#frydlona merlgeimwyn

[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.

#we had a narrow escape with me thinking the file was accidentally deleted but it was user error #ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: frydlona: ship #my fic: 5.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #sidurgu orl #rielle #drk squad ensemble #frydlona x g'raha

[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.

#tumblr your refusal to let me do line dividers now is personally hurtful #ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: ship #my fic: 5.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #g'raha tia #frydlona x g'raha #MEANWHILE: g'raha has asked tataru for ringbuying advice. the scions are laughing at both of them. #title from the wedding service in the book of common prayer and how seriously it's meant I leave as an exercise for the reader #crafting fic

[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.

#she does not have canon mch (able to use it in combat) but she does have canon mch (has done all the jobquests) #u know how it is #ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 3.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #stephanivien de haillenarte #me: wtf do I do with “battle of new orleans” for a ffxivwrite #the chorus: have we mentioned today that there are guns

[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.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 2.0 #frydlona merlgeimwyn #crafting fic

[weatheredpileoftomes]

in your darkest hour

For FFXIVWrite Day 4, “off the hook”. Frydlona, end of Stormblood proper, ~350 words. Spoilers for 4.0 and for dark knight quests through 50. I could have done a fun fishing adventure like everyone else but I sure did not do that.

Frydlona doesn’t get the luxury of saying she can’t, and yet.

The camp is alive with preparations. Everywhere the clamor of voices, the creaking of wheels. Before them stands Ala Mhigo, rose-gold even in the glare of full daylight.

It’s a beautiful city. Frydlona doesn’t want to get any closer to it than this.

I can’t do this, she thinks. I can’t. Not again.

“You don’t have to,” Fray says, leaning against one of the parapets. She’s an ink-black smudge against all this warm stone, armored more heavily than even the Ishgardian contingent, let alone Frydlona in her gold and white tabard.

It should stain. Frydlona still feels covered in the mud of that Doman courtyard, like she’s never quite managed to leave. Some hero she is.

‘I do have to,’ she tells Fray. ‘They’re all expecting me to. I’m…I don’t know. The figurehead of the alliance. They think I can do this, and if I tell them I can’t, then they’ll lose hope themselves. If even the Warrior of Light can’t beat him…’

“Do you trust me?”

It’s been a long time since Whitebrim, and Frydlona understands her better now. ‘Yes.’

Fray turns to face her, eyes nothing but sparks of light behind her visor. “You were better the second time. You’ve trained a lot since then. I think you can do it, after all.”

‘I can’t,’ Frydlona says. A simple fact. ‘Fray, I don’t think I can make myself walk down that bridge.’

“Then I will,” Fray says.

She waits for Frydlona to argue, but all Frydlona says is ‘Please not the civilians.’

“It wasn’t civilians last time,” Fray mutters, not incorrectly, and shimmers and is gone.

Frydlona watches herself set aside her glaives and take the greatsword from her pack. She wears a dress that looks dead plain, when she’s working with Sidurgu and Rielle—just another adventurer, nobody special—but Fray doesn’t touch the sunlit brilliance of her Warrior of Light costume, only shoulders the massive sword. The hilt and trim are gold, but the blade is black as soot. It carves the daylight like a wound.

As if she’s dreaming, she takes a step, and then another. She is no less afraid. But—Fray wouldn’t send her to die. Fray wouldn’t even send her to fail.

She’ll have to trust to that, and keep going.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2023 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 4.0 #frydlona merlgeimwyn #drk squad ensemble

[weatheredpileoftomes]

breaking bread

Don’t love this, but I’ve been tinkering with it for a few days without satisfying myself and want to get it out there before patch, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Frydlona, post-6.2, ~1000 words. 6.2 spoilers; mention of suicide, referenced canonical familial abuse. Might not make sense without this 6.0 Frydlona fic.

Frydlona considers past mistakes.

“Is aught amiss?” Varshahn asks.

Frydlona startles. One egg slips from her hand and smacks open against the counter. “No, I’m…”

She looks around the kitchen, the dazzling colors of Radz-at-Han. Lively chatter echoes in from the street outside.

“I don’t like this,” she admits, picking up a rag to clean the egg.

Varshahn stands on his toes to look into her mixing bowl. “Should it not be yellow?”

She swipes at the counter with soapy water, fighting the urge to tell him not to put his fingers in the batter for just a quick taste, please Miss Frydlona. “I mean…well, Zero, really. I don’t trust her.”

“And you do not often cook for people you mistrust,” he says.

She shakes her head. “I don’t… I don’t like the idea that she’s being honest with us, and maybe that’s all there is to it. Maybe I’m just being unkind again.” Haurchefant was more than enough for one lifetime.

Varshahn frowns. “You would rather I have offered my hospitality to a traitor?”

Frydlona sets the washrag aside and stares into the bowl. Her own reflection, faint and pale, stares back up at her. “I told you Zenos was alive when I left him. If she’s telling the truth, that he forced her into slavery and only his death freed her… He saved my life. He saved all our lives. I don’t want him to have died by his own hand again, when maybe I could have done something.”

“I see,” Varshahn says slowly. “And yet perhaps he found a mighty foe, and perished in that struggle.”

Perhaps.

She thinks of reality itself breaking under Shinryu’s assault, of the wyrm with the man’s soul holding her aloft while the Endsinger rained disaster on them both. Midgardsormr could yet defeat him, perhaps.

“And even if not,” Varshahn says, softly, “you cannot bear the weight of every life on this star.”

Frydlona sighs and picks up another egg, then—looking at Varshahn, and thinking about Estinien—three more.

“So this custard bread is an apology for thinking ill of her?”

The eggs crack open in her hands with a neat thunk. “Back at the end of the Doman campaign, we had… Yotsuyu goe Brutus lost her memories in the taking of Doma Castle. She’d done horrible things, but she didn’t remember any of them, and she didn’t want to do them again. She’d been so cruel, and it was all—it was all just because the world had been cruel to her. She was just like a child.”

Varshahn, who knows the shape of the war but maybe not the details, nods thoughtfully.

“I didn’t trust her at first, but Yugiri swore it was no act. She wanted… She played with toys, she wanted to bring the people she cared about little gifts to make them happy.”

“Yet she returned to Garlemald.”

Frydlona’s mouth flattens; she has to relax her jaw before she can continue. “Lord Hien told the Garleans that if her memories returned he would return her to them. He told his own people, in front of her—with her listening, still confused and frightened about why everyone hated her—that if her memories returned he would kill her.”

“I…see,” Varshahn says slowly. Frydlona looks at him, so small with such wide eyes, and thinks of Vrtra curled up behind his curtains. He loves Radz-at-Han and all of Thavnair, for all he makes himself someone to be treated gently—not feared, not even held in awe, just cared for. She thinks he would have done better. That means better could have been done.

She tosses the eggshells in the scrap basket and picks up a fork to scramble the eggs with. “And then her memories returned, thanks to a cruel trick of Elidibus’s. She killed the people who’d hurt her all her life and were planning to do it again and once she’d done that she thought she had no choice.”

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Varshahn bow his head. “Ah.”

“I’ve killed people myself,” Frydlona says. The eggs are a brilliant gold in the bowl, brighter than the ones she grew up gathering in La Noscea. She looks down at them instead of this dragon-boy, too old for her troubles and looking too young to tell them to. A splash of coconut milk dulls their brightness. “Some of them for not as good a reason. If she hadn’t thought she had no choice but to be as bad as everyone said she still was…”

“And thus you wish to do what you can to prevent another tragedy,” Varshahn says. “For her sake as well as your companions’.”

Frydlona thinks of looking Lord Hien in the face and lying to him: she’s dead, we need to get out of here before this place collapses. Thinks of how easily it could have been true, or how easily she could have failed to stop Tsukuyomi from draining Doma of aether and killing or tempering everyone there, the Scions included. You can always kill someone later, or try. You can’t bring back the dead.

She doesn’t say any of that to the satrap of Radz-at-Han. She just nods. He’s right, in the end. The details don’t matter.

“This is a traditional recipe from where I grew up,” she says instead. “With, um, a few ingredients swapped out. I thought it would be nice to let her try all kinds of food. If Estinien can think of anything he’d like to offer”—or to have again himself—“I can try to make that too.” Y’shtola was raised by Sharlayans, and Frydlona draws the line at feeding anyone Sharlayan food unless they asked for it on purpose.

“A kind thought,” Varshahn says, and nods approvingly as Frydlona spoons some palm sugar into the bowl. “And I will be sure her guards stay alert for trouble.”

I hope I’m wrong, she thinks, and I hope I’m not wrong. She doesn’t know what she hopes. All she can do is add some sweet Thavnairian cinnamon to the batter and start slicing bread, made in an unfamiliar oven with unfamiliar flour and hope that somehow, some way, this at least works out.

#my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 6.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #varshahn

[weatheredpileoftomes]

renewed

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 3, “temper” (I got here by way of thinking about tempering steel, and how you need to do more for a good sword than just make it pointy). Frydlona, late Heavensward postgame, ~1200 words. Canonical poverty/food insecurity.

Frydlona has discovered a fondness for what’s left of House Jervaint.

It isn’t that Laurisse is unlike any other Ishgardian noble—trueborn noble—Frydlona has met. She is, but it’s that she’s a child who hasn’t had enough to eat or warm clothes to wear, clinging to her manners like a rope flung overboard in spite of it.

“You really don’t need to go to the trouble,” Laurisse insists, even as her pale fingers tighten around the packet of roasted chestnuts. “Or the expense.”

“No trouble.” Frydlona hands Fremondain a second packet before Laurisse can try to split her own share. They’re still faintly warm. She’d risked not finding a vendor at the closest corner knowing if she had to carry them any further from the hot coals they’d be somewhere between cold and frozen. “You know, I’ve cooked for a lot of people training to fight, and they all needed to eat a lot.”

