#synnove's carbuncles

[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #5: Levin Deals

Prompt: barbarous || Master Post || On AO3

--

“You are completely lacking manners,” Aymeric said, voice dry and flat. “Utterly bereft of decorum and good sense.”

Affronted, Ixion snorted.

“Don’t you sass me, sir.”

Behind him in her lounging chair, Synnove stifled a laugh. Aymeric pointed at her without looking. “And you stay out of this!”

Synnove stopped bothering trying to hide her amusement at that.

The yard and its garden—both the myriad flowers and the kitchen garden—were typically Synnove’s domain at her Cedarwood home, but over the years, Aymeric had developed an affinity for tending the kitchen garden. The simplicity of digging in the soil, trimming back the herbs in their pots, keeping the rows of vegetables free of weeds, even readying the empty beds for winter, were chores that soothed his mind when the work of governance set him on edge. His developed green thumb proved useful, too, now that Synnove was still in recovery from her injuries and horrific aethershock sustained from the Final Day; she simply couldn’t do most of the work of keeping her home in order until she regained more of her strength.

His lady was also horribly indulgent of the overgrown colt that constantly snuck through the skies all the way from Gyr Abania to eat his vegetables.

Aymeric used the same finger he had pointed at Synnove to jab Ixion’s muzzle. The great unicorn jerked his head back with another snort, and glared at him with one baleful red eye.

Aymeric had regularly faced the might of the Dravanian Horde his adult life, and now regularly butted heads with the worst sorts of nobles and politicians in Ishgard. A spoiled unicorn, living legend or not, was not going to cow him.

Amandina, perched between Ixion’s ears and with only her head visible above the fluff of his mane, chittered, He says your dam was a hamster and your sire smelt of elderberries. Papa, what’s a hamster?

(Synnove’s laughter turned to outright cackling.)

“My mama was a saint and my da a gentleman, and I’ll thank you to leave the questions of my parentage out of this discussion,” Aymeric bit out, crossing his arms.

Ixion whickered, dipping his head, and Amandina peeped, He says sorry!

(Trust one the carbunclets to figure out how to communicate with a god’s steed or a Mhachi experiment or whatever Ixion actually was via “sympathetic aetherial resonance” as Synnove had put it, and we’re both levin! as Amandina had said.)

Sighing, Aymeric dragged his hand down his face. He’d been at this for over half a bell now, since discovering Ixion rampaging among the tomatoes and beets and radishes. And Ixion had been decimating the kitchen garden on a semi-regular basis for a few years now. It was far too late to actually put a stop to this, but he wasn’t going to let Rhalgr’s steed rule the roost.

Therefore: compromise.

He set his gaze on Ixion again and said, firm, “I’ll set aside one row of vegetables of your choice if you leave the rest of the kitchen garden alone.”

Ixion flicked an ear and pawed the ground. Once, twice, thrice, four times, five.

Aymeric clucked his tongue and shook his head. “No. Two.”

Ixion pinned his ears back and flared his nostrils.

Aymeric raised an eyebrow.

Ixion’s ears slowly half-perked again, and he pawed at the ground. Once, twice, thrice, four times.

Aymeric shook his head once more. “Two, final offer.”

Ixion grumbled, tossing his head (Amandina squealed in delight), then turned his head to look him straight on with one eye. He raised his hoof up, set it down. And, after another moment of thought, pawed at the ground. Once. Twice. Thrice.

Aymeric made a show of narrowing his eyes and tapping his chin, even as mentally he patted himself on the back. Three had been his initial thought, but the intelligent man did not let his opponent know his full hand in a negotiation. “Acceptable,” he finally said, and held out his hand.

Ixion tapped his palm with his horn. Deal sealed.

Synnove clapped behind him. Amandina cheered, then peeped as Ixion did a victorious piaffe as though he was the winner, Papa? What’s a hamster?

PREVIOUS || NEXT

[gunbun]

My in-character reasoning for multiple FFXIV jobs can be explained by "Tiona took a course in this once." Her honest to goodness job is GNB but today we're gonna talk about SMN.

I use, with permission, some arcanist fanon from @dragons-bones --

So a carbuncle is one of the first things an arcanist learns how to do. And it's really en vogue to expand and supplement the base arrays that go into their bookybooks.

Tiona’s not the best arcanist, but she did get some help from Synnove to set up a personality matrix for her carbuncle.

His name is Jeff.

Jeff does normal carbuncle things and Tiona understands Jeff's intent.

However, Jeff sounds precisely like a dial-up modem. This has confounded Synnove and it has confounded Urianger, who is canonically pretty good at carbuncle.

I know the reason Jeff sounds like a modem. Nobody in-universe ever figures it out, but Tiona uses brightly-coloured sticky flags on her book.

Pigments of this kind in a society like Eorzea probably use some funky-ass materials as a means to get bright colours.

The low-grade, ever-present aether leak from the sticky flags flipped a bit in Jeff's programming.

Thus: modem sounds.

[driftward]

Madame Commander is asleep, for now. She will be calm when she awakes, and then slowly the manic state will take her again, until she exhausts and sleeps again. And so I tend to her atelier while she rests, that it will be fully available for her when she wakes.

I enjoy my work with her, but I find myself worried. When she gets excited, she begins to glow brightly, the transcendent power burning within her, but I am worried. Does it burn from within her, or is it her herself that burns? I feel that she is working not out of desire, but almost a need, one that I cannot name. And there is an undercurrent of anxiety that I feel from her, threading through all that she does.

I wish, not for the first time, that I knew more of my kin. I would like their advice.

Absent that, my purpose is to advise and assist the Madam Commander to see her goals realised, and so I continue to do so.

~*~

Zoissette had a decision to make, and she was not at all certain she was ready to do so.

She frowned at the data she had collected. Not far from her where her hand rested sat two mirror apples, both half-eaten, with observation notes next to them. One had stayed here, one had travelled through the aperture she had opened in the negative energy field, and both were fine. Normal. The traveller had misted aether off its form when it had returned and had been cold to the touch, but was none the worse for the trip.

However, apples do not speak of their experiences, and the data did not tell her what she wanted to know.

Not so far from the apples rested a topaz, recently chilled. She had been reluctant to send a carbuncle through to the rift. To be certain, while carbuncles looked much like creatures of flesh and blood, there were a great many differences between them. For starters, they could survive and simply be resummoned back from the sort of misadventure that would spell the ultimate and final end for a creature born of body instead of aether.

However, they were a kind of life, and Zoissette felt that precious enough. Precautions had been taken, and the carbuncle had been made aware of the risk. At least, as aware as a creature such as itself could be made. She lacked Synnove’s or even Riven’s touch for summoning, and her carbuncle was closer to ‘clever’ than it was to ‘sentient’.

But it had gone and come back again. It had been disoriented upon arriving back, and seemed confused before it had eagerly jumped into her arms, nudging its nose in her face and swishing its tails excitedly. That it was in good condition was reassuring.

Less reassuring was that it did not seem fully aware of what had transpired. It had maintained a thin aetheric condition to her codex while it had traversed the rift, but what had come back was scrambled runes and glyphs, static and uncertainty, and an absolute mess of what seemed to be less ‘data’ and more ‘random noise’.

She had checked it over, and once she was certain it was okay, she had dismissed it, allowing its energies to return to the aetherial sea.

And then there was Lavender.

Zoissette had just flat refused to let her go at first. There were too many unknowns, too much risk. She was more cautious than Y’shtola, who had decided that a few trips made by a nixie was good enough to prove the work. The nixie had come back corrupted, a problem they had a ready solution to, but it had also come back sound.

