(Next update 3/6/24. Thank you for reading.)
Chapter 154: The Brothers Beoulve
Andrammelech the Wroth numbers among the known Lucavi (Lucavi whose names have been found in enough records to confirm their basic existence, if not their precise nature). He stands apart from those others because we know so much more about the origin of the name. When Ydoran cruelty threatened the people of Gallione with famine, the minor chieftain Andrammelech led a great rebellion against them. For decades, new Andrammelechs would rise across Ivalice to challenge the Empire and its lackeys. Each time, his great deeds are matched only by the horrors he commits in their pursuit. Some speculate that"Andrammelech" may simply be a name that marks someone who will commit terrible crimes to bring ruin to his enemies...
-Alazlam Durai, "In Search of Myth."
Ramza Beoulve cannot stop moving.
When the explosion destroys the staircase that leads to the second floor of the Beoulve Manor, he stops just long enough to check on his fallen brother. But Zalbaag his already on his feet, blood running from a cut across his forehead, Justice in his hand, as he faces the handful of Hokuten knights racing in from a nearby hallway. "Go!" he cries, and Ramza goes: he pounds up crumbling steps, gathers magic in his legs and bursts up to the second floor with a thoom. Dycedarg is nowhere in sight, but Ramza spies a fallen sword down one hallway and hurtles after it.
When he snatches Service from its place upon the ground, some small part of him recognizes this should be a moment of awe, and loss, and grief. There was a time he never imagined he would hold one of his family swords in his hand. But there is too much about this moment he would never have imagined: too much in chasing Dycedarg through the Manor, too much in fighting at Zalbaag's side for the first time in his life, too much in the heavy, unbearable weight of his father's murder.
His life has been defined by the unbelievable for a long, long time. He cannot afford to stop now. Not with Dycedarg running from the justice Ramza intends to deliver to him.
So he races down the hall, with Service in his hand. He cannot make out blood against the lush red carpet of the Beoulve Manor, but he finds he does not have to. As he hurtles down the hallway, he spies a light that is also darkness. The color of that dark light is not familiar, but he recognizes it all the same. He has seen it in two Cardinals, and in the Marquis, and in Wiegraf. It is the light of a Stone, and all the horror it foretells.
So bright is his rage that he does not even slow his step. He gathers his magic, finds the door to his father's bedroom (another dim moment of regret, buried deep in the rushing rapids of his wrath: his father's room, the room where he saw his father die, the room where Dycedarg's poison finally killed him, but the regret only whets his fury into something sharper, deadlier) made translucent by the too-deep too-bleak radiance of the Stone's magic. He twists the handle of the door, and kicks it in, and rushes in with Service raised to strike.
In the thick of the light that swirls and eddies like water, Dycedarg is already gone. In his brother's place stands the Lucavi. It as though a storm has been condensed into a single body, thick green clouds roiling together in a barely-human outline. Lightning crackles in its great webbed wings, dances among between straight, ridged horns. Dycedarg's hateful dark eyes crackle in its bestial, draconic face, and it flexes long clawed fingers that spark and crackle with every movement.
They leap towards each other without hesitation. Its speed is terrible to behold: it moves like a bolt of lightning, a sudden surge of furious force. Lightning-laced fingers jab towards Ramza: bolts of lightning scatter around them, setting the bed and the carpet ablaze.
Ramza drinks in its lighting, slashes back in turn and grapples for the demon's magic with his own. Once, the strength of the Lucavi had left him staggered: even now, the immensity of it makes his every slash feel poor and piddling, as though he is flailing ragged bare-handed blows against a boulder, breaking himself against its solidity. But this is not the first Lucavi that Ramza Beoulve has faced.
He drinks its lightning. He drinks its strength. They dance together, as the smell of singed air fills his nostrils.
"Ramza!" snarls the creature, and though there are layers to that voice it is undeniably Dycedarg's. "Foolish son of a foolish father!"
The creature explodes backwards, the force of its escape causing the building flames to rush and whoosh and roar in protest. It bursts through the large window behind it, and shattered glass rains from its passage. Without hesitation, Ramza explodes after it, spending the power he's stolen from it to power his steps. He leaps into the air as the Lucavi spreads its webbed wings to brake its flight.
"Murderer!" Ramza screams, and drives Service into the creature's chest.
The Lucavi screams, and they tumble through the air. As they tumble, Ramza slashes, slices, stabs: he drives Service into the creature over and over, as he strikes at it he is drinking its magic and casting every spell he can think of, and Service's rune-edged blade answers his call, his will, his rage, in bursts of shattering magic and hot flashes of flame.
