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year 5, quarter 3
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LOL. You want a new job, Ganba? Kuja's always in the market for minions.
Why should the world exist without me?
The woman glanced at Kuja, smirking as he spoke. ”What were you expecting? A welcome banner?” she joked, and for not the first time that night, Kuja felt his fingers tense into the flesh of his palm. He loathed working with the simple-minded.
”Hardly.” His voice came cool. Almost a little flippant. ”But if this were a mage of any worthwhile caliber, he should have left some kind of traps or observational magic on his entrance. I sensed nothing of the sort, and with just a single guard...It seems careless.”
Careless or arrogant. Either way, the mage was a fool to leave anything to chance. Kuja eyed the filthy floodways distastefully.
But the woman wasn’t talking to him any longer. Neither of them were, really, and as she set about posturing with the iguana-man again, Kuja couldn’t help but sigh. Why was it that he always found himself surrounded by idiots? Of course, that was sometimes of his own doing. Manipulating those with power, for instance, or keeping his pawns in line. But more often than not, he found himself in undesirable circumstances unwillingly working with undesirable allies.
Was it a stroke of fate that he found himself so constantly frustrated, or perhaps a bout of divine karma? It would certainly have seemed so if he’d believed in either of those things. As it were, Kuja could only imagine that it spoke ill of the general intelligence of almost everyone around him. Almost no one was worth his time.
Still, they were making progress. Iguana-man informed them of the general layout of the place and started off towards one of the (thankfully) less disgusting of the paths. He didn’t seem interested in conversation beyond pure function and Kuja had no desire to seek any from him. Instead, he was content merely to listen.
After the time they’d unwillingly shared, Kuja was beginning to grasp the peculiarities of the man’s speech. For one reason or another, the mammoth man seemed to think the two of them children -- no matter what they said to the contrary -- and Kuja could only imagine that “bleeder” meant something akin to “human,” though he could only wonder in morbid fascination what details of the man’s species might lead him to that nickname. The undead were, to him, “rotten.” And apparently they navigated not by sight, but smell. The necromancer’s magic had something to do with an obelisk and ritual circles -- amateur’s work -- and for some reason the iguana-man assumed that Kuja was here for “adventuring.”
”I’d hardly call this an ‘adventure,’” Kuja scoffed, but didn’t have time to elicit a reaction before he was cut off by a sudden hiss down the hall.
What dashed around the corner was, well, undead. Kuja wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with the concept after all of his dismal trips to the base of the Iifa Tree, but this specimen felt particularly unpleasant. It smelled horrible, for one, and seemed hardly glued together through magical stitches that barely kept it upright. Kuja raised a careless hand as it rushed towards them, stepping back to let it attack the other two first if it managed to reach them. He had no desire to demonstrate his magic if he didn’t have to, and thankfully, their reptilian guide wasn’t completely useless. He sent the creature’s head flying with a single swipe, thrusting the rest of it bodily into the wall before continuing on.
Well. The man seemed mildly competent at least.
”Tell me,” Kuja said as he followed behind him. ”What would motivate someone to work somewhere so dreary? Surely you could get better work somewhere else? With someone else?” They turned a corner, and Kuja found that they were once again alone. Or at least so it seemed. He stepped a little closer to the man and cast him a sideways glance. ”I realize that you must be low on options -- aren’t we all? -- but your employer appears to be an amateur mage at best, and the conditions aren’t exactly...tasteful.” Kuja glanced coolly at an open sarcophagus -- empty but for a wet grime that smelled vaguely of rot. ”Is it merely the pay or is there something I’m missing?”
The hulking iguana-man didn’t say a word to him. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all until the woman made her move. She stared them down like an angry mu challenging for dominance before telling them both that she’d rather not dirty her clothes in a fight. Then she edged towards the stairs, gave them both a promise of meeting the necromancer himself, and vaulted over the side. Kuja blinked at the brazen will of it all, but could only wonder what she’d find in the darkness. It certainly hadn’t been the most calculated of moves. In fact, it was absolutely idiotic.
A fact further emphasized when the iguana-man swung his ridiculous spear around and jammed it into the stone in front of her. From the sharp crack it made, Kuja could only imagine that it had been enough to stick it straight it into the stone. Kuja frowned and glanced between them, touching at his lip thoughtfully. ”I wouldn’t, if I were you. The architecture seems quite fragile.” He glanced at the hulking man, but of course they were both too distracted to see reason. One was as reckless as she was arrogant and the other was a hulking monstrosity hardly intelligent enough for conversation. Kuja let out a light sigh as the man relented. It seemed that all of that bravado had been nothing but a bluff.
