Your hands know this one by heart: cross, under, over, around, behind, and through. You look in the mirror as you slide the half-windsor knot against your throat and smooth your tie down your chest.
The face in the mirror is youthful and unmarred, a boy who’s a man only on paper. But you’re tall and broad and exceptionally healthy. Your suit is sharp and tailored to fit.
The bathroom you stand in is small and pristine, and the shelf below the mirror has an artful spray of fresh flowers on one side and the work uniform you shed bundled up on the other. The green and white clothes are still bright and new, still not quite broken in. You fold them loosely and tuck the uniform into your duffel, then sling the bag over your shoulder and open the door.
Around the corner, you meet your mother in the office. She’s six inches shorter than you with long, black hair and a perfume that smells like roses in summer. Her suit is even finer than yours, with a bright red blouse instead of a tie and delicate gold jewelry around her slender neck and wrists. She’s hanging up the phone when you come in. She smiles when she sees you before turning back to the checklist on her desk.
“Whew, okay. The flowers should be here in about fifteen minutes and I still need to talk to the musicians and make sure they have what they need... The caterers got stuck in traffic so I’ve been running a bit behind trying to get that sorted out. Can you help me with the editions? I haven’t had a chance.”
“Sure,” you say, tucking your duffel into the corner, the place where it lives when you’re here.
“Thanks. It’s these ones.” She pats a large, flat box on her desk.
“All of ‘em?”
“Yes, please. I’ll be in to help in a sec.” She smiles at you as she vanishes out the office door.
In the back room, halfway between the office and the storage area, you carefully unpack the box’s contents on a large, clean table and unwrap the padding. It’s a stack of limited edition prints, copies of oil paintings on heavy, expensive paper, all signed and numbered. They’re large, and the quality is exceptionally fine, but not just that -- the images themselves are beautiful. Loose dabs of vivid color that resemble a sparkle of water or the negative spaces between branches of bare winter trees, colorful shapes that build exotic and unfamiliar landscapes. You’ve seen a couple of these paintings online -- Vivét is a highly-celebrated artist, after all -- but most of these you haven’t seen before, and (as always) everything looks better in person.
There isn’t much time until the exhibition opens, so you put aside your interest and get to work. Each print gets an acid-free archival-quality cardboard backing in the appropriate size, then you wrap it in an elegant folio with the gallery’s branding embossed in gold on the back, and carefully seal the whole thing in a plastic sleeve. The end result looks like it’s worth what the gallery charges for it.
You’re about halfway through before your mother joins you, and the work goes faster with two sets of hands.
“These are really amazing,” you say, working a folio into a plastic sleeve.
She has a smile in her voice when she says, “When we’re done with this, go check out the originals.”
“Yeah.” You pause to look at the one you just sealed. It’s a painting of a huge rock formation casting a pale purple shadow through what looks like an orange dust storm. “Is this a real place?”
Your mother leans over to see what you’re looking at. “That’s Longwythe Peak. That’s just outside the city.”
“Oh! Wow.” It’s easy to forget how bleak and arid everything supposedly is outside the city. “It’s beautiful.”
You put it on the pile, then wrap a folio around another print. This one looks more verdant, with the silhouettes of mountains in the background. They look so big and far away, even though they’re loose splotches of paint.
You stare at the painting for a moment more before you slide it into a bag, wondering what it’s like to see a mountain in person.
Once you’re both finished, you follow your mother out to the gallery floor, prints in hand. These go in a cloth-lined basket near the office, and now that your only job is finished, you’re free to look at the art until someone finds another job for you.
The gallery is mostly empty except for pockets of activity around the tables where the caterers are setting up. The show will open soon, but for now you have the art mostly to yourself.
Your mother was right about the originals. The prints are nothing compared to these: eight feet tall and gleaming with color that the offset lithographic printing process can’t achieve, overwhelming in every way. The carefully arranged track-lighting casts a thin stripe of shadow under every brush stroke, giving everything a new dimension you couldn’t see on paper. Every dab of paint has its own character, and there are places where they all run smoothly together and others where they pile on top of each other as it fighting for dominance. There’s texture everywhere.
You wander the gallery, taking time to enjoy each painting one by one. Your mother seems to notice how much you’re lingering, and she comes over to stand beside you.
“What do you think?”
The painting you stand before depicts a path through trees. The main subject of the painting appears to be the way the branches cut the sky into tiny shapes, and the glimpses of an afternoon sun through the twigs looks like a stained glass window and coaxes the trees into improbable rainbow colors. The tops of buildings are visible through the trees, and the sky is streaked with the familiar purple shimmers that you’ve never seen the sky without.
“I think this one’s my favorite,” you say.
“All those exotic places and you still like the look of Insomnia best, huh?”
“Guess so,” you laugh. And a minute later, after some consideration, you say, “I think I’d like to buy a print of this one, actually”
She looks at you.
You suppress the urge to fidget. “What?”
She folds her arms. “I think this is the first time you’ve ever asked for one.”
“I really like this one.”
“What about it do you like?” The lilt in her voice makes you double-check her expression. Sure enough, she’s looking at you with a smile and a raised eyebrow. It’s the expression of someone who wants to be impressed.
Hmm.
You look back to the painting, considering, and you speak. You talk about how color and shapes evoke the subject without being overly descriptive, and about the efficacy of impasto to create additional dynamism. You talk about the contrast of saturation, and hard edges versus soft ones, and the ways they affect the composition, and the energy of the loose, impressionistic style. You talk about how the dazzling nature of this otherwise mundane scene reminds you to look for the beauty in all things, and to appreciate simple wonders like the sun checkering the grass on a warm day.
You look back at your mother. She’s quiet for a second, looking at you with eyes glinting and her chest swelling with pride. “Good answer,” she says at last and pats your arm. “I’ll set one aside for you.”
“Try not to take it too hard,” your father says, pulling up a weed. “Just think about what you’re going to do next.”
It’s been about twenty-four hours since you got your entrance exam scores back, and not taking it hard is still a struggle. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much if you hadn’t fallen short by such a narrow margin. How many more right answers would it have taken to get the score you needed? Five? ...One?
It’s unseasonably warm today. You’re sitting at a glass and wrought-iron table, still wearing your school uniform. Your physics homework is spread out in front of you, ignored.
You sigh. “All the schools with the sports programs are also the ones that have the best...everything else. I didn’t even make the cut-off for my third choice.” You lean back and stare at the sky. It’s unreasonably blue today, and you occasionally see distant waves of purple shimmers glinting off the edges of the nearly-invisible hexagonal panes in the sky. “I don’t know what other disciplines I want to focus on.... Makes it hard to choose.”
You hear the rhythmic chock of a trowel turning up the dirt as your father prepares the beds for spring.
“Taking a year off isn’t so bad,” he says. “You can try the exams again next winter, and get some work experience in the meantime.” He peeks his head up from behind the plants to look at you. The crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes are coming in, and the hair on top of his head is going out, but his face is round and gentle. “I did that too, you know. I didn’t even consider business school when I was seventeen, but getting a job over the summer gave me some direction that I didn’t have fresh out of school. Maybe something like that will happen for you, too.”
“Maybe,” you say. A purple shimmer briefly ripples against the sky and vanishes. “...There have been some Kingsglaive recruiters coming by the school lately. Apparently you can get a pretty good education, and the pay’s really good.”
Your father is quiet for a moment, hidden again behind the plants. There’s the sound of a particularly stubborn root popping free. “Think really carefully about that one.”
“I dunno. Maybe I’d be good at it, since I’m better at athletic stuff anyway.” You lean with your elbow on the table, cheek in hand. “Plus, I’d get to use magic. That’d be really cool... Anyway, they say that the skills you learn are competitive in the job market, so maybe I could use that to get something better later on. ...I don’t know.”
“Well, you still have some time before you have to make any decisions. There’s nothing wrong with getting a job and saving up while you think about it.”
“That’s true.” You tap your pencil against your homework. “I’ll give it some more thought.”
Behind you, the door to the house slides open and your mother peeks out. “I made some tea,” she says. “Would either of you like any?”
“Yes, please,” you and your father say in unison.
“Come help me, please, Shen?”
“Sure,” you reply.
You take off your sandals at the door and step into the dining room. It’s spacious and spotless, a Western style room with hardwood floors and paintings on the walls. There are fresh-cut flowers in a vase on the table, courtesy of your dad, always, no matter the season.
You follow your mother into the kitchen and get the tea cups out of the cabinet. “What kind is it?”
“Black tea with rose and cardamom.” Once the cups are on the counter, she begins to fill them one by one. “It’s a new blend. Tell me what you think.”
You take a cup between your palms and draw it close. The tea is a deep maroon against the porcelain. It smells like the garden on the hottest days of summer, when the air is heavy with the scent of flowers and the drone of cicadas. You take a sip and the flavor is smooth, both sweet like petals and spicy with the citrus-mint flavor of cardamom. It’s complex. “Is there vanilla in this too?”
“Yes, just a bit! Do you like it?”
“It’s excellent.”
She smiles all the way up to her eyes. “Take this one to your dad, please,” she says, handing you another cup.
You carry both cups of tea back out to the garden, sliding the door open with one stocking foot and slipping into your garden shoes as you step back onto the patio.
“Tea,” you say.
Your dad emerges from behind a cloud of winter flowers. “Ah, thank you,” he says, standing as his knees pop, brushing the dirt off his pants.
He shuffles over to the table to where you’ve put his tea, then takes a sip. His gaze turns inward for a moment, putting flavors together. “Rose and… cardamom?" He takes another sip. "Mmm, that's good."
He takes a seat at the table with you, and your mother joins you a moment later with a plate of cookies. The three of you admire the garden together and talk about lighthearted things, and you find that the disappointment over your test scores is a little easier to push away for now. In this moment, with your family beside you, a cup of tea in your hands, and a beautiful blue sky overhead, everything is good.
By 9:17 am you’ve already delivered forty-six parcels. You switch the itinerary on your GPS to today’s pickup route and turn up the music on the radio.
