(The Sacrifice Of Callirhoe, Jean-Honoré Fragonard)

As a retainer and, admittedly, a woman who thrives on being needed, it has been my ultimate goal to do all but predict the future in service to my masters. I think of what you need before you need it. I know where you’ll be, I know what you’ll be doing and with whom; I know what you’ll be eating, where you’ll be seated, the view out the window nearest to your meal setting, and even who will be preparing your food. I am the tangible hands of fate guiding you along invisibly through meticulously-planned schedules and the intimate knowledge of your preferences such that you never have to think about them.

This is power I can harness. It’s power I thrive on wielding behind my back, that nourishes me. But sometimes I get an immense humbling, a plan that was so ill-conceived, so steeped in godawful calculation that it was doomed to fail from the start. Something so unbelievably fucked that there’s no clever retainer magic in the world that can fix it. Such as when Ezen was murdered before I could fake his death and buy myself some time before dealing with the real problem—Luther.

You see, we had an agreement. He was going to take some time to explain to Miyasuke that he needed to “die” before I...pulled the trigger, if you will. In the meantime, I was going to get back to work with Luther as though nothing were amiss. And that’s where it both began and ended.

“Morning,” I chime as I enter his office, ignoring the disturbing, tainted fog that seemed to follow his every step these days. I cradle a clipboard and prattle on, easy as you please. “I’ve got a shipment scheduled aaat...” A peek down the list. “Approximately 11 bells, as I recall, but we’ll see if they manage to make it. The usual guy fell ill, so they’ve got a replacement. You know how that goes.”

Luther doesn’t respond, but instead beckons me forward to plant my chin between his thumb and forefinger in an affectionate gesture that I’m all too familiar with. “Come here, Carisa.” That name still doesn’t sit right. At this point, I've insisted that he call me elsewise enough that I know he doesn't because he chooses not to. What can I do? Cry about it?

Once I meet his hand with a warm smile, he steadies my chin and strokes my hair. Ours has always been a relationship that crossed professional boundaries in admittedly very expected ways, and this was no exception. His wife knows what we do and turns the other cheek because she's got it made; a baby, a huge mansion, and an endless stream of champagne even when there's nothing to celebrate. I guess that’s your prize for selling your soul. When his rough fingers make contact with the fuzz of my ears, I’m immediately sure our morning meeting will wind up with my face held down to a desk while I wonder for the thousandth time if this would finally be the time I wouldn't walk right ever again.

"Good mood today, huh?"

"You've always been my favorite kitten; you know that."

My heart thumps shamefully. I’m a simple bitch. "Yeah, it's never been a question, I think..."

"Which is why it pains me to tell you that I have used you." He delivers the news at the same time he draws his hand back, leaving me caught woefully unprepared. "But that's alright," he continues. "Betrayal for betrayal."

My ears flatten and I take a half-step away. My mouth summons the only words it can, dumb as I am. "Excuse me?"

"You didn't think I thought you would actually kill Ezen, did you...?" He rises for what feels like forever, unfolding upward in his impossible height. My stomach rises in kind into my throat. I'm dead. I'm surely dead.

"It seemed a little obvious for you, but you've asked me to do stranger things than that. Why not?"

"I needed someone to give him a false sense of security about the situation and assumed you wouldn't defy me openly..." He moves his attention to the window nearby and frowns. "A distraction while I sent another to take care of it. You're fired."

I turn to stone, frozen or paralyzed or both, the distinction between the two blurred in one swipe. The world holds its breath as I shuffle through so many different ways to respond, and finally settle on a truth that won’t change a thing. "I do love you, Luther."

"I love you too, Carisa, but I can't trust you. I'm sorry about Ezen, but it had to be done. We'll see eye to eye again eventually, I'm sure of it...but not now. Please go."

Ezen had this talk with me some time ago, about doing the right thing. He wanted me to give up the one redeeming quality I have, which is my loyalty, and all I could muster in response was that it hurt too much. That doing the right thing felt like shit, and it did, and does. I made excuses. I wanted to save face. Gods, I want to save face. I can’t this time. I don't want to die, but I’m ready. I’m ready to be good, I think.

