starofthemourning replied to your post “I see 'Hoist the Colors' as a song Thalassa sings - partly in warning...”
What dark things did I inspire Elri? Is Ardyn in the uncomfortable position of playing restrain?
I mean. It’s no more dark than usual, I don’t think?
But I was thinking something along the lines of @hamelin-born‘s and @charlottedabookworm‘s recent Leviathan thing with Nyx. As in, she doesn’t really care so much about the people - she’s not going to destroy Altissia or anything like that. I’d say in any other circumstances, she’d just slip back into her waters and reacquaint herself with the Sea.
Thing is though, Luna is right there. Luna is right there and spouting Bahamut’s Prophecy at her. Leviathan is grateful to her because she freed her - even if she was only following the path that had been laid out before her - but that does not mean she will new chains to bind her.
“You have my thanks for freeing me, little Oracle,” Leviathan says, “But I refused the Draconian before and I will refuse him again. Always. He bound me in chains for millennia as he did to my Chosen. He took my Tide-son, my heart, and shackled him to a cruel fate and when I raged against him, he did the same to me.”
And Ardyn, Ardyn will be watching this, will be listening to his Tidemother refuse the Prophecy. Will hear her claim that she did not go into sleep quietly as Bahamut demanded and was punished for it. And, even years later and all the distance between them, he will know her well enough to she the rage simmering beneath her scales - tempered, just as his is, by time and necessity.
“The Sea does not bow to Slavers,” Leviathan tells the Oracle, “You would do well to remember.”
And then Niflheim descends and Leviathan laughs.
She laughs and unleashes her fury on them because they dare. Imprisoned she may have been, but her children are loyal and they brought her news of the world above. They told her of the Empire’s conquests, of their slaughter and subrogation. Of their arrogance and destruction. And even if they hadn’t, Thalassa remembers an army raised and broken down and bent into little more than tools, remembers experiments on children, remembers the death and pain that follows in the Empire’s wake. The Empire is a den of Slavers.
So she laughs, because they think to try such things on her, think to chain her at best and kill her at worst. But she is the Sea. And the Sea does not bow.
(”The Slavers have forgotten me,” Leviathan tells her storm-brother after, eyes dark and gleaming and endless, “Help me remind them.”
And Ramuh, Ramuh, who mourned his sea-sister’s fate but had been helpless to do anything, who sheltered her children among his own, who love love loves his sister, will help her. Because she asked. Because Leviathan always asks. She never demands, not the way Bahamut does. She asks and Ramuh answers because he loves her, because her rage is his own, because his children have suffered at the hands of Slavers and he has not forgiven it.
Niflheim soon finds it near impossible to cross the sea. Boats disappear beneath the waves, airships are tossed about by storm after storm until they fall to the waters below.
The Sea is freedom and chains have no place in her waters.)
