War raged, and soldiers died. Like chaff, beneath the scythe of the farmer, a deadly crop that through its death only brought more suffering. The war-power of the Nola raged furiously on, their ships filling the horizons beyond Gallant, the staging ground for so many fleets. It was an immense thing, a spindly beast that stretched over the horizons on tenuous calls and fleets that could somehow remain so perfectly synchronized.
It was a beast that fed on the blood of navy men, trained and reared by the clergymen of Holy Nolabo to fight and die on the shores of Xhyolok and the many islands and island-nations of the northern seas.
Here was where that blood ended. Siqxhe checked over a patient, running through a list of procedures and checks he’d learnt from Iri. The sibilant was a veritable treasure trove of medical information- she just knew so much. Some of it was outdated, if barely- the human lungs were different now in the Nola, and the Ilyaochi had a slightly different physique, but still… less men died.
Hands bloody, but not quite as bloody as they would have been before, he sewed shut the last stitches of a wound. Something that Iri could have done better- her hands were incredibly deft, but he tried to keep her to the soldiers who were far too injured to care about who was healing them. Most people feared her… those burning eyes, those faces of silver-bright luminescence that gleamed…
He let his mind drift, to Iri’s form, to the solid intensity of his work as he moved from patient to patient, the blood and the gore and even the darkness… he thought about the darkness. Everything except-
It was nighttime. He’d moved through the dying and the wounded and those who were just minorly injured but had still been sent back to Gallant, to what had become the best hospital in the entire world. Nobody questioned his methods… but he was done here. In this room, where everyone had been patched up and rebound in clean, washed bandages, and…
“Are you well? The moonlight whispers tonight, of the rings that it will form.” It was the soft voice of Iri, her gleaming eyes illuminating the room in another level of brightness, casting an almost uncannily still light over all the wounded who lay on makeshift pallets. At least they were individuals, separated from the others so as to prevent the spread of disease. A nurse who was working in the background looked up, met Iri’s gaze, then quickly ducked out of the room. “She was one of them. Care within, made without…” She seemed confused, and Siqxhe put a hand on her arm to comfort her.
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Put a hand on her arm to comfort himself.
Siqxhe sighed, moving over closer to a window. There were tables here, simple constructions of wood and a carpenter’s spare moments, but the injured loved them. It allowed them to just… sit and stare and see the sails go by.
The beast of Nolabo’s war, watch it consume… his war. A war forged from both coincidence and Polarity Light, that indescribable thing- or person, perhaps? Whatever it was, Iri wouldn’t describe it, or couldn’t- it was beyond description. It was power, and it was the key to God. The Eternity Falling, that spaceship that reached beyond God.
“Iri…” He didn’t want to say what he had to. There were so many things he’d learnt, deep secrets of the universe that humanity had been denied for so long. Still… “I have to leave.” He breathed a deep sigh, the very sound of it echoing out through the silence, the breath of war, so many soldiers, breathing or sleeping or mumbling… “My home- not Abōeo, but the village I was born in- was attacked.” By the Orroyelans, he thought, but didn’t put into words. It was one of the first places they’d attacked too, just another unfortunate coincidence he didn’t need his life. “I… have to return.”
There he’d said it. Iri looked at him, almost… confused. Siqxhe had attuned himself to the faint expression of her form, what she was- sibilant, but also near-human. “I will come.”
“You… will?” It was unexpected, completely and totally. She had nothing there, no connection to his people, no connection to Nolabo in the slightest. She preceded Nolabo. “But- the people here…” They hated her, though. She was something they couldn’t understand, and that scared them. “Your search. You’re hidden here.”
Iri’s eyes gleamed, and with a start Siqxhe recognized the emotion as fear. “The eyes of eternity scathe everything between here and the far reaches of the solar system. I’m never hidden, not in the center of the earth or even the heart of the sun.”
“Very well then. I mean to leave tomorrow…” They sat beneath the pale light of moon, fragments of something Iri had seen destroyed floating above the world as they prepared the cumulation of years, a return to Nolabo at last.