ffxivwrite 2021 - #11: Preaching to the Choir

Continued from#9 Friable

Gridania, 1565 6AE

It wasn’t that Shandrelle had never had a blade turned against her before. Time had failed to sand away the first time- even now it lurched out of her dreams every so often, casting her out of the pitcher of sleep with a strangled gasp as she sprung upright in bed, sweat plastering her nightgown to her skin. Over two decades later and still memory cast every detail with the surety of a painter’s brush. The crispness of the autumn air, tinged with the bated breath of an oncoming early snow. The crackle of the leaves underfoot as she stumbled off the road. The way the edge of the shortsword caught the glint of dim noon’s light as her assailant swung it toward her. The hairs on the back of his hand. The sound of his breath.

And then there was the terrible shout her father loosed, so shockingly inhuman, like the retort of lightning detonating a tree. The way he leapt forward, his azure robe flooding around his legs. The unnatural rent of wind that screamed fury as it tore his chestnut hair from the nape of his neck. The terrible crack, then a thud.

The wind died, and the bandit followed.

It hadn’t been the first time she’d seen death before either, but never like this- never with the violence happening in front of her and certainly not by her father’s hand. She lurched backward, legs quivering like a newborn deer, but her father didn’t turn. He simply stood there, his shoulders heaving with quick, urgent breaths.

Then at last his head jutted over his shoulder, looking back at her, and most of all she would never forget his eyes. The wild frenzy that pulsed through their green depths like a boar lost in blood.

But perhaps it was because of that first time that language leached from her mind like water through her fingers, thoughts stumbling over each other like a swarm of bees drunk on smoke as they heaved this way and that to no destination. And yet at the same time words thundered in on a rampaging herd, expanding a deep breath into her chest. The tip of Ojene’s dagger prickled against her neck as her throat swelled around the air, but Shandrelle swallowed nonetheless as she did her best to straighten. To scrabble onto the outcrop of courage that she didn’t feel.

There was no hint of blood-frenzy in Ojene’s eyes, and Shandrelle supposed that helped. But who knew what lay beneath their stony placidity, belied only by the stark furrow between her brows as they fixed unerringly upon Shandrelle’s face.

Every nerve in Shandrelle’s stomach squirmed, and she licked her lips with a suddenly dry tongue.

“My father,” she said softly, and the words hung in the air as an incongruous bird sang joy in the boughs. “He told me the truth… a few years ago.” Suddenly it was hard to meet Ojene’s eye, but as her gaze began to fall a shiver of mortal peril shrieked down her spine. Throat tightening, she settled for staring at Ojene’s chin. “I- I had just gotten married… some months before. To another Wildwood, named Ezette- I think you’d like her, if-”

Shut up Shandrelle, stop babbling! “Er, anyway-” Heat burst out on her chest, spreading up her neck. “I- I don’t think he meant to tell me. It slipped out of him one day… he made some sort of comment about it because- well… Ezette’s a good match for me, according to our families.”

Even as the words left her lips she cringed. She almost expected the prick of the dagger to bite deeper, and yet- nothing happened. Ojene simply stood there, statuesque.

In the well of silence, shame flooded the rest of the way up Shandrelle’s cheeks. “He, well- he said something about how… it was a good thing he’d gotten you out of the way. And when I asked him what in the hells he meant by that he dodged me at first. But eventually he confessed and- it was… exactly what you’d told me he’d done.”

Peril or not, she squeezed her eyes tightly shut. “I- I’m sorry. I should have listened to you… but it wasn’t just about that. I should have listened about everything else too. Everything you were going through, the way people treated you- I really let you down. If I were you I probably would have scrapped me too.”

A deep breath cascaded through Ojene’s nose, the first sound she’d made since she’d asked her question. “Shandrelle,” she said, and suddenly the cold metal at her throat was gone- a half second later the hand clamping her shoulder slipped off.

Shandrelle dared to open her eyes, to see Ojene standing there a couple paces away. The dagger hovered between them, but though its point angled at Shandrelle’s chest the cold intentionality was gone, replaced by the puzzled wrinkle between her brows.

“Do you really think,” Ojene said, “that I’d come put a blade to your throat for some shite over a decade ago?”

The heat simmering in Shandrelle’s cheeks blazed into an intense inferno and she took an involuntary step back as her fingers trailed nervously behind her, budging against the velvety petals of vetch.

“No, of course not,” she lied.

“Fucking hells,” Ojene exclaimed, and the blade gave up any pretense of hostility as she slumped against the ruin of a fallen tree, perched awkwardly on its crackled bark. “You really don’t know anything, do you?”

“Know… about what?”

With a bone-rattling sigh Ojene scrubbed her free hand over her closely-sheared scalp, and her gaze dropped to the ground as she propped one boot on the meandering spiral of a half-unearthed root. But her attention shot back up but a moment later, and surprise spiked down Shandrelle’s spine. For something of Ojene’s perennial mask had dropped, leaving the troubled flicker of consideration in her eyes exposed. As if, despite the nature of their encounter, they’d somehow found themselves thrust into a hazy etching of the past.

Decision clicked into place, and to Shandrelle’s shivering shock a bitterly wry smile sprawled across Ojene’s face.

“Your family is trying to kill me again,” she said brightly.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #10: Heady

The Fringes, 1539 6AE

The caravan might as well have been thunder. It wasn’t just the shuffle of feet trumpeting through the foliage, though that was certainly part. It was the wagon wheels that did it in, cracking through twigs and leaves alike with as little care as if they were plowing fields. The fact that it was happening was a great surprise, but that none of her elders found anything wrong with it was the bigger shock, for ever since Ojene had arrived here amongst the Laisonoix a year and a half before they’d instructed her to walk with the most silent step and she’d spent many long bells practicing just that, tiptoeing to and fro the outskirts until she made nary a sound.

But nothing about this trip was normal. There was the number of carts her elders hauled along, six sturdy wood frames piled high with crates and bags instead of the usual one or two. Or the fact that she was here at all. Let alone the other children- six others of varying ages trudged along clasping bulging sacks. Not unlike the one she carried, its allotment of hides heavy enough to set her arm burning if she dared to hold it over one shoulder too long.

Yet the further east they went, the more she thought she began to understand. For instead of deepening like she expected- the forest always seemed to deepen the further they got from Gridanian territory- the canopy began to part.

It was subtle at first. At the start all that changed was the depth of shadow began to relent, leaving the twisted path ahead of them clear. But then the color began to change. The trees, melting from verdant green to autumn tones despite the early season. The dirt, from the familiar Tinolqa browns and greys to orange. Rockier, as the flush undergrowth receded in favor of wiery scraggles. In the back of her head it niggled with a beat like the wings of a bird til suddenly it burst out in a flood of remembrance that prickled gooseflesh down her arms, and in an instant she knew what it was.

It reminded her of home.

At once the cataclysm of memory swept in as if ripped from her marrow, striking her still where she stood. She could do nothing but stare, and yet a few seconds later a sharp burn of moisture threatened to blot her vision out. Ojene thrust a hasty sleeve across her eye and swallowed a rough sniff, but no one seemed to notice- she lunged forward as if she never stopped at all.

Home! For what was the northern reaches of Tinolqa but this, the deep forest giving way to rockier climes? If she let her vision blur just out of focus it was almost as if she was there, the chill of the breeze soaking welcome to her brones. She swept it all in with sudden rapacious greed and yet- even as familiarity tingled down her skin the note went sour. And she remembered the rest. What was the beginnings of a broad smile slipped away, kneading into a resigned frown.

It was in this sullen space she rested as the caravan forged on, all too happy then for her silence as conversation chattered lightly around her, in a loose circle from which she walked apart.

Yet as they went on, the sun’s descent eventually threatening the bell when her elders would stop the caravan to make camp, again the forest changed. The canopy began to falter, striking the divots of light that billowed through the boughs into cracks, then cracks into holes, like the splitting apart of an egg and out from its confines they emerged.

And once again, Ojene stopped short. But this time she stayed there, staring out with full focus as her heart filled with quiet, disbelieving awe.

“First time, is it?” came a voice at her side.

Ojene looked up to see the smiling countenance of her distant aunt Beviere, the brilliance of the unfettered light illuminating brown tones in the dusky grey of her skin that Ojene had never noticed before.

“It’s…” she began, but in truth she had no words.

Beviere laid a genial hand upon her shoulder. “It takes getting used to,” she said. “When you’re in the middle of it, Tinolqa seems like it goes on forever. But all things end, even that.”

All things indeed. She’d known there was a world beyond the forest and yet knowing couldn’t prepare her for the broad expanse of sky littered with lazy puffs of white as it stretched out in a great unbroken dome. Gone were the trees ahead of them- or had the trees ever been there at all? For it was just dusty orange earth and stone, swelling into toothy crags that filled the expanse out to what could only be the horizon.

It was odd. Dead even, green’s absence leaving it strangely inert.

“People actually live here?” Ojene blurted.

Beviere laughed, and as her head tipped back the sinking sun gilded the round curve of her nose. “Oh, plenty. Let’s catch up with the rest before we fall too far behind, shall we? And I’ll tell you more on the way.”

As they canted forward at an easy jog, Beviere did just that. But half listening, Ojene found herself distracted as her eyes fell to the dirt. And she repeated the name Beviere called this place in her head, like a silent whisper to the earth.

Gyr Abania.

Her faint smile returned.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #9: Friable

Gridania, 1565 6AE

The promise of the warm breeze billowing the back of her conjurer’s robe against her legs bore Shandrelle all too eagerly past the gates of Gridania and down the narrow path leading toward the creek- but so it did daily this season when she found a brief sojourn for lunch.

All the better, for it was just as quiet out here as yesterday- as soon as she slipped away from the main road the sounds of people were left behind, leaving only the vociferous arguments of birds. The basket dangling from her elbow tapped now and again against her side, the leaves of spring already thick enough to break the sunlight into a kaleidoscope of green that dappled the undergrowth like motes of glass. Beneath her breath she hummed a faint song to the tune of the rush of foliage as the wind tossed it to and fro, catching the few strands of hair that escaped her neat bun to scatter them against the side of her neck.

The path dipped her down the crest of a rolling hill that plunged the city out of sight, and the wilding foliage that grew taller and taller at her shoulders gave way to the resplendent purple trumpets of vetch. She couldn’t help but trail her fingers towards the blossoms, catching upon the narrow leaves of a particularly precocious example, and in the back of her head spidered half-unconscious designs to fit it into a verdant bouquet. She could tuck it into the basket for safekeeping, only to sneak it into a great vase at home at a convenient place to draw Ezette’s attention. Or perhaps Astrane would take to it, for while the girl hadn’t yet the botanist’s eye the sight of a new spot of color in the house lit her face up with a grin to match the finery before her.

The memory was enough to suffuse a great warmth through Shandrelle’s chest, and before it could reach her toes it was decided. Setting the basket at her feet she reached out to pinch off the stalk beneath the long curve of her nail.

But just as her fingers fixed around its smooth vibrancy, a sudden force seized around her middle. With a squawk Shandrelle lashed out, struggling a hand towards the wand at her side but arms wrenched her shoulders, binding around her arms as sure as steel.

A breathy cry stuttered free, and Shandrelle twisted hard in her assailant’s grasp- but a searing pain burned through her shoulder as hands shoved at the back of her head, jabbing her chin down into her chest. Eyes watering, she locked her gaze off to the side, but just as she began to call the earth to rise up to her aid, buckling the earth just behind her, the grip shifted and the cool bite of a blade lay against her throat.

Shandrelle froze, her heart pounding in her chest. But it was the voice that crystallized her blood.

“Shandrelle,” it growled, and something about its resonant alto was familiar, so familiar in a way that shot every hair on the back of her arms upright, but oh- by the Twelve- the malice it promised wasn’t.

“W-who are you?” she stammered. “What do you want?”

At once the lock released her, only to whip her around with violent force as the blade whipped back to her throat. Her bones ground against each other as the grip tightened so hard she thought her shoulder might come apart, but as she gasped through the pain, vision swimming, she locked her eyes upon the face of her assailant- and the pit of her stomach bottomed out.

“Ojene?” she gasped.

It couldn’t be- and yet it was. Thirteen years weren’t enough to blot the face she remembered away, the angular jaw beneath the long nose cast with a light spattering of freckles that peered out against the dark grey skin. And yet she’d never seen the jet-black hair cropped this short before, barely bristling above the scalp. Nor this cold wrath the face held, casting the brilliantly blue eyes she’d once thought of so fondly into twin drills of ice that speared her to the spot.

“You look shocked,” Ojene said coldly. “Surprised it didn’t work? That I’m not dead?”

“What are you-” But even as the pain in her shoulder spilled a fiery tear down her cheek, the calamity of memory stuttered through her like a whirlwind of glass. The hand on her shoulder impossibly tightened further, and a pained cry burbled from her throat. “No!” Guilt roared in, staining heat up her throat. “I’m sorry- I didn’t know! Or- I should have believed you! Let me go!”

She didn’t expect it to work, for as recollection caught her in its screaming tempest it flung too many things she knew as true before her feet. That Ojene was never one to back down. Always flinging herself into a fight. The way she screamed fury at her betrayers and yet- something in those glacial eyes shifted. Flattened, even, as if something of the cold fury they held attenuated. Or at least, slipped below the surface.

The hand on her shoulder didn’t release, but it slackened to something more reasonable- a new wave of pain crashed in its wake, but Shandrelle half-swallowed a gasp of relief.

“Explain,” Ojene said.

