+ Fallacy, a 100themes Challenge +
Sarehptar

Theme: 42, Standing Still
Characters: Garfakcy, Sinistra, Kharl
Pairing: None, although Sinistra/Kharl/Garfakcy gets played for all the laughs it will ever be worth.
Warnings: I am not responsible for the copious amounts of brain bleach you might need after this. Well, technically I am, but whatever.
Need to Know Info: Um, lots? First off, I apologize for Sinistra. If her character/powers/everything strikes you as completely bizarre, that's because I totally made it up. She's almost straddling the OC wall at this point, and I don't even care. And let's see… remember when I mentioned Kharl was a birdie (because I said so)? Well, this is that, played out to its logical and absurd conclusion. Ornithology, ho! Lastly, I probably should have said this somewhere ages ago, but I am totally not a fan of Kharl/Garfakcy, so when I poke fun at it here, it's about 20 percent affectionate and 80 percent "No. Just no."
Title Provider: Talking to the Moon (Bruno Mars)

Or Am I a Fool Who Sits Alone, Talking to the Moon?

It's not like he can ever forget, nine-tenths of Garfakcy keenly, constantly aware of it—it's just that sometimes, against all expectation, it sneaks up and takes him by surprise.

Kharl is a demon.

No, he knows that, really, but most of the time it's impossible to think of his master that way. Demons are monstrous and monstrously strong, untamable beasts whose instincts clamor for bloodshed, whose bodies are built for pure and unadulterated destruction—they are wild and cruel and beautiful and maybe, when he's feeling poetic, something like all the kinetic energy of the world collected, smooth and perpetual forward motion sealed behind decadent grins. Every step is a practice in half-concealed violence, every toss of their hands the seductive promise of supreme power, animalistic surrender.

Lord Kharl is not exactly any of those things.

It's true he can be cruel and quick as a viper to his enemies' throats (and it's true too that the stronger the demon, the more refined their tastes), but he also does a lot of sitting around, and drinking tea, and reading harlequin romance novels from Dusis that he makes Garfakcy buy. He likes to eat dessert before dinner, he needs help getting up in the morning, and (Sinistra likes to joke), he twitters in the bath.

He's different from Garfakcy, unmistakably so, but sometimes he's so damn human it's only as different as talking to someone from Glaciosa maybe: a little more provincial, the hint of an odd accent in there somewhere, the occasional questionable moral. The day-to-day of it all undermines reality, and some time after Garfakcy explains the function of their vacuum cleaner for the four hundredth time, Kharl loses nine-tenths of his demon mystique and tumbles into the neat little folder in Garfakcy's head labelled "Utterly Hopeless."

Even when he uses his power directly, steps into a serious, fiery stare and plots mass genocide, he ends up looking like something else entirely: a vengeful god, so far above the rest of them that even other demons find themselves scrambling to bow at his feet. Garfakcy understands the concept of demon kings, but in Kharl's case—when he lifts his little finger and blots out lives or just as easily brings them back, when he creates new souls from ash and nothing—it's easier to think of him as divine, the lord of giving and taking away.

So he's lazy half the time and god-like the other half and nowhere in there is there room for odd monster instincts—but sometimes there has to be, because Kharl is a demon after all.

It begins as a completely innocuous day. Garfakcy gets up just after dawn, throws open the curtains throughout the castle and drifts toward the kitchen in no particular hurry. At one point, he stops to idly dust out a wall sconce. In the pantry, he sorts through their stock, contemplating. They're out of eggs. He could pop over to Dusis and get some, but it's just so far... (Never mind that transportation spells take about fifteen seconds.) He decides on the flour instead, maybe crepes. The wood-burning stove takes a while to catch; he pitches in three logs and settles back to wait for the fire.

That's when he happens to glance at the calendar hung over the wash basin.

"Shit," Garfakcy says, and for good measure, he repeats it.

It's the first day of spring.

Forget the crepes. He is going to need those eggs after all. And an entire boar for bacon too, while they're at it. Somewhere in the castle, a monster is sleeping. Garfakcy tamps the stove and does something that looks a lot like running away.

There is a pattern. It took Garfakcy an infinitely long time to figure out the pattern, his first few years in the castle, but he did notice it finally, began to dust the calendar off at the end of each winter to check his suspicions. Sure enough, something strange most definitely happens to Master Kharl on the 20th of March every year.

