avril 2021: (warrior of light sairsel au) words for a shard; or, a conversation with a part of yourself. ffxiv:shadowbringers (5.0) spoilers. 470 words. (read on ao3)
“I dreamed of you last night.”
You say that like I’m gone.
“I can’t touch you, so what would you say you are?”
Is that all there is to it? Touch?
“To tangibility, aye. Touch.”
How is that different than before?
“Maybe that’s the thing—maybe it isn’t. You can dream of things you’ve never had, places you’ve never been; I dreamed I was by your side.”
I’m always at yours. We have that.
“I dreamed of your heartbeat. I put my hand on your chest, and I could feel it. I touched your scars.”
Which ones?
“The ones you wanted. Would you have let me?”
You’re a part of me, I’m a part of you; of course I would.
Why? Does that bother you?
“I don’t know. It feels like a trespass. Like saying your name, or you saying mine.”
Intimacy isn’t a transgression.
“Intimacy.”
Yeah. It feels good.
“It’s not… me. I don’t know that I’m made for it. Maybe it’s why I can only dream of it.”
I thought you dreamed it because I was gone. Because you could have it if I wasn’t, couldn’t you? We’re all made for it.
“Then why did you stay so far when you were still here?”
Ha. Now that’s the question.
I didn’t know I could. I didn’t think I deserved it.
“Funny you should lecture me, then.”
It’s easy to lecture you. Who else do I know like I know you?
Hey.
If I could put your hand on my heart, I would.
Would you let me?
“
Aye. I would.”
See? Maybe you are made for it.
“I think you might be making me better than I was on my own.”
Don’t say that like it hurts.
"It does, though."
I was already dead and gone and lost. You were always enough on your own.
“Once, maybe. It doesn’t feel like that anymore.”
I’ll be with you every step of the way. Don't forget that.
“You don't have much of a choice.”
I already made it. I'd make it again.
I was alone for so long. The silence, it gets so bloody loud, you know. But your kind of quiet—it made everything bearable again.
“I wish… I wish things could have been different.”
I know. But I’ve made my peace with death a long time ago.
"Maybe I should start, too."
Not yet. Not you.
“What if I’m already tired of fighting?”
You don’t need to fight. Living’s enough.
That was always what you were before you ever started fighting, wasn’t it? The balance in every living thing. The balance in you.
“Did you find that in my head or in my heart?”
Maybe I always knew.
“Promise me you’ll stay. You’re the balance in me.”
From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers
The Sandsea, Thanalan
I know it’s only been a few days, but I have to ask. Are you eating enough?
From the “desk” (kitchen table) of Sihtric, Wild Child of East End
yea
From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers
The Sandsea, Thanalan
I’m glad to hear you’re doing well in such consummate detail. It’s just like reading Sairsel’s reports. Do you need anything?
From the “desk” (garden bench) of Sihtric, Ghost of the Sprawl
gold saucer money
From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers
The Sandsea, Thanalan
no
From the desk of Pavane Altos Dionys of House Malichar
Radz-at-Han
Grand Steward Riot,
Let it be known firstly that I am not in the habit of reading the private correspondence of any under my roof regardless of their age; however, I could not help but glance at the letter my young charge left on a chair in my study when I very nearly sat upon it. Therefore, I must assume that he has no great concerns regarding its confidentiality, and so permit myself to comment upon its contents.
You may rest assured that the boy’s needs and comforts are seen to with the highest care under my roof. In fact, I am told he haunts the kitchens at all hours of the day, and sometimes late at night. He sleeps in a warm bed, wears clean clothes, and washes daily—all improvements upon daily life alongside an adventurer whose nature you are evidently familiar with.
I have also taken upon myself to give him informal lessons on geography, history, literature, calligraphy, mathematics, alchemy, and theoretical thaumaturgy. He is an apt and eager pupil; in spite of the hardships of his childhood, he retains well the learning that was previously imposed upon him, inappropriate as it was for his age. We continue his physical training, as well, and there is not a night where he does not retire contented. His spirits are high, though he sometimes misses wandering; we have made plans to go exploring the city and its environs together to remedy this.