The heat of guilt rolled up her cheeks- or was it shame? “My father,” she uttered. “You told me- all those years ago what he’d done- and I didn’t believe you! I’m sorry- I should have listened to you. Done anything, other than what I did.” The words babbled forth like a creek bursting its banks, but even as she heard herself she couldn’t stop, the warmth climbing hotter and hotter in her face. “And you left- and I can’t blame you- I would have done the same, I’m sure, if it was me, for how could you trust a thing I said, er-”

Ojene blinked. A faint furrow pressed between her brows. And the ice cracked, rippling with the slightest flicker of confusion.

“What?” Ojene said.

“The act you told me about,” Shandrelle bullied on- she could scarcely feel her face. “How he tried to kill you. And I didn’t listen- but you were right.”

Again Ojene’s expression changed, as subtle as the shift of a snake’s muscles beneath its scales, collecting into an austere frown. The edge of the blade withdrew, but its tip didn’t, laid delicately against the curve of Shandrelle’s throat.

“What do you know?” she asked.

Gridania, 1549 6AE

“They are going to hate me,” she groused.

With a deft hand Shandrelle pulled the laces tight, disappearing her Duskwight’s plain white undershirt beneath her jacket, covering linens with a delicate brocade that spilled up her front and over her arms in a deep umber orange marked with shimmering yellow, vines that formed into the pattern of dappled foliage like autumn undergrowth of fallen leaves swishing lively beneath her feet. It was Ojene’s finest jacket- her only one for formal occasions in fact- a sunset contrast to the deep night expanse of her skin like the bloom of candlelight in the dark- or so Shandrelle thought.

“It’s fine,” Shandrelle assured as her fingers darted to the next ties below, lingering upon the fabric as she drew it together. “They hate everyone.”

She felt more than heard a deep sigh beneath her fingertips. Shandrelle glanced up, but Ojene was looking away, her light blue eyes fixed somewhere off in the corner of the small cluttered space that served as the wardrobe beside her bed, and a muscle flickered in the deep line of her angular jaw.

“You’re nervous,” Shandrelle supplied brightly as she descended to the third tie.

“Of course I’m nervous.” Ojene’s broad shoulders shifted slightly beneath the thick fabric of her jacket, as if the garb was suddenly too warm despite the uncommon chill of the 3rd Astral Moon’s breeze that gusted through the crack of the open window behind them. “Who wouldn’t be?”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about.” The third tie knotted into a neat pair of loops at the perfect length to match the rest. “Whether or not they approve- it doesn’t actually mean anything. They can’t stop me.”

“They can’t stop you, perhaps.”

This brought Shandrelle’s head up sharper, but this time Ojene’s head angled only mostly away, regarding Shandrelle’s rough direction out of the corners of her eyes as if she was hesitant to truly look at her. 

A faint breath huffed through Shandrelle’s nose, and her fingers paused. “They can’t stop you either,” she proclaimed, “and that’s what counts. We’ll be fine.”

With another sigh, Ojene dropped her head, but she said nothing in reply- instead she simply stood there as Shandrelle hurried to bind the rest of the ties. But even as she did the first niggles of doubt gnawed at the pit of her throat. Could it be possible that she needed to take this more seriously? All too clearly the image of her father’s face kneaded into one of his disapproving frowns bled in. But even as the thought crossed her a fire lit in her chest, one that bloomed a tingling heat down her arms. And so, she jerked the final knot into place with a sharp ferocity that surprised her.

“There,” she announced, and Shandrelle smoothed her hands across the shoulders and arms of Ojene’s jacket. “You look nice. So nice, that I can’t possibly imagine they’d reject you. And if they did, well- I still get to come back with this.”

Ojene’s head turned back then, and a reluctant smile cut through the slight frown that’d lingered there the last few minutes, seeping gradually into her eyes. “Well-” she laid one hand over Shandrelle’s, the calluses on her skin firm against the backs of Shandrelle’s fingers. “I suppose I can’t complain about that.”

9th Sun of the 4th Umbral Moon, 1537

My dearest cousin,

Your letter comes to us in good health, and I do believe you would be pleased to know that I showed your letter to Ruvierre and he became so delighted upon catching its scent that he barked over and over as he spun in circles til he tripped over his own paw, upon which my granddaughters decided it was the perfect opportunity to festoon him in laurels and the pair of them chased him up and down the river creek til all three of them were coated in mud to the shoulders.

Family reunion aside I am deeply grieved to hear matters for you are so grave. We were not untouched by the drought, but the caves are still replete with Mun-Tuy beans and the Gridanians sup upon the backs of luscious Thanalan merchants as they always do. We are getting by.

To that end I send this letter with three crates of dried beans and a wheel of antelope cheese. I wish we could deliver more but the Wailers are thick in the forest this year and I do not wish to bring trouble to your house.

I know you are loath to consider it but I would be remiss if I did not suggest again that you and your clan do not have to live apart. Though we may live on opposite stretches of Tinolqa, if any number of you chose to stay with us we still would be able to feed and house you despite the troubles of the season. More hands are always welcome and those hands need not engage in conversation with the Gridanians if so chosen. Even now there is plenty to be done amongst the beans and antelope if continuing your sort of work is the life that they desire, and any sojourn need not be permanent if that is your wish.

I implore you to please consider the suggestion in earnest. I could not forget your disapproval of our methods of farming, but it is better to farm another way than to starve. Sometimes I do think the fewer of us, the happier the Gridanians would be. There is no love lost from them, and you know as well as I that they do not see us much different no matter how we choose to live.

My wife would like to add that we will also be sending along a box of maple brittle for the children as well as a few extra blankets if you are in need, but that is the most we can provide without sending a real wagon. If the Wailers relent we can try again.

Please let me know your thoughts for else I might go mad with worry.

Your loving cousin,

Jiorraut Laisonoix

ffxivwrite2021 - #30 Abstracted

Gridania, 1567 6AE

“I have a confession,” Shandrelle blurted.

Ezette’s hand froze, her knuckles tightening around the spoon clasped in her fingers, dangling the heap of tea leaves motionless over the fresh water she’d boiled just for them. Her lips thinned as a shadow passed over her deep brown eyes, and a pang struck through Shandrelle’s heart. As one hand balled antsy at her side she couldn’t help but feel it should be her brewing the tea and not the other way around.

“What is it?” Ezette asked after a beat, her voice equal parts resignation and resentment.

“Ah, well- I know what you said… and why- but. Ojene was here a week ago.”

The spoon clattered against the countertop, scattering ocher fragments of dried leaves as Ezette seized her fingers against the polished wood. “Shandrelle-”

“It’s not what you think! I swear.” Reflexively she clutched a hand to her throat, her fingertips brushing over the new rope of scar. “I actually sent her away. In a sense.”

“Which means what?”

“Well-” Shandrelle’s eyes averted as she absently rubbed the sides of her neck, “she showed up dreadfully upset about something. It turned out she’d gotten some bad news from home. Her actual home, not Gyr Abania or around these parts. La Noscea,” she finished lamely.

The pressure of Ezette’s gaze was palpable as she made a noise in the back of her throat.

“She seemed to want to go back, you know,” Shandrelle added quickly, “all this stuff about the assassins be damned, but she was too afraid to, so- well, I went and gave her a push. So theoretically, if she did what I wanted, she’s probably halfway to Aleport right now and you might not ever have to deal with her again.”

A heavy breath gusted through Ezette’s nose. “To La Noscea,” she repeated.

“Well, that was the idea of it, yes. I don’t know if she’s going to come back or not, but with the way things happened- you know.” Haltingly, she shrugged. “It might be for the best.”

Ezette bowed her head. “You know it’s not that I don’t want to deal with her,” she said.

Shandrelle stared at her feet. “I do,” she murmured.

There was no forgetting. The way Ezette’s eyes had burned with an all-encompassing fury and hurt like the depths of a lake disgorged into flame. Her tight mane of untied curls bouncing with force. The declarations she made, hissed with such asperity that Shandrelle’s blood crystalized, only to break down into deep, wracking sobs as they clutched onto each other like the lost.

But Ezette, never one to repeat herself, simply nodded. One finger picked at the bed of her thumbnail.

“I hope she’ll be happy,” Ezette said. “I do. And I hope we’ll be able to move on from this- together. That this won’t sit over you like a big unanswered mystery that you have to solve. And it’s not that this doesn’t need solving! Because it does. But I want you alive more than I want answers.”

A quiet sniff caught Shandrelle by surprise, and she angled her head away to hide the burning in the corners of her eyes. “I know- I’m sorry.”

“No- it’s not-” With a strained noise Ezette hunched forward, gripping the edge of the counter in both hands. “It’s not your fault you were attacked. It’s just that this is clearly a lot bigger than you. Than us.”

A deep sigh billowed free, and it felt not unlike a gust of wind battering her towards the edge of a cliff- urging her to jump. “It is, but- it does bother me,” she admitted. “The idea of simply- letting it go. It’s like- trying to give up something I’m responsible for. Who else is going to prove it? That my family is a bushel of traitors? What happens if I don’t stop them, and then the Garleans attack us and we lose everything because my family helped them win?”

“It’s not on you,” Ezette said quietly. “Not alone. Maybe we’ll think of something once this has had a chance to… die down. But for now, I just want you safe. And so- I’m glad… that she’s gone.”

“Well, I wouldn’t celebrate just yet,” Shandrelle plucked at her skirt. “I’m sure if it doesn’t go well, she’ll be back.”

When the rest of the moon passed with no word, Shandrelle thought little of it. And despite herself, life began to embrace a form of normalcy. The motions of life before Ojene upturned it began to creep back, from the normal family morning routines of hastily brushed hair and shared breakfasts at the table, to the long days spent at the Fane helping whomever came. The only clandestine trips she took at lunch were simply oases to herself, no more demanded of her than an easy walk. The scar’s angry red had even begun to fade a touch, and the hoarse edges it flanged into her voice were sanding away.

Yet on the second moon she wondered now and again how she would know what happened to Ojene- ifshe would know. And on each lunchtime walk she found herself glancing around, her head kept carefully straight to avoid attention, groping into the undergrowth and the canopy half-expecting Ojene to be there. But she never was.

It wasn’t until the third moon that an answer came. Shandrelle stood at the dining table sorting through the post- Astrane had dropped the lot haphazardly on the dining table- but as she sifted the handful of letters this way and that her eyes caught a slip of familiar handwriting. Her own name, scrawled neatly on the front in a clean, precise hand.

For an instant, she froze. But her heart skipped, as if surging her back to motion and at once she grabbed it up. Her fingers slipped beneath the lip as she popped the wax, and as she flipped it open she came face to face with a half sheet of parchment occupied by no more than two lines.

You were right.

Thank you.

There was no signature, but it needed none.

Shandrelle huffed a laugh. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

ffxivwrite2021 - #29 Debonair

Continued from #24 Illustrious (link)

East Shroud, 1548 6AE

The forearm bulged in a ghastly color, smooth pale skin turned into a bulbous balloon of purple that split apart the scab before it had a chance to form, oozing blood and fluid from a small cylindrical puncture a couple ilms below the wrist.

“You’re lucky it’s not worse than this.” A bead of sweat slipped down the side of Shandrelle’s noise, and her spectacles threatened to spill with it. But she didn’t dare let go to adjust them, one arm locking her patient’s shoulder in place while her other hand clutched her wand. The tips of the rosewood twigs, tapering into thin leaves, glowed with a pure restorative blue, transferring but a droplet of the forest’s blessing as the air hummed in her ears like Nophica’s breath.

Her patient laughed thinly, the wiry Wildwood lancer’s face distorted by puffiness. Despite the coolness of the autumn breeze his forehead shone with sweat. “It got me when I wasn’t looking. I was too busy trying to drive off the hog, and… it came as a bit of a shock”

She’d seen the wreckage of two of the hives well enough when she arrived, honey smeared across shattered wax and wood splinters. By now smoke thickened the air with the subtle sweetness of oak, cast off from rapidly built fires. And the bees, rendered docile, ambled around the yard in meandering clouds as the beekeepers performed a hasty triage on the hives’ remains.

But the peaceable river of fat insect bodies pouring in and out between the cracks belied the specter of violence looming just a handful of yalms down the road in a slumped black hill. The hog, sprawled in a coagulating pool of blood. Even in death it looked lethal, its tongue slithering from its open mouth and flanked by two massive ivory tusks- easily the size of Shandrelle’s arm. Thick fur coated its warted hide, broken here and there by the ravages of the fight. Purloined honey smeared over its nose, the golden amber mixed with blood. Whether it was the hog’s or a victim’s, Shandrelle couldn’t say- but the handle of a spear protruded from its throat, sheared to splinters at the end.

“I can only imagine,” Shandrelle said with no exaggeration. “But it’s going down, see?”

So it was- the swelling had begun to slacken, settling into some semblance of normal shape. Her patient loosed a sigh of relief, closing his eyes.

“I’ve never been stung before,” he said distantly. “I didn’t know this would happen.”

“It happens to the best of us. You’re going to be all right- though you’ll probably be sore and tired as all hells for a few days, hah!”

At last Shandrelle dropped her hand, and she released the pull of the forest from its call- the soothing glow cast off her wand winked out. “There- that’s good enough for now, but you’ll want to scuttle back to the Fane and they’ll take care of the rest.”

With a quick nod her patient shot off with as much haste as he could muster, and Shandrelle turned to survey the scene. A few conjurers dotted the field here and there, seeing to the wounded lancers, but as her eye roamed for those yet untreated she found none. Exhaling, she planted a fist into her hip, fully intending to take a pause upon the upturned crate at her feet, but as she turned away a figure came into view, standing apart beneath a large ash tree.

