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Owner	Pose
Marigold	"The world is war. War has always been its highest court! Who has the power of the sword, has final power over life and death. So the greedy and the vile will always rule. A wolf that will not murder starves, and even trees smother saplings in their shade. And we humans--"      "--we who murder and rape and steal, fathers who kill their sons and nations ruled by slavers, we have failed to surpass the beasts. Dragons, alone, were nobler. They were strong enough to master nature, and wise enough to not crave greater strength. They knew no war, until we savages forced them to it!"      "And now... hahh... now, finally, the highest court finds us unworthy, for all we sought to master it. Look at how I prepared the world for Iðunn! My army of traitors, cravens, and cowards... if mankind deserved to live, I could never have destroyed it."      "Peace. ... Peace will be built atop your bones. You fight for a future of everlasting blood. And I, for a world wiped clean."      - - - -      "So it's true. They've taken and poisoned that poor girl," he says, Odette's and Madeleine's words seeming only to sharpen his disgust. By the sympathy in his voice, he can only mean Fae. "If she's known no better than human company, of course she bears it. Is that what you're proud of? Parasitizing a child?"      Time is your greatest enemy here. Zephiel knows it. Besting him at all is daunting; doing it before the Bernish loyalists mop up Galle's forces and swarm back over the castle is a suffocating task. What marks do tell on him so far- cracked armor at the gut, a mark across the cheek- compare unfavorably to the clock.      In that sense Roy's bluff, menacing Zephiel with the Binding Blade to force an overextension, is both very stupid and very smart. Risking everything really might be the only way.      "You're no Hartmut, little--"      It's a measuredly sharp advance with his left hand outstretched, until Flamel injects Roy with concentrated purpose and hope. Then the edge of the Blade sparks with gentle flame, the same as Roy's eyes, and the advance becomes an all-or-nothing lunge.      "--khhhh--!!"      Roy backs away from Zephiel until his spine is pressed to a pile of rubble, eyes wide and ember-crackling sword held high. The King slams his shoulder against Riku's claw to rebuff it, endures Nobunaga firing on his back though something metallic cracks, electrocutes Odette as she burns him and tries to ignore her weight hanging off his outstretched arm, lashes Eckesachs against three different attempts to sink blades through the joints in his armor, strikes Lilian once- twice- across the head with his sword's pommel to drive her off, and...      His bleeding armor-shattered hand is closed around Roy's grip at last. The Blade, held up against his chestplate in vain attempt to ward him off, sizzles to slag a line across the metal in the scant space between their bodies. A twitch one way and it could end Zephiel's life. A twitch in the other and it could end Roy's. "Please! Just--" "Is this mankind's--" "--Hartmut spared her for a--" "--pathetic conviction?" "--doesn't... have to..."
Marigold	"It's peace, and I'll die to see it last another *day*"      "Whatever it takes."      "Beg my forgiveness or spend your life to bloody my nose!"      Those words, still hanging in the air, are answered by the echoing crunch of Roy's fingers breaking in Zephiel's grip. Roy cries out in pain, and his drop to the floor as the Binding Blade is wrested away from him is what saves his life from the whirling slash that follows against the rest of you.      Zephiel, with blood trickling from the cracks in his armor and the shard of Maltet in his shoulder, wheels about with an awful bellow and scrapes Eckesachs and the Blade across each other, one in each hand, like scissor-blades to cast their energies in a parting horizontal arc.      The Binding Blade, it's said, makes its wielder's vision of victory manifest. For Zephiel, that means- evidently- a terrible bow-shock that seems to carve matter out of the world and fill the void with a burst of fire, felling the third of the high castle ahead of him as if it were a tree, black-and-whitening the vegetation to pure coal and ash and turning the moat beyond to a boil.      Hartmut carried one in each hand, too, in his depictions and in your glimpses of the past. The only thing to separate them in this instance is the wretchedly triumphant look on Zephiel's face.      "SO BE IT! You, the fattest among the maggots, die as you have killed with honey still on your tongues!" he howls, but his words are barely audible after the ringing thunderclap of his blade-conviction.
Flamel Parsons	"ROYYYY!!" Flamel shouts, in desperation. Blade and boy separate, Flamel's telekinesis rushes in, hands clawing and grasping to stop the worst possible outcome, and he--     ---     Every screen in the facility flickers all at once, showing a crystal-clear image of Roy limp body torn along Galle's spear, and a singular declaration: CODE GOLD.     ---     --grabs Roy away, after the whirling slash puts Flamel behind cover. His eyes are bloodshot with the effort when he rushes behind Geed. He didn't get the sword, he only got Roy. Dammit, he's still got that feeling in his heart.     But he got Roy. He glances down to him. "Roy." He whispers. "You were ready. Ready to use it. Hold it in your mind. Clearly. *Clearly*." He presses his hand on Roy's shoulder. The broken hand means he won't be fighting. But Flamel remembers Hartmut. Flamel knows Roy. Flamel... Has been opening Psychogates, channeling the images deep in the heart of everyone.     He plunges his hand deep into Roy's skull.     He digs for conviction. For history. For Roy's dedication to his friends. For the clear-forged manifestation of a thousand years of peace that Roy inherited from Hartmut. He reaches for something solid, something graspable, something he can get his palm around. He reaches, he grabs, and he pulls.     For a moment, the Binding Blade flickered in Roy's hands. And if the heart is willing but the flesh is shattered, then Flamel is the one who knows how to pull it out of him. There is a sword of some kind, buried in Roy's heart, and now we know that for certain. It's the blade of a king who brings a thousand years of peace.     Flamel draws UPE-1631 out of Roy's own skull, and through him, the minds of everyone he's met and known across Elibe. Whatever its shape and properties, the meager construct of the will to hold the Binding Blade is the only chance to take on Zephiel while he holds the form of it.     Only thing he can do in the storm, while he shelters behind Geed.
Riku Asakura	The Claw strikes the shoulder of Zephiel, which causes both the weilder and the claw to stumble back from the blow.  While it no doubt cracked the armor that the King was wearing, it wasn't enough to stop him from getting close to Roy.  Back on his feet, Ultraman Geed is once more attempting to rush towards Zephiel and Roy! The clash is devastating for both combatants, but more so for Roy than it was for Zephiel.  This is because, in the clash, Zephiel breaks several of Roy's fingers, which causes the Riku inside Geed to wince in sympathetic pain.  Worse, the blade falls into Zephiel's hand... which is the worst possible situation they could face right then.   "GET BEHIND ME!" he shouts to the other combatants, if they can.  Once more, the Ultraman raises a barrier, this one more powerful than the one in Primitive form.  The only thing on Geed's mind right now is protecting his friends and allies, trying to make sure they make it just another clash longer than before.  It's especially critical right now because the Binding Blade is in Zephiel's hand.   The enormous weight of the swing is enough to drive Ultraman Geed to his knees in the explosion that follows.  The barrier does not hold; it tries its very best, but the explosion that follows Zephiel's swing is astronomical in its power.  Hopefully others got behind him, because when the smoke clears, the roar of the blade is still causing his ears to ring. Ultraman Geed is forced to the ground by the blow.  He can't seem to stand, but he hasn't transformed out of Geed and back into Riku yet.  However, Riku himself lies in the same place that Ultraman Geed inhabits.  I can't feel my body, he thinks.  I can't... get up, he continues to think.  Is this how it ends for this world?  For me?  I just want to close my eyes... 'It was bad. Magic almost left the world. Snow fell in the middle of the summer... even the sky was damaged.' 'You of all people should remember, those people I was willing to kill.' 'But it's sounding like that blade needs unsealing -- just as long as Geed is still around to make sure a guy like me never touches it before it's time to settle it back into Project Scabbard.' The memories of meeting Bramimond, the dangers of the blade, the promise both he and Flammel made to each other about the blade and, if anyone... including themselves, were to use the blade...   "I... can't... let you use... it like... this!"  Geed manages to say, finding the conviction in his heart.  Even as his body screams at him to stay down, he can't do it.  His arms grab the ground as he forces himself up to his knees, and then to his feet.  He sees Flamel trying to help Roy... which means they need to get the blade out of Zephiel's hands.   "You... are not allowed to use that weapon!" Geed states, pushing himself beyond the breaking point.  He dives right towards Zephiel, rushing to meet the king head-on.  He likely can't strangle the weapon out of his grip on his own, but he CAN make it impossible to use! He attempts to slam his body into the king, even if it means taking another blow with the other sword.  Instead, he aims to wrap his arms around the arm holding the Blinding Blade, attempting to wrangle it up into the air.   "Someone... anyone... get it!" Geed calls out.
