– JACK OF ALL TRADES –
'I highly doubt I will return to this place' -Freya
Freya silently marveled at Fratley as he made minute adjustments to the burlap sail.
The sandskid rode over the Vube desert like a freshly loosened arrow.
Each time it juttered over a patch of rough sand, dipped with a ridge or jumped over a furrow, his body moved with the Spartan craft to compensate but his head remained still and level in contrast, as an Owl's did riding on a branch in the wind.
He continuously searched entirely by feel for the best point of sail to make the best speed as the wind changed, and she watched him intently as she worked the tiller attached to the tail skid, occasionally glancing at the tiny leatherbound compass in her forepaw.
Together driven by nought but wind, the two of them sailed over the flat unpainted canvas of the desert under the rising sun. The featureless landscape made her feel as if they two were the only inhabitants of the entire world.
She was aware of the smile she wore.
This was all she had ever pined for years ago. She and Fratley, comrades and beloved companions in adventure and hardship, grace and hindrance, always together regardless of the tides of fortune, success or failure. Moving through the world with their combined skills, bravery, ingenuity and selflessness for each other, making love in moments of respite. This had been her foolish youthful ideal of grandeur and a life well spent. For a moment, she was sixteen again and her heart beat strong and forgot its scars.
It was the height of irony, she thought, that she was only granted this after she no longer wished for it.
All she pined now and in a very different way was Fratley, and warm dark solitude with him in her little home. She yearned to turn the skid about and be nowhere but there with he.
"Freya, look there!"
She turned her head to where Fratley gestured with his long nose.
Their skid raced with the Vubara Bird.
The long winged creature was a silhouette against the fire-orange sky and rising sun. It soared level, its long legs and tail trailing behind and riding the same wind that propelled them.
A creature of legend, she never thought she would have the fortune to lay eyes on one.
All thoughts of gilded past and adventure left her head the moment what had once been Cleyra came into view.
Even at some distance, the debris of blackened branches and masonry cast from the explosion had caused Fratley to loosen the sail to slow the skid and Freya to alter their direction several times.
The great trunk was laid low, heat-twisted and black, and by far most distinct in that from its gaping hollowed top and voids that had once been natural cavities poured a now solidified flow of glass. The sand that had once filled and poured through the tree from the sandstorm had been fused by the intense heat. Although somewhat murky dark instead of perfectly clear, it shimmered like a crystalline waterfall in the rising sun.
After all this time, the husk still visibly smoldered, a discernible trail of gray smoke serving as an indicator of the wind's direction. Embers and fires still burnt deep within it. The nearer they drew, the more the radiant heat of the tree and ground became apparent to them. The explosion had been so intense that it was still hot.
The sand around the base of the tree had been similarly fused into glass. Fratley looked to Freya and Freya understood, and steered away.
The sky had turned from fire orange to gold as the sun rose higher. Circling Cleyra's immense trunk took the better part of half an hour and two upwind tacks on the far side. As they circled their keen ears and eyes searched for Jack. Finding nothing and concluding they had most likely somehow beaten him there, they drew back to the side they had arrived at, the side that faced Burmecia. Here, Fratley let fly the sail and the skid drew to a hissing stop. He brought the sail over them both as a sunshade, and here they waited.
Each took turns scanning the horizon while the other dozed and rested their eyes from the bright desert sand and sky. Freya had always been an excellent timekeeper and noticed Fratley would always try to silently prolong his turn and shorten hers. She let him, without complaint, but kissed him to let him know he could not fool her.
And then she picked out a tiny hooded figure across the featureless sand.
The figure stopped when they ran to him, and said nothing at first. Fratley drew himself down onto a knee and bowed to him, deeper than she had ever seen him bow to anyone. It was less a knightly gesture and more that of worship.
Freya broke the deafening silence.
"Dearest Jack, your father's treasure, do let me see you…"
She heard and felt Fratley inhale sharply, and knew the words that did not escape his mouth. Still, she lowered herself.
The little figure shuffled, but did not outwardly object as Freya slowly knelt and reached out toward him with both her forepaws. As delicately and lovingly as if it were her own child, she gently lifted the hood.
Despite all she had weathered, it took all that was within her to resist weeping and recoiling with grief at the familiar, unfamiliar little half face.
"Hello Freya, I remember you. Thank you so much for trying to protect my family."
