Chapter Text
Fire. Unforgiving, unrelenting, luculent fire. It burns, molten and angry, then growing, eating, swelling, before…
It explodes. Racing like a crackshot of liquid lighting, it bolts through veins, muscles, bone, tissue. Magic blooms, limbs seize. Palms slap, the land cracks, and for a single moment the light of the very sun shines itself into every surrounding crevice, cranny, and shadow before fading away. Then,
A contraction. A flutter, hesitant and weak but beating and alive and,
And Noctis Lucis Caelum sharply gasps, drawing in his first ragged breath in six months.
The first thing he recalls – and really it’s the only thing he can recall – is his abrupt and painful return to awareness. He hadn’t returned slowly. No, he came to like a switch flipping on, all fevered heat and seizing muscles and prickling skin. First he’d been nothing and everything; the stars, the light, the space in-between, and then his eyes had snapped open, and he was one, and he was here.
Sound had been the first thing to greet him. It came to him in the form of a loud, tinny voice and it'd been just enough to pierce through the fog in his mind. Shouting directly into his ear until he was able to parse the words, “get up, Noct!”
It‘d been then that his vision returned. The world had warped and smudged in a confusing array of muted colours and flickering shadows until he’d been able to blink it back into clarity. Then, he’d seen the blue, fuzzy creature bouncing on his chest, digging its tiny paws into a series of rapid compressions that’d actually really hurt.
Noct– Noctis, that’s what the blue creature calls him, so it can only be his name, had sat up with a jolt. He’d felt the chill from the stone beneath him, felt his lungs fill and expel the air and felt the beginnings of a bruise forming over his heart as it beat in frenzied double-time. …Had he been scared just then? Maybe angry? Hysteric? In his attempts to think back, Noctis still isn’t sure, but he knows that his first real, coherent thought after he’d frantically ran his hands along his trembling body had been the word: Alive.
Alive. Alive. He’d mouthed the word, then whispered it in stunned reverie. What a strange and scary word to have spring to mind upon waking up.
“Yes, it’s a very complicated word, especially coming from you,” the blue creature had said with a slight manic edge to their voice. “Now get up! We gotta get moving!”
That’d been five minutes ago. At least, Noctis thinks it’s been five minutes. He hasn’t been great with marking the passage of time, having spent all of it focused on stumbling after the strange, deft creature as they’d darted from one room to the next. It hadn’t even occurred to him to think at first, to make any sort of sense of where he is, or who he is, or how he’d even gotten into the bowels of this old, dark crypt in the first place. Not until now.
The creature – small, blue, fuzzy… a fox? Cat? Noctis struggles to match a word to the creature with his head feeling scrambled like something fresh, yellow and warm – they seemed to have taken some pity on him and slowed their pace. They glance back at him every few steps as if to make sure Noctis can still keep up, their expression indiscernible in the shadows.
The creature… It feels wrong to call them that. They had given Noctis his name, an identity to tether himself to. It wouldn’t sit right with Noctis to just leave it at that. Noctis gathers himself, what little of himself he still has left, and he takes a breath.
“Hey, um, cr– Blue? Um.” Noctis coughs. His voice sounds as though he’d just garbled a ton of rocks before waking up, and his throat is no better; it's as though he’d intentionally coated it in dust and gravel before he’d woken up.
The creature twists their head back, ears flicking forward in attention. Blissfully, they stop walking, and Noctis stumbles to a halt. His legs are already starting to kill him. “You, uh, do you have a name?” Noctis croaks.
The creature, fox, cat… rabbit? Stares back at him for a long moment. Despite the poor lighting of… wherever they are, Noctis spots something glimmering on their forehead, some sort of ruby-red horn about the size of his fingernail that he hadn’t noticed until now.
“You called me Carbuncle,” the creature says. Their voice is soft, if not still a little harried. “You can still call me that now, if you’d like.”
“Okay,” Noctis says, and he adds Carbuncle to his mental list of two names that he definitely knows now. “Carbuncle?”
“Mhm?” Carbuncle begins walking again, and Noctis follows in spite of his protesting muscles.
“Where are we?”
Carbuncle looks around, not that there’s a whole lot to look at. Dilapidated walls surround them on all sides. Broken structures and piles of debris litter the floor, and Noctis has to step carefully around it to avoid tripping over it and falling on his face.