I was not asked to make such reports to anyone when the boy was entrusted to my care, but I hope this missive will ease your concerns and unburden you to continue your usual responsibilities. I imagine there is much for you to attend to; the management of a free company and a seat on Ala Mhigo’s council surely must leave you little time to pine for the return of our mutual friend.
Cordially,
From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers
Keane House, Ala Mhigo
Thank you for your detailed report. I admit I was surprised to see you even had time to compose something so lengthy for my sake, what with Sihtric’s education and care taking up so much of your daily life, but it was nevertheless appreciated. It’s good to know you are both enjoying each other’s company.
Though, between you and I, I would not say I am the one who pines for Sairsel.
From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers
Keane House, Ala Mhigo
Remember, you’re welcome at the Sandsea or at the house any time. Stella misses you.
So do I. And I miss Sairsel, too.
From the desk of Sihtric not-Salt
do you think he’s all right?
From the desk of Ashelia Marco Riot, Grand Steward of the Riskbreakers
Keane House, Ala Mhigo
I would be lying if I said I didn’t worry for him, because I love him, and that’s what you do when you love someone.
But yes. I think he would let nothing stop him from coming home to you.
Sairsel has lost count of how many times it has come to this.
Sometimes he has his bow, and he wins; sometimes he has his gunblade, or a sword, and it isn’t enough—he isn’t enough; sometimes he chokes the life from Zenos with his bare hands and it doesn’t feel like winning.
‘Winning.’ As though the outcome of every cycle can be measured like the result of a game—as though there isn’t just a little more loss in every one.
He is tired of dying. He is tired of seeing the good in killing. Of thinking, it was either him or me.
(Maybe, says his lover’s head from his belt—the burden of death he never wants to be liberated from—the problem isn’t that it’s either you or him.)
“What do you mean?” Sairsel asks.
(Maybe it’s that it’s always you and him.)
“No need to be jealous for my sake, Viper.”
(Of the deranged fucking madman? Please. I know I’m all head and no heart these days, but I can’t exactly be bothered.)
For the first time in… gods, too many cycles, Sairsel finds it in him to smile. He allows himself a moment to lean back against a boulder—this time, they are in his domain, his hunting grounds—and unhook the head of his beloved from his belt. Only vaguely, he remembers his own horror at what he had become, with the axe in his hand to preserve the last of Pavane’s spirit, but his presence is now as mundane in its atrocity as it is a lifeline.
(You fell in love with a necromancer, he says as Sairsel touches his brow to his and closes his eyes. It comes with the territory.)
Sairsel only regrets that he never had a choice; that he still doesn’t.
He has finally understood why his grandmother called all her stories tragedies: no matter the telling, the way she would change the events at her young audience’s urging for a happier, or stranger, or more gruesome outcome, every story she told was an inevitability. Always the hero was trapped within it, she said, bringing them into complicity.
“When do we set him free?” Nairel had asked, once.
“When the story ends,” their grandmother replied.
Sairsel is still looking for his way out. The Hermit becomes the Fool, playing his part upon a stage he cannot bring himself to exit. And from the wings he hears movement, a shadow wending its way between the trees: the villain—the hero, the narrator—is come.
(Look alive, darling. Time to fight again.)
“What if I didn’t?” he asks, trading the head for his weapon—his gunblade, this time. He runs his fingers down the flat of the blade, along the keen edge of it, and thinks that there is no point to it. Zenos is near, now; if Sairsel had his bow, he could soon loose upon him.
(What are you saying? You’d just lie down and die?)
“Maybe I’ve just got it turned around. Maybe this isn’t how I deny him,” he says. And Zenos comes, death wrought in blood and gold, and smiles like he has found a prize. “What if I’ve just been accepting, all this time?”
