the reluctant protagonist

Confession;

#WtSaA Week Two: Beguiled Rated M | #wolmeric | #FFXIV

To find the true dark underbelly of Ishgard, however, one had to go so much deeper than the Forgotten Knight. Officially, the Holy See was against the lowly traditions of All Saints’ Wake. Trickery and mischief were unwelcome before the Fury, for any battle fought was one to be fought with honour. Victories claimed through nefarious means held neither honour nor glory, and the prevalence of the late-fall celebrations had been no small headache for the various dioceses of Ishgard. Unofficially, in the furthest corners of Ishgard’s catacombs, deep beneath the Brume and hidden below the mists, the true heartbeat of the city lay.

Communion;

#WtSaA Week Two: Forbidden Rated M | #wolmeric | #FFXIV

Ishgard ran on blood.

The centuries of turmoil against the dragons may have sent the jewelled city’s streets running with the blood of man and dragon alike, but even as it dripped from Ishgard’s stones and steel spires, blood ran all the more thickly through its veins.

Thus, when the call for service came, even in the midst of the season’s violent turn towards sudden storms, there was only one answer to give.

“Bring your children in before the mists arrive,” came the whispers between doorways. “Set lights in your windows.” “Bank the cracks in the corners.” “Keep an eye on the baby’s cradle.”

The myths and the mundane swirled together like the fog itself, lulling Ishgard into an uneasy sleep when night rolled in.

In shadow and darkness, the Warrior of Light seeks her secret lover on the city's eerily empty streets.

---

“You’re up to something.”

“Clearly.”

“And you’re not going to be forthcoming on what that is?”

“Obviously.”

“And you recognize that this is going to cause me undue stress and ire?”

“Absolutely.”

Hades’ expression could have frozen the very core of the Star, but the girl before him – so recently having taken up the mantle of ‘Azem’ – paid him no mind. She was more than used to being the target of Hades’ frustrations after so many years, and likely would have thought something amiss if he weren’t suspicious of her motivations.

As it was, when she offered him a single berry-blue grape from the bunch she held, it was with a devastatingly bright smile that could melt any frost he confronted her with.

It said a lot that he took it without complaint.

“Are those the only questions you have?” She asked mildly, popping a grape into her own mouth in turn. The bright, tangy sweetness lingered tingling on her tongue, and she had the passing thought to share the sensation with him. Unfortunately, they were in public, and he was cross, and she had just repaired her travel robes from one of her last journeys; the last thing she needed was getting them into…enthusiastic disrepair so soon.

“Hardly.” Hades peered at the pool of water at her feet, contemplative, his mouth pressed into a firm, disapproving line. The pool was natural, a result of rainwater and groundwater flowing over many years down into its depths. The water was clear as crystal, leaving one to feel as though there was no danger at all in getting wet if you tried to reach in and touch the strange mosses and waving algae that had grown in the warm sunlight over time.

The fish, however, were new.

“Wherever did you pull them from?” Hades dropped to a crouch, his fingers ghosting a hair’s breadth away from the surface of the water as he traced the movements of the fish below. They were elegantly made, he had to admit. The little creatures shone gold and vibrant in the clear water, their long transparent fins gliding gracefully around their little bodies, catching the light and sparkling in ways that weren’t often found in nature.

Azem dropped to her knees beside him, palms flat in the cool grass as she leaned over the pool. “One of the smaller continents,” she explained, voice gentle so as not to startle the fish from their languid circling. “The climate is slated to change soon, to allow for warmer-weather concepts to thrive, and they wouldn’t have made it.”

“So your solution was to summon them here.”

The smile she flashed him was devastating. “Aren’t you at least pleased that I managed to pull what I intended this time?”

Hades kept his mouth in a firm line. “Am I pleased that you managed not to drag a bloodthirsty beast to your side? Or an untamed slab of burning lava? Or Lahabrea?”

“That’s what I said.” She was on her feet in an instant, nimble and bemused, her hands damp with dew. Hands she stretched out towards him as he rose to his feet.

Hands he took without hesitation, despite the stoic, displeased expression on his face as he looked down at her. 

“Let me presume then, that you’ve asked me here because you want my help finding what to do with them? Since your plan doesn’t go past this point?”

She needed to rise up on her highest tiptoes to press a light kiss to his cheek, all amusement and mischief. “You’re catching on! Come on.”

