Archive of Our Own

He dreams of her ghost for decades before she arrives, in occasional interludes between nightmares of Sin Eaters overrunning the Crystarium, and Black Rose spreading from the Source to the First. Nothing so worrisome as hallucinations. Nothing as sinister as malicious illusions spawned by either the Tower or Ascian interference. Stress and exhaustion account for their fair share of night terrors in any being which partakes of sleep; Raha can at least count himself lucky enough to remain among that classification.

She is as disheveled as ever in these dreams, the orchid strands of her hair tied back into messy loops, her tunic snagging on the scales of her throat. She is a kaleidoscope of gold and silver and purple, a creature of metal and jewels, of unyielding sharpness. Unlike reality, Raha has no fear of freely showing her affection here. He wraps his fingers around hers, leaning against her to feel the warmth of her shoulder pressing into his. He cups his hand against her head and lets himself be lost in the illusion of it all as they simply exist together, content and protected from all the tragedies which might part them again.

"Don't leave me yet," he always tells her, when he feels the distant intrusion of the waking world beginning to corrode his sleep. 

"Raha," she reminds him, looking at him with a meticulous pragmatism that has stared down Primals and warmachina alike, "I am already dead."

When the Warrior finally arrives on the Source, Raha spends more time than he would like to admit reminding himself that none of it is a fantasy. 

She is no less diminished for being revived from the dead, and part of him wonders if she should be: that proximity to her fate might have affected her in some manner, and she would have been a wan ghost with even less of her soul intact than the Scions. They had been similarly restored to life -- to life and to fury upon finding themselves in Raha's company while a war had been raging hot around them. Unlike Thancred, Raha's call had not come at opportune times. It does not go unmissed that he could have killed all the Scions in the very process of attempting to save them. 

But the Warrior takes to her sudden displacement with as little concern as a merchant taking a chocobo carriage from Gridania to Quarrymill, a giddy tempest of energy packed inside a delicate frame which is terrifyingly prone to bruising and stumbling down stairwells. She is clumsy, small in stature even for an au ra. Even her crooked spectacles are the same: a battered, slightly askew pair that she had worn back in Mor Dhona, complaining about how the goldsmiths in Ul'dah must have never fitted a customer who had horns instead of ears before. 

She pays no better heed to her body's vulnerabilities either, eating rarely and sleeping less, the glint of her eyes accompanied by a bloodshot squint of exhaustion. Her physical form is a token inconvenience that she wears like a hand-me-down tunic, complaining about how short her legs are and the inadequate reach of her arms. She ignores its limitations, insisting on traveling everywhere she can reach on the Source -- as if the entire world is a path that she must walk in order to learn it, proving to herself that the territory exists in more ways than mere lines scrawled upon a map.

It makes it only fractionally easier to endure as Raha watches her aether become steadily corrupted by the Light, sliding inevitably towards the monstrous transformation that has driven more than one Crystarium resident to end their lives early rather than experience it. The Warrior cares so little for herself that she would regard sprouting wings with more curiosity than horror. Even as she bears the Light upon her, she bears it as pain alone.

Afterwards, she sheds it as one might dry themselves after a rainstorm, and steps forward as if she had never weathered such a terrible burden at all, laughing away any questions as to her health. She is as unruffled as the very first time Raha had ever seen her: a slender figure shadowed by the boughs overhanging Urth's Gift, book in her hand, egi floating at her side.

She is no less diminished, and that means she asks all the terrible questions.

"I swore I heard the Ascians mention that they needed but one more Calamity -- one more Rejoining, rather -- to revive their god. That Rejoining succeeded in your time. And still there was no Zodiark, no great towers of Amaurot restored. No Ascian paradise. Had they miscounted?" 

Raha, clambering down a ladder with three books in his arms, risks a glance over to where the Warrior is munching on a piece of bread, surrounded by an array of scrolls and papers assessing the stability of linear history. "There is little record of them after the Eighth Umbral Calamity," he remarks, surprised at his own lack of information. Even with decades to consider the subject, he had not spared the Ascians in that timeline much thought; daily survival on the Source had taken precedence, which had quickly been replaced by daily survival on the First.

Now that she mentions it, however, it seems strange for their adversaries to have been so absent. "Mayhap the Light had reinforced Hydaelyn's strength in an unexpected manner," he suggests, descending another shaky step, "and our foes were forced to require a ninth shard instead?"

The Warrior frowns up at him, still visibly unimpressed by the available facts. Impatient for the tomes in his hands, she scrambles off her chair and hastens to the ladder's base, stretching up her hands like a child waiting for sweets. "If so, then any on the Source with Her blessing would have been that much stronger as well, I'd imagine. Ardbert and his companions were uncommonly talented, able to best Ravana himself though they had but a fraction of aether compared to the souls around them. If that was the result of dwelling on a shard so close to the Light, then I can only imagine what that same strength might have been like once their souls had been reborn on the Source."

Raha, tactfully, does not point out that the Warrior herself has inherited that portion; even if she shows no outward signs of being affected by her trials, he does not wish to stir up any more memories unnecessarily. "Aye," he agrees, passing the books down one by one until he is freed of their weight, and can finally reach ground safely. "Mayhap the Ascians had their attentions full with Warriors we knew little of. 'Twas a mercy, either way."

She accepts this much with a thoughtful pursing of her lips. "Eight times rejoined is eight times the resistance, I suppose. Which means, at least, that we still have leeway for failure before Zodiark's actual rebirth," she tacks on cheerfully, ignoring Raha's unsettled frown. 

Books in her arms, she makes a delighted hum as she darts back to her chair with her newly-acquired treasures, and Raha leans against the ladder wearily as he considers which encyclopedias might be asked for next.

Already, it feels as if he has reorganized his collection from the Umbilicus a dozen times over. After the purging of the Light and Emet-Selch's defeat, the Warrior had set herself up to research every text in the Tower she could get her hands on, promptly exploring each of its unlocked rooms despite all Raha's reminders that it remained a hazardous place. He can no longer use the excuse that it contains strange mysteries from an unknown land, or that it might suddenly vanish as inexplicably as it had arrived; unlike the Crystarium, the Warrior already knows the full truth of its history. Like a stray pet, he had found her sleeping on the Tower's stairwells, underneath a table in a spare study, in one of the storerooms that contained machinery which still needed to be evaluated for stability, and on the Emperor’s Throne itself. When reminded to eat, she simply brought all her meals into the Tower's libraries, wandering barefoot back and forth from the Ocular to the aethernet shard outside whenever she needed anything. 

You won't let me call Feo Ul in here, she'd said sternly around a mouthful of apple, after he had caught her trying to lug a retainer bell directly to the gate. What else am I to do?

In the end, the best compromise was a promise that Raha would assist her in her work, and so they have ended up here: him shifting books from shelf to shelf, and her happily interrogating him for every scrap of information imaginable from the Source.

For the preservation of his own sanity -- and that of the Tower, and all of Norvrandt itself, most likely -- Raha attends her. 

Like his days on the Isle of Val, each bell of the sun has been assigned to some form of scholarship. His mornings are spent with Beq Lugg and work with the spirit vessels, methodically testing and retesting minute adjustments of aetheric variables, and analyzing the results. At the midday mark is their break -- more from Beq Lugg's insistence to eat and allow their aether some respite -- and then Raha hauls his findings with him from one study to the next, meeting the Warrior in one of the other rooms where the books of the Umbilicus await.

It is a schedule he cannot truly complain about. Even though he had protested with each step that the Warrior had worked her way into the Tower, it is as if she is adventuring with him in the only way she can. They cannot travel together physically, even though he longs for her to invite him along to explore the Qitana Ravel or the renewed beauty of Il Mheg, or even back to Lakeland for a short while. He does not have the right any longer to want to be a part of her story again, greedily wanting more even after he should have already bowed out of her life.

Instead, their quiet evenings are a treasure that he prizes: time which has been reserved for only the two of them together, without the worries of other quests to call her away. The Tower feels warmer with her company beside him, breathing quietly as she turns the pages, or muttering to herself with occasional displeasure as she comes across a passage of particular note. Being with her like this is a privilege Raha would fight to keep; he cannot surrender it, knowing that she will be there waiting for him each day, having promised those hours to him. It reminds him of their work back in Mor Dhona and the debates they would share around Rammbroes's campfire, his own research constantly disrupted by the rush of excitement -- and frustration -- that her presence would bring, always lit with curiosity for the latest news from the excavation site.

They had argued too, back then, and he had hated it: having to deal with all her neophyte opinions on the secrets of the Crystal Tower, when it had been his research specialty, his calling, his his his. She'd had an interest and a talent for absorbing everything on an abstract level that skipped directly past any practical reservations, and an equal willingness to accept the outlandish ideas at face value -- which should have made her foolish, except that she was just as swift to turn them around into tangible applications. Even Rammbroes had taken a liking to her faster than he had tolerated Raha.

