kyrie e leison
Chapters
Chapter 01: Keep your eyes on the prize, Addam. [2021-08-10]
Chapter 02: I've got you. Don't you worry. [2021-08-27]
Chapter 03: I'll be sure to savor this feeling. [2021-08-27]
Chapter 04: Finally, it's coming together. [2021-08-27]
Chapter 05: Our curiosity was rewarded! [2021-08-27]
Chapter 06: I'll do my part, I promise. [2021-12-17]
Chapter 07: Hey, Prince, did you see that? [2022-05-02]
Chapter 08: Greed is... Well, it's OK, sometimes. [2022-05-02]
Chapter 09: Didn't think you'd guess my favorite! [2022-05-02]
Let's not overindulge in another heavy-handed splice of the pre-experiment scenes. They've been over and done with, and Minoth takes his place somewhere he knows Addam will find him. Took his place, knew Addam would find. Calm down. The motion ceases.
Because Addam found him, and frowned and tilted his head, and blinked appraisal, and said, "Hello, old friend. Well now, this isn't right, is it?" And Addam was never one to be either prescient or doddering.
Pursing his lips, Minoth shooed him closer and put a hand to the "this" in question. An eyepatch. Telltale trickles, almost like rushed rivulets, of mottled skin poked out from top and bottom.
"Can you keep quiet?" he muttered, glances not quite furtive to the left and to the right.
"I can," Addam allowed. He was twenty-something, now, old enough to be trusted. Not that it took much to trust a boy, a man, like that. So Minoth sighed assent, as if he hadn't exactly planned this, planned exactly this, lifted quiet un-gloved hands to the scrap of black fabric so stupidly stretched around his head (he'd woven it in underneath the ponytail both for security and style), and pulled it up.
Addam was grinning like an idiot, of course, because it was even a silly peek-a-boo, he thought he'd be met with another fierce blue eye squinting cagily down at him, and it wasn't normal to be so mildly undulating, where had the "this isn't right" gone?
Never mind that, where had the eye itself gone? Orphaned socket studded over with a gray-brown expanse of scabbing was all that remained. The prince's own eyes went wild. "What on Alrest...?"
"Don't." Again, Addam wasn't one to get apoplectic either, but... "I lost it."
"You didn't lose it," Addam prodded with something almost like a sneer. "It was taken. You don't just lose an eye, especially not someone like you."
Somehow Minoth didn't think Addam meant his being a Blade. And oh, that. That too. To go with the eyepatch, a poncho. Minoth sighed again and shuffled it aside to reveal his now-tainted Core, snapping the eyepatch back down as he did so. And Addam, the idiot, didn't even seem to really notice. Not the right thing, anyway.
"Oh, what's this? Minoth...your hands."
His hands? Of all things here, his hands? Yes, they hadn't escaped unscathed, but his literal damned eye was missing and his Core was the wrong color. Not a different color, damn it, the wrong color. But poor beautiful oblivious Addam didn't seem to wonder about the shifted depth perception, or the lack of balance, or where the apparently handily heisted thing was now, not to speak of the mounted item.
Well, if you're going to disregard, my prince, so will I. "Eh, don't worry about it, I can write still. ...probably."
Addam's face was grave. Finally. Finally? Again. Again? "I'm worried, Minoth. You won't stop me by some clever wordplay this time."
"What, you wanna make an inspection tour?" And something something warrior monks passing by, a cliché of scenery. As yet, they, the mismatched twosome, still looked like they were just having a casual conversation, Addam's hands back to being propped so symmetrically on hips.
Then they moved to grasp at unwilling things. "Not to be maudlin, but that's exactly what I'd like to do." If not willing, and not even ready, then at the very least able. Fine.
Not fine. As the prince brought the damaged appendages closer to his watchful eyes, each scabbing wound only became more apparent.
His impressioned voice was a velvet murmur. No it wasn't. "Minoth...I'm taking you with me, today, now. You know that, don't you?"
Minoth wanted to snatch the hands back, but he didn't, for whatever reason, and they just hung limply between the two men. Not men. Two other things. "I didn't know any such thing until you mentioned it, and I still don't know it. What are you talking about?" His speech, then, was not quite so limp.
Addam shook at the dangling limbs, both sets. "Please, don't deny it. There's no one who loves you here, and I don't think there's anyone here that you love, either. Am I right?"
"You're not wrong. But c'mon, you're a prince. Ain't you got problems of your own? What do you need hanging around with a guy like me?" A guy like you, a guy like me. Something in Addam's shoulders sagged, but it was with relief, not resign.
"If I was feeling a little more diplomatic, I'd say that it's precisely because I don't have problems that I'll put my best efforts towards helping you. But I'm not, and I don't need to be. It's simply because I love you."
"Prince..." And now look who was being maudlin - not Addam, as he raised the bruised knuckles to his lips and kissed each one in painstaking turn. Minoth stood silent and staring for quite some time, and eventually Addam felt the singular transfixed gaze on the back of his head.
He raised his head back up slowly, agonizingly slowly, and Minoth's dominant ocean blue eye that so recently used to match his Core Crystal wholesale was wobbling in its searching glance. With a simple, careful rotation, Addam moved the hands he yet held to face palms inward, and laid one on each of his own cheeks.
"I've always been your prince, haven't I?" What the hell was this? Roll with the improvisation, one supposes.
Yet somehow Minoth found the presence of mind to press his hands closer then, and reply softly, "Always."
"Part of the point of the experiment was to make it so that you don't need a Driver, right?"
"Affirmative."
"But you can still have one?"
Oh, okay. This. That's what the hell it was. Something off with the pacing, but fine enough.
"But I can still have one."
"And I can be yours?"
The repetitive pantomime had almost worn out its welcome as Minoth gave his last reply: "And you can be mine."
Forehead met forehead, eyes and lids fluttered shut, and in that quiet, desolated corner of the Indoline Praetorium, where precious few good things had ever been, a bond was kindled, perhaps even reforged.
"We'll go back to Torna, and you can stay with Flora. And I'll visit you whenever I can until they ship me off somewhere with my own land, and then you'll be safe, truly safe. Would you like that?"
Something sure as hell was off with the pacing. It came in smatters, a gruesome glut of dialogue with simultaneously no meaningful motion and every emotive gesture cast and crammed in and in between. Here and now, the very thing. Lovely, I'm sure. And just so, indeed.
"Asylum from my abusers and a girlfriend into the mix? You strike a very pretty bargain, Addam."
"Now wait just a minute, I didn't say that-!" And then Addam thought about it for a moment, and then he thought about it for another moment more, and then his widest smile blossomed against Minoth's lips. "Yes, dear. You can have a girlfriend too."
They could not, of course, obtain the aforementioned feminine blessing quite yet, still trapped as they were on an intellectually hostile sub-titanic dragon with no clear path to freedom.
