The Capitán’s hand brushed the wall of the upper floor, guided by habit and annoyed chatter. She could already guess what the topic of friction was, she’s been here before. The redundancy of the Cors inner lives became all the more apparent once World-Eater flipped her priorities upside down. The day had passed, as did the others. It should have been a week since then? The length of days felt like it had warped beyond understanding. She was never meant to read clocks or follow the trail of the Sun and the stars, why was the preconceived order of hours affecting her so? She entered Willow’s room. She heard her gasp and the Capitán landed a hand on the Major, feeling his presence close to the doorway.
“Leave it to me.”
Without complaints he obliged, as he should. The Capitán approached the bed, thankfully not empty this time. She had spent quite a pleasant day, all things considered, but feeling it come to a close increasingly frustrated her and having to go back down to fetch a wandering Willow would’ve pushed her further than she wanted to. Nothing more had happened after all, and the Capitán of the Cors still needed to save her strength. She kneeled down against the head of the bed, close enough to hear the quick and shallow breaths of her little Doctor. The Capitán hated how well Closer’s crude remark had slithered its way into her vocabulary. A growing unpleasantness weighed down upon her.
“Feeling restless?” The Capitán whispered even if she didn’t need to, the Major was still awake after all.
“I want to do more…”
The Capitán snarled internally. Her hand reached out, finding Willow’s forehead. Slipping her fingers behind her hair, she held them here, feeling the heat through her palm. One could have diagnosed her as feverish but the Capitán knew better. It could spill, at any moment, at any whim of the Capitán, the mountain of unresolved frustrations. All of the guileful cunts she had been forced to hear prattle their meaningless ideologies as if it mattered in the slightest. She had waved it off in front of Raime, sending her Cors to the winds, and followed a call to the Glassway. A momentary respite, one that she felt the full brunt of, her hand against Willow’s head. She could hit, she could hit again and again. She would accept it, wouldn’t she? She would welcome it. The Capitán brushed a fringe of Willow’s hair behind her ear.
“I couldn’t find the piece of World-Eater’s jaw,” Willow continued, speaking so low it was as if she was already asleep.
“Hmm… You don’t think Arma took it?”
The question was rhetorical, Willow not immediately accusing her meant she had another culprit in mind.
“Closer must have.”
“Maybe he took it as a souvenir, who knows when we’ll get more progress. I’m as impatient as you are, you know?”
“Hm, hm…”
“While we’re talking about Closer… Would you say he’s ever looked at you intensely?”
The Capitán felt Willow wrestle slightly under her covers.
“No… He never ever looks at me in the eyes, he also pretends to ignore MJ when he’s here… it’s funny…”
The Capitán let her fall asleep, staying knelt, completely still until she heard Willow’s breathing steady itself, left in the hands of dreams. She then made her way out of the room, gently closing the door behind her. One more day, one more night, one more day, one more night. Raime wandering away, as blind as her. Closer, dancing in front of her, his steps so light she could never feel the weight of his insolence. The Pillars, skittering away from her like desperate worms, clinging onto every ashen remains of the Old Man’s reign. And the Major, he was still here wasn’t he? He’d sat himself down in front of a desk in the main hall, waiting for her as if she’d held a revelation from him. He could make himself discreet, if he wanted to, but the wind flowing in and out of him was for her to hear, for her to discern his whole shape, for she could never see it. She sat herself down next to him and sighed.
“World-Eater…” The Capitán said, elongating the last syllabus of the name, “What’s it up to? What’s it doing?”
“Universalis and the rest of the city has yet to hear of its bearings.”
“And yet you… You’ve found out its origins. The reincarnation of a fairytale, sprouting out of the ground after a thousand years or so, to finally give Terra its final cataclysm.”
“You do not believe me.”
“I believe every word you’ve said to me,” The Capitán spat, “What I find hard to wrap my head around is why would a living myth be jerking around after getting a taste of what it can still do. Why are we here? Why am I arguing with you? What is it fucking waiting for, Major?”
“I do not know.”
“Entertain me some guesses, I’m not in the mood for sleep this early. Mine? I don’t believe Closer’s idea that it’s gestating. A natural process, born out of the hard labor of the laws of nature doesn’t seem likely to impede our mysterious phenomena.”
The Capitán brought out Vulpine’s manifesto from her coat and tossed it to the Major.
“Recognize this?”
“I do.”
“Coming out of the Glassway I was sure the four fuckers leading the dig into the underbelly weren’t up to the kind of shady business that leads to them being turned into meat slop. Knowing they’d been following Vulpine’s words makes me think they were looking for some kind of weapon. To use against us? To use against City Hall? The meat slop shall not give us any answer, but maybe… Maybe the weapon they’d been searching for was our elusive World-Eater, hm?”
“It would have sat in a common crate, alongside silverware?”
“Too far from the depiction you saw in the museum?”
She heard the Major wheeze slightly out of his joints.
“It is possible,” The Major replied, “The Marrow Knight allegedly sacrificed their body and soul to form the Marrow Tree that called to Jiù ēn. If any part of them had been recovered from the tree, it could have fit in a casing as big as my hand and form itself back up.”
“Using one of the workers as a vessel? A remnant of the long gone knight, smuggled across the world in a pencil case. It feels like we’re creating a new fiction, a sequel to the world renowned tale of the Marrow Tree…”
The Capitán couldn’t stay tensed around the Major. For better or worse, he couldn’t reflect her attitude back to her. She had gotten severely frustrated at this facet of him, a long time ago, but this had led her nowhere, and the Capitán had little interest in running in circles in her own head. Once more she was at the mercy of feeling her own time slipping drop by drop, grain by grain, as if she was the only one in the world hearing it tick away.
Sending Raime to probe the Hull could yield nothing as much as it could be the breakthrough she needed. At best, finding the heir to Volantis and finding whether or not Black Lake plays any role in World-Eater’s absence. At worst, nothing but a waste of time. She’d also get a hold of Closer once he’d creep his way back to the lab, but for that to be likely the Capitán would need to somehow wrench Van Kalkain’s hands open. A task who could definitely be her biggest challenge past, present and future. A vision of impossibility, an wall with no holds, a path without end. Could she allow herself to reveal the nature of her quest to him, as she did with the Old Man? As the Pillar of Life, it should at least motivate him to act in some way. No time to lose, yet World-Eater seemed content in waiting its turn.
The Capitán sighed and looked to the sky. She knew it was obstructed by a glass roof, she knew the Sun had set, and that was as much as she was ever granted. In the silent hall, she could hear the sounds of Byzance from the streets around the building, rising with the night itself. They hadn’t waited for anything, the music had dimmed and the voices grew louder, some sort of celebration that the Capitán would not be privy to. The gentle whispers of the Major’s frame went silent. The Capitán sat up in her chair, knowing that the other hand of the Cors was flexing his senses to catch something moving across the air. The Capitán rose, glancing towards the mess of colors that emanated from the front of the building facing the street. The voices joined themselves in an incomprehensible cacophony, reminiscent of the crowds the Capitán had once walked through. She made her way to the Major who had risen without her noticing. Pressing a hand on his chest, she felt his core humming under the cloth and his organic frame. He’d turned as stiff as stone, focused on the outside, listening between the muddied words drowned in the night.
“What are they saying?” The Capitán asked.
She felt his core rotate, clockwise then back again and his frame relaxed a fraction, his attention falling to her.
“The Old Man is dead.”