The Dawn of the Future

by Jun Eishima

  　“I’m . . . ”

  　She trailed off, unsure how to continue. Her mind was muddled. And then the feel of cold metal was gone, and she heard the thump of a body hitting the hard surface of the road. Lunafreya hurried to right herself.

  　“Miss? Are you all right?”

  　The stranger had clearly been full of murderous rage. Now she was crumpled on the ground, body limp. Lunafreya put a hand to the woman’s throat and found a stable pulse. She removed the woman’s goggles and saw slight twitches of movement under her eyelids.

  　The stranger must have fainted from the hits she’d taken during the fight. Lunafreya loosened the collar of the woman’s jacket, taking care not to jar her body.

  　She spread a hand, thinking to ease the stranger’s discomfort with her powers as Oracle, then hesitated. The way she’d brought down the daemon―what was that power? It was bizarre and unsettling. What if it happened again now? Did she still have her powers of healing at all?

  　Lunafreya looked down at the palms of her hands. She ran her gaze along her arms. The gouges in her flesh had been deep, but now not even a scar remained. The wounds had healed over so cleanly it was as if they’d never been there at all. She had encountered no curative power like it before. In fact, she hesitated to think of it as curative at all. There had been those awful black particles, clustered over the site of the wound. Could they truly be what she thought they were?

  　Lunafreya had no answers. And one mystery still troubled her above all others.

  　“Why am I alive?” she wondered to herself again.

  　In that darkness that was not night, Lunafreya’s hopes, too, seemed bleak.

  The young woman was a walking armory. Lunafreya was half disturbed and half amazed. When she unfastened the stranger’s jacket, intending to check her over for wounds in need of attention, she found an astonishing amount of weaponry. Her eyes involuntarily darted over it all: spare magazines, several knives she could only assume were meant for throwing, grenades hooked to a belt, and numerous cylindrical containers of varied sizes, whose purpose Lunafreya could not begin to fathom. On the woman’s shoulders were several holsters, a gun carefully secured in each.

  　Given the stranger’s tone before fainting, confiscating the weapons seemed the reasonable precaution to take. Lunafreya was not anxious to find a gun pressed to her head again. But the quantity of weapons and munitions posed a problem. Even if she were to take them, where would she hide them all?

  　In the end, she resigned herself to not tampering with the stranger’s belongings. She might find herself staring down a barrel once more, but she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

  　Eventually, the stranger woke. Her first action was predictable: she quickly distanced herself from Lunafreya and readied one of her many guns.

  　“Who the hell are you? What do you want?” she demanded.

  　The fact that she hadn’t shot first and asked questions later was promising. She had even asked for Lunafreya’s name. There seemed to be a small glimmer of hope.

  　“My name is Lunafreya Nox Fleuret.”

  　The stranger continued to glare at her, but Lunafreya noticed a small, uncertain shift in her gaze.

  　“That’s . . . That’s the name of the Oracle. The one who’s been dead for ten years.”

  　So I did, in fact, die, Lunafreya thought. But aloud, she found herself questioning the claim.

  　“A decade ago?” she asked.

  　The question reminded her of another pressing uncertainty. She withdrew from her dress the bit of newspaper from earlier, unfolded and smoothed it out, then held it aloft.

  　“Please tell me, do you know anything about this?”

  　Perhaps the young woman could shed some light on the article’s contents. Gun still leveled, she approached close enough to snatch the paper from Lunafreya’s hands, then stepped back and studied it warily.

  　“Weird thing to ask,” she muttered. Then, “Geez. Weird thing to carry around, too. If they’re saying the king’s been gone for three years, this must be, what . . . six or seven years old?”

  　“The king is gone?” Lunafreya’s thoughts whirled. Noctis, missing? How? Why?

  　The stranger continued, “Yeah. Nobody’s seen a trace of him for a solid decade.”

