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Guts burst into Falconia’s throne room, sword drawn and growling, intent on confronting Griffith once and for all, only to feel like he’d barged into a sepulchre.
The large room was shrouded in darkness, and the echoes of soft sobs and gasps flitted about like bats before being swallowed by the darkness arching high overhead.
Immediately, he slowed, breath almost freezing in his chest as his eyes fell on the figures in the center of the room.
The throne was draped heavily in dark, thick fabric, and in the middle of the room was a large funerary stone vault. A woman knelt beside it, weeping. And laid out on top, bare, and still…
“Griffith?” After so long, the roar living in the back of his throat like a separate creature, starving, fizzled like a stray spark on his tongue, and the name— that once beloved name— came out choked. Soft.
The woman raised her head from the edge of the vault, and he saw it was Princess Charlotte. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes sunken from sorrow. One of her little hands held one of the lifeless hands laid on top of the stone.
“What—” Guts started to ask, before a mob of guards flooded into the room behind him, swarming him, shouting and trying to drag him to the ground. He didn’t fight them, but still easily shrugged them off, his eyes locked on the pale form stretched out over stone.
Charlotte’s voice rose shrilly above it all.
“— stop it ! Have you no respect for the dead?”
The men went still, although their unease was almost palpable.
“Your Highness, this is the Black Swordsman,” a younger man protested, turning a dark look at Guts.
“I am aware,” Charlotte answered, much more confident and severe than he remembered her being.
“He has come to do you harm and plunge our kingdom into darkness!”
She held up a hand for the man to stop speaking, then studied Guts’ face for a long minute. She scoffed lightly. “ Me harm? I think not. I’m not the one he came here to see. And he can do no further harm to Lord Griffith.”
She turned her back on them, her fists balled at her sides. They shook slightly.
“Let him do as he will,” she said, “If the tales are true, he’s killed far more men better armed than you.”
“Your Highness—”
Charlotte’s voice rang out, eerily placid and controlled. “Leave us.”
They obeyed, bowing before leaving and shutting the doors behind them, leaving them in the silent dark together. When Charlotte turned her attention back to him in the gloom, the coolness in her blue eyes caused a jolt of eerie recognition to run through Guts’ veins. The expression was gone in a blink, but he could see that her hands were no longer shaking.
Very slowly, Guts laid his sword on the floor beside him. Never had it felt so heavy before. Drawing a deep breath, his eyes caught on the dead, pallid face that was once so familiar to him. He could feel Charlotte’s eyes on him, studying him anew, and something about the scrutiny made him want to bow his head in shame.
“ You ,” Charlotte whispered, as if she only now feared she’d wake Griffith, “You were one of his captains…”
He met her gaze hesitantly, feeling the years separating him from that past version of himself like unseen figures in the dark pressing around him. He felt those golden years gazing out at her from behind his eyes, felt the bittersweet glow of them. He swallowed.
“How did he… When did he…”
Several days ago, he’d seen the form of Zodd flying in the far distance. They were rumors of the Apostles leaving Falconia all at once, leaving in separate directions like strange winds and not returning. He assumed that meant Griffith would be guarded only by Falconia’s guards and his army of petty demons, but when he got to Falconia, all was silent, and a cloud of dread hung low over the kingdom. He learned little more as he snuck his way into the castle.
Charlotte drew a weary breath. “Three days ago. I found him in the gardens. I haven’t left his side since. I haven’t even let them begin to prepare him for burial.”
She let out a mirthless laugh. “Perhaps I was meant to wait for you. My men speak of you being a harbinger to darkness, but Falconia has already fallen under a grim shadow. His men— monsters; whatever they were— abandoned Falconia almost immediately. His army…disappeared. We have lost our light and all of the armor that rallied around us to protect it. Our most precious light…”
Guts watched as she twisted a silver ring around her finger again and again. He wondered if it was a wedding ring. If they’d even been engaged. Tears rose in her eyes and she blinked as if she could will them away.
“You’re here for him, yes?”
Guts found himself nodding.
