But truth is to be found even in the most fantastical of mummeries, over-bright and extravagantly staged as they may be—
Find here the adventurer, the lover, the mother: the hero whose sword would rest at home while the younger journey on. There shows the place she may never see, all made up in colours to fill her matter-of-fact eyes.
Let her be lost a while, for even in dreams do the lovers meet, and the ever-young are so fond of dreams.
/
The king had brought their sapling—yes, in this little tale she is their adorable sapling!—a gift. When they said this to her, she scarcely reacted, for she was a surly old scion of a tree who would not let herself so easily grafted, like a poorly trimmed leafman with no mind for merrymaking or mischief.
(So had the king been known to bemoan, though none shall be revealed who had heard this.)
The gift was, they proudly announced, how they planned to remedy this grey-cloud look of hers.
“I don’t see a gift,” said the sapling.
Her beautiful branch scoffed. “[Lovely sapling],” they said, and it may have sounded more like a threat than a mark of fondness, “is my sole purpose as your [beautiful branch]” (far more lovingly spoken, for the king held themself in high regard as any happy pixie should) “to keep you in this cold, bleak room? Am I to leave you penned in like a misbehaving porxie?”
“...No?” the sapling suggested flatly.
“No!” insisted the king. “You must be taken from this cheerless place, and find your gift in my domain.” And there, another peevish reproach: “Where you are always welcome!”
The adventurer stepped away from the summoning bell and tied on her sword belt, long-suffering. “Will you pay my aetheryte fees, at least?”
“Och!” said the king with a click of their tongue, and whisked her away to the Kingdom of Rainbows.
/
Morgana’s expectations were, to say the least, low. She knew Feo Ul meant well, as a child might mean well upon deciding to wrap the sword of a parent in ribbons and bells to make it prettier. Their kindnesses were simply… culturally misplaced.
She figured their gift would be something wildly impractical that they would insist she take back to the Crystarium and make frequent use of. Like some gigantic bowl endlessly filled with fruit punch. Or a water slide pinched from Lyhe Mheg. Or a whole stained glass window from somewhere deep in Lyhe Ghiah that would allow her to glimpse herself in the form of a pixie—anything someone more freely frivolous than she might genuinely appreciate.
What she was not prepared to see as she climbed the top of the hill that made up Lydha Lran was Raubahn, flesh-and-blood and horribly out of place in a paradoxically peaceful sort of way.
She would never have done it in Ala Mhigo. Even in the Crystarium, among the strangest of strangers, she might not have dared it. But here, under the pastel sky and surrounded by dream-pink flowers, she ran to him like a lovesick maid and launched herself at him, arms flung around his shoulders with such force that he stumbled backwards.
That rumble in his chest—she had missed it more than she knew. And the scratch of his stubble on her skin, and the warmth of his breath in her ear, and the mountainous solidity of him.
“Are you real?” she asked, muffled against him. “Or are you just—”
All at once, her throat tightened as she pictured him lifeless like the Scions, wasting away in soul-empty slumber—
“Real enough, aye. It feels like a dream, but your friend was adamant enough that I lose weight for the next time they’re forced to carry me across worlds that I’m certain I haven’t fallen. Mostly certain.”
Morgana pulled away to look at Feo Ul over her shoulder for confirmation.
“I will have to return him before he’s missed,” they said. Then, their voice turning to a lament: “How my kingly arms ache! Ah, but there is no need to thank me, my beautiful sapling.”
“Thank you all the same,” Morgana said earnestly, smiling in a way Feo Ul had surely never seen as she looked up into Raubahn’s eyes again.
“Now go on and frolic before these meddlesome pixies decide to keep you!” Feo Ul said with an urgent gesture of their hands, spinning around to hiss helpfully at the residents of Lydha Lran who were presently gathering to watch with great interest.
Morgana mostly ignored this. She lifted a hand to touch Raubahn’s face, to feel him leaning into her touch, and smirked as she fingered the petals of the flowers crowning his head.
“They entertained themselves with you while you waited, I see,” she said.
“They mean to make me stay. Apparently, as your consort, I am to be their May Prince,” Raubahn said. Then he added, in conspiratorial Ala Mhigan: “Whatever that means.”
