FFV: Toki no Hourousha (The Wanderer of Time)
Chapter 6: Art of Life

      Istory's harbors bustled with commerce, as was typical of cities that relied on international trade to keep its economy afloat. Vendors were closing down their booths in the cobbled stone streets and the nightwalkers came out to seduce the money from wayward sailors. This post was merely an extension of the main town of Istory, which was in turn much more cleaner and wealthy than this commercial harbor section. Those who couldn't afford to live upstream lived down here, trying to scrape up as much money as they could selling fish, trade, or partaking in other far less savory occupations.
     Benjiro walked up the streets, dressed in a long overcoat that hid one of his most private treasures from prying eyes. He needed time alone to indulge in a rare hobby, somewhere in which no one knew him and could critisize his work. The party was to stay here for the night and head back to Tycoon the next morning. Yllesia had dragged Faris off to gods knew where while his son stayed in the inn to entertain the boys with a few lightshows and Butz was either taking care of the birds or buying supplies for the rest of the trip. And he was out in the streets.
     It was always a bar or inn that drew his attention, and rarely did the inhabitants bother with him once he found a small dark table well away from everyone else and pulled out his tools. This one was no different. The lighting was bad in Kappa-chan no Izakaya, but nothing he couldn't work in. He stepped up to the bar and slammed his fist upon the table to get the bartender's attention.
     "Nan no go you desu ka," the bartender asked, and it took the pirate captain a moment to comprehend that the bartender was inquiring what he wanted.
     "Ah...sake wo hitobin, kudasai. Ikura desu ka?"
     "Nijyuugo giru, kudasai."
     Twenty-five gil for a goddamn bottle of cheaply-produced wine, Benjiro thought sourly, the world is going insane...
     He sighed and turned over his money to the bartender, then found a nice, quiet corner in which to pull out his sketchbook and work. It was his precious book of memories, in which the names and faces of everyone he held dear in his childhood could live on. On the first page was Raandel, the pirate captain who brought up him and Faris on the ship, and his craggy, weather-beaten face smiled pleasantly from the aged paper. Next to him was his son, Geilin, a handsome youth who turned out to be a slimy rat and sold Faris to the enemy so that he could live. Oh, he met his end once Benjiro found out what he did, and reappeared a mutilated corpse washed upon the Tule shore. The next couple of pages that follwed were group portraits of the rest of the crew, now mostly dead, and after that ...
     He dedicated entire pages to his best friend, who he then thought was another boy just like him. I was falling in love with another boy, he used to think, and the idea didn't bother him at all. Male or female, he didn't care what Faris was, just that he was helplessly in love with her. And in that love his talent blossomed ... where once he drew because he could, now he drew to preserve the faces of those closest to him. The first image of her he had was Faris at the age of twelve, having fallen asleep on the deck during nightwatch duty. He didn't bother to wake her up then, but immediately pulled out his sketchbook and began capturing her beauty onto paper.
     God I'm a lovesick ass, and after all these years I'm still as deeply in love as I was then. Nothing bad about it, he mused as he dug around a vest pocket for the sticks of graphite, but it used to be I was once so distant to others and would bottle up my emotions because I feared being laughed at by the other members of the crew.
     The pirate captain flipped to an unfinished sketch he had been meaning to finish up for awhile since its creation and took gulp of wine before setting his pencil to the paper and resumed. His pencil scratched lines into the paper that in turn began to form into a greater picture, and that slowly took shape as he fixated on the image in his mind and translated it to paper the best he could.
     "Who's that, sailor? Your woman?"
     Benjiro looked up with a start, having been so lost in his own work that he didn't hear the blue-eyed woman come up to him. The woman who leaned over to get a better veiw of the portrait was a platinum blonde whose natural hair color did well to disguise the streaks of white that marked her age, and though she tried to hide her few wrinkles with layer upon layer of noxious cosmetics they stood out all the more. A cursory glance at her attire, which was stitched to enhance her volumptuousness, gave truth to his suspicions about her occupation.
     "You could say that, though if you did in her presence she would plant a bruise in one of those pretty eyes of yours," he stated dourly before taking another mouthful of wine. "Or both if you tick her off bad enough."
     Smiling, the prostitute returned her attention to the image of a long-haired woman curled up asleep in what looked like the bed of a noble, cradling an equally dormant baby within her protective arms.
     "I had a lover once who could draw just as well as you do. Damn bastard left me with a child that destroyed my life..."
     Apprehensiveness and recognition gripped him then, and when he stared straight into the woman's eyes, he knew that she too felt the same thing.
     "And you drowned your son, didn't you..."
     "Benji," she exclaimed with a gasp, her hands instantly shooting up to hide her face. "Oh my god, I didn't think-"
     He gazed bitterly at this woman who bore him only to try to take his life. It wouldn't be too hard to whisk her off into some dark alley and take her life, and she wouldn't be missed much, but... Mistakes of the past were to remain in the past. It would do no good to retaliate. "What's done is done, it doesn't matter now. Actually, if you didn't try and drown me, I would never have been adopted by a bunch of pirates and met the love of my life. Don't worry, in the end, I think it worked out for the best for me."
     "For you, perhaps," she muttered as she took a chair and sat down. "My husband found out about my infidelity, and cut me off from his fortunes when he died. Had to move to this part of town and work doing what I do best. Your father never came to help me...none of my lovers did."
      "I'm sure you get enough money to survive on..."
     "I'm not as young or as beautiful as I used to be, Benjiro, and it won't be long before I can no longer get the money to survive." She dabbed at her tears before they streaked her make-up, and smiled slightly at him. "But that doesn't matter, I don't expect you to somehow support me. How ARE you doing, anyway?"
     "I have a ship of my own, a beautiful lifemate and a son to be proud of, nothing at all to complain about..."

