2023-02-07: SEVEN IS THE NUMBER: Et initium in quo contingit preventio
- Log: SEVEN IS THE NUMBER: Et initium in quo contingit preventio
- Cast: Seraph Boudicca, Seraph Harmaus
- Where: The mountain range south of Lohgrin
- Date: 2023-04-21; backdated to 2023-02-07, after Solaris's attack on the Farhenheit
- Summary: Harmaus attacks Boudicca, in her liminal homeland. Though she's alone, Boudicca tries to fulfil her oath to stop him... but he is stronger than her killing intent. In the end, neither of them can abide the other.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
OST: La fille aux cheveux de lin, performed by Lang Lang - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGSZPRk6aXA
The mountains south of Lohgrin separate habitability from inhospitality. No soothing shadows pass over the swampland further on; the monster's claws are long and sharp, now.
Here in the mountainland, the terrain is rough. The paths are frequently dirt, and not always well-kept; it is wooded and untouched in many places, and the signs, at times, are crumbling.
But there are other signs -- which do not rely on human artifice.
In many places dotted about the mountainside, trees grow into each other, woven about each other. It feels designed, the way their largest woven branches point in one direction. It was designed. Abilene's magics tamed the wilderness, and Boudicca, too, knew something of them -- enough to carve stones with her razor-winds and to enforce her will on the greengrowth.
Mama always said she'd have even more talent at this, when she was as old as her, because her will was stronger than the Earth. But mama always said she should fear the fiery artifices of Man, just the same...
... and she's wearing armour shaped by the hot forge of Filgaia's heart, now, wielding weapons tempered by heat.
" <I'm back,>" she says, the way they used to say it, as her olive hand presses against a woven tree. She's walking in the opposite direction the branches are indicating. The Beast of Lohgrin marked the paths of her mountain to lead humans back to civilisation -- not on towards danger. " <I just wanted to take back, before...>"
Her fingers curl. Her brow knits. " <... I'm gonna kill a,> Clysmian, <mama. They say I can't do that, ei, eith, too -- but I did it before. That one was just a baby, but. This one's really old. Maybe as old as you were, mama. Or even more old.>"
The breeze sighs, trailing down the mountain path.
" <I wonder how old you really were... I wish you would've said me.>"
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"Ah, here it returns."
Once, many centuries ago, a much younger Boudicca had a chance meeting with a cat. It had been a fine cat. A clever cat. A cat that had told her many secrets of the world outside her small circle -- that had in its own way reinforced the lessons she had been taught.
Perhaps that former her ought to have wondered about that cat and its power of speech. Perhaps, yes -- but how would she have known to have?
That same cat stands here again now, shimmering with the light of distant stars. His light is now a sickly one.
Perhaps she already knows the reason. Perhaps, she does not. But even if that story has escaped her ear unto now, she will know the tale upon seeing him. Malevolence pulses in his veins as blood does in a mortal frame.
Harmaus is possessed of the obsession that has captivated him for centuries. And now here he stands, in this mountainland most sacred to her. His very touch will mark the earth.
BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEeMIUy7u_U
"It wonders me... finds it here? Or, finds it here not? I sees it not arrayed against my master. So wonders I... wonders I what comes of it! So seeks it fight 'the Clysmian'?"
Harmaus laughs, a short bark of a sound. "Well, I wishes it well! Long it troubles me... and long it troubles me! Perhaps finds I two troubles ended? But, ah..."
The light around him flares suddenly, sailing in a scorching burst for her location.
"Trusts I not even 'Clysmian' in ending mine nemesis!"
GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Seraph Boudicca with Glimpse Of The Sun! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 1 Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Boudicca takes a glancing hit from Seraph Harmaus's Glimpse Of The Sun for 69 hit points! GS: Jam and Poison applied to Seraph Boudicca! GS: FP up! Evade bonus and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
Boudicca knows Malevolence. For many years she feared Malevolence, and from it she fled -- now she burns it away, to purify the country she came to.
