Saw a bit with baby Sola braiding Ardyn's hair. A World in Grey's? Made me think, though- What if Ardyn was the one with the Galahdian mother? Except he remembers a bit more- not enough to feel like he's one of them (no one could, or would, claim him now, surely) but some. His mother disagrees strongly and is pitching the most unholy of fits in the afterlife. Ramuh sympathizes, really he does, but there's nothing that can be done at this point- wait just a little longer- (1/2)
Come the time Ardyn is released from his hell, it's not by the Nifs. No, one very determined teenager Who Walked Twice snuck in ahead of the Nifs and stole him out from under their nose. They were more than a little miffed that they got the blame but none of the reward for the deed. Now Ardyn's getting mothered by someone maybe half his age, but with all the baby stories. All of them. And she's determined to teach him /properly/ this time.
Me: Okay so 1, yes Sola belongs to @a-world-in-grey and 2, this is ... a wee bit out of my comfort zone for some reason? Maybe it’s because this idea kinda walked up behind me and decked me with a muse bat. But I’m not uncomfy enough to not do a really long ramble so here we go (also buckle up the angst gets going REAL FAST):
-Ardyn remembers his mother fondly, if .. vaguely. He was only 4 when she died after all, and by the time he was 5 his father had already remarried and had had Somnus.
-But he does remember her a little bit. He remembers her sound of her voice when she sang (but not when she spoke), he remembers that she always smelled like rain and wildflowers. He remembers the braids in her hair with glittering beads of purple and black, how she wouldn’t let her touch them, but would gently braid his hair so that he had the pretty beads too. He thinks he remembers her voice telling him that someday she would teach him to make this braid himself, that someday she would teach him everything. That he would see her home one day with his own eyes.
-He remembers her war scream, wild and feral and primal with fury, as she fought off the assassins that had come for them. He remembers cowering under the dining table as people screamed and guards fell bloody and unmoving to the floor and his mother surged to the battle with glittering knives in her hands. He remembers crying for his father, who usually spent dinners with them but just this once had been too busy, he remembers sobbing as his mother’s war scream turned wet and pained.
-He remembers the silence that had greeted him when he finally crawled out from under the table, moments before the doors burst open for his wild-eyed father and a host of more guards. He remembers, in those moments of silence, of staring around at the unmoving bodies of the assassins and the guards.
-And his mother, slumped near the dining table. Not moving. Not reacting when he pushed at her arm, or tried to clean the front of her dress with his hands because it was her FAVORITE and now it was covered in Red.
-His father was never the same after that. Nothing had ever been the same.
-He’d kept her beads, after the funeral. Kept them hidden away from his step-mother, who was nothing like HIS mother. He’d been afraid she would take them away, or try to wear them along with all of her other jewelry, and that would have been wrong on a level Ardyn couldn’t explain.
-Sometimes in the dark, in between screaming himself hoarse just to hear something and the hallucinations of Aera and Somnus that haunted him, he wondered what had happened to those beads. What his mother would think of him now if she could see him.
-Sometimes he laughed, rasping and broken, because of all the ghosts to come torment him, his mother was never one of them at least. Maybe her memories were too faint and blurred to come taunt him.
-He doesn’t know how long he’s been in the darkness (days, weeks, years, an eternity perhaps) when something in the air changes. He thinks it’s another hallucination at first. The shaking of his prison, the rumble of dust falling onto his numb skin, the loud crack of stone giving way in front of him. Something stabs his eyes with pain and he whimpers since he cannot scream (his voice gave out a long time ago). It takes a long, breathless moment of cringing away from the pain as much as his chains allow to remember that the thing hurting him is LIGHT. That this is what light looks like.
-He’d forgotten what it had looked like.
-Something enters into his prison and he wonders if this is some kind of new, even more vivid creation of his isolated, screaming mind. He cringes from the hands that touch his skin near the chains, sobs without sound as this new dream wrenches the chains free of his skin and curses in his ear over the blood that splashes to the stone floor as a result. The world gets blurry after that, fractured and strange. He hears someone talking (to him?) but he doesn’t know the voice. He feels something get poured over his wounds that burns and hears the cursing get worse and wonders if the pain was unintentional or a new kind of torment.