The lighting is worse. It shifts and shimmers as though alive, casting them in a fluid blue hue that makes Noctis wonder if he’s starting to see things shifting in the dark. His nape prickles as he casts a nervous glance to his right when the light wavers in a sudden, strange movement. There’s nothing there, but still, it’s unsettling.
“Steyliff Grove,” Carbuncle replies.
Okay. The name doesn’t ring any bells, or give any sort of clue to answer his question. Carbuncle doesn’t seem too keen on elaborating though, as they start trotting just a little faster. Noctis runs their conversation through his head, grasping for something more, something a little more tangible that might keep his head from splitting itself in two. Just one thing. If he can focus on asking one thing at a time…
“Carbuncle?”
“Mhm?”
“You… You know me?”
“I do!” Carbuncle seems to be a little more amenable to this question. They glance back at Noctis, their tail flicking in a happy wag. “We met when you were just a kid.”
Just a kid… Noctis looks down at his hands. Under the flickering light he notes the calluses, the hair, the dirt, the tattered clothes, the scar over his left palm, and the raised, grey scars over the veins of his right hand that race up and along his arm like branches of lightning. It springs to mind another question.
“Carbuncle? How old am I?”
In the time it takes for Noctis and Carbuncle to reach the next floor, Noctis learns five new things about himself.
One, Noctis is exactly 30 years old. Two, Carbuncle doesn’t have an age, and they’ve been a companion to Noctis since he was 3 years old. Three, Carbuncle had been the one who brought his body to Steyliff Grove to heal him. Four, Noctis had died, and had remained dead for six months. Five, Noctis had been a pretty important person in his past life.
A king. King. Noctis can’t remember any of it, let alone fathom the concept. The responsibilities, the influence, the wealth. He had governed over people? Cared for them? Died for them? Noctis can barely walk three feet without tripping over himself, or think a single coherent thought without sending his brain into a fuzzy, spiraling mess. How had he been in charge of anything? Noctis, as far as he knows, has only existed for an hour. All he knows for certain are these old, broken walls of this place called Steyliff Grove, a talking blue fox named Carbuncle, the strain he can feel on his body from continuously pressing onward and upward, and abstract concepts of things that might’ve existed in his life before; a texture he can’t name, a smell he can’t quite recall, or a shape that once held a space in his head.
Noctis doesn’t feel a deep sense of regality, or power, or any other kingly attributes. He feels, quite frankly, like a newborn: overwhelmed and completely run through.
“But I don’t know a thing about laws… or people…” Noctis mutters as they climb another set of stairs. He wonders belatedly if Carbuncle plans on breaking anytime soon. A burn is beginning to alight in his lungs and an ache has long since settled itself into his back. They’ve been walking for a long time.
“The you now might not,” Carbuncle says, and at this point Noctis doesn’t even think they’re speaking a real language. Their words tangle in his brain like something tart and sticky, catching his brain and forcing it to fumble over itself. “Which is just fine, because we’re not going back.”
“We’re… not?” They reach the top of the stairs and Noctis's foot catches on the last step. He falls forward with a startled yelp, just barely saving himself from smashing nose-first into the cold stone floor. Yeah, Noctis thinks as he rolls onto his back, gasping for air, very kingly of him.
Carbuncle is yipping something. Little paws skitter across the floor and a small, round face suddenly pops into his view; their big dark eyes wide with concern.
“Noct? Noct! Are you okay?”
Their voice hurts his head. It's too much. There's just too much. His skull feels like it’s ready to rupture from the questions alone, and Carbuncle’s voice is so, so, loud and they won’t stop talking.
Instinctively, Noctis reaches out and pats a hand between Carbuncle’s ears, which effectively silences their concern. Their fur is soft. Startlingly soft. It’s the softest thing Noctis has ever felt in this life, maybe in any life. “Sorry,” he says, still gasping, still trying to wrest some sort of control over his body again as another set of tremors begins to take hold, like he’s coming back to life all over again. “Just… need a minute. Please.” He drops his hand to the floor and just focuses on breathing. Feeling. Being… alive.
Carbuncle doesn’t say anything at first. They dither, looking one way, then the other, ears roving and tail flicking in irritation. They look back at Noctis.
