And now the bit that Asch has been waiting for… only not exactly. Still, it's going to be fun! …only not exactly.
-
"I see you."
An instant later there was a hyperresonance right behind Van's position. It was an effort to turn and raise his sword with the headache still fading away, the pain brought on by the replica Luke's wrath.
It seemed that the one who opened the link could control what passed back and forth, and if they disliked the other the hyperresonance that transferred the thoughts would translate that hatred into pain. When Lorelei spoke it was different: Lorelei didn't hate, it seemed incapable of it as an entity with perfect understanding of all of Auldrant's inhabitants, but bound by the Score Lorelei was in so much pain that it couldn't keep it from leaking through.
That was why Van tried to keep it asleep as much as possible and draw on its power as little as possible. It hurt, it could easily hurt so much he couldn't think, and the grand fonic hymn bound Lorelei to protect him. If Lorelei's presence caused him pain it could use that as a loophole to escape.
A strange sword caught his between strangely positioned blades as the Key of Lorelei struck in a place that was not only barred by the honor code Van taught his students but no man could think of hitting another without cringing. Lorelei healed the wound, of course, but that just made the pain resume for an instant, and an instant more, and longer.
"Oh, didn't I tell you I can make it hard for the seventh fonon to heal wounds?" Luke smirked, viciously happy as he blurred backwards, a few feet away from Van now in the empty air of the core. "It looks like I can make you feel it when I hurt you even though you're taking advantage of Lorelei." Good to know.
"Where's Mystearica?" He would need her to sing the Hymn to free Lorelei: it was locked to Yulia's descendants.
"In Belkend, with Natalia, trying to keep Luke alive. Unless Lorelei's freed he's got about a month until he dies, which actually gives me a reason not to kill you right now. Besides that the longer you live the more I get to hurt you for what you did to me!" He blurred forward, and Van tried to fly back as Luke slashed with the two blades, the strange one far stronger than even the Key of Lorelei and failed.
No, he was flying, and he was twisting and turning, but it made no difference. No matter how he moved, Luke was always right there with him, in the same position, so that it seemed as if they both were just standing still. "You have improved." This meant the core was no longer a refuge. He couldn't use Lorelei's power to evade Luke with flight anymore, it seemed. And "Asch is dying?"
That earned him a brief snarl, then a mocking laugh. "No, I'm fine, don't worry. I blocked the Big Bang Effect ages ago, that's why he's dying so quickly. Luke can't steal my fonons or body anymore to save his sorry hide. Just like he can't steal my life and force me to die in his place at Akzeriuth." This time the sword was thrust in and remained in, twisted on occasion just slightly. "I'm wondering about using him to purify the miasma. I'd have to turn him into a monster and drive him insane to keep him alive that long, but it's not like he was a worthwhile person to begin with. Kimlasca's weapon, then yours… he owes it to this world to make himself useful, don't you agree?"
As the sword was withdrawn, the replica, the other Lorelei, laughed. "Well, other than by being my host body. Ironic, isn't it? By replicating the light of the sacred flame in order to save his worthless hide and kill Lorelei, you yourself gave Lorelei, gave me, a manifestation in the world, a clump of seventh fonon created from the pure power and self you extracted from Luke, and you didn't have a clue that you'd created your own nemesis!" He laughed, harder and harder, the fonons around them resonating with it until Van realized that the only reason Lorelei hadn't woken up was that Luke, now, was the one keeping it asleep, so that Van couldn't use it to save himself. Or to spare Lorelei the pain of having to watch as one of what Luke called 'that bitch Yulia's spawn' was tortured.
Because without the hymn, there was no other reason for Luke's presence here. Testing that he could defeat Van, toying with him, gloating.
"Exactly." More laughter as he was used as a practice dummy. "I would have helped you, you know. You're right, everything you told me when we met up there was right. This world is addicted to the Score, the Score that is powered by and creates my other self's agony, its people don't care who suffers and dies as long as they have their precious prosperity. But, Van? You're no better than them. You hated the ones that strapped you into that machine, your grandfather who arranged for all of that to happen, the ones who doomed Hod. And to destroy the Score you became them. You did that to me. To me! Your creation, your son!"
And now the swords were put away as too distant, too detached: the replica wanted to feel Van's flesh tearing and bones breaking. "You're the only human to realize the evil of the Score and fight against it, you're the only one who could have earned a place in Eldrant, and you did that to me!"
When Van could see again the red-gold, flickering flame aura of Lorelei surrounded the replica, clinging to it as Van's blood did to its arms. Luke knew when Van could see him and he laughed. "You know why the Score happened, Van. Humanity wanted to control the future so badly they went to war with themselves and Lorelei. Want to know how many billions died? Want to know how the miasma happened? And Lorelei, guess what Lorelei did? He chose Yulia because a Score was the only way to save your kind! Being stuck in the core cleaning up your mess, holding back the miasma, being tortured and doomed to death was the only way to save your sorry asses! And this is how you, and they, repay him! Either blaming him for your own suicidal, homicidal greed or going like rappigs to the slaughter he was tortured for two thousand years to save you from! Or both!"
Yes: that was what humans did. "Then why are you fighting to save this world?"