“I assume…it’s complicated,” she said thoughtfully, “Do as you will, but leave me something to bury, or I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
She gave Griffith one last look, then began to walk past Guts when she paused beside him. “I feel you should know…when I found him, he’d been weeping.”
With a rustle of silk skirts and the clicking of the soles of her shoes against the marble, she left, the large doors shutting behind her. leaving him alone in the dark with Griffith.
With his body.
It felt like there was no more air in his lungs. Like there was no air in the room and the whole world was holding its breath. And for some reason, Guts thought of a book of fairy tales Griffith read to him while teaching him how to read. There was a story about a man who woke a princess with a kiss, only she hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been dead.
There was an illustration on the page opposite the story of the man approaching the princess, his feathered hat pressed over his heart, his face hidden from the viewer but standing with reverence and awe. The princess laid on an altar of stone much like the one before him, beautiful and cold.
Beautiful.
He found himself approaching the stone from an angle much like the man in that fairy tale. The stone’s sides were intricate with carvings of flowers and vines and columns. A single panel on the front depicted a falcon rising.
Soaring higher and high. Always going where he couldn’t follow.
Griffith laid like he was asleep: one arm draped over his stomach, the other— the one Charlotte had held– sprawled palm-up at his side. His head was slightly tilted to the side and back, his lips parted. If he wasn’t so still and if his eyes weren’t half open in a dream he won’t rouse from, Guts would think he was sleeping.
He’d been beautiful before, with his scars and slightly crooked front teeth, the faintest freckles across his cheeks, his too-thin body carved from rations and war. When he was human. This thing…this Griffith was flawless in a way that made Guts uneasy. It wasn’t that something was wearing his friend’s face, but that his friend was wearing a different skin painted to look like him. A pageantry of him. A romanticization of what he’d been and made only of those parts, given more and more life until the truth of what he’d been— who he’d been— was buried beneath and forgotten.
This new Griffith…this reborn Griffith was flawless. Even in death, he lacked the waxen, empty look of other corpses. Moon-white skin, just a shade closer to white marble than flesh now that he was dead. Lips the color of the memory of a kiss. Eyes like winter skies dreaming of summer.
Past tense. Gone. Never to haunt him or hurt the ones he loved ever again. Never to ignore him again. Never to laugh or dance or smile at him…
A sob tried to break out of his chest and he drew it back in. When was the last time he’d seen him smile?
He couldn’t replace the sound of Griffith’s boyish laughter with the screams of their frightened comrades in that nightmare place full of faces and death. He couldn’t replace the image of him smiling across a crowded ballroom teeming with admirers out into the dark of the terrace at him with the ill-fitting saccharine smirk of the thing he met on that hill of swords…
He felt his resolve fade, felt his muscles wrapped around his bones like so much useless fabric.
No one to raise a sword against. No one to raise a sword for. No one that mattered.
“Griffith,” he whispered, reaching down to gently squeeze his wrist and run his thumb back-and-forth, back-and-forth across his skin like he was trying to wake him carefully. Not that Griffith ever startled awake. He always woke up ready, like he’d been awake for hours
He did not stir.
Sitting down on the edge of the stone, he gazed at the face artists and poets would commemorate for the next hundred years. A face they’d emulate but never get right. A face not even this thing had gotten quite right. Nose just a little too delicate, eyelashes just a little too long, lips just a little too plump. This Griffith’s cheeks were full like they would have been after the war, maybe, after several years of never wanting for anything, of never giving up his own portions for his men.
Holding his breath, Guts stroked the backs of his— blunt, rough, dirty— fingers across the soft, milky skin of his cheek. Still, Griffith slept.
“I would have liked to see that,” he said quietly just for the two of them, “You getting fat. And old.”
And no less beautiful.
He swallowed hard. Even as the teasing words left his throat he realized just how true they were. How sincere.
Leaning down, breath shuddering, he pressed his lips over Griffith’s.
Griffith’s mouth was as cold as the stone he was laid out on, but it fit well against Guts’. Perfectly. Guts stayed pressed against him for one…two…three heartbeats, then broke away, aching at the stillness that did not shift in Griffith’s face. As if it was as easy as that, like a story written for children who need a happy ending to cling to.
