Retweet if it is 100% okay to come to your DMs and just say 'Fan la Norne'

"Her name is Haze," says Minoth.

Amalthus stands in the center of the audience chambers, posture as straight and unbothered as ever, and says nothing. He is not facing Minoth. His thoughts are turned away.

"Haze," says Minoth again. It's a simple word. Not much to mishear, no matter how clogged your ears are with willful indolence. Does he need to spell it out?

It's been round about fifty years - now not just longer since the cataclysm of the Aegis War than the time when he was first awakened into this forever-lifetime bullshit but twice if not twice squared as long.

He starts to regret leaving his holsters with the daughter of a shopkeeper he'd been friendly with, and his guns in the ether. Keeping his fists clenched on instruments that could kill Amalthus, or that could kill him, was always something that could help ground. Always.

Instead, Minoth grits his teeth. Clenches his jaw. Pinches the bridge of his nose, draws back his ears, rolls his shoulders, cracks his neck. He goes through every possible machination, every one of them fruitless, in an attempt to get some bearing, any last drivel of a stabilizer, on...what?

What is he even looking for? Why is he even here? If he were Haze, he wouldn't want to be found by the man who abandoned her and her Driver, who didn't do a thing to stop his Driver from starting the chain reaction that eventually killed them all.

Blew them up. Nuclear. Atomic. Gotta get in to get out.

If he were Haze, he would hate Minoth. Because he's Minoth, and he hates himself. It's a bitter contest for who's sworn to the biggest prize in that ignoble arena - him, Amalthus, or what of him came from Amalthus.

Now, Minoth, the Blade, the literal standing-slouching body, hasn't literally turned his back on the problem, on the multiple problems, on the suffering. So maybe he deserves at least a little bit of credit for that.

(Not the credit of blame, the credit of character. Or perhaps those are the same. It matters not what you say, only what you do.)

That means he can't go now, right? That means that no matter what Amalthus, what his Driver, has to say to him, he is bound by duty and by arbitration, by love and by hatred, by intuition and by intellection, to find out what went wrong here.

Oh, Architect, what on earth or above it went wrong?

So Minoth continues, with or without his Driver's assent. His consent, rather. So I'll shove it back in your pompous prissed-up face, asshole.

"I've been over every inch of every continent on Alrest, and I have not seen her. Furthermore, nobody else has seen her."

They've seen Jin, a ghost in the night of silent-screaming terror. If they've seen Jin, then Minoth knows that Lora is either very much alive, or dead in a bad way. But they couldn't both follow down that hellish hole. Not both of them.

(Oh, yes. Lora had a favorite.)

He'd hit up all his favorite information brokers, then those he didn't feel so amicable towards, then finally he'd stooped to walking door to door to inquire (at the richest houses first, even though that didn't really make sense, because anybody could find a fallen Blade), have you seen a girl who looks like this? Cheerful, and sweet, and exceedingly well-mannered, with a Core Crystal shaped like a diamond?

(Jin's had been a kite. Jin wasn't a Wind Blade. Jin wasn't the one who flew away.)

But everyone said no, not in this town, there haven't been any new Blades awakened since before the war, we don't know what happened to those that lived here then, they probably got lost when their Drivers died. And Minoth thinks, that could have happened to Haze, but I know it didn't. Not with our luck. Not with the luck that thrust Jin into Lora's hands on a dark and stormy night thirty some-odd years ago.

When he ran out of houses, he went to the fields. Spessia was dark, and dank, and dirty, its swampishness turned to uncomfortably evile levels of filth. He picked over the puddles and tried to gauge whether someone else had been here just before, doing the very same thing. By now, the dormant Core Crystal would surely glow, and signal its lonesomeness. Not that Minoth would awaken it. Would awaken her.

He knew she was dead. Goddamn it, he knew she was dead. And oh, how he hated knowing.

"Now, I know when I've been fooled, and I know when I'm being a fool. Neither of those happened. No one knows where she is."

If he were smart, this would be the part where he'd cock a firearm and walk in a line just as straight and confident as he'd followed against the Jagron up to the back of Amalthus's head, and square up the barrel with the soft flesh on the nape of the Indoline's neck. Never mind that the Praetor's robes rather prohibited both the affect and the effect of an action like that. The intention, and the regret of it lost, remained.

If he were smart. Minoth always liked to think that he was smart.

"You've always had a bit of a penchant for acting like you know things other people don't - or, very often, actually knowing them. So I think you know something, here. Would you care to share some of your precious wisdom with your precious Blade?"

Amalthus turns. The hems of his robes make an empty swish as they brush across the floor. The floor is clean. The robes are clean. Minoth's conscience is very, very dirty. Amalthus sneers. That's probably not why.

"Fan," he calls.

At first, Minoth thinks he's epitomizing the indolence, asking for a lower rank's indentured palm-frond relief. But no. Heels clack, a crosier clinks, and she appears.

Fan. Fan?

Amalthus nods, makes no pretense. She bows. Her Core Crystal is not a diamond, it is an isoceles triangle.

"My name is Fan la Norne. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Master...?"

Minoth gulps. Hard. Ugly. Choking. Not that. Anything but that.

This is where he starts to delude himself. If Haze is, was, Lora's twin, then couldn't Lora have had another twin? Another Blade, one she'd awakened by accident when she was still a child, another first resonance who'd been left to the wayside, knowingly or unknowingly, willingly or unwillingly? It would explain the emptiness in her eyes, if not the obvious forced faceting in her Core.

But if that's so, then Amalthus knows what Haze looks like. Minoth hadn't been there in the first audience with the king. He hadn't seen what kind of leering glances the Quaestor had given the Paragon and his sister. Not too much of a stretch to consider that Amalthus would remember.

(Where is your guilt, when I have so much of it? I must have learned shame from you. Mustn't I?)

"My name is Minoth," says the very Flesh Eater. Always has been, always will be.

"Your name is Haze," says Minoth, under his breath. Not was, is. Her name is Haze.