He had forgotten all these parts of her, Raha realizes. In the records of the Warrior, so many of her tales had described her only as a pure, luminous defender of Eorzea. A scholar of the esoteric. Nobler than the most pious knight Ishgard had ever seen. Inspired by the Twelve themselves. 

There was nothing about how truly vexing she can be, particularly when she knows she is right. 

"Will you want the records from Camp Dragonhead from the first year of the Eighth Umbral Era soon?" he asks as he watches her dive into a fresh volume, wondering if he should move the second ladder over or not in preparation.

"Later, mayhap." Still bent over the table, the Warrior squints at an illustration that has decayed into more smudges than lines. "I'm still in the midst of the Dragonsong War. Count Edmont de Fortemps must have been the most concise elezen in all of Ishgard compared to these volumes. Must I honestly learn about the number of yak hides that needed transport from Falcon's Nest to the Convictory each winter?"

Raha chuckles, knowing that -- despite all her complaints -- she will still read each line in full. "I shall bring up some additional lights, lest weariness sap your sight," he promises, and resigns himself to another long, peaceful evening spent watching her lose herself in her work.

She had known all along, apparently, about his true identity. Apart from Urianger, the Warrior had been the only one who had been unsurprised when Raha's hood had been torn from him, battered free by the flood of aether upon Mt. Gulg. There had been a great many reactions going on during those vital moments after Vauthry's death -- panic being foremost, beaten out only by extreme agony and Emet-Selch's smugness -- that Raha had wondered if her shock had merely been buried beneath the effort of not turning into a Lightwarden and eating them all.

When he finally gets around to asking about it, the expression the Warrior gives him is not one of kindness.

"You received us so often within the Crystal Tower, a place of finely polished reflective surfaces," she points out, tapping her palm meaningfully for emphasis, as if she could summon a mirror to her hand. "All I had to do was look down, G'raha."

It is so simple a method that it borders on insult -- particularly when Raha had gone through all that effort to have his tail restrained, lest it peek past the hem of his robes. "And... you did not think to say anything about it?"

It is her turn to look baffled now, as if he had just asked her to march over to Castrum Centri and deliver the Garleans a basket of sandwiches. "I thought it was some strange, elaborate game of yours, much like all your grandiose speeches when we first met. Or that, mayhap, you were possessed by an Ascian and no one wanted to be impolite enough to mention it. That you were all Ascians, or only the Scions were the Ascians, or that it was some ploy akin to how we bested Fordola, where we could not be informed as to the method lest our own minds skew the outcome. But no!" she concludes in exasperation, having the gall to sound disappointed by this, of all things. "'Twas merely playacting again. And badly!"

How he wishes he had thought of that last tactic as an excuse. The battles against the Resonant hadn't been particularly well-detailed -- likely to prevent that knowledge from being engineered into a counter-technique. "It worked well enough on Thancred and the rest of the Scions," he defends. "And they dwelt here on the First for years."

Despite the Warrior having mercy for all of Eorzea, there is none in her for him. "Truly, how did you and Urianger even imagine you could keep such a secret from one with the Echo?" she grouses. "You brought someone with the ability to read another's soul into conversation with you both on multiple occasions. Between the two of you, I don't know which one of you is worse at playing the villain! You must have spent all your energies thinking about something truly mundane whenever I was around either one of you, like chicken stews or people's smallclothes."

Mention of food nudges him -- Beq Lugg having firmly sent him away earlier in the day than usual, insisting that he eat and regain his strength -- and Raha reaches out to place a ribbon across the passage she is reading, pinning it in place with his fingers to keep her from brushing it off. "Speaking of which," he emphasizes, "your appetite for literature is far greater than that of your stomach. 'Tis well past time for us both to remember supper. For all that you comport yourself well in battle, you still have no sense of self-preservation otherwise."

The rapid shift of the Warrior's attention to his hand makes him glad he placed the crystal one down, lest he risk loss of the limb. "I am a summoner, G'raha," she reminds him, a lofty pronunciation which is ruined by the subtle press of her own hand against her belly, attempting to stifle the hunger which must have been gnawing there. "'Tis an art which Y'mhitra and I are making up as we go along. And yet, despite how you have befriended the Tower over the course of nigh-on a century," she adds meaningfully, "you refuse to allow me access to the original manuals of its art."

"The Ninth Umbral Calamity would surely unfold," he deadpans, but every word is serious. Pressing his advantage, he reaches over to try and close the book itself, even as the Warrior fights to keep her hand between the pages. "All of Eorzea should rightfully fear what you might accomplish with such information. Besides, can you truly trust all that Allag has wrought? Now that you have learned of Emet-Selch's influence in the matter?"

"Oh, aye, I'd imagine there's some half-formed concept for a Primal or three in there, hidden as a spell to animate one's broom." Scowling theatrically as Raha pulls the book further away, the Warrior finally relinquishes her grip. Her voice remains as cheerfully reckless as a Garlean researcher Raha had met once who'd discovered how to detonate ceruleum inside an intact oak tree. "But the man had immense skill with his work, and if he spoke true, then the Ascians themselves originated the art. I had thought about trying to summon a Hydaelyn-egi as a means of dispersing the Light," she continues, merrily flippant, which immediately causes Raha's chest to seize up in dread. "I've had contact with the Mothercrystal before, after all. My body could not handle the aether needed for Ramuh -- but with such a surfeit of Light, surely I would have had more than enough here. Then I realized that Sin Eaters were essentially the same thing. Ryne's ability to control Eden as the Oracle of Light is no small coincidence. I wonder if I might summon an egi of the Tower," she posits next, which is both entirely impractical, and immediately calls to mind images of floating castles in the sky. "Or rather -- are you not serving as the Tower's egi yourself now, G'raha? I could summon you similarly, belike?"

"What has Rammbroes been allowing you to get away with?" he asks in a desperate attempt to stem the tide, even as his own imagination veers towards the possibilities. "You cannot simply... attempt to craft aether into smaller versions of aught which you encounter, and treat it as a pet."

The long, calculating look she gives him provides no actual reassurance whatsoever. "I still cannot believe you attempted to convince a real summoner that you called forth a piece of architecture. If such a technique truly existed, we would be stealing one another's houses at whim, and put all of the Lavender Beds into disarray. I would have transported the entirety of Saint Endalim's Scholasticate into my personal collection. You were an archer, of course, your grievous ignorance could be excused," she adds emphatically, completely disregarding his noise of affronted protest, "but Urianger is a trained arcanist! If I could not make a full egi out of Bahamut to dote upon my will, then how could you have brought an entire building across the rift?"

The only reasonable tactic against such logic is to resort to personal attacks -- a strategy which Raha has little shame in applying, for whenever the Warrior of Light is involved, no diversion is too foul. "Do I sense a bit of pride on your own part now? Mayhap, even envy?"

Thankfully, his query hits the mark. The Warrior rewards his contrariness with a glare. "If you will not give me the proper manuals," she retorts, sitting up straight and clapping both her hands upon the table, "I will simply have to see how much I can continue to summon into my body in the form of various Trances, and see what exhausts itself first."

Raha already has the concession on his lips before he realizes exactly what she is leading up to, and hastily swallows it down, reeling himself away from the trap. "Are you attempting to extort the secret knowledge of the Allagan Empire from me under the threat of turning yourself permanently into a dragon?"

"That depends," she shoots back stubbornly. "Did it work?"

Bested by her doggedness, Raha can only laugh -- realizing with distant amazement how much easier it feels to do so, as if every muscle in his body has begun to slowly unknot after soaking for bells in a hot bath. The sound stirs something inside him again, something that has not had a chance to breathe for over a hundred years: something that takes joy in each new possibility, in the idea of the unknown as a force to be intrigued by rather than fearful of, and to welcome uncertainty as a blessing.

He has been different since the night's return. That much, even he can recognize. And though the Crystarium believes it to be the banishment of the Light which has lifted his spirits so, Raha knows the true cause. 

What he does not know is his own relationship to that happiness. He is too battle-weary to be G'raha Tia and too careless to be the Exarch, and such joy should belong to someone who already knows their place in life. Instead, he is caught between the death that should have come for him and the life he has surrendered, and neither side shows him what step to take next. 

And yet, through it all, the Warrior has always remained the same. The strength in her has not been dimmed. She is no less brilliant and determined and infuriating, and Raha knows that -- no matter who he has become -- he will always find a reason to love her.

They tear through the first few shelves that he sets up with the Umbilicus's books, fishing out the earliest tomes he can find off the top stacks and offering them up to appease the Warrior's hunger. She is rabid about reading the entire collection he had brought with him from Eorzea from start to finish, regardless of relevance. For the first week, Raha devotes his efforts towards trying to categorize it all, shelving and resheveling the same tomes a dozen times over. For a hundred years, he had allowed the books to exist in a terrible entropy of being left in piles at random, without even an organizational system of his own. Instead, he had simply picked up books and set them back down again wherever it was convenient, like an inn room where all one's clothes ended up on the floor in various states of unwashedness. 

