Chapter 10
The crypts were a neat row stretching in one long, unbroken line before the High Altar, recumbent effigies staring towards the heavens beyond where the graceful murals of nymphs and angels guided their souls to their everlasting rest. Each one was a mark of an age past, a lifetime lost to the steady march of the centuries shaped by their rule. And now, as the casket of Grava Aston was doused in the holy waters of Jichia, another would be added to their number, another link fastened to the chain of a thousand years.
"In the eyes of Jichia, the souls of the righteous are freed from torment," the priest intoned as he flicked his wand to send another spray of water across the surface of the casket. "In the eyes of the mourning they appear to have died, but they are at peace. Their hope is full of immortality."
"Their hope is full of immortality," Millerna whispered the response. Her fingers moved about the earth which rested in her palm, feeling its weight and the way it moulded itself to its cradle. She cast a small, furtive glance at her elder sister, marveling at her stillness, as statuesque as the effigies which adorned the ancestral tombs. What she could see of her features beneath the heavy black veil revealed no signs of grief, only the stoic acceptance of the ebb and flow of life, the continuation of one era to the next, one monarch to the next.
But had she seen? She must have. It had been impossible to miss, the stillness of the mourners in their pews suddenly stirred and rippling like waves in the wake of a sea serpent as the Royal Guard hurried his way to the ranks of the Knights Caeli to whisper in Allen's ear. What he'd said Millerna naturally could not have heard from where she stood at her place near the altar, but the expression of abject horror that had briefly flashed across Allen's face had delivered the message clearly enough. In a whirl he'd vanished down the aisle, the rigid quickness of his steps evidence of a barely restrained panic. He'd been trying not to break into a run, not to cause any undue disturbance, but Van had caught the wave of fear and had abruptly risen from his seat to follow Allen outside.
Something's happened. Something's gone wrong with his sister.
Millerna again turned to Eries, the chanting of the priest lost to her as she tried in vain to catch her sister's eye. Eventually, feeling the weight of Millerna's gaze, Eries's head moved ever so slightly to give a questioning, if understandably irritated look at her sister's interruption. But the irritation swiftly dissolved into concern as she took in the worry so evident in Millerna's face despite the heavy blackness of her veil and knew at once in the silent way only siblings can know one another's thoughts. Her eyes flickered out to the pews and then back to Millerna, bringing with them in that brief second a stern negation as she gave the barest shake of her head. Leave it.
Millerna held her sister's gaze for one taut second, finding herself flailing between her usual stubborn insistence and the demands of duty, between childhood impertinence and queenly resolve. She could chase after Allen, as she always had, and be denied as she always had, or she could take the soil still clutched in her hand and do the responsible thing.
There was the smallest trace of a sigh as her head bowed, not in defeat, but in acceptance of where she stood, not only in the physical sense but in the temporal and symbolic sense as well. The casket before her, glistening with the thousand tiny streams of water in the candlelight, brought the reality of her life to its inevitable conclusion. Her days of knights and airships and fleeing from her own fate could now only exist in the past, to be buried as finally as her father as the priest turned the gears to lower him into the crypt. She stepped forward and stretched out her hand to throw the first handful of the blanket of soil beneath which he would sleep.
Goodbye, Father. Jichia rest your soul. Give my love to Mother.
Eries stepped forward next, the soil dropping from her long, graceful fingers like a counterfeit of rain to mix below with Millerna's offering and the holy water. As she withdrew her hand sought her sister's, and for the first time in perhaps ten years, a warmth and understanding flowed between them, a reassurance that from this moment on nothing would come between them. Not even Allen.
At first, there was only sensation. The hard press of the ground against the body, the sluggish shifting of limbs as consciousness tiptoed its way through the blackness only to retreat after getting second thoughts. The protest of bruises upon bruises blossoming over aching joints courtesy of the pillar of light which had so unkindly deposited her in the middle of this clearing of an unnamed and unknown forest.
