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]

This is, in many ways, the one you've been dreading.

Emet-Selch, for all his flaws and griping, is easily convinced, because not only do you know who he is, but he knows who he is. His compatriots...

Well. You don't know if there is anything to be done, for Lahabrea. The idiot's been carrying a piece of auracite around in his pocket for ten thousand years, and it has worn him down and twisted him like every other. If you're to have any chance of putting him to rights, you're going to need the help of the others, and a crystal that you just have to wait to have wash up upon your shores.

Perhaps you can get Emet-Selch to fish it out of the lifestream for you.

But you can only face those problems one at a time. And in this case - you've prepared yourself as best you can.

And so he does not catch you unprepared, the shadow of a figure in white robes, his hood up and a red mask - such as you can only remember him wearing like this - on his face.

You tip your head. "Emissary."

He tilts his own at you, a faint hint of confusion on his features. "Strange, to need no introduction. Though hardly unexpected, given my comrade's recent preoccupation with you."

"I should hope he's been preoccupied," you say. "Twould be embarrassing otherwise."

The night is brisk. Dravania is a harsh land made harsher by the recent Calamity, the winds colder, though not so cold as they will be by the time they fall upon Coerthas. You are near the border of Sharlayan, or at least what Sharlayan once claimed, now lost to the wilds. In the morning, Sohm Al will cast its long shadow over you.

Elidibus will not draw arms against you - not in this, your first encounter - so you continue onwards, allowing him the sight of your back. The goblins haven't fully taken the valley and the remains of the city for their own yet - the wild beasts and broken bridges own the most of it. The small encampment to the north is not yet torn apart by cheese wars and Quickthinx's prophecies.

It's impossible to read him beneath both hood and mask, in the silence of your trek. You continue down onto the old Sharlayan paving, until you find your objective, or at least the first piece of it.

"All the tasks you claim are before you," Elidibus says, "and yet here you are, righting an aethernet shard in a forgotten city."

"Who is to say this isn't one of them?" you ask. The dead aetherstone tilts as you set it into its base. "Teleportation magic is one of my specialties, after all."

You breathe deep and channel deeply of the well inside you, funneling it into the blue crystalline. It lights and lifts under your fingers.

Elidibus says nothing, until you turn to him and say, finally, the pale blue light casting just enough light that shadows climb across your face, "I lay claim to the Fourteenth Seat, as the successor of Pandora, who left none."

Elidibus says, "There is no Fourteenth Seat." His voice is cold. If you did not know him - in so many shapes, in so many times - you would miss the way it almost quivers.

You say, "The Seat of Azem, the Traveler. It is mine by right."

"It was abolished," Elidibus counters. "Azem betrayed us in our hour of need." There is definitely tension in his voice now.

You say, "I claim it. If you want to debate my claim on the merits, Emissary, by all means, but you uplift fragments of the other seats to your numbers for less. But the only other with a claim has recognized it."

"Hydaelyn." There's no small amount of hatred to the name.

You say, "So you remember that much, at least."

[oncedriven]

He doesn't flinch, physically. But his aether tells a different story, threadbare and barely held together. Elidibus is a person who barely has an identity at all, a soul who has dipped in and out of the aetherial sea too many times.

You say, "I remember your name, Elidibus. We were friends, once - not you and Azem, but you and I. I know what you have given up for your duty, and I am not asking you to put it down. I'm asking you to let me help."

Which is true at least so far as the Final Days go. But you can get to kicking his ass back and forth along the border between worlds later.

Elidibus stares, then takes a tiny step back. And then there's the twist of space, and he vanishes.

You look at the aethernet shard as though it has any opinions to offer, and sigh. "I knew he had a predisposition to cut and run, but honestly..."

Well. Back to it, then.

[oncedriven]

You take your time in the ruins of the Sharlayan colony, which does not yet deserve the name Idyllshire. Gobbiebooms play havoc around you occasionally; you ignore them and focus on your task.

Occasionally some wildlife has a go at you. You usually trade back and forth with Zero on it, get her used to working as part of a team. As your partner.

Aethernet shards and even aetherytes don't actually be open to the sky to function; it's just preferable. You tuck your slyly reestablished network into the shells of buildings, under the shelves of the cliffs.

Last of all, you put one just shy of directly outside Matoya's door. It's at the limit for how far you can put one aethernet shard from another and still have them connect up - and it is connecting up, as you stashed the other one away on the upper side of the cavern's landmass, where Matoya would have no reason to think it was related to her specifically even if she did notice.

And you're certain that she's noticed. She's probably been keeping half an eye on you the entire time.

Once you're certain that you've gotten it hooked into the network, you unroll a woolen Steppe blanket and take a seat, folding your knees up like you're a Doman lord awaiting supplicants. Though neither Kaien nor Hien probably has to deal with frogs attempting to sabotage their complicated works of magick on behalf of their hermitic mistress. Not on any kind of regular basis.

A frog appears, before too long. Without getting up, you raise your eyebrows to it and say, "I'm not following you into her cave to meet with her so that the rest of her minions can blow it up behind my back."

It blinks its big eyes at you. There is wobbling. You are unmoved.

You add, "You can also inform her that I know about the Antitower, the source of the Forum's dumbassery, and what her apprentice has been up to lately."

The frog wobbles its eyes at you one more time before hopping away.