Part 1 - Fall, Crash, and Burn
It was hard for Jeanne to accept what had happened to the entirety to the Umbran Clan. Years later it still ached, dull and hollow, in her chest when it caught up with her. At the time she barely felt the pain of loss as it happened – instantly working to organize those who hadn't perished into attacks, defences, and escapes. And ready contingency plans where everything else failed.
A numb fury rushed through her as she fought to each isolated group of her sisters, gritting her teeth against frustration and pain as she watched them fall. Over the sounds of destruction and rebellion she could hear her mother, relaying orders and demands of the witches who were still alive. It was encouraging to know the Umbran Elder had yet to succumb to the tides of Laguna and humans, but the more she fought the more Jeanne began to expect the worst.
Rubble punctuated what she once called her perfect home, dust settling over the courtyards and paths, gardens decorated with ash and char. These details were hovering in the background of her vision as she felled the golden beasts between her and her sisters, focused in her task try to turn each battle for their advantage behind her as she moved on from each.
When Jeanne finally reached the sanctuary with Cereza she realized that, more than anything, they were just fighting for time.
-—-—-
Jeanne remembers creating the seal to protect Cereza, recalls her mother's voice faltering into silence in the distance, and recollects the Imprisoned One on the ground as her sister and the Overseer of their Left Eye ran to her body. The screams of the clan were fewer as the chorus of angels grew louder. The furious cries of the humans storming the grounds rose to deafening levels while their fists beat at the sanctuary's doors. They had so little time left now; they couldn't let those damned angels take everything.
So while Cereza hugged her mother Jeanne released her mind from everything around them. She wove a spell that would protect her friend, layering it around her small hidden blade.
"… TABAORD PAGE FAFEN GROSB IPAM TELOCH… YOLCI DE BLANS…"
"… let her be governed to rest by the intent that this sting is not death… bring forth to protect…"
Cereza was wiping her eyes, with Rosa's form laid out in front of her, and Jeanne could see clearly the loss that lingered under the fear as the room became louder.
"BAMS, PAAOXT …"
"let them forget, let it remain…"
Cereza turned at her hushed words, eyes wide, as Jeanne finished the spell. She stepped towards the kneeling witch, her hand tight around the hilt, watching as understanding crossed her sister's face.
She remembers first driving through the layers of cloth into the gem Jeanne had given Cereza so many years ago. The spell released and attached itself to the ruby, and Cereza's body, mind, and soul slipped into the gem. The memory of Cereza's role to the Umbra was safely tucked away in the recesses of her mind and the facets of the stone.
As the spell wrapped around Cereza and solidified to her form Jeanne turned in time to see the doors had finally failed to hold and the Laguna had come forth. Knowing that she was all that stood between hope and despair Jeanne readied to fight with a vengeance.
"This is why the Left Eye, our treasured Left Eye, will never fall into the hands of another! I will not stand for the wild ambition of a treacherous Lumen Sage who disrupted our age-old balance. Your path ends here!" The emotions were becoming raw and painful and angry as she picked up the gem, her friend, and gazed at the carved lettering. "Do not fear your fate. Stand… Cereza."
She carried Cereza away from their ruined home, their family, their culture, their entire way of life. Anyone Jeanne encountered did their best to aid in her mission, providing protection, distraction, their life's blood to keep the angels from their treasured Left Eye. They guarded her through the tunnels under Vigrid, through to the other side of the valley, branching away from Jeanne to divert attention from her escape.
No one else made it with her, and Jeanne couldn't return to help until her task was complete. She selfishly used her mission to pull her mind from that fact for as long as possible, until she could examine it and call it the failure her success truly was.
-—-—-
Jeanne used her human guise to acquire the coffin and supplies she would need to prepare Cereza for an enduring sleep, uncaring of how suspicious her indispensable purchases might have been to the humans. The ruby wasn't meant for such long-term protection and concealment spells, and she could feel it tug apart at its glyphic seems. Taking extreme care not to be followed by any mortals or angels, she located the safest spot to store her last remaining sister, readying the witch's coffin and releasing Cereza's body to be wrapped and ready for centuries of security; whenever Jeanne could return and awaken her to start the war again or live on peace.
She never did come back for Cereza.
