Twelve
Years
Later
"Pyra? What are you doing there? Where's the control room? Pyra?!" Realisation fills the boy's eyes. "You can't mean—"
"I'm sorry…" The girl stretches out her arm, a smile on her lips, and the bridge connecting them explodes in a shower of sparks. Nothing but a black abyss stretches between them. "This was the first lie I ever told you."
"Pyra…" The boy holds onto some hope that doesn't exist as he pleads. "It'll be fine, right? You'll deal with the World Tree, then come back, right?!"
The girl's expression says it all. There is no coming back, no tomorrow.
Not for her.
Shulk jolted awake. Sweat covered his arms and drenched the linen sheets. Not blood. Neither did winds tear through his shirt to make him tremble; the cold only came from within.
He struggled to the edge of the bed and listened to his uneven breaths in a futile attempt at finding calm in the simple exercise of drawing and releasing oxygen. It didn't work. The images of his dream held him captive, repeated themselves with merciless intensity, and the loss of two people he didn't know stung in his chest like an ether bullet, a splintered ether bullet he had carried with him for too many years.
Nothing else moved in the vast room, the shadows might as well have been painted to the marble walls. Shulk clawed his fingers into the sheets, but his heartbeat continued to race against the ticking clock. The air felt heavy and used-up in his lungs.
After several moments, during which the relief of either sleep or unconsciousness faded further out of reach, he abandoned the bedside and fled towards the floor-level windows. The motion sensor he himself had installed approved of Shulk's presence, and the glass slit aside to allow entrance to the balcony. He collapsed against the balustrade and soaked in the air from outside.
Beneath him stretched Alcamoth. The many fountains sprayed water onto the spotless terraces even at night, and the ether lamps tirelessly illuminated the insides of the glass dome. A sight forever married to the sound of organs and choir chants. After the long years of rebuilding, the ancient capital had almost reclaimed its former glory. If not for the absence of Eryth Sea beyond the dome, one could have given in to the illusion that the city had jumped back in time to its golden days.
But the tents sprawled on the lawns below told a different story. Fewer people used the parc for a late-night stroll, and the lonely silhouettes out in the open hurried along as though a pack of problems chased them. The handful High Entia all shared the small wings of part-Homs.
Shulk searched the sky with his eyes, but not a single Telethia glid across the darkness beyond the dome. No one had seen them since… that day.
His chest constricted, and he forced himself to count to ten, and then ten more until his fingers loosened their grip on the railing. But with nothing to hold onto, they trembled. And the sight of his hand holding nothing terrified him more than the cramped muscles, haunted him more than a black abyss between two strangers, transported him back to that day.
Breathless, he lunged for the object on the side table next to him, and the familiar, laminated surface and the groves in between offered comfort where the night did not. Then his fingers began their work, pushing and shifting and turning the pieces of the puzzle box. The rhythmic clicking when parts locked into place calmed his rapid heartbeat.
In the first months after that day, Shulk had combatted his empty, trembling hands by sneaking into his lab, often in the middle of the night. For hours, he had connected circuits that needed no reconnecting, had replaced gears and fastened screws to give his hands something to hold. But then Reyn found out about Shulk's nightly ritual, and apart from stealing the key card to his lab, he and Sharla did everything to keep Shulk out of his safe haven. The puzzle box had worked as a sort of compromise. This way, they could sleep reassured that the lights in the lab stayed out, while Shulk could keep his hands occupied when contemplations were the only alternative.
Years had passed since then. Now Shulk had other reasons to substitute his visits to his lab with the puzzle box. Melia worried too much already.
Shulk had solved the puzzle box uncounted times; he knew the little mechanisms and the patterns to follow better than the corners of his room. Still, the simple task prevented the trembling.
And so, instead of that day, Shulk's thoughts drifted to the dream that had chased him out of bed.
No, not a dream. A dream would imply that the images faded once his body adjusted to the waking world, and even the most haunting of dreams did not repeat the exact same words in the exact same order. The blurry contours, the strict, unchanging arrangement of events, the persistence with which the images stuck to his mind — everything about this particular dream resembled Shulk's visions.
But he lived in a world without visions. That was what he had wished for, right?
Still, the boy and the girl he had never met had stolen his sleep eight times this month already. Perhaps, through sheer power of belief, Shulk had relearned the ability to glimpse into the future without Alvis and the Monado. Perhaps the days of stumbling in the dark were finally over. With a little luck he could prevent another disaster or even build a future in which the boy and the girl could walk together over that metal bridge.
Changing the future… like he used to.
The pitter-patter of bare feet joined the sounds of night-time Alcamoth. Shulk turned around to where a small shadow stood at the window frame.
