It was several minutes before Seulgi realized the ash gently drifting down on them as they ushered the last of the civilians across the bridge had turned to snow, and the adrenaline-fueled elation she had felt after reuniting with her family drained out of her in a wave of nausea.

“Irene.”

Seulgi glanced back at the others and saw Joy and Moonbyul also looking up at the sky. “I’m going back,” she announced, and Joy looked like she was about to protest, but the look on Seulgi’s face brooked no room for argument.

“Bring her back,” was all the queen said, and Seulgi was off, running full tilt back towards the town square.

She nearly lost her footing several times as she tried not to knock anyone down as she wove through the narrow streets of her hometown. These were her neighbors. These were her friends, and friends of her family. If she stopped to look, she could point them each out by name, but right now there was only one person on her mind, one name that kept repeating as the others fell away.

There was no more smoke, and the sounds of the fighting had almost completely stopped. The only soldier she saw left, chasing the civilians as they fled in the opposite direction towards the bridge, Seulgi practically climbed as she ran him right over in her haste. She heard his helmet hit the cobblestone with a crack and didn’t even pause to finish him off as she continued on. It seemed the danger was finally over, but Seulgi was afraid of what the cost might have been.

“Seulgi?” The sound of her own name was the only thing that finally slowed her feet. It was Wendy, dragging the much taller, limp form of Solji.

“What happened? Where’s Irene?” Seulgi demanded, looking Solji’s form over, even as her whole body nearly itched to break out into another sprint to the square.

Wendy’s features looked positively tormented as she saw the desperate look on Seulgi’s face. “She’s back at the- she told me to leave her, I have to get Solji to-” but that was all Seulgi needed to hear and she was off again. Wendy craned her neck to watch the rancher’s form running down the street.

The beam from the Magitek Armor struck the bonfire with an explosive blast, and when Wendy raised her head again, the square was littered with the flaming remnants of the fire. Flames at the fallen bodies of civilians and soldiers and raced up the facades of the damaged storefronts.

All burned.

And Wendy felt something rising within her, a heat of her own, glowing in the pit of her stomach, and her breathing came faster, her eyes opened wider and she saw them, the soldiers lying strewn about, smoking and glowing with the embers. She hadn’t done this. Had she? No, of course not, the Magitek Armor- but then why did she feel this terror? Why did she feel this horrific righteousness? After all, didn’t they deserve it? Weren’t they the ones who attacked the citizens? Shouldn’t she deliver judgment?

All burn.

No. No, she can’t. She won’t. Did she do this? Was this her fault, again? Why were the visions of flesh melting from bone so clear? As Wendy stared down at the flames just beginning to eat at the hem of a soldier’s jacket, she saw not his dull, lifeless expression and glazed eyes, but a charred, disintegrating skull from some deep corner of her memory.

“Wendy!”

That’s right. She was a monster. They all knew. How could she face her again after what she’d done? How could she face-?

“Wendy!!!”

Wendy’s head snapped up from the dead soldier and she saw Irene across the square, cradling Solji in her arms.

“Irene?” Had it been her? Had Irene been there, back then? Did Irene know what she was?

“You have to get her to Yeri,” Irene ordered, carefully delivering Solji into her arms.

Solji had been impaled, probably from the blast, a long thick piece of wood lodged in her side. Irene was still speaking, but Wendy was analyzing the wound. She wouldn’t be able to drag Solji all the way to the bridge in this condition. All that movement, and what if they were waylaid by more soldiers…

“Wendy,” Irene called impatiently.

But Wendy knew what she was doing. She cupped her hand around the wound and quickly covered it as she pulled the wood free. So much blood. She tossed it aside, already feeling the blood dribbling between her fingers before she got her other hand on it and pressed with all her strength. She could help. She had to - she had to show everyone she wasn’t just some monstrous tool of destruction.

She could heal.

As she concentrated, she could feel the gush of blood begin to subside, the wound was closing beneath her palms - she was actually doing it.

