Door of Souls, Interlude: Pity the Traitor.

Apologies: This is late, but I was abducted by a punishing work schedule and and even more punishing holiday one. Hopefully, the new year will bring an 2-3 week posting schedule, as originally anticipated.
Thanks: Distant Glory, as always, for the greek alphabet reads. Also, to feedback givers who sparkle motivation on this piece.
Credit: The image of Lowtown's bonfires goes to Sunnepho, and her utterly breathtaking "Claret Sky". If you have not read it, do so now.
Rating Change: This will move to an M rating after this interlude chapter. Not going to change anything in drafting or plot, but this is too much for the kid crowd, I think.
A/N: This is an interlude chapter. Some plot relevant matters occur here, but it can be read as an independent side story.


"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night"


Kain is a little concerned.

Clearly, there is a boot on his chest. And clearly, this is something he should be reacting to. But he is not. His eyes stay closed, and while he hears himself groaning, he is not thinking of how he got here, or who this man is, or why he is alive. He is not even thinking of the others, of Lightning, of how to find them and get home.

He is thinking of Cecil Harvey. He is thinking of Rosa Joanna Farrell.

It is an afternoon he remembers, and it is cold, and it smells of pine. Beneath his feet, the dirt of the Baron training yard is hard and impacted and almost frozen through.

He and Cecil are sixteen, this afternoon. And when they face each other, Cecil holds a spear; he, a blade.

Reversal is the exercise today.

The duel begins as it usually does. They circle one another, and the strikes are probing, much like play. Here is a lazy overhand strike. There is a light block and then a parry; a feint, followed by a tap. They are smiling. Neither of them really tries.

They warm up; they ready themselves for this fight and every fight thereafter. They ready themselves for tomorrow, the day each will choose his path.

Kain feels good today. He feels good because the future seems a straight line. He will be a dragoon, Cecil a knight of the Red Wings. He will fly unaided, while Cecil will rely on oil and spring. And so today he is not jealous that Rosa's eyes do not follow him. Today he does not care that the apples she brought are not for him to taste.

Today, he is practicing for tomorrow. And tomorrow, he will rule the world.

Kain is aware that memories are prone to exaggeration. They are color saturated; they are too-loud and sentimental. Somewhere, there is always the playing of music or the singing of skylarks. But even so, he recollects of that afternoon that the sun was bright as diamonds are bright. That the wind was a living thing, and the blade in his hand had good weight, good balance, good speed.

The trade in blows rises in a slow acceleration. Kain swings his body in a two handed block of Cecil's forward strike. It is a stronger blow that he believes Cecil capable of, and he inhales sharply in shock and surprise.

Blade crushes to haft and Kain pushes him back. And before they commence their dance again, they stare. Cecil's eyes are apologetic, and Kain does not know why this fills him with rage.

When they resume, Kain's blows are wilder. He makes them now with intent.

The sound that rises on the new winter air is the song that steel sings when it's warring. And while Kain remembers his fury, he remembers this too. And he remembers it was beautiful, or at least he found it so.

Cecil's confession is a blow unto itself. He will become a Dark Knight, he says somewhere in a parry. And while he will fly with the Red Wings, he will do so in black armor, and he thinks Kain should come with him. To the end.

"Please," he says. "My brother. My friend."

There are moments, Kain knows now, that narrow the path that tomorrow can take. And if he is honest, which he can never guarantee, he might admit that these were words that changed his life.

It's possible. But even now when he looks back, his anger is the sharpest thing. A bright red pennant that sails the winter sky.

Cecil will do as the King has asked; what Kain refuses to do. And he will have the honor and the standards; the roses and she who is named for them. And he will buy them with death and be loved for it.

Yes, he will do what Kain does not have the stones for. And while Kain does not know if it is fear that grips him, or rage, he only knows that this path will spoil everything. And afterwards it will not be how it's supposed to be.

Beneath the dark armor, Cecil will rot or die. The death magic will hollow him out. And if it does not do so quickly, it will do so by inches. Cut by cut, it will feed. Take a tithe of flesh for every single kill. Until there's nothing left. Of him; of them. A husk of a man will be all that remains, and still Cecil will have more than most could ever dare dream. Certainly more than Kain, who will be left without Rosa, without Baron, and now without even a friend…

Kain does not know why he needs these people so much. He hates it.

In this moment, rational words are lost to Kain, so insults spoil his tongue. He says his friend has no mind of his own, and that this will not turn the King into his father. He calls him a martyr, a dreamer, a fool. Cecil, of course, says only one thing. But it's all the worse for that.

"You're a coward, Kain," are the words that he says. And even now, after so long, they still burn.

The memory Kain has of the duel after that is all iron, and grit and sweat; all impact and anger and why won't you fall?

With every step, it becomes clearer that Cecil is going to win. His smile is vicious and magnanimous; he's rubbing it in, but there's nothing Kain can do.

Again, he wonders why it is that everyone views Cecil as so pure.

The song in the air turns sour. The movement of his left hand is too wild, too unrestrained. And while he's aware he's better with a blade than Cecil is with a spear, he loses his grip anyway. The tip of Cecil's spear finds the pommel of his sword, and then he's standing unarmed and defeated and ridiculously young.

The endless sky wheels above him. He can see straight through to the stars.

"Yield," Cecil says.

"Not to you," Kain replies.

If pressed, Kain will say that of all of these memories, the clearest is the one of him cheating. Of the smile that he smiles as Cecil's jaw cracks beneath his fist. He will want to say that he enjoyed it, but he can't because he remembers those eyes.

They are sad, Cecil's strange eyes. And they are angry, and betrayed.

Kain still does not understand how he let himself believe that he was the noble one; the one who would not buy the King's favor with blood…

It will be Rosa who separates them, as she always does. She will run from the parapet and she will push them apart; she will offer them smiles, and she will act as if the apples were always for sharing. She will hook her two arms through both of theirs until they form a chain, they three.