Harmaus has always been malevolent. No wonder, perhaps, that now he is Malevolent.
Just like Abilene, once upon a time.
"You--!" Boudicca exclaims, the way humans talk, as she whirls to face that horror leashed in a cat's skins. "You detestable hinderling!" Well -- the way humans once talked, anyway. "Darken not my halls! You are unwanted in this space!"
She bristles; her lips twist, upwards, over her teeth. (Hers are blunt, like humans' are. All the better to grind together.) "And who is your master now, wretch? Neither have I seen you on Spira's shores, worsening Sin's shadow!" And surely it's a deliberate insult, to a bright creature such as he.
The light flares, and Boudicca leaps, legs bending; breaching six feet tall and broad to match, she doesn't look like she ought to be able to leap so high, but looks can be deceiving. So too with she, who is the wind, even as the light burns at the edges of her silks.
"And why are you not ALREADY GONE?!" She screams, as she brings out her tonfa to strike down on his location with meteoric speed. The wind blows out from her as she lands, in all directions, in a billowing shockwave. "You miserable creature! I know the poison in your veins! Be consumed to nothing! There is no justice in a world where you can hold on to yourself--!!"
She rises, and strands of her hair fall from where her horned helm ought to have trapped them, across her angry face. "By my name -- RACCOUC GUEBOHHA -- here will I end you!" And her True Name is in the old style; the style Seraphim used, when they were called something different.
Why does she name herself as the Malakhim did?
Surely she can't know.
GS: Seraph Boudicca has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Rabid Lunge! GS: Seraph Boudicca has gained 1 Combo! GS: Seraph Boudicca takes 29 damage from Poison! GS: Seraph Boudicca has completed her action. GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Harmaus takes a glancing hit from Seraph Boudicca's Rabid Lunge for 39 hit points! GS: Shieldbreak applied to Seraph Harmaus! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"Knows it not my master's name? Ah... long gone has it from these shores! I follows but the Lord of Calamity...!"
But, isn't the Lord of Calamity dead? Felled by the blade of the White Knight himself, or so the stories have been circulating in the days following the deed. Here at the edge of time between the great battles that have been and those yet to come, there is time to celebrate and reflect, still--
"...Or so did I, until he is murdered!" snarls Harmaus, his fur rolling and raising along his back in a wave of rage. "Slain is Lord of Calamity, slain by those calling themselves 'heroes'! No longer brooks I meddling -- once I finishes here, I heads to eradicate stain that is source of all falseness and wrongness!"
By which he means the Goddess, rightly, of course.
He only hisses when she speaks of Sin. Ever has the Clysmian supped on Malevolence's strength.
She leaps; the light but sears her edges. And here she comes for him as sudden as the wind, an explosion of force that catches him even as he leaps away from where she drives in. The wind has him for a time and he tumbles in its gusts.
But he is a spiritual thing of the same cloth as her and he lands with but the distant jingle of the bell at his collar.
"Consumed I am not. Catches I thread of truth from heart of the world!" he declares to her. "Recalls it not what I promises? Here I am now: I keeps mine promises!"
His eyes slit as she names herself thus.
"...Keeps it its own? It wonders me...!"
And the light, now phantasmic and shimmering, now tinged with pulses of violet, swims around his form as he takes to the air before her. "-A true existence needs no support!-" Harmaus calls out and like a swarm of meteors, the light begins to swell and orbit him -- as if he were the sun and they his lonely wanderers.
"AUTARKEIA!"
Not one, should it hit, will burn as it should. They touch but do not touch: they pass through her and yet may leave traces of their passing.
Rarely does a comet chance to strike a world. But when it does...
