Auron, said his friends, said the other young officers of Bevelle's warrior monks.
Auron, you should come with us to Verda. Come with us to the stadium. It would do you good to get out of the city. Watch a couple of games. This time of year, there's a tournament every weekend.
The high priest's daughter, who could often be found within earshot of wherever Auron was, watched him shake his head. It made her laugh. It was a sound like coins raining on the tiles of the temple floor.
"Lord Auron," she said, affecting a seriousness unsuited to her age. "I think you are the only person in Spira who does not care for blitzball."
"You may very well be right." He took up his sword and his paper and his choji oil, and bowed his way into the temple. As he walked past the other monks he said in a voice the high priest's daughter could not hear, "I'll go later. Right now, there are things I have to do."
Which was why the high priest was so impressed with Auron that he placed him at the head of the first regiment. Which was why when Sin came to Verda and razed the stadium to the waterline, Auron received orders to lead his men to the town and give aid where he could.
In the name of Yevon.
The town was not entirely gone. In a way, that made it harder for Auron to accept. If Sin had the strength to do this much, why not send Verda into the sea whole? Why leave only enough to show what had been?
Then he remembered that Sin was supposed to be a punishment.
One section of the stadium, the farthest from the sea, remained standing in an unstable arc. Auron thumbed loose the strap of his helmet, tucking it under his arm and tilting back his head. Carved into the shell that remained, he could read the letters of the dedication and make out the device of the city seal. Along the ruptured edge, he could count the rows of seats. Ten. Twenty. A little past halfway, and already up to thirty.
Kinoc detached himself from a cluster of monks in uniform and walked over. He laid a hand on Auron's shoulder.
Fifty-five, and he'd reached the top.
"You should have come with us last week. It looked a lot better then."
Auron snorted. "It'd be hard for it to look worse."
"They say it was burning last night, but that it quenched itself at dawn, just before we arrived."
"Praise be to Yevon." Auron walked out from under the hand, and began picking his way over the rubble, down to the shoreline.
The ground was red with clay, and wet, and Auron's boots were new last spring. At least that was what he told himself when he placed a foot wrong and went down on one knee. First he cursed his clumsiness. Then a garuda went screaming past his head, and he cursed again, reaching for his blade.
Half a second later it was unsheathed and ready, but not before Kinoc cut the garuda's head from its body and sent both crashing to the ground.
"Your turn," he said, pointing with his sword.
Auron waited until the other garuda was overhead before sidestepping and gutting it neatly.
"Damn them." Kinoc checked his back, glancing once over each shoulder. "Are they down from the woods already?"
"No. It's the unsent. They're restless."
From what little of his face Auron could see under his helmet, Kinoc looked disgusted. "The Temple should have sent a summoner. There's never one around when they're needed."
"They'll send one. Eventually. But that's not why were here." Auron bent down and retrieved his helmet from where it lay against a broken doorframe. "Has the spawn been sighted?"
Kinoc shook his head.
"Take half of the men and head for the center of town. Send the rest around the treeline. I'll check the beach."
"Sir," said Kinoc, with the backstep and bow of the prayer.
Auron made it down to the beach without further incident. He even kept himself from turning to gawk again at the ruins of the stadium. Paying less attention to the buildings, and more attention to where he placed his feet, he also noticed the handful of people, here and there, moving under its shadow.
Looking for the dead. The beach was long and wide, and Auron's view of the water unrestricted. When the spawn came, it would draw more notice than the average fiend. Keeping one eye on the water, he walked closer to an old man with dry eyes who was struggling with a block of stone too heavy for one to lift.
Under the stone was a body. Without words, Auron shoved it aside, then left the man to care for the rest.
Along the side of a road, on top of a pile of rubble, a woman with the red-burned face common to the people of Verda lifted planks and bricks and passed them down to a man in a cloak of blocks of color waiting beside her. With his not-quite pale complexion and not-quite pale hair, he looked nothing like her.
To the man, Auron asked, "Family?"
"A daughter. Of hers. I'm just a visitor here."
