“Get up, get up, get up!” You plead to Erden, pushing Rejuvenate after Rejuvenate into him. His carefully crafted jacket has been violently stripped of its usual metal, and the fabric which composed it has been torn and sliced. You eye his claymore and helmet a few yalms back-- the helmet has had one of its wings broken off and is covered in dents.

“Y-you have to wake up, Erden! Can’t you hear me?!” You begin to tear up, and toss your grimoire into the mud beside you. He doesn’t have the luxury to wait for a slow, passive heal. You dismiss Brick to get a chunk of aether back and give your all into a Clemency, and even that isn’t enough to seal the large stab wound in his stomach.

You take off his coat to examine his wounds more closely and happily note that all his lesser cuts have sealed, but the issue of the large gash still remains. You take off your blue-white scarf and tightly wrap it around his abdomen, struggling not to bawl as you watch it quickly soak with a deep red.

You reach down to try and pull Erden up. Even just getting him to sit up is taxing, but you refuse to let him sit here and die. Just as you’re getting ready to carry him, you hear a twig snap in the distance, and suddenly it occurs to you to wonder what exactly caused this injury.

You scramble to pull Erden against one of the orchard’s trees and lay against it, carefully slowing your breath as you try to listen for more nearby sounds. After a moment, you hear the slow and methodical advance of steel boots on cobblestone. As they grew closer, you noticed the direction it came from shine a dim blue, creeping through the leaves and the grass.

You reach at your hip for your grimoire, but realize that you left both it and Brick’s topaz gem a few yalms away. Close enough that you could rush for it, but certainly not without being spotted. If Erden wasn’t able to fight off this foe, what chance do you stand? You pull him and yourself tighter against the tree.

“Where have you gone, darkspawn?” A gravelly voice called through the quiet night. “Show yourself! That I might banish you to the void where you belong.” The footsteps grew closer and closer until suddenly stopping. “...Heh...Clever.” S’anah’to’s ears twitched at the sound of metal clasping metal. “Leaving your blade behind to throw me off your scent!? I should have known-- your aether is far too faint here.”

After a long pause, the boots began to gradually move further away-- headed towards Summerford Farm directly. You know better than to let this opportunity slip by, and quickly but quietly grab your book and Brick’s gem. Peeking from behind the tree, you catch the faintest details of the man-- a tall man, and a Raen Au Ra, but you can only tell from his tail, as he is otherwise decked in pure white armor. It's hard to tell from the back, but you believe he has fully hidden his appearance in a manner very similar to Erden.

Once he is well out of a distance that even you would be able to hear from, you struggle to pick Erden up. Your muscles burn and ache horribly as you try to lug his massive body around. As you drag him and the task grows increasingly hard, you notice his breathing becomes more ragged, and you begin to cry.

You are only able to carry him a few dozen yalms before you lose your grip and fall backwards into the mud. Every second that passes is another moment you’re terrified that the ferocious man after him will return and you’ll have to fight for two peoples’ lives. But you keep trying, and trying, and trying, and trying. A few yalms and a short break. A few yalms and a short break. It doesn’t matter how badly it hurts, or how cold you are, or how drained you feel after burning so much of your strength on healing. You have to keep going. You have to, you have to, you have to.

You wish you had the strength to summon Brick to help-- not that you think he could even do much, but if you expend even one more drop of aether it's hard to say for sure if you’ll remain conscious at all. So instead you squirm, heave, and sob your way along. ‘Just a little bit further,’ you keep telling yourself, not daring to look at the long road ahead.

Marmots occasionally try to harass you, and unfortunately the best means of defense you have at the moment is to violently hiss back at them. It works, for the most part, but makes your trek back all the more exhausting. Once or twice, you have to set Erden down to pull out your grimoire, which causes them to scurry away.

You nearly get to the city limits before you suddenly hear a voice.

“There you are.”

You spin in attention and pull out your grimoire, reaching an arm out towards its source and have already begun to channel aether before you realize who it’s from. Ace approaches you slowly before realizing that you’re weeping.

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“...Anah’to, what’s wrong?” His attention drifts from you to Erden. “Good lord!”

You keep trying to explain yourself, or what's happening, or the simple fact that Erden desperately needs a conjurer if he wants to make it through the night, but every time you try to talk it just sounds like a jumbled mess. Every time you hear the sound of your own voice choking through tears, it just makes you want to cry more.

