Chapter I - Where Peace and Rest Can Never Dwell

M.E. 721

Ardyn was certain that even if he'd spent every moment of the last two thousand years imagining what the future would look like, he would never have envisioned this.

Besithia's facility was an endless maze of stark, flat walls and floors, polished to a shine beneath blazing white lights that made Ardyn's eyes ache and his head throb. The air was dry and smelled of chemicals—warm enough to be bearable but too chilled to be truly comfortable. There were no soft surfaces. No cushions, no curtains, no tapestries. The couches were hard and upholstered with unyielding leather. Even his bed was uncomfortably firm, the blankets rough and thin.

There was no life here. Merely existence. Ardyn sincerely hoped that the rest of the world was different.

He'd been here for seven months. Or so he'd been told. He'd spent most of that time in a coma and he had no recollection of the few times he'd woken. He remembered being freed, though he rather wished he didn't. Cold horror settled in his gut every time his mind replayed the screams of the young man on Angelgard, every time he closed his eyes and saw that twisted, dying face, or relived stolen memories.

Perhaps Somnus had been right. Perhaps he was a monster.

But at least he wasn't as much a monster as the man standing next to him.

"Have you reconsidered?" Besithia asked. His tone was conversational, but something dark lurked behind it.

"I've no desire to make daemons for you." Ardyn glanced out at the bleak, mountainous terrain outside the window. "Rest assured, I am grateful to you for liberating me. But my calling is to eradicate daemons; not create more."

Besithia snorted. "I don't believe in callings. Daemons are simply another tool. We would be fools not to exploit their potential."

"We would be fools to loose them upon our fellow man."

"Why?" Besithia started down the hall and Ardyn was forced to follow. "It's hardly different from firing a gun at them, or dropping a bomb."

Ardyn snarled. "You know why it is different, Verstael. The research in your laboratory tells me as much."

Besithia gave a dismissive wave. "Biological weapons are a reality of warfare in this day and age. The Empire already employs Anthrax, Coxiella, Cholera, and Black Typhus. I don't see how weaponizing the Scourge is any more dangerous." A flash of his access card and they passed through an irising door into a sloped passageway. "It's not as infectious as Coxiella, nor as contagious as Rotavirus or Malaria."

"Yet it is invariably deadly," Ardyn countered.

"If an infection is caught in the first forty-eight hours it will respond to antibiotics and antimalarials." They reached level ground and Besithia looked over his shoulder. "It is only superstition that keeps people afraid of the Scourge. One plasmodium is not going to bring about an apocalypse."

Under his breath, Ardyn growled. "Your arrogance just might."

The way Besithia glanced back at him made Ardyn certain that he'd been heard. But he said nothing and carried on, through another irising door and into a space even more devoid of life than those above. Here there were no concessions to civilization. Just metal gantries and reinforced concrete and buzzing fluorescent lights.

"Now, I'm aware that I cannot force you to do anything anathema to your nature, but allow me to at least make sure your decision in properly informed."

Before them was a long observation window. Lights came on in the space beyond it and Ardyn gasped. Encased in ice and lying prone beneath the blasts from massive freezer units, was the Infernian. Small, for an astral, but every bit as handsome as the legends claimed.

"You subjugated a god... and brought him here?"

Besithia smiled a serpent's smile. "He was sound asleep, just like the legends said he'd be, so we put him on ice." He leaned on the railing and looked at Ardyn. "Do you think you could turn him?"

Ardyn blinked. "Into a daemon?"

"If you manage to daemonify a deity, you could learn truths no mere mortal could ever dream of knowing. You'll access two thousand years of his memories, and, if you can control him, he'll be a weapon of supreme power. It's certainly an enticing offer, isn't it?" Besithia gestured out at the sleeping god. "Just think. You could exact sweet revenge through divine retribution."

"You know nothing of what I want," Ardyn spat.

"I don't," Besithia said. "But I know you have no other options."

