Album
by: akikos-wok
DISCLAIMER:
SaGa Frontier is copyright of Square-Enix CO. Its characters do not belong to me and I make no money by messing with them.
le
fantôme
Immortality is an alluring and fragile curse. I say it is alluring for what mere mortal could resist eternity, resist abolishing all fear or thought of aging, of sickness, of forever fading gradually towards death? I say it is a curse because it is eternal. There is no change. If I am unhappy, thus shall I remain. There can be no escape.
Though this is not entirely true. I could escape. I could end everything through suicide. But this would be an ultimate end. No hereafter. No heaven or hell for the soulless vessel.
The defining aspect of my curse is its frailty. My immortality guarantees only exemption from death by natural causes. I cannot age or contract illness. But I can die. More accurately, I can be killed. However, if I am killed, that is the end. I shall diminish into nothingness and feel no more.
So instead of destroying my fear of death, eternity has magnified it beyond the reaches of human capacity.
This is what I realize as I watch him. As I see him take another girl, rendered witless by his overwhelming charisma, see him drain her, and capture her youthful beauty. For a moment she struggles in his embrace, gasping, coming out of the swoon, realizing for the final second of her mortal life that she is being murdered. Then her body goes limp and she is dead. But she will live again, though not as before.
She had no choice. Her fate was sealed the moment she wandered into his sight. When he decided he wanted her, she was already his. He always gets what he wants. No human, male or female can resist him.
I tell myself that I too was seduced by the Charm Lord. I like to think that one day he saw me bathing in a river, deep in the lush forests of Shingrow, took one look at my porcelain skin, soft, slender frame, and plumes of wet raven hair and decided then and there that I must be his. Then he came to my chamber in the palace one star less winter night, gathered me in his arms, and carried me away to his château where, under his spell, I gave myself willingly to him as he sucked my mortality from my pulsing neck.
I like to think this, but I know it isn't true. I know the truth, and it disgusts me. It is a bitter fruit that my mind sugarcoats to make it palatable.
Orlouge did find me in Shingrow. At that time he had no region, no château, no entourage of lordlings. He did have a carriage, but it was a farm cart in comparison to the coach he has now. One day he rode into what was then a flourishing kingdom and found the restless young queen, smashing a ceramic vase on the stone wall surrounding the palace. Who knows exactly what prompted her violence? She had a vicious temper, which she exercised frequently. She hated her life and everything about it.
I was this wretched creature so unappreciative of her good fortune. I should have been thrilled that I was a queen at all, having been raised an aristocrat in Kyo. Royalty usually only married other royalty, but the King of Shingrow, who had seen me at the court of the King of Kyo, was so enamored by my beauty and poise that he simply had to marry me. I am convinced that this marriage marked the beginning of the downfall of the monarchy.
I cannot recall my husband's name, but I remember I did not think he really loved me. What is worse is that I remember I did not care. When Orlouge arrived he did not find me a sobbing maiden, forced into a marriage of profit, longing desperately for her freedom. There was nothing vulnerable about me; I was not waiting for my true love to come and rescue me from my fate.
All I was waiting for was power.
Being queen was not what I had imagined it would be. Oh I was quite influential, dwelled in splendor, dressed in the latest and finest, dined solely on gourmet cuisine, drank only the finest of wines, and everyone obeyed my every command. Including my husband. That was the source of my discontent. My king was never belligerent enough for me; he never even objected to my needless tantrums, let alone threatened me with physical punishment. I could never understand why no one ever challenged his supremacy.
What I had envisioned was not the secure and glamourous life of the established monarch. I wanted the life of a conquerer. The life I saw in Orlouge.
He had just murdered and absorbed three of the high ranking Lords of his clan. Orlouge had been a low class mystic, but immensely powerful. Other mystics did not recognize this, for his power was unique. He was the Charm Lord long before he officially assumed the title.
Maybe I was attracted by his power. I certainly found him beautiful, and know he aroused my sexual desires. Yet a part of me is vaguely aware that this attraction was entirely natural, and not the work of Orlouge's spell. For I saw in his power, my own power, the power of beauty.
After all, the king had married me because I was beautiful.
Sometimes I wonder, if it was perhaps I who seduced Orlouge and not the other way around.
He did ask me if I would be his, if I wanted to become a mystic and live with him forever. And I of course said yes, for this is precisely what I had wanted him to ask. Our affair had been brief and free of scandal. My husband was too naive to suspect. So long as he could behold my features doused in sunlight for an hour or two each day, he was content. We did not share a bed, which made it quite easy for Orlouge and I to meet at night, for if we so desired the comfort of aforementioned furniture it was always available, and if I stole out of the palace to see him, my husband would not miss me.
