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Kratos goes when he is summoned. He has been waiting for the call for some time, though more and more he finds he cannot be exact with his years. How long has it been since this vessel failed? Maybe a decade. The worlds still strangle each other below— one toiling without hope, one sailing on under the sun. While Sylvarant prospers, Tethe’alla sinks into peril. He has touched down once or twice since the regeneration journey ended to find the land crawling with monsters. Even the Desians have holed up in hiding, hoping to ride the turning tides. The people are praying in terror. Had they misunderstood, that their Chosen had reached the Tower of Salvation? Have they not done enough, that Martel will not wake to save them?

It is not their fault, Kratos knows. Their god is still angry.

“I want you to oversee Sylvarant this time,” Mithos tells him.

It has been years since Kratos last saw him. Even then, he had been as Kratos had never seen him before. He thinks this every so often (the boy has never been so distraught, so crazed, so out of touch) and somehow, every century or so, it is even more true than it was before. Kratos has not come to Vinheim since then, but he stands here now, receiving his orders from the other end of the purple couch where Mithos sits, slouched, holding a little flowering plant in his hands as he speaks. In the dark starlight of Derris-Kharlan, his hair shines white, and he looks all the lonely little boy Kratos remembers him to be. 

Mithos’ fingers pucker and curl like the legs of an octopus. The flower flutters in response, its petals shriveling shut. He does it again, and the flower blooms, back and forth with an idle mummer’s magic as Kratos watches.

He looks well. He looks beautiful, white-gold under the starlight, like marble with his limbs splayed out and his hair draped over his shoulders. His frame is the same long body of the growing boy he was when he last aged, caught somewhere between the worlds of adolescence and adulthood. He looks hale, whole, so unlike the last time Kratos saw him, the way his eyes moved, the way the universe shook as he wept over the vessel he slapped to the floor. 

“This lineage is promising,” Mithos says. The flower blooms, then wilts. “It needs your hand.”

It is a punishment then, as he thought. He steps from one waning world to another. He has had time to dwell on Tethe’alla’s failure and the honey-haired Chosen who went down like a dog in the regeneration chamber. She looked like Martel. Not that it matters, and it does not (it may have, once, but that was long ago), but she had kind eyes and an honest smile. Wendla was her name. Mithos does not know that, or if he does, he does not care. Her blood was promising. Her mana was as sweet as Martel’s, and still she failed. 

She came closer than the rest. She smiled through the trials. When the angels bore her to the heavens, her silence was sincere in her clasped-hand prayers. She smiled, until she was foaming on the chamber floor, wild dark eyes searching for a final comfort as the light of her soul sputtered out. Like a deer with a hunter’s knife to its throat. All she found in her desperation was Kratos’ face. She met his eyes even as he drew his sword to end her misery. She trusted him until the end. Mithos is asking him to do it again.

“Yuan is responsible for Sylvarant,” Kratos says. It is a lame protest; neither of them can hardly be said to be responsible for anything these days. But it is the only excuse he has, for himself or for Yuan, who is up to something. He has always been up to something for as long as Kratos has known him, but this time, it is different. He does not let Kratos in anymore. He has not done that for a long time, but… something has changed.

“Yuan is pissing me off,” Mithos mutters. 

So, a punishment. Not for Kratos, perhaps. But a lash against one of them always manages to strike them both. 

Kratos watches the float and fall of the flower in Mithos’ grasp. The petals wing and weep— lilt, then list.

“He doesn’t believe anymore,” Mithos says at last. He clutches the flower a little tighter to his chest, its bare roots threading through his fingers as he stares at it. He has not once lifted his eyes to Kratos. “He loved her. How could he not want her back?”

Kratos has many answers to that question. He suspects Yuan has even more, or perhaps just one. Maybe someday, Yuan will tell him. But there is no answer Mithos could ever bear to hear, so Kratos goes to Sylvarant.

It is dull work.

It is cruel of him to even think so. Mithos has trapped the world in an hourglass, and now he turns it again with a flick of his wrist, a whim, upending life as the universe knows it. The seals around the Great Seed lock on one side, then come undone on the other, and the world is changed forever. Again. Histories are rewritten, destinies unraveled. Kingdoms rise in Tethe’alla as empires fall in Sylvarant. It is cosmic, deific. The number of lives lost each year to Cruxis’ machinations is hard to fathom, even after all this time. Even angels struggle to cope with acts of god. 

Still, it is dull work. 

Kratos lands in a Sylvarant transformed. It has been months, maybe years, since the Tower of Salvation disappeared from this world. Already he can feel the sap of mana draining from the air. The people will not notice for a while longer, and for some time, there will be an equilibrium between the two worlds, the two planes holding fast beside each other as the tides turn and the energies shift. Sylvarant will stay above water a little while longer. Eventually though, it will sink.

The decline of the flourishing world is always a slow, dying thing. Kingdoms do not realize they are drowning until the cities around them have crumbled to dust. The Desians have returned to Sylvarant, though for now they appear only as ghosts, the distant thud-thud-thud of something happening in the distance. The people whisper of their terror, of what the scriptures and legends say will happen now that Martel slumbers. Soon the Desians will become a pest, and eventually they will be the scourge of myths once more. They will raze farms and raid villages. Trade roads will die as cities wall themselves in, praying to a goddess who cannot hear. Soon all roads will lead to the Tower of Salvation, paving the way for the Chosen with pilgrims’ blood. 

This is necessary. The angel transformation takes better when it happens over weeks, if not months, if not years. Like an hourglass, a Cruxis Crystal cannot stay dormant. It must list one way or the other. It must live, or it must die. 

The change of the mana flow will be more immediately obvious in Tethe’alla, where the desolate lands will suddenly bloom with flowers under the watchful eye of the Tower. It will become the blessed land of the righteous, the home of the pious, of those who prayed to Martel for the salvation of their world and won. Kratos wonders if they will be looking for their Chosen, sweet Wendla with the kind eyes, or if they have forgotten her already, their gazes now fixed on their future. The streets will smell of mana, the ripe scent of life, and the cities will breathe again. They will build palaces and academies and music halls, filling their towns with thinkers and dreamers and artists. Cruxis’ guiding hand on the flourishing world is not as heavy as it is on the declining world, but Tethe’alla tends to follow the same road, over and over again, always going back to the start.

For once, Kratos is glad he walks the declining world. The busy streets of Meltokio are too close to a home he once knew, a city of vassals and knights and heroes, sapped up in the sweet scent of war. He has thought sometimes—

(He does not let himself linger in the past. Those days are long gone and can bring nothing to him now. But when winter’s sun is low on the Fooji mountains and the sea glitters gold at Meltokio’s doorstep, it is all he can do not to think of his mother. He never told her where he was going.)

— sometimes, he lets himself look at a glimmer of life outside the hourglass. Sometimes he thinks about who he might have been if a pair of half-elves had never stumbled into his life. If he had let Sylvarant win the war, how many lives could he have saved?

It does not matter now. Sylvarant wanes, and Kratos watches.

He sends his observations to Welgaia. Long gone are the days he penned scripture for the people (even in the early days of the church, the people penned most of the scripture themselves). These days, this millennia, he passes his notes onto a stone-faced angel who transposes his words into something more poetic, something that sounds divine. Then the records are pressed and bound and uploaded into libraries and archives. One day, they will be taken from Welgaia’s database and returned to the land as legends, or myths, or corrections to church-issued history books. 

These are not stories for today, not for the people living through Sylvarant’s collapse in real time. No, their present still belongs to them. Even Cruxis cannot take living memory, though there is nothing the Eternal Sword has not tried. These people remember the first of everything in this new age: the first Desian raids, the first Day of Prophecy, the first naming of the Chosen. They see villages burn and resistances rise. They watch leaders uplift and soldiers die. Perhaps by the time the hourglass is turned again, the memories of their here-and-now will only be stories old folks tell. And when that many years have passed, the haze of human memory can be rewritten as the church sees fit. 