The monster hits the ground beneath him. Ramza feels the shock of it through his body, and stabs into demon again, drinking its magic to heal his wounds. He raises Service once more-
The demon twists. Its clawed hands spear in from either side. Ramza manages to dodge one, but not the other: its claws pierce chainmail and leather, and spear into his right side. Flesh tears like fire, and ribs crack like thunder.
Then comes the lightning—a shocking burst of electricity, too sharp and sudden to drink in. It is all Ramza can do to shove down with his legs, in another explosion of magic: the force of that explosion pushes him away from the demon, and he skids across the grass, to land in a bubbling aqueduct.
"Ignorant child!" thunders the Lucavi, rising to its full, terrible height. It is at least three yalms tall, thought its form shifts and swells as it lightning crackles in its cloud-like body. Only its hands, its face, and its wings are set: the rest is horribly amorphous, suggesting cyclone strength. "All this strength, and see how you squander it!" He laughs, and the laugh is too horribly like Dycedarg, too sharp, too bright. "You could have been a Beoulve to live in legends for all time! Instead you waste your strength on impossible foes!"
Ramza staggers to his feet. Rage remains, but pain and weakness blunt it, smother it. He doesn't quite dare to look at the wound his brother has carved into his side, and he is shaking terribly from the lightning it exploded into him. He is barely strong enough to stand.
The Lucavi shakes his bestial head. There is something like pity in his black eyes. "I wanted to spare you our father's fate. I wanted you to spend your strength on worthy ends, not squander it on foolish fantasies of honor. I should have known you could not be saved. Would not be saved."
Another wave of rage, and it is not enough to give him strength. But Ramza cannot bear the thought of losing here, dying here, loosing his monstrous brother with a Lucavi's strength upon an unsuspecting Ivalice: he shifts Service to his left hand, hugging his right arm tight against his body to staunch the flow of blood.
The demon studies him for another moment, still with pity in its eyes. Then it moves—too fast, much too fast, and Ramza's strength is gone as it flickers in front of him, then crackles to one side. Again, its arms stab like spears: Ramza twists aside (and twists inside: the pain is horrible, a scream of agony from ripped flesh and shattered bone that he feels building in his own throat), tries to deflect it, tries to drink in its magic to heal his wound-
But it is too fast, too strong: with two bone-shaking blows it knocks the sword from his hand. Another spearing hand comes jabbing in: just barely, Ramza manages to fling one gauntleted fist in front of it, and answers its attack with one weak blast of magic. It is enough to blunt the blow, but not enough to stop it: it smashes him backwards, and he tumbles head-over-heels until he rolls to a stop with his back against the Manor wall.
It thunders, just like Cid, as it comes closing in again. Ramza can barely lift one hand in a feeble attempt to stop it. The rage in him is childish now, feeble and mewling like a whining dog. He does not want to die like this. He does not want to die with his father unavenged. He does not want to die, while Dycedarg still lives.
The cyclone demon appears before him, in a rattle of quiet thunder. But then a shining blade comes cleaving down, and rips through one of the Lucavi's great webbed wings.
The demon screams, and crackles away. But fast as he is, he is not fast enough—a blurred shape chases after him, swinging his shining sword. He flows like a river of silver, his great blade blurring in front of him, hounding the demon at every step, tearing fresh wounds into its body with every slash of his burning blade.
They call Zalbaag Beoulve the Gallant Knight. He moves with all the power of Agrias Oaks, all the intuitive speed of Beowulf Daravon, and all the cleaving precision of Melidaoul Tengille. Watching him now, Ramza remembers that neither he nor Delita ever once got the best of him. Watching him now, Ramza wonders if they could manage, even now.
The frenzy freezes: demon and knight are locked together, the Lucavi catching Zalbaag's great sword in its clawed fingers. A fresh wing is sprouting from the stump left by Zalbaag's first spectacular slash: lighting crackles around them.
"Pitiful Zalbaag!" sneered the demon. "You would be a well-made sword, if you could only-"
"Be SILENT!" Zalbaag bellows, and as he bellows power explodes from his sword, a great column of white fire that smites the screaming demon backwards, and Zalbaag follows again. It thrusts its head forwards in a headbutt, and lightning sparks between its long horns and spears out towards Zalbaag: Zalbaag swings, and meets it with fresh white fire. The grass around them begins to burn.
