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farplane · 5 years

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liberty or death

septembre 2019: morgana arroway, castrum oriens, and a family’s past; a direct continuation of the taste of defeat. ffxiv patch 3.56 & minor 4.0 spoilers. 18+ nsfw. 16,136 words. (read on ao3)

When the smoke cleared, Morgana was alone.

Alliance soldiers swarmed the Wall under orders to ‘secure’ the castrum—some magitek stragglers and little else, after the Griffin’s stunt, but the arrogance had to be expected of the Grand Companies. The survivors from the Resistance were so few that their involvement may have seemed like a particularly vicious nightmare, if not for the bodies of her comrades lying dead everywhere she looked. Her whole unit decimated; dozens of friends fallen not upon imperial swords, but the mad plans of one of their own.

She would have spat on Ilberd Feare’s corpse, if not for the cowardice of such an act when she had not taken his life herself; if not for the fact that there was nothing of him left in the primal’s wake. She would have done a lot of things, if she’d had enough sense to be angry.

Rage was easy; rage had kept her warm all these years when her belly was filled only by gnawing hunger that dragged an unshakeable chill into her bones. But everything around her was senseless, and there was none of it in her mind and in her heart, either. Sense would have taken her back to Little Ala Mhigo, back to what remained of the Resistance on their side of the Wall—and thinking of the wrong side as theirs made her want to choke on the very word—while the Alliance took hold of the castrum. The only thing that had made sense for the last twenty years was acting for the Resistance, for Ala Mhigo; to survive long enough that she may see her homeland freed, and give her life when it mattered if she must.

Now, she could hardly even conceive of leaving the castrum at all; there was no clarity in her mind.

Her son was nowhere to be found.

She’d sent him off, naïve and barely trained, to face a man twice his years—a madman and a fanatic, but a man with more skill than any boy could have ever worked up from almost nothing in a matter of moons. She’d sent him off as an ally, but would that have mattered, to the Griffin? All those who had followed him were lambs for a slaughter, wood on a pyre. If Sairsel was gone, then—

She couldn’t bear the thought of it. The Griffin cutting him down, the primal consuming his body until he was nothing but one voice lost in a current of prayers and dying cries. Every waking hour, her mind worked up some new version of the horrors; every night that passed buried the knowledge, deep into her bones, that she had brought this on him.

Anything, she’d said, and twenty years of rage had made her believe it. Morgana would have done most anything, for Ala Mhigo, but not this. Not giving her son’s life away like it was some cheap coin—and certainly not to summon a primal. She should have seen through Ilberd; she should have seen through the mask of familiarity and recognition in the losses they shared and found how far beyond the realm of the acceptable his plans lay, but she’d been blind, and Sairsel…

She could not let him go. The Alliance settled in around her, making a proper occupation of the castrum, and every day Morgana joined the soldiers on the Wall who gathered the bodies, sifting through familiar faces and those of strangers looking for her son’s. Every day she asked the soldiers who shared this duty with her if they had found him.

My boy. My only boy.

As those days passed, she no longer knew what she could stomach. Would it be better, to find his body as she had found Gotwin’s—something cold and still over which to weep? Or should she be made to mourn him, halfway between grief and the foolish hope that he might have lived, as she had mourned Mathias and Havisa and every last person she had left behind in Ala Mhigo?

Even as the castrum was cleared, she never found an answer. It left her feeling as empty as those corpses, walking as though between worlds. I have survived everything that tried to kill me, she thought when the realm of the living pulled at her. I will survive this, too.

Would Sairsel want her to survive him?

Not even that found an answer in her mind, and it was the emptiness that cut deepest. She did not know what he wanted, what he believed. She barely even knew who he was.

So she lived, for the time being. She hadn’t been able to step outside of the castrum and into East End, not on her own—she could not set foot on Gyr Abanian soil again with no one by her side, not when she had left it with the family she was running to protect. But she looked at it. She sat at the edge of the wall with a bottle in her hand and she watched the sun kiss the mountain peaks and she waited for something that she knew could not come.

Most of the Resistance survivors worked below, deployed to make contact with their brothers and sisters in Rhalgr’s Reach, and the Alliance soldiers rarely spoke to her. Likely a number of them thought her mad. The heavy footfalls on the metal were of no concern to her; they always passed.

But not these. They came near, and they slowed, and they stopped. A silent presence, undeniable. And then her name, spoken in a voice deeper and rougher than she remembered—worn by twenty years and all the hardships that came with them. Her own voice had suffered the same.

“Morgana.”

She turned her head—not fully, her chin only brushing her shoulder, but she hardly needed more. There were too few men like him that she could not recognize even a glimpse of him: the Bull of Ala Mhigo, as fierce and proud as he had been on the bloodsands. His skin bronze in the waning daylight behind him, brighter than in the lights of the arena. He was stronger, wearing more scars, and Morgana was the same; they had both always been the same, and somehow, twenty years had not changed that.

The irony of the same man having taken so much from the both of them was not lost on her, even before she opened her mouth to speak to him.

“Been a while,” she said, sand scraping against her throat. “Have you come to arrest me, General?”

Raubahn took a careful step closer, then another. When Morgana didn’t stiffen or pull a knife on him, he lowered himself to sit beside her. “Not today.”

“You didn’t have to wait until we were both in the Shroud to pay a social call. Little Ala Mhigo was just next door; your little Ul’dahn soldiers knew the way well enough.”

The words were too sharp; they lingered like thorns on her tongue, so she attempted a bitter smile and presented him with the neck of the bottle in a silent offering. If Raubahn remembered her well enough, he had to know she was only abrasive because she no longer knew how to be anything else. I never was all that pleasant back home, either, if I’m honest, she’d said to him once. Some of us are just born bastards, I suppose. It’s only fitting that I had one of my own.

“I’ve been told you were looking for your son.”

“A fool’s errand; he was primal fodder. I need to accept it.”

“He may yet live,” Raubahn said. Morgana didn’t know whether it was a platitude, or something he truly believed. Both seemed unlike him. “He would not be the first to survive being thought dead.”

“And who would that predecessor be? Ilberd?” she asked, snorting derisively.

“So you knew him.”

“Aye, I knew him. Threw in my lot with him.” She shook her head. “I’ve always been a shite gambler.”

Raubahn smiled, melancholy and reserved, as he lifted the bottle to his lips and drank. “I still have never seen anyone lose at dice as many times as I have you.”

“I’m sorry to report it hasn’t gotten better.” Morgana sniffed, drawing her eyes across the rising peaks on the horizon. “I’m still not certain what it is I said that made him take off that mask, but he did. Told me his name and what he’d done. He asked me if I cared, and I said no; I told him it wasn’t turning against a brother when he turned against you.”

To that, Raubahn said nothing, and Morgana did not search his face for the unspoken. The mountains were silent, too, but they did not see her the way he did.

“And now, where do I stand? On the graves of all the brothers and sisters he betrayed, my son among them.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I think I do. The last thing I told him was to go to the bastard. Why else wouldn’t he be here, if not for Ilberd personally making a sacrifice of him? I ordered him—” she repeated, and her voice shook and died in her throat. She snatched the bottle from Raubahn’s hand, drank, and steadied herself, grasping onto bitterness in lieu of sorrow.

That was easier. She watched the mountains still as she poured a few sips’ worth of the alcohol over the edge of the platform, toasting no one.

“It is never easy to command one’s own child in battle,” Raubahn said. “But we give the orders that we think we must, and they fight with their own strength.”

“Right—you have a son, now, too,” Morgana said, mustering half of a smile. It was worth very little.

“I do. Pipin. I came into his life late, but…”

Morgana shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I bore mine in my own womb and you’ve spent more of your life with yours than I did.”

“You didn’t go back to him? After the Coliseum?”

“I couldn’t. When they killed Gotwin, I—I was sure they’d come for me. I couldn’t lead them back to him. And after that, in the Resistance… I saw no point in going back to a child who would be without a mother either way,” she said slowly. That wasn’t the whole of it; she’d done it for herself, too, because leaving him the first time had been so painful she couldn’t bear repeating it. After a time, it simply became easier to be alone, leaving him to a better life than she could have given him.

“Did I ever tell you his name?”

“No,” Raubahn said, keeping his voice gentle.

“Sairsel. His father named him,” she said, wishing that he’d only ever needed this name, and not hers. It might have saved him from being led back to her. “Sairsel Arroway.”

“A good name.”

Morgana could bear to say nothing else, and Raubahn did not dare. He had to know she’d hate it, but he was still gentle and careful in the way he raised his hand to rest upon her shoulder. For as long as his touch remained, she thought of blindly reaching up and taking it, even if she couldn’t even look at him; her hands were heavy in her lap, gripping the bottle so tightly she thought she might break it. Her chest shook from the sobs that she wouldn’t allow to take breath.

Ever so slowly, she shifted towards him, like a quiet tide creeping towards the shore. She drew closer until her knee was against his and she could bury her face in his neck, a fist curling at his thigh. She did not weep, but she shook with sorrow and with rage and with shame, and he moved his hand to her back and said nothing.

“They don’t like us,” said Gotwin.

“Of course they don’t like us,” Morgana replied without looking up from her sword. She swept the whetstone one last time across the blade, blew, and lifted it up. “These gladiators, they’re just show chocobos, and they know it. Their whole purpose is just to fight and die on the bloodsands, and we show up, and we know real battle. Makes them look bad.”

Ul’dahns had been content enough to accept Ala Mhigan refugees within their borders, at first; the coin-lords saw profit to be made on their backs through cheap labour and desperate trade, but the veneer was beginning to wear thin for everyone else not benefitting as the moons turned. The gladiators themselves were, for the most part, most certainly not benefitting from the Ala Mhigans stealing their victories without, as Morgana had heard one of them put it, ‘paying their dues in training.’

She’d almost knocked his teeth out. Had they not paid their dues fighting for their lives when soldiers and magitek flooded their streets, looking to cut down any caught fleeing or resisting the Empire? Had they not paid their dues rising up against a mad king who had already spilled too much blood? Gotwin and Morgana had been raised with swords in their hands. They had paid their dues a hundred, a thousand times over.

“And maybe that sort of talk isn’t helping us all that much,” Gotwin said, his nonchalant irony making Morgana roll her eyes.

“You here to make friends, then? Because I’m not.”

“Not at this rate.” Gotwin threw a cursory look around the training grounds as he stretched, motioning with his head towards the man across the field who seemed hells-bent on decimating the striking dummy making a pitiful stand before him. “What about him, you think?”

“What, the Bull? Doesn’t look like the sort who likes anyone. And they like him even less than they do us.”

Morgana shrugged as she stood, rolling her wrist to spin her sword once. As far as she was concerned, the one they called the Bull of Ala Mhigo had a few damned good reasons to have that air about him. The first being that he was Ala Mhigan; that would be enough on its own, and Morgana figured that she would be just as wild and angry if not for the family that kept her sane. The Bull’s second good reason was that he’d been dragged to the Coliseum in chains to be executed upon the bloodsands—and lived long enough to free himself, but freedom was a strange thing to have without a home.

It was comforting, Morgana supposed, to know that at the very least, she and Gotwin had come to risk their lives on those sands by choice.

She bent to retrieve her shield and tapped the flat of her sword against it, catching Gotwin’s attention. Her body settled into the ease of a battle stance. “Come on, you lazy sod. You can make doe eyes at the Bull after we survive our next bout, and maybe I won’t steal your wife.”

Gotwin was ill.

With a healer for a wife, it meant his life was in no danger, but Havisa had a will of steel, and no amount of miserable begging on his part could convince her to force his body to bring itself back together enough that he could step onto the bloodsands. It also meant that Morgana was to be alone in the arena that night, and that the First Sword of the gladiator’s guild had a scowl on his face.

“I’m going to have half this town up my arse, Arroway,” he said, rubbing at his forehead. His attention was half on her, half on the bright-haired girl—no older than seven summers, by Morgana’s estimate—working on her form two feet away. Mostly on the girl. “Mylla, Thal’s balls, your stance is too narrow. I’ve told you a hundred times.”

“Her stance is just fine.” Morgana made a fist below her navel. “Women have lower root centers. She won’t be balanced right if she widens it,” she said, then put both hands on her hips. “Your arse is going to be fine.”

“You Ala Mhigans don’t understand how I make money. What do you think all these fine people will think, when I announce the Griffin’s Talons and give them a fucking one-legged chicken?”

“I’d say it’s going to be very hard for them to understand a word of your announcing because the little chicken ripped out your tongue,” Morgana said flatly. She clucked for good measure, holding his gaze with a withering stare.

He closed his eyes with a sigh. “Twelve, woman. Do you ever make anything easy?”

“No, man.”

“I’ve a bout set up for a pair and only one fighter. You can count far enough to understand my issue, yes?”

It was Morgana’s turn to sigh, a long and measured exhale. “My brother will fight when he’s well enough, and not a moment before. It isn’t like I’ve come to beg you to pay him regardless of his presence—I’m informing you that I’m here, and he’s not, and I trust your clever sense for profit to make this work like you would with anyone else.”

The guildmaster leveled a cynically tortured expression at her, but Morgana maintained her refusal to offer any semblance of sympathy for a man who made a living training men and women to die in an arena. There was honour in the training of warriors, and no Ala Mhigan would dispute that—and Morgana was under no illusion that she held any moral ground as a gladiator—but she was growing weary of the manner with which he always seemed to want to make it into some sort of great plight.

His gaze drifted to the girl as his mind worked. Morgana snapped her fingers in front of his face.

“I’ve got as much claws on my own as I do with Gotwin. You’ll have a show whether he’s here or not.”

“Aye,” the guildmaster said, a solution forming in his mind. “And gil will flow.”

When Morgana saw the bout rosters an hour later, she swore, but he wasn’t anywhere to be found to hear her complaints. Another hour later, she stood inside the tunnels with the crowd roaring beyond the gate at a skinny Miqo’te in a desperate bout with a coeurl. In the tunnels on the other end of the arena, five prisoners with crude weapons awaited the battle that would cost them their lives, hoping for freedom in the blood of their would-be executioners.

She could have been their sole executioner, and it wouldn’t have made a difference, but the guildmaster—and the coin-lords who sank their gil into the Coliseum, and the people who gambled for a piece of their fortune—had wanted his show.

The Bull of Ala Mhigo stood beside her, silent as a monument.

“Is there anything I should know?” Morgana asked as the Miqo’te avoided a sweep of the coeurl’s claws with a somersault where his hands did not even touch the ground. “Or would you rather keep all your old injuries and blind spots to yourself so that I don’t know your weaknesses if we ever have to face each other in there?”

“I can already tell you yours. I’ll cover them.”

She snorted. “Is that so?”

“You can’t turn your head fully to the left; your brother compensates by staying near your flank. He’s left-handed, so you favour back-handed—and underhand—strikes more than the average warrior. It makes you unpredictable, but your momentum tends to be more rooted than mobile.”

Morgana didn’t know whether she was irritated or impressed; her meager smirk seemed to be reaching for the latter.

“All right, so the quiet one is good at watching.”

“I rely overmuch on charges, you might have noticed from the name,” he said, a tinge of self-derision to his voice. “It is a gamble; I’m left open as I recover. My heavy strikes are slower. Also, I took a Garlean arrow to the knee on the Ilsabard border,” he said, tapping his right leg. “I still can’t pivot quite well enough.”

“You might pivot better if you didn’t rely on kicking anything and anyone that gets close,” Morgana said, her mood alleviating.

“So you do watch, too.”

“I see. There’s a difference.”

Rather than countering the statement with a request for clarification, the Bull nodded as though she made a fair point. He moved a hand, palm face-up, in front of Morgana. “Raubahn.”

His hand was far larger than hers, but Morgana always kept her grip heavy. When they shook, it was as equals. Out in the arena, the coeurl fell limp, and the Miqo’te dropped to his knees with the relief as the crowd cheered for him.

“Morgana.”

The gates opened, and the light swept in. The Bull and the Talons of Ala Mhigo stepped onto the sands as equals, and left the arena bloodied—and as comrades.

“How did it go?” Gotwin asked, propping himself up in bed with some degree of misery. Two summers ago—perhaps even less—Morgana would have joked and called it his deathbed, but now, the words seemed violently out of place.

“Well, as you can see, I’m still standing with all my limbs and all my innards where they should be.”

Gotwin managed a pitiful little smirk. If he’d voiced his concerns, it would have earned him Morgana’s ire, but she knew as well as he did that sending her off to fight on her own when they always fought at each other’s side had worried him. He didn’t have to speak to show his relief; placatingly, Morgana gave his cheek a pat, and that was that.

“I know you’re just fine; if I still haven’t figured out how to kill you, no one else will,” he said. “I meant the bout.”

“There’s not much to be said of it. Our wise and respectable master wouldn’t let me fight it on my own, so I didn’t,” Morgana said, giving a resigned shrug. “The other one didn’t die, so maybe he’s just going to replace you, now.”

Gotwin wrinkled his nose; Morgana thought that he was about to sneeze and took a gratuitous step back. “Who’d he saddle you with? He better not have used the Griffin name on an Ul’dahn, that slimy—”

“Don’t get yourself all worked up; Havisa is going to skin me alive. It’s fine. I was the Griffin’s Talons on my own. Our good friend the Bull of Ala Mhigo already has a good enough name for himself.”

“The Bull?” Gotwin said, raising his eyebrows. “I suppose it makes sense. How does he measure as a partner?”

“The man’s seen his fair share of battles, that’s for certain. Mhigan through and through. I was surprised; he’s watched us fight enough that he knew where to stand with me. Crowd seemed to like it.”

Gotwin nodded. Before he could manage even one other word, Havisa appeared behind Morgana as though she’d stood there the entire time. “It is far too late for you to be up chatting,” she said, pointing a threatening finger at her husband. “And you should know better than to encourage him.”

“He looks like the very image of health. Only slightly green,” Morgana said, almost at the same time as her brother spoke.

“I’ve been confined to this bed and to sleep all day, my love. Surely—”

Havisa’s tone cut without mercy. “Surely you can yet rest through the night.”

“Tomorrow,” Morgana assured Gotwin, relenting. “I can tell you both about the match then.” Around Havisa, she softened; her smile was easy as she glanced down at her, pressing an affectionate kiss to her sister-in-law’s cheek and drifting towards the doorway. “Do as your wife says and get better, Gotwin, or I’ll end up getting paired with a bull for the rest of my fighting days.”

Morgana had spent too long in the woods; every night in Ul’dah made that abundantly clear. The way the stones drank the warmth of the sun to carry it through the cold desert night choked her, and the starry sky above appeared only to be a patch of something that she knew to be greater, endless—and there was irony in that. Under a canopy of trees, the Shroud only lived up to its name, the sky veiled by branches and leaves as far as the eye could see; how could it ever compare to the endless expanse that arceed over the Gyr Abanian mountains from one side of the horizon to the other?

Thanalan was more open than the forest could ever be, but she still felt trapped. Through the worst nights, a voice inside Morgana urged her desperately to go, to leave, to move, even if no part of her knew where. She had enough of running; her family had enough of running. There was nowhere else she could—not should—be, and she laboured to write those words into every fibre of her being.

The nights laboured to erase them: they swept over those certainties as though she had traced letters in sand, and replaced them with the voice of a babe. How many times since parting with him had she been woken by her own imaginings of Sairsel’s fragile whimpers? They had no place here, but she still found herself, far too often, on her feet in the darkness of her cell before she was even fully awake—only then realizing, as her skin touched the cold stone, that the voice she heard only screamed within the confines of her own mind.

She ached for him, for those searching eyes, for his tiny little mouth and his primly pointed ears. She missed the smiles that he had begun to form. Being without him was an emptiness worse than even the losses that sundered her time and again since the fall of Ala Mhigo, a weakness she’d never known to endure; how could she have? Most of her life, she’d scarcely ever imagined herself as a mother, and even less so a mother without a home whose son belonged neither quite in the Wood or at all in Ul’dah.

The emptiness, she usually shook away through keeping awake under that night sky, with a sword in hand as though it might serve to slice her a larger few patches of black velvet and shining stars. A practice sword, but a sword nonetheless.

As she crossed over from the gladiator barracks to the training grounds, Morgana found that she was not the only one to have had the idea: the rhythm of repeated strikes against a striking post echoed through the night’s silence long before she was even inside the practice arena. Hesitation bound her for two faltering footsteps—she had no particular desire to share the space with an Ul’dahn from whom she kept as much distance as they did from her—but she pressed forward, more desperate to wear herself to sleep than she was for complete solitude.

It should have come as no surprise that it was her countryman, rather than any other gladiator, going about thrashing the striking post. Morgana could have pretended that it was exceptional Ala Mhigan discipline, that it did not go as deep as it did—but she knew better than that. Not one of his moves took shape in the manner of real training; there was no pursuit of betterment in the way he unleashed his ferocity upon the post. A man who trained was sharp, focused. He was lost in it.

Morgana watched him for ten moves. At first, she studied his stance: narrower than when he truly fought, his torso angled nearer to the post than it needed to be. In a real bout, an opponent might exploit the change in his balance, use his momentum to topple him over—but this served him to unleash the full weight of his titanic frame, and the striking post shook in its foundations from every blow. Despite the chill that fell over the city at night, he’d elected to train bare-footed and shirtless; the low torchlight turned his sweat-slick skin to gleaming bronze, shadows shifting across the lines and curves of his muscles. As the tenth blow fell, she regarded the tense set of his jaw, the stiffness in his grip, and decided to step forward.

“You fight two bouts in one evening and it still isn’t enough to sate your appetite?” she asked, leaning against a pillar and crossing her arms over her chest. “Rhalgr himself couldn’t find a more eager pupil.”

Raubahn met her lofty tone with an exhale that could have been a scoff as much as a sigh, glancing fleetingly at her—down, up, away—before directing his attention back onto the striking post. “I do not sleep,” he said, his voice clipped by the effort of his next blow. “Not as long as there is any fight left in me.”

The weight of the unspoken weaved between his words could have choked a man. Morgana understood, and he knew without looking—without knowing her outside of the intimacies of shared battle—that she did. Those truths hung in the air, silent but for the thunderous rumble of his blows.

“It’s a marvel you haven’t exhausted yourself into an early grave.”

He grunted, spinning on his heel to deliver a backhanded strike. “Early, timely; I no longer know.”

“Don’t wonder. It’s a waste of energy better spent on surviving.”

“And you?” Raubahn asked, finally falling still. “You’re here.”

“I’m here,” Morgana said. She pushed herself off of the pillar, crossed the length of the arena until she was standing with a hand against the striking post he was abusing, eyes steady on him. “So maybe you could wear yourself down on something that will actually hit back.”

Raubahn considered her, his gaze trailing down again; this time, it caught on the pink scars at her throat, and there was something strangely disarming in that. She preferred the brief new flashes of interest that he now allowed himself, looking away before crossing the border into impropriety.

“Fists or swords?”

Morgana smirked and turned on her heel, going to a basket full of training staves and tossing Raubahn one. “The Mhigan way,” she said as she took up a staff of her own. She spun it in one hand, tossed it to the other, and clasped both hands around it behind her back to stretch. “It’s how my mother taught me to fight.”

“See, I learned with pitchforks. One of my friends did not have very good aim,” Raubahn said, pointing to three small, puckered scars just above his hip bone. Morgana grimaced. “It was real swords and the military after that.”

They both gravitated towards the center of the training grounds, walking onto the square: a mat fashioned with supple leather and filled with enough straw to feed every chocobo in Ul’dah upon which the gladiators fought and wrestled, replicating the unsteady ground of the bloodsands without the mess. Morgana angled her body away from Raubahn’s and widened her stance, knees bent, whipping out the staff at her side in a perfect line that followed the length of her arm. She said nothing else to him; battle spoke more clearly than any of her skill with words ever could.

“Let’s dance, then,” Raubahn said as he fell into his own battle stance.

It had nothing of a dance, even before the first strike: they circled each other as predators might a prey, and grace was forgotten when Raubahn charged forward.

His staff cracked against Morgana’s as she blocked with both hands, the force of the blow reverberating through her arms like coursing lightning. She pushed back against him and snapped her right hand up to strike the side of his jaw with the end of her staff. Startling, but not meant to injure; it was only enough to make Raubahn shake his head, blinking against the surprise. Morgana smirked, but the Bull of Ala Mhigo was not stunned for long.

What ground she’d gained on him, negating the advantage of his reach, he took in driving her back with three heavy thrusts. She parried the first two, and the third struck her shoulder with a burst of pain. A few strides were enough for him to push her nearer to the edge of the mat, but her back heel was firm against it, and his next move was familiar: the gamble of a charge, the sheer mass of him a weakness as much as it was a strength. It could have sent Morgana stumbling out of the square, but she bent at the waist to dodge and snapped her staff across his back, twirling away as he grunted.

Her breath rose quicker in her lungs, the thrill singing in her veins. They traded harsh blows, more evenly matched than she’d expected, both blocking and parrying and striking back with such efficiency that the clapping of staff against staff echoed in an erratic rhythm through the arena like a fall of rain. Pushing in, pulling back; driving each other away only to come charging back in.

Morgana had Raubahn down on one knee after a series of quick thrusts that allowed her to get close and rob him of his balance when he tried to kick her back. His staff rose to block her two-handed cleave, and he jabbed a fist into her gut, knocking the wind out of her lungs. Precious seconds flew from her hands as her shoulders drew in, even as she did her best to mitigate her body’s instinct to curl in on herself; she tightened her core expecting another punch that didn’t come. Instead, Raubahn knocked her staff up and away from his, then swept it under her feet.

She landed on her left shoulder with a groan, breathing hard. Raubahn was back on his feet; his towering frame moved towards her, but his staff did not meet Morgana’s throat yet. Curling in on herself, legs swinging, she rolled away and got up on her feet in a low stance, one steady leg extended for balance. When Raubahn made to strike her again, she shot up to stand and snapped away his staff, bearing down—he blocked—then spinning away with a flourish to deliver a backhanded blow, her body sideways, arm extended—

It didn’t land. Raubahn was closer than she’d judged, and he caught her arm under his left, pinning her by the sheer force of his body. Morgana felt the proximity of bare skin on skin like the crack of a whip, or that coursing lightning, looking up into his face as she tried to wrench herself free. He had her firmly trapped, her grip tight on her staff but useless; she panted and watched his parted lips, felt the rise and fall of his chest against her.

Perhaps he expected her to surrender then. He raised his staff, aiming for her throat, but Morgana raised her empty left hand to catch his wrist, fingers as hard as claws. She held firm even as he pushed against it.

“Did you think you had me?” she asked.

“I have you,” Raubahn said, low in his chest. His gaze moved down to her mouth, too, and for a moment it seemed like he might say something else.

Morgana had no intention of turning this into a conversation. She tipped her chin up and her head back—carefully measuring the angle, prudent enough to remember that this was only a spar—and smashed her forehead into Raubahn’s nose. This time, he didn’t just grunt; he swore.

