#i will queue it

Rothe had heard the stories. The Garleans took everything. Their homes, religion, hope, and lifestyle. Their lives. He remembered the sacrifice of his aunt, and how she risked everything on the hope that the dawn’s showers would slow the Imperial patrols an extra minute. Sixty seconds gave Rothe and Alrek the opportunity to have a life where they would not be forced to live subjugated and abused. Word never arrived from her after they escaped. Alrek never spoke of his mother again.

In prayers and vows, Rothe had heard the hushed recounts of the fall. His own blurry memories reconstructed it through their words: how the flames consumed the neighbors’ homes, and how their doors flew open to reveal painful, charred forms of the screaming and altered people he once knew.

The hysteria of information. Voices wailing over the sirens, demanding surrender or mercy equally unlikely to come. The clamor of rumors, urging all of Gyr Abania’s people to spare no hesitance in their fear of each other and themselves for thinking that revolution could ever come. Even now, the names of their twenty-year captors instilled an ire so unchanging that the occupation may have been the week before. The word reserved for hisses and whispers, “Garlemald,” drove every gaze to cold fire. It slipped in curses and drunken slurs and was greeted with a smack as if the corners of Ul'dah hid a Garlean spy instead of the alleyway drunk.

Auelin and Alrek spoke in those wary whispers now.

From his spot in the hallway, Rothe watched the two prod at unfamiliar straps and bags. Auelin shimmied an extra belt around her waist. She fiddled with leather pouches and metallic clips. Alrek tirelessly shoved the fabric of his paints into thick-laced work boots. Thin stains blotched the weathered aldgoat leather. He drew a finger over the darkest of the spots. A remnant of prior use and a glimpse of what was yet to come.

Solemnity bore into the lines of their faces. Lips thin and forehead wrinkled, with no sight of the pale crowfeet around his eyes, Alrek muttered something about needing a jacket. Auelin jabbed and stuck a meteor talisman to his chest. Stretching out her shoulder, she stepped over the spare swords littering the old rug. He reflected on the worn artifact and glanced to his hands. Aether burned beneath his skin: the resurrection of a discipline long abandoned. He turned back to the couch and inspected a worn canteen. Weighing the cured sack, he determined that it could still be of some use. He admired the armaments he and Auelin gathered every year for the purpose that relentlessly consumed their thoughts: liberation.

Ala Mhigo did not meet its end with the screams of magitek or in the bombs that incinerated homes. His homeland did not burn to ash under the steady march of Imperial firing squads or the famine that killed without bullets. The griffin, whipped and branded and forced to kneel, did not tuck its wings under its growling belly. It rose the flag elsewhere, and stirred spirits elsewhere. Ala Mhigo never died. From its knees, it will stand to rule the skies and mountains again. Ala Mhigo would no longer whisper the names of its slavers and its dead. Its voice would rise to a squall of blood and vengeance.

Under the same name, and with the same purpose of bettering Ala Mhigo, they would fight in the Resistance again. Alrek clocked his knuckles together and twisted his wrists in prayer. He slew the mantra under his breath and replaced it with the promise he made every day: “Freedom will be wrought.”

Auelin returned to the room and tossed him a thick arming coat. “By us, born from blood,” she finished.

Rothe curled his fingers into his gloved palm and backed himself closer to the wall. He knew they’d set out as soon as they finished, leaving a hasty letter in their wake. This was their battle. One to be fought by those who had vengeance in their veins and ghosts in their thoughts. Was he, the one who ran from his family, his heritage, his comrades, worthy to stand on the front lines and fight with those who had tirelessly worked all these years? Rothe had built a new life. To them, this was the only life they’ve ever lived.

Rothe took a step forward.

“I will come.” 

Alrek and Auelin had fought so he could start again in Limsa Lominsa. To reclaim all that they had lost and sacrificed in the jaws of Garlemald, he would join them in the lunge for the throat.