The carbuncle had been confused, and disoriented from its journey, and that bothered Zoissette.

Having an argument with Lavender was both interesting and vexing. The little fairy could not talk, and so communicated through flashing glyphs and runes on the pages of the codex, drawing symbols and making pictures, and body language that had gotten rather pointed. However, at last, they had managed to reach a compromise.

Back when the initial work was being done to create the anima that would ultimately become Lavender, Ardashir had fashioned a mammet-esque body for her to inhabit, with Lavender’s original soulstone nestled low in its belly. Lavender could inhabit it in whole or in part, and Zoissette decided that she was, in fact, willing to risk the small device.

If worse came to worse, she could pull Lavender back to either the scholar soul stone or the soul stone nestled in her codex, and leave the mammet abandoned to the rift.

Such did not come to pass. And unlike the carbuncle, Zoissette could more directly observe through it, but that turned out to be of little help. The images that came back as she journeyed where hopeless messes of indecipherable color, the runes and glyphs that Lavender used to communicate spilling by on the pages of her codex so fast that she could not decipher them. And the empathic link they shared saturated quickly, leaving Zoissette bewildered more than anything at the strange mix of feelings coming back.

The body that returned was cold, its joints brittle, but Lavender was quick to manifest outside of it. She was unable to communicate at first, save for a single image which she sent to the enchantments in Zoissette’s glasses.

The dark sky of the thirteenth. The black orbs that were native to the skies in that place, with the unsettling purple and red miasma that permeated its atmosphere.

Lavender had made it, and returned safe. And she recovered quickly enough, returning to her usual demeanor, but unable to fully communicate what had happened in the intervening time.

And now Zoissette was facing that decision she had to make.

She looked over the data that had been gathered. It was all neat and orderly. Multiple things had been passed through to the rift and back safe enough by all accounts.

She could, as well.

But should she.

The disposition of both the carbuncle and Lavender bothered her. They were more aether than mass, and so what had happened to them may be more detrimental to a being such as herself, dissimilar in many ways. She wished desperately to be able to determine what had happened to them, but the only good way to do so would be to transition to the void herself.

And another discrepancy had come to her notice. The containment field and energies fluxed, waxed and waned as mass passed through, and for many of the experiments, she had determined a way to measure an object’s mass through the changes. Heavier things tended to have larger displacement energies, which was logical and reasonable. Nothing came anywhere near to being a problem to threaten the containment field.

The problem was, again, with the carbuncle and Lavender. The carbuncle was by far the more physically massive of the two, intended as it was for actual physical combat. Lavender was meant to watch, to learn, to apply tactics, to deliver magicks, and to fly, but not ever to actually physically engage with an opponent. The carbuncle on the other hand was very much capable of doing so, both with magical acumen and with the rather less elegant method of simply tackling opponents, leaping upon them, and applying teeth as the situation warranted.

So in theory, the displacement of the carbuncle should have been larger than that of Lavender.

In actuality, it seemed Lavender was larger than the carbuncle.

Much, much larger.

And for that matter, the carbuncle was larger than it should have been too, for how much it weighed. For every other object Zoissette had passed through the negative energy field and into the rift, she could reliably match its mass to its displacement and vice versa. The carbuncle, however, had a larger displacement than its mass would indicate.

And again, Lavender more so.

She frowned, and wondered where the discrepancy came from.

However, nothing came close to stressing the containment field. She quickly did the math for a worst case estimate based on the numbers she saw for Lavender, compared it to the containment field’s strength and capabilities, scaled it up for herself, then multiplied that number by three.

Plenty of margin.

Still concerning.

Lavender flitted to her shoulder and landed, and she could feel a questioning feeling come from the little familiar. She reached up a finger to her, and gently touched Lavender’s wing, trying to be reassuring. With her other hand, she tapped the rim of her glasses, activating an enchantment that showed her the time.

It was evening, now. She had begun her experiments quite early in the morning.

She got up, Lavender taking to the air, and decided to head over to Gage Acquisitions’ headquarters. There she could perhaps review her notes, get some dinner, and get a good night’s rest.

Surely she would be better able to make a decision in the morning.

[scrollsfromarebornrealm]

🖊 🖊 🖊!

🖊 Sebastian when he first joined Riven and the others...well, let's just say he was a bit of a shit. Stick up the ass, Sharlayan-style. Especially when it came to Riven's Limsan arcanistry. Riven decided to 'help' him with an attitude adjustment.

Said help came in the form of Riven ensuring Seb would be spouting off his opinions in front of some Nym scholars, and then introducing the then black mage to the ancient Limsan Golden Rule of 'talk shit get hit' by instigating a bar fight between said scholars and Sebastian. (@dragons-bones noted that the natural order of things is to fight outside in the hallway outside the classroom like the gods intended and I fully agree but Sebastian was raw clay at this point, he had to work up to that level xD)

Suffice to say the stick was eventually removed, Sebastian ended up taking an interest Nym scholarship, and he can happily now hold his own in any no-holds-barred academia brawl in any and all regions.

🖊 And in that vein, there was a singular attempt once by visiting Sharlayan academics to bar any and all possible weaponry for an an academic conference they were hosting. This did not go well, because of the sheer amount of weapons Riven kept removing from her person--and also she was among quite a few scholars who had magical tattoos that could not be removed at all. (shoutout to Synnove!).

🖊 Mathye was ground zero for a Limsan academic brawl once. Net result was him climbing up on table and beating anyone who dared get close with his staff. Then he promptly got taken out by a Carbuncle slamming him in the back of the knees.

[starswornoaths]

🌼

send me a 🌼 and I’ll name three things I like about you - Accepting! 

Friend!!!!!!!!!

-You excel at character interactions and writing really memorable characters- be they in humor, drama, or more quiet and personal moments, your characters always pop in the best ways, as do your depictions of NPCs. Your carbuncles are not real and I cannot give them pets and that makes me very sad, but that’s okay

This is just an aside, but like. I can’t articulate it any other way, but I adore the fact that you write Aymeric like Gomez Adams if Gomez Adams were also afflicted with Dandyism and was made to run for office. He just...he loves Synnove so goddamn much and I love that you write him like That.

-You’re always so animated when discussing your interests that even if it’s something that I otherwise have no interest in, I’m still enraptured by your discussion of it. You once spoke about a baseball joke/scenario and broke it down because someone asked you to, and I read every bit of it and understood it even though I haven’t given one fig about baseball since I moved from the Midwest. You did that, you magical, magical person, you.

-You’re a delight to chat with, and I’m always so stoked when I see you’ve commented on one of my posts because you’re such a gem, and if I wasn’t such an anxious goob I would want to chat more, but I’m fearful you’ll realize I have like nothing to say because I’m usually either at work or sleeping :

[theredshirtwholived]

I’ve been working on this for the past MONTH and it’s finally done! This is easily the most complex art thing I’ve ever drawn and I’m quite happy with it.

I present to you @dragons-bones ‘s lovely Final Fantasy XIV OC, Synnove Greywolfe, and three of her darling carbuncles, Tyr, Galette, and Ivar. Galette and Ivar are both sniffing at their mama’s hands to see which one has SWEETS in it, while Tyr is trying to pretend he’s not interested when he really, really wants in on the action.

(Made in Krita.)

[catpella]

FFXIV Write #4: Unqualified Success

Prompt: clinch

to settle (a matter) decisively

Words: 1670

Valle’s second carbuncle summoning is also a victory.