“Wendy-!”

“I closed it!” Wendy said, in toneless shock.

“You what?”

“The wound. I closed it, but I don’t know if that’s enough.” She was already on her feet again, looping Solji’s arm around her shoulders, her bloodied hands leaving streaks of bronzey red all over their clothes. “Which way to the bridge?”

Irene pointed with her blade. “There, Seulgi said it’s directly south. Just keep going that way.”

Something was wrong with that answer. “What about you?”

“I’ll hold them off.”

Don’t do this. “No-”

“I’ll give you a head start and then I’ll follow.”

“Irene!” Irene from my past… whoever you are, don’t leave me again.

Irene gave her a faint smile before turning away. “The faster you move, the sooner I’ll catch up.”

Wendy stood there for another moment, with Solji’s weight bending her small frame. She had to get Solji to Yeri, and all she could do was hope Irene kept her word. She had to hope that she wouldn’t lose this tiny piece of herself that she had only just reclaimed.

“Be careful…!”

It was getting colder the further Seulgi ran, and she nearly slipped on the frozen sludge and she barrelled into the square, brandishing her sword. As she paused there, near the corner of a burned-out storefront she couldn’t even recognize, the tip of her sword slowly dropped until it touched the ground.

The square was eerily reminiscent of the wastes they crossed on their way towards Narshe, a desolate, frozen, dead place. Seulgi saw the mounds of what could only be bodies covered in frost. Where they weren’t torn open, burnt, or covered in debris, Seulgi could see their skin was tinged blue, and each one she passed she forced herself to look, just in case it was Irene.

But Seulgi found her collapsed behind a small snowdrift, back against a wall.

“Irene.” It was just a frosty breath.

Seulgi scrambled over the crystalline snow and crawled over to her, scooping her into her lap as she had done with Wendy only days ago. “Irene! Irene, come on!” The ex-general was so cold to the touch Seulgi kept switching her hold to keep the feeling in her fingers. “Come on, it’s okay. It’s over. It’s all over,” she continued, her breath hoarser with each word she forced through her chattering teeth.

She had run off so selfishly and left her. She had pushed her to this. Seulgi slowly pulled Irene closer, hugging her tightly, even as the shock of cold made her nearly choke and shiver violently. “I’ve got you, now.” With one arm holding Irene tightly against her, as if trying to lend her some small measure of warmth, she threaded the other beneath Irene’s legs and slowly, carefully lifted her. She turned to make the slow walk back to the bridge, but paused as she heard the scrape of a blade against the cobblestone under her boot.

Kneeling carefully to retrieve Irene’s saber from the muddied ash, Seulgi could only wonder what she had gone through to end this battle. “I won’t leave you ever again,” she murmured as she carried her away.

+++

Eunji’s ‘inspection’ of the Sky Armors was performed with barely a glance at the vehicles. She walked about them in a circle, bent to observe when prompted by the engineer, nodded in the appropriate places, and even managed to suppress several sighs. Heechul’s men were such bores, but it wasn’t helped by the fact that Eunji just didn’t care.

It was a fact that wasn’t missed by Somi. When instructed to do so, Somi watched the other pilots carefully as they mounted their Sky Armors and climbed in hers, for all the world like she had been training for this for years. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the correct sequence of levers and switches that brought the machine to life and only felt her confidence falter as Eunji climbed in behind her. She was going to be Eunji’s pilot? Somi glanced forlornly at the other pilots who had normal gunners as their cohabitors and cursed her luck.

“Alright,” Eunji murmured to her. “Take us out of here.”

Somi sent them upwards and outwards out of the hangar, the other two Sky Armors following as they circled higher and higher until they were almost level with the flattened top of Emperor Ghestal’s iron ziggurat.

“It’s a long first leg, but we’ll stop in Doma to rest, then on to the Gate.”

Somi was barely a beat late with her “Yes, ma’am.”

