be released

[selenias]

Title: be released
Fandom: Final Fantasy XVI
Characters/pairing: Kihel + Dion + Terence, Dion/Terence
Rating: T
Word Count: 7137

Notes: Written for angst week on the Teredio Discord server. A post-canon, fairy tale adjacent story, featuring Kihel as Leviathan, two wyrms and a man, and bittersweet partings. It was written fast and whimsically so it's imperfect. A more serious take would be much more solemn.

I... love this crew... @_@ More seriously, formatting might be a bit weird here. When I have patience I'll... do something about that...

-

Dion circled around the base of the spruce trees and descended down the hill to stand firm by the long pond, bending down to card his fingers in the cool water. Birds floated across the surface in pairs of two. Dragonflies lighted on cattails and chased across the winking surface. Terence stood over his shoulder and commented on the sky, and together they watched the sun slowly set into the autumn glow of pink and orange, talking softly. Not talking at all.

From her perspective on the hill, Kihel could see the slope of their aging shoulders now, more visible than the summer previous, and the summer before that — Dion curled slightly inward, Terence still tall and firm beside him, hair brindled with silver and body beginning to stiffen beneath the off white of his shirt.

In thirty years, she’d be clasping Terence’s hand when Dion’s casket was put to rest at that same vista point, and they’d stand together by the pond after, and she’d card her own aging hands in the darkening water, crow’s feet against both their eyes, and they wouldn’t speak of it then. But they would speak of it later. In the early morning when Terence woke, and stoked the fire in the hearth, and made two cups of tea and habitually slid the other one to the empty spot at the table, startled to grief at the absence and the monotonous quiet when he realized what his body had not. Kihel would pad quietly over and put her arms around him. Dion’s name would stretch between them like a yawn. But they would speak of that, also later.

You were the best gift he gave me, he would tell her. Kihel would sink her shoulders into the ever softening press of his own, and the memories would flow like water to the sea.








The world ends, and then it doesn’t.

Kihel’s a pilgrim, and then she’s a kept daughter.

She has one man to call friend, and then another.

They return to Sanbreque. Terence has the deed for a house in his name. It’s summer. The fields bloom rich with balsam root and clover. Kihel wakes every morning before them. Eventually, the habit will stop, when her body stops harboring the paranoia of unending peril. Her shoes will have thick soles. She will never want for anything.

They’re in their late thirties by the time they settle. It’s not because they gave up on the work of sovereignty, but that Bahamut has vanished and what remains of the realm falls not to the old leaders of incumbent nations, but the rising of the new ones.

Dion’s an instrument worn out with no strings left to pull and grief ages him unkindly for the first few years of their reunion: he loses weight and muscle, his body aches with fatigue without magic to string together his parts, his mind suffers nightmares and disappointments both real and fictional, and one nondescript morning after all this settles and passes and he wakes up to the freedom he was denied, his hair is colored with thin silver strands in not easily seen places — but Kihel notices nonetheless, and raises her hand slowly so he can pull away if he wants, and captures it carefully between index finger and thumb.

“Truly?” he asks.

Kihel carefully pulls one around for him to see in the low morning light at the breakfast nook, a sharp contrast to the rest. She’s fifteen and gleeful at the appearance of apparent hard-earned wisdom.

Dion demands he see Terence’s head next and he obediently bows his crown low, hand high on the back of the chair. Dion grows distracted by the patch of skin on his neck instead — never mind the silver — and Kihel laughs soundly at them when Dion lands the quietest raspberry kiss against the green collar of his tunic, face soft and still pale from deep sleep. Terence makes eye contact with her over his shoulder and winks; she draws away with a small smile, shy at the affection they so easily exchange.

Kihel spends the early morning in the shade pulling weeds from her herb garden and returns to the yard smelling like rue and yarrow with brown hems and fingernails. The summer flowers are in high production and she rarely escapes without pollen or dirt smudged across her skin. Terence is stringing laundry up on the line and the pale shirts blow sideways with the breeze. Dion stands adjacent in a patch of sunlight, face upturned to the sun, one good arm loose and relaxed at his side. The other is mostly stone. It’s crooked in its sling, a washed out dead thing. Military men as Kihel remembers them were always in pieces. Dominants and bearers though — she looks at her own hands, a spotting of gray on one bony knuckle that itches more than it hurts — never part from their pound of flesh owed.

