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Too slow.
Too late.
Failure.
Another failure.
It was the second true failure of Artorius Collbrande's life, and it was in every measure as painful as the first. More painful than the first. Failing in the task that had been set for him by his master was understandable. Circumstances outside of his control had ultimately prevented his success, not some personal failing of effort or study or imagination. At every turn, on every isle of the empire, the answer he had found was the same: There was no way to quell the generation of malevolence itself. That was regretful, but a man could not find that which did not exist. It had been an effort doomed to failure from the start. An effort that he had given every waking day for a decade in the service of.
On the very day that he had given up, he had met the young woman who would suffer for his second failure. A kind, generous girl with a genuine zest for life. An understanding, empathetic girl who had told him that it was okay merely to live, when he had thought his failure had left him with nothing to live for.
He had failed her, and she had died.
Celica Crowe, his wife for a too-short, blissful span of years, was dead because he had failed to protect her. Failed all on his own, in a situation that he should have controlled.
It was his fault. He knew that truth with every fiber of his being, even as he stared back toward the forest, at the daemons he had slain.
It was undeniably his fault. His failure. He understood, even as he sank to his knees at the lip of the shrine. At the very edge of the chasm in the land that his wife had been flung into. Understood, even as Melchior attempted to prod him with the spiked barbs of his words into action.
Yes, he understood his failure. Until the shrine was bathed in a sudden, golden light that forced back the sullen red darkness of the Scarlet Night. Until two malakhim stood before him, one wearing the face of his wife.
His second failure had illuminated a new path. A path that might allow him to salvage his first. If only he were strong enough to take it. Strong enough to follow the path that his master had set him on, that had been opened at the cost of his love.
"Wait!" he'd cried out, voice jagged with the edges of everything he'd lost. "I'm sorry. That I couldn't protect you."
The red eyes of the malak had watched him entirely dispassionately as he held out the charm he had made and apologized. For all it bore the appearance of his wife, it was not. Celica could never have seen him in the very extremity of despair and simply looked silently at him. Never merely listened as he promised to throw away the man that he had been, a weak man who had fallen away from his path. The right path.
"Nameless spirit, I make this vow unto you. The whole of this world, all of its pain, I will put an end to it."
He had declared his own name then. Not the 'Arthur' of misspent years, but 'Artorius Collbrande', the man who would carry on the will of the Exorcist Claudin Asgard. Then, under the shadow of the ruins and the crimson light of the moon, he bound the malak to his service.
-----
"Celica, what's for br---"
With a sudden jolt, he remembered. There was no Celica. Not anymore. Laphicet and Velvet had looked at him with childlike incomprehension, when he had at last recovered them the night before. Velvet had cried. Laphicet had merely fixated on Seres, as though the ghost of his older sister had been standing right at Arthur's shoulder. It wasn't until he picked them both up to carry them home that the boy had finally cried.
They had to cry for his share as well. He couldn't allow himself to show that weakness, for their sake more than his own. It was the least - the very least - that he owed his wife. Not while those eyes of molten red-gold watched him out of his wife's face.
From the moment he stepped outside for his morning practice, those eyes were on him. He refused to return the look, though he had seen it. It was a blank thing, flat, devoid of anything that might have reminded him of Celica. Strangely, that pierced the armor he'd surrounded his mind with far more easily than if it had had the feel of her.
There was no reason to acknowledge the malak. It was not his wife. Merely a tool created vaguely in the shape of her. At most, it was a reminder of his failure. A goad to spur him onward, and a reminder of what must be done, and why.
Slowly, he unsheathed his sword. It was not trivial to draw out the blade with his left hand. The entire motion felt wrong. Was wrong. But his right arm hung useless at his side, and mere wrongness was insufficient to deter him. Daemons still needed to be slain, and would not wait merely because he had been wounded.
The blade glittered faintly in the morning light, bright and clean, as though it had not cut down the hulks of what had once been men the night before. As though it mocked the dirtied disorder of his own thoughts while he moved from one arte to the next. The lack of his dominant hand made each strike waver, sometimes overextending, sometimes falling short.
Insufficient.
Frustrating.
The road back to mere competence stretched out before him dauntingly. He would walk it. Before long, he would run it.
