#ffxivwrite2022

Title: Stepping onto the Steppe

The party stood outside Reunion’s gate, wide eyed, and mouths open.

“It’s…so…WIDE!” Rikichi explained.

“A sea of grass!” K’ome added.

“And we need to find one man…Like finding a needle in a haystack,” Ashe retorted, crossing her arms. She glanced over to Kade, “You ok? You look a bit worried.”

“Yeah…Well…I didn’t expect my homecoming to be like this…Much less how am I to explain…this…?” He motions to himself, the aspects of Diabolo’s corruption that glamor couldn’t hide.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Ashe said, taking his hand.

“Yeah, first we have to cross THIS!” K’ome said, waving out over the steppe.

“It’s a good thing we have our chocobos,” Rikichi said, patting his bird’s plumage.

“You really are a city Lalafell,” Rosa snorted. “We’ve wandered all over Eorzea, and you still balk at the concept of walking ‘corss anything bigger than the next stall over.”

“Maybe if I was in the company of Tataru or Papalimo…” Rikichi started to retort, though they all fell silent at the mention of their lost companion.

“Still, Rikichi is right. We have a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of time. We need to move fast and our chocobos are faster than walking,” Ashe said, breaking the silence and mounting her own bird.

“It’ll be odd, crossing the steppe on birdback, but I’ll take the lead,” said Kaden. “I’ll keep out of some of the more aggressive tribe’s land…”

Shing! Clang! Thwick!

Blades met, rebounded, clashed and sang against one another. No blunted blades or wooden training wasters, these were naked steel, their song sibilant in the still air, their edges catching light and throwing it back from ground sharp edges. A mistake at this level would cost more than bruises and a bit of ego, no, these warriors paid for training in blood. Neither wore protective gear, facing each other in sleeveless shirts and comfortable pants.

All in all, it was either an expression of pure ego, or skill. Possibly both. The room itself was almost stale with their breath, both were breathing enough to be heard, now. Each bore some lines, red, of missed parries, and the slick sheen of exertion from the workout, though by some shared common decency, perhaps, neither had struck blows above the shoulder or below mid thigh.

Still, they danced, for far to long, until slight exertion yielded to panting breaths and the elder raised his hand, calling a halt. They stilled, each reaching for water, before the younger spoke.

"Need to talk about it?"

"No. I think… that was what I needed. I'm not sure."

A slow nod of his head. "Sometimes it's not about the words. Or even the feelings. You just have to work until you can move forward."

A soft laugh from his brother, setting his water down again. "Just so. And for this, today, two heads are better than one. Again?"

Squaring up, Fenris smiled his slow smile. "Again, Auberi. Until you're ready to talk about it, or it hurts a little less."

"I may never be ready to talk about it." Fenris nodded, slowly, raising his blade to guard. "Then we will march off to the War without speaking of it. And we will dance there with the magitek. And that will be what it will be as well." A pause, a slow breath, Fenris' eyes meeting Auberi's, twin sets of the family's brilliant gold. "We would have helped." "I know." Auberi's voice, soft, ragged. "I had to do it alone."

A makeup prize for FFXIV Write of @eva-cybele ( @dawnslight-aegis )'s beautiful Au ra, Kaede.

TW. Suicidal ideation.

The last traveller in line evaporates to dust.

Emerging from the outskirts of the plaza, Signe traces the footsteps of the adventurer that once was. Their terminal is unknown to her. Funny, how travelling via aetheryte can make even a destination a deeply personal thing. Most opt for a hands-off journey, being chauffeured from their beginning to end without a care — without control. 

People often speak of one’s constitution and aptitude in manipulating aether as necessities for aetheryte travel, but neither concerns her. No, it’s the unspoken requisite of setting intent — the reliance on one’s will as the sole compass — that roots her in her place.

Signe’s mind is the source of her power. The Scholar’s blessing and the Spinner’s curse. From her fingertips, trickling streams flow into the well of the crystal, releasing a floodgate of conscious and subconscious thought that merges into a confluence.

