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An aetheric storm loomed over Mor Dhona. It put Kethry’s ear fur on end. Her hair was all afrizz anyway, unwashed after three days running and zipping through aetherytes all across Eorzea and Othard telling everyone that the Scions were back. It’d seemed like they’d needed her around to deliver the news, as if Alphinaud’s perky little greetings weren’t enough evidence that they were really home safe, let alone the fact that they had already been back home for a month recuperating at the Seventh Heaven.
Things weren’t very good in the Source. If she pointed that out aloud, Pakik and Thancred would laugh and ask if they ever were. Alisaie would get all grim and say something about the Scions needing to step back onto the frontlines, Alphinaud would say something practical to motivate her, Urianger would say something she didn’t understand, and she wouldn’t be able to find Y’shtola in the first place. Krile would probably snap in half from the stress.
But Kethry had nothing to do. They’d won—twice. They’d saved the First and the Source and the entire universe, probably, and now they were out of the kinds of fights she could help with. The last dangerous Ascian was dead, Garlemald was crumbling like a dried-out kedtrap leaf, Alisaie was well on her way to curing tempering, and everything Kethry could touch seemed so exhaustingly fucking peaceful.
She didn’t want to be someone who liked danger and fighting. She didn’t like them, not really, not like Pakik did or like Zenos had. It felt good to win, that was all. But now that they’d really won, she’d really won, she was quickly discovering that after the feasts and drinking were over, after she’d slipped out of all the speeches and ceremonies, she was bored out of her skull. Maybe she could try out Estinien’s method and disappear into the wide world, hopping on a ship to anywhere and just looking around. Maybe she should go to the southern continents, or way out west. Maybe the gathering aetheric storm would knock down a cliff face to reveal some kind of ancient Allagan ruin somewhere so she and Pakik could round up some friends and go explore it.
As if summoned by the mere thought of Allag, the Exarch plodded up beside her. He’d left the hood and robe behind with his old—new? Old-new?—body in the First, but he had changed out of the vest he’d worn into the Crystal Tower all those years ago. The words she’d watched his lips form on that day still echoed in her head, like they had the whole time in the First. Even if it was just history now, she’d been there to see it, so it wasn’t really history at all, was it?
“Something appears to be on your mind.”
And he was right, like he always was about things that didn’t matter. She didn’t respond, just curled her tail into her lap and combed some dust from her fur with her thumbnail. Her perch on the edge of the wall, legs dangling over a twenty-yalm drop, suddenly felt like it was made of sand. She palmed the pommel of her greatsword where she’d leaned it against the wall at her side.
“I have noticed you coming up to this parapet more often lately,” he continued, leaning up against the turret she was sitting on. His new crystal-tipped staff contrasted violently with his scarlet hair and eyes. “Not that I have been spying on you, of course! I am simply trying to regain my bearings here in the Source. It really isn’t so different, you know, from the First. You surely noticed the geographical parallels between…”
She stopped hearing his words, but didn’t stop listening to his voice. He was old now. Older than her by a hundred years, or three hundred—she couldn’t keep it straight. Old enough to read about her death in a history book and young enough to still leap along the debris around the lake with Alisaie. Seeing him like this, the Exarch in G’raha’s body, put sparks in her blood that she couldn’t identify. All they did was sizzle and refuse to catch. They might have been rage, so she put them out whenever she felt them in case they would reveal that she hated him. She didn’t want to do that, not for the world.
His monologue came to a close. He’d noticed that she wasn’t listening, but he must’ve also noticed that she wanted to let him talk. She forced herself to look at him and found his expression somewhere between gentleness and fear. She hissed softly through her teeth. Those two always mixed to pity, and pity was the last thing she needed from him.
“I wanted to try again.”
“What?” Kethry jumped, her tail stiffening and flicking out of her lap. Maybe pity wasn’t so bad if this was the alternative. She gripped the edge of the wall with both hands.
“To… be, ah…”
For once, at least, she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t explain something.
“Friends,” he managed to finish.
Sparks. Before she could stamp them cold, they set her blood alight and she snapped, “Again? I was never friends with the Crystal Exarch.”
He flinched. “Kethry, I…”
She slipped deep inside herself, into the fetid pool at her very core. Deeper down than the boiling pain, fear, and hate she used for her dark magic; this water was stagnant. When she dipped inside it, she felt herself tainted by the aimless loathing that collected there whenever she was lost or confused.