Kratos walks among agents already at work, although most of them do not know him. He is of the highest order, a servant at Yggdrasill’s side. They are just foot soldiers— pilgrims visited in their sleep by angels who preach into their dreams; Desians waiting in the shadows, sending the Chosen where she needs to go; and priests who receive revelations in their prayers, enlightened by Martel to speak of the salvation awaiting the world. 

All this and more, he writes. There will come a day in two hundred years when no one will remember how the king of Asgard fell, or what the last pope of Sylvarant said in his final sermon. These things may not matter now, but there is not telling what the future will hold. It may matter later. It may matter, for instance, that the last Chosen of a flourishing Sylvarant is summoned to his holy marriage when the Tower of Salvation disappears, and Palmacosta rings with bells for a divine blessing on the land in times of blight. It may matter that his wife dies of childbed fever after three challenging labors, and he is ordained to remarry to carry on the righteous lineage as Cruxis commands. It will matter, because the second match proves fruitful where the first failed, and those three children are burned from the family tree in favor of their half-sister, whose blood sings promises of salvation.

The people will forget this in time. Mithos will not. 

The lineage of the Chosen has always been delicate. Imprecise. Laborious. The process is more akin to magic than science. Cruxis blesses weddings and anoints holy offspring. Priests draw blood from fair-haired babes and leave it in glass vials as an offering at the altar. An angel fetches it to the heavens, and when the match analysis is done, Mithos either smashes the glass against the wall or cups the blood as tenderly as if it were the Chosen itself. The results are never sure, no matter the parentage. Mana is as fickle as life itself. The only certainty Cruxis has managed to produce in their centuries of science is the instantaneous identification of impure blood from the smallest prick of a finger.

“That is surely progress,” Yuan had once said to Kratos. They stood in the neon-lit labs in the lifeless walls of Welgaia. “Once they had to examine our ears and measure the width of our skulls. Now all it takes is one drop of blood, and there are half-breeds everywhere. What a world Yggdrasill has built.”

Had things already changed, even then? Had Yuan already turned his gaze? When Martel died, Yuan kissed Mithos and called him brother. How long did it take for that to change? How long had it been since he had stopped using the boy’s name altogether? Kratos had not responded to his sarcasm. He did not need to say anything, nor did he need to remind Yuan they were the ones who had built the lab. They would not soon forget.

Pronyma tracks Kratos down after he avoids her for the better part of a century. She finally finds him in a travelers’ inn outside Palmacosta, where he sits alone listening to hushed human chatter about massacres in the mountains. The innkeeper disappears at the dark seething in her eyes, the tinge of madness that corners Kratos as his table. She learned that from Yggdrasill, he thinks. He remembers when she was just an officer, keen and cruel as she rose through the ranks. He wonders how much of her madness is an act, or if Mithos has left a scar on her soul.

She relays news of Cruxis. Kratos knew most of it before it ever trickled down to her, though he does not waste his breath telling her, even when she rambles about the route of the mana lineage. How dear it is. How precious. Lord Yggdrasill has been most specific with his wish that the Chosen lineage is not to be disrupted this time. That is rather always the goal, but he does not say that either. It has already gone asunder once with that ill-suited marriage. Instead he lets Pronyma steer her report into more mundane territory. The Desians, the ranches, the exspheres.

After so many years of this— he does not linger on it. Perhaps he should. But the Great Seed cannot be sustained by mana links alone. The base on Welgaia must be supported, powered, fed. The angels and soldiers must be equipped to fight the holy war. The exspheres, then, remain a necessary evil. 

“What will become of the Iselia ranch?” Kratos finally asks.

Pronyma sneers. “I am taking care of Iselia, my lord. It is no trouble at all for me to keep operations running as usual."

“Then perhaps you ought to take over,” he says.

He means it as a slight, and Pronyma takes it as such. He watches as his words eat her up and spit her back out. The contempt on her face is barely contained. Iselia’s isolated station is far beneath her. These days, she spends most of her time gloating in the halls of Welgaia, far above either human-infested world. The rest of the Cardinals have returned to their usual haunts in Sylvarant. Only Rodyle has veered into new territory, though that is usual for him. This time, he has taken to the sea for his remote experiments. Magnius once again terrorizes the hills of Palmacosta, like his predecessor did before him. The people there always put up a fight, and the Desians like a good show. 

For the first time in many centuries, there is a notable vacancy in the Cardinals’ ranks. Whoever takes up the mantle next will find themselves sequestered to the small ranch on the hills outside Iselia. Back in her lowly Desian days, Pronyma operated in the foothills between Hima and Luin, where a steady stream of travelers kept her ranch well-fed. To even suggest she would be suited to run the pitiful Iselia ranch is an insult. Few soldiers will be eager to assume the open Cardinal position if they have heard what happened to the last one. Kratos gathers something about a run-in with Rodyle, some kind of bet gone wrong. He does not care for the details, and the dead man was not liked enough for anyone to really care.

The darkness in Pronyma’s eyes flares. “If it is still Lord Yggdrasill’s wish, then I shall name a new Cardinal to oversee the Iselia region. There are many promising candidates. I shall need time to make my decision.”

It is a bluff they both see through. Desians with a cruel streak are as common as pennies, and there are just as many stupid soldiers as there are humorless angels. Cruxis scraped the bottom of the barrel when they promoted Magnius, though he has never known the difference. Pronyma has risen this far because she bears some semblance of common sense, which means she knows the same thing Kratos does, and that is why she bristles at his command: they are full up on cruelty. What they lack are wits. 

Once, that was Kvar. He stands unique among the Grand Cardinals as the only leader whose power does not derive from the Desian ranks. Even Rodyle was a foot soldier once, no doubt as slimy then as he is now, and Pronyma began as a grunt haunting the Tethe’allan hinterlands before she clawed her way to the top. It is little wonder they share a disdain for Kvar, who has not lived the battlefields and barracks so trademark of half-elves in the declining world. He was born in a mana-rich world, where his caliber was noted in the exsphere laboratories of Sylvarant’s royal academies. It was natural that Cruxis poached him for angel processing in Welgaia, and it was only a matter of time before his knowledge of exspheres led him back down to earth, where he now looms over Luin and Asgard with a ranch so feared its hand grapples into the land and laps up whatever life worth living is left. 

But Kvar has spent too long with his teeth sunk into his human experiments. Whatever taste of common sense he once had is long gone. Iselia’s ranch is unique in its requirements. Protection of the Chosen in the Village of Oracles is paramount to the region, and that means the ranch must spare the lives in the surrounding towns. It will be difficult to find a Desian who has that kind of restraint.

Kratos leaves that to Pronyma. In truth, she did not need to find him and tell him all this, but she did so regardless, a keen distaste clear in her eyes. He feels Mithos' hand in that. Even more so in the angel who finds Kratos wandering ruins near Asgard, who comes to tell him that the Chosen is about to receive the oracle. 

The lineage is promising, the angel tells him. It needs a guiding hand. 

Sylvarant’s Chosen receives her orders with tightly-clasped hands and a thin-lipped smile. She looks with disdain at the modest temple to which she has been carried from Palmacosta, dragged all the way to the backwaters of Iselia to receive her holy word. Kratos is among the onlookers, though he blends into the temple walls like a statue, one angel among many. This girl is of luxurious upbringing, still close enough to the legacy of her father’s flourishing world that she has never slept on a bare floor or felt the sting of a blade. 

She does not last long. Desian foot soldiers do not care for her riches or prayers when they slit her throat outside Triet. 

The Cardinals blame each other. Magnius rages through Palmacosta when accusations come his way. Kvar executes a hundred inmates in a show of loyalty, then locks himself up for half a century after Pronyma sneers at his tribute. It does not matter. The Chosen is already dead. The Oracle will come again.

And again. 

Kratos watches the Chosens fail, one right after another. He holds his post on high, watching from the clouds as the church follows orders. The lineage is promising, they have been told. He is in the crowds, listening to the priests at their pulpits, and on the streets, sapping up the whispers of the people praying for salvation. The Oracle comes again, and still the Chosen fails. 