“You’re going to get busted.”

“I’m not.” The zip of her bag was authoritative and sure as she pulled it close, like punctuation at the end of her sentence. 

The bedroom she occupied at her aunt and uncle’s farmhouse was small and unassuming, but even in the midnight shadows she was an odd fit for its apple-blossom wallpaper and vintage dresser with its bowl of HomeSense plastic lemons and the glow-in-the-dark stickers stuck to the insides of its drawers from owners long grown up. She stood at the foot of her low little bed, looking quickly around the room with those unsettling dark eyes of hers to spot anything she’d missed.

At the head of the bed, anxiously hugging a heavily embroidered pillow to his chest, sat her cousin, watching her with wide, worried eyes, even as he made no actual move to stop her.

“Dad will be back by the end of the week, and…”

“And I’ll be back before then,” she cut him off. She checked the back pocket of her expensively-cut jeans for her phone and her house keys, before moving around to the other side of the bed to sling her overnight bag up over her shoulder. “He came from Sweden, Celestaux. I’m not going to tell him no.”

“You could,” her cousin insisted, his accent drawling thicker with his worry, a habit he’d picked up from his mother long before her passing. “How did he even know where to find you here, anyway? You don’t have to do everything he says, you could–”

“I want to see him.” Her eyes were sharp on Celestaux’s face in the darkness, careful not to be loud enough to wake Dorys downstairs where she snoozed gently on the fraying sofa, her teenage charges safely upstairs and away from harm. The window was open, and the summer air was warm and languid as it wafted in, toying with her recently-dyed hair around her shoulders. “It’s only a few days, and it’s not as though I’m flying back to Europe early. Keep your mouth shut, Celestaux. I mean it.”

Her cousin set his mouth in a firm line, but they’d had this argument too many times for him to even hope at winning. “You’ll call me tonight? When you get to the hotel?”

A rare, vicious smile flashed at the corners of her mouth before it was gone. “Promise.” 

She scooped up the bag and slung it over her shoulder, crossing to the window. Without ceremony, she tossed it out. There was no sound of it hitting the ground; instead, a car door quietly opened, followed by a low, reassuring whistle.

Without another backward glance at her cousin, she swung her long legs out the open window, and carefully made her way out onto the gable roof. With an ease that betrayed how practised she was at it, she climbed down from her second-storey window, feet hitting the ground as light as a dancer’s when she landed.

Celestaux made his way to the window to watch her go, slipping into the waiting car. Its headlights were off, and there was no interior lighting, but he knew that the unknown Hades sat in the drivers’ seat, patiently waiting for his girlfriend to buckle herself in before easing back down the driveway.

In darkness and silence, the Ascian appeared in Ishgard.

He wasn’t unfamiliar with the city. In recent years, even, it had come to resemble his familiar Garlemald, locked in an icy grip from which its citizens needed to shelter against. It made them, in his opinion, all the easier to control; fear was quite conveniently sowed where challenges and difficulty lie.

It would likely be ripe to revisit in a few short years. When certain…inconveniences had died off.

In the snow-capped night, Emet-Selch gazed, unimpressed, down on one such inconvenience.

He was asleep, and the state didn’t improve him any. It had taken very little effort for the Ascian to trace the glamoured ring on the hero’s finger to the hollow attempt at a knight who currently lay atop his fully made bed, brow furrowed with restless sleep and nightmares. Worry, likely, and the simplicity and naivete of it all made him want to slit the Commander’s throat where he lay. Save him the mess and the heartbreak that was certain to follow, if he continued to follow his current path.

If he continued to follow her.

Despite knowing the hero of the Source for only a short period, Emet-Selch had known her, instantly and immediately. She reeked of death; destruction followed her like a plague. There was armageddon in those eyes of hers, and anyone who fell into their path would be met with only doom.

He had encountered eyes like hers before.

Only one of them had walked out of it alive.

The same fate waited for this son of Ishgard. The Ascian peered down at him with vague disgust in the darkness, watching the nightmares flit worry across his closed eyelids. With their hero stranded on the First, clearly the pair had been separated, and it was taking its pathetic toll; Emet-Selch could see the dull shadows under the boy’s eyes even in the dim light. He longed and yearned for her in ways that the man Emet-Selch had once been might have done, centuries ago.

