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bookbornexiv · 3 years

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the sea at the bottom of the sea

(wol and hythlodaeus check out azem’s apartment. warning: unedited and full of shadowbringers spoilers up to 5.5, despite which i clearly retained absolutely zero knowledge of any lore)

You heard it sitting on the docks south of Wright, a fishing rod in your hands and sea-spray salting your dangling feet and the mad cries of gulls in your hair; a story told through mouthfuls of sandwich by one dock worker to another, drifting to you like a thin thread of destiny over the pounding heartbeat of the sea in your ears and in your bones. You were thinking about fish and other such things, you had your eyes half shut to better feel the sun's warm kiss on your face. To better ignore that you should probably be actually doing or preparing for some important duty right now instead. To better forget that there was something you came here to remember.

"There's a sea at the bottom of the sea, and another sea at the bottom of that sea, and another sea at the bottom of that one. But below all of that, if you swim hard enough, you might see a city..."

You can see it now on the back of your eyelids, the shadows of spires and spirals like arms unfurling to welcome you, that city at the bottom of the sea. But you know it's not really a city, that the tale-telling dock workers are right. What looks like a city is just another sea, emptied of water and filled instead with memories so fluid, anyone could be forgiven for thinking them the real thing.

And you find yourself wondering, what's at the bottom of that?

You find, without much surprise, Hythlodaeus waiting in the lobby of the building when you eventually locate it. You fold your arms as you crane your neck back to gaze accusingly into his masked face. You really could have used his help three or four bells ago, at the front desk of the city council, or at any of the departments they eventually relayed you to like a ping-pong ball. At any of the points in time which you found yourself explaining over and over again, to a different face wearing a very slightly different mask, that you didn't have any identifying documents, you didn't have any legal or law enforcement credentials, but all you wanted to know and didn't see the harm in them telling you was Azem's mailing address. A PO box would have been fine. Finally, your patience wearing thin, you had to withdraw and hide in a back alley to surreptitiously make some coffee biscuits on your portable stove, craft a cute little paper box to put them in, and then - wearing your most winsome smile and the Amaurotine robes you'd kept from the first time you'd been run around doing errands here - rocked up to the concierge of the first residential building you could find, intending to say you had a cookie delivery for Azem but you'd forgotten the unit number exactly. To your crestfallen surprise, the lobby is entirely empty of staff and residents alike, and only Hythlodaeus is there, beaming at you in your cleverness.

"I didn't do anything," you say.

"Azem was always moving. When you're never in town and very charming but also very bad at arranging for bills and rent to be paid on time, you can't keep a place for long," Hythlodaeus explains. "Landlords get fed up and somehow Emet-Selch or I would end up with the eviction notice, we'd have to come around to make sure everything was safely put away in storage for the time being... Azem never even remembered how to get to any of them either. You're doing better. Very impressive."

You give him the box of biscuits. You're not sure how he's going to get any use out of them, but he looks delighted anyway, and tucks it carefully away somewhere in his robes.

"Shall we go up? You'll need me to press the lift buttons. You can't reach them."

You also end up needing his help to reach the lock on the apartment door, which you are completely unsurprised to find out he has a spare key to. For a moment, as he fumbles with the stiff lock, you find yourself backing up a little bit, holding your breath, as if that locked door were a rock over the mouth of a volcano already in the throes of an eruption. Later you'll ask yourself why you were so nervous, so anxious, what you were thinking you might see when he opened that door. For now your mind is a blank - one that, mercifully, remains so as Hythlodaeus wiggles the doorknob free and pushes the door open. "Welcome!" he says, brandishing one long arm gracefully to usher you in. "Watch your step. And your hands."

You don't take a step towards the open doorway. "Watch out for what? For cubus? Did Azem keep cubus as pets?"

"No, no, I mean it might be dusty. I don't remember if anyone arranged for weekly cleaning."

You finally let go of that long breath you had been holding. Dust you can deal with. You are the Warrior of Darkness. The Warrior of Darkness. The Warr- You clear your head, nod gratefully at Hythlodaeus and step past him, into the apartment.

It honestly is a bit of a disappointment. If you hadn't known the occupant of this unit to be a person of fairly major importance and influence on, like, an international scale, then you might have thought it pretty neat in a sterile, showroom kind of way. High ceilings and big glass windows and sleepy beige and grey accents on sleek and featureless furnishings, generic abstract paintings alongside boring black shelves on the walls, and lush plastic plants scattered about as if the designer had run out of ideas and just slapped a wall planter here or a flowerpot there to hide chipped varnish or distract from a glaringly empty spot. It isn't particularly dusty, or at least, the recreator of this physical illusion had neglected to include it, so it couldn't have been a terribly integral part of the experience. You wonder vaguely if Emet-Selch - if Hades - had been tempted to improve upon the reality of the past, even for just a little. You imagine him sneezing violently as he walked in, lifetimes ago, planets ago. The hood flying back off his head, him stomping around irritably resolving to do something about it. Does this count as doing something about it? Leaving the dust out of his recreation of a place he would have had absolutely no reason to come back to? Had he been tempted to come back to it?

"I don't know," Hythlodaeus says, as if he can read your mind. "I mean, I know what you're thinking. You're wondering if - if a memory of Azem might be here." There are more closed doors, leading out from this main room; there's a sliding door to a balcony, but you don't see anyone on the other side of that at least. "If everything was remembered into being so faithfully, so perfectly, then surely, you think, one of the most important people in this city should be here too. How could one of the Fourteen be forgotten? By another of the Fourteen, no less?" His masked face tilts to regard you in a way you want to interpret as tenderly, even though you can read absolutely nothing from its smooth, blank surface. "You're free to look. I'll just dust everything a bit and check the bathrooms. You know there's always a pipe leaking or something when you're not around to see to it."

