Kamakiriad
Chapters
Chapter 01: Trans-Island Skyway
Chapter 02: Countermoon
Chapter 03: Springtime
Chapter 04: Snowbound
Chapter 05: Tomorrow's Girls
Chapter 06: Florida Room
Chapter 07: On the Dunes
Chapter 08: Teahouse on the Tracks
Chapter 09: Big Noise, New York
Chapter 10: Confide in Me
Chapter 11: Blue Lou
Chapter 12: Shanghai Confidential
I'll never get out, Lora thinks. It'll always just be me and Mother along in this dingy house, with that man I refuse to ever call Father keeping us in fear of the horrible things he'll do to us.
Why? Why does he even put up with us? Why doesn't he just kill us right here?
Maybe he's too stupid. Maybe we're all he's got, after all.
But I don't want these memories. No, no, I hate them. I need new ones. And Mother does, too.
Jin falls to the floor, curiosity bound up and frozen.
"I'll keep you safe, always."
Gort's arm being sliced off, steel slick against bone, is formative, for Lora. She wasn't born yesterday, but she feels it.
"Okay," she whispers. "Okay. Let's go."
They struggle, at first. Life is still cruel. It's not sunshine and roses, Jin far too stiff to know how to gently, ably care for a child, and Lora far too fearful to accept him.
She watches him kill, kill, kill, over and over again. Each time, he gets more used to it. Each time, he gauges his own interest.
It takes a while for him to consider looking back at her, too.
"This isn't...we shouldn't want this, Lora," he cautions.
"I know that," she mutters, furry cuffs dirty against her mouth. "You'll find something better sometime. We will. Jin."
Golden eyes, chilled. Crystal blue, warmed.
"That's my name."
"Shouldn't I call you by it?"
Jin shakes his head, and guts another Feris from snout to tail.
Spring comes with Haze. Twelve years have gone by, and Lora is none the much stouter for it, physically, but her mind is strong.
Jin listens to her without a second thought, goes pliantly with his partner. When she steals Haze's Core from a jeweler's shop, he's more shocked than admonishing. He should be used to it by now.
From the moment her eyes open, that same amber golden hue, Haze is not for killing. Haze is not an instrument of destruction, only one of rebirth.
"Where are we going, Lady Lora?" Haze asks, supplicating and hopeful.
"I-" Lora stutters. "Oh. I don't know. We're looking for Mother still, I think."
But Haze is a compelling attraction, a fresh installation into their lives. They dawdle anew, in springtime.
Five more years. They travel between Torna and Coeia and Spessia and Gormott, linking surreptitiously with mercenary bands where they can.
Eventually, the borderlands of Torna become their most core home.
They learn forestry and mineralogy. They dine on wildflowers and ephemeral, ethereal tempura, and meat, bloody meat, that is the realest thing around.
"I never thought this would be our life," says Lora gaily, intuitively collective. "We can do whatever we like."
"Isn't it wonderful?" Haze's eyebrows dance with pleasure, and the bauble on her tiara dangles in time. "Don't you think so, Jin?"
To himself, Jin thinks, I suppose this is what I had meant. This is what we should want. Complacence.
Outwardly, he just smiles, cryptic as ever, and bids them rest a spell more.
A girl comes down from heaven. Mythra, her name is, and she destroys everything she sees (fit to) in a shower of harshest blinding light.
Is that a gift? Is that Bladelike, Bladekind?
"How could anyone act like that, just...killing people, without end, as their sole purpose and goal?"
Lora shudders; Haze shivers despite the summer sun and squeezes her hand. "Maybe she will come to reason soon, Lady Lora. We all have the power to change."
But Jin doesn't believe that. This year had begun like any other, and then suddenly there was a screaming terror in the sky, piloting gleaming mech.
No, she won't change. She is the rarest Blade this world has ever seen. Not even I have truly been able to change yet.
The girl is driven by Quaestor Amalthus of Indol, they find. Just as they have retrieved an orphan boy, Mikhail, from the ruins of a humanity-pillaged village, he greets them, seemingly in search of very nearly the same type of tagalong, and he eyes Jin with a dangerous glint in those yellow.
"My apologies for scaring you. Allow me to introduce myself. I am...the Driver of the Aegis."