GS: Seraph Harmaus spends 1 Combo on Poison! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Seraph Boudicca with Autarkeia! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 1 Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: Seraph Boudicca solidly guards Seraph Harmaus's Autarkeia for 51 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Boudicca gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Poison applied to Seraph Boudicca! GS: Charge!! You gain 30 FP! (That's 15 more than usual!) GS: FP up! Charge bonus and Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
"You!" Boudicca bites out, again, as Harmaus invokes the Lord of Calamity. At least, Harmaus confirms, he is dead -- and the edge of fear in her voice becomes hateful again. "All that is good is made wrong in your mind! Even if the truth is complex, though the Goddess be in error, I will not accept that the Lord of Calamity was anyone's salvation--!!"
They both are metaphors. That bell jingles --
She remembers. The threats and the insinuations and the promises; the way he suggested her people would be safe, so long as she minded her manners.
That he would destroy what she would protect, never mind that he thought she protected lies.
"PREVENCIOUN!" She cries, as she charges into those meteors. They pass through her, and for brief moments she shines with a terrible light; it makes stark the difference between armour and skin, stark the contrast of hair and ribbon. The truth of Boudicca: the defences she draws around herself, the form she has taken, the Holy Vessel she chose.
But they do not pierce her, even as they rain down and she makes no effort to evade their fury. The light comes, flashes, and goes, until it meets the earth instead.
Boudicca's coming, too.
"So long as I can fight will I fight you, Fembuel Caulaog!" She cries, as the wind and her tonfa strike out to knock him upwards -- before she leaps up, to send more of that might and magic crashing him back towards the ground. "You will die knowing nothing, and it is the barest mercy I shall give you! You, I offer no salvation!"
And she will fight on her own, though she is the spark for humanity's fire, and ever has she acted in their support. Is that why she's twisting the knife as she is..?
GS: Seraph Boudicca spends 1 Combo on Link! GS: Seraph Boudicca has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Cerberus Strike! GS: Seraph Boudicca has gained 1 Combo! GS: Seraph Boudicca has launched an attack Link! GS: Seraph Boudicca has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Soaring Blast! GS: Seraph Boudicca takes 27 damage from Poison! GS: Seraph Boudicca has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus partially evades Seraph Boudicca's Cerberus Strike for 102 hit points! GS: Disrupt blocked! GS: FP up! Evade bonus and Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus partially guards Seraph Boudicca's Soaring Blast for 26 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Slow applied to Seraph Harmaus! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"And that is why it thinks wrongly! That is why it fails!" Harmaus snaps back in reply. Not 'has failed' but will fail -- he is still convinced that in the end he will be proven the correct one, however things might go.
Whatever the corruption that has riddled his form and grows only by the day will eventually do to him. From this fertile soil there will someday be born an abomination: a cure would be a relatively simple matter and yet he clings to it as firmly as a child might a beloved toy. Even an attempt to purify him would be to no avail.
He is convinced that Malevolence is his salvation. That it will, someday, lead him to the truth of the world.
She has not forgotten his name. Fembuel Caulaog. Harmaus the Pilgrim to make the moniker plain. Once he had gone out into the world in search of his answer and once he had fought as any Seraph might. And then he had been provoked to undertake an entirely different sort of pilgrimage.
Now, perhaps, he approaches its culmination: once he ends his stay at this 'sacred site' he will next take himself to that holiest of holies of the Althenian faith, and...
"Ah? Seeks it my end?"
As if she hasn't made this plain before -- long before. He leaps away from her as she comes crashing in for him but again: Boudicca is not so easily evaded! Her winds catch him mid-flight; in the air is he not more subject to her domain?
One of them, now.
"It knows that not easily done! Springs I forth again, and again," he calls out upon his recovery: see how he shakes his head and fluffs his dingy fur. "Once I finishes with it here, seeks I the Goddess! Soon, Pentagulia's streets run with her blood! Then, knows I all!" But those eyes of his narrow as he leaps into the air and takes flight, luminous purples and greens trailing him like swathes of silks. "Tcha-- seeks it my ignorance? It fails! I sees to it!"
