pizzicato nunh  [ omnia sol temperat ]

your partner-in-crime. soul of your soul. the sun in the mirror. parallel timelines blurred and shifted when you met this man, and you know with an odd kind of certainty that he is you - or - another you, another miqo'te traveling the same path. you feel as though you've known him forever. come blood, sweat, tears, you will know him forever.

(home. where he and you and i are, we are home.)

y'shtola rhul  [ the witch and her familiar ]

y'shtola was the first friend you made among the scions, and in many ways she's still the easiest to talk to. one or the other of you will bring up some wild theory about the nature of aether and you'll spend hours discussing it, feeding into each other's energy. you worry for her, though. that one day she will unearth a truth which kills her. you suppose that makes you a hypocrite, but... that means you need to look out for one another all the more, don't you.

she figured out your draconic heritage through contact with true dragons, putting into context the curious amount of your aether bound up in your eyes. your artificial nature became apparent in azys lla, but mercifully, to her, your personhood is hardly up for debate. every miqo'te has their secrets, some more than others — but goodness knows she's curious. for your part, it's a relief for you to be able to discuss it with someone both knowledgeable and compassionate.

(she minces no words, for all she toys with them. you've never been a weapon to her. just... a prospect, then a colleague, then a friend. keep hold of her, boy.)

g'raha tia  [ the way out on the way in ]

he maddened you, at first. with the aethersand. playing cagey, testing you, a trickster to his bones. you settled into matching wits. you sketched him from across the campfire. occasionally, you would sit too close, your conversations would verge too close to the truth. you talked about the eyes of men in power, the ways you had learned to deflect them, to redirect them, to be taken the slightest bit more seriously in the field.

(“they have a terminal fascination with mystery,” g’raha had said, “which has the double purpose of keeping them at arms’ length.”

“they do get such strange ideas about men of a certain softness,” you said in reply.)

...partially in your lingering confidence from ultima weapon, partially because you knew cid and rammbroes would have your back, partially because you had come to trust g’raha, partially to make him and pizzicato stammer, you experimented with a pair of fishnets to go with your taking the Red. and wasn’t that an exciting day on the dig site!

but it was a distant orbit you occupied. your trajectory had not yet truly begun to decay — or — not fast enough to catch up with fate. even then, you were still in denial. you would see him again. it’d be, what, fifty years or so? and you’d been designed with the lifespan for it. at that point, you could still ignore the soft litany at the back of your head, men like that do not exist.

k'hrysos  [ the magician ]

your... you hesitate to call her mother, as she has always hesitated to call you son. your maker. a rogue ascian who infused an empty doll with a dragon's essence and some unknown soul, one that burns inside your chest, like a swallowed sun.

she must care about you, though, in her distant way. she murdered a man for your sake, ruined a plan decades in the making, all because a moving part of it had betrayed her trust and your innocence.

after — doma — you wonder if the thought ever crossed her mind, that it might be simpler to let her target go on feasting upon your carcass. a part of you was dead by then, anyway. why did she do that? for you?

(breathe deep through your nose. let the air fill your lungs, then let it pass from your lips. slower. slower.)

opal  [ a glimmer in the vein ]

(krita. krita, listen to me. meet me by our graveside. we have met there so many times before. funny, how the twist of a staircase is holier ground than the grandest cathedral in this rotten city.

do you see it?

are you with me?

good.

that memory... our end and our beginning. let it guide our sword, if you must. let no one else suffer that fate. only, promise me that you'll stay this side of the ground for a while yet, you idiot boy. be careful. love yourself as much as i love you.

in struggle and strife i will still be here. at the highest heights, in the drowning depths, i will still be here. at the end of all things, i will still be here. when your very shadow deserts you, i will still be here. for better or worse.)

haurchefant greystone  [ sunflower, lavender, asphodel ]

for a year you were exploring the shape of a life under the same roof, casually sharing a bed, putting no name to what you had. it felt as though you had known one another forever. the shadows of his cheekbones, his crooked nose, his smile, his smile, curves in charcoal. gods, gods, gods, does it ever stop? it's eating you alive. sometimes you'll still have dreams where you'll be walking along a street in ul'dah with him, in idyllshire, in kugane, planning every possible future, and those are worse than nightmares.

