a star at their feet
Oct. 2nd, 2025 07:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seleniasTitle: a star at their feet
Fandom: Final Fantasy XVI
Characters/pairing: Dion & Sylvestre, background D/T
Rating: gen, canon typical violence
Word Count: 3083
Notes: Canon-divergence. Sylvestre doesn't die in Twinside, and Dion asks after unhappy answers.
Fandom: Final Fantasy XVI
Characters/pairing: Dion & Sylvestre, background D/T
Rating: gen, canon typical violence
Word Count: 3083
Notes: Canon-divergence. Sylvestre doesn't die in Twinside, and Dion asks after unhappy answers.
-
Dion’s boots part the morning’s rain and squelch through dislodged stone, soil, and mud. Water drips from the end of his nose and hair while Storm keeps her name, sloughing Twinside into history and Dion into torpid bafflement.
Oriflamme had been simpler and Dion longs for it still: castle walls, capped mountains, and dusty wheat fields that shielded them from obliteration. The Dominion cries out at every boot upon her earth, spurning his men and refugees their trespass, surrounding them with hostility on all sides. The evil he had been warned to defend from had traveled here with him.
Dion halts before a stone corridor disappearing into Fallen remnants and scrapes his boots free of debris. He looks a commander at field and feels it in strength he invents to make himself a bastion when days before he was their terror. His men are scattered along the outer walls like pale lamps in the dark. The rest are buried or securing their way out of the city, splitting through crowds sodden and numb. He had not wanted this nightmare of incivility in the city. I wanted, Dion thinks, chest cracking, absolution.
The heavy door presses inward against the weight of his body and the air gusts along his clammy skin. Dion lets his steps fall heavy and clear, rattling his teeth. He had sullied Twinside beyond that which Greagor could ever forgive him for, but their empire lived as long as their order stood and the government could reach the people. But his senses were drowning under a vanity he had thought would bring relief. The pursuit of reason and integrity should have catapulted the empire to rally behind those they were obliged to protect. Why was it, then, that Bahamut had answered a boy his junior, and Dion failed to grasp the trap that gripped him? Ultima severed him without Odin's blade that cut him thrice over. Responsibility and shame wrapped their arms around him, familiar and solemn, and bore him no further than his feet could walk.
"Good Greagor," he mumbles, memory seizing him. His chest constricts. He owes the Rosfields this chance, but there is no peace in his heart.
Dion scrapes the wall with a gauntlet. The Fallen runes remain solemn keepers and bar no one entry save the soldier before him. “Terence.”
“My Prince.” Terence’s shape, rapt and still beside the barred gate, greets him in the humid dark. It turns his lips to hear his voice alone.
“Report,” Dion orders. “Then gather your things.”
The sconce burns low, licking about loose stones and deeper shadows. Terence rises from his vigil, stiff hand sliding from his sword to his chest. His body groans with new purpose. Dion watches his full mouth come into focus, seeking the rise and fall of his plate where above ground the wind or the dying obscure those already dead. His kits lays astride stacked stone, some cobbler's abandoned work that will remain forever unfinished.
“He wants no company,” Terence warns, sorry to bear him grief, and gestures at a new wick, the dark beyond the grate in the door, untouched, unlit. So his father chose his faith to shield him. “Fresh water and wine, on the table, there — he would not eat. I left this morning’s supper but I don’t believe he’s the stomach. No illness.” The gratitude at his attentiveness makes Dion's throat constrict, his eyes sore. Terence gives him none of his worst imaginings, only hospitality for his concern, and relief in steady companionship. Dion presses past his shoulder and strikes a new light; the lantern scatters further than Terence’s reserves. He presses it into his palm so he may not stumble in the dark.
“Thank you," Dion implores sincerely, withdrawing. “Topside. We will be anon.” Terence says nothing, not even goodbye, though his eyes search for his own. He bows, his mask immaculate to lend courage to Dion's own. His armor sounds like chains as he climbs the stone, leaving darkness behind him. It reverbs for a long time in Twinside’s old Fallen stronghold. Where their ancestral technology remains curved and stable human masonry crumbles into pieces from the shock of blasts Bahamut wrought five years apart. Parts of the prison are luminous where light refracts or blue sorcery illuminates mechanics unknown to him, but not here where the glow of the shattered mothercrystal can no longer reach, and not in his heart which finds reason to cloak itself in old terrors and conjure new defeats.