Zenos raises his great and terrible blade, poised to strike, and Sairsel tosses his own aside. That is enough to make him falter, for doubt to part the cold fire.
With death at his throat, Sairsel gives nothing. “I’m more than this. I want something that isn’t this,” he admits, looking up and meeting the eyes that have been his every horror for too long. “I just can’t fathom that you could ever be a person. Someone who puts his head down at night and dreams of missing a lesson or replying to a letter far too late.”
(That’s the problem: he only dreams of a world on fire.)
“How can I make you understand that that’s what I am?”
“I know what you are,” Zenos says with disarming, indomitable certainty. Then he smiles again, cold and pale in his affection, and cradles Sairsel’s body with hand and blade. (Powerless, Pavane seethes.) “What if I told you I killed every living thing in your wood on my way to you?”
Rage flares inside Sairsel’s body in an instant, and he is trying to tear Zenos apart with teeth and bare hands again. And then the blade is inside his chest, cutting him open as though to reach his heart, and he joins all the other rotting things on the forest floor.
“My friend,” he hears as his body twitches, choking on his own blood, “I will accept you even in your moments of doubt.”
Sairsel wakes up in the water where Pavane drowned himself to bring him back to his broken body, the very first time. He stumbles to his feet shaking and weary, dragging himself from the riverbed, and runs a hand through his hair.
He takes a breath and picks up his bow from the grass, gritting his teeth in resignation.
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-octobre 2020: (warrior of light sairsel au) some eight years after the liberation of doma and ala mhigo, two friends discuss literature and adventurous plans. featuring @thelegendofivalice‘s a’zaela linh. ffxiv:shadowbringers (5.3) spoilers for mentions of a certain npc. 18+ nsfw for mature subject matter. 2,115 words.
“Sairsel,” said Sihtric, scrunching up his nose at the edge on his knife. “Can I borrow your whetstone?”
Sairsel glanced away from the fire and over his shoulder. “It’s in my pack somewhere. Do you plan on stabbing someone soon?”
“Nooo.” Sihtric rolled his eyes and waved the stick in his hands, already rising to his feet. “Ashelia said she was going to come back with marshmallows for the fire. I just want to be prepared.”
A’zaela deftly avoided the stick as it waved dangerously near her eye.
“I think you’re dangerous enough as it is, lad,” Sairsel said, exchanging a small smile—apologetic around the edges—with her from across the campfire as Sihtric rummaged around his pack. By the sound of it, the bag was bottomless and filled with haphazardly thrown in knickknacks; Sairsel was by no means particularly organized, but he knew his spare few belongings couldn’t be that messy—
“What’s that?” Sihtric asked.
Sairsel turned to look and found Sihtric with a book in hand, turning it around and flipping through the pages—a book which, in spite of the boy’s insatiable interest in the written word, Sairsel had been very careful to keep out of his sight. He scrambled to snatch it out of Sihtric’s hands.
“That’s not—” he said hastily, panicked, and tossed it at A’zaela. “It’s A’zaela’s. I’ve been forgetting to return it to her.”
A’zaela gave him a bewildered look, which Sairsel answered with a look of his own that was equal parts insistent and mortified. She glanced down at the book in her hands, studying its nondescript binding and would-be innocent title—Freedom’s Cries—before opening at a random page. By the flustered expression that flitted across her face, Sairsel surmised bleakly that she’d stumbled upon one of the book’s more damning passages.
He considered hiding his face in his hands. Or perhaps leaving the Riskbreakers altogether. He’d had a good run of it; surely Ashelia wouldn’t mind if he disappeared into the aether for the rest of his days.
Sihtric frowned at Sairsel. “Can I see it, Miss A’zaela?”
“No!” they both answered in frantic unison.
“Why? What’s it about?”
“War,” Sairsel said quickly. “Now finish making a mess of my pack.”
