Tales of Berseria in its entirety © Bandai Namco
A/N1: Ever have an idea that just won't leave you alone? That's what this oneshot is. I'm not sure that I will continue it (maybe with other oneshots?), but I was fascinated with the idea of enslaved malakhim. I did play a bit with what actually happened because . . . I always do that. LOL
Please enjoy. :3
Darkness.
Hot. Smothering. It smelled of human, at first. Unbearably solid. Less than clean, like a bit of seaweed rotting in the sun. Not malevolent, exactly, but lava burying a branch of coral wasn't malevolent, either.
The darkness swallowed everything.
Air. Light. Purpose.
She fought it, but the darkness pressed against her until she could no longer feel her body. It blinded her. Deafened her. Killed her sense of smell, of touch. Choked off her voice.
The darkness pressed against her mind until it squelched all thought. It crushed everything out of her.
Memories. Identity. Emotion.
She forgot to fight. She floated as mindless as a coconut shell on the waves.
Unopposed, the darkness sealed the malak away.
..::~*~::..
It didn't know its name.
However, it did know that names held great power over its kind.
(What was its kind? There were more like it here in the darkness, but it could not communicate with them, so it ignored them.)
It did not know how it knew this, about names. Not in thoughts. Not in feelings. Not by instinct. These were concepts lost to it. It knew through action.
There was only one action. When the human called the name it had branded upon its psyche with his arte, it responded by materializing and using its connection to a warm, flowing mana that originated . . . somewhere without.
The arte was the source of the darkness. The darkness was All. And the name was the key.
It didn't mind. It had no mind.
..::~*~::..
Then a sound shattered the darkness, and everything changed.
..::~*~::..
Cassie hit the ground so hard she heard something crack. She'd had no idea she needed to break a fall. She'd had no idea she was falling.
Or had been knocked down. Pain blossomed like fire catching in a ship's rigging. It blazed through her right shoulder and arm. Her hand was twisted beneath her body. Her wrist screamed in pain.
She lay, stunned not by the pain, but by the sudden resurgence of self.
Her name was Cascade. She (she! not it!) was a water malak. Like sea foam, she traveled where the waves took her, learning as she went. Of merchants and pirates, of fishermen and shipwrights, of humans and and malakhim, of daemonblight and of unrest in the northern countries. She remembered the days of her childhood, when she boarded ships unheard by human ears or came ashore unseen by human eyes, unknown and happy. She danced with them. She watched them sleep. She sampled their food. She played with their children. She grew to love the peaceful, cheerful inhabitants of Yseult, where malevolence rarely breached the lazy contentment in the tropical waters.
Then, after the Advent, she walked among humans still largely unseen. Those who resonated assumed she was one of them when she came to trade the treasures she found beneath the waves for books.
So many books.
So many lovely, fascinating stories and histories.
Too many to count.
That was how . . .
That was how she . . .
..::~*~::..
The command was not heard, but she heard it all the same.
You are injured. Return to me, Narcariel.
The name. The key.
In the old language, it meant beautiful and gentle.
Cassie grimaced, writhing. How dare this human twist such an old and glorious name into chains! How dare he wrap those chains around her!
Narcariel!
The arte activated.
The darkness snatched her.
But the arte was losing its hold, and Cascade, the water malak whose true and secret name was Fidema Thimemnnuth, remained aware. Just enough that she could fight against the name that should never have been hers.
..::~*~::..
Time did not exist within the darkness. It could have been days later, or it could have been seconds, when the name called her again.
Completely healed, Cassie flowed out of the darkness on a wave of light. She, and two other malakhim.
She knew them. She did not know them.
Prisoners, they were. Just like her.
The light confused her. Her body confused her. The act of breathing confused her. She felt like she had drowned a thousand years ago, and now the receding tide had revealed her long-submerged body. That couldn't be! She was still very young, as malak measured years, not yet forty. Nothing made sense, least of all what her eyes were desperately trying to tell her.
"N—nnghh," she said. A revelation. She possessed a voice. "What?"
What had she been doing?
..::~*~::..
Pearls, discarded shells, lost trinkets, tucked within her bag. A small shop open to the ocean breeze. A happy human who wished her high health as he accepted the treasures from her as payment. Walking down the beach, alone, to read her new books in the shade of a driftwood tree, her bare feet pushed into wet sand.
The sound of kicked gravel behind her. A rough, old man's voice.
"O child of the fountain of creation, these vows we exchange."
Vows? What vows? What an absolutely bizarre thing to say to a stranger. Cassie didn't have a good feeling about this. She stood up and whirled around, her books tumbling into the surf.
