With all that said... the fic.
Somewhere in the Light
They never cared much for Odin in Mysidia. He had heard their muttering about this new king of Baron, start and likely end of a bloodline, him with his dark sword and his dark eye. Unquestionably it was the sword that bothered them more in a moralistic way, but it was the eye, without even a reassuring mist of cataracts draped over its blank stare, set across from its relatively normal twin, that made them squirm long after they met him. The state of the eye was a legacy of the first Earth, like his horse Sleipnir and his old lance Gungnir. He sometimes thinks they would have been more comfortable with an empty socket, which was what he'd been left with originally.
Odin visits Mysidia on his way to Ordeals. He isn't certain what he intends to prove by this but he goes anyway, strides through up to the House of Prayer, and then stands there. The sun has risen and around him the mages go about their business, with slight adjustments in their pathways to avoid coming within a spear's length of him. A few of them drift over in swirls of blue and red-triangle robes; he would call their actions staring, but it is too discreet to be such.
The Elder comes out after a few minutes. "Can I help you?"
"You cannot."
The Elder's forehead creases. "Your voice… have we met before?"
"Yes." It is no doubt wicked of him to take pleasure from the befuddlement of the Elder. He takes it, regardless.
The Elder realizes near-immediately but has the good sense to wait until he's gotten his syllables in order before he opens his mouth. "You're not King O-"
Even in Mysidia they must have heard tell of his death. "No king." He allows a small smile. "Not anymore. You think of Cecil."
"Perhaps you should come inside."
"Perhaps I should."
The Elder turns and goes back into the House of Prayer. Odin takes his time in following. Once inside, he declines a seat and other niceties and waits for words of consequence. Eventually they do arrive.
"Why have you come here?"
"Cecil-" He prevents himself from saying my son. Cecil is no longer his son. No. Cecil was never his son. He must remember this. "-has apparently discovered things of value on Mount Ordeals. I would see for myself."
The Elder nods; he thinks he understands. First there is Cecil and Kain marching off to Ordeals one after another, and now there is the fallen king Odin following for his own share of redemption. "Your sword will be ineffective."
"I have another weapon." He states the obvious. For this excursion Odin has brought Gungnir, strapped to his side opposite his sword. The magic of the first Earth has faded with age and now it does on occasion miss its mark. He would leave it behind in favor of his dark sword, but he has heard rumors and does not care to discover the truth of them for himself. But of course he has brought the sword as well - leaving it behind would be a compliance to something he does not wish to comply to.
"So you do." Then the Elder brings up what they've both obviously been waiting for. "We were told you had died."
"I do not die easily." Though he is aware most would not consider a sword to the chest an easy death. The Elder, being fairly intelligent, looks loath to accept his statement. It will be necessary to elaborate. But gently; it won't do to afflict the man with heart failure. "You know, no doubt, of Leviathan and Asura, of Bahamut Dragonking."
"Yes. Then you are… one of them. A Summoned Monster?"
"A 'summoned monster.'" He lets the words slide, languid. "'Monster'… it can mean a great many things, can it not? Has Kain come down yet?"
He waits. The Elder does not seem to recognize the name. But of course, he would not. "Yellow-haired," he prompts. "A great deal of leg."
"Him? He came and left yesterday."
"There was another man with him, one with a familial resemblance. Was there not?"
"If you know all this already," says the Elder with a hint of gratifying exasperation, "why are you asking me?"
"There was, then."
Three days ago Odin saw the Dragon's Tear cross the sky in the general direction of Mysidia; he knew what it signified. He visited Leviathan and Asura's home soon after and brought it up during conversation.
"It's his Kain," said Leviathan. "He'll be doing something foolish."
Asura said, "It's probably nothing more foolish than what we've all done." She glanced at Odin after saying this. He nodded once, showing her he was not offended, and she relaxed.
Rydia looked toward them. In private, in his sentimental moods, Leviathan has called her his second daughter, the other being icy Shiva. Rydia of Mist is Leviathan's daughter as much as Kain Highwind or Cecil Harvey Ya are Odin's sons. "His Kain? What do you mean?"
