Even the Sky has a Limit

Disclaimer: All known and recognisable characters, names and locations are property of Square Enix. I am just being depressing with them.

Even the sky has a limit and even the farthest point on the horizon is eventually breached. Every story has an end; all legends eventually fade and are, inevitably, surpassed. It is the way of things. The greatest gift mortality has to offer and the greatest insult to those of us who have been forced to face our imminent demise.

The sun is rising to the east (unsurprisingly – I suppose it is a little much to expect the laws of nature to change simply to please my sense of the dramatic) on the last day of my life. Although I suppose, as I will be well and truly dead by noon of this very day, this is not the last full day of my life. It is merely the last dawn and I shall not see another.

In many ways one might suggest that I have left it a little late to write…….whatever this rambling diatribe ends up being. My memoirs, perhaps? My final confession – an opportunity to apologise for my entire life? - frankly I have no idea why I choose now to pick up pen and paper. Perhaps it is simply boredom. There is nothing so tedious as waiting for others to decide when I should die.

You might wonder why it is that I, the legendary sky pirate Balthier (and I doubt you can even begin to imagine how much that appellation has come to grate upon my nerves) would be content to passively await my liaison with death, my fitting for the final necktie with equanimity. The truth is I always suspected that this would be my end and honestly (now there is a novel phrase for me) if I must die at all, I may as well go out with drum-roll and sombre spectacle.

I was asked if I wanted a priest to shrive my soul. I do not think my keepers were overly impressed with me when I laughed. The simple fact, however, is that I had not had cause to laugh like that in quite some time. Gods, but I have been locked up here, a caged bird with clipped wings, for so long I shall thoroughly enjoy the chance for some fresh air and a change of scenery before they hang me from the neck 'til dead.

It is a pity that this morn's sunrise is such a lacklustre affair. There is a haziness to the entire picture, a lack of clarity. The colours are muted and the clouds heavy. The view from my narrow barred window is as uninspiring as ever. There are now fifty-four apples on the nearest apple tree and the farmer who tends the paddock just beyond the grounds of my prison will need to fix the fence before long, there is another slat come loose and soon the sheep will be escaping.

This is the sort of mind-numbing minutiae that I have had to entertain myself with for the last however many months. I used to save Ivalice from tyranny and liberate the denizens of mythical floating countries from their centuries old oppression, now I worry that a farmer I have never met nor seen will lose his bloody sheep.

I have become quite fond of those sheep. It is not a large flock and in the spring I watched the ewes with their lambs gambol over the roiling grass and frolic in the wild flowers. There is a black sheep among the flock that I have developed a particular affinity for, which should come as little surprise to anyone.

How ridiculous. I just caught myself considering that I will miss those sheep and my astonishingly boring view. That of course is the gaol fever talking. In something like a little less than three hours I shall not be missing anything at all. It is a sobering thought. Existence has become a persistent habit for me and I am not sure I am quite ready to relinquish that habit just yet.

It is an indescribable feeling, waiting to die. I suppose if one is sick or mortally wounded the prospect of death might seem a blessing, but I am neither. I am not even old – thirty-eight is no age to die. There is an unreality to all this, a profound sense of the surreal. Everything that my senses and my body tells me is real and current yet seems strange to my mind as some part of me (that has not and never will resign itself, as the rest of me has, to this fate) struggles to strain every last nuance and texture from the most mundane sensation.

The shirt on my back itches over the flea bites covering my skin and instead of being irritated a part of me savours the feeling for soon enough I will not feel anything ever again. The dawn light, pink as watered wine or blood in spring water, splashes through the bars of my window and my eyes feast on the sight. There will be no more sunlight for me, soon enough. Outside the window, where life goes on and will continue to do so without me, the birds sing their morning chorus and my ears fight to retain some memory of the melody.

There can be no doubt about it, death is the ultimate cruelty. Life can be monstrous, short, cruel and vicious. I have seen it and I have felt it, and that is while knowing that I have always been one of the fortunate, but life is what I was born for and I do not want to leave it.

