[ChicletPrime]

Chapter 5?

• aaaand it all goes wrong. i knew it!  Xavier never comes back, the ceremony to name him crown prince is never held and he doesn't return to the Academy. nobody will talk about it and her teacher refuses as well. a month later she passes her exam and joins the Lightseekers - "walking the path my teacher told me to follow."
  
• king dies (goodbye) and there's a 200 year mourning period. wow. they REALLY stretch out everything, don't they? aaaand with such a long time span, nobody really cares after awhile if the throne is vacant.  i guess mom's out of the picture? no queen?  and in all the time, nobody speaks of the ceremony that would have been for the crown prince.
  
• where the fuck did Xavier go? did they throw him into an oubliette? nobody went LOOKING for him? Jeremiah, what the fuck. Girlfriend also, what the fuck? you both just... never tried to figure out where your friend went? 
  
• and girlfriend continues on with her goal of Grandis Knight, for royalty that.. doesn't exist anymore? 
  
• ah, okay. the Lightseeker order weakens and the various squads scatter over Philos, becoming insular and no longer speaking to each other without an overarching authority to report to.
  
• girlfriend just keeps continuing in order to continue. 
  
• she's still holding onto the idea that if Xavier just come back or turns up one day, and decides suddenly to be King, then.... she'll be the one at his side.
  
• i will pause here and say that i really like the bones of this myth a ton and Xavier's part in it is has been superb but i am really very annoyed with the girlfriend; she is not playing into the mythos well at all and i'm not finding it easy to excuse or justify her actions. she keeps clinging to a world-view that does not exist even as she keeps pretending it does, that if maybe she just believes hard enough at it, it'll somehow work out. some magic way some magic how. and nobody looks for Xavier while he's busy scratching a count of decades on his cell wall. or he's escaped or been sent off onto a very long ranging expedition, same thing.
  
• then: YEARS LATER
  
• so busy being a badass in charge of my elite squad, fighting Wanderers in a protracted series of battles over many days in Starfall Forest.  with JEREMIAH! well. this fanfiction writes itself at this point. 
  
• no one has "made it out alive" from the Forest, so I guess we're fighting on its outskirts?  "I doubt we can take down the beast," says our bestie.
  
• hey, Jeremiah at least mentions that the Gladius ceremony took place here.  
  
• "I wonder what happened to Xavier, but I won't sacrifice everyone for that curiosity."
  
• something is really wrong here. i am not sure if its because of the writing or what, but I am REALLY having a hard time swallowing that girlie and bestie did nothing for 200 years and just continued on with their Knight plans as if their prince was a speedbump along the way, easily trampled over. as a fairytale, this has unravelling seams.
  
• okay, so reminiscing while we figure out our next attack plan, we find out that our teacher (Grandis Knight Guy) took off on an expedition to the starry sea after His Majesty died. maybe Xavier went with in a space oubliette. Jeremiah seems to blame Xavier for the knighthood falling apart, for messing up his ascension ceremony i guess, so they had no one to follow.
  
• Everybody finally goes to sleep (again, presumed on the edge of the forest) but i stay awake, only to spot a glowing white figure under the trees before it walks away after meeting my gaze.
  
• Nooooo, i think to myself. It can't be!
  
• Like the fool I have consistently shown myself to be, I charge into the people-eating forest to catch what I am sure is Xavier who keep moving ahead of me. i can't reach the guy somehow.
  
• ah. "In the depths of my heart I knew it might just an illusion..."  at least that's something. you didn't even leave a note back at camp! all your people who are relying on you are going to wake up and find you vanished. 
  
• I blink and.. the figure is gone.
  
• you fool.  (I am so channeling Gandalf here, apparently)
  
• what hey? "The forest also vanished. I was in the center of a galaxy, its expanse unending." but.. but the background still shows a forest? I start to fall into the waves of stardust. weightless, i fall down into the nebulae.
  
• "Embraced in darkness. Time and space dissolved into nothingness. Whether I opened my eyes or not, it mattered not. The line between life and death blurred. Did I... die? Death was so quiet, weightless. I'm a feather floating in the starry sea. I don't need to be afraid of dying. Still, my only regret was... I wasn't able to see Xavier one more time."
  
• huh. double huh. did the Forest suck me in with the shape of what I wanted most, ate me and then spit me into death? 
  
• ??? "It's you, isn't it?"  hiiii Xavier's voice actor! 
  
• "That voice, it sounds familiar." 
  
