Barnabas stands with his hands planted on the table, staring at the map.
Anyone else might assume he is studying it with care– analyzing the angles of the battle, perhaps. Categorizing what went right and what went wrong, what needs improvement, what might have been done differently, what next time will be victory.
And maybe some small part of him is– Cid knows his king, knows the whip-sharp intelligence behind that pretty face and serious scowl. Cid can also see the way his right elbow is locked, not supporting his weight but straining not to shake nonetheless, and his eyes haven't moved from the same spot for minutes.
Even Benedikta is beginning to shift from foot to foot, unnerved. The report she helped write lays a scant handbreadth from Barnabas's hand, slowly soaking up the wine that had been spilt in a single, careless moment of shocked anger.
“Garuda. Leave us.”
For a moment she puffs up in indignation, but. Barnabas is. Quiet. His command barely more than a whisper, a subtle threat threading through the room around them that even Cid can feel. From the way Benedikta's eyes widen and her mouth snaps shut, it wraps firm around her throat.
She bows, short and only barely deep enough to be polite, before turning on her heel and sweeping from the room.
The doors slam shut behind her.
Cid watches with some concern as his king's whole body sags, tension bleeding out of him like water through a burst dam. Barnabas staggers back and drops into his chair like a stone. His face is severe, his eyes obsidian– and cracking.
“Tell it to me plain, Cid,” he commands with the uneasy edge of a plea that makes Cid's skin crawl. He makes his way around the table and plucks the paper from the wine, watching with a cat's idle curiosity as the ink flows off and dissolves away into the ruby red.
“I think,” he says, careful, pointed, “that you already know what I am about to say.”
“It's not possible.”
“I know what I saw.”
“It is not possible.”
Cid hisses a breath through his teeth. Ramuh is rumbling in his chest, disappointed, unimpressed. “I know what I saw, 'bas,” he says with a hand against his sternum to quell his Eikon's disquiet. “I know what I experienced. That man wove magic like fabric and laid out two full squads, no small number of them Bearers themselves. He laid out Garuda–” Barnabas flinches, and Cid takes no joy in this, but he presses on regardless. “-- and the only reason he didn't do the same to me is because he didn't want to.”
The memory sticks, clear as crystal even now– a hooded man, shrouded in black cloth and blacker magic. A sword on his hip, undrawn, and no other weapons but his wicked, boney hands as he smashed into the Mother Crystal with a deceptively dismissive little motion. Like flicking away a fly.
And the crystal shattered like so much glass.
He had turned to look at Cid, in the fractions of a second of destruction had met Cid's horrified stare with pale eyes and purple magic blazing. And Cid knew– knows– the only reason he hadn't been crushed like an ant, why his soldiers and his Benedikta hadn't been slaughtered en masse, is because it simply would have been inconvenient.
Barnabas slumps back in his chair and squeezes his eyes shut. One hand fumbles in the air, and Cid passes the half-empty bottle of wine without complaint. If there ever was a time to fuck decorum and drink, straight from the bottle, until your eyes cross, it would be now.
“A second Dominant of Darkness,” Barnabas croaks. Just saying it aloud makes Cid shiver, makes Ramuh rumble with approval and delight. “It's not…”
Not possible. Cid would say that too, had he not seen it with his own two eyes. It goes against every rule, every unbreakable law of nature they have ever known.
A second Dominant of Darkness appeared in Drake's Spine. Lingered there, primed and oozing magic, long enough that Cid and Benedikta could marshal the men to face him in that empty square. As though he were an actor just waiting for an audience, that he might finally start his show, and not a man living on borrowed time before his Eikon's magic turns his flesh to stone.
Just the memory makes Cid's hands shake.
“He would have told me,” Barnabas mutters into the lip of the bottle. “Odin would have told me. Why didn't he–”
The whole palace trembles. Cid scrambles, his feet slamming on the ground as he nearly tips off the table, and Barnabas lurches with wide eyes and a hand on his own chest. Around them, darkness sings like a harp’s deepest string plucked too hard. An admonishment even Cid can hear:
