The Missing Worlds - Firelands II
Rating: PG-13; some gruesome imagery and descriptions of violence in this section.
Summary: The Black Beast tells his story.
Author's Notes: This chapter was supposed to be up two weeks ago. I'm sorry, guys. *hands*
In moments like these time seemed to crystallize, slowing down and stretching out with a sharp-edged clarity unlike any other. Fai had time to note details that would have been a blur at any other time: the way the swinging lantern-light cast shadows wildly over the walls and ceiling of the crumbling hallway. The long, coarse black hairs that sprouted from the creature's skin, starting at the edges of his face and extending down his neck and throat to cover the whole quadrupedal body, so thick and sharp as to almost be quills. Tree-trunk legs that ended in appendages that were not quite hands and not quite claws, a thick dark layer of scale growing over the back of the fingers making them look almost like an eagle's talons. How the shaggy coat of hair was not even that terribly thick, but covered layer upon layer of bulging muscle that rippled with every movement of the creature's long, powerful body, adding to the menacing bulk. The deadly scorpion's tail that hung over those heavily-muscled flanks, the tip quivering with the eager promise of sudden death.
"WHERE THE FUCKING HELL HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS?" the not-Kurogane roared, filling Fai's vision with the spectre of those deadly teeth. The sheer noise of the words rang around and around in Fai's head, leaving him stunned too stupid to absorb their meaning. "AFTER ALL I'VE DONE FOR YOU - ALL I'VE BECOME FOR YOU - AND YOU CHOOSE NOW TO COME WALTZING BACK LIKE NOTHING'S HAPPENED?"
The sheer rage in this beast's deadly red eyes, a berserker fury that Fai knew all too well; he'd seen it time and time again on Kurogane's face in the heat of the moon battles in Shara. The primal, almost elemental desire to tear and rend and kill, to bathe in the blood of his opponents and laugh. Every line of this creature before him was filled to overflowing with the same murderous fury - yet for all the violence in their first clash, Fai pinned against the wall with razor-sharp claws against his chest and throat, he hadn't actually hurt him, yet. Even though the creature could kill him in a single blow, for some reason he had chosen not to - but one wrong word out of Fai's mouth would mean his violent death.
"No, I'm not -" Fai said, his voice weak and feeble in the face of that fury. He had to struggle to get air in his lungs, to force the words past the terror clogging his throat. "I'm not him, I'm not -"
His captor lifted him slightly, then slammed him back against the stone wall hard enough to rattle his bones. If possible, the creature's face drew even closer to his own. "HOW DUMB D'YOU THINK I AM?" the deadly voice snarled. "DO YOU THINK I WOULDN'T KNOW YOUR FACE, YUI?"
In that stretched-out moment, the thoughts seemed to fall into Yuui's mind like clear drops of water, one by one.
-One: Clearly, this other Kurogane must have known another him, once.
-Two: Equally clearly, this other him must be dead, or he would not have been able to come into this world.
-Three: As well as being other hims in the many worlds, there were other Fais as well; the one he had seen so briefly in the Hangchow market was proof enough of that.
If every Yuui, in every world, had a brother in every world as well -
He only had one chance to get this right, and then this monster would gut him like a fish.
"If you knew him," Fai managed to wheeze. "If you knew - Yuui - well, then he must have told you about me. Didn't he?" He looked straight into those red eyes, narrowed with rage and wild suspicion, and lied with the truth. "I'm not Yuui. I'm his brother - I'm Fai. "
For a breathless moment the tableau hung, neither of them moving a muscle. Fai's heart squeezed with breathless hope - it was a wild guess, a shot completely in the dark, but he wasn't dead yet -
"Fai-san!" Sakura's voice called out from his left, somewhere down the tunnel beyond the beast's bulk. And from further away, down the corridor where he had come, he heard another voice - "Fai! Sakura! Where are you?"
Fai breathed again. Syaoran was still alive, and he still had the strength to yell - the monster must not have hurt him badly, then, merely knocking him impatiently out of the way in his furious focus on Fai. He should have left Sakura with her, they'd have been safer without him, and perhaps they could have found their way out -
"Huh," the beast in front of him rumbled, and the pressure on Fai's ribcage eased off as his huge bulk shifted away, easing a few feet back down into the corridor. "I guess you are."
They caught up with Syaoran only a few hundred yards down the corridor, carrying the second lantern and cradling that arm with his free hand. He was shaken, but otherwise unhurt; apparently the beast had only knocked him aside in his hurry, slamming him against the corridor wall but nothing more. Sakura greeted him with a tearful exclamation of relief and a hug, and the two teenagers clung to each other for a moment in the small pool of lamplight.
He could take in more details now about creature's general conformation; in height he topped out at eight feet at the shoulder, a huge bunching of muscles around the neck and shoulder that nearly brushed the ceiling overhead. From there he tapered off to a long, low back to a pair of powerfully-muscled haunches, back-bent like a cat's or a horse's, ending in massive black hooves like a pair of deadly maces. The body seemed a jumble of different animals, topped with a man's face, and Fai could only guess that magic must have been somehow involved in the making of it.
