Dreaming Ends

This is it. This is everything she had been working towards, the ending Nameless foresaw over a century ago.

The white fox’s image crosses her mind.

She misses him. He’s been gone for so long now, done in by her own hands.

She still remembers how his blood-stained fur feels between her fingers and the way he looked up at the sky when the first drops of rain hit his face.

It was the only time she had seen him happy and it was the last time she ever saw him again.

Was he afraid when he knew the future he saw was just around the corner? When his emotions came barreling back into his life, did he cry out in anguish over his own fate?

She wants to.

The pain was beyond anything she had ever experienced, beyond words, beyond comprehension. Thousands of pinpointed stabbing sensations across her body. She was freezing and burning alive all at the same time. It was hard to breathe. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t even move, her limbs felt like they had been ripped ligament by ligament from her body and her lungs were filling with her own boiling blood, scorching her from the inside.

This is it. The more she says it, the more real it becomes. No energy left to cry, to scream, to even keep her eyes open. She was beyond the point of expressing her agony.

A hundred and fifty-two long years just to fade in silence alone and terrified, no one to hold her hand, to see her off, to keep her memory alive.

It’s fitting. The world never wanted her to make it as long as she had, so of course it would try to suffocate her in the night. Life has always been so cruel to her when all she wanted was to live the best she could.

In the end, she is giving hers up for another, for another that could protect an entire world’s population. It’s a fair trade: A sad lonely girl for millions of others.

Still, alone in her own blood, discarded, unable to even see what good her sacrifice is for… The remnants of a final tear falls from the corner of her closed eyes, leaving a trail through the dirt and dried blood on her face, stinging the cuts it sinks into on its slow descent.

In the middle of her suffering, there is a faint light. It’s familiar, part of a distant fond memory.

She’s ashamed to look at it, ashamed to admit she wants the light to envelope her and pull her out of this as desperately as she does. She knows it can’t.

In this brief calm, she opens her eyes.

His back is to her but she can’t find her voice to greet him.

All of a sudden she wishes she could fade unnoticed.

“L-Luna?” Shand calls out shakily. He can’t see her but his veins are burning and incinerating inside his arms and he knows she’s near.

After all this time, after these two years struggling and screaming and throwing things against walls in frustration because he can’t find a way to her in mortal danger- he can feel her close finally.

A deep dread sinks down through him like cold water washing over his whole body, leaving a shiver behind in its wake. It’s a feeling he hasn’t thought of for years, the flavor of the start of Corruption on his tongue.

When he turns finally and sees her lying there, her face in the perfect middle between utmost agony and peace, the bottom falls out of his world and everything else turns to blur, to ash.

Her face flashes in his mind again, a face from a different decade and dimension. Her pale one encased in crystal.

His brain doesn’t even have time for thoughts before he’s down on his knees, his arms are wrapped around her, there is a sob in his chest where there should be air in his lungs, but isn’t.

“Luna, no.” All he can do is whisper, feel the lightning strike inside of his veins and shatter things that had been whole for years now.

His chest is heaving and he can’t get any air. There are tears falling and he doesn’t even try to stop them.

“You can’t leave me! You can’t! Hey, do you hear me? Hey! FENGARI!” He snaps at her with wild eyes, as if his anger can chart a different course all on its own.

There is a lightning strike from the sky that fires and flames the ground right beside him, but doesn’t do either of them any good.

He shakes her violently, then sees the agony unleashed on her face and stops, pulling her into his chest gently and gingerly like he wants to absorb her into himself.

He is sobbing now, cries and yells permeating the air and his shoulders shaking and trembling to match the shaking of the earth at the thunder rumbling through the skies.

He is glowing bright light, that light blue color that she saw in his eyes before anyone else. The light increases, strains, like it will explode or erupt as he presses her harder to his chest, willing her to live, willing her to have part of his unwanted eternity.

He cannot be alone.

He cannot be without her.

And there's comfort. Comfort she'd never thought she'd have again. In her final moments, there is someone to remember her and beg her to stay, even if she can't.

She's not sure how she got here, back in this shared dream dimension between the two of them after not having connected in so long, but she's very glad she did. The pain is bearable if only because it means there is an end in sight she doesn't have to walk towards alone.

Maybe Nameless is doing this from beyond, giving her what little peace he can as he watches over her away from sight and physical realms. Did his good will and spirit call Shand here one last time?

It seems foolish but she'd believe anything in these last moments and happily pledge faith to any kind higher being.

It's funny, though. You'd think she'd see someone else right now. Lunath, maybe, Ivor, any of her other friends from long ago. Then again, none of them knew her like the crying man above her had.

Not many people understood the nature of their relationship, it was even difficult for her at first. But in worlds of expiration dates, fate somehow brought them to find another ageless tragic soul to look into forever with.

Some thought it was romantic, and maybe there were playful flirtations here and there, but it was more than that. Undying to undying, the only true other constant than themselves was each other. They were comfort itself to each other. It was indescribable.

She notices every thought she has is in the past and how it is coming towards an end.

Despite what Shand wanted to believe, she wasn't immortal. Ageless, but not immortal. He must have lied to himself about that fact, and now here the are.

Her hand shakes as she reaches up, holding the side of his head so softly that it's hard to even tell her hand is there, but she can't exert any more effort than that.

"Shh-Shh, it's okay. Shand, stop, it's okay."

It takes just about everything to push her words past the blood pooling in her throat. Years without seeing each other and here she is comforting him on her deathbed, but she can't help it. He looks like a lost child. She always was amazed by how fast she could think of him as an older brother one second then a needy younger brother the next.

