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The final words of Phainon’s farewell ring in Stelle’s ears; the inescapable truth of the final prophecy bites at the edges of her thoughts; the knowledge of Cipher’s sacrifice gnaws at her heart – but as she rushes through the collapsing palace, lance blazing bright in her hand, Mem flying at her side, there’s only one thought in her mind.
Dan Heng’s facing the Flame Reaver, alone
They killed Cipher and Mydei and I left him to face them alone
I can’t lose you too. I won’t
She slams through a door she’d sealed earlier in a vain attempt to delay pursuit – and steps out into chaos.
Waves shear across the once-tranquil baths, crushing shadow-clones aside; lashing spears of water bring down still more; in the centre, the Flame Reaver strikes again and again, never able to land more than a glancing hit.
They’d been a terrifying force against the Chrysos Heirs, and while some of it had clearly been their immense skill, she has to wonder – how much had simply been familiarity and foreknowledge, from facing reflections of the same flamechasers in cycle after cycle?
Because the black-robed swordmaster is fighting as hard as they’ve ever fought, perhaps harder still – and Dan Heng is matching them blow-for-blow, driving them back across the cavernous space with skills and power they’ve never seen before.
Stelle knows better than to call out to him in a fight like this, but she can act. And so, leaping from the doorway to the heart of the battle, she draws not on sparking Destruction, nor blazing Preservation, nor shining Harmony, nor shimmering Remembrance – but on the still-untapped depths of the Authority of Time, and in an instant, everything freezes.
Wasting no time – heh – she drives the lance of Preservation through the Flame Reaver’s chest and blasts them into the nearest wall, then grabs Dan Heng and Mem’s hands and pulls them through sundering spacetime, back to one of the few remaining Space Anchors left active.
Her grasp on Time slips loose, and the motion of everything else resumes, but that’s fine, they’re safe – as safe as anyone in this fallen city can be.
“Stelle,” he gasps, “Phainon – the Coreflame-”
“All shall bid farewell to one,” she quotes, the bitter words falling like hammerblows. “He went on ahead, alone.”
“...then...it’s almost time.”
“Yeah. Era Nova...whatever it’ll look like.”
Her fellow trailblazer lets out an exhausted sigh and slumps back against the wall, staring up at the ash-choked sky. “So...what happens to us?”
To you, he doesn’t say. Stelle swallows back bitter tears, all too aware of the looming weight of divinity. “Phainon said that he’d arranged for Lygus to fix up the Express car. So that we could leave. Go home. But…”
“Without Time, what happens to the Miracle of Genesis?” he finishes quietly. “And, even if it would work without you…could we really leave these people to face an unknown future alone?”
He knows her so well, this brother of hers. “That...and I’m wondering if it’s even the right thing to do,” Stelle admits. “Don’t worry, I haven’t been sucked in by all the Era Chrysea nonsense – but, if it’s a cycle without end...is this just going to keep happening, again and again?”
They both sit in silence for a moment, staring up at the shattered Dawn Device, before Dan Heng speaks up again, carefully, hesitantly. “We are a new variable. None of the previous cycles would have had a Stellaron host, blessed by four Aeons, serving as the Demigod of Time. Perhaps you can change...something.”
The thought has crossed her mind, but in the face of Okhema’s downfall, it feels like the thinnest, most fragile thread of hope, ready to snap at the slightest whisper.
“You know I believe in you,” Mem says softly, and Stelle gives them a watery smile. They’ve been quiet and subdued, watching the fall of Okhema with sad eyes, hurling glacial blasts of power at black tide monsters with a particular vengeance – but, in a strange way, their bright presence almost feels like having March by her side again. The trailblazing trio, reunited. She looks at them, at that sense of inescapable familiarity, and wonders; was Amphoreus what the Garden of Recollection took from her? Were you a Chrysos Heir, once, March?
March...we could die down here, and she’ll never know. I might become a god, and she’d never know...
“...Stelle?”
