Maeve arrived on the cliff-top within a few minutes, but Gabriel hesitated a moment to hop in. The skiff hovered a few inches above the broken ground, and with a foot set on the threshold, he glanced back to see if his stow-away had seen. Having moved to the front of the palace so crews could get in to put out the rear fires, Gabriel had a clear sight of the medical response personnel, and in turn, a clear sight of Furion.
Ren was over there as well, but only long enough to tell them she was fine and was going to leave again. There was a brief, awkward exchange between her and Furion as she went by, but quickly after, she made her way over to catch her ride, and put the whole thing behind her. Gabriel stepped in to make room, and she followed-suit with a foot on the ledge and a hand on the open door. She glanced back briefly, seeing that face watch her go, bsliverut she sucked in a breath, shut off the glow of her wings, and went within. The door closed, and Maeve lifted off to head west over the lake.
She held to the back of a seat for a few seconds as the ship leveled out, but then stepped out of her armor, and hooked her helmet over the top of the wing-arm. With a grunt of a sigh, she flung herself into the co-pilot’s seat, and stayed there with her eyes closed for a few seconds. Once she opened them again and watched the forward-screen blankly, she shook her head and pivoted the back of it against the seat so she could see the new Fourth, “…I never thought I’d get to be where I am again. The circumstances are really bitter-sweet, but…I’m glad I got to fly with you again anyway.”
“I’m not even sure what I’ll do with Maeve once I don’t need it anymore…” Gabriel answered anxiously, “Maybe I’ll give it to Seth. He can paint it purple or something so it matches his new colors.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
The water rushed beneath them in dubious silence for a little while, but Gabriel finally got the nerve to speak, “…I know we have a lot of other stuff to go over, but I… Uh… Shit…”
“What’s the matter?” Ren wondered, holding her right leg up on the chair, foot perched on the front of it, “Besides the obvious, anyway…”
“I have 80 different things I want to say and ask, and I don’t know where to start.” He huffed pitifully, “I guess I’ll just start with the one that’ll make the rest easier… What’s going on with Furion right now?”
Ren lifted her head a little higher, but then looked away, “I don’t want to speak for the man. We…haven’t been getting along for the last couple days.”
“Is it over between you?”
“…I think it’s safe to say so, yeah.” She answered, “I haven’t exactly said the words, but…it shouldn’t take a genius to understand the vibe is off. I beat him up and left him without a good way home, then I beat him up again…sort of.”
Gabriel’s brow raised, “…You beat him up twice?”
“Not sure if you noticed him limping into the fight when he did finally show up. That…was because of me.”
“I didn’t, but…wow… I thought you Fafnir were practically indestructible.”
“I did too, until we got our asses handed to us by Scyrexian’s Warp Magi hosts.” Ren said, her tone shifting slightly, “The Fafnir are in a bad way right now. Everything we thought we were is…gone. We’ve been brought to our proverbial knees, and now I’m stuck with the responsibility of containing the beast that brought us here.”
“How did you even…? I mean, I thought you guys said you beat it…”
Ren rubbed her face; the memory of it felt sickly under her skin, “The fight was over. The others had gone to start collecting bodies…or whatever was left of them.” She started, remembering too well the sense of loss that had crept in over those initial few minutes, “I had landed next to the sundered armor of one of my subordinates… The next thing I knew, Scyrexian had reforged itself with a new host… We thought Lord Rylen scored a direct hit with the Aegis, but it must’ve taken shelter inside that armor I was holding. It took control of one of the Inquisitors that had died nearby, and used it to…drag me into the ruin. It taunted me about doing things the hard way, right as I thought I dealt the killing blow…but I understood what it meant only after I noticed my hair turning white later on.” She explained, and waved her hand to turn off the color-app, revealing that shock of white.
Gabriel stared in worried awe, “…Damn. When did that start?”
“I saw my roots starting to go on…er, well…the morning after you got to the Aegis.”
“So it had already started when we…”
Her face went red, mostly for the shame of it, “Yeah…” She answered, and was a little surprised to find the man’s hand reach over to offer a comforting pet to her left thigh. He didn’t pull back though after that, and just rested it there, rubbing his thumb back and forth, “…You’re not mad?”
“Maybe I might’ve been if you hadn’t already seduced me.” He managed to tease.
“Seduced you.” She echoed incredulously, “How and when did I manage that? I feel like you don’t mean the goodbye peck.”
“The reintroduction thing you did while we were fleeing from Kitez.” He explained, “That was actually pretty clever.”