"My boys," she will say brightly, and for a time, they will all believe. For a time thereafter, they will laugh, and Cecil will train, and Kain will accept, and the weight of the afternoon will not be so heavy as he thought at the time.

Time will pass. And Kain will lie to himself, and think things well when they are not.

That a life can turn on such an insignificant lie as this is a fact that Kain still cannot accept. And while the boot on his chest demands he heed the present, he falls ceaselessly back to the past.

Every time he remembers it, it is still the same. And although he would trade half his soul to change it, he cannot. The contempt remains. The anger remains. The failure remains.

He always makes the same mistakes. He retraces his steps, and they lead him back to himself, each time.

As the pain seeps into his senses, Kain wonders how wrong a man is permitted to be in his life. And if it is not this, in the end, that will eventually manage to kill him.


In his more contemplative moments, Gabranth is certain that very little of him remains beneath the Judge Magister's armor. He takes it off rarely, these days. And while it burns in this heat, and the stench of his own waste bakes in the leather and stews in the steel, he nevertheless prefers it to the sight of his body.

Gabranth is not a weak or feebly made man. He has more faith in his own strength than he has the in the sun or the seas or the deserts of Rabanastre. Still, he'll take the metal over the flesh. It looks more like him, he thinks. It is more appropriate to his role.

Rolling the body beneath his boot, Gabranth grunts, thinks a bit on masquerades. The other men and women who donned this armor had all thought as he. They'd all known the truth.

Dress a whore in the robes of the Empress and people will bend their knee. Drape power in the pretty words of the law and people will put their head on the block for any reason you choose.

All men are fools. He doubts still that any in Archadia know the armor of the Judge Magister to be the mask of the executioner. At one point, it had made him proud, this insight. He'd gloried in the understanding that there was no truth but power; imagined that this held him someplace above the masses who keened over love; over honor and nobility and pride.

Much like that fool Basch, Gabranth rolls his sore shoulder, shakes his sore head. Much like this garbage before me.

He doesn't think that way anymore. Truly – truly – he does not care. All he wishes for now is to complete this Sisyphean farce of a task and get a drink of water.

Lifting his foot from Kain's chest, Gabranth sighs, lands a swift hard kick to the other man's ribs. A few give way beneath his boot. Yes, water might help.

Through his visor, Gabrath surveys the dog in the dirt before him and sneers. On the ash-defiled earth, Kain Highwind stays still and unmoving. Arrogant features that Gabranth can tell descend from highborn stock are relaxed, and Gabranth stifles the urge to crush the peace from his face.

He'd do so, if the Dragon had not bid him administer this trial. And while the Rift has many Emperors, Gabranth knows to whom he must bend his knee. Orders are orders. And Gabranth understands orders well.

"Let them fight you," Lord Shinryu hisses in his ear, "to return to the war of the gods."

Unwittingly, Gabranth's reminded of an old myth. Of the small god Prometheus; he who gave fire to men and was nightly punished for the mercy. Chained to the side of a mountain, every evening his guts were eaten out by vultures. Every morning they grew back anew. An endless cycle of slow dying, all for the sin of defying greater gods; all for the sake of men who scarce remember his name.

Lowering his gorget for a second, Gabranth spits on Kain's face, watches the trail of it cut a path through the grime. All these so-called warriors – all the refuse that falls into his lair, whose tales Shinryu whispers into his ears – are something like Prometheus. Endlessly, they die; meat for the Rift's great vulture. Except their sacrifice is even more hollow; more stupid and vain and ill-advised.

The Dragon tortures them and grows fat on their pain. And he will continue to do so until he can breach the Door of Souls and consume their spirits again.

It's pathetic. But it's also irrelevant. Gabranth has been set a task and he'll discharge it. Besides, he's come to appreciate the quiet of this place. Here, no conspiracies sink in his ears, speaking to him of petty intrigues. Here there is only rust, and it is silent as it corrodes.

Heat blurs the air around him, and Gabranth is sick of the taste of slag. His dry mouth longs for water, and waiting is tiresome. Looking down at Kain, he makes an attempt to speed matters along. "Rise," he grunts, kicking the broken ribs again. "Rise."

Nothing happens, and Gabranth grows tired.

"I know you hear me, dog." Out of patience, Gabranth kneels and places his knee square in the center of Kain's torso. Raising a gauntleted fist, he cracks the other man once across the jaw. Once. Twice. Three times. "Do not play dead with me."

It is something of a surprise to Gabranth that when Kain Highwind stirs in earnest, he does so violently. The eyes go wild with confusion for only a second before they focus and sharpen and see the steel that's descending on his face. More quickly than Gabranth expects, an unbroken left hand comes up to block a fourth blow.

His nose is bleeding. His lips are curled. "Get off me," he says.

"Well met, traitor." Gabranth can barely contain his contempt.

Kain ignores the insult. "Get off me," he says again. "Now."

"Silence." Gabranth leans down, and the shadow of his helm darkens Kain's face. "I will state rules. You will abide them. Do you understand?"

Amusement rumbles from the chest beneath Gabranth's knee, followed by a wracking cough. "Of course I do." The words slide over a bloody smirk. "You are making me repeat myself."

Gabranth knots his brow. He is irritating, this one. His headache plucks the nerve behind his left eye, and he stills it by closing his fist and crashing it into Kain's jaw again. Ribbons of blood slither over his gauntlet, bright red against onyx and gold. "When you are asked a question by your better, it is wise that you answer it. Now, do you understand?"

A flash of violence crosses Kain's face, and for a moment, Gabranth thinks he may be stupid enough to attempt escape. Lazily, he pushes down on Kain's larynx and waits for a more appropriate reply.

When Kain finally nods his assent, Gabranth is almost disappointed to pull his fist from the other man's throat. Aggravated, he shakes his gauntlet free of blood and scraps of flesh before he stands. "Wise," he says.

