Shock the Monkey
Oh, the adorable, wishful things you come up with when you're trying to avoid filling in the holes in a longfic.
The lower levels of the Indoline Praetorium, though perhaps in some ways more superficially palatable than the dull, stale bore of the Sanctum proper, were almost implicitly arcane. None went down there - not the monks studying the natural sciences - but those Magisters and Quaestors who had been granted permission, if idle and practically immaterial, from the Praetor Rhadallis, to pursue further research on lost technologies of the ever-revered Judician forebears.
If Blades were to be spotted there, they would be common types, and always male, never female or beast or even brute. Because Quaestor Amalthus, the ringleader of the perverse preternatural activities, was very selective. One might even say that he was bigoted, but then one never seems to find the time to say that about those who are percived as rich, successful, geniuses. Those who don't care for praise except as it serves them, and those who get the world wrapped up in their waxy, lackadaisical palm almost without trying, after enough time has passed them by.
So then, when a newly-minted Magister who had, in his own jealousy and self-saken praise-seeking journey, long been observing said Quaestor and his pseudo-religious routine entered that unauspicious hospite and found a rare Blade there, one who was tall and dark and markedly distinctive, of course one could only think ah, something's about to happen.
"Minoth, wait." The addressed paused the working of his metacarpal trapezoid (which is to say, in a place like this you mustn't say something so laymanlike as that it was the fleshy part of his palm) around his wrists and looked up. He hadn't been moving beyond that simple motive motor tic, so what was there to wait for?
"Huh? Oh, it's you. Here to make one last snide remark at me before I march to my death? That's cute." That was what there was to wait for.
"Stop being such a pissant." "Oh, there it is."
Baltrich and Minoth were acquaintances at best, cagey enemies at worst. At times the Blade wondered if it was down to the influence of his Driver whom he still somewhat reluctantly served, but then he wasn't exactly a likable sort himself, if you weren't someone who wasn't much for polite company yourself. And Amalthus was nothing if not blandest, politest company.
"If you really believe that it's 'marching to your death' that you're doing, then why don't you consider that you don't have to do this?"
I may as well tell you now, if you haven't already surmised it (I can't quite say whether it's a trait of a good or a bad storyteller to say these things straight out): this was the fateful Flesh Eater experiment, the culmination of all Amalthus's work and study, the first magnificent, not to say magnanimous, metapsychophysiological event he could effect in the service and name of old Judicium.
Now, if you were an academic researcher, and you were about to perform fateful, life-altering and possibly -ending procedures upon a body, wouldn't you start, if you could even bring yourself to think of it this way, with the most disposable one available to you? Maybe someone sickly, or even just someone who had volunteered their life and legacy despite their being strong and hale and having everything to live for, because they believed in your cause. Holding harmless in case of death or other force majeure, and promising not to disclose, but hopefully amicably, and all that.
Observe then the already apparent argumentativeness, the unum-ubiquitous uniqueness of our Minoth. Is he, was he, do you think, the right selection for such an undergoing, undertaking? Of course he was not, and there are then two paths of divergence: that he chose to go, willingly as much as begrudgingly, or that he was already the sickly, the wasted. That there already was something wrong with him, or perhaps...that Amalthus thought him disposable, indeed. The second branch of that larger conjunction cannot be untwined from itself, and so we leave it there.
Baltrich thought all this, vaguely, and yet Minoth said to him: "I'm a Blade. What other choice do I have?"
"That's...I won't pretend to know or care about whether that's correct or not, but I know you know that boy."
"What about him?" Minoth snapped, tone suddenly whisper sharp. If he was the knife, Baltrich was the cheese, ever smooth but rind unyielding.
"I know why you're doing this. Please. Help me kill Amalthus, and then I'll take your Core to him. Fair's fair, right? It'll be better for all of us."
Minoth, a hobbyist playwright at home and a well-kempt man of culture at large, kept his nails neat and trimmed, but they dug into his forehead with abandon as he raked back his hair (long and rebellious, just like him) with a tetchy sigh. "Oh sure, 'fair's fair' - you lizards really suck, you know that?"
Is a lizard impatient? A lizard is cold-blooded. Perhaps that's racist, Minoth. "Are you going to do it or not?"