Dion shoves the key in the lock and hears the release of the mechanism. On the other side his father does not look at him as he strikes the wick to life and reveals to each other their deceits.
Olivier’s blood still covers his robes where the false child had died. Dion considers how to coax him anew into something fresh, to cast off the remnants of Anabella’s sorcery over him. Sylvestre’s hands bare none of their silver promises, scabbed and bruised where men pulled him from the rabble of the palace and lay clasped across his robed knees like a woman's knits. His eyes level him with distaste beneath brows wiry with age--that reprovable gaze had withered his voice in increments until it was only ever invited. Had he always looked old? Never fragile, or destitute — his face shone like a god's even when his legs ached from days of inaction and he walked with a limp. What reserves he had were no more, cold and resilient as stone, and that stone fallen and buried. The silver tray looks pathetic in the room, the soup and warm bread his soldier’s ate a mocking of the banquets he dined at as a great man; his father will not care for his words or his gestures, strangled by pride to resist him that Dion sees clearly and feels repulsion for in himself.
The door clangs shut against the heel of Dion’s boot. Everything smells like the stink of aether to him now, including the scent of it on his father.
But Sylvestre is no ordinary man and remains untouched by transformation. The akashic in the mines of Oriflamme still prowl in the dark and climb through the cities lowest quarters growling and spitting, but Twinside’s silence is broken only by women gathering their things, parting miserably through smoking merchants or stiff soldiers with yowling or stone faced children, marking a trail of destitution that was alive before Bahamut’s flares razed even that. They all awoke to greet the same dead.
He may not forgive him his gentleness now, Dion decides, pouring from the untouched pitcher a goblet of lukewarm wine, but he needn’t to say his truth.
Dragging a stool with his foot, Dion drops his weight and drinks.
Sylvestre watches him steadily with a commander's eyes. His military ventures had been unremarkable and he'd been remitted the gallantry of blood in his youth through anointment instead. Dion's impatience for pleasantries wears them both, scratching like splinters, until the barb is pulled. “My compassionate boy. How long will you punish me for what I did to your mother?”
“What did you do to my mother?” Dion asks, low, quiet, and incurious. Phantoms talk.
“I made her wealthy and relieved her of her position,” Sylvestre says. His voice drags like a sack of coins. “I bought you to spare you the mockery her blood would invite.”
“It spared us nothing of our own,” Dion says plainly. “A woman with whom you had your claim to the throne was a meagre threat. The council was inclined to support you through scandals you brought. Bahamut chose me, not a more noble child -- therein lied your misery.”
“He did,” Sylvestre says. “And you rose to the occasion. You were a brilliant birth to behold. Enigmatic, clever, and pious. You are an expansionist the likes our empire has never known.” He quiets. Then, “Ambition has never suited you; you’re sincere in your modesty. I wish now you had not.”
Dion feels none of the desperate love that had given him the grace to speak at his father's feet before, only the weary marvel from how he solidifies his own fears -- he burned too bright. “Save your wishes for your augers. I cannot entertain a fantasy like you.”
“And you betray my faith to live in one of your own. Your half brother was no ghost. Olivier was—”
“As real as ash,” Dion interrupts, “when his akashic body blew to dust across his witch’s knees. You loved him just the same, and in that I grieve with you. Ultima tortured us both. We were oblivious.” Sylvestre's shoulders jerk as that name draws the prison's temperature cooler. “I have done all that has been asked of me; I defended our home from tyrants, invaders, and false allies. You invite them in on a premise I can't fathom. Will you tell me why? Why must I beg for your confidence?”
The silence is only the wick, winking, and Dion’s even breath stretching his mail to music. His father sits like a stone. Perfectly, Dion pictures the stoicism of their youth; the projection of his father’s glamour onto his own shoulders, leaden with chains, leather, and expectations too indelible to meet. Had they walked that path as father and son, or had Dion unknowingly walked it alone, soothed by the suggestion of great company when there was none? To whom did the responsibility fall that Bahamut should cast back on his leaders the iron bolts that propelled him across Storm and ravage that which he was honor bound to obey, kneel before, and protect? He had believed in it, but his chains had been tighter, heavier. He'd not tested their constraints.
“Greagor does not love us without persistence,” Sylvestre croaks. Dion leans forward to extend the goblet that his father’s cracked fingers take. “Our blood that makes us great, that rewards us with Bahamut — we’ve sullied it. Every generation the search for his dominant becomes longer.”