He might have stumbled back, if not for how closely they were locked together, but his grip faltered, and that was enough. Morgana ripped his staff from his hand and her own arm back from his hold, moving away from him and tapping the two staves together with a smug, satisfied look. The rush coursed along her spine as Raubahn stared at her, a hand covering his nose, and smirked in astonished delight.

“Bleeding?” Morgana asked.

Raubahn sniffed, wiping his knuckles underneath his nose and glancing down at his hand. “No.”

“Probably not broken, then,” Morgana said, nodding her head to one side. Her time in the Coliseum was turning her into more of a performer than she’d ever been: she twirled both staves in her hands, sweeping one arm up around her head while the other curled around her torso, and fell into a low stance with both staves poised like twin swords after one last spin. “I’m not done with you yet.”

Pleasantly resigned, Raubahn readied himself with his fingers curled into loose fists and, this time, waited for Morgana’s first move.

She had no intention of fighting him with both staves—they were far too long for dual wielding without some degree of encumbrance, and putting him at a disadvantage could only end up boring her—but she delighted in seeing him take a defensive position. He displayed surprising agility, for a man his size: he met the new onslaught of her blows with quick, careful dodges, bending back and deflecting Morgana’s staff with the palm of his hand. His breath came sharp when she struck his side, muscles tensing.

It was a good show, for a matter of seconds, but Morgana found that she wanted to fight him up close again. She tossed his staff up with another spin, caught it in her sword hand, and discarded both staves together off the side of the mat.

They shared a grin—sharp and wild—and met each other with hard, unforgiving blows. Morgana punched and kicked, avoiding a jab at her flank at the cost of taking a hit against her chin that snapped her head back. The surprise destabilized her, and she was forced to crouch to avoid a sweep of Raubahn’s arm meant to grapple her. She sidestepped, moving in a sharp line towards his back, and kicked the side of her foot to the back of his knee.

He didn’t even bend long enough to touch the mat, but it was enough, lowering him closer to Morgana’s own height: she wrapped an arm around his neck to keep him in a tight headlock against the side of her chest. It forced him to bend forward, one arm falling around her waist to try and grab her elbow and break the hold, his other hand closing around her wrist—Morgana was relentless.

“Thinking of surrendering yet?” she asked breathlessly, a smirk growing on her lips. “Or shall I put you to sleep?”

Raubahn growled without anger, the rumble of his voice spreading through Morgana’s arm. Her legs were beginning to tire and shake from keeping herself so firmly grounded, but she held firm against his thrashing—pointless, she thought, and then everything escaped her as she felt the stunning blow of his fist against her head. It was little more than a tap, far from the ferocity with which he might strike in a fight to the death, but her hold weakened on him, and he was quick to seize the advantage.

Before Morgana could act, Raubahn pressed himself against her back and seized her in a stranglehold, strong arm tight against her throat as he lifted the other hand to the back of her head, locking her tight. Morgana struggled, at first, thrashing as he had against her, hands grasping his forearm. She elbowed blindly, meeting only hard muscle, as her lungs burned and her breath came less and less.

All she had to do was tap his arm, she knew, lift two fingers in his eyeline to show her surrender, but bowing to her own obstinacy was something she still hadn’t learned to do. Her fingers tightened against Raubahn’s arms, and she did all she could to shift her balance and throw him to the ground. His feet barely even shifted on the mat.

Morgana dropped to one knee, then the other; Raubahn followed her, lowering himself—she felt his stance shift, his feet widen behind her. Was he in reach? She let her hands fall from his arm, and breath returned to her by an inch as he loosened his grip for an instant, thinking her defeated.

She could move, if barely. Blindly, she reached a hand back, fingers meeting Raubahn’s ankle: opportunity. All at once, Morgana shifted all her weight to the side, pushing back against him, and moved her shoulder behind Raubahn’s leg. She wrapped an arm around it and pulled.

The beginning of his fall tugged her back, but he let go before slamming down onto the mat. Morgana twisted and took hold of his leg, lifting his lower body, smiling even as she took desperate, gasping gulps of air. His back arching up, Raubahn tapped his hand twice on the mat, and Morgana relented. He stared at her as he lay still on his back, breathless, and she burned.

Not for the fight. She thought she ached for more of it, more of that thrill, more of this exchange, but she realized as she stared at his mouth that it was more of him that she wanted, the warm and hard press of his body. It didn’t have to feel like a war—not against him, not with herself.

She had been fighting for so long that she no longer knew how else to be, but she tired of it. So she chose not to fight; not this time. She moved before she could hesitate—from where she knelt on the ground by Raubahn’s feet, she drew nearer, swinging a leg up over him to straddle his hips, and leaned down to crush her mouth against his.

Raubahn lay stunned for one heartbeat too long, as though he’d had his head smashed into something far harder than the mat; Morgana was moments from surrendering and pulling away when he tangled his fingers in her hair, his hand a steady weight against the back of her head. In this, they both cultivated little grace, too—too weary to delve into the art of it, too fiercely animated by the thrill of battle. Morgana was harsher in her kisses than she was in a friendly bout of sparring, and Raubahn matched her ferocity in a way no one else had.

They met in the bruising of that kiss as sharply as their staves had. Morgana slid her tongue against Raubahn’s as though she could still taste the fight on him, fire spreading down her throat even as she breathed through her nose. When she pulled back, her breath nearly hissed.

“All right?” Raubahn asked, concern flashing over his face as he propped himself up on an elbow to lift a hand to her neck. For all his strength, the touch of his fingers was delicate against her throat, not daring to brush against her scars. “Did I go too far?”

Morgana smiled, sharp-edged. “I’m fine. Don’t patronize me.”

She laid her hand over Raubahn’s, then slid it over his wrist, grazing the taut skin of his forearm with blunt nails. He shivered; his fingers trailed down the expanse of her neck, down the hollow of her throat, down her chest. His grey gaze burned hot on her—every inch of skin, of muscle, of the shadows falling over her scars—and she found that, for once, she delighted in the flames.

When she kissed him again, there was no surprise: he met her lips open-mouthed, breathless and wanting. Her hands ran down his bare chest; his slid up under the thin fabric of her tunic, thumb running along the bottom of her ribcage. Finally, Morgana shivered, too.

Raubahn pulled back to look at her again, meeting her eyes before letting his gaze fall, unreserved in its trajectory and its hunger. He kissed her neck, and Morgana almost expected him to bite, to at least graze his teeth—that would come later—when his lips parted, soft and warm alongside the scratching of his stubble.

She rocked her hips down against his—and, Twelve, she could feel him, almost as well as her own arousal, slick and hot between her parted thighs. Her fingers, bent like claws, slid ever down Raubahn’s chest as she rolled her hips and drew a moan from him, rumbling low in his chest and against her neck. One of his hands fell to her thigh, holding her as an anchor, and Morgana decided that she’d had quite enough of the fleeting touches. How did he seem to know so well how to make her want?

When she shoved his shoulder down onto the mat, it was almost as though they were yet fighting, but Raubahn did not resist it. He kept on touching her, hands roaming torturously, eyes watching her as she moved. Morgana sank her teeth into her bottom lip to keep herself from keening as he pressed a thumb between her legs, tugged at the laces of her trousers so roughly she half expected to snap them, and shifted her weight forward on her knees. Courteously, Raubahn helped her push the fabric down as far as it would go while she unlaced his trousers.

He stroked his thumb against her while she wrapped her fingers around his cock and pulled it free, her breath fluttering in her belly. And, gods—he almost smiled when she swatted his hand away, head bowed, one hand coming to steady herself against his chest.

“I won,” Morgana breathed, rocking her hips down and along his length, still held in her hand. It made him heave a shuddering breath. “I get to have you how I want.”

Raubahn’s eyes briefly moved to the sky, letting out a sharp sigh, before his mind could grasp at the words again. His voice was low and rocky with want. “Is that how it works, then?”

He tried to push himself up again, and she kept a heavy hand on his shoulder, keeping him against the mat. The same unspoken rules had carried over from their spar: he had only tap against her arm, against the mat, and she would end it. But he didn’t. He only drank her in as she spoke.

“Tonight, it does.”

Morgana held Raubahn’s gaze as she moved a hand down between her legs and pressed two fingers inside herself, only dipping in—though she stole one greedy second of pleasure in curling her fingers up. Her fingers came away slick, even more so than she thought. And she was glad for it; she wanted to waste no more time.

Morgana took him in her hand again, flicking her wrist for two slow strokes that spread her wetness from her fingers. Raubahn’s fluttering breaths made his chest shift under her other palm; she spread her fingers wide over the hard planes of muscle as she leaned forward onto her knees and guided him inside her and lowered herself onto him, ignoring the shaking of her thighs. Her fingers curled in against his skin.

After how their fight had ended, Morgana’s breath still burned on its way through her throat. The rest of her was afire, too, with her muscles trembling and her skin burning everywhere Raubahn touched, even in the cool night air. And she ached with want, ached from the fullness and the pressure and the pleasure, and her mind spun as she took in all of him. It stopped her thinking; there was only Raubahn, strong and hot and just as lost as she was, and the same urgency with which they had fought. She didn’t need to catch her breath. She only needed to move.

One of Raubahn’s hands slid up her torso as she began to rock her hips, trailing over the now-fading white lines on her belly, feather-light along her ribs, and up to cup her breast. Morgana pressed her own hand over his, fingers tight, and sighed as she bowed her head. He breathed hard, too—quiet, at first, thrusting up shallowly in time with her rhythm, until she grabbed his wrists and leaned forward to pin them to the mat. Her heavy kiss muffled his moan, and she tightened her thighs around his hips and kept on holding him down. When her fingers slipped between his, linking their hands, she drew back and rose up again.

She steadied herself with her palms on his chest and rode him hard, losing herself in the sensation. When Raubahn shifted his hips as she pushed up, her body jerked, and her voice cut through the air with something that was half a gasp and half a moan; he drew that sound out again, pleasure rippling through her in waves.

That was when he pushed himself up so that he was almost sitting, one hand coming to Morgana’s lower back to hold her close as he stole a kiss from her lips and rocked along with her quickening pace. She hadn’t expected—or wanted—the closeness, but now she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and her chest brushed against his and—gods, she only needed a little more.

Morgana brought her other hand down to where they were connected, feeling him move in and out of her against the tips of her fingers as she rubbed tight circles over herself, familiar and sure, building up until all her pleasure crashed over her—and she moaned and dug her nails into Raubahn’s shoulder as she let the tide wash over her, jerking and clenching around him. He groaned against her throat.

“Morgana,” he breathed, taut, as her rocking slowed. His fingers tapped twice against the side of her thigh—surrender.

She lifted herself up shakily and reached back, fingers touching his wrist as he quickly finished himself off, his moan muffled against her shoulder.

They fell still for a while, panting and trying to catch their breath, sweat cooling on their flushed skin. Morgana felt the echoes of her pleasure still coursing through her, slow and tingling—it was a pleasant enough sensation, but she was wearier than she’d expected, and she was now simply aching all over.

She considered kissing Raubahn again, didn’t, and readjusted her trousers as she pushed herself up to stand. She was a wet mess, and she appreciated his courtesy of warning her before he could make it worse.

“Do you need a rag?” she asked.

“I’ll, ah, manage,” Raubahn said as he tucked himself back into his trousers.

Morgana didn’t look at him or linger long; the last time she had, she’d grown too fond, and ended up with a bastard in her belly for her trouble. She busied herself with getting the staves back with the rest of the training supplies as Raubahn got to his feet, just as worn in his every movement as she was. When Morgana glanced his way, he seemed to want to speak.

“Should have no problem sleeping now,” she said before he could.

Raubahn chuckled, weary and bashful. “Aye. It was a good fight.”

“It was,” Morgana agreed, soft enough to smile. She made no more ceremony of it, and went on her way back towards the barracks, putting a hand on a pillar to spin back around to face him again. “Maybe some other time I can let you have a chance at winning.”

They were too evenly matched, and they both know it; it never was about chances. It wasn’t about the fight, either, but the exchange—clearer in battle for the both of them than it could ever be in words. Still, Raubahn smirked; it was the last thing she saw before she showed him her back again.

“I’ll not let you get bored of me,” he said as she left.

Morgana slammed her hand down on the table so hard that it rattled and shook the dice. “Bugger me to the seven bloody seas!”

As though to taunt her, the pale die—the one that looked like whitewashed bone, the greatest pain in her arse—tumbled off the edge and fell to the floor on the exact number she had needed to win.

“Has anyone checked whether she’s got a knife?” someone asked from behind, through the drunken gathering of gladiators watching the game and waiting for their turn.

Before she could think that that was a splendid idea, the brute force of Gotwin’s arms wrapped around her middle and dragged her up from the box upon which she sat as though she weighed nothing—and she was pound upon pound of drunken muscle.

“Come on, now, Mora. Time for a bit of water, hey?”

“I ain’t paying you a single gil,” Morgana shouted over her brother’s shoulder as he steered her away from the table, “you mousy little shite!”

Gotwin patted the side of her head. “All right, all right; ‘s’all just dice. Keep that anger for the sands.”

In one last act of petty frustration, Morgana stiffened her body and clenched her fists before slumping like a ragdoll. Gotwin laughed quietly and set her down. Morgana hadn’t drunk so much that it changed her speech or made it hard to stand, but it slowed her senses enough that she didn’t see the oncoming blow when she turned to face her brother: he flicked her nose the way he did when they were children. She grimaced and swatted at his hand.

“Stop antagonizing everyone here. We have children to feed and it won’t help us if the whole barracks hate us.”

Morgana’s already foul mood soured even further. “Children,” she scoffed, shoving a hand without much force against Gotwin’s chest and lifting the other to her forehead. “A child, you mean.”

“Mora—”

“No. Let’s not. I hear you, loud and clear. I’ll endeavour to make friends,” she said, like chewing up a particularly bitter plant.

Gotwin crossed one arm over his chest and scratched the thumb of his other hand under his chin, considering; he had an air she didn’t trust. “And here I thought riding the Bull was making you—well, I wouldn’t dare use the word ‘happy.’ Less prone to bouts of unsanctioned violence?”

Morgana's fist connected with Gotwin’s shoulder harder and quicker than she could think to deny it. “Don’t you ever say those words to me again,” she said as he rubbed his shoulder. Then she stopped, took a breath, and didn’t look him in the eye. “How did you bloody know?”

“Maybe I’m a fate-walker. You don’t know.”

“You’re too thick to be a fate-walker.”

“Well, now you’ve hurt my feelings,” Gotwin said, then smiled as he nudged her shoulder. “Look—I only want to know that my little sister is doing all right. This happening for the right reasons?”

“The right reasons?” Morgana asked, grimacing; trying to keep her temper from jumping straight to insult. Usually, it was easier with Gotwin than most, but tonight everything gnawed at her. “I’ll thank you to stay worried about the things that do concern you. Gods, really—we have no home, the woman I loved is living under the fucking imperials’ heel and I’ve no way of knowing whether she’s dead or suffering, and my son is being raised in the forest by strangers. Should I be singing and dancing just because of cock?”

Gotwin coughed awkwardly, his gaze catching on something behind Morgana and growing uncharacteristically furtive. “You’re right; things are… difficult. I’m sorry. I, ah—I should go check on Mathias.”

It wasn’t like her brother to try and shuffle away, but the way he raised his hand, only half-up in a cursory greeting, gave her a fair idea of the source of Gotwin’s discomfort even before she turned and saw Raubahn. She didn’t know how to read his expression—amused? curious? offended?

No. He wasn’t the type. And neither was Morgana the sort to play coy, to ask how much he’d heard and try to make her words less crude; especially not when she’d drunk enough to give even less of a damn than she usually did.

“It’s good cock, for what it’s worth. And everything else,” Morgana said, flat but genuine.

It made Raubahn laugh: that low, rumbling chuckle of his that she was finding she enjoyed more every time she heard it. “I am glad to hear that I please.”

Morgana smirked and began to walk alongside Raubahn, slowly and aimlessly, away from the common room; the rowdy revelry growing more distant with every step felt like a blessing, as did the cool breeze blowing in from outside.

“Not gambling with everyone else?” she asked.

“I won enough for tonight. I like to step away while the winds still blow in my favour.”

“Twelve, I wish I could say the same. About a lot more than dice, too,” Morgana said unenthusiastically.

They ambled towards the training grounds without even noticing where their feet took them—somewhere they both felt a bit more right. Morgana leaned her shoulder against a pillar and crossed her arms, and Raubahn stood with his back against it next to her. “Did you have a woman, back home?” she asked. “Children?”

Raubahn shook his head. “No time for anything that lasted; not with the fighting. Between the mad king and the imperials, I never settled anywhere long enough after I left home.”

“Where?”

“Coldhearth,” Raubahn said, and Morgana gave a few slow nods. She saw the distance in his eyes, the pull of memory, of three words she didn’t hear—liberty or death—and then he found her again. “You had a woman and a child back home?”

Morgana forced her jaw not to tense. “A woman, aye. She stayed behind for her parents. I haven’t the faintest idea whether any of them is still alive, naturally,” she said, sighing. “But my son was born on this side of the Wall. He’s only seen a few moons.”

“Congratulations,” said Raubahn kindly.

“There’s not a day that I don’t regret bringing him into this world,” Morgana said like cold steel, the words coming unguarded. “I still think, some days, that I should have gotten rid of him while it was still time, but I couldn’t do it to his father. Kind man. Better father than I am a mother.”

Raubahn said nothing—without the dulling of the alcohol in her veins, she might have actually found some concern as to whether he reserved some judgement for her, but he was silent to listen. Half-drunk, she understood that.

“He’s Elezen, my boy’s father. I’m—I think I’m afraid that Ala Mhigo will mean nothing to him,” Morgana said, all in one breath. She felt like she was drowning in her own blood as she turned her head and looked at Raubahn. “Not the imperials’, or the mad king’s—our Ala Mhigo.”

“It is our duty, no? To keep it alive until we can set it free.”

Morgana breathed in once, then out. When they had first come to Ul’dah, she could almost fool herself into thinking that the cooling rock and sand in the evening air smelled the same as it did in the Lochs, but it faded away a little more with every passing day. Now, all she could taste was dust.

“I don’t think it exists anymore.” Morgana sniffed, then made to turn away. “Anyroad, you didn’t have to listen to me whinge. We all have better to do.”

Raubahn caught her wrist, his grip loose enough that she only needed slip her hand out to break free. She only stopped and looked down at his fingers, thick and strong and scarred. A hundred fights, a hundred battles, and there would always be more.

“Would you rather we remain strangers?” he asked. “I want to know you. We have all lost too much not to gain something here.”

Morgana kept her gaze down as she shifted her hand to touch her fingertips to the inside of Raubahn’s wrist, and he let go; she trailed her fingers down into his palm and released her grip on her own guard. When next she let herself be tangled up in his arms, Raubahn kissed the scars on her belly as though she had taken them in battle—understanding that it was a battle all on its own.

Morgana did not like to be cornered, and even as a gladiator, she did not like games; not when she felt she was more a piece than a player. She also knew that any man who hid in hoods and shadows were not the sort with whom she would do business—but this was not business. It was, after all, a game.

The rules were that the pieces were not to think too strongly on the blades that gleamed at their backs. That they were to face forward, towards the wall of the dead end in that dirty alley near Pearl Lane—and not to think, either, of the blood they might have to shed if they touched their own swords. The rules were what the hooded man conjured out of thin air, weaved out of nothing but words. For now, Morgana decided to obey the rules, but it did not stop her skin from pricking, her senses to feel like a sharp edge cutting against the bonds of sense.

And Gotwin—Gotwin was so calm he seemed to be standing before a stall at market to haggle with the fishmonger. No—calmer by far; back home, haggling was a serious and fierce affair.

“My friends have taken quite a liking to you on the bloodsands,” said the hooded man after dispensing with the understatements that he only wanted to talk and that this was simply good business. He twirled a dagger in his hands, pressing the point against the pad of his forefinger so that it dipped into the flesh without piercing it. “The bravery. The ferocity. The, well, beauty—a little something for all inclinations, eh?”

Morgana bit down hard into her cheek; she’d heard some of the stories. Gladiators in the beds of the rich of powerful. Handsome rewards, surely enough, but not the sort of arrangement that could be broken after agreeing even only the once.

“You and your friends may gaze upon us as much as you’d like,” Gotwin said evenly, then, more pointed: “on the sands.”

“Ah, of course! And that, yes, that, we shall. We’re all quite excited for the next real bout, aren’t we, lads?” the hooded man asked the thugs behind Gotwin and Morgana, drawing their assent. “Only two more nights of waiting, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Waiting for what, exactly?” Morgana asked, too sharp. “For us to lose on purpose so that your ‘friends’ can win their bets, or else you start breaking fingers?”

The hooded man laughed an absurdly enthusiastic laugh that bounced off the stones of the alley. “Oh, no. No! Quite the opposite, of course; why would we ask you to lose when you give such a show? Thal’s balls! That would be a waste.”

Morgana glanced furtively at her brother; the wariness she saw in his eyes was the same she felt. “Out with it,” she said.

“So you want us to win?” Gotwin said.

“Precisely,” the hooded man said, snapping his fingers and pointing to Gotwin in the same motion. From inside his robes, he produced a fat-bellied pouch, heavy and clinking with coins as he held it gingerly in his palm. “It’s quite the fight, you see, the Griffin’s Claws butting heads with the Bull of Ala Mhigo.”

“Like two wild dogs from the same pack tearing at each other’s throats,” said one of the thugs—the one behind Morgana. Not two summers past, she might have tried her chance with breaking his foot; now, she did not move a muscle, taking the blow.

“Ha! Well said, my lad.”

“So it’s two against one,” Gotwin said. “We’re confident in our chances.”

“Quite. However, you see, there is a… well, calling it a complication makes it seem so unpleasant, you see. A mere bump in the road. This Bull—your rival, I’m sure—has been making quite the stir since he arrival. A great and inspiring start, coming in chains and fighting his way to freedom out of his own execution; depending how you look at it. But my friends, they look at it rather from the side of all the losses his triumphs have been causing. It’s not a fight to the death, this bout, is it?”

“Guildmaster wouldn’t risk some of his best gladiators on a weekly match,” Gotwin said. His calm was beginning to fray; Morgana could hear it in his voice, in the tension with which he spoke.

The hooded man clicked his tongue almost mournfully. “But it is quite an unfortunate profession, is it not? Even in fights that are not meant to lead to death. Swords are oh-so-dangerous. Injuries catch.”

Shaking his head, the hooded man opened the purse and showed Gotwin and Morgana its contents: a pile of gleaming coins with, sitting atop it like a crown, a small phial filled with clear liquid. Something flipped inside Morgana at the sight; for good or for ill, she did not know.

“You need not count for yourselves: there is enough to house and feed sweet, young Mathias for, oh, nigh on a year. In better conditions than that gaol of a gladiator barracks, that is for certain.”

Morgana took a step forward, stopped only by her brother’s outstretched arm. “Keep his name out of your filthy mouth.”

“I did not mean to offend,” said the hooded man, raising a hand. “Merely to place an offer. You take this purse—let us call it your advance winnings—and use the little bottle as you see fit. It’s so versatile; genius work. Coats a blade nicely, or causes muscle weakness when ingested. Use your creativity! So long as the Bull, ah, loses quite squarely.”

Silence was all that met his words, and then Gotwin and Morgana both spoke at the same time:

“Or what?” asked Gotwin.

“And then?” asked Morgana.

She gritted her teeth and kept her eyes ahead rather than face the weight of the shocked look Gotwin tossed her way, holding the hooded man’s gaze even though she couldn’t see it. In the shadows, she could see his smirk crack through the veil of secrecy as the purse disappeared from his hand with a flick of his wrist.

“And then it is done, you already have your coin, and we never have to speak to each other again. Simple, no?” The hooded man spread his hands, the palm of his empty hand held outward. It might have been more of a peaceable gesture, if not for the dagger he still held between his fingers. “We have come to do business, not to make threats.”

“Where I come from, drawn swords are a threat,” Gotwin said icily.

“This is not Ala Mhigo,” the hooded man said. “This is Ul’dah, a nation of honest word and prosperity. My lads protect me on behalf of my friends; nothing more, and nothing less. If I were to make threats, I would speak them.”

Morgana could not stop her eyes from searching for the purse. Something inside her was recoiling, so violently it seemed like a serpent’s bite spreading poison through her veins, but she had been a sellsword long before she ever became a gladiator. A sellsword knew to behead those doubts swiftly and permanently. Knew to listen to the loudest surety—and in this world broken by the imperials, she only let herself look upon one path.

“Doesn’t matter. We’ll do it.”

“Morgana,” Gotwin hissed. “What has gotten into you?”

“I’m thinking of our family. Your son,” she hissed back.

The disdainful way with which her brother shook his head at her said more than words ever could. Watching Gotwin’s silent disagreement and the way Morgana stiffened, the hooded man clicked his tongue as though out of some misguided sense of pity.

“If I may—” he began loftily.

Gotwin cut in, his voice sharper than every blade between them. “You may not,” he said, taking hold of Morgana’s arm before she could think to reach for the pouch. “We will have nothing to do with this; find yourself another assassin. We are going.”

With that, Gotwin turned. His fingers found the hilt of his sword again, and he placed himself so that he and Morgana stood back to back, the way they so often did in the arena. Had she been more enthusiastic about their escape from the situation, she might have liked their chances; as it was, she thought her brother a noble fool.

“Now would be the time to make your threats with those pretty words of yours or let us be on our way,” Gotwin said to the hooded man without looking back. His voice was a rock, utterly immovable.

Morgana could only watch the hooded man and ready a riposte. With blades at their backs, disagreements—no matter how dire—always became secondary. Under her unforgiving gaze, the hooded man merely raised a hand to rub his jaw, lips pulled taut, and heaved a sigh.

“I cannot say I am without disappointment,” he said in that pale, milky voice of his, only thick with dishonesty, “but I have no threats to make. You are, of course, free to go.”

The thugs lowered their blades with the efficiency of automatons, and Gotwin reached a hand out to take Morgana’s wrist and guide her along with him so that she did not have to turn and show her back to the hooded man and his swordsmen until they were well out of reach. They picked up the pace and walked side by side, then, but they did not stop, and the breath did not seem to return to Morgana’s lungs until they were outside the city walls.

With that breath, she spat, “What in the seven hells is the matter with you?”

“With me?” Gotwin thundered back, his voice high on the wind. “Have you gone completely mad? Have we so wholly lost ourselves that we must play butchers for some rich shite’s convenience?”

“We are sellswords, Gotwin, I’ll remind you.”

“I have not forgotten. Not the way you clearly have forgotten that we still adhered to some gods-damned principle. The same rule since we were not even twenty: no job that does not sit right with even one of us.”

“You’ve gone blind with righteousness if you think we can afford to spit on a way to keep Mathias safe and fed for a year,” Morgana snapped.

“He is my son! I will not have him fed with blood. Not like this; not in his name.” Gotwin shook his head, his anger and disgust so bright in his eyes he seemed animated by the Destroyer himself. Still, he took a breath, and stepped closer to Morgana in the sand. He was no softer, but his voice had quieted. “Do you think I don’t see the way you look at Raubahn? How he looks at you?”