It's the exact same every spring: it starts with the eating, three—sometimes four—times as much at dinner, and then the addition of a brunch and a luncheon. Kharl asks for extra courses, takes two whole cakes at tea, grazes in the kitchen between meals and at midnight as if he is on the verge of starving. Garfakcy has no idea where he puts it all or how to handle his increasingly bizarre requests (where, exactly, can they find bonefish and starfruit in April?) but he draws the line when Kharl starts to look wistfully at his flower garden.

Along with the odd eating comes the irritability, a few extra hisses of frustration when this or that spell doesn't go quite right. Kharl gets a little clumsier and then angry with himself for the mistakes. At lunch, he complains about the lack of second salad fork even though he's never used a second salad fork in his life. It takes him two hours to get dressed some mornings, every outfit rejected on this trumped or reason or that—too bright, too dark, too thick, too light. He makes Garfakcy wash all the castle rugs and then rewash them the very next day, even the ones no one's stepped on in years. Sunny mornings seem to put him in a particularly bad mood, and he takes to lurking in his lab and expecting dinner brought to him in the library. Changes in color and arrangement irk him, and he gets almost waspish when Garfakcy suggests they move a chair.

He becomes abruptly territorial, locking his bedroom door with one clever spell after another, some so complicated it takes Garfakcy hours to break in and collect the laundry—and heavens forbid the servant try to clean up messes in the lab: Kharl flaps around an angry jay bird and snatches everything back, insisting every crumpled paper and rag is vital to his research.

He cuts all contact with his occasional allies for the entire month; more than one of Shydeman's agents is returned to Kainaldia in pieces for crossing the invisible border he's drawn around the castle grounds. He shuffles his work around suspiciously when a bumblebee so much as brushes the window, and at least once a season, Garfakcy finds himself wondering where Right Bird has vanished to when they need him most.

The restlessness is the height of it, like a peaking fever. Although demons don't need much sleep, Kharl never passes up a night (and morning, and mid-morning, and sometimes mid-afternoon too when Garfakcy dares to get close and ends up knocked over the head like some sort of living snooze button). By the end of March, however, the demon hardly sleeps, wanders the corridors at all hours murmuring to himself. All morning he twitches about, picking up one project and then another, sitting down and then standing, walking into one room and abruptly changing his mind, turning around to walk right back out. Even at meals he seems to hum and jangle, toying nervously with the hems of his cloak sleeves.

He's a thousand times messier and a thousand times more eccentric. In short, he drives Garfakcy insane.

Laden down with breakfast stuffs fit to feed a Hermosa orphanage or two for a week, Garfakcy slinks through the castle, half on tiptoe. He's almost to the kitchen again, trying to see where he is stepping around the heaps of wax-paper-wrapped breakfast meats and the dozen sweet rolls spilling out of his arms, when he runs knee-first into a living mound of fur and almost goes tumbling end over end.

"You too?" Sinistra is very suddenly scowling down at him, one blue eye cracked open in a narrow slit, slender hands on curvaceous hips. She's found a new face to wear already, and if the way she's throwing her weight around is any indication, she's quite proud of this newest disguise. (Not that she isn't proud of every shape she takes, and not that she doesn't change every two days.)

Garfakcy, on the other hand, is more interested in bracing for the storm than giving her transformation a cursory inspection. He shoves half his load into her arms with as much grace as he can muster at the moment, which is to say none. "You've got thumbs today. Put them to good use."

Sinistra makes sure he hears her particularly offended huff, but she follows along behind him just as well as she does when she looks like a dog, dawdling only to give the cheeses a suspicious sniff and shake her head at his choices.

Normally he'd have to fill the corridors with cooking smell and put food on the table before she'd bother to leave her customary spot at the foot of Master Kharl's bed. If she'd been sleeping in the hall, it could only mean one thing.

"He threw you out?" Garfakcy asks, reigniting the tinder in the stove's belly.

She actually stamps her foot. And that's another thing he's been wondering: when she steals the forms of other demons, does she get all their awful personality quirks too? As a dog she always strikes him as dignified and somber and wickedly clever—but give the canine a few extra finger bones and she starts to roll her eyes.

At least the gesture seems to fit this particular body; now that his view is not obstructed by prosciutto, he can see her newest shape shift is a tall, beguiling demoness, full-bodied and slick, a pattering of iridescent scales across the refined lines of her jaw and down her naked shoulders. Thick, dark curls pool to somewhere down her back, spill half across one clear and glinting eye in an artfully tossled manner. Her clothes are a hair's breadth away from leaving nothing to the imagination.

