It was a god. Or it wasn’t. Or perhaps it had been once. Gods were everywhere, whether you acknowledged them or not, and despite Garlean efforts to bleach them from the lands they ruled. They failed of course -- the Empire was gone, but gods remained in the marrow of the bones of the world.
Aidan knew gods -- you couldn’t not know them in the Twelveswood, the proper woods, not the city. City folk had Hearers and the Seedseers as their mediators. Anybody else sometimes got that, if you were lucky or tied to something bigger like a trade route. So you had to learn early. How to give your share of what you take back to the woods. How not to waste what you kept for yourself. To respond to anything you didn’t recognize with respect and wariness at the same time.
It was easy to know what you were looking at, even if you couldn’t see it directly. Allag had tried to tame gods, only to fall into ruin. Both it and Garlemald sloughed off the skin of the earth. Meanwhile, the bones remained for others to find in decaying labyrinths and derelict pieces of tek that inspired more shudders than excitement. A hell at heavens height.
He hadn’t thought about the eyes in the dark in a while. A year? Maybe longer; there had been a lot of other memories that beckoned louder (or demanded attention). Gaia, the deliverer of divine intervention when a monster stood to kill. Who spoke See The Truth, and his whole body obeyed. Who forsook her own name, gave it up in the face of subjugation. Whose one request of service was to die, in the end.
Not a god. Not anymore, perhaps. But in the longer stretch of his own life, the only one he felt cared the most, the way he’d been taught they should. Perhaps the best evidence he’d ever seen of divinity. Gods were everywhere. He knew. He had seen them.
A humming melody. Muttered words of a long forgotten verse. The phantom pain of exertion. Throbbing in remembrance to the spell or the slash that afflicted her body. Never her mind the armor she had worn then. Armor didn’t matter in that place, or, at the very least, it mattered only in her mind. There was a certain kind of power that lay in belief.
But after the Voyage had returned home, the thoughts and memories never left her. There were some that did wonder back when she had her staff made with Defiant Bride. A monolith to the Goddess Sophia, resplendent in her gold over her ashen skin. It was only a simulation, sure, but there were whispers.
Temper. Tempered. Aren’t they acting strange?
Silya ignored them at first. They had far more pressing matters to attend to than that. Keeping the Habisphere safe. Discovering the secrets of some hidden labyrinth. Flying back down to Eorzea for help from the Grand Companies. What time did they have to worry about tempering of all things?
That same staff made years ago rested in her hand now as she practiced her old, thaumaturgical forms. It wouldn’t do to disappoint the Father, after all, for allowing her to have kept studying at the Ossuary when she did.
But there it was again, that soft, gentle whisper in the back of her mind. A whisper that laid the seeds of doubt once again, just for a brief moment.
The dogs that roam wild around the perimeter of Rhalgr’s Reach, with their lean, rib-ridged bodies and lolling tongues, are all but alien to the type of dog I grew up with. I’m used to rounded heads and blunt noses, a snout that stands tall enough to fit into my palm, if I’m brave enough to open it. These Eorzean dogs are short and muttish, but curious and self-sufficient. I never see anyone tending to them beyond tossing them a few scraps from the garbage, but they take care of themselves. I wonder what Augustin would think of them, this motley crew. Would he know what to do with them?
I have a confession to make to you. (Don’t I always?)
I’m not okay.
I’ve tried to talk about it, but nobody hears what I’m telling them. When I say I feel like at any moment I could wake up and find myself back in the belly of an airship, it’s more complicated than either fear or nostalgia, but that’s all anyone wants to hear. So I’ve stopped saying it, but I haven’t stopped waking up in a stinking sweat, no matter whether I’m snug in my Ul’dahn apartment or sprawled out for a nap on a patterned rug in the Reach. Tight chest, hot eyelids, dry tongue; it’s all the same.
One of these times, I woke up under the afternoon sun with a mean, gold-furred dog lying in the dirt a dozen fulms away, with her grey-flecked snout resting on her paws and blackened eyes watching me closely. The moment she saw me looking, she picked up her nose and turned it the other way, aloof and resolute. No you don’t. You didn’t catch me staring.