Part of the duties of Mealvaan's Gate was to oversee the ships that came in and out, carrying the cargo that served as the lifeblood of the city. The Arcanists' Guild was involved in this process because some of the arcanists acted as assessors, inspecting cargo to determine if it was normal items that might pass through the port of Limsa Lominsa on any given day, anything ranging from fabrics to spices to fine crafts from other nations, or if ships carried contraband such as illegal herbs and drugs.

There were arcanists who grumbled about assessor duty, preferring other aspects of Guild life, such as research, or courses, or going into the wild and being adventurers. Valle Serreta found she and Equinox were rather good at it and didn't get harassed in the same way some inspectors did, that she rather enjoyed assessor work, and she never dramatically grumbled when she was assigned to it or came up with ways to get out of it. She'd noticed that she'd been assigned to it more often lately and suspected it was some combination of those factors that was causing it.

It wasn't as though she was a full-time assessor, though; she still had time to work on the academic studies she was interested in, including one study that had arisen out of her assessor work. The very thing they were putting to the test today, in fact.

The standard emerald carbuncle summoning array was a well-rounded design, one that  contained tested and guaranteed protocols for the major Guild uses. When it came to cargo detection, the background equations and calculations had remained fairly static for quite some time. There was a learning capability built into them - a carbuncle needed to be trained to learn new types of contraband to find it - but that just increased the range of what they could detect, it didn't adjust the common sensors and detection array at all.  

Valle had heard that a few arcanists here and there had modified the sensors in places, but when she'd asked around, she'd found most of those had been done by senior arcanists and not by ones who were as new in their education as she was. And most of them had been doing it as part of their specialized levels of research - such as Mistress Ingolia training hers to track aetherial trails, which she'd let Valle peek at for a bit just to see what advanced.

Valle hadn't gone totally blind into this. She'd shown her planned equations and designs to X'erys, who had read over them with grave concentration and then said, "They're something, Valle. I never would have thought of this. I think I see it." Then she'd shown them to Synnove Greywolfe, a senior arcanist who had done innovative designwork on her own carbuncles, to see if she was going to be told she was on the wrong track. What she got was, "Test it and see."

Armed with that, she'd finished the design, coded it into the grimoire, acquired a topaz stone from the guild's stores to use as the summoning foci and, and prepared for this trial. When it was all done, she'd spoken to Mistress Ingolia and arranged for a cargo inspection trial.

Now she stood in the training ring, rolling the summoning topaz stone in her hands, hoping she'd gotten it all right. Because this was so experimental, she hadn't wanted to use one of the stocks of good topaz they distributed for summoning. There had been a few stones in the Guild's stores that were smaller, or needed to be shaped differently to deal with flaws in the stone, and so when Valle had talked to the quartermaster she'd requested one of them. It hummed with aether in her hands like it was purring, waiting to be used for this.

The training ring was full of cargo boxes, and she'd been told that there were fewer than 25% of them containing contraband. Mistress Ingolia was overseeing the actual test and for some reason Valle had assumed it would be her alone watching this test, but no. Several arcanists ringed the outside, ready to watch and see what happened. She had an audience for this. Well, it was a test of a new, experimental adjustment...word must have spread. So there was a crowd. Some of the faces were at least friendly ones who she knew were rooting for her, others were just there to watch and didn't seem invested one way or another.

"You may begin the summoning," Mistress Ingolia intoned.

Valle closed her eyes, rolled the stone again, rooted her feet in the ring, in the smell of the wood, imagined the stone below that, took a breath, touched quill to grimoire, and began the summoning cant. She thought of the rich color of topaz, she thought of how she had made these equations so the carbuncle had the clever nose for seeking items as a whittret, she thought of how earth was material and solid and how to sort through material one needed to know what a thing was as surely as stone knew itself.

A topaz carbuncle burst into the world for the first time. Only...slightly different. The body was more slender and less long than a standard carbuncle, somewhere between half- and full-size compared to the normal model and the snout protruding forward somewhat more. It appeared otherwise to be a fully functional carbuncle and made a delightful dance as it rushed up to her, transmitting eagerness by hop-dancing around her heels.

A muted clamor immediately began to echo through the hall, arcanists talking to each other mostly in low tones. Valle heard, - 'looks wrong donnit' and 'awful small for a 'buncle' and 'whats wit its mouth' - among other things. She tried to tune it out as she bent down to inspect the carbuncle, running her hand over it to see if the equations and arrays were right, pausing at the head - yes, there they were, in that elongated snout.

"Arrays and sensors functional," she reported, standing up to face Mistress Ingolia, who seemed impassive. "May I begin the trial?"

"Go ahead," the Elezen said. Unlike the other arcanists, she was showing no signs of any concern over the strange appearance of the carbuncle, for which Valle was glad. "You have 10 minutes to assess the cargo and determine what contains contraband."

"Do we know what we're looking for?" she asked.

"No. Assume this is a ship with Ul'dahn flag and you have no manifest."

The most difficult type of exercise, no hope of knowing what should be there and thus the chance to mess up some things that scented somewhat alike - some herbs that could be used as medicines that smelled like some that were only used as poisons  -  which would ding them points. She'd have to hope her loaded library of recognition would be enough. "I understand," she said.

"And...begin!"

Immediately Valle moved towards the nearest stack of boxes, coaxing the carbuncle and watching as it sniffed its nose and began to move...

And after only one round of the arena, with the topaz carbuncle having climbed on three boxes to get better scents and in one cases slipping between a stack of crates in a way Valle couldn't tell if was due to its smaller size or if she'd accidentally copied in something physics-breaking from someone else's grimoire (which had not been her intention!), they had found 4 suspicious crates of 50.

"Four," she said.

Mistress Ingolia checked her timepiece. "You have four minutes remaining if you wish to check again."

That made it sound like she'd missed some. Briefly, she considered summoning Equinox to check and say she was verifying old vs new protocols but...no she trusted the array matrix. "I'm sure. I trust my carbuncle."

"You pass. Four crates. What was in them?"

"Somnus, an invasive species of snail, and seed packets of some type that I assume weren't reported."

"Correct," the Elezen said, and to Valle's surprise she did hear clear pride in her tone.

The thrill of victory suffused her, making her feel flushed and joyful.

Mistress Thubyrgeim stepped past Mistress Ingolia. "Come see me. Bring the grimoire and the carbuncle."

The murmuring from the audience grew louder. Everyone knew Thubyrgeim had basically become the Guildsmistress in the frequent absences in that of the man on paper. If she wanted to see Valle  - still a student and not yet a full journeywoman - what did that say? What did that mean? Was she in trouble?

Valle beckoned the carbuncle rather than desummoning it, feeling it crawl her her leg, but instead of settling in her arms, this one seemed happy to wind up her body and then to crawl up to wrap around her to hang along her neck and shoulders like a stole made of soft fur. Or, in this case, warm aether. She tried to let the sensation comfort her as she carried her grimoire to the acting-Guildmistress' office, fear beginning to curdle in her belly...

And an hour later, she came flying out the office and to the student lounge on the third floor of the Gate. There were a number of people in there, all occupied but most looking up when Valle came in.

"Did she chew you out?" asked R'awynde.

"Did she say you can't do assessor duty anymore?" X'erys asked.

"Are you still in the Guild?" was Gilded Feather's contribution.

"Yes, I'm still in the Guild. I'm likely on more assessor duty. I'm not in trouble, I'm not chewed out, she loved my carbuncle, she thinks it's clinched my journeyman's research project," Valle rattled off. "It's atypical in design but it had successful practical results and she thinks I can refine it further to maybe help improve future designs!"

"Let's take a look at how you did it, then," Feather demanded, pointing at her grimoire.

