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Stories exist to be told – Caelus knows this rule very well. It’s the kind of rule that is ingrained into the bones of his being, wrapped around him like a weighted blanket. One might say he is too new for this world – barring the fact that a stellaron is far too old for anyone to even comprehend.
Kafka had told him on the space station “At the end of your journey, all that perplexes you and troubles you will resolve.” The words are a touch fuzzier now – blurred around the edges like the rest of his fragmented memories – spinning lost and alone and never joining. Who was Caelus before the space station, before the stellaron? Caelus read somewhere that the human memory was a fallible, breakable thing – how much of that statement is true for him?
Caelus knows, with his patchwork memories – voids where things like childhood and answers should be – that they are nothing more than a way to render him a blank slate for the Aeons to push their will through.
Caelus gets it. Sometimes. It’s just, well –
-or in less pretty words: There’s a monster at the end of this story. Caelus is only slightly sure that it isn’t him.
---
“Hello,” says the lonely monster. “Why do I exist?”
The spider hums, the threads weaving. “You exist to hold a terrible thing.”
“Why?” asks the monster, confused. “Why me?”
“Oh, little monster,” the spider coos, crawling further up her web. “There are some things that I can’t give answers too.”
---
Here’s a question: Can a knight slay a dragon, if they love the dragon too much?
It’s not a question Caelus has an answer too – he’s never been in that kind situation. But after Belobog, he’ll sit disquieted, staring at the ceiling.
He was supposed to die when Cocolia ran him through with that lance, he thinks. He’ll stand in front of the mirror with his shirt off, and run his fingers over the place on his chest where a giant gaping hole should be. Now, it’s just a jagged scar, discoloured and eye-catching. There are old frostbite scars spiralling from it, and Caelus tries to pay them no mind.
It was one of those literary trope things he discovered when he was buying books in Belobog – a necromancer bringing back someone from the dead, but they come back wrong. A supposed warning to make sure people never try to do the same. Caelus gets it – the dead should stay dead. That’s the safest option.
But yet, here he is – alive when he shouldn’t be. He should have died twice over by now – run through by a lance, burnt alive by a dragon’s breath. He wonders if he came back wrong. If the stellaron fucked up somewhere and now there’s something slightly wrong with him.
Maybe he’s missing even more memories. Not that he would know – that’s the point of having poor memory, he guesses. You can’t remember what you forgot.
---
“Do you miss it?” The lonely monster asks.
The amnesiac witch frowns. “I dunno! Can’t miss what I can’t remember, you know?”
“Right,” says the monster, looking to the ground. “That makes sense.”
The witch grins, ear to ear. She slings an arm around the monster’s shoulders and holds a camera up high. “Well, my fellow amnesiac brethren – that just means we need to make a whole bunch of new memories!”
---
The Xianzhou Luofu had too many places to hide – and too many places with secrets that shouldn’t be shared. Caelus tries his best not to stick his hands into too many problems – interfering with every single incident on the starship was asking for trouble, and he’d rather thumb through the old books he finds abandoned on crates and in the back of boxes. The text is small, and even though the power of the Trailblaze could translate them, it was still hard to read.
Caelus likes that. It means he can take longer, thumbing through the old, yellowed pages in whatever corner he’s hid himself.
One day, a stellaron crisis will start with him, and it will end with him too. It makes him wonder sometimes – is Caelus him, the body that walks, or is Caelus the stellaron, the artificial heart that pulses with destruction? The question sits heavy on the edge of his mind – mixing and curling around his arms.
He tugs on a strap – yellow and sharp, and tries to count between the seconds, one by one.
---
“Do you have anything to ask me?” Asks the quiet dragon, tail curling around his leg.
The lonely monster shakes his head. It’s not the kind to pry.
The dragon walks off, an air of grief around him. This is his birthright, revealed to him in the single swing of a blade honed true.
The monster returns to watching the ocean – memories that do not belong to it cascading past.
---
Caelus’s trip to Penacony could only really be described as “a rather rotten experience” - too many people trying to hide too many things. No moments to stop, no moments to pause and let him process what he was seeing. Just one rotten experience after another, swirling past in strings of the pale blue that dreams seem to made of in Penacony.
It is only after Aventurine gets fucking – vaporised or whatever by Acheron, and Firefly returns from the fucking dead to reveal she was Sam all along, is that Caelus is given at least 20 minutes to just. Stop. He finds a relatively quiet corner in Dreamer’s Edge, and just. Sits. And stares out into the skyline. Hidden partially by a pillar, only to be found by those who he wants to find him.
Which, as of now – is no one.
The thing is, no matter how old Caelus’s body seems to be, he still only a few months old. Grief hasn’t had time to leave it’s bitter taste in his mouth. He supposes he is acting like a child – hiding away, trying not to acknowledge anything that is happening in front of him. But he doesn’t know what to do with all this – grief and rage that wells up inside of him, like a pot threatening to overboil and spill.
He thinks – he’d like to wake up now. This dream was rotten to its core.
---
At the end of this story, there is only one thing to ask: What is a lonely monster to do, with all this grief? With all these feelings it’s never felt before?
Does it contain it within it? Does it let it loose?
What is a lonely monster to do?
---
You see, Caelus thinks – there’s a monster at the end of this story, a lonely one destined to destroy everything on one fell swoop.
He’s just not sure if that the monster at the end of it isn't him.