Kefka had never loved sparring. He was always more clever than he was strong, and past a point with others in the military it always turns into strength against strength. He had always hated that.
But sometimes there was nothing else for it but to accept, when someone offered you a friendly (or "friendly") challenge.
Colonel Reytan was six inches taller than him and probably a good fifty pounds of muscle heavier, and he had a punch on him like being hit in the face with a lead weight. One punch. Two. Kefka stumbled back and saw the faint smile around Reytan's lips, felt his own lips split and trickle blood down to his chin.
And—
—then—
—Reytan's smile faded and he took a step back. Kefka could have followed for a punch of his own, but he didn't.
Do you enjoy what I've given you?
Reytan weaved on his feet briefly, like a drunk man, and sank to his knees. His hands came up to his chest and then his throat; his breathing sped up. Kefka watched with academic interest and wondered whether he should care.
Reytan's subordinates rushed over, between Kefka and Reytan, but Kefka could still see quite clearly. So he didn't bother to move.
Reytan began to froth about the lips. His eyes rolled back.
"You might get an antidote," Kefka said, but it was too late. Reytan shuddered into unconsciousness. Somehow, instictively, Kefka knew death would follow soon after.
The ancient scrolls had a name for it, but the best translation was simply 'poison.' Poison magic. Tested for the first time on another Imperial, albeit one who was arrogant, brash, stupid, no credit to his uniform.
He wondered if he should care.
She was a small thing, with enormous blue eyes and long hair the pale color of butter. She couldn't have been older than four years old, and she spent most of her time clinging to Doctor Cid's hand and looking around her with an expression of solemn curiosity.
"You're experimenting on children now?" Kefka said, in order to see Cid wince, and wasn't disappointed.
"Her parents gave her to the care of the Empire," Cid said, as though that explained anything. "And being young is a good thing." He looked down at her and smiled; the girl looked back up at him and then smiled herself, sweetly. "I think the injection might . . . take better with someone who was still young and malleable."
"Oh?" Kefka asked, and though he couldn't keep the edge of poison out of his voice, Cid didn't seem to notice.
Cid always had been dense in certain ways, hadn't he?
"I think your being post-adolescent may have—" Cid began, and faltered.
" . . . Explain why I went so wrong?" Kekfa asked, and now the poison was right there in the open and even slow Cid could see it.
"I didn't mean that."
"But it's what everyone thinks, isn't it?" Kefka watched Cid squirm, and then threw his head back and let out a long laugh, just for the pleasure of watching Cid's squirm turn into a jump. "I went wrong, didn't I?"
"Kefka—"
"It's all right," Kefka said, and then laughed again. He could see the way his forced laugh, a donkey's-bray waterfall of sound, made Cid uncomfortable, so he did it a third time. "I know the experiment didn't go as you planned with me." Somewhere in the back of his mind, Stray woke and stretched. Kefka leaned in, and watched the way Cid swayed back and then forced himself to hold his ground. "But it doesn't matter, does it? Because I've still got the power, either way."
"Celes isn't meant to be an insult to you," Cid said.
Kefka glanced back at the small girl. Celes? Interesting name. Celes celes celerity celestial. Though Cid had jumped and flinched, the girl hadn't moved, her hand steady in Cid's and her eyes calm. Kefka bent over until he was face to face with her, nose to nose, her round child's face filling his gaze like the moon. "Hello, Celes," he said. "I understand you're going to be like me."
"I guess so," said Celes, her voice diffident but her eyes still curious.
"I'm sure we'll be the best of friends," Kefka said.
The white powder was fine talc, from the workmen who used its smooth slipperyness to lubricate their workings.
Kefka mixed it with palm oil until both the oil and the talc moved smooth and luminous beneath his fingers. He spread it over his skin, from forehead to throat, across his collarbones, down his chest below where his shirt would reveal.
The red was carmine, crushed from the shells of insects, soaked in alcohol and vinegar, stiffened with wax.
He looked at his white face in the mirror and took his red fingertips—red as if with blood, massacre-red—and drew long shapes around his eyes, drew long lines down his cheeks.
Your mouth, said the Stray Cat. Color your mouth, blood-eater, kin-eater.
He drew his fingertips across his lips, and tasted wax and alcohol, and thought of the taste of gore.
Maybe it was her youth; maybe they'd refined the process of creating the esper essence to inject; maybe the blue-skinned and fair-haired esper they'd chosen for Celes was just more suited for the job than Stray had been. Kefka watched through a pane of glass as she lay still beneath the sheet. No thrashing. No calling out. None of what the cameras had recorded of Kefka's own injection.