Asura and Leviathan looked at each other; Odin could almost hear them say I guess this had to come up. Shiva, perhaps their only daughter, took the job of explanation.
"You see," she began, "centuries ago, Bahamut came to the Valley of Mist and met a human woman…"
Bahamut had lust, Bahamut had love-longing, Bahamut had desire for a more sentimental immortality built from the twining of bloodlines. What explanation, what excuse has Odin?
He thanks the Elder for his time and leaves the House of Prayer, echoing the empty wishes of good fortune they give him. The sun is high when he reaches Ordeals.
Gungnir destroys the advancing skeletons, and Odin's path is littered with fragments of bone and rusted metal. Perhaps even now they slide across the ground toward one another, reforming themselves to menace him again on the way down. No matter. If Cecil could survive the journey, he can as well.
Cecil Harvey Ya was a year old when he was orphaned, and two when he came to Odin's care. His mother had married, but everyone spoke of her son as a Harvey regardless. Better the name of a Baronian family than the strange two-letter syllable his father had brought with him, implications of illegitimacy or no.
Cecil's uncle Wiglaf had had the dubious honor of being the only living Harvey to receive the child. He had been a dark knight and not a particularly skillful, but one all the same and proud of it simply because. Like his sister, when he wasn't holding a pen to pour out inked trees and dragons, he fluttered his hands as if they were birds - shining jackdaws to his sister's doves. Unlike his sister, he readily cursed the name of her husband without even the aid of alcohol. Not in front of Odin, of course, but Odin listened and heard.
"Should have known, should have warned her until she listened to me." He would glance then at little Cecil sitting beside him, send him off to play with the other children, and continue on. "Poor kid, first he gets the stupid name and now he gets disappeared, probably dumped in a ditch somewhere. Poor kid."
For those years of feigned mortality Odin had strictly limited his access to supernatural knowledge and ability. He'd only been tempted once, and anyone would have been tempted to draw their sword and behead the Fiend of Water. But that would be years in the future. Still, he had known that something was not as it seemed in regards to the late Jewel Harvey's vanished husband and older son ("Golbez!" they'd whispered in Baron, unaware of the circumstances in which they would repeat the name years later. "Yes, that's what they named him. What kind of name is that for a little boy, I'd like to know").
"Pity the dark knight, will you," Wiglaf Harvey would rant to his absent brother-in-law, pacing with his sword halfway drawn, a few other dark knights - there were more, in those days - Seth Highwind, and Anselm Baigan on the other side of the table, looking slightly glazed, having heard it all before. "Pity the poor dark knight, Sir Ya, because everyone - everyone being you - knows you have to hike up some mountain in Mysidia and die horribly to be really happy. As if you ever did." That was before the death and the disappearances; he'd stopped after, probably because as far as he was concerned he'd just been proven right a thousand times over.
Odin met the man once, around the time of the wedding. His name was KluYa ("It's not even two words for heaven's sake," they'd whispered), and he'd given Odin the same look he'd given to the dark knights. Odin remembers thinking that KluYa, like Odin himself, knew more than he ought to. He remembers thinking how strange it was that this man so obviously pitied a king - a god-king, though he might not have known that - a god-king twice over, though he certainly couldn't have known that.
As if you ever did. And as it turned out, KluYa had indeed hiked up Ordeals, though whether that was what had made him a paladin was debatable.
Odin's attackers were all mortal men once. A number of them are still clad in fragments of the armor they died in, still wield the blades they held to the end. He wonders, and realizes immediately. Of course. Countless people had tread this path before Cecil even set eyes on it. How many of them had returned?
There is no time or means for sentimentality. Even if he should try to give them quarter they would continue their attempts to add him to their ranks. And the rocks of Ordeals are no place for burials - his, or theirs.
He remembers exactly where they buried the last prince of Baron. The last prince of Baron was hardly older than Cecil is now before the waiting curse in the royal bloodline revealed itself to him. Odin presided over the funeral, as was his duty, and feigned surprise when afterward the fading king pressed the crown into his hands.
