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year 5, quarter 3
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[attr=class,bulk] Thankfully, it didn’t take long for Mid to respond, cracking open the door so that only her head peeked through. Which was…a little secretive, but Celes supposed that Mid had a right to her own privacy. She supposed that, at least, until Mid began to speak.
Celes opened her mouth. And then closed it. She stared, her eyebrows furrowing as she tried to comprehend the exact magnitude of what it was that Mid was implying.
”You…did what?”
This was supposed to be the easy part. This was supposed to be the easy part. Why wasn’t this the easy part?
”I…don’t even…” she started before she shook her head. ”Well, as long as the training yard didn’t burn down, we can talk about that later.” She was too tired for this. It looked like she’d need to add “setting ground rules with Mid” to her to-do list. Once she’d had a nap. And eaten. And then fallen back asleep for three days straight. She didn’t think she needed to tell her newly hired engineer not to experiment with burning training dummies using mysterious fuel she’d found in Caius’ workshop, but it looked like she did.
In three days, she would.
Apparently that little incident was the only reason for Mid’s want of privacy because she opened the door after that. Celes half expected to find the burnt dummy inside, but instead she discovered that Mid had apparently been busy with more than “fire suppressant gizmos” in the few days since she’d arrived. There was an entire shelf that Celes knew hadn’t been there before, already half filled with books and scrap metal and all sorts of other things that Celes couldn’t identify. On the desk was what looked to be a half-finished model of an airship. She’d have to ask about that later.
Mid gave her a bright look and asked if she could help with anything. Celes felt the sudden and extreme urge to tell her that she could help by not burning down her base of operations, but that was only the sleep deprivation talking. Instead, she took a deep breath and said, ”I hope so.”
She really did.
”There was a disaster last night,” she went on. ”I was sent in to deal with an apparent sword-wielding maniac yelling gibberish about slaves and gods as he stormed the castle, assaulted the guards, and made his way to destroy the city’s Core Crystal. We fought, and he said some things that matched with your descriptions…”
He’d also said plenty of things that she might have left out. Then again, Celes only really remembered what she’d thought to write down.
”He’s from Valisthea. He said his name was Clive. He wielded fire magic. Does that sound right?”
[attr=class,bulk] It was the early hours of the morning by the time that Celes finally stumbled through the doors to the Wyvern’s Rest and closed them behind her, leaning against them for a moment so that she could take a long, deep breath and let out the longest, most vulgar string of profanities she could imagine.
Torensten, it seemed, had no end to its emergencies which only a competent off-worlder could solve. She wondered how it had ever survived without them.
She was sweaty, blood-streaked, disheveled, and exhausted. She wondered how she’d even made it back on legs that could barely carry her, but she had, and now she stood against the heavy wooden door, trying to direct her mind towards the next course of action.
Removing her armor. She could do that, surely. And then she would sit and take off her boots and…
Celes groaned, locked the doors, and started towards the couch. First, she unstrapped her grieves, her hands fumbling at the buckles as her likely sprained wrist refused to cooperate. She dropped them on the floor once she was done and then finally, blessedly, sat down.
Her pauldrons followed and then her bracers and then her boots which invoked another groan, this time of pain and relief as she freed her feet from their leathery prisons. What came next? A bath? Bed? Both seemed impossible when she was already sitting and her feet were protesting in full. Instead, she merely fell sideways, arm under her head, hair strewn about her in rough, sweaty tangles. Surely it wouldn’t hurt just to close her eyes for a few minutes. Surely…
She woke to the sound of birds cawing outside the window.
Celes stirred in the dull light of dawn, opening her eyes and blinking slowly and without comprehension. The light that filled the room was a blue-ish purple. Which must have made it…five o’clock? Six maybe? She winced as she raised her arm to find that her wounded wrist was red and swollen. Her feet ached – blistered, most likely. Somehow, she’d fallen asleep with her sword still strapped at her hip.
Celes sat up slowly, feeling like something that had crawled out of the sewer. Her mouth was dry and rank. Her head pounded. She would have thought she had a hangover if she hadn’t known better. Outside, the birds kept on with their morning cawing. They sounded somehow judgmental.