Krile would have murdered him in his sleep to see it.

With his identity openly known to them all now, Raha finally realizes just how much of her wit the Warrior had been politely holding back in her demands. He had been so busy attempting to fool her that he had misread her guarded expressions as mere distrust, and not a complicated heckling of his performance -- like an audience in a theater that had already read all the way through to the end of the script, and was stewing in disappointment for how long you were taking to hit the high notes. 

Yet with the secret out, the Warrior has little reason to conceal her familiarity with him, and so she insists on every scrap of knowledge she can wheedle from him. Having lost the wager with Y'shtola as to which of them would be best to delve into the Anamnesis Anyder, she had also lost one of her favorite companions to share ideas with. Urianger had hastily begged the excuse of working on the spirit vessels. Alphinaud and Alisaie had fled the Crystarium altogether.

Raha is her next choice, and she does not allow him the luxury of lagging behind. 

It makes Raha faster to try and keep up with her, struggling to reclaim the same darting rapidity he had once favored so much in his youth. The years have made him a creature of methodical, deliberate calculations, where no action is performed without a review of its repercussions first. The Warrior forces him to move at a different pace, stumbling gamely along behind her as she references and cross-references cultures and nations across the Source. She has already spent more time with the Umbilicus's books than Raha expected; during his capture, she had apparently not been satisfied by the one trip that he had instructed Lyna to give her, but had simply made the bald-faced claim that she needed to study the tomes further to try and aid him. Afterwards -- when he had initially balked at letting her back inside it -- she had threatened to simply stare at the door until the Echo itself told her where the key was among his possessions. 

It feels strange to allow the Umbilicus to be emptied out. But there is no reason to conceal the room from her or the rest of the Scions any longer -- nor from Beq Lugg, who must know as much as possible about the two worlds if they are to transport the Scions safely between them. And the library will not be read at all once Raha is dead and the Scions have returned home; Beq Lugg has both Raha's instructions to secure the chamber, and his trust to follow through. It seems kinder to the books, at least, for Raha to spend his few remaining days with them, before they will be sealed forever. 

The Warrior gives them plenty of cause for company. She devours her way through the years after the Seventh Umbral Calamity, and then the Dragonsong War, moving into the liberation of Doma and Ala Mhigo -- insisting, strangely, on reviewing the history penned by sages who had lived after the Eighth Umbral Calamity, even on nations and wars which had already been aging when she had been alive during the Seventh Astral Era. 

"Is it of such value?" Raha asks her one evening, unable to hold his tongue as he hauls down another book on the trading routes of Kugane. "You lived through those very same affairs. You know how they unfolded."

"True, but how the survivors of the Calamity chose to frame their history is different," she explains absently, jabbing her pen into its inkwell. "Which battles they elevated, which they ignored. We learn as much through omission as by accuracy. Through the observations of those who came afterwards, we can understand the overarching influences that led them forward -- along with their vulnerabilities."

Her pen nib loops around the shapes of Eorzean letters, listing out a handful of words without any context for meaning -- descent, wheat, hat -- and Raha studies them curiously, trying to pick out evidence of a cipher just in case it exists. "Will that still matter, when none of those influences should repeat themselves again in the present?"

"The details of future battles will change," the Warrior agrees. Her pen finishes off its sheet with a swish of the nib, and she shoves the notes aside to dry even as she grabs a fresh piece of paper. "But the sentiments of entire nations have deep roots which have fed upon generations of bones. The information I compile here may not match our altered future, but it will serve well enough as an indicator for similar reactions to come."

Such tactics seem reasonable enough -- at least, until the vast amount of data required to correlate so many points becomes apparent. "I have forgotten how quickly you move," Raha remarks, shaking his head ruefully as he stands up to go fetch another book. "Like levin itself."

She leans back in her chair, kicking her feet out to flex her toes back and forth as she cranes her neck to look at him. "And you have slowed down. Where is the man who stayed up until the third bell of the morning arguing the elemental significance of the four fangs with me? I could use him beside me now."

"I am old," Raha defends, laughing at her scowl. "Nearly a century has passed between now and then."

She rolls her eyes, straightening her glasses absently with her fingers as she sits up properly at last and stretches out her shoulders, grimacing at how the muscles protest. Her wrists remain terrifyingly thin; Raha could circle them with a thumb and forefinger. "And I am dead. And when you have become ghosts such as we, then it is our business to make certain that we leave as little sorrow behind as we can, in the moments before we vanish for good."

He cannot help but allow his smile out, enjoying the way that it warms his chest. "You have all the time you need for that," he reminds her, emphasizing the words as he lays the next book down upon the stacks to be perused. "It is I who must count how many suns he has left."

He expects another laugh, another round of idle teasing as they whittle away the bells until midnight. But instead, the Warrior pauses, the gleam of the room's lights kissing the rims of her spectacles, all of her energy suddenly focused like a flare spell in the seconds before its magicks rupture.

"On the contrary, G'raha," she utters softly, and then drops her gaze as she turns another page and resumes her reading. "I have no time at all."

The seriousness of her voice lurches through him, like a ship swaying wrongly into the wind instead of away. It leaves him uncertain in a way he cannot pinpoint, not knowing whether to make light of the matter or question her further. The only cause Raha can think of is the progress of the spirit vessels -- and those, at least, she should not have to worry about. Not to the point of breaking herself to exhaustion, and certainly not to search for fresh ideas in the stories of a shard undone.

He hesitates over how best to reassure her, and then resorts to what is most familiar.

"Your friends will not be stranded here, I promise you that." Spreading his hands on the table like a supplicant, Raha pitches each word with as much confidence as he can muster. "I will give everything within my power to ensure they will be rescued. If all else fails, my death will free them. I swear to you," he repeats, his voice gaining strength as it finds familiar ground, "they will be safe."

It is a simple litany by now, one that he can repeat nearly on instinct. He had delivered it many times already, enduring groans of protest and exasperation, Alisaie's many scowls and refusals. It brings none of them any joy, he knows -- and yet, if he does not insist on it, he may begin to forget it himself. To allow the option to slide away, and believe -- as the Scions do -- that it is a choice to avoid at all costs. 

But this time, the Warrior straightens up from her tome and gives him such a sharp look that he realizes he has repeated these words one time too many. "Do you have any confirmation that that would actually work?" she demands, not bothering to hide her disdain at the suggestion. "You assumed before that the prevention of the Eighth Umbral Calamity would have simply nipped you out of existence. You were wrong then, G'raha Tia -- can you not imagine you may be wrong now?"

Presented with such questions, Raha has to admit that his logic has certain weak spots. "That was time manipulation," he claims, resorting to the same limpid fallback. "This is a spell that has been set into motion by my own hands. If we cannot find a method to ferry the Scions safely through the rift, then my demise should end it."

"Aye -- set into motion by your and the Tower's strength together," the Warrior counters. "The Tower hardly seems as if it will join you as a companion in death. At best, I can only imagine that it will go on happily ignoring us all, and its strength will keep the spell renewed."

Beneath his robes, Raha can feel his tail twitch in chagrin. He had hoped she might have overlooked that point. Everyone else has, though Beq Lugg has begun to give him a few very skeptical looks of their own after asking for details on how the summoning had first occurred. 

But before he can dredge out a proper excuse, the Warrior has already leapt to another line of inquiry. "What is it that you are not telling me, G'raha?" Sliding her pen behind one of her horns, she frowns at him -- more warily this time, as if he has changed shape in the blink of an eye. "Even though we have sent the Light away for good this time, you seem extraordinarily eager to join in its fate. Do you mislike our company that much?"

"No," he protests, but his voice weakens treacherously halfway through the simple syllable. No, he means, and yes at the same time. No, he adores them. He wants to remain among them.

Yes, he should still leave. 

The Warrior cocks her head again, the violet locks of her hair wisping out of the haphazard braids she has tied them in to keep them out of the way. "Then why remain so obsessed with sacrificing yourself, when you must be aware of how the Scions will curse their inability to save you? Are you truly that wedded to such a shallow ideal of heroism?"

He cannot answer. Like a prey animal sensing the shadow of a cloudkin overhead, Raha feels his own words hide themselves within his throat, his teeth biting down to protect them. No simple explanation exists. The danger of the Light is gone. Emet-Selch is slain. The Source waits to welcome the Scions home.

Raha remains alive.

And yet, the fact that he has a future now is no less frightening than any Flood. Every sacrifice that Raha has made over the years has only been tolerable because he knew he would never have to live with the consequences. Leaving the Ironworks behind. Lying to the Warrior. Refusing the Crystarium's devotion. Allowing the Tower's crystal to possess him, ilm by ilm as it took him for its own. 

