[Can’t Opt Out]

The man should turn back. He should turn back and leave the little Baalphorian girl to her fate.

Clearly, based on the fact that she had been able to fool him—something that was generally impossible, as while his Empathy was only Perfect, it interacted with other parts of his genetics to give him more ability to feel emotions through the aether than most—and able to slip away, the girl was skilled. Hence, the kid would be fine… maybe… maybe not.

Fuck.

Fuck him and his bleeding heart… for some people, anyways. For probably innocent little Baalphorian girls who had been dragged into stupid situations by his stupid sister and her even stupider kid, the man’s heart bled a bit. The worst thing was that, regardless of whether the girl would maybe be okay, were she left to go down this path of the cave system that stretched far above the Lüshanian capital, realize it was a terrible path, and abort at the speed of a riptide swelling in the Zereth Sea, he would never know if she got out of this place or not.

The cave system was a maze of tunnels and dead ends, some of it an impenetrable darkness that seemed to consume the aether itself. The man didn’t like those spots, each odd section of dead aether leaving pinpricks within his awareness of the world, and for someone who never let his awareness wander? Who always slept on a razor-thin wire, lest someone come to slit his throat? Needless to say, this was not the sort of situation he enjoyed.

Something with this place was wrong, and he wanted to be free of it. Had no one known where he was—and therefore been unable to lay blame at his feet for anything that went wrong—he might have left his dumbass nephew to his fate, chasing that other Baalphorian girl around the cave system—or… no, the idiot wasn’t chasing her around anymore, was he?

It was blurry, through the cascade of power and emptiness of the cave system, but the man thought his nephew now chasing after a blob of aether of some sort—a Baalphorian skill, presumably. It was too far off—at least, it was with so much interference—and the man couldn’t make out the exact shape of whatever the idiot had been distracted by. While the young man had barely enough brain cells to fill a shot glass, the man didn’t think his nephew was so stupid as to run after anything but a full illusion of the girl.

Impressive, he supposed. Baalphorian skills really were something else. The man knew of Free Coloniers who could create similar things, of course, but it was by no means a common skill, nor was so much power and control at such a young age something common outside of low- and non-devs—although, perhaps these two girls were low-devs? Not non-devs, he was sure—he’d met a few of those, over the years, and to him at least, they had an aura about them that was impossible to shake. Some aspect of their personalities given a physical shape within the waves of the aether, rather than an echo of the power they potentially held within themselves, he generally thought.

These girls… well, the one his nephew was chasing had certainly been an interesting thing, in the brief moments when she had been staring him down, unaware he was staring right back into her. Unfortunately, while something about the girl was different, he had no idea what it had been—too much interference or something about her Censor offering her a layer of protection, perhaps? Or maybe she was like the girl he was chasing after, trying to stop her from running into a nest she would struggle to free herself from? Someone whose mind was able to clasp itself closed and breathe truth into whatever false reality its owner wanted to create?

So strange. Also, annoying.

At the very least, he could still feel the girl he was chasing through the burning blur of the cave system. It was almost sad that there were no Lowdouran left—the man would quite like to ask one what the emptiness within this place was. It could be intentional—some expulsion of the aether’s will from this place. Instead, it felt like a parasite, wiggling about, trying to make more room for itself within a place that was meant to be holy.

Holy to what, the man didn’t know. The aether, perhaps. There were a few religions, scattered throughout the continent, but for the most part, most of their populations tended to either have no beliefs or beliefs that wrapped themselves after ideas of the aether as a god—the originator of all.

Having travelled the northern edge of the southern continent, the man knew religion was more common there. It was a strange thing, for the crack of borders and tectonic plates to make so much of a difference in their cultures—strange to the point that it felt unnatural, and—

And the man slipped.

One moment, he was moving through the cave system, which had begun to turn downwards. The next, his foot had caught on loose gravel—and how the fuck, in a place where damaging the remnants of the Lowdouran’s power was virtually impossible, did gravel come to exist!?—and he was sliding. The man tried to catch himself. A hand reached out, barely brushing over the wall of the tunnel. He attempted to get his feet back under him.

It didn’t work, and for the barest of breaths, the world froze. Gravel tinkled down the tunnel. The man’s eyes met the ceiling. His ass met the ground—his head as well, unfortunately, and while he didn’t pass out, the man swore he saw stars.

