deercountry | Real & Half-Real: Chapter 2

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Real & Half-Real: Chapter 2 - Nephele-That-Isn't

Who: A brave party of rescuers and their intrepid support staff
What: Pocket dimension shenanigans to save a missing Sleeper
When: Two insane days in May
Where: Nephele-that-isn’t, which isn’t Deer Country either

All at once–one day, in early May–the portal’s finished, and the planning is as near to done as it will ever be. All at once, it’s time to venture into Nephele-that-isn’t, and retrieve not one but two Sleepers who’ve gone astray.

The team assembles in the clearing by Argonaut’s abandoned shrine, in a darkness lit by glowing CRTs and the green, green moon. The portal itself, and the world beyond it, casts a light all its own–and one by one they step over that rune-etched silver threshold, and one by one vanish into another story than Trench’s own.

What does it feel like, to journey to a dead reality?

Like being sieved through strands of glass and fire. Like being picked apart thread by narrative thread as the Words themselves that write the universe flash before stunned eyes in the seconds before they’re erased and something worse substituted. Moments of fleeting alignment between passager and host-creator come in stopped heartbeats and empty lungs, in the memory you’ve been dead for years and the cold slide of steel between ribs.

Then that second-that's-years is over and deposits its captives beneath an alien sky, with sun and ring and stars and moons foreign as any far-flung land. Some travelers wear skins and magic to suit those stranger heavens; some have been changed by the logic of the half-world half-story to better fit its weave.

With a changed nature come changed senses and abilities–and those in the skins of shrikes, with eyes to see, may notice much more if they look.

All can see one grim fact, however, on entering the world: Any clock, any watch, any Omni now displays 48:00:00 or its analogue equivalent... And begins at once to tick down.

[[ Part of the Real & Half-Real player plot! Navigate to other plot posts: [OOC] Interest Check | [IC] Prologue | [IC] Iskierka's Notes | [IC] The Portal & the Plan ]]

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It's meet that the second attempt at Beatrice's ritual begins where the first one ended: On the Iron Steppes, stalking the elusive Prince of Noon and Nephele's last precious airship.

The storms clogging the sky above and the war raging through the grass below it makes the expedition's path to Noon perforce an indirect one. To get to him and his airship, they need to defeat the Prince of Thundering and his Court; to challenge the Court of Thundering, they must cross miles of hostile territory, through slashing rain and driving wind and punishing hail, beset on all sides by furious dryads.

In this first challenge, a curse of the Waking World's Season of Tears proves a blessing instead: Chara, attacked by dryads and livid with hatred, summons a swarm of giant mantids--mantids like enough the dryads' missing symbiotic hama to check the raging plant-folk. The resemblance is sufficient to win the expedition a narrow corridor of safe passage--so long as one of their Darkbloods can keep up a suitable manifestation of insects. Two of the sapient plants (a yew and an ash, scarred in the bark from years of war) even condescend to act as an escort into the deeper Steppes. Their assistance is part-sentimental, largely pragmatic; they lead the expedition on a zig-zagging route between outposts of Thundering's Court and watch any ensuing slaughter with grim and dark and satisfied eyes.

Picking off Thundering's Courtiers--no slouches, these; even the thorns among them, more accomplished with rhetoric than the axe, can summon shattering thunderclaps with their words, and few will listen to reason--feels initially fruitless. Feels a wasted effort that doesn't diminish the punishing weather. But inevitably the storm above slackens, clouds dissipating to leave the sky cold and pitilessly blue around a heatless sun. Ring-twilight falls as the last Courtier does, and with it (storybook-perfect) the Prince of Thundering arrives to avenge his dead.

He is a rose's rose, the sort the Empire would immortalize in marble if he were only loyal: Topping seven feet, powerfully muscled, sharp-tusked and keen-eyed. His breasts are bound flat for war, his striking crimson mane left to loose to flow in the wind accompanying him. Yet for all his heroic stature he is a wreck of a man--the plainclothes he effects as a uniform are shredded and bloodstained, the long rifle and great-axe he carries filthy with use. Something inscrutable lurks in his expression as he regards the expedition, an emotion neither hatred nor dismay nor regret but partaking of all of them. His pale eyes sharpen to glass on seeing Illarion among the strange mixed company.