"What's the most distinctive part about you, that would get you caught if you came with me?" Leaving aside, of course, the obvious answer of his missing eye.
"My hair..." Minoth started slowly, knowing that Addam wasn't homing to a crafty point here but getting wary all the same.
Luckily for him, the prince was in agreement. "Well that's no good. I couldn't bear to see that go. What if we got you a helmet? Carnelian's been assigned to me, maybe he could find you a spare."
"And a uniform, too? Not too many cowboys walking around this joint, Prince. And even if it's smart, you couldn't pay me enough to dress me up like a monk."
"Don't be a gold-digger, Minoth!" Addam exclaimed, shoving at his arm and cueing their re-entrance into casual company for a blithe little trot down to the port. Don't be such a gold-digger, really, because that would have been the least of your thievings.
So they made it off, and never mind the details. Why not? Why don't mind them? What's being hidden here? And why am I asking it so plain out in front of your eyes? Anyway.
The little house in Heblin was square and sensible. Of course it was. You wouldn't design a spare set piece to represent spit-shine spot-on homeyness any other way. Addam stood Minoth to one side of the door, hand laid on his back just underneath the jut of the ether deposits, and knocked, smart raps one-two-three.
A little too neat. If Minoth had had to peg Addam for a knocker, it would have been something a little more sloppy, a little more dragged. This was almost like a wake-up call. Here. We. Are.
If luck would have it, then, well, there they'd stay, too. Addam hadn't indicated his exact itinerary, and again, he wasn't one to be doddering, so that was a little odd. Ah, well, but he could be hospitable. Keeping court business woven and all was something to be learned and appreciated. I appreciate you, Addam. I couldn't help but.
Luck was surely having it today, because it was Miss Hentisane herself who answered, and not the Mrs. As with the experiment, I needn't describe Flora; she's simply very clever and very sensible and very...very unpredictably non-combative, she was, when Addam had gauged the scene and pulled his newfound Blade into view.
"Oh, is this him?" she asked brightly with arms crossed at the cupped elbows and head tilted obligingly to the side. Her plaits didn't swing. Maybe Minoth hadn't been looking as they'd stilled their motion. But he hadn't been looking anywhere but at her. He couldn't help but.
"The very one," Addam returned with equal glow, clapping gloved hand on collared shoulder.
Minoth didn't say it, but he thought it: does she know me? Who is "him", to her? Who is she, to me?
"Well, come in," said Flora, as if it was cold outside and there was some brisk breeze blowing through each admirable head of even more admirable hair. "Mother's being absolutely horrid today, but I'll try to get away as soon as I can."
Addam made a face. "Is she pestering you about me again?"
"Oh, sure enough. Half the time I can't tell what she's thinking, if she's for you or she's against you. Really, in the end, all I know is she's against me."
"Girl trouble?" Minoth prompted, making a pained face of his own at his awkward joke.
Flora turned to face him - huh, that's funny, could have sworn she already had been - and her expression, more a guise, was uncanny. Lips slightly parted, eyebrows slightly raised, something plotting plotting plotting. "I wish," was all she said to clarify.
In they swept, directly up the parlor steps, and as soon as Flora had pointed out the correct doorway, she disappeared again, bootstep sounds hardly matching the way she flew down the flight.
The room was pink, a pleasant warm color of appreciable sanguinity, and it smelled just as pleasant. Minoth, the classically touch-starved, still found it then quite a curveball when, after the more vulnerable of the two had been settled into a resting position at last, Addam laid a questioning hand by the glowing tangency of the ether lines above his hip.
Unexpectedly handsy and non-hesitant, even for him. Well, but then I'm making Addam out to be some kind of depthless mad-maudlin freak who has and had no moral uphold. Quite the contrary. Quite.
The scene blinked into motion once more, mutters about startled shudders and tones utterly conciliatory and all.
"Is this alright?"
"Your hand on my side - at my side? Addam, that's..." The single eye was wily even as Minoth's ribcage heaved.
Breath marked pulsing, time meted out, and then the dialogue ran like paint dripping. Like something...dripping.
"Do you know why I wanted to touch you there so much?"
"Not a clue. You got a thing for my abs, or something?"
"I always thought your eyes were so beautiful, and now the one is gone and your Core Crystal is this mottled color. You could never be anything but perfect to me, Minoth, but forgive me if I'm particularly attached to the parts of you that are still that same beautiful blue. The parts they didn't taint."
"Me perfect? Need I say it again? You're the prince."
"And so what if I am? Doesn't a prince need his knight in shining armor?"
"I think that's usually the princess, and I don't exactly shine."
"So you'll have a princess! And whatever else it is that you could want."
"You don't need to spoil me, Addam, I'm still the same guy as I was last week."
"And thank the Architect for it, hmm? Listen to me, Minoth. Flora and I are great friends, and we always have been, and if I have to get married for politic business then of course it'll be her. But she's not much for being doted on, at least not by me, and if you're amenable then I want to try giving everything to you. I think it's the least you deserve."
"How come it's you waxing poetic?"
"It's just as I said: I want to love you the way you always should have been, and the way you always will be, if you stay with us."
"You're not really giving me much choice, here."
"Yes, well. I think if I did, overtly, you'd probably run away. The choice is still there and yours, it always will be, but I won't risk you by being timid. I'll say it out however many times I have to."
"So you're saying your girlfriend is too tough for you and you need me in the middle?"
"I don't know about the first part, but I do need you."
"Addam, you're..."
"I'm sorry, is it too much? I can't help but be overwhelmingly taken by you, and want to care for you."
"I'm just a Blade, Addam. Not even, anymore."
"But I've known you for quite some time."
"You were young. You still are."
"And what's that supposed to mean? If I'm so young, then you can't blame me for having a bit of a crush. More than just a bit of one."
"Addam..."
And then Flora came back in, calling something strangely incomprehensible over her shoulder to her mother, and her tone softened when she saw Minoth, and everything stopped. Hazy. Was it the flesh? Everything dulled, sharpness shaved?
Indeed, it was a dull sort of comfort when she moved to join them in their repose, Minoth now laid and flanked on both sides by willing and able protectors - against what? He didn't fall asleep, no, so it wasn't that. Well, one supposed having any sort of affection at all tended quite exponentially away from the flatline curve of the Praetorium. Anything was better than that. Anything...
"My chest hurts," Minoth said idly, almost just to pass the time.
Flora remained where she was, but Addam bent up at the waist and cast a concerned glance at the Core Crystal that had just been pulsing beneath his ear.
"That's not good," he frowned out, and Minoth smacked the back of his head. "Not like that, you clown. ...inside."
"Oh," said Addam, dumbly. Flora pulled him back down and herself closer, and mumbled softly, "Does it still hurt?"
"Hurts more now."
"Not to be a sadist, but...good."
"Good? Flora, I'm not supposed to have a heart."
"Maybe so, but at least we know it works."