And those same shimmering lights burst brilliantly from him like the tail of a comet: falling away as he sails overhead, they rain down like arrows, like spears.
And they explode with a sickly violet light.
GS: Seraph Harmaus has activated Force Action: Snipe! GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Seraph Boudicca with Daybreak! GS: Shieldbreak expired! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Boudicca suffers a terrible blow from Seraph Harmaus's Daybreak for 206 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Boudicca gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Infect! Debuff durations extended!! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Boudicca enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
"You are one to speak of failure!" Boudicca spits, because the both of them are convinced of their righteousness, here.
Oh, hear her! Malevolence is no salvation. It is the rot that destroys the world.
He is the pilgrim, and she the warrior; he would ensure his path is clear, and she would not move from it. Perhaps this confrontation was written the moment they knew themselves and their private faces.
(But in this situation, Boudicca's the only one whose public face doesn't entirely match her private one. Harmaus has always sought the truth; she can acknowledge that much.)
"Speak not to me of springing forth, when you took his life to do so!" She cries, as she lands, whirling to face him again. Her braids whip about around her, as if to show the shape of the whirlwind with their dark lines all tipped in green. Her look was inspired by a Shadow Seraph, did you know? That's why she's eschewed the blonde hair so many of their people favour. "You think a Goddess so much easier to kill?! What can you possibly do, against the woman who made us all!"
Harmaus claims the air, though, and Boudicca glares up at those comets as they slam down. Too late her eyes widen, "hah--!!", as she realises just how FIERCELY they burn; too late does she abandon her vengeful stance to try and flee. She is fast as the wind but the speed of light is something else entirely; they catch her where she tries to leap away, and though the light passes through her, still she falls to the ground. She, at least, makes an impact. She is enough of a physical thing in the world for that.
As she pushes a hand to the ground, a green Seraphic glyph claims the earth; she rises, standing again, and throws a hand out towards Harmaus. "Blow, storm, and stopper misery!" She invokes, and bothers with the entire chant, though they have enough magic not to need to. "Howling Gale!" And the whirlwind isn't just in her motions, now; it picks up around her, before the storm crashes upwards, to blow Harmaus away.
"I may not be able to kill you as you are," she says, all tension, drawn out like a violin's bowstring. "But you have outplayed yourself, knave. All I must do is push you far enough to lose yourself, and you will forget how to hold onto all that you hold dear! Before that power makes you a menace... in your twilight, I will kill you!"
She's done it before. She wished she'd never have to do it again, after she realised she could save Yvain.
GS: Seraph Boudicca has activated Force Action: Lock On! GS: You have activated the Force Action Lock On! GS: Seraph Boudicca spends 3 Combo on Gatling, loading 3 into Gatling! GS: Seraph Boudicca has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Howling Gale! GS: Seraph Boudicca has gained 2 Combo! GS: Seraph Boudicca takes 26 damage from Poison! GS: Seraph Boudicca has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus solidly guards Seraph Boudicca's Howling Gale for 78 hit points! GS: FP up! Guard bonus and Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
Always, from the day his existence began. Oh, there was a time when he had been bound to a location, as so many Seraphim are. But the day had come when he had lost that protectorate and with little else but the graves left to him, he had gone out into the world -- both at last free to and with no other choice but to heed that which had plucked at the strings of his soul from the start.
(If there had never been a plague, would he be steward of that town even now? Or might it have been that one day he would have left of his own accord? If, if, if -- these are the moments which history hinges upon.)
"Worries after mortals even now?" Harmaus responds in kind, twisting his body to face her as if he were faced with an opponent of equal size to him. "Thinks I that one had but a handful of decades remaining. Soon, it dies regardless! And it worries after this?!"
He bares his teeth when she more or less calls his intentions impossible -- but how can a Seraph hope to slay a Goddess? Surely reason-- "Silence! Althena is false! She... She is not one responsible for our creation!! She is false, and like all false, will fall against the truth!"
