Dona Nobis Pacem
DISCLAIMER: Yggdra Union, Dept. Heaven © Sting. I like how a pair of parentheses and a c turn into © in Microsoft Word. That aside, the story is mine, inspired by a few Macross Frontier songs.
(the light of our armistice – this is the country of a new god)
There are birds in the courtyard when the children slip out early to play, chasing each other in a game of tag. The littlest ones, who can't keep up, scatter hunks of yesterday's bread for those birds, who flutter down and peck at it. They're used enough to the people of the grand white city that they don't scatter as the children run past.
They know that no one here means them harm. This is a city of peace.
The city is a paradise on earth, the children know. Their parents and grandparents have told them so. They run through the streets with nothing to fear, hardly knowing what fear even is. They pass the statues of their city's ancient heroes, giggling, and stop to bow their heads and pray to the image of their immortal queen.
As they do, they notice that there is someone sitting on the far corner of that statue, singing softly. The children approach cautiously. This is a someone they have never seen before, and they know everyone in the city.
The someone finishes the song and rests both hands in their lap, and turns with a sound of metal to look at the children, who simply stare.
"…Hello."
"Hello," says one of the bolder children in return. "Are you a traveler?"
"Yes."
The children all smile. Travelers are exciting—they're new people to talk to, to beg stories from. "Do you like the statue, traveler?"
"It's a fine statue, I suppose. I don't think it looks very much like her, though—it's the statue of a hero, not a person."
The children don't understand his words, not very well. "We have lots of statues of heroes here."
"I know; I've seen them. None of them look quite the way I remember them—it may be my own memory that's the problem, though. It's been a very long time, after all." A sigh. "I shouldn't have expected to see any other ones here. How disappointing.
"I knew a hero once, though. Kinder than anyone. More courageous… than anyone. You wouldn't know anything about him," the traveler adds with a strange smile. "It's… easier for people to forget that some heroes ever existed."
Yggdra Yuril Artwaltz walks through the light-filled castle halls in slow swaying steps, scepter in hand. She does not waver, but neither does she pay much attention to her attendants, who trail behind her as they chatter. Her mind half-sleeps under the weight and warmth of her heavy thoughts. She feels sedentary, tired, ready for a long sleep—she doesn't think she can, but she is quite tired.
The castle has not changed much through the years. It has progressed more towards being a palace—or simply a fortified, oversized mansion—but she still thinks of it as a castle. That's not something that's going to change so easily.
Sometimes she half-forgets—her mind is so taken up with her duties and her memories that the small changes slip her mind, and she finds herself confused as to why there is a painting where the tapestry is supposed to go, or why the chamber pots are on the other side of the hall instead of there just being a privy in such a room. Worse, there are times when she expects to see different faces when she turns to speak to her retainers.
Like now, when the young captain comes around the corner to salute her. Her heart sinks at the sight of him. He looks so very, very much like his great-great-grandfather; his eyes are more gray, his hair wavier, but oh how it hurts her heart to see the similarities.
"Your Majesty."
He sinks to one knee, and she smiles faintly, gesturing that he should rise.
"Yes—have you any report to make?"
"I wasn't sure that Your Majesty should be bothered with such a trivial matter, but… some children in the lower city claimed to have seen an 'angel' early this morning."
She raises her eyebrows, feeling as though someone has flicked cold water onto her face.
"Where?"
"Near the Heroes' Plaza—but, Your Majesty—"
She shakes her head. She already knows how to handle this.
"I thank you for telling me this, but it likely doesn't require any investigation. You know how the children are, captain."
He sighs, relieved, because it is the answer he has been praying for. Yggdra wonders with slight pity if this makes her a bad person—knowing her subjects just enough to manipulate them perfectly.
The rest of the day is as unremarkable as the last (which is in itself something remarkable; for so long they were so turbulent). Yggdra settles a few disputes, reads reports from across the country, and asks the castle staff to draw her a bath. She dismisses them (she can, at least, clean her own body after so long) and undresses—it is so easy now that corsets have long since fallen out of fashion.
Standing naked in front of the mirror, she undoes her hair, looking at herself passively. Her body is still that of a seventeen-year-old girl. There are faint marks that might once have been battle scars; her waist is no longer cinched down to precisely twenty-five inches in diameter and her breasts are rather larger. There's some weight—not a paunch, but weight—settled around her lower belly, and fainter marks than the scars arcing over it: old stretch marks.