“What,” Dion asks, voice amused. “It’s very warm today.”

She remembers Terence’s face as surely as she remembers how her own cheeks had stretched, relieved and pleased by his serenity, for Dion’s journey back to them was the shedding of an entire self. As surely as the Greagorian church had claimed believers were baptized in the light of their prophet how Dion looked cleaned of his sorrows when it bleached him and his crop of golden hair. Terence got down on his knees before him to renew his promise of fealty; Dion had mirrored him, not as a lord but as a man on return to self-possession.





(”Wyrms shed too,” Dion said, later that same evening. Kihel sat at his heels. “Their scales peel off, nearly as thick as parchment.” He leaned forward over his knees, drawing the comb to her scalp and through the long layers of hair she’d accumulated, mindful of his pulling. It was wet from the bath and smelled richly of the lavender oil she’d rubbed in the ends, perhaps too strong. He’d offered, bored, curious. Whatever misses he’d spent the day writing were neatly folded and stacked on the table to leave the next morning.

Kihel leaned into the back of the chair between his knees, abandoning the book in her lap. Her reading was better than it had been when Terence had collected her from the ruins of Twinside. Dion urged to her to make progress everyday and fed her education and imagination with lore and stories from his own childhood.

“Like a snake?” she’d asked. Dion made a thoughtful noise, then in a rare friendliness ducked down to bop her on the knee with the sandalwood comb. She laughed low, surprised, and turned to look up at him. His face was full of longing for a memory she knew nothing of.

“No, not like large, silver wyrms,” he said, soft, wry. “The old shed can be used in armor.” He called her Levi then, rapturously, and Kihel discovered she only liked the name when he said it, formal and soft at the same time like her grandmother had, her rasp quiet and full of awe in the aged and wrinkled lining of her throat. Her eyes watered for reasons she didn’t understand. It was a secret, and also not.

Dion returned to combing her hair and Kihel to her book.)




 




Before Terence, Before Dion, before Twinside and Dhalmekia and before her grandmother’s departure, Kihel knew loss.

It was a cold companion that accompanied her since her arrival. She doesn’t remember her parents or if she was one child or one of three or four but how grandmother used to tell the story is like this:

A great snake spit you up from the bottom of the ocean and you were washed to the surface and the beaches like flotsam or kelp. I took you home and warmed you up in the house with blankets and fire crystals and gave you a bottle that I used to use for goats and young ewes. You perked up and screamed and cried for the love you’d been denied. You spoke so smartly by the age of three and knew the differences between the garden vegetables and the weeds when you were four. When you were five I fell and broke my finger and you told me not to panic and wrapped it. You put your hands in the water and fish swam into them. Everything you watered grew to be of great heights. You never cast a spell or reacted to the aether but I knew you were something special.

You’re lying, Kihel used to say. Or, her favorite, phrases she’d learned from other children, That’s stupid.

Those are ugly words, grandmother would bite back.

The real truth was this: Kihel came from a quiet home with quiet people who entrusted her to their most beloved civil servant.

It’s no small gift to give someone their babe. But they did, grandmother said. They did.

Her copper bracelets would jingle against her arms and slide over Kihel’s wrists like music when she held them in her own. Her face was shallow and sunken, and she smoked tobacco every night and morning. Sometimes in the middle of the night Kihel would wake to hear her coughing wetly on the porch. Kihel would slide into her lap and grandmother would kiss the side of her face. They’d watch the stars wink out. The night would dwindle into the easy mask of morning and days, weeks, and years passed in easy companionship.

Someone is going to love you til death, grandmother said.

She was right.











At seventeen Kihel is long limbed with rosy cheeks and a nose for trouble. She’s too smart and too bright and too kind to believe that what truths she knows don’t always match what someone presents her so the night she’s absent too long from home on a path she doesn’t usually tread on an evening she’d promised to cook dinner Terence and Dion go looking for her.

It’s the first time Kihel’s seen Terence kill a man in years.

Whatever words are exchanged are loud and meaningless in the heat of the swirling room.

Former bearers exit on hands and knees, sick with poison and drugs that should rekindle their magic, and Kihel remembers stroking the spot of gray on her hand, smaller than a brass thimble, and cannot recall what she’d ever possessed aside from herself — the eikon of water took her. And only ever once. She doesn’t know why she’s here.

