Tales of Graces granted us not one, but two sexy green haired ladies of questionable morality. May the power of friendship give you the strength to make this choice!
Summary: Emeraude prepares for her glorious immortality on Fodra, and receives her comeuppance.
Read on ao3 or go under the cut...
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The day I died, I wore my silver brooch. I don't know what whim it was that saw me fumble the thing from its dusty box with its peeling gold leaf inscription; Amarcia Society Award. I could have been seventeen years old again, the youngest candidate for the society in a generation. I wore my brooch, with its three prongs-- representing wisdom, integrity and innovation—pinned on my chest as a medal of honour.
Amazing how a small piece of silver can make one more than oneself. I was no longer one of Telos Astue's numerous, anonymous orphans. I was more than a survivor of the mud slide that had taken the lives of both my parents, and blotted the mining town where we lived from the map. I was someone. I had the genius Cornell himself as my mentor. I had the world itself at my fingertips.
The award had lost its magic. The tarnished silver brooch on my lab coat was just that: a brooch. My face was no longer the eager fresh face of a seventeen year old but a woman pushing forty. Lines scored my face. When I coughed, something caught in my chest. The air had gone bad.
The communicator beeped, the sound like sandpaper against an incoming headache. It was barely past eight, and I hadn't even had my morning coffee.
I knew from the start the day would be no good.
Telos Astue was under martial law. It'd started with the food shortages. The people, unable to see the bigger picture past filling their own bellies, began looting. The looting led to violence, and if they didn't kill each other, the monsters took them. The dried up old ministers in sector sixty-seven's citadel blamed us for the crisis, wanted us court-martialed for our supposed crimes.
I dared not leave my lab. The others in our program had long left for Ephinea, to uphold the banner of Amarcia there and guide its terraforming efforts. Long I had dreamed of Ephinea, and seeing the fruits of our labours. But that fruit was spoiled now. Cornell had let a demon in our newly-born paradise. I knew Lambda would be waiting for me there. So I had elected to stay behind, the lesser of two evils, and keep the lights on as the old world fell further in decay. Not so much a life but a half-life, watching day by day the news outlets on the holoscreen fall to static, or reduced to overoptimistic jingles: we'll be back shortly!
The only solace I held tightly as a talisman: that I will live past it all.
My personality data and consciousness had been uploaded into a humanoid body. The Little Queen data I implemented in Protos Heis's design, instrumental in its creation. She-- I--- hibernated as if sleeping, a long sleep, not to wake until Ephinea comes into bud. It may take hundreds of years, or a thousand, but someone will come from the colony one day, and then I will be here, lone emissary of a lost world, to help guide and shape the future of the new.
Lambda surely then will be long dead. I have no doubt in Protos Heis's abilities. If anyone remembers him, it will be as the harbinger of Fodra's destruction.
And Ephinea will need guidance. Amarcia have taken oaths; to oversee, not to interfere. So that humans will not repeat their past sins and poison the skies and the sea of the new world. Yet I pity those poor creatures thrown back into the dark ages.
It will be up to me-- and me alone-- to shape history.
“Ma'am, Ma'am.” Psi spoke urgently through the communicator. “There's someone in the lab. A woman.”
I tucked the gun into the jacket, but to my shame, my hands shook. It'd been years since I'd last encountered another person. Not since the last shuttle from the Research Centre left. There should have been no way to get inside the lab. Perhaps it was a looter, driven by desperation, who wrangled their way inside. Perhaps another who needed someone, anyone, to pin the blame upon, who had burned down our sister lab. Humanity was burning, and humanity's response: to add another can of oil to the flames. My hand hovered by the gun, and my mind ran to foolish things: like how my hair had been scraped up into an ugly bun, and that I'd taken to wearing bright, clownish eye shadow, simply because I could. I spoke aloud to myself. I wore one sock to ward off ghosts. I feared that over the years alone, I'd gone rather peculiar.
Inside the lab, a woman leant over my humanoid self, safe in her protective pod. I recognised her at once from my research. It was worse than I'd feared, and the thoughts of my eyeshadow fell out of my head. Neither plant nor human, she wore a tumbling crown of crystalline leaves: a Little Queen.
She turned to look at me, with a face eerily devoid of expression. Beautiful as a flower, I felt in her a danger, something more akin to the venus flytrap. “I felt part of us here, but this child has the face of the Destroyer,” she said.
“I—what?” I said, stumbling over my tongue.
“Lambda has told us about you, Destroyer. We know what you have done.”
Her voice came from behind me this time, and I turned my chair to find the Little Queen standing behind him. Two of them.
“Lambda!” I spat. “It's him-- this is all his fault.”
“No.” A third Little Queen, and a fourth. A fifth. I was surrounded.
“We are Fodra. Lambda is Fodra. You are the Destroyer.”
I whirled round. “He was dangerous! Even now, his monsters ravage this world. I did what I had to do.”
“You hurt him,” chimed the voices in unison. “He hurt you back.”
“No! I--”
“You were jealous. He took you under his wing, the father you never had. After the accident, he wouldn't look at you. He replaced you. Like being an orphan again, adults shy and gentle around you. So you took what he loved and smashed it.”
“That's-- how do you--?”
“You will be judged for your crimes.”
The voice became one voice, resonant, ringing in my ears. I pushed myself back-- and stumbled from my chair to the ground with bruised elbows. I squeezed my eyes closed against a blinding light. When I opened them, the Little Queen was gone, and out of the light stepped a woman in white. Hair green as the vast pine forests that once covered Fodra, eyes deep blue as the oceans were before they burned away. She was the delicate scent of magnolias mid-morning, decked in dew; she was the earthy tang of soil, rising after the summer monsoons; she was the storm, the earthquake, the force of a mudslide that had buried my family alive. She was Fodra, and in her I saw all that had been lost from this world.
I could not bear to look.
Alone in my lab, I'd grown old. My plan at immortal life seemed foolish. This was what an eternal guardian looked like: not I.
She planted the heel of her boot against my chest, pinning me down. “Do you have anything to say for yourself, human?” she asked.
“Nothing that would matter,” I replied. The point of her heel dug in against my ribcage. I struggled to breathe.
She summoned her blade, and I closed my eyes against its brightness. I'd always had my eyes closed.
“Good,” Fodra said, as the pain drove into me, hot and searing, unceasing, until--
BLACKBOXDATA/TIME7:11/RECORDING/END.
A new observation: observing one's own death is unpleasant. A second observation: as is guilt.
The colonists arrived today and woke me, with bad news. Lambda is still alive. This is not a possibility I could have imagined. Thankfully, Protos Heis is still functioning, although she appears to have forgotten her purpose. As, I fear, have I.
