finalflight | PSL; [YOU KNOW I LOST MY MIND]

PSL; [YOU KNOW I LOST MY MIND]

how high is too low?

[Noctis’ light had swallowed him whole.

Engulfed him like he were nothing, his power finally realized and strengthened by the chains of destiny. The King of Light wielding that selfsame weapon, as much of a pawn of the gods as he was, fulfilling his very purpose for existing. And it hurts, for a few harrying moments — it hurts, the light burrows into him and makes the Starscourge scream and he’s expelled from existence like a disease destroyed, like a plague banished from the land. The darkness fallen, his mind and spirit and his very right to exist erased. And then the pain is gone. Noctis’ light, too, wanes and becomes nothing, like him.

Then there is only nothing. And freedom — finally, after so many ages — is a release he cannot even truly appreciate.

But it doesn’t matter. He’s gone now.

* * *

Until he isn’t.

Until his body feels like it’s shuddered back into existence, so much feeling in every nerve ending. Air and dust filling his lungs. The cold press of a stone floor, dull pain across every limb, in every bone. It’s impossible, and for a moment that void of nothing is filled with fear — like a vacuum letting air in for the first time — and Ardyn jolts into consciousness. Gold eyes are wide in the shadows, fingers curling into fists, then opening, then closing, then opening again.

For those few awful moments, he is unflattering. Confused and disoriented and lost in the sensation of being alive and being without a darkness that crawls beneath his skin. It’s like gaining too much and losing a limb all at once. He might have released a desperate noise from the back of his throat, he might have had nails bite into his face as he felt the contours of his features. It’s all a great storm in his head, only slowly released.

It’s only later when the anger sets in. The frustration of his rightful end stolen from him, because this was not how it was supposed to go — he was not supposed to exist, he was not supposed to be alive. Was he alive? He felt off, strange, weak and unbalanced like the healer he used to be. The Starscourge — where was it?

Where was he?

He can’t see much of anything. It’s dark, though he swears a flicker of torchlight dances just outside the exit to this stone room of rectangular shapes and oddly purposeful placements. It reminds him of Angelgard, an unpleasant association. It reminds him of a prison, or of a tomb.

A minute more and he’s shuffling to his feet, heading towards that light. What an irony.]

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[ Sometimes X’rhun wonders if he dreamed it all, everything from awakening on a great structure of steel and plastic and materials for which he has no name in the depths of space, to his year on the surface of the planet below, to the odd few months shunted into a new world altogether. When he found himself back home with a full head of hair, his usual clothes, and easy access to his magic, it became difficult not to doubt his memories as perhaps one extended, bizarre hallucination.

But there are scars where there weren’t before, marks of battles taken place worlds away, and a new regret that sits heavy in his chest, settles there with the rest until it has formed but another part of the foundations of his life.

He moves forward because he has no choice, because that’s just how he is. He keeps his memories and his regrets both tucked away in his heart, but his pilgrimage continues. Perhaps it was his experiences elsewhere, the year spent living under the lie that Hydaelyn had met Her demise, that draws him back to Ala Mhigo. Draws him back to the place where he entombed his comrades’ blades ere he put his homeland behind him. X’rhun finds the tomb set upon by grave robbers, and it is only thanks to the intervention of some old friends – students old and new – that he sees the swords returned to their rightful place.

With that business done, X’rhun seeks to depart again, to stick to his oath and continue to be a wandering force for good wherever he may be needed. Mayhap he ought not have started said journey by cutting through the long abandoned royal crypts, tucked into the mountainside near where the Duelists’ swords lay entombed, but he could handle a few dark tunnels and wandering voidsent.

