Arc II, Chapter 48

Rashid

Rashid knows he will not be forgiven.

Standing under the sweltering heat of the summer sun, he cannot escape the chill of fear that has engulfed his heart, that has spread along every vein and artery. It's in moments like these, on the cusp of inevitable tragedy, that he feels his mortality all the more fully; his every shallow breath, his every aching bone and muscle - he feels them as if he is the one waiting to be harvested by death.

Sifr-siks-e, the hometown of the Maguanacs, is a small village that sits on the cusp of a dry basin; it pays tribute to the city-state a two-day's journey away, from where Lord-Master Zayeed Winner and his family live. It had been unusual for the young lord and heir-apparent of such an affluent family to bother with Sifr-siks-e, even though Rashid and his men had been pleading for aid for nearly a year now- and yet....

And yet.

Mistress Iria and her sisters are inconsolable. They have wept and wailed nearly the entire day through, joined by the wives and families of his men at turns, the grief so loud and heavy that it's impossible to do anything but lament. Rashid's grief sits like a burning lump in his chest, constricting his breathing to the point where he wonders if his body is even getting any air.

Abdul had tried to breach the barrier around the basin; he curled in the fetal position before the very first step, dragged back by the others before the blood could be drained from his body. Ahmad had donned himself in as much armor as their small village could provide and attempted to claw his way down the steps; his wife was still attempting to rouse him, his body left pale and sickly. Rashid had tried himself, had attempted to scale down the walls of the basin - but he'd been pushed back, voices screaming in his ears as fear cleaved like a physical presence through his heart.

"You should have stopped him!" Aalia screams at him. Her tears have left coal-soaked tracks down both sides of her face, her thin arms nearly bruised from the crushing hold of her twin sister Maha. Blond curls peeked out from under their headscarves and above baby blue eyes, a match in color and form to all of their other sisters - and the brother who disappeared down the basin. "Save him! Save my brother!"

The village elder, Sada, once more tries to offer the distraught woman a weeping cloth. Aalia bats his hand away, but is soon pulled into Iria's embrace. With her face buried in the older woman's shoulder, Aalia begins to wail anew.

"How long?" Iria asks, looking to Sada. How long until we can retrieve my brother's corpse?

Sandrock Basin is half a mile across, desert stone and sand sinking steeply to the crater. The basin itself has existed for generations, long before the first settlement of Sifr-siks-e and the Winner family's city-state, but how it came to be and what lived at the center was weaved throughout their histories and tales.

Sahndräk had descended to the mortal plane, touched down on the sands of Lagrange's vast desert territories; their holy figure had left an impact, sinking the sand and stone beneath their heels and creating a vast basin. In honor of their first touch upon the land of humans, Sahndräk pulled their ever-beating immortal heart from their chest and sunk it into the bottom of the basin, where it had continued to beat for millenia.

A heart for humanity, a supposed kindness that had cursed those near the Sandrock Basin for centuries.

Countless men and women, adults and children, were lost to the basin's heart. The heart of Sahndräk promised power nigh-undefeatable, an impenetrable shield that was said to guarantee everything from wealth to eternal life. The people of Sifr-siks-e eventually learned that no promise was worth the mountains of bodies the basin slowly fed upon through the ages, the Winner family promoting an age independent of the mysticism that had led to so many being swallowed up by Sandrock's hollow heart.

But then the drought had dried their crops, leaving famine and disease in its wake; the conflict between Sanc and Oz worsened once more, the latter's troops thieving and killing along the desert border; Romefeller offered weapons and sowed discontent, leading to violent upheavals in nearby city-states where the whisper of Sandrock's promise slowly began to spread.

"Once the barrier falls away, we will search for Young Master Quatre," Sada replies steadily. "It...will be a few hours more."

He doesn't say that it takes the basin sixteen hours to fully devour a person. He doesn't say that it is likely they will find young Quatre Winner's body, left almost perfectly untouched except for the crater in his chest where his heart had once been - now torn away and eaten by the greedy power of the basin.

A heart for a heart.

