It was the next morning, or maybe it wasn't. The Calm Lands had gotten dark and then they'd gotten light again. We'd snuffed out all the candles and then occupied ourselves the way respectable people are supposed to after dark, say, when they're sleeping in the same bed and it's not like when Tidus and Wakka are sharing because there aren't enough to go around.
Hey, don't look at me expecting all these juicy details. A lady never tells. This is not that kind of story!
Well, okay, maybe it totally is, but I'll make a deal with you. When you start sharing the fantastic details of your sex life with me, I'll quid pro ya' -- and boy, can I tell some stories, and not just my own, either. For some reason, I guess because my boyfriend is dead and people figure I'm all weepy and lonely and starved to hear about any kind of physical contact, people just unload all their steamy and delicate secrets on me. You know what I wasn't ready to hear about? Paine and Gippal and Bara -- okay, no. I need to just stop talking about this before I derail even further.
Anyway. What was I talking about again? Oh right, not telling you about my sex life. Maybe if you give me all your gil.
No? Okay then.
It was the next morning, I guess. It was orange like dawn instead of like sunset and I stood barefoot in the black sand and let the waves lap up around my ankles. It was my last day to wear one of my sun dresses, so I picked a pale green one the color of one of those queen moths. You know what I'm talking about, the ones the color of melon with those moonspots on their wings. Speaking of, there had been a bowl of melon waiting for me when I woke up. Ashura's excellent room service, I guess because she figured that when next we met it would be for the last time.
I had woken up with my ankles cuffed together by one of the belts from his gi, but he'd still been sound asleep, or faking it at least, so I'd unbuckled myself, had some melon, wriggled into a dress and then gone down to the beach. He could explain that later, and I figured he would. I mean, we weren't even sleeping on the edge of a terrifying and bottomless abyss this time. But I told you before. I don't know if Auron even knows with Auron sometimes.
So I stood there and listened to the water on the rocks, felt the tide lapping at my feet, and watched the little fish dart around in the shallows. I had my back to the fairy bridge purposefully, mainly so that if Levi came strolling out he would see that I was deep in contemplation and maybe leave me alone for once.
Of course, it wasn't Levi that came strolling out, was it?
"You gonna tell me about why I got the belt treatment, or just leave me in desperate and scintillating suspense?" I asked.
"I got tired of your foot in the small of my back, kicking the backs of my knees, kicking my shins, kicking the base of my spine -- " his list was exacting and numbered, I could tell, and he was prepared to go on for a while.
I held up my hands, "Okay, okay, I read you, big man. I guess I do sometimes have the problem of having an active dreamlife."
"It's all right," he said flatly, "It is something I will learn to deal with."
"Really?" I asked.
"I have plenty of belts," he said, and that pretty much satisfied my curiosity on that one.
We were still for a little while then, watching the surf, listening to the water, listening to the hymn.
"What are you thinking about?" he asked as he moved to stand at my back.
"Tomorrow," I chirped like a songbird, because I am Princess Aurora of the Al Bhed and I can do things like that, or at least I like to pretend I can.
"Tomorrow," he repeated, and dwelt on that for a moment. "Not today?"
"Nope," I said, letting my hand flutter up to wave him off. "Not yesterday either. I'm not worried about that. After all, I got you, babe. Syho ryhtc syga mekrd fung, and all that. We'll do this because there's no other way for it to happen. It's like beating Sin. We'll do what we can, everything we can, and that will be enough, because if it's not, that's all she wrote, right? Well, I don't think it is. My pops would say, Ed yeh'd dra fyo dra funmt'c syta. Someday we'll go into the sun, and maybe that day's not too far away."
"I would say, 'Wishing doesn't change the world,'" he said gravely, then stopped.
"But?" I asked, because well, there had to be, didn't there? We were in a world made of wishes, inhabited by wishes, and we had devoured wishes to give us strength. What Yuna has? Maybe what every summoner has, or is trying to find? Faith. Belief. Wishing power.
"Maybe it does," he finished, and that was all he wrote.
"You'd better believe it," I laughed.