The sigh grew larger, longer-winded. The hair was perhaps yanked upon, as the only thing one can find purchase on when one is about to give up their life for the faintest sneaking glance at trumped-up independence, and especially as when one becomes conflicted about what they're leaving, because then what do they care, anyway. Life's life and death is death. You get through it somehow.
"Yeah...yeah, I'll do it. But if in any way it turns out that it might actually look like I've done it, so help me, Baltrich, you had better smash my Core with an Architect-damned hammer."
Baltrich raised his eyebrows, elongated his nose, screwed his eyelids sideways, made an appraising face. "You pretend to have that much pride?"
"No, I don't have any fucking pride," Minoth snarled lowly, "I'm about to give up the supposed sanctity of my inborn nature just so I can avoid following through on this cockamamie plan of yours. But 'that boy', as you wanna call him...if something I do leads anyone to so much as think about laying a single finger on his already ruffled-up head..."
"Understood. Shall we?"
Within the laboratory chambers, Amalthus was pacing between data terminals and conferring with Stannif about their impending sinister scavenge. He turned slowly, evenly on heel when the other two entered. "Baltrich? What are you doing here?" he asked nervously, in that way that you do when someone you have a tenuous and indeed tentatively tending towards awful relationship with has, well, come to kill you.
"Are you ready, Minoth?" Oh, again, they weren't fast friends by any slightest or broadest stretch of the term, but neither could resist tending up a little flair for the dramatic.
"So you've come to kill me?" Amalthus sounded almost bored. "What could possibly be the point? You'll never get away with it, Baltrich. They'll find your fingerprints."
"You think I'm going to stab you, choke you, like some base hooligan? You really are stupid, Amalthus. You always have been." The Magister stepped swiftly to a cart full of supplies, taking up a stray piece of cloth first.
"Then my own Blade's going to do it? He doesn't have the stones. Your Core is too advanced for you to do something so foolish, Minoth. You know they'll find the traces of your ether bullets. Or are you really that dull of mind, after all this time?"
Minoth somehow found it in himself to smirk. "Not ether, but aether. Learn a little lexicographical nuance, will you, O crafty Quaestor?" O fucking beloved Driver of mine.
Stannif had slipped quietly, creepily away, out of the chamber, and not a one of the contentious three yet remaining therein cared a wit. He was a slithering, wibbling snake, powerless and resourceless without his partner in crime, so the main bartering objection of bumping off the anti-bombastic ringleader concerned itself not with various and sundry counterparts. If he was still alive, he could be blamed for Amalthus's death, even. Stannif ranked below Amalthus, of course, but Baltrich still came in between with higher honor, or the feigned semblance thereof.
Minoth didn't bother holding his Driver at gunpoint, because the conceded advantage was indeed one. They weren't dumb nor driven enough to deal in such reckless absolution. But still, the cowboy wore gloves, if Blades even had fingerprints to leave at all. He was no martial artist, but he could strangle in an instant if he needed to - he certainly had the pent-up venom for it - and as Baltrich fumbled with the jar of vicious chloroform, it almost looked like he would.
"What, is this a social event?" Minoth barked out, and Baltrich nearly dropped the damn thing. "If this doesn't work, you're dead, you know that? I'm already dead, but that's not saying much."
Amalthus didn't seem to fear for his fast-approaching end of life hardly at all, standing there as if perpetually perched as he was in the middle of the clinical room. "You'd threaten to kill another man just to satisfy your brutish bloodlust? Really, Minoth, I thought we hadn't made you human yet." Near about laughed, the villain did, at his own clever turnabout quip.
"Amalthus, I am going to kick you in the goddamn nuts," Minoth half growled, half ground out. "Before or after you die. Maybe both. I am sick and tired of your pathetic nihilistic worldviews. I get it, your mother didn't deserve to die, and maybe you don't right now either, but Baltrich has no moral code when it comes to his status, and I'm going to clatter out my last lines right there on the tiles with you. So if we need to do this to stop you spiraling out of control and hurting more people than just the good-for-nothing cowboy who's dwindled fruitlessly under your resonance, then I'm glad I'm not complacent anymore. I'm glad you're--"
And Baltrich was there with the crucially soaked rag. Done and dusted, to the floor Amalthus went with a soft thump.
"You've got the real poison, now?" "I've got it."
Of course he had. Baltrich's inmitable, ever-tenacious confidence was a wonder at times. Dirty deed, dirty deed. The monologue only made it dirtier.