His voice rung with sincerity.
"Oh Jack…" her voice cracked and betrayed her.
"Don't worry, of all my wounds, this one hurts the least." He said with a resolute but empty smile.
He took her forepaw in both of his. One white and slender, the other dark red and burnt and mangled and nearly burnt away.
She felt Fratley's arm around her shoulder and this helped her continue to resist what was growing inside her.
By her arm, Jack led them both quietly over the sand and onto the field of shining glass, toward the burnt trunk. They three were perfectly reflected upside down on the ethereal flat mirror sheet.
Stopping at where the exposed roots became the base of the tree, equally black and stonehard, he lay down and felt the dead wood.
"After you got us to the cathedral…." He began.
Freya and Fratley both knelt right beside him.
"None of us could find you after a while, but everyone was too afraid to go out and look. And then Odin came…"
Freya was on the Red Rose again, and began to relive what she had seen. She took Fratley's forepaw and could not stop trembling.
"There was fire everywhere, it really hurt. Mum wrapped us up in her arms and protected Adam and me, but the fire hurt her too much and she screamed and died holding us.
Then the whole place just kind of blew away around us and everything burned. All the things turned into pieces and the pieces went everywhere, Mum and my brother got burned like this…"
Jack spread his arms matter of factly.
"But only half of me did because a big stone tilted over me. Then this half of me got thrown off the tree by the hot wind from the fire, along with I guess all the pieces the whole town, and I fell and got all broken, but seeing mum and my brother turn into dust broke me inside way worse, so I didn't feel the pain on the outside of me, so I just started looking for Mum and dad and my brother Adam."
Freya's trembling turned to shivers, and she felt the same in Fratley. Her breath refused to come to her.
"So I looked and looked, for a really long time, until I found Mum and my brother. They were all broken and missing pieces and my brother was dead too, so I found as many of their pieces as I could put Mum and him together so they'd be safe.
I never found dad so I reckoned he got buried by all the stuff that went everywhere, so I went back to Mum and Adam and I went to sleep."
Fratley stared blankly through the gaps in his fingers at the glass ground, one forepaw loosely against the side of his face and the other that had fallen limp in Freya's, and had become ice cold in her grasp. She trembled no more, and was simply hollow.
"It's funny because when I went to sleep I didn't hurt, not on the outside anyway, but when I woke up I did hurt, more than I thought I could ever hurt, and I couldn't stop screaming. I didn't think I'd wake up at all, I really didn't want to because I wanted to follow Mum and Dad and Adam, really bad. We don't just disappear when we die, you know." Jack stated, just as forthrightly, his voice both perfectly and poorly masking pain. "Then one of those beautiful dancing women from the cathedral found me, the one named Shannon. You protected her, too! She was so beautiful that I wanted to stay awake for a little bit longer. She thought I was dead at first but when she found out that I wasn't she cried lots and lots, and took me with her. She was really nice to me. We found a bunch others, lots of them were really hurt too, and then an airship found us."
He abruptly stopped talking. A long silence indicated that Jack had finished.
"No child should be made to go through anything like this." Fratley finally spoke, hoarsely.
"No one no matter how old they are." Jack corrected him, flatly, shaking his head.
Freya could say absolutely nothing.
"Jack, I must know how you came to restore my memory to me."
Jack smiled a sad half-smile. It was the saddest smile either of them had ever seen in all their wanderings.
"I hurt so much that decided to go around the world, just like you did."
Fratley let out a hollow laugh that wasn't a laugh but a cough.
"Shannon and everyone else who stayed with me tried to stop me so I ran away. I had to figure out a way of making things right."
"How does a child go around the world?" Freya asked, blankly.
"People treat you very differently when you're a child." Jack responded with a tone of mild indignance. "You get free rides on wagons and chocobos and even airships, people let you through gates without papers, they give you food and water even if you don't have any money!"
The corners of Freya's mouth somehow formed a smile. Despite the terrible emptiness, she was confounded and impressed by Jack's simple but knife-sharp cleverness. Suffering and loss had made her clever, too.
His tone abruptly shifted to sorrow. "Especially if you tell them you are looking for your mother, or that your family is dead, and when I told them that I wasn't lying."
Freya sniffed. She knew that to be true.
