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[ruin-iii]

FFXIV Write 2022 | Quote Compilation

This is a compilation of my favourite quotes from each of my FFXIV Write entries. Enjoy!

Cross

Nothing would grow in this garden since plunged into the Sixth Hell, its aetherial stasis no environment for life to grow within — so why maintain its guard? Stagnation is the zeitgeist of the Ishgardian people. Their backyard is no different.

Bolt

Imogen lets the polearm clatter to the bed and lies beside it, facing away. This eternal bond is hopeless.

Temper

Her entire body stiffens. Her lungs stop in their paces. Her throat is on strike.

Gaudy (Free Day)

Trapped within the bijoux is the last sunset over a La Noscean shore. The deep rouge of the Warden’s blush trickles into the bottlegreen of the ocean. What little light the Lover has captured hits just upon the crest of a wave, and then there is nothing.

Cutting Corners

Each diagram is a work ready to be published, then dissipated into powder and dust.

Onerous

Intercepting her retreat from society, sparse flyclouds pick at the back of her hands and the slope of her chin. Each slap she sends in the way of a biting bug feels like an overplayed joke that ends incessantly in the punchline, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

Pawn

“Good luck,” says the Ruby Princess, succinct and quiet. This is the first time she has ever spoken to him. “Don’t need it,” retorts the One-Eyed Royal gruffly, and she’s reminded of why she never speaks to him.

Tepid

She drops the metre into the water, hardly upsetting its equilibrium — a diver’s technique.

Yawn

Obsidian-clad, she’s an expensively packaged meal. The cowardly creatures seek to intercept her journey when she least expects it, and these are no Ishgardian duels.

Channel

Merewald is scraps of midlander, swaddled together in muddied hempen cloth. Underneath is tousled tawny brown hair, an asymmetrical smattering of freckles, twin pools of desperation, and — he won’t fool him with his beggar’s garb, no — fine boarskin leather underneath, no doubt provided by the Trappers’ League.

“Wendreda,” he whispers painfully. She can hear each syllable stabbing at its heart. She memorizes the colour of his blood.

Miss the Boat

In exchange, I will support your research causes with my expertise in academic research, conduction of interview, minuting, bookkeeping, accounting, shoeshining, ironing, library organisation, desk organisation, interior design, and Far Eastern cuisine. There are no candidates more suitable than myself and my research partner.

Confluence

[T]his is not guileless white noise that fills an empty space — this is cacophony that endeavours for purpose, the bustle a byproduct of the work. Like smoke to a machine.

Attrition

No, Mholi receives Vahri’s regard from the near fulm her ahya has over her, puberty having paved the dirt between them and put up a picket fence not moons ago.

Her left cheek gives way to a thin-lipped, lopsided impression, curved and punctuated with doubt.

Row

"I thought better of you. If the roles were reversed and my research colleagues, Twelve forbid, made slights at you, gossiped amongst themselves when they thought you couldn’t hear it, and did everything short of calling you knife ears — I’d give them a grand tour of the Seven Hells."

Deiform

The pages thereafter lose the pleasantries. It’s rendered in rushed scrawl and chicken scratch, a raw and raucous dash to keep up with her thoughts. This is the Bole, the setting of intentions, before the branches sprawled to one side and wept for the death of its fruit.

Novel

Its very nature is finality, housing the leaves it needs and only that, with no means by which one can append to the volume without packing sparse words into the margins. And that would ruin the elegance of it[.]

Waldhorn (Free day)

Not long after its herald is oft the underwhelming percussion of thwips and thunks. Then after, the cacophony of silence offset by the thundering heartbeat of the forest running for its life.

Turn a Blind Eye

Hammering his five digits and the tip of his tail against the table’s edge. Nervously eyeing the other end of the room as if a predator stalks the entrance.

Anon

Before her, the sky churns clouds as one tosses duvets, each sprawling to their apex as a never before seen shape, then forgotten moments after in a crumpled heap of wisps.

She was oddly polite, and her frigidity was not in her words — it was in her hollow heartbeat, as she put out the candle and said goodnight. Each action was set to a metronome.

Solution

An ear remains lofted in attendance of his fellow arcanist, who assails it with laughter. He supposes ‘assail’ isn’t the right word. There’s a distinct flutter to it that makes it a bubbly, digestible affair…

[E]ach with an eraser and piece of chalk to parry the others’ suggestions aside. But it’s a spar, not a duel — a collaborative effort to better the other.

Veracity

Still, the dim glow loses the territorial war, shadows marching upon the edge of her pages and swallowing ink whole.

Vicissitudes

She bestows aether upon the cards as one would spread butter upon toast. Second nature to the point of sedation, but not laziness. She spreads to the corners because that’s how she’s done it all this time.

Pitch

His manner of speaking and precision for tone was a concoction of powerful charisma that she could never perfect. Each lilt, an implementation of his will made manifest.

Break a Leg

This is enough for his rickety esteem, blown to insecurity by harsh side winds, clinging to sanity via clothesline pegs.

Hail

They’d learned a trick from observing a particularly lazy superior at the Institute: if you leave the quill right in the pot, you practically never have to dip it.

Vainglory

A line! Of Limsa Lominsans no less, who wouldn’t know a line if it kicked them to the back of it.

Her new lance is polished sharp with a healthy appetite for action it’s yet to know.

Fuse

He feels closer to his arcane focus now more than ever before, and all it took was to treat it like the back of a napkin.

Sojourn

Filtering through her faux lids, there is a bright light — the sliver of Thanalan sun through a drawn curtain. It slices through her sleep, carving a warm yellow glow into her cheek and nose and mouth, all of which she can’t move, she can’t feel.

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Sojourn

TW. Suicidal ideation.

The last traveller in line evaporates to dust.

Emerging from the outskirts of the plaza, Signe traces the footsteps of the adventurer that once was. Their terminal is unknown to her. Funny, how travelling via aetheryte can make even a destination a deeply personal thing. Most opt for a hands-off journey, being chauffeured from their beginning to end without a care — without control. 

People often speak of one’s constitution and aptitude in manipulating aether as necessities for aetheryte travel, but neither concerns her. No, it’s the unspoken requisite of setting intent — the reliance on one’s will as the sole compass — that roots her in her place.

Signe’s mind is the source of her power. The Scholar’s blessing and the Spinner’s curse. From her fingertips, trickling streams flow into the well of the crystal, releasing a floodgate of conscious and subconscious thought that merges into a confluence.

The potency of her reason cannot be tamed; no matter how much she wills it to silence, her thoughts prise their maws open with gnashing teeth and desperate winges. She knows what they say even in echoes. 

The aetherial sea is devoid of tactile feeling. The ocean is her own liquid skin, the lot of it familiar and folding in on her. Kneading dough that serves to nudge her along, but only just, as other presences — presences that feel like her, but also adamantly individual — flit past with great ease. She floats along the lazy river. How comfortable. How modest. 

Would it not be nice to stay a while?

She wonders how long one can rest here before they are cast out, how long before the corporeal realm gets tired of her too. Is there a place in this realm where one can indulge forever and a day, shielded from the current in a pocket of blissful nothingness? Bathed in dim light. Pickled in it.

Her thoughts recognise what she’s done as the unpleasant, broiled word passes her psyche. 

Do you remember where you had meant to go?

She doesn’t remember the name of any place in this state. They’re all blurs and backdrops to her. Set dressing for another rotation of events, the palette of meaningless filler. She doesn’t know where she was meant to go despite how routine it is. Why would she leave, for that matter, when the Lifestream cradles her so?

