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"I will take it," Ashe declares.
Balthier does not point out that their fair princess has taken the last three espers they've come across and that, at this point, she's beginning to resemble a twenty gil trollop. The black ink spiralling around her arms is decidely tacky in its excess.
He is morbidly curious as to whether the newest one shall cover her bared stomach.
Their orphan boy looks up from where he's digging enthusiastically through what is either the remains of an earlier Etem dogfight, or a dead mage. Balthier isn't sure which it is, to be quite honest; the churl has less compunction over stealing from the dead than most sky pirates do.
They are bloody and half-beaten, but they are alive and the fickle esper they'd disturbed is contained, spinning slowly as it waits for their decision. It is a good time to steal from the dead.
"Whatever," Vaan says, "Not like I want all that on my skin. Do you know how hard it'd be to steal when all they'd have to do is say, 'Yeah, that guy, the one with the big esper tattoo!'?"
Ashe turns to stare at Vaan with the look of a noble faced with something extremely distasteful. "Not all are concerned with a life of thievery," she says.
"But some of us are," Vaan returns easily. He does not glance up from his treasure again, well-versed in the foilibles of royalty by now; he had learned quickly that Ashelia b'nargin Dalmasca was more than half scared child and less than a quarter queen.
Instead, Balthier watches as the boy sets aside a book that looks older than the mines themselves. "When you got a second, Balthier, can you read that and lemme know if it's worth anything?"
A leading man does not poke fun of a commoner's inability to read. "Of course," Balthier murmurs, "Though I daresay I will need a bath afterwards."
"Thanks." The smile he's flashed is dirty, exhausted, and charming for all of that. It is not so much that Vaan cannot read, as that he struggles with anything but the most rudimentary of hunting bills.
The price of a country in decline, Balthier thinks, and politely gives Ashe the attention she's waiting for. She has an exhibitionist's streak in her, the princess. He's never seen her accept an esper if someone is not watching raptly with bated breath.
"Esper," Ashe calls, "I summon thee." She raises one arm to the spinning sigil and it flares black light.
The gravity of the situation is ruined slightly by the fact that Vaan's much abused katana is still sticking straight out of the ground two feet from Ashe's royal person. Balthier squints in the light to make out Vaan's slight figure, not paying the slightest bit of attention, and so misses what happens next.
"What trickery?" Ashe murmurs, affronted.
Balthier shoots a look at her, then turns to face her fully. The esper's sigil is still rotating slowly in the air, the esper himself a ghostly apparation behind it. It gives Ashe an unimpressed look from one serpent yellow eye and opens its great maw.
"No," he says. Balthier finds himself rather startled to hear a child's petulant whine in its voice.
"I have defeated you!" Ashe says. ("We," Vaan mutters from his dusty corner.) "You must obey me!"
"Not you," the esper says liltingly. Its teeth are like daggers in its mouth as it slowly turns its head, regarding the three of them. Vaan still has not looked up from his loot, Balthier notes, and is amused despite himself. "Beloved of the Occuria are you, child of kings, and Occuria we do not serve. To you we shall not bind."
Ashe breathes harshly through her nose. "You judge me for what others have laid before me?" she asks.
"Yes," the esper says, "As is our place. By our laws are the Occuria anathemas to the gods, false gods themselves. We shall not bind to their Hand."
Ah, curiouser and curiouser. "False gods, did you say?"
"Mewling infants, undying, fashioned by the High Seraph's traitorous hand." The esper tilts its head again, considering, "We alone hold sway over right and wrong, ever Ivalice's souls to guard."
There's a general stir behind him as Vaan clambers to his feet. "Why do you sound like a kid?" he asks. He wraps both hands around his katana and heaves; Balthier reaches out a hand to steady him so he does not end up on his (rather fetching) rear.
The esper's tail twitches. "Feared by the gods, we are bound as a child evermore, to carry out our duty with eyes unclouded."
"That stinks," Vaan offers. He slings his katana across his shoulders and rubs a hand across his nose, streaking dirt. "Kind of stupid, though. They made you, right? Why would they be scared of you?"
Balthier hands a handerkerchief over to the boy when he fusses at his nose again. Picking dried blood out of his nostrils was one of Vaan's few habits that even he found foul. "I think," he murmurs sotto voice as Ashe fumes, "That you are rather forgetting what our battle was like."
"Well, yeah," Vaan says, "But if we could defeat him, the gods should be able to do it, easy. They defeated the twelve dark espers, right? So they're just being mean to not let him grow up."
"That is not the issue," Ashe interrupts. "I have not made my decision on whether to follow the Occuria's path or not. Surely you can bind to me."
The esper rears back and opens its maw further to display teeth that are, frankly, more daunting than any Balthier has seen before. "Insult us not, Occuria's Chosen. Touched by their foul deeds you have been, reeking of their machinations always. We shall not prostrate ourselves to one who blindly follows the commandments of false-gods."
It turns its face to regard Balthier next. "Touched by the traitors," it pipes, "You wear their sigils on your skin. Nay, we shall not bind to you."
Chaos stirs in the back of Balthier's mind. His sigil itches between his shoulder blades, but Balthier only smiles. "I admit I am relieved," he tells the esper and it throws back its serpentine head and laughs, high and piping like a child.
At last it turns to Vaan and Balthier is not precisely surprised when its inhuman eyes soften. Vaan stares back, nonplussed, as Ashe hisses curses beneath her breath.