     "So, sweetheart, how do you think this looks on me?"
     Faris looked up from the newspaper spread on her lap and studied her friend's new outfit critically. It was a silk marigold-toned shift with a velvet overtunic of the color of newly budding leaves. Honeysuckle vines were stitched in gold-toned thread along the hems and collar of the overtunic, and the same pattern was repeated on the long-sleeved shift in dark green thread. A long yellow velvet sash embroidered with lillies and honeysuckle vines cinched her waist. It was a very pretty dress ... it also looked to be very expensive.
     "Yllesia, please promise me that's the last dress you'll buy for a while. I'm not made out of money."
     The Queen of Karnac did a small spin before kneeling before her friend, crossing her arms on the taller woman's knees to rest her chin on them. She looked up with large, pleading brown eyes and pouted cutely.
     "My dear, this is all I really want, nothing else. Now, how do I look?"
     "The dress suites you. Now, can you decide on less expensive clothes to get at least until we reach Tycoon? For my sake, at least?"
     The smaller woman bounced to her feet and leaned forward to hug her. "Don't worry, my knight, I have no intention of driving you to poverty. I shall even wear rags if it pleases you ... although if you did request that of me I'd first require something more."
     "How many times have I told you about that?"
     Yllesia just smiled and rose her hand to brush away the strands of purple that hid half of her friend's face, then cupped her cheek. "I know, I know, it's just force of habit from a time long past. Didn't think you'd mind ..."
     "What made you think I did? I don't mind a little flirting, but I'd suggest keeping it to a minimum, at least in front of others. Benji will feel threatened, you'll only add more fuel to the rumors about your orientation..."
     "Why lie when the rumors are true? I have always been lesbian, I always will be. There's no reason why it should be a problem. I have produced two heirs for the throne, I am discreet in my ways. And it's nothing we should worry about now, because now we have more immediate problems to consider. Like what I'm going to have to do to get you to buy this for me."
     "Certain arrangements can be made," Faris said with a suggestive grin. Their friendship practically thrived on such suggestiveness that would never see full bloom. "But not now. Take that and get another couple of changes of clothes."
     The smaller woman, Faris' elder by five years, skipped back into the the tailors' room and left her friend alone. Faris then returned her attention to the newspaper on her lap. Nothing interesting, of course, as Istory was pretty much isolated and kept to itself; and what rumors sailors did bring with them only kept to bars and gossip circles. She folded it and put it away to contemplate other things of greater importance.
     The Karnac rebellion was ignited because the country had fallen into debt with the rest of the world. It relied far too heavily upon its Crystal, and when it shattered its economy crashed. Mithril-workers needed to revert to their old ways of smelting, purifying, and shaping the ore that made Karnac famous. The old process was time-consuming, tedious, expensive, and often dangerous; whereas the process using the Crystal made the smelting and purifying process easy enough for mass-production. There was that and the fact that when Yllesia was possessed by ExDeath, many died by her order. Faris thought at first that her friend would have been forgiven for those acts done under the influence of another, but now...
     Be thankful you got them all out alive, she reprimanded herself. There would obviously be some questions flaring up once she called for an emergency meeting of the Assembly, and then after the announcement she and Queen Karnac had agreed on...
     They'd start accusing her of trying to follow in her grandfather's footsteps. King Leon, often called 'The Invader', was infamous for the massacre on Caledonn Field when he took over Karnac, and then Lix, Tule, and the Ancient Library shortly followed. Countries that were once at odds with each other united to stop his invasions, and then came the world war named by scholars as the Dragon War began. Ten years later, as Leon was defeated and sentenced to execution, the Assembly of Nations was formed, and their first task was to crown the eight year old son of Leon as King, with his uncle acting as regent. The Assembly was put together to prevent another Leon from rising to power, and now she would go against it and against her father's attempts at smoothing over international relations.
     She forced those thoughts out of her mind, and a scene from earlier returned to her.
     Her son was watching the sunrise, seeming as much a part of the dawn as the clouds above with his coppery hair and golden eyes, and skin and robes painted a vibrant reddish gold with the rising sun. He had his father's hair, eye color, and temperment, but his face and slender structure was a mirror image of her own. The name she gave him was old Jacolean, meaning 'favored by god', because in a sense, he was...
     He turned from watching the sunrise to gaze upon her, and his expression was one of resignation. The words that came from his lips carried a tone that was a mixture of wistfulness and surrender.
     "It's my dream to walk among the stars, and when I die, I want to die up there."
     Why did he have to remind her of his mortality? He fought since he was a baby just to overcome his own physical weakness to survive, almost scaring her to death each time he came down with an illness or some physical malady, and now he gave his own life for hers. Oh, he wouldn't say it outright, and avoided all mention of whose life he took in exchange for hers, but it was in his eyes...
     She worked too damn hard to get him accepted as prince and her heir, paid since he was a kid to go to the Ancient Library and learn to take advantage of his skills, and now he'd just be selfish and throw it all away just because he wanted her to live...
     ...No, no, she was the one being selfish, for she was Queen of Tycoon, and so many people relied on her. And dammit, she hated being left alone with nothing to do for too long, it made her think too much about things she'd rather not think about...