"This is what you bring me, butcher, to end the war forever?" He does not raise his weapons. Neither does he cast them down. He is not blind with battle-fury like his Courtiers, resistant to any persuasion but violence. This is an opportunity to negotiate--to remind him of the ideals he'd once held, and hold out a final end to the Conflagration that consumes Nephele-that-isn't. (Pragmatically, it's an opportunity to use what Thundering knows of the Prince of Noon, and the bond between them, to bring his airship close enough to capture.)

And while the band of negotiators who've volunteered for this are a mixed lot--the fledgling elf Izerge, little Sweetroll, Bigby, and the Prince of Lies himself--and while Thundering looks on them with scorn, he is willing to listen. He--perhaps alone of all those they'll hunt to enact the ritual--is willing to bend.

But he watches the shrikes in the group with suspicion bordering on hatred, the eldest of them most of all.

Ultimately, the peacemakers' efforts are successful: The Prince of Thundering yields to their entreaties and agrees to negotiate with the Prince of Noon--to rekindle the sworn brotherhood between them, if he can, though he doubts greatly he can be forgiven for breaching it. He agrees, moreover, to get them onto his sworn brother's airship, and let events take the course they will; whatever comes of the expedition's attempt, the last of the Skilled Fleet will be captured--or destroyed. One side of this war-within-the-War will be eradicated, leaving Domitian's remnants to perish with the ritual's completion.

Thundering leads the expedition back through dreamlike, twisting terrain to an abandoned airship tower at the Steppes' edge. He climbs to the top of the decaying structure, his charges precariously in tow, and uses the signal mirror at its top to summon Noon's circling airship. Hours seem to pass before the ship's arrival, and no time at all; the only objective measure of how many minutes pass is the relentless countdown on the Omnis. (Too many. They are losing precious time, waiting.)

"We'll have to jump," Thundering observes, as the ship draws near. It's an observation rapidly confirmed--whether or not Noon himself intends to parley, his crew refuse to bring the airship close enough for easy boarding. The Court of Noon, driven mad by ceaseless battle and in sight of their greatest foe, will resist to the last.

But the Prince of Thundering, that old foe, has learned very well how to fight these sailors of the air. He organizes the expedition--those who'll listen to him--with brisk tactical grace, keeping those who can't cross the empty yards of air on their own back in reserve before leading their would-be boarders across. They make the jump under a hail of gunfire and burning coherent sunlight--and Thundering roars as he leaps, changing and twisting in midair to an enormous bristling boar. The great temple beast lands with an impact that rocks the deck and bowls through the nearest of Noon's ragged marines, sending shouting men over the sides. It does not linger to confirm its kills, leaving that to Chara and Atreus' clever knives, Izerge's automatons, Ruby's scythe, Michael's strength as it charges for the quarterdeck.

The ship's captain--the Prince of Noon, a tall dark man whose face is a maze of self-inflicted scars--watches the boar's advance with resignation in his eyes. He does not lift a hand to save his sailors. He does not raise his pistols until the boar's upon him, until it's returned to orcish form with crimson mane streaming in the wind. Only then does Noon draw, and press the muzzles of his guns to Thundering's chest. "Your apology needs work, Nash," he snarls, and doesn't fire.

Still doesn't fire, when Thundering lifts one of those guns with odd tenderness to nestle beneath his chin. "That was not the apology," he intones. "But this: My life poured into your hands; my honor / mingled with yours, as blood and wine are mixed / in libation to all gods of roses, / of Civilization's brief flower--"

It is a rose's oath of sworn brotherhood and he offers it with a fervor that silences the other man. Whatever more they say to each other is lost in the swirl of the wind and pitched shouts of battle--but what can be glimpsed of their faces speaks of a reckoning long in coming, and a wound drained that was long in need of lancing.

Below decks, the fight for the engine room is pitched and swift and vicious. Noon's engineers turn quickly from defense to sabotage once it comes clear they're losing, leaving damage that will need quick repairs. By the time the mechanical-minded among the expedition return from that task, the ship is cleared of all but a last few stubborn holdouts--

And the two Princes who stand by watching the mopping-up. Some agreement's been reached between them and their grudge put aside; they look defeated, and relieved by that defeat. They carry their burdens no longer.

"The ship's yours by conquest," Noon shouts, as the last of his blood-mad Court falls.

"Your contract's fulfilled, butcher," Thundering adds, staring hard at Illarion. "The rest of you see she completes it."