Dion struggles but carries her near adult body the whole way home in dreadful, suspended silence. Terence pours water down her throat and gives her her own draughts; they’re horribly bitter, and Kihel wonders why no one told her where she could improve. The room spins. She heaves. Her body cries. Magic does not return because the fabric of the world has been remade.

Kihel sleeps in her parent’s bed sandwiched between them for three weeks.

The next summer, she goes to what remains of the University in Kanver. It’s being rebuilt. It’s small, and expensive, and brimming with urchins and old aristocrats both, and Dion hid a coin purse in her bird’s saddle bag when he thought she wasn’t looking. Terence gave her a new belt for her light sword and a hastily scrawled love note.

The city is too loud and the people are raucous and she realizes too late she’d grown accustomed to Sanbreque’s quiet hillsides and tall, thick trees. She longs for the clover fields and clean smell of spruce and transparent bodies of water. The streets are cracked and the grout is flaking and she can picture easily iron stains in the tissue of the old city. She doesn’t look away.

Kihel writes twice a week and always receives a correspondence when she sends one out. The courtier who greets her is nearly her age with a solemn face but soft voice. His polite smiles overwhelm and make her shy, then make her brave and wanting when she finds him kin. She invites him into her bed and takes from him what she wants. She’s droughts for all things that could leave her possessed of more than herself, and she takes all that he offers and they both marvel quietly at each other in breathless silence.

Terence’s letters are full of stories and sage advice, and Dion’s have pressed flowers from her garden and reminders that they’re not that far away if she needs them — for anything anything at all. Kihel thumbs through them and wonders for what reason she’s left at all — what ambitions she has are most unsuitable for a place where they are not there under her watchful eye. The professors are smart and clever but most are more green than her and her hands have buried bodies and enemies both. She can’t relate. It’s no one’s fault.

“You’re going to leave?” The courtier asks. He combs his hands through her hair and Kihel pulls away, distraught. The light coming through the room faces east and north — toward home.

“Will you be terribly sad?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he confesses, swallows. “But you seem unhappier than me. You also seem to know what you need,” he says, soft, imploring. He already knows her answer. He lets her go.

Kihel goes home after a year. Dion and Terence are waiting for her at the outpost, legs pressed together and talking quietly. Kihel throws her arms out and nearly bowls them both over in her hurry. Their delighted laughter fades to soft and grateful murmurs and she turns her eyes skyward to the sun to scald away the threat of tears. The breeze is cool and caresses the nape of her neck.

She raises her arm when she pulls away, smile rueful and thick. A small silver ring graces her calloused hand.

In two years time she throws the damn thing out to sea and shouts curses up and down the coastline, scorned twice in love.

They pour her some wine, and Kihel burns it off in her old garden, ripping up the overwhelming spread of tansy, insulting the chamomile and its inability to soothe. So furious she is she never notices Terence observing her rage quietly from the cornerstone, bearing witness to her temper, her hurts, stalwart and steady as the trunk of an old oak, like he’s never known any different.

Later, she’ll understand, he hasn’t.














Kihel misses the ocean as she travels across Storm but never for long. In the early spring of the new century Dion and Terence take her to an old haunt.

Sanbreque’s coast is steep with sharp cliffs and a salty breeze that makes her hair curl around her ears. The gulf between Ash and Storm has seen many more ships in her waters, and there are several bright upright bows with flags for traders and new reformation of a monarchy upon Ash. Dion watches the horizon with an appreciative blankness. Terence takes his left hand and Dion becomes animated, drawing it up to kiss the inside of his wrist.

“There used to be crystals in the surf when we were kids,” Terence tells her. “Amongst other things.” They walk along the bluff and look down into the rocky shores below. Not as grand as Drake’s Head or pointed as Drake’s Tail, but magnificent, still. It’s a steep descent, but the chocobos grasp the shallow edge of the trail with great grace, their claws firm on the rocky and perilous outcrop, and the water roars and echoes all around when Kihel slides from the saddle straight to her backside, legs stiff from the ride and horribly asleep.

“Grandmother used to say Leviathan died on the ocean floor. The crystals that rose were her children rising to escape.”

Dion follows after her, inspecting a shell here, a rock there. “You swam to shore then,” Dion says, dry. “You’re no snake, just a fish.” He snags a whole sand dollar and together they inspect it for a creature, and finding nothing, pocket it.