His brother is fighting. Ramza cannot let him fight alone.
Ramza pushes himself off the wall, fumbles for the bow at his back, and finds it gone—he has lost it in leap after the demon. With every step, the pain in his side throbs more deeply: his head is swimming, with the pain and the blood loss. Still, he staggers on, looking for-
There! Service lies with its sharp tip buried in the ground. Ramza stumbles after it.
Behind him, the explosions of the Bursting Blade keep ringing out like cannon fire, and he hears the crackling of fresh lightning bolts being flung with reckless abandon. Dycedarg's demon-layered voice rings out over the melee. "You believe in a God who cannot save you! You believe in a Saint who would know you for the blind fool you are!"
"And what do you believe in?" Zalbaag roars back, quieter than the demon, but no less fierce. "What have you sold your soul for, Dyce?"
"Sold my soul!" shrieks Dycedarg. "See how you blind yourself, even now! I am made glorious, and you cannot see past the lies your Church has told you!"
"You look the monster you've always been!"
Ramza grabs Service, and jerks it from the ground. He turns back to face the scene. Zalbaag has been driven back: his clothes are smoldering in several places, and the grounds around him are charred and blackened, ringed with embers and little flames. The demon's wings are nearly regrown.
"Monster!" sneers the Lucavi. "I am Dycedarg Beoulve! I am Andrammelech the Wroth! My names are carved into the annals of history! I brought our family the glory our father would have-"
"Do NOT!"
Zalbaag leaps forwards, his sword blazing white and terrible. Andrammelech leaps to meet him. Fresh lightning bursts across the crystalline blue sky: fresh white flame cascades in all directions. The demon crashes to one side, and rips through the wall of the Beoulve Manor. Debris collapses all around him. Zalbaag stands alone, Justice held en guarde before him. He looks like a hero out of legend.
Then the rubble explodes—outwards, and upwards, and in that explosion the demon flies. Its great webbed wings are spread: lightning dances about its form. It rises, horribly real beneath the beauty of the late summer day, living storm in the cloudless blue sky. Baleful light burns in its misty depths—the same blue-green as the Stone that made it, too bright and too dark, all at once. Ramza has seen that light before.
"Zalbaag!" he cries, but his voice his hoarse, and thin, weak from the ripped place on his side.
The light explodes from Andrammelech's body in a great wave of nightmare force, a blue-green beam so bright and dark the world around it looks thin and washed out by contrast. Zalbaag raises Justice with both hands and slashes down to meet it. The edge of the shining sword cleaves into the beam: there is a flash of white flame, and a surge of energy geysers up in front of him, a tumult of seething, obliterating light.
Then the white fire gutters out, and Zalbaag's smoking body is flung from the raging storm, to land in a crumpled heap perhaps a hundred yalms away. The rage in Ramza gutters like his brother's fire: he starts after him before he's quite had time to think-
Then his eyes flicker up, to the demon like a living storm, as lightning crackles around it.
Fresh bolts smash down towards Ramza: he throws himself aside, groaning against the fresh throbbing embers in his right side. Another bolt spears down towards him: he flings Service out to meet it. He knows he is not strong enough to master the magic, and steal its strength for itself. He tries anyways: he fails. He manages to blunt the edge of the bolt, but cannot stop it entirely: he feels it shoot up through the blade, burning his hand. He drops to one knee as the moment ends, trembling like a leaf. Another bolt like that will burn him to ash.
"Do you see now!" thunders Andrammlech, from his place in the unreachable sky. "The power you rob yourselves of? The strength you refuse?" The light in him is burning again, mounting towards a fever pitch. Ramza tightens his grip on his sword, tries and fails to rise from his place upon the ground.
"Power belong to those who take it!" Andrammelech howls, and another wave of nightmare light-and-shadow comes surging down its body. And Ramza, with no rage left inside him, braces himself as best he can.
He is going to die. There is no magic left in him to avert this fate, no strength left in his arms or legs. There is a moment's regret, different than he expects. He does not want to die. He does not want to leave his father unavenged, his sister unrescued. There is terrible danger in the world. His friends will carry on: his friends will do their best. He does not want to leave them behind. He does not want to die.
A shadow leaps into the path of the wave. "Ramza!" Zalbaag howls. "Take it!" He is clutching Justice by its great blade, as blood runs down his blackened hands.
Ramza reaches out for Justice's hilt. The wave smashes into Zalbaag.
