Dearest Ashelia
For all that time and distance and war have stolen from us, I have never once in twenty-six years forgotten the significance of this day.
Ashley moved as silently as he was able across the creaky kitchen floorboards in the dead of night. Alma had moved his satchel from where he'd put it last - or maybe he'd misplaced it himself - but he had promised to keep the lights off and he was supposed to have been out the door seven minutes ago. In truth, there was nothing he needed among his personal effects that could not be replaced once he reported in at the palace; nevertheless, he paced around in the dark until his pulse beat quicker with anxiety and frustration. Then he heard footsteps from the bedroom, then a sigh, then Tia murmuring his name.
His wife had lit a lamp by the time he returned and was sitting up in bed, white sheets kicked to one side, her skin glistening with sweat. The night was hot and unbearably humid, and he did not begrudge her the eventual need to go back to sleep.
"You're leaving?"
He nodded his affirmation from the doorway, only scarcely trusting himself not to speak a word of the mission ahead.
Tia let out another deep exhale, then lowered her gaze to the swell of her abdomen beneath her thin nightshift. "I think it's time. Then again, it could be another false alarm."
There was no plea in her voice for him to stay, nor even the barest hint that she wished for him to abandon his mission in favor of remaining at her side.
"Please promise me," he said. "I know Mondeberta is the finest midwife in the Quarter, and you know I would trust her with all our lives, but please - if anything should go awry, the palace chirurgeons will be ready to receive you. You need only call for them."
"I promise, Ashley."
Ashley did not often consider the possibility of falling in battle, or of never returning home; yet for all he had tried since he and Tia had first spoken of such things, there would be no coming to grips with the notion that he might leave a child with one less parent.
He crossed the room in a few quick paces and drew her into his arms. Necessity hastened his every movement, clipped short what he knew would be their last embrace before everything changed: he tucked a lock of Tia's sweat-streaked hair behind one ear, stroked the line of her jaw as he kissed her, and let his other hand settle on her belly for the briefest of moments before he realized that if he did not leave now, he would never leave at all.
I was not present at the moment of your birth. While you were being brought into the world, I was serving the Mad King through what would ultimately prove to be one of the greatest atrocities in Ala Mhigo's recent history: the Kingsguard's sacking of Rhalgr's Reach.
As a Riskbreaker, my tasks went far beyond those given to the standard rank and file. I was sent to the Temple of the Fist early that morning to eliminate key targets - monks and priests with the standing or the means to rally others against the king. My mission was, in short, to eliminate all hope of reprisal before the battle had even begun.
Leaping Doe sat at the front of the recreational hall with her legs crossed in a traditional meditative pose and a crowd of refugees assembled before her. The hall itself, like much of the rest of the temple, looked to be centuries old, what with the dawn light pouring in through the open ceiling and the elaborate tapestries on the walls depicting scenes of monks from antiquity. Though the space had the means to hold several hundred comfortably, no more than twenty had gathered to participate in Leaping Doe's guided morning exercises. Ashley pulled his ragged cloak - a staple of the Undercity's - a little tighter across his shoulders and sat down at the back of the group, near an elderly Miqo'te woman in rags.
The smile that the young monk sent across her crowd of pupils was kindly but guarded; Ashley could see in that smile every onze the charitable soul the scouts had reported, albeit one whose good deeds had been rebuked once or twice too often. She would allegedly have been bound for a position of leadership within the year, had one of the senior monks not seen fit to promote instead some nephew or cousin. Nevertheless, Leaping Doe's reputation for kindness twinned with her innate gift for the forms had inspired recruits and refugees alike - had given her the capacity to lead others through her example.
In the event of a massacre, she would be the first whom many of them would turn to. She, whether or not she knew it, was among the select few with the means to launch a counterattack against the crown.
She spoke in a gentle voice of committing oneself to great deeds, her words creating a steady rhythm that ebbed and flowed for all to hear. He closed his eyes along with all the others but did not allow his mind to give way to meditation. Though he could have slipped into the Echo as easily as anyone in the hall, that momentary peace would not be worth the lapse in concentration.
He counted the seconds before the refugees stood one by one, stretching and chatting amongst themselves, until each of each of them had departed and Leaping Doe preoccupied herself with putting away any of the threadbare meditation rugs that had been left out across the stone floor. Her death would have to be quick, or all would be for naught. She was bound for the kitchens after this, and none of the routes she might take would be devoid of witnesses-
"What are you still doing here?" Her voice, little more than a murmur, radiated with the same power he had forsaken only moments before. Her every muscle was poised to strike before she had even turned to face him. "Leave now, friend. Cease this course, or I-"
She abandoned her placating demeanor, as he had known she would, and lunged toward him with a shoulder tackle.