"I don't think it did have to be done." Too late to turn back. "I think if that were the case, I would have seen it by now. I know you better than most. I really miss you, you know?"

He moves his attention back to me and shakes his head slowly. "It's us or them."

"There isn't a lot of 'us' in this one. It's you and...the others. The ones who made the pact. My name isn't on that list. I'm not 'us'." It feels unsettling to be talking about it so openly. To just say to his face what so many others have noticed but couldn’t vocalize: he’s not like other people anymore. He’s not even a people at all, not now.

"Are you so sure...? You're marked by the River. You don't belong here any more than the rest of us."

"I didn't make the deal with the Lobby. You know that. You know what I did." I want to be right. I really, really want to be right.

"Are you so certain it matters?"

"If it doesn't matter, then what purpose is it?"

"There's a good chance that you'll be forced to submit your new life with all the rest. If the Lobby goes, so does the River, Carisa."

"I don't want to die." I look away finally, pull my eyes from his inescapable, intimidating presence. I was reborn in that place, in that darkness, and by his will and Ezen’s resilience, I got to see sunlight again. Who did I even owe anymore? Whose debts were steeper? How could I possibly calculate? Have I paid enough? "I didn't want to die the first time and I sure as hell don't want to now. But I love these people, too, and you don't."

"Ezen is already dead, but Khagatai was spared for it. Can't you appreciate that...?"

I am so stupid. How arrogant am I that I thought I could outmaneuver? He knows me just as well as I do him. Loyalty, baby. My godsdamned undoing. I trade one man for another like cards in my hand. "There's no way this wasn't going to hurt no matter what, huh?"

I’m what they call power-adjacent, a bit of an obscure way of saying that I like to be in proximity to, but never take power of my own. I’ve spent a lot of time with Luther Aldric, enough to rival that of his own wife. I could bury him with his secrets, but not without burying myself for the lengths I went to to keep them. That’s the tradeoff, isn’t it? I can bask in force strong enough to shape the world for better or worse, but I consequently can’t escape it.

I always knew this day was going to come, but I had foolishly envisioned it as being my choice. I had orchestrated a plan far bigger than myself using my ties with the Annelise and Katarina, had tried to encourage the pieces around the chessboard in the ways I’ve learned from my masters. I put the lockbox in the right hands and waited for the man with the machine in his head to act on its precious contents. The risks were never zero, but the situation was bursting with promise that maybe, just maybe I could pull this off.

Unfortunately, the student has not yet become the teacher; as a matter of fact, I still have a lot left to learn. When I showed up to Luther’s office that day with a fresh report of shipments arriving coming and going from Radz-at-Han for both his tidy little drug empire back in Eorzea and even more shit his treasure-hoarding wife was plotting to somehow pack into their comically overflowing manse that teetered between opulence and complete gaudy excess, suffice it to say that I was not prepared for the orders he sprung upon me.

“You’re going to kill Ezen.”

If I looked shocked, I prayed to the gods it didn’t show. I felt every muscle in my face lock up in an effort to preserve the nonchalance with which I entered. Of course I said yes, what other option was there? I didn’t dig this hole hugging my employer’s enemies into submission, that’s for goddamn sure, and Ezen had the weighty bollocks to try to assassinate Luther a second time all by himself. As if once hadn’t gotten us into this mess to begin with. Unbelievable, this man.

So what did I do? I tracked him down, of course. I look different now, move differently. I took my time, I prepared thoroughly, I pulled every string I could reach out and seize to get home unannounced and start the hunt. I staked out his home in Ul’dah shared with the priestess for far too many days before I finally made my move. I followed him at a distance, unrecognizable, and it wasn’t five minutes into the chase that he turned around and just announced in front of the gods and all that he knew I was there.

“Hello, Lolah.”

“Hello, Ezen. Let’s keep walking. No need to stop on my account,” I called back cheerfully, as though this were planned, as if this were a casual stroll between two friends who hadn’t been separated by time, distance, my own faked death, and loyalties I’m going to have a fuck of a lot of trouble explaining. “Come on, don’t tell me I was obvious.”

