FFXIVWrite 2020 Prompt 3: Muster (Atropos)
A picture, a sketch, a Viera woman standing tall and awkward in the back with three Hyur and three miqo'te arrayed around her, their arms wrapped around her and each other. All of them are smiling, even the Viera. The picture is much creased, faded, tattered at the edges, yellowing with time.
The phrase was bellowed through the underground tunnels of the small sanctum where the organization made it's home. The young men and women that made up the newest group of foundlings stumbled out of their simple rooms and met up with each other in the halls, jostling and leaning on each other. They had snuck out the night before, gone to one of the cheaper bordellos, gotten shit-faced and wrecked on cheap alcohol, somnus, and aether-dusted mushrooms. Their eyes were still bloodshot and the bellowing voice rang like bells of doom in their still-addled heads.
"*****, c'mon!" called Matthias, a young Hyuran man, hooking an arm around her waist and steering her towards the dusty subterranean training room. "Eyes open and shoulders back." He teased, slurring a little as he mimicked the voice of their arms-master.
She couldn't remember his face, or her name. Static in her ears, a blank blandness where his face would be. Dark eyes. She remembered dark eyes. They had dust on them and had become like raisins in the heat, wrinkled and lifeless.
She smiled at him sheepishly and let him guide her, her long limbs showing a disturbing tendency to tangle up and trip her. They met up with another Hyur, then a miqo'te woman who wrapped her tail around the Viera's wrist like a soft silk bangle and groaned dramatically as they passed through a small square of sunlight cast by a narrow, street-level window.
Tan fur, tan under the rusty brown that spiked it into unnatural spines, sticking straight up in the sun. What was brown on the fur was red on the mosaic, spreading in loops and spatters.
Another two miqo'te met them in the training room. Brother and sister.
Cousins? She couldn't remember. They hadn't found enough of the bodies to tell which was which so they had burned them on the same pyre in the pauper's field. She remembered the smell.
A Hrothgar man stepped into the training hall with the last two Hyur at his heels, both young men. All the youths arranged themselves loosely at attention, their spines snapping straight and their heads lifted. Despite their bleary eyes and their pounding skulls, they were proud. They were capable.
They were gone. The underground tunnels were gone. A traitor's bomb, they'd said. Imperial technology, they'd said. All of Rabanastre had been targeted, they’d said. Nothing personal.
She folded the sketch up carefully along it's creases and slipped it back into it's hiding place. She shed no tears- those were as lost as her name. Turning onto her side, she turned down the flame in the lamp and closed her eyes.
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