"Being an orphan is a powerful bargaining tool. I learned lots of things from lots of different people and creatures, I learned how to talk better, I learned how to help people and trick people, I learned how to make things, I learned how to look at things differently. I learned what mist was and where it came from, and I learned lots about you two. I heard much about your travels."
"It seems I have met my match. Had I achieved all this at your age, I might have made a difference…" His voice trailed into nothingness as he stared at his own reflection in the glass beneath him.
"You don't go around the world because you want to, you go because you have to. That's why I made it and you didn't."
This stung Fratley in his center. It stung even moreso because he knew Jack meant him no effrontery or insult whatsoever. He now felt as if he were a child again, and Jack were some sage.
"And I didn't just go around the world." Jack continued, looking straight at Fratley with his Hazel halfgaze. The force of his stare made Fratley lift his head and look back. "I went inside it, and I'm sure I went beyond it."
At this Freya and Fratley's eyes grew wider.
"I even saw the Blue Stone where we all come from."
Freya's eyes grew wider still. Jack now stared at her.
"I met a recordkeeper in the place called Daguerro who kept a book of all that happened everywhere. I spent almost the entire last year of my life there.
He told me there was a horrible Thing that was made like a machine that lived like a monster and looked like a tree, and it was hurting Gaia and everybody on it for a long time, you and your friends made it die and then Gaia began to heal, and people's inner light could go back to the Blue Stone.
He told me how when the horrible tree Thing died, it left a hole that went all the way down to the Blue Stone, and he told me how to get there. It took me days to get there and get down the hole, but I found the blue sky ocean in the Middle of the World, and I saw how the Blue Stone lit it up like the sun."
Jack related the story to them as if they had seen none of what he described for themselves, this astounded Freya far more than the story itself.
"Was – was it free?" Freya whispered.
Jack tilted his head.
"The roots, they grasped the Stone no longer?"
"There weren't roots." Jack replied. "There wasn't anything, just the Blue Stone, and its warmth."
Freya closed her eyes and pictured the strange Terran sky, and in her imagination, dashed the awful un-tree away from the blue orb in its center.
"It asked me to come back to it." Jack went on. "But I couldn't. Not until I had found where Mum and Dad and Adam were and not until I had fixed everything else. It told me my family was inside it, their feelings, their memories."
Jack's voice suddenly broke, and his entire body went limp.
"It told me they could finally come back inside where they belonged after being kept out…"
He began to weep bitter tears, even from the hole where his missing eye should have been.
"I didn't really understand what all this was about until it told me that. It told me in feelings, not in words. You can't understand anything from words, not really."
Freya began to cry.
"That's why only people who've felt the same thing can truly understand each other." Jack added. "Have you ever felt what it feels like to look at a happy family in a warm house through the window when you are out in the cold and dark?"
Freya had.
"I felt that so many times as I wandered the world, but I felt it more when the Blue Stone told me that than anywhere else. I looked inside of it and I felt my family in there and I was outside and couldn't go in."
Jack steadied himself against his own grief for a time, and then went on through his own tears.
"But they were inside, where it was warm and safe forever! They had been pushed out and couldn't come inside before until you all killed that horrible Thing around the Blue Stone. And so you see, Lady Freya, you did truly save my family, you and your friends, just as you and Sir Iron Tail saved them those other times before. Do not think for one moment that you failed to do so."
Freya choked on her own gratitude. What he said did not make her feel any better. She remembered what poor miserable Learie had said in the cathedral, with tears in her voice.
"I just want to save the children."
"I told it that I wasn't finished and couldn't come in yet. It told me it could not give me what I needed, so it opened a door to the place beyond it.
It was such a beautiful place, it was all white. There was a beautiful light there, the Blue Stone came from it a long, long time ago, and all the other Stones did too. I bargained with it. I said I needed to fix what was broken, and heal those who helped my family, and make those who did them harm pay for what they'd done. I just wanted gifts to protect my family and fix everything, the way the Blue Stone makes them to protect itself, and it understood. I told you being an orphan is good for bargaining. So it gave me three gifts, this is the last one I have to give."
Jack withdrew a pearl-white orb from his small satchel. It glowed with iridescent inner warmth, and it reminded Fratley of what he had seen at the end of the tunnel of light that the emerald green sister orb had opened to him.
Freya's entire world stopped.
