Chapter Text
When Cyrene had started this, she had thought perhaps a thousand cycles would do the job.
They are in the millions now.
She sits there, in the grand, endless blue of the Space Path, and looks down at the world below through the portal. She watches Phainon — Khaslana — with the bags underneath his eyes, the whites of his eyes bloodshot, so tired, so scared, so sad as he comes face to face with his younger counterpart.
And here is the thing: there is no one in this universe that Cyrene loves more than Phainon, and these cycles are killing him. If they were simply draining his life, she could have lived with that — he is a soldier, she would have been grieved, but it was what he had chosen — but it is his spirit being extinguished. As the flame of destruction ever grows larger, that core of Phainon is being eroded by Iron Tomb. And it hurts her. It hurts so badly.
So here she is, on the outside, the power of memoria growing around her with each passing cycle, but Phainon dying as the destruction grows in him. He’s outstripping her in power, and with every moment she spends watching him fall apart from her seat so high above, she begins to doubt more that he’ll succeed in turning it to his own advantage.
And it is horrible, but… Phainon means more to her than the world.
And though she might not have the power to save Amphoreus, she certainly has enough now to do something.
Wondering to herself if Phainon will ever forgive her, Cyrene locks onto the golden blood and pours every single drop of the power of memoria she has into it.
It has to work. It has to.
Khaslana hesitates. That’s all it comes down to.
He’s at the Grove, the Black Tide come and gone, the Coreflame still on the Luminary Throne, Anaxa doubtlessly guarding it.
Khaslana doesn’t take part in the destruction. All of this is awful enough, but he can at least be efficient about it by just going to get the Coreflame. But there is a man in his path — Phainon is early this time.
And Khaslana is cornered, even with all his power, under that blue, blue gaze. He raises his sword — but hesitates. And Phainon — stupid, young, brave Phainon — rips off his mask instead of stabbing him in the side.
He falls back with a gasp, and Khaslana… He knows he must kill him now. He cannot let Phainon live with this knowledge. He cannot let this past version of himself live until the end.
It is a kindness, in a way, he tries to tell himself. But as Phainon sputters on the floor, wide eyes glued to Khaslana’s face, he feels the weariness crash over him.
That young, innocent face. It so easily twists into revulsion and pain. And Khaslana knows he deserves it — he ends Phainon every time, even if they meld together afterwards. But there’s a life gone there. A possibility that would only end in pain anyway, of course, but — precious nonetheless.
If lives full of suffering were not worth living, people would have given up long ago.
Khaslana has not yet.
Which is, in the end, why he must do this. So he raises his sword, ready to strike, and then — Cyrene. He feels her, in the air, in his lungs, reaching out from above through his soul. She’s not there, yet she is, her power rising, and he is her point of contact to this world now she’s left it herself. It takes his breath and his sword falls out of his hand, clattering down as he falls forward, against Phainon.
Where his hand touches Phainon, everything turns gold. Cyrene reaches through him into Phainon, and then, through Phainon, to the golden threads. He can feel the web spanning over the entirety of Amphoreus, Aglaea in the center, all the Chrysos Heirs caught in it. Cyrene is reaching, but her power is failing, and he doesn’t know why she is doing this. But he has trusted her with millions of lives, with the recreation of this world, with his soul, which he feels wearing out with every single new cycle. Trusting her with this is nothing in comparison.
So when he feels that beautiful blue power falter along the web, everyone it’s trying to reach just a little too far away, he pours his own power into hers. Gold and blue bleeding together, the power of memoria and thousands, millions of Coreflames.
In this moment, Khaslana gives everything, and for what little Phainon has (nothing but his will to fulfill the dreams of his companions), he also gives.
Phainon is staring at him, eyes wide, mouth open as if screaming, power overflowing through both of them, burning them until they’re ash.
The strangest thing is that it does not hurt, a sensation almost alien to Khaslana by now.
Needless to say, everything goes black.
The overhead lights are so white and unnatural when he wakes up that he wonders where they’ve ended up now. He tries to even his breathing, so as not to give anything except the barest opening of his eyes. It’s not sunlight, that much is clear, nor is it the eerie glow of the blue nightlamps. Khaslana, in his many, many lifetimes, has never encountered anything like it before.
He’s lying on something hard, and someone is talking in the background. There are many hum-like sounds too, and whirring, which he can only liken to the sounds the automatic doors make, or the strange machines they encountered in the Fortress Dome.
“Ooooh!” a girlish voice suddenly says, right next to his ear. “This one’s awake too!”
Knowing he’s been found out, Khaslana instantly gets up and moving, trying to put distance between them. A small girl — with ball joints at her knees?! — blinks up at him. Is she a threat? She sure doesn’t look like one, but nothing here looks like anything he’s ever known. If anything, the materials and strangely shaped furniture remind him of Lygus, which is never a good thing.