An old man stared at her with indecent focus. He was draped in heavy white robes and a turquoise sash, his cheeks flabby and age-spotted, a purple-lensed monocle screwed into his left eye, his hands twisted with arthritis, describing shapes in the air.
"May our purpose, resplendent, help to purify this cursed world," he intoned.
A ring of light appeared above Cassie's head. A match appeared below her feet. Before she could throw herself out of the way, they rushed toward each other, trapping her arms and her legs. She tried to struggle. She tried to speak. The arte tightened until she surrendered. She stared at the human in total disbelief, tears brimming in her eyes along with all of her unasked questions.
He looked as dispassionate as though he was merely scooping oyster meat out of the shell. "Remember this true name I bestow unto you," he said.
And then his voice exploded inside Cassie's head. Narcariel!
..::~*~::..
That was then. This was now.
After the nothingness of the darkness, her body dragged at her. Heavy, constricting clothes covered her from head to toe. A helmet restricted her field of vision. Boots chafed her feet. Her head lolled.
"Why am I here?" she asked. The words fell, sluggish, from numb lips.
A crowd of people – it could have been two, it could have been thirty – faced her. Not one answered her. Their postures and expressions were hostile.
"Her consciousness has returned?" the rough old voice asked, angrily and of no one in particular, sending shudders rippling up and down Cassie's back. "So that is its power."
That is what's power? Cassie did not turn, as she had done that day on the beach. She concentrated first on breathing, slow and laborious, and second on a figure standing apart from the others. A malak, dressed in black, a shiny black . . . thing . . . held loosely in his hand. That thing . . . its bright silver sigil held her eye . . . the old man was very interested in that thing. What was it?
The malak's tilted eyes, narrowed at first, widened in horror at the same time Cassie heard a clap behind her back.
Another sound followed. A sort of growl, like that of an animal . . . a werewolf . . . a daemon.
The sound of malevolence.
Then the sound of wind, the cold whistling wind of high altitudes, full of snow and determination, came from the other direction.
For the second time something beyond her control knocked Cassie flat. That time, she had enough sense to twist so that she did not hurt herself on landing. The gale pushed against her bulky clothes, the chunky helmet. The black-clothed wind malak stood with his hand out, a look of concentration pulling his thin eyebrows down over fierce orange falcon-eyes.
Right where Cassie had been standing, a ball of swirling black malevolence burst apart on tan-colored flagstones. It splashed everywhere. Cassie pulled her legs closer on instinct. Fear made a fiery knot behind her sternum. Human malevolence. She had spent her life finding ways to peacefully exist without coming in contact with it while still seeking out the human-written books she loved.
The two fire malakhim who had been standing behind her, however, were not so lucky. Their minds, sealed within the darkness, did not let them see the danger. They stood, passive as statues, while the malevolence sought something on which to latch.
Cassie watched, revulsion clamping thick fingers around her throat, as the malevolence swarmed up the legs of the pair of malakhim. It buzzed like a thousand angry wasps, digging into their skin, seeking their hearts. The malakhim abruptly broke out of their trances. They cried out in terror and agony, clutching their helmets, their tabards, struggling to rip apart the clouds of malevolence.
One after the other, Cassie watched their lights go out.
Lights that should have been as free as sunlight, not shuttered like lanterns.
Fire that should have burned clean and beautiful, not stinking and smoky black as it billowed from the snakelike snouts of the two bile-colored wyverns that rose, flapping, from where the fire malakhim had been standing.
No one seemed to care about Cassie lying on the floor, still reeling from her awakening, or her salvation, or whatever had happened to her.
"He turned them into daemons!" a woman said.
"What?" another exclaimed. "This can't be happening!"
The wyvern daemons swooped around the sanctum of Lothringen. Cassie knew where she was! She must have always known, been aware on some level what she was doing, though the darkness had kept her quiescent and unable to access her mental faculties. And just as she recognized the temple, she also could put a name and a title to the old human man who stood watching the wyverns with clinical annoyance on his age-spotted face and in his rheumy gray eye. Melchior Mayvin, legate elder of the Abbey.
"A chain reaction," he said, smoothing his neatly-trimmed white beard. "Your 'Reaper's Curse' is quite the dreadful affliction, isn't it?"
Outrage tinged his voice, belying his calm posture. Cassie whimpered. She had no idea what he was talking about. Lord Melchior turned his back on the whole scene, untouched by and feeling no regret over what he had done – what he had intended to do to her once she was no longer of any use to him.
Outrage boiled in Cassie's heart, an angry ocean compared to Melchior's puddle. All she had ever been to him was a tool to be used and thrown aside.