So every night for three weeks we met, and I would kiss and caress him, and he would hold me and tell me of his dreams of conquest. And the more he talked, the more I kissed. With every divulgence that passed his lips, the caressing increased, grew more fervent, and ultimately we would make love, our bodies intertwining passionately, desperately under the Shingrow moon.
The night he made me was the night the kingdom fell. With our sites set on Facinaturu, the Region where the last of Orlouge's clan dwelled, we needed energy. We took what we needed. Took as much and ten fold more.
It was I who took the king. He died silently, never fighting back, never even trying. He accepted his death, just as he had accepted his life. But in absorbing his life energy I did not absorb any of his complaisance.
What made me think even for moment that I would be happy forever with Orlouge? That I could live forever, thrive forever, love forever? Perhaps it was the knowledge that I would be young and beautiful always, never age, never wither, never lose a fraction of that beauty, my greatest power. Did I know that never aging meant never changing?
After we conquered Fancinaturu and took up residence in Château Aiguille, I was certain my life was about to become all I had dreamed it would be. There was only Orlouge, myself, and several others who had joined in the uprising against the last of the legitimate mystic lords. And of them, only one was permitted to dwell in the palace, and I rarely ever saw him, so massive and labyrinthine the place. It seemed to me that my world now consisted solely of Orlouge, his solely of me, and the world was ours for the taking if we wanted it, so limitless was our power.
Deterioration began slowly. Orlouge said we needed more people worthy of status to populate the palace. People to advise us, help us maintain order among the people, temporarily reign in our stead should we ever travel. He brought only young men at first. Beautiful young men, clad in fashionable lace and velvet coats with epaulettes and lustrous eyes. And this did not vex me for I did not know then that he gave his sex to these glittering lordlings and palace guards near as often as he did me. Then he brought a girl. He told me she was to be the head of the house keeping staff, advisor to the homely, clammy skinned maids who trekked up from Rootville twice a day to make sure the palace remained as sparkling as its inhabitants.
And I believed him. Believed him because every night he summoned me. Every night I was in his bed, bleeding blue from my throat, bleeding for him. And every so often, him bleeding for me, my piked fangs breaking his porcelain skin as I stuggled from beneath him, fought for dominance.
Another girl was brought not a month later. This one lovely like the first, but older, more refined, possessed of an elegant, proud beauty not unlike my own. This one he said was to be a companion to one of his lordlings, whom I did not know he was sleeping with and we did know were sleeping with each other. He said the next girl was a cook, though we did not eat. By the sixth he stopped making excuses. By that time, I had not been his bed mate for near twelve years.
I think I was sad at first. Sad to have been deceived, sad to have been naive. Yet my sadness waned fleetly and was replaced by disillusion. I ceased to long for Orlouge's touch, lost interest in the glory of Facinaturu. Any charm he or it had held sway over me dissipated along with my ignorance.
But then again, it was never there to begin with.
The charm robs mystics of their mortal memory. They neither know nor care to know who they were, what they were, what they might have been. They remember nothing and no one. For them there is only Orlouge. They realize he takes many lovers, yet still they are consumed with him. Many do not waste away their days and nights with longing, but none the less, they are always aware of his charm, his power. Even the few who covertly dislike, even despise the Charm Lord, when not in his irresistible presence, express no interest in their human history.
I watch mysticism change the girl, limp and broken in Orlouge's arms. Layers of straight, inelegant brown hair turn to torrents of sumptuous, glossy curls. Inherent imperfections of barely post-adolescent skin disappear and thin, pallid cheeks fill out to round and rosy. There is nothing real about this girl; she is a porcelain doll, a collectors item. Another treasure in Orlouge's trove.
I am not a treasure. Oh I am beautiful, more beautiful than my human self. My eyes are black almonds, lost in a jungle of coiling lashes. My skin is firm, yet soft as an infant's, and forever sun-kissed. My hair is violet, plush and cascading. I say it is violet because violet sounds more real than purple. People have violet eyes, not purple.
I am real. I chose to become a mystic and I choose to endure it, fearing death. I know now that I was foolish. But I do know.
If I had remained human, I would be dead, maybe miserably so. But perhaps I would have matured, realized my good fortune and learned to ignore the things that galled me. I am certain I could never have loved the king. I am certain he never would have betrayed me. I could have ruled a kingdom peacefully, ostensibly by his side, actually on my own. Instead I destroyed one and took another. One that holds me captive now and laughs as I long for impermanence, while the rest of its prisoners are blinded by its everlasting splendor.
Only I can see. Remember. Though centuries have cast misty shadows over my memory, it is still there, shining mutedly. But shining nonetheless. It is there and it is mine.
Ignorance made me happy once. It will not do it again. I will not allow it.
Freedom is the only happiness. Mortality is freedom. Freedom to change. Mystics have no such freedom. If I hold on to what is mine, much as it sickens me, I might remember how to change, and break free. Some day.