She needed to move. She needed to get up and take care of herself no matter how much she longed to sit here for the rest of time, slowly melding into the fabric of the couch. After far, far too long, she finally summoned the willpower to stand. Then she slowly, painfully, limped to the kitchen for a glass of water.
She followed that glass of water with another. And then that glass was followed by a third. The bathroom was next, and she slid carefully into the tub, wondering how long it would take her to drown if she merely fell asleep in the hot water. By the time she emerged, the sun had properly risen and the birds were even louder. Her sore muscles and blisters felt quite a bit better though her wrist looked even more swollen than before. She took the time to tightly bandage it before she brushed her teeth, combed out her hair, and changed into her yellow civilian’s clothes.
It was eight o’clock when she finally dressed for the day. She’d gotten, at best, about three hours of sleep.
Bed sounded lovely. So did breakfast, really, but that would have required actually making something so she resigned herself to some tea instead hoping that the caffeine would rouse her. Once she had a steaming cup of it in her hands, she took it to her desk and started rifling through papers.
Mid, the new engineer, had said quite a few funny things when she’d first found her way to the Rest. Celes hadn’t grasped most of it, but she’d still made a list of the most important. Once she’d found that list, she skimmed through it, hoping her guess had been right.
And there, right at the bottom of the page, she saw a word circled and underlined: Valisthea.
That was her world, apparently, and it was the same word the mad swordsman had used the night before. Scanning the list properly, she caught another familiar name. Clive. Otherwise known as Cid. Otherwise known as Wyvern. Otherwise known as Lord Underhill. Otherwise known as Ifrit for some reason. Next to that, she’d written a simple, one word description: ’Stupid.
That tracked.
If this was the same man as she suspected, the nickname Ifrit would certainly make more sense. The man had wielded fire magic like an esper. Or maybe a half esper. Did they have espers in Valisthea? If so, Celes would have suspected Ifrit to be his father. The man’s weird magical form had reminded him of Terra’s trance, after all.
Gods, she was tired.
Celes took a deep, long sip of her tea before she stood and made her way upstairs to the room that Mid had claimed as her own.
So far, Mid had only been staying with them for a few days, other than demanding help from her men along with strangely specific supplies and directions to the local blacksmith, she’d largely kept to herself. Celes hadn’t seen what the engineer had made of her new room simply because she hadn’t had a reason to. This seemed like a good reason.
”Mid?” she called through the door, knocking twice with her good hand. ”Are you in there?”
[attr=class,bulk] Celes had thought her plan would work. This was a starving animal she was dealing with, after all, but no. Of course it didn’t. Though the magical wolf-dog eyed the meat ravenously, at the last second it seemed to think better of the idea and instead decided to try its little ice spell again which seemed far less surprising now that it had taken on an entirely different form. Its ragged, gray fur had turned a pure white. Its eyes glowed a piercing blue, and the rest of it turned black like soot. It trailed a stream of magic behind it as it ran charged towards her, hurling blizzard at her as it went.
Thankfully, Celes already had runic activated and the spell was quite easy to negate. However, the negation cost her valuable seconds which the monstrous wolf used to leap past her and dart through a gap in the barricade, paws scrambling for purchase on the stone floor.
Why couldn’t anything ever be easy?
Celes cursed under her breath and sprinted after it, wishing she’d stabbed the damned thing when she’d had the chance. The wolf easily outpaced her as it banked a corner and charged headlong down a hallway towards who knew what.
What to do, what to do? Celes ran through every option in her head. It was still within range of her spells. She could try something to kill it from here though seeing as they apparently shared the same elemental affinity, even that option was less than ideal. She was running out of time before the monster managed to escape her altogether, and then what? If it killed someone, that blood would be on her hands.
Without a moment to spare, Celes thrust her hands together and tried something else. She muttered her incantations, felt her magic surge within her, and then cast it. ”Sleep!”
These kinds of roundabout methods weren’t her usual style. It hadn’t come naturally to her in the same way that ice or healing magic did, but that’s why they’d started off using magicite, wasn’t it? Once learned, the simple spell had integrated itself with all the rest like a kind of immigrant making its home within her blood.
Surprisingly, the gamble paid off. Setzer would have been proud.
