Broken Wings
N.W. 943
The Last Knight
"So you're here."
Lloyd walked forward, glancing around as he did so and eyeing the seal. "You asked me to. Actually, I'm technically a couple days early."
"That's fine," Ratatosk said, voice soft. "More than fine, really. I think if I put this off any longer, I'll lose the courage to do it at all."
Lloyd stopped in the center of the space that had long since lost most of its color, and gave the spirit a worried look. "Ratatosk?"
The redhead turned just enough to look over his shoulder, then waved Lloyd forward. "Come here. I did everything I could with this damn seal, but the demons are still trying to wear at it from that side and wriggle through. I'm going to teach you to tighten it, first... And then I have a gift for you. The last I'll ever hand out."
He didn't want to join Ratatosk at the sealed doorway that had once housed the Centurion's Cores but... Well. There was no stopping what would be happening in the next few hours, Lloyd had a feeling. And ensuring that the demons couldn't get to Aselia was of utmost importance.
So with reluctance, Lloyd walked forward, standing next to Ratatosk as the spirit lifted a hand.
"You feel this?" the redhead asked. Lloyd felt, not physically, but with his mana and the ambient mana swirling through the air, a skill Genis had done his best to teach him and Colette over centuries of friendship.
And he did feel it, the way Ratatosk was pulling the mana into a line, using it to trace a design that slowly lit up on the seal as he worked.
Once the design was fully lit up, the spirit twisted the diagram, and immediately, Lloyd could feel the difference as the miasma of Niflheim began to leak free. And yet, with another twist back the other way, it was sealed once again.
"The more they work at it, the further the seal will slip," Ratatosk said. "It should hold for a millennium at least before the miasma begins leaking through, but it still annoys me that I couldn't make it solid enough to ensure they'd never get through."
"If you're right, that's still a lot less to worry about than the original seal," Lloyd said. "If I have to drop in every thousand years, so be it. I've put too much work into protecting Aselia to let it be destroyed by negligence."
Ratatosk laughed, the sound startling and rather heartbreaking, if only because of the pain he seemed to be in. "Well. At least I can move on knowing it's being tended to." Red eyes met russet. "You've set Zelos and Colette free of the binds of mana, correct?"
Lloyd nodded. "I have. Thank you for showing me; I'll probably have to do the same for Dad when he comes back."
"Likely, unless the spirit of the Derris-Kharlan tree can manage to do what I've done here," Ratatosk said. "And even then... You never know when you'll need that skill. Anyway..." He turned to face Lloyd fully, and the angel had a feeling that this was going to be it. "Tenebrae."
The last living Centurion appeared in a cloud of darkness, stepping to Lloyd's side and rubbing against his hip as any domesticated cat might against someone's ankle. Though Lloyd would never call Tenebrae a pet, he had become a very close companion...
He would miss him terribly, Lloyd mused as he ran a hand down the Centurion's back.
"Thank you, for your companionship all these centuries," he said softly.
"And you for yours," Tenebrae replied.
And then, in another burst of dark smoke, Tenebrae was gone, and all that remained was a Core that was absorbed into Ratatosk.
The redhead smiled, and spread his arms as a glow overtook him, a vibrant crimson in color just like his Core...
"Farewell, Lloyd Aurion. I leave this last treasure as a gift to you, and a token of the promise you've made in your heart," Ratatosk's voice echoed as the red glow brightened and condensed.
As it began fading again, something became visible in the glow, and Lloyd stepped forward with a heavy heart to accept the... pendant.
It was a simple, burnished gold disk, with a red, spherical gem in the very center that yet glowed.
And arranged around the red gem by color were eight more, smaller than the central one, but it took no more than a glance for Lloyd to recognize exactly what he held in his hand.
Because every last gem had a design in the center, and Lloyd knew those designs. Ratatosk's final gift contained nine beautiful, miniature replicas of his and his Centurions' Cores.
Lloyd ran his thumb over each marble-sized gem as he listed them off. Ratatosk in the center, Ignis above where on a compass one would find north, then Solum, Ventus, Glacies, Aqua, Tonitrus, Tenebrae, and Lumen going clockwise.
Only, now that the overall crimson glow from Ratatosk had faded, Lloyd could see that the red gem in the center and the smokey gray-black to its left were both lit from within.
The other seven were dark.
Lloyd took a deep breath, fighting off the urge to cry as he realized what it meant.
Soon enough, Ratatosk's and Tenebrae's miniature Cores would fade as well. And the fact that the spirit had given him this at all...
"...a token of the promise you've made in your heart..." Ratatosk had said.
And Lloyd knew what that meant, too. Because everything he'd worked for in the last century was intended to be for the good of Aselia as a whole. So he pulled the chain of the pendant over his head, and whispered his vow even as he turned to leave the Ginnungagap for the last time in a long time.
"I swear... to preserve the mana tree and protect Aselia from threats, both native and foreign, for as long as I live..."
The warmth he felt from the pendant might have been an acknowledgement of that vow, or it might have just been his imagination. Either way, it helped, because even though the pendant was the final nail in Ratatosk's proverbial coffin, the spirit had left him with a mission.
A mission he refused to fail.