She's a dog. She doesn't see anything wrong with this picture. (Or maybe she does, and that's why she does it.) Normally he wouldn't spare her a second glance, but today is the 20th of March and anything but normal, so he practically swallows his tongue.

"Change. Now." He forgets all about the stove and lets it hiss and steam. It's not even the stove that's making the room hot; he can feel a horrific blush creeping up his neck and in his ears.

Sinistra, for her part, sweeps a look over her newly claimed body and errs on the side of defensive. She has to sift through a lot of ugly, petty little souls to find open ones like this and good looks are always hard to find among the dead. "Why should I?" she pouts.

"It's spring!" Garfakcy grinds the words out between his teeth like they're the answer to every significant question in life.

But "So?" she retorts, cocking her head to the side in a gesture that looks much better on dogs. "What should that mean?"

He sputters. He chokes. He even briefly wishes a Dragon Knight would pop into their kitchen and kill him on the spot because this is one conversation he never planned on having with anyone, let alone their dog in the form of a pin-up model and why'd she pick that body today of all days anyway?

"It's spring," he repeats, the only thing he can really bear to do, but of course it doesn't sink in. "You're a demon, you're supposed to know this stuff!" He throws his hands up in something like supreme supplication to the heavens. There are some things he can be totally candid about but this is not one of them. "You should just know!" His voice is approaching breathless squeak or self-conscious whisper.

"Know what?" She is grinning, that particularly evil, knowing grin that says she's already read his mind, knows exactly what he's thinking but will never let him go until he suffers the humiliation of saying it out loud.

"He's—I mean—it's like this every year—he gets so—you're demons—isn't there a—season?" Garfakcy's so mortified the last word barely comes out at all. For a half second he cringes in utter terror at the chance she'll fake she didn't hear it, ask him to speak up louder.

But she doesn't. The room goes eerily silent for one long, agonizing minute.

And then she bursts out laughing. She laughs like she was born doing it, like the hyenas Dusis gets south of Costa Rica sometimes. She starts laughing and can't stop until she's doubled over and as red in the face as he is and where the hell did she learn to laugh anyway, because the last time he checked, dogs don't do that. Also, scratch the part about a Dragon Knight killing him—Garfakcy hopes the Dragon Knight swoops in and kills her, so he can thoroughly pretend this whole humiliating morning never happened.

"You're such a—!" She has to stop talking to breathe around her giggles. "Such a kid!"

Some of the soul-rending embarrassment gets buried under indignation. "I'm two hundred year older than you," he deadpans.

"Mm..." She leans down toward him, crossing one arm under that body's ample chest, raising one inviting and completely teasing eyebrow. She reaches her other soft, slender hand out to his face—"But you still can't catch up!" —and immediately pinches his horribly blushing cheek.

"I hate you!" It takes a good minute's flailing to free himself, and by then she's laughing again.

Sinistra rests her face in one palm, staring off into the distance for a moment in a look that might have been genuinely contemplative on someone far less wicked than her. Finally, she grins—slightly different than the last, an out-of-place cat-that-got-the-canary smirk. "I suppose I can't blame you for coming to that conclusion though," she drawls. "He was so rough this morning..."

Oh God.

"And he's been so alone all...these...years..."

Oh God. Oh God.

"There must be times when he just craves—"

Garfakcy puts his fingers in his ears and starts to recite the names of his favorite cleaning products in order of their usefulness. He is so, so, so not hearing this, won't think about it, made sure to never, ever, ever think about it—

She leans a little closer to be heard over his mantra, winking conspiratorially even though he's about ready to crush his eyes shut and run away wailing. Her ridiculously supermodel hair slides down over her shoulder and brushes on his neck and, really, she's just evil.

"Maybe we ought to—" she puts the last nail in the coffin "—offer to help our master with his... problem."

Garfakcy skips down the list of cleaning favorites to bleach and oh. my. god. how much of it is he going to need to clean this entire memory out of his permanently sullied brain and screw battles, if he ever gets post-traumatic stress it's going to be from this she can't be serious what is going on he doesn't even—approaching critical mass and no. Just no.

She actually waves a hand in front of his momentarily blind eyes and worries for a second that she's broken their poor maid. Poor old maid. Ha.