She chokes back a desperate sob, and tugs off a glove to scrub at her eyes. Her hand catches on a stinging cut on her cheek, and when she lowers it, bright gold shimmers in the dying light, glowing with a faint radiance of its own. “It’s funny, you know,” she whispers, the words catching in her throat like molten glass. “I’ve always had golden blood. But not like this. ”
“I remember,” Dan Heng replies, just as softly. He wraps an arm around her shoulders, and she leans into the hug, turning to bury her face in his shoulder. He leans in too, resting his head on hers, and she distantly realises he’s still in his vidyadhara form. “Jarilo-VI, when you…”
“Yeah,” Stelle continues, and wraps an arm around him in return. “First time I died. I must have looked like fucking Nanook, with that giant stab wound and a half-dozen smaller cuts. Still kinda do, with how the scars look like Qlipoth’s amber. But now it’s a slightly different color, and it glows.”
The subject she’s avoiding, has been avoiding since that day in the Vortex hangs in the air between the three of them, looming like the shattered Dawn Device; and the latest topic of conversation only brings it to the fore. But she plunges onwards, once again seeking escape in humor. “Guess that really does make me a Chrysos Heir, huh? Who knows what becoming a Titan will do to me...heh…”
He doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to; the way he tightens his arms around her, the way Mem hovers down to hold her free hand, shows her exactly how convincing her false levity is. It’s been harder and harder, lately, to reach for that familiar, comfortable coping mechanism. Perhaps it’s something that comes with being a Pathstrider of Remembrance; some bone-deep awareness of the inescapable weight of every single moment .
Oh, Aeons...what am I becoming? Can you still struggle to recognise the person you were before even when you can’t remember most of your life?
“...yes,” Dan Heng whispers, breath catching. “You can. And it’s alright. I understand.”
Something tight and knotted within her loosens, just slightly. “...thank you, Dan Heng...did I say all that out loud?”
He tenses. “Not exactly. It’s… ”
Stelle leans closer, and rubs soothing circles on his back. She knows well enough when there’s something he’s scared to say. “ What is it? ”
“We haven’t talked,” he says carefully, “about the more recent time you died. And I understand that, it’s just been one thing after another since we landed here, and I don’t want to push you, not now—”
“No, it’s alright,” she replies shakily. “We...might not have long, after all. Tell me.”
“When you were dead,” Dan Heng begins, sounding like he’s barely holding back tears, “you were silent. I could still hear you speak, but I think I only let myself realise after that day in the Vortex that I was hearing your voice in my mind, not with my ears. No one else brought it up, either because they didn’t realise, or because – well, no one talks about Aglaea’s blindess, after all.”
N umb shock reverberates through her; she’d lost her voice, for weeks, and she hadn’t even noticed— “wh-what else?” she desperately demands. “What else did I lose? How much of me—”
“You weren’t breathing, except when you remembered to,” he continues. Tears splash into her hair; but that’s fine, just as many of hers are slowly soaking into the shoulder of his coat. “Your skin felt like ice. You barely ate or slept. You got hit, in a few of those fights, but you didn’t bleed. You had no heartbeat, I-I don’t know how I didn’t see—”
“I don’t think either of us wanted to. I think I thought it was just some weird quirk of the Stellaron trying to protect me, or the combination of four Paths, or something—”
“—but giving voice to that fear would have made it real.” There’s a dreadful finality to the words, made only heavier by the awful fact that it had become real, in the end. It always had been.
“...and now?” Stelle asks, her voice feeling so small and fragile.
Dan Heng hugs her tighter. “Your heartbeat, breathing, all that’s back. Your voice, too, most of the time – but it’s different.”
“Different how?”
“You sound...older, more worn,” he explains. “And it’s not just the pitch and tone that’s different; the overall sound isn’t the same, either. I think I can guess—no, I’m fairly sure why.”
He reaches up with his free hand, gently tracing a thin scar on her neck. One of countless little slices of hardened amber she doesn’t remember where she got. “When I dragged you out of the wreckage, you had several shrapnel wounds...one of them right here.”
Stelle can guess what he means. “Something in my throat didn’t heal right. And when I came back—”
“Yeah.”
New Path. New Coreflame. New voice. New scars, inside and out. Even if I do make it back home...will the others still recognise me?
