, a supernova imploding my boundaries. How'd you get inside? You got inside because I was born with you there. Yes, and it's mortifying. Mortalizing. The ideal is an ideal because of its ubiquity.

Being looked at by a human was an experience of curiosity - hello, who are you, why do you walk in quite that way, you don't seem the same as any other Blade I've seen? Being looked at by a Blade was an experience of alienation that followed after that same curiosity - hello, what are you, why does your ether pulse in quite that way, you're not the same as any other Blade I've seen?

Addam had, oh, worlds of curiosity. Addam had unabashed warmth and obligement. Addam was an Architect-damned idiot for everything that mattered because he'd made up his own morality and bound himself into a horridly cubical box, and when you're that tall, well, a cube makes you crouch and crumple in on yourself. Just like Minoth would one day.

But it wasn't because he thought Minoth so different, so piquant, so curious in and of himself. Perhaps too many prepositions, but you know what I mean. Addam knew without knowing that the reason Minoth didn't seem the same as any other Blade he'd seen was because Minoth was the only Blade he had truly been meant to see. Less Blades about than humans, and so some have to mark two, but Addam hadn't. A sad thing, that.

(Perhaps Minoth had marked two himself. That history was rather slightly unknowable. Only slightly.)

Addam's hands, offering and supplicating and caressing hands, reached to the back of Minoth's Core so easily, reached around behind it, pulled it out of him towards his own heart. Can I make him so magnanimous? I can, because of course Minoth didn't find it half so easy.

He struggled with the notion, with the winding curve of the plot, with the twist about his cranium so much more violent than the scar. I've said it before and I'll say it again, trauma takes many shapes and Minoth's was in the shape of a man half-past two decades into the third trying to make mealtime peace with the axialized animator of the universe and doing a horrendous job of it.

Blades aren't meant to change Drivers while they're still alive to know it. It's not easy. It is overwriting the protocol, it is overriding the permissions, it is throwing the hard drive across the room to see if it'll stick on that cabinet over there like cooked spaghetti.

When Addam died, Minoth was halfway across the world, but his Core hadn't started pinging-panging the throes of death anywhere near yet - his own, that is, of course, because of course I'm leading into saying that he felt it. He felt it like the beginning of his own death, because Blades are supposed to die with their Driver.

What happens to Blades who get reawakened after their soul has been commuted? What happens when you think you've reached the ultimate and then you have to take the falling action, you've no choice, and you don't even have the crucial backstory? And what happens if you do?

Minoth had Addam Origo's name written all over the garish fuschiaed cyan of his Core. That's not something Amalthus found out, but now everyone knows it.