“As if the Saintsmaker didn’t make me read half a thousand histories on war when they were all ‘you have the power to alter the course of Man’s fate on this star,’” Sihtric said, taking on a moaning voice that mocked the Saintsmaker’s, waving his hands menacingly all the while.
“And I’m supposed to abide by the logic of some mad bastard who kept a child locked away underground, am I?” Sairsel retorted as A’zaela slowly slipped the book under her knee and out of Sihtric’s sight. “It isn’t suitable reading for a boy your age. Leave it be.”
Sihtric heaved a great, world-weary sigh and resumed his search for the whetstone. Sairsel, overcoming his embarrassment, met A’zaela’s gaze long enough to communicate gratitude, apology, and no small dose of unabated mortification.
‘Burn it,’ Sairsel mouthed before Sihtric plopped back down next to him with stone in hand.
A’zaela did not burn it.
For nigh on a week, Sairsel comforted himself in pretending that she had, at the very least, gotten rid of the book if not by fire. It was a pleasant lie, and one that allowed him to avoid thinking A’zaela’s opinion of him changed by the embarrassing tripe in his possession.
Because she was discreet, A’zaela waited until they were alone. She waited, in fact, until one night after the Sandsea had become empty of patrons, and Sairsel had returned inside from avoiding the crowd to have a drink while Sihtric slept in his room. It was a perfectly peaceful evening; even Ashelia had gone to bed, and Hickory napped by the warmth of the hearth.
A’zaela slid quietly onto the stool beside his. “Um,” she said, taking up very little space, “Sel?”
Sairsel swiveled to better face her, blissfully unaware of the cause of her shyness. It wasn’t exactly outside of the norm for either of them.
“What is it?”
“I read your book, and…”
Sairsel tensed. “Look—” he said quickly, “I know it’s horrible, and it looks like it’s about me—which is absurd—but I was curious and it isn’t like having Sihtric around leaves much time for… you know—”
“It’s not that,” A’zaela said, avoiding his gaze.
Sairsel struggled to believe that she had nothing to say of the fact that he owned a debauched novel—a thinly veiled fictionalization of uncomfortably recent history—about a dashing Doman lord and an Ala Mhigan hero partaking in all sorts of buggery in the midst of a revolution, ostensibly inspired by his own time in Othard during the liberation campaign.
Not that buggery had ever been a part of it, in reality.
“I… What?”
A’zaela blushed fiercely. “G’raha,” she said to the bartop, slipping her thumbnail in a crack in the wood, “used to have a boyfriend.”
“I see,” Sairsel said—though it was rather more like making out a vague shape in a very thick fog that might be a tree or a mountain.
“Do you think he—” A’zaela tried, making a vague gesture with both hands that Sairsel hoped he interpreted correctly as he jumped, for some reason, to reassuring her.
“Not necessarily. Doesn’t matter who the people in the bed or their parts are, yeah? There’s not just one way to—”
“I mean, do you think he would like it if I did it?”
Sairsel’s mouth fell open. A beat passed. A’zaela looked as though she would rather slip through the floorboards and stay there.
“That’s,” Sairsel said in a miserable attempt at stringing words together, “that’s something you should ask him, isn’t it?”
“I know he would.” A’zaela paused, her brief moment of certainty in the man she loved overtaken by clumsy embarrassment. “But I don’t— I don’t know what I’m doing. I bought a… the lady called it an ‘aid,’ and she tried to give me advice, but I think she thought I had a girlfriend and I didn’t have the courage to correct her.”
Sairsel did his best to move past his astonishment—mostly at the idea of A’zaela alone in some curio shop for this very specific purpose—and laid a hand on A’zaela’s shoulder, looking gravely at her. “Zaela,” he said, and her ears twitched back under his attention. “Are you asking me for advice on how to fuck your man?”
