Chapter Text
For whatsoever from one place doth fall,
Is with the tide unto an other brought:
For there is nothing lost, that may be found, if sought.
―
Sometimes Caelus dreamed of a girl.
He had his first of such dreams shortly after he embarked on the Astral Express and stepped onto the frozen plains of Belobog. At first, the newest member of the Trailblaze had written it off as another random, one-off conjuration of the mind.
But then he had another one. And another. All of them centered around this singular, elusive figure, shrouded by the impenetrable mist that was his own clouded and nonexistent memory.
Because of this, the recollection of his dreams were fleeting and fragmented, blurry and without form.
What he did know, however, was that in the wake of the inexplicable heartache that followed these dreams, there were always bits and pieces that remained.
Sometimes he remembered a voice. It was sweet and familiar and he did not know why.
Sometimes he remembered the flash of a smile. It was bright and familiar and he did not know why.
Sometimes he remembered a gentle touch. It was soft and familiar and he did not know why.
Though he could never recall much about the girl’s appearance upon waking, there was one thing that always remained with him.
There was a sunset in her eyes.
The only person he confided in about these dreams was March 7th.
It was shortly after their encounter with the Garden of Recollection, after their somewhat fruitless attempt to unearth his fellow amnesiac’s memories with the help of the Grand Diviner. He had wanted to comfort her, to let her know that her woes were understood more than she could imagine.
So he had shared with her the voice, the smile, and the touch of the ghost with a sunset in her eyes from his dreams.
The peppy girl had first exclaimed with starry excitement that maybe it was his soulmate, that he had formed a destined connection and that it was their sworn duties as trailblazers (and best buds) to seek it out among the stars.
Then, she had noticed the foreign, forlorn look that shaded his golden eyes and the tune of her song changed almost immediately.
March had asked him if he was sad.
That question had taken him aback; people always said Trailblazer was composed, adventurous, and sometimes just a little too goofy for his own good.
Caelus wasn’t known for being sad.
So he sighed and said maybe he was, and the smile he received from his friend wasn’t quite as wide anymore.
The hug, though, was appreciated.
The Astral Express was swallowed by the red void of the Giant Sting.
Caelus hadn’t thought much of the bugs at first. His forays into Herta’s Universe, to witness the very downfall of the Aeon that birthed this Swarm, had seemingly prepared him for this very confrontation.
But as the simulated facsimile of an Aeon traversing a digital world, the trailblazer hadn’t needed to worry about the mortal ramifications of the insidious silvery scales released by every wingbeat of the Sting. He hadn’t had to consider that the remnants of the Propagation would disguise its hungry fangs with the deepest desires of those who had fallen victim as its chosen prey.
March 7th had seen a beckoning mirror of herself, tempting her with the promise of her missing past.
Argenti had seen beauty, an object of his fascination and devotion to his dearest Idrila.
Caelus thought he had figured these intruders out, that he had rooted most of the pestilent insects from their hiding places on the Express he called his home.
Then, amidst a lull of deliberation regarding their next plan of action, he rounded the hall towards his room to see the fleeting sight of a ghostly figure. The shimmering mirage of a familiar girl glanced at him, then disappeared down the hall and out of sight.
Caelus followed.
The girl had no shape outside of a general silhouette, sometimes to the point of formlessness. It was as if he was trying to draw a picture that lived in his heart on the canvas of his mind with paints that did not exist.
Well, aside from the soft blue, pink, and white in her eyes, of course.
It wasn’t until Dan Heng had barged into the storeroom, shattering the illusion and impaling the creature lying behind it with a single throw of his jade spear, that Caelus realized he too had been fooled. Oddly, the stoic database manager of the Express refrained from delivering the chiding disapproval at being tricked like Caelus had been halfway expecting.
Instead, his friend had asked him why he was crying.
The trailblazer didn’t have an answer.
After the ordeal had ended and the Express was once again on its way, their navigator Himeko had posited him an innocent question.
“In your opinion, what is beauty, Caelus?”
His answer was swift and immediate.
“The sunset.”
Penacony was a den of thieves.
Caelus knew that underneath the golden skyline of the eternal hour of the dreamscape, something was rotten. He had known ever since he found out about that encoded message, and the point was only driven home further when that damned IPC representative had nearly held him hostage to a rigged deal in his own room.