He didn’t budge. Instead, he held his ground and stared me down with one eye, the other covered strangely by a length of black cloth. “I knew you were going to be here today and I know why you’re here.”

“Don’t tell me someone tipped you off.”

“I saw you in my dreams last night,” he said almost distantly. Something wasn’t right about him; he seemed both there and not-there. “Luther sent you to finish what he started.”

It’s tempting in such a situation to completely lose your cool. To be caught out at whatever dirty deed you’re up to and throw caution to the wind, go all in on a hapless gamble. But the truth was far more complicated. There were a thousand questions in the face of just what the hell saw you in my dreams meant here, but it was most important to stay the main course. I could hear the moment threatening to fly past me with every second I said nothing.

“Technically a right answer, though not the right answer,” I finally conceded. “I’ve got some time to get the job done, so there’s no need to rush it. But you do need to die.” I paused, then tacked on, “At least, you’ve got to appear to die believably enough that I can usher along some other machinations.” Come on now, you didn’t really think I was going to do it, did you?

I owe Ezen my life, not just technically, but...sort of literally. It was at Luther’s beckon that he waded down into the River to pull me out of its deathly grasp with Inika and the vessel Lolah, herself. For months, I slept in his bed when the nightmares were too vivid, when I was held hostage to fear that if I went to sleep, I’d be back there. I was given purpose again, had life and direction breathed back into me by the Khotgor priest himself. I threw myself into his service out of love and gratitude alike. It was the absolute least I could do, and to kill him after racking up this insurmountable debt—well, it’s completely fucking unconscionable, you see. I don’t have many, but trust that the scruples I do possess are ironclad.

“I wasn’t sure,” he began, and I froze in place. He must have known, right? He must have understood that my return to Luther was complex, but that I still knew who had carried out his will in the end. “But I actually have to kill you, Carisa.” His hand went to his blade and my blood ran cold. That name. I was surely dead.

(Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot, Jean-Simon Berthélemy)

I’ve got a gift for talking too much, and having a seasoned hunter reach for his sword with the intent to kill me didn’t preclude me from accessing it. My mouth was moving before I could even think about the words, the exact sentences that would spill out. I’d pacified tyrants so many times before, but they all had similar impulses; they wanted to be soothed, to be made right, to have their righteous indignation validated and echoed. This was new. This was scary.

“See, I was thinking you might come to that conclusion, and unfortunately I’m going to have to decline,” I said smoothly, hoping my nerve wouldn’t shatter. I gestured at the gleaming blade of his katana and swallowed the lump in my throat. “Put it away. You’re going to regret it if you don’t.” As if I could maneuver my puny daggers against this man. Such hubris.

“There are no choices here, Carisa.”

“I know you’re not going to give this up, but I’m also not planning on dying. Bit of a stalemate, mm?”

“You could run,” he offered peaceably, and although that was my exact inclination in the moment, to turn and flee far, unfortunately greater machinations were still at hand.

“If I do, you know we’re going to need to have this conversation again.”

“Is it a conversation we need to have...?”

“I can’t go back to Luther until you’re dead. Or ‘dead’. This thing is much bigger than either of us, Ez. But you have to trust that I haven’t forgotten you. Or anything we talked about.”

“He will know if you lie.” I didn’t want to admit it, but I knew he was right.

“How?”

“It isn’t how, it just is.”

“Unless you’ve got a better idea, that’s what I’m banking on right now—can you just put the damn sword away already? Honestly.” I let out an uneasy huff of air, unable to focus any longer with the executioner looming fulms from my face. Who could blame me? “Just...you lay low until I have time to finish my work, and then he won’t be a problem to either of us anymore. Or...until he comes back.”

His next question caught me by surprise. “Did you do this?”

“Do what?”

“Him.”

The implication loomed heavy. Luther was a monster and we both knew it. Had known it for some time, in my case. Deep down, I was happy to be free of him when he died...or when I thought he had. I mourned, I moved on. And when he made contact out of the blue, it was with...both elation and dread that I accepted the invitation. I had quietly been dreaming of a return to older times. Never in a thousand years would I have guessed what he had become. Or had yet to become.