He has carried the guilt of it all for nearly a century, held only at bay by believing he would join the Ironworks in oblivion someday -- and that day had never come. 

His is not the only fate that has been changed unjustly.

Raha has no response for her. Instead, after the Warrior leaves for the night, he finds himself turning back to the study room instead of his own quarters. He searches through the unshelved books, rearranging the piles until he finds the volume he is looking for: a thick, aldgoat-leather binding that has gone brittle over the decades, its corners pale and worn.

The pages fall open naturally to the sections he has viewed most often. He brushes through them respectfully, seeing how age and the oils of his fingers -- when they were still flesh enough to stain -- have darkened the paper, lining the edges like gilt.

After the weakening of Limsa Lominsa's forces, he reads, knowing the passage by heart, the kobolds of Vylbrand found their fortunes greatly improved. By the 43rd Year of the Eighth Umbral Era, they had established fresh territorial rights over the ore found within O'Ghomoro. With their defenses renewed, they set trading accords with Limsa Lominsa that the city-state was forced to accede to, opening the way for a reassessment of relations between the two. Over time and with the growing need of Lominsan colonies to rely upon their aid, the kobolds became more confident in their claims upon Vylbrand, and saw little need to call upon Titan again...

It is only a matter of time before the Warrior uncovers the rest of Eorzea's history for herself. 

Research with the crystals had stalled out gracefully, despite all of Raha and Beq Lugg's efforts. While the prototype vessels had not been damaged during their experiments, neither had they increased their capacity to the necessary degree to carry an entire soul safely. Despite how memories seem to be as freely shared as air at times -- Beq Lugg had started to inquire about the Echo, suggesting that the Warrior might be a better vessel for the Scions' aether, which Raha had dared not breathe word of in her presence -- it balked at being forced inside stone. Raha had suggested blood, and then more blood. He had suggested different parts to be chopped off of his body. He had suggested himself.

Finally, vexed by Raha's willingness to engage in self-destruction, Beq Lugg had sent him back to rest and recover.

Raha would have protested more, save for the bouts of dizziness that have begun to worry even himself. He pauses at the kitchens only long enough to fetch a loaf of bread and some preserves, and then a fresh teapot of water, hot and steaming.

"Have you eaten?" he calls out as he navigates through the door to the study with the tray in his arms, feeling the teapot shift precariously with its weight.

The Warrior is already deeply immersed in another book, hunched over the pages as she scribbles frantic notes on the nearest sheet of paper. Her robes today are blue, a deep color like the open ocean; the gold of her scales makes her seem as if she is part of the Tower itself, blending in with its lavish furnishings. 

A natural automaton, brought to life like the rest of its constructs and equally prone to running itself to exhaustion.

She glances up to him, unsmiling. When she lifts the book to display its cover, Raha recognizes it as the very same record on Vylbrand's history that he had paged through but a few nights ago, as if the warmth from his body still lingers upon it, and she had hunted it down with a touch. 

"Are these records true?" she asks him, her voice as calm as the glassy surface of the sea with no wind to stir it, and Raha can hear the same implacable doom within that sailors know to fear.

He buys himself some time by laying the tray down carefully upon the nearest clean table, and then checks one of the apples for spots before beginning to cut it into smaller chunks. He knew she would find that section of the histories eventually. With the rate that she had ravaged the collection, it is a miracle she has not reached it before. 

"Yes," he says. "All of it, as far as I am aware."

She does not immediately pronounce a verdict, only nodding as she returns to her reading. Raha glumly finishes carving apart the apple, walking through his memory of the volume's contents. Not only did it contain the history of how the kobolds had changed, but it also continued on to the rest of Vylbrand, south to Western La Noscea. The sahagin there had finally been able to secure better regions for their spawning grounds, claiming Aleport and then Swiftperch as their own territory, and forcing the vessels of Limsa Lominsa to treat with them as equals if they wanted their shipping routes to be unthreatened. 

There are even more records than that. Raha has read them all. They spell out a litany of other lives which had found a way to flourish after the upheaval of their world, banding together in unexpected alliances as they sought to master the new aether-touched flora and fauna around them. With ceruleum rendered inert, Garlemald's conquests had been paused, their ambitions stalled with rebellions and political infighting. Their territories had slipped free from their hands. Bozja, reclaimed. Dalmasca, liberated. Castrums emptied of their soldiers, turned into makeshift shelters for mudstained refugees and hunters risking their lives in the new darkness of a world without ceruleum lights.

Left waiting, Raha tries not to count out each of his breaths as if they are his last. He makes himself pour the tea instead, watching as the Warrior skips back and forth through multiple sections, pinning chapters between her fingers as she runs out of other markers. He nudges the cup closer to her in hopes of breaking her concentration; the offering goes ignored. She is skimming fast enough that even her reading speed must only be gleaning the surface details, but those details are enough.

By the time she begins to slow down -- still frantically noting and cross-referencing pages -- her lunch is long cold. 

She reaches out blindly for her cup, groping through the air for it until Raha carefully slides it under her hand, and she promptly dunks a finger into it by accident. The splash of water is enough to bring her out of her trance; she glances up, blinking, as Raha catches her wrist before she can drip all over the books and dabs at it with a napkin.

"It was as I assumed," she says cryptically, watching him wipe her hand dry as if he were attending a piece of pottery instead of her skin. "Not only did the world not end entirely -- for some, it began anew."

He did not know what he expected; he never does with her, really, but the confidence of her response takes Raha aback. "You expected it?"

"Aye." Wiggling her fingers until he releases her hand, the Warrior looks down towards the book once more, and then wrestles herself back to the conversation with an effort, as if the gravity of the ink alone is greater than any other known mass. "Y'shtola and I have whiled away many a long evening together, speaking of the consequences of power as it has shifted since the Seventh Umbral Calamity. The city-states have caused more conflicts than they have solved, and the label of beast tribe -- an arbitrary title to begin with, applied for no better reason than that of politics and discrimination -- has long created a disrespect for Eorzea's many peoples. That their recoveries were treated as of less worth than the damage from the Calamity is no surprise to me." She pauses, pursing her lips in a resigned frown. "I wonder -- how many of these tales considered the Calamity to be all-encompassing only because they measured their own kin, and naught else mattered?"

Raha allows himself to let down his guard just enough to reach for the pot of jam. "Such fallacies remain unchanged no matter the era," he acknowledges softly, smearing wide, berry-red strokes across a fresh piece of bread. "When one nation sees their long-standing enemies benefit after a disaster, they consider their plight to be that much worse, even should the other side consider it to be a salvation. To harbor fear and jealousy whenever others benefit -- that is, unfortunately, all too much a part of mortal nature."

"Mortal nature, aye." The Warrior falls silent as Raha pushes the bread insistently towards her, evaluating the clots of berries as if each one is a count of the fallen. "And how many other times in Eorzea's history have others cried out for the same salvation? How many times were other nations destroyed, their people left bleeding in the ashes? Yet none of their disasters were considered worth changing, even after the Ironworks found the power to do so. And 'twas not merely their voices which cried out for history to be undone," she notes, her fingers lightly tracing the last lines of the chapter she has just concluded. "Not merely we mortals who wept."

Raha exhales slowly, lowering the jam knife. He knew that she would come to this point. He knows her far too well.

He would have been a fool to think that she might have become any more willing to turn a blind eye, when she never has before.

"Yes," he acknowledges. "The Ascians, too, have lost."

In the mawkish, unpleasant silence that extends suddenly between them, Raha is the one who speaks first. 

"There were many who left the Ironworks out of disagreement with Cid's plan," he admits quietly. "Unwilling to sacrifice the new lives that had been born since the Calamity, even if it meant a restoration of the past. And when more became known to us of Emet-Selch's intentions, I could not miss the similarities between our plights." He can feel his eyes squint in reluctance as he forces himself to continue, a wince against the pains he has only managed to survive by pushing them away. "And then, when my life was not undone with the Light's destruction, I knew then that the Source of my departure might have survived after all. Which means, if I had given Emet-Selch the Tower... then the Ascians could have been given a chance as well."

His hands are remarkably steady upon the dishware, despite how his voice wavers. He has never uttered these words aloud. They are no kinder for finally being given form.

"One timeline for them, one for us." Raha's throat feels as if it is too thick to allow air through it; he forces it to produce sound. "For their griefs are no less than ours -- and we have done no more than they sought, exchanging the future for the past. We, who could not endure the world in its present condition and saw it as a mistake. We, who took those chances away from the future, claiming it was for a nobler cause. We are the same as the very enemies we scorn."

