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And all the world shall cry out
“Hope hath murdered Innocence”
Hope hath murdered love and the king and the night
Hope is all that remains, and she is lost
And all the world shall cry out
And hold up a mirror to
That corrupted sky
That eats and eats and eats
And never learns to stop feeding
And all the world shall cry out
For the her that is no more
The saviour they devoured
In their greed for salvation
And all the world will cry out
And she will say “no”
The Light burned and burned and seared through her and she couldn’t hold it, no matter how hard she tried, desperately straining her own aether to net around the Light, to keep it from the Scions watching helplessly. The Light wore holes in her aether, like a stone too heavy and too sharp for the thin fabric bag it was kept in, and she tried to knot the remnants of herself around it, to hold it in just a little longer, just a little longer, a little longer.
Enough to convince them she was fine.
Just enough.
Just a little longer now.
It was getting hard to breathe, now. Not that it had been easy to start with - every Lightwarden's death had stolen a little more air from her lungs, but now every breath was a desperate drag to get enough air in.
The faint golden dots across her scales that had grown with each new influx of light now dappled her shoulders and trickled down her horns, the texture lost to a metallic smoothness, and the white patches of her skin glowed from within.
Her limbal rings still gleamed crimson, but the colour leeched from her irises, and every time she closed her eyes - Leda had locked herself in the room at the Pendants, trying to ignore the way her eyes refused to focus, the way her mind was full of a glimmering white fog that made it hard to think.
The Tempest. Emet-Selch had invited her to the Tempest, to lose herself in peace. It was almost comforting. She was already lost, she knew - she wasn't strong enough, not anymore. And it wasn't the first time, only the first she could remember happening - after all the girl she had been before Bahamut no longer existed, not even her name.
She was running out of time.
She couldn't have the Scions seeing her like this - couldn't let herself hurt them, not after- not after what? She had to go, had to protect them in the only way left to her, leaving.
The Tempest, where was that?
Under water, off Kholusia... if she 'ported to Eulmore and went swimming, followed the draw, the faint echo of starsong from Emet-Selch and then-
And then she wouldn't be alone.
By the time the Scions burst through the doors, the room was already empty.
She blinked. There was a man before her, standing in the light behind her eyelids. His mouth moved, his face drawn into an expression that made her chest feel tight, but she couldn't hear his words.
She opened her eyes and he was gone, and she had nothing but the water all around her, the pull of starsong and the Light beneath her skin, like barbed wire in her veins.The lights of Amaurot were on - she couldn't remember when she'd learned its name, only that she'd always known it, and she aimed for distant starsong in the depths, leaving a shining trail of Light in her wake.
He was waiting for her in the Capitol, and she opened the doors surprisingly quietly for their size.
His footsteps echoed as he turned to face her - she drifted towards him, her feet bare, dripping, and hovering a good yalm above the floor.
She didn't remember when she'd learned his name, only that she'd always known it.
She reached out with a gleaming, long-fingered hand, the other little more than an impression, a shadow of Light where heavy metal had hung from her shoulder, diffuse and aetherial. She cupped his face in those hands, one burning and insubstantial, searing him through the vessel, the other uncomfortably solid, digging golden nails into the soft skin of his cheek.
'Hades,' she breathed, looking into him with golden eyes that did not see, 'Hades,' she said again, 'what have you done.'
His face went slack, and she kissed his forehead with the sound of burning flesh, Light pouring into him and then back into her.
She dropped his vessel as he fled her, turning sightless eyes to the door, waiting for the Dawn, waiting for the man behind her eyelids, waiting for the sword she'd taken.
‘How… disappointing,’ he said when he came face to face with her once more. Her eyes, black and white and gold, stared at him dispassionately. ‘Come now,’ he murmured, ‘what became of those companions of yours?’ Her mouth, glimmering and golden, didn’t so much as twitch, set in the gleaming, marble white that had overtaken the blue-grey of her skin.
‘Fled? Destroyed?’ he paused, eying the hint of red on a single gold-clawed hand. ‘Eaten?’
The wing, golden, gleaming, made of blades and shield and staves, drooped, where it attached to an armless shoulder, metal shifting as it wrapped around shoulders still draped in the gauzy sleeve, the pale blue-violet stained gleaming white.
The dark skirt she’d worn was half torn away, scraps beneath a golden ribbon that did little to protect what modesty remained.
Were she in her right mind, he knew, she would be appalled, as fearful as the moment he’d accidentally popped in to see her naked.
Her eyes had been wide then, terrified and red and not a hint of gold or blue in them, the sort of horror that came with experience as she hurried to cover herself before even reaching for a weapon.
That sort of thing had implications, and he found himself distantly horrified that any fragment of his dear friend, the shattered echo of a girl who had once been family, would react quite like that.
But there was blood on the clawed hand, the patterns of her scales that had been unfamiliar on so familiar a face now stranger when gold, and the soul within her, if he tilted his head the right way and let the body’s eyes adjust to his own peering through them, a little nucleus of a soul with its shards spiralling around closely, was faded and tattered at the edges.
Horror sliced through him then, sharp as a rusted knife.
He hadn’t meant to - or rather he had, which was rather the problem.
But here she was, the fragment of Azem that was close enough she’d pulled the name Leda from the depths of the soul’s memory, and the Light that had overtaken her corporeal body was pulling at the bonds between the shards of her soul. If it went on too long, he knew, with the same biting fear that had hit him at the destruction of the Thirteenth, not only would the First be lost, but so would she.
Lahabrea was no longer here, Elidibus was busy, and there were few enough of his lesser colleagues remaining. He was running out of time - and wasn’t that almost funny, in a way that felt like grieving - when his plan had relied on outlasting whatever effort she would put into stopping him.
The woman she had been, in the corner of his eye, smiled. The mask around her neck, the gleaming sunbright gold, with its blue eye on the forehead, seemed to wink at him.
One can almost imagine
Hope lost
Turned with hands bloody with Innocence
To face salvation
For what does hope do
To salvation but spit in its face
And the skies darken once more
Light and Hope lost
But in the end didn’t she win
A victory wrested from his hands
A victory won by his hands
A victory-death at his hands