The dagger that left his hand flew through the air and embedded deep in her throat. Her eyes widened in pain and shock and fear, and only after a second did the blood begin to seep down her neck in a heavy gush; when she fell to the floor, her final motion was to let out one last cough of blood and spittle before she at last lay still.
He retrieved his dagger and cut slits in her stained tantra robes, that they might fall away with greater ease when he threw her body into the Velodyna. There could be nothing left of Leaping Doe - no means at all for her to become a martyr.
To this day, there are few missions that haunt me to such an extent. It was in many ways my first test of many throughout my stint as a Riskbreaker - a test to see if I could live with the future I had carved for my family and my country through my actions and allegiances.
The blaze shot up through the early morning mist of the Peaks, tearing through the horizon in a column of flame and smoke and dispelling any hope of serenity in that dawning. The only mercy, if any mercy was to be had that day, was that so little grew in the outlying areas: the beacon of destruction shot only upward and bore no chance of spreading to outlying settlements through sparks on the wind. It would instead send a message, one that would be made clearer still when Theodoric's standard was eventually raised over the wreckage.
He had always found it difficult to wait. He suspected that that was part of the reason he had always excelled at his own lengthy missions: so long as he had something to do with himself, no matter its physical toll, he would keep from delving too deeply into his own thoughts. Even when he'd been a newly-orphaned sprat, he would rather have scoured the foulest passage in the Undercity than sit alone and idle on a market corner.
To sit and watch and wait without any guarantee that anyone would ever pass-
There came the brief gust of a southerly wind and he nearly gagged at its stench of burned flesh. Even as it reminded him of that horrible day in Rinomy's only nine moons back, it was enough to tear him away from still more memories.
As the bells dragged on, he espied some few people atop the cliffs from the place where he lay in wait: a lone Roegadyn miner who fell to his knees and sobbed, a slight woman on the back of a chocobo who immediately raced off to the north, a pair of gangly Hyuran brothers in identical cloaks who stood transfixed and clasped each other's hands. He let them come and go, for they could hold no possible threat to the crown.
At long last, the target for whom he had been waiting emerged from a heavy curtain of smoke amid the blackened pillars, as though summoned from the depths of the void. The elderly priest cast about wild glances at his surroundings, shifted a fulm-long bundle in his arms, and took a tentative step toward the road to Ala Gannha.
There would be no traversing the distance between them without being seen, not in the vivid afternoon sun. Ashley raised his readied crossbow and fired three silent shots: two into the chest, a third into the cheek.
The priest had ceased twitching by the time Ashley could sneak over to the body, and the bundle had come unbound in his death throes. Priceless works of scripture, teachings handed down through generations since the great flood, lay scattered and torn at Ashley's feet.
He gathered what he could and left the rest for the earth.
Ultimately, what kept me sane during the aftermath of that day was the unyielding belief that it would all mean something - that there would be some great, underlying justice to the wrongs I had committed for the sake of order. In the years that followed, when it became more apparent than ever that the Garleans had set their sights on Aldenard, I believed an Ala Mhigan tyrant preferable to foreign occupation and told myself I acted only in accordance with those beliefs.
The Kingsguard's initial orders had been for each knight to take up a precise station at each entrance or exit to the network of stone tunnels throughout the Reach and to cut down anyone attempting to flee. That plan had gone awry as the conflagration had spread to the tunnels themselves, quicker than Grand Steward Atkascha could have anticipated. Any fighting was done out in the greater courtyard, beneath the gaze of the Destroyer. Few of the monks who had managed to stumble so far from the temple presented much of a challenge, their lungs so filled with smoke and the reek of death; before long, even the most skilled of their number were overtaken by the sheer force of the knights lying in wait for them on all sides.
But it was no battle. Monks of the sect of the light believed above all else that battle could only ever be counted as an engagement between participants on equal terms. Anything else, they maintained, was slaughter.
The sun beat down into the canyon with a hellish insistency. The pool around Starfall, so clear the previous morning, was now tinged a murky brown. Wherever the fires had begun to abate, some of the knights had taken to gathering up the corpses from within the smoke-filled ruins and moving them into horrific piles. He passed a lone soldier holding a sword in one hand and dragging a burned monk by his hair from under a toppled pillar with the other; when at last the blackened, crumpled body was free, the soldier reached over and proceeded to stab it over and over again.
Beads of sweat ran down from Ashley's brow and back, tracking through every layer of soot and blood and grime. His skin itched beneath his leather armor; the summer heat compounded his discomfort. He needed to find water - clean water, after what they'd done to the wells - before he collapsed from dehydration. With that single focused thought at last propelling him onward, he set out on a new course away from the carnage.
It took nearly two days for the last of the fighting to die down. Only when all was being accounted for, when the weight of the Kingsguard's victory was still being assessed, did I learn of your birth.
