The Straw That Broke The Camel's Back.
He had been having so many doubts of late that it's a wonder where to start, or where it all began, but one thing was for certain – it was all Wrong. Perhaps it began the day he was born and it would finally end the day everything died, but he couldn't be too sure. Perhaps he'd been born wrong; it was so hard to tell when you'd been born into war. Everyone he knew had been born and bred in war, a war he shortly suspected after five minutes of being exposed to it was never-ending, a war started for the forgotten wrong reasons perpetuated by insane tyrants at the cost of thousands of lives in the name of a vast, grand, collective unconscious desire for nihilism. He wondered if there had been an exact moment, a precise point in time where it had all come to. It was hard to imagine where it all began or how it started; the precise point at which everything suddenly became Wrong.
And yet here he was standing on the precipice of it all with the fate of everything he has ever known and has ever been in his hands.
He didn't have the words. They didn't exist. The strange thing was, now he had the power to will those words into being. He held the cards now, and yet forgot entirely how to play them, or maybe forgot entirely the reason to play them. He was a summoner, one of the only ones left, and if the world wouldn't change on its own he possessed the power to make it change, to turn it completely around on its festering war-torn head. He just wasn't sure where to start, or how to begin, or where it had all began in the first place.
She wouldn't stop bleeding, it was just everywhere. It wasn't ending. There was too much going on at the time and he couldn't remember half of what happened or what was said. She was in pieces. He was sure there had been some crying involved with some people, but he didn't care much about them anymore. He forgot briefly how to care, since it all began and ended with her.
Perhaps it wasn't entirely fair to let him off the hook – after all, he had an irritating tendency to hold on to his promises until the grave. He never made a vow he didn't intend to keep, and having failed that, it was only reasonable that some things would end up broken in their keeping. He just hadn't expected her to end up so broken or so bloody in that process. It had really been the only promise he'd ever truly given any value to, the only one that really mattered in the long run; so long as this one promise was kept, nothing else mattered in the world. It followed then that with the promise broken, the world would shatter.
It was the lack of shattering that really startled him. It was the lack of feeling broken, or feeling anything, that he truly wondered at. Where had it begun? How had it come to be? Was it correct or incorrect to feel this way? His friends had no answers, not even his former mentor had answers, probably because possibly the only thing that would've been able to given him an acceptable answer was very, very much suffocating on her own blood at the dead feat of Mana itself.
He couldn't believe how messy it had been. It didn't seem reasonable since she'd always been such a neat and tidy person that she would cause such a horrible mess. If she'd been able to see the mess she'd caused she would never have tolerated it. She would've cleaned it up in a heartbeat. But there was no one left inside, no one left outside, there was simply an all-consuming nothing.
"I will always protect you."
In retrospect, which is always perfect, it was a very foolish vow to make considering how easily it was broken. More so that he had hinged his very concept of the world around him on the sole principle that that vow would never under any circumstances come in danger. It was the entire purpose. It was the reason. There weren't words that existed in any language he knew.
He'd fled with her from Heimdall away from prejudice and vowed to protect her from it.
He'd asked his friend to become his mentor in order to learn how to fight, so he could protect her.
He'd made pacts with the spirits of the world, so he could protect her.
He'd stopped a thousand-year war between two psychotic nations, so he could protect her. He'd vowed to those same spirits that he would resurrect the Tree of Life, solely so he could build a better, stronger world for her to live in. For them all to live in.
She was the reason, the hinge upon which everything swung, and she was dead.
Dead by human betrayal.
It was a wonder he didn't erupt then and destroy it all, in retrospect, but retrospect is always perfect. Thinking back he's not entirely sure why he hadn't ripped a new hole in causality that consumed creation with the powers of the Eternal Sword, but he blamed Origin for that one. The spirit always managed to find a way to interfere in everything that wasn't His business. That, however, was easily rectified when he turned his former friend into the Seal and tore apart his own vow.
