FSF - Deathwatch - "Come with me if you want to live."/"This is how the world ends."
“There are worse ways to die,” she said.
“Would you say so?” he asked.
There was the passing of a moment wherein the space between them was filled with no more than the sound of the wind, the crackle of the glaciers as they shifted.
“Well,” she said with a bit of a snort. “In fairness I must confess that I’ve experienced precious few of them myself. But secondhand? You may take my word upon it.”
“Perhaps I shall do so,” he answered after the silence of another moment. The sun had vanished beneath the blowing snowstorm as the planet’s elliptical orbit carried it away from the star that had momentarily warmed its surface. As it refroze, the turbulence created in its thin jacket of air covered the fresh remnants of battle, scars not unlike those that lurked beneath older layers of the ice.
“Generous of you, mon-keigh,” her voice rasped in his ears.
He shrugged his remaining shoulder, a scrape of the cooling, silver-painted pauldron against the ice. “It seems it would be churlish to contest such things, now of all times.”
The pair lay quietly together, perhaps a meter apart. One was a motionless, skull-masked figure armored in darkest blue-black sprawled upon its back, laid out beside an emptied weapon nearly as long as she was tall, whilst the other was a twisted snarl of ceramite plate and machinery that hardly resembled anything human - neither of them a threat to the other any longer. As the snow settled upon them, obscuring craftworld insignia upon the one, Ordo sigils and oath-markings upon the other, he managed to make the tiniest motion of one hand. “Was it destined to so end, do you think?”
“Once the portals closed, yes,” she answered.
“I don’t mean this battle. Have you ever wondered if the moment a primitive human creature took up a sharpened rock from Terran soil long ago, was all the rest set in motion? Was the meeting of our kinds a mere formality?”
Frost crackled as she lifted one hand a mere few centimeters and then let it down once more. “Who can say. Perhaps there was a point things could have gone differently. Why do you ask?”
“If there are such moments in the past, perhaps they yet lie in the future, as well. Not for us, of course,” he added, unnecessarily.
“Not for us,” she agreed. They lay in silence once more until a quiet beep echoed thrice. “What was that?” asked the one that bore the mask of Maugan Ra.
“The support system for my organic components is at critical power,” replied the tangle of machinery that had once been a space marine. By this point, the snow from the condensing atmosphere lay so thickly upon them that each of them had been reduced to shades of dull white.
The dark reaper did not reply to this admission for some moments. “For what little it is worth, there are better ways to die, as well,” she ground out.
“Mm. I had always hoped for it to be at the height of battle, my brothers and sisters at my side, striking one last blow in the name of mankind,” he said dryly.
Her chortle was a short rasp of rusted metal against barbed wire. “I cannot grant that wish, human,” she said as the sound faded. “The most I can offer is quietly, in the company of an enemy.”
He was quiet, sparing a moment to listen to the wind as his auto-senses faded. “Well,” he said eventually. “I suppose I can live with that.”
There was silence, and then she crowed with laughter, joined by the vox-distorted voice of the space marine. In time it faded, the last sound made by living beings upon the cold planet as the long night closed in.
[Gen][Thancred Waters & The Scions of the Seventh Dawn][WOL (X’shasi Kilntreader)][Feo Ul][Angst][I’m sure about the angst this time][A past relationship between Thancred and X’shasi is alluded to but there’s no real shippy content here][Body horror][Assisted suicide mention][Alcoholism mention][FFXIV 5.0][Takes place during the MSQ quest Extinguishing the Last Light][5.9k words]
This story contains ending/MSQ spoilers for FFXIV expansion 5.0, Shadowbringers.
[AO3 mirror]
Light streams in through her window. That feels wrong—as though the sun should have turned its face away from the world. Even if it had, Thancred knows, it would make no difference. Day and night, the light falls through her windows onto the same spreading rectangle upon her floor. Sitting in it brings no warmth and no peace.
He has dragged the chair from her desk into the center of that bright pool anyway, and there he sits in observation. He is not always alone—in fact, he rarely is—but he is almost always there, for reasons he cannot name, and a few that he can.