He promptly snaps out of his stupor (or just snaps) and hurls the pot, the kettle, and the cheese wheel at her. A chase ensues that might have gone down on the record as the most bizarre and most furious Castle Arinas has ever seen, had Kharl been awake to make a record (and if he could have found the record book in the first place).

Of course, she long outlasts him. When Garfakcy slumps against the wall she's quite suddenly there, all smiles, ruffling his hair like he hasn't been trying to kill her for half an hour and like she isn't their dog. And breakfast still isn't made.

"Besides," she adds too long after the fact, tapping her bottom lip in mock innocence, "you do have it wrong. What's bothering Kharl is something else entirely."

He deflates, all the energy rushing right out of him. At the beginning of this conversation, Garfakcy would have found that annoucement a great relief. Now it's completely possible there's some worse secret out there and why the hell did he ever want to become a demon again? They're all insane.

"I wasn't lying though," she adds, murmuring. "There is a way we can be of some help." She leans back against the cool stone wall of the remote corridor. Her voice hits a solemn note, the smile falling off her face into a more subtle expression, something fond and a little sad. The sharp shift leaves him tumbling again, on uncertain ground. For a short moment, he resents the fact that she seems to know something about Master Kharl that he doesn't, but she is the governess of the mind and built to know. He quiets his ragged breath to listen to her.

"Be kind," she says. "He needs it."

Normally when he can hear her speaking he takes her words with a grain of salt, but today he takes them with three dozen eggs, and when Kharl finally stumbles to the dining table and starts to inhale the banquet spread, Garfakcy bites his tongue to hold back a reprimand. He uses the extra time to observe, and it's true, Master Kharl looks terrible. The circles under his eyes are so dark it looks like someone's smacked him around, and even his normally irrepressible hair seems limp and miserable. He slumps bonelessly, the sort of sloppy behavior Garfakcy would never stand for any other day. He eats so quickly his face is almost in the plate, the fork in his hand a blur. If Garfakcy had not lived with him for decades upon decades, he would have accused the man of needing a good shave. (But he had lived with Master Kharl for decades upon decades and he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Kharl never needed to shave, thank the gods: if he couldn't handle salad tongs, Garfakcy didn't want to see what he'd do to himself with a razor.)

The alchemist doesn't so much as mumble a word to anyone; Sinistra pats Kharl's free hand consolingly and snickers in Garfakcy's direction when she thinks he isn't looking.

And then there's quite simply nothing left on the table, and although Sinistra and Garfakcy had next to that nothing for themselves, Kharl still sends their barren plates a particularly dark and offended look. He gets up from the table as silent as he fell down at it, not one mention of his usual thank yous or "So what are we going to do today, Garfakcy!" (The answer isinevitably the same thing they do every day, which is something like try to take over the world. Subtly, of course.)

Before Kharl gets even three steps, Sinistra reaches out to run a sultry hand up his droopy arm, catching the sleeve of his cloak and pushing it up so that she can touch his bare skin with her own stolen fingers and for all the obvious reasons and some less obvious ones too (how often do they see Master Kharl's skin really? It just looks weird!) Garfakcy is disturbed all over again. The one crepe he got threatens to escape him violently.

But—although she never touches Kharl this familiarly and certainly never in a body like that at a time like this—the alchemist doesn't comment about the strangeness at all. In fact, he doesn't even seem to notice: he keeps right on walking out of her hold like she's a ghost he can pass through, his reddened eyes far away, his mouth a grim line. Garfakcy can tell he's gritting his fangs—not like he's holding anything back but like he's suffering some pain the rest of them can't and won't ever feel.

Sinistra lets him go, settles back down in her chair for a moment and turns an expectant look on Garfakcy, a sly grin. "I told you it wasn't that," she teases, but it's hardly a minute before she's frowning. He still can't follow the tidal changes of her expressions, the rapid ebb and flow of amusement and discontent. More than once he's got the sense she wears feelings as well as she wears bodies: everything managed down to the minutiae of her fingertips.

Sinistra stares at the place Kharl was sitting a moment ago, and the soft cant of her lips, the lowering of her eyelids is everything tender and loyal. "It's more like we're not here at all," she mutters, and for a half second she's just as far gone, off some place he can't even hope to find.

Even though she's sitting next to him and Master Kharl is just a few rooms over, Garfakcy has not felt so alone in ages.

She turns her borrowed face the smallest bit to stare at him from the corner of one eye. "Do you want to know what's wrong with him, really?" she muses.