Nobunaga	Whether Nobunaga is shouting at Zephiel or Roy is unclear in the chaos of the King's triumph. Ultraman Geed steps up to offer some manner of defense; and it is the Demon King who steps up beside him. She plants her leading foot in a purposeful way that consumes the stone at her feet in flames, rushing out in a circle around her which consumes the crumbling High Castle's throne room. As Geed defends, Nobunaga offends; tipping her head back in a tense glower while the transformed terrain surrounding Zephiel erupts in a pillar of Hellfire.     It's all to force Zephiel on the defensive and cut his attack short, though not short enough to keep the overwhelming power from flooring Ultraman Geed. As he goes down, the Demon King's posture shifts; the flames chasing Zephiel dissipate just as Nobunaga gets right in his face.     "That doesn't belong to you."     Zephiel has the two greatest legendary swords in all of Elibe; but Nobunaga is the Demon King of the Sixth Heaven. She augments her swordsmanship with volleys of gunfire and jets of flame from surprise angles, switching up her kenjutsu forms. The goal now is to keep the King busy while Geed recovers.     "The only maggot in this castle is the one I see before me! Writhe, cower, and scream for mercy! Your foe is no mere dragon but the Demon King herself!"     Blade goes high; fire comes from the side at a low angle. A feint, the blade sweeps back and curves into an upward arc. Rifles materialize above and discharge. A dance of fire and chaos. In her peripheral vision she is aware of Geed crawling back to his feet; a fine man who would make a finer samurai in another age.     When Geed charges, Nobunaga strikes; a blast of Hellfire disguised as another surprise attack, to drive Zephiel directly into Ultraman's arms; and once Geed is on him, Nobunaga immediately slashes at the gap between Zephiel's bracer and pauldron of his closer, Left arm.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	For a moment, Madeleine really thought Roy was going to pull it off. A heroic turn of the tide, a perfectly-timed blaze of defiance against the promised end of everything. As Maltet's haft breaks again in her hands, its blade finally finding purchase in Zephiel's flesh, she truly *hopes* that it's about to be over, that she and the other Elites have slowed the king enough for Roy to find courage for a final blow.     That doesn't happen. Roy's hand crumples, and the Blade falls into Zephiel's grip. Who has the power of the sword, has final power over life and death. If that is so, then Zephiel has already realized his sterile future.     Madeleine, only somewhat sheltered by the Geed Barrier, is tossed back by Zephiel's subsequent shockwave attack, landing in a roll partway across the court chamber. She scrambles for newly-fallen rubble, taking what scant cover she can.     Ultraman Geed rushes Zephiel, and Madeleine takes it as her final chance to act. She scrambles up a half-shattered wall, leaps from the jagged top of the heap of stones, soaring over the Geed Barrier just as it shatters from another blow. When she lands, she's fully behind Zephiel - surely he knows she's there, because there's only so much her decoys can do to convince him she's in the mix with the other Elites.     For a single heartbeat she looks for her opening, and then Geed forces the king's off-hand higher, the Binding Blade rising into the air even as Eckesachs thrashes below.     It's hard to be self-pitying when the world is on fire. Bramimond doesn't even have a soul. But even if it sounds silly, I mean it. There's always been something missing inside me. I wasn't built quite right, quite like everyone else.     She kicks off, lunging for Zephiel's midsection but rising, in the last moments before contact, as the lightning washes over and around her. Gritting her teeth in pain and anger she takes hold of Maltet's broken haft with one hand, cutting her thumb and wrist on its snowflake blade.     It's easy to be brave if you don't feel pain. Easy to be a saint if you have no desires. Everyone else has this burning purpose and I just have 'might as well'. How could that ever be enough?     Finally, she thinks she has her answer. And she hopes, sometime after Barigan set down his spear for the final time, that he found his too. For Roy, for Elibe, for everyone she's met on this journey, she pounds her free hand onto the fist clenched around Maltet's shattered haft, hammering the spear-head into Zephiel's oozing wound. Might as well.
Lilian Rook	She knew that this wouldn't be easy. She was the one who cautioned the others not to think it would be. Even outside of Ekesachs, Lilian couldn't estimate Zephiel poorly after just the few encounters they've had. Everything from Harmut's lineage to the Divine Weapon to his background, build, experience, bearing with a sword, and single-minded suicidal drive, told her that getting to Zephiel in the heart of the capital wouldn't be the hardest part. She knew that he was the king, and that he would be defended by the most elite, and afforded the best equipment, and still . . .     The dreadful thought that the solid slabs of his armour must all be made of Silver had struck her when Winter Crow had nearly broken first, but she couldn't bring herself to truly believe it until his gauntlet shattered instead of his arm.     It would be a lie to say that, in watching Roy hesitate, cold panic had nothing at all to do with her sloppy followup and failure to compensate. It'd be more of a lie to say that she couldn't have aimed for anything more deadly.     When the first pommel blow flies at her head, and Lilian blocks it only by raising her right arm, her thoughts on Castle Bern intrusively return through the crunch of her own armour. When the second snaps her ruined vambrace and slams her wrist into her temple, her own voice echoes back at her through ringing ears and tilted vision, as if from very far away. She wonders why she screamed "Roy?!" instead of pushing him.     The Blade was so close to Zephiel's heart. Now it's already in his hands.     When her senses catch back up to her, Lilian realizes her arm has gone numb from halfway to the elbow. Milliseconds later, she realizes that it's why she must have so badly misgauged the power of Zephiel's one-handed strikes from the first half of the whirlwind; she didn't feel the impact of Ekesachs in her right-hand grip, already shaking from the third consecutive blow. The decision to parry the Binding Blade too, instead of getting out of the way, was intrinsically flawed.     So that sharp pain, the one she's gritting her teeth against, must be from her right arm breaking. That's why it hurts so badly when she hits the ground with her right shoulder. Self-preservation causes her to catch herself against the column behind, knowing the likelihood of her being killed in the middle of an uncontrolled roll. It keeps her from dropping Night Mist, too, even though freeing up her left hand means clutching it in the right, despite the nauseating pain. But it can't do anything about the spasm in her left wrist. Her first attempt to cast a spell, her last remaining option, bursts like a breaker failure when her fingers twitch out of place.     'SO BE IT! You, the fattest among the maggots, die as you have killed with honey still on your tongues!'     Behind Geed, Lilian struggles to catch her breath from the invisible effort of getting behind the barrier in the first place. Her body runs so hot from stress that her sweat feels cold against her skin; there's blood in her mouth, and she can only assume it's from her tongue; yet still, Zephiel's voice makes her heart beat out-of-control with anger. To be deemed pathetic for trying to fight a war without killing, then condemned for the blood on her hands being all the same as the rest; something about it mixes so explosively with pain and adrenaline that all the words are stolen from her tongue, and instead, Lilian spits the blood from her mouth onto the floor, and says in their place,     "Petra. Give me Apocalypse."
Odette Raskins	Electrocution isn't a new sensation to Odette, but it's the sort of pain and loss of feeling that she could never actually train her body to get used to. With the way she's wrapped around Zephiel's arm, she actually manages to hold on for a little while even as he carries her whole weight with just the one arm, but it can't last forever. The tension in her muscles gives out, and she's thrown off soon after he starts swinging around Eckesachs to fend off so many attackers at once. Gasping for air at the pain shooting through her, the EMT can only watch helplessly as she sees Zephiel's grip closing around Roy's hand. As close as they are, she can't see what's happening, but she can hear it, and the only feeling that returns to her hand is in her hands rather than anything else that might stop the King from cruhsing the young Lord's hand. "Roy! Dammit, get up, get up..!" She demands of herself while struggling to push herself back up to get back into the fight, desperately wanting to stop Zephiel from slaying Roy on the spot somehow, wanting to get behind Ultraman when he calls for everyone to get behind him. Her body still isn't cooperating enough to get off the ground quickly, but that's still enough. She throws enough of herself behind Geed's barrier in a panicked slide just in time to avoid geting her head shorn in half, buckling at the last moment to fall behind Ultraman just as Zephiel's blades come slicing forward with that terrible scraping noise. Whether it's pure survival instinct or luck that saves her in that moment of physical weakness, Odette's unceremonious drop still isn't enough to save her completely from the matter-rending slash that passes over her. She can practically hear the slash passing over her, and then she can't hear anything from that side after the fact. She can feel the thunderclap, at least, and that's enough to keep her from thinking too much about the wet burning feeling on the right side of her head where her ear was as she jabs yet another injector into her side to dull the pain, the ringing, and the pounding pain in her body. Flamel's got Roy, and he's doing something important inside his head. Riku's getting back up and going for Zephiel again with his . Nobunaga's driving into Zephiel with her sword, and Madeleine's aiming for the piece of Maltet. Lilian calls for something thoroughly ominous, and Odette... Odette still has her sword, but Zephiel still has two. Even though he's got plenty of cracks in his armor and isn't completely invincible, his presence with just one is terrifying enough that she needs a moment to overcome the fear of two, to find something she can do in the face of his howling rage. "Someone... anyone... get it!" That's her cue. With enough medicine coursing through her to keep the pain from overriding her ability to move and forcing its way through her terror, Odette starts slinking around again to seek out an opportunity to get the Binding Blade out of Zephiel's grasp. Once she sees her chance, she rushes in to try and get in on Zephiel while it looks like he might be turning towards someone else, sword still gripped loosely in hand. As she passes by Zephiel, Odette takes her sidearm out, and she flings it right at the Binding Blade, directly where the King would see it. Instead of going for that blade, however, she lunges for the arm holding Eckesachs. She knows she's got no shot at tearing the Binding Blade out of his grasp when there's already been the call to grab it, but she can make it easier for someone else to do so if she can get his attention away from it and towards herself, even for just a moment. The longsword comes slicing up at Zephiel's Eckesachs-wielding arm, and then she's moving in closer to try and wrench that out of his hands with another desperate and blood-deprived gambit.
Angela	''If she's known no better than human company, of course she bears it.'' "I've literally seen no other dragon fighting for this that wasn't some sort of near-mindless monster bred for the purpose of killing." Roland says. "Not even able to articulate why they wanted us dead. Will the dragons with the big wise hearts return after humans are gone. What makes you so sure that if there's only dragons left, they won't find ways to be cruel to each other?" He exhales out his mouth. "Of course Fae wants dragon friends. But the biggest fear and pain that girl's shown is when the people she cares about vanish from her life. I can't blame you for not recognizing that she and her mother love the hell out of her, since you never looked, but don't call an adoptive parent's love FAKE just because you never had it. If you think Fae will appreciate the slaughter of most everyone she's ever loved, will come to realize it's for the best, you" His sword interposes between strike and strike, not quite blocking, but more shifting the powerful forces away just enough that it neither rips off his arms (again) or cleaves him in twain. The presence of fire means he's in more danger than he normally ought to be, though maybe he'll be lucky and someone will pick up his book if he falls. ''The Binding Blade, it's said, makes it's wielder's vision of victory manifest'' Well Roy still managed to lose it, and Roland can't think that the kid's will is somewhere too inferior for that to matter just because he doesn't breathe and exhale murder like he does. ''--attempting to wrangle it up into the air'' Roland looks at his hands, instinctively, even though he doesn't have the gloves and he can't use the gloves lest he reveal himself, but he does have the coat. Oh his everything aches, though he feels it mostly in his bones than in his blood. He glances to Lilian.