Laurisse, carefully transferring the chestnuts from packet to mouth one at a time, says nothing.

“So since you’ve accepted the sword…” Frydlona tries. Laurisse’s pinched little face haunts her as much as any child of the Brume’s. “Of course I’d need Fremondain to help eat as well—you can’t very well make stew or bread for one.”

Laurisse swallows visibly. “I would insist that he help eat.”

“Oh, my lady—”

Frydlona interrupts Fremondain’s usual self-sacrifice without hesitation. “Good. Where can I find you?”

“Directions to Jervaint Manor should be easy to obtain,” Laurisse says, chin high. “I hope you will forgive the temporary condition of the estate.”

Directions to Jervaint Manor are easy enough to obtain, though Frydlona gets some funny looks for asking. The place is… She’d expected Laurisse to mean the steps weren’t scrubbed, which they aren’t, and the yard is all bare dirt and prickly weeds, but it’s the cracked window that worries her more.

“You know she can’t pay for whatever you got for her, right?” one of the street-sweepers had asked, staring at the hand-cart Frydlona was pulling.

If Frydlona hadn’t known before, she knows now. She’s already measuring that broken window with her eyes as she knocks on the kitchen door.

A weary Fremondain opens it for her and gapes as she wrestles her hand-cart over the sill. “I thought—a single meal—”

The kitchen is cold, a pitiful little fire banked on the hearth. “And firewood, and supplies for the next single meal.” Frydlona lifts the baskets of dry goods and the paper-wrapped side of venison—she’d shot the steinbock herself this morning, and traded the rest of it for most of what she’s brought—off the stack of wood. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.

She builds up the fire and sets a bowl of beans to soak before she starts chopping popotoes.

Ishgard needs Laurisse, the same way it needs Aymeric and Francel and, she supposes, Stephanivien, though she can’t really imagine Stephanivien getting involved in politics. It needs Hilda too, and the people she’s taken the responsibility of speaking for, but Frydlona isn’t gullible enough to think the lords will listen—even the nice ones, like Count Fortemps, or whatever Durendaire is really up to—if they’re not hearing it from one of their own.

She can’t cook for every child in the Brume, even knowing that some of them might grow up to be…anything. Artists who would make her weep with their skill, healers who could find a cure for diseases that neither magick nor alchemy can touch right now.

She’s giving what she can to Francel’s restoration and the charities that have sprung up in the meantime, but she and the Scions are leaving Ishgard soon, and it’s never been the only place to suffer. Even Frydlona knows that, even if she wanted to, she couldn’t solve all Ishgard’s problems herself.

No. It needs Laurisse, and Frydlona will do everything she can to be sure it gets her, whether it wants her or not. She wishes she’d known Laurisse’s father—she wishes a girl of Laurisse’s scant age, whatever it is, didn’t have to help carry this responsibility. She wishes she trusted more of the grown lords and ladies of Ishgard to carry it instead, for that matter. But.

Laurisse has slipped into the kitchen and is standing near the fire, its light flickering golden over her. Frydlona wonders whether Laurisse can be talked into getting her clothes patched. Maybe she could add a lining, too, keep out a little more of the biting cold.

“I like that song,” Laurisse says softly, and Frydlona realizes she’s been humming as she scours out one of the neglected pots. “What is it?”

Well, Laurisse has almost certainly heard worse by now, if not seen it. Frydlona wouldn’t be surprised if there are Halonic hymns all about torturing heretics, for that matter. “It’s one of the songs they sing working on ships around La Noscea.” She dumps the scouring sand out of the pan, rinses it, and adds another handful. “‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest…’”

Laurisse listens with wide-eyed interest, and even Fremondain doesn’t protest. By the second verse Laurisse is very softly singing along with every yo ho ho and Frydlona has the pan clean enough to swing over the fire.

She teaches Laurisse the one about the whale that stole a fishing boat while she chops the onions and sears them and the venison—that one was very popular for a while when Frydlona was younger, from old pirates pretending to be sure that the same thing would happen to them and from everyone else who just liked the tune.

By the time the stew is bubbling, the warm kitchen filling up with the scent of meat and vegetables and herbs, Laurisse looks more relaxed than Frydlona’s ever seen her. Fremondain is half-asleep, nodding in his chair.

Frydlona locates the crock of bread dough she’d brought—she hadn’t wanted to ask them to keep the kitchen warm enough for long enough to let the yeast work, or wait any longer for food—and switches to something softer, to let Fremondain sleep.

“You have a beautiful voice,” Laurisse says. “It has been quite some time since I heard an artist perform.”

“Thank you.” Frydlona tears off a piece of dough and rolls it out. “I trained with Jehantel the Godsbow. He wasn’t always the best teacher, but he’s a wonderful musician.” He’d been a better teacher of music than archery, at least, though it’s hard to imagine an archery teacher worse than Jehantel, driven by his own ghosts as he was.

Laurisse nods like she knows who Jehantel is, which Frydlona realizes she probably doesn’t, stuck in Ishgard as she’s been.

When Frydlona drops the shaped flatbread on the pan nestled among the coals, it starts bubbling almost immediately. She flips it, lets it finish cooking, and puts it on a plate for Laurisse, who starts ripping bite-sized pieces off immediately, juggling it between her hands as it cools.

New swords are well and good, but Frydlona thinks this is probably even better.

#one of the HW bsm quests is called Blade That Was Broken so of course you see why I had to call this that #ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2022 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 3.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #laurisse de jervaint

[weatheredpileoftomes]

refulgence

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 10, “channel”. Frydlona, post-Shadowbringers, ~1100 words. Spoilers for the eighth Eden raid; discussion of canonical character death, war, anthropophagy, etc. Variant on a canon scene.

Memories of ice.

“Perhaps you could describe her for us,” Thancred says.

Frydlona sighs. Titan had definitely not had wheels when she fought him, nor Ramuh a unicorn’s body below his chest. She’s not sure Ramuh had had legs at all, for that matter, but more to the point he’d been less warlike than the one Ryne had used Eden to call forth. That’s what worries her more. “Brave and wise. Kind.”

None of them say anything.

“The real Shiva was in love with the great wyrm Hraesvelgr, and he with her. She knew he would outlive her by…” Frydlona shakes her head, thinking of the ancient depths of Midgardsormr’s voice, of Bahamut, Nidhogg, Hraesvelgr. Tiamat, mourning and tempered and chained. “More time than any of us can imagine. So she asked him to eat her to keep her spirit with him forever. He did, and it was—we all would have died—”

“Sorry,” Ryne says, wide-eyed. “Eat her?”

Frydlona nods.

Ryne’s voice pitches up. “Like Vauthry’s people and the meol?”

“No, no—she… She wanted to do it. Really wanted it, not because it was expected or anyone told her she should. Everyone told her she shouldn’t, even Hraesvelgr, at first, but she insisted. I think she must have known something they didn’t yet. Maybe it was Hydaelyn’s plan, somehow.”

A chancy thing to say to the Oracle of Light, and yet. It’s true. Man and dragon had still lived in peace when Shiva lived.

“What a romantic,” Gaia says. She tries to sneer it, but there’s something vulnerable in the twist of her dark-painted lips.

“How can she have wanted to stay with him?” Ryne shivers. “I’m not saying you’re lying, but it sounds horrible, becoming part of someone else forever, losing everything you are—”

Thancred reaches toward her and stops, his hand just short of her shoulder.

Urianger clears his throat. “Yet thou hast told us only of the Shiva of long ago, and not of the one hight Ysayle, at first thine enemy and then thy true ally.”

Eden’s core is almost as unlike Coerthas as Frydlona can imagine. It has no cold, no wind; the air around them is dark and lit with a garden’s worth of color all at once. “The Shiva I fought was a—a memory, I guess you’d say. Ysayle saw her through the Echo and wanted…not peace, but justice. She lived in a frozen land with cruel laws—a little like Eulmore, but without the parties, and they didn’t eat their dead. They didn’t turn them into sin eaters, either, they just killed them. Or tortured them and then killed them. Or let them freeze to death on the streets, or—”

“These faults they lay at the feet of dragonkind,” Urianger says, “though ’twas their own betrayal of the wyrms that made strife twixt those who walked the land and those who soared the skies, and bloodshed begat bloodshed for a thousand years.”

If Frydlona were Ryne and Gaia’s age still, she might mutter something about Urianger knowing something about betrayal and strife. “Yes. The Ishgardians called everyone who didn’t hate the dragons heretics, and Ysayle made herself the leader of a group of these so-called heretics. She learned to summon what she thought was the real Saint Shiva, as a primal, but she summoned her into her own body.”

“Did she…remember it?” Ryne asks.

Ysayle had never asked questions about what Shiva had seen, and Shiva certainly responded without hesitation to everything Ysayle had known. Whether Ysayle had truly remembered Shiva’s actions, or whether they were lost the way a battle-frenzy can make people lose them, Frydlona is less sure. She hadn’t ever spent time talking to Shiva, for Ysayle to remember or forget later on. “I think so. She switched between the two easily enough, and she never seemed confused.”

“And she didn’t forget who she was?”

Frydlona shakes her head. “Never. I had to fight her once, because her summoning was draining too much aether from the land, but I was glad when we were able to fight together instead of against each other. I liked her.”

Ryne stares into the space between them, considering. “So she found a way to be powerful, when she wouldn’t have had anything like that normally. I wonder how it first occurred to her that she could do that…”

“It was about faith, for her,” Frydlona says slowly. “When Hraesvelgr told her that she had made up her Shiva and insulted his beloved’s memory in doing so it destroyed her. She thought it was about being Shiva. If she had lived she might have figured out who she was on her own, and what Shiva meant for her as a…a weapon, or even a prayer, but.”

Neither Ryne nor Gaia looks surprised. “How did she die, then?” Gaia asks, frowning at—Ryne?