And work it did, as they sat there, lay there in the quiet stillness for quite some time until Flora frowned herself and reached a hand back to the top of her head.
"Addam, do you feel a draft?"
"Not particularly, why?"
"My hair feels like it's been chilled, and Minoth is shaking. I'll have to go ask Mother if she's opened a window somewhere."
She made to swing her legs off the side of the bed, but Minoth's arm around her waist stopped her. "Not a draft."
"No? What then? Are you alright? I suppose this is rather an uprooting for you."
"And here I thought you were the smart one. Would you take a look at my face, already?"
"Now, Minoth," she started as she fit the rise of her gaze around the contour of his jaw, "there's no need to be-- Oh. Oh, Architect in Elysium."
Out of his right eye and decorating the cheek below, tears. Normal, human tears. Blades cried them also, when there was due cause, but then for Blades there was not often due cause. Not when there was time to go with it.
Out of his left eye, or rather where it had been, if we must be over-heavy-handed, and we must, to state that it was yet missing...pure liquid ether, blue and viscous and leaked. Some of it, likely, had leaked down onto Flora's crown.
"If you keep holding me like that, I may very well die. And then again, if you let go, it might be just the same."
"That's not much of a choice," Flora said as she worried her lower lip. "I don't think we should just put the eyepatch back on and leave it."
Addam, bless his buoyant soul, seemed to be madly determined to keep heedless of the situation, taking the tack of burrowing in closer as if his human hands could bind the Blade together and stop the chemical bisection of his Core Crystal. Oh, human hands...
"Addam, do you think maybe it's because you haven't formed a bond?"
Human hands! Again! Addam had the mind to keep his mouth shut, again. "You think I could handle that, with the state I'm in?"
"We can't just leave you here in this purgatory. You'll have to choose something: bond, or be held, or not be held. Whichever you think will be best."
And the thought was nearly tantalizing, a bond with Addam, gold like his prince was and always had been, a bond the way Blades were supposed to have, a bond that would make him real and whole again, Core Crystal or not.
"I'll take door number one."
Flora nodded briskly, grasped Addam's right hand in her left, and leaned questioning lips up to the ether-stained cheek.
"What, are you going to be there for emotional support? I thought that was supposed to be my job."
Something shuddered, in the air and in her breast, and she kissed the emanating eye without the slightest additional hesitation, at the same time as Addam bowed his head to the Core.
As a writer, even tangentially, Minoth never liked to stoop to tossing something off as indescribable and leaving it at that, but this...? There was no room in his mind for thought, only the need to squeeze their hands tighter and tighter as the coiling ether surged.
Then, it was over, and yet it had only just begun. "You've been awfully quiet," he croaked out to Addam, who simply hummed, "I love you," and that was that.
Only that wasn't that, because Flora was still there.
"How's it hurt now?" It...oh, he hadn't stopped to check. His chest felt like it was levitating, but no, it didn't exactly hurt. Instead of answering, he clamped an arm again over her waist and buried his nose in her hair; it was deceptively soft and smelled like strawberries.
"Hey!" "What?" "I can't see your smile now."
"Oh, Flora... Can't you feel it?"
"Oh, you're right. Yes, love, I can."
Something hitched in the affinity link. "What?"
"You know what."
"Hmm, no, I don't think I do."
"Addam!"
"Humor him, won't you, Flora?"
"Oh...go to sleep, both of you. I have to go make dinner."
Not another sound was made, and it was only an incredibly strong pull in the ether, perhaps one doubled in fortitude by virtue of the paired count of souls willing it, that kept her wrapped gleefully up in arms and smiles and love.
"You're going to starve, you know that?"
"Eh, you kept me alive this long. I'm sure you won't have too much more trouble."
"My lord, I cannot accept your offer, even your command. You know as well as I do that I would fare no better with an Aegis than the Quaestor has. Please, select someone else - perhaps another scholar from the Praetorium?"
In the throne room of the Tornan palace. Said Quaestor, said storied scholar, only raised his chin a single inquisitive, observing inch, and the only thing that kept Minoth standing firm and not crushing Flora's steadying fingers in his grip was her own crushing his first.
Everything shifts into the present tense then. Addam is walking towards him with the same steady stride, the same benign smile that Minoth loves and has pledged himself to love, only he seems now completely lost to the caricature that the Flesh Eater never wanted to paint nor even see him as. His lips quirk madly, maddeningly.
"Here, why don't you try? You might as well. What could be the worst that would happen?"
A very Addam thing to say. No it isn't. Flora just as crescepent beside him lifts his hand in hers, tilts her head like she's being purposeful and motive in her beguiling. "Go on, love, why don't you?"
Why don't I? Because obviously you're afraid to, and you're not half as traumatized as me.
Why don't I? Because obviously you're afraid to, and you're not half as traumatized as me.
He takes the crystal, gray in its purple-greenness such that he can't tell, not quite but at all, which one it is, which one it was supposed to be that Amalthus owns (owns?), and Flora is still holding his other hand, so he shrugs, and lets his left hand drop to his side.
"Sure thing, Prince." Then his eyesight bloats, as if the missing eye is forcibly regrowing its way in and all his careful reattunement has gone to waste. Fish-eye, they call this. How on earth would he know that? Sure thing.
The pressure builds and builds and builds and his eyelid screws itself counter-clockwise. Counter, right. No, left. Correct, right. No, wrong. The Aegis is in his left hand. The Aegis Core is in his left hand. Oh, obviously. What's to be afraid of? A Blade can't awaken a Blade. A Blade can't form a connection with an Aegis. A Blade can't--
No one, Blade or human or Flesh Eater most of all, can keep their eyes open anymore when the retinal cords have been cut. Unplugged. Lights out. Pay the piper? Anyway.
Father, please. He's so close. Let us help him.
...
Wind does not blow in a throne room. Grass does not rustle, brooks do not babble. And neither did they here.
"Where am I?" Hey, might as well be predictable.
"This is Elysium." Minoth was about to rejoin when the flat, matter-of-fact voice offered something many orders of magnitude more jarring: "You're dead."
"So a Blade resonating with another Blade kills them? Or maybe just when it's an Aegis? That's fine, I guess." Had to be some way to kill me, now.
"You've been dead," a second voice said, similar in timbre to the first in such a manner that he couldn't quite trace back to tell which of them had spoken each of the three phrases. "You've been dead since the experiment. Is that fine, you guess?"
"Would that explain why the both of you are here, and not just the one?"
By then, the owners of both voices had passed into view, stepping out from behind the tree that marked what seemed like the center of the universe. No, not from behind but from the other side. The world a ring, the stage not set back to front but round to round.
"It would. But don't you care about the both of them?"
"By your account, everything that happened between us was some kind of anti-lucid dream. I don't see what's to care about. I'm dead, and you two are the arbiters of heaven and hell. Send me where you like, it doesn't matter now."