“What...he is? No. No, I didn’t.” Emotion finally made a clean crack into my bravado. “Come on, Ezen, you know what I was up to after he died. I was with you. I didn’t wait six months and then go take a deep dive into the fucking River for him. Liana told me herself, in a prison cell, that he was, you know...gone gone. I figured that if anyone knew if he was in that place or not, it was her. And he wasn’t.”

Finally, fucking finally, the weapon went back into its sheath. I felt the pressure release from my chest so suddenly I could’ve cried. “He must’ve made it to the Lobby himself, then...”

“There’s not really another explanation, right? And if we kill him, well...he just goes back and takes a little vacation.”

“I’m aiming higher than that. I’m going to cut the knot clean. The link must be severed.”

“What do you mean? How do you plan do to that? I...have got some wheels in motion and it would be good to know...” I paused without warning as impulse welled up like an overtaking wave. “Hang on. First, can I, like...have a fucking hug or something? It’s been awhile, and...honestly, I’ve missed you.”

I could see the wheels turning in his head. Despite whatever mystic force had filled his head and set him on this strange mission, I could see a glimmer of familiarity. The hard-ass who got me back on my feet when I was too busy moping was still there. The nod precludes the words. “I trust you. Come here.”

Despite the assurance, I kept my hands up and approached him like a wild predator. No sudden motions. This is how some fools die, and anyone with half a brain knows a sheathed katana is still a perfectly deadly one. But I did the calculations and determined that if I was going to get cut in half, it may as well be attempting something honest for once in my life. When I got within close range, I threw caution to the wind and flung myself around his middle. No tricks. No daggers to the back. Just sweet relief. “I dunno what the fuck that fall out of the mansion window did to you, but it’s still good to see your face.”

(Starlight by Patrick Hughes (ca. 1983).)

Luther knows the value of a debt extends far beyond just monetary. With the right amount of interest, it becomes more than just a way to feed your family, it becomes a way to secure them for life. A way to build an empire not from bricks, but from expansive and ever-shifting wealth that can become whatever you need it to be at a moment’s notice. Fuck-you money. The kind of coin that leaves nothing off the table, builds a fucking god out of a boy who once ate dust in Ul’dah while his mother toiled to make him worthy of his royal blood. I know him well.

It’s been the debts that I owe him that have prevented me from really moving on, and let’s be honest, I haven’t been trying hard enough in the first place. I loved him. Oh, why even put that in the past tense? We fucked only weeks ago and I know his wife knows, but she seems relieved to split the burden of this hellish man’s attention with someone who can endure it. It’s a tenuous peace, this one, but for how much longer?

When he died—or when we thought he was dead—I vowed to live a better life away from the quagmire I’d gotten myself into at his side. You know, after I was done causing a scene in my prison cell at the time. Call it bedroom persuasion, but I let Ezen convince me that there was a better way to do all of this, a better way to live and be, and in his coup de grace, invoked the debts that I owed him, as well. What can I say except checkmate?

I’m not a bum, so of course I did the right thing. I attended sermons, Khotgor and kami alike, and I beseeched whatever invisible forces that be to just help me clean up my act. I cut ties with people who were no good, I contented myself to do paperwork and amuse myself in ways that wouldn’t necessarily land me in prison (or at least came with a lesser sentence...if we’re being fair.) I had it made. I was set. I could live like that, I could maintain. It’s not a life I loved, but it was one I could live with. And then he came back.

Things aren’t quite the same. I know exactly what happened to him and still it’s difficult at times for me to be in his presence. I do my best not to let on that my nerve is breaking because he doesn’t exactly have a wealth of true friends and it feels wrong to cut the bond we’ve made even if he has a veritable black cloud following him these days. I wish we could go back to how things were when we could get belligerently drunk at the Bismarck after racking up a food bill so high they couldn’t even dream of kicking us out. I wish I could go back to the nights on my airship when there was nothing but wind and starlight, when all we felt was mutual peace and a deep, unconditional love for one another that had nothing to do with romance. I would shake myself and tell the past me that I had so much to be grateful for. I’d tell myself to slow down and look around. I’d tell myself that my need to be loved and acknowledged wasn’t worth all of this. I thought I was so smart, but I’ve been a stupid little forest cat this whole time. Fuck.