Thank Akivili for the timely intervention of that galaxy ranger he simultaneously met for the first and second time shortly after.
It was because of this confusing, puzzling, somewhat frustrating prelude to the Golden Hour that he entered the sleepless dreamscape of Penacony with his usual sense of adventure tempered heavily by guarded skepticism.
He was no stranger to agendas. Ruan Mei had an agenda. Cocolia had an agenda. Phantylia had an agenda. This was nothing new to him.
But those motives had been grounded in reality. A reality set in the vastness of space, a world of endless snow, and an arbor-plagued starship.
Here, in this fluctuating dreamscape, Caelus wouldn’t be surprised if the very walls had an agenda. Not to mention the living billboards.
So he explored the streets of the seemingly endless city with a polite smile plastered on his face and his ready baseball bat a just mere inch away in its digital storage space.
“S-sorry for bothering you! Please, I need your help…”
Whatever polite refusal/excuse he had lined up died on his lips as his head turned to the feminine voice that had interrupted his thoughts.
The girl that had approached him had long silver hair and a pale complexion. She wore a delicate if practical green dress that accented the highlights in her hair perfectly. By most standards, she was drop-dead beautiful.
But that’s not quite what Caelus cared about.
No, what the girl possessed that interested him the most, what nearly arrested all oh his thoughts on sight, were her eyes.
Soft shades of blue, pink, and white that quelled even the endless whisper of the World Cancer within him.
Caelus saw a sunset in her eyes.
Against all logic, there was something about the girl named Firefly that made him forget where he was.
The way his impromptu tour-guide spoke of their surroundings with a voice tinged with awkward yet sweet and eager awe turned the set pieces of this gilded stage into true wonders to be marveled at; she stripped away all the pretense of this false world and appreciated things for simply being.
It was infectious. It was intoxicating.
It was painfully familiar.
He should have been wary when she inadvertently revealed she was much more perceptive than a small-time troupe singer had any right to be, not just anyone could notice the notorious scoundrel that was Sampo Koski (or the equally as stealthy person pretending to be Sampo Koski). On the contrary, to Caelus it seemed… right. Like another piece had been slotted into this ever elusive puzzle.
When Firefly up and outright told him that she had lied to his face, he should have left her right there and then. But some feeling within him absolutely refused to budge.
So he just smiled and nodded and she had lead him through the winding paths toward the edge of the dream together. To a place that she had called her secret.
When she shared with him the truth, her origins as a stowaway with her body sick and ailing and unable to experience life’s joy like she wanted to, he had the oddest sense of deja vu.
He should have known this. He was sure he had known this. The information was too familiar; it fit like perfect, cookie-cutter shapes in his mind instead of making space anew.
Firefly told him she was after the Watchmaker’s Legacy. She told him that she hoped they wouldn’t be enemies.
Caelus noticed how her voice nearly trembled at that last word, burdened with a weight of things that had to remain unsaid.
So he told her the truth: that he didn’t think they would be enemies. Or even could be enemies, for that matter.
When Firefly had smiled at him, bright with the eternal Golden Hour reflected in the sunset in her eyes, he came to another startling realization.
He loved this girl. He loved this girl that he had known for maybe two or three hours at best.
And he was beginning to have an inkling why.
When Firefly gently held him, apologizing as she dissolved into nothing but fading, effervescent foam in his arms…
Caelus had felt anger.
He had felt the Cancer of All World’s resonate strongly, too strongly, with his hatred. And it took every ounce of his willpower and the aid of the mind-bending Memokeeper to not let the reality-warping force of destruction use his body as its outlet.
Lest he end this dream prematurely, along with everybody in it.
As they worked to piece together Firefly’s final moments, Caelus found that he felt a sense of… wrongness.
There was something extraordinarily off-putting about the way Firefly had fallen. Like there was something missing.
It shouldn’t have been so easy; he knew she was stronger than that, more capable than that.
So where was her fire?
He barely had time to think about where these thoughts were coming from when they encountered the Stellaron Hunter named SAM.
The towering, mechanical warrior demanded them to leave. Then it attacked, lighting its own body ablaze with purging flame.