"Let's take Valle out to eat first, she must be starving," X'erys said.

And so they went out to celebrate.

[nalukahvi]

Little New Years Boartraits for Bena, Bradach, Synnove, and Enfys!

@benanightsong​ / Bradach / @dragons-bones​ / Enfys With Wolf, Tiny Boar, Emerald Carbuncle, and an Imp respectively

All Rights Reserved; This work is not free-use and may not be taken, claimed, edited, copied, redistributed, or otherwise used without my consent. Reposting is 🚫, Reblogging is ♥

• • • • • • • ⦃ Commission Info ⦄ • ⦃ Ko-Fi ⦄ • • • • • • •

Art Special Information is here: [LINK]

[angstmongertina]

@dragons-bones replied to your post “All right. Since I’m currently at school with good WiFi speeds, time...”

MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT, DT. :P Yours, Synnove’s, and the carbuncles’ faults. :P

[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #8: Behold, a Man

Prompt: shed || Master Post || On AO3

--

Ryne clapped both hands over her mouth, shoulders hitching. Gaia bit her lower lip and looked skyward, vainly attempting to keep a straight face.

The amaro yearling in the middle of her first molt sighed heavily and flapped her wings. Each of her four wings were utterly bare, her soft baby down having fallen out all at once, the naked, pink skin in stark contrast to the grey-green of her shaggy coat. “Bwee,” she chirped, forlorn.

Gaia snorted, gaze still to the sky. A choking wheeze escaped Ryne.

“Girls, what’s the mat—” Synnove stopped right behind them. A strangled squeak escaped her. “Oh,” she said, voice pitched high. “I see.”

The yearling bleated. Gaia chanced a look at her; the amaro’s eyes were very big, and limpid, and sad. She flapped her bare, stubby wings.

Gaia hurriedly looked up again. Such a lovely blue the sky was. A shame there weren’t any clouds today, trying to find shapes in them would make for an excellent distraction right about now.

The pitter-patter of little paws across the paddock reached her ears, followed by the soft thump of a carbunclet running into the back of her legs. Oof! Roksana, then. Sorry, Gaia!

“It’s all right,” Gaia said. She was very proud of herself: her voice was only a little bit strangled.

And then, the horrified, too-loud whisper of a carbunclet who still didn’t quite understand volume or who not to project her harmonic to: Mommy, what happened to her wings?!

Gaia snorted again, and broke, and cackled. Automatically, she and Ryne braced their shoulders together to stay upright; Gaia wrapped her arms around her stomach, as if that would do a damn thing to keep her near-hysterical laughter contained, while Ryne still had her hands clamped over her mouth, eyes squeezed shut as desperate, wheezing giggles escaped her.

Mommy, she looks like a plucked chicken, came Amandina’s incredulous harmonic echoing through their minds.

The yearling, outraged, squawked.

Yeah, nope, Gaia was done.

Both she and Ryne collapsed to the ground. Her best friend curled up on her side, tears pouring down her cheeks and laughing so hard she wasn’t even making sound any longer. Gaia meanwhile was on her knees, forehead pressed into the bare dirt of the paddock and one fist pounding the ground as she gasped for air between bouts of laughter. She felt Roksana poke her cheek with a paw and heard her ask What’s so funny? and it only made her laugh all the harder.

“I can’t breathe,” Ryne wheezed, then managed to stop her convulsions long enough to gulp in a breath before more giggles overtook her.

Gaia was vaguely aware of Synnove stumbling around them to console the embarrassed yearling, but the older woman’s snickering was audible over the hysterics of the two Oracles. She could vaguely hear two of the Zun amaro keepers—probably Szen and Knem—chuckling somewhere behind them, and then Szel’s familiar voice calling out, “Girls, no dying, or Captain Lyna will be cross!”

“Trying!” Gaia croaked.

“Try harder!”

“Not helping!” Synnove’s voice pitched too high from struggling to contain her own laughter. The amaro yearling was audibly grumbling.

Eventually, both Gaia and Ryne managed to get a hold of themselves, and they flopped on their backs as they slowly got their breathing back under control. Gaia dared to peek over at Synnove and the yearling; the yearling had her head pressed into Synnove’s torso, still grumbling and growling her discontent, while Synnove scratched her neck and crooned wordlessly. She hurriedly looked away before she could see the poor yearling’s wings again.

Roksana, meanwhile, had flopped onto Ryne’s neck—from this angle, Roksana’s body obscured Gaia’s view of the lower half of her friend’s face—and Ryne was cuddling the white pearl carbunclet. You two are weird, Roksana chittered.

“So are you,” Ryne said, and Gaia saw her eyes crinkle in the way that meant she that was smiling in that wide, shining way of hers.

Her vision was suddenly full of black pearl carbunclet, and Gaia grinned up at Amandina. “Can I help you, little miss?”

Amandina headbutted her cheek and said, her harmonic soft and staticky in the way that meant she was speaking to Gaia alone, Ask her out already.

Gaia gathered the little carbuncle up and kissed the top of her head. “Stop trying to rig the betting pool for your mum,” she whispered into Amandina’s ear. “When we’re both good and ready, all right?”

Amandina grumbled. Fine, fine.

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[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #10: [INDIGO ABRASAX]

Prompt: reactivation (free write!) || Master Post || On AO3

A/N: This idea originated before the 6.4 PLL that announced Certain Specific Scholar Updates. Yoshi-P, I demand royalties along with the use of my twenty-year old internet handle as the abbreviation for your new expansion.

--

Synnove stared down at the soulstone on her desk; the dark blue stone was cut in such a way that what little light refracted through it drew the eye to the Scholar’s bespectacled emblem carved into its surface. She poked at it gently and the sonorous bzzz of unaspected aether brushed against her mind. Soulstones didn’t usually have unaspected aether unless they were blank, waiting for memory and experience to fill them.

This one was weird.

“This one is weird,” she said aloud. “Not that I don’t mind a mystery, but Surito is sending this along because…?”

“It’s something about the fairy,” Halulu said. “This one is from the most recent cache of soulstones the recovery teams have located in the Palace, and it’s the only one Surito can’t place to its original owner at the time of Nym’s fall. All the others, if he couldn’t recognize the aetherial signature, the fairy within responded at least long enough to identify herself and her Scholar.”

“But this one stayed silent,” Mhaslona said, not a question after Halulu’s explanation. Synnove’s old advisor lounged in one of the chairs on the other side of her desk, turned to the side to allow her to stretch her prosthetic leg out.

Halulu nodded and said, “And since Synnove is Eorzea’s resident strange summons expert…”

“You rewrite the laws of aetherology once and everyone expects you to walk on water,” Synnove grumbled without any heat. Halulu and Mhaslona both snickered at her. “All right, I’ll see if she’ll say hello to me.”

She pushed back from her desk and stood, picking up the soulstone in the same motion, and walked to the center of her office. Those first summonings of Tyr and Ivar had taught her never summon a damn thing near her desk ever again. The Gate quartermaster would likely refuse her requisition for another ironwood desk, especially one that would need hauling all the way up the northeast tower.

Synnove cupped her hands together, the left under the right, with the soulstone nestled in the center of her palm. She allowed her eyes to unfocus as she reached out with her aether to nudge the soulstone. In her mind, it hummed acknowledgment, but did nothing else.

The logic for a fairy wasn’t one with which she was intimately familiar, but her perfect memory could recall it regardless and Synnove held it in her mind as she drew on her aether—and frowned.

The soulstone refused to respond.

