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It did not take long to find him. Lying beneath him was the pivotal figure of the blood-soaked battlefield that Emet-Selch was wading through, though few would recognise him as such. Lahabrea did prefer to work from the shadows, after all.
An advisor abandoned by even his king, whom Emet-Selch had seen fleeing before also being cornered and struck down by the enemy. A pathetic finale, though exactly the one Lahabrea had envisioned, for these characters.
Emet-Selch was not surprised that Lahabrea didn't materialise out of the body at his appearance. After all, it was not only the case that it took more energy to move into a living body than a corpse—leaving one was also more taxing, and clearly, the man was just about spent. The only movement from the body (deliberate movement—there was plenty of haggard breathing) was those dim eyes flicking up to meet his own.
"Now, what do we have here?" Emet-Selch lowered himself into a crouch beside the wounded man.
"I assume—" at this point Lahabrea's body took a heaving breath, only to interrupt itself with a far-too-wet cough, "—that you are not here to heal."
Emet-Selch pinched the torn, bloodied material of Lahabrea's uniform-jacket between two fingers, making a show of lifting it almost gingerly to peer at the wound beneath. The blood seeping into his own glove was a fair price to pay for the irritation he was sure the action would cause. "I haven't quite decided yet."
Sure enough, a click of the tongue from beneath him. "So, will let this body die? Kill me yourself, perhaps?"
Emet-Selch let a mockingly-thoughtful hum be his reply. The means to cure the body were not beyond him. Had he tried his very least, he could prolong the life beating in that flesh enough for the man within to drag himself out.
Had he done work that could be called passable, Emet-Selch was sure he could mend the body wholly. He could fix this new trapping Lahabrea had chosen for himself, could lengthen the amount of time between now and the next inevitable body. What man would Lahabrea become then, he wondered.
It was quite a wound he'd found himself with, though. Examining it more closely did nothing to make Emet-Selch doubt his ability to fix the body, but it was almost impressive, the amount of damage that could be done without killing a man. The cut was a deep, piercing blow to the side of the abdomen, but not so to-the-side that it escaped at the waist; the inside of it was dark on account of the thick blood and viscera filling the gash. Anything beneath the almost-bubbling liquid was not visible, but Emet-Selch imagined that the blade that had put the wound there had scraped roughly against Lahabrea's spine as it had been pulled back out.
That was just the physical appearance of the wound. Sensation was shared between the body and soul within, when the body was alive. The pain was surely enough to cloud even one of their minds. Though, perhaps Lahabrea had found a workaround for that, at this point. Emet-Selch's eyes flicked back up to the man's face.
Lahabrea was shivering, in that dying body of his. They were evidently unconscious movements stemming from the shock and blood loss and not movements that could be repressed, but the action was so unlike Lahabrea that Emet-Selch felt his eyes narrow.
His image of Lahabrea was still, somehow, that of a man who never let his control over himself slip. He had only ever seen the man react to physical discomfort long ago, when Lahabrea had carved a part out of himself. Just the smallest shifting of the shoulders, and only rarely—it had taken Emet-Selch a little while to realise what he'd been seeing were suppressed shivers from a man who had not ever, until that point, gotten used to feeling the cold.
But even at what had equated to being at half a soul, that Lahabrea, as he had been for a time, still far outshone the pathetic shade below him.
There were only dregs remaining of the man Lahabrea had once been, only deep within whatever vessel he chose to wear. How long before those few dregs, too, would disappear? How long until he was the last of them to truly understand what it was they were fighting for?
The eyes blearily glaring up at him may as well have been anyone's. The mind in that head was barely comparable to what it had been. Only the colour of his soul was as it once was. Though that, too, had dimmed. Clouded. Diluted itself. All too irreparably.
Perhaps, for centuries now, Emet-Selch already had been the only one truly remaining.
He found that the thought entered and left his mind without disturbing the calm, dark sea that his heart had become. No fresh despair or turmoil washed over him. It was, after all, a line of thinking he'd gone down time and time and time again.