Angela	''Petra. Give me Apocalypse.'' Hoo boy. Roland can't exactly vanish in front of the eyes of someone he's been fighting, but there's a lot of people trying to kill Zephiel right now and that means he can still fade. He slips between Madeleine and Nobunaga, relying on the latter's loudness to distract away from his presence as he takes the helmet off of a royal guardsman and slides it on his own head to hide his face. As for the former, well, Madeleine is not supposed to be, and some instinctive part of Roland understands that because he is not so far away from being someone who shouldn't be himself, easily looked over by the world. A plan formulates in his head but he takes a moment, in Madeleine's shadow, to just feel out his body, his cells, as they burn in agony. He has to imagine that Zephiel has a death grip on that blade. It's a bit unorthodox of a use of his fighting style and near suicidal to put into practice, but that doesn't make it impossible. Zephiel has experienced assassination attempts before. Roland was warned against trying it, for ethical as well as 'this guy has survived a thousand assassination attempts' reasons, but Roland's one of the best. If people could be wholly defended against assassins just because they fended them off their whole life, nobody would hire them to begin with and often those who know all the peculiar ways someone might sneakily try to murder them will be betrayed by their own mastery. Suddenly Roland is in Zephiel's space, crouching low as he swings a dagger with his right hand for Zephiel's neck. Roland has also gotten a lot of practice at leaving openings so that people who visit the Library have a chance at all. He is, suddenly, a loyal Bern soldier that had been killed now swinging for Zephiel's throat like he always expected. Roland is ready to lose an arm for this, surely someone of Zephiel's skill and experience with Roland-type enemies will prepare him for that. But his true killing move is his other hand, empty of any weapon at all, reaching out for the Binding Blade as Riku wrestles with it, intent on swallowing it up in the subdimensional space he holds his other weapons--and then in just as smooth a motion, swing his arm back and send it flying back towards Roy or, failing that, just AWAY, A mace reappearing in his hand largely by instinct though he does not strike with it.
Petra Soroka	How different would the world be if the castle of Bern had been torn down years and years before? Seeing how *ecstatic* Zephiel is to do it, the thin justification of swinging lightning wildly in the direction of the League just to incidentally demolish his own cage, it can only confirm Petra's earlier musings with a final, heartbreaking note.     Zephiel's entire worldview is built from within this castle, from the noble court to his father, and the bitter self-loathing he feels for being shallowly revered by them instead of the hated outcast. The 'best of humanity' in here is constrained to the center of their pack, whose only possibly virtue is wielding the weapons of humanity to plunge through his own heart and drown the world in his blood, the same shade of red as theirs. If he'd razed the castle and thrown away the monarchy after becoming king, as he surely imagined doing, then the vagabond Zephiel's contempt for humanity could only have manifested as doing small acts of good as a human being in spite of it, rather than this cleansing genocide.     And he always had the power to, and he always had the desire to. The small, sad truth, when the roof collapses, and Petra watches him laugh through the cloud of dust while she struggles to catch her breath, is that he needed the permission. Human after all, resentfully. Zephiel and Lilian really aren't that much alike at all. "I hope with all my love for her that she does not."     "Then you still hate yourself more than you love her. Or else you'd be doing everything possible to *become* worthy of her loving *you*! Why should the world be better for Iðunn without you in it?! Only if you're so caught up in this being your *way out*, that you're afraid that trying any harder would make you humanity's *redemption* instead of its executioner, along with yourself!" "You fight for a future of everlasting blood. And I, for a world wiped clean."     Petra hates to feel like this, the instrument of Zephiel's own suicide turned against him, win or lose. There's only so far that shouted words can change this, the long scrawl of history that could've shifted course at any moment before now, and so little breath to spare in the haze of smoke and sweat and blood, but she still has to, for the sake of....     For the sake of nothing, really. All she can spare thought for is the man in front of her, and the glimmer of love and hope enshrined even in his suicide, and the altar his mind built around the woman who showed him any life besides the one he had. 'Humanity' is only Zephiel, just like it might someday be only Petra.     "You're such a *coward*! Why do you still think, as the only person in a thousand years to ever have these feelings, this much awareness of humanity's failings, the opportunities you have and Iðunn right in front of you, that this is the best you can do?! Oblivion is the *easy way out*!"
Petra Soroka	"--pathetic conviction?"     "Oh, wow, behold humanity's *greatest* escapist!" Each exchange makes Petra angrier, out of sheer *indignation*. The amorphous orb of Silver by her side contorts and lunges, tendrils grasping to wrestle Zephiel's grip off of Roy. "Grit your teeth and live-!"     The Silver on 'silver' splatters on collision. Spears of it coalesce in her hand to be sprayed across the floor like molten detritus by the swing of the Binding Blade in Zephiel's hand, only stopped from being lethal on the followthrough by the hasty interposition of her own. Petra is thrown like a doll away from Zephiel and Roy, crumpled against a shattered pillar in the ruined throne room.     The void that preceeds the scraping of the Binding Blade against Eckesachs causes Fourth Match Flame in her hand to wink out. The torrential flame that follows ignites the matchstick blade in a secondary explosion, a hydrogen flame of sudden resonant reactivity. The Silver bubbles up around her to ablatively wither away in the fury of the Binding Blade, as Petra crawls towards Geed.     Sheltering behind Geed's barrier deflects the swing of the Binding Blade to either side, the heat shield for atmospheric reentry back into the world of Zephiel, the comet trail of her sword's short-lived flame winnowing off into the eddies of apocalyptic vacuum that whirl behind. Her Silver is spent, morphmetal boiling with a cracked and blackened surface, scattered across the remains of the castle like stars, and Petra only has her matching burnt and bloody EGO in hand to use to help herself to her feet. "You, the fattest among the maggots, die as you have killed with honey still on your tongues!"     Petra opens her mouth to retort and wheezes, struggling to suck air into her lungs. Her throat is raw, eyes painfully slit half-shut, slowly ground down from shouting about life and love, to a clumsy, bloody slog back and forth in a pile of charred rubble. She readjusts her hands on Fourth Match Flame, but... "Petra. Give me Apocalypse."     The folded up page, opened and smoothed by Petra's thumb, is in Lilian's hands before any other word or motion. "Do you need help? Do you need anything?" For whatever reason, she's compelled to blurt out, the page inscribed with a complicated array of circles and signs held between their two hands, "I want both of us to live through this."
Desire Stars	Is that what you're proud of? Parasitizing a child?     Geats sticks to Zephiel even more after that--but the reach of his weapons, his speed, those have to be respected even in the Mark II armor. The wrong approach, a careless attack, it could cost him much more than--frustration boils over at Roy's hesistation. "ROY!"     Na-Go flash-constructs a wall between herself and Zephiel, stretching the distance between herself and Geed, to allow her time to vault with the Gigant Hammer and plant firmly behind Ultraman.     Through the barrier, Geats and Na-Go are both flung across the room to land ungently in heaps. Without it, the memory of them both would have been erased from the world. Far from here, an observer, or perhaps observers, take notice of the angry, red blinking danger indicators on each Rider's HUD. Each Rider can see it, too, their armor's overall integrity holding, but alarmingly low compared to the seeming state of Zephiel. *But what can I do? Run? After everything I've said, all the people who have helped me get here, all the people I've helped with my own hands... that... would be the ugliest thing I could do. What right would I have to say that I want true love, if I abandoned the love these strangers have shown me? I have to get up. I have to get up. I have to...*      "Get UP!" Na-Go screams at herself, and her body listens, scrambling to its feet and extending a hand for Geats to take.      That helps him find the words, shapes to give the anger that boiled in his bones from the moment Zephiel made his accusation. He nods at Na-Go, then turns his attention to Zephiel. "...I've lived among humans for centuries longer than that child has. I've witnessed the horrors they visit on the world again and again, lifetime after lifetime. Still, I'm here to stop you and wash clean the wounds you salted. Why? Tell me that it's because I'm poisoned, too. Tell me that it's because I'm another fool that's mistaken a stay of judgment for the final verdict. Tell me that it's because I'm blind. Because I'm a pig who can't see that he's a pig."     Geats, in the mysterious armor he seemed to call to himself against Galle, finds it easier in terms of physicality, if not in terms of the willpower it takes to tear himself from Zephiel after that comment. It burns at the back of his neck even seeing the Blade in his hand.     The barrier holds--for an instant, for less-than, it doesn't matter to either of them, only -- only Ultraman giving anyone an opportunity to strip the blade. The equalizers on either Rider's heads-up-display are flat and silent. The understanding they share in this moment transcends something as clumsy as spoken language. It's a glance, towards one another, a heartbeat spent before the focus returns to Zephiel.     "Now hear me. I reject it."     Neither one of them notices Roland, per se--rather, they both lock eyes on Zephiel in the precious few moments that Geed can hold his arm in that way. "Every place that you've poisoned, we've washed clean. I've been welcomed as a guest in places that should have despised me, according to you. You stripped them bare to prove your point, and they shamed me with their kindness." Na-Go twirls the Gigant Hammer so that its thruster faces down. Geats is on the head of the hammer before the thruster is even level with the ground. Na-Go guns the throttle, sending the hammer violently upwards, catapulting Geats into the air.
