In Batallia Downs—

Though I have done it, I can hardly believe it. Those were the thoughts of Rheia, over and over, as she sat on a log in Batallia. She sat and watched the peach-colored sky growing black with the encroaching rain and thought it over and over again as she tightened and retightened her obi, righted her sash, twisted the sheathe of hagun against her breast (it sat across her lap like a musical instrument, and she clutched it like a lover) and when the wind picked up a little, she shivered for she was wet, though it was not from sweat or blood—that had been washed away.

The battle was over but the battle-haze had fallen on her more deeply, more strongly, than it had ever done before, and now she sat on a stump in Batallia, sat and thought about what she had done, and did not precisely believe that she had done it. Her mind, still wracked by adrenaline, could not see it all. There were moments of terrifying clarity—a splatter of blood, a splash of gore, a dread growl behind her and the hot blast of breath on her neck from the snort of a roused orc—and there was, more than this, a blur of action, in which she had been terrified, but her fear had been overwhelmed by her training, her mantras, her focus.

She had gone deep into the Monastic Caverns, where tunnels wind in on each other in conspiratorial handshakes, and the greatest leaders of the orcish host hold unholy rites in tribute to their black king, and where the diseased shadows writhe with life invested in them by foul magic in the air and work to confuse and blind those who enter.

She had come to this place before, seeking the crest of Davoi for Maat, had come here with the assurances of her party leader that all would be well, that it would be the work of just minutes. What followed were hours of horror and death, in which the party had been discovered, routed, and they had abandoned her to the tunnels to save themselves, and as she had lurked through the darkness alone, she could hear their screams echoing in distant chambers, and the exultant cries of the orcs who hunted and sometimes found them, and the sounds of slaughter.

This was not like that.

It was as if Kaska had known every movement of the patrols, and every crack in which they could squeeze themselves into to evade them, and every empty chamber and dead end to which they could lure orcs in ones and twos, and by that, they had killed more than a dozen of the cavern’s guard without being discovered, and had gone deeper into the caverns than she had ever been, where they had finally come upon the engraved doors to a temple of Altana, all covered in verdigris, and where they had entered and found, by din of Khocha, the Dragoon most vile—the murderer sitting upon a mound of trophies from those he had killed.

The orcish Dragoon calling himself Dragonbiter Rurrdrak welcomed Kaska as a peer, and then vowed to eat his wyvern as he had eaten his own, absorbing into himself the blood of the dragons. In Khocha he could sense quite a lot of power. But he was not rude; he would be happy to eat them as a second course. And so he leapt from a dais that had once been an altar to Altana, and the battle was entered, and she remembered, his speed had been more than hers, and his terrible might was such that it threw them long into stone walls so hard they bounced, even when they parried.

Rurrdrak hit like a dragon and leapt like a Dragoon. The battle was desperate. But the wyvern was glowing, and every time she felt herself about to collapse, his breath hit her—warm white fire like a good night’s sleep and the care of a mother at once—and she rose again, her will to fight renewed, and so she fought longer and harder against a foe who dwarfed all other challenges before that, the orc whom was also the murderer whom was also the Dragoon, and she lived in the moment, just her blade between she and life and death.

There had been Kaska, moving like a shroud across the walls, falling upon the orc again and again, stopping it short of killing her every time it seemed like it was the end, fighting it with a breathless majesty that could only be accorded to one who merges the way of knight and dragon, and rising again and again from the vile orc’s worst attacks, until it realized that it was losing, that it was dying, and it howled in rage and summoned its allies—but they would not come. They lay dead for four hallways back, strewn like chaff, and so he was alone against their final resolve to slay him…

Rheia…Rheia!

The mithra’s ears twitched in the direction of the voice that had been calling her, and then her mind caught up, realizing that a voice had been calling her, and she rose, whirling hagun back over her shoulder.

“Woah! Easy!” said an elvaan farther down the hill. He was approaching her now, and she relaxed as she recognized him as Commander Ovourand of the Temple Knights.

She flushed slightly but made no apologies. She was still a little stunned by all that had happened, and had yet to assume the proper attention. “You caught me by surprise, is all.” She looked down the hill to the tree she had burnt, and saw a group of knights with spades digging up the graves, as a trio of priests clad in the typical black robes with green traceries stood nearby, ready to give temporary rites under the bruised peach sky.

The knight followed her gaze down the hill and, perhaps detecting the run of her thoughts, was silent for a moment, before saying, “Inspectors are looking at the lance you brought back from Davoi. They’ve all but confirmed it as the murder weapon.” The knight then cleared his throat and affected a manner such as that Rheia’s reaction was to square back her shoulders and come to attention. Ovourand cut a short salute and said, “You will surely have the thanks of the papsque for what you’ve done here today, and the gratitude of all the people of San d’Oria, swordswoman Rheia. Dismissed.”

Rheia knelt then, her eyes downcast, her thoughts still racing, elsewhere. One step closer. I will restore my honor one step at a time. She rose and nodded, etching a farewell with one hand. “All for the Kingdom.”