The morning finds you in one of the outer wards of Insomnia. The streets are narrow here, flanked by old cement buildings with flaking paint and weathered street signs. There’s less traffic than downtown, though, so you’re making good time today.
The GPS directs you down a cramped side-street, where you find the address that matches the one on your screen. It’s a tiny bakery with a lavender awning, under a stack of apartments with laundry drying on the balconies. There’s no space for parking here, so you pull your van up onto the sliver of sidewalk to get as much of it out of the road as possible, enough to allow room for other cars to pass.
As you grab your handheld scanner and poke at the settings to prepare for the pickup, you can see yourself. You’re wearing a white and green polo and matching slacks, and there’s an orange logo of a bird in flight on your breast pocket. The skin on your arms is lightly tanned and free of scars.
You slip out of your van and into the bakery, which smells of coffee and bread, and all the self-service racks that line the walls are laden with all sorts of fresh pastries of every shape and flavor. Your stomach perks up, even though you still have a few hours before lunch.
The short, scrawny teenager at the counter has a soft face and hard eyes. His ears are pierced with a stud in one and two dangling gold earrings on the other, and his head is shaved on both sides, leaving a stripe of long black hair down the middle, currently pulled back into a knot at the back of his neck. He’s wearing a pastel lavender apron, and he’s cleaning an espresso machine. His small hands have scarred knuckles and look like they’ve seen their share of labor, despite the boy’s age.
“Morning,” you say. Nothing else is really necessary -- your uniform makes it clear what you’re here for.
“Mm,” he says, giving you a slightly too-long evaluating look with eyes as green as moss after the rain. Then he turns away.
A moment later, he returns to you with stack of pink boxes, each taped up tight and sealed with a pre-printed packing label. You scan the labels on the boxes and have him sign the touchscreen on the scanner, then you thank him and that’s the end of your interaction.
As you load the van, the memory begins to speed up, as if it’s being fast-forwarded into a time-lapse sequence. You do another thirty pickups in the same ward, most of them from businesses. It’s repetitive work -- scan, pack, scan, pack, scan, pack. You sing along to the radio in the space between pickups, but (mercifully) the recording is playing too fast to actually hear any of it.
The trip back to the depot is a montage of highways and bridges and sprawling urban landscapes, skyscrapers packed right up to the edges of giant cliffs and waterfronts. Every inch of land is covered in parks or concrete. Through the gaps in the skyline, you can see glimpses of the enormous gray wall that holds the city in.
Still in fast-forward, you unload your van at the depot, pick up your next load of parcels, and review your new itinerary as you hastily eat the lunch you brought from home. Seconds later, you’re back on the freeway, heading back toward the outer wards, not too far from where you were that morning. This area’s a little farther out, a little more cramped, a little more shabby. The buildings are worn down, devouring each other like weeds fighting for light.
Your itinerary is full and you have a very busy afternoon. Box after box after another eighty-odd boxes exit your van. As you prepare to deliver a bubble mailer full of what feels like three pounds of paper, the memory abruptly slows back down to regular speed.
You step out of your van and into a shady-looking law firm, parcel in hand.
Instead of coffee, this place smells like cigarettes and flopsweat. There are a couple broken-down chairs along the wall and a faded, dusty plastic tree in the corner. In the center of the room is a reception desk, overflowing with papers and open books.
The receptionist is the same short, scrawny teenager from the bakery, but this time he’s wearing a teal dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and hair hanging down the left side of his face like a black curtain. He appears to be too busy for you, as he is currently shouting at a man with ill-fitting clothes, a tattoo on the back of his head, and at least triple the boy’s mass.
You may have, in fact, arrived at a bad time.
You stand there awkwardly while the receptionist and the client scream at each other. At some point the teenager smacks the client in the chest with a folder full of papers, and instead of punching him, the client snatches the folder out of the boy’s hand. The air feels electrified as they stare each other down…
...then the client turns and pushes past you. He slams open the door and he’s gone.
You look back to the receptionist. The agitation is already draining from his body language, like it’s just another fucking day at the bullshit factory. He gives you another evaluating look with those too-hard eyes, but his lips quirk up at the corner, wry.
“You again.”
He holds his hand out to you so you can put the scanner in it. So you do.
...
In this memory, the boy is a stranger you have only met that day. But your present self, looking in on this sliver of the past, recognizes him. He’s younger here, and his face and arms are free of the scars he wears today, but it’s definitely, absolutely him.
You’re lounging on one end of an enormous, navy-blue, L-shaped sectional couch. You have a blanket over your legs, and your feet (clad in a brand-new pair of ludicrously colorful wooly socks) are up on the ottoman. You’ve been here for a while, having tea and sponge cake while watching stand-up comedy on TV. You’re comfortable, full, and a little sleepy. Everything is good.
Your mother and father are on the other end of the couch. They look a little different than they did in your last memory. Your mother has a different haircut, and your father is a little more bald.
In the middle of the couch is Thorn. He's changed, too. Though he’s still small, he’s put on some healthy weight. You can actually detect the edges of the muscles in his exposed forearms. He’s still missing the scars he wears in the present, and at the moment he’s wearing a pair of colorful socks that match yours.
He’s reclined, sinking into the couch cushions. The family cat -- a pale gray, spotted thing -- is draped up his chest, purring loudly into his chin. He has to keep petting her with both hands or she’ll put her paw on his face to remind him to keep going.
The whole scene is peaceful and comfortable. You’re very relaxed.
The clock hits the hour and credits start to roll on the show you’ve been watching. Thorn peels the cat off his chest and sets her down on the couch, then climbs to his feet.
“I should start heading home before the trains stop running,” he says.
“Oh?” says your father, stretching, “Are you sure? You’re welcome to spend the night if you want.”
“...I don’t want to impose,” says Thorn.
“You’re not imposing, we’re happy to have you,” says your mother, gathering up her dishes from the coffee table.
“Yeah, c’mon, stay,” you add. “We can go back to the dorm together in the morning.” Peer pressure.
Thorn turns to look at you with an expression of stifled confusion. “...I didn’t bring anything with me,” he says.
“We have enough to share,” says your mother. “You can sleep in Shen’s old room.”
“Then where will he sleep?”
“I'll just take the couch,” you say. “It’s big enough.”
He hesitates, silent.
“I have some old nightclothes you can wear,” you say, shoving the blanket aside and getting to your feet. “C’mon.”
Thorn’s quiet and his expression is hidden behind that curtain of hair. He pauses for a minute before obediently following you out of the living room.
You see a brief tour of your house as you lead Thorn to your old room -- everything’s tidy and warm and Western-style, with paintings on the walls and the occasional small sculpture in places where they can be admired. The dining room table is covered with the tablecloth and runner that’s reserved for special occasions; the kitchen is full of the leftovers the four of you weren’t able to eat -- roast kujata, potatoes, vegetables, salad, bread rolls, sponge cake with strawberries and whipped cream, the works.
On the wall by the base of the stairs, there’s a large painting of a carp jumping up a waterfall. Your room is upstairs, first door to the left. It’s cold inside. It’s been mostly used for storage since you moved out, but all your stuff is where you left it. There’s a shelf on the wall with a modest number of trophies and medals. There are posters for video games and sexy motorcycles on the walls. There’s a small TV in the corner with some old video game systems bundled up underneath.
You start going through some boxes of clothes, looking for the one that has something resembling pajamas.
“You should sleep in your own bed,” Thorn says. “I can take the couch.”
“No way. Guests take the bed. It’s the rules.”
“I don’t want the bed.”
“Too bad, I already have dibs on the couch.”
“Not if I take the couch first.”
“We’ll see,” you say.
“Suri--”
You cut him off by handing him a soft shirt and a pair of sweatpants. He stops talking, and it’s really unclear what his face is doing -- or not doing. There’s a careful lack of expression there, and he mutters his thanks.
When you get back downstairs, your mother has rounded up a towel and washcloth for Thorn to use in the morning, as well as a spare toothbrush, still in the package -- one of the ones reserved for guests in case of such an occasion.
It is, in fact, pretty late. Your parents don’t stay up much longer. You hug them both and they head upstairs.
You and Thorn, however, can stay up as long as you want. Neither of you have anywhere to be tomorrow; you both got military leave at the same time through some kind of Solstice miracle.
You get some extra blankets for the couch while Thorn changes in the bathroom. He comes back drowning in your clothes. He’s rolled up the sleeves and pant legs, pulled the drawstring on his waist as tight as it will go. The collar hangs low and he looks like a child. But he’s got his head tipped back and he’s jutting his chin; you know better by now than to say anything.
You wind up playing video games with the sound turned low and watching stand-up until late in the night. The cat gets back in Thorn’s lap, which he seems to like. At some point, you both fall asleep on opposite ends of the L-shaped couch and neither of you makes it to the bedroom.
Preliminary peace talks have begun. The Citadel is thrumming with activity, tense and electric. Lucis has been losing this war against Niflheim for nearly four hundred years, and now that the Capitol is the last stronghold left, Niflheim is here to talk about a ceasefire.
Lucis has a lot to gain, but even more to lose.
The government is putting up a strong front this week. Everyone in the Citadel has broken out their finest ceremonial attire, and every member of the Kingsglaive is working extra hours, even greenhorns like you.
You’ve spent twelve hours at attention outside of doorways today, providing security detail for minor nobles and diplomatic aides as they flesh out trade deals in cavernous and richly ornamented meeting rooms.
Your expression is the picture of disciplined neutrality. Nobody looking at you would be able to tell that you’re wound like a spring. Nor would anybody be able to tell how very, very armed you are. But most importantly, nobody would be able to tell that there’s apprehension in your secret heart that’s been gnawing at your ribcage the entire day, which has nothing to do with work or politics. Your mind worries at it like a loose tooth. The closer you get to quitting time, the harder it is to tamp it down.