Ice settled in Ardyn's stomach at those words. He'd suspected from the start that Besithia would not allow him to leave, but he'd held out hope that he would at least be given the freedom to choose not to be part of his experiments. He had no idea what sort of tortures might await him, but memories of racks and stakes and boiling cauldrons rebounded upon him mind. He steeled himself. His body knew pain. Besithia would find him a well-taught student.

Still grinning like a shark, Besithia pushed off from the railing, fingering something in his pocket. "Well, shall we?"

Ardyn lingered a moment at the glass. If he awakened the Pyreburner could he bargain for his freedom? If he called upon a messenger, let Shiva know what had become of her beloved, would the gods grant him the release of death? Or at least send him somewhere far from the dreadful man who was beckoning toward another door. He supposed he could try fighting his way out... But did the young soldiers and researchers deserve his wrath?

"Come! See the fruits of my magitek research. This way."

"It would seem you and I are both prisoners here," Ardyn muttered to the slumbering deity before trailing behind Besithia.

As they strolled into a large, open warehouse space, the scientist continued. "The ancient civilization of Solheim, forefathers of our magiteknology, once flourished on this land. Had they not incurred the wrath of the gods, they may have remained prosperous to this day."

"And you wish to restore them to greatness." Thoughts of Aera, dancing about ancient ruins, taking rubbings of carvings for study at home, bounding from inscription to inscription with the joy of a child, choked him.

"To surpass them. Which is why I need you to lend me your strength. But I'm certain magiteknology and daemons are the keys to unlocking the door to a new future."

Ardyn exhaled. "Chief Besithia, I thank you for the information you have provided me... and for the pleasant memories of times past... But looking over your research has only strengthened my conviction that the Scourge is not something to be toyed with."

Whatever Besithia had intended to say in response remained unspoken. A thrill of magical energy prickled on Ardyn's skin; the sharp whine of a warp sounded high above him. Men and women in fitted black uniforms landed in a line of perfectly synchronised crouches. Their faces and hair were obscured by hoods and veils. The after-image of their warps were blue... Just like Somnus.

"Lucians! Damn it!" Besithia fled, though the soldiers paid him no mind.

"Qun'mi Squad. Adagium sighted," the nearest soldier said. "Requesting backup from Nimbus Squad."

Ardyn remained where he stood. The soldier before him sounded about his age—his physical age, at least—and moved with a restrained confidence. She was too old to still be a zealot, and she sounded reasonable. Her features, what he could see of them, were classically Lucian.

"Did you come to kill me?"

"Or die trying."

Something in the air changed. It was heavy, like breathing water. The world pitched around him. Sweat prickled on his skin and his heart raced in his chest. The blue warp-light distorted the soldiers' faces—dissolved hands and masks to reveal the faces beneath. Every one of them was Somnus.

"Just as you would kill me. Right, brother?"

Ardyn shrunk back, stomach twisting, skin crawling in anticipation of pain. Somnus' blade came to his hand already dripping in blood. Ardyn turned, but Somnus was behind him too. A circle of him—surrounding Ardyn.

"Well, I'm afraid to say you'll never know the satisfaction of taking my life. I'm already dead, and have been for a long time." The circle of Somnus' held their swords aloft and Ardyn flinched. Somnus snarled, voice like dripping hemlock. "Though I may be gone, my blood, my desires, still live on in Lucis. They live on in the minds and hearts of the soldiers before you. What sort of legacy have you left behind, brother?"

Ardyn lashed out, his scarlet blade coming to his hand in a shower of crystalline shards, but his swing met empty air. Somnus dissolved into mist with a laugh and someone cried out. The soldiers, who had warped clear, charged. He dodged and parried, but he was outnumbered. A spear tip caught him in the ribs and a curved knife blade managed a clean slash of the ligaments of both knees. The pain was fleeting but still drew a cry.

"While you were lost in slumber, I was busy building a kingdom," Somnus continued, his voice coming from all around. "You have nowhere to return."

It was impossible to parry all the soldiers' strikes. For every blade turned aside, a warp-strike caught him. For every warp-strike dodged, a sword would cleave his flesh.

"I don't want to fight you," he said as he held the leader in a sword-lock.

"Then don't."

Face-to-face he could see her eyes and they were cold—focused. "Please. Let us talk."