...opal once said men like that do not exist. good men, kind men, who make you laugh, who look at you with shining eyes, and make you feel... just the slightest bit like there might be aught worth seeing inside you. they are a faerie tale, murmured in a soft voice by the light of a midwinter fire. every so often you hear a stray phrase which stirs the old feeling, and you feel the warmth of that distant hearth bloom beneath your skin like spring.

what a curious flower. how deep its tendrils burrow in the tender flesh of one's chest. you know that someday it will be beautiful again, but now it is only splintered ribs, gnarled red roots, crumpled petals, lungs too raw to breathe.

(i thought... no, i knew he was too good to be true. of course i loved him too. gods, what else is there to say?)

ysayle dangoulain  [ baring teeth at god ]

wip

estinien varlineau  [ i can hear the water into the bath ]

wip

aymeric de borel  [ blue rose blooming through the stones ]

in the months after the war, you and aymeric grew close, holding fast to one another through the political nightmare of the restoration. you try to get him to relax, you play his beautiful secretary on occasion. you joke about stealing him away from all this.

(who says that was a joke? not i. he has earned his happy ending, his freedom, so many, many times over. we've been over this, i know. in the inferno of the living, he is a rare draught of cool water. he understands. his heart, it beats to the same broken rhythm. we'll spirit him away with us. you need only say the word.)

niobe  [ bless, curse me now with those fierce tears ]

(your child would have been pale-haired and perfect, too compassionate by half. he would have tried to save the world with his bare hands, wringing dreams from raw aether, if his parents were any indication.

the perfect fool. all trampled idealism. shouldering mountains on his tiny shoulders.

but here he is, eh? a scar in the shape of a boy. our niobe.)

(for all i am not, forgive me.)

ilberd feare  [ dreaming of claws and wings ]

back when the crystal braves first got started, your fondness for ilberd was an uncomplicated thing. dashing, charming, clever, above all else *thoughtful*... there was so much you admired in him. admire in him! you still admire him, for the portrait of who he was is... many-faceted. his betrayal hurt. you won't lie. you understand it better, now, but it still cracked you open in ways you did not expect were possible. a crack in the foundation. something tectonic began on that night.

if you had a family, a homeland, its soul strangling under occupation... and if the only way to get someone, *anyone* to pay it any mind, after twenty years, was through subterfuge... through dealing as much pain as possible to anyone with a heart, to make them listen... then... logically, what else would you have done? who would you have felt safe trusting that secret to?

...at the very least, you owed it to his memory to play by the tempo he set.

(you think of the rage and the pain in his voice, right before he died. it haunts you... and it haunts raubahn, too, you can tell. oh, oh, i want to give Ilberd back to him, if only for a sliver of time, if... if only to say goodbye, if only to give them the chance to bare their hearts to one another. i know it won't help. i know. why couldn't it have gone differently?)

lyse hext  [ lighthouse in the storm ]

a dear friend and sparring partner. your arrangement is casual, stemming from shared warmth in a cold desert night, talks on belief. tactical meetings. her voice spills out so sweetly, laughing, singing, talking, but she never says the same thing twice.

her energy is infectious, spurring you on when you thought your heart would slow to stopping. and you are there for her in the night, when she speaks of fierce love and crushing loss.

(we're all fools hiding behind the faces of the dead, aren't we...? but see how she burns now, though, so brightly, like His star. red is her color, red as sunset, red as blood.)

zenos yae galvus  [ drowning in petals ]

you hate him. you do. he crawls under your skin and burns like an infection. like a parasite. a hot coal which stokes the black fire in the pit of your stomach to blazing. you could tear his heart out with your bare fists. (ugh. he would laugh. he would moan. he would call you the finest monster in his menagerie.) you retch after battle, the first two times you fight him, as though trying to vomit out that sickness.

but you can't, of course. it's a part of you. he wormed his way into your heart.

he is equal parts horror and menace and dance partner. you enjoy what it is you do. the steps of the foil and the broadsword. you pick your battles, you choose causes you care about, or that will let you live with yourself. but you enjoy the — wetwork. more than you would ever care to admit. you relished the terror in that inquisitor's eyes. it made you feel warm inside, a visceral heat, so unlike the fragile, dead shell you live inside.