"Eidolons…"
"I don't know what they're called. The light didn't tell me, and I don't really think it matters. It just said they were gifts and in order for them to work, like any gift, they had to be taken willingly."
"And I took mine as such…" Fratley broke his silence.
Jack beamed at him. "And that's why it worked. Thank you, Sir Iron tail, for accepting the gift I had to give. You gave Freya a gift greater than I could ever have given her by doing so."
Fratley's arms were instantly around Freya, pulling her into his lap and kissing beside her head as he kept his eyes focused on Jack.
"And Beatrix accepted hers as well, because she knew she had to accept the consequences of what she had done to all of us."
Fratley and Freya were overtaken with a sudden chill.
What could he possibly mean by that.
"I don't regret what I've done. But I have one more gift to give before my half-life is over." Jack caressed the pearl white orb. "Then I can go inside, and be with my family."
Freya and Fratley looked at each other with an unease that grew quickly into a silent horror. They both felt the same and both knew it in each other, in that they both suddenly and overwhelmingly sensed an impending and immediate end to Jack.
He continued to speak.
"I meant it when I said I wanted to protect my Family. Because of what you've done, I consider you Family now, too."
He shakily walked to them, and without even realizing it they instinctively opened their arms. He nestled between them and wrapped their limbs and their clothes and their whole selves around him like a blanket, disappearing absolutely between them.
"I love you so much…" He sobbed.
Freya drew Jack's broken little half body under her chin and sobbed, too. Fratley put her head under his chin and she felt the rain of his silent tears in her moonlight hair and on her ears.
"I want Mama, I want Dad, I want Adam." Jack shrieked into Freya's bosom.
She inhaled sharply as she cried.
"Jack the Brave fought beside me." Fratley began. "His story is one of triumph and of tranquility."
Jack's cries lessened.
Fratley continued. "Jack the brave, with his cleverness and pureness of heart, and his understanding of all that is Right and Wrong, turned Odin away from the beautiful green tree of Cleyra. And his beautiful mother Learie, and his brave father Soldier Dan, and his brother Adam did not die. And the beautiful cathedral stood tall and shimmered purple and blue in the sun, and Cleyra's green tree continued to grow and bloom each spring, as did its people."
A new urge sprang forth in Freya's heart among the intense emotions and pain. She suddenly yearned to see Fratley as a father.
Jack's cries subsided almost too quickly as Fratley finished his narrative. Freya felt him tilt his head up. They both turned their heads downward to his. He still streamed tears, but wore a quivering smile as he looked up, and his Hazel eye shimmered for the first time since either of them had seen it. It was the first time his gaze had actually appeared as a child's.
"I can make that story real." He said.
He wriggled from their grasp, tightly clutching the pearly orb.
"Jack, please come back here."
He ignored them and climbed into a notch in the base of the burnt Cleyran tree, sat himself upon a jagged burnt outcropping, and squeezed the orb. It cracked like an egg. Fratley visibly winced as he did so, expecting a powerful reaction.
Jack removed pieces enough to make the cracked orb form a bowl. Now open, exposed within it sloshed an equally pearly liquid that shimmered with the light that they had seen emanating from it. Not one drop did spill.
Gazing at it for a few moments, Jack suddenly shut his eyes and tilted the liquid back into his mouth.
His body tore, and from it burst forth Life.
Roots and Green surged from the notch where Jack had just been.
The burnt trunk heaved and changed, and shook the entire desert. Freya and Fratley were thrown to the ground by the force.
The protruding roots shifted. The field of glass and the solidified flow of it within the tree shattered in an instant with a deafening, ringing crash that filled the sky and echoed to the horizon.
Freya found herself picked off her feet in Fratley's grasp as the glass floor under them cracked, he steadied them both. He had donned boots before they left Burmecia, she had not. Had he not have swept her up, her feet would have been bloodied by the jagged edges. He moved them both to a protruding root, and they struggled up it.
The flying shards turned the world around them to rainbows, each sliver a tiny flying prism casting its own at random as it fell. Fratley was instantly reminded of his previous experience, the power of the color was so similar.
The shards turned to dust as they fell, sweeping harmlessly over their hair and shoulders. What had once been a mirrorlike glass floor was now a shifting churning mass of hundreds of pieces smashing and grinding against each other, breaking smaller and smaller.
