*********
"Is this the place or what?" Val was on the verge of whining at Xelloss, who refused to tell him whether or not they had reached their destination. "Come on!"
"Give it a rest!" Lina finally screeched. She was polishing off the last of the dinner, and had gotten quite sick of the conversation during her meal. Val clammed up immediately.
"Tomorrow," Zelgadis started, "Xelloss will stop this foolishness and take us to where we need to go. For now, we need to get some rest. Go to bed." He promptly rolled over in his blankets. Val pulled his own up to his chin and closed his eyes.
Lina glared at Xelloss once. "Pretend to sleep or something," she snapped. "And don't say a word." She pulled her own bedroll between Val and Zel for warmth. Val looked at her once and went back to sleep, while Zel merely moved over a tiny bit to give her room. She gave Xelloss another look, just in case, and closed her eyes.
*******
She stood on a cliff, watching him emerge from the darkness. She vaguely heard Filia speaking with him, but was too angry to pay attention. How dare he try to destroy her world! And without her permission!
Lina brushed her hair from her eyes, and saw him in the desert, the cocky Mazoku with his own light weapon who had such an easy time harrying her group. She was really sick of Mazoku hating her for no reason. It wasn't like she was the one who'd killed Garv. She'd only been there.
She saw the one who would become Valteira as she had seen him so many years ago- the half-Mazoku, half-Ancient Dragon who had let himself be absorbed by Dark Star. She saw her own Valteira as a child, laughing in Filia's arms. Finally she saw it. Filia's vision of a tiny child, surrounded by his dead kin in the snow, his tiny fist rubbing his crying eyes. She stepped closer to him. She only wanted to comfort him, to smooth his wing feathers and tell him that he'd have a Mommy and...
He looked up at her, his eyes hard and yellow, his adult body lean and scarred. He held out a clawed hand and set her up on a black cross.
His laughter still rang in her ears as she opened her eyes. "Stupid dreams," she muttered, and rolled over. Her back had been very cold, and she wanted it warm. Val had been on that side of her. Val was so much colder than Zel...
Or he might have been, if he'd been there at all.
*****
Lina found him standing next to one of the standing crosses, his hand resting gently against it.
"These are memorials of a dead race, Lina," he informed her. "I had a dream about it. Thousands of Glod Dragons attacked this place, when a temple was standing here. They all looked kinda like Filia, and they were killing these... these other dragons that... that looked like..." He turned to her finally, his eyes glistening with tears.
"Like you," Lina finished. Val nodded.
"I... I was a little kid again. All I could do was watch them die. It was so vivid. This place wants me to know about it, I think. Except, it didn't look like this."
"A temple once stood here," Lina told him. He nodded again. He'd seen it in the dream. "Your people guarded a dangerous weapon here."
"So it was a true dream?"
"It was the past. A thousand years ago- more than- Gold Dragons attacked this temple to gain the weapon. They failed in that, but killed the Ancient Dragons who guarded it. It was... a great tragedy, almost as bad... just as bad as the Kouma War."
Valteira glanced back at the cross. "A thousand years... that's a long time," he laughed. I must have been seeing it through someone else's eyes!"
"Yeah..."
"No!" Xelloss's voice rang. "Tell him, Lina!"
"Xelloss," Lina hissed. "It is not our job. Filia-"
"Filia has no part in this! She is not here. We are. It is our duty to tell him." Xelloss floated down to the boy. He looked at Zelgadis, who approached from Lina's side. "What do you say, Zel?"
All eyes turned on him, Zelgadis sighed, wishing he could just melt into the snow and hide. "You have to tell him now. Look at his face. You can't get away without telling him after bringing it up." He paused. "Originally, I would have told him. But now..."
"He is not Valgarv!" Lina stopped him.
"I hear that name in my dreams, sometimes," Valteira whispered. "Last night... you all called me that name in my dreams. 'Valgarv.' That was my name once."
"But not now!" Lina held his arms. "You're Valteira. Valteira Ul Copt. Filia's son."
"Filia..." Val stared up at the dark sky, watching the stars wink out as the rising sun pinkened the sky.
