But for all the power Otolin possesses in this moment, he can’t shake them.
Can’t release them from a soul ready to ravage.
As his chakra pop open one by one, he realizes he’s given into-
What.
Will unlocking a few chakra put the fear of Him into these risen forms?
Don’t stand there.
Move.
Right foot, left-
Too late.
Pomp and circumstance leads to punishment. He forgets himself in the midst of drawing upon inner might, and so his eyes widen, almost bulging from his head. No movement, arms and legs and thoughts caught within a field of stasis.
It’s not the first time he’s been in chains.
It probably won’t be the last.
But these are the kind that shake and shatter the soul. They tear apart and put it back together like an angry child might with a jigsaw puzzle.
And for Otolin?
It feels like…
Time doesn’t matter. Didn’t matter.
They didn’t have names.
Numbers.
They didn’t have ages.
…
They didn’t have-
They were the cycle.
Destruction leads to destruction leads to death leads to-
Perversion of ages-old doctrine leading into a cycle of punishment.
In the here and now, the battle between his friends and the pair of voidsent, Otolin collapses in the cavern.
In the mind’s eye, he finds himself with his face against hard rock and rough sand.
He feels himself bloodied and bruised, barely able to stand.
There’s tears in his eyes.
He can hear the voice that haunted him for a period of time he can put no number to.
“Up. Open. Show us.”
That hurts more than any wound might.
He doesn’t want to get up.
Doesn’t want to move.
Just wants to lay there and waste away, let the sand eat and be merry to the point where he would join the legions of dead here.
He’ll be carrion, just like all those who desired the crown.
“Up.”
Again.
“Open.”
No, please.
“Show us, Otolin.”
They keep asking.
Keep buzzing.
An angry swarm that he just can’t swat away.
Louder and louder, their voices never go. It mixes with the pitched battle around him in the here and now, an almost inseparable thing.
Body and mind come together, and he slams back into reality.
He needs to get up.
He needs to open a few more.
He needs to show these voidsent he’s…
That he’s just not to be fucked with.
Herky-jerky movements. His body tosses and turns as he rises.
Just like last time.
Three more pops, echoing across the cavern.
Just like last time.
The trail of smoke from each corner of his lips, the way his shadow looms within the darkness of the cavern itself, how his skin turns just a little more red, like the color of the sand he laid down in long ago.
Just like last time.
Maybe he can go-
No.
Not yet.
There’s only one person here who’s seen that.
She heard him speak His word and it was-
Even now, he’ll hold back.
It’ll make the day that he doesn’t…
Maybe it’ll make it easier to handle.
(Or maybe it won’t.)
No more pomp and circumstance.
He’s been in chains before.
No more pride.
Only punishment in the purple that overtakes his irises.
So,
my son/slaughterer
are you going to tell them?
are you going to answer the question?
no, not like that.
"I AM GOING TO DIE. I HAVE LOST SO MUCH. I AM LOSING SO MUCH OF MYSELF. I DON’T WANT TO DIE. PLEASE COMFORT ME. WHAT HAVE YOU LOST? WHAT ARE YOU NEVER GOING TO GET BACK?"
"Home. Mother. The sound of my sister's laugh."
She wished there’d been a way to comfort the lamb. She wished there’d actually been a lamb to comfort. Voidsent needn’t provide a mirror to gaze into. Unna kept everything close. Too close, some of her older compatriots would say. Too soft to grind the gears of revolution. To spend year after year and know it will become decade after decade of tireless, thankless work. Costly, too.
Rabanastre, leveled.
Mother, buried too soon.
Mjara... well.
Mourning Mjara wasn’t fair. She still had a perfectly good pair of eyes to roll at her sister for being such a ninny.
And now here she was wishing she could even be called a ninny.
The annoyed way she’d drawl out Unna’s name.
How she’d play off hurts even when half her face was red from a busted nose.
That time she had a lisp from knocking out a baby tooth.
She’d forgotten the specific timbre already. Until it came, bright as sunrise, out of a creature on the other side of the world. Her laughter.
The walk out through those great gates at Castrum Oriens was much easier than the walk in. All of the hiking around I’ve been doing has been good for me, I think. Not as comfortable as the abbeys in Thanalan or the Shroud where the wine overflows the cellars and the chapels are festooned in gold and glassy wonder, but the thrum of my heart strikes me as content when my lungs are working to pull in thin air and my boots strike the gravel road. Yet, it was hard to feel right leaving. Even as I knew – as I know I had to.