After breaking one promise, you see, it was so very easy to break the others. They were like twigs, one by one, snapping in slow, tortuous agony. He wondered at the time if, based off of how easy it was to break his promises, how easy it would be to break something else? Other people? Maybe the world? The world, after all had broken her, and by proxy him, so it was only fair treatment. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.
His resolve tightened because in his own way, he was keeping to that vow… or at least the tattered remnants of it.
He wondered vaguely when it all began, when it became Wrong. There was not a one among them that understood. For a very brief time, his former mentor understood – his eyes had become a hollow devoid of everything. He became dead inside. But even then, he was hiding from himself – he understood that on some level and the spark came back over time. It was infuriating. His mentor got the spark back, and yet he was continuously denied. He of all people should have understood, shouldn't he? What he was attempting to do? What he'd literally spent thousands of years in the planning and in the making? Why was that so hard to understand? Why was it so wrong? It was never wrong to seek meaning, to search for the right thing.
There was no one who could grasp the concept, and yet for him it was so feeble, so simple. There was only one thing that had ever held meaning, and in the process of saving it he had broken it irreparably. There was no choice, no going back. He would make the same choices if given the option to do it again. He would always know why he had done what he had done. It was so simple, so easy to do. It wasn't revenge for how the world had treated his kind. It wasn't revenge for what the world had done to him. It wasn't revenge for what they'd done to her. He'd shaped the world in the way he wanted it to be. It would always remember him how he wanted it to remember him. The world wasn't the issue. The world wasn't the factor. The world was under his control, and the world was meaningless.
Perhaps it was so hard to understand because to them, the world meant something. It had once meant something to him. He'd understood that and even at some point sympathized. The world used to be verdant grass and trees, sparkling oceans and rainy skies, white clouds and light breezes, chirping birds and radiant sun, civilization and nature, harmony and chaos. It used to mean so much to him that he was prepared to sacrifice himself for it all. He loved the world once, and would have done anything to save it. But something changed in him. It became all Wrong.
It became apathy, the opposite of meaning, the opposite of all love and hate. He sympathized with the plight of the world, he did. He'd never show it because that would mean weakness but he understood. It was tragic that they would never have the opportunity to understand how utterly worthless they all were in the grand scheme of things. The world would never know its own insignificance and its tragedy was in its ignorance and inability to understand its own role; they would never be able to understand so it was pointless to send them platitudes or justifications. They were far too set in their ways to truly listen, and he was far too set in his to truly care.
It was a simple truth; she was gone; there was nothing else that mattered. Bringing her back was all there was and all that needed to be. If it had to be at the cost of the world and everything else, so be it. It didn't matter at all. He would spend it like coin if he could. He would kill everything to bring her back.
They asked him why, demanded more platitudes, more justifications, more pleas. He'd laughed. They wouldn't understand, nor would they make the attempt even if offered. He knew their kind.
He still couldn't help but wonder, though, where it all began or where and at what point precisely it went all wrong. It wasn't when she died. It wasn't when he'd made the world the way it was. It wasn't when that fake-Martel spouted her filthy lies and rejected him. It wasn't that at all.
Hence the conclusion that perhaps there wasn't any particular moment that it had become wrong or it had really begun at all. Hence, it had always been wrong, that maybe it was created wrong in the first place. He hadn't been able to fix it because it was naturally this way and there was nothing to fix, just the natural course of events moving in their natural way. The wrong way. He'd been born the wrong way into a wrong world and it wasn't something that had just happened, oh no, it had always been that way. Nothing had really changed. It was the same savage world that he knew; he may as well just have taken it apart piece by piece and put it back in alphabetical order. The reality had not changed. He was the one who had changed; the reality was the one that had always been Wrong. The reality was that at no specific point in time did it just suddenly happen or suddenly start because it had always been this way. It had begun exactly this way and it would end exactly this way. The world, the everything, the everyone, had always been and always would be perfectly, exactly, and completely Wrong. He'd just been blessed with the misfortune to be the only one to see it for its ugly truth:
It was simply not a world worth saving anymore.
…Perhaps the elves should never have left Derris-Kharlan… then people like us would never have been born…