HEAVENSENT, HELLSBOUND

If I’m honest—I never thought that I’d actually make it. I half-expected to be struck down on the spot, since people in Ilsabard who’ve been keeping track of the war say they’re protected by the divine, or something. But I survived my first steps off the ship, so that’s promising! The people here don’t seem much different from the people of Ilsabard… I mean, their culture is different, and I’ll need to figure out some of their accents, but they’re all just trying to make their way.

The ship came in to port just before dawn. I figured—this could be a new chapter, since this’ll be my first time in a land that isn’t suffocated beneath the shadow of the Empire. I wanted to be presentable for it, but I’ve spent so long without a brush that I ended up just having to cut most of my hair. It looks like shit. I should have waited until I could buy some scissors.

Still. Maybe things’ll start going for the better. Maybe I’ll start a new journal, here, since this one is almost out of pages.

There were a good number of people out there who took for granted what you could get away with if there were enough people around. Like a feline familiar melting into shadows, ice into water—a shed jacket, a silk tie slipping from around his neck. Flip the jacket in-side out, reveal the patterned lining on the inside that was, in many ways, nicer than the black exterior. Pull a scrunched silk beret previously posing as a hurriedly-folded handkerchief from a pocket to slip over his head, his subdued business suit transforming into a loud cacophony of colors and patterns befitting a performer due for a comedy club appearance more than a conman. His glasses removed, tucked away in a now-interior pocket of his suit. Gloves slipped off and tucked away, replaced with motley of thin, golden rings that glittered in the streetlights.

Verify, verify, verify.

Because if it sounds too good to be true, there’s a very good chance it is—but anything is possible in Ul’dah, and it’s also possible that it isn’t. Likewise, just because something fits into an established pattern does not necessarily mean that the claims that one might hear on the Lane are automatically true…

That was the motto of the office that Leonnaux had been told to direct his inquiries to—the same office that the Platinum Mirage employed for quiet solutions to their more prominent problems. While the Mirage famously offered the services of its in-house enforcers to its esteemed clientele, to use those selfsame enforcers publicly would draw too much unwanted attention to matters the powers that bee would rather have kept private.

Such as the disappearance of Laurant’s sister.

The hustle and bustle of Ul’dah suited Leonnaux’s tastes much better than anywhere else. The streets, lined with merchants; the denizens, cloistered together or wandering by; the wanderers, passing through Eorzea’s most prominent trade hub under the blessings of Nald’thal…

for ffxivwrite 2022 day 19: turn a blind eye wc: 846

conceptualized as a follow-up to this, but i overestimated my ability to write follow-ups to story concepts that are over a year old. also i dont actually know how to play blackjack. i’ll revisit this later

“Hit.”

The Lalafell next to Leonnaux tapped two fingers on the table and was rewarded with another card. The game had only just begun, but as far as Leonnaux could tell, this was one of the Platinum Mirage’s more discerning patrons—one who was just as happy to take home his weight in gil as he was to lose it, and who oft employed the services of the debt collectors who lined the Mirage’s halls. It was just him and Leonnaux himself at the blackjack table, now; the other players having called it quits for the evening, retiring back to the mirror-studded bar on the other side of the room.

This man, the sole other player at the table, was on what most might call a ‘hot streak.’ In other words, a trap to lure in the uninitiated, drunk, or just plain overconfident gamblers. The Miqo’te dealer across the table from the two of them seemed to know that as he turned his gaze over to the Duskwight, his lips curling into just the slightest of wry smiles.

And, in reply, Leonnaux slid a stack of chips over, doubling his initial bet for the hand.

“Double down.”

The dealer wordlessly dealt him a card, and Leonnaux flashed him a smile in thanks as he leaned back in his seat, toying idly with the turquoise feathers affixed just behind his ear. If his count was correct, then this card would be just enough to bring him to 20, all but assuring his victory unless the other player or the dealer managed a blackjack this hand. They’d been playing long enough to be running out of cards, after all, and while there was always the matter of the cards that the dealer wasn’t using, Leonnaux had been playing around with cards for long enough to trust his gut.