     Zurvan watched the stars once again, as he had every time he came up to the Namtar Station. The Lonkans weren't used to having a mage help out with their work, but a few were grateful for the help nonetheless. He did everything he could to make them feel like he was one of their own, yet when several scientists wanted to study him and figure out how magic worked, he declined, and he had power enough that they would not think to force him to cooperate.
     Oh, it was a golden age for Lonka. Breakthroughs in genetics opened up the path for progress in gene therapy, and Lonkans were now given age-defying cocktails of drugs, enzymes, and viroid-like capsules of DNA, all when they wanted to. These cocktails would, theoretically, extend a person's life to two hundred years, perhaps more. Perhaps the Lonkan civilization would be peopled by immortals who could look down on the planet of their birth and scoff at the lowlifes still struggling with their petty wars. Zurvan had, of course, been stupid enough to give both himself and his sons the treatment. Those cocktails were his idea, after all. Cid had merely executed those ideas.
     Planet R, the bland, sterile name the Lonkans gave their world, hung like a beautiful blue-green gem against the sea of stars. Photographs of it were sent back to Gohn, and could be bought by any Lonkan with a mind for astronomy, but they could not capture the true splendor of looking directly at the planet below. Zurvan at first wondered why the Lonkans actually wanted to move permanently on an artificial moon that had none of their homeworld's natural splendor, but looking at the stars without the hindrances of clouds and the planet below, he understood. The beauty of the stars and planets was indescribable.
     The clapping of dirtside boots came up behind him and stopped at his side. He looked up at the towering, sinewy figure of Cid Singh and took a deep breath before he spoke.
     "When I was a boy, it was my dream to walk among the stars... Now that I have achieved that dream, it is time..."
     Cid cocked an eyebrow in query. "Time for what, old friend?"
     Zurvan gave a thin, pale smile as he pulled out a sealed envelop and handed it to the scientist. "This is for Ormazd, I want you to deliver it into his hands personally. And make sure he gets Omega, I do not want it falling into Ahriman's hands."
     Cid frowned to himself as he gazed at the light blue wax seal. Ahriman was the quieter of the twins, lean and pale with hungry yellow eyes that seemed to devour everything. He reminded Cid far too much of a hungry predator; and yet, when he spoke, his pleasant honeyed tenor came forth and managed to charm the dourest of people. He could be dangerous...
     The king of Tycoon turned from the window and walked past his friend to put on an extra-vehicular activity suit, ignoring the concerned look Cid gave him. He pulled the suit over his clothes and the helmet over his long copper-red hair and locked it all in place.
     "I am going for a little walk now, so do not wait up for me," the king said before sealing the helmet completely. He opened the hatch to the airlock and left without looking back.
     Namtar's soils were the deepest black, caused by its mostly-carbon composition, and its landscape pockmarked by the ceaseless onslaught of meteors and smaller particles. Radiation was bad out here, without an atmosphere to protect the psuedomoon from the onslaught of solar winds. Perhaps that radiation would have an unforeseen effect on those who took the senescence treatments, perhaps it would make those treatments fail completely. That would have to be pondered later. Ishtar hovered over the Irkalla mountains, the largest range on the asteroid, radiantly white against the blackness that absorbed all light, its own craters more like beautiful patterns than scars left by pummeling rocks. He half-walked, half-skipped over the dead black terrain, for the gravity here was so low that few risked jumping too high, until he came to the peak of a small mountain to watch clouds make their way across the face of the blue-green planet.
     The skies above Tycoon cleared, leaving him an unhindered view of his homeland. The last time he was there, right after he had experimented the beta version of the senescence treatments on himself, his people had stared at him as if they had seen a ghost. Had he really been gone that long? That had bothered him while he sat still for the portrait, and what bothered him all the more were the whispers they thought he couldn't hear. They were little things, really. Rumor was going around about Ahriman arranging something or another, about people found dead in hidden places, their bodies mutilated past recognition, about Ormazd's strange depression and withdrawal from the world. There had also been little whispers along the lines of Zurvan's ageless complexion, which had amused him. These days he looked so much like his mother that only coloring could differentiate them. That his people were now seeing him as an ageless and sexless being amused him for some reason or another.
     He reached out as if to touch the planet, then slowly pulled his hand away as he realised that this was the last time he would ever see it again, and with that knowledge his eyes watered. "It was my dream to walk among the stars, and when I die, it will be here..."
     A faint crunching sound of boots upon rock and dirt alerted him to the intrusion of another, and he spun to gaze upon a silver-haired Lonkan girl with one eye sealed behind an ugly scar. Once upon a time she would have been pretty, but the cold haughtiness of a professional killer took that away. She carried a serrated knife by her side, along with a gun half-hidden in her EVA suit's toolbelt.
     "Ahriman sent you, did he not?"
     The assassin's one ice-blue eye widened in surprise, and she answered with a voice that carried as little emotion as her face did. "Yes he did, and I've been hired to get you out of his way. Nothing personal, m'lord."
     A strange half-smile flitted across his face. Azhi was now Ahriman's pawn, hired to do his dirty work for him ... how long would it be before his son would twist her to his will the moment she expressed thoughts for herself? "I have been waiting for you, Shinryuu."
     Azhi Dahaka struck, her knife ripping through his suit and between his ribs, and in that second he felt the air rush from his suit into the vacuum of space. With his last breaths he uttered his warning.
     "I am Zurvan Akarana Highwind, but I was born with another name in another time. Heed me, Shinryuu, for your master will fall..."
     A woman who would become the god of dragons merely watched as her victim died in the vacuum of space, his blood turning to ice with exposure to the absolute zero temperatures, and the lack of oxygen suffocating him ...

