Darkness.
Complete and absolute not the darkness of a room with the lights off, not the darkness of a moonless sky. The darkness of a place that has never known light and has no particular interest in changing that.
Emerion turned his awareness in several directions.
Nothing.
I guess I really died.
The thought arrived without drama. A quiet observation, the way you note rain when you step outside. He couldn't feel his muscles.
Couldn't feel anything physical at all no heartbeat, no breath, no weight. Just consciousness existing without anything to exist inside of.
Is this what death is?
He tested a few more directions.
Still nothing. The loneliness of it was its own specific texture not the loneliness of an empty room, but the loneliness of being the only thing present in a space that has no rooms, no walls, no edges. Just dark, in every direction, forever.
I hope Arlienne and the others can save the ship.
He let the thought sit for a moment.
I tried my best at the end.
"You are a big liar, Emerion."
The voice came from everywhere simultaneously mature, unhurried, carrying the particular quality of something that has been present in this darkness long enough to be entirely comfortable in it.
Emerion turned toward it by instinct and found nothing to turn toward.
Who are you? Are you an angel?
He asked it internally, uncertain whether he had a mouth.
Silence answered him.
Then, after a pause that felt chosen rather than accidental:
"What is heavier than earth?"
Emerion waited for elaboration. None arrived.
Even in death I have to answer strange questions.
He considered refusing. Then reconsidered the darkness was extraordinarily lonely and the voice was the only company it contained.
Fine. Something heavier than earth.
He genuinely didn't know. Whether the question was physical or philosophical he couldn't tell, and he wasn't sure the distinction mattered.
His mind drifted, unhurried, through the absence of anything else to do.
I don't have anything to lose now. Might as well think.
When he was alive, his heart had felt heavy so many times he had stopped counting the occasions. The words his family aimed at him that sank into his chest and stayed there. The specific weight of watching Pristilia raise her weapon toward Alec's uncle and being completely, totally unable to do anything about it.
Shin's father's mob. The barrier that refused to crack while Ryuuken bled on the other side of it.
Each time, his heart had been heavier than he thought a heart could be.
I made a lot of mistakes.
The admission came out easily in the dark, stripped of every audience he usually needed to protect himself from.
Just him and the silence and the honest weight of it.
I don't know anything physical that would be heavier than earth. But the feelings the guilt, the helplessness, the self-hatred those made my heart feel like it could sink through any floor I stood on.
What word sits underneath all of those feelings?
He turned it over slowly.
I ran away from home because I didn't want to be used. That's sloth running from duty instead of facing it. On the ship I confronted Shin's father without understanding the situation and called it justice. That was pride of some kind, maybe arrogance, maybe both. And in the barrier, telling my ownreflection it deserved to die--
He paused on that one.
What do you call wrath turned completely inward?
Sin, he decided. Sins are heavier than earth.
The darkness absorbed the conclusion without comment.
Then the voice returned.
"Which one represents you?"
That's not a fair question. The protest formed before he could stop it. I just listed several.
But the silence had a quality to it now patient, expectant, the silence of something that will wait as long as required and has no opinion about how long that turns out to be.
Emerion understood. He would have to answer to keep the voice talking.
Fine.
He thought about it honestly. Not the sins he had committed in specific moments but the one that lived in him most naturally.
The engine running underneath everything else.
Sloth, he decided. Running away. That's the most consistent thing about me. When things became impossible, I ran.
From home, from duty, from the version of myself my family wanted me to be.
"Sloth," he said.
No response.
He waited. Still nothing.
Of course. I finally answer and I get ignored.
He sighed or did the consciousness-equivalent of sighing and was beginning to accept the darkness again when he felt his muscles.
All at once. Suddenly and completely, the weight of a body returning from wherever it had temporarily gone. He could move his hands. He could feel a surface beneath him. He could
Something kicked him squarely in the back.
"What the--"
He hit a surface face-first and slid, the impact more surprising than painful, and when he lifted his head he was in the middle of a road.
He stood slowly, turning in a full circle.
The city surrounding him had no right to be as beautiful as it was.
Victorian in its bones stone facades carved with the particular detail of an era that decided grandeur was a moral position and built accordingly.
Arched windows framed by ironwork that curved like something grown rather than forged.
And the cathedrals impossible things, their spires reaching heights that made you tilt your head back and quietly doubt the engineering required to put them there, before arriving at the further suspicion that perhaps engineering hadn't been involved at all.
Each building a separate argument for what a building could be, the whole city assembled like someone had collected the most beautiful structures from across a hundred years and placed them here together.
Every single one of them empty.
No voices. No footsteps. No movement in any window. Market stalls had goods arranged on them as though someone had prepared for the morning and then simply ceased to exist mid-preparation. The public baths steamed quietly for no one. Cathedral doors stood open onto darkness.