Temptation beckons to bask in the warmth of her blood — to fall into deep slumber.

If she had eyes, they would glide shut.

Filtering through her faux lids, there is a bright light — the sliver of Thanalan sun through a drawn curtain. It slices through her sleep, carving a warm yellow glow into her cheek and nose and mouth, all of which she can’t move, she can’t feel. The light is incessant and impossible to ignore. The light is belligerent and demands her attention. The light needs to be addressed. 

Now.

Her physique coalesces with unreasonable conviction, each part of her falling into place and tied together with the slab of obsidian she calls a greatsword. A perfectly wrapped parcel, delivered right to her apartment tower’s doorstep. She has the gait of a groggy child woken from a nap, yet she drives herself forward as if she’d been awake the whole time.

Nothing happened. 

You can’t get rid of me that easy, says Brand, lounging in her peripheral. You won’t get rid of us. 

You don’t want to. 

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: signe ymir #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Fuse

“The Heavens bless us, and so we keep their hearth as it were. We don’t dare disturb the holy balance: as above, so below.”

For cycles, Vahri’a had endeavoured to keep his grimoire a sanctum.

On the tail end of his picatrix, there hides a secret commonplace book. Sketches that would be filed away in throwaway journals he’d purchase by the bulk have been smuggled in through the temple’s backdoor. Still never held to even dim light, nor shown to the curious, but they are equal to the immaculate spreads he had sheltered from their spidery scrawl years ago. These refractions of his innermost self, the reflections of his eyes onto paper — they are as good as God. 

This stamps the signature of his soul to the page. Within each margin note of a brilliant thought, each arrow drawn with conviction between two ideas, from bow unto paper, he devotes a little bit of himself. He feels closer to his arcane focus now more than ever before, and all it took was to treat it like the back of a napkin.

Look hither and take heed, says his grimoire. The taste of this teaching would pair nicely with your charcuterie on ephemancy, no?

Truthfully, the book had become equal parts himself and the clan he’d stepped one foot into. These sketches and soliloquies are his attempts to understand his family better, in the way he’s best learned how. Who knew such a vital pillar to his life could be learned at twenty-six! Nothing goes without being captured and dissected, each thought subjected to entomology. Following his grimoire’s call, he navigates the thumb index to a tab left blank, but he knows it from memory to be the beginning of his notes on ephemancy. 

Ephemancy, they called it. Never had he dreamt arcanima could be wielded so religiously, both parts of the phrase “ritual worship”. The arcanima of Limsa Lominsa is a relatively new art compared to its fellow schools, and juxtaposed to its rigid structure comes the informality of being the youngest. Despite its roots in Allag and Nym, no one treats it as an ancient, sacred art — it is a precise science to be practised in the here and now, and from its predecessors it can borrow, but never revere. Limsan arcanima is a tool, not a rite.

Limsan arcanima never borrowed from the Heavens, however. Ephemancy is a blend of two arts — the precise methodology of turning one’s aether into something entirely of the imagination, with the vulnerable act of appeasing the ambient, celestial aether to borrow its lifeblood. Ephemancy is both a mundane implement of use in the sun-to-sun and a sacred ritual guarded by its keepers. Ephemancy is an alchemy of two opposing ideologies. This is far from incidental — this is the magic’s true purpose. The clan is built around these parallel towers. The sun shines right through their windows, twice a day. 

How Vahri’a longs to carve the sigils into his skin. Ironic that he once challenged Savarah’s belief in the resurrection of the arcane tattoo, and now he yearns to adorn himself with one. And not for the matriarch’s convictions, or even that which lay close — for the mere curiosity of it! Damn him to the Hells for the blasphemies he entertains, but who would want for further reason than to feel the Mother Moon’s presence glowing upon them, every single day—?

“You write too much,” remarks the venator, and he glances up from his archive. He hadn’t even procured his quill. No, her eyes bore into ink long dry. 

“Do you think so?”

“I wonder if you’ve ever lived.”

She draws her hunting knife from her constellation rune. She wields it like it’s an old friend, in that it wouldn’t care what she did.

“Let’s move, wanderer.”

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: vahri'a korla #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Vainglory

“I got back from Garlemald nearly two moons ago.”

“You. You went to Garlemald.”

“Yes. So, do we need to test your Common any more or do we have a deal?” 

“I dunno, lass.” 

This is one of the first times Imogen’s seen an adventuring party earn themselves a line. A line! Of Limsa Lominsans no less, who wouldn’t know a line if it kicked them to the back of it. Perhaps she’d be more understanding of the situation if she were lining up for a chance to work with the godsdamned Scions of the Seventh Dawn, but these adventurers would be Twelveblessed to possess a sliver of the Warrior of Light’s talent. 

Perhaps over a year ago, she would’ve forgone the line altogether. But since the Grand Company of Eorzea was established and people started abandoning their day-to-days for adventure in the Final Days’ post-mortem (and damn it, she’d abandoned her day-to-day before it was cool), the market has been exceedingly competitive. There aren’t any flashy, well-paid freelancing jobs that haven’t earned themselves an equivalent to a line in any city-state. Where it used to be a few heads in front of a board that she’d rummage past in five seconds, she now has to donate bells of the day in patience — a tax for getting an audience with other adventurers who, by sheer luck, managed to spot a job first.

Furthermore, she’s better kitted. She gleams in her vexillum armour, wrought in blue, brown and silver — a trustworthy palette, indicative of fidelity and a small amount of class. Her new lance is polished sharp with a healthy appetite for action it’s yet to know. She’s gotten comfortable enough in her current standing to reduce her pack to a reasonable amount of supply — not a whole two sennights’ worth — and a good third of her old, shitty tool belt has been unremorsefully replaced. 

She looks like a proper adventurer now. And fuck what she looks like — she is a proper adventurer, having partied with experienced company, and if she has to get in a line to show other adventurers that, she supposes she will. 

The adventuring party’s leader — the lalafellin marauder whom she’d been arguing with, hands on hips and face pulled to its epicentre in suspicion — doesn’t seem convinced by her word, however. In fact, the new armour seems to be working against Imogen’s favour. At the very least, its gleam makes the axewoman squint.

“And nothing over in the North bothered to scratch?”

“I bought all this after I’d come back,” Imogen explains exasperatedly, pushing her circlet a little further up her forehead so she can press her palm to it. “You know, with the money that I earned from doing the job in the first place?”

“And who paid you?”

“As’kari Tia. Former levemete.”

“Former? So he wasn’t officially registered?”

“He was, then he resigned.”

“Your job made him quit?”

“You should have longer legs for all the leaping to conclusions you’re doing.”

“You should have tighter lips for all the jobs you haven’t gotten in the past two moons. Tell me about this trip to Garlemald, then. Tell me all about it.”

“We travelled to the outskirts of the city via airship — which I learned to pilot, by the way. No simple feat. Could’ve crashed the ship at any time, but kept it sailing. Then, we infiltrated the place via the underground. There were magitek patrols everywhere, and we gave them what was coming. They were such smoking messes by the end you’d think they were about to lift off.”

She gracefully leaves out the part where her shitty old polearm had failed her and broken from their first fight, and she’d had to switch to her magecraft. She isn’t confident to show that side of her to the guilds. Not yet. She soliloquizes on:

“Then we fought the tempered Garleans — they were in the city, too—”

“I know. I heard the stories from the contingent.”