Ah, woe is me; for what poor brigand and scoundrel, when finally caught upon the rack of their own misdeeds, does not yearn for life and liberty and the chance to do it all over again?

I do not repent, you understand. I'll not make excuses for my life, not here and not before the block. I am the sum and substance of all I have done but my deeds, ill or otherwise, do not define the totality of myself.

I have been tried and convicted of murder and more. I have the blood of others on my hands I do not deny it, though will say only that those I killed were also guilty of crimes the equal of, or the greater than, my own. Still for all that I have shed blood and taken the lives of others, or perhaps because I have extinguished the totality of other men's lives in my time, I can say with full conviction that execution is a foul matter.

It is humbling and infuriating to know that in some two and half hours a man I do not know will take my life simply because it is his job to do so. I have met hired killers and mercenaries before, I have been accused of being the later myself, but those men and women at least risked their own lives in the commission of their grizzly vocation. The hangman who will end me will fix the noose and pull the lever and once I am dead and in my flimsy coffin, go home to his family without a hair out of place.

Death should mean something, shouldn't it? We who live should be affected by the death of another. Murder should hurt, it should stain us, but I know from my own experience that it does not. Life is cheap, some lives more so than others but eventually all flesh is grass.

This is a maudlin beginning isn't it? I am ashamed of myself to write such melodramatic twaddle. This was most definitely not my intention; still I suppose a man can be forgiven a touch of the macabre melancholia on the day of his state sanctioned execution.

Of course, when all is said and done, this is also no beginning, but instead an explanation of the end, which, now I think on it, had its genesis many years ago. After all, that is hardly surprising, for what is a beginning except the precursor for the end?

Ah, but I am going around and around in circles, am I not? You, whoever you may be who come across these words, you do not want to hear me bemoaning my fate. It is quite contemptible of me, for who can in good conscience lament that a criminal should die a criminal's death, hmm?

No, you want to know the how and the why, the gory details, the description of the betrayal that resulted in my terrible fall from grace. For that is what makes a great story, a thrilling yarn fit for the title of legend, isn't it? The blood and the tears and the hero fallen and defeated, these are the things that quicken the blood and make a story.

I have never been a hero, you understand, but I have in the past been known to perform a passable imitation.

I have been many things in my life: a son, a traitor, an exile and a sky pirate, a criminal and a lady's man, even, once or twice, a father (albeit one in absentia whose precious little bastard-born are best off without me). None of that matters; the masks we wear, the titles we appropriate and the roles we assume. It is all dust on the winds of time in the end. I know this; I have always known this in my cynical little heart. Now I can proudly prove the fact.

I was right, I can declare before the scaffold, it is all for naught in the end.

Twenty-two years of running from start to finish and my damnation is now complete. My flight is over, I am running still but there is nowhere left to go. I run on the spot, a man rushing towards his death and trapped waiting for others to release my soul to whatever punishment or ecstasy await here after.

They tell me, my jailors, that my execution is to be a private affair, contained within the high imposing walls of this old fortress turned private prison that sits in the middle of nowhere far from any town. The gibbet is being erected as I write faintly I hear the hammering and sawing as workmen construct my last stage.

I am a celebrity, you see, my executioners fear that I or one of my adherents might attempt a rescue. They fear that the adulation of the crowds come to see me die will grant me wings so that I might fly away from the sentence of death I have long earned; my own assurances that I have no adherents or magickal tricks on hand to affect a dramatic last minute escape fall on deaf ears.

Still, I have it on good authority that I'll have quite an audience for my curtail call closing act. I understand that the retired Judge Magister Gabranth will be in attendance. I can't imagine why. The man behind his brother's metal mask is not a man I had thought to be much enamoured of a good hanging, but I suppose he has his reasons. I simply won't be around to hear of them. There will representatives from Dalmasca and Bhujerba also present to watch me swing, Landis and Archadia as well.