(but what he did to ilberd's dream was a gods damned sacrilege. rip that passion out from under his skin. it has never been his to bear.)

yotsuyu goe brutus  [ a flower in the violently windy wasteland ]

you reached out your hand at first, and she spat in your eye. you couldn't blame her for that. she took her dignity and her agency where she could get it.

when she returned from the dead, she was your little sister, for the few months you stayed at the doman enclave. you didn't question her story. you'd dealt with similar enough things inside your own self to believe her. besides, why would yotsuyu, who had fought so hard for every scrap of pride, act like this willingly? so you took little tsuyu on walks to see the flowers in bloom, and told her stories of the meanings behind them. often, niobe would run and play with her as you watched from the back of your head, for once acting his age.

she deserved so much better from this twisted world. so much more. you hope she is at peace, now and in the next life, but the thought tastes bitter as moondust on your tongue. she ought to have had a second chance. it wasn't fair. had you murdered asahi when you had the chance, or — had hien listened to you, or to gosetsu, then none of this would have happened at all.

(she only needed someone to understand. she was so much like me, when i was new. and i wanted to see her. i wanted so badly for there to be at least one person in the world, if only one, really to see her as herself, to forgive her. i think it makes sense that isse couldn't. but i'm glad we were there.)

the crystal exarch  [ sure on this shining night ]

much like dalamud, it took the gravity of an impending umbral calamity to drag you back into contact with the crystal tower. you cursed his voice at first. not for your own sake, for it was not so much worse than the echo, but the others were not prepared, and you could not shield them from it.

a stranger grabbed you by the scruff, bedraggled, bloodied, shaking, zenos — elidibus — both of them simultaneously somehow still playing your heartstrings like a fiddle. all you could do was curse at him for what he'd done to the scions, scream at him to put you back, until he struck you with those words which rang you like a bell. the first

you were fairly certain your own life would be forfeit sooner rather than later, at the rate you were burning yourself up. but to prevent an impending calamity? to help ardbert? to see minfilia again? to rescue the others… well, you didn't have a choice but to take that leap of faith.

once you arrived in the crystarium, your suspicion deepened. you kept looking for the city's hidden face, the secret to put the lie to its bizarre network of mutual cooperation. but the startling thing was: there were no secrets here, aside from the exarch himself.

at first you figured he was probably an ascian, a trick of the bastard emissary to wrench the knife in your gut. or perhaps some other figment of regret, like myste, come crawling out of the corners of your mind. which was why he evaded your figuring him out for so long. men like that don’t exist. any resemblance to g’raha tia’s situation had to be either coincidental, or deeply unfortunate. you didn’t get to have nice things. you’d already consigned him to the lost, and the exarch confirmed it. in spite of his sensitivity to your plight, in spite of his methodical care for his city, in spite of your late-night talks, you knew on so many levels that the exarch was only a stranger with an ulterior motive.

...the spring blossoms raising their heads in your chest, therefore, were going to be A Problem.

emet-selch  [ love, love, this i swear ]

wip

elidibus  [ what does it matter how my heart breaks? ]

wip

ardbert  [ high summer holds the earth ]

you were not fond of him, at first. saw a man committed to being a pawn in a game he did not understand — and then of course you learned its stakes. there is a knife in his gut, too, and even a century after his death it is twisting still. gods all damn the emissary. a century of silence… you know you could not have borne it.

you tell him he is free to haunt you whenever he wishes. your eyes, your ears are open to him. he needn't be alone. he scoffs, and says, "but for a brief time alongside my friends and companions, i have always been alone. just me and my echo." (his voice keeps following you nonetheless.)

...a shepherd is alone among the sheep, after all. but there is a kindred spirit here. the spark of his is so, so buried, but it shines a soft and tarnished gold, so very like your own. in the abyss, there is a flame.

(what in the gods' names happened in here)

helianthe  [ the prince and their rose ]

wip

character  [ You ]

peanus weanus

opal commentary

niobe commentary