#ffxivheartless

It was a god. Or it wasn’t. Or perhaps it had been once. Gods were everywhere, whether you acknowledged them or not, and despite Garlean efforts to bleach them from the lands they ruled. They failed of course -- the Empire was gone, but gods remained in the marrow of the bones of the world.

Aidan knew gods -- you couldn’t not know them in the Twelveswood, the proper woods, not the city. City folk had Hearers and the Seedseers as their mediators. Anybody else sometimes got that, if you were lucky or tied to something bigger like a trade route. So you had to learn early. How to give your share of what you take back to the woods. How not to waste what you kept for yourself. To respond to anything you didn’t recognize with respect and wariness at the same time.

It was easy to know what you were looking at, even if you couldn’t see it directly. Allag had tried to tame gods, only to fall into ruin. Both it and Garlemald sloughed off the skin of the earth. Meanwhile, the bones remained for others to find in decaying labyrinths and derelict pieces of tek that inspired more shudders than excitement. A hell at heavens height.

He hadn’t thought about the eyes in the dark in a while. A year? Maybe longer; there had been a lot of other memories that beckoned louder (or demanded attention). Gaia, the deliverer of divine intervention when a monster stood to kill. Who spoke See The Truth, and his whole body obeyed. Who forsook her own name, gave it up in the face of subjugation. Whose one request of service was to die, in the end.

It didn’t happen as often as it used to. 

A humming melody. Muttered words of a long forgotten verse. The phantom pain of exertion. Throbbing in remembrance to the spell or the slash that afflicted her body. Never her mind the armor she had worn then. Armor didn’t matter in that place, or, at the very least, it mattered only in her mind. There was a certain kind of power that lay in belief. 

But after the Voyage had returned home, the thoughts and memories never left her. There were some that did wonder back when she had her staff made with Defiant Bride. A monolith to the Goddess Sophia, resplendent in her gold over her ashen skin. It was only a simulation, sure, but there were whispers. 

Temper. Tempered. Aren’t they acting strange? 

Silya ignored them at first. They had far more pressing matters to attend to than that. Keeping the Habisphere safe. Discovering the secrets of some hidden labyrinth. Flying back down to Eorzea for help from the Grand Companies. What time did they have to worry about tempering of all things? 

That same staff made years ago rested in her hand now as she practiced her old, thaumaturgical forms. It wouldn’t do to disappoint the Father, after all, for allowing her to have kept studying at the Ossuary when she did. 

But there it was again, that soft, gentle whisper in the back of her mind. A whisper that laid the seeds of doubt once again, just for a brief moment.

The dogs that roam wild around the perimeter of Rhalgr’s Reach, with their lean, rib-ridged bodies and lolling tongues, are all but alien to the type of dog I grew up with. I’m used to rounded heads and blunt noses, a snout that stands tall enough to fit into my palm, if I’m brave enough to open it. These Eorzean dogs are short and muttish, but curious and self-sufficient. I never see anyone tending to them beyond tossing them a few scraps from the garbage, but they take care of themselves. I wonder what Augustin would think of them, this motley crew. Would he know what to do with them?

I have a confession to make to you. (Don’t I always?)

I’m not okay.

I’ve tried to talk about it, but nobody hears what I’m telling them. When I say I feel like at any moment I could wake up and find myself back in the belly of an airship, it’s more complicated than either fear or nostalgia, but that’s all anyone wants to hear. So I’ve stopped saying it, but I haven’t stopped waking up in a stinking sweat, no matter whether I’m snug in my Ul’dahn apartment or sprawled out for a nap on a patterned rug in the Reach. Tight chest, hot eyelids, dry tongue; it’s all the same.

One of these times, I woke up under the afternoon sun with a mean, gold-furred dog lying in the dirt a dozen fulms away, with her grey-flecked snout resting on her paws and blackened eyes watching me closely. The moment she saw me looking, she picked up her nose and turned it the other way, aloof and resolute. No you don’t. You didn’t catch me staring.

Alright, bitch. Fuck.

I went back to work, dismantling the arms and legs of an old Avenger model that the Resistance had dragged up from an underground storage unit over by Castellum Corvi. The magitek suit sat upright in front of me, an ape with nothing to say and nobody at the helm, losing itself piece by piece to my wrench. It’s mindless work, and I lost myself in it too, until I heard snuffling and grunting off to my left.

It was that same fucking dog, nosing through the bolts and screws I’d laid out. And I swear to you -- I wouldn’t joke about this, but I know you won’t believe me -- I saw her chomp and swallow three steel washers before I could shoo her away. Three flat Garlean steel rings, and this idiot animal chewed them up like kibble, staring me dead in the eye as she gulped them down, like she was laying down some sort of gauntlet. Try me. You gonna stop me? Pussy.

What the hell was I supposed to do?

Eventually we reached an uneasy truce. I’d lay out a pile of metal scraps for her to chew on, which I cherrypicked from the least-valuable and most-busted materials (even warped and pitted metal is still good to melt down, if you know someone who can work Ilsabardian steel, and fortunately I happen to be dating a guy), and she’d leave my carefully organized array of dismantled parts alone. She’d sit back down on her haunches, still about ten fulms away from wherever I was working, but watching me with a keen air of inspection. I felt judged, like a captain of some sort was watching over my shoulder, picking her teeth and spitting in the dirt with every twist of my wrench, but she was still more agreeable company than most soldiers are. Whatever. We worked it out.

And the next time I woke up on that rug with a nauseous lurch, surprised to find myself greeted by the Gyr Abanian sun rather than the dim blue glow of an airship’s indicators, I was weighted to the spot, nailed down by an impossible pressure on my chest. That bitch again, with her head and paws swaddling my rabbity heart until it was forced to slow. She locked onto me with one eye, dark but intelligent behind its glassy sclera. We shall never speak of this intimacy. Don’t look me in the eyes when I do this.

Your name is Defiant Bride. You’re a Goldsmith, and a Secretary, and sometimes a fighter, and you hate flying and heights and flying high up in the sky...

what twist of fate has brought us 

wc: 1,175

<When Tieve's lips touch your forehead, you feel something pleasant--something comforting. A scent? A vision? A taste? All? Think about it.>

....Byron’s Bread found itself another bountiful harvest. Wheat crops, not quite endless, not quite far. Enough to walk through - showered in amber light of sunset.