Ren stared at that one visible blue eye, peering back at her now and then while he tried to fly. She huffed a quiet laugh, and set her hand down over his, “Who would’ve thought that simply saying ‘hi I’m Ren’ was all it took…”
“Well, there was a little more nuance than that, but…in essence, yeah, I guess.” Gabriel said, and focused forward again. He drew in a long breath as he considered his next words, but then gave that leg a gentle squeeze to get the woman’s attention back again, “…Circumstances being what they are, I feel like I shouldn’t even broach the subject, but…if you…want to give me a chance, I’ll figure something out. The Eidolon still have to sleep sometimes…”
“I had a feeling you were just using it as an excuse to avoid the topic. Earlier, I mean.” Ren surmised, and managed a smile as she set her head against the crest of her upturned knee, “I know it was…kind of shitty of me to not tell you about Furion. I had a chance to tell him about my weird way of being before we got together, so I guess I just…didn’t want to poison the well when the circumstances were different.”
“You’ve glanced a mention of it, but nothing more. What are you suggesting?”
Ren hesitated, and sighed a grumble, “I guess I should explain… I’m…polyamorous. Or at least I thought I was, until…I started taking a real accounting of what was happening. Now I just wonder if I was already over it and was looking for an out that I couldn’t find.”
“What about Ravan?”
“…Harmless fun that was easier to come by while hiding from Lord Rylen.” She explained, a bit of an edge to her voice, “Dating a Captain when you’re his direct subordinate is hard to keep under the radar. Apparently, we weren’t as sneaky as we thought though, because Lord Rylen said he’d already known for a while when it came up recently. I actually thought it would make things with Furion easier, because we wouldn’t have to be so careful…maybe it just made the futility of it all clearer.”
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“…Do you think you would’ve come to blows with Furion eventually anyway?” Gabriel wondered dubiously, “If not for the transfer, you’d still be where you were before.”
“I wonder…” She said, her words drifting slightly, “If Scyrexian’s done anything since taking-up residence inside me…it’s taken away a lot of the inhibitions I had before. Things I’d been living with – tolerating – and accepting without much resistance… Maybe I would’ve been content to let Furion sideline me until he was good and ready to retire, but now? …It’s hard to tell where Scyrexian’s influence made the biggest difference, or if it was just time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I challenged him. …I want to be Captain, and I’m tired of waiting.”
“Ren, that’s really serious… To actually declare your intent to unseat someone…”
“I know. The filter’s gone. The agreement we had…” She clasped her free hand over her eyes, and rubbed down to her cheeks, “He was eventually going to resign the office and recommend me as his replacement, like his father did before him, and grandmother before them… The Rydells have had a chokehold on the Fafnir leadership for generations. He…actually thought it was kind of funny to skirt around handing it off to anyone else by asking me to marry him as he stepped down, so I’d be the next Rydell to sit the throne.”
Gabriel quirked a brow, “I know I’m speaking from an extremely biased position right now, but…that actually sounds really shitty.”
“For the longest time, I thought it was kind of romantic…” She shook her head in disbelief at herself, “I’m sure he thought along similar lines. I can’t stop myself from feeling like he was trying to erase me instead, though. I hate thinking like this… It feels wrong. I know this isn’t really me…and I know he didn’t believe that, either.”
“Would Scyrexian really push you in that direction though? What purpose would it serve?”
“It’s not that it’s pushing me…not actively, anyway.” Ren curled her fingers around that hand a little tighter, “It’s just…making me impatient. It makes me constantly ask myself, ‘what are you waiting for?’ like the concept of playing the long-game is unfathomable. And I get these flashes of things in my mind - what feel like dreams to me, are memories to it, maybe? - where I can experience these moments it’s had, and I can tell that it doesn’t like waiting. It’s…inflecting onto me, making me get on with things that get me closer to what it wants.”
“So, you can see what it was doing before?” Gabriel wondered, “Can you see how others have dealt with it?”
“…No…” She looked at the man worriedly, “It comes unexpectedly, and it…feels like the things it shows me are curated. Scaring me with nightmares of how it killed the other Fafnir…or tempting me with…uh…well, dreams of you.”
That just made Gabriel’s face light-up like a red bulb, “…I see.” He said meekly, feeling all sense of focus vanish. He let go of the piloting stick for a second to smack his cheek and regain some semblance of wit, “…Um…well… Right… So…what’s it’s endgame? Do you know why it wants to get to me so bad?”
“…Not exactly. I know as much as you do, and that’s just based on what it made me say at the palace. About it having a deal it needs to fulfill.” She answered, and pinched her chin with her free hand, “It’s mentioned the Prime Mover stuff before… And what it did with your affliction…”
“That was honestly terrifying and I never want to experience it again.” Gabriel quickly noted, “It was horrifyingly invasive.”
“I felt it, too…” Ren agreed, “It’s like it hijacked you. But what’s weirder was how it was as if it was tasting your potential. It wants to have access to the full scope of your capabilities…and for that brief second when it was connected to you, it felt like I was standing on the edge of a massive abyss. It resents the fact that you won’t let it in.”
