#DoA2019

[thanidiel]

Prompt Twenty-Six: Shadow

Mothers and Fathers held different domains of Celestial-like mystique to the Children of the Village.

Women were sturdy, and grounded. Coolheaded, and thoughtful, and industrious, and very much like Moons.

They used to be frightened, sometimes, watching their Aunties cook. Not because it was a ferocious, or frenetic, or unhinged affair, but the way it was the exact opposite in every meted motion; how the sproutling spirit of a Child could not succeed in any capacity to bring dimension to such a possibility of their own characters.

Sometimes these powerful Women committed mistakes - a cleaver meant to divide animal fat from animal lean suddenly scraping against the bone knots of fingers, or perhaps a slip of hunched strongbacks sending them awry, knocking down the boiling pot big enough to fit the Lu Family’s little plump zhuzhu son.

And Jian, and Hui, and Chenglei, and Mei, and Jie, and Shao, and Liang, and Guo, and both Da and Xiao Xiang would all hold their tiny mouths agape (until an Auntie threatened a bird would sweep down and pull their tongues out, root and all, if they kept them wagged out).

They would watch that determined apathy as a Mother’s blood merely continued to smear and drip into stock, and pickled vegetable, and cattle meat being chopped steadily into paste. How She would simply raise up the beautifully gnarled joint, suck with a loud rupture of Air to the open gash, and that is how She would manage the injury between actions.

Frozen in fear of sympathetic pain as She would simply shake off attire drenched in scalding liquid, reaching down and seizing that rebellious pot and throw it right back atop of Fire. Only the briefest pauses were ever taken for Her to wander down into the numbing River then back up to duties as though nothing had occurred.

Every mishap of Women’s work would leave them questioning, terrified and stupoured, on if their Aunties would die.

Then, later, when She had not suddenly vanished from their lives, the Children would think to themselves: how?

The dominant theory was that Mothers are Mothers.

Somehow, imbued with Jin-like power in light of Their statuses and space occupied in this Universe. Thus contributing to Their iron-handed and level judgment cast upon others, and the way that matters of mortality slid off of Their skin like Water against waxy greens.

In an intuitive way, Jian understood that his admiration for these Women went beyond what was expected of him - broke generations of philosophical tradition about how the delicate lives of mortals ought to be composed. It was all well and good for Children to worship their Betters; it was another thing for a Child designated Man to have more than simply filial reverence to Woman.

For his heart was suffused with not just fondness, fondness like the way a Man is satisfied with the rightful efficacy and calm of a good Home, made so by dutiful companion and dutiful beasts. But a measure of the same longing that twisted into the muscles clutching his Family-given bones when he witnessed the deeply black strokes of characters onto cloth, or when the older boys would grapple and thrash one another down onto yellow Earth.

A deep, bloodful, reflex in him wished to imitate.

And through imitation, he would grasp ‘being’ like the hesitant, echoing, smiles of infants.

He wished to be like his Mother, privately and ever-silently. Both Parents received his equal piety, but he found more relation as the years cultivated the body They had given him to the set weight in Her brow, and the quiet, than to the different permutation of his Father’s strength.

So much did he wish so, that it was often a question left mixed through the ashes of the incense burner on if the Jin had placed his and Hui’s souls within the wrong seeds of Mother’s womb - some trick of mischief played upon her by some black-furred fox. Or perhaps they were supposed to be birthed from the same Water as was often joked, and had been split apart improperly by the creature.

It was often said, insisted, that they were of such keen similarity that it was only their physiology that indicated who was Eldest Son and who was Eldest Daughter of the Zhen Family.

On many days, most days, he was inclined to agree and play into it. On other days, when the longing buried too fiercely in his heart, he wondered if it were truly so, or if it were some illusion complimented by their sexes.

The Son that took more than his proper share of the Moon appearing similar to a Woman, and her akin to a Man from the leftover Sun.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Eighteen: “Memory”

“Where’d you grow up, Takeshi?”

“Ah?”

Not good.

“Somewhere else, right? Roshu, Doma, far end of Shishu? You don’t seem like you’re from here.”

He did not have a good answer for this prepared.

He did not think anyone would ask. Why would they ask?

“...Yes. Kugane is still very new to me… “

You must answer the question. Quickly, before it is no longer passable.

“... I am not from Doma or Hingashi. I came from one of the islands across the Sea.”

“Yeah? Pirateblood, aren’t you? That’d make sense on all of the knowhow you came in here with.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those… hook swords you have? What do you call them?”

Hu Gou.

“Tora Fukku.” Tiger Hook.

“Yeah, those. We don’t have that around here, you know? Makes sense for you, though.”

“Mm. They are very useful in disarming or tripping your enemy…”

Make this believable.

“... Useful when what is beneath your feet is constantly swaying, no?”

“I can imagine. Just thought I’d ask, you don’t look too Hingan and yet you’re with us.”

“Yes.”

Just make it up. They cannot determine your falsehoods. Make it up, and remember it for later when others ask.

“...Pirateblood and Halfblood,” he starts to elaborate this new tale, “My Mother told me she was from here, and my Father was a foreigner from Aldenard, Ala Mhigan. I came here because the Sea was getting bloody, have you heard of what that Nenda woman did? I wished to make an exit before the different groups…”

[thanidiel]

Prompt Thirteen: “Stash”

There was a quaint little tea store between the Consulates and the Kogane Dori.

