The marsh waiting beyond the eave of the open window was just as grim and morose as ever, and I ignored the chill bite of autumnal air clawing at my back. The rising breeze brought scents of the briny sea and cemetery clay into the dark sitting room, a peculiar mix of this world's primordial beginning and its abyssal end. I breathed it in and reflected on the mire's perpetuity.

Despite the years lingering between my periods of residency, Cuxiel's domain never changed.

I perused the volumes gathered on my shelves in search of a specific cipher I knew to be stashed among the accrued collection of poetry and epics. At least, it had been here. It could have been moved without my knowledge. My fingers hesitated on the bent spines and rough edges as the breeze filled my nose and my shoulders slouched. 

Tired. I was tired. My search for the weapon had proved fruitless so far, and the unrelenting pace I'd adopted in its pursuit was taking its toll. 

Exhaling, I sank onto the armchair's edge and braced my arms against my knees. The shifting of the cushions arose a new scent from the chair, and as the smell of orchids overtook the heavier smell of impending rain, my gaze flicked toward the open bedroom door.

My rooms were quiet and empty aside from my own presence. 

"Where has she gotten to now?" I pondered as I again noted my shadeborn's absence. I had—foolishly—hoped she'd spend her time at the manor in my quarters and thus out of trouble, but I knew Sara well enough now to understand her inexplicable need to explore and puzzle over the unknown. The universe had cursed her with the ability to attract danger: after all, the woman had managed to intrigue me and the attention of a murderous cult. 

I stared into the belly of the blackened hearth, fingers feathered across one eye as I leaned on my arm. Thoughts of surrender played through my thoughts and I considered them with a passive curtness. I despised surrendering, but I also despised flinging myself headlong into problems that lacked solutions. Expecting different results from perpetual repetition is insanity, and I wasn't insane. Not yet. 

Holding a hand to my face, I allowed flames to course through the fine bones inside my bent fingers and silently admitted the possibility of the weapon's nihility. 

Was my quest doomed to fail? Should I bother to try at all?  

Somewhere in the hall beyond my quarters, an Aos Sí let out a cry of alarm that was succeeded by a clatter of rapid footfalls. My narrowed gaze flashed toward the door as it shuddered and flew open, and an unfamiliar man stood at the threshold, his hair a mess of brilliant red locks piled atop his head like cooling lava. His countenance was too alien to be from this realm, the angles too sharp and the long slope of his ears too exaggerated to belong to an Aos Sí.

While his face was unfamiliar to me, I recognized the man's eyes. They were an amber color shaded with variations of orange, and I'd seen them peering from the face of a cat before. It was the Druid Lionel, the one that had taken to following Sara—and in his arms was my shadeborn.

Her middle was redder than the Druid's hair. Redder than my eyes. It dripped to the floor and left bizarre patterns on the wood.

I was across the room in an instant, yanking the woman from Lionel's arms into my own. "What have you done?!" I snarled as Sara's head lolled against my chest and my fingers slid along her jaw, seeking a pulse. No, this hadn't been Lionel. I knew it hadn't been the Druid. The beat of her heart inside her veins was as weak as a child's. Her blood soaked through my shirt and warmed my skin. "What happened?!" 

Lionel answered with a shrug and I swore I'd take a bite out of the bastard's heart for his casual disinterest. I hefted Sara higher against my front and hurried into the bedroom. Heedless of the blood and the sheets, I laid her down and my hands flew to the hem of her ruined blouse. The material tore without protest as I ripped the front of it open and sought Sara's injury below her ribs. 

It was deceptively small. I could cover the entirety of the incision with the pad of my thumb, and yet it wept without end, Sara's life slipping from its demure mouth faster and faster. The air tasted of copper and Balthier's disease, the essence of his ability like a mouthful of rusty needles. Tearing the sheet, I wadded the thick fabric and pressed it into Sara's side and swore at Lionel when I heard his quiet approach.

"Get Cuxiel!" I yelled, daring the creature to disobey my command. My fury was naked in my expression and in my bared teeth. In answer, the Druid tilted his head and I released an inarticulate shout. "Go!"