It was the Duskwight- the same one she’d seen now and again in the last couple moons on trips to the Lancer’s Guild. Her complexion alone would have made her strikingly memorable, between her slate-toned skin and even darker hair, but nothing about the way she bent forward diminished her height, her broad shoulders straight. She frowned as she stared into her hand, gingerly picking at her upturned palm.

“Need some help with that?” Shandrelle asked as she approached.

The Duskwight looked up, and against her deep grey skin her eyes stood out almost shockingly bright, like two pale blue slivers of eyes. They narrowed slightly, and Shandrelle stopped short as a faint prickling rippled beneath her collar with the niggling sense that she was being studied. A breath later it relented, and the Duskwight nodded, proffering her hand.

“My spear wasn’t quite sturdy enough, it seems,” she said. A jagged line sliced through her palm, the skin around it peppered here and there with tiny protrusions.

Shandrelle made a noise, and she promptly yanked her kit out of her pocket. Flipping the leather cover open, she slipped a pair of tweezers free from its slot. “That looks rather uncomfortable there.”

The Duskwight eyed her palm. “Worse for some.”

Seizing the outstretched hand at the wrist, Shandrelle pulled it closer, angling it towards the haze of light that slipped through the canopy. The Duskwight’s long fingers splayed wider, pushing the bones of her palm on display. “It’ll pinch a bit.” The edge of metal caught the light as she attacked the closest splinter.

A slight flinch twitched in the back of the Duskwight’s hand, but nothing more.

Without lifting her eyes, Shandrelle asked, “That wasn’t your spear in the boar’s neck, was it?”

“Mine? Oh- no.” The Duskwight turned her head towards the boulder of the boar’s body, now circled by a few spare lancers as they gestured to and fro. “Mine broke off in its side.”

“Ah, well there’s the pity- I was going to tell everyone I healed the great boar slayer, hah!”

It was a joke, but the Duskwight didn’t laugh- instead she simply jerked her opposite shoulder in a small shrug. “It was- something to see. I’ve- hunt hogs before.” She stole a glance at Shandrelle, who looked up only briefly as she slid a three-ilm long splinter from the pad just below the second finger. “But it’s a risky business. They’ll run up your spear if you’re not careful, and maybe it’ll kill them but they’ll take you with it.”

“So I’ve heard,” Shandrelle said, but a shiver ran down her spine.

“Well- Lafienne didn’t have a hog spear. None of us did. It’d already trampled the one we’d brought. But she stood in front of it anyway, and it charged. I thought for certain she’d die, but she just- stared it in the eye and braced for it. It was only at the last moment that she jumped away. Turned out, she’d planted her spear in the ground, and the hog charged straight into it.”

“Lafienne did that?”

The Duskwight nodded.

“I’ll be damned,” Shandrelle breathed. “I didn’t know she had it in her- not that I’d be the expert anyway, but I hear things often enough.

Out of the corners of her eyes, the Duskwight shot her a glance, but whatever lay within their icy depths was unreadable. A low affirmative noise rumbled from the back of her throat, but no more.

“I’m Shandrelle, by the way.” The ends of the tweezers paused mid-dig in pursuit of a particularly stubborn fragment. “I’ve seen you a couple times but- I hadn’t had the chance to talk.”

“Ojene,” the Duskwight said simply.

“Well, it’s nice to meet you properly. Though I can’t say I haven’t met most of the lancers this way, hah! But usually they’re in the Fane and not the other way around. Ah- there we go!” Releasing Ojene’s hand, Shandrelle clacked the tweezers together. “Did I miss any?”

A quick feel around the palm revealed two more tiny slivers which were quickly extricated, and then Shandrelle drew upon no more than a small bit of aether to soothe the cut down her palm. Nothing more was needed. She would have made more conversation perhaps, but as soon as it was done Ojene reclaimed her hand, and with no more than a quick thank you she slipped away.

ffxivwrite2021 - #28 Bow

Continued from #27 Benthos (first|second)

((cw: PTSD))

The Lochs, 1552 6AE

She must have fallen asleep again. The grey returned, a formless haze that she slipped in and out of without pause. Sometimes as reality seeped through the interior of the tent took shape, bringing with it the vague awareness of the pale canvas over her head, splotched with dirt and threadbare spots. Other times intruded her cell. Solitary and dark, the stench of waste stinging her nose. But it didn’t matter which vision presented itself to her, for through it all her heart pounded like a drum and a sickness rose up her chest, sharp and acrid in her throat, til her head spun and vertigo struck, seizing her by the ankles and tossing her over as solidity dissolved and the fog claimed her once more.

How long she spent there she couldn’t say, but when her brow rumpled and awareness slipped in, light trickled through the worn canvas- and a hand rested again on her arm.

With a sharp intake of breath Ojene pulled, taking her body with it as she tipped to her side, but just as a foot lashed out against the swallowing wrap around her leg, a face loomed into view.

“Whoa- easy there. I don’t mean you any harm.”

Ojene blinked, once then twice, and the idea of structure solidified. It was the Highlander woman, bent above her. Her bronze skin was lit with a dappling of old rippled scars- they circled up her cheek and crept up one side of the bridge of her nose, bisecting between her green eyes.

“I’m just tryin’ to take a look at your arm,” the Highlander said. “If you’ll let me.”

Her heart quickened in a sudden rush, and Ojene’s eyes narrowed sharply, but there was nothing in the woman’s face that exposed ill intent, just the way her thick brows busheled with concern. Or pity.

Even so… Seizing her right arm just below the shoulder, Ojene rolled over, angling her body away.

“All right,” said the Highlander, a faint sigh billowing out in the final consonants. “But I can tell from here it’s not right. Is it broken?”

Was, steeped a thought, but it seized up before it even hoped to approach Ojene’s throat, as if it struck a barrier held entirely apart from her mouth and tongue.

“If it’s broken now,” the Highlander continued, speaking for both of them, “then we can put it in a quick splint, but- if it’s worse than that I dunno how much we can do. Least not here, but there’s a medical camp we can take you to out in the Fringes, if we can find it. You’re not the only one we gotta take.”

A furrow kneaded between Ojene’s brows, and she peeked back at the Highlander over her shoulder, but the woman was looking elsewhere. Ojene followed her eye, and with a sparking shock she saw at once they weren’t alone. For though a stack of crates huddled at her left, the rest of the tent crammed with bedrolls- and in them other people. Six in all, apart from her.

She seized upon their faces in a desperate flurry, one by one, but the young Hyur boy who stood beside her on the gallows wasn’t there. Nor was the first person the Garleans took- the Hellsguard. But as their likeness flashed before her eyes, so too came the memory of the rope. Hard and wirey, its twine scratching her throat, the promise of tension coiling up, ready to be drawn tight-

With an incoherent noise, Ojene clutched a hand to her neck and slumped forward.

“Right,” the Highlander pushed to her feet and turned away. “All of you! Sorry to have to do this so soon, but we gotta get on the move. If you can’t walk or you’re damn slow we’ll load you on the cart. We can’t give the Imps a chance to find us, so speak up now if you need a hand.”

Noises rustled through the narrow confines of the tent, the low tattoo of voices interspersed by the occasional cry. Of pain perhaps, but every so often a whimpering sound struck through to Ojene’s marrow, turning her blood to ice. She gripped onto the bedroll with her good left hand as footsteps swirled around her, and one by one with the slip of wood over wood the company of crates disappeared.

Finally a pair of boots stopped where the crates once were, mud caked liberally over the sides of drab Resistance leather, and a new person kneeled down in front of her. A Miqo’te, her black hair tailed behind her head. Tattoos triangled this way and that across her face, framing her dark eyes as she regarded Ojene squintingly.

“One more for the cart, do you think?”

“Think so,” came the Highlander’s voice from the other side. “But she tries to punch me every time I touch her.”

Ojene shot a sharp glance over to see the Highlander kneel down at her opposite shoulder, the soldiers flanking her sides. A sudden prickling ripped up her spine, and she coiled her body in on itself as she hunched.

“Listen,” said the Miqo’te. “We gotta get you in the cart. You think you’ll be alright with that?”

“We’re not gonna hurt you,” the Highlander added. “We’re gonna wrap our arms under you and carry you out, and then we’re gonna lay you down and you won’t have to move for a good long while. All right?”

Slumped onto her back and pinned between them, their bodies enclosing around her, Ojene gripped her right arm close to her chest. The soldiers leaned closer, and her heartbeat quickened as she pressed herself backwards, the crown of her head budging into the side of the tent. A snarl caught in her throat, attenuating into a low animalistic thrum.

The soldiers shared a glance.

“If you don’t want us to move you, then you gotta move yourself,” the Miqo’te said. “We have to go.”

Ojene didn’t.

At first the Miqo’te frowned, but as she edged a hand forward Ojene felt the contortion in her face. The way her nose rumpled, her lips lifted. Curling back in a wolflike snarl as her heart leapt in her chest, tumbling over itself in quick, tumultuous beats as sweat broke out across her arms.

Startled, the Miqo’te yanked her hand back. “Rhalgr’s teeth.”

Lobbing quickly to her feet, she crossed away from Ojene’s left side to join the Highlander on the right. A fragment of tension attenuated, but the thunder of her heart did not- the urge to lunge away into the open space twitched in her legs.

“How long do you think they had her?” the Miqo’te whispered. Had it been anyone else, perhaps it would have been quiet enough.

But as the Highlander turned her head, Ojene heard every word as the soldier whispered back, “Long enough.”

ffxivwrite2021 - #27 Benthos

Continued from #25 Silver Lining (link)

((cw: PTSD, implied torture))

The Lochs, 1552 6AE

She was floating. Gently suspended in a fuzzed grey. Like a fog, rolling off the creek that ran through her childhood village. Or the sea… It had been so long since she’d seen it. She thought she might have smiled, had she the capacity. The improbable expanse of blue cast around her, gliding gently over her arms, her legs, her face. Each powerful swell was like the surge of a great beast, far more powerful than she. At the slightest provocation it could seize her in its jaw and crush her between its teeth. And yet she floated, and in drifted an inexorable sense of peace.

This must be it, she wondered. How much longer til she saw the Gates of Thal- though perhaps she’d passed through without realizing. This could be one of the heavens, she supposed, although it would be a great shock to get here instead of being summarily deposited into one of the hells.

But perhaps it was so. And by the will of the gods, she could descend into repose. She closed her eyes, or at least had the sense of doing so but nothing about her surroundings darkened, and consigned herself to the abyss.

She would have been content to stay here forever, she thought, yet there was a peculiar tug in her gut. Like a hand gripped her side and pulled, and in the featureless pale void she felt herself begin to spin. Slowly at first, in a gradual rotation of her body, then faster, like an undertow gripped at her legs and sucked them in. She sat up, or at least she thought she did, but she felt her balance teeter perilously forward, and in a desperate lunge she grabbed out at the fog but seized nothing. No purchase, no succor, just the sense of the whirlpool seizing her up and plunging her head first into the darkness of oblivion.

The first thing she felt was a weight on her arm.

With a sudden snap that resounded in her jaw, Ojene flailed to life. Her limbs flung out in every direction, but something snaked around them tight, and she convulsed with violent force, ripping and tearing with teeth and fingers alike til the bindings fell away and she toppled- hard. Her shoulder struck something solid but she rolled, basilisk-like over the floor til she pulled her feet beneath her and staggered up.

A hand touched her shoulder. She whipped around, and to her shock her hands parted, no manacles binding them tight as they flew fist first. The impact jarred up her arm with a meaty thwack, and the pressure ripped off her shoulder. A shriek poured into her ears like a banshee scream, unnatural and bloodcurdling, and on blind feet she staggered forward, groping every which way as she stumbled into a thick film, then spilled out- and at once she was enveloped by white.

Ojene froze. Pain seared into her eyes, a blinding blur that shattered all vision and yet she could see it so clearly. The ghoulishly placid face, pale and smiling, haloed just outside the blinding sphere as a knife laid against Ojene’s bared middle, til the face turned and washed itself out in the spotlight’s glare save for the protruding lump in its forehead, the alabaster pearl of the third eye-

Through the agony Ojene blinked, and slowly the bright shock began to recede as shape and color drew into form. And it was not the searing flame of a ceruleum beacon she faced, the cold metal of the table absent from her back. There were no cermet walls, no squalid stone floor braced by impassable black bars. It was orange stone, dusted with traces of sandy soil. Scraggly brush poking between a crack in the rocks. A soft breeze breathing through her hair. And most of all, once again, the blue expanse of the sky lit by the steadfast sun.

Her legs gave out, and Ojene collapsed to her knees, then fell back on her heels. Her body contorted forward, palms slapping into the ground, and the gravelly dust ground beneath her fingers. A sob seized her throat, crashing through her body in sharp, keening retorts as she toppled onto her side. The flood of tears plastered her cheek to the warm stone, and her hands gripped at her wrists, for the first time in an age striking not relentless metal but her bony wrists.

She seized them so hard her raw skin cried in protest, but the searing pain shot laughter through her tears, a giddy bubble that surged up through her chest and poured forth like a creature spilling out her throat.

A weight pressed to her shoulder, and her body flinched, but as she cracked her eyes open, choking around a strangled noise, a familiar face loomed over her- the Highlander woman who’d pulled her from the gallows. Her mouth moved, but whatever she said Ojene couldn’t make sense of it, and a moment later arms folded beneath her.

The touch seared, and Ojene’s body twisted to deny it as a sharp wave of revulsion overtook her- but the spiking urge to lash out and roll away fragmented somewhere away from her consciousness. Her eyes fixed on the Highlander’s face- the woman was smiling now, a small gentle thing. And somewhere in the sparking pieces of her mind spilled a soft wave of relief. And so Ojene didn’t fight it as they wrapped their arms beneath her and carried her back the way she’d come- into the recesses of a Resistance tent.