A sword drove between his ribs. Black blood splattered on the concrete. He struck out, reflexive and instinctual, and the Rakshasa Blade cut through bone and sinew. One of the soldiers—a young man—fell in a spray of blood, his head no longer attached. Ardyn blinked, transfixed, his heart thumping in his throat, and Somnus' voice spoke again.

"Don't you realize? You're the scourge who ought to be purged. Perhaps you ought to sleep away your sadness."

Steel flashed in the corner of his eye. A warp sounded behind him. The world pitched again. Ardyn gave a cry and power burst from him, throwing the soldiers to the ground in a cloud of miasma and purple light.

"You monster."

The armiger whirled to life around him. Red, crystalline weapons launched forth, skewering the soldiers.

"I hope you know it's your fault Aera is dead," Somnus commented as blood spread over the concrete. Reinforcements warped in and Somnus' voice became a sneer. "That girl proved your undoing, you know."

"No." The word rang hollow. Ardyn could smell blood—blood on white linen, blood running over his hands, blood carelessly flicked from a sword. He didn't wait for the attack this time; he rushed the soldiers, overpowering and daemonifying the first several who came within reach.

"You were too caught up in your idealized delusions to save your beloved." Somnus laughed, but for a moment it sounded wrong—too deep, and tinny, like it was coming from a speaker. "You deserve to wander the darkness for all time."

The floor shook beneath Ardyn's feet. The fans to his left belched fire, melting the chain link separating them from the rest of the hangar. Sparks and shattered fan blades exploded outward, bouncing off the walls and floor, trailed by molten metal raindrops. The few remaining soldiers broke off, their attention shifted to the spreading flames.

Besithia remerged, trotting away from the burning control room, as a massive shape rose from the wreckage. A crown of curving horns adorned in rings and chains of gold. Coppery flesh glowing like molten metal and wreathed in flame. Eyes white hot in a snarling face.

"Blast." Besithia sounded more annoyed than surprised.

Ardyn staggered back. "He's awake!" Ifrit spoke, but without an Oracle to interpret, his words were unintelligible. He shouldn't have been able to break out. He'd been frozen solid. Months, Besithia had kept him imprisoned, and he woke now? Think about that later.

"We must stop him before he destroys everything."

It had been a long time since Ardyn had fought a god. He was out of practice, unarmoured, alone. Besithia was fleeing; the Lucian soldiers hung back, seemingly uncertain whose side to take.

Ardyn's heart still raced, Somnus' words echoing in his ears. Heat washed over him and the urge to flee, to hide, to curl to the floor in submission, nearly overcame him. His skin crawled and nausea burned in his gut. He stood transfixed, his palm sweating around the hilt of his sword. Once more the thought of offering an alliance crossed his mind. But Ifrit did not share his hesitation.

One of the Infernian's enormous hands closed tight around Ardyn and lifted him from the floor. He spoke again in the astral tongue but Ardyn paid no heed to the words, only to the burning, choking heat of his grip. The smell of smoke, the crackle of flames, dry, hot air in his lungs... He couldn't move. He was burning. It was too much... too much. Remembered sensations burst upon him—wrists bleeding and raw beneath rough rope, pitch clinging to his skin, heavy, viscous, filling his nostrils... boiling. Screaming as skin cracked and peeled and burned away. Screaming until his lungs filled with fire.

Ardyn thrashed, grabbed at the hand that held him, and dug his nails in. Power erupted from his veins, sucking the light from the room. Ifrit howled and sharp pain spiked into Ardyn's skull. Images and sensations he had no words for flared behind his eyes like novas—visions of continents with no names; strange beasts and seas teeming with life neither plant nor animal and utterly alien; visions of Solheim; of great cities and crowds in bright clothes; of towering explosions that blossomed like second suns; of freezing eternities of darkness and stars and barren worlds of sand and stone and ice. A collision in the dark. Stone splintering in eerie silence. Two asteroids spinning away from one another—one, white and crystalline, vanishing into the endless night—its glittering shards tumbling in every direction. Falling in a ball of fire. Colossal cycads and warm, shallow seas. Mossy earth and bright sunlight. Nights that held no terrors. White crystal meteors punching craters in the ground—plants rotting into grey soup wherever they landed. Animals dying, spilling black ichor from their eyes, noses, mouths, and pores. Bodies twisting into new shapes, rising to hunt as the sun went down.

