Sight Through Spirit

by hopefultexts

The infamous Rezo, long thought dead, lives in two forms: in a jar, and in a body resurrected by Hellmaster Fibrizo. Which is the "real" Rezo? What are his real motives? And how will Zelgadiss react?

10. What Binds You?

Chapter 9: What Binds You?

(Author's note: The pink teddy bear DOES exist in CANON—and it's found in Rezo's secret laboratory under Old Sairaag! See Slayers Season One Anime, the episode titled: "The One Who Was Left Behind!" I am not making this up, lol! Enjoy the chapter.)

"I descended a dusty gravel ridge
Beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge
Until I eventually arrived
At the place where your soul had died.

Barefoot in the shallow creek,
I grabbed some stones from underneath
And waited for you to speak to me.

And the silence; it became so very clear
That you had long ago disappeared.
I cursed myself for being surprised
That this didn't play like it did in my mind.

All the way from San Francisco
As I chased the end of your road
Cause I've still got miles to go.

And I want to know my fate
If I keep up this way.

And it's hard to want to stay awake
When everyone you need, they all seem to be asleep.
And you wonder if you missed your dream.

You can't see a dream
You can't see a dream.
You just can't see a dream.

And then it started getting dark.
I truged back to where the car was parked
No closer to any kind of truth
As I assume was the case with you."

~Death Cab For Cutie

*******************************************

The great shimmering, gelatinous silver beast hovering above their heads, drooling through a distended gummy mouth of fangs, growling menace, was hardly the most disturbing element that stood in their path out of the phantom Flagoon.

Rather, it was the three people at the foot of the Zanaffar.

The Wise Man of the Age who, unlike Rezo, had never glanced back and doubted being a container of Shabranigdo. His eyes open, bloody red, the complement to the green in Fibrizo's. The lord of hell dropped to his scrawny pale knees and crawled over to the red vision like a pathetic dog, bleating, "Father..!"

Filia Ul Copt, the young golden dragoness, the only person on Red Orb who could stir the cold cunning and lethal Xelloss Metallium to some modicum of feeling aside detached curiosity, or hedonistic pleasure, or cordial hatred. The only person who wiped the smirk off his face, the only person who could slap him across the cheek and live to tell about it. The only person who made him take another look at the stars, at people laughing, at babies, at rainbows in oil spills, at a sprouting sapling's fragile new life. The only person he kissed for the sake of kissing, and no ulterior motive. His equal opposite and soul mate with cascades of dandelion-yellow hair. A feisty spirit with a penchant for chaos… a member of the same race whose ancestors he'd….

Zegladiss Greywers. Hurting and defiant and barely twenty. Hands on hips, which jutted rebelliously to the side. Zelgadiss, with cantankerous, messy hair that looked so like his great-grandfather's sans the use of a comb. Only those enormous thick-lashed pewter blue eyes were still soft. The rest of him ravaged, a memory of a fierce, clever, strong-willed human boy petrified in stone and cankered with sharp black shards of rock. The boy of bedtime stories, guitars and oatmeal for breakfast, of hide and go seek games among the twisting, bubbling tubes of Rezo's laboratory, the boy of "gramps," and "teach me this," and "show me that," and "what's this thing do?" and an unending thirst to grow and know and improve. Rezo's boy. His boy…ruined by him.

Rezo saw none of this but he felt it. He felt the hostility exuding from his kinsman. He knew Zelgadiss stood before him and wanted to tear him asunder. "Go ahead," he moaned. "Go ahead and do what you want with me. Nobody will blame you in the least."

But the specter of his great-grandson remained still. And Rezo lost the courage to say anything more.

"Go on," Ash urged them all. "What binds you? Face it."

Xelloss was the first to break ground. Xelloss, in whose nature it was do simply do what needed to be done. He took one step toward Filia. "What are you doing here, Filly?" he breathed. He executed vocal nonchalance beautifully. But his smile was unsteady. It trembled.

"You killed them," the golden dragoness droned. A dead, resigned tone. Nothing like her excitable soprano. "You killed my people, a millennium ago…"

"…S…So?" Xelloss pried it out through tightly smiling lips, an attempt to be cavalier and unfeeling, and yet it sounded insincere. "What's your point, then?"

He conjured a teacup—a plain white teacup with a Greek meander trim. He tried to sip from it—an absurdly casual gesture. His hand was as shaky as his smile.

Then it happened: Xelloss's staff vanished from his right hand. He yelped and the teacup fell from his other hand and shattered.

