I do not own Tales of Symphonia or the characters of Tales of Symphonia. Namco owns Tales of Symhonia and all characters not of my creation are the creation of Kosuke Fujishima. This disclaimer will only exist in the first chapter.
Knights of the Exspheres
Chapter 1 "Nights in the Forest"
"Man, that Katz did one crappy job..." Lloyd sputtered, crinkling up the makeshift map. He bounced it off the tip of his boot, sending it into a small bush nearby. He looked over to his platinum-haired companion and nodded her over to follow. Needless to say, they were lost in their new world, as one unfortunate side effect of the aftermath would be that the entire geography that was marked down and set for thousands of years suddenly was ripped to shreds. Now, somehow, the Gaoracchia Forest was on the same continent as Iselia and Triet and its already confusing paths were even more horribly twisted than the branches of the desiccated trees that lined the woods.
"Cheer up, Lloyd! At least we got rid of all the Exspheres in Iselia, thanks to Dirk's Seal Crest," Colette said, flashing her heart-melting smile.
"You're right," he replied. He noticed that the faint glimmer of light that filtered overhead was starting to fade. They had been lost for so long that even the strange spots of light that charged the Sorcerer's Ring's light ability were beginning to fade into tiny glimmers. He sighed in frustration; maybe they SHOULD have gone to the Ossa Trail instead. "Come on, Colette, we have to get out of here before night falls. I don't want to know what this place is like in the dark."
Colette shuddered, "Yeah, it's even starting to get a little cold, too."
The two walked on and on and on, taking random twists in the road, looking up at the breaks in the canopy to check the time, yet it all amounted to nothing, as so far. All they saw were dead trees, twisted trees, animals that should not have been there, and animals that probably were monsters but somehow ignored them. As the light began to grow into a frail sparkle, one thing stood out to them at a certain uphill pathway: a familiar red ball switch and a half-rotted trap door. Here was where a certain ninja and assassin first took them on during the regeneration journey, or rather, plummeted to the musty maintenance passageway below.
"Oh look! This was where Sheena fell!" Colette giggled. "I'm glad she was okay, even if she was trying to kill me. Hehe, isn't it weird that we all became friends in the end?"
"If this is here, then, we must be in Ossa Trail also! Looks like Gaoracchia Forest and the Ossa Trail merged, eh? We can follow this path back up and over and we can get to Izoold," the red swordsman laughed. He was so elated, picking up Colette in his joy that the distinct sound of clinking armor drowned out by their celebration...
"This is it, Rethka. I'm sure the Pope will give us back our titles," Jay muttered to his spear-wielding friend. "No more rogue Knights for us!"
"Are you sure that's them?" Rethka asked. The armor-plated swordsman grunted in affirmation. The two approached proudly to the cheering couple, their polished weapons blazing in the faint Gaoracchia-Ossa light. After creeping some distance towards them, the red swordsman's face crumpled into a grimace. They had not planned to surprise them, so it was no matter if they both were prepared to fight. Jay lifted his visor first. He failed to sheath his sword, though.
"Who are you?"
Jay's eyes narrowed and he puffed up his chest, pointing his Blessed Sword at them. The red swordsman drew both his blades and his golden-haired companion produced her chakrams. "We are the Papal Knights and we've come to take—er... deliver you to His Eminence, the Pope of Tethe'alla, for your crimes against the Church!"
"Way to mess up, Jay," Rethka quipped sharply at the edge of his mouth. Jay kicked his shin.
"Are you still on that? The Pope's gone!" Lloyd fired back.
"That's right," Colette added. "He was plotting to kill the King of Tethe'alla and to take over the throne!" She spoke with amazing ferocity that it even made Lloyd give a little gasp. "If you still want to fight, we'll take you on and we'll beat you! Because Lloyd and me, we're both really, really strong!"
"Well, good job Colette!" Lloyd chuckled, making her blush. Despite that little aside, they quickly returned to their alert stances.
The Knights looked at each other, Rethka now raising his visor. Jay suddenly smiled at him and mouthed, "She's so cute!"
Rethka sighed loudly and mouthed back, "Don't you want to get back into the Knights?" Jay nodded enthusiastically and lowered his visor.
"What's it gonna be?" Lloyd spat.
Without a word, Rethka leapt high into the air twirling his spear about, drawing the eyes of his foes into the impossible height far above the canopy. He seemed to almost soar, locking their eyes on him an just as he was about crash down upon them, Jay charged forward, faster than lightning, tackling Lloyd sending him flying into a tree.