Thancred has neither the knowledge nor the contacts to try and find a solution. Unlike most of the Circle of Knowing, he has never been adept with magics—and now less than ever. He understands what is happening, but he needs others to explain it. Y’shtola can see, and Urianger can understand; even the twins can feel something. Ryne can act. All Thancred can do is watch and wait.
The other reason he stays is because he owes it to her. Because she has been so much to him—hero and inspiration and friend and even, for a while, lover—and he cannot bring himself to do anything else. He has been too absent for too long.
Her name is X’shasi Kilntreader—Shasi, sometimes, when they are alone. Not now, even when there is no sound in the room but the beating of his heart. It hurts too much to think of her as Shasi, his Shasi, when she lays stiff and unmoving atop her bed.
It hurts worse when she doesn’t.
She seizes. It takes Thancred by surprise—this is not the first time it has happened, but there is no regularity to it. X’shasi convulses atop her bed and her breathing becomes ragged with panting. Something—not blood; it looks more like meol, though Thancred refuses to follow the thread of that thought—leaks from the corner of her lips or sprays from her gasping mouth. He is afraid then that she will hurt herself, until he remembers that she is already in pain and there is little she could do to injure herself worse than she already has. In the aftermath, Thancred turns her onto her side and holds her head gently until he is certain she is breathing; that she has not choked on her own aspirated Light.
Then he calls for Ryne, and whatever else she might have been doing she abandons to come and bind the Light once more. It taxes her, he knows, but there is no one else to ask. There are shadows beginning to form under her eyes; she looks older than a girl her age has any right to.
X’shasi turned thirty, Thancred remembers, some time after he was called to the First. He isn’t sure if she is thirty still. Either way, she is far too young to die. Ryne may be the end to the endless cycle of reincarnation for the Minfilias, but there’s no guarantee she’ll live much longer than her predecessors.
Then again, if he doesn’t call for Ryne, there’s no guarantee that any of them will live for long.
“Thancred?” Ryne says. He hasn’t even heard her come in. He’s taught her that well, or he’s that preoccupied.
He looks up from where he sits on the edge of the bed. X’shasi’s pillow rests atop his knee, and her head atop that. He has laid a hand against her neck to measure her pulse with his thumb. He can feel her heartbeat in his hand. It is as close as they have been in five years or more.
“It happened again?” she asks. “The last one was only two days ago.”
“They’re getting more frequent,” Thancred says. There is no emotion in his voice. It is as blank as X’shasi’s sleeping face, which he now looks upon once more.
“Hold her still,” Ryne says. “I’ll get to work.”
Thancred does, shifting his hand from neck to shoulder and anchoring her upon her side. Ryne kneels beside the bed and closes her eyes. She stretches out one hand, feeling at something Thancred can’t even see. She does not look much like Minfilia anymore, except in moments like this when she bows her head and prays. Then it is as though he is still a young man, newly come to Ul’dah, unsure how to care for the girl he orphaned.
He has orphaned this one too, he knows. He stole her from Ran’jit and now has seen the man killed. It is far more direct even than his role in Warburton’s death, and while he does not regret it he thinks he may never see the end of repenting for it. He tries not to let the turmoil show on his face. He has long practice at that.
What Ryne does requires a type of sight he does not possess—or a pair of goggles he left on the Source. As she works he can see the signs, though. X’shasi’s breathing deepens, becomes more even. Her muscles no longer tense with pain. Ryne holds X’shasi’s hand between both of her own a long moment, looking down at the signet ring she wears. Then she withdraws and stands. Thancred carefully rolls X’shasi to her back and adjusts her pillow.
White stains her chin, spatters her clothing. The bedsheets, too, are drenched. He offers Ryne his hand, and leads her out with him into the hallway. A chirurgeon from Spagyrics waits there.
“Another incident. She’ll need a change,” he says.
“I’ll attend to her,” the chirurgeon says.
Thancred only nods, and shepherds Ryne further down the hall, back to her own apartments. The door is still ajar, speaking to the haste she must have left in, but Ryne balks at the threshold.