The Shape of his Heart
By Gabihime ( gabihime at gmail dot com )
Chapter Ten: Showdown: All in, cards speak
It was different somehow, completely different now than when Leviathan had stood waiting for us at the crossing of the nave and transept. The whole place was eerily quiet, and although I knew the torrent of water went on uninterrupted all around us down the exterior walls of the temple, here, the sound was strangely muffled, like it might have been the faint patter of rain and nothing more. I had the intense impression that I was in the presence of something ancient and dangerously pure, like a flame that burns at such a high temperature it'll take your arm off, bone and all and cauterize the wound as it does, so you're without an arm and it looks as if it's never been there.
The tiled floor was bare, all of Leviathan's little decomposing sea creatures and microclimate tidepools gone as if they had never studded the floor. The torches along the wall bloomed blue-white, and then moon golden and suddenly the seams between the tiles caught up their radiance and I realized that what I had taken for mortar between Leviathan's tiles of aquamarine and lapis was a mosaic of spiderweb lines of diamonds and moonstones. As they lit up in brilliance, with the crossing in the center of their diamond dewdrop pattern, the tiles fell away into shadow and the golden light streaming through the rose window outlined two figures barefoot on the rug. Leviathan was kneeling, on one knee, eyes closed. The king of the summons had bowed his head and knelt in the service of his lady. Around us the hymn braided up like strands of silk and I could feel his reverence in every word, and I wanted to fall to my knees beside him.
Because she was standing there still and perfect, skin like alabaster, hair like cornsilk studded with the stars of her hairpins. She opened her amber eyes slowly and I could hear Auron clear his throat, trying to find his voice to let his challenge boom across the space, but I touched his arm and shook my head. He looked at me then, maybe hard and maybe soft, I can't really say, but he stepped back and I slowly stepped forward and folded my hands in front of me and tried to imagine what it must be like to have Yuna's strength, to have Yuna's way of knowing what to say and how to say it.
"It's time," I said, and somehow my voice rang like a bell, carrying clearly in the silence, so I sounded not so much like ten parts a spazz and three parts a disaster waiting to happen, but like something else, maybe like that princess I've been trying so hard at pretending to be since I was five years old. "It's time," I said, "For all the deeds of the past to be reckoned. We have come to seal our pact, Fayth of Indara. We have come to finish things."
She smiled and it was strange, a flicker.
"I hope you have prepared yourself," she said, and raised one slender hand to point squarely at me as she closed her eyes again, "Because I will kill you. Commend your souls now, because there will be no one to send you." She opened her eyes again and looked at me, looked at us, and it was like a hundred golden needles through my heart, "The you that is here will die. The you that has never been will come to be. I will be the one to finish things."
She snapped her fingers, crisp, a momentary sound like a crystal ornament falling to the floor, and I felt that same soul-rise of holy cure filling me up inside and out, lifting me out of myself and into myself, into everything, she and Auron and Leviathan, this place, the Summoned Sea, a world under the skin of the world, lifting me into everything and driving me deeper than I could have imagined going, and it hurt like music and sunshine, like having all of me pulled to its fullness, as if I could burst into full blossom, right then and there, and I felt like crying. I felt like falling down and crying over everything from the beginning, each moment like the beat of my heart, like the beat of the song, memories rising around me, through me, and letting me settle down at last onto my feet, into my self as I was. Such was Ashura's final mercy.
"The doorway to heaven is open," Leviathan said, then stood and bowed his head to us once and melted into the flickering shadows, to watch and yet not be seen.
"It is time," she said. "I am sorry that this shall be the end, but make no mistake. It shall be the end," she said, and then faintly I heard, "All dreams must end. Here is your quiet night."
And she had rippled into nothing, into the throb of the music, into the heat shimmer of the torches, rippled upward, rippled outward, fair and terrible like glass being blown in the hot air. In that first moment it was both Ashura and something other, but then that had gone into nothing and the All Holy was upon us.
I don't know what it was that I imagined Ashura's otherself would look like, in all the moments that had passed by me before. Indara had no shortage of depictions of its king, but curiously none of its queen, the diamond Lady, the moonstone lady. It was then maybe that I understood, that I knew, that some things you just don't depict, even in a holy place, even in a sanctuary of the fayth.