Her voice came out low and harsh. “You’re not G’raha Tia. You’re the Crystal Exarch. The Scions didn’t know G’raha from before, so they think you’re him. But I knew him.” Did she? “You’re just acting like the person you think G’raha was.”
Those godsdamned eyes of his, that scarlet that had been haunting her for years now, blinked with hurt. She hid a pang of guilt with a low growl. It was his own fault for doing the things she’d said. If he didn’t know he was doing them, then he was just ignorant, and that wasn’t good either.
The Exarch turned to look out over Mor Dhona. The purple light of the storm refracted off the curve of his left eye; the sky crackled. “Then the Exarch wants to get to know Kethry Ament.”
The fire in her blood died. She blinked away tears before he could see them, then jumped a little when she felt the small zap in her soul as Pakik arrived back in Revenant’s Toll by aetheryte.
Hi!
Pakik’s presence snapped Kethry back into herself. Her friend took up a whole room, sometimes a whole town, just by being there. Kethry had gotten used to shrinking to the back corners during her time in the First, waiting close to the door so she could eavesdrop while the Scions decided where to go, then head that direction before any of them turned to ask her what she thought. Pakik’s time in the First had somehow made her even louder than she’d been before, maybe happier somehow. The Scions looked to her like a real member of the team, not just a weapon. Kethry was happy for her in a way that made her jaw sore.
Pakik was prodding at their bond. Kethry finally relented: Hi.
Seemingly satisfied with that, Pakik wandered off to do whatever she wanted. She always seemed to have somewhere to be and something to do there, like she’d figured out some secret to being alive in her years away in the First that she wouldn’t share with Kethry.
That wasn’t fair, but it still felt true.
Kethry had been sitting silent for a while. The Exarch waited like he could wait forever.
“Fine. Ask away.”
He perked up, his ears flipping vertical and the little lines by his eyes wrinkling as he suppressed a smile. “Actually, I was hoping we could do something a little more active. Would you follow me?”
#
The Exarch led her back down the stairs, winding through Revenant’s Toll and out the south gate toward Silvertear Lake. G’raha Tia rattled off something about the way the airship wreckage suggested that Garlemald had based some of their technology off Allag’s; the Crystal Exarch walked in silence.
Saint Coinach’s Find had been packed up and hauled away years ago. With the Crystal Tower’s door locked behind G’raha, they must not have found much else to research. Now that the Tower was completely broken—or inactive, or drained, or whatever had happened to it—there was little chance they’d ever come back. Kethry kicked a rock off the place where a young girl’s tent had once been pitched, sending it sailing past the little patch of dirt where the girl’s bait box had sat and skipping off the place where the girl had set the butt of her spear before she curled into bed. The rock bounced to the side, clattering to a halt in the place a young man had sat hunched over candlelit books for hours, ignoring or not ignoring the girl as she paced, restless, behind him.
Kethry shuffled just as restlessly as the Exarch settled onto his heels and sighed up at the distant peak of the Crystal Tower. His gaze slid down its glittering mass, then panned across the labyrinth. He turned and looked straight into Kethry’s eyes, so sure and casual that she almost flinched. “Do you remember the way down into the chasm? I feel it would be an appropriate venue.”
She did. Something seated deep in her gut told her it would jump into her throat and commandeer her tongue if she spoke, so she just brushed past the Exarch and made for the narrow ledge that descended through the mist obscuring the base of the canyon. Something else, up in her chest, nagged her to ask what he wanted and where they were going, but her body was bustling with feelings she couldn’t name, so she shut them out and kept walking.
The footing was bad, but not nearly so bad that Kethry couldn’t walk it. The Exarch had a little more trouble; even after his weeks getting accustomed to walking around in G’raha’s body, he hadn’t quite shaken off G’raha’s little clumsy tics and hesitations. Kethry made sure to sweep the small patches of gravel off the ledge with her boot and kick the unsteadiest of the rocks loose to crack against the floor of the chasm.
The leather strap holding her sword on her back chafed a little through her shirt. She hadn’t put her armor back on. Pakik had ripped it off her the day after they’d gotten back from the First—had barely managed to, with how weak her body had gotten while it had lain idle in the back room of the Rising Stones—and thrown it into a pile by the ale barrels, saying some cryptic chocobo-shit about taking a break from being the Warrior of Light. Kethry had been tired and Pakik had been serious, so she’d taken her armor to the Ironworks tent up the hill for repairs and hadn’t gone back to pick it up yet. She’d had a few good baths since then, though, so she guessed she owed Pakik a bit of thanks for that.