It takes some time for Kain to get up. He moves slowly, with his hand at his broken ribs. He makes no sound of discomfort, though. And while his eyes are half shadowed by strings of filthy hair, they linger only a second too long on the broken spine of his spear.

For a moment, they simply stare at one another. And despite himself, Gabranth cannot help but recognize the weariness in the slump of Kain's shoulders, the flatness in his gaze.

He does not know why exactly this infuriates him.

Blood drips from Kain's nose to his lips, drops to the rust below. He doesn't bother wiping it away. "I assume there's something you want from me."

Gabranth makes a sharp, bitter sound. "Wrong, dog. There's something you want from me."

The edges of Kain's mouth twitch, but they don't make it all the way to a smirk. "Really now?" The question drips mockery. "No. I think not."

Gabranth pauses a moment before he replies, considers his words. "Much has been said of you, Kain Highwind," he spits eventually. "That you are prideful of your station and disloyal to your King. That you are weak and petty and a fool. It appears I was not mislead."

Kain blinks. The sound of his name has captured his attention, apparently. "Who are you?"

Gabranth watches a single drop of Kain's blood trace the angle of his clenched jaw. It quivers; tense and unsure of its own direction. "A gatekeeper," he answers after a while. "You've fallen far to this pit. If you wish to crawl out, you must go through me."

Straightening, Kain finally raises his hand to wipe the mess from his face, and the drop of blood that Gabranth has been watching collapses into an edgeless smear. Rage simmers in his eyes. "Where am I?"

"Where all traitors go when they die," Gabranth answers, crossing his arms. "Hell."


Kain does not allow himself to think too closely on the Tower of Zot, even though it looms in the center of his mind. It is a long shadow lost in a longer night; and sometimes when he is just waking or just falling asleep, he sees the blade that hung over Rosa's long, white neck, just glinting.

'It's not sharp enough' is the thought he always has when the image drifts over his eyes. Her neck will be crushed, not severed. She will take longer to die, this way.

Kain remembers everything, but not exactly. Like a light-soaked reflection in water, it changes…he can never be sure...

All he knows is that a part of him never leaves this place. He is always here and she is always here and these were things that happened. To both of them. To all of them.

The memories come to him in fragments, the night Golbez's spells were reapplied. It was after he did not or could not kill Cecil. He sinned, and in chains he waits to be punished. He is on his knees. He will never get up.

Kain recalls noises that are not human words. Rumors traverse his unspooling mind; whispered by the fiends who rule air and fire and water and death. Their voices scratch the sides of his skull, but he cannot close his ears. Nonsense, they sound of nonsense, and it drifts through his hollow mind.

The content of these conspiracies is something Kain can't fathom. After some time, he views this as a merciful thing.

He is almost conscious; but then again, he is not. Rubicante has cast Slow on his mind, and he cannot think. Everything is murk and dark. Everything is pain.

Everything that is not hate, that is. Everything that is not 'Please-I-am-sorry-make-it stop.'

The stone floor is rough and his knees are skinned. His flesh is clammy. They have taken all his clothes.

"My Lord, I will kill him," are words Kain thinks he blubbered, but he really can't be sure. The more important features of the memory involve a dry and open mouth; wrists abraded by chains; shoulders that have gone loose in their sockets. "I am sorry, I will kill him; I am sorry, I promise I will…"

Kain is furious that he cannot remember it the same way twice. It always seems as if he is missing something; as if it the moment was a song he knew once, but now he cannot remember the words.

He is very cold, as cold as he has ever been; but still, not so cold as the eyes that bore into him, that rest – as all mocking eyes do – on all the things he hides. They are almost as Cecil's eyes are, pale as dust in the dawn. Except they are malignant and they are far too bright; carnival tricks in a carnival night.

Golbez.

Theodor Harvey, but he did not know that then. Beholden to the same magic as he, but also, he did not know that then.

Kain recalls the words: "You failed," and they are gentle and urbane and true.

Does Barbariccia make it so cold here? Is that the smell of Scarmiglione's dying flesh? Kain wants to struggle, but the chains are too tight, and he is too feeble and the lord of fire has pressed a burning hand to his face.

"Ready yourself, dragoon," he says. "You may die today."

Rubicante will heal him so the touch will leave no scar. But Kain will remember the sound of his own screaming, the smell of his own burning skin.

How many moments – Kain lets himself think – have passed between that one and now? And yet, he still cannot remember exactly why it was he wept. The pain was not so great. The tears, however, were sharp and slender, and they fell swiftly down his face.

In the days he does not hate himself, he believes that it is regret that wet his eyes. Because he is loyal, and he is valiant and he did not want to kill his friend. In the days in which he does, he insists it was because he was just too weak, either to resist or embrace his own hate; to kill the man as is fair, with pride and no hesitation.

It is of course Rosa who stopped him; whose eyes knocked his spear to the floor. She saves them, but then, she is always saving them. It is her arms that hold them together; it is her arms that keep them apart.

She is upstairs and her screaming keeps him sane. In every version of this memory, this is the only thing that stays the same. That, and the laughter of fiends.

"You failed." Golbez' voice comes again. "And we shall have to pull the leash."

The Lamia is the part that Kain despises most. In his memory, she has no face, but her tail coils round his waist, and her fingers rake his chest and play in his hair. The tongue she twirls in his ear is wet and exact and slips all the way inside.

"Kill, kill," she whispers. "Take, take."

"You heard her," Golbez purrs. "You know what to do."

He does not want to feel pleasure at the touch of a snake, but he does. He does not want to believe what she says, but he does. His shattered mind believes; her voice weaves the fragments to sense.

Kain wants so much to think that there is a part of his mind that is screaming. But he can't tell anymore. It all felt so…good. So heady and black and free.

With dead-cold fingers, the Lamia traces his throat and lips, and Kain does not know where his soul goes.

The spell is dark and he falls into it. It is bottomless and he cannot swim up. Everything feels the same to him; the love and the hate, the lust and the shame, the want and need and obey.