Only faintly conscious of her head tilting in puzzlement, Synnove mentally prodded at the soulstone again. Scholar soulstones were locked with the fairy logic; summon the fairy and the bearer could begin to attune to the soulstone. And it wasn’t a mystery lock, either, the logic was practically writ into the soulstone’s aether, one just needed to ‘fill’ it and—

—unless it wasn’t a fairy.

Synnove mentally threw out the fairy logic and plunged into the heady waters of the soulstone. Yes, there was the most basic of geometries used in summoning at its heart, pulsing and strong, but the way it branched out into the greater logic didn’t match the ones Scholars used for their fairies. She followed the equations and lines spiraling out from the core, mentally tracing out the shape of the summon that guarded the soulstone’s heart.

…This was familiar.

This was very, very familiar.

Without intention, without even having finished tracing this not very Scholarly logic because it wasn’t a logic at all, it was an array, Synnove filled in the blanks, and aether sang out in her office.

Synnove looked down.

A bright blue carbuncle blinked up at her.

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then a sound not unlike that of an Allagan node—though oddly feminine in its neutrality—rang out in her mind.

[>>776SKK900NLS0000 GLORIOUS DAWN NRM-COM/IPMA: ASSETS//CORE//IMPERATIVE IMMEDIATE ACTION ORDER Tactical morality reset from EMERALD EXIGENT. SECURITY STATE is ADAMANTOISE. LUCIFERON is INACTIVE and MIDNIGHT. Primary command structure defragment commence on mark. Evocation matrix INDIGO ABRASAX reactivation success. Format moral structures for KYRIA TRACE. STOP STOP STOP 776SKK900NLS0000]

With the way Mhaslona and Halulu were excitedly chattering behind her, Synnove knew she was the only one who had heard that. She suspected she wasn’t supposed to have heard that.

And then the carbuncle opened her mouth, and in the same voice said:

[Greetings, New User! I am the Intelligent Personal Obligant and Medical Operative for Emergency Applications! You may call me Ipomoea for convenience. Please specify the nature of your emergency for prompt service.]

Dead silence in her office.

“Um,” Synnove said intelligently.

“Is,” Halulu whispered, “is she talking? As in, open mouth, sound comes out talking?”

“More like an orchestrion rather than talking,” Mhaslona said slowly.

“Oh, I don’t like that. Not one bit.”

--

“So,” Synnove said, filling the final shot glass with whiskey and keeping it for herself, “best I can tell, the soulstone was carved from a carbuncle-quality focus gem.”

Surito Carito, Setoto Seto, and Alka Zolka were huddled around her desk with herself, Halulu, and Mhaslona, each with a shot glass in front of them. The bottle of Synnove’s best whiskey was not as full as it had been half a bell ago.

Surito sighed heavily and rubbed his face. “I remember her,” he said. “Her summoner—though perhaps better to say her programmer—was the college’s Allag expert, Vatete Vate. And carbuncles weren’t a popular choice for familiars; fairy logic was the preference, since it wasn’t reliant on gemstones infused with living aether.”

“We were isolated from most of Aldenard because of Mhach and Amdapor’s warring over the centuries,” Setoto said, shaking her head. “By the time of the War of the Magi, we hadn’t had a reliable gemstone trade in generations, it was why the fairy logic was developed at all.”

Mhaslona sucked on her teeth. “Where the fuck did Vatete even get the Allag tech? Based on what Synnove heard, it sounds like she reverse-engineered one of their command nodes into a carbuncle array.”

The two tonberries and one former tonberry all shrugged.

“Best we can do at the moment is ask around the Palace,” Surito said, raising his whiskey glass to sip from it. “Vatete isn’t among the tonberries, and she kept to herself much of the time, but she’d ramble to anyone who showed a lick of interest, so it’s possible, though not probable, that she may have let slip something without either she or her audience realizing the import.”

Synnove rested her cheek on her fist and sighed, then said over her shoulder, “How’s that database update coming along, honey?”

[Azys Lla terminal connection is sporadic, update is only seventeen percent complete.] Ipomeoa had, thankfully, switched to an aetheric harmonic upon request, although it still sounded vaguely artificial. [Prioritization algorithms are still sorting data. WORLD STATE: HYDAELYN set to UNBOUND.]

“…I don’t want to know what that means,” Alka Zolka said wearily. “I don’t think I have the clearance to know what that means.”

“You do now,” Synnove grumbled, and tossed back her whiskey in one gulp.

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[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #2: Drumming Song

Prompt: bark || Master Post || On AO3

--

“I think I’ve found it,” Synnove muttered to herself, examining a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb made of tiny, glittering aetheric equations repeated over and over in a perfect tessellation, floating amongst a ribbon of other geometries.

Her new carbuncle, Tyr, was a lovely, sweet boy, gentle despite his enormous size, but he was…quiet. Unnaturally so: he made no physical sounds like the purring or chittering common of carbuncles, nor did he communicate via the aetheric harmonic that Galette uses with her. The lack of it has clearly frustrated the lad, and so Synnove had spent this first sennight of possessing a new summon on unspooling his physical form into a single line of code to examine each and every fragment of his full manifested array. The written array was perfect, so clearly something had gone pear-shaped during summoning.

And now, finally, she’d found it. This equation tessellating into the honeycomb, at a glance, seemed to be related to sound; Synnove jotted down the full equation in her notebook, as well as a sketch of a flat rendering of the shape it formed, to better study it later. Her current theory was that the sheer density of aether contained in Tyr’s topaz had caused some sort of interference and so far, the evidence supported it. That this was the only hiccup was a pleasant surprise.

For all that he couldn’t communicate in a traditional manner at the moment, Tyr was still aware and able to make himself known: the ribbon of his unspooled-self did an excited little shimmy. Synnove grinned as she began to pluck the honeycomb apart, pinching a dodecahedron here, smudging one with her thumb there.

As she worked, something rhythmic began to niggle at the back of her mind, thumpthumpthump, like someone rattling a door, growing steadily louder as the honeycomb. Her grin widened. “Patience, Tyr,” she crooned, and despite her growing excitement, she kept to her own methodical pace.

Finally, as the penultimate dodecahedron melted away, leaving but one behind:

--ama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!

“Hello, Tyr,” Synnove said, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. Tyr’s aetheric harmonic was the comforting thrum of gazelle-hide drums and tolling brass bells. “It’s nice to finally meet you!”

MAMA! MAMA MAMA MAMA HI HI HI!

Synnove shoved her chair back, and the long, glittering ribbon of golden light abruptly rolled itself up with an audible snap! As the roll completed, Tyr burst back into full materiality, and he landed with a wood-creaking THUD. For such an enormous carbuncle, he was fast, and in the blink of an eye he had rushed forward to shove his head into her stomach, his tails lashing as he tried to crawl into her lap, and chattering at a high pitch.

She aggressively cuddled him back, leaning down to plant a smacking kiss between his ears, and laughed when the action elicited in an adorable tippity-tap from Tyr’s paws. “All right, my boyo,” she said, drawing away and cupping his head in her hands, “want to give me a nice big bork hello?”

Yeah! Tyr chattered. He backed up a few steps and sat down, so excited he was visibly vibrating. His chest expanded and he opened his mouth and—

[the agonistic colliding of tectonic plates and the melting of corruption into coal into diamond and the igneous iron at the heart of the star and the tintinnabulation of limestone water into stalagmites and stalactites and the ever-wait as fire becomes stone and the ancient humming at the root of a mountain and the patient rumbling as crystal becomes Self]

—Synnove’s  eyes snapped open and she wheezed for breath as she stared up into Tyr’s worried face.

Mama, did I do it right?