"Doesn't it?" The male, or at the very least male-adjacent, figure, broad and foreboding, crossed its, his, arms. "You wouldn't have dreamed all that if it didn't matter. And you're no woolgathering stooge. You wanted a better Driver, yeah, but you didn't make up the fact that those two would do anything for you."
A better Driver...and he'd idealized, hadn't he. His one-off off-chance meeting with Flora in a marketplace - she'd been barbed but open, warm in her steely frigidity because she was so clever and so kind - had turned itself over in his mind until he'd decided that she would accept him with Addam, she would pull him in and care for him because anyone's touch, woman's or man's, was better than the marbled bleakness of Indol.
Accept him with Addam, because he'd grown to think of the prince as his own, to think of him as his Driver even before that experiment that had promised, as Stannif had whispered to him as if it was a morsel of meat and he was the most vociferous carnivore, that he could choose his own, that he didn't even need one. But perhaps he longed for one, and there was his prince always so obligingly present, of course he was the obvious, intrinsic choice.
Obvious. Intrinsic. A lie. "Didn't I make it up? Aren't I just a foolish dreamer? The world is cruel and I'm its tool, Amalthus's whims are mine to carry out and to be rebellious would be to discard my inborn purpose."
"Slow down with the rhymes there, Mr. Poet Laureate." The female counterpart now, fluorescent and blinding, hand cocked coolly at hip to match who must be her brother, looking smug if her lips weren't pursed to accompany her effortlessly arched eyebrow. No she didn't. No she wasn't!
Her tone gentled, schooled. "And please, enough of the self-hatred. You didn't even live through the future where your abuse at the hands of your former Driver led you to run away from him and let him bring about the eventual destruction of three Titans, as well as countless other desecrations of our father's system and world."
The what? The what? Whose WHAT? "That would have been my fault? Taking my sorry ass out of that stagnation would give him the power to end the world? You've gotta be kidding." Well, they didn't exactly look it.
"And now you're asking me if I care about them. Obviously it shouldn't matter very much, for the fate of the quite literally Architect-damned world it CANNOT matter very much! Just let me out of this already, let the next Minoth wake up. Let him have the experiment and die again. Let whatever needs to happen happen so that whole mess will be staved."
Minoth said all this with hand on hip and orator's half-curled fling of fingers, and then he flung the arm towards gravity, willing something, anything, to follow natural pattern. The arm and attached socket did. The conversation didn't.
"He can't."
"What?" Hand came off hip, two sets of digits massaged tired forehead.
"Your Core wasn't just tainted, it was corrupted. You're dead. Like, dead dead."
"If I'm dead," Minoth started through clenched teeth, "then why won't you just let me DIE?!" Again, arms flung down to side, both of them. "Flesh Eater experiment here to make me live forever, wish-fulfillment daydream there to make me happy with the way I had to live, and you two here guilting me into...what? Just what is it you want from me?"
"Amalthus brought you here," she said, as if that helped anything. As if that...changed anything?
"To Elysium? Great, I owe everything to him, as ever." Go on, be reductive, as if if if ! that will help. Help. Who cares about help. Who cares about help, and what doesn't. You're a what now, Minoth. You're dead.
The taller heaven-dweller scoffed. "You don't owe him a thing."
Owing, and keeping tallies, and oh, what's this?
Minoth bit his lip, chewed at it with the very tip of a single front tooth, stretched it out to its limit before it dropped back down as if untouched again. "I never told him about the experiment. Just told him to look at my Core all screwed up...but then he mentioned it by name later, and he knew details about the purpose too."
The woman (this specific ponytail strongly suggested it, anyway) nodded. "How else would he have known that if he wasn't a figment of your subconscious?"
Minoth was yet too distracted to answer. "And leaving Indol. It happened in an instant, I don't even remember how we did it." He pursed his lips now. "I'm not one to leave out details all wanton like that."
"Tell me something, Minoth," she started in again, softly. "Do you like writing out the gory details? Does it make you feel happy? Does it make you glad to be alive?"
"No...not usually. It's the people talking, the love they show, the symbolism. I want to make people feel something, not think something. Not that I don't want to make them think too, and challenge their minds."
The gory details...the gory details, the gory details, the gory details. "Everything was so disjointed. People looking one place and sounding another, and everything still until it would all tumble motion together. Is that death?"
Arms crossed tighter on the bulkier of the figures, hugging ground and solidity. "Not death, but corruption, like she said."
"She," Minoth repeated. "Who is she? Who are you? I know you're the Aegises, I could have gathered that much, but...no, really. Who are you?"
"Pneuma." The calmer, steadier voice. "Logos." The brusquer, blunter one.
"And is that all you are? Names? How do I know I'm not imagining you two as well?"
Logos shrugged. "You don't. But if you want to believe, if you want to cling to the life and the truth that you might still be able to have, then consider...isn't this a hell of a lot different from what you were experiencing when you thought you were alive?"
Minoth, not half so seemingly dismissive, scowled. "That sounds exactly like what a figment of my imagination would say. This is exactly what I was afraid of, you know. That I'd die in the experiment, only I wouldn't really be dead. I'd be in some kind of purgatory." He waved observation at the skybox.
"Purgatory," Pneuma echoed, again softly. "Without a Driver, yes, you will be in purgatory. Because you, unlike us, were not made to exist without one."
He was still stood there like an awestruck child, taller than Pneuma, yes, but so small among the landscape. So small among the veritable angels they were. Make it biblical and eldritch, even - ha, maybe then Amalthus would believe.
You can work with this, Minoth. Time for action. Time for cue, if you must frame it that way, but eh, that's your lot, isn't it? That's your role, isn't it? Might as well play it.
He stood up straighter then. The knee splayed confidence, but now was the time for the dueling stance. "I wasn't made to be knocked off my block by a power-hungry blue-skinned twink either, I bet, but here I am, huh? What's the next motive?"
"Now," Logos started, and there was a dash of devilry in his tone, "we wait. You can't be woken up again, but we can. And once we are...showtime." Showtime.
Architect have mercy on that poor fool's soul - only he's not so poor and he's not so old. He's no lamest lost sheep, so bring him into the fold. Architect have mercy on that poor fool's soul...
Let's pull the lens back, shall we? I'm sure it's only fair - surely you all think me far too impish, entirely too much so! I'll be...expository, if you will.
Minoth died on whatever semblance of an operating table. Amalthus, quietly furious with the failure, packed it up and made to scale the World Tree. His aim was to find the Architect at the top and cast before his maker what a ridiculic farce it was that his so treasured envoys of the universe's truth were in fact so pitiful, so unable to withstand an actual fusion with humanity outside of his preimagined, not to say predestined, delicate balance.
No one knew, no one ever could know, better than Minoth, what the world under Amalthus's whims would look like. No one else would have ever dreamed of destruction made needs must meteable by the influential force of one singular Quaestor upon one singular Core Crystal.
