weatheredpileoftomes

[weatheredpileoftomes]

whole damn place is about to blow

Linza, gen-ish, early Heavensward, ~1100 words. Canon-typical violence, xenophobia, etc. Writing my way through msq again—I am absolutely fascinated by the way existing in Linza’s canon changes Ilberd as a character; I have been thinking about very little else for days. Some dialogue has been taken from the level 51 quest “Keeping the Flame Alive”.

——

“Give me the key,” Yugiri snaps, waving poison-green smoke away from her face as she kneels at the magitek field’s controls.

They hadn’t even given Raubahn a change of clothing, not in months. The rags he wears are still covered in his own blood. Linza’s fingertips are numb as she hands the key over; she resettles her grip on her staff and thinks of a strong, clean wind—off the distant ocean, salt-tinged and wild.

It stirs the air a little.

Carbuncle’s tail fans back and forth as Alphinaud mutters over his book. Linza coughs, and coughs again.

“You came,” Raubahn says again, a little stronger this time. He’s looking at her, not Yugiri or Alphinaud.

Linza doesn’t know what to say. Of course I did. I promised Nanamo. I promised Nanamo, and she might not be dead. She stares helplessly back at him, struck almost as silent as if she’d been bespelled again.

He goes into another fit of coughing as he tries to thank her, and then gods-damned Ilberd shows up.

Linza’s very blood is fire and lightning, here in the bowels of a cave turned bloodsands. She burns to turn them on Ilberd, even as the poison still lingers in the air.

“I have us, Linza,” Alphinaud says, and—of course. Of course, he’d been betrayed as surely as Linza was, though differently. These were his men that they’re facing. Who are still wearing the uniforms he designed, as Linza was flung bound and silenced in front of the assembled leadership of the continent wearing Ala Mhigan violet and with the embroidered griffin on her skirts spreading across the floor.

Who swore an oath to Alphinaud and Eorzea, as Ilberd had claimed that killing Nanamo and removing Raubahn and the Scions and Linza herself in one fell swoop, that leaving men like Teledji Adeledji and Lolorito in unhindered control of Ul’dah and all the refugees outside its walls, was for the good of Ala Mhigo.

Linza draws in a gasping breath and puts herself between Ilberd and Raubahn. It’s useless—he might be taller than her even kneeling—but she can’t not do it.

They’re yalms below the open sky, and even if she had the strength in conjury to bring the ceiling down on Ilberd and his jackals it wouldn’t satisfy her. But Alphinaud has them, and so she calls on destruction, on black magic, in Rhalgr’s name, and feels the lightning gather and burst from the shadowed air itself.

She’ll see them all in hell.

Fray will want to know why she didn’t call forth her sword, but the only answer Linza can give is that it’s not right, not now. Steel is all they respect in Ishgard, but this isn’t the Fury’s ground.

You should have killed him, Fray would say. You should have done it for the harm he’s done and called justice.

Fire blooms between Linza’s hands, explodes against the worn stone of the hall. Ilberd is cornered now, sweat dripping down his face and blood spattered across his uniform from Yugiri’s knives. The Braves must have taken a poison ward, but even with that Ilberd is panting for breath, his sword and shield drooping.

Why didn’t you kill him? Fray would ask. Linza can feel the thunder gathered, a storm built within her staff.

“It is over, Ilberd!” Alphinaud shouts. “Lay down your arms and surrender yourself to justice!”

Surrender?

“Justice?!” Ilberd echoes scornfully, as if anything he’s done has served justice either. Linza’s body crackles with unspent lightning, prickling in her fingers, searing as she squeezes her staff to try to ground her rage. Her ears ring with it.

When Ilberd’s voice fades back in he’s speaking to her. “You fight for whoever bloody well tells you to.”

“I fight for Ala Mhigo,” Linza says. She can feel her mouth moving; she can hear the voice whispering, too quiet to be understood. “I always have.”

“Can you not see you’re being used?!” Ilberd demands.

Linza shakes her head. He might say the Scions and the city-states had used her, but that isn’t a surprise. She’d known they were. She’d been using them in return, hoarding scraps of goodwill that had turned into feasts of it, and then he’d come in and thrown that all on the midden.

Two years of smiling, of staying quiet, of being a reliable errand girl, of doing whatever she was asked. Two years of listening as people called the refugees every name they could think of, to her face, not realizing she was one of them too, and not being able to say anything. Her whole life, growing up without ever having seen her homeland.

So what if she hadn’t suffered as long as he had? There wasn’t a price to be paid in blood or tears before someone could do something to free Ala Mhigo. Everyone should want to, whether they’d suffered or no.

“Know this,” he shouts at her. “There is nothing I would not give to take back Ala Mhigo! Nothing!”

Linza gulps air. “Including Ala Mhigans! What good is a country that’s nothing but empty dirt?” The storm is starting to blow away, unspent. She clutches her staff even tighter, as if that could keep its power there in case she changes her mind. “All of us are nothing to you! You’d entrust the refugees in Ul’dah to Lolorito and keep me from getting Alliance support for a war of liberation just so you can be the hero? Hero of what?”

Her head is spinning. She’d burned through too much aether, maybe, with the poison, with sprinting through the twisting halls of Halitali, with the choking cold of Coerthas before that.

“Pampered brat,” Ilberd spits. “You with your private meetings with the sultana of bloody Ul’dah, the praise you’ve gotten from the Flame General.” The look he flicks at Raubahn is venomous. Linza takes a step closer to Raubahn, drawing the shapes of Manaward in her mind. “This isn’t your struggle. You’ll never understand it.”

Before Linza can protest, he and his men vanish in a puff of smoke, like one of Yugiri’s shinobi tricks.

Raubahn groans, and she turns and drops to her knees beside him. He’s filthy, with new pain-carved lines on his face, but he’s alive. She did that much for Nanamo, at least.

She did that much, at least.

Even when she reaches for her staff again, settling into the healing flow of conjury, the electric fizzing under her skin doesn’t ease.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

my sign is "stop"

For FFXIVWrite Day 19, “weal”. Majha, early Heavensward, implied spoilers through the end of ARR patches, ~350 words. A couple of lines of dialogue from the jobquest “What’s Your Sign?”

Another course of study.