Sight and sound returned next by slow degrees, light bleeding through half-opened lids in a silvery blur which itself gradually transformed into dim shapes of trees. There was a soft soughing which was distantly recognized as wind as is wove its way through the boughs. Slightly cool, though not uncomfortable against her face.
With a soft groan Refina stirred again, rolling ever so slowly over and pushing herself up on shaking arms, wincing all the while. Her head ached abominably with the dizzying rush of her sudden drop from the sky and it took more than a few minutes for its waterfall echoes to die away. Her eyes, meanwhile, blinked furiously against the livid red afterimages seared into her vision. The looming shape of Allen's guymelef. The slender figure of Allen himself dropping down from the pilot's chamber, hair streaming, as he rushed towards them. Celena…
Celena…
Unconsciously her right hand flexed where the girl had grabbed it. What had that been? She'd been so hostile to even that smallest and most involuntary moment of physical contact, so abrupt and rough in her attitude towards Refina that it was certainly the last thing she'd imagined Celena would have done.
The name itself seemed to arrive like a slap to the forefront of her mind, galvanizing her out of the last of the mental doldrums. Now righted, she had a better sense of where she was, though judging by what little she could see it wasn't anyplace that was immediately recognizable.
The same could not be said for the person laying a few feet from her.
Surging to her feet against all strident protests of her body, Refina's hand flashed to her sword and the clearing echoed with the resonation of drawn steel on which the thin moonlight ran down its edge like quicksilver which itself was reflected in the hair of the boy lying on the grass.
He wasn't facing her, but the sound of her sword sent a ripple through his shoulders. Bare shoulders, she noticed, which had torn through the blue dress, the remaining tatters of which were draped haphazardly across a body that was much taller and much more wiry than what Refina had departed with. A body she, steadfastly ignoring the heat which crept into her cheeks at the memory, had spent many a time admiring beneath his leather armor. Now fate, in a twisted sense of kindness, had answered the darkest and most forbidden questions of her imagination in the full display of long and well-shaped limbs, though it had been equally kind to spare her the answer to one very particular question.
Beneath her blade Dilandau Albatou awoke.
He did so with the same sluggishness and reticence as she had, though it did not take him quite as long to sit up. His head remained bowed into one hand as he struggled to swim against the undertows of aching confusion towards the surface of full consciousness. A groan escaped him, the sound of one who knows that when they did reach the surface there would be many a bruise to greet them.
"Shit," Refina heard him mutter, shaking his silvery head as the full impact of their ungracious landing began to make itself felt. There was no quaver, no timidness of Celena's tone in that voice. It was rough, raspy, and very, very irritated.
"The fuck?" The hand left his forehead to draw a silent question on the remains of the blue silk wrapped about his waist. "What is this?"
A grimace of pain was revealed as he lifted his head at last and Refina found herself that stricken girl on the Vione once again as his profile revealed itself to her, features still as coldly beautiful and untouchable as she remembered from that first moment. It took all of her will to still the newfound sense of dizziness that reeled through her again at his very nearness, the very reality of his existence sitting a mere six feet from the trembling tip of her sword.
This is impossible! her mind screamed through the long forgotten shock of the old desires. He can't be here! He's-!
He's what? Dead? Cool logic stepped in to place a steadying hand on the shoulder of her roiling emotions. There had been no reports of Dilandau dying in battle. There had been no reports of him at all after she'd been taken captive. There was nothing to suggest that he hadn't been out in the wide world all along, roaming about wherever the winds of fate would take him.
But he shouldn't be here. He shouldn't be where Celena had been only hours ago. There shouldn't be the mangled mess of her gown around his body, an ill fitting garb to the new shape of his reality. People didn't simply vanish into the air...like…
Like we just did...
"Where am I?" His gaze wandered about the trees until they found the tip of the sword aimed with some degree of uncertainty at him. Traveling up the blade they found rather a higher degree of uncertainty in the eyes of the girl staring back at him with an expression so filled to the brim he had no idea which emotion he was looking at. In fact, he had no idea why or how he had got around to looking at her in the first place.