Lionel left and the door eased shut in his departure. In only a minute, the sheet was dyed in rivers of red and pink, and though the blood slipping through my fingers was warm, Sara's skin had become much colder. It was as gray as spent ash, and I worried she'd disintegrate with a strong breath.

Her body stiffened, every trapped breath shivering in her ribcage as they struggled to escape. I framed my fingers over the wound and felt the tremors rise through me as my Absolian ability kindled, siphoning Sara's pain. The piercing torture exploded in my own ribs, lurid in its ferocity. Grunting, I ignored the urge to cover my uninjured middle and concentrated on Sara's wound.

The woman settled without the pain and whispered insentient words in her unconscious haze as her head rolled on the depressed pillow. Though her skin was cold and clammy under my hand, her brow was slick with fevered perspiration. She'd lost too much blood.

Cuxiel said nothing when he appeared just inside the closed door, a rolled of gauze and bandages loosely held in his fist. His expression tightened when he beheld the sight before him and the scent of blood met his nose, but the Sin of Sloth said nothing as I extended a hand for the medical items in his grasp.

Cuxiel shifted just out of reach. 

"What are you doing?" I demanded, snatching hold of his sleeve with my bloody fingers. The white cuff was ruined in an instant. "Give me those!"

"She is dying." Cuxiel's eyes rested upon my face, a well of sadness hidden in their gilded depths. "Darius...."

"Do you think I'm fucking blind?" 

I lunged, almost clearing the foot of the bed as I grabbed the items from Cuxiel's hand. My knee tipped the mattress and the woman lying on top of it whimpered in pain. I reached down to touch the nearest bit of bare skin I could—her ankle, peeking from beneath the cuff of her pant leg. Her legs were bloody as well, her thin socks saturated with it, and her pain spiraled through me anew.

Cuxiel's gaze followed my grip and something akin to disappointment sharpened the nascent lines born at the corners of his pursed lips. "Do I think you're blind? Of a sort, yes. I very much do."

I fished out the needle from the wad of gauze, setting its tip alight with elicited fire to sterilize it. "I need blood. Universal donor."

"I will have some sent up."

Cuxiel remained where he was despite my hurried motions to thread my burnt needle and prepare the wound for washing. "My friend...."

"I know she's dying!" I spat as I worked. "I know, Cuxiel."

"And yet it bears repeating."

"She goes on my terms." Sara's breath seized again as I tossed the ruined sheet aside to wipe the new gore away. "Not on yours. Not on anyone else's. On mine."

The Sin was silent for a moment, bathed in equal measures of shadow and candlelight, the chill of his mood stinging in its intensity, though I hardly noticed his exit in my working fervor. The needle flashed in my practiced fingers as I wove the thread into a neat line of sutures in Sara's pale skin.

"Do you hear me, idiot girl?" I muttered through clenched teeth as I closed the unconscious woman's injury. "Do you hear me? Your death is mine to claim. You don't get to shed this mortal coil without my consent!"

My hands were sticky with her blood long after I'd sown shut the mortal's injury. I stared at it, rubbed the gritty texture between my fingertips until it peeled in black strands. Sitting at the lip of my—her—bed, I held my palm over the guttering candle and stole what fire remained to scorch the gore from under my nails. The smell of burnt flesh battled with the harsh odor of antiseptic.

Such effort for someone so small. I licked my raw skin and tasted the remnants of her blood mingling with my own, the individual flavors as distinct on my tongue as wine and vinegar. Was Cuxiel's unvoiced recrimination correct? Should I...let her go?

Her heartbeat was so quiet, like the patter of a late spring rainfall upon the surface of a pond. I knew it could end at any second.

Sara brushed my side, her touch feather-light and feeble, and I started, glancing at the bed behind me. Her eyes—bright with fever, glossy in the dying candlelight—were open and fixed upon me, her gaze unfocused. Sara's chest rose and fell with the struggle to breathe, and though her cheeks were flushed from the much needed transfusion, her face was slick with sweat and creased by exhaustion.