Morgana’s blood went cold. “Is that what this is about? Some bloody tryst?”

“It is about everything,” Gotwin said, low. “My concerns do not begin or end with him, but I can’t ignore it, either. You and I, we—”

“I am not weak,” Morgana said. She felt the rumble of her own voice low in her throat, raw with the disappointment of having to remind him, of all people.

“—swore to look after each other, and—” Gotwin’s voice trailed off, shock written into the lines of his face. His shifted a hundred ways in the space of a moment, through years and seasons, before it settled on understanding. “Mora. Caring for someone who isn’t your blood isn’t weakness.”

Morgana could only speak the way she lifted her shield to block the force of a blow. “It is a waste,” she said stiffly. “And we are fools if we let anyone get in the way of doing what is best for our family.”

“What is best for our family,” Gotwin began, breathing through his nose between the words as his anger took on an exasperated shape, the tension unyielding, “is that my son does not carry a legacy of cowardice and cruelty. I will endure every indignity the Coliseum holds for us, but I will not sully the name I’ve given him by stabbing a brother in the back for coin.”

He made to turn away, thinking he finally had the last word, but Morgana had never been content to let him have it.

“They only need one of us to agree. I don’t need your help to slay a bull,” she said coldly.

Gotwin turned towards her, his eyes no longer a fury. All Morgana could see as he stepped close to her was disappointment and disdain; both cut deeper than a rage she could meet. His anger, she knew: for nearly a quarter of a century, through the days of peace and storms, she had coaxed it out of him, quelled it, matched and outmatched it. But this—seeing him look at her as though she were lesser by her own design, no longer his equal—she knew not how to endure.

“Mark me, sister—” he never called her sister; Mora, Mo, bo-turd, but never sister, “if you go through with this, you will lose this family. May these cursed fucking sands be my witness.”

Gotwin ground his foot in the sand, making a trace in the ever-shifting soil of Thanalan; it would fade away, covered by the wind and dust in due time, but the scraping sound of it seemed to have been made to last in Morgana’s ear. She could almost taste the salty air of the Lochs on her tongue, fresh against the way the desert winds burned in her nose. Her brother said nothing else; he simply walked away, back towards the city gates, his shoulders taut and his fists still clenched. Morgana’s own fists were curled tight, so badly that even her short nails dug half-moons into the flesh of her palms.

She stood shaking in the desert for a long while—as though her body knew that, within a matter of days, she would be kneeling in these very sands again, cradling Gotwin’s corpse in her arms as the jagged slash in his throat wept crimson.

“I’m glad he’s alive,” Gotwin had said the morning after their bout, smiling with relief even as he rolled his bruised shoulder gingerly. “Even if he thrashed us.”

“He shouldn’t have been able to,” Morgana had said. It was easy, how things always mended between them, as though it were Havisa’s magic knitting them back together like broken skin. It had always been so. After everything, Morgana had moved on to sullenness. “Two of us and one of him. And I know all his tells.”

“Like he knows all of yours?” Havisa had teased.

They hadn’t spoken of the hooded man’s offer; not the three of them together. Surely Gotwin had kept no part of it from his wife as he always did, but Havisa hadn’t let it change her demeanour. She had met Morgana with grace even in the aftermath, and sometimes that grace involved beaming as her sister-in-law snapped a bloodstained rag in her general vicinity.

“I don’t tumble like I fight,” Morgana had said, inaccurately.

“Regardless. You were fractured, you two. Could see that well enough. Any wall breaks easier when it is already cracked.”

Morgana had sighed. “How is it that someone as thick as you married someone as wise as her?” she’d asked Gotwin, and Havisa had blown her a kiss.

Now, Havisa’s hand was clutched in hers so tightly that the metal of her wedding band dug into Morgana’s very bones, and the absence of her smile left her face empty and ashen with loss. They moved as specters through the empty hallways of the barracks, without shape and without colour, death clinging to them and to their silent footsteps.

It was like fleeing Ala Mhigo without the burning, without the screaming, without the violence; all of it was contained to the arena, where the ringing of blades was buried under the weight of hundreds of empty cheers. Hundreds of discordant voices calling for fabricated chaos.

Morgana had not understood quickly enough that it was the fabrication that was the deadliest—deadly, and unfeeling, and greedy enough to claim the life of a man who had survived too much to die like a beast. Everything was too empty without Gotwin, too stark. She walked with a hand on the hilt of her dagger because every part of her rejected that void, knew that something would fill it—and if it wasn’t Gotwin, it would be something to cut down in his stead. To protect his family.

The quickest way was far from the arena, through the hallways at the edges that lay open at the sides to let the air in. Familiar paths twisted so in this new realm for her to inhabit that they had become unrecognizable, their shadows spreading further, the low moon shining pale as a sickness on the stone floor. Morgana should have known to see the training grounds with the eyes that had guided her to them so many times, should have known that this place would not be empty—that they were as haunted as Morgana felt.

The Bull of Ala Mhigo was meant to be nursing the trifling wounds he’d suffered against the Griffin’s Talons, but that did not mean there was no fight in him. He was alive, and so it burned within him, a flame that could dim but never fade. Alive. The very sight of him leaving the training grounds made Morgana’s blood boil, when she realized that it was Raubahn and not some shade of an assassin; by then, she already had him pinned to a pillar, her forearm like a metal bar across his shoulders as the point of her knife touched his throat.

Her blood boiled, but she barely felt it. She was cold all over.

“Morgana,” Raubahn said gently. Even in the dark, he saw the smear of blood on her cheek—she’d pressed her forehead to Gotwin’s, touched his throat, stained her fingers with his blood—and Havisa’s haggard visage, Mathias asleep in his mother’s arms with his cheek pressed against her shoulder. “What’s happened?”

Morgana wanted to growl and bite and scream her throat raw, but it was Havisa who spoke. “They killed him. They killed Gotwin,” she said, not meeting Raubahn’s gaze.

His shock shifted quickly into a frown, deep with anger. “Who?”

“The ones who want you dead,” Morgana said through gritted teeth, pressing harder against his shoulders. Twelve, she wanted to draw blood. “He denied them. You denied them. And now they’ve slit his throat to make him pay for it.”

“Morgana, I—”

“Do not say my name. Don’t say a fucking word.”

“Don’t go,” Raubahn said, fierce even when he was quiet. “Don’t leave it like this. We’ll fight—we’ll fight them together, and they will answer for Gotwin’s life with blood—”

Morgana’s anger echoed on the stone. “If I stay, one of us dies!” Her fingers curled in the fabric of Raubahn’s tunic, clenching tight. She looked into his eyes and spoke: low, this time, and cold. “I would have done it without a second thought. I would kill you a hundred times if it meant my family could be whole.”

She almost jumped when Havisa’s hand touched her arm, gently pulling her back. “Mora, please,” she said quietly. Morgana didn’t know whether it was urgency or kindness for their countryman; when Havisa looked at Raubahn, her expression was unchanged. “She took his remains to a man named Osferth in Little Ala Mhigo, for safeguarding. If you would—”

“I’ll see to it that his last rites are taken care of with dignity; I swear it,” Raubahn said gravely. His gaze shifted from Havisa to Morgana, always drawn to her even in anger and grief. “Where will you go?”

“Where we’ll be safe,” Morgana said. The gods still had many a lesson for her—the next that nowhere was safe, and especially not the Shroud. Not for them.

She reserved no more farewells for Raubahn, her only goodbye the lowering of her blade. Still, he reached for her, and the point of her dagger was at his ribs.

“Watch your back, Aldynn. Stop making yourself weak. They won’t stop until they have a dead bull and my brother will have died for nothing.”

A great many deaths were for nothing. There would be no meaning in Havisa’s, either, and in what Morgana would believe was Mathias’.

The only meaning was for the living to find, and Morgana and Raubahn lived.

“One of your men addressed me as ‘Captain,’” said Morgana, forgoing the effort of a prior greeting.

Raubahn paused with his hand still in the bowl of water on the table before him, droplets of water falling silently from his chin. He looked at Morgana, straightened, and shook his hand out.

“I was told you’re a unit captain,” he pointed out.

“Aye, I was. But there’s no unit left. I was standing at their last rites—half of them without a corpse to recover—when it happened,” she said, then pushed out a bitter sigh as she realized that she sounded like she’d only come to complain. “I didn’t know the Immortal Flames of Ul’dah,” (and here Raubahn could only shake his head at her mockingly lofty tone, strangely fond), “recognized the ranks of the Ala Mhigan Resistance.”

“The Ala Mhigan Brigade does,” Raubahn said.

That gave Morgana pause. “Oh.”

Even after twenty years, Raubahn looked at Morgana as though it were still habit giving him the expectant look on his face, as though he knew something else was coming. “So?” he asked after a moment. “Shall I tell my men not to show respect for your position?”

Morgana sighed again. “No,” she said, and moved closer—Twelve, she hated the sound of footsteps in the castrum; metal, always so cold, so high, the same way it had resonated when they were dozens running through Baelsar’s Wall—to splash her own face with water, dragging a hand down over her eyes and mouth. “I wanted to thank you. For letting us honour our dead our way.”

“I insisted.”

The ripples in the water distorted her reflection, but Morgana was still startled to realize, as she looked down, that she looked like half a corpse herself. She set both hands down on the table and bowed her head.

“I really thought the Alliance had come to put those of us the imperials or Ilberd didn’t finish off in chains,” she said, wiping the water from her nose as she looked back at Raubahn. Suddenly, standing still and empty-handed seemed like an imprisonment in itself. “Still find myself thinking maybe you ought to.”

This time, Raubahn’s silence wasn’t one of waiting for her to speak; neither was he meeting her hard edges with a smile. His usual gravity was tempered in something else, something that seemed to make his frown pull at the scars on his face; when he spoke, she realized it was the harshness of his own ghosts.

“Would it make you stomach any of it better if you were in chains?” he asked. “The guilt? The betrayal? The pain of knowing you’ve failed those you love?”

Morgana wanted to say yes, but the words wouldn’t come.

“It does not,” Raubahn said. “It makes the shame no less heavy to bear.”

His face was a silent storm, dark with a memory that was still too familiar, too fresh. In the quiet that fell from his words, Morgana’s eyes drifted down: down to his neck, to scars she didn’t know, so strikingly similar to her own; to his left shoulder, uncovered by the black cape which now lay draped over the back of a nearby chair. His gaze followed hers, but he said nothing.

“Ilberd was a bloody fool,” Morgana said stiffly. “Rip off a bull’s horn, and he may well gore you with the other.”

Raubahn managed a small smirk and an exhale, scraping the palm of his hand against the stubble at his jaw. “Would you believe me if I told you I’d come to hope I would not have to face him in battle again?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Morgana said. She moved closer to him and raised a hand—not to what remained of his left arm, but to his throat, fingers barely touching the old scars that, to her, were new. “Neither would I understand it.”

“Had it come to it, one of us would have died.” He held her stare, looking for familiarity, for understanding. “I did not wish to be the one to end his life.”

“You got your wish.”

“Some wish,” Raubahn said with a bittersweet smile, laying his hand over hers at his throat. When her gaze dropped, he bowed his head and touched his brow to hers.

They stood this way for long minutes, perhaps, or a mere few heartbeats. Morgana knew only that she was breathing, even though her lungs still seemed to fill with nothing true; that he touched her skin even when it seemed only like wind. She tilted up her chin and kissed him, and he wound his arm around her waist—and she felt not even half-whole, but at least she felt something that was not a bone-deep ache.

When they lay together—in those rare moments of peace that could be afforded in the routine chaos of Castrum Oriens—Morgana kept to Raubahn’s right side. She let him trail absentminded fingers up and down her spine, along scars both old and new; he had a favourite, she noticed, one that he always stroked even more slowly and delicately.

“I remember this one,” he said as Morgana lay on her front with her arms curled under the thin pillow of his cot. As general of the Immortal Flames, he had some privacy and comforts, but she still found it a minor miracle that they both could fit without being stacked on top of each other.

“You do?”

He spoke of the past because he understood that it stung less than the present. She still ached, bitterly so, but the old loss that she’d survived was more bearable than the sheer emptiness of looking upon Baelsar’s Wall and wondering how her only son’s blood had fed the primal born within those hard planes of steel.

“On the bloodsands. I was watching before my own bout; you miscalculated the reach of a woman half your size and took the tip of her spear, right there. Barely flinched.”

Morgana searched those distant memories, every night under the lights hazy but for a few. She could still remember the dark wormways under the arena, dark but for the drab afternoon light seeping in, the way they had looked on the day her brother had sealed his own fate.

“It was Gotwin,” she said after a moment, her voice strangely disconnected from the memory as it slowly returned to her. “He misjudged her reach and didn’t block when I expected him to. His wife gave him an earful about it while she was stitching me up.” She tilted her chin up on the pillow to look at Raubahn, frowning. “That was twenty years ago.”

That they should be able to even say those words was a blessing in itself. Twenty years of surviving every struggle, every indignity, every horror the fates thought to toss their way; there was beauty in that, in the new and myriad scars marring Raubahn’s hardened face. In him, she could see it, but in herself, it only felt hateful. Knowing that he remembered her in a time before the years had chipped most of her away embedded a deep sense of unease into her bones.

“Memory acts strangely,” Raubahn said, tracing his fingers down her spine. “I can scarcely remember my own mother’s face, but I still see you through the gate that night with the utmost clarity. I lost my bout right after.”

Morgana snorted weakly. “Because of me? Having a woman made you soft.”

“I was nursing an injury, if I’m not mistaken,” Raubahn said, mockingly defensive. When she said nothing, he slipped into a moment of thoughtful silence, then said: “Do you really still believe that attachment was a weakness?”

“Everything can be a weakness as much as strength. It’s in the clarity that it changes," Morgana said numbly. “If my brother had valued his attachment to his family over his precious morals, he might still be alive today, a father to his son and a husband to a living wife.”

Raubahn’s hand stilled on her back. “And I would be long dead,” he said, more of an observation than a judgement. Morgana only shrugged.

“You might have survived us. You survived everything else. I know they would not have stopped wanting you dead just because they’d gotten to slit my brother’s throat.”

The door to Raubahn’s quarters nearly shook from the urgency with which someone pounded its other side. “General,” said a muffled voice. Morgana rolled off the bed and began searching for her shirt—far harder to find than her sword belt among the mess of hers and Raubahn’s clothing and armour. “The Warrior of Light and the Scions have come.”

“Thank you. Tell them I will meet with them right away.”

Morgana raised her eyebrows at him as she waited for the footsteps to have receded to speak. “Making the Warrior of Light wait because you couldn’t keep your trousers on. Really. You’ve gotten sloppy in your advanced age.”

“I don’t wear trousers,” Raubahn said as he swung his legs over the cot and bent to pick up his tunic in one fluid motion.

Morgana was the first gust of wind to sweep out under the bright sky of East End, and Raubahn the second, taking his place at the war table with the other gathered Alliance commanders. The garish sunlight blinded Morgana, and it wasn’t only the result of being confined within the imperials’ cold steel walls; everything was too bright now, almost unbearably so. She already felt like half a corpse, some cursed spirit of resilience that wandered Castrum Oriens because the fates had bound her to it.

A part of her wanted to leave—perhaps she could find meaning in the fight again if she wandered out onto the lands to which her blood was bound. The members of the Resistance who had crossed over from Thanalan after the Griffin’s disaster were already moving back and forth to Rhalgr’s Reach, more familiar by the day; the Flames’ Ala Mhigan Brigade was moving with a vigour that, by Raubahn’s own admission, had never animated them before they had been able to return home. It could be so easy, not to be a ghost, but Morgana woke every night thinking that a blade was lodged between her ribs, as though telling her she had no place left in this life.

She was not the first to have lost; every Ala Mhigan fought because they had. Blood kin, lovers, friends, homes. They all went on living for the dead, but her loss tethered her to this place, to this empty in-between that stood with her old home on one side, occupied and bled dry, and the forest that had given her only child his first breaths, seen his first steps—the in-between where she could only believe he had breathed his last.

Nineteen years without him. Nineteen years without Gotwin, without Havisa, without Mathias. Could she live nineteen more, now that she had had her son within reach only to have him torn away so quickly? She had barely survived losing her family; now, without Sairsel, she thought that perhaps the fates had finally broken her—every piece scattered to Thanalan, to the Black Shroud, to the Fringes.

The worst of it was that she could not blame him the way she had blamed Gotwin; only herself. She had wanted to see Sairsel strong, to know that he could survive the Empire if he was truly so devoted to seeing Ala Mhigo back into the hands of their people. She had traced a bloody road for him in following the Griffin, foolish as she had been to believe in that man, and of course he had walked upon it—not because he was blind, but because she had been.

And now he was gone and there was nothing left of him but for a primal lost somewhere in Gyr Abania, made real by the suffering of hundreds like him.

He’d loved days like these: bright, with the sun golden in the trees and a quiet breeze that made the leaves sing. When Morgana thought it, she did not even ache. She only felt that emptiness, gnawing, filling her with a screaming void she only knew to quiet in those stolen moments with a man who, some twenty years ago, had felt her equal in battle and in loss.

She barely even had it in herself to want blood, the way she had then.

Then she heard his voice.

As quiet as that flutter of leaves, the way the wind whispered through life-filled branches—his laughter, of all things, weary but alive. She thought she was going mad until she ran forward and saw him among a handful of others, stiff under their grateful touches, leaning into the press of Leofric Snakesbane’s brow against his. She saw nothing else but him.

“Sairsel,” she breathed, the word burning on her tongue.

“Mother.”

He spoke so softly she barely heard him, his expression heavy with a hundred emotions that weighed upon her just the same, and reached for her as she did him. When she pulled her son into her arms, Morgana felt a quaking sob climb up her lungs, holding him so tightly she could feel his breath, too, shuddering as he buried his face in the crook of her neck.

“You’re alive,” she barely heard herself saying. It was strange, how long it took for her to realize that she was weeping. “Oh, my boy, you’re—you’re alive.”

Sairsel almost laughed. “Barely,” he said, sniffling.

She pulled away, taking his face between her hands—and she saw not Nimaurel in the dark evergreen of his eyes or the hawklike elegance of his nose, not Gotwin in the set of his jaw or his frowning mouth, but Sairsel. Her son. As she looked into his eyes, she smiled and pressed her forehead to his, stroking his cheeks with her thumbs. He lay a hand over hers, old scars on his palms of which she knew too little hidden away under scraps of fabric and leather.

When she drew him into another sharp embrace, Sairsel flinched.

“Are you all right?”

“Getting better,” Sairsel said, fingers against his chest as he pulled away. He tugged at his scarf, at the laces of his shirt, and showed her a few inches of his bare chest: sun-kissed brown struck through by a thin, ragged line just shades paler than angry red. Morgana’s fingers tightened around the hilt of her sword as though it were an anchor, but Sairsel had only a weary smile for her. “Ilberd’s parting gift to me. I suppose the Griffin we knew had claws of his own, too.”

Morgana put a hand on his shoulder rather than touch the scar, her thumb against the side of his neck; she could almost feel his pulse. “You found out who he was?”

“When you sent me to him. I heard you say his name,” Sairsel said softly. “I was angry; wanted him to pay for my friend. So I fought him—tried to, at least.”

“Oh, you foolish boy,” Morgana whispered, briefly closing her eyes.

“I know. I don’t think I would be alive if not for her.” Sairsel glanced over to the Warrior of Light, her tall, glorious frame gleaming in her armour. The title suited her perfectly. “She carried me out, did what she could to heal me. I think some of the Scions helped, but I wasn’t—I don’t remember everything.

“You were with the Scions?” Morgana asked, eyebrows high. “All this time?”

“At first. Ahtynwyb took me back to the Sandsea.”

To little Ashelia Riot, the girl who played mother to her son. In another life, she could have been her daughter—resilient and willful and brave. Kinder than Morgana herself was; kinder than Little Ala Mhigo, than her own mother, and her father’s absence could have made her. With that kindness, she cared for those who meant something to her. For Sairsel.

Morgana had to speak as though around glass. “She kept you safe?”

“Aye,” Sairsel said, nodding. “Safe so that I could come here and fight. If they’ll still have me.”

Nothing needed to be said; Morgana did not need to tell him that the fight would always have someone like him. More blood, more swords, more bodies. She could still believe in it—could believe in it again—so she put a hand up between his shoulders and guided him forward, past Liberty Gate. They stepped onto proper Gyr Abanian soil together.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:morgana #f:xiv

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farplane · 4 years

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land of fury; now (30-32)

février 2020: more scene excerpts from the yeehaw sairsel au™️. 18+ nsfw (warning for sexual content until the end of the first scene). 5,663 words. 🎧 dead of night - orville peck

The sky unfurls wider at night when Sairsel finds himself riding with Arne, silent and side by side. It spreads like a warm, heavy blanket; drowns him like a sea that goes as deep as the core of the earth. And when he looks at the stars, they blink in quicksilver and melt into him.

This isn’t the first time they’re on this path, even if it isn’t the same road—not exactly. It’s always a different camp, a different sky, a different dirt line under the hooves of their horses. Arne ducks into Sairsel’s tent, shakes him awake with a hand below the edge of his collar, and they exchange hushed barbs the way they have since they were teenagers. It’s easy, it’s familiar, and there’s nothing more comforting than to slip away from camp like the brothers they’ve never been.

Sairsel has seen what it’s like for Arne to have a brother. Jostling Jacent every chance he gets, shoving his hat down on Jacent’s head to obscure his lynx eyes with the brim, snatching cigarettes from between his fingers only to pass him food under the table an hour later.

What they have—they’ve lied to themselves for years, but this isn’t it.

In the morning, they’ll hit a coach or a shop or whatever else they can find that’ll bring in enough coin to justify their outing, and they’ll spend a few weeks contenting themselves with stealing kisses and whatever follows on the margins of the camp.

But this, waiting long enough to sit through a ride under the great big sky in the dead of night, it answers a different need entirely. Without fail, Sairsel tears his gaze from the road and the stars and the sense of flying and drowning at the same time to look at Arne out of the corner of his eye, at the way his shoulders—usually rounding forward, unless his purpose is to intimidate—loosen like a knot in thick rope when he’s on Scorpia’s back. Easy and familiar.

Sairsel gnaws down on his bottom lip because his mother can’t see it, can’t tell him that it makes him look guilty or, worse: vulnerable. He throws another glance Arne’s way, and this time Arne is looking at him, so Sairsel clicks his tongue and taps his heels. His horse speeds to a trot, and Arne’s—Scorpia, her sleek blue roan coat gleaming in the moonlight like bleary silver dawn—follows effortlessly into an easy lope.

Impatience is usually Arne’s domain, but it always happens this way. If there’s to be a quicker pace, Sairsel always sets it, and Arne follows. And when they ride into town, sleepy and quiet but for the bustle of the saloon, they don’t need to speak: Sairsel hitches up just outside the light and the noise, dismounts without a word, buys a drink. Arne lights a cigarette and rides a loop around the main street until he’s smoked it down to almost nothing, and then he goes inside to buy a room. He gets this weary traveler look about him that says he’ll bite if someone so much as looks at him wrong, keeping his gun belt clearly in sight, and disappears upstairs.

It’s only after the door has closed that Sairsel pushes himself off the bar and leaves. He finds the back door and the stairs, walks the landing until he catches sight of the penny Arne always drops by the threshold; he picks it up, puts it in his pocket, and slips inside the room.

They’re both vaguely aware that they don’t need to take so much precaution, but it is the nature of thieves, and there’s comfort in it. The secrets they need to keep are more or less from the rest of the camp, even though everyone knows but doesn’t speak of it because Morgaine doesn’t like it. If they end up running into trouble, though, people are less likely to remember two strangers without connection than the conspicuous pair of armed drifters who took up a room in the middle of the night and disappeared come morning.

Most of the time, these rooms have paper-thin walls and beds that creak as aggressively as a train passes over rails; they’ll debate the merits of staying quiet and careful, and more like than not, decide to throw caution out the window because whatever noise they make will be lost within the usual product of the house girls’ work. Still, they always keep a gun in reach, in case the lock fails them somehow and someone barges in. All it takes is one free hand between the two of them, because at this range, it doesn’t matter that Sairsel is the best sharpshooter the coterie has ever seen or that Arne is frighteningly accurate in the midst of a good and honest gunfight. Years of contests and petty rivalry and bickering never matter when it comes to looking after each other.

Here, the floorboards groan immensely under Arne’s weight in the short few footsteps it takes him to cross from sitting on the bed to where Sairsel is standing as soon as the door is closed. Arne pins a heavy hand on Sairsel’s chest, holding him against the door as he locks it, and kisses him. The weight of him, the warmth—Sairsel lets it trap him, immobile and steady with solid wood at his back, pushes his tongue past Arne’s parted lips as strong fingers trail down the open line of his collar.

Arne always touches him with a wonder that borders on reverence, no matter how familiar this has become, and there is this small part of Sairsel that clings to the heat of it like nothing else; it’s almost embarrassingly easy how Arne gets him wanting, but Arne doesn’t mock him for it like he’d mock him for how quickly his ears got red if anyone gave him attention when they were young. Sometimes, if they have a rare desire for words and Arne has the balance of power tipped towards him like an offering, he’ll whisper whore in his ear, deep and hoarse and just as needy as his condemnation.

They share control, rather than taking and yielding. Sairsel knows how to feel it shift in a gesture, in a look—silent dialogue, something about the way they work that few understand. And Arne opens his mouth to him and presses him against the door with fingers seeking skin like a cue between rider and mount, so it isn’t long before Sairsel shoves him back onto the bed—the frame manifests a screech—and pins him down in return.

Sairsel unbuttons Arne’s shirt, kissing and scraping his teeth down his chest until the breath in his lungs moves against his ribs like a stuttering thing. He parts the fabric aside, runs his palm over the planes of muscle under him while rocking against Arne, and Arne looks at him like a storm and pushes himself up to kiss Sairsel’s neck.

For a moment that flirts with the frenetic, Sairsel considers simplicity—rutting against each other, barely divested of their trousers, as they have so many times before. But with a bed under them and four walls and a door, it seems a dreadful waste.

Maybe later, if they’re still awake enough to want something easy, or in the morning before they leave.

He tugs Arne’s trousers open and touches him until he’s shaking. The first few times they were together, Arne was indomitable as he was in everything: big and forceful and in control, even when focused on Sairsel’s pleasure the way he would lead a job to ensure everyone’s safety. And, eventually, things shifted; Sairsel grew confident—or maybe simply annoyed—and discovered, in wresting control from Arne’s hands, how beautifully satisfying it is to overwhelm him, to see him lost in it.

There’s something wild in him that speaks to Sairsel more keenly than either of them would like to admit. He watches the muscles in Arne’s thighs shift as he spreads his knees apart, the way the lines in his neck draw taut as he tilts his head to the side.

“Hiding from something?”

“No,” Arne says, and the rasp in his voice carries through the groan that slips his lips when Sairsel sinks his teeth into the meat of his shoulder.

