Chapter Text
The glowing spear that stabs into the queen's stirring form staggers Eunie, as if there was an explosion and a shockwave. Her gut turns and her vision clouds. Chills play across her arms. It takes her a few moments to get steady on her feet.
Lying in her… pod? The queen looks almost as peaceful as she did seconds earlier. She's not bleeding, at least not visibly. There's just the singed hole in her robe, wisps of smoke rising from the wound in her flesh. Eunie feels her stunned mind coolly register that the queen looks a bit like Mio. Similar hair and face shape at least. Longer ears.
Was that in M's memories for Mio? Is it a coincidence? If not, what is going through Mio's head now, as they all turn and listen to D and J begin to gloat? The feline's face is pale even by her standards, jaw clenched. On the other side of her from Eunie, Noah looks like N did in that moment at the castle when Mio handed Noah the white flute.
Lanz's voice creaks with strain as he argues with Joran. With J. The Moebius lashes them with his own self-loathing. There's so much more of it than Eunie understood. She thinks back to the Joran she knew. Hadn't they all supported him?
When he says he remembers all his past lives now, she flinches. Weeks of nightmares, since they found that ruined ferronis. She wants to ask if he remembered any of that before he was Moebius, but she can't speak in the face of his anger. His pain.
They fight, because that's the easier way. And it really is easy, six on two. They're used to Moebius now. If you can get them to start attacking they're just big, strong monsters, most of them. This time they have no tricks. They don't even back each other up well.
Eunie interlinks with Taion and it's like getting home to camp after a battle while they're still fighting. He steadies her and she drives him on. There's no hesitation, no wavering. They don't need to talk or think.
Then the Moebius are beaten back to a standstill. Eunie stops with the rest of the Ouroboros, drawing deep, warm breaths against the cold wind gusting up into the bottom of Cloudkeep. There's the prickle of good circulation, good exercise, in her shoulders.
Ringing in Eunie’s ears is the sad little, "No… not again!" Joran let out as he sank to his knees.
Then, more talking. Lanz and Noah take the lead, pleading with Joran to remember them. Lanz has more to say, more eloquently, than Eunie can ever remember from him. Eunie can't follow up. As Lanz presses, his voice growing ragged, Eunie feels her face, her neck, her chest tensing up. She wants to cry but she can't. Joran's memories of the time they shared as rookies are so different from her own.
Fresh from the interlink, she can still dimly feel Taion, standing to her side and a little behind her. Watching carefully, like he always does. Does he sense her discomfort? Like her, he says nothing, even though Sena and Mio both try.
Somehow, it's working. Eunie doesn't understand the difference between J's 'triumph' and Joran's 'soaring'. Something is passing between Lanz and Joran as they throw words at each other like third-termers trying to wield full-size blades. Joran seems to be about to capitulate.
Then D smashes his head into the tiles and absorbs him into one of those freakish, distended Moebius interlinks.
"Ever had dreams?" D sneers. "Dreams of dying? Of being slaughtered?"
Eunie feels her whole body clench, a surge of sudden nausea.
"Ah well, most people forget soon as they wake." The Moebius' voice throbs in her ears, ringing from every architectural crenelation of the Cloudkeep. "No harm done." Even though his tone softens, none of the menace dissipates. "But tell you what, they're all completely true."
Again, Eunie reels inside. She takes a half step forward, fighting it. Trying to push back like Lanz did to Joran. "And so snuffin' what? What if they were?" The words sound thin, her conviction a joke. She knows, even before D can start to explain, that he speaks truth. "The past is past, and the present is now!"
"I wasn't finished." He's like a cliff face, towering over them, bored with invulnerability. "Dreams, y'see. They're little traces of intense memories from your past lives, that didn't get purged before rebirth."
Bright sun. Fire and blood. Bodies on black rock. Whirling panic. Energy rifles firing in aimless, hopeless directions. Fear. Kneeling on the ground, looking up into the sharp-toothed grin of a magenta monster. Dreams, over and over again, as vivid and bewildering and horrid as her flashbacks about Agnus Castle.
