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The Convocation is fond of grand displays like these. Pomp and precedent and all that. Hades supposes he was once fond of it, too. He can remember it, distantly, the excitement and the fun.
Indeed, seeing Azem enjoying herself so thoroughly feels almost like his own enjoyment. But she adores people and parties and dancing, and she is rather new yet. Ordinarily he’d think, well, she’ll get used to it in time, but the thought irritates him more than it comforts him. He wouldn’t like to see the fire in her extinguished, certainly not by the drudgery of duty.
She is stronger, more resilient than the rest of them, he tells himself. The mantle of the Fourteenth will not change her the way it has changed the others.
“Aren’t you having fun?” She appears before him all at once and far too close, bright eyes glimmering beneath her mask, pushed just slightly askew by the crooked tilt of her smile.
”Just…thinking,” Hades replies, but he finds he doesn’t have to force a smile in return.
Azem rolls her eyes fondly. “Well, there’s your problem. Parties are no time for thinking.” She thrusts out both her hands. “Dance with me?”
“And what would be a good time for thinking?” Hades deflects, trying very hard to pretend he is not taken aback by her request.
“Ha, ha,” Azem takes his hands and pulls, and he is left with no recourse but to follow her.
“I am serious, you know,” Hades continues, and tries very hard to mean it. “Between you and Hythlodaeus, one wonders who elects to think less before acting.”
“Oh, is that what you’re brooding about?” Azem laughs. “By the stars, Hades—oh, sorry,” she clears her throat, continues dramatically, “Most Honourable Emet-Selch. Anyway, it all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”
“For you,” he mutters, but it is surpassingly difficult even to pretend to be cross with her when she’s positively glowing at him like this. In the end, he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that at least half the Convocation is furious with her, and all the more furious with him for smoothing over her latest mess, an action they are beginning to view as ‘taking her side’.
“And, I daresay, for the people whose entire way of life was not destroyed by a volcano,” Azem replies mildly. She turns in time to the music, more of her own volition than because Hades has led her, and when she returns to him, she seems somehow even closer than before. “If you ask me—“
“No one ever does, and yet—“
“If you ask me,” Azem continues, unfazed, “the Convocation ought to put a little more thought into what makes a life worth living at all. If you’re still technically alive, but everything you’ve ever loved is gone, and you’re shattered into a million pieces, have you truly survived at all?”
“Of course you have,” Hades frowns. She speaks so cheerfully for such a dire subject. “What sort of question is that?”
“That fellow who’s always hanging about the Hall of Rhetoric loved it.”
Hades feels his frown deepen, and his stomach turns uneasily. “Well then, perhaps you’d better go and dance with him.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Azem pretends to consider this, her cheery mood utterly unabated. “A good debate is nice every now and again, but that fellow never tires of it! Why, I think if I were to ask him for a dance, he’d suggest something foolish like, oh, say, dancing is a frivolous pursuit with no artistic merit.”
In spite of himself, Hades lets out a small huff of amusement. “You suppose he has such a distaste for dancing?”
“That is the question, isn’t it?” Azem taps his shoulder lightly. “That’s the thing I can’t stand about people like that—would he mean it, or would he simply be arguing the point for the sake of it?”
“In this…hypothetical scenario that you’ve thrust upon him?” Hades drawls.
Azem rolls her eyes dramatically. “It was obviously a humourous example to illustrate a point. I suppose your position will be that all examples used in idle dance floor conversation must be strictly empirical?”
“My position is that I prefer to avoid the Hall of Rhetoric and all who frequent it,” Hades retorts coolly.
Again Azem turns under his arm in time with the music, more leading herself than following him, and again she draws somehow nearer than she was before. He can just barely see a strand of her hair peeking out from beneath the cover of her robes, and her vibrant eyes catch the light most alluringly. He wonders distantly if she knows what she’s doing, or, more likely, if she is just as blithely ignorant of this—her actions, his longing—as she seems to be in so many other matters.
--
Something changes after he plucks the little white-haired Miqo’te from the Lifestream. He can feel it almost instantly. Something about the way she looks at him, like she’s never quite bothered to see him before.