“Saving our lives,” Frydlona says. “All of us, in the end, but right then mine and Alphinaud and Y’shtola’s, as well as allies of ours you don’t know.”

Cid and Biggs and Wedge among them, but she doesn’t—she flinches away from wondering whether, if Cid had survived, if the Ironworks had survived, if the Eighth Umbral Calamity had still struck, whether there would have been anything left at all those centuries on. If they still would have been able to awaken G’raha, if he would have looked at the ruin she’d made of everything she touched after he bid her farewell, and shrugged, and sought a better hero to undo it all.

“Frydlona?” Thancred’s voice is strangely gentle.

She shakes her head, flicking the thoughts away like so many flies. “We would have died, and failed at stopping a—just like Vauthry again, really. A ruler eaten up by his own power and self-image, making the worst of everyone he ruled and turning himself into a monster that had to be stopped. And Ysayle—Shiva—came out of nowhere, just in time, and took the shots aimed at our airship herself.”

For a moment, there is silence. Urianger bows his head. Ryne presses a hand to her heart, fingers spread.

Frydlona thinks of her last sight of Ysayle, a blue-white spark vanishing into the murky yellow skies below Azys Lla. “Hraesvelgr brought her to us, in the end. I hope…I hope she had peace.”

Ryne nods thoughtfully. “You’re right. She does sound brave and kind. To do something she knew was right, and had to be done, in spite of the cost…”

“Ryne,” Gaia says.

“What!” Ryne says. “It wouldn’t hurt you to honor the memories of the dead too. Anyway, we’d better get going!”

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2022 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 5.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #ryne #etc.

[weatheredpileoftomes]

primal courage

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 16, “deiform”. Frydlona, post-Endwalker, ~500 words. Spoilers for the 6.1 Myths of the Realm alliance raid quests, for ARR sylph tribal quests, and briefly for tier 1 Eden raids; discussion of canonical character death. (Not a direct sequel to Enough Prayers for the Day but touches on related themes.)

A change in perspective.

Frydlona offers prayers to Byregot daily. More than daily, sometimes. Looking up at him now—lightning rippling across his skin, hammer in hand held more like Nero’s than her own smithing tools—she feels…unmoored. Lost.

The thought of trusting the souls of her dead to this sneering Thal is dizzying, sickening.

She looks from Azeyma to Raha, who rarely speaks about his faith but had quietly added his own shrine to the Warden near Frydlona’s to the Matron and the Builder. His face is set.

Frydlona had never appreciated how deeply brave Noraxia was. Not when she was still alive, not even after she died fighting a battle that was lost before she even began and against orders to save herself. Frydlona had learned conjury, and then white magic, because of Noraxia’s courage—because Noraxia dying under her hands had been so senselessly awful that she couldn’t not let it change her.

She has saved lives because of Noraxia. She has—she had—

She swallows down that unmoored feeling again and looks back at Rhalgr. Covered in crackling violet power that arcs off his skin in little jolts, bearded and floating, he reminds her both of Ramuh and of Ryne’s unicorn-legged recreation of the primal.

The Scions of the Seventh Dawn had been devoted to combating the primal threat. Noraxia had known that when she insisted on joining them. They had met when Minfilia had sent Frydlona and Lyse and Papalymo to be sure the sylphs had no intention of summoning Ramuh, and to stop them—stop him—if they did.

Minfilia had sent Frydlona and Y’shtola to stop the kobolds from summoning Titan, or to dissipate him if it was too late to stop his summoning, and Noraxia had stayed. She’d died attacking the woman who threatened Minfilia.

Frydlona had thought helping the sylphs of Little Solace was the best she could do for Noraxia’s memory. She had done it, and gladly, even dealing with that bungling Hyuran researcher all the way. Every podling she rescued from the Sylphlands, every tempered sylph she misdirected, the fear and the struggle of saving the Chosen One not once but twice—she’d reminded herself Noraxia would never have faltered.

She looks up at Byregot again. Aside from the glaives Raha had commissioned for her, she has made every defense she has. Protective and strengthening magicks are woven into the cloth of her dress, stitched into the leather of her boots, set like gems into her jewelry, baked into the very food she will eat.

Noraxia had signed on to help the Scions of the Seventh Dawn knowing she might be asked to help Frydlona defeat Ramuh and send him back to the aether he had formed from.

Noraxia would never have faltered. Frydlona can do no less.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2022 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 6.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #noraxia #THE BRAVEST AND BEST OF CABBAGES ;o;

[weatheredpileoftomes]

moonkissed

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 18, a free day, written bc Day 16 reminded me that I’d meant to get back to Frydlona and Menphina when I wrote about Frydlona’s personal theological beliefs (6.0 spoilers). Frydlona/Exarch and past unrequited Frydlona/Haurchefant, ??? to Shadowbringers postgame, ~3000 words. Spoilers through 5.3, for dark knight jobquests through 70, and for Shadowbringers craftquests capstone; canonical character death, survivor’s guilt. (There’s an immediate sequel to this I leave as bait for another even later future me.)

Menphina’s blessings are as stubborn as the tides, if not as regular.

The mark of the Lover is in Coerthas, graven deep into one of the cairns Frydlona passes every time she returns to Haurchefant’s memorial. They placed it well.

She doesn’t know if that was one of his favorite spots only for the view of Ishgard. It is a lovely one, with the city rising up from the mists like a confection of towers, prettier yet at dawn or dusk with the harsh grey stone washed rose and golden. But perhaps he’d found it in the first place coming to the mark of the Lover to pray, and only come back after for the sights. She doesn’t know. She will never know. She has not the right to know.

The Heaven of Ice is not just for lovers, but for knights and heroes, the truest and purest of what Halone could have been. She can’t imagine Haurchefant anywhere else—he was all of those things, little as she’d welcomed it while it still could have mattered. And it must have been gentle Menphina to welcome him there, not Halone in all her wrath.

Centuries of eager hands have worn the stone around the mark smooth as if it’s been polished, reaching out to it for blessing.

Frydlona flinches from it every time she passes. She comes to the memorial only in daylight and always leaves at duskfall, not daring to stand by it under Menphina’s silver beams. The Lover might be a gentle goddess, even welcoming Oschon in the face of Llymlaen’s justified anger, but surely even she must have her limits. The Hell of Ice is not only Halone’s domain, after all, any more than the Heaven of Ice is only Menphina’s.

It’s hard to imagine something so easy to anger the Lover as rejecting her blessings. She had given Frydlona a gallant and true-hearted knight, a man instantly loyal, warmly courageous, selflessly devoted. He represented Menphina’s virtues better than Ishgard’s; he could have been spun of the goddess’s own moonbeams to be her champion.

He would have helped Frydlona carry her burdens, if only she had been willing to let him, and she had slapped his every offer away.

The Hell of Ice is for cowards and oathbreakers, and Frydlona broke no oaths to him, and yet.

The moon of the First shines a subtly different light across the world, faintly gold-tinged like the great wall of frozen Light that still stands in Amh Araeng. Dalamud’s light was red-tinted, Menphina’s is pure white.

“Does she have a name?” Frydlona asks Lyna one night not long after returning from the Greatwood. She wouldn’t have asked before, or at least she wouldn’t have dared ask Lyna, but it seems most of Norvrandt’s secrets have been peeled away before her already. “The moon, I mean.”

“We call it”—a string of what must be Viis that Frydlona can’t even begin to break apart—“‘the Chariot of Yx’Lowka’. The Church of the First Light only called it the moon. The dwarves…” Lyna shrugs with a clank of her mail. “Who can say what the dwarves call it, if it’s anything other than ‘moon’.”

Frydlona nods. Odd, to stand under an unnamed moon, that only carries and makes no judgment.

“And you?” Lyna asks, frowning up at Frydlona. “What is…she…where the Exarch and you come from?”

Why Lyna hasn’t just asked the Exarch Frydlona couldn’t say, but even if it wouldn’t be rude to dismiss her question, it’s only fair to answer. “Her name is Menphina,” she says. “Goddess of love and…kindness, I suppose you’d say. The people she chose as her saints fed the hungry and brought medicine to the sick. Everyone who met them came away the better for it.”

Frydlona would love to be that kind of person, but if she ever could have been it’s been too many years and far, far too many deaths for it. The lives she’s left in ruins behind her…

Lyna nods sharply. “I see.”

That same unnamed moon shines gentle on the Crystarium as they limp back from Amaurot—all alive, all well. Somehow, all well. For a moment as they cross Tessellation Frydlona sees the Warriors of Darkness, joyful and waving, and Ardbert running ahead to meet them. She blinks and they’re all gone, only the crowds of people she’s come to know and work with since she came. All just as joyful.

They insist on a party. There’s already food, and music. Frydlona takes off her mourning and puts her Warrior of Darkness costume back on, brightening it up with a sash the shimmering blue of—well, it matches her glaives, technically, but she isn’t bringing them.

She doesn’t know what to say to the Exarch. She wouldn’t have known what to say to the Exarch even if he hadn’t told her she might as well keep calling him that, instead of by his name. They’re…colleagues, she supposes.

It’s a little—

It’s kind of—

People are thinking things, is the thing, from the way everyone talked to her after Emet-Selch had shot him and stolen him to Amaurot, as if she had some special right to be upset.

She brushes her fingers across the crystalline blades of her glaives. They’re beautiful, as much jewelry as weapon. He’d had them made for her, and kept them all those years, and then, what, been too shy to give them to her? She thinks, from the way he’d looked seeing her carrying them below the Tempest, that that must have been it.

She thinks about the way he’d looked seeing her carrying them below the Tempest, the way he’d shivered when she checked him for injuries, then shakes her head, hard.

Frydlona has spent years wishing she’d given Haurchefant the chance he should have had. They could have been happy. She could have made him happy, instead of only making his life harder and more frustrating until he’d—even then—jumped in front of Zephirin’s spear for her.

