Sagittarius.
Ilya came to with a start.
Floor. Cold marble. Dank musty smell, little air.
Even with his eyes still closed he could tell there was hardly any light.
An old, enclosed place then: a Temple for sure, but which one?
No Aura.
So. An empty Temple. Libra? Or Sagittarius?
A foot connected hard with his ribcage and sent him sailing into a wall. He slumped forwards on hands and knees.
"Who?"
What Saint could hide his Aura so thoroughly that he had not noticed his presence?
Smell.
Saints generally smell of unwashed clothes and sweaty leather and metal, and blood.
"There is all of that, but…different. Something else added to it…flowers? What Saint would smell of flowers? Of course, Aphrodite…but I have never met him, and this scent is not unfamiliar…"
"Open your eyes, Renegade, before I close them forever."
"Oh please, what a corny phrase!"
His second thought ran: "A feminine voice…so flowers is a feminine smell! Can't be Juno or Antonia, and Athena smells fresh and expensive, so it must be…"
It was.
Still on all fours he slowly looked up along shapely legs to dwindle on what would have been a codpiece if he had been dealing with a male Saint. Its decorative design, right between the legs, reminded him of something he did not wish to name and which he would not have recognised or known to how to name if he had not found some dirty old magazines under Camu's bed, back in his izba in Siberia. They had been moulding away, but the pictures were still fully explicit. He had been shocked then, and he was shocked now, at the immediate association, the memory, and the reaction.
"Hello Marin." he mumbled, to cover his embarrassment, " Nice to see you too."
Yes of course, Marin, who else? She alone had bee capable of making such a blank of her mind to confuse the mighty telepath Asterion, and her will had overruled the mountain's.
He leaned back against the wall, his wings outspread and his arms resting on his knees.
Angel relaxing.
"Get up. "
He sighed. This apparently was going to be difficult.
"Marin, it is really very simple: you are, of course, at all time at liberty to kill me, if you have no moral problem with that. I however have turned my back on that sort of thing. No! Don't say it!" He held up a hand to silence her, " I was forced to kill Kanon: he was threatening my friends and me. We were cast into the Bermuda Triangle and his death has released us. I am going to stand up now, and search the Temple. If my friends are not here I will go to the next one and search there, and so on, up and down. At no time do I intend to be a threat to anyone. Do you believe me?"
Marin did not answer.
"I said: do you believe me?"
"I believe you."
Much relieved he scrambled to his feet.
"I am still going to kill you."
"Bozhe moi, grant me patience! "
"Why ?"
For answer, the female Saint sprang in the air and rammed her right foot into him. The remains of Aioros' testament, carved in the wall behind him, crumbled.
It took him a moment to get his breath back.
"I asked you why. Can't you give me a civil answer? Why do you want to kill me?"
"Surely you know the reason. I am a Saint. It is my duty."
"Where does Marin come into it? I can't believe she does this of her own free will. Or does she not have a will of her own?"
"What makes you think that my will and Sanctuary's do not coincide?"
Ilya sighed once more.
"I suppose it would have been too much to hope for that you would be reasonable. Would you be at all prepared to listen to me? I do have a tale or two to tell that might interest you. Incidentally, you do realise of course that I am two senses ahead of you and therefore way out of your league…"
"That will not stop me from trying any more than it stopped you last year, against the Gold Saints."
"Will you listen though?"
"At your justifications? I think not."
Again the Aquila Saint jumped to hit him midriffs. This time he evaded her. There was a hole in the wall after she had pulled her foot free.
"There is a way of making you listen."
With a nonchalant snap of the fingers the Cygnus Saint created a ring of swirling ice-crystals around her.
"It is the Koliso." he informed her while she struggled to free herself of the cold restraints, "Eventually you will be able to break free. In the meantime however you will listen. I am not going to justify myself. I just want you to know what you are working for and, more importantly, who…"
Marin thrashed about like a caged animal.
"I know what I am working for. " she snarled, " A world of peace and harmony build on Athena's principles and guided by her loving care…"
"What principles? Bozhe moi, have you any idea what you are talking about? She is the Goddess of War! We are warriors!! There is precious little peace and harmony to be found among ourselves. It's all fighting, fighting, fighting! Trainees have to vanquish their opponents in order to win their Cloths, leastways, that is what Ikki and Seiya had to do, and Cassios was not slain because Pegasus chose not to. Shun, Shiryu and I passed tests against the forces of nature. How did you win your Cloth? No, don't answer that, I don't particularly want to know. You are a true Saint. You will live on that like one, and, having done your duty and nothing but your duty, you will not have lived at all. How old are you? Twenty? Ever had a boyfriend who took you to the cinema and discos and such? Ever been kissed? Would you even like to? Is there anything left inside of you that feels?!?"
Marin gave a derisive laugh.
"People who do that are but half alive. They preoccupy themselves with utter futilities, attaching importance to appearance and material welfare, and the satisfaction of their supposed needs. They are all base, empty, hollow inside, with no sense of direction or purpose. But we Saints feel the Cosmos explode within ourselves. We have a goal, a Mission. Our path lies clear before us. I have chosen to walk it as Seiya did; you have cowardly abandoned. You betrayed Seiya, and that I cannot forgive. For that you shall die!"