"Are you ready, Minoth?" Baltrich asked once again.
Minoth drew a stuttering breath. Perhaps one of his last. He hadn't hated Amalthus wholly, or at least not the whole time. It was more the possibility of world-ending despair being wreaked upon them at some future date by the grisly scholar that made him wary. Protecting him, as birth-sworn Blade to Driver, still sparked something in him. Had done so. Now...the awakener was unconscious on the floor, and the haze of redormancy was almost a preimage.
"You'll take me to Addam." "I will."
Deep breath in, deep breath out. One two three? Three, two, one.
"Do it."
Minoth's Core Crystal indeed clattered lifeless to the floor. Baltrich pocketed it, and swept out of the laboratory with impunity, not to say a sneak-thief's cagey pride. Amalthus was down, and he was up. Up, up, up, and away.
The news traveled fast, that Amalthus had suffered an incident in the midst of some research. No one knew what that research had been, and the poison was fast-acting quick-dissolving stuff. It could have been anything, because he had been their most skilled autopsist, and now his fingers carried no skill anymore. They couldn't. Let the dead things lie; even the Indoline, the latent Judicians, wouldn't try to reanimate, not least those who yet remained.
Stannif notwithstood - maybe he was vanished without a trace. Of course, with the axis of experimentation gone...only an afterthought.
"Tell me, Baltrich. Didn't Quaestor Amalthus have a Blade?"
A simple conferral audience, a routine meeting, only a few other basest-ranked warrior monks there as attendants. You can do this, Baltrich, think what you've just done, you can bring it off right, you're clever enough.
"I-- Yes, Praetor, he did."
Then came the obvious question. "And where is that Blade now?"
"I'm afraid I don't know, sir." He knew. The wretched thing was leaden in the pocket of his blessedly spacious robes.
Rhadallis laughed, a creeping, condescending thing. "You needn't look so frightened, Baltrich. I don't care in the least about yet another Core Crystal making the rounds of Alrest - so long as it won't come back to count against the greater glory of Indol."
Always with that. Baltrich half suspected that his leader had turned about the irony in such entirety as to make mastery of the idiotic phrase. Like a campaign slogan that could be laughably lauded in just as equal measure as it could be murderously marauded, the crafty Praetor surged ahead with full possession of his motto, so as to become untouchable.
Amalthus had timed his work well; he always did. Running the experiment just before a summary summit with Torna, Uraya, and Mor Ardain meant that he could keep his vaults locked up with impunity, and there would be too many mincing-milling people around for anything slightly off-kilter to be truly noticed.
Baltrich knew the description of Addam, his all-important guest even if the younger individual didn't know it, easily: muscular arms of a twenty-year-old boy with nothing better to do for years than to get up to able-bodied mischief, silver hair that could never ever stay properly coiffed, and golden eyes that glimmered and shone like the sun. He couldn't have been less like Minoth if he'd tried.
"You there." Even the way he turned around at the vocal equivalent of a tapped shoulder gave every ounce of youthful springish innocence, wiry limbs that had grown strong in the shoving away of ugly truths not because he was afraid but because to him they didn't need to be. "Me?"
"Don't make such a fuss about it. I have something to give you. It's from your friend, he...he wanted you to have it."
"Do you mean Minoth?" Baltrich nodded, his face slightly more ashen than usual.
Addam, however, didn't seem to take notice, so cheered was he at the prospect of a gift from his odd but cherished ally. "How very thoughtful of him! Thank you for bringing it to me."
Stiffly, Baltrich thrust the pouch into Addam's hands, willing himself to ignore the blue glow that immediately began to emanate from within as soon as it reached the safety of the prince's grasp.
"What's this? A Core Crys-" "Shhh! What did I say about not making a fuss? Just take it and get out of here."
Addam's expression was damnably sympathetic, nay full-on worried. "Is anything the matter? Are you in trouble?"
Baltrich had to summon every last remaining scrap of wily will to keep from pinching the bridge of his nose in order to make elegant, perhaps performative, show of his petty exasperation. "No, but I will be if you don't just go! Now!"
And of course he went, because there was nowhere important for him to be anyway, it was a farce that he'd even been there for the picking in the first place. Foolish little prince, where are your goals, your ambitions? Where is your drive and your distinction? And why on Alrest did Minoth love you so?