Desire Stars	"Lifetime after lifetime..." At the apex of his leap, Geats twists the throttle on the Mark II Boost Buckle, setting the otherworldly tenor of the armor's engine to roaring throughout the crumbling castle. "No matter how much the pain of loss hardens my heart..." The bone-rattling hiss-thud of an ignition heralds a thin lance of fire from the back of his helmet. "I meet humans who manage to touch it anyway." It widens, washing the interior of the castle out as if a lightning strike were frozen in its stunning brilliance, shadows crawling long across the floor. "I meet humans who teach me something about the world, about myself, who give me the strength to keep moving forward despite the inertia of thoughtless cruelty that permeates it." He extends his leg just as the next-stage rocket ignites-- "These people, who I've fought and bled with to pry your boot from the neck of this place, aren't any different. I've learned so much from them."     While Na-Go holds the Gigant Hammer firm, finger still on the throttle. The thruster pushes her increasingly fast across the floor, her boots digging up tiling and carving furrows in as she goes. At the edge of the weapon's range--a distance she's well acquainted with, thanks to her frequent use of the Armed Propeller--she abruptly flips the hammer along its haft, reversing the direction of the still-firing thruster for an abrupt brake that transitions into a standing whirl. Her battle cry, and Geats', rise above the roaring of their thrusters. Na-Go's hammer strikes low, a superhumanly strong sweep--                                  GIGANTSTRIKE!                                       "But of course, you didn't see that, because it didn't *serve* your point. I pity the fearful world you live in--but I won't allow you to make it real." Geat's flame-wreathed foot aims center-mass, the very air around it blistering until the impact sets off an explosion that leaves the vision swimming and the ears ringing afterwards.                                  BOOST STRIKE!
Marigold	Roy, with his twisted left hand and his grimacing pale face, clutches onto Flamel's shoulder and looks into the Psychonaut's eyes with defeated relief. "It's... I did my best. They got him pretty badly, didn't they...?"      His hope that Zephiel will just bleed out now is dashed by the desperation in Flamel's eyes. "Oh," he says in a very small voice. Something more is being asked of him, and he doesn't know what; only that he still has to be brave. "... Whatever it is, do it."      ... What Flamel pulls out of Roy's forehead is like a shard of fog, with faint projections playing out on its surface. Arcadia. Ostia. Rutger and Marcus and you. The dimly-remembered smile of a youthful-looking mother.      Riku is moving already, but can't cross a room faster than Zephiel can swing the Blade a second time; this one a vertical cut, splitting the room and castle in two while cascading fiery explosions down the center of the group. He steps to one side of the ruined flaming gulch while hurling Eckesachs-lightning across it, buying himself a little space.      By now the High Castle is little more than a heap of rubble, barely obscuring the beautiful cool night sky. The wind blows through it, fanning flames.      Even after condemning the value of speaking at all, Zephiel can't resist the urge to praise the dragon he worships with the bit of breathing room he's bought himself, pacing the new valley's ragged edge. "Had you seen Iðunn in all her glory," he barks at Roland, "you'd know not to waste your breath speaking of dragons' flaws. Why justify yourself to me, worm? Does your heart twist with guilt, to know you're a stain on that girl you've taken? Then die guilty."      When his attention turns smoothly to Petra, it softens oddly from taunting contempt to merely contemptful sympathy.      "She is God," he says to Petra as he paces, with a voice that's almost hard to catch. "Only when we sinned against our God below did we begin to search for a God above. If only mortals could deserve her. But to spare a race of sinners on account of just one saint... is something a saint would never ask."      "If I am evil, may She destroy that evil. If I am good, may I prove it through sacrifice."      Another crackling swat with Eckesachs assails the group, but fails to fend Riku off; unable to dodge away due to Nobunaga's harrying, Zephiel digs in his heels against the giant's charge, but gasp-laughs when he realizes that Riku is trying to wrench the Binding Blade up and away. The flaming sword itself digs deep into Geed's arms and fingers.      'Let'!" he answers, with rich and almost giddy contempt. While trying to wrench the Blade away through Riku, he makes an attempt to stick Eckesachs into Riku's gut as well, only mercifully distracted by the need to defend himself from the others closing in too.      Even with one arm entangled, he can cross swords with Nobunaga well; she's proven enough of an irritant that he feigns like he's going to defend himself, then completely forfeits the defense to strike her across the chest with Eckesachs' blade as she digs her sword into his elbow, gambling on her to flinch first. On the same principle, his skull slams into Madeleine to dislodge her; Odette slips in with her cut during the headbutt, finds his grip on Eckesachs briefly loosened, and manages to fight him for the hilt.
Marigold	Neither of his hands are free when Roland, in a guard's diguise, lunges.      "There," he breathes almost-happily, as if someone in Bernish red lunging at him with an assassin's knife was a beautiful inevitability, like the first birds of spring.      He shoves Odette back while relinquishing Eckesachs for a moment, seizes Roland by the face to halt the dagger just shy of his throat, laugh-roars indignantly when the Binding Blade is teleport-and-thrown away- "And what use is that to you?!"- and then slams Roland's skull against the floor in a one-handed motion, hard enough to crack stone and dent the metal helmet.      Two smooth motions, now that he isn't trying to keep ahold of the Blade: first, slip his unencumbered arm away from Riku, easier without his fist balled around a sword; rip what's left of Maltet from his own shoulder and Madeleine's grasp, and try to plant the sharp metal in her chest before hurling it (and her?) aside.      Second, aim a hard stomp at Odette's stomach, reclaim Eckesachs from her with both hands now, and backhand Riku and Nobunaga both with a rough cut while stepping around them.      Roland and Riku's gambit has, ultimately, succeeded- the Blade has clattered to a stop just ten feet from Roy and Flamel- but for all that he's been bloodied and his left arm half-lamed, he seems almost relaxed while walking towards the Blade once more, daring Roy with his eyes to get back up.      "... Tell me that it's because I'm blind. Because I'm a pig who can't see that he's a pig."      "It's because you are a fattened cannibal," Zephiel spits at the rising Ace as he approaches, with something that's not quite relish. "A fox with bloodied muzzle and golden trim, crowing around mouthfuls that this is the best of all possible worlds. By what justice did you come by your centuries, cur?" He's swift to take that at face value.      "No; you take for kindness the cravenness of the masses to the wealthy and the strong. Mutilate yourself upon this sword and see who cheers for you then."      Zephiel holds Eckesachs out like an invitation. When it isn't taken, he swings it high over Na-Go's ducking head, raking her with lightning noentheless; takes the hammerblow to the back of his knee and falls backwards; shoves her away, halfway-rises, and tries to meet the plunging kick with another swing of Eckesachs.      He's forced a bit further from the Blade on the floor by the blast. Its edges are subtly chipped by his abuse of it. And from that last blow, Eckesachs too has a hairline fracture down the center.
Riku Asakura	Geed can't stop the second swing, but thankfully it's not aimed directly at them.  It splits the castle apart, and debris rains down on them.  Pelted with stone, Geed still pushes forward, unwilling to stop... especially with the fate of the world now in their hands.  Keep going, he says to himself... just a little bit more.   'Petra. Give me Apocalypse.' Lilian has a plan, and others are moving with him to disarm Zephiel.  They just need to get that sword out of his hands... the Binding Blade can not be allowed to stay in his hands at any cost, even his own life, he realizes.  How many would suffer?  How much more could this world be driven towards destruction?  Could it even spread to the Multiverse itself?  His own home?   He finds it amazing that people even have the strength to talk to Zephiel right now; all Geed can do is put one foot in front of the other.  Wrap his hands around that arm.  Even as the lightning crackles through him because of Eckesacs, he refuses to give up his plan.  Even as his entire body /screams/ to go down and revert to Riku, he refuses.   The gem on his chest is now red and blinking furiously.  He's in very real danger now; if he continues to go, he could very well die.  He is very lucky at this point that Eckesachs can't be used to impale him.  He has to fend off the others.  Through this, he sees that his gambit has paid off thanks to Oddette and Roland, though he doesn't know it was Roland.   The backhand of the sword catches Ultraman Geed, throwing him away from Zephiel and rolling across the ground.  With his gem flashing red repeatedly, he pushes himself back onto his feet.  It takes him only a few moments to realize that Roy has a shot at the Binding Blade, and that there is a crack in Eckesachs.   "Roy... please trust in yourself.  We trust you to use the blade right; if you can't believe in yourself, at least believe in the trust that we have in you..." he says and draws energy into himself.  It gathers into him and focuses on his arms.  Finally, it overflows from his body as he forms his arms into a sort of L shape. "BIG BUSTAWAY!" he booms, and a powerful beam of energy charges from him towards Zephiel, specifically right towards Eckesachs itself.  If he could crack that sword wider...!
