In the aftermath of all they fought for, two sides of the same coin have a conversation.
As brief as the moonlight, as vital as the path to freedom.
Dreams resembled the gentle faces of newly baked cookies, plump with all the hopes baked into their dough. Potential weaved into fragments of flour and warmed with wishes into the form willed of them. Silent Salt Cookie saw these kinds of wonderful things in amounts as scare as flowers in the Great Barren.
After the fall of the world, he never thought he'd glimpse something so beautiful again--nor did he dare to assume he deserved such a kindness. But as he leaned down, graced with reflected radiance, the darkened moon to the bright light of the sun before him, he wondered.
Dreamed, of something better.
The sort you wanted to drift around in forevermore.
Yet the time came to lift his head up, and with it all the burdens weighing him down. Cast aside, a torn old coat of history fraying at the seams, yearning for release in the same way Silent Salt yearned for his voice to be sealed away forever. Even if a fragment of the Freedom he once sought still stained his soul, he wondered. Dreamed of the times where he stood, worthy, wondering if he'd ever see it.
A ray of hope other cookies basked in, icing each step with their memories.
"I know...I know," White Lily Cookie repeated to herself as Silent Salt Cookie righted himself.
"What do you know, now?" he said, a touch of reverence casting a smile upon White Lily's face. She gripped her staff with the determination carrying her so far.
Her eyes so deeply red, the color of strawberry jam. "What I'm going to do. What I must do now."
"Where will you go?" Because of course he knew. Two halves of the same, corrupted whole.
"It's..." White Lily began, before she looked down, angel wings folding over her shoulders in their pitiful attempts to protect the cookie from what was to come. "..something I can't involve anyone else in. I don't want to hurt them more than I already have. If I'm going to make my dreams come true, I need to...I have to..."
Her grip tightened. He nodded.
"I shall do what I must as well," he said, sword at his side as its deep black surface captured every fragment of White Lily's light. "I'll rally all the force we can muster to defend this continent."
"You and your knights," White Lily said, smile tinted fond. "If you need anything, you can talk to my friends. I'm sure they'll fight alongside you."
"We shall see about that," Silent Salt said. "To them, I am but another beast."
They knew nothing of him. What reason did any of her allies have to find trust in someone who could be hiding his true intentions? He saw the encounters the other cookies faces with their counterparts, honeyed with emptiness, poisonous promises. If he had to fight alone, he would.
He had to. For the sake of those he swore to protect, and the one speck of hope still alive after all this time.
White Lily turned away. And as she so became the sun, the light bounced off her and showed Silent Salt a glimpse of the shadowed moon. To the cookie she left behind, Silent Salt became the eclipse.
"Everything will be okay," White Lily said, betraying nothing. "I promise."
Once she disappeared, Silent Salt turned to the two unconscious cookies nearby. With a grip so gentle as if he cradled newborns, he trudged up the long, worn pathway to the surface, wondering.
Dreaming, the face of a young cookie at the forefront of his fractured memories.