That grim thought was probably shared too, from how her friends huddle closer still. “ You’re still you , ” he reassures her. “Families – real families, the ones we choose – endure though any change. And so will the Nameless. So will we. ”
She thinks about the long-ago Nameless who stayed on Penacony, fighting the IPC for a world’s freedom. Had they stood strong, fearlessly carrying the spirit of Trailblaze into an uncertain future? Or had they felt lost, alone, and terrified, too?
Had they looked ahead, to a future without their family...and regretted that choice?
Could she choose to leave, to turn her back on this burning world, and be able to live with that ?
When you have a chance to make a choice, make one you that know you won’t regret...don’t give up, even if you’re about to be forgotten...
“Dan Heng…”
It takes her a few tries, but once she’s able to start speaking again, the words spill out in a desperate tide. “You’re the brother I never had, you’re my family and I love you, and I never got to tell you, and I wanted to make sure I did, before— you’re all my family but I have to stay, whatever happens with the Era Nova I can’t just leave these people to die, not when I can help — ”
“Stelle, it’s ok.” There’s the ghost of a smile in his voice now. “If you stay, then I’m staying with you...sister. You won’t be alone.”
She’s crying again, but it doesn’t feel so painful, now. “Thank you. I’m sorry. Thank you. I-I wish we could— ”
“...me too.”
After a moment, Mem speaks up again, taking each of their hands with a tiny paw. “Your family will never forget you. Not from what I’ve seen of your memories of them. And there’s still time to leave them a message...just in case.”
“The car!” Stelle exclaims. “If Lygus has been repairing it, then it might be able to get a signal out, or even just archive a message!”
“Only one way to find out,” Dan Heng replies. “Come on – there’s little time.”
With some difficulty, they untangle their limbs and stand, then step through spacetime once more, back to the very place they first arrived on Amphoreus. Back to the place she’d died. Again. And Phainon was true to his word – the car sits upright amidst the ruins, battered and scorched but still largely intact. The door slides open at her touch, and when she steps inside – it’s utterly surreal, the sight of a piece of the home she’d feared she’d never see again; the home she may have departed for the final time. She quickly locates the onboard computer, and by some miracle, it starts up. “Right...what format’s most likely to survive?”
“Text, unless you know how to create a memory bubble?”
“Nah, I’d have to ask Black Swan,” Stelle replies, and opens up a document. Usually, it takes her some time to get her thoughts in order, but here and now, the words flow quickly, as if the urgency of the situation has cut through the usual distractions with an uncommonly clear focus, and before long, she’s done. “Alright, your turn.”
He takes even less time than her – all that work maintaining the data bank must come in handy – and then it’s done, the document saved.
Our farewell letters. Our suicide notes, by some definition. “ Ok , before we go...Mem, give me a hand…”
She reaches for that shimmering crystalline core of Remembrance, focusing on the letters they’ve written with all she is.
These memories will not be lost. These memories will never be forgotten..
—and for a moment, pink-purple light sinks into the computer, into the car, into everything around them. “There. Now the Remembrance will ensure our final words survive.”
There’s a weight, a sense of force to the proclamation, but Dan Heng only smiles, a flicker of light in the storm. “Thank you. So...where to now, Demigod of Time?”
“We can’t help Phainon—” and it hurts to admit that, but it’s true, it’s so painfully true, “—we can’t do any more for the Flame-Chase. But we can still protect the people in the city. I’m the last Demigod left in Okhema – I won’t abandon them. Even if it all works out and they’ll be reborn, they shouldn’t have to spend their last moments in pain. And, if the Miracle fails…”
“...then we fight until we fall.”
They step out of the car, and back through a Space Anchor, back to the crumbling city. Just ahead, a number of Okhema’s surviving citizens huddle behind Hyacine’s rainbow shields – and further back, a horde of Black Tide monsters advance on a smaller group of survivors.
They’re not going to make it. Not alone, at least.
Stelle tucks Mem’s quill behind her ear, and dons the Watchmaker’s hat with a twirling flourish. The Lance of Preservation blazes bright in her hand, and her ever-trusty bat hums in readiness at her side. Nestled beside the Stellaron that serves as her heart, the Authority of Time shines, just waiting to awaken. Beside her, the waters rise at her brother’s command, and Mem cracks their knuckles with a sound like a crashing glacier.
“Like always, Dan Heng, let’s make this quick!”