In a short-sleeved shirt and thin pants, the layer of slick mist halfway down the path chilled her through the bone. She rubbed furiously at gooseflesh on her arms and stifled a shiver, forcing herself to focus on clearing the path for the Exarch.
A light fluttered, then flared, behind her; she turned to see the Exarch holding a ball of flame in one hand and his crystal-tipped staff in the other. His hair and eyes looked almost gray in the glow.
“A little warmth and light?”
Kethry grunted in agreement as the mist evaporated off her skin, then continued down the path. The mist diffused the firelight so that it cast no shadows at first, but as they descended further, the shadows grew thicker so Kethry had to slow her pace to pick her way down the path.
They came out onto the wide, flat, night-dark bottom of the canyon a few moments later. The Exarch lifted his flame overhead and set it adrift ahead of them, making it impossible for Kethry’s eyes to fully adjust.
“Put that out. I can’t see a thing.”
The light snapped out as if she’d been the one commanding it. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and listened to the Exarch’s boots scraping up to her side, then opened them again to see the hazy texture of the ground sharpen as her sight adjusted.
“Why are we down here, anyway?”
The Exarch shuffled slowly forward to turn and face her. “I was hoping you would be open to a friendly spar, like those w—” He coughed. “Like those I have been enjoying with Alisaie and Thancred. After all, if the Scions are serious about having me along, I could do worse than to acquaint myself with the strength wielded by the Warrior—” His face went bone-white and his eyes popped wide. “By you, I mean. I am… I am sorry. I know that…”
“Shut the fuck up and get your bow if you want to spar.” What was she thinking? He wouldn’t use a bow; the Exarch was a mage. She unslung her sword from her back and let its point scrape along the stony ground as she stepped five long paces away. Too far into the dark for him to see, but not for her. “Or whatever you fight with.”
He barked a laugh as he squinted at her. “I believe I have lost nearly all my hard-won skill with the bow after a hundred years in the First. Were I to try replicating my performance against the Cloud of Darkness, I would require no small share of lu—”
Kethry’s sword smashed against the aetheric shield the Exarch had thrown up, cracking and sparking through the blackness where her steel ground against his magic. She’d wheeled on him and closed the gap without thinking. He’d been quick enough. She skipped backward and settled into a fighting stance, sword overhead and canted down at her opponent, who had surrounded himself with the pale blue glow of a barrier.
The Exarch could pretend in front of the Scions all he wanted, but not in front of her. She smacked her lips, finding that her gums were drying around her bared teeth.
I don’t say this often, Fray piped in uselessly, but it may be best to calm yourself.
#
Kethry dashed in again, this time tossing a scrap of darkness at the Exarch to upset his rhythm before feinting an upward swing, then thrusting her sword at his knee. The faint glow of her own aether gave him too much warning. He slipped away from both strikes and jolted her with a burst of levin that seemed to stick in her muscle, stiffening her limbs and forcing her to slow down and let him retreat.
He watched her, eyes wide and tense, mouth taut, jaw set. A few hundred yalms up and to the east, a thousand years ago under the long-cooled shard of Dalamud, she’d seen that same expression on G’raha’s face.
She pinched her eyes shut for a second and earned a fireball to the chest—and a brief moment of half-blindness—for her carelessness. The Exarch was already charging another spell as Fray soothed and healed the burn; Kethry kicked forward and batted the next attack away as he loosed it, relying more on her sense of his casting rhythm than her eyes, but the Exarch had already repositioned.
The base of his staff whirled faster than Kethry could track, carving whorls in the stone below him that glowed with aetheric light. A hair-thin string snapped taut between his chest and the center of the ley lines, and Kethry was only barely quick enough to dive clear from the ice crystals that burst up under her feet as he thrust his staff forward.
Kicking sideways off one of them and torquing her hips around to keep her feet under herself, then swinging her sword in an overhead arc to counter her spin, she sprung all the way to the wall of the canyon and stopped dead against it. She settled silently to the ground and rushed to a position in the Exarch’s blind spot as he flung his head side to side frantically, searching for her in the dim light. She tried to steady her breathing and found it stuck in her chest.
It was just a spar. Just a friendly little competition. She hadn’t even been that excited. She didn’t even like fighting that much. The last time she’d felt this way…
She tripped over her own ankle as the Exarch turned and she locked eyes with G’raha.
