Bereft: Demise

P | Of Realms Once Green

The Dreaming Isle was once a land of emerald splendor.

The Dreaming Children had made their homes within the Isle's temperate dales and below trees of quivering ochre leaves. The forests had echoed with their voices, their laughter, and the Songs they created in the name of their beloved Wild King.

The svelte people of the Isle had known happiness, and their world had prospered.

Their fortune had lasted until they came. Until the Sins arrived.

As the Sin of Envy perched himself upon a blackened outcrop and surveyed the withered land before him, he recalled the beauty and the people that had inhabited that dark, despairing place. He remembered when the Realm of Sin had been the Isle, when his brethren had been his allies, and when their corruption hadn't yet touched that unspoiled paradise.

He didn't want to remember, but he couldn't forget.

Balthier rose from his rock and leapt to the ground below. Thin plumes of ash disturbed by his movements lifted into the stagnant air. What remained of the ancient forests that had housed the sylphlike people of this realm yet smoldered with the hellfire summoned from the bowels of the Pit. It filled Balthier's lungs and choked him.

Silence reigned. The green-eyed Sin tilted his head back and would have uttered an oath to the sky overhead—but there was no sky to behold. There was naught above but the vast emptiness of the void torn into the heavens by the Baal and his minions.

In solitude, Balthier walked the broken paths to his destination and heard nothing but the soft hush of his own footsteps and the murmur of embers seething in the ruins. The darkness pressed upon him, inescapable, but vague dints of light illuminated the boundary of the smoking crag and the shell of the once stately tower.

Above the crushing silence rose a single keening cry.

The Sin smirked as the sound echoed from within the ruins and escaped into the dark. Whispers seemed to rise in its passage, curious susurrations mimicking the agony heard within that solitary scream. If there had been a passing wind, it would have laughed as it carried the noise to all stretches of that bleak domain. The Children were long gone, but their bitterness remained, sown into the earth like so many hateful, acrid seeds.

The crunch of withered bracken below Balthier's leather shoes became the chatter of shifting rock. In a bygone age, the dome of the Wild King's temple had gleamed like a warrior's polished breastplate, but it'd long since become a tarnished, shattered shell of its former self.

Again the cry rose from the tower's depths.

Before the Sin appeared a thin, wavering veil, a ghost of color and light drawing a translucent curtain between the creature and the tower's crooked entrance. As he came nearer, the curtain grew more opaque and the vaporous whorls solidified into onyx-like bars. The veritable wall of violent effulgence extended in every direction without end.

Balthier studied the ward with a cynical eye as he tapped his fingertips upon the surface. A bolt of energy lanced through his hand and Balthier recoiled, hissing at the crimson burns smoking on his fingers. The ward crackled in warning and sent the barbed whorls into a frenzied kaleidoscope of motion.

Balthier didn't heed the implicit warning. He was, after all, the one who had set the ward here in the first place.

The Sin raised his hand to his mouth and pressed the pad of his thumb to his lower canine. Balthier bit down until the skin split and blood welled from the open wound, then he took his hand from his lips and inspected the bloody digit. He traced his thumb across the ward's face.

The magic existing within the ward pulsed beneath the Sin's foreign touch. The opaque whorls withered, and the snap and crack of shifting energies played a gruesome melody. The Sin's blood soaked into the ward until a fissure appeared, and Balthier ripped the fissure wide, causing the barrier to screech in protest.

The Sin of Envy parted his ward and stepped into the dilapidated tower, where he allowed his eyes to list from the blackened remains of a gilded chandelier to the convex walls. He continued forward as dry bones crumbled underfoot.

At the rear of the once splendid temple waited a simple door of rotted wood and oxidized metal. The door fell aside when Balthier passed through the crumbling portal where stone steps led to the dark recesses below. The walls were forever held aloft by time's frozen embrace.

The Sin descended. Again the silence was broken by the lonely, solitary cry reaching out for response. The walls of the cellar stairwell had once been painted in scenes of weaving leaves and young, pale haired warriors chasing wolves through the trees. The images were blackened by flame, by smoke, and by blood.

By deception.

At the stairwell's end, a final door barred Balthier's passage, and it too fell away at his touch. Inside, a groaning creature skittered upon the dirty, uneven pavers with disconcerting movements. Chains clicked in the cramped, rank space.

"Sethan."

The scrawny creature jerked as Balthier spoke, and his head snapped upright when wild, unfocused eyes searched the shadows. For a moment, golden light blossomed and spilled forth from the Sin of Wrath's flesh as unchecked power rushed through his bones. The large shackle tightened about his throat was illuminated, as was the length of his matted, carmine hair and his black, sightless eyes.

"Sethan," Balthier crooned as he walked nearer the trembling Sin. Sethan lurched backward only to be held in place by the unrelenting shackle. "I've come to release you, Wrath."

Sethanstared as his lips parted to reveal sharp, jagged teeth. His features were narrowed, and his ears were elongated to slender points. He didn't speak, but his quivering eyes found Balthier's emerald gaze and held it. Balthier stared back into the abyss waiting beneath Sethan's bruised lids and wondered if the mad Sin of Wrath was beyond use.

"I will let you go, but you're going to do as I say. Aren't you, Sethan?"

The Sin struggled to find his voice, to remember words. His throat bemoaned a century of mistreatment, as it had been a hundred years since Sethan had last had something to drink or to eat, a hundred years since he had last spoken to another, and many, many decades since he had given in to the sweet abandon of madness. "Yes...."

Balthier grinned. His hand gripped the shackle binding the Sin of Wrath to that wretched place and with a singular, downward motion, Balthier ended the Sin's century of captivity. "You and I are going to kill your brother, Sethan," he said as the bits of corroded metal slipped through his closed fist. "We are going to kill the Sin of Pride and his ill-gotten host!"

Sethan clutched the leg of Balthier's ironed pants. "Yes," he repeated as he fumbled at his naked throat and his shoulders heaved with quick, eager inhalations. Free. Sethan was free. Free of that static, broken realm and its silent tortures—and the soft droning of him, of the monster murmuring in the weft of the Dream.

The Sin of Wrath screamed—but not in pain, not in loneliness. He screamed in jubilation.

He vanished from his prison in a quick gasp of sulfur and smoke. Balthier tossed his head back and, thinking of the waiting nightmare he would unleash upon Darius and his host, began to laugh.