The creature glanced at them, then looked away. "I suppose you'd better come with me, then," he said; his voice was no longer the furious roar of before, but still a deep sonorous rumble that echoed through the maze. He turned, his bulky body filling the corridor as it flowed against itself, and then paced away without looking back at them. Fai and the others had to hurry to keep up.
A daunted silence fell as they made their way through the maze; their walked with utter confidence through the identical, twisting corridors, and there was no time for Syaoran to stop and mark the walls, so they soon became quite lost. Perhaps in an attempt to break the increasingly uncomfortable silence - or perhaps because she really was just that friendly - Sakura was the first to try to strike up a conversation. "We're sorry for intruding without permission," she said. "Thank you for letting us into your home, Mr. Ku - Mister...?"
She trailed off invitingly despite her near mis-step, but the black-furred creature didn't turn to look at her. Sakura cleared her throat and tried again. "Can you tell us your name? It would feel rude just to call you 'mister.' "
"What name I once had was lost years ago," the Not-Kurogane replied. "The man that he was is gone, burned away. Now I am what the people of this world call me: the Black Beast, nothing more."
Sakura fell quiet again, a dismayed look on her face. "That's so sad!" Fai heard her whisper to Mokona, and dearly hoped that the Beast's hearing was not as good as his - or Kurogane's. He was rather afraid that it was even better.
"So," Syaoran said, bravely stepping in to fill the conversational breach. "We - um - we got a little lost before, and we ended up in the room downstairs."
"I know," the Beast said, still without pausing or looking around. They were coming to wider corridors now, a dim grayish light opening from ahead.
"If you know, then you know - what we found down there," Syaoran said, pushing ahead. "All those - people. The townswoman said that treasure-hunters and the like have been disappearing for years. Were you the one who killed them after all?"
The Beast snorted, a surprisingly familiar sound replayed at thunderous volume. "Sure did," he said. "They came to kill me, after all. Every man who's stepped foot in this temple in the last twenty years has attacked me on sight. I'm not going to apologize for defending myself - or my sacred charge."
Fai dearly hoped it wouldn't occur to either Syaoran or Sakura to wonder what exactly the Beast had survived on for all those years since the townspeople had deserted the area. It had not escaped his notice that not all of the bodies in the pit had been whole.
"Your charge?" Sakura's eyes had gone very round. Syaoran and Sakura both looked at the Beast with a kind of fearful fascination. "Does that mean that you used to work for the temple? You didn't look - like this, then?"
"Of course not," the Beast replied. "I was a hero, their finest warrior. I slew hundreds on the battlefield, the enemy fell like chaff before my hand. I held the temple of Akros for thirty-five days while the town was under siege by the Usurper, and for that the Oracle named me her premier knight."
The corridor abruptly t-ended in a stone chamber, large and rectangular, with a higher ceiling than the surrounding maze. One wall was solid and had what seemed to be windows, or rather vents, cut deep into the stone to the outside face of the mountain; they couldn't see much through them besides a square of dull orange, but some light filtered through nonetheless. The opposite wall was either made of or coated with a layer of black volcanic glass, polished to a dark, almost mirror-like shine; they could see dim moving outlines of themselves as they walked past.
Evidently this was the Beast's living chambers, or what passed for them. A large area in the corner had been cleared of detritus and piled with the decaying remains of tapestries or fabrics, dragged up and wadded into a kind of mattress. Around the rest of the room were various other tables, chests or other pieces of furniture, some in various states of destruction, and other bits of detritus or debris littered the floor that Fai preferred not to examine too closely.
The Beast continued his story without further prompting, this time. "Orusta knew she was dying; she had foreseen it. She knew that once she was gone, the capital would have no further interest in Akros, and that they would strip this town of defenses until it was overrun by thieves and vandals, the Temple would fall into ruins, and the sacred feather would be taken. She would have done anything to keep that future from coming about, and so would I." The Beast scowled at the memory, a terrifying expression on his elongated features.
"On her deathbed, the Oracle laid on me the charge of keeping the Temple, and the sacred relics within it, safe. But not before she used the last of her magic to fix me with a dying curse: that for every person I killed, I would become stronger."
There was silence for a few beats, as the travelers tried to parse this revelation. "Umm," Syaoran hazarded. "Are you sure it was meant to be a curse? If you became stronger the more you protect... that sounds more like a blessing than a curse to me."
"Yeah," the Beast said, his voice dust-dry. "I thought so, too. Then."
"Think it through, Syaoran-kun," Fai said gently. He already had, and the thought of it made him ill.
Such a spell would seem like a blessing indeed - at first. The problem was that such an open-ended spell had no upper bound, no ending condition. It would root itself in the host like a parasite, feeding on itself, growing geometrically each time the conditions were fulfilled. How much magical energy could be poured into a single human body before it began to warp and twist under the assault? How strong could one human being become, before he started to become something that wasn't even human any more?