There, laid on a thin bedroll, when she turned her eyes upward she saw no sky. But she grabbed her wrists and wrapped her ankles around each other as the new shards of reality began to sink in. The fetters were gone.

She was free.

ffxivwrite2021 - #25 Silver Lining

Ala Mhigo, 1552 6AE

The innards of the convoy stank with the familiar reek of piss and shite and the sweat of unwashed bodies jammed together too close, tinged with the metallic undertone of old blood. But there were only eight of them clenched in cavernous darkness, including herself- distantly Ojene had counted them as they were loaded in- left with no sense of where they were or where they were going save for the fact that they were moving as the thrum of the ceruleum engine vibrated beneath their feet, punctuated by a sharp lurch now and again as the vehicle took a turn, thumping Ojene’s shoulder into the metal wall.

Dimly she was aware that some of the others were speaking, their voices low and furtive. But she couldn’t recall a single thing said, as if the sound drifted into one ear and slipped out the other with little more than a shallow imprint that left her with the sense that something had happened, but she couldn’t say what.

It was just as well. Curled up in a corner she rested with eyes closed- not that it made a difference- aware of little else but the tepid beat of her heart in her ears and the everlasting ache in her left arm.

The muted whine of wheels and the heave of the floor forward then back brought her to her senses as the engine’s vibrations cut out, and the persistent sense of movement halted. So did the voices, if only for a beat before they launched into new vocalizations, heated and urgent.

A resounding bang echoed through the convoy’s innards, and with a sharp metallic shriek the world turned white. Wincing, Ojene flung her arms up- the manacles around her wrists clattered as she buried her face in the crook of an elbow, squinting vociferously against the pour of light as footsteps thudded in- the sharp retort of metal boots to a cermet floor.

“Get up!” cracked a voice. “One at a time, file out.”

As the pain receded the shapes around her began to resolve, throwing the Garlean soldier into sharp relief. A sword bristled in his hand, and he thrust it demonstratively towards the huddled lumps hazed into vague definition beyond the brilliant line demarcating the dark.

They obeyed, sheltering their eyes as they stumbled forward out the open lip of the convoy, the chains on their ankles turning each step into a commotion of steel. Ojene watched as the first stepped out, then the second, til finally she peeled herself from the floor. It was a miracle her knees held as she staggered forward, but she kept her eyes averted to the ground as she passed the soldier and stepped off the edge.

On the first heartbeat she was blind. She thrust her face back into her arm, and her throat crackled as a low hiss slipped between her teeth. A peculiar sensation twitched at her skin, prickling all the hairs on her arms to stand, when all at once realization flooded in. With a quiet gasp she dropped her arm. The light assaulted her, driving her eyes to slits, but she forced through, blinking rapidly until vision seeped back.

It had been so long. A lifetime, it felt like. She’d been treated to light this bright now and again, the sear of a ceruleum glow so concentrated it blazed like white fire directly into her eyes. But this wasn’t the unnatural light of Imperial machination, nor even the duller burn of a normal flame. And the sensation pillowing on her skin wasn’t the occasional gust through a vent, nor the humid mustiness of breath. This was fresh- alive. Real.

It was the breeze. Trickling against her like the subtle pull of a creek. And the light, warm and potent, was the consecration of the sun.

Ojene turned her head upwards, and the sun’s rays fell in graceful fingers against her cheeks, casting a gentle heat into her skin. Squinting still she searched for the source, and above the crest of the Royal Palace she found it- the brilliant orb hanging in a clear blue expanse. Like a comet, she thought absently, pointing her on.

A smile crept onto her face. How quaint it was, that the Garleans should bring her this gift! To take her here upon the roads of Ala Mhigo, beneath the open sky.

But just as an unidentifiable sound began to burble up in her throat, a surge of awareness struck her as the clamour of voices folded itself out of the blank fuzz of her senses. And as the two prisoners in front of her stepped forward her thoughts hastily ratcheted through what she’d missed- their orders. She hurried forward.

There were more soldiers walking astride them now, she distantly noted, each one of them visibly armed. A couple officers here and there, from the gunblades clasped at their sides. And beyond them- a crowd? Yes, that was it- a collection of people of all sorts lined the streets, shifting about on their feet. There was an energy about them she couldn’t quite place, a frenetic quality as if the lot of them had collectively held a breath.

Perhaps it was the soldiers posted around, black dots here and there in entryways and corners. Or the line of Garleans they approach, standing at attention. And just past them-

She wasn’t quite aware of her feet, numb as they were. It was for the best, for if she had any more self-possession she might have stopped short. For behind the line of expectant soldiers stood their destination- it could only be that. A gallows, long and accommodating with five waiting nooses.

Sensation curdled in her stomach, and Ojene lost all notion of her fingers. A strangeness fluttered in her chest, like the scintillation of a butterfly’s wings, and her chains rattled as she clenched her hands tight.

They were finally discarding her. She supposed she should be happy. It was after all what she had wished for, spitting blood and bile onto a stone floor she could barely see. An end to this, one way or the other. And she’d known, deep down, that no matter how hard she clung to the fantasy of slipping free, this would always be the result. It was just a question of when.

An odd sense of loss bubbled in her middle. Strange, given that she’d known she was a dead woman for weeks. Moons- years maybe. Perhaps she could imagine Sylbfohc’s face one last time. Yet as she groped for him all sense of it slipped away, a mirage to her fingers. A faint rumble burbled from her throat, splintered and hoarse, and as she squeezed her eyes shut the corners of her eyes burned.

There was no sense in mourning it. The wooden stairs were warm beneath her bare feet as she climbed, and the shadow of the noose fell across her face. It was a bit too long, a distant thread of thought noted grimly, knotted for someone shorter. A fact that promised an elongated death.

Even so, it would be over soon.

Five of them lined up in their places, and one of the officers stepped in front, facing the anonymous sea of faces upturned from beyond the line of Garleans.

“Mark this day!” the officer bellowed, her voice buzzed through the enclosed pipe of her helmet. “You stand witness to the hanging of eight traitors to the Garlean Empire.”

Movement caught the corner of Ojene’s eye, and she tilted her head slightly to see a soldier settling a noose around the neck of the first prisoner, a Hellsguard woman whose arm was chained to her side, for her second arm was gone. Her eyes bored into the wooden platform, sullen but blazing.

“It is the will of Gaius van Baelsar that you look upon their faces and study them well, for theirs is the fate meted out to all who defy his will. Anyone who affiliates with the so-called resistance will join them. And so will their families, down to the last parent and child.”

The noose drew sharply into place around the neck of the second prisoner, a short Highlander boy who couldn’t be more than fourteen. His body shook with shivering force, but to his credit he stared forward.

“We will tolerate no challenges, nor brook any dissent. Our demands upon you are simple, to follow the law and pay your tithe. Nothing about this should surprise you. But if your memory has lapsed, then simply look up to these gallows and watch.”

Ojene felt rather than heard the footsteps of the soldier as they drew up to her shoulder. Sensed the presence of their arms as they reached for the rope. She closed her eyes, and despite the rapid flutter of her pulse a peculiar sense of calm settled over her. Twine brushed the top of her head, then slid over her neck.

But as she felt the length of it move, rough fibers scraping against her skin as the soldier prepared to jerk it tight, a small hollow pop resounded under the rising tenor of the speech. The shifting rope stopped short.

“What-” she heard the soldier mutter under their breath.

A sharp crack retorted, and in a blink of an eye Ojene’s vision went white.

“No-” she heard the soldier’s sharp exclamation behind her, but other voices rang out in sharp cries of alarm as a series of answering cracks filled the air like hails of gunfire.

A chaos of sound erupted, pouring with heavy footfalls and the sharp bark of orders drowned out by the crashing screams of the crowd. Ojene turned, or tried to- one leg buckled beneath her, and though the rope was slack it barred against her throat. Stars sparked before her eyes, and her feet desperately groped for purchase as she pushed herself upright, grasping at the rope with a sharp gasp.

She stood there numbly, seeing nothing as her fingers looped between the rope and her neck, when a figure billowed through the whiteness, a vague shape darting into view then out again. Smoke bombs, she realized belatedly. But who-

A hand shot from the smoke and seized her arm- the grip squeezed down on the old break and pain sparked up her shoulder.

“Come on!” barked a voice, and a face surged out of the smoke. A Highlander, her eyes half-concealed by her brown hair splayed across them, a bandana wrapped over her nose and mouth. Beneath the loose collar of her sweeping Ala Mhigan robes, a slip of leather armor protruded.

Resistance, Ojene’s thoughts stuttered. It had to be. But that idea was a single disconnected thread pulled from the morass left of her mind. Her body froze around the impossibility, the ludicrousness, as if her reality splintered leaving all agency somewhere else apart. She didn’t move.

The woman loosed a low frustrated sound from her throat, and all at once she seized the noose and ripped it away. The ground dropped out from Ojene’s feet, yet she didn’t fall- instead she was left with the odd sensation that she was floating sideways through the air, with a weight clasped around one of her legs and the other hooked over her arm.

She’d been flung over the woman’s shoulders, Ojene realized in a start, and every pounding step the woman took jostled her bony side against the Highlander’s head.

“How-” Ojene whispered into the smoke, but the fangs of skirmish drowned her out, shattering the air in the sharp retort of metal on metal. The crack of wood. A halting scream.

Her head tilted, straining against her shoulder. Peering back the way they’d come- or at least the way she’d thought they came. It was impossible to tell, for though the smoke had begun to thin, disgorging the tempest of shapes reeling and crashing in vague silhouettes, the noose had already vanished out of sight.

It was odd, as her rescuer’s feet thundered against Ala Mhigan brick, carting her away, but for the second time Ojene’s middle bubbled with a strange sense of loss.

They spilled out of the far edge of the smoke into an empty alley, and the Highlander broke into a full-tilt run.

((@sea-wolf-coast-to-coast))

ffxivwrite2021 - #24 Illustrious

Gridania, 1548 6AE

The walk up to the Lancer’s Guild was fine enough, but it was the last few stairs that did her in. Sweat burst upon her forehead, and a droplet plunged down her cheek and rolled over her jaw. Gritting her teeth, Shandrelle heaved her weight behind the crate, its contents clinking faintly together as she hoisted herself full-bodied forward til her feet crested the top and with a deep gasp she bent in two and practically dropped her burden to the deck, catching herself only at the last moment as she set it down with a quiet thud.

With a groan she straightened, arms burning as she rolled her shoulders. Not quite deep enough across the deck to reach the shade, she stood at the mercy of the summer’s sun as it seared into the dark blue sweep of her conjurer’s robe. Groaning, she tugged at the damp collar of her robe to coax in the breeze but it did nothing, for around her the air pooled in a stagnant swamp, soaking heat to her skin without reprieve.

Just as she began to work up the strength to haul the crate into her arms, jocularity poured through the open doors of the guild, drowning out the faint jumble of voices and the sharp punctuation of wood cracking against wood, and out spilled a half-dozen of the younger recruits. None had yet hit their growth spurt- the tallest among them barely passed her elbow- and the moment they jostled off the building’s steps they swung their training staffs at each other with a bone-shattering recklessness that would have aged their instructors at least a year.

Not a single one of them looked her way as they passed, and Shandrelle frowned.

“Oi!” she called. “Can one of you weedpullers help me with this?” She tapped a foot against the side of the crate a little harder than she meant- the contents clattered in muffled protest.

A few of the recruits looked up sharply. “Sorry, ma’am,” one of them said, a spindly girl who couldn’t be older than sixteen. She skipped up, clearing the steps two at a time in excessive bounds too long to be comfortable for her legs. “Where do you need it?”

But as Shandrelle opened her mouth to give directions, a voice cut in over her shoulder. “I can take it for you.”

Uttering a note of surprise, Shandrelle turned. How he’d gotten so close without her hearing was a mystery, but from a few fulms behind Casaux Vitraire flashed her a genial smile, dimpling his fine-boned cheeks. His pale skin flushed from exertion, sweat staining his blonde hair coifed behind his head into light sodden brown, and he was still clad in a plain brown set of padded training armor that echoed his eyes. But his hands were free, and with a small showy flourish he bent down to retrieve the crate.

“Oh, you don’t have to-” Shandrelle started, but the trainee bobbed her head and scampered back to her fellows.

“Nonsense,” Casaux proclaimed.

Shandrelle suppressed her inward groan.

Unknowing, he glanced down at the crate. “Are these more potions?”

“They are,” she said. “Fresh from the Fane.”

With an interested noise, Casaux began to lead the way into the guild. Shade whooshed above Shandrelle’s head in a blissful rush of coolness, and she darted a slick of sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. Beyond the doors the voices, once indeterminate, resolved into form, the familiar sharp retort of one of the instructors leading a class.

“Did you make these?” Casaux asked, glancing back at her over his shoulder to be heard as the rapid crack of staves battered their ears.

“Only a few,” Shandrelle said, but it was a lie. In fact she’d been involved in the process from start to finish with this batch, brewing the liquid with a careful hand as one of the senior conjurers directed now and again. But if she mentioned it, he was sure to go on about his family’s garden plot, and she’d heard quite enough about that in the last introductory ‘dinner’ their families had set up. “Is Maelys teaching today?”

“She is, and by herself to boot.”

Sure enough, as they rounded the corner to cross past the training space she was there. A tall Wildwood with dark brown hair clipped near to her scalp, Maelys hovered at the sidelines, scowling in a deep reflexive scrutiny that kneaded the lines in her face into deep crevasses.