The Warrior stirs at last, her hands moving jerkily as she pulls them back and away from the very food he has offered, as if that sustenance is a new form of poison he is coaxing her to ingest. "A star that had been struck by an overwhelming disaster which affected all life upon it," she begins. Her fingers curl into fists in her lap, hiding themselves like children cowering from a hurricane. "And the world left behind seemed like a disaster which never should have happened -- where mankind was driven to brutality and entire civilizations were eradicated. Was that the world after the Eighth Umbral Calamity, G'raha? The tale of the Ascians? Or was it Eorzea after the Third Umbral Calamity? After the Fourth? Tell me -- which disaster matters, and which do we merely shake our heads at and term mere history?"

She speaks as if in rhetoric, with the calm, unworried pace of a lecturer who is willing to lay out the matter like an anatomy study: all the blood drained out beforehand, leaving only pale, faceless flesh behind on the table, the matter regulated to mere philosophy and little more.

But she does not turn away from the impossible dilemma of it -- as many would, Raha knows. He has agreed with all the platitudes, the numerous justifications on the lips of the Scions. He has heard them from the Ironworks. From himself. One's life was worth fighting for, they had all agreed. There was no shame in choosing to defend it -- even should it cost the lives of others. 

As it had, so many times with them all.

Yet the Warrior disregards all of those rationales, her gaze steady now as she stares at him with the same inflexible demand as if he were a student lexicon penned to provide easy answers. It is the same ferocity that he first witnessed back in Mor Dhona, when she had first driven herself towards the Crystal Tower and its secrets. There has always been some vestige of a ruthless, relentless purpose instilled within her, compelling her to reach out to lives across Eorzea: to consider every soul upon the star that she has come across, regardless of their cruelties or mercies. 

She has always burned in a different way than anyone Raha has ever met, than anyone he has known, and he has never found a way to counteract it.

But she assembles matters together too swiftly in a direction he does not expect, and the tense frown of her brow warns him too late. 

"G'raha," she begins quietly, "when was it that you first began to wonder if you had made the right decision after all?"

He is not ready for this. She has ever been quick to grasp at different points. Incisive, sharp-eyed. Fearless. 

She has always asked the most difficult questions.

"This was always the right decision," he says bleakly, because it is the truth. "To save you and your tale from an unjust end."

"All ends are unjust to someone's eyes, G'raha. If I were trampled by a stray aldgoat while helping a traveler, would you have called for an extermination of all beastkin? Knifed in an alleyway for my pocket gil?" The crystal lights overhead glitter off her scales as the Warrior shakes her head, rounding the lenses of her spectacles like flat, empty eyes. The melody of her voice turns bitter. She presses her lips together hard, as if her thoughts are threatening to rise out of her stomach like acid and melt away her teeth. "By our own words, we claim the right to live because we are alive in the present moment and the Ascians are not. And yet, many on the Source after the Calamity doubtlessly said the same thing. Those who were lost in past tragedies were dead. They remained alive. And the Ironworks chose knowingly to sacrifice them, regardless."

"Yes," Raha acknowledges. He cannot see the room clearly. The edges of the table feel numb against both his palms, crystal and flesh alike. He leans hard against it for support. Every ilm of him does not wish to talk about it; he balks, instantly and automatically, shying away from the truth as if its very proximity will incinerate him in the process of giving it his voice.

But underneath the unrelenting fire of the Warrior's gaze, he cannot lie. "The Ironworks. And myself."

He recoils away from the table with a shove of his hands; he cannot bear to look up and see what surely must be revulsion on her face. As if hunting down one final Lightwarden through the twists of Norvrandt, the Warrior has bored into the heart of his argument -- the one Raha had reached long ago, and could no longer bear to look at. He had allowed himself to brush the edges of that guilt and had found it too deep for any cure, so he had turned his back instead and pretended it had not been there, like a sinkhole that was eroding away one's home from the back lawn, yawning wider every time it was checked.

That shame had been an eternal companion for all of his years on the First, lingering in the Tower like a stain on his own soul. And then, in the days after Emet-Selch -- when Raha had remained unexpectedly alive -- it had only grown further teeth. 

The guilt is right, he knows. It is right. Even as he smiles encouragingly to the Scions and all of the Crystarium, and finds words to reassure them that they are blameless, he feels those same platitudes falling hollow when turned towards himself. All Raha's ambitions had seemed so noble when he had woken up after the Calamity, promising him that his acts were valiant ones. The path had been a straightforward one, then. Save the Warrior. Restore the world. Make everyone glad once more, happy for the change in their lives. It was what they all wanted.

He should have remembered that the songs of old were only songs, and not true records of the past.

"It was simpler, when I thought that the world after the Eighth Umbral Calamity was naught but an unending wasteland, where even death would be a mercy," he begins. His face is turned away, towards the bookshelves; the air feels thin in his lungs, each breath shallow. "Too late have I come to realize that what makes a champion is not simply the strength to make the difficult choices. It is those who can survive those actions afterwards. In this, too... you have always been a better hero than I, my friend."

The Warrior's response, when it eventually comes, is quiet -- but not forgiving. "When we know not if we have done good or ill, oftentimes it can seem as if the only recourse is to throw ourselves upon the fire in one last act of self-sacrifice." He can hear the rustle of her sleeves as she makes some small motion; his ears swivel automatically towards her, but he cannot tell if she is standing up from her chair. "Afterwards, others can remember merely that you died on their behalf, and you can lay yourself to rest engulfed by the shroud of the martyr."

It sounds far less glorious with such phrasing. Raha tries to claw back what little humor he can, forcing his mouth into a wan semblance of a smile. "Dying to redeem one's self is usually an approved venue, in the stories," he remarks. "And yet, for all the selfishness in the act, I would make the same choice again. I will never regret having you alive as you are now, in this life and time."

The confession should have had enough conviction to end any doubts. Instead, it rings hollow, flat in light of everything else that hangs upon their conversation. Raha has held it trapped in the back of his throat for decades, expecting that a single utterance of it would destroy him, leaving him so open and vulnerable to the Warrior's scrutiny that he would never again be able to hide from her insights. 

Now, it is merely overshadowed by all the rest. She has already seen too much of him. It no longer has any value, save as an excuse.

Lacking his staff to cling to, Raha can only fold his arms tightly across his chest, as if they might provide an impenetrable barricade between himself and the rest of the world. "All we can hope to do with the power in our hands is to preserve our own lives and the ones whom we love. It may be short-sighted," he agrees. "It may well be a sin. But it is the desire to stay alive." 

"Such arguments only work when one's power is limited to those around them," the Warrior replies, unforgiving: a final scouring away of every flimsy defense held up against a storm. "And not when we can change reality itself. Or is our love the only authority we need to pick and choose between the worthiness of strangers we have never met, and who are defenseless against us?"

Like a liquid vein of crystal tapping into his heart, despair runs like a cold undercurrent through Raha's blood. Her condemnation is not unfamiliar. Those words have already found their roots in Raha's own soul. Like crystal petrification, they have seeped in to replace his ribcage, constricting his chest whenever he breathes. He has learned to eat and drink around how they have choked him; he has learned to pretend to live.

He looks up at last and then away again -- unable to meet the Warrior's eyes for longer than a second, unable to speak. They both know the response to her question. The Warrior's own intolerance of concessions is one of the many parts about her which drives her forward, always demanding to learn the truth of things for herself, and then promptly questioning the very information she has been presented. She will not let him loose until she has the knowledge she seeks.

"G'raha." She says his name like an incantation, as if she is commanding the Tower itself to deliver him up to her. She could do it, he thinks feverishly; she has the strength of will. "Is it that you truly believe death is the answer -- or is it simply easier?"

This time, he has no defenses left. She has scraped him clean of all else. Only honesty remains, in all its foulness.

"It is an answer I cannot protest," Raha admits. "Else, I would merely evade the consequences of my own actions by embracing this new chance at life. To have been given so much, and yet not pay the cost for it -- even as others lost their lives, and countless more may never have had a chance to be born. To claim that my acts were somehow sanctioned simply because I wanted it more?" He makes a bloodless laugh that feels peppered by acid, scouring his throat. "No. In even that, I believe the Ascians had a desire whose breadth I could never dream of surpassing. If I had been given a Calamity instead of the Tower and told to use it instead to restore the past, I would have. I would have," he insists, feeling the madness of it roaring back up inside him from a place he has not let himself touch in so long: a place of mourning and dusty ground, of hopeless tears and an emptiness that has carved out every piece of flesh in his chest, leaving it hollow until the Tower had simply painted his insides over with crystal. If they crack him open in the end, he will glitter like a geode. "And then I would have filled my heart with any number of stories about how the lives on the Source were not true casualties, just as Emet-Selch did. They would never have been alive. They shouldn't have been alive. They weren't real."