Kain thinks what he wants most in this moment is to break Cecil's neck. For the angle to shift and go wrong beneath his hands. Or perhaps he wants to take everything Cecil is; his glory and his goodness and the soft thighs of his woman – the light that he sees in all things...

Then again, it's possible all he wants is revenge. Because chance sent him down the side of a mountain, and it is Cecil's fault he's chained here. That he's on his knees in the dark, so afraid and so cold; so naked and owned and ashamed.

After this, there will never be a human mirror that will show Kain a man he wants to see. He has long ago left off caring about it, but it is true, nevertheless.

Kain cannot tell whose thoughts are whose. Golbez is in his mind and in his heart; what he sees he sees with Golbez' eyes. He does not know where he stops and this other man begins and perhaps there is no difference.

On some later night when they are watching the Blue Planet crest over the cratered moon, Rosa will place her hand on his and tell him not to trust how he felt. She will say that the spells are old and cruel; that they are illusion and smoke and Lunarian lies. But he believed her once when he should not have, so he does not believe her then.

When the snake uncoils from his body, Kain's mind is a cavern the wind blows through. He will do as asked, on command.

What Kain cannot account for is everything that happens next. The binding, the lightning spells, the pain. He feels weight of Pressure bear down on him, and his arms and legs don't move. He's trapped, and when Golbez lays a frozen hand on the back of his neck, there is nothing he can do. Thurdara seizes his muscles and sears his nerves and he'd vomit if the paralysis would release him.

The pain is exquisite and unending, but the light that riots in his eyes is gold as a winter-bright sun.

Kain will hear Golbez whisper that the mind must be soft for the spells to settle. That electricity burns new pathways in the brain. Of course, he will not say why he leaves Kain to the fiends. But then again, the answer to that is obvious enough.

It is a reminder and warning, the torture. It is so that Kain will never again forget who is the one that serves here, and who is the one that eats.

There is no name for the hate he feels. There is no direction for it. It consumes everything else he is.

The things that Barbariccia does to him are written on his body. She carves the name of malice in his skin. Kain chooses not to think too hard upon it, but he remembers the patterns the blood splashed on the floor; he remembers he tried very hard not to scream.

Above him, Rosa calls his name along with Cecil's, and Kain will never forget the sound. And while he hears her voice collapse with screeching, he knows it is not for him she cries.

Eventually, he will look in her eyes and almost kill her. And although she forgives him, everything will change.

They will break and stay broken. He will leave and not come back. She will never bring him apples again.

In the present, Kain wonders if there is there is anything he would not trade for another chance, anything he would not give so this wound would cease bleeding.


Among men who know steel, few words are necessary. And while there is much in Kain Highwind's story that begs to be mocked, this – and perhaps this alone – is something Gabranth can respect.

It did not take much for him to agree to this duel. A few sparse terms. A promise that Shinryu would revive his depleted spirit enough to rejoin his allies. A taunt:

"Pity the traitor. For he shall never be redeemed."

To his credit, the mongrel yipped nothing in reply.

In the pulsing heat, they prowl around each other. At their feet, featureless debris grinds to orange dust. The sword Kain holds in guard over his chest half consumed by corrosion, and Gabranth cannot help but think it fitting.

It is a short, brittle battle they will fight here today. Over nothing, and for nothing. And they will duel until one of them lies here amongst the garbage, as discarded and forgotten as everything else.

Magma casts a fevered pallor over the field, and heaps of melted wreckage fester like open sores upon the land. Broken swords conspire in skeletons of rust, and in their jagged shadows dry corpses stretch out their hands. Idly, Gabranth wonders what it was they died reaching for.

Closing his left eye against the accelerating pain in his head, he raises Deathbringer and watches the squalid light drip down its edge. It matters not. Whatever it was, the bastards died empty-handed. He may even have killed a few of them himself, though he cannot remember a single name.

Across from him, Kain has dropped his guard and raised his sword. He is waiting for salute. And because Gabranth remains a creature of ceremony, he nods and crosses the blade with his own.

The x-shaped shadow drifts long across the ground, and they stare at each other a moment before their weapons shear away. Ash sails between them, and perhaps it is the headache, but for some reason when Gabranth looks at them he's reminded of the bonfires of Lowtown…the way the cedar popped and splintered in the heavy summer night…

Blood still pours from Kain's nose. When he speaks, his mouth is thick with it. "Begin," is all he says.

Wasting no more time in thinking, Gabranth does. Wanting to end this quickly, he rolls all the force of his pent up rage into the brutal descent of an overhead strike. War designed this dance; fury guides it; and by the time he is halfway through his swing he half expects this to be a one hit kill.

It is not.

Kain is skilled enough at swordplay to know he lacks the strength to parry. With surprising speed, he steps back, and when Gabranth uses the momentum of the miss to spin his blade back to ready, it is only just in time to block a heavy cut. Screaming, the rusted edge crashes over the strong of Deathbringer, and the impact clatters the joints of the Judge Magister's armor. He feels it jolt through his bones.

Piercing and mineral, the smell of iron oxide slides through Gabranth's flared nostrils. He does not enjoy much these days, but oh, how he loves that smell. It is orderly, he thinks, using his leverage to force Kain off the block. It is clean.

Kain shuffles backwards over the rubble and holds his blade back in a diagonal guard. The first entente concluded, he finally – slowly, as if savoring the taste – spits the blood from his mouth. Smirking, he asks, "That all?"

It is unnecessary for Gabranth to answer. He is not so easily goaded. Squinting his eyes against the oily red light, he only lifts his sword again and begins the battle in truth.

The next few moments are a blur to even Gabranth. There is the crashing ring of iron and the dry crush of debris. There is the rank sweat that gathers in his armpits and bakes into his mail. There are flakes of rust, so many flakes of rust, and they clog his nose and coat his tongue and they lend each wracking blow the bitter taste of metal.