To many, it was simply where to get packages of sencha or matcha, purchase a new mortar and pestle, sit down for a cup of silk-stocking-tea, or acquire a spice mix to copycat the palates of Thavnairian or Gyr Abanian teas.

To the Kuroiri, it was where they would sometimes stash dreamweed, blackroot rose, somnus - every nasty sort of substance that leaked through the tight borders of Hingashi onto Shishu. One of the many unsuspecting caches throughout the Foreign District.

It was laughably easy to do so, and even moreso when they started to utilise the quiet, head-down, personality of ‘Takeshi’ to do so. It was him who ran the deliveries for some time after the shipments got through the walls and were processed out of the warehouses.

No one questioned such a quiet, dutiful, laborer bringing in pungent, fragrant, crates of herb and tea from a wagon fresh from the ports - toiling seemingly endlessly as his long sleeves and neck drenched in sweat. Never trembling with his exertion as he politely waved off urchins who wished to earn koban assisting him or made sure to provide loud greetings of respect to those he had recognised as the teashop regulars.

Then he would step into the back and everyone would remark graciously to Mister Tanaka that it was good that his worker was both out of the sun and could sit down and enjoy a drink during the remainder of his duties.

Meanwhile, Jian merely continued to place down the goods fearlessly, without the worry of gazes through the thinly-opened doorway that separated the front room from the cold, dark, storage.

The perfume of chrysanthemums and jasmine, the dark richness of the most popular green and black teas, and the sweetness of dried persimmons and peaches, all covered everything in the most blatant of senses, even to the Kuroiri and Tanaka.

They had a subtle system of distinction, to be felt whether blackness or light fell onto the layers of disguising herbs.

An undistinguished notch of the knife used to break apart packages, and rope, and crates. On the underside of the lid. Something a worker could seamlessly notate with the way their thumbs brushed against the wood when they lifted it up by its right corner.

“Takeshi!” carried over into the claustrophobic room.

“Here, Uncle Tanaka.”

“Master Nakai has come for the white tea from Gridania. Can you please carry a crate out to his servant?”

Milkweed, then.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Four: “Parasite”

He discovered quickly that the Kuroiri-Kai was like a glutted parasite feeding upon the nation of Hingashi. 

Nothing so simple, so go-to, like a river leech or fly larvae bitten into the skin.

It flowed deeper than that.

It crawled through Shishu’s body. 

In the blood, etching through the organs.

The way you would see it worm boldly, openly, through fish, or frogs, or reptiles. Through the transparency of their eyes. The uncharacteristic slithering of ‘fibers’ through the muscles when you’ve hacked an infected animal open. The eggs underneath thin skin, in blood vessels or spread along orifices.

Kuroiri - Kuroi kiri.

Black mist.

Black like Garlemald.

Like they had sent forth the Rose upon Hingashi in the form of criminals.

He did not question where the funds from outside flowed in from.

Not his business, neither was he anywhere close to necessary in that regard.

He merely kept his head down, earned his pay and his survival by beating who he was told to beat, protecting the cargo he was told to protect, so on. He only found out when a job got dirty - when they were taking in goods that landed on Shishu’s northern coast and getting it over the walls of Kugane into the warehouses.

Some inexperienced Sekiseigumi had stumbled into them in the sidestreets. Not looking, not expecting, for trouble. And instead of doing the trained thing, to light up alarm, he had thought to intercept the men and women in the darkness.

His hu gou brought him down, but that did not stop one of the crates from striking the ground and breaking open when the peacekeeper’s sword swept across Oka’s arm.

Weapons.

He was stuffing weapons back into the crate as he and the wounded man tried to flip it onto its bottom, get it moving and away from the bloody scene before a restless citizen investigated the noise.

Firearms, at that.

Pricy, sleek, things. Not too heavy, not too light. 

Nothing like the older models that the Kuroiri and the wiser, elder, criminal sects of Kugane preferred; their generic, ‘easily found like change’, pistols spread across the world.

No.

This was…

Fresh. 

Off the assembly line. Not the newest models found in the Empire’s territory and its armies, but new enough for the world beyond. Something they would not mind mass-producing. Something that Jian had seen before in his service to the Empire.

They had too many crates for this to be a stolen shipment, the operation from mainland Othard all the way to here had been too smooth, too simple, for such.

These were freely given.

Injected, even, from the source. To spread across Hingashi’s underground.

A very purposeful infection.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Twenty: “Reconcile”

“...it’s not about the wrongs or rights you’ve done.”

“Then what is it, Little Brother? What about me repulses you so that you would deny me entrance to my own home? Do you forget who has loved and watched you through your childhood?”

He did not like the disconcernment in his Brother’s face. The way that the bushels of his brows settled like he were looking dimly at a stranger, some Family friend that he had not seen since childhood. He wanted it to be a trick of the dust and heat, or perhaps his mind playing tricks on him from hunger in his belly.

“That is it. ‘Your’ home.” The mere implication of such rolled out with such distaste from the too early made of a man, “It is not your home. It has not been your home for many cycles and many strifes. What bond do we share anymore than being birthed from the same waters?”

Something about that stung evermore than even Second Brother had intended it to be. For with that, Jian had glanced away from the man sitting crosslegged with him upon the Earth. To let the weary bleakness of such a reality sigh out into the air.

And in that, he caught a child peeking out from the doorway. A child that he had almost taken as simply a Nephew sprung from Little Brother’s loins and blood, until he recalled dimly that he was too young to have sired any Child beyond three cycles. Dimly, he blinked, an action that seemed to take one thousand rotations of the world.

