Contains spoilers for the Reaper job quests, the Dark Knight job quests, but no Endwalker spoilers; also serves as a follow-up to alter idem and absentes adsunt, so I’d recommend reading those if you haven’t.
(actions, not words / a journey; a burden; a joining)
Hanami summons her first voidsent.
The packed earth outside of the entrance to Cutter’s Cry wasn’t quite as hard or cracked as the badlands of Broken Water or the winding canyons of the Red Labyrinth, but Hanami still felt a wave of vertigo as Drusilla faced her, arms crossed with all the expectation of a soldier’s taskmaster. If she’d been a fulm shorter and wearing plate instead of leather, Hanami might have had to close her eyes to keep from seeing Fray in the corners of her vision.
Though, theoretically, she’d be seeing something worse if all went to plan.
“You’ll understand I’m not much in demand for imparting magical learnin’,” Drusilla said, with a wry curl to her mouth, “but given what the mad bastard at the Ossuary said, you’ll be needin’ it. So listen well: if you try to pull this voidsent through body and all, you’re more like to kill yourself in the attempt than get anything useful done. That’s why we call ‘em avatars—they’re not the whole beast, just what power we’re willing to bargain for stuffed into a nice little puppet. I understand your mages like to use statues or pottery to hold the things, but I find them a bit tedious.”
Hanami couldn’t help but wrinkle her nose; she hadn’t had cause to go digging through any Amdapori or Mhachi ruins in a while, but she remembered the damn gargoyles.
“If it were me,” Drusilla continued, “or any of my people, for that matter, we’d use a soul crystal—bloody handy, those things are. They store enough aether for a voidsent to construct a body of its own, at least for a little while, and the more they feed on your victims, the stronger they get. But since you’re bein’ stubborn, I suppose there’s some other trick you’ve a mind to try.”
“I do,” Hanami said, fist clenched in her pocket. “Wait.”
She took a steadying breath, and closed her eyes.
Her soul crystal—Fray’s, once—rested over her ribcage as it nearly always did. At its gentlest it was warm like a blanket left by the hearth, a constant companion—not Fray, not really, not as they’d been in life, but her own heart flavored by the dregs of their memory. Now it prickled against her skin like a hot poker, restless with irritation.
You’re really asking permission of your own delusions, she heard (the voice wasn’t quite hers, too raspy, too alien, but the sentiments were familiar enough to pass as her own mind), to rip open your heart and let a dead thing crawl in for a visit.
Wouldn’t be the first time. Arguably, a voidsent was less dead than some of the other splintered souls that had wedged their way between her ribs. And this one was—maybe—trying to reach out, at least.
You do remember the last time you tried this, you wound up bleeding from your face?
Hanami clenched her jaw—she still had a headache, nearly a full two days later—the noise had been like fingernails on a chalkboard, like metal being chewed up by machinery, only unimaginably louder and echoing directly inside her skull. But the words, jumbled as they had been, were familiar. Home. Light. Love. Save me. If this…thing was what she thought it might be, answering a call for champions, it probably hadn’t hurt her on purpose. Most of the voidsent she’d had the displeasure to meet before weren’t anything resembling human anymore. Who better to play emissary than the fell creature she’d already welcomed into her head?
Ha, she heard. As if you aren’t a fell creature yourself. But the laughter was genuine, if scornful, and the soul crystal settled into a gentle simmer of consent.
Which only left the other thing.
The constellation stone was still wrapped in a scrap of linen, kept carefully separate from her bare fingers after the last disastrous contact she’d had with it. Even through the fabric she could feel it burning—with magic, or with promise. That was part of the reason Drusilla had brought her here in the first place. Cocobuki showed me the scorch marks you left in the street, she’d said, and I rather like this rug.
Carefully, cupped in her hand to conceal it from view, Hanami pulled out the constellation stone and let it slip free of its wrappings.
She still didn’t…entirely understand what had happened, the last time. She only remembered pulsing a little magic into it, the way it had burned like a beacon atop the Crystal Tower, and she’d blacked out soon after. Whatever had made its way through the summoning sigil—if anything—hadn’t lingered long enough for her to see it. But she’d done this, or something like this, once already, and so there was no reason she couldn’t do it again. She just had to do it right.