She was tall, slender like a whippet, or maybe like a birch woman, the kind I used to look at in fairy tale picturebooks, as if she had been planted in the earth and then grown to that lovely and impossible height. She turned her head and the stones that hung from her crown chimed like bells, and her hands fluttered like live doves on the tethers of her wrists and her own cure burned up the air around her, carving halos and roses of holy frost in the air around her.
I was already twisting to turn back towards Auron, feathers between my fingers, and it was an impossible moment, slow and terrible as I brushed the feather against his cheek and he caught the pulse of haste because suddenly something seized me by my arm, wrenching me up off the ground so that I hung there, as if this were the gallows where Yevon could finally hang me as a witch.
A thing held me, a thing held me like I was some piece of filth, or nothing at all, it was, it was, it was a terrible thing, with red hair like a demon's mane and eyes bloodshot, yellow like a cat's eyes, only rimmed around with black, devil's shadow, and it opened its mouth and it had teeth, it had teeth, these teeth and its skin was like clay that had baked ten thousand years in a furnace, and it shook me like it would shake the bones from my tendons, shake all of me out of joint so I fell in so many pieces that there would never be any Rikku again, and then it screamed. It screamed.
And then it laughed.
"I will paint myself with your blood, Rikku Cidolphus. I will paint myself with your blood."
And then I screamed. I screamed and screamed and screamed because I couldn't think of anything else, just the screaming, the seizure running, like I was a lizard who could lose its tail to get away from a bird, like I had a skin to leave behind that wouldn't spill my insides out everywhere, and something must have happened, might have happened, because I was scrabbling across the ground on all fours, thinking of nothing, thinking of nothing, just screaming and screaming and screaming and --
A bottle broke over my head, making my skull smart and my eyes bulge as cold syrup matted my hair and slipped down my neck. I could breathe. I could breathe.
And then I saw.
The great red thing was towering above me, bearing down, teeth and hair and those mad yellow eyes, and I was on the ground, on my hands and knees, my belly pressed to the stone. He was standing above me, between us, the neck of the bottle of remedy he'd broken over my head still hanging jagged from his hand, pressed back but still standing, still standing, the old wicked blade of the muramasa bearing the brunt of a bloody scimitar that was longer from curve to hilt than the length of his body.
"Rikku," he grunted, husky and strained, but I was already moving, rolling to get out from under him so that he was free to move. And he did move, putting his shoulder behind the blade and somehow throwing her off of him so that she fell back a step and he lunged forward and struck. It was a heavy blow and she staggered, or at least I thought she staggered, but instead she was shimmering, like heat off the desert ruins in the zenith of the day, and somehow it wasn't the terrible red thing any longer, but instead the white lady again, and the doves fluttered again and her high cure knit her whole, perfect, and peerless.
I was going to have to do something about that. I finally got my feet again and let the haste pulse through me as the last feather from Frances fluttered into nothing, then I dug my fingers deep inside my side satchel and came up with what I wanted, a silk net like the sky full of stars. I didn't stop to think, didn't let myself wonder what would happen to me if the red monster came back, just gritted my teeth and charged right at her, leaping as I spread my net on the ambient magic in the air and let it fall over her, cleaving to her skin across the bare marble of her breast. A heartbeat gone, and then it burst into far spread points of wine light, and I knew I had caught her in my reflect.
I skidded to a halt on the far side of her, wheeling to dig my fingers into my bag again, but she was already shimmering, and the white lady was gone leaving a somber blue dancer in her place. She held a golden scale made of a thousand spinning, moving cogs by one granite finger, and when she looked at me I felt I had been pinned by iron gone red hot in a fire.
"That will not work," she said, and the wheels in the scale spun into a blur of action and reaction, a turn forward and a rapid recoil back. "I am the balance on which the world hangs. You cannot slay me."
And the wheels and cogs stopped suddenly as if all the little particles in the air around had gone frozen, and a thousand prisms split the light around her and my reflect dissolved before her dispel.
Then I swallowed the fear that had built like a dead thing at the back of my throat and dug and dug into my bag of treasures, my sack of things the dead left behind them, the things I sift out of them before their last and final rest, my bags and parcels filled with nothing but personal effects, last rites, and dying wishes.