“I floated in like debris,” she teases. “Unlike you though, my entrance was graceful.”

“He tried to drown me in the aqueducts of Oriflamme when we were eight,” Terence offers.

Dion turns on him, sand flying around his heels. “I was a hot head, I know this.”

“Still are.” Kihel hustles out of the way laughing when Dion presses into Terence’s space to make him walk backward toward the water.

“Oh, should I recreate our meeting?”

“It’s not in your favor anymore,” Terence says, and nimbly dances out the way when Dion surges after him, left hand grasping hold at the edges of his tunic and yanking him sideways and down into the cold, cold water.

They open two bottles of wine between the three of them and drink it all. There’s dark colored bread and last year’s honey but it’s not meant to be a meal and Kihel gets drunk faster and they laugh at her when she hands the rest of her glass to Terence, winded. She goes to sleep in the soft grass when it makes her sleepy, Dion carding his fingers through her hair, and the whole world drifts sideways in the ensuing silence of sleep. All around them, the breeze is wet and sticky, and the ocean roars and the tide sweeps out. “Happy nine-hundred,” she manages to say, and not much else.

Eventually, Dion says something to Terence that makes his hand stop and still. Kihel wakes to the stillness and watches the exchange through half-lidded eyes. The veneer peels back strangely; the shape of the wound Dion carries has congealed so thick she forgets herself sometimes.

“You’ll be okay,” Dion says. “You won’t be alone.”

“Whether I am or not you needn’t worry,” Terence says. More silence. Dion’s fingers leave her head and he scoots along the blanket on his knees.

“But I do,” he implores. “I know you. How can I not. Forgive me, please. For asking hard things.”

“Done,” Terence croaks. “You’ll forgive her too for living a life of her own.”

“Of course,” Dion says. “As she should. As she has.”

Kihel mimes sleep and rolls over to hide her face, sighing softly. A warm palm curls around her ankle as if sensing her as a witness. It squeezes, once, broad and calloused. Terence.

She doesn’t stir. She understands the beginning of a farewell when she hears one.












A lone wyvern circles over head, shadow drawing circles along the clover fields.

Dion stretches his back and shades his eyes to watch it pass, as if the ghosting of wings may emerge to carry him to familiar heights.

Kihel pictures Twinside and Bahamut’s fury.

Dion’s life with them had always been a slow return to self-possession.

She’s still determining her own.











When Kihel was twelve, the world ended.

Twinside rose into the sky. Akashic grabbed at her.

She transformed into a beast.

Her body was not her own. She struck down the creations of an old god and carried those who remained alive on the fins of her back. They are dominants. They are men, tired and bloody, and her healing waters remake them.

And Terence is the most ordinary among them, and also not. He’s steady and firm, not unfamiliar or terrified of her shape — he looks at her with recognition, calls her name from the silver scales on her back he clings to, once, twice, pleading —

Her power is one day of reckoning and no longer.

Kihel lays on the shore, aching and hollow, magic burning her up and leaving at the same time, but not for long. Terence pulls her into the circle of his arms and holds her secure, breathless and sorrowful. His hands fumble with her left one, as Leviathan leaves a mark like some loose change, a hot iron kiss against the shallow skin of her knuckles. His words wash over her through the ringing in her ears. Mostly she remembers the thank you he’d pressed against her temple, both of his charges secure and in reach and she will understand — later.

As the exchange of endings and beginnings becomes meaningless and blurred and they exit from one scene into the beginning of the next, Terence will ask what she wants to do. Where she wants to go. If she’s hurting, still. He holds her palm and puts a salve over the gray pallor on the back of her hand. She watches him from under her eyelashes, certain already of how she feels about his generosity and tenderness and wanting, quietly, a piece for herself. She thinks mostly of Dion and his stone arm. His complexion, later, is gray in the dim light of the half-rotten house by the sea and he stirs for no one, even Terence’s careful hands when he washes his body and holds his head upright whispers encouragement and pour water down his throat. Dion will be like a statue in a square if left to his own devices, and if Kihel knows anything about the legacies of men, he will have one in his own likeness someday too whether he asks it or not.

“I have no wishes, milord.” Kihel uncorks the waterskin with difficulty and drinks. Terence takes it from her after and drinks himself.

“I doubt that very much,” Terence says. “Do you want to come with me? You can take your time considering.”