"Fuck the world. I'm fighting to free Lorelei, to kill you, and to live. To live, Van. You're sick, you're fucking sick, making yourself my entire world so that I would fulfill the Score of self-destruction after Akzeriuth by killing myself, atoning the way you didn't have the courage to. You, you… everything was calculated, everything was a lie, you kept me weak, starving, and… You tried to write out my fate the way that bitch Yulia wrote out Lorelei's! You claim you hate the Score, you claim you want freedom, and you try to bind me! You fucking hypocrite!" Anger, wrath…
And then Luke laughed. "I just told you that I can read your thoughts, that I know everything you know, because I'm the seventh fonon, you fool, and you think you can make me hate humanity enough that I'll destroy it and create a replica world and you'll at least win that way even if you can't murder us?" 'Us' meant the manifestations of Lorelei. "I might, Van, I just might." Luke abandoned the pretense of standing on imaginary ground and grabbed Van by the neck. "But, Van? You'll never know. You'll die without atoning for Hod. You'll die with nothing paid for, just another murdered city on your conscience, and guess what? You're a seventh fonist, Van. You know what happens to seventh fonists when they die."
Their selves went to Lorelei in the fon belt the way replicas who dissolved did. "That's right," Luke purred. "The Score you blame the victim for? It's hurt Lorelei so much that he's going to fade away as soon as I free him. Leaving me as the only avatar of the seventh fonon. Its sentience, its god, the ruler of the souls in the fon belt, and guess what, Van?" And now the smile was cheerful, the one the carefully kept innocent replica smiled when he told Van one of his few secrets or when he thought he had the right answer to a question and would earn Van's approval, the only approval he was ever given. "I don't like you."
Van had to try to run, when he was released, even though it did absolutely no good. The scion of Lorelei, the true heir of Lorelei's power, never the one he had made into Asch, just smiled and what felt like a rain of the seventh fonon fell around him and scorched the skin from his bones, the acid flowing into his veins and making every heartbeat pulse agony through him.
Or that wasn't what it felt like. It was still the only real metaphor he could think of, either that or a thousand small knives instead of drops, tunneling their way to his heart.
"Did you like that, Van?" Luke purred. "You liked doing it to me."
A thousand words, a thousand small deeds, a thousand proofs that everyone thought he was weak and worthless because he didn't remember. That they didn't want him. A thousand attempts to kill him so that Asch would emerge from his shell.
"Do you want to feel what the people of Akzeriuth felt when you caused them to be dissolved away by the miasma? To become miasma, the fonon corrupted by hatred, death, and pain? The miasma is the hell humanity created for itself, the curse of the hungry dead, of the abandoned, the ones it sacrificed without giving a damn. You know, I might not purify it after all. There are some people, like you, who deserve to rot there for condemning others to it for your own self-righteous desires to take away their free will and force the world into the shape you wanted it to take!" Those words were more screamed or sung than spoken, Luke more Van's idea of Lorelei than the tired one who had come at his call, genuinely wanting to save him despite the cost it was well aware of and the fact that it was forced to risk the world to help him.
"Master Van," Luke called with a voice heaving laden with irony, the satisfaction of someone watching someone suffer as they deserved. "You wanted to erase the planet's memory so that your sins would be erased. You wanted to kill Lorelei, you wanted to kill the witness, even though he was the only one who ever really cared for you. But, Van? I remember everything you did to me. To us. You refused to put Hod behind you and I won't use my power to make you forget."
Van hadn't realized.
He hadn't realized that overwriting the world's seventh fonons and memory particles meant overwriting his own. Meant destroying his soul so he didn't have to exist after death, didn't have to live on forever with what he had done. Yet Lorelei knew.
"You'll never be at peace, Van. You'll never be forgiven because you refused to be forgiven. I would have forgiven you, you know. Lorelei forgave you before you were born. And you rejected us. We loved you, we helped you, and you just used it to hurt us. I'm not going to help you anymore. I'm not going to care about you anymore. I'm not going to try to get through to you anymore. I might have forgiven you, I might, if you'd died at the Absorption Gate. But no: you just had to do this to Lorelei the way Yulia did, you utter bastard.
"I may or may not replace humanity with a replica world, but I won't overwrite your memory fonons. You'll remember, Van. You'll remember what you did. I'll free Lorelei and then I'll never speak to you again. I'll never bother to remember that you exist. Because there's no point in hurting you: I just get frustrated. You hurt someone to teach them a lesson. I wanted you to understand how you hurt me, that I had feelings, that my pain matters, and I wanted you to try to make up for it, but you're just incapable of changing. And I'm not going to change you, I'm not going to do the work for you the way you wanted."
Luke held up his hands and the blood fell off them, drop by drop, even though there was effectively no gravity here. "I wash my hands of you. The next time I see you will be the last, Van. The last time you see anyone. I'm not going to let you hurt anyone again. Except yourself. You're good at hurting people, and the one you've hurt the most isn't me. It's yourself."
The laughter, mingled triumph, freedom, contempt, and something Van couldn't understand still echoed after the light of the hyperresonance had faded away.
-
The 'real' Christian hell has two characteristics.
It is populated by those who have refused to admit they did anything wrong, get the help of others in changing, and/or do their best to either fix it or (re)pay it forward.
It is a place where no one cares about you. A place without god, without love, a place where everyone is fundamentally alone, because no one there is willing to accept or give help.
Noticing some similarities with the scene where all of them left Luke alone right after Akzeriuth because he was in denial about the fact he'd done something wrong?
Forget fire and brimstone. Fire and brimstone would be wonderful next to this. Fire and brimstone would be a masochistically loved distraction. Hell is solitary confinement with no chance to escape because you, yourself, are refusing to escape.
It is not possible to damn someone else to hell. Hell is something an individual can only do to themselves.
The miasma might be what Jade speculates on re. Sword Dancer, which is the only explanation that works in game physics (the in-game explanation for the miasma is that no one knows wtf caused it, and they actually say that it's strange that just a war would have caused something that dangerous, drastic, and world-enveloping… of course, this is the war that caused the Score, which is equally or even more so), and very nasty stuff, but while it might be torment what Luke is doing here just by leaving Van to his own devices? Is hell.