But reason has ever failed to sway Harmaus, ever since the obsession took him.
He is still in the air when Boudicca calls upon her element and responds as only she might: the winds rise up in a howling gale about the Seraph's smaller form. He has his own physicality in the world: such that he is, he cannot help but be swept away.
But light erupts from the place he has fallen. "-...Untroubled by insignificant things, your heart is steady-," Harmaus intones, arising from the place he had fallen amidst so many shimmering sheaves of blue-white-violet light. "Ataraxia!"
Even in this, using a spell aimed to but soothe his corpus, the corruption is evident.
"Ah? It thinks it pushes me to limits? It thinks it changes me here? ...It assumes much," Harmaus tells her, walking through the tufts of grass towards her. Light pours from his form like vapor. "It assumes of what it is capable. It assumes nature of Malevolence. It assumes what awaits on other side...! Even if I changes, my heart remains the same."
Cats don't smile the way people do. Harmaus slowly closes his eyes as he regards her.
"Always, will I pursue mine true desire!"
GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Ataraxia! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 2 Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus's stances have changed to Hero! GS: Slow expired! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: CRITICAL! Seraph Harmaus accepts Seraph Harmaus's Ataraxia for 0 hit points! GS: Mighty and Riposte applied to Seraph Harmaus!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
The plague, too, pushed Boudicca from the comforts of her swamp into the arms of man.
Is it strange that the same thing brought the both of them to their paths..?
He's bigger than his body, and Boudicca can believe his size beseems her. She is colder than her hearth, in turn, as he puts down the worth of his host. "That you would ask is proof enough of your transgressions! Even a single decade is precious, to creatures bound by time! A single year -- a single day! They deserve to live their lives, and die when it is natural to die!" Boudicca isn't so arrogant as to demand immortality for mortals -- surely this would be its own cruelty -- but to end their lives before their time is worse still.
"Is She not? Then who!" Boudicca demands, with a CLANG of her greaves, as she takes a ferocious step forward. "Who shaped the Earthpulse from whence we came?! Who poured blood into the veins of the world, but the Goddess who favoured Lunar overmuch?! Nonsense! It is not force that shall shift Her will, but the words of mortals wiser than you!" Boudicca will not go with Hiro, to address the Goddess, though surely she has questions for someone she felt so unusually devout towards for so long. She will not go -- but she trusts him.
She will never trust Harmaus again.
And oh, Boudicca is troubled by insignificant things. Perhaps that's why she finds his enhancement so odious. Even his support of himself is something she -- humanity's ardent supporter -- cannot accept, all written in the snarl on her own lips.
(It looks different, on a human face. The disgust is still unmistakable.)
"I have seen it," she insists, as she steps up and forward just the same. She floats, a foot or so above the earth, barely brushing the grass; this manner of magic has always come to her, second nature. "The change comes with greater and greater madness. You will lose yourself, and in time you would be as the Saint of Sinners, mindless in your destruction. Your desire would be as dust. But... you will never get that far."
Boudicca is humanity's ardent supporter; with no mortals beside her, she is limited overmuch. But there are still some echoes she can call on, even as those she's chosen are far from her. "I know," she insists, another step forward, "I am not deadly in the manner of Lily, ferocious in the manner of Cyre, fearsome in the manner of Avril. I have more fetters than Leon, or Ethius, or Ragnell; nor do mine grant me power, as Azoth's or Ruth's do. Would you have me list every soul better suited to kill you than I? We will be here quite long."
Her hands flex, and she lifts one; snaps her fingers, flint against steel, as fire sparks there and wraps around her. "But Ida and Dean have never wanted for strength, with my support. And I am capable of more than you know. Aid me, Moor Gault!" She cries, and scarcely needs to; their connection is understood, implicit, inside that heart now their bridge to the world.
It is not a cry which goes unanswered. Just as Moor Gault's anxiety has pushed her to address their threats entirely too promptly, perhaps Boudicca's anxiety lends credence to Harmaus's threat, too.