Nobunaga	The defense is forfeited and in turn Nobunaga commits; Eckesachks carves across her chest in a spray of blood and electricity. In turn, her own sword bites into the mad King's defenseless arm at the crook of his elbow. Her footing shifts and she leverages both hands on the katana's handle, cleaving down as she moves back, slicing through armor underlayer, then tendon and muscle in one smooth motion that also slides her back to a safer distance.     Here, the Demon King lifts her free hand to the wound across her chest, glistening wet and red through the gash in her black bodysuit. Fingertips touch into her blood and she lifts them, examining the crimson staining black and gold gloves.     "Fufufu... Leave it to a beaten dog to snap at his betters." Her fingers clench into a fist with a faint wet sound, crimson eyes refocusing on Zephiel without turning her head, "You are neither 'Good' nor 'Evil'. You are only seeking a way to die and you have made all of the world your enemy in search of it."     "I am a merciful Demon King," Nobunaga turns now to face Zephiel, approaching him, bloodied as she is with her hands held out to either side-- one still holding her own sword, "Consider your wish... Granted."     The High Castle is crumbling, the ceiling opening up as she speaks. This gives the Demon King more room to work; she had already been quietly summoning a fan of rifles above and behind Zephiel while she was talking to him. The second she speaks the word 'Granted', they all fire at once. The aim is fairly low; she isn't aiming for his body, where his armor is cracked but still more than adequate. She's aiming at the backs of his legs and in particular the backs of his knees, where the need for articulation tends to require less protection.
Desire Stars	By what justice did you come by your centuries, cur?     "The oldest injustice there is--birth." The smoke clears behind Ace as Na-Go's armor sparks violently at the touch of lightning.     "Does that frighten you?"     Stumbling backwards, Na-Go isn't in a position to do anything about the sword.     Geats is exhausted, too, but he's still on his feet. The armor's rev is the only warning Zephiel has before Geats' blinding speed sees him nearly on the sword's position. He low-profiles, dipping into a slide after having seen how Zephiel deals with his speed. His outstretched hand grasps the blade. Maybe it ignited, maybe it didn't. For Geats and Zephiel, that instant where his clawed hand is on the sword must seem like a lifetime. The lenses of his helmet gleam red for a fleeting moment, and perhaps in that moment it might look as though he's going to swing.     Zephiel could be forgiven for thinking that, as Geats rises in the span it takes to blink. He could be forgiven for assuming the twist at the upper body means a slash--the positioning of his feet would be perfect for it. Maybe, as his arm travels further, the glint of the sword might be the beginnings of his 'will to victory.' Or it might be just a trick of the light from the heat that radiates from his armor. Neither one of them will know, because the swing isn't a swing.     It's a toss--to Roy.     "To think that it could have been you?"     Na-Go interposes herself, using the Gigant Hammer's eye in a downward thrust to control the space between Zephiel and Roy. Though her muscles burn and scream, she continues the assault with a step back to avoid a reprisal, loosing up on the grip until her hand is nearly at the butt of the haft and swinging underhand to force either a parry or evade.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Maltet's largest piece - the one lodged in Zephiel's shoulder - comes free, and Madeleine goes flying back with it. The wound bleeds openly, now, and may kill a man even as tough as this king with time and an absence of curative attention, but time is not what Madeleine, or nearly anyone else here, has in supply.     Without really thinking, the huntress has Drogrung in her hands by the time she's returning to close quarters. For just a moment as she charges, she ponders her weapon's origin. Long ago, a mighty serpent was found slumbering and forged into a weapon of war by Excrucian battle-smiths, never to know true peace again.     She wonders what Zephiel would think of a dragon - even if not one of Elibe - brought to such a fate. Parasitized, likely, just as he thinks of Fae. Corrupted by human (or similar-enough) folly into a being of war. It's nearly enough to make her falter in her charge, but its single staring eye is set with determination on Zephiel, ready as Madeleine herself to see this through. The peace it was denied is not the neverending sterility of Zephiel's lifeless dream.     And, crucially, Zephiel knows not of the mutual vulnerability of his weapon and Madeleine's, each to the other's power. Her first attack is a feint, just inside Zephiel's area of control with Eckesachs in his good arm. Even before the decoy she leaves there is finished falling in two, the real Maddie is coming in for a strike from high and outside relative to Zephiel's center, almost perpendicular to his area of facing.     Then, a moment before Zephiel would need to execute a counter-maneuver, the final trick up Drogrung's sleeve is revealed to the king as an enormous pair of ghostly clawed hands spring forth from the weapon and grab hold of Eckesachs at the crossguard. Claws sink into the fault on Eckesach's blade, driving it wider and pouring hideous venom into the flaw. As the stuff dribbles down to the stone floor, it hisses on Zephiel's silver gauntlets and burns his fingers, but that is secondary to its true aim - destroying the king's signature Divine Weapon once and for all.     All the while, Madeleine wrestles to hold her spear steady, to keep it too close to Eckesachs for a proper counter-swing, and above all to endure the lightning washing over her body. Her heart pounds and shudders in her chest as the energy causes her to spasm, but even if her body is about to give out her newfound will to live, to fight for life, drives her onward.
Odette Raskins	Odette sees it. She sees Eckesachs slip out of Zephiel's hold, and she even has a hold of it for a time! Better yet, the opportunity to use it presents itself to her, but it's not enough. Just having the opportunity to use it isn't the same as having the strength to wield it or the sense of mind to actually take advantage of it, especially in the horrible state she's in. Her arms are barely cooperating thanks to getting battered and blasted around as many times as she has, and getting thrown to the ground even after Zephiel's let go of the weapon is enough to take the breath out of her again when she hits the ground. Still, she has the blade in hand, and having it even for that moment feels almost like a terrible blanket that she can't wait to stop needing, but can't bear to just get rid of. If she could just get up, maybe she could turn the blade on Zephiel himself, but it's that maybe that proves to be too difficult for her to realize before he's already above her again. She only musters up enough strength to swing it at him once from that supine position before he stomps down on her, and she screams out at feeling something in her midsection breaking. Unable to muster up much strength in her hands after that, she scrapes a bloodied hand against his boot a few seconds after he's already moved on to continue fighting against her other companions. With all that pain shooting through her body even with the already-excessive quantity of medicine in her bloodstream that's quickly starting to come out of her mouth , Odette's finding it hard enough to even move from her spot, and just laying there is preferrable to curling up defensively with as much as her entire body hurts. She wants to scream, but she can't get the sounds out, and even trying to lift a leg makes her stomach hurt even more. She settles for tearing up as the only thing she can do without making the pain worse, but she can still see the fighting going on not too far from where she is, and she can see that fracture in Eckesachs that wasn't there earlier in the fight. More importantly, she can see the blade near Roy, but his hand still worries her. Somehow, she's still worried about that now of all things, even while she can feel herself bleeding out. She wasn't expecting to die here, but letting go doesn't quite feel like such a bad thing if the alternative is getting stomped on again. She feels her vision starting to fade, and- "Roy... please trust in yourself." "To think that it could have been you?" Odette feels something starting to stir inside of her. Even with as tired and wounded as she is, her body demands survival more than her mind seeks peace, and she knows intuitively that the only way she might have a shot at surviving is to do anything but lie on her back and cry herself to unconsciousness. Getting up still isn't an option, but there's still one thing left she can still do, even from there. Cradling her staff against her chest, she closes her eyes, and she remembers what Lucius taught her. Years of training to learn magic, years of meditation to calm her mind, all those times she excitedly ran up to him to show off what she had learned... It's all coming back to her so clearly, and the warmth of those memories calms her mind as she feels the flow of magical power more clearly than she had ever felt it before. Although it's still nothing near what her mentor nor his students could achieve, it's still something she can direct, and she puts it all into her staff. She reopens her eyes, turning her head briefly away from the most immediate sounds of combat towards the young lord. "Roy, you've got this. No holding back." She whispers, unable to speak any louder. She'd give him her hand if she could, but she's pretty sure her staff can't do that, so she'll settle for healing magic. Odette raises the staff to turn its healing magic on Roy and his busted hand in the hopes that it'll be enough with the shard Flamel's pulled out to give him one last push to utilize the Binding Blade to its fullest.
Flamel Parsons	UPE-1631: One Thousand Years Classification: PRS-10 Containment Protocol: At least one copy must be held by the military and administrative leadership of all nations capable of armed-forces organization. Description: Visualized as a 'fog' or atmosphere. However, this construct is solid enough to produce useable fragments that compress its essence. This substrate material is used to construct essential segments of world-perception that allow the world to be seen as 'good' and 'just'. ...     ---     "Wish you had a gun or something in there." Flamel mutters softly, eyes squeezed tight. Hands, squeezing tighter. They tremble around the fragment.     ---     "Time is up."     "Director, we need more."     "There's none left to give. What do you have?"     "The entire core of the anomaly is irreconcilable. We've subjected it to every possible procedure and we don't have any response that neutralizes it, much less destroys it. It always ends the same way: Overwhelming violence and loss."     The Director paces at the table. Outside of the observation deck, the facility is still in lockdown, still under massive assault. There's no slack left. Within the chamber, the armored King's form stays still, scepter in hand. "You can't pull him out of this." The researcher says. "Not unless you could time-travel to stop him from ever being made in the first place. The component pieces are all too..."     "So there's nothing. The Parsons Institute will collapse, and you have no findings."     "I'm sorry, Director. It was an honor."     ---     Noise. So much noise. Everyone's pulling out all the stops. But Flamel rises to his feet, gulps down a nervous swallow, and slicks his hair back -- what little he still has after the head wound tore open and exposed the rock above his neck. "Back to fundamentals." He says, softly. "All I have left. Fundamentals." He holds the Thousand Years in a loose grip, projections dancing over it. And, despite beams and bolts and blasts and swipes and slashes and strikes dancing around them, he begins to approach Zephiel.     Everyone has something to say to the king, but Flamel's focus is all at his back. <Here it is.> He says. <Look. Can't you see it? Can't you see me, right, correct, just now? Look. Look. Look, Roy.>     A gesture to one side. <A gentle fox, still young, rushing to meet him.> Another direction, to Petra in cover. <A lost sister struggling to reconcile her love and her survival.> Another direction, up. <A girl who commands the crack of thunder and death.> A trembling finger towards Lilian. <There's the knight who's too clever to be gentle and too kind to be ruthless.> Madeleine. <There's a woman defined by abhorrence and schemes a long time ago.> Odette. <A poisoner to bring him down and back up.> There's Roland. <There's the 'worst of the worst', the 'commoners' who move for the wealthy.> And Geed. <Giants of light from somewhere and somewhen else.>     <Roy. You and I are already inside of his mind.>     <Everything here is his truth.>     <The people. The place. There's no division between the inside and the outside. Here. Out in Bern. Out in the world. Out to the stars. We were inside his mind since the day Narcian burned Laphet.>     <So please. Acknowledge him. Be kind, open your eyes, and tell him, 'I see you, and I understand you'. Even if it hurts. Even if the nerves are searing pain and your foresight is nothing but scary futures and your heart is beating itself apart. Go to him and reply. See his truth. Be kind enough not to shut your eyes, and be strong enough to do what happens next when you do.>     Or all of us are going to die, he thinks to himself.