Little An; Third and Youngest Brother. Someone he had almost forgotten entirely, for Jian had been taken when the twins were not even past their first spring. Where was Ai?

He could inquire about the twins later.

“...I could not help that. You know that decision was beyond me, the Kou took me, Father gifted me away. To punish me for forces neither of us could have controlled is—”

“Zhen Jian,” the lacking familiarity in that address sank the wound deeper, “Do you remember how to till barley fields or renew the rice paddies? Yoke cattle? Thresh grains? Can you still feel when rain heralds in the air, know to harvest early?”

Chenglei even went as far as to take his somehow smaller Elder Brother’s wrist in his hand, twisting it around towards its underside, displaying the miscellaneous scatter of scars, “You have been enveloped in a different profession than the one Father passed down to us. That does not inherently sever you, but you are ungainly, and another mouth to feed atop of that. Prosperity does not come to us with Doma’s freedom - it will not for some cycles. How can I live with myself to feed you and deny An,” Where was Ai?, “and Mother their proper nourishment?”

The Son come Home rips away the other’s grip from his limb, scoffing in indignity to be spoken to so, “Then I would be the one to eat thinly.”

“And in turn you would provide us with furthered useless work?”

“It would not be useless!”

“Undernourished and underskilled does not lend to productive hands. Two Brothers under one roof was not meant to be, you know this. Father had well intended to assure us all our own domains were he to have lived throughout every Son’s youth. Contentment does not spur from such a situation, especially when you would be under our roof for sometime.”

“What am I to do then, Little Brother? Shall I lay my head upon the Earth in the village square, beg? Gather twigs from the trees and clay from the River, make my own shoddy shelter because I am forsaken by my Family?”

His Younger Brother looked at him quietly. So much like him and yet not at all. And then Jian thought about it more and found himself begrudgingly… coming to the same conclusion that Chenglei had drawn to just a bell ago.

They were no longer congruent, had not been for seven cycles, and the most crucial cycles of his Brother’s life at that.

And neither could they survive within one Home.

Jian could not satisfy himself to be lower in stature than his Little Brother. And Chenglei could not satisfy himself to ketou and surrender all he had worked for, without his Brother’s presence. That was not the way taught to them - to exist peacefully without their independences amongst Family.

He had hoped Yuanfen would have had a kinder circumstance prepared for both of them.

“...I remember where Father used to hide koban within the walls. We have not touched it in fear of its necessity in the past years. I will divide this with you. From there, you must discern yourself what path has been intended for you. I do not think you will find it in the shadow of those who took you from us.”

As Second Brother attempted to rise from his feet, Jian felt himself reaching over, halting his Sibling with a hand that first rested against equally work-hardened knuckles then gripped tightly.

“That is an offering I cannot take. Please, I would rather a meal and to see Mother’s face and Father’s grave before I am to leave you again.”

The thick arch above Chenglei’s eye rose, but it did not come in hostility or questioning. There was an acceptance of sorts in that stoic face, a vanishing act of the displeasure he had greeted this stranger approaching their Home with.

They rose together.

The calm of it did not wipe away the loneliness.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Seventeen: “Sink”

Chenglei was not allowed to wander within the rice paddies like he and Hui. He was too young, too short compared to the towering majesty of his six and seven year old siblings. 

Father irately said that his clumsiness would knock over all of the tenderly situated sprouts, that his siblings would not adequately observe them as they should - that, at some point, Jian and Hui would be swept up into some sort of activity and forget about watching over their little brother.

Mother with her pregnant belly stared at them from under brow as her strong hands, perhaps more labour-beaten than Father’s, kneaded over sticky meat that now clung to the table and looked as though it had the consistency of bread dough. And then frankly observed that if Chenglei were to find it acceptable to wade into the drenched soil, he would end up like the infant animals that sometimes drowned themselves inside the terraces.

That, was a rule insisted by both parents that the children abided after the first couple, gentle, corrections. Perhaps they were too young to truly understand the gravity of either hypothetical, but they understood wrath in the form of strikes to the hands and feet, or kneeling atop of dry grains.

Truly, they did.

Jian still remembers, to this day, that little incident. The blame they had received afterwards until the dust had settled and their frightened parents finally lost their dumbness and regained hearing is like an afterthought, barely there.

Instead, he recalls the pounding terror that had ripped through his heart. So great it was that the reminder of memory continues to work a fear unlike anything else. Something that he had grown numb and familiar with in many of the situations of life he had encountered as a man.

It was innocent, and in that innocence, it was somehow more sickening in the horror that stuck inside of his ribs afterwards. 

He and Hui were walking through the paddies that the Village men had coursed river water into. They were speaking of something - perhaps the way they thought Uncle Gong’s beard was matched by Auntie Yao’s spiteful face.

Chenglei and their parents were supposed to be elsewhere, towards the Village’s square so that Father and Mother could perform their errands that had brought them over the hill. Last they had seen, their Second Brother was holding onto Father’s pantleg and studying what he could see over the perpetual fog of yellow dust.

But, then, Chenglei was there.

Later, they discovered that he had wandered off, and that both Father and Mother had assumed his older siblings to have swept him away. Following them in that toddling sort of stride from rocky dryness to the carefully manmade greenery west of the square. 

And in his eagerness to reach his beloved Elder Brother and Elder Sister, his little will had ceased to tolerate the winding path and attempted to step through the paddies. Unaware of the incline, Chenglei slipped right down into the saturated Earth.