The girl, clad in a strange white garment, makes a note on… some kind of teleslate?
And there, in the corner, are several Chrysos Heirs in varying states of waking. Aglaea, barely awake, touching her head like she has a massive headache, and Hyacine seems to be examining her. Phainon, still unconscious, is laid out on some kind of table next to them. Castorice is talking to the triplets, and Anaxa stands next to them, taking everything around them in with greedy, curious eyes. Cipher is watching everyone too, a suspicious gaze sliding over the people instead of the machines surrounding them, and next to her is Mydei, who — is looking straight at Khaslana.
"Two Deliverers?"
The girl turns and leans into his space, suddenly far, far too close. Khaslana freezes as she examines him, turning his face this way and that. “You’re telling me they’re not twins! Screwy, get in here, we either have a memoria lifeform come to flesh that managed to duplicate in the process, or there was corrupted data involved and I want to know everything about it yesterday!”
Is that… a godly power emanating from her?
“My apologies, Herta, I am still checking up on the Trailblazer and Dan Heng. I will join you once the exam has been completed,” a voice says from nowhere in particular, and Khaslana flinches. Several of the Chrysos Heirs do as well.
Before he can ask what is going on — though he’s not sure he’ll believe the answer even if they give him one — Phainon wakes with a gasp, shooting into a sitting position in an instant. “Cyrene!”
Hyacine instantly moves on from Aglaea to Phainon. “Nightmare?” she asks as she checks his temperature and pupils, then his pulse.
Phainon, with his hair all over the place and more than a little wild-eyed, says, “No, she was here. I swear I felt her—”
Hyacine frowns. Behind her, Anaxa cocks his head. The others react less favorably; even from the other side of the room, Khaslana can see what he is sure is more than one pitying look among the concern.
His grief has always been well known. That is something that never changes with lifetimes. Aedes Elysiae, and Cyrene in particular, is a story all of them know about. Khaslana clenches his fist. Pity is never easy to bear, though, whether you’ve seen it once or a thousand times over, no matter how well-meant.
Phainon can see it too. “I know it sounds insane, but she was there! I was fighting the black cloaked stranger and he fell against me and then — blue and golden light, and it was her.” His eyes fall onto Khaslana. “You felt it too, didn’t you? I’m not sure why you’re wearing my face, but… She was reaching out to me through you.”
And Khaslana, looking at the wide eyes directed his way, couldn’t help but laugh bitterly. “It was my face first. And I’ve had it for many, many more years than you as well.”
Anaxa slaps his fist into his open hand. “Time travel!”
The triplets turn to him. “Huh?!”
Anaxa looks down at their confused expressions and sighs and deigns to explain it to those of lesser intellect. “Phainon just implied his double is the black cloaked stranger. The black cloaked stranger has only ever been seen along with the black tide and killing Chrysos Heirs to take their Coreflames. Ergo, it is likely there is a second Flame Chase Journey party out there, because collecting more than one Coreflame makes no sense for personal power. The black cloaked stranger wears Phainon’s face and claims to have had it for longer than Phainon ever did. The logical conclusion: time travel.”
It is so familiar that Khaslana almost wants to cry.
Anaxa turns to him expectantly. “So, how many Coreflames do you have?”
“…” It is silent for a moment. All eyes are on him. “That,” he says, “is a very long story.”
And well. At that point, he has no choice but to tell it. Faces turn white and red around him at turns, and the girl in the white garment is scribbling on a teleslate like her life depends on it. When he gets to the part about how their world is made of data, born of memories, Anaxa smiles when his theory is confirmed, while the others around him pale.
“So we never had real bodies at all?” Castorice asks, shocked.
Khaslana looks at her a little helplessly. “Not really, no. Lygus was more real than any of us.”
The girl looks up from her teleslate and scoffs. “I could have told you that when you arrived. Now, go back to the cycles. I wonder what kind of programming was used… That would be excellent for the Simulated Universe.”
Cipher looks at her skeptically. “Who are you?”
“Wrong question!” the girl declares imperiously. “You should be asking why you’re here.”
And before Cipher can give in to what is clearly an impulse to either claw off her face or figure out what she thinks is most valuable in this world, only to steal it, the room gets even fuller than it already was.
Khaslana had not frankly thought that possible at this point.
But then he sees the face of an intellitron, and decides there's at least enough space for a fight.
Apparently, not all mechanical lifeforms are pure evil and aligned with Destruction, though Screwllum is involved with one of Madam Herta’s projects called “the Simulated Universe”. This, understandably, sounds a little too close to Amphoreus’ data-state for Khaslana’s comfort.
That Khaslana had been willing to risk fighting in close quarters just to protect his fellow Chrysos Heirs, even knowing he would have killed them a few hours ago… is also a revelation he’s trying to deal with.