Synnove was not sure what he had just done. Her scientific brain was furious about that. Her common sense brain told her scientific brain to shut the fuck up and reminded it that sometimes stupid mortals Did Not Need To Know Things. Synnove listened to common sense brain, and promptly let her memory go fuzzy and grey.

Instead, she reached up and patted his cheek. “Think so,” she croaked. “We’ll work on volume. And tone.”

Tyr promptly dropped down onto her in a full-body sprawl—she wheezed again—and began to purr. It was deep, almost soundlessly so, but it sunk down into her bones and caused every muscle in her body to relax and woah. All right, yes, that. That was good. And amazing.

Synnove wrapped her arms around her carbuncle, and decided this was probably as good a time as any for a nap.

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[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #25: The Best Cure

Prompt: call it a day || Master Post || On AO3

--

“I am nob sick.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’m nob!”

Synnove gave her knight her very best “I Know You Speak Bullshite” look that she normally leveraged on carbuncles and students. Aymeric’s answering scowl would have been a more effective rebuttal if his hair wasn’t disheveled, his eyes not watery, and his nose not bright red.

“You have run yourself ragged,” Synnove said, hands on her hips, “and now you’re paying the price for spreading yourself so thin.”

“Dere’s too much to—ACHOO!”

Aymeric got his arm up just in time to sneeze into his elbow. And then a second time, and a third, in quick succession.

“Darling, you have a very competent second-in-command and an equally competent new political secretary, you can take the bloody time to rest and get better.”

An authoritative mew drifted up from next to Synnove’s shin. She pointed down. “See! Lady Crème agrees with me!”

The Ala Kharan cat leaped up onto the bed, then sat primly with her tail curled over her paws, and stared at Aymeric. Aymeric refused to look at his mother’s cat, instead trying to scowl again at Synnove. “If I always did what the cab wanted,” and now he seemed to be vainly trying to ignore how his congestion was only getting worse with every word he spoke, “I would neber ged anyding done.”

Synnove narrowed her eyes.

“Tyr.”

The topaz carbuncle popped his head over the side of the bed, and, like Lady Crème, stared. Now Aymeric looked concerned.

“Sit.”

Boof!

Aymeric tried to scramble away, Lady Crème hissing angrily at being jarred, but too late: Tyr was crawling up the bed. As soon as his hindlegs were on the mattress, the enormous carbuncle threw himself forward to flop on Aymeric’s legs and torso. Aymeric went flat on his back with an oof!

Synnove smiled. “Good boy, Tyr.”

Another wordless boof, this one smug, as Tyr drew himself up into a proper loaf shape. For good measure, he swished his tails to the side to drape over Aymeric’s face. Lady Crème stalked up the bedsheets to claim one of the pillows next to Aymeric’s head.

“You fight dirty,” Aymeric grumbled, voice further muffled by both snot and carbuncle tails.

“I fight to win,” Synnove said, smug, as she walked around the bed. “I’ve already gave Lucia a call on the ‘pearl, and I’ll be contacting Norlaise shortly.”

“Conspiracies.”

She snickered, and brushing the tips of Tyr’s tails out of the way, she leaned over and kissed Aymeric’s forehead. “I’m going to go help Hersande make some chicken noodle soup,” she said. “I’ll come check up on you in a bell. If you need anything, just tell Tyr and he’ll come get me.”

“Fiiiiiine,” came the sulky whine. A pause. “I love you.”

“I love you, too.” Synnove gave an ear scratch to both Tyr and Lady Crème, and then headed out of the bedroom.

Aymeric was snoring by the time she closed the door.

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[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #24: Sovenance

Prompt: refraction (free write!) || Master Post || On AO3

--

A wiggle here, a wiggle there, and pop!

Roksana tumbled to the ground with a whee! and Amandina followed a heartbeat later, landing lightly on her feet. Roksana got to her feet, giving herself a good shake, and the pair of carbunclets looked around.

…I think we took a wrong turn at the gemology lab, Amandina whispered, ears pinning back against her head.

Roksana cheeped agreement.

Above them, singing in chorus, were the enormous aether batteries that powered all the wards and protections in the Arcanists’ Guild. The laboratories, the libraries, the classrooms, even the special holding cells for dangerous cargo. Sunk into the last of the subbasements, deep beneath the floor of Galadion Bay, only seven people in the whole of the Guild had the access necessary to even reach this level.

Mommy was one of them, and she did not bring them or their siblings with her. Ever.

The twins pressed up against one another, staring with wide eyes. The aether here was thick and cloying, the giant clusters set into the batteries so potent that the wrong gesture could probably cause a spell to cast. Roksana’s nose twitched under the assault, and she sneezed.

Amandina headbutted her, and then slowly crawled forward on her belly, ears twitching and tails lashing. I dunno how to find our way out, she whispered. It’s hard to sense directions in here. My array feels…weird.

Itchy?

Yeah.

Me, too.

Roksana wriggled her way after her sister, craning her neck back to stare at the battery. The aethersong was loud, too, which was making it hard to think. She pawed at her ear, unsettled. The aethersong didn’t sound right, either.

I think one of the water crystals is broken, she chirped.

Amandina wrinkled her nose. Ew.

Yeah.

The two stared up at the battery together for a while longer, and then Amandina shuffled away to poke her nose into the far corners. Probably trying to find a spot where they could wiggle through the wards and into voidspace and back up to Mommy’s office, despite how sleepy and confused the aether was making them; Amandina was very good at finding spots like that. Too bad the spot they had come through was too high up on the wall, close to the ceiling, for them to reach.

Roksana’s attention, however, was still held by the aether battery. Maybe the water cluster wasn’t broken, but it wasn’t right, either. She sneezed again.

She ilmed a little closer, peering up at the battery. Maybe the cluster had a crack? Maybe it hadn’t been set properly?

She sat up on her hindlegs, nose twitching and ears flicking, and carefully reached up her paw. Maybe—

The pad of her paw brushed ever so gently against the metal of the battery casing.

[THE WATER IS POISON THE WATER IS POISON AND THEY HAVE CHANGED THE WATER IS POISON AND THEY HAVE CHANGED AND THEY WILL KEEP CHANGING EVER AND ON THE WATER IS POISON AND THEY HAVE CHANGED AND THEY WILL KEEP CHANGING EVER AND ON AND— THERE IS FIRE. THE WATER IS POISON AND THE WATER IS GONE IT IS FLASH-BOILED IN AN INSTANT LEAVING THE BEDS BARED AND DEAD AND DYING AND THERE IS NO WHERE FOR THE RIVER TO GO BECAUSE THE RIVER IS GONE AND SO IS THE OCEAN THEIR SIBLING IS NO LONGER WATER. THEIR SIBLING IS LEVIN. THE WATER RETURNS AND IT ROARS FROM UPSTREAM AND FROM THE SEA AND IT RUSHES INTO THE EMPTY WITH RAGE AND GRIEF AND HORROR AND IT IS TOO LATE FOR EVERYTHING IS DEAD EXCEPT THEM THE WATER IS POISON BUT IT IS A DIFFERENT POISON THE WATER IS POISON BUT IT IS A DIFFERENT POISON AND THEY HAVE CHANGED THE WATER IS POISON BUT IT IS A DIFFERENT POISON AND THEY HAVE CHANGED AND THEY WILL KEEP CHANGING EVER AND ON—]

Roksana was wrenched back into awareness, peeping at the top of her lungs and trying to curl into a ball to hide amongst her tails and cover her eyes with her paws, but she couldn’t, because she was currently dangling from Big Sister’s mouth as Big Sister leaped from the ground of the thirteenth basement and through the hole in the wards.