”Follow me.” His voice was as rough as gravel and nearly as dull. His gaze turned to Kuja with an abrupt tension. ”You, bleeder- s'long as you keep yourself tame, we ain't got us a problem. Sure the bleeder downstairs would be interested in your kin.”
”Bleeder?” Even repeating it, Kuja couldn’t help his own skepticism. He raised an incredulous eyebrow. ”What are you blathering about?”
But the man was already gone. He’d showed just as much regard to Kuja as he’d managed before -- that being none. Kuja’s lips soured into a scowl as public attention left him. The two of them were so simple that he could hardly stand it.
But he had a task before him, and he wouldn’t leave empty-handed if he had any say in it. So Kuja let out a short breath, straightened himself, and started towards the stairs. He rounded them and descended down like a normal person with any sort of manners, sense, or caution. Traits that his unwilling companions apparently lacked.
The stairs were dulled and prone to crumble under stress. The walls carried with them cobwebs and accumulated dust. Kuja lit his hand again as they descended, eyeing their guide cooly as he went. From this angle, Kuja had no choice but to appraise the man’s thick, reptilian tail as it swished irritably from side to side. If their guide had known any amount of tact he would have hidden the thing so it wouldn’t give his intentions away, but then, what did Kuja really expect from a man as crass and bull-headed as this? He very much doubted the man knew what the word “subtlety” even meant.
”Big cavern downstairs, no dead to disturb.” The iguana-man’s grunts echoed back at him. ”Ain't keen on superstition and that crap; ain't keen on being stupid neither.”
”Clearly,” Kuja said with a smirk. If anyone was a paragon of intelligence, it was the seven-foot monster before him. ”There’s nothing dead here? I thought that to be the point of a mausoleum.” At least as far as he understood it. He’d never particularly cared to learn the pointless rituals Gaians performed over corpses. He’d gathered enough to feign sensitivity and that had been all he’d needed.
”And what of it? Clearly none of us here care for superstition or we wouldn’t be traipsing through a tomb in search of a necromancer.” The comment on a “big cavern” intrigued him the most, but he didn’t have time to get into it. What on earth had prompted the man to tell them that?
Did he intend to fight them? Was he leading them on only because he’d lacked the space to use his lance properly above? If so, then Kuja hoped the man wasn’t harboring any delusions of getting the best of him.
As the staircase ended, Kuja found that, indeed, they’d been led to some kind of underground cavern. It had been hollowed out by human hands. The stone was still stacked in precise walls. The ceiling was held in place with arches etched carefully. As Kuja stepped into the open, he caught glimpses of an underground waterway rank with bile and floodwaters. He wrinkled his nose at it before glancing distastefully at the plates mounted on the walls next to macabre tunnels which no doubt held further sarcophagi.
”You said the mage is here?” Kuja’s eyes cast across cavern. He couldn’t imagine setting up a lair here no matter how desperate he might become, but he supposed necromancers might come in a different breed than himself. A breed with dramatically lowered standards. ”I don’t see a thing.”
The Alexandrian herald is a three foot penguin. Kuja's not phased by an odd looking reptile man.
Why should the world exist without me?
The crypt was spacier than he would have imagined and lined with engravings and ornaments that no one had ever been meant to appreciate. The walls were filthy and the air so stale it was almost toxic. Kuja eyed a cobweb-lined sculpture of some kind of angelic figure before the dust overwhelmed him and he coughed into the back of his free hand. This place smelled more of stagnation than Terra and it reeked of death. Still, Kuja had forced himself through worse for the sake of power and he wasn’t about to let something as trivial as a dismal atmosphere stall him. He strengthened his flames and started towards the stone staircase inset into the back of the tomb.
"If you're going to be sneaking about at this time, you might want to learn how to sneak."
Kuja froze at the voice behind him. Female. He’d seen no one outside. Perhaps he should have raised his guard.
"Whatever reason it is you're digging up bodies is your business, I guess, but I'm going to need you to stop. Got it?"
”Digging up bodies?” he echoed. ”I’ve done no such thing.” But of course a necromancer would. And that would lead to outrage. And suspicion now directed squarely at him. Why hadn’t he acted with more discretion?