There are things that the human mind knows, my pops says, and there are things that the human mind knows that it doesn't know that it knows. If my brain is a web of lines tying all my memories, all my thoughts together, all the things I can think and will think, then there are way, way too many of those little threads linking moment to moment for me to ever really understand them all. So there are plenty of those little connections, things that I know that I don't know that I know, that maybe I'll never, ever be aware of. I think the human mind is an impossibly large place -- bright, pulsing, a network, a star that pumps like a heart. My pops once told me that they called those things quasars in the old days.
But there are times when you're torn to the limit, when you're strained as hard as you can strain against yourself, when you've maybe got more adrenaline pulsing through your veins than blood, when you're burning up a white-hot high -- a quasar high -- and in those moments you can understand.
I fell backwards into it, into the understanding, feeling my fingers digging through my bags as if my hands had hearts and minds and eyes of their own, and I drew blind, like I was drawing cards again, and there was a grain of sand that weighed more than Spira, that might break my spine and all of my bones and carry me through the belly of the world and out the other side, but I held it, I held it like a bare burning flame in the palm of my hand. In my other hand a marble sputtered electricity, jolting through me like I was a circuit.
And then I clapped my hands together like I could call the end of everything.
And a jolt with a shorter wave than electricity rippled through me, seizing me up, and it was like all my nerves fired at once, fired impossibly, tightened every coil of my body so I became a precision fighting machine. I felt like I was walking a tightrope of murder, and I knew it was the same for him.
I don't know if you've ever watched him move, I mean really move. Tidus likes to say that he charges into everything and leaves us to run flailing after in his wake, but maybe that's not really it. He doesn't have to think about what he does ahead of time because he thinks with his body. If you've ever really watched him move, you'll understand what I mean. He thinks with his body and he feels with his body. The thinking he's always done, and maybe the feeling he had to learn, or maybe it just comes naturally. When he loved me he loved me, and there was no thinking about it. Maybe that's why I stopped being afraid. Maybe that's why I'm still not afraid even now.
He had engaged her, captured her attention fully, that red monster with the seven foot blade, and theirs was an exchange of steel. Blow for blow he caught and parried her strokes, and sparks like pyreflies struck off in the air when their blades met. And she pressed him, pressed him like she would back him into a corner, but he's a swordsman, the best fencer I have ever known, and he kept on his feet, melting in and out of her zoned rage while she reared to strike him like a snake. But he was like water, or the breath of wind, and somehow he moved between her strikes, flowing like a haze, his sword like a lash, each blow with the force of a hurricane behind it, so that it was like a lightning strike pitting the ground and fusing up the sand when his sword struck her strange stony soul-skin.
I knew then what I had to do, knew what it was that would save us if I could just spread the net. So I crept up on that terrible thing while her sword sang against his blade, crept up on her and let my starry silk brush like a breath of nothing against her back -- and then, so she would know I was there, would figure my intentions, I dug my hands into her deepest secrets, not for want of finding anything, but just to draw her attention. My hands came away curiously full when I had figured them empty, my fist closed tight around something small and hard, like a hunk of coal or marble.
And then he had thrown his shoulder into me, sending me sprawling behind him as he took another strike that she had meant for me, to cleave me clean through, to let out my blood. She would paint herself.
He panted and I could see he was bleeding, blood running down one arm and making his palm sticky like it was covered in red glue. Here is the tie that binds us, I thought, and I found it there in my bags, the silver minaret of an elixir, and I wrenched off the top and slung it over him so that it rained like fairy water. He didn't spare a moment to look at me then because neither of us had a moment to spare, but it was there, laid bare between us. I have given you all my best.
He dodged her strike and then he struck, and I had lost my fear, so I struck, and then he struck, and I danced past the blade that sang so close it took away the end of one of my braids with it as I spun around.
And then he sank his sword into her so that she screamed, and then she was fury, impossible fury as she put her own clawed hand around the hilt of his sword and dragged it out of his mortal hands, pushing it first deeper into her belly and then pulling it out, slick with the blood that was as clay red as her skin. She threw his sword away then and I heard it clatter against a wall forever-far-away as she shimmered and she shimmered, the white lady pulsing up in her own quasar and I couldn't think, I couldn't think, I couldn't move fast enough -- and then I found it there between my fingers, a curtain made of moonbeams, and I threw myself against him and pulled it over both of us as we hit the floor hard and the All Holy exploded into white hot light and fury, turning everything to stardust and burning like it would sear the flesh from my bones. I might have screamed then, screamed then and not known it, never heard it, because there was a high, keening pulse like music in the air, although it was a song I didn't know.