Orders start trickling in. Magnius’ men redirect the next Chosen northward to Hima instead of across the sea. Kvar chases her all the way to Thoda Island before the priests route her back to Asgard, to Luin, to the Tower of Salvation. The journey lasts five grueling years, and the Chosen is skin and bones by the time she reaches her destination. That does not matter. All that matters is her mana. The lineage is promising.

She makes it into the Tower. Then she dies of exhaustion at an angel’s feet. 

It is just as well that her descendants are passed over. These are the journeys that never take place, the follies in the lineage that cannot be explained by science. Magic is like that, especially old magic, and mana is arcane. Even after thousands of years spent poring over households and bloodlines, Kratos understands little of what it will take to match Martel’s mana signature. The Chosen lineage began with half-elves long ago, and each descendant still bears some small fragment of elvish blood in their veins. That is easy enough to do, but the human half has pinned an age-long thorn in Mithos’ side. Humans are malleable, far more impressionable. There is room enough for more than one soul. But they are frail too, and short-lived, and their lines die and meander and never quite turn out the way Mithos wants. 

Once, the lines in each world diverged down different paths. Mithos would have created a hundred lines, a hundred worlds, if it had been worthwhile. But the efforts proved fruitless. The mana always comes back to the same place. Here they are hundreds of years later, arranging marriages and blessing wedding beds, waiting for the blood samples of the next generation to whisper secrets to the Great Seed, to tell Martel that all is well and she will soon wake.

It was like that in Tethe’alla, the day Wendla was born. When the church confirmed her mana was a match, Kratos listened from the shadows as joyous bells rang across the land. For once, it sounded the same in heaven as on earth.

It is not like that in Sylvarant. 

The Tower of Salvation flickers in and out. Generations come and go. The world sinks deeper into despair. Martel’s mana signature goes unmatched. Kratos watches as priests pray and die and try again. The marriages are fruitful, the prospects plentiful. The lineage is promising. But Sylvarant’s children are born failures, one right after another, dozens deep in the family tree until he loses sight of the branches. Kingdoms fall, and the sacred line is sheltered in their ancestral home of Iselia. It only gets worse when an angel comes to see him. 

“Lord Kratos,” the angel tells him. “I have been bid to inform you that the Oracle will soon come to Sylvarant. Please prepare for the Tower of Salvation to appear.”

He speaks like the wind moving over stone, eternal and unbothered. 

“The next Chosen is the one called Aithra,” he reports. “There is a small chance she will succeed.” 

Yet the Oracle will come.

Kratos observes the newly-named Chosen from afar, though there is little to her that he does not already know. She is one in a rabble of ill-suited offspring bred for a purpose she cannot hope to fulfill. There is only a slim chance she will reach the Tower of Salvation, and even if she does, he can tell just by breathing in her presence that she could not hope to hold Martel. But she does not need to succeed. The line will not die with her, and nor will her journey be futile. This is for the people.

Aithra is a slim quiet child, her flaxen hair woven in braids across her crown as she studies scripture with the priests. Kratos listens to her read hymns in strange angelic tongues. Strange, because it sounds like a language he knows, or once knew, the old Elvish tongue evolved by Cruxis into something divine. Kratos learned Elvish as a boy, or at least the fundamentals of it— the polite words and proverbs taught to all noble children in Tethe’alla at that time. He truly learned Elvish from two outcast siblings, the same way he helped them master Tethe’alla’s common tongue: over campfires and wounds and long nights spent spelling out hopes for the future in a world that did not want them. Them, or the future. 

That old tongue is almost lost now, though it can still be heard in some corners of Heimdall, or high in the crags of the Lathean Gorge, those ancient depths of Elvish lands not yet touched by angels. Sometimes he hears it on Derris-Kharlan, when Mithos sits under the stars and whispers to the Great Seed. 

Aithra has a sister, similarly ill-suited for her destiny. Their brother was a better match, though he was born with feet twisted inward like tree roots and each hand short a few fingers. He died at only a few days old. Whether that was fate or design— Kratos does not know. 

Kratos does not see the Chosen again until she receives the Oracle, and by then, he has settled Desian disputes and toured the ranches and watched militias die in fire and blood and holy fury. He has charted generations of the family tree of the Chosen lineage and searched out long-lost ancestors and cousins and children and sent their blood to the heavens for testing. He has seen Sylvarant slip further down the path to destruction, watched kingdoms fall, watched city-states crumble, watched the world fracture into little more than clusters of desperate people praying to a goddess who cannot hear them. A goddess who may never wake.

By then, Kratos has spent too long watching the world burn. 

He is attuned to mana as an angel far more than he ever was as a mere human— yet as Sylvarant wanes, he cannot help but think that he knew this breathlessness as a boy. When he was a young man, machines and magic ate the world alive; when he was a knight, he fought a war between countries that did not care if there was still a world left as long as they won. He was born into this strain, and he never knew the difference until the universe had been torn apart by an impossible sword, an impossible everything, and the hourglass poured clean ripe mana into a waxing world that felt like a life’s worth of fresh air straight to his lungs. 

Things should never have come this far. It should never have happened this way, the war, the worlds, yet here they are, five thousand years since their ancestors cleaved this terrible fate fighting over something not even the elves can remember. 

Once, Kratos believed in that impossible sword and the boy who held it. Now he watches Aithra stagger to seal after seal, and he thinks— clearly, truly, for the first time in a long time— that nothing has changed. They did not end the war, like the legends say. They only joined the fray.

For Kratos, that is the beginning of the end.

He watches a young woman lose her mind. He watches the priests bind her, maim her, drag her up a thousand stairs to a sunlit altar. He watches a boy lash out for the one he loves, and he watches the last bit of light leaves Aithra’s eyes when there is nothing left to be saved. He almost steps in to kill her himself before the angel’s light hails down in fury. Instead, he retrieves her body. He bears her to the Tower of Salvation and buries her in the steps to heaven in an unmarked grave beside her kin. Then he leaves his sword on Derris-Kharlan, and he goes to Sylvarant.

Time passes.

Kratos learns to live like a shadow. He moves in circles across the land as the years wheel overhead in the turn of the stars. He keeps his eyes to the ground. He plies his trade as needed, one mercenary among many on the road. It is no longer an uncommon sight in Sylvarant, as the last rich precipices of the great empires have fallen, and the land has descended into darkness. Cities wall up and hold fast against monsters and Desians and all the evils plaguing the dried-up fields. The land grows sparse, the crops weak. Kratos passes through wheat fields that brush his sword belt, half the height they once were. Without grain, livestock starve; and without either, the people suffer. Famine turns to poverty, which turns to blight and disease as the starving collapse in canals and on crossroads. 

He has seen this Sylvarant before. By now, he knows it well. A suffering world cannot sustain hope forever, and he feels a jitter in the air every now and then, a stutter and stop of the mana drain to ease any pending disasters. It is not enough to cease the decline, but it sustains the church for a generation more. What good is the Chosen if there is no one left to pray for her journey? 

The world goes on around him. He does what he can. He plucks off some bandits hiding in the woods outside Asgard, then wields his sword to guard a pilgrimage shuffling to the Balacruf Mausoleum. They pay him a paltry sum, and he passes it to Luin’s watchman for fresh catch and a campsite. A family of traveling merchants give him a ride across the peak to Palmacosta, where he lets a pair of starving half-elves rob him blind in the marketplace. A blacksmith loans him an old steel sword. The Academy hires him to escort students to Thoda Geyser. A fishing boat gives him a lift to Triet, where he follows a band of nomads over the hills, across the sea, and back up the road. 

Then he does it all again. 

Time passes.

Noishe finds him outside Hima. One day, Kratos is sharpening his sword in the foothills, a colorful handknit shawl tied to his scabbard— payment from a desperate woman and her ailing daughter, whom he guided through the hills in search of a medicine man they had were seeking. He did not tell the woman there is no medicine in the world that could save her child. He did not accept gald either, leaving them to pawn the last of their wealth to some supposed shaman hoodwinking the ill and the poor. Instead, the woman left the handknit shawl she had worn around her neck and carried her daughter up the mountain. Kratos sits with it for a while, his eyes roving the brightly colored rows of wool. Then he looks up with a start and finds Noishe settling down at his feet, his head brushing Kratos’ legs like they are familiar old friends.