He flung his spell backhand at her. She called all her aether to bear, welling it up around herself like the mist they’d passed through, and hardened it in front of her chest. The Exarch’s fireball broke around her; she broke through the smoke it left behind. Charging in with her sword low behind her and her shoulder forward, that misty armor shielded her from his attacks and obscured the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
A heatless flash of light blinded her. In the split-blink between the flash and her moment of impact, she scoffed. The Exarch was really fooling himself if he thought that would stop her. She swung her sword overhead and down hard.
It carved straight into the stone. A cold point of crystal pricked into the back of Kethry’s neck. She cursed and dropped to her hip, rolling away just as a gout of ice burst from the Exarch’s staff, then kipped back to her feet with her sword leveled in front of herself.
“Hah! You are faster than I remember by half. I am certainly glad I took the time to learn a few new tricks myself.” The thread from his chest had dragged his ley lines with him, allowing him to slip behind her without sacrificing any speed.
“You don’t fight like a black mage.”
“How do you mean?” The Exarch took the pause to lean on his staff and catch his breath. The way his back broadened as he settled his weight made it look like his muscles were itching to draw a bow. She tried to think about Naago instead.
“You move around a lot. Most mages stick in place like they own the ground.”
He stared at her levelly for a breath, smirked softly, chuckled, and said, “An old friend once told me that no one is really in charge of anything. They just have it until someone comes along to take it from them.”
No, he couldn’t say that. The Exarch didn’t know that. He hadn’t been there.
“I’ve found the tenet to hold true. Shall we continue?” He lifted his staff again and tipped up onto his toes.
Kethry didn’t bother answering, just darted in and took the Exarch out at the knees with the flat of her sword before he could react. His jaw crunched on the stone and she almost winced in empathy, but instead just kicked him away to roll across the ground.
He found his footing before he disappeared into the darkness, scrambling upright just inside Kethry’s vision. That meant he couldn’t see her. She hushed her steps again and repositioned. He charged another fireball and flung it at the place she’d been standing.
It cast a roiling, flickering glow across the chasm floor as it arced, looking almost like water as it spattered across the ground. Flame licked her pantlegs, spreading much further than the last few. The Exarch’s eyes flicked to her as he lifted his staff forward with both hands, then sent a healing spell into his jaw.
Kethry slipped away from the fire’s surge of light, but she saw the Exarch’s eyes follow after her as she should have left his sight. He flung another spell: a cold, glowing blue light that stuck to the chasm wall and didn’t go out.
She hissed and skidded to a halt, setting her feet to dash in at the Exarch, but her legs seized up again as he jolted her with another levinbolt. Staggering for balance as her body betrayed her, Kethry slammed her sword into the ground and steadied herself on it, but crashed onto her back when a massive ice crystal slammed into her face. Her head hit stone and she rolled to her feet, dazed but conscious, in time to split another flying ice crystal in half around herself.
More light to her left, then to her right, and there was no way to go but forward, but Kethry wasn’t stupid. The Exarch had been tracking her far too well; he would have a trap laid if she charged straight in where he could see.
She tried to stop and think for a moment so she could work out his plot, but then growled and charged straight in anyway.
The stone below her erupted into lava when she was three yalms from the Exarch. She yelped and tumbled forward as she yanked her foot away, flipping forward off the surging heat and bouncing on her hip on cold stone. When she scrambled to her feet, the Exarch was nowhere to be seen.
A lock of her hair, just at the edge of her vision, lit up orange from behind. She sprawled to her fingers and toes, sword hilt under her right hand, and sucked air through her teeth as the Exarch’s fireball singed her ponytail. She had to steal the pace of the fight back from him, but he seemed to know everything she was going to do before she did it, like he’d memorized the way she moved. She was locked down, just like—
Pakik had done this to her once before, back on the Bloodsands. Kethry had brought all her speed to bear and come up against Pakik’s steel-clad fists before she’d abandoned all her discipline and let her guts do the fighting for her.
But that had been different. This was the Exarch, not Pakik, and with him, Kethry wanted to…
She shook the thought away and stood, feeling the surging heat and hearing the crackle of another aetheric fireball flying at her. He didn’t seem to have many tricks besides fire and ice. Maybe he was just holding them back, being polite for their spar. Kethry smashed the flat of her sword backwards through the flame, splitting it across the steel, before turning to the Exarch. He stood near the center of a long section of the chasm that he’d completely illuminated; Kethry had to squint to see him in all that light. She’d have to put it out if she was going to beat him here.
