#phansi

In the end, though, the hunter Lev Almasa scooped the creature up in a net and hung it from the gray branch of the tree around which they’d made camp, where they could all watch it thrash about and  Dzul could wonder at whether they’d be tasked with feeding it for as long as they were to travel the Feywood.

The camp, their fourth in the Feywood so far, encircled the massive dead tree so that all sides could have their eyes on the shadows and the beasts that lay beyond. They’d already settled into the pattern of sleeping in three shifts of four awake at a time, so that there would be no blind spots. Eight of their number were hunters, pirates, guides, survivalists – these things were as natural as breathing. And three of the four others were used to nothing so much as following orders, and so they adapted just as quickly.

The last was the Engineer, who barely paid it mind, studying a notebook most day and night and hardly paying them any heed at all. The last time he’d spoken at all was a day earlier, where he mused aloud that in earlier generations, they’d called the Feywood “a forest of chaos,” which had done nothing to improve the mood after they’d slain a pack of wolves unlike any she’d seen before, with fur of mottled crimson and their horns aflame.

To think, on the maps this place was but a hand’s breadth from the Golmore. That jungle was not without its dangers – Dzul first faced a morbol in her nineteenth year, and for the next two she’d breathed with a rasp – but they were known dangers, and those without malicious intent oft had the Wood-Warders to watch over them from the branches. Here, though, was different: because the Mist was heavy in the Feywood, heavier than she’d ever seen it in all her life.

Ioachim and D’ghoz had never seen the Mist before with their own eyes. They were knowledgeable when it came to forestry, skilled trackers, and other things besides, but their partnership had been founded in the Salikawood far to the west, in safe Nabradia, and they were the rawest of the recruits assembled. Some of their number had been hired through intermediaries, some were respondents to notices posted in the major Clans, and in the case of Yulil Kline, roused from beneath a pile of straw in some cell in Old Archades – but this pair had come on recommendation, someone in the Thirty Houses who had become an investor, and found the group lacking in controllable assets.

“Cor,” Ioachim had finally said after his jaw had raised, “I’ve never seen fog like this.” And amidst a series of incredulous looks, the Engineer laughed, the first time his expression had changed from a sort of dead-eyed, detached interest in his surroundings since the group had set off from Balfonheim.

“This is no fog, my boy...” The Engineer had placed one hand on the young hume’s shoulder and stretched the other outward to encompass all of the Feywood, where the white haze trailed between the trees. “This is Mist, this is the source of all magick. A natural phenomena older than humes, older than even the Nu Mou, ‘tis a lifeblood of the earth that exists in all the air.”

D’ghoz snorted and shook his head. The Seeq were rotund, even the strongest of them, and their porcine faces were quick to emote, but offered poor chance at pronunciation; Like many, he didn’t speak often unless it were truly necessary, communicating more with wheezes from his snout and a scorning sound that more resembled flatulence.

“Eh?” Ioachim scratched behind his ear. “How’ve we never espied such before now, then, if it’s in all the air?”

“Wasn’t aware you had to see it, to know.” Lev horked and spit a fat gob of something awful at his feet. Big, bearded, barely dressed – he’d run hunts out of Dalmasca, even after being drummed out of Clan Centurio for conduct unbecoming, but Dalmasca was racked with plague and had been for much of the year; he’d fled to Balfonheim rather than catch the sickness as his former countrymen had. He viewed most of the assembled group with disdain, most like for the very reason that even a comparative boy like Ioachim had better relations with his clients. To call D’ghoz a “pig” would be a slur – would mark any of them for Archadian at the least – but to call Lev the same was nothing.

They all watched the Mist swirl, then, saw mirages of their own selves dance and flicker in the unearthly light – no fog, this, that was reflective, prismatic, warm and cool at once to the touch in a way indescribable.

“Fool,” had said Yulil, twisting and tumbling a dagger ‘round his fingers. “We are in Jagd; how could you not know the very word?”