It annoyed her in the moment but, looking back now, she doesn't really mind either. In fact, the thought of all his childlike outbursts and teasing jests brings a fragile, weak smile to her face.

Her vision is blurring and it gets harder to see him, but, even so, just the outline of his form is relaxing.

"Don't cry. This was supposed to happen. I'm a Lunatic, remember? I do crazy things all the time."

She can't laugh like she wants to, the multiple holes in her chest and stomach preventing that much.

Fengari... She's never heard him use her actual name before. Only Nameless ever did that. It's comforting and nostalgic. She always liked it more than "Luna" anyways.

"Now is a bad time for you to be so soft-hearted."

A sob catches in his chest and he tries to breathe out, to give his lungs at least that, but it comes out as a slow and tortured moan.

Her face is still so calm. She hasn't aged a day. It makes him think that there is nothing more wrong in the world than having to sit here with her in his arms, dying. They were always supposed to have more time.

"Luna, no, please, just don't-" He presses his lips together and looks away to try and compose himself, but his lips are trembling and his whole face is wet with tears. His tears are even staining the front of her shirt and her skin.

"You can't joke right now. You can't." He takes her hand and squeezes it in his, searching her face as if he's trying to find the answer that can save her.

He would do anything to save her. He would give his own life, if he could.

"Wait, wait, don't go, Luna- let me," Shand's words, like his thoughts, are far from coherent, but it's clear what his intentions are as he starts rolling up his sleeve and looking around for a sharp object, desperate as if this is his last resort, one he knows already will fail.

"You're it, you're the only thing left," he croons to her, his hands gently glancing over her hair like he's trying to memorize every bit of her. "You can't."

It feels nice to be so deeply cared for in this moment and the thought that there is even a single person that does attempts to cancel out the throbbing in her head.

But he seems to be as far from calm as he can get. His desperate glances around for a way out, the way out he always searches for, do little to shield his breaking heart from view. Not that he's trying. He typically didn't try with her. They were too connected but, then again, that's why they're here.

In the short agonizing minutes he's held her he looks like he's aged centuries, his face contorted by grief masking over his still spotless young skin. While his concern and desire to help fills her with something close to peace, it's not what his face should look like. This is not how she remembers him. Her hand drifts to the corner of his eye then to his mouth and just that little bit of movement winds her further and her muscles shake in pain.

"You're going to lose all your blood if you keep cutting yourself open like that."

Her fingertip pushes the corner of his lips up ever so slightly, her skin noticeably cold against his. The action pulls a ragged laugh from her collapsed lungs.

"When did you stop smiling?"

Before she knows it, her eyes well up at the sight of the smile she's forced him to wear. She missed it. No one in her world smiled at her. No, they hated her. Friendly gestures were distant memories and far off dreams for too long. Lips part to say something more but she stops herself, content with just watching him for as long as her fading vision will allow, her tired arm dropping to rest on her stomach.

It won't be much longer now. She already can't feel her legs and her hands are starting to tingle as her nerves begin to shut down and her heart aches at the idea of leaving him like this. Through her tears, her smile is unwavering, hoping it brings him some level of comfort, even if small.

"Smiles suit thugs like you much better."

The sight of her smiling is tearing his heart out. He’s already opened every vein he knows to open, and his blood is all over them both. It is doing nothing, as he knew it would.

What is the point of having blood in his veins if it won’t keep her alive.

He can’t watch her smile, try to comfort him. He knows what she’s doing. He understands the fear she must feel and he realizes that in many ways, as their road parts here, it leaves them both alone again, just as much as they were before they’d found each other.

“Stop it, just stay with me. Please stay.” All he can do now is beg, plead. He presses his forehead to hers and pushes himself one last time into her subconscious.

The door of the room is shut. He pounds on it violently, yelling and crying out still.

“Luna, let me in! Just let me in, let me try!” He bangs his fists, his arms, his shoulders and whole body against the solid, locked door so hard that he comes away bloody.

Finally with a desperate cry that ends in a sob, he breaks the door down and falls into the room he remembers so well, but hasn’t seen in years.

A thin layer of dust covers the exposed surfaces and thin, white fabric is draped over all the sparse furnishings.

Her chair is covered, and over it stands her lamp, welded in the middle from the misadventure of that one incredibly long day. He walks slowly over to the lamp and lets his finger run down the cold metal. The lamp is turned off, but when Shand clicks the switch on, the light remains off.

And outside her window, it is night, dark without any stars.

He lets himself sink to the floor and cries into his hands like a child.

"There's nothing there for you anymore."

She's not there with him, unable to get to that part of her mind anymore, but she knows where he is and she doesn't want him there. She wants him here in this moment with her, not in a worthless empty room. She calls out to him, beckoning him back.

"You were... Everything I never thought I'd find, I, and I... The future didn't seem so dark knowing you'd always be there, yeah?"

All she wants is confirmation that he felt the same even though his answer would do little to change how things ended. Did she make his long endless future seem brighter while she was alive, even in the lulls of their connections with each other in this safe dream space shared between them?

When he keeps his forehead to hers for more fleeting precious moments, the loneliness creeps back into every fiber of her being. Her body begins to twitch and convulse in violent shivers. The air feels frigid even though she knows, between her firey blood and the warmth from his body next to hers, it shouldn't.

"P... Please. Don't ... Don't hide, not right now. I don't want to..."

The rest of the sentence can't make it past her quivering lips and the tears pour freely now, her body giving up everything it can, knowing this will be the last. Her breaking voice begs, repeating the same thing over and over, brain unable to think of a different way to say what she needs to bring him back to her in this moment.