“She’s getting worse,” Ryne says. “Isn’t she.”
Thancred looks down at the girl and longs to lie. Instead he nods once.
Ryne lets go of his hand, balling hers into a fist at her side. “I don’t know what more I can do,” she says.
Thancred glances back the way they had come, and is surprised to find no one looking on at this outcry. He gently places his hand atop Ryne’s head a moment, and then steps past her and into her apartment. “Come on,” he coaxes.
She follows a moment later, shutting the door after herself. Her room is neat, organized; the door to his suite hangs open, revealing that his is a great deal less so, as untidy as his thoughts. “I wish Minfilia were here instead of me,” she says.
“Well, I don’t,” Thancred tells her.
“She would know what to do! She could save her. She could save everyone, and I … can’t.”
“Ryne,” he says, sitting down at the table and indicating to her to sit opposite. “I’m sorry.”
Ryne sinks into her seat and just stares at him.
“I don’t think Minfilia would know what to do any more than you do,” Thancred says. “I certainly don’t. It’s not fair that you have to deal with this.”
“I want to deal with this,” Ryne says. “I want to just fix it! Minfilia could fix it. X’shasi could fix it! I’m not good enough.”
Thancred finds a deeper ache than the one that has pervaded for the last sennight. He welcomes the pain, perverse as he knows the impulse to be, because it is a novelty. Because something is changing, at least. Then he masters it and reaches out to pat Ryne’s arm gently. “You’re doing your best,” he says. “You’re doing more than should ever have been asked of you. I know it’s my fault that you think that’s not good enough.”
“Just tell me she’s going to be okay,” Ryne pleads.
The lie rises to his lips. He wants to tell it. He wants to believe it. He wants the act of his speaking it to somehow make it the truth. He says, “We’re going to do everything we can to make sure she’s alright.”
Ryne stands, her arm slipping from beneath his hand. He thinks she might storm away, but instead she flings herself at him, burying her face against his chest. Thancred freezes for a moment, and then he wraps an arm around her, stroking her hair with his other hand. “It’s okay if it’s too much,” he says. “You should be able to live a normal life.”
“She told me over and over that it was my choice,” Ryne sobs. “But if that’s true then I’m always going to choose to try to help her.”
“That’s all anyone can ever ask of you,” Thancred says. “There has to be an answer somewhere. Our friends are going to find it. You have to believe that.” No matter how hard it gets.
– – – – –
Thancred paces his room. It is the same as it was a moon ago, but for the light outside. It contains all the same amusements and distractions as ever, but lacks the things that tempt him most. This is on purpose, of course, and so far has been sufficient. But the Wandering Stairs are never far. Three times already he has put his hand on the doorknob, ready to go out, and thrice he has retreated.
He does not know if he has the strength to resist making a fourth attempt. So he puts himself as far from the door as he can, sitting on the cushioned bench beneath his window. He throws it open and is greeted by harsh light and the smell of stale air. His windowbox plants are a bit rangy-looking—most have dropped their flowers, which wither in the pots below, and some of the leaves have discolored.
Of course. Preoccupied as he’s been with everything else, he’s forgotten—these are varietals from before the Flood, planted with seeds from the Hortorium after night returned to Lakeland. They are as unhappy with the return of the all-enduring light as anyone else.
One by one he drags them in and sets them on his dinner table. It’s not as though he’s been eating at it in any case, but he sits down and resolves to tend to these plants as though he expects to see them bloom again.
He picks the weathered trumpetflowers from the soil of its pot, tossing them into a spare bowl. A few blooms still cling to the shrub, but these are withered and browning, their scent less a delicate perfume and more like fruit gone to rot. He plucks these too, along with the discolored leaves. The shrub looks stunted beneath his hands, its bare branches knobby and pathetic. He rises to find the shears, and in the midst of his pruning he hears the sound of laughter.
“Such care for a poison tree!”
“I’m in no mood for pixie pranks, your Majesty,” Thancred says.