✮ ✮ ✮

Internally, Emilia cackled. Her floating form circled Conrad as he lay there, hands flopped to the sides, his chest rising and falling. He didn’t say anything—hadn’t said anything since Lux had run off, really.

Had this been the present, she would have worried about her friend—her future friend—not moving yet. Clearly, he would be fine, however—Lux, too, even if Emilia knew she was going to be coming out of this tunnel more than a little traumatized.

“There was a man… he was with the person who kidnapped me, but he wasn’t part of that? He came to get me, after I got away, but it was to help me?” Lux would say later, after almost everyone was back in Seer’ik’tine and being checked over, their relay filling with a debriefing that Emilia had always meant to look over then somehow…

Somehow, she had never gotten to looking over so many of the documents that had been dropped into that relay—Samina’s documents, for instance. All of the information she had recorded as she moved through this place? All of her thoughts on the strange way the aether behaved in the cave system—thoughts that Conrad shared?

Emilia had never looked at them, and her only thought as to why was the same as it had been before: someone had messed with her memories of this trip, erasing her belief in the will of the aether and knowledge of whatever was within that dead space, Olivier’s horror story, the dungeons. Someone hadn’t wanted her to remember those things, and it had created a blank spot within her mind, where any information that might return that belief to her had fallen, vanishing from sight until she’d found herself in {{A Life (not) in the Stars}}. Then, something had shifted.

Slowly, she had begun to feel as though something she hadn’t consented to had been altered within her mind—a tug of misremembering that didn’t lead to herself or the clones or even Zavriel. Then, she had met all of those children in Livery, as well as Carne—had found herself listening to Conrad’s horror story and digging through records in an echo of the Dionese Royal Archives that shouldn’t have been there, and yet was, her fingers pulled to a document that backed up Conrad’s story as not a simple myth or fabrication of time.

Then, there was Hyr—Hyr, who had so easily opened her heart into a full-blown belief in the will of the aether and the ability to glean information from it. Emilia hoped that when she woke, she would still remember most of what she had seen and no longer remembered, but really, who knew.

“He was weird—spoke in a weird mishmash of languages, some of which my Censor didn’t even know,” Samina had added of her experience with meeting Conrad, decades ago. Did they know? Had they been able to tell, when they’d met each other in Sil’s dorm room earlier, that they had met each other before? Emilia doubted it. There had been no moment of recollection, no flash of something in their eyes. Really, it had been so long, their crossing of paths so brief, that either remembering this short interaction that had happened four decades ago—millennia for Samina, who knew how long for Conrad—would have been weirder.

Below her, Conrad stirred, muttered a soft word that must have been a swear word, but even so many decades on—even so many languages being recorded within the OIC during the war, Emilia having learned every one of them with diligence because she never wanted to be left without her Censor to translate for her and be therefore unable to communicate—she didn’t recognize several of the languages her future friend used.

“Should have just followed my gut and gone into Falmíer,” Conrad muttered, his words slipping into Lüshanian as though he had taught himself to default to the language of whatever nation he was within, rather than speak his native tongue.

“Still hiding things?” Emilia asked, letting her body fall to sit beside him—and strange that she had a body here, when she would have been perfectly fine without one. Part of her thought her body a thing that existed simply so Hyr could see her, when their souls had crossed paths.

Reaching out, Emilia brushed her fingers over Conrad’s mask, willing it to vanish. It didn’t of course, but she had felt like she needed to try.

It was a fascinating thing to have immediately recognized Conrad even like there. Aside from similarities in their bodies, each on the shorter side and so thin their thighs didn’t dare touch, Emilia had seen so little of this younger version of her friend that it seemed impossible for her to know it was him.

Yet, she had known from the moment her eyes found him. It had felt as though her soul itself had known, and as Conrad pushed himself up, his head tilting in the direction Emilia knew Falmíer to be, she wondered if she was the one Conrad was being pulled towards. It had been so immediate, the connection between them in with raid—insane, of course, what with Conrad chasing after her, the two of them bantering, then with him showing up again and again until it had felt normal to have him there, with her.

At this point, as insane as it sounded, Emilia was comfortable believing that Conrad’s pull was leading to her. At the same time, after everything she’d seen—after all the bits and pieces of information she’d overheard within everyone’s head—Emilia didn’t know what to believe anymore. There had been that moment, though, within Rayleen’s mind. The woman had been considering how many souls were tied to hers? Something like that. There had been words she didn’t know—heartbonds, corebonds, those potential and absolute.