“I can ask Ashe if—”
Sairsel shook his head and grimaced. “And tell her where you got this stroke of inspiration? I’d rather rot in a bog,” he said, and began to pat the pockets of his coat until he found the pencil he kept in case Sihtric lost his—which happened about once a fortnight—and set it down on the bar between them. “Have you got something to write down on? I’m going to tell you everything I know.”
Any discomfort he might have felt ebbed away completely at the way A’zaela’s ears perked up. Her face was still flushed, but she had a focus to her that spoke of both determination and trust—and Sairsel used up the time she took looking for paper dwelling upon how touched he felt to know it. As she rounded the bar to sit beside him again, A’zaela spoke, her words growing easier, if yet nervous.
“I just— I don’t know how this goes, you know? I mean, there’s the book, but…”
“It’s filth, not a guide.”
A’zaela laughed a little. “Exactly. And he knows, Sel—he’s rusty, but he knows.”
“Look,” Sairsel said seriously, and tapped the papers as she set them down. “I’ll tell you this—and you might as well write it down, because, first lesson: the best way to go about this if one person doesn’t know what they’re doing is for that person to be— well, doing the buggering. Trust me.”
A’zaela did not write it down, but she nodded intently, somewhat comforted.
“I was you once, A’zaela. We were all you. He won’t notice if you swive him silly.”
Sairsel then proceeded to tell her, in consummate detail, exactly how best to achieve such lofty ends.
Before long, he had spoken more words in one evening than he had for the last week, A’zaela’s page was full of helpful advice, and the adorable blush on her cheeks had faded to be replaced with an expression of determined focus.
And gratitude. Perhaps even a bit of wonder—and genuine excitement. Sairsel felt oddly proud.
“Thank you,” A’zaela said earnestly, looking down at her notes.
Sairsel put a hand on her shoulder again. “You’re very welcome, Zaela. And so is he,” he said, more smugly than he usually found he could be. Perhaps the charismatic Ala Mhigan hero from the book had rubbed off on him. “And if he doesn’t make you come at least three times the next time he sticks it in you, he’s not worth the bother.”
A’zaela flushed once more. “Sairsel!”
“I’m only saying you ought to know your worth! And so should he.”
“He does,” A’zaela said, her gaze falling to the bartop to shift into something dreamy and sweet that might have been nauseating had Sairsel not felt so bloody happy to see it on her. A silly smile pulled at her lips, but when she looked back up at Sairsel, it shifted into something purposeful and attentioned. “Do you know yours?”
He hadn’t expected her to turn the tables on him—but that was A’zaela. A’zaela, who understood things about him without either of them speaking; A’zaela, who saw because she gave a damn. It was Sairsel’s turn to grow flustered.
“Ah, well,” he said quietly, with a small smile meant to be dismissive of himself.
A’zaela watched him carefully, then bent to stuff her notes into her own pack where it sat beside the stool. She paused, ears flicking at attention at the sound of someone stirring somewhere down the hall from the bar, then straightened up with the accursed book in her hand when nothing came of the noise. Her way of setting it down on the bar was careful, as though she worried about ruffling his feathers somehow.
“He really did remind me of you,” A’zaela said, tipping her chin towards the book to designate the man living between the pages. It isn’t you, obviously, but he’s… solid. The way you are.”
Sairsel thoughtfully set his hand down atop the cover. “Thank you.”
“Anyway, I thought I should give it back,” she said, and blushed again as she added, “I think I’ve more than enough to go on for now.”
Sairsel laughed. “I’d tell you to keep it, but I do spend most of my nights sleeping on the ground with a dog and an eleven-year-old.”
A’zaela gave him a smile and patted his shoulder with great sympathy and solidarity. She then shifted on the stool, uncomfortable with her own curiosity. “I know it’s clearly not a history, but did you and Lord Hien ever…?”
“Oschon’s balls, no,” Sairsel said, and his rueful chuckle covered up the sound of the hall door opening. A’zaela had bared enough to him in one evening to warrant him making an admission to her, if only in the spirit of fairness—and so he did: “I can’t say I wouldn’t have said yes, but… it was better this way.”