“Okay,” Carbuncle says, and leaps onto his chest, curling themself into a small ball that rises and falls in time with Noctis’ choppy breathing. “When you’re ready, Noct.”
The Grove falls quiet, save for the echo of Noctis’s ragged breaths, until eventually, they quiet too. He’s not sure how long it takes before the burning in his lungs and legs abates, nor how much more time it takes before his heart finally calms, but it’s barely enough time for him to collect his thoughts.
He’d died. Noctis had died. Would his past self, the Noctis with all 30 years of memories and experience of life and love and hurt and death – would he even want to be here? He’d been a king. Had he left behind a successor? Or nothing at all? Had his people moved on? Does he even have a people anymore? Is it wrong for Noctis to be here? To want to be here? Does he want to be here? Does he even still have a place in this world?
Too many questions. Noctis grits his teeth and presses the back of his head against the floor until the pressure gives way to pain. He focuses on that. Something a little more real and grounded. Something he can actually feel.
Looking up at the far-distant ceiling where that flickering blue light wavers, he wonders where exactly the light is coming from. He watches the distant light dance, ignores how the shadows skirt along the edges of his vision, and it's an undefinable amount of time later when Noctis suddenly notices something strange about the ceiling. He blinks.
“Carbuncle?” He prods the dozing figure on his chest. Carbuncle grumbles, opens their eyes. Noctis clears his throat. “Is the ceiling…”
Carbuncle looks up. “Oh!” They chirp. “Yeah, that’s all water. We’re beneath the Vesperpool.”
“Um,” The word Vesperpool doesn’t mean anything to him, but the word beneath isn’t exactly comforting, not while staring up at a massive body of water with nothing holding it in place. Noctis tries not to let his mounting panic show on his face. “That’s not… Gonna, like, fall apart anytime soon, is it?”
Carbuncle makes a strange noise, and it takes a second for Noctis’s garbled brain to actually compute it as laughter. “No, no! Don’t worry, it’s all kept together by ancient magic. All these stone walls will crumble to dust before that water comes down.”
“Oh.” Noctis doesn’t quite know what to make of that. Magic… makes sense. Come to think of it, there is something preternatural about the Grove that Noctis hadn’t quite been able to put a finger on until now. Something that’s clung to the walls and settled deep into his core, ingrained itself into his heart. It’s nearly symbiotic, the connection Noctis feels with this place in new, startling clarity.
Noctis looks back up at the water. The wavering lights cast a near ethereal glow around the Grove, mixing and playing with the shadows. When Noctis squints, he thinks he can make out little, distant figures darting around the pool. Something small and warm kindles in his chest. He smiles.
“It’s pretty cool,” he says.
“Yeah,” Carbuncle says, tucking into his chest. “It sure is.”
Turns out, accidentally sleeping on the hard ground of Steyliff Grove isn’t such a great thing for Noctis’s back.
He wakes with a groan already on his lips as his spine sparks in angry protest. The thought of moving is already torture, and Noctis doesn’t even want to think about the implications of actually following through on that thought.
A tiny weight on his chest stirs at his groan, and Noctis blinks his eyes open to the sight of Carbuncle, already sitting up and looking down at him attentively. They make a cheerful chirp.
“Good morning, Noct! Did you sleep well?”
Noctis lets his head fall back with an agonized moan. Why, why is his back so sore? He hadn’t done anything to it, but if this is what did him in last time, Noctis would understand.
“Oh dear,” says Carbuncle. The weight on his chest disappears, and suddenly Carbuncle is at his head, poking at his forehead with a wet nose. “Is your back still bothering you?”
“Uh huh,” Noctis says, or tries to say. He’s not sure if the words entirely make it through his clenched teeth.
“Okay, just hang on, Noct!”
Carbuncle’s nose is then replaced by something hard and sharp, and Noctis barely has a second to register the difference before the world lights up in an array of startling colours that he barely has a chance to comprehend, and then his pain is gone.
Actually, everything is gone. The ache in his muscles, the fog in his head, the crackle in his throat. Noctis sits up with hardly any effort and looks down at Carbuncle, who doesn't look any worse for wear, if not a little more anxious than before.
“Better?” they ask.
“Better?” Noctis echoes, then laughs. He feels more than better, with his mind clear and his body hardly under any pain, he actually feels like a person now. “Yeah, yeah much better. Thanks, Carbs.”