“I’ve heard about astrology,” Majha says. She doesn’t want to run an errand to the Athenaeum Astrologicum. She wants to go and bother someone important until he lets Ta Tribe into Ishgard too, but Haurchefant has told her not to. It will only make it worse, he said.

She wouldn’t have listened to It won’t help, but she’s not doing anything to make it even harder. Errands, though? Errands, again?

“They practice a different sort of astrology there,” Artoirel says dismissively. “Not a practical sort, but something to do with conjury and playing cards.”

Conjury and playing cards? Against her will Majha is interested.

She pulls her cloak tighter around her as she walks through the frosty streets. Ishgard is bone-cold, death-cold, nothing like the crisp snap of the mountain winters where she grew up. It’s not natural. She finds herself wondering as she walks what it would take to unsnarl the aether of the whole place, not just a little at a time—how to let the ice go, and stir tree and plant to wakefulness again.

The message is quickly delivered. She lingers, though, looking around the astrologicum. There are tables spread with star charts, and strange globes. They seem almost familiar somehow, though Majha can’t think why, and she draws closer to one of the tables to take a look.

The feeling fades as fast as it rose, but someone has noticed her. “You!”

Majha doesn’t bother looking around first. She turns, politely, not grabbing her cane as she does. She has a letter from Count Fortemps in the purse at her belt.

“Have you an interest in studying astrology?”

“Maybe,” Majha says cautiously. She’s definitely curious about what this might have to do with conjury, when it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the world around them.

“Perhaps you were drawn by fate to this place of learning!” the man who’d spoken said. He’s not dressed like a noble, but he acts like one. “Do you wish to know more of fate?”

She believes in fate. She doesn’t like it, and isn’t willing to be drawn around by it, but she believes in it nevertheless.

She glances over at the star charts again, the wire globe one of the people here is tinkering with, but that elusive sense of familiarity doesn’t return. Still…it wouldn’t hurt, to learn fate better, that she can defy it better when she needs to. “All right,” she says.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

a sequence of calamities

For FFXIVWrite Day 18, “a fish out of water”. Temimi, early A Realm Reborn, spoilers for Tonberry lore (and warnings for Tonberry lore), ~700 words. A little canon-divergent in places.

It’s been…some time.

The lesser moon is gone. In the night sky Menphina wanders alone, her hound lost.

Temimi travels by day, and keeps the curtains drawn at night.

*

People have a tendency of explaining things to Temimi as if she doesn’t know them; she ought to be offended, maybe, except…she doesn’t.

A ferryman tells her about the Sahagin, and about Admiral Merlwyb Bloefhiswyn, and about something called the Thalassocracy that runs Limsa Lominsa. Temimi, clutching her stolen robe tighter around her with her mittened hands, nods with interest.

There are twins on the ferry with her, bored to sleep by the ferryman’s ramblings. Temimi makes careful mental notes instead. She would be expected to know about the Admiral, most likely. She would certainly be expected to know about the Sahagin.

“Thank you,” she says, when they reach the docks of Limsa Lominsa safely, after all.

“Hey,” he says. “If you don’t mind, where are you from? I’ve never heard an accent quite like yours, and I’ve ferried an awful lot of travelers.”

Temimi swallows. Her mouth is dry, but she can’t lick her lips to moisten them before she speaks; she has none to lick. “Nowhere I’m going back to,” she says.

He nods, and asks no more questions. She would go back, if she could. But it does all right as a deflection.

*

Baderon Tenfingers, the man who runs the Adventurers’ Guild, doesn’t just tell Temimi how to find the markets; he sends her to people who will make sure she understands what a fair price is, and where to look for one. It might be a courtesy for any newcomer.

Temimi has never seen the funny little coins they call gil before. It’s a relief when she sees people trading Allagan-stamped metals for larger purchases—that much, at least, hasn’t changed.

She wonders if the Allagans really stamped that many metal pieces, that they can still be used even now, or if people have made more since then. The value of a coin is what people give it; the value of a robe, or a meal, is certain. And the Allagans were ancient even in her time.

*

She meets a cheerful and bespectacled man in a library—a little shorter than her, she thinks, though maybe not shorter than she was before. She thinks she grew.

“Oh, hello!” he says. “Are you interested in Ancient Nym too?”

I was born in Nym, Temimi doesn’t say. I am ancient.

“How old is it?” she asks.

“The Sixth Umbral Calamity happened one thousand, four hundred twenty-three years ago,” he says. It isn’t casually; he’s proud of his knowledge.

That’s…so many years. So many. Temimi wants to ask— “And how long,” she asks carefully instead, “how long was the Fifth Astral Era?”

Her fellow student’s eyes and lips work as he calculates silently. “Fifteen hundred…seventy-seven years, roughly.”

“Ah,” Temimi says, or hopes she says. People she knew who were not stricken by the Green Death died in the Sixth Umbral Calamity, then. She wants to ask what it was, and doesn’t dare.

*

“There was a Calamity five years ago,” Baderon tells her. Temimi can see a few of the other people around shaking their heads impatiently. Someone scoffs. She looks up at Baderon with polite interest, not that he can see her expression behind her veil—not that he could read her expression even if he could see it—and waits for him to continue.

He tells her about a Garlean invasion—she has no idea who the Garleans are, but gets the impression they fancy themselves a new Allag, and resolves to act accordingly—and a battle at a place called Carteneau. Dalamud was no moon, but a cage for a primal, unleashed upon the world.

She nods, storing all this away too.

There were heroes to save much of the world. She wonders if there were heroes in the Sixth Umbral Calamity as well, if aught of Nym, or Amdapor, or even Mhach survived, and doesn’t ask. A simple adventurer wouldn’t care, and that’s all she is now—an odd-jobber, a willing hand, a last resort. That Baderon keeps finding her work to do means things are worse than they should be.

Well, she’ll do what she can. What else could she do?

[weatheredpileoftomes]

a blunt form of change

For FFXIVWrite Day 17, a free day. I had nothing lingering from this week’s prompts and Merriam-Webster offered me a word of the day from a specific Earth religion that is not mine, so I put iTunes on shuffle instead. Frydlona, post-3.3, minor Ishgardian Restoration spoilers, ~500 words.