When your shift is finally over, you catch your reflection in the locker room mirror as you prepare to leave. You’re still a young adult in this memory, but your face is more angular than it was before. The Kingsglaive uniform you wear is perfectly tailored for your wide shoulders and broad chest. It’s the finest uniform you’ve ever worn, both in quality and status.
You don’t bother changing into your civies today because you’re in a hurry; you merely shuck your uniform jacket and replace it with the expensive wool coat from your locker. This is enough to communicate you’re off duty.
You throw your uniform jacket over your arm, grab the brown paper bag from the floor of your locker, and head out through a staff entrance out the side of the building. As you leave, you look up at the sky. It’s evening already, overcast and heavy.
The building you just left behind looks shockingly like the Game Tower of Tokyo-F, but with four towers instead of two. Between them, a jet of purple light extends like a pillar holding up the sky. At the top, brushing the underside of the cloud layer, the light blooms horizontally in every direction, spreading into a rippling sheet of magic like water flowing out over an invisible umbrella, to create the dome under which all of Insomnia is safe.
You turn your back on the Citadel, make your way out through the security checkpoints, and into the city. On a normal day you’d take the train back to the dorm or wander into town to blow some money at the arcade, but today you hail a taxi and head in a different direction with a bit more sense of urgency.
The taxi picks its way through narrow, crowded streets. It weaves under overpasses and down through several stratas of urban development. The weak light of the sky struggles to reach this place, but even in the dark, it’s still busy. Insomnia never sleeps.
At your destination, you pay your fare and thank the driver, then head in through the wide double doors of the Crown City Royal Military Hospital.
You sign in at the front desk. The receptionist hands you a visitor’s badge, which you pin to your uniform shirt as a nurse escorts you down the hall. She stops in front of one of the doors, knocks, and slips inside. You wait in the hall by yourself until she opens the door again and invites you in.
And there he is, looking tiny and frail, tangled in blankets and wires and tubes: Thorn.
He’s paper-white, with dark eyes and sunken cheeks and vivid red lines criss-crossing his features, angry and fresh. He barely resembles the version of himself that deployed two weeks ago.
His expression’s a mixture of bone-deep exhaustion and boredom, but his eyes soften when he sees you, and the corners of his mouth tug upward, just a bit. “Hey,” he says. His voice is raspy and thin.
You pull up a chair and sit at his bedside. “Hey,” you say. “You still look like garbage.”
“Oh, fuck off,” he says, but his smile gets a little bigger.
“I brought some stuff to keep you busy,” you say, digging the paper bag on your lap. “First,” you pull out a book, “this came out while you were gone, so hopefully you haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I’m under the impression you like this author, since you’ve already read everything she’s ever written at least twice.”
The only reason you’re able to keep your voice from wobbling today is because you already got it out of your system yesterday, when you saw him for the first time since they brought him home. He’d been back for days before you found out, which was just the same -- he’d been in and out of surgery so much he wouldn’t have remembered you anyway. Even still, you wish you had been there.
You kept it together for the duration of the visit yesterday, but only just.
Today is better.
You put the book on his lap. A thin arm, just as sliced up as his face, snakes out from under the covers and picks it up so he can read the title. “Cool,” he says. “Thanks.”
“But wait,” you say, “there’s more.”
The second item you pull out of the bag is a brand new Nintendi 3DX, still in the box. You got the one with the metallic teal case. You’ll never admit it, but you had to go to four different stores to find this color in stock.
You hold out the console. Thorn just narrows his eyes at you.
“Listen.” You put it on his lap, and Thorn frowns at it over his book. “There’s this game, okay, where you collect monsters and raise them to fight each other. No, shut up, listen, it’s really fun. There are like eight hundred monsters to collect but there are two different versions of the game, and each version only has some of the monsters. So you can’t collect them all unless you trade with a friend.”
He’s looking at you again now, still squinting a little, but his eyebrows have crept up a little higher.
You pull the game out of the bag -- the compliment to the version you have -- and hold it out to him. “C’mon, man, you have a ton of free time right now. Help me out.”
It’s a beautiful afternoon. A red carpet spills down the Citadel steps to the throng gathered in the inner plaza, which is open to the public for this special occasion. The whole thing is packed.
Giant screens mounted around the plaza show a live broadcast of the historic moment unfolding inside the Citadel. The scene on the monitors shows the Grand Hall, with high, barrel-vaulted ceilings and massive windows. A congregation of Niflheim’s visiting politicians are on one side of the hall and the King’s council is on the other, all decorated in their finest ceremonial robes.
At the far end of the room, King Regis and Emperor Iedolas sit side-by-side on matching thones. It almost looks like a wedding, but instead of an altar, they sit at an ornate table before a peace treaty that will, once signed, end nearly four hundred years of war between Lucis and Niflheim.
Today you are stationed in the plaza with a few other lower-ranked Kingsglaives. There are a dozen or so Crownsguards here as well, dressed head to toe in riot armor. All of you watch the crowd for signs of hostility or dissent, for anyone who looks abnormally anxious or might be hiding a weapon. But so far everything has been peaceful.
On the screens, the camera zooms in on the treaty where a pen hovers over it, ready to sign.
Then, several things happen at once:
There’s a sound of gunfire and breaking glass from inside the Citadel. Your earpiece blasts to life with engagement orders and cries for reinforcements. On the screen, you see every politician in the Grand Hall summon their weapons, each with its own flash of brilliant white light.
Someone in the crowd screams. People begin to panic and scramble away from the Citadel, shoving and shouting as they surge toward the exits.
You are trained for this, and your duty is to get the crowd out of here safely. So you get to work, directing people toward exits, breaking up bottlenecks so nobody gets crushed.
Less than a minute later, the roof of the Citadel explodes.
They took out the Crystal.
Without it, the entire magic dome over the city disintegrates with a sound like the ending of worlds.
In seconds, Niflheim dropships descend on the now-unprotected city.
You grasp at the empty air and, in a flash of light, there’s a lance in your hand. You haul it back and throw it like a javelin. Right before impact, you pull yourself after it, warping forward as if pulled by a rubber band. The world smears itself around you and instantly you’re clutching your lance again, and you’re airborne. When it slams through the Niflheim soldier, it has your full inertia behind it.
This is the first time you’ve ever killed someone.
But it isn’t the last.
=====
Without the shield to protect it, the city fills with invaders. They bring their gunships and magitech armors -- large, bipedal exoskeletons with machine guns and rocket launchers -- and mow down everything that moves.
This isn’t even a massacre, it’s an extermination.
Your first priority is to defend the evacuation routes. You fight, you get injured. You clench a fist to summon a green flash of magic to chase the wounds from your flesh, and you continue.
As evening falls, daemons boil up from the shadows for the first time in centuries. They’re small ones at first, bat-winged and spider-like, screeching and snapping and grotesque. But bigger ones aren’t far behind, crawling out from the deeper levels of the city. The claustrophobic streets and labyrinth of overpasses become a death trap.
In each hand you wield a gigantic shuriken. You whip them forward, one after the other. After each impact, they blink back into your hand, ready to be thrown again.
You’ve nearly finished sawing through this particular pack of daemons when your shuriken doesn’t recall the way you expect. A daemon bites the arm that ought to have a weapon in it by now, and its shark-like teeth sink straight through the reinforced fabric of your uniform and into your skin.
You tear the daemon in half with your other shuriken and cast a healing spell.
But this magic doesn’t come, either.
You try again, and a third time, but it’s gone. Your magic is gone.
If your magic is gone, it means the King has died, and all the magic in Lucis has died with him.
=====
You don’t know where it came from, but there is a daemon in the city beyond anything you could have ever imagined.
You flee, taking along as many citizens as you can find. You fight back the monsters that attack from all sides. You help navigate around the rubble. You can’t warp or heal or summon your other weapons.
The dead are everywhere.
You flee.
=====
Twelve enormous statues of the past Kings of Lucis have come to life throughout the city.
You have no idea what’s happening any more.
=====
You run, and run, and run.
You’ve lost a lot of civilians, but picked up many more.
The whole world is humming with the sound of Dreadnought-class airships. They’ve brought in more of those titanic daemons from before -- you’ve seen at least four of them now.
The statues seem to be able to warp the way you no longer can, and they fight the daemons like they're characters in a robot vs. kaiju movie. But the statues seem more about attacking the daemons than defending the city. They tear the town apart like it’s something cheap, converting your home into gravel and fire.
You escort your group of civilians toward the edge of the city. You run, and run, and run.
They die, and die, and die.
=====
On the miles-long bridge between Insomnia and the mainland, the power finally goes out, plunging you all into darkness. Daemons come out of everywhere. You can’t see a thing, so you fight them blind.
Everyone is screaming.
=====
Your first impression of the world outside the city walls is shadowy silhouettes against the pale pink sky. You hoped to visit this place someday, but this isn’t how you imagined you’d do it.
Light is crawling back into the world, and the daemons are finally crawling back out, slithering into the ground like spilled oil.
Every inch of you is spattered with sweat, blood, and ichor. You barely feel the sting of pain across your face because everything else hurts so much more. Your right sleeve is wet and clingy from the elbow down, and your fingers don’t work. Your right boot -- once leather and metal armor up to the knee -- is shredded and nearly useless, not unlike your leg itself.
There are civilians here. You managed to keep at least some of them alive.
You’re exhausted.
Now you’re lying in the dirt, but you don’t remember how you got here.
Your hearing goes out, and your vision isn’t far behind. The last thing you see is the sun rising over the smoking hole that used to be Insomnia.
Altissia. The Jewel of Accordo. The City on the Sea.
You always fantasized about coming here someday.
In your fantasy, though, you were happy about it.