They are old friends. But not familiar, not after so many years. The creature never liked Welgaia, especially not the angels, so he disappeared to earth and has spent the last many centuries roaming across the world, doing whatever protozoa do. It has been a long time since Kratos has seen him, and he wonders how Noishe found him, if he can tell that Kratos does not like the heavens either. Then he thinks, so many years apart is nothing to the long-lived like them. Hello, old friend.

It is easy to ignore Sylvarant’s slippery path once Kratos learns to stop listening. After Aithra, he— after that, the church is easy to ignore. He grows used to the shadows that walk among him, the darkness that slithers through the trees, the evil that seeps into one dead field after another. Soon monsters are a way of life, and mercenaries are more needed than ever. Pilgrims stumble from one holy site to another, commanded by their priests to journey as the scripture says; they carry herbs and gold and offerings in their bags, praying to the goddess from the cresting mountains to the sunken valleys. But it is easy for a goddess to ignore when she has been asleep for four thousand years. Their prayers go unanswered.

The people learn to carry swords, or knives, or pitchforks, whatever they can use to bite back at the monsters who haunt their fields and trade roads. The land is ripe with terror. Perfect for a Chosen, Kratos thinks— a Cruxis Crystal could gorge on this fear. 

He puts that out of his mind. He tries. It is easy enough to ignore, until one day Noishe brings him to Luin.

He smells the Desians before he can see them. Smoke rises on the horizon. The city is some miles further, nestled on the freshwater shores of Lake Sinoa. The townspeople will have seen the flames too, and they will have fled on their river boats and dinghies, hiding in the canals until the danger passes. These villages on the harbor’s outskirts are not so lucky. Their houses are mud and wood, little thatched cottages built into round hills tufted with grass. They are close enough for Luin’s fish and salt and name. Too far for its protection. 

Kratos watches from the hills as the village burns. Beside him in the grass, Noishe huffs and whines and paws at the dirt. The villagers have been gathered on the road, snatched from their beds and breakfast tables. Some of them are only half-dressed. Some are still half-asleep. Some of them are weeping. The rest are silent.

Soldiers rummage through the burning houses, holding whips and shouting orders, overturning carts and tables and mattresses. It is a terrible thing, but Kratos cannot help but think the villagers have been lucky so far. The Desians who swarm them have no crossbows, no helmets, no real anger in their voices when they shout. These are the lowest-ranked, a genus of mixed bloods that are no longer half-this or half-that or half-anything. They are as hungry and tired as the people they ransack and terrorize. Orphans and whores and beggars from crossroads and slums across Sylvarant, sought-out and sweet-talked to join the cause, or otherwise snatched from the streets and told this is all for their own good. Humans are a blight upon this land. They have taken everything from you. But together we can save the world. Won’t you fight for us?

One of these soldiers shouts at a middle-aged man in a nightgown. The mayor, Kratos thinks. When he does not answer, the soldier only grits his teeth and stumbles off, bumping into his comrades as they search the pig pens and stables. 

His captain has no such patience. He saunters forward with a fine-tipped spear held upright in one hand, his helmet gleaming with gold under the sunrise. It has been many years since Kratos visited a human ranch, but he knows this kind of soldier when he sees one. He is one of the elite, the righteous, the driven. He serves one purpose in his life. Glory to the coming age of half-elves!

When the captain beats the mayor’s brains onto the street, some of the younger soldiers flinch. But none step forward to stop him. The ranch will make Desians of them yet.

Noishe whines.

“You’re right,” Kratos says. He sinks back into the brush, out of sight, and turns his gaze northeast. “Let us go.” 

It is no coincidence that Kvar is known as the cruelest of the Desian lords. The other Cardinals give him a wide berth and grimace at his experiments. Even Cruxis does not know the full extent of what goes on in his ranch. He is as tight-lipped as he is cunning. But even for him, razing an entire town is out of line. The humans in the declining world are to be scared, managed, culled. Not eradicated. Not dragged from their beds, beaten to death in the streets, and marched towards doom in the ranch as their homes burn in the distance. 

So, Kratos thinks, Kvar has an escapee. 

And a valuable one at that— Desians do not go out of their way to recover escaped test subjects. It is a waste of manpower to chase after prisoners who are so starved so they can squeeze through the fences. They never last long outside the ranch. An escape is merely a game of attrition, and rarely do prisoners make it to a town, let alone a city. Even more rarely do they live to see another day before fever or paralysis or madness takes them. So few have survived that the people of Asgard and Luin believe it to be impossible. Not impossible, Kratos wants to tell them. But perhaps not worth it. 

The Desians’ search perimeter encircles the outermost edges of the wooded hills where Kvar’s ranch sits. Soldiers crawl the forest, carrying crossbows or leading keen-eyed sniffer dogs. Noishe disappears into the brush, slinking low onto all fours like a cat, and the dogs go wild chasing after him, their noses to the ground as they drag their handlers into the thickets. Kratos watches the search from between the trees. The soldiers do not let up even as the sun goes down. Kvar must have lost his mind to send so many men after a prisoner. The ranch will be unguarded. All of his troops are prowling through the woods with lanterns, shouting at each other to Find her! For a moment, Kratos thinks—

What exactly is he thinking? He would not need to wait for Kvar’s defenses to fall if he wanted to infiltrate the ranch. He could slip into the innermost control room without letting a single soldier see him. He could walk up to the guards at the front gate and announce that he has been sent by Cruxis, and he would be shown straight through. Although he does not know what has happened in his absence— for the first time, he thinks of the many long years he has spent roaming Sylvarant. It all seems a blur now. He could not count the years if he tried. It is not so unusual for him to linger in the waning world, but Mithos must know by now that he has not simply fallen out of touch. It has been too long. The church has not heard from him, nor the angels. He has made sure of that.

No, Kratos is on the run. All of Cruxis will know by now. There is no telling what would happen if he showed his face to the Desians. 

And what is there for him to do? Does he hope to break into the ranch and make himself a hero by freeing the prisoners? That would do them little good. They are already dying, and they will surely die if they are turned free with nowhere to go and no one to help them. Kvar would rage, and then he would raid the fields and farms for more host bodies. It would change nothing.

It is yet another consequence of his past. He should be used to this by now, unraveling the threads of the last four thousand years like the string of fate trailing behind him, looking back to see all the things he could have done differently. If he had loved Mithos more, would that have changed anything? Perhaps Kratos should have whipped him into shape instead, struck him upside the head to siphon all that rage into the sword until he was whittled into something worthwhile and wooden, the way men of Kratos’ generation were made. The way his father made him. Mithos was far too impassioned for that. Martel allowed him to be so, regardless of their cruel upbringing, or perhaps in spite of it. Maybe if she had not been so soft on him—

No. An ancient memory deep in his heart aches at that betrayal. It was not her fault.

Kratos waits in the woods, watching the soldiers’ lanterns bob in the dark. He has long heard rumors of indescribable experiments that take place at the ranch, the same whispers the Cardinals tell each other behind Kvar’s back. Their rumors trickle down through the ranks, from captains to sentries to scouts, and then outward from the ranch, creeping into the ears of sailors and farmers who have the rare displeasure of trading with the Desians. In the cities, the rumors only grow. Kratos has heard stories from Asgard to Iselia of test subjects mutated into monsters that claw out their own eyes and prisoners whose bodies shrivel until they look like they are made of sand. He has heard that people in the ranch are cut open by doctors, who dig around inside of them, then sew them back up and wait to see what happens. He has heard there are no doctors in the ranch, and the ones with knives are just soldiers, the same men who whip people until they bleed and tear out children’s tongues. He has heard that the people in the ranches are slaves, laboring under the summer sun and in the winter winds. He has heard that the people in the ranches are nothing more than cattle, that the Desians tear them apart and feast on their flesh. He has heard that the Desians force the women to mate with them, then raise their children as superior half-elves who spit on their filthy human mothers. He has heard that Kvar keeps children in his ranch not for experiments, but for his own twisted pleasure.