Alright, bitch. Fuck.
I went back to work, dismantling the arms and legs of an old Avenger model that the Resistance had dragged up from an underground storage unit over by Castellum Corvi. The magitek suit sat upright in front of me, an ape with nothing to say and nobody at the helm, losing itself piece by piece to my wrench. It’s mindless work, and I lost myself in it too, until I heard snuffling and grunting off to my left.
It was that same fucking dog, nosing through the bolts and screws I’d laid out. And I swear to you -- I wouldn’t joke about this, but I know you won’t believe me -- I saw her chomp and swallow three steel washers before I could shoo her away. Three flat Garlean steel rings, and this idiot animal chewed them up like kibble, staring me dead in the eye as she gulped them down, like she was laying down some sort of gauntlet. Try me. You gonna stop me? Pussy.
What the hell was I supposed to do?
Eventually we reached an uneasy truce. I’d lay out a pile of metal scraps for her to chew on, which I cherrypicked from the least-valuable and most-busted materials (even warped and pitted metal is still good to melt down, if you know someone who can work Ilsabardian steel, and fortunately I happen to be dating a guy), and she’d leave my carefully organized array of dismantled parts alone. She’d sit back down on her haunches, still about ten fulms away from wherever I was working, but watching me with a keen air of inspection. I felt judged, like a captain of some sort was watching over my shoulder, picking her teeth and spitting in the dirt with every twist of my wrench, but she was still more agreeable company than most soldiers are. Whatever. We worked it out.
And the next time I woke up on that rug with a nauseous lurch, surprised to find myself greeted by the Gyr Abanian sun rather than the dim blue glow of an airship’s indicators, I was weighted to the spot, nailed down by an impossible pressure on my chest. That bitch again, with her head and paws swaddling my rabbity heart until it was forced to slow. She locked onto me with one eye, dark but intelligent behind its glassy sclera. We shall never speak of this intimacy. Don’t look me in the eyes when I do this.
What would you have done? I looked away from her, ashamed, still disoriented from nightmares and dehydration, until eventually she picked herself up with a lazy yawn and slinked off into the shadows again with a belly full of screws. I’m going to miss her when I leave this place, but my pride won’t let me tell her that. She wouldn’t want to hear it anyway.
Your name is Defiant Bride. You’re a Goldsmith, and a Secretary, and sometimes a fighter, and you hate flying and heights and flying high up in the sky...
But for the first time, you think you understand why someone might spend their whole life chasing this endless blue.
<When Tieve's lips touch your forehead, you feel something pleasant--something comforting. A scent? A vision? A taste? All? Think about it.>
....Byron’s Bread found itself another bountiful harvest. Wheat crops, not quite endless, not quite far. Enough to walk through - showered in amber light of sunset.
This far from Ala Gannha, the sounds reaching my ears as I drift through the fields are those of only nature - things taking to their natures, at that. I don’t feel the buds of wheats along my fingertips, but that’s alright. The price paid was worth it, merely to know and see it all grow, have this chance. Let the ones to come after us frolic and revel and toil working through as they wish - it’s all for them, just as it always has been. Maybe for me, too, if they’ll let me in.
Wind drifts around me, a sound of grace descending from Mason’s Falls, and with it, a gentle summer’s breeze. So violent in its intent I can’t help but follow its direction as it circles, guides, points. All I can do to stay in place, stay upright as I turn, and I’m grateful for it, given I’m reminded what exactly is producing those sounds of only nature - things taking to their natures. People, in the distance, groups and duos scattered. Over rustrock, over stream, next to tree and scrap, stoic upon boulder....