When all you have is a gun, everything looks like a Diadem sprite. Or a yak. Or…

“Ah, Frydlona!” Stephanivien de Haillenarte exclaims as she walks into the Manufactory. “Just the person I was hoping to see.”

Frydlona blinks, trying to accustom her eyes to the shade. “Is it something to do with the Restoration?”

He starts rummaging through boxes, muttering to himself. A little louder, he adds, “Only tangentially. Tell me, you’ve had no issues with the mechanism of the aetheromatic auger, have you?”

“No…” Frydlona looks around as if someone, somewhere is going to explain this to her. A blonde Hyuran woman in plain clothes shrugs when Frydlona catches her eye.

“And the aetheromatic clipper?” Stephanivien asks the depths of the drawer. “I know the yaks have been safely unharmed, but is the device itself natural to use?”

Frydlona hadn’t expected to laugh today, but she has to bite her lip against the urge. “Well, some people might say that using handheld clippers is a more natural way to shear an animal than using a…shoulder-mounted cannon?”

“’Tis much more efficient.” Stephanivien straightens up, beaming, holding a gun of some kind. It’s shorter than a gunblade, longer than one of Merlwyb’s pistols. Frydlona doesn’t know much about guns, as a rule. “Now, I know you to be familiar with my work, and Francel says you’ve been very supportive of his work in the Firmament, and…did I hear someone call you an archer?”

“Ah.” She hesitates. There are a lot of answers she could give, and she suspects Stephanivien de Haillenarte might even understand some of them, but… But she doesn’t want to. “I’ve trained as one, yes. I’m using war quoits now.”

“Fascinating,” Stephanivien murmurs, taking out a device of some kind and scrutinizing her through a lens of it, as if she’s a jewelry project he’s working on. “But you have good aim.”

Frydlona is not sure where this is going, nor that she entirely wants to find out. “Yes…?”

He hands her the gun and a glowing box that seems made mostly of tubes and wires. “Would you mind testing this for me?”

“What does it do?” It looks…normal, as far as Frydlona can tell, apart from the glowing box.

“Well.” Stephanivien actually looks a little uncomfortable. “It’s a gun.”

She hadn’t thought weapons were his style, somehow. “A…gun? Like with bullets?”

“Do you know how much it costs to become a knight?” he asks, gesturing broadly. “’Tis a fortune, even for those knights who fight on foot. The armor, the swords, the training, the patronage… Ishgard’s army is made of the wealthy, and the poor are defenseless.”

Frydlona looks down at the gun again, and thinks of Francel’s patient rebuilding, and Laniatte’s even-handed diligence. “I see. All right, I can try it.”

“Excellent!” Stephanivien beams, and the Hyuran woman watching them lights up as well. “Then come back, and I shall introduce you to Joye, and we can discuss plans.”

Frydlona had come to the Skysteel Manufactory to ask Biggs and Wedge if they needed her to bring anything to Jessie back in Revenant’s Toll. She is not quite sure what just happened. Still, Stephanivien makes more than a few good points.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

sing for your supper

For FFXIVWrite Day 16, “jerk”. Linza, shortly pre-A Realm Reborn, ~650 words. Discussion of hunting for food.

Someone has to do the work.

The last few strips of jerked marmot are in the stewpot. Linza checks the sky—a few clouds, probably not enough to be cooling but still something she can tell herself will be cooling—and says, “Anzo, it’s your turn to get dinner.”

“In a minute.” Anzo’s voice is dreamy, which means he’s probably composing again. When Linza turns around he’s staring up through the thin branches of the trees. “Do you think I could rhyme—”

“Can you rhyme while you walk?”

Anzo sighs heavily and gets to his feet. “I suppose I could. Do you happen to remember where I put my bağlama?”

It’s only her brother, not even their parents let alone a stranger, so Linza lets her tail flick from side to side in irritation. “Were you planning to club a marmot with it? Or maybe a dodo? Oh! You could rip the strings off and slice up a cactuar with them!”

“I had it this morning…oh! If I rhyme pretty and pity I think that adds a depth, don’t you?” He hums a few notes, then takes the ney out of its case on his belt and plays them. It doesn’t satisfy him; he does it again, with the last few going up instead of down.

Linza walks into the family tent, picks up Anzo’s bow, walks back out, and drops it in his lap.

He lowers the ney and looks up at her. “You could have damaged it.”

“It would have given you an excuse,” she says through her teeth, “to not use it.”

“You don’t have to be like that.” Anzo sounds wounded as he gets to his feet. “I was just trying to get this verse right, except then I realized I’d have to rewrite the chorus—did you find my bağlama while you were in there?”

They’ve all been talking about someone going to Ul’dah to try to make a change—most likely one of the Tabito or Naeuri children since they might easily be travelers from Othard or Thavnair, able to get a foot in where someone more obviously Ala Mhigan would not. Linza doesn’t know why they even considered Anzo as a possibility, when he’d just wander into the first tavern that had a good minstrel performing for the crowd and stay there until he found out if they have theatre in Ul’dah.

He’s always been like this. She shouldn’t let it bother her.

“I did not look for your bağlama,” she says. “Come on, I’ll go with you and help with your harmonies if you’ll just actually do your work yourself.”

“Really?” Anzo beams. “All right, so the first line goes ‘da da da, da-da da da,’ and then you repeat it a half-octave higher—do you think that’s too much?”

Linza hums it for him, considering. She’s not the composer, or the poet; she has a good voice and she’s not awful with the bağlama, though it’s a little big for her hands, but he’s asked her to help him with music often enough.

He’d have a better chance of making his fortune in the big city than she would, after all, when she isn’t sure she has the temperament to sing for an Ul’dahn crowd. The problem is that he wouldn’t remember what to do with it. He’s older, and people take him more seriously until they’ve spoken to him, but… But then they speak to him.

“Third line is different, right?” she asks.

He gives it to her, and makes her run them all through twice, and then starts in on the melody and the lyrics himself. It works, Linza thinks. She’d had things to do this morning, but this works too.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

not in our stars but in ourselves

For FFXIVWrite Day 15, “portentous”. Frydlona & Urianger, post-Endwalker, spoilers through 6.0, ~1200 words.

An olive branch.

The Chatelforts’ inn is a small one, half-swallowed by the overhanging greenery of the Black Shroud. They’re not too far from the border to Thanalan, but you’d never know it from the thickness of the woods here. The inn itself is well-kept for all its small size, the walls in good repair and the tables and floors clean.