Colette's angel wings sprouted and she flung her chakrams at the sword Knight, ramming his helmet and sending him to the ground in a daze. Lloyd quickly recovered to counter Rethka's spear-driving attack. He leapt up as high as he could, spinning himself in a Tempest, knocking away the spearman's blade in one revolution and sent him hurtling to a sloppy landing, face first into the dirt with another lightning-fast revolution.
As Lloyd landed, he saw a glint of a blade and quickly parried the sword blow away. Jay used the force to spin around and rammed the red swordsman with his shield, bashing his cranium. Yet again, Colette unleashed her Chakrams upon the Knight to knock him down. As she floated to retrieve an in-flight Chakram, a swift swoop of air nicked part of her hair off sending the few golden locks to float to the ground. Rethka followed through on his swing and was about to circle back around follow up his attack. The ex-Chosen reached into a hidden pocket and sent out a torrent of Para Balls onto the Knight, slamming into his electrically vulnerable armor with the unseen power of lightning, riddling his body with purple sparks.
Jay and Lloyd staggered up at the same time, both dizzy beyond equilibrium. In unison they both shouted, "Okay! We're done...!" They collapsed.
The blonde Chosen, looking at the spread of bodies that lay around her quickly hid away her twin Chakrams and floated over to Lloyd. "We've got to get out of here before they wake up!"
Lloyd never drank a drop of alcohol ever in his life, although Zelos tried to drag him to the bar in Altamira, but this time he felt a pounding throb reverberate all through his head. He felt the ground beneath him and realized that he was lying down and slowly sat up; why rush things especially when a pair of Papal Knights obviously did not get the memo that their Pope was fired. He rubbed his eyes to get the smear of his blurred vision back into focus. When his headache stopped ringing in his ears, the crackle of a fire flowed into his them and he relaxed, for the aroma of a sizzling steak wafted into his nostrils. Then it hit him as hard as that shield that slammed into his face: What happened to Colette?!
"COLETTE!" He blurted, shooting up to his uneasy feet. His hands fumbled for his swords, but his dizziness got the best of him and his ankles, plopping him back down on his bottom. He cursed himself for being so careless in battle, too overconfident for even his experience! They fought the Papal Knights before and they had beaten them countless times, so then why did they have such a hard time fighting them? When his companion answered back, he waited for the worst: a harsh crack with a gauntlet, or an angry rasp followed by the heart-breaking sound of her body hitting the dirt and her pleading to spare both of them. Instead...
"Jay, he's awake now. I knew your healing arts would work!" she giggled. Her giggle nearly floored him. He turned his head to see the sword Knight and his friend smiling at each other as if they had known each other for years on end.
"H...hey! What's going on, huh? Colette, why are you...?"
"Don't worry, Lloyd, Jay and Rethka are our friends now. See, when you guys fought, you all got knocked out," she explained. Lloyd and Jay rubbed their heads in painful reminiscence. "So, I thought I could carry the three of you out of the Trail, but it looked like my angel strength gave out when we healed my sickness. Anyway, I thought I could never move you, until Jay got up and helped me out!" She smiled warmly at him, and he bashfully grinned back, a flood of red already washing over his firelight-drenched face.
Jay added, "Colette also explained to me all that stuff about the Pope and all, so what I say now might not be appropriate, but we're sorry for attacking you. Living on the edge of Ozette cut us off from the rest of the world, so we only heard about you when one of the Papal Knights tracked us down to get our help, but we refused."
Rethka's body stirred from his prone position and he, too, stood up. When he saw Lloyd there, he reached to his back ready to cleave the swordsman in half. When Jay yelled at him to stop, he froze. "What the hell is going on?"
The four of them sat around the fire, over Colette's Steak, and talked and talked. More than just conversation, it was also an unspoken truce between the two factions. Each side explained their reasons for traveling the new world. The Knights needed some convincing about the cause for the new world being the responsibility of Lloyd and Colette, as it could not be helped as almost every being on Sylvarant thought their Chosen had failed and the people of Tethe'alla assumed that their time of flourishing had ended as their Chosen had failed as well.
"Oh, so that's why those mountains weren't there before and that's why we couldn't go back," Jay said to Rethka.
"Why are you two on the road?" Lloyd followed up.
Rethka took the lead for their part of the conversation. "Jay and I are both Dragon Knights, a former order of Papal Knights that are responsible for defeating and sealing the corrupt dragons that often plague areas of uneven Mana distribution, kind of like when you spread butter on toast: not all of it is even."