“You traded our stability for a union. Was this,” Dion murmurs, skin pricking, “before or after the tragedy of the Rosfields?”
“It was before even you.”
Dion grimaces. “I do not believe you.”
“I speak the truth. My mind has always been my own!” Sylvestre touches the edges of the table, trembling with outrage, palm chafing along the wood. “I met Anabella when her first son was born. It was a novelty that he did not awake as the Phoenix. We discussed the responsibility of siring or birthing a nation’s future; then, we realized that dream could be ours together. You cannot imagine my relief to find that who could understand without mockery the high regard we felt for our history. She was stronger than I.”
“But less accessible then. Your indiscretion served you.”
His father turns his mirrored face to his own. “I did rejoice when she told me of our night. Finally, I thought, it's done." Sylvestre refills his cup. "I don't consider it a fault of your own that you are so difficult. I thought I could save you, teach you, train you, but your blood has you in its grip. Suffering is our lot, but you made it your name."
"My blood," Dion says coldly, "is partially yours. What of merit?"
"What of it? Your work was not done! Look at the ruin you have brought in its absence!" Sylvestre points to the high ceiling and through it, scoffing. “The Twins may have known from whence we once came! Anabella’s boy, he would have lead our empire from shore to shore and cleansed it—”
Dion rises and grips the table with a ferocity his father suddenly mirrors, and eye to eye, it jerks between opposing forces before Dion rips it angrily away and hurls its pleasantries sideways. The pitcher and goblets tumble and splatter like a star at their feet. Soup scrapes across the floor. His chest heaves. His father stands rooted in arrogance and assurance Dion feels envy for. He wants to wipe it off his face with force alone. Righteousness strikes through him lightning quick. Ramuh, he considers anew, and hates this business of defense.
“I would not give you Storm. I, not Bahamut, but I, myself!” Dion rages. “That witch was beyond any of our understanding and you are a fool to buy her stories or entertain your own! Her son was no boy but an imposter to drive us to this misery, this senseless pursuit for invisible progress,” he spits. "He was dead and never ours to know. You latch onto him and ignore everything else. This talk of blood forgets all the rest in the Twins who bleed the same. A man who vehemently abandons his principles for glory is negligence.” Sylvestre recoils into the dark. Dion gains strength and stalks forward across spangled, stinking stones, then no further, sick and exhausted. “I asked Greagor to watch over you every night,” Dion confesses, choked, furious, “and now you have made me ashamed to share even a name. How many times have you lied only to give me causation to bring down Bahamut's wrath? I loved you, I have honored you, but I am a butcher to you. To what end will we displace our neighbors of their same sickbeds? When the curse finally shatters me to pieces, or when the Twins are scorched and blighted and people must buy their favor from their Emperor to endure?”
"You are so apart the measures I must abide by." Sylvestre shakes his head. His feet leave red boot prints where the wine flows along the grout. “You give me mercy to torment me because you know no better. It is my weakness that has allowed this."
The wretchedness of a reality won and lost drives its stakes deeper; if it were not for Anabella's transparency, where would he force his spear in his despair? To deny the empire was to invalidate the trail of corpses that let him stand for a little longer in the light. To think of it any deeper would be beyond his bounds to tolerate. Fantasies and myth held extraordinary power. Dion feels apart from his body.
“Your people live,” Dion insists, dry eyed. “Our heritage remains. Your champion remains. I am Sanbreque's, always, but hers now before I am yours.”
“What part of your vows will you not break,” Sylvestre moans, trembling some. His hands shield his eyes. “You are not the child I wanted. You were precious before I knew you could not walk with me because you would betray me. Mine, no longer," he weeps. "Greagor forgive me for what was taken from me. Forgive me his wrongs."
Dion looks at the dull hair, the proud nose that was his own, the way his father’s spotted, papery hands reveal his decay. All the aspects of himself that were his own are mirrored as failures to him now. His inheritance was impropriety alone.
"You relieve me, Father. We do not deserve the honor of your lofty imaginings. Rally yourself. I shall do the same.” Dion’s jaw seals itself. He withdraws, mouth ripe with bile. He leaves the cell open.
Behind him, a stranger keens. The misery follows Dion like a burial shroud until he can take it no longer and pauses to retch. What men they both were, trading blows on principles neither could understand, so certain of their faith and unable to rectify where each lost the other.
