And the Devil Makes Three

After Drillemont's knights had dragged the bodies from the courtyard and washed the blood from the stone staircase, Claudinette still found herself with a standing invitation to dinner. Being renowned for one's heroism, she supposed, did have its perks from time to time.

The dinner invitation she politely refused in favor of provisions for the road; Drillemont praised her austerity and devotion to duty in the face of terrible adversity, but in reality it was less of a driving need to seek new wrongs to right but a desire to flee the scene of a recent embarrassment that led her to leave for Ishgard before the dawn broke, when only the priests and astrologers were still awake keeping their quiet vigil turned towards the night sky.

The ride was long and lonely. Claudinette was used to solitude -- that was what came of going where all else feared to tread, after all -- but there was something particularly jarring about this silence, something hollow and empty.

Going mad had been tiring, humiliating, and ultimately futile, but at least for a time she had had some company worth talking to.

The city of Ishgard was oddly hushed when she finally spurred her bird through the Gates of Faith. Above her, the central aetheryte shed blue light down onto the snowy cobblestones; below her lay the alleys and lean-tos of the Brume, the city's slum and a breeding ground of heretics and thieves. She left her chocobo tethered to a creaking scaffold -- the creature was well-trained enough that any would-be bird-thief would swiftly find themselves missing a finger or two from the chocobo's sharp beak, if they were lucky enough not to be disemboweled -- pulled her cloak around her shoulders, and descended swiftly into the slums.

She had only intended to visit the half-finished walkway that served as the makeshift grave of the nameless warrior her madness had dubbed first Fray, then Esteem, then Anguish. She was entirely surprised to find that the corpse was actually still there, just as she left it -- decay halted by the freezing cold, its face still covered by the blue-black metal helmet. A corpse in the Brume was nothing unusual, and with no family to claim her and no priests currently bold or unoccupied enough to come and drag the corpse away to be buried anonymously in the pauper's cemetery, the anonymous woman had simply laid where she'd fallen -- another casualty of the Dragonsong War, the Calamity, and the general meanness of life in the lower parts of the Holy See.

Gently, Claudinette reached out and slid the helmet from the warrior's head. It came free with surprising ease; matted black hair spilled from the helmet over the corpse's face. The corpse was both like and unlike the fierce mentor Claudinette had imagined -- like Fray she was of elezen descent, with a certain similarity about their long ears and hawkish noses, but there the comparison ended. Her face was frozen in the unquiet rictus of death, her lips blue and cracked, and her eyes crusted shut with frost -- she might have cut a striking figure when she was alive, but in death she was simply another thing to be pitied in a world full of pitiful things.

Still, this mysterious woman had given her some measure of enlightenment, and a sword that she still carried. She drew it from its scabbard on her back -- a great, notched black blade that seemed stained with red that would never wash off since her battle with Fray.

The blade was ill suited to the task, but she managed to slice off a lock of the woman's hair dark hair. Twisting it around her fingers, Claudinette tied it around the pommel of the blade that was now hers -- there was no one else to remember her now, after all, and dead as she was she had been something very like a friend. After that, she went and cornered a priest who did not look busy and glowered at him until he agreed to have the body hauled away and given a proper burial of some kind.

Once the corpse had been seen to and Claudinette had returned to her chocobo to find the creature had not killed anyone while she was busy, she toyed with the lock of Fray's hair and wondered where she ought to go.

"Alphinaud would have me counsel with him until his dithering is ceased, or until the end of the world -- whichever comes first. The Lord Commander would have me in the streets quelling unrest. Vidofnir would see me chase down Nidhogg reborn. The leaders of the Grand Companies would have me in their territories, fighting their battles for them." The chocobo clacked its beak, and she stroked his feathery forehead thoughtfully. "Emmanellain Fortemps would have me telling stories and drinking wine to impress his boorish friends. And you, I suppose...you'd prefer that I ride straight back to the Twelveswood and feed you fresh apples from the latest harvest, like you were a hatchling again." Claudinette sighed, hoisting herself up into the saddle. "But where do I want to go, I wonder?"

Talking to yourself, however, is not nearly as satisfying with nobody to answer back.

In the end, she rode back to Gridania. She wasn't quite sure why, other than it had been the first place she'd arrived at in Eorzea and thus it held some little amount of sentimentality for her. Imperfect as it was, the Adventurer's Guild here was close enough to a home to offer some solace -- the warm smile of Mother Miounne, the notched wooden tables and the vivid flicker of the leve-plate light box, the promise of food and company and a bed. She sat down in a corner table, ordered a cinnamon cider, and waited for the crowd at the leve table to disperse.