She is so different this time around that he doubts himself at nearly every turn. The first one he’d seen had been painfully recognizable, a near-exact miniature of the original, a perfect fragment with the same crooked smile and easy manner, distinguishable even in that she seemed, as the true Azem surely would have been, blissfully unaware that she was a small and sickly sort of abomination.
This one, though…he knows not what to make of her. She is cautious, almost stoic. Skillful and driven, impressive even for being something like half of what she was. He finds himself wondering whether she was very different before Hydaelyn’s influence.
But whether it be by Hydaelyn’s will or her own, she is not the sort of person who pushes. She is, instead, almost infuriatingly amiable. She’s taken what he understands to be quite a beating from Elidibus, aided by the not unsubstantial body of his own great-grandson, no less, been robbed of her companions and then rent across the rift between worlds in their wake, and she seems no less than perfectly contented with this turn of events.
Indeed, as far as he can tell, she treats her closest companions, that small, scheming creature who brought her here, and him, Emet-Selch, more or less the same.
But she is different somehow, after they leave Rak’tika, and she approaches him without reason for the first time in the course of their acquaintance. The people of the Crystarium are practically beside themselves with glee to see her arrive—one would think she’d returned the night sky to them all over again for how they erupt into celebration. Why, to look at them, one might almost forget that they had but recently suffered a terrible attack.
Then again, he supposes there have always been mortals who revel all the harder for having brushed hands with death. It is not a phenomenon he can readily understand. Emet-Selch has never felt lucky for surviving.
“I want to thank you,” she says, quiet, cautious as ever. Her smile isn’t crooked like Azem’s, nor does it light up an entire room. Instead, it is small and subdued, weary. It is the smile of a person who has endured much, who wonders, perhaps, whether she might still achieve anything resembling true happiness again.
No, her smile does not light up a room—at least, not all at once. It burns low and steadfast, a modest hearth his only refuge against an endless winter. His heart aches to see it, and he twists his face into a thin approximation of distaste. “Oh, so I do one little favour for you and now I’ve no ulterior motives to speak of? Is that how this works?”
To his surprise, the one they call the Warrior of Light laughs softly. “You would think that, wouldn’t you?” she inclines her head thoughtfully. “But whatever your reasons, I have my friend back, and I’m grateful for that. It feels like I’ve almost lost them all so many times, I…well.” She averts her eyes, hesitates. “Thank you,” she says again, “for saving her.”
Emet-Selch hesitates, words caught in the back of his throat. “A dear friend once asked me, if one is still technically alive, but everything she’s ever loved is gone, and she is shattered into a million pieces, has she truly survived at all?”
Her smile falls, and she considers him for a moment. “Yes, I think so,” she says, ever cautious. “It would be a miserable circumstance, to be certain, but…as long as you’re alive, you can always start again, can’t you?”
She reaches out and squeezes his arm before she turns to go, and it is only a sliver of pride that keeps him from flinching away from her touch. She is so suffused with light that he can feel it rolling off of her when she draws near, and he wonders yet again how she does not break apart. Surely Hydaelyn’s blessing alone cannot account for such uncommon resilience.
He wants to argue, but his words feel foolish and petulant at best. Suppose you don’t want to start again, he thinks to ask her. Suppose you cannot bear the thought of starting again, after all that has transpired? You cannot possibly imagine what I have suffered these long years without you, he wants to tell her, but what good would that do?
She is not Azem, however unmistakable the hue of her soul. He has not suffered these many long years without her, because she is not even nearly herself. She is little more than a stranger and an enemy to him now, and he suffers still in her presence.
When night falls, the Crystarium comes alive with music and laughter and dancing. The Warrior of Light, or of Darkness, depending upon whom one asks, dances happily with one of the little white-haired twins, with the white-haired Miqo’te who got herself caught in the Lifestream, and even coaxes the hooded creature who calls himself the Crystal Exarch into a dance. He gazes up at her with the unmistakable awe of a hopeless admirer, and she smiles politely back at him, either oblivious or uncaring.
Emet-Selch watches them from high above, caught between seething and aching, missing of all things those dreadful balls the Convocation insisted upon throwing. What wouldn’t he give, he wonders, not without considerable irony, to be standing awkwardly on the sidelines there instead of here?
