Work Text:
Castorice sits atop the roofs of Okhema, gazing up at Kephale’s ever present light.
The day never fades here and sometimes she misses gazing up at the star-speckled skies that she grew up under, one of the few solaces she had in her childhood.
The stars were her only companions back then and even though she has others now, has found a family here and carved a place for herself in this city, she still longs for those distant friends sometimes.
Cold and distant, just like how she feels right now.
Below her feet the city is buzzing like a beehive, streets alive with chatter, laughing children running over the cobbled streets without a care in the world. People buy fresh fruits at the market, make their way home after a bath, skin a pleasant rosy colour.
In this city of eternal daylight, the troubles that lie beyond its borders seem so distant. The black tide and its creations seem like nothing but a story that parents tell to their children.
But Castorice knows them to be real, has seen them, fought them.
In this city of eternal daylight, Castorice feels like the only shadow present. The cold grip of death, luring people in with a warm embrace yet she knows that nothing awaits them. Just emptiness and solitude.
How she longs for a world without parting. How she has longed for it for the millennium that she has walked this earth, walking up to smiling faces but leaving nothing but cold, dead bodies in her wake.
Castorice finds that somewhere along the way the deep, all-consuming sadness, the anguish had morphed into something else and now she too was empty. Now she had become death.
She wonders what life could have been like without this curse, without this burden, without this duty. Without the prophecy.
What things would have been like in times of peace, of no partings, of smiles. Where all tears would be tears of happiness, not of grief or despair.
She wonders and ponders this, she has for all her life, the questions flooding her mind anew after every person she has seen off. Yet even a thousand years later she has not arrived at an answer.
Castorice is torn out of her reverie when she hears the rhythmic clacking of heavy metal sabatons against the shingles. It surprises her, after all she had thought herself to have hidden away quite well, far enough away for it to be unlikely to be found.
When she turns around and her eyes meet her sudden companion, her eyes widen slightly.
Perhaps she shouldn’t be surprised, after all it is well known that this visitor particularly likes to hide himself away amongst the rooftops whenever he fancies a quiet moment to ponder.
Quickly her expression of surprise morphs into a timid smile as she regards the man behind her. “Lord Mydei.”
He himself also looks surprised - as much as his usually stoic face allows for such an expression - to find someone else already sat in his favourite hiding spot. He had been under the impression that only a certain white haired pain in his side had known of it. Still, Mydei is pleased to see her.
“Castorice. I did not expect to find anybody else here.”
Castorice shifts slightly in her seat, suddenly feeling very out of place and a little like a hunted animal under his scrutinising gaze.
“Oh, I apologise. I did not know that this spot was already taken,” she says, already preparing to get up and leave, but Mydei holds out his hand, bidding her to stay.
His sharp gauntlets gleam underneath Kephale’s bright light.
“It’s fine, no need to leave. You were here first after all. I shall find another spot,” Mydei says matter of factly. He gives her a nod in lieu of a goodbye and turns to leave.
Castorice doesn’t know what possesses her, whether it’s the troublesome thoughts she was lost in prior to his arrival or just the decades and centuries of sadness catching up to her, but she calls out to him. “Lord Mydei!”
Mydei halts mid step and glances at her over his shoulder, his hair like the sun at dawn that she hasn’t seen since she was a child. Not since she came to Okhema.
Perhaps it’s because she feels him to be somewhat of a kindred spirit, both of them having been touched by death more than anyone else in this fragile peace they have build. Perhaps it’s just because he happens to be there. Perhaps she is just so very, very lonely.
“Would you…care to join me?”
Mydei’s eyes widen near imperceptibly at the request. He is not used to hearing her ask for anything ever and perhaps it is due to this fact that, despite his rather solitary nature, he feels inclined to acquiesce.
He spins around on his heel, his armour clinking quietly as he does so and without another word he sits down beside her.
They stay just like this for a while, neither saying a word, simply gazing out at the streets below, the mountains in the distance disappearing in the fog, Kephale’s ever imposing form looming over the city.
Castorice’s hair sways in the gentle breeze. It is a warm day, yet the chaos inside her head makes her feel anything but.
She glances to her side and sees that Mydei has closed his eyes and is leaning back on his arms, almost like a cat soaking up the midday sun. He looks bright, almost radiant with all the golds and reds in his dress. So entirely unlike her, she finds.
Him, a future king, and her, just a girl fated to bring misery to all she touches.
An uncomfortable tightness ensnares her ribcage and she suddenly finds it hard to breathe as she looks down at her hands in her lap. The very hands that have brought death to so many.
There is less chatter in the streets now and she figures they must have been sitting here for quite some time. Castorice is the first to break the silence.
“Lord Mydei, do you ever get lonely? Do you ever miss your home?”
She can hear Mydei shift by the rustling of fabric, though she still does not look up. His deep voice cuts through the air like a blade. She does not hear him talk very often, but she finds his voice to be kind. She finds him to be kind despite the way he likes to carry himself. All of her fellow Crysos Heirs are so very kind. So very unlike her.
Mydei cocks his head to the side as he watches her. The way she is slumped forward and the subtle crease in her brow betrays her emotions. He can see that something is troubling her, can tell by the question. She never would ask such things if something wasn’t wrong. He knows this and so he decides to be candid with her. Because he knows that she likely needs just that right now.