Feo Ul’s wings tinkle like bells as they flit about his shoulders. “But of course not,” they say. “Your saplings are not the only ones withering under too much Light.”
“I am well aware,” Thancred says. He grasps his composure and his tools more tightly, lest the faerie king drive him to drink after all.
“Oh, but these are alright,” the king says, settling on the rim of a pot of crocuses. “Growing plants that nourish and plants that poison side-by-side … how reckless! How like a mortal.”
It takes a great deal of effort to turn his thoughts from the idea of clipping those gossamer wings in his annoyance. “What do you want, Feo Ul?”
“I want nothing,” the pixie says. “I came to give you something! A report from Garlemald. My lady Tataru seemed to think it best trusted to you, if you would care to receive it. Or were you sulking?”
“No,” he lies. “Who is it from?” He is quite certain he knows the answer.
“Why, the Crown Prince, of course,” Feo Ul replies, aflutter once more. They flit to the next pot and begin to pull sun-scorched leaves from the plant there, tossing them about in a cascade of pink and brown. “Now this one,” Feo Ul says, “is neither food nor poison. Why grow it?”
Thancred has no ready answer. After a moment he says, “She gave you back the night. I thought the least I could do was give back its flowers.”
“Ah, for love’s sake,” Feo Ul says, “or beauty’s.”
“I—” Thancred protests.
The faerie king continues undeterred. “You do still have a good heart, then.”
Rather than comment on that, Thancred uses his pruning shears to cut the branches he’s severed into mulch. “The report, if you please.”
“The Princeling says that he has arrived in the city and found Asina’s old workshop empty. The First Legion have been recalled in force.” Feo Ul goes on like this with their task as does Thancred with his; when they are done Thancred has a few cups of mulch for the compost heap and a more complete understanding of Garlean troop dispositions than he has in five years.
“This report was meant for Tataru?” he asks.
“No,” Feo Ul replies. “Not primarily, although I had been instructed to give it to her as well.”
“Galvus asked that of you?”
Feo Ul shakes their diminutive head. “My sapling bid me do so, but since she was in no position to issue orders as she usually does, I asked Tataru. She suggested I ask you. ‘It’s what X’shasi would want,’ she said.”
That takes him by surprise for a moment—and then surprise fades and he admits it only makes sense. X’shasi has been fighting some covert, proxy war in Garlemald for moons—trying to keep the pressure off the Alliance, no doubt—but he hasn’t been part of it. Still, with X’shasi out of the picture, he’s the one most fit for the responsibility, though he’s not at all sure he can hold the leash. “Does Galvus know about her condition?”
“I never saw fit to mention it,” Feo Ul says. There is pixie mischief in the king’s tone.
“Don’t,” Thancred says, “and won’t he be so surprised when he finds out his instructions came from me.”
Thancred can only hope he’s out of sword-reach when he does. He issues the instructions anyway, his heart leaden, and then he says, “What if she never wakes up?”
“Do not say such heartless things,” Feo Ul demands, and the furor of a ruler is not diminished overmuch by the fact that the king stands a fulm high at most.
“Is there anything you could do for her?”
“No,” the pixie admits. “I could save the world, but not her. We could force the crown upon her and bind her to the castle, as we did the last Titania, or I could turn her into the adorable sapling she has always been. Would you tend her as you do this garden?” Feo Ul wonders. “There is relief there, to care for her until she flowers; to eat of the fruit of her branches; to sleep forever beneath the shade of her boughs.”
Of course a faerie would think so. What shocks Thancred is that he thinks so, too. But he can’t afford to—Emet-Selch is not much like Lahabrea, he supposes, but he will not leave that door open just the same. “If she starts to change,” Thancred says, “will you answer my call?”
“For my sapling’s sake, I would do all you asked,” Feo Ul says.
“Well,” Thancred says, “go to her sleeping prince, then.”
Feo Ul does, and Thancred is left with his garden—stunted and only dubiously saved—and a bowl of things he must now leave to rot.