"How come we haven't heard about you before?"
"Because, during our fathers' time, the Pope—well, former Pope now— saw no need for the Dragon Knights and framed every single Knight for blasphemy and other lies," Rethka continued. Jay sat there nodding to everything he said, a human spell check so to speak. "So he excommunicated our order and all records of us were erased. The only thing left that even tells us apart from the Papal Knights are these things: The Draconic Emblems." Rethka held out his left hand and removed the gauntlet, as did Jay. There, embedded on his hand was a highly stylized Key Crest, with engravings far different from that of the normal Key Crests of Lloyd's experience. These specific Crests were not the standardized ones he found on Desians and his father's workbench; emblazoned on the Emblems were the silhouette of a Dragon, with lines and lines of tiny charms and incantations upon them, each one written in a calligraphy that identified the family and heritage of the Knight that held it. Of course, the main feature was the Exsphere itself.
"Lloyd...!" Colette gasped. "An Exsphere..."
"These are heirlooms in our families. We can't just take them off," Rethka stated, concealing his Emblem. "That would destroy our entire livelihood and our mission, despite your journey."
"I understand and I don't need to tell you again how those... things are made of and at what cost. Just hand them over to us. If you don't," Lloyd muttered, grabbing the handle of his right-hand blade, "then it looks like we'll have to fight, after all."
None of them were thrilled at that prospect, and each side had their own respective reasons for keeping the Exspheres, or taking them in the case of Lloyd and Colette. A tense silence hushed the group, save the click and clack and the occasional sparking of the little fire that was already at its prime. In fact, the fire seemed to grow a little too bright for its type. The flames swelled into a tall, multicolored pillar of Mana that was neither harsh nor overwhelming; it merely surprised them. The pillar soon started to unravel itself, just as a flower in bloom would be in the beginning of spring, and a young woman, dressed in green with a staff of leaves, stepped out of the Mana Flower's stigma and nodded to all who sat around it.
"Martel!" Colette breathed.
"The goddess Martel?!" the Knights cried in unison.
Martel bowed slightly at the Knights, and then turned towards Lloyd and Colette, who stood up out of respect. This was only the second time, ever, that they had ever lain eyes on her ever since they viewed the Giant Tree's future form in her presence. She turned herself and strode over to the speechless Knights, her gait more silent than a still breeze, yet as calming as one. The two of them shuddered in their armor and Jay audibly whimpered at her sight. She seemed almost amused at the two, but she only smiled gently, before returning to her place on the Mana Flower. "I see that you have found each other; that is good."
Lloyd stepped forward and asked, "What's wrong, Martel? Is there something wrong with the Eternal Tree?"
She shook her head, but instead raised her staff and her audience gazed up in wonderment at the spectacle that she projected. She started to narrate, her voice a calm contrast to the chaotic catastrophe that her staff foretold, "This is Nidhogg, the Dragon created out of the huge amounts of Mana being drained from the Giant Kharlan Tree between the two sides during the Kharlan War. It is a creature so dark, that not even light can reflect off it, and thus is the direct antithesis of Mana itself. During the Kharlan War, it was responsible for damaging the Giant Kharlan Tree into such a state that Mithos had to seal it into a seed in order to save his sister, Martel, and to balance the lack of Mana between Tethe'alla and Sylvarant."
"Martel... I remember some Draconic Lore from my training," Rethka stated, in utmost respect to her. "Nidhogg was also defeated by Mithos and sealed away, right?"
"Correct, but the seal only would only last as long as the creator of the seal himself would still be alive. And thusly..."
"Nidhogg is freed, since we destroyed Mithos," Lloyd concluded.
"The Eternal Tree is in danger, isn't it?" Colette pointed out. "Martel, how do we stop it? How do we defeat that monster?"
"This is where you and the Dragon Knights come in. I do not need to state the importance of saving the tree, so I ask that you put your quest aside for now and to gather up the strength necessary to defeat Nidhogg," Martel said. "I also ask that you hurry as not many know of the Tree's existence and, as such, it is still quite fragile. I leave you all, now. I shall wait for all of you."
With that, Martel's spiritual projection broke apart into countless pieces of shimmering Mana and flew off into the eastern night sky, leaving the fire to continue to burn. "Look's like you guys are off the hook, for now. But when the time comes, you have to hand over your Exspheres."
"We'll see about that..."