Garfakcy has to physically fight his automatic reaction, which is to demand to know, immediately, everything she has to tell. Of course he wants to—he wants to know everything about Master Kharl, almost has (after so many centuries!) the right to know. And yet something about today, about her distant grimace, his incorrect assumptions, makes Garfakcy hesitate. Will he hear something he doesn't want to—something that changes the delicate balance of their lives? Maybe it would be better to go on as they have; at the end of spring it will be like nothing happened and everything will be fine even if Garfakcy never understands the real reason for it and even if he never finds a way to fix it—

"Obviously I want to know," he snaps.

Sinistra shuts her eyes and tilts her head to the sound of his voice, her open mouth a glint of tooth and tongue. The expression of content is all canine and all the more genuine for it; Garfakcy is reminded sharply of the fact that he adores her (when she's small enough that he can pet her head).

She stops to sniff at the air for a moment, two rapid-fire inhalations. A brief pause is all the contemplation she gives it before decisively declaring, "Tomorrow morning I will show you."

Great, he thinks, sarcasm a caustic thing even in his head. Just great. It's not the suspense he's worried about either. How exactly does she intend to show him?

X – X – X

But of course it's the suspense that gets to him, gets to him so badly he goes through the day on eggshells, winding himself up and up wondering what dark secret Sinistra intends to reveal—and what he will do when he knows, how he will attack and scour the problem as effectively as he does everything else, so Master Kharl can at last rest trouble-free...

It gets to him so badly that by afternoon tea he forgets his mandate to be kind, barks at Kharl when the alchemist whines for another tin of biscotti—Sinistra, one chair over, looks up from her book with a glare full of dark promise. Garfakcy goes and gets the biscotti without another complaint.

And so on. Through thirteen more demands for snacks, two or three paranoid episodes, one onslaught of manic energy that sees their poor master shuffling papers from one precarious stack to another and back in an endless loop for an hour. Is it worse this year, or is he just imagining things?

It feels like an eternity before Garfakcy finally gets to call it a night, leaving his bedroom door open a crack so he can keep Kharl out of the stores when the inevitable midnight prowling begins. He shuffles into his night clothes and falls down face first onto his bed, all of the air going out of him in single whoosh.

He stays like that for another small eternity—he would have stayed like that all night, already half-asleep, if something cold and wet had not suddenly pressed against the arch of his bare foot. Jumping to face the enemy, ash spell already sparking in the back of his mind, Garfakcy meets a pair of wide amethyst eyes and a long, dark muzzle just peaking over the end of his bed.

She doesn't even need to make puppy eyes. All she needs to do is keep up that solemn, dignified, unblinking stare and the tiniest twitching of her button black nose and really, he can almost hear her "Would you leave a poor girl out in the cold?" (which he would, by the way, if this were anyone else).

"Fine," he surrenders with a hiss, and before he can finish the word, she leaps in a smooth arc up onto his down comforter and settles herself in an elegant pool of shadow over the end of his bed. Without so much as a nod of gratitude in his general direction, she curls her tail over her nose and goes right to sleep. Or she looks like she's sleeping. You can never tell with demons.

And okay, he admits a half minute later, so it's nice to have her soft back just in reach of his fingers, each strand of fur like silk. His feet have never been so warm and this must be what every human kid feels like curled up with his first puppy dog, falling asleep with loving companion and loyal guardian both. The thought is so sweet it's gross. It takes his mind easily, immediately off the coming morning, and for a bit he almost thinks it would be nice if they don't succeed in patching up Master Kharl right away, because he could get used to this.

X – X – X

He could get used to cuddling with a dog—not whoever the hell this is!

Garfakcy wakes up to a tangle of limbs and a head of dark red hair buried under his chin and lets out a shout half war cry and half terror.

"Get off me!" With all the adrenalin-fueled rage of a young man with one too many enemies, he kicks and pushes solidly at the stranger wrapped around him like an octopus. Only the element of surprise makes it possible for him to throw the intruder right off the bed and onto the floor, because when the red-head straightens up, it becomes blatantly obvious the demon could have overpowered him in a heartbeat.

Roubal sits beside Garfakcy's bed, in the blank square of moonlight through the window, rubbing his eyes and scowling. "You're manhandling me now too?" he grouses.

No, Garfakcy pauses the situation, rewinds, corrects himself: Sinistra sits beside his bed; that's Sinistra complaining, through and through.