The monster slowed, stumbling at first before slowing to a trot and then a walk and then swaying on its feet and finally toppling over with a low whine. Whatever had caused its strange transformation ended and it was back to looking for all the world like nothing more than a wolf the size of a small bear with a little golden cuff on its paw. Celes finally caught up to the thing and stopped, leaning over her knees and panting for breath.
She nudged it with her boot to make sure it was well and truly unconscious before she gave the order to haul it into the cage. They could decide what to do with it later.
Someone cried for help down the hall. A healer, they said. They needed a healer. Celes groaned, ran a hand through her hair, and then took off even though her arms ached, her wrist was sprained, and she sported cold burns across her body from the shards of ice that had struck her.
[attr=class,bulk] No, she didn’t agree to the help, as a matter of fact. She didn’t care if this Clive was looking to redeem herself. She didn’t trust him at her back. She trusted him behind bars and maybe after a few months proving he could keep his head cool, thank you very much.
And if it was her choice then she had no problem in saying so.
”No,” she said flatly. ”I want you away from this. You’ve already done enough.”
And that was that.
As she charged towards the gates and then heard from one of the uninjured guards that the monster was actually now sectioned off in a portion of the palace and then getting directions to said portion, she set aside her feelings of being the only adult in the room. She was, perhaps, the only one with any sense. Why was it that the king seemed so insistent on freeing a murderer, one who would have more than gladly taken the king’s life had Celes not stepped in, to go wander freely about his castle? Why did the man trust him with a sword? Celes didn’t. She also didn’t trust this king, and as her boots pounded against the castle’s stone floors, it was the king’s words which beat like a drum in her ears.
He wanted her to be a leader in his military. What a joke.
Celes had never been inside the castle before. Its layout was more confusing than she wanted to admit, but eventually after several minutes of cursing and back-tracking, she made her way towards the room in question housing this supposed monster. It was a dining room, she thought, meant for servants or guards if her judgment was correct. The men had had the sense to move the heavy wooden tables and prop them up in a kind of barricade around the door, and as she entered, she found them all surrounding something with their lances.
”What’s the situation?” she asked as she strode confidently past the makeshift barricade. The guards acknowledged her and told her how the beast had slipped past the castle gates and gone charging into the castle until they’d manage to reroute it here. Celes peered past their weapons to find…
A wolf.
Granted, it was a rather large wolf, but still. Celes gave them all a look of both disappointment and skepticism before she sighed and dismissed them with a wave of her hand. ”Take cover. I’ll handle this.”
A wolf. Really? She sent her newest recruits on missions against overlarge dire wolves. Times like these only proved to her the necessity of outside forces protecting the city of Torensten from harm.
The men lowered their lances and began to cautiously edge away from the beast. This must have been the opening the wolf was waiting for, however, because they hadn’t made it far before she felt the sudden, familiar weight of magic in the air. Magic which hadn’t come from her.
”Get down!” she cried before she pulled her sword and started a mad dash towards the apparently magic-imbued beast. She didn’t make it. The spell struck her head-on, and she stumbled back as icicles jutting out towards her, freezing her feet in place before shattering as though in a mockery of the very same spell she’d thrown at Clive. It hurt. It hurt quite a lot, actually, but this spell wasn’t nearly as powerful as her own had been, and it happened to be in an element of far more comfort to her than fire. She grit her teeth, wincing as each individual shard pierced and burned itself against her, and then it was over.
Alright. Perhaps this wasn’t quite the usual wolf, after all.
It was dirty. Thin. Perhaps feral. There was a golden cuff on its ankle that suggested it might have once been chained somewhere. Was it someone’s ill-advised pet? Celes had no idea, but it was her problem now, and if that pet happened to storm a castle of all places then that pet owner didn’t deserve the right to a happy reunion.
Still, the sight of it was somehow sad despite it all. If it really had been someone’s pet once then there was no honor in killing it. Not that Celes believed in honor. She believed in saving lives by whatever means necessary, but that look in its eyes…
It seemed more desperate, cornered as it was, than truly hostile. Celes grounded herself, readied her runic abilities in case the thing cast again, and glanced to the castle guards. They were all frightened, some of them cowering behind the barricades while others had lost their footing and simply stared at the beast, pale and frozen in shock.