Rezo jolted at the breaking sound. "What was that? Anybody?"

"Father…!" Fibrizo kept wailing. Clinging at Lei Magnus's robe hem. Kissing it, all but drooling on it. Dryly sobbing. "Father, father! Lord Ruby Eyes! Father!"

And Xelloss turned, and watched with jaw ajar as his staff impaled Filia straight through her gut.

Her cornflower blue eyes, hooded, glazed and reticent, never moved from Xelloss's face. "You killed them…and one day the Greater Beast will have an order for you."

"Oho, nah, no no," he giggled, a forced giggle. "No, tch, haha, my mother doesn't make me do unnecessary thin—"

"And you'll kill me too," the ghost of Filia concluded, as a river of thick dark redness spilled repulsively out of her mouth, and nose, and eyes. "You'll kill me too, Xelloss," she gurgled. "And you'll kill Val. And you'll kill everyone that got in the way of the purity of your mission to serve the monster race…"

The phantom Zanaffar gave a screeching roar of delight at this verdict.

"Please, ahaha, please stop talking," Xelloss laughed, frantically. He waved his arms, and snapped his fingers impatiently, crisply, like a dog trainer with a little terrier pooping on a rug. "Really this is all so absurd…this is all silly, it's not real anyhow…You're not Filia." He tossed his hair, and compulsively, brushed some loose strands of it behind an ear, over and over. "Filia's back at her quaint little cottage making pottery! Snug as a bug!" Over and over and over. "Ha, yes. I'm not giving into this emotional sillyne—"

The specter of Filia vomited up more blood. In squirts, in streams, in rivers. Red kept coming and coming.

It was amazing how much came out of her slender, feminine body.

"Kill," she gurgled. "You."

Xelloss lunged for her. "Filia, stop. Stop talking, it's hurting you. Ahaha, silly dragon, stop talking, you heedless bigmouth, stop it Filia, stop talking ahahaha oh my GOD hahaha you're so messy stop talking I said you brainless…stop talking, stop lying about me, I won't…not ever…god damn it, Filia, don't…!"

His voice, though it never rose, trembled so much that the words were almost inscrutable. He held her head smiling and laughing helplessly, tittering in grief, while she continued to purge herself of life, all over the front of his robes, red everywhere.

And mixed with the red, weeping from her eyes, were little brutalized chunks of morning glories. Morning glories everywhere, all around the group of wanderers, dying morning glories, the residue of a private joke between Xelloss and Filia. Then a child's toy drizzled out, a wooden stick with two marbles to clack together, with the name "VAL" written in big capitals onto the side….

What they could not see, what Xelloss alone could see, were piles of stinking shredded up golden dragon carcasses. The exact scene of his infamous act of genocide, during the Koma War, a thousand years past.

Xelloss sat there, catatonic, holding the leaking-out life of his forbidden idol, caught in a limbo between being the monster race's purple-haired aberration, who was capable of feeling love, and that same race's glorified war hero, the Lesser Beast, the general who had killed a flock of ryuuzoku in the twitch of a finger, void of remorse. His smile was a horrible mangled thing, and no sound came from him.

Rezo didn't understand everything that the demon saw. Even if his eyes had worked, he wouldn't have been able to witness all of it. But he tried to speak. "Xe…Xelloss…I don't…think that it's real…"

Xelloss shook more and more violently, with silent, hysterical laughter. He shrugged, and shook some more, paralyzed. "Not yet," he finally sighed. "Not some of it." He looked around at all the dragon carcasses and sighed again. "…I think maybe I feel bad about some of this, after all. Huh. That's…curious. Do you suppose I've developed a conscience, Red Priest? Ahaha. Holy man, can you save my soul? How about your own?"

Rezo had no parry for that blow. "I…really don't know."

Ash's face carried the deepest registers of sadness as he watched their struggles unfolding. "Keep trying," he murmured, eyes urgent.

But the ghost of Lei Magnus-Shabranigdo was caressing Fibrizo, holding him up around his neck—a noose and a hug at the same time. Turning into a dark formless miasma. Crooning to Fibrizo that he needn't exist on his own, that he existed only to serve the dark lord, that he needn't fear the burden of choice or selfhood. Fibrizo was choking and crying with joy. Shrinking in size. To Nothingness. With bliss. "Father, Father, Father…!" he gagged, reaching up greedily for Magnus-Shabranigdo's face, to be further entwined, consumed, assimilated to the smoldering blackness. To cease existing, but with fear in his eyes at the same time as there was euphoria.

