Hi all! My name is already known to the whole internet since that's the only username that wasn't taken. Sigh.

Anyway, I finally worked up the guts to have people tear into my writing. So please do so! The only thing worse to a new writer than getting a review is not getting one. Yes, ours is a strange profession.

The concept here is: everyone's on the boat after Jupiter Lighthouse, and everyone's not quite ready to be friends yet. This was one of the moments when TLA really revealed its near-complete lack of character development, IMHO. Isaac and co. have been chasing these dudes for what, a year or so? And then they get to Contigo, four minutes of Kraden babbling like a senile old man, and they're all like "Huh, okay cool we're buddies again now." Seriously.

If I owned Golden Sun, it'd be so plot-heavy you still wouldn't have finished it. So obviously that didn't happen.

Catharsis
Intro

My brother?
He left us.
- Jenna

Deep beneath the forbidding cliffsides of the coast of Hesperia, shadowed by tall trees and whipped by a strong wind, the ocean crashed and dove. Spray flew as water met grey rock. High overhead the sun rode, passed by flying rags of cloud. A lone ship plowed north. At its pointed nose, a certain distressed Mercury Adept watched the anger of Nature. Mia leaned her weight more fully on crossed arms supported by a wooden rail and sighed. She needed this moment, needed to drown her thoughts in the chaos around her.

Much had happened, and most of it she knew would take a while for her to accept. It had all started when they got on this ship. Actually, it had started much earlier than that. The ship rocked and creaked as crying gulls wheeled overhead. It wasn't a bad ship, all things considered. No, definitely not the ship's fault, but Mia would rather have been on any two-foot-square on the whole surface of Weyard at that moment. She was finding it quite hard to get any of the thinking she desperately needed done while expecting the fight of the century to erupt at any second beneath her feet.

She remembered quite well the first time she had been Outside. She had been working diligently in the small, snowy town of Imil in winter, bustling about her daily round of errands. Another call had come for her. It was completely indistinguishable from all the others that fateful day. Just a normal old person having a normal reaction to the utterly normal amounts of snow and cold in that season. But she had walked in the door, preparing her medical kit, and seen what looked like apparitions standing about, like warriors from the old legends. A tall, sunburnt boy with blond hair, a huge, solid young fighter painted in broad strokes of red, and a small, delicate, frail child with haunting features, all of whom had the same burning, fathomless gaze in their eyes. It unnerved and fascinated her at the same time. They were like ghosts, but flesh and bone. Like Adepts of the epic sagas her ancestors told, but real.

She went through the motions of caring for the sick person in the hut, and she hoped, thinking back, that she had done no harm, and maybe possibly some good. She didn't know at the time. Her mind was completely absorbed by those mysterious people. While climbing the Mercury Lighthouse, she had known from the start that she wanted to join them. There was something about them that posed an irresistible attraction to her, that tugged on the deepest parts of her being. She just had to go with them, to find out what it was that filled their eyes with fire.

Throughout the long, arduous trek across Middle Weyard, crisscrossing Angara far too many times for her taste, she had learned their story. The tragic and bitter tale of betrayal, anger, and revenge that consumed Isaac and Garet, and Ivan to a lesser extent. The two from Vale were hurt, confused, and their anger at their situation focused itself on their quarry, the people who had ruptured their lives, and especially the one, the dark one, who had torn at their hearts and left them only questions with no answers.

She had always been an empathetic, emotional person, and she felt for those two, who brought themselves to harsh tears each time they mentioned through clenched teeth the name of the friend and hero who had come back from the dead - a traitor. Atop the Venus Lighthouse was where she saw him for the first time. And it was there she was filled with a deep, abiding fear. She was afraid of that man, the one who should have been a boy still but whose dark features were revealed, as he pulled off his mask, to be carved with deep lines of hate, sorrow, and care. His brown eyes, behind the blowing screen of his hair, seemed almost to hold a deep regret at this meeting, but as she watched, they hardened into cold, impenetrable glass. It was at that moment that she knew to be afraid, for she could see that this boy was capable of utterly anything. He was alien, removed. He had cut himself loose from the comfortable, friendly world in which she lived. There was nothing left in his soul at all. He was merely an empty shell.