He hums before he speaks. “I do, sometimes. I think we all do. The path of a Crysos Heir is one of loss, after all.”
A pause. He breathes in before he speaks again. The air smells of rust. It always does to him.
“As for my home…I feel no attachment to any particular place. I might have been born of Castrum Kremnos and be its rightful heir, but I have never lived there. Okhema is more of a home to me than Castrum Kremnos ever was. But even here I do not feel a sense of home. To me, it is more so the people that make somewhere a home, rather than the place itself.”
He looks at her and she finally meets his gaze, head cocked to the side a little.
“Do you miss your home, then?” he asks in turn. Castorice gives him a faint smile before she turns to gaze at the sky. “I scarcely remember what it was like. I only remember the death. I felt more at home beneath the vast night skies than I did in my own room. I don’t feel like there is a place for me to belong anywhere in these lands. I wonder, will the nether realm feel like home to me? Perhaps that is where I have always been meant to be.”
She smiles sadly again as her gaze drops back to her lap.
Mydei just looks at her, not quite knowing what to say. He feels she deserves more than simple platitudes and so he chooses to remain silent instead, knowing that anything he could say right now would be meaningless.
Not long after, Castorice speaks again. Now that she has given form to these feelings of hers and spoken them aloud, she cannot hold them back from bubbling up.
“Do you never find it unfair that this is our fate? Don’t you ever wish for a happy life, free of sorrow and worries? To never have to part from those you hold dear?” Castorice can feel how her voice wavers, how choked up she feels and she grips the skirt of her dress tightly with those cursed hands of hers.
Mydei shifts a little closer to her and she moves to shift away but when she looks at him she does not see even a trace of alarm in his face. And so she relaxes again.
“I find it to be no use fantasising about these things. I have never known this happy life you speak of. Never have I been free from sorrows or my days free of hardship. I was born into these circumstances and so too shall I die in them. Though it might be unfair, this is the hand we’ve been dealt. All we can do is try our best to live with it, to fulfill our duty or die trying. After all, we are not doing this for ourselves, but for the greater good. Isn’t this, too, a way of protecting what we hold dear, of ensuring happiness for those we cherish?”
He sees her expression morph into a pained grimace as she pulls her knees up against her chest, hugging them tightly.
Mydei imagines she would be craving the touch of another right now, the simple comfort of an embrace.
He looks down at his own hands, the hands that, like Castorice, have slain so many. He can still feel the blood on his palms, can still see it when he closes his eyes.
He remembers the pain and loneliness of his early childhood years. The constant struggle to stay alive. He had cursed every god, his father, his mother, himself. He had questioned everything and dreamed of a better life, wished for things to be different. None of it had changed his circumstances at all.
The first real light in his life had been his friends. His companions that he had naively believed would stay by his side forever.
He had watched them die, taken away from him one by one. And still he could not follow them with this undying body of his.
He had cursed Thanatos then. He wonders if Castorice, the one to inherit their core flame, had ever done the same.
“Do you fear death?” Mydei asks her then, glancing at her out of his peripheral vision. Castorice does not move from her position, her face hidden against her legs. She presses her knees into the sockets of her eyes, willing them to stay dry.
She shakes her head, stopping half way. A pause, then she nods, hesitantly.
“ I must, if I wish for it to be gone from this world.”
Mydei sends her a sympathetic look. “I do not fear it. I have cursed it, first for taking everything I held dear, then for refusing to take me as well. But I have come to realise that the fragility of life, the impermanence of it all is what makes these connections, these bonds we share special and so worth cherishing. As backwards as it might sound, it makes me hopeful. That perhaps one day, when I might finally rest, people might mourn me, too. That I, too, an incarnation of war and bloodshed as I am, could be special to someone and change their life, even if just a little.”
Castorice lifts her head then and Mydei can see the tears clinging to her lashes. She smiles, a broken little thing.
“It seems that, though we have both been touched by death, we both have very different views on the matter.”
Mydei wishes he could soothe her ache with more than just empty words. That’s when he gets an idea.
Perhaps he can use this cursed body of his for more than just fighting. Perhaps he, too, can be gentle and spread joy. Leave his mark on this world in more than just blood and ruin.
Perhaps he can do good.
Mydei takes the gauntlet off of his left hand and Castorice watches him curiously.
He gives her a warm smile and before she can even open her mouth to ask what it is he is doing, he gingerly places his hand on her head, ruffling her hair affectionately.
Alarm immediately floods her entire system and she moves to scramble away in a panic but Mydei shakes his head.
“It’s okay, Castorice. I cannot die, remember?”
Her eyes widen in recognition and she cannot stop herself as the tears finally spill from her eyes and sobs wrack her body, shoulders shaking.
Mydei pulls her closer, carefully wrapping his arms around her as she hold onto his robe for dear life, sobbing against his chest.
Castorice remembers the little girl she played with as a child and how she sent her off with an embrace just like this.
He runs a hand down her back, hoping it might be a soothing gesture. After all, he hadn’t exactly done this before.
He can feel the wetness of her tears against his bare skin and how fragile she feels in his arms, like the smallest gust of wind might tear her apart.
But the most prevalent thought is just how warm and gentle her embrace is and he finds himself wishing that every death of his felt this kind.
Mydei smiles to himself, knowing that for once his hands have brought comfort instead of death as his vision fades beneath Okhema’s eternal sunlight.
“See you tomorrow, Castorice.”