Rezo heard enough to understand, torn between Xelloss's and Fibrizo's dilemmas and his own confrontation. Goosebumps raised along his forearms and calves. He didn't know to whom he should go first. Help, help…yes, that was his purpose always, to help, to help, but whom should he help first?

"Ignoring me to bleed your heart at strangers again, eh, gramps?"

God, the voice was so horrible and wonderful and foreign and familiar all at once, and Rezo forgot everyone else that very instant. "…Zelgadiss?" The apparition was speaking to him at last.

"You lousy megalomaniac. You dare to show your face to me again? You died and I was getting okay. You've ripped off the scab, you piece of filth! You were NEVER there for me, so why NOW?"

The Zanaffar greedily snarled. Jeering.

Rezo's stomach dropped to his knees. Why? Why? Such a simple question. And his mind was a panicked blank. A blank!

"Why'd you come back?" Zelgadiss's specter advanced on Rezo, drawing his broadsword. "What FOR?"

"Be…" Rezo stuttered. He tried to think of the words. It seemed ever since the moment he'd reawakened from his slumber of death, this was the moment he'd prepared eloquent, tender remarks for. Now? No words came. None. "Be-because it…"

Zelgadiss mocked his great-grandfather pitilessly. " 'B-b-because it, it, it,' " he simpered, then roared, "Don't make me puke, you hypocrite!"

"But no, wait, please a moment, please I—"

"I hate you."

Oh, that hurt. Those three words. It was stunning, dazzling, how much those three words hurt coming from that specific person. "I…know. I know you do…and I deserve that, but…"

"I thought you died!"

"I did but—"

"FINE! THEN WHY DIDN'T YOU STAY DEAD?"

"For YOU!" Rezo finally screamed, palms raised over his head—breaking free of the mire of mutual despising and miscommunication.

The whole chamber rang and echoed with his maimed voice.

"For YOU! I came back for YOU! Because YOU CALLED MY NAME! YOU! Because I LOVE you! Zelgadiss, I show it pathetically, but I still do LOVE you…!"

The phantom of Zelgadiss balked.

"…More than my own life," Rezo added, in a tired rasp. "More…than anything or anyone else. And that's why…this…" He gestured at the ghost of his great-grandson, at the maze of terror around them "…is so hard."

At this, all other ghosts disappeared—Filia, her blood, the dragon bodies, Lei Magnus—but not the Zanaffar. It grumbled and growled, shifting weight and seeming to restlessly expand.

Ash's face looked like dawn after an endless night. "Yes…" he whispered. "Good, Sir Rezo. Keep going…"

Xelloss blinked, and frowned, his expression immediately retracting from the despairing to the mildly puzzled. "Whoa," was his profound assessment of the past half hour of agony, and then the even more astute post-script, "Hum!"

Fibrizo was curled into a fetal ball at the foot of the Zanaffar, where Lei Magnus's specter had been. "He left me," he whimpered.

Fibrizo needed help.

Rezo hesitated before Zelgadiss.

Then, with an expression of quiet anguish, he tore himself away, and went to Fibrizo. He braced the tiny demon lord, brushing some of his sweat-soaked black hair from his dazed eyes. "Sit up…it's alright," he crooned. "I'm…here." He had no idea what possessed him to say it. Maybe the need to be needed…the desperation to find a surrogate for the kinsman who towered over him hating him so fiercely. "I'm here."

Fibrizo looked up into Rezo's exhausted, sweaty, worry-creased …and yet…warm…serene…accepting face. He was astounded…and completely vulnerable. "…You're…here?"

"Yes," Rezo replied. "It's…alright now."

That was when something soft materialized by Rezo's right foot. He jolted, startled. "What…?" He picked it up and turned it over in his hands.

It was a big, lumpy teddy bear, with black button eyes.

Rezo's breath went ragged. He was smiling…so lovingly. His eyes felt heavy and moist. "Oh...look. Look at this."

Ash nodded.

Fibrizo blinked.

Xelloss crawled over. He cocked an eyebrow. "Er. It's a stuffed animal, Mister Greywers."

"Is it pink?" Rezo begged. "Tell me!"

"…Yes," Xelloss nodded. "Disgustingly pink. Powdery…pink. Ugh."

"No, you don't…! You don't understand." Rezo cradled the bear now, cradled it like a baby. Nuzzled it, like it was the most precious thing in the world. Then he gave an embarrassed laugh into the silence.