And it had maybe seared all my skin off into ash, but I was breathing, I was breathing, maybe only just, but I was breathing, and as I struggled to untangle myself from the skein of lunar silk that had saved our lives I saw her hands flutter, felt the holy cure ripple through the air, saw the magic splash against her reflect like it was water running down channeled steel, felt it fill me up again, felt it fill me up deep, knew it had washed over him too as I felt his strong, steady hand on my arm as he got to his feet, saw her, saw her shimmering, shimmering back to that blue dancer, to her scales and her dispel, but then his hand on my arm was strength, his strength, all of it in me, for me, all of everything, each moment that had been like a flame, like my pulse, and it was just enough, it was just enough.
I palmed another heavy grain of sand from somewhere lost at the bottom of my bag and he pressed a stone that was as cold as December into my other palm and I threw myself back against him as I brought them together and my supernova split the room, throwing us both against the wall so hard it left a spiderweb of impact fracture. He took my weight, kept my spindly rollerskate body from cracking into shards against the marble, but at this we were finally both spent, and I had begun digging feebly for some kind of potion in my bags when some beautiful alabaster ankles came into my field of vision -- that I was at ankle height should tell you something about my condition -- and then I was lifted up and taken away to heaven.
"You are matchless," she said softly, and it was clear she offered this with genuine respect. I'm not so sure I looked all that matchless, hanging on big red's arm and panting like an asthmatic even after her final cure, but it had all come to an end, from the first moment, to this moment. It had at last come to the final rest. This was our quiet night. And then I couldn't stand it any more and I just wept and wept.
He let me cry, hanging on his arm like I'd never hung on it before, carrying my weight like I was only two ducks and a penny gil, didn't say anything, just put his hand on my back, and maybe I was crying for both of us, crying for all of us, Leviathan and Ashura lost forever in an abandoned temple, the arrogant guado lawyer who'd given up all the things that made him alive, that made him a man, to be with her, Ashura, once upon a time, once not so very long ago she had been a woman, just a woman with a heart big enough to enfold the world inside it. Spira had taken from them and taken from them, just like it had taken from me, had taken from him, taken from everyone, until it was all ten kinds of miracles that we could still stand, that we were still breathing, that I could still smile and laugh and dance and run around buck naked.
"Now you perhaps know," and that was Ashura, quiet like raindrops on the back of my neck, "More than you knew before. This world is worth saving."
"And you have learned this difficult lesson without giving away your life," and that was Leviathan, coming up behind her to lay his long taloned fingers against her white arm, "What it means to live. Even when the path is dark and bleak, even when your path seems long and endless, at last there will be a moment when you come into the light, even if you must rend the sky to let it in. When there is a will, you can always make a way, Rikku of Cidolphus."
I laughed then, weak and exhausted and I finally managed to stand up again on my own two feet, although he kept his hand against my back.
"Now that sounds like something my pops would say."
And then Auron chuckled, low, like a tremor and then rolling, like he'd never get tired of laughing, but then at last he said, "Then maybe he's more intelligent than I gave him credit for."
I thought about it.
"Not really," I said, "Although I guess that depends on what exactly you mean by 'intelligent.' But he's always been a risk taker. He likes to say, 'Huputo ajan vuiht y haf luihdno fedruid mucehk cekrd uv dra cruna.' It means, like, let me think," I squinched up my eyes, "You'll never find the undiscovered country unless you leave the one you already know. I freely admit he's kind of retarded, but maybe it's the kind of retardation that everybody needs once in a while."
"I think," said Leviathan, and he said it in his Yea-ye-shall-listen-unto-me-for-I-speaketh-the-truth fayth voice, "That it may just be the kind of retardation that could save this world."