[Careless! Thoughtless! Always having to know even if it means trouble! This is why you are not supposed to wander!] Big Sister was furious, her harmonic no longer the familiar windchime but a howling gale, but for all her rage, she was the eye of the storm, cold and still and relentless.

Big Sister crawled through the spaces of reality, growling low in her throat and slapping aside wards with a paw or smacking away a clinging bit of magic with her tails, forcibly shortening the path between A and B in ways that made spoken gibber uselessly. They crawled for a heartbeat. They crawled for a myriad.

Then Big Sister was stepping into realspace, into Mommy’s office, hopping down from empty air with a commanding warble. Big Brother jerked awake, rolling off the couch, and scrambled over to join them at Roksana and Amandina’s basket.

What happened? he said.

Stupid baby sisters went wandering and touched things they shouldn’t, Big Sister grumbled, her harmonic back to normal. She dropped Roksana next to Big Brother, then turned and hunkered down, wind aether gathering along her haunches. Keep an eye on her, I need to get Amandina.

She leaped, and vanished back into the space between.

Fire and water normally didn’t mix well, but Big Brother had always tolerated her squishing into him because he was warm and it felt gooood, even if grumbled. He didn’t grumble today, though, as Big Brother loafed immediately in her basket and Roksana pressed her face into his side, peeping pathetically and shaking all over. Big Brother wasn’t good at comforting, not like Biggest Brother was, but he started purring immediately.

Roksana couldn’t remember why she was so scared, but she was, and Big Brother was helping, and that was what was most important.

Big Sister re-appeared in a flash of displaced aether, Mommy’s wards rippling, with Amandina hanging docile and contrite by her scruff from Big Sister’s mouth. Big Sister stalked over, deposited Amandina next to Roksana (Amandina immediately cuddled up to her, purring her tiny, squeaky purr), and then promptly loafed on top of them both, starting up a ferocious purr like storm shutters rattling in the wind.

Roksana was starting to feel much better. Big Sister and Big Brother would always keep her safe, and their aether was almost as comforting as Mommy’s or Papa’s.

Mama is going to be upset, Big Sister said primly.

Roksana felt bad again. Please don’t tell! I’m sorry!

Baby sister, if you don’t think Mama isn’t running full speed up the tower right now, you are sorely mistaken, Big Brother drawled.

The aetheric resonance was so strong we felt it through our foci, Big Sister said. Mama wears all our foci on her wrist, she knows something happened to you, and you [will not lie, am I understood?]

Roksana whined wordlessly, but slumped beneath her siblings. Okay… Thank you for saving me, Big Sister.

No thanks necessary, you little troublemaker. Big Sister’s harmonic was at least affectionate beneath the annoyance.

…How did you find us? Amandina chittered.

I followed my nose.

That made sense. Big Sister had the bestest nose in the whole of Mealvaan’s Gate. She could sniff out anything, anywhere.

How did you voidwalk?

I’m Eldest, Big Sister said, as if that explained everything. Which it did.

That was when Mommy burst into the office, chest heaving and breath a wheeze as she stumbled over, Bigger Brother right at her heels. “What happened?” she croaked, gently pushing Big Sister aside to scoop up Roksana and Amandina.

Mommy was scared, which meant she was mad, but even when mad, Mommy cuddles were the best. Roksana promptly burrowed into Mommy’s neck to hide as Amandina crawled up to perch on the opposite shoulder.

We went wandering, Amandina said quietly. And we took a wrong turn, and we ended up in the aether battery room.

I touched it, Roksana admitted. There’s a bad water crystal in it.

“Just touching something with a crystal component out of alignment shouldn’t have caused a reaction like that, my dears,” Mommy said, gently stroking her back and tails. “Can you remember what happened?”

No. I think it was scary, though. Still kinda scared.

Aetheric resonance, Big Sister said, harmonic grim. I think one of the clusters is from the Yafaemi Estuary.

Roksana didn’t know what that meant, but Mommy did, because she said a bad word in Abanian. She didn’t feel like asking what aetheric resonance was right now. Maybe later.

Mommy was upset, and she and Amandina were definitely grounded, but Roksana was warm, and safe, and home, snuggled up with her Mommy and the comforting sound and smell of her aether. Everything would be okay, even if it meant no cake for a sennight.

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[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #6: The Form of Magic

Prompt: ring || Master Post || On AO3

--

Synnove sets stick to ground, and begins to walk.

The stick would be better called a rod: two-thirds her height, just thin enough to close her hand so that thumb touches middle finger, made of ironwood. A simple, unassuming tool, save for the simple fact it is over two hundred years old and has only ever been used to map out arrays.

Synnove herself is a mathematical genius with a memory like a steel trap: show her an arcanima array, and she will know it for life, how to tweak it, how to scale it, how to draw it, how to hold it in her mind in two dimensions and in three. She is able to draw a perfect circle freehand, a fact which drove more than one of her teachers in her early days at the Guild into fits of hysteria (and Mhaslona into fits of chortling, smug glee at poaching her from the mathematics department). She is, thus, the perfect arcanist to create the draft for a new permanent array for the Guild’s use on the Range.

The circle is the most basic shape of magic, the foundation for nearly all of the most important spells within an arcanist’s grimoire. Even thaumaturgy and black magic must needs bow to its use, stabilizing their spells else the power they attempt to channel consume them whole. Conjury, too, though less obviously, for the cycle of life and death and the elements was just another kind of circle writ large across creation.

Synnove walks smooth and sure, adjusting her grip on the array rod minutely as needed to ensure the circle growing behind her is as perfect as her steps. Tyr shadows her, ensuring the furrow left by the rod are smooth and flawless, using his equally precise aether control to flick away pebbles and rocks. Across her shoulders, Galette sprawls, though they are working today so rather than napping, she keeps the winds on the work site that blow off the Indigo Deep calm and friendly, and her nose twitches as she takes in the ambient aether, ensuring no sudden changes occur that will affect the efficacy of the array.

Dawn is only just breaking on the eastern horizon.

Ten minutes later, Synnove finishes the circle and a satisfying snap crackles through the air as she closes it, the protective magicks this array will emit already thrumming to life with the intent that Synnove used in the shaping. Tyr packs down the small pile of dirt with a paw, and Synnove side steps carefully inward until she is precisely six feet from the edge. The end of the rod hits the dirt with a soft thud, and once more, she begins to walk.

This time, behind her, other arcanists move in to begin carving out the shapes and equations that will fill the outermost circle. Topaz carbuncles join Tyr in removing the detritus, either pitching it beyond the edge of the array or packing it down into the earth.

Once a permanent array has begun its crafting, they cannot stop. If it takes all day to finish, so be it. If they work into the night and the next dawn, to ensure its perfection, so be it.

When the second circle is complete, Synnove moves further inward, ever and on, creating each and every circle this array requires with surety. Once the last closes, she moves to assist with the secondary lines and equations and shapes, one arcanist among many working as a smoothly oiled magitek engine.

They break at noon for food and water, and as Synnove drinks from her canteen and eats a roll stuffed with cheese and thinly sliced beef and roasted peppers, she walks the array, Tyr at her side. With a critical eye, she tracks every curve, every straight line, every number and letter scored into the earth, ensuring total perfection. Anything less, and the array won’t work.

Or it’ll explode.

Fifty-fifty chance, depending.

After lunch, work resumes, slow and methodical. Someone starts a shanty that helps the afternoon roll by a little faster, though quiet still dominates: concentration is key. But as the shadows lengthen, the carving finishes, and Synnove and the other senior arcanists walk the array once more, stepping carefully into any free spot, examining and double-checking and studying. Her fellows use copies of the array written in plain ink on plain parchment as reference; Synnove needs only her memory.