“I’m looking for one of your guests,” Frydlona says to the Elezen at the bar.

“I’ve only got the two, and they came here together,” he says. “This time of day they’re out walking around looking for trouble.”

She pushes a handful of gil across the counter. “I’ll wait. House special in the meantime, please.”

The house special turns out to be a stew made mostly of beans, with a few chunks of sausage here and there. It’s not too bad, and it’s hearty and filling. She takes sweet cider instead of hard, and regrets it a little; this far past the peak of autumn there’s a sad thinness to the flavor. Say what you will about Ishgardian cooking, they at least disguise the age of the fruits they can get well.

She’s not keeping the innkeep—Isarmoix, he introduces himself as—from getting other custom, at least, so she doesn’t need to feel bad about taking up a table, even once she’s finished her stew and cider and doesn’t particularly feel like ordering another drink.

“Quiet out here,” she says, looking through her bag for something she can work on that won’t leave wood shavings all over the floor, or risk a bead or a bit of wire getting away. She didn’t bring any knitting with her, which would have been the easiest, but she settles on a pair of gloves to mend.

Isarmoix, scrubbing down the bar, nods. “I wanted to be a minstrel, but that didn’t work out, and when it kept not working out my sister and her wife took me in instead. Sami travels a lot, so it was just Ondine here by herself half the time.”

Frydlona thinks about asking Isarmoix about his verse, or to sing something, and thinks again. Odds are there’s no good advice she can give, especially not with the verse, so who would it help, in the end?

He hums a little while he cleans, tunefully enough. After a bit rain starts drumming on the roof, and not long after that a woman who must be Ondine, pale as her brother and with the same twilight hair, darts in. She must have left a cloak on the porch, because her boots are wet and muddy but her clothes and even her hair are mostly dry. “Got in out of the rain, I see,” she says to Frydlona with a nod that vaguely suggests a bow. “It’ll probably keep going until nightfall.”

“If you have a second room…” Frydlona says. “I’m waiting for friends, your other guests, but I can stay.” She could teleport out, but there’s no need if there’s a bed here. She can certainly afford the fee, and she’d like to pay it. She doesn’t know if Ondine was hunting or trapping or gathering, but she came back empty-handed either way.

Though—that’s bark and bits of wood Ondine is brushing off her tunic. If she’d been breaking up fallen trees, she wouldn’t have brought lumber in with her.

“We do,” Isarmoix says. He looks Frydlona over, and so does Ondine. She can see them both considering her clothes, her jewelry, the spray of flowers from another world in her hair.

“I’ve stayed in much worse places,” she promises them, and shivers.

Thancred and Urianger get in just then, both streaming water and trailing puddles across the floor. Urianger is, at least, not wearing his usual gear, and is in a heavier robe that won’t have left him quite as cold on the way back in.

“Wretched weather—” Thancred starts, and then jolts. “Frydlona?”

She puts away her mending. “Tataru got Urianger’s latest letter and…I don’t know. I was feeling restless, I guess.

“It bringeth me great joy to see thee,” Urianger says carefully. “Many are the days that have passed since last thou sought my company.”

The Chatelforts are watching with great interest, but when she notices Frydlona noticing her Ondine leaves through the back door into the rest of the inn. Isarmoix, humming a little louder, starts scrubbing down one of the tables.

“I know,” Frydlona says.

It’s been hard, since that Echo vision after she came back down from Mt. Gulg, drowning in light. She could have forgiven almost any of the others for conspiring with Raha, since they wouldn’t have known any better. Y’shtola, say, except she struggles to imagine Y’shtola lying, even when it really would be kinder. Urianger, though…he’d known.

He’d known, and he’d apologized, and he’d worked to change. In the swirling darkness at the end of the universe itself, beneath a dead star, he’d thought about lying again, and hadn’t; he’d given her the burden of his sacrifice, as he’d once carried the burden of Raha’s.

“I wanted to thank you,” she says. “Again. And then…I don’t know. I thought maybe we could just spend some time together?”

Urianger brightens. “Aye, that would be most pleasant. Hast thou aught in mind?”

“Card games,” Thancred warns Frydlona, “are out. I don’t know how he does it, but you get even a normal playing deck anywhere near him these days…”

“It is but the decree of the fates,” Urianger says serenely.

Frydlona considers it. Urianger does love to explain magical theory, and she likes learning things. “I’ve been wondering how that works, actually. It works like white magic, except when it doesn’t, right?”

He nods, clearly delighted. “Envision, if thou wilt, the cosmos stretched out before thee…”

“And that’s my cue,” Thancred says. “Isarmoix, a cider, please.” He pays for it, then settles down at the next table to clean and dry his gunblade.

Urianger keeps explaining: the vast sea of stars above; the influences of the constellations; the possibility of grasping just a bit of fate and twisting it, for a momentary gift of strength. She’s heard stories of his time in Eorzea before the Calamity, disguised as a prophet, and she thinks it must have suited him tremendously, or maybe it’s that time that lets him do this now.

“Thou drawest power from these sublunary elements,” Urianger says. “They are bountiful, and that bounty enableth thee to work with great strength, while I am accustomed to seeking further. Thou workest with earth and wind, I with celestial fire, but we both strive to the utmost of our abilities to heal and protect our boon companions.”

“Do you think you could teach me?” Frydlona asks. “Just a little, I don’t think I’d ever want to rely on it when it mattered, but…it sounds nice, when you talk about it. I’d like to learn from you, if you wanted.”

She sees Urianger struck speechless again, then. He swallows, and just nods.

Outside the rain continues to hammer down. A draft sneaks beneath the door, and Frydlona draws her chair a little closer to the fire. She doesn’t have anywhere else she has to be right now, and she’ll take that gladly.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

some kind of occupation

For FFXIVWrite Day 14, “clear”. Grishild, just about five years pre-A Realm Reborn, ~400 words.

A fisher’s life.

Sunlight glitters sharply off the water, shifting and rolling. Grishild, staring far out to sea, lets it dazzle her eyes.

“Well, well!” cries a voice from behind her.