“Yeah, they arrived later than we did, mind you. So we fought the tempered Garleans, and we had to fight our way back out against some of them. We were able to deploy both lethal and non-lethal force, when it was needed. We’d found some survivors on the way and they wouldn’t have been happy if we had just went about killing everything wanton. But that’s a mark of versatility on my part, I’d say. Then, we went back through the underground and got out, back to the airship.”

“So what the hell did you go in there for?”

Her mouth thins to a sliver.

“Can’t say,” she puts curtly.

“Okay. Why?”

“It’s not my business to tell.”

“Is there a source I can ask? How do I get in touch with this As’kari?”

Her brow furrows, all wobbly.

“Uh… You can’t get ahold of him right now.”

“What about the client?”

“... He’s busy,” she says all too quickly.

“Busy, or dead?”

“Busy, Twelve above. Preoccupied.”

“What, they both eloped after the job?”

“Wow, you’re springing.” Truthfully, she wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Sven and As’kari decided to deal with Sven’s little problem. “Contact Levemete Cain Locke. He’ll have the records you so sorely need. Never thought this industry was one for the absolute nonsense of resumes.”

“Never heard of a Cain fucking Locke.” Loathe as the party leader is to show it, she’s clearly getting irritated with Imogen at this point. 

“He’s new. He took over for the last levemete.”

“If he’s new, his testament’s not worth any.”

“He was part of the job, too. As an adventurer. He can tell you how hard I worked. He was with me for the landing, and the infiltration, and the fighting, and—” She was about to say ‘the untempering’. Gods know how she’d explain that one. “The whole thing.”

The marauder looks over her shoulder to her party, who have formed a backdrop tableau with nothing to say unless prompted. The hyur behind her thumbs their nose, then shrugs languidly at Imogen.

“Don’t think it’s in the cards. Sorry.”

“I could literally pull out a deck and show you,” Imogen says with grit teeth.

“Nah, fuck off,” curses the miqo’te woman next to them, with a rude to-the-elbow gesture cast Imogen’s way. “That’s their way of sayin’ you’re too much of a bitch. We wan’ someone who’ll come an’ learn with us an’ be a proper party member, ain’ that right, Hokopo?”

“That’s right. We want a team player.” Hokopo looks up at Imogen with glassy eyes. “You seem like you’ve achieved so much on your own, so maybe it should stay that way.”

They all bunch up in a line, standing by each other. It’s the perfect ensemble for a mass skewering, but she sets her anger to simmer as she takes up her things and storms away. 

Next time she gets in a line, she’ll have to bring at least one of three levemetes in a chokehold. That’s her lesson learned. 

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: imogen lafontaine #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Hail

On the outskirts of their stately manse, passersby double take at a sight of scarcity. A juvenile Viera — yes, a pair of lagomorphic ears paired oddly with features of youth. For a moment, the strangers would consider them merely made to confuse: a proper Veena short in stature, or a hyuran child with a headband attached for ease of playing pretend. Such considerations are spurned by the sudden twitch of their ears towards their crown, and the shrunken quality of their quiet, yet audible voice.

“That cannot be correct…”

With curiosity satisfied, the pedestrians would hurry away. 

The child lies nose up in the garden. Their journal is poised parallel to their face, blocking the sun from creeping to their eyes. They’d learned a trick from observing a particularly lazy superior at the Institute: if you leave the quill right in the pot, you practically never have to dip it. They retrieve the sopping thing from its bath, drowning rare Rabanstran blades of grass in obsidian ink, letting the remainder splatter onto their working shirt. The working shirt, mother had coined it sennights ago, for it had been dark enough to accommodate their stubborn habit until she’d find a way to break it.

Obedience had not entirely escaped them, however. They could be wandering about the city at their leisure, but at their parents’ behest, they remain here. They aren’t fond much of the metal men that guard the gates, regarding them with a stare that could never be met, so they suppose it isn’t much of a compromise. They’re content to study ambient aether in their backyard, for it makes an excellent control group. Predictable, placid and perfect—

Until there’s a sting in the middle of their forehead, and they’re not entirely sure why. The same prickle erupts from their arm, then their knee. In a gradated onslaught, the stinging gets harsher until they jump from it, then it’s all in their ears, head, and shoulders. Antilons? Their arms are bereft of anything in motion, save the blossoming of little red dots. Nettles? There are no nettles in the courtyard — if there are, someone is going to be sacked.

Nevertheless, they bolt into the front hall with the energy they’d saved with their enervated writing technique, ink pot and journal in tow. They shake white dots from their tresses, and there’s a moment of fretful, widened eyes. Had they inherited dandruff from one of the scholars? No, the dust is large, tough, frigid — not a pathetic fleck of reject skin.

In their self-examination, their father strides down the steps, having heard the pitter-patter of steps from his child oft quieter than a breeze.

“Why the hurry?” Pa’s mellifluous voice is practised to not startle them, but the fact that they know its purpose gives the game away. 

“What is the meaning of this,” they hiss, shaking more and more pellets from their body and belongings. They glare up at their father as if he had brought it about, chucking down ice from the window upstairs.

“Ah…” He picks up one of the pellets, examining it as it melts betwixt room temperature and his warm fingers. “This is hail. A rare weather for this place. Formed in the high heavens. Not snow,” he says pointedly, noticing their lips part. “Snow is different. Snow is formed below. Snow is umbral. This is astral.”

“The distance to the star is not correlated,” they insist but now they’re not so sure. 

“Both are true,” he says, ruffling their head of grass blades and cresting waves as he moves to kneel. “Your mother will explain it better than I can. But consider me proud.”

“I did not cause this.”

“I would not think that of you, brilliant as you are. I am proud of what you have done this sun. I am proud to have raised a child who knows when it is right to leave.” 

He takes a shard of hail from their hair and holds it up between them. The two watch it fade to nothing.

“Enough of these, and we would have been bandaging you. Remember this. When in doubt, Signe, run.”

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: signe ymir #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Break a Leg

Cradling his lute like an ill babe, Vahri’a ambles his way through thickets and over roots towards the clearing they’d deigned concave enough to be an amphitheatre. Between curtains of verdant growth and a gathering larger than most pubs could accommodate, the greenery’s as good as one in his book.

Not that he had ever taken to a proper stage. The mere thought had made his heart an epicentre not sennights prior; it since had been laid to rest for its insolence.

This is enough for his rickety esteem, blown to insecurity by harsh side winds, clinging to sanity via clothesline pegs. The efforts he puts himself to are too immense for two eyes — that which scan his strings for any sign of wear or thinning, and check the pegs to see if they’ve inched away from his scrupulously fine tuning. Too immense for two shoulders, which slouch over the instrument to shield it from… what exactly? Light would do nothing to hurt the wood, yet he acts as if it’s harsh enough to kindle flame.

And then there’s the forks in the road. A mental labyrinth to funnel a racing mind. Each beat is an opportunity for mistake, and underneath that, a net of his own design. Should he rush into a stanza of backing that isn’t yet to be, he knows the acoustic path to lead it back, and the way forward for a delayed piece. The script has been combed with fine teeth to its individual syllables, and where his litanies of memorisation may fail him, he’s pored through the thesaurus and embedded the suitable substitutes to his skull.

