Her voice lilted in time with the tinkling of wine at the bottom of her glass. She asked Ardyn of himself – not of his world, but of his present activities. He smirked faintly at the question. “You strike me as someone who would enjoy wandering the world and learning new things,” the girl said before glancing to meet his eye with a faint smile. “Then again, I have been wrong in the past.” Ardyn chuckled in his usual, self-assured way.

“My, my. Why, you are perceptive, aren’t you?” He finished with her glass and replaced the bottle on the table. She had already lifted her glass between her fingers and sipped delicately at the rim. Ardyn did the same, leaning back in his chair with his legs half-crossed and his eyes raised to the ceiling. He swirled the wine thoughtfully before raising it to his lips.

“It’s true that I’m nothing but a wanderer – an impatient traveler carried by the waves of conflict and intrigue.” He sipped the wine again, rolling it on his tongue. It had a sweet taste with a hint of cherry moscato. His favorite. “Wandering and learning,” he mused. “I’ve found there’s very little to learn here. It’s been dreadfully boring. Too many ordinary people living ordinary lives. How droll!”

He sighed, lowering his glass. Corrupting Prompto had been too long ago. Taunting Noctis’ other guards had come even longer before that, and he could scarcely even remember his dealings with Iris the Demonslayer. What was he to do with his time when he had neither plots nor schemes? For too long he’d been driven by revenge alone, but why did he continue now except for petty spite and his lack of real choice in the matter? Was this to be his true and final hell, lingering forever in the company of the uninteresting and uninterested? He shuddered to think.

”But there is hope, isn’t there?” His eyes raised to meet hers, a faint smile at his lips. ”Not everyone is so unremarkable. Every now and again, there’s one who’s…different.” He raised his glass to her before drinking again. It slid down his throat like the sweetest of acids. ”I’m looking for someone, actually. I can’t say for certain that he lives, and yet…” Ardyn trailed off wistfully. His fingers tightened on the stem of his glass. ”I feel that he might.”

Noctis. There was still Noctis. If he lived, then his retribution had not yet been fulfilled. If he lived, then there was still some meaning to Ardyn’s existence.

”Oh, but I fear I’ll never find him!” Ardyn let out a moan of frustration before setting his glass carefully back on the table. ”It is such a large world! What are the odds?” He sighed before returning his attention to Terra, brows raised in interest. ”And what of you?” he asked. ”You must have goals of your own.”

ulla

The girl’s reaction was…odd to say the least. She went on about the virtues of patience though he had hardly mentioned the topic, and then continued about a town she’d save from some monster or another. Ardyn wasn’t entirely certain what she was talking about, but he just smiled pleasantly and sipped his wine anyway, listening. It wasn’t a painful conversation – just a confusing one – and it wasn’t as though he had anything better to do.

So he nodded along. He said ”I see,” even when he didn’t, and ”Oh my!” at all the times he thought he should. Mention of the fire-spewing monster did pique his attention to some degree, but she didn’t give him enough details to care. Eventually, however, she did mention something of value – no matter how small. The tale of her amnesiac friend rang quite close to home, and might have aided him if he hadn’t already seen it twice before.

“It was as though she got pulled from a different time and place,” she said, and Ardyn nodded solemnly. Such an odd idea – to be pulled through time. But what else was he to say of Iris and Prompto? They’d been ten years younger than at the time of his death, and they hadn’t recognized him in the slightest. After everything that he’d done, he could have at least expected a drawn gun in greeting, but no. He’d been slighted as though he’d never existed. Ardyn let out a short breath through his nose.

“Curious, isn’t it? The gods can be so cruel…” Ardyn leaned back and considered the ceiling, tapping his foot thoughtfully. In truth, he hadn’t thought much of the whole affair since it had happened. It was an anomaly, but then, so were so many things. His immortality, for instance. Time displacement was of little consequence to him.

Perhaps he was simply too jaded to care.

Terra didn’t ever answer his question. She didn’t tell him of her goals or plans, but she did tell him something else – a little louder than before and with an odd lilt to her words. “I know for a fact that I have to be the most exotic of beings here on this planet,” she said without a wisp of restraint. “As I have yet to meet any other Esperkin on this world.”

Ardyn blinked at her uncomprehendingly. Exotic? That was an odd thing to admit so casually, and yet his curiosity was piqued. ”Esperkin?” he repeated without really understanding. It was a bold claim, and even with no context, he was almost certain she was wrong. Whatever she told him next, he could say with little doubt that he had a far stranger history than she could ever dream of.

”My, if you truly think yourself so unique, then I must hear this story. Please go on.” He gestured at her encouragingly, eyebrow raised. ”It seems you have so much to say.”

ulla

Terra, it seemed, was many things, but discrete was not one of them.

First she went on a rather baseless tirade against the gods. “There are no gods,” she started. “Only what we do for ourselves inside of our own lives.” Ardyn smirked as he watched her, head tilted and thoughtful. How much easier would the lives of mortals be were that true? He supposed it was wishful thinking, and not one he could particularly fault her for. It was a terrible thing to be powerless in the face of fate.

“Honestly, if there was a god back within our world, they would have stepped in and stopped Kefka,” she added and Ardyn nearly laughed.

“One would think,” he agreed. His smirk widened. ”Otherwise, they would have neither benevolence nor omnipotence, and certainly that can’t be true.” Ardyn chuckled quietly to himself with a shake of his head. The gods had done nothing to spare humanity in his lifetime  – nothing but sending Noctis, and even then, that was of Ardyn’s own accord. In truth, the gods were as ineffective as they were selfish. It was best to hate them.