“The word Jagd comes from the Garif, where it meant ‘hunt’ only,” mumbled Haeva – then to her left, now asleep in a hammock strung between the dead branches, looking as though she’d been caught up in a net of her own... a female Bangaa Ruga who had known the Golmore, was on vaguely-friendly terms with the Viera that made it their home. The Mist settled on her yellow scales gave her the look of a sculpture carved in ice. “To say Jagd means ‘mist-choked’ only in the common tongue, but they named it such from the creatures the Mist spawned.”

The Engineer tolerated all of the cross-talk, though to Dzul’s eye it all appeared to bore him, or at least waste time spent thinking on whatever sad calculations hung behind his eyes. He was aristocratic in bearing, were it not given away by his fine white gloves, the embroidery in his crimson expeditioner’s jacket, and the expense of his glasses, the three men and one woman of his group who wore the polished plate armor of the Archadian military, the ones who’d come at his side and watched over his every stomp through the muck as though they expected him to fall into a frost-covered bog and vanish from sight completely.

He drew from his pocket a polished stone, dark in color but brightening in his hand. Ioachim had goggled over the sight; as though he’d never seen magicite, before.

“Attend here, now, and I’ll instruct you.” With the stone between two fingers, he held it up and outward, and the two Salikawood hunters watched in awe as the Mist was drawn around in in spiraling loops, like water in a drain. The stone’s glow increased as it swallowed the Mist, and Dzul knew that to hold it would be to feel it vibrate softly, like a harp-string.

Now, at the beginnings of nightfall, as Dzul inspected her crossbow, repacked her other gear, and watched Ioachim trail his hand through the Mist, she had to admit that the Engineer had a flair for rhetoric, that his lesson seemed to have taken hold in a boy barely-lettered. She hated Archades and she hated the nobility, but she wanted to know a bit more about this man, who had gathered them all together to hunt for a faerie tale.

“For Mist to be visible,” he’d explained, “It must needs be quite dense, quite full indeed... places like the Feywood, where most races daren’t settle. To breathe in so much Mist at a time can be dangerous to the body, you see, for our capacity for magick, our very souls, are fragile things.” It was little wonder the Viera stayed further north, that the Nu Mou and the Garif never came here. Those more in touch with the world of magick were all the more endangered. “Magicite, those stones we use to enable our technology, our great feats of engineering, are able to hold the Mist, the way air can be held within a balloon.”

“How can a stone hold Mist?” Ioachim had asked, which had been the wrong tactic, in terms of understanding, for the man’s other side slipped free from its tether.

“Crystals are formed due to uniquely geometric structures in their composition; magicite such as this become an aetheric lodestone precisely because of that geometry. For the harmonic resonance of  such structures allow the Mist to pass within, and then ‘tis stored because the space within, as with all such geometry, is larger than its volume without.”

Ioachim had looked stricken. Yulil and Lev had shaken their heads and stalked off to scout ahead, presumably hoping to inflict violence.

Now, Dzul came to stand next to the boy-hunter, crossbow returned to the thong tied ‘round one shoulder and over her back. Normally, Mist took years, decades, to accumulate in regular magicite. Only in a place like the Feywood could it be displayed so dramatically. Mist soaked into the land like dew, or collected underground as if a water table, and crystals leeched at it over the ages, waiting to be mined up and put to use. But here, in the Forest of Chaos, the air itself was made of volatile magick: they’d kept their spell uses to water and ice, worried that a spark or flame might spread through the Mist and torch them all alive. The camp was lit by electric lamps that ran on processed magicite stones, unfolded from packs hung over their chocobo’s back and placed around the camp in hopes of discouraging the nocturnal beasts.

It was quiet; the soft buzz of the maps, the rustling of the trapped bunny, and light snoring from Haeva, but you’d be forgiven for thinking they were alone there, in the Mist. Ioachim yawned, Dzul watched herself, an apparition in the Mist.