”Move!” she told the ones who hadn’t managed to make it to cover, and her insistence was enough to get them to join the others. Celes knew that she should simply kill the thing. It was so filthy and desperate that perhaps it would even be considered a mercy, but for the second time that night, she found herself making what very well might have been a terrible mistake.
”I’ll need a cage. A big one,” she said with her usual biting sense of authority. ”And meat. This is a dining hall, there must be something you can find!”
Soldiers were trained to follow orders, not question them, and while Celes technically had no authority over them, the sound of their scrambling footsteps told her that they didn’t much care for the distinction. She was the only thing standing between them and a desperate, cornered animal with snarling teeth, wild eyes, and magic that could freeze a man in place while the beast launched its attack.
And so she waited, sword at the ready for defense against both magic and the deadly lunge of the beast in question.
[attr=class,bulk] Celes blinked in surprise at Mid’s theory of how their strange situation had come to pass. It certainly wasn’t the worst theory she’d heard since nearly everyone had one. For the first year or so, Celes had thought everything to be a hallucination brought about by Kefka torturing her mind, and Mid’s theory certainly beat that one.
Everyone had their own overwhelming enemy who could change reality with a thought. Everyone blamed their current state on that one singular evil. But a god trying to create a new world? That mapped much more cleanly onto everything she knew.
”Well…I wouldn’t rule it out. Though Ultima…Isn’t that a spell?”
It wasn’t a spell that Celes herself had learned despite finding the magicite for it. Given the time it would have taken to master, she hadn’t thought it worth the effort at the time.
”I haven’t heard your story before, and trust me, I’ve heard plenty. I wouldn’t go blaming your world just yet, but I’ll add it to the literature.” Celes smiled with a hint of amusement as she tapped the booklets on her desk. She’d need to update them before too long. Adding an entry on this new mad god next to all the other confirmed maniacs with more power than sense wouldn’t be a terrible idea, really.
Mid made sure that Celes was prepared to write before she began listing off everyone she was missing. The girl really hadn’t been kidding about readying her writing arm.
There was Clive. Or Cid. Or Wyvern. Or Lord Underhill. Or…Ifrit? Well alright then. At least she knew how to spell the last one. Next to the names and aliases, she wrote a single description, ’Stupid.’
This Joshua who was apparently the first one’s brother didn’t get any other description except that he also called himself Phoenix sometimes. Apparently these people loved nicknames based on espers. Then there was an uppity woman named Jill without any agency of her own, someone named Gav with one eye, a reserved knight named Dion who apparently didn’t like hugs, a talkative scholar named Vivian, someone competent with planning named Otto, an immoral trader named Charon, and Blackthorne, the thoroughly depressed blacksmith. She wrote it all as fast as she could in exactly those terms, more or less, before writing one more word underneath it, circled and underlined.
’Valisthea.’ That was the one to remember. If anyone mentioned it, she’d know to tell Mid.
”Well, we’ll keep an eye out,” Celes said, wondering how much luck they could possibly have with so many people. Apparently Mid had quite the social circle.
Then again so had Celes even if she’d been more allies than friends half the time.
”I think that should be enough for now. Consider yourself officially hired, Mid.” Celes set the pen down and started putting the extra booklets away. ”You can take any room upstairs that looks empty and I’ll show you Caius’ workbench when you’re ready. Let me know if there’s anything else you need to get started.”
[attr=class,bulk] The Headstone Forest. Well, that would explain why no one had found her. Even if some poor, lost traveler had encountered Terra in her esper form, they would have assumed she was just another ghost or monster haunting the place. Still, for three years, that sounded like an absolutely miserable experience…
”To find…me?” Celes repeated as Terra went on. ”Oh. Well, thank you. I’m glad you did. Really.” She didn’t know how sincere she sounded. She was sincere, obviously, but it sounded much less so now than when she’d approached her friend on the verge of tears. Now she didn’t quite know what to say. Or what to do for that matter.
Terra told her that she’d made her own choice to fight which was all well and good, she supposed. Celes had done the same and certainly couldn’t disagree with Terra’s logic when it was her own. Still, Celes couldn’t help but frown as Terra spoke.