Flamel Parsons	He turns back to Zephiel. Only a few seconds for all of that to convey to Roy, and incidentally-telepathically-sensitives nearby. Flamel holds the fragment like a dagger, which is not even close to its function, in a grip that's nowhere near expertise. "You're right." He says. "Everything you see is true." He squeezes the fragment and mouthes something to himself.     "Elimine, please..."     "But I'd die for that cravenness. I'd die for that selfishness. I'd die for that filth. That mud. That dirt." A long exhale. "One day I probably will. Everything beautiful and important comes from soil."     He raises the fragment and snaps it in half. And the experience is so, so horribly familiar, to Lilian Rook specifically. Astral inversion. Whatever experiences Roy had that could ever make him willing to strike Zephiel are years and then hundreds of years of substrate and foundation to build a mind on. Release it here, and astral processes can work in the air. The physical matter will give way to the collective will of what Roy has been gathering and refining in his skull, and what Elibe has been gathering and refining in its borders, since the Scouring.     A little. Just a few percentage points of motion, aesthetic. A few flickering images on the maggot-eaten stars. A shitty little astral inversion that disgorges nothing but millions and billions and trillions of peaceful lives in villages and towns, going in circles, doing nothing remarkable. Barely enough to reshape the stone or be seen in the sky.     But, since it's an astral foundation material, it might let Roy move the way a mental image does. It might let a hand clasp a hilt even though it's shattered, or let a young man execute the will of those thousands of years of dirt, soil, mundanity. All with the same force and speed as the generationally-inherited psychohazard that stands in front of him. If he's gotten through to him, at least.
Angela	Roland might be fearful of what his will would entail while wielding the Binding Blade, or he might be aware that in terms of pure strength, he might end up just handing the weapon back to him. He can't thank Riku and Odette for the help because his head is about to be grabbed by Zephiel's hand which is one of the multiverse's worst places for your head to be. He hasn't had his head crushed to pulp before, it'd be a new experience, but it isn't one that he's eager to experiene. His ees widen a little as he sees Nobunaga pointing guns in his general direction (because he's being held by Zephiel). He grabs at Zephiel's hand so he doesn't just kill him by squeezing his hand too tight. ''Why justify yourself to me, worm.'' "Justify...myself..." Roland exhales. "Nah, it's just as you say. I'm worm. I don't even want to imagine swinging that sword." He grunts, failing to pull himself free. Better to leave weapons like that in the hands of people who have some hope left in their heart. "It just pisses me off... how you talk about Igrene... How you talk about Lilian... Your own sister... Even Murdoch. A man loyal, a father you could have chosen. A sister who will have to bear the guilt, forever, wondering if she could have done anything to show you of the joy that still exists in this world, a mother who never wanted her daughter to come along on this journey but let her so she wouldn't feel like the world left her behind again." His head is slammed into the concrete before he can finish. He presses his hand into the floor, bleeding terribly from his forehead and ears, head ringing. "But...what pisses me off... most of all..." Roland spits out too much blood out of his mouth as he stands up, stealth no longer really helpful at all. "Is you're calling Lilian worthless. Every day..." He gets up onto one knee. "She works herself crazy, when she could retire and just enjoy her happiness..." He slides another leg underneath him, struggling to get into a standing position. "She brightens other worlds every day because she can still enjoy a walk through the forest, the company and love of friends and family. That because she shares some cynicism, she is somehow the same...? Destroying the world's easy, even men who never lifted a sword in their lives can do it. She does the hard boring annoying shit that makes reality better. Lilian brings the sun even at her most bitter." He stares out to Zephiel, dropping his sword he can no longer lift. "Petra's right, you're a selfish lover." He tumbles forward, hitting the floor. The ruins of the castle means, however, that the Magical Girl of Love, in her Queen of Hatred form, clambering up to look down from the night sky with a no doubt with her very terrified rider along her. "Hi!" She says. "You were taking so long and everything was falling down so I wanted to see what was happening? It's going bad out there!" Her eyes travel towards Roy. "Roy! I'm here now!" She then stares down at Zephiel. And she says, "Hey!! Why are you being mean to Roy?? I thought you liked dragons! In the name of Love and Hate..." And then she opens up her jaw and fires a large magenta laser at The King while Roland is sort of lying on the floor there. I'll punish you!
Lilian Rook	In the seconds between calling Petra's name and hearing her voice, Lilian realizes that what she is attempting to do is absurd.     Her heuristic combat sense, her 'instinct', had told her that this was her sole remaining viable option before she consciously realized why that was. Her sidearm had been a calculated sacrifice. Needing it was because she had judged Zephiel in error. Her arm was an improvised one. She had sacrificed it because she had judged Roy in error. She has enough time remaining, and no feasible course of action to spend it on. Her arcane 'batteries' are nearly full, but declining to carry an implement demands dexterity that she no longer has.     Using both hands might make it easier, but it would mean letting go of Night Mist; an act she has never once performed in her entire life, much less somewhere she might never get it back from. She could always pull back and trust in her allies, hearts on fire with the full karmic weight of history behind them; but 'I leave the rest to you' are words that she has never once had the faith nor the courage to say.     Unable to feel her own weapon in hand, knowing that she can't possibly swing it anyways, desperation drives Lilian's subconscious to claw for the closest thing to a replacement that it can find; anything that might fill the terrifying absence of a sword at her side for long enough to make it through this. What it finds is the memory of talking to Raigh and Sophia by the campfire, and being told that Apocalypse could likely be completed with any gesture at all.     If she could fight any other way, she would. She knows painfully well that she could never hope to reach Bramimond's level; even if she threw everything they had and more, she would never even come close. She has none of Niime's experience, none of Sophia's talent; she knows even less than Raigh. Attempting to cast a spell no one has seen in a thousand years is lunacy. Even if she succeeds, she has no idea what it does; not its range nor its effects nor its delivery mechanism or destructive potential. Resorting to Apocalypse the moment she is deprived of a sword is an almost humiliating act of escalation.     But she can't pretend to not know that she is the only one who can try.     'I want both of us to live through this.'     And so, once again, Lilian thinks about death.     "We're going to." she says, taking the page without looking. Not at Petra, or Roy, or anyone else but Zephiel. She refuses to. She can't afford to.     'Do you need help? Do you need anything?'     Because to do this, she must only think about death.     "I need you to not hold my hand."     As she has gotten away with avoiding for far, far too long.
Lilian Rook	She knows that dark magic draws on 'emptiness'. Absence. The places where things should be, but aren't. The things that should have been replaced by now, but haven't been, and maybe never will be.     In the throes of Zephiel's attempted self-annihilation, in the ruins of castle Bern, beneath a sky filled with holes where the stars should be, gripped with the paralyzing fear of loss that always finds its way back to her when she can't feel the weight of her sword; the perfect alignment of the moment is a very good start, but still not nearly good enough.     To tap into 'absence'; not pain, suffering, loss, or any of their equally noble cousins, but absence, Lilian Rook can only grapple with the things things she wished more than anything to never have to.     She goes back to the empty rooms that were always kept just as they had been, held in stasis and barred to her in memoriam of people she would never have the chance to meet, but who might have helped her if she did. The stories everyone knew but would never tell her. The memories everyone had but would never share. The places where everyone never went because they couldn't look each other in the eye if they did. In a bathtub full of his own blood lies her father, and the wall of silence that surrounded the word 'suicide', because everyone was better off believing that it was. She sets aside the one and only time he had ever used her name in his life, and presses her hand to the smouldering iron of everything she had never asked and never heard instead.     But that isn't enough either. So she thinks about Angelica; their few talks together, the hope she had for her family, the City that she had promised to bring about just for her, and the letter that arrived at her desk instead. She thinks about Roland standing by himself at her own wedding, and when she starts to flinch away, she doubles down on why it hurts instead.     Telling Cinder to die for her, and seeing her smiling face through the cell door. The months she hadn't spoken to Petra after that, and the knowledge that she couldn't be everything Cinder was too. Ishirou's lifeless corpse in her arms, left in a public park, so that the humanity he had fought so hard for stung her eyes and nose with the first hours of putrefaction instead. The last day she spent with Meika Kirenai, telling her everything she should have, but didn't, and the hours at the skating rink that no one would admit were a funeral; not out loud.     Winter Holiday. Her first taste of another girl's war that was just like hers, except it wasn't, because those girls were twelve and she had to carry their bodies herself. The abject sense of failure; of feeling ready at last to face anything out there, and how it didn't matter, because she wasn't there and now there is nothing she can do. She can trace the line it draws through her entire life. Gregory had given her a taste of it again, and she had turned and walked away rather than face it. She had seen it in Dorothea's slashed throat, and pretended to not recognize it. It had begun long before even that nameless man who died in Ketchikan. She already knew its name before she walked through Sapient Heuristics and was deafened by the silence where Emery Heller's should be instead.     It had followed her here. Their names had come to her lips at the moment she entered the castle, and went unuttered. Names that she could do nothing for, because the hands of the clock had claimed them first, and unable to turn them back, all she could ever do was try to catch up
Lilian Rook	All Lilian Rook has ever done is try to catch up. 'Absence' is in the uncrossable span between her and second hand. It lives in the exact length by which she will always be behind. It is never more apparent than in death. To think about death, she has to think about Schneider Greco.     'Then we were alone, together.' Those words mark the final limit of her abilities. The closest to the metal that she will ever get. Schneider didn't die in the Suitcase; she died back in the Walden. It's impossible to say when the very last second she had left to save her had slipped away, but it must have been between when the dead man first spoke to her, and when she had given Forget Me Not exactly what he wanted.     The essence of 'absence' lies within that one moment which is blacked out in her memory. The instant where the wrong words at the wrong time under just the wrong circumstances had made 'Mrs. Rook, Chevalier and PhD' cease to exist.     There is no more pure an absence she knows than the moment that everything she had ever done with her life, everything she had ever healed from, every aspect of the better, stronger person she was supposed to be, had winked out of existence, and the last year that ever counted was sixteen.     The wall she couldn't break past, even to save Schneider Greco, is made of all the years that she will never be able to go back and fix, and will never be used to make anything else.     Absence is the contemptible mad dog she never forgot how to be.     Apocalypse can be cast with any gesture. Lilian doesn't think about which one to use. She doesn't recognize the motion of her hand in the moment, and doesn't recognize it after.     Looking at the glyph paper clutched in her hand from anywhere but behind her own eyes, though, the gesture looks a lot like pointing a gun.