Looking at her reflection this way makes her a little lonely, a little sad. She misses the tender physicality of sex, the warmth of an unborn child inside her, even the pain of childbirth. She knows logically that she could have another lover or another consort if she wishes, as many more children as she pleases. Yet so much of what she misses is her husband—his body aligned with hers, the look on his face when she let him know she was pregnant, his hand in hers as she labored. She could never bear having another man inside her, let alone give him the authority she has.
She bathes, selects nightclothes for herself, and retreats to her vast plush bedchambers. While she waits for her hair to dry, she selects a leather-bound book and a pen and writes about the day. The entry is a short one, and she sets the diary aside quickly. She has filled many of these books across the years, and the slumber of the unchanging peace has made it a tedious task.
Yggdra wakes hours earlier than she normally does, dressing by herself and then slipping through half-remembered back passages out of the castle and into the sleeping city.
Paltina is nearly silent; it is barely dawning, and the world looks like a detailed picture rather than a real place. Yggdra holds her skirts in both hands, her scepter tucked under her arm, and crosses the streets in swift businesslike strides as she glances around.
She slows down when she reaches the plaza, and takes her time looking from place to place. She examines the statues especially, even though it bothers her that none of her friends would really and truly strike such poses—it seems so silly, so storybook, when the war had been so painfully real.
When Yggdra turns the corner, he is there, kneeling in the middle of the walk, facing away from her and scattering seed for the birds. It is easy to see how even the children had been able to tell what he was. That small, pale figure dressed wholly in white does not look as though it belongs to this world by any stretch of the imagination. Even without those heavy shackles.
Does it comfort her that he seemed to have changed as little as she? Or does it bother her?
"…Nessiah."
He doesn't seem to react at first, but she knows he's heard her as he dusts his hands off and slowly rises—perhaps in an attempt not to scare the birds. They scatter anyway, a feathered whirlwind spiraling up from around him to disappear in the sky.
She can't think of anything to say—it would be utter nonsense to inquire that he's alive after all, isn't he? as he's standing right in front of her. As for where he's been—she can't ask him that. He has every reason to not want to be around her.
Nessiah turns to her wearing that small ironic smile she still remembers well.
"I've been here—investigating your peaceful world. Just as I told you I would. There's little else to do in this place but sleep or die, and neither of those stick for very long."
"…Nessiah…"
"How have the centuries suited you? No need to really answer, I can tell just by your appearance; the time has turned your blood to tar in your veins, and you're as weary of the years as any. Any but me—you'll have a better understanding of that once you've completed your first thousand years."
The spiteful mirth in his voice stings, but all the same, Yggdra almost wants to embrace him: for he is familiar, his time at a standstill as hers is, a familiarity in a world that has long passed her by.
"I've only been around to watch the recent progress, though. I can imagine the first years. How was it for everyone else?"
He is asking how they died. Yggdra knows this from the hint of malice in his smile. He has the right, she knows. She took away what was his, and time served her comeuppance.
"Milanor… was the first. The way he got to behaving after a few years, I think we all half-expected it. Kylier meant too much to him—he rejected a world without her. So when all the fighting and the settlements were over…"
She still couldn't know—none of them could—if it had been an accident born from his recklessness or a straight-out suicide. Either was likely, and either way, Milanor could rest in peace.
"Nietzsche and the others left the world with Pamela, afterwards. It was hard for them. The prejudice against their race in the wake of Embellia was just too strong." And she could resent Nessiah for that, if she wanted to; it had after all been his fault, but she was too tired to resent anyone anymore. "I'm sure they're all still perfectly well, but none of them ever came back. A necessary separation, Pamela was calling it. It was a sort of death in itself.
"Russell and Flone lived to have five children and a full family of grandchildren. Even Cruz eventually settled down; they had such full lives. Mistel lived the longest of any of them—she just died of old age in the end; she was eighty-seven, can you imagine? At that time, it was unheard of.
"Durant married, but… it didn't take too well. He grew depressed from the war, from those of us we lost, and drank until he ruined his health. He was at peace in the end, though, and his children and his children's children have always stayed with me. They're all very much like him. Elena—it was much the same with her, I suppose. She wore herself too thin, and once she broke her leg and couldn't get around anymore… she pined herself out of life for want of something to do."
"And Roswell?"
Of course he's asking. It hurts her the most to remember him, to remember watching him get older—their children get older—while she stayed frozen in time, to remember the worries they had, their insecurities about their shifted time.
"His health was always a little fragile after some of the wounds he took in the war. He died when he was fifty-nine. It was painful, but I don't regret it."