”I’ve come to meet with a mage who I’ve heard frequents this place. Though I hardly see why.” He turned slowly to face the woman and caught sight of her leaning against the far wall. She was dressed almost entirely in tight-fighting leather with a jagged choker and a bodice so constrictive he wondered how she managed to breathe. From head to toe she was nothing but sharp edges and odd-fitting armor and he wondered for a moment what she thought she was trying to prove. He attempted a smile in her direction which he knew came far too bitter for comfort. ”I’m a sorcerer by trade, and I’ve come to ask of his skills -- if not his methods.” He cast his hand towards a sealed sarcophagus and sneered at it distastefully. ”I’ve nothing to do with the dead.”
The words had barely left his lips before a sound interrupted him, dismissive and strangely human echoing from the stairs beyond their entryway. Kuja tensed and turned in that direction -- the far more immediate threat. Was it one of the mage’s creations or perhaps the mage himself? He raised his hand defensively and waited, glancing only once in the woman’s direction before locking his focus on the darkness beyond those stairs.
A second passed. And then another before he caught the scrape of heavy plate mail.
What erupted from the shadows was more monster than man. A towering figure of bulging muscles and erupting tendons packed together into a vaguely humanoid shape. His jaw was framed in thick, black scales feeding into sleek silver hair and his eyes judged them both in harsh angles. Kuja had never seen anything like the man before him, but could only imagine that he was some kind of foreign species perhaps reptilian in nature. Kuja's fingers sparked with apprehensive magic.
The man gave an almost animal grunt and looked between them. ”Ain't really your choice though, now is it, kid?”
Kuja wondered at first who on earth he was talking to. Kuja hadn’t said anything to prompt the man, and the woman behind him had to be pushing thirty years old. Regardless, he didn’t care to correct him. Somehow, he imagined that provoking the seven-foot alligator man might end poorly.
The man cocked his head abrasively, and something slipped out between his lips barely visible in the dim light. Kuja squinted, trying to get a better look, before blinking in surprise. A forked tongue. Perhaps he was more of a snake man or some kind of heavily armored lizard. An iguana, perhaps.
”Goin` keep it real simple for you, ain't much fan of repeatin' myself.” The man glanced at the door behind them and gestured for them to leave. ”Get gone. This isn't a playground and I sure as hell ain't looking to add slaughtering kids to my burdens.”
”Kids?” The word slipped out before Kuja could think better of it. He touched at his mouth and felt his shoulders shake with his own laughter. How could he help himself? No one had ever called him a child before. After all, he’d never actually been one.
”I assure you I’ve come with good reason.” He lowered his hand as he spoke, turning to face him with an almost pleasant smile. ”If you’re here then this place must be inhabited. I’m a sorcerer, you see, and I’ve come requesting an audience with who I presume to be your master.”
Kuja raised a wrist in emphasis, smirking. ”There’s hardly need for bloodshed, but if you insist on slaughtering, I assure you it won’t end well. Now would you kindly move aside? Or would you prefer a display of my magic?”
I guess I'm feeling Kuja lately. Oh, who am I kidding? I always love him.
Why should the world exist without me?
Graveyards were the height of mortal stupidity.
Kuja entered the place with a distasteful eye. He stepped carefully through soft earth and kept his flowing sleeves carefully to himself. The moon hung high that night -- a single half-orb that doused the scene in ethereal silver. Stupid. Kuja glanced at the grave-markers, dull and crumbling. Crude. He sneered at a rat scampering behind tufts of dead grass. There was nothing more pointless than memorializing the dead. Beneath him there were buried nothing more than the rotting husks of human vessels without use. Their souls were gone. Their identities. So why was it that they were so revered? Why was anything about them seen as sacred?
No, to Kuja they were nothing more than disgusting wastes.
The cemetery began with rusting iron hinges and the most base of memorials. The poor, he assumed. Those too common to be properly lavished with wealth they’d never enjoy. As he ventured deeper, the markers grew more elaborate. Statues where there had once been plaques. Embossed columns where there had once been rough etchings. The night was still but for the odd scuttling animal. Still and quiet and protected by taboo. Kuja didn’t bother to glance over his shoulder. He didn’t believe in ghosts because he’d already dealt extensively with the spirits of the dead. In fact, that was why he’d come now.
Soon, Kuja would create life.