How long she had been a captive of the Abbey, helping to subdue and seize other helpless malakhim and Amenoch knew what else? She ripped off her helmet and cowl just as the wind malak yelled, "Don't you run away!"
He chased after the old man. Cassie wanted to call him back – after all, he had saved her life, and the Melchior they had watched leave the sanctum was only an illusion. The real one, though close by, was probably headed leisurely in the opposite direction – but another woman said, "Heads up. Wyverns incoming!"
They were. The two erstwhile malakhim, bewildered by the raging negativity that no malakhim could ever generate on their own and in considerable pain caused by their transformations, had decided to attack rather than flee. They swooped down in purple-clouded fury.
They were doomed, Cassie and the other people – six of them, she saw now. Only exorcists, wielding their stolen malak artes, could stand against daemons. Stop them and, if necessary, kill them. Only exorcists –
Cassie's mouth dropped open.
All six of them, even the little malak, barely seven years old, if that, produced a weapon of some kind, spread out, and went on the offensive. Blades and artes flashed. Screeching, the wyverns retaliated with fang and flame and barbed tail.
"Why would an exorcist create a daemon?" one of the women asked as she thrust her polearm between a wyvern and the little malak. That woman was an exorcist herself, so Cassie sort of understood her presence here, but –
"Hey, worry about that later!" a black-haired man in very odd clothes scolded her. He shoved the lady exorcist out of the way. A stream of poison spat by the other wyvern splattered the floor. "We've got damn dragons to take care of."
He jumped and slashed with twin short swords. Bleeding cuts opened along the wyvern's neck and left-forward wing. When the man landed, he flicked his messy hair out of his eyes and turned to check on the petite, redheaded exorcist. His right eye glowed crimson from amid the burned-looking black scars that marred his otherwise handsome face.
Daemon. The word clicked into place in Cassie's head, but she couldn't make sense of it. That man was a daemon. Who had protected an exorcist.
A daemon who rushed in, his loose sleeve singed by wyvern fire, to help out the little malak, who fought with similar intensity and childish artes.
The noise of the battle pounded against Cassie's newly unmuffled eardrums. Shouts and yells and snarls and growls. Spells bounced off the rounded walls and scaled bodies. Cassie looked closer at the combatants, trying to track them through the melee.
Aside from the lady exorcist, the foreign-looking daemon man, and the young malak – a powerful one, though she couldn't tell which element he resonated most strongly with – the party consisted of a second daemon, a woman dressed in rags, whose left arm was monstrous at times, an oversized red claw, but normal at other times, concealed by bandages. Cassie rubbed her eyes, wondering if they still weren't working.
A tall blond man charged by her, an earth malak wearing a long black coat and heavy boots. He slammed his fist right in a wyvern's snout. The daemon flipped all the way over and crashed to the floor by the last person, a woman.
Or was she? This woman seemed young as well, by human standards. Still a teenager, perhaps? Cassie puzzled over her the longest, perhaps thirty seconds. The best word for her that came to mind was "exorcist," especially since she seemed to have tethered with a normin, but something about her – her style? her attitude? – seemed . . . off.
Discarding the helmet, Cassie got to her feet. It didn't matter who these people were. She was not going to passively wait for death or capture or rescue. Not ever again.
She reached for her connection to the elements and the earthpulses, swallowing down her anxiety that her power would no longer answer her, somehow severed from her during her enslavement, somehow weakened by the fact that she no longer had a weapon of her own. Even her vessel, a perfect pink conch shell gifted to her by a human child, had been taken from her. But the power responded instantly. She nearly burst into tears of relief.
Instead, she shouted, "Tidal Wave!"
Bright blue water heaved out of the flagstones. It rose rapidly, swirling, frothing, going white. Cassie felt the whole temple rumbling under the onslaught. She glared into her arte, holding it together, keeping track of the sparks of life – human-exorcist-malak-daemon – those lives she was determined to keep safe. She sent the wave higher. It sucked the flying daemons into a raging whirlpool.
Around and around went the wyverns until they could fight the wave no more. Only then did Cassie cease her arte.
The wave dissipated. The water disappeared.
The wyverns, exhausted, plummeted to the flagstones.
One of them stirred. It gurgled deep in its throat. Feebly, its four wings flapped.
"Wow!" the little malak exclaimed, his small face alight with wonder. "She's really strong, Velvet!"
"She certainly is," said the daemon woman, subtly turning her body to hide the malak from Cassie's line of sight. "But we don't need her."
Cassie backed nervously away from the icy steel glinting in the daemon's golden eyes.
The earth malak tossed messy orange-and-yellow hair across his forehead. "Thank you for your help," he said. To Cassie.