The crystal. His own face reflected there.

"No..."

Ardyn dropped to the floor, gasping like a drowning man. The concrete beneath him, the tarp-draped machinery, and the panelled walls came back into focus, painted orange in the light of the fires.

Ifrit crumpled to his knees with a strangled sound. Glistening black spread over his flesh, draining him of colour and threading, spidery, through his veins. The nails of his left hand lengthened into talons, gouging slashes in the floor. He spoke, and this time Ardyn understood the words.

"You dare to subjugate the divine?"

Ardyn stared past him as he disappeared, as golden light pierced his chest, the image of his face in the crystal lodging in his heart like a morningstar. "I was the one chosen to be king...?"

He was still dizzy, still buzzing with his racing pulse. He squeezed his eyes shut, tried to force the panic down, but the floor swayed beneath him. Darkness closed in—warm, comforting. The soft scent of sylleblossoms drifted in as a distant voice called.

"Ardyn... Ardyn."

There was soil beneath his feet. Around him, in the darkness, the only light was the gentle golden glow of pyreflies. Wheat swayed around him and on a patch of bare ground, a body lay—glowing, clad in white, blonde hair flaring about them like a halo.

Aera.

Ardyn staggered to her side, put his hands to her slender shoulders. "Aera." At his touch, she stirred.

"Forgive me." Her voice broke, as if she were close to tears. She sat up, wound her fingers in Ardyn's shirt. She felt real... alive... Her skin was warm. Her chest rose and fell with her breath. "I defied the will of the gods and revealed to Somnus that you had been chosen to be king. I never dreamt he would try to kill you."

She wasn't alive. But this was no hallucination. Ardyn brushed his palm against her cheek. "But he did. Somnus fooled everyone so he could usurp the throne." He failed to stop the bitterness that entered his voice. "Everything that happened... it's all his fault."

Aera rose to her knees and seized Ardyn's shoulders. "No! Listen to me! It's my fault. I'm the one who ruined your future. This was divine retribution for my sins."

"You've no sins to atone for." Ardyn reached up to cup her face but she collapsed against him. He couldn't fathom why she would want him to blame her, couldn't begin to imagine the effort it must have taken to appear to him like this. He cradled her, wound his fingers in her hair and looked upward into the inky blackness. "Gods! Answer me! Why have you burdened us with this fate?" He didn't expect the gods to heed his call, but the demand was cathartic. And he wouldn't let Aera see how resigned he had become.

His bravado broke when Aera released a pained noise. "Aera." She curled in on herself and he reached out with his powers, the instinct to alleviate her pain taking over. Violet light flared in the dark. Aera cried out and it was a knife in Ardyn's heart. She thrashed and shame and horror twisted behind his ribs. "No!" he wailed as black spread through Aera's veins. "Aera, please."

In a sudden burst of strength, she shoved him back. "In the names of the gods above... fulfill your calling, Ardyn, and punish me for my sins."

"Aera..."

"Kill me."

The words struck him like a slap. He froze, staring agape at her as she collapsed to the ground. This couldn't be real. It couldn't. Another nightmare, some symptom of his... what had Besithia's doctors called it? Post Traumatic Stress?

"That's right. Kill her." The voice of his brother slithered into his ear like poison and he stepped into view out of the darkness as naturally as if he'd been there from the start. "Put that monster out of its misery. Just like I did."

Tears left tracks down Ardyn's cheeks. "I... I can't. My calling is to save lives. Not take them."

"Just like you saved that innocent man by turning him into a daemon?"

Aera met Ardyn's eyes, holding his gaze and paying no heed to Somnus. "Please, Ardyn... You must live..."

"I can't," Ardyn whispered. "Not without you."

The sound of the armiger raised the hairs on Ardyn's neck. Somnus swaggered into view again, brandishing Ardyn's own knife. He pressed it into Ardyn's hands in a mockery of gentleness and curled his own hands around them.