Her silks light up -- flaming, around her, unlike the smouldering damage of the Light. Wind feeds the flame; fire is her weakness, and that is why Moor Gault is so strong, acting through her.
Perhaps it's why her tonfa were forged in flame, too.
GS: Seraph Boudicca spends 1 Combo on Reload! GS: Seraph Boudicca has attacked Seraph Boudicca with Smoke Sigil! GS: Seraph Boudicca takes 28 damage from Poison! GS: Jam expired! GS: Seraph Boudicca has completed her action. GS: Seraph Boudicca accepts Seraph Boudicca's Smoke Sigil for 0 hit points! GS: Amplify, Burst, and Hyper applied to Seraph Boudicca! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
A life, no matter how short -- even if it had but a day worth living left alloted to it -- is worthwhile, says Boudicca. Harmaus' response is but to laugh. "What gains us the value of such a short, short life? What changes it the world with so little alloted?! It has seen again and again what humanity achieves: destruction, war, death! Let them have what they desires! Little, less, nothing!"
He backs down not a step -- not a step -- as she advances towards him, arrayed for war. He may be but the shape of a housecat and she, a warrior, but their forms betray little of what rests within. Judge not a book by its cover, it is often said: a Seraph is not defined by the shape their corpus takes. "No, not Her! Never Her!" Harmaus snarls. "Knows I not, yet, who, what makes us! But knows I will from whence comes us! From whence steals us!" He has heard the tale if in breaks and pieces: what had come before.
It has been only fuel for his fire, more tinder for his obsession.
"A false Goddess is She! She, hiding from the world! She, pretending! Lying!" His fur stands on end and as the mind ever is a plaything of the body, arches his back. He is well full in his fury.
"Believes it the stories!? It sees but those succumbing! Those without will! I-- I possesses the will and goes I through, discovering what others fail!"
He intends to see it through, then. Perhaps that is his terrible plan for the Goddess's death: to permit himself to become a Fell Dragon and in such glory, slay her. But he thinks that will alone will keep his mind intact through the transformation that is to come. That he won't be lost. That he won't become an abomination.
"So intends it killing me here... jaeja. Well..."
She is alight with fury and purpose, as is he: together their sparks rise on high to the heavens.
"Sees I if it is capable...!"
There is light from behind her, then. It is brilliant, golden... and tinged with violet.
GS: Seraph Harmaus has activated Force Action: Lock On! GS: MYSTIC ARTE! Seraph Harmaus has attacked Seraph Boudicca with Light Everlasting! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 2 Combo! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: Sneak! The true nature of Seraph Harmaus's attack becomes clear! GS: Seraph Boudicca takes a solid hit from Seraph Harmaus's Pallid Sun for 216 hit points! GS: Poison applied to Seraph Boudicca! GS: Disease blocked! GS: FP up! Evade bonus and Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Boudicca enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
There is light, yes, but the blaze of the heavens comes from a direction yet unseen by Boudicca. That golden light fades to ashes under the blazing glory that comes from on high. It had been but a harbinger of what was to come: as the shadow moves from before that phantasmic star, that star trembles and shudders, pale and purest white.
Gold has become white. Its brilliance threatens to transfigure all before it into so much shadow etched on stone and earth.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
'Little, less, nothing!'
"NO!" Boudicca cries, and it is an anger close to madness, stripped of eloquence and wit. "That is not the desire of Man! No --" Repeat it and repeat it again, even as her cadence throws back to the old times, even as she pulls herself back: "-- their lives are more than what value they offer us! Whole and complete!"
But they both have things to deny, of the other.
"You wretched fool! It does not matter whence we come," is what Boudicca decided, as she storms on. "But that we have come, and here we stay! 'Tis our works and deeds, not ancient mysteries, which define us!" She grasps her tonfa, again, and screams: "Old we may be, but I live in today!" It's a lesson Dean taught her; a lesson she's seen help Ida, too.
