Disclaimer: The characters and settings in this story are from Tales of Vesperia and do not belong to me.

Flynn walked slowly before his assembled brigade, surveying them. They stood like toy soldiers, uniforms and helmets hiding identity, transforming individual into legion. From the corner of his eye, he noticed the shine of Sodia's copper hair. When he turned to look straight at her, she was gone, just another wooden soldier standing mutely at attention.

He was the only thing that moved in all the field. Not even a breeze dared stir. Everything was bright, bright, bright. The cloudless sky was dyed a sharp, stunning blue, the grass painted a dazzling green. He came to a stop. His knights were perfectly arrayed, a human grid. He could almost see them from high above as a series of precise, white points, blotting the color from the field in exact rows and columns.

He stepped forward, one hand outstretched. Had the knight right in front of him been the one with the copper braid, or was it one of the others? Unseen, faces shuffled beneath the helmets, and he took an uneasy step back, hand falling to his side.

"Why are you wearing that mask?"

Yuri's voice was thin in the brittle air, and Flynn turned to him in relief. He stood in shadow, framed by distant, dark mountains. His back was to Flynn and the knights.

"Yuri, I—"

"It doesn't suit you." His words leeched the color from the world. The grass dulled. The clear sky was no longer painful to behold.

"Doesn't suit me?" He looked down at his captain's uniform. He'd earned it.

"Take off that mask."

"Mask?"

Reaching up to touch his face, he found something between gloved fingers and skin. It had no weight to it, nor the bulk of a helmet. He found the edge of it just beneath his jawline. Behind him, the knights stood impassive as he pulled off the mask.

The lower quarter hummed all around him, a droning beat of conversation, footsteps, hard work, and community. The mask was gone, and Flynn ducked his head, covering his face with his hands. He knew without seeing that his eyes were gone, nothing but empty darkness filling his sockets. He couldn't let the people see. They'd be horrified, disgusted. They would know he'd failed. They would forsake him.

"Lift up your head."

Yuri was still facing away from him. Flynn could tell from the way his voice sounded, from the way it had to turn around and loop through the crowd to reach him. It carried shadows with it that darted like fish through the market sea.

"My eyes... Yuri, I—"

"He took them. We'll get them back, though. You've already got one."

"I don't. I—"

"I gave it to you last time."

Just as Yuri said, there it was. He could see out of one eye, and he looked down at his hands, turned them over in astonishment. Taking off the mask had stripped him down to childhood. He wore his old clothes, thin and threadbare, rips and cuts and punctures stitched and patched up like so many old scars. His body beneath was unmarred.

Looking up, he saw Yuri standing as still and dark as nights beyond the barriers. They were the only unmoving souls amid the rush, and Flynn began to shoulder his way through to Yuri's side. Although he never saw Yuri move, he couldn't manage to come face to face with him. He circled, battered by the crowd that remained a faceless current.

"We'll get the other one back," Yuri promised him.

Flynn had only just gotten close enough to reach out and touch his back when he awoke with a start, grasping at empty air.

For a long moment, his arm hung above him, as if suspended from the top of his tent. His heart had started pounding somewhere between dreaming and waking, and he let his arm fall with a soft thump onto the tangled covers of his bedroll. He took a few minutes to just breathe, pushing sweat-damp hair off his forehead as the dream escaped him. It didn't leave him in peace.

They were only a day out from the desert ruins of Yormgen, and the little tent had grown far too hot and close while he'd slept. He wouldn't have pitched the thing at all when he and his knights had stopped for the night, except he was a captain now, and officers of that rank did not sleep exposed under the stars, not when there was a tent available.

Although, as he worked his legs free of the bedroll and sat up, he appreciated the privacy. He must have been tossing and turning as bad as Yuri.

Waking thoughts of his friend brought a grimace to his face. There had been too much going on for him to focus on Yuri's crimes, but they'd taken up lodgings in the back of his mind, and hadn't left him alone but for short stretches of immediate danger or exhausted, oblivious sleep. The clamor of action-reason-guilt-justice-consequence-responsibility was a circling argument that fed on itself and seemed without end. Sorting it all out was an undertaking he wasn't prepared for.

He crawled free of the tent, graceless and in no mood to care about his appearance or rank. He felt thick-headed and clumsy, and his fingers fumbled with the tack for his horse. The air was as still as in his dream, and sweat trickled down his back. The plain tunic he wore was damp with it, enough that, when the tremors began, he couldn't tell if they were due to a chill or the early start after a poor night's sleep or to the agitation that crouched ready to spring in his joints. His horse caught his mood and picked its way nervously out of camp until Flynn urged him into a gallop across the plain.

The sun was only just stirring, not quite yet ready to rise, and the world was indistinct in predawn blacks and grays. Even the grass was silvered with dew. As he rode, Flynn rubbed at his eyes, one after the other. He couldn't tell if his vision was blurring, or if it was merely a trick of the misty, gray light.

Faded to the insubstantiality of early morning starlight, the dream had still left him with the image of black pits where his eyes should have been, and a foul mood to start the day with. He had enough work before him without his sleep being interrupted by strange, unsettling dreams. There was the question of what to do about Yuri, for one thing, though that was a problem that could be pushed into the future beyond the other emergencies that were rising like maggots from the bloated, corrupted corpse that the empire looked to for law and order.

It was still so hard to believe that Alexei was a traitor. Flynn had believed in him, believed in his ideals. He had believed in the Imperial Knights. How had the Knights fallen so far? How had things gotten so bad without him seeing it?

Yuri had seen. Seen and acted, and now Flynn wasn't sure if he was part of the problem or part of the solution. He tried to push that uncertainty away. There were other problems that required his attention. He had a job in front of him, and he would do it, and do it right to make up for his lack, for the blindness that had allowed the rot within the Knights to spread. He would tackle the problems before him one by one, until he made up for his blind faith, and then he would turn his attention to Yuri. What he would find there remained to be seen.