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Every step up the crystal bridge had been agony. The twins had held his hands, gently urging him on. His fingers held onto theirs, frozen into helpless claws.
When had he last touched someone without the intent to harm, to kill?
He had touched G'raha, hadn't he? The sense-memory of his silken hair sliding through his own calloused fingers seemed nearly gone from his mind; the velvet of his ears and tail as he writhed over him gasping in pleasure was surely another fantasy this place had conjured to torture him.
He did his best to focus on the twins' voices and on breathing, walking ever forward, but what was ahead terrified him in a way nothing ever had. Not the bird girl wrapped in despair, but the final sacrifice, the final loss.
He tried to hold them back when the time came. Tried to sway them with all the words he could not string together well enough to stop the others. It was no use. They smiled at him, just like G'raha had; satisfied with their sacrifice, knowing it was worthwhile.
He closed his eyes as they vanished. His eyes were dry, but his throat was locked in a soundless, lacerating scream; a dying gasp forever lodged in his chest. He felt as if cleaved in half, his soul cracked and fraying once again. He tried to remember how the Light inside him had felt as he had tried to hold himself back from the shattered edge of that final transformation in another world, a lifetime ago. Had it felt worse than this? How had he retained any sense of self? But even there, even then, he had had something –someone– to hold on to.
Here, there was nothing and no one left. No future to work for nor a world to burn down if he failed.
He knelt on the dust of this dead and forgotten place for an eternity, feeling his throat close and trying in vain to draw more air into his lungs. Time had no meaning here, but the very air he breathed had been too dearly bought to take for granted, so he counted every breath, every inhale more painful than the last.
The tears he reached for still wouldn't come and the place inside him where he usually kept his rage and determination felt cavernously empty, bereft of all emotion but despair. He clawed at the dust and debris strewn about him until his fingers ached, but still Fray wouldn't answer. If this place had allowed for sound he would have heard his own keening, the mournful throes of a wounded, dying animal at the edge of creation.
He was truly alone now.
He stopped trying to breathe or think or cry. The whispers of a myriad dead civilizations pressed in all around him, driving away everything else. He laid on the ground, or maybe simply fell, his eyes still closed and dry. His mind drifted, his thoughts scattered and as distant as the galaxies wheeling overhead, far beyond his reach.
He had wanted to lie down on the crystal bridge too, had crawled up on his hands and knees, tried to see something beyond its smoothness; the surface had been warm to the touch, like the Exarch's crystal flesh had been, both alive and not.
Alisaie had cried over his bent, grieving body, but she had done so quietly, as if ashamed, whereas Alphinaud's tear-tracked cheeks had shone unapologetic in the light of the dead stars, his small hand closing like a vice on his shoulder, the only comfort he could offer.
G'raha had held his face as he kissed him last, forehead to forehead, mouth stretched into a shaky smile, safe in the knowledge that he would be remembered, that he had been loved after all. All they had ever had was a handful of stolen moments and a century’s worth of longing.
Urianger had offered him a tarot card and one of his most enigmatic smiles before joining Y'shtola, but it had vanished alongside them before he could read it. Y'shtola had given him a gift of hope with her final words, but it had proven no less ephemeral than the card.
Estinien had favored him with the warm glint of his eyes as he leapt into nothingness one last time, courage beyond compare. Their partnership had always been simple, they had shared the close bond of brothers in arms and the bittersweet losses of home and childhood.
Thancred had entrusted him with what was left of his family as he crawled forward when it all seemed hopeless, as he ever had, a protector to the last.
Would he simply lie here and waste all their lives?
He breathed in deep, at last, and the whispers of the dead seemed to recede, their sad echoes morphing into something else. Despair uncoiled its cold shackles around his heart as he strained to hear, to focus on that wisp of feeling growing in his chest, warming him. Wind rose around him like a song as he stood up and found the strength to finally open his eyes.
There was another bridge directly ahead, glowing and marvelous and going ever upward, dispelling the darkness at the edge of the universe. His chest felt on fire; the amber crystal that hung there close to his skin seemed to hum and throb with power and possibility.
His eyes reflected the light of a thousand dead stars, but he saw nothing now save for that bright thread his loved ones had woven for him, showing him the way forward.
The bridge of light beckoned him, the song of hope in his mind growing louder.
He began to walk.