#hydaelyn-arts

[strigif0rme]

The Master, Matoya available on redbubble 🖤 ko-fi | twitter | ig 🖤

[hydaelyn-arts]

Welcome back

A few months ago the changes occurring on Tumblr forced us to take a break as we lacked the ability to shuffle the posts within the queue, making it far easier for us to post randomly artworks, screenshots, writings and other types of arts.

As the option is now back and available to every users, we're going to slowly return to our past schedule and hope it will help you to discover new artists within FFXIV's community. If you have some suggestions regarding the tags we should follow ourselves, feel free to send us a PM.

@hydaelyn-arts

[seki-no-kishiko]

Kishiko Seki: Creature of the Deep

I wanted a new banner image, so here we are... in sketch form.

[satyharvenheit]

:3 spending some time drawing a portrait of my final fantasy XIV character Hye Senft i’m always on Aether datacenter Siren server! Always up for some rp , content and commissions too ! XD  contact me on discord !  Saty(hye)#0441

[haeres-viaticum]

Charon

(Charon and Psyche, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope)

“Please, Miss Briar, you have no idea what sort of hardship this is going to put on my brother and I. My mother overestimated what she would have to leave us, and this would force us to make some very difficult decisions. She didn’t know of my brother’s debts...”

“I understand your concerns and believe me when I say my heart is touched by your sincerity and earnest, but I’m afraid that your external affairs are outside the scope of what I’ve been tasked to handle. The contract and every measure in it was agreed-upon and signed for by your mother before her death, and I am but a woman of my word to honor it to the letter, as she intended.”

This was not the first time she held council with desperate next-of-kin to hear their impassioned bids to annul funerary contracts before they could be fulfilled. They saw the bill for the imported northern reds, for the exotic flowers out of Thavnair or Doma or gods-know-where. Without a doubt their eyes had opened wide at the number of commas in the total for the cadre of mourners their dear mother had requested in her final days, and they required an entire day’s pay in order to inflate the number in attendance, for who wanted to look unloved at their final rite? It wasn’t cheap to host a proper Ul’dahan burial, to hire the elephants or pay the musicians to play until late into the night, but you only die once, don’t you?

“You have to make an exception. It would be heartless to leverage this against us. I know my mother signed for this, but if she knew the state we’re in now -- she would have revised her wishes, she would never go through with it knowing full well it would devastate what’s left of our family estate.”

“It is not my place to litigate what her wishes might have been under other circumstances.“

“Please. Please.” The aggrieved woman leaned forward and braced her palms on the desk, dark eyes glistening faintly with unshed tears. “I urge you to...to...look inside yourself. Consult your conscience, ask yourself if it would be right to garnish the wages of my children’s father, if it would be decent to wring coin out of my brother who works so...s-so hard to provide for his family...” She paused, holding a hand at her breast to beat back the desperation that surely loomed close. “Can you reconsider?”

Oh, heavens, they were begging, begging for mercy, the kind only she could provide as the one who held the contracts. Of course she knew she had the power to lift the yoke of debt sloughed onto their shoulders by late mothers, fathers, grandparents, aunts, and all it would take was a few signatures to grant them what they desired. They would thank her profusely, perhaps even weep with gratitude. She would appear kind, gracious, and compassionate. Nothing about the process of unburdening would be particularly taxing on her part, but one question begged the ultimate answer: who was Lita Briar to intervene on the ritual tolls levied by Nald’thal themselves?

Pale hands folded patiently over a stack of parchment, fingers lacing one over the other over the other. The ghostly mortician fixed her pale gaze on the pleading eyes that held kindling hope, embers that wanted for her to lean forward and give them a little blow, and in two words she snuffed them without ceremony.  

“I cannot.”

[akanemiura]

Epic

Muscle against metal, bones to dirt; the thudding and scraping of the smaller scuffles that make a larger war had become secondary to her own rapidfire breathing pumping in and out and in and out of her charred lungs, choked thick with the cinders of a village that couldn’t be saved. Parrying chimes were answered with warcries were answered with the death scream of horses being slaughtered and dragging their masters down, too.

