Epilogue
((Sometimes a character sticks with you longer than you want them to. Some little thing in the back of your mind that just won’t stay quiet. Rhisi is one of those characters. So, have a story- I warn anyone reading this though: it isn’t happy.)) He’s not coming back. She swatted away the unwanted thought as she prepared to get up on the stage they’d set up for her. Simple act tonight- two songs with a dance between to bridge them. The club had mostly people like her in it- people that hid in plain sight or had worked out deals with the shadows.She was real, gods-gifted and maybe more than that. She’d had a future as more than that but time had such a strange way of grabbing one and throwing them twisting and tumbling through the void until you were spat out with only bright spots of memories like stars to navigate by. “Pssshhht! You’re up!”
Knocked out of her daydream and pushed up on stage she became a different creature. She teased and flaunted, using the grace of her dancer (warrior? archer?) body to compliment the songs that rose from her lips on foreign tongues that even her scrambled faculties could not seem to make sense of. (What had happened? What had she lost? What had she gained?) The songs rose and fell and as she flowed into the dance- each sinuous rise and fall of her breasts, each sway of her hips was punctuated by the solid drumbeat of her heel on the floor. Magic (aether…. sunlight...) began to form around her, her voice rising in volume and power and encircling her, bathing her in a forgotten comforting golden glow that felt too much like kind hands stealing caresses and some great blazing heat entrapping her as a sacrifice. She spun and danced on the stage, lost in something that wasn’t a vision or a memory but the cobwebs left by powerful ghosts of both. The spinning, spinning, spinning- she was falling, she was screaming, her songs shook the heavens, her songs reached out-- When two sets of hands grabbed her shoulders she screamed and her magic flared before shattering away. Echoes of magic fell in tinkling pieces to the floor, each crack releasing a confused, lost sigh or whimper. They put her to bed, wrapped her up in a blanket, and spoke in hushed tones of how much worse she’d gotten. That they already spent all their money just keeping her here. That maybe it was time they stop saving her. Their conversation stopped when they heard her speak, her words unintelligible: “Hitoride wanai. You can’t you can’t, we promised hitoride wanai until the stars fell and the mountains crumbled. Hitoride wanai. I am waiting. I promised. I crossed worlds for him and time. You don’t underst-- hitori-- you can’t he’ll come for us.” The two sighed and gently slipped somnus into her favorite incensory before setting it over her bed. “We know, momma. We won’t. We’ll wait and you can keep singing and dancing.” “They’ll come. You’ll see. Even though I left and jumped through time I know they will remember me. They just haven’t found me yet…” The somnus slipped in and stole her away, and the two breathed a sigh of relief as her voice faded into uneasy whispers of dream-touched sleep. “We can’t keep doing this, Tohby.” “I know. I know. But what are we supposed to do, Ree? We can’t leave her. Last time we tried…” They both looked over at her. Golden limbs were still full, muscular, and youthful as a girl’s. Time had not touched her- no greying of her hair nor slackening of her skin. She was beautiful, even with her hair shorn for ease of washing and her face and ears occasionally flickering through emotions too quick to follow. The last time they had left her, Tohbias had received a frantic call on the Flame’s linkpearl- a golden coeurl-like creature was seen rampaging across Eastern Thanalan, screaming about false faces and chasing someone through time. He and C’ryo had gone to investigate, only to find her on an impossibly high arch of the Burning Wall, screaming into the air with her voice shattering crystals. When he had called to her, pleaded with her, she had leapt down at him… C’ryo’s hand touched his arm, pressing her fingers gently over the four deep claw-scars there.“She’s dangerous, Tohby.” “I know.” He sounded defeated, looking up into his sister’s eyes. Mis-matched mirrors of his own- blue and green, her hair black streaked with gold. “We don’t have any choice.” She made an angry hiss and turned away, crossing her arms as her tail lashed behind her and she walked out of the room. “They don’t even exist, Tohbias! -No one is coming!-” Her last words come out softer, tone bleak, “He’s not coming back.” The closing of the door behind her was soft and final. Tohbias lowered his head into his hands. “They exist.” He whispered, reassuring himself that he, too, hadn’t been touched by his mother’s madness. “I remember them. I -remember- them.” He passed a sleepless night that way, watching the slow rise and fall of her breathing and listening helplessly as she told long, lyrical, disjointed tales in her sleep of people who both were and were not, who existed worlds and times apart. Scarlet samurai and mechanical men, monks and mages, dragon’s eyes and copycattes, the end of the world and saving it, a forest come to life, a madman in a mask, a sorcerer, Garleans, a wolf, a succubus, an elezen made of ice. She sobbed sometimes, other times she railed and snarled so that the house shook and dust fell from the beams. She whispered his father’s name in tones so lost that he wept as she did, tears running down both of their faces. Sometime in the night, C’ryo came in to take watch and he went wearily to his bed. Tomorrow would be another hunt for food, for gil, for somnus to keep her sleeping. Tomorrow he would go again to the Flames Headquarters- the last place his father had been seen- and ask. Tomorrow he would go to the city states, using some of their precious little funds to check once more about the existence in the records of “The Sword and Rose Order”. Tomorrow, she would ask again in mad innocence, and he would have to tell her once more that in this world- in this reality- his father was yet missing and the Order had never been. Tomorrow, he and Ree would have to coax her back into sleep and pray with increasing desperation that she didn’t wake up. Half-awake, his eyes moved to the chest that sat dusty and unused in the corner of the small room. A katana slumbered there, the demon within it all but hibernating. A bow’s red lacquer cracked and flaked away. A tanto, a wakizashi. Throwing knives. A linkpearl set in an earring. The only thing missing still- the detail that he knew gave them their last spark of hope and that kept his mother’s madness from destroying them all- was the helm. The hare helm of a clan that had been destroyed worlds and times away. The hare helm that he and C’ryo had played with as toddlers, that they had known too-briefly just as well as they had known his face.... He could not remember his face. Red eyes, snake-like, gazing at him with fond pride, but beyond that only a sense of strong hands lifting him onto broad shoulders and a man all in red with that helm...always with that helm... Dawn came and C’ryo stumbled into the room, muttering about nightmares and increasing their mother’s dose. As she fell into bed, he rose to face the day.
