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Of course Ardyn knew Prompto Argentum for what he was as soon as he caught sight of him at Galdin Quay. Oh, not that he knew the boy’s name—marvelous, that: one of Chief Besithia’s conceit-borne delusions wandering Leide’s top vacation spots, with a name, as if he were human! Two thousand years, and did wonders never cease?
No, at Galdin’s deserted docks, a coin in his palm and the as-yet unborn king before his very eyes at last, Ardyn had no way of knowing what the cowering creature called himself. But he could hardly forget a face he’d seen so many, many times before, could he? So as he delivered Noctis his first—the simplest, the palest—challenge to the throne, Ardyn had no choice but to ignore Besithia’s lost, forgotten toy, lest he begin laughing and find himself unable to stop.
They had no idea what they were letting call itself ‘friend,’ did they? Ardyn couldn’t have penned a more delectable twist in their story himself.
--
He learned the boy’s name from Noctis himself, naturally.
He hadn’t been sure they’d keep the coin from Princess Lunafreya’s ascension, but perhaps some things held true to blood: Bahamut’s gift of limitless pockets made hoarding dragons of the Lucian kings as well. A boon for him, in this case. He’d supervised the crafting of the coins himself, so this one—ah, even should Noctis’s sharp-eyed retainer inspect it, he’d find no difference between it and any other Oracle Ascension coins they found on their long, dusty path.
The only difference really was that this one held within it a clever little transmitter. He could hear every word the four of them spoke, so long as they were together. And this early in the game, they were rarely—if ever—apart.
Still, their conversations were almost frightfully boring. Where they were going, when they’d arrive, what they’d eat once they got there. Name-calling and quips as old as the stars themselves. He could hardly stand it. But Ardyn had not carefully set up this continent of a stage, had not orchestrated his entrance upon it, without millennia of patience, so he let them natter on obliviously in the background as he took the Empire’s airships to and fro.
Ignis Scientia he knew, through spies and by reputation. Gladiolus Amicitia—his family had served the Lucis Caelum line for so long, even Ardyn didn’t care to count it. He understood well both their types; understood the roles they played for their callow lord. But ‘Prompto Argentum’ hadn’t merited much study before now, and there was little enough to uncover, now that he looked. Now that he listened.
Ardyn found that Prompto was a perfectly mediocre young man who somehow didn’t realize the transparency of his façade, the monumental clarity of his insecurity. A stolen infant, he had, at least, been chosen—what luck!—but by inattentive parents. Left all alone for so much of his childhood, now best friends to the prince, all he could do was compensate for the gaping chasm between his world and his friends’ with constant whining and humor. Not what Ardyn would have chosen, but it seemed to serve their party well enough.
It made him a wonderful sort of grounding force for Noctis. Or ‘Noct,’ rather. Reminded the boy of what he had to lose—and of what he must stand for, as Lucis’s ruler and protector.
Ardyn had originally intended to make use of Ignis—reliable, capable, versatile Ignis, the one who had known the prince longer than any, save Noctis’s father. Just enough youthful foolishness remained in him to be attached to, for him to be a friend as well as guide and guard. Gladiolus was too obvious, too solid. He knew his calling and lived it unapologetically. As such, he took some burden of responsibility off the prince’s shoulders.
Ignis, for all that his job should do the same, was gentler in wielding his position around Noctis. It had, Ardyn previously thought, made him ideal.
But that had been before a boy with Verstael Besithia’s face sidled nervously behind Gladiolus Amicitia like the next king’s Shield was his to borrow.
So Ardyn studied, and he learned. Prompto wasn’t terribly clever, and that was a shame—it would be as difficult to soften his wit as to match those abominable speech patterns. Did no one know how to speak in royalty’s presence any longer? Still. He wasn’t terribly clever, but he was quick, as his name suggested, with a knack for machinery that felt like the Astrals’ black humor. Next to Noctis’s sometime mercurial temperament, Prompto felt breezy, more of a zephyr: moveable but not mutable. Air always returned to its proper form no matter what one did with it.
A hypothesis worth testing, perhaps. Soon.
