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You walk. It isn’t that far to the nearest consort village, you vaguely remember the way. You could always just fly there, effortless as rockets, but that’s not how Quests are supposed to go, or at least your battered old world mythology books have taught you so.
Besides, there are hordes of imps and bigger creatures to tangle with along the way. Strifing feels good, warming up your muscles down to the bones. Early Drive sings in your hands, a lot lighter and more musical than your first scythe was, impossibly light metals rather than stiff heavy wood. You turn the haft hand over hand and get on tiptoe and jump for leverage. It’s like dancing. Siskier has your back, and leaves each final blow to you. That same weird video game sense gives you the feeling of a meter slowly reaching up to the sky, a little like an old waveform generator, or maybe an exponential graph-experience and money and grist flowing into some mechanic that’s part of you and yet not.
Emilia’s Land was covered in deep green forest, and another forest of stars hung in the sky like a planetarium ceiling, and Nessiah’s had been bright with its shallow water as a mirror for its blue skies and chains scattering dazzling light everywhere, but LODAF is dark. The earth under your feet is a color close to black, the rock formations are a sludgy obsidian color, and the stars are distant beyond a sky that’s thick and overcast with smoke. The fire in the ground provides more natural light than the heavens, and Siskier shines like a great nightlight.
The travel is near effortless, and the silence between you and your sprite is kind and easy. What isn’t easy is remembering running around with Nessiah and his sprite yesterday.
No matter how many times you assure yourself that you don’t want to ever have to repeat that clusterfuck again, mediating between two of the most passive-aggressive person you’ve ever had the honor to meet-there is a big empty space in your heart from Nessiah’s absence. You keep recalling his slow crooked smile, one corner of his mouth just a little higher than the other, and his eyelashes soft on his cheeks. Next to you, really and truly and in overwhelming detail that no number of webcam sessions could prepare you for. Warm and laughing in that aggravating quiet giggle, Ophelia in a royal purple one-piece dress, little white hands fanning out his skirts.
Siskier has been dead for two years, you should be happy for the chance to just walk next to her again, and what you are feeling has fuck all to do with that kind of conventional logic. You have got to find a way to knit this party together sometime soon, if only for the sake of everybody’s emotional stability.
Of course, with Yggdra an obligatory member-because what are you supposed to do, leave her out? When her sisters get an invite? You are not that big of a douchebag-stability might be the last thing that would occur, but this is another bridge that you plan to cross when you get to it.
If Siskier has two cents to share about your quiet or your pining or your churning thoughts, she just holds her peace. You feel guilty, and you feel safe. A part of your life that’s been taken away from you just got handed back, and the quiet between the two of you is just as easy as it always was.