On the long dark wall of mirrors, starting at the left end and marching in a steady progression across, was a series of painted white outlines. If you stood in front of the wall you could see your own darkened silhouette; someone had stood before the mirror and reached out to draw an outline around what they saw, capturing it permanently. An indelible record of the changes over time.
The first outline was that of a man - a big man, a strong man, with bulging upper arms and thick shoulders and neck, but still only a man. As the outlines progressed, the basic shape began to morph out of the bounds of what could be considered recognizably human; the head grew tall enough to brush the ceiling, then shrunk and disappeared behind the steadily thickening outline of the neck and shoulders, now merged into a bulging hump. The legs began to bend under the weight, the feet thickening into massive hooves to support the body above it. The very last outline, near the right-hand wall, even had the distinct outline of horns peeking up from where the face would have been. The next mirrored panel beside it was smashed by some titanic force, shards of black volcanic glass crusted by ancient blood scattered over the floor before it.
"Enough," the Beast said abruptly, rising and walking over towards the mirror-wall. His black bulk slid between them and the dim outlines, blocking their view of them, and he turned his ferocious gaze on them. "You didn't come here to hear my sob story, now did you? You want to know about your brother."
In all honesty, there was nothing that Fai wanted less. He knew, abstractly, that there were other versions of him out there. He wasn't a fool; he knew that the others had met one such him in the last world they had come to, and that the meeting had not been auspicious. He did not particularly want to hear of any more tragedies, any more betrayals and lies and deaths.
But that was their cover story - Fai's supposed connection to the lost 'Yuui' was their only excuse for being here. If the Beast found out the truth - that they were here for the feather after all - they'd probably end up as smears on the shiny black wall, their bones tumbling carelessly to rot in the pit below.
So Fai made himself smile, and if it was a little tighter and more tremulous than he could usually conjure, if the Beast's red eyes pierced right through that smile as surely as Kurogane's ever had - well, that could be excused by the topic at hand. "Yes," he answered. In their walk over here Fai had time to refine the cover story a little better, to rehearse the lies he would tell.
"When my brother left home all those years ago, at first he claimed it would be no more than another research trip," Fai lied easily, drawing on his own self-knowledge to spin a convincing story. If he ran afoul of some inconsistency, if he got some essential detail wrong about his own 'brother,' they might well all be dead. But given how much Syaoran's alter had been like Syaoran, how much Sakura's alter had been like Sakura, how much the Beast was very, very like Kurogane - he felt pretty confident in his guesses. "But he never came back. We didn't worry so much, at first - he'd been away for longer than planned, before, when he'd get distracted by some new shiny thing and lose track of time, or lock himself in the library for days and forget to eat..."
The Beast snorted again, sardonic agreement, and Fai flashed him a quick shaky grin. He clasped his hands together and stretched them between his knees, staring past them to the floor to avoid that forbidding visage. "But after enough time had passed, we knew he must be dead," he said quietly. "His notes, the effects he left behind - all the signs of his passage, years gone cold, led to here. I wanted - I hoped... I just wanted to know. What he found here. And why he didn't come back to us."
"You want to know," the Beast asked. "What he cared enough to die for?"
When Fai's nod came a bit too slowly, a bit too hesitant, the Beast tilted his head and regarded Fai with a kind of dispassion. "D'you think that I killed him?"
Fai made himself look up into the Beast's eyes and he wished that he could say no. And it wasn't just because this man before them was a killer and unashamed about it, that the evidence of all those he killed was rotting in heaps downstairs. It wasn't just that. Because Kurogane was a killer too, Fai had always recognized it in him even if the children never had; Fai had smelled the blood in his soul the same way he had always smelled it off Ashura.
No, the reason he wished he could lie and say no was because he knew that Kurogane, for all the violence in him, was a good man. That he did not kill without reason, that he did not kill the innocent. And Fai knew himself well enough that he could not be sure that the him in this world - the man who shared a soul with him - was any kind of innocent.
He didn't know. He didn't want to know. So he only swallowed and looked down to the side, without answering.
"Fair enough," the Beast said. He was silent for a long time, and then he spoke.
"The rumors spread," he said, "as the last of the Temple servants left..."
Just as the Oracle had predicted, the political interest in Akros faded after the Oracle died. One by one the other priests and officials had left, to other postings or to return to their families, or just as their nerves broke. The temple became empty, decrepit ruin beginning to creep in as its caretakers deserted it. One man, no matter how strong, was not enough to keep the hallways clean and the lanterns lit, even if he had cared enough about such things to try.
What he cared about was to guard the sacred relic, and that he did. As the economic lifeblood of the temple town below withered, its people became less reverent, more desperate. More and more of them appeared not as worshippers and supplicants, but as thieves and vandals, seeking to loot the wealth of the temple for their own gain or merely smash it out of malice.
He killed them all, and his strength grew. And grew.
The change came on him gradually; with so few others around to see it, so few faces to reflect himself in, he could ignore it for a very long time. The last of the servants fled in terror, not even pretending to come to the Temple once every fortnight to attend to their duties. No one came from the central Temple at the capital to relieve him of his duties, or to assign a new priestess. No one came at all except more vandals and killers, and at last, unexpectedly, a hero.