Every second he's not awake and aware here is another second the darkness closes in and through her now wavering smile a soft whine resounds in her raw throat. It's conflicted, sad and hurt, filled with pain and regret.

"I don't want to... I thought..."

She can't bring herself to finish the sentence even when she thinks she can. She thought what? That this was what she wanted? To escape life like a martyr, like the lamb she was raised to be? That she would be fulfilled when the inevitable finally happened?

She doesn't want what? This end? Him to cry and mourn her?

To die?

She can't tell him that. Not now.

He can hear her calling him back and he picks himself raggedly off the floor, rubbing his face numbly with the back of his arm, wiping tears and blood everywhere.

In a moment, he is back with her and in the time he was gone, her calm and easy and smiling face has crumpled and now he sees his fear, his sorrow, his denial mirrored in her face.

“Shhh, shhh.” He rubs her cheek with his thumb, brushing off some of the dried blood and dirt. Even though she’s the one in excruciating pain, even though she’s the one dying, he feels odd comforting her, as if there’s been a sudden and unnerving role reversal.

Hadn’t it always been that way? Luna was the responsible one. The one who gave herself up always and deserved to have forever for it. Shand was the unworthy one, the reckless and rash one, the childish and selfish one.

Even now, he can’t bear the thought of the world going on without her. He can’t fathom the idea of going on without her.

“There’s nothing left for me if you’re not here,” he manages to get out in between shaky breaths and his struggling attempts to stifle more sobs.

His insides feel like they’re about to burst and rip and tear with the injustice of this, with how badly he wants, would give anything, to escape this with her.

This cannot be real.

He wrenches his eyes away from her grimacing face and yells up into the sky, his own face crumpling with the weight of the reality of this moment. Soon, she is going to be gone and he will have nothing, be nothing.

As he yells, the lightning grows violent, striking the ground all around them. The thunder howls and growls like it, too, is a furious, wounded animal.

Shand’s fingers grip her tighter, as if he could hold on to her tightly enough to keep her from slipping away from him.

Then, a thought bursts into his mind like morning.

“Luna! Luna, where is your ring? Do you have your ring?” His voice is shaking uncontrollably, like he barely wants to dare to hope, as he looks for it on her fingers.

"Are... Are you, you, are you... Confessing to me?"

Unable to laugh at even her own teasing joke, her face stays twisted in growing fear, something in her mind telling her it's time.

She doesn't respond immediately to his hopeful question. What did he say? It's all echoing around her like she's in a tunnel.

Ring? Oh, that ring. Her breathing starts catching breath after breath and she feels light-headed from the lack of oxygen.

In response, her right-hand twitches but the weight that she normally feels weigh her down is gone. Where did she put it? How long has it been missing? It's getting harder and harder to think. A flash of the faintest memory plays but it's not the one she needs.

She sees that memory, the ground below her, Shand tossing his ring to the side with the bravest conviction she had ever seen. He called it foolish but she had always wished she could have been half as determined as he was. Maybe, if he was part of the prophecy instead of her, people wouldn't have had to have died. All the people swept up in the crystal war, Nameless, herself... If someone with his strength had been there instead of her... If only.

Her mouth barely opens but, again, no words come out, only choked sounds of pain and terror, chin shaking. It feels as if her heart should be pounding through what's left of her chest but she can feel it slow.

She attempts to swallow back the blood in her throat but can't and she coughs to attempt to free her airways but the cough is weak and little spurts of blood trickle out the corners of her mouth. As disgusting as it is, she turns towards him, burying her face against his shirt and chest, allowing it to soak her tears and the drops from his own eyes still on her face.

Even though they haven't seen each other in so long, he smells like home to her but the nostalgia only presses more tears from her now growing-dull blue eyes. She keeps repeating, "I don't want to" over and over into his dirtied shirt without even being fully aware of what she's saying.

The texture of his shirt is soft and she wants nothing more than to play with the frayed edges she sees here and there but she can't. That's a luxury she doesn't get any more. Defeated, her eyes slip close and it heightens her other senses for the last remaining time.

His voice from his chest by her ear, his rough but gentle hand on her face, his own tears, his pain, and more. She can feel, see, hear, and sense it all at once. Regardless of his immortal abilities, he's still tragically and beautifully human, she's just upset she never got to tell him, especially all those times he would sulk in pity, wrongfully calling himself a monster. She should have said something.

She doesn't want to leave him. She wants to stay with him for however many thousands upon thousands of years she could have had side-by-side with his neverending life.

But she can't stay with him anymore. Long ago, a smarter part of her knew she should never get attached to anyone or anything. If they don't stab you in the back, you'll just lose them one way or another and it will shatter your heart. Each piece of whatever is left of hers aches for him. She knew this was her fate yet she still lead them both on to believe it could be different.

"Shhh.... Shand..."

It takes everything in her to make her voice audible. His crying is distant to her now but she can hear the intensity of it shift but it is beyond her aid now.

"Shhhhhh..."

Her chest falls.

It doesn't rise.

“Luna.” He says testingly, challengingly. “Luna!”

Her movement ceases, her noise ceases, and Shand grips her that much tighter until he is completely rigid with her clutched to his chest.

Something is telling him to put his fingers under her nose and just, just feel. Just see.

But he can’t. That’s something you do to enemies slain in the dead of night, to those you are indifferent about.