What he remembers hearing was splashing, followed by a ‘plop!’, followed by more disruptions of the water and a broken squall that drove coldness over his body as though he had fell bodily and bare into Snow.

Next, everything fell into a nonexistent blankness, as though Time had skipped across a rapid. 

And then he and Hui were wet, and filthy, and fallen into the cropfield.

Mudslicked Chenglei was in his arms, retching Water and Earth and fruit across his chest and back. And he was screaming in such a hoarse, concerted, way that he could feel rumbling throughout every structure of his Younger Brother’s body both internal and external. 

The sound was unlike anything else; nothing mortal nor Jin he ever encountered had made such a dreadful sound. Later in life, Jian thought the only half-adequate comparison was the buzzing rumble of dozens of gunshots after gunshots - the way the vibrations came so compressed and close together one could barely comprehend their individual peaks, and the high-pitched, inhumane, ring.

Yet, even that that failed to touch the way it brought nothing but instinctive, soul-deep, fright to their bodies and weeping to their eyes well after Chenglei had calmed enough to cease.

“Gege! Gege! Gege!”

[thanidiel]

Prompt Fifteen: “Stage”

It is an impulse.

Or is it?

Either way, it is the best plan he has at the time.

It is logical. It created itself from a logical basis. Pulled everything he knew about the world into the most reasonable response for what needed to happen. It just also happens that it is stupid. It is stupid. It is reckless. It may not work. It depends on if Yurou takes advantage of the opportunity given. It is putting an innocent person on the chopping block - starting approximately in the next ten seconds.

But he has to.

If he chooses not to, or if he delays, then it is, as his Brothers would say, game over.

Yurou cannot be searched nor questioned with what he has, what their current duty for the Kuroiri is.

So as his conversation with the Sekiseigumi continue; as the men grow more suspicious and pointed with their inquiries, ‘Takeshi’ approaches the slack-faced Eorzean walking past them.

He does not like this man.

It is unfair. He knows it is. Teacher Xu, and Father, and Mother, and Uncle Bao, would be distraught with him allowing himself to feel such thoughts, to be so spiteful and as immoral as he is now.

He does not like this man.

He does not appreciate the length of his face, the way it lines into something harsh and keen like an animal, a horse, and not a man. His lips even situated themselves like such a beast, an incision of pink opening his skull. The pudgy pale of his skin. The way his eyes reflected colour like the Ruby Sea beyond them. He even disliked the thick, waxy-looking, black hair shocking from his head.

Adrianus

This one will do.

He lets the heavy sway of his step strike into the stranger’s hip, both of them stumbling from the force. Watches the way this foreigner lets panic erupt in his face and offer him repetitive apologies in his crumbling Hingan.

Jian practices, then, riling his face into the terse sort of aggression he saw always on the faces of his Brothers, spitting to the ground as he orders the man to simply leave his presence.

And as the Eorzean does, his hand drops, as though rummaging for his string of koban.

‘Missing?’ Missing. (Never was there).

The smuggler pushes through the crowd, ignoring curses and remarks from the women displaced in his path, and grips onto Adrianus’ the stranger’s shoulder.

Wrenches him right down to slam sickly onto the stones of Kugane’s streets, makes sure he shoves his sandal to stomp down onto the side of the cheap haori. Koban spills out like rice.

“Kugane Gumi! Kugane Gumi! Look! This ijin thief had thought to make away with my money! Come here before I have a mind to punish him thoroughly myself!”

He sees Yurou twisting around to run into the alleyway from his peripheral.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Two: “Unwritten”

They were both prisoners.

No one had to say it.

It was there.

It was there.

Neither of them belonged there.

They simply did not fit.

They did not integrate in any manner close to harmonious with the rest of the Phantom.

Jian had the advantage of being less conspicuous in it, less violently intrusive in his mixture. The crew tolerated him, nodded their heads at his handiwork whether it was in the bowels of the ship or on the decks when they ran red-slicked, and left him right alone.

This… engineer, this Garlean, did not possess the same ability to level even somewhat with the others. She was strange; cold. It was not something antisocial and misanthropic, but like the way Stone is beholden to hold a chill. She did not seem to grasp much of their language even with all of the moons spent of hearing all of them except Yurei speak in their own tongue. The woman did not look like them, walk like them, eat like them, function like them to any capacity.

Passing by her, in the engines, the hallways, reminded him incessantly that she was ijin, more than he’ll ever be. An outsider, a foreign creature. Not one of them. If Jian could pass as a fox amongst wolves, this woman was more like a hare in the wrong range.

He always sensed that wrongness of her presence.

It evoked something in him, and all of them. A wide variety of flared instincts. In Yurei, she spawned his possessiveness, his passion. In the crew, she bore them raised hackles and a want to pounce. In him…

Was there something kindred?

No.

Not kinship.

They were not the same. They were… parallel, adjacent.

He was simply more peaceful than the others could ever strive to be. Ergo, she was not a threat like she was to the others. She was just… there, in the wrong place, much like he was.

They were both prisoners.

No one had to say it.

They merely had different reasons to be in the same cage.

If it was Yurei’s hands that kept her upon the Phantom; it was the salted Earth below that trapped him in the same vessel. It provided the possibility of a bond but little else, in the manner that both of their individual perspectives gazed upon the wolf pack, and both coolly regarded one another without concern for the other’s bite.

