This Time Imperfect: Prolouge

Fanfiction: The Legend of Dragoon
This Time Imperfect: Prolouge

All things created exist to be destroyed. That is the fate of things that live. Life is powered only by death, they exist together as part of a cycle, a wheel that spins round and round through space and time never ending until one day all stops, and the cycle begins again.

A tiny light...a breath in the darkness...a pulse...a heartbeat. All that was planned will come to fruition. This is my purpose. Not to destroy, but to give life.

I walk in the footsteps of Soa.

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A platinum haired man stood tense against a richly decorated guard rail. His pale hands, once clenched tightly about the hilt of a sword, now held on to the rail like a vice. From the room at his back there came a scream that sent dread through his body like a shockwave, it propelled his body away from the rail. For a moment he struggled, instinct against reason, and finally he willed himself back to the railing. Again from the room a scream echoed and he clung to the rail as though it could save his own life and that of the woman behind the door. As much as he wanted to, he could not go to her, he knew better, especially in this country that was governed by women. It was taboo for a man to be present at the birthing of a child.

“Please,” He whispered, squeezing his eyes shut as to her he sent all his strength. “Take courage.”

Moments later a final, weakened cry issued from behind that locked door, then nothing. He strained to hear: the sound of a baby’s cry, a mother’s wail of loss, the midwife shouting orders, anything! But there was nothing, only a dreadful silence that seemed to pass into a gaping eternity that echoed round the confining walls of an ageless empty heart.

The door opened behind him and he spun around. The nurse, Setie, looked at him with tears in her large doe like eyes. But he would have none of it! He would not believe what he saw there! He raced past the woman in a flurry, so quickly she did not even realize until he was already in the room.

“Don’t!”

“Setie, you fool! Get him out of here!”

The voice and the order were as sharp as the arrows that suddenly pierced through the man’s ageless heart. There on the bed lay his love and life, her soft blonde hair splayed across a pillow, sticking in clumps or plastered to her forehead by sweat. The sheets around her legs, her soft pale thighs, the skirt she’d been wearing, all soaked with blood, the dark secret blood of a woman’s womb, the blood that had nourished their child, and more blood, the blood of her whole body.

His eyes took all this in, even as the women scrambled to cover her body, and finally they alighted on a small, carefully wrapped bundled placed on the small table where rightly their baby should be. Nothing, her struggle, for nothing, her devotion, for nothing, her death… Nothing.

He buried his face in his hands, his tainted hands that could create nothing, that could only hold a sword and follow the misguided deeds of others. Hands that should never have held her! He must have screamed, but he only knew the hollow ache in his chest where his heart should have been.

“Please,” Setie begged as she tugged on his arm. “Come away.”

He dropped his hands and stared down at Setie with empty eyes; finally he understood and turned to follow her when from the table there came a small strangled noise. It was immediately followed by the long anticipated sound of a baby’s wail. Everyone turned and for a moment no one moved. Finally, the father approached it and unwrapped it with careful hands.

A girl.

She lashed out at the world with tiny limbs and screamed with a voice much larger than her body, screamed for the mother she had killed.

And in that instant, he understood.

Nearby were the doors to the balcony. With one arm he roughly scooped the child up and with his free hand he threw open the doors. Before any of the nurses could stop him he had the child over the railing, holding her by only one leg.

“Stop,” cried the midwife, the First Sacred Sister of Mille Seseau. “You don’t have to do this! It is not the child’s fault; if you must blame someone blame me for not being able to save her!”

He ignored the woman’s plea, his attention focused instead on the child. “Abomination,” he growled as the child’s wails grew louder. “Neither human nor Wingly, in ancient times, in this very palace, you would never have been born. I could let you plummet to the ground, destroy that which was never meant to be,” he paused, “but would I then save you? Would you save yourself?”

Slowly he drew the child back and gently curled his arms around her. After a moment she quieted and opened her eyes to blearily gaze up at him. Her eyes were red violet, like all wingly babies In fact her coloring lent nothing to her human heritage.

“We’ll find her a nurse,” Miranda was saying. “Leave her here in Mille Seseau, we will raise her as a Sacred Sister.”

“No,” He replied softly. “She will have a Wingly nurse. She will be raised as a Wingly.” He turned his crimson eyes to the darkening sky where the night’s first stars and the remnants of The Moon That Never Sets sparkled. “Welcome to the world my daughter…”

The hum of magic reverberated through the room as Lloyd’s wings of light blossomed from his back. Effortlessly, the Wingly leapt from the balcony and into the eternal sky.

“Lloyd!”

Welcome to the world my daughter.

Welcome to Endiness.

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Twenty-three hundred years after the destruction of the Moon That Never Sets, Endiness had become a very different place, and though the fairly recent destruction that assailed the land lent some familiarity to the world gone by, it was still a very different place. For a time there had been peace. Nearly twenty-three hundred years of peace and prosperity. Together with their Wingly cousins the Humans had created marvelous technology. After a time of strained relations those few Winglies who still felt hostility for their flightless cousins finally admitted that their cleverness and ingenuity was on par with, if not surpassing, their own. And so the humans created machines were powered with the Wingly magic to create a better life for all.

All of that had changed now however. Some forty odd years previous the Winglies had slowly begun to disappear. At first the human leaders sent envoys to their hidden cities to determine what fate had befallen the Winglies, but to their great dismay they found that the cities had sealed themselves tight. Thinking the Winglies had betrayed them the Humans lashed out with their technology but nothing could break through the enchantment. As news leaked out of the Wingly’s supposed betrayal the lives of those few Winglies still remaining in the world were suddenly in utter peril. Many were captured and dragged to gates of the ancient cities but not even they could open the way and thus several hundred Winglies were destroyed. Those left alive were run from both town and city to make their way in the hostile world outside. Few survived. With no one left to blame and rumors spearing from court to court as lightening from the sky, the Humans finally turned on one another, and thus died the peace of twenty-three hundred years as Endiness once again burst into war.