"Come. Why not give the lady what she wants?"

Somnus forced the knife down and Ardyn had to seize every muscle in his body to keep it from striking true. His brother was strong... too strong. He'd never been this strong in life. Arms weakened by millennia suspended on chains shook with the strain. Somnus seemed to require no effort. His eyes focused on the blade, his face twisted in malice.

Not again. He wouldn't let this happen again.

Ardyn threw every bit of strength he had into an upward shove and, with a shout, sent the knife sailing away. Somnus let him fall to the ground, chuckling.

"Allow me."

Crystalline weapons erupted from the air above Aera's prone form. Ardyn screamed, dove toward her, but too late. The blades came down; Ardyn shut his eyes. No sound met his ears save his own ragged breath. He remained prone, shielding his head with his hands, face down where he'd fallen. He could still smell sylleblossoms, but the ground beneath his forehead was concrete, not soil.

"I'll never forgive you, Somnus."

ά/δ/ά/ς/ί/μ/м

The hiss of the door opening broke the silence in the room. Ardyn didn't lift his head from his hands, nor move from his perch on the edge of the exam table. The panic had left him hollow in its wake—wrung out and clammy. He wanted to sleep but he feared the dreams that would come.

"That was excellent work, today."

Ardyn could have spat at Besithia. Some dark and hungry part of him imagined daemonifying him.

"I can only imagine what you must have learned."

"Nothing of aid to your research, I assure you."

Besithia moved closer, until Ardyn could see his boots on the pale floor. "You must want vengeance after all you saw today. Aid my work and I can offer you infinite opportunity to exact justice upon Lucis."

Ardyn raised his head and fixed his eyes upon Besithia. A chill crawled over his skin as he remembered that laugh. The one that hadn't sounded like Somnus. The one that had sounded like it was coming from a speaker.

"How much of that was you?"

Besithia was still for a moment, then he sighed. A guilty smirk tugged at his mouth. "You're cleverer than I gave you credit for."

Ardyn snarled through tears that threatened to fall from burning eyes. "Why?"

"Because it got you where I needed you." Besithia's expression was dispassionate. "PTSD symptoms are easy to manipulate. Just as daemons are easy to contain. You'll find I'm skilled at both. Now, you can help me with my magitek research willingly and be rewarded with freedom of movement about this facility, or you can refuse and be confined to this room as an experimental subject. The choice is yours."

Some choice.

Ardyn set his jaw. "I will not help you build an army of daemons to murder and subjugate. You may not believe in callings; I don't care. But I have mine, and it is to preserve life." He looked away from Besithia to the plain, white wall across from him. "Do as you will. I will give you nothing."

For a moment, Besithia was silent. Then, with a derisive snort, he turned toward the door. "Resist if it makes you feel better. But I'll get what I want." The door shut behind him and Ardyn let the tears fall from his eyes. For all the show of hospitality, he'd simply exchanged one prison for another. One with neither fresh air nor anything by which to measure the passage of day and night. And while he no longer hung on hooks, there was, instead, the promise of more pain to come.

He wasn't certain if he should ever have expected anything else.

ά/δ/ά/ς/ί/μ/м

Besithia was nothing if not creative. Ardyn had believed himself prepared for any sort of torture mankind could concoct, but, alas, with technology and science, had come fresh horrors to inflict. His cell was emptied until all that remained were four white walls and an open drain in one corner. At first the lights were doused and he was left in utter darkness for hours... days? Then, with no warning, the lights were brought up to full, blinding, brightness. They remained that way for weeks. Besithia would periodically visit to harvest miasma from him and during those visits the lights would turn purple, searing his skin until miasma poured from him.

Occasionally the light or darkness would be accompanied by droning noise so loud that his eardrums bled. So loud that he couldn't hear his own thoughts. So loud that it left him shivering and dazed, lying curled on the floor, crying and deaf. The only time he left the room was when he was hauled into a shower and hosed down with freezing water. He hadn't been provided clothes after his first ice-bath, and he returned to his cell naked. What food he was given was tasteless, odourless, grey mush. He was rarely allowed to sleep.