Yes indeed, my execution will be quite the international event. Perhaps there will be some manner of state banquet once my twitching corpse is dropped into the ground? Those friends in high places who could not save me from my own self-destruction can but sate their masochistic conscience watching me die; oh well, each man to his own I suppose.

Vaan and Penelo will likely not be present to watch my end, but then they know I'm guilty, and what is more, they know that I have no will to be rescued.

It has been many weeks since Vaan and his sweet-faced partner came to visit me. If I recall Penelo wept and beseeched me, most tearfully, to think of what I do to those who care for me still, while Vaan simply stared at me hard eyed in a red face.

'I always knew you were selfish but I never knew you were this selfish. Do you really think she'd want this for you?'

I wonder, Vaan, if you will ever come to read this little confession? I wonder if you will remember saying those words to me the day that the diplomacy failed and even Her Majesty Dalmasca could no longer halt the proceedings enshrouding my death. I wonder, also, if you will ever realise how terribly misguided those words were? Of all the emotional leverage you might have thought to use against me, evoking her ghost was the poorest choice.

Of course your absence since that day, whenever it was, might be answer enough. Perhaps you know that I chose this path, just like all others, and I'll see it through to the end. It was always my fate to die.

It should not have been hers.

'What about Mona and little Isla? What about your children Balthier? Are you happy that they will grow up believing their father is a murderer and died on the scaffold?'

It was typical of Penelo to try and use my little ones against me. It has always been her failing to believe others have the same sense of morality she does, or that any of us would even wish to aspire to such lofty heights.

The truth is that my little girls, those sweet faced toddlers in bonnets and petticoats, barely know me anyway. I have never been a father to them, or any sort of comfort to their mothers. I never wished to be; my paternal devotion extending no further than the rare visit and financial support given their mothers through intermediaries. I understand that Isla's mother has since married a perfectly respectable merchant banker and chance is good that he will be a fine father for my youngest little one, in any respect.

With any luck my daughters will grow up with no memory of me whatsoever. It is all I could ever wish for them.

There is a large black crow perched on the outer encasement of my barred window. It is peering at me with eyes that should be pure black but have, instead, a reddish shine to them. The bird and I stare at each other in peaceable silence for some time. It is a cold day today, the bite of winter on the air. I could rise and shut the shutters but I do not wish to do so. I have never minded the cold.

I wonder is death cold……or does it burn?

The crow continues to regard me with curious solemnity; head cocked at an angle and those reddish eyes almost remind me of her. I wonder would she have wanted to be a bird, to reincarnate within Ivalice as a creature to whom the trees are home once more?

It is a foolish fancy of mine; she is well and truly gone. Gone back to her damnable Green Way. She is worm food now. Her flesh and her bones buried deep in the black soil under the gnarled and invasive roots of her beloved Golmore Jungle.

I put her there myself. Carried her body under that dark canopy and returned her to her home to be devoured. The Green Way victorious in the end, as she always knew it would be.

Gods but there had been a part of me, savage hume heathen that I am, that had wanted to take lighted torch to those low hanging tendrils and vines, that thick carpet of roots and foliage. I wanted to watch the jungle burn. I did not want to take her back to that place, to the sisters who would not mourn her and the Wood that had once dared condemn her.

I did take her back though. I did all that she would have wanted me to do. There was nothing else that I could do for her but honour the last wishes and final rites that I should never have had to uphold. I should not have had to live in an Ivalice that did not contain her living breathing self.

It is the hume that should die first. This is a rule that should have been inviolate.

It was always my fate to die and yet she betrayed our covenant when she, my proud and ancient partner, was not quite good enough to avoid the lucky strike of one no-account flatfoot patrolman.

I don't know who was more surprised by her death; the man who killed her almost in accident or me.

She was dead before she hit the ground. I have seen enough death to know this. I have seen wounds far worse than hers, but her blood on obsidian marble tile will still stain my eyelids even after I am dead. I rather think that I will see her, dead on the marble, red on black and white silk hair all over, even as the noose snaps my neck. I am resigned to it. I was condemned from the moment her body hit the floor and all else is simply affectation after the fact.