He looked up as he sheathed the sword. The malak was still watching him. Silently. With all of the beauty of a doll. Judging his every step upon the earth behind those fiery red eyes.
Or was it merely a reflection of his own judgment?
-----
Maintaining his 'family' had been the most immediate challenge that faced Artorius in the aftermath of that Scarlet Night. It consumed time, and that was in decidedly limited supply. Velvet could care for Laphicet to some degree, but she couldn't do more than the most basic cooking. He himself faced his own challenges hunting with only one arm, which cost yet more time, and he begrudged every second of it.
Hidden in the shrine, somewhere, somehow, was the very thing he had been seeking. A malakhim lord powerful enough to end the daemonic threat, could he merely awaken it. There was a way. There had to be a way. Melchior would search for it in his own studied manner, but Artorius suspected that the answers lay closer to home. That suspicion - unreasonable and unsupported as it might be - bound him tightly to Eastgand.
Not the emotional attachments he had to his wife's younger siblings. He could have severed those. In accordance with Reason, he should have. Even then, he could not. If he was to remain anyway, cutting them loose would have been needlessly cruel. Unless they actively held him back, unless removing that shackle called 'family' was necessary, there was no room in his belief for actively doing harm.
"I will succeed for their sake as well," he half-whispered.
No one but the malak was around to hear, and it maintained its silence. What did it think? What did it want? Did it want? Celica had never been so withdrawn. Had been incapable of not expressing herself.
Seeing the cold ghost of her form be so inexpressive hurt. It was not a physical pain - not at all like the ache that had lain under his heart in those first days after his wife's death. Instead, it lived in the hidden corners of his thoughts, twisting him down paths better left untrodden.
'Is life something that you have to earn? Something you must deserve?'
The ultimate unfairness of the world lay there. He tried to think that it was for the best. That it had opened the way to save the world. That his wife, and his son, were an infinitesimally small price to pay.
He would never embrace his wife again.
His son would never see the light of the world.
No matter what he did, they would both be forgotten all too soon.
The price was small, when compared to the world.
But the price had been his world.
There was no way he could move beyond that as not-his-wife watched him day after day. Artorius seized the malak by the shoulders, only for a moment. The soft, gentle slope of them was entirely Celica's, and he spun away at once before the sudden spike of grief could tear the mask from his face.
Keeping Seres by his side had been another mistake. One that Melchior had tried to spare him from, in the moment. Artorius suspected that the old man had known even then that he was still wobbling back and forth across the path rather than truly striding straight along it.
What would he have done, if Claudin's confidante had insisted? Had he been rational enough to accept the truth of the matter and let go? It was deceit - self-deception, at that - to believe that he could have. He had been grasping for salvation - Was still grasping for it - and had sought some vague comfort in keeping the memory of Celica by his side.
If not that, what could the malak do? He knew its true name. Not only that, but the name that he had bestowed to mask it. 'Seres'. Not a gentle flame, but an all-consuming one. One that he could use to clear the path before him. Would use, in memory of what he had lost. Not as a comfort, but as a goad.
He looked back. The malak was still staring at him blankly, as though it failed to comprehend even the simple fact that it had been touched. Surely, it had some intuition, even newly-born as it was, but it was clearly insufficient to the task of understanding him.
That was for the best. Artorius Collbrande did not need to be understood. He needed to understand something far more fundamental to the world than the birth and growth of a malak.
-----
Seres found herself left behind more often in the months that followed. She did not know why, but that did not matter to her. The tasks that her vessel required of her were not onerous, and well within her abilities.
Every time the man looked at her, she felt some vague hint of recognition. More than a hint of sorrow. A lingering desperation, like the one that had filled his voice on the night of her birth. There was pain there, a silent agony that remained unspoken, and she did not know why.
It was a day that she was not left behind. She journeyed with him out from the half-finished gate at the village of Aball, down the loose path of dirt and grass and the occasional rock that marked the main track through the forest. Artorius Collbrande had not said where they were going. He had merely commanded her to attend, and she had obeyed.
She walked, not truly by his side but a half step behind, past the well-kept apple orchards, and on into the wilds that made up the vast crimson sea of trees in middle Eastgand. It was intentional, the way she avoided his sight. Though she could not say why he refused to allow his gaze to settle on her, or why the very appearance of her seemed to rouse some unspeakable thing within him, she knew that it did.