In his mind, Griffith’s eyes fluttered and he drew a rattling breath, spring blooming vibrantly back into his cheeks. His teeth were still perfect, his eyes with their refractive surface and crystalline pupils still uncanny, but it was still him , Guts realized. Even the monster he’d met in that nightmare place. Even this Griffith.
“Griffith.” Guts felt like he could say it over and over again like a mantra until the end of time. He stroked his cheek again and kissed his chin, the bow of his lips, then sealed his mouth over Griffith’s again as if he wanted to taste his very breath, “Griffith…”
When he pulled away, Griffith was watching him with those inhuman eyes, but there was softness in them. A fondness.
When he spoke, his voice was as clear and flowing as a sweet, hidden spring deep in a dark forest.
“When you left, you changed the both of us irreparably, forever.” He raised a hand to cup Guts’ cheek and when a sob finally burst from Guts, his expression curved into one that was almost pitying. He stroked Guts’ hair so slowly Guts could feel every single hair shift with the movement, each one touched by him. “ You know this . There is nothing you could do, short of going back to that day, to that moment, that would alter our present. That day made us the men we are today, and it led us here. It always would have,” he added gently.
His hand grew heavy as if he was very weak. As if he was still dead. Guts gently placed his over the back of it, pressing it against him, leaning his cheek into it. He wept and Griffith let him. For a long time, the only sound in the dark room was the sound of the swordsman weeping. He wept for them as they were now, for their estrangement, for Griffith’s first death, for the broken thing he’d found in Wyndham’s dungeons, for the figure he’d left behind in the snow, for the triumphant commander he’d followed, for the boy he’d dumped buckets of freezing water over one early morning, for the children they’d both been when they met one another on that grassy expanse— a place almost mythical in his mind now, liminal. It still existed in Midland; likely, he’d walked over it several times since, but it would never be the way it was that day.
Griffith made a soft sound and Guts looked up to see his eyes were full of tears, too. He smiled. “I remember it, too.”
Guts held his hand between both of his, heart heavy when he realized the heat of his own hand didn’t seem to leech into Griffith’s skin. Griffith’s fingers remained limp and his hand remained heavy.
Slowly, Guts traced a fingertip along the edge of one perfect nail and smiled slightly as he traced the smooth skin over Griffith’s first knuckle where he knew a small scar should have been.
Those eyes watched him, the tenderness that rose in them almost piercing.
“I lied to you when I said I felt nothing on that hill.” Seeing the confusion in Guts’ expression, he continued. “I only felt when it came to you. My heart would beat—”
He weakly squeezed his hand around Guts’ in a rhythm like a heart. B-thump, b-thump . Two pulses paired together, never far apart, always, always together.
“—when I saw you. Only a few times. It did not beat at all otherwise. It should not have. I thought it was a fluke, an anomaly, but then…thoughts of you, alone made it beat. And beat. And beat,” his voice faltered. “I feared it would thaw me, unfreeze my blood and make me useless to the people I sought to lead and protect.“
“Human,” Guts said and Griffith’s large, almost animal eyes blinked.
“Yes,” he answered softly. “I was afraid I would regain the humanity I shed and regret every single thing. Even you.”
They gazed at one another. Slowly, Guts leaned down. His eyes fell on Griffith’s mouth, but instead he leaned his forehead against his like he was tired. Griffith closed his eyes.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and it beat. And beat,” his hand squeezed Guts’ again, then squeezed it again and again faster and faster and faster. He gasped as if catching his breath, “And beat and beat and beat until it killed me. My desire for you killed me .”
Their breath mingled in the space between them.
“It’s funny,” Griffith said, gaze lowering to Guts’ mouth, “To transcend my humanity and be destroyed by the very thing that made me human.”
It wasn’t funny, but then Griffith had always had a lousy sense of humor. Guts huffed a soft laugh and offered Griffith a gently wry smile. “How embarrassing.”