She’d treated the Exarch with suspicion and hostility, and still he’d planned the whole time to throw himself into the Rift for her.

He isn’t her second chance. She can be nice to him, certainly. There’s no reason she shouldn’t. They can be colleagues, and if she happens to find a book she might think he’d like she can buy it for him the same way she would for Alphinaud, or bring him something to eat if he forgets the same way she would for Y’shtola, and that’s perfectly reasonable.

And it wouldn’t hurt to spend time with him—she’s going to see him when she goes down to the party, certainly, and there’s no harm in talking to him there, for a start. Of course she wants him to enjoy the time he spends with her, when he was so ready to never have it again.

But she can’t— It isn’t fair, just because he’s alive, just because she saved him, to try to— She’s seen the way he looks at her, now that she can see his eyes again. She’s heard the way he speaks to her, even before that, the warmth in his voice like the heat at the door to a forge. It would be too easy, if he speaks to her again like he did above Kholusia, or in the ruins of Holminster, to just…reach out, like he so clearly wishes she would, like he just as clearly would never ask her to.

And she can’t, when he deserves so much better than her pity, her obligation, her wish to make amends.

He isn’t Haurchefant. She’d do well to remember that.

Frydlona has no shrine to Menphina. She’d had a runestone, once. It’s in her parents’ home in Cliffhide still if they haven’t gotten rid of it—she has a vague memory of brushing her fingers across it, thinking let me find that again, at least let me have another chance. It was before Haurchefant’s death, of course, she wouldn’t have dared after. So it must have been just before she left home.

Instead she kneels at the window of her room at the Rising Stones. Menphina is barely a sliver in the swirling sky above Mor Dhona, but that sliver is enough.

Please, she prays. Please, don’t let me hurt him.

The thin gleam of white in the sky makes no response.

Don’t let me do it. Keep me from just taking what I want, when I can’t give fairly in return. Let him find someone who loves him back for himself, not because he would have died for them and they think it would make him happy.

The thought hurts as it should. Menphina, pale and undistant, remains unmoved. Frydlona gets up slowly from the floor and makes her way to bed.

Frydlona finds the young Elf boy wedged into the corner of the steps outside the Pendants just at the edge of the pool of lamplight, sniffling.

“What’s wrong?”

He breaks down sobbing at her question, and she drops to her knees and pats his shoulder, feeling useless. Dead parents, mayhap—it’s still not entirely safe out there, with some sin eaters still roaming, and the usual sorts of beasts as well. Or even just the usual hurts of childhood—a fight with a friend, a friend whose family has gone looking for better opportunity elsewhere, a parent who’s too harsh or too unsympathetic.

He just cries harder at the touch, small body shaking.

“Can I do anything?” Frydlona asks, knowing she can’t. She doesn’t think he’s hurt, and she’s certain he’s not hungry. Nobody in the Crystarium would let a child starve.

“You’re too nice!” he wails.

She sits back in surprise.

Through a fresh flood of sobbing she thinks she makes out “night-light” before his voice jumps in pitch and his words all run together, which…what?

“Is this about the night-lights I made?”

A nod.

Something she actually can fix? It feels like a lesser miracle in itself. “Do you want one? I can make one for you, if…there were supposed to be enough for everyone.”

He raises his face, red and blotchy from crying, from his knees. “I broke it! I had one and I broke it and my mother says I can’t ask for another one because I don’t take care of my things and it’s dark! And you’re so nice and I broke it!” His voice rises to a scream.

“All right,” Frydlona says gently. “All right.” She finds a clean handkerchief in one of her pockets and hands it to him. “Well, you didn’t ask for a new one, I just found out you didn’t have one. So if I make you a new one right now, then you haven’t asked, and you’ll still have a night-light to take home with you.”

“But I broke it! Aren’t you listening? I broke it!” He balls up the handkerchief and scrubs at his face with it.

Frydlona puts as much doubt into her voice as she can. “On purpose?”

There’s a pause. “…no.”

“And you’re sorry it got broken, aren’t you? If you had another one you’d take very good care of it?”

He nods frantically.

She checks her bag. A few crystals, some wire, jeweler’s pliers—ah, there, a nice fat round opal. Some fire and lightning in its heart will do a fine job of making light. “Things get broken sometimes. It’s just how it is. That doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to fix them if you can fix them, or have anything like them ever again if you can’t.”

Sailors follow stars, but the sea follows the moon. Menphina has never pulled the waters of the First to and fro. The Tempest has never risen to her call or sunk in her absence.

Elidibus’s specters are so real Frydlona can touch them.

She knows this, because she has had to kill some of them already. She has cut into the memory of their flesh, spilled the memory of their blood. Nightmares that still won’t die, friends that already have or might still.

Myste clings to her hand, so tightly Frydlona can feel the bones grate together. It anchors her.

“Keep walking,” Fray says.

Frydlona had fumbled her glaives when Papalymo attacked her. Fray knows the greatsword best, and that’s what Frydlona is—what they are—carrying now, Fray’s hands wrapping around hers on the hilt every time she draws it before Fray is the one to swing, and swing, and swing again.

She lets Frydlona be the one to clean it, after.

“Look,” Myste cries. The sound is torn from his throat, so frantic Frydlona hardly recognizes it.

Across the square stand three men in Ishgardian garb, one of them with blue-silver hair the same gleaming shade as Myste’s. Frydlona stops dead, and even Fray doesn’t move her feet closer. Fray had walked her all through occupied Ala Mhigo, ridden Frydlona’s paralyzing fear like a bad crosswind and brought them safe to harbor anyway.

Fray stands there below the Tempest, on a star neither of them were ever meant to walk, and stares just as Frydlona does.

Myste drops Frydlona’s hand and takes off at a run, pale as a ghost himself. She wants to call him back, but she doesn’t know if her voice will work. He circles the group and runs back, even faster. “It’s all right!” he calls. “Come see!”

Frydlona does move, then. They’re like the bystanders she had seen around some of her earlier battles but even more so. They don’t see her, or respond to her.

Her knees wobble and then give. She sinks to the cool stone.

Haurchefant is arguing with his father about Camp Dragonhead, the men and supplies they need and the ones they could use. Wages, repairs, profits and income. Frydlona doesn’t understand it, but she sits there and listens anyway.

Myste could never have shown her this, she knows it now. This Haurchefant can’t make any demands of her, and can’t offer her forgiveness in exchange. But Myste’s couldn’t have either, not really.

She’s never followed the economics of Ishgard. She’s never commanded a fort. She has no earthly idea what Haurchefant and his father are talking about. It’s so…ordinary, strangely so, for a conversation between a ghost and a memory, in such a place as this.

It’s real, she doesn’t doubt that much—even if this exact conversation never happened, it still could have. Elidibus’s specters are terrible because they’re so real. But it’s not what she remembered.

Count Fortemps’s face is younger, brighter. She’s sure Elidibus meant that to haunt her, but she knows. Arguing over the budget for Camp Dragonhead he’s a little pompous, a little old-fashioned, but still responsible. He listens when Haurchefant makes points. He’s willing to consider that he doesn’t know everything. There is a kindness to him, harsh as he can be to his living sons. Frydlona had feared that harshness herself the whole time Haurchefant had been alive, and hadn’t been able to see the kindness after without choking on it. This is a Count Fortemps she could look in the face.

Haurchefant is—she had remembered him differently, even now. He is the commander of Camp Dragonhead, responsible for dozens on dozens of lives. He is conscientious, passionate, well-informed.

And yet, the star is full of such people.

Frydlona sits quietly against the wall, watching him. He seems smaller than she imagined him, the living memory of the man whose ghost has driven her across greater distances than she can measure. She has carried so much for him, knowing he would have believed she could do it. Knowing that, as long as he had died for her, she had to do it.

Haurchefant exclaims, “And yet with only so many lancers on hand half of them will get only one day off a sennight, and the other half none! Either send us more men, or appeal to Lord Drillemont to take on a greater share of the patrols.”

The deep peacock-blue of the haunted city blurs behind Frydlona’s tears. He had been a good man, and she wishes she had treated him as he deserved. And yet, what would he say if he could see her now?

Elidibus’s specter carries on his appeal, but Frydlona thinks of the real Haurchefant, dying in her arms, blood bubbling in his mouth as he asked her to smile as one last favor to him.

She thinks of the soul-deep exhaustion that had driven Fray to lash out like a wounded animal in a trap, of years afterward spent faking a strength and a courage she didn’t feel. Of the bright and shining gold of her Warrior of Light outfit. Of the dread of people expecting that of her. Of forcing herself, time and again, to go on at the end of her strength, dragging herself one more aching step not with the love of her friends but from the fear of a ghost’s regret.

She thinks of Haurchefant after Ul’dah, bringing her hot chocolate when she was frozen past the marrow of her bones, of Haurchefant in Ishgard, inviting her to a chocobo race, a play, a choral mass at Saint Reymanaud’s Cathedral.

She thinks, perhaps, she has done his memory a terrible wrong.

Myste’s small arms wrap around her as she cries, here, in the deep gloom under an alien sea, far below any ray of sun or moon. She cries until she feels washed clean as old shell.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2022 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: ship #my fic: 5.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #drk squad ensemble #frydlona x haurchefant #frydlona x g'raha

[weatheredpileoftomes]

diversions

For Wondrous Tails of FFXIV, “toys” (from the NSFW prompt list). Set during Stormblood, but mostly only by crafting mats; ~3000 words (?!?). This is a fic about crafting but it is specifically about crafting sex toys; also contains canon-typical sexual harassment from Gigi the goldsmithing mammet and spoilers for drk jobquests through 50.

Some of the commissions the crafting guilds take are stranger than others.

“Oh dear!” Serendipity says, frowning at the piece of paper Jemime has just handed her.

“Is ThErE a PrObLeM?” It should be impossible for a mammet to sound excited about a potential problem, but Gigi manages it. Frydlona keeps one eye on him and the other on Serendipity.