-He drifts away into the void of unconsciousness to the sound of someone shakily singing what might be his childhood lullaby.
-Ardyn wakes up and he is ... not free of pain, but in so much LESS pain that for a moment he is breathless with it. The Scourge still writhes under his skin and there is still the wordless screaming for blood and fury in the back of his mind, but for the first time in a long, long time, the noise is muted. There are other things to focus on.
-Like the strangely colored ceiling over his head, the blankets under his hands and the mattress so soft he feels he could sink into it and never emerge. Like the LIGHT creeping in through the window nearby that lets him SEE all of this. Light. There is light. There are WINDOWS and blankets and- and-
-Is he really out? Is he really free? Or is this some new nightmare that will break him beyond repair?
-He turns his head slowly, every part of him aching, and he sees-
-A living being. Another human. A teenager, no more than a girl really, huddled by his bed in a strange white chair that has a very odd shine to it (or maybe he’s just no longer used to how things look in the light). The chair is small and has no cushions and looks supremely uncomfortable even to a man who has been chained and strung up on great metal hooks for unknown ages, and the girl is somehow small enough (thin enough, too thin, his healer side whispers) to curl up in it with her legs to her chest and her head resting awkwardly on her knees.
-He doesn’t recognize her in the slightest.
-Surely ... surely if this was another nightmare, it would be Aera sitting there, or Somnus, or one of the servants, or even one of the common folk he had befriended in his travels. Not a stranger. Right?
-He tries to say hello and all that comes out is a pained croak. Her eyes snap open in an instant despite the deep bags beneath them from lack of sleep. She stares at him for a moment with eyes of bright amber, then she’s scrambling. Clattering around the very small, oddly shaped room they are in. She pulls a cup down from a cupboard and holds it under a metal rod. She turns something and from the rod comes ... water?
-Maybe he really is dreaming.
-But her hands feel real as she helps him sit up a little, and the water feels heavenly against his throat as she helps him drink, and even if this is a dream, Ardyn prays that for once it will not turn to ruin and pain. Let him keep dreaming of kind things. Just for a little while longer. Please.
-She talks to him only after he’s drunk. She pets his hair and tells him everything will be alright now, that she got him out of his prison and took him to the caravan in Galdin Quay (he does not know where that is, but he knows of a region of Galdin and thinks perhaps it is a village there), that he’s very weak and sick, but she will help him get better. That she’s so, so sorry it took her this long to come find him.
-Ardyn looks at this tiny girl who cannot be more than 16 and wonders why she was looking for him to begin with. Then his eyes catch on her hair. There are braids there. They are not like his mother’s braid, they are different in style, and the beads are purple and yellow rather than purple and black but they are SIMILAR and- and he wonders. He manages to ask for her name before sleep drags him away.
-She tells him, and he doesn't have the energy left to laugh and tell her that she shares a name with his long lost mother.
-It takes Ardyn a long time to be functional again, and when he is (when he is finally sort of convinced of reality) it is to find that everything has gone strange and alien. The world is 2 thousand years beyond his last known date, and technology is its own kind of magic that is confusing and exhausting by turns. Food tastes different, though perhaps that is just because he no longer needs it and has gone without for so long. The only anchor he has is Terra, and even she is an impossibility.
-He knew the legends of the Walked Twice, he had even met two of them on his travels, but to think that his own mother would fight her way out of the afterlife just to come find him-. To RESCUE him-.
-Sometimes he still wonders if this is all a dream. Because surely that is just a wishful fantasy.
-But the dream never wavers or changes, and the girl with his mother’s soul never leaves. She knows him, knows his childhood stories and songs and secrets, she knows how she died. Her knowledge of his life after that is patchy, but apparently she took note when he did not arrive in the afterlife well after he should have, and she had fought her way back to the lands of the living just to find out why, and that apparently the Fulgarian had taken pity on the soul of one of his island children trying so desperately to find her child and told her where he was and why.
