Like a Brother [fic]
Title: Like a Brother
Game: Pre-Game Blazing Sword (FE7)
Characters: Limstella, Nergal, Kishuna, Renault
Genre: Angst, Introspection
Prompt: FE7, Limstella -- A rare emotion
Warnings: Emotional abuse, casual approach to murder
Summary: Morphs do not have anything that Lord Nergal does not give them. When Limstella witnesses one going beyond what he was given, the sight triggers something new and horrific within the eldest morph.
This new one is an experiment. An intellectual exercise of the lord. An academic question: how well can man create another man (Later Limstella will contemplate Jaffar's existence, and determine that human beings are equipped to create one another very well). ((Even later Limstella will see why resorting to books and formula holds such a sway over those who wish to make others in their own image)).
This new one looks old before his time. Lord Nergal has always made the morphs fully adult so no one will question their lack of age as they go about the world. There is a delicate point in human lives where no change seemed to be occurring. Go too old or too young, and someone will ask why time has not left its mark. This morph, however is a wizened bag of skin and bones, the gold of its eyes gleaming out of desperate hollows shaded by an over large nose.
Limstella, changeless, the first creation, contemplates the frail body as it levers itself off the table under the watching eyes of the elder morph and the lord. Lord Nergal watches the first tottering steps of the latest creation with a hawk-like intensity. Limstella's gaze is as impersonal as a table's contemplation of a newly introduced chair.
The first act of the new creation is to gaze desperately at the small audience its first steps have garnered, and then to clutch at its sexual characteristics to hide them. Lord Nergal smiles at that. “You see, Limstella? This newest one, not a few breaths after awakening, feels shame! I have given him no desire, or intelligence beyond a map of what these feelings are, that they exist, but the process! It is possible to take the memory of quintessence, and graft it onto the body of the creation. Clothe him. I must work.”
Limstella readjusts its thoughts until it is a table contemplating a masculine chair. “Yes sir.”
“Ah, at last. This creation will get to the heart of the matter of the source of Quintessence. The soul. With such free will as you have, you might be the first step towards creating a constant source. And you, Kishuna, shall be the first morph with the ability to feel human emotion,” Nergal gazes proudly at the experiment. Under the intensity of the gaze, Limstella can see Kishuna tremble, the bones and flesh trying to retreat slightly. Is that what it is to experience fear like a human?
A yearning mouth opens, confused and sorrowful. But no sound escapes, only a hiss of air.
“Can he speak?”
Lord nergal waves the question away. “Newborns cannot talk, and he is the first. There were bound to be flaws in the creation.”
(Later standing over a dying raging little sister, Limstella will reflect that despite the uses of spontaneous emotion coupled with the programmed emotions of any true morph in covert agents, Lord Nergal never really worked out the flaws. He merely replaced physical defects with less tangible ones. Certainly, Sonia would have been more tolerable without a tongue).
It goes to obey the order to get Kishuna clothed. Lord Nergal turns to his research. Kishuna remains by the table, hissing piteously.
Newborn is a bad word for Kishuna. He knows many things that humans take years to absorb. He can dress himself if given clothes. He can follow instructions if given orders. He can remember words said about him. Limstella stitches up the first gash from forehead to jaw bone, skipping the deep set eye only by luck of physiology. Kishuna bleeds black like the rest of them. He does not hiss at all, but his eyes fill with tears as he acknowledges the pain of the needle lacing through his paper thin skin, like the furious words that he is supposed to be generating quintessence on his own by now, useless slug. The sadness hangs over him like a thick layer of windless heat.
Limstella does not desire to feel the world raw upon its heart. If Kishuna is equipped with the sentiments of a human, then humans must live lives of constant Hell. Does suffering make a physical being so valuable? Limstella is content that Lord Nergal did not see fit to give it a desire for a state of becoming human. (Later, as other experiments are discarded on the way to creating Ephidel, Limstella remembers this again and again. The longing jealousy of failed morphs seems a difficult existence in the fact of Limstella's constant satisfaction).