"Ah. Then maybe you should help us understand." Xelloss used the mild, measured tone of someone well-acclimated to bosses and employers who were decidedly off their rockers. He probably had a lot of practice, if Fibrizo was any indication.

"It was for my boy," Rezo explained. "It was for Zelgadiss, when he was little. This bear. Only I never gave it to him. I left it in my lab in Old Sairaag and…how can it be here? Strange…It was for his birthday…oh, my goodness, years ago. He was…seven, eight, I think?…and I got it on the way home from my laboratory late that night…and…"

A cleansing torrent of tears drizzled onto the pink bear's head…onto Fibrizo's face, as the lord of hell gazed, in awe, up at the painful beauty of a kind person like Rezo weeping.

"Why didn't you give it to him?" Fibrizo found himself prompting.

Xelloss, who had been about to ask, glanced at the Hellmaster, head cocked. "Eh?" he mumbled, puzzled at his boss.

"Because," Rezo breathily laughed, "it's, haha, it's pink…! For a very boyish little boy! And I didn't know that when I bought it, I thought it was blue, because I put my hand into the toy store's bin full of blue bears and didn't realize it was there by mistake…because, well you know…" He gestured at his eyes. "Oh. But if only I had just…regardless, it would have been okay, he wouldn't have really cared, if I had just…"

"HA!" came a sharp battle cry. And the ghost of Zelgadiss lunged at Rezo, at his heart, broadsword raised to skewer.

And that was when Fibrizo, the Hellmaster, who toyed with life, got involved in a human's life, for honorable reasons.

He stood, stepped in front of Rezo, shielding him completely, and pinched two fingers. A golden marble extracted from the heart-center of the charging chimera and perched between the Hellmaster's poised fingers. Fibrizo squeezed.

Zelgadiss immediately collapsed.

"You don't hurt Rezo, Rockface!" Fibrizo snarled. "GOT that?!"

Xelloss's eyebrows completely disappeared in his bangs. "Um," he said, uncharacteristically inarticulate once again. "Whoa."

Ash stepped forward and slipped his arms under Rezo's, hoisting him to his feet. "Everything is going to get better now," he said. "With a few bumps. But you're doing it."

Rezo wasn't listening. He shook free of Ash. "You, Fibrizo!" he snapped. "What did you just do to Zelgadiss?"

"I'm teaching him what happens when someone is mean to you," Fibrizo sneered, fingers closing in on the golden marble.

It was as if he were exhibiting a bizarre, sadistic sort of newborn loyalty to the Red Priest. The only way that he, a mazoku lord, knew how.

Rezo was not impressed. "STOP that." He ripped the tiny orb from the Hellmaster's fingers. "Nobody hurts my boy." He let the bauble go then, and it floated away, unharmed. "Don't you touch him."

Xelloss cringed, bracing for impact. For a tantrum. For a minor nuclear holocaust, even.

But Fibrizo was utterly abashed. He teetered back from Rezo and the fallen ghost of Zelgadiss, chided and shy. Crestfallen. "B-but…he's not even real…"

"You didn't seem to feel that way about your 'father' just now," was Rezo's savage retort. "You just back off, Fibrizo. Back off."

Silence. Fibrizo kicked at the dusty ground and laced his arms over his chest.

And Rezo was immediately ashamed of his harshness. "Oh…look…I appreciate what you were doing, for me…but…he's been through enough…my 'red button,' as you call him." He spread his arms, red velvet robes billowing at his sides. "His anger and bitterness, even his betrayal, are my fault. I can't in good conscience punish him for those things."

Fibrizo just shrugged, and turned away. "Whatever," the lord of hell churlishly mumbled.

"I hate to interrupt," Ash piped up. "But you're both wrong. When you felt regret for your past, Xelloss, and when you let go of your eyes and put Zelgadiss first, Rezo…and Fibrizo, when you showed care…for someone aside yourself and Shabranigdo…well. You, er, summoned Master Zelgadiss here. To, um, hasten the procedure of …moving on and growing…"

Fibrizo's proverbial tail came out from between his legs. "What? Oh, COME on! That's ludicrous!"

Xelloss poked the collapsed body of Zelgadiss with his foot. "For reals?" he interjected, like an emotionally labile preteen watching a reality show. With an irreverent and wholly sarcastic shrillness that would make the most grounded of people want to smack his grin off his face.

Fibrizo took a swipe. Xelloss yipped and ducked.