“All for the Kingdom,” he echoed, before walking back down the hill toward the exhumation. The coffins were being loaded onto a cart, and flanked by a procession of candle-bearing mourners whose voices were issuing up a solemn hymn to the sky.

The funeral procession would carry them back to San d’Oria, where the dead would be given their proper respects. There would be a time of sadness, followed by the relief of knowing that these murders were to be the last. Darkness had come and thankfully gone. Sliding the sheathe of the hagun back through her sash, Rheia exhaled, and felt the realization wash over her in a balm of peace. Her nerves were no longer firing signals to attack, defend. Her mind’s rapidity was calming. The battle haze was ascending. She was returning to normal.

She turned to look for Kaska and saw him twenty yards distant, on the crest of a hill amidst a topple-down stone wall choked with yellow grass. The dark blues, blacks, and purples of the wyrm armor caused it to stand out and gave it a blacklight radiance; it seemed to choke on the day, gathering a pall around it like a rain cloud. It also seemed wet at a distance, like living scale, but she imagined that perhaps this was because they had been so recently drenched. Her own armors were not yet dry.

Kaska was tracking an airship’s progress across the sky, but she could tell by his stance that he was preparing to move. She joined him on the hilltop after a few bounding strides, and stood still a moment, watching the airship disappear over the walls of Jeuno.

“All is well?” Kaska asked, his voice again softened and altogether different from the one he sometimes evoked.

“Right as rain,” said the mithra. “They accepted proof of the deed and…” Rheia trailed off, suddenly feeling self-conscious. They stood together for a moment in silence, as the distant hymn curled up in smoke and incense. The procession was a distant line of candle-lights drifting toward Jugner’s coppiced maw. Rheia glanced over at the burned out tree and saw Commander Ovourand directing several pages in an investigation of the crime scene. She looked back to Kaska, who was still silent, distant, and—she feared—readying himself to go.

She ventured to touch his arm to get his attention, but something in the way he was looking off into the horizon stilled her hand above his bicep. She held her hand there long enough to feel silly, and then put both hands behind her back and took a sharp breath, admonishing herself. Finally she stood up on her tiptoes and said, “Kaska, won’t you introduce yourself to the commander? Set him on with a word?”

Kaska answered in the same manner as before, his gaze arrested by some point on the distance. “I’d like to, but I have to get moving.”

Rheia frowned, her ears dropping back against her head. She couldn’t understand, why, after all they had just gone through, was he acting like a stranger? They were as one in battle, and she had seen first-hand what a Dragoon could do, and it had astounded her. Together they had slain the killer and cleared the Dragoons of all blame. How could he be so somber? It robbed her of no little sense of joy. Her tail flicked with agitation. “Kaskaaaa,” she sighed. “You’re supposed to be happy, this is a joyous occasion. The murders are over, the Dragoons will be set free, and I’m sure there will be a grand celebration in the Kingdom. Wouldn’t you like to come? You can’t make me take your share of the credit—”

“I’m sorry,” he said, turning to her abruptly. She blinked, her breath cut off by his words. “I have no cause for celebration,” said Kaska, “because while your quest has ended, mine is incomplete.”

“Oh?”

“Dragonbiter Rurrdrak was a fiend in need of slaying, true, and relieving the world of him was a rare case of pleasure cohabiting with duty. But did you ever think—who has been training orcs in the ways of the Dragoon? What dragon initiated the bond with Rurrdrak and, who was it that gave him such an education in the ways of our form?”

Rheia narrowed her eyes. “You don’t mean…?”

The leather lining of his gauntlets creaked as he clenched his fist. “I do. I saw signs of another Dragoon: his mark in a coat of arms at several junctions of Davoi, and in the scratches left by scales all along the walls of the caverns, as if a dragon had recently passed through.”

The mithra gasped. “Training beastmen? Kaska, why would a Dragoon do such a thing?”

“It’s only a hunch,” said Kaska. “And I hope I am wrong…but for every Dragoon who has bonded with a dragon, there is a chance his bond will develop the unholy sign and, having chained his soul to an evil wyrm, the Dragoon too will grow to become evil…assuming he wasn’t that already. As for why…Dark Dragoons rarely have an interest in the means, only the ends: they seek to bring down the world.”

It crossed her mind run straight back to San d’Oria in voice of a warning, but Kaska, again, cut her off.

“What I have said, I have little proof of. There’s no reason to cause a panic…because I will be watching, and waiting. If a vile Dragoon rears up anywhere on the face of Vana’diel, I will lance it through like a pustule. I would have you keep this between us. Leave it to me. Breathe easy. Enjoy your celebration. But leave it to me.”

The mithra sighed and nodded in acquiescence. “So what will you do now?”

“I will wait for him to appear and strike him down.”

“And until then?”

“Until then I will continue training in the ways most befitting a Dragoon, so that next time such a one appears, I will be ready.”

“And…where will you go?”

“Anywhere I must. To the dens of unholy and sacred wyrms, to the old places that stood here as a testament to the birth of our world; to foes that would challenge my skills and put me to the test, and wherever my power can best still the mourning of the lands, that is where I will be.”