Intense memories, no doubt. Eunie's mouth is full of saliva. She can feel her shoulders shuddering, her skin trying to crawl down the insides of her sleeves. Her breath comes shallow. She's wincing, eyes screwed tight, almost closed.
D stands there bragging. His voice seems too loud for words, she can't follow what he says. When she tries to say something to the others, they don't understand. She's not sure she wants them to, but Lanz and Sena's encouragement rings hollow.
It's almost a relief when D smashes through the floor. Together, they tumble, floating for a fraction of a second just long enough for Eunie to think wait, were we at the bottom of Cloudkeep, or is there a floor below us? The raw terror of falling, and the jarring, bone-deep shock of the impact, cut through the sick feeling in her heart.
More fighting. With Joran's power at his disposal, D is stronger, tougher, nimbler. But he's still just a monster. They've fought worse, and now it's six on one. They surround him, trading off when it gets too much, interlinking when they take big hits. The interlink is warm and sweet, wrapped around them like honey but gone too soon.
Noah and Mio send D flying, smashing him into one of the hanging buttresses. The Moebius staggers upright ranting, giving them his name. Eunie listens with horror to Taion's explanation. Why does he know stuff like that? How can he remember it now?
Something happens inside the D-J interlink, some internal exchange that's too muffled to hear. The Moebius heats up, sucking in swirls of black fog. Its body is fighting itself, stumbling, wrestling backwards towards the precipice, and this time they are on the bottom level of the tower. Thousands of metres above the Aetia region.
D glows brighter and brighter in the chaotic swirl of darkness. For a moment, there's a glimpse of Joran. Not J in his Moebius pink and grotesque mask, but Joran as Eunie remembers him from the day he died. He says a few words.
Then the whole monster goes over backwards, tumbling out of sight. Eunie can't move, wants to chase, reach out, try to catch him. A few seconds later there's the flash of annihilation. A gust of heat that reaches them even near the middle of the platform.
The moment that follows, in the moment as it happens, is maybe the worst Eunie has ever felt. She knows that, if someone asks her years from now, what she'll remember is Agnus Castle. The horror of this moment is different. Grief for Joran, terror at the implications of her own memories, the hollow despair of waiting for someone to lead the way back up the tower to confront the Queen's corpse. It's routine. This is everything she's lived for nine terms and worse.
She looks around at her friends. Noah, his jaw set, staring out into the sky, with Mio looking to him, hand half-raised. Lanz with grief carved in his cheeks, Sena at his side, her arm across his back as if bracing in case he collapses. Taion, emotionless and unreadable as an ancient statue, on his own off to the side.
The staircase waits, strewn with rubble from D's wanton destruction. Eventually Noah – it had to be him – turns and starts walking over to them without meeting anyone's eyes. His shoulders hang low. Despite that, everyone follows him. Cloudkeep has a lot of steps. Eunie's knees ache as if her feet weigh a tonne each.
Finally they stand in the Queen's chamber, silent before the awful stillness of it. Even Taion can't keep the emotion from his voice as he says, "This was… supposed to be how we take back our world." The smoke has stopped rising from the ruined pod. Mio's ragged apology hangs in the air with all the weight of Monica's – justified, as it turned out – paranoia behind it.
And then, somehow, there's a distinctly un-monarchical curse and the beautiful, silver-haired lady stirs. She sits up, muttering to herself. Seeing her move, there's no doubt of her resemblance to Mio. Even the name she gives, Nia, sounds similar. Eunie feels laughter boiling up within her, almost violent, twisting off in a shudder.
The story she tells them, of worlds torn apart and drawn back together, is calamitous on a scale that Eunie can't really grasp. She doesn't understand who Z is, or why he created the Endless Now. The talk of keys and hearts brings back a flutter of dizziness, and she presses a hand to her chest. Taion, she can tell, understands much better, and she trusts him to interpret for them later.
If the history is bewildering, the mission to Origin sounds easy. Just more of the same. But the way the Queen hesitates to answer Sena's question about transforming the world, and her evasion when Noah asks – impossibly, but utterly himself – whether Moebius must be their enemy… Eunie is still thinking about that as they leave the tower. What world will they make if they can defeat Z?