Carbuncle does a little happy leap into the air. “Great! Now, we can’t stay here for very long. We gotta get moving again!” Carbuncle grabs one of his torn up sleeves with their teeth and begins to tug. “C’mon, up! Up!”
“Alright, alright,” Noctis chuckles, letting the little fox pull him up. “You’re in such a rush all the time, you know?” Noctis says once he’s on his feet again. This time, when they start walking, Carbuncle sticks by his side.
Carbuncle’s ears droop, and they glance up to Noctis almost sheepishly. “It’s for a good reason,” they say. “I healed you just then,” Carbuncle gestures to Noctis with their ruby horn. “With magic.”
“Well, yeah,” Noctis says, “it couldn’t’ve been anything else, right?” It couldn’t have been, because Noctis feels like a new person, like an alive, real person, and he doubts anything natural could’ve soothed what Carbuncle did just then.
“What I just did, that was just a quick fix,” Carbuncle sighs. “But…”
“The amount of magic required to bring you back… That was a lot of magic. It was almost more than I could take. It was more than I could take. I had to bring you here to do it, where magic is at its strongest, woven deep within the very earth and air itself.”
Noctis knows. He can feel it in the air, a smell like ozone, a tingle against his skin. The static of untapped magic surrounds him like a tactile thing, like he could just reach out and grab a fistful, to draw it into himself. “But… what does that have to do with…”
“Magic can be traced,” Carbuncle quickly says. They sigh again, and suddenly they stop walking. “You can feel it here, can’t you?” Noctis nods when Carbuncle glances up at them. “The world outside is different. Magic is harder to come by, and it’s only gotten harder with every passing day. These days, up there? It’s practically nonexistent.” Carbuncle’s tail swishes against the ground, kicking up small particles of dust into the air. “But people haven’t forgotten. A lot of things… haven’t forgotten.”
“Oh.” Noctis chews at his lip, taking a second to ponder over Carbuncle’s words. “Is there someone coming after us?”
“I don’t know,” Carbuncle says, “but we’d better keep moving, just in case.”
Noctis doesn’t quite know what to say after that. They walk on in silence.
“We should get you a different name,” Carbuncle says unprompted, while they’re halfway up some set of stairs that have clearly seen better days and were obviously designed by some ancient cardio-health freak.
“What?” Noctis manages to gasp. He’s completely sweat-soaked through his clothes, and he’s pretty sure they’ve been walking up endless staircase after endless staircase for at least a good three consecutive hours. Noctis is beyond the point of feeling the burning and aching in his muscles and his lungs. He can't even feel his legs anymore.
“A different name,” Carbuncle says. “Noctis Lucis Caelum is a pretty well-known name, well, everywhere. You’re basically a celebrity.”
“Am I now?” Noctis wheezes, and valiantly attempts to ignore the fact that this is the first time he’s heard what he assumes is his full name. It’s a bit of a mouthful.
“Why would I need… a different name?” Noctis asks between desperate gasps. Seriously, where is the top of this staircase? “Can’t I just… keep Noct?”
“You can,” Carbuncle says. “If you want to be recognized."
“What’s bad… about that?”
Carbuncle stops. Noctis stumbles and nearly falls all the way back down the stairs.
“You were king, Noct,” Carbuncle says. Their voice is stressed, like this is the most important thing Noctis needs to ever know about himself. “If anybody finds out, they all find out, and then…” Carbuncle turns away, facing the stairs. “…I won’t be able to keep you safe.”
From what? Noctis wants to ask, but Carbuncle is already moving on, leaping up to the next set of steps before Noctis can even open his mouth. They turn, suddenly, gesturing for Noctis to follow them with a twitch of their head.
“Come on, we need to get out of here first. Just think about it, okay?”
Noctis groans, forces himself to take another step forward, then another. He knows Carbuncle isn’t wrong, that his life in some way or another would be put into danger the moment his identity gets out. It wouldn’t have mattered if he wanted to return to the life he’d had before. Noctis had died. The people have likely moved on.
Noctis stops short. He doesn’t even know what he was like before he’d died. Was he a good king? A bad one? Will his name strike fear into the hearts of those on the surface? Or would it be a source of faith and goodwill, entrusted by the people onto him?