Rezo stooped over the fallen body of Zelgadiss.

The chimera lay on his back, now, still unconscious, but clutching the pink teddy bear of a should-have-been past. The Red Priest placed his hand over his kinsman's mouth. This was no phantom conjured from a tortured psyche anymore. Zelgadiss was breathing—and his breath rather reeked of coffee…but he was alive. Indeed, "for reals."

"Oh, God," Rezo whispered.

The Zanaffar was still here—and Zelgadiss was in danger again. Because of Rezo.

"Can you all swim?" Ash chimed. "Because you might be able to escape the Silver Beast that way! He's rather top-heavy and there's a lake in this direction." He pointed down a dirt-encrusted tunnel.

"I'd be delighted to go for a dip!" Xelloss chirped. Ever so casually, he curled his fingers around Rezo's and Fibrizo's arms. And then he bolted.

The Zanaffar ghost screeched in protest. A whole chunk of its leg had been ripped asunder by the selfless acts of its four prisoners, and now its prey was escaping. It pulsated a brilliant white gold and shimmered eerily like one great glob of laser breath. And then it plunged forward, limping but speedy, in pursuit.

"WAIT!" Rezo cried. He twisted in Xelloss's grasp, reaching for where Zelgadiss lay.

"I've got him, Sir Rezo!" Ash trumpeted, with the body of Zelgadiss and his teddy bear, an absurd sight, tossed over the spirit of Flagoon's shoulder. He trotted after Xelloss, huffing and puffing.

Xelloss lunged, dodged, curved, and sprinted through the bowels of the phantom tree like a nocturnal beast, never once slowing. Shortly he came upon a gelatinous transparent wall, like the underside of a jellyfish, and through it a seemingly endless dark body of water. "Time to hold your breath!" he crowed.

"I…I can't swim!" Rezo croaked, a delayed and dismaying realization. World renowned for his magical power, and he couldn't even doggy paddle. Peachy!

A tiny cold hand covered his mouth. "Just breathe normally. Deep Sea Dolphin taught me this trick…I've got Rockface covered, too."

Fibrizo.

"…Stuffed animals don't need to breathe, do they?" came the same juvenile voice, in an unsure squeak—evidently referring to the pink teddy.

"N-no, they don't," Rezo stammered. "Ah…don't worry."

And then all around him, wetness, coldness, crushing in, as Xelloss slid through the wall and into the lake.

Rezo took an experimental breath…with ease. Fibrizo had been sincere. He was producing oxygen for Rezo's lungs underwater. And, presumably, for Zelgadiss's lungs as well.

Payback? Was a demon lord capable of thanking a mere human that way? Incredible…! But all he had done was give his assurance that he hadn't left Fibrizo…hadn't handed him over to Nothingness…

Just then Fibrizo shrieked like an arachnophobic catching sight of a Tarantula. "IT'S TOUCHING ME! KILL IT, KILL IT! IT'S SLIMY, AGH, KILL IT!"

Rezo quivered too as something that felt like a centipede covered in grease brushed his ankle.

Xelloss lurched around and reset his grip more firmly on Fibrizo, a responsible retainer trying to keep his squirmy babysitt-ee from falling out of his arms. "Hold STILL, Lord Hellmaster," he tsk-ed. "It's just the Zanaffar's tentacles, and we're almost to the surface."

Well. Rezo didn't know about Xelloss, but the thought of a demon beast's tentacles groping someone's body disturbed him.

"NO, GETTIOFF GETTIOFF!" Fibrizo continued, not at all placated.

One good turn deserved another. Rezo gripped his staff tightly in his free hand and swung it with all his might, blindly, in the direction of Fibrizo's hysterical screams. He chanted a forceful Elmekia Lance. Like a potent lightning rod, his staff discharged in the water toward, he hoped, the correct target.

The spell made contact with something solid. A mangled roar beneath them signaled that the Zanaffar had at least been startled by his spell. It would only buy them a little time, though, because any Zanaffar was sealed off from the astral side's attacks.

Fibrizo stopped screaming, free. "Slimy," the Hellmaster shuddered.

"Good show, Sir Rezo!" Ash cheered, and Rezo began wondering if he could ever actually disappoint Flagoon's kindly spirit.

"Great, now you made it angrier," Xelloss hissed, in direct, pragmatic contrast. He swam upwards so fast that Rezo's ears popped from the rapidly changing water pressure.

