This is the time Stocke returns to. After Eruca led her doomed charge on Protea, he came here. When he could think of no way to save Rosch, he came here. When Marco, sweet little Marco who was deadlier than any of them had imagined, had left him to die with his blood pooling between the ancient tiles of Granorg castle, he came here.
Now Marco twirls in a circle, his hair disheveled without his helmet, his elbow linked with Aht's. The little Satyros girl squeals as they spin. The firelight casts their shadows in the trees, far taller than they are.
How do ordinary men stand it? Stocke wonders. How do they continue on unable to return to these few good times? He tries to remember the days before he held Historia, but he cannot. It has been so long, years and years now, though only months have passed for everyone else. He wonders how long it will be before he appears unnaturally old. He wonders if he will have enough time before his companions start to notice. Will he have enough time to correct every mistake? Enough time to save the world from burning?
He watches Raynie dance. Put a spear in her hands and a spell on her lips and her every movement is graceful and perfect, but Liese had to teach her how to dance. She'd had no idea what to do. She still hasn't quite mastered it, but after a few pulls of whatever Satyros liquor Vanoss kept in his pack, her movements are less jerky. She mimics Liese's movements as she stretches out a long leg. She moves her feet together, raises her hands to the stars.
The music stops as Vanoss lets his bow fall to his side. Raynie stops too, suddenly unsure of what to do with her body without the rhythm of the fiddle. She glances Stocke's way and smiles as their gazes catch. He had noticed before that moment that she was beautiful, in the way that tigers and thunderstorms are beautiful. Now, with the dancing and the liquor and the firelight reddening her cheeks, with her long ponytail coming undone to let locks of thick black hair fall around her face, with her mouth pulled in a wide grin, he cannot deny that she is beautiful in the way that a woman is beautiful. Stocke does something he has never done before in the many times he has relived this night, and grins back. He knows, somehow, that he has made a mistake, even before she tucks a bit of hair behind her ear, suddenly shy in a way that Stocke has never seen her, not on this night nor any other.
No. I've looked too long, I've come back too many times. I've ruined it. Raynie approaches with a smile on her face, a very meaningful smile, and Stocke's heart stutters with something that is part fear and part something very different. She sits next to him on his log, very close.
"Do you dance, Stocke?" she asks.
"No," he answers. "But neither did you until today."
And Vanoss plays another song, and they dance, and he is awful at it. He nearly trips into the fire, but Raynie holds him upright, their bodies squeezed tight together for moments that leave Stocke with a terrible longing, one he knows he cannot fulfill. Not now. Maybe not ever.
Nothing else happens. Not that night. Or the next. Until Raynie pulls him aside in Skalla and tells him about this guy, this reckless guy she knows. She's always been a mercenary, she's never known any other kind of life, but for this guy…
He has to tell her no. He needs to tell her no, and he does, time and again. He tells her that he has to keep fighting. And she tells him that she will be there, at the end, when their battles are over.
This time he can't say no. He has watched the world burn again and again and again, and he is not sure whether there is any end where it doesn't.
But there is an end where they run away together. Where they look for some end to the desertification, where no one dies, where there are no wars. Where Locke becomes known as the red prophet rather than the red warrior.
They don't find a solution, but they make love in the desert under the stars, like that's all there is, because it is. All there is. There are flowers in the windows of their home before they burn, like everything else. The day that the end finally comes he stands before Teo and Lippti once again, the burning of the sun fading into the brilliant whiteness of Historia. He expects some sort of condemnation, something. He doesn't receive it.
"Most wielders of Historia go mad," Lippti says simply. "If that was what you needed to continue on, that was what you needed."
Teo shrugs. "There are far worse reasons to watch the world burn."