It is a dreary turn of thought indeed that compels him to descend from his lofty post. He will miss this, too, one day, he thinks. He will miss even this tragic fragment of Azem when she is subsumed into something greater, assuming she even survives the next Rejoining, and where will he be then? Watching some new travesty unfold, feeling nostalgic for the one that came before?
“Oh! I…forgive me, you startled me.” The Warrior of Light quickly returns to her customary distant politeness. “How long have you been here?”
“Here?” Emet-Selch lifts a shoulder, feigning indifference. “Oh, awhile. I was feeling nostalgic, one might say.”
She inclines her head curiously, but there is a certain wryness about the expression. “Oh?” she wonders. “Nostalgic for what?”
In lieu of an answer, Emet-Selch extends a hand to her. The corrupted light that radiates from her is overwarm and nearly blinding even from this distance. He wonders how she does not feel it.
She eyes his hand with thinly-veiled skepticism. You used to like dancing, he almost tells her, but the thought is as a knife twisting in his chest. “Forgive me,” he drawls, “does the esteemed Warrior of Darkness require a more formal invitation?”
She considers him a moment longer, halfway to a strange sort of amusement, before she takes his hand at last.
There is…a rightness in it, in holding her in his arms again. Like the last missing piece in a puzzle long incomplete. He tries very hard not to dwell on the notion.
“May I ask what inspired you to join the festivities?” the Warrior of Light asks him, not unpleasantly. “I confess, I wouldn’t have taken you for a dancer.”
“And what would you have taken me for?” he wonders airily. Perhaps it is uncharitable, he thinks vaguely, but the alternative—to tell her that he never was much of a dancer—begs a slew of follow-up questions he is unwilling to entertain. “Do you suppose I spend my free time tormenting innocents? Kicking puppies?”
“You think my opinion of you so low?” she counters, poorly stifling her amusement. “Is it a crime not to be fond of parties?”
“And when did I say I wasn’t?” he sniffs. “Parties can be most enjoyable, given the right company.”
Her lips twist into a crooked grin. He falters momentarily in the steps of their dance. She has never looked more familiar.
“Shall I take that as a compliment or an insult?” she wonders wryly.
He leads her in a turn under his arm, a momentary respite from the warmth of her closeness, but he finds he is not sorry when she returns to rest her hand upon his shoulder. “I don’t know,” he inclines his head in mock-thoughtfulness, unwilling to think on how he is almost, almost enjoying himself. “How would you measure the pleasantness of your own company?”
The Warrior of Light laughs. Emet-Selch positively loathes how he revels in the sound. “I don’t think I’m qualified to judge,” she says, her smile radiant, blinding.
“No?” Emet-Selch cannot help but to take on a teasing tone, cannot help but to draw her just a little closer against him. She doesn’t seem to mind, if she notices at all. “I happen to know that I am rather miserable company at the best of times,” he tells her, “especially at parties.”
The Warrior of Light seems suddenly…softer, somehow, and she inclines her head thoughtfully, studying him. “See?” she says, so gently that her words seem to ache. “You’re not qualified to judge, either.”
“By the very stars,” Azem drawls, stretching her arms high above her head as they descend the stairs. “Are the meetings always so long?”
Hades hadn’t noticed. Truthfully, he’d been too wrapped up in her presence, in the joy of having her there, in being able to share it with her, in wondering what she might say when the meeting was over. “I’d say we were fortunate it was so short,” he replies pleasantly.
Azem groans and stretches again. “There’s still a bit of daylight left,” she says. “Come on.” She takes his hand and sets off in what is very nearly a run, and what is certainly far too boisterous a pace for the delicate sensibilities of certain residents of this district.
Indeed, as they pass, he can hear various grumbles and shouts of protest, insinuations that they ought to act their age or, more often, that they ought to act the part of upstanding members of the Convocation of Fourteen. A halfhearted protestation of his own settles heavy in the pit of his stomach, and he loathes himself for it. Much as it might embarrass him to be looked down upon, he will endure it gladly rather than be the one to dim Azem’s light.