The day he came out of his seclusion to investigate a noise in the temple and came face to face with one of the legendary heroes of Theras - the day that hero took one look at him and sprang to attack with a bloodthirsty battlecry, that was the day that he realized the truth. By then it was too late.
He withdrew into the Temple, hiding his face from the world. It did no good; they kept coming, thieves and assassins, eager to slay the monster and steal its hoard. He killed and he killed, he couldn't stop killing; they came to slay him because he was a monster and he became more monstrous with every life he took.
The villagers of Akros avoided the Temple, speaking of it only in fearful whispers; they spoke of demons, curses. They let the would-be treasure seekers pass with terrible portents of what they would find in the crypt beyond - monsters to slay and treasures to win. None of them spoke any more of the faithful defender of the Temple, the Oracle's blessed night, nor of the largesse of the gods that had always been their charge to keep and defend. None.
Until Yuisha came.
The Beast's harsh growl of a voice softened as he reached this part of the tale, lightening with the recollection of a better time. Yuisha came from the East, from the far reaches of Xerxes, the exotic and distant empire that the people of Theras had alternately warred with and traded with over the years. He came on the strength of rumors that had travelled hundreds of miles across desert and water to find him: of a sacred relic which glowed with its own inner light, beautiful and strange, inscribed with words that no one could read.
Yuisha had seen a crude rendering of the design and thought that he could translate it, that the runes hid secrets of miracles and healing which he could unlock. He came not to plunder and destroy, but to learn.
And when he stood in the antechamber of the Temple and came face to face with the monster of the maze - when he laid eyes on the monstrous hulk before him, twisted with magic and stained black with blood - Yuisha had not screamed or cowered in fear, had not struck out with word or blade. He had reached out with gentle hands and touched, his own blue eyes wide with amazement, his fair hair wisping around his head as though the sun had come to shine in the Temple for the first time in twenty years.
The Beast paused here for a very long time, leaving the three travelers hanging breathlessly on his narration. Fai was almost numb with the effort of controlling his reactions, being sure not to betray any hint of anything untoward.
"We became friends," the Beast said simply.
For a time life returned to the temple. Yuisha did not disdain the simple chores of cleaning, and if the whole body of the temple was too much for him to manage, at least he was happy to sweep and scrub the sanctuary, the wide-open dining hall they stood in right now, the corridors between them. He was an artist as well as a scholar and it filled him with great and shining joy to uncover the beauty of the temple, to clean the mosaics and murals of grime.
But he went further than that, mixing paints out of the crusted pigments and decorating every blank wall with abstract renditions of birds and beasts and flowers. He only laughed when his host grumbled about his choice of subject, claiming that there was not enough of the beauty of nature in Akros that they could afford to squander it.
Feasts for the senses were not the only kind that Yuisha prepared; he was also a more than capable cook, and stepped up readily to the challenge of stoking his host's unnatural bulk with food. The temple had kitchens built in, of course, though they were long since stripped bare; Yuisha cleaned out the rotting refuse of all that remained and filled it with fresh ingredients from the markets below.
Yuisha often left the temple to venture out into the town, despite repeated warnings and disapproval; Akros was not the most friendly of towns, in the wake of the war and its gradual abandonment by the capital. Everyone in Akros knew of the monster hidden in the dungeon, though few now remembered who he had once been; they lived under the constant shadow of his terror. They hated him, but they also feared him, and that fear kept them cowering in their homes rather than storming the temple to try to make an end to him.
Yuisha was a stranger among them - a foreigner from the far-off distant lands who were more commonly at war than at peace. He stayed in the Temple without harm coming to him, crossed and recrossed the boundaries of the cursed grounds with a sunny smile on his lip. He brought cursed gold to spend in the marketplace, stolen from the purses of the adventurers who had gone there and never returned. He walked openly into the land of the dead, and no shadows clung to him.
They hated Yuisha as they hated him - but Yuisha, they did not fear. And Yuisha, they could reach.
So it came about one day that Yuisha went down to the town below shortly before lunch, to buy meat and herbs for their dinner. He promised to be back before the sun had crossed three hours' marks across the facade of the Temple, and at first, the one who waited for him did not trouble overmuch when he was late. Yuisha was often late, easily distracted by some novelty or another.
But the afternoon darkened into evening, and then into night, and Yuisha never came.
He emerged from the temple at last, the sound of his footsteps thundering against the stone steps leading down to the town. The townspeople drew back from him, hiding in their homes or in alleys as he stalked past, his horned head casting long shadows from the last of the blood-red sun as it fell behind the horizon. None dared stand in his path, or even look upon him as his heavy measured tread shook the foundations of the town.
He found Yuisha - or what he thought must be Yuisha - by the edge of the town square, his hands chained to a hitching-post. It was for this reason that he had thought at first when he saw Fai that perhaps - perhaps - there had been some mistake. The face was too pulped and ravaged to be sure, but no one else in Akros had that bright blond hair - now caked black with blood over the caved-in skull - or that style of clothes, shredded and stained where they had dragged in the dirt.