"What the-? Refina?" A silvery brow drew itself down on the strings of manifest confusion over one eye, and he began to feel the dull throb of another headache knocking delicately on the inside of his skull. "The fuck are you doing out here?"
"Stay back!" she shouted, though it was her feet that took her up on her command by moving her away until her back was flush against the nearest tree trunk. The sword was flourished again, the earlier tremblings of shock now replaced with a cool, businesslike control that was the inverse of Dilandau's heated glare. Fire and ice reacquainted themselves with each other in this desolate stretch, remembering those days which they had shared when he had tried to burn but had only ever managed to get himself frozen. Whatever she'd been feeling before it was certainly vanished now behind that carefully controlled facade staring down at him from behind a blade that glimmered with the moon's chill touch. That look from a hundred strategy meetings, conferences and state dinners. No one else could have looked at him that way and not gotten a sound slap for it.
"What the hell are you on about?" he demanded, rubbing a hand irritably along the back of his head to stave off the renewed feeling of dizziness. "What's the matter with you? And why in Dornkirk's name are you pointing that sword at me?"
"What happened to that girl? Celena? Where is she?"
"Who the hell is Celena?" Dilandau snapped, the confusion now pulling along frustration behind it with an insistent quickness. Waking up in the middle of nowhere without any memory of how one had gotten to be out in the middle of nowhere did not stand to leave one in the best of moods, though in Dilandau's case he had never been one to harbor good moods in general. At least, not while either sober or without a flamethrower in arm's reach. He gave an imperious and dismissive wave at her brandished weapon. "Will you put that damn thing down and talk sense? Do you know where we are?"
"There was a girl here just a minute ago." Doubt flickered for an instant in her eyes as they gave a sweep about the clearing as if she half-expected Celena to suddenly appear. "Where is she?"
"What girl? The only girl I see here is you. Why are you acting like an idiot? It's me you're talking to! Remember?" Here he waved a hand over his faces as if by doing so he could banish her stubborn insistence at playing ignorant. "Zaibach, the army, breaking a vino bottle over Folken's head during the Emperor's birthday?"
The blade lowered a tiny fraction. Though doubt could still be discerned lying guardedly behind her otherwise immobile expression it was now being elbowed by memory, who insisted that this was something no imposter demon would know. Only the real Dilandau would remember that particularly wicked evening at Folken's conclusion of his toast for the Emperor a mischievous and very drunk Dilandau, with an unusually but equally drunk Refina's encouragement, had snuck up behind him and delivered a christening of Asturia's finest to the back of his head. They had spent the rest of the night dodging Nariya and Eriya's vengeful blows, their respective subordinates attempting in vain to aid them with their loyalty being rewarded by an interesting array of scratches and bite marks. People who thought of Dilandau as a bastard clearly had never spent time with Nariya and Eriya.
"Those damn catgirls," Refina remembered, a half-smile sending its cracks through the ice. The sword disappeared in its sheath. "I never understood why Folken kept them around."
"Guess he enjoyed having something to clean up after," Dilandau quipped dryly with a roll of his eyes, though an answering half-smile tugged briefly at his own lips as he imagined their late Strategos chasing after the twins with a broom and a squirt bottle, an imagine highly at odds with the man's absolute zero cool that made even Refina's natural reserve seem warm and welcoming by comparison. He certainly hadn't seen the humor in Dilandau's little stunt on that long ago evening. Neither had Dilandau's immediate superior, Adelphos, who had severely upbraided him for it as soon as they'd returned from the holiday.
"You're not wearing your armor," Dilandau said suddenly, expression shifting back to its earlier mixture of surprise and confusion at her rough and shapeless clothing. Of his own lack thereof, he gave no inkling of self-consciousness. A lifetime of communal showering had done much to rid him of his sense of modesty. "What happened?"