Dzul Zulejha was born to the northwest of Archades, in a small village in what was once called the Republic of Landis. Theirs was a small nation, but proud; they were predominantly hume, but lived in concert with the Bangaa minority and an encampment of Garif-miga that had assembled on the border almost a century ago. She used to play amongst the Garif-miga; her mother was a tradesman who would bring goods back and forth from the capital, and he was well-liked there. When the posting for this expedition came to her, she was amongst the Garif of Kerwon on the other side of the Ozmone Plain, men more proud and also more fragile than the families she’d known, but she knew their dances, and had been made well-welcome. Thirteen years ago, however, the Archadian Empire had come to claim Landis as their own. As the knights of Landis had broken and scattered into guerrilla groups, her mother had taken her on bocoback far from the land of her home, that she need never see it conquered.

Her mother would be shamed, that she’d taken the posting, but the Garif had a saying: to eat is the blood’s desire, and the heart needn’t pump without it.

She was twenty-four, her skin was darker than the earth, her hair lighter than a clear sky, her arms were wrapped to hide the scars, and they called her the Wolf-Slayer. She didn’t much recognize the girl from Landis in the woman who peered back from the Mist, but she also felt little shame in it.

Ioachim rubbed at the back of his head, looking to her. “Guessin’ I should apologize t’Go for boppin’ his snout, before.”

“You were hardly yourself,” she said to him with a half-smile. It was hard not to like Ioachim.

Behind them, Swati (pronounced like “Svati”) sneezed himself awake, grumbled, and rolled over in the dirt. A Bangaa Sanga who’d said little the entire trip; he wore a blindfold and was not allowed back to Nabradia and could shoot the wings from a fly with a Ras Algethi. He and Haeva had not exchanged a single look, less Dzul had missed it. She’d not expect the other races to need each other’s company, but when surrounded by Imperials who’d like as not use other words or worse, she’d think they’d find safety in numbers.

Ioachim shrugged. “Can’t say as I know who I was, then.” He walked off, and cleared her eyeline to see the Engineer sitting in a folding chair, one of his armored retinue standing at his side. He was taking notes and drinking an iced tea, as though he was on holiday along the Phon Coast. At his feet, the jar held those twinkling lights, orbiting each other lazily.

Before she’d known it was Imperials, she’d known it was to travel the Feywood, and she’d said yes. She’d said it because she hadn’t been, and because others would think she couldn’t. She’d said yes because the purse was good enough to send some along with a Kiltian missionary she knew, who made trips north to what remained of Landis, which wasn’t much. She said yes because most often when folly of this scale came well-funded, it collapsed early and you could walk away with the spoils for hardly an effort. Others had other reasons – Lev had the bloodlust, and Haeva through some complicated debt she felt she owed the Golmore Viera, Yulil fought for his freedom and Swati was making of it some elaborate suicide – most of all, Dzul wanted to see the truth of the stories.

The Nu Mou spoke of Giruvegan, and the Garif believed it; for a hume of the Empire to seek it out, he had to know something, that he believed it’d prove out.

And so she approached the man, and spoke the legend that she’d heard aloud.

“On the farthest shores of the river of time, shrouded deep in the roiling Mist, the Holy Land sleeps: Giruvegan.”

The Engineer did not look up from his notes. “A Viera song, that. ‘Who knows the paths? The way to its doors?’ I expect it’s more pleasant to the ear in the original tongue, more... lilting.”

She crossed her arms. “You think yourself the answer to its riddle?”

“This shroud roils well enough.” He slid his glasses back up his nose and looked up at her. And it was truth, that their camp looked like an island adrift in an abstract oil painting, some small broken chunk of the purvama if the skies were diseased. His pen made some long calligraphic flourish. “We shall see what we shall see.”

This answer wasn’t good enough by half. There was a rustle in the gnarled stalks a few yards away, and she unslung and fired; a small bipedal plant emerged with an arrow through its blossom head, not even yet a fruit; it spun around, clutching its chest and falling over like a stage performer. As it expired, a spare flew flickers of light, like the ones in The Engineer’s jar, drifted upwards from the body, seeming to dissipate into the Mist. The man in armor attending made a mildly satisfied noise.

“You rarely see it, save in places thick with Mist,” The Engineer mused. “Perhaps it would have served as visual aid for the boy, earlier.”

Dzul turned. “Why do we make for the city the Gods built?”