Gabranth has never fooled himself into thinking he fights with grace. Brute strength and relentlessness have guided his hand since he first picked up a blade, and this is no different. So while Kain's corroded sword cuts shapely patterns in the drifting ash, Deathbringer knows only one trajectory: down; through. Eventually, Gabranth's shoulder begins to burn, and the ache stretches through his nerves as the blade descends again – Kain blocks – again – a circular parry – again – and there, finally, it is. First drawn blood.

It is a glancing blow only; the sword just grazes Kain's neck. But the cut is there, and it bleeds, and the black magick in the blade purrs, satisfied. The sound of his own pulse whispers in Gabranth's ears as Deathbringer's dark enchantments leech strength from the open wound. Stolen strength surges in his veins, and beneath the steel glower of the Judge Magister's helm, he smiles.

Eventually this sword will demand a price for the power it lends him. For every life taken, it will take a measure of his. But that time is not now. No. Gabranth grits his teeth through another attack, closes his ears against the crash of steel. Now it howls for other blood.

Grunting, Kain retreats, blade up in a ready guard. He tries not to let the confusion play over his face, but it's obvious anyway. Freak-violet eyes narrow and the rotten, highborn lips twitch. From a creased brow, beads of sweat glisten then bake to dullness in the punishing heat.

The skin of Kain's knuckles goes tight around the hilt of his blade. He breathes heavily. "What magic is this?"

Stepping forward, Gabranth snorts, swings Deathbringer in a vicious, elegant arc. Shadow magick lingers in its wake, silent and intent. "Surely," he sneers, "you are not so stupid as all that."

"Do not speak to me in riddles."

"Do not play so great a fool."

The block Kain throws up in his defense is hesitant, off balance. This is not his weapon, and this low-ceilinged chamber is far from the open sky. There will be no dragoon trickery here. Just the killing simplicity of steel on steel. As it should be. As is just.

Gabranth presses his attack, and Kain cannot keep pace with the pressure. Whether from confusion or exhaustion or both, his strikes lose their discipline; they do not land with such force. A parry that should close stays open, and Gabranth crashes his blade through the gap. The blocks are awkward and strange – they beg for the haft of a spear – and under the heavy rain of his blows they grow fragile and easy to break.

Strangled by smoke and whirling ash, no light dances off of Kain's weapon. It makes the jerky, incoherent gestures of defeat, and Gabranth can almost taste clean water on his tongue.

As befits the chopping of meat, Gabranth wields Deathrbringer as a cleaver now. Every crashing blow he lands sends magick jolting through his veins. They trade steps, Kain and he. Each one Gabranth gains, Kain loses, and when he finally breaks the man's feeble guard and slides the sword through the soft flesh of his shoulder, it slices easily through flesh and muscle and tendon.

The skin is bruised and unguarded. It offers little by way of defense.

Kain cries out, and the scream sounds tortured from his throat. In a wash of cursed magick, he doubles over, and Gabranth feels nothing but heady satisfaction as the point of the sword sticks into bone. He resists the urge to twist the blade.

Smirking, Gabranth leans over Kain's semi-prone body, turns the steel lips of the Judge Magister's helm until they brush away sweaty strands of hair and rest against his ear. He can feel the man's shudder of disgust; he can smell the stink of his fear. "Yield," he whispers.

Uncut muscles tense around Gabranth's blade and shift its balance, and he thinks he hears only a soft chuckle in reply.

The rush of wind that accompanies the dragoon's jump races around the chamber, and for a second Gabranth is confused. He does not quite understand how a man who was just now impaled on his blade has managed to pry himself free, vanish back somewhere into the blackened wreckage of the chamber. But it doesn't matter. Kain cannot hide from him, not here. Gabranth has called this place home for so long, he barely has memory of any landscape but this. There is no inch of this ruined place he does not know, that he cannot see – that he does not always see – when he closes his eyes.

Eventually, Gabranth catches sight of him, standing on a high pile of rubble some fifteen or twenty feet from where they were. His right arm hangs limp and useless at his side, and while his left still holds his blade, the grip is loose and untrustworthy. After a second, he plunges it into the debris, uses its uncertain strength to keep him from falling to his knees.

Gabranth takes his time walking towards him. "Did you not hear me?"

Stumbling around his own sword, Kain struggles to keep his eyes from rolling back in his head, his feet from betraying his tenuous balance. It's obviously everything the man can do to stay upright, but still, when he looks up his face is a blood and crystal painted mask of rage. "That," he mutters, soft and furious, "is a Dark Knight's blade. Cecil's blade."

"It finally seeps to your brain, then? Though you are wrong. Deathbringer is mine." Gabranth raises the sword before him again. The red of Kain's blood is indistinguishable from the lurid glow of the magma. "Your half-breed king barely has the stones to lift it. He disgusts me almost as much as you do."

"Do not speak his name. You know nothing of Cecil," Kain croaks, hoarse. The death magick that sucks at his wound has already started narrowing his arteries, closing his throat. "Nothing."

"I know duty, dog." Gabranth snaps, and the echo of his words is a tin counterpoint to the sound of grinding metal as he struggles up the pile of rubbish. "And what I have sacrificed for it."

With the limited breath in his lungs, Kain manages a pinched laugh. "You are still alive. You've not sacrificed enough for my taste."

"You deign to mock me? You?" Gabranth scoffs. "A traitor who kills from behind? Who lacks even the courage to own his own hate? Every man I intend to kill, I look in the eyes, Highwind." He pauses. "Even Ratsbane's brother. Even you."

Kain is leaning so heavily on his sword, the corroded metal curves and strains. His breathing is audible now, desperate. And yet…"Ratsbane?"

Gabranth shrugs. He does not shy from what he's done. And the more rage Kain feels, the deeper the magick will open up in his gut, the faster it will do its work. The sooner this can end. "Vaan's the name you know him by. His brother was seventeen when I killed him. His belly was soft when I ran him through."