“We have five commissions from important merchant families.”

For some reason, she seems to think this is a bad thing. Frydlona is definitely missing something here. “What’s wrong with that?”

Serendipity hesitates, tugging at one of her twintails. “Well…oh dear. They’re nearly all rather complicated, and I wasn’t expecting this many, and one of them is delicate. Do you think you could help me with two of them?”

“Of course,” Frydlona says, confused. “What do you mean, delicate?” She hopes it’s not gold leaf. She hates working with gold leaf, which sticks to her fingers but flies away if she exhales too near it.

Serendipity looks at Gigi, then hands Frydlona the list.

“OhOhO! aNoThEr MaMmEt FoR pErSoNaL pLeAsUrE, cRaFtEd FoR a NaRrOw-MiNdEd FoOl WhO cAnNoT aPpReCiAtE a MoRe—”

Frydlona picks Gigi up with her other hand and puts him in an empty supply drawer.

“Please be careful with him,” Serendipity says, but she doesn’t make any move to take Gigi back out. A few muffled words drift out to their ears.

One of the requests is in fact for a Mammet Pleasurer #008D, a thing Frydlona shouldn’t be surprised you can just buy in Ul’dah but finds she is anyway. Another is for a wall-mounted chronometer that will not only display the day’s weather but predict the morrow’s. There’s a request for a music box that will let the listener choose between three different songs, and for a different music box to be topped with a clockwork ballroom scene featuring at least four couples in a round dance. The fifth calls for a tiara, earrings, necklace, bracelets, and rings, all with matching pearls.

“Which of these do you want to assign me?” Frydlona asks. The pearl set looks easy if the pearls can be found, and Aistan can probably help with that. It’s all the clockwork that will be a problem, and there are some apprentices and maybe even journeymen she’s not sure Serendipity wants to assign the Mammet Pleasurer #008D to.

“—OpPoRtUnItY—” Gigi insists faintly.

Serendipity takes the list back, her frown deepening. “You haven’t worked much on barometers, have you?”

Frydlona has to shake her head.

“I should have you do that at some point, but I don’t think… The time is so short. I think…oh, I think I’ll have Nanaren take charge of the chronometer, and W’arhll the parure.” She looks worriedly up at Frydlona. “You have done some mammet repairs in the past—would you be willing to work on the special mammet as well as one of the music boxes?”

Frydlona nods, considering. “If someone else knows the dance for the second music box, I don’t—it would be quicker if they could do that one.”

“Oh good,” Serendipity says, beaming. “I’ll get you the schematics for the other two, then.”

Gigi kicks the drawer open. “An OuTrAgE! yOu CoWaRdLy InCoMpEtEnTs! YoU fEaR mY rEjEcTiOn Of YoUr InAdEqUaTe BoTtOm AnD yOuR gArGaNtUaN hEiGhT!”

“Yes,” Frydlona says. “That’s it exactly.”

Serendipity turns back around with her hands full of papers. “Oh dear! Gigi, did you hurt yourself?”

The Mammet Pleasurer #008D turns out to be a simple enough design and not just a convenient thing to have around, once Frydlona actually gets a look at the schematic, though she is a little worried about how delicate the gears that work the vibrating arm are. It’s possible another metal would hold up better than mythril—she’d like to try it with durium, if she had more time, but that would call for stronger belts, and…hm. Best to stick with the original schematic.

The core is very simple, closer to the modified cores the Ironworks has used for a few of their magitek experiments or even the ones found in wind-up toys, which is probably why Serendipity trusted her with the commission at all. It’s for the best for more than one reason, Frydlona thinks. Some people might want a Gigi, but a lot of people certainly wouldn’t, and Gigi has strong enough preferences of his own to consider as well.

And speaking of Gigi—

“AdEqUaTe,” he sniffs. “FoR wHaTeVeR fLaCcId MeRcHaNt’S uGlY wIfE nEeDs It.”

“Now hold on.” Frydlona taps the final rivet into place. “You don’t know who ordered this or why. You don’t have to jump to the worst possible conclusion about them.”

“EhEhEhE. dO i NoT?”

“You really don’t,” Frydlona says, and starts polishing the metal to a satiny finish. She hopes it’s helpful to its commissioner. There have been times she wouldn’t have minded having something like it herself, but even if there hadn’t been, it’s just manners.

Geva is more direct, which isn’t surprising.

“Ever made a set of restraints for recreational use?” she asks out of nowhere while Frydlona is preparing alumen.

One of the apprentices knocks over an entire tray of tools. There’s an awful crash, and the slow sound of an awl continuing to roll across the floor. Geva doesn’t blink, let alone turn. “Pick it all up,” she says. “Now. Frydlona?”

Frydlona puts her alembic aside. “I’ve never made a set of restraints for any use.”

“That’s going to change,” Geva says. “This commission is going to put your skills to good use, and it’s not something Fen-Yll wants advertised as theirs nor something I want to have to explain why I didn’t put the Fen-Yll name on. You’re more than competent to do it well and you don’t work for Fen-Yll. Now, what leather would you use?”

What a question. Frydlona tries to think—she’s heard about people tying each other up in bed (or out of it), in tavern chatter in Limsa where it sounded interesting and in novels where it mostly read like the people getting tied up weren’t having enough fun to make it worth the effort. None of that helps, and the roomful of apprentices and journeymen watching Geva’s test makes her reluctant to admit she has no idea. She’d hoped they were past this by now.

Geva is watching her, arms folded.

“What scale are they being made to?” Frydlona remembers to ask.

“Good. The client has requested they be scaled to fit a midlander Hyur.”

The leather will need to be flexible enough to make fairly narrow loops that will hold up to strain, then. Frydlona would have recommended gyuki at once if they were being made to fit a Lalafell, but she does have quite a few more options for a Hyur, even a midlander. “And the budget?”

Geva nods. “As you can imagine from anyone who didn’t just hope to commission Fen-Yll, but would have, finance is no object.”

Frydlona considers it, still unsure. Everyone else in the guild is still watching intently, probably glad Geva isn’t asking them. She doesn’t know, and she’s not willing to try to bluff. “It depends on what the client wants. Hippogryph leather would be an easy and practical option that doesn’t sacrifice raw quality. If the client is most concerned with how it looks, coeurl skins make leather with a striking pattern, or chimera hide takes dyes especially well even after curing. Gyuki leather from Othard is very supple.” The client might want something less yielding, though. “Most of the saurian leathers are tougher. I’d say procoptodon if they want that and they’d guarantee the material costs, pteinosaur or pterodactyl if they wouldn’t.”

“Excellent,” Geva says. There’s a surprised murmur from the apprentices, and even a few of the journeymen look impressed. “And what other materials?”

“It still depends on what the client wants,” Frydlona says, much more confident in her uncertainty now that she knows what Geva is doing. There probably is a commission, and it probably even is for restraints, but Geva is using it to teach the apprentices, knowing that the initial question would get their attention. She thinks about her gathering wristbands and the way they used to irritate her skin when her work gloves hit them wrong until she started lining them. “Some kind of padding, unless they want the leather to leave marks. Maybe a soft cloth like silk over something else, maybe fur. Rings if they’d like to attach the restraints to something else. Maybe they want some jewels worked into the design.”

“Perfect.”

All the journeymen look shocked now. One of the apprentices is gaping.

Geva turns back to them and says, “Who can tell me what—Hob, close your mouth before I decide you’re offering your tonsils for tanning—who can tell me what you’ve learned here?”

Another murmur. Finally one of the journeymen puts her hand up. “Keep the client’s needs in mind?”

“And budget,” the young man next to her says. “Master Leatherworker Merlgeimwyn mentioned that twice, one time even after you said they could afford Fen-Yll.”

Geva nods to them both.

“And the properties of the leather,” says another journeyman.

“That’s the client’s needs!” the young woman who’d answered first protests.

While they argue about that, Geva walks over to Frydlona’s workbench. “I have the commission information here,” she says. “Good thinking on those questions—they’re all answered in there.”

Frydlona had not wanted to have to guess. “Good.”

“There’s good money in this, you know. It’d be better with a name to recognize, but if you’re ever looking for the easiest way to make gil as a leatherworker…”

Frydlona shakes her head.

Geva raises an eyebrow. “Too good for it?”

“I don’t want to have to check my clients that carefully.” Frydlona looks down at the notes—wrist measurements, ankle measurements. Chain—she can make that herself, rather than ask the guild suppliers. Dark leather, not black; neutral padding dyed to match. Moderate flexibility, nothing out of the way. “I trust you did, but I wouldn’t want to have to trust a stranger means well with these.”

She’s not sure she’s ever seen Geva look that taken aback before. “I—did, but thank you. And don’t let this lot hear you say that!”

“Your secret is safe,” Frydlona says, and gets up to start sorting through samples.

She has made dildos before.

The first time had been when a stammering Brithael had practically shoved a pretty client at the nearest smith in his shop, who happened to be Frydlona. Q’zanza was one of the easier customers Frydlona had worked with, and her request was fairly straightforward. She had a clear idea of the dimensions she wanted, and a fairly simple shape in mind.

Steel was easy to work with, too. Frydlona had been able to work up a wax model to be sure Q’zanza was happy with the design before casting it. Wax and clay were easy to model; showing a client exactly what they’d get was always good. Q’zanza had paid at once and in full, and come back for more standard blacksmithing jobs.

The second time had also been more or less an accident, at least as far as it being Frydlona’s job went. Corgg had asked her to see what was up with a suspicious-acting Elezen in lancer’s armor loitering near the shop. When Frydlona had gone out to talk to him he’d stammered something about a sensitive commission.

“Beatin doesn’t bite, you know,” she’d said.

“I can’t listen to him talking about how someone has to be the wood!”