-
We went into the center of the temple, the crossing where the nave met the transept, the place of our pacts and challenges, with its tapestry rug figured over with fish and sea titans and other things from the briny depths, the mandala of light where the sun from the rose window left its handprint against the lapis and aquamarine tile of the floor, and Leviathan pulled the rug aside and uncovered a spiral mosaic that fell away in pieces into the darkness. Two figures rose out of that maw, two figures twined together as if they had been dancing at the moment they were flash frozen, a long fingered guado, razor thin, with hair swept back from his forehead, an elegant woman with long, cascading braids and a kind face. They were both like marble, or like marble spun from cobwebs, slick and shimmering and wrapped together as if there could never be any tangling them apart.
"Here we have waited long," said the Leviathan that stood looking at himself, stone frozen in that statue, "But now I think it is time that we are done with the waiting. You have proven yourself worthy, Rikku of Cidolphus, Auron of Faris, by all the laws that have ever bound us, that have ever bound mortal men. If, at one time, Yunalesca Yu granted us a way, now at last we have been given a new way."
Ashura moved and again she tinkled like bells and my heart felt like it would burst just looking at her. She smiled. "You love well enough," she said comfortably, "That I shall be satisfied."
"Now it is the time of the end of Indara," said Leviathan, and his voice split the air like it was knit of magic, "We have closed one compact, and now we shall make a new covenant. Rikku Cidolphus, I would give you a heavy burden to carry. Will you bear it?"
"Um," I said, because I couldn't think of anything else to say. But then I thought again about the undiscovered country, and dwelt for a moment on what had happened to me for taking ill-advised bets. Then I stopped. "Hey, you always act like you're so awesome that you know what I'm going to say before I say it, so why are you bothering to ask me now?"
Leviathan looked like he was thinking that over, then he shrugged.
"You have a point. Sworn and witnessed."
"Hey," I danced, waving my arms, because now seemed like a really good time to give everyone a reminder about the ants that I keep in my drawers, but Leviathan just ignored my primo dancing and waved nonchalantly in my direction as he turned his attention to Ashura.
She folded her hands before her chest and she looked like the Madonna, golden and fair and diamond tipped. I became so engrossed in watching her that I forgot to keep dancing. After a moment, she spoke.
"Auron Faris, I would also give you a heavy burden to carry. It is nothing easy, in these times of trouble, but I believe I am not mistaken in thinking that you have some experience with bearing a burden alone. Will you do this thing?"
He looked at me, looked at them, and then turned once to look over his shoulder at the great doors standing open and the tangerine glow of the surf behind them. Just then I knew what he would say, knew he could carry the world on his back if someone asked him, knew that nothing could buckle him, and maybe that had always been true, and maybe he hadn't known it before, or maybe just forgotten it and been reminded. It swelled then, in my soul, in my guts, and in the dark places of my insides where my roots are buried.
I could never ask him to be less than he is.
"Let it be," he said, and that was that. It was final.
"Sworn and witnessed," she said, and then she stepped toward him.
What happened next I'm still not really sure. Even if somebody really versed in the explanation of stuff, like that historian guy Machen, even if he took the time to write out in triplicate what happened then, I'm still not sure I'd understand it. It happened all at once, the hymn blossomed around us, around me, and I could feel it in my heartbeat, could feel it in the blood pulsing at my wrists, and then Leviathan's cool hand was on my arm firmly, a touch that burnt like salt and coral and the sea, and all I could see were storm gray eyes with amber lines like lightning strikes.
And suddenly the cobweb marble statue before us, two figures wrapped in plastic, began to dissolve into sand and the magic burst over us like an explosion of pyreflies, steam and hissing and the strong mother beat of the hymn. I fell to my knees coughing as the sand of the fayth slipped away into nothing, down that deep, endless maw from where it had come.
Even though I was gentle, you still couldn't keep your feet. Such is just my way, I thought.
Then I thought, Wait. I didn't think that.
Then I thought, You certainly are your father's daughter -- and by that I mean that you are not very clever.
Then I pounded myself on the head and cried, "Why am I insulting myself?!"
"Leviathan," I head a reproachful voice, gentle in the cradle of my ear, "Be sweet."
I looked up, and I must've been crosseyed or something because Ashura was leaning comfortably against big red's arm, like he had gone and traded me in for a better model. And then I looked down again and I could see those bare guado feet in front of me. Then he leaned down and offered me his hand.