At the top of the stairs Terence is rooted. His eyes are wide, red, and dry with the same sleepless gauntlet Dion feels needling him. “Shall I bring him?” His voice is grim with readiness.
Dion looks past him. His head throbs in sync with his heart. The world unravels faster than it can be spun to coherence. There are powers that know more than him, that leave Dion reaching for their threads. Through the warm haze, a pale pink and watery skyline dawns over Twinside's foggy blanket. Terence stands before him in a danger Dion can no longer identify with confidence; he risks his heart, but trusts no other to command him, so he strangles him with the same misery. What conversations they shared as companions about the evils they enacted were fabricated on the belief that they would be remitted.
His fate was sealed in war -- his arm was truth of it and so was Ultima -- but Terence could walk away; he could permit him to live which had more value than dying for empty favors. Their suffering was for a false security and to dig deeper was the dissolution of their convictions, but not love.
“Shall I bring him?” Terence repeats. “My prince, the cardinals who remain would--” his mouth thins. He looks at him in incomprehensible distress. “Dion,” he whispers, afraid. “I’m so sorry. Dry your eyes. We've time for this. You’re not well.”
“Yes,” Dion answers, distracted, sick with knowledge. “The Duke would be glad to see my father. He honors him, maybe a friend would do my father more good than his son.” Beyond him Dion can hear the sounds of people picking through a wreckage his justice wrought. His dragoons will continue to toil while the people part around them in disbelief. Every disaster reveals another that he cannot soothe, but Terence risks danger and seizes him in a tight embrace. Dion's fingers dig into the worn leather beneath the metal for an anchor. Greagor is silent but his mass is warm. "I cannot despise him for what he's made of me. I fear the rest."
“Don't speak ill of yourself,” Terence contests fiercely. “You’re modest in your grief.”
Dion laughs bitterly. "Do not spare me," he returns. “There’s no peace in my heart, though I treasure yours. We war with each other only for satisfaction over the other. I need a new oath. We need new office.” Terence's dry cheek presses fretfully against his own in solemn companionship. He smells like the smoke he walked through to find him as Dion’s world unmoored in senseless tragedy. When the final dissolution of reality finds him he resolves that he should face it alone with no army at his back; then he will know the strength of his own justice and all his certainties.
“What are you thinking now?” Terence whispers. Dion parts them gently and ascends the steps ahead of him.
”That this city will be glad to see their Emperor and his court looks at them even once.”
Dion’s boots part the morning’s rain and squelch through dislodged stone, soil, and mud. Water drips from the end of his nose and hair while Storm keeps her name, sloughing Twinside into history and Dion into torpid bafflement.
Oriflamme had been simpler and Dion longs for it still: castle walls, capped mountains, and dusty wheat fields that shielded them from obliteration. The Dominion cries out at every boot upon her earth, spurning his men and refugees their trespass, surrounding them with hostility on all sides. The evil he had been warned to defend from had traveled here with him.
Dion halts before a stone corridor disappearing into Fallen remnants and scrapes his boots free of debris. He looks a commander at field and feels it in strength he invents to make himself a bastion when days before he was their terror. His men are scattered along the outer walls like pale lamps in the dark. The rest are buried or securing their way out of the city, splitting through crowds sodden and numb. He had not wanted this nightmare of incivility in the city. I wanted, Dion thinks, chest cracking, absolution.
The heavy door presses inward against the weight of his body and the air gusts along his clammy skin. Dion lets his steps fall heavy and clear, rattling his teeth. He had sullied Twinside beyond that which Greagor could ever forgive him for, but their empire lived as long as their order stood and the government could reach the people. But his senses were drowning under a vanity he had thought would bring relief. The pursuit of reason and integrity should have catapulted the empire to rally behind those they were obliged to protect. Why was it, then, that Bahamut had answered a boy his junior, and Dion failed to grasp the trap that gripped him? Ultima severed him without Odin's blade that cut him thrice over. Responsibility and shame wrapped their arms around him, familiar and solemn, and bore him no further than his feet could walk.
"Good Greagor," he mumbles, memory seizing him. His chest constricts. He owes the Rosfields this chance, but there is no peace in his heart.
Dion scrapes the wall with a gauntlet. The Fallen runes remain solemn keepers and bar no one entry save the soldier before him. “Terence.”