He touches his tongue to the grooves in Arne’s shoulder. Arne drawls out a threat to shove Sairsel off and take over if he doesn’t hurry up—it only makes Sairsel smile, and he keeps Arne pinned down on his back with a hand on his chest and brings him near to bucking like a wild horse under the curling of Sairsel’s slick fingers.

Neither of them ever begs, but they both know to recognize the sort of hitch in each other’s breath that comes close to it. It’s a strange sort of vulnerability, and Sairsel feels it like a burst of heat when Arne’s want is empty of words, somewhere between aggressive and desperate. Arne’s fingers dig into his sides when Sairsel sinks into him—slow, at first, moving as a tide, and then the storm settles between them and in the way he fucks Arne.

His hand finds Arne’s throat, settling without choking. He’s always made certain not to touch his breath, because he can never go that far; he feels his pulse, and Arne loses himself under the weight of his hand. Arne wraps his fingers around Sairsel’s wrist to keep it in place, and his blunt nails dig into his skin. Sairsel’s mind spins—heat around him, an echo of pain on his skin, and he burns in his own rhythm until he pulls back to finish, white-hot and nearly dizzy, against Arne’s abdomen.

Arne is breathing hard under him, all flushed skin—bright pink patches on his chest—and a heavy-lidded gaze, and Sairsel has no desire to waste time. He moves down, takes Arne in his mouth. Before long, Arne tips back his head and grips Sairsel’s hair hard in his release.

Sairsel falls back against the bed, shoulder to shoulder with Arne, and they stare at the ceiling in silence as they always do while they catch their breath. When he lets his eyes go out of focus, Sairsel thinks he can almost see a cloud-veiled moon in an old water stain near the window.

“Good?” he asks, his voice rougher than he expected, still looking at that moon.

Arne turns his head towards him. “Good.”

Both bed and floor groan under Sairsel’s weight as he drags himself off to the washstand to rinse out his mouth, clean himself and Arne off. He tosses the rag back on the edge of the basin and dumps himself beside Arne again, shifting so that they both have a head on the pillow. Arne’s revolver is on the nightstand, almost eye-level with Sairsel; it sits between them and the door, the blackened steel of the barrel trained towards it. Sairsel recognizes a meticulous intention that few expect of Arne.

“Do you want your gun on your side?”

“No need. You’ve got it,” Arne says simply, and something small and needy in Sairsel lights like a lucifer in a dark room. “Night, Sel.”

Sairsel says nothing. He stares at the door down the length of the barrel until he falls asleep.

Morning comes pale and bright and carrying the scent of a winter that is still long in the coming. Sairsel is out of the room and fed before Arne even wakes; he wanders the streets looking for opportunity as the sun rises higher in the sky. Coach schedules, a sleepy low-stakes card game—though the red-nosed man who strokes his mustache when he has a good hand, Sairsel notices, tries to conceal the expensive metal work on his pocket watch whenever he moves—a bounty on a woman posted outside the saloon that turns his stomach.

He’d be a fool to find the lack of big game surprising. When Morgaine picked him up, lost and half-wild by polite society’s standards, she’d told him that real money comes from planning, from patience. Back then, he clutched his bow like it was the only thing that kept him from dying, and she’d looked at it and said, “your father taught you how to hunt, yes?”

“Not my father,” Sairsel said, frowning at her with a sense of perplexity that bordered on arrogant—the blood they shared must have been the only thing that kept her from boxing his ears. His father was no hunter, and even if he had been, parents in the clan did not teach their own children. Apprenticeship was a sacred thing.

“But you do know how to hunt.”

“Of course I know how to hunt. I’ll be a man soon.”

That had made Morgaine laugh. “Sure. Well, it’s the same, innit? If you just run out into the woods and try to kill something without tracking first, you can only hope for—what, a squirrel? An unlucky songbird?”

“Right,” Sairsel said, slowly.

“Think of stealing as hunting. The most you can do if you improvise a hunt on money is pickpocketing, and once you’ve outgrown pickpocketing, you’ll find it about as filling as a skinny little squirrel.”

But it isn’t like he and Arne can go back to her empty-handed, so he bides his time and slips a finger-slim knife from his boot to his sleeve in case he needs it. Arne will likely come to the same conclusion when he wakes up, and it’s a big enough town that they might leave with a decent bit of coin if they both put their talents towards it.

Wishful thinking, really. Arne is more likely to have him set up an improvised trick-shooting showing, or a betting brawl that’ll end with them running out of town with the law on their tail—because Arne is big and angry and hasn’t gotten past Veric’s scoffing at pickpocketing as child’s play. And Arne sees Veric as a father far more strongly than Sairsel accepts Morgaine as his own mother.

At the very least, Morgaine has given him no such qualms—she rather rolls her eyes at some of Veric’s more antiquated and unhelpful notions—and Sairsel is still quick enough to be a good cutpurse.

He’s set his sights on the red-nosed man, who walks out of the saloon with a hand curled on the lapel of his coat to keep his pocket watch concealed, and is about to follow him as he heads behind the building for a piss when a woman calls after him.

“Mr. Arroway!”

Bright, charming—and, when it carries like this, clear of the low creak that sits at the bottom of her voice when she speaks with her half-nonchalant tones.

Sairsel wants to close his eyes and sigh. “Miss Rose,” he says, smiling thinly as she trots up to him. It isn’t that he doesn’t like her; he rather admires how well she conceals her wit like a weapon, and she’s always treated him as though she sees him as a gentleman and not the unwashed bumpkin they both know him to be.

She is, quite simply, singularly talented at appearing in his life when he least needs it.

“It’s Mrs. Foxe, now, Mr. Arroway,” Rose says with a glint in her eye. She presents him with her left hand, adorned with a thin ring that hangs somewhere between modest and expensive, and Sairsel dutifully brushes his lips to her knuckles.

“A long and happy marriage to you, then.”

“Oh, please. I’ll always be Miss Rose to you.”

“I’m flattered, ma’am,” Sairsel says.

Rose smiles, the way that narrows her eyes and digs charming dimples into her cheeks. “Would you walk with me a while? It would please me so, Mr. Arroway,” she says, and doesn’t wait for an answer before taking hold of Sairsel’s elbow. She keeps a reasonable distance for a respectable married woman, but Sairsel can smell the crisp notes of wisteria perfume in her hair.

The last time he saw her, she’d worn it to her shoulders, tumbling in coppery blond waves that she barely pulled back from her face; now it is pinned up and decorated with a flower that perfectly recalls the dark mulberry taffeta of her dress. Sairsel smells her husband’s money on her even more strongly than the wisteria: the cream front of her dress is embroidered with a delicate pattern in gold thread, and her collar ends in lace at her throat.

For her sake, he hopes that the man she married is kind. She deserves that much, and the rich men he’s met usually did not have that fibre.

But then again, Arne would say, ain’t many people would show kindness to their robbers.

“So, er,” Sairsel begins clumsily, letting Rose steer him into an ambling pace like a gentle horse, “Mr. Foxe, is it? If I didn’t know better, I’d say you married for his name.”

Rose swats his arm, as she should. “All this time since our paths last crossed, and the first thing you think to do is to accuse me of social climbing?”

There’s no real bite in it; Sairsel knows her, and she knows that he does. Her voice is smiling, conspiratorial, so he matches it.

“I wouldn’t. This is at least the third thing I’ve thought to do,” Sairsel says. He continues before she can ask slyly about the first two: “I mean, Rose Foxe. You can’t get a nicer ring than that.”

“Oh, all the result of careful planning, I assure you.”

Her fingers inch up from the crook of his elbow to touch his arm, fleeting but coy. She reaches her other hand across to squeeze his forearm, as though to signify that it is, after all, a game. It makes Sairsel wonder if this sort is the only game she still plays; almost makes him miss the sure steel of her eyes when she was one of the best cardsharps he’d ever known.

He still hasn’t forgotten the look of absolute destitution on Maybel’s face when they’d come up to Arne at the tail end of a high-stakes evening on a riverboat and admitted through gritted teeth that they’d gotten fleeced by some country girl from nowhere. Miss Rose never did join the coterie, no matter how useful she might have been—I’m a free spirit, darling, she’d said, running a single finger down Arne’s cheek and tapping his nose so charmingly that he actually blushed—but she was thankful that he elected to ignore Veric’s order to break her legs.

“I would expect no less from you,” Sairsel says.

And Rose smiles, chancing a wink when he turns his head. “I take it no one’s made an honest man out of you yet, sweet Mr. Arroway?”

“You know my curse, Miss Rose. Someone who might make me honest usually keeps me dishonest,” he says lightly and with a stiff, dismissive wave of his hand. Nothing has changed since they saw each other last; he and Arne have their own brand of honesty.

“And your brother?” Rose asks, shrewdly—because she is well aware that Arne and Sairsel have nothing of brothers, and that he knows she was never fool enough to believe the drivel they feed fish on jobs. “Is he well? Is he nearby?”

Sairsel stiffens despite himself, careful to keep his tone light. “In a room at the saloon with his face still smashed into the pillow, no doubt.”

“Oh, you’re far too intransigent. Mr. Fay—” and it does not escape Sairsel’s notice when Rose shortens his surname to the moniker few but friends and women Arne has slept with get to— “is a hard worker and as noble as they come.”

Something in her tone lessens the tension in Sairsel’s shoulder. Still a game. He can do with that.

“If I didn’t know better, I would think you’re after his company far more than mine.”

“Ah, but you do know better,” Rose says with a smile. “One brooding scoundrel or another; like exchanging ten coppers for a silver.”

“I’m the silver, I hope.”

“Oh, surely.”

Sairsel snorts at that. Rose draws closer, hugging his arm like a sister.

“But I do think Mr. Foxe may prefer the company of the silver,” Rose says, dropping her voice to a mischievous whisper—and it is enough for Sairsel to feel lost again. If it is still a game, he doesn’t know the rules. “I’m only guessing, of course—so young a marriage, there is still much to learn—but I think he would delight in meeting you. How about a luncheon?”

“Er. Today?” Sairsel asks, stupidly.

Rose quirks an eyebrow. “Is your schedule so packed, Mr. Arroway?”

“Well, I—” he stammers, then clears his throat. “I wouldn’t want to disappear on my brother, ma’am. We did come to town hoping to find work.”

Innocent words that any honest man might say; Sairsel feels safe saying them.

“Then you would be a fool to turn down a free meal, wouldn’t you?” Rose asks brightly. She used to pounce on food she could have without spending a piece of coin as ravenously as a feral cat. “You know, I’ve decided: I won’t take no for an answer. It’s ever so rare to come across old friends in these parts.”

Sairsel scratches his cheek. “Miss Rose— You know I have little of what makes for a dignified dinner guest among polite society. I’d only bring trouble for you with your husband.”

Rose keeps on smiling, undaunted, and quips, “And who said my husband was polite society?”

She steers him to the side of the road, out of the path of a slow-moving cart, that she may stand facing Sairsel—and she pats his cheek in a way that almost makes him draw back like a child from an overly enthusiastic schoolmarm.

“You bring me neither trouble nor shame, and least of all with Mr. Foxe. Trust me. Learn to smell an opportunity, won’t you?”

Sairsel dares to gaze down at Rose’s eyes. She stands only a few inches shy of tall, and Sairsel is far from Arne’s imposing stature; it brings them close to equal, but not quite enough that she doesn’t need to gaze up at him through thick lashes. Her eyes have always been strikingly honest, for a cardsharp: unassuming dull blue, at their most charming when genuine. Rose plays games, but she rarely acts.

“Miss Rose,” Sairsel repeats gently, and pointlessly.

“Now, I have a few errands to run,” Rose says, narrowing her eyes playfully at him as she smooths down her skirts, “and I’m sure you have to go and commiserate with Mr. Fay. Do let him know that he’s welcome at my table, too. Mr. Foxe’s house is a half mile outside of town from the north path. Pretty green gables; you’ll recognize it right away. You will come, won’t you?”

Sairsel shrugs, palms open in surrender. “You won’t take no for an answer, ma’am.”

“Good. And don’t worry about your clothes.”

“Well, now I’m worried,” he says, glancing down at himself.

Rose laughs, squeezing his arm again; she holds on for balance as she tips up to kiss his cheek—still a sisterly gesture—and then she is entirely gone.

“Where’d you run off to?” Arne asks the moment Sairsel is in earshot of his mumbling.

“Looking for work while you were sleeping like a babe,” Sairsel shoots back. He crosses his arms tightly over his chest, watching the mellow, unburdened movement of Arne’s body as he leans back against the wall.

There isn’t much to this town beyond the main street—and, for that reason, not much money in it. The buildings behind it look like bones trying to tuck themselves into the bustle, but never quite reaching so far. Morning isn’t doing the narrow space between these two rickety houses a favour, blanketing Arne and Sairsel in shadow where they stand. It’s almost intimate, but Sairsel still finds himself glancing towards the street every few seconds on instinct.

Arne is not quite so bothered. He splits his attention between Sairsel and a tin of tobacco he pulls from his coat pocket, his eyes hidden by the low angle of his hat.

“And how’d that go?”

“Like you’d expect when I have good intentions.”

“Stop acting so goddamn shifty,” Arne says, and Sairsel becomes aware of the stiff set to his own shoulders, the sharpness of his gaze. “Ain’t done nothing wrong. Or did you get in trouble?”

Sairsel says, brightly defeated: “Well, I ran into Rose, so I guess it depends on how you look at it.”

“Miss Rose?”

“Missus now. Married to some fancy man—a Mr. Foxe.”

Arne stops in the middle of gathering tobacco onto a paper, snorts, and starts laughing—low and uncommitted to merriment, as he usually does unless he’s actually laughing with his belly.

“Foxe is a fancy man, now? Well, that’s rich,” he says, and snorts again. “Rich.”

“Who’s he?” Sairsel asks, frowning. He’s never quite outgrown the part of him that was always competing with Arne, and he doesn’t like Arne knowing something that he doesn’t.

Arne meets the question with a smirk; Sairsel thinks this is him showing off, but if the mention of this Mr. Foxe is enough to stir Arne to bloody wordplay, maybe it’s not quite so personal.

“A crook, is who he is. Literally. Last I saw him, he was lame because his leg broke and didn’t set right.” Arne pats his right thigh. “He must’ve met Rose sharping. Real good with cards, when he kept his temper in check.”

Sairsel scratches his cheek. “Makes sense, I suppose. She seems oddly happy.”

“She looks happy, or she seems like she’s doing that trick where she makes men see what they want to see?” Arne asks pointedly. He raises a hand before Sairsel can answer. “If you think you’re immune because you don’t do women, don’t fool yourself. What she does has nothing to do with that.”

“I know her games.”

“Sure.”

“She must be happy, if her Mr. Foxe isn’t so different from her and they can feed polite society enough tripe that they can settle down without being asked too many questions. That’s my impression. Would you like us to hire a witch-finder to see if she cast a spell on me?”

Arne almost grins. Below the thin, reflexive veil of irritation, Sairsel indulges in the passing thought—and the vanity that goes with it—that the night has put Arne in an exceptionally good mood.

“We ain’t got that kind of coin, and you know it,” Arne says smoothly, patting Sairsel’s cheek with his free hand before returning to the task of rolling himself a cigarette.

Sairsel watches his hands, and then he says, “Rose wants me to go have lunch at theirs. Says her husband would delight in meeting me—and she insinuated something about opportunity.”

All at once, the brightness fades from Arne’s whole demeanour; his mouth settles in a line that tells of the frown hidden by the brim of his hat. He doesn’t look at Sairsel.

“He wants to bed you,” Arne concludes stiffly, bringing the cigarette to his mouth to lick at the paper in staccato motions. And he adds, as though it wasn’t clear: “Foxe does.”

“Pardon?” Sairsel says, perplexed. “How can a man who’s never met me want to bed me?”

“Ain’t met you, but he’s seen you before. I remember. In that town with the big stupid tower, that tavern where every player had to have a bodyguard. I was standing behind Maybel, and Foxe was beside them, and he leaned over and pointed to you—you were just hanging off by the bar, I don’t—”

“Oh, right. They had those insane rules about insurance and I ended up having to wait around as collateral.”

Charming place with charming rules around big card games. Veric had insisted, and Maybel had been confident, and Sairsel drawing the short straw meant he could have lost a finger or ten if Maybel’s confidence had been unfounded. He doesn’t miss that place, and by the sour look on Arne’s face, neither does he.

“Yeah, well, he said, ‘I wouldn’t mind having that on the table as a prize.’”

“Romantic.”

“Maybel said he’d be better off ordering a plate of gristle and calling it a night,” Arne adds—and that, at least, brings some semblance of a smile back to his lips.

“You would find that amusing,” Sairsel says dryly.

“Got to find something to laugh about.” Arne holds the cigarette between his teeth as he pats his pockets down for a pack of lucifers. His words come even more like mush, even more like a scowl. “Either way, I don’t like the sound of this.”

Sairsel raises his eyebrows—and if he saw himself, he’d notice that the look on his face is startlingly similar to the one Jacent gets when he wants to play the annoying little brother.

“Why? Because it makes you jealous?”

“We ain’t playing this game, Sel,” Arne says, bending to strike a lucifer on the heel of his boot; the flame sparks his eyes and draws sharpness into his rueful smile.

“Then what does it matter? No one blames you for having terrible taste, so I’ll extend the same courtesy to Mr. Foxe.”

Arne takes a deep breath around the cigarette and tilts his head away from Sairsel to exhale the smoke. There’s nothing measured or calculated in the gesture, but it keeps his expression well shadowed as he speaks—it’s a familiar kind of serendipity. “I wouldn’t be worried if he was still an honest crook, but if he’s come into money, he’ll have them rich man worms in his brain. Like he’s owed whatever he damn wants so long as he has a bit of gold to throw at it.”

“I’m fairly certain Miss Rose didn’t invite me to a luncheon so that her husband, whom I have never met, could pay to bed me like I’m some fancy pleasure boy,” Sairsel says, glancing both sides before reaching out to pat Arne’s chest. “But I do appreciate the concern, big man.”

Arne grimaces. “You would make a terrible whore.”

“So we’re in agreement.”

“And an even worse polite dinner guest,” Arne adds, chasing away his discomfort with another teasing smirk—stiff, but a clear effort. He nudges Sairsel’s jaw with his thumb. “You’re just a few sharp teeth short of being feral.”

If it came from anyone else, Sairsel would bite in a way that could only give the statement weight; time and again Veric has sat there and raised an eyebrow at Sairsel and said, to Morgaine—though his gaze never leaves him— “See? Proves me right.” But Arne never says it the way Veric does, never like he’s some thing that can’t be controlled. He says it because he knows that Sairsel has a wild heart and it makes something spark within his ribcage.

So Sairsel grins, showing teeth that aren’t that sharp.

“And you’re a few hooves short of being a horse,” he says, and Arne doesn’t even blink. “You should come. Miss Rose did invite you, too. Mr. Fay.”

“Not a good idea,” Arne mumbles with a modest little cough. He jabs the cigarette back between his lips, inhaling long and sharp.

“Because you fucked Mr. Foxe’s wife?”

Arne’s neck flushes. “I didn’t— Why you got to be so crude?” He pointedly ignores the arch of Sairsel’s eyebrow, quickly adding: “I didn’t. We, uh— there was some, well, mutual appreciation, I suppose, but I was with you.”

“That shouldn’t stop you,” Sairsel says, sobering. He doesn’t exactly jump for joy at the idea, but they haven’t got the life of quiet little lovers and he doesn’t want to fool himself into thinking that they might. Mercifully, Arne doesn’t chase after sex half as much as many men do.

“Just don’t want no one else,” Arne mumbles, so thickly Sairsel has to run the sentence back in his mind twice before he can make sense of it.

When he does, he stands there like a fool, and Arne avoids his gaze and flicks ash from his cigarette once, twice, three times. He rubs at his beard and smokes some more, and tries to salvage himself with quick words that almost run into each other.

“Anyway, I got a funny feeling about this.”

“So do I,” Sairsel says, bristling—because Arne has an irritating tendency to think he always knows better, and it’s true he has good instincts, but Sairsel was born and raised in the wild. Instinct feels like his birthright. “It’s only a meal. And we always trusted Rose.”

“I know. Lot of women don’t get to stay themselves when they come into marriage, though. Just—be careful.”

“I’m the nervy one, big man. I’m always worried and always careful.”

Arne smiles, its edges more fond than he seems to want to make them. “I’ll stay behind. I can ride by at the hour, and you can signal if you need back-up.”

“I’ll flash my watch at the window if I need you to come in and help me pick which fork to stab myself with when Mr. Foxe starts flirting with me,” Sairsel deadpans, tugging at the lapels of his tan coat and buttoning his vest. “How do I look?”

“Like a no-good bastard drifter who couldn’t clean up well if he tried.”

Sairsel shrugs, pushing down at his apprehension with manufactured carelessness. It will have to be good enough; he will have to be good enough. Arne is looking down at his feet as he finishes his cigarette, tossing the butt away with a flick of his fingers. Smoke rises around him and dissipates as he lifts his head and stops Sairsel from walking away with a hand on his chest.

“What?” Sairsel asks, glancing down.

“Nothing,” Arne says, and he tips the brim of his hat up with a finger to kiss him. If they believed in good luck, Sairsel figures this might be the seal of it.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:arne #p:yeehaw

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farplane · 5 years

Text

the taste of defeat

août 2019: eorzea sairsel and baelsar’s wall. ffxiv patch 3.5 spoilers. 5,043 words. (read on ao3)

Sairsel had been raised under the shadow of Baelsar’s Wall.

Far enough, deep enough inside the forest, it could easily be forgotten—as was the plight of the people who suffered on the other side. Beside it, the Wood still lived, breathed, thrived. Sairsel had never known the world any other way: the Wall had stood, skeletal and cold, in the seasons before he came into the world.

His people lived as the heart of the land beat, calling no place home but the Wood itself. If ever they camped by its eastern borders, the children were under the strictest warnings not to approach the limits of the Wall; all they needed to obey was the shadow of a girl who had wandered too close and returned with a gaping hole in her chest, a memory they were not soon to forget. Nairel—six years her brother’s elder, and nine summers on the day the hunters had carried the girl’s body home—had told Sairsel that their people had very nearly taken up arms against the Empire in revenge, arms long since laid down when the war against Ala Mhigo had been won.

The clans of the Twelveswood had been the first to fall to the griffins’ blades, in those days; the stories of the elders made that abundantly clear. What could they do now, against the might of a magitek empire? They would not suffer the slaughter of all their children to avenge the death of one. The Empire won; the Empire had already won.

The jagged metal spires slicing the sky, in the eyes of all those who lived among the trees beside it, were the forefront of its dominance. Ala Mhigo was an enemy left behind in the past, and a neighbour forgotten in the present.

When the Calamity came, the sky bathed the Wall in its red shadows. Sairsel couldn’t forget the sight of the way the crimson moon in the west had rained down fire, so devastating in its destruction that it spread west, too, everywhere they looked; everywhere burning. The sky had been red, and the Wall had been red. It had stood tall and angry, sharp and unshaken on the horizon, never faltering. Even in the disaster of its own making, the Empire never seemed to suffer. Dalamud was cut down from the sky, and it stopped burning, and the Wall stopped flowing red. Its sharp lines were choked by grey, barely visible, but no one ever came. It simply stood while the smoke drowned the forestborn.

Ever flows—

Months. It had taken Sairsel months to forget the stink of it, the feeling of ash under his feet, so thick it blanketed the earth like the first blush of snow when winter came to kiss autumn. Had the imperials on the Wall felt that fear—the one that crept in and pierced the heart, whispering that everything was lost? Had they seen the sorrow, the loss? His people’s laments and the wailing of the Wood itself had seemed like an echo to answer the waning call of Hydaelyn, her voice long extinguished by the fading of the light.

the land’s—

They never returned west after that; the desolation alone was near impossible to stomach. The whole of the Twelsvewood had fallen so quiet since the red moon had taken to the sky that even the forestborn strained to hear its voice, and in the west, the corrupted aether was so stifling that it was utterly silent. Rock and barren earth, singing no songs but that of the dead. None could live upon that land.

well of purpose.

In the five summers of healing that followed, Sairsel never saw Baelsar’s Wall again, either. With every passing season, it seemed, the imperials encroached upon the Wood more and more: with the threat woodwrath had once posed no longer standing against them, there were only bodies, always too few to oppose them. Sairsel’s heart broke for his home and ached not to be far from it, but for the horizon itself. For skies not darkened by the shadow of that wall. And when his feet took him away at long last, they took him west, as far as the sea of sand—until a daughter of the griffins welcomed him to a home he’d never even known to seek.

“You were a sellsword?” asked the Griffin.

“Aye,” answered Morgana Arroway. Her voice scraped like sand on stone when she spoke of the past. “My brother and I were courted by one of the companies, in the end, that led the charge against the mad king—gods, I don’t even remember the name. But I imagine we would have stayed with them for the new world order, if that order had been ours.”

The Griffin was silent for a moment. Even sitting a ways from them, pretending to be wholly focused on sharpening a new batch of arrowheads, Sairsel couldn’t help but wonder what sort of face lay behind the mask. Did he look kind? Hard? Broken? Perhaps half-mad? Handsome? His silences held as much weight as his words, always spoken in a low voice like a serpent’s venom filled with shards of glass.

The stone, the sand, the broken glass. Everyone in the Resistance had something of it in their voices—the ones old enough to have known the fall, at least.

“I was, too. A sellsword.” Another pause. Morgana made no effort to fill it; every moment, she seemed to be taking the measure of the Griffin. Not out of the same naïve fascination of her son’s that bordered on burgeoning admiration, but the way she regarded every man and woman who asked to lead her sword. “So you would have stayed, then, if not for the invaders?”

“Of course. I never had any other intention. I’d entertained the notion of taking my sword elsewhere, for a time, but never without my brother, and he had a wife and a boy. Never without my family.”

The broadhead in Sairsel’s hand slipped, slicing the side of his finger open. It stung, and his breath hissed; blood welled up from the shallow cut. Both the Griffin and his mother’s attention were pulled to him, but he didn’t look at them, because he didn’t know what reaction he might have if he looked into her eyes after hearing this. Never without her family—without Gotwin, Havisa, Mathias. But her own son? He’d not been born in Ala Mhigo. Him, she’d had no qualms leaving in the Wood with the shadow of a mother he thought long dead.

“Your family—”

Morgana shook her head, jaw tight. “Gotwin, my brother, he wanted to stay and fight—thought we could drive the Garleans back. If not for the child, I’d have stayed, too, but we convinced him to leave. We fought in the arena for a time; earned a reputation. It was right around the time General Aldynn was fighting, too—gods, but they loved pitting the Griffin’s Talons against the Bull of Ala Mhigo.”

Neither she nor Sairsel could have seen the minute shift in the Griffin’s expression, even if he had not been hiding it behind the mask. She went on, none the wiser: “We were set to have a match against him, and we were approached to make certain he didn’t make it out alive. He’d come to the bloodsands in irons, see, and won his freedom—and by then was costing the wrong people too much coin. I would have gone through with it, but my brother, the honourable fool, he refused.”

