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Much to the foiled expectations of the soul-drowsy Elidibus, within the heart of the Crystal Tower, she appears. Jura Fontaine, the would-be Warrior of Light to these people and this place.
But she is unrecognisable. She is plain.
She is human.
In his dead memories she has always had that deep black hair, complexion as hollow-pale as weak opal, has always had that blemish stain above her brow.
Here she is standing, leaning on a black jointed cane, in plain but bizarre clothing, and without her eerie visage.
She looks as weak as any easily discarded mortal. But it's the same gaze. Sundering stripped her of her true glory, but it did not take her eyes.
Jura Fontaine, her living flesh gifted back its blood and pigment, her hair dun and brown, her brows blank.
So banished is her specter as much as his, at the spire of this beacon tower that's repeated shard and shard over. She seems, as does he, a younger creature, possessed of a kind of cursed innocence. It's as she was before either of their sacrifices.
"I'm sorry.
I was selfish.
I gave up what you did, but it was a tiny soul for an equally tiny wish."
She smiles and he tastes the bitterness of it.
"Back then, in that world, none of us had the power to make miracles.
...but you...?"
Elidibus tilts his head, shaking loose more of the aetherdust of his greatest persona. They've both forgotten so much.
Why would she say this now? Now, after all has been wagered, the feather of his heart weighed?
But she only adjusts her grip on the beak of her implement.
"I wish I remembered more. I know I would have more to say to you. All I know is that if we were different people, back then, I'm sure I would never have let this befall you."
Her sore eyelids crease, looking away.
"But I know without remembering that I did."
He regards this weak creature, marveled and embarrassed in turn that it was she, it was this, that defeated him.
It's then that he understands how--and why.
Death dripped from her hands and rendered her barely visible.
But those awful eyes.
He saw they wished for kinship.
And he saw that they were dead.
This hollow being that the world had made up into its hero--this creature who had become seafoam before, and mayhap would again, be it by his hand or not.
Why... why did Emet-Selch deem those eyes worthy?
The glassy texture forming over them told him she'd asked the same, once.
"I'm... I'm so sorry. You were right. I think you nearly always were.
I *am* Death.
I didn't want to be," she murmured, as that younger, former self bled away into the pale creature he'd met in the company of Minfilia, his equal, his other.
And there stood the only surviving silhouette of the defector.
Azem.
Bearing her mighty, horrible, mournful crook. As violet as the sky her former seat had been capable of singing to.
Behind spectacles, her eyes were glassy, full of undertow.
"Don't worry," she said, softly. "I'm not going to send you to your death."
They both looked to the handfuls of singing stones, wellsprings of aching memory.
"...A friend of mine once thought this place a kind of tomb for himself. And he went there, willingly..."
His form stood on unsteady knees, the remnants of anger licking at the back of his mind. But he was listening, nonetheless, for she was not yet finished with her soliloquy.
"My friend slept here with a full heart, because he knew that were he to wake, it would be to a deserving future..."
She looked askance, away, and then to his eyes, her grip shifting on her shepherd's grandstaff.
"Would... would you like to do the same?"
Elidibus--his original name blurry and having bled down the face of history like chalk drawings in rain--regarded his embraceful of precious words and memories. A future? Would there really be a future beyond the dominance of the past...?
Would it be worthy of that?
"...At duty's end, we meet again," his ageless voice recited, again.
A dose, somewhere, of what Emet-Selch must have seen, into which he had placed his crumbled hopes.
"...A worthy future, is it?", he asked the bringer of death, the ferrier of souls.
Almost tearfully, the debutante Warrior of Light smiled as warmly and sweetly as he had ever, ever seen, destroyed memories notwithstanding.
"Yes. Yes, my new old friend.
I will spend this chance; this life; laying it down for you. For everyone that I can, if I can."
At that, his heavy eyelids, behind their sorrowful crimson crown, blinked and wavered.
"How long...?"
She shook her head slowly, shrugging ruefully.
"As long as it takes."
He tightened his arms around the warmth of his myriad siblings' memories, reflected in crystal.
In spite of himself, Elidibus chuckled, a little dryly. His true voice was long unused.
"...See that you do.
And perhaps, after that, I shall meet you, too."
Jura knelt at the base of her grandstaff, and carried the Emissary to his fairy-tale slumber.
'Someday.
Someday I will call you by your names, your deaths in the palm of my hands.'
Such strong souls weighed through to breaking her palms, wages and coins of her living-dead, dread magic.
She waited on the precipice, a friend's soul gem in hand, and stood and waited and waited until she saw the smile of good dreams on the former Ascian's lips.
'O God,' she invoked, an alien deity's prayer, 'I want to do this right.'
She squeezed her weapon tightly, then let it dissolve into the creek of water it was made to become.
'For all of you. I don't want to live in a world where strange souls must die.
So dream now.
Of a better tomorrow.
Dark or otherwise.
I promise.'
The gates of the Crystal Tower closed around their new prodigal son;
not with a bang, but with a whisper.
The gwyllion turned to leave, and she stepped softly, so as not to waken him too soon.
This world wasn't ready yet--but it would be.