“Once you’re back in the real world, remember to tell everyone… about the Stellaron Hunter who was behind your ultimate departure.”
Then, watching the Hunter wreathed in fire descend upon them like a falling sun, something within Caelus clicked.
He had found her fire.
They met again on a platform amidst a dream of nothing, after the confrontation against the Sigonian that was supposed to be on their side.
“…Elio is right.” declared a voice in a metallic drone, “In this Land of the Dreams, you and I will reap unforgettable gains.”
The towering warrior paused, an odd hesitance for something supposed to be a machine.
But by now, Caelus knew it wasn’t a machine at all.
“I don’t know people’s hearts as well as he and Kafka do, nor do I have a speciality like Silver Wolf and Blade,” the Stellaron Hunter SAM said, “Most of the things that I’m good at only apply to villains who need no mercy.”
The trailblazer shrugged.
“I dunno. That in it of itself seems like a pretty good speciality,” Caelus said, leaning on his baseball bat, “But if you’re looking for other work… then I think you’d make a great tour guide.”
There was little external reaction from the mechanical warrior, but the towering figure turned ever so slightly. Just enough that Caelus could see the glinting teal glow of its visor.
The galactic baseballer cracked his best grin, “Isn’t that right, Firefly?”
A long silence stretched for several seconds.
Then, without any preamble, the Molten Knight shimmered. The trailblazer didn’t even flinch when the refractory light burst into hot flame, his body reflexively familiar with the sudden heat even if he didn’t have the memory to support it.
The blaze burned out, revealing the familiar girl he had watched ‘die’ to the collective memory of Death wrought by whatever delusion this dream was turning out to be. Her expression was painfully guarded as the veins of energy that crawled up her neck faded away.
“How did you know?”
Her voice was devoid of the emotion it had just the other day. Now it was nothing but melancholy… and resignation.
Caelus shrugged.
“Same way I knew who Kafka was,” he explained plainly, “Though for you… well, long story short let’s just say I reacted a little more… strongly.”
That was somewhat of an understatement.
Seeing Kafka had only tickled the back of his brain.
Seeing Firefly had taken his brain and set it ablaze.
Something flickered in her expression, and the sunset in her eyes began to sparkle. Just a little.
“Then… you…?”
His smile saddened, “There’s… not a lot that I remember here—“ he pointed to his head.
Then his hand trailed over his chest, over the heart that burgeoned with an inexplicable yearning for the girl that he had only met yesterday, “—but I certainly remember you here.”
The silver-haired girl’s lips parted in silence, her hand clutching the device in her grip just a little tighter.
“Do you trust me?”
The trailblazer then let out a dry, sardonic chuckle, an uncharacteristic noise for the person he was supposed to be right now.
“If you know me as well as I think you do, then you know I wouldn’t stick around with anybody in this Aeons-forsaken place any longer than I had to,” Caelus said, “And, memories or not, I feel like you’re the only one I can trust, ‘Fly. Outside the Express, at least.”
He hadn’t meant to shorten her name, but by the look on her face he must have done so at least once before.
The trailblazer let his bat disappear, replacing it with a take-out bag with a familiar logo on it.
“So how about we forget about all of this for a moment,” he made a dismissive wave with his free hand, “All of this script, the agendas, the legacy. All of it.”
Caelus pulled out what was unmistakably an Oak Cake Roll, her favorite, and offered it toward her with a smile.
“And maybe you and I can have that second date?”
There was only the briefest of pauses before Firefly ran — no — flew toward him, her neutral facade finally crumbling away like sand on a Xianzhou beach. Caelus did his damn best not to drop the slice of cake as her full weight collided into his arms.
“You remember,” the girl managed through a teary sunset, “You remember me.”
Caelus did remember.
And he was not going to forget.
Ever again.
…
“So… did you practice that line in the mirror or something?”
The girl used the cake in her mouth to stall her answer.
“…I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The boy chuckled.
“Ahem… ‘Once you’re back in the real world, remember to tell everyone… about the Stellaron Hunter who was behind your ultimate departure.’”
The girl pouted.
“…It was SAM’s idea…”
The boy chuckled harder.
Something told him SAM didn’t really speak.
And that same something also told him it was completely Firefly’s idea.