I knew then that all I had done had not been in vain.
"Are you alone?"
Ashley, his linkpearl cupped in his hand, cast a glance around the shadowed antechamber. It was full of soldiers as weary as he, many of them a good deal more bloodied, all of them seeking out a moment's rest. "Alone enough." Whatever orders he had been given in secrecy mattered little now that they had been carried out; each of them, Riskbreaker or no, had played their own part in the king's madness. "Let's hear it."
Atkascha sighed, but though Ashley readied himself for a lecture on the need for protocols, none came. Atkascha was in all likelihood as exhausted as the rest of them after over two days of intercepting and analyzing untold amounts of intelligence, despite not once setting foot outside the capital.
"Initial reports estimate over eighty percent of the temple's two thousand four hundred residents have been confirmed dead, with many more still missing. That isn't accounting for the refugees. Not one of your targets has yet been listed among the known dead; as was expected, what survivors can be accounted for have since focused their efforts to locate them, particularly Leaping Doe."
"Go on."
"Word of this has already spread throughout Aldenard. Throughout Hydaelyn, perhaps. These events will doubtless embolden some anti-monarchy sentiments, and an early report from Ala Ghiri suggests that the True Sons are already clamoring for retribution; they will doubtless need to be quelled before long. And-"
"And?"
Ashley could only hold his breath in the intervening pause.
"...Your daughter, Ashelia Marco Riot, was born two days ago without incident."
He was staring off into the distance at something that might once have been a pillar but was now little more than a heap of dark rubble. His daughter. And they had given her Marco's name nevertheless. A soldier off to his left began to clap, then was joined by another; someone else in the vicinity burst into tears.
"You've been given leave to return to the capital at once."
At that, Ashley pushed to his feet with a groan - perhaps he had been sitting on the unforgiving cobbles for longer than he had realized - and hastened to the chamber's exit, to the courtyard where the Destroyer stared down upon them all. Thick rain clouds had blown in early that morning, bringing with them an occasional rumble of thunder. Were he capable of believing in anything at that moment beyond what he could see, beyond what he knew for certain, he might have thought of it as an omen from Rhalgr Himself.
His daughter.
"Are you still there?" he said into the linkpearl thirty seconds after he was certain he wasn't being followed.
"Of course."
"I need a favor."
"Name it."
"Keep talking to me on my way back."
"Too great a chance of you being overheard." There was no one, would be no one for malms, but Ashley suspected his superior had only stayed awake as long as he had in order to be the one to deliver the news. "We'll speak again once you've returned."
The line went dead with a click, and Ashley turned northward in solitude.
We only ever had two wishes for you, your mother and I. The first was for you to see more of the world than we did, and we thought that a foregone conclusion each time you would sneak your way into the Undercity to explore. The second was that you would never feel a need to follow in my footsteps.
Marco was a more loyal, braver, better man than any I have ever known. He died the day you quickened in your mother's womb; you were given his name the day I brought the temple of his faith to ruins. And you are more than worthy of his name. He would have loved you with all his heart.
His eyes burned from fatigue by the time he passed through Gylbarde's Gate. For the first time in longer than he could remember, though he could remember precious little at that moment, he had crossed the Lochs on foot without considering a stop at Marco's tree. There would be time later, his family were waiting, and he did not think he could bear to face Marco then.
He moved like a wraith through the daylight streets, dazed to the seventh hell. He felt removed from the bustle and clamor, numb to every sensation except the sharp glare of sunlight. It would have been easier to go through the sewers, and yet he did not want to travel in solitude any longer; even still, the crush of so many people going about such normal tasks threatened to overwhelm him. Every now and then, always in hushed and agitated whispers, came fragments of discussion of what had taken place at the temple.
Only when he heard three sharp, familiar barks was he jarred back to the present, to the grounding reality that he had come home from one more mission.
"There he is!" came Alma's voice before he had opened the door. "Oh gods, he's back, he's-"
He had only to step through the threshold and into the kitchen before his sister-in-law's arms were around him. "She's beautiful," Alma said. "Tia's resting. Montblanc hasn't left the foot of the bed."
He opened his mouth to voice some apology and blacked out.
That I send this letter now to Rhalgr's Reach proves once and for all that your deeds have far surpassed my own.
Happy birthday, my dearest.
He awoke in his own bed to Tia's fingers pushing back his hair and her deep indigo eyes meeting his own. It was a knowing gaze, an acknowledgement of everything unspoken - a kinder welcome home than any he deserved. With one arm trapped beneath her frame and his head propped against her shoulder, he looked down to find a tiny baby girl, scarcely two days old, swaddled and asleep in the crook of her mother's arm.
And she, Ashelia Marco Riot, was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen.
I remain, now and always,
Your father