"Aha, so there was where Seiya got that from. His fine speech about modern youth's futile existence did not come off his own bat, he was reciting his master."
"Dear Miho, you ought to know by now that Saints barely had an original thought in their heads. They will recite the age-old adage repeated from Master to Apprentice. There are four or five generations to a century for ordinary humans, double that for Saints: they are not as long lasting."
"They are not totally without brains. They could have used them."
"Well, we did. Who can tell how many previous Saints or Apprentices felt like us and opted out? We were luckier, I guess, and were successful where they failed."
"We had outside help."
"That, and we had each other. That made all the difference."
"What is wrong with you? You are not stupid. Look at what Sainthood has done to us all! Look at what it did to Seiya! Consider the crap we have been fed. 'Athena abhors weapons therefore her Saints bear none save Libra to be used in direst emergency.' What about the Medusa Shield? It turned us into stone! There are Andromeda's Chains, offensive as well as defensive, and Cerberus's Morning Stars and Auriga's razor sharp discs. Jamian trained birds to attack for him, Ichi the Hydra uses poison. Look at the Sagittarius Cloth, for crying out loud, it has a bow and arrow, what are those if not weapons?!!"In the middle of the Temple the Gold Cloth stood. A small spider had woven its web from the tip of the arrow to the knee of the body. There were a couple of flies caught in it.
The Cloth was not dead, but it did not hum and glow as it used to do. The spirit of Aioros had either left it, or had been so thoroughly absorbed by the souls of the previous Sagittarius Saints, that he no longer imposed his will on it. Apparently, the Collective too had retired from action.
"Can you honestly say that he does not have an unfair advantage over others? And yet without it we would not have vanquished Poseidon."
For the first time Marin hesitated.
Ilya saw that gap (little more than a fissure) in her defence. He pressed his advantage.
"I've wondered about you. You are Sanctuary trained yet you knew from the start that Saori Kido was Athena. You were always there at the right moment, though most of the time you acted secretly. When we thought you had gone for good you produced Seika, which gave Seiya the strength to hold on. Too may coincidences or none at all…"
He suddenly had a flash of inspiration and cried: " You are an agent of Graad! Kido send you to Sanctuary ahead of us, when he was still collecting all his children, to pave the way! While we were babies and toddlers, you were training for Sainthood, and you gained it in time to train Seiya in turn! I'm right, aren't I?"
Marin stood very still within the twirling circles of ice, expressionless as ever behind her mask. After a moment she said, defensively: " What if I am?"
Ilya had another illuminating thought. "Seiya told us about Asterion claiming you were his sister, or rather a Japanese girl come to Sanctuary looking for her brother. Were you? Was that how Kido black-mailed you into it?"
"Kido-San appointed me as his agent and honoured me with is full confidence! I have served his wishes to the best of my abilities and did what was needful. I will continue to do so!"
"I suppose Asterion had you two mixed up, although Seika must have arrived much later in Rodorio. I bet you recognised her immediately, and decided to hold her back in case you needed her, as indeed in the end you did. You knew how desperate Seya was to find is sister and yet you said nothing! You used her, you used them both! He trusted you. Not I, you betrayed him!"
The explosion of her Cosmos shattered the Koliso.
Ilya gasped at her strength. She had attained the seventh Sense! Her Aquila Cloth broke free from her body, allowing the Cygnus Saint delightful glimpses of her curves.
"Sagittarius! To me!"
She launched herself in the air as she cried those words. It throbbed with energy, and the Golden Cloth came alive. The frightened spider hurried to the centre of its web.
"Marin! Listen to me! Kido is a murderer! I have proof that he deliberately had the ship that bore my mother and me sunk, and ordered the sailors to abandon her and take me! God knows how many others he had assassinated, perhaps your mother as well! He stopped at nothing to achieve his ends, and Saori –Athena knew it! Despite all protestations of her love and understanding she is as guilty as he was, listen, it was all a lie! All lies!"
The Sagittarius Cloth split to its separate components, sending the spider and its web flying every which way, and shaped itself around the female Saint. Marin drew the bow, pointing the arrow at the young Russian's head.
"Listen, I tell you! Even is she does mean well, and I agree she probably does, she wants to preserve the world from harm, she goes about it the wrong way! Humanity has spoken up. It doesn't want a graveyard's peace, the harmony of the dead. It is no not worth the tortured children, the suffering, the sacrifices, however noble they may seem…"
The arrow trembled.
"Look behind you Marin! All of us Saints look back on a trail of corpses. All we can look forward to is a pile more!"
The bowstring sang.
"It is wrong! Wrong!! Wrong!!!
The arrow sought its target.
To be continued.
OK, that WAS what the design on Marin's Silver slip in the manga made me think of. Wears tight leotards, has a cleavage a guy would like to die in, and has to put on a mask to hide her femininity? Since the rule was imposed in Sion's day, one may suppose he never read 'Playboy'. Or maybe he did.