His Core Crystal.
"You had blue eyes, yeah?"
"I...yeah?"
"What color?"
"What...color." Didn't I just say blue? Didn't you just say blue?
Pneuma elbowed her brother, not unkindly. "Logos, he's not going to give you a hex code. Come on, approximate."
"Me? You're the graphics processor, why don't you do a little work on this?"
"Logos."
"What?"
"It's just one parameter. Just do it."
"Haah...fine. But if my pipeline gets jammed up and hangs because this was a bad branch prediction, I'm blaming you for the wasted time."
"Won't be the first time..."
"You two, uh...okay?"
"We're fine. He forgets that Ontos took the stable storage as well, so me doing something to hog up the swap memory...not a good idea."
"Oh, look at you, little miss 'it's just one parameter', bet you think you're just so smart now, huh-"
"Logos."
"What?"
"Shut up."
"Whatever. Cyan-y blue or cobalt-y blue?"
Oh. They're talking to me. Words...words I know. Descriptors, powerful above all. There is no dreamcast in the lowly noun.
"Cyan." Not that it much mattered, since Addam wasn't around to look at them. To look into them. And, then, Minoth was the one who wasn't around. Anyway.
"So I can sample from the ether lines. How does #29BEFF sound?"
Pneuma considered this for a moment, and the pronounced electric blue shade seemed to flash in the globe of their presence for a moment. "Too bright. Try #29C3CE?"
"Perfect."
"What, you're not even gonna wait for convergence?"
"Piss off, partner. That was preconditioned enough."
"Oh, right. 'Subspace, schmubspace', how could I ever forget?"
"Are you...arguing about what color to make my eye? You're replacing my eye?"
Logos nodded. Well...something nodded. The light shifted, but only very subtly. Precious subtly.
"So why don't you just match it to the other one?"
Silence of and in motion. "Uh-oh."
"Look - Minoth? This is all gonna sound like a bunch of technobabble bullshit-"
"Oh, perish the thought." As if there hadn't been a veritable plethora of nonsensical specification dragged on and up to this point.
"-but when your Core got corrupted, that means that some of the sectors on it which usually store data and provide heap space for your basic functions were damaged. In your case, it was the ones that connect to your optic nerves. Just like in the human brain, the right side and the left side sit next to each other. So much for wear leveling."
"In other words," Pneuma continued with an air of morbid finality, "your optic chiasm is now an optic chasm."
Oh, context, how I love you. Oh context, how I hate you. "Oh. So that's why the lights went out."
"Bingo. Now, that's no big deal, because eyes are eyes, but we've got a very precise maneuver ahead of us once we finish fixing you up."
"Something involving me seeing, feeling, walking, breathing again?"
"Bingo again." Again, but this time Logos. "In order to make sure that your Driver doesn't abuse us like he did you-"
"-toward the corruption of the entire world-"
"-we have to let me be awakened by him, have me awaken you, and have you kill him so you can then kill me, but not before we get you to your Drivers so someone can actually stay awake and remember this whole mess, because otherwise none of us will ever leave this damn tree."
Deep breath. Again, you're not breathing yet, but still. How many steps is that? One, two, three and three point five, double back to insert two point five which leads on to four five six seven...
"Hell of a convolution you've got going there, Logos."
"Exactly. Exactly."
"Exactly what? You said I couldn't be woken up again."
"Details, details - that was shorthand, an alias. You can't be woken up to get walking on your own, like a normal Blade, which means that Amalthus can't touch you, and neither can Addam, but I - we - as you can imagine, don't follow the normal rules. You are exactly the temporary variable we need to get this switcharoo rolling smoothly."
"Thank you. I guess."
"You're always welcome," put in Pneuma, once more neither sweetly nor sickly-sweetly.
"And your role is?"
"Damage control." Not quite a verbal shrug, but close. "And Amalthus could choose either of us, so if you'll help us then I imagine you'll consent to being instantiated by either one of us as the parent process."
Suddenly, Minoth wished quite strongly that he could pinch the bridge of his nose to relieve some of the tension building up thereat, except, of course, the non- and even anti-corporeality of the whole affair meant that he needn't worry.
"Sure, sure. Whichever. Long as I'm helping. But if I need to kill you, that means that you won't return to your Core when I kill him. So why can't one of you kill him?"
"It's not that we can't. It's that we won't want to."
"Huh." He had to admit, Logos was onto something there - no matter how much hatred he had harbored for his Driver, he'd never quite been able to bring himself to such blatant, blunt urges.
Logos clarified, "When an Aegis enters resonation with a human, which was never meant to happen, originally, we get more or less reformatted. Only the shell of our processing framework remains, and none of our own learned morality or behaviors. Now, I can leave in an instruction dictating that our purpose is to awaken you, but an installed persistent duty to kill whoever awakens us will only make trouble. Amalthus isn't in the system by any defined identifier the way you are, so it'd have to be universal."
Convenient way to enforce a death penalty, maybe. Or a weapon of mass destruction for a war, perhaps? Christ, Minoth. Look at the way you've been trained to think.
"Father wanted Blades to be able to interface with humans," Pneuma commented, "but it seems he didn't do a very good job, as far as our overseeing of the system is concerned."
"Nodding, nodding," Minoth said out loud to make up for his lack of ability to actually visibly perform the same action (for whose watching eyes? it was unknown).
"So it's curtain up, and Amalthus will no doubt awaken one of you, because he's a greedy, conniving, nihilistic son of a bitch. You'll inherit his piss-poor outlook, but you'll also remember just enough that you're meant to grab me from wherever he's got me stashed and awaken- wake me up, let's say.
"Now, I, without having had my memories wiped - even though I'm still sorting out the facts from the fluff with this whole prophetic dream scenario - will know point-blank that I'm supposed to shoot him dead. You're an Aegis, so you won't return to your Core, but you'll probably be hopping mad at me, so I'll be set to jump off the tree and run, run, run, until I reach Addam and Flora.
"You, being on crazy-brain, won't be able to work your Aegis magic again to bond me to them, so that means that whichever of you didn't get snatched by Amalthus will have to be awoken by someone more sanguine-minded so I can explain this to them. Then once that's done and dusted, my beloved non-Praetor predator will have to be put down, whether by mind or by matter.
"Architect have mercy, that's a lot of exposition. But whatever. Fin scene, curtain down, everybody take a bow. Yeah?"
"You've got quite a way with words, you know that?"
"Oh, piss off. Give me my damn eyes back, already."
So Minoth had eyes. So he had eyes, arms, legs, and guns, and all of that without having a body, just yet.
The world was purple, for the briefest moment. Without having been flashed over blank through his most substantiating memories, he had enough perception to see that, and so there was Logos.