“I don’t mean this in a bad way but to Hell with that thing. You can keep it.”
“…Well…” She shrugged her shoulders up and held for a moment, “That’s…kind of been what I figured would happen all along.”
“After you left to find the medics, Furion mentioned that we had lied to Rylen about your condition.” Gabriel pointed out, and glanced over at her, “I didn’t want to speak for you, and honestly I was still in too much shock about Xanarken to form a coherent thought anyway…but… He’s not entirely wrong, either. Keeping this from Rylen…”
“I’m afraid of what he’ll do if he finds out, Gabe.” She explained simply, “I had it under control before… I was able to face you without it pulling the same shit it tried at the memorial. Right up until the second Aamin showed up, Scyrexian-”
“Sorry, the memorial?” Gabriel interrupted, “Is that why you looked scared of me and booked-it?”
Ren sank into herself a bit, “Yeah, sorry… I don’t know what changed between that whole day we spent together, where it didn’t do a goddamn thing, and the memorial, when it actually got close enough to the surface that I lost sight of myself…but I haven’t felt it since. Not until Aamin.”
“…Everything about this creature is confusing and messy.”
“Aamin had a piece of Scyrexian inside him.” Ren explained, “I could feel it, like a heat-lamp. But it…wasn’t the same as me. It was more like a sliver that had been broken-off and festered out of control. Scyrexian rejected him outright because of it. I didn’t know it was possible to feel that level of disgust, but…”
“So, you’re completely aware of what it did while it was in control?”
“In a manner of speaking?” She narrowed her eyes slightly in skeptical consideration, “There’s a big fuzzy gap from the moment Aamin came out and when I know I kicked Furion off the cliff…but after that? Yeah…it’s like I was watching from behind my own eyes as it piloted my movements.”
“…What did it make me do to him?”
Ren hesitated a second, but then simply stated the fact, “You compressed reality around him; made a space that’s normally person-sized and changed it to the size of a bean. It’s just like I was trying to figure out before… You don’t just cut stuff. You can manipulate space like it’s clay in your hands; splitting things was just one facet of the whole.”
“I tried calling you the other day about it…I think I figured out something else about it, too.”
“Oh?”
“I’ve been practicing. Feeling at things on the other side of the room from myself, like you told me.” He started, “But at one point I had actually been able to pull something towards myself, more than I would’ve been able to normally, like if I’d picked the thing up with my real hands. At first, I didn’t know how to describe it, because it happened when I wasn’t looking…but then at the palace, just the other day, I think I teleported.”
Ren leveled a look at him, “…Come again?”
“Maybe that’s the wrong word… I think…I swapped places with the thing I was holding? Or went to it? Whatever it was, it caused the heel of my boot to get stuck in the floor!” He said, and gestured at his right foot, momentarily dissipating the nanotech replacement he’d been using, “I had to replicate a fake one so I wouldn’t have to explain why I suddenly had new ones!”
“…That’s…honestly incredible.” She ascribed, “…My Fafnir mind is going crazy right now, trying to figure you out on the fly. I honestly don’t think we’d be able to take you down if you ever went rogue.”
Gabriel scoffed, “Don’t say that! I could never. Everything I’ve ever known and loved is with the Council.”
Ren blinked at him.
Gabriel felt all the blood leave his face as a dread worry settled in, “…Sorry, is that coming off heavy-handed? I feel like I’ve done that twice now. I have such serious whiplash about everything at the moment…”
She just puffed a quiet laugh and turned where the man’s hand was still resting on her thigh, and slipped her fingers through his before pulling the whole thing up to kiss his knuckles, “It’s…the kind of thing I’ve been wanting to hear for a long time. I just didn’t expect to hear it from you.”
“…Maybe we’ve both been a little neglected for a while.”
“A couple of love-starved fools.”
“Just in time for me to take Xanarken’s place as the Fourth Eidolon…”
“…Yeah, I knew that was coming.” Ren offered what comfort she could, rubbing the man’s thumb with her own, “Like you said, we’ll figure something out.”
“It doesn’t even feel real.” Gabriel said, that whiplash really biting him now, “I know I heard the words, but…I’ve seen Xanarken disappear a million times before, and he always comes back. That flash of light…I couldn’t see through it, so whatever happened to him completely escaped me. How do I accept that the man is really dead if I…don’t even have a body to look at…? He’s just…gone now? And all I have to go by is that notification from the Eidolon System that he’s offline? Rylen went offline once, and he came back…”
“For the sake of your wellbeing, I’d suggest not thinking about it for now. Let yourself have the mental space to deal with what’s going to happen in – or rather, to Kitez.” Ren recommended, “You’ve got to get ready to tell the whole Hadiran Accord what just took place in Trazad, and…I imagine you might be the one to tell the kid…”
“…Yeah…”