Rheia was still absorbed by his words when he startled her by reaching for her hand. He took it anyway, making little show of her fright, and clasped her hand like an old friend. “Your blade was flawless today. I will not soon forget the lines you cut in battle.” Nodding, he released her hand, and proceeded down the hill, leaving her with a slight blush on her face. Khocha, whom had been roosting on a disused tower, leapt down and spread his wings, catching the air low enough to throw up a spray of leaves, grass, and dust as he stroked the wind and quickly caught up with his master.

She watched his back as he strode off to some far corner of the downs, likely to vanish in some manner as unlikely as he had come, just another one of Vana’diel’s ghosts which it had wont to spit up and sometimes again to swallow. And as she felt it again, that feeling that here was someone who knew what she wanted to know, who had a path for his strength when she had none, who knew not only his goals but how to achieve them, and whom she had fought alongside and felt released to the fullest extent of her might, so long as he was there with her, fueling her with the force of his dragon’s spirit. That deep bitter wailing rose up in her again, and she lunged forward a step and cried, “Wait!”

Kaska and Khocha turned at once, the latter hovering with his head inclined quizzically. “Childe Rheia?” asked the former.

She was not sure and had not been sure up until that instant that the words that were coming would come, so she stood on the precipice preparing her leap of faith, caught in that silent instant between breaths, and heartbeats, waiting to see whether she would clear that distance or tumble back into herself.

What came to her were two memories at once: one—of that alliance which had broken apart in Monastic Caverns, a third of its number casting escape and leaving her to fight for survival, alone in the blackness which even her superior eyesight was at pains to cut, and the orcish hosts closing in all around her and she with no recourse but to die, and her being carried out of Davoi, and her faint memories of waking up in a San d’Orian hospital near-death and in terrible pain because they had left her; two—of the orcs closing in on her again like some nightmare revisited, only this time she was going to die for real, because she had just killed Dragonbiter Rurrdrak, because she had come this deep into their territory without a plan for escape, and was once again surrounded… Only this time, she was not abandoned. Kaska was just above her, climbing the slatted siding of a ruined house, reaching back and telling her to take his hand and pulling her further up the roof even as the house shook to and fro with the weight of the orcish crush all around it. Axes and bolts bounced and sometimes buried themselves in the surrounding shingles, and the two scampered ever higher, until she could chance a glance down and saw no less than a thousand orcs massing on the island below them, hugging the walls of the house and piling atop one another to form a fleshly stair over which their brothers could climb, climb up and slay them.

So here she was, consigned to death and ready to fight, and somehow calm, knowing not that she was in the moment of glory but ready nonetheless to be glorious, and the Dragoon who had brought her, and whom she appreciated so dearly for his incredible, wonderful talent for fighting was standing by her, and would not leave her side. To a mithra, the situation was perfect; there could not have been a better way to die. But die she would not.

Because that is when she felt the surge and saw him passing his arms in a slow circle before his chest, gathering such an amount of raw force as to rival Meikyo Shisui. Flowing into this channel of swirling forces were the motes of his wyvern which seemed to dissolve first by the millions of particles, and then all at once, flowing into the Dragoon and lighting up his aura with the swirling anima of dozens of soaring dragons and the spread wings of the wyrmking himself.

He looked at her and stretched out his hand. “To me!”

She took it without a thought, and he pulled her hard against his side. As the orcs came up over the roof at them, hungry malice in their beadlike eyes, he hunched against her for a moment, and she felt a force like the unfurling of a wyrm’s wings, the heavy unrolling of the wind, and then he leapt, blowing apart the roof, scattering shingles and beams and orcs for a hundred feet in every direction, and she and he were flying, flying through the night sky: up, over, and out of Davoi. They had lived only by the grace of thin boughs and a deep place in the Vedout Brook where they splashed down.

All this having occurred to her in a space of an instant, she found herself staring across at him, and she knew which way she would fall, and perhaps had known it from the moment she’d pulled him from the muddy stream, bleeding and laughing, but alive.

“Wait! …Wait,” said Rheia, moving to catch up to him, thinking to herself: go for it. She went for it. “It’s not right that I should go home and celebrate. If you’re not going to be at the party, neither am I.” She hitched, wringing up her fists, visibly rankled at the effort to put her erupting feelings into words. “Kaska, take me with you. I want to see—” but she did not know what she wanted to see, “I want to know—” but she could not name what she did not know. She shook her head, furious in her frustration.

“Agreed.”

She stopped shaking her head and fell still. “What?”

“If you would follow where I will go, I would have you every step,” he said. “I would not question the will of one so generously gifted with the tachi. Besides, between the two of us, we might be able to keep certain characters from causing too much trouble.” He gave a pointed glance at Khocha, who sagged in the air, chortling weakly. “Come on," said Kaska. "We have many places to go, and little time to make way.” At that he turned to resume his trek across the hills.

Rheia bounded along without hesitation and, for the first time in a long time, without question.