"I heard something very interesting today." Not a very unusual thing for Azurda to say, because he rather liked being cryptic at times.
"Oh? What's that?" Addam answered with just the same breeziness.
They were chatting out by the deserted rear gate in Auresco, near the palace's cargo entrance. Both had been in Indol earlier that week, but by now Addam had both learned and decided that it wasn't worth the dillying with his beloved Nuncle when they were in foreign territory. Save it for home, and keep your wits about you abroad.
"Something about your friend from Indol." Getting warmer now, are we? "Oh, yes! Look, he sent me a Core Crystal. Now why on earth do you think he might have done that?"
"Well, I-" "He well knows I'm the last person ever to want one. It's awfully kind of him to want to protect me, I suppose, though even still, I rather think if it was time for me to awaken a Blade I'd have come upon one on my own. Rites of passage, and all."
Azurda's voice was a constant steady grumble, but even he cleared his throat then. "Addam, before you say anything more, I think you'd better hear what I have to say."
Addam raised his nose from where it had been trained on the subjected pouch and craned his neck up to try to meet the old Titan's broad yellow eyes. "Alright, alright, Nuncle, I'm listening."
"Quaestor Amalthus is dead." Apparently it hadn't been mentioned at the summit, or at least not trickled down enough for Addam's comically stuck-out ears to hear. Very hush-hush, the Indoline could be.
"He's...dead? But that means that-- Oh." "Indeed."
They stood, but with the air of plaintive sitting, in silence for several moments, Addam turning the crystal delicately over in his hands as it was shielded by the fabric of the pouch, his face growing ever more forlorn, and Azurda watching him with a careful horn.
"Will you awaken him, then?" he broached the stillness at last. And, Addam was ready with the answer.
"I'd say I'm bound to. After all, isn't that why the Magister brought him to me?" Azurda smiled. Of course.
"The womb center would be rather apropos, I think." Just around the corner, and familiar enough. Home, for a Blade - and Azurda liked to think that that meant the same for one born definitively of Torna or not.
But, Addam didn't agree. "There? No way, Nuncle, it's all cold and clinical in there."
"You think the sun and sand would better suit?" "Absolutely." And off they flew to Dannagh.
Addam had often wanted to visit Turqos Plateau with Minoth. The Blade had at times mentioned to him, in a tone pointedly made offhand, that he and Amalthus had passed through the Dannagh region, most often in the earliest years of his life. He seemed determined not to express any truer opinion about it than that the area had a nice aesthetic, that it was a good backdrop, that maybe, maybe, it could provide some sort of loose inspiration. It was as if he knew, and perhaps it wasn't hard to tell, that Addam would have gotten all the moroser if he had known that Minoth had visited the place and felt attached to it, but couldn't stay, couldn't express that he wanted to stay.
Not that Turqos Plateau was where they made landing. Addam was allergic to the Prism Poppies plentifully present thereupon, and of course the last thing he wanted to do was awaken his old friend and then promptly fall asleep in his arms. Very undignified, even for a predestinedly disgraced prince four seats removed from the throne. The Great Breaksand was precipitious too, because, well, the sand had a tendency to break there, and then one might be intercepted by the not-so-socially-graceful Interceptor Grace. The rest of Golden Twin Mesa was safe, however, if a little less classically picturesque, and so that was where Addam staked out his spot.
Insects skittered around in the sand beneath his feet. Dharma Crickets, Sand Upas, and Munchygrubs, Addam pointed them out to himself, and was quite proud of what he'd retained from the last time Minoth had summoned up enough patience to haul out his most precious preserved specimens and make a lecture of it. Like little good omens, they were, even though none of them actually carried that superstitious superciliousness. Minoth never cared for the astrological aspect of it, anyway. Bugs are bugs, he'd always say, and then probably eat one just to prove it.
The thought of seeing him again so soon made Addam simultaneously too afraid to even lay a single searching finger within a three-ped distance of the crystal and too anxious to keep his hands away. He'd never, never, thought of doing anything like this, of having an awakening to plan even if it was a somewhat unwilling one that he was coerced into for some politic or other. And yet now it seemed the most natural thing in the world.
Azurda kept silent, stony neck bowed and ether lines calmly pulsing their soothing blue light. The Core Crystal glowed as well. It- no, he was ready.