At last they broke the surface; Fibrizo's spell cancelled out with a plorking sound, and Rezo took a liberating gasp of fresh air. "Are we back in the…the real world?" he coughed, scraping at the soaked hair plastered to his skull.

"Yes," Ash cried. "In Seyruun!"

"Where?" Fibrizo groaned. "I'm all wet…"

"Ah, Seyruun," Xelloss wisely intoned. "That explains it. Mister Zelgadiss comes here a lot, you see, and that's probably why it was so easy to summon him to Mister Ash's astral pocket. I thought they were already on their way to Vezendi, but apparently I was in error." He treaded water to the shore, holding Rezo's and Fibrizo's heads above the surface.

"I…I'm sorry, I don't follow you. Why does Zelgadiss come to Seyruun?" Rezo queried. He coughed up some lake water, sprawling in the sand, and wracked his brain for factoids on Seyruun…white magic central, led by a series of pacifist kings and princes…most recently the crown princess Gracia had fled after the alleged murder of her mother the queen's assassin, and the next daughter in line to the throne…

"Why, because he's in you-know-what with Princess Amelia Wil Teszla, of course," Xelloss coyly supplied. "It's repulsively obvious, ahaha. They travel together constantly."

"…Really? He's in love with her?" Somehow this lifted Rezo's spirit to the high heavens. The idea that his boy was capable of that much trust, and devotion, to another human being, after all he had done to Zelgadiss…

Another voice crudely, blearily interjected, "What…the fuck…?"

Speak of the devil.

"Ah, Mister Zelgadiss," Xelloss giggled. "Morning, sunshine!"

Rezo stopped breathing.

"You're turning blue, like a bruise," Fibrizo murmured, and Rezo took another gasping gulp of air, reminded of oxygen's necessity.

"Xelloss, you bastard," the chimera moaned in a gravely voice. He sat up and shook out his water logged steel-wire hair. "I was having high tea with Amelia and her father and recapping that nonsense we endured with Gioconda and Duclis, suddenly everything went..ugh…black and I thought I had…owch…fainted and was having a nightmare about you and someone else I hate, but evidently…" And then Zelgadiss fell mute.

Gawking at Rezo. Eyes those of a caged beast's.

The whole world stopped spinning. All sound ceased, and not a breeze disturbed the landscape along the outer edges of Seyruun. Xelloss, Ash, and Fibrizo all froze, captivated by the unfurling tableau.

…Now was probably the time for a deeply melodramatic speech, embracing, or dual-to-the-death-throe.

Complete with snarky cackling, hand-claws, and perhaps a cliché proclamation or two along the lines of "It's been a long time," or "So we meet again, o my kinsman and foe."

Well.

Rezo could only think to feebly mumble, "Er…hi, there."

Hi, there?!

Oh, bullocks.

Zelgadiss twitched. He raised a granite, white-gloved finger, and pointed it, with remarkable steadiness, at Rezo.

"…I'm giving someone…anyone…ten seconds to explain who the hell is sitting there in front of me looking exactly like my dead great-grandfather. And then, if nobody supplies me with information," he added crisply, drawing his broadsword, "someone is going to lose a vital organ or two. Because I know this has something to do with the jar that belonged to that dead demon lord." And he pointed the sword tip at Fibrizo.

The Hellmaster stood to his towering four feet of height and stuck his hands on his hips. His eyes grew greener with wrath. "Say that again, you ungrateful freakface. You'd be dead if I hadn't helped you breathe under that lake!"

Xelloss whistled. "Maybe we're all just having a wild acid dream," he suggested helpfully.

What, now?

In the middle of his icy fury, Zelgadiss slanted the Lesser Beast a schoolmarm-ish look of disapproval. "I don't do acid, you imbecilic pile of—"

"I found you!" Rezo blurted then, stupidly, with inconceivable joy. Zelgadiss was about to run him through, and all he could do was pathetically slaver his happiness at this chance at reconciliation. Well, perhaps that was poetic justice, the tables aptly turned. But Rezo reached in the direction of his assailant, unabashedly blissful. "I found you before he did and that's all that matters!"

"Who are you?" Zelgadiss growled, jerking back. "Before WHO did? Listen, I'll poke out your useless eyeballs if you tell me you're another copy 'trying to surpass Rezo.' I swear to gods I will. Nevertheless, talk. NOW."

For some reason, this caused Rezo to dissolve in laughter. He covered his face for a moment, wracked with loud, rich guffaws.