His eyes, Cassie couldn't look away from. Turquoise as a tropical sea, tortured as the wreck of a ship. They burned in his pale, wary face. He walked toward Cassie with one gloved hand raised as though prepared for her to attack him. His voice was deep and pleasant. "Are you all right?"
Cassie lifted her chin, slightly offended by his assumption. "I know my name," she told him. A statement that any malak would understand.
This one did. The ghost of a smile touched his extraordinary eyes.
"Looks like you got caught in your own trap, old man."
At these words, the haunted-looking earth malak turned, because the white-haired wind malak was back. Grinning, he shoved Lord Melchior into the sanctuary. Cassie squinted at them. From the outside, she couldn't tell if this Melchior was real or not. The legate, stiff-shouldered, stumbled. A thick black cord bound his arms to his sides. The wind malak pressed the point of a pendulum into Melchior's hat.
Melchior licked his lips, much like a cat checking for feathers. "Oh, are you sure about that?"
The smug tone of his voice wiped the triumphant grin from the malak's face.
Right then, one of the wyverns righted itself. It opened its mouth, venom sizzling as it dripped from its fangs.
The angry-looking woman, the daemon, responded by releasing the concealing arte on her bandaged arm. The vicious red claw burst into existence. Cassie made an unhappy face. It resembled the flayed limb of a dragon. It was revolting, especially hanging from the small shoulder of an otherwise pretty woman.
The earth malak broke into a run, coat flapping behind him. He drew back his fist and then shot forward. His knuckles plowed into the skull of the wyvern still on the floor, knocking it out.
Meanwhile, the daemon leaped into the air. Her claw engulfed the other wyvern's head, snapping its fiery mouth shut. She brought it crashing to the flagstones.
Head immobilized, the wyvern thrashed its barbed tail. Unconcerned, the daemon squeezed her long, sharp talons.
And squeezed.
Like the arte that had enslaved Cassie.
She gaped in wordless horror as the wyvern's body, with a wet tearing sound, exploded into a red and purple mist.
The daemon, scowling, spread her claws and, with the palm of that hand, sucked up all trace of blood and malevolence.
"What the –?" the wind malak breathed, looking nothing short of appalled.
"Who are you?" Cassie cried at the same time, too traumatized to keep the words in. Her face felt like it was breaking. A malak, demonized. Just like that. Dead. Just like that. Eaten. Just like – "What are you?"
At her questions, the earth malak's expression flattened out. The little malak, his face pinched with stress, turned apologetic green eyes on her. The lady exorcist turned hers away. The daemon man scratched the back of his head. The younger girl stretched her lips in a truly humorless smile.
The daemon woman straightened. She acted as though Cassie had not spoken. She raised her head. "I'll take care of the last one," she said roughly.
Slowly. Deliberately. She stalked toward the sleeping wyvern.
With a pained cry, Cassie opened her awareness to the flows of mana within the earth. She let the earthpulse take her away from that place of malevolence and death. She did not care who saw her flee. She did not care what any of them thought of her. She begged Amenoch to bring her home.
..::~*~::..
The ocean's warm currents welcomed her with such joy that Cassie broke down and cried. Bobbing within sight of inhabited islands forested with swaying palm trees, she shucked her Abbey uniform and watched parts of it sink, other parts float away.
Stripped to her smallclothes, she rolled over in the gentle swells. She allowed her loosened hair to drift around her body. It shone like sand in the water, the lower half of the strands as white as pearls.
A skiff would be along sooner rather than later. The fishermen would mistake her for a castaway; it had happened before. The friendly Islegandians would heave her aboard, give her what clothes they could, and deliver her to shore, where she could begin her life anew and forget everything she had just seen.
Cassie frowned. She spread her hands, patting the water. It was too bad about that earth malak, really. Too bad that they were such a solitary race. He had been handsome.
And obviously trouble. She'd seen it in his eyes. Danger walked hand in hand with a man like that.
With effort, Cassie smoothed her frown and let the water soothe her. She was safe. For now, all she had to do was wait for the darkness to let her go.
..::~*~::..
It did, but it had left its mark on her. Restlessness plagued Cassie while she dived for her treasures, while she shopped for her books. It made her turn her head always to the north. Made her wait, listening, for something more to happen, as though a storm was gathering on the horizon.
Those people. Human-exorcist-malak-daemon. Who were they? Why had they been in Lothringen that day? How had they saved her?
What were they doing now?
A/N2: Hello, Dearest Readers, and welcome again to Anne's brain! What do you think of Cascade and her story (so far? Maybe so far). I'm an Eizen fan. So, so much an Eizen fan. X3 Anyway, won't you please leave a review before you go? Thank you!
Yours,
Anne