The howl that split the air above the scene of the crime sent all the townspeople to scatter; the roar of rage that followed sent them fleeing to their homes where they cowered behind doors or under tables as though such petty shelters would save them. They knew better; they knew their guilt, knew their crime, and should have known better than to think that they would be spared the wrath that fell upon them then.
"And then?" Syaoran asked, his voice thin and breathless with trepidation.
The red eyes of the Beast bored into him, their crimson gaze relieved only by a slow blink. "And then what? I killed them."
"The... ones who were responsible?" Sakura said anxiously, hopefully, and Fai had to bite his tongue not to shush her. Lest they forget that they were guests in the Beast's lair, the last thing he wanted was for Sakura to push the boundaries of their host's patience. But she was young and brightly optimistic, and wanted to believe the best of everyone, and she wanted to hear a happier ending than the evidence of the ruined town and the Beast's own curse would tell.
"They were all responsible," the Beast snarled, his voice rumbling in a chest the size of a kiln. He half-rose to his feet, his scorpion's tail lashing agitatedly above them. "Every one! Whether their hands actually tied a rope or lifted a stone, or only egged each other on... or even if they just turned their faces away and did nothing because they feared for their own miserable lives if they stood in the way. All of them!"
Sakura made a noise of distress, and this time Fai did move, quickly sliding an arm behind her back to encircle her shoulders, giving a comforting and warning squeeze to her arm. Hush, he thought at her, even as he tensed to jump up and run again, mind mapping the nearest route to safety. It was a hopeless thought; they had all seen how well that worked the first time.
The Beast slowly settled back onto his haunches, his gaze distant and unwavering. "I don't remember much of that night," he said, his voice low and deep. "Flashes. Stone and fire, fire in the dark. Smashing down a door... I remember that. Blood on my hands, my face, under my feet. And the sun breaking over the horizon the next morning, rich and red as though it had bathed in it."
He paused for a moment, and no one else spoke into the silence. After a moment he continued, "Any who still lived had fled, and good riddance to the lot of them. I came back here... meant to get some things of his. To lay in the grave with him. Then I saw the wall. And I saw what the curse had made of me."
Four pairs of eyes darted to the polished obsidian wall, the empty stretch at the end of the row of portraits that had been smashed in by some titanic force. There was nothing left in this room - nothing left anywhere in this town - that could provide a clear reflection any longer.
Sakura was the one to shatter the silence, in the end. "But Fai-san," she said, turning to him with wide earnest green eyes; "Can't you break the curse? Make him back the way he used to be?"
Fai's mouth fell open, hanging uselessly for a moment before he made his voice work. "What?" he said, blinking at her stupidly. For all the worlds they'd been through together, for all the time they'd known each other, Sakura still managed to catch him by surprise.
"Can't you cast some kind of, of counterspell?" Sakura exclaimed. "Oh Fai, I know you're a great magician! Can't you help?"
Fai raised his hands weakly, finding himself suddenly the target of every set of eyes in the room. "That's very sweet of you to say, Sakura-chan, but I can't use my magic right now."
"Fai broke the spell on the feather from the last world!" Mokona piped up, and Fai glared at her for a brief moment, traitor that she was.
"But you wouldn't be casting a spell, would you? You'd just be un-casting one, right?" Sakura wheedled. There were tears standing in her bright green eyes, and Fai wavered against them as weakly as he ever did.
"Maybe we should," Syaoran spoke up unexpectedly. "In return for his hospitality. I mean, if we could turn him back into a human being again..."
He trailed off, but Fai could follow the logic in his eyes: even aside from a gesture of kindness, breaking the spell might also benefit their quest for Sakura's feather. The Black Beast was a formidable guardian, and none of them stood a chance against him in his current form; but if they could find a way to turn the beast back into a man, that greatly improved their chances of stealing Sakura's feather away from him.
Personally, Fai thought that Syaoran was being exceedingly optimistic; the Beast had been a mighty warrior long before the curse had come into effect. If he was anything like as powerful as his counterpart in Kurogane, they would have no chance of getting past him with force no matter what shape he was in. "Listen," he began, searching for a way to say this tactfully. He wished Sakura had not been so earnest, so heartfeltedly outspoken, as to bring up the subject in the Beast's very presence. "It's not that simple..."
"It is simple," the Beast spoke up sharply, and the three travelers looked over him, startled. They'd almost forgotten him, the way his presence melted into the black wall of the stone chamber. "No."
"Eh? No?" Sakura looked confused. "What do you mean? If Fai could help you, break the curse..."
"I said no, and I meant no." The Beast rose to his feet, his tail lashing in agitation. "I didn't ask for your help and I don't want it."
"But you could be yourself again!" Syaoran said earnestly. "You could be the man you used to be!"
"I AM MYSELF!" the Beast roared, his long teeth snapping in Syaoran's direction. "D'you think I haven't thought about it before? The man I used to be is gone! Everything he had, everything he was is gone, fifty years gone. That life is all burned up now and there's nothing left to go back to. What I am now is all that I am and I'm not going to run from it!"