“Takeshi.”

…

“Kikanrusui.”

They were both prisoners.

No matter what Yurei called it.

No matter what either of them called each other.

@curiouslich @stormandozone

[thanidiel]

Prompt Fourteen - “Frost”

He determined he liked one thing about Kugane.

He liked the Snow.

It was gentle in a way such phenomenon never occurred in his childhood.

The Snow in the high altitude between the Steppes and Yanxia fell much heavier. Of course, they were never cold. The Kha traders brought furs that Mother and the Aunties would make into coats for those who had outgrown their’s, while the Village Down The Water provided charcoal in their own barters. And if the charcoal ran low, then there was the dung of their beasts to burn.

Still, he remembered keenly of how often he had to hoist Hui, Chenglei, and Mei out of the Snow because his shorter, and smaller, siblings had become entrapped in the weight of it. Or having to help the more elderly horses and cattle around the Village. Reinforcing homes with his Uncles or climbing up onto the rooftops himself to sweep away the substance before a ceiling creaked inward.

Here, Snow possessed a different meaning.

Not some burden to account for and minimise, not fatiguing.

In fact, it had a character that Jian would regard as whimsical.

The type of beauty that is espoused to enwrap every aspect of Nature according to the poets and scholars. A concept in which he understood but did not feel in much of the same regards, with this exception.

It dusted so very lightly, like sugar, the pretty, sleek, stones of Kugane’s walkways and ceramic rooftops. Made the colourful port that just more bright, which, in turn, increased the allure of hued light emitting from the lanterns all around. And instead of the moisture of the Ruby Sea to Kugane’s west, and then the temperate of Forest and Mountain to its east, it made the mornings cold and dry in a pleasing way that stuck inside of his lungs.

It was these mornings that correlated with the rare occasions that ‘Takeshi’ would walk out into the streets without business of the Kuroiri.

Sometimes he used the excuse of items for the sparse little room he had bought above a dumpling shop. Incense sticks for his altar. A sharpen of his knives and razors. Thread to mend his clothing. Oils for his tools. Anything that let him pick apart the markets below his home. 

And if he grew tired of mulling about in search of purpose and justification, then he walked over to Uncle Tanaka’s shop and pulled a stool outside as he enjoyed a sweet, hot, drink. Eventually, some other Uncle that regulared the shop would stop by and share tobacco with him. And when that dwindled and his belly growled, ‘Takeshi’ would come to the shop right below his home. Let the odd looks burn into his plate and shoulders as they watched him eat plates of jiaozi in a way that was decidedly not Hingan - dipping them all in chili oil, and improvised yuzu sauce, and sugar set aside for his drink.

By that time, the Sun would be high in the Heavenly Arrangement, and all of the powdered Snow would be melted away; much like the small delight harvested with it.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Twenty-Five: “Finery”

He could feel that notch of flesh between his brows start to bulb.

Silk brocade. 

Black in its base, with an elaborate scene of golden-barked trees and sanguine maple leaves; a very strange offspring of Garlean and Doman Blood. There is not even need to touch it, to determine the thick and tight threadcount of its weave.

Jian’s head tilts to the side as he looks back up from the folded cloth up to Quintus.

“What is this.”

“It is… Master Albus called it a changshan.”

Automatically, his tongue started to move in his mouth, beginning to demonstrate the way it had want to almost begin with a T-like sound. Then he cut himself shortly, realising the err of such a thing. His skull returns to proper alignment atop his shoulders, chin bowing in a nod.

“Why.”

It is a good gift. It is a proper gift. It is expensive. More expensive than it should be. That is the way of gift-giving, he has grown to understand, not only in his homeland but this Garlemald as well.

It almost follows etiquette to the brush stroke.

He is Servant.

Why is his Master providing him such a thing?

Why is this so thoughtful?

Why is he being given something that is not black steel or equally black wool? Why not trim, and tight, and within the fashion of the Empire? Adrianus even thought to specifically assure it is in the style of the Villages and Mountains from which ‘Caio’ had been plucked from as a young man. Changshan, not kimono or haori. 

There has to be a catch, some sort of jagged fish’s hook that he’d catch on were he to reach his hand out to the bauble presented to him.

What a brutal intention for koi.

He punctuates himself with his eyes disengaging from the fine fabric and the way light glosses over it like water. Letting it level out like a swaying scale with Quintus’ contrastingly ice blue irises. 

Jian tries to reach through his memory and its constructs, adapt that ferocious tiger-like, almond, gaze that Hui could sometimes rip across her face - the manner in which the muscles around his eyes flexed enough to brandish forth and narrow the structures. Letting the illumination in a space strike the reflective, white, sclera and be eaten by the tunneling void center of it in a flaring, man-eating, threat.

Why, Quintus, WHY?

The Garlean is bigger. Even of ‘poor’ blood and with the lacking care the House of Albus allocated to him compared to their pet ‘Caio’, he is bigger. And yet the manservant is cringing back, looking away from those snarling eyes to the white stone underneath them.

“I-I…!” The square of folded clothing drops, and Jian is surging forth with curled over shoulders, snatching it out of air with a noise of inconvenience sawing out of his throat.

And like that, the koi’s been enticed to pierce its lip through that hook.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! Nervous h-hands, that’s all! Master Albus is presenting this to you so that you may don it at the dinner party he is hosting for the fae Pasidia! H-he wishes for a n-native performance to be demonstrated!”

“A demonstration of what?”