Already, it all seemed so blurry and far away—definitely not a good sign for her hopes of remembering more than the barest bits of information about everything she’d seen.

What had it been that Rayleen had thought? Something about how her heartbond was nearby, but the distance between them was so great that the woman had known they wouldn’t meet here?

Emilia had no idea what a heartbond was, of course, but it felt important—it felt like tears welling behind her eyes because she and Conrad had been so close and she hadn’t even known it. They had been one decision, right here, away from meeting one another. Pushing himself up, Conrad finally tugged off his mask and she was graced with the youthful curves of his face as he rubbed at the back of his head, checking for blood. Here, with his head constantly shifting towards the city, far below them, he could have decided to come to her.

It was a palpable feeling, flooding through her. It was a pressure, building within the man to come to her, come to her, come to her.

He wouldn’t, she knew—and in no world would she want him to.

“He seemed… annoyed, when he found me. He didn’t really talk to me, only muttered about feeling like he’d given up something important to save me. I tried asking what he’d given up, but all he said was he didn’t know. It was weird, but I think he was telling the truth—at least, telling his truth. That guy… he really believed that by saving me, he’d given something up—something important and unknown.”

Lux had been quiet after that, so aware that what she’d experienced had been horrific and yet nothing compared to what some of them had dealt with. Trauma wasn’t something to be measured against another’s pain, yet it was so impossible not to. For Lux, huddled away in the Baalphorian Embassy in Seer’ik’tine along with a collection of children, each traumatized and alone in the world, unsure of what the future held—and really, out of all the things Emilia wanted an answer to, she really wanted to know why they had waited for her to get there, days later, to start making decisions about what to do with all the kids—her own trauma had been nothing.

Maybe it was nothing, in the grand scheme of things; for Lux, it had been something, and that was okay. It had taken her friend, now gone to the aether, a while to accept that, but she had gotten there, worked on dealing with what happened to her down this path of murky darkness, but she had gotten there.

“Fuck…” Conrad groaned, pushing himself all the way up, and had Emilia not already known that he would go to Lux, she might have thought him about to come for her instead. He wouldn’t—it wasn’t their time to meet yet, as painful as that was.

More painful than little Hyr, crying tears of ice as they begged to be allowed to come to her—to meet her in the middle of a fucking war—was knowing that she and Conrad had been so close to meeting, and yet, he had chosen to save her friend instead, as though part of his had known she would break, were Lux to vanish into the cave system.

“It’s okay,” she said into the waves of the aether, time a strange stretch around them as she added, “We’ll meet one day, and be great friends.”

Conrad tensed, turning so abruptly in her direction that she was worried he might topple over again. “What…” he started to say, lips pulling down and it was only now that she noticed his eyes weren’t the deep purple of the present—she’d fucking known those were coloured contacts! Instead, the man’s eyes were… strange—strange enough that she’d never seen colour like them before and could definitely understand why he was covering them up.

Vibrant-pink eyes stared straight through her, their pupils a darker shade of pink, while the outer rim of Conrad’s irises were a soft purple. Little sparks of silver seemed to flake through his eyes, almost like the shots of silver that ran through Emilia’s own eyes, but not quite. If her eyes had shooting stars of silver filling them, Conrad’s had a dusting of the stars themselves.

They were beautiful—breathtaking.

Also, she’d fucking known the bastard had an irregular deviation of some sort!

“Go,” she repeated, unsure if he could feel her there, but needing to say it nonetheless. “I’ll be fine,” she said—she lied. Where she was now, she would be fine. Later… later, she wondered if Conrad’s presence would have made a difference—not just later in this city, but in the war as well.

Would this young man—probably about the age her real body was—now tugging his mask back on and hesitating before continuing on his original path, have made a difference in anything? It was a dangerous thing to consider, especially since nothing could change this moment—nothing would have brought them together sooner.

Still, Emilia never had been good at shutting down her mind—at turning off the part that loved to wonder and consider.

Fortunately, the aether pulled, and then she was gone—consumed by flames, her thoughts flying away into the burning aether because fuck! She had known this battle had been bad, but somehow, the true terror of it had been downplayed!?

Someone had once said that only the district had been at risk of burning down. Emilia would quite disagree! They were lucky they hadn’t burnt the entire fucking city down!?