starburst, starburst

Mythra, the Aegis who sunk Alrest's most beloved continent, can't in good conscience consider herself someone engaged in the business of watching people die. Though she doesn't know, will never be able to confirm, whether or not Addam's ward drew his last wracking breaths in view of her wobbling eyes, the last sight she saw for five hundred years, the horror of the hundred lives she hurtled to the bottom of the Cloud Sea contends mightily for the worse sin.

Milton was personal. Torna was perjury.

"I hardly know you, anymore."

Cole's cough jars Mythra's mouth, and as she stands with lips parted, her face starts to sag, quiver. A retch in her throat rises, pulls tears down from her eyes. Slow as a century, and five dumped on your crown all at once, she realizes what the crumbling heap of old man won't say, maybe more than can't: she never really knew him to begin with. Maybe no one ever did.

Oh, God.

How can she scrabble back the centuries and uncover what it is that Minoth tried to tell the world, through his plays, but couldn't, because it was buried so deep, so convoluted? How can she right what Addam put wrong, from the very first moment he grasped her Core? How can she stop another great corpse from eating it, keeled prone on the stage?

Another cough sounds. The Aegis makes eye contact with the bottom corner of the bedpost.

"You think it's your fault."

Her fault. Amalthus had enacted his experiment without even a thought toward the World Tree. Or, well. Who knew what he'd been thinking? But Mythra had hardly been around to do anything about it. It had been before her time, plain and simple.

But...not so simple. Never so simple as all that.

"Well, yeah. What good is a Master Blade that can't save people's lives?"

Such an Aegis War sentiment. Such an echo of the impotent things she said at Addam, for all around to bear witness that the Driver of the Aegis was an idiot, and put no thought into anything, and obviously didn't deserve his awakened (assigned) Blade.

So that rhetoric Mythra had dreamed up in impatience now serves to condition her, to wear into the grooves where she knows she's not enough, by way of being too much, so Pyra has to take over.

Doesn't matter that Pyra hasn't exactly done any of this mystical Master Blade stuff herself. She hasn't killed anyone. Hasn't snuffed out life, or sat back and watched it happen.

The Dragon Incense. Same stuff as they'd found for Freja. Well, they'd sent a makeshift band of mercenaries, then, but still. Freja would have grown up, lived a great life, had a world of stories to tell, if Mythra hadn't made a righteous mess out of that.

The smallest hiccup becomes a gaping sob, and Mythra slides down to the floor, palms clutched over a nose that doesn't know how to run. But for Jin and Malos, the last soul that remembers is fading from this world, and all she can do is pity herself.

"You remember what I gave Rex, right?"

Directions into the belly of the beast? A rusty dagger? A big head?

"No," Mythra mumbles wetly, and chokes on it.

"Spiral Chip," Cole says, and chokes on it, too. "Gordian Gunknives."

The significance of this beeps insistently out at Mythra from the recesses of her mind, but she pushes it down, perhaps unwillingly.

"I don't...what? I-" she shakes her head, shivers "-I don't know what that means."

"Impossible knot. Only solution is" -an explosive hack- "brute force."

And how, exactly, does one solve a knot? Isn't tying the knot the solution? Why is separation considered to be the natural state?

Because it's a damn rope. Mythra doesn't feel so much as become aware of the ugly-cry tensing-squeezing of her cheeks and buccal muscles. How in the hell is she supposed to go on with that piece of wisdom? Is it a clue or a caution?

With the force of a final sob, Mythra throws herself into Minoth's arms, knowing he won't return the embrace and not caring. "I don't want to say goodbye, I just--"

I never got to say hello.

A weakest aged hand graces her back.

"Then let's say...so long."