“I don’t envy her.” Casaux dropped his voice, forcing Shandrelle to lean closer to hear him. “It’s a sea of new recruits, and I don’t think half of them ever held more than a pitchfork in their lives.”

With an appraising hum, Shandrelle took in the room, the wide space stacked with matched-off student pairs carrying not spears but staves. They battered them about, moving in what could have been a coordinated choreography had it been done together- or elegantly. Maelys swept in now and again, redirecting students with her hands as she adjusted everything from the way they stood to the way they swung.

Most were clearly young, some as fresh as the trainees that clamoured past Shandrelle at the door. But not all. Towards the back of the room a few pairs cluttered, spears in-hand. Adults all of them from their height, but Shandrelle’s eye drew in particular to one.

“A Duskwight?” Shandrelle nearly whispered.

Casaux’s eyes flicked up, and he let out a low dismissive noise. “Oh, that one.”

Maelys was tall, and so were a couple of the others at the back, but the Duskwight’s height put the lot of them to shame, standing a few ilms over the rest. Her deep black hair like the curtain of night was pinned neatly out of her eyes, her skin the hue of slate. All her attention fixed on her opponent, circling the spear at beat, and in truth Shandrelle couldn’t tell if the Duskwight moved right or wrong, but she did it smoothly. Confidently- standing out with an elegant grace.

“Three moons and I’ll bet you she’ll quit,” Casaux said, and as he shifted his grip on the crate the potions clinked quietly.

“Maybe,” Shandrelle allowed, but as the two of them stepped on towards the storeroom she stole one last glance at that unusual dark figure before the hallway enclosed around them, tucking them out of view.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #23 Soul

Gridania, 1549 6AE

The shadow of a fish approached the surface of the lake, rising with intent as its glassy eyes fixed upon the silhouette of a tiny struggling form- a fly that darted too low, snatched from the air by an improbable swell of water. It lifted its curved mouth, poised to lunge with sudden sucking force to cast the fly to its oblivion, but just as it shot up a rock struck at an improbable angle, shattering the surface with a sharp smack as it tossed a ribbon of spray into the air. In a teal flash of scales the fish fled into the depths, and in the gradual fade from light blue to deeper browns the rock sank to its new home, leaving nothing but the disturbance of ripples in its wake. The fly, jettisoned a few ilms from where it started, struggled quixotically against its fate.

High above, Shandrelle flung out a hand. “There! There, did you see? It definitelybounced.”

Ojene scoffed, her elbows dangled over her knees, both legs drawn up close to her chest, feet wedged in the gutter of the roof. “With that kind of throw? Please.” Her toothy grin glittered in the afternoon light. “I only saw one.”

“Say what you like,” Shandrelle said primly, crossing her arms across her chest, “I know the truth!”

“Hm.” Ojene plucked another rock from the small pile heaped between them, stolen from the lake’s edge and hauled all the way up the building in Shandrelle’s pockets.

The thought of the tiny shards of stone and the dust she’d have to crumble from the clothes was the furthest thing from Shandrelle’s mind as she grinned impishly back, giddy with mischief as the wind ripped a strand of hair from her bun and flung it into her eyes. Ignoring this scrutiny, Ojene eyed the stone, turning it over in her hand as her thumb tested the flat surface on one side, then the other. Then, seemingly satisfied, she reeled back her arm and in a sharp crack of motion she lobbed the rock out into the expanse.

It had no chance. The stone angled too far, too fast, striking the lake in a heavy drop that flung a tongue of water high.

“Well!” Shandrelle proclaimed. “That wasn’t nearly as good as mine.”

“Oh? Then why don’t you give it another try, if you’re so good?” Ojene flourished a hand to the heap.

Shandrelle’s grin snaked wider as she grabbed another rock. As she squinted at the lake she circled her arm experimentally one way, then the other. The angle was hopeless, she knew. The chance of them skipping a rock from up here, huddled three stories up on the roof of a bakery, was slim to none. But maybe if she got it just right-

“Hyah!” Shandrelle yelled as she flung her arm forward- but the stone slipped traitorously from her fingers at the wrong point and crashed, not out into the lake, but hard into the bakery’s wall.

Ojene doubled forward as she cascaded into pealing laughter. “What was that?”

“I don’t know!” Shandrelle dissolved into giggles. “But I hit it!”

“You- oh no, they might have heard us.” Swallowing a great guffaw, Ojene spun around, squinting over the slanted roof.

“What would they say?” Shandrelle gasped, clutching at her pinching sides. “‘What are you doing on my roof?’ ‘Get down you ridiculous mummers.’ ‘I thought you’d be children’?”

“Children- probably! Hm. It’s fine.” Snatching up another rock, Ojene eyed the lake.

“Matron,” Shandrelle uttered, and she snaked a finger behind her spectacles to strike a spot of moisture from the corner of her eye. “Skipping or not, you do have a much better arm than me.”

“I don’t know about that,” Ojene said, half-grin returning, and she coiled up her arm before snapping it forward like a snake, and the rock soared free as an arrow in a long, lazy arc. “You could have put out a window with that last one.”

“Occupational hazards,” Shandrelle declared. “But in all seriousness- damn!” she shot a finger forward, gesturing haplessly at the space the rock sailed through. “Do it again!”

With a laugh Ojene obliged her, and Shandrelle watched in rapt fascination as the second rock scored just as far as the first. “That’s what I mean! How do you dothat?”

“It’s archery,” Ojene said, then shot Shandrelle a quick glance. “Well, not really- but it’s the same idea in a way. You’re launching an object and trying to make it go as far as you can, so there’s a sort of- best angle to do it in. Depending on the wind, and so on and so forth.”

“Really? Show me again!”

Ojene did- over and over as Shandrelle egged her on until the small pile of rocks was depleted, leaving only dust. With an effusive sigh, Shandrelle leaned back against the roof, casting her arms behind her head.

“I’m glad you convinced me to come up here,” she said. “I never knew roofs were so fun.”

“They can be.” Ojene flashed her a sidelong smile. “It’s also nice sometimes, just to get away from the crowds. I used to do this, but with trees. It’s not so different really.”

“Ah yes,” Shandrelle said with a laugh. “The bustling fourteenth bell crowds outside a closed bakery with nary a customer in sight.”

Ojene shot her a measured look. “Don’t laugh. It’s different for me. I didn’t grow up with this. It gets claustrophobic sometimes.”

“Right, right. Sorry- I forget sometimes. About our backgrounds, I mean.”

“I don’t know how you could.” From the recesses of a trouser pocket Ojene pulled out a small object, clutched in her closed hand. “No one else does.” With a sharp flick of her wrist, one last stone shot through the air, catching the sunlight in a blip of light before it cascaded down to the lake, crashing into the ripples before it sank out of sight.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #22 Fluster

Continued from #21 Feckless(first|second|third|fourth|fifth|sixth)

Gridania, 1565 6AE

A shiver sluiced down her skin, but it was just the bite of the wind as it whipped up beneath her robe, unusually cold for this time of year- or that’s what Shandrelle told herself as she stepped up to the patch of vetch beyond the city walls. The heartbeat of the forest embraced her, folding it into its verdant tresses with a quiet solemnity as life flooded through its veins, pouring with the quiet drone of insects and the unfettered cascade of birdsong, as free as it always was when the wee beasts saw nothing wrong.

But Shandrelle knew better. She stood alone amongst the flowers, and she swung her head this way and that as she surveyed each direction with uncommon intensity as if by sight alone she could pry the vines apart and unearth what she sought.

“I hope you didn’t do that on the way here,” came a voice, and Ojene dropped like an opo-opo from the trees, landing neatly on her feet. “You look bloody conspicuous.”

With a sharp wheeze of surprise, Shandrelle took a step back. Up, she thought dryly. You should have looked up. “Don’t do that,” she huffed. “And no, to answer your question, I did not. I brought what you wanted.”

Ojene’s brows rose as Shandrelle dug into the basket on her arm. Budging aside its contents with force, she pushed past the thick picnic blanket of durable blue linen and displaced her lunch in its neatly folded paper box to seize the corner of what she had hidden beneath it- the folio she yanked free. She held it out. “The Wailers’ file on you, or at least what I could find. If they’ve got some secret documents elsewhere I couldn’t tell you, getting thiswas already hard enough.”

Ojene accepted it without comment, and she flipped it open without a moment’s pause. Her expression, held to careful stone barely changed as her eyes flicked over the first page, then the second, before she riffed through the lot of them and regarded the one at the end.

“It’s all old shite,” she remarked. “You read it, of course?” Glancing up, she lofted one brow high.

Heat shot into Shandrelle’s cheeks- she glanced quickly away. “Er, well-” Delicately, she coughed. “I might have taken a look.”

“Then what did you think? While you read it, was there anything that stood out?”

“Not… really.” The creeping flood of her blush prickled across her nose. “I was shocked to see how much they’d written on you while you were training with them,” she blurted. “I mean- you didn’t do anything wrong and they were watching you- so closely.”

“Of course they were,” Ojene said dryly. “Did you ever think anything different?”

“Well… no. I didn’t realize. I thought they liked you- or at least, some of them liked you.”

With a noncommittal grate of a noise, Ojene snapped the folder shut. “Well, if this is truly all of it then- that confirms one thing.” She shot Shandrelle a side-long glance. “Your family is circumventing authority.”

A sharp prickling stung in Shandrelle’s throat, sweeping full-bodied down her chest. “You think so?” she breathed. “Because there’s nothing recent in the documents, you mean?”

“Precisely that. If they were acting in accordance with the Gridanian order of things- why not report the business to the Wailers? Have them keep an eye out for me? So either your family doesn’t have anything on me, or… the matter is too secret for the files you were able to find.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Shandrelle murmured, but Ojene was already turning away, long fingers dangling against the curve of her jaw.

“No!” Ojene exclaimed, her back half-turned as she paced away, shoulders hunched with the frenetic energy of a caged animal. “It’s more than that- because as we’ve established your family isn’t above framing me. If they really wanted to bring me in, all they would have to do is lie- and they haven’t even done that! All they have is silence.”

Briskly Ojene rapped her fingers against the front of the folio, and she spun round on her heel to face Shandrelle. “Your family wants it to be secret,” she hissed, “because they have something to hide.”

Shandrelle’s tongue staggered to the roof of her mouth, the thump of her heart in her throat all too palpable. “Like what- the fact that they’re after you?”

“That. But more specifically, why.” Again Ojene spun around, her fingers digging just above the folio’s crease as she stalked away, circling round the copse of wild flowers. “There’s only one reason I can imagine. Your family-” sharply Ojene whipped about, and her eyes bored into Shandrelle’s with such virulent intensity that she froze to the spot. “They must be working with the Garleans.”

For the second time since Ojene seized upon her but a week ago, Shandrelle’s legs turned to a peculiar consistency as all sound collapsed into a droning high-pitched whine that seized all other senses in its throat, gripping them into oblivion until at last its hold grew slack and the noise petered out.

“I,” Shandrelle gasped, “the Garleans?”

“I have no proof.” At once Ojene twisted back into her hectic pacing. “But it’s the only thing that makes sense!” she proclaimed, tossing one hand into the air. “Why else would they do this? Why?It’s too much of a coincidence that they try it on as the Garleans do it too. Too much effort to be just a grudge! And the persistence- they don’t seem to fucking stop!”

“The Garleans,” Shandrelle breathed. “Are you- that doesn’t make any sense. Why would my family do something like that? With them?” A sharp fluttering quailed in her stomach as Ojene rounded her gaze on her, but she clutched her hands tighter and forged on. “After what they did to the edge of the forest- and then that wall. We all saw it.”

But where Shandrelle expected sharpness, something changed in Ojene’s expression- a subtle fluttering of feeling that was gone as soon as it appeared. Ojene looked away.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly. “It beggars belief, and yet- in these past years I’ve seen a great many things I’d never thought to see. I have no other leads.”

The hair on the back of Shandrelle’s neck prickled, and she clutched her free hand to her opposite elbow, hauling her arms tight to her stomach. “My father,” she blurted. “He- we haven’t been on the best of terms ever since he told me about what he did. But he invited us- me and Ezette and the girls- over to dinner. He hasn’t done that in… gods, moons. It was… odd. The timing, you know. Do you think… that is, is there a chance- that it’s all related to this?”

Ojene lapsed into silence, regarding Shandrelle through the corners of her eyes. Her mouth pulled slightly to the side, the only echo of expression her face held, before with a deep exhale she turned her head to stare behind them. Towards Gridania, where it lay hidden behind the swell of hills and the conference of trees.

“It could be,” she said at last. “There might only be one way of knowing. To go, and see what he says. What he asks you. If he presses you.”

“Matron,” Shandrelle groaned. “More espionage.”

“It’s a decent thought,” Ojene continued. “Perhaps he’d try to see if you’d speak of me. Bring me up, apropo of nothing. To find out if I’m on your mind.”

“This is… I’m going to sit down.”

Shandrelle felt Ojene’s eyes on her back as she staggered towards the fallen tree, dropping heavily into the same spot Ojene had perched a week before. Head swimming, she let the basket slip from her arm and thump delicately at her feet, before plummeting her chin to her upturned palms as she curled in on herself.

At last when the fog cleared, she squeezed her eyes shut.

“Why are you telling me all this?” Shandrelle asked. “Last time you seemed nothing but hostile, and now-?”

A faint shuffle of feet rustled the understory, and when Shandrelle allowed her eyes to crack open she laid her gaze upon Ojene’s half-turned back, arms folded over her chest as her head angled towards the ground.