Without another word he turned - the scraping of his claws over the stone the loudest sound left in the chamber - and stalked out, the echoes fading gradually in the cavernous halls. The travelers were left behind in the dining chamber, alone and shaken.
The Beast didn't return, even as the last of the light from the vent-windows darkened into black. Eventually the travelers had dinner - shared from their own stores; there was nothing to eat in the Beast's lair and Fai wouldn't have trusted any food they'd found here anyway.
The grim chamber made for an unsettling place to sleep, but they'd had plenty of practice in their journey of bedding down in uncertain locations. This chamber was warm, out of the wind and rain, and dark enough for their sleep not to be disrupted. And despite the violent promise of violence lurking around the Beast at all times, he had extended his hospitality to them for the night and was unlikely to suddenly turn on them without warning.
At least, Fai thought, they were unlikely to run into anything in this world more dangerous than the Beast; so for the night they were safe enough.
If they slept lightly, that at least was no change to their usual habits. There were no walls or partitions in this chamber, and only the one wide pallet of ancient withered straw and bedding for a mattress. Sakura and Syaoran settled down onto the mattress together, fully clothed and curled up like kittens. It was an arrangement they were well used to in places where they could not get separate bedrooms, or had to sleep in the open; Syaoran slept uneasily, ready to wake on a hair, while Sakura tossed and turned and kicked energetically in the protective circle of his arms.
And yet when they were able to find a town with separate accommodations, Syaoran was still hilariously shy about approaching Sakura within her own 'bedroom.' It was a telling reflection of the ways in which, no matter how far they came from their starting place or how much they changed on the outside, in some ways Syaoran would always be Syaoran.
Of how some parts of them always remained the same, no matter how much the outsides were changed.
When the next morning dawned, peach and pale orange light shining through the vents, the travelers had recovered somewhat from the shocks of the previous day. There was no sign of the Beast, so they had breakfast - again, from their own supplies - and discussed what to do next.
Syaoran came up with several complicated but ultimately impractical ideas to keep the Beast's attention occupied in one part of the temple while they combed the rest of the temple for the feather. Mokona chipped in with wild elaborations on his plans that served only to distract and confuse the question, while Fai searched for ways to gently and tactfully dissuade Syaoran from trying any of them. Of the four of them, Fai suspected he had the most realistic idea of what kind of man their host really was; the Beast would not be easily deceived, would not take well to the attempt, and was unlikely to hold back on his wrath simply because his target was still only a youth.
Sakura did not join in the discussion, preoccupied by the notion that if only they could convince the Beast to accept their offer to break his curse, he would willingly give up the feather in exchange. Despite the fact that the Beast had rejected the idea in no uncertain terms, she kept circling back to the idea.
"It just doesn't seem right," Sakura said finally, brooding over a last fragment of croissant that she turned over in her hands, squashing it into a tiny cube. "I mean, we're all getting our wishes fulfilled because of Yuuko-san; it isn't fair that we can't grant the wishes of others, as well."
"But he doesn't wish it," Fai said gently. "I can't work any magic on him without his consent, Sakura-chan. That would make me as bad as the ones who put this spell on him in the first place."
Or... perhaps not. Consent was such a complex question in matters of magic, so deeply fundamental and yet so slippery. Most kinds of magic were strengthened by the consent of both the caster and receiver; some could not be cast at all without that consent. It was the deepest secret of the magi, the intimate pact that came with spinning the impossible into reality.
Yet with magic, as with any other power, the temptations to abuse and corrupt that power were strong. And mages, whose training necessarily taught them to think sideways around the traditional definitions of words, often came to interpret 'consent' very loosely indeed. It did not matter to a spell whether the receiver's consent was freely given or coerced, informed or misguided. And so many of the more... questionable mages became quite practiced indeed at bending the truth to their will or whim: leading people astray with false knowledge, or deliberately omitted knowledge, or the worst of all: knowledge that was true and yet not complete. It was possible that the Beast's lost priestess had not realized what an insidious and cruel effect her magic would have, over time; it was equally possible that she had known it would do exactly what she said.
Fai of all people knew how very deeply you could lie with the truth.
"There's so much suffering and unhappiness in this country," Sakura said miserably. "It's one thing when we don't have the power to help people change things but we do. We should try to help people when we can, otherwise what's the point of even coming here?"
"But we're not here to save the world, Princess," Syaoran reminded her gently. "We're here to find your feathers. If we can help people along the way that's good, but sometimes that's just not an option."
The four of them lapsed into a glum silence, no nearer to that goal than they had started.
"Here to find feathers, eh?"
Sakura shrieked and Syaoran yelped as the quiet was split by a deep, grating voice that seemed to come from nowhere. Fai leapt to his feet as the darkness shifted in a corner of the room, the stones of the very wall seeming to come alive and move towards them. In the better light of morning, he realized with a start that what he had taken for a solid joined corner of the room was in fact a shielded alcove leading away into another dark stone corridor, a second entrance to the room which servants had perhaps used to come and go unobtrusively. Twin points of scarlet light gleamed in the darkness, then resolved themselves into Kurogane's crimson eyes, in the magnified, distorted face of the Beast.