While fighting to help people might have come naturally to Celes, it simply wasn’t Terra. Not if the woman didn’t have to, that was. Not as a natural instinct.
”You mean Chaos?” she asked as Terra finished her tale. ”I…well, yes, of course I remember. I was here too. Not fighting Chaos, obviously, but healing the injured, saving those I could, that sort of thing. I nearly died when I ran inside a burning building to help a trapped family. It…isn’t something I like to remember.”
That had been shortly after Terra and Celes had parted ways. Long ago when Celes still couldn’t help but look over her shoulder for an ambush or glance distrustfully at too clear of skies. The smell of the fire had reminded her of Kefka’s Light of Judgment. That memory of a memory was almost too much for Celes to bear and so she quickly changed the subject.
”Terra, I agree with fighting to help people. That’s what I’ve been doing here all along, after all, but this isn’t…I mean, mercenary work? It isn’t you, is it?” Anyone could change in three years. Maybe Terra had decided differently than before, she knew Terra. She’d lived with Terra. She’d argued with Terra over this exact sort of thing! Getting her to use her power to fight against Kefka had been like pulling teeth out of a feral yeti.
Terra was gentle. Terra was kind. Terra was delicate if not physically then certainly emotionally. She’d never wanted anything that had been thrust upon her even when it was in her best interest. Terra was everything that Celes wasn’t, and the opposite proved just as true.
Terra was no soldier. She had more to offer the world than just her sword.
”If this is really what you want then of course we’ll have you. I’d trust you with anything that comes our way. But…” She hesitated. ”Would it really make you happy?”
It didn’t even make Celes happy, but then again, Celes didn’t think that anything ever could.
”I know people here. I could pull some strings. There are plenty of children in need and institutions that would pay you for your time. There are healers too who could use your white magic. In fact, we even have a branch in Provo run by Yuna. I already told you about Yuna. She’s a brilliant white mage, and she runs a clinic rather than a band of sellswords.”
There were so many things that awaited Terra in the world, opportunities that had always been denied her. Even Celes had only ever asked for her help in a fight. That time was over.
”Or…If you really want to stay here, we could use a dedicated healer. I’m about as close to one as we have, and you’ve always been better at it than me. And it would be helpful to have someone specifically at the ready for rescue operations. Usually when some disaster or another strikes, that job falls to me because of my magic, but if you were here then we could either work together or you’d give me the opportunity to run headlong into danger to help stop whatever it is causing it all.”
Brainstorming. Idle ideas. They were all she had at the moment.
”It’s your choice to make. I won’t ask you to do anything that doesn’t feel right.”
[attr=class,bulk] Celes wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing. She was talking to Yuffie, obviously, but she hadn’t gone into it with any kind of plan. She only said what came naturally to her, and in this particular instance, the words came more naturally than most. She’d dealt with plenty of insubordination in her time, and she knew exactly the stance, the look, and the words to address it. Yuffie might have been a tad unique, but that didn’t mean that Celes had to flounder about in her handling of it.
What she didn’t generally do with other insuboordinate recruits was reveal her past affilliations, but again, the words had come naturally, and as she saw the girl’s expression change to something far less grandiose, Celes knew it had been the right choice.
Yuffie, it seemed, had quite the story of her own.
Celes listened patiently, trying her best to keep up with the proper nouns and world-specific lingo. For once, Yuffie didn’t make it hard, and for once, Celes’ own experiences made the story easy enough to understand. It was a tale she’d heard a dozen times – a tale that she herself had enacted on the wrong side of things. It was a tale of war and conquest and an endless lust for power and resources. Yuffie was a survivor of that war, condemned to see the nation she loved stripped for its resources and treated like nothing more than a joke for all its differences in culture from its invaders.
And that was why she found it difficult to follow orders. She was a rebel at heart. Celes could hardly fault her for that.
As Yuffie finished her story, Celes couldn’t help but smile. It was far warmer than anything she’d previously thought possible in the girl’s presence.
”You’re right,” she said which was also something she hadn’t expected to admit to anything the girl had to say. ”I would never ask you to go against your own moral code. You have to think for yourself, or did you forget that I joined a rebellion?” She gave a short laugh, shaking her head.