Knuckles white-hot as she gripped the hilt of her sword, mouth in a snarl; there was no other way to tell that story. It was the first time Sairsel heard so much of it, but he knew.

“They slit his throat and left him in the desert. I tried to hide his wife and boy away in the Shroud, but I lost them, too. That’s when I joined the Resistance; it’s what I should have done from the first instead of running.”

The Griffin shook his head, his voice raw with quiet anger. “Even scattered beyond that accursed wall, they’ve taken everything from us. We ran to protect our families, only to fall to the blades of those who were content to watch them slaughter us. The only way forward is back where it began.”

“So that’s your play,” Morgana said slowly, after a moment. “You listen to our stories, and then you make a rousing speech of it.”

“Do I seem to you like a man who is playing?”

“No. But whoever you are underneath that thing,” Morgana said, reaching out to tap a finger against the mask, “you should know, already, that I don’t need convincing.”

“So you’re prepared to do what it takes?”

“Anything,” Morgana said.

The Griffin held out a hand, palm angled upwards. Morgana looked down at his gauntlet, as though considering, then slipped on her own to grip his forearm with fingers like claws. “I’m with you,” she said, then tugged his arm towards her, bringing him closer, “but I can’t be doing with the mask. The imperials hide their faces, too, my friend.”

Behind the mask, the Griffin smiled bitterly. “We are brother- and sister-in-arms. That is all that matters.” As Morgana let go, he deigned a glance towards Sairsel; he could feel the weight of that gaze even behind the blank white of the mask as the Griffin motioned to him with a tilt of his chin. “The little Elezen. He’s yours?”

“Aye.”

The Griffin turned back to Morgana. “Has he got the stomach for it, too? Anything?”

Sairsel answered before his mother could do it for him; he wouldn’t have put it past her. “I do,” he said between gritted teeth, wishing that it were true.

The Griffin looked at him. Sairsel did not know what he saw.

The people of the Wanderer were easy enough to find, if one knew where to look—and Sairsel never needed to look very long or very far to come home. It had been months since the last time; he’d found his clan near Urth’s Fount then, as though by some twisted game of fate. He hadn’t stayed long, too distraught and broken to let the world come into focus around him, but his father had come with him to the place where Wilred’s body was found. The water was not stained red. No part of the Wood bore traces of his passing, or his lonely grave—instead the weight had traveled all the way to Little Ala Mhigo and remained where his absence left the greatest void.

“The worst part is I didn’t even know him all that well,” Sairsel had said, his voice half-caught in his throat, “but he was so desperate to free Ala Mhigo when I met him, even though he’d never even seen it. This must have been the closest he’s ever been to it. And I—all my life, I’ve been so close, and I never even cared.”

He’d barely felt the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder. “I kept too much from you. I worried that it would only cause you pain to know that a wall stood between you and your mother’s homeland.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not about my Ala Mhigan blood. It’s about all of us not giving a damn about this—this cruelty that’s been under our noses for twenty years. Twenty years, Baba. All of Eorzea turned their backs on them, and Wilred, he… he died wanting to protect it. Killed by one of his own.” And he’d sounded like a boy, then, even to his own ears: “It’s not fair.”

“One of his own?”

Sairsel had heard the name Ilberd a fair number of times, through the Resistance as much as through what covert information he exchanged with the Riskbreakers. A brother-in-arms. A traitor. No one knew whose blade had killed Wilred, but the whispers running through the Resistance said that it could have been no one else’s but Ilberd’s. Hearing the name was one thing, and hating it, too, but speaking it was something else entirely, too caustic on Sairsel’s tongue.

“An Ala Mhigan. A comrade in his company.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” his father had said, and Sairsel knew that he truly was.

The weight of Wilred’s death had pressed too hard, too close; he’d left soon after.

Now that he returned, it was only in passing again: he found his clan near the Sylphlands, this time, far enough from the Wall that he hadn’t run into the hunters while scouting, but too close for him to be comfortable.

He’d told Gundobald and the Griffin and anyone who would listen that this was his home—that he knew the Wood inside and out, that it was on his doorstep that the imperials had built that monstrous thing. For once, he could show that he was not playing at this for his mother’s sake: he was not two halves, not forestborn one day and Ala Mhigan another, but a whole of a boy who had grown up under the shadow of a chained homeland he’d never known was as much his as the Twelveswood.

He was forestborn. He was a Riskbreaker. He was Ala Mhigan. And he was a damned good ranger.

It wasn’t his first time being sent on a reconnaissance mission by the Resistance; if the gods were kind, the next would be beyond the Wall, scouting the reaches of Gyr Abania. He hoped he would live long enough to see Ala Mhigo itself. The thought that he might not had haunted him on every one of the nights he spent in the Wood on his own, watching for guard patterns and breaches in the Wall’s defenses. It was an inescapable reality, burrowing inside him and settling through every empty space of his being, but he was even more afraid of running than he was of dying.

The Resistance did not own him. It could be easy, he thought: he could send his last report, toss his linkpearl into the bushes, and take the nearest aetheryte to the Goblet. Ashelia hadn’t thrown him out on his arse for associating with the Resistance; surely she’d welcome him back if he said he had given them all that he could. I could not bear it if you became another corpse. Even after all this time, all those days spent with the Resistance wondering if there was even anything left of the boy he had been when he lied to his mother that he no longer had anything to do with the Riskbreakers, the Grand Steward’s words rang as clear in his mind as they did when she spoke them.

He was afraid of hurting her, but he was selfish. When he thought of leaving, he couldn’t help but imagine what his comrades would say of him—that he was a traitor, craven, that he had only needed himself to prove that he never belonged. He thought of the Griffin turning that blank-faced mask to his mother and showing his judgement of her even through it. Whoever he was—Sairsel was beginning to think that it didn’t matter, because what mattered was the way he spoke, the way he led—Sairsel wanted to prove himself to him almost as much as he did his mother.

So he did not run, but he did not return to Little Ala Mhigo. He would wait for the others to join him, he said, and one of the Masks replied that they would come.

While he waited, he found his clan. He found the nightfires, pulled his sister from her watch almost feverishly; the dawning of the assault was twisting him with apprehension.

“You have to leave,” he whispered to her, taking her face between his hands. Watching her face like it was the first time he saw it; like it was the last. “You have to leave, all right? Tell your mother whatever she needs to hear to move camp as quickly as possible.”

“Sairsel—” Nairel said, but he shook his head.

“No, listen to me. There’ll be fighting at the Wall, and if—if it spills out on this side, or the Garleans decide to retaliate, they will put anyone they find to the sword. You need to go west, or north, or—I don’t know. Just be as far from the Wall as you all can get.”

Nairel narrowed her eyes; she looked at him like he was half-mad, and for that, he couldn’t blame her. He certainly felt as much. “What are you saying? Why would they retaliate against us?”

Because if we do everything right, they’ll think the whole of Eorzea has moved against them. “I need you to trust me, Nairel. Please.”

For a moment, Sairsel thought that his own sister would turn him away once and for all. She searched his eyes, as though watching for some truth she knew him to be hiding, and, at long last, gave a nod.

“I’ll talk to my mother,” she said, squeezing both of his arms. “We’ll alert the Wood Wailers, too, try to get—”

“No. No Wood Wailers; they’ll only report back to the Adders. Only the clan.”

Nairel’s frown deepened. “Sairsel, what have you gotten yourself into?”

“We’re finally doing something. This is the first step for Ala Mhigo. It’ll be worth it, you’ll see—I promise.”

It made Sairsel ache more than he thought, to slip his hands from his sister’s, but he retreated back into the shadows before she could tell him to stay safe, or anything else that might sound like what Ashelia had told him—it could only hurt more.

The next morning, his people were gone, but this part of the Wood remained as he had always known it. Baelsar’s Wall stood with its sharp edges, dark against the colour of ash, as lightning split the sky.

Sairsel had always hated the Wall’s cold, graceless metal and the angry lights of all the Empire’s blighted magitek polluting the peace of the Twelveswood. ‘Beautiful’ was a word he never would have thought to be applicable to that thing, but tonight, it was—because tonight, Baelsar’s Wall was burning. Shrieking alarms blared, watch dogs barked and howled, and men and women in all the colours of the Alliance shouted battle cries as they clashed against imperial soldiers.

For the first time in his life, Sairsel found beauty not in the peace of the Wood, not in the quiet and the solitude he so dearly sought, but in chaos and violence.

“It will be a long while before the Empire is done paying for all they’ve done to us,” Morgana had said to her unit as they readied for the assault. She’d been restless the whole day before the attack, likely spurred by the urgency of being so close to home yet so many battles far—but Sairsel had an inkling it was the Twelveswood, too: the place that had taken from her far more than it had given. She’d barely looked at him all day. “But for tonight, I’ll be glad to take back some of that coin in blood.”

And blood there was. It slicked the metal footpaths under Sairsel’s boots, and he was glad not to be encumbered by a Serpent’s uniform; he spent much of the assault scouting ahead, and back and forth to ensure the infiltration of each unit, sticking to the shadows. His ranger’s clothes served him than those glaring yellow jackets and heavy boots ever could, and he was thankful for it as he climbed higher through the castrum, closer to the sky, deeper in the blood. Every ladder he found, he climbed.

Morgana was alone, pulling at the collar of her Flames uniform, her sword more crimson than steel when he found her. Far from the fires, the air was cooler, and the breeze blew stray strands of greying hair across her damp forehead.

“All right?” Sairsel asked breathlessly.

“All right,” she replied, weariness sewn into the fringes of her voice. “My unit’s deployed. Everything to plan. Finding higher ground?”

“Aye. Putting those forest-soft skills to good use,” Sairsel said curtly, designating his bow. “I—”

“Wait.” Morgana made a beckoning motion that was more a quick tilt of her head and grabbed Sairsel’s wrist when he came closer, pulling him to the edge of the walkway. “Look.”

Beyond, the sky bled from the steely black above to a soft, dusky blue. And against that blue lay a horizon, bright and clear but for a few wisps of clouds, marked by the rising lines of mountains that spread as far as the eye could see. For the first time in his life, Sairsel gazed upon the other side of the Wall, stretching far beyond the Twelveswood he knew.

“The Gyr Abanian highlands,” Morgana said. She raised a bloody hand, pointing east. “It’s too far to see, but—far beyond that tower, there. You’re looking at Ala Mhigo, boy.”

Sairsel opened his mouth to speak, but found no words. Instead he took his eyes from the mountain peaks and looked at his mother, trying to understand the look on her face. He never quite could, but the intensity in her eyes was more familiar than anything he’d ever seen; he simply couldn’t remember, in that hasty moment, why it was.

“How do you feel?” he asked, quietly. Surely she’d find the question appalling. Surely—

“I feel,” she began.

A crash resounded below, shaking the ground. Morgana swept around and fell into a battle stance—but no attack came. She rushed to the other side of the narrow platform upon which they stood, with Sairsel beside her, a hand at his quiver. A pair in Garlean colours ran across just below them; Sairsel nocked an arrow and readied to draw, but his mother’s hand lowered the bow.

“Wait. I know those men.”

“What?”

Morgana’s fingers tightened around his arm. “I’ve seen them with the Griffin—those traitorous shites.” She gave an urgent squeeze, then a small shove. “You need to go find him. Tell him we’ve got turncoats. I’ll make them talk.”

“Morgana—”

“That’s an order, boy. Go!”

The two men were headed back towards the fighting, and Morgana would be following them down into the Garleans’ hells. It was enough to make Sairsel hesitate, but there was no going against her. Not now. He turned, made to run off—and heard her voice again, quiet, not directed at him.

“Bloody hells, Ilberd,” she hissed, a desperate curse for her own ears.

He never should have heard; he would not, had he been anyone else. But he had a ranger’s ears, and the name cut through the faraway battle and the wind itself, turning Sairsel’s blood cold.

So he’d shown Morgana his face. He’d told her his name, and it had meant nothing to her, and her loyalty had been unshaken—or maybe the name meant something to her, too, and she hadn’t cared. Anything, she had said. Anything it took.

Sairsel tasted blood in his mouth as he ran. He ran until his breath burned in his lungs, ran until he could see the proud line of the Griffin’s back, his black-and-white figure stark against the night. A victory so close at hand below him—and Gyr Abania beyond, at his right hand. Sairsel watched the griffin embroidered on the fabric of his cape and felt, above his rage and his disgust, a grief so heavy and sharp it clawed at his throat.

“Look at me,” he said. His fingers were tight around his bow, the string biting through his gloves. The arrow was already nocked. He’d seen the Griffin in his armour enough to know that his throat was bare, unprotected—Sairsel had wondered, once, about the point of so much armour if one arrow could do the trick. Does he want to die?

The Griffin turned, pinned him with the blankness of that stare shadowed by mask and hood. He said nothing.

“Two of your people are in imperial soldier uniforms. Morgana is chasing after them for turncoats.”

“She’s more loyal than most.”

Sairsel was tired of wondering what lay beyond that mask. The itch to see the eyes hidden underneath was a raging gale, and everything—all of it—made his hands shake.

“What are you really afraid of?” Sairsel asked, breathlessly. “People knowing your face, or your name?”

“You assume wrongly, to name it fear,” said the Griffin. “Is it that you’re afraid, boy?”

“I’m a lot of fucking things, right now.” He raised his bow, keeping the tip of the arrow level with the Griffin’s throat. All he had to do was draw, loose. Set it free. “I knew Wilred. In Little Ala Mhigo. I didn’t join the Resistance until after he went off to fight for the Braves, but—I knew him.” He swallowed. “Did you kill him?”

“He died to bring us closer to freeing Ala Mhigo, like every man and woman here,” the Griffin said, steadfast. No doubts; no remorse. Sairsel ached. “Some of us are worth more in death than in battle.”

“Then you die, too,” Sairsel yelled, his voice rising too harshly from his throat, “and maybe it’ll bring us another step closer.”

And, if not, it might help Wilred rest, at the very least.

Sairsel did not hesitate as he pulled back his bow string as far as it would go, unfeeling. He loosed; pain blossomed in his chest as the arrow flew towards the Griffin’s throat. It would have torn through him, if not for the blade that rose to slice it in two.

No man should have been capable of such a thing—but Ilberd Feare no longer was the man he had once been. And Sairsel had not the sense to let people stronger than he defeat the things that made monsters of someone like the Griffin; not tonight. He tossed his bow to the ground, sprinting forward, and tore his sword from its sheath.

His sword-skill was never good enough; blades didn’t sing in his hands the way they sang in his mother’s. Swords always felt too heavy, their weight all wrong, their steel too firm compared to the wood of the bows that seemed to know his hands, his eyes, his heart. But he was beginning to understand how people worked with swords in their hands—beginning—and so he managed to dodge the first thrust with which the Griffin met his forward lunge.

Sairsel found himself beside the Griffin’s left shoulder, with Gyr Abania at his back as he slashed at that bare throat. The Griffin threw his head back just in time, sidestepped away, then charged back in to throw his shoulder into Sairsel’s chest. That sent him hurtling back, his head and shoulder meeting the unforgiving metal of the platform hard; it knocked the wind out of his lungs, tearing a groan from his throat, and his sword clattered away.

Not like this.

The pain was spreading like wildfires through his body, but his fingers still searched frantically for his sword, and his eyes still saw the Griffin’s blade bearing down on him. He rolled away, scrambling to his feet. His chest felt like it was going to collapse in on itself from the force of the Griffin’s blow, but he could still stand, so nothing mattered. He still had a knife.

“I don’t want to kill you, lad,” the Griffin said, and Sairsel couldn’t see in his eyes if it was true. That didn’t matter, either. He lunged again, slashing and slashing and slashing like a wild coeurl swinging its claws until they found purchase.

And his claws drew blood. For a heartbeat, Sairsel stopped, but it wasn’t enough; only a glancing blow drawing a shallow line under his jaw. It was enough to make the Griffin hiss, but he was a man who barely faltered, and Sairsel had already given up his opening in the hesitation. The Griffin’s blade slashed upward, and Sairsel staggered back.

The pain in his chest changed. He barely felt the blood that began to run down the front of his jacket.

“I didn’t want to kill you,” the Griffin said as he collapsed—first to his knees, then to the ground. And, just like that, he turned away to watch the fighting below.

Sairsel didn’t know if he was breathing anymore, but he knew that it hurt, worse than anything he had ever felt before. Sobs that wouldn’t rise from his lungs died on his lips, and his fingers clawed at the Griffin’s ankles, too far from him to reach. He wanted to ask— he wanted to ask—

“How could you do this do us?” he croaked out.

If the Griffin answered, Sairsel didn’t hear it. He turned his head and watched the mountains fall into the night sky as the fighting went on.

That voice.

Shining is the land’s—

He heard it again.

“Mother?”

light of justice.

It was a foolish thing to ask, because he had never heard his mother sing, and the voice was soft. But it reminded him of her. The echo rose all around him, at once distant and so near it seemed to resonate within his very heart. Like the Wood, on the day—

On the day—

Sairsel reached an arm out again, heavy as stone. His fingers found the narrow spaces in the metal below him, and he dragged himself—wheezing and whimpering—until he could curl one hand against the edge of the platform. He shook as he peered over, lifting his head with everything he had left.

Was her voice rising for the piles of bodies that lay silent upon the metal? Did she lament for him, too—for Ilberd Feare, broken among them, his unmasked face a horror in death?

As the light rose from them into something without shape, something far brighter than the fires and far greater than the deaths that served it, Sairsel’s mind latched onto one last thought.

Does she sing for me?

It hurt so much. Sairsel rolled onto his back again, let his head fall to the side, and saw light again. Not that light—not the light that consumed.

The light of a warrior.

Sairsel watched her, gleaming in her armour, as the edges of his vision blurred and that angry light burst.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:morgana #f:xiv

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farplane · 5 years

Text

for hearth and home

septembre 2019: sairsel and morgana arroway, brothers-in-arms, and the fight for home; a direct continuation of liberty or death. ffxiv:stormblood (4.0) spoilers. 15,699 words. (read on ao3)

In truth, Sairsel was not quite certain what it meant to be an adventurer.

It was a path he’d decided to follow once he realized it was better to be on a path of his own, even if it was obscure both in direction and in what he wanted from it, than to follow something that he increasingly felt was never meant for him. And it wasn’t that the whole clan was to blame—Nairel’s mother was, by far, the most skilled of them at finding words that strongly implied he had no real place among them without saying it outright, and even she tempered herself as a courtesy to her daughter and Sairsel’s father. Even at nineteen summers, Sairsel had wisdom enough to know that he himself had his part of responsibility in it, too. He still didn’t know whether Nairel’s mother had meant it as a kindness when she told him that Oschon himself had cursed him with wandering feet, but to him it had felt like the first thing setting him free.

Perhaps adventuring meant fighting, or helping as many as possible—but for Sairsel, at least, it started with finally being left alone.

He loved the freedom of solitude. He was perfectly content to provide for himself and to spend his days as a vagabond through the Wood; one day soon, he told himself, he’d take another path and see the rest of Eorzea. As long as the forest had for him new landscapes that he hadn’t seen on his own, though, he didn’t want to leave it all behind.

For the most part, he avoided the settlements—and most pointedly of all, he avoided Gridania itself—except out of necessity. Even if it did come to necessity, he’d try and find every possible alternative to having to find himself among people who had never been quite his own even when he’d had a clan to call his: the settlements in the Wood were all offshoots of Gridania, and he was ever more of an outsider to them than he was to his people. When the strap of his quiver wore down so terminally that his most recent attempts at sewing it back together broke his sewing needle, he resigned himself to the inevitable with a dread that crawled unbidden inside him and settled as a weight low in his ribcage.

His apprehension, as it so often did, proved to have been pointless and unfounded as he passed through the open gates of Quarrymill: no one so much as spared him a second glance. He wondered why it was so, when he’d been made to feel for so long that he stood out in every possible way. Could his short ears still be seen as those of a full-blooded Elezen at a passing glance? Or was it simply that he looked enough like an adventurer that it was expected of him to be an outsider? Perhaps it was the foul weather, with its bloated dark grey sky and cutting winds, that made everyone less keen to appreciate their surroundings.

It wasn’t until he’d traded a few skins for a new strap and sewing needle that he overheard the Highlander’s argument with the Hearer, and understood that he went unnoticed because someone stranger than he was stirring up trouble.

The man was built like something carved out of sturdy brown rock, but emaciated; the muscles of his bare torso were much too sculpted, and exhaustion showed in the dark colour sunken deep under his eyes. He wore his black hair braided and tied back, but for a few beaded braids framing his face that shivered and tapped against one another in the wind. Behind him, a few others stood and sat near the water, the lot of them looking just as—if not worse—haggard as the man did. Among them lay a man who seemed halfway to his grave, sweaty with fever and breathing raggedly.

These people were not of the Twelveswood; that much was clear in the way the man spoke to the Hearer and cursed the elementals. Desperate anger was written in every tense inch of his posture—before he even understood his plight, Sairsel found himself feeling for him, though he was unsure as to why. Perhaps it was all his father had said to him, of Hearers abusing their positions to give commands that had little to do with the elementals’ true will; even Nairel’s mother claimed that their will was in every part of the Wood—every leaf, every branch, every stone, every storm and wind and flood—and that the Hearers were but fallible proxies. The wandering clans knew woodwrath better than the Gridanians and their guilds ever could, and Sairsel’s father had raised his children to be wary of the abuse of which people could be capable when they believed too staunchly in keeping others out.

He stepped forward before he could be afraid of doing it, his heart jumping in his throat when he realized there was no pulling back. “What’s going on?” he asked, turning his attention to the man more than the Hearer herself.

“One of my men is grievously injured, and these—” the man said, gritting his teeth against insults that could only worsen his position, “they refuse to offer succor out of superstition and judgement of us outsiders, even in the face of begging.”

“It is the will of the elementals. They have denied us to act, and they will continue to do so, and we will continue to obey their will for the safety of all those present.”

Sairsel scoffed, glancing over to the wounded man before turning his gaze back to the Hearer. Don’t be reckless, said a voice at the back of his mind that sounded suspiciously like his sister, don’t look for a fight. He’d never been so combative, not since he’d realized it only ever made things worse—but now, he was tired of making himself as small as he could be.

“Aye, because the elementals do terribly fear a dying man,” Sairsel said flatly.

“The elementals do not fear. The elementals—”

“Speak to you, sure, but I’d wager it’s been rather quiet of late. When’s the last time you’ve seen woodwrath strike since the sky went red?” he asked. The Hearer opened her mouth, and Sairsel turned to the man beside him. “What do you need?”

“You doom yourself, boy,” the Hearer said before the man could answer, staring pointedly at Sairsel’s ears. “You gamble with the grace they have afforded you by letting you walk our land.”

Sairsel had never been so calm in his anger. A cold chill spread through him down to his very fingertips, and he felt like someone else as he took the man’s arm and began to steer him away, his other hand outstretched as he looked up at the trees around them.

“Woodwrath take me now, then, if the elementals so staunchly oppose the mere fucking act of preserving the life the Wood grants us.”

It was more complex than that; he knew that much. He knew it was about balance, that the Wood could destroy with a ferocity that did not discriminate; no one life was worth more than any other. But Sairsel had grown up with the belief that perhaps—just perhaps—any who took the time to live in the Wood and listen to its heart knew the elementals just as well as any Hearer could. So he trusted his instinct, and the elementals did not strike him down.

The man was looking at him with an expression Sairsel didn’t understand—eyes wide, brow furrowed. Sairsel gave him a tentative shadow of a smile.

“You— You’re the first person here to even dare to help us,” the man said.

“Well, I’m not from around here.”

“An adventurer, then?”

Even though he’d told his family otherwise when he left, he didn’t feel like an adventurer. “I’m not—I mean, I am from the Wood. Just not this town. We believe different things about the elementals, I suppose.” He scratched his neck. “So, er, your man—what does he need?”

“His wound’s festered. We have no healer with us, and I’ve no means of obtaining any remedy while stuck in this gods-forsaken place.”

Sairsel was startled to realize that there was something he could do for them. Though both of his children had shown more of a penchant for the path of the hunters, Sairsel’s father had been staunch in his insistence that they should learn as much of what he knew as the clan’s herbalist, and Sairsel had taken better to it than Nairel, who could hardly sit still. He’d helped him, once, with a hunter who hadn’t properly cleaned a scratch she’d obtained from a broken tree branch; a fever had settled in within days.

“I can get you what he needs. Let me— I’ll just be gone a few bells at most. Do you think he has that long?”

“We can only hope that he does,” the man said, touching Sairsel’s arm just as he made to turn. “Thank you. I won’t forget this kindness.”

Sairsel made an uncomfortable gesture that was meant to be dismissive of himself; it was only as he had walked away that he realized it may have come as plainly dismissive and coarse. He ruminated the concern for a time, while he searched for the herbs he needed in the underbrush—but what did it matter? The man had far more dire things on his mind than whether the skinny half-Elezen helping him had reacted to his gratitude in an impolite manner or not, and surely the help itself balanced it out. What Sairsel understood the least was himself, for having gotten involved in the first place as much as for how eagerly he seemed to want to make this man think well of him.

Behind its veil of grey, the sun crawled along the sky as though it meant to steal daylight away, barely noticeable in its progression. It was a harder search than Sairsel had expected, and by the time he finally did find the white-leafed plant he sought, his thoughts were weighed down by doubt—doubt that perhaps the elementals had not struck him down with woodwrath, but that this was their way of showing their disapproval. It was a stupid and poisonous thought to have, he realized as he knelt down and began to pluck at the leaves as efficiently as he could; the Wood provided. It always had, and always will.

All that mattered was that the right people knew it, and knew to make something of that boon. Sairsel uttered a silent prayer of thanks as he prepared the remedy in a wide leaf from a nearby tree, for want of a mortar, and kept those words in his mind the whole way back to Quarrymill.

The wounded man had not yet breathed his last. When they saw him, the whole pack of his comrades seemed to shuffle to their feet at once, moving towards Sairsel expectantly.

“I’ve got it. You only need to apply it directly over his wound—” he began, and a spindly woman snatched the leaf out of his hands with a quick, thickly accented word of gratitude, “—er. Just make sure to spread it at least an ilm around, too.”

“Thank Rhalgr you’ve come,” said the man from earlier. Rhalgr? That gave Sairsel pause. “Stay here—give me a moment.”

Sairsel watched, meeting the thanks of the others with curt nods as he watched the man kneel before his wounded companion. He took his hand, pressed a palm to his glistening forehead, and whispered what Sairsel assumed were words of comfort—to his surprise, even through the fever and what must have been immense pain, the wounded man managed a little smile that he turned up towards Sairsel with a grateful nod. That fleeting moment of serenity was broken as the spindly woman began applying the remedy; Sairsel looked away from the wounded man’s contorting features, not knowing whether it was for his own sake or to allow him some privacy in his pain.