They both jumped at the sound of Ashelia’s voice. “You two are up late.”
She dragged her feet over to the bar and bent behind it to fetch a bottle and a glass. Her troubles with sleep were no secret to the two of them, but they still managed to look like two children caught at mischief, and they both reflexively made to cover the book with one hand.
“Can’t sleep?” Sairsel asked idly. He felt A’zaela try to slip the book away from under his hand.
Ashelia narrowed her eyes at them. “No,” she said slowly.
The weight of her stare whittled away what little determination Sairsel had for keeping face. He sighed and took the book from A’zaela’s hand, setting it down in front of Ashelia like an offering.
“Someone wrote a book about stolen moments of, er, passion during the liberation campaign. It appears to have been inspired by my time in Othard,” Sairsel declared, throwing himself upon the proverbial sword. Ashelia’s eyebrows lifted in clear interest. “Sihtric found it in my things and almost read it.”
She looked at Sairsel in silence, covered her mouth with her hand, and began laughing until her shoulders shook. Sairsel glanced at A’zaela—smiling at her crestfallen expression—and gave her a wink.
At least her precious notes were safe in her pack.
novembre 2019: warrior of light au sairsel and an alternate ending to another final battle. ffxiv:stormblood (4.0) spoilers. cw for violence and gore. 1,323 words.
For a moment—one desperate, hopeless, foolish moment—Sairsel thinks he has him.
And he hates that moment more than everything that comes of it. The time between the seconds, Zenos called it. Sairsel hates that he remembers, hates that he still hears that voice dripping poison in the back of his mind.
He hates, and then the blade pierces him. Sairsel’s voice comes strangled, and everything goes quiet and still as his breath catches in his lungs. Pain and shock rip through his body, drowning him. He can taste his own blood.
The blade that Zenos cherishes like some pet is long, and Sairsel’s shaking hand has to reach halfway across the world to claw at his throat—only to grasp empty air. His vision swims and his legs shake, but the sword keeps him upright, like a puppet strung wrong.
Slowly, and with sickening intimacy, the blade pushes deeper into his abdomen—rending flesh and muscle and viscera.
Every second, Sairsel expects a death that doesn’t come. He doesn’t know whether Zenos merely wants to make him suffer, or wants him close. Horror claws its way into Sairsel’s insides, blinding, and his bow falls from his hand; his fingers wrap around the blade and feebly fight, try to keep it away, but he is scrambling without strength and only half-alive as the point of the sword cuts his back open.
“Is this not glorious?” he hears Zenos say, too close, in a low growl that would make him recoil if he could. “Do you feel it? The rush of blood?”
Blood is all Sairsel can feel.
“You are a hunter,” drawls Zenos’ voice in his ear. Sairsel’s hands tighten—twitch—around the blade, trying to force it away, but he only succeeds in cutting himself deeper. His sob chokes around the blood that fills his throat, thick and wet as Zenos whispers to him. “You know blood. The quivering of the beast under your hands as you take the life that was yours from the moment your gaze claimed it. How does it feel to be the prey?”
Sairsel coughs, filling his body with near blinding pain. Dark red splatters down onto the blade.
Zenos lets him—lets him—fall to one knee, directing the sword down with his body as the strength drains from him and leaves him shaking. A gauntlet frames Sairsel’s face, burning against his skin.
“You will be my greatest loss, my friend.”
Sairsel wants to scream and growl and tear his throat open. He wants— he wants—
His hands fall from the blade. Zenos is all that is left to keep him upright; all that keeps him from lying down, closing his eyes, and taking his peace. Inside him, the Light rages, and he wonders like a man half-drunk if the Mother is all that keeps his heart beating. He never wanted to be Her champion.
He never wanted to be Ala Mhigo’s champion, either. He was never worth it. A real champion wouldn’t be on his knees before that animal, halfway between the mercy of the sword piercing him through and the hands cradling him like a lover or a child.
