Work Text:
Mayfil.
She loathed this place. Syuveil lost his mind to it. She'd thought it destroyed in the Campaign, but...
Well, it seemed only the good died young.
"Shirley," a familiar voice called out, echoing with a spectral air. Though it had been millennia, she was not surprised to hear it. She had long since guessed the true implication of certain shifts in the common people's mythology. "It has been a long time."
"We've expected you," another called out, mirroring the eerie echo. She knew that one, too.
As she waited calmly, two flames appeared before the group - one searing red, the other purplish-black - and began to shift and change their form; she held out her arm to signal peace for the group, and her companions watched, tense, as the black flame reshaped itself into a woman and the red one into a man. The ghostly woman, her dark eyes as piercing as they had ever been, gave her a short nod. The ghostly man, his crimson armor not dulled even by death, looked at her almost pityingly. "You've changed a great deal."
Shirley gave him a mirthless smile. "As have you. My congratulations on your conquest of Hell. If any of us could have managed that, it certainly would have been the two of you."
"Conquest of... These people are the Lady of the Void and the Lord of Flames?! They're real?"
The woman looked past Shirley's shoulder, towards Albert. "He's an excitable one. Reminds me of Syuveil." She flicked her gaze back towards Shirley. "Should you have taken him here?"
"He's not as... fragile," Shirley replied.
"They're so like us, yet so different," the man mused. He looked at Kongol and nodded. "The Earth Dragoon, the gentle giant." He turned to Albert. "The Jade Dragoon, the knightly scholar." He looked at Meru. "The Water Dragoon, the child who is not human." Ignoring her protests that she wasn't a child, he looked at Doel. "The Violet Dragoon, the bloodthirsty warrior." He paused for a long time, looked at Lloyd and Lenus, and grimaced. "Hey! What are you looking at, punk?" the female Wingly demanded, starting forward and being stopped only by Lloyd's hand on her arm. "Some stupid human myth or not, I'm not afraid of you!"
"Lenus, they aren't just creatures from the humans' myths." The male Wingly shook his head. "Weren't you listening? They know Shirley. They referred to the Dragoons as 'so like us'. What does that tell you?"
She paused for a moment. "You BASTARDS!" Lloyd seized her as she leapt forward, and grappled with her as she spat curses at the two spirits. "You're to blame for everything! You! You stole our empire from us! How dare you?! Who did you think you were?! Stupid human upstarts!"
The rest of the group had the grace to look embarrassed. Shirley had long since worked through whatever secondhand embarrassment she'd had cause to feel - having begun the moment that those Dragoon Spirits accepted two Winglies as their masters. At least the two souls before them seemed not to be rolling in their graves. The man shook his head, while the woman just looked resigned. "I suppose it would be pointless to remind you that you achieved that power only through conquest and slavery."
"Damn straight!" Lenus shouted. "We took what was ours by right! This was the inheritance given to us by Soa!"
"The same inheritance," the woman said, "that you would deny the Moon Child." Lenus's struggling abruptly subsided, and, after a moment, Lloyd let her go. "It's different," she muttered, but in a subdued voice.
"For what it's worth, if you defeated us, it was because we had grown stagnant," Lloyd said, addressing the man and woman with a slight note of respect. "What became of us, and of the world, was not your fault. It was ours."
"You two are totally arrogant," Meru said, crossing her arms and glaring at the two older Winglies. "If the humans bringing us down was a bad thing, it's because of them, if it was a good thing, it's because of us... You guys just show we haven't changed at all." She looked at the two spirits. "Sorry. You two who fought alongside Shirley, you who slew Melbu Frahma... you must have been incredible."
"It was mostly Zieg," the woman said; she appeared indifferent, but if she had not changed overmuch in death, Shirley knew she was secretly embarrassed.
"Rose underrates her contributions," the man said, with a shrug so familiar it hurt. She had thought she would never see it again. It was bitterly ironic to see it here, in the Winglies' artificial realm of the dead. "Except in the long conquest of this place. That was mostly her."
"Amazing..." Albert muttered, his handsome face dazed. Shirley knew someone would have to interrupt before he became completely distracted and started interrogating the deceased Dragoons on history and myth - he'd done enough of that to her, Soa knew, and been grievously disappointed that eleven thousand years had done her memory for details no good.
Fortunately, Doel took up that role. "Enough of reminisces," he said. "The cult of the Moon Child seeks to infiltrate this place and break the final Signet. We have reason to believe their agents are already here. Lend us your aid, or we will go through you."
The man and woman looked at each other. Shirley did not like the look that passed between them.