No, that was incorrect.
She knew why. Had known why ever since the night her fate had been bound up with his, when she had been tethered to him, and gained him as a vessel in turn. Had known as soon as he discovered the two children who were not his, hiding behind the trunk of a tree near the outer edge of the forest. She reminded him of family, though what she could not say was how.
He had never truly spoken to her since that day. Commanded, yes, but in the way one might command a subordinate. Or, lesser yet, a well-trained hound. At best, as a person, but certainly never as an equal. Some days, she doubted even the 'person' part. She would have doubted that always, were it not for the ways he did react to her. Especially the way he could not bear the sight of her. She was too bound up in what the man had lost, and it wasn't her that he hated for it. It was himself.
That was her suspicion, as inaccurate as it might have been. He kept her even further than arm's length because he could not separate her from the woman Celica Crowe in his own mind. And because he could not separate them, he was entirely incapable of seeing her as herself.
Seres wondered, sometimes, what Celica Crowe must have been like. Surely, she was a wonderful person - had been a wonderful person - to provoke such a strong reaction from Artorius even after her death. To dent the mask of calm that he seemed to be desperately pulling over his own face every morning, to be relinquished only in the arms of fitful rest at night. Had the woman been raven-haired like the girl Velvet? Fair-haired like the boy Laphicet? Had she been tall? Short? Thin? Plump? Quick-witted? Gentle? A tease? A nurturer?
She could know, if she chose to. Laphicet could see her, though he seemed hesitant to speak to her - perhaps because Artorius never spoke to her casually. But when she considered it, something held her back. What good would the knowledge do her? She wanted to help, and she could not conceive of any way that merely knowing about the man's family would allow her to do that.
Perhaps there was a simpler way. He reacted most strongly when those pale ice-blue eyes of his met hers. Were it not for that, maybe, just maybe he could see beyond his past. And more importantly, possibly even begin to heal. That was not something given to her to do. Fire was not made to wash away old hurts. Not made to fill in old gaps and make them anew. Not even made to carry them away as words into the very air. She was uniquely unsuited to the task she wanted to complete, and she hated it.
"Artorius," she said softly, barely above the breeze whispering through the autumnal leaves.
He turned slightly and looked at her, lips deliberately thinned down to a line to hide the frown she knew would be there otherwise.
"What is it?"
"Would you..." she paused. There was only so much she could ask. If she couched her request as something to spare his feelings, he would deny it as a matter of course. No, it was not something that she could ask. "No. It is nothing. Pay it no mind."
He did frown at that.
"What?"
"I would prefer if..." She needed a lie. An imminently believable lie. "If you would procure for me a mask. The sight of me still upsets Laphicet from time to time. Were my visage more obscured from him, perhaps his heart could finally heal."
It was the best sort of lie: The truth. Only one facet of it, intentionally held forth to hide the rest of it, yes, but what she had said was not false. It was merely incomplete. Artorius Collbrande was no fool, she knew. He likely would hear the things she had left unspoken. But he might at least allow himself to act as though he believed they were true.
"Hm..." He spoke as he turned away from her. "Your idea is not without merit."
Silence filled the gulf between them once more, and Seres carefully did not smile. It was a small victory, but it was a victory. She had won. She had won for him. A victory that her vessel would never have allowed himself.
The faint heat of a flush of pride reddened her cheeks as she maintained her careful pace, still only a half-step behind.
-----
Artorius slowly confirmed his own suspicions in the year that followed. Both from local sources, and from research Melchior had done, he had come to understand what it was he was waiting for.
The mere awakening of Kanonushi was insufficient, as he had known from that first night. But the process of truly embodying the malakhim lord was more fraught than he had thought. Patience was required. Kanonushi required another offering - another pure and highly susceptible vessel. More, that offering needed to be made on another Scarlet Night. He rejoiced and cursed his luck in equal measure when he had learned that - that he had begun the process entirely by accident.
He could be that offering. There was a part of him that almost looked forward to it, when he first realized what the requirements to awaken the Fifth were, and that he met them. Of course, any true exorcist would meet them. He was hardly special in that regard. But at first, the thought that he could both save the world and cast off his burden and follow after Celica had nearly claimed him.