“Let me know if you need to switch out, though,” Eunji said in a less commanding tone as she sat back, unclipping her harness. She almost took the pilot seat for herself right from the beginning, unsure of what to do with herself in the coming hours flying towards the Northern Continent. Being left to her own thoughts was far more terrifying than the endless sea that would be stretching out before them soon.

Once again her mind wandered to that afternoon in Narshe. Had Irene been able to convince the other Returners to take Wendy in? Or had she misplaced her trust in the ex-general? Or had the Returners killed them both? And always, the haunting worry that Wendy hadn’t survived that initial gunshot. It’d been so reckless - the risk had been astronomical, but what else could she have done? She had been backed into a corner, left with only one choice. She had to trust herself, and trust Irene. It was the same argument that had been circling in her mind ever since her finger pulled the trigger.

Somi felt a deathly silence from the seat behind her and didn’t dare to risk a glance back. When word of this mission had reached her ears, Somi had done absolutely everything within her power to ensure she ended up on one of the Armors: stealing uniforms, mimicking schedules, salutes, names, protocols - anything she could witness in order to make them all believe the farce. It had been several near-sleepless nights, but she was finally escaping the Southern Continent and going home. She’d figure out how to rejoin the others once they landed, but in the meantime, with the General of the Imperial Army sitting right behind her, it was going to be a long flight.

+++

The dreams.

The dreams exhausted her more than the fight had. She walked through the howling yawn of desolate glacial landscapes, always against the bitter wind that flung her long hair and skirts billowing and whipping behind her. And though she wandered endlessly, it wasn’t the temperature that drove her, no, it was the loneliness. The asive, desperate feeling that she had no one else in the whole World of Balance who understood. No one who would look upon her blue-tinged skin, her wild hair glassy with ice, take her into their arms and tell her she needn’t wander any more, that she could rest - that she was home.

But that was why she fought so hard, wasn’t it? The hope, the promise that across the expanse, there would be something waiting for her, some threshold she would cross where she could doff this visage of ice incarnate and stop fighting. It came on the wind in whispers, distant, faint, almost completely drowned out by the screech and scrape of the gales as they cut across the scared, icy emptiness.

And she followed them, on, and on, and on.

Irene heard snatches, here and there, on the edge of consciousness.

“I was staying there after the attack. I was in real bad shape…”

Voices she didn’t recognize.

“I thought I was dreaming, but this pigeon just kept pecking me.”

“You got my letter?!” gasped a voice she did recognize.

“Yeah. And let me tell you one thing, Seulbear. Next time you go off on some mission with a secret resistance organization? Maybe don’t announce all your plans in writing for whoever to read?”

“... Seulbear?” Irene murmured, in a surprisingly hoarse voice, as if she hadn’t used it in days. She felt a hand on her cheek and realized her eyes were still closed. With a great deal of effort, she slowly opened them.

“You’re awake,” Seulgi said softly, and Irene stared at her for a long moment, trying to make sense of the immediate situation. “We’re back at the house - my house. You’re safe,” Seulgi assured her, letting her thumb lightly brush along Irene’s cheek.

Irene raised her hand to Seulgi’s, catching sight of her pale skin as she did so. “I’m…” back to normal. What did that mean?

“Are you hurt?” the new voice asked, and Irene’s dazed look turned to see Seulgi’s brother seated on her other side. She struggled for a moment, narrowing her eyes and blinking several times. He looked just like Seulgi… a male version, perhaps. They had the same square jaw, round cheeks, and as he grinned at her answer - an airy “No,” - Irene could see faint hints of that same smile that had so captivated her.

She turned back to Seulgi, wishing she could see that smile now, instead of the tearful look of relief Seulgi wore. As she began to sit up, both of them reached out to push her back down.

“Wait, you shouldn’t-”

“Don’t try to get up yet-”

Ah, she was in a bed? That made sense. Seulgi’s house… “Mobliz…”

“Safe,” Seulgi’s brother iterated quietly.