The man with the braids stood and returned to Sairsel, taking him a few feet away to gaze upon the gentle stream running through the village. He turned his eyes to Sairsel: a brown dark with honesty yet softened by gratitude, though no less worn around the edges.

“You’ve done Gallien a great kindness, lad,” he said. “All of us. I wish there was something I could give to repay you, but we’ve nothing—”

Sairsel shook his head. “I didn’t do this for coin. I did it because… I don’t know. The Wood is my home. It’s not right, what that Hearer did.”

The man nodded and leaned with both hands on the shoddy fence. He looked out into the water once again with a furrowed brow for a moment, grappling with his thoughts, before turning back to Sairsel again like he’d just remembered something, holding out a hand. “I’m Meffrid.”

“Meffrid,” Sairsel repeated. He shook his hand, then belatedly pointed to himself. “Sairsel.”

“Well, I meant what I said earlier, Sairsel: I won’t forget this.”

“Me neither,” Sairsel said clumsily, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “May I ask—how come you’ve found yourselves here? You’re obviously not Gridanian. Are you going to be all right from here on out?”

That made Meffrid smile—a weary, diminished sort of smile, but it was a smile nonetheless. “Aye, lad, we’ll be all right; I’ll make certain of it. We’ve come from Gyr Abania—from the Ala Mhigan Resistance. We have a hell of our own over there. I led them all the way here for their safety, but I suppose that being away from imperial dogs only means we’re closer to a different sort of hound.”

“I’m sorry,” Sairsel said. He didn’t know whether he was apologizing for their whole situation—was that presumptuous?—or for the hardships suffered in the Wood. Perhaps it was simply for Meffrid himself that he felt sorry; for the way his gaze fell spoke of all the weight on his shoulders, all the responsibility he carried by himself.

“You have nothing to be sorry for. We’re more than halfway to Thanalan by now, aren’t we? As soon as Gallien has recovered, we’ll be on our way, and we’ll soon be safe in Little Ala Mhigo.”

A heaviness settled in Sairsel’s chest. “I hope the Wanderer guides your path.”

“Thank you.”

Meffrid laid a hand on Sairsel’s shoulder and squeezed, a gesture that made him feel as though they were not strangers at all. And yet, they were—Sairsel made certain to remind himself of that when he parted ways with the Ala Mhigans and left Quarrymill feeling stifled and guilty. They were strangers on separate paths. He forced himself not to hope to see them again, because their plight was a faraway one, and Sairsel had given what he could when they needed it.

He never did see Meffrid on this side of Baelsar’s Wall again.

“Are you Gridanian, by any chance?” asked the Grand Steward.

Sairsel shifted uneasily in his seat, wondering—for perhaps the fifteenth time—what in the seven hells he was still doing here, sitting in a free company mansion in the middle of the desert across from a woman who somehow inspired both terror and inexplicable awe in him. He considered correcting her, but decided against delving into the subtleties of what it meant for a forestborn of the clans to be called Gridanian when he had never once lived in the city for a day in his life.

“Is that going to be a problem?” he asked instead.

The Grand Steward tilted her head. Ashelia Riot, her name was; leader of the Riskbreakers, a company that, against all sense, Sairsel still considered joining. Something in her eyes kept him rooted—something of an anchor, true and fierce—against everything that told him to get up and leave. Everything but his instinct.

“Not at all. I’m simply surprised that a Gridanian would be interested in joining a company run by a Mhigan.”

Sairsel didn’t stop to wonder if there was some age-old disdain lingering from the Autumn War to that remark—there wasn’t—and instead mumbled something clumsy about the imperials and his home and dedication to what was right that, within the year, he would already have forgotten. What he did remember was the thought at the back of his mind, then—that if Ashelia Riot was as caring and selfless as what he had seen of the man named Meffrid in Quarrymill, he would be prouder to follow her than any Gridanian he could ever meet.

(He learned, soon enough, that he was prouder to follow her than any other Ala Mhigan he could ever meet, too.)

There was a twinkle in Madelaine’s eye that Sairsel knew, by now, heralded a particularly clever or biting remark. He was already preparing to roll his eyes.

“So the little rabbit wants to learn to hop.”

Sairsel rolled his eyes. “You know what, this was a bad idea. I can ask someone in Little Ala Mhigo. They’re always going on about Mhigan pikemen, anyroad,” he said, and made to turn and leave. Madelaine was smirking as her fingers wrapped around his wrist, tugging him back.

“Don’t be a child; it only makes you look like a boy trying to be a man,” she said, twirling a finger in the direction of the stubble on his jaw. “Besides,” and she bent to reach under the bed, dragging out a long bundle that she opened to reveal two lances, “you didn’t come all the way to Coerthas just to see my face, did you?”

“You’d be surprised of the lengths I’d go just for you, Madame Lachance,” Sairsel said. It didn’t have quite the suave effect he was hoping for with his teeth chattering; acclimatizing to the desert heat had been a hell and a half, and now it left him especially ill-suited for the cold climates he’d always tolerated better than most.

Madelaine snorted. “What is it really, Sairsel?”

“It’s—” he began unsteadily, then sighed. “The Resistance, they’re all people who’ve been fighting for years. And, I know, they had no other choice, even the ones my age, because Ul’dah and that whole fucking desert have been cruel to them—but I’m not like that. I’m a hunter, not a warrior. Sword-skill doesn’t come easy to me and I know I disappoint my mother every time I try to make her understand why swords feel so heavy in my hands.”

“What makes you think learning the lance is going to be easier than a sword?” Madelaine asked, keeping a level gaze on him.

“I’m an archer. I’m better at a distance.”

Madelaine raised an eyebrow and spoke in an airy voice, the sarcasm clear in her words: “How unlike you to balk at intimacy even in violence.”

“Oh, you know me. Love looking people in the eyes.”

Without a word, Madelaine gathered up the lances. She paused by a chest at the foot of her bed, opened it with one hand, and tossed Sairsel a fur. “Well, come on, little rabbit. We’ve a long way to go before you’re worthy of the Sirens, so we had better get started yesterday.”

Sairsel was still unsure of how, exactly, he felt about standing in Gyr Abania.

It wasn’t like coming home, of course; how could it be? He had come into the world in the Wood, lived most of his life in the Wood. Ala Mhigo had been a distant thing to which he was blind beyond a wall that had seemed, for twenty years, to be utterly impenetrable.

Seeing the mountains from the top of Baelsar’s Wall for the first time, with his mother at his side—or perhaps rather he at hers—had been a moment he knew he would remember for all his days. But standing on Gyr Abanian soil—that was not a moment. It was seconds, minutes, hours all woven together, as continuous as the flow of life itself; how could he make sense of something so utterly immeasurable?

He’d liked East End best, predictably, because it felt familiar. The sound of the wind through the trees and the distant rush of water, the vibrant colour of the canopy, the earthy smells of nature—they all spoke to him as though to a friend, albeit in a different voice. East end was the Wood without the elementals, and it should have unnerved him, but it didn’t; he heard not the silence he expected.

The woods in Gyr Abania spoke the same words, even if they did so in another language. Sairsel could almost understand it, but they moved on deeper into the Fringes before he could wholly make sense of it. There was a wideness to the highlands that simply disoriented him—greater, somehow, than the bare and sandy expanses of sand in Thanalan. In the Fringes, the sky seemed to open up even higher and farther; the waters swallowed up what might have been finite in the dusty ground and made it endless, from waterfall to stream to tree.

He couldn’t explain how beautiful he found it, and how small it made him feel.

Perhaps it made him quiet. It came as a surprise that anyone even noticed, because that was how they knew him—but Leofric seemed to see the difference. When Sairsel rejoined his unit in Castrum Oriens, it fell naturally that he should bring up the rear, because he was, above all things, a ranger. As they reached the Striped Hills, however—all rock and dust and dead trees and harsh sun, but air cooler than Thanalan could ever breathe in daytime—Leofric insisted that Sairsel should stay with him at the front.

Sairsel didn’t ask why, but his expression did.

“Don’t look so glum and wary, hey? It’s not a punishment,” Leofric said, clapping him hard on the back.

“I just thought it would be better if I lay low for a while,” Sairsel muttered. He very carefully did not look over his shoulder at the others despite how much he wanted to; he didn’t need any more reasons to look suspicious. “After the whole Griffin business—”

Leofric gave him a perplexed, incredulous look. “What, you think people think badly of you for survivin’ hell? Because you followed him?”

“Everyone’s going around saying he was a madman and a fanatic.”

“Aye, because he was. No one was saying that before he went and threw himself from the Wall to summon a primal, though, were they?” Leofric said. “We’re all oracles when something’s already passed.”

Sairsel raised a hand to his chest, scratching at the fresh scar through his coat. Every day, he wondered if he would have survived the Griffin if not for magical healing. He certainly would not have been back on his feet so soon without it, and that alone was more of a blessing than he deserved, but gods did it itch.

When he didn’t answer straight away, Leofric added, keenly: “Everyone needs someone to blame for our dead, Arroway. We can’t blame the imperials this time; it was one of our own. So we need to tell ourselves he was the worst of us.”

The worst part of it all was that Sairsel could see past his rage, and it wasn’t clarity that waited on the other side. It was a single, muddled thought, one that tore at him: he wasn’t certain whether the Griffin—Ilberd—really was the worst of them. Only the most desperate.

That, he never would dare to speak aloud. “I suppose,” he said instead.

“Aren’t you going to ask why you’re at the front, then?” Leofric asked after a moment.

“Why, you want me to? You could just tell me.”

Leofric draped a heavy arm across his shoulders and leaned in with a conspiratorial smile. “I want to see your face when you see the Reach for the first time,” he said, straightening up but not pulling away. “Everyone in my unit’s been at least once, so it’s not new for any of us. But the young ones—it’s always something for you lot. First time ever seeing Gyr Abania somewhere that’s really, truly still ours.”

There was something in the way Leofric’s voice weaved those words together that made Sairsel’s heart jump in his throat. He’d seen East End, the Velodyna—all with the creeping metal of magitek almost everywhere the eye could see. He wondered if he would feel something that he could understand when he saw it; Leofric’s manner made him hopeful of it, at the very least.

“I didn’t know you to be so sentimental.”

“About the right things, I am. You’ll see,” Leofric said. “You’ll understand.”

Sairsel expected more rock that wouldn’t speak to him at all when they came upon a dead end by the end of the afternoon, the light falling low and hot on the cliff face. Then Leofric opened a tiny satchel at his belt and blew a pinch of dust into the air, and the glamour fell away with a shimmer, and he smelled the water and heard the rush of waterfalls.

The sky opened. He was home.

Not his home, perhaps, but a home nonetheless—with the Destroyer standing high under the heavens, palm outstretched, water streaming down from the mountain behind him into a shimmering pool all around his altar. The temples were carved into the rock itself, and colour spread between the walls in tents and awnings and bright torches even in the daylight, and people—the Resistance as he had never seen it, as it never could be in Little Ala Mhigo. Gnarled trees stood between the tents, twenty summers dead in flames, but patches of green grew at their feet, creeping up: life clawing its way back even into the things that seemed lost.

Gazing upon Rhalgr’s Reach, it truly did almost seem as though freedom was close enough to grasp.

“Told you,” said Leofric’s voice near Sairsel’s ear as he stood in awe of that illusion. He put a hand on Sairsel’s shoulder and steered him forward through the base while Sairsel barely even looked ahead; there was too much to see, too much to take in.

The statue of Rhalgr drew his gaze the most. It was the first time, Sairsel realized, that he saw him represented as more than a symbol: now he was a man with a face, a hand that seemed to be calling him forth, with moss growing at his feet and creeping up the rocky folds of his clothing. Where the water flowed, green followed, and the Destroyer stood at the center of it all as though it came from him. Rays of waning sunlight fell into his hand, colouring the stone of the Reach an orange gold.

Sairsel was staring, he knew, but he couldn’t tear his eyes away even as Leofric stopped to greet old comrades, exchanging embraces and handshakes. The unit fanned out, finding reunions of their own, and the relief and energy seemed to feed that light, that freedom—without Leofric’s hand on his shoulder, Sairsel brought his gaze down to the people around him. It was a beautiful sight, and though he was alone in that moment, being an observer did not make him feel as much of an outsider as he did in Little Ala Mhigo.

This was the Resistance: the devotion, the embraces—the people fighting not against the Empire so much as for one another.

The voices tumbled over one another in laughter and spirited conversation, and then something moved through the crowd, and one familiar voice cut through the rest. At first, Sairsel mistook it for Leofric’s; he looked his way, only for his gaze to catch on a man moving past Leofric, and towards him.

“Destroyer take me,” said the man just as Sairsel noticed him. “Sairsel?”

Of all the things Sairsel had expected of coming to Gyr Abania, he would never have dreamed of hearing his name spoken this way—and at the headquarters of the Ala Mhigan Resistance, of all places. His lips parted, his voice caught in his throat and onto a whirlwind of emotions he didn’t understand; he could only cling to Meffrid as he pulled him in a bone-crushing hug.

“You’re here,” Meffrid said, his voice a muffled rumble against Sairsel, “I can’t believe you’re here.”

“I can’t believe it either,” Sairsel breathed.

Meffrid pulled away, keeping one hand on Sairsel’s shoulder, heavy brown eyes searching his face. The weariness Sairsel had known still wore him around the edges, but his cheeks were fuller, his frame stronger than it had been in Quarrymill. Sairsel couldn’t help but wonder what changes Meffrid saw in him.

“I don’t imagine you remember me, after all this time,” Meffrid said with a sympathetic smile that didn’t completely conceal a spark of hope.

“Of course I remember, Meffrid,” Sairsel said. “I never forgot. I’m— I’m with the Resistance, now.”

Meffrid smiled. “Aye, I can see that,” he said fondly, taking Sairsel’s face between his hands with the warmth of a brother. “Gods, let me look at you.”

Still unsure—but growing less and less so—Sairsel laid a hand on Meffrid’s forearm as he watched him in silent wonder. The attention made the back of his neck burn, but it didn’t matter.

“You look—” Meffrid said, searching for the right words. “You look so—”

“Grown?”

Meffrid corrected him with unshaking certainty, almost incredulous in his affection, that very nearly made Sairsel weep: “Mhigan.”

“Ah, well—about that,” Sairsel said, laughing nervously, “I am half-Mhigan, as it turns out. Recent discovery.”

“I’ll want to hear all of it,” Meffrid said, and Sairsel was shocked to realize that he actually meant it. He gave Sairsel’s cheek a pat, looking into his eyes and smiling once more. “Feels like that Spinner has been working herself to the bone for us, aye?”

Sairsel couldn’t help but smile, too. “Aye, she has.”

Few were those who could wake Sairsel—for the simple reason that he was usually long on his feet by the time most people even started stirring. He woke with the crows, his father always said; in the misty, cold hours where the Wood was silent but for the croaking and the fluttering of black wings in the trees. Even in the Resistance—in Little Ala Mhigo—he’d always been among the first out of their bedrolls, and they were by no means the sort who lazed about. But Rhalgr’s Reach was different.

Meffrid was different.

Sairsel learned that on the morning he woke, his face still smashed into his bedroll, to Meffrid halfway inside his tent and poking his hip with the pommel of a sword. It was, at the very least, sheathed.

“Oi, new blood,” he said, as though they were strangers—and grinned when Sairsel cracked a bleary eye open in his direction— “Time to earn your keep.”

Miserably, Sairsel pushed himself up and rubbed his eyes. “What d’you need me for?” he asked with a stifled yawn.

“I’ve heard from your unit you’re a gifted scout. So I want to see that scouting for myself. Come on,” he said, tossing a green jacket right at him. “You know that barricaded tunnel to the east? Of course you do; you’re a scout. I want you there in ten minutes; Lyse is already waiting for us. There’ll be food if you get there in time.”

Sairsel extricated himself from his bedroll as quickly as he could and dressed, taking a few self-indulgent seconds to hold out the jacket and admire it: the same style that most members of the Resistance wore in Rhalgr’s Reach, and now he had one of his own—for the first time, he felt like perhaps he did have a place of his own among them, after all. He shrugged the jacket on to combat the morning chill and ducked out of his tent, hurrying through the rest of the steps to get himself ready.

As soon as he appeared by the tunnel, Meffrid handed him a dry cake wrapped in leaves. “I’m on time?” Sairsel asked.

Meffrid glanced at Lyse, who shrugged, and gave a shrug of his own. “No idea. Everyone ready to go?”

“Ready and raring,” Lyse said, enthusiastically thumping her fist into her palm. When Sairsel merely nodded, as though afraid to take up space, Meffrid clapped his shoulder and took the lead.

It was strange, traveling with Lyse. Sairsel knew her only in passing—the Scions called her Yda, when he was only half-conscious in the aftermath of Baelsar’s Wall, and by the time he’d rejoined them with Ahtynwyb to cross over into Castrum Oriens, she had shed the mask and taken a first step towards freedom. The way the Resistance spoke of her was as though of an heir, and Sairsel was beginning to piece together the legacy her father had left Ala Mhigo; he felt like a voyeur even knowing this, and an intruder even more as they walked together on the side of the Reach that would lead her to her childhood home.

Even though this path only took him further and further away from his own home, she treated him no differently than the rest. With her and Meffrid beside him, the Peaks were silent giants not judging his approach, but welcoming him.

And welcoming Lyse, too. Sairsel was glad, in some way, for the distraction that his focus on reconnaissance provided; it gave him something to do rather than watch her come home. He liked to believe he’d been raised with some manners, and it only felt wrong not to let her have at least some intimacy to live these moments of her life—and from what glances he allowed himself when he stood on distant vantage points, any real proximity might have overwhelmed him. She took in her surroundings with almost childish wonderment, with unbridled joy and relief; and then she would see something familiar, or perhaps something that was everything but—a broken statue, a glint of Garlean steel—and loss would flash across her face.

Still, she was strong, and hurt never prevailed over her for long. She was smiling again under the bright sky, some distance ahead on the path, as Sairsel hopped down from a high outcropping of rock to give his report. They were more than halfway to Ala Gannha, by now, and the sun had the height of midday; its warmth bled through the air enough that they had tied their coats around their waists.

Lyse's eagerness was contagious: Meffrid's easy smile betrayed his high spirits even when he tried to play the part of the responsible captain as Sairsel updated his report.

“Good. Very good. I’ll never tire of hearing about an absence of imperial patrols,” he said, clapping Sairsel on the back again. He was getting into the habit of putting a hand to the nape of Sairsel’s neck and giving a fond squeeze and a shake—and that, Sairsel never tired of. “You’re doing good work.”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” Sairsel quipped, and almost immediately regretted it. Had he gone too far in the familiarity? Sure, he’d helped Meffrid months ago, but—

“I’m not surprised at all,” Meffrid said, genuine. “And if I were, it would only be pleasantly so. I couldn’t have been sure what to expect, could I? This isn't exactly the Shroud.”

Meffrid extended his hands, designating the Peaks as a whole: the dusty roads, the rock, the open ground where the hardiest trees could only sparsely grow. Scrunching one eye closed against the glare of the sun, Sairsel glanced around, and up towards the sky.

“No, this isn’t the Wood,” Sairsel said. “Maybe if this were right after we’d met, I would be a proper nuisance, but I learned a lot in Thanalan. And I talked with some of the others—the scouts and the rangers and the skirmishers, and all that lot. M’naago knows this place like the back of her hand, doesn't she?”

Meffrid nodded. “Oh, aye.” Lyse’s voice called to them expectantly, and he shared an almost conspiratorial smile with Sairsel. “And I'm sure you will, too, in no time.”

Such a small thing, faith could be. Still, those words—unassuming as they were—remained with Sairsel. If Meffrid believed he could know this land even half as well as someone like M’naago did, then perhaps he had a place, too.

When they camped, Meffrid would often sit at the fire and sing as stars began to fill the sky. He never dared to properly raise his voice; it was little more than a breathy sort of hum that filled the silence with something deep and worn, but never devoid of life or hope. By now, the tune was familiar: one Sairsel had heard in the Reach, on strings and voices—once, on a trumpet—but never dared to ask after.

Mostly because he was afraid of reminding them all that he was an outsider when he could now find himself believing, a bit more every day, that he wasn’t. But Meffrid—Meffrid had never done anything but welcome him, even before Sairsel had told him about his mother. And then, he’d only listened with kindness, and told him he was a son of Ala Mhigo.

“It was kindness, aye, and maybe the Spinner’s hand that brought you to us that day, in the Shroud,” he’d said, “but maybe it was your Mhigan blood, too. Guiding your heart.”

He’d smiled at him, then, and Sairsel had found himself smiling back.

Son of Ala Mhigo or not, his disposition was still no different. He was growing braver—fiercer, Morgana had said before they separated in Castrum Oriens—and better at mimicking his mother’s boldness when it came to talking back, but talking at all was entirely different. And it was worse when it came to purposely drawing the attention of someone he admired; by the time he worked up the courage to interrupt Meffrid, he already felt breathless.

“You sing that song a lot,” Sairsel said, “would—”

“Do you want me to stop?” Meffrid asked, raising an eyebrow.

Sairsel shook his head and waved his hands, already halfway to frantic. “Wh— no!” he said. “I really didn’t say that to make you stop. I only meant—”

Meffrid smiled. It was then that Sairsel noticed his hands moving, turning over something small—wood?—in a manner that had more to it than mere idleness.

“You wonder what it is?”

“Aye.”

“The Measure of His Reach, it’s called. It’s our song,” Meffrid said, his gaze briefly falling to his hands before glancing back up at Sairsel. “With those words, at the very least. The imperials have tried to make it their own—so if you’re going to sing it outside the Reach, better make it hard to hear the words. Especially if you’re in Resistance colours. Makes it harder to pretend you’re singing for the glory of the Empire.”

“Oh,” Sairsel said. His face fell into a thoughtful frown.

“It’s a risk to take, but everything is, these days. I’d rather die with pride in my heart than live singing their words like they own us.”

“You could not sing at all,” Sairsel pointed out, though he didn’t really believe in the sentiment. As soon as the words left his mouth, he vividly imagined thumping his head against the nearest rock.

“I could also not fight at all. What’s freedom without a little risk, hey?” Meffrid said, nudging Sairsel’s arm with his elbow. His smile was soft around the edges, not quite as steady as it could be—but Meffrid’s faith never wavered. “Every small thing—it ends up mattering, Sairsel. Sometimes it’s a supply run going right. Sometimes it’s snatching intelligence from under the imperials’ noses. And sometimes, it’s just singing a song that reminds us who we were—who we still are, no matter what. Reminds us why we fight.”

Sairsel bit hard on the inside of his cheek, looking up towards the star-speckled sky as though it might quell the rising tide within his chest. Beside him, Meffrid kept on trailing the pad of his thumb against the bit of wood in his hands, only closing his fingers fully around it when Sairsel’s gaze moved back towards him.

“Would you teach it to me?” Sairsel asked quietly. “So that I can sing it with the right words.”

“Of course,” Meffrid said, nudging him again. “Maybe you can sing it when we liberate Ala Mhigo, make a proper bard of yourself. And make your Gridanian ancestors spin in their graves.”

Sairsel snorted. “I’m no bard,” he said, and focused on what little aether he could manipulate, as Aoife had taught him: like reaching into the pantry for that last biscuit, she’d said, except that the biscuit was a lute. Once it was in his hands, he strummed the strings once, and raised a finger pointedly. “I have a friend who is. Just because I’m an archer and I like singing—when no one hears me—”

“And Gridanian.”

“Forestborn,” Sairsel corrected.

Meffrid smiled, and Sairsel began to pluck away at what he remembered of the melody—and ever so quietly, like sharing a secret, Meffrid taught him to sing the beating heart of Gyr Abania.

“How are you acclimating?”

Sairsel shrugged stiffly. “Would you ask anyone else in Leofric’s unit that?”

“No,” Morgana said without hesitation. “I have only the one son in that unit, so I am asking him.”

Something in his mother had changed since Baelsar’s Wall—to say she had softened or warmed to him would have been a grand overstatement, but she was different. As though some walls of her own had been knocked down; whether it was the loss and betrayal of a man she had believed in, the abject failure of the operation, or the simple fact that she got to stand upon Gyr Abanian soil, Sairsel wasn’t certain. He appreciated the change, of course, but he wished it hadn’t taken her believing that he was dead for the ice around them to begin to melt.

And, much as it shamed him to even think it after having spent his life without a mother, he felt as though he’d finally been breathing his own air since they had separated in East End. Without her presence, her gaze, her weight, he had been able to begin to make sense of what the Resistance meant to him and him alone, to make something of what it was for him to be Ala Mhigan without all of it passing through what it meant to be the son of Morgana Arroway.

Now that she’d returned, he thought—with no lack of guilt for wanting such a separation—that perhaps one was intrinsically tied to the other.

“It’s been going well enough. I prefer it here to Little Ala Mhigo.”

Morgana showed a hint of a smile. “That doesn’t surprise me. More green, aye?” she asked, then laid her wrist against the pommel of her sword as she looked around. “Is your unit captain satisfied with you?”

She almost never referred to Leofric by name if she could help it; the way she regarded him could only be described as wary, and Sairsel was beginning to understand that it was protectiveness. Part of him wanted to reassure her that she had no impropriety to fear, but that would require, at the very least, hinting at what had already transpired—and Sairsel had no particular desire to broach the subject of men with his mother.

“I haven’t been with my unit much of late,” Sairsel said, clearing his throat and straightening his spine. “I spent most of my time since I got here doing reconnaissance work under Meffrid. He asks for me personally.”

“Meffrid?” Morgana asked, raising her eyebrows. Childishly, perhaps, Sairsel enjoyed the pleasant surprise on her face; of course she hadn’t expected him to be able to make something of himself on his own. “He’s one of Conrad’s best. How did you come by that?”

“I told you when we met that I’d helped some members of the Resistance back in the Twelveswood before, didn’t I? Meffrid was their captain.”

Something in her eyes shifted; they narrowed and softened at the same time. “That’s good. That’s very good. I’m glad to hear you continue to earn your place.”

“What,” Sairsel said, regarding her with an expression that allowed no quarter; something he had learned from her. He didn’t know how much of it was teasing and how much was genuine. “You didn’t think I was capable of it?”

“No, I didn’t say—”

“Oi, Sairsel,” called Meffrid’s voice off to his right—always the voice of an equal. Meffrid never commanded; Sairsel liked that about him. He waved a roll of parchment in his hand. “Mind helping me with this map? I can’t plan this route in any way that I like.”

“Time to earn my place some more,” Sairsel said to his mother, perhaps too harsh in his sarcasm. Morgana gave him a satisfied nod and waved him off; he regretted how stiffly he turned away.

He didn’t mean to antagonize her, really, and neither did he expect that she was trying to be as abrasive as she had been with him before, especially now. Still, he struggled not to respond in kind, even if the attitude was needlessly preemptive, after the time he had spent learning it from her. As he followed Meffrid to a nearby table—a slab of wood mounted low on a number of stacked boxes—he tuned his mind to the tension in his shoulders, releasing it, trying to slip back into the ease he felt at Meffrid’s side. Breathing his own air.