-Ardyn struggles with believing, and with accepting, and with the waking nightmares that still try to haunt him with his brother’s face and voice. But Terra Khara (no longer Terra Ulric or Terra Lucis Caelum, yet still so very much both of those at the same time) refuses to leave or let them take him. She talks him down from his panic, and lifts him out of his depression when the world feels overwhelmingly strange. She leads him into the wilderness, away from modern people and their strange behaviors and the familiarity of walking through the wilds on the thin chocobo trails is soothing. They find Havens, and she tells him they were made by Oracles as safe places for the night (a novelty and a wonder, for there were none in his day save the handful Aera made) and Ardyn lies on them for an hour or two, vomiting black sludge and shivering in pain while Terra rubs his back and sings, but the periods of painful sickness HELP. It scrubs him raw on the inside, but each time he recovers from it he feels a little more stable and the screaming in his head is a little fainter. It makes him feel hopeful, tentatively, and it is the excuse Terra keeps bringing up when he begs her to leave him after another hallucination nearly made him hurt her AGAIN.
-She tells him about her culture, braids Khara beads into his hair and tells him the Songs and Stories. She drags him to civilization eventually, when he is stable enough to go entire days without a hallucination and is slowly starting to remember what hunger for food is rather than the hunger for human blood the Scourge breeds under his skin. They sail across the water to the islands of Galahd, to what she calls a little fishing village but to him is as robust as a respectable trading town, and there she introduces him to her (their) family.
-The Khara Clan welcome Ardyn with open arms. They have known for years that their little Terra was a Walked Twice looking for her son. They have known for years the story Ramuh told her, about a sickness and a curse that will not let him die until the new Chosen arrives to cure the Starscourge entirely, and a part of him would be so very bitter of that (a new Chosen King because he wasn’t good enough, born of the line of his brother who betrayed him), but ... it is hard to be angry when there is family HERE. When there are grandparents who pat his hands and press new, comfortable clothes into his hands to help him not burn in the sun. When his mother’s uncles and aunts and cousins flock to him to feed him and sing to him and weave a braid in his hair that is ornate and beautiful and then tell him that it is a Hero braid. A story of his perseverance, of how he tried so hard to protect his people at such great cost to himself. It is done up in a different style from his Khara braid, and his ... new grandmother (Terra’s mother, who is older than him physically but not by much) tells him that it is an Ulric style braid, to acknowledge that he was born of Ulric blood first before his mother became a Khara.
-There are only the barest handful of Havens on Galahd, and all of them are on the coast. The Oracles rarely came here even over two thousand years of history. The nearest Haven is still outside Khara territory, and Ardyn cries from gratitude when the Khara Chief (his chief now he supposes) goes to negotiate with their neighbor Clan for access to the Haven.
-The islands may be modern and all the Clans on good terms, but apparently even now the Bellum are a wary, prickly neighbor to have. He has no real knowledge of the Clans save what he is learning at the feet of the Elders and what his mother whispers in his ear, but according to them the Bellum have always been ... temperamental. Still, they agree to the Khara’s request to set up a little Clan outpost near the Haven for medical purposes so long as a Bellum stays to monitor them and make sure they’re not doing anything too strange on Clan lands.
-Ardyn meets Kassandra Bellum and is immediately charmed. His mother laughs her head off when he says as much to her after the meeting, even though he has no intentions of acting on the surprise attraction to the woman who is built like a Coeurl, is a head taller than him, and who’s reaction to seeing him writhing and vomiting Starscourge on the Haven was merely to raise her eyebrows and offer him some strong whiskey afterwards. It has been two thousand years, but Aera’s death is still a weeping wound and he is not, and probably will never, be ready to move on romantically.
-Ardyn lives there for years. Surrounded by a Clan that cherishes him, and a mother who still acts like it even though she is far, far younger than him physically, and by the prickly Bellum neighbors who hear about him from Kassandra and instead of being horrified are in Awe that he is apparently stubborn enough to out fight the Starscourge itself (Kassandra starts bringing him dead things and weapons, Ardyn is not so blind as to not recognize the courting attempt, but for all there is a physical attraction, he gently refuses. He is still mourning Aera. Kassandra eyes him thoughtfully, then nods and lets the matter drop. He isn’t sure when exactly she goes from being a former attempted lover to his Shield, but one day he wakes up and realizes she is).
-The Ulric Clan gets involved eventually because rumors spread through the islands of the Khara’s Sick Member who has kept his human form despite being sick enough to Turn and who uses a Haven to slowly burn it from out of his veins and who wears an Ulric hero braid.