”I wish there had been someone to tell me that when I was your age. All I ever knew was the chain of command. Disobeying orders was insubordination which could count as treason. I never thought to question it. Not until one of the other generals decided to poison the river of a castle under siege. I objected, he called it treason, and I was sentenced to death by my own emperor.” Her smile turned dry and humorless. ”If a certain rebel hadn’t come along by my prison cell to see what he thought to be a damsel in distress chained to the dungeon wall, I wouldn’t have lived past the following morning.”
This was…not how she preferred to introduce herself to strangers. Given the girl’s history, she wondered if admitting that she’d been an accessory to conquest herself was wise. But emotional honesty had proven effective before so why not try it again?
”What I mean to say is that I understand. If you ever object to something we ask of you then by all means, disobey. You’re your own person, after all, and I’m certainly not perfect. But I want it to be because you really and truly object. Not just because you don’t want to.”
Celes crossed her arms. That was enough of that, she thought. ”With that said. Are you ready to prove yourself?”
Not only was she not amused, she was furious. For all that she had already said, she wished she could say more. She wished it was smarter to say more. She wished it was just a little less dangerous. For everything that she had lived through, for all of her time in the empire, the last thing she wanted to do was aid a king in his scheming. She didn’t appreciate his excuse for why exactly he was here in the first place either. While she’d been battling to the death only moments before, the king and his guard had been doing…
What exactly?
Nothing, of course, because there had been nothing they could have done but make an excellent set of hostages to complicate the situation even further. The king admitted that he wasn’t a warrior, and Celes almost snorted in laughter.
’Of course you’re not, you pudgy old toad.’
That’s why she’d been called in. Celes was a soldier. The king in front of her was not, which meant that he was either noble and stupid or intelligent and lying. Either way, it didn’t leave her in the mood to trust his competence.
Thankfully, it was the mad swordsman, Clive, who saw reason. He insisted that he be punished, an act as insane as it was strangely masochistic. Still, he had more sense than the king of Torensten. She bit her tongue to warn him not to fall for the king’s act. It was clear to her that the decision to spare him any consequences whatsoever came from a place of connection-building and debts among those with power. Maybe they’d have time to talk later. As the king agreed (after being reminded of his duties apparently, something she didn’t think a head of state would need), it seemed they’d have plenty of time after all.
Maybe she’d include skepticism in her lessons on Zephon. This man seemed as though he could use a healthy dose of it.
”I’d do it without a contract,” Celes said, her tone even and cool. ”We work for the sake of the people. Not for any nation.”
At least she did.
She glanced at Clive in surprise as he thanked her. He said it with a small smile that seemed strangely at odds with the man she’d faced only minutes before. Celes couldn’t help an even smaller smile of her own in return. He had good instincts if he’d immediately placed her military background – and a general no less. Perhaps they could talk about that too when they were beyond the king’s ears. She didn’t want to give any heads of state ideas.
Though it seemed the king had something like those ideas all on his own.
”Respectfully,” she said perhaps a bit too icily for her own good, ”I’ll have to decline. We can arrange for a conversation if you wish, but know that the Dragonblades are an independent organization. It would go against our code to accept work or payment from any government.”
In truth, they didn’t have any rule preventing it, not one official and in writing at least. She knew that Caius had been rewarded for the defeat of the Kraken which was all well and good, but she refused to make accepting that kind of money a habit between them. After fighting for so long at the behest of a tyrant, she would never again work for anyone but herself.
Once again, Clive spoke, and Celes found her lips twitching with unexpressed laughter. Was he…joking about his own imprisonment? He made it sound like a nap. But before she could, in fact, get to the business of tending to men, the door burst open once again with the frantic words of a messenger.
Had no one listened to her about the evacuation?
”Wonderful,” she said, shoving her sword into its sheath so that she could move all the faster to the next fire she’d have to put out. ”I’ll handle this. You get Clive here secured. If you wouldn’t mind. Your Majesty.” Was that what you were supposed to call a king? She’d only ever addressed an emperor.
With that, she was off, running down the stairs two at a time just as she’d taken them up. All around her were the stains of blood from men or corpses that had been dragged away. She hoped she could trust the king and his men to take a willing prisoner to his cell to await her until morning. She hoped they would prove that competent. At the moment, she apparently had some sort of monster to deal with, and she was not in the mood to hear that not a single figure of authority could manage without her.