Needless to say, Ace helps you carry him back to the front gate. Once you make it there, one of the marauders stationed there takes your half of the load while the other gives you a drink of water. Weak, tired, and cold, you collapse to your knees and breathe. As Ace and the Yellowjacket take Erden away, you struggle back to your feet and chase after them. The guard helping you tries to get you to wait and rest, but you ignore her, and she is duty bound to remain at her post.

He is kept in one of the main Inn rooms where a conjurer of The Maelstrom looks after him. You are promised up and down that he’ll be fine-- that it’s a good thing you were there to patch him up, and that you’ve saved his life. You know it’s true, but you don’t like the idea of leaving him there, knowing that at any minute that monster could return and try to claim him again.

Ace eventually manages to calm you down with a warm tea-- blackberry, your favorite. The entire time you drink it, your arms keep trembling from equal parts weakness and adrenaline.

“Your guildmates were worried.” Ace explains, leaning back in his chair. “‘Where’s Sanny gone? Didn’t he say he’d be workin’ on his studies tonight?’ Once it got real late, they came knockin’-- worried something had happened.” He leans forward a bit. “...And you’re sure you’re not hurt?”

“N-not a scratch.” You take a deeper sip. He pushes a plate of crackers towards you-- aether dense ones, ideal for tea to get the nasty grain flavor out of your mouth. You barely manage to stomach a few down, but you know how badly healing like that drained you, so you try not to bemoan the self-care.

“If you need to wait until tomorrow morning, it’s fine. You’ve more than earned a rest.” He looks to you with deep worry in his eyes. “...But...if you’re up for it, can you tell me what happened?”

What a question. Of course, you don’t really know what happened. You give the question a lot of pause, and mask the time you take to think by drinking more tea. What you objectively know is that Erden left for another run to Ul’dah by carriage, and at some point between then and now donned his armor to kill...someone.

Perhaps he meant to kill the man who got the better of him, or perhaps that man was an unwelcome third party. Either way, the situation is pretty damning if Erden doesn’t have an alibi. You may have taken his cloak off, but you just messily left it out there in the fields-- you didn’t have the time to stash it or anything. If you don’t know what happened, and someone finds it, it won’t take a genius to infer that Erden was the one who had it on before getting cut up.

Erden is in danger. He is hunted by a foe that can, at least somewhat, track his aether, so the last thing he needs is a lot of scrutiny from the Limsan officials. What he needs is sanctuary-- shelter from the growing insidiousness of the world around him. You are terribly tired, but it seems you’ll have to stand for just a moment longer.

“We were attacked.” The pain of lying stings you and makes you begin to well up again, but this only adds to your credibility. “We were traveling together by Chocobo carriage, and Halone’s Champion descended upon us. He cut them free, and seemed to be after me, but Erden…” You look Ace dead in the eyes. “He wouldn’t let him get to me, and got hurt really badly because of it.”

“That damned psycho!” Ace slams his hands on the table and stands up. After a moment of quietly pacing about the room, he turns back to you. “How did you get away?”

“...My...my holy spells really did a number on him. Erden even got a few good hits in with his axe before going down. I think...I think my holy magic might actually be why he’s after me…” You grasp your tea cup tighter and force tears out. “Mom always said that paladins had enemies everywhere...do...do you think…?”

“I won’t let him hurt you, or Erden. Never again.” Ace swears to you with more conviction than you’ve ever heard him carry before, which does make you feel tremendously guilty for the rest of your life. You quietly pray that at the end of this terribly long journey, Ace finds room in his heart to forgive your deceptions.

Ace sends you off to bed, but of course that really means you sit next to Erden’s mattress and refuse to go anywhere else. The conjurer examining him takes the time to examine you, too, and she mentions that you might have torn your arms carrying him back, but she won’t know for sure until tomorrow. It’s late, terribly late, so she insists that you get some shut-eye. She argues back and forth with you about how staying here won’t help Erden, and that you need to tend to yourself.

Eventually she caves and gets you a small cot from the Inn staff so you can at least sleep properly. You thought it would be impossible to sleep, that you would be too worried-- but there’s nothing quite like carrying a man twice your weight for over a thousand yalms after giving your everything to stitch him together. That is to say, you fell asleep before you could even count to ten.