“My Prince.” Terence’s shape, rapt and still beside the barred gate, greets him in the humid dark. It turns his lips to hear his voice alone.
“Report,” Dion orders. “Then gather your things.”
The sconce burns low, licking about loose stones and deeper shadows. Terence rises from his vigil, stiff hand sliding from his sword to his chest. His body groans with new purpose. Dion watches his full mouth come into focus, seeking the rise and fall of his plate where above ground the wind or the dying obscure those already dead. His kits lays astride stacked stone, some cobbler's abandoned work that will remain forever unfinished.
“He wants no company,” Terence warns, sorry to bear him grief, and gestures at a new wick, the dark beyond the grate in the door, untouched, unlit. So his father chose his faith to shield him. “Fresh water and wine, on the table, there — he would not eat. I left this morning’s supper but I don’t believe he’s the stomach. No illness.” The gratitude at his attentiveness makes Dion's throat constrict, his eyes sore. Terence gives him none of his worst imaginings, only hospitality for his concern, and relief in steady companionship. Dion presses past his shoulder and strikes a new light; the lantern scatters further than Terence’s reserves. He presses it into his palm so he may not stumble in the dark.
“Thank you," Dion implores sincerely, withdrawing. “Topside. We will be anon.” Terence says nothing, not even goodbye, though his eyes search for his own. He bows, his mask immaculate to lend courage to Dion's own. His armor sounds like chains as he climbs the stone, leaving darkness behind him. It reverbs for a long time in Twinside’s old Fallen stronghold. Where their ancestral technology remains curved and stable human masonry crumbles into pieces from the shock of blasts Bahamut wrought five years apart. Parts of the prison are luminous where light refracts or blue sorcery illuminates mechanics unknown to him, but not here where the glow of the shattered mothercrystal can no longer reach, and not in his heart which finds reason to cloak itself in old terrors and conjure new defeats.
Dion shoves the key in the lock and hears the release of the mechanism. On the other side his father does not look at him as he strikes the wick to life and reveals to each other their deceits.
Olivier’s blood still covers his robes where the false child had died. Dion considers how to coax him anew into something fresh, to cast off the remnants of Anabella’s sorcery over him. Sylvestre’s hands bare none of their silver promises, scabbed and bruised where men pulled him from the rabble of the palace and lay clasped across his robed knees like a woman's knits. His eyes level him with distaste beneath brows wiry with age--that reprovable gaze had withered his voice in increments until it was only ever invited. Had he always looked old? Never fragile, or destitute — his face shone like a god's even when his legs ached from days of inaction and he walked with a limp. What reserves he had were no more, cold and resilient as stone, and that stone fallen and buried. The silver tray looks pathetic in the room, the soup and warm bread his soldier’s ate a mocking of the banquets he dined at as a great man; his father will not care for his words or his gestures, strangled by pride to resist him that Dion sees clearly and feels repulsion for in himself.
The door clangs shut against the heel of Dion’s boot. Everything smells like the stink of aether to him now, including the scent of it on his father.
But Sylvestre is no ordinary man and remains untouched by transformation. The akashic in the mines of Oriflamme still prowl in the dark and climb through the cities lowest quarters growling and spitting, but Twinside’s silence is broken only by women gathering their things, parting miserably through smoking merchants or stiff soldiers with yowling or stone faced children, marking a trail of destitution that was alive before Bahamut’s flares razed even that. They all awoke to greet the same dead.
He may not forgive him his gentleness now, Dion decides, pouring from the untouched pitcher a goblet of lukewarm wine, but he needn’t to say his truth.
Dragging a stool with his foot, Dion drops his weight and drinks.
Sylvestre watches him steadily with a commander's eyes. His military ventures had been unremarkable and he'd been remitted the gallantry of blood in his youth through anointment instead. Dion's impatience for pleasantries wears them both, scratching like splinters, until the barb is pulled. “My compassionate boy. How long will you punish me for what I did to your mother?”
“What did you do to my mother?” Dion asks, low, quiet, and incurious. Phantoms talk.
“I made her wealthy and relieved her of her position,” Sylvestre says. His voice drags like a sack of coins. “I bought you to spare you the mockery her blood would invite.”
“It spared us nothing of our own,” Dion says plainly. “A woman with whom you had your claim to the throne was a meagre threat. The council was inclined to support you through scandals you brought. Bahamut chose me, not a more noble child -- therein lied your misery.”
