This Is The Picture
There was the sword and the shield. There was the man they armored. And there was war, and there was death, and there was causality and casuality, as there always was and as there always will be.
That is the sketch. That is the outline. Those are the facts of it. We lay them all into equal relief, here and now.
Objects. Playthings. Dolls. Fantastic creatures. Painted and stripped, gouged and ripped.
Aegaeon is a connoisseur, a born lover, of such things. And Aegaeon has never felt that way.
He has never felt anything like an object. Not with Emperor Hugo, and he wishes he could suspect that is has not been so ever, but at least once, it must have. This is truism, is tautology. It is what it is. It was what it shall always be. And cycles, and cogs, and gears, and they are sat around the fire once more creating of commonality.
Addam's rough-russ productions were replicas of artifacts from times long past, perhaps some of which he had seen in vaults at Aureus and at Aletta. From each one came inspiration for one of Hugo's own useless contraptions - from the Critic's Fan arose Electricite, just as effective but twice as recollective of his old friend; there was the Chain of Many Hues and then there was the Prism Pickaxe; the ancients had called it a Koto of Self-Interest, but Hugo, our modern man, simply said, well, why not call it Droppicium? It's what it does, anyway.
And they all laughed. And they all agreed, yes, these silly objects, these trinkets, such useless fluff, so entertaining for us royals who have such better, except really they're worse, things to do. Let's make another, shall we? And Aegaeon, who did attempt at divers times to be such a man's man, to be one of the boys if he couldn't actually be one of the human men, obliged, assisted. These parts are our playthings, let's see just what we can do with them!
They unwound springs who'd gotten crumpled, attacked screws whose heads had been blown out, with hammers and with expensive grit, equal parts furious and curious at their distorted faces, and who ever said screws were made to come out, once they were screwed in? But it must be possible. It must! Discretion is the better part of valor, but valor will suffice here.
(The screw is stripped, and the driver judders, bounces, jumps towards the morning sun. It is rejected by an object without a will, merely because another had been there before and had driven with such purpose.)
You ask too many questions. You seek too many answers, and then again you don't. Just tear it out with pliers, already. Screw the screw, let it bend and break and snap and strafe.
(When they lost one, clean and new and useful, usable, Aegaeon was the only one who really got appreciably aggravated, the only one who persisted, later that night, in peeking about for it, under logs and grasses and stones, when he knew full well that it was unrecoverably lost, and didn't even matter enough to be found, after it all. It was about the principle of the thing, you see. You see?)
You collect dolls. Myriad, a veritable rainbow, cloth and porcelain and fibers of all kinds, they lie dormant in your quarters in the palace, that room which is as stagnantly reserved for you as is the glass case complete with plain velvet pillow upon which you will lie, be lain, be slain, evermore. Over, and over, and over again. They gather, gather, gather. They never disperse.
Another doll. Another trinket, another token. You are so like a doll, yourself, with your perfect posture and all your built-in sounds and sayings - is that why you love them so? No one ever asks why. They just humor it, humor you. Brighid and Hugo, that is. No one else knows. No one else cares. Will anyone else, ever? Will they, come again?
What of you is life? What of you is so uncertain? Have you ever been even the slightest bit unpredictable, flat and dull?
He has always been far too palatable a chef for Ardainian tastes. If Hugo had any special liking for his Blade's cooking, it was only for the thought, and the love. He could not detect the quality. It was of no import to him. It never would be. It wasn't an uncaring admission, it just was. Certainly, the young emperor was just so forthright.
But that of the unperishable, the constancy? That of the studious and eminently detectable? From and for this, he could stray crafty, he could learn. (It seems overly deviating, at this juncture, but after all, this is the only picture of the past we will have - this is the final snapshot, the brittle family portrait painted of and after death and dying. So we look, we look, we look.)
When Emperor Hugo was quite young, he was fascinated with Aegaeon's armor, the strange and beautiful combination of a mechanical mechanism and an organic organ in the ever-flowing tubes. He had eyes, he could and did blink, and yet everything about their expression came from outside of them - from the eyebrows, which he very nearly also did not have but which were backed in spirit by the spirit of bone, though he also did not have bones.
(He had perfect posture so regardless. Metaphorically, he had someone to lean on. He was never quite so harshly new.)
No eyes, no bones, no heart, no soul...? An object. Inanimate, except for the fact that Aegaeon moves. Moved. We mustn't be too coy, and forget that he cannot move, now. Hugo's Aegaeon, that is.
No. He is frozen. In his inability to provide for the situation and its suitors, he is caught like a fish with its lips fruitlessly flapping. Ah, but see, there? Aegaeon does draw oxygen. Aegaeon does breathe. Aegaeon does temper the flame of life. Perhaps, one day, quite literally in another life...
No. Never again. Always, has he thought, there will never be anyone like Emperor Hugo again. This confidence, this ardor...the Aegaeon of now stubbornly resists, closes his eyes against, the idea of the Aegaeon of later ever being so content as he was, as he is, as he...always shall be. What would it mean, if that were true? An object is constant, as the tides, but the tides never return in quite the same way as they left. No, not quite. And so, how will you rebel?