Back before he knew what women of her sort could do. What the follies of hearts not meant to be could do to topple a society, to fracture and destroy thousands of lives.

This Warrior held the same nuclear power in her very being.

He intended to use it. Incidentally, by turning her into the weapon she had been designed to become, he would unintentionally save this poor, unassuming boy from the fallout of her blast.

Tilting his head as though studying an insect beneath a magnifying glass, Emet-Selch considered the sleeping knight. He found him lacking and sorely wanting in every way, and the disappointment he felt annoyed him more than it should have. What about this powerless, unimpressive knight had turned the hero’s head on that lovely neck of hers? He was plain, and Emet-Selch had seen similar of his ilk dozens of times over the centuries; princes who thought they could make a difference.

They bled just the same as every one who had come before them.

After a few moments, as his annoyance grew, the Ascian disappeared as seamlessly as he’d arrived. Back to the First, back to the plans he’d laid, and back to their precious hero with her icy anger and fire-torn eyes.

Living Memory set her teeth on edge.

From its glittering towers to its flashy entertainments, the entire atmosphere offended her in a way that was difficult to put into words. The souls here weren’t souls – they were data, farmed against will and kept here indefinitely to soothe the balm of guilt the remnants of their leader felt. A layer of paint over a dystopian nightmare was never going to fool her, and she followed her companions with a rage simmering low in her throat that she hadn’t felt in a long time.

What a sham, to call this “living”. What an insult to every doomed race, every massacred generation, to have this shining amusement park of data, stored memories pretending to be souls. Nothing lived here, and therefore nothing died. It insulted her on every level, and it was only years of practice that kept her mouth shut and her cold fury contained. 

It had been wrong since the moment she stepped into the dome.

And this was not a cause she was willing to sacrifice or die for. Sphene could rot in the consequences of her own foolishness, and the Warrior of Light would never spare her a second thought, nor a fraction of pity. 

There was no one to pity. The young queen was a bastardised attempt at humanity, data stored in an all-consuming machine, same as her subjects.

It curdled her blood to see it, and a single thought infuriated her still, simply for the nature of having had it:

What an insult, what a slap in the face, to everything the Unsundered had suffered.

How Emet-Selch would loathe this place. Worse than the Sundered souls, these were souls to farm, to admire and stroke like pets, and keep suspended in time to be revisited whenever their self-absorbed ruler decided she wanted to return and visit her little menagerie. Hers, completely and selfishly, while she removed the ability of all these peoples’ friends and family members to ever remember them. She hoarded them like a personal collection, butterflies pinned to the wall, and the disgusting selfishness of it all reeked from every corner.

The Warrior of Light followed her travelling companions, and listened, and compressed her anger into a frozen, cold fist behind her ribs, familiar and aching.

It never failed to amaze her, how quickly her companions could forget and ignore. It was that ignorance and refusal to carry the scars of their own pasts that made her keep them, unfailingly, at arm’s length in all ways. They wandered through the sticky sweet streets of Living Memory and lamented the loss of ‘lives’ when they inevitably shut the system down, while seeming to completely forget those who truly lived and died in every civilization their bloodied, war-torn hands had touched. The Ancients, the Dead Ends, Allag and Mhach and Amdapor and Nym. The blood drenched in the soil of Ala Mhigo, or the ghosts haunting the underbelly of the Twelveswood. To entertain this place to live was an insult to their memories, and to preserve this data here like flies in amber – and apparently against the will or even knowledge of its victims – made her want to not only shut it down, but to tear its remnants apart, brick by electrope brick, so that its ilk could never again be repeated on precious human lives.

She kept her eyes fixed firmly on the ground, and one by one shut them out of existence, and didn’t feel an ounce of guilt. She would remember lives lost, but there would be not hurt; their lives had been lost long ago, and there would never even be a grave to mark them. She’d hold the remembrance of their lives close, but she would never feel any pain for shutting down this living hell of limbo they’d been trapped in.

She was guilty of many massacres, but this was not one of them.

“Everything looks in order, thank you.”

“Please do not hesitate to call upon us should you require anything else, my lord.”

The deacon swept into an elaborate bow ahead of his exit, but Artoirel’s eyes were already back on the pages laid out in front of him. The sun was setting glorious fire over Ishgard’s snow-capped peaks, and it was warm and comfortable in the lesser study of the Fortemps Manor. He had a fresh pot of tea at his elbow, a warm fire crackling merrily behind him, and the calm, reassuring knowledge that everything was tidy, in order, and properly completed.