It was an awkward thing, coaxing the crystal all the way out of the pouch without grasping it wholesale. He was nervous, of course, and when you're nervous all your best efforts towards being careful fall away at all the most perfect (and that is to say, worst) times. So of and in the same course, the Core that was Minoth's came tumbling out past Addam's waiting hand, and he had to dive for it down into the sand, scattering grubs and grotesque little things everywhere as his chest hit the soft, all-too-yielding ground.
Once the resonance began, Addam didn't have the time nor presence to jerk himself up straight again, but after the warm purple-brown-black feeling had swirled around him for about a minute or so, the grip of the ether eased, and he was able to stand. Someone else was also standing. Very tall, he was, and proud, with chest held in tremendous assuredness and legs splayed like he owned the place. For all Addam cared, he could and might have.
"Minoth?" Addam spoke the syllables with infinite trepidation, his voice cracking like it hadn't done for the better part of four years now.
"That's my name, don't wear it out." Wear it out? Any more care and he wouldn't have been able to get the damn word out of his mouth. "Oh, it is you!"
There seemed no better recourse than to fling his arms about the Blade and envelop him in a crushing hug, because after all it's him, he's here, he's mine! Addam thought, then frowned into a silent mental caveat that "Well of course I don't mean that I own him, or possess him at all, but...but it's Minoth and we're together at last!"
"Whoa there...nice to meet you too, I suppose."
Addam pulled back, slowly, though not lifting his hands fully away just yet. "Wait...nice to meet me? Not to see me?"
Minoth's right eyebrow was arched, and he looked about to crack a grin, but then he was a bit too out of his element for that, as yet. "What, you want me to ruffle your hair and tell you what a handsome young man you are?"
"Oh, that's...that's right." Unsure of what else to do, Addam surged in for another hug and tackled Minoth to the ground. The sound the Blade made was half an "oof" and half a laugh as he went down easily, obligingly.
"I knew you," Addam murmured quietly into the side of Minoth's jacket after the dust had settled. "You were a dear friend."
"Is that right?"
Something came tumbling down and collapsed in Addam's mind at the merest suggestion that he had overstepped, had twisted around boundaries he wasn't supposed to - for any Blade. Because maybe you weren't supposed to say that to someone who gets reborn as someone different every time they come back to life.
"Oh, but you don't have to- you don't-- It's okay, I don't ca- mind," he amended in as hasty a tone as he could manage without becoming completely incoherent (and of course it hadn't quite worked on either count, anyway).
"Hey now," Minoth said, letting his arm fall in a natural enough position over his Driver, "there's no saying we can't try again. This was a pretty good start, after all - a little unconventional, but it's something. C'mon, kid, what's your name?"
Titan's foot, what a mess. "Addam. I'm a- a prince, you know. If you want to call me by that. Because you always used to."
"Hey, hey, quit stuttering, my prince," and here Addam's face perked immeasurably, "you look - and sound - like you're about to start bawling straight out. Is this really such a big deal for you? I'm just a Blade, same as any other. You know how these things go. Don't you?"
"Well...don't you?" Addam asked, eyes indeed shining. "Most people, most Drivers, don't get this chance. Thank you, Minoth."
So, Minoth ruffled his hair after all, and they sat (more lay) in a quiet, companionable silence. The beginning, not to say continuation, of a beautiful friendship, and all that.
"He changed his tune about resonation rather quickly once he realized it was you, you know," Azurda piped in eventually.
"Did he now? This past me was really all that special?"
"I wouldn't know. I never met him. But, Addam isn't one to tell tall tales, so I believe that your old Driver was really as horrid as he said. It doesn't surprise me that you killed him."
"I did WHAT?!" The sudden yell jerked Addam up; he had been mutely clinging to Minoth's side all the while, even as the Blade had shifted up to converse with the Titan (and to maintain a general semblance of dignity). "Nuncle, what's all this about?"
"Your fair Magister Baltrich seems to be the only one who knows. He was looking incredibly guilty when he passed by me in the harbor. That is, despite his obvious relief that he'd just unloaded the incriminating Core Crystal." It was only Azurda's slow-as-molasses cadence that kept the news from being even more alarming (or perhaps didn't do the same).
"Hang on, but that means Minoth-" "Not to worry, my boy. He said that we should just stay out of it - and that Minoth, the last one, was very insistent that no harm should come to you as a result of this event."