Morgana snorted. “Well, they’ve made you rather handsome.”
He grinned and bent his head to kiss her, more unburdened than he had been in… far too long. There was no weight on his shoulders, here; only him and his easy smiles, his loving touch. His hands on her waist, and—
The realization gave her pause. Morgana pulled back again, flashing him a perplexed frown, and lifted his cloak: in place of the now-familiar absence of his left arm was a new limb attached to the vestigial, made out of what seemed to be unnaturally supple bark and twined ivy. And from that would-be flesh grew flower buds and sprouting leaves, as vibrant as anything in Il Mheg.
Morgana turned stormily to the clutter of pixies hovering about them.
“What the hells, you lot,” she said, “you can’t force a limb on someone! And him too bloody polite to say anything—take it away. Now.”
A number of pixies cowered; others insisted that it had been very hard work, and it was so very pretty, and her consort had not protested.
“It’s all right, Morgana,” Raubahn said pacifyingly, running his hand down her arm—the flesh one. He flexed the fingers of the pixie’s gift with a pleasant creak of bark. “It’s only for a few hours; I can at least try. Besides, I’m sure it will come in—”
“Do not.”
“—handy,” Raubahn finished, eyes crinkling.
Morgana shoved at him, then turned her head towards Lyhe Ghiah, calling out: “I’ve changed my mind, Feo Ul, you can put him back.”
The king did not bother to peek out from their castle, for Morgana had pulled Raubahn to her by a fistful of his cloak and kissed him very deeply, smiling all the while.
/
“Are they pollen-drunk?” asked Uin Marn as they watched the mortals, hanging upside-down from the branch of a very fine pine. “All they do is grin and stare at each other and barely even frolic.”
Iala Tyr, sitting in their favourite bough with chin in hand, considered this with mild disinterest. Things had been altogether very quiet since the unpredictable Feo Ul had taken Titania’s crown and scepter—and it was not that they disliked the king, but they were so irritatingly possessive of their favoured mortal. And Iala Tyr had promised their bush court some mischief, and a May Queen.
A slow smile spread across their lips. “My gentle Uin Marn, I have something far more interesting in mind for our beloved Titania’s sapling than pollen.”
/
Uin Marn returned from their mission quite satisfied, presenting themself to Iala Tyr with an exaggerated bow. “The deed is done, your dear friend has had their fun!”
Being a pixie of some pride, Iala Tyr did not cackle their joy, but it was a very near thing.
“So you put the petals on their eyelids like I asked?” they said joyously, already imagining the animal-rutting romp that would overtake Titania’s mortal and her consort—and so near to the Fuath’s waters, too! It would fall out better than they could devise.
But Uin Marn only gave them a worryingly blank look. “... The petals?”
“I told you to give them some of the purple flower,” Iala Tyr insisted.
“Make them cakes,” Uin Marn said slowly, repeating what they had understood from Iala Tyr’s instructions. “With the purple flour.”
“Purple flower!”
“Purple flour!” said Uin Marn, distressed.
“Useless moon-blind pixie! Now they’ve awoken and the chance for secrecy is passed—” grumbled Iala Tyr. They shook their head. “We will have to find another way. Aye, we will surprise them both with the flowers, and Titania shall know their mortal is not theirs alone to amuse themself with,” they said grimly. “Now, find the consort!”
“I go, I go!” Uin Marn said, by now quite irritated by Iala Tyr’s reprimands. They twirled sarcastically. “Look how I go!”
Iala Tyr followed closely behind to supervise Uin Marn’s second attempt. It was near the banks of Longmirror Lake that they found the mortals; they approached from a distance, carrying sundry branches and shoreside plants to mask their presence.
The sapling was astride her consort, both mostly unclothed and entirely unaware of their surroundings. It was the desired outcome, and it should have greatly amused Iala Tyr, but at present it greatly confounded them.
“I thought you said you didn’t give them the flower,” they said. “What have you done now?”
“I did nothing!” hissed Uin Marn in return.
Before they could argue further, Titania was behind them both, pinching them by the wings to pull them away from the bank.
“They are mortals,” they said, ignoring Uin Marn’s meowing whines and Iala Tyr’s grunts. “That is what lovers do when they miss one another.”
