Shining

At the interval where evening crosses into night, more fall. These people flee for their lives from the battlefield, but sickness has captured them partway, with death shortly to follow.

A dying boy has lost the strength to struggle. His mother kneels at his side, but all she can do is hold him close, like one would their newborn. Sensing how the body in her embrace holds warmth no longer, a noise rises from her throat. It is more a cry than a shout.

Seeming to heed her voice, the boy's weak chest gives a light flutter. Then, another. The movements from the body's deepest parts grow distinct, as if what lifeforce has passed now returns again.

Practically leaping to her feet, the mother clutches tight the hands of the strangers who arrived here before them at some point. At a glance, she recognizes the two as Sarkaz, but whether they are the gospels of life or the emissaries of death, she can do little but beg.

The white-robed Sarkaz places her hand to the chest of the ailing. The black-cowled, instead, lowers her gaze down at them. What remainders of sunlight still strain past night's shade sink now into the pallid eyes of the dying. Gaze meets gaze again, between he and his mother. From their start to their end, the memories which engrave each passage of a person's life, and the emotions held therein, seep out from their selves, circling them together with the faint light of the setting sun. It is a light of no warmth, and ceases now to flow... simply, its journey is from the eyes of the dead to the eyes of the living. A teardrop falls from the mother's dried face, whereupon this instant elapses, and night finally enshrouds one and all as equals.

Shining silently watches the last wisp of twilight pale into the night.

'Legend holds that once, in ancient Kazdel, was a white-horned King of Sarkaz.' A cold voice from behind her. 'It's said they possessed the ability to weave sunlight. They made the evening their thread, and wove the Sarkaz's past, present, and future glory into the sky. Each soldier fighting upon the battlefield needed only to lift their head, and they would see eternity in a mirror. It led them to forget thoughts of life or death, and under the King of Sarkaz's command, they conquered all.'

'Legends of the sort are plentiful in Kazdel,' comes the white-horned physician's response.

'Placing the living in touch with the boundary between life and death both spurs their courage to rush into death, and leads them to perceive life as something not devoid of meaning. Thus, they bid a better farewell to their loved ones,' Kal'tsit recounts factually. 'Through your and Nightingale's treatment, the patient's final Oripathy flare-up has been suppressed in his terminal hours. The rapid growth of Originium crystals in his body has temporarily been pacified. You have not only aided him in his peaceful passing, but saved his mother too.'

'Hence why you haven't given the assassin staring at me a single opportunity.'

'When we first met yesterday, I noticed the look in your eyes as you saw Amiya. You knew who she was from the first moment, and had no intention of imparting your secrets to us, yet you did not hide that flicker of emotion.'

'What emotion?'

'Compassion.' Kal'tsit closely watches over Shining's eyes. 'Identical to what you showed here and now. It is a physician's gaze.'

It was an eerily still night, all light in the mansion extinguished, only moonlight spilling through the window into the room.

In the dim and the dark, a precocious daughter was led to her mother's delivery bed.

Still so young, yet her strict education had already begun, and a sword and scabbard conferred upon her. The father's daughter naturally inherits the ways in which he surpasses others, bloodlines ever able to record power and wisdom. So was the theory to which the Confessarii subscribed.

The daughter watched her mother intently. The white-haired Sarkaz woman shut her eyes and laid down upon her back. Her body rested in calm and grace, shadow cast upon the wall as if the very contours of love for her child.

Below her, an infant's silhouette was drawn out by the slanted moonlight, magnified, and finally thrown upon the wall as if some sort of monster. This newborn life was yet frail and impotent, but did not impulsively wail as the normal suckling would, instead silently opening its eyes that could not yet see. Then clouds masked the moonlight, and the mother's arms slid down past the bed.

Together with the light, the monster's silhouette did vanish from the wall.

Now the daughter gazed, at this succession of life.

It was not her first time witnessing a life pass before her eyes. Her father had departed this coil not long prior, and now, another demise and nascence was playing out. The vanishing and parting, the swelling and birthing of life, every particular presented before the daughter, yet her Arts... the Arts of the Confessarii, would not stir at this, would not collect at her fingertips as expected.

Why?

The daughter was struck by confusion.

'Life' was... the concept her father made occasional mention of, the subtle weapon held by the Confessarii, and the thing she was ever urged to gain comprehension of. But her father's death was an airy gossamer in her memories, of little thickness or weight; her mother's passing was all too abrupt, as if someone had with naked hands taken all vitality from her. Now, here in this dead of night, her brother had silently arrived.

Just what was life?

Just what was it she was feeling?

Did the lives of those that populated the household, her mother and father that possessed the same silvery hair, herself who resembled her mother so, and this newborn brother who had yet to cry, did their lives resemble each other in any way?

'Our lives, in the end, will become one with a higher form.' Such did the father tell the daughter before drawing his last breath.

Instinctively, she had sensed it was no majestic metaphor.

Life flowed in the veins of the family of the purest bloodline, and something returned to her side once again in this moment... Or perhaps, it had never left.