Minoth grinned then. "Got me watching out for you already, huh? Suits me just fine."
"You know, Minoth, you weren't half this...cuddly before." Of course he wasn't. One didn't cuddle a Quaestor, not even if there had been one with more of the personality of an impressionable young Mr. Origo.
"That so? Must've gotten it from you, then." Indeed, and what a wonderful thing. And yet... "You don't mind?"
"Hell no. If I hated the last guy so much as to clean his clock fair off to time immemorial at the drop of a ten-gallon hat, yet was still able to know that I wanted so badly, so principally, to be brought to you, even though I wasn't gonna remember a goddamn thing, you know...c'mere."
Addam went, and held Minoth tighter than he'd ever done. The most natural thing in the world. Of course. This was the only way things should be.
"I wanted very badly for you to leave there, too. I never asked, but...I could tell you weren't happy."
"Happy? Tch. Addam, I killed a man. Who cares if I'm happy? I should just be thanking the Architect that I'm not really the same person as I was."
"Right, right," Addam mused softly. "No blood on your hands, but blood on your Core Crystal, as it were." (Just between you and me, of course there wasn't any to be seen on the shining blue crested gem sent among filigree and leather. Funny how that worked.) "Well...but I don't mind, so much."
Minoth was silent for a moment. Wasn't anything much to mind. Horrid or not, the man was dead. Men died. Apparently, just as Azurda had said, no one knew that he was the one who'd done it. A happy, if freak, accident, if you will. Fine enough.
"Hope you've bled out all your hatred there, Prince," he said at last.
Addam jerked away. "Now wait just a moment! This wasn't my fault, I didn't endorse this!"
Minoth sighed. "You're right there, I suppose. Let it alone, then. It's all we can do."
Amalthus dead, and Baltrich the overseer, never mind the actuator in between. For once, Addam was glad that he'd always not kept away but been kept away from politics.
"Say, Minoth, what's that creature there?" He'd always asked before, but the information never quite seemed to stick in his mind. To say the prince was forgetful...well, we don't have to put it there so patly, just yet.
"You think I know? A bug's a bug. It's creepy and it crawls and that's enough."
Addam's face fell with a crash, shockingly moreso at this revelation than at the previous one, and he tried feebly to tug it up from the wreckage. "Might you be interested in learning, though?"
"Why? What's it about?" What's it about? It was about Architect-damned everything.
"You used to study insects - and write plays, and know about perfumes, and everything. I suppose I don't want to force anything on you, but...if those things might still make you happy, I wouldn't want you to forget them."
Minoth crossed his arms. "Like I said, Prince, who cares if I'm happy? I've got one job now, and I'll be damned if I don't do that well before I go around getting myself hobbies."
Somewhat mollified, Addam just nodded. Had to have priorities, didn't one. And speaking of...
"Nuncle, will you take us to Heblin?" The old Titan might have been sleeping, then, but he shook himself awake to answer.
"What's this? You're taking your wingman and getting to wooing, after all this time?"
"Oh, keep your hot air up in your horn. It's nothing like that. I just feel...energized. Like I can do anything, and there's nothing to be afraid of anymore."
Leaving aside the talk of wingmen and wooing, Minoth offered a dry quip, and a question: "Prince, if you were my first Driver I think I'd be fair off to going insane by now. Is he always this cheery?"
Azurda couldn't help but chuckle. "Indeed. That's my Addam - ours now, I suppose."
Minoth stowed that conversation until they were well aboard and gusting their way down to simmer over by way of the Cloud Sea along the coast. Addam, of course, wanted to sit close by his not-so-newfound partner and wrap arm around back, and Minoth didn't stop him. He even reciprocated. Whatever. Better this than a Driver who'd refuse the same.
And then back to the crucial topic. "This colossal lizard can't possibly be your legal guardian." (Said lizard marked no offense at the descriptor.) "So you're a prince, huh - prince of what?"
"O-oh," Addam mumbled nervously. "Is it really all that important?" He knew that it wasn't, but insecurity won out, as it always could.
"Easy now, I'm not trying to get an edge on your status. But if you're some poor orphan, well, I can protect you, but I don't have any money, to my name or any other."
"Oh!" Silly worries, Addam thought. Of course there's no problem. "No, I'm not poor, or anything of the sort. I'm a prince of Torna."