He cannot explain it, but he knows his words have power. His lyrical will coupled with a melody can drive a stoic to tears, turn the tides of battle, make the air thrum with feeling — all inexplicable, yet apparent with its weight. He refuses to sling it around. Not the potent story, nor the history that comes with it. Whether it would be roiled forest creatures or the ghosts of the Shroud’s past that would get him first, he prays he shall never know.

No amount of dress-rehearsing tragedy can ever make one ready for it. Yet he, cursed with his mother’s narrow throat and blessed with her cantabile voice, refuses to leave it to fate. 

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: vahri'a korla #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Pitch

Mitra finds herself grateful that her deluxe inn suite has been paid for. You can’t ask for a better desk than a king-sized bed. 

Her folio’s guts are laid lovingly across the duvet. The densest document is a written guide from her superior outlining the product’s KSPs, competitive features and frequently asked questions, with keywords underlined in crimson ink. Truthfully, this leaf has been strewn to the side in favour of her grand design.

On pieces of parchment in all kinds of shapes and sizes, she’s curated the ideas that really speak to her. There’s diagrams of the device as drawn by its designers, dissected layer by layer or shown in prospective for each use case. In their peripheries, there are business cards from various clientele she’s worked with, the keywords of their testimonials scribbled on the backs. Occasionally, there’s a scrap of parchment with her own writing on it hosting a solitary phrase such as “set-up”, “inversion” or “size” which are single triggers to a sprawling web of persuasive ideas, filed into her mental cabinets. There’s not a single industry buzzword to be found here — strings of letters that evoke nothing within her.

Instead, her eyes flit between the organs of her sales case, digesting the lot in the way she best knows how. All the while, she’s muttering the spiel to commit it to memory, spurred by the invisible connections between visual aids. Once she completes her umpteenth run through, she deflates entirely with a sigh.

She had never seen the former consultant put his ideas to the test in this way. The outline was all that he needed, and the rest was emollient talk. The deal would be agreed, signed and shaken on after a seed of fear was introduced, wherein the competition’s repute would be taken into question, and of course — a few drinks. She had so little to minute. Her notes were an audit trail, and nothing more. He had always said, “Thavnairian alchemy speaks for itself,” and that had been the core of his work.

But his era has suddenly collapsed, his advice with it. No longer is Thavnairian work an esoteric, sparse commodity. Following the Final Days, alchemical experts are strewn across Hydaelyn in droves. Not to mention a united Eorzea has proven for further innovations in their own alchemical technology. It isn’t enough for something to be Thavnairian — the product must host its own merit. 

Further to that, her late superior had never used the Thavnairian brand as a crutch. His manner of speaking and precision for tone was a concoction of powerful charisma that she could never perfect. Each lilt, an implementation of his will made manifest. It cut through sceptical first-time clientele, drunken long-term business partners, and everything in between. 

An innate magic she doesn’t hold. Not inherited from his passing. She possesses the singular tool in his kit, and there it lies, far out from her periphery.

She glances towards the cheat sheet, taking it between delicate fingers. The other hand attends to the loosely strewn bathrobe she’s slung over her diminutive form, and her lips purse. There’s a proper bureau to the right of her, left untouched.

After she tucks her bits and pieces into the folio to rest, she hobbles over to the closet and starts sifting through her outfits.

Here, the real preparation begins.

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: mitra sattari #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Vicissitudes

Loathe as she is to admit it, Imogen has begun consulting her Deck of Sixty every day.

Once she had finally connected with the pillars of each major arcana, all else under each suit fell gracefully into place. The result was something of novel mystique — each card claiming dominion over its own parcel of life, the lines drawn elegantly and never overlapping. The serendipity of the deck either indicated the simplicity of living, or more aptly, the complexity that the deck’s design was founded upon.

Now, she has found herself turning to the arcana for all matters of inquiry as a clergyman turns to prayer. The deck is accessible, light as a pocketbook when stacked together. It’s of beautiful make despite its age, dulled foil crystallising each detail of the Gods’ visages. Most of all, when she asks questions, it answers. The answer is wreathed in riddles and keeps its intent between its teeth, but it answers with sincerity.

They answer, period. 

Between lazy digits, she twiddles her quill from tail to head but barely pays it mind. Her head is cast out the window, watching frosted glass paintings of noblemen walk across the square. Light snowfall barely besets their journey, deterred by parasol and soon to be forgotten in the gentle hearth glow. Further down the steps, others are not so blessed. Under roof and behind key, lowborn can only warm their hands atop the cooking, if that.

Idly, she runs her three middlemost fingers along the top of her neatly stacked deck. She bestows aether upon the cards as one would spread butter upon toast. Second nature to the point of sedation, but not laziness. She spreads to the corners because that’s how she’s done it all this time. As she offers herself to the Twelve, she lets the question refract within the mirrors of her mind. 

Why do bad things happen to good people?

A card presents itself to her fingertips, guided by a low pulsing pull. She accepts it with eagerness, the bottomless well from which she’s drawn a dozen times this sennight alone. She can feel the weight of a major arcana, its constellation’s power surging through her, but it is not the aetherial blessing she seeks — it’s the sentiment of the art.

The card is turned.

The Spear.

Only now, it strikes her as odd that this card hasn’t stepped forward over the past sennight. It’s a rare draw. There had been a healthy smattering of pips from the irons suit, and the other major arcana had all emerged at least once, but the Spear is reclusive. Ironically so, considering Halone’s visage hangs above her bed. The Fury makes Herself known in every corner of Ishgard, but not in Imogen’s spreads. Had she realised the Goddess of War was missing from her fortunes, she would have been fending off deep guilt that She did not approve of her practice, but now she is validated.

Validated for a moment, until she ponders further.

The superficial interpretations flit by her, summoned and dismissed with ease. For example, the Spear presides over the dominion of ice, implying that the star is an inherently harsh climate to live in. Alternatively, the Spear heads a suit of irons, which lends to the message that misfortune is merely a chain to which one is bound. All shallow interpretations brought about by basic associations, and none satisfactory to her needs.

The true interpretation is this: the Fury commands and the Lover entreats for contrition from their people. To maintain the realm of ice, an element of fragile stagnation, all must be considered holistically. This world is a den of sin. 

To atone for the misdeeds of the wicked, the righteous must suffer. Thus, all must remain as it is.

The young astrologian examines the depiction of the Fury. Her stance is decisive, springing into action with spear and hoplon in tow. Her expression is placid. She fights for it is all she knows, not for passion. 

She frowns.

Without the aid of aether, she manually shuffles the major arcana back into the deck and lays it to rest for the eve. The answer had been pertinent, but not what she had been looking for.

The once fortuitous act of the draw that had blessed her sun-to-sun decisions with clarity now clouds her mind with pall and leaves the bitter taste of smoke on her tongue.

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[ruin-iii]

Veracity

Unadulterated candlelight renders Signe’s outline to nothing. Still, the dim glow loses the territorial war, shadows marching upon the edge of her pages and swallowing ink whole. It takes her occasional interference to not lose words to the pall, tipping the book forward and sideways each time she wants to read a sentence in the margins. What is a flick of the wrist to her is a significant swerve in the balance between light and dark, localised to her home library.

Ever since she had learned to read at an intermediate level, she wanted to get a hand on these old journals. Her mother’s commonplace, bound from old leather and musty parchment, belies a wealth of knowledge.

She can see the line, but knows not the history of why it was drawn, and thereby has no reason to respect its boundary. She knows that the contents are forbidden, but she doesn't know why.

