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The first thought that crosses Joey's mind is, This isn't real. The second is, I don't think I care.
Xornoth -- is this Xornoth, the man who became the demon, or is it Ceura, the man who ran away from their destiny for so long that they ran right into it? -- smiles at him from the steps of the temple, pink hair pulled back into some complicated elvish braid that Joey's never had the patience to learn how to do no matter how many times they tried to teach him. They say, "Hello Joey."
The water temple is burning around them; Joey can feel the heat from all the way over here and yet he still moves closer, still gets drawn into the man's space before he can rightly help it. Xornoth stands up. They're taller than him -- but they've always been taller than him, even way back when they were just children ruling the world and nothing more.
"You're dead," he says in place of a greeting, just barely stopping himself from flinching back when their hand lifts to touch his face. They pause, glancing over his face before they ask, softly, "Do I look dead to you?"
No, Joey thinks. Behind them, the flames rise higher; it makes their hair shine red. No, you look like the last time I saw you before everything went wrong. You don't look dead, love, you've never looked more alive.
"You're dead," Joey repeats instead. "You're dead."
But they're not. They're standing in front of him, so close that he can hear their heart beating -- or maybe that's his own beating so loud he can hear it pounding in his ears. They're standing so close that it wouldn't take much effort at all to close the distance.
Xornoth's hand ghosts over his cheek, just the barest brush of skin to skin contact, and it burns. They say, as the fire grows bigger, "Am I?
Joey doesn't know, and, to be honest? Joey doesn't care.
/
(If he thinks about it hard enough, he can remember wandering around a stuffy, cold elvish kingdom because his mother dragged him to a diplomatic ball and he did everything he could to get away from it. His feet carried him to the city's library, though he didn't ever read all that much, and some days he wished that he had just kept walking.
He had wandered through the building until he found them. Two boys, one dressed in the bright blues of Rivendell and the other in softer shades of the same color; an heir and a spare.
The younger one (the one he had assumed was younger and had been right), with the less elaborate circlet on his head, had asked him something in such fast given Elvish that he could only stare. He'd been taking Elvish for years and he still had no idea what he'd been asked.
The other boy, the one with antlers on his crown, had spoken in a heavily accented Mangrovian Common to his brother, "Elinar, we speak Common to our guests." And to him, he said, "You're from the jungle, aren't you?"
He simply nodded. Slowly, he said, "I'm Eztil, Sovereign of the Lost Empire."
"Ceura, Prince of Stars," the elf had replied, "and this is Elinar, Prince of Stones."
Elinar, after pulling a face and looking between his brother and the winged boy, had asked again, this time in Common, "Are you trying to get away from the party, too?"
"We're not getting away from the party, little brother, we're studying." The older had grinned over at him and he had eyed the book of fairy tales in his lap and said nothing to the contrary. He sat down.
Some days, he knows that he should have just kept walking.)
/
"Stop that!" Xornoth exclaims and he doesn't flinch when their fingers come up to grasp at his arm and hold him there, instead of allowing him to run away like he's done every other time. "Stop acting like you don't care, I know you, Joey. Stop it."
"You don't! You don't know anything!" He spits back, venomous. He doesn't want to think about how their face drops as he goes on, "You died, Xornoth! You died and you left me here to rot alone!"
They are silent, and so Joey goes on, quieter, sadder:
"How do you tell children that their parents aren't coming home? You don't, so I didn't." Joey closes his eyes, hoping and praying to all of his gods that his voice stays steady. "They waited for you. Ixnite and Ciltali waited for you."
"Where are they?" Xornoth asks; they're staring at him. They don't know. "Joey, where are they?"
"They're dead." He says it with an emotional absence he knows he shouldn't have, but the temples are burned and his empire is gone and he can't spend too long dwelling on all of the people so he doesn't. He doesn't, and so he says it again, voice hard, "They're dead. They died in the temples. A lot of people did. We have to keep going."
He jerks his arm out of Xornoth's grip, loosened in their stunned state, and goes back to walking. They don't ask where they're going, they don't need to know.
/
(He remembers being thirteen and running through the river streets of the Lost Empire until he skidded to a muddy stop in front of a prince of stars he hadn't seen in two years, kneeling on the ground in the pouring rain. Several people had tried to stop him from getting any closer, but he paid no mind to them, dropping to the ground beside the prince. In soft Elvish, for he had finally learned to speak and not just understand, he started to whisper, "Ceura --"
The elf flinched. They were shaking their head, muttering over and over again something too quiet for him to properly hear. He just barely caught the words not my name and can't go home and left him. Ceura -- not Ceura -- picked up their head to stare at him and Joey didn't know what to do besides reach out to touch them.