Soon enough, they reach the edge of the city, where marble turns to verdant grass and towering trees bathed in the warm light of the setting sun. Azem kicks off her shoes, and before he can even think to prepare himself, she throws back the hood of her robes and casts off her mask into the grass at her feet. She shakes out her hair as she turns to face him, barefaced and resplendent, somehow brighter than the sun at her back, and he is left slack-jawed and staring in her wake.
After what must be a rather long moment, her smile falters by a fraction. “Well, are you going to join me, or not?” she wonders with a tilt of her head.
Words fail him. He thinks he says something, stammers a few incoherent syllables, but it’s as though his own voice is coming from very far away. How can he bare his face to her now? How, when she is as a star incarnate, and he altogether unimpressive but for a form which is monstrous even at its very best?
Long before he manages to say anything of consequence, he realizes she has drawn much, much nearer. She moves slowly, more cautious than he has ever seen her as she reaches up and pushes the hood away from his face. Her fingers graze his hair, and he shivers involuntarily. She hovers uncertainly at the strings of his mask, waiting to see if he will stop her.
He is caught impossibly between two extremes, equally devastating—to allow himself to be seen by her, and to run away and hide for the rest of time. If it were up to him, he could not say rightly which he would choose. The only certainty is that he cannot deny her.
“There,” she says, as his mask falls away. She smoothes his hair away from his face. He cannot suppress a shuddering gasp. Her hands settle upon his shoulders and she smiles up at him as though she is uncommonly glad to see him. “Doesn’t that feel better?”
Hades feels himself smiling, feels his hands hovering just shy of her waist, dumbstruck and reeling, basking in the glow of her closeness. But all too soon, she is gone, and it seems to him that she leaves a gnawing emptiness in her wake.
“I won’t be taking your shoes off for you, but you should try it,” she is saying as she turns away from him. “Honestly, I don’t know how you never travel. Amaurot is nice and all, but it’s only so long before the buildings start closing in on me.”
Hades shakes his head subtly, willing a plethora of unhelpful turns of thought to dislodge themselves, and focuses instead on the conversation Azem has offered him. “I was born here,” he says as he moves to join her. He sits in the grass, but does not remove his shoes.
“All the more reason to go elsewhere!” says Azem cheerily. “There’s a whole, wide world outside of this city, did you know that?”
“Well, yes, but—“
“And I’m not sure the Convocation realizes that, either,” she continues. “I mean, I’m grateful for the appointment, and honoured, of course, but one person to oversee everything outside of Amaurot?”
“Do you suppose two would suffice?” Hades drawls, unserious, unthinking.
But Azem turns to look at him, all bright eyes and bare, beautiful face, and she is smiling at him as though his thoughtless sarcasm is the most wonderful thing she has ever heard.
“It would be a start,” she tells him sweetly. “I’m so glad you’ve volunteered.”
Hades sputters at least half a protestation, but Azem’s smile only grows, until at last she falls back into the grass, laughing at him. Her laughter is a warm, musical sound, and though it is at his expense, he cannot help but to feel that he would suffer countless greater indignities for the mere pleasure of hearing it again. If her smile could light up a room, then her laughter is as the very sun above them.
There’s a whole, wide world outside of Amaurot, did you know?
None of them has ever quite had her voice, for a mercy. It was a warm, sweet thing, a music all its own, a music he had never heard before and has never once heard since. The mere memory of it echoes now in the empty hall he could not bear to fill with the shades of his comrades.
He can feel her presence now, the one they call the Warrior of Light, the fragment, the usurper. She is practically bleeding corrupted aether with her every breath, but it seems the reincarnated Oracle managed to stay the flow for the time being. Better this way, perhaps. Now that he thinks on it, he’s not sure he could bear this agony another seven times, wondering, waiting, hoping, despairing. It is far too much already.
He has been a faithful servant. He has done more than could be reasonably expected of him. Perhaps when the world is whole, he might rejoin her in the Lifestream. It is a surpassingly soothing thought, that this torment might one day come to an end. She is a force of nature, even sundered as she is. It won’t be long before she envelopes what remains of this wretched world in light. Nothing of note to stand in her way now, and Emet-Selch will not prolong her suffering unnecessarily.