It’s beautiful... probably. It’s hard to tell from here, behind a chain link fence topped with coils of razor wire, where you’re still trapped at the port like cargo endlessly awaiting inspection. But across the water, the city gleams in the afternoon light, all white marble and red tile roofs. You can almost make out the ornate architecture you know is there, or the golden domes, world-famous sculptures of Messengers with sweeping robes and graceful wings. Occasionally you catch glimpses of gondolas, ferrying passengers from island to island before disappearing back into the labyrinth of canals between the buildings.
click to embiggen
The sky is achingly blue, bare without those curtains of purple light. It's cold and vulnerable like a model posing for a painting. Instead of a wall, the city is hemmed by natural stone formations and sheets of water. From the other side of the compound, looking the other direction, you can even see a few degrees of horizon. It might be one of the weirdest things you’ve ever seen. It’s as if the world gets to a certain point and just... stops.
Feels like a metaphor.
The sound of shouting snaps you out of of your navel-gazing. Dock workers -- grown men, older than you -- are back again to yell slurs and throw garbage into the camp. Fortunately, they can’t get over the fence any more than you can, so you don’t need to give them any of what little energy you have left. But you wish that the tin cans they were throwing at you still had food in them, at least. You’ve eaten nothing but compressed wheat biscuit rations for the last three weeks.
Probably doesn’t matter. Your body’s hungry but you have no appetite anyway.
You peel yourself away from the noise and start hobbling over to the immigration office, even though your appointment isn’t for another few hours.
It’s slow going. Your new scars feel tight and sore. Physical therapy distracts you from your thoughts a little, so you’ve been keeping at it -- you’re able to stay on your feet longer these days, and you’re finally walking again, even if you still can’t do it without a crutch. You’ve also regained some use of your right hand, though not much.
Without magic to sweep away your injuries, you have to heal the old fashioned way.
It’s a long wait in a plastic chair in the immigration office. You don’t have anything to do but pick at the holes of your ill-fitting clothes. Like everything else, they don’t feel like they’re yours. Your clothes were cut from your body as you were slipping in and out of consciousness when you got here. However, after considerable effort afterward, you were able to pick through enough garbage to locate your socks. They were brightly-colored and stripy once, but now they’re mismatched -- despite your best efforts, the one you wore on your right foot will forever be a rusty brown.
You’re wearing them anyway, though.
Eventually, the receptionist calls your name and you meet with your caseworker. She goes over your paperwork and hands you the documents you’ll need to leave this place, hopefully to find job and somewhere new to sleep that isn’t a mat on the floor of a warehouse, surrounded by several hundred other desperate, broken strangers.
The photo on your new ID card shows an unfamiliar, hollow-eyed man with unkempt hair and an angry red slash across his nose and cheek.
The internet cafe is tiny and cramped, tucked into a side street along one of the smaller canals. It’s dirty and smells of cigarettes, but it’s cheap.
It feels strange to be here this early in the morning. Normally you’d be at the shipyard this time of day, getting your gloves and hardhat back on at the end of your lunch break. Or you’d be prepping a gondola, getting ready to start your 9 am shift. You’re almost never not working at this hour.
Turns out, getting fired really frees up your morning.
You know why it happened, this time -- you still haven’t fully recovered from your injuries, even though it’s been a few months now. Your arm is too weak to reliably lift the heavy cargo. Your limp makes you slow and unstable on the rolling deck of the ships. The crashing noises and large moving shapes in the half-light of dawn give you panic attacks that lead to mistakes that throw off the schedule.
As your former coworkers let you know in no uncertain terms, immigrants like you are ruining this country. Every one of your failures was proof you didn’t belong here. But you have nowhere else to go, and you still need to eat. So you’re here now, at the internet cafe, applying for every job you’re qualified for and even more that you aren’t.
Hopefully your next job will have fewer loud noises.
Today’s afternoon shift with the gondolas starts in just a few hours, but the constant practice of looking for work has made you fast at it, at least. You send out a few dozen applications before you need to think about heading out.
Before you go, you navigate to the online Survivor’s Registry, as you always do whenever you find yourself at a computer. It’s been a few months and fewer names are being added these days, and compared to the population of Insomnia, the list is hundreds of thousands too short. You added your name as soon as you could, back at the refugee camp, in case anyone out there is looking for you.
But nobody is.
You search for your friends and family one by one, hoping this time their names will have appeared on the list of survivors -- hoping they’re safe, that they escaped somehow.
Thorn’s name isn’t there, still.
Neither are your parents.
Your neighbors.
Anyone from school or work.
You search until you run out of names to look for.
Nothing, still.
On a news site, you find an article with new photos of the recovery efforts in what used to be downtown Insomnia. This photo depicts a skyline with gaps in it like missing teeth; this one shows a giant hole in the ground piercing several layers of city; this one’s a train station that looks relatively intact, but behind it is an ocean of gravel where a neighborhood used to be.
...You pause your scrolling.
You recognize the train station. It's intimately familiar -- a place you visited twice a day on your way to and from school; the place where you met up with friends to do things on the weekends; the place with the arcade and your favorite ramen shop.
From where this photo was taken, you used to be able to see a neighborhood, all tightly packed houses with tile roofs and little gardens around them. You know every detail of that neighborhood between the train station and your house.
But now all that’s left is a wasteland, flat and burned and twisted, crushed completely flat. There isn’t a single thing left.
You’d seen aerial shots of the damage, so you already knew, in an abstract sort of way. But this photo is personal to a degree you weren’t prepared for, and hits you all afresh.
-----
You keep it together, at first. But on the way back to the shelter, you duck into a narrow alley so you can lose it a little in private.
You thought you would run out of tears at some point, but you never do. The weight of the people you miss is crushing, so painful you feel like your insides are dying.
You weep, wiping at your face and trying to breathe. You don’t have time for this. You have to pull it together and go to work.
You can’t afford to get fired twice in one day.
Notes:
- The scenery outside, while he's walking through the streets, strongly resembles Venice.
- Cobalt walks with a limp, here.
- This memory is confirmation that his home was destroyed, and Thorn and his family are almost certainly dead.
The light that begins filtering in through the wooden slats is anemic and dishwater green, and you start to let out some of the tension you’ve been holding.
You’ve almost made it to another morning.
As soon as you dredge up the energy, you’ll crawl out of the corner you’ve wedged yourself into, pull aside the scrap of sheet metal you put over the entrance of the half-collapsed shed you’ve been hiding in, and try again to find something to eat.
In a minute, though.
You’re exhausted. You didn’t sleep again last night; the Things outside were too close and too loud and entirely too persistent. You sat, still and quiet, coiled like a spring with a dagger in each hand, ready for the moment they’d break in and you’d have to throw down to save your own life.
Now the sun is dragging itself up through the sick haze on the horizon. Soon the things of the night will settle down, and the only thing you’ll have to watch out for is the wildlife, which is just as hungry and desperate as you.
Just five more minutes. Then you’ll pretend you’re not so cold that you gave up shivering. You’ll pretend you’re not stiff from the tension of a night that was much longer than nature ever intended. You’ll pretend the last thing you put in your stomach wasn’t rainwater from an old tin can, sour and discolored as the rain itself, that you found two days ago.
You stare at the dirt and blood flaked on your skin, willing yourself to at least wipe it off. The wounds are gone -- you erase them almost as fast as you collect them -- but they still seem to ache, somehow, and the effort of healing them leaves you even more drained. You are still criss-crossed with scars that are too old to fix.
There are noises outside from the wild things that have already started their day. Grumbles like engines and the crunch of dead plants. You hold your breath and freeze a little longer -- that’s fine, you have the energy for this much, at least. But your ears are straining, trying to map their positions.
As they approach your hiding place, you realize the things outside aren’t walking on four legs, or eight, or seventy. Just two apiece. You listen harder. Yeah, just two legs, and gait that sounds like yours.
It motivates you to roll onto your hands and knees in a way your hunger didn’t. You clamber to the door and you don’t even care that you’re shaking. You have to put down one of your daggers to grip the sheet metal, and as you wrap your fingers around it, all at once it gets yanked away from the other side. The dim light is blinding after so much darkness; you recoil back into the shed, an arm in front of your eyes.
There’s a shout of surprise and a clatter of metal on dirt.
“Fuck, you scared the shit out of me!” says a woman you don’t recognize. She’s muscular and square-jawed, her brown hair pulled back into a tail. She’s wearing an armored vest and combat boots and dirt.
“Six,” she says, looking you over. “How long have you been out here?”
You peek at her from around your arm. “...I don’t—,” you manage. Your voice sounds raspy.
“You look like shit. What’s your name?”
You open your mouth to tell her, but your name doesn’t come. Your throat works, soundlessly. You can feel your eyes water with the effort of trying to think of an answer.
You shut your mouth.
She looks at you for a moment, then looks cross. “Ah, shit.” she hisses. “C’mere.” She strides toward you before you get yourself together enough to react, and she tugs back the collar of your tanktop, looking for a dog tag. You don’t have one. You’re not sure you ever did.
Finding nothing, she grabs your hand -- the one holding the knife, and pulls it closer. She wipes the dirt off the blade and squints at the engraving. She looks back at you.
“Are these yours? ‘Ascensuri Cataracta’...” She taps at the engraving. “Is this your name?”
You look at her helplessly. “...I dunno,” you say. And it’s true. You don’t remember how long you’ve had these or where you got them. You don’t know if they’re yours or not. You don’t know if that’s your name.
She frowns at you for a moment, then looks resigned. “C’mon,” she says with a sigh. She turns and moves out of the entrance of the shed.
You pick up your other dagger and follow her out. In the dim gray light, you can see three others besides the woman, all filthy and armed with machetes, and all of them are watching you. Even being this close to other people feels surreal.
“Toby!” the woman shouts, and one of them -- presumably Toby -- trots over, looking you up and down.
“Who’s this?” he says.
“A Glaive,” says the woman.
“Gods damn, another one?” He looks at you even harder. “Do you remember anything? Shit, how long have you been out here?”
You still don’t know. You look at the ground.
“Fine.” He says, finally. “Let’s get you out of here.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Memory 1 - Landscapes
Your hands know this one by heart: cross, under, over, around, behind, and through. You look in the mirror as you slide the half-windsor knot against your throat and smooth your tie down your chest.