She looks at him. His eyes are resolute but kind. When he’d called her name through the curtain of the door of her residence and let himself in to kneel proper before her she’d startled and mirrored him, distraught. They stared at each other in flat surprise and he’d broken the moment first, wry, and asked if she knew of the lords of the land, and what of dragon fire and Bahamut’s dominant or both?

“Perhaps,” she whispers, small. “But where will we go?”

“Somewhere quiet, where we can mend. I know a place. You needn’t worry.”

Two months after the end of the world, Dion Lesage wakes up.

He’s more corpse than man, but he breathes, and that’s the important part.

Two partners become three.

Everything else can come later.











Kihel is forty-four. She’d insisted she wouldn’t stay underfoot but not too far, just in case she was needed. Her home is closer to the settlement taking root north of the forest. That winter, they make a journey to Rosaria to say goodbye to the last inheritor of the Phoenix.

Joshua Rosfield is a gangly, thin man with an easy smile. Illness has rankled him his entire life and Kihel remembers him, vaguely, though those memories of childhood get further every year. She’d fished his corpse out of the ocean. Miraculously, he’d opened his eyes.

He rises to greet them with open arms from a soft chair that is not in the throne room or a reception chamber at all, smile wide and eyes nearly closed from the width of it. Dion embraces him and claps him carefully on the back, Terence taking his turn as well, and then Kihel is being pulled into a hug of her own where he gently rocks her and she laughs over his shoulder. He smells faintly of illness and antiseptics. When no one is looking and the night is late and they’re all half drunk on wine, Kihel pulls a discreet satchel from her bag and wraps his paper thin hands tightly around it.

“It will ease the worst of the symptoms. Enough for comfort,” she says, soft.

Joshua’s eyes are lidded and low. “I hate medicine,” he confesses to her. “It has sustained me my entire life.”

“Milord, you won’t dislike this one,” she says.

He makes it through the winter, then the next, and the one after that.

Five winters later, at last, his laugh is gone. Jote writes them.

Rosaria flies her flags low. The duchy dissolves with its legacy and gives way to a republic made by cursebreakers.

Dion burns incense out of habit and kneels outside his home to take ceremonial vigil when the news arrives. Kihel joins him, expecting a prayer, though he’s long since cursed the gods for their selfishness.

He squeezes her shoulder and murmurs a quiet thank you when she kneels beside him, joints cracking.

“What? It’s not me,” she says.

“If you insist,” he replies.

Later, they will take a paper lantern and watch it bob across the surface of the water. Perhaps it will tangle in the reeds, but Kihel can’t find it the next morning or the day after that.

Later that year, some of the oldest members of Cid’s outlaws die. They are names Kihel knows and also doesn’t.

Terence’s mother passes from an old illness. Jill Warrick lays an ancient frost wolf to rest. Lord Byron joins his youngest nephew, though it had long been teased he’d outlive them all.

The years turn, the wheel spins. The ones she loves will someday leave too.




 







She travels some, travels less every year as Dion’s health becomes questionable and fragile. Kihel has always been a pilgrim moving from one place to the next, but she likes to think that in the same way Metia orbited the moon she never strays too far from her roots.

Terence writes to her twice a month. The first letter is delayed due to a flood that left a mud slide a kilometer long with no safe crossing point. The date was a fortnight ago. Dion has been ill, but his health is mostly unremarkable. He was asking about you, Terence writes. The second arrives after the old road is forsaken for a roundabout mountain trail, and she tears the letter from the courtier’s grip, heart tight for reasons she already suspects to be true. He’s not improving, Terence writes. The letters are unsteady, the paper wrinkled from the difficult penmanship altered by grief and the rough journey in the courier’s bag. Come home. He’ll want to see you before the end.

She’s fifty-two, and she rides her chocobo hard from the edge of the blight in Oriflamme south to the fields north of Twinside’s memorial. It’s autumn. What fields have been cut now lay flat and yellow and the sun warms her but not enough like it used to; she feels the bite of the polar winds, the looming winter and its sickle moon soon to arrive and bury parts of Storm in a soft blanket of snow. Wyrms and wyverns and aevis will fill caves and tuck into cliff-sides alone or with their mates, and she considers a story as old as time of how snakes and dragons used to share the same spaces.