He clutches the crystal he fashioned for Azem, so tightly it digs into the flesh of his palm. He has half a thought to relinquish it to this Warrior of Light, to lay the truth before her and beg or cajole or force her to see reason. He tells himself that it is out of respect for Azem’s memory that he does not.
He feels her approaching before he hears her footsteps upon the marble floors.
“I’m afraid this is quite unacceptable,” he tells her as she enters, his gaze still affixed to the far wall. “I gave you very specific instructions.”
She doesn’t respond. He considers that perhaps she doesn’t remember. She was very nearly gone when last they spoke. Curiously, it is this remembrance that compels him to turn and face her. Strange that a foolish part of him should be glad to see her still in one piece. He will miss her when she is gone.
“Whatever am I do to with you?” he sighs, mocking but without any bite. “My invitation was for you alone. Don’t think I haven’t felt your little friends scurrying about. Are you so lost without them?”
She considers him curiously, takes a step forward into the grand ballroom. “A little, perhaps,” she says quietly, and with surprising amicability. “But your accusatory tone is a little rich. I’ve just been talking with your old friend, Hythlodaeus, after all.”
The name alone is as a dagger through his heart. She has never sounded more familiar. “Of course you would have,” he mutters. “I may have gotten a little carried away in my…attention to detail,” he lifts a shoulder, poorly feigning indifference.
“It is impressive, I’ll grant you that,” she says, with a sad sort of a smile.
Amaurot is nice and all, another voice echoes from within his very soul, but I don’t know how you never leave. “Not to your tastes, Hero?” he sneers, but there’s not even nearly as much bite in it as he’d intended. “You prefer to feel the grass between your toes?”
Her smile falls and she narrows her eyes curiously, understandably confused by a jibe meant for someone who no longer exists.
I was born here, he almost tells her, the same explanation he’d offered to Azem, who had not considered it an apt excuse for how dearly he had loved the original city. But he was most certainly not born here, in this flimsy approximation upon this tragic fragment of a star, and he rather doubts even this broken shadow of Azem would understand. How could she?
“And what was it that you came here to do, exactly?” he sneers, instead. “To stop me?”
Her features soften subtly. There is something profoundly irritating about the expression. He feels almost as though he’s being pitied.
“I’m not sure I know how to do that,” she tells him. Her voice seems so much softer than the echo of Azem in his mind. “But I do very much want my friend back.”
Her words are as kindling to the flame rising within him. He’ll concede he’d thoroughly enjoyed putting that small, scheming creature through hell while he awaited her. “Your friend, is it?” says Emet-Selch with cruel glee. “How disappointed he shall be to hear that! ‘Twill be a joy to tell him.”
She is infuriatingly unperturbed. “I don’t suppose you’ll just tell me where you’re keeping him,” she offers sorrowfully, and just as quickly as it has come, the fire within him goes out, extinguished utterly by the sheer force of the sorrow she feels for the one who calls himself the Crystal Exarch.
“No,” Emet-Selch agrees simply. “I don’t suppose I will. It’s quite impressive, what your so-called friend has achieved, and in your name, no less. Does one allow tomes upon tomes of precious knowledge to go walking out of the library? Not in the care of what will soon be a world-ending abomination, at the very least.”
This, of all things, proves enough to dampen her indomitable spirit at long last, but it doesn’t feel even nearly as good as it should when genuine fear flashes across her features. Indeed, he realizes he’s never seen her look this way, not even for an instant.
Bizarrely, absurdly, foolishly, he feels compelled to put a stop to it.
“Oh, nevermind that nasty business for now,” he affects a smile, waves a hand. His change in demeanour catches her attention, at least, and the fear is replaced by a wary sort of bemusement. “I wonder,” he approaches, watches how her shoulders tense and how she forces them to relax, “would you favour me with another dance?”
She studies him carefully, and his attention is drawn to the strange paleness of her eyes, the way the Light has begun leeching the colour from her hair. He thinks of Azem’s vibrant eyes and the way she was so proud of her long, lustrous hair, tries not to dwell upon how strange it is to feel fondness for the eyes and the hair of one so different, one a mere shadow of the first.