The smell of petrichor rising up from the wet ground⁠—wet with rain, with viscera; who could tell anymore?⁠—made the whole bloody mess feel deeply, unshakably ritual and elemental to being. Soldiers who had once displayed an unmovable, stoic discipline for years in their training right down to the ruler-straight seams of their uniforms now transformed in an instant to muddy, feral beasts who licked their lips to a glisten and gnashed with impatience, roiling and seething with volcanic rage while hot flames tore through shopfronts and cottages distantly beyond the field of battle.

But not her.

She had a focus not unlike a trance, one that saw her swaying and moving like water around the impotent swings of those who would see her cut to pieces. It was as though she’d been possessed by spirits unknown who saw fit to expose her enemy’s motions a moment before even he knew what he would do. She adjusted her grip on her patient blade, invoking the perfect stillness of a coiled viper, and watched the lowered horns of a soldier’s helmet lower toward her like a bull ready for a gore. It was over in a matter of seconds and the blood tasted the way her sword sounded when it clashed with his, turned it away, and immediately drove deep into the unguarded, yielding flesh that makes a mortal mortal. Victory.

--

The early light of day was just beginning to warm the paper screens of her simple room when she arose from dreams of war bloodless and unscathed. Akane had never known the brutal struggles of her great-great-great-great-greats, but the stories of valor had echoed down through the ages until it pervaded her sleep, until she was playing out lessons from the training yard in her mind’s simulations of history as told by her forebears. At her most honest, she yearned mightily for fantasy to be made flesh, wished selfishly for Kugane’s newer age of peace to rattle ever-so-slightly so she might have a chance—a real chance—to prove her Miura worth as all who came before, with body and mind thrown into the environment for which it had been honed tirelessly for years. Alas.

As the sound of bokken clacking and childish laughter permeated the stillness of morning, she sighed. Heroes looked a lot different these days.

[miyasukeietada]

The Immaculate Plague

CN: body horror

---

“What does it mean to be a conduit?”

A thin wrist shot up in the air, all five fingers splayed wide like a peacock’s fan with all the same desire for notice. A few groans escaped under exasperated breaths around the room until sister Feiyan rapped her knuckles against the weathered desk. That harsh knock alone was enough to command silence without further threat from the long slat of a ruler hanging menacingly from a nail in the wall just within reach.

“Miyasuke.”

A slight girl who jingled with layers of an adult’s jewelry as she moved stood from the straight-backed chair and cuffed one wrist with her hand behind her back when she came to her feet. She wore a stern expression that was terribly out of place on the round visage of youth, dark eyes fixed just beyond the willowy matron’s expectant look.

“A conduit is not only a servant of the spirits, but makes herself a vessel to contain them. To bring the light of the kami to others through her,” she recited with full matter-of-fact. Even in spite of the ramrod-straight posture of pride, her gaze flickered to the head of the classroom for evident validation.

“And why is it important that we make ourselves a conduit? Why don’t we remain content as a servant?”

The girl’s narrow shoulders rose and fell with a quick breath, but not a finger fidgets in the face of scrutiny. “Because...servants only do as they’re told and remain separate from their master’s desires. But conduits...they are...united with their masters. They want what their masters want. And...when they are united with their masters, they can speak for their masters to others. They become an extension, like—like an extra hand.”

Feiyan motioned for the girl to sit and retired her weathered hands to lace together at her front. “Miyasuke is correct. Servants are useful, but if we make ourselves into conduits, we can better serve the spirits by needing to ask less of them. We no longer need to wait to be told what to do, we simply know and we are free to guide others...”

---

Their future had already been signed and sealed by holy decree. She had encouraged countless Domans to leave Revenant’s Toll and seek refuge in the verdant bowers of the Twelveswood where it seemed the kami could be coaxed to seed the land’s treasures and gradually flourish in the fertile soils protected by the good men and women of Gridania. Together, they could construct a new life in Eorzea atop the detritus leftover from their broken homes in Doma and determine a new way of life on their terms, in the way of their worship. The fit was natural, it only needed to be realized by capable hands. She had been given this divine council and it would not be denied, and yet something sinister lurked in the depths.