With a sigh, Artoirel sat back in his chair, studying the pages in front of him contemplatively.

“It’s finished, then?”

Artoirel looked up to see his father standing in the doorway. Age and stress had not deteriorated the calm paternal figure before him, the same man that had made his sons quiver in their boots when they’d misbehaved, and encouraged them to continuously crave his affection and attention, even into adulthood.

Edmont, supported by his cane, stepped into the room, already dressed for dinner. He crossed to his son’s desk and then moved to stand beside him, peering down thoughtfully at the same documents. Artoirel felt, as he always did in his father’s presence, the familiar sensation of being a small boy again. 

“And these are in perpetuity?” His father asked, one finger trailing lightly down the document, careful not to smudge any ink that may not have yet dried.

His son nodded. “Indeed. The consultants all agree it’s iron-clad, as well. Even should the worst befall, they’d be hard pressed to find a single soul in Ishgard or beyond who would be able to question or break it.”

“Though I suppose if any tried, they would have her to contend with.” Edmont chuckled quietly, carefully going over the rest of the paperwork. “I’ll sleep better knowing she’s taken care of.”

“You know she’ll tell you she doesn’t need it,” Artoirel countered. He rose from his seat at his father’s side, and began to carefully fill two dainty porcelain cups from the tray with tea. 

“I’ve ensured my sons are taken care of,” Lord Fortemps said, quiet but firm. “I will ensure my daughter is taken care of as well.”

“You do know, hero, that you’re meant to drink at a bar.”

The Ascian had appeared at her elbow suddenly and without a sound, but she didn’t flinch. She raised her small glass instead, turning it in her hand to show off the gently rippling amber liquid within. 

Emet-Selch did nothing but raise his eyebrows, and didn’t leave.

The Wandering Stairs were nearly empty at that hour. With darkness restored to the land, residents of the Crystarium had discovered very quickly that their bodies naturally responded to the ebb and flow of daylight and evenings. Children began to find regular bedtimes, and adults found themselves yawning over late-night projects that had never had them bat an eye before. In the latest hours of the evening, the usually lively bar space was almost deserted, save for a few poor souls hunched over their drinks, or slumbering gently at one of the nearby tables.

The Warrior of Darkness had no such attitude. Spine straight and eyes dry, she sat unmoving on one of the unoccupied stools, slowly sipping at a drink that almost reminded her of the whiskeys she was accustomed to on the Source, save for a slight tanginess that lingered on the tongue and kept drawing her attention.

She wasn’t sure she liked it.

Rather focus on that than the Ascian currently standing at her side, perfectly at his ease as he slouched against the bartop next to her elbow.

“You know,” he mused, tilting his head slightly as he examined her, a small piece of theatrics that she didn’t appreciate, “if I didn’t know you better, my dear, I would say that you almost seemed melancholic.”

Cold in her calm, she pressed her glass to her lips. “You don’t know me at all.”

If she’d been looking, it was possible that she could have seen something soften in his eyes. “I know you far better than you think, hero.”

When she glanced over, his impassive expression was back. “You would have enjoyed the drinks in Garlemald, I think. None of this flavoured nonsense to seduce fools into thinking they’re enjoying what they’re drinking. Proper, spiced brews that will keep you warm in your chilly climes.”

That, at least, kept her sharp gaze on him unflinchingly, and he at least had the decency to smile. “What, you think I haven’t done my research on you, Warrior of Darkness? Seems only fair, since you have entire history books about me.”

She didn’t reply, but he didn’t seem to expect one. Instead, he reached out and plucked the glass out of her unresisting figures. “Seems a pity to waste, though. I should have expected they would only serve you from the top shelf.”

He took a swig, exactly where her own lips had once been on the glass.

Zenos embraced death, and found it a dream.

The aetherial sea was beyond and beneath him. Here, he found a blood-drenched red sky, where black birds flew in perfectly symmetrical vector patterns across the sky, and the horizon slashed violently across his vision and hurt what he assumed was still his eyes.

Against the crimson sky, a lone tree stretched crooked and deadless. Black and barren, it sagged under the weight of the swing, and groaned with every sway of its brittle branches. Zenos followed its gently swinging movement like a man possessed, his head lolling unsteadily on his compromised neck.