Lord Nergal does not notice the wreckage of Kishuna, absorbed in his research, and too pleased with the implications of emotion's connection with soul. Free spontaneity can be reduced to a fractal formula and pulled from the void, he is certain now. He will not have to use the echoes of someone else's dying memories to create the next Kishuna. The formula absorbs time once dedicated to finding proper sources of quintessence, and he does not notice the sluggish air rising out of his creation's unvoiced human feelings.
The absorption lasts several years. It culminates in a trip to Ilia, where Lord Nergal maps sites of power, Limstella following at a distance wondering why the lord chose to make this journey alone-Limstella cannot count as company. Limstella is of no more personhood than a table or a knife. Limstella desires nothing more, after all, it is programed to be satisfied with its master's will. Whatever Lord Nergal found, it left him unsatisfied, staring at a mountain.
When he returns to his workshop, he summons Kishuna, to test the morph's quintessence. There is none, and he breaks into cold fury. Cries of “scum!” “failure!” “disgusting soulless vermin!” chase Kishuna from the altar room. Limstella finds the morph with more scratches on its face and many down its wrinkled arms hiding behind a staircase. Nergal banishes all thought of his experiment from his mind, and gets back to the work of calculating souls. He comes to the conclusion that he needs a human to examine and dissect.
The seventh gash-one of the ones so deep that it will leave a scar across Kishuna's exhausted face-is tended to by the grim man looking for relief from over whelming loss. Limstella notes that the stitching is much better than its efforts. Perhaps there are reasons for keeping the angry human alive besides Lord Nergal's unexpected whim. Perhaps the unexplained trip to Ilia has something to do with it. Maybe the mercenary knows the same sense of human confusion.
The newest stitches make a black line across the prominent chin, and from a distance Kishuna looks as though he is smiling. Still the breathless pain continues to flourish. Limstella wonders if the aura actually comes from Kishuna's body, or if it just leaks from the soundless mouth the way dreams seem to slip out of his head when he sleeps. Limstella has stopped leaving itself open to that invasion. Lord Nergal has not slept for centuries. He gets all the energy he needs from the void.
When Limstella finds Lord Nergal slumped over his desk, the wrinkles of time visible, and faint snores audible, it knows something is wrong. Limstella feels lead weights on its eyelids and realizes in a minor bit of horror that the stuffy workroom is energyless as well as airless. The living pulse of the earth is gone. All the sources of life have fled. It can almost see a red film smothering all trace of magic, extinguishing the sparks of spirits and sentient beings.
As it rouses Lord Nergal, the floor creaks, and Kishuna enters, hissing nervously. The red leaks from his red robe, gathering into a thick gel of physical presence that moves with him. Several of the older experiments left to physical labor when Lord Nergal had no more use for them trail after him. Limstella thinks it now knows why Kishuna has never shown any sign of quintessence despite feeling the world so keenly.
Lord Nergal starts up. “A seal? You dare take magic from me?!”
Kishuna coils back, silenced. In the dead tomb of earth faint images flicker through the air. Desire flows along the foul presence that surrounds the morph. Limstella has the laughable impression that Kishuna hopes that it still might have a use with this growing power.
“Limstella. Kill it.”
Limstella looks at Lord Nergal. “How, my lord? You made Kishuna to be more durable than his outer shell would suggest. And I cannot use magic.”
The argument is valid. Lord Nergal turns to the drudging morphs. “You curs, then, you are strong, you get rid of it. Dismantle it piece by piece, if you have to.”
The morphs do not move. Nergal shouts for the mercenary. Something in Kishuna breaks. The eyes nearly hidden by their dark hollows glisten for an instant, and then Kishuna does what he has always done. He turns, breaking into a run.
Limstella watches him go and is knows it is the Lord's relief it feels knowing the seal on magic will soon lift with Kishuna gone.
“Go after it,” Nergal hisses to Limstella. “If that useless human does not encounter and kill it, make sure that it never returns. I cannot have my work interrupted.”
Orders taken with the obedience Limstella has always possessed (and always will posses. Obedience is the certainty of its life) the elder dashes after the younger. Even in robes and frail bones, Kishuna possesses a speed that would leave a fit human baffled. But not a strength. In the narrow corridor of the half collapsed ruin, Kishuna has run into the bulk of the mercenary, who is all cold eyes and scars from recent rituals straining over muscle. The polishing cloth for the sword usually strapped to his back is in his right hand. The hilt of the sword is in his left. There is something oddly human in that, though Limstella does not know what it is.