It wasn’t anything special and it wasn’t anything new. He’d long studied all of the theories, and artificial life was far more natural to him than any kind of human family structure. But it was different in each world. The resources varied. The atmosphere shifted. And with every variant, Kuja had no choice but to alter his formulas and try again. And again. And again.
That was how he found himself in the city of Provo that late, somber night. It was something of a commercial trade hub -- always busy, always bustling, always base. He’d avoided it for a reason; it reminded him far too much of Lindblum. Still, every setting had its use, and here he’d heard tell of an ancient dark magic still practiced in the shadows. While he’d busied himself setting up a new workshop in the forest at the city’s border, he’d thought to investigate these claims.
Someone here knew the secrets of reanimation. How very useful if the rumors turned out to be true.
He came across a row of marble-cut mausoleums. He’d been told to meet the unholy mage near one of them, but he’d never been told which. His lips pursed as he glanced from one to the next with no visible differences between them. Idiots. Was this some kind of test? He stepped forward with a cautious air, hand raised and sparking with magic. He’d come at midnight just as they’d agreed, but where exactly was the mage? He stopped as something caught his eyes. A shadow. His eyes raked the front of the nearest marble walls and caught something there. A crack. His head tilted in interest as he approached it. Someone had opened the door.
He touched it lightly. There was no magic here. No sorcery to entangle him, but the crevice wasn’t quite wide enough to sidle through and the inside was engulfed in shadow. He ran his finger down the cold marble before glancing behind him for the first time. There was nothing there. Just the wind, the headstones, and an old crow watching him with beady eyes. His lips thinned.
He was not afraid to disturb the dead.
Magic flowed freely from his fingers. He captured the heavy stone slab in blue shockwaves of magic and motioned sharply. The door ground into the surrounding stone like teeth against granite. He nearly winced at the sound, but there was no one there bother. No one with a soul left anyway. So he pulled until the thin crevice had widened into something he could squeeze through.
Why was he so convinced he’d find something here? Nothing could have gotten inside, at least not without magic. His eyes steeled on the doorway. That was why he was here, wasn’t it? Perhaps it wasn’t so impossible…
With a muttered word, Kuja brought flames to his fingertips and stepped quietly towards the darkness.
”That's not right..." The girl frowned, tensing on the stone in her hand. ”The fog here is... Different. Before it was just normal fog but here... It's like something's controlling it. It's pushing back against me."
”Controlling it?” Kuja turned on her sharply. ”That’s impossible, unless…”Unless it was managed by a Soul Divider. The thought came and went as unpleasant as the Mist itself, but it meant nothing. This was a world without the ravages of another planet, and the Mist here had not yet infected the world at large. Still, he couldn’t help but consider the possibility, as unpleasant as it was. If this world had no soul divider, then where had the Mist come from?
The girl’s fingers snapped to her pouch and she pulled another of her magic stones from within. She rolled it once within her fingers until its power activated and with a short battlecry, she tossed the stone into the shadows. There was a burst of flame and the brief silhouette of something before the fog swallowed it again, but there was no mistaking it. They had seen a monster and the monster had seen them.
”Idiot!” His tongue snapped faster than the magic he brought to his hand. ”Was it your intention to give us away or were you too stupid to think of anything else?”
The room echoed with snarls as the monster sought its vengeance on the poor, stupid creatures that had attacked it in the fog. Kuja readied his spells, tense as his eyes raked the Mist for something he couldn’t identify and would never see coming. The girl had busied herself on the crystal, and within seconds he shivered as a ripple of strong magic pulsed from the thing. Kuja risked a glance to see what the stone was floating in front of her on its own volition and carried with it a kind of eerie and ethereal glow. He blinked.
Was this its power? It seemed so close he could almost touch it…
There was a crash beside him full of scrabbling claws and a monstrous roar. Kuja’s eyes snapped to the fog, but he couldn’t see anything beyond their bubble. What had it hit, and why hadn’t it been able to reach them?
"Ideas would be welcome..." The girl’s voice was strained. She’d done something. Something with the crystal...A barrier perhaps? Kuja glanced from the crystal to the Mist beyond and let his thoughts stream forth unfettered.
”Your crystal repelled it. Whatever it is, it aligns itself with the Mist. It carries the same properties and the same weaknesses.” His mind landed upon the Mistodons and the myriad abominations which lurked within the Iifa Tree. They were all fearsome and bloodthirsty, but even the Divider itself had carried the same exploitable weakness. They were creatures born of the Mist and could be banished just as easily.