The answers croaks back, nearly lacking entirely with wind needed to carry the sound out from his neck and off his tongue,

“Combat, they are providing one of those… b-bloodthirsty animal-men from Golmore.”

Precious silk dusts the floor.

[thanidiel]

Prompt One: Imposter

Zhen Jian.

甄健

Ken Ken?

Shin Ken?

No.

Too close.

Perhaps…

陶工健

Toko Takeshi?

Almost there.

陶工武

Toko Takeshi.

Toh-koh Ta-keh-shi.

It sounded so harsh to say - the syllables pushed out spitting from his mouth with rolling blows of his tongue. Nothing like the soft wind of ‘jhen chien’ gently eased out from under his teeth in twin breezes.

Parallel, in a way, like Earth and Sky.

Which meant it was fitting; opposite, in its energy, if not its meaning.

If anything were to be left intact, it ought to be the meaning.

A name is supposed to be a reflection of the spirit.

This… name manages to be both less him, and more him. It rips away the pride of his family, and then tacks on something added over the course of his life. Or… not tacked on. It is something more elegantly incorporated than that.

Takeshi.

It could be a direct translation: to be strong, healthy, of vitality. 健

It also simultaneously related to what is martial and militant. 武

It depends on whim, how you choose to transcribe it.

He has layered himself, like a curtain or blanket.

Hui would have called it an inside joke.

She always referred to the quirks of the language lessons he’d transfer down onto her after School like that. Everything written or said was either an inside joke amongst all those who spoke Hingan, or had a story woven into its elements.

He guided her hand through ‘Bei’, 貝, once, and she paused to point towards the two downward strokes, the tails that finished the stroke order. Observed to his canting head and narrowed eyes how it resembled the strings pushed through stacks of koban to hold them on your person.

It would not do good to bring old memories into this.

He stares back at himself in the little mirror the host’s daughter had offered him. This new person, new name.

His whiskers had begun to sprout free on his face ever since Garlemald had surrendered him and his. And so too, has hair atop his skull begin to droop down like long stalks of plains grasses.

There was more freedom than what had been insisted upon him in the years past. But, still, such would not be tolerated. He had felt such pleasure, just before, on the possibility of being able to grow his hair long again as their Father and Mother had, and all those before them. But such would not be, or, seemingly, ever be.

So he cut, and trims, and scrapes down all that had grew from his cheeks, and chin, and ‘round his lips until there is only his dark skin when he turns the glass here and there. And he levels his hair into the shorter fashion he remembers that Hingans seemed to prefer, from the few that would pass through or by the Consulate.

When it is all done - he looks almost as he did in the black-and-gold armour that consumed the last seven years of his life.

His hair is just an ilm longer.

And his face…

He looks more gaunt. Tired. Sunsinged.

He had not eaten well in the past moons, with the exception of this poacher’s kindness. Not that he was given good fare before his release, but he was given enough to be healthy, useful.

But does he have the important characteristics down?

...No.

He does not look very much like other Domans at all, much less Hingan.

His dzo-eyes absorbs the light unlike the reflective green he remembered them as. And his skin is like milk-tea where it ought to be white and gently hued. His crop of hair? Not nearly a dark enough brown to even somewhat pass as black.

He could pass as well as a Garlean could.

Perhaps he could fix some aspects of this after the Tithe sees him to Shishu.

Or perhaps he could disappear into Kugane.

It has to be Kugane, doesn’t it?

He could not imagine being allowed into Shishu greater, or Roshu, at that. Much less finding much of any work as ijin beyond Kugane’s walls.

At least inside, if he could fake everything else, he could say he had some uncommon heritage; a Roegadyn father and Hingan mother. He would not be the first story of that spread through the port city. And neither would they banish him for what Fate has made of his life. It rings almost preposterous that he looks towards a city of decadence for bare work and survival.

But if Doma would reject him so readily, then he would reject Doma in turn.

What is my name?

Zhen Jian. 甄健

Toko Takeshi. 陶工武

[thanidiel]

Prompt Twenty-Three: “Scorch”

Sometimes the jobs on the ground were not merely smuggling.

They were something more akin to… sabotage.

Quiet jobs, the ones in which its security managed to be even more of a key aspect than usual. So it was natural that these rare, rare, assignments had involved ‘Takeshi’ for a couple instances.

To more than a few petty gangs, the Kuroiri-Kai loomed over as a… Big Sister of a sort. A guiding sort of Motherly touch. Most of the small groups understood this ‘charity’ as it could very loosely be considered in the underbelly as the blessing it was, assuming their personalities and work well enough for the Kuroiri-Kai’s interest. The inherent protection brought by being under the Kuroiri’s umbrella of their insisted Mandate.

Others squandered this for one reason or another. An inability to handle squabbles between one Gumi and another. The wrong words expressed to, or in reference to, Oyabun. It all chalked up to an offense of some degree to either the Kuroiri, or their law for their chunk of Kugane’s underground.

He did not know what this particular judgment was related to. He did not care, nor did he need to know. He had the job, and it would be calculated and performed.

It took some thought for him to consider this act of extermination, how it would occur. It was one of the higher women above him and the Brothers who had mentioned it, that one of the Aragaki-Gumi had died just some days ago from a violent sickness.

To which, ‘Takeshi’ realised would mean that they would be attending to the funerary traditions.

It was easy enough after that to receive the information needed to discern the exact day and location of which the wake commenced, and then to structure out the ‘plan of attack’ with his superiors.