Both pronouncements have a fatal finality to them. Neither Prince leaves much time to be argued out of what they've decided--they know they must die, after all, and this death has some slim chance of bringing them final relief if the ritual succeeds--but they do entertain those arguments and anything else said to them, for a little while. A little while, until Thundering gestures all comers to silence, and strides to the fore of the ship with Noon beside him--speaking quietly of small things, as two old friends would talk as they walk a city street.

They mount the ship's railing together, Noon leaning on Thundering's broad shoulder. They clasp hands. There's something clean and final in the handshake, in the last look they give each other. Then Noon gestures widely with his free hand, plucking sunlight from the air to wreathe them in solar fire; and as one, they step out over the void below.

They fall together like a dying star.

Edited 2022-05-29 05:10 (UTC)

The world does not bear crowns lightly. So many in one place must strain at the unseen chains of fixed reality, or so Atreus imagines, in the flickering half-thought instants of clarity strung through the battle like river pearls on gut-string. Sometimes he thinks he hears it groan, the aching, mechanical wail of a ship twisting in a storm.

Where Noon blazes and Thundering booms, his passage through the battle is marked otherwise by silence only splintered by those he sets his knives against. He does not bring forth the rest of his arsenal strung up on his other-side self, not for a fight like this one, all cramped chaos. When it is done, he is slicked in blood, the blacks of his garb gleaming before they begin to dry in iron scales.

This is what he is striving to mop from his face as he sits cross-legged in observation of his fellow Princes at their conference. This is what he tastes when he watches them fall, eyes ~~blue~~ ~~golden~~ flat as leaves. The outcries of others are like gulls calling in a language he does not know, if he ever did, and when he rises it is supple and untroubled.

He pads across the gore-strewn deck with a singular purpose, one with eyes brighter than blood and hair limed silver in the sunlight.

"It's done," he says, as if he's offering something that anyone could not already know, and he does not understand why it does not feel true.

Kaworu has retreated, no longer interested in any words that the Princes could give. Somehow they'll proceed forward and he'll carry on with them. How it's done matters little to him. He leans against the edge of the airship, head bowed between his arms. The wood grain of the railing presses into his skin, digging tiny red trenches into pale skin underneath his hair. The uncomfortable sensation counteracts the pull within his mind, slowly tearing out the stitches that hold him together.

Atreus comes near. He wishes he wouldn't. It's not fair to be angry with him for not being Paul, or not being enough of Paul. But it's a sense of loss, one that exists somewhere closer to half-real but still manages to be painful. He doesn't look up.

"No. Just this part is done."

There's so much more. So much longer to hold together.

Atreus doesn't understand the way that the angel will not look at him. He doesn't understand this angel being able to make choices like that at all, the ability to not look.

His hand alights on the railing, a feather's span away from the angel's elbow, and then it slides away, drawn closer to him as he turns to lean with his back to the open, yawning sky that swallowed Noon and Thundering.

(He wonders what it feels like to stop falling.)

"Do you..." he begins, tongue unsteady, "Are you well?"

For a second, he wants to close the gap between himself and Atreus. It's so small. Just the smallest shift of his arm would bring them into contact. There's a yearning there, to be touched and comforted, by someone, even if it's not the person he wishes it was. It's better than being alone. Then Atreus pulls away and Kaworu expects to look up and watch his retreating back, but instead he raises his head and catches the Shrike's eyes.

"I'm... I don't fit in this world." Atreus knows this, he's sure. It's clear from looking at him. "It's trying to pull me apart."

Those eyes. They're heart's blood red, gleaming ruby seeds, and he's never seen their like in the waking world.

"I won't permit that," he says, tautly, with all the authority of his position. A Prince speaks, and the world listens, even if it does not always obey.

(A Monarch speaks, and angels always do.)

"The old man would kill me if I let that happen." Why does he tilt to lightness, unsteady as a freshly hatched babe? "Or he'd try."

Kaworu laughs.

It's not bitter, instead it's almost wistful. It's something Paul would say, with mouth set and eyes blazing. So perhaps it would follow that it is something that Atreus would say. "Would you command the world as you do your Court?"

He thinks he knows the answer. Gripping the railing, he leans back a little, letting the breeze blow through his hair.

"He might. But he'd give you a headstart, probably."

There is an instant in which they are known to each other. Atreus feels it as a breeze across feathers, an uplifting spiral, dizzied and vast. They cannot be. He cannot make sense of it. He has made little sense of anything since this mad quest began.

"Is that not what a Prince aspires to?" He asks, and he would be archly playful - or viciously cold - or matter of fact - with anyone else.