The tree was moving, and changing, and as it did it began to grow.
New living roots of every shade of healthy brown and green continued to pour from the notch Jack had entered, until it drew closed as the trunk made itself Whole. Bark blackened and charred cracked and lurched and fell away to reveal fresh and living tree. The root they now clung to shifted upward, the dead, hot wood was suddenly cool and warping against their hands and feet, changing in color. Moss sprung from folds of bark, wet sap and dew poured and oozed from furrows and spaces.
The air was full of the noise of newness, creaking and expanding and rubbing of fresh and growing wood. The trunk that had been surging higher had now begun to shoot out branches. Starting as tendrils and widening, they extended in all directions, arching across the golden sky. It towered higher and higher into the sky, higher even than they remembered the original tree standing.
As the great rise reached a crescendo, for a moment there was hesitation as if building for a finale, and then came a tremendous explosion of foliage. The sky was suddenly blotted out by billions of crisscrossing branches and an undeniable tide of emerald green leaves. The billowing treetop expanded with such force that it produced a rushing wind that again laid them low. The sky changed from gold to green, the searing sunlight turned to shade.
It did not stop at the boundary set by their memories of the original Cleyra. The tree hurled itself at the horizon in all directions seemingly with a great joy, overflowing itself with shimmering wet greens of emerald and chartreuse and every other shade. The sound was now that of gentle creaking and a great ambient hiss of rustling leaves. Even now the base of the trunk thickened and settled, the roots slowly crept outward and grew larger.
The broken glass amidst the grasping and shifting roots ground churned and stirred in a cacophony of ringing sound and broke smaller into smithereens and began to sink beneath a new layer of fresh sand that burst from underneath it. Soon there was no evidence whatsoever of the otherworldly mirrored ground.
As the lower growth around them tapered off and slowed to a pace visibly indistinguishable, the last extremities and leafy branches only ceased their quick expansion when the canopy of the tree touched the horizon itself.
As the noise stopped, they found themselves crying bitterly.
Cleyra's tree was far larger than it ever had been before, and little Jack was gone.
On the brand new trunk Freya and Fratley grieved, as they had for the loss of each other. They grieved in the soft green light cast by the leaves above, and in the sounds they made as the prevailing desert wind gently caressed them.
Their sadness still burnt them, but the tree made for them a guarded Sanctuary with which to quench it.
As they held each other, a peace so utter and complete overtook them that they nearly fell asleep.
The softness and silence was Whole and Absolute. The concavity of the root they lay in was now full of soft moss and cradled them as they held each other.
Long after their cries had fallen silent, Freya whispered.
"Fratley, your hair…"
"And yours…" he mouthed, even more quietly.
The dust of the glass shards had settled in their hair and made each appear to the other to shimmer with a halo of rainbowed stars, that winked brighter and dimmer and changed color as the light filtering through the tree slowly shifted.
Another noise slowly became apparent to them with accompanied motion in their peripheral vision, a syncopated and tiny orchestra of clacking feet and beating wings, and chirping.
A tiny Wren alighted near them, behind Freya. She felt it, Fratley saw it. It indignantly trilled its displeasure at their presence and then flew to the next root.
Birds were returning to Cleyra.
"It's red."
"It's brown."
"A thousand times red."
"Bannister! Webb! Will you two shut up over there!" The navigator shouted at the helmsman and first mate, breaking their argument.
"That's no way to talk to your first officer!" Bannister stamped his foot.
The navigator's eyes abruptly widened and he began to pant heavily, trying to form words.
"That's better, but don't you think you are pouring it on a bit thick?"
"T – Tu – Col – Tah!" He stammered, pointing past them and slamming the palm of his opposite hand on the chart table.
Bannister and Webb turned to each other, smirking.
"Turn the ship!" The navigator shrieked.
The other two stared at each other briefly with wild-eyed expressions and turned to face foward. Through the windows they saw something that had not been there merely a minute before, when they had started arguing about Lindenwald Syrup.
A great tree filled the windows of the bridge and spanned their vision end to end, as wide as all the world, and the ship was nearly right upon it.
"What's this!" Gasped Webb, dropping his tea.
"Where did that come from!" Bellowed Bannister, convulsing so that his tea went sideways across the bridge.