He’d wanted the spar in the first place. She’d followed him before she knew what he’d planned. Shouldn’t she have been smarter than that by now? She still wanted to hear him say something, maybe, or do something. Maybe she wanted him to apologize, or to tell her another secret that would make everything that had happened over the past year make sense.
It still didn’t. She knew she was the Warrior of Light, but she didn’t think she’d ever understand why it had to be her.
So she did something only she could do: put the Light out. She tore a sheet of darkness from herself and thrust it into the tip of her sword as she ran toward the Exarch again. Her weapon rang with the cycling aether, and as she stomped to a halt three and a half yalms from the Exarch, it nearly burst with strain from holding the power. She swung it high, drawing it in a sideways arc over her head, and flung a crescent of shadow upward.
She reached up to it, lowered her eyes to meet the Exarch’s as he stood with both hands on his staff, and called the shadow down. With her hand clenched into a claw, she yanked the aether to splatter across the illuminated ring, dousing the lights in a rain of darkness that ran blacker than the chasm itself.
Kethry could see through it. It was her own darkness, after all, and it served her. She stifled a sigh as it embraced her, replacing the armor she’d left with the Ironworks to shelter her from the things that would hurt her.
The Exarch hunched low, eyes snapped wide, staring into the blackness. The same warm, dry blanket of dark enveloping Kethry, the one that always kept her and her friends safe no matter what, began to descend around him as if it had intent of its own. That wasn’t what it was for. It was for protecting her closest friends, like in Ala Mhigo and in the skies above Amaurot; it was for keeping the people she loved safe. She bit her cheek and willed it away.
Before he could gain his bearings, Kethry crouched low and pumped her arms back, then leaped thirty fulms in the air to hang from the cliff above. She caught a small cleft with one hand and peered down at the Exarch as he shuffled around and hunted for her. Her darkness faded, giving way to the chasm’s natural dim light again, and he grew frantic as he realized she had disappeared.
The right moment came. Kethry pulled herself up a little, planted her feet on the cliff wall, and jumped straight down at the Exarch, slamming into him with her shoulder and knocking him off his feet. She kicked back up out of sight before he recovered his senses.
She crept along the cliff wall on her fingertips and toes, breathing shallowly to stay quiet and stepping carefully to avoid kicking rocks loose. A ledge wide enough to stand on appeared by her chest; she mantled it and crouched on it with her sword over her shoulder, looking down to watch the Exarch heal himself again.
Another opening: she rocketed into him, flattened him on his back against the ground, and disappeared again—
“Break.”
The world ticked forward and Kethry didn’t. Her blood froze in her veins and her lungs stilled. She was gripped tightly from the inside and out by nothing at all. The darkness that had armored her blinked out of existence. Not even the air had changed its texture; the eddies her movements had made in the dank chasm swirled on past her, heedless of her terror.
She’d seen the Exarch do this before. It had been scary then. It was vomitous now. She struggled, but didn’t struggle, because her muscles wouldn’t work and all her strength was locked a second away, but the Exarch had slammed a wall between her and that second. She was suspended ten fulms off the ground, midway through her jump back to safety, and not even her weight was on her side. She tried to do anything at all and couldn’t. Her heart would have pounded through her chest if it could beat. She would have choked if she could breathe.
The Exarch had gotten back to his feet, healed the rib Kethry had broken, and was looking up at her. His eyes were narrowed, appraising, inspecting her with a gaze that was pure horror to see on G’raha Tia’s face. It wasn’t cold or distant like she’d always imagined the Exarch’s eyes to be under his hood. It was full of heat, of blazing interest and that light she’d seen in G’raha’s eyes when he found a new Allagan artifact to study. His gaze slid over her like a glass jar over a wasp.
She strained aimlessly, trying to move anything at all, pulling every direction at once. Only her mind seemed to work until she felt herself blink. She wrenched her eyes shut and open again, slamming the trickle of aether she could control into them and channeling the entire force of her will into wriggling more of herself loose.
As if waking from a reverie, the Exarch’s ears shot upright and his tail frizzed. He thrust his staff at her, released the spell, and swept under her to catch her as she fell.
Kethry’s weight drove him to his knees. He moved to set her on the ground, but she rolled away and leapt to her feet. Her tail flicked back and forth and she panted heavily; the dimness of the chasm got a little brighter as her eyes bulged open.
The Exarch inhaled and rose. “Are you alright? I should not have used that spell in a friendly bout. I have been told it is a uniquely distressing experience.”