So, Emet-Selch placed a single hand on the man's neck. Lahabrea's eyes were goading, as if to spur him on. He could almost imagine the Finish it, already, that would come from that mouth. Perhaps a Don't waste any more of our time, had it been a few centuries earlier. Outside of his imagination, however, he heard no words at all. Whatever Lahabrea had to say would only be reduced to pathetic croaks and rasps, anyway.
At one point, that voice had held order during their meetings. A voice that they had each respected in their best moments and protested in their worst. Now, the body beneath him was too far gone to speak with any dignity, blood already flooding its windpipe.
Only a moment passed in which Emet-Selch was lost in thought, but in that moment, Lahabrea's eyes narrowed, an impatient scowl painting his features. The twist of the man's lips was only slight, but it was a conscious movement made by Lahabrea, not the body he was inhabiting. Though the face was unfamiliar, finally, it wore an expression Emet-Selch could recognise.
"How does it feel?" Almost unbidden, the words slip out.
Lahabrea's eyes narrowed further, and Emet-Selch could have almost assumed the movement was another of many spasms from the pain, but the irritation in the expression was all-too-clear. Get to the point.
"How does it feel, taking on living bodies over and over—" Emet-Selch tapped a finger against where he could feel a faint pulse, "—trapping and quieting writhing souls as they scrape against your very essence?"
Emet-Selch had asked such a question, once, long, long ago, before he himself had attempted anything beyond entering a corpse. Perhaps out of hesitation. Maybe it had been fear. For all his vice of remembering too much, he couldn't quite place what his own reason had been for asking.
(He'd needed reassurance, maybe, from the only other he recognised. His sole remaining equal. Their Emissary was at once far above and far below them, and no other soul they could gather up and feed old memories to truly understood.)
He did, however, remember Lahabrea's response.
Unless you're asking out of curiosity, you don't need the answer. Leave knowing 'how it feels' to me.
(In terms of reassurance, he'd gotten it. After all, that had been just it, hadn't it? Lahabrea had always been quick to act, but it had always been decisiveness. Actions that could have been dismissed as rashness in others were unmistakeably something more precise, at Lahabrea's hands. More surgical.)
"Perhaps you would benefit from trying it again and reminding yourself," the body sneered out, barely, each word nigh-incomprehensible against the gurgles of blood surrounding the syllables. "A less reluctant approach will hasten Zodiark's rebirth."
And so it went. Emet-Selch didn't reply.
There was nothing surgical about the man beneath him.
Emet-Selch chose that moment to push, concentrating the aether at his hand down, and down, until and the simple pressure of the motion crushed Lahabrea's throat with a satisfying give.
Unprepared—But why wasn't he? Had he not been the one to bring up the possibility of being killed himself?—Lahabrea's eyes widened, just the briefest movement before they and the rest of his body fell still. There was a quiet, high-pitched wheeze, and Emet-Selch's eyes followed the sound. It came not from Lahabrea's mouth, but from his throat, where bone had pierced esophagus.
His eyes remained on that throat, crushed beneath his hand. The pulse at his fingertips dragged out for a beat, then two, the beats slow and hollow, before vanishing from under his grip.
There was only a moment of quiet before a sudden burst of colour filled his vision. Emet-Selch watched as Lahabrea dragged himself out of the corpse.
It was not the first time Emet-Selch had seen Lahabrea do so, but it was the first time he'd been paying attention. Truly paying attention. He could see a glimmer—just the tiniest of glimmers—of that bright, dim soul of his flake off, caught in the whirling maelstrom of aether created by the mortal soul in the now-corpse dispersing.
Emet-Selch wondered, briefly, if there was anything he could do to catch that spark. Save it. Pull it back into the rest of Lahabrea's materialising soul.
…But then, what exactly would that accomplish? What was even left of Lahabrea's soul to adhere it to?
Emet-Selch found himself silently watching the fragment fizzle out. It did not take long.
Soon there was only darkness where colour had been, and he looked away.
Emet-Selch lifted his hand and dispelled his stained glove, opening a rift to the void in the same movement. He let the simple displacement of aether pull Lahabrea's soul in before the man started talking.
Given the choice between two cooling corpses, he preferred the company of the one that didn't speak.