– – – – –
Y’shtola is not happy to have returned to the Crystarium. Thancred suspects in part that she might not have come in person at all if the master of the Tower were not absent—and while he would never accuse his friend of delighting in the misfortune that surrounds them, he finds he cannot blame her either. After all, she had been right to be suspicious.
“How are things in Slitherbough?” he asks.
“Perhaps not so dire as you may expect,” Shtola replies. “The Night’s Blessed have seen the stars, and to lose them has not dashed their hope but steeled their resolve instead. But there were no answers there. Nor in Fanow, where I also chanced to inquire.”
“I suppose if it were that easy,” Thancred says, “they would have turned back the Flood long before.”
“How are things here?” Shtola asks.
“The same,” Thancred says. “So: worse. I’ve had to field a dozen enquiries as to the why of it all, and can come up with no more convincing lie than ‘we don’t know.’”
“We are in dire straits if you cannot spin some yarn or another,” Shtola says.
Her needling should bother him, perhaps. From anyone else, it might. If not that, it might comfort him, but it does not do that either—he is vaguely aware of it, and that is all. No thought follows from the first one, much as he refuses to come to any conclusion about the white blood he has seen stain dark lips all too often.
“Does it hurt, to look on her?” Thancred asks softly.
Shtola nods once, but does not turn her face away from the bed. “Like staring into the sun,” she whispers. “And yet I cannot bear the thought of looking away.” She does not finish the thought, and does not need to.
Thancred only nods in reply.
“I could see her well before I entered the city,” Shtola says. “Like the beacon at Pharos Sirius, or the wellspring of aether beneath Silvertear Lake. I could have guided my amaro by her light from malms away. Something happened yesterday?”
“Mm,” Thancred says. “Another seizure. Ryne took care of it.”
“The sky …” Shtola takes a moment to gather her thoughts. “The sky is always burning,” she says, “but it was like the backdrafts that tore through the Castrum all those years ago. Around eight bells or so.”
“You could see it from there?” Thancred says, and curses. “We are running out of time, then.”
“And options,” Shtola says grimly.
They sit there in silence. It should be companionable—they have been friends more than half his life, and for who knows what proportion of hers—but it is merely silence, smothered by the stillness of Light.
“One thought has occurred to me,” Shtola says after a long moment, “though I fear if I should tell it to you now you will try to dissuade me.”
“Then why mention it at all?” Thancred wonders, the words bitter on his tongue.
“I am not half so fascinated by secrets as our friend Urianger,” she says. “And moreover, it is not exactly a novelty. If I tell you my plan, I expect you to hear all of it.”
Thancred sets his teeth a moment. He has an inkling. “Should we ever make it back to the Source, I am going to have words with Master Matoya,” he says.
“So, despite my injunction to hear me out, you’ve already drawn your conclusions. G’raha’s theory was sound,” Shtola tells him. “If I draw her into the Lifestream with me, she poses no danger here.”
“There are no Elementals or convenient Ascians to save you this time, Shtola!” Thancred snaps.
“I do not expect to be saved,” she says.
“You can’t honestly expect me to just accept this as the plan.”
“Do you have a better one?” Shtola asks.
The silence answers for him.
– – – – –
He returns in the days that follow, knowing that he will continue to do so; tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, until she wakes or until she dies. To the last syllable of recorded time. His shadow when he sits falls ever the same way across the floor. It stops just short of the edge of her bed with its freshly-changed sheets, crisply folded and neatly tucked, stiff as the unmoving thing atop it.
Even as a shade he does not touch her. He is a fool, he knows.
A greater fool than he enters the room, his soft footsteps all but lost in the chiming sound of the chains that dangle from his garb. Urianger Augurelt has always been the smartest man in the Scions, and Louisoix’s most trusted agent, and the most damnable idiot of all of them.
“Good morning,” Urianger says.
Thancred’s gaze hardens. He says nothing. If the astrologian notices, he gives no sign. It is only then that Thancred realizes that Urianger is not speaking to him, and has expected no answer. Thancred stands, suddenly restless, and his eyes and Urianger’s meet for a moment. The frisson of anger that passes over him, through him, leaves his jaw tight and brow furrowed. He stalks from the chair to the window and throws it open to the incongruous sound of birdsong in the mountains beyond.