Half a blink later, he doubled over with Kethry’s fist in his stomach and retched onto her sleeve, then fell to his knees again and gasped for breath. Not fair. She’d also gone too far, but she’d wanted to hit him for a year now, and maybe her nerves were still a little raw from all that Light. The stagnation that had been leaking from her pores in the First was gone now, but being frozen by the Exarch’s spell had brought all that fear back in a rush, and she’d… panicked a little. She’d hit him when he was trying to help her. He’d heal himself. It would be fine, she promised herself.
She grabbed him by the ear and lifted his head to face her. “Never do that again.” She couldn’t manage to put any acid into the words.
He winced and his lips pulled taut, not from the pain, so she let him go. He staggered upright as she stepped away. “I apo—” He paused, exhaled, and chewed his cheek, looking everywhere but Kethry, then looked her in the eye and said, “I will not.”
Kethry settled onto her heels when she decided she believed him. It was a stupid spell, but as she stifled the panic she’d felt when he’d made her helpless like that, she realized it was only stupid because she’d been on the bad end of it. It was a really good spell. “Just not to me.” He’d already said that. She’d gotten him back fair and square when she’d punched him. She shouldn’t have done it, but how could she apologize for that to him, after all he’d done?
What would she even apologize for? She couldn’t ever put it into words, so why did she want so badly to try? Half a word burst from her lips, more a grunt than speech—“I…”—and ricocheted off the chasm walls, disappearing into the mist above.
She what? Hadn’t meant to punch him? She had. Kethry had been good at fighting for too long to ever hit someone by accident. Just because she didn’t understand why didn’t make it an accident. So she’d been scared? A little. A lot. She kept looking in his eyes for her—for G’raha, instead of some old mage who had needed the Warrior of Light and not Kethry Ament. She kept trying to find words to apologize for the fact that Kethry Ament never seemed to be enough.
She settled for saying, “If you’re okay, we can keep going.”
He coughed three times and rubbed his neck, then prodded at his belly and waved another little burst of aether into it. “I have energy to spare for another round. Anyroad, I could use more practice with my shield.” He hefted his staff in front of himself with both hands and shook it once; his arms disappeared in a flash of light, then came apart holding a lurid blue sword and kiteshield. His hands wavered a little as he lowered them, still shaken, but he put on a serious expression like she couldn’t see right through G’raha’s face to the Exarch’s beneath.
Kethry wanted to boast that he wouldn’t be able to keep up, or at least to say anything at all, but that same little knot in her chest threatened to hijack her voice. She had a rough idea of what it would say. She took two smooth steps closer instead.
The Exarch matched her movement with his shield covering his torso and upper thigh and his sword hand back at his hip where she couldn’t see. At least his form was decent.
He struck first. Kethry sidestepped his overhead swing—clean, but too clean and predictable to land—and thrust her palm into the flat of his blade to throw his balance off. She almost lost her footing as he jabbed the tapered point of his shield down at her knee; he pushed harder, not quite driving her back, but keeping her just a touch off-balance so she couldn’t counterattack.
The Exarch had used that spell on her because she’d pushed him too far. She’d jumped across the line first, using tricks that were more for hunting than sparring, and he’d just responded in kind, so now it was Kethry’s job to hold back. That was the best she could do for an apology, so he’d have to take what he got.
She slowed her swings and tried to make her footwork worse, giving him openings to block her strikes and letting him get a few stabs in, even if she slipped around them at the last second. His excited expression faded, lips drawing tight and jaw bunching up as he realized that he wasn’t making any headway.
Kethry eased up a little more, letting him in closer so he could nick her arms a few times, but he pushed in harder than she’d expected, gaining ground and pushing her off-balance again. He managed to jam his shield between her arms, locking them up so she couldn’t swing or retreat.
She grunted as he knocked her chin with the top of his shield. Their spar had just turned into a test to see how much Kethry could hold back, and she was done with it. She let her sword clatter to the ground and clamped her fingers around the rim of the Exarch’s shield. It was connected to him with something a lot stronger than leather, so she slid a foot back and tapped into her bond with Pakik. She didn’t call or say anything, just held it tightly and drew the connection into herself.
Pakik loved barfights more than she loved almost anything. She was really, really good at them, too. Kethry picked up a little bit of Pakik’s deranged ideas of what qualified as “fighting” and heaved up on the Exarch’s shield, lifting him off his feet, then swung him in a circle so fast that he stuck out like a windmill blade.