Her fingers clench, tightly, around the forged iron of her tonfa. "Whether the Goddess be false or unfeigned -- IT MATTERS NOT!"
Perhaps Harmaus won't listen, but it releases her, just the same.
"You possess nothing but empty hope," she issues, "and I will take this from you, too." From behind her, the light frames her; she glances behind, and speeds forward, but that poisoned dawnlight catches her anyway. And as the shadow moves, the light turns sallow; chiaroscuro Boudicca is framed in the forest, between white trunks and black leaf-litter, standing dark against the star.
She would cast a shadow over Harmaus, but how can she blot out his terrible light?
How can she?
How --
She stumbles forward, and catches herself on a hand; she is a story she tells the world, but her tale and her faith are beleagured, and her voice comes from her in sharp rasp. The edges of her ribbon sizzle, burnt edges from something harsher and brighter than flame. She'll carry that weight.
And this: she pushes herself standing again, though her heart screams through it. "I'm not... done... yet," she spits out, in the way they speak, words all clustered together.
Though, certainly, she has not much left to give.
She grasps her tonfa again, and, knees bending, she charges past him, in a flurry of wind and violence to send him flying. A martial strike -- a terrestial thing -- though they both command such brutal magics. Perhaps she's making a point.
GS: Seraph Boudicca has activated Force Action: Lock On! GS: You have activated the Force Action Lock On! GS: Seraph Boudicca has attacked Seraph Harmaus with Soaring Vortex! GS: Seraph Boudicca takes 26 damage from Poison! GS: Seraph Boudicca has completed her action. GS: Seraph Harmaus takes a glancing hit from Seraph Boudicca's Soaring Vortex for 63 hit points! GS: Reaction switch bonus! Seraph Harmaus gains 1 additional Combo! GS: Entangle blocked! GS: FP up! Evade bonus activated! GS: Seraph Harmaus enters CONDITION GREEN!!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"Then, it proves it! It proves me wrong, Boudicca!" Harmaus snarls, bowing his fram low as if he were about to pounce on her from here. His frame ripples with his animosity: it was not just the plague but the wars that lay him low. The wars, the deceit, and all the death that followed.
Humanity sows lies. Deceit is the heart of all that eats away at the roots of the world. And he has learned about what humanity has done in the past to their very own kin--
"It knows, yes? It knows that once, our kin slaved by humans?! And still, still, it defends them! I understands it not!!"
Whole and complete: he will not have them in such a state. They, and those who deny him -- all who deny them -- he has turned his back on them. Let there be not truth for the world. Let there be only truth for Harmaus.
"Ah? It matters it not? From whence comes us? Fool it is! Fool that not understands own roots! It cannot see where it heads without knowing where it was!" he hisses back at her insistence that it doesn't matter.
That even whether the Goddess is false or true matters. That all that matters is...
"It lives only in the now and minds not past or future!! That is what I can not permit!"
Here breaks the daylight. Here is the star, in all its pale glory. And here yet stands Boudicca, the wind that fuels the flames. Even such brilliance will see her light not yet extinguished.
She's not done, and here, she is for him. Racing towards him in a heart-stopping rush, she has time to see him leap, to swing at him nonethless, to strike once again. It happens so fast. He moves -- he is a blur. She can't see where he has gone. But she'll feel the impact of her tonfa against his corpus.
And then she'll see him, standing in the grasses and breathing hard. "Learns it much," he tells her.
The light around him speaks of the golden glow of the setting sun.
"BUT NOT ENOUGH!"
The light winks out. There is a flash of green: it slices along the ground, across the distance, onwards towards Boudicca like the scythe of a reaper.