They moved. Half-tackling the sovereign of lost things and lost people alike to the muddy ground, the rain pouring down around them and lightning flashing in the not so far distance, they wrapped their arms around him and he could do nothing but hold them.
It was only after a few minutes of this that Joey spoke: "You can stay but you can not be Nameless, we have to call you something."
"Xornoth." They said, and it took only a moment for the word -- the name -- to process. Nothing evil lives here.
Slowly, Joey nodded. "Alright, Xornoth it is, then."
The elf buried their head against the crook of his neck and he said nothing else. There was nothing else to say.)
/
"Ceura," he says with a bitterness he didn't really know he possessed and it doesn't take any heightened senses to hear the sudden inhale from behind. They say nothing back, so Joey turns.
They're almost frozen where they stand on the edge of the jungle. The sunlight through the overhanging leaves casts strange shadows on their face and after seeing the look in their eyes, he almost takes it back.
He doesn't, though. And there is a long moment of them staring at each other until Xornoth finally says, "What happened to there being no use for true names here?" A pause, before they add, "You of all people should know better."
He should. He should know better, because it was him who told them so in the first place, it was him who told them that day as they laid upon the hard ground, Your true name doesn't matter to anyone here. You can not walk around Nameless, though, so what should we call you?
"Don't presume to tell me what I should and shouldn't know," He says instead of apologizing. Not that they expected him to, not that they should've. "All the power you have here is mine, and it always has been. In the Lost Empire, you have nothing. Not even your name, Ceura."
He sees them flinch back that time, and again, almost takes it back. He doesn't.
The air is heavy, and for a long moment neither of them speak. And then, as he begins to walk away, Ceura says, something changed, "And what of yours, Eztil?"
Joey keeps walking.
/
(Joey isn't really sure what he's meant to do when Xornoth appears in the hall. He watches their eyes travel from him to the little girl holding his hand to the boy holding her's, and then he watches them look at him again with their eyebrows raised. Soft, they ask, "Who's this?"
The girl grins at them, pulling away from Joey as she also drops her brother's hand and bounces over to them. "I'm Ciltali!" She tells them, very matter-of-factly, and points at the boy, "And that's Ixnite, he's my brother!"
Xornoth smiles, crouching down to be on the same level as her. They run a hand through their hair as Ciltali continues to ramble about everything and nothing at all. They catch Joey's eye over the top of her head, eyebrows raised again.
He isn't really sure what to say, so he mouths Later. Beside him, Ixnite wanders over to his sister and grabs her hand again.
Ciltali doesn't even slow down.)
/
The Crystal Cliffs are desolate as they pass through, the commune empty of students and wizards and dragons alike, and somewhere deep in Joey's chest aches. The fires have burned down to embers, the buildings fallen and destroyed, and there is not a soul in the kingdom save for he and Xornoth.
"Where is everyone?" Xornoth asks, and for all Joey doesn't want to talk to them, he still responds.
"They went home, if they had a home to go back to." He doesn't mention that plenty of the students had been from the Grimlands, whose capital city is nothing but rubble now, but he sees it when they look towards the front gate. "Gem and fWhip are gone. They just left one day and didn't come back. Then again, I didn't bother looking too hard."
Xornoth doesn't say anything to that. For a moment, Joey thinks they're just being silent, but then he turns to look and finds them crouching down in front of a cat. There's a purple ribbon around its neck, and it looks far too smart to be a normal animal, but still it bumps its head against their hand when they hold it out.
Joey doesn't say anything, just watches, and the look on their face, the look that Joey recognizes as the one they get when they forget that something can look at them and not want to run screaming, just sort of makes him hurt worse. Neither of them move for a very long time.
/
(When he was sixteen years old, his mother summoned him to her rooms and held his hands in her tight grip, whispering that she is so, so proud of him. He hadn't understood. He hadn't understood until his mother's hands grew cold and his voice broke when he shouted for the guards and it was not a guard that appeared first but Xornoth.
He'd cried. He doesn't remember starting to cry, but he remembers the way they'd walked into the room and slowly made their way to the ground where he was sitting. Joey doesn't remember starting to cry that night, but he remembers them speaking soft words in a soft voice.
He remembers whispering, "She's dead." And he remembers Xornoth saying, still in that soft voice he'd only ever heard them use for children in the marketplace, "Yes, she is."
Joey doesn't remember the guard coming in, doesn't remember the priests from the temples being called to the palace, doesn't remember his mother's body being taken away, but he remembers with a crystal clarity the heavy weight of his mother's still warm crown being placed atop his head. He remembers that, and he remembers the feeling of sitting on the floor of his mother's room that was now his with the runaway prince of snow and ice and magic.
Sometimes he wishes that he didn't.)