Death was close. Perhaps not tonight or tomorrow, but the hooded specter loomed and demanded his due from my shadeborn. He couldn't be delayed forever.

Her lips moved in jumbled syllables, the upward inflection of her words caught in every stolen gasp of air. I glanced at the door to ensure our solitude, then lowered my ear closer to Sara's mouth. I'd thought to hear her pleading for salvation, begging for a reprieve from death, as it was what humans did when the end was near, what I'd always seen and heard them do before their final breath was shed. Drowning humans were known to grab and tug their saviors under the waves in their own blind desperation, and that selfishness was reflected in all their possible demises.

"...so much undone," she whispered, voice barely audible. "...I...I didn't...save him...."

My brow furrowed as I met her wavering stare. She would remember none of this, none of her ill, nonsensical mutterings, and I doubted my host even recognized my presence at her side. "Who did you mean to save?" I asked, heat curling about my spoken words as I brushed damp bangs from her face. "What do you mean?"

"Darius."

I thought she'd woken and went to withdraw, but Sara still wasn't awake. She'd voiced my name, and had answered my question. 

Rage exploded in my heart and crept up my throat as I braced a hand against the mattress and leaned over the woman. "Such arrogance," I seethed. "You dare think I need your salvation, girl? You dare—?!"

Cold fingertips touched my cheek, silencing my words.

"I...dare."

Her hand fell as Sara's eyelids flickered, lips parting on a pained exhalation. I turned that hand over and laid my fingers against her pulse, tracing the junction of delicate blue veins that converged under my touch. Weak. Her pulse was so weak.

"Sara? Sara, can you hear me?"

She didn't reply. Glancing again at the door, I leaned nearer again and growled, "Wake up, you infuriating creature. Hear me. Answer me."

My bloody and blackened fingertips left smudges on her cold skin. The smudges swelled like decay and, in a fit of irrational panic, I wiped the smudges clean with the bed's blanket until only residue remained. Her eyes opened again to reveal blown pupils consuming the wintry color of her irises.

"Am I dying?" she asked in a faltering murmur.

"No," I told her, willing her to focus and recognize me. "No, you're not."

"Liar." Sara smirked, shutting her eyes again. "All mortals die, you know."

Her words rang with sincerity and truth. Sara's death was inevitable, but faced with its imminence, I couldn't reconcile my understanding of her fate with my reluctance to let the woman die. It should have been a simple thing to wrap my hand about her skinny neck and squeeze until her failing lungs seized and her heart ceased. It'd be a mercy, really. For the both of us.

In the solitude of the cold bedroom, unobserved by the scorn of my fellows and hidden from the world that viewed me only as an unforgiving beast, I could admit I didn't want her to die. Not yet. I didn't want to let this fierce little mortal go, not when she saw me as Darius instead of as Pride, not when she recognized my identity as a person instead of a violent, vicious idea.

Sara Gaspard lay unmoving in the bed, unafraid of the end waiting to claim her as I lowered my brow to hers and silently surrendered my pride to the quiet woman. With my skin pressed to hers, I begged Sara to be afraid, to fight for her life, to be selfish and cruel and to curse my existence—because it would be easier that way. It would be so easy if she hated me, if she hadn't shown such magnanimity and courage in my times of need, if she hadn't recognized and accepted my evil with such aplomb. 

It would be easy to end her life if Sara hadn't given my own purpose and meaning.

Eyes shut, I breathed in the scent of orchids and wheat like a dying man stealing his final breath and refused to give the rest of the manor an iota of my attention. Hours ago I had considered the potential folly of my hunt for the Baal's fallen weapon, and though folly it may be, I knew I would never stop searching. I was a selfish, needy monster, and I would search every inch of this realm twice over before letting Sara go.

I couldn't say goodbye. Not yet. Not yet. My quest may be futile, but I couldn't give up yet.

The universe can change and shift in a soundless instant, and though I had always strove against such change, I didn't care at all when my world was forever altered.