Then, finally, once they deem the array perfect, it’s the turn of the metallurgists to work.

Ivar and the few other ruby carbuncles the Guild has have been minding the crucibles, ensuring the metal within remains fiery hot, especially now as the metallurgists carefully carry the crucibles out in pairs to the array from the makeshift smithy. And, even more carefully, they begin to pour, melting flowing down the circle’s edge and diverting into the channels made by the other array elements as the metallurgists now walk the same path that Synnove did.

The ruby carbuncles now work to ensure the metal—a mithril alloy the Guild favors for shielding arrays, a proprietary mix they jealously guard—stays just as molten in the earthen furrows as it does in the crucibles. When the metallurgists are finished, every part of the array that touches itself will be a single piece of metal. For now, the molten material glows white with its heat, setting the growing night alight.

By necessity, this step is slow: the metallurgists must tip the crucibles carefully and pour even more so, to ensure no metal splashes and mars the array. And the crucibles must be refilled. It is nearing midnight when every single element glows under the night sky.

Most of the arcanists returned home bells before, but Synnove and a few others remain. They walk the array one last time with the topaz and ruby carbuncles—Tyr is on her right, Ivar her left, sniffing suspiciously at anything that looks remotely like a bubble that could lead to a void in the metal. The radiating heat is pleasant against the chill of the night, and Galette draped around her neck—now asleep, no longer on duty—makes for an excellent scarf.

Finally, they are satisfied.

Force cooling metal so quickly could lead to brittleness and breaks if not performed with care, but with carbuncles aspected to earth and to fire working together, such work is complete in nearly an eyeblink. The final product glitters in the light from the torches surrounding the worksite, perfectly flush with the ground.

The ambient aether thrums with the change. Reality has been warped, if subtly.

Synnove strides out to the very middle of the array and points up. A roiling ball of Ruin rushes forth into the sky, up and up and up and—

—reality twists more obviously, and the spell smacks into a domed shield that glimmers into life, forcibly dissipating the spell into harmless aether. The shield itself is wide: the dome isn’t limited to the array itself, but arches out into the waters beyond the Range. It seals the entire island.

Synnove grins as she walks out to meet her colleagues. “Interior shell seems to hold well on initial application,” she says, softly scritching Tyr’s head where it leans into her hip. “We’ll do a more thorough test with the exterior defenses tomorrow.”

Houxine from mathematics rubs at her eyes as they trudge out the edge of the permanent array. “So glad to have this project nearly finished,” the elezen grumbles.

Murmurs of assent and yawns answer her. Synnove takes one last look out over the array, now lost to shadow, and leans down to rub her fingers over the perfectly smooth outer edge of the circle. The metal is still warm, and the magic in it hums contently to match the song of the aether in the air and soil around her.

A job well done, and Synnove nods her satisfaction, and follows after her colleagues.

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[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #22: Code 'Buncle

Prompt: fulsome || Master Post || On AO3

A/N: Sequel to "[INDIGO ABRASAX]" from earlier this FFXIV Write!

--

Synnove pressed her palm to her forehead and groaned. Not for the first time, she wanted to strangle Vatete Vate.

Too bad she was a couple thousand years dead.

Mama, you’re going to need to rope in Nero, Galette said waspishly.

Synnove groaned again. “Noooooooo.”

Yes.

As was her wont when working on a carbuncle’s physical array system, Synnove had taken over an unused lecture hall within Mealvaan’s Gate. Unspooling a carbuncle and making sure the physical arrays had enough space was a frequent part of her routine and an important aspect of carbuncle maintenance. Just because the written arrays were still flawless did not mean that the physical ones couldn’t be affected by any number of factors.

She should have known trying to get a grasp on Ipomoea’s array system wasn’t going to be easy when the carbuncle didn’t unspool. Ipomoea unfolded.

When unspooled, Galette had the densest array system of all the carbuncles, her ribbon of self tightly coiled to fit, even in a room as large as a Guild lecture hall. She was an old carbuncle, the frequent first recipient of any upgrades Synnove devised or needed to test, and the bearer of a number of unique functions that neither construct nor summoner ever openly advertised. (Some were benign, or minor tweaks. Others not so much.)

But Ipomoea’s physical array system wasn’t a tidy ribbon of aether folding or curling in on itself however many times it needed. It filled nearly every ilm of space in the room, a chaotic jumble of geometry and equations and Allagan coding language. Synnove had been at this for the entire morning and she had only examined perhaps a sixth of the mess and understood even less of it.

[Senior Construct Galette, who is Designation: Nero?]

Ipomoea’s blandly pleasant aetheric harmonic seemed to physically echo, and Synnove made a conscious effort not to twitch. Galette’s tails lashed once against her shoulder, before the emerald carbuncle regained control of herself and chirped, Nero Scaeva is our not-so-resident expert on Allagan technology and programming. You will end up meeting him sooner rather than later. Also, he’s an annoying prick.

[Should I assume by the negative appellation that Designation: Nero Scaeva should not be listed as a New User for the purpose of debugging my array system?]

“That is correct,” Synnove said. “Never, ever, ever.”

[Designation: Nero Scaeva categorized as ALLIED UNIT, Subcategory: Annoying Prick.]

Synnove allowed herself a mean little chuckle at that. Galette just flat out cackled, eerily similar in sound to Garuda’s high-pitched mad shrieks.

But reality reasserted itself, and Synnove found herself scowling again soon enough. Galette, unfortunately, was correct: she was going to need to call in Nero. Synnove was good at untangling Allagan bullshite, but Nero was better, especially since this was his bread and butter and not a side hobby as it was for herself. And Vatete Vate had done some truly disgusting things while bashing arcane geometries into fairy logic into Allagan service node programming; she’d probably need to get Halulu or Setoto in on this, as well, for the fairy logic components of Ipomoea’s system. What a fucking mess, and even poor Ipomoea couldn’t explain half of what was inside her; Vatete apparently hadn’t bothered to include even a fucking table of contents in either Ipomoea or the soulstone.

And then there was all this other fucking nonsense in the physical array that seemed to have no bloody fucking purpose! Strange squiggles and shapes that she dearly hoped weren’t Vatete’s own shorthand, because there would be no deciphering that. Honestly, some looked like little…

…oh, she fucking didn’t.

“Ipomoea,” Synnove said slowly, and pointed to a flourish currently floating near Galette’s ear, “are you able to explain what this is?”

[Certainly! That is a hedera.]

Seven fucking hells, she did.

“Vatete put PAGE BLOCKS in your fucking physical array?!”

[That is correct.]

Synnove bit down hard on her lower lip, but that merely turned the shriek she wanted to indulge in into something closer to a whistling teakettle. Galette rubbed her head against her cheek in commiseration.

“Ipomoea, are you able to locate each hedera in your array?”

[I am.]

“Please light them up for me.”

She did.

“…I fucking hate Vatete Vate.”

[You are not the first.] Ipomoea’s harmonic, for once, forewent polite neutrality in favor of wry, dare Synnove think it, agreement.

“How the fucking fuck do you put a page block into an equation, Twelve fucking help me.” Synnove rubbed her temples and sighed heavily. “All right, sweetness, let’s see if I can’t find your bloody personality matrix somewhere in this mess.”

[…What is a personality matrix?]

Galette made a noise, and it was angry.

Synnove felt similar. “I am going to find how to murder a woman three thousand years dead, I swear to the fucking Traders. Ipomoea, look for anything related to…”

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