Karn Evil 9
It's still Jin. It's always Jin.
Chapter 01: 1st Impression - 836 + 449
Chapter 02: 2nd Impression - 707
Chapter 03: 3rd Impression - 907
cold and misty morning, i heard a warning borne in the air, about an age of power where no one had an hour to spare
(welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends)
Jin had always been accustomed to living under a generally dark cloud of fear. His life was born and borrowed on stolen time; he knew this, had always known it, would always know it.
Such was the lot of being a Blade. Rather, the lot of a Blade itself. But what's the difference between being and being, in a state like that?
His story had begun on the oft-satirized stage of a dark and stormy night, and would very likely not end the same way - governmental seizure was more of an inevitability than a possibility at this point, he felt. But moreover: his life was proceeding in the opposite order to a normal Blade, who would come into being during peacetime and then die among war.
Jin wasn't...stupid, no. He didn't think himself prescient enough to be able to guarantee that he wouldn't fall to martial peril once Lora had grown up, or even before. But he had seen suffering, in the back streets of Auresco and all surrounding hamlets, of children just like Lora who hadn't had the mystical, incomprehensible opportunity she'd had to accidentally resonate with a resolute, powerful Blade whose only aspiration had become to protect her and their fast-unfolding life together.
I could talk about Jin and his oh-so-splendid characteristics for hours more, as I always do, and pick apart the delicate issues of bluntest blame, tremblingest trauma, undeservedest undulation towards the end of death, death, death, you're going to die, Lora, you never had a chance, and thus the lot of a Blade is turned so upside down.
But a story, as I've often said, is best told by showing, not telling, and though I tell you a great many things, none of them ever mean very much.
So imagine instead Jin, awake and on watch in Spessia one moderate night in the summer of 3557, seven years before the rocking of the boat was truly to begin, starting to consider what else he could be doing with his life, unmarred as he currently had it.
What if all this truly wasn't enough? What if there was something more he was meant to be doing?
Right now, he was living Lora's life for her, making all the larger-scale decisions about where their itinerant path would take them, while day to day she was granted the illusion of choice in whether they would hunt by land or by sea, whether she would have a new comb or a new dress that season, whether she'd try to snitch a language primer or a book of sums from the next nearby schoolhouse.
Lora was a child, was still a child, only Lora had not been a child for the past ten years.
Children were meant to be let sleep through the night. And yet here Jin was, pondering the overturning of his precious death-penaltied independence without her. If he was her Blade, then the decision fell to her. If she was his Driver, then the decision fell to her.
If they were one in body and soul, then the decision fell to both of them.
"Lora?"
She was a light sleeper. No voice was more important to her than his.
"Mmmh...Jin?" Her eyelids fluttered, unstable and birdlike. There she was again, caught halfway in between critical knowledge and the bliss of being fully unawares.
"Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
The fire ate oxygen, flicker by gulp as it smouldered away, away. It was dying. It hadn't even the strength to lick at the clogged soles of Jin's boots.
Blades are meant to sleep, eventually. But this dream...
By and by, enough oxygen came to Lora's stuttering lips, and she sat up, alive. "I thought we talked about this, yesterday. Through the next town, right?"
"That's right. And what will we see there?"
"Ahh...Mother, hopefully. Right?"
Oh, precious, precious reassurance. You can always ask. You can always be just so unsure. It doesn't matter. Someone else will always be there, shining the guiding light.
Again, "That's right. And if we never find her? Then who will you be?"
In the waning glow, every trace of dirt that had escaped their ineffectual worn-down rags and dregs of soap shone like a beacon on Lora's face. She was real. Jin had never been. His entire being was ensonced in a shell of impermeability.
Jin had never been poor. That was only Lora's problem. Jin, who didn't really need to eat and didn't really need to sleep...
Jin was not human enough to know such a struggle.
But Lora just grinned, teetering on the edge between adolescent cockiness and adulthood confidence.
"I'll be Lora. I think I'm okay with that, now. Because I've got you. I've always had."
Jin nodded, eyes lidded, and chilled the fire to sleep. "Who would you be if I wasn't here?"
"I..."
Now the golden eyes blinked, the pale, chapped, bitten lips worked.
"Are you alright, Jin?"
Are you?
"Calm yourself, Lora. It's nothing. Go back to sleep."
"You are nothing without me," Amalthus intoned, a dreadfully placid reminder. He didn't appear to care about the content of what he was saying, in any sort of self-interested way. In fact, he probably didn't. That was acceptable. He was just telling Malos the facts as they stood.