There is silence in their little deadend cave. The hum of magicite is already dieing now that the esper fueling it has been unsealed and taken. He gives it another fifty years or so before it is as exhausted as the Lhusu Mines.
The esper twitches two of its ludicrously tiny feet and its sigil lights up again, rotating slowly.
"Unworthy of the Occuria," it murmurs to Vaan, "Cast aside in favor of a child more tractile, born under the sign of the Knight-Star." It twirls like a snake shedding its skin. "Unmarked by the traitors are you, and so you shall be our voice in this world, to summon us how you see fit."
Vaan is mometarily stunned into stupified silence. He would treasure it, if Ashe's eyes weren't narrowing dangerously, her mouth already open to argue with a creature eons older than herself. Balthier, at times, admires their plucky heroine for her gall. When she goes as redfaced and petulant as a child is not one of those times.
"No, hey, no!" Vaan says. He draws away from the esper and shakes his head violently. "I don't want you. Come on, bind to someone else!"
The gaze Vaan is gifted with is distinctly amused. Amused on a serpent looks vaguely like it is deciding whether you would taste better dead or alive. Balthier rests one hand on the churl's back, low, where the skin is bare and warm and criss crossed with almost invisible scars; their journey has not been easy for one so untried.
Vaan flits an uneasy glance his way. "How about Penelo?" he asks frantically, "She has, uh, Zeromus, I think. And Cuchulainn."
"We are the Keeper of the Precepts, hume-child, knower of the rights and wrongs of your soul, and by us are you judged worthy." The esper drifts closer still, lowering its head to eye level. "We shall have you, or we shall have none."
"Can we go with the none?" Vaan asks.
"No," Ashe answers tightly, "We shall need this power if we are to protect Dalmasca, Vaan. Accept it." Her arms are crossed over her scant chest, the Tournesol's jaunty sunflower motif hugged to her breast.
The esper rounds like its been stabbed in its tail. Its eyes gleam as darkly as its body shakes ominously; even see-through, Balthier has no illusions about who is in control. "You will not use us," it hisses, the s sounds elongating in its agitation. "To the Occuria we shall never bend head; to their profane rites we hold no quarter. The hume-child alone shall we grant our ear."
"Is it going to hurt?" Vaan asks in a small voice.
Balthier forgets, at times, that seventeen is still very much a child in most parts of the Empire, Dalmasca's disputed heirarchy not withstanding. He himself hadn't been considered an adult until he was 21 and suffocating under a Judge's heavy armor.
Vaan is sand and desert storms, unpredictable and stinging in battle, but he is still very young. "No," Balthier murmurs back, reaching out to squeeze one muscled shoulder, "It shan't hurt a bit."
"I'll do it," Vaan says.
The esper whips around and lifts its fang filled jaws in what Balthier is going to charitably call a grin. "We are Zodiark," it says, "And Zodiark has chosen the hume-child Vaan to be our guide in this world, to summon and use our power as he sees fit."
The sigil unwinds itself in long spools of black ink that dive over Vaan's shoulders even as Zodiark fades from view. Vaan makes a low, startled noise, and Balthier feels the mark write under his fingertips, silky and slick to the touch.
"You're alright," he says, because the boy is clamping his fingers hard against the metal of his pants. "You're doing fine, Vaan. Breathe."
An esper's mark is not precisely painful. Rather, it is an amalgam of uncomfortablely intimate touches, sliding cooly across skin until it can settle where it wants to. Balthier leans away from Vaan slightly, so that he may watch the mark settle.
It is larger than the sigils the others bear, which he supposes is to be expected. Zodiark almost killed Vaan a number of times, beating the boy down only for him to arise, more and more exhausted, with every wave of Ashe's magic. Any esper capable of putting this little party down at this stage of the game was bound to have a showy sigil.
When the sigil has finally settled, it is scrawled across the boy's shoulders. It flirts with the short ends of the boy's hair against the nape of his neck and dives down 'neath his vest only to reemerge on his lower back. Balthier uses a finger to touch the mark where it disappears again, cut off by the edge of the churl's red sash, and finds himself wondering just how far down it goes.
He wants to find out. Preferably by stripping the boy in his bunk and tracing it with his tongue.
"Impressive," he tells Vaan when the boy stops panting like he's going to sob. "Much larger than my own." Chaos had left a mark like an arrow down his spine, the sigil's horns just barely brushing the base of his neck while its end terminated below his shoulder blades.
Vaan gives a shaky laugh. "Really?" he asks, peaking out through his dirty hair.
"Yes, though I am quite certain it is the only thing on your person that would be true of," Balthier says, and steps away from the boy. Time enough to find out just where the sigils ends later, when they are not hundreds of feet below the earth and surrounded by death.
"You can feel it?" Ashe asks. Her own marks suddenly seem less lewd, if only because they are small and powerless in the face of the sheer magicks Vaan's sigil implies. Her small hand covers the one on her bicep with something like envy. Belias has been loyal to his master, but he's not particularly powerful.
"Yeah," Vaan says, frowning, "He's... he's pretty happy. He was alone a long time."
Grand, Balthier thinks. Their orphan has just adopted an orphan. A giant orphan who almost killed them all and then got snotty about it.
"Well then," Balthier says, dusting off his hands, "Shall we leave?"
It's a miserable trek out of the mines, made all the worse because Vaan is in front of him and all Balthier can think about whilst he slays hecteyes is those damnedable sigil marks, stark and crisp against Vaan's dark skin.