More interesting was Prompto’s response to him. Upon reappearing before them on their way to the Archaean, he was surprised to find that Prompto was often the first to ask him a question. And yet, it wasn’t as though he were unwary. While the others fixed him with grudging, tense attention—hunter animals sniffing danger on the wind, readying themselves for fight or flight—Prompto… clearly didn’t trust him. Certainly didn’t like him. Ardyn would have said the boy was downright afraid, though he hadn’t—yet—given him any such reason. It seemed all four of them had good instincts. Good. It would prove invaluable to them in the days to come.
Yet Prompto hardly sounded anything worse than unsure about him. As if fear were simply another part of the child’s daily life.
And why ever shouldn’t it have been? He could see, now, the bands hiding Chief Besithia’s brand from his friends’ keen eyes and inevitable questions. Idly, Ardyn wondered how difficult it must have been for him, acting for so long as if he were something he was not.
Ah, poor, poor thing. It would have to be him. He was sure now. All in due time.
--
Ardyn wasn’t sure what changed his mind about Princess Lunafreya. Of course, he’d always intended for the ring to go to Noctis, or why arrange any of this at all? Yet seeing her again in person, confronting her face to face as the two of them could not for so long, both fettered for so long by their positions in the Niflheim hierarchy—gods, she was so righteous.
His shadows exulted as the knife plunged in, aware of Noctis’s futile denial as he lay helpless. Less amusing, though, to watch Lunafreya rise. As she continued to struggle. Such an inelegant act, struggle, and yet Lunafreya was always so frustratingly flawless in all she did. Perhaps he shouldn’t have even given her those last, fast-fleeing moments, though they served his purpose. She gave Noctis the power Ardyn needed her to. It just left something dissatisfied and nameless within his vile, hollowed cavern of a corpse.
His hand felt strange after her touch, he noticed, opening and closing it as his airship left behind a ruined Altissia, a blinded Ignis, a murdered Oracle-princess.
His hand felt, and that was strange.
--
To tell the truth, he hadn’t expected the train incident to go so well. He’d only had so much time to practice, and Prompto himself could hardly be let in on the plan. Surely something in the way ‘Ardyn’ was behaving should have alerted Noctis.
But his anger blinded him—a foible Ardyn both understood and found darkly entertaining. The whole farce was entertaining. He should have applauded the prince; he hadn’t enjoyed such a performance in any theater over the past two thousand years.
Yet there’d been a moment he’d thought, for a moment, someone else might steal the show.
‘What did you do to him?!’ snarled Prompto from the other end of a gun, tears in his eyes—Chief Besithia’s icemelt-blue, the only part of Prompto that matched what the man had become now. ‘Leave him alone!’
That’s the idea, he might have told him, had Noct—Noctis—not once more exercised his preternatural dramatic timing.
Now, ah, there was so much to keep track of. Making sure Prompto found his way to the First Magitek Research Facility, keeping Aranea from ruining the party too early. Setting Noctis and the sorry remains of his party on their way to Gralea for the final chapter of their play. Emperor Aldercapt. Ravus. How utterly tiresome.
Re-capturing Prompto at Zegnautus Keep was more of a light-hearted diversion than anything else, at this point.
Centuries of planning had gone into this: not only into setting up each player’s pieces, but in crafting said pieces themselves, growing the wood from which each knight and bishop would be carved, planting the trees that would bear this final, wondrous fruit—Noctis Lucis Caelum CXIV. The Astrals’ Chosen King. Ardyn had worked, and waited, and whittled time away with nothing more than his fingernails, because what else had he to do? Immortal. Accursed. Banished, forgotten, blotted out of history by his own kingdom, his own kin.
It had taken one hundred and thirteen Lucian kings to create Noctis. Twenty years of careful maneuvering to prime and polish him. A smattering of months—of deaths—all planned, all changed on the spur of a moment, to twist the key that would walk him here, to this point, to ring Princess Lunafreya died to give him, to his father’s sword, and to the Crystal bequeathed to his bloodline, all under his own power.
It took Prompto Argentum, locked to a cross in a cell deep within the Keep. The last frayed, slender tie anchoring a boy called ‘Noct’ in this world.