These stories and more, the people tell in the dark. They whisper in underground militia meetings and in secret circles by moonlight. They think they are exaggerating. Kratos knows they are not that far from the truth.

None of these stories, however, touch the barest truth of all— that Kvar will stop at nothing to get what he wants. 

It is by the light of the moon that Kratos first sees the lone soldier. A glint catches his eye at the western edge of the ranch, and he watches a figure scurry out from the brush, helm gleaming in the dark like polished steel. He knows at once this is no Desian, though the stolen helmet would ask him to consider otherwise. The figure seems as small as a child in the dark woods, slinking through the trees away from the ranch. It must be her. Her bare feet pick across the forest floor, like pinpricks to angel ears, and she stops every now and then, listening to the search parties barreling through the woods. It is a dangerous trick to hide so close to the ranch. But a clever one. 

Clever— and slow. Her fleeing shadow is thin as she stumbles over rocks and trips on tree roots. Her path had seemed to be southeast, down the hills to Umacy and Asgard, but in the moonlit forest, she is soon limping westward into the thickets, glancing over her shoulder to see if she is being followed. She does not realize she is walking straight into a Desian search party. 

Kratos cannot say why he does it. All these years wandering Sylvarant, he has turned his gaze and let the world crumble around him. After all, what can he do? He is still watching from the shadows when the prisoner stumbles directly into the flame of a Desian’s torch. Then his hand is on his blade as the soldiers draw their swords and shout, sending the escapee stumbling backwards over a tree root, her stolen silver helm thudding to the ground as the soldiers close in. Then Kratos is in their torchlight too, slicing each of their throats before they can make another move.

The night is still again when Kratos turns to her. Without her helmet, she does not look even half the part of the Desian she was trying to play. There is a torn blue breastplate over her fraying rags, and the weapon in her hand is only a broom handle.

She struggles to her feet, grasping for the helm. She is bleeding from her forehead where she smacked against the ground and bleeding from her feet where she stumbled over thorns and needles and fallen branches. Her thin arms struggle with the weight of the helm. She lets it go, thudding back onto the forest floor, and stares at Kratos in the pitch-black darkness, her eyes wide like a cat’s. 

“You should run,” Kratos says. He turns away. “There are more of them coming this way.” 

The woods flicker and howl with search parties when he leaves them behind. He finds Noishe prowling the edge of the forest and heads back toward Luin, toward the fading grey wisps of smoke rising into the moonlight. Only when he reaches the city does he acknowledge the shadow following him. 

She is quiet the whole way, though Kratos could hear her miles off. She is careful, as contemplative with her steps as she can be in her frail state, and he thinks she must have planned this for a long time, a day when she could walk among the trees again. She stays on his tail through the woods, creeping after him in the dark of night. It is only when he reaches the edge of the woods and continues into the plains that he hears her hesitate, and he knows she is wondering if she should risk following him out into the open. He wants to turn around and tell her, don’t, but he is the one who saved her. She is free now, and it is her choice to make. She is still lingering in the last recesses of the trees when he begins to disappear from her view. At least she is smart enough not to trust him. 

When he reaches Luin, he makes camp by the lakebed. He pays a fee to the watchman, starts a fire, and cooks dinner. It is not much. He does not eat much these days, if at all, but he has some bread and he trades a night fisherman a pair of whittling knives for some fresh catch. When the soup is cooked, he sets two bowls by the fire.

That is all it takes to coax the shadow out. She sits at the furthest edge of the campfire and watches him eat first. Then she sops some bread into the soup and eats with a hunger Kratos has not known in many, many years. After a while, she lowers the bowl, eyeing Noishe chasing fireflies in the distance.

“Why did you help me?” she asks. There is no need to point out that he knew she followed him here. It is good she figured that out already. It is difficult now that he has to answer her.

“I don’t know,” Kratos says after a moment.

The girl snorts into her soup. That surprises him, and he finds himself looking closer at her. She must have been born outside the ranch, somewhere people still have a sense of humor. Somehow she has retained her wits, even after all she must have endured in there. He sees too that she is older than she appears; malnutrition has left her bone-thin and greying, and her hair is a hack job that looks like it was done by a child discovering scissors. 

Kratos adds, “I did not wish to see you suffer at their hands.”

“Really?” She sweeps the crust of her bread around the bottom of the bowl, soaking up the last drops of soup. “I hope your luck is better than mine. They’re going to come after me.”

“They will kill you,” he says.

For the first time, her face opens up. The corners of her mouth turn, her lips pursed together, and her dark eyes flicker to him, meeting the solemn stoic gaze that he set on his features many years ago. Do not get involved, he tells himself. 

But she is smiling.

“No,” she says. She raises one hand. “They won’t.”

Her exsphere is— how can he describe it? It is there, all at once. He has been so muted and dull, watching the world move around him as a stone watches moss grow in the forest. He did not notice it, except for the usual glint of a gem embedded in a prisoner’s skin. But when he sees it, suddenly it is impossible to ignore. Mana radiates from it like static before a thunderstorm, standing all his hairs on end; it pulses like a heartbeat, like waves on a seashore, like the back and forth of a boat on rough water, a seasickness that floods through him as he tries to stay his footing.

It is only so strong because it is eating her alive, flesh and soul and all. It is nothing more than a parasite devouring her from the inside out. She will be like an angel when it is done. Like him, but far, far worse. Like the Chosen. He thinks of Aithra. 

Kratos amends his words carefully. “They… will never stop chasing you.”

She is not smiling anymore. There is no surprise on her face, and less fear than before. But there is something else, glinting in the dark when she meets his eyes— fire.

“I will never stop running.”

So he becomes a fugitive. 

Kratos is certain Mithos could find him if he wished. Mithos could smell the memory of Martel’s mana hanging on him and have him strung back to Derris-Kharlan in a matter of days. There is almost nowhere in either world he could hide where he could not eventually be hunted down. He thinks of Heimdall then, petting Noishe by a campfire as Anna sleeps, remembering the soft bristle of tail feathers under his fingers. He thinks of Yuan too, and he wonders if Mithos is chasing both his seraphim, or if he has given up on them altogether. He wonders if Mithos is letting him run free because he is too busy hunting Yuan— and if Mithos cannot catch him, because he can no longer find the imprint of Martel on Yuan’s skin.

The angels do not come looking for Kratos. If Mithos finds him, he does not make it known. There are times he lies awake with Anna, looking at the stars, something tentative between them as she rests her head on his shoulder, and Kratos feels certain he is staring back at eyes that peer down. But no one comes. 

That leaves the Desians. After all, this Angelus Project (as Anna describes it) is a mortal’s folly, the touch of those who seek to seat themselves among the gods. Angels have little need for imitations of their holy designs, though Kratos is sure that Anna’s exsphere has powers yet untold. But those powers are, yet, untold. As long as that is true, the gem is an object of desire for those who walk the land, not for those who already dwell above it. If there is anything Kratos knows for certain, it is that Kvar will not understand this, nor any of the Grand Cardinals. He knows exspheres too, at least as well as any Desian, and he knows no gem can do anything the Eternal Sword has not already tried. Neither can bring Martel back from the dead.

So Yggdrasill remains unmoved, and Kvar does not relent.

Kratos and Anna keep running. 

At some point, he has to tell her all this.

He has never lied to Anna about who he is, though for a long time, she does not ask. He knows what she thinks, and he does not correct her, though— somewhere on the road, he finds he wants to tell her everything. It would be easy to blame it on the exsphere embedded in her hand. To be in the presence of such dense mana as it mutates and feeds, well, it is little wonder all the Desians are half-mad. It would drive anyone insane, that power. (Not her. Never her.) But his crystal is stronger still, at least for now, and he keeps his wits. As much as he has left, at any rate.

His only excuse then is that he likes her. He does not mind the way she looks into him, even if she cannot decipher what she sees. He lets her in the night they meet, and he never keeps her out again. 