“That was your mother—Morgana, aye?” Meffrid asked, smoothing his hands over the map. Without even needing him to ask, Sairsel reached out to hold down a corner, while Meffrid laid three fingers against the opposite.

“You know her?”

Meffrid smiled. “I know of her. She’s been with the Resistance a long while, and even before that—the Coliseum, the Griffin’s Talons. People like her make a mark. You’re lucky you were able to return to Gyr Abania together.”

Much as Sairsel wanted to complain about her like a little boy, Meffrid was right. The fates had been unfathomably kind, after ripping so many families apart—including the family they might have shared—if only in bringing them together. That they should have both survived the Griffin was a boon for which Sairsel knew he should be thanking the Twelve every day, but he never could bring himself to speak to them as though they had ever done anything for him.

“I know,” he said. “The Spinner has been working herself to the bone.”

“It’s a good thing to cherish, my friend,” Meffrid said, clapping him affectionaly on the back. He kept his hand on Sairsel’s shoulder long enough to give it a squeeze, then motioned to a spot on the map, and launched back into the subject of supply routes with little more ceremony.

Sairsel liked that about him. Much as Meffrid had a knack for wearing himself to the bone with concern for his people, he never wasted time or words. His devotion fell to the right places. Twice as they pored over the map did Sairsel look up, studying the sharp focus in Meffrid’s eyes; the weary, kind lines of his face. Something about his admiration for Meffrid felt almost boyish—Sairsel was aware of that—but no one else in the Resistance seemed to draw it from him the way Meffrid did.

When they were done, Meffrid clapped Sairsel’s back again, satisfied with their routes, and went off under gathering storm clouds to take the plans to Conrad. It was only a matter of hours, then, before Sairsel would come to think that the Spinner had perhaps had enough of keeping so many threads of his life intact.

This time, when Sairsel fought amidst chaos and flames, there was nothing in them to be celebrated. At Baelsar’s Wall, there had been triumph; there had been choice, a chaos of their own making; they had been taking something back that was theirs.

Now, the imperials only took. The flames of magitek artillery choked all the peace out of their sanctuary, taking away in minutes something that had been preserved for decades, and the sky answered with sharp purple-white lightning. Still, Rhalgar only watched. He could only watch as the Resistance died with his name on their lips—the same broken cries Sairsel had heard in a fog as he lay at Ilberd’s feet.

It took him almost all he had not to sink down and drown in it; it took him everything else just to stay alive. He clutched his bow like it would keep him afloat and ran—not away from the fray, but into the smoke, his fingers and boots scraping on rock as he climbed to a vantage. Barely high enough, but it had to be enough. He had to be enough.

Aim quick. Strike true. Three, eight, eleven arrows. The fires blinded him, the beams of light sparking from the imperials’ arms too bright— Between the plates, through the circuits. Cover the ones who can really fight. Fourteen. Twenty.

“I want that fucking archer dead!” bellowed a woman’s voice, her accent so thickly Mhigan that Sairsel didn’t realize it came from an imperial until a bullet whizzed past his left ear. With shaking legs, he jumped down from his vantage and rolled away just before the cannon blast hit where he’d been standing, burning at his back as he scrambled to his feet.

He threw himself into the smoke to disappear, the way the skirmishers had showed him. Bullets and magitek blasts still burst through the air—it was endless, a chorus of explosions and screams and slashing steel—but no longer at him. Still, the woman in black saw him: she advanced, cutting down every Resistance fighter in her path with ease, dressed in some fading memory of Gyr Abanian styles plated with Garlean blacks.

It was only for a breath, for two footsteps, but Sairsel felt himself become prey. Her blade was relentless; he knew there was no surviving it, not when so many with more skill and strength than he could ever dream of having lay dead in her wake.

Then he heard Meffrid’s voice. “Sairsel!”

In the tumult, Meffrid stood as a titan. He challenged the imperial with a low growl that seemed to shake the earth, halting her advance towards Sairsel; their blades clashed with flashes of steel. They met blow for blow. Meffrid’s rage bled into every stroke of his sword. Just beyond him, Sairsel’s eyes caught a flash of metal, and the arrow was already nocked to his bowstring as an imperial aimed his gun, the bullet meant for Meffrid.

The man fell. Meffrid grunted, blood splashing from his mouth into the sand as the Ala Mhigan imperial cracked the hilt of her sword against his jaw. He spat red at her feet.

“Traitor! Kinslayer!”

Her arms, her neck, her belly, her legs; she was nowhere near as unprotected as the rest, a target full of weak points for Sairsel’s arrow to strike. Briefly, he wondered if Meffrid would see dishonour in Sairsel shooting her while she was engaged solely with him—but he was prepared to accept any scorn if it meant they could both live through this hell.

He reached back. His fingers grasped only air—and panic rose in his belly. It was wrong, it couldn’t be, he’d counted, he always counted—

“You are no kin of mine,” the woman said, launching forward with a slash that passed through Meffrid as quickly as the lightning that split the sky in two.

Meffrid staggered back with a quiet gasp as blood spilled from his belly and dripped onto the ground. Sairsel watched him drop to his knees, so still, and Meffrid’s name tore through his throat in a scream, joining the thunder of Lyse’s.

Sairsel didn’t see her. He didn’t see the fighting around them. All he saw was the spear that lay on the ground to his left, a mere few steps from the imperial. He tossed his bow aside, running forward with burning lungs, gripped the lance with both hands, made to strike with the most savage thrust he could muster—

Strong arms locked around his waist and stopped him, pulling him back so swiftly that his boots scraped in the dirt. He thrashed and swore and—

“You’ll get yourself killed,” hissed his mother’s voice in his ear. “Is that what you want?”

“Let me go!” Sairsel howled, tears stinging his eyes. “Let me— I’m going to— Meffrid!”

Lyse was a blur of crimson as she unleashed her fury on the imperial. Sairsel could only struggle in Morgana’s hold, his rage so consuming it made the corners of his vision darken and his entire body shake. She kept on dragging him back, far from Lyse and the imperial, far from the looming figure of the viceroy, far from Meffrid. To safety—or some semblance of it.

He cursed and struggled so much against Morgana—almost freeing himself—that she had to strike the back of his neck with the hilt of a dagger to get him still. If only for a moment, everything faded.

“I’m sorry, boy,” he heard her say as she lowered him to the ground.

She was gone. Sairsel shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut to clear his vision. His head swam, and his limbs moved as though through mud, but the urgency was not long in returning. Every inch of him, inside and out, seemed to burn. When he managed to drag himself to his feet, the imperials were gone, as quickly as the shadows of death had descended with them.

There were bodies everywhere; wounded and dying and dead. Sairsel ran for Meffrid, falling to his knees beside him with a foolish shred of hope still flickering inside him like guttering embers, burning him from the inside out. He grabbed Meffrid’s face, thumbs on his cheeks, wiped away a stain of blood from his skin as he shook him.

“Oi, oi,” he said, as though there was any word he could say that would reach him, “Meffrid. Please. Please.”

His hand moved shakily down to the wide, open gash in Meffrid’s belly. The blood was still hot on him, growing cold and sticky on Sairsel’s hand in the harsh night air; all the life that was left of him, ebbing out. Sairsel could almost taste it, sickeningly bitter on his tongue and sharp as the blade that had cut him open.

The breath was already long gone from his lungs, but Sairsel couldn’t let go. He slipped an arm under Meffrid’s shoulders and drew him close and clutched his hand, pressing his forehead to his. When he squeezed his eyes shut, he could see Meffrid’s weary smile, his anger moments before the imperial hound struck him down.

His bloodied fingers tightened even more around Meffrid’s hand as he squeezed his eyes shut, holding onto him as though it might keep him from slipping away. The first sob rose from his chest like a panic, stripping him down to nothing.

“Fuck,” he wailed from between gritted teeth, his voice so choked and raw it was barely a sound.

He didn’t know how not to make it ache, how not to let it tear him to shreds. The grief and the shock burrowed deep into him, turning him to stone beside Meffrid—Meffrid’s corpse—as Rhalgr stood high above them, silent and watching.

No one came near them; not for a very long while. There were too many wounded, and many more dead—and what was one more grave? Sairsel had long since fallen still and silent when a hand touched his shoulder, only to draw back as he flinched.

“Sairsel,” said Morgana’s voice, so distant it may as well have been underwater.

The sound of his own name shot through his veins so coldly that it sent a shiver down Sairsel’s spine; the last time he’d heard it had been in Meffrid’s voice, heavy and urgent. He couldn’t bring himself to answer to it.

“I’m sorry, lad.” Her hand returned to his shoulder as she crouched beside him, the other coming to his wrist. “You need to let go.”

He’d been wrong to think he had no tears left to cry. The sorrow closed around his throat again at the mere thought of leaving Meffrid behind, letting him be nothing but a dead man. He shook his head, gritting his teeth.

“Do you want to stay with him while he rots in the sun?” Morgana asked, not unkindly—but her words cut. “Is that what he deserves?”

“He deserves to be alive,” Sairsel said, his voice scraping at the back of his throat. Despite it all, he didn’t have the strength to fight as Morgana pried his fingers from Meffrid’s hand.

“He’s not. He’s gone, Sairsel. He died fighting and it’s better than dying beaten and on his knees. You sitting here—”

“I know it won’t change anything,” Sairsel said, jagged and broken. If he’d just had one arrow, if his quiver hadn’t been empty—

He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to see something, anything that wasn’t Meffrid falling to his knees. “Just leave me be. I’ll—I’ll get him with the others.”

“You’re sure?”

Sairsel sniffed and didn’t look at her, laying a shaky hand on Meffrid’s brow ever so gently. “I’ve gone my whole life without you. I can do this on my own.”

He had to do it on his own; he didn’t know how to share his grief with her, and the simple truth of it was that he didn’t want to. These last moments with Meffrid had to be his and no one else’s.

He sat stroking his thumb over Meffrid’s brow in silence—barely at home in his own body—until he heard Morgana’s footsteps recede and fade into the quiet. This time, when she was gone, he did not breathe any easier; still he forced himself to move, to pull the air into his lungs and remind himself that he yet lived. It was too early to think of legacies, of carrying on, of making Meffrid proud while he waited for kith and kin on the shores of the next world. For now, Sairsel contented himself with burying the guilt at least long enough to get his body with the others.

It was like ripping a part of himself away, but Sairsel drew back from Meffrid. He wished it could find the words, find his voice—tell Meffrid, even not knowing whether he could hear his voice, that he was his brother. That he would sorely miss his kind brand of courage. That he would fight to his last breath, too, to see his dream of a free Ala Mhigo realized. No sound came; it felt as though the dirt of a grave filled his throat, weighed down his tongue.

So he took his hand. When his fingers slipped into the loose grip of Meffrid’s fist, Sairsel felt wood against his fingertips. He opened Meffrid’s hand, pulled from it the small charm he’d held as he died: the faces of a woman and a child stared at him, their likeness carved into stillness, and Sairsel’s vision blurred with tears before he could make out the details of it. He squeezed the charm until he realized his hand was shaking, that his grip on it was so tight the ridges of the wood dug into his scars through the fabric of his gloves. The hard press of it hurt.

“I’m sorry,” he choked out, half a sob. “Meffrid, I’m sorry.”

Meffrid was silent. Knuckling at the traces of fresh tears on his cheeks, Sairsel sniffled and let out a shaky sigh, then carefully slipped the charm into a pocket he’d sewn into his jacket, near his heart. I’ll keep this safe for you, he thought. He took Meffrid’s sword, too—vowed to let it drink the blood of imperials until Ala Mhigo would be free—and left his own sword with Meffrid, laying both of his hands over the hilt. It had always been too heavy for him.

“He looks like those great warriors in the tombs,” M’naago said from behind Sairsel as he got to his feet again, his legs shaking as much as her voice trembled. She swallowed a whimper of emotion.

“I’ve never seen them,” Sairsel said, stupidly.

“Oh,” M’naago said, and then she pulled him into a crushing hug that, even with her wounded, made him ache inside and out. Her voice was so quiet as she spoke against his chest that it took him a few heartbeats to understand. “I’ll have to show you sometime.”

It wasn’t until they stood in one of those tombs, cold and rocky and silent, that Sairsel showed M’naago the charm.

“Thought you were training to be a pikeman,” said Leofric, leaning against a tree as he regarded Sairsel—the blood and ichor staining his blade, his clothes, his face. He considered their surroundings, too, and thumbed idly at the scar below his lip. “Are you tryin’ to put the Alliance watchmen out of a job by decimating every living thing around here?”

Sairsel adjusted his grip on his sword—Meffrid’s sword. “I’m training,” he said stiffly. “And I’m being careful; I’m only killing the disruptive ones. Won’t put the forest out of balance.”

“Are you in balance?”

Of all the moments to become astute, Sairsel wished Leofric hadn’t picked this one. He had better things to do than to answer to his captain while the rest of the unit was off-duty, for one; and he hadn’t yet found a way not to be so raw, even as the weeks passed, which meant it was a struggle not to bristle at this sort of razor-sharp, prickling attention. He sighed, picked up a fallen leaf off the ground, wiped the blade clean with it.

“I’m standing on my own two feet. That’s balance enough.”

Leofric made a noise at the back of his throat that was not exactly enthusiastic agreement. “I won’t have a blood-frenzied boy in my unit endangering himself and the rest of us because he can’t handle loss.”

“I can handle it,” Sairsel snapped. “I’m still as capable as I was before the Reach, and after how I picked off that patrol over three hours the other day, you should know I haven’t forgotten to be patient.”

“But you’re angry.”

Sairsel stomped closer to to Leofric, his voice bursting through the quiet of the forest. “Of course I’m fucking angry! Were you even there, Leofric? Why aren’t you angry?”

“I am angry,” Leofric said, low. His face had darkened, and now he stood straight, tapping a finger against Sairsel’s chest. “But I know how to wield it, and I want you angry the right way, too. You don’t grab a sword by the blade.”

“I’ve got it right,” Sairsel said.

Leofric glanced down at Meffrid’s sword in his hand, tipping the blade up with a finger against the sharp edge—slow and careful. “Are you really training, or just looking for things to keep killing?”

The words sent a chill down Sairsel’s spine. All his life, he’d walked through the Wood knowing just how much he could take, knowing to offer quiet words of gratitude in prayer when he did. It had been a long while since he’d given any thanks, or any thought at all towards hurting, towards killing. In truth, what he wanted now was to keep the blood singing in his veins, because it drowned out the rest; he wanted his body to ache, because it got his anger to fade.

But the question was a necessary one.

“I’m training,” he said firmly, hoping it might solidify his own thoughts. “My sword-skill needs it. I need to be able to hold my own.”

“You said swords weren’t right in your hand.”

Sairsel attempted a meager smile. “That’s because I favour my left,” he said, and Leofric smirked. He looked down at Meffrid’s sword once more. “I think I’m starting to understand them better.”

“That so?”

“Aye,” Sairsel said with a nod. “It’s been getting lighter. Every time an imperial falls, the burden’s less.”

Slowly, Leofric’s smile faded, and doubt crawled within the spaces of Sairsel’s certainty. What part of this could be wrong? He was finally learning, finally becoming strong enough to matter in the fight against the Empire—

And then he realized that Leofric’s expression was not disapproval. Not quite satisfaction or pride, perhaps—a part of Sairsel desperately wished it were so—but understanding, at the very least. He saw the path that lay before them, before Sairsel, and knew that he must walk it.

Standing close, Leofric reached out and grabbed Sairsel under his jaw, making certain that he wouldn’t pull his gaze away. “Just promise me one thing, Sairsel,” Leofric said. “Don’t die.”

“That’s not a promise anyone can make.”

“It’s not a promise everyone can keep,” Leofric corrected, shaking his head. “But you have to make it. Because then you remember.”

Sairsel held his gaze. Despite everything, he didn’t want to die. He remembered the fear and sorrow whenever the scar on his chest throbbed with that dull ache, never forgetting the unrelenting sharpness of the Griffin’s sword. He couldn’t forget how tightly Morgana’s arms had held him when he crossed Baelsar’s Wall alive and whole.

And he’d made a promise, already, even if not with words—a promise for a dream to be realized.

“I promise,” he said, and not just to Leofric.

By nightfall, Leofric’s face was shifting in his mind; the words he’d spoken thrummed like a different string every time. Don’t die, said Meffrid’s voice. Don’t die, said Morgana’s. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die, don’t— Ashelia, Madelaine, his sister and his father and—

His own voice, too.

To say that the Lochs had Sairsel breathless was an understatement. It had everyone breathless, to begin with; no one who crossed Castrum Abania, whether stepping onto the soil which bore Ala Mhigo for the first time in their lives or in twenty years, stood unaffected by the sight of the city—a mountain bared by flatlands against the burning sky. Salt in the air; the sun like fire on the horizon, bleeding into every rock and stone. The glittering waters of Loch Seld in the distance, more precious than any diamond.

There was the beauty of the place, the taste of it on the wind, and then there was the feeling of a storm crashing through the whole of Porta Praetoria, constant and endless. Since Rhalgr’s Reach, no one would have shied away from calling the reality as it was: they were at war, now—but penetrating the last castrum made it palpable. They could gaze upon their final battlefield. They could feel the creeping of victory, or defeat.

At the Lochs, those whispers of war never stopped; how could they, when those whispers had become a constant cry?

In that ever-shifting, elated chaos, the only thing Sairsel could hope to quiet was his own mind—but he no longer knew how to find the silence. Battle loomed; every day, the strongest of them pushed closer and closer to stand at the doorstep of the Empire. They waited, they worked, they fought. Sairsel hunted, perhaps more in that short time than he ever had in his life, because soldiers needed to be fed.

It was the best he could do. And then, when night fell, he couldn’t sleep. It would be half a day yet after sunrise before his unit was to be deployed, and he knew he had best use this time resting, or preparing, at the very least—but his body was locked between restlessness and frozen fear. He hated to be afraid, but he was; every hour, at the very least, he swallowed the impulse to stand up and walk back through Castrum Abania, cross the Peaks and walk until he was in East End again, and smell the air of a forest again, and leave Baelsar’s Wall and all its horrors behind until he was home in the Wood, where he belonged.

But Ala Mhigo wouldn’t let him go—or perhaps he couldn’t let go of it, glittering in the distance as he sat upon the battlements of Porta Praetoria with a sword across his lap. At night, the shadows could almost make the stark white flags upon its walls seem different. When he closed his eyes, he could almost believe that M’naago had glamoured them, too: that the flashes of white were the shape of a griffin. But they wouldn’t need glamours if they won.

They would fly the Ala Mhigan flags themselves.

And then, the colour he saw didn’t belong to imperial flags. It was the Griffin’s cape, cut clear across the Gyr Abanian sky.

His fingers rose to the scar on his chest.

“Still hurt, does it?”

Even when it was quiet, Morgana’s voice cut through the night like a blade. Sairsel jumped, but she said nothing—instead, she put a hand on his shoulder as she sat down beside him, straddling the battlement with a knee pulled up to her chest.

“I’m fine,” Sairsel said.

“No, you’re not. It always hurts. This?” Morgana asked, tapping the faded scars on her neck. “Older than you, and it’s never entirely stopped. Sometimes it’s in my head, I think, because you don’t forget. But it still aches sometimes.”

“Just the wound?”

It was a question he asked knowing the answer; she knew that he did. Months ago, she might have chosen to pretend otherwise, and simply walked away. Now, she stayed. She looked at the stars with her son.

“Everything,” she said.

Sairsel’s hand, still resting against his chest, crept up; his fingers touched the shard of crystal at his neck, ran it along the leather cord upon which it hung. Morgana had worn it for nigh on fifteen years before she left it with him.

“I’m afraid,” Sairsel said at last, keeping his voice as steady as he could.

“You’d be a fool if you weren’t. All that tripe about courting death the songs always go on about, it’s—it’s shite. Fighting means fighting death. You’re not fond of it. You have to hate it. To fear it. It’s the only way.”

Sairsel turned his head to look at Morgana, watching the lines of her face, the distance in her eyes as they followed the silhouette of Ala Mhigo in the sky. At first, he turned over her words in his mind; then he found his thoughts drifting past death and fear, only to settle on the city itself.

“Tomorrow, you’ll be going home.”

“Aye.”

“Will it—” he began, his courage slipping. Then he gripped it again: “Will it be strange, coming home with me? I mean, I know our units won't be fighting together, exactly, but—”

“I won’t be fighting with the Resistance,” said Morgana.

“I’m— What?” Sairsel asked, purely stammering. His mother’s words were so disarming that it took his mind several seconds to catch up. “I’m sorry, but—what? You’ve been with the Resistance almost twenty years. I joined for you. And now you won’t be fighting? Who are you?”

“I won’t be fighting with the Resistance,” Morgana repeated, surprisingly calm and not nearly as cutting as she had a habit of being, “because I’ll be with the Flames’ Ala Mhigan Brigade.”

“The Flames.”

“The Ala Mhigan Brigade. We’re leading the vanguard.”

Saisel let out a breath as though he’d been holding it. “And you were planning on telling me this, what, ten minutes before their lot is going to march out?”

“I didn’t realize you were counting on me to hold your hand during the fighting.”

“I didn’t realize you were aiming to get yourself killed,” Sairsel shot back. There was truth in his insolence; after the words fell, he frowned, growing more serious. “Is that what it is? You’d rather die fighting to free Ala Mhigo than keep living after because there’ll be no fight left?”

Morgana scoffed. “I am not a tragic hero in an hour-long ballad, so no. I have no intention of dying tomorrow,” she said, rolling her shoulders. “But I want to be first through that gate. Because I’ve been fighting for twenty years. It’s a smart way to use the Resistance, securing the Ala Mhigan Quarter, but it’s not enough for me. I want to fight the way I should have twenty years ago.”

“All right,” Sairsel said stiffly. The more seconds passed, the less he knew how he felt—not about her choice, but about how unburdened it made him. “I’ll fight with the Resistance. For the both of us.”

“Not just for me, then?” Morgana asked, watching him.

Sairsel shook his head. “Came for you. Stayed for me.”

“The old bear would be proud to hear you’re fighting for the right reasons.”

To that, Sairsel could only hum in passive agreement. He looked down at Meffrid’s sword laid across his lap, pressed his bare palm to its hilt. “I just had to cross the Wall understand what it was I was fighting for, is all,” he said gently.

“Liberty or death,” Morgana said. To Sairsel, they were Lyse’s words—a rallying cry, one that burrowed deep into his bones with every passing day. He didn’t know what it meant to Morgana; didn’t even know she had gone to Coldhearth and seen the words, timeworn and faded, upon the bricks of an old home—into the very bones of Gyr Abania.

He nodded, swallowing around the fear; he thought of Meffrid, and knew that he would have said these words from the deepest reaches of his heart. “Liberty or death.”

It was, after all, for liberty that he had died.

(“Do your lot take on irregulars?” Morgana had asked. “Or do you have to swear and salute and say ‘for coin and country’ as though there’s something at all inspiring about it?”

“I sense there’s another question underneath some of those knives.”

Then came a sigh, followed by a question asked pointedly so as not to sound like a question at all: “What if I wanted to fight with the Ala Mhigan Brigade.”

“I’d start by asking why you’d turn your back on the Resistance so close to the end.”

“I’m not turning my back on the Resistance. I’ve spoken with Commander Hext. The Resistance has my sword, has my blood, but— Well, let me ask you this: would the Bull of Ala Mhigo feel content with anything less than charging through the gates?”

She’d known the answer to that question even before she asked.

“No.”

“Neither am I.”

“You’d fall under my command.”

“Aye, I was able to work out that much, thank you. I should be able to tolerate it for a few hours. Heard you’re not bad at it.”

“You’re certain you don’t want—”

“I’m bloody certain, Raubahn, else I wouldn’t be standing here.” Another sigh. “I can’t be down there with the Resistance. If I am, I’ll— I won’t be able to stop looking for him. Not after Baelsar’s Wall. Every moment of the fight, looking over my shoulder, trying to find my son in the crowd. If I’m tempted to fight for the both of us, I’ll get us both killed.”

Her words had found only a searching frown.

“Do you not have faith in the lad?”

She had more faith in Sairsel than she ever thought she might when he came to her, scrawny and naïve, and pretended he had no loyalty left for Ashelia Riot’s Riskbreakers to join the Resistance.

So she’d shaken her head, and admitted, as though she tasted broken shards of steel: “It’s in myself I don’t have faith.”)

In the morning, the chaos was worse; and it grew by the hour. Commanders from all manner of companies—the Eorzean Alliance’s, the adventurers’—bellowed orders left and right: Sairsel trained his ears, in the din, to pick up Ala Mhigan accents above all. Still, there was something distracting about the airy lilting of the Gridanians’ words, as though they brought with them the rustling of leaves from the Wood. Dully, Sairsel ached—only for a breath, only like an echo, but every time. He focused on the sharp ice of the Ishgardian voices, thought of how Madelaine’s tongue had shifted to match theirs, picked up the rolling roars of a Lominsan. When he heard orders for the Flames, he turned his head towards the voice.

Ala Mhigan.

As far as he knew, General Aldynn was a good man. He had the natural charisma to inspire loyalty in hundreds, the strength to survive this long, the tactical talent—Sairsel supposed—to lead adopted forces of a foreign land as well as his own people. Something about him had the same pull as Meffrid had, the same solid kindness. Like Ashelia, like Lyse. Sairsel would have followed any of them; hells, a part of him still felt like half a turncoat for fighting among the ranks of the Resistance when he could have stood with the Riskbreakers—and he’d been watching Porta Praetoria for a glance of the Grand Steward, or A’zaela, or anyone familiar all morning.

But it still barely made sense to know that Morgana would fight along the Flames, and not with her people. He wondered if it was that she saw ghosts in the Resistance; Leofric had told him with a surprisingly sympathetic look that none of her unit had survived Baelsar’s Wall. Since then, she’d been filling the roles that needed it, never falling back into a command of her own. In his grief, he’d been vaguely aware of her taking on some of Meffrid’s responsibilities during Lyse’s absence. She’d never seemed to sit still.

And now, the Flames’ Ala Mhigan Brigade gathered at the foot of the steps, ready to march on the city while the Grand Companies prepared for the initial assult. No sitting still for the vanguard.

“Oi.”

For a moment, her voice sounded almost like Ashelia’s. Sairsel’s heart very nearly skipped a beat as his head snapped back to look at Morgana, her hair tied high, braids pulling back the sides—revealing the grey that was most obvious just above her ears. She bore two swords: one blade with the familiar curve of the Ala Mhigan scimitar, the other long and slender and a bright violet reminiscent of the griffin banners flown all through Porta Praetoria. Utterly undauntable, even in armour that had more of a mercenary or a gladiator’s carefully selected, distinctive styles than a proper soldier’s.

“Ready to go to war?” Sairsel asked.

“Aye.”

He fiddled with the fabric around his hands. “Is this the part where we say goodbye?”

“I’m not saying goodbye,” Morgana said sharply. She glanced down at the sword he wore. “Are you not fighting with the bow or lance at all?”