It was not that simple. Things never were. Awakening the Fifth was akin to reaching the starting line of the race, not its conclusion. His study had yielded frustrating hints and glimpses of what lay beyond, and it was nothing that he would leave to another. It was not in him to leave a job half-accomplished. Or worse, barely begun. Especially not this one, which he had already abandoned once, thinking it impossible.
He would need another. Someone else clear-eyed to the truth of the world, attuned to the spirits of it, and all that surrounded it. Someone who could give everything for the sake of a better world.
"Laphicet."
The name passed his lips as the barest of whispers.
While his wife's younger sister was growing up, had taken over the keeping of the house, even begun studying under him in the martial artes, she was insufficient. Even the hint of Seres never caught her eye. The boy, though...
The boy had seen Seres from the very beginning. Had loved her and been repulsed by her from the first moment he had laid eyes on her. Had felt the same overwhelming wrongness that Artorius himself felt when looking at her. That had abated somewhat after he had used the mask to obscure the malak's face, but he doubted that it would ever dissipate entirely. Certainly, it would not for him.
More than his aptitude, Laphicet was not growing. Some sickness, some illness, some infirmity marred him. Artorius knew it, had read of it in his studies, though he had never encountered it before. The 'Twelve-Year Sickness' - aptly, if unimaginatively, named. At most, the boy had some five winters left, presuming he survived them. It was a strangely metaphysical thing, though the physical symptoms seemed to carry off at least as many of the sufferers. The cough, especially - a wet, wracking thing that went on and on, particularly in the cold months - seemed a harbinger of the sufferer's eventual end. There were medicines to alleviate that, but alleviate was all they could do. Curing was beyond any arte he knew, whether that of a malak or of a physician.
Slowly, deliberately, he introduced the boy to his books. The illness often left him too weak or sickly to leave the house, but reading was not beyond him. Artorius sat at the table, under the light of the lamps after dinner, and began Laphicet's course of study. He had books aplenty, and not all of them were esoteric histories out of which he had gleaned what he knew of Kanonushi's return. But the world was in those books, and even young as he was, Laphicet had grasped for it desperately, as a drowning man might grasp at any slight hope floating on the surface of the water above him.
In due time, he would introduce the boy to the writings about the Fifth. To the state of the world. To the only way to save it. For now, though, he would wait. The child's joy of discovery was too fresh, and there was still time. Years worth of time. Far too long, and yet short enough, if it led to the salvation of all humanity.
-----
The mask, a rich thing of metallic black and gold, concealed Seres' eyes as she settled it in place. It fit neatly, almost like her own skin, and through some inexplicable craftsmanship, did not even obscure her vision.
Seres had been correct on both counts, both her spoken intent and her unspoken one. Without the instant reminder every time they looked at her, both Laphicet and Artorius had slowly, finally relaxed around her. The man was still guarded in her presence, but as she had come to know over the course of years, he was guarded around everyone. It twisted her heart, because it was only too obvious from her knowledge of the Crowe siblings that he had not always been thus.
They relied on him, both of them, without suspecting his motives. Well, they were children, and could be forgiven for trusting the man who had married their sister, who had stayed and cared for them after their sister's untimely death. His goal was larger than that, though, and thus beyond anything that they might have considered on their own.
She saw them grow up, as though they were her own family. Perhaps they were, if Artorius was the father figure of the cobbled-together unit. The girl - Velvet - remained as blind to her as the day they had 'met', but that didn't prevent Seres from feeling a warm sense of something not unlike parental pride as the girl grew up. The girl always had been an outrageous tomboy, more at peace in the woods or sweating out the form of a new combat arte than she ever would have been in a garden or at a loom, but the years had tempered that with the necessity to keep the house in order and care for her younger brother.
Laphicet, on the other hand, had only become more curious as the years passed. He spoke to her often, on the occasions that she was around the house and not out following Artorius. It was all that he had to him, some days, that curiosity. She hated those days - days where it felt like a light breeze could have carried the boy away forever, days where she was powerless to help.
