Interlude:
Three Moments Between A Moment, And The Moment After
.i.
::Wake now, little lord, the silver cord snapp'd in twain and the course laid bare for future's sail. Here you are in home's warm hearth, but needs must not tarry. You carry us all, and us all you will heed. Rise, rise, rise, Doctor –and live.::
Images flashed through his addled mind as a chorus of many voices faded away. A door, a box, a hidden key. Colors blinded him, a rainbow slashing before his eyes like knives… or were they stones? Yes. That was it.
He shook himself and rose first to his knees. The room swirled around him, familiar, but night-darkened. The last confused him most, for time seemed thick and heavy, his eyes, unspectacled and over-old, trying to make sense of the information given to him. Bell-like voices hummed, a cacophony of aural delight but without organic echo. Dimly he realized that the voices were in his mind alone.
He was not given space to contemplate the disturbing development. Instead his feet, unused to this new life, forced themselves forward towards another room. A … yes, he did recognize it. A library. Like a dream, or a nightmare, his feet moved without sensation, but he put out his hand to rest it against the door as it approached. It opened before him without a creak and he continued across the little library until confronted with a bland stretch of old, dimpled wood wall.
Now the sensation of his hands slipped away and his fingers danced from dimple to dimple with alien agility. He watched with interest, the world still hazy and distant to him.
A memory came to him, but briefly, and slipped away again. A boy, hunched over a book almost as big as he – bright, bright eyes already squinted with a touch of the near-sighted, lips reading along to some unremembered words. A sensation warmed him—love, it was named. Yes. That was it. He smiled, forgetting that his body moved without his will to guide it.
Ah! The old compartment. A boy's little secrets. The smile vanished as his hand slithered into the pile of stones laid bare by actions he could not feel.
::A kindness done, though sure to be mark'd as other. Gathered for us, the schedule sped, a difficulty avoided. We are pleased, and will grant the mercy you beg, though Hume's loved 'fate' and 'will' marks him a danger. He will sleep and dream and wake in morr'w – and you, you, you return'd to direct, though not in halls familiar::
::Heretic guides you once, and e'er you desire your gentle rest, you'll take our guidance now. Fate will be ours again to control, and you, sweet rebel, will be our hand.::
As if to illustrate the point, his hand, with fingers once arthritic and knuckles stiff and easily sore, curled around the thirteen stones one after another – crushing them with ease and scattering dark dust through the cabinet and down the wall.
Shadows bled from the stones as they crumbled, splitting, and splitting again, twelve and then twenty-four, though one stone bled not at all. A murmur of disapproval was heard for a moment, and then gone, as the shadows themselves blended with the night - moon's light gone unnatural, red, and cold - and vanished.
Doctor Cidolfus Demens Bunansa shook dust from his fingers and slipped away into red-hued shadows. He did not think too hard on what his hands had done. Better to not. Let the Occuria act as they will. His purpose was, in defiance of all his work, not for him to dictate now.
.ii.
The little boy blinked bright, bright eyes of hazel-green, and watched Doctor Cid stalk away without a sound. Dark blonde hair fell about his ears in unruly, overlong mop, and the white cotton shirt shined in the weirding light like a brand.
He blinked again – and peered down at a face echoed by his own, only all angles and wry lines where the boy's still bore the sweet roundness of his youth. The man moaned faintly in his sleep, but did not otherwise stir.
Blink – Blink – Blink, and more. From room to room where all tossed and turned, taken by a fitful dozing, he stopped and looked at each, and each did not look back. Only that same soft moan would greet his coming and going. Here a Hume, there a Bangaa, then a pair of Viera one after the other. More and more, and over a dozen – now a second Nu Mou, and there was near a shock – the girl Nu Mou did not stir awake, but nor did the moan come. Instead, burred by sleep, came a dreaming query: "Are you lonely, child?" He blinked away swiftly at that one, unready to talk yet to the dreamers who would soon no longer dream through the soundless red night.
Blink! And red turned to blue.
A Hume woman with ageless white face hooded within blue velvet robe smiled red lips up at the boy from where she sat behind blue-satin table. Beneath her white left hand rested a tall deck of cards. Beneath her other lay stones of black and white, carved with zodiac marks. "It is time," he whispered to her, his voice gentle. She did not respond at first, merely watched him with eyes of bright gold, black merely pinpricks within the unsettling stare. He widened his own eyes, ready to blink again.
"Time is never to be declared." She paused to emphasize her import. "Time does not wait."
He blinked away.
.iii.
It was that dream again. Shattering airship crumbling about him, Fran nowhere to be found, no ways to hail the Strahl, no comforting Moogle chirp to help guide the way. As the dull, floatless metal fell to earth around him, the scene morphed to airships long since dead. Balthier didn't want to see that again, then or ever, had he the choice. Often enough had the nightmare come that he always fought it. He turned to flee towards better memories, the thick white tunic he'd worn in the alien future seeming to catch on every piece of jutting, rusting steel.
