[A/N: MAAAAJOR spoilers for Disk 4 and endgame. This story grew out of the snippet I wrote for Shana's focus chapter in "Soul of a Dragon." I hope it makes your skin crawl. Major thanks to Raindog Bride for being my beta reader and for giving me such lovely reviews!]
PRAYER FOR THE DAMNED
In the month after the nightmare at Vellweb, Shana grew accustomed to captivity. Her captor often left her alone, drawing some arcane circle around her before vanishing for hours or even days. Human weapons were useless to break it, she had no Dragoon Spirit to draw on now, and the latent power of the God of the Destruction would not wake, sensing no imminent harm to its vessel.
Instead she sat, for days sometimes, shivering in the night winds and longing for a drink of water or a little food. Not even Hellena Prison could list complete abandonment among its modes of torture. Finally he would return: a tall man in armor dyed scarlet as if with blood. Without expression or explanation he would break the circle, grasp her wrist—or, if her cramped legs wavered, simply pick her up—and in a sizzling flash of power, they would be elsewhere.
Not even Lloyd, for all his swiftness and power, could teleport.
"Soon, Moon Child," her captor said once, looking down at her with his dead eyes, as she gulped water desperately from a spring. They were alone on a vast dark plain, with the moon glowing bright and fatal overhead. She no longer knew or cared where they were, only that she had water for the first time in two days. "When all five of the Signet Spheres are broken, the God of Destruction will be born."
If it was rare that he remembered that she was only mortal, and would die without sustenance, it was rarer still that he communicated his intentions. She forced herself to pay attention. "Five?" she rasped, wiping her face. "How many are left?"
:Two." And then he smiled. "The City of Law. Then the City of the Dead."
She shuddered, and prayed that Dart and her friends would come quickly for her. She prayed that Miranda could be stronger than she had been. Already, she had begun to feel a second heartbeat inside, a half-imagined echo of her own, a hair out of time. The Virage Embryo was stirring.
-------
Her captor returned from Zenebatos, City of Law, with shards of the Signet Sphere still embedded in his glove. They gouged her, drawing blood, as he seized her and teleported away. She twisted free as they reappeared in a silent gray forest, all the trees long since turned to stone and slowly crumbling.
To her surprise, he let her go—almost shoved her away. He staggered against a tree, hunching over as if stabbed. Sweat stood out on his forehead, veins showing darkly through the skin. Shana stared while he dragged himself upright against the trunk. "Accursed—weak flesh," he gasped, before doubling over. His knees hit the ground with a thud. Bloody vomit splattered the ground.
She didn't breathe for a moment, too stunned. Then she ran.
The sound of retching ceased. He spoke again, ragged and raw. "Little girl. Little girl, wait. Quickly."
He had never called her anything but 'Moon Child' before.
Obeying instinct more than reason, Shana stopped and turned back, as another gagging fit silenced him briefly. "Don't run," he rasped, stretching out a trembling hand. She kept her distance, still poised to flee. "He'll only catch you again."
"Who will?"
"That damned dead Wingly—using my body. Quick, girl. Before I'm lost again." He gestured impatiently for her to come closer.
Shana trembled. The man's voice was the same, but the intonation and the words had changed. He spat phlegm and hunched over the mess.
"What do you want?" she whispered.
With visible effort, he raised his head and looked around. "That rock. There. Pick it up." She obeyed, staying out of reach. "Good."
"What do you want?" she asked again.
Something in his face when she asked reminded her of Dart: older, careworn, but she knew that look of fire and desperation. That made his answer all the more horrifying. "Bash my head in."
Shana rocked back. The man pushed himself up against the tree, blood and vomit staining his armor. His eyes made embers in a mask of suffering, glittering with angry tears. "For the love of Soa, girl! I beg you. Please. If you don't, he'll kill us all."
Paralyzed, Shana tried to envision lifting the rock, dropping it on his head, watching the brains splatter—
"Now! Please! Before—" The rest of his words never found voice. He grimaced and doubled up, clutching his throat. Then, too fast for Shana to even think of interfering, he slammed his head against the trunk. The crack echoed through the stone forest. Blood left a halo where his skull had struck the petrified bark.
Only one Signet Sphere remained. Something had to break. Now she could not look at him without seeing Dart—some nightmare of Dart with his eyes shut, crimson running down his face. Dart broken and begging.
He was not—could not be Dart. Be strong, she told herself, and lifted the rock.
Like a marionette, he sat up at once, lifting dead eyes to her face. The brief flare of vibrancy had been snuffed out. His stained mouth twisted in contempt. The rock fell from her fingers and bounced harmlessly off his steel-toed boot.
A wave of power swept her off her feet, sending her crashing into a thicket of petrified thorns. They shattered around her. Bound writhing in the searing net of magic, she could only wait as he stumbled to her.