The potency of her reason cannot be tamed; no matter how much she wills it to silence, her thoughts prise their maws open with gnashing teeth and desperate winges. She knows what they say even in echoes. 

The aetherial sea is devoid of tactile feeling. The ocean is her own liquid skin, the lot of it familiar and folding in on her. Kneading dough that serves to nudge her along, but only just, as other presences — presences that feel like her, but also adamantly individual — flit past with great ease. She floats along the lazy river. How comfortable. How modest. 

Would it not be nice to stay a while?

She wonders how long one can rest here before they are cast out, how long before the corporeal realm gets tired of her too. Is there a place in this realm where one can indulge forever and a day, shielded from the current in a pocket of blissful nothingness? Bathed in dim light. Pickled in it.

Her thoughts recognise what she’s done as the unpleasant, broiled word passes her psyche. 

Do you remember where you had meant to go?

She doesn’t remember the name of any place in this state. They’re all blurs and backdrops to her. Set dressing for another rotation of events, the palette of meaningless filler. She doesn’t know where she was meant to go despite how routine it is. Why would she leave, for that matter, when the Lifestream cradles her so?

Temptation beckons to bask in the warmth of her blood — to fall into deep slumber.

If she had eyes, they would glide shut.

Filtering through her faux lids, there is a bright light — the sliver of Thanalan sun through a drawn curtain. It slices through her sleep, carving a warm yellow glow into her cheek and nose and mouth, all of which she can’t move, she can’t feel. The light is incessant and impossible to ignore. The light is belligerent and demands her attention. The light needs to be addressed. 

Now.

Her physique coalesces with unreasonable conviction, each part of her falling into place and tied together with the slab of obsidian she calls a greatsword. A perfectly wrapped parcel, delivered right to her apartment tower’s doorstep. She has the gait of a groggy child woken from a nap, yet she drives herself forward as if she’d been awake the whole time.

Nothing happened. 

You can’t get rid of me that easy, says Brand, lounging in her peripheral. You won’t get rid of us. 

“The Heavens bless us, and so we keep their hearth as it were. We don’t dare disturb the holy balance: as above, so below.”

For cycles, Vahri’a had endeavoured to keep his grimoire a sanctum.

On the tail end of his picatrix, there hides a secret commonplace book. Sketches that would be filed away in throwaway journals he’d purchase by the bulk have been smuggled in through the temple’s backdoor. Still never held to even dim light, nor shown to the curious, but they are equal to the immaculate spreads he had sheltered from their spidery scrawl years ago. These refractions of his innermost self, the reflections of his eyes onto paper — they are as good as God. 

This stamps the signature of his soul to the page. Within each margin note of a brilliant thought, each arrow drawn with conviction between two ideas, from bow unto paper, he devotes a little bit of himself. He feels closer to his arcane focus now more than ever before, and all it took was to treat it like the back of a napkin.

Look hither and take heed, says his grimoire. The taste of this teaching would pair nicely with your charcuterie on ephemancy, no?

Truthfully, the book had become equal parts himself and the clan he’d stepped one foot into. These sketches and soliloquies are his attempts to understand his family better, in the way he’s best learned how. Who knew such a vital pillar to his life could be learned at twenty-six! Nothing goes without being captured and dissected, each thought subjected to entomology. Following his grimoire’s call, he navigates the thumb index to a tab left blank, but he knows it from memory to be the beginning of his notes on ephemancy. 

Ephemancy, they called it. Never had he dreamt arcanima could be wielded so religiously, both parts of the phrase “ritual worship”. The arcanima of Limsa Lominsa is a relatively new art compared to its fellow schools, and juxtaposed to its rigid structure comes the informality of being the youngest. Despite its roots in Allag and Nym, no one treats it as an ancient, sacred art — it is a precise science to be practised in the here and now, and from its predecessors it can borrow, but never revere. Limsan arcanima is a tool, not a rite.

