a dream thawed

[oncedriven]

You fall. The impact of cannonfire, in your arm, your leg - it will be over too swiftly to really feel it. Your aether is already strained, aand in these last moments, Shiva forsakes you in the end, leaving you naught but the foolish girl you always were -

Everything begins to fade. But before it does, you hear the faintest sound of a voice singing, and a feeling of warmth, carrying you away...

----

You wake slowly, resisting the very idea, resisting the logical conclusion that if you wake, you are alive. Your final summoning was not the act of one who sought to live.

Voices, accented but indistinct. The flow of conversation, and almost familiar the way it lilts. At first, you can't place it, but when one of the voices registers as more masculine, it resolves into a familiar sound.

Ah, Aodhan. Of course he would be the one to hover at your bedside. You are not sure why you expected anything less. Damnably stubborn as he is, unsatisfied with leaving you to the solitude and weight of your sins...

The familiar voice grows agitated, asking something of you that you cannot make out, as the fall claims you again.

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[oncedriven]

When you wake again, it is more thoroughly, with more awareness. The air feels thin, even to your mountain-adjusted lungs; it reminds you of the Churning Mists, the skies above the treeline where trees somehow yet grew, where you always felt just a little short of breath until you forgot to.

You take a deep breath, and then another, without opening your eyes. The sheets you're on are the sort of rough-spun that's common to hospitals and sickbeds. That is, all in all, a logical place for you to end up, though you don't feel anything more than phantom pains where injuries should be.

You're familiar enough with how shedding Shiva's form also sheds her injuries - that you were even able to walk out of your battles with Aodhan and then Ravana is testament to that - but you could swear that you still remember the impacts of the Garlean cannons. You'll be remembering them, always, for...

However long the rest of your life stretches out, from here. The thought of it does not especially have you rejoicing. What are you to do, from here? Your sources of guidance have gone silent; Shiva because she was you (nothing more and nothing less, in the end, than your own desires), and Hydaelyn has not spoken for many long months. A year, perhaps more, you've naught counted particularly closely, since she was never aught more than a murmur after you found the Shiva inside yourself.

Now you have nothing, not even a crystal of light to serve as touchstone. Feeling more exhausted inwardly than you do outwardly, you push yourself into a sitting position and open your eyes.

It isn't Ishgard, the way you'd half-feared. It isn't anywhere you recognize; certainly not the floating Allagan islands you last recall. There is too much light, pouring in multicolored windows, a high ceiling that reminds you of -

(There was an Ishgardian Orthodox church, in Falcon's Nest. It's presumably still there, dug out from the ice and snow once the Holy See decided to reclaim the town. You remember it only through a child's eyes, ever turned upward while the rest of those attending the service bowed their heads.)

"Ah! You're awake!"

The voice is familiar, but not quite right - you swing your head to look at the speaker automatically, and for a moment something catches in your throat.

But a long habit of biting your tongue catches you from your mistake - the man sitting in a chair beside your bed, wrapped in an embroidered robe, the shoulders set with round epaulettes and the sleeves long and dangling, looks almost like Aodhan. The hair color is the same at a glance, though darkened towards the tips of his ears, and the overall shape of his face is the same - but the cut of hair is wrong, feathered and framing his jaw where you're used to seeing it pulled back.

It isn't your friend, who looked at you with such understanding. You would know those eyes, a light gold not unlike Hraesvelgr's. This man's eyes are too dark to be alike to Nidhogg's, not nearly pink enough but a closer color to rust, but it's that insight that makes you somehow confident that the fact that his face is similar to Aodhan's is not simply because he's only the second viera you've ever met.

"Where am I?" you say, because it seems the most important question, because how am I alive is a question that has to wait.

"Lemures," he says, and when your expression must make clear that that means nothing to you, he hesitantly adds, "The sky continent of Lemures, over Meracydia."

Meracydia. His homeland, near enough the entire world away.

"Fool," you whisper, forgetting you have an audience. "Damned fool. I wasn't worth that kind of salvation."

[oncedriven]

Ruaidhri ava'Feol is the elder brother of Aodhan, and you can see something of their commonality the longer you speak with him. That particular measured quality, the calm acceptance that kept Aodhan anchored even in the face of terrible revelations and war - you see it in his brother and wonder which of them it came from first.

Ruaidhri hasn't seen his brother in six, steadily approaching seven years. He didn't know Aodhan was even alive, because six, steadily approaching seven years ago...

Aodhan told you, that his people practiced the consumption of dragon's blood with an entirely different context from that of the Ishgardian heretics you once led. (Never again, now, even if you desired to.) Aodhan told you - told Hraesvelgr in your presence, rather - that they were descended of a willing offering, made by the true Bahamut to the tribe of mortals that lived alongside his brood.

Approaching seven years ago, the primal Bahamut fell to earth, and screamed a song of vengeance that rang across the heavens - not unlike the song of Nidhogg himself.

And so seven years ago, his children, even here in distant Meracydia, heard him, and cried out for vengeance in turn.

And those who had once been protectors turned claw and fang and fire against those who had once been their kin.

Ruaidhri is sparse with the details. You have not told him that you know well the carnage a dragon attack leaves in its wake, that you can imagine it even without the aid of his words. There is enough horror there without you adding to it by telling him of Nidhogg's war.

"In a single night, the world went mad," he says. "And since then, we've been picking up the pieces."

"I come from lands where a shard of Dalamud fell," you tell him. "My homeland, once green, has been trapped in eternal winter ever since. I know well how much that single night destroyed."

It is not the same, but Ruaidhri nods as though it were. "Some have returned to their senses since that time," he says, "but for many... It was too late. So many of our people died. For years, I thought that my brother had been one of them. And now, you appear, fallen from the heavens like a gift, and..."

And murmuring his brother's name in your sleep. You say, choosing your words carefully, "He is alive. I have no doubt that he will be well. Aodhan is the strongest person I have ever known."

Strong enough that he need pray for naught, you do not say. Strong enough that his prayers could move mountains if he wished it.

Stronger than you, broken-hearted girl, will ever be.