[Years in the past, but not many...]
A man who sets out on a death march knows he will not live to see the end.
Victoria knows the same.
In the end, it isn't some grand display of tragedy that breaks her. Not their impregnable wall bursting full of holes like wet paper. Not hearing the enemy cheer as the XIIth ran like kicked dogs, not the haunted survivors whose scars the poets could twist into something romantic.
Not the unburied dead. Not running. Not knowing they had nowhere left to run. Not the rations running out or being shot at with the guns the Eorzeans pried off their broken-down machina or the legionary sobbing because he couldn't put the pieces of his squadmate back together right.
Not the shockwave from Servius's exploding reaper that punched her into the dirt. Not the fight to gasp for breath or the ringing in her ears. Not lurching to her feet and nearly falling right back down as the pain came roaring in. Not the realization that she was studded with shrapnel, spotted with burning ceruleum, and bleeding from anywhere and everywhere. Not the reflexive acceptance that she was putting out parts of herself that were still on fire.
Victoria oen Castellus hits her breaking point at seventeen years old as she stands at the edge of a crater and wipes her friend’s brains off her face.
Ala Mhigo can crumble to dust and the XIIth Legion can whine and cower before rolling over. Neither of them are worth dying for. For Glory Garlemald are empty words on the empty lips of empty men, recited to an empty army.
They have no right to tell her die nobly. They have no right to tell her it's about honor, or valor, or love of a nation that's never seen her as anything better than shit on its boot.
They have no right to tell her not to walk away.
So she does.
It's a stupid little thing, really. Her first real gesture of defiance, and like as not her last. The Eorzeans supposedly shoot their prisoners, but fuck it. Better that than collapsing in the sun like a work-broken horse to be picked clean by the birds and foxes.
But that's posturing on her part, really; her hard-edged fatalism is nothing more than a thin slick drifting atop a flood of terror.
She does not want to die.
She does not want to die.
Oh, Solus, she does not want to die.
She should have seen the signs. She should have known before now. A month or a week or the evening before, in the slowly collapsing half-house they'd piled into for a few hours of rest. Tracer rounds in the night, bright streaks winking out like falling stars. Half the birds in Ala Ghiri roosting in their ruin.
Crows at the window. Crows in the rafters. She should have known. She should have known.
One boot in front of the other. Again, again, again. Don't think about the crows. Don't think about the pain. One boot in front of the other. Walk. Walk.
Time and distance contort themselves into unidentifiable shapes. Has it been malms she's walked, or merely fulms? If she turns to glance behind, will she see the same gore and smoke and twisted cermet she's fleeing from? Gyr Abania is nothing but a smear of sun and dust scored by distant gunfire.
Day and night. Day and night and day again. An empty canteen and slowly scabbing wounds too hot to the touch. No Legion. No Eorzeans. No help. Just her. None of it makes sense; they couldn't have just vanished. She can't have missed every single bloody one of them. There has to be someone to surrender to.
Is she the one who's gone? Is she dead and simply denying it? Is all that's left of her just blood and bootprints? Is--
Her unhinged spiral of thoughts teeter back into something approximating a regular orbit when she notices she's been wading through knee-high bushes.
Somehow, she's bumbled through a gap the Eorzeans blasted in Baelsar's Wall and right into the Black Shroud.
Brilliant, Castellus. Absolutely fucking brilliant. There's one for the fucking record books.
Fucking incredible.
In the end, she shoves a low-hanging branch aside and resumes her doomed journey to nothing. It's the only choice she still has the power to make; either she walks, or she sits down and dies. The end result may be the same for both, but she'll be damned if she'll just roll over and accept the inevitable after coming this far.
In the time her unit had been stationed at Oriens, they'd never managed to cut a path in the Shroud that stayed clear for long. From the looks of things, neither had the Eorzeans. Perhaps they knew better than to bother in the first place. The arrogance to try and conquer a forest primeval may be uniquely Garlean; rusting machina from the XIVth's aborted offensive seem to concur from where they sit overgrown and decaying.
By the time she notices him, there's no telling how long he's been watching her struggle through the underbrush.
This time there is no fog to herald his arrival, nor any ominous dimming of what light can make it past the choking canopy. Nor is there any break in the birdsong bouncing back and forth between the trees. He sits straight-backed and dignified in the saddle like some wildling king of old, surveying his domain and Victoria with it.