"Torna? Like, Torna Torna? World power Torna?" One of the things Blades got to know off the bat, apparently.
"That's the one." Ah. "Pretty grave there, my prince."
Addam sucked in a breath, then let it out. "Well, it's an odd thing. Some privilege I have, when I can't even do anything worthwhile with it. I'm just the bastard prince, and for people in a slightly better mood I'm the charming young bastard prince. But I'm not good for much of anything, am I?"
"You were good for me," Minoth pointed out, and Addam let the teasing smile grow. "Thank you for reminding me - I don't ever want to forget."
"You want to help people who are poor, though? Give 'em a chance, like you gave me?"
"No," Addam answered dejectedly, "I don't think I could. For as much as they seem not to care for my presence, or even existence, back home," (and some home, really), "I don't think I could get away that often."
Minoth considered this for a moment. "Why don't you just send me, then? You certainly don't need me to take care of you, you're man enough, and I need something to do with myself."
"I'm only twenty. And I could never just send you off alone, that would be horrible of me."
"Addam," Minoth started, squeezing his Driver closer and jutting his chin down on top of the soft gray hair, "unless something really, really screwy got going with the world, I don't think we could find a horrible bone in your body."
"And I hope you haven't a mind for looking!" Addam shouted into the wind that began to rush down upon their faces as Azurda suddenly lifted them by great wingbeat out of the sea and up towards their destination.
They found Flora's residence easily, tucked among neatly-spaced wooden cabins that gave a tremendous air of sensibility to such a square, sensible-sounding town. Hers was at the far end, though not representative of richer folk but rather those who had arrived more recently in a clump that wouldn't fit in with the rest of the buildings.
"So what's doing? You gonna toss her a handful of pebbles like a true gentleman?" Addam had to laugh. "How did you know? Perhaps because it's a trope?" He nudged Minoth's side, and Minoth nudged back, and up went the spraying stones.
Flora's plaits swung with unwield as she leaned a full half of herself (that wasn't hard to do, you see) out of the house's second-floor window. "Addam? It's past midnight, what are you doing out there?"
"Waiting for you to come down!" he called back with nary a demonstrated compulsion of his own about the time and thus his volume.
Flora readjusted her grip on the sill and squinted more. "And you think I'm about to risk tossing a ladder down the side of the house at this time of night?" Clever girl, apparently, that she even had one to hand.
"Just jump, Minoth will catch you!" Unfortunately, that comment engendered a bit of a tussle among the pair on the ground.
"Oh, I will, will I?" Minoth's arms were lazily crossed and he leaned over to look at Addam through one open eye - not the one lacking the scar, because that was both of them, and what a wasteful description if it clarifies and illustrates not at all.
"Won't you?" Addam replied, and leaned himself on the broad leather covering the Blade's ribcage to remind Minoth that you're just a big teddy bear, now, aren't you? "Fair enough."
Meanwhile, Flora was still up in the window squinting away at the statuesque shapes, prince and cowboy and dragon alike, in the hazy dark. "Minoth? Him, here?"
"I'm a bit surprised myself, little lady," he called up, amiable as anything. "But make us for an acrobatic introduction, then, why don't you?"
So, she squinched her eyes shut even further and slipped her bottom end out the window, and Minoth caught her easily, and kissed her cheek in greeting just for the silly, silly sappiness of it all.
"Addam," she started again as he stepped closer once more and grasped her hands with all his tightest exuberance, "what's this all about? I thought you said he was trapped on Indol, never to get out."
"Somebody," Addam said like a knowing old owl, "killed his Driver."
"What, and he's yours now?" Indeed, the little prince's confirming smile could have lit the entire cul-de-sac up to midday.
And of course the three of them got on like a house on fire for all they'd so conveniently stopped the world from torching itself via much of the same. They met Zettar in the halls of Aureus, Addam striding proudly through with Flora on one arm and Minoth on the other because it was Torna that they lived in, and if they were going to let him into the palace at all, why, he'd make it a happy, accepting place by his own volition and voluntariance.
People, retaining staff and the like, wanted him to do more than just walk around with Flora, because she was an eligible young maiden (meaning only that she had true blue eyes, their standards lowered for the bastard child), and so he defied them and their box-slotted expectations with impunity. In one glinted truth, it was that he somewhat treasured the fact that they'd be looked upon with just the same sneering eyes as he was. The misfits three, and happy for it.