”Lower the wall.” His fingers sparked with magic as he readied his spell. He’d need only one. ”I’ll make this quick.”
With the crystal’s power weakened, he might as well have closed his eyes for all the good they did him, but he heard the beast lumbering and snarling beyond his vision, and that was good enough. He heard it collect itself, prowl some fifteen degrees to their left, and then charge again. By the time he caught its silhouette, it came with a flash of yellowed teeth and sharpened claws swinging towards...the girl. Kuja hesitated for a moment, allowing it at least one swipe before raising his hand to stop it.
If they finished each other off, wouldn’t that be most preferable, really?
With a muttered word, magic circled his target and erupted from its feet in rays of ethereal light. Their chamber echoed the creature’s death cry as the light settled deep inside it and brought it quickly to its knees. In seconds, the screams were cut short and the shadowed creature fell heavily at their feet.
It was truly humorous how simple it was to dispatch the undead.
Kuja lowered his hand. ”As I thought. It’s useless against white magic.” He stepped forward and peered at the unsightly beast before them. It was vaguely draconic in nature with taught skin and protruding bone plates. A whitened eye stared back at him in the fog -- glazed with a death far less recent than this one. He sighed and crossed his arms haughtily. ”Well then. Shall we?”
But the fog didn’t clear. It came just as thick as before, if not thicker. His eyebrows furrowed as he glanced at the girl sharply. ”Well?” he prompted, but the answer came before he could finish the thought.
The ground trembled beneath them. The walls groaned with an unearthly wail. At first, it sounded like the very roar of the earth, but then the sound took shape. A voice. A word. ”Who…?”
The Mist shifted with an invisible wind. It curled in spirals, in longing tendrils that whipped across his cheek and hands. Kuja batted it away with the tips of his nails, nose wrinkled in disgust. The earth moaned in the tenors of scraping stone. ”Who dares bring that magic here…?”
There was a crack and then a gust of stale, unnatural wind that thrust the fog against them and out the opposite hall. Kuja raised an arm against it and peered into the darkness. Without the Mist, he could almost make out a face -- twisted, skeletal, and demonic. But where was the rest of it? He caught nothing else but a blank slate of flesh, dirt, and stone.
He brought fire to his free hand and flared it against the wind. In that moment, he glimpsed the thing before him for what it was. Flat. Expansive. Stretching from one side to the other.
Before him was nothing more than a face in a wall.
It let out another tortured groan, its mouth twisting with agony. There was another crack and then a terrible screech of stone on stone. It was pushing towards them. ”You who wield the purifying light…” Mist spewed from its lips as it spoke, releasing like steam from a dragon’s tongue. ”Let this be your tomb!”
Why have two of my characters asked Terra on a date?
Why should the world exist without me?
She told him about Metaia Temple. It was useless information to him, but he supposed it was a good sign that she’d started with the most obvious. Perhaps she wasn’t useless after all. After that, she described some dragoon’s relic or another (interesting, perhaps he would pursue it at a later time, but doubted it was relevant) and something about a tree in the Headstone Forest. Odd, he’d seen no such thing, but he supposed his own magical senses had been dulled by the Mist. He’d have to search for it when he returned.
Hadn’t he been meaning to return soon? Yes, he’d had certain enterprising thoughts about that Mist. Perhaps he would have to execute the first phases of his plans shortly.
The girl met his gaze and then broke it, glancing off to the side almost sheepishly. Perhaps his attention made her feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she’d sensed his intentions at last.
”We can exchange information and if we find something let the other know?” Her voice came weak and uncertain. Almost afraid to offend. ”I… do not really want to seem not all that trusting but there were things back in my world that soured my full perspective on helping people so blindly.”
So she did know better. How surprising.
”But of course.” He blinked as though in offense. ”I thought that was understood. I wanted nothing more than to stay in contact. To imagine you’d agree to anything else, I would have had to have thought you hopelessly dull.” He turned away from her so she see the smirk hiding behind the back of his hand. As hopelessly dull as she was gullible, but perhaps she had more sense than he’d thought. Just a little, at least.
”But you’re someone who I would like to meet again under the light of another moon.” He gestured towards the sky. It’s one, silver moon touched upon them both. ”Perhaps at this site again in, oh, three? Months that is. That should give us more than enough time to gather what information we can. Until then, I wouldn’t mind getting to know you better.” He tilted his head as he looked back to her, eyes lit with interest. ”Your magic intrigues me, and I wonder if you might help recover my lost memories. Perhaps we could meet to show each other a few spells?” He raised a hand from his crossed arms and gestured towards her, palm turned upwards. ”Unless you have a plan of greater importance?”