Gods, the boy was only thirteen.

He'd been a small thing, the youngest of his numerous siblings, a tactical mind hidden behind the sullen look in his eyes. Rashid doesn't have children, but he acted as mentor and uncle to numerous children in Sifr-siks-e, and could see the way Quatre's narrow-minded youth blinded him to the devoted love of his family, how the heavy weight of expectations worn at the young boy at every turn. Quatre's words could be sharp and cutting, but they came from a place of loneliness. Rashid could not hold that against him.

When he'd come down a few months ago with aid for the suffering citizens of Sifr-siks-e, Rashid had seen the kindness that Quatre tried so hard to hide behind a veneer of disinterest. However, as the number of failing crops grew, as the youngest children began to fall ill, as the reports of attacks on nearby villages and towns increased - their hopes began to wane, and Quatre's desperation grew.

It was Alma's death that did it, Rashid was sure. The death of the kindly daughter of elder Sada who treated Quatre like her own child; she'd rode with a few messengers to a town a week's journey away for supplies, and had been killed in an unprovoked attack by Oz. Her body had been returned, almost unrecognizable save for the birthmark on her shoulder, and Rashid had not been quick enough to block Quatre's view of her.

A week since then, and just last night, they felt the barrier snap into place as one more soul descended into the basin. It doesn't take them long to see that Quatre is the only one missing from their numbers, and every hour since that miserable twilight hour has yielded nothing but despair.

Mistress Iria passes her sister into another's arms, standing up to arrange her skirts and striding back over to the rim of the basin. She doesn't try to breach it, merely stands a scant foot away from it to stare down into the pit. A small pool of water ripples from the center, large enough for several adult men to drown in - and it is within this pool that her brother's body has disappeared.

The barrier will fall away, and then young Quatre's body will float to the top of that pool - life and heart stolen.

Iria is an unmoving pillar in the subsequent hours, staring down into the basin. Rashid stands beside her, much the same, and the crying has subsided to impatient despondence behind them. Abdul, Ahmad, and the other Maguanacs who had tried and failed to breach the barrier are now awake, sitting along the edge and waiting for their chance to descend.

It is then that Rashid realizes-

He can no longer hear Sahndräk's heartbeat.

The barrier does not disappear instantly as it had all those countless times previous; instead, it falls away like rainfall, a shimmer of cold against the desert air and scattering across the sand and stones. The ripple of the basin's pool has only increased, splashing at the edges with a tumultuousness he'd never seen before, and then the face of the pool ruptures as a figure emerges from its center.

Rashid's moving before he's consciously aware of it, barreling down the side of the basin and towards the small, blonde figure crawling out from the pool's depths. Rashid falls to his knees in the mudbank, pulling that small figure completely out of the icy waters and fully onto dry land. Iria is beside him a scant minute later, her arms and legs bruised and lightly bleeding from her mad descent after him, though she pays her own injuries no mind as her eyes scan her brother's torso looking for the same thing as Rashid.

There is no open crevice in Quatre's chest, his skin unblemished under their hands, and Rashid can't help but place his hand above where the boy's heart still beats. Iria is already checking his pulse, a mix of anger and relief finally surging in the unshed tears in her eyes as Quatre continues to live and breathe under them.

"You fool," Rashid says, feels his own hot tears streaming down his face. "Never- Never do that-" The words come to a stop, practically choked in his throat when he finally looks up into Quatre's face and away from his chest.

His eyes meet cerulean.

Quatre sees this hesitation and knows as well, the smile on his face weak but sincere. There is cruelty in that understanding, in that gentleness, and the chill from the water has now soaked into his small form. He holds his sister's hand with his left, places his right atop Rashid's, and confirms their worst fears with a smile on his face.

"A heart for a heart," Quatre says.

And there, under Rashid's hand and in the cavity of Quatre Winner's chest, beats the heart of Sahndräk.

---

In a future

once

written...

He is a monster.