"Don't just do creepy stuff like that!" His voice comes out a stage-whispered yell, automatically hushed in response to the late hour. Or the early hour: on the horizon outside he can just see the first tinges of deep blue, the very beginning of dawn. Garfakcy resists the urge to pull up the covers protectively even though he's totally covered already and absolutely safe from everything but her mockery.

Roubal rolls his eyes. Or Sinistra rolls her eyes. Or something half in-between. (It's so much easier to keep things straight when she stays a girl at least, but no amount of complaining of his part can convince her to pick one gender and stick to it. Demons!)

When his heart calms down enough, she slinks back onto the edge of the bed, brushing out the folds of Roubal's cloak with a disgruntled huff. He can't stop himself from muttering, "Please tell me this is not how Master Kharl wakes up every day now," even though he totally doesn't want an answer to that, and of course she'll hear.

"No, he doesn't wake up the same way every day," she says, the hint of smug, wily decadence totally off in a man's voice. "Sometimes I—" Garfakcy blanches "—well that's not important: it's almost time." Sparks of odd anticipation form in Roubal's dark eyes at the abrupt declaration, but she doesn't use that mouth to smile.

In the space of one of his breaths, she flickers across the room and stands in the open doorway. "Follow me," she says, a weighing command that seems to echo in the room and out beyond, slower than time, like all the most significant decisions of his life when he remembers them. There's physically nothing forcing him to go and yet he feels as if they've made a sort of promise, passed a point of no return.

He slides off the bed and heads for the door without even pausing to find his boots or overcoat. Even so, by the time he gets there he's—she's—already gone, the hem of a dark cloak disappearing down the next corridor.

Garfakcy runs.

It takes him longer then it should to realize where she is leading him but every hall and staircase whips by in a dark blur as he struggles to keep the demon in his sight. Just when he figures it out—the north bastion, the highest defensive platform in the castle wall—he loses sight of her for good, but it doesn't matter then, because there's only one way there—

Gasping for breath through his half-closed throat and his burning lungs, Garfakcy clambers up the last short ladder (these rungs could use replacing) and shoves open the trap door, hauling himself out into onto the cold stone and into the crisp night air which feels like a blessing against his sweating skin.

He can't make a sound of relief though. He can't make a sound at all. Even his breathing stops entirely.

The stone face of the bastion and the rampart are awash with the last clean moonlight of the night, bathing Kharl and Sinistra where she sits at his feet, black fur stretched out across the stone like a pitch pure shadow thrown into relief. They are both watching the sky.

A hundred thousand birds are flying overhead.

In the dark he can't make out their breeds except for the cranes, the great white flocks spread out like shifting constellations, and the geese, loudly calling to each other to keep time. But there are a thousand other shapes in the wheeling sky: small birds and big, those that seem to soar and those that flap without ceasing, the clapping of their wings joining with broken bursts of birdsong to fill the pre-dawn with ethereal noise, a high, constant hum like the hummingbird beating of his heart.

Garfakcy breathes because he has to, ends up amazed when the hiss of his exhalation doesn't break this dream in two. The birds do not evaporate into the dark; they go on without pause, replaced when they reach the extent of his sight by the next thousand bodies, a relentless rush of forward motion, all the whirling of the world feathered and flung under the stars. Going north.

He looks away at last because he wants to see their master's face (delight—he is the kind of demon who would be delighted), but instead what Garfakcy sees hurts, hurts in a primal physical way, the individual chambers of his heart condensing into something like stone and slamming against the inside of his ribcage.

The look on Kharl's face is want, pure and simple. The demon's hands are bloodless from clenching the cold rampart, scoring irreparable gouges in it with his claws. There are hundreds more sets of marks just like them (and suddenly Garfakcy feels guilty from scolding Right Bird at least once a year), the record of centuries of sleepless springs, and now it all makes sense. Because Kharl doesn't show it but at the heart of every demon is a beast and the alchemist has wings.

There is a place he wants to go. There is a place he needs to go. Every single one of his baser instincts must be screaming to escape, to push him forward with this stream of living beings, the chilling wind through pinion feathers, the connection with so many other minds all bent on the same end, the call of a tradition bigger than all of them, millennia upon millennia old. How to ignore it? To fight against the pull of that tide, to hold still in the face of such a necessary journey? And why, even? Why fight when going wouldn't cost anything at all?