"I…" How did she even begin to explain when it was evident that he still thought they were at war? How could she recount how the rest of the world had joined together and marched into their country to utterly destroy it from within? "It's hard to know where to start. It's a long story."
"Well, I'm not going anywhere." He gestured uselessly at his makeshift sarong. "Obviously."
"I was taken captive at the end of the war by Asturia, where I've spent the last six months rotting away from boredom in a prison cell," she began, leaning comfortably back against the tree and crossing her arms. The careful watch she kept of his expression showed her the open bewilderment and disbelief in his face as she spoke. "I don't know what they were planning to do with me. Execute me, maybe, but they took their time about it. I think it had to do with the King being ill. He died and I escaped with…" She stumbled as she came to her second encounter with Celena and the bizarre events that followed, unsure whether or not she should include them, before finally ending with a brief and evasive "I escaped."
"What do you mean 'end of the war'?" Dilandau asked, showing no notice of the nervous way Refina pursed her lips, instead sounding almost suspicious, as if he thought she were making some sort of twisted joke at his expense. But he knew Refina, or knew her well enough to know that she was not the type of person to make such a joke. Her patriotism and devotion to duty had eclipsed his own enough to rival any of the Four Generals, who had been fanatical enough to believe that conquering Gaea would bring true peace to every land they'd razed. No, even as the suspicion appeared it vanished just as swiftly again as he took in the grimness of her expression.
"The war is over," she said simply with a shrug. No point in denying it, even if admitting it aloud made her stomach churn. "We lost."
"We lost?" Dilandau cried, surging up from his slouch as if struck by a stray bolt of lightning; indeed, to not only hear but to see the resignation in her face as she admitted defeat was nothing less than a shock, rattling the remaining foundations of not only his confidence but his hope that the great engines of Zaibach were still turning in spite of his own personal misfortunes. "How the hell could we have lost? We outnumbered every other military on Gaea!"
"Well, it seemed that every other military on Gaea decided to join forces against us." Here her expression hardened like a polar glacier, dark and heavy with the impotence of her ruined pride. "And Basram had a weapon capable of wiping out the majority of our army in a single explosion. That's how I lost my squad and how I ended up captured. No one in Zaibach had any idea it existed."
"Van...Van had something to do with it," Dilandau muttered, more to himself than to her. In the soft light of the moon above the crimson of his eyes glittered with his own shared rage and powerlessness as the image of the White Dragon and its pilot haunted the hallways of his memories. He saw again the night at the lake, saw the small, slim figure of the girl from the Mystic Moon standing on its shoulder, arm outstretched like some ancient prophetess guiding her champion into battle. The grass beneath his hands found itself crushed and torn in his throttling fingers as he imagined them around her neck.
"Him and his little Mystic Moon bitch. Miguel was right." Poor Miguel. Strangled for his loyalty by Folken's pet doppelganger. While revenge against the Mystic Moon girl had been out of his reach, it had been so sweetly and thoroughly satisfied with Zongi's death in the liquid nest of his Crima Claws as they slowly crushed him bone by bone. He allowed himself that thrill of pleasure at the memory of his screams, pleading for forgiveness and mercy that Dilandau had never known and could never give. A shame Van and Hitomi couldn't have added their bones to the pile.
"So…" he sighed, glancing up from his reminiscing to meet Refina's watchful gaze. There was no sign of her anger, her features having regained their usual equanimity, a sight which left him both puzzled as he was fascinated at how quickly she could let go of her emotions even as his own were still frothing beneath the surface. He shook his head in an effort to steer himself into calmer waters, though he knew it would take him far longer to bring that particular ship into port. He met her calmness with a dry, rueful smirk. "Zaibach has crumbled and those podunk bastards won. Now what?"
"I don't know." She threw up a helpless shrug. "I don't even know where we are."
"I guess that means you don't know why I'm like this, then?" The smirk rearranged itself into a sneer of disgust as he picked at the blue silk wrapped around him. "And what were you going on about some girl?"