And so were Iala Tyr and Uin Marn both unceremoniously flung back towards Lydha Lran, so that Feo Ul might leave their beautiful sapling to her deserved furlough from loneliness.
/
“You mean to tell me,” said the Crystal Exarch, in that slow pondering old man way of his he used when he was trying to make sense of something particularly intricate, “that you pulled someone from the Source, whole and without prior prompting, and then sent them home with little more than the memory of a pleasant dream—all this within twelve bells of time in the Source?”
The king tilted their head, blinking innocently. “Should it have been harder?”
The Exarch’s mouth opened. He couldn’t think of a single thing to reply, which, to him, was neither a familiar nor comfortable feeling.
“Might you, then, agree to lend your talents in assisting me to send the Scions’ souls back to their bodies before they have no living vessels to return to?” he said at last.
It was not out of any ill will that Titania gazed at their nails and smoothed their skirts with an evident lack of interest. It was simply in a pixie’s nature that they should reply, “I cannae un-fuck your fuck-up, mate.”
When It sees the Body, It sees it from the inside out: not flesh and blood and bone, the blood that flows through Its veins, but something perhaps stronger, perhaps infinitely more fragile: a mind, a formless soul, a broken heart.
A pulse of energy: rage. This It knows, for it is the violence the Body has given, offered up like a sacrifice.
And then the siphon of grief, cold and too-bright, and this too is familiar in its ravening and ravages.
But there is another body—another broken half to the whole of It. This one is not so familiar; immaterial. A bright, sharp shard. This body It knows as Her, with spite and disdain and a devouring, unfulfilled sort of admiration.
As the Body knows Her, so too does It know this body. And when It, too, becomes immaterial—a memory, a parasite, a haunting—It slips once into Her body, in the black soft waters of the gift that once was Hers. Before the offering, and Its birth, and Its death.
Her body is like this:
The desert heat sears her lungs; tears would sting her eyes if she had any tears left to weep. Her grief is wider than a desert, her heart greater than a city, her rage more endless than hunger.
She thinks: I have no home to return to.
She thinks: there was never any such thing as a place.
She thinks: the whole of my family is dead and so must my son learn that mother, in his tongue, means dead.
But they are not, in truth, Her thoughts—not in words nor voice. They are an echo of something unshapen and gaping inside her as she walks the desert alone, until she comes to where her home died, where the sand was once dark with blood.
She sinks to her knees and turns her face to the sky where It would be birthed and has died and she screams, she howls, and there is a harsh sting of red on her thigh—
Ilberd came to himself breathless, like a man breaking the surface halfway to drowning. In front of him, Morgana—always her, like a dogged shadow, like a precious cursed thing from which he could not be parted—; in her hand, her grip white-knuckled, a knife.
Still reeling, he registered some mild horror at the blood seeping through her trousers, at the red-blossom point of her knife. He had nothing to think of the habitual contempt in her eyes, except perhaps an unexpected sting of regret.
Was that what she had felt, on those battlements, when she had seen— when she had discovered something far more wretched than his concealed treachery?
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he hissed.
“I did what was necessary,” Morgana replied, venomous and withering. “You ought to know something of that. You had no right—”
“So you would stab yourself just to spite me?” He steadied himself upon the nearby wall and straightened, extricating himself from the stray vertigo hanging over him as Morgana glared. “It was beyond any choice of mine. You should know that.”
The weight of her grief lingered, choking; but the shape of her anger felt like breath, a noose loosening from around his throat. She glanced away and scoffed, content to ignore him. She did know. She knew precisely what it felt like.
“It worked,” she said instead, pressing her hand to her thigh, “didn’t it?”
And then she smiled, all hungry-wild, and that Ilberd couldn’t begin to understand.
He pushed an impatient sigh out through his nose and, unnerved by the sight of her blood seeping onto her skin, slapped her hand away. She didn’t protest as he crouched in front of her to bandage her thigh best as he could—himself unsure whether it was the gesture of an exasperated father, or an irritated friend, or.
“I knew you were a vindictive bastard, Arroway,” he muttered, “but I think you may actually be mad.”
“No one likes a mirror, hey?” she said, and she nudged his cheek with her knuckles. Never an open hand; not for him. “Misery does love company.”
