#aetherfont

FFXIV Vanilla GPOSE Challenge prompt 1: Job

Send me a title and i’ll come up with an AU to go with it

In this AU, Cloud’s always known he was different. He was bullied, never had many friends. Grew up in his tiny town and got apprenticed to the local smith, by the time he was around twenty he had his own small smithy, and was good. 

There were rumors about how good. His knives never dulled, the nails he wrought never bent wrong, his forge took far less wood than it should.

A few years after that, and after his mother passed away, a dragon attacked the village. It was fended off by a knight all in red, a knight who snatched the dragon’s flames from the air, summoning more of his own, and vanquished it, before moving on. 

Cloud met him briefly, repaired a horseshoe for Sir Rhapsodos’ mount, and  tried to ignore that he noticed the man staring at him oddly. Or that he enjoyed it. The next day, a second dragon attacked.

This time there was no knight. And the creature rampaged through the village, until reaching his smithy. As it arrived Cloud felt afraid, standing in front of it uselessly with a hammer and...

He doesn’t remember what happened after that very much. Except that he looked at the sky and hoped, hoped, prayed for something, anything to happen. There was a strange flooding that poured out of him and then-

Lightning, columns and pillars of it pouring out of the sky? Out of him? He wasn’t sure. All he could remember was pain. Was screaming “Stop, stop, freeze”

And then blacking out. 

When he woke, it was to Sir Rhapsodos tapping him on the cheek. They were surrounded on all sides by a mountain of ice that he’d erected inside the village, catching the dragon, and the lightning somehow, in its depths. Behind the knight was a tunnel that’d been carved by flames. 

“What...how did I?” he remembers asking, dazedly.