Chapter Twenty-five: Hey-ho, hey-ho, it's off to Giruvegan we go

'Ooh!' Ashe recoiled, stepping back and treading on Vaan's foot.

'Hey – ow!'

'I - I am sorry.'

'Something troubles you, Highness?'

Ashe cast furtive glances all around her at the swirling, iridescent Mist.

'N-no, I am fine. Let us move on.'

'Which way?' Penelo asked plaintively, 'It feels like we've been going round in circles for hours.'

'That's because we have been going around and around in circles for hours.'

Balthier weighed in, he gestured languidly to the scraggly thorn bush he had tied a loose piece of string to the second time they had staggered into this clearing.

' I have been marking our route.'

Ashe glared venomously at him, ' Then why don't you take the lead, Balthier? If you think you can do better.'

'Gladly.'

Balthier walked forward and immediately set off in any direction, walking right through his own Mist induced reflection.

They had been in the Feywood for something like a day, their passage through Golmore thankfully uneventful and taking them nowhere near Eruyt.

In that time Balthier had watched all the other members of their intrepid band driven half out of their wits by Mist and shadow. He failed to see what was so frightening about one's own reflection.

Unspooling the thread he carried in his belt pouch, in case of emergency clothing repairs, Balthier tied bits of the thread to trees and bushes to mark the route.

Balthier, he would admit only in the privacy of his own thoughts, had no better idea of where he was going than Ashe, but at least he was sensible about it.

The fiends of the Feywood were more worthy of fear than phantoms in the Mist. Behemoths lumbered about, slow but deadly, and Balthier was glad of Basch's fighting prowess and Vaan's sheer bloody-minded resilience.

The Preying Manti disturbed Balthier particularly; any creature that would cannibalise its own kind was best left well alone. Except that every time they saw one, Ashe or Vaan, or someone, would go haring after it.

Balthier had decided that this was evidence of the madness that had taken his compatriots since entering Feywood.

They were so hyped up from fretting over reflections that they needed something to attack just to make themselves feel better.

It was as well, Balthier thought, Fran had instructed them all on the use of curaja before they set foot in this bloody place.

Fran. He cast a furtive glance back to her, where she dragged in the rear of the party, despite the fact that she still bore her sledgehammer.

She was as unsettled by this place as the others, though she hid it well in her usually undemonstrative way.

'Ah, look, see, we come out somewhere new.'

Balthier declared, pleased with himself, when they stumbled through Mist, Tartarus wolves and Preying Manti into an odd sort of structure. Pillared and open on all sides it was octagonal in design with a mosaic floor.

The legend engraved on the central floor tile of the structure gave the usual cryptic instruction.

Balthier found himself wondering why ancient civilisations had delighted in such enigmatic and irritatingly obtuse directions. Would it have really been so hard to just leave a message along the lines of Giruvegan – this way.

Balthier was still contemplating this when a Behemoth pair attacked the party.

He and Vaan slashed at them with their swords, Ashe bludgeoned the huge fiends with her pole and Fran and Basch loped off body parts with hammer and axe. Penelo, at the back with Aldebaran, supported with spells.

'Well that was invigorating.'

Balthier examined the four inch long rip he had sustained to one sleeve in the skirmish and sighed. Typical, just when he needed his emergency sewing kit he had used all the thread elsewhere.

Balthier became aware of the stares he was getting from a number of the other members of their happy band. He frowned.

' Something wrong?'

It was Basch, uncharacteristically, who spoke up first. ' It bothers you not at all, Balthier, this Mist?'

'Should it?'

For the first time Balthier wondered if he had missed something important in the shadows and distorted reflections that seemed to have so shaken his compeers.

Fran spoke up, coming to stand near him for the first time since entering the Feywood. He had begun to think she was deliberately avoiding him.

' He has no dead to fear. His regrets lie before him, not yet in shadow.'

Fran then moved on, passed him, with nary a look.

' I see an oasis through the Mist, it is this way we should go.'

The others trudged forward after Fran and it was Balthier's turn to be left dragging behind. He was now unsettled. Fran was upset with him and he could think of no reason for it.

Briefly Balthier's eyes settled on the Princess who lingered to give him a quizzical look. She too, clearly picking up on the fact that Fran was displeased.

Was Ashe the reason? Did Fran know about that little debacle in the Sochen caves? But that made no sense. Fran could not care less for his trysts, dalliances and dangerous liaisons, mores the pity.

When Balthier was next confronted by a version of himself running at him through the Mist, he glared at his reflection. What did you do, you bloody fool? How did you upset her this time?

As they trudged from one octagonal structure to another, one or other of the party spying the oasis, which interesting Balthier could not see, even when he really tried to entertain the group psychosis, Balthier grew increasingly oppressed by the atmosphere.

He has no dead to fear. His regrets lie before him, not yet in shadow.

Well, it was true. Balthier's mother died in labour and his two older brothers were tiny skeletons in their tombs by the time of his birth, so he had no lost loved ones or bitter foes among the dead to be haunted by, but that was hardly his fault, was it?