For that is what Blades are - objectified, soldiers. They march on in endless unwinnable war. Even Aegaeon, the disquieted antioptimist, knows at heart that that is what it is. What it was. What it shall always be. Brighid is iconography of war far more than she is simply imagery of beauty. Her affect is violent. So is her effect. Yes. Indeed.
I would never have told you not to do it, Your Majesty. Never, truly, would I have crossed your heart in that way. But it hurts me all the same. To know how, to know why, even just now before I die.
What he could not do for Hugo becomes what he could not do for Addam becomes what he could not do for Lora, for Jin, for Torna, for Alrest, and then back again for Mor Ardain.
It is a bareness, in the pool. It is a low point. Some Shield of the Empire you were. Some lowly crest, where she was such a jewel.
And did you mind it? Truly, did you mind it? You must have, to be comparing now. Unless you always have been. Unless you always will be.
Many a time has he watched Brighid die, though he doesn't directly know it. He remembers the once, however. The first, and then again the last, for him. As if such an experience is one for which he can be said to own and have owned it. It was her death, not yours. Only now do you go together.
Her Core Crystal falls with not half the grace and presence she has always had, though its fall is, was, to the carpeted floor of a palace where everything is grandeurous. Everything is filigreed. Everything is armaments, legacy, gilded gold.
Everything is as it should be. This is an egregious cobbled altar to someone, something, as yet truly unknown, and so death is permitted to occur here. You are allowed to die. Hugo is dead, is dying, and so you are allowed to die. You might not be, otherwise.
He was never jealous of her, nor smug over her disappearance. He mourned as he should, and did not cry, for she was the only one who had ever seen it. They passed that knowledge of precious emotional intimacy back and forth, rise to rise.
She had looked at him, once, as the blast struck. Had she sought his tears? Had she sought his free-flowing water?
No one was looking at him but her. No one was looking at her but him. In one respect, that was how it always had been. In another, that was how it would always be.
He had seen her eyes, had seen her soul. She, meanwhile, saw nothing more of him than she ever had. His eyes were still blank. His soul was still, once again, empty. Only pointless things were in it. All those lost screws and crushed springs, of course. They did neither bolster nor buoy him now.
Or maybe it was full. Maybe it was overflowing, maybe it was replete, maybe she had already seen all that he had to offer. She had watched him, the first in the Emperor's confidence, for all her life, after all. She had filled it. She had given of her own. She had been of their own.
(He is watching Hugo. He is watching cold, liquid ether fire preliminarily, so preemptively, engulf a body that has yet to be entombed, or cremated, or laid, mounted, upon a pyre - of course, for he is so short that everything must be motivated up, up, up. It was devotion. It still is. It...it still is.)
But, of course, it doesn't matter what she saw. It doesn't matter what she sees. What oxygen she derives from his presence soon will be cut off at the source. She is no more useful, only slightly more a spectacle, than he is. No one will bother with them to mourn, only feel their own grisly discomfort at holding those objects in their hands.
To all else gathered there, it is oh, Hugo, he died for you, oh, Addam, and oh, now you are the only one who survives, Lora, and oh, what will become of Mor Ardain, oh, who will curb the whims of Domnhall?
If they cared that Hugo had died too young, they never once put a thought towards his Blades. And perhaps that was right. Perhaps that was prescient, for those who would hold the objects in their hands. That's how it goes, with matters of state.
They won't feel it. Even now, perhaps they cannot even begin conceptualize and so do not know it. That is not a picture fit and fitted for their eyes.
Not their ears, either. He does not hear that rotten clatter, stone upon stone. He does not feel the smallness of his fate.
Water, water, to drink and be swallowed. To call and be cadenced, to listen to the familiar sound of another's voice.
Will you send a counterwave, before you go? Will you make loud and manifest your grief and your guilt? Or will you just...simply...be lost? How is that, on the principle of it? Are you allowed?
Shelve it. Free the empty space.
Aegaeon, that most excellent fair-fowl bird, furls up his wings and scales and tubes and shields and...and he is very quiet. He is reticent.
(It's not so easy to breathe.)
He is very calm. He sings his storm as a silent song.
(It hums. It lives. It breathes. It dies.)
He is unshakeable. He is unshaken.
Of course he is. Of course they are. Inanimate objects cannot move.
Objects, icons of violence, vectorized waypoints of the here and now before it becomes the there and then. Ground and beaten, sound and fleeten.
Aegaeon is a connoisseur, a born critic, of such things. And Aegaeon is not dying in that way.
In battle or not, quite little does it matter. It's been quite a while since the last time, you see. For this Aegaeon, there is no other fate.
This is the picture. So this is what it feels like to die.
To die when you will not be celebrated and cannot be mourned, that is. For Emperor Hugo, his only Driver, and Jewel Brighid, his only partner Blade, are dead.
Forever, they are dead. The water is lapping. The ripples are circling.
The sword and the shield, and the boy they armored, were not just extant for war. We placed them all into disparate ponds, there and then.
Let them die. They are dead.
They are dead.
They are dead.
They are dead.
You are dead.
As you always were, and as you always will be.