But What Is A Soul?- A LaDS/FFXIV Idea
Brain wyrms activated again, so here, have a premise/start of a fic. An elongated idea thought whatever. Idk. A What-If even.
~~~
“Can you hear me?”
“Hnng…”
A sigh was breathed in the space between dreaming and waking. “Hey, can you hear me? Hellooooo?” But the girl in the bed did not wake. She simply rolled over. “Well then.” Ghostly fingers slipped through soft locks of short hair, not quite touching. Full lips quirked down at the corners. “We’ll connect eventually.” She glared at the bars of this dreaded cage. The ghost then faded away as the padded room’s door opened to let in another scientist in a pure white lab coat. A name badge gleamed on the older woman’s chest.
The nameless girl woke, crying out in terror as she was dragged away to the labs. Her fellow experiment reached his small hands out to her through his own cage to no avail. And then she didn’t remember anything at all when she died on the table. Again.
~~~
Tilly watched over and over as the child she was tethered to died, revived, and forgot only to be forced to do it again. Seeing one of her fellow remaining Azem shards suffering this way was terrible. Made worse as well by the fact she couldn’t touch anything which meant no rescue from Tilly’s part of existence. Not for the girl or the other child, a boy named Caleb, desperately trying to shield her. And it made her furious. All her strength from before was made meaningless!
Was this how Ardbert felt? Useless? Unable to touch or affect anything physically? Forced to witness such suffering and unable to render aid beyond encouraging words to the one person who could even see him? This helplessness in the face of evil was beyond the pale.
No. There had to be something she could do. And so Tilly turned her eyes onto the scientist named Josephine. When she wasn’t haunting the little Azem Shard, she whispered guilt into the woman’s dreams. Until finally she broke. The final cataylst happened soon after which finally spurred Josephine into action after nearly losing the girl in the chaos that followed.
The Chronorift Catastrophe.
The rip through time and space affected Tilly hard as the girl died. For the first time after years of limbo, she felt pain and it came from her living tether. Frantic, she threw herself at the child’s soul to prevent her from losing all of her memories. The Warrior of Light plugged holes with her own eight times rejoined soul as quickly as she could. Most memories of the lab leaked away except for some of Josephine and Caleb. The child woke again, lost and confused, after Tilly was done. And then she vanished into sleep within the child’s Aether Core bound heart. She never saw the flash of Light that carried the girl away out of danger from the Wanderers during the incident. When Tilly next woke, everything changed. For she and the girl had truly became one.
A soul born from a sundered Azem, now nine times rejoined.
~~~
TBC???
