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The clocks stop at nineteen bells on the hour when Emet-Selch dies. There is a single great, unaccountable heave as the world shudders to a halt. Amaurot in all its detail, in all its niceties, falls silent, and still, and for a moment shudders as a plucked string.
Amaurot holds its breath, as unmoving as the grave. And then, slowly, painfully, at last, breathes again.
It is gradual, this slow decay of silent and forgotten things, waves lapping against a far-distant shore, washing it away. Hytholdaeus knows when Emet-Selch dies, because eir understanding of the worlds shifts, narrows to a pinprick, and fades. The cosmos beyond the little diorama of Amaurot, built on a miniature scale, is wiped away. Frost clears the windowpane. The only thing left behind is the shade of the world from before, and Hythlodaeus both knows-and-does-not-know what it is e is supposed to remember—or supposed to forget.
They find Hythlodaeus after the Akademia Anyder crashes open and beasts both great and small, foul and fabulous, beautiful and terrible spill forth, memories that will soon enough be forgotten. Eir chord of greeting is kindly, a simple A1 when hailed. The Warrior of Light’s hands shake slightly, adrenaline and confusion both, and when they at last ask if this is their fault, they seem unable to even lift their hands to sign it, as if to put it into so many words is to admit guilt.
E hums a Cdim, for eir friend has changed but has never changed, gentles a Gmaj7 to 9b5, and e can see their face fall, shutter. Their hands settle, held limp before them, unmoving, self-censure in the tightness in their shoulders, and e so badly wishes to reassure them, Dmaj13 even when rolled and rolled, long and layered, only good for so much.
These things are inevitable. Amarout has lived them before. For had they not noticed Esus2, 4, 4b, Zodiark already there, a statue to be revered? Their brow furrows, and their hands are jerky as they lift their palm from their chest to their face—sharp with themselves for overlooking. Thinking too far ahead, danger afield, no time to focus on scenery, however beautiful.
These are the last days of Amaurot, after all. But Amaurot had last days longer than the span of mortal lives, and Emet-Selch never did think much like a mortal, for all his vain pretension to it. It is all the last days. It is all the end of the world, all at once, crashing in upon itself, an apocalypse condensed.
For Emet-Selch, it never stopped happening. It never dulled.
For Hythlodaeus, it never happened. It never will happen. And yet, it has happened, is happening right now, and to stand in the midst of an end of a world e does not remember, even as e knows it is happening—
Emet-Selch’s remembered Amaurot is a cycle, born of a thousand years condensed into a single pendulous heartbeat that hangs, suspended, above an abyss. And Hythlodaeus is the only one who knows the drop exists. Reliving the same day again and again, Hythlodaeus cannot help but notice how small the world seems when e knows they are all ghosts. E can see the structure behind the figures, the memories that tangled up into Emet-Selch as indelibly as the cut of a blade.
Warning bells toll in eir voice when e speaks, and e struggles to find peace as a figment of a fragment. A ghost of a corpse. A memory.
The Warrior of Light is not to blame. They simply took the blade Emet-Selch handed to them and drove it home. Hythlodaeus sees them on the streets nearly as often as eir own feet carry them through public squares, cutting down monsters taking advantage of little opposition in the empty ruins, pruning trees, as if they could correct the blood on their hands by washing it away through toil and sweat.
The clocks stop. The memories recede. The lights go out. Hythlodaeus thinks, and the Warrior of Light walks, and together neither one of them comes any closer to understanding how their world ended, or how this new one began. They chase the shape of a black cloak, the sanguine drip of a sneering voice, and neither one of them can catch it: Hythlodaeus is too early and the Warrior of Light too late.
They grieve, in their own ways, for a man they never really met, in an empty graveyard for things they never really knew.
Hythlodaeus wonders sometimes what parts of eir mind are eir memories and what parts are just Hades and his wishful thinking. E does not remember dying—could Hades not bring himself to consider it? E does remember past the end of the world—so what could be so painful Hades could not consider it?
E does not remember loving Hades. And yet, e does. There-and-not-there, a trick of the eye.
The Warrior of Light, too, does not seem to remember loving Hades. And yet, they do. They come and wander the streets and they look almost-not-quite-enough like eir friend that sometimes, a trick of the light is all it would take to remind em all over again.
Hythlodaeus knows that e should not know, that eir conscience is a mistake, and yet e does not regret for a moment this lingering in its slow recession. Hythlodaeus has been left a guardian, standing in the crumbling façade of the ruins of a half-remembered world, a monument on the grandest scale imaginable to something lost-beyond-lost.
Hythlodaeus walks circuits around eir tomb, and sometimes crosses paths with the only other mourner, and finds this strange dualism they now share, coming and going, seeing and unseen, comforting. One trapped below, one trapped above, and both searching for something that, try as they might, they cannot find.
Hythlodaeus wonders what would happen, if e walked away, followed the Warrior’s path back to the surface. It would not be so hard: Hythlodaeus could climb the hills up away from Amaurot, walk the shores and beaches far above, breathe the sunlight on eir face. Pretend e could forget the truth.
For all the good it would do em.