Still, his smile feels suddenly quite genuine, and there is no affect in the way he offers his hand to her. “Humour me?” he asks her, and scarcely recognizes his own voice.
An echo of her former easy smile returns to her lovely features, and she takes his hand at long last. “All right,” she says.
There is caution and distance in it at first, a thread of undeniable tension she does not quite manage to conceal, or perhaps displays intentionally, as though to remind him that she has not forgotten where she is or what brought them here.
Or perhaps, he thinks, with no small measure of surprise, it is to remind herself.
Somewhat impulsively, he leads her in a spin and draws her against him all in a rush. She lets out a soft gasp as she grasps onto his shoulder and looks up to meet his gaze, flushed and breathless. The sight is intoxicating. Indeed, in the span of an instant, he could very nearly forget himself.
Her lips part and she inhales as though to speak, then hesitates. Her brow furrows subtly. “Why ask me to dance now?” she wonders, but there is no accusation in her tone. “Are you so fond of dancing?”
You used to like dancing, he almost tells her again, but the words catch in his throat, too heavy to be spoken aloud. “Why agree?” he counters, instead.
She inclines her head, almost playfully. “I’ll concede to a certain morbid curiosity,” she tells him. “Don’t tell me you’ve never done anything simply because you wanted to know what would happen?”
“You flatter me,” says Emet-Selch flatly.
The corner of her lip quirks upward. “Perhaps,” she teases, “I’m merely hoping you’ll be more amenable to what I want if I indulge you a little.”
“Yes,” Emet-Selch agrees airily, “that is how most of your dealings go, isn’t it?”
The Warrior of Light laughs. None of them has ever had Azem’s voice, for a mercy, but there is just the barest sliver of it in her laughter. It is a music all its own, one which fairly echoes in the empty hall around them.
“Is it so wrong?” she wonders. “To need something that someone else can provide?”
He leads her in another spin and draws her against him once more. She is smiling and breathless, thrown off her guard by the exertion, perhaps, but the sight of it is intoxicating, nonetheless.
“Why,” he drawls, teasing, lost in the moment, “I think I ought to be offended. Is that all we are to one another, Hero?”
He amends his mocking nickname for her without thinking much about it. Indeed, he is not thinking much at all. Not about who she is, and certainly not about who she is not.
Not, at least, until her easy smile falls by a fraction, turns cautious and weary once more, and she studies him for a long and heavy moment before she speaks. “That is the question, isn’t it?” she asks him.
In perfect harmony, their dance comes to an end, but neither seems eager, or perhaps willing to pull away. He wonders for the first time what Azem might have said, what she might have done if he had posed such a question to her. He finds that the answer doesn’t matter to him as much as it should. He inclines his head to the Warrior of Light, willing her to continue, curious only as to her answer.
“What am I to you?” she clarifies softly.
Suddenly he is acutely aware of her closeness, of her had on his shoulder and of his hand upon the small of her back. Her pale eyes reflect the warm light of the hall, the faintest echo of the unique hue of her soul. In so many ways, she is nothing like Azem. In so many ways, her mere existence dishonours and disgraces Azem’s memory.
If he should care for her still, if she, herself should mean something to him, not set apart from the legacy she bears, but in spite of it, what then? What will become of him then?
Silence reigns a moment too long between them. Emet-Selch hears himself swallow, feels her warm breath against his lips.
But he can feel her comrades approaching, senses them long before he can hear the clamour of their feet upon the pavement or their voices ringing in the unnatural stillness of his city.
In the end, it is more than he can abide. To care for her, this Warrior of Light and of Darkness, is to care for a usurper, a disgusting, damaged thing that clings to the vestiges of Azem’s soul. If she, herself, is real, alive, enough—
Emet-Selch affords her a thin challenge of a smile. “Perhaps,” he says wryly, “if you’d come alone, as I asked, there might have been time for such talk. But, as it stands…” He pulls away from her with a sweeping bow just before the doors swing open.
