#proditor

Corny ahh doodle I made. Throwing this here. I’ve been meaning to draw him more. Proditor! Proditor! Proditor! I love this pos.

In cowardice, I liberated myself. In freedom, I condemned others.

I have conspired against my benefactors, against my family, against my nation.

There’s a special place at the center of the Malebolge for people like me, a gaping frozen maw with unknowable rows of icicle teeth waiting to bite into my skin and freeze me in eternal stasis, left to endure the agony of being unable to scratch my ass or run my mouth in perpetuum.

You’ve gotta understand that I didn’t want to leave home. I never asked for any of this, and Eorzea is inferior to what I left behind in every possible regard, except for the part where I somehow managed to free myself from the expectations of everyone I had ever known. Up to a certain point.

In cowardice, I liberated myself. In freedom, I condemned others.

I have conspired against my benefactors, against my family, against my nation.

Wait. Let me walk that back real quick.

Back home there’s a fountain at the Trivium, at the intersection of the city’s three biggest thoroughfares. It’s a sprawling, brutalist stonework system of pipes and spires that converges in the middle of a shallow round pool, erupting from there into a towering geyser. Ten, twenty fulms high, the water shoots up over the shimmering surface, over where the sun glances off the distorted faces of thousands of coins, gold and silver and copper under the rippling water, a trove of untold riches, and every single one of them holding somebody’s--some real, actual person’s--most heartfelt or selfish or facetious wishes.

I like to stand by the rim and listen to the patter of water succumbing to gravity, rushing briefly upward into furious flight only to be dragged right back to square one, waiting for its turn to fly anew. I’ll probably never see it again. I hope I don’t.

The fountains at the Mattock are smaller. And calmer. And have about 800% the amount of holy granite titties as the Trivium fountain, but it works in a pinch. The air is colder, biting at my face with a punitive chill that I could swear feels like teeth. Maybe this is fitting. Maybe it’s fitting, that this frost-fucked city is the place where everything finally catches up to me.

I’ve got a pocket full of koban. They’re invalid as currency, but still worth the gold that comprises them, and I feel like there’s something poetic about that. Functionally useless but intrinsically valuable, the complete fucking opposite of me. One of these oblong coins is just the right size to fit over the pad of my thumb, to hold in my palm and rub my fingers over the ridges that sit in parallel all along its face.

I scrape my skin over the koban like I’m scrubbing the come out of a soiled pair of underpants over a washing board, and I leave behind on its scored surface the psychological imprint of whatever my massive fucking damage amounts to. It’s not much, but it’s mine.

I’m not gonna be this guy anymore, I say to the Fury’s impassive glower, but can you trust the promise of a turncoat? Even one he makes to himself?

You have to phrase it like a wish, dumbass, or it isn’t going to work.

I wish, I correct myself, to find the straight path. There, that’s better. Now turn around, close your eyes, and switch the koban to your mangled and fractured right hand, the hand with which you’ve already paid so much penance. It’s protocol, you see? Hold your wishes in your right hand, toss them over your left shoulder, and wait to hear the sudden glunk of the coin breaking the surface of the water. The pact is sealed.

This fountain’s only been here a few weeks, but already there’s a couple dozen other gil pieces cluttering up the stone tiles under the ice cold pool. A small congregation of worshipers of the Traders, perhaps, clogging up the Firmament for the Restoration and finding that they need somewhere to leave their tithes. Whoever they were, I’m not the only one.

I’m not the only one. And that’s comforting, I guess. It’ll have to do.

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n. A traitor; a betrayer