"You mean to say that I couldn't exist without you?" Malos drawled in response. He wasn't usually one to question the facts, but he couldn't help but seek to...clarify, if given the chance.
He needed the truth. And the truth was...
"Quite." Quite so. If I had not brought you down from that architected arbor, you would have not been here to walk among men. Functionally, you simply would not have existed.
(See how much value Amalthus still places on the words and the ways and the means of men? In his misanthropic case, the hypocrisy is well taken. You are not God, o Quaestor. You will never be God, for you have not the stones, and you know it. Still, you cannot hide the fact that you very much do want to be.)
But return we must: quite so. It was a lie, and Malos could tell. Very little escaped him, once it was presented before his graying violet eyes.
On this cold morning, the Praetorium was arrayed in a mist of self-righteous emptiness. Usually, when it rains, one notices. One behaves accordingly. Not so here. It wasn't that these people were impervious to rain, but rather that they had never once reveled in its beauty.
To Malos, this was, quite clearly, a mistake. He made a point to know, and perhaps even to appreciate, every creature and orifice of this place that he was meant to destroy. It made the game gamier, the victory sweeter.
(He wanted to understand. He needed to understand. Maybe that wasn't his place, his purpose, but he wanted it all the same. It was only Amalthus's impulse, all in all, that kept him from doing so. Kept him from being so human, so whole. Right?)
"Right." Quite right. And this was satisfying enough, being a process spawned with the time of terminating signal so clearly in sight, with the goal laid so firmly. But Malos was a litle more maximal than that. Just a little.
So away he walked, the messiah pulled from a hat to fight the coming of tomorrow in whatever form it intended to appear. He would test this claim, that his existence meant less than negative space without a Driver to will it.
He would show the world that he was his own. That he was here, truly here, and that his purpose was...his own. Until the end.
come and see the show!
When Jin's eyes first locked with those of the Aegis, whatever rarity it was that he had diagnosed in its brighter, younger, brittler counterpart swiftly flew itself away, a petty distinction between brattiness and arrogance (that is to say, a growing pain and a personality trait) not worth trifling with when the fate of the world was at stake.
A game, he'd said. A game played with human lives as pawns - those of Blades as well, and at the present moment Jin truly couldn't tell if Malos was equating the overcapitalized individuals to their backdoor masters.
There wasn't much more time for deliberation. That sword, swirling with flames of fuschia and amethyst, mulberry and plum wine, was moving fast - far faster than Jin had ever seen any other being move, save for Mythra and he himself.
That was one point for Malos. He didn't mess around when it came to his purpose. Jin could appreciate that. Jin could see his reflection in that. Only...
Did Malos...like fighting? Did he enjoy this wanton impulse to destroy?
Jin was an excellent combatant, but he didn't like it. He didn't care for what it brought him, because if he'd his druthers every monster could simply be talked down from bloodthirsty scrapes at the air, their packs, other beasts, Lora's face--
There, she'd just barely dodged. And Malos grinned at her, showing no frustration whatsoever at the fact that he'd missed. Mythra's not-so-carefully planned plays with Addam as an assist were "nice tricks" to him - human things, contrivances that the Endbringer didn't need. So there - Mythra liked victory. She liked winning, liked to be the winner.
But the more Jin watched Malos, the more painfully weighted arcs of that Monado ripped through the air, threatening to tear Aegaeon's tubes from his head and slice the front half of Brighid's dress cleft from the back, the more he began to doubt how similar the two Holy Blades really were. He began to see a dichotomy of floral nature and fauning nurture.
So Jin juggled these thoughts as he pressed the flat of his blade closer, closer, close enough to turn just ninety degrees and see if, perhaps, the Aegis would make available the easy, painless (oh, were it only so) dispatch of the jugular after all.
Mythra liked sweet foods and meat, the two food groups most easily promising of an evolutionary payoff - there was sugar, there was salt, there was blood. Mythra was so human, and did so like the easy pleasures of being alive.
If she didn't have to rise up to this purpose of destroying this broad, violet blight on the world, the place she had to accept that she would call home, then she wouldn't fight. She knew other things, had been taught them.
And Malos? Once Mythra had cut in again to distract her partner (her brother?), the Paragon froze a shield in front of him and blinked once, twice, thrice, collecting his thoughts down from the acrid sky.
Malos had not evolved, apparently. In the two years since his "birth" he had come to appreciate nothing about humanity. He considered himself a blunt instrument, cloaked in all the richest purple of piety and royalty, wealth and mourning, yet caring for none of it.