“He did,” Sylvestre says. “And you rose to the occasion. You were a brilliant birth to behold. Enigmatic, clever, and pious. You are an expansionist the likes our empire has never known.” He quiets. Then, “Ambition has never suited you; you’re sincere in your modesty. I wish now you had not.”
Dion feels none of the desperate love that had given him the grace to speak at his father's feet before, only the weary marvel from how he solidifies his own fears -- he burned too bright. “Save your wishes for your augers. I cannot entertain a fantasy like you.”
“And you betray my faith to live in one of your own. Your half brother was no ghost. Olivier was—”
“As real as ash,” Dion interrupts, “when his akashic body blew to dust across his witch’s knees. You loved him just the same, and in that I grieve with you. Ultima tortured us both. We were oblivious.” Sylvestre's shoulders jerk as that name draws the prison's temperature cooler. “I have done all that has been asked of me; I defended our home from tyrants, invaders, and false allies. You invite them in on a premise I can't fathom. Will you tell me why? Why must I beg for your confidence?”
The silence is only the wick, winking, and Dion’s even breath stretching his mail to music. His father sits like a stone. Perfectly, Dion pictures the stoicism of their youth; the projection of his father’s glamour onto his own shoulders, leaden with chains, leather, and expectations too indelible to meet. Had they walked that path as father and son, or had Dion unknowingly walked it alone, soothed by the suggestion of great company when there was none? To whom did the responsibility fall that Bahamut should cast back on his leaders the iron bolts that propelled him across Storm and ravage that which he was honor bound to obey, kneel before, and protect? He had believed in it, but his chains had been tighter, heavier. He'd not tested their constraints.
“Greagor does not love us without persistence,” Sylvestre croaks. Dion leans forward to extend the goblet that his father’s cracked fingers take. “Our blood that makes us great, that rewards us with Bahamut — we’ve sullied it. Every generation the search for his dominant becomes longer.”
“You traded our stability for a union. Was this,” Dion murmurs, skin pricking, “before or after the tragedy of the Rosfields?”
“It was before even you.”
Dion grimaces. “I do not believe you.”
“I speak the truth. My mind has always been my own!” Sylvestre touches the edges of the table, trembling with outrage, palm chafing along the wood. “I met Anabella when her first son was born. It was a novelty that he did not awake as the Phoenix. We discussed the responsibility of siring or birthing a nation’s future; then, we realized that dream could be ours together. You cannot imagine my relief to find that who could understand without mockery the high regard we felt for our history. She was stronger than I.”
“But less accessible then. Your indiscretion served you.”
His father turns his mirrored face to his own. “I did rejoice when she told me of our night. Finally, I thought, it's done." Sylvestre refills his cup. "I don't consider it a fault of your own that you are so difficult. I thought I could save you, teach you, train you, but your blood has you in its grip. Suffering is our lot, but you made it your name."
"My blood," Dion says coldly, "is partially yours. What of merit?"
"What of it? Your work was not done! Look at the ruin you have brought in its absence!" Sylvestre points to the high ceiling and through it, scoffing. “The Twins may have known from whence we once came! Anabella’s boy, he would have lead our empire from shore to shore and cleansed it—”
Dion rises and grips the table with a ferocity his father suddenly mirrors, and eye to eye, it jerks between opposing forces before Dion rips it angrily away and hurls its pleasantries sideways. The pitcher and goblets tumble and splatter like a star at their feet. Soup scrapes across the floor. His chest heaves. His father stands rooted in arrogance and assurance Dion feels envy for. He wants to wipe it off his face with force alone. Righteousness strikes through him lightning quick. Ramuh, he considers anew, and hates this business of defense.
“I would not give you Storm. I, not Bahamut, but I, myself!” Dion rages. “That witch was beyond any of our understanding and you are a fool to buy her stories or entertain your own! Her son was no boy but an imposter to drive us to this misery, this senseless pursuit for invisible progress,” he spits. "He was dead and never ours to know. You latch onto him and ignore everything else. This talk of blood forgets all the rest in the Twins who bleed the same. A man who vehemently abandons his principles for glory is negligence.” Sylvestre recoils into the dark. Dion gains strength and stalks forward across spangled, stinking stones, then no further, sick and exhausted. “I asked Greagor to watch over you every night,” Dion confesses, choked, furious, “and now you have made me ashamed to share even a name. How many times have you lied only to give me causation to bring down Bahamut's wrath? I loved you, I have honored you, but I am a butcher to you. To what end will we displace our neighbors of their same sickbeds? When the curse finally shatters me to pieces, or when the Twins are scorched and blighted and people must buy their favor from their Emperor to endure?”