One more win ought to get the right kind of attention, he knew; some eyes were already on him from his time at the roulette table, and the only reason he’d moved from poker to blackjack was because he had only narrowly avoided winning himself a bloody nose at the poker tables. Thankfully, his opponent causing a scene expedited things somewhat.

The right kind of attention tonight, was, of course, the wrong kind.

He’d honed his art as one would a knife, until it was as a razor’s edge. Some mages might have preferred to branch out to other schools—and indeed, he’d considered it for a time, but every new technique and trick he picked up along the way (be it from reading about other trades or learning from others about their preferred methods for spellcasting and the like) inevitably ended up assimilated into his preferred method to the madness. Little tricks to add credence to his illusions, such as moving small objects without touching them; stealing the color from various items he’d acquired over time in order to more finely tailor his disguises; even combining a reagent with a scrap of paper bearing a simple arcane rune that he could use as a focus to generate smoke in a small vial…

Leonnaux liked to think that his applications of magic were somewhat novel, though he knew that he would not have what he did were it not for the foundations that his ancestors laid—and protected, for centuries, while the denizens of Gridania continually scorned their adherence to the old ways. It wasn’t even, necessarily, that they feared what they didn’t understand; it was a more active kind of scorn than that. On the Wildwoods’ part, perhaps it was a symptom of their willingness to turn their back on their own history, whereas the Duskwights cherished their origins in the network of caverns that had been lovingly carved out beneath the Black Shroud.

for ffxivwrite 2022 day 15: row wc: 1611 content warning: gun violence, et al

It wasn’t long before they reached the armory proper, though the route was a little more circuitous than Janos remembered it being. Perhaps that was a natural consequence, though, of some hallways being blocked, either having been destroyed in the disaster or purposefully sealed in an effort to stop the flames’ inexorable advance. The door had, at some point, been removed from its hinges—perhaps by Imperials responding to the disaster, so that it would be easier to remove the surviving ammunition and weaponry and ammunition from the facility before it could be looted by opportunistic mercenaries and rebels.

“There’s nothing here,” Janos assessed.

“Ah… I guess it was naive to expect anything to be left after so long. I guess I should have expected a castrum going down to be a bigger deal… Every soldier the continent over probably made their way down here to pick up whatever the Garleans left behind.”

“They wouldn’t have left much of what we had here, I think.” He pressed his lips into a line. Of all the things Janos did remember from back then, perhaps the thing that stuck with him the most was the way the armory had been arranged—and what, exactly, it had contained. The facilities of the castrum had always been outdated, that much was true. But as far as the projects he recalled working on, he could think of very little of it that the Empire would suffer to leave behind for scavengers to make use of.

Janos absent-mindedly traced his fingertips over the lockers embedded in the wall—arranged in neat little rows. Pulling a few open revealed nothing of value inside: just the organizers that had once been used to space out the drawer’s contents and ensure that everything was maintained in good condition while it waited to be used.

for ffxivwrite 2022

wc: 229

It was a rare rainy day in Ul’dah—where the skies had darkened and opened up, granting the city a much-needed reprieve from the summer heat: the kind of heat that wore you down, that threatened to rip your soul from your flesh and grind your bones to dust by the time the sun had made it across the sky. It was the first real sign that autumn was starting to take hold in Thanalan, a short-lived season of torrential downpour as the climate’s focus shifted from trying to fry its denizens alive to trying to drown them. Where the Shroud’s autumns were a period of reaping rewards and the forest preparing for a long slumber beneath a blanket of snow, Ul’dah’s usually ended up lush until the temperatures dipped below freezing during midwinter.

It was a break that Leonnaux’s welcomed, resting his forehead against the window pane as he watched the rain fall. A gil coin danced over his knuckles—a way to keep his hands busy, more than anything else—and for a long time he just listened. The rain came down in sheets outside, crashing against the stone walls of the Sultana’s Breath, the roof of the complex, and the window panes. it was a steady hum interrupted only intermittently by the creaking of the windmill’s never-ending turn over-head.