I want to explain to you what it is like to have someone like him look at you.
There is a particular quality to being seen by something that has no reason to notice you. It is not flattering. It is not even frightening in the conventional sense. It is something closer to the feeling of a door opening onto a room you did not know existed in a house you thought you understood completely.
He was floating above the field and the field was falling apart around me, soldiers running or firing or crumpling, Tarq somewhere to my left shouting for everyone to form up, Dav on the right saying don't fire, and I was doing what I could which was not much, keeping my weapon raised at a target I knew I could not touch because it was the only available action, because Orin had gotten back up and we owed him at least that much.
And then the shooting stopped.
Not all at once. But the urgency went out of it, soldier by soldier, weapon by weapon, until the field had gone very quiet again, and I lowered my rifle without deciding to, because something in the air had changed in a way that my hands understood before my mind did.
Above All was looking at me.
Just me.
I have tried to describe this accurately to myself many times. It was not the way a threat looks at a target. It was not the way a conqueror looks at something beneath him. It was the look of a man who has walked into a room he has been in a thousand times and found something in it that was not there before and cannot explain how it got there. It was the look of a system encountering a variable it was not built to process.
And for a reason I could not name, that look was more frightening than everything else on that field combined.
He came down fast. No performance this time. Direct. And then he was in front of me and his hand was around my jaw, firm rather than crushing, and he was close, close enough that I could see the faint reflection of my own face in the obsidian of his visor, and I could not understand it, I could not make it make sense, why someone like him was holding someone like me with that particular quality of attention.
Something flickered behind the visor. A ripple in the reflection, a wrongness so brief it might not have been real. Like a crack in a surface that seals itself before you can look directly at it. Like a glitch in something that was not supposed to have glitches.
I did not have the language for it then. I would understand it later.
Above All: "What is this"
He was not speaking to me. He was speaking to himself, or to whatever internal architecture processed the world for him, and I happened to be standing in front of it.
Above All: "What are you"
Saviour: "I-I am a soldier… I a-am nobody…"
He did not answer to it. He closed his hand around my arm and we left the ground.
The field dropped away beneath us with a speed that compressed the world into a single vertical line. The soldiers became shapes and then suggestions and then nothing readable. The Ashveld Wastes spread in every direction, pale and cracked and enormous. The wind at altitude was cold in the way that altitude wind is always cold, immediate and totalizing, and I grabbed at his arm because it was the only solid thing and held it with everything I had.
He was going High enough that the command post was a grey rectangle. High enough that the entire eastern border of Aryavarta was visible. High enough that I understood, with the particular clarity of enormous height, that if he let go of me I would not survive the landing.
What happened next, I will recount as accurately as I am able, which is not very accurately, because accuracy requires the kind of mental presence I did not fully have.
He tested me. That is the only word I have for it. He pressed at me from different angles, physical and otherwise, with the controlled urgency of a man trying to understand something under time pressure. There was pain involved. There was also, and this is the part I could not make sense of at the time, simultaneous healing. Whatever damage accumulated, he reversed it before it could become permanent. He was hurting me and fixing me at the same time, which is not a combination that makes any emotional sense, and I said so.
Saviour: "Why are you fixing me. If you want me dead, then let me be dead."
Nothing. He looked at me the way he had looked at me on the field, with that expression I couldn't name, that variable-not-in-the-system expression, while below us the soldiers of Aryavarta kept firing at nothing and Tarq kept shouting and Dav kept watching.
Then he spoke.
Above All: "Who are you"
I told him my name. Just my name. What else do you say?
Saviour: "My name is Saviour."
The word landed on him like a physical weight. I felt the change in his grip. I watched something move behind the visor in that same flickering wrong way, that glitch-in-the-surface way, and this time it lasted longer.
And then, slowly, with the deliberateness of a man performing an act that cannot be taken back, he reached up and removed his helmet.
I have never found the right words for this moment and I have stopped trying to.
The face beneath the helmet was my face.
Not similar. Not reminiscent. Not the coincidental overlap that makes strangers pause on the street. My face, in every particular. Every angle of the jaw, every line, every feature that I had looked at in a mirror my entire life. Looking back at me.
From the face of the being who had ended more conflicts than I had years.
The silence between us had a texture to it. A weight. Like standing in a room where something enormous has just happened and the air has not yet decided what shape to take.
Above All: "No"
His voice, without the helmet, was different. Still controlled. But something was in it that had not been there before.
Above All: "You are not. I am Saviour. I have always been Saviour. You are not possible"
Saviour: "I-I don't know what you want me to say…B-but to that. I have been Saviour my entire life. I was born with that name. I don't know who you are or why your face is my face. I don't know what any of this means"
He looked at me for a long time with my own eyes.
Then he let go.
The sky opened beneath me. I dropped through cold air with nothing under me and the ground a very long way down, and I had exactly enough time to understand that this was how I was going to die, falling from the sky above the Ashveld Wastes because the most powerful being alive looked at my face and found it intolerable.
Something hit me from above.
Not the ground.
Him.
He came down like the closing of a fist, like a decision made in full, and the impact when we hit drove us both into the cracked earth of the Wastes with a force that swallowed the world entirely. The ground detonated upward in a wall of dust and sound that rolled outward across the field in every direction.
It swallowed everything.
The soldiers stopped firing. The shouting stopped. Even the wind seemed to pause.
The dust settled slowly, the way dust does, taking its time, indifferent to what lay underneath it.
The Ashveld Wastes was quiet.
And somewhere far above the cracked earth and the pale sky and the settling cloud of it, somewhere in whatever vast architecture governed all things, something old and patient and watching took careful note of what had just happened.
It had been waiting a very long time for two faces to find each other.
It would not wait much longer.