"You must do this, for me. There's no one else now. It isn't right, Odin." For that period of time Odin's name had been bandied about as if it were regular as any other. After the coronation it promptly returned to its former stature. "It isn't right that he went before me. It's not right."
Odin had looked into the man's eyes. They were pain-clouded, but he was reminded of mirrors. "I lost a son, once."
It was, in retrospect, a foolish thing to say; it sounded for all the world like an attempt to upstage a father's grief. But the man didn't seem to see it that way. "Did you, Odin? How old was he?"
"Older than yours was," he said, which was true.
"What was his name?"
"Baldur." That was true as well.
"Baldur? Strange name."
"We were strange people."
"Yes, perhaps so. How…?"
"He was murdered." That was true as well. (Better take care now, Leviathan would say, laughing, better be careful, Odin One-Eye, or it'll become a habit.) "Everyone loved him - nearly everyone. I suppose we all believed nothing, nobody, would harm him."
"And it was nearly nothing, then?"
"Yes. Nearly nothing."
The man's laughter scraped at his throat and at Odin's ears. "Not like mine, then. Nice enough of a boy, but everything wants to harm him. He can hurt himself standing still!" Odin didn't bother to correct his tense. "Just goes to show… just goes to show…" The clouded eyes blinked once, twice. "Did you catch the scoundrel who did it?"
Odin's jaw tightened. "We caught him quick enough."
"Good. That's good."
The old king woke the next morning as usual, but he didn't wake on the one after. His death is one thing Odin can truthfully claim he had no hand in.
Odin remembers, too, where they buried Frey Baigan. He had done with his reign by then, and there was nothing stopping him from knowing all that transpired afterward. Foolish, he would have chided if it was any of his concern anymore. Of all the times to be brave. Why couldn't you have kept your head down?
Besides befriending the old king with his doomed son he had befriended a young guardsman named Anselm Baigan, who was a reasonably competent commander given the chance but at a loss when it came to naming his own, equally doomed son. "Would Frey suffice?" Odin said in the end, "It was the name of an old friend." Anselm had promptly said it would suffice, and in the subsequent days became fairly taken with the name. On his part, Odin was pleased that he'd resisted suggesting they name him Baldur. Though if he had, he would've likely gotten a blink and an Excuse me, Your Majesty, but isn't that an adjective?
And it soon became clear the boy was no Baldur in any case. Like the last prince of Baron Frey Baigan tripped over pebbles and got bloody knees. He went to school when he wasn't abed with every cold that arrived on the wind; he sparred with his father with a wood sword and eventually managed to stop whacking himself in the face. To be fair, he improved dramatically with military training, but still when light-footed Kain or radiant Cecil challenged him to a match, he might as well have rammed himself into the nearest stone wall and gotten it over with.
A place for everyone and everyone in their place. Frey's place was in the uniform of Captain of the Guard, where he could feel of import, as Kain's was with the dragon knights, and as Cecil's was on the throne of Baron, in the end, as Odin had known for years it would be.
What did you do, you fiend, what did you do to His Majesty?
Fiend… you call me fiend, eh? What did I do to that old fool? What I now do to you.
Like they had with Odin's shell, they had kept his body intact long enough to have one of Cagnazzo's more talented servants reproduce his form, and then they did the work of carrion birds to a far greater extent than any bird ever had. What they dumped could barely be recognized as human, let alone as who he was. The identification of Frey Baigan's corpse while he was "alive," if estranged from all family and friends, would have rather interfered with their deception.
That reminds him - after he has done with this, Odin will return to Baron and see to it that they are all enlightened as to the true course of events. It is discourteous to Anselm and his wife to let them continue to think their son a traitor.
He cannot possibly be tiring already. It's not possible. He must be able to endure what Cecil endured, when Cecil had little more than an ineffective sword and the two young mages, black and white, to help him. But the white magic - yes, the white magic would have given him considerable aid, along with whatever healing items he would have been able to obtain in Mysidia. In his pride Odin has brought along neither.
He does, however, have the next best thing.
Odin glances alternately above him, taking care not to stare straight at the sun, and to his sides to try and spot the next attack. He is soon rewarded by the sight of one of the great birds he has seen around Mysidia - Zuu, they are called - flying overhead.