She sits looking for the part of it that is still connected to her, like pressing a finger against a wound; he turns away from its withered wings and splintered bones because he is afraid. Clinging to what is his, what has become hers -- better in her hands than belonging to his monster.
"Stop prodding," he says. He can smell what will come, cold and putrid, when her hand presses too hard into sloughing flesh and it breaks apart into carrion. He does not want to see her skin crawling with beetles and flies and worms.
She breaks off a piece of bone that crumbles away to dust in her hand. "No," she says simply.
"Then you need to be prepared for what you'll find."
This time, she buries both hands inside the god's carcass: it begins to throb and tremble as she disturbs the life that takes shape inside its death. Bile rises burning in his throat. The flesh-eaters crawl under his skin, too, a thousand deaths racing to make a home inside his body.
He wonders if she realizes what it does to him, her digging. She is red-black and brown and yellow up to her elbows with it, but she endures -- perhaps because his horror is preferable. Perhaps there is intention in her persistence, or perhaps only ignorance. The empty place in her skull has not made her more attentive to what is outside of it.
"I'm going to take it apart," she declares, so single-minded that it makes her shake. "Until there's nothing left. Until I can sleep."
She means to kill a withered corpse, but not even rot will be enough to kill a god.
He lowers himself to his knees and crawls across the broken blades, tearing at his flesh until his legs are mangled and bare, but he reaches her even through the slick of his blood. He pulls her body against his, and for the first time since long before they were ever chained to the god together, she does not fight it. Her fingers merely twitch at the crawling of a scarab over her knuckles.
"I am sorry," he whispers, taking her face between his bloodied hands as though they were kin. He cradles her head and shoulders; he holds her chest to his so that her heart will drum the counter-beats to his own; he presses his brow to her cheek like a child, penitent. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
She makes him taste the god's death on her skin, feel her haunting on his tongue. She has shared his long enough; it is only fair that their terrible intimacy sees its bounds dissolved. He welcomes it, and the god's voice shudders in a thousand whispers.
"I forgive you," she says, and they know it is a worse sort of pestilence than the god's carcass because it is true.
When he wakes, he finds their bed empty; the sky before dawn is grey, balanced on a knife's edge.
He finds her, in that bloated, cold quiet of barely-morning, in the empty armoury. Her hair is braided for battle, tight against her skull, and her burned arm bandaged in linen wraps to guard against the buckles of her pauldron.
She ties the bright silk sash around her waist -- a splash of colour, a furl of sunset oranges and reds trimmed with indigo; a memory -- with her gaze turned up to the violet standard at the end of the room.
She stands framed by the talons of the griffin rampant and readies for war.
"I haven't given the order yet," he says.
She takes a breath and reaches for her sword belt. "No," she says, only pausing at the touch of his hand crossing the path of her own. "But you will."
"Aye."
They both stand in silence, joined where his hand has not let go of hers, fingers curled against the belt.
"Two years ago," he says, and does not place his words at a more precise time -- she will know, and remember the feeling of unraveling under a cocoon of light, "you told me that you couldn't do this anymore."
"I didn't mean fighting."
He smiles at that, gentle as can be. Of course not, it says; I know you. He goes on: "And when the Resistance became an army, when it stopped being a resistance, you told me that you were a sellsword; not a soldier."
"Where are you going with this?" she asks -- knowing, too.
"From where I stand now, it seems as though this is you stepping into a role you had forced to release its hold on you, and that of a soldier."
She shrugs. "It doesn't matter, does it? Champion, hero, sellsword, soldier," she says, and turns her eyes back to the griffin. "If I decide to stand back and watch for the sake of roles, what am I?"
He shakes his head because he does not know the answer. He has never done well with standing back and watching. What can he say? This does not have to rest on your shoulders.
A blunted weapon, easily turned against him. Then why should it rest on yours?
"Don't try to talk me out of this fight," she says before he can think it. "You'd be a fool for turning away volunteers for this one, and especially me."
"I know."
He could sooner talk the sky into changing colours -- and he would not do her the dishonour of trying to keep her from this out of a desire to see that she does not come to harm. It will always tear his heart to ribbons, the fear of losing her, but he loves a warrior.