Did I get reborn or something?
He walked forward, because forward was the only direction that made sense when you had no information.
The ground moved.
A low rumble first, felt more than heard, traveling from the cobblestones up through his feet and into his spine. The clear blue sky which he had been too disoriented to properly register until now darkened in the span of three seconds, clouds assembling from nowhere with the purposeful speed of something that had been waiting offstage for its cue.
Lightning hit the nearest cathedral.
The impossible spire cracked along its impossible height and began, reluctantly, to reconsider its position.
Another strike. Then three in rapid succession, each finding a different masterpiece, the storm working through the architecture with the enthusiasm of something that has been given permission to destroy what centuries assembled.
Cracks opened in the cobblestones.
He looked behind him. The road was disappearing not crumbling, not collapsing into anything below, simply ceasing to exist, the surface fading from the edges inward like ink washing off wet paper.
Am I just alive to die again?
He ran.
The lightning adjusted, each bolt arriving slightly closer than the last, tracking him through the streets with the patient attention of something that already knows where this road ends. His legs burned.
His lungs renegotiated their contract with him on increasingly unfavorable terms.
I can't fly in this the current would throw me straight into a building.
He ran harder and stopped thinking about anything except the next step.
Then he saw it.
Ahead, set back from the road, completely untouched by the storm raging within fifty meters of it in every direction a glass structure, warm light pressing through its transparent walls into the grey chaos outside.
The silhouette of green visible through the glass. Leaves. Flowers. Grass moving in a wind that belonged to a completely different and considerably better day.
The warmth reached him even from the road. The smell of living things soil and petals and something faintly sweet underneath both of them cutting through the ozone and the smoke of the burning city like a hand extended in the dark.
He dove for the door with the last of everything he had.
It opened.
He slid across the grass on his stomach, the smoothness of it almost offensive after the cobblestones, and lay there for a moment with his cheek pressed against the green and his heart doing something complicated and his lungs finally finding air that didn't taste like lightning.
I really need to swim more. But at least I'm alive for now.
He pushed himself up on both arms.
And stopped.
At a round table in the center of the garden surrounded by flowers in every color, blue and gold and deep red, growing with the organized wildness of a place that has been loved rather than merely maintained sat a figure with a coffee cup raised halfway to his lips.
He was mid-sip.
The face above the cup was Emerion's.
Exactly Emerion's same jaw, same silver hair, the same arrangement of every feature that Emerion had spent eighteen years looking at in mirrors.
But the expression wearing those features had never once belonged to Emerion. It belonged to someone who had never looked at a situation and wondered whether they had the right to be in it. Someone for whom doubt was a language they had chosen not to learn.
The black coat. The high collar edged in gold, framing that familiar face from jaw to cheekbone. The gold branching across the left side of the chest like the map of a decision made long ago and never revisited. The boots with their gold bands at the top, catching even the warm indoor light. The weapon resting against the table's edge staff at one end, blade at the other, refusing to commit to being either.
The eyes were Emerion's blue.
But deeper. As though the color continued past the iris into somewhere much further back the blue of something very far away that has been watching patiently for a very long time.
The figure lowered the cup.
Looked down at Emerion lying on his grass.
And jumped in his seat, the coffee sloshing dangerously close to the rim, both hands coming up in startled alarm.
"Geez--what the hell are you?"
Emerion lay on the grass and stared up at his own face wearing an expression of complete horror.
He rolled his eyes.
"I," he said, getting up from the grass, "should be the one asking that."
The figure stared at him for another moment. Then, with the visible effort of someone recollecting a dignity that had been briefly misplaced, he settled back into the chair. Recrossed his legs. Retrieved the coffee cup. The throne effect which had been momentarily disrupted by the jumping returned immediately and completely, as though it had never left.
"Really? Yeah, maybe you are not wrong," he said, with perfect carelessness. "But I don't feel like talking right now."
"What."
Emerion sat down across from him without being invited, his eyes sharp.
"That's unfair. You are wearing my skin and you think you can just ignore me."
"Your skin?" The figure tilted his head Emerion's own gesture, exact and familiar and entirely wrong in this context.
"You came into my home. You sat in my chair. And now you claim my skin as your own." He looked at Emerion with the patient curiosity of someone examining an interesting but slightly confused specimen.
"Are those things promised to you? Do you claim them with such confidence because they were given to you, or simply because you arrived and decided they were yours?"
He crossed his legs, and the ordinary garden chair became a throne.
Emerion hesitated for a moment the certainty in this person's posture doing something strange to his ability to argue but pushed through it.