There is a soft scraping sound of metal on stone, and when Thancred looks back, Urianger has dragged the chair from that patch of direct light so that he may sit at X’shasi’s bedside. He takes her inert hand in his, clasping it between his long fingers. The Elezen’s face is a mask of anguish, and for some reason this casual intimacy between them pricks him.
“What news from Il Mheg?” Thancred asks, as though this tableau does not matter to him at all. He turns away again, leaning out the window. X’shasi’s window box is a collection of sun-bleached pots and scorched soil, the flowers that had once decorated it long since withered.
“Little to hearten, I fear,” Urianger says. “The pixies spoke only of their own powerlessness in the face of their erstwhile king’s transformation, though the nu mou told somewhat of a different tale.”
Thancred reaches out to take up a handful of dirt. It is desiccated and crumbles in his hands, taken by the winds in a trailing plume as he lets it fall. He could replant these flowers, he thinks, but to what end? The person they are meant for will never see them. “What, did they offer to change her into a mushroom?”
“No,” Urianger says, “but they spoke of a knight of Voeburt changed to a leafman rather than a sin eater.”
“Feo Ul suggested something like that,” Thancred murmurs, casting the last of the dirt back into the pot with a disgusted flick of his hand. He is tilling soil that will bear no harvest. “I’m beginning to think it’s our best option.” Certainly better than losing Y’shtola to her Flow.
“Thou wouldst sacrifice her so readily?” Urianger asks. Thancred can feel his gaze upon his back, the note of surprise in his voice making it tight.
“If she does not recover on her own, of which she gives no sign, we will have to start considering the practical options,” Thancred says. He cannot look back at Urianger, so he busies himself with washing his dirty hands and rifling through X’shasi’s pantry. It is all but untouched, most things even unopened, and Thancred begins to suspect that the past few weeks are the most time she has spent here since her arrival. “Shtola has offered up a plan of her own, but I don’t see why it should fall to her to sacrifice herself. The way I see it, it’s either me or you, and of the two of us you’ve a better chance of learning the intricacies of Flow.”
“Wherefore comest thou by this conclusion?” Urianger asks.
Thancred pauses in straightening the labels of the untouched spices in a rack. “It began with me,” he says. “It should end with me. And you …” He turns back to that hateful tableau.
“This whole situation is your fault,” Thancred says. Urianger says nothing, only purses his lips. “This was your great plan to save the world,” Thancred continues. “This has been your affair for years. You sacrificed Minfilia to this ambition readily enough, and G’raha, and now her. Don’t you think you should bear some portion of the burden yourself, now that your gambits have failed?”
Urianger, he of so many words, is silent. He bows his head, looking down upon the hand clasped in his own—the one he won’t let go of. Envy flares in Thancred anew at the sight; it should be him, he thinks. It has not escaped his notice how close the pair have grown in their time on the First. Thick as thieves, which is an irony, as they two are far more virtuous.
Perhaps virtue is the problem.
It is not, he imagines, that they are lovers—and if they were, could he really object, after the things he’s done?—but ever since his calling, Thancred has been estranged from her. Her presence on the First has done less than he hoped to remedy that, and he despairs of ever getting the chance. How can he make amends, after all, with her sleeping form?
With a tree? With nothing at all?
“The pixies had no knowledge to aid me, nor the nu mou, nor the Amaro,” Urianger says. “The wisdom of Voeburt is rotted away, and if the fuath came to know any of it they did not grant it me. Mayhap the answer is within the Tower; ’twas not the Students of Baldesion that would have taught G’raha to make a vessel of the self. Moenbryda’s siphon,” he says, “would be a starting point.” He sighs, turning his face away. “Would that I could change your stars,” Urianger whispers.
“So that’s it,” Thancred says. “You’re going to lock yourself away in the Tower in the hopes there’s an answer in some ancient book, while the rest of us struggle on in the real world. How like you.”