• look, the only time that "familiar voice" has worked on me as a person was in Endwalker in FFXIV when I heard a voice that I somehow was not expecting in that moment (although in hindsight how did i miss it?!) and promptly burst into real tears, clapping my hands over my mouth. i can recognize voices on my own, you know game. you don't have to spell it out for me. 
  
• ???: "Answer me! Where are you?"
  
• A blinding white light pierces my dream of death. Like watching the universe be created, light split the darkness and swirled. From light everlasting, the world unfolded.  (NICE!)
  
• Xavier: "Don't fall asleep! Please, wake up!"  no background at all, just white. "You can't fall asleep. Let's go home. Together."
  
• i am somehow reminded of when he falls asleep in the café, and he murmurs "let's go home... $nickname."
  
• what the heck?!
  
• Xavier returns, he's a Lightseeker and he takes me to his base camp on the OTHER side of the Forest. "He was always nearby when I was whenever I was in danger."
  
• okay, maybe THAT's what's rubbing me so wrong on this myth. This is (obviously) older content and the writing is all over the place. but this kind of exposition is unpleasant. just this stating of factual knowledge that is not supported in any other text and is not grounded in any way to anything. HOW did I know Xavier was always nearby? He was gone for 200 years, nobody knew where the hell he was, that was specifically stated at least two or three times. If you were in danger (as you must have been many times over your career as Lightseeker), then you should have seen Xavier wayyy before this, instead of being surprised now. 
  
• "Strictly speaking, Xaiver's squad was not official." so... somebody knew he was out there running a ragtag fleet of.. anyways. looks like everybody in his group is using different insignia, so he's collected these guys from different Lightseeker factions.
  
• oookay, now Jeremiah is here. which means my personal squad must also be here. on the other side of the Forest somehow. that nobody has returned from in months. who i left sleeping while i wandered off chasing a wisp.  i get this must be some sort of unannounced time skip, but jeez.
  
• so Xavier's been spending his time investigating the Forest itself. Wanderers slain, only to be reborn. He wants to attack the problem at its source. so. the pool? 
  
• we get the low down in a debriefing from Xavier, who speaks in a monotone. he seems himself but... not. 
  
• we talk a little afterwards, he gives me some water. "Over the years, I could have fallen in love with someone," i say. "Good," he replies.
  
• "Aren't you going to ask who it is?"  "It matters not. I'm happy for you. Having someone in your heart gives you hope to press on."
  
• I check his sword hilt and yup, star charm still attached, faded but there.  
  
• "You cherish that tassel," she says, unjealously, just commenting. "I do," he replies without any inflection at all.
  
• "Do you recall... " I start before I am immediately interrupted by Xavier directing my attention to their new spaceship.
  
• so time passes, Xavier is always busy. he never says why there was no ceremony when he returned to the palace, or how he joined the Lightseekers, or what he's been doing all this time, he just redirects the conversation away from those things. aaaand he avoids spending time with me. i am, in a word, suspicious. he has to be keeping something from me, right? 
  
• what are you, Harry Potter trying to figure out what Draco Malfoy is doing all the way across the castle? 
  
• so what do we do when we don't know something? you guessed it! we hit up bestie Jeremiah to find out.
  
• so i pretend to collapse for some reason, Jeremiah freaks out dramatically and when Xavier comes to find out what's wrong, we tell him that after the illusion, my "condition" has only "worsened". my condition being snoopiness?
  
• "Does it involve her heart?"
  
• oh Xavier, you are the BEST.  please give up on this MC and find a better one, this one is probably defective because she's being written by an inexperienced team. 
  
• Jeremiah hams it up, which is fantastic. Xavier just... picks me up in his arms?  /awright! FINALLY!
  
• on his headset thingie: "Are you still on the spaceship? I need to borrow it. Put Operation Backtrack on hold for now. Yes, at this very moment." 
  
• FINALLY. again. so the various faction people he's recruited into his ragtag bunch are what will be the Backtrackers. goddamn it, what was the name of the guy that was his greatest supporter, that eventually defected to EVER? hopefully he's mentioned by name in this. Isaac? Isayah? 
  
• I try and stop this plan from running even more wild. This was not my intention! I get out of his arms and prove that I'm in decent working order, no heart problems.
  
• "You lied to me?" 
  
• Terribly, yes, but in my defense, you did fall for it.
  
• "What did you discover? Does it affect someone's heart?"  
  
• He looks at where the white figure had been. (how did he know where the white figure had been??). "This doesn't concern just a person's heart. This concerns the entire planet. We found out the secret that Philos has been hiding."
  

And this has to be a chapter break!