He is not surprised when the Warrior only gives him silence back in return; it is all he deserves. All the poison of his years is spilling out from him like a lanced infection, pouring across the carpet like a font of corrupted aether, a Flood of his sins with no eaters to devour him for his audacity. He cannot tell if she is granting him forgiveness, or permission to relinquish his own life. The entire world feels muffled, as if he is sliding into a pit of cold mud that is slowly smothering him, while those on solid ground merely nod in acknowledgement: this is Raha's doing. This is his acceptance of it. 

"So you understand, then," he says, panicked and breathless, barely holding himself together as he seeks to convince himself of his own words even as they exit his mouth. "As I am the representative of the Ironworks in this timeline, then either chance or fate should become the determiner of my life. That may be the only manner of justice that can make matters fair once more."

He cannot go on. He has the taste of his own hubris on his tongue; it shames him before the Warrior, robbing him of the last few days of kindness he might have had with her, letting himself believe that she thought well of him.

The only mercy is that soon, he may no longer be alive to know how poorly she might think of him now. 

"Forgive me," he says, fumbling with the nearest chair as he tries to push it closer to the table in a feint of casualness, and instead simply tips it back and forth on its legs. He cannot lift his eyes from the carpet; his sense of the room is dim, only marking the territory that the Warrior occupies so that he can avoid it. "It was the right decision -- even if it was the wrong price."

He turns away blindly; he cannot grant her the opening for a rebuttal, not with all her witty words and twists of logic. All he wants to do is to allow her to take on the conversation as she always does: like another enemy to be challenged, wrestling the problem into some brilliant scheme the same way she would debate endlessly with Cid and Nero and Rammbroes around the fire. To convince him, somehow, that he is no longer at fault. 

To save him, when no salvation exists that does not spit upon the deaths of those who have gone before. 

"G'raha," she begins. Her voice is uncertain for once, and he cannot bear this either: to be the cause of her voice taking on such an inflection, when it should rightfully be filled with only merriment and glee.

"You have paid the balance far too often, my friend." My most precious companion, he wants to say, but he does not have the right. "Consider it my honor to redress the remainder one way or another, so that you do not have to spill your own blood once more."

He avoids the Tower's studies the next day, and then the day after that -- grateful, for the first time, that the Warrior comes and goes as she pleases. Her wanderlust is strangely muted; she keeps to the rooms that have already been prepared and eats the meals Raha lays out for her, entering with a yawn near midday and leaving at the dusk bell. The guards notify him as much when he asks, and he can see the question in their eyes, though he does not explain further.

At night after she has left and Raha comes to collect her used dishes, he sees the evidence of her continuing work. Books shift from pile to pile, sorted by region and then by year. Her notes multiply like ants. She has not slowed down on her own. If anything, her efforts have only increased in his absence, as if she must hold the entirety of Eorzea itself within her mind before she departs for the Source, and not lose a single line.

It is cowardly of him to avoid her. Even worse: it is wasted time. He should not miss the few days remaining that he can spend with her, not when every bell is precious.

And yet, Raha is just as terrified of what she might say to try and sway his mind. He should have felt relieved about the whole matter. He had confessed the sins of a hundred years and more to her; he had promised the Warrior that he would clear the slate. Instead, every consequence Raha had intended to embrace feels like a fatal disease bubbling up inside him, renewed instead of expunged. It leaves him breathless and shaking whenever he tries to swallow it back down, hating each second of his own inadequacies.

For nearly a century, he had managed to stand fast. Now, at the end, he can no longer look away from it all, even as the reckoning of it creeps closer and closer.

As yet another evening drifts away, he waits in a room of the Tower overlooking the Exedra, and watches the Warrior depart for the Pendants. Back on the Source, the future stretches out before him once more, waiting for him to partake in it. At their last meeting, Beq Lugg had suggested that the vessels might be able to carry Raha's soul back to the Source as well, alive and intact. The First has been saved. Lyna and the rest of the Crystarium have new paths to embark upon. Even Biggs III and the rest of the Ironworks have their own futures now. 

After all had been said and done, Raha has lost nothing. Both of his worlds have been restored. He has surrendered no one that he holds dear. Even as crystallization threatens to claim his entire body, Beq Lugg's research has offered him a way out of that as well. He can have everything he wants, without any penalty -- if he only shuts his eyes and takes it.

We fought for our own lives, he knows the Scions would say. We could not afford to lose the souls of millions for the sake of hypotheticals. There is no fault in that.

There is no other antidote for his guilt, save abandonment. Raha can pretend that it is simply too vast a toll to handle, and wash his hands entirely. No one would condemn him for turning away from other worlds and other timelines. 

No one -- save the Warrior and himself, and the ghosts of a million lives that will never have a chance to breathe again.

The evening deepens into night. A fresh shift of guards comes through to relieve their counterparts, their figures small in the distance below the Tower. Raha watches his breath fog the windowpane, and then he lets his hand drop, turning away from the world outside.

He cannot entirely escape the Warrior; even unattended, she continues her work stubbornly, as if daring for him to leave her to her own devices. He takes the risk anyway. The Tower does not explode, though it does shudder once in a way that leaves Raha nervous.

But -- like two stars tied to the same constellation -- they do not vanish from one another's lives. He glimpses her always at a distance, catching sight of her from across the heights of stairwells and at the opposite ends of long hallways. Every time, Raha finds himself hungering to give in and go to her side. A swirl of emotions has bottled itself inside him, like fireflies blinking against glass. He wants her to ignore him, to refuse him -- and also to tell him that all is forgiven, that she understands his choices, and that his duties are finally over and he can rest.

He wants all these things, and more. But he knows better than to expect shallow comforts from the Warrior. She has never been that yielding. Her nature is as sharp as the metal she resembles, able to attack and defend with equal rapidity. Her enemies are many, and not all of them come from the battlefield; she and Nero had nearly come to blows once over how safe it was to drink from a teakettle with rust in it, both of them loudly proclaiming superior knowledge of the science behind it. 

Even if he cuts himself to hold her, Raha loves her anyway.

He does his best to put himself back together on his own, patching up his resolve like a shoddy brace of scaffolding. As long as he keeps to himself, then he can allow everything to settle down like debris after a storm, withered leaves drifting back to earth where they would be free to decay. He resorts to the calm he has learned to wield like a replacement for the bow he no longer has, aiming it directly at himself: a skill he had honed over the years out of similar necessity, after reminding himself, year after year, of what must be done.

But he cannot avoid her in the end when he opens the door to his personal chambers one evening, and finds her already there waiting.

Rather than remain in the study rooms, the Warrior has brought in several of the books directly to his quarters, rearranging the furniture to her own liking so that she could build a small fortress for herself out of tables and chairs and tomes. One of the blankets has been pulled off his bed and is now folded over her lap to keep her legs warm, the ends trailing over her bare toes.

She glances up when he enters, her fingers poised over the passage she had been engrossed in, and simply looks at him.

For a critical instant, Raha considers fleeing the Tower entirely -- but it is far too late, now that she has spotted him. She has a ghostwolf's sensibilities when it comes to the hunt: pitiless for its prey.

"Do you wish for some tea?" he asks instead, politely. It comes out with a petulant air, one which he hates immediately -- but he does not know what else to say. Too many parts of himself still feel raw, broken down and forced to stare into the face of his own powerlessness. It would be best if he could urge her away, back into the arms of the Scions she will return home with, and go back to shutting himself within the Tower's walls.

She arches a thin, dark eyebrow at him, tucking up her feet under a corner of the blanket. "I have a great deal of work still to get through, so yes. As do you," she continues, without bothering to pause. "If you are so hellsbent on perishing, then you must tell me everything that is contained within these volumes first before you go."

Again, Raha cannot understand her fervor: the strange, incomprehensible quest that she had chosen to bear so soon after saving the First, learning about lives which she does not need to be held accountable for. It worries him -- worries and frustrates, when he cannot understand the root of her convictions. Pulling the latch shut behind him, he crosses the room rather than linger at his own threshold like an intruder, and takes the nearest chair beside her, turning it so that he can speak to her directly. 

"These things will not happen in your timeline," he reassures her again, as gently as he can, in case she cannot let herself trust that she has won an honest reprieve from her struggles. "You need not lose any sleep over them."

She looks at him with a blank, aghast widening of her eyes, as if only now realizing that his confusion is sincere. "But I do. You, and Cid and Nero, all of the Ironworks -- you did make me responsible for it, G'raha! All of it, this entire repository of history," she adds, waving a hand at his quarters in a wild gesture that nearly clips his ear. "This bloody Tower! Or did you forget just who you picked to serve as the figurehead for your entire campaign? 'Twas the Warrior of Light you held as your excuse. My name that you used for this. You treated the other lives of the Source as the same expendable possibilities that we complained of with the Ascians, and you chose my life as the justification for doing so." She makes a scoff, a hissing tch between her teeth, and does not disguise the bitterness as she does. "Strange that, of all those souls who championed my restoration, not a single one stopped to think about what I might have felt about it. And now you plan to die -- and leave me to clean up this mess alone."