The drawn sigils are inefficient and must have taken hours to craft. The incantations are in ancient phonetics that she yet knows not how to fold into her tongue, press to the back of her teeth, or bestow with a voice. But when has her curiosity fallen to inertia? A force that never meets friction keeps going, and going, and going.

She snuffs out the candlelight between her fingers, ending the war. The unwilling passenger of her mother’s old book is stuffed under her nightgown, stolen to her bedroom where it will reside for several years, unbeknownst to the house’s pillars. There is nothing that cannot be known if she doesn’t try with the whole of her ears, eyes, nose, tongue and cheek. 

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[ruin-iii]

Solution

Each time Vahri’a’s head topples to the wall beside, the bombination of the upper level floods into a roar of chatter and clanking about. Whether it detracts from his concentration or enhances it, who’s to say?

The brief of the assignment is written in brilliant bold letters at the top of his workbook — decidedly kept separate to his grimoire, in preservation of his immaculate handwriting. Aim: To transpose Ruin into an orb of 5 ilm diameter and reduce channeling time to 50%. It should be simple. In theory. 

Yet underneath, the contents is shy and ashamed, hiding behind scribbled ink. Attempts to transpose the sigil come across more as abstract art than a workable geometry. 

He has been here for two bells now.

The lichyard of the basement is all he has to bounce off of. A vacuum of thought. There are a couple of skilled casters taking the opportunity to practice reps in the arena, but this is a relatively quiet and private affair he easily tunes to muffled phonetics. Other arcanists often work at home, but his is a hole in the wall. 

Way off to the other side of the circular expanse, however, is another he hadn’t noticed on his first sweep of the room. She’s a short and wiry Seeker of the Sun, all ankles and wrist bones, in a set of suspenders and rolled trousers. Rendered in autumn colours, with auburn hair and patches of brown skin woven with burgundy burns. She adjusts her glasses every so often and squinting through them as she makes her way through one of the guild’s many tomes. She’s got piles of books set off to the side of her, none opened. Sprawled onto her desk of discarded crates are a number of parchment pieces, each playing with the same sigil that’s been etched into his mind for the evening.

As if alerted by the Twelve, her gaze darts up.

He catches it, lips thinning and stretching — not into a smile, but rather a sheepish impulse.

She grins proper, the tips of her ears and the corners of her lips stretched upwards.

He raises a hand in a bare wave.

She gets up. Gathers her materials. Strides over to him.

He isn’t going to get any work done.

“I didn’t realise you spent your studying time in the Gate, Vahri’a. Thought you’d be the type to skitter home after every class.” He doesn’t know her name, but she talks with the lilt of someone who’s known him for ages and has the right to affectionately resent his withdrawn tendencies.

“Don’t you do that?” he asks, returning his gaze to his work. An ear remains lofted in attendance of his fellow arcanist, who assails it with laughter.

He supposes ‘assail’ isn’t the right word. There’s a distinct flutter to it that makes it a bubbly, digestible affair…

“I can never concentrate in here. There’s too many people milling about usually. But I needed the research, and the Navigator heard my prayers, wheeling everyone away from the Gate for once. Save our quietest classmate. But no, I study at the Docks. The noise doesn’t bounce around on the open sea.”

“Did you have much luck, then?” Vahri’a asks curiously, looking over her papers.

Given the dissonance between his workstation and hers, he expected her penmanship to be equally dissonant. It’s not quite the steady hand he uses to draw all his glyphs, but hers is neat by certainty. A single, quick stroke marks a circle, a line, and a poke of the pen for the dots. She doesn’t waste time, and her work is all the cleaner for it.

For that, she’s gotten farther than him. She doesn’t conceal her mistakes in a big, black box. All of her experimental failures — even the ones that are excessively silly, like deconstructing the core of the glyph and dispersing it to its arms — are on full display, their page remaining their own domain, with notes scribbled into the margins.

“Working on it still, but I’m stumped,” she admits, showing off a particular sheet. The heart of the spell is circled with great aplomb. The margins scream in all capital letters, which he can only just make out for its colloquialism and alternative spelling: WERE TH FUCK DO I PUT THEES? 

“I would assume you keep it where it is,” Vahri’a says, frowning.

“But should you? See here—”

She grabs one of her books from under her arm, setting the rest down beside her — decidedly parking in his study space — and flips through the pages until she reaches a dog eared entry. Gods, did she dog ear a book from the archives? The page falls to a spell of a similar casting time to the one they’re attempting, Bio. She points to the top of the sigil, furthest from where her palm connects to the tome’s spine.

“This largest push is at the end,” she says, circling a more complex set of large circles with her digit. “It’s ‘cause you want to have your aether, let’s say, ‘valves’ opened proper by these little bits so they’re all oiled up to let go of bigger amounts. It makes the spell imbalanced, which isn’t a problem for this one ‘cause it’s all about volatility in the first place. But Ruin’s got to have that trajectory, and let you channel more quicker…”

Vahri’a blinks. He holds the book’s other end to get a proper look, eyes flitting between his grimoire’s open page and her book’s example.

“Now, let me see what you’ve done?” she asks, side-stepping to get a better look at his workbook. Her brow furrows as she sees his work — redacted clouds of meaningless scribble. “Well, you’re no help. Did you just draw a bunch of tits?”

“No,” he says flatly, shaking his head in disbelief. “None of those were correct, so don’t worry for them.”

“But maybe parts of them were. Better to be able to use the scraps than tossing out the whole boar. Walk me through what you tried, then. Or we’re both hopeless.”

She has a point. He hasn’t made any progress thus far, and she has. He may as well take her help rather than spurn it and flunk the coursework.

The work had proceeded for bells, but those bells went by at a ship’s pace. Time speeds to a brisk walk as he explains his theory to her, and she posits some rightful critique — and he does the same for her when they eventually wheel a chalkboard out of the classroom and work that way, each with an eraser and piece of chalk to parry the others’ suggestions aside. But it’s a spar, not a duel — a collaborative effort to better the other.

By the end of it, they’re tired messes fighting off the concentrated La Noscean heat, but they’ve got a working prototype that their tutor might actually accept. 

The two fall to a natural silence as they copy the geometry down into their respective books.

“Hey, Vahri’a.”

“Mm?”

“You don’t remember my name, do you?”

Air skids to a halt in his throat. 

“Ah…”

There’s that laughter again. Gradated and effervescent. Like a glass of champagne. 

“Gods, you’re the worst.”

“I’m sorry.” He realises just how much he’s pied off his classmates. 

“It’s fine. Remember it this time.” She extends a hand to him. “H’nemti. But you can call me Nem.”

“Are you sure?”

“... About my name?”

“About the nickname.”

“If it means you’ll remember it, then I’ll take what I can get.”

The rest of the eve is little, but precious. Their work is preserved in ink, its dust dissipated. He says his formal goodbyes after checking his bag twice over, and she waits for him without poking at his habit. They ascend the steps in a close file.

Every so often, she turns back to chat with him, her merriment skewing her glasses one way. By the end of it, he manages the littlest of smiles, and hers carves dimples into her cheeks. 

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[ruin-iii]

Anon

Ishgardian painters, those industry old hands hired only by the first syllables of their names, paint the sky bluer than it is. Imogen Century had once been fascinated by this phenomenon. Had it been born of a collective, unspoken decision to render the Holy See pre-filtered for the mind’s eye, or had it spiralled from a single mind’s subconscious misinterpretation into a social — and only social — truth?