Once he’d explained the commission, she’d had to admit he had a point. It might be a little uncomfortable to think about the carpenter being that involved in the finished product.

Still, again, the dildo itself hadn’t been hard to make, and although Ursulin wasn’t as clear with his ideas as Q’zanza had been, she’d at least been able to work out what he wanted by showing him sketches and measurements. Wood wasn’t like wax—she had had to be absolutely sure of every shaving she carved off—but she’d picked out a nice mahogany with a lovely grain that didn’t catch on her knife, and it turned out nicely enough, especially once she lacquered it.

She was proud of it when she finished, and Ursulin had seemed pleased too. It had been harder than the first, but she’d had more experience crafting things to order since then too. Some of the conjurers’ canes that Beatin had had her make were much harder to get right.

This, though…

“I simply don’t have time for such frivolity,” Severian snaps.

He looks like he’s been sleeping, at least. Well, mostly sleeping. He doesn’t look like he’s gone so long without sleep that he’s been seeing things again, anyway, which is probably as good as it gets for Severian.

“But what do they want?” Frydlona looks around the guild in case anyone else wants to help, but as far as she can tell nobody is listening.

Severian makes an impatient gesture. “Glassware.”

They have definitely made glassware before. The room is full of glittering beakers, vials, retorts, bottles… “For…parties?” Frydlona tries. “Or cosmetics?” It can’t be that different making a perfume bottle than a bottle to hold a potion or salve, can it?

“Does it matter?”

“Well, it’s a commission.” Frydlona glances at his workbench, but there are so many papers there that she can’t hope to make sense of which one this is. The topmost sheet seems to be mostly sketches of plants. “So if you need someone to make it, and you want me to make it, I need to know what it is, or I can’t.”

Severian makes a disgusted noise. “I suppose. It’s a waste of your time when you could be working on serious projects, though. You’ll gain no useful skills from crafting a phallus, and it won’t benefit—”

Frydlona holds up a hand. “I’m sorry. You said glass?”

He did say glass. It doesn’t matter that the client’s specifications are detailed and clear, he absolutely did say glass. The thought that it might break is a fair bit terrifying to Frydlona, even though she knows it probably wouldn’t be her fault if it did. If it were, if there were a fault in the glass—

The client wants it shaped like a series of stacked spheres, which doesn’t make her less nervous. She’ll want to use a few fire shards as well as the lightning crystals, to give a steady heat that will help melt each of the spheres together, but…

She abandons another test project.

“You shouldn’t be wasting your time on this either,” Severian says from behind her. “I must have a more incompetent apprentice somewhere.” He’s looking down at the scattering of spheres across her workspace.

Frydlona can smash them down and re-melt them, of course, but it’s still…well, he’s right. It is a waste. “If there’s someone who can do this better, please. But if there isn’t…” She shrugs.

“This is hardly an urgent necessity. It’s a toy.”

She starts sweeping the glass spheres into the lined bag for clean glass waste. “People like to do things that make them feel good. For some people that’s food or music or wine, but you’re not saying we should shut down every tavern in Ul’dah. Some people travel, or play games, or get a baby animal, or watch a match at the Coliseum. Some people have sex. People can’t just… People need their frivolities.”

“You don’t,” Severian says.

Frydlona opens her mouth to reply. Stops. Tries again. “I…I don’t what?”

“Get distracted. You’re reliable, even with all the…” He gestures. “All of that fighting business you keep having to do. The wars. When I send you a request you fill it, you keep improving at your craft, and the realm still seems to be in one piece so you must be doing your part there as well.”

“I do things that make me feel good,” Frydlona protests.

Fray, who usually leaves Frydlona alone while she’s making things, says, “Do you?”

’Shut up,’ Frydlona tells her. She’s fairly sure she didn’t say it out loud; she’s not sure Severian would notice if she did.

The glass is still not fusing well enough for her to be satisfied. To Severian she adds, “I’m going to try this again with some aethersand and see if it sticks better.”

He looks thoughtful—just what she’d hoped by making it about her process instead of his commission. “Aethersand…that could be interesting. Try everbright first; the residual energies of the lava should serve as an additional binding force. Have you tried incorporating dark matter?”

She hasn’t, but now that he mentions it… “Good idea.”

It takes another few days’ work before she has something that meets the client’s specifications and that she thinks will hold, but by the time she does Severian is pleased with the glassworking techniques they’ve had to adapt. Everyone else is just pleased that the job is done.

“Adopt a kitten,” Fray says afterward, leaning against the wall in Frydlona’s room at the Quicksand and not helping her pack. “Go have sex. Come to the godsdamned beach. Something!”

“I have meetings.” Frydlona folds a pearly-white cape and packs it on top of the gleaming gold of one of her armored tabards. “Alliance things. Maybe after that.”

“It’s been ‘maybe after that’ since—”

“Maybe,” Frydlona says, spacing out each word, “after that.” She ties her bag firmly closed and goes to pay her bill.

#i do NOT know what happened here #wondroustailsofffxiv #wondroustailsofffxivwriting #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 4.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #crafting fic

[weatheredpileoftomes]

let me in

For Wondrous Tails of FFXIV, “confessions”. Frydlona/Exarch and past unrequited Frydlona/Haurchefant, post-Shadowbringers (probably 5.2), spoilers through the end of 5.0 and for drk quests through 50, ~2200 words. Canonical character death, grief, survivor’s guilt.

Frydlona is tired of the lie.

“I was wondering,” the Exarch says softly, “if you would be willing to tell me of some of your adventures yourself.”

Rain taps lightly against the glass overhead. The lavender tops of the trees far below his favorite vantage point sway. A few children splash gleefully in a puddle, so small Frydlona can’t even tell what sort of children they are. She wonders how long it’ll be before rain in Norvrandt is a commonplace thing again.

How long before she doesn’t have a reason to be up here with him anymore.

“Which ones?” she asks, trying to sound as if she hadn’t been trying to catch him watching her just for the selfish glee of it. She shouldn’t. He deserves better.

“Oh, any of them.” A moment’s pause, then he adds, more slowly, “I have…wondered what happened just after we parted ways. Count Edmont de Fortemps’s memoirs said your arrival in Ishgard was just a few moons after I sealed the Tower.”

Of course bloody Heavensward has followed her even here, to another star. “Mm.”

The Exarch looks away, giving her the crystalline side of his profile. She wonders if the crystal soaks up the cool of the rain. “Pardon me. That was a painful time in your life, and I had no right—”

“We went back to Saint Coinach’s Find,” Frydlona says quickly. “It was…uncomfortable. Nero left right away, and that distracted Cid, but everyone else… We wanted to free you.”

She thinks he smiles, a little.

“But there was a lot happening with the traitor in the Immortal Flames and—well, in the Crystal Braves, too, but we didn’t know that yet. And I don’t really know anything about magitek or Allagan technology except how to break it, so I left the Ironworks and the Sons trying to figure it out and went to do what Minfilia asked me to.” Did he think she should have stayed, or wish she had? Is that it?

She must have hesitated a moment too long, because he says, “Of course,” as if it really is that obvious. “I hope…I hope you were able to find some respite between these errands?”

Frydlona shrugs. She wouldn’t describe Severian’s desperate quest as respite, but Serendipity had insisted she learn a few things about mammet repair, and Fufucha and Redolent Rose were always pleasant company. “I helped a few of my guildmasters with projects when I was in the right place for it. Did some fishing. I managed a quick visit home after Moenbryda died—it was good to see my family, and especially later I was glad I’d had the chance.”

“Of…course.” This time he sounds… She doesn’t know what to call it. Not uncertain, exactly.

She doesn’t know what answer he wants.

“And then you were all betrayed.” The Exarch looks up at her. His Allagan red eyes are vivid against his pale face, faded hair, the rain-veiled city beyond. “Yes?”

“Wilred tried to warn us.” She’d been so angry at Wilred when they first met—what had he hoped to gain by summoning Rhalgr, except the deaths of everyone who followed him?—but she knows the Ascians better, now. She knows Wilred better, too. Poor boy. “They killed him before he could, and then…”

There have been worse nightmares since then, but the thing that still haunts her most isn’t Nanamo crumpling to the floor while the Warden’s Paean echoes uselessly in the air, or the hot spray of Raubahn’s blood across her dress, or even Merlwyb and Kan-E-Senna turning and walking away while Frydlona herself knelt on the floor in chains.

It’s the knowledge that if she’d had her wand with her when she went for her personal visit with the sultana, Thancred and Y’shtola would never have been lost for so long in the Lifestream. Hydaelyn might have taken Minfilia anyway, but perhaps she could at least have said goodbye, or Hydaelyn might have found someone else. They could have had more time with Papalymo. Maybe even Haurchefant wouldn’t have had to die.

“We were all betrayed,” she agrees.

The only sound is the rain, drumming on the glass, roaring down the gutters. The Exarch waits patiently while Frydlona prepares to tell the well-worn lie—she’d forgotten to seed it, earlier, hadn’t mentioned those trips to and from Camp Dragonhead as a respite. She probably should have. It’s certainly what Alphinaud and Tataru had assumed.

Menphina’s tears, she doesn’t want to. The truth is too ugly to give him, even if it would cure him of his infatuation, but maybe if she just…doesn’t lie. “We couldn’t think of anywhere to go except to hope for a welcome in Ishgardian lands after that. I didn’t know that the Admiral and the Elder Seedseer had their doubts, or that Lolorito”—she makes a face—“could be reasoned with. Not that we could have stayed in Ul’dah either way. Lord Francel didn’t have the resources to help us, really, but if Lord Haurchefant had refused we would have tried him instead.”

The Exarch opens his mouth to protest, then closes it again. He looks baffled.

She’s doing such a poor job of this. Nothing to do but go on. “He was…he was very kind. Much kinder than he had to be.” Her eyes are prickling. She has to breathe deep, swallow hard, but her voice at least doesn’t break. She hadn’t expected the truth to hurt this much, still. “He tried to make us welcome. Give us what little joy there was to give in Coerthas.”