One that likely would have been fatal for at least one person involved, had Caelus and Dan Heng not popped out from behind Screwllum to restrain him and calm down the other Chrysos Heirs. With them had come two other members of their Astral Express, the much-talked-about Mr. Welt and Sunday. Khaslana is not entirely sure what that was all about (a novel experience!), but the others seem to have heard stories enough for things to calm down pretty quickly.
Rolling his wrists to see if everything still works properly, he watches as everyone is sitting around in groups now. At a glance, triplets have started climbing all over Mydei, while Castorice is staring at her hands like they’re an alien lifeform (he has no idea what that is about either). Caelus is hugging the stuffing out of Cipher, while Hyacine is doing much the same to Dan Heng, who looks only a little disgruntledly squished. Phainon is talking to Welt and Sunday and Anaxa seems to have found his place with Screwllum and Herta.
“Anaxagoras, I was very impressed with your work with the limited scope of information provided!” Screwllum says. Khaslana narrows his eyes at him.
Anaxa scoffs. “Of course. The logical conclusion was the truth I sought.”
Herta, poking him like she has been poking about everyone in the last half hour, asks, “Are you still being held together by the remnants of the Coreflame?”
Anaxa doesn’t even seem to mind the molestation of his person as long as it’s for science. Khaslana thinks of the many lifetimes that man has ripped his own body apart for it, and that was when he technically had no physical body yet. He wonders how long it will take Hyacine to catch on and thump him on the head as “preventative medicine for his own good”.
Next to him, Aglaea sighs all too long-sufferingly. “There are more of him.”
Khaslana is currently, to be honest, occupied with most soul-destroying thoughts he’s trying not to be thinking, such as the fact that he’s not inside Amphoreus anymore and thus the original plan to save it won’t work anymore. There is a grief in believing he could save Aedes Elysiae in the end, but now he can't. And that grief is so hard to process because everyone he loves otherwise got out.
But did they? His eyes glide over the people surrounding him. The Chrysos Heirs.
They’re not his friends and family. They could have been, of course, had he and Phainon melded into one person. But they didn’t, and now he is here and he has… no one. Nothing but a vague sense of relief that they were saved, and a screaming sadness deep inside, threatening to drown him.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
An alarm goes off somewhere in the room. Khaslana’s eyes snap to the source of the sound, and it’s a… teleslate? No, Madam Herta had called them screens.
Screwllum is in front of it, tapping on several different icons, as Welt’s face grows graver next to him.
“What’s going on?”
Screwllum speaks up even as he continues reading data. “There is currently another expel event happening in Amphoreus, much like the one that ended up with your energy data being expelled from the planet and ending up in our synthesizer for clone bodies, with Caelus and Dan Heng sprawled next to it given they didn’t belong to your world in the first place.”
Phainon frowns. “It can’t be Cyrene — she ended up using up all her power, and on top of that, most of Khaslana’s and mine too.”
Khaslana clenches his fist. “There is only one entity on Amphoreus who has power enough to do anything similar. Irontomb in the Scepter. He must be sending Lygus after us, or Lygus has sent himself after us with Irontomb’s power now we’ve escaped his little experiment.” He turns to Screwllum. “Will he also manifest here?”
Screwllum shakes his head. “I fear this energy signature is much bigger than one of all of you combined. If Irontomb has indeed expelled Lygus from Amphoreus in order to go after you, he is using more than enough energy to manifest a body near the planet at once… Or, if Lygus is truly an outside entity like he told you, manifesting his real body.”
Dan Heng pales as he fights his way through the crowd to get to the desk. “Himeko is still there with March! We have to warn her!”
Sunday holds up his phone. “Already on it.” There’s a back and forth there, until he speaks up loudly again. “Black Swan said that March’s consciousness is stuck in Amphoreus, separated from her body by the ice. They can’t get her back in right now, but they’re moving. Danger to her body should be minimal.”
Dan Heng breathes a sigh of relief. “We can come back for her later, but she can’t come back from potentially dying if they meet Lygus now.”
Welt nods, putting a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll meet up with them near here soon.”
Herta waves him away. “You know where they can dock. But if you’re taking my fascinating new specimen with you, you’ll be sending me regular updates.”
Welt looks a little exasperated, but nods. “Of course, Madam Herta. I assume I can contact Asta about this?”
“That would be best, yes.” And with that, Herta is gone. A little more breathing room in here, at least. For how small she was, she definitely took up enough room for at least five people.
Khaslana’s mind is racing. Lygus had all but admitted that this was a race between Irontomb and Khaslana amassing power. That Khaslana’s actions multiplied Irontomb’s power, even if it was the only way to get another Aeon’s gaze on them somehow, someday.
And now, Khaslana has inadvertently escaped. And Irontomb has more than enough incentive to want him back.
“He’s after me.”
The others blink in confusion.