Kharl doesn't move. He stands totally and completely still, not even blinking. Only the endless movement of the birds above reflecting in his eyes seems to make them shift.

He wants, and he refuses.

Sinistra shifts the barest amount, turns her head to watch Garfakcy with an imploring gaze. She can show him but it's not her place to explain, and maybe she couldn't explain it anyway, would need to say a long thread of things for which there are no words.

But that's all right. Garfakcy thinks he maybe, sort of understands.

He doesn't know yet who it was that struck the blow, doesn't even know, really, what the blow was, but he has always been terribly aware of the fact that Kharl exists in some place he can't reach, an alternate dimension effective just for hiding treasures, and what he's hiding from them is inevitably his heart—run through and bled out by tragedy he won't share.

Kharl's master is dead. Garfakcy's master is waiting even now.

Waiting. That's what it is, isn't it? It's not that Kharl doesn't want to go but that he's afraid to leave, afraid the moment he turns his back will be the moment everything comes home to him, and then he won't be there to meet it, will lose everything all over again and never, never get another chance.

He has to be here in this castle, always ready, certain that the next breath—or the next—will bring the past back to him, whole and well. Kharl cannot move forward. Will not move forward.

And then it opens up in Garfakcy's head, every thing falling into place.

The land and the king are one. He's known this, knew this even before Kharl, read it in the books about Dusis, seen it in Kainaldia. And yet somehow it never occurred to Garfakcy before, never settled into to the right notch in his mind:

Arinas is a barren kingdom.

Its ruler is equally barren.

Nothing lives here except by Kharl's provenance. But nothing dies here either. Arinas is a world without permission to change, without a future. The trees growing now, blue in the pre-dawn light, are the trees that grew then, new leaves perhaps but no taller than the day the world stopped turning for their master and these birds even make the same journey year after year without a single molt of their feathers, without aging a day, because he wills it all to be enduring or just the same. Arinas is a frozen world, to match his master's frozen heart, trapped, still beating, in the cage of that secret, lonesome past.

Kharl stands behind the rampart, every single breath a battle to remain unmoving in the face of the perpetual motions of life, the endless forward streaming of time. Behind him the entire soul of the wounded country strains for freedom, desperate for the right to be different tomorrow, to move. Above them the sky seems to shiver with bird wings and a hundred thousand tiny eyes glinting in the light, straight on into the fading darkness with the half moon on their shoulders. On the bastion, Kharl keeps all the world waiting. Garfakcy is sure the castle clocks have ground to a halt.

Before he knows he has moved, Garfakcy finds himself beside his master, and he's never done it before but be kind, he needs it so he reaches out a little hesitant and tangles his fingers in the sleeve of Kharl's cloak, just close enough to feel the hollow warmth of his master's wrist. Garfakcy keeps on watching the feathered sky, undemanding, and Kharl doesn't move to take his hand exactly but a sort of shiver seems to travel through him that brings him a half inch closer to reality and the both of them. On his other side, Sinistra or Roubal or whoever's body it is now levels a light hand on the small of their master's back, not intimate but utterly necessary, the thread tying them all down not to the stone ground but to the steady revolution of the planet, the slow advance of the moment.

When the banners of the bird flight begin at last to taper, and the distance edge of the sea glimmers gray and gold, Sinistra leans Roubal's red-head onto Kharl's shoulder and, smiling a stolen smile, says something like "I've heard Hyuray is nice this time of year."

"I've never been there," Garfakcy catches himself adding.

Kharl sighs, long and whispery. For the first time in a hundred springs, his eyes seem to really focus, with a soft jolt, and his grip on the castle wall relaxes into something almost regretful. He doesn't look at either of them, but Garfakcy feels seen anyway and when Kharl murmurs, "We used to go there every summer," never mind the plural, the past tense—it feels like a heavy weight easing off. He lets go of the alchemist's sleeve at last.

"We should visit," Garfakcy says, at the exact moment Sinistra points out, "A little change won't ruin everything."

The last chains of lapwings disappear over the distant horizon. Kharl almost smiles. "Maybe," he says. "Maybe."

They stand together for a long while, just breathing.

(And then Garfakcy bangs his forehead hard against the castle wall, because seriously? All this time it was about migrating? He'd honestly thought—thought—on their master's other side, Sinistra laughs out loud, rough and boyish and very much alive.)

Theme 43: Dying
"It's okay, Dad, really—I'll find you an easier game!"