She jumps and whirls, heart racing, hand going for a sword she’ll never carry again. It’s just a Lalafell in a funny hat, stuck full of feathers and strange ovals. He’s carrying a fishing pole.

Not a threat. Not, she reminds herself, her problem.

“A woebegone woman, wasting away at the pier on such a picturesquely perfect day as this? Granted, the fish find foes more easily when the sheltering skies are clear and cloudless, and the weather clement, but with the best bait some can still be brought to bite!”

He looks expectantly up at her. Grishild, desert-born, stares blankly back down. She’d chosen to go to Limsa with her severance pay because…she doesn’t know why. She’d liked the thought of sailing somewhere, of ending up in a place very different from Ul’dah. She’s asked for work at three taverns so far today and nothing yet, and she’s so bloody tired, and the deep pulse of the sea is soothing. She doesn’t know much of anything about fishing.

“A pile of pedestrian paperwork waits for me,” the Lalafell confides, “but I’ve cleverly contrived my escape, eager to engage with a fish or find myself a lonesome lass lingering with a light in her eyes—and instead what have we here? I called the skies cloudless, but clearly, your gloom could grow—”

The man could talk both legs off a chocobo. “I’m sorry if I’m in your way,” Grishild says.

“Never! Nonsense! Now, since you’re here, might you want to learn the ancient and amusing art of angling? A perfect pursuit, pleasing to the senses, the spirit, and eventually the stomach alike!”

“I…suppose?” It couldn’t hurt, and it would give her something to do. Fresh-caught fish no doubt taste better than any others, and…she likes the ocean. It’s been the best part of Limsa Lominsa so far. She wouldn’t mind having a reason to sit by it, something to do instead of just staring. She could catch a fish, and have accomplished that. “If you’re hoping I’ll be your lonesome lass, though, I…”

He’s shaking his head. “A congenial companion is a better catch.”

Well, he’s not wrong. “All right,” Grishild says. “Explain fishing to me.”

[weatheredpileoftomes]

passed pawn

For FFXIVWrite Day 13, “check”. Helenne, end of A Realm Reborn patches, major spoilers for 2.55, ~550 words. Warnings for, in fact, 2.55.

A very sound tactical mind has planned all this.

Helenne learned to play chess as part of her education, as a pursuit befitting a noble; she excelled at it, because she has what her colleagues in the arcanists’ guild assure her is an uncommon grasp of mathematics. She is familiar with arranging pieces to trap, and eventually to capture.

She had even considered how those pieces might feel, if they were real queens and knights, bishops and castellans, foot soldiers dragged into a grand war to defend a feeble king. She’d liked to consider them as people, and the stories they might live. The gambits, the captures, the valiant defenses, the battles of attrition; the final victory as the king, tipped over, rolls across the board and into stillness.

Nanamo’s crown had chimed, faintly, as it hit the tile. Raubahn’s armor had hit the ground with a clash.

They never say what happens to the pawns left after the endgame. Helenne had never considered it, but now she knows herself pursued. She’d been promoted, maybe; she’d found herself a knight, or even a queen, but with her side defeated all she can do is inch forward again…

“Helenne!” Thancred snaps. His fingers bite into her shoulders.

Helenne blinks, and focuses on his face.

“Come on.”

They run. Helenne doesn’t think about board games of strategy, just about the torchlit stone of the hallways—gilded bright, but with deep shadows—and the thick pile of the carpeting—soft enough to muffle footsteps. She glances back at Papalymo once, but he’s keeping up as well as the rest of them, though he’s older and shorter and inclined to leave the vigorous activity to Yda.

She wishes she’d worn something other than white. She’s covered in Raubahn’s blood, a crimson spray as loud as a shout that will make it impossible to pretend she’s some other Elezen just passing through the city.

“Wait,” she blurts suddenly. “I need to—”

Yda is bouncing on her toes with impatience, but they do wait, just long enough for Helenne to trace a familiar circle on the back of her hand and re-summon Larkspur.

She does come. One of her wings is a little askew, and she glares up at Helenne with her arms crossed, but she comes, alive and well, when she’s called. Helenne holds out a hand in overwhelming relief and Larkspur ignores it, but deigns to perch on her shoulder instead, half-tucked behind her hair.

She’d saved Raubahn’s life, and Ilberd had known it. Helenne had felt her aether dissipate as he grabbed her; she hadn’t known whether Larkspur had un-summoned herself, or been killed, or whether if she was killed it would be permanent.

“Shall we?” Y’shtola asks. There is clear in her voice the implication that the only acceptable answer is yes; fortunately, it’s the one Helenne already wanted to give.

They run, defending and defenseless, and the chessboard comes back to Helenne again. She has sacrificed pieces, and she knows the wisdom of it, but leaving Papalymo and Yda feels wrong, even if it might be wise. Leaving Y’shtola and Thancred feels worse.

When Minfilia says she needs to stay, Helenne trusts her, but then she’s alone again under the bitter stars, and this time—unlike last time—she knows enough to be lonely.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

the essence of style

For FFXIVWrite Day 12, “dowdy”. Helenne, early/mid-A Realm Reborn, ~550 words. The thing about summoner gear is from Encyclopedia Eorzea II; I love lore.

There’s a lot to be said for arcane geometries.

“I hope you don’t consider it impertinent,” Y’mhitra begins.

This is either a promising or a distinctly un-promising start to a conversation, in Helenne’s experience. She gives Y’mhitra a look of polite interest.

“Was that the sort of outfit you were wearing when you defeated Ifrit?”

What an absolutely baffling question. Still. “It was,” Helenne says with caution. Y’shtola values practicality highly, never mind that Helenne is perfectly capable of imbuing clothing with arcane protections, and has in fact done so; and never mind that wearing longer sleeves or longer skirts would do no good to protect her from magickal fire, whether from a primal or a Garlean thaumaturge, any more than it would protect her from arrow or sword or spear.

Y’mhitra nods, though. “Excellent. You may have noticed that other mages have a preference for heavy robes.”

Helenne has noticed, without delight. Some of the robes have a certain charm, like Mistress Thubyrgeim’s overgown, but none of them are the sort of thing Helenne particularly desires to wear herself: for one thing, she could have worn them any time under her parents’ watchful eyes; for another, it is far too warm in La Noscea, or Thanalan, or even here in the Black Shroud, for anyone accustomed to the biting cold of Coerthas to wear that much cloth. Helenne has gone for walks in snowstorms in the sort of clothing that people around here seem to find suitable for a sunny day at the markets.