I thought a great endeavor would do me some good. If I can tell you the truth, and I think I can, I was almost excited when I heard the news of what had been happening in Gyr Abania – the burns, the ancient mysteries. It all seemed like a story coming to life, a page in the book where I might have been able to make a mark again. Pride was never my vice, or at least so I believed. But there is hubris in what I tried to do, I can see it clearly. To tell a story in total – to look with the eyes of the Keeper at a people, a country, and try to fashion it into something I could grapple with. A point of allegory.
I can’t tell you that I was humbled by their rustic simplicity or their kindly demeanor or their tenacity to survive. These are the characteristics of all people, everywhere, and the Gyr Abania that I’ve seen is no more lacking in the dynamics of the great and the small, the zealous and the hopeless, than anywhere else these feet of mine have tread. Perhaps, then, it was a kind of disappointment – to find that my work would not be any easier or more difficult, more meaningful here than anywhere else. This is not a promised land, not any longer; it’s a place, with a history, a history that like I told Farid can make it great or weak or anything you would want it to be. That was the allure; making it a place I could stay.
The canopy of the Shroud was familiar, and if I felt a quiet kind of heartbreak as I passed through green woodland lanes then at least I had the surety of my own two feet. I could feel the past weeks nagging at my back, but it wasn’t until I came to speak with a fellow traveler that I could find any relief. How embarrassing that a priest of Althyk would find himself at the Godmark trapped in any moment but the present. I have to thank Tieve for speaking my own catechism to me, as much as it shamed me in the moment. Pride is often the price of clarity, and the serenity I afford myself, afforded myself in that moment by letting go of the things that I want, of returning to quiet observance at the side of the stream, does not absolve me of that.
Faith is always a crucible and a process; there is always a mountain, always a stream, and one never arrives at the true summit. I was in error to think myself immune to the song this land could play in my heart, but as I walk again beyond the burden of steel that cuts the kingdom off from its neighbors, as I again see the karsts and the canyons and the rivers laid out before me, it strikes me how empty it all is. How like anywhere else. Myth, fable, the dreams of my boyhood have receded; I can see the people before me for what they are, rather than what I wish them to be. What I know they could be. It’s not my place to push. The hardship of restraint, the passion of holding myself apart will be good for me, I think. I can feel it in the calm flow of my blood beneath an endless sky that is the same over Gyr Abania as it is elsewhere. Returning, in this way, is easiest.
It’s getting easier to tell when the visions are coming.
When they first happened, I thought it was all a part of that materia deal that was happening on the Voyage. Stray memories being seen by passing through at the right (or wrong, some could argue) time. Glimpses into pasts that wanted to stay hidden.
But then they started happening when I was nowhere near the ship. It was then that I realized that it was the crystal doing its job. Showing me glimpses of its past, the past that it wanted to show me. To teach me lessons on monkhood, what it means to be a Fist.
This memory, here, I can feel it start to happen by the dull sense in the back of my brain, the fuzzled mumbling of voices, just high enough to be heard, low enough that I can’t make it out. Gives me enough time to close my eyes and focus. Which is all I can do, laid up in this hospital bed in the Quarter.
The pain comes first. It’s a similar pain, but instead of the left side it’s on the right, and there’s more of it. You put a hand on it, feeling the wetness of blood that’s all too familiar by now. Still flowing, even now? That’s never a good sign.
“Set me down, s-set me down I need a minute.” You say through gritted teeth. Even speaking is getting hard to do. Something that always comes so easily, it’s a strain now.
Rose doesn’t do it at first, trudging on with you on her back. She wouldn’t feel the blood seeping through her doublet, not yet, its too thick for that. You start to make the request again, but she slows, moving the both of you behind a rock. It’s not as gentle a set down as you’d like, but here you are now, sitting on the cold Gyr Abanian dirt.
“What’s wro--ah, shit. You’re bleeding again.” Rose comments, turning to see the state of you. You wonder if she’s just as hidden as you are behind this rock, what with how tall she is.
The soft, gentle rasping of the White flows through you after a moment. The focus in Rose’s hands glowed as it floated there in the space between them. It was a shining, brilliant purple in its coloring once. But the metal is tarnished, chipped, covered in dirt. At least you hope its dirt. You know that it isn’t.