It’s night when she arrives. Through the windows, the hearth still burns. An oil lamp on the table illuminates a half-eaten dinner and a lone glass of water.

Kihel doesn’t knock on the door, simply lets herself inside, and drops her bag on the bench by the door. Terence steps out of his room to greet her, grimacing in the light, and Kihel throws her arms around him, holding him firm. His shoulders are closer to her own than she remembers.

She sits on the edge of Dion’s bed and digs through the thick covers for his good hand. His fingers are cool and dry in her own. His face is withdrawn and shallow, cheeks hollowed and lined with soft wrinkles; he looks like an old lord or a father. The sickle rises high. She knows she gave him some of those lines.

“He tried to stay awake when I told him you were coming home. It may be a while before he wakes again,” Terence warns.

“It’s alright. I’ll talk to him. Maybe I’ll even intrude on a dream.” Kihel stands to kiss his cheeks and pulls back the sheets for him to crawl in. Terence kicks off his shoes and lays back in the bed, exhausted, a grateful smile crossing his face. Terence hasn’t slept she can hazard, but he sleeps now with her arrival, crawling into the cold spot beside Dion’s prone form, shoulder to shoulder. Dion won’t pass in his sleep tonight, but in a week he will take to a coma he’ll never wake from and Terence will wait with bated breath for it take him too, and rage when it does not.

Kihel tries not to hold this final memory in her head or picture the ending.

She holds Dion’s hand until he wakes and longer after, stroking the back of his spotted and freckled knuckles, the skin as soft and whispery thin as spring leaves unfurling. He yawns enormously, jaw cracking. When he processes her arrival at last, his eyes crinkle and his smile is so soft and surprised and sincere she leans down to hold him tight, brought to tears. His hand draws broad strokes over the length of her back, breath stale but warm against her ear.

“You came home,” he whispers. “I’ve missed you, silver wyrm. How are you?”

Kihel huffs, laughing, then trembles and weeps. Were magic still around, she imagines Leviathan would drown Valisthea in her grief. It’s good that the gods are dead.

Dion speaks of her journey home, confesses of his exhaustion without holding back, and voices the worst of the burdens on his mind — I’m afraid to leave Terence alone.

“You needn’t,” she says. It’s important he understands. “I’ll take care of him. I’m going to take care of you now, too.”

Dion looks at her for several long seconds. He brushes the back of his fingers against her cheeks. “You are a lot like myself,” he rasps. “I’m sorry for that.”

“Whatever for? I’ve never wanted for anything more than this. You gave me a home,” she says. “You chose me. I love you,” Kihel says adamantly. He repeats her words back to her.

His smile is so tired then. “Thank you,” he says. Kihel draws the blankets up tight to his chin. Then she excuses herself to put a kettle over the fire, numb.

Dion dozes and wakes in lulls and only fully when Terence rises to coax him to drink, relieve himself, or to shift into a different indent in the bed. Their words are soft whenever they speak and Kihel can’t stand to hear them and also fears missing a second of an exchange that will shed light or peace on the urgent advent of his imminent departure.

Two weeks after her arrival, Dion doesn’t wake again.

There are gifts she has been given in life and when she looks at her oldest warden and his most loyal vassal there are gifts still flowing freely; no one had to love her. They made a choice to offer a young girl a place in the circle of their lives, just like they had chosen each other again and again.

And so no matter the agony, how the story unfolds and concludes Kihel cannot bring herself to regret a minute of it despite the flood of tears when the chapter closes.














Dion and Terence know too many things, and Kihel attributes it to the wealth of their upbringing. But they also have traveled far across the realm and their stories and comments open up worlds she’s never heard of, and sad stories she lingers on long after the telling, histories written before she was even a conceivable thought.

One afternoon, Kihel observes the slender curves of many birds in the water. They fly above like a storm and descend into the pond screaming their songs. It rouses her from deep sleep, and Terence and Dion are looking out the window in the kitchen, watching the flock quietly descend into pairs of two.

It’s spring. Animals are possessed by their migrating spirits and their loins.