No sooner had the captain stepped through the bridge door than he added his commentary by rapidly expelling the gin behind his lips in a furious jet against the nearest engine telegraph.
"TURN THE SHIP!" The navigator shrieked again, getting up so fast his chair tripped him and he fell to the floor, smashing his face.
Webb threw himself at the engine telegraph and braved Bancroft's suspiciously long-lasted jet of gin, repelling it as best he could with his hand and being thrown against the apparatus by its force. He swept the handles on both sides to Astern Full.
Bannister set upon the steering telemotor and spun it around hard over against the starboard stop. The steering engine behind it readily hissed to life and its crankshaft whirled, the drum under the floor could be felt to tense up and begin to furiously wind, and the immense highly polished emergency manwheel in the slot just behind the windows began to spin.
El Adrel began to turn.
Webb threw telegraph handles this way and that and had just pointlessly thrown the foredeck docking telegraph over. When Bancroft had finished expelling what remained of his gin, the telegraphs were already ringing back in response and raucous shouting issued from the voice tubes. The captain began to shout in rage; "Straighten her out, Straaaiiighten!"
"Straighten?" Bannister shouted. "We're going to hit!"
Bancroft furiously worked the telemotor back over center to port.
"Give me the forward vertical screws as fast as they will go!" He shouted.
Webb spun the forward lift engine telegraph.
"If we go hard over, running astern will do us no good, she will side-slip right in! How many years have you been on this ship, point her at danger so the screws can come to bear, and tilt her back to stand on her stern! The lift screws will push backward then!"
El Adrel had been going ahead at a mediocre pace and trailed a thick cloud of black smoke from wetted coal from rain getting into her bunkers in Burmecia.
The airship wheeled toward the shimmering tree that towered above her and blocked her path to the sides, and she bore down on the air with her drive screws spinning in reverse as fast as they would go.
The bow dug in, but the captain's orders rang deep inside the ship and the airscrews on the forward mast torqued and began to beat furiously at the air. Up came the bow, higher and higher until she took a raucous angle like a dancer standing on her heels.
With much undignified whirling and churning air, the airship came to a stop just beyond the branches of Cleyra.
Freya and Fratley were awoken from their slumber by the throaty and uncaring voice of a steam whistle echoing from a distance, and the unwelcome sound of machinery.
The peace was shattered, the spell broken.
After a few moments dazedly staring at each other, without her asking him to he carefully rubbed the remnants of tears from her eyes and helped her to sit upright.
They looked outward, toward the horizon that the tree now kissed. Beyond the sweep and fall of its leaves they could make out the shape of a white airship coming to rest on the sand.
"What is that thing doing here." Freya's contempt was audible.
She and Fratley looked at each other. His heart sank at her visible weariness, her eyebrows hung and her half closed eyes were dull with fatigue.
"Jack's gift certainly won't go unpunished. I should have known that the scavengers and claimstakers would come to lay their flag here, I just didn't think it would be this soon."
Fratley did not know what to say.
She turned back to look at the airship.
"Those damned creations have made the world far too small." She spat.
"We are here, and I shall fight to defend what Jack gave back to the people of Cleyra, if I must."
She took his forepaw and kissed it. "If only we had brought our weapons."
"I need no spear to fight." Fratley smiled at her, raising his fists.
She laughed sadly, but genuinely. "I am so grateful to have you."
They began to walk away from the little hollow where they had rested, looking on it fondly before they left it.
"I don't wish to leave this place." Freya whispered.
"Nor do I."
For a short time they walked arm and arm under kind emerald tinted sunlight, and the green danced over the sand. As if, they both thought, on the arm of a cherished newlywed on a tree shrouded boulevard of a royal city, or wading in the shallows of a tropical ocean. For this short time the world they tread was aethereal and blurred the line between fictitious and factual.
And then became slowly apparent the sound of clacking tin boots.
Up came Steiner, red in the face and breathing heavily.
Only upon seeing the two of them did he stop, and look up in absolute confusion.
The tree extended above them in all directions, touching the Rim of the Sky.
"Wh – where is…"
Freya and Fratley both raised their hands in gesture to the tree.
"He's in the tree?"
The three of them were shaken by a familiar voice; it rang not in their ears but in their heads.
"He became the Tree, Steiner!"