None of Besithia's methods hurt or damaged him as much as tortures he had already suffered at the hands of his brother, yet, somehow, they were swifter to wear away his resolve. He was exhausted, cold, aching down to the marrow of his bones, all sense of time shattered, half-deaf and disoriented. Resisting required energy he did not possess. He stopped fighting during Besithia's harvests. And when his underlings began visiting to draw blood, Ardyn remained passive, watching the little vials fill with thick, black fluid.

But when Besithia had him placed in a larger cell—this one full of people—and demanded that he daemonify them all, Ardyn refused. He refused, even when the purple lights came on. Even when one of the guards jabbed a rod against his side and electricity burned through him. Even as his muscles spasmed, as pain arced along every nerve, as his bowels released. And he refused, even when Besithia had every one of them—men, women, children—shot dead before his eyes.

He was left in that cell for a few days, and though he had no holy oil and none of the dead appeared to be Lucian, he granted each of them their last rites. There was naught else he could do.

Besithia tried again, with animals, soldiers, captured rebels, captured Lucians. Each time he refused, Ardyn spent weeks on a metal frame, held in a pose reminiscent of that in which he'd been suspended on Angelgard. Electricity, a hundred times stronger than the guards' cattle prods, was run through him, left on until his heart stopped or until he passed out. And all the while, visions of Somnus continued to haunt him.

He couldn't begin to guess how long he endured. It could have been months, it could have been years. But his resolve eventually cracked. Two weeks with no sleep, an ice water shower, and eight hours of electroshock and he caved. Besithia asked for information—Ifrit's knowledge of Solheim magiteknology—and Ardyn gave it to him. The torture ceased. He was given clothes. And when he answered the next day's questions without resistance, he was given a bed.

Nevertheless, he tried to resist when he was placed in a cell with several dozen falxfangs. But they'd been starved beforehand, and they attacked, despite undoubtedly smelling the Scourge on him. Bone-tired and outnumbered, panic won out. He daemonified all of them.

It was behemoths next time. Then behemoths became malboros and birdbeasts and spiracorns. Then animals became humans. Stolen memories crowded his every moment, both waking and dreaming. Memories of family, of homes, of sparkling cities and quiet towns, of long black roads and colourful mechanical carriages. Cars... They were called cars.

He remembered running down garula, sinking fangs into their throats to haul them to the ground. Baying to pack-mates as his prey struggled its last. Firearms drills in a cramped training room, pistol kicking in his hand, each bullet striking true on the paper target. Laying explosives under sandy desert roads. Watching from atop a butte as Niflheim troop transports vanished in bursts of flame and noise. His clan's yurts burning while armour-clad soldiers dragged him and his family into trucks.

The worst memories were those in which he was the monster. The rebel who beat his children before bed each night. The Lucian spy who stabbed another girl in a back alley over a bag of pills. The soldier who raped a woman in every village he helped pacify. The remembered feeling of blood running, warm, over his hands, of a wooden rod reverberating with the impact against small bodies, and the remembered sounds of creaking tables, loud sobbing, and the slap of flesh left him sleepless and nauseous.

The horror of it all was that the more memories he absorbed, the harder it became to distinguish those that were stolen from those that were his own. The thoughts, the feelings, the dreams and beliefs of hundreds of living beings collided and blended, shattering and reforming until he hardly recognized himself. He didn't recognize the fits of anger, the thrumming urge for violence, for blood, the thrill that rushed through him when another daemonified victim stilled beneath his hand. A thrill that left him retching in a corner of the cell, shame and horror and disgust wringing his guts. What remained recognizably him careened wildly between periods of fatigue and crushing emptiness, bursts of mad laughter, and long stretches of uncontrollable weeping.

He was losing his mind. Worse, he was losing himself. And there was no telling who, or what, would emerge from his ashes.

He would have given anything to return to Angelgard. Hell, even Pitioss would be better than this place. But he'd long since stopped beseeching the gods for mercy. His prayers fell on deaf ears.

As ever, he was alone.