The Exarch and Elidibus had both talked about rituals and practice, old arcane nonsense for stuffy sorcerers and wizards locked in grand towers. Hanami didn’t do magic, not like that. Her power had always been more primal: raw power, pure intent. A need, and an answer to it. Fray—the thing she’d made of Fray—had said as much: you had a sword and a soul crystal, but what you wanted was a mentor. Shadows spun themselves into shields at her fingertips when her feet were too slow to save her. She would make what she had to, so long as she could pay the cost. Ceremony was incidental. In the Burning Wall, all those years ago, she’d spilled her blood in the soil to tempt beasts to wet her blade at Fray’s behest; now she would bleed aether to tempt something far greater and far more terrible.
She opened her eyes, and darkness boiled on the ground before her.
She hadn’t called up this shadow often—once in the burning memory of Amaurot, the first time, defending her from the monsters that had lunged for her when the Lightwardens’ aether had rendered her blind and useless, and again in the undersea graveyard to drag her through Elidibus’s gauntlet of ghosts. But she recognized the purple-black smoke, the glittering shards of magic that drifted up from the ground, heralding the vessels she’d conjured in the past to hold the shattered pieces of her heart, the same haze that had hung thick around Myste in Gyr Abania when he summoned wave after wave of adversaries from her memory. In another heartbeat or two she would be able to make out an arm, maybe, or the edge of a blade.
In her hand, the constellation stone flared to life, and the ground erupted in fire.
The sigils that had flared on top of the Crystal Tower had been the same clear gold as afternoon sunlight; this time it burned deep orange, like a brushfire, little tongues of purple light dancing from the edges. If Drusilla thought the light show strange Hanami couldn’t see to tell, focused as she was on the scorching heat in her palm. Power and intent, she thought: she had power, and needed only to guide it. The thought came unbidden of the Exarch slamming his staff on the ground, making his grand declarations, but she’d never been fond of theatrics and anyway, the voice had made its desires clear.
Her incantation was simple, in comparison: I’m here. Come home.
The pillar of light flared like a bonfire with ceruleum thrown into its flame, so hot the air currents ruffled Hanami’s hair and the heat forced her to stagger backwards a step; and there, at the heart of the fire, that darkness, the shadow as familiar as her own, only as the light died around it she watched it clutch at the earth and crawl out of it like a corpse clawing out of a grave—
The hazy outline of Esteem solidified as she watched, smoke and shadow given flesh. The gauntlets grew longer, tapering into bloody claws; the faceplate melted away into a gaping maw lined with jagged fangs; the torso oozed out of shape, pulled by its own weight, which made no sense as the familiar skirt ended in dark tatters, short and fluttering around the place where Esteem’s legs no longer were, replaced by crackling red levin and roiling smoke. It was a knight, if a knight could be made of veins and rotting flesh; it was horrid and lovely, a splash of pitch and lurid bleeding red across the browns and blues of the Thanalan desert. Esteem—the voidsent—the avatar howled, once, that same metallic screeching Hanami remembered scouring the inside of her skull, and then its eyeless face swiveled to focus, unerring, on her.
It occurred to her, as the avatar swooped toward her—as Drusilla, somewhere a thousand malms away, cursed—that she might have fucked up.
But the stone in her hand pulsed, once, so bright it felt painful, and before Hanami could move—could begin to reach for the sword at her back—the avatar changed course, diving to the side to skim under her clenched fist and swirl up around her back; before she could run it had pressed its horrid face up next to hers, its teeth cold and wet against the skin of her cheek, and she did stumble back from that only to be caught by its spindly fingers, which curled around her hip in a mockery of a lover’s embrace.
It hovered there, expectant, and the stone hummed with something that could almost pass for—
Joy.
Hanami took another deep breath, and hoped she hadn’t screamed herself hoarse again.
“You said you wanted saving,” she whispered. “You said you wanted me to find you. Are you going to help me, if I help you?”
The avatar unhinged its jaw, and its—eugh—tongue lolled out, nearly brushing her neck. She made a point not to flinch.
Yes, she heard, that same raspy other-voice from her soul crystal, layered with a sound like a shriek trapped in tar. Yes yes yes yes yes. Bargain-maker soul-finder heartsblood yes.
And slowly, so carefully, almost delicate, it tucked its monstrous face against her chest, nestled under her chin, nuzzling against her heart.
while discussing the crystal tower’s voidgate and the risk in forging a pact with another voidsent to re-open it, you’ll get some special dialogue if you’re a reaper at the time!
Y’shtola: You seem to have struck a bargain of your own, Hanami. Though it serves you well in battle, be aware that the beneficial nature of your “arrangement” is the exception which proves the rule.
