Ari wonders sometimes when he stopped being "the boy."
He's too old for that any more, his classification juxtaposed a few years, but "the teenager" or "the young man" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it? There's still nothing special about him, after everything they've all been through, and now he lacks even the simplistic, demeaning, catchy title. The letter he receives is merely addressed to "Ari of Tenel."
And it's not quite even a letter, really, it's just a ticket to a concert in Madril.
He travels the distance by foot – how else – tracing paths he is far too familiar with, paths he has crossed and re-crossed and criss-crossed more times than he'd like to think about. The shadow he casts as he hikes with the sun at his back is lifeless and boy-shaped, teenager-shaped, whatever-shaped, but certainly not evil king-shaped. He is thankful for that in some ways, but lonely for it in others. The absence of a burden on his back reminds him he does not carry a sword; the presence of his hands in his pockets remind him that he does not carry anything else, be it nuts or gears or anything else but his ticket.
If he focuses really hard, he can pretend that he didn't just barely glimpse a man-eating onion way off to his left. It's not bothering him; he's not yet a man, despite how much he is not "the boy."
Madril is still too industrial for Ari, he realizes. He could never live here; he misses Tenel, he misses the city of Triste that he now sees only in his dreams. The concert stadium blends right in to the rest of the City of Gears: making up for what it lacks atrociously in modesty by copious amounts of flashing lights and whirring gadgets that sit nestled into corners. He has arrived late, he realizes, because he hears music blaring from the inside already.
Of course he recognizes the voice; he wouldn't have received the ticket otherwise.
It's not quite the voice he remembers, wide-eyed if a voice had eyes and tenacious if a voice had teeth. Has she had training? Has she merely grown up? She stands, sings, sometimes bounces and glides from stage left to stage right and back, black petticoats swishing under her artfully shredded pink dress, top hat perched just askew on her orange hair streaked with red, balanced between the crown of her head and her left horn.
The crowd is wild for her, and he knows this is what she has always wanted.
Her lyrics are straight out of their journey, as only Ari knows – not so much in their story, for she does not sing true ballads, but more in the emotions that tugged and nicked at all of them: self-doubt, fear, wonder. A line that screams out something about sand in the hourglass, sand in the tower-glass gives him elegantly painful Addashi flashbacks and he wonders, for the first time, if he is not the only one of them who has been invited. He cannot see anyone else from his position in the back – perhaps not the best vantage point, but it at least rules out Big Bull – but then, oh, then the teen idol's special effects flare up in a way that seems spontaneous, and Ari has the sense to look up.
Perched high above the crowd on a trapeze is the phantom, just as Ari remembers him, unchanging, blond, and queerer than the square rhinos that are undeniably round. His eyeliner strikes a chord parallel to Linda's fusion of melodiousness and harshness, bold in its thickness but delicate in its design. He gestures with subtlety at the stage; it is Epros who commands Linda's flawless pyrotechnics.
So that's that, then. The two of them still stuck together, though they both surely belonged elsewhere. It both was and was not meant to be.
The blond in the air with his uncanny sixth sense must feel Ari's gaze on him and he looks, peering down with wide violet eyes at the seething, shrieking crowd, searching for a familiar face. Ari knows he is different: he wears stronger colors now, a half-hearted facsimile of the assertiveness he searches for and never finds; he wears his hair longer now, and though it is pulled back from his face more often than not he still sometimes uses it to hide behind. But Epros finds him, and their eyes meet, and Ari knows it means something; and Epros turns his gaze back to Linda, and Ari mirrors this, only to find his green eyes clashing straight with Linda's as they connect as well.
And Ari knows that this means something too.
He is not "the boy," but he has no idea who he is other than the one who sort of accidentally saved the world, only to be blessed with "we're sorry, but the princess is in another castle – and she went there of her own accord." Yet the commanding presence on stage proves that Linda has left her childhood behind, and the precision of the stage effects show that Epros has gained competence and even prowess. They are so sure of themselves it makes Ari want to cry inside.
Maybe – if he stays with them - maybe, in ways good princesses or evil kings never could, the idol and the phantom can show the boy how to grow up.