She cannot bring herself to freeze in fear. There's nothing left in her that might cave to such a pointless gesture. He's too close. Were he so inclined, he could cleave her head from her shoulders without even needing to lean over, and there is no one to save her.
No unnatural judgment pares away her psyche this time; he regards her with the detached, idle curiosity of one studying a particularly interesting bug. Perhaps he's puzzled by her presence, if things like him can be puzzled. His blank-faced helm betrays nothing.
Perhaps theirs is an inevitable meeting. He has his sword, she has her rifle. Unworthy though she may be, there is no question he would strike her down should she take aim. Her suffering has gone on long enough; it would be merciful to let her rest at last. There is no shame in that. She could have her honorable death, should she wish it.
She need only ask.
That understanding hangs unspoken between them, and for a fleeting moment it renders even the balance of power between a desperate girl and a forest lord.
One heartbeat.
Two.
And then Victoria oen Castellus looks a god in the eye and says, in a voice hoarse from dust and disuse, "I want to live."
There is an instant where it seems her words mean nothing; then slowly, the horned rider nods, and with a gentle tug on the reins he guides his mount aside. As she pushes through another armful of brambles, Victoria can't muster the emotional intensity required for true surprise. An apocalypse lies behind her and a forest lies ahead, and all that is left of her simply says walk.
She walks, and the lord of the hunt walks alongside her.
Perhaps she's going mad; hobbling out of a war and into a hungering wood may have been the last straw, and her mind has resorted to conjuring visions to keep her going. One does not stumble on beings primeval by chance. Maybe she's dying, and this is how she's to be beckoned into the dark.
Whether ghost or guide, his company offers a sort of twisted reassurance; if nothing else, she will not die alone.
Thin spots in his unearthly aura start to show through in close proximity. Though he does not breathe, Victoria can see him shift minutely in the saddle, and his leg tenses slightly as his steed takes a particularly large step to clear a rock. Maybe he was mortal, once. Maybe he was like her, wounded and afraid, and in his desperation he became something more. Maybe not. She'll never know.
They're close enough to touch. Were she so inclined, she could reach out and stroke the flank of his horse, or lay a hand on his armored knee.
His sword lies in reach, too. A tarnished, twisted thing, warped as though the smith had hammered out the edge and let the molten remainder cool in place. A primal weapon for a primal being.
Yet misshapen as it is, something in it calls to her. It offers no sweet nothings, nor sly, seductive whispers. Whatever compels her claws its way through reason and restraint to find a dark, hungering part of her and clutch it in iron fingers.
Take me, it says. Take me and fight again. Take me and carve your name in blood through all the ages. Take me and run forever on a wild hunt for a glorious end through a sea of unworthy dead. Take me, wield me, and ride joyous as you burn the world to ash. Take me.
With no small amount of effort, she tears her eyes and mind away. The promise of a saga that makes her mythic pulls at the deep and hidden parts for her that even now yearn silently for glory. And yet it's not enough; the bargain dangling before her is too damning.
It hinges too much on a future she may not live to see, and at a cost whose true gravity proves too great to grasp in her current state. Maybes and what-ifs hold roughly as much value as the fallen leaves her boots crunch down with every staggered step. In another time and place, she might be appalled all the deaths required to ink the pen that writes her legend, but the only one that matters right now is her own.
Ahead, the brush begins to thin. If she squints, Victoria's almost certain there's an open field beyond the trees. It takes only a few steps more to confirm that she's right. Then, and only then, does she allow herself to feel any relief; Gridania must have at least a few guardposts along the forest's edge. She can let herself stop walking.
Another, riskier option tempts her more than it has any right to. She's fluent in the common tongue. If she discards most of her uniform and concocts a convincing sob story, she could simply disappear. It's not wholly impractical. When she's right up against it, the difference between surrender and desertion seems a very fine line indeed.
Uncertain, she turns toward the lord of the hunt and finds him gone.
Perhaps he vanished in the half-second she peered too intently ahead. Perhaps he was never there at all. Perhaps his domain is the Shroud and the Shroud alone, and he can go no farther. Straying beyond its borders may well be impossible for him.
But not for her.
With steely determination, Victoria Castellus turns and limps away into the golden afternoon.
