Edea gives pause, her gaze locked on the boy. Squall meets her; for a moment it's normal, a break in his turbulent expression, and then it sounds dimly in the back of her mind that Squall is terrified.
A shudder bends her spine forward, leaning on her forearm like a behemoth, pawing the ground before it makes its stand. Spasms carry her on, reaching, grasping and baying with the fervor an animal.
Edea wakes up.
The memory resounds. Esthar's scenery does nothing to relieve the sensations of her nightmares. Six years by a window does not undo her actions then, when she clawed for little Squall—what Ultimecia wanted with him, she can only throw out mad estimates. Perhaps use him as a hostage to make Ellone cooperative and weak, or even cast her soul into his fragile body and pull the boy's bones like puppet strings.
No. Odine's "conversations" echo, weeks spent agreeing to one needle and the next, worming her words around a magimometer. Anything for company in her prison of luxury. Men cannot even have preterpotential. Ze children were at best, pretereceptive.
"Pretereceptive is still receptive to the Sorceress." Makeshift claws scrape at her forehead, seashells and kelp knitting in with the black train she's kept under close watch. Some days Edea lets it down; others she is hasty, possessed by a sense that there is no time to dress the glossy locks. It slithers into her mask like a frightened serpent.
Her body is alive with power, every motion snapping like an off-key fan. No door is closed to her; instead doors melt into viscous puddles and cower in the cradle of their own thresholds. Esthar is her prison, bound by walls that do not give to ice lancets or maelstroms, but it is also licking the sand from her heels.
"Would you like to take your medication now, Descendant of Hyne?"
The Sorceress' nostrils flare, scoffing. She wonders what they would say if she said no.
"Sorceress EDEA..."
A sigh ruptures her thoughts, leans her jewelry and the body attached to it down against the desk. Her attendants scuffle out, tablets left on the table. Edea is treated with disturbing respect, for being the land's nightmare. No one in Esthar would call her anything less than Great Magus, her name etched boldly like a god's. She is as much a cage to Esthar as Esthar is to her. Even as their prisoner, the Sorceress is reflexively worshiped by all.
Except Laguna, but she can promise him an age of torment and a river of blood dedicated to his name.
"Feeling moderate today?" Edea's lips whisper. It is beginning to come together, what Ultimecia was grasping at—a knight perhaps, right from the storybooks. Children make the best soldiers when trained young, but She cannot allow Ultimecia that luxury. Deposing a Sorceress from beyond time is difficult enough; She cannot give Ultimecia the kind of advantage a knight would allow for.
Edea no longer lets her attendants beyond the curtain. A vanguard of silk interposes itself between her and the world, the Sorceress' expression chill as She reclines on a throne of negative space. Sculpture leaps at her touch, armies bubbling up from Her seat, as if every object in the world was fighting to please Her. The window remains closed.
Her thoughts turn again to Squall, and there is a twinge of loathing. Anguish; longing for that face She cannot bear, for the boy who lights thunderstorms in her skin.
"Bring me children." The first sign of resistance is when an attendant recoils at one of Her commands, but the gaze Edea affords him breaks that resistance swiftly. It is a covert affair at first, that Her jailers are ferrying war orphans into the Sorceress' throneroom. Something that Her magic can conceal, making the walls gape into cavernous tunnels for Her thralls to step through.
The boy they bring Her cowers, arms locking around his nest of brown hair. He is prostrate, or as nearly as he can manage with his whole body cambered inward. In Her infinite wisdom, ten years old. One who knew Adel personally.
EDEA says nothing, but inwardly She is purring and Her thralls shiver in the presence of pleasure. Then the Sorceress stands, and they are all cowering before Her, ready to obediently surrender to Her commands without ever seeing Her face.
She gathers the boy up, his warmth tickling Her bare collar. Not warmth—a cold so infinitely removed from Her own, that She can delude Herself into feeling heat. In him is the simple reality that the ice cube is hotter than the glacier.
Her fingers weave through his mussed hair, feeling out the burnished sandy waves. Now he can look at Her, and EDEA's lips pass over the child's cheek. The Sorceress fusses over him all evening, under the watch of Her attendants. It is not as though thralls could do anything against Her if they thought She were to harm the child.
How lucky, to be raised by the Sorceress.
EDEA is not certain if that thought was sarcastic or not.
But then a giggle pokes up from the boy's mouth, and EDEA cannot deny the flutter against Her breast. She is caught in the laughter, as though a mountain had pinned Her down; and Her spell shatters like an empire of glass, cast into the earth's crust.
For that moment they are not thralls, and Her activities are reported. Soldiers seize the child from Her arms, and EDEA is left pouting like a scolded child.
Her attendants enter on the next day to the smell of molten metal, Her throne burned out and made into a puddle of steaming salt. EDEA stands at Her mirror, laying a peach polish across Her brow.
She spends three days at the mirror, tireless. Unweary. Caking Her cheekbones in layers of powder and lotion, appearances running together and melding into an inch-thick mask that darkens all around Her. Every motion is accentuated now, exaggerated to its finest proportions. Perfume clings to Her every footstep, sea breezes mingling with Galbadian peonies.
It could have been two rivers.
The attendants cannot deny Her forever. They are easily taken in, shut up inside Her words. Esthar is the land closest to Her, and it will bow to EDEA's demands.
"You can have him," It is the first time She has seen Laguna in months, and it is the first time She must exercise restraint on Herself, "Whenever you're not crazy."
Laguna keeps his promises. Tom is escorted by a personal guard, heavily armed but nonetheless fragile in Her presence. When EDEA is lucid She holds Tom near, plays games of words and hands with the child. He emerges like a bird long enclosed in its egg.
EDEA takes some bizarre pleasure in ULTIMECIA's reaction, at the Sorceress playing Scrabble.
It cannot last forever. Her instincts do not take kindly to Laguna's bindings. They scream at Her, to walk out the door with Tom, to hold his hand tightly in her palm and tuck the covers around him at night. Tom must leave, a boy free to walk wherever he pleases, and She is a snake coiling in its cage.
Squall would be the same age by now. Ten, his eleventh birthday growing near as the boy squanders his days. EDEA should be baking a cake, but when the day comes She must sit alone, enclosed on Her third throne, and dine silently behind the curtain of silk.
Fire snakes along the curtain's rim. She has cast off Her mask for this day, left it in shattered pieces beneath Her heel. EDEA shoves Her dining stand away crudely, the cake's innards splattering across oaken steps.
"D-descendant of Hyne...?"
"Great Magus EDEA..."
"Are you all right, Descendant?"
Noise. Meaningless noise.
One of the attendants makes a desperate motion, trying to save a situation that is running through his hands like a melting mountain. "Shall I fetch Tom?"
"Who?" Their bodies cave, splintering against Her prison's walls. A flame has caught that She cannot put out. There are a hundred ways to burn the world, and now She is faced with the dilemma of choosing which one is best.