I wish Ezen had never put him to death in the first place. And sometimes I wish he would have just gone ahead and left me in the grave.

Dying was the best thing that could have happened to me. I’ve embraced this fate, even begun to make jokes about it. They say cats have nine lives and I know what I’ve said in the past about the offensiveness of referring to a miqo in that way, but I’m starting to wonder. Fortunately for me, this time was a little less dramatic than the last thanks to the more metaphorical nature, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still miss the ones I left behind. But time marches on and good retainers need to be able to see the future coming rather than keeping an eye on the past.

After the sweat and humiliation of earning my dear employer’s consideration, I found myself in a world that was all too familiar, and yet so much more. Annelise is a force of nature and commands a room just by showing up in it. She snorts lines that cost enough to build a palace at a time, pure money that disappears straight up her pointy nose in a bid to wrench more hours out of her day and outplay her competition as she travels from country to country, continent to continent. This monstrous woman won’t stop in her bid to have her husband’s company empire’s mark on every piece of land she so much as glances at and desires. She is high maintenance and I am the perfect mechanic.

If you ask me, Annelise and Luther would have made a terrifying couple, but it’s fortunate for all of us that his interest remains in little blonde pushovers who can produce heirs and throw dinner parties. Don’t tell him I said that. I never knew her husband, but rumor has it she killed this Kazimir after she gave him a son, that she had everything she wanted out of him and had no more use from that point on. All he was doing was getting in her way. If it’s true, I have no choice but to respect that level of dedication to playing the game, but who can really say? She’s been known to let rumors fly when they’re advantangeous. If they can’t love you, let them fear you.

These days, I’m training to be her when she can’t, won’t, or doesn’t want to be present. I take extensive notes on the way she dresses, the way she styles her hair and for which client and what the stakes are. I note her bartering preferences and also that she likes to let others who haven’t yet had the pleasure of being ground under her heel use the notion of her motherhood to condescend and undermine. I too made the mistake of assuming this was just part of her conniving, but in private, she’s confided on rare occasion that she’s in fact even more ruthless for the sake of her baby boy’s future, not the other way around. She’s terrifying. I really think I’m smitten.

I make her appointments and I purchase her drugs; you don’t honestly think a woman like that does her own dirty deeds, do you? I deliver it to her in a way where she doesn’t have to recognize it’s drugs she’s being given; in jeweled brooches that spring open, necklace pendants that pull apart, and heavy rings crusted with glittering red jewels the color of blood. I give her reports from her maidservants and nannies about the state of her perfect child—and then turn around and yell at them when the state isn’t good enough.

“Your wine refill, miss,” the waitress offered cheerfully, stooping to present the woman with a fragrant glass of rich, velvet red. Lolah smiled pleasantly and pulled it closer, taking a moment to catch a deep breath as her bodice pinched her middle with every slight shift. “Thank you, this looks lovely.” In truth, she could have delivered a glass full of piss for all the miqo’te cared with regards to what was actually in it. It was barely a prop in the choice people-watching that unfurled before her eyes.

She was dining alone, bereft of company by choice, and invisible to the other occupants of the Bismarck who were fully engrossed in conversation or the hungry pursuit of the last streaks of sauce left on their plates chased by a hunk of crusty bread. This is the way she preferred it, being an inoffensive (albeit slightly breathless) part of the scenery, soaking in the din of completely inconsequential chatter, casting presumptions on the dozens of lives that filtered in and out. It was comforting to be surrounded by the mundane in the best possible sense; these were people without pretense, without ulterior motive.

Lolah drank modestly, tipping her head back to let her dark curls spill over her bare shoulders, bathed in dim candlelight under an endless canopy of distant stars. The water lapped at the stone foundation, the breeze fresh and mild. By all means, it was so close to perfection, a delicate spiderweb net forming a safe cocoon around her, save for one small snag that began to beg her attention. Upon the third or fourth taste of the wine, the hole finally tore completely and the illusion was shattered. What is that taste?