Nessiah is watching her with a dissatisfied expression. Perhaps she has not suffered enough for his taste; it may well be that she has not suffered as much as she deserves. But there is nothing she can do to change that.
"—Actually, I rather expected better of you."
Yggdra frowns and stares at him. The smirk has dropped from Nessiah's face, and his expression is quite blank.
"This world, I mean. Your peaceful world. You brandished your ideals so furiously, as though they were as much a sword as my Gran Centurio. Perhaps I was just projecting 'myself' onto you, or I missed the full implications when you said you desired a world without borders. And the world is at peace, and developing through cooperation instead of conflict—just as you promised. And yet—
"—And yet, the Fantasinian border stretches straight from the southern coast to the mountains. The Vanir, the reprobates have been assimilated, Verlaine was engulfed long ago… Lost Aries is still unwanted land, as is Nyllard, and Lombardia keeps its territory through veneration. This continent is a Fantasinian paradise, it's true; but it's a Fantasinian paradise.
"People are happy, it's true. But the inconvenient things aren't marked down in the history books, and for the second time you've made off with the place I could go back to."
"…I can't apologize." This is true, although she is sorry for him. Yggdra brushes her hair back and looks up at the golden-pink sky. "This world hasn't ever known a lasting peace—and I simply did the best I could. To be human is to win your ideals by trampling over someone else's, after all."
She hears the regret in her own voice, and she believes Nessiah must, too.
"You're less human now than you were before, though," he points out, and she drops her gaze from the sky to look at him again.
He stands, a specter of days long lost, throwing her shortcomings into her face for a purpose she can't even guess at. She does not think that he intends to cause trouble—he would gain nothing from it—but neither is she sure that he means her anything but ill.
"The king must become more than human—must abandon his humanity to become what a ruler must truly be. Someone said that once; I can't remember who. They were likely right, and besides—you've experienced more than can be understood by any mere human."
"You may be right," she admits simply. Nessiah shifts his weight and slips one arm around his back, hooking his pale fingers at the thin swell of muscle in his other forearm. He tilts his head to stare at her with a blank expression (or perhaps it would be quite telling if his face weren't so obscured by that mask).
He is silent for a long time, then turns his back and walks away. Still, before she can try to stop him, he comes to a halt, framed against the light of the dawn. She can almost imagine the wings he's long been without furled at his back.
"…I actually came here not just to discuss this, but because there's something I wished to tell you."
Yggdra walks toward him again in patient sweeping steps, toward her once-enemy and only kin. "What is it?"
"What if…" Nessiah clasps his hands behind him and shifts so that he's just peeking over his shoulder at her. "What if I told you that I knew how you could die?"
She doesn't, cannot, answer.
"What if I told you that I and only I am aware of how you can let go of life peacefully, even naturally? That you didn't have to become like me at all? That you could pass your duties to another?"
…Does he want her to beg? She can feel her knees shaking, her heart pounding.
He turns around fully and examines her expression—she can feel the scrutiny of his gaze even if so much of his face is obscured.
He smiles, slightly, but she can sense that his heart isn't in it. "Of course—the information on how exactly this could be done… I have enough spite left in me that I won't tell you for free."
She expected as much, and holds her breath.
"I'll let you know—if you find a way for me to die."
He is no longer smiling, but simply looks old and forlorn, much as she must from time to time.
"Any way is fine. Any way at all. As long as I stay that way. I'm so tired of living, Queen Yggdra. I'm so tired of continuing to exist in a world like this.
"And, if I were to be selfish—there is one other condition."
Yggdra wets her lips and smoothes her skirt. "What would it be, then…?"
Nessiah's shoulders rise slightly, and he stares at her firmly. "You cannot give Gulcasa back to me. No one can. So give him back to this world. Correct your own mistakes, as price of passage."
…It is fair. Yggdra thinks about it, and nods to herself; yes, this is fair. If she is to abandon her title as the Immortal Queen of Fantasinia, she can at the very least fix the places she erred, and soothe what remains of her guilt from the time of the war.
"If I were—to accept your terms."
She wonders for a moment if this is simply another cruel joke of fate, if Nessiah is simply here for further revenge—it was all he seemed to understand when they first met—but he steps forward until there are barely a few inches separating them.
"I would hold you to them."
He leans forward, resting his forehead to hers, hands on her shoulders.
"Because you understand now—what it is to be this tired, what it is to hurt this deeply… don't you, Yggdra?"
It was the golden age of peace in the paradise on earth called Fantasinia.
The immortal queen accepted a new court arch-magister, and a soft new current was born within the stagnant world.