“Irene - Irene, you did it,” Seulgi professed. “You saved everyone!”

Irene cracked her eyes open once more, staring dubiously at Seulgi with a frown.

Seulgi didn’t balk. She leaned in with Irene’s hand in both of hers. “We were able to gather everyone by the bridge - there weren’t any soldiers, they had all run back to the square.” She paused for a moment, a shadow of concern darkening her excitement. “We heard blasts. We knew you had drawn all the Magitek Armors to the square.”

Seulgi’s brother picked up the story as Seulgi herself struggled to explain through her memories. “Once we’d rounded everyone up-”

“How did you escape?” Irene interrupted.

They looked down at her in mild confusion. Wasn’t that what they were trying to explain?

“Doma. How did you escape Doma?” She stared up at the low, wooden ceiling, not daring to look him in the eye, even in the drawn-out silence. “Did Seulgi tell you who I am?”

“Yeah,” Seulong quietly sighed. “She did.”

Her eyes slowly closed again, as if a great weight had settled on her. He knew, but she was still here, welcomed into this house and allowed to recover. How was it that he and Seulgi could forgive her sins so easily? How could everyone forgive her? And why couldn’t she forgive herself? “Please.”

She heard him inhale through his nose and heard the creak of the chair as he sat back. “I was actually just finishing up the story when you woke up. Let me see if I can summarize it real quick.”

The men were dropping, and not to the enemy’s gunfire. Seulong watched as one soldier fell from the battlements above to land several paces ahead of him. He ran up to the man but came to a stop as he saw his pale face, striated by blackened veins, a foam bubbling from his lips as his eyes stared up at the sky.

“C-captain? Captain!” Seulong shouted as he backed away before turning and running back to the barracks. If he hadn’t been running, he might have realized the soldiers he was pushing past to make his way inside were staggering, grabbing their necks. It was the coughing and choking as he entered the barracks that brought him to a halt there in the doorway.

He must have run rather quickly, or perhaps it was the anxiety of the moment that made him feel dizzy suddenly, as he swayed, watching his fellow soldiers beginning to slump in their seats or collapse haphazardly around their beds.

“C… captain…” he gasped as he fell to his knees, only barely able to prop himself upright against the doorframe. Something was wrong… it was too sudden to be a camp plague… it had to be poison, but on such a massive scale? He turned his body until he was leaning up against the stone wall of the outside of the barracks, taking in the bodies that littered the ground with blurring eyes. How? His arm felt so heavy as he raised it to press his fingers to his eyes, trying to refocus his vision. He could hear them, outside the walls, the mechanical stomping of the feet of dozens of Magitek Armors.

“Odin… take them,” he huffed laboriously. Their damnable machines… their stolen magic… Unless whatever had afflicted them left as quickly as it had come, there was no way they could keep the Gestahlian army from breaching the walls. Above the intermittent beam cannon blasts from the approaching Armors, a new sound rose up… this time from the city itself. Screams. Retching. Shouting and running.

So that was it, then? Just like that, it was all over? He sighed, and then promptly rolled to his side and spit a foamy, greenish, blood-speckled mucus into the dirt. Well, if he was going to die, it wouldn’t be here, like this, hundreds of miles from his family.

With considerable effort, he began to crawl.

It was easy to avoid the Imperial soldiers by periodically dropping and lying still in the dirt until they passed. His hands had long since taken on the black veins of the other soldiers he saw, and he certainly needed the breaks as he dragged himself out through the main gate of Doma and away from the fallen kingdom.

He must have lost days passed out in the fields, weak from the poison coursing through his blood and the beginnings of starvation.

“I’ll spare you the details of how I got through those days, but let’s just say I didn’t have much of an appetite, and the things I did end up having to choke down certainly didn’t help,” Seulong said, glossing over some of the nastier descriptions in his story. “Not a lot of options when you’re laid out in the grass, though.”