He leaves you, disappearing into a small room which, you assume, is not hiding a snoring recreation of Azem, since he makes no startled exclamation. You think you know him well enough by now that he'd pop back out again, all excited, and wave you over to come look at Azem, if he'd found anything. If he'd found his new, old friend.. You breathe a little easier and muster up the courage to step forward, poke at a stack of books that looked like they were lifted out of the box they'd been stored in and plonked down upon a low shelf to never move again until the next time Azem forgot to settle the rent. You can't actually reach most of the stuff in here, but there's nothing that you actually feel worth taking a second look at, let alone trying to climb the bookshelves for. No portraits of loved ones, masked or unmasked, no trinkets or souvenirs one might have expected of a constant traveler, nothing that looked like a notebook or journal or even a grocery list. Nothing personal. It looks and feels like a place that had been carefully arranged to look homely and welcoming, but in reality is no one's home. You do eventually climb the coffee table and stand upon it, looking around, trying to imagine yourself about ten times taller, to no avail. No skull-splitting flash of light, no rush of memories, no sense of deja vu assaults you as the Echo had seen fit to do everywhere else. This place doesn't mean anything to you. Perhaps it never had.

You sit on the table, shoulders slumping a little, and wait for Hythlodaeus to come back. He looks at you, goes to the kitchen and re-emerges with two cups of tea, although the cup he plonks down in front of you might better serve you as a bath than a beverage. You sit on the balcony together and eat the coffee biscuits, Hythlodaeus pinching each one delicately between thumb and forefinger as one might pick up a grain of sand, and craning his neck back as he lifts it to his mouth so you never quite see the face below his mask. When you look down into the box and find it empty, Hythlodaeus says they were delicious. You remember making six biscuits and you remember eating six biscuits. But you don't mention it. It has been such a peaceful afternoon.

"Did you find what you were hoping to find here?"

You shrug.

"I suppose we can't always find what we set out to find," Hythlodaeus says. "But sometimes, you know, you find something you absolutely weren't expecting or even thinking to find. Sometimes it's something you had no idea could even exist. That's what Azem always said traveling was like, you know? It can happen even at home, but I suppose when you're on the way to somewhere else every day, it happens all the time."

You point out that that unknown 'something' could be something as bad as it could be nice. But, you concede, it's probably better to be prepared for it to be bad, while hoping for it to be nice. Otherwise, you can't imagine that anyone would ever want to leave one place for another.

"That is something Azem would say," Hythlodaeus says with great satisfaction. "You know, I think we never quite managed to meet up here and have a chat like this. It's nice to be able to sit here and talk nonsense together at last."

You look at him, wondering if a crack might have appeared on his mask somewhere, if something in this city is programmed, triggered, coded to unravel the minute someone finally acknowledges who you are and who you were in the same breath - the new old you, the old new you. You can't say in words what exactly you're expecting. Perhaps you'll hear your true name, Azem's true name, perhaps even spoken in Emet-Selch's voice rumbling from the speakers in the walls, from the waves high above the city's spires. Perhaps you want the city to crack and crumble and fall to pieces around you, only to reveal the true city at the bottom of this remembered city, the city at the bottom of the bottom of the bottom of the sea. Perhaps all you want, every time you return here, is to truly be home.

"I'll finish your tea, if you're not going to drink it."

Hythlodaeus puts the cups away when he's done, wipes the crumbs from the empty box and deposits it gently in a massive bin. You make a mental note to come back and check on it later. Can a remembered garbage disposal or recycling system actually dispose of very real cardboard, made from real pulp from real branches you cut yourself, a world away - fourteen worlds away? - in the quiet forests of the North Shroud?

"Did you know Azem wasn't going to be here?" you ask him, later, when you've taken the lift back down to the building's lobby. He is poised to see you off, standing at the exact spot he was waiting to welcome you in, long limbs arranged in exactly the same position. You wonder how much longer this simulation of Amaurot, sundered from its creator, will stand, can pretend to function, pretend to live. Is it beginning to loop things to conserve resources? Is that even close to a guess at how this place works?

"I wasn't sure," Hythlodaeus replies. "We didn't open any of the other doors, after all. And Emet-Selch complained about Azem being absent almost as equally as he complained about Azem... Perhaps he felt it was more true to memory not to recreate Azem in Amaurot. Perhaps he was stubborn enough that he didn't care and did it anyway... In the old days I'd have offered to bet on the outcome. But these aren't the old days any more and anyway, you're here."

"I am," you agree. "But I gotta go."

He lifts a hand to wave you goodbye. For a moment your heart leaps to your teeth, but it's not the same way you remember Emet-Selch waving at all. But it's also, excruciatingly, bone-meltingly painful and endearing and wonderful all at once. You don't want to stop looking at him, and you don't want to leave. And yet, and yet, and yet, you find your feet turning and then you're facing the doors, walking out into the emerald light of the sea-sky over Emet-Selch's Amaurot.

It turns out there really is a city at the bottom of the sea at the bottom of the sea, but it's not your city any more.

#been sitting in drafts for 1000 years #now free #ffxiv #i forgot my ao3 login its also been 1000 years

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