  　Lunafreya felt herself grow dizzy, on the verge of fainting from this new revelation. It seemed impossible. Her last memory was of Altissia. The covenant with Leviathan. She’d been prepared to sacrifice her life that the king might receive the Tidemother’s blessing. Lunafreya had already realized the weakness in her body. She knew the ritual would mean the end for her, even had Ardyn Izunia not come with dagger in hand.

  　But death had not mattered. She’d opened the way for the future of their star. The king would dispel the darkness that plagued Eos. The promise would be fulfilled.

  　But now . . .

  　She looked up. Darkness shrouded the sky. This was not the black of night. It was sinister. Ominous. What had happened to their world?

  　The rider’s patience was wearing thin. “Are you really the Oracle?” she demanded. “Or are you some daemon posing as a human? If you’re really who and what you say you are, give me some proof.”

  　“I do not know that I have any,” Lunafreya responded.

  　She pressed a hand to the scar in her flank. Even over the cloth of her garments, it was easy to feel the raised flesh. There was no pain from the wound, though it seemed so recent in memory. If this wasn’t the scar from her stabbing, what was it?

  　“I don’t know anything,” Lunafreya confessed. “Why I’m here, what this power is, or why I’m alive.”

  　She cupped her hands and covered her face. Just one answer. That was all she wanted. But she’d received nothing. No one could explain what was going on.

  　“Look,” the stranger said, voice suddenly soft. “I just wanna know one thing.”

  　Lunafreya looked up at her.

  　“Can I trust you?”

  　Once again, Lunafreya stared down a barrel of steel. But the stranger’s eyes were no longer those of a killer. The question was sincere.

  　“I am afraid I cannot say with certainty,” Lunafreya responded.

  　“Why not?”

  　“I have no way to prove to you that I am who I say.”

  　She did not want to lie. The stranger stared at her, and she felt compelled to stare right back. Lunafreya held her eyes open wide.

  　The gun barrel lowered. But instead of relief, Lunafreya felt her knees begin to tremble. She’d been so on edge, she hadn’t even recognized her own fear.

  　“Just remember this,” the stranger added. “One wrong move, and you’re dead.”

  　Then the gun was back in its holster. A small sigh escaped Lunafreya’s lips.

  　“If you want to show me you’re trustworthy, I could use a hand pushing the bike. This looks like more of a repair job than I can handle here on the road.”

  　The driver looked back at Lunafreya and added, “This is mostly your fault, y’know.”

  　“I’d be happy to,” Lunafreya responded, “Miss, um . . . ”

  　She realized she had not yet asked the stranger’s name.

  　“Sol,” the stranger answered.

  　It was unclear whether that was a surname or given name, or perhaps some manner of nickname, but Lunafreya nodded.

  　“C’mon then, Lady Oracle. Let’s get going.”

  　She hoped, at the very least, they’d found trust enough for the stranger not to give a false name.

  Sol was breathing hard.

  　“You’re . . . a lot stronger . . . than I would’ve guessed,” she remarked, flicking a glance at the self-proclaimed Oracle as they pushed the poor, busted three-wheeler down the road.

  　“That’s . . . very kind of you . . . to say.”

  　The stranger―Lunafreya―was speaking in the same short, concentrated bursts. They were both gaspin
g for air, a clear sign of the effort it was taking to push the vehicle along the road.

  　She’s a lot stronger than she looks, Sol thought, feeling a bit perplexed.

  　When she’d asked the woman to give her a hand, her expectations weren’t exactly high. Pushing the bike was obviously going to be an effort well beyond her. Not that the woman’s shabby attire was doing her any favors, but from the way she spoke and conducted herself, Sol could tell she’d had a pretty posh upbringing.

  　Still, when they righted the motorcycle and its sidecar, and when they began rolling it down the road, Sol quickly realized the woman was pulling her own weight.

  　Come to think of it, she’d held her own, more or less, during the fight with the Deathgaze, too. She’d held her little stick as if it were a real polearm, and her movements were those of someone trained to fight.