In an instant, the words fell hush around her and she was paralyzed in the silence. The next testing sip fell short of her mouth and spattered against the bare tops of her cleavage, leaving blood red rivulets down the tawny flesh. Her lips parted, but what was it she wanted to say? She looked down to the mess and sprung for a napkin, her motions without wit. Her head turned in search, but the waitress who had once been attentive to the point of omnipresence was now nowhere in sight. And they were looking at her. They were all staring, weren’t they? All eyes on her, all eyes on the scene she was surely starting to make. The spell was broken. It was no longer safe. It was no longer innocent. What was it she wanted to say? What was it? What was it?

Poison. It’s poison. It’s poison.

She stood quickly, nearly upending the glass all over the pristine tablecloth, nearly saturating the basket of rolls she had only barely touched. Coins spilled from her fingertips onto the plate, some uncounted amount that would surely pay for whatever it was she had ordered—it barely mattered now. In a flash, there she was like a servile phantom; it was that smiling, gods-forsaken woman who had delivered the traitorous beverage, and now she was trying to touch her elbow, trying to guide her back into her seat. Trying to usher her to the other side.

“Hey, did you know...? Your name is in papers all over Eorzea. Menphina’s tits, you’re famous!”

Lolah looked down at the crumpled newspaper sheet thrust at her with a note of interest. Sure enough, splashed across a column was the headline that had sparked it all: HANNISH AMBASSADOR’S DAUGHTER JAILED FOR KUGANE HEIST.

“Ah...heh...” She grins slightly, but doesn’t say much to the woman who eagerly watches her expression as she reads on.

--

Shock rippled through Kugane as the coveted sword of Kaien, the last king of Doma before its occupation, was stolen from its display at a museum in Kugane. The frantic search turned up no sign of its whereabouts, but the thieves curiously came forward in the days after and made themselves known. Ashley Stone and Lolah Bajhiri, daughter of Ihsan Bajhiri, an official ambassador to Kugane from Radz-at-Han, confessed to the crime in full to shock on the international stage.

In a curious twist to this most unusual tale of a young married couple, they have invoked a peculiar and somewhat obscure law of diplomatic immunity and ownership rights that prevents Hingashi from reclaiming the Doman relic that was in their possession. However, this is not the end of the line for the relic. Officials feared the duo had sold the priceless artifact for money, but instead it seems to have taken yet another turn.

In recent days, Yanxia native currently operating as the head of the Aureate Ward, Miyasuke Ietada, presented this ill-gotten sword to Lord Hien, son of Kaien, proclaiming it a gift not to him, but to the rightful heirs of Yanxia: the people. The move has been viewed as controversial by some, but the locals are repotedly fascinated by the gesture. Some view Stone, Bajhiri, and Ietada as local heroes, going to great lengths to restore a land torn asunder by Garlean occupation.

Finally, the story has taken a dramatic new path as Ms. Bajhiri was arrested by former Brass Blades officer Elia Hext on unrelated charges consisting of suspicion of murders dating back several months that have gone unsolved, brought to light by the news of the heist that launched her to international infamy. Bajhiri has yet to be tried on these charges.

--

The list was simple, scrawled into a worn scrap of paper with a bit of a discarded match.

Contact Ashley Get cellmate a pair of socks Ask someone to do my hair

Lolah scratched off the final item on the list as the woman who shared her cell braided her hair into a thick plait. Her ears twitched at the sound of footsteps coming down the cell block, but she didn’t pay any more attention than she had to as the guards wandered by, a thick ring of keys clanking against their hips to announce their coming and going. It was routine even after one night, their scheduled arrivals and departures tight enough to set a watch by. But then they stopped.

“This her?”

“Yeah, are you surprised?”

“Aye, ‘spose I expected someone a bit lankier t’be gettin’ away with murder.”

The laughter echoed off the stone, and she didn’t dare look up even as her cheeks burned with indignation. As though to make matters worse, her stomach growled with protest at the meager rations afforded to her since she arrived, prompting another round of raucous laughs as they jangled onward, away from her cage.