Auron took the next load, and alternate ones after that. By the time the pink of dawn had burned away and the sun was high in the sky, he started giving serious thought to disobeying regulations and stripping off his breastplate. The other man still wore his cloak, but had developed a rhythm that let him swipe his hair away from his forehead at regular intervals.
A couple hours in, the woman held out a brick in each hand, but the man did not take them. He looked at her closely and said, "Jona."
She looked down at him, and he shook his head.
Slowly, too slowly, she sat down where she was and held the bricks to her chest. Auron made a move to climb up, help her down, but the other man rested a hand on the small of Auron's back and shook his head again. He walked further away from the stadium. Auron followed.
When they were beyond its shadow, the other man said, "I appreciate your help."
Auron felt awkward. It was, after all, only what he'd been ordered to do. Less, if you considered his primary assignment was to keep Verda's occupants out of danger, not ghosting around its edges. "You'd be safer waiting in town," he told the man. "We haven't killed the spawn yet."
"I'll be all right. This isn't the first I've seen of Sin."
They stopped at the next pair of men they found, one unhurt, and the other, after Auron applied what knowledge he had of field medicine, with a roughly splinted arm. Midway through the morning, Kinoc made a brief appearance at a high point on the road, signaling down to Auron with widespread hands: nothing yet.
Fine. They could wait. More people had come out as the day wore on, and extra hands were appreciated. They worked until noon, when two women came down from the town bearing an odd assortment of bread, and leftover roast, and chunks of an orange cheese that smelled sour but tasted sweet. Auron finally removed his breastplate, wedging it face up into the clay and using it for a seat. The man in the cloak washed his hands in the sea before coming to sit beside him. They made a silent picnic, squinting under the sun.
Auron was surprised by how good the food tasted.
"I will bring an end to this."
It was a strangely calm statement. Auron would have expected more bitterness from someone so recently forced to watch a town destroyed. Even if it were not his own.
"I wouldn't mind seeing that," he replied. "But we're neither of us summoners."
"Actually, I am."
Auron started and bit his tongue. He turned and stared at the man, who was watching him with a quiet smile.
"My name's Braska."
"Oh. Yes. I've... heard of you. My lord."
"I'm sure you have. Braska, the chosen of Yevon. Braska, who married the Al Bhed. Braska-- what was he thinking?" He ate the last of his dinner. His smile had gone a little cold. Not so much around the lips as within the eyes.
"Something like that. But it's also been said I don't listen well."
"That's a strange fault for an officer in the ranks of Bevelle's monks."
"Not so strange as a summoner marrying a heathen."
He spoke without heat, but only after the words were out did Auron suspect that he might have been too blunt. The man was a summoner, however irregular an example. He deserved at least the respect due the high priest. Though perhaps he had not spoken so coolly after all, because some of the chill seemed to slip away from the summoner's eyes.
A pair of pyreflies escaped from a break in the clay. They spun a helix around Braska before dipping low to hover over the water.
"Here," said Braska. "Will you hold this for me?"
He raised his hand to his throat and flicked open clasps, one, two, three, down the front of his cloak until it fell off his shoulders and bared his arms. Auron took it by the collar, tossing it over his shoulder, and watched the other man wade into the shallows of the sea.
No. He didn't wade. He walked. The foam broke over his toes and licked at his ankles, but didn't have the strength to wet the hem of his pants.
He danced. Empty-handed, and Auron thought his staff might have been one of the things lost to Sin. It did not seem to matter. The pyreflies drew near, kicking up the water that his feet did not. He called a dozen, two dozen more like them from the ground and the wreckage, then a half-hundred more dove down from the stadium like dying rainbows.
Like beautiful dead rainbows. Auron wondered if he might walk on water, so long as Braska danced.
When he was done, the beach was very quiet.
Then an unearthly scream rolled over the hill, followed by a second, fainter but human. Auron turned and ran even as he unsheathed his blade. Braska scrambled up from behind, and Auron caught his wrist.
"Where are you going?"
"To help."
"You haven't got a weapon," Auron said, and knew he sounded ridiculous as soon as he heard himself.
Braska almost smiled. "Have you ever seen an aeon?"
As Auron nodded, another scream echoed down to the beach. He let go of Braska's arm and ran ahead, towards the fight.