She hadn’t once considered the possibility of metaphor, a device so dependent on accepting an individual’s interpretation rather than the collective’s mandate. Before her, the sky churns clouds as one tosses duvets, each sprawling to their apex as a never before seen shape, then forgotten moments after in a crumpled heap of wisps. They migrate to a destination she can’t see, though their march is steadfast. These are Ishgard’s ocean waves. 

The painters didn’t draw that metaphor on purpose. Heavens, no. But Imogen is willing to accept that the Ishgardian sky is blue, for it is the only place where its people are free.

“Cuppa for ye.” The Roegadyn deckhand cast in brilliant ochre, built into the airship’s wood like raw crystal, hands her a hybrid mug of steel and oak. The drink could be boiled dishwater — though it is a harmonious blend of chocolate, cream, milk and cinnamon — she chugs it down all the same, savouring its warmth. She had been holed up in their lukewarm estate long enough, and the frigid scrape of the winds upon her back reminds her to relinquish the privilege she hadn’t earned. 

“Cap’n didn’ getta chance t’ tell you our route, eager as y’ were to leave.” Imogen looks at his cup. His is just beer. It sloshes around as he gesticulates, “We’ll be ‘eaded towards the Farreach, then t’Ilsabardian waters. Can drop ye off at me brother’s an’ he’ll have ye sent across with th’kids leavin’ the village. Y’lucky it’s the season for it, else ye would’a had to find yer own way t’Sharlayan.”

“Thank you,” says Imogen curtly. Her lips don’t form the phonetics so easily. “What brings you to Ilsabard, pray tell?”

“I’ll tell ye if ye tell me why you’re so damn keen on gettin’ to that place up North,” he barks. “We coulda’ kidnapped ye, y’know.”

“I would’ve liked to see you try,” she mutters into her cup, earning his rancorous guffaw. “I’ll let you keep your secrets, then.”

It’s clear the deckhand’s had enough of the whipping gusts she’s subjecting herself to, as he turns for the entrance to the deck below once more. Before he leaves, his voice is thrown over his shoulder.

“Y’welcome to celebrate with us, if ye’d like. Not the first noble we’ve ferried outta Coerthas, an’ not the last. Have a pint or two to life a’ freedom.”

Imogen turns from the big blue, beckoned by the autumn glow of the merriment inside.

“If you so insist.”

* * *

Etraux clutches his ring as a heretic would a rosary, offering the same prayer on its solitary bead: Come back safe.

Last night, his fiancé had been a drifting ship that could hardly dock in their entrance hall, guided by the ghost of a whole crew’s celebration that once lit her hearth. She was oddly polite, and her frigidity was not in her words — it was in her hollow heartbeat, as she put out the candle and said goodnight. Each action was set to a metronome. He worried for her, but he had hoped to give her time.

Time, he has plenty of. Time is the inheritance of every son of the Architects. Imogen had been impatient for she had so little of it. Her feelings, she hadn’t realised, were mere passing ships in an endless expanse. She would be back, he knows, if he waits and prays.

From the other room, their daughter of her namesake wails. It’s as if she knows — and for the fear of it, he hurries to her cot and fetches her with great care. Young Imogen, too, is a heretic’s rosary.

“Be calm, my dearest.” He bounces her on his palpitating heart. “Your mother will return on the morrow. If not then, within the sennight. At the end of the moon mayhaps, but she will return. I shall take care of you in her stead until then, but you will not be without your mother for long. I swear you this.”

To his benefit, Young Imogen would not grow to remember such a lie. It would be drowned in the raging tempest by all else. 

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[ruin-iii]

Turn a Blind Eye

TW. Alcoholism, drug addiction (and predating on it).

"Hey Li, could you do me a favor?"

"Sure."

"Could you step a little over to your left?"

Vahri'a is oddly sheepish. It's odd to see the eldest, often a gaunt shadow cast over the lot of them, in the blundering state that he is now. Crawling through his drinks, sip by sip, despite having had five of them at this point. Hammering his five digits and the tip of his tail against the table's edge. Nervously eyeing the other end of the room as if a predator stalks the entrance. 

A woman in smithing attire with her mitts slung over her shoulder enters the restaurant bar with an entourage of friends. Vahri'a becomes one with the table. 

"Just pretend I'm not here."

"Mhm.”

Vahri’li can't believe his older brother slept with her, and clearly wasn't courteous about it. He thought Vahri'a might know better than to act like that, but who is he to tell him off? Li’s the younger of them both and not remotely experienced in romantic affairs. At most, he’d just be cause for Vahri’a to make a bigger mess.

He serves his brother up another drink and watches as it shrinks, ilm by ilm, to near-nothing. 

* * *

"Ah, look! That's the friend I was telling you about...! Isn't he severe? I mean, in an impressive way..."

Vahri'li can't say he recognizes the man, if for his type. Skin like a counter platter — and only ever the kitchen counter, never further — with burns to match. The stranger eyes Vahri'sae like he's struck ceruleum and he's pretending it's dirt.

"Between you and me, Li," Vahri'sae whispers like wind chimes, improvising a melody. "Have you heard of dreamweed...?"

"Nope," says Vahri'li decisively. Honest and clean. Chef's sleeves.

"Leon has. He says he can tell me alll about it at his place. For free! Most people in Limsa aren't so nice, huh?" 

"No, I guess not."

It’s not his job to tell Vahri’sae not to make mistakes. Especially not mistakes he’s still making, six fulms deep into his fascination with the illicit offerings of La Noscea. Who is Vahri’li to clip his younger brother’s wings? If Sae makes mistakes, he’ll make them, and Li will be the shoulder to cry on. But to scold him would be a bridge too far. He keeps his teeth and tongue to their own.

* * *

"Oi, Li. Could I get a fuckin'... bottle of wine for the road?" 

Vahri’to is a hazard to himself and others. He can barely walk straight, occupying the breadth of a two-way footpath which each step. His words are an incomprehensible slurry of phonetics. But he’d asked nicely — nicer than he usually does.

'No' isn't a viable answer.

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[ruin-iii]

Waldhorn

TW. Animal death.

The venator is the harbinger for his own coming. This single solid note occupies the clearing, filling the orifices of the treeline, summoned from his throat as one draws breath. Not long after its herald is oft the underwhelming percussion of thwips and thunks. Then after, the cacophony of silence offset by the thundering heartbeat of the forest running for its life. 

The marmot wonders if he means to warn them. The note is synonymous to death; perhaps even predators want for peace, spurred by nature nonetheless. The forest's bounty wanes after Dalamud feasted at their table. There is not enough room in the forest for all of them now, and the band would be damned before sharing their spoils, but still each hum of that singular note is as good as a siren—

Or sirensong, as the marmot watches their bretheren emerge at the sound. Beauteously crafted in its simplicity, enough to invoke curiosity from poor, wistful souls. Even half an ilm of their snout will be the death of them, yet they will die bathed in song, and for that? One is envious.

The orchestra rises to its sudden crescendo. Cuts into the wind that ricochet off the aether end in their kin's puffed chest. 

They are not spared, as they feel the arrow find purchase in their heart. They had not been mesmerised by the sound, but rather the beauty beholden by another. They take their last breath knowing they too had been tricked, and was it truly so damnable? Is there not a place in Heaven for those who watch and wait for all the sounds the star has to offer?

The venator cradles the twin marmots like babes he never knew. 