Torches line the walls, kept alight by magic or else by someone with an unfaltering sense of duty even decades after the fall of the monarchy. Apart from the voidsent, it isn’t uncommon to find the odd living soul in the catacombs, seeking to stumble upon something of value from a place long picked clean by the desperate and the destitute. So, when X’rhun’s sharp sense of hearing catches the tell-tale beat of footsteps stumbling over the broken stone and uneven ground of one of the many tombs to line the main passageway, he thinks it to be one of his grave-robbing friends, out for revenge or perhaps lost and cut off from the group he and his students had so handily bested.

The Duelist slows to a stop, hand on the hilt of his blade as he waits. ]

[Memory returns to him, sinking into the crevices of his mind, easily slotting back into place. He remembers his death at Noctis’ hands, just as he remembers the strange grouping of foreign experiences he held, the ones that didn’t hail from Eos, and yet he carried them all the same. More than a year of displaced experiences — of thinking that his star was destroyed, of feigning living a mundane life, pretending to adjust. The people he had met, the battles fought, those he would call enemies, and the one man he would call a friend. (Maybe more than that, his wretched heart tells him, but he sets aside regrets with the same practice he had in those years of darkness, thinking of nothing more than fighting Noctis, than finally, finally ending it all.)

Now that he is here, what was there to expect? He did not know if this was some fallacy, or some trick of the gods. If it was, it was a rather dusty and unfunny one, he thinks, as he nearly stumbles over uneven ground on this pathway made of stone. The torchlight is all that guides him, and it is all that Ardyn follows; he feels his magic still thrumming in his veins (no longer coupled with the Starscourge — how freeing, how terrible) but does not call forth a weapon. Not unless such a thing is needed.

A hand presses against the cold walls of the short corridor leading to the main passageway, and Ardyn thinks he may hear footsteps from around the corner. The flickering of shadow stretching into view, drawn by some manner of figure blocking the torchlight. And yet he cannot bring himself to feel tense or wary, instead only that annoying feeling of exhaustion and frustration running through his bones.

It’s with some display of stubbornness — of daring fate to throw whatever it must at him, he doesn’t care — that hastens his step. He decides to meet the individual first, surprising them before he can be surprised, and so Ardyn walks faster until he’s right at that corner, turning sharp.

And who he sees, a shadowed silhouette with his back against the weak flames of a torch, nearly stills his heart.]

X’rhun?

[ Those approaching footsteps quicken and X’rhun does very nearly draw his blade, ready to fend off an attack. It’s good that he doesn’t, however, for when the mystery figure rounds the corner and steps into the torchlight, X’rhun would have dropped it from shock.

Blue eyes meet all too familiar amber ones, and all X’rhun can do for the space of a breath, two breaths, three, is stare. Stare and reel as the foundation shifts beneath him, regret and acceptance upended and threatening to crack and give way. ]

Ardyn?

[ The name tumbles gracelessly from his lips ere he can stop it, ere reality catches up to him and slams its doors down hard. He is lurking in a place rife with voidsent, creatures with terrible powers and not at all above luring men to terrible fates by any means necessary. ]

I swear to the gods, if this is some sort of trick…

[ He’ll be far from amused. Still, there is the smallest seed of hope taken root in his chest, a feeling that wars with logic and confusion. ]

[He had thought the same. His mind flashing back to a time years ago — his conversation with Bahamut, how that dread astral had summoned a semblance of Aera with a faux smile, made to torture him and force a reality into his mind: there was no escaping the fate destiny had wrought for him, no matter how hard he denied it.

Was this similar? X’rhun, who stood before him in this foreign, shadowed place, appeared real and sounded real. But if he reached out, would he be met with the cut of a blade? Would he be laughed at? If he cracked his heart open by mere inches in this moment, would a knife be slid through its middle?

For as easily as Ardyn summons up his usual flippant manner, it does not come naturally today. Eyes narrow and he lets out a laugh that would fool no one; strained, frustrated, and distrusting. Amber eyes reflect distant torchlight, as if belonging to those of a specter.]

I could ask you the same thing. If you’re little more than an illusion sent to torture me, know that there is no pain so great that hasn’t already been dealt by your divine hand.