This way
He paused in his struggle against the choking wreckage, the sound of distant combat and furious darkling scion fading away for a moment. He glanced around, wondering where the unfamiliar, faded voice came from.
This way! Stronger now, and it was decidedly coming from behind him. But that way lay the battlefield. He'd lived it once, seeing the horrific would-be Gods again did not appeal to him, even if he knew it was a dream. Still, he felt a pull.
THIS WAY!
Unable to resist, he turned and marched towards the rising shrieks of Hashmal's suicide and the meaty sounds of Humes falling to pieces before inhuman assault, passing through a shaded red curtain of gore—
And found himself enveloped by sapphire blue.
"Time does not wait," said the white-faced Hume woman, her tone wry as if repeating herself. He glanced around. There was no one else with them.
A roar rose in the distance – the memory of Hashmal's death lingered with the Sky Pirate well into most nights – and he shuddered, suddenly disgusted with showing his weakness before the ageless blue-robed figure. Certainly he was no coward, but the fall of the leonine figure had troubled something deep inside him.
Long, colorless hands moved, and cards spread onto the table between them in a wide fan. Twenty-two; he knew the number instinctively, but not its meaning here. More were set aside in a set of four distinct piles.
Then a set of thirteen black stones was placed before him. "Ah," he said, his thoughts too quick in dreams for sleeper's tongue to hold back. "The Zodiac."
"The Zodiac has but twelve signs for all to know." Her voice was low, with a rich, sonorous quality to it that was nearly masculine. There was no mocking sound to her voice, but he heard it anyway.
"There are thirteen, but no one is born under Ophiuchus, the great leviathan," he tossed back in even tones. "And besides, I dream. There might be forty in this time and place."
"Or twenty-five." She smiled, and the smile was old and more like a white leather mask made to smile.
Balthier looked around, seeing nothing but lapis drapery. What brings a dream as odd as this? Idle question, who knew what the subconscious sketched?
The woman pushed forward one of the black stones. He felt his gaze drawn to it, noting the little circle and arcing line. Leo, his own natal sign. "Hashmal," she said to it.
This was getting to be a bit too much, even for his subconscious. A musical troupe of Vieras would have been richly preferable. "What?" he queried politely.
"You thought to protect, but instead manipulated fate into forbidden order. The sin was innocent, the outcome yet to be decided. The payment for your act is now in collection, as you well knew would come." She swept the stone away from his view, mingling it beneath the others. The fan of cards ruffled and one flipped over. It was painted with a bright red sun. That too was swept away, and the fan folded into its original neat stack. "You are in the Velvet Room. I thought to take your measure before flesh's face made mystery less plain to me." She smiled again, a total lack of warmth, but also a total lack of hostility. "But by coming here twixt the moments, the Dark Hour's birth, a contract is forced between you and I. You'll find it adds no burden to you – well, except for once, but not to worry upon that yet. Here," and with a gesture appeared a piece of parchment.
Scrawled in fine silver was a simple enough phrase – "I accept my fate of my own free will." He leaned close, and noted it was merely one copy of at least a dozen, if not a little more. "Yes, yes," she muttered impatiently. "You will not be alone in the future's weave, though not even I see its ends. Choose whether to sign or no, and you'll waken."
Getting out of this dream would be delightful! He reached for the pen that also appeared next to the small sheaf of contracts. No harm to sign, of course fate and free will were his! His father had seen to that – though the method chosen had left his name marked as villain rather than hero.
Choice.
Worry surged through him as he finished leaving his first name in elegant silver scrawl on ivory parchment.
"There, then, it's done, and don't think to renege!" The woman smiled again, all teeth and red lips, and emotionless, unblinking gold eyes. "You'll come to me by day before the moon reaches its fullness. I am below, a mere curio shop run by Miss Selenay, though you will ask for me by this name: I am, for you and your fate-bound kin, Risa Adel Yigori. You will not forget. Now, awake!"
-----
Balthier came to with a start, already seated upright in his bed at ancestral home. He turned his head and fumbled a hand over the bedside table, coming up with the cunningly designed Moogle clock and squinted at the time it told him – 12:01. He swore, knowing full well he'd not rest more that night.
The worry felt in his dreams rose in him once more, and he threw himself out of bed as awake as if an airship klaxon had bestirred him instead of disturbing dreams. He pulled a robe around his chilled bare chest and loose sleeping-trou and hurried downstairs to check on what nagged at his consciousness, pausing only to grab a gun on his way.
Stairs and halls and now the door, already pushed open though he knew full well he'd left it shut before retiring. Hesitant, the gun in his hand and a weird certainty in his mind of what he'd see, he pushed the library door open the rest of the way and saw silver moonlight pool and sparkle along dust and jagged shards. A black hole gaped from far walls, as if to say yes, you cannot misinterpret this.
Balthier's jaw clenched. Words in five languages rose to his lips and failed him. Eloquent curses roiled through his brain, and his fingers curled, white-knuckled, around the butt of Ras Algethi. To sum up, he fell back to the simple crudity of youth.
"SHIT!"