Less than a day after her mission was completed Jeanne returned to the bloody Crescent Valley. She nearly froze and dropped Angel Slayer at her side; the devastation was appalling, worse than she could have possibly imagined.
The bridge out of the valley was torn apart, and very few witches had made it that far in their escape. The Training Grounds had pieces missing from their structures, sections that been flung away into others or had collapsed from the strain. The courtyard of the Umbran complex was full of bodies; the remains of her mother surrounded by faithful guards and scorched stones. Everything in the valley was dead – trees, grass, familiars, the entire clan. The angels hadn't just killed them either – they toyed and tortured any who had the misfortune to linger on this plane.
It was expected of their demons, an agreement built into their pact, but to see it from the Riders of Light filled Jeanne so fully and blindly with rage that it consumed her. Anger was familiar, an old friend she had learned to channel and curb early in her training. But this sensation was so far beyond her composure – her magic shimmered with it. Even though she was moving in Purgatorio someone could have easily seen her body haze through the worlds.
'They were going to do this to the world. If they had succeeded in obtaining our Left Eye…' but chaos and nothingness followed that route of thought.
Jeanne didn't stop, but slowed as her gaze took in the desecration of the Umbran home. It ached that she took so much of it for granted. Jeanne looked at it now, really looked, at the paving stones in disrupted patterns, the shattered stain-glass portraits and interrupted stories in the windows. The trees were burnt, charred, or torn up from their roots. It was seeing everything the heiress had ever known, ever trusted in to remain long after she'd passed on, utterly ripped from her life. A nightmare she'd never dreamed of made true.
'Enough,' she told herself. 'Enough of this. This will be where it ends.'
It was no wonder the angels found her so quickly, descending from on high to answer her yet unspoken call for their gore. After she had killed the first wave the clouds parted further, golden light spilling as the Auditio Fortitudo itself appeared from them. She didn't wait for words, rushing headlong into combat. Under other circumstances she might have won quickly and cleanly with a clearer mind, but Jeanne had let herself be blinded by their battlefield.
And then he appeared. The exiled Lumen Sage who had orchestrated the Witch Hunts.
Preternatural gusts billow out and around her, gathering towards the witch's body like a cloak, reflecting the tremulous emotions instead her. Jeanne grasps and clenches tight to the feeling of anger, ignoring all else in her head and her heart, and moves to meet the enemy halfway.
He had asked so horribly politely for the location of the Left Eye, and she replied with a summon sigil, which he was disturbingly able to avoid and counter meritoriously. But she was determined to end his kind once and for all, and she threw herself behind Angel Slayer to finish him.
In minutes her connection to Madama Styx was broken, her heel guns were shattered, and she barely recovered herself enough to see that she was not winning this fight. Her weaves couldn't formulate properly and were torn to shreds within seconds. Her attacks were sloppy, too dedicated to aggression and it was costing her energy and control with every slip past him. Retreat became her only acceptable option.
Fortitudo and the sage seemed to have noticed her resignation, the man pulling back from the attack as the Auditio withdrew above.
"You should be gracious in this loss, Umbra. As the last, the honour of your defeat should come from mortal hands. We have had our fill of witch blood. We'll wait patiently for you to die, and then we'll recover the Left Eye of the World."
His taunting and prophetic revelation rung hollow in her as she fled the valley, bruised, burnt, and broken. She could not risk exposing Cereza's location, thus running as far away from her home and her sister to protect what little remained of the Umbra.
She quickly continued the campaign for the mortal counterpart to the Witch Hunts and rejoined with the military troops. She cast a glamour on her hair, donned a uniform for skirmishes, and surrounded herself in the Lancaster War. It was necessary to remain in the realm of humans avoid detection from the entities above; Jeanne wouldn't dare move through Purgatorio in her state of caution. Purposefully restricting her magic, Jeanne used her natural ability and honed skills to dart behind lines, gather movements, and ready positions for the French to take before flitting away to her station. She spied on the enemy and sent her "predictions" to commanders to sway their direction.
Even if she had all but failed her clan, the least she could do now is win the rest of the hostilities and set about some rights to her allies that aided the Umbra in the Clan Wars.
-—-—-
The humans eventually caught up with her gambit, claiming her self-declared visions were the work of witchcraft.