“That should….that should do you, for now. I never did quite get very far learning about the White like the others did.” Rose explains, her face soft and sympathetic. “I still can’t believe we got out of there, the way we did. With you being as stupid as you were.”
You’d laugh, but the pain in your side is still intense, even with the bleeding stopped.
“Me? Stupid? C’mon, Rose, you know I’m not stupid. It’s us or them now. Fighting this battle on two fronts. If it ain’t the Garlean standard at the end of my fists, it’s our fuckin’ flag on their faces. We’re alive now, though, aren’t we?” You ask. It’s not the first time you’ve asked that, and you hope this isn’t going to be the last.
That soft and sympathetic face turns to stone, the smile a frown, brow set, the familiar creases between the eyes that she loved to talk about so much. “We’re alive, for now. But you know Alesone wouldn’t approve of what you did back there, burning through all of those chakra’s like you did.”
The weight on your chest comes back. It’s so heavy, like a boulder placed on top of you. You almost wish that it was an actual boulder, that would be far, far more easily dealt with than the heartbreak running through you now.
“You didn’t….have to bring her up, Rose.”
“I did. You know I did, how could I not? Only godsdamn way to get through to you sometimes.” Tears start welling in her eyes. It’s not hard to notice them, although they’re starting to come more and more silently now. You’re not sure if that’s good news.
A sigh escapes you after a moment, causing you to shift in displeasure. This isn’t the first time you’ve had a broken rib or three. Never a fun time.
“Look…...I’m sorry, alright? If I didn’t do what I did, we wouldn’t be alive. We can’t very well get our revenge if we’re dead on the end of a pike now, can we?” This also isn’t the first time this questions been asked. This one you hope is the last.
Rose turns away, looking back the way you two came. The edges of your vision start to blur, and darken. There’s more being said here, but its fading, becoming that fuzzy mumbling again. The end of this particular memory.
I can never really tell what the crystal is trying to tell me, even if I’ve had it for the better part of six moons now. Especially now. Did it come because we both had broken ribs? Me, in this hospital bed, her bleeding out in the Gyr Abanian wastes? If there was any lesson to be learned from this one, though, it seems like its the one I already learned myself.
Patience.
But it seems to be getting harder and harder to be patient when there’s always a threat looming on that horizon now, doesn’t it?
Originally, he had just been “One”.
No, not even the name.
Just the number.
( 1 )
It was how they all referred to themselves, for it was easier.
Efficient.
Anything to keep sentences short on the battlefield.
He had been a tall youth, a little gangly and perhaps awkward in some spots. More of a striker, somebody who could hit you a dozen times in the blink of an eye. Long hair, black, and his skin was tan. To say that he was handsome was an understatement.
Otolin had spent most of his youth alongside him.
No, he hadn’t been…
That hadn’t been his-
“Zero”.
No, not even the name.
Just the number.
( 0 )
“One”- no, Marcus had left before him. Refuge sought in the dead of the night. The commune had been sent into quite the rage over his escape. That was the word he had used later when Otolin had run into him.
And he had said it with such a smile. A big one. Free from the burden, from the expectations, from having to-
To do the thing they had been made so good at.
Crafted. Conjured. Whatever word they would use.
Created.
Right.
After Otolin left, they had met years later at a tavern in Ul’dah. Two souls brought together by mere coincidence. Marcus still had worn his hair long, and was sporting a beard that framed his features well. Oh, too well.
And he had earned good money too, the result of good work spent in Thanalan’s mines working over the rock and stone.
“Good, honest, and… easy work, One.”
“Otolin.”
“Oh, I’m-”
“It’s… it’s alright, Marcus. You… you don’t need to… apologize.”
“I feel as though that’s… that’s my life now though. An apology for what I did.”
The feeling was still there.
It is now.
He receives word through a contact: an accident in Bourneholm. But Otolin… has that feeling, knows better. It’s never just that. Never an accident. He had warned him to even not go, a meeting that had taken place months prior.
But it had been good work, wanting to…
To rebuild home.
Marcus had the courage to return home where Otolin hadn’t. He had always been the first to try new things, to make an attempt at something more than the legacy that had been entrusted to them.
“No, Otolin, it was forced upon us.”
He was right, of course.
He always had been.
His name had been “One”.
But he was so much more than that.
He was a friend.
And his name was Marcus.
Oh,
how
guilt
drives
our
failed
son/slaughterer
back
toward
the
place/home
he
fears/hates
most.