“My apologies that my stewardship of the Waking Sands was not exciting enough for thy liking,” Urianger says. “It is perverse that a sage of Sharlayan should so disdain scholarship.”
“It’s not scholarship I mind,” Thancred says. “You’re running from your responsibilities to yet another library. You might regret it someday, should you ever come down from your ivory tower.”
“Thou knowest little enough about my life, to say naught of my regrets,” Urianger replies. “Moreover, at least I would go in hope that an answer might be found. What occupiest thee, as thou keep thy silent vigil?”
“The same question that occupies us all,” Thancred says. “How we’re all going to make it out of this alive.”
“Nay,” Urianger says. “Thou hast relinquished that hope, all too willingly, as thou hast abandoned her company.”
“I haven’t abandoned anything,” Thancred protests. “I’m here every day to look after her.”
Urianger only looks at him a long while, the scholar’s soft hands locked around X’shasi’s. At length he stands, gently patting her knuckles and laying her arm across her chest as though she merely sleeps. Then he carries the chair back to its place in the light, setting it down with another pointed look, and quits the room.
Thancred sits uneasily in the still-warm chair. His shadow does not reach the bed. It will never touch her.
– – – – –
Four people makes the room crowded, even if one of them is inert. Since she is not awake to eat on her own, Spagyrics has her hooked up to tubes. The sludge they feed her is off-white, and the three living people in the room cannot stand to watch her fed it. The memory is too fresh, and the twins are too young to bear it easily. Instead the three of them sit at the table on the far side of the room, taking a meal of their own—more traditional but no less bland.
Perhaps it is merely that food has lost its savor, but he watches Alisaie push the food around her plate only so long before he turns his attention from that too. He never expected much from them, in truth, though he thinks better than to say so. The twins have done their best; that much is not in dispute. But the Scions had all come from Kholusia, and if there were secrets to be wrenched from the distant islands, they might have managed it before they left. Amh Araeng, too, has given up as much as it’s going to, and the Inn at Journey’s Head employs ever the same tactics.
He looks down at his bowl, at the mess of lentils and cured meats—odds and ends preserved with salt and stretched with easy grains to grow and a handful of herbs. He knows a bit about making food last, but this is far more elegant. It occurs to him there’s something he should know and doesn’t. “What,” Thancred says, “does X’shasi like to eat?”
“Hot chocolate,” Alphinaud volunteers. “Haurchefant would—”
“Not another word,” Alisaie interrupts. She sets down her fork very deliberately, not looking at Thancred nor her twin brother.
Alphinaud smiles, the long-suffering smile of a put-upon sibling. The pair have had their spats in the years since their arrival here, but it has always been playful. Thancred can see that this is not; Alphinaud seems to be meeting his sister’s ardor with his usual good humor. “I suppose that’s not really food.”
“We’re not discussing this!” Alisaie’s tone is strident, her delicate hands curled into fists at the edge of the table. “I’m not going to just let you poison her,” she says. When she lifts her gaze to stare Thancred down, her blue eyes are sharp as daggers.
Realization catches up with Alphinaud, and he reaches out to set a hand on his sister’s shoulder. “I don’t think anybody really wants to do that,” he says. “Least of all Thancred.”
“He’s right about that, at least,” Thancred offers, though his voice betrays him—too subdued, too resigned. So he might as well say the rest. “But I will if I have to.” There’s no sense obfuscating the truth. They are Louisoix’s grandchildren, and have his talent for sniffing out a lie. Besides, they’ve seen and done enough that it’s not a mercy to spare them but a denial of their role in things.
Or perhaps Thancred has never been able to be alone in his grief, and simply wants the excuse to drag everyone else into it.
“Why not kill her weeks ago, then,” Alisaie wonders. “You had plenty of opportunity, with the rest of us chasing our hopes.”
Thancred flinches, because he’s asked himself the same question. “I don’t relish the thought,” he said. “But I do have to entertain it.”
“You were traveling when it happened,” Alphinaud says, “so you never got to see us have this same conversation about Thancred.”
“What,” Alisaie squawks, “because of Lahabrea?”