'They're not wrong,' she thought as her surprise turned to annoyance.
They manhandled Jeanne into an English gaol, and though she so very easily could have escaped, it might have caused more fuss than her current predicament would. If Jeanne d'Arc was charged of witchcraft and suddenly escaped, it would, in the eyes of the law and church, prove the allegations made against her. And possibly stir a continuation of the Witch Hunts for her and who knew how many other women's deaths. If she played her part in the execution as a martyr she would have the freedom to move across Europe and away from this atrocious war. It wasn't her first choice of action, but after a year of tireless work there was little more for her to do here.
So Jeanne did entirely what was expected of an enemy woman gifted with heaven's light; reciting prayers and making requests of the other devote for a proper and respectful death sentence. She took small satisfaction from the fathers' nervous glances and soldiers' grimaces.
She did not play weak, and refused to give in to their sordid demands of her.
Pretending to burn was the easiest thing she had done since she started posing as a human. Jeanne made certain that she caused every possible amount of trouble and grief before the execution. Now that the humans were going to think her dead it would be easier to move about without suspicion.
She let them bind her, asked for the presence of a cross, and held back a smile as they nervously obeyed her wishes. She let them build the pyre and light it, waiting until the fires grew and licked at her legs before mimicking a helpless combustion victim and fazing herself into the realm in-between as the fire reached for her clothes. Jeanne quickly removed the smouldering ropes tying her and stripped off her tattering cloths, and then leapt off the burning wood, letting the humans think what they will as she escaped from their despicable realm of heat and red.
She needed more time to build her strength and prepare to finish the Lumen clan once and for all. A death certificate always has advantages, one being the lack of other-worldly creatures explicitly looking for her.
At one point there's a man, who isn't truly a man, who runs into her in London, a lost soul seeking a mutual companionship without attachments, a bond that doesn't go beyond staving off loneliness. They separate before they start to like each other, and Jeanne is, too late in realizing, left with the fruit of their union. For everyone's safety, she finds a remote little island tucked away to leave the bundle, far from her realm of running and fearing.
She hopes, in the privacy of her dreams, that someday she might be forgiven, for all of it, but she knows better than to let those thoughts pursue her waking world.
Jeanne flees across Europe to someplace she couldn't feasibly be recognized, hiding and researching as much as possible, trying to learn more of the wretched sage that started the genocide.
-—-—-
It took her literal ages to find him, and when she did Jeanne nearly regretted the very moment of it. Of course, he changed his mind – killing her was too useless. He praised her public execution and evasive nature during their years apart, but gloated that she couldn't have possibly avoided him forever. He might have been right; given how determined Jeanne was to end his self-proclaimed reign over Vigrid. She was eventually going to come back to end him, but that wasn't how it played out.
He circled around to her, with his heels languidly clacking to punctuate every venomous word he slowly uttered. Trapping Jeanne when she knew running was never really an option she had to her.
She was glad he still couldn't find Cereza or the burden the sleeping witch bore, but that didn't stop him from trying to pry that information from Jeanne. His power had grown as much as hers, but he was older by far, and had something more to him that she couldn't fight. Jeanne learned, years later, that he had a god's power brewing inside him.
The horror of her failure and breakage was so easily pushed against her mind. She didn't reveal Cereza's tomb until after the indoctrination was over, but by that point it didn't matter.
(The worst was over and the rest was just script to finish by – all they needed was the remaining Eye and it would be over, like it should have been the first time five hundred years ago.)
-—-—-—-—-—-—-
Reuniting with Cereza (the real Cereza, awoken from her pseud) helped temper her inadequacy. It didn't make the memories any easier; if anything they were hard and clear compared to the others floating in her awareness.
Knowing all sides of the truth healed more of her than she would have expected. In the end it was a matter of embracing such things, accepting the multiple outcomes that Cereza had torn in the fabric of their existence. It is something inherent in their Umbran blood, something natural to them that simply required a little mental adjustment and composition to shift the events right and properly into place. Cereza has that in spades; something wreathed in her power that makes it easy and seamless. Jeanne is still putting pieces of herself together, but it's not difficult. Tedious and frustrating, as living in the past always feels, but it's necessary if she doesn't want to go mad and lost from grief and the strain.
And now half of the work is done.
(end of Part 1)