Rashid has heard that refrain before. It falls from the lips of dead men, of grieving mothers and widows, of angry orphan children. It had come from Mistress Aalia before, among the sand and rocks of Lagrange, after Rashid had pulled her brother from the basin pool. It had come from allies and enemies alike, after blood dripped from shotels under impossibly cerulean eyes.

Rashid had never believed it. He'd reprimanded those who spoke out of turn, he'd shielded as best he could, he'd followed into the depths of a foreign land because this was what he'd sworn. After the rains had come to Sifr-siks-e, after the long-beating heart could no longer be felt under the sands, after impenetrable shields had been set around his hometown- Rashid had promised his life.

Fitting, then, that he should live up to it.

Master Quatre had left him to die in a pool of water similar to the one in the basin. Rashid doesn't think it was intentional, the perfect irony of it, but it doesn't matter in the end; he knows he will die here, water lapping at his legs and blood seeping from the wound in his chest. It hurts - everything hurts when you die, until it suddenly doesn't - but what hurts more is the fact that his failing heart still beats in his chest.

He'd seen the flicker of awareness in Master Quatre's eyes the moment his chest was pierced. Rashid knows this is the only reason why he's allowed to die slow, because some part of that sweet, sweet boy was still in there fighting against Sandrock's corruption. It had come too late, and the slain bodies of the other Maguanacs dotted the landscape, chests empty of the hearts that curse so clearly craved.

If only Duke Yuy had been... no. It was impossible now.

"Ah... yoU'rE DyiNg."

Rashid could not move, not when he was in his final throes, but he doubts he'd be able to even if he were in perfect health - the chill is unmistakeable and unnatural. The voice was as recognizable as it was not; it is the voice of his wife, who had passed long before; the voice of his infant son, who passed with her; the voice of Abdul, dead on the river bank; the voice of Mistress Iria, pleading for her brother to stop.

A form hunched over him, and it was shocking to see it so clearly when everything else had already started to fuzz. A dark robe with a hood, pulled over a skeletal face made of only black bone and rotten sinew. Rashid thinks he can almost smell flowers, the kind placed on graves and given in farewell, and a hand brushes over the crown of Rashid's head with disturbing gentleness.

"I cAnNOt sToP tHis," the figure murmured. "I CanNOt hELp you. YoU wilL DiE HerE."

Rashid almost recognizes him. "You..."

"It'S OkaY. YoU WiLL bE wiTH yOur WifE AnD sON, witH yOuR fRieNDs," the figure continues soothingly. The skeletal hand brushes once move over the crown of his head, reminiscent of the way Rashid's mother used to console him when he was the height of her knee. Even as he bleeds away and fades, Rashid knows what hovers over him now.

He knows him, he knows-

"Please...stop...Master Quatre..." he manages out, feels the way blood heaves from his mouth and almost drowns the words. "He... He doesn't want..."

Master Quatre did not want this. Years upon years, even with Sandrock in his chest, he had prevailed with unparalleled mercy and kindness. For a moment, it had almost seemed like Sandrock had found contentment in Quatre's soul, that their lives would be at peace and their hearts would be full.

Rashid knew when it all had started to go wrong.

After the death of the Duchess of Yuy and Lady Meilan, after Master Quatre's voice was torn from his throat, after Duke Yuy went mad in his grief- every one of their tragedies piled up, one after another, until the delicate balancing of their lives fell away like sand. Even if they had gone back to Lagrange, back to Sifr-siks-e, this was the inevitable outcome the moment Solo Maxwell stole his brother's corpse away from the mausoleum.

"BaRtOn Has GoNE TO SToP hiM," the figure responded. "He wiLL fAiL, aNd tHEY BOth wiLL DIe. YoUR mAstEr WilL joiN YoU SoOn."

He says the last sentence as if to comfort him, but Rashid can feel nothing but despair. He wants to beg, to plead, but his vision has started to gray and he can only lay there and stare up at the one attempting to pacify him in his last moments.

"I'm EnViOuS Of yOu," the being said. "ThE dEAd are ThE oNLY oNES aLLoWeD TO reSt."

Violet eyes, Rashid recognized, just before he faded to black.