In the early mornings after a particularly poor night of sleep sometimes Dion gives into the melancholy of regret and walks it off around the handful of acreage carefully compiled under Terence’s family name. His hair shines from a long distance. Swans and geese cry out and somewhere further, more haunting still — the call of a wyvern scorned in love, with no answering bellow to greet it. When Dion circles back he’s still agitated, but quieter, and takes a seat at the table where Kihel and Terence are idly passing time with a deck of cards. She’d spent the morning carefully copying sentences from books that took her a long time to read and breaks apart their rhythm and meanings under Terence’s watchful eye. Neither comment on Dion’s state of disarray. They deal him in when Terence loses to her again, and he dramatically groans when she takes the last of the marigold bread gifted to her after an emergency visit to treat a neighbor’s wretched illness. She learned from the best though, and breaks it in half to share with him, sliding the sticky cloth closer to his side of the table.

Dion begins to talk of the birds. Inevitably, it drifts to something sadder. “There are many creatures that keep the same partner for life. If everything is satisfactory, they’ll continue together, nesting, coupling, raising their offspring, until one of them dies.”

“What happens to the one who remains?” She asks.

Terence answers her. “Sometimes they find a new companion. Sometimes they die from grief. Or they develop abnormal behaviors, and then they die anyway.”

It’s sad and also not. Death is no stranger to her. She’s fourteen and parted with her grandmother at eight, but Dion looks frightened by the direction of their conversation. He places his card hand face down for her to gather and strokes the stone gray of his arm, pensive.

What will become of you two, Kihel wonders. It doesn’t seem like something she should say. She shuffles the cards in her hands and carefully counts the piles. Dion takes his new deal and leans back to keep Terence from seeing his hand. The breeze blows through the yard and Kihel sits up taller, crossing her legs at the bare ankles for warmth when her skin prickles and raises. She’s been rapidly outgrowing her clothes but has not yet had the nerve or thought to ask for new ones.

Terence looks at Dion, expression suddenly thoughtful. Kihel senses an impending storm, or another sad story.

“Do you remember Valefor, when her mate passed?” Terence asks. His hand disappears under the table, and Kihel knows without looking how it rests over Dion’s thigh. “She started killing her own offspring.”

“Yes,” Dion says mournfully. “That was an awful, bloody fight. I couldn’t calm her.”

“She was loyal to one and would take no others,” Terence finishes, soft. Dion looks at him.

“Loyalty is foolish,” Dion says, final, in warning. Kihel holds her breath.

“It’s good that we’re men and not beasts then,” Terence replies easily. He shakes Dion’s leg. The spell breaks.

Dion looks at him, mouth twitching. “Yes indeed,” he whispers. “What luck.”

Terence’s smile is content.

She won’t understand their secret histories, as with most things, until later. Some of them will remain with them and them alone and she won’t begrudge it.

Kihel rests the remainder of the deck in the middle of the round table. They both look at her, and her at them, gaze sweeping back and forth. In the distance, the birds have left the water and started exploring and settling along the grassy banks, and they’ll climb higher still as they wantonly follow the new warmth of the sun, until they’re nearly upon her most precious spaces.

“I’m afraid the swans will eat the rice that’s starting to sprout,” she offers, sad. “They’re bottom feeders.”

Dion fights a smile then huffs outright. Terence follows suit.

That evening, the garden remains standing, uncontested.











After the services for Dion are concluded and his solemn request for quiet burial rites are concluded, Kihel expects Terence to follow soon after.

But he doesn’t. He grieves openly, he eats less, he festers in his loneliness, but he lives. One year turns into two, two turns into three.

Kihel writes missives to her operatives and expels her grievances in the politest writing:

Consider my absence long-term. Write me with questions, but don’t expect my return. I am needed elsewhere.

Terence blazes the same paths Dion would take in his walks, though more carefully, less sure footed than in his youth. Kihel follows along with him, not to hover, but because her body is beginning to hurt too. Later that day Terence puts the scissors in her hands and ask if she’ll cut his hair. It’s all silver and soft under her fingers. He drags his hands through it and smiles when she’s done, a light in his eyes that she knows she carefully mirrors.

That winter, he’s ill for near the entire season, with a cough she struggles to tame, and an ache in his body that leaves him restless and dazed.

Kihel comes back from the market near the beginning of spring to find him in a chair outside, face upturned to the sun, dressed in his thickest wool coat. He’d talk quietly to Dion this way. His brightest light, the center of his orbit. Kihel’s seen all the mannerisms of grief in the mourning and she realizes too late that Dion had been preparing Terence for their separation since his enunciation. He is calm, and quiet, and sure of himself still, despite the certainty that he’s lost most of his purpose to live. His mind is sound, his body is strong.