Frydlona had thought the worst of him, grieving and unmoored as she was, and that is not a conversation she wants to have with the Crystal Exarch, or with Feo Ul again. Cold and cruel and heartless.

“It was lonely.” The strain of it rips at her throat. She can feel the tears running down her cheeks, hotter than the spray of the rain. “It was cold, and grey, and for all I knew most of my friends were dead, and he was—he was so kind, and he didn’t have to be. I didn’t expect—”

She does lose her voice there, breaking off in a sob.

The Exarch reaches out his crystal hand toward her, glittering through her tears, then jerks it back as if he’s been burned.

She doesn’t deserve his comfort. She shouldn’t even be crying; she has no right. “I’m sorry,” she says, as clearly as all her training will let her. Even so, her voice is still thick with the tears she can’t stop shedding. “I shouldn’t—I’m sorry.”

“You loved him.” There’s pain in his voice. She can’t look at him. “There’s no shame in grieving him still.”

“I didn’t, though.” Frydlona almost chokes on it, but she’s said it.

She thinks she’s said it, anyway. It might have been Fray, but Fray wouldn’t have stopped at a simple truth. Fray thinks Frydlona should take advantage of the Exarch’s devotion. Fray would have said—Twelve only know what she would have said.

“I…you…what?” He sounds lost, not angry or even disappointed.

The whole ugly mess bursts out, as easily as it had to Urianger. “I didn’t think he cared for me. I hated Coerthas, and Ishgard, and every wretched soul who let the Inquisition just slaughter anyone they wanted, and it seemed like he was part of that. He’d wanted me to save his friend—I didn’t think of that as brave, at the time, I was so disgusted by everyone else. And then we owed him such a debt for taking us in when we were outlaws, I didn’t know how I could ever repay it. It was…too much, if he’d just been looking for a mistress.”

The Exarch draws a sharp breath, but he has the sense not to interrupt.

“He wasn’t,” Frydlona says quickly. “He never—once we were in Ishgard, once his father made us wards, he even stopped flirting. I think he…guessed, a little.” She’d resented him so fiercely, and he had taken such care to never push her for a no she might have been afraid to give. “But the count making us wards was even worse, a bigger debt. Too much. I didn’t know what Haurchefant wanted, and I was so tired, and he kept…talking to me. Inviting me to things. I didn’t—I could have told him I was tired, instead of going and pretending I was having fun. Getting angrier and more tired the whole time.”

The sheer waste of it levels her. It always does. He had only wanted to spend time with her, give her a distraction to lift her spirits. See her smile. She’d made everything so much worse for herself.

“I thought I was… I don’t know. A funny hobby to him. I never took a single thing he said seriously, except the flirting, and even that I thought was just that any other adventurer would do as well, and I was just convenient.” She hadn’t been convenient. She should have known. “And then he died saving my life, and I—I never. If I’d been…kinder, better, if I’d done anything to—to make his life better while he still had it…”

She closes her eyes. It does nothing to stop the tears. “His family all thought we’d been courting. I was afraid to tell them we weren’t while he was alive, in case that was the only reason we were allowed to stay, and then once he was dead… They thought he’d been happy. They thought he’d died like a lover in a ballad, and it made sense to them. I didn’t know how to take that away.”

She wishes it had been true. She thinks maybe they could have been happy, if she’d let them be.

For a moment there’s nothing but the rain, still beating on the glass above their heads. Then, so quietly she can barely hear him, the Exarch says, “Ah.”

It’s for the best, really. It shouldn’t feel as if her heart is cracking again to know that she’s disappointed him. She’s never deserved him, when all she can want is the chance to do it again and do it right this time.

“Did, ah. Did you…have anyone to confide in?”

“Biggs and Wedge, and Cid. Urianger.” That still cuts to the bone, even after his apology. The first person she’d told deliberately, and what he’d done with it. “My family. Thancred, eventually. You.” Sidurgu and Rielle know enough to be a comfort, but the fact they’ve given it without asking for details is more comfort yet.

“Ah,” the Exarch says again, much sharper. “I…see.”

Far off, over Lakeland, thunder rolls and fades.

“Frydlona.” He waits. When she looks at him, vision still blurred, he’s twisting one hand around the other wrist. “May I offer my opinion?”

She’s afraid of his opinion. “Yes.”

He glances up at her, eyes the brightest thing in this storm, and then away again. “I think he would—you showed some kindness to him then, did you not?”

Haurchefant’s blood on her hands, soaking into her clothes. They’d been past saving, and she hadn’t much wanted to try. Such a simple thing, to hold the dying. Even she couldn’t possibly have denied him that. The barest kindness imaginable, but still she nods.

“That would have been more than enough for—for a knight such as he,” the Exarch says.

Frydlona, rather hysterically, supposes he would know if anyone would, as he’d just barely managed not to say. It’s the reassurance she’d so desperately sought from Thancred, that he couldn’t give her. That maybe it could be all right, that maybe that one dying moment’s mercy counted for something after all. That maybe, even if he had thought about it—for a minute, a day, a year, a lifetime—first, that Haurchefant still wouldn’t have changed his mind. That she doesn’t have to bear that.

“I think he would not have saved your life for that to be a burden to you, or for you to be miserable.” The Exarch is looking back over the Crystarium again, with nothing but the crystal side of his face visible. The stone doesn’t move, but his ears are drawn down.

She’d said as much to Ryne, in Amaurot, and still not thought about it. “A smile better suits a hero,” she whispers.

It feels…better, and worse, at the same time. If she could set another part of being the Warrior of Light down, if she could stop trying to be someone worth a good man’s death…

She takes out a handkerchief to dry her face and blow her nose. “Thank you,” she says, louder, for the Exarch’s hearing this time.

He glances at her again, and whatever he sees makes him smile with such relief the sun might as well have come out. Frydlona’s stubborn heart kicks at her ribs, still ignoring her. She can’t. She can’t. She cannot.

She still stays atop the watchtower with him until the rainclouds clear from the sky.

#wondroustailsofffxiv #wondroustailsofffxivwriting #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: ship #my fic: 5.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn #g'raha tia #frydlona x haurchefant #frydlona x g'raha #your honor the girl is a Mess

[weatheredpileoftomes]

enough prayers for the day

For Wondrous Tails of FFXIV, “the Twelve”. Post-Endwalker but pre-Myths of the Realm, ~750 words. Canonical character deaths, references to war and apocalypse; spoilers through 6.0.

It’s not as simple as having a single guardian deity, for most people.

Whenever she’s asked, Frydlona says she gives her first devotion to Nophica. She wasn’t born under Nophica’s moon, but Doenthota was, when Frydlona was just old enough to remember. Maybe that had been where it started.

She couldn’t have grown up in Cliffhide, daughter of a sea captain, without offering many and more prayers to the Navigator. When the seas were rough, she prayed—they all prayed—that Captain Merlgeim’s ship, or any smaller fishing boat set out alone, would come back safe. When weeks of brilliant sun left the fish wary and made the fishers come back empty-handed, it was Llymlaen they asked to bless the fishers’ casts.

But Frydlona has always liked verdant shade and leaf-dappled sunlight, rich soil under her hands and the pale perfect green of a new-sprouting seed. More than that, she likes the promise Nophica makes to provide.

If she could only choose one favor, it would be that: life abundant, for her and everyone she loves.

She does give her first devotion to Nophica, but there are days she offers more prayers to Byregot. Quick with each meal she cooks, and over any gear she needs to repair. Longer when she starts a new project, or can’t get a detail to come right.

Her rooms in Ul’dah have two shrines; his is the second. It’s the only one she brought to Ishgard when she was helping Francel with the restoration, and she’s burned incense there many a time she’s been working on a new master recipe.

It’s hard now to remember that there had been long years of Frydlona’s life when she thought of picking up a spindle when she thought of praying to Nymeia. Oh, people had died in Cliffhide, but few, and rarely, and for the most part kindly.

She grows Nymeia lilies, now. There’s never a shortage of need for them.

For the Scions buried at Saint Adama Landama’s, and all the other dead of the lichyard—the sylphs keep no graves. For Moenbryda, though Frydlona adds moon daisies as well when she can. For Minfilia, who has no grave or memorial to leave them at. For Haurchefant, and Ysayle, and all the dead of the Dragonsong War. For Sidurgu’s friend and Rielle’s teacher Fray. For Papalymo. For everyone cut down at Rhalgr’s Reach, in Doma, in the final battling to retake Ala Mhigo and all the drawn-out struggles after.

They worship different gods in Thavnair, too, but the memorial in Radz-at-Han to those lost in the Final Days is never short of offerings. Lilies are for the others, and she never has enough.

They worship different gods in Norvrandt, and honor their dead with different traditions. The Warriors of Darkness have no graves for Frydlona to bring bundles of plain sweet-scented herbs to, but neither do those lost to the sin eaters.

She still goes back—not just carrying messages between the Scions and their loved ones on the First, but visiting the friends she’d made herself and carrying on the work she’d started. The Crystarium gardens have more than space to tend those mourning herbs, and now that the soil is very slowly starting to recover they can plant and tend them.

She does bring Nymeia lilies to the ghost-filled streets of Amaurot under the sea—before Elpis, because she didn’t know what else to bring. After Elpis, because…because maybe things could have been different, this whole time, if there had been a way to say I mourn, and have it be seen.

But she brings no flowers to Garlemald and its burned-out streets, to a park sitting empty under the hollow wrecks of massive buildings. She’s afraid there are people there who would take it as mockery.

There had been a long-ago time when Frydlona thought of Nald’thal as a miner’s god, the same as she’d thought of Nymeia as a weaver’s. Her prayers had been for a true strike with sledgehammer and pickaxe, or for a rich and lovely find.