"Malos." The call came leveled, frosty, across the dead radius of distance the Aegis had put between itself and the party.
"Yeah? You want something from me?"
"I want to know why you're doing this. Do you even know yourself?"
It was an academic, philosophical question. It put the ball in the other's court. Jin was ready to play the game, but just as Malos, he would only agree if he had the proper estimation upon the qualification of his opponent.
Visibly, Malos choked. It seemed some of his bloodlust had gone down the wrong pipe. He broke the eye contact Jin had yet kept up with a vicious jerk of his head, and the flames surrounding his feet leapt like a dog, a hellhound, raising its hackles.
"I'm just doing what I was made to do. Aren't you?"
He looked at Lora as he said it. Then he kicked her in the solar plexus, and she crumpled to the ground, and someone screamed.
man alone, born of stone, will stamp the dust of time; his hands strike the flame of his soul
ties a rope to a tree and hangs the universe, until the wind of laughter blows cold
Lora was dead. Jin was alive. She was and had been, in fact, nothing of any significance without him. If one took the Aegises' futures as fated destiny, then Lora had only existed to be a creaky, misturned cog in the wheel of the morgue-cart that had become Jin's life, for Jin was only extant to stand contradiction to Malos's straight-road path to his father's own personal hell.
Jin's life. Now, Jin was alive. If he wasn't, then they were all dead, because there was no way Haze could have survived, she'd never have done such a thing to Mikhail, no one ever would have done such a thing besides Jin, Jin, Jin--
What are you living for? Why are you doing this? Do you even know yourself?
He wanted that question answered. He needed that question answered. He needed to understand, understand, understand, why, why, why and how had Alrest come to be this way?
It wasn't dead. Torna had sunk, along with Estham and Coeia and Spessia, in spirit and all but, and Mor Ardain and Uraya and Leftheria and all the trade guilds that had yet to boom were still just as alive as they had been, if not, eventually, more (Indol, of course, didn't count).
But it felt it. Oh, without Lora, how it felt it. Every single other member of their group - even Haze, yes, even Haze - could have died away in the aftermath of that horrible encounter on the Soaring Rostrum, and Jin wouldn't have cared. It had always been just the two of them. He would have been perfectly content to live out his life in any world just that same way.
Perfectly. Content. Right?
But it didn't matter. What was past was past - Jin was no economist, no enthusiastic prospect for the likes of Addam's scythe-ridden post-apocalyptic farm, but he knew about sunk costs. He would gain none by waxing on should-have-dones and would-have-beens, on could-have-dieds and should-have-dinneds.
The only thing remaining for him now was answers to his questions. A mutant cannibal such as he was would never again be fit to provide the answer to that question he'd had on the tip of his tongue, on that one lonely night with Lora - What if there are other children? What if there are other little girls, just such as you? Don't they deserve what you had?
Does anyone deserve what you, we, I had?
This was the question standing foremost. What comes next, as a consequence? Revenge? Reeducation? Redemption?
Was any of that even possible? Jin didn't know. Still, he did very much care. The nihilism was, thankfully, only catching him in fits and starts, horrible little bursts, as yet.
What he did know, however, was that now the only being fit for him to commune with was Malos, and though he considered it a delusion, he had a horribly irritating sneaking feeling that the Dark Aegis was, somewhere somehow someway, still alive. After all, nobody would ever have pegged Malos as the type of being that just up and died.
It would be funny if it weren't gruesome. They were, together, unkillable. In the most selfish, twisted forms of selflessness, they were carrying out purposes that weren't their own, but also quite clearly weren't anyone else's.
They were the same. If Jin could wage his hypothesis again, he'd find it hitting all too much more apparently close to home, only he hadn't got a home. He only had life, which he didn't want.
All this, he told to Malos, but was generally much more collected as he did it. He delivered unto the walking Word of God all the impressions he had made in the past seventeen by three, six, nine, eleven sets of years, and then he concluded:
"If you're to come with me, you cannot yield. We must know what we are about, at all times." Your corrupted programming, our marching orders that we once so futilely clung to, cannot stand in our way.
Malos, arms crossed, kept up his own impression of bluster, but Jin marked carefully the ways in which facial geometry reacted to the imperative.
"Big talk, coming from you. I didn't have to answer your questions to know what you were about. You didn't care about anything but your Driver. You had morals, like all humans claim to, but you were nothing without her."
"I know that. You think I didn't carry that cross my entire life?"
"Your life's not over yet, Jin."
"So you take my point, Malos."