     Suffocating ... no air ... nothing ... nothingness ...
     He felt a fist strike his chest, and a second later warm, moist lips fell upon his his and a lungful of air passed into him. His eyes fluttered open and he looked dazedly up at his mother, who, relieved that he was breathing on his own, took him into her arms and held him close.
     "Don't ever scare me again like that, Red," she bit out, still shuddering in dread that she would lose him so soon. They sat together on his bed in the castle. It had been the day before when they arrived and Yllesia and her sons set in a special apartment set aside for important visitors, and a small congratulatory party thrown for the success of the Karnac mission. Those involved didn't feel the need to inform everyone else of Faris' return from the dead, at least not yet.
     The prince laid his head on his mother's shoulder as he stroked her back reassuringly. "I am sorry, Mother, please forgive me ..."
     A mere nod told him she understood, and they took comfort in each other's silent presence for the next few minutes, until at last Faris felt the need to ask what had caused him to suffocate in his sleep.
    "A dream," he whispered as he squeezed her closer. What is one supposed to feel  when they see their own death? Probably anything other than the acceptance he felt. "A dream in which I died, only it was a thousand years in the past, not in the future. It puzzles me, for I have no business there ..."
     "Perhaps, but you must have some kind of destiny ... after all, I think you're the only child to ever be able to brag about being conceived at the Fire Shrine, and to have plotted the whole thing in the first place. You may be more than you think you are, ibnya."
     I do not want to be, he wanted to say, I would rather live out my life here in this castle reading and in the presense of those I love, not that of complete strangers...
     Yet what if I am more than I think, what then? If my duty calls me away to another time, then I must go regardless of my own desires...
     "Mother, you really should go back to sleep. There is no need to worry about me anymore for the moment, and you have not had a good night's sleep since before the Karnac mission."
     He could feel her frown, and picked up a faint thought. She was far too preoccupied lately, what with being faced with her own mortality, the fragile lives of those around her, the weight of thirteen million people depending on her every action, and her impeding actions that would set the Assembly in a frenzy. Lenna had also left her with all the paperwork that piled up over the last couple of weeks, which was much harder to dig through than it appeared to be at first. So much stress, no wonder she couldn't sleep lately. Perhaps if he could block it all away for a little while...
     He looked down as his mother fell asleep, ushered into the state by a simple little spell. The magelord teleported her back to her bed with his father and curled up in her place.
     Ten days from now she would reveal her plans for Karnac to the Assembly of Nations. And what would happen after that, even he could not guess...

~end chapter six~

 

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