While he continues to brandish Gungnir in the general direction of any potential enemies with his right hand, he draws his sword with his left and aims. He has performed this technique enough that speaking his intentions is no longer necessary. There is only the dark beam, the falling bird, and Odin's revitalization. As Odin sheaths his sword, the Zuu lands just ahead of him. If it hasn't died in the air, it is certainly dead now. Will the next visitor to Ordeals be greeted by the rotting bird?
You must learn to give before you can take. The adage has a quality of holiness about it, but it was what the dark knights of Baron lived by. They would send dark waves over monsters and practice dummies until they dropped their swords and folded up into the dirt and clapped their hands to their red-streaming ears and mouths. For most of the knights, Wiglaf and Cecil Harvey included, the only vaguely feasible goal was to strengthen their waves and to be able to fire off more of them before they were reduced to that state. A few others could feasibly become able to take from their opponent rather than give of themselves to shed still more blood. Odin is the only one of them still alive.
Odin is no stranger to sacrifice. The eye for which his dark one is a replacement was given away for a drink of wisdom before the concept of the Dark Sword was ever introduced to him, and for nine days and nine nights he swung from a branch of the World Tree - again it was for wisdom, not so that his enemies would pay the same price or more, for he was generally able to take care of such without resorting to these means.
The dark knights of Baron gave and gave, bled and bled, and one by one they fell.
One choked on a fishbone, one who'd struggled up to the level where he could almost take as well as give drowned on his leave in Fabul - they never had recovered his gear - and one came to Ordeals and renounced the Dark Sword. War took the rest.
Odin sees the table where the warriors of Castle Baron gathered. It is not really there, of course - Bahamut in a poetic frame of mind would say he sees it with his missing eye. There had always been some dragon knight or guardsman or ordinary soldier there in reality, but his missing eye sees none of them now. There are only the dark knights. Arkady Leonart tells them, bright eyes staring from his drowned face, of his latest readings on Fabul; he has always dreamed of going there. Wiglaf Harvey holds his tongue between his teeth and his pen in gauntleted hand, ignoring the dripping blood except to keep it from spattering the paper. Cecil, too, in his paladin's garb with fair hair drifting about his face, sits across from his uncle and cranes to stare at the picture - Wiglaf had always drawn young Golbez a picture for his birthday, Odin remembers. It was just about the only consistent contact with his sister's family.
This one has the boy smiling and stroking the head of the serpentine dragon wrapped about him in a fashion not at all threatening. He says it's called the Shadow Dragon, says Wiglaf, and I'm not going to argue with him. Wonder where he got the idea.
Shadow Dragon…? And Cecil smiles in that way he has. Eh… don't make it too strong, all right, Uncle Wiglaf? Of course Cecil has never spoken to his maternal uncle in such a way; he never had the chance to.
Wiglaf smiles back. How'm I supposed to make it strong or not, Cecil? It's his dragon.
"You are aware that I was not the one to kill you." With his speaking, the table and its occupants dissipate. Odin continues up the path.
Their voices remain for a moment - That doesn't mean you didn't cause us to die. Cecil's voice is absent. Of course, it would be.
The first thing Odin sees when he enters the shrine is himself. "Clever," he says. He gets no response, takes a few steps forward, and stands in the center of the shrine. His reflection on the opposite wall stands as well. It is so calm, it knows nothing. "Well?" Not for a thousand years has Odin felt as foolish as he does now.
What do you want here?
He chooses the most succinct of the hundred replies that take shape. "I wish to know."
But he'll not be allowed to get away with that. To know what?
He concentrates on each word, not permitting them out until he has ascertained each is flat, without trace of inflection. "To know what your younger son knows."
The implication of a sigh emanates from glassed walls and ceiling. My son… I must give you thanks for raising him.
"You must give me thanks? What is it that you wish to give me?"
Why did you push him to the Dark Sword? Ah. It would be that. You must have known my son would have never achieved his full potential as a dark knight.
"Better that he was with lower potential than if he were dead."
A flutter of agitation. What do you mean by that, Odin?