On the back of the ash, a moment of silence drifts between them. It is interrupted only by the creak of Gabranth's armor as he draws closer and closer, closing the distance between him and his prey. Kain is on his last legs now, and just as he crests the broken hill, the man's silhouette crumples.

In shadow, his back has the bend of one already dead. Gabranth need only finish the job.

Looking down at Kain, he licks his parched lips. Beneath his dry tongue, the cracked skin is rough and tasteless. "Now what say you?" he spits, setting Deathbringer at the nape of Kain's neck, right where his head is bowed over his sword. "Do you yield or do you not?"

"That," Kain growls, not looking up,"is not something you ought to have told me."

"Why now?" Gabranth taunts, raising the blade to slice the man's head from his spine. "What vengeance will you take for the boy's sake?"

"No vengeance," Kain's voice is low, and the words are nearly lost to grating, metalling noise as he unsheathes his weapon from the earth. "Only pleasure. I think I shall enjoy watching you bleed."

There is no reason that Gabranth can think of to explain how Kain is able to roll out from under his strike. Nor can he account for how the block that saves the man's life manages to flash up to his neck in the split second before Deathbringer descends to the naked flesh. But as Highwind rights himself, it occurs to him that a creature as destroyed by dark magicks as this vermin was might have some tolerance for the stuff.

In concession, Gabranth snorts a short, bitter laugh. Very well. They shall finish this as they started it. One on one; steel on steel. "Have at it, then," he spits. He tries to make the words sound venomous, but for some reason, they ring hollow. Empty.

Kain angles the sword so its shadow cuts his face. "Indeed."

When they resume, something has changed in the way that Kain wields his blade. There is no exaggeration now in the strikes; no confusion. They are fast and they are precise and they do not stop. He attacks efficiently. He does not miss his jumping; he does not miss his spear. And now that he has the higher ground, Gabranth finds that it is more difficult than before to keep the blows from finding their mark.

He is tired, he realizes. From too much climbing, he assumes.

It happens slowly, and Gabranth does not believe it, but he finds himself backing up. He finds that the length of time it takes him to parry and block the rain of rusted steel lengthens. He cannot find a way to recapture his momentum, and his boots slide back down over the hill of rubble. The Judge Magister's armor is heavy, and his balance is slipping.

What he sees when he glares through the visor of his helm is a blur of ash and iron and red, red rust. He can't make out the face of his attacker. The helm disrupts his gaze, and for a second, it seems like the broken man crashing steel down around his head bears a scar between his eyes as well…

Gabranth never hates himself more than he does when he understands his own hesitation; realizes why Deathbringer's parry slides an inch too wide, turns a second too slow.

Seizing his advantage, Kain doesn't jump up, he jumps ahead. And suddenly Gabranth is crushed back down to the jagged rubbish below. The point of the sword has found a gap in the armor and the force of the blow tears the wind from his lungs. The mail beneath the plate is enough to keep the blade from going straight through his gut, but still, Gabranth can feel the skin splinter and break.

Fresh blood slides between steel and skin. It's sticky and itchy and too hot.

Before he knows it, Gabranth is lying in the dirt without his weapon and a hard hand is tearing the helm from his head. A knee comes to his chest followed suit by a blade to his neck, but that's not what Gabranth cares about at the moment. In fact – at the moment – he's not thinking of Kain at all.

He is thinking that the air – hot and scarred and burning as it is – feels good upon his face. And that it is has been a long, long time since he has really stopped to feel it.

Relaxing his neck, Gabranth breathes. Somewhere, he manages to find the words that he's been saving. "Do it," he says. "I care not."

Kain's face is filled with revulsion. "Why should I give you anything you want?"

A slow smile turns his lips. He can feel the blood from the wound spread over the small hairs on his chest and stomach. It is wet and slow, like a caress. "Killing me is what you want," he replies. "Now, have the strength to do it."


It happens only once. They never speak of it again.

They are in the armory, and Kain is uninterested in talking. What he is interested in is forging a new blade for Gungir.

Cosmos would have made him one, had he asked. Even though he suspects she knows the use he intends to put it to. But he prefers to do the work himself. There is something cleansing in the heat of it. The shoulder strain. The sweat.

It is a blade with which he will turn traitor. As such, Kain feels as if the hands that craft it should be his. Besides, this will be his last blade. When he leaves Sanctuary this time, he will not come back.

Lightning stands behind him and watches him work. She keeps whatever words she has folded in her mouth, and her eyes trained on her back. There is no doubt that she notices the ferocity of these strikes and their angle, their force.

She is one who notices much, but Kain decides he does not care.

Let her stop him, if she can.

The hammer descends and he feels the impact in his teeth. Cecil's blood will coat this edge, and Kain wonders when – if ever – it will stop. He has had Cecil's blood on his hands for too many years, in too many ways. Since first he pulled the dark armor's teeth from that lunar-white back. Since first he pressed this blade of this weapon to that lunar-white throat.

"Yield." Kain feels Golbez's words in his mouth – angular and rough - but does not fight them.

"Not to you." Kain is aware from whose lips Cecil robbed the words, but thinks only of the bitterness in his face as he said them.

Even now Kain does not know if it was with rage or fear or sorrow. Or violence, barely leashed. It is not an answer he wants, necessarily.

"I am sorry, Cecil." He says the worlds silently, but still they taste of ash. They reek of repetition.

Kain's mind returns to these thoughts again and again in different shapes, at different tides; as waves return to the shore. He smashes a hammer into molten Damascus steel, and sparks spill through the air.

"I am sorry." Saying it again does not make it better. But he does so, anyway.

His mind despises him for wanting yet more forgiveness, yet more reprieve. There are times he feels he is addicted to it. Like some men are to drink or flesh or poppies. At times, he wishes he were like those men, that he had those hungers. They are more easily sated.

Kain hears her rap her fingers on the doorframe of the armory. He hears her click her tongue against the top of her mouth. The sounds tap his skull. They are agitating.