Petra Soroka	"I need you to not hold my hand."     "Okay." Petra's hand slips away from Lilian's, but her stare doesn't, even when Lilian's eyes won't meet hers. Probingly intense, it seems sometimes that Petra can read Lilian's mind as easily as she can read hers, like no one else can.     If she can, it must be just a little spiteful that her words before fading back into the fray are, "I love you." "If I am evil, may She destroy that evil. If I am good, may I prove it through sacrifice."     "God! You're impossible!"     Petra's frustrated scoff is weirdly mundane for the circumstances, almost domestic. The cool breeze is a blessing through the flame and the sweat, but the sword in her hand doesn't allow her to fully indulge in the night air, spitting heat that engulfs the right half of her body. She matches his pacing on the opposite side of the chasm-- the comparisons to Gebura are tempting, but Petra could never bicker with Gebura mid-fight like she does now.     "Those are the *same thing*! In the end, you're just *using* her to justify your own choice! So that's as far as your piety goes, huh, sinner? Using the image of God to wallow in your own fucking pity? You--!"     Petra's shout is drowned out by the thunderous shockwave of another blow from Eckesachs, erupting the crumbling stone at the edge by her feet like a geyser. Suffering through it, and then responding in kind with her dwindling catalogue of weapons: she draws her transteam gun, and with the small reserve of Silver in its bottle-magazine, fires a series of explosive energy blasts around Zephiel, to force him to hesitate, or listen, or collapse. Spent, she drops the plastic gun again, pulling from osomethingo else instead.     "That girl was alone for a thousand years, Zephiel! More, before that! And you know what your one role should've been for these past two?!"     To dissolve yourself into the narrative of another, to feel every aspect of the present moment acutely so as to outline the shape of where you should not have been, where else everything should have been if not for the way the past went, is why the Spring Bloom's power is so accessible to Petra when across from Zephiel. The concave rubble separating her from Zephiel pulls itself back up under her feet, only wished to reassemble to cracked stone subfloor stepping stones, still a destroyed castle but not a war-torn one. In its place, Petra retrocausatively takes the vertical strike of the Binding Blade, stalled mid-crossing with a shudder that clamps her jaw achingly shut.     She wipes the pink-tinged saliva away from her lips, and wrenches her mouth back open. "Is returning to a blasted, empty world really what Idunn wants, or is it the only answer you'd-- you! As the first person to look her in the eyes in a thousand years!-- would accept?! Come on! Bring her over and ask her! I'm not being fucking rhetorical!"     "Because a God who's only worshipped by one person still *needs* that one person! This whole time, you could've been there for her too! After all this, I didn't think to talk to you and find out that you're *lazy*. You got so caught up in all of your own little personal fixations, hating the crown, hating the court, hating your generals, hating your soldiers, hating the people who listened to you and the people who fought against you, hating your fucking self, that it didn't even *occur* to you to try to be better off alive to her than dead! Typical fucking human!"
Petra Soroka	Petra's detour, heavy-breathing, takes her to Roy first before Zephiel. "You know," She reaches down to give him a hand up, and the brush of Sakura's power against his fingers heals his hand and wounds hers in equal measure. She hisses and recoils, using her other hand to take his instead.     "... I think you've thought about what 'victory' looks like a hundred times more than he has. So if he's able to do it, you can too. I know you can."     Facing Zephiel, Petra's grip on Fourth Match Flame is ginger, then she tightens it, shivering from the flood of real and psychosomatic pain. Eckesachs alone in a melee is a terror, meeting arcs of lightning with similar sword-swings of flame, the clash between the two a haze of fire and force. What was once the stairway up to the throne is now a hill of rubble and gore, a stepping stool for Petra to come down at Zephiel from above instead of below.     In the midst of it all, her focus doesn't change from Zephiel; the man, rather than the enemy. She can't even say that she's hoping to convince him to surrender, that she entertains any real idea that he could survive the day in any timeline where she does too. But still, but still.     "You could've left this place decades ago! You could've left instead of becoming king. You could've left with Idunn! Imagine, for a second, how *anything* could've been another way than this one! *You* didn't have to turn out this way, as king! You *still* don't! And if you could be different, could be better, could deserve anything besides this pathetic, self-indulgent martyrdom, then you're *obligated* to!"     A series of badly timed mistakes at once, a statistical inevitability with how poorly weighted Petra's dice have become. Her foot slips on the gravel, her ankle rolls, her injured hands spasm, Eckesachs sweeps parallel with the ground and rips Fourth Match Flame out of her grip, sparking the sword's blaze even hotter for a split second, then extinguishing it when it clatters to the ground.     Stumbling and disarmed, Petra flickers to catch her fall. Her reappearance is wrapped around his arm and shoulder, grappling with the full weight of her body to force him down on his already injured knees, to wrestle Eckesachs out of his grip, thrashing and kicking.
Marigold	Roy, at Flamel's behest, starts to pick himself up carefully- two knees and one hand, dripping a few dazed tears onto the floor. He's surprised, but grateful, when someone helps him: "A-ah... thank you, Petra... hhh."      The other hand he keeps cradled close to his chest. The less he moves it, the better. 'It hurts' would be an immature thing to say, during a life-and-death struggle in the smoldering ruins of a devastated castle, so he doesn't.      "Already...?" He doesn't understand Flamel, for a long moment. Then he nods shakily, at least willing to try.      There is no person in Elibe he understands less than ansi221, Zephiel). It'd be easier if there were righteous fury in Roy's heart; when he shuts his eyes and tries to summon up the vision of victory Petra says he has, he finds little but an embarrassingly childish (he thinks) wish for everyone to just talk it out and come together.      In the vision of victory that lies nearest to Roy's heart, his mother Ninian is still alive and Douglas never died and Hector and Echidna aren't doomed by the axe's curse. This war never happened and Iðunn just mends her ways and yet he still met Dieck and Shanna and all of you somehow.      If he fails to use the Blade it's because to cut down an enemy can only take him further from that beautiful dream.      "... No. I don't think I've thought about it much at all," he lies to Petra with a meager smile. Or maybe he doesn't know it's a lie.      Odette coming to his side behind the piece of rubble he's sheltering at startles him softly, too; he scrunches his face and says "isn't anyone more hurt than me...?" as halfhearted protest, but doesn't stop her, and shakily smiles a more-relieved-than-he'd-like "Hah. Th-thank you, Odette..."      - - - -      Zephiel's face tightens at Roland's words, giving the fallen man a glance back over his shoulder. These, more than anything, he has no kneejerk answer for. Maybe most people know better than to try to find guilt in the heart of the King of Bern. Maybe no-one's cared to learn that much about him and the people he's let down.      "... So, the greatest among worms is still a selfish worm. Do you think you've told me a word I don't know? What new shame do you fancy you'll inflict, cur?"      "The oldest injustice there is--birth. Does that frighten you? To think that it could have been you?"      "No. You bore me," Zephiel says to Ace, with a sharp scoff as Na-Go forces space and Ace tosses back the Blade. He retaliates as he does- jarring blows of Eckesachs against the hammer to rattle her grip, wide swings to ward him back and cascades of lightning to punish the distance.      "Men like us are first among the living! Convenient for us that the vanquished are silenced. How many among the dead would curse your name, old beast? So it's been, and will always be, until someone shatters this bloody wheel of birth at last."      "If I had forever, I would give a life eternal to that purpose just the same."