"Surely you are aware of the state of this mountain. Surely you didn't expect him to survive the journey so young. And you would trust me to teach him of paladinhood?"
More flutters. You do not lie. But that is not the whole reason, is it? There is… something more to it.
"Why does this matter to you?"
Why does knowing what Cecil knows matter to you?
His reflection stares, dumb. "Wonderful question."
Is it such a shameful reason?
Minutes pass. Again and again Odin moves to leave. Again and again he stops. Sooner or later he will be out the door and on his way down the mountain. But he speaks before this happens.
"Better weaker than dead…"
The castle was accustomed to Cecil and Kain by the time they were fourteen. At the sound of their cries ("race you race you") people flattened themselves against walls, hurried through handy doorways. The braver looked on from cracked-open doors as the two passed in a flurry of arms and legs and flyaway hair. That time Odin heard them come to a stop just outside the throne room. They laughed and laughed with their breaking voices, drew breath, laughed some more. Odin's hands froze against the arms of the throne.
"Cecil," he called. As he spoke he stood, and was at the base of the steps when the door opened.
Cecil was still smiling when he came in, but it faded fast. "Your Majesty?" He locked his thumbs together and moved his fingers in patterns his mother and uncle would have been proud of. His brightness was near tangible; even now he radiated it like a boy-sized star. Dangerous radiance, burning him to still brighter collapse.
Odin had seen it long before this, but he'd held off. The young were often like this; it faded with age. But with age Cecil's light only increased. The first time Odin had seen brightness like that, he'd thought it protection. In truth - he knew this from experience - it was the protection of a torch in the wilderness, frightening off the weaker creatures and drawing the strongest ones from the shadows. And Cecil Harvey could fall to a thousand things besides mistletoe.
We thought nothing, nobody would harm him.
Kain peered wide-eyed around the edge of the door until Cecil turned back and shut it. Then he repeated, "Your Majesty?"
It is not right, it is not right that they pass on and leave us behind. He will pass before me of course but not so soon. I will not allow it to be so soon.
"Cecil," he repeated himself back. "We must discuss your future."
I see. Your son -
" - is dead."
At least he does not say I see again. You feared for him.
"I did not."
You did not want to make the same mistake.
He senses the trap but walks into it anyway. "Of course not."
KluYa's amusement is palpable. Of course not. Amusement fades. I apologize.
"For what do you apologize?"
I apologize for believing you the same as the fiend that replaced you. I apologize, for you cannot know what my son knows.
"You cannot let me know or you will not?"
I cannot. At your core…
"There is darkness. Is there not?"
Yes. As long as you have been in existence… you have been of darkness.
"It seems, then, I took in the wrong one of your sons." The inflections slip in again; it does not matter now.
I cannot change who you are in your heart, Odin.
"Ah, then, I am irredeemable, correct?"
I would not say… irredeemable.
"Then would you care to inform me of your sweeter alternative?"
Not only evil lives in darkness.
"Very gnomic. I applaud you."
Another flutter, this one of impatience. I meant it, Odin. Your dark knights were good men and you were a good king - if perhaps more militaristic than I would have liked.
"You say that because if you did not you would condemn your own son."
That does not change the truth of it.
"Why, then, did you pity us?"
Because when I looked at you, when I looked at them, I saw death and I saw darkness and I saw goodness at the core of it, and I thought that was the only thing there was to see. Odin… I can say nothing else to you. Goodbye.
"Goodbye," he says, and wonders if KluYa lingered long enough to hear it.
Odin leaves the shrine with all due haste and watches the doorway seal again. Night has fallen, but his eyes see through the shadows cloaking Ordeals and he makes his way downward with ease. No revenant dares attack him in the darkness.
Sleipnir waits for him at the base of the mountain. They leave Ordeals behind, approach and pass Mysidia and its bay. By this time Odin has completely cast away his adopted limitations of mortality; Sleipnir's hooves churn through the waves as they did the grassland. Odin sits straight and keeps both his eyes on the nearing shore as the first traces of morning light begin to shimmer on the ocean. They are just outside Baron by the time the sun fully rises.
END