"Is that not why we seek the Throne?" He asks an angel seemingly untethered from a Monarch, pulling apart under what strange laws he is composed of in conflict with Atreus' world, and there is an ache in him that falls from his mouth like drifting pollen.

"I'd rather we spare him the chase," Atreus says, switching tacks as the ship does, heaved round to a new course. "How may I be of service to you?"

"Perhaps the world isn't meant to be commanded." He says, softly. He isn't Throneborn, but he feels sorry for the ones called "angels" in this world who have no will but what the monarch tells them. He feels the blankness creeping on the edge of his mind, a static growing ever louder as it seeks to encompass all of him. To live a life like that... it's not life. It's a worse life than those of his brethren who could do nothing but seek Seeds of Life.

Still, he glances over Atreus, eyes much softer than before.

"I just want to do what we're doing. Kill the targets, save the old man."

Those words would be naive from anyone else. The world is meant to be commanded, or it would not manifest rulers and crowns, or the Throne for which they all struggle. There was a First, there will be a Last, and all the while the world will be commanded.

It's madness and impossibility from an angel, the instrument of a Monarch's command. A knife might as well speak to say the world was not made to be cut.

He is a Prince. He manifests his domain, in the creak of his hands gripping the railing behind him and the bewildered, heady weight of what he says, pulled up from a new-tapped well of the yet to be:

"I dreamt of you."

It's the kind of thing he would have hesitated to say, once. It's the kind of thing he would have imagined he'd have time to say, if he chose to, but he knows better these days. Life is one willing knife from an end, and this angel of will is talking only about his duty. He can't let it stand. There's too much he needs to know, for reasons still obscure to him.

"Why was that?"

"Maybe we know each other in another life."

The wind flutters his silver hair, the tips catching the light so the strands almost appear iridescent. It's a joke and the truth at the same time. He knows that this world is not real, but it's real to Atreus. Perhaps, it's all inverted and reality has become the dreams of this world.

He turns to look at the shrike before him, a knowing smile playing at his lips.

"What do you think dreams mean?"

The ship bucks ever so slightly, the workings of the internal engines being repaired shuddering through the artful construction. Atreus steadies himself through it, a watchful eye on the angel, any tremor in his eyes surely a result of whatever averted catastrophe ensues below.

Casually, he hoists himself up to perch on the narrow rail, braced by his curled talons on either side. It's a precarious position, even for him. Nothing will happen. Nothing ever does.

"Sometimes they mean nothing." He shrugs, a supple flowing motion. "Sometimes they're symbols of our struggles, reflections of our thoughts. Sometimes they're memories, or amalgams of memory. Sometimes they're glimpses through others' eyes, or portents, or omens."

"You smiled at me like that in them." He tips his head back, contemplating the sky above. "Like you knew a secret, and weren't going to tell me. Everyone tells me their secrets, you know. Sooner or later."

"Do they?"

Kaworu moves around him, a smirk now playing on his face. He likes challenge. He likes play. For a second he forgets this is Atreus and not Paul. It is just another one of the games they play together. Jabbing, poking, prodding, to see who caves first before collapsing together anyway.

"How would you take my secrets from me then?"

Ize, fleet-footed and only sparing breath for moving, bounds forward without thinking, uncoupling his armor with a pull of a few straps and his magecraft. The large overlapping scales separate and fan away from him like wings, blood spatter from the fight vivid under the sun. They arc overboard in a metallic flash to follow the two Princes wreathed in flame.

He collides with the rail in an uncharacteristic jumble to keep Noon and Thundering in his line of sight. Only then does he allow himself a frustrated shout.

He hangs on the rail like he's going to be sick, but his cedar brown face does not turn pallid. He's seen blood, death, and on a more personal level, the slow rotting knell of his own people like a diseased tree. These were two lives that didn't need to perish. Therefore, these were two lives he couldn't save.

His armor plate slowly returns and arranges itself quietly on deck to be wiped down. Ize straightens with his back to everyone, shoulders taut under his gray coveralls, viridian feathers still. He remains standing there for a while.

The butterfly is too light to be felt, as it lands on the back of his hand. It opens once, closes once, then flies over the edge - it rides, carefully, the tearing atmospheric winds, gaining only a few nicks in its fragile wings, and the momentum of the ship quickly leaves it behind.

Between being a caterpillar and emerging from its chrysalis, every one of a butterfly's organs are dissolved. It is motionless, helpless, formless paste, taken down from a body to the pulp and meat that all cells would be without constant effort to keep each other together and alive. What everyone will be again, once the effort becomes too taxing.