Not your saving grace. Not the only person who ever took the time to peer into your twisted, tortured mind when you didn’t even want to see it yourself and make you feel that maybe there was still room for you among everyone you would inevitably leave behind.

Not your home. The weight of her body in his arms is home, even though he can barely remember the last time he had been so close to her.

And it is all pointless, senseless. He doesn’t know why she’s lying in his arms bloody and spent, although he has his suspicions.

He should have known this day was coming. He’s always known she wasn’t immortal. He has just gotten very good at ignoring the things that hurt him until he can’t any longer.

Why won’t she answer him!? That ring has the power to save her, limited though it is. Not for the first time since that day, he curses his recklessness, his brash impudence, in throwing it over his shoulder and leaving it.

He finally draws in a deep breath and turns his face down to her.

She is finally at unending peace and her face, her countenance, everything about her is soft and beautiful.

She rests, her pain gone and her worries no matter of any consequence. The weight of the world gone from her sweet, sacrificial shoulders.

“LUNA, NO.”

Shand’s voice booms out from his chest, and it’s impossible to tell it apart from the thunder. He presses his face to her face and it is unbelievably cold and his heart sinks.

He yells, howls, cries, roars like he’s the one dead, like he’s trapped in a world ending with no way out. Like suddenly every peace and composure he’s worked for years to obtain, that he never thought he could have to begin with, is shattered in his hands.

It is.

The pain of each loved one he has lost. The agony of watching his father draw his last breaths, of watching Dakara tremble on her deathbed in fear of what waited beyond, of holding Lunath’s hand as he slipped away to join them, claiming to see them beyond in a way that, despite all his other sight, Shand knew he could never see himself.

It is compounded, piles in upon itself in a way he never knew pain could. It would hurt less if he had been the one to die, if he had been torn limb from limb and made to survive it.

The last person he knows, the last person he loves and cherishes is gone. Across the universe, in any dimension, there is no one.

No one he shares memories with. No one he can speak freely to. No one who knows his heart from the inside. No one who knows his name.

His tears fall in her hair and stain it darker than it was before. They fall and wash some of the blood off her still face.

He presses his trembling lips to her forehead and kisses her. It is goodbye.

But damn him, curse his very existence and his power and everything that makes him different, everything that has thrust this upon him, if it is going to be forever.

Shand mourns over a corpse of someone who once was but she isn't coming back. In fact, her broken body isn't even technically there with him. This is just a dream dimension where their minds can join together at random, remind each other that, though the people close to them in their own respective worlds may die, there is someone out there, even world apart, that is there and can understand.

Fengari Estenor was not immortal, a well-placed bullet or vengeful being were both just as dangerous to her as any average human either of them had lost. Her body was stronger due to her powers and she had years longer than most people to train how to fight and keep herself going on a battlefield. At the end of the day, none of these things mattered. She could have lived forever with him, probably in another world, only meeting here in this realm to dispell the crushing loneliness from each other. Still, that could have been enough. Now even that slim comfort is gone.

The image of her fades right from his hand with the connection with her mind gone. There's nothing there for this dimension to grip onto, the only thing remaining back in her world is an empty husk of the sad girl that once was.

Before Shand there is a bird. A motionless bird. Its slender wings sprawl by its sides on the ground, plum feather tattered, even the usually long tail feathers are ripped to pieces. Nothing about it looks like it should even be in one piece but even so it remains, eyes close, serving as his own personal, painful reminder of who was once here.

In a way, lifeless on the ground, it looks oddly free. Freer than it's been for years, possibly its entire long life. It can no longer fly, but at least it's not being made to soar for someone else.

Her world never wanted her. Actually, several scars on the bird, ones that can actually be seen through the blood and new open wounds, seem old and healed over but still there on display. A long lifetime of being hated for caring, for being beaten and pushed around for attempting to help, shoulders always heavy with every choice she made to help the souls of her world backfired and thrown violently in her face, gone, and, in some ways, finally.

Would it be better if she had lived? She'd have to live in hiding for eternity from a reality that should have been home. It's a weighted question that may never find an answer.

Her world is an unknown to Shand other than what he had seen from her memories and dreams, but it is not a place he should visit, especially not in this crumbling emotional state. He won't like what he finds. Anything he ever saw or she told him pales in comparison to the truth of the undeserved hatred of an entire population for multiple generations.

A distant clicking sound can be heard like a door opening or window swinging open. If he could get there, he could solve the mystery of her violent death. All laws of science would dictate that he couldn't do anything about it even if he found her remains, but at least someone would know how the flame of her life was extinguished in a few fell swoops.

He knows he shouldn’t walk through that door, but he doesn’t care. It has been so long since he actually cared about anything, thought about the consequences of his choices earnestly, saw through the lens of anything other than a liquor bottle, until today.

But today, there will be a reckoning. If he spends the next millennium searching the world over for it, he’ll have it.

He twists a fallen feather between his fingers, slips it’s under his ragged coat, and stands. It takes a few seconds for him to even feel like he ground is under his feet. The world feels so much different now. Colder, if that is even possible.

Through the door is wind, strong and violent wind the likes of which he hasn’t seen since he was in that room, the one he was never meant to be in, the day he met her.

It lasts only a moment, giving him barely any time to come to terms with that nostalgia. It spits him out in another dimension he is utterly unfamiliar with, but the aim of the portal is true. He stands at the door of a modest dwelling, and he can hear movements inside.

He kicks the door down in one furious blow, sorrow and grief compressing heavily in his mind, pressurizing until they solidify into a sort of hard, sharp, bitter anger.