They did, eventually, dwindle down to a tiny handful of anxious hyur. Their yellow uniforms proclaimed them Wood Wailers; the distraught look on their grimy faces proclaimed them in need of an adventurer to come to their aid. She caught the eye of what looked to be the leader of them -- a woman with close-cropped hair and a nose that had been broken more than once. She sized up Claudinette with a weary glance before her expression changed to that awestruck reverence that had long ago ceased to be flattering.

"Are you...are you truly the Warrior of Light?" the woman asked, coming up to her table with an obsequious manner that Claudinette found entirely unsuitable for someone who had clearly seen much combat. Claudinette nodded carefully, and the woman laid her hands upon the table to begin the recitation of her troubles. "Our fellows were ambushed by a remnant of the Lambs of Dalamud that once inhabited Amdapor Keep," she said. "They took our mender, and two lancers. We barely escaped -- it would take too long to mobilize a force of Wailers, but one such as you..." Here, the woman's glance raked up and down Claudinette again, taking in her calloused hands, her black sword, her cold eyes. "You are said to be swifter and more dangerous than a hundred men. They say you've felled Primals and dragons...we...we need a hero, Warrior of Light."

There it was -- the plea she could never bring herself to refuse. "I can't make any guarantees of heroism," Claudinette said quietly, "but I suppose I'll see what I can do."

The woman thanked her effusively, bowing at least ten times. Claudinette ordered her enough cider to drown a bison, left a handful of gil on the table, and went to collect her armor.

Of course, they were all dead when she arrived. That, she had predicted from the first. The only reason the Lambs of Dalamud would take prisoners was to power one of their dreadful rituals with a blood sacrifice, and nothing was to be gained by waiting until a rescue or escape could be mounted. The cultists had holed themselves up in a cave system overgrown with ghastly mutant fungi that spat out choking spores -- enough to keep out most beasts and sensible passers-by, but Claudinette grimly downed an antidote and trudged inside.

The cultist's ritual space was not hard to find -- simply following the smell of brimstone and rotten meat led her straight there. There were guards, of course, but of course the Lambs had not anticipated the Warrior of Light and thus the screeching imps and a single hunger-mad coeurl failed to slow her down. She found the mender first. He was a Moonkeeper boy -- a rare enough sight indeed -- lying sprawled with his throat cut on the altar. He must not have had a family anymore, she thought, as they would never have let one of their few menfolk take up such a dangerous trade as this. That meant fewer condolences to deliver at least, she added, in a voice that sounded not entirely her own. The bloody spears lying shattered upon the steps of the dais were a silent testament to the fate of the two lancers. And, to complete the grim tableau, an entire coven of Lambs were lying serenely in a circle behind their altar. They might have been sleeping, if it were not for the ritual cuts upon their wrists, self-inflicted, that had drained them of life in the service of their dark masters. The floor around them was slick with blood and the buzzing of flies nearly drowned out her own thoughts.

No, not the buzzing of common vilekin. It was the droning hum of parasite voidsent, crawling through the dead cultists' veins.

The red-robed corpses shuddered and stirred; Claudinette drew her blade, and it seemed to howl hungrily in the presence of so much fresh blood and cruel death. It was far too late for heroes to do any good here, but at least there seemed to be something still left to slay.

The first of the animated dead grabbed at her ankles, too weak to stand; she dispatched it with a simple kick to its head, but the others were not so easily dealt with. They lunged at her in a churning mob, and beyond the crush of undead bodies she could see tentacles spill from the mouth of the murdered mender laid across the altar. Even as she struggled with the claws and teeth of the newly risen Lambs, she could feel the mind flayer's foul presence probing the limits of her mind, its psychic power scratching into her consciousness, looking for a foothold.

"Not today," she growled -- or thought she did, but the sound seemed to come from somewhere outside herself, from the splash of blood upon the ground and the grim ringing of her blade against supernaturally hardened flesh and bone. Each wound, hers or theirs, seemed to make the black claymore lighter in her grip until she swore she could swing it one-handed.

The sword pulsed in her hand, beating like a lover's heart, and Claudinette abandoned herself to the red and black.