The face in the mirror is youthful and unmarred, a boy who’s a man only on paper. But you’re tall and broad and exceptionally healthy. Your suit is sharp and tailored to fit.
The bathroom you stand in is small and pristine, and the shelf below the mirror has an artful spray of fresh flowers on one side and the work uniform you shed bundled up on the other. The green and white clothes are still bright and new, still not quite broken in. You fold them loosely and tuck the uniform into your duffel, then sling the bag over your shoulder and open the door.
Around the corner, you meet your mother in the office. She’s six inches shorter than you with long, black hair and a perfume that smells like roses in summer. Her suit is even finer than yours, with a bright red blouse instead of a tie and delicate gold jewelry around her slender neck and wrists. She’s hanging up the phone when you come in. She smiles when she sees you before turning back to the checklist on her desk.
“Whew, okay. The flowers should be here in about fifteen minutes and I still need to talk to the musicians and make sure they have what they need... The caterers got stuck in traffic so I’ve been running a bit behind trying to get that sorted out. Can you help me with the editions? I haven’t had a chance.”
“Sure,” you say, tucking your duffel into the corner, the place where it lives when you’re here.
“Thanks. It’s these ones.” She pats a large, flat box on her desk.
“All of ‘em?”
“Yes, please. I’ll be in to help in a sec.” She smiles at you as she vanishes out the office door.
In the back room, halfway between the office and the storage area, you carefully unpack the box’s contents on a large, clean table and unwrap the padding. It’s a stack of limited edition prints, copies of oil paintings on heavy, expensive paper, all signed and numbered. They’re large, and the quality is exceptionally fine, but not just that -- the images themselves are beautiful. Loose dabs of vivid color that resemble a sparkle of water or the negative spaces between branches of bare winter trees, colorful shapes that build exotic and unfamiliar landscapes. You’ve seen a couple of these paintings online -- Vivét is a highly-celebrated artist, after all -- but most of these you haven’t seen before, and (as always) everything looks better in person.
There isn’t much time until the exhibition opens, so you put aside your interest and get to work. Each print gets an acid-free archival-quality cardboard backing in the appropriate size, then you wrap it in an elegant folio with the gallery’s branding embossed in gold on the back, and carefully seal the whole thing in a plastic sleeve. The end result looks like it’s worth what the gallery charges for it.
You’re about halfway through before your mother joins you, and the work goes faster with two sets of hands.
“These are really amazing,” you say, working a folio into a plastic sleeve.
She has a smile in her voice when she says, “When we’re done with this, go check out the originals.”
“Yeah.” You pause to look at the one you just sealed. It’s a painting of a huge rock formation casting a pale purple shadow through what looks like an orange dust storm. “Is this a real place?”
Your mother leans over to see what you’re looking at. “That’s Longwythe Peak. That’s just outside the city.”
“Oh! Wow.” It’s easy to forget how bleak and arid everything supposedly is outside the city. “It’s beautiful.”
You put it on the pile, then wrap a folio around another print. This one looks more verdant, with the silhouettes of mountains in the background. They look so big and far away, even though they’re loose splotches of paint.
You stare at the painting for a moment more before you slide it into a bag, wondering what it’s like to see a mountain in person.
Once you’re both finished, you follow your mother out to the gallery floor, prints in hand. These go in a cloth-lined basket near the office, and now that your only job is finished, you’re free to look at the art until someone finds another job for you.
The gallery is mostly empty except for pockets of activity around the tables where the caterers are setting up. The show will open soon, but for now you have the art mostly to yourself.
Your mother was right about the originals. The prints are nothing compared to these: eight feet tall and gleaming with color that the offset lithographic printing process can’t achieve, overwhelming in every way. The carefully arranged track-lighting casts a thin stripe of shadow under every brush stroke, giving everything a new dimension you couldn’t see on paper. Every dab of paint has its own character, and there are places where they all run smoothly together and others where they pile on top of each other as it fighting for dominance. There’s texture everywhere.
You wander the gallery, taking time to enjoy each painting one by one. Your mother seems to notice how much you’re lingering, and she comes over to stand beside you.
“What do you think?”
The painting you stand before depicts a path through trees. The main subject of the painting appears to be the way the branches cut the sky into tiny shapes, and the glimpses of an afternoon sun through the twigs looks like a stained glass window and coaxes the trees into improbable rainbow colors. The tops of buildings are visible through the trees, and the sky is streaked with the familiar purple shimmers that you’ve never seen the sky without.
“I think this one’s my favorite,” you say.
“All those exotic places and you still like the look of Insomnia best, huh?”
“Guess so,” you laugh. And a minute later, after some consideration, you say, “I think I’d like to buy a print of this one, actually”
She looks at you.
You suppress the urge to fidget. “What?”
She folds her arms. “I think this is the first time you’ve ever asked for one.”
“I really like this one.”
“What about it do you like?” The lilt in her voice makes you double-check her expression. Sure enough, she’s looking at you with a smile and a raised eyebrow. It’s the expression of someone who wants to be impressed.
Hmm.
You look back to the painting, considering, and you speak. You talk about how color and shapes evoke the subject without being overly descriptive, and about the efficacy of impasto to create additional dynamism. You talk about the contrast of saturation, and hard edges versus soft ones, and the ways they affect the composition, and the energy of the loose, impressionistic style. You talk about how the dazzling nature of this otherwise mundane scene reminds you to look for the beauty in all things, and to appreciate simple wonders like the sun checkering the grass on a warm day.
You look back at your mother. She’s quiet for a second, looking at you with eyes glinting and her chest swelling with pride. “Good answer,” she says at last and pats your arm. “I’ll set one aside for you.”
Art by Erin Hanson, edited
Memory 2 - Ronin Year
“Try not to take it too hard,” your father says, pulling up a weed. “Just think about what you’re going to do next.”
It’s been about twenty-four hours since you got your entrance exam scores back, and not taking it hard is still a struggle. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much if you hadn’t fallen short by such a narrow margin. How many more right answers would it have taken to get the score you needed? Five? ...One?
It’s unseasonably warm today. You’re sitting at a glass and wrought-iron table, still wearing your school uniform. Your physics homework is spread out in front of you, ignored.
You sigh. “All the schools with the sports programs are also the ones that have the best...everything else. I didn’t even make the cut-off for my third choice.” You lean back and stare at the sky. It’s unreasonably blue today, and you occasionally see distant waves of purple shimmers glinting off the edges of the nearly-invisible hexagonal panes in the sky. “I don’t know what other disciplines I want to focus on.... Makes it hard to choose.”
You hear the rhythmic chock of a trowel turning up the dirt as your father prepares the beds for spring.
“Taking a year off isn’t so bad,” he says. “You can try the exams again next winter, and get some work experience in the meantime.” He peeks his head up from behind the plants to look at you. The crow’s feet in the corners of his eyes are coming in, and the hair on top of his head is going out, but his face is round and gentle. “I did that too, you know. I didn’t even consider business school when I was seventeen, but getting a job over the summer gave me some direction that I didn’t have fresh out of school. Maybe something like that will happen for you, too.”
“Maybe,” you say. A purple shimmer briefly ripples against the sky and vanishes. “...There have been some Kingsglaive recruiters coming by the school lately. Apparently you can get a pretty good education, and the pay’s really good.”
Your father is quiet for a moment, hidden again behind the plants. There’s the sound of a particularly stubborn root popping free. “Think really carefully about that one.”
“I dunno. Maybe I’d be good at it, since I’m better at athletic stuff anyway.” You lean with your elbow on the table, cheek in hand. “Plus, I’d get to use magic. That’d be really cool... Anyway, they say that the skills you learn are competitive in the job market, so maybe I could use that to get something better later on. ...I don’t know.”
“Well, you still have some time before you have to make any decisions. There’s nothing wrong with getting a job and saving up while you think about it.”
“That’s true.” You tap your pencil against your homework. “I’ll give it some more thought.”
Behind you, the door to the house slides open and your mother peeks out. “I made some tea,” she says. “Would either of you like any?”
“Yes, please,” you and your father say in unison.
“Come help me, please, Shen?”
“Sure,” you reply.
You take off your sandals at the door and step into the dining room. It’s spacious and spotless, a Western style room with hardwood floors and paintings on the walls. There are fresh-cut flowers in a vase on the table, courtesy of your dad, always, no matter the season.
You follow your mother into the kitchen and get the tea cups out of the cabinet. “What kind is it?”
“Black tea with rose and cardamom.” Once the cups are on the counter, she begins to fill them one by one. “It’s a new blend. Tell me what you think.”
You take a cup between your palms and draw it close. The tea is a deep maroon against the porcelain. It smells like the garden on the hottest days of summer, when the air is heavy with the scent of flowers and the drone of cicadas. You take a sip and the flavor is smooth, both sweet like petals and spicy with the citrus-mint flavor of cardamom. It’s complex. “Is there vanilla in this too?”
“Yes, just a bit! Do you like it?”
“It’s excellent.”
She smiles all the way up to her eyes. “Take this one to your dad, please,” she says, handing you another cup.
You carry both cups of tea back out to the garden, sliding the door open with one stocking foot and slipping into your garden shoes as you step back onto the patio.
“Tea,” you say.
Your dad emerges from behind a cloud of winter flowers. “Ah, thank you,” he says, standing as his knees pop, brushing the dirt off his pants.
He shuffles over to the table to where you’ve put his tea, then takes a sip. His gaze turns inward for a moment, putting flavors together. “Rose and… cardamom?" He takes another sip. "Mmm, that's good."
He takes a seat at the table with you, and your mother joins you a moment later with a plate of cookies. The three of you admire the garden together and talk about lighthearted things, and you find that the disappointment over your test scores is a little easier to push away for now. In this moment, with your family beside you, a cup of tea in your hands, and a beautiful blue sky overhead, everything is good.
Memory 3 - Twice is a Coincidence
By 9:17 am you’ve already delivered forty-six parcels. You switch the itinerary on your GPS to today’s pickup route and turn up the music on the radio.