The Warrior of Light was simply dressed in his death, a slip of black silk that left her long, elegant legs swinging bare as she swung herself back and forth, languid and unhurried. Her bare feet brushed against the hilltop below her, and when Zenos began to climb, he could feel the way their blood connected, pulsing in time everywhere they touched the same sordid ground.

It was an easy ascent for him, helped by the useful protruding limbs and sharp, broken ribs jutting white and gleaming out from the pile of mire and gore they’d been piled high in. This was heaven, a perfect cloud nine, and so they held no stench nor rot; just perfect corpses, their blood tacky and still warm, subjugate beneath his feet and hands as he climbed upwards to the peak, towards his goddess.

Fire-paved skies stared down unmercifully upon him as he reached for her, streaked down his front with dark, sacred blood. His hands weren’t clean, but neither were hers, gripping the hangman’s ropes that served as her seat, swinging back and forth, her lips stained with apple red and her eyes on his, supplicant and certain.

I knew you would be here. My dearest friend. My only.

When his hand touched her skin, wrapping his palm around the ivory flesh of her slender calf, it was better than the release of death had been. Heaven is hell, and I am worthy of its glory. 

She stopped swinging, and stared down at him, cold and untouchable and glorious. Her hair was unbound and spilled like coloured ink over her collarbones, and if he hadn’t severed his vocal cords he would have spoken her name, her legacy, if only to hold it in his mouth and call it his own.

Here, she belonged to no one but him.

As she should have always done in life.

Sliding down from her seat, her skirt rucking up around her hips for an instant, her feet hit the open skulls of the corpses beneath her without making a sound. Innocent stained her hands, the soles of her feet, the very interior of her soul, and he nearly shook with the need to reach into her chest and feel that impossible, furious heart of hers for himself.

Instead, he dropped to his knees, and against his will, his head lolled forward on its half-severed neck, pressing his forehead heavily against her stomach.

Death was nothing, and no one.

They were everything. There was no one who would matter, had ever mattered, except the two of them.

It was so clear now. He could have laughed, if it didn’t catch in gurgling bubbles of blood in what remained of his throat.

If he joined the corpses of her victims, it would be an honour he’d never considered in life, and could no longer shake from what remained of his mind in death. 

Elegant fingers knotted in his bloodsoaked hair, she tugged his head backwards, forcing his milky blue eyes to stare upwards at the holy horror of her face. For a long, terrible moment, she considered him, every piece of his barren, wretched existence laid bare.

He could see the moment he was found wanting.

“Coward.”

He heard the word, without her lips ever moving. It echoed in his brain, hammering against the limits of his skull, and the pain was exquisite and unmatchable. 

His grin split the burning sky, and when she fit her mouth to the wound at his throat, lips open and working at him like a kiss, he knew bliss.

Death was what he had earned, and what he would shortly be robbed off, dragged back into the cold, and the darkness, and the loss of her at his side.

“Come here?”

Aymeric’s hand at her wrist was gentle, and she went willingly. The sun was bright and glaring over Tuliyollal, setting the ocean waves crystal shades of turquoise and sapphire. In the shaded dock of their private cabin, the couple had been sequestered for the better part of the day, door locked firmly against any intruders, and any prying eyes were sorely disappointed to find that their view of the sea was completely blocked from anywhere else on the mainland.

They were alone, and she could breathe again.

They’d done little through the day but sit in gentle silence together, but he pulled her out of the burning sun anyway, down into the comfortable lounge chair on the deck and into his arms. His skin was warm with sunlight, and he was golden all over in the way he’d taken so well to warmer climates; first in Radz-at-Han, and now here in Tural. She let him wrap his arms around her and pull her back against his chest, dipping her head to press her lips to his bare forearms, and feeling his brush against the top of her head in turn.

“You were meant for this, you know,” she told him quietly, gaze drifting out towards the picturesque scene before them of crystal waters and coloured coral. He made a questioning noise against her hair, and she leaned more comfortably back against his chest.

“Travelling like this,” she clarified. “You fit in everywhere you go, and I’ve yet to find a place you didn’t immediately adapt to.”

The unsaid was just that, but he heard it anyway. Unlike her.

