FFXIVwrite fic: day 16, 'jerk'
Elilona, Midgardsormr, and her dark knight jobquests.
***
“I should have left you all to drown in Leviathan’s tidal wave!”
“When we meet again, you will give us your answer.”
Moraby Drydocks dissolves into white sparks, white flecks, snowflakes biting into her skin like shrapnel-sting — snow all around her, and steel in her hands, and she’s so cold — gray steel and a flash of gray hair — gray hair and then white, and a slim pale figure in the distance — blood on the steel, blood in gray hair, and then it’s Haurchefaunt falling into a strange sky and Ysayle on the stone — there’s blood on her arms, her chest, patchy on her fingers, so bright but still so cold, and she’s falling —
— she jerks awake.
The rough wool of her blankets scratches against her palms; rafters crisscross a dingy ceiling. The Forgotten Knight. It’s not as cold as her dream.
A small brown shape moves at the corner of her vision, and a low alien rumble rolls through the room. Thou hast been dreaming, Midgardsormr tells her.
“I was.” She sits up, tugging the blanket with her — it’s disordered anyway. Midgardsormr is with her often, perched on her shoulder when she’s sewing or whittling, flitting around while she walks, but he doesn’t speak that much. She’s not as used to it. But sleep is sticking to the corner of her eyes, and there’s a raw ache at the back of her throat, and she is very much alone. (She could have been at Fortemps Manor. She didn’t want to be.)
“I’ve been dreaming a lot, lately,” she says. Midgardsormr stretches his wings, orange-pink in the firelight, and flaps his way over to perch on her knee. The tilt of his head is a listening one, even on a dragon.
The same dreams? he asks.
“Yes,” she says. In this dim and dirty pool of candlelight, it doesn’t seem like a strange guess. “About a stranger, and… dark places. Small, mean, angry people. And a sword.”
That needle thou hast been using of late?
“It’s a rapier,” she says, as if that’s the part that matters.
Thou art better with thy cane.
“I know,” she says. “But I might need… I was barely enough against Rhitahtyn. And then the Ultima Weapon… I would have died. I needed more.”
So doth thou practice with thy rapier. Until thou dream’st of it, it seems.
“It isn’t that sword, actually,” she says, flexing her hands. Midgardsormr rolls one beady eye at her. “It’s a greatsword, in the dreams.”
I have not seen thee wield such a weapon.
“And you never will.” Her voice is as soft and final as dropping a stone into the bottomless chasms around the city. Midgardsormr flaps his wings, his claws catching on her knee. She looks away.
Thou hast wielded one in the past, then. Before I knew thee. And before Hydaelyn knew thee, perhaps. Though not even I can be sure of what she knows.
“Not a greatsword,” she says, very quietly. “An axe.” She drags her hand across her face. “I should get back to sleep.”
Most likely. The children of Hydaelyn are fragile, fast-paced things.
There’s nothing much to say to that. They are, to a creature as old as he is. She shrugs one shoulder and burrows down into her blankets, dislodging him; he digs his claws into her knee again in retaliation and flutters up to the headboard above her. His tail scratches against the wall. She closes her eyes, clutching her pillow as if without it she’ll drift away.
The fire flickers and begins to burn down. Snow rattles against the window and collects against the glass. Elilona tosses back and forth, eyebrows drawn down into a tight and fretful pinch even as she dreams. The Father of Dragons watches her, wings folded tight; not even he can guard her against her own self.
Near dawn, still sleeping, her mouth shapes a half-voiced word.
“Fray…”
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