and i want, and i feel, and i know, and i touch the walls

Mor Ardain's streets were dirty. Muddy. For Jin, that was a new experience. Even after seventeen years of seeing all the worst and the witlessest of all this world had to offer, it was still a new experience.

(Seventeen years plus or minus...fifty. Probably not a hundred. But, then, he'd stopped counting out time. Time didn't matter anymore. Time wasn't precious anymore. If a clock ticks and there's no one around to tap a deadline to it, does anyone care? Did it even really happen?)

Being broken, being lonely. Lacking purpose. The mud drawled up in pathetic rivulets around his boots, and the bows once tied so brightly on the back of his calves by Haze, mauvey mopey tint and all, drooped.

It's all a metaphor, isn't it? Boots muddied, Core Crystal bloodied. It's all the same.

All the same. You're no different from any other Blade, Jin. You're no Paragon, among men or anything else.

Only of course you're different, because you don't have a Driver. You have nothing, and that is everything.

It's what you always wanted, isn't it? It's what you always dreaded most in life, in death, in the world, isn't it?

Gruesome dreadful, dreadful gruesome, that those should be the same.

It's all the same.

Different boots, far cleaner and far more vicious, both seemingly preternaturally, untouchably so, struck out new ripples in the rain. A great clacking thud with each one, a miniature microcosmed thunderstorm jailed into the outline of an atmosphere by the ridges around the outsole.

The appearance was heralded, somewhat, by a crass fanfare of bravado. "What a stench!" rang the anacrusis.

Jin couldn't...couldn't place the voice exactly, no, but it registered somewhere in his Core - in his brain? which was more correct to say? what had happened to him? - the relevant emotions that should viscerate up and back.

You would hate the smell of rain, wouldn't you? The petrichor that signifies microorganisms enacting their role in the circle, the cycle of life, as they decompose the dead to make nutrience for the living?

They are killing, they are breaking down. But only that which is already dead or dying. Not the rocks, not the minerals, just the organics. Just the organs. Just that which was once alive.

To you, we all were that. So perhaps you should like these bacteria. These vermine scum.

(Was I once alive?)

What were you, when you fell? When Mythra eviscerated you from the inside out by dragging you through the hellfire you so gleefully prophesized?

What were you, "Malos"?

He whispered it just as the proclamation came down from the other plane, the hyperplane whose margin away was an extraordinary revelation. Malos, the Dark Aegis, being considerate, conciliatory, offering. Respectful. Curious. Unsure. What that distance classified...oh, yes, extraordinary.

Jin let his eyes rise, lidded, to take in the environment anew. Shifty-eyed, he felt like a nibbling rat. He hadn't left Lora in a ditch, and she'd only been drunk once when she was eighteen, and had thought it'd be fun - ironic, really - to carouse around with and within the bounds of the law for a change.

Sometimes he forgot where he had put her. Frozen, alone, on the Monoceros, all his long-amassed skill at scrubbing out bloodstains from incipience innocent and violent alike then turned to the task of erasing a wound of his own making.

When he'd first penned down the ritual - rather, when he'd first read of it penned by a hand that both was and was not his own - it had only seemed arcane, ritualistic in a spiritual and intimate way that lent incredible gravity to the sheer strength of the old Jin's bond with Ornelia, a bond he hadn't been able to properly describe in terms that connoted both its overt yet nuanced platonic nature and the way it promised to run him to the ends of the world if he let it.

(That was what Jin had to assume, anyway. He had no concept of any other, different bond with a Driver. He was only Jin. He had only ever been Jin. He would only ever be Jin. But would he only ever be Lora's Jin?)

This new Jin had let it. And now he realized that it only made him a cannibal. But cannibalism is for when you eat your own, yes? No? And he had not been the same as Lora. They had both been codependent, both been end-to-end partners in the tumble of it all, but he had not been as blindingly crisp, as sincerely wrinkled, as endearingly flawed as she had.

No one had ever looked at Jin's, the Paragon of Torna's, flaws. No one had ever seen, had ever wanted to see, anything deeper within than the man of ice. He had worn the mask to keep out prying eyes, but hadn't he always been wearing it?

It was impossible to know how he'd been with Ornelia. No matter how deep the introspection within the journal went, he didn't trust it to show the whole of his heart, his soul, his Core. Architect knew, then, that he certainly hadn't been ready to trust the quill's trail when it came to Lora.

(Architect knew. No he didn't.)

Jin felt himself then in the wrong context. Absent, weaving around the flow of real time, taking chances unbidden.

He blinked, looked up again, and saw his own hand moving to take the rough, implicitly capable grasp of Malos.

(He never would have thought that Malos could be anything not entirely explicit.)

His sworn enemy. Death was once his sworn enemy. Living without Lora had once been the one thing he'd feared, the thought of it what he hated, worst in the world, beyond even the Aegis's promised scourge.

So now you change. Now you're not the same. You are a Blade. Reset, even if not fully back into the Core, a hesitant hand reaches now to awaken you. One hundred and seventeen years is a long time, yes. Isn't it time for something new?