I blinked, the world blurring then sharpening around the winged figure. Regal, imposing, and those eyes… they triggered something. A memory surged, hot and fast, stealing the air from my lungs. I squeezed my eyes shut, but the images were already there, vivid and terrifying. This wasn’t a bad dream; it was a recollection I’d buried.
“Krowen!” he boomed, his voice rolling across the plain like thunder. He stood some distance away, the setting sun framing him in gold. “In case your shattered fragile mind doesn’t remember, I am Redken Flarion, revealing myself to you again.” He rose to his feet and began to stalk forward, each step measured and powerful. “Before anything else,” he continued, “… steady your mind.”
I understood why he’d opened with that - there hadn’t been room in my head for anything else until now. My thoughts pulled back to what had happened at the Asuya station, what felt like only yesterday. “Where’s Shiinx?” The heat rose in my face before I’d even finished asking. “Is she with Kiara?”
“Kiara holds her,” he said. “But she is unharmed. Neither Kiara nor the Sun Jin soldiers have laid a hand on her.”
Something in me eased, just slightly. Alive. That was what mattered. I dropped to one knee, not out of reverence, just to get lower, closer to something solid to help level thoughts. I pressed a few fingers into the dirt and tried to do what he said, focus. He wasn’t wrong. I needed to settle down. But it wasn’t easy with the noise crowding my skull, louder now with him standing right there. “Alright… good. Steady my mind.” I said, shaking my head. “Lock in. Look as in control as you do, I suppose.”
He didn’t appreciate that. His forward claws came down hard against the dirt. “Do not-” He stopped. Reset. “I have spent a millennium,” he began again, “standing between Jethro and everything he would unmake. I have watched worlds fold under his reach.” His gaze pinned me down for a good second, then softened slightly. “I feel your blood boil in my presence. Yet I trust you can calm it.” He dipped his head with solemn weight. “A feat we cannot yet explain, and one you must master. Lest your inner Bloodtiger break free, again.”
“So you know what’s inside me.” I pressed my fingertips into the dirt.
“I know that you know who I am,” he said, “And you know what is inside of me.”
“Yeah, I remember you.” The sweat trickled into my hair. “Things are starting to come back. Pieces anyway.” There was an ease to being near him I couldn’t account for - not reverence, not the godhood the Templar tribes pressed onto him. Something older and less voluntary. The piece of Jethro behind my eyes, recognizing its host the way a splinter recognizes the hand it came from.
Whatever I’d expected from the creature that haunted the edges of my fractured memory, it wasn’t this. He paced with the patience of someone who had nowhere to be and all of the time to get there. No snarl. No static behind the eyes. I knew what it looked like when something dark was running the show. I’d seen it from the inside. This wasn’t that. So what was he when Jethro was in control?
Flarion stopped pacing. “You know who I am. Good. Kaisara made sure of that.” He let the silence sit for a moment, that confident smile working at the edges of his beak. “Forza Ninetails of Amber Krowe.” He said my full name the way someone sets down something heavy. “Given our little… mutual friend in there,” he tapped his temple once with a talon, “I can see further into that head of yours than you’d probably like. So then. Let’s shake some of those memory fragments loose.” He tilted his head. “How does a man like you end up on Tier?”
“Vaguely,” I said, “I remember this being entirely your fault.” My thoughts were still catching up to my mouth.
“My fault?” One of his brow ridges arched slowly. “A heavy accusation.” He let the silence stretch, his gaze unwavering, making it clear that in any contest of wills, he had centuries on me. “Pray,” he continued, his tone dangerously smooth, “enlighten me.”
Fragments from Caisteal were surfacing, slow and incomplete. Days or weeks after escaping Sun Jin’s captivity. I couldn’t pin it down. Trudging through endless snow with Rio, the Caistealian woman I’d tried to describe to Shiinx. I could still place her scent before I could place her face. Somewhere in that cold stretch of time was my first encounter with Flarion: gunshots, scrambling for my weapons in a village I was actually there to protect, not- …the rest frayed at the edges. Whatever had happened, it had landed me here, on Tier, with something dark burrowing deeper into me by the day. I held him responsible for both.
I rose slowly, finding my footing. “Why is everything before Tier so fractured? I know I was on Caisteal. I remember Rio. I remember villagers,” my jaw tightened, “,the good kind. Not the ones I…” I shook my head and dropped into a squat again, forearms on my knees. “But now that you’re standing in front of me…” I looked up and let a beat pass, “…your, ah… greatness,” the corner of his beak pulled into something satisfied as I smirked, “…it’s coming back together. You were there. Soldiers were there.”
Flarion stopped and settled back on his hindquarters about ten meters out, upright, watching me. The sheer size of him. “Surely you’ll keep at it and let me know what else you remember, won’t you?”
“Yeah, of course.” I swallowed hard. We had met before - at least once, and I was certain it was on Caisteal. That black and red silhouette, the white chest, those red eyes. Not Jethro’s eyes. The years I’d spent with the Sun Jin Empire bled into the time after my escape, and sorting through all of it while keeping the shard of Jethro in check, choosing my thoughts just right to stop it from crawling up my spine wasn’t making any of it easier.
A few moments passed. Flarion tilted his head, then apparently decided I'd had long enough. "Would you accept a handout?" he inquired. "Of all my mystical tricks," he said, swirling a talon lazily, "I've saved my most devastating for this moment: the ability of 'I was there'." He was a smartass, but when he chuckled, the low sound vibrated in my bones, a deep resonance that seemed to bend the air between us.
Something about the whole thing was off in a way I couldn’t name. Not tense, not formal. Just… easy. The kind of easy that made me more suspicious, not less. Still, I caught myself leaning into it. “Yeah. Help me out.” The memories were surfacing but not landing clean. A barn. The Varunium swords cutting through Sun Jin armor on Caisteal. Kaisara’s swords. Had I been carrying them that far back? And where had they ended up?