A smile Guts hadn’t seen on Griffith’s face in a long time trembled into existence on lips he pressed tightly together as if to seal in a laugh. The corners trembled even as they turned up. He’d seen it too often when Griffith wasn’t supposed to laugh. When it wouldn’t be proper. Back then, a single look from one could make the other cry with mirth. As much as Guts wanted to press it, to make him laugh loudly enough to light up the room and remove the pall of death from over them, he didn’t. The way Griffith’s body shook with a single silent laugh felt like enough of a victory.
He lifted his hand back to Guts’ face and Guts helped hold it there as Griffith brushed a thumb over the corner of Guts’ mouth, smiling serenely at where lines marked the boundary of his smiles, a record of the passage of time. Time they hadn’t shared. Time they no longer had.
“You were always going to be the architect of my destruction,” he said, “One way or another… Only you, always you, even if we’d ended happily ever after.”
He gently guided Guts face down and opened his mouth when they kissed. He was cold, his tongue clumsy, but Guts kissed him deeper, licking into his mouth, and when a breathless moan sighed out of him, Guts let his other hand travel down his side. He let himself touch everything he’d barred himself from: drinking in the satin of Griffith’s skin, the arch of his ribs, the roundness of the muscle of his thighs.
“What will you do now?” Griffith’s voice drew him back. He still looked strange, otherworldly, but softer…more like the Griffith he’d known. His lips stayed parted slightly after his question, making his eyes look rounder, his face sweeter. Doll-like or childish, Guts could never decide. “Where will you go? What will you fight against? What will you fight for?”
Griffith waited, looking eternal.
“How long can one of us exist without the other? How long can you exist without me?”
Guts let out a shaky breath, then sat there holding Griffith’s hand. Swallowing, he looked at the still face, the slack mouth, the distant eyes and smiled. “Not too long, I think.”
It made no sense to Charlotte to wait around for the Black Swordsman to finish paying his respects. As strange as the guards and servants felt his presence was, she ordered them to let him stay as long as he wanted and to leave when he willed.
Her maidservant, Anna, convinced her to eat and bathe and put on fresh clothing. It made her feel a little better. The sorrow still settled heavily over her shoulders like a mantle she had to bear, but she felt fresher and strengthened, and although she was not ready to face her grief again, she would be able to bear it for a little while longer. She had to stay strong. Without Griffith, a whole city of people would depend on her now. He’d left detailed notes related to trade and diplomatic relations as well as plans for the future of Falconia, and she would build the kingdom he’d dreamed of. A better place than Wyndham. A fairer place. A place where children wouldn’t run hungry in dirty streets and class wouldn’t determine whether a person’s voice could be heard in her court. It would be his legacy. He would not be forgotten.
After a couple of hours, she returned to the chamber holding her beloved’s body. The guards she stationed there were still in position. One gave her a sideways glance before quickly looking away, but his expression remained slightly uncomfortable.
“He hasn’t left?”
“No, Your Highness.”
She hoped she hadn’t been wrong. Part of her worried she would open the doors to a scene of carnage, Griffith’s body in pieces and dashed across the room, the swordsman’s legendary bloodlust sated at last.
Instead, she stepped into the room and all was as it had been: quiet, dark. There was something different, though, and it took her a moment to realize what she was looking at.
She gasped and her guards immediately rushed to her side, then stopped and stared as well.
Two bodies laid on the stone: Griffith just as he had been, and the Black Swordsman, his body pressed as tightly against Griffith’s side as possible, his arms wound around him, his face buried against his neck like they’d fallen asleep together as lovers. A knife lay buried in the swordsman’s chest as if driven by his own hand. He was dead.
When she stepped closer, she saw he was smiling slightly, almost peacefully, and her heart lurched at the sight. She thought she might understand the Black Swordsman for the first time— better now in death than she ever could have in life. Strangely, it felt like a hidden compartment of a puzzle box had opened: it was suddenly unmistakable to her what they had been to one another.
She refused to let her guards remove him and determined they would be buried together just as they were. At least Griffith wouldn’t go into the ground alone.
Something caught her eye and she stepped closer, nearly hovering over them, her eyes widening at this last miracle:
Curving down Griffith’s cold cheek and not yet dry, was a single tear.