Tsubasa Exceed, a Fantasy fanfic

TSUBASA EXCEED

Second Movement: Nive's Birthday

“Where do the minutes fly to?”

The little girl beside the boy laughed derisively when she heard him. “Is dun go anywhere, s’upid.”

The boy just sighed and looked over the girl sitting next to him, her legs splayed on the fresh green grass and trying to make a garland of dead leaves with broken branches. The girl was failing, but it didn’t deter her from picking up the pieces and restarting. It was a sunny day; the golden light of the morning sun only broken by the feathery clouds, but otherwise the cerulean sky beckoned for great deeds. The girl’s face was red from the morning heat, her beautiful hair looking like the nest of a chicken.

And she completely forgot that it was his birthday.

“Stop that, it’s dirty,” he admonished the girl. He lied on his back staring up at the tree leaves that covered this hill, watching the clouds flit by through the branches. He saw the chapel roof below, and the half-mile winding path that led downhill to it.

She glared at him. “Whas dirzee?”

The boy of ten years sighed again. He was a little older than his playmate, yet she possessed the easy superiority and arrogance common to high-bred people even if she couldn’t even pronounce ‘t’ properly. “Nothing.”

The girl pouted. “Are you going zu play?”

“No, I’m tired,” he exhaled, turning over to his side. “I don’t feel good today.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, Princess Amitiel.”

He felt the half-formed garland of dead leaves land on the nape of his neck with a force formidable enough for a ten year old. He winced just before he felt her rise and cast her shadow on him, her hands on her hips.

“Why? Aren’t you—”

“S’op ee’!” she commanded.

He stared up at her, then finally held up his hands as if for defeat. “Okay.”

“Le’s play,” the girl called Amitiel said after a while, her voice soft and little. “I wan play.”

“I have to go already,” Nive said, making up an excuse. “Da’ will have me fetch firewood, or Ma’ will get chills. She’s pregnant, you know.”

“Whas pregnan?’”

He sighed again; this boy had a habit of sighing, as if he was a wizened hermit mentoring a flock of stupid chicks. Never mind that his father was not around and his mother was not really pregnant, and that it was too early to cut up firewood. “She has a baby inside her.” That was the only explanation he could offer; he was still puzzled as to how a baby suddenly grows inside a woman’s belly. He had once asked his father why boys couldn’t make children, to which his parents just looked at each other and laughed, and then, “You will understand, in time.”

That word again. “Time”. Where does it go to?

And in his bones he had the foreboding that he had no time left to understand; he finally realized it now, after the excitement earlier had died out and now he lay quiet and reflective. He felt that the world was fast approaching its doom, a boat teetering on the edge of a waterfall. There was something else… something hidden behind this travesty of false joy, as if everyone was masking an inner fear—like him.

Amitiel grasped him and pulled him towards her, shattering his reverie. “Really?!” Her face was alight with fire, no doubt thinking that the mere mention of a childbearing woman would make her a mother herself.

“Well… er, yes, I think so…” he stammered.

“Can I see your mommy?”

The boy laughed, a hollow, mirthless sound in the face of an unseen danger. “Of course you can’t, dummy. You’re a princess and you can’t walk outside these walls.” He gestured magnificently to the turquoise-and-marble walls surrounding the garden, which was at the back of the chapel, which was, in turn, part of the Grand Keep of the City of Felimgrad. Amitiel was its princess.

Amitiel whined. “I wan mee’ your mommy!”

Nive looked around alarmingly and put an urgent finger to his lips. “Ssshh! I’m not supposed to be here, remember?” A wind overwhelmed the last of his words, but Amitiel understood it anyway. This was their secret place, where they met for a few times before, mostly due to Ami’s insistence. Nive thought it was her birthday gift to him, but he was a little disappointed when she didn’t even know. Or asked.

Her face brightened. “Okay. Bu’ I wan mee’ your mommy.”

Nive palmed his forehead. “You can’t!”

She pouted.

“Look, if you insist, try to talk to your father,” he suggested, still looking around. His nose twitched. A cold wind was blowing from the east, and he rubbed his arms unconsciously. “But I doubt he’ll allow you.” He looked around. Leaves were blowing.

“Papa will give me anyzing,” she responded haughtily. “Even your baby.”

He put on a wry face. Princesses really could not understand the speech of normal boys. “I don’t know. The king will—wait, do you smell that?”

A thunderclap sounded in the far distance.

She looked around. “No ‘smell’, you s’upid, hear,” she corrected, thinking that it was the thunder he was referring to.

