Afterthought

Riovanes castle

Rapha would not leave her brother’s side, even when the sun came up. In his final moments, he had finally understood what she had tried to tell him, why she defected to our side. He understood, and it cost him his life.

It was a heartrending sight to be sure. None of us had the heart to tell her to leave, and Ramza stood by her, guarding her. For what?

Then it happened. None of us expected it.

Rapha held on to the stone Marach had given her. It resonated with her tears, and Ramza feared the worst. We had all witnessed what auracite had done to cardinal Delacroix, and Wiegraf.

She could not allow it to take her in, Ramza warned, she should not listen to it. We wouldn’t have been ready to fight another Lucavi. How would we handle that? We only made it out of Belias’s four muscled arms by a thread…

The auracite rose and flashed. We expected in the flood of light for a Lucavi to appear. But instead, when the light dimmed down, it wasn’t a monster that had appeared, but instead a wonder. Marach was breathing again!

None of us knew what to say. This wasn’t what we had grown accustomed to from this entire ordeal.

We made our way into the castle and counted the dead — too many of them. But no Alma, and even fewer answers. A Lucavi mauled all those castle guards, but among the dead was Isilud. We had fought against him in the Orbonne monastery, but here he seemed to have fought on our side, mauled indiscriminately by a Lucavi. And another zodiac stone lay by his side.

After what we witnessed on the rooftops, one question remained. Was auracite truly inherently wicked? It seemed to have spoken to Delacroix, to Wiegraf, the high confessor of the church of Glabados wanted to use them for purposes unbefitting a man of faith, the scriptures of Germonique painted a dark picture of the first zodiac braves… Had we been wrong in assuming the stones were a source of evil?

Perhaps it was not the auracite that was inherently evil. Marach now lived, and both he and Rapha joined our cause thanks to the auracite. Perhaps… Perhaps the auracite just amplified what was already within the people it spoke to.

I am Bathsua, humbled, and these are my memoirs.