Why would he admit that? In the moment it doesn't seem at all suspicious, and Lora eagerly reciprocates.
Amalthus observes again. "Did you know that there is another Core? I have been searching for a suitable Driver for it."
Lora looks up at Jin, then down at the violet artefact. If Gort had awakened him...
"Alright. I'll do it."
Malos is quietly, dangerously wild, much like a bull contented only in passing. He seems to want something only he, or perhaps not even he, can comprehend.
"My name's Lora. And what's yours?" Her voice trembles, wobbles near to breaking and shattering upon Haradd's duney, hilly floors. She is afraid, though she'd never admit it.
"Malos," he says. It is new information; he delivers it with perfect equanimity. "So you're my Driver?"
"That's right!" Lora, recovered somewhat from her initial trepidation, gestures to either side. "This is Jin and Haze. I guess you could say I have some experience already."
Malos narrows his eyes, sets his brows. Jin gulps, pulls back his ears so as to ignore the burning in his Core.
There is something crucial Malos understands.
Everything Malos does is maximal, extreme, and not quite as unerring as he might most fervently wish. Nervous but firm, Lora directs him and Jin to spar.
"You're tough, right? You can handle him?"
Malos seems to think so too. Whatever fond regard he might be beginning to develop for Haze, his communication with Jin is much more straight-shooting. Blade to Blade, beast to beast, animal to animal, not-human to not-human; the pings never stop.
Jin is his model. His Paragon, indeed. They trip over each other, destroying ever more monsters to protect Lora, and Haze as well.
"You were awakened to erase Mythra from the face of this world, you know," Jin says quietly.
"Yeah?" The bravado is hollow. "I guess that's nice to know, isn't it?"
The first encounter with Mythra is all fireworks. She's cooler than Malos, but he adjusts accordingly with frightening speed.
"So you're my partner? All that power, and still you side with the humans."
"There are more of them than there are of us," Malos says, implicating both Aegises and Blades. "We have to make our peace eventually."
The bastard prince and Amalthus's other reject stand to the side, ununderstanding of either in totality. He's just as removed as his emperor friend is. No, he...doesn't understand.
But maybe Lora does. And maybe Lora has to, if Malos does, because she's where everything he is has flown from.
Unless...
No time. Mythra snatches the seal, wriggles away on winged foot, and Malos nearly destroys Auresco in his righteous anger.
Jin wants to know. Curiosity rears its unmasked head.
"Do you think there's some truth to it? That you...really don't need us?"
Malos hacks a caustic laugh in answer. "Sure. Wouldn't that be nice?"
If the crash of Jin's composure upon the city streets' tiles could be heard, it might have shattered the hard-fired surface even more thoroughly than every contact from Siren had.
"You don't want to be here?"
"I never said that. I just...want it all to end."
And he has that power, doesn't he? He could rip it all to pieces. If he wanted to. If he was like Mythra.
"She's waiting for us, at the Core. Why?"
An easier question. Logic. Logos.
"She's just playing life's game. Same as you and me."
Mythra is too strong, too fast, too willful.
The indecision and apprehension that ripple through Malos's Core, placed there subconsciously by Lora and Jin both, stifle his surety. He has Gargoyles, but she has Ophion. The power of the "common folk" Artifices is not enough; they are but flies about the snake.
Before, Malos had been working on bravery. Now, he wants justice. Siren is what he needs to put things right by his own hand, instead of sitting back and watching the destruction unfold. He has to claim it for himself.
It's what Lora would have done.
Not so much what she would have wanted.
Maybe Lora likes means to ends. Maybe she doesn't. But Torna is sunk all the same.
They flee, five hand in hand.
The bombing of Spessia brings the final question. Only Jin and Malos know; so busy with each other are they that they don't even notice when Haze and Mikhail split for quieter reconciliation.
She trusts them to bring their lady, the fiery force that binds and bonds them all, out of it alive. She counts on them, even now.
What she doesn't count on Lora's own recklessness. In recent years, the simple girl from a backwoods cabin has been confronted, even as a side piece, with so much pontification and stress upon the individuality of Blades that instinct tells her to take the cannon fire for herself.
"We're nothing without her."
By his own hand, Malos brings the merciful end.
They'd never have gotten out any other way.