Still, that wasn’t something to mention in polite conversation. He didn’t want to think of what such existential knowledge might do to her. The hopelessness of it all might drive her mad.

And it sounded as though she hardly needed the pressure. With only the slightest push, she told him everything about who she was and where she came from. She told him about her parents, one of which was something called an “esper,” though she had to have known that word would mean nothing to him. Personally, Ardyn thought that divulging such information to suspicious strangers wasn’t the smartest of ideas, but he was only mildly surprised. The girl had already proven herself loose-lipped and naïve. Why shouldn’t he have expected her to give him her life story?

Her parents’ home had been invaded! Her parents cast out and killed! It was all so tragic that he could he could hardly contain a grievous sigh. ”Oh my,” he said instead, eyes sweeping over her. She sat loosely with her shoulders hunched and her head unsteady. With every new refrain, she spoke with that odd lilt she’d acquired only minutes before. If Ardyn hadn’t known better, he might have called her drunk, but of course she couldn’t be. A glance to her glass proved that she hadn’t even finished her first, and she’d only been sipping it for a quarter hour at most. Unless their wine had been laced with sedatives, she shouldn’t have felt anything yet, but he supposed that the mind was the most powerful drug of all. He drained the last of his glass in one gulp before turning to consider her, twirling the stem between his fingers.

If she thought herself inebriated and felt the same, then was there really a difference?

“You know, that reminds me of a fairy tale. Would you like to hear it?” The words came of their own regard – sudden and thoughtful like the cadences of a song. He tilted his head to consider the ceiling. His lips twitched in some grim amusement. ”Long ago, long before the reign of man, there was a dispute between the gods. You see, the Infernian hated the twisted and darkened creatures they had created, and sought to end their terrible mistake. However, when he entreated the other gods to his cause, none answered, and he was cast into shadow. Over time, the solitude drove him mad, and in an act of spite, he blighted the world with his hatred so that all of humanity would become as twisted and tainted as he’d always thought they were.”

It was a familiar tale – one that every man, woman, and child of Eos would know well. His eyes darkened as he finished the last refrain, the words bitter on his tongue. There was more, of course. So much more, but that was a tale known by him and him alone. He leaned his cheek against his palm before continuing.

”So strong was the Infernian’s hatred that it seemed it would darken the very skies, but even upon his banishment, the gods were powerless to stop him. With little time remaining, they summoned the next in a line of kings and gifted him with the power to save his people by taking the blight into himself. The man did so gladly and marveled in his work, but his self-sacrifice came at a price. With every life he spared, his own soul was further tainted by the god’s corruption until a day came when he was more monster than man. On his return, the very people he had saved scorned him and turned him out for his corruption, and though the world was saved, their savior was cursed to wander in darkness forever.”

Ardyn twirled the empty glass between his fingers and watched the light flicker in crystalline prisms across the edge. There was still a pinprick of red lining the bottom like blood. He tilted his glass until the residue ran in streaks down the side.

”What do you take from that story?” he asked the girl without looking at her. ”Was the sacrifice worth the cost? And who do you believe to have been at fault – god or man?”

ulla

The whir of the ceiling fan was nauseating. It beats its rickety rhythm, loud and creaking with each puff of livened air. The girl said nothing for a moment, leaving them in a local kind of silence that did nothing to mask all the smaller irritations around them. Muttered speech. The slap of uncoordinated footsteps. The hum of fluorescent lights, and above it all, the unending creak of that accursed ceiling fan.

Terra had finished her first glass now and set it down carefully on the table. She considered it for a moment, quiet and mournful as ever, before finally giving her answer. “I take it as the story of someone who did what they believed in,” she said, and Ardyn’s grip on his glass tightened. “It mattered little what was good or evil in the greater scheme of things.”

He hadn’t asked for her opinion on matters of good or evil. He didn’t want to listen to some silly girl’s personal morality or what should condemn one to villainy. It was that first part that he heard the loudest. Someone who did what he believed in. And what was it that he believed now? There were only two principles that he knew with utmost certainty: that the gods were as fickle as they were cruel and that nothing mattered in the grand scheme of eternity.

She spoke of other matters – that she would have done the same and that the gods were at fault – but he wasn’t really listening. She was the self-sacrificing type. The type to weather tragedy like a storm and relish in the rain. It wasn’t interesting, not really. His heart desired corruption and conflict. Selfishness and strife. Despite the girl’s many hardships, she wallowed in her darkness rather than letting it simmer. She wasn’t worthy of his antagonism.

He longed for a more corrupted adversary.

The girl was quiet for a long time, watching her hands. When she finally straightened to face him, she carried a new air about her. Something serious. Something immense. ”I may seem naïve,” she said. ”I may seem young, but I know what I would do. If it meant saving my friends, I would do it with a smile on my face despite damnation.”

His grip tightened. He hadn’t asked for her opinion on the matter. He hadn’t asked for this.

”That tends to be the consensus,” Ardyn said. ”But it’s an odd thing, isn’t it? Surely with so much self-sacrifice, there wouldn’t be a problem in the world. Funny how few answer the call.” He eyed the creaking ceiling fan before finally setting his empty glass on the table. ”But enough of such grim matters.” Ardyn grabbed for the remaining bottle and refilled his glass. He purposefully left Terra’s alone, placing the bottle between them. ”Tell me, what do you plan for tomorrow? Or tonight? Surely, I needn’t tell you that my night is as free as you’d will it.”

He brought the refilled glass to his lips and swallowed before casting her an earnest half-grin. ”Won’t you make it memorable?”

ulla