He allowed the seventh day to pass.

And the days after that - drawing on until an ‘unknown’ death had occurred in the area. To which, he and two others obliged another day before rushing to claiming it as their own relative, paying for the same little shrine space being used by the Aragaki.

Afterwards, they started to perform the funerary rituals. Bringing themselves and all of their grief to the wake. He and his ‘Wife’ staying into the next day and its funeral commenced after, as they could not bear to be parted from the deceased!

Then they bore themselves to the temple for the customary sennight, he alone always staying long and pacing restlessly around the quaint building’s perimeter. Sometimes even requiring to hold himself against the stone in his solitary weeping.

Their ‘Son’ kept to strict adherence of the seven days. He and his ‘Wife’ continued to come to an eventual trickling silence. And then they all ceased to make presence after that with the expectation of attending the forty-ninth and hundredth day.

Soon enough, that forty-ninth day arrived. 

Not for the memorial of a Miyu Suzuki, but of the fallen Aragaki-Gumi. 

And word across that district and Kugane’s underbelly spread like the same consumptive fire spoken of. The way it had started on the inside and leapt ferociously across the dry wood to suddenly encircle and engulf the structure in seconds.

Word muddled and twisted and expanded into inaccurate words of mouth. The flames were the intention of some sort of Kami. The Aragaki were conspiring with what foreigners call ‘Voidsent.’ A shrine tender had spilled something, perhaps lantern oil and embers had splattered across the small building. Those who were nearby, in a nearby shop or residence, claimed that they saw people whose faces they could not catch scurrying away from the blaze. Ijin put the blame on Garlean magitek as though they would have any reason to do so. The Hingans blamed the recent docking of a wave of Eorzean ships. Criminals, both weak and powerful, did not dare blame or assert identities, but burned incense to protect themselves and their own from the actions of rivals in the days afterwards. 

And some quietly referred to the incident as an act of Heavenly Mandate, as all matters of Fate both well and painful answered to.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Twenty-One: “Core”

The life of the airship, and every component within it, owed itself to the Kikanrusui.

Other hands explored the outlying extremities, the network spurred from its most significant features outward. His own was even included, combining the little expertise passed onto him in Garlemald with what the rest were willing to teach him.

But she cradled the heart.

He watched her, sometimes. Because he was told to keep an eye on her, or simply in passing on some other duty or idle bell.

The others liked to mutter that she was like an automatron, some magitek construct, or some wind-up apparatus like what the master woodworkers of Hingashi would create. At least, they did when they were within absolute certainty of Ichiro’s lacking presence.

He did not care one way or another on what she was classified as in anyone’s mind.

However, he did eventually come to the conclusion that such comparisons were not entirely accurate; did not grasp the Kikanrusui’s motivations of navigating the course of her life properly.

She, plainly, just did not care for what was irrelevant to her. To him, he pieced it together to be less like a ‘robotic’ thing, and more a creature that had lost the need to investigate the world beyond her own.

This Garlean was a focused creature. Like… a bee, or an underwater creature. Joy found in efficiency and performance of her role. Stiffness normally observed fell away quickly when he saw her engage in her work upon the engine.

Suddenly, against all commentaries and insults associated with her, the Kikanrusui moved fluidly and innate, saw beyond muted looks that deliberately washed away her jailers into transparencies, possessed subtle emotive states that she instilled into the machinery.

Pride manifested in a pleased way after the end of any task that she ran through to bring some sort of system or mechanism he failed to comprehend to about ‘ninety-four percent of maximum capacity.’

When something was damaged or its efficiency harmed by the actions of others, he saw the annoyance and territorial sense of the ship’s functions in her brows and the way she would reroute her schedule immediately to bring things back into mechanical harmony.

Sometimes, when he observed her and her nuances, Jian would try to rack his mind over tea later on if he, too, possessed a similar love or passion down to his heart the way she did.

Perhaps not anything currently within reach.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Sixteen: “Collapse”

How long ago was it that his feet was atop of the Earth of Yanxia?

Seven cycles of this world? Eight?

He could not remember.

Time between one life and the next had long ago become an irrelevant thing to dwell upon. No matter how much he grasped for the Rocks, there was no way he could ever swim up against the current to where he first fell in.

He had seen so many lands in the meantime.

Garlemald. Hingashi. Dalmasca. Nagxia. Golmore.

None of them… this close to once-Home.

Yanxia was not Home either.

Nothing could be called Home anymore.

Not the House, not the Village, not the Mountains, not Yanxia, not Doma, not Garlemald, not the spanning property of Albus, not the little room allocated to him aside the Family’s wing.

The only thing he could still call Home was this world upon which he sprouted.

His eyes feel seeing-yet-unseeing. Like he was a blind witch who did not need the material world. So lost in his thoughts as it were, he could barely focus on the crackling fire before him with how much the void of his mindful weight superimposed itself. At least his body knew what to do, insensitive fingers reaching without care to perform its work. He was cooking, he knew that.

He understood exactly what was occuring physically at any point of time. There was no division between himself and reality. He was just… numb. Memory of the moment just before was not holding, not encoding. Time, the current, was merely happening, and then whatever was supposed to constitute the past was just evaporating into nothingness.

As he reached into the gathering ashes and embers, flipping around the blackened fish he had pulled out of the muckedge of the River onto its grey-caked side, the heat from the fire aside only reached him as though through layers. 

There was nothing for him except his life and this fish.