Except...his wings were missing, and the garish yet alluring lavender-violet of his hair had been toned down to a grim blue-burgundy-black, and he looked...constrained. Corrupted. Less powerful than he had in the Elysium not-dream, and much less benevolent, benign.
He looked like trouble, and Minoth did not in the least feel like riling that demonic beast by striking down his, their awakener. But he didn't have a choice, right? Their plan was to combine a failed experiment's reserve willpower and independence with a god-child's precision and single-mindedness to eliminate Amalthus for all how foul they knew that he was. In the future Pneuma had hinted at, there would be no stop to his self-serving, half misguided but more plain misanthropic ways.
Minoth wasn't down for murder, generally. He didn't like using force, though he would admit to favoring, even relishing, intimidation. It was theatrical, wasn't it? All in the spirit of the script.
And the script they were meant to follow now dictated that Logos (or whoever he was, in this altered form) would regard Amalthus very carefully, and then direct his gray-eyed gaze down to the bag slung across the Quaestor's waist.
"What is your name?" His voice quivered, ever so slightly, but after years of observation the tell was quite plain to Minoth, and if he could detect it then Logos surely could.
The fallen angel, through his prominent presence, seemed to think for a moment (or, if you wish, he seemed not to think at all). Was he deciding on a name? Sliding aside datanomical bolts to the innermost recesses of his mind and Core so that he could retrieve that already chosen long before, or seconds ago? Was he waiting for Amalthus to provide him one?
Maybe he was just being dramatic himself. Maybe he was just drawing out his entrance, before providing the same name he'd given to Minoth--
"Malos."
Oh. Not good. The opposite of good. Bad.
It was, oh, so very very very too much on the nose. Minoth knew that the cores of Zettar's siblings' names could be traced back to roots meaning "white" and "useless", but at least those could be slid more comfortably into colloquial parlance: perhaps "pale" and "frivolous", evoking sentiments of preciousness and precociousness, leaving the half-siblings of the High Prince to be set as gems in Aureus's crown.
But Malos? No. Nothing more there than the essence of all evil. Minoth processed the auditory cue and tried to tease out any semblance of inflection from the low, clear voice, but found none. Perhaps if he could see, with those oh-so-very-important eyes, but he couldn't. He could only listen.
"My name is Amalthus." Likely, there a bow. "I am a Quaestor of the Alrestian nation of Indol. We preserve religious integrity where the other nations do not, and venerate the teachings of our forebears as they have brought us closer to understanding all of Bladekind. It is my hope that you will assist in that endeavor...?"
Silence.
"Malos?"
More silence, but this time it breathed.
"You have something."
"The other Core? Yes, I am holding it. I intend to take it back down to the Praetorium with me."
"Not that. The other other Core."
"The...ah. You must mean--"
The color of the ambient light shifted, turning from muffled, boring navy to a more electrified, cooling if not calming cyan - there it was again!
"I'm pleased that you noticed, Malos." If Malos was flattered by the schoolboy's compliment, he didn't say. At least Amalthus was still too far removed from his base element to offer a patronizing "Very good." at the end as well.
He shifted Minoth's Core in his palm, once, twice, pausing only briefly when seeming to notice the absence of wear that had just previously been present. It didn't matter. The touch was simultaneously uncomfortably impersonal and slimily intimate nonetheless.
"I brought this corrupted Core with me to show to the Architect. If he is nowhere to be found, perhaps you can offer me an explanation. Why are Blades so fragile? Why are they so easily diverted from their purposes in serving us, as their Drivers?"
Reaching for the Core with a single steady hand, Malos gave his jaw a nigh-imperceptible clenching set. "Maybe they're meant to serve more than just their Drivers."
Amalthus yieled the jaded stone willingly. Probably, he thought Malos was going to fix it, whatever he had done to it, the true extent of which he didn't and thus would never know. Certainly, he didn't think it possible that Malos had already done so, without a Driver to give him a will.
Of a sudden, the Core Crystal, mounted in spangled brown leather, shone a cool, deep purple. Maybe that was on the nose too, except it wasn't - it was on the chest, you see?
Minoth felt his legs underneath him. He felt his arms hang at his sides, above his holsters. He felt his eyes blink open, a scar painted proudly above and below his left, and then his right hand spun up a gun, and leveled it point-blank at Amalthus's head.
Probably, the Quaestor thought he was seeing things. Certainly, he didn't think he was about to never see the light of day again.
He felt no more free than he had the first moment he'd awoken missing an eye, real or not, air shoving uncomfortably at the (thankfully or perhaps only intuitively) cleanly sculpted negative space in the socket where once such an ocular device had been. At the present moment, he could be regarded Driverless, and he had been so then. He didn't understand the science completely, and neither had Amalthus, but it was something about a self-perpetuating cycle; a being that could interface with itself, providing both clasps of the connection at once.
Carefully holstering the gun, Minoth turned to lay cautious eyes on Malos. If it were indeed possible, the Aegis had become entirely disconnected from his own recently-primary objective and now regarded Minoth as something entirely new. Processor ticked up, Malos ducked to the fallen body faster and palmed the emerald Core Crystal with a hideous ease. His armor creaked as he stood again.
"What do you plan on doing with that?" Minoth queried, conversationally and unbarbed as could be. Behind his opponent lay a vast room covered in rivets and sheeting and circuitry and terminals, millennia more advanced than anything Judicium had ever elucidated. If they had been able to shut Amalthus up here ad aeternam, maybe that would have been alright. Maybe he would have occupied himself non-detrimentally, for once.
Yeah, right. That was the whole problem. Even just getting his hands on Malos for the most miniscule of timespans had been enough to transform the Master Blade from a neutral, snarky entity with otherworldly features and incredibly pragmatic intent to...this robot. He considered everything at length, but acted without pretense or preamble.
He was, indeed, very dangerous. And he had the Pneuma Core, to boot. That...was trouble. Even though Minoth's quick-note dramatization of the whole affair had definitely, absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, waxed improbable on the actual measure, the affect and the effect, of Amalthus's influence on whichever Aegis he would choose (and oh, Minoth should really have been able to predict which one that would be, despite any flickering phases of color perception he'd had in the premonition dream), there seemed no safe way out of this.
Option one: try to thrust a barrel at Malos's Core, or head, or waist, or shoulder, or neck, or...did a Blade even have vital points? A Blade this armored, this so surely more physical than its original incarnation? So that was a nix on option one. Minoth was too small, too weak, in comparison, even though he positively towered over the rest of the Architect's creation and creations.
Option two: keep at the friendly bit and see if Malos would hand over Pneuma's Core (what would her name be, come to think of it? would Buena be too whimsical, too risible?) for inconsequential inspection, and then turn around and book it, praying for a cushily cloudy reception on the other end. Yes, Malos would chase, and Minoth hadn't even stopped to consider estimations on his physical capabilities vis-à-vis running, jumping, swimming, flying? So that was terrifying too.
