Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story

Right off the bat, inspired, and quite frankly a long time coming, by this breathtaking art from the ever-lovely Sicahya.

One fight was all it took. Not a battle, a fight.

The time was cavernously infinite. The time was infinitesimally short.

Here Malos, Sirens called and mental sirens likely blaring, there Mythra, and then...no more Mythra.

Did she die? No, she didn't die. She hid. Hid away, and hid herself. Addam was left to be a dead man walking, because his failure was such an enormity it was a singularity. You destroyed our home. Your home. Because you couldn't control her. Couldn't trust her, couldn't show her that it was right, really right, to trust you. And that is the bare minimum of what a Driver should be able to do.

His wife yet lived, ashy and shaken but still hale enough, and so did the child. Minoth stayed around the Leftheria house, collected books and artifacts that the sparing few refugees and those who had been on other Titans at the time of the battle brought to him. He was polite with Flora, but never chatty. Never gregarious. Somehow it seemed that the time for that was over.

Addam didn't seem to realize that, though. In sparing polite company, he forced himself to be the same smiling, cheery prince of hearts and minds as he'd ever been, but his cheeks were hollowed and his eyes were sunken and suddenly he'd disappear to a farther-off island for days at a time.

He'd come back, then, and mope around Minoth's makeshift study in the midst of the happenstance library. Minoth wouldn't ask him what he'd found. Addam wouldn't ask him what he'd buried.

And what did Minoth bury? He buried his hopes. Addam hadn't had hopes, necessarily. He'd had idling dreams, yes, plans for the future, but for all you could have made him out to be the reluctant bearer of the onerous responsibility that was Mythra, he didn't treat the affair like it was so precarious. Not in and of itself. That is to say, he didn't make grandiose the happy ending. He didn't idealize.

The years wore on and Minoth buried other things in the pages. The little quirks he'd incorporated from each of their roundabout dozen were shelved, and he didn't characterize the new cast in the same way, but he idealized Addam.

Whose story was he telling, and to whom? Maybe he was telling Addam Origo's story, the Driver whose resonance wasn't just for show, the prince who was more a king and then more of a king than his father ever had been, as far as the people were concerned, but he wasn't telling Addam's story.

The Addam of "Team Addam" and their beloved "Duke of Dumbass" and the Addam who'd told Haze the ghost stories and the Addam whose bumbling energy bubbled under and uplifted them all. The golden boy of their golden country, the figurehead they needed and had needed, and the one they'd truly had was the one they'd deserved.

History, however, perhaps deserved a different one. Needed it. Needed the vindication that light was right and dark was stark and the Architect had cared had dared had spared to send them an angel with a firmament waiting steady and strong below.

Only, Jin and Malos didn't start truly brewing for another two hundred years or so. Minoth had been planning, sketching, plotting far in advance of that. Guided by what vision, steeled by what righteousness? To show what audience what vigil of vindictiveness?

While Addam was alive, those scribbled notes were even lies. Lies you tell, Minoth. Didn't anybody ever teach you better than that?

Mythra died. Addam lived. Addam died. Mythra lived.

Minoth didn't die. Minoth wouldn't hardly ever die, surely not at any climax that mattered. Minoth was, quite literally, made to live forever. And to what end?

Well. Amalthus certainly hadn't intended to make a historian out of his specimen, but now Minoth's, Cole's, specimens were the world. He didn't write about Amalthus except privately. Gray-washed anger isn't particularly interesting, after all.

But glory...glory is interesting. Glory is gripping, stirring, scintillating, awe-inspiring, glory is the magnification and the magnificensation of people who deserve it.

Addam never got glory. He never wanted it, but...but he never got it. And that's something that sits with you, isn't it. Isn't it?

Sitting with you. Nice to draw a lexicographical parallel, then, as ever, because Mythra had come to visit after their apparently revelatory clash in Bulge Harbor. They'd seen Mikhail, and Haze-not-Haze, and the roiling wretch of being misremembered, of being disremembered even as you thought of all the people who had been dismembered for a cause without cause, and oh this wasn't what Lora had died for, if and after you staved away the ugly thought that she'd died for nothing.

To visit. To sit. No, she didn't. She came with much more of an agenda than that. Pyra had a fire, that much was for sure, but Mythra had a light that burned, that bristled, that shone for the truth as much as it did for the justice, and if not the bravery or the compassion, well...Pyra had those.

As he met her eyes and watched them train their wobble, Cole tried to gauge whether or not Mythra begrudged her sister, her other self born of the urge to up and vanish and have no self remaining at all. An accidental creator still struggles with the aftermath; they just, funnily enough, shouldn't be blamed. For some things. Not for everything.

Her boots tapped with that same effervescent fleet-of-foot winged-goddess step. She marked impatience with stunning control. When had Mythra had the time to become a woman, a pristine package of pride and precision? Maybe her sleep hadn't spanned a full five hundred. Either thought was worse.

"I know you lied." You know you lied.

Cole groaned; something ungraceful, unpolished, beyond his usual aged pales. "Mythra, can you blame me?"

Of course, he knew exactly what she was talking about with immediacy, and not just because it was semi-ever-present in and on his mind. No more skirting. No more pretending.

Mythra resisted the urge to let out a snort herself. "Read the room, Minoth. Aren't you supposed to be so good at that? This is me blaming you."

"After everything he did for me..." For us. For everyone.

Now she screwed up her lips even as her eyes and ears flattened back. Like she was tasting something bad. Or no, not quite bad, but familiar. Unexpected. How could she not expect it? One doesn't expect the past, and she only ever saw the future.

"Everything he did? What did he even do?"

The list was cavernously infinite. The list was infinitesimally short.

"He was my Driver." He was my Driver. "And he was yours too."

I hate to admit it, but he doesn't get enough credit for all the credit he gave us.