She’s never cared much for commerce, or understood that aspect of the Traders, but she’s lived in Ul’dah long enough that the thought of praying for Thal’s mercy alone isn’t strange.

Nymeia lilies were a traveler’s blessing, once.

Frydlona offers prayers to Llymlaen before journeys by sea and Oschon before journeys by road. Especially now, with the Scions scattered all over Etheirys, it seems she spends as much time thinking of Oschon as she does Byregot or Nymeia.

Guide their steps. Keep them safe.

She can spare a few lilies for this.

#i have Thoughts about frydlona and menphina but that's a fic set at a very specific time #wondroustailsofffxiv #wondroustailsofffxivwriting #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 6.x #frydlona merlgeimwyn

[weatheredpileoftomes]

it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

For Wondrous Tails of FFXIV, “beach”. Post-Endwalker, ~550 words. Spoilers through 6.0 and for drk quests through 70. This twisted very sideways from where I intended it to go but here we are, I suppose.

Fray finally gets a chance to take the Warrior of Light to the beach.

The water off of Bloodshore is vivid turquoise, clear as the finest glass. Frydlona has been all over three worlds and she’s never seen a gem quite like it. Winter is mild here in Eastern La Noscea, especially after…everywhere. Ishgard, Sharlayan, Garlemald. She barely even feels the chill as she lets the surf run up over her ankles.

“I didn’t think this through,” Fray admits.

The wind catches Myste’s hair, whipping it around his head as he tries to bat it away. Fray is still wearing her armor, helmet and all, like an ink smudge on the beach. Frydlona is the only one of them dressed for this, in a short pareo and close-fitting top, and she can’t help asking, “What was your plan?”

Fray shrugs with a clanking of armor. “I wanted to get you somewhere warm and safe. Somewhere happy, where the people around you were having fun and nobody wanted you to be the Weapon of Light. And I didn’t think you’d let yourself go, so it hardly mattered.”

Somewhere in one of Vaillance’s saddlebags Frydlona has a ribbon. She goes back and sorts through until she finds it, then hands it to Myste. “They have hats at Costa del Sol,” she says to Fray while Myste ties his hair back with a quick thanks.

Fray’s silence is deeply skeptical.

“You could take the helmet off,” Frydlona says. “I know what you look like.”

Myste hugs her, quickly, and runs off down the beach. The spray kicks up under his feet, glittering white, until he stops at a spar of rock running out into the water and bends down to peer at it. Tidepools, Frydlona thinks. Starfish, and sea urchins, and seaweed like silk ribbons. A whole tiny world of dark, rich colors and glimmering texture. “Watch for crabs!” she calls after him.

He waves and nods.

Fray folds her arms with another clank. “It’s good to see him having a nice day at the beach.”

“You want me to…play in a tidepool?”

“It wouldn’t hurt.” Fray tips her head back, looking up at the pale sun. “You don’t like it when I take the helmet off.”

It’s disorienting, looking at herself from the outside. But— “I’d like you to,” Frydlona says. “Actually.”

Fray pulls the helmet off. The air around her swirls red-edged black, hiding the moment that she grows a good fulm in height, and then she’s looking Frydlona in the eye.

Her way of wearing Frydlona’s face is kinder than Zenos’s, now. She hasn’t looked like she did at Whitebrim Front in years.

Frydlona swallows and nods. “I could play in a tidepool,” she says. “If you come too.”

“What?” Fray says. “No, I—”

“‘Come to the beach,’ you said. ‘We should run away to the beach,’ you said. ‘Let’s just ignore them all and go swimming,’ you said.” The water isn’t quite familiar here, but the air is—salt and warmth and the sweet dry scent of winter grass—and Frydlona finds herself grinning at Fray almost the way Fray might. “Don’t tell me you’re giving up on it now.”

“Oh, all right,” Fray says, but she’s smiling too.

#wondroustailsofffxiv #wondroustailsofffxivwriting #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 6.0 #frydlona merlgeimwyn #fray esteem #drk squad ensemble #title is from an ee cummings poem

[weatheredpileoftomes]

be not alone

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 29, “fuse”. Frydlona & Ardbert, early Shadowbringers, ~450 words. Spoilers through lv 71 msq.

Gathered together, but not rejoined.

“Wait.” Frydlona reaches out on instinct, even tired as she is, and when her hand brushes Ardbert’s heavy sleeve they both jump.

Ardbert stares down at her hand with a famished kind of yearning. He feels as real to Frydlona as anything else in the room does, but—a hundred years, he’d been like this. A hundred years with not a soul able to see or hear him. A hundred years mourning his dead, entirely alone. Frydlona thinks she would have gone mad.

She’s forgotten what she wanted to ask. “Do you want to stay?”

“Stay?” Ardbert repeats. She still hasn’t moved her hand. He still hasn’t looked away.

“Stay.” Frydlona yawns again, can’t help it. It’s late, and she’s so tired, the Light she carries weighing her down on top of the normal fatigue of battle after battle for the fate of the star. Two stars, now. “Do you still sleep?”

Ardbert hesitates. “I could try.”

He hadn’t arrived until after she’d bathed, this time—one of these nights someone is going to appear in her suite while she’s in the bath, instead of before or after, and then they’re going to have words—so all she has to do is pull the covers down on her bed before she can crawl into it. “Stay,” she says again, before she steps away from him to do that. “Not the axe, though.”

“Not the axe,” Ardbert repeats. He still sounds stunned. She hears the axe stutter against the floor as he puts it down, wonders if his hands are shaking.

Armor clatters, too—just one or two pieces, probably, but enough that she won’t be getting poked by spikes in her sleep. She should’ve said; she’s glad he thought of it. After a moment the bed dips. She moves a little closer to the wall to be sure he has room to lie down.

“You’re sure?” he asks. “You won’t—”

Change your mind, Frydlona fills in, when he doesn’t. She can imagine—she can’t imagine, actually, what it would do to have a simple touch again after so long, and then lose it. “I won’t,” she says.

Ardbert lies down carefully next to her. After a moment, he shifts so his head is resting on her arm. His back is warm and solid against her; he breathes, like she does.

She falls asleep between one shared breath and the next.

He’s still there when she wakes in the morning, and it seems he’s managed to find sleep himself as well, curled into the arc of her body. Good. If she can help—if she can lessen that burden for him, at all, when he’s the only person she’s ever met who lived the same one she carries—she’s glad to.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2022 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #my fic: 5.0 #frydlona merlgeimwyn #ardbert

[weatheredpileoftomes]

theatre of combat

For FFxivWrite2022 Day 26, “break a leg”. Frydlona and Emet-Selch, mid-Shadowbringers, ~600 words. Spoilers through lv 77 msq and implied spoilers for drk 70.

Well-wishes(?) from an enemy(?).

“The orchestra is tuning up,” Emet-Selch murmurs.

Frydlona jumps. He hadn’t been sitting at her table a moment ago.

He’s out of place in the Pendants, even aside from how she hadn’t invited him. Her suite is all warm brick and dull metal, potted plants and cream-pale stone. Emet-Selch stands out against that background like the kind of exotic flower you have to root out and burn to keep from taking over your garden, which is more or less exactly what he is. Frydlona had helped the Botanists’ Guild deal with a seven-sisters rose incident, once. She’d do it again.

“You’d know about that, wouldn’t you?” he asks, slouching back against the table.

“Get out.”

She will say one thing for the Exarch—he’s about the only person in Norvrandt who doesn’t just wander into her room, even though he technically owns it.

“No moralizing speeches? No furious denunciation of my villainy? No protestations of your virtue?” Emet-Selch presses a hand to his heart, assuming he has one. “How…un-heroic of you. Are you sure you’re feeling quite all right?”

Frydlona isn’t, but she isn’t going to tell him that. Her head hurts, dully, with the feeling that her skull is contracting in rhythm with her pulse. She’s tried to Esuna it away with no luck. Divine Benison helps a little; Myste’s Blackest Night helps a little more. It isn’t that bad, though; it’s not worth setting aside her glaives for. It just…hurts, a little. All the time. She’s had worse.

What worries her more is that it might be related to how Y’shtola and Mi—Ryne keep looking at her. And now, very differently, how Emet-Selch is looking at her.

It’s a thoughtful look, a little unfocused, almost dreamy except for the pinch of his brows.

“Sorry to disappoint,” Frydlona says, “but I’m fine.”

His gaze sharpens on her and he smiles. “Of course you are. A hero always is, aren’t they?”

She knows how to deal with people like Emet-Selch, in every way. Never let the Ascians see that they’ve rattled her, even when they have. Never let a man who acts entitled to her time see a weakness. Still, this bitter echo of her own thoughts makes her flinch back.

“You’ve got heroism on your mind today,” she says, trying to recover.

He shrugs. She wonders if he knows that the movement is a little too broad, even for his usual flourishing style. Nashmeira had to teach Frydlona to gesture too much, to make up for the motion of her dance and the distance of the watchers. Emet-Selch is sitting still just a few fulms away from her. “Well, of course I do. I’ve been thinking about you, and all your little…struggles. Was the Lightwarden of Amh Araeng easier to kill than the others?”

Frydlona wants to turn away, and doesn’t want to turn her back on him. “Does it matter?”

“Hardly.” There’s such finality in his voice she wishes she hadn’t asked. “Do enjoy your final battle. I’d tell you to break a leg, but…” His eyes trail down her body, lingering where the drapes of her costume cross at her thigh. “You do need those as a dancer, don’t you.”

She’d slap him, but she’s not entirely sure he wouldn’t like it. “Goodbye, Emet-Selch.”

“No gratitude at all,” he says with a deep sigh, and vanishes again.

#ffxivwrite #ffxivwrite2022 #my fic #my fic: frydlona #my fic: frydlona: gen #insofar as...shadowbringers...is gen... #my fic: 5.0 #frydlona merlgeimwyn #emet selch