Zelgadiss approached apoplectics. "HEY!" he barked. "My GOD! Are you even LISTENING to me?!"

The disgruntled exclamations were like a lullaby to Rezo, for despite their harshness, they carried the sounds of the known, the safe and secure, the patchwork of bright spots in the past with Zelgadiss in them, like sunlight piercing through the opaque, oppressive lead gratings of a window, through the tumult and darkness of Rezo's incurable blindness. So often, seemingly from toddlerhood, Zelgadiss had fussed at his comparably impractical, imaginative, self-destructive great-grandfather, had chided him for not sleeping enough, not eating enough, saying yes to too many healing requests, and loving concern had always been behind that shrewish chastising. Now Rezo felt so warm, remembering that love that hid behind the nagging and bickering. He should have been more aware of it before.

"I'm sorry! It's just…It's kind of silly to gouge out something that's already useless, my boy—I mean it's not a persuasive tactic!" he quipped.

But his heart was thundering in his ears; he was three feet away from the person who had single-handedly called him back from the dead, ten years ago, when Shabranigdo was defeated. The person who meant more to him than anything. The person whose yelling made him feel happy.

"Hoh shits," Zelgadiss exclaimed, staggering to his feet. "I must say, you've sure got Rezo's attitude down. And his weird-ass sense of humor. Come on, sicko. Who ARE you? Did Xelloss put you up to this? And who's the hippie?"

"I'm Ash!" the spirit of Flagoon happily boomed. "I'm a tree!"

Zelgadiss blinked. "Wow," he grunted. "Maybe I AM having an acid dream…"

"Zelgadiss, I can prove it's really me," Rezo pledged. Information privy only to him poured from his lips: "You like oatmeal for breakfast. With a touch of curry, of all spices, HAH, and I bought you an acoustic guitar when you were four, and when you were fifteen you told me you thought Eris was a brainless clingy slut, which is really rather rude of you, but anyway, you're alarmingly good with guns, Ra Tilt is your specialty spell, you liked to play pranks on Dilgear and Truth or Dare with Zolf, and and…"

He took a deep breath and continued:

"And alright here's a memory, when you were two you got locked into the second floor bathroom and your rear end got stuck in the toilet because you were tiny but determined to get out of diapers that day, my little ambitious guy, and I picked the lock to get in the bathroom and rescue you from the flushing-monster, and when you stopped crying, ha-HA, oh dear, you asked me how I picked locks and I taught you when you were older how to pick locks and safes too, and…"

He gulped.

"And…and I never had enough time for you, and I put my stupid STUPID eyes before you, and I was a selfish damnable old fool and that's why you started hating me, and stopped calling me—"

"Gramps," Zelgadiss spoke the word, unable to otherwise breathe, and without thinking.

And then the chimera blinked, and his face flushed crimson with the weirdest feeling of longing and shame and nostalgia and gratitude and regret all wrapped up into one moment…feelings he'd not had since the day Rezo died helping Lina Inverse slay the same Shabranigdo that he'd resurrected.

Rezo was, for a moment, stunned. And then he said, "Yes. Gramps. You remember."

"…Al…right, alright…I believe you. It's…you. But. How are you here? How are you back?" It was a softer, calmer question than Rezo had anticipated, had dreaded, in the bowels of Flagoon's ghost. Rezo should have known. Zelgadiss was such a rational creature, so composed and stoic, and always had been.

"That's Fibrizo's doing." Rezo gestured at the petulant demon lord. "After all the master of death would have the materials to pull back a one soul like a card out of a big file cabinet, and…"

"Not that simple," Fibrizo mumbled. "Takes skill."

Rezo continued explaining. "And well, Zelgadiss, furthermore, it's only part of my soul in that jar in Vezendi, contaminated. This me…" He placed his hands on his chest, over his shoulder guards and mantle. "Well, this me is,…just Rezo. For better or worse. Asking you to listen to me before acting, just this once."

Another pause. And then Zelgadiss gave a quiet hard laugh, a cynical hiss of "keh!" He sheathed his sword and he asked, "Why would I do anything as pointless and illogical as listen to you?"

Fibrizo bristled like a territorial lapdog. "Stop being mean to Rezo!"

"And that's another thing!" Zelgadiss barked right back. "You've got that nasty little sadist at your side—Shabranigdo's bitch! How can you claim to me that you're 'just you,' free of that monster, with Hellmaster Fibrizo, his most powerful servant, clutching at your robes and defending you? That's all but paradoxical!"