After all these years, there is Ivor with his back to Shand, so unaware of this intrusion that he doesn’t even have time to turn and see who has kicked in his door.

He picks Ivor up and throws him across the room with startling strength, one he’s developed only in the last century, since he’s learned what pain truly is.

He barely even notices Ivor’s response. It’s barely even about that.

He strides over to him and picks him up by his shirt, slamming him hard against the stone wall and holding him there with one hand.

He looks deep into Ivor’s eyes and sees the startled recognition, and also the blind terror. How long has it been since they’ve seen each other? All Shand cares about is right now.

With the other hand, he unleashes balled fist after balled fist of everything he is terrified he cannot change.

He hand connects with Ivor’s face over and over and over until Shand’s blood is mixed with his all over his face and bones in Shand’s hand have cracked and broken and his own skin is ripped and bruised.

He lets Ivor slide to the floor and turns away, trying to catch his breath, leaning over the table in the middle of the room for support, trying to remind himself who he was before his awful fate, this curse had twisted him beyond who he thought he could ever decay into.

Back to a time when sociopathic foxes had called him pirate-boy, noble thug, to get a rise out of him.

Sometimes, Shand wonders if Nameless would derive some sort of sick satisfaction from knowing that he had fallen farther than any of them could have ever anticipated. Sometimes, he wonders if he would have broken his father’s heart, Dakara’s. If any of them had lived long enough. Luna’s.

“She’s gone!” He barks as too many emotions spill over and poison his voice, his back to Ivor’s form crumpled on the floor. Shand feels a sob start to rack his chest, but he inhales and shoves it all back down.

“You tell me what happened to her.” His voice shakes now beyond his control, like he doesn’t truly want to know, like he knows there’s nothing left to break inside of him but is sure this new knowledge will find something to tear and burn and take.

When Ivor doesn’t respond, Shand flies to him, kneeling by him in the floor, taking handfuls is his hair and jerking Ivor’s face up close to his own.

“What. Did you do. To Luna,” he barks, his teeth bared in a predatory snarl and his eyes glowing pure white fire. “And where THE HELL is that ring?”

In all his years of fighting goddesses and their pets, Ivor had never felt this much-concentrated pain before. He knows Shand is barking down some sort of order at him but it takes everything in him to try to focus on the words.

Deep down he realizes he quickly needs to get over the sudden shock of seeing Shand again after having gone so many years with only vaguely hearing of him from Luna.

What has he been doing all this time? He seems completely different than that memory of bars, demons, and other dimensions. He doesn't remember Shand being so... Crazed.

Who is he asking about? Why is he here? He never hated the man but the two of them didn't know each other, Luna was the one-

Luna.

He comes to the realization at the same time Shand screams her name into his face and his eyes would widen in that conclusion if they both weren't so bruised and swollen already.

"Shand... She died almost a year ago."

Luna hadn't aged, but Ivor sure has. There are wrinkles beginning to sink into his face, bags have started forming under his eyes, and his already gray hair has taken on a more silver sheen over the years.

The little house is a mess of books spread all over the floor and any flat surface, cups of discarded tea all about, piles of wax from candles that have run their course strewn about haphazardly. The place is disorganized, to put it lightly.

A shaky finger points towards the window at the back of the building not too far from the two men where a desk sits in front of it with a view of the small backyard enclosed by trees.

On the desk are papers with Ivor's handwriting and, over and over, Luna's name is written within paragraphs of text. It's a working historical telling of Luna's life, actions, and impact but none of it are things Shand doesn't already know.

The view outside the glass is more what Ivor meant. Off at the edge of the treeline is a small gravestone, new enough that you can still clearly read what it says but old enough that some flora has started to grow up and around it. Old flowers rest on the ground in front of it.

His question about the ring doesn't bring anything to mind at first, he's just hoping Shand will finally get off of him, distracted by the window, so he can catch his breath and wipe the blood away from his mouth.

Suddenly, nothing is as concrete as he’s thought.

For the first time, he notices how Ivor has aged, and it makes him self conscious of how he hasn’t. As the centuries have passed, aging has seemed more and more like a reward, a dignity afforded to everyone but him.

He can see his surroundings for the first time, too, as if he’s only just stopped seeing all red. His violent intrusion has scattered some of the papers on the floor, and he picks one up with a trembling, bloody hand and leans unintentionally against a wall, sinks to the floor  with his knees pulled into his chest.

Her name is all over it. The last true thing left of her. He wants to crumple it, to hold it against his heart, to rip it into pieces. Her legacy, her goodness.

But what he can’t bring himself to look at is what’s outside the window. The grave, the weathered quality of it and the dead flowers. No, she had just left him. It was still fresh, still raw.

Now, looking at Ivor, he can see his own sadness, only fast forwarded and placated by time, but working away like rushing water at rock under the surface.

So much time has elapsed. The ring isn’t even relevant anymore. His only hope, a long shot, fades from his grasp.

He doesn’t care that Ivor is still standing there, bruised and bloody, watching him like one watches a wounded animal that harms everything in its path as its trying to escape from its pain.

He lets the paper flutter to the ground as the sobs start to well up again, and he covers his face with hands that won’t bend properly, rigid fingers that had touched her face what seemed like only moments ago, before the breath had left her body.

He can’t make eye contact with Ivor, not after what Shand’s done to him and not now that the tears spill out of his eyes unhindered. Not now that he’s painfully aware of how broken he looks.

“How... how...” he can’t finish his sentence, the words keep getting choked in his throat, swallowed up by silent whimpers that shake his core.