That name struck him like a thunder spell. Terra. She said it so casually and yet all he could do was stare. What right did anyone here have to utter that word so thoughtlessly? What cruel irony was this and why couldn’t he find pleasure in it? If there was anyone worthy of that name, he supposed it would be her -- wrapped in blue, frail as a child, and watching him with those mystical violet eyes -- but why? Surely it couldn’t be mere coincidence, but if not, then what could it mean?
And why did he feel as though he’d thought all of this before?
Kuja didn’t realize that his expression had slipped until a moment too late. He cleared it just a quickly as it had come (what had he looked like to her?) but his thoughts continued, sparking with an almost electric frequency. Did she have some connection to him? To his native planet? Why was she capable of such a familiar trance and how on all of Gaia did he know her?
”My apologies,” he said as lightly as he could manage. ”Your name. I feel as though I’ve heard it before.” Too many times before. Far, far too many and in a cloud of blue haze. His fingers clenched into his sleeve as he recrossed his arms. He refused to lose composure.
”I think that it’s certainly possible to find a way home. In fact, that’s exactly why I’ve come here. I’m a scholar, you see, and specialize in the study of ancient magic.” He glanced at her carefully. This next step would need a delicate hand. ”This place carries a particularly unusual brand of magic and a powerful one as you’ve no doubt noted. I’ve seen it before in dimensional portals and teleportation spells. Surely you can infer the significance.” He turned to consider the archway, tilting his head in thought. ”I believe this to be a gateway of sorts between our home dimensions, but I also believe it to be currently inactive. It feeds off of other sources of magic, but finding them has been rather...troublesome.” His attention fixed on Terra once again. ”You seem far more attuned to such matters than I. Have you sensed anywhere else with power like this? Anything at all?”
For him, there was only the Metaia Temple. Perhaps the World Sight, but it had already yielded its secrets to him and he doubted it would ever come to relevance again. He touched thoughtfully at his bottom lip.
”Unfortunately, the people here want no one near their places of power. I assume it has something to do with tradition and old superstition.” Or the possible release of a horde of feral dragons. He shook his head. ”Such meaningless trappings when lives are at stake.” He looked up to meet the girl’s eye. ”I wish to return us home,” he said. ”As far as I’ve seen no one else has a plan except to wander the world at random and scoff at anyone who upsets their peace. But I’ve been studying this world since I arrived, and I have no intention of remaining stranded on it.”
How familiar. Certainly fate was cyclical. This was not his first foreign planet nor the first time he’d scoured it for the keys to activating a dimensional portal. At this point, such matters were almost mundane.
”Would you join me? With your sensitivity to magic, I think that I might have hope for progress after all.”
She claimed she would have remembered him if they’d met before, and Kuja had to grant her that at least. He worked hard to make certain that he was never forgotten, and he had no doubts that it worked on even those who he’d never spoken a word to. From his violet suede to his glittering eyeshadow to the perfect curve of his hips, he’d highlighted, redefined, and accentuated the very meaning of beauty. But she didn’t mean strictly in a physical sense. Apparently, she sensed some kind of similarity between their magic.
Odd. His stemmed primarily from the crystal of Terra. She must have been mistaken.
“My own ambition,” she said, “Is to stop people from causing wanton destruction without a cause or belief behind it.” Kuja eyed her carefully. It was such a heroic statement that he wondered why on earth the sight of her didn’t fill him with dread. Every other time he’d run into one of her type whom he remembered, he’d loathed every second beside them and constantly felt wary of their blades. He smiled at her passively, his own bitterness only barely touching his lips. She’d get along well with that ridiculous storybook paladin, it seemed.
She told him about her battle against a force of “pure, unadulterated chaos” which nearly destroyed a town. Kuja wondered vaguely if she meant his dragons, the infamous monster over Torensten, or someone else entirely. If he had to take his pick for the right to be called by such titles, he’d have chosen Nero personally. He was a consistent and unyielding irritation.
“I do not believe in chance as well,” the girl said. ”Meeting one another in a place like this has to be some form of fate.” Kuja wouldn’t have gone that far, but he supposed he was the one who brought up the ridiculous idea to begin with. They’d both been drawn to the same magical artifact -- nothing more and nothing less. But he did so love poetics.
