He hadn't meant to.
He hadn't.
But he was a poor hand at holding back, a fact she knew well, and she was too courageous, too stubborn, too determined. This would be a fight to the death.
She ran at him from the side as he deflected another stolen black magic attack from the witch Vestal. The fire and smoke obscured his vision and he thrust his sword instinctively, running her through in an instant.
His veins froze as he stared at what he had done. Static filled his ears, drowning out the screams of her companions and the weak cough she gave, blood spraying out of her paling lips. As his heart began to die a painful death in his chest, she gave one last smile, meant only for him.
"Edea - " he started, but then she was pushing at him again, always stubborn, and the two of them crashed into the railing of the airship. It splintered under their combined weight, and Alternis found he could do nothing but hold her close as they fell through bright light and blazing heat to an unknown world below.
She had died in the fall if she had not already been dead by his hand - his! - before they ever hit the ground. He wept as he gathered up her broken form, his heart and armor in shatters. Why he had survived when she had not, he couldn't understand, and couldn't think of anything but the unnatural whiteness of her skin, the stillness of her form. For hours he held her, until the ache in his chest dulled to an emptiness that he knew could never be filled. His eyes were dry. He had no more tears to give.
The ravine they had landed in had been torn by the evil that had crossed worlds, but he found a beautiful place to bury her remains, a small pocket of green and flowers that had stayed unscathed. With his bare hands, he dug just deep enough to cover the body. In death she looked beautiful and peaceful, arms crossed and eyes closed, as though she could have been sleeping… were it not for the ugly wound in her chest that had been caused by his sword. He covered the ghastly wound with the remnants of his helmet. This way, he thought in a haze, a piece of him would be with her forevermore, though it was a poor substitute for him laying beside her and taking his own life.
He couldn't do that, not just yet.
Grief held his heart tight in its grip, but it was rage that filled the emptiness inside of him. He could not rest until his work was done.
"You know me," he begged the blonde woman in front of him. "It is I, Alternis."
It had taken him days to drag his aching body to Caldisla, and by then he had been too late. She had already been swept back up into the net of the Vestal and her wretched fairy. He'd waited until his first opportunity, and it came by way of Edea storming out of the inn at night, stomping away with heavy steps to the graveyard. A fitting place.
She looked unconvinced, but the deep furrow of her brows straightened as he desperately relayed their childhood memories, things that only they could know. Memories that belonged to a woman rotting in a ravine because of him.
"Alternis," she said, and he nearly cried at the sound of his name from a voice he'd never thought he would hear again. "I won't return to Eternia."
"Listen to me," he said, and grasped her arm, marveling at how alive she was. "I won't make the same mistake twice."
He could not.
But he may as well have, because it was his words - his! - that she confronted the fairy with, and he could nothing but watch as she was run through by the creature's claw, blood spraying out of her paling lips as she fell to the floor, the screams of her companions drowned out by the static in his ears. Rage exploded out of the emptiness inside of him.
When the Caldislians retrieved the bodies from the wreckage, at long last he found himself at rest, buried beside her.