She, by virtue of her status as the Warrior of Light, was never going to properly fit in anywhere. She was a hero and a guest wherever she visited, and the enormity of who she was no longer allowed her to simply exist anywhere, regardless of how her traveller’s heart would want to slip anonymously from city to city. That, combined with the very nature of her, made it impossible for her to fit in anywhere. She was unsettling in ways that Aymeric could never be, and cold in ways that were foreign to his nature – inner secret workings of his heart aside. He could play the game better than she could; always had.

Nosing into the curve of her neck, Aymeric kissed her bare skin, porcelain pale but still warm from the same sunlight that had touched him. “It’s because of you,” he reminded her softly, and his words whispered against her skin, setting down a shiver that had nothing to do with the temperature. “I would never have left Ishgard, if not for you. I would never have been who I am, if not for you.”

“That’s not true.” She turned slightly in his arms, enough that she could meet his piercing gaze. “Even had the war not ended, you would have gone. You knew what Ishgard needed before anyone else, and you would have found a way, outside of her walls if you had to.”

With one hand, he hooked his fingers under her chin, and tilted her face up to look at him. The whole world was in his eyes, always had been, and it still managed to take her breath away that every day he chose to look at her like that. “I wouldn’t have wanted to go anywhere, if it weren’t for you.”

A lifetime in Ishgard had prepared Aymeric for colossal, impressive rooms. When he stepped into the palace of the Dawnservant, however, he couldn’t help the way he looked up, and up, and up, the enormous receiving chambers seeming to have no ceiling at all for how high it went. Torchlight flickered against the warm stone walls, and at the far end, the Dawnservant himself had sat, comfortable and patient, waiting for his invited guest to approach.

Gulool Ja Ja was a calm, authoritative figure on his throne, fingers drumming absently on the armrests, waiting with a bemused, parental smile as Aymeric came forward. A far cry, to be sure, from the cold, ultimate power that his father had once held in Ishgard, and the long, sharp shadows that he cast upon his unwanted son.

The Dawnservant, by contrast, seemed to look at him fondly, even without knowing him.

“So, stranger,” Gulool Ja Ja began, spreading his hands out in welcome. “I hear you have come to our shores in search of my daughter’s champion.”

How strange, to have her referred to in that way, Aymeric thought to himself as he tried to collect his words properly. The woman he had devoted life and limb to, the one who had his sword and his heart in equal measure, summed up in a manner that addressed neither her accomplishments nor her life at all. A handful of words that had nothing to do with her, and the impossibility that she was, and yet – it was all that anyone here knew her as. 

That, at least, was by design. Before she’d left for Tural, they’d discussed it at length. There was a new danger that came with her reputation after Ultima Thule; in particular, her apparent resurrection following the deliverance of the Star. Threats may have been eliminated, but that type of legendary status meant an open door for another instance to try and eliminate her now that she had, in theory, ‘let her guard down’. 

She would go, but she wouldn’t fight. She would watch, but she wouldn’t interfere. She needed to keep an eye on proceedings, that much they agreed; but nothing in Tural was worth the risk of drawing attention to what – and what – she really was.

Aymeric met the Dawnservant’s discerning gaze, and didn’t falter. “I am.”

For a moment, there was silence. Then, like sunlight breaking over the sea, the Head of Resolve’s face broke out into a toothy, crooked, delighted grin.

“I see you, stranger,” he said, laughing merrily around his words. “No stranger at all! You are her consort.”

Bemused, Aymeric bowed before Tural’s exalted ruler. “I don’t think I’ve quite heard it put that way before,” he said, straightening. Amusement danced in his bright blue eyes. “I don’t dislike it.”

“She never said a word!” The Dawnservant slapped his knees happily, pushing himself to his feet. “I would have had a proper welcome for you, had I known.”

Aymeric’s smile softened, and the expression that had given him away to the sharp-eyed ruler was back when he spoke of his wife. “She’s not one to speak of her personal life.”

“Nor you either, I reckon!” Gulool Ja Ja looked down at the elezen man, seeming to size him up anew. “I am very curious to meet the man who our lauded champion has aligned me with.” With the light of a new idea, the Dawnservant’s toothy smile twisted ever-wider. “You know, I got to know her by challenging her to a duel.”

“Is that so?” Aymeric took stock of the leader before him; his power, his legacy, his considerable strength. “And did she land you on your back?”

The Dawnservant’s laughing guffaw was so boisterous, it nearly hit the rafters high above. 