"I thought…"
What had she thought, exactly? That telling him the full recounting of her adventure was a good idea? She hardly cared to believe it herself; she could only imagine what it might sound like to him when he was already staring at her as if she'd just sprouted a pair of Draconian wings. No need in having him think her grip on reality was slipping or she might just find herself not only lost but alone. And to be alone after fate had just crossed their paths again...it wasn't something she wanted to chance.
"Never mind," she said dismissively. "I guess I was confused."
"Yeah, whatever," he grumbled. "Just don't start getting weird on me again."
"Weird? Who's talking about 'weird'?" Sarcasm rose in valiant defense against his surliness. It was the old, usual pattern, but old patterns were often the most comfortable ones and she could stand having a bit of that just now. "Have you seen how you look?"
"Hmmph." A curdled look came across his face as he planted his chin in one hand and threw her a poisonous side glare. "Yeah, and I'd like an explanation for that."
"Well, you're looking in the wrong place." Pushing herself away from the tree, she stretched out her aching muscles and coolly strode past him in an effort to mask her discomfort to where she found his sword lying in the grass a few feet away. She picked it up and tossed it to him, the pommel glancing off of his hip as it landed. "Here. You'll probably want that. Especially when we find a town."
"And you'll probably want to go and build a fire. I'm freezing my ass off."
"And then they just...disappeared?"
Allen turned aside to watch the coming night fall gently like a discarded veil over the last amber glow of the vanished sun. The sconces had already been lit by some thoughtful servant, the candlelight briefly reflecting on the gloss of pain in his eyes before they were shut against the terrible rush of shame and anger that he had allowed this all to happen again, that he truly was no different and no better than the little boy ten years ago who could only watch, paralyzed with horror, while his sister was swept away by men whose cruel appetites for power haunted him even down to very breaths he drew here and now in Millerna's parlor.
"Yes," Allen said, his voice gone quiet against the realization of just how lost he was against this all, how little he truly understood of Celena and what had happened to her during those years under Zaibach's control. "I jumped down from Scherezade but before I could reach them the light had gone, taking them with it."
"It was just like what used to happen with Hitomi," Van said, watching him from where he slouched in an armchair, face as stony and carven as any of the fine marble statuettes which graced the room, although he did not share in their sense of frivolity with their flowing drapery and light steps. He had been unusually quiet since their disgraced return to the palace, their guymelefs, having been rendered entirely useless, sent back to slumber in the hangars. It was only natural that Allen had fought him every step of the way, a bizarre role reversal which had left Van feeling distinctly unbalanced as he'd pulled the knight away from the empty air where his sister had stood, alternately begging Allen to leave while assuring him that he would do everything in his power to get her back.
"You found her once, we'll find her again!" It reverberated across the passing of nearly a year, through the flames which had destroyed Fanelia and which Allen's wisdom had once saved him from rashly throwing himself into in an unthinking need for a quick and violent revenge against his attackers. Allen had thrown himself between them, defending him against his own foolishness with a similar declaration:"As long as Fanelia as a king, and a people, she has a future!"
But a glance at the brooding figure at the window made Van wonder where that chivalrous knight had gone, if the weight of too much grief and too much loss had finally come collapsing down on top of that facade of bravery and nobility and left nothing in its wake except a deeply wounded and deeply frightened man who's only want in life was the very thing that Fate kept allowing to slip through his fingers to leave him all the more alone.
But he's not alone this time, Van thought as he studied the hanging profile of the other man, nearly veiled by a long stray lock of hair. He was my brother when I needed him. I'll be his now.
"Didn't something similar happen when Dryden called the Ispano?" asked Millerna from the sofa, jolting Van from a memory that was merely unpleasant to one which was particularly gruesome; blood running in glaring streams from Escaflowne's helm why he'd barely clung to life, its wounds somehow become his. "Is there a connection somehow between them?"