The two rats looked wide-eyed around them, and then at Steiner, and then at each other. Steiner reacted very differently and became incensed. Even Freya took a step back as in all the time they had spent together; she had never seen his face filled with true rage. At once the naive and somewhat comical knight she was familiar with vanished and became suddenly formidable and intimidating, a figure of true power.
He looked at the ground, his eyes darted left and right. He let out a guttural noise, and drew his sword.
Finding the nearest root, he began to hack at it mercilessly.
Fratley was with him in an instant and exposed a small dagger in his undershirt with his hand at the ready.
"Stop this!"
"This does not concern you, Sir Fratley!"
"It does! You shall not harm Jack."
In one deft motion, Fratley painlessly disarmed him. The sword landed in the sand, humming like a tuning fork.
Freya was quickly at his side.
"Steiner, my friend, your conduct does not become you, you must explain yourself!"
"Jack destroyed Beatrix!" Steiner howled with fury.
"No!" Shrieked the voice in their heads.
"Stop it for once in your life, actions have consequences!" Steiner beat the air, as if trying to banish a ghost.
"Jack did not do this, Gaia's crystal did, but truly I did this to myself!" Beatrix wailed into their minds. "It is you who must face that there are consequences for the actions you take, I've had to!"
Steiner disagreed fiercely, and protested.
Freya and Fratley looked silently for Beatrix, nonplussed, and not understanding the manner in which they heard her voice.
"I must see him, Steiner."
"B – but"
"You must let me see him."
Steiner became still and fought back angry tears. He fumbled with the strap of the satchel on his back and drew it around him, undid the drawstring and removed its contents. It came out in a putrid mass of liquid.
Freya stared at the pitiful creature and knew it at once to be Beatrix. She was somehow instantly recognizable to her, perhaps because she had always viewed her as such a monster and now her physical being reflected her appearance through the glass of Freya's contempt. She stared fixated, and was unable to look away.
Fratley took it differently, he shut his eyes, turned away and emptied the contents of his stomach upon the sand, shivering.
Steiner held the awful form high, as the one trapped within it demanded.
It peered from its familiar, bloodshot, bleeding eye, and with the blood tears rushed anew.
"So he succeeded." She thought, and the others heard. "This form is perhaps the only way I can express my regret at destroying this place. May it now stand forever, and be repopulated by this who will never know my name. Adelbert, does thou still love me?"
Steiner coughed through his tears.
"It still hurts."
"How do I help you?" He asked.
"I wish to protect this place forevermore. Adelbert, I hurt as much inside as without, and I can no longer bear it! Please – please let me out of this body, I wish for you to impale it upon this beautiful tree."
"I refuse!" Steiner yelled. "For I shall not live without you, we must try and find a way to return you to normal because of your duty to Alexandria and to our Queen, and because I need you!"
"Adelbert, it is not possible, it's not that I have been changed, it's simply that I had something taken away. I wished to leave Alexandria because this is what I saw in the mirror, as does anyone who does what I have done. This way of being is torment and I feel as if I burn, I cannot bear even one more second!"
Steiner sat down with her, cradling the writhing, softly screeching form in the stained beddings of the satchel.
"I commend and lament your servitude, and I declare that you shall be a far better general for Alexandria than I, because your heart is true and pure, unlike mine. This is why I selfishly fell in love with you. I have always destroyed, and you have always repaired! There was a reason you beat me in that challenge so long ago. If my heart had been such as yours, the gift Jack gave me would have had no effect, and I would not hurt so! Please help me make this stop!"
"I shall not kill my beloved!" He shrieked.
"Then you shall kill your General! As your commander, I order you to end my life against this beautiful tree!"
The wheels of State moved in Adelbert Steiner like freshly oiled clockwork. Without thought or question, he picked up his fallen sword, placed the struggling mass of flesh and pain against the nearest treeroot, and ran it through. Blood and other fowl liquid sprayed everywhere, and all at once the miserable little creature was at rest, and it began to melt.
Steiner fell to the ground.
Mist began to erupt from the melting body. Freya stepped back as she now knew what it truly was and had never expected to see it again. She pulled Fratley back, protectively.
The mist did not settle as it normally did. It rushed as if drawn by a hurricane wind up and out beyond the tree, and began to whirl. With its wake of wind was drawn the desert sand.
