#MEANWHILE: g'raha has asked tataru for ringbuying advice. the scions are laughing at both of them.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

reverently, deliberately

For FFXIVWrite Day 6, “ring”. Frydlona/[ShB spoilers], pre-Endwalker, spoilers through patch 5.5, ~700 words. Late due to some nonsense at work, but still within the Week One amnesty period! I might expand it later, but this was a real “get it done in two days or else two years” thing.

A promise that is also a hope.

Frydlona almost always carries a sketchbook for her design ideas. For a project, she’ll rip the pages out and keep them in a case, and what’s left is just thoughts she’s had, things that might be fun or challenging to make, things that might turn into a project if she needs them to.

She sketches all kinds of things, often ones she’ll never get around to making. A crown made out of the lavender blooms of Lakeland; vambraces and pauldrons gilded and carved with flames to be worn with an embroidered black cloak; a workbench with drawers nested inside drawers; a gown with a trailing skirt like seafoam; a rocking chair with flowers that look like they’re growing out of cracks in the wood itself, alchemically preserved.

A ring, wrought like a white mage’s cane, with leaves curling around a rough-cut gem.

She scribbles it out the first time she catches herself drawing it. She doesn’t need to make such a thing.

*

They’ve been reeling from one crisis to another, with hardly time for breath, and now the threat of the Final Days hangs overhead. It’s too fast, and Frydlona knows it; fear is a dangerous spice for emotion. People think they fall in love during wartime, and if they’re lucky enough to live, they have to live with whatever choices they made.

All in all, she’s known Raha for less than two years, and some of that was years ago. They’ve done none of this properly, or reasonably; they’ve raced forward in freefall, and it frightens her how much she doesn’t want to stop.

*

Some nights she wakes up with nightmares, and some nights Raha does. Either way it keeps her awake after, staring into the darkness overhead and trying to let the solid warmth of him in her arms settle her.

She thinks about the sea of stars, the sunless sea—the glitter and blaze of uncountable points of light, the swoop of Thaliak’s river through the darkness—and wonders. She couldn’t cut diamonds small enough, not and keep their facets and their sparkle, but powdered hematite, maybe… no.

*

She sketches a ring with metal curled like a breaking wave, wrapping over a pearl—she could find a pearl, and the challenge of finding a good enough one would be half the point—and another engraved with palm leaves and massive flowers, the kind of things that grow around Cliffhide. Another ring with vines and leaves: sun-warmed La Noscean grapes, a tiny cluster of cabochon amethysts, and an orange in the form of an orange garnet.

Her glaives don’t make a good design for a ring—too jagged, smooth them as she might—and no more does Mor Dhona. Raha had given her a pair of Allagan earrings he’d found in the Tower, but she’s never been comfortable with the harsh lines of Allagan metalwork. Besides, that’s him, not her.

She keeps coming back to the cane, though. Gerolt made her some lovely weapons while she was working with the Bozjan Resistance, and she’s always liked adding natural elements to jewelry. She could make it beautiful, and it would certainly have meaning, more than just that it was where she’d come from—it would be where they’re going, together, from here on.

But it’s too soon, she reminds herself, even as she adds the final leaf to the sketch. The gemstone buds from the wood itself, framed by leaves and accented by opening blossoms.

A white stone, unaspected, for the center. She’s tempted to use opal, but conjurers tend toward clear crystals; diamond might be more easily understood. Aquamarine for the buds, for the sunlit ocean she grew up with after all. Rose gold for the bark and electrum for the leaves…

*

It’s still too soon, Frydlona tells herself, even once she’s set the last gem in place. The metal is blood-warm in her hand.

She wraps it, carefully, and puts it in a box, and wedges the box deep into one of her pockets, and then buttons the pocket closed. She’ll just keep it with her, so that as soon as it isn’t too soon she’ll have it ready.