"That's what I'm beginning to think," he replied grimly, brows knitting together the threads of recollection as he continued, "Whenever Hitomi was near Escaflowne things...seemed to just work better. I would win more battles when she was with me. I think...I think it had something to do with her powers. Maybe being near Escaflowne made them stronger and that's why she could always see when the enemy was coming."
"Escaflowne was the entire reason Zaibach started their war," Allen growled, long hair whisking about him as he abruptly turned to face them. His blue eyes were ablaze with the fury of ten long years of solitude and suffering. "Their emperor wanted that guymelef so badly it didn't matter how many countries he invaded or how many lives he destroyed to get it. And for what? What was so special about Escaflowne that merited worldwide destruction?"
Van instinctively bristled at Allen's comment regarding his nation's, in fact his own family's, sacred relic, but he bit back the retort that had leapt up onto his tongue and instead traded it for a sigh of resignation.
"Folken explained it to me just before he died," he said. "He told me it had something to do with the power of wishes. Zaibach wanted Escaflowne because they thought they could use it to fulfill their wishes and that if they were able to do that they could bring an end to all fighting. I think we all know how that turned out."
"Trying to change things," Allen muttered, disgust livid in every feature. His white-gloved hands gripped the back of an empty chair, imagining instead of flowered printed silk it was the neck of the one old man responsible for all of this. "Just like what they did to my sister. Now it looks like it's happened again."
"But Zaibach couldn't be behind it this time," Millerna said. "Their forces were completely destroyed and their emperor is gone."
"It's not Zaibach that's behind it." Allen released his hold on the chair, much to the queen's private relief, his hand going up to rake through his hair in a rough gesture of simmering frustration. "It's only one person. Dilandau. Dilandau called that light."
"Dilandau?" she asked in the tone of one combing through the beaches of memory before alighting upon the shell of recognition. Millerna had never met the infamous Diabolical Adonis, though Allen's vivid, if not outright terrifying descriptions of him were enough to leave her thankful that she'd been spared the displeasure. "You mean the boy that-"
"Yes, that boy. That monster! He...Somehow he was still there inside of Celena's mind. And I think that being near Escaflowne, being near Scherezade and me...all of us together were the trigger. We tried to push him back but we ended up letting him free. And now they could be anywhere on Gaea."
"We'll do everything in our power to help you find her, Allen, and bring her back," Millerna said without hesitation. "Anything you need, just name it."
"I can't ask that of you, Millerna." Allen shook his head emphatically. "Not after you've just lost your father."
"But you've just lost your sister," she protested, eyes wide and imploring as she stared up at him, pleading for him to see the common ground they stood on. It had been quite a large reason, perhaps the defining reason she had chased so persistently after him in the first place; the both of them having lost a sister to the callous whims of fate. And Marlene was lost to her forever, she'd be damned if she let Celena follow the same path. "Allen, you and Van are just as much family to me as my own father was. Let me help you. Not just as your queen but as your friend. I can send the word out to all of our allies to keep watch for anyone matching Dilandau and the other prisoner's description. I'll even go and help you look for her myself if you like."
"There's no need for that, but I would appreciate you notifying as many as you can. And, if it's possible, I'd like to take Crusade out. She's light and fast and she can carry Scherezade and Escaflowne." Slowly he began to straighten as words transmuted into a plan of action. Ever the knight, Allen was much better equipped to face the world with sword in hand than he could ever be facing his own feelings. It was a quality he shared with his father, the eternal wanderer, though some personal epiphanies were better left unvisited.
"Where do you think they'll go?" inquired Van, rising from his seat, the anticipation already radiating from him. Much like Allen, Van was more for solving his problems with action rather than contemplation, though the mantle of kingship was beginning to tilt the scales towards the latter rather than the former. It was a balancing act that he knew would take decades for him to learn how to maintain.
"I don't know, but we'll start checking the surrounding countryside first and then branch out from there. Millerna-"
She held up a hand to cut him off. "You don't even have to ask. Go. Get your men and your ship together. I'll start contacting our allies. We don't have a moment to lose."