/
"Was it ever real?" He asks, after a long time. They're away from the Cliffs now, somewhere in between there and the elven kingdom they've made their destination, and for another long while, Xornoth doesn't answer.
Sometimes, Joey thinks that they were never going to be anything other than a tragedy in the making. Fate's a little fickle like that.
They don't answer for a long time, so long that he almost forgets what he had asked. They don't answer and then they do: "All of it was. Of course it was."
It doesn't occur to him until later that they didn't even have to ask what he was talking about.
/
(Joey doesn't like to think about them anymore, but he still remembers the way his children had looked at him when he finally had enough of them asking about Xornoth. He hadn't snapped at them, per say -- Joey had never really snapped at Ciltali and Ixnite, not even when he was running on something close to empty and wished to be anywhere but here -- but he can still see Ixnite start crying and can still hear Ciltali cursing loud enough for him to hear her and not caring.
He remembers that Ciltali stopped spending her days in the palace, that she took to wandering through the jungle until night fell and he remembers the unease that held his heart in its tight grip every night until she came back, her fur muddy and clothes messed up, but alive. He never faulted her for looking, Joey hopes that she knew that; he would've looked, too, if he'd ever had the chance.
And Ixnite, well, he remembers that his son had gotten far more interested in the lessons his tutors were giving him. "Distractions," the boy had murmured when Joey had asked, soft and quiet and sad, "I need distractions."
Well, Joey had understood that one. He still does.
How do you tell the children that their parents aren't coming home? Joey had asked Xornoth, and then he'd said: You don't.
But if there's one thing Eztil of the Lost Empire has always been good at, it's telling only half the truth. He hadn't told the children that Xornoth wasn't coming home, he'd simply told them that they were gone. He told them that he didn't know where they had went or if they were coming back, but they were gone.
But they didn't need to know that, did they?)
/
Rivendell, like everything else, is barren and crumbling and empty. The few elves he does see as they wander through the mountains and valleys have ears that are too short to be the High Elves of Rivendell; Joey knows there are Wood Elves in the forests surrounding Rivendell, but he's never really seen any before now.
Now, they're everywhere. Watching him and his wings and the prince trailing behind him. Xornoth is shaking -- from the cold or from something else, he doesn't know and he isn't all that sure that he wants to ask. He doesn't lift his hand to wave, and when he does manage to make eye contact with anyone, they turn away almost instantly.
They climb the mountain in silence; Xornoth doesn't speak and so Joey doesn't either, but he still keeps looking back at them regardless. Honestly, he's not sure how they haven't fallen over yet -- they're not looking where they're going, eyes taking in the kingdom they abandoned for (not him, not for him) freedom. The kingdom they left to weigh down their younger brother's shoulders instead of their own. The kingdom that was always meant to be their birthright and the kingdom that they gave up.
(For him?)
They reach the top of the mountain, and he shakes his head to dispel the thoughts plaguing his brain. He stops looking at the prince beside him and looks at the ruins before him. The ruins of Rivendell, once a stronghold of elvish power that stood for millenia and should have stood for millenia more -- Joey isn't quite sure how something can still be standing and be considered ruins, but it's the only word he can think of to describe it.
The buildings are standing, yet they are empty. The people are gone and yet he knows somehow that they still live. There is blood on the ground and yet. . . Well, Xornoth is standing behind him so there is only one person for that blood to belong to.
/
(The first time Eztil of the Lost Empire stepped foot in the cold mountains of Rivendell, he was a prince. He was not called Joey, not yet, he had not yet chosen that name, and so they called him Eztil. He was a prince, Sovereign of the Lost Empire, kingdom of rogues and refugees and runaways, kingdom of the newly lost and the not found and the nearly forgotten, and he was young. Too young, then, to know what he knows now.
The things that Joey of Lost Empire knows now are these:
- Do not sit in Elven libraries and talk to stowaway princes. Do not tell them your name. Keep walking.
- When a wayward prince stumbles towards you, do not catch them. Let them fall. You are not strong enough for the both of you, you never will be.
- Never forget that in order to go home again, you need to lose yourself. Do not give yourself away to people who lose you regardless.
- Don't fall in love. It will end, and it will not be pretty. You are not made of fairytales and you were never going to get a happily ever after.
Joey of the Lost Empire stands in the ruins of Rivendell, a lost-found-forgotten prince of ice and snow and horror at his side, and he does nothing when the prince begins to weep over the brother he loved and lost and left behind. He tells himself that he doesn't care -- not anymore, not ever again, not about Xornoth.
When he turns to go, he doesn't look at them. He can't; because Joey promised himself a long time ago that he would stop checking behind his back for monsters.
And what else has Xornoth ever been but just that? Nothing evil lives here? What a load of shit.)