“Do you want me to be hostile?” she said at last, but to Shandrelle’s shock a hint of a smile shaped her voice.

“No,” she blurted. “Of course not. It’s just- well, I didn’t know if I was ever going to see you again, but if I did- this really isn’t how I thought it was going to go.”

With a huff Ojene tilted her head further away- the first time, Shandrelle realized, that she fully let Shandrelle out of her sight.

“I never planned to come back,” she said distantly.

The two of them sat for a long spell in silence.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #21 Feckless

Continued from #18 Devil’s Advocate (first|second|third|fourth|fifth)

Gridania, 1565 6AE

By the next morning, Shandrelle made up her mind- she wasn’t going to do it.

It could have been any number of things. The way Ezette’s hand lingered on her waist that morning as she leaned past her at the vanity, or the muffled chatter of high voices through the door. The burnt umber flash of Devone’s new dress as she twirled in the foyer one way, then the other, like a flower blooming and furling in rapid succession that danced to the tune of life flooding through the kitchen. A morning’s routine, as the teapot’s wail cut through the clatter of pots and scrape of utensils, and Shandrelle poured the girls’ tea first before sitting down with her own. She lifted it to her nose, but the faint floral bouquet was undercut by the cloying scent of fresh porridge spiced with cinnamon and cloves and the thicker aroma of sausage sizzling on the stove.

As the four of them sat down at the table for breakfast, the girls chattering about a nook beneath a footbridge they discovered yesterday, Shandrelle met Ezette’s eye. Pools of deep brown, in the shadow they often gleamed as black as her hair. But now, as a sliver of morning sun fell across her face, the light scattered through her irises like a pair of twin jewels, splitting into a topaz sunset.

And in that moment, as the girls’ conversation devolved into incessant giggling about normal bodily functions, it was as if the light painting Ezette’s face touched her too, blooming a warmth into her core that spread up her skin as if she was a corrugated flower, Shandrelle beamed.

Of course she wasn’t going to do it! The warmth carried with her as she strode on to the Stillglade Fane, like a sun-kissed stone tucked into her middle. Her family needed no interruption. Herfamily- not her father or her mother. And certainly not her relatives. The most important thing was the girls, and her wife. She would brook no interruptions- no unnecessary dangers. Whatever Ojene’s business was, it wasn’t with her. She wouldn’t aid it, but nor would she stop it. If her kin was up to something foul, eventually the truth would out.

Two days later, her father found her.

She hadn’t heard him coming. Caught up in the Fane, her thoughts lingered on her smallest patient from earlier that day- a small Hyur boy with a terrible rash spreading up his throat. His voice splintered on every word, or what little he could manage before it shattered into wheezing coughs. Half mindlessly her fingers glided across the shelves, drifting over small jars before plucking down one or two. A poultice, she decided- it’d soothe the ravages of what the elemental’s succor could not. She’d only just reached for a mortar when his voice struck her from behind, melodious and cool.

“Ah, Shandrelle.” Efrault Roiveaux emerged from the hall. His once chestnut mane of hair, struck white at the temples and bound with ribbons of grey and platinum, was tied tightly behind his head with nary a loose strand in sight. Its long tail trailed over the shoulder of his robes, the deep azure of the Fane bound with the embroidery of his station- the sort that made the new apprentices quail into silence when he passed.

“You’re back,” she said simply- she didn’t turn around.

“I am, and a couple days early at that.” The smile he tossed at her was easy. Relaxed, as it pleated the wrinkles collecting around his mouth, crinkling through skin so much paler than her own- she’d been born with her mother’s complexion, and thank the Matron for that. “Your mother and I were wondering if you and your family would like to come over for dinner.”

The pestle scraped against the side of its bowl a little too hard, stone against stone, before it stopped short. “Tonight,” she said flatly, though it was more of a question.

“Not necessarily tonight. But this week perhaps? It has been too long since we’ve seen the girls- and Ezette, how is she doing? Is she still working on that wardrobe for the Guillenoix?”

“No.” Shandrelle twisted her wrist sharply, grinding a flake of leaf to dust. “She finished that a moon ago.”

“Ah,” he said simply. “Well, how about on Earthday? If you’ve plans I expect Astralday would work just as well.”

“I’ll ask Ezette,” she hazarded. “Now, I really must get back to work-”

“Of course.” He cast a glance down at the jars at her elbow. “If you need any advice, I’ll be teaching today. Just a little ways down.”

“Thank you, father,” she said dryly. “Goodbye.”

It was only when he left that she released the pestle, and she struck a trembling hand down the side of her robe, her palm slick with sweat.

Dinner? The thought snapped at her heels the whole way home that evening- just before the turn that would take her within sight of their respectable house Shandrelle kept going, clasping her empty lunch basket tight to her side. Her father hadn’t invited them to dinner in moons- and granted he’d been on his usual sojourn through the Twelveswood. A person of his ability was in frequent demand after all. But even when he was home, these days he rarely came to call. So why now?

Why now indeed. A shiver sluiced down Shandrelle’s spine.

Perhaps she wanted to spare her family the trouble, but it was already too late.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #20 Petrichor

Limsa Lominsa, 1567 6AE

The illusion of solitude was easy enough to keep- the heavy wood door admitted little more than the muffled rumblings of voices of passersby and the limestone walls allowed even less- save for two times a day when Corporal Baenblyss came to call. The moment the door cracked open a cacophony of voices poured in from down the hall- as did the stench of sweat and dirt and unwashed bodies that had sat together too long.

Ojene’s nose wrinkled in reflexive surprise. “Sailors?” she asked, but she hardly had to.

“Aye,” Baenblyss conceded, and moments later the bilious croak of an accordion exhaled a noise like a cat being dragged over nails. “They just rolled in from the docks- well after they rolled in from the taverns, most like.” She shot a glance over her shoulder, her toothy grin excavating the caverns a pair of missing molars left behind in her smile. “Here’s supper- but is this going to be enough for ye tonight?” Concern washed through the undertow of Baenblyss’s pale eyes, stained purple like the petals of an iris.

It wasn’t much. A hunk of crusty bread far more rind than substance and a bowl of lumpy gruel, its pale humps interspersed with burnt flakes of black and brown. Far less than the Barracudas normally brought, for on a typical day they set aside for her whatever bits the sailors didn’t eat in the mess hall. But every so often the leftovers ran out, and so her overseers made do with the only thing left- a prisoner’s food.

The irony wasn’t lost on Ojene, but at least the plain teapot beside the bread was sure to be full.

“It’s plenty,” Ojene said, accepting the platter into her arms. “Thank you.”

“They’re from Western La Noscea,” Baenblyss continued conversationally, but she turned her concerned eye in the direction of the ruckus as to the staccato beat of full-chested shouts of encouragement, the instrument heaved in a dissonant catastrophe. “Or were for any rate,” Baenblyss raised her voice to be heard as the accordion at last began to even out into a passable tune. “Them’s some of the number what had their homes wiped out by the sahagin a few moons past.”

Ojene’s heart lurched. “Oh,” she murmured, but the sudden heave of sympathy warred with an urge to burrow safely into the confines of her Barracuda-assigned room. The chance that one of them would recognize her was slim- and yet why risk what didn’t need to be gambled? “Well, I’ll forgive them for their music then,” she added dryly. “Speaking of ships, though-”

“No word on yours yet. But I’m keepin’ an ear out, sure as can be.”

It was still early, Ojene reminded herself, as the door enclosed into her cocoon of silence, shut away from prying eyes as she had been for the last three moons. The Syhrwyb wasn’t due for another week- gods only a week. A peculiar energy sparked through her fingertips as she set her tray down upon the table, easing a splay of leftover papers out of the way. Anticipation, she decided, as she scrubbed her knuckles against her side. Or nerves.

The room was barely different since he left. Repurposed officer’s quarters in a sailor’s barracks, her neighbors were constant transients changing out from one week to the next and her only company was herself. It had suited her well enough. The bed, while stuffed into one corner spanned wide enough for a roegadyn with some room to spare, and the table served well enough as a sitting room and desk. It even had a private bathroom, only big enough for one person at a time, and a tiny kitchen that in truth she hardly used.

In an odd way she’d felt as if she’d fallen into the lap of luxury. Clean water to bathe in and enough food to eat- when she was lucky she’d had that, as hard as it had come by in the last ten years. But the simple fact of having a chair to sit in and a place to sleep? One that was hers- if borrowed. It was a world she’d never thought she’d have again.

But as Ojene liberated a dented spoon from the drawer and sat down to consume her unfortunate dinner, her eyes drifted to the empty chair across from her. And the room, cavernous in its cramped expanse, felt small.

With a prickling sensation, not for the first time she wondered what Sylbfohc would think.

Ten years was, after all, a long time. And their three weeks of reunion had been far too short.

Not for the first time, a hand trailed up to her hair. The strands crimped beneath her touch- short and spiky, but long enough now to budge between her fingers. And quietly, she wondered if he’d like it.

((@sea-wolf-coast-to-coast))

ffxivwrite 2021 - #18 Devil’s Advocate

Continued from #17 Destruct (first|second|third|fourth)

Gridania, 1565 6AE

Naturally, the first thing she did was tell Ezette.

It had to wait until evening, and after the girls went to bed, but the two of them collected into the conservatory- or once was anyway, until Shandrelle made the choice to move the plants outside. Drawn shut against the evening stars, the thick green curtains on every window spanning its several slanted walls blanketed the room into more cave than dwelling, and all the cozier for it in the orange glow of the oil lantern sitting on the end table between their plush yellow chairs.

There in the comfort of home, wrapped in a soft woolen blue robe with golden vine embroidery fringing the cuffs and a cup of rapidly cooling tea clasped in her hands, she disgorged the story. Ojene’s sudden arrival, the unexpected response. The threat. Then the mystery she brought with her, and her last request.

At the end Ezette sat back. The slim handle of her porcelain teacup dangled absently between her brown fingers as if she’d forgotten it was there, yet she was well into her second cup. Dressed for evening she wore a matching robe of scarlet, the patterned vines blooming to her throat.

“Well, that’s a lot.” The ends of her hair bobbed as Ezette spoke- let down for the night it haloed her head in a cloud of tight black curls.

“It is,” Shandrelle exhaled in a sigh.

“If you want to get involved… Do you want to get involved?”

“I’m not sure… I don’t know what I’m going to do about it yet, I’ve barely had time to let it sink in, let alone make a choice.”

“Of course, of course,” Ezette murmured, and with deliberate economy she poured herself a third cup of tea. “Do you want to talk it through?”

Despite the seriousness of the situation they found themselves in, Shandrelle couldn’t help but crack a small smile. “I’d like that very much.”

“All right.” Squaring her shoulders, Ezette settled in, planting both elbows upon the arms of the chair as the rest of her body flowed languidly before her, shins peeking out from between the folds of the robe. “Well- my first thought is that you don’t owe her anything.”

“Don’t I?”

“Of course not. It was thirteen bloody years ago when you saw her last. That’s long enough for any blood debts to be paid.”

“Try telling her that,” Shandrelle laughed dryly, but whatever joke there was fell flat, desiccating midair between them. “No, I guess that was the strangest thing. I don’t think she really cared about that- but who knows! With her, it could turn up a few moons later that she’s been carrying this grudge toward me all along, but then I don’t really know her anymore, do I? And she doesn’t know me.“

“True,” Ezette offered.

“I don’t know, I wouldn’t be surprised if part of all that was whatever old ire she might hold against me, but she hardly addressed it. It was all about what was happening now. And maybe if the question is resolved she’ll just drop off again and we won’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“That would certainly be nice,” she said dryly. “I know you’ll probably have already tossed this into the bin, but you wouldn’t consider turning her in, would you?”

“No!” Shandrelle blurted aloud. “No, of course not.”

“Then, I suppose we’ve got two options left. Either you work with her… or you don’t. Though I suppose if you did work with her, you don’t have to do what she said. You can do some other thing for her, if she’ll agree to it. Maybe… I don’t know, go to a few dinners, ask your father some leading questions- the works.”

“Maybe.” Shandrelle groaned. “My father. I can’t believe that he might be tied up in all of this. Again.”

“Would he be the one, do you think? If what she said is real.”

“To be honest… I don’t know.” At long last, Shandrelle took a sip of her tea, but the tepid liquid was merely an excuse to pause and think. “I don’t think it makes much sense, but then again- he did tell her to leave the Twelveswood. And now she’s back. It depends on whether or not he’d be willing to enforce that over a decade later, I suppose.”

“And who else would it be, really,” Ezette mused to herself.

As the two of them lapsed into silence, Shandrelle let her eyes close. Behind them sat a hallowness that throbbed with the slow beat of her heart, one that on another day could have threatened to spill into fresh tears. Yet in the maw of exhaustion that surrounded her, nothing came.

“Maybe I’m just scared, Ezette,” she murmured at last.

Ezette’s head jerked up. “Of what?”

“That it is him… but also that it isn’t. I don’t know, maybe it’s the whole of what this could mean. We’re happy now, or at least I’d like to thinkwe’re happy-” In response, Ezette’s brow pleated and she outstretched a hand. Shandrelle snatched it up, clinging on tight. “This could upend… everything. And she said it was bloody dangerous, to boot.”

Gradually, Ezette’s fingers eased between hers, squeezing them softly at the base. “You don’t have to be afraid of that,” she said softly. “At least not for us. For the danger- if there’s more than what she’s said we’re going to have to talk about it. But we’ll be fine, no matter what comes.”

