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Seteth closes his eyes and breathes in.
The scent of long-burnt cinders and the cloy of the dying, slowly falling away beneath the shoots of new growth, takes him far, far back.
He remembers a fear so acute it wanted to rend him through. He remembers the horrid, dawning truth that he could die, he could really die.
He remembers the first time he realized that his daughter might not outlive him.
Even now, the memory shakes him, guts him. Seteth opens his eyes and gazes out the window of the crumbling Monastery, across a barren field that once carried the trod-down footprints of travelers, and he reminds himself how far they have come. Hundreds—No, thousands of years. They have survived yet another war, yet another attempt to eradicate their kind. It is even possible that after this last war, with so many lost, with history wiped clean, he could finally uncover his ears without the anxiety that constantly crept up his veins.
So much has changed.
Seteth turns away from the window, from the sun as it pokes its golden head above the horizon, and he continues along the battered corridor. His shoes click neatly across each tile.
He reminds himself that some of these changes are good. The Church, for one—It needed an uprooting, an altercation. A reason to be questioned, to feel its own fear as its foundation was leveled. The new Monastery, once it is complete—once each busy day finally sees its culmination some years down the line—will spark something pale and new and dew-crisp for the scarred people of Fódlan.
Seteth turns a corner, begins to ascend a darkened stairwell. The stone floor creaks underfoot, but it holds, as it has for so many years previous. Seteth marvels at the strength of the rock, that it could so easily betray him, yet it still prevails, upright, the same as it had before it freshly cracked.
Seteth considers the strength of dragon bone. Of how solid it appears at a first glance. Of how easily it shatters under the wrong foot.
He stops beneath an eave and inhales, more sharply than he had intended to. Some memories retain their sting, no matter the time nor distance.
The domed ceiling before him is covered in a delicate spiderwebbing of fractures. Thus, the sunrise shines through, rendering the chipped openings golden. The snarl of breakage illuminates the Cathedral, striping honeyed tones across the once-opulent walls. Without its ageless, timeless touch—now that it has been sullied and shattered—it looks nearly as old as its maker.
The shy thought of Rhea sends a barbed tremor through Seteth’s sternum.
He is learning how to heal. He has been learning all his life, and these eons later, he still does not know the answer.
A regenerative slumber healed his daughter’s broken body when she was hurt centuries ago. Seteth watched her bones reknit, his head tucked into a corner of her stone coffin. It wasn’t a coffin—didn’t share its purpose—but it looked one, complete with its glass lid and pallid occupant. Seteth had watched his daughter’s wounds heal so slowly that his eyes couldn’t track the closing skin as it stitched itself whole. He watched, all those years.
Yet he still cannot understand the inner mechanism of a thing broken, of how it learns to bind anew, of what restores it within its remade shell. He only knows suffering. Ending.
Last night—As he has many nights lately—Seteth sat out late with the Professor. He listened to their steady cadence without quite connecting his thoughts. He enjoyed the sensation of their tone falling over him like a steady rain.
He is no stranger to exhaustion, yet this one is new, somehow.
The Professor had said as much about the postwar efforts. “It feels foreign to this land, to want to fix itself so wholly. Almost like it’s never happened before.”
And something had connected with a spark in Seteth’s mind. He had thrown his head back, and he had laughed and laughed.
The Professor sat silently beside him, waiting with that open curiosity of theirs that Seteth had come to seek out, to reach out to in recent moons, when he’d finally begun to tire of his seemingly endless solitude.
Seteth had shaken his head to them. Had merely said, “You’re right. You don’t know just how right you are.”
Now, he watches the sun rise through the gutted, misshapen walls of the Monastery’s Cathedral, first gold, then citrus, then fire.
He watches until a familiar hand settles on his shoulder, one whose welcomeness he nearly sags into.
Then he meets the Professor’s eyes and says, “Let us get started. I thought we might begin restoration here for today.”