And Malos hadn't even answered the initial question. Instead, he was just...watching Minoth think. Hell, what if he could hear the very thoughts currently squirreling? Maybe he was at a dead loss. Maybe he'd been doomed from the start, agreeing to enter into negotiations with a Blade far stronger, definitionally more preternatural, than any that had ever been seen.
Or maybe Malos would be open to reason. Maybe, being able to see inside Minoth's mind, he'd find the motivations agreeable, and call off any plans for fratricide.
"What color am I thinking of?"
A blocky eyebrow raised, the only visual cue of anything that had occurred in the past few minutes. "You think I'm stupid, cowboy? Purple."
Well. That could mean anything. Could be human humor and indignance, could be the computerized version, Minoth would never know. Asking how many fingers he was holding up only tested whether or not Malos could see through corporeal objects, really.
Minoth was very good at handling humans, especially those who were adverse to yet unfamiliar with him. Very, very good. He wasn't a people person, nor was he a man of the people, but he was a consummate people-watcher - a diligent student, an avid dissector, if you will, or even if you won't.
Malos gave him no cues, no signals, no ways, no means. Malos gave him nothing. Not even...
"You willing to spare me a look at that Core Crystal, partner?"
"No," answered Malos, honestly. Of course he was honest. He didn't know what ulterior motives were. Or...didn't he? "She's mine."
"She's yours," repeated Minoth. "Your...what, if you don't mind my asking?"
"My partner." He rolled it over, facet to face and hand to hand, syllable to syllable and man to man. "We were meant for great things."
"And you're not now?"
Malos shook his head, without looking up - without needing to. "Still are. It just...perturbs things a little, since you killed my Driver. I would have thought we were supposed to have the same Driver, you know."
Elysium, the World Tree, was far too cool for Minoth to sweat, but he could feel the panic beading all the same.
"Trust me," he began, and now he was slipping into an all-consuming bout of humanity relations, "you don't want that. You wouldn't have wanted that. No one wants that. You know the kinds of things a man like that does to his Blades?"
"I know what you think he does. I've seen inside your memories." So then...not inside my mind? Hell of a relief. "But it doesn't really matter, in the end. I saw inside his memories, too. Before you killed him."
Ah. Should I be...wanted for murder, right about now? Down there, anyway, if not up here? What are the charges for a Blade who kills their Driver, anyway? Does that count as homicide?
Oh. Of course. No one's ever lived to tell the tale before. Wasn't exactly how I wanted my name in the history books, but nevertheless.
Malos was by no means oblivious to this mental tangent Minoth was taking, but he was entirely disinterested, once again. "I know what he's seen. I know what humans are like."
"You've only ever met the one."
"Good enough. Now I know they need to be destroyed."
Well. This didn't exactly not check out.
"Not very scientific of you," Minoth fenced.
Malos smirked, and Minoth could have sworn if he hadn't blinked he would have seen the Aegis prop a cocky hand to a bulky hip. "Show me an outlier to my sample, and maybe I'll reconsider."
That was an invitation. Malos's hand still wrapped firmly about his sister's Core, but his other arm was relaxed, very nearly extended in permission. Minoth turned, started walking. Malos's sizable, weighty footsteps followed close behind.
So, the lay of it now: Minoth was a tour guide to humanity for one very incensed Master Blade, made manifest as the will of one Quaestor Amalthus who was more than fed up with what he had seen of the world. He had had no such lofty intentions of killing himself about it, though, which had taken things on a bit of a detour, but the end goal was still the same as it always had been: it was time for Minoth to find Addam.
As he climbed, hand over hand and ever more thankful for his gloves, Minoth considered how the narration that had carried him through this highly improbable series of dubitably unfortunate events had proceeded thus far. It had been...drier than he would have expected. More predictable.
More predictable. Right. As if you'd ever believe that. No, they did not climb down the vines the same way Amalthus had come. Minoth commented, offhand, that he'd always wondered how anyone could ever climb the damn thing by hand. Really, had the Architect? He must have had an easier way up - come to think of it, maybe he'd cut it off, years ago. Maybe it had been easy to get to heaven, once. Maybe that was why humanity had become so apparently embittered - and there, it all came full circle.
Not that Malos was particularly enthralled by any of that philosophical conversation. He simply turned on heel and bid Minoth, without speaking, to follow him to the true center of the tree, where there appeared a lift with attached console. The delay before he produced the requisite password was noticeably and notably shorter than that which had preceded the first uttering of his own awakened name. Minoth considered that, pocketed it, and followed Malos into the cylindrical chamber which he was flatly informed was called an "Elevator."
It was more than a little ridiculous. You agree, don't you? This doesn't quite make any sense, and this time it isn't even, supposedly, a dream.
But down they went. Malos watched Minoth, studied him, in the elevator, floor after floor after floor after floor. Minoth tried not to be too stiffly conscious of his usual stationary idiosyncrasies, which meant that in the end he came out more stiff than he might have if he had tried to act it.
Leg bow out. Arms cross. Hand to hip. Brush back bangs. Tighten ponytail. Loop around ear. Shuffle belt. Spin guns. Straighten pants. Scratch jaw. Pinch nose. Sleek eyebrows.
He felt like a plasticine doll, and as Malos watched Minoth could see him loosely reciprocate. The eyebrows wiggled, the cheekbones shifted, the torso rotated in the space above the pelvis...
Malos was trying to become human, to try on the mold of the enemy, while watching a Blade who was almost the very same amount distanced from his original identity as the Aegis was from that non-original. He couldn't help but learn from his environment. And, it would make his impending plan of genocidal destruction all the more gruesome, because the longer Minoth stared, the more he felt himself mirrored.
"Do you need to do that?"
"Do what?" And now there was actual sarcasm laced into the repetition. Malos knew what he was doing. He knew the advantages he could carve and serve. The World Tree was old, but it didn't seem old enough that Minoth should expect to be able to feel pressure caving in and up from the sea. Maybe it was just Malos. Maybe he was just that powerful.
And if it wasn't the sea, then Minoth had no reason to feel so sick. There was nothing in his stomach; it'd been empty since before the procedure, as might easily be expected.
"You don't need to pretend to be like me. I can see what you are, or near enough. You don't respect me, and you never will respect me."
The current arrangement of eyebrows was somewhere between lazy and lackadaiscally menacing.
"I will try to kill you before you kill me. You know that, don't you?"
Malos scoffed. "Tch. As if I pose any real danger to you. You're making up stories, just like you always do. You don't know anything about me."
"I don't think you know how to lie just yet, Malos." The taunt of just prior had only been the first hint of learning how.
No answer came, and when the door finally opened, they were at a base partially covered by a wet entrance to the Cloud Sea.
"Okay, cowboy. Start swimming."