“She did at that!” He admitted cheerily. “Not in my lifetime have I come across such a worthy opponent. She is strong and capable, your warrior.”

“Wife.” Aymeric’s correction was quiet, but the pride he held at being able to hold such a word in his mouth was something he couldn’t hide. “She’s my wife.”

Gulool Ja Ja’s smile didn’t falter, for all that it softened.

“Well then,” he said, slamming his fist into his opposite palm decisively. “If that is the case, I think you and I will need to duel as well, stranger. I have grown rather fond of our champion, you see. I would need to see that she has chosen herself a worthy consort.”

The delight in the Dawnservant’s tone was contagious, and Aymeric found himself smiling. “I would be honoured.”

“Wonderful! I will summon you again, and mind you bring everything you have; I will be holding you to a very high standard, stranger.”

“Aymeric,” he offered, bowing once more, Ishgardian courtesy running deep in his veins. The Dawnservant chuckled, and ducked his head reverently in return.

“The stranger seems quite taken with her, no?”

Koana’s tone was low and studied, arms crossed across his chest as he watched the impromptu celebrations below. He and his unmatchable sister had been crowned as Heads of Reason and Resolve a full day prior, and the celebrations weren’t showing any signs of flagging. The streets were full of dancing and music, faces lit up with laughter in a way that warmed the private, secret recesses of his academic heart. 

These were the people that Lamaty’i had been speaking so warmly of all along. These were the ones that she would grow and love and fight for.

He was immeasurably grateful that he hadn’t taken too long to see it too.

But that wasn’t his focus tonight. Tonight, he was focused on the revelry, and the celebration…and the champion that his sister had brought from across the Salt to support her.

More specifically, the stranger at her side, who’d arrived by ship only a few days prior.

In the flickering lamplight, with coloured lanterns dancing bright across her skin, the Eorzean hero moved with a lightness of foot that he’d already begun to associate with her in battle. She didn’t dance, not truly; not in the thick of the crowds, where the mezcal had been flowing freely, and hands had gone wandering in time to the beat. Still, she was sure and graceful, moving around her partner, linked by their entwined fingers only. They seemed to have eyes only for each other, regardless of the party around them, and Koana’s shoulders tightened involuntarily.

The stranger had arrived quietly a few mornings prior, without fanfare and without announcement. Since he’d come from across the Salt, he’d apparently been taken in to speak with Gulool Ja Ja not long after his arrival. Their audience was private, but the fact that the stranger had been summoned at all was buzzed about throughout the markets and residences – not in the least because of the newcomer’s unquestionable good looks.

Koana watched him with a critical eye, sharp on the two of them despite how they kept to the fringes of the crowd, private except for those who thought to watch. He’s nothing to write home about, he reassured himself. He’s certainly far more…shoulders than the scholarly types in Sharlayan.

Types, he refused to admit to himself, that he hoped the champion would lean towards, rather than the sort of looks this salted stranger had. The kind that all the young girls of Tuliyollal seemed to already be fawning over, despite him, oddly, never looking twice at a single one of them.

From his perch above the beach, he watched the warrior move absently to the rhythm of the drums, her bare feet sinking into the cool, dark sand while the sun sank beneath the sea beyond. There was something delicate and forbidden about her bare ankles, pale and lovely in the setting sunlight, that made him want to look away. 

But her fingers were still laced with the stranger’s, and he pulled her gently towards him by those fingertips alone.

And she didn’t resist, even when they pressed palm to palm. She turned his face upwards towards him, and her expression caught in Koana’s throat. 

Gone was the cold, impassable stance that he had grown so used to on her, the one that he so enjoyed puzzling out. Gone was the guard in her eyes, the hardness to her lips. If she hadn’t known this man before, she knew him now, and in his presence she softened like a flower, blooming into a sort of loveliness in the rising moonlight that the Head of Reason couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

By then, he’d forgotten he’d spoken, but his sister wasn’t one to let a conversation linger and rest in silence. At his side, she peered thoughtfully down at the pair, her ears twitching as she examined the sight before her, her nails drumming rapidly on the railing before them. 

“I like him!” She declared brightly after a moment, arching back as though to stretch, her grin spreading wide. “He looks at her the right way, you know? Maybe she’s finally met someone.” Lamaty’i’s smile was bright and cheerful. “It would be good for her to relax, I think.”