"Can't you sleep?" Shulk whispered with a look past the shadow's shoulder back into the room. The teleporter had to have given both a visual and an audio signal when the newcomer entered, but he hadn't noticed either.
The shadow toddled forward, and the cool light of Alcamoth's ether lamps gave his pale face a ghostly appearance. Although tailormade and stitched with silver threads, his pyjamas had endured too many restless nights. The shock of silver hair hadn't enjoyed the tender care of a comb for some time. But the blue eyes shone as if they wanted to make up for the absence of the sunlit sky. Aaron gave no answer to Shulk's question and instead studied him with the quiet serenity so unfitting for a five-year-old.
"Do you want me to call your mother?" Shulk kneeled down and stroked Aaron's hair. The tiny wings growing out of the side of his head hid themselves under the soft strands, but they were there.
Aaron said nothing and reached out for the puzzle box in Shulk's free hand. An unspoken question swam in his wide eyes.
Shulk wasn't one to read between the lines, but even he understood this question.
"I guess I couldn't sleep either," he said.
Although he resented the idea for a moment, he gave Aaron the puzzle box. His small hands began fumbling with the mechanisms without delay, and Shulk wasted a second to admire the simple curiosity with which the boy flicked the movable parts. As if he expected a treasure inside.
"Maybe it's better if we don't wake your mother," Shulk said. "I could carry you to your room instead."
"I don't want to sleep."
Aaron's bright voice sounded like the chirping of birds. Comforting. Optimistic even. Despite this and despite his age, the few words he shared came with a gravitas that made others shudder. Everything he said was well thought out, engineered to leave a lasting impression. Aaron constructed sentences like Shulk constructed machines.
Shulk's hands resumed their restless fidgeting, and he craved for the familiar cold and roughness of a metal component. "Maybe we could both use a mug of hot Armu milk first."
That idea seemed to please Aaron, and he locked his arms around Shulk's neck after Shulk lifted him up. Like this, Shulk tiptoed past the bed and towards the teleporter. The system sprung to life, and after the familiar chime, the pair dematerialised.
The travel from one teleporter to its twin lasted perhaps a second, while their ether particles destabilised, rushed through the conductor spanning the distance between both end sports, and reformed faster than a Hom's mind could comprehend. When Shulk had stepped onto the teleporter platform at the Eryth Sea for the first time, his thoughts had run wild with theories as to how the High Entia had achieved such a technology. His performance in the following brief skirmish against a Nebula had been accordingly poor.
After so many years in Alcamoth, however, and after designing one such teleporter himself, the technology had lost a little of its magic. Like most apparent miracles, the workings hinged on a simple trick. This one merely used the abundance of ether to its advantage.
Aaron remained likewise unimpressed by the teleporter when the brightness of the palace hallway replaced the dimness from before. He turned the puzzle box on its head and tried a new corner piece.
While the golden light bounced from the high marble pillars with the same intensity as always, only Shulk's steps echoed in the vaulted ceiling. The emptiness could lull him into believing in peace.
No one overworked in the nearby kitchen at this time of day either; the army of servants on whose work-hardened hands Alcamoth's palace rested had excused themselves for the night.
After placing Aaron on one of the polished work surfaces, Shulk busied his hands and shut down his thoughts. Open cabinets, take out mugs, feel the assortment of metal, glass, and clay jars in search for milk. Everything sat in its predetermined place, and everything was in his control.
Until a voice from the door startled him. "Is the great engineer on his way to fix another problem that doesn't exist?"
Shulk looked at the newcomer long enough to acknowledge her presence before he returned to his task. "Tyrea."
"Your warm welcome makes my mother look like an overly sentimental housewife."
Tyrea stalked across the immaculate floor, and the sound of her heels only lost their harshness when she spotted Aaron. Her headwings bounced as she leaped onto the counter and whispered to him. He answered with a smile, an absolute rarity on the best of days.
"No wonder he doesn't sleep when he is supposed to," Tyrea said while helping Aaron with the puzzle box. "With a role model like you."
Shulk was not in the mood for conversation, and his sleeping habits needed no discussion. "I will take him to bed in a moment."
"How about I do that. You have done enough damage already. Can I at least count on you to have kept Melia out of this?"
Shulk filled the two mugs with mechanical movements. "She knows nothing."
"I highly doubt that. Unfortunately, she cannot help wasting a part of her time and energy with concerns about you, even now. To her detriment as well as that of Alcamoth. I hope you are aware of the consequences. That's the least you owe her."
As much as Tyrea found pleasure in berating Shulk for his questionable life choices and his even more questionable mental stability, Aaron's presence smoothed the edges of her lecture. Soon she had lost herself in pointing him towards the solution to the puzzle box's riddle. Her features softened, and a smile reserved for no more than three people in the world tugged at her lips. Like this, seated on a kitchen counter next to her almost-nephew, one could forget she had served as an assassin of the Bionite Order most of her life.
