the sky and the setting summer sun's harmony

[oncedriven]

You breathe. Today is -

(ten, twelve, fourteen.)

Bahamut's song echoes in your ears. You can hear it now, as you couldn't then.

(when's the last time someone called upon you to play that role?)

The memories flicker, twist, as somewhere beyond the sky a red moon cracks open like an egg -

(Thank you, you say to some stranger, whose sacrifice resounds, half a world away. Whose mantle lays strewn across the fields of Cartenau, waiting for you to pick it up.)

You are no dragon. But neither is that dragon who falls from the sky.

"Aodhan?" you hear someone asking, as the crashing outside renews. The madness, the despair. The twisted song of Dalamud, which all of your people can almost hear, even if it doesn't yet beckon them into madness.

To them, you imagine, it must seem that you drift as though you're in a trance, making your way to the doors with a grace that sixteen-year-old you never possessed.

(turn it back, take it back, we can make it better this time - )

No one actually tries to stop you until you're at the doors. Holy child, dragonspeaker child, fragile child.

It's your mother who is the first to act to stop you, of course. A hand on your arm, rougher than anyone else would dare.

(In your heart there is loss. Somewhere in another future, another you lives out another life, through to the end.)

(But the you in this moment - )

You say to your mother, "I'm going out there whether you allow it or not."

"Don't be foolish," she says, and it's more than an admonishment, it's a command. Her grip tightens on your arm.

(Beneath your skin, aether prickles - )

(What would happen, if someone tried to make a primal ou of dynamis?)

You stop only long enough to tell her, "Let go or you'll be dragged. Someone has to stop Dalamud's song."

(When it comes to making things right, you have to start somewhere.)

(Why not here?)

You turn your head away just as you see the shock bloom on your mother's face, and then you begin to walk.

As you'd promised, your progress isn't even slowed by the hand in a death grip on your arm, even as she digs her claws into it. Even as she digs in her feet - even for viera, the kind of ceremonial heels she's wearing aren't great for balance. When you reach the end of her reach, she stumbles half a step after you and lets go.

If you wanted to really be impressive, you could blow the doors off their hinges, you think. That's not the point, though. Golden lights already beginning to float through your fingers, you pause on the doorstep, and shoot a cocky grin over your shoulder before sliding out the double doors like a child sneaking out after curfew.

As soon as your feet touch the ground, the power floats up into you -

With the hymn of a dead world on your lips and the memory of an unmade god in your soul, you step forward onto the air, and become the sun.

The creation of primals is flawed, because they are not - have never been - creatures of aether alone.

Prayer, after all, is a staunch requirement. Belief, faith, whatever it is you choose to name it -

Half a world away (but only half), the primal Bahamut, the rage of Bahamut, roars and screams a song of destruction across Eorzea.

You are but one person. Your voice cannot reach so far, even with the grief of a dead world to carry it. Even if your hope reaches further still.

(For a moment, you imagine you can feel them, those who would hear this song in the tongue it's meant for. Four wyrms with their heads tilted to the sky, to the song only they can hear, the grief that they too bear.)

(Dawn will come, you sing. Not a hope but a certainty.)

A dancer's footsteps, to calm the heart. To draw the poison out and make it something you can fight, something you can kill.

Every hatred, you take, and you swallow it. Fuel for your next steps, across the horizon line, sunbeams flickering in your footsteps and the sound of your voice.

Every hatred, every grief, rooted in love -

(What is the sun?)

(Those who study the heavens posit that it is a great orb of flame, set in a distant abyss, shining its light on all creation.)

You burn, until there is nothing left. Until all that there is has gone still.

Only then do you slump forward, in the silence that follows a battle, strength leaving you with little more than pinpricks of starlight -

Someone catches your shoulder, as you spit up a last few notes of gold, and that's the last you remember.

Comments

[oncedriven]

Even after you rope Venat into your scheme, there is so very much to do. For today, you start the slow work of working your body while you sort out what order to do the rest in.

The first thing you need is help. Help that Hydaelyn cannot give you, locked away in the core of the world, waiting with her nest egg that will bear you to the end. Help you cannot get from the Scions, who are still too green and too freshly hurt by their failure, by their loss. Not even to mention that if you're sixteen, then the twins are eleven, and gifted as they are, naught but students still.

If you look at it that way, your pool of potential help narrows considerably. It leaves you, really, down to Ascians, dragons, and Zero.

Well. Start at the very beginning, as they say.

She doesn't have a name - that puts rather a wrinkle in traditional voidsent summoning. To call a powerful voidsent, you need their name, or at least a means of identifying them, a vessel, and enough aether to catch their attention. You have aether in abundance; a vessel in your own form, with thanks to an old friend, and when you actually bother to reach Eorzea you'll be sure to reach out to her. So you just need a way to ensure that you get the right voidsent in the first place.