A deep breath chuffed through Shandrelle’s nose, and her cheek crimped around one side of her quiet smile. “I thought you were going to try to talk me out of it.”

“Well… I thought I was too.” With another squeeze of her hand, Ezette released her grip and settled back into the chair. “I’m not thrilled by the thought of you in danger, but- your work has always been riskier than mine. I can live with it, as long as you don’t do anything rash. And if you try your best to be safe.”

“Of course. Always- without question.”

“Then… do what you think is right. Just go carefully about it- and maybe tell me once you’ve made up your mind. Before you do anything, so I don’t break myself worrying about you in the meantime.”

Quickly, Shandrelle captured Ezette’s hand and gave it another firm squeeze. “Perish the thought,” she said, her throat unexpectedly tight.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #17 Destruct

Continued from #15 Thunderous - ( first|second|third)

Gridania, 1565 6AE

The bell was nearly up by the time Shandrelle returned, and if it was possible she was only more cross. First the air had changed the moment she reached the creek. If had only been able to get down to her picnic spot on time she’d have been able to eat in peace in that perfect spot on a span of flat warm rock right beside the creek bed, where she would lay out her blanket and soak in the quiet solitude punctuated only by the garrulous contributions of birds and frogs as she gradually consumed the crisp sandwich Ezette had made for her that morning, alongside half a jar of spiced apples she’d purloined from the pantry and a mug of wine.

But no! Instead she had to hunch under the large oak tree that oversaw the outcrop, clasping her meal beneath her to guard it from the errant raindrops that rolled through the foliage, battering her nerves in solid wet plops, then a stream.

Then the rain stopped but moments after she left her shelter. As if the gods found all of this funny somehow. Well if they did, she wasn’t laughing! Instead she was stuck smearing water from her forehead and ringing out the edge of her robes, but there was nothing to be done for her underclothes which would assuredly slick to her skin as if she was a drenched rat until she managed to run home.

If she had been in any other mood she’d have abandoned her outdoor lunch and skittered back to somewhere drier the moment the weather turned, but this whole affair had already wasted at least a third of a bell, and she would be damned if she let Ojene ruin the rest of it!

And so, soaked to the bone and shivering in the breeze, clutching a water-slick basket over her arm, Shandrelle scowled at the empty space where she’d left Ojene to begin with.

“You’d better be hiding,” she called out. “Because if you’ve gone and vanished on me after all that, I am going to be verycross.”

“I’m here,” came a voice behind her.

With a yelp, Shandrelle spun round to see Ojene standing there - how was she dry? - as if she’d been there the whole time. “Good gods, don’t scare me like that! Matron, have your feet ever made a sound? Sit down.”

Ojene obliged, and silently, claiming her spot on the now-damp fallen tree. Frown deepening, Shandrelle flipped one side of the basket up and, claiming two of its contents, poured the rest of her wineskin out into her glazed pewter mug, then with an audible huff stuffed it into Ojene’s hands.

“Tell me everything,” Shandrelle proclaimed. “But maybe not everything because I don’t have a surfeit of time. The brief notes, for now, to give me the gist.”

Ojene blinked, staring down at the mug as befuddlement creased between her brows. “Wine?”

“Yes,” Shandrelle snapped, and she gestured sharply. “Drink!”

Grimacing, Ojene set it to the side, balanced in a splintered crook of the fallen tree where old lichens scaled the bark between intermittent shelves of fungi, and she folded her hands together at her knees, hunched forward. Despite the fact that she had escaped the rain, she somehow seemed bedraggled in a way Shandrelle hadn’t noticed before- the leather armor she wore was scuffed in places, caked here and there in dirt and filth, and there was a gauntness to her face that Shandrelle suspected wasn’t just the product of long years past.

“I went to Ala Mhigo,” Ojene said, “from the start. I expect you heard what happened?”

Shandrelle’s arms twitched in surprise. “Yes- of course! Who here hasn’t?”

“Well,” her eyes averted to the ground, “I was there for a good long time. Fighting the Garleans. Helping people. Doing everything I could, no matter what it cost…. Did you ever go there after I left?”

“No,” Shandrelle answered regretfully. “I didn’t. When the city fell at most I wound up in the east, healing those who were. Or the refugees.”

Ojene nodded. “The refugees,” she repeated softly. “That’s the main thing I did- helped them get far enough so you lot could take them to- wherever they needed to go. The Garleans- they are truly terrible, Shandrelle. I’ve never seen anything like it before or since.”

“Not even here?” Shandrelle asked before she could stop herself, and a bitter laugh burbled silently behind her teeth.

“Not even here.” Ojene’s eyes flicked up, meeting Shandrelle’s with a vivid intensity that- Shandrelle noticed in an instant- lacked the lethality it had before, for the dagger was safely sheathed at Ojene’s hip. “It all pales by comparison. And they’ve sought to bring the rest of Eorzea to heel, too.”

A prickling seared down Shandrelle’s spine. “I saw the wall,” she blurted. “The thing they’re building… it might even be done, now. Did you come here across it?”

Again, Ojene nodded. “Though not in the last few moons. Suppose it’s just as well, since my work was getting exponentially harder since they started ramping that damned thing up, but I’m entrenched on this side of it now, for better or for worse.”

“All right,” Shandrelle breathed, “well- what does this have to do with my family?”

“Your family,” Ojene uttered, and a muscle flickered in her jaw. Again, she glanced away, but if Shandrelle didn’t know better she’d have called their silhouette troubled somehow, though she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why she thought it. “It started a couple years ago,” Ojene said. “First it started with the Garleans. I’d been trying my best to be a thorn in their side, true, but it was odd that they sent people for me specifically. Trying to catch me out, or by surprise. There were better people for them to go after, I’d always thought. Or at least, otherpeople. It made little sense that they were always out for me.”

“But then,” Ojene continued, and her eyes jerked back, regarding Shandrelle through their corners, “one time we brought a new crop of refugees past the Wall, and it wasn’t a Garlean who attacked me, but an Eorzean.”

“An Eorzean?” Shandrelle repeated, dumbfounded.

“Yes- a mercenary, and of the sort seeking their fortune around theseparts. It’s not the first time the Garleans got Eorzeans to do their bidding of course, beyond the people they’d already enslaved, but something seemed odd about the whole thing. I tried to get that one to talk to no avail, but the second one told me the truth. That some Gridanian paid her to do it. And when I got to the bottom of it, there was only a single name behind it.”

Blithely, Ojene shrugged. “Roiveaux,” she said.

“Roiveaux,” Shandrelle repeated, and a shiver rippled through her shoulders. “You’re sure?”

“Positive. It’s all I was ever able to get, beyond a hunch now and again that the attackers I dealt with that day weren’t Garlean either, but now I’m on the other side of the Wall and I just- want it to stop.”

Biting her lip, Shandrelle skated one hand over her rain-slicked hair. “Damn,” she breathed. “I’m sorry, Ojene- I had no idea this was happening to you.”

“I’m a little relieved to hear it- to be honest.” Quickly, Ojene’s gaze fastened to her folded hands- only to flick back up at Shandrelle shortly after. “After dealing with them for so long- I had no idea what to expect. No notion of who to trust. It’s an agony of a sort.”

With a deep sigh, Shandrelle nodded, and despite herself some small layer of spiteful anger cracked, dissolving its contents into something gentler. “So that’s what that whole- incident was about. Well, I’ll forgive you, Ojene- though I don’t know if I really should- as long as you promise not to go shoving any more blades in my face.”

Ojene flinched, and yet as her fingertips curled into the beds between her opposite fingers, her face twisted in a quiet frown. “You have to understand my position here. Even now as I tell you all of this, I don’t know if you’re someone I can trust. If you’re a person who is willing to go against your own family. Or an empire. You might think you are-” she bullied on, cutting off Shandrelle as she opened her mouth, “but a person’s mettle never shows until it’s tested. You say you don’t want to harm me and- I could believe that. But what happens when you have to choose?”

“Between you- and my family you mean?”

Quietly, Ojene nodded. “It could happen. And if you chose to help me, it probably will. Are you sure you could handle that?”

“I mean…” Shandrelle tossed up her hands, though the weight of the basket swinging on one arm stayed it at her side. “I don’t know! When you put it that way, I couldn’t say. But I’d like to think I could. Unless it turns out you’ve lied to me or some shite and you’ve really become some sort of criminal they’re out to hang.”

Ojene smiled, and darkly, a bitterly humorless note that seized something in Shandrelle’s gut, like a rabbit frozen in the bush. “Not unless you have. Very well. A test, then. Do you come down this path often?”

“Er…” Shandrelle shifted on her heels. “Every day I get the chance, usually. Which isn’t always, but often enough.”

“Then, let’s give it a week. You’ll come back here and meet me at this same bell. You won’t confide in anyone what we spoke of, or even that you’ve seen me at all. And, if you’d be so obliged, you’ll take a peek in whatever ledgers you can to see if there’s mention of me. Wailer records would likely be the best start.”

“Wailers-” Shandrelle gasped. “That’s assuming I can even get to those!”

“Perhaps not. But if you’re to help me with this, it’s largely that sort of work I’ll need you to do. Not with Wailers specifically, but reconnaissance in general. Spying. You know, the lot.” Ojene’s eyes narrowed sharply. “If you can’t figure out how to do that- well. You were always smart. I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

Without preamble, Ojene climbed to her feet, and leaving the mug of wine untouched in its dead wood cradle, she turned into the thicket of foliage. “In a week!” she called over her shoulder, then with barely more than a rustle of leaves vanished from view.

Alone Shandrelle stood by the vetch, eyes rapidly fluttering as her mind struggled round the pieces.

“Ojene!” she yelled into nothing. “That’s not very nice of you, Ojene!”

Only silence responded.

ffxivwrite 2021 - #15 Thunderous

Continued from #11 Preaching to the Choir - ( first|second)

Gridania, 1565 6AE

In that peculiar manner like her head had been doused into a stream, the sound went out. A subtle ringing noise replaced it, droning into a disassembling whine until it faded out into the disagreement of birds that punctuated the whispered susurrations of the leaves around them. A chattering chorus that still for some reason felt unreal, leaving her standing there numbly with her fingers slack, hands crooked in front of her like a pair of pleading paws.

“I beg your pardon?” Shandrelle managed at last.

Before she knew why, she flinched.

“Your family,” Ojene uttered, and true awareness roiled back with a rapid prickling down Shandrelle’s shoulders- for the wry familiarity Ojene’s eyes had vanished into a sharp intensity that burrowed straight to her spine. And though Ojene hadn’t moved the dagger, it suddenly bore again a lethal promise that parched Shandrelle’s throat. “They’re trying to kill me,” Ojene repeated. “Again. And you’re telling me you know nothing of it?”

Shandrelle found velvet petals smoothing between her fingers again, grasping backwards as if somehow reaching out to something- anything- would steady her, for abruptly she felt as if the ground beneath her rolled like a drenched log floating down a river, and her scrabbling desperately to stay afloat as her hands windmilled madly at her sides.

“No,” she croaked. “Matron, Ojene, why would I? The last I saw you, Twelve, it was- you up and left and so abruptly! And I haven’t heard hide nor hair of you since.”

“Then why do you think they’re after me?” Ojene asked, her voice suddenly too calm.

“I- I don’t know! How should I know? I don’t even know what you’ve been up to the last decade or so, how could I even feign to guess?”

“Perhaps you could,” Ojene said softly, “if you tried. You said your father told you what happened.”

“And perhaps he’s unhinged enough to try it! I don’t know- I wouldn’t put it past him- but why would he after all these years? You’re not a threat to me anymore. Er- in his eyes!”

Ojene’s expression hardly changed, save for the subtle narrowing of her eyes. “Then your mother,” she said, just as soft. “Or your relatives- think,Shandrelle, think!” In a flash she was off the fallen tree, pacing forward in a wide circle, the dagger loose at her side.

Twigs jutted hard in the small of Shandrelle’s back as she recoiled. “No- leave them out of it! Unless- they diddo something wrong that I don’t know about but- my mother- I don’t think she ever knew, even if she didn’t approve of you and I, she couldn’t- she wouldn’t-”

“And you’re sure?” Ojene nearly whispered, and she stopped but a couple fulms away, looming over with her great height, and oh, by the Twelve- how Shandrelle felt herself shrink in the shadow, pinned there by the twin glaciers that bore such a cold and distant promise that her voice matched.

“I-I-” Shandrelle rapidly stammered. “As sure… as I can be. Which is not to say… a lot.”

Twin creases kneaded around Ojene’s eyes as she regarded Shandrelle for a long, silent moment, before with a low rumble of the back of her throat she turned on her heel and withdrew a couple paces.

And the end of her thought burbled up in the back of Shandrelle’s thought, leaking out like the croak of a frog. “I was sure of my father too,” she blurted. “After all.”

Ojene shot her a glance over her shoulder, but in truth she’d never fully turned away. “All right,” she muttered, and she returned to the spot at the fallen tree, and still standing she propped one boot up in the same place she had before as she leaned forward like an apostrophe.

In the break from scrutiny the deep breath Shandrelle had swallowed heaved out in a tremulous gust, and she seized her elbows in quivering hands, clutching her arms close to her chest.

“Twelve, Ojene,” she breathed. “I know we didn’t part on the best of terms but… what’s happened to you?”

To her surprise a subtle ripple jerked through Ojene’s shoulders, bowing her head a couple ilms lower. The silhouetted panes of her irises vanished as her eyes swiveled off- and yet still not baring her back, not truly looking away-

“A lot,” at last came Ojene’s muttered reply, and as she straightened she turned back, fixing Shandrelle with an expression that after all this felt strangely empty.