“No, I know… something like… burned meat…”

A strong gust of wind suddenly went past them, a forerunner of terrible, evil things, black and cold like death itself. Trees croaked at its passing, and overripe fruits, crawling with maggots, fell lifelessly from their branches. The grass and leaves rustled, the muted, wailing voices of the damned, and the two children wondered against the coming darkness.

“What was that…?” Nive asked, half to himself. Far overhead, the rotten leaves and branches were whirling, pushed to and fro by a half-felt wind. Branches rapped at the chapel walls below, audible even at this distance, and the sturdy oak that shaded them was groaning—not against the gale, but at the sharp taste of oily blackness that it carried. And he began to tremble. It’s happening, he thought, and felt a sharp, sudden heave at his guts. What was happening, he didn’t know.

Amitiel was holding up her midnight-colored hair, tousled from the mighty drafts. A look of innocent curiosity was on her eyes, and Nive foresaw with sudden realization that she did not comprehend the impending danger. With horror, he saw her face began to take on that eager, comprehending expression.

“No, Ami—”

Her childish screams of delight drowned every last bit of his protests; that, and the keening wind that seemed to be getting stronger every minute. He sat in mute fear, noticing that a cloud had begun to blot out the sun, and the thunder was becoming more frequent, closer, deeper; the approaching battle drums of a celestial army.

But what he saw next was not. He looked to the north, and saw only darkness, swallowing the entire world, cloaked in the bulbous robe of thunderclouds descended to earth. They billowed forward, ever nearer to the city, and at its feet swarmed more blackness, which at this distance looked like armored ants.

He realized that it was an army—a fighting force of hundreds, thousands of men with swords. He had a gnawing certainty of this… why, he didn’t know. It’s as if he was reliving a nightmare; the sensation of déjà vu was overwhelming, choking, dizzying.

Everything was dim, bathed in that half-light; there were only shades of purple and blue, and even that was fading. The clouds above were but a black mass, pierced only by the occasional lightning tines that forked through that belly of a giant monster.

He knew he was looking at the fall of Felimgrad, for reasons he couldn’t fathom. It was an inner sense, a compass of ruin that he so often wore that made children of his age ostracize him. But it was common sense, he asserted; why would an army march to Felimgrad anyway, but for that?

“Ami! Wait—” He cursed as he scrambled to his feet and followed her. He ran down the flagstoned path that wound through the small hill, falling twice and skinning his knees, but even then she was just at the edge of his darkening vision. Her trilling voice seemed far away, but he could hear it, and was relieved that she was still within earshot.

“Nice of you to ruin my birthday, God,” he said, but hated himself immediately.

A long, dreadful sound screeched through the sky, the din terrifying, like the howling of a hellhound. It was a horn, the deep, throaty rumble overpowering the numerous thunder; its steady tone made the earth tremble and everyone cower, as Nive did himself. No voice of a god could be so powerful; the banshee cry lasted for an eternity before it died. But the princess, unfazed, continued on, humming and laughing. Her raven hair disappeared in a final flourish behind the wall that divided the chapel below to the rest of the garden.

The boy found himself on his back, gasping and holding his hands over his ears. He knew that sound from somewhere, from a forgotten memory or a tomorrow that hadn’t come yet. Tears stung his eyes.

“Ami… wait up…”

When he stood, everything was as black as night. The ubiquitous bass of thunder and what seemed like growling horns sounded ever closer, as if they were just beyond these walls themselves.

He ran. He was screaming, out of fear and in pity to the land he had called home, which was even now, unbeknownst to him, was marshaling the last of its able men to fight an invasion a hundred years in the making. The chapel beckoned ever closer, the worn path leading to it studded with pebbles and lined with low-lying shrubs, but the beauty of the chapel with its six towers rising from its six corners, and the prismatic light from its stained glass windows that once enchanted him, were now gone. It now stood alone and gloomy amidst a sea of swirling darkness threatening to envelop the world, and the bell tower was hushed, dead and forbidding. A silent witness, a barn owl, was perched on top of it, watching him with horrid eyes.

He came upon a small backdoor and pushed with all his might, banging the wooden slats to the wall. He was gasping; his eyes flopped in their sockets wildly; his matted blond hair clinging to his face and sweat running in rivulets through his face. He had come at the western transept just near the center, but he saw that the interior of the chapel was dark and forbidding, and there was none in sight.

“Amitiel! Where are you!”

Only his echoes answered him. A murder of ravens was startled by his sudden intonation and took flight, cawing and fluttering from the beams crisscrossing the ceiling. Lightning that flashed nearby bathed the chapel in otherworldly, split-second brightness, highlighting its dark emptiness and sinister silence. It’s as if the darkness had swallowed everyone save him and the Princess.