Fai quickly moved to stand between the Beast and Sakura, only to nearly be run over by Syaoran doing the same thing. He glanced behind them to see Sakura, Mokona clenched in her arms, looking at the Beast with an expression that mixed anxiety, sadness and a thin pale thread of hope. "Mister Beast!" she gasped.
He looked at them steadily, his expression closed and walled. It was hard to read what emotions might be behind that face; the huge red eyes and double row of fangs that split his face gave him a ferocious look, but it was hard to say whether that was a result of what he was thinking or just the way his bestial features made him look.
"Come with me," he rumbled and turned away, his body sliding around behind him with that smooth turn that was so startling in its swiftness. The four travelers shared a nervous look, then scrambled to catch up; none of them wanted to be left alone in this labyrinth.
The corridors were narrow enough that none of them could walk beside the Beast; they trailed after him instead, wondering what he could possibly have in store for them. Reassuringly (perhaps) he led them not downwards towards the pit of bones, but upwards instead; they passed through a maze of corridors and took one of the stairwells that they had not tried before. It wound upwards in a tight spiral, piercing through the rock of the mountain.
The air changed before the light did; the dank and damp smells falling away to be replaced by the piercing, burning smell of ash and cinders instead. All at once the corridor opened up around them and they found themselves on a broad stone balcony, a wide circular ledge running along the inside of a curved cliff. The light filtering in from above was muted and grey, dimmed by the ash clouds, but the change from the darkness of the labyrinth still left them all blinking blindly in the light until their eyes adjusted.
When it did, Sakura let out a gasp and Syaoran an exclamation. The cliff wall - and the balcony - ran all the way around in front of them and curved back to meet them on the other side, a closed-off ring of stone open to the sky. Here and there along the balcony they saw platforms leaning out into the open space below, accompanied by carved flights of stairs leaning down to the arena floor.
They were in the caldera itself - the very heart of the mountain temple.
Their guide turned to the left and paced along the edge of the stone balcony, leading them down what turned out to be a complicated interlacing set of pyramids that made up the stairs, then headed purposefully to the center of the ring. As they did Mokona uttered a cry, her ears pointing straight up and quivering as her eyes opened wide.
"Mekyo!" she chirped. "It's here! Sakura's feather!"
The stone floor of the arena was raised in shallow, broad steps in concentric rings narrowing in to the center; at the center was a raised dais, and upon that a square stone slab as broad on each side as a man was tall. Something about that stone slab made the hair on the back of Fai's neck rise, and he grabbed Syaoran by the shoulder when the younger man would have rushed forward to claim the feather. Syaoran stopped, looking back over his shoulder at Fai in question; but Fai only shook his head.
It was Sakura's feather without question; he could feel the bright, clean sensation of the feather's magic washing over them even from his distance. But underneath that was something old, something dark and tainted, generation after generation of darkness that had washed these stones and poured into the darkness beneath. The sound of their footsteps changed when they stepped onto the last few stone rings, a muffled echo sounding from below their boots - and although Fai's sense of direction was not as good as Syaoran's, he suddenly knew with crystal-clear certainty that they were positioned directly over the chamber that housed the careless refuse of bones. It would be easy and convenient, from here, to pour out the lifeblood of an intended sacrifice, then let their body fall to the pit below...
None of the others seemed to have made the connection, thankfully; Sakura was staring at the feather where it rested innocently in a small coffer, propped open. The Beast paced in a half-circle around the other side of the altar, seeming reluctant to step onto the center dais. He didn't seem to have dragged them out here for some sacrificial ritual, which could only be a mercy, but then what was this about?
"This was what you really came for, wasn't it?" He jerked his massive head in the direction of Fai, standing frozen a few strides away. "Not for your brother."
Fai couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't make the matter worse, so he said nothing.
"...Yes." Syaoran stepped into the breach, thankfully, taking control of the conversation as he always did when the fate of Sakura's feather was at stake. His eyes were clear and his voice unwavering; there was sadness and regret in his tone, but no sliver of doubt. "It belongs to the Princess. It's her memory, and it was scattered long ago. I know it's precious to your people, but -"
"Take it." The Beast sat down, ceasing in his restless pacing with his haunches folded under him.
Sakura stared at him, wide-eyed. "R-really?" she stuttered.
"Yeah," the Beast said.