“As for helping one another. I would like to know just what it is someone like me could do to assist you?”
Kuja smirked faintly and shoved a handful of hair over his shoulder. She was making this far too easy. ”I have nothing in particular,” he lied. ”But we’re both mages of a high degree of power. You must feel lost here -- alone in this unfamiliar world. I feel much the same. It would certainly help to have another whom I know I can rely upon.”
He looked up to consider the moon -- how odd it was even now to see only one of them. It gleamed with a silver hue not entirely unlike himself, mystic and ephemeral. He cast his eyes to her again and extended a hand towards her just close enough to grasp it, but not so close as to be presumptuous. ”And what is your wish?” he asked. ”You say that you desire the end of thoughtless destruction, but what is your current goal? Or is it merely company you seek?”
He laughed softly, a delicate laugh that he’d practiced to perfection. ”You say that you sense a connection between us, and it must be true. I feel somehow drawn to you. Perhaps it is merely your magic or perhaps something more.” His words fell soft from his tongue in a near-whisper. ”I know what it is to not be human.”
His eyes lingered on hers for a second longer than was necessary before he straightened again with a smirk. ”Would you mind offering your name?” he asked. ”Mine is Kuja. A sorcerer and man of many talents.” He offered her a courteous bow complete with a careful sweep of his sleeve. ”It’s a pleasure to meet you, though perhaps not for the first time.”
She didn’t give him any meaningful answers. Useless. Completely useless. Whatever memories might have flickered in the back of Kuja’s mind were at least twice as strong as hers. Kuja touched at his temple before pushing back a handful of his hair. Whatever he’d expected from her, he wasn’t going to get it, and she wasn’t exactly going to help him in the process either.
Still, there remained that lingering question that filled him unease. ”Do you have a state like this one?” He would have scowled at that if she wasn’t watching him so closely. Did he have a trance? Oh, how we would have loved to have said yes.
”I’m afraid not,” he admitted instead. ”It isn’t quite in my range, I suppose.” Not that he needed it. A trance was nothing more than a rush of power from the soul -- one that was apparently barred from him once Garland denounced his soul as defective. How delusional. Perhaps Kuja couldn’t trance, but it hardly mattered for the results he’d wrought. Even with his trance, Zidane was nothing more than a naive idiot running about with knives and a magic he was too stupid to understand. Intelligence was far more dangerous than raw power, and charisma was the deadliest toolset of all. Kuja had irreparably altered the world by his own merits and with barely a spell needed for any of it.
Trancing was beneath him.
She shifted back in stages. First simply losing her ethereal glow before the fur receded and fell away from her in waves of light. In a moment, she was just another girl -- confused, fragile, and hopelessly weak. Gullible, he thought, and writhe with power.
Kuja didn’t need that kind of raw magic, but it was certainly useful to stumble upon potential puppets who did.
”Like dew upon the morning sun,” he repeated with a sad smile before crossing his arms and considering the moon thoughtfully. ”How tragic, and yet, I’m certain that we’ve met before. In a formless place I can hardly remember.” He shook his head as though to rid himself of the thought. In truth, nothing good had ever come from considering that era of his amnesia. ”Tell me, do you have any ambitions of your own? Or are you merely a leaf upon the wind, drawn to places of power without direction?” His eyes shifted to hers and sought to catch lavender in brilliant blue. ”I don’t believe our meeting here to be chance,” he said. ”Perhaps we could help each other.”
Kuja stopped. Nero had spoken to him. Well that was new.
”Wait.” There was a shuffle behind him. ”Please.”
And so he waited. Patience was one of his greatest assets, after all.
“May I come with you?” The words sounded like they surprised even him. “At least, just to see your dragon for a moment. Please.”
Kuja paused, taking the moment to scowl while his back was turned. He’d needed the escape to clear his head. He’d wanted to leave for the exact purpose of avoiding burdens like Nero, but he doubted that would get him anywhere. Yes, the man would still crawl back to him like the feral and pathetic creature he was, but it would be with less conviction. Kuja had earned his place in Nero’s esteem through his endless patience and charm -- breaking character would only weaken his puppet’s strings. For someone as unstable as Nero, fear would do nothing. Intimidation was meaningless. There was only one route to win his prize, and so Kuja tilted his head to the ceiling before waving his hand. ”If you wish,” he said. ”But you must tread carefully and do as I say. She’s still wary of strangers.”