And then he watched the conal arrangement of the wood he had collected cave in.

[thanidiel]

Prompt Eleven - “Chosen”

The way he was being touched reminded him of the way they’d run their hands along the muscles of beasts to determine their health. Pressing their fingers here and there, or delivering their pats soundly to see how the animal’s body would take the little force.

Although, the intention here was something very much beyond a concern of sickness or injury. This felt more like the way the butcher would demonstrate to Mother the fat built into the meat with a spread of his fingers to showcase the thick, snowy, layer of it, or the way it webbed through the meat in younger carcasses.

A… quality check.

The roughness of the ‘Decurio’s’ gloves memorised his chin and his jawline, up to familiarisation with the way the end of his jaw curved in a connection of his skull. It palpitated out the strength of his pulse at his temples and at this throat like easing a splinter. Fingers moved his shoulders to square or relax as the sturdiness of his bones were determined by the position of the ball-joint and then the straightness of the line from there to the other end of his clavicles. They felt for the width of the fat-coat between his belly and the body underneath. He was urged to wet his feet and step across the cold ground as the Kou had wished to see the way weight fell naturally on his soles.

They even put him through motor tasks, lifting mighty things or dainty things, slowly and minute, or swift and grand. Observed where the tendons and tissues in his arms and back and wrists shook, or did not at all. They tested where they could strike him with firmed digits and see how spiritedly his body would leap in reflex.

After that, they shaved him down to where the sprouts of his brune hair were almost not there at all, and dashed the whiskers, that Hui and Mei had just been teasing him over a sennight ago, into nothingness.

The cotton that his Mother had fashioned for him and him alone was replaced - thrown away in all likelihood - was replaced with articles of Kou attire. ‘Trousers’ and some tighter shirt that traveled to his wrists and had no center division.

Finally, all of these new faces and names that he failed to fluidly hold in his mouth vanished.

It was only him and the ‘Decurio’ in a room, of which connected to something he could describe as temple or palace-like, that was so much larger and sleek than anything he’d ever seen before.

Yet, somehow, pressed so much more onto his skin and space as though it were minuscule.

He did not like to look this man in the eyes.

The pale third-eye center of his forehead concerted him, seemed to burrow down.

His face was not comforting. It was too long, too angular. There was no wealth insulating his cheeks and under his chin. Blue eyes like a cat’s, and black hair of which was the only sense of comfortable recognition. The thinness of his lips made him think of how lips drew themselves on the snouts of predators.

The ‘Decurio’, this… well, he could not say it without his tongue and mind growing confused and frozen, ‘Adrianus pyr Albus’?

This Adrianus was smiling in a way that did not lid his eyes in the way Father’s and Hui’s eyes would. The Hingan that flowed out of his mouth did not sound like a stream current but like a shaky trickle of Water across multiple Stones.

“I know exactly where you will be of use to me.”

[thanidiel]

Prompt Ten - “Mentor”

They wished for him to continue his education, once it had become clear that his learning of all of the characters and their strokes and the way they associated to ideas well beyond the apparent of their meanings was incomplete. When his Brothers and Sister would quote the classical verses to him to deliver some idea or in mere friendship and the constant of his response was the growth of that bulb of fat and skin between his brows in befuddlement.

There was something he, minutely, regarded with cool humour in this insistence that he sit down with the others to Great Master Geigu’s hall.

The Black Kingdom had been what interrupted the growth of his knowledge.

And now the cloudy Mists at its Rock base sought to make it whole.

The reason, as passed unto him, was that the Kuroiri-Kai would claim to be the most refined of Shishu’s underground. Afterall, they were Mandated by the (Black) Heavens above; it was they who would be the most worthy to suspend beyond mortal atmosphere and control what was below their feet. Thus, it was only appropriate that their members, above all, were strong in the virtue of scholarship.

Geigu’s hall was a strange, ethereal, sort of tranquility that failed to be found anywhere else where the presence of the Kuroiri crawled. It was always cold. The room always bare outside of zabuton, tatami, and the Great Master’s desk. He tried to strain his thoughts through the memories of Teacher Xu Pi, again and again, trying to find the bare minerals of his sensory memory through the diluted soil.

It was cool then sticky and warm. Because the ‘class’ of him and the other boys and girls from the villages all around the Village Down The Water was outside, in the morning until after the Sun had peaked. Sometimes, when the rare rain rolled down from the Steppes, they’d be permitted to sit inside of Teacher’s home as his Wife would quietly prepare dinner, prop up a babe atop of her hip.

It was not clean, it was not alien. The yellow dust that coated everything of his old life, always, floated through the air, and sometimes gusted up into the eyes, or stuck to clothing, walls, and wet plants. Everyone’s clothing was rough cotton that had seen better lifetimes. The tools they used were on the fringes of unusability, or perhaps there were none at all for some children so they improvised with fingers and the Earth or Air or within their minds.

And everyone was so thin, and scrawny, and the chopped hair of the children contrasted so heavily with the lengthy hair that spilled down the Teacher’s chest and shoulders. Here, everyone claimed short hair and bare faces. And their bodies varied from fatness to leanness, to plush or angular shapes. Their clothing varied from simplicity to silk kimonos, and yet all of it was in enviable quality that he remembers no one from his childhood possessed sort of the Magistrate and Kou.

How odd that the same virtue that was once humbly exchanged with him was now being offered and taken with dragonlike arrogance.

“Takeshi,” the Great Master lulled across the room, “If you would recite…”