"Okay," I said, scrambling up on my own and ignoring the goldfish queen while he shrugged again, "Somebody gonna tell me what it is exactly that I agreed to ten seconds ago?"
It won't matter, even if I tell you, I thought. It's already done.
"I'm starting to get kind of an impression anyway," I threw my hands up glumly.
"We are sworn, Rikku Cidolphus. Our contract here is ended. We will walk with you so long as you walk. You shall carry us into whatever future Spira may have, and if we are to meet our end, we will all meet it together. Such is an acceptable fate, in my opinion," said Ashura, and that faint smile curled up on her face again like a cat.
You're honored, I know, I thought.
I wheeled to face big red, my hands on my hips. "Is he talking to you this way too?"
Auron looked away for a moment, then looked back.
"No," he said. "She's talking to me."
"Aww," I started to dance my ant dance again, utterly distressed, "Aww, aww, awwwwww. You mean you got her and I got stuck with, with, with him? Raw deal. Raw deal raw deal raw deal."
I am gracious so I am going to pretend you didn't just say that, he said, only it was to me, in my head.
"Ashura," I clasped my hands in front of me and tried to look the best and sweetest and most charmingly wonderful I have ever looked, "Don't you want to trade? Come on, I'm much nicer than him, I really am."
Auron grunted and she laughed, musical, as if I were the drollest thing that ever were droll.
"It is your place to worship me," she said consolingly, "It is his place to carry me."
It is your place to worship her, agreed Leviathan, You are born under my star, after all. You can't help it.
I sighed.
"This is how it's gonna be, isn't it?" I asked, but I already knew the answer, even before he thought it at me, high and mighty.
"It is," he said, and that was Leviathan.
"It is," he said, and that was Auron.
"It is," she said, and that was Ashura.
"It is," I said, and then I took a deep breath. "And maybe that's all right too."
-
We crossed that fairy bridge of light one last time, and I skipped along the webs of silver floss, and then danced between the streaks like I was playing a game of step-on-a-crack. When we got to the dark sand we all turned back to look at Indara, temple of the Summoned Sea, a cathedral like a marine star set in a fitting wrought of the boiling orange ocean.
Leviathan stood beside me, and then put a hand on my arm, as if he was seeking strength.
"This time has passed away," he said.
"That's what time is meant to do," I said, and he nodded once, and then stepped away and spread his arms wide, as if he could encompass the world in them.
Ashura moved until she was standing behind him, her white hands on his shoulders, and then, they began to sing.
The hymn was still pulsing in my blood, throbbing all around us, as Leviathan had told me it would always, so long as I carried him, but as they began to sing that hymn fell into an echo behind their climbing voices.
And as they sang Indara began to crumble and slide away into the sea.
All around us the lights in the fungus above and below burst into pyreflies and swam away into the growing dusk, and the sea itself twisted into phantasmal shapes, dancers and warriors, beasts and birds, and then those shapes exploded into pyreflies too, and the water began to fall, dreamed away to some other ocean. I moved close to Auron without thinking, letting my fingers creep around the weight of his arm. I leaned on him and together we watched the world fall down, a rondo, the end of things.
And then I sang too, sang with all my heart the words of that hymn from another place.
Pray. Your heart. Your soul. Your meat and blood and bone.
Savior. Saver. One who saves. Well will save.
Dream. To Dream. A Dream. Our Dream.
Child of Prayer. Children of Prayer. The Children who stand, who will stand.
Forever. For always.
Bring us peace.
One door closes, my pops would say, but another opens.
At last, as it was all going still, Leviathan and Ashura whispered away into nothing, and I would have cried out then, but I could still feel his coiled serpentine weight wrapped around my brain. As the shadows fell, Auron turned away and we started the trek back to the tiled tunnel that would lead us back to the surface.
At the lip of the cave I stopped to look back.
And then I started to laugh, throwing my head back as I dug along the seams of my shorts for the places I keep those cards when I know I'll need one on the sly.
He turned back.
"What is it?" he asked, watching me skip and jump as the tangerine darkness fell around us.
"Final card," I said, as the last flickering glow of the glittering orange sea melted away and I pulled it.
Four of Hearts.
Fa ymm kuddy ku cusatyo.
You live until you don't.
And that's all right too.
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