“What’s he saying,” she asks. She drags a wooden stool out from under the veranda and drops it close to his own. Terence closes his eyes.

“He’s quiet today,” he offers. Kihel hums her assent, uncertain what that means.

The next winter, Terence grows ill again. Kihel gets on the chaise with him, slipping an arm around his shoulders to hold him. This time, she doesn’t think he’ll make it through.

She clasps his firm and leathered hands and gives him a gift when he shakes horribly through a fever and begs Greagor for mercy: she tells him he’s free to go anytime.

Later, when he’s well, he’ll remember.

“Have I overstayed my welcome?” Terence teases. “Are you sick of me?” Kihel kisses his cheek and protests vehemently.

“No. But you don’t have anything to worry about here.”

“I feel well kept,” he says, then abruptly coughs horribly, breath rattling. Her arms go about him. “I’m alright, Kihel,” he says. “I’m tired. I miss him. But I’m alright. It’s just the weather.”

“Don’t make me any promises,” she mutters.

“I don’t mean to keep either of you waiting.” Terence pats her hands. “I’ve been more than seen to. What regrets I have — well, most things turned out alright, in the end.”

She withdraws to brew him a tonic for sleep and mix a salve of arnica for his joints. When Kihel returns from her own dark room, Terence is in deep sleep and snoring softly. The mass of him has nearly lessened by half. She wouldn’t recognize him in a crowd. His hair is thin and white. If she closes her eyes, she can picture where Dion would curl up beside him. The two of them, and her. Where will she fit when the last of them is gone?

Kihel leans against the doorway of the house Terence inherited after the passing of his father and looks around. When he passes on too and fades into obscurity, and she lights a lamp and secures passage for his crossing over, it will be her’s. It’s inconceivable to consider a thing that has always been their’s.

For the next seven years she stays with Terence, and him with her. His heart, she’s near certain, is beating for two.










When Terence passes, it’s quietly, in the middle of the night. Kihel rouses to silence, and feeling the stillness that comes from departure, parts the door of his adjacent room to find him still and cool. His eyelashes are wet and his hands dry. She doesn’t cry or scream. She opens the window since he can longer feel the cold and casts an old wish that his spirit may fly free.

Is it better to die in the home you built or violently to the song of steel? Steel might be more merciful, but that’s a short life.

He’d held on for far longer than most and lived nearly a decade without his oldest charge.

Will you be alright, he’d asked her. Yes, yes, she assured. I’ll miss you, but what more could I possibly want for?

Then she remembers the most important thing.

“Thank you,” she says. “For taking me home with you.”

Terence smiles. “I’m the lucky one,” he confesses. “I don’t know how I found myself with such extraordinary people.”










The pond glitters orange with the sinking sun. The hill is frosted over with snow. Two headstones lay side by side, glittery with ice.

Kihel throws herself outside in a fury, grief tearing at her.

She’s taken to smoking tobacco like her grandmother, and she paces the same trail Dion had worn so long ago, breathless with agony.

She watches the stars flicker out one by one. Bahamut’s Chariot is crystal clear. Beside it, the Champion rises higher in the sky.

She’d learned far too late, but better later than never — as with most life lessons — Leviathan’s Daughter resides high above them both.

Solitary and established, the solemn witness to the two.

Kihel cups her hands around the empty portion of sky to hold the three of them, and the fight goes out of her.





.|.|.|.

 


Can you tell of their histories, their deaths, their legacies?

Kihel tosses her corded hair over her shoulder and closes the door too hard behind her. Her fathers’ fingers had plaited it in her youth, and now it’s crowned and burnished with silver, strands soft and fragile in her wrinkled fingers. Outside, the tansy bush nearly obscures what remains of the garden. The pond is still visible, the hill above it, and the two headstones made from limestone from Oriflamme’s cliffs — where they’d met as boys.

“They died as two men in love, as they always were. They did what was asked of them and then one more great service, for me.”

“But who are you to them?” They ask her. “We had heard… well.”

Kihel closes the door, shoving past the cursebreakers on their recruitment crusade. There were hundreds of answers, but only one truth. “No one important. I’m just the keeper.”

In this brave new world dragons obeyed no one and knights faded into obscurity. Kihel grits her teeth and steps into the first light of the day.