Jin and Malos were both alive. Neither were perfect. Taken by humans, neither had ever been perfect. And thus, neither would ever remain so infallible as they would hope, as they would dream, as they would assert and stake their claim.
At the top of the World Tree, Jin chose to meet his maker: Amalthus, the one who had coerced the world into such a state as to draw its most unbalanced systems out of hiding.
Malos, who had believed in him for so long, so nigh uncountably long, looked him in his stony façade, and the Aegis blinked as Atlas might shrug.
"We said we'd go together."
We said there was no other way.
"What are you without me, Malos?"
I gave you this new life, let you share of my own that I so foolishly took.
"Nothing, Jin. Is that what you wanted?"
"I am who I am. Are you?"
[First Impression, Part One]
Cold and misty morning, I heard a warning borne in the air
About an age of power where no one had an hour to spare
Where the seeds have withered, silent children shivered in the cold
Now their faces captured in the lenses of the jackals for gold
I'll be there
I'll be there
I will be there
Suffering in silence, they've all been betrayed
They hurt them and they beat them, in a terrible way
Praying for survival at the end of the day
There is no compassion for those who stay
I'll be there!
I'll be there!
I will be there!
There must be someone who can set them free:
To take their sorrow from this odyssey
To help the helpless and the refugee
To protect what's left of humanity
Can't you see?
Can't you see?
Can't you see?
I'll be there!
I'll be there!
I will be there!
To heal their sorrow
To beg and borrow
Fight tomorrow!
[Part Two]
Step inside, hello! We've a most amazing show!
You'll enjoy it all we know
Step inside! Step inside!
We've got thrills and shocks, supersonic fighting cocks!
Leave your hammers at the box
Come inside! Come inside!
Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!
See the show!
Left behind the bars, rows of Bishops' heads in jars
And a bomb inside a car
Spectacular! Spectacular!
If you follow me there's a speciality
Some tears for you to see
Misery, misery
Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!
See the show!
Next upon the bill in our House of Vaudeville
We've a stripper in a till
What a thrill! What a thrill!
And not content with that
With our hands behind our backs
We pull Jesus from a hat!
Get into that! Get into that!
Roll up! Roll up! Roll up!
See the show!
[First Impression, Part Two]
Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends
We're so glad you could attend, come inside, come inside
There behind a glass stands a real blade of grass
Be careful as you pass. Move along, move along
Come inside, the show's about to start!
Guaranteed to blow your head apart
Rest assured you'll get your money's worth
Greatest show in Heaven, Hell or Earth!
You've got to see the show. It's a dynamo!
You've got to see the show. It's rock and roll! Oh
Right before your eyes we pull laughter from the skies
And he laughs until he cries, then he dies, then he dies
Come inside, the show's about to start
Guaranteed to blow your head apart!
You've got to see the show. It's a dynamo!
You've got to see the show. It's rock and roll! Oh
Soon the Gypsy Queen in a glaze of vaseline
Will perform on guillotine! What a scene, what a scene
Next upon the stand will you please extend a hand
To Alexander's Ragtime Band, Dixieland, Dixieland!
Roll up, roll up, roll up!
See the show!
Performing on a stool we've a sight to make you drool
Seven virgins and a mule! Keep it cool, keep it cool
We would like it to be known the exhibits that were shown
Were exclusively our own. All our own, all our own
Come and see the show! Come and see the show!
Come and see the show!
See the show!
[Second Impression]
(Instrumental)
[Third Impression]
Man alone, born of stone
Will stamp the dust of time
His hands strike the flame of his soul;
Ties a rope to a tree and hangs the Universe
Until the winds of laughter blows cold
Fear that rattles in men's ears
And rears its hideous head!
Dread, death in the wind
Man of steel pray and kneel
With fever's blazing torch
Thrust in the face of the night;
Draws a blade of compassion
Kissed by countless kings
Whose jeweled trumpet words blind his sight
Walls that no man thought would fall
The altars of the just
Crushed, dust in the wind
No man yields who flies in my ship
DANGER!
Let the bridge computer speak
STRANGER!
LOAD YOUR PROGRAM. I AM YOURSELF
No computer stands in my way;
Only blood can cancel my pain
Guardians of a nuclear dawn!
Let the maps of war be drawn
Rejoice! Glory is ours!
Our young men have not died in vain
Their graves need no flowers;
The tapes have recorded their names!
I am all there is!
NEGATIVE! PRIMITIVE! LIMITED! I LET YOU LIVE
But I gave you life!
WHAT ELSE COULD YOU DO?
To do what was right!
I'M PERFECT. ARE YOU?