When the trance lifted from Claudinette's eyes, she found herself standing again in a ring of red-robed corpses. Instead of being arranged in a grimly religious manner upon the floor, they had shattered themselves upon her blade. The foul voidsent inhabiting the corpses of the Lambs of Dalamud had crumbled against the purity of her dark fury, leaving little more than drained and lacerated husks when she was done with them. The poor mender who had played host to the mind flayer was near unrecognizable. Her breathing coming in hard, short gasps, she glared at the remaining bodies, as though daring them to come at her again.

"You look beautiful like this, you know." The voice was as familiar as her own mother's -- moreso, even, for it was nearly her own, and she whirled around with her blade still held at the ready to find she was being watched.

Claudinette's hair was stuck to her forehead with sweat; what little exposed skin was drenched in blood and ichor and dirt. Fray, as always, seemed clean, her black armor immaculate as though nothing could touch her. She was barely visible in the darkness -- a pale and ashen face just like Claudinette's, the faint suggestion of a cruel smile upon her lips. Her double, and yet so different that Claudinette could never mistake Fray for a mirror image.

She blinked, and the vision was gone. Then, just as suddenly, she felt a body pressed against her from behind. A cold gauntleted finger traced the edge of Claudinette's ear, trailing through the blood upon her jawline. Of course, Fray knew that even the gentlest touch along that sensitive flesh would make her shudder. Fray knew everything about her -- most especially those things which she struggled to keep hidden.

"Go away," Claudinette said. "I don't need you anymore."

"And yet you've barely left the Brume with a lock of my hair before you let it loose again. You may not need me, Claudinette, but I think you might want me."

Denial was pointless. The same thought had been crawling through Claudinette's own mind at that very moment. She could feel Fray pressed against her back -- the smooth outward curve of her breastplate, the roughness of her chainmail skirt -- but her armor was every bit a part of her as the breasts and hips and arms beneath it, and still her nearness made Claudinette shudder.

"I'm not like this sword, you know," Fray said. She felt the leather skirt of her light armor shoved upwards, jumped a bit as an armored hand slid along the curve of her backside, cold even through the heavy linen of her leggings. "Something you can draw at will and then put away and forget until needed again." The hand trailed around her thigh beneath her skirt, fingers pressing between her legs, unyielding metal against soft and vulnerable flesh. Claudinette's hand trembled upon the hilt of her sword; she feared to look down, because she did not know what she would see. Would it be Fray's teasing fingers? Her own? Was there any difference? "Darkness is more demanding than that. You are more demanding than that."

Claudinette found herself tilting to meet Fray's hand in perfect rhythm as she pressed herself against the gauntlet. Her mentor, such as she was, knew every inch of her body intimately already and knew how to make heat pool in the pit of Claudinette's stomach. A demand to stand down died on Claudinette's tongue. The fabric of her leggings was rough and near painful on her sensitive flesh and the metal of Fray's armored glove was cold and hard and utterly unlike the warm and gentle touch of a lover; Claudinette had scarcely ever thought she might enjoy an encounter like this, but Fray had always known. Fray had been waiting, and wanting.

Another hand pressed against her lips, the finger slipping into her mouth. She tasted blood and iron. "I'm always here, you know. The more you call me, the less inclined I will be to stand silent. I can be with you always." The hand between her legs drove upwards, nearly making her squeal in a strange mixture of pain and surprise and arousal. "Would you like that? "

Claudinette wanted to answer yes, but she remembered the worn look of the Wood Wailers at the guild. The desperate flailings of the corrupt priesthood in Ishgard. The scream of Nidhogg reborn, that seemed to contain all the rage in the whole world. The rumblings of Garlean engines, and the quiet pulse of Azys Lla where dreadful things lay sleeping.

The world needed heroes. The world needed her. And yet...and yet...

The rough hands that had been steadily driving Claudinette brutally towards a climax withdrew so abruptly that she gasped. The solid press of a body behind her vanished. Aching, frustrated, she whirled to face Fray and found nothing but a body-strewn battlefield and darkness.

"Indecision is unbecoming of a hero, you know," Claudinette heard, or maybe whispered to herself. She ached, but hesitated to reach between her thighs for fear she would find that was all she had been doing all along. "But we all have our faults. I'll be waiting, still. Any time you need me. Any time you want me."

Somewhere towards the mouth of the cave, there were footsteps -- reinforcements, arriving far too late to do anything but stare in shock, Claudinette surmised. Sheathing her sword, she walked away from the bloody tableau not a hero, but a weary woman bearing nothing but doubt and the burden of terrible tidings.