He shouted as he spun, then cried out as Kethry released him. He arced out of sight into the darkness, but a meaty thud told her that he’d landed badly.
A spar. A spar. He would be fine. He had healing magic; she’d just seen him use it. She jogged over to him, scooping her sword up with her boot and kicking it into her hands. He should be fine.
#
The Exarch lay in a heap on the ground. He groaned in pain, so he was fine, but she knelt by him and laid her hands on either side of his head anyway. She shouldn’t bother. He could heal himself.
“Look at me. Did you hit your head?” His pupils were dilating fine, though they were a little wider than even the dim light of the canyon would call for. She prodded at his temples with her thumbs. He winced away from one side. “Sorry. We should get you back up to town.”
“Ahh, I suppose that makes this my loss. Not that I expected less from you, Kethry.”
His eyes were too clear for someone who’d just hit his head. His face was too young for someone who was… him. It was just as it had been when G’raha had left her. When she’d looked him in the eyes and told him what she wanted—what she needed—and he had shoved her aside in favor of something so cheap and brittle as destiny. She dropped his head; he caught himself before hitting the stone again.
“You were okay.”
He chuckled as he clambered off the ground and Kethry stepped away, then froze halfway to his feet. Dropping back to his knees, he reached to the ground and grabbed a fist-sized rock. He must have landed on it.
It crinkled in his hand; he smoothed it out almost flat. Pulling it taut, flat like paper, he settled onto his haunches. He began to read, because reading was what he did.
Down in the dark, in a place the wind wouldn’t touch and the stars were too distant to guide her, Kethry came unmoored. She made no noise as she screamed and took a shaky step toward the Exarch. He squinted at the crumpled pages of her journal. Scribbled messily onto those pages, between the diagrams of fish and sketches of the back of G’raha Tia’s head as he hunched over his desk, around the time-rotten stain of her own blood, was something he’d call history.
She took another silent step toward him.
Pakik, panicking as she felt what Kethry was feeling through their bond: What the fuck’s wrong?
Another step.
I’m coming. Hold out, Keth. It was raw emotion, but it rang as clear as words.
Kethry froze, ignoring Pakik. The—who was it? Who was this, crouched onto his haunches three paces away, struggling to make out the smudge-ink story she had tried her godsdamned best to tell for the sake of someone he might have been once?
Time slowed, or her breaths did, and the man below her shifted to sit. His shoulders and chin twitched toward her occasionally, as if he wanted to turn to her but couldn’t look away from the pages as he leafed through them.
She scuffed at the ground with her boot. The bottom of the chasm wasn't for walking; no one was ever supposed to be here. There was no path, no trail, no intuitive spray of tree branches across which to leap. It was just the bottom of a hole. If she looked up, she wouldn't find anything to guide her way. That was how Pakik navigated: eyes on the stars and the sun, always tethering herself to something weightless and distant. It was how G'raha had navigated: eyes on the past, towing its hundred-tonze heft to pave a road into the present.
Kethry just had the stone under her toes. It usually told her where to go, guiding her with the suggestions carved into it by water and wind, but this stone was silent. It waited like it could wait forever.
It wouldn’t make any choices for her. It gave her one path, the hardest: the one that led to what she wanted. She took another step forward.
A cacophonous surge of fear overflowed through the bond, matching the maelstrom inside Kethry’s mind. Pakik was directly above her, probably staring down into the chasm. It didn’t help. It didn’t help, and Kethry didn’t need Pakik right now.
She pushed back against the bond, squeezing it to stifle the fear. Go away.
Forceful, like Pakik was shouting down into the chasm and their bond was carrying the words where sound couldn’t reach: What’s wrong? What happened?
Kethry squeezed down tighter.
Are you hurt? How did you get down? I have to—
Whatever Pakik had meant to say was drowned out by a shuddering memory of a dark, stale hole in the world—the Tunnel, the Dark—and the mist covering it, and a clean-scouring fall, and panic panic panic panic panic.
Overwhelmed by the maelstrom of Pakik’s fear and whatever she herself was feeling, Kethry lunged forward and tore the pages from Raha’s—
No, no, it wasn’t fair. It was history, and it had to stay that way. She tore the pages in half, then in half again, then crunched them into a tight ball and threw them harder this time, farther from herself, except not farther at all because she was already standing at the bottom of history’s grave and you could only carve an epitaph once.
He stood and turned to her with shaking hands and tear-filled eyes. He said something, three words, and she didn’t crack clean in two because they weren’t the same ones he had said as the Crystal Tower’s doors slid shut between them.