The morning finds you in one of the outer wards of Insomnia. The streets are narrow here, flanked by old cement buildings with flaking paint and weathered street signs. There’s less traffic than downtown, though, so you’re making good time today.
The GPS directs you down a cramped side-street, where you find the address that matches the one on your screen. It’s a tiny bakery with a lavender awning, under a stack of apartments with laundry drying on the balconies. There’s no space for parking here, so you pull your van up onto the sliver of sidewalk to get as much of it out of the road as possible, enough to allow room for other cars to pass.
As you grab your handheld scanner and poke at the settings to prepare for the pickup, you can see yourself. You’re wearing a white and green polo and matching slacks, and there’s an orange logo of a bird in flight on your breast pocket. The skin on your arms is lightly tanned and free of scars.
You slip out of your van and into the bakery, which smells of coffee and bread, and all the self-service racks that line the walls are laden with all sorts of fresh pastries of every shape and flavor. Your stomach perks up, even though you still have a few hours before lunch.
The short, scrawny teenager at the counter has a soft face and hard eyes. His ears are pierced with a stud in one and two dangling gold earrings on the other, and his head is shaved on both sides, leaving a stripe of long black hair down the middle, currently pulled back into a knot at the back of his neck. He’s wearing a pastel lavender apron, and he’s cleaning an espresso machine. His small hands have scarred knuckles and look like they’ve seen their share of labor, despite the boy’s age.
“Morning,” you say. Nothing else is really necessary -- your uniform makes it clear what you’re here for.
“Mm,” he says, giving you a slightly too-long evaluating look with eyes as green as moss after the rain. Then he turns away.
A moment later, he returns to you with stack of pink boxes, each taped up tight and sealed with a pre-printed packing label. You scan the labels on the boxes and have him sign the touchscreen on the scanner, then you thank him and that’s the end of your interaction.
As you load the van, the memory begins to speed up, as if it’s being fast-forwarded into a time-lapse sequence. You do another thirty pickups in the same ward, most of them from businesses. It’s repetitive work -- scan, pack, scan, pack, scan, pack. You sing along to the radio in the space between pickups, but (mercifully) the recording is playing too fast to actually hear any of it.
The trip back to the depot is a montage of highways and bridges and sprawling urban landscapes, skyscrapers packed right up to the edges of giant cliffs and waterfronts. Every inch of land is covered in parks or concrete. Through the gaps in the skyline, you can see glimpses of the enormous gray wall that holds the city in.
art by Mike Molnar, lightly edited
Still in fast-forward, you unload your van at the depot, pick up your next load of parcels, and review your new itinerary as you hastily eat the lunch you brought from home. Seconds later, you’re back on the freeway, heading back toward the outer wards, not too far from where you were that morning. This area’s a little farther out, a little more cramped, a little more shabby. The buildings are worn down, devouring each other like weeds fighting for light.
art by Paul Chadeisson
Your itinerary is full and you have a very busy afternoon. Box after box after another eighty-odd boxes exit your van. As you prepare to deliver a bubble mailer full of what feels like three pounds of paper, the memory abruptly slows back down to regular speed.
You step out of your van and into a shady-looking law firm, parcel in hand.
Instead of coffee, this place smells like cigarettes and flopsweat. There are a couple broken-down chairs along the wall and a faded, dusty plastic tree in the corner. In the center of the room is a reception desk, overflowing with papers and open books.
The receptionist is the same short, scrawny teenager from the bakery, but this time he’s wearing a teal dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows and hair hanging down the left side of his face like a black curtain. He appears to be too busy for you, as he is currently shouting at a man with ill-fitting clothes, a tattoo on the back of his head, and at least triple the boy’s mass.
You may have, in fact, arrived at a bad time.
You stand there awkwardly while the receptionist and the client scream at each other. At some point the teenager smacks the client in the chest with a folder full of papers, and instead of punching him, the client snatches the folder out of the boy’s hand. The air feels electrified as they stare each other down…
...then the client turns and pushes past you. He slams open the door and he’s gone.
You look back to the receptionist. The agitation is already draining from his body language, like it’s just another fucking day at the bullshit factory. He gives you another evaluating look with those too-hard eyes, but his lips quirk up at the corner, wry.
“You again.”
He holds his hand out to you so you can put the scanner in it. So you do.
...
In this memory, the boy is a stranger you have only met that day. But your present self, looking in on this sliver of the past, recognizes him. He’s younger here, and his face and arms are free of the scars he wears today, but it’s definitely, absolutely him.
Thorn.
Memory 4 - Solstice
You’re lounging on one end of an enormous, navy-blue, L-shaped sectional couch. You have a blanket over your legs, and your feet (clad in a brand-new pair of ludicrously colorful wooly socks) are up on the ottoman. You’ve been here for a while, having tea and sponge cake while watching stand-up comedy on TV. You’re comfortable, full, and a little sleepy. Everything is good.
Your mother and father are on the other end of the couch. They look a little different than they did in your last memory. Your mother has a different haircut, and your father is a little more bald.
In the middle of the couch is Thorn. He's changed, too. Though he’s still small, he’s put on some healthy weight. You can actually detect the edges of the muscles in his exposed forearms. He’s still missing the scars he wears in the present, and at the moment he’s wearing a pair of colorful socks that match yours.
He’s reclined, sinking into the couch cushions. The family cat -- a pale gray, spotted thing -- is draped up his chest, purring loudly into his chin. He has to keep petting her with both hands or she’ll put her paw on his face to remind him to keep going.
The whole scene is peaceful and comfortable. You’re very relaxed.
The clock hits the hour and credits start to roll on the show you’ve been watching. Thorn peels the cat off his chest and sets her down on the couch, then climbs to his feet.
“I should start heading home before the trains stop running,” he says.
“Oh?” says your father, stretching, “Are you sure? You’re welcome to spend the night if you want.”
“...I don’t want to impose,” says Thorn.
“You’re not imposing, we’re happy to have you,” says your mother, gathering up her dishes from the coffee table.
“Yeah, c’mon, stay,” you add. “We can go back to the dorm together in the morning.” Peer pressure.
Thorn turns to look at you with an expression of stifled confusion. “...I didn’t bring anything with me,” he says.
“We have enough to share,” says your mother. “You can sleep in Shen’s old room.”
“Then where will he sleep?”
“I'll just take the couch,” you say. “It’s big enough.”
He hesitates, silent.
“I have some old nightclothes you can wear,” you say, shoving the blanket aside and getting to your feet. “C’mon.”
Thorn’s quiet and his expression is hidden behind that curtain of hair. He pauses for a minute before obediently following you out of the living room.
You see a brief tour of your house as you lead Thorn to your old room -- everything’s tidy and warm and Western-style, with paintings on the walls and the occasional small sculpture in places where they can be admired. The dining room table is covered with the tablecloth and runner that’s reserved for special occasions; the kitchen is full of the leftovers the four of you weren’t able to eat -- roast kujata, potatoes, vegetables, salad, bread rolls, sponge cake with strawberries and whipped cream, the works.
On the wall by the base of the stairs, there’s a large painting of a carp jumping up a waterfall. Your room is upstairs, first door to the left. It’s cold inside. It’s been mostly used for storage since you moved out, but all your stuff is where you left it. There’s a shelf on the wall with a modest number of trophies and medals. There are posters for video games and sexy motorcycles on the walls. There’s a small TV in the corner with some old video game systems bundled up underneath.
You start going through some boxes of clothes, looking for the one that has something resembling pajamas.
“You should sleep in your own bed,” Thorn says. “I can take the couch.”
“No way. Guests take the bed. It’s the rules.”
“I don’t want the bed.”
“Too bad, I already have dibs on the couch.”
“Not if I take the couch first.”
“We’ll see,” you say.
“Suri--”
You cut him off by handing him a soft shirt and a pair of sweatpants. He stops talking, and it’s really unclear what his face is doing -- or not doing. There’s a careful lack of expression there, and he mutters his thanks.
When you get back downstairs, your mother has rounded up a towel and washcloth for Thorn to use in the morning, as well as a spare toothbrush, still in the package -- one of the ones reserved for guests in case of such an occasion.
It is, in fact, pretty late. Your parents don’t stay up much longer. You hug them both and they head upstairs.
You and Thorn, however, can stay up as long as you want. Neither of you have anywhere to be tomorrow; you both got military leave at the same time through some kind of Solstice miracle.
You get some extra blankets for the couch while Thorn changes in the bathroom. He comes back drowning in your clothes. He’s rolled up the sleeves and pant legs, pulled the drawstring on his waist as tight as it will go. The collar hangs low and he looks like a child. But he’s got his head tipped back and he’s jutting his chin; you know better by now than to say anything.
You wind up playing video games with the sound turned low and watching stand-up until late in the night. The cat gets back in Thorn’s lap, which he seems to like. At some point, you both fall asleep on opposite ends of the L-shaped couch and neither of you makes it to the bedroom.
Memory 5 - Visiting Hours
Preliminary peace talks have begun. The Citadel is thrumming with activity, tense and electric. Lucis has been losing this war against Niflheim for nearly four hundred years, and now that the Capitol is the last stronghold left, Niflheim is here to talk about a ceasefire.
Lucis has a lot to gain, but even more to lose.
The government is putting up a strong front this week. Everyone in the Citadel has broken out their finest ceremonial attire, and every member of the Kingsglaive is working extra hours, even greenhorns like you.
You’ve spent twelve hours at attention outside of doorways today, providing security detail for minor nobles and diplomatic aides as they flesh out trade deals in cavernous and richly ornamented meeting rooms.
Your expression is the picture of disciplined neutrality. Nobody looking at you would be able to tell that you’re wound like a spring. Nor would anybody be able to tell how very, very armed you are. But most importantly, nobody would be able to tell that there’s apprehension in your secret heart that’s been gnawing at your ribcage the entire day, which has nothing to do with work or politics. Your mind worries at it like a loose tooth. The closer you get to quitting time, the harder it is to tamp it down.