"Wait…no…" Slipping. Reconciliation, family, atonement, slipping through Rezo's fingers. Butter. Just slipping away. No. No. The lights all going out. No. "Please, my boy, I can explain…"

"That's ALWAYS your line!" Zelgadiss gritted. Rezo's desire to make contact, to seek his penance, only seemed to set off some feral fury in Zelgadiss's head, like a red flare, becoming a blaze, far past reason. "Do you really take me as that stupid? That gullible? That…fickle?! That I would ditch my friends and kiss your ass again, because you've cooked up another hare-brained pie in the sky dream that will 'make every sacrifice worth it'? YOU DREAM ON! I don't BELIEVE that garbage anymore, Rezo! Just...DIE! Just die and STAY DEAD, and be glad I'M not assisting you in getting there faster!"

It was a brutal, systematic assault on anything Rezo had planned to say. The Red Priest had no rebuttal, no retort. And, certainly, not the heart to defend himself to the person he'd so tragically wronged.

The ground rumbled ominously. Something was coming. "Tick-tock!" Xelloss giddily intoned.

Because the wet sand was too lumpy for steady footing, Rezo crawled on all fours over to Zelgadiss's feet. The chimera, bereft of the steam of his cathartic outburst, shifted uncomfortably at the pathetic gesture. Then Rezo felt around in the sand.

It was Fibrizo who knew, somehow, what Rezo sought. He grasped the soggy pink teddy bear, now missing one button eye, and handed it over.

"Something wicked this way coooomes," Xelloss sang, tapping his foot.

Rezo ignored Xelloss. He lifted the bear in both hands like some sepulcher in a holy investiture ceremony. "This was for you."

Zelgadiss was flabbergasted. "Gods, old man, it's a soggy stuffed animal. Are you that off your rocker?"

"When you were little. I bought it. I thought it was blue. When Eris told me its actual color, I was too ashamed by my insufficiencies to give it to you. I kept waiting to be perfect for you, to deliver what everyone expected of me. A mage's power, a saint's perfection."

Veins stood against the thin white skin of Rezo's forehead. The effort not to cry, which Zelgadiss would see as melodrama and grandstanding, was titanic.

"It was stupid. My lonely little boy would have loved the devotion behind that gift, not the gift itself. Therein lay the perfection, in the love I held but never showed you. Wasted perfection. Wasted love. I won't ask you to forgive me…that would be too great a task to place on you, the victim of all this."

Zelgadiss half-heartedly bristled. "I'm NOT a victi—"

" But I just ask that you know…" Oh. It really hurt. His eyes, his tear ducts. They ached. "…that…I love you, I always did…I want you to take this…better late than never…and I want you to at least consider…not…" He choked. "…not hating me. Free yourself from me." He swallowed. "Deal?"

Zelgadiss was riveted in place. His huge winterstorm blue eyes drank in the sight of the bear, as if it were an old acquaintance he'd thought long dead. "Oh…yeah, wait. That bear…was in your lab…in Sairaag. Sylphiel…my friend, she was standing there praying for guidance and saw it and…she said it was…cute. It was on a shelf. With the Claire Bible stone tablet and…other stuff…"

Rezo nodded.

"I thought it…was just another…damn experiment…in magic…some valuable item…"

"Oh yes, my boy. Valuable indeed. The most valuable in the whole laboratory. Your birthday present." Rezo laughed, pitiably, brokenly. "Aren't I just an idiot?" He bowed his head.

Fibrizo scowled at Zelgadiss.

And Zelgadiss said, "Yes, you are," but then he bent…and picked up the bear. "…deal." He turned and started toward Seyruun's town square, not looking back. A diminutive girl in white, with a sensuously curved body and short, tousled hair the color of a ripe plum, rushed to greet him with a hearty embrace.

"He's leaving," said Fibrizo. "With that Justice-girl. He's leaving you behind." A strange green fire lit in his eyes, a betrayed, hateful, raking-coal fire, as though he were feeling Rezo's abandonment vicariously.

"Yes," Rezo replied, smiling and weeping, weeping and smiling. "Yes. I know he is. That's as it should be."

"Is it?" Ash, who had been quiet for some time, pressed.

At that moment, the ground beneath Zelgadiss and Amelia crumbled.

"Annnnd it's here," Xelloss clucked.

Out from the water pipeworks beneath Seyruun, in a sickening sulfur-scented geyser, came the phantom Zanaffar. And it was bearing down on Zelgadiss and Amelia.

Fast.