Raha blinks.

"You cannot -- " he begins, and his own voice dies in terror at the possibility that is being spelled out for him at last. Of all the Warrior's reactions, Raha did not predict this. "You... you cannot wish that you were still dead."

Anger straightens the Warrior's shoulders with a jolt. She draws herself up, as fierce as a gladiator on the sands, and turns all that cold fury upon him. 

"If my salvation is to come at the expense of other lives which have equal value in this world," she utters, as slow and deliberate as a vow hammered into the aether of the very shard, "then I will never accept it. Not now. Not ever. Not even to restore the star itself."

A sudden prickle runs across Raha's skin.

In her own voice, he hears it. Emet-Selch's explanations, his declarations. The whispered explanations of the Ascian known as Hythlodaeus in an illusion of Amaurot. The schism that had fractured the Source's caretakers and had led to Hydaelyn splitting the star. Sacrifice to save others. Save others through a new sacrifice.

Ascian words. Ascian promises.

That was the same offer that Emet-Selch had made even before his death, seeking the destruction of the reflections by condensing them down to one star. And Raha himself had done the very same thing to the one person he cherished most: he had taken the choice away from her, all the while crowing about how he was saving her life.

He had been so proud of how he had respected her. He had bragged to Emet-Selch about it, about not using the Warrior as a weapon -- and yet he had made that exact bargain anyway, even if some part of him might have known all along that she would not have wanted this. 

Raha, he remembers her whispering, his own subconscious thoughts warning him about a truth he had been fiercely shutting out -- or perhaps it had been her very spirit reaching to him from across both the rift and time itself, a last connection to his own version of the Source. I am already dead. 

Horror slams down across Raha's entire mind, robbing him of any ability to speak. All he can do is look up at the Warrior desperately as she regards him from across the distance of fate itself, her luminous eyes like golden coins judging him, both halves of Nald'thal's scales counting out his value.

Then the moment passes and she is mortal once more, her thin shoulders going slack in a sigh. "In grief, we can understand that those who are arrayed against us are exactly like ourselves," she offers softly. "We are simply fortunate enough to have our hands on the handle of the knife."

Her words attempt to be gentle, but it is too late; the atrocity of it all has already drowned Raha within his own mistakes. He leans against the table in a desperate need for support, shoulders hunching as he presses his hands to his eyes. His own selfishness had not allowed him to leave her in the past. His own self-awareness cannot keep him from knowing what he did to get there. And all of it -- as she had incisively pointed out -- had been performed without asking if she had truly wanted it or not.

"I did not know how else to fix things," he admits roughly, shutting his eyes. Even that darkness is not enough for him to hide within. "The people of the Source needed hope. They needed to believe in heroes once more. In the quest to bring you back, they found that light in themselves again."

He dimly hears the rustle of blankets, and then a dull thump as the Warrior closes her book, pushing it aside. "But I wasn't the only person who could have inspired that, was I? When you chose sleep, G'raha, it was so you could bring Allag's technology to the very same future you awoke in. If there ever was a time when the knowledge of ancient Allag would have been needed to save Eorzea, it would have been then. Instead, you abandoned your resolve almost immediately." Merciless, she presses on to the next conclusion, ticking off each point without pause. "You had already resigned yourself to leaving us behind, G'raha -- myself included. Why alter that?"

"Because I love you." He says it hopelessly, with not a shred of grace about it. She has already wrung everything else out of him; the words themselves seem a mere afterthought now, an acknowledgement of a basic fact that has been thrown as cheaply upon the table as a punched gil. "I did not know how much until I looked upon the Source again, and realized you were no longer in it. And then, it did not matter which time I was in. It was no longer my world. And that -- that was my only path forward. To undo my own decisions and return to the past, for there was no future left for me."

Silence brews thick on the air between them. He cannot look at the Warrior; he dares not risk seeing the brilliance of her mind adding up the pattern of his own failures. He had chosen to abandon a world and then regretted it -- and then abandoned it again and regretted that, a series of mistakes that had only continued to grow exponentially into a cage that had no escape. 

His ears flatten back as he tucks his head down, curling further into the cradle of his arms as if he can contain his misery within their circle, and similarly contain its harm.

"Lie if you must. But please," he begs, "do not tell me that the greatest thing I have done with my life is to ruin yours."

Cloth whispers again, the sound coming closer. Then, suddenly, warm fingers settle upon his hair, stroking back across his scalp and smoothing down his ears. They are gentle, far beyond anything he would have ever expected from her. Nothing about the touch is demanding as it lingers on the boundaries of his body, as if it knows just how close he is to shattering.

Even though it might be childish of him, he turns and reaches for her, desperate for the simplest of reassurances even through touch.

The embroidery of her robes snarls in his fingers. He shudders, too afraid to make yet another misstep -- and then her hand pulls his head against her chest, and he buries his face in the smell of her clothing, his arms wrapping around her waist.

"G'raha," she says quietly, no longer sounding as if she is considering the potential usefulness of a war. "You say we have changed the future. But what will you do when I perish again? We have both seen very keenly what happens when those with great power also carry a vast, unsolvable grief." Her fingers pause in his hair; her murmur is as patient as a placid forest stream, and yet her words are as dangerous as a waterfall. "Will Eorzea turn back time once more when they next need a hero? Or will they call upon a figure born of aether and prayers instead? The dragons mourned Bahamut in such a way. Ysayle and the Archbishop both sought to call upon the souls of the dead to empower them as champions. In the days to come, will Eorzea once more forget that it is their turn to become their own heroes -- that the world belongs to them to save and protect?"

Despite his own turmoil, Raha can feel himself calming under her touch; he is too shaky to feel ashamed for clinging to her, though he knows he will berate himself later. "We will not," he promises weakly -- except that even as he speaks, he knows it to be a lie. A precedent exists in the world now. The Ironworks merely finished the labor to turn the theoretical into reality; Cid and Nero already have the skills in the current timeline to begin the critical path forward. Even if only the Scions know the secret, it is still a secret which will be recorded in some fashion, remembered by those who lived through it -- and that knowledge may always be found again, even if its mortal memories pass away. 

"We will find a better way, the next time," he protests, feeling as if he is trying to argue a cloud to descend to earth of its own whim. "We will find a way that does not require such methods."

"We will?" she challenges. The cloth of her sleeves strokes against his cheeks as she gives his ears a final caress, and then slips her hands and herself away, stepping out of his grasp. "But you will be dead, G'raha. You will do naught."

It is a clear ultimatum. He knows the answer she is looking for: to accept her argument, to give himself the easy way out and let her make his excuse for him. 

But he cannot. It is a terrible spiral of consequences that he cannot see the way out of, even with her offering of help. To choose selfishness out of love. To choose love, and have it be selfishness. To have a pile of corpses strewn behind you no matter where you walked, and know that no matter what you did, someone would die as a result of your own actions. 

"My aid will hardly be necessary, with you and the Scions both alive once more," he tries instead, and cuts his own words off when he sees the Warrior's eyes narrow. 

She presses her thumb under his chin, forcing him to keep his face upturned. "You have already used me once as an excuse to escape the Source, rather than fix it yourself," she utters. "I will not allow you to use me again so that you can run away a second time."

It is there again, in her eyes: that impossible fire that seems eternally trapped beneath her skin, scorching him with her refusal to accept reality as it should be. The fierceness of it blisters him at first, daunting him with its stubbornness -- and then, suddenly, like two parts of an ancient puzzle lining up together to form the picture of a lock, Raha realizes that he has seen it elsewhere.

Only on the First. Only in a few rare moments, each of them memorable.

The Warrior does not burn like a madwoman. 

She burns like Emet-Selch. 

Like Elidibus. Like an Ascian, able to look at a person and perceive an entire star represented within their single form -- so that you might feel as if you are the most important creature in all of existence with their eyes upon you, and yet also realize how miniscule you are in the greater scheme of things. Infinitely significant and insignificant at the same time. Temporary even while you stand beside them, impermanent on a wheel of time that churns all souls back into the depths of the Lifestream before spitting them back out for another endless cycle.

On the Source, Raha had always shrugged away the Warrior's strangeness as a side effect of having Hydaelyn's favor. But now -- looking upon her like this, knowing the entities they have faced and the stakes being wagered -- he wonders if it has always been the other way around. That the Warrior has always been intended for wars waged on the battlegrounds of centuries, of eons, weighing tangible and intangible possibilities together as fact, able to bear the terrible weight of being mankind's bloody champion with hands that would never come clean. That what Raha and many others had fondly called, a tendency towards foolishness, had instead stemmed from a soul who had always regarded Eorzea within the shimmering context of potential, and who had never bothered to wrestle their perspective down to a single point.  

He has tried to barter with death, thinking to exchange his own life for hers -- only to discover that she has never been concerned by it at all.