Limsan arcanima never borrowed from the Heavens, however. Ephemancy is a blend of two arts — the precise methodology of turning one’s aether into something entirely of the imagination, with the vulnerable act of appeasing the ambient, celestial aether to borrow its lifeblood. Ephemancy is both a mundane implement of use in the sun-to-sun and a sacred ritual guarded by its keepers. Ephemancy is an alchemy of two opposing ideologies. This is far from incidental — this is the magic’s true purpose. The clan is built around these parallel towers. The sun shines right through their windows, twice a day. 

How Vahri’a longs to carve the sigils into his skin. Ironic that he once challenged Savarah’s belief in the resurrection of the arcane tattoo, and now he yearns to adorn himself with one. And not for the matriarch’s convictions, or even that which lay close — for the mere curiosity of it! Damn him to the Hells for the blasphemies he entertains, but who would want for further reason than to feel the Mother Moon’s presence glowing upon them, every single day—?

“You write too much,” remarks the venator, and he glances up from his archive. He hadn’t even procured his quill. No, her eyes bore into ink long dry. 

“Do you think so?”

“I wonder if you’ve ever lived.”

She draws her hunting knife from her constellation rune. She wields it like it’s an old friend, in that it wouldn’t care what she did.

“I got back from Garlemald nearly two moons ago.”

“You. You went to Garlemald.”

“Yes. So, do we need to test your Common any more or do we have a deal?” 

“I dunno, lass.” 

This is one of the first times Imogen’s seen an adventuring party earn themselves a line. A line! Of Limsa Lominsans no less, who wouldn’t know a line if it kicked them to the back of it. Perhaps she’d be more understanding of the situation if she were lining up for a chance to work with the godsdamned Scions of the Seventh Dawn, but these adventurers would be Twelveblessed to possess a sliver of the Warrior of Light’s talent. 

Perhaps over a year ago, she would’ve forgone the line altogether. But since the Grand Company of Eorzea was established and people started abandoning their day-to-days for adventure in the Final Days’ post-mortem (and damn it, she’d abandoned her day-to-day before it was cool), the market has been exceedingly competitive. There aren’t any flashy, well-paid freelancing jobs that haven’t earned themselves an equivalent to a line in any city-state. Where it used to be a few heads in front of a board that she’d rummage past in five seconds, she now has to donate bells of the day in patience — a tax for getting an audience with other adventurers who, by sheer luck, managed to spot a job first.

Furthermore, she’s better kitted. She gleams in her vexillum armour, wrought in blue, brown and silver — a trustworthy palette, indicative of fidelity and a small amount of class. Her new lance is polished sharp with a healthy appetite for action it’s yet to know. She’s gotten comfortable enough in her current standing to reduce her pack to a reasonable amount of supply — not a whole two sennights’ worth — and a good third of her old, shitty tool belt has been unremorsefully replaced. 

She looks like a proper adventurer now. And fuck what she looks like — she is a proper adventurer, having partied with experienced company, and if she has to get in a line to show other adventurers that, she supposes she will. 

The adventuring party’s leader — the lalafellin marauder whom she’d been arguing with, hands on hips and face pulled to its epicentre in suspicion — doesn’t seem convinced by her word, however. In fact, the new armour seems to be working against Imogen’s favour. At the very least, its gleam makes the axewoman squint.

“And nothing over in the North bothered to scratch?”

“I bought all this after I’d come back,” Imogen explains exasperatedly, pushing her circlet a little further up her forehead so she can press her palm to it. “You know, with the money that I earned from doing the job in the first place?”

“And who paid you?”

“As’kari Tia. Former levemete.”

“Former? So he wasn’t officially registered?”

“He was, then he resigned.”

“Your job made him quit?”

“You should have longer legs for all the leaping to conclusions you’re doing.”

“You should have tighter lips for all the jobs you haven’t gotten in the past two moons. Tell me about this trip to Garlemald, then. Tell me all about it.”