Shulk had finished the drinks, and was glad to trade one of the steaming mugs for the puzzle box in Aaron's hands. His breath went more easily, and he even had the confidence to offer the second hot milk to Tyrea.
Her eyes dissected him like ether daggers. Then she accepted the peace offering.
"The situation has worsened, in case you were wondering." Tyrea sipped from the drink. "We lost another dozen square metres to gravity. Which means the headland with the former Companions' Cape will have disappeared by the end of the week."
Shulk nodded. "The Shoulder is losing its structural integrity. Maybe the effect of the hover stones is wearing off too."
Tyrea's report hardly surprised him. In fact, this issue had plagued him and Melia for a while. At first, small pebbles had broken from the Shoulder's cliffs, nothing to lose sleep over. But the decay had continued. Boulders the size of houses dropped into the sea below on a weekly basis. The ancient rock crumbled under the feet of Gran Dell's inhabitants.
No one knew why. And in a world without visions, no one knew how much of the Bionis' Shoulder would remain in a year's time.
"The loss of the Companions' Cape is bad enough," Tyrea said. After a glance at Aaron to confirm his attention remained on the content of his mug, she continued. "But we have the first two casualties to rack up as well. A couple of wildlife researchers. Their assistant said they wanted to observe the local Pterix population. When they stepped too close to the cliff edge, the ground gave away, and that was that."
Shulk's stomach twisted, and he was glad to have gone without the hot milk. "If even the small pressure from two people can cause a rockfall, that means the decay is progressing far faster than we anticipated."
"Then I don't need to tell you that the people are getting anxious."
"I have seen the tents around the fountains. I see them every day."
"And yet you rather waste your time with that thing than with our actual problem." Tyrea stabbed the puzzle box with her forefinger. "We don't need ship engines or another one of your ether swords. What we need is a way to keep the Shoulder in the sky. Alcamoth can't support all these people, and you know that."
Shulk had run the calculations. Many times. Not only accommodation for the refugees from the Shoulder would turn into a problem soon. The fields north of Gran Dell also supplied Alcamoth with essential flour and vegetables, not to mention the fish they drew from Tranquil Tarn or the milk of the local Armu herds. All the essentials that had poured into the capital like water into a gigantic marble tree were turning into rare commodities. A few voices called to cut rations already.
If the Shoulder fell, so too would Alcamoth.
Shulk's world was living on borrowed time.
"It's not without reason to assume there are other islands in the ocean besides Colony 9," Shulk said. "Finding them might take us time, but it's our safest bet. That's what we will need the ship engines for."
Tyrea smacked her mug onto the counter, and the ceramic protested sharply. "Then you have given up on Alcamoth already. Melia's home. Your home, for what it's worth."
Aaron, who had listened to the argument while hidden behind his mug, slipped from the work surface and mustered a fake yawn that succeeded in preventing shouts from both parties.
"I'm going to bed now," he said. "Goodnight."
Tyrea jumped to her feet. "Excellent idea. Let me escort you. We don't want to keep the genius engineer from work for too long, do we?"
With a final glare at Shulk, Tyrea shoved Aaron out of the kitchen. Barely a sound smoothened the cold silence when the door slit close behind them.
Shulk's restless fingers had solved the puzzle box before he attempted to follow them. Night still held Alcamoth captive when he stepped into the hallway. In the far distance, a breeze tore through a multitude of tent canvases. A tiredness scratched at Shulk's legs, and he felt his age more than on other days. But when his thoughts drifted to his bed for the briefest of moments, the promise of rest came packaged with images from his dream. The loss of two people he didn't know stung in his chest.
Haunted by their sorrowful eyes, Shulk dragged himself through the palace and towards his lab. When the respective teleporter spit him out amidst boxes of diodes and conductors, broken and half-repaired engines, and the constant murmur of machines, he dove into work without thinking.
He gave his hands something to hold, and his mind something to cling to. Like this he continued until the sun rose upon the crests of an endless ocean.
18/05/22: Welcome to the future.
Yep, to make matters more complicated, this story has a time skip. In chapter two. Truly, I am ambling into every possible writing pitfall on my way to this story's ending. Well, Shulk didn't get the chance to cope, so neither does the plot - there are at least two other major conflicts in need of attention. I don't know when I will update, probably whenever I find the nerve. I might go for twice a week, especially if a given chapter is rather short. It would be pretty neat if I could finish in time for XC3's release, but thanks to a certain anti-delay, it's not too likely. Not that I'm complaining.