Impossibly, then, from the other side of formlessness, something unrecognizable as a caterpillar returns. It builds itself and emerges. Not everyone is so lucky, to survive things that destroy them. Not everyone is so unlucky, either. Never being the same afterwards is only a price - rather than a reward - if you consider what you were before to be of any importance.

Far in the distance, back at a spot in the air that the ship has long since passed, a cloud of orange and gold larger than the ship itself joins the single pinpoint. Together, they descend - towards what remains.

Edited 2022-06-04 18:44 (UTC)

He remains standing there long enough, in fact, for another wood elf to approach — one who joined the fight late, although not so late as to miss the spectacular light-show sendoff of the two Princes, nor so late as to have no cause to bristle at Thundering's glare, and the implications that follow (not calling Illarion "she", that's just culture clash — but the idea that he might not carry through on his promises? How dare this infant Prince, et cetera) — one whose steps are silent, out of a grieving respect for the dead wood of the deck they trod upon. Perhaps the familiarity of the hand gripping his shoulder is a surprise; perhaps it's just the temerity, that someone would, without asking if Ize would welcome a touch.

Someone who isn't his Prince, at that.

There's blood: streaking the electrum of his ancient uncle's hair; staining the matching blades he carries, naked, cradled in one arm; spattered over his chest and face, as if something visceral exploded right in front of him — and his expression shows no sign of awareness of the gore, only the same sort of blankness as on Illarion's (isn't that what happens to the undead, when they are Risen? aren't their emotional responses always wrong somehow, and usually muted to the point of indecipherability?), with a faint leavening of something — pity, possibly, or concern.

"It's very cruel, to deprive someone of a choice," he says, quietly enough (distantly enough) for the wind to steal and scatter his words before they've traveled more than a few feet. "Equally cruel, perhaps, to force someone to make one — especially where life and death are concerned, young nephew. You couldn't have prevented this, and they wouldn't have thanked you for interfering."

His grip on Ize's shoulder tightens, briefly, and then he drops his hand. "My brother, though... He would have been very proud of you, I think," Augustin adds, even more quietly — almost inaudible even to Ize, under the creaks and pops of shifting beams and lines, all over the ship. "To know that one of his descendants inherited his compassion."

(Alfred Quinque killed himself, and forced his brother to choose whether to lose him forever, or subsume his soul — but despite that, he, too, is very compassionate, even when he's creeping on Deku, Paul, and Kaworu from the seam between kitchen wall and ceiling.)

It feels like a tree falling on him. The ominous weight of an unfamiliar hand (acting familiarly) was generally not a good thing. Most of the time, it meant his projects were about to be messed with by the more callous members of his community--before he could defend them and himself, before he got the hang of his magecraft and left the doubters in the dust. (It seems incongruous that Izerge Greendale feels more threat from a hand on his shoulder, a seemingly normal gesture, than Izuku Midoriya will feel from a coastal taipan checking up on him in slithering coils--a snake in God's dead garden.)

He doesn't jerk skittishly away, because the hand of a Prince is power, and they are nominally allies. Ize doesn't know this one like the other, with whom he teases the boundaries of how a follower should act. His head angles in the direction of Atreus to confirm to his own flightiness that this is all right. There is no summons away, so Ize remains here with family.

The wind might thunder over his uncle's words, but both their ears are keen, attuned to every fluttering leaf of their respective territories. They're the usual sort of comforting, noncommittal words until he mentions his brother. Ize could have gone on today being alone in his sentiments, and that would have been fine. He's an outlier in many ways, used to being alone.

Instead, he draws in a small, slow breath, because it is hard being perceived, and harder still being praised. He presses his lips together firmly. As one of Atreus's, he must show some strength. (Or, is it a weakness to hide one's heart, to fear it, to kill it so that one appears stronger but ends up maimed and incomplete?)

"I'll be all right, Uncle. It's happened before," he says as quietly as the other. (When? Why does it hurt?) Then at a more normal volume, just a touch of something iron and dubious in his voice, "He'd be proud? He wouldn't call it weird or stupid or unnecessary?"

(Somewhere, still compressed under the onslaught of centuries' worth of false memories dropped into an already-overburdened mind, still trying to sort through them all and make sense of them all enough to get back out, Augustine the First is desperately wishing that Alfred were here — and he doesn't know, when no snake forms in the space beside or between them, or wrapped around his shoulders, if the fault (that he does not) belongs to this pocket-dimension and the way it has overwritten him, or to himself, and the way Lord Deathless would never think to summon a snake and call it brother.)