One night, he talks about his childhood. He speaks as if moving his hand over a framed portrait, pointing to the faces and trying to recall the names, like he is telling myths about someone ancient and faraway. That is the only way he can remember his life. There is the man’s little sister, who was blinded by a mortar and played the lyre like a songbird. The lyre? Like a harp. There is his only brother, knightly and true and dead before his time. No, not the war— a fever took him on his wedding bed. There are the rest, the ones who lived far longer than the man would have liked in a world that should never have been built. A mother whose voice he has long forgotten, though he knows he has her eyes. A sister whose descendants fought angels and died. Cousins, friends, teachers. All of them dead. 

The man might have had a father, but it is easier to forget when he was only ever a shadow looming in the background. It is the first time Kratos realizes he has forgotten his father’s name.

“House Aurion,” he says when he is finished. “There you have it.”

It is a story of half-truths and things unsaid, though when she asks about his age, these people, this war, he answers her truly. She does not believe him, or at least, she has not, so far; she does not say that either. It’s alright. It’s the way they talk. This is how they understand each other. 

“That’s a human name,” Anna points out. 

It is, but not in the way she is thinking. It comes from a human language, but not one that she speaks, not one that anyone but three seraphim speak anymore, and it has been rewritten too many times to be worth explaining now. Mithos is a human name too, to her ears, though nothing could have been further from the truth when Kratos heard it first four thousand years ago. He heard it first from Martel, pleading her way through the human tongue she barely understood, a slim little boy clutched to her elbow. She was weak and bruised and half-blind with hunger when she met Kratos, but she had a presence that bade him stop, please, hear me. She was like that, for all of them, for everyone who met her— like a willow wisp in the forest, dancing where the grasses grow tall and the sunlight laps the land, that edge between real and imagined where travelers lower their hoods and wonder if they have glimpsed a god.

It is little wonder Chosens go mad.

“Aurion,” Anna says. “Isn’t that human?” 

Her echo of his surname sits in his mind, and for a moment, Kratos thinks, yes, that was House Aurion. Now, let me tell you about my family.

He does not say that yet. Soon, he will.

“You thought I was a half-elf,” Kratos says.

Anna shakes her head. “No. Maybe. I can… I don’t understand how this works, but I can tell you’re not like other people. Other humans, I mean.”

Nor is she. He will have to tell her, if she asks, how this works, how the exsphere imbues her with its powers. It is her, he will have to say, or at least, it will become her soon. Parasite overtakes host and feeds power from what it eats. He will have to explain that she will never really die, not as long as the gem survives. Neither will he.

“I am not,” he says.

“But you are a Desian,” Anna says, asking. If it has bothered her all this time, traveling with a Desian, or a half-elf, even one who rescued her, she has not let it show. Even now, she speaks to the ground, staring at the shadows of the campfire between them. It’s only when he does not respond immediately that she looks up, and then the hurt on her face pains him, as if his silence was all the answer she needed. He wants to tell her everything.

“No,” Kratos says, finally. Finally. “I… am an angel of Cruxis. The Desians and the Church of Martel are operated in tandem. All the nature of the world is owed to Cruxis. The Chosen, the tower, everything. That is who I am.”

“I don’t understand,” Anna says. “What does— how can that be?” 

Bits and pieces of this, he has told her before. 

“You can’t be that old,” Anna had said. She had asked him about his sword-fighting, where he learned to wield a blade, then stopped him in the middle of his story about becoming a knight. “We call it the Ancient War for a reason. That would be impossible.”

“I am impossible,” Kratos had answered, and she had laughed in a way he had not heard before. He can see now, as the fire dances in her eyes, she is realizing he was telling the truth.

He hesitates a moment more, looking to the harvest moon above their camp. He thinks of Tethe’alla, of Derris-Kharlan, and he wonders who Yuan has told this story to, if he could tell Kratos what to say.

“It is a long story,” Kratos tells Anna. “Let me start at the beginning.”

Anna names their son after her father, or what she remembers of him. She asks Kratos later, when Lloyd is beginning to walk, whose family name he should have. Not mine, Kratos thinks. Let the House of Aurion die with me.

The Irvings find tentative peace in Palmacosta. 

It is far from the first place they land. Lloyd is born in a nomad camp outside Hima, an intentional choice on Kratos’ part, who knows the remote village sees hundreds of families pass through, shepherds and settlers and bards. Many of them are three or four generations deep, traveling with babies swaddled on grandmothers’ backs and children running underfoot of their clans. Kratos and Anna fit in, as much as they can. At any rate, they don’t stand out; though they have to wait a while for Anna’s labor to begin, sitting around a campfire making up stories about the passersby. The midwives— because Anna sees four in the time she’s at Hima, each one coming and going, as wanderers do— furrow their brows when she tells them how far along she is, because her belly is smaller than expected, little more than a bump beneath her dress. They tut and measure their tapes around her stomach. Then they listen, tapping with their knuckles like she’s a ripe pumpkin (do they think the baby’s going to answer? Kratos asks once, and Anna laughs so hard she wets herself), and then the prodding of hands around the lowest part of her belly. Each midwife finishes the examination pleasantly surprised.

“He will come soon,” the third midwife tells them. “He’s small, but so are you. I’d prepare for a long labor.” 

Her hands dig into the curve of Anna’s stomach, as if outlining the shape of the child within. They’re not even in the inn— stars above, they stopped the midwife as soon as they saw her coming into camp, because it’s been weeks since the last one was here and the baby should have come by now. Anna stands with her tunic pulled up over her stomach, the midwife crouched between her legs, still wearing her traveling gear. Kratos gives up trying to protect his wife’s decency, and no one is looking anyway. Anywhere else, someone would have balked. Not in Hima. 

“Is he alright?” Anna asks. She pauses, her breath catching. It’s gotten harder for her to breathe. Kratos is so focused on that, he doesn’t notice until later that they already talk like it’s a boy. Once Lloyd is born, well, it just seems meant to be. “He’s overdue.”

“He’s fine,” the midwife answers. “Just comfortable where he is.” 

It is a long labor, as predicted, and Lloyd is born in the morning as the sun comes over the mountains. Anna is fine, more than fine. She cries as Kratos has never seen her do before, because she’s not a crier (never has been, never could be). But she weeps when she first holds her baby, and she doesn’t let go of him until she passes out from exhaustion. The healer who stays with them is a rare Sylvaranti elf, traveling between why do you want to know and that’s none of your business. She’s not a midwife, she tells them vehemently, and she doesn’t deliver babies, much less humans. But she is there anyway because she can’t stay away once Anna’s labor starts, though even her elvish stoniness cannot hide her alarm when Anna lurches upright and insists on walking before the afterbirth even comes. It takes both of them to hold her down, and even then it only works when the old woman who owns the inn barges in and yells at her to get back in bed.

“She’s used to pain,” Kratos explains to the healer. He doesn’t have to say anymore. Few have reason to cover their exspheres the way Anna hides hers. And like those few, the Irvings do not linger. 

It is a slow-moving, perilous journey they make back east. Looking at the map while camped in Hima, Kratos considers taking them southwestward across the straits. But there is little to be found there, or at least little that he remembers. It has been many years since he spent time in the Triet Desert. It was not always a desert, not until Efreet blew up the place upon learning what Mithos had done with his pact. They should consider themselves lucky that both worlds are not asunder in quakes and fire. He takes his family to Asgard instead, then onward. They have doubled back across the continent more than a few times, crossing by night in the forests and on the high roads, the narrow stretches not fit for Desian armies. Kratos can still easily take out scouts and bandits along the road, and these have been of little concern until now. But everything is harder with a babe in arms, and the early months of motherhood leave Anna feeling far more ragged than she cares to admit.