Dragging slowly returned to crawling, and crawling turned into short spurts of walking, though doubled over in pain as his muscles screamed at the black blood pumping through them. The forests of the foothills east of Doma provided plenty of cover, though he suspected no one was looking for him. It was a terrifying thought. No one was looking for him. He could die out here, and no one would know. Not his parents, not Seulgi… he was alone.

“Seulbear…”

“Oh, come on!” Seulgi protested, hiding her face at her brother’s dramatics. Truthfully, the story was painful to hear. She couldn’t imagine fighting in such a long siege only to have all of her companions she had fought alongside start dropping without warning. She felt Irene’s insistent hand take hers away from her face and held it. The ex-general’s face was stony, resolved to listen until the end.

“There’s not much left,” Seulong admitted as he cleared his throat and continued.

He followed the sounds of water to a river and was relieved to have some landmark with which to orient himself, but it was still a very long walk back to Mobliz. He could still very easily die out there in the wilderness with no supplies or any means of survival. It came as quite a shock to him, then, as he continued to follow the winding river and came upon a natural cave. After stumbling inside, he realized that it was in fact a compound of sorts - though the occupants seemed to be long gone.

He lost several more days hovering on the brink of consciousness after pillaging what remained of the stores of food and medicine. The worst had passed through his system and the dark veins were little more than faint grey shadows on his hands, though it wasn’t until he received a visit from an odd stranger that he was able to completely rouse himself. Somehow or other, a bird had managed to fly inside the compound and Seulong may have missed it completely had it not begun cooing. He followed the sound into what looked to be a study or office of some sort and there it stood on the desk: a pigeon. As soon as it saw Seulong, it flew up to him, attempting to land on his shoulder, though with the way Seulong tried to duck and shoo it away, it was having considerable difficulty.

“That’s when I realized it was the Returner’s hideout. That note the pigeon was carrying was from Queen Joy, with Seulgi’s note rolled up inside. I packed up what I could from the rest of the leftover supplies and kept making my way east until I was finally home. The end,” he finished lamely.

Irene was silent for a long moment, but Seulgi spoke up. “But the hideout, where did the Returners go?”

Seulong looked across the bed at her with a blink of surprise. “Where?” And then he looked down at Irene. “You mean you don’t… know where they are?”

Irene held his questioning gaze for a long moment, something unaccounted for wanting her to maintain a small amount of defiance. Why did he think she would know if Seulgi did not? Had she not just killed dozens of imperial soldiers to liberate his town? But after another moment she looked away. Why was she taking this personally all of a sudden? She realized she was even bunching the blanket in a white-knuckled grip and she forced herself to calm down. It was as if everything she had done these past few months to try to listen to the others, to try to forgive herself, had been for nothing. Seulong’s story was a stark reminder of who she used to be, and in the end, what was truly the difference between Irene the General who would order attacks on civilians, and Irene the Returner who ruthlessly slaughtered her own people?

“M-maybe Joy knows…”

Seulong glanced back at Seulgi. “You really should call her Queen Joy…”

Seulgi couldn’t help a laugh at the thought, but it was short-lived. She had seen the swirl of emotions on Irene’s face and thought maybe she should rest. “Maybe you should ask her what she’d prefer,” she suggested with a not-so-subtle nod of her head towards the door.

“Huh? Oh, right,” he said after a long enough pause that confirmed he was in fact Seulgi’s brother. He stood up out of his seat and stretched before strolling towards the door in the awkward silence. He paused in the doorway, however, and turned back to the two girls, as if thinking over something. In the end, he thought better of it, giving Seulgi a long unreadable look before shutting the door after himself.

“I’m sorry,” Seulgi began as she heard his retreating footsteps heavy on the steps. “It’s been… an interesting week.”

“A week?” Irene asked, her eyes opening wide as she tried to sit up again.

Seulgi reached over and tried to hold her still by her shoulders, but Irene weakly fought her. “Well… close enough - a few days… will you rest?!”