[If this is a trick of the astrals, he will not fall for it again.]

I’ve done my part. Let me rest, will you?

[ It goes unseen, the way X’rhun’s ears perk in mild confusion, though the feeling remains evident on his face, in the minute arching of a single brow. Why would an illusion think him an illusion in return? There are voidsent capable of extreme subtleties, Lilith had been proof of that much, but X’rhun doesn’t expect such nuance from the creatures shambling around the catacombs. If they mean to lure him with their tricks, they’d do it outright, not have their visions feign confusion.

At last his hand drifts away from the hilt of his blade, falling to his side with a sigh. ]

You’ve called me a lot of things, my friend, but “divine” has never been on the list. Should I be flattered?

[ There is a smile on his face, a small thing for whatever surge of relief and joy he might feel falls away in the face of those words. I’ve done my part. Let me rest. There is so much he could infer there, that life for Ardyn marched forward as surely as it had for X’rhun, and all that entails. ]

I assure you, I am no vision, unless you’ve the means to imagine the whole of Ala Mhigo.

[He isn't quick to drop his guard, but there is something so utterly disarming about X'rhun and the way he's looked at, that Ardyn struggles to find a reply.

It isn't how one of Bahamut's visions would act, it isn't what they would say. He hears no poison wheedling at insecurities or bolstering the notion of the futile. Ardyn is instead granted only with his friend's tinge of humor, wry and sanguine, and he did not realize how much he had missed it until now. Something in his shoulders slump, his lean into the wall more marked. He hardly knows how to process the flare of tangled emotion in his chest, memories and associations suddenly revived and standing before him.

And so he falls upon his default — the smile of a man lived too long and lost too much, thin and never sincere. But it lacks its usual acid, a strange hopefulness in his eyes betraying all else.]

X’rhun… is it really you?

[He had thought he should never see him again. Resigned himself to it, chalked it up to another loss in a long line of them. Regrets, shoved down and locked up tight. His retort is strained, reaching out with his words if he cannot bring himself to do it quite yet with his body.]

You just can’t stay away, can you.

[ It may be a trick of the torchlight, but he swears there is something that shares a distant relative with hope in the way Ardyn looks at him. That, more than anything, hooks itself into his heart and tugs, propelling him forward over the uneven, rust-colored ground and towards the other man. A man he thought he would never see again, whom he missed dearly and held many, many regrets for all the things left unsaid between them. ]

‘Tis really me.

[ Said with an easy smile, a soft and hopeful sort of thing, offered just as easily as he extends a gloved hand to Ardyn once he is close enough. If this is a trap, he has surely fallen for it, but he highly doubts that possibility now. ]

I beg your pardon, but you came to me. Welcome to Eorzea. What say we quit this dreary place?

[His body language stills when the other man approaches, more eager than before, his heart sticking in his throat. Ardyn tries to shove it back down where it belongs, but when X’rhun reaches forward with a hand coupled with an easy smile, the entire weight of the Eos, all its wretched Astrals and his jaded suspicions would not stop him from meeting it.

He reaches out, curls fingers gently around the man’s gloved touch. He’s real, he’s here, he can feel his warmth. And Ardyn shudders out a breath, laced with a tired laugh, as if his old friend has suddenly enervated him.]

Eorzea?

[Overcome by resignation, Ardyn loses all his sharp edges in that one word, but never unlocking his eyes from X’rhun’s own.]

How? What manner of divine power has issued me to yet another world? [X’rhun’s home this time. Only just arrived, it’s too early to think on what it means, but it feels like less of a prison than the others, a surreal revelation that he doesn’t know what to do with.]

But I suppose you should shuffle me off to somewhere far more flattering, else I form a terrible first impression of your precious star.