Though the Zero of this time has no name, you cannot imagine she has changed. Voidsent are outside the reach of time. So except for that which changed in your knowing her, all that you know of her will still be true.

So you sing. Scythe lax across your knees - never a favored weapon, not for you, but an apropos one - you sing until you get an answer.

Mistress of the ruins. Memoriate. She who is only herself. Oh, bargain-striker, won't you deal with me? I have so much to offer you, whose form remembers her body.

Of course, your bait draws four imps, a hecteyes, two succubi and a gargoyle before you attract her attention properly. To each of those you make yourself quite clear - they're not who you're looking for, so they can either return on their own with a small gift of aether, or be cut down.

They're hungry, always. Most of them take the easy meal. The imp that doesn't is, you'll concede, stronger than the average of their kind, but hardly a match for you, even now.

Finally, she comes.

"You know an awful lot about me for someone I've never met."

For a hot moment at the sight of her, at the all too familiar sound of her voice, you are momentarily reminded that you're sixteen again. But, bravely, you carry on. "But not someone who has never met you. Time travel. It's complicated."

She's skeptical. But she accepts the offer of aether to hear you out, and by the end you think that you've convinced her that you are, at least, not full of shit.

oops it's horny now

[oncedriven]

She's staring at you - not in a bad way, exactly. You're not sure there's anything that could actually prompt a reaction of disgust from the woman used to beings that eat each other for sport. More just taken aback, genuinely confused, like she pulled up a sprout thinking it was a weed and found a whole carrot in her hand instead.

Someday, you'll be free of thinking about carrots.

Finally, she says, "You're serious."

"You can say no," you say. "It has no impact on our other arrangement."

"I simply fail to understand why you'd be interested in such a thing," Zero says, in that tone she has, where she's pulling herself back from a situation because it's something just a bit too close to her real feelings. It occurs to you, belatedly, to wonder if anyone has ever propositioned her before, much less anything else.

'Do voidsent even fuck?' was never something that broke into the list of things you've actively considered researching. While there are plenty of records of idiots falling for some succubus or another (and sometimes even less human-shaped), the matter of whether they experience desire on its own is an open one.

You might guess that, if anything, any lust they might experience is so tied up in the hunger that any encounter ends in one partner consuming the other. And that in turn spirals off to a tangent labeled 'Shiva and Hraesvelgr' in your mind, and really, why is that a recurring theme in your life?

"Because it's you, and I trust you," you say. Zero narrows her eyes in that particular way she has, now, the one that says 'only an idiot trusts voidsent, so are you an idiot?' and for a moment you think you've fucked it up.

But after a long moment she says, "I'm not going to be what you're expecting under my clothes."

"I don't have any expectations," you say. "You're half-voidsent. I came prepared for anything."

A slight softening. "Even aside from my nature," she clarifies. "I was not like other women."

You snort lightly. "There's not nearly as much difference between viera men and women as there is in other races," you say. "You might be surprised yourself."

A glimmer of curiosity, now. She is - was? is-but-partially? - Hyuran, despite her stature (which makes sense, if you've taken her meaning correctly), and you have no idea what other races there were for her to encounter before the end. The First didn't have all of them, or at least not all of them survived the Flood.

Hyur tend to be fairly straightforward, but a bit on the girthier side, from your understanding, as someone who by coincidence or fate has mostly fucked Elezen men. You might have to practice before you're able to take her.

The thought is not unappealing.

Zero says, "Ususally, those who summon voidsent with such purposes in mind get eaten quickly."

"Good thing the only one I'm interested in doesn't like eating people," you say.

Zero hums. There's a dash more color in her cheeks, only visible because she is so very washed out in comparison to most people. She leans forward, now, into your space, like she's testing if you'll flinch. "The only one?"

Your heart beats just a hair quicker in your throat. "I only invite people I trust into my body," you say. "In any meaning of the word. No other voidsent is ever going to be that kind of trustworthy."

Zero leans further forward, her face pressed against the length of your ear, her voice a touch more whispery. "You're a fool," she says. "But you're going to be my fool. I will seal this pact with you."

A proper voidsent pact is sealed with blood. That's true whether it's as someone's avatar partner or anything else.

So you shouldn't really be surprised when Zero leans the rest of the way in and just bites your ear, in the sensitive part of the shell right down by your head, hard and sharp enough that you can tell those are no human teeth. The side of your ear is not the only place where blood is flowing downward rapidly.

You think she's bitten all the way through. You think that if she has, you're going to put an earring in the hole to keep it.