“It is practical, as a rule,” Y’mhitra says. Helenne nods, resigned. “However, our research indicates that summoners, in particular, found the opposite to be true—that the fewer barriers between the summoner’s skin and the defeated primal’s essence, the more easily that essence may be absorbed.”

“Fascinating.” Helenne holds her arm out in front of her and considers it, front and back. It looks the same as ever, to her—perhaps a little more brown, with the sun, but in the end perhaps not. It doesn’t look as if she has absorbed Ifrit’s essence, though she has no idea what that would look like. Glowing cracks in her skin? Unsettling. A fiery glow, perhaps, like the shifting blue-orange of the Bowl of Embers itself.

She runs a finger along where she knows the veins lie, imagining fire and magma running through them. What is a primal’s essence, anyway? Would it have soaked into her in one of Ifrit’s bellowing bursts of flame, or more slowly, more sadly, with his dying groan?

Y’mhitra says, “There are limitations to many forms of equipment, though the Allagan summoners had particular attire designed most specifically for their purposes, with arcane geometries worked into the fabric and perhaps even painted or tattooed onto their skin.”

“I see,” Helenne says. She considers her arm again. She is a reasonable hand with a paintbrush; she is not sure how she feels about tattoos, which would be impossible to change later if she wanted to. Perhaps a healing magick could restore her skin to its original properties, though, and it might be interesting to try. “Well! I’d feared I would be treated to a lecture on dressing properly for the job, not offered the opportunity to consider how my own aether can best interact with that of the world around me.”

“You have found the right place, I think,” Y’mhitra says with a smile. “And in the interests of securing it, allow me to explain the Austerities of Flame…”

[weatheredpileoftomes]

locked tight

For FFXIVWrite Day 11, “once bitten, twice shy”. Majha/Ysayle and past Majha/OFC, mid-Heavensward, spoilers through lv…55? msq, ~550 words. I knew this was Majha the minute I saw the prompt but I didn’t figure out how to cram it into an FFXIVwrite until the small hours of the morning.

Majha has been here before.

When Majha got her heart broken, she was seventeen and trusting.

The girls were encouraged to pair off—or group up—among themselves, the same as the tias were, to remove temptation. Majha had thought she was more than just available and not Payan’s sister. She’d thought they were courting, that it mattered to Payan the same way it mattered to her. She’d thought that she ended up suggesting more ways to spend time together than Payan did because…

She doesn’t know why she’d thought it. She hadn’t considered it all then, and even now she’s never been able to puzzle it out.

Payan had told her eventually that she was being too strange about something that was only a convenience in the end, and Majha—Majha had taken it, because she’d had to, because she had no choice.

Because in the end it’s impossible to make anyone feel anything. She wouldn’t have even if she could, she just wishes she hadn’t even wanted to. No more, she’d decided. No more letting herself fall for anyone who made her no promises, for anyone who didn’t want her.

No more, she reminds herself now, watching firelight reflect blush-pink across Ysayle’s face and hair.

It’s been a long, strange trip.

The Churning Mists are bitter cold, enough that even Majha—used to the high woods near the Gyr Abanian border—and Alphinaud mind it. Ysayle and Estinien seem less bothered, but they would, especially in front of each other. Majha can’t imagine one of them being the first to admit something that they’d see as weakness and she’d consider simply having a body made of flesh and blood like any other, here in lands never meant for the Spoken, or indeed anyone not made of magic or covered in fur.

Furless mortals as they are, they’ve had to sleep curled up together, to hoard warmth. They’ve had nothing to do as they scrambled across broken roads and over rocks never meant for foot travel but talk to each other.

Majha had had to do something about having to work with Iceheart, is the thing. Iceheart, who’d taken the supplies meant for Revenant’s Toll, who’d seen Majha’s chosen people as mere obstacles. She’d had to do something, and so she had considered Ysayle’s good qualities, and then kept finding more of them.

And she is beautiful, and Majha had saved her life once in the burrows of the Gnath—had fought for it, fiercely, defying Thal himself to tear Ysayle away before Majha relinquished her, which she would not—and then Ysayle had given it to her in trust on the way up Sohm Al.

And Ysayle would follow Shiva, and marry Hraesvelgr. Ysayle has never even considered anything else. She has spoken of it, often, these last few days and nights.

She considers what they’re doing an honor and an opportunity, the final chance to complete her legacy. Majha could argue—surely the legacy Shiva left would be satisfied with peace and friendship between man and dragon, if nothing else—but why argue? If Ysayle won’t choose her, freely and without persuasion, then firelight or no what’s it worth in the end?

She looks away from the fire and into the night, and it takes a long time for the dazzle of her eyes to fade.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

the wanderer's chosen

Written as a makeup entry for FFXIVWrite Day 2, “bark”. Temimi, just pre-ARR, Tonberry lore spoilers only, ~350 words. Mention of canon-typical violence.

The world has changed.

When Temimi had last seen the Wanderer’s Palace, it had been dry and shining. Sunlight fell smooth on pale, clean stone, surrounded by gardens only false-wild: tame enough to meander through.

When she last remembers seeing it, anyway.

She can’t stay here any more. She has no skills in healing or any other magicks. While her fellow tonberries are no threat to her, she can’t bear this familiar place with its unfamiliar inhabitants, its moss-slick walls and algae-fouled floors, its rusted mechanisms and its silence. Its skeletons in the corners.

She had walked here, once. Now she stands at the gateway to the Palace and looks out at shining water, wind-ruffled. It would take a bark to get them all back, if there is ever a chance for them to leave, and as it stands there isn’t even the smallest of rowboats. Weeks later, Temimi still can’t figure out why she has been restored to herself. Why none of the people around her heard the voice echoing inside her head, or saw the shining crystal or the dark figure.

Why she remembers seeing herself, not in any kind of uniform she’d ever known, holding a knife that glowed with impossible radiance. She doesn’t know how her knife can be used for something so bright, instead of silent stabbings in the dark.

There is no boat.

Temimi flexes her tail carefully. She might be able to swim with it. It might be possible, if she tries; if she plans, carefully, going from isle to outcropping, to the top of a shattered pillar. It won’t be easy, but it will get her out of here.