“I am sorry.”
He meant it.
“G’raha?”
Somehow, he knew what she meant. He shook his head slowly. “No, not the way that you wish. I was G’raha Tia once, centuries ago. That is still my name, but only vestiges of that boy remain.”
“Then…”
He couldn’t guess her second question, which was how she knew it was right to ask.
“Raha?”
He choked on a breath, then grinned through his tears, then threw his head back and laughed longer and louder than she had ever heard him laugh.
Meeting her eyes again, he murmured, “I would aspire to be no other man.”
His words did not echo; Kethry did not even have to share them with the canyon walls.
Strain sloughed from her and spattered onto the ground at her feet. She felt weightless. Raha’s round face, unmarred by creeping crystal but carrying wisdom she had only seen behind the Exarch’s gaunt cheeks, glowed in the darkness. Some of it was aether pulsing in his eyes, but not all of it.
She mustered all the willpower she’d ever known and threw an arm over his shoulder. He crouched a little so she could reach. She shifted her weight to support him better, and that tight feeling in her chest burbled up. It was her own laugh, she realized, and this time she let it out.
They walked back to the narrow path out of the canyon, Raha limping a bit before channeling some aether into his hip to heal the bruise from where he’d landed, then split to walk single-file up it.
Scraping and shuffling, the subtlest of vibrations in the stony path: Are you okay? I’m coming, I swear, I promise.
“Oh, shit. Pakik.”
Kethry left Raha behind, sprinting full-tilt up the path and into the mist, then nearly slammed straight into Pakik’s boots.
Pakik was scooting down the path an ilm at a time, sitting with her feet pointed down the slope and her eye wide and bloodshot. Sweat flowed from every one of her pores and soaked through her shirt. “Oh, thank fuck you’re back. Holy shit. Are you okay? Are you good? Do you—” She turned her head to the side and retched.
Raha jogged up behind her, bootsoles scraping loudly against the stone as he picked his way along the uneven footpath. “Ah! I was afraid you would fall when you took off like that! Pakik, my friend, what has you so—”
Kethry raised a hand to silence him and put her other on Pakik’s chest, where she felt a heartbeat so fast and hard it threatened to crack her ribs from the inside.
With the splay of her fingers and a low hum, she asked, Is it the Tunnel?
Pakik looked up at her and sucked air through her teeth, eye wild but calming down. I just thought you were in trouble. “It felt the same as when we were on Mount Gulg. I thought your boy,” she raised a shaky hand to Raha, “had gotten shot again. Or something.”
Kethry straightened, blood flushing her cheeks. He is not ‘my boy’.
“Yes he fucking is. I’ve seen your mopey little moon-eyes you make at him when you think nobody’s looking.”
“What are you two talking about? The… moon-eyes?”
Kethry whirled to Raha before he could say any more and stuck her finger in his face. “You let me handle her.” He shrank back with his hands up and his ears flipped down as Kethry turned back to Pakik and pulled her to her feet.
Maybe Raha was back, and that was fine. Maybe he knew Pakik, and that was fine; maybe he knew Kethry, too. He didn’t know the two of them, though, and he wouldn’t. Not ever. That, she could keep for herself. Their bond wouldn’t be history, not ever, and so Raha would never really know it.
They emerged from the mist and climbed back to ground level. Pakik’s breathing steadied, and Kethry tipped her head back to watch her friend look for the stars, even though it was the middle of the day. Instead, she met Pakik’s eye looking right down at her, steady, anchored to the ground. Her bright red eye—not scarlet, never scarlet—shone with something just a touch gentler, a touch happier, than ever before. Their bond hummed a contented note, either from Pakik or from Kethry’s echo off her, and did it really matter which?
Kethry looked up in her stead. The storm was still stewing, unable to make up its mind about whether to crack in a day-long symphony of levin strikes or dissipate into blue sky. Pakik looked down at the rutted path beneath their feet, sighing heavily as she settled back into sanity, and Raha looked straight ahead at the gates of Revenant’s Toll.
If Pakik could come back from the First so different and still be Pakik, then Raha could come back to her the same way. Kethry closed her eyes and felt a drop of rain splash off her cheek, sizzling with aether. Every time she woke up, the world was a little bigger than it had been the day before. She reached up to grab Pakik’s hand, then tucked her fingers into Raha’s palm. With those two pulses beating in her hands, it felt like they could walk forever and never reach the edge.
That was how it should be.