  　Frankly, the woman was suspicious with a capital “s.” Who went around claiming to be the Oracle? And that spell or whatever she’d used against the daemon. And the wound. Now here she was, blithely pushing away like nothing had happened, like a Deathgaze hadn’t just sunk its claws right into her arm. Sol had been staring straight at the wound when it closed up. It was weird. Creepy as hell, she thought.

  　On the outside, Sol was doing her best to keep a straight face. “How about . . . a bit . . . of a break?” she asked the woman.

  　“Yes, please,” came the response, voice thick with exhaustion. They stopped, each leaning against the bike, then sliding down to sit on the ground. Sol was careful to keep her arm positioned for a quick draw if needed.

  　This was the second time they’d stopped to rest. Sol glanced once more at the bike. The Deathgaze had managed to mangle it pretty bad. No amount of roadside tinkering was going to get it moving like this. They needed access to spare parts, as well as the space and time to make the repairs. Pushing it to the nearest temporary outpost was the only choice they had.

  　Not that it was a bad choice. It was the right thing to do, and part of what the outposts were set up for in the first place. Aside from functioning as bases from which to conduct reconnaissance and strikes against the daemons, they were dotted throughout the former imperial territories as makeshift shelters for anyone who found themselves in unexpected circumstances.

  　She’d told the so-called Oracle that Wael outpost was just a stone’s throw away. In reality, that was mostly to keep the woman from getting any funny ideas. It seemed reasonable enough to think she’d go along with things quietly if she believed Sol’s comrades weren’t too far away.

  　When they’d had a minute to catch their breaths, Lunafreya asked, “Might I ask, do you often travel by yourself?”

  　“Are you nuts? Of course not. It just worked out that way today.”

  　It wasn’t a lie. Traipsing around daemon-infested territory on your own was gambling with your life. The kind of thing only a mad fool would do.

  　Yeah, Sol thought. It just worked out that way.

  　More precisely, she’d had an unfortunate run-in with a pack of daemons. She’d taken the things on and, in the process, ranged a little farther out than she’d intended. When she realized what had happened, she was pretty far separated from her squad. Naturally, she’d immediately headed toward the rendezvous point. It would have been fine if she hadn’t been sidelined by an Oracle and a Deathgaze along the way.

  　Anyway, the important thing now was getting to the nearest outpost. Fixing the bike was the next priority, even if it meant heading in the opposite direction of the rendezvous.

  　“It seems strange that there isn’t any other traffic along here,” Lunafreya ventured.

  　When they’d had their first break and Sol had stopped the bike right in the middle of the road and sat down, the Oracle had asked, “Shouldn’t we at least push it to the shoulder?” She’d said it with a completely straight face, too. That had been the first clue that maybe she wasn’t full of it, maybe she really had been living under a rock for the past ten years.

  　“Didn’t you hear me last time?” Sol responded. “It’s empty out here. Lestallum’s the only town we have left.”

  　Sol had explained that because of the daemons, the world was in a state of perpetual night. The corners of the Oracle’s mouth tightened at the news. And when Sol told her how daemons ran wild in Insomnia―that it was more or less a nest for the things―the woman’s face visibly paled. To top it off, Sol mentioned a rumor she’d heard, that the king had been pulled inside the Crystal itself. At that, the Oracle began to tremble, as if she might faint altogether.

  　“So,” she continued in the present, as if explaining to a child, “if there aren’t any people, there aren’t any cars.”

  　Admittedly, there was some traffic in the areas outside of Lestallum. Trucks still had to haul materials from one location to another, and hunters hit the road for recon missions or to take out particular packs of daemons that needed quelling. But that didn’t amount to a large number of vehicles, and the farther out you went, the fewer there were. The former expanse of the empire wasn’t exactly on the doorstep of modern civilization.

  　So the idea of a car cruising down the highway, blaring its horn at a couple of travelers sitting in the middle of the road, was a scene that could have been straight out of a fairy tale.

  　Sol turned to look at her companion. “Assuming you’re the real Oracle and everything you’ve said is true, that you did actually die ten years ago and came back to life . . . ”

  　Speaking of fairy tales, she thought.