Mostly, though, she spent her time following the man who was dead set on saving the world as he searched out the true means to do so. They had searched the length and breadth of Eastgand - for other shrines, or information about the one they already knew, or old stories of half-remembered lore, or books written in ancient tongues. It was all incomprehensible to her, but Artorius understood it.
She had her misgivings about the plan. Something about the half-glimpsed figure of the Fifth in the old stories chilled her to the core. Artorius did not seek her counsel, though, and largely kept his own besides. On rare occasions, he might speak of it to the old man named Melchior, the one who had been set to take her away that first night.
On that matter, she kept her own counsel. There was no one she could tell, but she could put no faith in the man. He seemed almost too 'cold' to be human, and the idea that she might have been bound to such a person unsettled her. She was already something of a poor match for her vessel as it was - a mix of fire and water. But at least the water was not uniformly still, glassy, almost ice-smooth. It would never be her match, but she could respect it. When she looked at Melchior, though, all she saw was a void where a person ought to be, and it always pleased her to see him depart.
Unfortunately, that most recent time, he had brought news. Knowledge of when the next Scarlet Night would arrive. A mere half-year, in the early autumn. The time was finally arriving, whether she had settled her misgivings or not. Whether Artorius was ready or not. Whether Laphicet was ready or not.
She had heard that conversation all too clearly, and wished dearly that she had not. She understood exactly what the boy was doing, willingly giving away a life that would be cut short anyway for the chance to make the world a better place for his sister. He lacked any of Artorius' grand ambition, which only made his choice more desperately heroic. Every time she had seen him, after, she was thankful for the mask. It had been intended to protect him as much as it was to protect her vessel, but in that moment, it had begun protecting her instead. Without it, she never would have managed to conceal the sheer, helpless empathy she felt. Felt so deeply that it became almost incomprehensible to her, like a flame cast about hither and yon, flickering in an unpredictable breeze.
It had to remain a secret. Velvet, for one, would never understand. The girl was the sort of person who would fight to the bitter end without ever giving up. That mere words would enable her to accept what her younger brother had chosen was unthinkable. Impossible. No matter that the boy had chosen it himself, with her in his heart the whole time. Her knowing that would only make things worse.
Seres grimaced as she watched the occasional flicker of embers from the hearth. All too soon, it wouldn't matter. There would be no reason left to remain in that house. All of them, excepting perhaps the girl, would move on from there in their own ways. It was inevitable, in the same way that fire reduced wood to ash.
-----
A day that had dawned so bright and clear should never have heralded the beginning of a change that shook the very foundations of the world. Artorius had known what was coming. He had spent seven years preparing for it, after all. And it had all nearly come to naught because of one lone daemon and his wife's siblings' love of the cape that overlooked the deep blue sea.
He had been in time. Barely. But unlike the last time, when he had lost Celica, it was time enough. Laphicet was shaken, but well. Velvet was unconscious, but alive. His mind revolted at examining just how close one simple happenstance had come to ruining everything he had spent seven years working toward.
As he looked around the cape, his own impatience goaded him. It was not time. Not yet. He glanced from Laphicet to Seres and back. No matter what the malak was, it was not his wife. Nor was it Laphicet's older sister. He had carefully refused to consider what Celica might have thought of his plan. Of Laphicet's plan. Now that it was all coming to a head, he could hardly avoid thinking on it.
Celica would have been too emotionally invested in her little brother to see the larger picture. She loved too freely, too deeply, for her to be any other way. It was a love that had even touched him, when he had despaired of life itself. He could wish that she would understand, but that was all it would ever be: his own selfish desire.
Without another look, he took Velvet in his good arm. She, at least, could be kept safely out of the way. It was his promise to the boy, and he intended to keep it, if such a thing was possible. The Scarlet Night, and the presence of Kanonushi, might well render such things as promises unfulfillable.
"Is... Is she okay?"
Laphicet was bleary-eyed, but slowly regaining his senses. Artorius nodded to himself. All was still well.
"She will be," he answered simply.
With a hesitant movement, as though he didn't quite trust his legs, Laphicet rose to his feet. He came over to stand by Artorius, and gently lifted one of Velvet's arms. Carefully, he placed the comb in her hand and curled her fingers around before allowing it to settle against her chest.
