The butterflies were not of this world.
They shimmered in the dim light like fractured fragments of distorted logic, fluttering with an elegance that defied space. Each wingbeat was a soft prayer to something long buried beneath the laws of physics. They didn't land. They hovered, as though reality had forgotten to apply gravity to them.
Zeph stood still.
He watched them as a priest might behold a divine vision—equal parts reverence and dread. There was something unnatural in their presence, not malicious… but purposeful. They carried a whisper, a scent, a sensation that clawed against his spirit's walls.
What kind of power is this…?
He could feel it pulsing at the edge of his cognition—a creeping weight on his shoulders, as though he were suddenly inside a dream that belonged to someone else.
Then came the thought.
Not one birthed in his mind, but placed there—like a cold needle in warm flesh.
"I feel as though I am dying… no…
As if I were trapped in the agony of a woman birthing twins with skulls too large for fate to bear…
Both trying to escape her womb at once…
And reality splitting with each contraction…"
His breath trembled. The air around him grew still. The butterflies vanished.
From the folds of perception stepped a figure that should not have been.
Noct.
The Prince of Agony.
His robes dragged behind him like mourning veils woven from the screams of those who dared resist despair. His mask—a porcelain echo of a child's face—smiled with eternal indifference.
He did not speak at first. Only stood. Watching.
Then, as though the world had shifted to obey him, he moved forward and spoke with a voice that rang like a bell tolling in a flooded cathedral:
"The Age of Ever-Mercy has ended.
This is no fiction whispered in fevered minds.
This is Revolution, Zeph.
And you—
You are alone."
The words struck like glyphs etched into his soul.
Zeph exhaled, frost slipping from his lips. He stepped back, the floor groaning beneath his heel. From the space between seconds, his weapon descended—a concept forged into steel, breathing with cold purpose.
And then he asked—not with pride, but with solemnity:
"What are your last words, Prince of Agony?"
Noct did not react. Not immediately.
He tilted his head, his hollow eyes gazing into Zeph's very core.
"Why fight for them?" he asked, gently. "Why carry the stain of a race so devoted to its own ruin?
What debt do you owe to humanity?"
Zeph felt it instantly.
A fissure in his resolve.
Not wide. Not loud. But deep.
Like a crack in the ice above a bottomless sea.
He staggered, not from injury—but from the echo of truth. The question didn't strike his body—it pierced his concept of purpose.
A whisper bloomed in the corners of his mind:
"Why fight… for them?"
It was not Noct's voice.
It was his own.
His hands trembled.
Memories of comrades long dead. Cities burned. Betrayals. Screams. Pleas unanswered.
He doubted.
For the first time in years… he doubted.
Noct stepped closer. His presence was cold, but not like ice—no, it was the cold of abandonment, of stars dying without ever being seen.
He leaned forward. Whispered into Zeph's soul:
"Why?"
Silence.
Then—
A heartbeat.
A breath.
A truth.
Zeph's lips moved, softly at first.
"Because…"
Then louder.
"Because I want to."
His weapon ignited in a storm of inverted lightning—light that devoured rather than illuminated. In a motion that defied spatial law, he moved—faster than truth, beyond even Light's forgotten twin.
With divine precision, Zeph swept Noct's legs, the concept of balance itself folding beneath his will.
The world rippled.
Noct fell—yet even in descent, he recited.
Not words of power.
But a poem.
"Shall mercy find your heart,
May you know rest in realms unseen.
For I shall now reveal—
The Agony… you so earnestly demanded."
Zeph landed, boots cracking against the world's thin shell. His cloak flowed like oil over a mirror.
He clapped—once.
Not mockery.
But recognition.
"I see…" whispered Noct.
Then twisted mid-air, the geometry of his motion defying comprehension. A 540-degree kick spiraled toward Zeph—not through muscle and bone—but through causality itself.
And yet Zeph smiled.
The play had begun.