As glad as Ivor is for the sudden release, the look on Shand's face, his pain and grief, are all too familiar to him. He still sees those same eyes in the mirror. Not a second goes by that he isn't remembering her, haunting himself with her memory.

But did Shand just find out about her end? Honestly, he's not sure how he heard about it to begin with but he learned long ago to stop questioning the capabilities of multiple dimensions.

Holding a hand to his face, he sways over to the kitchen, fumbling around with a kettle on the stove, ignoring the still warm cup of tea he had been drinking before Shand came kicking down his door sitting on the desk. Unable to see clearly now, he knocks around some of the waiting mugs and containers on the counter clumsily.

"A year ago Olvreign began attacking the town of Jiden so the two of us went to push her out, or at least help the people get away before the town was turned to crystal. We didn't realize that this was going to be our most difficult fight with her yet. It all happened so fast..."

His hand clenches tightly on a mug, knuckles turning white.

"I should have known. She told me that this would happen. She told me that she would die protecting me like it was her damn job descriptions. I just... I didn't... I had hoped Nameless's vision was wrong or that I could change it if it did happen."

Ivor has to set the mug and kettle down, his hands shaking. He thought he was over this, that writing about her would bring closure, but his heart feels as torn as it had when he buried what was left of her outside. Slamming his palms down on the counter to steady himself, he hangs his head.

He does have the benefit of some distance from the event but Shand looks like he just saw her seconds ago. How?

"I had turned, ushering a family towards safety, fighting those pawns Olvreign always has with her, but the son's leg was snatched by the crystal and it began growing on him, consuming him. I was so distracted. I didn't notice Olvreign herself had found me. She had come stalking down each alley of the town looking just for me. I didn't know that, but of course, Luna did. She noticed everything."

There's an air of admiration in his voice that mixes oddly with his raspy grieving retelling of the event. He never thought he'd have to say this all out loud. He thought he could just write it down to keep himself detached to an extent, but actually saying everything brings a familiar throb back to his heart.

"She held her own for so long, longer than anyone should last against Olvreign when fighting solo. I had never seen Olvreign so terrified. It was like she was tangling with an angel of death. Luna even managed to strike one of Olvreign's eyes, blinding her. You could tell she had trained for a century for that moment. But, in the end, she was fighting a god alone. There was... So much blood... She wasn't even recognizable once it was all said and done. What was left of her was being eaten away by crystal..."

He has to drop his elbows to the counter to hold his head, gripping his hair tightly, threatening to pull it out of his own scalp, the sight of her torn body refusing to leave him. When he does, a necklace slips from his shirt with a familiar ring hanging from the simple silver chain.

It catches Shand’s eyes and it’s like everything he is hearing and seeing fades away.

“Th-that,” he pushes the words out of his mouth, transfixed. The memories come back in ravaging floods, so long forgotten that it’s almost as if he’s living them again for the first time.

He can feel the crystal surging in his veins. He can hear Olvreign’s silky smooth voice, feel her touch tingle his cheek one moment and slice it the next. He can see Luna frozen in that crystal, looking more dead than she had when he body has shivered and quaked and faded altogether from his sight.

The ring. It can’t bring her back now, but seeing it around Ivor’s neck freezes his heart in his chest until the only place he can feel his pulse is in his head, his ears. There are other uses for that ring.

He watches Ivor as he looks down at the ring. The swollenness and bruises welting his entire face are already starting to heal from contact with Shand’s blood, still a residue on the man’s face.

Funny, how that blood has the power to heal everyone but the man whose veins it courses through.

But Shand’s spent enough lifetimes pondering that.

As the years got longer and longer and his friends became fewer, Shand learned to occupy himself in other ways. Has found new methods of making time pass.

Enough lifetimes spent using that gift to cure innumerable rampant epidemics that would have brought humanity low.

Used his blood to battle dark lords and demons and deities so many he’s lost count, from his dark cave high up in an unknown mountain range, far enough away from people that no one had known or ever would know the depths to which they owed their survival as a race to him.

Far enough away to keep him safe from things like this.

Has injected himself with things so foreign and wicked, that he thought perhaps his immortality would prove to be a lie after all. And when the that wasn’t the case, he’d tried harder and harder to make it so.

But that ring. That ring could make it all stop.

He eyes Ivor, his face slowly returning to wholeness, and Ivor’s eyes meet his. When Shand speaks, his voice breaks.

“Do you know what that is?”

Ivor eyes Shand standing closer to him, unable to hide his distrust and fear for the man now, not knowing if this is a stable Shand speaking or the same one that suddenly appeared just to beat his face in.

His hand finds the necklace, gripping the chain tightly but, still uncomfortable with Shand's proximity, he stands from slumping over and takes a step back, hand tightening on the metal string. It looks like he's trying to protect it from Shand.

"No? Luna just gave to me a couple of years ago and said it was for good luck."

Little does Ivor know that, around his neck, is probably the most powerful tiny item to exist in this world. He doesn't seem to think it goes beyond sentimental value, a gift from a friend and ex-lover, an important person now long gone.

The crystal shines and shimmers just as brilliantly as it had all those years ago. If you listen closely, you can hear the faintest chime sing out from it every time Ivor moves and it hits against his body.

It's disgusting that this could last longer than the woman who owned it and still hang there glimmering unused, just as pristine as the day she had found it when she herself had no discernable remains to speak of.

Luna clearly didn't want Ivor to know of its power, be it in fear he'd use it on himself or he would judge her for keeping it on her person for long.

Shand blows air out through his nose in a shaky, relieved almost-laugh. So after all this time, she’d given it up, too. Just now that he was so ravenously wishing for it back.