Shandrelle loosed another held breath. “By the gods- I know you don’t have any reason to trust me… but that’s a far cry from me wishing harm on you.” Her voice splintered oddly- she swallowed. “I never wished harm on you. Didn’t know about the harm on you, or… didn’t want to see. And maybe I did cause it. And if I’ve hurt you beyond the ways I realized- then I’m truly sorry. But for the sake of what we did have- Matron’s breath I never wanted you dead!”

Quite unexpectedly tears seared into her eyes in surging pools that spilled thick drops into her lashes, and Shandrelle stuffed her hands to her mouth as she indendeted her upper teeth into the meat of her palm, choking back a sudden sob.

In the moment before wetness blurred it out, she saw the way Ojene’s expression suddenly slackened, her brows lofting upwards. But then the waters streamed forth, wiping everything away into a kaleidoscope of grey and green, and Shandrelle squeezed her eyes shut.

“I’m sorry,” Ojene said, a bit breathlessly. “I’m sorry.”

“Gods,” Shandrelle uttered, a hoarse croak against the vice in her throat. She buried her face into her elbow. “What has gotten into you?”

“I’m- you’re right. You shame me- and rightfully so.”

In the lapse of momentary silence Shandrelle staggered a tremulous breath into her lungs, and with a deep breath she lifted her face aloft. The blurry figure of Ojene resolved, in the absence of tears, into a withdrawn shape once again perched upon the fallen tree. But this time her legs crooked up in front of her, drawn inwards as her hands looped absently around the hilt of the dagger, the blade disappeared under the flats of her arms.

Their eyes met, and a muscle flickered through Ojene’s jaw. “I never truly thought you were out to cause me harm,” she continued softly. “I suppose I was just- furious about it.”

Sniffing hard against an unpleasant wave of phlegm, Shandrelle struck her sleeve across her eyes. “Over- the past? Or now?”

“Both, I suppose… but I shouldn’t have treated you like that. I’m sorry.”

“Why did you?” Shandrelle demanded- and suddenly as she did she had the sense that the ground had changed beneath her feet but this time her shoes burrowed against solid earth that buoyed her up the lip of the hill looking down, not the other way around.

Ojene averted her eyes, one thumbnail budging under the dagger’s pommel. “I guess I wanted to know if you were telling the truth.”

With a disbelieving laugh Shandrelle thrust a hand over the top of her head, flattening down a few straggly hairs as she went. “Well, there’s better ways to do that, you know! Instead of launching me into- some bloody interrogation! I mean, honestly! Did you not hear a word I said?”

“There’s hearing. And then there’s believing.” Ojene’s gaze flicked up, suddenly affixed to Shandrelle’s face with a seriousness that stopped her short. “My life has been a liability to the people around me for- some time now. So I have to be careful with who I bring into it- especially with you.”

“And what is that supposed to mean?”

Ojene grimaced- and as soon as she’d met Shandrelle’s eye she glanced away again, one shoulder rolling in an approximation of a shrug. “Well, if you weren’t part of it all, then… I was going to have to ask for your help.”

A particularly shrill ululation of birdsong punctuated the silence.

“Ojene,” Shandrelle gritted through a half-bared grimace of a smile. “You have one hell of a way of asking for support.”

Ojene opened her mouth to reply, but Shandrelle battened it down with the sharp loft of a finger. “I am very put out with you!” she said. “And I am going to need a moment to process- whatever the hells all this is- but if you’re telling me that you’re in danger and it’s my family that’s doing it- well, I couldn’t very well say no, could I?”

“You don’t know that yet,” Ojene hazarded.

“I suppose I don’t! But fuck you, honestly, showing up here, telling me things like that, and then expecting me not to give you succor. I am going to need some time!” Bending down, she swiftly plucked her lunch basket over her arm. “So you are going to stay here.” She turned on her heel. “And don’t follow me!”

With a great huff Shandrelle swept down the path she had meant to walk down to the creek from the start, blooms of vetch long since forgotten as Ojene’s silent eyes followed her til she turned out of sight.

ffxivwrite2021 - #14 Commend

Present Day - pre-Ghimlyt

The paper brimmed with life, but who knew what sort. Once the pale back of a discarded flier pulled from the market, now it was a tangle of colors morphed into indeterminate shapes that scrabbled this way and that, with spindly protrusions woven into great round blobs. To the untrained eye it was, in a word, a morass.

But as Ojene planted her elbows on the dining room table and leaned over the page, she asked the only expert there could be, “What is that?”

The artist scrunched up her nose and jabbed a stubby finger into the middle. “It’s you an’ me. And… the monster!”

With an exaggerated gasp, Ojene leaned closer. “The monster?”

“Yeah!” she crooned, her dark eyes alight with feral promise. “We’re gonna fight. I gave you a sword!”

There was indeed a grey triangle lighter than the rest of the grey around the spindly collection of sticks that was her own representation on the page.

“A sword,” Ojene proclaimed. “How thoughtful. What kind of monster are we fighting?”

“It’s big… and blobby… with lots of teeth.” The artist fastened her hands around her mouth, fingers arched in the facsimile of fangs clenched around her giant grin.

“Isee.” Ojene hooked a finger in the middle of the digits, and with a nasally mock growl she tugged against the false fangs like a small struggling animal failing to break free, a show that sent its recipient into a cavalcade of gigges.

A few moments later Ojene plucked the artist up into her lap as she slipped into a chair. “What else did you draw? Did you put your father in here?”

“Here!” she jabbed a finger towards a much blobbier shape right of the paper’s center, the skin etched in an unnaturally bright shade of green. “We’re gonna rescue him.”

Ojene struggled to bite back a laugh, but bite it back she did- she ruffled a hand through the artist’s wavy black hair. “I see. Well I can’t argue with that- if any monster saw you coming, it’d turn tail and run.” But, a light glinted in her eyes, and she leaned down to her daughter’s ear. “Or would it?”

The air filled with delighted screams.

((@sea-wolf-coast-to-coast))

ffxivwrite 2021 - #13 Oneirophrenia

((cw: implied torture, death))

An Imperial prison - Ala Mhigo, 1561 6AE

If she wanted, she could let go.

The realization shocked a flare of fear that ripped in a tingling sweep beneath her skin, but as the surge prickled away it melted into a warmth that bubbled up Ojene’s throat and spilled out into rasping laughter that floated unnaturally through her ears.

How oddly the Garlean watching over her must be looking at her now. As the laughter died the sense of it remained, floating balloon-like through her mind, and she imagined the stupid look on the guard’s dumb face. She couldn’t see it after all. Her eyes had lost the ability to focus some time ago on the endless ocean she floated upon, arms spread wide as every lap of the waves against her face throbbed with the pain that cushioned her back. Devoured her in its embrace, til there was nothing left but the distant awareness of it somewhere far below.

Blearily she blinked, struggling her eyes wider, for whenever she dared to let them close for longer than a split-second he stepped forward knife raised. What was another cut to join the others, their crosshatch pattern coating her like a second shirt as they seeped into the tattered rags she wore. Yet every time he did she felt the scream ravage her throat, her closely trained stoicism long since collapsed.

But this time the Imperials had taken it too far. The balloon of laughter sublimated into a haze of revolving glee that slipped through her awareness like an eel. They’d told her she’d never be free again, but ah! She could barely feel the stone floor beneath her, the everlasting weight of the manacles on her wrists featherlight as if the chains themselves fell away. With each thud of her heart the pain surged, then faded, each wave growing dimmer like the receding of a tide. It could take her with it, and then it would be done. Slipped away beneath their noses, if only she could keep her eyes open long enough to maintain the ruse.

Head lolling sideways, she flexed her fingers faintly with her pulse. It wouldn’t be long.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she murmured.

She wasn’t sure she made a sound, but it made no difference. A sensation pushed against her chest like the firm press of a thumb, the creeping vice of disapproval.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “The Garleans, they take everything, even you.”

The vice’s crank turned as the pressure grew, and she saw his eyes, sharp and grey upon her.

“Stop looking at me like that. Just let me go… we’ll see each other again when you’re dead. It’s the best way.”

In the pit of her senses- or what was left of them- she felt as much as heard his low rumble of dissent, like a distant peal of thunder vibrating the stone beneath her fingertips. Get up, Ojene.

“No,” she groaned. “Don’t make me do this again. I can’t.”

You can. You must.

“Why?” she demanded, and suddenly through the fading haze a spike of anger shot through, hot and sizzling.

You know why.

“Don’t you think I’m trying to come back to you?”

You’re not. You’re trying to die.

“Well, that’s the bloody fucking point!” Ojene snapped, and suddenly she wasn’t floating upon the ocean anymore but standing upright, somewhere, in some seamless fog as her clenched hands raged at her sides.

You’re not allowed, his voice admonished, but even as it did it melted into something softer. Gentler, as if it molded into a soft caress that breathed against her jaw. Come back to me- whole.

“I…” she started, but it was too late. A tether looped around her waist and with a faint tugging sensation she spilled forth.

Rapidly her eyes fluttered, and as the world rose back into blinking awareness a shape loomed over her. A hiss slipped into her ears, and as Ojene squinted hard the Garlean guard blurred into focus- as did the blade in his hand. But he frowned down at her, unmoving, and as a deep breath cascaded unwillingly into her lungs so did the surge of pain as it blanketed her entire torso.

Her hands tightened and the manacles rattled, the tips of her fingers numb.

“Fuck you,” Ojene spat aloud, and she passed out.

((@sea-wolf-coast-to-coast))

ffxivwrite 2021 - #2 Aberrant

North Shroud, 1545 6AE

It didn’t matter that she’d pictured this moment for the last eight years. Dreamed of it from time to time, some nights overtaken with an acuteness of longing that subsumed her entire self into keening undulations of grief. It stuck with her on the waking, and she would topple over in her bedroll and curl up as she clutched her hands to the hollowness in her gut the dreams left behind, as if her innards had been gored out in her sleep.

All of that and yet- now that Ojene stood on the precipice she couldn’t move.

It was right there. She’d roamed across these hills at least a thousand times. All it would take was simply pushing between the crooked rocks to find the second path, the one that swiveled west. It would spill her from the surrounding mountain teeth into the valley they cradled, and from its lip she’d see it all. The border of trees, pushing up the rocks as far as they could. The place where the forest gave way, broken into terraced patchworks of farms nestled up and down the hills. The creek that spilled from the peaks, their reluctant snowcaps bleeding water so cold it laced straight to the bone. And at its banks, the humble splay of homes where she had once lived. Buried in the woods’s very outskirts in the grooves of Abalathia’s Spine, her family- the Suinuet clan.

What would happen when she walked in- that she didn’t know. But she’d imagined it every different way. Her aunt, crowing with joy at the sight, then sobbing as she tucked Ojene to her chest. Her parents, laying one hand each upon her shoulder. The family dinners they’d immediately sweep her into. Or, perhaps they’d turn her away. Averting their eyes as if they couldn’t look at her straight, as if she didn’t exist. Her aunt might give her one last reluctant look but that would be all, and that’s how she would know she was truly alone.

And then there were the visions where she simply screamed and screamed until all her air ran out.

She rather felt like screaming now, but at what she didn’t know. The backs of her eyes burned as if she’d been weeping but yet no tears came, her hands balled up tight at her sides.

Did she want to stay? Or did she want to leave? It felt such a waste to even contemplate after all the effort to wind through the deep stretches of the wood to come here, and yet- despite the desperate longing that throbbed in her chest with the beat of her heart, so too pumped the urge to run. Dueling forces that seized her in the crossfire, locking her knees like ice.

Who knew how long she stood there but at last with a grating yell of frustration she whipped on her heel and flung her satchel to the ground. If she couldn’t make up her mind, she would makeherself make up her mind. She stomped about making camp.

Strangely the act of coaxing the fire to life was the first thing that brought her any modicum of calm, and with a deep sigh Ojene dropped her back against the line of rock behind her, gingerly poking her cindering kindling with a stick.

In the shadow of the mountain and between the boughs of the trees, the breeze whispered through the deep green leaves. And in silence Ojene watched the color of the sky melt from blue to orange. As dusk descended the insects rose, their chorus cascading into an orchestra of creaking chitters and groans. In another state of mind it might have been comforting, but now? At once she saw herself much smaller, lying on the floor of her treehouse with a blanket puddled beneath her, with the silvery glow of the twin moons spilling through its open arch. Wide-awake, drinking in the sounds of twilight life she never saw.

So entrenched in their song she was, she almost didn’t notice the scrape of boots against rock. With a start Ojene scrambled to her feet just in time to come face to face with the tall figure that stepped out from around the nearby curve of path.

Shock spiked down her spine- for as the figure stopped short she recognized him in an instant. In memory he towered above her like the sentinel of a looming tree, but now somehow her uncle Greupaux stood a couple ilms shorter than she. The years hadn’t been kind to him- lines emphasized the angular curve of his face and his black hair had morphed into a burst of grey tied loosely behind his head- and yet undeniably it was he.

A sharp breath sucked through Ojene’s nose but her tongue plastered to the roof of her mouth. And in the moment of silence Greupaux stepped forward.

Yet as he extended a hand her eyes locked on his, and she saw the way they searched her face. Distantly, without recognition as he offered her an affable smile.

Ojene’s heart sank.

“Sorry to startle you,” her uncle said. “I didn’t know there was anyone camping here. I’m Greupaux, did you need a place to shelter for the night?”

“No,” Ojene said, and it was strange hearing her words in her own ears, as if a stranger spoke them. “I’m fine.”

By morning all traces of her campfire were gone, and so were any signs that Ojene had ever come here at all.