He continued on without looking back at him. If Nero had any worthwhile conviction then he’d follow. If not, then it wasn’t worth his time.
His dragon had taken to resting in a collapsed antlion tunnel when he wasn’t around. She preferred the oasis, of course, but he’d deemed that too public -- too obvious when there might be prying eyes or Nero to stumble upon. Instead, he’d found another hollow nearby with air access and enough space to fit a dragon. Of course, such a private dwelling was too far to easily walk, and the tunnels from the oasis to her hideaway had long-since collapsed. Instead, he led Nero to a small alcove which he’d gated off with magic in the shape of his old stain glass windows. It melted at his touch, and he stepped forward onto a circle of magical sigils that pulsed a faint, ethereal blue in the shadows.
”The experience can be a tad disorienting if you’re not used to it.” He glanced at Nero before stepping into the circle himself. ”It helps to close your eyes,” he said with a smirk before he was engulfed in magic like rainfall. It had taken Kuja nearly a week to set up a teleportation link between his oasis and his dragon’s nest, but the convenience far outweighed the effort. In seconds, Kuja’s vision cleared and he stepped out into a familiar outcrop of rock and water.
And the sharp stench of rotting flesh.
His nose wrinkled in disgust, and the culprit wasn’t hard to find. He’d gone to great lengths to make his dragon’s nest appealing. He’d hollowed out the center underneath the skylight and used his own spells to fill it with water to protect her from the heat. He’d cleared it of debris and cleaned it nearly spotless except for the series of rocky precipices along the north side where she liked to roost. And as Kuja stepped into his miniature, self-made oasis, he found that it was exactly as he’d left it except for the over-large, half-eaten antlion dangling in pieces only a few feet from the portal.
His eyes sharpened. ”Ava.” He stepped off the teleportation circle and searched for her, lips pursed and arms crossed. He spotted her scrabbling down the south wall, and it didn’t take long for her to take to the air and glide towards him. She landed as gracefully as ever -- a testament to her species if not her individual personality. Kuja fixed her with a cool look before gesturing at the mangled mass of exoskeleton and fur behind him.
”How many times have I told you to deal with your prey outside?” The words came clipped in his native tongue. In all honesty, he didn’t strictly need to voice them at all, but he’d always found it easier to speak the words of his psychic conversations -- particularly if those words were Terran. He received a wave of foreign guilt in return as the dragon dropped her eyes and scuffed at the ground beneath her. There had been a sandstorm recently, and she’d wanted to eat in peace. ”Well you could have at least cleaned up after yourself,” Kuja spat in return before capturing the corpse in his magic and shifting it to the side. He’d deal with it when he wasn’t being watched.
None of his accomplices knew the meaning of manners.
”This is Ava.” He gestured towards his dragon, and it was only then that she seemed to realize that they weren’t alone. Her eyes caught on Nero, and she shifted at once into a more predatory stance -- crouched with her hackles raised and her mouth open. She wasn’t brutish enough to growl, but she did let out a low whine of desire until Kuja silenced her with a hand a look sharp enough to still her. ”He’s not for you,” he told her. ”Not yet.” And so she reluctantly backed down, straightening herself into a sitting position that would have been almost majestic had her eyes not been trained on Nero like a cat before a mouse.
Kuja sighed. Why did he always pick the neediest of pawns?
”You may step closer, but do so carefully. She hates being startled.” He did the same, approaching her delicately before placing a hand on the side of her neck to run his fingers through her feathers. It was a sign of her own distraction that she didn’t seem to take pleasure from it. All she could look at was Nero. ”I named her after Lord Avon -- a prestiged playwright and one of the most talented of his generation.” He sighed in longing. What he wouldn’t do to see a familiar theater again! ”As the sun lends me no ear, I pray instead to the twin moons! I beseech thee, wondrous moonlight, grant me my only wish!” His eyes wandered to the ceiling and the circle of moonlight that danced through it -- not the moons as he’d known them, but it was close enough.
”I suppose if you’re to leave this place, you’ll need my dragon to do so.” He didn’t like the idea, not at all and particularly not when it meant leaving his dragon in Nero’s care, but it was practical enough. What use was a pawn if he couldn’t send him out to do his bidding? ”Would you care for a flight?” Kuja’s eyes trailed to Nero’s, meeting his gaze before tilting his head and offering him a dry smile. ”I dare say the both of us have spent far too long underground.”