“We travelled to the outskirts of the city via airship — which I learned to pilot, by the way. No simple feat. Could’ve crashed the ship at any time, but kept it sailing. Then, we infiltrated the place via the underground. There were magitek patrols everywhere, and we gave them what was coming. They were such smoking messes by the end you’d think they were about to lift off.”

She gracefully leaves out the part where her shitty old polearm had failed her and broken from their first fight, and she’d had to switch to her magecraft. She isn’t confident to show that side of her to the guilds. Not yet. She soliloquizes on:

“Then we fought the tempered Garleans — they were in the city, too—”

“I know. I heard the stories from the contingent.”

“Yeah, they arrived later than we did, mind you. So we fought the tempered Garleans, and we had to fight our way back out against some of them. We were able to deploy both lethal and non-lethal force, when it was needed. We’d found some survivors on the way and they wouldn’t have been happy if we had just went about killing everything wanton. But that’s a mark of versatility on my part, I’d say. Then, we went back through the underground and got out, back to the airship.”

“So what the hell did you go in there for?”

Her mouth thins to a sliver.

“Can’t say,” she puts curtly.

“Okay. Why?”

“It’s not my business to tell.”

“Is there a source I can ask? How do I get in touch with this As’kari?”

Her brow furrows, all wobbly.

“Uh… You can’t get ahold of him right now.”

“What about the client?”

“… He’s busy,” she says all too quickly.

“Busy, or dead?”

“Busy, Twelve above. Preoccupied.”

“What, they both eloped after the job?”

“Wow, you’re springing.” Truthfully, she wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how Sven and As’kari decided to deal with Sven’s little problem. “Contact Levemete Cain Locke. He’ll have the records you so sorely need. Never thought this industry was one for the absolute nonsense of resumes.”

“Never heard of a Cain fucking Locke.” Loathe as the party leader is to show it, she’s clearly getting irritated with Imogen at this point. 

“He’s new. He took over for the last levemete.”

“If he’s new, his testament’s not worth any.”

“He was part of the job, too. As an adventurer. He can tell you how hard I worked. He was with me for the landing, and the infiltration, and the fighting, and—” She was about to say ‘the untempering’. Gods know how she’d explain that one. “The whole thing.”

The marauder looks over her shoulder to her party, who have formed a backdrop tableau with nothing to say unless prompted. The hyur behind her thumbs their nose, then shrugs languidly at Imogen.

“Don’t think it’s in the cards. Sorry.”

“I could literally pull out a deck and show you,” Imogen says with grit teeth.

“Nah, fuck off,” curses the miqo’te woman next to them, with a rude to-the-elbow gesture cast Imogen’s way. “That’s their way of sayin’ you’re too much of a bitch. We wan’ someone who’ll come an’ learn with us an’ be a proper party member, ain’ that right, Hokopo?”

“That’s right. We want a team player.” Hokopo looks up at Imogen with glassy eyes. “You seem like you’ve achieved so much on your own, so maybe it should stay that way.”

They all bunch up in a line, standing by each other. It’s the perfect ensemble for a mass skewering, but she sets her anger to simmer as she takes up her things and storms away. 

On the outskirts of their stately manse, passersby double take at a sight of scarcity. A juvenile Viera — yes, a pair of lagomorphic ears paired oddly with features of youth. For a moment, the strangers would consider them merely made to confuse: a proper Veena short in stature, or a hyuran child with a headband attached for ease of playing pretend. Such considerations are spurned by the sudden twitch of their ears towards their crown, and the shrunken quality of their quiet, yet audible voice.

“That cannot be correct…”

With curiosity satisfied, the pedestrians would hurry away. 

The child lies nose up in the garden. Their journal is poised parallel to their face, blocking the sun from creeping to their eyes. They’d learned a trick from observing a particularly lazy superior at the Institute: if you leave the quill right in the pot, you practically never have to dip it. They retrieve the sopping thing from its bath, drowning rare Rabanstran blades of grass in obsidian ink, letting the remainder splatter onto their working shirt. The working shirt, mother had coined it sennights ago, for it had been dark enough to accommodate their stubborn habit until she’d find a way to break it.