The faith she kept roused her before daybreak and walked her, nightgown and all, to the homes of strangers in order to perform everyday miracles on hopeless addicts and the gravely infirm. She had seen the pallor of death flush pink with life in a matter of minutes with her touch; she lifted the shroud of disease beyond repair and left just as hastily and unexplained as she’d arrived at death’s door, only to collapse back into her own bed aside a perplexed man whose brow sank further each time she returned. 

On the surface, she remained steadfast that such benevolence could not possibly portend ill omens, but when asked if she could resist the call to martyrdom if it were to come some day, she was disturbed to find the answer was far from a simple ‘no’. Aether flowed through her like a live wire; frightening amounts, she would later recount, that no one person ought to be able to channel. Intervening in the natural order, by all rights, should have given pause to a sensible woman, but instead she forged ahead with reckless belief that so long as the kami willed it, she could trust them as her compass. She could be a good, bright lantern, a veritable lighthouse filled with unimpeachable white light.

Little did she know that the field she purified of void-tainted ivy tangles had gone fallow and all the life that depended upon it along side. Birds dropped from the trees with a parched rustle and a cloud of brittle feathers where not even worms could devour them, for they, too, had gone belly-up; leaves curled back as they turned to pure ash just a split-second before they scattered to dust by the slightest breeze. In four weeks, a man she cured of somnus addiction will watch his skin slowly bleach and turn to leather. His body will purge itself of ichor in front of his wife and children without warning. He will expel a stream of aether strong enough to leave them all nauseous, and then he will die. This will play out again and again; the florist, the cobbler, the carpenter—no man, woman, or child who was cleansed by her hand will be spared the same.

But she won’t be there to see it.

[strigwrites]

Paean

Warning: Shadowbringers spoilers ahead

This is an experimental writing piece set in an alternate ending where Emet-Selch’s mission is realized. This is not necessarily lore-compliant or accurate even in a hypothetical, just a headcanon to be enjoyed as-is.

In the womb dark of some accursed nether we remained in a dreamless slumber so unlike the exquisite jungle of creation we’d enjoyed before the annihilation by light. What torture for ancient artists such as we, to drift afloat an aimless tide with no paintbrush in sight to capture even that bleak terror, that placid glass surface upon which we could no longer make so much as a ripple. Lost impressions to the decay of eons that have passed since last we woke, a terrible pity. Imprints swirled through the blast wind after it all collapsed and only by a pair of desperate, grasping fingertips was the dying breath of known existence spared the final graveyard, the true death that is being forgotten.

Here we’ve been locked in ignorant entombment divorced from our vibrant days while monuments to the duality of grief and hope have been erected in our stead to hold vigil until we might return to that which was unfairly razed. What gentle ashes that stir in a man’s empty hearth to keep the ancient embers glowing far below, stoked by the steady and hollowing stream of homesick that far exceeds a simple home. Stars collide and no amount of drifting through the resulting dust would abate the longing. Nobody looks like us, speaks our language, knows our ways, holds our secrets, and no matter how many generations and nations and civilizations rise and fall and rise again, it’s never his.

Our champion carried the unfathomable and cruel weight of our collective memory through the maddening march of years until decades turned to centuries turned to millennia neverending; he drank deep in a sea of despair, and yanked us from the very fringes to see the spark of life returned to us, his people. When the rejoining came, it started as a knife thrust through a clean, white sheet. It carved a black arc through a cataract, and all at once it blinked wide and awake and alive. The new pupil expanded, engulfing all in darkness and sanctuary. A soft sigh roused us from hibernation most deep, its caress giving form renewed by touch, and planted on our lips the kiss of life that inflated our lungs, made hills of our sunken chests.

Rest assured we’ll never forget the fractured creatures that stumbled into being, the imperfect ones who never asked to live in our long shadow without a prayer of filling it. We think to their smallness, how fragile and ephemeral they were like motes of dust suspended in a spidersilk beam of light, and we know the sacrifice must have been great. Worlds were lost that we might inherit the one true star and we remain indebted forever to Zodiark’s blessed, the hero who woke us—the one who so loved his people that he would go to the ends of time to see us restored, whole.