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[ruin-iii]

Novel

Of course S'akai is familiar with the written word, but this time it's dressed in leather, spanning merely the breadth of his hand. Its very nature is finality, housing the leaves it needs and only that, with no means by which one can append to the volume without packing sparse words into the margins. And that would ruin the elegance of it, which he'll admit, it has in bounty over the bound scrolls of his tribe. 

This binding, however, whispers an implicit message to him as he runs his fingers over the engraved cover: this is the single version of the truth. Perhaps it is something the Warden could claim, but spoken?

Skeptical as he may be, the tale he reads is decidedly fiction, and he offers it a generous amount of his time. Five chapters in, the roguish yet somehow grounded protagonist has identified the whereabouts of her prodigal son after discovering he is supposedly alive, despite the fact that she put him in a lichyard not six moons ago—

"Sir," says the stall attendant, sharply bursting the bubble of his musing. "If you would like to continue reading that, you'll have to pay for it."

"... I'll have to what?"

For a flickering moment, she looks at him like he’s daft.

“Spend gil to take it home.” She taps the sign. He balks at the price.

“I don’t have to own it,” he says, placing the book back in its former place. “Surely you could tell me how the story ends, or the resolution of the twist? How did Rowan come to be alive?”

“I didn’t read this one, so unfortunately, I can’t tell you. If you purchased it, however—”

“Yet you’re selling it now instead of reading it yourself first?”

Though she’d held her ground with his initial question, she can’t hold back the titters of laughter that bubble up from her now. 

S’akai doesn’t stick around for much longer, all of his gil still in tow. He can think up a better ending to that story, he knows — but replacing the mystery of Rowan is a larger question altogether.

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[ruin-iii]

Deiform

Almost everything is back to normal. A skyline of books is scattered across her apartment floor, some in low hills and others in tumultuous towers. As Signe returns to the foot of her desk, her idle sauntering snags on the overlapping set of carpet neath her polished chair. The stare she gives the flooring could cut it neat enough to fit.

She will deal with it. Again. Later.

Later, when the current affairs aren’t suffocating her attention in every orifice, engulfing every ilm of her. In the here and now, she lives to archive.

With her chosen book in hand, she places herself betwixt two distinct spires. One is dressed in dust, hems frayed by the delicate nibble of time, the desperate nibble of midges, though it’s interspersed with pristine, mint condition publications here and there. The other is dominated by paperbacks with veins in the spine, leather-bounds with well-wrinkled covers, thick volumes with foreign leaves sticking out the ends.

She cracks open the journal. The first page introduces itself to her. Signe Ymir. Commonplace book. Yr. 5, 7th A.E. 

The pages thereafter lose the pleasantries. It’s rendered in rushed scrawl and chicken scratch, a raw and raucous dash to keep up with her thoughts. This is the Bole, the setting of intentions, before the branches sprawled to one side and wept for the death of its fruit.

Curiously, a section in the middle — pages made distinct by the crinkle of their edges — causes her brisk flipping to come to a languid scroll. 

The first illustration is wrought from the Lifestream in chalk, charcoal, and whatever else vaguely grey that she could get her hands on. The tools toil for her approval, the most rudimentary and stubborn being relegated to blocks of impressionistic shadow — the most useless of detail. It’s suitable for what it captures, distilled from hazy detail. Curved horns spiking forward, and the same from his hind, his claws, his tail, all are precocious flicks following the curvature of her hand. Further flicks define the texture of his horns, though she can only guess where the scales lay. How would one know amid the smog, let alone the heat dancing off the ground?

The lord gives way to a far more precise portrait. Each detail is cared for as a newborn child, cradled with loving strokes of the hair and skin, blossomed into fruition and then left to cement itself in its parchment-bound world. She is not a bad artist. She is not formally trained, nor does her art evoke emotion, but she can invoke a neat hand and technical eye when the situation demands. The recollections she had captured aside, scribbled all the way to the inner margins on the left-hand page, were as good as she was going to get from the witnesses to this serendipitous icon. The tails of her garb croon outward, resentful to envelop her. Atop her head, a short crown of crystalline shards. Clad in nothing but thick mist. She could not be certain she had truly been summoned nude as the interviewee had described, and so she kept her bodice devoid of detail.

Further illustrations place her improvement on a dated timeline, each with a watermark scratched into the corner of the page. She flips through the entourage of depictions, some requiring a set rather than a single version of the truth, much to her apparent chagrin. 

Then there are the final pieces. 

Where the works she had produced until this place had been better suited for wanted posters or biographical accompaniments, the entries that follow are truly sketches. They do not aim to capture a particular detail, but instead flourish a wide array and watch as they are naturally culled. Even depictions that are rendered to granularity do not do so with finality, some places worn with forceful erasure and others an impressionistic blur.

An elderly, towering man clad in beams of light, and then a woman enveloped in the same ethereal entourage. A floating figure of an elongated snout, pointed lops, adorned in metal regalia, yet wielding a mason’s trowel. 

The final illustration is formed of several predecessors, each eviscerated by her notes and reincarnated into the other. Brilliant wings defy gravity, raising their peaks to the heavens. Where legs would lie, feathers are braided together into an ornate pattern of pseudo-eyes and bristle, ending in wind-swept lashes. Atop the mass of curated cloudkin appendages, four lagomorphic ears extend from a rich collar of fur, within sitting the porcelain, emotionless face of a woman. Her arms extend, one glittering gold and the other rusted silver, clutching a thaumaturge’s rod in one hand. But her feathers are not dusk-touched like the uniform of the three submissions, no — she is bathed in white, the shimmer accentuated with sparsely placed glitters, bearing the beams of the idea that long preceded her conception.

The certitude of the artwork is written in pristine calligraphy, titled—...

Quietly, she shuts the book before it’s been thoroughly scanned. The same courtesy was not given to the volumes she blasted through to the end and snapped shut, but she has seen enough of the manuscript to make her decision. 

Placed atop the powdered pillar, the old journal is laid to rest. Painstaking archivist that she is, there are some things better buried. 

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[ruin-iii]

Row

“One more fête. No more, no less. Then, we shall retreat from the scrutinising eye of the public pageant entirely. This, I promise you.”

“Mm, and what of the soirées? You’re going to let me skip Feorant’s hundredth nameday party? This, you promise me?”

“Feorant… is one of my closest friends in childhood. I would at the very least ask that you—”

“It’s not just the fêtes, Etraux. It’s not the crowds I have an issue with, it’s the sardines that make them up. Even when they’re sparse and far between, they still stink. Feorant has been an absolute prick to me.”

“You know that his intent is maligned—”

“Yes!”

“No, no, I meant misaligned—”

“Misaligned with his words due to his cultural biases? You should know more than anyone that cultural biases don’t make up a moral framework, nor do they have any place in one. I thought better of you. If the roles were reversed and my research colleagues, Twelve forbid, made slights at you, gossiped amongst themselves when they thought you couldn’t hear it, and did everything short of calling you knife ears — I’d give them a grand tour of the Seven Hells.”

“You cannot blame them for being shocked. I hope, I truly hope, as much as you do that they develop their peripherals and use their eyes as apertures rather than windows. It will take time, my love. They will grow from sproutlings on stilts to great trees, if we entreat them with patience.”