“I’ll go off on my own so they don’t bother you,” Khaslana says. These might not be his friends and family, but they’re the only Chrysos Heirs who ever had a slim hope in hell to get away from Irontomb, and he won’t let Lygus get to them now.
He’s been this way before. He needs to keep his eyes on the prize.
Overhead, a voice comes from nowhere again, mechanical in nature. Khaslana freezes.
“DOCKING. DOCKING. DOCK 4 BREACHED.”
“No time to lose,” Caelus says, and takes off running.
And at that point, what can they do but run after him?
The spaceship parked in dock four isn’t very big, but size doesn’t necessarily indicate threat. Just look at Hyacine, who is most certainly one of the hardest Chrysos Heirs to kill.
…Khaslana doesn’t want to be thinking about that right now.
It is much, much easier to zero in on the threat.
…Who is leaning against the spaceship, twirling purple-red hair around her finger like she hasn’t a care in the world. She has muscle behind her, a man with a menacing red gaze and a chest that could compete with Mydei’s, but her manner alone already tells Khaslana who the true threat is.
Whoever she is, she is a spider, and they have all walked into her web.
She smiles when she sees them, her eyes curving into crescents. “Hello, Astral Express Crew,” she says, holding up her hands as if that would somehow make her harmless.
Khaslana’s hand glides towards the weapon on his hip. From the corner of his eye, he can see that many of the others do the same.
The woman tuts. “Now, now, I’m only here for a pick-up. Elio has a new casting in the script and he’s willing to make a good deal for the little demigod’s help.”
“We’re not giving you any of them, Kafka,” Dan Heng says point-blank, hand tightly on his spear.
And just — Titans, Khaslana doesn’t have time for this. Any moment he lingers here is one moment more that Lygus has to come after them.
Kafka laughs. “I think you’ll find one of them will be very eager to go with us once he knows what we’re all about.” Her eyes flick to Khaslana, a movement so casual it must be calculated beyond belief. “Did you know that the Stellaron Hunter’s ultimate goal is the annihilation of a certain Aeon?”
Khaslana’s breath catches in his throat. “You’re hunting Nanook?”
“That is the plan, yes. Though we’d thought we’d start with your little intellitron enemy and his Irontomb. The Lord Ravagers are such pesky opponents, you see. I would rather not waste any more of Bladie’s lives on any… extras popping up.” She pats the wall of muscle next to her. He doesn’t move an inch, eyes glued to any movement their party might make. “Sustainability, and all that.”
Khaslana surges forward to join them, but Aglaea’s hand hooks into the back of his armor, holding him back.
“It occurs to me,” she says, “that having Lygus after you would most certainly help you set a trap. But do you have the knowledge our kind hosts did not? Do you know how to destroy a Scepter? From what I understand, to kill Lygus is to kill Irontomb, for otherwise he will simply get up again.”
Kafka’s eyes gleam dangerously. “A newcomer speaking up? I don’t believe I addressed you, Lady of the Golden Threads.”
“I simply wish to have assurance,” Aglaea says, tilting her chin up, “that my people will be safe. I may not have many left, but they are mine, I assure you. All of them.”
Khaslana… is not sure what to do with that, but it kindles a warm ember in his chest that he is quite desperate to protect.
Kafka cocks her head, as if taking Aglaea’s measure, and then says, “In that case, no, we don’t. Not yet. But we’ll get it, with him on our team.” She makes a come-hither gesture at Khaslana. “We have two men with his face here, don’t we? All he needs to do is give us a little strip tease, and we can pass him off as the other one. The Express is off on its merry jaunt across the universe, staying ahead of our little robot friend just by a hair each time, letting him catch just a tantalizing little glimpse of what he thinks is surely his prey… Only for you to lead him to the grasping jaws of death in the end. We’ll make sure it snaps shut, so don’t you worry your pretty little head about that.”
Aglaea doesn’t immediately assent. “Mr Welt, I would like your input as a representative of the Astral Express. Are you able and willing to assist us in such a ordeal, should we wish to?”
Welt nods gravely. “The tenets of the trailblaze are clear, Lady Aglaea. We fight and celebrate alongside those we encounter. We will aid you, if you ask.”
Lady Aglaea inclines her head. “Then I will ask that of you. But before that: Phainon, are you willing?”
Phainon rests a fist over his heart. “Always.”
Aglaea turns her unseeing gaze to him. “And you, Khaslana?”
He cannot help but mirror Phainon’s gesture. “Yes, Lady of the Golden Threads.”
She smiles, brilliant and bold for just a single moment, as if she has found that one way for the Flame Chase Journey to succeed.
Perhaps she has.
“Then we are all in agreement.”
And with that, she lets go of his armor and leaves him free to go.
So he does.
Khaslana leaves the Chrysos Heirs and the Astral Express members behind him and walks towards his future.