When your shift is finally over, you catch your reflection in the locker room mirror as you prepare to leave. You’re still a young adult in this memory, but your face is more angular than it was before. The Kingsglaive uniform you wear is perfectly tailored for your wide shoulders and broad chest. It’s the finest uniform you’ve ever worn, both in quality and status.
You don’t bother changing into your civies today because you’re in a hurry; you merely shuck your uniform jacket and replace it with the expensive wool coat from your locker. This is enough to communicate you’re off duty.
You throw your uniform jacket over your arm, grab the brown paper bag from the floor of your locker, and head out through a staff entrance out the side of the building. As you leave, you look up at the sky. It’s evening already, overcast and heavy.
The building you just left behind looks shockingly like the Game Tower of Tokyo-F, but with four towers instead of two. Between them, a jet of purple light extends like a pillar holding up the sky. At the top, brushing the underside of the cloud layer, the light blooms horizontally in every direction, spreading into a rippling sheet of magic like water flowing out over an invisible umbrella, to create the dome under which all of Insomnia is safe.
You turn your back on the Citadel, make your way out through the security checkpoints, and into the city. On a normal day you’d take the train back to the dorm or wander into town to blow some money at the arcade, but today you hail a taxi and head in a different direction with a bit more sense of urgency.
The taxi picks its way through narrow, crowded streets. It weaves under overpasses and down through several stratas of urban development. The weak light of the sky struggles to reach this place, but even in the dark, it’s still busy. Insomnia never sleeps.
At your destination, you pay your fare and thank the driver, then head in through the wide double doors of the Crown City Royal Military Hospital.
You sign in at the front desk. The receptionist hands you a visitor’s badge, which you pin to your uniform shirt as a nurse escorts you down the hall. She stops in front of one of the doors, knocks, and slips inside. You wait in the hall by yourself until she opens the door again and invites you in.
And there he is, looking tiny and frail, tangled in blankets and wires and tubes: Thorn.
He’s paper-white, with dark eyes and sunken cheeks and vivid red lines criss-crossing his features, angry and fresh. He barely resembles the version of himself that deployed two weeks ago.
His expression’s a mixture of bone-deep exhaustion and boredom, but his eyes soften when he sees you, and the corners of his mouth tug upward, just a bit. “Hey,” he says. His voice is raspy and thin.
You pull up a chair and sit at his bedside. “Hey,” you say. “You still look like garbage.”
“Oh, fuck off,” he says, but his smile gets a little bigger.
“I brought some stuff to keep you busy,” you say, digging the paper bag on your lap. “First,” you pull out a book, “this came out while you were gone, so hopefully you haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I’m under the impression you like this author, since you’ve already read everything she’s ever written at least twice.”
The only reason you’re able to keep your voice from wobbling today is because you already got it out of your system yesterday, when you saw him for the first time since they brought him home. He’d been back for days before you found out, which was just the same -- he’d been in and out of surgery so much he wouldn’t have remembered you anyway. Even still, you wish you had been there.
You kept it together for the duration of the visit yesterday, but only just.
Today is better.
You put the book on his lap. A thin arm, just as sliced up as his face, snakes out from under the covers and picks it up so he can read the title. “Cool,” he says. “Thanks.”
“But wait,” you say, “there’s more.”
The second item you pull out of the bag is a brand new Nintendi 3DX, still in the box. You got the one with the metallic teal case. You’ll never admit it, but you had to go to four different stores to find this color in stock.
You hold out the console. Thorn just narrows his eyes at you.
“Listen.” You put it on his lap, and Thorn frowns at it over his book. “There’s this game, okay, where you collect monsters and raise them to fight each other. No, shut up, listen, it’s really fun. There are like eight hundred monsters to collect but there are two different versions of the game, and each version only has some of the monsters. So you can’t collect them all unless you trade with a friend.”
He’s looking at you again now, still squinting a little, but his eyebrows have crept up a little higher.
You pull the game out of the bag -- the compliment to the version you have -- and hold it out to him. “C’mon, man, you have a ton of free time right now. Help me out.”
He just stares at you.
...Then he reaches out and takes the game.
Memory 6 - The Fall
It’s a beautiful afternoon. A red carpet spills down the Citadel steps to the throng gathered in the inner plaza, which is open to the public for this special occasion. The whole thing is packed.
Giant screens mounted around the plaza show a live broadcast of the historic moment unfolding inside the Citadel. The scene on the monitors shows the Grand Hall, with high, barrel-vaulted ceilings and massive windows. A congregation of Niflheim’s visiting politicians are on one side of the hall and the King’s council is on the other, all decorated in their finest ceremonial robes.
At the far end of the room, King Regis and Emperor Iedolas sit side-by-side on matching thones. It almost looks like a wedding, but instead of an altar, they sit at an ornate table before a peace treaty that will, once signed, end nearly four hundred years of war between Lucis and Niflheim.
Today you are stationed in the plaza with a few other lower-ranked Kingsglaives. There are a dozen or so Crownsguards here as well, dressed head to toe in riot armor. All of you watch the crowd for signs of hostility or dissent, for anyone who looks abnormally anxious or might be hiding a weapon. But so far everything has been peaceful.
On the screens, the camera zooms in on the treaty where a pen hovers over it, ready to sign.
Then, several things happen at once:
There’s a sound of gunfire and breaking glass from inside the Citadel. Your earpiece blasts to life with engagement orders and cries for reinforcements. On the screen, you see every politician in the Grand Hall summon their weapons, each with its own flash of brilliant white light.
Someone in the crowd screams. People begin to panic and scramble away from the Citadel, shoving and shouting as they surge toward the exits.
You are trained for this, and your duty is to get the crowd out of here safely. So you get to work, directing people toward exits, breaking up bottlenecks so nobody gets crushed.
Less than a minute later, the roof of the Citadel explodes.
They took out the Crystal.
Without it, the entire magic dome over the city disintegrates with a sound like the ending of worlds.
In seconds, Niflheim dropships descend on the now-unprotected city.
You grasp at the empty air and, in a flash of light, there’s a lance in your hand. You haul it back and throw it like a javelin. Right before impact, you pull yourself after it, warping forward as if pulled by a rubber band. The world smears itself around you and instantly you’re clutching your lance again, and you’re airborne. When it slams through the Niflheim soldier, it has your full inertia behind it.
This is the first time you’ve ever killed someone.
But it isn’t the last.
=====
Without the shield to protect it, the city fills with invaders. They bring their gunships and magitech armors -- large, bipedal exoskeletons with machine guns and rocket launchers -- and mow down everything that moves.
This isn’t even a massacre, it’s an extermination.
Your first priority is to defend the evacuation routes. You fight, you get injured. You clench a fist to summon a green flash of magic to chase the wounds from your flesh, and you continue.
As evening falls, daemons boil up from the shadows for the first time in centuries. They’re small ones at first, bat-winged and spider-like, screeching and snapping and grotesque. But bigger ones aren’t far behind, crawling out from the deeper levels of the city. The claustrophobic streets and labyrinth of overpasses become a death trap.
In each hand you wield a gigantic shuriken. You whip them forward, one after the other. After each impact, they blink back into your hand, ready to be thrown again.
You’ve nearly finished sawing through this particular pack of daemons when your shuriken doesn’t recall the way you expect. A daemon bites the arm that ought to have a weapon in it by now, and its shark-like teeth sink straight through the reinforced fabric of your uniform and into your skin.
You tear the daemon in half with your other shuriken and cast a healing spell.
But this magic doesn’t come, either.
You try again, and a third time, but it’s gone. Your magic is gone.
If your magic is gone, it means the King has died, and all the magic in Lucis has died with him.
=====
You don’t know where it came from, but there is a daemon in the city beyond anything you could have ever imagined.
You flee, taking along as many citizens as you can find. You fight back the monsters that attack from all sides. You help navigate around the rubble. You can’t warp or heal or summon your other weapons.
The dead are everywhere.
You flee.
=====
Twelve enormous statues of the past Kings of Lucis have come to life throughout the city.
You have no idea what’s happening any more.
=====
You run, and run, and run.
You’ve lost a lot of civilians, but picked up many more.
The whole world is humming with the sound of Dreadnought-class airships. They’ve brought in more of those titanic daemons from before -- you’ve seen at least four of them now.
The statues seem to be able to warp the way you no longer can, and they fight the daemons like they're characters in a robot vs. kaiju movie. But the statues seem more about attacking the daemons than defending the city. They tear the town apart like it’s something cheap, converting your home into gravel and fire.
You escort your group of civilians toward the edge of the city. You run, and run, and run.
They die, and die, and die.
=====
On the miles-long bridge between Insomnia and the mainland, the power finally goes out, plunging you all into darkness. Daemons come out of everywhere. You can’t see a thing, so you fight them blind.
Everyone is screaming.
=====
Your first impression of the world outside the city walls is shadowy silhouettes against the pale pink sky. You hoped to visit this place someday, but this isn’t how you imagined you’d do it.
Light is crawling back into the world, and the daemons are finally crawling back out, slithering into the ground like spilled oil.
Every inch of you is spattered with sweat, blood, and ichor. You barely feel the sting of pain across your face because everything else hurts so much more. Your right sleeve is wet and clingy from the elbow down, and your fingers don’t work. Your right boot -- once leather and metal armor up to the knee -- is shredded and nearly useless, not unlike your leg itself.
There are civilians here. You managed to keep at least some of them alive.
You’re exhausted.
Now you’re lying in the dirt, but you don’t remember how you got here.
Your hearing goes out, and your vision isn’t far behind. The last thing you see is the sun rising over the smoking hole that used to be Insomnia.
Memory 7 - Immigration Papers
Altissia. The Jewel of Accordo. The City on the Sea.
You always fantasized about coming here someday.
In your fantasy, though, you were happy about it.