"The Moon Child's servants... if 'none' had truly escaped, they would not have grown to their present prominence," the man said. "Extinction or war. You and Belzac, you sought a world in which no one had to die. But was this the right choice?"
Shirley gritted her teeth. "I had to be whom I have always been," she said. "If I became otherwise, the White Sea Dragoon Spirit would have rejected me, and rightly. I was the one who lived. You - I care not what you would have done. I will not have my long vigil judged by the dead!"
"That utter bloodlust, the conviction that all who move must be left dead. This is insanity for a human. It is cruelty for a Wingly. But it is the savage nature of a dragon." The woman crossed her arms. "Michael, could he have-? But would he have obeyed any control for eleven thousand years, or would he have eventually broken free to enact mindless slaughter? I don't know. Even though I raised him from his birth - could I have restrained him forever? I can't be sure."
"I get along with Michael just fine," Lenus said dismissively. "I don't know what your problem is."
Shirley refrained from commenting that it was easy to get along with an impulsive, violent brute when your minds worked almost on the same level. From the expression on the spirits' faces, they were already thinking the same. Doel, however, would not be distracted.
"You're stalling," he growled. "Why?"
Again, that disconcerting expression passed over their faces. "Eleven thousand years pass, yet little changes," said the woman.
"A sister plots, spinning her schemes for the betterment of all living things. A brother works, seeking his own advancement at the expense of all living things. For how long has this war gone on? Was its beginning with the sealing of the Virage Embryo, or did it begin as a squabble in the nursery? We humans cannot say, only fight as a soldier for one side or the other. Perhaps none are now left alive who can remember. Would these two admit it, could we ask them?"
Shirley narrowed her eyes, her gaze flickering from one to the other. "Worked, you mean," she said. "Those are the siblings you mean, aren't they? Melbu's dead. You killed him. Isn't he here?""So different, yet so alike," the woman said. "Both masters of magic, specialists in the mysteries of the body and the soul. One constructed the Signets for the benefit of the world, and made you immortal. The other constructed the Crystal Sphere for the benefit of himself, and..."
She trailed off. Shirley ground her teeth, unable to figure out what game they were playing - but then Kongol spoke up.
"Is this a riddle?" the Giganto rumbled. "Kongol no like riddles."
"A reasonable question, Kongol," Albert said, rubbing his chin. "They could choose to say anything, and yet they suddenly talk in this roundabout way. If they were just stalling, as Uncl- Doel says, they could continue to speak normally. Yet they wish to tell us something. What?"
"Oh, who cares!" Lenus snapped. "If they're in our way, Zieg Feld or not, we'll cut them down. We'll kill them until they die!"
"I do see why you 'get along with' Michael..." the woman murmured.
"What's that mean?!"
Lloyd ignited the Dragon Buster.
"Don't tell me you're agreeing with Lenus," Shirley said in disbelief. The two might have been lovers, but Lloyd - Red-Eyed Dragoon or not - was certainly the cooler head.
"I'm agreeing with the two of them," Lloyd said, taking a fighting stance. "You can't speak of the one who's controlling you, can you? Not directly."
Shirley stared at him. Out of the corner of her eye, however, she saw the man give a wan smile.
"That the 'long vigil' should fail upon the 108th Moon Child is odd," he said. "Has this been decreed by fate? Could it have been predicted long past, and a plan long made...?"
"The thralls of the Moon Child scurry about, and yet the Moon Child is still only a child. Its godhood is unborn." The woman looked behind her. "Who is its regent? Those who would take a child's kingdom..." She aimed a pointed gaze at Doel, who looked unabashed. "For 'godhood', for how long might someone scheme?"
"Soa's plans have lain dormant for thousands of years. One whose plans depend on Soa's... might they lay in wait as well, remaining dormant until 'that time' came again?"Shirley felt herself going numb. "But - he-""I see," Doel said darkly. "A 'man behind the man'."
"So the one who truly leads the cult is not the Moon Child's vassal," Albert breathed, "but rather..."
"If it is your will to impede 'that one', we must fight you," the man said, enormous, demonic armor forming around him from Mayfil's vapors. "Even the rulers of Hell must serve the one who created Hell."
"For the future...the new world must be built upon the ashes of the old." The woman's face had vanished behind a demonic mask, stylized in the manner of the artists of old. "Defeat us! So you might end the cycle!" She gave a despairing laugh. "So that there will be a world to build."
Whatever protests Shirley might have had were drowned out as the armies of Mayfil fell upon the Dragoons, and the battle began.