Just then a small whimper sounded far up the aisle, as if it was underneath the grave. “Nive…” A fit of sobs. “Nive, help…”

He ran to where she was, and found that she was stuck underneath some pews. Her leg was jammed between the feet of one and the other behind it, and as lightning blitzed again he saw that the pews and candle stands were in chaotic disarray; the carpet flooring was torn, and edges of marble tiles stuck up slightly in some places. He surmised that the destruction happened just after Ami hid beneath the pews.

“What happened…?”

“I dun know, Nive, help me, puh-leaasseee…” She sobbed. “I… I hid becuz of zunder and… and… I dunnoooo…”

“Okay.” She yowled again. “Just shut up, I’ll get you out of there already!” He bent down and pulled her arms. She cried, but she won’t move. He grimaced and pulled again, and the only thing that he earned from his efforts was more of her crying.

“Dammit, you won’t budge!” Nive cursed again, then decided. “Wait here, I’ll call for help—”

“I wan’ my sis!”

“Shut up, just stay there you stupid girl!”

Lightning flashed again, and he ran. He smashed through the gate separating the nave from the doors and jumped through pews. Nive was trying to find a torch when a series of thunderclaps, but this time much closer, exploded in sequence. On the background, Amitiel still wailed, like a pig going to be butchered.

Afterwards there was a lull, an abrupt, deep moment of silence, so thick and choking that it felt like he was suddenly put inside a tomb. Contrasted to the din and noise earlier, he thought he could hear everything, even the respiration of his pores and the dripping of his sweat on the carpeted floor; even Ami became silent, her sobs nonexistent. Far away, he thought he could hear the shouts of men, the unmistakable repetitive clashing of steel, and a note of desperate hope on their voices.

“Ami…?”

She didn’t respond.

And it was then that he noticed that the repetitive boom had stopped. There was nothing.

And after that, he realized that those were, indeed, battle drums.

Nive stood up. And almost fell, when those drums once again took up their chant, this time fiercer and faster, almost feverish. He heard sharp, zipping sounds bolting through, gigantic lances thrown through dark, dense air, as if colossal arrows were being loosed at the city.

We are under attack, he thought dumbly, but his body worked faster than his mind ever could. He ran; His legs pumped for purchase, not slowing down, straight to the double oak door of the chapel’s portal, forgetting the torch and his eyes finding their way through the darkness—

The door exploded inwards in a spectacle of both light and fine wooden splinters.

Nive shrieked as he was catapulted backward, and he thumped far up the aisle, near the altar’s fence with its wide font of clear water. His back screamed at him, and tears freely ran down his eyes as he whispered the name of his parents for an impossible rescue; in the background, Ami’s cries were insane, frenzied.

He tried to get up from his position but found that his legs were still numb. He propped himself on his elbows and tried to crawl away, and that was when he first saw that he was bleeding from over half a dozen cuts, and even one considerably large piece of wood was stuck on the meat of his thigh.Nive almost puked at the sight of his own blood.

“Ami!” he cried out in agony. “Da’! Ma’! Cerine… Help me… help me, please…” Only Ami’s mad howling answered him.

A dark figure coalesced in the light beyond the bygone door, and Nive shielded his eyes.

“Princess Amitiel!”

Amitiel wailed even louder. The figure became the unmistakable figure of the Adjutant Commander of the Royal Panzers, the Golden Lady, Kera Evergrace. Her gigantic hammer that some said possessed Azoth was nestled on one shoulder. She ran forward, seemingly not seeing the injured Nive on the floor.

“She is there,” Nive pointed unnecessarily. The woman just went past him without a word, as if not realizing that it was she who wounded him.

“Keraaaa…” Ami wept. “Help me… I’m ssuck…”

“Princess,” Kera began as she knelt beside her. “I’m here, stop crying. We’re evacuating this city.” She looked at Nive. “You’re coming with me as well.”

She pulled Ami, the injured Nive crawling and spattering blood on the floor. “Is she okay?” he asked through a grimace when he saw that simply pulling Ami wouldn’t get her free. “I think you need to remove the pews and the stones first.”

Kera looked around; the church was almost at the point of ruin, and nodded. “Can you move?”

Nive grinned dryly. “I could, but my leg is bleeding.”

The half-Elf just shook her head, recognizing that he was a mere commoner. “We will tend to that later. You are a man. Help me with the Princess.” Her tone was gruff, a voice of command.

The boy grimaced and crawled closer, smearing his blood on the dust-laden marble flooring. There were regular tremors that coursed over the city, and this caused an outpour of dust and dirt from the chapel’s ancient roof. Amitiel was still crying, and Nive clasped her hand.