As for regrets, well, what good were they to man or beast? Balthier prided himself on his no nonsense approach to life.

Guilt was an indulgence of the indecisive, regret could be prevented by looking at things in a clear and sensible manner before embarking on any new venture.

What did Fran mean by his regrets lie before him? Did she intuit something about their imminent arrival in Giruvegan?

Did this have something to do with Cid? But why then not just tell him? She knew he had little patience for enigmas.

Not yet in shadow. Well she had remedied that sure enough. Balthier had been feeling quite fine until she decided to take her ire out on him. It was not as if Balthier had made her come here. He would have been happy to leave the Princess had she wished it.

When the party finally collapsed in exhaustion outside the Gigas Gate, all of them able to work out that particular puzzle; though Balthier did wonder what would-be visitors did who were not in possession of their own Esper, Balthier was in a royal sulk, though he was too proud to admit to it.

Balthier chatted to Vaan, who although tired and drawn from long journeying, was the least affected by the pall of depression that had fallen on the others.

But talking to Vaan was only entertaining for so long, it wasn't really the boys fault, he just didn't know anything remotely interesting about anything.

Growing up in a country without a system of state education and living on the streets of Lowtown does not a good conversationalist make of the boy, it would seem.

Balthier didn't even attempt to engage the Princess in conversation and happy little Penelo was already asleep.

So, feeling the need to be doing something, if only to pretend to himself that he wasn't still affected by Fran's odd behaviour; Balthier went for a walk.

Picking up Aldebaran, because he was always so much more comfortable with a gun, Balthier strolled out of their encampment in search of somewhere secluded to brood.

'What do you see?'

Fran's voice startled him. He had been sitting down under the outreaching branches of a strange tree that he knew not the name of, rolling a pebble over the ground.

'Fran?'

She walked towards him, silent as ever in her spiked heels, sashaying out of the Mist.

She came to rest above him and pointed out towards the rainbow shifting screen of Mist that cut them off from the rest of the Feywood.

'What do you see?' she repeated.

'Mist.'

He wondered if his answer sounded as petulant to her ears as it did to his own.

Fran took his elbow, she who rarely touched anyone, ever, and lead him towards that shifting mirror. In the Mist a reflection of Balthier and Fran looked back at them both.

Balthier looked at the guarded but miserable expression on his reflections face and worked to mould his own features back into their usual mask of polite inquiry.

' Now what do you see?'

He sighed, so it was like this was it? She wanted to teach him some lesson about Mist, did she? Well alright.

'A phenomena of nature, light and shadow refracted through the Mist creating reflective images of fauna and flora in the surrounding environment.'

A ghost of a wry smile twitched mirror Fran's lips as he looked on her, beside him he was very aware that Fran still held his arm, her touch so light it too could be illusion.

' A scientist's answer.' She murmured amused.

' What do you really see?'

Balthier frowned, resisting the desire to turn and face her directly and instead directing his annoyance towards her mirror image.

'A reflection; like any seen in a mirror.' He answered.

' The others see themselves, yet you only see a reflection. Do you not find this odd, Balthier?'

He frowned, 'A reflection of myself created by sunlight trying to pierce the Mist.'

Balthier amended his previous answer, though surely Fran had known what he meant?

Reflected Fran nodded her head, ' A reflection of a self but not truly that self.'

Balthier frowned more, wondering if somehow he and Fran had started talking different tongues and not noticed; it seemed as though they agreed on what was there, but somehow he knew they did not.

' Well, it is a reflection; of course it is not real.'

Beside him Fran sighed, reflected Fran shook her hair from her face and behind her back the slightest of slight frowns touching her features.

Reflected Fran pointed towards the Fran that was warm and real beside Balthier.

' And what is she, another reflection?'

Balthier hesitated, the beginnings of understanding prickling his mind; her meaning beginning to permeate his thoughts even as some part of him rejected it outright.

' What do you see Balthier?'

She asked again, reflected Fran's lips moved but the voice was beside him.

' You, Fran, I see you.'

Fran in the Mist nodded, ' You see me in the Mist and yet your own likeness is only a reflection; a false image of one who is not truly here, not in his heart.'

'We should get back to camp.'

Balthier tried to turn from the Mist screen, even though they would have to cross through it to return to the camp.

Fran pulled Balthier back around easily with that one hand wrapped around his upper arm; she made him face his reflection again.

'I see you, Balthier. You are real, no illusion. Names do not matter, pasts are finished. You do not need to hide from yourself.'

Then she walked forward to the point where reflection and reality merged before disappearing through the veil of Mist leaving Balthier alone with his reflection.

Balthier glared at that image peevishly, 'Right then.'

Taking a deep breath Balthier stepped forward towards his own merging of illusion and reality, though the cathartic or revelatory effect that Fran was clearly hoping for when reflection and reality came eye to eye was ruined, for all he saw as he pierced the Mist, was her.