In the distance, come to rest beneath a tree seeing its leaves bloom once more, I see Synnove, all crimson and hat and wild fiery teeth, babbling and educating and lecturing for a crowd of two, one to partake, one to consume. Farid, smiling and grinning and nodding his head like a smitten puppy, as ever - but the sight is warming, inspiring, seeing that familial love and dedication in his eyes. I hope he comes to understand all she’s imparting to him, down to the essence - it’s the weight of a future. Vio’s learned to wear it well, seeing how she sits there with them, how radiant she still is cast underneath the trickling shadow of verdant. A silent regard, attention drifting from the apocalypse of ink and parchment beneath her and the cacophony of passion and madness speaking above. Focus, unyielding. Can feel my muscles ache in hopes that Synnove gives the red to her soon. Ache hits more when I hope Farid screams the loudest when it happens.
You’re desperate.
In the distance, breaking the air and shaking rustrock after square ilm of rustrock with the sheer force of their fervor, I see Livia, all beef and pride and vigorous enthusiasm as she slips further and further from that purposed holding back of hers as the heart is taken more and more by the performance of the aspirant before her. Silya’s her pride, my pride, our pride - only some few months into the path of the monkhood and she’s already seen two chakras opened, wrenched open and pulled taut by the skin of her teeth and the grit in her claws, and even standing away as far as I am, the sheer power of their training is infectious, sending hairs alight my carcass as I bear witness to the raw power of their twin smiles. Like you could take one and replace the other with it - maybe they did, given I’ve not seen them drop those grins, even when breaths are taken to pass comments of performance. Can feel my heart stir in hopes that Livia keeps her on the right path. Beats hit harder when I know that she will - that Silya’ll be the best of us.
....almost makes me want to take up teaching just to shout at them.
In the distance, preceded by shouting and noise more so than presence.....I see you.
I see him bent over at the waist, teeth gnashing, breath heaving, muscles twitching. You’ve pushed him too far, again, but there’s no one there to tell you that you’re supposed to beat him while he’s down, just as he had your family do to you. Can see how you’re biting it back, that frustration, the impulse - you’re not as tired as you were before all of this, invigorated by those two golden tonfa in your hand, that sacred quarterstaff in his. No--maybe not that. I see the third drift in from the edges of the makeshift arena, blooming and luscious as the vines he held reign over, his touch soft as ever as a single hand comes to rest upon your shoulder. You look at him, and he looks at you, and maybe you see something in that emerald gaze of his. I don’t know what - I don’t want to know what - but whatever it is, I can see the spark flare and flex in you, and instead of a kick, a punch, a scream crashing upon him - it’s your hand, offered, open, even if stiff as blanched cotton.
I’ll make sure he does not have to run again.
You said that men will choose and do as they wanted. You were right, of course, and as much as everyone wanted to share their well-meanings with you, I could see in that lone gaze of yours that you were tempering your expectations. Men will choose and do as they want - but they can always say as they want, at that. How many of us have a hidden leash of the Alliance around our throats, needing to put the ‘good of Eorzea’ before the good of men? Of Spoken? I heard the story so many times - all it took was a single pair of lips, a single wagging of the tongue, for Rensa to end up in the gallows, hung like any other dog of war.
.........but even with this threat, I’m still a hopeful fool. If Lawrence will shed his collar for you, so can the others. All they have to do is choose.
Men will choose and do as they want. Yet in all of this - aren’t you a man, too?
Salgard wasn’t, but he became one. Iago wasn’t, but he can be. You...you aren’t. Not in this context. Not as you are.
It is desperation. You were right. But it wasn’t desperation for you to serve, not to atone, not to pay penance. A desperation to get you to hope. Because this is what hope looks like. Monsters being unmade. Brothers living their lives. Brothers in all. Us minding our business.
Hope is a choice. Not expectations forced on you from people yearning for a dream, like I forced on you, and you forced on me. Our message, passed on to you. Our message, which you received. Our message...which I hope will make you remember what you are owed from the world.
Hope is a choice, and it is a choice the world will not let you make right now. But it is a choice I--we, all of us-- it is a choice we’ll make to carve out the chance for you. For you are a man too, are you not?
You deserve to choose, too. And this time - this time, I won’t doubt you.
Sunrise is coming. I hope you’ll choose to see it.