"She never told me where I came from," he started. "I didn't care. I had her, and Jiras and Grabos and all of you. I sometimes wondered why I was different from Filia, but she would say 'It doesn't matter, now does it? I loved you, I watched you hatch. Does it matter that I didn't really give birth to you?' And we would smile, and Jiras would get all teary-eyed and go 'Valteira-sama...' like he always did. But when we flew...
"When we flew, Filia was all round and golden, and I was black. I would see glimpses of my wings- my FEATHERED wings- and think 'I'm not like her.'
"Lina, who am I? Who was I? Why do you have to hide it from me?" His golden eyes bored into her until she looked away.
"You were-" Zel started. Lina smacked him to stop him.
"You were our enemy when we met," she explained, shaking her newly bruised hand. "When you were Valgarv, you wanted to kill me. After that dream you had, that real dream where your family died, Chaos Dragon Garv took you in. He named you Valgarv and made you half-Mazoku."
"It's against regulations to make mortals Mazoku," Xelloss added. "Another reason we had to get rid of Garv."
"Who's telling the story here?" Lina snapped. "If we have to tell it at all, then leave it to the smartest one. ME." She smoothed her cape. "Anyways, Valgarv was Garv's servant until Hellmaster Phibrizo destroyed the Chaos Dragon. Valgarv thought I did it, and wanted me dead. At the time we met, he was working for Almace, a being from another world who wanted these weapons to banish Dark Star.
"Dark Star had devoured his world and aborbed the god Vorfeid, so Almace came here to collect the lights weapons- weapons made of Dark Star's energy- in order to get rid of him.
"Things went wrong, and Valgarv let himself be absorbed by Dark Star. We all thought he was gone.
"We then concentrated on stopping Dark Star from entering the world- no easy task, with Almace and his buddies loose and messing with things! We ended up here to retrieve the last weapon. The light-bow that your clan died to defend. The temple let us have it, but it showed Filia what had really happened."
"It was her own people," Valteira said softly. "Her own clan that was... they were the killers!"
Lina nodded sadly. "Her own clan had said that the Ancient Dragons were the bad ones, that the Golds had destroyed them to save the world. But it wasn't true. Filia nearly broke when she found out the truth. Her wonderful people were butchers, their enemy peaceful guardians.
"But her clan paid. While we were inside the temple, Almace's former companions- they'd killed him when he tried to stop them, after he realized he was wrong- attacked, and the Golds came to stop them. They were all killed. Only Filia and the Elder were left.
"Filia defied the Elder and renounced her priestess status. Then she flew us to stop Dark Star from entering the world.
"We didn't. Dark Star came and flew all over the place, leaving destruction in his tracks. Until it came here.
"The Valgarv part was strong enough to replicate himself. He told us he wanted to cleanse the world."
"You mean destroy it."
"Yes. As a dragon and a Mazoku, and then as Dark Star, the Demon Lord of Almace's world, Valgarv saw the purpose of the Mazoku clearer than even the Hellmaster. And he would have carried it out.
"Except for us. Somehow, with all our different types of magic- the Dark Star weapons, my Black magic, Filia's power from Ceiphreed, and even Xelloss's power- we destroyed Dark Star." Lina paused there, regarding the boy. His face was troubled, his eyes shadowed.
"I remember Filia crying for Valgarv," she continued slowly. "Or maybe I'm confused. We were all surrounded by black feathers. But as they cleared, we saw a light. And when the feathers were all gone into white, Filia held in her hands a tiny egg. Inside was an perfect black dragon." She reached up and stroked his cheek. "You."
Valteira stared at Lina for a long time. Zelgadis watched them without moving, not even to close his cloak against the cold. Xelloss...
Xelloss waited. He'd waited for the boy to grow up; he could wait a few moments more. His master's plan had begun as soon as she'd learned of his existence. As Garv's minion, as a Ryuuzoku, as one who knew the Mazoku's secrets, he could not be allowed to live after his awakening. But the victory would only be sweet for Xelas if he had been awakened.
It had already soured for Xelloss.