Around the tree the cloud darted and spread, gaining speed, followed by a puff of sand, and then a cloud, and then a mass, and then a storm.
It whirled faster until there was no gap, and the sandstorm slowly rose high and wide and blocked their view of the white airship, the Vube desert, and the sun from their low level.
Cleyra was protected again. Beatrix had kept her promise, and in doing so, Freya knew, would see no rest, and not ever return to Gaia's crystal.
"It's too late to seek forgiveness!"
And now it truly was.
Freya finally felt dissatisfied in her satisfaction, and so empty that for a moment she forgot that Fratley was at her side. Peace for her was only a soft touch or a kiss at this moment just an arms length away.
Not so for their fellow Knight.
Steiner clawed at his own face and tore off his helmet and the chainmail around his head as he let fly his rage and grief lying on the sand. He was suffering a breakdown and it hurt Freya so much to see that she fell to her knees beside him. There was never a clean repayment; there was always collateral damage. An eye for an eye would blind the whole world.
"Why!" He cried out. "Why! How did this come to pass? Why need I lose my beautiful Beatrix!"
Freya extended a forepaw. "Steiner…"
"Don't touch me!" He repelled her. "Don't look at me, do not speak to me! You are in part responsible! Damn you!"
Freya wrapped her arms around herself.
"Shall there be no rest for me, shall I always be at the mercy of the will of someone else? What has my Kingdom ever done for me save teach me how to follow orders so blindly that I kill the only one who ever loved me when she tells me to!"
"I love you, Steiner. As do many others…"
"If it weren't for all of you, none of this would have happened!"
He covered his ears. "I should have never sworn myself to service, they have made of me a repugnant clockwork tin man, a child's wind-up toy!
How was it I never saw the key on my back! I would have fared better as a vagrant! Damn this life, Damn Alexandria, Damn my service, Damn this entire world!"
Puck did his best to keep his sniffles silent. He had followed Jack across the desert but instinctively hidden himself when he saw Freya and Fratley. From behind debris, rocks and the roots of the tree he had quietly shadowed them and watched the entire series of events unfold, and he had not been able to hold back tears since Freya had withdrawn Jack's hood and exposed his injuries.
He was adept at the art of eavesdropping and observing from afar but until now had saved this talent to provide himself only a source of amusement. Bar fights, lover's quarrels about things he found puny and irrelevant, first kisses, shady transactions in darkened corners, the occasional fellow thief or pickpocket. Never anything remotely like this.
And now he ran, he ran away on his bloodied feet and although the party did not observe him, he now cared not if they should.
In this last hour he had been forever changed and felt as if he had been violently shoved through several years of life. These were the things that his father had frustratedly berated him for, and warned him of, and tried to make him aware of and sympathetic to.
His father…
He nearly stumbled.
What could not be true appeared truer now than ever before. The mask of denial had been withdrawn from the laughing, cruel face of the true nature of things.
His father would never return. He had died in and with this place, and would not return to life with it. Just because he hadn't seen it happen did not mean it was not real, as he had tried to tell himself for so many moons.
He'd never be able to say goodbye. A fitting punishment for never having wanted to in the first place.
He was blinded by the sandstorm as he ran through it and emerged on the other side awash in fresh physical pain, veering this way and that from his now profusely bleeding feet and sand gashes and stinging eyes.
He made no effort to nor was he capable of stealth. Using only his upper body strength and forepaws, he climbed up the side of the white airship on the rope ladder Steiner had used to practically fall off it, and entered through the same open porthole in its side that he had exited out of to follow him. Landing on casks of wine destined for Lindblum and splintering one, he ran away from the light of the window and the adjacent lantern and into the dark inner spaces of El Adrel.
Finding an open crate, he overturned and hid underneath it, lying down and folding himself into a ball.
Here he cried as he had never before.
The world was much larger and deeper and more daunting than he had realized, and all this realization entailed had lain waiting for him like a set trap under a thin veneer. He had finally broken through it by stopping long enough to finally be distracted from his selfish wants and restlessness, and the trap of realization had sprung.
How was he in any way deserving of the throne of Burmecia? In what way did he possess even a speck of the strength of character he had just witnessed in those behind him as they suffered, and wept, and made sacrifice, and loved, and died?
How ever would he become a Kind and Benevolent and Just King?
How had he wasted so much of his life to only now come to ask this question?