Obedience had not entirely escaped them, however. They could be wandering about the city at their leisure, but at their parents’ behest, they remain here. They aren’t fond much of the metal men that guard the gates, regarding them with a stare that could never be met, so they suppose it isn’t much of a compromise. They’re content to study ambient aether in their backyard, for it makes an excellent control group. Predictable, placid and perfect—

Until there’s a sting in the middle of their forehead, and they’re not entirely sure why. The same prickle erupts from their arm, then their knee. In a gradated onslaught, the stinging gets harsher until they jump from it, then it’s all in their ears, head, and shoulders. Antilons? Their arms are bereft of anything in motion, save the blossoming of little red dots. Nettles? There are no nettles in the courtyard — if there are, someone is going to be sacked.

Nevertheless, they bolt into the front hall with the energy they’d saved with their enervated writing technique, ink pot and journal in tow. They shake white dots from their tresses, and there’s a moment of fretful, widened eyes. Had they inherited dandruff from one of the scholars? No, the dust is large, tough, frigid — not a pathetic fleck of reject skin.

In their self-examination, their father strides down the steps, having heard the pitter-patter of steps from his child oft quieter than a breeze.

“Why the hurry?” Pa’s mellifluous voice is practised to not startle them, but the fact that they know its purpose gives the game away. 

“What is the meaning of this,” they hiss, shaking more and more pellets from their body and belongings. They glare up at their father as if he had brought it about, chucking down ice from the window upstairs.

“Ah…” He picks up one of the pellets, examining it as it melts betwixt room temperature and his warm fingers. “This is hail. A rare weather for this place. Formed in the high heavens. Not snow,” he says pointedly, noticing their lips part. “Snow is different. Snow is formed below. Snow is umbral. This is astral.”

“The distance to the star is not correlated,” they insist but now they’re not so sure. 

“Both are true,” he says, ruffling their head of grass blades and cresting waves as he moves to kneel. “Your mother will explain it better than I can. But consider me proud.”

“I did not cause this.”

“I would not think that of you, brilliant as you are. I am proud of what you have done this sun. I am proud to have raised a child who knows when it is right to leave.” 

He takes a shard of hail from their hair and holds it up between them. The two watch it fade to nothing.

Cradling his lute like an ill babe, Vahri’a ambles his way through thickets and over roots towards the clearing they’d deigned concave enough to be an amphitheatre. Between curtains of verdant growth and a gathering larger than most pubs could accommodate, the greenery’s as good as one in his book.

Not that he had ever taken to a proper stage. The mere thought had made his heart an epicentre not sennights prior; it since had been laid to rest for its insolence.

This is enough for his rickety esteem, blown to insecurity by harsh side winds, clinging to sanity via clothesline pegs. The efforts he puts himself to are too immense for two eyes — that which scan his strings for any sign of wear or thinning, and check the pegs to see if they’ve inched away from his scrupulously fine tuning. Too immense for two shoulders, which slouch over the instrument to shield it from… what exactly? Light would do nothing to hurt the wood, yet he acts as if it’s harsh enough to kindle flame.

And then there’s the forks in the road. A mental labyrinth to funnel a racing mind. Each beat is an opportunity for mistake, and underneath that, a net of his own design. Should he rush into a stanza of backing that isn’t yet to be, he knows the acoustic path to lead it back, and the way forward for a delayed piece. The script has been combed with fine teeth to its individual syllables, and where his litanies of memorisation may fail him, he’s pored through the thesaurus and embedded the suitable substitutes to his skull.

He cannot explain it, but he knows his words have power. His lyrical will coupled with a melody can drive a stoic to tears, turn the tides of battle, make the air thrum with feeling — all inexplicable, yet apparent with its weight. He refuses to sling it around. Not the potent story, nor the history that comes with it. Whether it would be roiled forest creatures or the ghosts of the Shroud’s past that would get him first, he prays he shall never know.