Kefka had watched those recordings with great interest, so he had a basis for comparison.
No, Celes slept calmly, her long braid coiled under her head. But if you watched carefully, you could see Jack Frost traceries of sparkling white frost crawling up her skin from beneath the sheet, writing glittering words in an unreadable language on her fair skin.
Kefka smiled.
Terra was something else again, though. Though she was no older than Celes she came to them with the magic already in her. Or at least those were the stories in the barracks, that at age four she lit fires with her mind when she was frightened, that she could close her own wounds with a look and a thought when they tried to restrain her.
That she closed their wounds, too, when she had accidentally burnt them with her fires.
Fool girl.
Celes was a ward and Kefka was a volunteer, but Terra was a prisoner, an unpredictable child with powers even Cid couldn't account for. They kept her in a stone cell with nothing flammable in it but the mattress on the floor. She didn't light the mattress on fire. Kefka would have, and then he would have laughed in the ashes; it would have been worth sleeping on the floor to prove to them that he could, that he didn't need their small comforts.
But when he spied Terra through the bars of her cell, he could see only the shape of her small shoulders beneath the curly ends of her mint-leaf hair.
Celes had no seizures, and though Cid was concerned of the rime that crawled over her body and turned her skin to glittering ice, the ice retreated and she woke as any child would awaken: groggy, rubbing her eyes, asking first for water and then for hot chocolate and a blanket.
"No seizure for her," Cid said, relieved.
The Stray Cat that bristled beneath Kefka's skin sneered that of course there wasn't, because though humans might care so little for children as to torture them with experiments, the espers had more mercy. Celes' esper would not drive her mad. Celes' esper . . . .
She will be a better knight than you, Cait Sith's echo said, smug and soft.
You promised me—
You will be more famed than her, never fret, Kefka Palazzo, the fragment of Cait Sith said. I did not lie, though you often lie. You will be legendary beyond what you know. You will always be remembered. But she will be a better knight than you.
Celes sat with a blanket around her shoulders and breathing the smell of the hot chocolate, and when Kefka looked at her he could see something new and frozen behind her wide blue eyes.
Celes, at least, they could understand. Within a week of her injections she could turn water to ice with a touch, and when she cried in the night her tears froze on her cheeks and collected like icicles on the curves of her face. But that was as expected, and her control grew by measureable increments. By the time she was six, she froze water in the glass only when she wanted to, and had she wept she could have kept her tears liquid, although she rarely wept even at that young age. By the time she was eight, she could turn her ice outward to freeze the water in an enemy's body. By the time she was ten, she could heal her own wounds by instinct, though she couldn't turn the power outward to heal another.
Emperor Gestahl put her in training with Kefka, who had undergone the same initiation himself. But he put her there with an observer: Colonel Leo Christophe, a young man for his rank, who watched with great mistrust as Kefka bade Celes show him her tricks.
"They aren't tricks," Celes said. "They're magic. It's important." Ten years old, and she had more gravity than half of Gestahl's counselors.
Ten years old, Cait Sith's echo whispered in his ear, and you injected her with the spirit of an immortal ancient when she was four. What do you expect?
"I'd expect a little more wisdom from you, if you're an immortal ancient," he murmured.
"Who are you talking to?" Colonel Christophe unfolded his arms and straightened up, with the air of one not so much looking for a fight as ready for one should it come his way.
"No one," Kefka said, and laughed, the high-pitched bray that reliably made people cringe. But Leo just met his eyes, and Celes looked up at him with mild surprise but no alarm.
What spirit did she have inside her?
Do you think she got luckier than you? Whose idea was it to put the Stray Cat inside you? But I forgot, you people couldn't tell one esper from another . . . .
Kefka rocked back to his heels, so that he could look at Celes eye-to-eye. In truth, she was his only equal, the only other one who knew what it was like for him. He would still be greater than her—Cait Sith had promised—but he would accept her as an honorable subordinate. "And how do you learn your magic, little Celes?"
Celes looked at him thoughtfully, and then said, "She teaches me."
"She who?"
"I don't know her name." Celes met his eyes seriously, and then said, "She's blue as the sky, and her hair is light gold."
"Like yours," Kefka said, and touched the long soft locks of her hair.
"Brighter," Celes said. "Like gold in sunlight. Almost white." She hummed a little in her throat and then said, "She helps me. She teaches me what I need to know."
Kefka backed up a few more steps and then muttered, beneath his breath, "You never helped me."
She is a helpless child. The esper protects her, because we, unlike you, are not monstrous. But you were an adult who wanted to enslave me. I give you what you deserve.