"I want her to have that. So that she can remember me, after..."
Artorius watched impassively, waited to see if the boy would say anything more. When no more words were forthcoming, he nodded again and strode away, bearing the girl with him.
-----
A cruel, sullen red bathed the night air. It was horrible by its very nature, and it raised in Seres the spectres of a night long past. A night when she had stood beside another malak, stood before the man called Artorius Collbrande.
'Unsettling' was the only word for it, for returning to the time and the place of her birth under the blood-red light of the moon. She could not pin the feeling down more firmly than that. Something was wrong, but that knowledge was a thing of intuition only. If asked to explain it, she knew she would have failed utterly.
Artorius and Laphicet stood before the gaping maw of the shrine, awaiting some moment that only they would know. She watched them from a short distance away, when she was not scanning the treeline for interlopers. Daemons. The red moon seemed to attract such things, and interference could not be permitted tonight of all nights.
She was no less convinced than they that what they were about that night was necessary. The daemons were more threatening year by year, with no end in sight. As she stood her guard in wait, though, another thought wormed its way into her mind: Was a thing good, just because it was necessary? Or was 'necessity' really just a palatable shroud pulled over the darker things that lay beneath it?
'Someone' had to be sacrificed to awaken the Fifth fully. 'Someone' who met certain, special qualifications. Not just 'anyone' would do. Was it mere chance that Artorius had been unable to find another? She had followed him all over the island in his searches, but was that truly what he had sought?
She could not say.
She could not, and as she looked upon the two of them, all she could think was how horribly, horribly cold they felt. As though they could quench the very flames at the heart of her.
It was enough to distract her from her duty, and Laphicet was the first to notice that his sister had burst from the treeline.
"Thank goodness! You managed to protect Laphi, at least!"
The girl didn't understand. How could she? If there was one person in the entire world that none of them wanted to be there at that very moment, it was Velvet Crowe. Her eyes fixed on the girl. If she tried to interfere, Seres' orders were clear enough.
"Yet another 'passion' to be cast aside."
Artorius' voice was as cold and impersonal as an avalanche, and just as deadly.
"Sis, RUN!"
Laphicet broke toward her, and she toward him. It was within the man's expectations. She didn't even have to look to hear his sword grate upon the stone as he used it to trip the child. Her eyes were still on the other Crowe sibling.
Flames sprang forth from the girl's limbs and forced her to the ground, where she writhed like a worm suddenly dropped on a hot stone in the middle of summer, with no relief in sight.
They spoke, but Seres could not hear them. Refused to hear them. The girl Velvet struggled against her, straining every moment to escape her bonds. For what purpose, she could not have said.
A horrible, grating sound rent at her ears. There was no need to glance back. She knew what she would see if she did: That terrible, perfect sword - Collbrande - piercing the chest and the heart of a beautiful little boy who already had no time left. Who had chosen to make the most of what remained to him, not for anything as altruistic as a better world, but that his sister might be safe.
In that moment of compassion, Velvet broke free of her arte. She sprinted, not at Artorius, but past him. For her brother, who must already be beyond saving.
Artorius was correct. The girl was ruled by her passions. And it was a far more beautiful thing than Seres had ever known. Even if it had killed her all too soon.
'Has it?'
The thought was not hers. It was hers, but it wasn't. It was...
Disbelief.
Just as she had been born there seven years earlier, something that was not - that could not be - Velvet Crowe had been birthed under the baleful glare of the blood-red moon as it hung in the night sky. It rolled across the ground as if it had been flung away by the hand of some unseen giant, and when it stood, all her eyes could see was the twisted jet-black and glaring crimson of its claw.
A daemon mindlessly leapt at it, attempted to attack it. A negligent flip of that awful claw caught it, killed it, consumed it.
"A daemon that eats other daemons... So this is what the texts called a 'Devourer'."
And so she was. The beasts that came before her - attracted by the shrine, or the red moon, or just the scent of human flesh - none could even conceive of being her match.
Seres would have moved, had Artorius commanded it, but he watched as grimly as ever as the thing that had been his sister-in-law tore apart daemon after daemon.
Only then did she attempt to strike the man who had killed her brother.
Only then did Seres stop her.