“What's the sad guy done this time?” The mercenary asks, looking over Kishuna's cowed and quivering shoulder. “Or are you finally trying to run him down before he near on kills himself, rather than after?”
The disinterest rolls off him in the same wave that Kishuna's terror exudes from the morph's skin. Limstella feels the depth and passion of humanity buffeting it. “Lord Nergal want you to kill him. We cannot right now.”
The mercenary's eyes narrow. He glances once again at Kishuna, looking at the rotten ghostly thing as though he had never seen it before. Limstella, in turn, watches his hand on the sword hilt, knowing that is where the human will show his determination first. It does not even twitch as the mercenary puts his eyes on Limstella one more time. “What's the price?”
“What?”
“For his life. I know what mine is worth. Your master is giving me back a living breathing human, full of the life and soul he should have had, in exchange for my life and body. That's the price I'm paying. Killing scared old men wasn't included in that. What's the price for his life?” Something vicious glimmers in the human eyes. “C'mon now, did you all forget I'm a mercenary? You throw my occupation around like an epithet often enough.”
Kishuna hisses, drawing the cold attention. Sighs and noiseless gapings resolving into something like pleading, something like ranting. Fingers scrabble foolishly for the hem of the mercenary's tunic, just like any human showing submission in human courts fifty years ago. Now, as Limstella has carefully observed, the appropriate way to ask for a hearing involves bowing. But this behavior is an echo of whatever memory had made Kishuna in the first place, something instinctive, or as close to instinct as a morph can achieve.
Kishuna is spontaneous, and will never rely on the inscribed codes that made him.
Some of the morphs, those who go out into the world to act as Lord Nergal's eyes and ears, speak of physical disgust and revulsion for humans, in an all too human way. Limstella has ignored these comments as unimportant. But watching Kishuna mutter, keeping his eyes locked with the mercenary, whose brows are rising and whose expression is shifting to shock, something fizzes overwhelmingly inside Limstella. The feeling rushes through its stomach suddenly a roaring beast like hunger, and a tightness of the lungs. A trembling overtakes it, as the mercenary's sword drops to ancient stones. This is nothing like the distant relief on knowing that the seal would leave. This is a raw irrational pulse and hum of the world waking under Limstella's skin and crackling like a perfectly cast lightning bolt.
“Get out!” Limstella yells, shocked beyond itself, even as the mercenary steps back.
Kishuna doesn't notice. Kishuna is already fleeing into the night air. Limstella breathes out, and sags against the nearest wall. It was Angry.
Later, other rejected discards join Kishuna (Limstella is sure the wretch was following the movements of Lord Nergal carefully). Sometimes Limstella hears of magicians speculating on magic seals as it travels for Lord Nergal. It ignores the muttered rumors of Kishuna's theorized existence, a seal that could wipe out magic for a whole day's march. Obviously the legend has grown a bit in the retelling. Kishuna cannot be that powerful.
Later still, the mercenary leaves, nearly soulless and empty handed (despite having served his purpose, Limstella cannot understand why Lord Nergal did not have him killed). For a while Lord Nergal wants him watched, and silenced if he speaks. The mercenary does not, he settles for a while in one location, usually as a mercenary, sometimes as a weapons smith, or an armorer. Skills thought lost by human memory get reintroduced in some areas by accident. But always, his vicious emptiness shows through, and he moves on, letting his sins pile up behind him.
Limstella does not know if they are real sins, or this is just how the people questioned about the missing armsmaster choose to relate what they have observed. It is not quite sure what a sin is, aside from those that have been clearly defined. Sins are human things. They are Kishuna's problem, not Limstella's. Eventually, years later than Limstella would have expected, Lord Nergal stops caring about the mercenary. A century on, and Limstella suspects that the mercenary has been forgotten (later, when Sonia demands that the filthy morph teach her black magic so that she might be closer to the Lord, Limstella does not mention the fact that much of the Lord has been consumed, memory by memory by the void from which he draws his power. Perhaps it is secretly hoping that Sonia will go the same way, but since that frisson of anger, Limstella has decided not to care).