Sometimes she felt like not only the single adult in the room, but the only one in the whole world.
[attr=class,bulk] Celes couldn’t read the expression on the man’s face. He only had eyes for the crystal, and Celes had no idea what that meant. She suspected the worst, but after a long, terrible moment he finally sheathed his sword.
And then he put a hand on her shoulder.
Celes almost flinched away on instinct, but stopped herself under the weight of that hand. She stared at him, bewildered, as he promised he wouldn’t destroy it.
”You…won’t…?” She wanted to ask why exactly when he’d been so dead set on it before. Had she really convinced him? With that pathetic excuse of a rambling argument? If so, he must have been quite easy to persuade. She wasn’t used to her words having more of an effect than her sword.
But he was true to his word. She let him approach the crystal only because she didn’t think that she could stop him and watched suspiciously as he placed a hand upon it. She had no idea what he’d expected to feel from a hunk of magic rock, but whatever it was, he apparently didn’t. He cursed and stepped away, seemingly no longer hostile, but Celes did not sheathe her sword as he had. It was better not to lower her guard with someone so unstable.
”Go. Heal them. I surrender.”
”What?”
Celes watched almost in horror as the man placed his swords to the ground in defeat, submitting to trial and potential execution. ”Have your justice,” he said. ”If Ultima is gone, I do not belong here.”
”I…But…What?”
Celes, for not the first time in her life, had absolutely no idea what to do.
She didn’t have long to think, however, before another voice made her jump nearly out of her skin. She bared her sword, whirling around to face the new intruders to find…guards. Castle guards. Celes bristled with irritation (hadn’t she told them all to evacuate) before noticing the man they escorted. It was an older man, balding in places, clad in the finely crafted silken robes of nobility. Though Celes had never seen this man before in her life, she recognized him instantly from his statue in Legend Square.
King Hremit looked a lot less appealing when he wasn’t carved from stone. He looked frailer, fatter, and more than a little toad-like.
”What are you doing here?” she asked furiously before realizing that perhaps pointing her sword at a king wasn’t her best idea. She lowered it, lips pursed as she tried to hide her displeasure.
Because, really, what was he doing here? She knew she had no military authority here. She knew that, but she’d demanded that the castle guard evacuate. If she hadn’t by some miracle managed to talk the swordsman down then who knew what would have happened? A lot more men would have died, that was for sure, along with their king if he’d truly been lurking close enough to eavesdrop. The mad swordsman had seemed particularly furious at Torensten’s leading body.
The king spoke of said swordsman’s righteous intentions and said that he was “free to go” so long as he “didn’t continue to cause trouble.” As though the man had been a mere thief instead of a killer. Is this what the king thought was just? A light slap on the risk for attempted murder of his own guard?
Apparently so as long as it kept the king in the good graces of a man of his talents. Oh yes. Who could resist having a man of such amazing talents indebted to them? Celes would have. Even the mad swordsman looked distrustful of him.
Celes let the king speak. She knew politics. She’d stood at the left hand of her emperor for years as their prized weapon of war. When the king thanked her and thanked the Dragonblades and offered them thorough compensation, she merely hummed in response. The king could shower them in riches, and it wouldn’t change a thing. It wasn’t as though he’d submitted a personal job request to be processed in line with all the others. The Dragonblades had sworn to respond to disaster, that was all. She wasn’t on the king’s personal payroll, and she didn’t plan to be. In fact, she found it almost insulting how she dangled such compensation above her head.
All the better to keep the Outlanders pleased, wasn’t it?
Celes didn’t look up until the mad swordsman began to speak.
His name was Clive, apparently, from a world called…
’As for the world, we all called it Valisthea. Or, you know, ‘the world’ given that we only thought we had the one.’
Her eyebrows furrowed. She’d heard that name before.
She didn’t remember all of the names that Mid had told her. There had been a lot of them – even more when apparently half the people on Valisthea had about five names each – but that’s why she’d written them down in a list she’d left back at the Rest. That aside, while Clive’s story didn’t make much sense to her and had about as much gibberish in it as anyone else’s, it certainly sounded familiar. She watched him carefully, trying her best to align his story with the half-sensical ramble from Mid only days before.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. Could it?