"You are so apart the measures I must abide by." Sylvestre shakes his head. His feet leave red boot prints where the wine flows along the grout. “You give me mercy to torment me because you know no better. It is my weakness that has allowed this."
The wretchedness of a reality won and lost drives its stakes deeper; if it were not for Anabella's transparency, where would he force his spear in his despair? To deny the empire was to invalidate the trail of corpses that let him stand for a little longer in the light. To think of it any deeper would be beyond his bounds to tolerate. Fantasies and myth held extraordinary power. Dion feels apart from his body.
“Your people live,” Dion insists, dry eyed. “Our heritage remains. Your champion remains. I am Sanbreque's, always, but hers now before I am yours.”
“What part of your vows will you not break,” Sylvestre moans, trembling some. His hands shield his eyes. “You are not the child I wanted. You were precious before I knew you could not walk with me because you would betray me. Mine, no longer," he weeps. "Greagor forgive me for what was taken from me. Forgive me his wrongs."
Dion looks at the dull hair, the proud nose that was his own, the way his father’s spotted, papery hands reveal his decay. All the aspects of himself that were his own are mirrored as failures to him now. His inheritance was impropriety alone.
"You relieve me, Father. We do not deserve the honor of your lofty imaginings. Rally yourself. I shall do the same.” Dion’s jaw seals itself. He withdraws, mouth ripe with bile. He leaves the cell open.
Behind him, a stranger keens. The misery follows Dion like a burial shroud until he can take it no longer and pauses to retch. What men they both were, trading blows on principles neither could understand, so certain of their faith and unable to rectify where each lost the other.
At the top of the stairs Terence is rooted. His eyes are wide, red, and dry with the same sleepless gauntlet Dion feels needling him. “Shall I bring him?” His voice is grim with readiness.
Dion looks past him. His head throbs in sync with his heart. The world unravels faster than it can be spun to coherence. There are powers that know more than him, that leave Dion reaching for their threads. Through the warm haze, a pale pink and watery skyline dawns over Twinside's foggy blanket. Terence stands before him in a danger Dion can no longer identify with confidence; he risks his heart, but trusts no other to command him, so he strangles him with the same misery. What conversations they shared as companions about the evils they enacted were fabricated on the belief that they would be remitted.
His fate was sealed in war -- his arm was truth of it and so was Ultima -- but Terence could walk away; he could permit him to live which had more value than dying for empty favors. Their suffering was for a false security and to dig deeper was the dissolution of their convictions, but not love.
“Shall I bring him?” Terence repeats. “My prince, the cardinals who remain would--” his mouth thins. He looks at him in incomprehensible distress. “Dion,” he whispers, afraid. “I’m so sorry. Dry your eyes. We've time for this. You’re not well.”
“Yes,” Dion answers, distracted, sick with knowledge. “The Duke would be glad to see my father. He honors him, maybe a friend would do my father more good than his son.” Beyond him Dion can hear the sounds of people picking through a wreckage his justice wrought. His dragoons will continue to toil while the people part around them in disbelief. Every disaster reveals another that he cannot soothe, but Terence risks danger and seizes him in a tight embrace. Dion's fingers dig into the worn leather beneath the metal for an anchor. Greagor is silent but his mass is warm. "I cannot despise him for what he's made of me. I fear the rest."
“Don't speak ill of yourself,” Terence contests fiercely. “You’re modest in your grief.”
Dion laughs bitterly. "Do not spare me," he returns. “There’s no peace in my heart, though I treasure yours. We war with each other only for satisfaction over the other. I need a new oath. We need new office.” Terence's dry cheek presses fretfully against his own in solemn companionship. He smells like the smoke he walked through to find him as Dion’s world unmoored in senseless tragedy. When the final dissolution of reality finds him he resolves that he should face it alone with no army at his back; then he will know the strength of his own justice and all his certainties.
“What are you thinking now?” Terence whispers. Dion parts them gently and ascends the steps ahead of him.
”That this city will be glad to see their Emperor and his court looks at them even once.”