The magic died. Sobbing for breath, she twisted her neck to see him, a bloody silhouette against the ever-sinking moon. "Eighteen years of waiting, and you ruined his one chance to be free," he said tonelessly. "Bow to Fate, Moon Child."
Shana trembled. "There… there are two of you."
"No. There is one of me." He touched his forehead, and examined the blood that came away on his fingertips with remarkable disinterest. "Yet you, more than any other of these human wretches, should understand that the body is merely a vessel."
Other than the stain of bile, no sign remained of that other tormented soul that had briefly appeared in his eyes. Was he still watching, listening, but unable to help himself any more than she was? Or had this other person, her captor, just obliterated him entirely? Her gaze drifted down over the man's ravaged body, noticing as if for the first time the awful scars and gouges in his red armor, and how poorly it hung on his bones. She had assumed he did not need food, because he had not eaten. If body and soul were not joined, however—
"Is he dead?"
"He wishes he were. Did he not ask you to end him?" He tilted his head. "Moon Child, do you know whose body this is?"
She shook her head.
The fiend crouched down, the petrified thorns crunching under his feet. He gripped her chin in his hands, turning her face from right to left. "He loves this girl," he said. "Your boy." After a moment, she realized he was not speaking to her, but addressing that other person.
His attention refocused on her. "He rages."
"At me?"
"At himself. He is the reason I did not die with the Paradise he destroyed. He is the means by which I will restore that Paradise. And now he understands what I intend to do."
"You're going to end the world." The words came lurching out; she had never dared speak them aloud before.
"Yes, and then it shall be remade, without the flaws of this present one." He kept hold of her, transferring his grip from her chin to her hair, using it to pull her head up, baring her neck as if for sacrifice. She cringed, glancing around in the corners of her eyes for the rock, for a second chance. "But that is no great revelation to him, after all these years he has spent with me. No, I intend to punish him for his disloyalty."
He was gloating, she finally realized, even if his flat expression and tone barely wavered. Who was it inside, that her captor seemed so triumphant? She felt as if some part of her mind knew, but refused to say.
"Punish him? How?" she asked to distract him. Behind her back, she scrabbled at the ground, prying up a new weapon.
His lips pulled back, more a rictus than a smile. "Through you."
Closing her fingers around the rock, she whipped her arm around and smashed it into his skull. His head snapped sideways, but the grip on her hair never lightened. A grown man's strength held her to the ground by her scalp. She kicked armor, to no avail. Shaking off the blow, he looked down at her with blood running down his cheek, grasped his crooked jaw with his free hand, and snapped it back into place.
Shana screamed, staring into his eyes, letting out all of the hatred, humiliation, and futile rage of the past month. When she did, something constricted inside, then cracked. It welled up, rushing through her veins, seeping through her skin, a cold clear power even more awful than any dragon's—
"Stop. Enough."
The power fled like water down a drain, so rapidly that it left her gasping for breath. It wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, how could he command that power that even she was helpless to control, now when she needed it most? He straddled her legs so that she could no longer kick him, and laid his bone-cold hand over her breastbone, fingers digging under the bone as if he planned to simply break her ribcage open. She caught back a cry of pain.
Eyes like that could not even be pitiless, they were so empty. "Have you always been so weak?" he demanded. "You are pathetic. Laughable. Are you the last joke of the Creator, or merely an anomaly? How did you survive in this stupid little body when the Black Monster has slain you a hundred times before?" He waited, then dug his nails in. "I asked you a question."
"I don't know! Get off me!"
"Laughable," he said again, not laughing. "All humans are weak. Your bodies were never meant to channel magic. This flesh strains at the mere touch of it, trying to force me out. Power is a gift Soa never intended for your kind. Why else do your Dragoons ache in their own existence?"
Abomination, she thought, and did not know which of them she meant. She could not look into his face without seeing Dart's, now that the connection had been made. Would he ever look at her with such coldness, such scorn? Would he beg for death?
She clamped her jaws together and spoke between her teeth. "I've been hurt before."
"Then I shall teach you agony." Hands like ice moved across her shoulders, her sharp ribs, the bones of her hips. A wild pulse beat in them—the fiend's, or her fellow captive's?
"You are the newborn mother of my new world."
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Even when the bruises faded, she could not close her eyes without seeing his face, golden hair matted flat with sweat and blood, lips contorted with a furious plea or unmingled scorn. The memory made her stomach twist and her knees buckle. Every day the Moon sank like a beaded drop of blood.
Regrets served no end except to pass the time, but still she replayed the moment when the rock weighed down their hand. Their misery could have ended. If the chance ever came again—but it would not.
She still prayed, but the man whose heart had bled out of those eyes had taught her better now. She did not ask the impossible. Her prayer was not for the Dragoons to save her, but that they would be brave enough to kill her when the time came.