And as for our much less beloved prince... "Addam-! What on earth are you doing with the Quaestor's Blade?! And this...wench." Oh, poor, poor bereaved Zettar.
Flora herself probably even liked being called a wench, if only by dear friends and the avuncular types such as Minoth was. It was snappy, punchy, inmitable. "Who's this punk?" Just like their very cowboy himself.
Addam couldn't quite remember if Minoth had ever known, even before, though as bad as he could be with descriptions, the Blade was twice as fantastic at parsing out those that were so summarily, pitifully and pitiably unhelpful. "That's my uncle - well, half-uncle, I'm none too sorry to say."
Ashy ponytail met ashy ponytail, as did well-eyelashed ocean blue eye. One's eyebrows went up, dangerous amusement, and the other's went down, acquiescent derision. It was impossible to say which was which. "Oh. So he's a bitch, in other words."
"You--" Zettar was positively screwed up, in every facet, then. "I'm standing right here!"
Minoth's hand, bulky gauntlet and all, was quiet but warning as he moved it to block Zettar's own rising from his side. "Yeah, you are. Shame."
They came arm in arm in arm, and they went hand in hand in hand, with no purpose other than to make good on doing good. Not like hooded robins, not like spreading eagles, but like those who seek a cornerstone upon which to land, and having found it invite others to do the same. You needn't sit by with the injustices. Nothing is strong enough to stop you, after all, when there are people out there, and in here, whom you love.
Baltrich himself did eventually go up the tree, so starkly terrified was he of the prospect of being caught out that he only redoubled his pretension of esteem and devotion towards Amalthus and his left-behind work. And what he brought down...well, one cannot say. Perhaps that's a tale for another day.
The Architect deigned to look out upon the journeyman in that moment, and the quiet array of deeds that he had done. "You were not virtuous, Baltrich," he said without scorn.
And Baltrich replied, "No, I was not. After what I have done I feel that perhaps I should be. That's why I am here. That is, I wish that I had come here out of something other than fear."
The Architect intoned back to him, "I say that you were not virtuous, yet you caused good by that which you did. Perhaps, then, we both know these accidents."
"You are the father of all, are you not?" His words nearly taunted the pensive, perhaps complacent being before him. Punching up, as it were, only the Architect didn't seem to feel that way at all.
"Of all that is now, I am. Of all that was...far be it from me to make a mockery of that, or perhaps who, which presided over us all."
Baltrich gestured out with a curved hand, then made it into a cup and rotated it downward as if around the side and bottom of a globe of glass or crystal. He stared into his palm, and the motion was supplicative; he questioned his own truth. "But you made people, honorable people, like the three who walk together now because of the cowardice and jealousy I had."
The room stilled, and the Architect bowed his head. "Three also were they that I made. And one is now in another world with the totality of my hubris. I mark your cowardice above my own, Baltrich."
Things, objects, tools, Blades, that Amalthus had sought. "Are they here? The other two?"
"Why do you ask?" The creator seemed almost taken aback by the question. Are they here? Not where are they, but are they here?
"If they are here then they are untainted." And one would never seek to taint on purpose. If they did, they would hide it, wouldn't bear it unabashedly before the proprietor, the ambivalent arbiter, of the souls. Even, they would do it by accident. Your intentions could be worlds wide open of good, but what is unborn possesses something that life cannot ever repair.
"But they have not had the chance to live." Living in forcedness and fear is not living. They have not had the choice to live, in fact. "That is so. But I will not take them."
"That is a difficult choice, Baltrich. You do not make it out of fear." The Magister had been about to lay the ever-faithful hand on breast, but stopped himself. How false, how sniveling. You needn't be that way before the lord, whether he praises you in his brokenness or not. A tête-à-tête for weaker minds.
"No, I don't. Another might have. But if I have virtue it is only because I saw it reflected, in truth and in tarnish, from him."
"He was your brother." And you killed him. "So he was. As you are the father of us all."
History diverted, the future averted. And the monkey in the middle keeping everything in time.
Okay, weird little story, but there it is. I considered titling it "Shaking the Tree", but that song is really strongly in the pocket about women's empowerment, which is fantastic, but not suited for this story. Indeed, the given title/song fits better than I had expected, upon final review.