"'Compassion and tolerance are not a sign of weakness, but a sign of strength,'" the lord beside him recites, but... distantly, almost absently, as if a reflex from a catechism. There's a flicker-quick glance at Ize, from the corner of his own colorless eyes (and which is more disquieting, to one who would seem to study this most ancient of wood-elves — the sudden bursts of speed, here as in battle, or the realization that, in his youth, his eyes must have been as vibrant as the teal feathers growing amidst the electrum that looks like hair?), before he adds, "It's troubling indeed to think you've been surrounded by those who are in such haste to discard others, or denigrate their value to those who do perceive it."

And, in a stronger voice, brisker, whether or not anyone else has come close enough to hear it, "No. He would not have called it weird, or stupid, or unnecessary, to try to help or save another — but."

Augustin reaches for Ize again, turning as he does, but barely touches him — the talon at one fingertip very, very gently preens a feather back into place, next to Ize's ear. "He would also remember that each of us makes our own choices, in every moment; when an offer of compassionate help is rejected, even if the consequences for the sufferer are severe, it is not the fault of the one who tried to help; he would not seek to accrue more blame, or guilt, than he truly earned."

There's a faint sound in the air, then, a little more melodic than the wind and ship have heretofore managed: a reedy little chuckle, although his expression barely shows any humor.

"He was always much more patient and wise than I, after all."

"Not so many as that," he murmurs before Augustin continues in a stronger voice. Whatever politeness he clings to, he still has to slip in a good word for those of his friends--old, new, from all over--who value life and the protection of it that stems from compassion.

He shies away with a lean and a frown as his feathers briefly puff up. It's nothing personal--which is exactly it. Augustin is not his mother, his friend, his close comrade, or his Prince. Despite the complicated interlocking social breaches, and more importantly, the reminder of where they are and what they've done in the form of the blood spattering them both, it's a distinctly harmless and young sort of annoyed look from someone with something to prove. Really, Uncle?

"It's not guilt," he continues seriously as if he never moved. "I hardly ever feel guilty. I look forward. It's why I'm here. And blame is something other people do. I've been blamed, but for stupid things, not for anything that really matters."

He looks up (and up) at him, not moving his solidly planted feet but for the necessary lilting to accommodate a moving ship. It comes easy to those who can walk on snow.

"It's responsibility. I'm responsible for everyone near me. That's just how it is. It's my failure," he says this tightly as if to clutch it to his suddenly constricted voice, "but I have to keep moving. Can't help anyone else if I don't get up."

He produces a rag, and the first of his blood-stained armor plates floats into his scarred hands.

"Responsibility?"

It's a mild echo; it's not for him to be judgmental, to be quick-tempered — no hot-headed, hot-blooded mammal, he — mildly questioning, as if trying to ensure he hasn't somehow simply misheard his (unfathomably) young nephew. The tilt of his head, as he watches Ize's hands busy themselves cleaning this fancy bit of metal, is far too avian for any mammal present or watching to even contemplate in any depth without the risk of sympathetic muscle spasm.

"Failure... fault... self-castigation..." A small twitch of his shoulders is a shrug, apparently, serving to dismiss all of these words as nothing but synonyms to prove his point.

It hurts, of course, to see someone so young bearing a weight so terrible, so terribly heavy; but — well, this notion with which he's credited his brother still hangs heavy in the air between them:

... when an offer of compassionate help is rejected, even if the consequences for the sufferer are severe ...

"Who placed this responsibility on your shoulders? To say that you, and you alone — as young as you are — are the one who bears responsibility for all those around you — who was it, fledge, who decided she didn't want to bear her responsibilities any longer, and shifted them to you? Or have you taken on the weight of the world all on your own?"

It would just figure, that a descendant of Alfred's would do that.

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Real & Half-Real: Chapter 2 - Nephele-That-Isn't

2.1 The Princes of Thundering and Noon

2.1.1 A Rose's Rose

2.1.2 Be Angry at the Sun for Setting (cw: suicide by fall, threats with firearms)

2.1.2 you wouldn't want an angel watching over you (they wouldn't wanna watch) [kaworu nagisa]

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2.1.2 Rage against the dying of the light

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Re: 2.1.2 Rage against the dying of the light

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