But it is short-lived and empty comfort. He reaches into his coat and lets his fingers glance over the feather, closes his hand around it despite the pain.

“She’s... she gone...”

Shand knows he sounds ridiculous, but he can’t get past it.

In his mind, he is back in that dark and empty room in her mind. He’s sitting on the floor, staring out the window, begging the sun to rise when there is no more sun in the sky.

“What am I supposed to do now.” He mumbles half to himself and half to Ivor, although he knows full well that it’s not a question Ivor or anyone else can answer.

He can go back to him own dimension, to his solitary life where he’s locked himself away from everything. He had done it to protect himself from these emotions they had all warned him about- Nameless, Olvreign, Luna.

But now he can see clearly that this pain will follow him into eternity and however long time stretches after that.

So he can’t sit and play around with syringes anymore. He can’t close himself off, he has to do something. He wants to do something about this, find a way to make it all worth something, make it make sense.

If there’s anything he’s learned in these hundreds of years, it’s that few things in the mortal- or immortal- experience make sense. But this one has to. There is no other option.

“Olvreign. What happened to her?”

"She ran and hid herself deep in the mountains by Jiden after her fight with Luna. She was in a pretty serious state, too. She's been closed off ever since, probably to heal and ready herself to try again."

Ivor turns towards the front of the house, looking at his basically broken door. Out in the distance, over the skyline of trees, a mountain range stretching far above the branches and leaves.

It doesn't take long to notice the crystal caps in place of snow, like a fortress keeping anyone and everyone out.

"We've tried to break the crystal for months now, hoping to get to her before she's completely recovered. If there were a chance to kill her, to finish this, do what Luna and Nameless were aiming for at the cost of their lives, now would be the time."

He doesn't need to continue his sentence to tell Shand the result of all of this: They can't. They can't break the crystal and they can't reach Olvreign. They can't finish what the two before them started.

Ivor's shoulders sit low and weighted, obviously bothered by this knowledge. While he definitely is older than the last time Shand saw him, he has more signs of age than someone should have at this point in life. It seems like just the past year alone has pushed him over the tipping point.

"Are you going to find her?"

The man doesn't even turn around to ask and it's not like he knows Shand well enough to be able to predict his actions. There was something about the tone he asked about Olvreign paired with his own desire to find the goddess but inability to that tipped him off to the future situation.

"I'm sure I don't have to tell you but you shouldn't go rushing in there foolishly."

“You bet your ass I am.” A cold, steely determination has taken over Shand’s face, sealing over the broken places and the cracks in the facade he used to wear so well.

A real laugh comes out of him now, almost as if the sadness has evaporated to make room for something else.

Shand has never been able to deal with lack of control. Now that he has a plan, there is an end in sight to the pain.

“Things stopped being foolish a thousand years ago when I️ realized I didn’t have anything to lose anymore.”

He pushes himself to his feet beyond the support of the wall and brushes the flecks of dried blood off his shoulders- his and Ivor’s.

The man’s face is completely normal again, as if Shand has never been there.

“Sorry,” he mutters as he glances up at the man. He certainly feels a bit foolish now, breaking into the home of someone he hasn’t seen in millennia, his time, and beating him to a pulp before even saying a word.

All this time, and he still can’t get beyond behaving like a child. More like a scared child than he wants to admit.

But that has passed now. He knows what he has to do and what he has to accomplish to achieve it.

“I need that ring from you. Do you want her back?” Shand asks gruffly as he pauses at the threshold where the door had been, as if its as simple as asking Ivor if he wants one cube or two in his tea.

"Shand..."

Ivor's hand never leaves the chain though he does nearly pull it off his neck without thought at the question before the more logical part of his mind kicks back in.

"She's been dead for months. You can't just bring her back."

To emphasize his words, his eyes flick to the window to the backyard again, where any remaining part of her rests secure six feet under.

His tone is of a man who thinks he's tried anything and everything but has lost hope when it was fruitless. He doesn't want Shand to go on the same spiral he did, one that he's only just now recovering from.

What could Shand possibly think he could do that no one else could? Besides, death is final. Everyone has to come to terms with that in their own time but Shand should be well beyond that point. Ivor isn't sure how old he is but he has to be old enough to know better.

Instead he stands in the doorway like a stubborn child, demanding a ring to carry out a plan on the shadow of a hope.

“You don’t know what the hell I’m capable of.”

The barbed tone in Shand’s voice isn’t helping his case, he knows. He looks like an unstable madman who’s stumbled blindly through the centuries having never grown, learned, become anything better.

Has he, though? He shakes off the thought. Not like he’ll run out of time to ponder the idea into oblivion. Only after all this is over. After he and Luna can stand side by side and laugh all this off. The thought sickens him with sadness again, but he knows that will only cripple him. He banished it.

“You have no clue what that ring really does. I️ had one, and I️ know. And I️ think I️ can make it do something more.” Shand calms his tone into one more understanding, compassionate. Ivor has lost an incomprehensible part of his own existence too, in a different way.

Shand looks down for a moment, then pulls the damaged feather from his coat. Its deep purple is stained in spots by blood.

He doesn’t offer any explanation, but holds it out to Ivor in one hand, and extends his other empty palm.

“Let me do this. Please.”

Ivor's eyes light up at just the color of the feather. Even stained in blood, it's too familiar a hue. He hadn't realized he nearly forgotten his favorite shade of purple until this moment and he reaches instinctively out for the feather.