“I can rest on the ship! Let me up! We’ve got to move on - we’re so close to Thamasa.” And answers.

With a knee on the mattress, Seulgi practically bear-hugged Irene to keep her prone. “I didn’t know if you were going to wake up,” she murmured into her ear, and Irene finally relented.

Irene reached up and wrapped her arms around Seulgi, keeping her close as she stared up at the ceiling again through the tangle of Seulgi’s blonde hair. “Shiva saved me.”

Seulgi didn’t stir from Irene’s embrace. “The crystal?”

“Yeah. I… absorbed it, somehow, and it gave me her ability.” The diamond dust that had rained down on them in the Magitek Facility… the same silent flurry in the square. “I was able to take out all of them… in a single blow.”

“No wonder… everything was covered in snow when I found you.”

“Yeah… snow.”

“Irene?”

Irene held her tighter suddenly, and Seulgi adjusted so that she was on the bed more comfortably, holding Irene as she felt her fingers dig into her back, and tears start to soak into her shirt.

+++

There was a lot of activity in the Kang family farmstead, with Returners coming and going giving updates to Joy and receiving new directions to help the town of Mobliz as much as they could while waiting for Irene to recover, but it wasn’t long before the ex-general herself waded into the chaos.

“Irene!” Yeri announced in surprise as she finally saw the woman coming down the stairs. The conversation in the kitchen died out as Moonbyul, Joy, and Yooa watched Irene enter with Seulgi close behind.

“So what did I miss?” Irene asked immediately, and though it looked like Moonbyul was about to say something, Joy cut her off.

“Repairs, mostly. It’s going to be a rough winter, but we gave them what we could. After Thamasa, we should really consider heading to South Figaro.”

“-Otherwise it’ll be a rough winter for us, too,” the ace pilot groaned, though, from her light grin, it was clear her complaining was merely performative. “So, are we ready, then?”

Irene looked around at all their faces before finally landing on Joy’s. “Should some of us stay? To help?”

No one answered immediately. Instead, four pairs of eyes looked to Seulgi. Irene followed their gaze and realized she must have missed more than the repair effort while she was out. “Are… are you staying?” Irene asked her. It seemed silly to even ask, but the surprise of not having Seulgi by her side when they took off from this remote village was like a jolt to her system. Why wouldn’t Seulgi stay behind? This was her home. They had kept her from her family for long enough.

“Of course she’s not staying,” Seulgi’s mother said busily as she swept into the room with a handful of empty jars. She elbowed her way between the others and set them all on the already-crowded counter. “She got you this far. I’d hate to think what’d happen to you girls if she left you to your own devices.”

“Mom…”

“Nope, I won’t hear another word about it. Besides, your brother’s got a big enough stomach for the two of you, so unless you want to help him eat us out of house and home, you’d best go with your friends.” She turned and huffed at Seulgi’s distraught features, but it was Irene she stopped in front of before she left the room once more. “And when you’re finished overthrowing the Empire, maybe we can get to know each other a bit better, hmm?”

“Well now that that’s finally settled,” Moonbyul picked up, “I got us some new clothes in exchange for all the food.”

Joy glared at her.

“What? I thought it was only fair! And besides, who’s going to take us seriously looking with these raggedy tuxedos?”

The group glanced at themselves, lamenting the quality Jidoor tailoring that had been reduced to rags from all of their adventures.

“Fine, but we can get changed on the ship,” Irene said impatiently as she waved the others out of the house, leaving Seulgi alone to say her goodbyes. There was a strange air over the group as if they had been recharged by this one success after their many failures. They were laughing, talking animatedly, and passing conjectures back and forth about what was to come next.

All except for Yeri.

As she stared up at the huge airship the others were quickly boarding, Joy dropped back and paused beside her.

“Are you ready?” the queen asked quietly, trying to mask her concern.

Yeri sighed and gave a small nod. “Yeah. It’s time. I’ve waited long enough.”