Again, he wonders why she's here, why it seems she is always here. He does not know why she seeks his counsel; what answers she proposes to take from him; what she sees when she sets hawk-sharp eyes where they do not belong.

He doesn't want her to stay. He doesn't want her to leave. He doesn't know what to think of her, other than he views her as well-named.

He wants her naked beneath him, too. But then, he wants many things. Desire is thing that he is accustomed to. Equally, its restraint.

Grunting ,Kain sends the hammer down again. Another time, another place, perhaps he would have wanted her to weep for him. He would have viewed her as worthy of mourning his lost honor, his lost name. But now is not that time. He has no need for any man's pity, nor any woman's tears.

He neither needs them nor desires them. They are meaningless to him and to this task.

"You are luckier than I, friend" Cecil told him once, in the barracks, in the infinite promise of seventeen. "They expect nothing of you."

Very well then, Cecil. The words are true, and it is truth that he will use. What he does here is not redemption. But it is something. And Kain has learned that he must take what he can salvage of the man he once imagined himself to be.

Once – he thinks, and the irony is too bitter, even for him – upon a time.

Lightning remains silent, even though they usually talk. It is the ordinary course of events with them that she will ask a question and he will mock a response. Or he will remark on her lack of sense and she will smirk and continue to lack sense before she charges off in some manner that appears engineered to irritate him.

This is new for them, this silence. As is her hand between his shoulder blades. He stops what he is doing, and he places the blade on the anvil and he listens to her breathe.

A moment passes, and the warmth of her hand is almost too much. Her fingers are slender. They assume the shape of his scars.

Kain tenses, navel to shoulder, and he wants, for a second, to take it all back. He does not want to do what he has sworn to do. He does not want to run this blade through Cecil's back. He does not wish for this woman to despise him, as she most certainly will.

A crack forms in his resolve. Its size is infinitesimal, but it is there. And it asks him to consider – yet again – being a good man.

She is tired; he reads her fingers as they curl. And she is weak from the attacks as he is weak from the attacks, and if she continues as she is, she will fall. He doesn't want that either. Because while she believes herself a monster, Kain does not. And he likes the feel of her hand where it rests on his skin.

She speaks finally, and when she does, it's one of the three things she says to him that night. Her voice is tired and distant and alone. "This is getting old, Highwind."

He replies with a low chuckle, a "You're right," an exhalation that sounds of a sigh. "Although I'd not have thought you the kind. To be troubled by such a mundane thing as age."

Under her breath, she laughs a rare, private laugh and Kain is surprised that he finds it pleasant. It has been some time since he has found something so. Since the Baron of his youth; since the unburdened laughter he traded once with the King and Queen of his homeland, when there was nothing between them but the dry scent of winter.

It occurs to Kain that he is not young anymore. That he will never be young again.

The blade on the anvil still glows red with intent. It asks him if he dares destroy even this. He does not know the answer.

Coming forward, she sets a sticky brow against his back, and he comes close to just telling her. He thinks perhaps he was wrong, and that if he tells her, there may still be another way out for them. Her breath on his spine is wet and it charges to his groin, and for a second, he closes his eyes.

The heat that pulses between them is not from the fire.

Kain does not know exactly how it happens, but he remembers how she tastes. He has memorized it. Salt, he will decide, when thinks upon it later, in those weeks he spent alone. Sharp breath. The iron of blood from where her teeth gnash his lips. There is a crushing of bodies, a duel of hands that pull or push or grab, a kiss so hard it would feel like pain or consumption, if it her cutting mouth did not fit so well on his.

She tastes of smoke or carbon; of everything that is not apples.

She winds her leg around his waist and he slams her against a weapons rack. He is certain that the steel digs into her flesh, but she makes no sound of complaint. He presses his hand to her branded breast, and she makes sounds that spike through his nerves. And while it is possible they are using each other, it does not feel that way.

In the silence, there is only the slide of sweat-slick limbs that yearn for something better; something more.

The second thing she says to him that night is 'Claire.' Her name. It is whispered to him at some broken point when his hands are twisted in her hair. He whispers it back, and for a moment that will not stop, they are sharing a secret.

Honor. It's something like honor he feels, when she trusts him with this thing.

The greediest part of him wants to keep it. He clutches it with hands he has not felt worthy of such a thing for some time.

Strangely enough, it is this that stops him. This that guides his arms as he throws her away. He is not an honorable man. Not then and not now.

He remembers Cecil's eyes and Rosa's screaming and he knows this to be true. Though perhaps in the end, it is dishonor that will save her. Save Cecil.

Save him.

It is such romantic nonsense, but Kain finds he cannot stop believing it's true.

With a soot blackened hand, he wipes the remains of her kiss from his lips. He makes sure that she sees it. He narrows his eyes in contempt. He makes sure she sees that, too. He turns away.

He is glad he cannot see her face.

"Whatever," Lightning says. It's the last thing she says to him. It's the last thing she will say to him until they meet again over the length of Gungir. And while they will never speak of this, it will linger between them as an unopened letter, a locked door.

When she leaves, her footsteps haunt his ears. And as he raises his hammer back to the virgin blade, still yet unformed, it dawns on him.

Perhaps he will always be a traitor, after all.


The duel is over, but the air between Kain and Gabranth stays heavy. It is laden with heat and ash; it is filled with the wheedling demands of an unanswered challenge.

Swollen drops of Kain's blood splash on his face, but Gabranth doesn't look away. He just stares and watches and waits. Pain and disgust and anger flicker over the patrician features in equal measure, but no sentence has been decided, no judgment rendered.

In shuddering, concentric circles, pain radiates from the gash in Gabranth's stomach. The blood has dried somewhat, but still he can feel the ragged lips of the wound flap as he breathes. It hurts like a whore bitch, but for some reason he finds it comforting. He did not expect to lose, but of ways to die, this seems acceptable enough.