Thancred nods. “There was never a plan to save me. We didn’t know it could be done.”
“Well, it could! And we did! And we’re going to save her, too.” Alisaie’s voice grows quieter but more resolute as she speaks.
“Right now there’s no hope of that unless she wakes up,” Thancred says. “And even then, we don’t know what to do. Unless you think we should go to the Tempest without her and try to rescue the Exarch?”
“That’s exactly what I think we should do,” Alisaie said.
“Getting to the bottom of the ocean presents a few logistical problems,” Alphinaud points out. “Like breathing, for one.”
“Not a problem for me,” Alisaie says, waving him off.
“You can’t just do this alone,” he says.
“Then you’d better get started on the logistics, hadn’t you?”
Alphinaud balks a moment, glancing from his sister to Thancred and back again, but he seems to read something in the set of his twin’s elfin jaw that tells him the same thing Thancred sees: that Alisaie needs a private word. Although it’s foolish to fear a girl—no, a young woman—half his age, there is a twinge of nervousness in Thancred’s heart just the same. “I’ll see what I can find out,” he says.
The door shuts behind him. Somehow three is easier to bear than four; it is even more welcome than two, despite the forbidding set of her brow.
“You were the first to fall, you know,” Alisaie says, rising from her seat. “Doubtless you understood that when you were the first to arrive here.”
“Second,” Thancred says. Standing, he continues, “Minfilia was the first.”
“Minfilia went of her own accord. Even unto the aetherial sea.” Alisaie stacks her dishes and steps away from the table, crossing to the bedside. “She told me about it,” she says, nodding at Shasi’s sleeping form. The tube by which she was fed ran clear now, water washing away the remnants of her meal and filling her belly. Even an inert body had its needs.
“So I was first. It doesn’t change anything.”
“It changed her,” Alisaie said. “She tried her best not to let it show, especially after Y’shtola and Urianger were called—with so few of us left, I think she was concerned about scaring me, but … whenever she could, whenever her duties allowed, she was off searching for an answer. She sent Arya to look for X’rhun and see if he thought this was something like the blood-curse they’d dispelled; she sent Shpoki to Master Matoya and called the Sons of Saint Coinach. She visited the alchemists and the thaumaturges and the conjurers. Everyone she could conceive of that might possibly have an answer, and when we ran out of leads …” Alisaie shook her head. “When there was nothing left to chase, she came back to the Rising Stones—to watch over you all, she said, but she always sat in the same place.” Alisaie turns her face up to regard him. He cannot tell whether she wants to be hard or soft; there is recrimination in the set of her brow but pity in the trembling of her lips. Her eyes are bright with tears. “Next to you.”
There is a terrible symmetry, he realizes. To everything. But he doesn’t know how to say that. All he can say is “Alisaie,” and then she is speaking again.
“She has given up so much of herself to the cause—to all of us—to you. If my only hope is at the bottom of the ocean, then I suppose I know now why the kami blessed me all that time ago.”
“You really think that you can face down an Ascian alone?” Thancred asks. “I’m a strong swimmer, but I can’t hold my breath nearly that long.”
“If I have to do it alone, I will,” Alisaie says. “She did it for me. She deserves more than our resignation to inevitability. Fate turns ever on a capricious spindle, after all.”
“It’s the slenderest chance,” Thancred says.
“The odds get better with everyone who helps me,” Alisaie replies. “My brother seems happy to be part of it. Would you go with me? Or are you going to stay here and wait for the worst to happen?”
That wasn’t who he was. How could he have forgotten? His life had been a series of impossible odds, and no one ever beat the house at the Platinum Mirage by paying the blinds every round and doing nothing. There was still darkness at the bottom of the sea, if the Ascian had retreated there. They could find it and bring it back—and the Exarch along with it—and if she could not save herself, Thancred would save her or die trying.
It was what she would do.
It was what she had done.
Y’know, it’s weird, but with the pictures I chose, the more fanservice-y characters like Diane, Merlin, and Ban are wearing more clothing while King and Gowther are completely shirtless.