The light seizures beneath his brother's skin: he glows the way a thin piece of fabric glows, when stretched before a fire. But the fire is too hot, the fabric too close: pieces of it start burning away, holes in the cloth, but its not cloth, its skin, his brother's skin, Zalbaag's skin, and his eyes are wide and his mouth is open but he is not screaming. He is shouting.
Take it.
Ramza closes his right hand around Justice's hilt, ignoring the agony of his wound. It is only as he takes hold of the sword that he realizes just what Zalbaag is asking of him. It is only as his hand closes on the blade, and Zalbaag jerks back his charred arms, and buries the tip of Justice in his chest, that Ramza understands what Zalbaag is asking him to take.
Power flows down the hilt of the sword, flows out of Zalbaag and into the blade, and Ramza has only drunk from a man like this once before, drunk from Gaffarion as he plunged his stolen blade into his former mentor's breast, but this time he is not wresting power away from an unwilling victim, this time he is being gifted power, gifted life. It rockets into him with shattering force, as electric and irresistible as one of Andrammelech's bolts, buoying him like a healing spell. He feels his ribs pop back into rough health: he felts the itching heat of flesh knitting itself closed along side.
But the feelings are irrelevant. They reach him at a great distance, like the sound of thunder on a clear day. He is too occupied by the sight of his dissolving brother, turning to dust in front of him as he pours his magic and his life down the sword he buried in his chest. His eyes are locked with Ramza's, until they, too, dissolve.
The light dissolves with his brother. Andrammelech crackles and cackles in the sky. "Fool to the last!" the demon laughs. "He has not saved you! He has only bought you a brief reprieve."
But Ramza has already started moving.
He thought the rage that drove him to the Manor was intense. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it is. It is still inside him, that rage and shock—that his monstrous brother is more monstrous than he ever understood, that his father did not have to die the same way as his mother and Zal's mother and Delita's parents. He grieves the years he might have known his father. He grieves the world his father might have made, and the lives they might have led.
But he has learned to live with his father's death. He does not know how to live with Zalbaag's. Zalbaag, so powerful, so potent, so capable. Zalbaag, whose order had killed Teta. Zalbaag, who on the last day of his life had given Ramza everything Ramza could ever have asked of him. Zalbaag, his brother, who has died to save him.
His brother's name repeats over and over in his head, echoing with every step as he races towards Andrammelech. Dimly, he hears the demon's laughter: senses whetted to a razor's edge feel the lightning gather above him, and fresh bolts crash down towards him. At the last moment, Ramza twists, and catches the bolts on the blades he holds in each hand—Service in his left, and Justice in his right. These weapons are not made for the Draining Blade, but they are some of the finest swords in all the world, they are Beoulve swords, they are his swords. He drinks deep of that lightning.
And he steps into the sky.
Magic bursts from his feet, as he rockets up to meet Adrammelech. The magic is agony: it burns in the old wound in his leg, aches against his side, drains his soul. But exhaustion does not matter now. Pain does not matter now. He has gone beyond pain, beyond fear. The demon rains destruction from the sky, so Ramza will go into the sky to meet him.
He steps into the sky—an explosive detonation of force from the soles of his feet that flings him yalms into the air. He sees a moment's disbelief on the Lucavi's long face, and almost laughs. It thrusts its hands again to loose fresh bolts, and Ramza kicks again, looses magic from his feet and hurtles towards it, into it, catching the lightning on crossed blades, drinking from it to patch over the threadbare parts of his body, the threadbare parts of his soul.
More power, spent as quick as he has it: one final kick of his legs, as though he's swimming through the air, and the force of the blast quakes in his bones but he will not stop. The Beoulve Manor, and much of the surrounding grounds, are burning: the smoke is thick in the air, clogging his nose and burning in his throat. Ahead of him, Andrammelech looks more demonic than ever—a surging cylone with a monster's face, lightning crackling in its wings.
Then he is upon the demon, and the demon is upon him.
There is no conscious action, in the frenzy that follows. His exhaustion, his pain, his anger, his grief, his magic, his sight, his every sense: all have been alloyed into a killing will. A monster is in front of him. His brother's killer is in front of him. His father's killer is in front of him. It does not matter if Ramza lives or dies now. All that matters is that the demon dies, too.
Lightning crackles, claws rip and tear, swords slash, slice, and stab. With every cut, Ramza steals a little of the demon's enormous strength for himself, papers over the worst of his burns and bruises and wounds and breaks, turns its strength against it. His legs are numb from his explosive steps: as he pursues the demon across the sky: his arms are numb from the speed and force of his attacks: but his mind is not numb. His mind is focused to a spearpoint, aimed at his enemy.