For ages beyond counting, the seasons in Amaurot were nothing less than perfect. Summer was never too hot and winter never too cold, and the spring and autumn were beautiful beyond description.
The change was so subtle at first that hardly anyone noticed, and those that did thought, or perhaps hoped they were imagining it. But as years went by, the winters grew harsher, the summers hotter, and sometimes it seemed the spring and the fall came and went on a whim. Hades was young when the change began.
Hades is a young man still, yet he feels as though he has aged well beyond his years of late. Were he a less prideful man, he might ask Hythlodaeus how he has managed to keep hold of his youthful spirit since his appointment to the Chief of the Bureau of the Architect.
Indeed, Hythlodaeus’ infallibly cheery disposition is beginning to rankle, but Hades is not eager to be alone with his thoughts this evening. It is uncommonly cold and dark for being so late into the year. Shouldn’t it be the spring already? Shouldn’t there be flowers?
“Hades!” Hythlodaeus calls to him as he enters. It’s a favourite haunt of his, whenever he gets the time, a small and simple bar where everyone seems to know him. To Hades, the atmosphere is stifling at best.
He doesn’t notice until he’s already far too close that Hythlodaeus is accompanied by someone else. She pauses mid-sentence and turns to smile crookedly up at Hades as a strand of long, lustrous hair tumbles out from beneath the cover of her hood.
“The infamous Hades,” she says in a voice like music, “lord of the Underworld, or so I’m told!”
Hades shoots a halfhearted glare in Hythlodaeus’s direction, but his friend is, as ever, unperturbed. He introduces Azem by her true name—for there is, as yet, no such thing as an Azem—and she-who-is-not-yet-Azem waves away Hythlodaeus’s high praise of her own gifts and character in favour of asking after Hades.
He answers her questions, not a little baffled to be the subject of such acute interest from one so obviously remarkable, and all the while, her true name echoes in his mind as though it were a large and cavernous space, devoid of anything else but the sound. It feels too sacred to speak aloud, and so he never does, not to her nor anyone else. It is something of a relief when she acquires a title, but that is much, much later.
The three of them talk long into the night, far longer by far than Hades had intended to stay. But while he will concede to enjoying the presence of Hythlodaeus on occasion, to be in Azem’s presence is to bask in the glow of the sun itself.
Night fades into the grey light of early morning by the time they make their way home. Hades well knows that Hythlodaeus doesn’t live in the opposite direction, yet he says nothing by way of protest. Indeed, when Azem links her arm in his as they walk, the thought to raise the matter fairly flies from his mind.
“Would you look at the sky?” she says, squeezing his arm gently. “It seems the spring might finally make her appearance, after all!”
Hades sniffs doubtfully. “It’s early yet,” he says. “It could just as easily turn into another cold and dreary winter’s day.”
He very nearly regrets his words, but Azem’s spirit is not even remotely dampened by his needless pessimism. She chuckles lightly. “No, I don’t think so,” she tells him.
“And what makes you so certain?” he wonders.
She lifts a shoulder, affords him a crooked smile. More of her hair falls free of her hood as she turns her head to look up at him. “Just a feeling,” she tells him easily.
“Do your feelings often control the weather?” Hades drawls.
She laughs again. “Well, it’s a mercy yours don’t!” she bats his arm with her free hand. “Why, it’d be winter all year round!”
Hades scoffs, dangerously close to smiling, and somehow wholly unable to feign any real offense. “I’ll have you know that some people quite enjoy the winter.”
“Then,” Azem considers slowly, poorly concealing a mischievous sort of grin, “you’ll concede that today might turn into a lovely day, regardless of the weather?”
Hades furrows his brow, baffled. Azem returns her attention to the sky, and her hood at last falls away from her long, lustrous hair. “I’ve always loved early mornings,” she tells him quietly. “It reminds me that no matter what came before, you can always start again, you know?”
Hades turns his attention to the sky, as well, and he tries, for whatever it’s worth, to see what she sees. In the days, the years, the centuries to come he will often doubt her, will misunderstand her and think her worldview dreadfully naive at the very best. But in this moment, he considers that the world must be quite beautiful through her eyes.
“Yes,” he murmurs. “Yes, I suppose so.”