GS: Seraph Harmaus has attacked Seraph Boudicca with First Light! GS: Seraph Harmaus has gained 1 Combo! GS: Mighty and Riposte expired! GS: Seraph Harmaus has completed his action. GS: Seraph Boudicca takes a solid hit from Seraph Harmaus's First Light for 208 hit points! GS: FP up! Sufferer activated! GS: Seraph Boudicca enters CONDITION GREEN!! GS: Seraph Boudicca has Fallen! She is no longer able to fight!
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Boudicca has posed.
"What else can I do but this?!" Is Boudicca's demand, as Harmaus insists she prove him wrong. She swore an oath to impede him; surely it is in her nature, now, to disprove all his illuminated hypotheses.
But -- the Malakhim. "I know!" Boudicca cries, lashing out a hand. Pain lances her anger, and her expression twists in frustration. "I know this! Abilene herself may well have been one of them! But humans and Seraphim alike are capable of both kindness and cruelty! 'Tis inherent to neither of our natures!"
She can't very well call her people guardian angels, either -- so long as someone like Harmaus exists. If the truth is only for him, she will adopt all the lies of the world, embrace them in their complexities.
"Here I stand -- that is enough!" Boudicca yells. "You have never learned to accept enough, Fembuel Caulaog! Through you, I am given that same hunger -- you execrable fanatic! I hate what you inspire in me..!!" He cannot permit her to live in today; she cannot abide him tearing it apart to reach yesterday.
But one of them is older than the other.
She impacts; she comes to a stop, heavy, against the grass. Her trunk lowers, and she presses a hand to the ground, again. She's not floating any more.
She lifts her head, and their eyes meet, for one terible moment. What she's learned...
Her own eyes widen, as the light extinguishes. Green slashes out, flashes through her, a perfect dissection -- or it would have been, were it a scythe.
Were she a woman.
In a gust of breeze that story disappears, into a mote of light which retreats into a ribbon. "I..." Boudicca's voice emanates, just as it did, when she was the Beast of Lohgrin he once found here.
"... I have not the power to defeat you, alone. There is nothing more I can do... with my power."
The breeze ruffles the grass, as it blows past Harmaus. "... but know this," her voice says, as that ribbon is carried away. "Hiro and the others will not let you have your way... and ever shall the wind curse you."
As it curses him, here: "Go, and realise how meaningless the truth will be."
The wind carries her vessel high, as Boudicca flees from the strength of Harmaus's horrible sunlight. It will carry her to a shady hollow, and only there will she heal.
Only in the shelter of darkness.
<Pose Tracker> Seraph Harmaus has posed.
"But humans, they does such much and more than we! When has last Seraphim collared mankind? When has last Seraphim waged war and lies as humans!?"
It is hardly a fair question to ask her: surely, if one were to dig down, deeply, they might find evidence of such of some actions -- and are the rest not born from the sheer numbers of mortals when stood against the relative few of the Seraphim? If the ratios were inverted, might not the same and greater tragedy be born?
But she will never convince him of such: it is her nature to try and prevail against his stubbornness, and it is his nature to be stubborn.
To, indeed, not know the word 'enough'. He is fanaticism given form: he is true to his name to the last.
The Pilgrim. The seeker, on an endless journey.
She tries to stand against him. She does her level best to tear him to shreads, to end him before he becomes what he might -- before he invites the same tragedies he rails against in humanity. Before the Seraph Harmaus comes to wage war against the world.
But, alas, he is seven hundred and seventy seven years old, and through age, he has learned much. And he has become quite powerful, even with Malevolence coursing in his metaphysical veins.
An outside observer might think that Boudicca were obliterated. As Harmaus had noted, though, a Seraph is not easily destroyed. Through her vessel, she yet endures.
With her power, there is nothing more she can do, however. Nothing more but survive, and live to see another day.
She has but one warning for him ere her ribbon floats away on the breeze, before she retreats to darker places. Mark her words, the day will come...
...and the others have yet more power than she.
"Jaeja," Harmaus utters, watching the ribbon as it floats away. "We shall sees. We shall sees!"