Aimed at his brother.
Blades crash against claws, rip into stormflesh, slice through wing tips. Lightning splashes against blades, is drunk in and turned back in explosive bursts of force.
"Look at yourself!" Andrammelech howls, as he hammers blows against Ramza. "Again and again, you fling yourself into battles you cannot hope to win! And for what? For the same folly that killed our brother! Killed our father!"
One last surge of rage.
"YOU!" Ramza screams, kicking out with a burst of explosive force, rocketing into the demon's chest.
"WILL!" He twists, stabbing Service beneath the demon's throat, using it as leverage to pivot himself around to the creature's back.
"BE!" He slashes down with all the strength he has left, and slices Justice cleanly through one of the demon's wings. A fresh burst of lightning burns in his fingers, numbs his arm: Justice falls to earth alongside the severed wing.
"SILENT!"
The air is roaring, as they tumble down towards the burning Manor. Andrammelech is roaring, fresh lightning crackling off its terrible body. Ramza is roaring, clinging to the crackling demon as they fall, drinking in as much of the lightning as he can bear, drinking in its strength until he feels it smoldering inside him, threatening to turn him to ash the way Zalbaag was turned to ash, and that thought is the last one he needs, that pain, that rage, that grief.
"YOU ARE A CHILD, THROWING A TANTRUM-" Andrammelech screams, and Ramza closes gauntleted fingers around the demon's great jaws, his right hand around the upper, his left around the lower.
"BE!" Ramza screams, and that scream is all his rage, all his hate. He steals magic from Andrammelech and uses it as fast as he steals it, pouring magic and power into his arms. Runes flare and spark in magic bursts, he feels muscles tearing in his fingers, in his wrists, embers of pain swelling into steady fires, and each ember is fresh fuel for his fury. Andrammelech is trembling beneath him, and his voice is a high and wordless shriek from the savage mouth Ramza struggles to rip apart.
"SILENT!"
One final burst of strength. One final burst of magic. As they crash into the burning Manor, tear through the roof in a shower of smoldering debris, Ramza's quivering arms burn with white fire. Andrammelech's lower jaw rips free, and melts into so much mist in Ramza's hand: the right remains flesh, as his fingers tear up through the demon's skull.
The hit the ground, and fall apart. They have crashed back into the foyer where their battle began, with its smashed staircase and ruined ceiling. Smoke chokes the air, though no fire is visible yet—this part of the Manor is not yet ablaze.
Ramza stumbles to his feet. His arms feel as though magma is coursing through them, cracks of agony filled with pulsing fire: they hang limply by his sides. Across from him, Andrammelech is struggling to lever itself upright from the crater they smashed into the foyer floor. One arm is gone entirely: another is missing most of its savage, razor-clawed fingers. A lolling black tongue and a single glaring black eye remain in the bloody ruin of its face.
It takes a step towards Ramza. Ramza takes a step towards it.
And within the creature's body, light and darkness begin to bloom like dawn. The single dark eye narrows in concentration for a moment, then goes wide with panic and disbelief. The long black tongue wiggles frantically, like a worm on a hook. But the blue-green light brightens, and so does the darkness beneath, and Andrammelech shakes his head, shakes his whole body, shakes like a frightened child. With every moment, the light and the darkness alike deepen, and less and less of Andrammelech remains.
An arm reaches towards Ramza, just visible in the swirl of light and dark. It no longer looks like Andrammelech's arm—no longer the too-long razor-clawed limb. Now it the shadow of a human arm, feeble and pleading, grasping for purchase as its owner falls. The shadow is so dim, so distant, barely visible through the blue-green radiance and its underlying darkness. Ramza cannot make out the face the arm belongs to.
Then the shadow is snuffed out, in an explosion of darkness and light and horror. Ramza has seen this horror too many times now—the horror of that world of souls, the hell that Malak described. But Ramza finds himself hoping Dycedarg is in that hell. It is no less than he deserves.
Light and darkness fade away, and the world is left behind. The Capricorn Stone hovers where Andrammelech once stood, then drops to the floor. Ramza takes a single step after it, and his legs finally give out under him. He hits the ground with a dull, echoing thumph. The pain barely registers—not the pain in his arms, not the pain in his legs, not the pain in his chest, not the pain in his soul.
Dycedarg is dead. It is enough.
Ramza closes his eyes.