The Golden Sun eludes me,

or is it I who flees from truth?

-That I do not possess it as of yet.

Ultimatum

3

Paroxysm

I awake to silence and darkness. The air is light and soft, but wherever I am I covet the warmness. Saturos awakens with me. His breathing is calm again as if his wounds no longer pierce his heart. I realize I am healed as well. I raise up feeling clumsy on my own feet. The flooring is marble. There comes a tapping echo as my booted heel clicks against it. I reach Saturos.

We stand silent together. Comfortable, yet unwitting.

"What is your foresight?" Saturos asks grudgingly to the blackness.

Swirling light coagulates before our eyes, and blinks into a blocky eye.

"You must choose. Resolution."

"Is alchemy restored? How long has it been sinc-…"

"Long enough."

Saturos stifles a growl.

"We are not dead, what do you seek of us?"

"You must choose."

"Options, you mean, live or die. This is a faulty limbo ?" I say. The Wise one blinks.

"Indeed hypothetically. Your Venus Adept is floating away by island, the conniving Mercurian is off plotting who he's currently allied, and your rivals search after long friends now found, yet lost once more."

"What happened after Venus?" We both ask.

"Lit, and Gaia rent. Your ally floats on the result, the sheet of rock drifts. The tremor felt throughout. Prox sends vain forces."

"You wish of us to aid our comrades, you need not ask or see this a choice. We would once more give our lives for our loved." I say. Oh, how I've missed Karst.

"A condition."

"Which is?" Saturos ask monotonously.

"Alchemy is used as insurance on your parts. If you prove yourselves capable of saving the world thus as you once thought, violence need not be the action to acquire peace. Innocent lives as those you seek to save in Prox should not have been wasted. You claim they halted the beacons being lit, and you burned through them. What, exactly, do you fight for? So now the condition is; if you both find yourselves the strongest then let us test that notion."

The darkness wanes as light radiates from the Wise One. It glows ever blinding. I wish darkness instead. I shut my eyes. Wind flutters softly about my face. Our capes billow gently and somewhere a phoenix cries in wonder.

I open my eyes looking to Saturos for answers. My lungs stutter in a paroxysm of breathlessness. My legs suddenly feel week, and waver on the vivid grass I stand. We never agreed to this!

I usher a strangled sob. This is worse than any death. The level of humiliation worse than being felled by headstrong children. The Cyclops and its mind tricks!

"What is this!" Saturos bellows. It doesn't help that a bunch a phoenix stare at us mockingly from above. Taunting with flaming wings.

I fall to the ground as Saturos continues to shout at his hand's complexion. His entire body trembles in unrestrained rage and terror. His new markless, human pale-peach face frees scornful tears from royal blue eyes. His black hair bristling in fury.

Damn that Wise One and its bipolar ideals of redemption!