“Fine. Sure. If moons down the line they treat me as an equal and not some foreign, lowborn consort, then I’ll gladly welcome them with open arms. But right now, Etraux, I am exhausted, mentally battered, and for Gods’ sake, I am fucking pregnant. So let me take a break from this awful rabble while they’re still pathetic plants so I can have the patience to deal with them at the eternal bonding. You can tell them our interracial to-be-child is subsisting on large quantities of my blood if that’s what it takes to get on their good side.”

“Despite their judgments, they like you. They appreciate your wit. They see your intellect. They lack the tact to avoid quipping at our choice, but that is separate to who you are. Further, I wish for you to be there with me. I wish for you, the woman I love, to be close with the people I have known my entire life. Is this so wrong?”

“What, so you’d like me to play your foreign trophy wife? Not sure that’s going to work the charms on them. They’re all calling me fat for not putting on one of those slimming maternity dresses when again, I’m fucking pregnant.”

“You are upset about this as well? They are simply offering you advice! This is not my point—”

“No one’s imploring you to put on a slimming dress when you put on five ponze, let alone when you are carrying a literal baby in your stomach, which might I remind you, you have no experience with—”

“Pute—”

“What did you call me?”

“I had only meant it in exclamation, it was not literal!”

“Are you sure?”

“What do you think me for?”

“Gods, I don’t know anymore. I’m leaving.”

“No, Imogen.”

“What?”

“Please, I implore you. Trust me with your whole heart, as you once did when we were but budding sweethearts. I empathise with the toll this places on your mind, but you are making progress in their favour. If you are to retreat to our home, your efforts until now will all be for naught. This is the core of what I mean to say. I would like for your efforts to bear fruit.”

“I’ll be honest, Etraux. I don’t care whether they like me or not. The only person I care about in this wretched place is you. The rest could trip into Witchdrop for all I care.”

“You will not even endeavour for this… for me?”

“I…”

“For my sake, my love.”

“Just… just let me think about it, please.”

“At the very least, come to bed with me. I can prepare for a warm bath, or a massage…”

“... Okay.”

“Thank you.”

Nyunkrepf would not wait and bear witness to the memoir of a war. He erected his Ark and set sail, seeking sanctuary in a place far, far away from home. 

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: imogen century #ch: etraux lafontaine #a: ffxiv write 2022

[ruin-iii]

Attrition

“Ahya… I h-hope you accept my apology… I am very sorry for allowing Fluffy to, um, r-run away… I promise next time, I will pay more attention.”

The lanky 12-year-old has no laurels around her neck, whereas the 9-year-old has more than she can accommodate, a wall of flower wreaths nearly limiting her ability to see her older sister’s disapproving face, were she not craning her neck up to witness her. No, Mholi receives Vahri’s regard from the near fulm her ahya has over her, puberty having paved the dirt between them and put up a picket fence not moons ago.

Vahri pinches the bridge of her nose between her dirtied fingernails. Her nostrils flare. Her left cheek gives way to a thin-lipped, lopsided impression, curved and punctuated with doubt. 

“You said the same thing last sennight,” she says in irritation. “And the sennight before that, and the suns after it happened. How many times do I have to say there won’t be a next time? We aren’t passing through Larkscall for another few seasons, so I’m never getting Fluffy back. So how are you going to make up for that then? This is serious, anhtan.”

As with every time Vahri has repeated these words, Mholi leaves on her own and stays her quivering bottom lip. She holds her painstakingly made wreath, each hand-picked baby’s breath and sprig of lavender glistening with perfect galvanisation. With the throb of deep hurt coursing through her, she tosses her gift of attrition to the bonfire. 

As her mother Aila attends the feast and she, unlike all the other children, is left to her cup of water, she finds herself skirting the hems of Mama’s robes with the faintest of tugs.

“M-Mama,” she says quietly.

“Mholi, you know that I cannot provide you with food,” says Aila as she turns from the table to her daughter, though there is a sorrow to her words. “Her Sister will be angry.”

“I kn-know, I know…” Mholi concedes. “I just wanted to ask for some advice.”

Aila’s firm expression softens to one of wistful appreciation.

“You are a good girl. Come here, let us speak in quiet.”

They pass through the hempen tents and past the merriment of Alonhi performers as they come to the hems of their clearing. It takes Aila a while to familiarise herself with her surroundings, listening for waiting boars or, Goddess forbid, the cackle of beings from the void — but their patch of the outskirts appears all clear.

“What is it that worries you, dear?”

“I just d-don’t understand,” Mholi says, kneading her skirt in her hands. “Ahya w-won’t accept my apology, even at the Renewal. What am I doing wrong?”

“She will not accept your apology?” Aila’s expression sours, her brow furrowing deeply — what little of it Mholi can see under her hood, at least. “Well, you are doing nothing wrong by apologising. Your sister is being too stubborn before the eyes of the Goddess. I will speak with her.”

There is a tight feeling in Mholi’s chest. She isn’t sure why. Ma is offering to help her out, and soon she and her ahya can be friends again. In the name of logic and rationality, Mholi forces the tiniest of smiles from herself. Aila knows her second daughter is not quite as expressive as her first, and she ruffles young Mholi’s hair with great encouragement.

“I will finish my feast and then speak with your sister. Recite your prayers and we will speak in our tent later as a family.”

“Yes, Ma.”

The night passes with raucous laughter, Mholi resigning herself to a nearby tree a few yalms away from the fire. She practises her galvanising spell with great ease. A rock, a branch, part of the bark behind her — the act of putting the runes in her robes to the test is one that readily clears her turbulent, worrisome mind.

When the sun has fully risen, Aila ushers her children to their tent amongst the other Moshroca’s abodes. Young Ilma, blissfully unaware and having had fun playing with the other Cirkan kids, is put to bed with relative ease, her energy thoroughly depleted. It is Mholi and Vahri who remain awake, looking up at Aila with nervous expectation.

“You should forgive your anhtan. She has been apologising to you for three sennights now!” scolds Aila. 

“But Ma, she’s just saying the same things over and over again,” snaps Vahri, hands balled into fists beside her. “I keep telling her, there isn’t going to be a next time with Fluffy. I’m not replacing him.”

“You would spurn your sister for a marmot?” Aila shakes her head with disdain. “A rodent? It would have perished in mere moons, Vahri. Your sister will be here forever. You should not treat her with such coldness.”

“I would have taken care of him enough. He would live forever!”

“That is not how the world works. Be kind to your anhtan. Forgive her, now.”

Vahri sighs on full throttle, her eyes blazing with indignation. She turns to Mholi who can feel the heat of her ire, her heart palpitating as she takes one step back.

“I’m sorry, anhtan. There. Are you happy?”

“... Th-thank you, ahya,” says Mholi quietly. 

“Good,” says Aila. “Now, I do not want to hear any more arguments about this again. And I do not want rodents in the encampment anyroad, Vahri.”

“I bathed him. Every. Day.”

“It is still a rodent. They are meant for eating, not… scurrying around Goddess knows where.”

Despite Ma ushering them both to bed, Mholi can catch a glimpse of Vahri’s angry, wide-open stare from a yalm away. As her ahya looks to the cloth canopy with fiery stubbornness, she can hear the rage that occupies the lot of her mind, incessant, but quick-witted and full of precise points. She shoots them rapidfire at a target that doesn’t even notice the arrows are there. And Mholi, lying in her dark corner, can only quietly pray that her sister will truly forgive her. 

#FFxivWrite2022 #FFxivWrite #ffxiv #ch: mholi moshroca #ch: vahri korla #a: ffxiv write 2022