Hakonesia Peak is almost insurmountable. It takes them weeks to make it across. They try to haggle with the guards, and like every other poor soul, they are turned away. Then they come at night, bundled up in the darkness, only to find the pass lit with the torches of a search party. Desian or not, the flickering lights on the mountain force them to turn back. They return to Asgard to rest, again, though Kratos spends most of his time wandering the caverns, wondering if he cannot carry all three of them over on wing, wondering what relics he could loot from the caves to pawn to the old man guarding the gate. He has no great treasures, at least not anymore. He left his sword in the halls of Welgaia. The only valuable left to his name is his Cruxis Crystal.

A useless thought— as if anyone but an angel would know its true worth. 

Their chance finally comes when a pilgrimage of sisters shepherds poor young women forth from Asgard’s slums, calling down into the caves and up into the hills, promising that sanctuary awaits them in Martel’s halls. Kratos knows this trick. The doe-eyed pilgrims round up fourteen-year-old mothers and their babies, coaxing them onto the road in promise of a better life in Palmacosta. The sisters do not know their work is unholy. The group will be attacked on the other side of the mountain, and most of the poor will end up at a ranch. Usually the mothers will go to Magnius and the children to Kvar. That is the longstanding outcome of a Desian spat Yuan and Kratos once chastised Pronyma for bringing to their attention. It seems this is how she settled it. 

Anna is quick to shuffle into the group before Kratos can stop her. What follows is the longest week of his life, watching from overhead on wing, or else silent behind the trees, as the sisters guide their poor up the mountain and over the peak, graciously compensated by the charity of the church. Anna is quick again to leave herself behind, dropping off from the group once they stumble down the other side of the mountain. If any of the sisterhood notice a missing mother and child, they do not waste time looking for them. 

“Can’t we help?” Anna asks him.

Noishe leads them off-road through the woods. They follow the curve of the mountain range towards Palmacosta, staying well out of sight of the main roads. Lloyd rides on Kratos’ shoulders, cooing at the light that flickers through the forest canopy. Kratos knows, as Anna knows, that whatever they could do to help those women and children would inevitably put their son in danger too.

He does it anyway, though not in the way Anna asks. Their forested path eventually trickles out onto the plains, where it meets the main road that leads to the city. Kratos sends Noishe charging ahead with Anna and Lloyd on his back. He stays behind, and in a matter of minutes, he takes out the Desian troops lurking in the brush. Whether they were waiting for the sisterhood or some other unsuspecting travelers, he cannot say. It does not really matter. He saves at least one life that day, though it comes at the cost of many others. Some of the Desians he kills are knock-kneed half-elves like he last saw in Luin— young men and women stolen from the slums, breaking their first blood on a craven’s hunt. He considers, for a moment, that perhaps he is saving them too. But he cannot reconcile that with the throats he has to slit to do it, so he puts it away, like everything else. 

Palmacosta waits on the horizon when they reunite. Lloyd squeals at the sight of his father. Anna holds Kratos a little tighter when she hugs him, and he thinks— not for the first time, not for the last— if only they could get rid of that damn exsphere.

It cannot be removed, or at least he does not know how to do it. Once there were dwarves in the world who practiced the art of runes and crests to ensure such gems could be removed at whim. Long ago, they were the first to find the exspheres’ power, feeding their kilns and flames with the life force of mana to refine their magics. That is a history even Kratos does not fully know. It was said in the late days of the war that Tethe’alla and Sylvarant once fought for the mines where such pure ore was found. The gems they unearthed tapped into magic as deep as the roots of the Giant Kharlan Tree. They powered machines, cured ills, and set humans on equal footing with the elves who had long since grown tired of their short-lived neighbors spreading like pests. The exspheres built weapons, too. It is said that was how the war began.

(Once, as a young knight defending a royal carriage across the Lathean Pass, Kratos glimpsed Heimdall over the hills and thought it would be enlightening to be an elf, to watch the rise and fall of civilizations in one lifetime. Now he has lived four elven lifetimes, and he knows it is just exhausting that humans never learn from their mistakes.)

These days, he would not know where to find such a dwarf, if any are left to be found. The land is hollowed out with the forgotten mines of old. There may be no dwarves left in either world, and if they exist, they are high in the labs of Welgaia, far from their natural order underground. Kratos thinks— not for the first time, not for the last— of taking Anna to Tethe’alla. He has not been there in a long time, but Sylvarant’s continual decline means its counterpart is flourishing. They will be in need of exspheres for their machines and dwarves to do the delicate magics; though it is the waning world that provides the lives to meet demand. What use has Sylvarant for the thousand exspheres churned out every year at the human ranches? The Desians are fitted for battle, their machines are maintained— then the rest of the gems are farmed to Cruxis and Tethe’alla. There may be someone over there who knows what Anna needs. Perhaps if he could reach Yuan—

No. 

There is no one he can trust. Even if the passage across space and time were not an obstacle, even if they could make it to Tethe’alla without Cruxis’ detection… it is not only about Anna anymore. They have a child to consider. 

Lloyd grows so fast. One day, there is a heartbeat in Anna’s belly, then Kratos blinks and he is teaching his son to fish. When a mere human lives for millennia, time passes like that, as if years were only seconds. He tries to taste it all, to remember the way Lloyd squirms in Anna’s arms until she sings him to sleep, and the way his first tufts of hair grow in seemingly overnight, and every old woman stops them on the road to comment their predictions for his future. There are little things about being human that it seems he had forgotten. Anna laughs at first, watching him marvel when the baby’s first teeth emerge through sore red gums; then she sits with him all night, leaning on him as he holds Lloyd through his teething pains.

“I’m going to keep a string of his baby teeth, like in the old wives’ tales,” Anna whispers as they are curled up together. “I don’t want to forget any of this.” 

He thinks Anna knows, when he does not answer, that he is reaching into the recesses of his memories to understand what she means. Once, when he was as little as Lloyd, someone held him and wished all the same things he wishes for his son— a world without war, a life without violence, nothing but sweet yellow sunlight and deep jumping rain puddles. He is sure of this, even if the memories he pulls from the depths of his mind are only things his heart makes up to fill the gaps. He listens to Anna’s memories instead, her sleepy giggling stories about tying loose teeth to doorknobs. Stories about losing teeth list into stories about stepping on nails, and those lull into stories about chasing feral cats and tripping on the cobblestones. After that, she falls quiet, and he knows her stories have veered into memories of the ranch, dark halls where teeth and nails were pulled without a comforting hand to wipe the blood away after.

Growing up, Kratos thinks, is not unlike becoming an angel.

He does not keep things from his wife (he has told her all the horrible things he has ever done, the innocents he has killed and the guilty he has spared— she knows about the human ranches and his hand in their design— she knows about the ones he killed just for them to get to Palmacosta, and how he sits awake at night, not thinking about any of it— she knows what it took for him to become an angel, the magic rock that sank into his blood like poison, the gleaming wings that sprouted through his flesh, the scars that have healed over and over and over again, the exhaustion, the nausea, the pain— then the nothingness), but he does not tell her this. 

Lloyd is listless that night, and by the next day they have discovered he is running a fever. That happens with children, apparently, and Anna takes charge, though on the inside she is not any less vexed than Kratos. She is just better at dealing with it. It’s one thing after another for them, moving from town to town across Sylvarant; even in Palmacosta where they settle for a while, they never stay on one street, always hopping from poor house to hostel to pilgrims’ hovel, the three of them tucked together into one bedroll. They are not the only family living on their feet, and though their friendships form reluctantly, though Kratos and Anna always give fake names, they find themselves helpless to stop Lloyd from sharing his toys with the kids next door or carrying home flowers from a market woman who finds charming. 

They have a life this way, even if their names and addresses are never the same. There are plenty in these hills who do not want to be found, and plenty more running from things they would rather forget. Palmacosta boasts the largest port in Sylvarant, and people move through like flies. 

Kratos sharpens the knives of a butcher’s boy and soon finds himself sharing swordsman’s tips with young men eager to join the militia. Anna meets an old woman on the docks who sells her oysters for a steal, then befriends a traveling witch who brews herbs to still her womb. (No children would have been safer, they both agree. But— Lloyd.) She knows two quarter-elf girls who spread their legs for Desians in exchange for their officers’ orders, and they sing Lloyd to sleep when all five hide together during a raid on the city. She knows the muck boys who rake manure from the streets, and she pays them a penny to fetch her shopping from the market, where she knows a butcher who does her a discount as long as she shuts up about catching him deep in his sister-in-law. Kratos is certain she knows every maid in the city, from the pretty washerwomen dragging baskets of uniforms around the academy yard, to the wizened old women beating rugs behind the Governor-General’s house to the tune of sea shanties carried up from the harbor.