The travelers hesitated, confused by how quickly the situation had untangled for them. "But... you swore an oath, didn't you?" Syaoran said with a frown. It was clear he had trouble understanding how Kurogane, any Kurogane, would so easily forsake an oath. "To protect the temple and its treasures? You made a vow to your priestess -"
"Yes, and she did THIS TO ME!" The Beast uncoiled to his feet, claws raking deep gouges in the stone below. Every muscle shook visibly with furious energy - the need to lash out, to rend and destroy - and his face contorted in grief and pain, bitterness and hate that ran years and fathoms deep. The travelers froze in place - Syaoran pulled Sakura slightly behind him and she went, clutching Mokona with wide eyes. Fai touched his tongue to the back of his teeth, wondering if there was any spell he could speak now that would not attract the attention -
The tableau hung for a long moment, and then the Beast slowly eased back to the floor, and the travelers nearly melted with relief. "Everything Orusta foresaw," the Beast said, his voice now almost back to normal. "The empty town, the ruined temple. There's no point to trying to prevent the prophecy because it all came true anyway. There's nothing left to protect.
"So now this just sits here. It's not doing anybody any good. Thieves will just keep coming after it and I'll keep killing them. Enough. Enough already."
"Thank you," Fai said softly into the tense atmosphere. "That's very generous of you."
The Beast glanced at him once, then looked away. "Yuui thought that this feather could be used for healing. He thought it could cure - " His tail lashed once, then rested. "Well. He thought lots of things. He wouldn't have wanted it to rot in the dark and neither do I. So take it."
Mokona cheered, looking elated. Syaoran mostly looked relieved that they weren't going to have to fight the Beast again (or rather, try.) Sakura, on the other hand, looked as though she were going to cry.
"But, what will happen to you?" she piped up, even as Syaoran stepped forward and gingerly lifted the coffer from the altar. He moved towards Sakura, reaching to restore the feather to her, but Sakura took a small step away and shook her head. Clearly, there was something she wanted to stay awake for. "After we leave. When the thing that you lived to protect is gone. What will become of you?"
"Nothing," the Beast said flatly. His massive ruff raised in what was almost a shrug. "I don't think anyone's gonna believe that the treasure isn't here any more. They'll still come looking for it. I'll still kill them." He paused, eyes half-lidded, staring into the distance. "Maybe someday one will come who's strong enough to take me down. But I'm not in a hurry to do their work for them."
"Unless you're planning to move in here permanently, you should go." The Beast turned away, that fast-sliding motion, and paced towards the edge of the arena.
The travelers gathered together near the center of the stone rings, the lines of the temple radiating out around them. Fai stared around the grim stone walls and imagined a lifetime of being surrounded by them, alone, having nothing to live for, just waiting for someone to come and put an end to it - someone who might never come. It was all too easy to imagine.
There was nothing they could do. They couldn't save everyone, and the Beast had made his own choice. The wrong choice, Fai's conscience insisted at him, but what could he do?
The hardest part of it, the part that sat like a lead ball in his stomach, was that Fai couldn't even ask why the Beast had chosen as he did - because he already knew the answer. He could almost see through that black hide to the bones and tendons beneath, see into the distorted skull to the mass of pain brooding beneath. Of old, old agony that you feared to let go of because without that, who were you? Of choices that were not really choices, of choosing misery just in order to feel like you could choose at all.
But it's the wrong choice.
Mokona's circle rose around them with a whisper of magic, the edges of the world pinching and thinning as Mokona prepared to draw the fabric of reality around them again. On a sudden impulse Fai stepped forward, reaching out towards the Beast once more. "Wait," he said.
Red eyes looked back at him with a guarded, impassive expression as Fai stepped closer, closer than he'd been since the first time the Beast had slammed him against the wall - close enough for that row of jagged fangs to bite his arm off at the elbow. Heedless of the danger he stepped further in still, until he could wrap his hands around the Beast's massive, furred head. In those eyes he saw his own reflection, years and years gone, a life of promises and possibilities all gone to ruin. There was nothing, Fai knew, that could bring that back. There was nothing that he could be, or do, that could undo the past and bring it to life again.
"I don't really believe in granting wishes," he said aloud, knowing that Sakura and Syaoran could hear his words, were watching him with intense worry. "But I do believe in starting over."
And he leaned forward and kissed the Beast; and as he did so, his lips closed on the loose thread of magic and pulled.
One of Fai's early tutors in magic (back when he'd been too young to understand it on a more abstract conceptual level) had compared magic to weaving, or knitting. In order to knit a sweater or a scarf in the first place, the man had said, you needed the right tools - like knitting needles - the right materials - like yarn - and you also had to have the skill to knit them together and the time to create the fabric bit by bit.
But once that sweater was complete, he'd gone on to say, none of those things were required at all to unmake it. All it took was an understanding of how the weave was put together, and the knowledge of where to look to find the weak points. And if you could find that weak point, if you could grasp it and pull, then the entire spell would unravel.
The massive hulking form of the Beast lit up with a weird, red-black glow that left purple spots in front of Fai's eyes as he backed away, blinking. He stepped over the threshold of Mokona's spell and felt it take him, the transport magic rising to completion.
A massive bellow echoed throughout the labyrinth, transmuting in the middle to a hoarse human cry. The last thing any of them saw before the golden tunnel enfolded them was a tall, rangy man with iron-grey hair and line-scored skin falling to his knees in the courtyard, blinking at them through stunned crimson eyes.
~tbc...