Delicately, he turns it over in his hand, taking in all the shifts in the color as he moves it and he can feel a lump beginning in his throat. It looks just like her hair, right down to the very slight wave in the fibers. He's never seen anything remind him so much over her. Maybe he was avoiding items that would bring her face back to his mind so vividly, maybe slowly forgetting details was healthy, but he can't see himself handing the feather over any time soon.

As if the trade is fair, though he probably looks like a madman for doing so, he tugs the chain from his neck then drops it and the ring into Shand's open hand, looking up to examine the other man.

Ivor's tired eyes seem to have a little more life to them and there's hope: Hope in Shand and what he promises, hope that he'll see Luna again, hope in the impossible, but there's hope.

But he feels the need to add a final warning before Shand leaves.

"Don't get yourself killed, even if, somehow, it brings her back. You know just as well as I do, maybe even better, that outcome won't fix things because then she'll run right after you."

"Sweet Ivor." Shand says dryly, patting his now-mended cheek. "I️ can't get myself killed, don't worry. I've tried."

He asks Ivor to point him toward the nearest source of alcohol, and Ivor hesitates, but delivers.

Shand has now sat in the corner of a slow, mostly empty bar for the better part of two hours, wondering if he can actually truly pull this off.

He takes out the ring, turns it over in his palm. The crystal glints in the dim sconce light and he hates it. Hates its glimmer, holographic shine.

He's drank enough by now that, for the first time in a really, really, really long time, he feels kind of tipsy.

It's not a good mix. The alcohol, the loss. This plan, this ring. It's bringing memories back that he doesn't need to remember. To feel right now.

Some of them make him laugh, but all of them make him nostalgic, fill him with an empty aching craving. God, he misses staring down death itself with her. Fighting back the world right on their doorstep, in their minds.

He imagines her maybe somewhere else, looking down on him, saddened. By his lack of acceptance, his stubborn rebellion against this hard-earned rest of hers.

He wonders if maybe she is happier now. But those last words, that last thought she couldn't quite complete: I️ don't want to die.

He finishes off some really strong whisky- which is saying something because he's had years and years to find the good stuff all over the known world.

"I'm taking this with me," he alerts the bartender as he grabs the bottle and ducks out. Wisely, no one comes out after him.

The trek up to the mountains is long. Not particularly arduous, but then again, Shand is used to mountains by now.

They've been a makeshift almost home for so long, he barely remembers what the ocean looks like, sounds, smells like and he doesn't want to, not yet.

By the time he reaches the crystal caps, he's drained the bottle completely. With one lumbering swipe, he knocks the neck of it off on a crystal formation, leaving sharp shards of glass protruding from the destroyed neck of it.

He sits now on another shorter stack of crystals, looking oddly familiarized with the alien landscape, opening a vein in his arm, one drained many times over. He bleeds into the large glass vessel.

The physical pain stopped tormenting him a while back. He can barely relate to that old, crippling fear of needles that kept him up so many nights as a child. In many ways, it's freeing. But in others, he can't help but feeling like he's lost the larger part of who he was.

Once the bottle is full, he staggers onwards, using it to fling streams of blood at the crystal blocking the way, eating a path toward the center of the tallest peak. It's a strange case of deja vu- so much so that he almost expects to see that tower at the end of his journey, climb those stairs and see her crystalized to the wall.

But instead, he sees a huge cavern, covered over partly by jagged, dagger-like crystals.

And it is different. He is much, much more furious and much stronger.

And drunk.

He flings the now empty bottle at the crystal and it shatters loudly and echoes in the mountains. The droplets of his blood fling outwards and hiss at the contact with the crystal, melting the outer layers slowly into a gross blue gel.

"You remember me? Get out here!" He screams at the frozen-over cave, his voice slightly slurred. "Eat my glass and die, you rapey bitch-hag."

Disturbing silence is all that greets him for the longest time.

Near the mouth of the cave is a massive body. A massive familiar body. The large crystal fox is halfway absorbed into the crystal covering the ground and it doesn't move. The crystal that makes up its body lacks the shine of the crystal eating at it.

It's dead. Seems to have been for a while now, the shell of it serving as an ornament to welcome the stupid and brave into the cave.

It's shattered and broken all along the left side of its body, the sharp edges of the crystal blackened... By smoke? Whatever this impact site is, it's burned and charred, some areas melted by inexplainable heat.

To add more context to the old tale, several pieces of long plum hair sway in the breeze coming in from the opening of the cave, the strands stuck in what's left of the creature's open mouth and fangs.

Luna. She killed Ears. Not only did she kill Nameless but, after all of that was said and done, she was the end to his sister.

It was probably for the best. It always appeared in pain and destroying it would at least free it from Olvreign's control. Still, what must that have done to her? To kill these two children? It had to be done but none of this was their faults. They were just two more victims of Olvreign, yet it came down to Luna to clean up the goddess's mess in the worst possible way. The guilt had to have been unbearable.

"I know that voice..."

The low, sweet voice echoes from the back of the cave but it lacks the forced warmth it normally has.

From the shadows emerges the goddess in question, long blonde hair dragging the floor, but it's messy and in knots. She lacks the glow she typically as and her robes are dirty with her own blood and someone else's. The biggest change is the mass of crystal growing from the socket where her right eye should be and the remains of dry blood dripping down from where one could only assume a gaping hole had once been forcefully created on her beautiful face.

"You. Leave, I'm in mourning."

The green eye that is left cuts a sharp glare towards Shand. Her tone seems serious enough but there's something in it that tells Shand she is also mocking his feelings and alcoholic outburst.