  　“ . . . it still doesn’t add up. We’re talking ten whole years. You had to be doing something during that whole time.”

  　Lunafreya remained silent, crestfallen. Sol sighed. This was the real world. Not a fairyland.

  　“Whatever,” Sol said. “Break time’s over. Let’s get some more effort out of those arms, Lady Oracle.”

  　The stranger stood up, looking determined once more. It seemed like her spirit might match her unanticipated physical strength. Clearly, there was more to this woman than met the eye.

  　“Not much farther to Wael,” Sol announced.

  　This time, it wasn’t a lie.

  “Ready . . . steady . . . push!”

  　Right around the time they’d developed a nice rhythm and the motorcycle was rolling along at a steady clip, Lunafreya saw a stretch of road ahead lined by several wooden structures. Sol nodded her head toward it. So this was the temporary outpost she’d spoken of, Wael. They’d made it.

  　According to Sol, nobody lived out here in the remnants of the Niflheim Empire, but the Hunters and the Kingsglaive were still active. It seemed they came out this way for reconnaissance or to conduct surveys of the land and daemons. Wael was one foothold from which they could carry out those duties.

  　When they drew close to the buildings, Lunafreya could see that everything was old and worn―all except the doors and their locks. The outpost seemed to consist solely of repurposed structures. These buildings must have been abandoned residences that the Hunters and others had salvaged for their own needs.

  　Lunafreya breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that their long walk was over. Sol had lent her a pair of boots when they began pushing. She was grateful to have them, but the fit wasn’t quite right and the way the leather chafed against her bare skin made it difficult to walk. She’d been determined to do her part in pushing the motorcycle, but in truth, her feet were sore and she was exhausted.

  　They parked the motorcycle, and Sol produced a keycard to open the door of one of the buildings. From her confident movements, Lunafreya perceived it wasn’t the first time she’d been to this particular outpost.

  　“Hey! Anyone here?” Sol shouted.

  　Then after a pause, “Guess not.”

  　Sol flicked on the lights and gave a small shrug. None of the windows had been illuminated as they’d rolled in. Apparently, Sol was right. No one else was here.

  　From the
way Sol had spoken, Lunafreya assumed the young woman’s companions would be waiting for her at the outpost. Perhaps it was simply her way of making Lunafreya feel a bit less forlorn―just like how she’d continually described the distance to Wael as “a stone’s throw away” when for most of the trek it had been anything but.

  　“Hello? Cindy?” Sol stood with a small device in hand. “Finally! It’s about time you picked up.”

  　The device was thin, flat, and rectangular. It must have been some kind of transceiver. And whoever “Cindy” was, Sol seemed ecstatic to be talking to her.

  　In fact, she realized, Sol had been trying to reach this person for some time. Before they’d started pushing the motorcycle, and again during each of their breaks, she had fiddled with the same transceiver, apparently trying to get through to this Cindy. Each time the transmission failed to go through, Sol had made a sour face and muttered, “Why isn’t she picking up?” Then she’d put the transceiver away with a sigh.

  　Whatever the case, Lunafreya could guess at a few things: Cindy was versed in whatever knowledge they’d require to get the motorcycle running, and Sol desperately needed Cindy’s help.

  　“Yeah. That’s right,” Sol was saying. “Wham. Right down onto the pavement. And now she’s not making a peep. I don’t even know where to start.”

  　It seemed her assumptions had been correct. Sol moved back outside to the parked motorcycle, and Lunafreya followed at a slight distance. She’d promised to help. It didn’t feel right to stay behind in the building, resting by herself.

  　But it occurred to her that perhaps she ought to hang back a bit longer, so as not to accidentally appear to be listening in on the conversation. Just then, she heard a familiar bark. She turned around to find a black dog bounding toward her, excitedly wagging his tail.

  　“Umbra!” Lunafreya exclaimed.

  　She hurried over to meet the dog and immediately began running her hands through his warm, soft fur. His poofy tail swished excitedly from side to side. The sight of it made her glad, but it also brought to mind another tail, this one white.