I killed them all; the whole patrol. Oh, I was swift and quick. They did not suffer a protracted death. I did not prolong the agony of those who had killed her. I simply killed them and then I picked up her body that no magicks would heal, and walked away.

I was accused of many things when finally apprehended. I was the evil in this story. I was the villain who had been caught in the commission of a robbery. I should have surrendered in good grace and simply escaped whatever gaol or dungeon I was dropped in quietly and without rancour a short time later, as I had done so many times before.

I should have done many things differently, I have never disputed this. Yet even the leading man must take his cues from the other players sharing his stage. I am not the only one whose actions were at fault. She should not have died. She should not have failed so completely after so many years of seeming immortality. That night should not have been any different than any other but it was and she died.

It was always my fate to die; the other players uninvited to our drama should have known what was expected of them also.

That man, that private with his pike steeped in magick proof poison should not have thrust his steel tipped halbard through her stomach. He should not have pushed that weapon through her until it exited the other side, shattering her spine. He should not have torn my partner almost in half when he wrenched that thorn-barbed metal spike back out of her.

It was always supposed to be my fate to die in high notoriety, in gun smoke and the flash of blades. It was the choice I made. It was to be my reward. It was for her to remember me and to hold my memory close within her secret heart as she continued to wander, to fly, to watch Ivalice change from year to year.

Alas we mortals make plans only to have them torn asunder. There is no reason behind it, no logic profound or mundane to be found in any of it. It is of no matter. What is, is. The past is past and cannot be changed nor undone. She is dead; twenty Rozzarian patrolmen are also dead. I am condemned. This is not how I might have wished our story to end, but I cannot deny that it was always a possibility.

No, that is a lie. It is only with hindsight that I can say that I should have realised that this might happen. That she might betray me. That it was perhaps not my fate alone to die.

I used to believe with everything in me that she would persevere once I was gone. She was to be my immortality. She was to be the one to mourn me, the only person who ever knew me to greater depths than I could ever know myself. Other men throw themselves at the gods in fear of being forgotten, in fear of oblivion. I had her. She was my courage. She was to be the one to remember me once I was gone.

The sky, I once believed, had no limits and neither did I. I, who had cast aside one existence in favour of another. I who believed that there was no convention I could not circumvent, no rule I could not bend, and no law I could not find my way around. I was an actor giving the performance of my life and she was my chosen audience.

Yet for that I believed as devoutly as any adherent of Kiltia in the promise of her wise and ageless beauty she did die and she did leave me. Now there is no point in the performance if the audience is not here to watch any longer. There is no point in going on when I will only die eventually in any regard. She died. She who should always have remained, always have persevered and maintained, is gone. Now all the applause in all Ivalice is hollow. I would that the curtain falls; it is time to quit this place.

The crow on the windowsill leaves as suddenly as it arrived with a harsh croak and crash of oily black feathers. I watch it soar upwards through the pearlescent milky cloud heavy sky. The sunrise has long faded into obscurity; the sun dare not show its face this day. It may yet rain but even my hubris is not so great as to believe that the sky weeps for me.

I can hear the clomping of armoured boots upon the stone turnpike stairs leading up to my tower cell. My jailors have come to escort me to my own finale. I realise now that the hammering and sawing has long since ceased. Below my window I can hear the crowds milling about; all those people come to see history made. They have come to watch the end of the legendary sky pirate Balthier.

I will not disappoint them, my final audience, though their presence gives me no joy. I shall set the women to weeping and make the men grow pale. I will teach these faceless voyeurs of my own mortality to shake in their bones and relish the life they still possess.

The show must go on, after all, at least for a little while longer.

My guard of honour will be upon me in but seconds and I find that I do not know what parting words to leave with you. Mine has not been a life spent in the pursuit of a higher purpose. I have no gems of great wisdom to grant you as I shuffle off this mortal coil. I know no more now at the end of my life than I did at the beginning. All knowledge is fleeting, all experience merely transitory. This is what I know. This is all I know.

Even the sky has a limit.