He shakes his head, forcing the questions out. It doesn’t matter, because at the end of the day, his name is big. He should avoid drawing attention to himself, for his own safety.
But it’s unfortunate, Noctis thinks once they reach the top of the stairwell. He looks back down, far down, where the Steyliff Grove falls into watery darkness. His heart aches at the thought of being left down there, entombed in the dark.
Quietly, he murmurs, “I really liked Noctis.”
They keep moving.
“We made it!” Carbuncle announces once they reach the top of the last set of stairs. They sound far too cheerful for Noctis’s exhausted taste, but he’s far too distracted by the sudden burst of fresh air that greets them as they step out of Steyliff Grove to be annoyed by it.
They’re surrounded by a thicket on all sides, and old structures that have definitely seen better days a long, long time ago sporadically litter the ground. In the distance, above the growth of thin trees, the sky is just beginning to colour. Pink dusted clouds form in the distance as a trickle of golden light begins to peak its way through the horizon, alighting the forest with gentle rays.
For a moment, Noctis feels his breath catch in his throat. It’s the most colour he’s ever seen, and the thought of that alone is enough to spring unbidden tears to his eyes. He doesn’t want to stop looking. He can’t stop looking.
He walks until he reaches the edge of the entrance to Steyliff and collapses onto the last step, eyes trained on the golden horizon, painting the world around him in a stellar display of greens, blues, yellows, oranges, pinks, and browns.
Noctis senses his companion take a seat at his side. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Yeah, Noctis thinks, unable to tear away his gaze even as the sun burns his eyes. It really is.
It's louder outside than it is back down in the Grove. There’s distant chirping from the surrounding trees, gentle murmurs from the rustling leaves and gentle splashes as the sparkling water laps against the earth. The world around him buzzes. It’s different from the sensation of magic down in Steyliff – Noctis can already feel its absence up here like a ghost limb – yet it surrounds him all the same. Alive. The world is alive. Still turning, still breathing and colourful and… Alive.
“Come on,” Carbuncle says. “I hate to but… we really can’t stay here.”
“I know,” Noctis says, and forces himself to gather the strength to stand once more. He pries himself away from the sunrise, blinking away the sunspots in his vision as he does. “Where to?”
“Well, for one, we gotta get you some new clothes,” Carbuncle says as they leap down to the earth. Noctis follows suit. It squelches beneath his feet, and Noctis stumbles yet again, catching himself at the last second on some pillar half-buried in the mud. This ground is a lot less stable than the stone floor back inside the Grove.
Noctis takes a moment to glance down at himself, taking stock of the dark clothing still clinging to him. “What’s wrong with my clothes?”
“Seriously?” Carbuncle yips. “They’re barely hanging on to you! You're missing a sleeve for love's sake! I don’t even know if they fit you properly.”
“They fit fine!” Noctis argues, feeling his face beginning to heat. He rubs a hand along his bare right arm, feeling where the sleeve must've burned off at the shoulder. “They’re just…” Noctis gives himself a second look-over. “…not in great shape right now.”
Carbuncle shakes their head. “Unbelievable. Well, there’s a place nearby where we can get you some new ones. Come on, keep up!” They take off.
“Hey, wait a sec!” Noctis calls after Carbuncle, but they’ve already vanished out of sight. He sighs. So much for taking a second to orient himself.
Noctis pushes himself away from the pillar, and this time with his arms extended for a little extra balance, he starts to trudge after Carbuncle. He barely makes a step and a half forward when a sudden movement in the corner of his eye catches his attention. He whips his head around. For a moment, Noctis is back down in Steyliff Grove, with the ever-shifting lights shining from the waters above, messing with his eyes and playing with the shadows.
But he’s not down in Steyliff anymore. Here, the light from the rising sun trickles down in perfect serenity, hardly casting a disturbance aside from the occasional ripple and refraction from the nearby lake. There’s nothing else surrounding him, just a bunch of trees, bushes, and old weathered down bits of stone. As far as he’s aware, Noctis is alone.
Hesitantly, Noctis returns his gaze to the path ahead and follows the direction Carbuncle took off in. He keeps a close eye on the shadows this time, however, because Noctis can feel a slight prickle of unease beginning to settle in at the nape of his neck. But unlike last time, Noctis can’t quite shake the feeling of being watched.