Zero shifts her head slightly, to close her mouth over your ear so that no blood escapes. (You appreciate that there won't be any dried clots in your hair.) She sucks gently, pulling not only the literal blood from the wound but the figurative, sucking a thread of aether out of you into herself to sustain her presence in this world. You breathe the smallest flutter of a sigh and lean into her body as you feel the pact transmute and settle into place, knitting the two of you together. One of your arms wraps around her waist.

After a few moments of this, probably when the wound in your ear has clotted enough not dribble, Zero detaches herself. She doesn't make any move to pull away from you.

Instead, she says, "I don't actually know how it goes from here," and you laugh lightly into the cape over her shoulder.

"Then I guess I'll just have to show you."

[oncedriven]

Even though you've already stepped into it to make the pact, you still have to get Zero out out of it. She folds against, over, into your body, physicality becoming aether connected to yours, your body now her gate into the Source. You can feel her right there, a tickle at the base of your spine, a breath at the back of your neck.

You wonder how much of the sensation of your body she can feel. She's not technically possessing you, not yet, just waiting for your call.

You step out of the summoning circle, just enough more voidsent yourself than when you entered it to feel the difference as it passes over your skin, and then you do the responsible thing and scuff the hell out of it so that no one else can go summoning so much as an imp with it. Leaving a potential open crack to the void, even a tiny one, is significantly more problems than it would be worth. You set up a mop and bucket in the corner for precisely this purpose, in fact.

If it's practically an extended tease with yourself and her, going through the important steps of making sure nothing else follows her through even while your aether is hooked into her and vibrating with the desire to pull her back into this plane properly, well. You enjoy enduring it, feeling your clothes just a little too tightly, a little too intimately. The ache in your ear, just a little too intense to be called dull, is in the same category of hyperawareness.

So you drag out the process just a little, until you can really start to feel Zero building up beneath your skin, a unique sensation in its own right. It's confirmation that voidsent, or at least half-voidsent, can feel desire, because you've never had cause to think of the normally laid-back Zero as impatient for anything else before. Why would she be, with an endless age stretched out on either side of the present moment, in a world where no one dies or is born?

Eventually you call it good, in part because you're not entirely sure that Zero couldn't simply possess you if she wanted it badly enough. It's not a battle you've ever had to fight, not against both an external force and your own self, who trusts her enough that you would probably let her. Will almost certainly let her, at some point down the line.

Instead, you walk, measured pace and carefully stiff, back to your bedroom, and there shut and lock the door and close the windows against any potential disturbances. You take a seat on the side of your bed and undo just enough of your clothing to be interesting, kicking your shoes away from the bed.

Only then do you call her to you, a gentle beckon as you offer a hand for hers, which appears in a gentle swirl of shadows. You feel the change in her presence as she shifts planes.

She's still fully clothed, but the first thing she does is lift the hat from her head and hang it on one of the ornamental overhangs on your bedpost. It's a start, you think.

After a moment's hesitation, she starts on some of the buckles of the rest of her outfit. "I'm unused to wanting things," she says. "I'm beginning to wonder what kind of devil I've aligned myself with, that can tempt a voidsent."

You huff a laugh and reach out for her hand. She gives it to you with a curious look, and you start very carefully taking the glove off. The skin underneath is as pale and strangely un-time-worn as her face, except for a scar cutting deep into her wrist, which - in contrast to human scars - sits with the purple darkness of a bruise, or darker, on her skin.

"I didn't know you could scar," you say.

"A memory of the living," she replies. "I can't, anymore. But these remain."

"The body remembers what the mind forgets, I take it," you say.

Zero nods. You slide your thumb over her wrist - there isn't a pulse as you're familiar with it, and her skin is cooler than almost anyone else you've ever touched. You catch your thoughts wandering towards Shiva - the goddess, this time, not the real one. You still wonder sometimes if her skin was cold.

Zero slides her other glove off and tosses it to the side in a dismissive motion. You underhand the one you're still holding in the same direction. The two dissolve on impact into the black wisps that correspond with voidsent dispersing, and you raise your eyebrows.

"How do your clothes even work?" you ask.

"I've never investigated it too closely, honestly," Zero says. "It wasn't important. They're just clothes."

There's another scar on the back of her other hand, this one just the faintest line of darkened skin at an angle behind her knuckles.

"If you're so impatient, you could have saved time and appeared naked, then," you mutter, pulling at the bottom of your shirt, and to your surprise she chuckles.

"I hadn't thought of that," she says. "Could I? I don't know. I haven't seen my own skin in..."

She doesn't so much trail off as simply stop. You understand. Linear time is incomprehensible. You say, "Something to try in the future. We'll just have to do this properly, this first time."

That tiny smile is back. "Properly?" she repeats, tone just incredulous enough to be mocking, to say is there anything proper about this? and it makes you want her mouth.

So you push off your bed with just the smallest bounce and into her, catching one hand to tangle in the fabric of the cape that's still over her shoulder, and you kiss her.