-The nearest Ulric branch comes to visit and the Khara tell their story only after the Ulric have sworn not to tell the Mainland. Ever. The Khara know how Ardyn got locked away, they’ve heard the legends of Adagium. They will not let some Mainlander king and his troops come to steal away their lost child if they can help it. The Ulric listen to the story and glom onto both Ardyn and Terra with a ferocity that matches the Bellum in intensity but is a lot more open (the Bellum just tend to give him shiny things and threaten to fight anything that looks at him wrong, the Ulric are HUGGERS and the children are not afraid drag him into cuddle piles). Ardyn meets one Nyx Ulric, who is maybe 13 and utterly, adorably reckless and he isn’t sure when this boy becomes his Heart, but he does and by extension his best friend Libertus sighs as he slots into the roll of Hand without hesitation.
-Then one day- the Empire he's heard complaints and dire warnings about comes to take the islands, and as the ships approach, Ardyn sees blood in his mind’s eye and hears the dying war scream of his mother from a lifetime ago and when he Rages, the Scourge in his veins, thinned and mutated and almost tamed by repeated exposure to the Haven, Rages with him in perfect unity.
-The initial invasion force shatters under the might of a Lucis Caelum two thousand years matured into his power and when night falls, the daemons that lurk on the beaches and in the trees do not so much as look at the Galahdians, but instead pick through the wreckage, tearing apart any MT unit or soldier they find (btw MT units are still a thing, but are not Starscourge infected clones, they’re straight robots that Besithia invented based on Solheim tech).
-Niflheim tries again, and Ardyn repels them again, this time with the help of the Clans to whom he gives his magic freely (he is a monster in his own mind, but he is also still a healer, a KING, and these are his people now. Any weapon he can give them to help them survive he WILL).
-King Regis, young and only married, hears rumors and reports of Galahd being protected by a Lucis Caelum with blood red magic and comes to see for himself, and once he finally gets past the frantic interference of the Clans (who cannot hurt him because he is still Ardyn’s Kin no matter that his ancestor was a Kinslayer, who know he is their king of Lucis and to whom they swore oaths of loyalty), Regis comes face to face with a red-haired man who has one blue eye and one eerie gold eye. The man smiles and tips his battered, ugly hat, “King Regis Lucis Caelum, descendent of Somnus, I was wondering if you would ever come pay me a visit.”
-Regis narrows his eyes, but he has manners, and this man has protected citizens of Lucis, and is quite possibly a ... half-brother maybe, or a distant cousin of some sort, “It is a pleasure to meet you...?”
-The man grins and the expression is almost childish, “Ardyn Khara. Though once I was known as Ardyn Lucis Caelum, but you would not know that name.” Regis can feel the nearby Galahdians circle closer and the hairs on the back of his neck rise as he instinctively knows that if a fight breaks out in the next five minutes, these people will NOT be on his side and there are a LOT of them and he only has Clarus and Cor and a handful of Crownsguard at his side. The man’s smile shifts into something predatory and all teeth, “But perhaps you might know the name my dear, late brother gave me.” He tilts his head and his white of his golden eye almost looks black for a split second, “Adagium.”
-Regis tries to remember how to breathe.
-(so yea there you go. Things happen and once Regis calms down from his heart attack over meeting the Adagium he gloms onto having another relative with draconic fervor. Ardyn saves Aulea from dying with his Healer magic and he gets to be Noctis’s Weird Galahdian Uncle. Also Terra is Pelna’s big sister so Pelna grows up gleefully calling Ardyn “nephew” and Ardyn finds it kinda hysterical).
-Also also the Oracles get involved somehow and the Prophecy goes sideways because of course it does I like my happy endings. This one involves Regis not dying to the Ring, Galahd not burning, and Noctis and Ardyn both living happy lives once Noctis goes into Science and figures out a new magical remedy that can cure/vaccinate people to the Starscourge.
-Also Prompto still exists but he’s Besithia’s illegitimate kid who’s mother ran away to Lucis with Cor’s help (he was in Niflheim on another mission but he couldn’t help but aid the woman and her tiny blond baby) and ended up marrying Cor. Because Dad!Cor is my jam.)