Shaken, Raha can only make a plaintive, haphazard twitch of his head in denial. Her fingers are still clasped around his chin; he does not even know how to ask the question of someone who has never once flinched from her own terrifying work.

"How do you do it?" he whispers. "How else can one survive it, save to die in atonement for everything you could not do? At the end of it all, how does one even begin to tally the debt?"

She lets go of him suddenly without warning, and then lunges forward fast enough that he is forced to jerk back to keep his face from being accidentally struck. Her hands seize the top rail of his chair, trapping him between her arms. She is so little in frame -- and yet, leaning over him, her body caging him and her gaze like a lance, she feels suddenly as vast as the stars. 

"Raha," she asks softly. "Do you want to live?"

He draws breath to answer and his own body betrays him, choking him before he can claim the word no. He swallows down the mangled sound, thinking of the bare syllables of his name after it has been shorn of his tribe, of his title -- of all the history that he has carried like a tortoise upon his back, the shell of it so heavy that he can only claw his way through the mud now in hopes of drowning in the nearest pond.

"Yes." His voice breaks on the note of it. He can feel his expression contort into a grimace of sorrow: ungainly, ungraceful, an ugly thing in his grief. "I do want to live. I want to be with you, to follow behind wherever you may go next. I wish to see the future now that you are back in the world. There is naught that I desire more. But... how can I possibly ask for such a thing, when I should rightfully be dead?"

At his question, a lopsided, bemused smile flickers suddenly across the Warrior's face. She reaches out, her fingers smoothing against his cheek as if to smudge away the pain; Raha turns his face into her palm, letting it hide him instead. 

"This is the weight that must be accepted when one takes on the destiny of entire stars," she replies, shaking her head. The motion dislodges a coil of her hair; it loops down over her shoulder, dripping like a velvet sash between them. "If you wish to claim responsibility for that, it is here. This is how. We are both ghosts now, you and I -- our natural lifespans unmade by time, caught between life and death as it decides what to do with us. But we are ghosts who know what might have come. For all the opportunities taken from the future, we yet have the chance to restore them. And one day, when another great disaster arrives, the people of Eorzea will find that same light already within themselves, rather than turn to saviors from the past."

Before Raha can offer up a hasty evasion, she leans in again, turning her cheek against his hair as she murmurs directly into his ear. "Raha." Her voice coils around his name like a silken leash. "It does not matter if you think to flee into death. I will already be there, waiting."

She utters this with absolute certainty, as if she has already seen the future through to its final end, and Raha cannot suppress a shudder, his nerves contracting as if she has spoken the words into the rules of the Lifestream itself.

"Is that a blessing or a curse?" he whispers at last. His fingers feel sluggish when he finally moves them, as if he has forgotten somehow that he has a body at all, let alone mastery of it. Like an egi, she has called and bound him; all his compulsions point towards her. He brings his hands up gingerly, sliding them along her hips in search of something tangible, something to prove to himself that he is not somehow dreaming.

The corner of the Warrior's mouth crooks upwards. "Mayhap you'll simply have to remain alive until you find out."

Her fingers curl around his chin, drawing his face up towards her, and he finally feels the last of his resistance slip away when her lips press against his. He opens his mouth willingly, allowing her inside. She breathes life back into him, and he lets her, tiling his head back as she indulges herself in the taste of him, as methodical as if he were a book himself.

Perhaps he is wrong. Perhaps he is already dead, and this is a crystal dream. He is back in the Tower on the Source, with only a week passed instead of hundreds of years. He has never woken up.

He cannot tell anymore. It does not matter. Whether it is real or imaginary, they are both here now.

She slides onto his lap, straddling him easily as her robes hitch up around her legs, and he lets his hands follow along with the hems, tracing the soft skin of her thighs. She is so quick normally in everything she does, but she is slow here, even slower than his own breathless, fumbling pace as he fights with the clasps of their robes, struggling with the hidden lacings. He undoes his belt, her sash; his arm gets tangled in his own sleeve as he tries to pull his clothing off, even as the Warrior grasps the neck of his robe and begins to insistently yank it open. A new fear simmers inside him, making his fingers clumsy -- as if, should he take too long, the Warrior will simply leave him anyway out of sheer boredom.

But she waits as he pulls his arms free, and she waits as he helps her yank her own undertunic off, and even as he skims his hands over the scales that adorn her chest and belly, she does not vanish. Her own fingers are careful over the places where his skin has become stone, and Raha is grateful anew that she lives by the boundaries of her own country, her own laws for what is normal, because it means he is welcome there. 

"Raha," she whispers against his ear, her breath a tickle of heat. "Stay with me."

He gives her proof of his surrender through action, bracing her with his crystal hand so that he can reach down with the other, working his thumb across her until she bends into him with a shudder, his name a gasp on her lips. 

But afterwards, she is the one to reach down in turn, guiding him into her even as she sinks down upon him. Raha's breath chokes into a strangled groan in his throat; the heat of her feels already like too much and yet not enough, as if there is no salve save to have more of her. He shifts his hips experimentally, and is rewarded by a pleading gasp as the Warrior tucks her head against his shoulder, and then both their reserves of patience evaporate into sheer need.

Raha shifts his arm around her, kissing every part of her that he can reach. Her hair is loose, pouring around her shoulders; her spectacles are discarded on the books. She braces her hands against the back of his chair and the table, her weight rolling and sinking down harder again even as her voice begins to rise, and he forgets which parts of him are flesh, and which have already become ghosts.

Afterwards, when Raha wakes, he is alone.

He sits up, his breath lurching in instant terror, his mind mocking him already -- he was too slow for her tastes, too simple. She had offered him comfort purely out of pity. He has failed her somehow in this as well.

He rolls over in a rush, shoving off the covers and swinging his feet down, and then proceeds to accidentally kick the Warrior of Light in the head.

After she has finished complaining loudly -- despite all Raha's profuse apologies, his magicks soothing the pain and also the minor concussion -- he finally gets a chance to look around at the mess she has made of his floor. She had relocated her books directly to his bedside, not bothering with any tables; if he hadn't hit her first, he surely would have stepped on one. "What are you doing down here?"

He knows that his healing spells are strong enough within the Tower that the Warrior cannot possibly still be injured; even so, when she continues to groan theatrically and tuck her head into her arm, he cannot help but be concerned. Yet the moment that he reaches out curiously towards the nearest open book, wondering which one she has picked out, she snaps to attention and snatches it away.

"I tried reading on the bed, but you kept knocking the books off," she announces loftily, as if it was somehow Raha who was being unreasonable, and she had been given no other choice. "So down here is exactly where I need to be, and nowhere else."

Stifling a laugh as he reaches out to cradle her hand in his, Raha strokes his thumbs over her palm, letting himself indulge in the affection of it. Between the two of them, he had always thought of her as being the one who was lighter than air, floating away from rules and reality -- but now, it seems as if sky and earth have been reversed. He has been the one descending all this while, falling through an endless pit wrought of his own despair, while her feet have been planted firmly upon the ground of an entirely different country. 

We have both seen very keenly what happens when those with great power also carry a vast, unsolvable grief, she had said, and Raha cannot deny that he has, even now, stood among those ranks.

This is the weight that must be accepted when one takes on the destiny of entire stars. 

He hadn't known how to walk that path. It had been too terrifying to try doing it alone; he had never thought in such directions before, had always considered the necessary perspective to be either too cruel or too indifferent. He had stubbornly thought of himself as a mere Student of Baldesion even as he had held time itself within his hands and had performed acts of magicks that not even Emet-Selch could reproduce with an Ascian's skills. It had left Raha trapped between living and dying, not knowing if he should be one thing or the other, just as his body had wavered between skin and stone.

He had thought he had deserved his death, both as punishment and atonement -- but there is no atonement that can be made, because it has never been a case of earning one's death. It comes for everyone, even immortal Ascians. It will come again for him and the Warrior both, and so every day that is given to them is another day that matters. 

I will leave you again someday, the Warrior had warned him, in so many words. But also: when you die, I will already be there waiting.

It is a distant light for him to hold onto -- a distant light at the end of a long and winding journey, one which will have to be even longer now. Raha has no choice but to do his best to make it back to the Source intact. He will have to navigate through a new uncertainty of years with the Warrior beside him: unrepentant as ever, carousing through the years while always seeing the whole of eternity contained within each second.


To live on as a ghost, holding fast as long as he can so that he will not leave unfinished grief behind: a hole in people's hearts that can only be filled by begging you back into it. 

Yet, alive or dead, present or future -- in whatever state he and the Warrior may be in, and whatever time guides them, at least they will be traveling forward together. 

"Yes," he agrees with a laugh, brushing her hair back behind her horn, and watching her eyes crinkle with amusement. "I suppose you are exactly where you need to be after all."