"Don't be stupid. Maybe it's your home, but I have a valid reason for being here. Don't you see the chaos outside?"
The figure tilted his head.
Genuine confusion moved through his expression.
"Chaos?" he said. "How can there be chaos if nothing exists?"
He said it the way you state a fact about the weather calm, certain, entirely unbothered and looked at Emerion as though Emerion were the one saying something strange. The confidence in it, the complete absence of any doubt, made Emerion briefly question his own experience despite having just lived it.
"No-- you're joking." Emerion pressed his hands against his head. "There is a thunderstorm outside. An earthquake. The streets are completely empty. Why is this world so weird."
"Thunderstorm?
"Yes"
"Earthquake?"
"Yes"
"Empty streets?"
"Yes"
"Where ?"
The figure stood, reached to his side without looking, and picked a blue flower from the grass beside his chair. He held it up, turning it between his fingers, and looked at Emerion over it with an expression of genuine serenity.
"My world is beautiful. Filled with these flowers, this grass, a peaceful wind that calms the mind." He glanced toward the glass walls through which the storm was clearly, undeniably, actively visible, a cathedral currently losing its spire and looked back at Emerion.
"Where exactly are you seeing a thunderstorm?"
"Just--" Emerion stood. "Just shut up. Answer my first question. Why are you wearing my skin."
The figure sighed.
"You are really stubborn," he said. "It's my skin. Not yours."
Something in Emerion snapped.
He couldn't explain it afterward the words hadn't been aggressive, hadn't been threatening, hadn't been anything that should have produced this reaction.
It was more like hypnosis. The absolute certainty in the person's voice pulling at something in Emerion that responded before the rest of him could weigh in on the decision.
"ZALTREIGN"
The spell left his hands before the choice to cast it had finished forming. The blue energy crossed the space between them instantly. Emerion watched it go and felt the horror of it arriving a half second too late.
"Oh no --I shouldn't have-- I can't reverse it--" He lurched forward. "Dodge it--"
The figure didn't move.
He raised one hand a small, casual motion, the redirect of someone managing something that presents no serious threat and the spell curved away from him, changed direction entirely, and dissipated harmlessly into the glass wall behind his shoulder.
Then he looked at his own hand.
"You stole my attack as well, eh." He looked at Emerion with the expression of someone adding a new item to a list that is becoming unreasonably long. "What next? Would you steal my wife?"
Emerion stared at him.
"H-how--" He looked horrified. He should have been relieved the spell hadn't hit, nothing had been destroyed, nobody was hurt but something about this person was fundamentally wrong in a way he couldn't locate. "How do you know how to use my spell?"
"What? I should ask you that," the figure said, rolling his eyes giving back Emerion's own reaction from thirty seconds ago with perfect accuracy.
He pointed his weapon at Emerion, the staff-sword-thing that couldn't decide what it was, and his expression managed to be simultaneously threatening and mildly exasperated.
"How do you know how to use my spell? And if you steal my wife too, I want you to know I would fight you until death."
He was smiling. He had been smiling, Emerion realized, since the moment Emerion had walked through the door. Not mockingly. Not cruelly. Just smiling, the way someone smiles when something is genuinely and privately amusing to them.
"W-why would I steal your wife?"
"You wouldn't?" The figure asked it genuinely the question of someone who actually wants to know, not the question of someone setting up a rhetorical point.
"No. Of course not."
Emerion exhaled. This conversation was going nowhere. The headache building behind his eyes was impressive for someone who technically didn't have eyes.
"Then you don't envy," the figure said. "Envy."
The smile extended slightly.
Emerion got more confused. The word had landed twice, with two different weights the sin and something else underneath it, something that might have been a name, the two meanings sitting on top of each other in a way that felt deliberate.
He couldn't parse it. He filed it without understanding it and moved on because the alternative was standing here indefinitely.
"Since you seem like a good person,"
the figure said, and his voice had shifted warmer, more direct, the carelessness replaced by something that felt like a genuine decision, "I will answer your one question."
Emerion hesitated.
One question. Can I trust this guy to actually answer? Will he answer straight?
He had nothing to lose. He asked the only thing that mattered.
"Who are you?"
A pause.
The figure stepped closer unhurried, the movement carrying the ease of someone who has never once approached anything with uncertainty and raised his weapon. The blade end passed through Emerion's chest.
No blood. No pain.
Just sleep, arriving all at once, pulling his consciousness down toward something warm and dark and inevitable. His vision blurred at the edges and kept blurring, the garden softening around him, and in the last moment before everything went he heard it:
"I am you."
His eyes opened to Veryn.
The red-haired man stood above him, sword raised, chest heaving slightly, his expression carrying something between resolution and genuine reluctance.