Marigold	He's wounded, but you all not much less than him. He's disarmed of the Blade, but he's proven a challenge already with Eckesachs alone. This still doesn't feel like a triumphant push. 5R      He turns on anticipation and catches half the bullets Nobunaga aims at his back in a dismissive swirl of his broad blade, rebuffing her with a strike of lightning from above; Madeleine seizes Eckesachs with Drogrung a moment later and he grabs the haft with his spare hand before ripping the cracked blade free, hacking at Drogrung in turn, and aiming the next slash at her guts; Petra casts him off-balance to one knee, and while she grabs at Eckesachs he grabs at her throat to pry her off.      "Come on! Bring her over and ask her! I'm not being fucking rhetorical!" "'I care not what day you die, save that you are useful,'" he recites, and it's not hard to guess those are Iðunn's words graven on his heart. "'It has always been my duty and purpose to cleanse the world.'" "'Hatred is beyond me. The filth are simply filth.'"      "If God is too noble to hate you," he rasps out, gradually forcing Petra away from Eckesachs, "my duty is to hate mankind in Her stead!"      Roy, with Riku and Petra and Flamel and Odette's and even Love's encouragement behind him (though not her panicked rider, who yells "c-c'mon, girl, we did our job, get me out of here!!"), moves swifter with Blade in hand than his body would normally permit.      He strikes at Zephiel's wrist to make him drop Petra if she hasn't already wriggled or flickered away; then bats #-1 INVALID ANSI DEFINITION: #eeeeeee Eckesachs to one side; the flames wreathing it force Zephiel's hand away this time when he tries to seize it again.      In the gap afforded by the collective attack, Roy scores away part of Zephiel's breastplate with the brilliant heat to bare his chest, and then- gasping for breath and unsteady himself- fades back half a step, to hold him at a blade-to-heart brief impasse. "... I believe," he coughs out as his best attempt to reach the King's soul, "Hartmut spared her for a reason." "Why that wretched man couldn't kill Iðunn is no matter or mystery to me." "The world needs mending. No-one knows that better than you. Bramimond... told me... they still hope this could be for the best, somehow. For humans and dragons both." "Then the Heroes are irresolute fools." "Please--!"      Love's declaration about Roy makes him hesitate, for just an instant, staring at those blue eyes. But not longer.      Zephiel starts to lunge forward, raising Eckesachs again. The Blade is right at his chest. Lunging upon it would be a fatal wound, but Roy's brains will paint the castle floor long before Zephiel bleeds out, and likely several more besides.
Marigold	Apocalypse is nearly silent. It flashes with black energy, but the sound of its terrible casting is hard to distinguish from the low, hollow noise of the breeze blowing through the ruined castle already.      A black hole not much bigger than a fist passes through Zephiel's chest, just below his heart, and Roy's shocked blue eyes stare across the room at Lilian's pointed fingers through the dripping hole it leaves in man and armor both.      "Khhhh-- ahhhh-- hhhahaha," the King coughs up, slamming down onto one knee with Eckesachs propping him up. Roy backs away instinctively as he figures out how to speak with one lung.      ". . . Look," he says so quietly, head tilted back. "It's... beautiful." And it might take a moment to see that he doesn't just mean the flaming ruins of Castle Bern.      For the first time in Elibe, the Milky Way or something like it is lighting up the night sky, a great luminous brushstroke blooming from the southwest and stretching horizon to horizon. Where his eyes rest, the starlight has grown a dozen times brighter. "Already, she's... hah, mending..." "Zephiel. What have you done? What did you do?!" "When you see her... truly, see her... you'll know, hahh, the weight... of our wrongs to the dead."      Zephiel's body shifts, then slackens. He seems dead. Then he rises up with one last surge of strength, slams Eckesachs' tip into the floor, and bears his weight on its hilt like he means to shatter it. Its cracks glow dangerously, lighting up what used to be the room as lighting crackles faster and faster.      "The rest... is in your hands... IÐUUUUUNNNNNN!" he screams.      Roy has already grabbed Odette by the elbow and started sprinting away.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's eyes are stuck, up, as Zephiel dies. The milky way. It's visible. He goes pale; this, to him, is a mushroom cloud, a bright flash on the horizon. It occupies all his attention, as the sign of absolute loss.     But there's still one last thing to do. His motion is breakneck. The stone in his skull seems to spill endless waves of light out of the wound Zephiel tore in his head. Roy is running away. Flamel, though, runs straight towards him. His hands clasp around Eckesachs too. His eyes lock with Zephiel.     "No." He whispers. "Not like this."     A dense shield forms, a sphere of light around the pair. Something so dense that it stands a chance, however small, of stopping any death besides bleeding out. But Zephiel is bleeding out. So what's he doing? It's impossible to hear what words he says, with that intense, focused face, with those quick movements.     "Please. Listen. This is secret. All of this is secret." He says. "It's past the end. It's done. Everything but the crying." A heavy, shuddering breath. "Scene ends before you answer. I promise." The hands are shaking. "Tell me what you'd change. To die as the type of person you want to be more than you are. What you'd do different. What your wish is. Just inside your brain, just while you go. Please don't--"     "Not for the dragons. Or the world. Or the worms and the pigs. Just for your mind." He won't let go and he won't leave. "So," A heavy cough. "Let me. Please. Any wish. Anything. Someone alive impossibly. Someone completely different. A sky full of stars on the day you were born. Any wish." Palliative care. He stays until the blast and after, probably having to dig himself even more wounded out of the rubble.     What happened? What did Zephiel say? Was there a wish at all? Flamel wouldn't abide anyone else knowing. Not even you.
Lilian Rook	'Men like us are first among the living! Convenient for us that the vanquished are silenced.'     §I know.§     'How many among the dead would curse your name, old beast?'     §I would like to think there are none.§     'I care not what day you die,'     §I do.§     'If God is too noble to hate you, my duty is to hate mankind in Her stead!'     §She wouldn't want you to. I wouldn't.§     'Then the Heroes are irresolute fools.'     §You're the one lacking resolve. If you had just a little more, you would be the hero; you would have broken this castle and snapped the crown beneath your heel long ago, then hurried to her side and overturned all this. You would never have tolerated the rules nor the role nor the fate you were burdened with. Grimly bearing your doom takes resignation, not resolve.§     §If it were me instead of you, I'd have started the day I killed that man.§     Lilian will never tell him a single one of those things. No more than she has already tried to convey. She knows it as well as him. She thinks they had known when he had killed his own guards and she had trampled on their corpses. Both of them, on some level, had expected the Binding Blade to be his judge, with Roy at its hilt as the vessel of the will of the world.     But Roy hesitated, judgement never appeared, and neither of them had spoken a word to each other since. The last thing that she and Zephiel still shared was that, in the absence of any greater arbiter, they could only escalate until they died.     Then Lilian doesn't think much at all. The entire world falls away in the service of contemplating death, and then that falls away too, leaving only 'life that wasn't lived'. In her dissociative silence, hand and finger raised just like she had seen that day, Lilian's eyes unfocus just before the paper burns in her grasp. Hammer to primer to powder.     She only has room to feel the horror of the moment after.     Apocalypse could have been anything at all, and the only reason the black hole doesn't reduce her to delirious, miserable laughter is the fear that it was something within her that had made it so. It could have done anything, been anything, any form of unthinkable weapon against dragonkind, and what sprung from the rawest place in her heart was a silent shot through the heart. Any remaining notions of the absurdity of casting it are bleached from her mind. The only thing she can feel is that it was preordained.     Zephiel is going to die. He is already dead and he knows it, and only delays to take Ekesachs with him. She wishes he would struggle to break it forever. Once he does, the first and only human being Lilian has irrefutably slain will be the one she had most fervently wanted to live. By killing him, the world's designated vessel of collectively deferred sin, she has become the instrument of society's will. Smoothly, efficiently, and in that instant, without malice, conscience, or thought.     How fitting that in casting Bramimond's spell, she has thrown away a piece of her identity that she will never get back.
Lilian Rook	'Khhhh-- ahhhh-- hhhahaha,'     Lilian's breathing stops completely, then comes in bursts so fast and shallow that her vision blurs. She tries and fails to say something so many times that she loses track of when she stops and her teeth are only chattering out of agonizing stress. "I didn't--" escapes her lips alongside a hoarse-rattling breath, and dies the moment after.     Didn't what? Even if she hadn't willed him to die, in that moment, she didn't care if he did. How much could the absence of intent possibly matter when she had unflinchingly reached for the deadliest tool she could find? What did she expect would happen? That he would spitefully refuse to die? And then what?     She hadn't done a single thing that she didn't mean. She had been given her final moment to back down, recognized it for what it was, and threw it away, just so that she wouldn't be the one who flinched first. She had rejected him as her mirror, but failed to reject his ideology; she didn't want to. She only wished that he had come to worship power sooner, and been the greater beast than Bern.     'Beast'. He had used that word over and over again. It lodges in her mind like a splinter. A memory of long time ago, when §she§ had rejected the shadow self-named 'Perfect Beast', consumes every other thought; that if it was no longer a part of §her§, then where could it go but over to her?     What was the point of all this? Try as she might, she can't recall ever thinking that Zephiel should die and everyone worse than him should live.     "I'm--"     But she isn't sorry. Saying the words would make her ill. She had looked him in the eye and and declared in all but words 'I'm crazier than you are', and when he dared her with his actions to prove it, she had done so without a moment of hesitation or higher thought; like an animal.     It's just all so . . . "--Unfair."     Lilian staggers back. She loses her balance in the rubble. She forgets herself, and catches her fall with her broken arm. That she cries out from that, after what she's already done, disgusts her. Against the ground, her vision is forcibly tilted towards the milky way, and instead of being overawed by the sight, she is seized with the irrational fear that somehow Iðunn might die for this too.     Roy is running. Lilian can't stay either. She can only walk, but turning her back and limping away where no one can see feels fittingly degrading. All she can bring herself say, looking back in the last moment she can spare is, "I wish we'd both made the right choice instead."