As much as the king had dismissed her with the promise of his “compensation” and Clive had dismissed her to go heal who she could, this had to be her problem now, didn’t it?
Damn it all.
”With all due respect,” she said, stepping forward without being bidden. ”Are you really going to let him walk free? These people…” She gestured at the bleeding, unconscious men piled at the wall. ”Men sworn into your service are hurt or dying or maybe even dead because of him! And you’re not even going to imprison him to wait for trial? There are families that right now are waiting for some of the worst news of their lives!”
Perhaps she wasn’t in the mood to be quite so respectful, after all.
”Well. If you won’t do it then the Dragonblades will.” She closed her eyes, let out a short huff of a breath, and opened them again, her eyes sharp on the so-called king. ”If you could take him for the night so that I can go about helping with the healing effort, I’ll come to pick him up in the morning. We’ll take him under our watch and our custody. We might be the only ones who can stop him if he decides to get confused again.”
She’d had enough of weak men and weak leaders. She’d had enough of politics and war efforts and kings who cared more about their own maneuvering than the lives of their people. As a soldier herself, she’d had enough of seeing their sacrifices for a nation who couldn’t care less for their lives.
”I think one of our newest hires might know him, anyway. She’ll tell us if he can be trusted while he cools his head.”
[attr=class,bulk] Celes listened to Mid’s argument though really it was less of an argument when Celes whole-heartedly agreed. Mid’s world had been overcome with just as much war as Celes’. Mid’s father had fought to put an end to all the injustice, and that was the world in which she had been raised.
Celes wondered what world they could have created if it hadn’t been for Kefka and his suicidal disturbance of the forces of magic itself. She wondered if the Returners would have stayed as they were, fighting ever against the empire, gaining more and more legitimacy until they too could have raised children into the fight. Or perhaps the empire would have disbanded them all and stomped them out with a fleet of magitech mechs. Both seemed like just as likely of outcomes.
She wondered who would have taken leadership in such a scenario. Edgar, most likely. He had the most legitimacy as the king of Figaro, and his experiences had granted him a great deal of charisma. Celes, on the other hand, had been nothing but a soldier for the cause and a flighty one at that. At least until the world as they knew it had ended.
It gave her some small comfort to hear that Mid’s hero of a father had once been a general not so unlike herself. It was Celes’ belief that almost anyone could change. It was something she had to believe if she was to continue living with herself.
”I think I would have liked him too,” she said simply with a warmth she wasn’t used to. There were few who could understand her life, her goals, her complications. It sounded as though Mid had been raised by one of the few men who could.
Celes laughed at Mid’s suggestion that she add a shower to the Wyvern’s Rest. Honestly, Celes wouldn’t have minded in the slightest. ”I only just got done training the recruits when you came along,” she said, feeling suddenly self-conscious of her disheveled appearance again. ”And it’s hot out there. Normally, I don’t mind, but normally I’m not the one running the front desk anymore.”
That was quite the distinction, honestly. A soldier could very well be as disheveled as she pleased, but a secretary? Much less so.
Celes listened as Mid went on about her unwillingness to fight which was quite unsurprising and then exactly what she would need from a blacksmith. She agreed to help the Dragonblades and the city at large until she could get home which was also expected until she quite casually dropped that she might not have a home to go back to.
”The end of the world?” Celes repeated, blinking in surprise. It wasn’t that the story was new by any means, but…
”Well. My world ended, and I’m quite happy to have a new one if I’m being honest. Perhaps you’ll run into an old friend who can shed some light. No matter the case, I’d keep your hopes low. As far as I’m aware, no one’s found a way back yet. It won’t do to keep from settling in because you have your hopes caught in something that might not even be possible.”
They were, perhaps, too harsh of words for a girl so full of optimism, but they were realistic words. They were exactly what Celes had needed to hear over three years ago.
”Oh, on the subject, I have another question to ask.” Celes rifled through the desk drawers until she found a blank piece of paper and set it in front of her. ”Is there anyone in particular that you’d like us to look out for? In case they arrive on their own, I mean. And what was the name of your world, again?”