"But I do not wish to see you fighting because I have commanded you to."
"Would that be such a terrible thing?" she asks, unwittingly testing his balance. She can still surprise him -- stubborn and fierce and independent, and she says this. "Honestly. Would it?"
"I thought it might."
She huffs. "Then you're a fool," she says. "That suicidal little cock put my city to the flame. His master would burn the world down for the pleasure of killing my son. I was going to fight regardless -- I know you know this."
At last, she slips her hand out from under his, only to switch her sword belt to the other. She presses a half-formed fist to his chest, just above his heart, and looks into his eyes.
"I'm devoted to you -- you must know this. Command me, and I will. I'll follow wherever you lead."
Even if it is to the end.
He feels them, the strips of his heart, of flesh torn apart and put together. He cups her cheek.
She leans into him, face tilted up, and her fingers touch his jaw. When he bows his head to her, she touches her brow to his, and he closes his eyes.
Dawn breaks.
septembre 2020: i may not be doing ffxivwrite myself, but i am once again spinning off of a fantastic livvy piece because it’s good. please read her whole ffxivwrite tag @onwesterlywinds. mild ffxiv:stormblood (4.1) spoilers. 266 words.
“Stop antagonizing council members.”
Morgana was too old to play the petulant child, but she was stubborn enough to reply without prior thought as to Raubahn’s implications.
“I’m not anta—” she began, then caught herself. Set her jaw. “Little Grand Steward go crying to daddy, did she?”
“Spare me, Morgana; pettiness does not become you,” Raubahn said firmly. “The Hall is a grand room. Voices carry.”
Some manner of discomfiture descended upon Morgana at last; it was one thing to talk shite to Ashelia Riot’s face privately, and another to feel like half the palace might have heard the commander’s watchdog dig her claws into a well-respected representative—even if the people whom she represented were not quite so. She crossed her arms and bit into her cheek.
“Pardon my language, Commander, but she is a bit of a cunt,” she said without much enthusiasm.
Raubahn almost laughed. “Says the self-proclaimed bastard.” He cast a look over Morgana’s shoulder towards the door to his office, making certain that she’d shut it behind her. “At her age, if someone spoke to you the way you speak to her, you’d have fed them their teeth—and don’t try to pretend otherwise.”
“Yes?” Morgana said, opening her hands in a way that said she failed to understand his point.
“If you ask me, it’s a testament to Ashelia Riot’s character that she still hasn’t.”
Morgana scoffed. “Please. I’d love nothing more than to see her try.”
“See to it that you give her no reason to,” Raubahn said—and added, carefully walking the line between familiarity and authority, “and that’s an order.”
mars 2020: i don’t have any fancy commentary about this except that i haven’t played 5.2 yet and this was written between the hours of 3 and 6 am on a monday so this is as good as it’ll get, i just felt some type of way! ffxiv:shadowbringers (5.2) spoilers (i guess?); sort of wol morgana/sairsel au but fits within my non-wol canon as well. 1,084 words.
“What is it?”
Raubahn sighed and pressed two fingers to his brow, letting the parchment fall limply back onto his desk. “A message from Maxima,” he said, his voice taking on a somber note that usually did not accompany talk of the defector.
He respected Maxima—Morgana could not go so far as to say she felt the same, but she hadn’t spent the last twenty years attending matters of state. It was enough for her to simply accept that his intentions in standing against the Empire were genuine. She didn’t doubt his honesty; only his character.
“Since when does he send letters? He could have just walked over.”
“He must be keenly aware of the sensitive nature of his information and the resulting proposition.” Raubahn gazed up at Morgana. She still sat perched on the edge of his desk with both feet on a chair, but she wasn’t reaching for the letter. “I believe he’s afraid of you.”
Morgana snorted. “Then I’m doing my job right. So, what is it exactly that he’s too craven to come suggest in person?”
“He means to arrange a meeting to discuss information brought forth by another defector from the Empire. The word is he’s recently returned from the imperial capital having witnessed events that will have repercussions throughout Eorzea—and, sooner rather than late, Ala Mhigo.”