The form of the girl tumbled to the earth and failed to rise after the blast of flame threw her away, a small comb flung free from some pocket or fold of clothing as she bounced and rolled. It skittered across the ground to Seres' feet, and she reached to pick it up.
She had known that girl all her life.
No.
She had known that girl all her life.
With an effort that took every last scrap of her will, Seres did not crush the comb in her hand. That is, or was, or had been her sister. Her brother lay dead now in the depths of the earth. And her husband had done it, every last bit of it.
She knelt there, at war with herself, with the sudden, piercing clarity of her memories. Of a life cut all too suddenly short, so that her life could begin. There was so much rage there. Rage at what her past self could only think of as an unimaginable betrayal of her whole life and everything she loved.
Wracked by that sudden guilt, all she could do was look away. Look away, and let a close, silent flame melt the tears away.
The mask was no longer for Laphicet's good, or for Artorius' good. It was entirely for her own salvation.
-----
As with so much of the groundwork, Melchior had handled the construction of what had been named Titania, the prison island. Situated atop one of the very veins of the earth, and well away from prying eyes, it was necessary.
Not until he had seen the twisted thing that had once been his sister-in-law had Artorius truly understood just how necessary. Given its own choice, the Devourer could have - would have - done incalculable damage. Not merely to him, or his plan, but to anything that it could have laid that horrible, grasping claw on.
He owed Celica's memory, and Laphicet's sacrifice, and even whatever remained of Velvet within that daemon, to keep the wretched thing under control.
On the surface, it looked no different than any other island fortress might. Formidable. Imposing. Practically carved from the rock upon which it sat. Protected as it was by storms and reefs and sheer distance, no one would come there accidentally. Not that any would be so foolish as to want to.
The prison met his ice-blue glare, and he approved. Whatever artes of earth and wind and water Melchior had used to craft the place were obviously as peerless as they were flawless. In time, it might be filled with prisoners, warded by those who had come to see the purpose that he himself had taken up, but for the moment, there was only one prisoner. The only prisoner that the island ever truly had to contain.
The torches in the deepest recesses of the place were not fitful. They burned less as a combustion of sticks than as an expression of Seres' will. The malak looked at him more directly these days - had, in fact, ever since the Scarlet Night. Its voice was at once more expressive and yet more remote, as though the weight of the world had settled on its shoulders that night.
Perhaps it had. Certainly, it had lain more heavily on his own in the days since. Responsibility for the fate of the world was no light thing, and a lesser man would have been crushed under that burden.
In the darkness of that final cell beneath his feet, he saw the occasional flash of gold of the daemon's eyes as it looked around. It was less frenzied than it had been, though he had no doubt that it would be so again were it to see him. For the moment, the seal on its cage would do - not only the depth of the cell itself, or anything so mundane as the iron bars which blocked the only potential point of egress, but the arte Melchior had prepared and taught him.
He had other tasks to see to. A kingdom to save. Daemons to slay. Other Devourers to search out.
Without a second glance, he left the prison behind.
-----
Seres found herself keeping her own counsel more and more often as the days passed. On its own, she could have forgiven the sacrifice of Laphicet. Her - Celica's - brother had understood the choice he had made, even if Artorius had carefully guided him to it. She might even have forgiven the imprisoning of Velvet, or at least, of the daemon the girl had become. As much as it would have broken the heart of the young woman she had once been, it was necessary.
Necessary.
She had told herself that again, and again, and again, until it seemed that the word would lose all meaning. Until it became a hateful thing that she thought only because she could not think anything else, for fear of beginning her own descent into impurity. That way lay madness, and worse than madness. She was not ready to concede her own life so readily. Not yet.
No matter what she believed, Artorius believed in that justification that she herself could not. That what he did was necessary, and therefore correct. Even righteous. Not only the malakhim who had descended on the Scarlet Night now called the Advent, but men and women able to see them after that day had flocked to the banner of Artorius Collbrande, the banner of what he called the Abbey, to strike back against the daemons.
Were that all they had done, she might yet have quelled that own inner voice of her own memories. Instead, the Abbey under Artorius' leadership had raised up 'Reason' as a bulwark against the daemonic threat. It was a cold thing, almost as cold as the man himself had become. From time to time, she still remembered meeting him, and it became more and more difficult to remember that the meeting she recalled was not hers - at a shrine under a blood-red moon - but Celica's, under the shade of a tree, under the warm spring sun. That he had gone so far as to conceal his name in an attempt to begin his life anew.