It’s not much. It’s hesitant, and overbearing at times. It’s restless, moving their beds every other week, sometimes sleeping under tents and in alleyways. It’s exhausting, when Lloyd is howling about the ball he dropped in the gutter, and gut-wrenching, when Magnius’ men meander into the marketplace. It’s dizzying with relief when the soldiers go back empty-handed, and it’s the most beautiful thing he has ever seen when he watches Anna chase Lloyd through the shallows where the beach meets the sea.

It’s life. For the first time in four thousand years, Kratos feels like he can breathe.

It does not last.

The land has been awash with rumors of the birth of a new Chosen. Pilgrims share whispers across the continent as they travel, and people praise the goddess in hopes of a new savior blessing Sylvarant’s blight. The priests are predictably tight-lipped, though the number of acolytes shipped to Iselia suddenly swells. Kratos cannot help but watch the Church. Their ritual is familiar. They are preparing for something, but whether it is what the people hope for— none of them will know until Cruxis sends the holy word. 

Sylvarant has been without a true Chosen in generations. Since Aithra. One of her descendants was last named Chosen. A cousin or a sister, he cannot recall, but a Chosen in name only, ill-fated and unremarkable save the lineage of angels from which she was born. If she has now had a child— if the lineage is still promising— this may be the closest match yet.

But the land is feeble, the mana weak, and the food poor. So it is not until the girl reaches a tender healthy two that Cruxis commands bells be rung across the land. The streets of Palmacosta flood with crowds as people throng to hear the priests speak from their pulpits. Salvation is near, the Church proclaims. On this day in fourteen years, an oracle from heaven will bless the Chosen with her holy quest. The masses rejoice.

The Desians cut the celebrations short. 

“Fourteen years is a long time,” Kratos tells Anna when they flee. He does not need to explain much of what he means. Fourteen years is nothing to him, but to the people of Sylvarant, to the people in the ranches, and especially to the tyrants who will raze the land until the Chosen climbs to heaven (if she makes it that far), it is long enough. There is much that can be done in fourteen years. That is twice the lifetime of some exspheres.

They leave Palmacosta in the middle of the day, in the middle of a crowd, on a fishing boat whose captain pushes away for Izoold as Desians break into the port. Such chaos is uncharacteristic of the movements Kratos has tried to track carefully for his family, and something about it does not sit well with him. This is far from the first Desian raid they have seen, but something is different this time. They watch as they sail away— Desians tear apart the city without regard for order or quotas, brandishing blades from their belts and flinging spells at the milita's resistance. Desians in blue. 

If the birth of the Chosen has driven Kvar’s men to such barefaced desperation, that is difficult news. Kvar has long sunk his teeth into the Angelus Project and Kratos knew he would not let it go. But these last few years, he has been content to send them scurrying up and down the coast like rats in the walls. If that has changed, if he can no longer bide his time, it is because Mithos’ gaze has moved on. So— this Chosen is special. 

Kratos does not doubt that Kvar will do anything to retrieve Anna’s exsphere. And he knows that Mithos does not care much for Desian matters, not when Martel is within his grasp, but both of his problems can be solved for him. If Kvar finds the exsphere, he finds Kratos. And if he finds Kratos—

“We can always double back to Hima,” Anna says. “It’s the long way round, but it’s nothing we haven’t done before. Or we could head north to Iselia. Take shelter with the Chosen herself.”

He does not like their odds in Triet. Many travelers pass through the desert, spicers and weavers and swordsmen; but unlike Hima, few linger, and even fewer carry children with them. The northern pass back to Luin is closed to them too. He makes fast friends with the fishermen by looking clueless with a bottle of Palma potion, and they confirm his suspicions. Ships are stalling in harbor for fear of the Desians who have breached the northern bridge, and more have been seen in the deserts. In Asgard and Palmacosta, that is not news, but Triet is well out of Iselia’s range. Desians even there…

It is Iselia then, as he feared. Is he running like a rat in the maze they have set, or is this the blindspot just below the watchtower? Once Kratos would have said Iselia is the most dangerous place of all, a town to be avoided at all costs. With the birth of the Chosen, much in that regard has not changed. But there are still fourteen years in between her and her destiny. She is of little use to Cruxis as a toddler, and her town has brokered a tentative peace with the Desians who look down on them. There was plenty of talk in Palmacosta of Iselia’s treaty, and people could never make up their minds: is it admirable, or is it just stupid? They are all short-sighted in their hope for a world free from terror, but it does not matter. The Desians will not attack Iselia. Someone has been very clever to plant a treaty in the minds of the backwater farmers who would never think of such a thing themselves.

Either way, the Chosen is secure in Iselia. They may be too.

The fishermen talk too of the half-elf who rules those cliffs, a soldier from the slums of Asgard risen through the ranks to be hailed as a hero. Once, Kratos thinks, that was Yuan. When Ossa’s peak appears on the horizon, he wonders about Forcystus the Brave, who will not beg for Yggdrasill’s attention the same way Kvar does, running around like a dog with a bone. Nor will he take kindly to an encroachment in his newly-earned territory, flush with glory as he takes his seat at the Grand Cardinals’ high table. As little as Desian squabbles matter to the angels, Kratos is certain Mithos has already heard of Forcystus’ deeds, if only because Pronyma would not be able to resist ensuring he knows exactly who placed the half-elf hero in command. 

It is little reassurance to Kratos if they are driven that far north. Iselia may be a sanctuary, but it is small and isolated, and Forcystus is young. Fresh blood. The other Cardinals will think him easy and stupid, and that will be true if he picks a fight with Kvar. He cannot ignore hierarchy just because he has ideals. They all did once. 

“The Village of Oracles,” Anna reads from their map. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Kratos tells her. They step dangerously close to Cruxis’ gaze. They are running out of steps to take. 

“We’ll say we’re pilgrims,” Anna says. She smiles, a tight-lipped look Kratos knows too well. “Perhaps the goddess will finally take pity on our prayers.”

When Kratos was young, his people prayed for an end to the war. They called to figures in the stars and poured wine at altars, asking gods to save their children. He cannot recall much of it now, and he does not think he ever believed in the war gods of old. He knows too that there is nothing in the sky, having seen the stars up close. And he knows Anna does not pray anymore, if she ever did. 

Still, something in him thinks of the heavens when the sand gives way to grass and the Temple of Martel appears over the hills. He knows they cannot stay here. But all he wants to do is throw himself at the chapel door and beg for sanctuary.

Fool, he thinks. What have prayers ever done for him?

On the cliffs outside Iselia, Kratos prays to every god he knows.

“Do me a favor,” Yuan says. Only some of his words parse through Kratos’ grief. “Stay alive a little while longer. I can’t let you die just yet.”

He cannot find it in himself to hate Yuan. In almost four thousand years, he had thought he would never love anyone more. How could he not? After all this time, these millennia passing by, watching and waiting and wondering what else they could have done, how else they could have lit the world to let it burn at the hands of a boy they once knew, he thought no one else could ever love him. 

He knows better now. And it hurts.

“It will pass,” Yuan continues, later. Much later. Kratos has been counting the years. The oracle is near. Lloyd would be a young man soon. 

“But it does not end,” Kratos says.

They are standing in the regeneration chamber, watching Mithos whisper to the Great Seed. They have not all been in the same room together in as many years as this room has existed. He does not know why Yuan has come when he was not called. Mithos does not notice, or mind, or care. There are more important matters at hand. The lineage in Sylvarant is promising, and this time— this time, Mithos swears— they will bring his sister back.

“No,” Yuan says. Then, softer, “I don’t think it ever does.”

So Kratos goes to Sylvarant.