The man in the armor scoffed. “What need have Clansmen for reasons? The coin is good.”

“I’m of no Clan,” she said, betraying bitterness she’d thought behind her; this man raised an eyebrow, as though she’d not just shown her draw speed. He looked old, his silver hair in some ridiculous nobleman coif, but the muscles in his neck were as tight as the cabling inside an airship, and she suspected it for an even match. “You’d tell not the hunter of their prey?”

The Engineer snapped his notebook closed and eyed her over the rims of his glasses. “We seek the Eternal.”

She let a laugh slip out unbidden. “Is that all? Men of means have always sought wellsprings of youth; you hadn’t struck me as vain.”

“Vayne? Not I.” The Engineer smiled. It was a sad smile, hollow, and ghosts danced across his twitching cheeks, though if they were shadows in the Mist’s light she couldn’t say. “Though it’s true enough that Emperor Gramis himself would approve of our finding results, no, I alone am the fool whose errand we now pursue.”

“If you seek immortality, have an heir.” The mention of Gramis, despoiler of Landis, had soured her mood further. “That is what the gentry does, is it not?”

His eyes darkened, and for the first The Engineer lost the faculty of speech. But finally: “An heir I have; and no consolation prize he, though I’ve eyes set on more and greater.”

There was something there, an anger not at her, but something else, the anger her mother had tried to suppress as he’d explained their homeland was razed to dust. "Who watches your son now?"

He waved it off. “An apprentice, one of the shipwrights. Just above the age of reason, I think, in Moogle years.”

She could only imagine a boy raised by Moogles. The little creatures were collectors of family, mischievous at best, brilliant and insufferable. “Why?”

“Because he misaligned a glossair ring during an engine test and nearly exploded our entire laboratory,” The Engineer lied, and she turned away in disgust.

It was perhaps those moving lights, that this place was called the Feywood. They were everywhere, like stars that danced. Either the proximity to Mt. Bur-Omisace, or the image of them in the air like falling snowflakes frozen in time, suspended – they called them snowflies. It was said that their congregation confused the explorer, that those who saw them were forever lost. It was said that they were drawn to The Dark.

She wondered if she’d die here. If they all would, as Swati seemed to long for, if The Engineer’s boy would instead come of age upon an airship in flight.

She cast the man in the armor one last look before heading back towards her bedroll, noting tiredly his bemusement, and fished from her pack a bottle of Valendian wine, hard-bought, and as always a nostrum for the lost. She drank from it straight, looked at the label, decorated with a fine-penned image of Kali, though the old goddess was holding glasses in each of her hands. It tasted like her childhood smelled, the fields she’d run through, burnt by the men she brought to the Gods.

Yulil stirred, from his place on the ground beside her. He’d had no gil to buy creature comforts, but the years interred had left him inured to such, regardless. She offered him a pull of the bottle, and he lifted it to the sky, gulping greedily.

“You hate it like I do,” he said, hoarse, wiping his mouth the back of a fist.

“The Feywood?” She placed her crossbow on the ground before her so that she could lean back against the massive trunk. “I’ve seldom seen a Hell more beautiful.”

“Nay, the Imperials.” He cocked a head back towards where she’d stood moments before. “The hollow men.”

She sighed, drank. “To ignore them is to ignore half the world. In time they’ll own everything, or Rozarria will. I’ve not the luxury for pride.” The Garif west of Ozmone were proud, and they acted as if their land wasn’t shrinking by the year, claimed by Dalmascans or overrun with beasts even they couldn’t hunt.

He looked at her queerly, then, and took back the bottle. “...You don’t know.”

Dzul scowled. “What don’t I know, save why we were all fools enough to besiege God’s approach?”

Yulil glanced at the man in the armor, who stood rigid, hands clasped behind his back, as though The Engineer had flown a statue in from Bhujerba. “Him. Guess his face isn’t as known, as he’s not wearing that impractical helmet they gave him. He’s only Judge Magister Phansi.”

Above them, the Mu bunny screeched and cried, sending Haeva into a long moan.

Phansi, the butcher of Landis. Dzul Zulejha could feel her heart stop.