So Minoth swam. It might have taken hours, it might have taken days; it certainly didn't take weeks. The most recent occasion on which Minoth had felt fatigue had been when he was dead, and one would suppose that it would be very hard not to feel depleted of energy when you are...dead, and in the Cloud Sea, he could tell that it would be very hard to feel that very same way.
He was a Blade. He was a machine. He wasn't tired, but he was lonely. He swam. He swam. He swam.
Malos's presence bore down, very much like a shark. If he wanted to, he could indulge in nightmarish daydreams about what would happen if he let himself go slack and limp, and start drowning. Blades were heavy, after all.
Would Malos leave him? Would he raid the deadweight-but-not-dead, more just shut off and powered down, corpse for anything of value? Would he steal Minoth's armor and parade around in his skin for real this time? Would he take the purple-cored guns as a weapon of his own?
Arm over arm, legs paddling paddling paddling, they inched closer and closer to Torna. No commercial transport Titans ever breached nor broached this radius - what would be the point? There was always a more legitimate landmark to stop off at on a straighter line through richer civilization.
No one found them, spotted the two strong bodies propelling their dubious ways through the sea. Soon, Minoth began to think that they might never be found. Maybe no one would ever see them. Maybe they were invisible. Maybe Malos was dead, too.
Purgatory. And to think he'd thought they'd been offering him a promise he could keep.
Just a little farther. Just a little further. Just a little more, more, more...
Until what? Until they reached Torna, and found Addam, and said look, he has an Aegis Core, and we need it, because he is a Blade without a Driver and that cannot be, look here I am and I cannot be without a Driver, surely not, maybe I'm dead, they said I was dead, how can you know anything when you're dead, I'm a Blade and Blades don't have a persistent state that can be called being dead because they're supposed to vanish, they're not supposed to exist on their own, maybe they were never meant to exist at all and if that's so then why would you believe me, why would you ever believe me, oh, Addam, I hate this, I hate this, I hate this, let me out, let me out, let me out--
"Minoth!"
"WHAT!?"
Yelling. How can you yell when nobody's around to hear? Why does the Cloud Sea feel like that? Like...strong hands on my shoulders, and golden eyes trained on my face...
"It's alright! You are here and so am I, and I do believe you. I believe you, do you hear me?"
"That's cute."
He was standing. He felt his legs again. He could see with his eyes. He could motion with his arms. He could practically hear Malos's smirk and very nearly see, smell, taste and feel the false confidence.
Maybe Malos was afraid. No, definitely, Malos was afraid.
"It doesn't make sense, does it?"
"What doesn't?" Again with the no-question questions.
"Give me the Pneuma Core."
Addam, quieted, stood back and regarded the both of them. Possibly, the declarations of emphatic belief had been platitudes, but then again, you can believe something without knowing what it's meant to be about. Flora, beside him, watched just as warily.
"How do you know her name?" It was the first actual confusion Minoth had been able to read from Malos in all the glances he'd cast on that chiseled face, and he reveled in it, however cruel that might have been. He hadn't felt this confident, this suddenly sure of himself, in...
Not ever, really. But it was real.
"Because I've been to Elysium." And maybe that was hell, after all, but I probably wouldn't call it that.
Automatic response one: "You can't have."
"I know."
Automatic response two: "I miss it."
"I know."
Because Logos was not a trained nor born killer. He knew that, and he wanted to know what else he, in fact, was. As quickly as the mystery had developed, Minoth had found a way to solve it: with knowledge, and with truth. With purpose.
"I led you here because this human" - here he gestured at Addam, and then to Flora in kind, who met his eyes very, very carefully - "is the best example I know of the fact that humanity does not just seek to destroy. Despite all his fears, he cares for me. I knew even without having reason that he would care for me. And I...I don't know what to do, really, now, but I do know that if I start with him, I won't be in the worst shape."
Pursing his lips, Malos made to crack his neck, gazing around at the scattered animals roaming over Wrackham as he did so. Luckily for Minoth, Aletta was quiet, just then.
"You haven't done anything wrong yet. But you seem like such a blank slate that in my eyes it really wouldn't hurt to...to try to avoid that, huh?"
Malos handed over the Core, and remembering the sequence from the throne room, Minoth made to accept it with palm bare. Pneuma appeared, only now she was blonde and her hair was down, and her first gauge of her awakener was all fiery defiance instead of cool calculation.
"Pneuma?"
"Mythra."
"Do you know Logos?"
"I do."
"Is this him?"
She cracked a smile. "Not hardly." And Malos watched her, and Mythra watched him, and they gauged with their eyes and their ears and all their other critical receptors that something wasn't right, here.
But that's not why we opened, and that's not why we're going to close. All of Minoth's exertion came now absolutely crashing down on his Core, and he felt non-theatrically faint.
"Addam?"
"Here, Minoth."
"Would you be my Driver?"
As if he'd been expecting it, and then again as if he hadn't, Addam made an appraising face, and replied, "I would be honored."
Oh, the bond. Oh, their bond, not just the plurality of two but that of three, and two pointing in to one. He felt it twice and twice squared the realness and goodness of the sensation in the death dream, and this time he really did cry, but Addam and Flora caught him on either side and again the touch felt worlds more electric.
"Oh, I love you both. So much."
Flora blinked at him. "You...do? I'd only met you the once, before."
Addam bit his lower lip and concurred. "This is a little sudden, Minoth."
"But my prince, is it wrong? Please, is it wrong?"
Please, please, and please again. The clouds escorted themselves away. "No, actually. It feels very right."
"Oh, Addam...that's because it is. It is, it is, it is, and how."
How do I explain this? Maybe I don't. Maybe I've said too many maybes and the concept was quite strangely half-baked to begin with and we've not developed too much more of any importance anyway. But I can try:
Sat on the rooftop overlooking the moor, Addam glances as casually as he can muster in Minoth's direction, and says, "You know, I never thought Amalthus's proposition to you would end up being his undoing."
"Yeah, well, he thought he was aligning the world to its natural order, but he was gonna get there by a hell of a lot of twisted extra steps, pretty much screwing the lot of us over in the process."
Addam sighs. "Same old Minoth, even though you...do seem to have changed. Would you care to elaborate on that?"
"Blades have two purposes in life - more than a human, if you can believe that, which I can't. But anyway. Besides their own personal calling, the pursuit they're best able to fulfill and benefit the world and themselves by, there's the purpose of serving their Driver."
"Serving?" Ah, yes, serving.
"If you want to be blunt and or reductive, which I do."
"I can't imagine why you'd ever want to do that."
"No? Maybe not for you, I wouldn't. Not usually."
"Not usually," Flora repeats, running careful fingers through the short hair by Minoth's temples.
"But, what does happen usually is that we, Blades and humans, generally agree that there is one human, over all, whose resonance is the true purpose for one Blade. One that they are most compatible with, both ways."
"And that's Addam?"
"And that's Addam."
"And that means...?"
"It means I was put here to love you, Flora. Can you imagine that?"