She takes a deep breath and wades in.

If she can be restored, she tells herself, dragging herself over ilm after ilm of chill water, then the others can be restored. If she can be restored, she can learn who she’s lost, and who she hasn’t.

If she can be restored, it must be for a reason.

Moonlight makes a path on the lake, and Temimi swims on.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

the light in the abyss

For FFXIVWrite Day 10, a free day. Frydlona & Sidurgu & Rielle + Frydlona/[ShB spoilers], post-Shadowbringers, spoilers through 5.3, ~700 words. I glanced off of Frydlona’s job change in Day 6’s fic and meant to come back to it later, and now it’s later!

There are as many ways to protect the people you love as there are ways to love.

“The problem is,” Frydlona says, tracing her finger over a scratch on the table. “The problem is, he’d die for me.”

Rielle nods.

“Not just to save my life.” She’s…she wouldn’t say she’s used to it, or that she accepts it, but she acknowledges that sometimes, it’s tactically necessary to keep her alive. It doesn’t make her comfortable. She wishes it weren’t true. “Or—I mean, yes, to save my life, but…”

“But what?” Sidurgu asks, frowning.

Frydlona stares into the depths of her mug of cider. It’s dark in this corner; the reflection of her face is barely even a pale blur. “He would… You know how we had to learn that it wasn’t about what you could endure alone, and just because you could didn’t mean you had to, if someone else were willing to help?”

“We,” Rielle mutters, with the exasperation of someone who has all her combat training in conjury.

Sidurgu nods a little guiltily.

“He’s still learning that. We both are, I guess.” Frydlona sips at her cider. It’s gone cold while they talked, but the cinnamon and ginger still warm her almost right through. Nothing ever really does, in Ishgard, hot or spiced or both or neither. “But I don’t… I’ve learned a lot of things, to try to protect people. I’ve learned the dark knight’s arts, and how to heal. I’ve learned how to…”

“To?” Sidurgu prompts, after a moment.

“To kill more efficiently.” She’d left Cliffhide to see the world, and so much of what she’s seen has been red with blood and black with soot. “Because sometimes that’s what you need, to just end it.”

He nods again.

“And I can’t do any of it alone. None of us can. But you know how it is, when you’re the first line of defense. You can wear much more substantial protective magicks without the aetheric resonances warping your abilities, and you can wear as much armor as you’d like besides, but you still get hurt.”

“You do,” Rielle says grimly. “All the time, blood everywhere, trying to hide cracked ribs sometimes—”

Frydlona cuts in quickly. “I don’t think I trust him to watch me get hurt, on purpose. To let that happen. I don’t know if I could protect him that way, or if he’d do something reckless because he couldn’t bear seeing it.”

She isn’t sure what else to say. To ask whether it’s a betrayal of Fray—the real Fray—’s legacy, when he left her a part of his soul? To ask whether she’s right at all, or whether it’s just cowardice in disguise?

“So don’t.” Sidurgu shrugs and finishes his own cider. “That’s never been what this is about. You took up the sword to defend the weak and disturb the powerful, but you didn’t graft it to your hands. If you don’t feel right using it, you shouldn’t. If you think it would hurt someone you love, that’s not protecting them.”

“Fray’s the one who taught me conjury,” Rielle says, a gentle reminder that still pierces like a needle. “He and Sidurgu kept me safe, and now I keep Sidurgu alive.”

Frydlona goes back to tracing the scar in the tabletop. “I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve studied white magic, been using it for years…” It would be good, she thinks—reassuring—to have all that overwhelming power at her fingertips, ready for the next time G’raha feels the need to put himself between her and a threat. She doesn’t think she could stop him. Besides, she wants him safe, but she doesn’t want to change him, and she’s not sure how else to reconcile the two.

“You’ve never relied on the sword.” There’s just a suggestion of a smile around Sidurgu’s eyes, bright in the gloom. “We never said you were doing anything wrong when you slayed gods with a charming little dance—”

“Stop,” Frydlona says, but she’s laughing, as he meant her to.

He does. “It’s not any different. It doesn’t mean whatever you think it means, if you won’t rely on it now.”

Frydlona looks from him to Rielle, and nods, and lets it settle in.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

served ice cold

For FFXIVWrite Day 9, “fair”. Sisila, early Heavensward and then early post-Heavensward, spoilers through 3.0 and for dark knight quests through 50, ~400 words. Canonical character death, references to torture, grief, godtier bad coping mechanisms, implied murder.

It isn’t fair.

“What do you mean Lord Drillemont tortures people?” Sisila demands.

The fire snaps. It’s a warm spot in these horrible, cold, grey, miserable halls, and she’s grateful for it, but—Lord Drillemont is a knight. She doesn’t—he can’t just—

Haurchefant sighs. “Unfortunately, he is…not a good man.”

That’s an understatement.

“And he surrounds himself with many of the same, I fear.”

But…torture. Torture. That’s not right, even for enemies of the state—you kill people, you don’t hurt them.

Sisila opens her mouth to protest, then closes it again. She trusts Haurchefant. That’s supposed to be part of what being in love means, isn’t it? And…even if it isn’t, she doesn’t have anything else left. She was supposed to protect Nanamo, she’d sworn oaths, and Nanamo got poisoned while Sisila watched. Raubahn is probably dead too, and Sisila couldn’t even avenge him. If Haurchefant thinks there’s nothing they can do about a lord killing people, if they can’t gather a rescue army and ride in banners flying…

Maybe it isn’t an era for banners.

Haurchefant wipes the tears gently from her face, and Sisila realizes she’s been crying. “We do what we can here,” he says, and she nods.

*

Someone mentions Lord Drillemont on a clear, bright morning near the start of winter, and Sisila suddenly remembers his basement. They said he tortures people to madness, with or without proof of their heresy. And his guards—they do all that for him. They should have stopped him.

“We can stop them now,” Fray says in her ear.

Her voice is low and dark, something that tugs at Sisila’s wounds. “Stop them how?”

Fray shrugs with a clank of plate. “How else? You have the sword.”