Humming to no one in particular, Ardyn danced his hand over the cell’s assorted instruments and considered how best to sever that tie. What pangs would herald the birth of the Chosen King he’d so meticulously fashioned over these interminable, lightless centuries?
It was simply too bad he’d already blinded Ignis. It had seemed so poetic at the time—the man who liked things to be clear. The driver. The guide. But what could darkness have done to dear little Prompto, the gunner, the photographer, the one who saw Noct in a way the others could not: as a lonely child not unlike the orphan, the stolen infant? Ignis was capable, too capable. What would that do to the hatchling king, finding his dearest friend, the one soul who asked nothing of the prince and everything of the man, so utterly, irrevocably broken, robbed of the future they’d promised each other?
His hand alit on a circular blade—and dropped away. No, no. He hadn’t come this far to break Noctis now. The best thing would be to let Prompto be. To let Noctis free him from his restraints. To remind him of the kingdom he must fight for.
‘I… am a Lucian!’
“How right you are,” he assured deaf ears. Yet to regain consciousness, Prompto dangled there as if he were broken, a limp, picked-up plaything waiting in the drawer.
Ardyn closed the distance between them. Like this, away from his friends, even strung up in this fashion, he looked… less small. A product of his trial at the Facility, perhaps, or. Perhaps not. Perhaps it was simply a matter of having no comparison, of his current inability to make himself shrink, to fall back on that fine-tuned uselessness. Like this, he looked a man like any other. Not one of the late Chief Besithia’s dolls, either. Merely human.
Ardyn reached up without realizing it, curled fingers grazing the unconscious boy’s cheek like he jokingly tried to do at the Cauthess caravan, all those many, many games ago. “What does he see in you, I wonder,” he murmured, then tilted Prompto’s chin up to get a better look.
It hit him then, as strongly as if he stood in Tenebrae himself. The scent of sylleblossoms. The smell of fur. The color white, pure as moonlight, a reflection of the sun that wouldn’t burn, not even a monster as repugnant to life as he.
Quickly, he snatched his hand back, but it was an illusion. It must have been. None of those things belonged to Prompto, who stank ridiculously of hair product and gun oil and—who knew when he last had bathed, between the facility and here? Ardyn frowned at him, then at his hand, opening and closing it as if it were something not entirely familiar.
He thought he could almost hear a dog barking.
Then he could hear something. The transmitter. Noctis had nearly arrived with Gladiolus and Ignis. He ought to provide them a proper welcome.
Instead, for a moment, Ardyn continued to stare at his palm. Finally he closed his hand and looked at Prompto once more.
“All this watching, and I’ve still no cause to believe you’re anything special.” He didn’t try touching him again, letting his hand fall to his side. “You’re hardly even a person in your own right. You’re not unique, you’ve no particular talent. So why…”
There was no gleam of moonlight. No mystery to this beaten, manufactured boy, drawn entirely from Chief Besithia’s cells to become a mere fraction of a piece of his army. Ardyn could account for every second of his life from conception, to abduction, to the dull loneliness of childhood. He could speak to every influence, every hand that had gone into Prompto’s life. He did not speak to gods. He had no royal bloodline.
“Why does it feel as though you’ve been chosen by a player against whom I was not aware I play?”
Prompto had no answer for him. And in the end, Ardyn Izunia had one last king to put on the board.
--
‘Hey, Noct.’
‘Mm?’
‘You think I can meet Lady Lunafreya when we get to Altissia?’
‘Why wouldn’t you?’
Somewhere under the moon, a white dog still ran, carrying missives from her mistress despite both their long-past deaths. Somewhere, sylleblossoms still bloomed. Somewhere, someone else held a coin, but that coin transmitted nothing but her love for her star. Her love for the man, the child, the king that lived upon it, and all the people who loved him, all the people they would save.
Somewhere, Lunafreya Nox Fleuret still bided her time, aware that, in the brevity of her life, she’d once penned a twist in Eos’s story that no one, perhaps not even the gods, had seen—and that it was perfectly, wondrously, painfully ordinary, like a boy with freckles who liked dogs.
Oh, how she’d wanted to meet Noctis’s friends. To see them for what she knew them to be.
‘Heh. Guess you’re right.’