"You fought well," Veryn said. The words came out heavy. "I must take a part of you as I promised to my siblings."
Move.
The command went nowhere. Emerion could feel everything the floor beneath him, the weight of his own limbs, the cold of the air but the connection between wanting to move and moving had been severed at a point he couldn't locate. He was entirely present inside himself and entirely unable to act on it.
Move. Come on. MOVE--
The door opened.
Veryn turned.
Shin stood in the doorway. A kitchen knife in his small hand, held the way someone holds something when they have decided to use it regardless of whether they know how. His eyes moved from Veryn to the body on the floor and went very still the specific stillness of a child who has understood something he wasn't ready to understand.
"You killed him."
His voice came out smaller than the accusation deserved. One tear reached his cheek without his permission.
"Was he your relative, kid?" Veryn's full attention had shifted sword lowering, body orienting toward this new element with the instinctive assessment of a fighter reading a changed room.
Shin said nothing.
"Go away. I have no business with you."
"Shut up."
The charge was not skilled. It was the charge of a child who has run out of things to calculate no hesitation, no technique, no reserve, just forward with everything. Veryn disarmed him with a single effortless motion, the knife skittering across the floor.
He looked at the boy. At the knife.
"You drew your weapon against me," he said, and his voice had shifted into the formal register he used when his code was being invoked. "I will honor that. Your courage deserves a response."
His sword began to glow red.
Move-- MOVE--JUST MOVE--
The sword came forward.
Blood landed on Shin's cheek.
Not Shin's.
The silence that followed had no category. The room didn't know what to do with it.
An X marked Veryn's chest two clean cuts crossing from shoulder to hip, mirror image of what he had done to Emerion.
He looked down at it slowly, with the expression of someone reading a sentence that refuses to parse no matter how many approaches he takes.
Emerion stood between him and the boy.
No wounds. The blood that had covered him was simply gone not healed, not cleaned, just absent, as though the accounting of the last several minutes had been quietly revised by someone with the authority to do so. He was looking down at Veryn's bleeding body on the floor with a smile on his face.
Emerion's smile. The exact shape of it. But wearing it with a lightness that Emerion's smiles had never quite managed the ease of someone for whom the outcome of this situation was never seriously in question.
"You sick bastard," Veryn said. The steadiness in his voice had found a crack. He pressed one hand to the X on his chest and pushed himself upright, using his sword as a prop, his eyes working through what they were seeing and finding no adequate framework for it. "How are you still alive?"
The figure didn't look at him.
He looked at Shin.
He crouched to the boy's eye level a fluid, unhurried motion, entirely comfortable and when he spoke his voice carried Emerion's warmth with something underneath it.
The assurance of someone who has never offered comfort without already knowing it was warranted.
"I hope you are not harmed, kid." A small open smile almost childlike, nothing guarded in it. "You see, I will have the pleasure of fighting someone strong after centuries." He tilted his head, the gesture familiar, the certainty behind it belonging to someone older than Emerion had ever been. "So would you please leave?"
Shin stared at him.
At the X on Veryn's chest.
At the face that was Emerion's and wasn't.
He nodded the slow dazed nod of someone whose mind is moving faster than their expression and left.
The figure stood.
He turned to Veryn with the unhurried ease of someone who has been waiting for this moment for a very long time and has no intention of rushing it now that it has arrived.
"I hope I didn't hurt you too much. My apologies for the sudden attack." He sounded genuinely apologetic the apology of someone who means it rather than someone who has learned to say it.
"You were so eager to harm a child. My instincts responded before I could think it through." A brief pause, as though recalling something with mild personal exasperation. "My wife would have spanked me for acting on sloth and letting it happen."
He picked up the sword from the floor. Turned it once in his hand, examining it with the mild interest of someone appraising a tool that is almost right.
"After all."
His eyes found Veryn's.
The blue in them had deepened past anything Emerion's eyes had ever shown the blue of something very far away that has been watching this particular moment approach for a very long time and found the wait entirely acceptable.
"I am not Sloth."
The sword went black in his grip.
The mana that rose from it was Emerion's unmistakably, the same fundamental signature, the same origin.
But without the hesitation Emerion always introduced between the power and its expression. Without the half-second of wondering. Without the question of whether he deserved to use it.
This was what that power looked like with the doubt removed entirely. When the question of worthiness had been answered once, permanently, and never revisited.
Veryn looked at the sword.
At the figure holding it.
At the X on his own chest that had arrived before he had seen the movement that made it.
For the first time since stepping onto this ship, the grin that spread across his face had nothing performative in it whatsoever.
Pure. Undiluted. The expression of a man who has spent his entire existence looking for exactly this.
"Now," Veryn said, raising his blade with both hands, "we're actually fighting."