She’s right. It isn’t fair that a good man lies dead beneath the snow while so many bad ones are still walking around. It isn’t right that Haurchefant, who always tried to be the best of knights, who gave Sisila something to believe in for months when she had nothing else, was killed, and Lord Drillemont and his men are allowed to ruin others’ lives.

If everyone else is too afraid to stop them, she’ll do it.

“Good,” Fray whispers, and the world goes black with rage.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

outtakes but too pretty to just discard

[weatheredpileoftomes]

by daylight's glare

For FFXIVWrite Day 8, “shed”. Majha, early Shadowbringers, spoilers through level 79 msq, ~700 words. Canon-typical violence. (The phrase never made it in, but I was thinking about “shedding light”.)

The aether of the First is bizarre.

If it isn’t one damn empire, it’s another.

Majha hates going into battle without Ta tribe. She hasn’t had to in years, and just like last time, it’s only political necessity keeping the man whose fault it is in one piece.

Still, at least she isn’t alone. She has Alphinaud and Alisaie, and she has Captain Lyna for as long as Lyna never finds out what happened in Holminster Switch. She and Krile Baldesion must never, ever meet, because Warrior of Light or no Majha would probably not survive that meeting.

Chaanqa, though. Majha wishes all of Ta tribe were here—except that she doesn’t because there’s no safe way for them to be here—but she especially wishes for a defender with the training to take some hits, especially if G’raha “never heard of him and I truly think you’re stupid enough not to recognize me, a normal if very short Hyur” bloody Tia is going to have to stay back to run the city this time.

It’s not like she actually let him die in Holminster, anyway. She’s known paladins before; he could have stopped her.

With a snarl of frustration, Majha turns on the hapless Crystarium guard next to her, then takes a deep breath when he recoils. “Sorry,” she says, with what she hopes looks like a smile.

“We’re almost ready, miss.” His smile back looks just as uncertain as hers.

“Let us go,” Lyna says.

She doesn’t like Majha, and that’s fine. Majha doesn’t resent that, she merely regrets it. Lyna is loyal and competent; Majha understands that, and will do her best to keep Lyna from harm and return her safe to her Exarch.

It’s normal when she raises her cane and weaves a Regen through Lyna. It’s normal when she adds a Medica II to that, rainbows bouncing under the cloudy sky as the regenerative magicks take root in Majha herself as well.

Lyna nods, once, in acknowledgement, and then darts ahead. Her glaives cut into a Eulmoran soldier as easily as they cut through the air itself.

Majha calls the wind, and watches holy light stream forth instead.

It staggers her.

She actually stops dead in the middle of combat, staring from the blue-white sparkles rippling over the soldier’s skin to her own cane, which she’s been using for months. It felt like wind. It erodes like wind, she thinks, but—it isn’t wind. This is no form of Aero she recognizes.

“Excuse me,” Lyna shouts back at her, and Majha jolts and grabs at an aetheric lily, crushing it for energy and sending that energy to Lyna in a burst of healing.

That’s normal, and almost the same color as the holy light—which, for that matter, looks much like Holy, the spell. Regen, again; that’s normal too.

She works her way closer to Lyna and the fighting and tries a Holy. That, too, looks right, a brilliant burst that stuns everyone around them for a moment. Again, and again, with her familiar aether-grown lilies to sustain them, until there are only two guards left standing.

When she calls to the earth, it’s a solid burst of light that smacks into the soldier. Not even a glowing rock, just light made solid.

Or, no—Light made solid.

It hits like Stone, and it feels like she’s calling it from the ground beneath them. It’s not right, but nothing about this cursed place is right. Elemental Light saturates the entire world. It’s not surprising, probably, that with more time spent here it’s creeping into her magicks that call upon the world.

She’ll ask one of the conjurers back at the Crystarium, or Urianger if G’raha can be persuaded to disclose her location—Majha can be very persuasive, she thinks, spinning from the Eulmoran soldier’s crumpling form to hit Lyna with another lily—but it’s fine, probably.

It feels all right, anyway. It should be fine. If something were wrong, she’d feel cut off somehow, and as it is she can feel the pulse of the world just beyond her skin, the same she’s always been meant to.

“Majha!” someone shouts, and she looks up to see the twins running toward her.

Good. Time to get this done.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

welcome innovations

For FFXIVWrite Day 7, “noisome”. Frydlona, mid-ish A Realm Reborn, ~400 words. Offscreen animal deaths in the context of leather-making.

Some of the crafting guilds’ innovations are wonderful.

Some things Frydlona still likes doing the old-fashioned way, even if it’s quicker and easier to use catalysts and the guilds’ new methods. Broth and stew, for instance, just don’t feel the same if they’re heated in a flash with pure elemental fire. Stew is for stormy winter evenings when the rain hammers on the roof and the house inside is warm and safe, fragrant with the day’s cooking.

She doesn’t mind heating metal with fire shards, or smoothing wood with wind, though there’s a real pleasure in hand-sanding carpentry as well. To take something rough enough that it can only be touched gingerly, and work it slowly until it’s smooth as satin…that’s satisfying.

Tanning leather, though.

They didn’t have a tanner in Cliffhide; the closest one was in Horizon’s Glen, on the outskirts of town. Frydlona only hunted for food, but there was no sense wasting the hides, and when she could she brought them to the tanner. Jaegswys didn’t just work alone, she lived alone, on the outskirts of the town half-into the trees. Every time Frydlona had to drop off hides, or pick up leather, she’d been glad the trip was that long; tanning reeks, worse in summer but still ever-present in winter.

Frydlona has no idea how the Leatherworkers’ Guild refined their process, but it’s simple and straightforward, smelling not much worse than the hides themselves. Geva and some of the senior journeymen use chemical baths on more exotic-looking hides—ones that come off the animal striped or spotted, or out of the bath supple as cloth or nearly as stiff as metal—but even then, with earth and wind to help, it’s not that bad.

The baths themselves are different, too—some of the work must still be being done by the catalysts, for it smells more like an alchemist’s workshop than a tanner’s. The wind shards clear the air even as they dry the new leather, and with no more than a rinse it’s done.

No more bringing hides, in late evening so they won’t ripen too much along the way, all the way to another village. No more having to explain if she needs a hide to keep herself just how she wants it to be. Frydlona can just…make leather, at any time, as easy as mending it. That alone would be worth the guild fee, even if she weren’t learning more besides.

[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.