It is the only way, Gabranth reasons, to leave this armor with some measure of honor. And for the first time in what seems like a thousand years, he feels as if he would not mind taking it off.

Kain breaks the silence with an accusation that he spits in Gabranth's face. "Do you think me a fool?" He's so close when he growls the words that Gabranth can smell the rancid breath. "I've told lies enough to know them well. You left yourself open, there at the last. Explain."

Gabranth rolls his head, looks away. Sharp debris spikes the tender flesh of his cheek, and he inhales deeply of dirt and steel. "I owe you nothing, traitor. Now end this, or I will know what you truly are."

Kain pushes the blade harder against his neck, and the toothy imperfections in the edge tease and pull his skin. "And what, pray tell, is that?"

"A coward," he whispers without a single moment's pause. "A failure. A waste."

If there is a thing that Gabranth knows well, it is how to read a man's face in a time of judgment. By the turn of lips and the set of a jaw, he can tell whether a prisoner will go to sentence at peace with their measure, whether they have soiled themselves, or if indeed there is one in the crowd that is dear to them. One who will watch, no matter what the verdict, with eyes that do not condemn. But gazing up at Kain Highwind, for the first time Gabranth does not quite know what he's looking at, what he sees.

Gabranth lets his eyelids drop and does not think about Bast. He will not permit himself to do so. He will simply wait and let retribution come to him for once.

"You really killed the boy's brother?" Kain asks.

"Aye," Gabranth replies. He does not care to open his eyes. "I did. I would do it again."

The weight on the blade rises, and Gabranth feels content. He waits for gentle-armed blackness to brush the sight from his eyes, the tightness from his breast. And yet, just as he anticipates the splitting of skin, the opening of his throat, the pressure comes off and there is only the clatter of steel skipping over loose rubble as the sword is thrown to some forgotten corner of the chamber.

Damn it, are the only words he thinks.

"I knew it." Gabranth's eyes sail open and his lips curl to a sneer. "I knew you'd not – " he starts again, but before the words can leave his mouth Kain's fist has come down on his face. For a second, Gabranth feels a flash of respect. He wants to think that perhaps Highwind will do this with his bare hands, but the blows that land do not have killing strength in them. They are hard, but they are not fatal, and as Gabranth feels the flesh on his face tear and his teeth come up from his gums, all he can think is that if Kain believes this is mercy, then he is even more facile than he thought.

When the punches finally slow, Gabranth licks the blood from his ruined lips. "You admit your cowardice, then?" he asks. "This is not an honorable thing you do here, Highwind."

"Perhaps not," Kain muses, and rising, he turns away. His right arm is a rigid pendulum of flesh, but when he speaks again, there's a soft hint of mirth in his voice. It grates on Gabranth's raw nerves. "But who said I was an honorable man? Now I've passed your cursed trial. Send me back."

Gabranth rolls to a sitting position, wipes the blood and mucous from his face. With his chin, he gestures to a black gate in the distance; the path of the Stolen Crown. "Your way back to the war of the gods is there, Highwind. May Cosmos welcome you."

Pivoting back towards him, Kain's filthy brows knot. The fool seems somehow surprised. "I'm uninterested in returning to my allies in Dissidia," he says. "It's the others, those that fell with me at the Empyreal Paradox. Return me to them."

Gabranth pauses before answering. It takes much to raise his laughter. In fact, if there is one thing about his life he still cannot recall, it is the last time that he had a good chuckle. It starts slowly, bubbling from his diaphragm and gaining momentum as it fords up his throat. And what starts as a quiet chuckle swells into a gale of cackles. He laughs so hard that his sight blurs, that he doubles over his own wound.

Of all the…

Perhaps he is capable of being surprised after all. Even now, in such a ridiculous state as this. Going back to Dissidia is one thing, but to stay here…

Gabranth cannot stop laughing. Tears line his eyelids; his chest heaves for breath. "You wish to return to the Rift?"

"If that is where my allies are" – Kain's eyes darken – " then yes. What of it?"

"Beg pardon, then." Gabranth's reply is patchy and breathless. With his right arm, he makes a weak gesture off to the distance. The laughter's made him dizzy, but he finds for some reason his headache is gone. He feels almost light. "But we are in the Rift already, fool. The exit lies some leagues that way. This trial is only for those who wish to return to the war. If your desire is to rot in Hell" – Gabranth smiles a small smile – "by all means, have your pleasure. Take what you will and be gone."

"You mean to say – " Kain begins.

"Yes, Kain Highwind." Gabranth interrupts, his throat still raw from the laughter. "Yet another pointless trial. Though I'd expect you'd be used to those, by now."

If Gabranth is expecting some kind of reaction, he is disappointed. The dragoon merely makes a small sound of disgust and walks off. By the tin tinkling of debris, he knows Kain is sifting around for salvageable supplies. By the start and stop of the man's breath, he can tell that the broken ribs, the death infected wound in his shoulder will shortly exact their price. But still, he pays no attention. All he does is crane his neck, cast his eyes upward, away.

The ceiling of the cavern is splattered with shadows. And while Gabranth has no desire to keep staring at their aimless drift, he finds he cannot look away.

Some moments pass, and Kain finishes collecting what he can. By way of farewell, he mutters only one thing.

"You've my pity," he says.

Gabranth snorts, and wiping the remnants of the tears from his eyes, he relaxes his neck. He supposes he could turn his head to watch the man depart but then decides there would be no point. Their business together is concluded. Whatever path Highwind chooses to walk makes no difference to him.

A few quiet beats pass before Gabranth finally replies. "Keep it. You'll need it for yourself."

For a time, Gabranth listens as Kain's footsteps echo through the chamber. When at last they fade, he sets his brow over the heated steel of his greaves and thinks of nothing. Automatically, his hand searches the broken earth for his blade, but he finds only loose stone, fragile ash, rusted nails. Nothing.

In his ears, the sound of ash drifting over bone prevails.