Mia knew indifference, the clinical detachment from the pain that she could suffer, from the eyes of the three facing her, for the first time in her sheltered life, and she was afraid. But at that moment, in a small puddle of water lying slickly on the aerie floor, she caught her own reflection, and realized how much they had all changed, what a useless sad waste of childhood this whole chase was. Why couldn't the seal-breakers have left well enough alone? After the fighting was over, a brief and yet endless blur of cries, moans, and the vicious sound of unleashed Psynergy hitting flesh and stone, she saw something else. She saw the shell, the frozen ruins of a person, come back to life, to motion and vivid animation, as he reached for his friend. In that split-second she realized the other things he was capable of. Almost before she could think her sympathy went out to him. She wanted him to succeed, and she watched in disbelief as he failed. Everyone, friend and foe alike, turned at the cry to see a small, defenseless-looking girl slip and fall off the edge. It was a primal scream, a shattered, choking cry of rage and disbelief, hung suspended in the thin air atop the remembered, with numbed horror, how high up they were, how far from the ground. Her mind showed her what would happen when the girl impacted, and her sensitive, delicate nature recoiled from the vision. She wanted to turn away but couldn't.

And then he dived. He drew himself up, looked to the sky as though pleading for help, took one or two steps, and disappeared off the edge of Venus Lighthouse. No one could move, no one could say a word. Through the many long days ahead, Mia had more than enough time to reflect on what she had seen. She realized that Felix's senseless act of bravery had raised more questions, not answered them. Was he bad? If so, why did he jump to save that girl? Was he good? If so, why was he trying to directly bring about the end of the world? Why had he ruined the lives of her friends? With time, her emotions about the boy began to fade, her impressions formed atop the Venus aerie began to recede, but her curiosity remained. She often had no time to think, in the midst of healing, fighting, sleeping, traveling, but in the odd spare moment she found her thoughts returning to him.

Then came another day, another life-changing moment, another bizarre shift in perception in a world where nothing seemed to make sense anymore. She'd suddenly found herself kneeling on the edge of a precipice, Garet's shocked face hanging and swaying just out of her reach, and the limitless void falling away with sickening energy beneath him. With the clinical part of her mind she noted the tilt of his useless arm, made a quick assessment of the bones and ligaments that had to be torn to make it flop that way. With the battle-hardened heroine in her, she did her best to lift his weight up and cursed her fragility and weakness. The girlish part of her hid in fright, amazed at the craziness of this moment, of the utter fearlessness she had not known she could display. The clash of arms, shouts of surprise, reached her, but she couldn't take the time to look up or Garet might fall. She tried once to summon enough energy to begin healing, found that her mind was too shocked, too drained.

He shifted, trying to ease his weight partly onto the ledge and release some of the tension from his one good arm. He could be hanging for a while, from the sound of things above. He waited until she looked into his face again and cracked, "Guess the all-powerful ancient race didn't believe in safety, huh? People are always falling off these stupid things." She laughed, a small sound in the back of her throat. Then came running footsteps, surprised shouts, more noise from up above. She craned her neck, trying to make out what was going on. A loud argument began, continued for a short time, and then abruptly broke off. Silence fell. Suddenly a head popped into view over the edge of the lighthouse above her. It was that girl. Mia felt a quick rush of happiness that she survived; seeing her alive cleared a little corner of the cloud of doubt and sorrow in her soul that Mia had forgotten was there. She spoke quickly, in a clear, eager voice.

"Hang on, we'll get you up from there."

Yeah, it really sucked, but I know you hate it just enough to leave a review, right?