My friend.
Sairsel has no strength for his own rage; too deep in the abyss of drowning in his own blood. His fingers twitch at his side. Like a flash of lightning, he thinks of the Griffin: of his rage, of his pain, of the sacrifice that saw him dying with power between his fingers. The power should never have been Zenos’; that enrages him, too. And all he has is empty hands, weak and bloody.
As Zenos breathes—willing himself to end the hunt, to end him, to face the emptiness that will follow—the pad of Sairsel’s forefinger touches the tip of the arrow wedged into his boot.
He made it on the Steppe. A memory of the greenery fading out from the center of Dotharl Khaa fills his mind so vividly that it may very well be his death-sight, but his fingers curl around the shaft like breath filling his lungs. It isn’t over yet. It isn’t over.
If he can only reach.
“Zenos,” he says through the blood. He doesn’t say it like dripping venom, doesn’t let his tongue shape his revulsion; he says it like begging, reaches his empty hand up with every last ounce of his strength. Trying to push himself back up, or pull him down. He opens his mouth, lips forming a whisper and a lie that cuts him deeper than the sharpest steel: “I accept you.”
And Zenos is close enough, like he wants to hear it again. Close enough to reach.
Sairsel spits blood in his face for lack of strength to say what he truly means—this is for Ala Mhigo—and thrusts the arrowhead into the side of Zenos’ neck.
And Zenos laughs: pain and surprise warps his voice into breathless elation. He lifts a hand to the blood.
“Only you were ever worthy of me,” he says, his twisted fondness coloured by melancholy, as he rips the blade out of Sairsel's body.
A scream tears through the air and seems to shake the very skies, all pinks and blues staring down at him. Sairsel can feel his body shake, can feel the pain burning away what remains of him, his blood seeping into the earth of the garden below him. And he hears that scream, as though all the furies in all the legends inhabit the same body and howl for vengeance with the same voice.
His mother’s voice.
“BASTARD!”
Morgana’s sword, its bright violet flashing like the griffin standard in Sairsel’s eyes, clashes with the blade still dripping with her son’s blood. She fills the silence with her growls, with her fury, with her relentless assault—and all Sairsel can do is stretch twitching fingers through the dirt and the flowers. He wants to call out to her; tell her to run while she still has her life.
He wonders if anyone will ever speak the irony of the insult: the heir to the imperial throne of Garlemald killing some half-blooded bastard boy and earning the curse of his life. Sairsel can hardly hear his own thoughts over the raging winds of that fight, over the white-hot flash of pain that has him gasping and choking on his blood again as hands drag him away.
Loving arms cradle him, this time—warm and kind and desperate.
“Do something,” snaps Alisaie, her voice raw with the begging, right on the edge of screaming. Her arms holding him. “You have to do something.”
And panic permeates Alphinaud’s words, his shaking hands, his magic that rips through Sairsel worse than the blade. “I am trying,” he says, and Sairsel aches for the tears in his voice.
“He can’t die,” Alisaie says through gritted teeth. Her hand touches his face, his skin too pale and too cold, and her touch burns. “You can’t die. You said you would come— when all this was over, you said you— with me and Lyse and Y’shtola— you said you’d pay for the bloody cakes.”
Sairsel’s lips almost form the words of an apology, or perhaps some jest—stop yelling at me, Alisaie, I’m dying—but he can barely breathe through his own blood.
Then comes the slash of a blade catching the nick of the arrowhead, the dripping of blood, the infernal noise of metal plate as Zenos falls to his knees.
Morgana does not open his throat cleanly. She knows how; she slices through what matters, but she doesn't finish it. She circles him like a hawk and grabs a fistful of his hair and viciously pulls his head back. And, with all her strength and all her rage, she kicks his body away.
Sairsel only sees her silhouette like a vengeful shadow against the sky: bloody sword in hand, head in the other. The voice dripping poison into his ears is silent.