[ There is a part of him that still thinks this a dream until Ardyn’s fingers close around his own, real and warm and there, pressed against the worn leather of his glove. No claws spring forth to pierce his skin, no foul magicks that try to drag him into the maw of a beast or into the Void itself. Just two errant souls, brought back together across worlds on the wings of some unknown force, defying all odds or expectation. He heaves a silent sigh, his posture relaxing all at once.

X’rhun can hardly begin to fathom what any of this means, for either of them, for both of them, he’ll have the time to think on it later. ]

I’ve no idea, but to say I am not glad to see you would be a lie. I’ve missed you.

[ More than he would care to admit at the moment. There can only be so much heartfelt reuniting done in the belly of a defunct crypt, and he would know what Ardyn has been through, how he feels, ere he goes pouring his heart out.

His hand still joined with his friend’s he begins to guide them away from the tomb, into the winding pathways of the catacombs, and gradually, towards the exit. ]

Keep your head about you. There are voidsent that lurk in this place.

[ I’ve missed you. Such a plain statement, and yet it encompasses the strange, hollow ache he felt as he whiled away the days, the years, in the bleak darkness of the Citadel. As he waited for Noctis to push those crumbling doors of the throne room open, to meet him in one final battle that would put the both of them to rest.

He had thought at the time that he would be free of it then. Strange how being with X’rhun now, his hand guiding him through the belly of this crypt, is only accentuating the ghost of that loss further. As if he is finally paying attention to a wound left ignored for ages, only now letting its discontent catch up with him, despite simultaneously having the balm at his side.

But now is not the time for such sentimentality, if that’s even what it can be called — X’rhun would agree to him about that, too, and Ardyn’s boot kicks up a stone that’s sent clattering down the corridor.]

Oh, of course there are. Come now, as if I cannot defend myself from all manner of things that would wish to kill me from the shadows. Though I wonder if it should be possible to truly slay a dead man?

You are quite lively for a dead man, my friend. Though— [ a half turn, to regard Ardyn with a glance as they wind their way through the bowels of the mountain, as if he might hope to gauge how Ardyn feels about that statement. Probably mixed at best, which is why he doesn’t press. ]

‘Tis less the Voidsent and more the labyrinthine tunnels that concern me. Most of them have fallen into disrepair over the decades, and where was once a way out, one would only find a mountain of rubble now.

[Mixed feelings are an understatement. They are quite complicated, should he have the time to unravel them -- but at the moment? The fact that he doesn't seem to be very dead at all is frustration running millimeters beneath his skin.]

Yes, quite lively indeed. That rather defeats the point.

[He lets that be known, before tending to the idea of Voidsent and winding tunnels, which are their primary concern at the moment. Ardyn is perhaps not nearly as worried as he should be; given all that's happened to him, it's so inconsequential.]

I could phase through a piece of rubble or two and leave you to fend for yourself, swathed in the dark. But... well, that would do our reunion little good, wouldn't it? Let us cross that bridge when we get there, as the saying goes.

[ They’ll have to take the time to mull over the nature of Ardyn’s appearance here once they’re somewhere a bit less full of monsters and a bit more private. There are no displaced princes here for Ardyn to vent his frustrations against – though X’rhun cannot help but wonder at the fate of Noctis, if Ardyn is here and claiming that he is supposed to be dead – so X’rhun will have to do as a suitable target. ]

Your brilliant plan fails to take into account that I know these passages very well. There shall be no need to phase through anything so long as I am here to lead the way.

[ True to his word, X’rhun seems to know exactly where he’s going, passing by the many branching paths to head down one in particular. It isn’t much longer until the golden light of the setting sun makes itself known, peering through an opening at the end of the tunnel. His fingers still curled ‘round Ardyn’s hand, he guides the other man out of the crypts and into the late evening air – a bit arid, perhaps, but the heat of the day is waning rapidly with the setting of the sun.

In the distance, the looming walls of Ala Mhigo stand stark against the sunlight. ]

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~timeskip noises~

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