The man called Artorius Collbrande was broken. Of that, Seres had no doubt whatsoever. Not in a way that prevented him from existing, perhaps, but in a way that prevented him from living. It frustrated her beyond words that no one else could see it. That none but herself understood that the man the world was praising as the 'Shepherd', as 'Lord Artorius', as the very salvation of the world, was entirely incapable of giving a single, solitary damn about a person. He had so divorced himself from emotion that even the accolades failed to reach him.
'It hasn't made him a daemon. But it has made him as horrible as one.'
A daemon would rage, would rampage, would kill because it wanted to. Artorius would do nothing so wasteful. Instead, he simply didn't care about anyone individually. Not even himself. A sacrifice to improve the world was worth the cost. Any sacrifice that left the world a 'better' place. As she came to understand just what it meant to truly awaken the Fifth, the idea horrified her.
It could not be allowed. Her thoughts and her memories were in complete agreement on that point. What Artorius wanted to create was a dead world. She saw it in the face of every malak that had descended at the Advent. They were not people. They were nothing even close to people. They were merely the tools that the exorcists claimed they were. A world where everyone acted in that same accord would be lifeless, even if its inhabitants went through the basic motions of living, and Artorius was too far gone to see that simple truth.
Something had to be done, and she could not be the one to do it. She was bound up all too tightly with the man, both in her present incarnation and in her memories. The shade of Celica, even as appalled as she would surely have been at what her husband had become, would never have been able to conscience striking Artorius down with her own hand. She knew that, and worried it would cause her to hesitate at a critical moment. There had been a kind, gentle Artorius, once, and she could see all too clearly how those memories might betray her. And in betraying her, betray the whole of the world.
Thankfully, she knew someone who lacked that hesitation. Someone who had spent three years knowing only two hungers: The hunger for the flesh of other daemons, and the overriding desire to feed Artorius Collbrande to the worms. If anyone could stop the man, if anyone could rend his life from him without a moment's hesitation or pity or remorse, it was Velvet Crowe.
All Seres had to do to accomplish her goal was to loose the most terrifying daemon she had ever seen on the world. Loose it, and hope that ehough of Velvet remained within it to keep from making a wasteland of the world after it accomplished her aim.
-----
"Release me."
Artorius turned fitfully in his sleep. Dreams had been beyond him for years. Dreams, true, but not nightmares.
"Release me."
It was Celica that he saw in that nightmare, lovelier than the day they had met. As lovely as the day she had told him that she was bearing a child - his child - beneath her beating heart.
"Release me."
How could he ever do that? She was the one thing, above all others, that he had never willingly let go. So she had been torn from him instead. Torn from him by his own failure, his own inadequacy.
He no longer could let her go. She was the foundation of a new and better world, free of the daemons that plagued humanity. So much was built on top of her loss, it was not possible to pry her free from it.
With a start, he woke. It was still night, quiet and peaceful. His small room in the Abbey, furnished with little more than the bed he had been sleeping in, and the wardrobe that held his clothes, met his gaze. Only one thing was not in it which might have been.
"Seres..."
That the malak was not there should not have come as a surprise. Seres shared the tendency of the malakhim to eschew things like buildings, especially dwelling places. Somehow, though, he could feel the lack of its presence in a way he usually did not.
It was best that Seres was not there on nights like that one. It was not the malak's fault that it had captured his wife's form and frozen it at the impossible peak of her beauty. Save for one day when he had grasped it by the shoulders for a moment, he had refused to so much as touch it, because the memories it invoked were too strong. He did not doubt his own strength of will, and yet... Every one of his failures was bound up with Celica. Another such failure was unconscionable.
Irritably, he turned his head away from the window. Too much remained to be done. Artorius Collbrande had no time which he could afford to spend being tempted by the flesh of his dead wife, no matter how appealingly the malak wore it.
It was a weakness.
A failure.
Another passion to be cast aside.
And cast it aside he would. For the world's sake. For the world's sake... and for his own.