“Are we to make friends with every grease-slick rat that slips out from Garlemald’s bowels?” Morgana asked with a huff, crossing her arms. She considered the lingering furrow in Raubahn’s brow, then frowned herself. “So let him come to the border—not Ala Mhigo itself. We meet him at Ghimlyt, make certain he’s stripped of weapons and watched when he so much as takes a piss, listen to what he has to say, and turn him back out once it’s done. Is Priscus entirely certain it’s good intel?”
“He doesn’t need to be,” Raubahn said.
He leaned back as he spoke, and Morgana’s curiosity got the better of her: she put her fingertips to the parchment to slide it towards her, tilting her head, and gave the letter little more than a cursory glance.
The chair under her feet fell over as she moved off the desk and to her feet, snapping into a wild-eyed fury.
“No,” she said thickly.
A more reasonable woman might have seen the titanic restraint it took Raubahn not to let his own anger be swept up into joining hers, but Morgana had never been one to contain herself with reason. Especially not in the face of the name Baelsar.
“We choose our friends, but it is not so simple to choose who is the enemy of our enemy,” he said, too sensible; breathing too evenly.
“That man will never be anything but our enemy!” Morgana snapped. “You cannot be considering this. Raubahn. Please.”
“If Gaius Baelsar—who has taken up the cause of hunting Ascians as few but the Scions have—comes to us offering information on ‘dire happenings’ at the very heart of the Empire, we would be fools not to listen.”
Morgana shook her head again. Her fingers itched for the weight of a blade, but where might she turn it? Perhaps Maxima had been wise to keep his proposition to writing.
“I would drown in my own blood rather than to allow Gaius van fucking Baelsar to step foot on Gyr Abanian soil again.”
“And how would that punish him?”
“Don’t.”
“I spoke to Lord Hien after he resurfaced as Shadowhunter in the Burn. I do not believe he exaggerated when he said he nearly dislocated Sairsel’s arms to hold him back from making an attempt on Baelsar’s life. How did that punish him?”
“It would have if the little princeling had bloody let him,” Morgana scowled.
“We do not have the luxury of pride, Morgana,” Raubahn said, his voice rough with bitterness. “Ul’dah has taught me that.”
“Ul’dah has taught you to sit and take it like a beaten dog,” Morgana said. She regretted the words as soon as she spoke them, but it was pride that kept apologies from her mind even as Raubahn’s jaw tightened. At the very least, she forced a slow breath through her nose and swallowed, so that her next words might come better measured. “How can you accept this?”
“I accept nothing. I am enraged,” he said slowly.
She frowned at him; he continued.
“There is no unwriting the last twenty years. There is not a single act of Baelsar’s that will be forgotten when he stands before us. He will never be able to fool himself otherwise—just as we cannot fool ourselves that refusing a mere conversation could ever be enough to make it right.”
Pride would not take down the Wall; anger would not keep it from ever having been built.
Morgana averted her gaze, turning it up at the griffin standard behind Raubahn’s desk. For a time, it had been the emblem of the mad king; she remembered the banners burning in the streets when the rebellion rose. None who fought then forgot, but it was the very same standard that they hung outside the gate to Little Ala Mhigo once stark Garlean whites flew all across Gyr Abania.
She almost understood the reason that guided Raubahn—almost.
“And justice?”
“There was a time when a man could walk away from his own hanging if the rope broke before he died—because the sentence merely said ‘hanged by the neck.’ It was considered that the sentence had been carried out, and that it was Nymeia’s mercy,” Raubahn said. He sounded as though he were speaking more to himself than to Morgana. “Baelsar has survived his first hanging, but I would not call it Nymeia’s mercy. We have learned to give the sentence ‘hanged by the neck until dead.’”
That was little comfort to Morgana, but it was not the commander’s duty to comfort her. And for now, that was all Raubahn could be.
“I’ll request the attendance of the Scions,” Raubahn added after a moment, in the face of her silence. “I won’t have you stand in that room; I swear to you.”
Morgana barely even heard herself speak; she did not know what moved her towards the decision. “No. I want to look into his eyes.”
And when Gaius Baelsar came to Ala Mhigo once more, Morgana stood at Raubahn’s side—at his left, as she always did—and they both looked Baelsar in the eye, unbroken and unblinking.