“When I say, pull with all your might,” Kera instructed him. Nive nodded.

And before he could do so it happened.

They had no forewarning of it. The wall behind the altar suddenly exploded inward into thousands of flying, frozen rubble and fine grit, all pulverized by the force that punched through that indestructible fence of stone that enclosed the chapel. The stained-glass windows shattered. And in the middle of it this whirlwind of stone and glass and steel, Nive glimpsed a man, bloodied and holding a sword that glittered like the sun, before Kera covered him and the princess both.

The spectacular display of destruction plowed right through the altar itself, destroying it in a great show of randomly-soaring objects, and the man inside such a force made a furrow in the floor, uprooting tiles and tearing carpets as he landed, bounced, and was still. It was as if some gigantic fist had smashed through the chapel’s north face, and a jagged hole of ruin was left where the force had gouged right through it. Nive beheld a wake of demolished religious accoutrements and a clear, destroyed rut in the floor littered with the shattered remnants of what was once the north wall.

Kera stood up, and dust and what seemed like ice particles were floating everywhere, so thick it seemed like fog. “Are you all right?”

Nive nodded, but knew she couldn’t see him. “I’m fine, I think.”

“What was that?” Kera asked mostly to herself. “Where’s Amitiel?”

“Here,” Nive said, and found Kera’s hand blindly. “She’s free now because of that fuss.”

Amitiel began to cry again.

But it was not over. The icy dust cleared, as if blown away by an invisible wind, it vanished outward so suddenly they felt it sear through their skin. And it bared a standing man in the center of the vicious crater he had made, with himself or because of another, garbed in a white coat with torn sleeves, bloodstained and dirt crusting the joints, the hem of his coat frayed and filthy. He panted shallowly, and blood trickled down his forehead.

“State your allegiance!” Kera demanded immediately, brandishing her giant hammer in front of her as she faced the man.

The man—they saw that he had his long blond hair tucked into a tail behind his head—looked up at the hole he made and clenched his jaw. “We have no time to squabble, Lady Evergrace,” the man simply said as his gaze went to her.

It was at that point that the one of the two surviving Royal Panzers recognized him, and her hammer-arm fell. “You… you are the prophet…” Her throat was as dry as sand as she uttered this, and her eyes could not believe what she saw, either. His clothing was torn, his regal blond hair matted from sweat and blood, but those piercing eyes were the same; those eyes that proclaimed that he had seen it all before it happened.

No—that he was here when it happened.

“I fight with a force greater and more formidable than you can imagine. You must escape. You must not be drawn into this!”

“If you are as powerful as you claim to be, save my city!” Kera cried. “Why didn’t you tell us this earlier? Why did you—”

“Your city has long fallen,” the prophet said in a quiet tone, and pointed to the east, down to where the chapel and the Grand Keep atop the man-made hill overlooked the entire city, through the jagged maws of the chapel walls. “Look, my lady, and see for youself.”

The sky was dark, the clouds swirling in the inestimable blackness, and over everything streaked black forms, in the distance looking like flies. But in their hearts they knew they were not… they were anything but insects. Kera and the two children looked, and saw only a mass of fleeing men and disorder in the advance of the entire host of Men and Elves gathered to destroy the last city of Harmonia. In the distance, the catapults keened as their boulders flew through the air that smelled of charred wood and soot, leveling what remained of their defenders and the once-glorious buildings that stood for decades. And the defenders that Kera left were nowhere to be seen, as the innumerable Alliance soldiers—the sands in a beach, the stars in the sky, the grass in a field—approached, blowing their horns, drawing their swords, raising their spears and banging their shields for a glory they were certain to achieve.

“This city is doomed. Go and save yourselves.” The prophet’s gaze turned to the boy, and Nive felt a chill run through him. “Especially these two children.”

Kera was shaking, her face ashen. “Where…?” It was an effort not to break down.

“Anywhere safe,” the prophet answered. “You three must live, for that is your destiny. You will live… but if you falter, then history will be unwritten.”

“I don’t understand…”

“Go now, Kera. I will try to save your lord as much as I can, but the prophecy never lies.”

Kera stood in silent indecision, her lip trembling. It was the boy who snapped her out of it, as he pulled the splinter from his leg, braving the pain it would cause. He bit his lip as he did so, and blood seeped out both from his leg and lip as he succeeded. He threw the wood away. “Miss Kera, let’s go. It’s just as he says. Our city is falling.”

“Not you, boy,” the prophet said. He turned to him and climbed out of the crater towards him. “Not you. Because you must witness this city’s destruction for yourself.”

And his hand reached for the boy, and then all hell broke loose.