It’s beautiful... probably. It’s hard to tell from here, behind a chain link fence topped with coils of razor wire, where you’re still trapped at the port like cargo endlessly awaiting inspection. But across the water, the city gleams in the afternoon light, all white marble and red tile roofs. You can almost make out the ornate architecture you know is there, or the golden domes, world-famous sculptures of Messengers with sweeping robes and graceful wings. Occasionally you catch glimpses of gondolas, ferrying passengers from island to island before disappearing back into the labyrinth of canals between the buildings.
click to embiggen
The sky is achingly blue, bare without those curtains of purple light. It's cold and vulnerable like a model posing for a painting. Instead of a wall, the city is hemmed by natural stone formations and sheets of water. From the other side of the compound, looking the other direction, you can even see a few degrees of horizon. It might be one of the weirdest things you’ve ever seen. It’s as if the world gets to a certain point and just... stops.
Feels like a metaphor.
The sound of shouting snaps you out of of your navel-gazing. Dock workers -- grown men, older than you -- are back again to yell slurs and throw garbage into the camp. Fortunately, they can’t get over the fence any more than you can, so you don’t need to give them any of what little energy you have left. But you wish that the tin cans they were throwing at you still had food in them, at least. You’ve eaten nothing but compressed wheat biscuit rations for the last three weeks.
Probably doesn’t matter. Your body’s hungry but you have no appetite anyway.
You peel yourself away from the noise and start hobbling over to the immigration office, even though your appointment isn’t for another few hours.
It’s slow going. Your new scars feel tight and sore. Physical therapy distracts you from your thoughts a little, so you’ve been keeping at it -- you’re able to stay on your feet longer these days, and you’re finally walking again, even if you still can’t do it without a crutch. You’ve also regained some use of your right hand, though not much.
Without magic to sweep away your injuries, you have to heal the old fashioned way.
It’s a long wait in a plastic chair in the immigration office. You don’t have anything to do but pick at the holes of your ill-fitting clothes. Like everything else, they don’t feel like they’re yours. Your clothes were cut from your body as you were slipping in and out of consciousness when you got here. However, after considerable effort afterward, you were able to pick through enough garbage to locate your socks. They were brightly-colored and stripy once, but now they’re mismatched -- despite your best efforts, the one you wore on your right foot will forever be a rusty brown.
You’re wearing them anyway, though.
Eventually, the receptionist calls your name and you meet with your caseworker. She goes over your paperwork and hands you the documents you’ll need to leave this place, hopefully to find job and somewhere new to sleep that isn’t a mat on the floor of a warehouse, surrounded by several hundred other desperate, broken strangers.
The photo on your new ID card shows an unfamiliar, hollow-eyed man with unkempt hair and an angry red slash across his nose and cheek.
He looks dead inside.
That part, at least, is recognizable.
Memory 8 - Search
The internet cafe is tiny and cramped, tucked into a side street along one of the smaller canals. It’s dirty and smells of cigarettes, but it’s cheap.
It feels strange to be here this early in the morning. Normally you’d be at the shipyard this time of day, getting your gloves and hardhat back on at the end of your lunch break. Or you’d be prepping a gondola, getting ready to start your 9 am shift. You’re almost never not working at this hour.
Turns out, getting fired really frees up your morning.
You know why it happened, this time -- you still haven’t fully recovered from your injuries, even though it’s been a few months now. Your arm is too weak to reliably lift the heavy cargo. Your limp makes you slow and unstable on the rolling deck of the ships. The crashing noises and large moving shapes in the half-light of dawn give you panic attacks that lead to mistakes that throw off the schedule.
As your former coworkers let you know in no uncertain terms, immigrants like you are ruining this country. Every one of your failures was proof you didn’t belong here. But you have nowhere else to go, and you still need to eat. So you’re here now, at the internet cafe, applying for every job you’re qualified for and even more that you aren’t.
Hopefully your next job will have fewer loud noises.
Today’s afternoon shift with the gondolas starts in just a few hours, but the constant practice of looking for work has made you fast at it, at least. You send out a few dozen applications before you need to think about heading out.
Before you go, you navigate to the online Survivor’s Registry, as you always do whenever you find yourself at a computer. It’s been a few months and fewer names are being added these days, and compared to the population of Insomnia, the list is hundreds of thousands too short. You added your name as soon as you could, back at the refugee camp, in case anyone out there is looking for you.
But nobody is.
You search for your friends and family one by one, hoping this time their names will have appeared on the list of survivors -- hoping they’re safe, that they escaped somehow.
Thorn’s name isn’t there, still.
Neither are your parents.
Your neighbors.
Anyone from school or work.
You search until you run out of names to look for.
Nothing, still.
On a news site, you find an article with new photos of the recovery efforts in what used to be downtown Insomnia. This photo depicts a skyline with gaps in it like missing teeth; this one shows a giant hole in the ground piercing several layers of city; this one’s a train station that looks relatively intact, but behind it is an ocean of gravel where a neighborhood used to be.
...You pause your scrolling.
You recognize the train station. It's intimately familiar -- a place you visited twice a day on your way to and from school; the place where you met up with friends to do things on the weekends; the place with the arcade and your favorite ramen shop.
From where this photo was taken, you used to be able to see a neighborhood, all tightly packed houses with tile roofs and little gardens around them. You know every detail of that neighborhood between the train station and your house.
But now all that’s left is a wasteland, flat and burned and twisted, crushed completely flat. There isn’t a single thing left.
You’d seen aerial shots of the damage, so you already knew, in an abstract sort of way. But this photo is personal to a degree you weren’t prepared for, and hits you all afresh.
-----
You keep it together, at first. But on the way back to the shelter, you duck into a narrow alley so you can lose it a little in private.
You thought you would run out of tears at some point, but you never do. The weight of the people you miss is crushing, so painful you feel like your insides are dying.
You weep, wiping at your face and trying to breathe. You don’t have time for this. You have to pull it together and go to work.
You can’t afford to get fired twice in one day.
Notes:
- The scenery outside, while he's walking through the streets, strongly resembles Venice.
- Cobalt walks with a limp, here.
- This memory is confirmation that his home was destroyed, and Thorn and his family are almost certainly dead.
Memory 9 - Lost and Found
You’ve almost made it to another morning.
As soon as you dredge up the energy, you’ll crawl out of the corner you’ve wedged yourself into, pull aside the scrap of sheet metal you put over the entrance of the half-collapsed shed you’ve been hiding in, and try again to find something to eat.
In a minute, though.
You’re exhausted. You didn’t sleep again last night; the Things outside were too close and too loud and entirely too persistent. You sat, still and quiet, coiled like a spring with a dagger in each hand, ready for the moment they’d break in and you’d have to throw down to save your own life.
Now the sun is dragging itself up through the sick haze on the horizon. Soon the things of the night will settle down, and the only thing you’ll have to watch out for is the wildlife, which is just as hungry and desperate as you.
Just five more minutes. Then you’ll pretend you’re not so cold that you gave up shivering. You’ll pretend you’re not stiff from the tension of a night that was much longer than nature ever intended. You’ll pretend the last thing you put in your stomach wasn’t rainwater from an old tin can, sour and discolored as the rain itself, that you found two days ago.
You stare at the dirt and blood flaked on your skin, willing yourself to at least wipe it off. The wounds are gone -- you erase them almost as fast as you collect them -- but they still seem to ache, somehow, and the effort of healing them leaves you even more drained. You are still criss-crossed with scars that are too old to fix.
There are noises outside from the wild things that have already started their day. Grumbles like engines and the crunch of dead plants. You hold your breath and freeze a little longer -- that’s fine, you have the energy for this much, at least. But your ears are straining, trying to map their positions.
As they approach your hiding place, you realize the things outside aren’t walking on four legs, or eight, or seventy. Just two apiece. You listen harder. Yeah, just two legs, and gait that sounds like yours.
It motivates you to roll onto your hands and knees in a way your hunger didn’t. You clamber to the door and you don’t even care that you’re shaking. You have to put down one of your daggers to grip the sheet metal, and as you wrap your fingers around it, all at once it gets yanked away from the other side. The dim light is blinding after so much darkness; you recoil back into the shed, an arm in front of your eyes.
There’s a shout of surprise and a clatter of metal on dirt.
“Fuck, you scared the shit out of me!” says a woman you don’t recognize. She’s muscular and square-jawed, her brown hair pulled back into a tail. She’s wearing an armored vest and combat boots and dirt.
“Six,” she says, looking you over. “How long have you been out here?”
You peek at her from around your arm. “...I don’t—,” you manage. Your voice sounds raspy.
“You look like shit. What’s your name?”
You open your mouth to tell her, but your name doesn’t come. Your throat works, soundlessly. You can feel your eyes water with the effort of trying to think of an answer.
You shut your mouth.
She looks at you for a moment, then looks cross. “Ah, shit.” she hisses. “C’mere.” She strides toward you before you get yourself together enough to react, and she tugs back the collar of your tanktop, looking for a dog tag. You don’t have one. You’re not sure you ever did.
Finding nothing, she grabs your hand -- the one holding the knife, and pulls it closer. She wipes the dirt off the blade and squints at the engraving. She looks back at you.
“Are these yours? ‘Ascensuri Cataracta’...” She taps at the engraving. “Is this your name?”
You look at her helplessly. “...I dunno,” you say. And it’s true. You don’t remember how long you’ve had these or where you got them. You don’t know if they’re yours or not. You don’t know if that’s your name.
She frowns at you for a moment, then looks resigned. “C’mon,” she says with a sigh. She turns and moves out of the entrance of the shed.
You pick up your other dagger and follow her out. In the dim gray light, you can see three others besides the woman, all filthy and armed with machetes, and all of them are watching you. Even being this close to other people feels surreal.
“Toby!” the woman shouts, and one of them -- presumably Toby -- trots over, looking you up and down.
“Who’s this?” he says.
“A Glaive,” says the woman.
“Gods damn, another one?” He looks at you even harder. “Do you remember anything? Shit, how long have you been out here?”
You still don’t know. You look at the ground.
“Fine.” He says, finally. “Let’s get you out of here.”