“Bow, yes; still the most useful I can be. Lance, no. My sword-skill’s gotten better.”

And he would fight for Ala Mhigo with Meffrid’s sword in his hand, no matter what. Regardless of whether Morgana understood—Sairsel had given up on trying to work out what she thought, and on caring about it—she nodded.

“My brother wasn’t all that talented with a sword, either, if I’m honest. But he was strong,” she said as she glanced back up at his face. “Remember that today, Sairsel. You’re not just my son, or your father’s. You’re Gotwin’s nephew—this is his legacy you’re fighting for, too. Our family’s.”

Too many legacies to count. If he was to survive, he’d have to empty his mind of them—Gotwin, Morgana, Ashelia, Meffrid. Curtis Hext, Conrad Kemp, Ilberd Feare. Hundreds, thousands more. He knew so few of them, but he could forget none. His heart wouldn’t; not while standing upon this ground.

“I will.”

“You’ll fight well.”

Sairsel nodded. “So will you.”

Stiffly, Morgana reached for him: she hooked her arm around his neck, pressed a hand to the back of his head as she touched her brow to his, eyes closing. He closed his eyes, too, and breathed. Salt and storm on the air.

When she tore herself away, she was silent, though her lips were stiff around words that wouldn’t come. Sairsel swallowed and forced his own voice.

“See you in Ala Mhigo,” he said. Only a matter of hours; win or lose. They would see each other there, or they wouldn’t.

“Aye. In our Ala Mhigo,” she said, and turned away as though the horns of war were at her heel.

Blood trickled down the side of Sairsel’s face; he didn’t know whether it was his or someone else’s. In the fight, he’d vaguely been aware of the spray that had hit him when his blade had caught in the vulnerable spaces between the bottom of an imperial’s helm and the top of his armour. He’d been vaguely aware of pain throbbing above his eyebrow when debris from a magitek blast had burst at his right side. Everything seemed to come into his awareness only as a blur, like a dream shifting and rewriting itself and wiping away what had passed—a dream filled with screaming and the ringing of blades and shrill magic and heavy magitek, the smell of blood and smoke and death.

So long as the blood didn’t get into his eyes, he didn’t care. The only thing for which he had utter clarity was the number of arrows in his quiver. This time, he didn’t just keep count: he repeated the numbers in his mind like a chant, slipping it in the spaces between the war cries and the paeans that had him singing his throat raw, screaming words almost bare of melody with the rest of his unit.

The Resistance, even after every loss, after every fallen warrior, seemed to flood the streets of the Ala Mhigan quarter, breaking down the imperials’ barriers with thaumaturges from their own ranks and those of the companies. They made barriers of their own, too, cutting off the imperials from the civilians on every block. Sairsel kept to his orders at finding high ground, covering his unit, keeping an eye ahead at the enemy’s movements. Leofric’s blade flashed like a green serpent below, and Sairsel kept to it like a beacon.

He did not think of Morgana, fighting in the city above with the vanguard, clearing a path for the strongest of them. Cutting down, cutting through to the palace. Fighting alongside brothers and sisters who were strangers.

In the palace, her eyes caught a flash of white hair. Even if she had looked for Ashelia Riot through the battle, she would have never found the cherry blossom pink she expected; instead, she looked like a shadow of herself—a vengeful, righteous shade, but a shade nonetheless. Skinny as the girl with bloody knees in Little Ala Mhigo, as the young woman who’d traipsed off with the Corpse Brigade.

Morgana let out a battle roar worthy of the bloodsands and thumped the flat of her blade against her shield. “Face me, you bloody worms!”

She danced around the mob that turned to her as the shade and her comrades passed through the hall unseen, cut down all in reach of her blade. Breathless, she whipped around, looking for Raubahn’s towering shape, and ran to his back—as they had fought once, young and lost, under harsh lights and the bellowing of a crowd. As another imperial unit poured in through the hall, black bathed in oblique blades of sunlight, she turned to his side and yelled above the noise, shoving at his shoulder.

“They’re going to get through,” she said, the bloodied point of her sword designating Riot’s party running ahead. She threw aside her shield. “Cover them.”

He opened his mouth, and she unsheathed Gotwin’s scimitar with her left hand, sunlight catching the sharp black edge. “I’ve got this,” she said, twirling it once. “We’ve got this. Go.”

As Raubahn charged ahead, Morgana turned and stood with the three of her countrymen who had pushed through while the rest of the brigade fanned out through the palace. “We hold the line,” said Brida, the unit commander.

The imperials crashed in with a magitek armour at their backs like an all-consuming tide. It wasn’t long before Morgana was screaming.

Sairsel did not hear her voice—but he heard the horn bursting like a clap of thunder through the air, as though it rent the sky in half. There were three arrows left in his quiver and his entire body shook and the first thing he noticed as the battle faltered with hesitation was that the sun was setting, casting pinks and oranges across the clouds. Then came the second blast from the horn.

He heard Leofric’s voice to his right, quiet at first. “He’s dead. We won,” he said. Then again, louder, echoing through the street: “We won.”

It rose through them like a murmur, then like a chant, and Leofric brandished his sword towards the sky and roared: “Ala Mhigo!”

Sairsel’s arms dropped at his sides, his shoulders sagging from the shock; the noise rumbled in his ears as freedom fighters screamed and whooped and wept, and his own breath fluttered in his chest. Much as the battle had been interlocking seconds of chaos all weaved together into something he could scarcely pick apart, this new disarray of victory spread itself so wide across the reaches of his mind that it seemed unreal. Leofric was the only fixed point, even as he moved: in freedom, he shone like a beacon, his smile unbreakable even as their unit closed in around the imperial soldiers who hadn’t simply run as the horn sounded their defeat.

It wasn’t until he heard the clattering of weapons—swords and lances and bows falling to the ground like drops of rain—that Sairsel began to smile. The viceroy was dead. The XIIth Imperial Legion was surrendering. Moving as though through water, he slung his bow across his shoulder, slipped the arrow in his hand back into his quiver, and jogged back to his unit.

Leofric caught him in passing. “We won,” he said again, holding him at arm’s length with both hands on Sairsel’s shoulders before pulling him in and planting an elated kiss on his lips. Sairsel realized he was laughing as Leofric looked at the rest of the unit, and at a fair-skinned man in a Flames uniform. “By Rhalgr’s cock, I could kiss every last one of you. Aye, even you, Ul’dahn.”

The Flames officer responded by scoffing and throwing Leofric a length of rope for the surrendered imperials. Before long, the Resistance had gathered up their prisoners; civilians began to trickle back into the streets, adding to the vibrant commotion as they walked the streets no longer governed by the Empire for the first time in twenty years.

There were those who mourned their dead, too. Resistance fighters who had died for liberty, wounded pulled to the sides for urgent healing who watched their victory through a haze of pain or barely had a notion of what was unfolding around them; it was then that Sairsel felt the pull of reality past the overwhelming rush of celebration. His eyes searched frantically for the nearest Flame uniform.

“Oi,” he called, rushing past Leofric at the fair-skinned Ul’dahn from before who was gathering imperial weapons from the street. “Is there word of the Ala Mhigan Brigade?”

The Flame shook his head, and Sairsel’s heart dropped. “I’ve no clue, friend. I’m not on their shell. Last I heard, they were pressing the advance into the palace.”

“Thank you,” Sairsel said, halfway to breathless. If the viceroy was dead, then—they had succeeded. The vanguard had to be whole. Otherwise the Flame would have heard of it, surely, if—

He only had to turn towards Leofric to see him nodding his way before he even spoke. “Go. But keep your head on your shoulders; not all dogs have to sense to show their bellies,” he said, sharp and venomous as he glanced towards a bound imperial being shoved forward by a Resistance fighter. “Report back to me by nightfall.”

“I will. Thank you, Leofric,” Sairsel said, already running towards the steps that led up towards the palace.

“We won, Arroway!” Leofric called after him—as if he needed the reminder.

Sairsel flew past Resistance fighters and officers of all three Grand Companies and nearly barrelled into an Ishgardian knight; he heard a griffin loose a cry to or from the heavens, which the Ala Mhigans on the ground met with a swelling cheer; the sound of his footsteps was buried by chants of Ala Mhigo! and Liberty! Liberty or death! and For the Reach!—now no longer battle cries, but oaths for what was won. Countless names poured past Sairsel and receded like the swell of a tide as he moved deeper into the city: he heard Conrad Kemp’s and realized that they were the names of the dead.

Please don’t make me say hers.

He was at the very edge of the Royal Menagerie when he saw her standing beside a bed of prim pink flowers that matched the sky—he thought fleetingly of Ashelia—with her right hand against gilded metal railing. Supporting herself, he realized: most of her left arm was wrapped in bandages, the flank of her armour singed black.

“Morgana,” he called, his voice wavering.

It didn’t matter that she was meant to be watching the leaders of an alliance gathering to consider the death of a tyrant; when Morgana heard her son’s voice, there was nothing else in the world that mattered. Even with one arm, she embraced him so tightly it made the scar on his chest ache again.

“Sairsel,” she said against his hair. Her whole body was trembling. No more words seemed to come.

So he spoke for her. “It’s over.” Then, in his clumsy Ala Mhigan: “Mother, you’re home.”

“We’re home.”

She pulled back, touching the side of his face with her hand, then glanced sideways at the two thin ranks forming on the side of the promenade, awaiting Commander Hext and the Warrior of Light. She tugged him along to fall in beside her on the line that could see over the edge of the Menagerie and toward the mountains, the Ala Mhigan Quarter sprawling below.

“Are you all right?” Sairsel whispered. Morgana stood at attention, but she was still shaking from head to toe. He took her right hand in his—her skin was ice, but her grip was firm.

“Magitek blast. A few small burns: nothing more. Field medic’s healed it some.”

He didn’t have time to ask after the meaning of “a few small burns” when spoken by a woman whom he’d heard referring to a countryman’s dismemberment as a flesh wound. The procession led by Lyse—a proud commander in crimson—marched forward, away from the fallen body of the viceroy.

From a bloodthirsty tyrant’s ending to their new beginning.

One by one, Resistance and Alliance alike saluted their leaders as they passed: Commander Hext, the Doman lord come all the way from across the seas to fight for them, the Scion boy and Ahtynwyb, too, a woman whom Sairsel had once witnessed sitting in a stream while in full plate—their Warrior of Light. And light indeed did she cast over the world.

Rather than salute with her good arm, Morgana opted to keep Sairsel’s hand tightly in hers. Out of the corner of his eye, Sairsel watched his mother smile at General Aldynn, strained by pain but open in a way that was unfamiliar to him. A former comrade—and opponent—on the bloodsands; now a true brother-in-arms. Short as his passing was, he smiled at her, too.

Morgana pulled at Sairsel again as they joined the back of the procession, gathering behind them; he found himself beside M’naago, her breath audible as the force of her emotions made it flutter in her chest. Wordlessly, they shared a glance—Sairsel felt his throat tighten as he thought of the last time they had stood alone together, in silent tombs where he gave away a piece of Meffrid to which he had been clinging—and touched foreheads.

It was as they stopped at the edge of the promenade that Morgana’s hand slipped from his. She was still shaking, and Sairsel brushed his fingers against her wrist, not daring to take it and wind her arm around his shoulders.

“You can lean on me. You’re free.”

He half expected her to look away and force herself to stand taller, but she dropped a heavy arm around his shoulders and rested some of her weight against him. She smelled like smoke. He raised a hand and laid it against hers, and she tilted her head down against his as if in answer.

Below, the Ala Mhigan Quarter was a sea of people. Horns blared a familiar note through the air twice, and Sairsel felt a sharp pang between his ribs—elation and sorrow were two edges of the same blade—as voices rose from below around them.

For the first time in twenty years, the free people of Ala Mhigo sang a hymn that belonged to them and them alone. And Sairsel sang, too: he sang with all the breath his lungs would muster, sang words that had weighed upon every inch of his soul since that quiet night where freedom had still seemed like half a dream that could fade away in the smoke of the campfire.

Raise up your hands and voices; let fill your hearts with pride.

Sairsel wrapped his fingers around the hilt of Meffrid’s sword and didn’t let go as he sang the words Meffrid had taught him. Just ahead of him, Arenvald—the boy his age, the one who called himself half-breed as though digging a blade between his own ribs—lifted a heavy standard high above his head, and the banner of the Resistance flew over Ala Mhigo, whipping in the wind in time to join in their chorus.

Morgana had a beautiful voice—even weary and shaking, it was strong and clear; she sang with her chin tilted up towards the heavens, staring at Rhalgr’s burning star upon the flag’s violet field.

His beacon, carried forth by all the hands fighting for liberty, had guided them home.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:morgana #f:xiv

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farplane · 5 years

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the hunger

novembre 2019: warrior of light au sairsel and an alternate ending to another final battle. ffxiv:stormblood (4.0) spoilers. cw for violence and gore. 1,323 words.

For a moment—one desperate, hopeless, foolish moment—Sairsel thinks he has him.

And he hates that moment more than everything that comes of it. The time between the seconds, Zenos called it. Sairsel hates that he remembers, hates that he still hears that voice dripping poison in the back of his mind.

He hates, and then the blade pierces him. Sairsel’s voice comes strangled, and everything goes quiet and still as his breath catches in his lungs. Pain and shock rip through his body, drowning him. He can taste his own blood.

The blade that Zenos cherishes like some pet is long, and Sairsel’s shaking hand has to reach halfway across the world to claw at his throat—only to grasp empty air. His vision swims and his legs shake, but the sword keeps him upright, like a puppet strung wrong.

Slowly, and with sickening intimacy, the blade pushes deeper into his abdomen—rending flesh and muscle and viscera.

Every second, Sairsel expects a death that doesn’t come. He doesn’t know whether Zenos merely wants to make him suffer, or wants him close. Horror claws its way into Sairsel’s insides, blinding, and his bow falls from his hand; his fingers wrap around the blade and feebly fight, try to keep it away, but he is scrambling without strength and only half-alive as the point of the sword cuts his back open.

“Is this not glorious?” he hears Zenos say, too close, in a low growl that would make him recoil if he could. “Do you feel it? The rush of blood?”

Blood is all Sairsel can feel.

“You are a hunter,” drawls Zenos’ voice in his ear. Sairsel’s hands tighten—twitch—around the blade, trying to force it away, but he only succeeds in cutting himself deeper. His sob chokes around the blood that fills his throat, thick and wet as Zenos whispers to him. “You know blood. The quivering of the beast under your hands as you take the life that was yours from the moment your gaze claimed it. How does it feel to be the prey?”

Sairsel coughs, filling his body with near blinding pain. Dark red splatters down onto the blade.

Zenos lets him—lets him—fall to one knee, directing the sword down with his body as the strength drains from him and leaves him shaking. A gauntlet frames Sairsel’s face, burning against his skin.

“You will be my greatest loss, my friend.”

Sairsel wants to scream and growl and tear his throat open. He wants— he wants—

His hands fall from the blade. Zenos is all that is left to keep him upright; all that keeps him from lying down, closing his eyes, and taking his peace. Inside him, the Light rages, and he wonders like a man half-drunk if the Mother is all that keeps his heart beating. He never wanted to be Her champion.

He never wanted to be Ala Mhigo’s champion, either. He was never worth it. A real champion wouldn’t be on his knees before that animal, halfway between the mercy of the sword piercing him through and the hands cradling him like a lover or a child.

My friend.

Sairsel has no strength for his own rage; too deep in the abyss of drowning in his own blood. His fingers twitch at his side. Like a flash of lightning, he thinks of the Griffin: of his rage, of his pain, of the sacrifice that saw him dying with power between his fingers. The power should never have been Zenos’; that enrages him, too. And all he has is empty hands, weak and bloody.

As Zenos breathes—willing himself to end the hunt, to end him, to face the emptiness that will follow—the pad of Sairsel’s forefinger touches the tip of the arrow wedged into his boot.

He made it on the Steppe. A memory of the greenery fading out from the center of Dotharl Khaa fills his mind so vividly that it may very well be his death-sight, but his fingers curl around the shaft like breath filling his lungs. It isn’t over yet. It isn’t over.

If he can only reach.

“Zenos,” he says through the blood. He doesn’t say it like dripping venom, doesn’t let his tongue shape his revulsion; he says it like begging, reaches his empty hand up with every last ounce of his strength. Trying to push himself back up, or pull him down. He opens his mouth, lips forming a whisper and a lie that cuts him deeper than the sharpest steel: “I accept you.”

And Zenos is close enough, like he wants to hear it again. Close enough to reach.

Sairsel spits blood in his face for lack of strength to say what he truly means—this is for Ala Mhigo—and thrusts the arrowhead into the side of Zenos’ neck.

And Zenos laughs: pain and surprise warps his voice into breathless elation. He lifts a hand to the blood.

“Only you were ever worthy of me,” he says, his twisted fondness coloured by melancholy, as he rips the blade out of Sairsel's body.

A scream tears through the air and seems to shake the very skies, all pinks and blues staring down at him. Sairsel can feel his body shake, can feel the pain burning away what remains of him, his blood seeping into the earth of the garden below him. And he hears that scream, as though all the furies in all the legends inhabit the same body and howl for vengeance with the same voice.

His mother’s voice.

“BASTARD!”

Morgana’s sword, its bright violet flashing like the griffin standard in Sairsel’s eyes, clashes with the blade still dripping with her son’s blood. She fills the silence with her growls, with her fury, with her relentless assault—and all Sairsel can do is stretch twitching fingers through the dirt and the flowers. He wants to call out to her; tell her to run while she still has her life.

He wonders if anyone will ever speak the irony of the insult: the heir to the imperial throne of Garlemald killing some half-blooded bastard boy and earning the curse of his life. Sairsel can hardly hear his own thoughts over the raging winds of that fight, over the white-hot flash of pain that has him gasping and choking on his blood again as hands drag him away.

Loving arms cradle him, this time—warm and kind and desperate.

“Do something,” snaps Alisaie, her voice raw with the begging, right on the edge of screaming. Her arms holding him. “You have to do something.”

And panic permeates Alphinaud’s words, his shaking hands, his magic that rips through Sairsel worse than the blade. “I am trying,” he says, and Sairsel aches for the tears in his voice.

“He can’t die,” Alisaie says through gritted teeth. Her hand touches his face, his skin too pale and too cold, and her touch burns. “You can’t die. You said you would come— when all this was over, you said you— with me and Lyse and Y’shtola— you said you’d pay for the bloody cakes.”

Sairsel’s lips almost form the words of an apology, or perhaps some jest—stop yelling at me, Alisaie, I’m dying—but he can barely breathe through his own blood.

Then comes the slash of a blade catching the nick of the arrowhead, the dripping of blood, the infernal noise of metal plate as Zenos falls to his knees.

Morgana does not open his throat cleanly. She knows how; she slices through what matters, but she doesn't finish it. She circles him like a hawk and grabs a fistful of his hair and viciously pulls his head back. And, with all her strength and all her rage, she kicks his body away.

Sairsel only sees her silhouette like a vengeful shadow against the sky: bloody sword in hand, head in the other. The voice dripping poison into his ears is silent.

When next he wakes, it is only a memory.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:morgana #f:xiv #au:wol

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farplane · 5 years

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blood in the water

octobre 2019: warrior of light au sairsel, carrying on. ffxiv:stormblood (4.0 lv 65) spoilers.1,578 words.

For the first time stepping off the Misery and onto the Kugane docks, Sairsel felt as though he could breathe again. Lyse might have had to drag him kicking and screaming from Rhalgr’s Reach, if not for the shock and grief having rendered him into a state one step removed from complete resignation. The truth was that he couldn’t bear to leave Gyr Abania, couldn’t bear to walk away from the defeat just because he could—never mind that he had to, because they called him “hero” like he deserved it—while the rest of the people he so dearly wanted to be able to call his continued to suffer.

But he’d gone, because there was another truth that lay in the pit of his chest, burning like a coal that wouldn’t fade to ash: he was enraged. If he had to go halfway across the world to spill Garlean blood, to give Ala Mhigo an ilm of an advantage against the Empire for its liberation—then so be it.

Sailing to the Far East had washed over him like a tide, and he’d watched the line of the horizon and let seawater fill his lungs, drop by drop, the farther away the waters carried him from Gyr Abanian shores. He’d never realized, despite all that people said about him and a notion of heroism that felt as though it belonged to someone else’s name, how much he cared about Eorzea until he realized that he was leaving all of it behind.

So he hadn’t breathed; not for a long time. And then the sky opened above him, and what lay under his feet was a great grass sea. The Steppe had so little of home—not the Wood, and not Gyr Abania—but something about the way the clouds stretched over his head, silent and endless over a land that was wild and untamed, simply felt right.

He’d had enough of the hours they spent underwater with the blessing protecting his body but not the instincts that told his mind he was supposed to be drowning; he was glad to drown in the horizon, for a change. The dizzying spin came to a stop. The rage—only burning brighter after having stood in front of the thrice-damned Garlean bastard—almost faded entirely.

His voice, dripping with blood—the champion of the savages—almost fell quiet, with the wind howling in Sairsel’s ears.

I am no hero. I am no one’s champion.

I am a fool of a boy with a bow, and I am forestborn, and I am Ala Mhigan by blood. I am not living for your pleasure—I am fighting.

It had always been the trees that answered him, but their voices were not to be heard upon these plains; the wind spoke in their stead. And it pushed.

And he breathed.

“You’re smiling,” said Lyse as they navigated the Reunion markets. In her voice, there was, of all things, hope.

“I’m not smiling,” Sairsel said.

“Yes, you are. I know, because you’ve been making the same three faces since the second we left Limsa, and they are not pleasant.”

Sairsel raised his eyebrows, giving Lyse a childishly irked expression that he hoped Yugiri would not turn around to see. “Did Alisaie task you with insulting me while she was gone so that both my feet would stay firmly on the ground?”

“No; I came up with that myself,” Lyse said with a tight-lipped smile that was somehow no less cheeky. “You grew up in a roaming tribe like the people here, didn’t you?”

“Not like them,” Sairsel said, making no effort to hide his wonder at the wealth of different people around them, “but, aye, I did.”

Absentmindedly, he rubbed his fingers over the line of green ink running down from cheekbone to the corner of his lip, and wondered if any of the Xaela tribes held a marking tradition that might resemble his people’s blood writing.

“Feeling homesick?”

“Not the way you think,” he said dismissively, tugging at one of the clasps on his ears. Homesickness and wandering felt like two things that didn’t belong together—if he was homesick, it was not for the Wood. It was for Rhalgr’s Reach, before Zenos had turned it into a violated, smoking wreck.

But they didn’t speak of the Reach. Lyse had borne enough since Baelsar’s Wall for anyone to struggle to keep a smile on their faces, and she kept fighting. Even had Sairsel been able to push the words out—to speak about defeat, about the loss, about Meffrid and Y’shtola lying broken and everyone else—he couldn’t bear the risk of tearing her down. They had to keep their heads out of the water.

Still, she knew what he meant. Of course she did. “Yeah, me too,” she said, then smiled, and tugged him away from the buuz stall with a promise—to herself or to him, he wasn’t certain—to try the local fare later.

While they scoured the market in search of information, thick grey clouds gathered over the Steppe, and a part of Sairsel was half-prepared to take it as an omen as they went from one Xaela to another, teetering between obtaining only silent stares and causing offense. He was already exhausted by the time they found the Mol woman, sweet and pink and so softly bright that she seemed to help the sun to rend the clouds. When she pointed out the hill to them, Sairsel looked up and saw blue skies.

“You mean he’s been right above our heads this entire time,” he said flatly.

“If that isn’t how this whole adventuring hero business goes,” Lyse said, halfway between sympathy and goading. At that, Sairsel groaned and sank into a crouch, resting his elbows on his knees to better bury his face in his hands. Lyse helpfully patted his head.

“Can’t we ever just—”

“No.”

“—go to one place and—”

“No.”

Sairsel heaved a mournful, long-suffering, muffled sigh. Lyse allowed him another two seconds of wallowing before patting his shoulder, then taking his arm and pulling on his sleeve. Yugiri and Gosetsu were already halfway up the rise.

“Come on, soldier. I don’t want to miss that noble lord everyone around here has been going on about, and neither do you.”

“I would rather not talk to anyone for the next three days.”

Lyse gave a tug that he imagined was meant to be soft and still felt as though she were trying to pull his arm out of its socket, and so he followed. He climbed the hill at her side, and then stood breathless at the top of the rise—not from the effort, but at the view. As the plains fell open at their feet, the sky arced wide over his head the way it did from the banks of the Velodyna; he could trace its domed curve with his eyes, its edges spilling into the horizon. And at the very edge of the cliff, as though he meant to be one with that horizon, sat Yugiri and Gosetsu and Doma’s Lord Hien.

When he spoke, his voice seemed to be born of the wind, unshakeable as a mountain, and Sairsel felt as though he were listening to a bard whose words flowed with such unity with the world itself that they needed no melody. Sairsel was listening only with half an ear, startled not by the nobility of his words but the simple, deeply rooted calm of the voice that bore them. When Hien got to his feet and turned—and smiled—Sairsel no longer knew what he’d expected; there was only the man before as he stood now, with a bare sky and a wild land at his back.

Fleetingly, Sairsel found himself wondering whether it felt as strange to Lyse now as it always had to him to be called a Scion. If Minfilia had been standing with them, or at the very least Alphinaud, or even Thancred, it might have felt more natural. As it was, he might have preferred to have been introduced as members of the Resistance.

But the titles and the words, he realized, mattered little. It was their deeds that spurred Hien to meet Lyse’s gaze, then his, and bow—hands at his sides, back arrow-straight, gaze tipped downward. Sairsel almost stepped back. How could a single, silent gesture hold so much force? Even after all this time, after all the names—Eorzea’s champion, the Warrior of Light, Hydaelyn’s chosen—Sairsel couldn’t bear even this.

He averted his gaze. The wind became razor-sharp with cold against his cheek as though he had pulled the clouds back over the sun.

“The Scions of the Seventh Dawn,” Hien said. Even after Yugiri’s swift departure and rousing talk of revolution, Sairsel may as well have listened with his head underwater; he had a knack for being shocked about all the wrong things. “An inspiring title indeed. But we are more than our titles, are we not?”

Sairsel wasn’t certain whether that was his way of asking for their names, so he raised his hand—low enough to hope it wasn’t noticeable—and nudged Lyse forward. She stumbled two steps, snapped narrowed eyes his way, and set her spine straight.

“My name is Lyse.” She jammed her thumb in his direction. “This is Sairsel. We’re Ala Mhigan.”

We’re Ala Mhigan.

Sairsel’s feet were firm on the ground as he met Hien’s gaze. Study roots had crept along with him across the seas, and now they held him fast, and he stood tall.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #f:xiv #au:wol

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farplane · 5 years

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to the horizon, part two

octobre 2019: morgana and sairsel arroway, freedom, and the future; a direct continuation of to the horizon, part one. ffxiv:stormblood (4.1) spoilers. 5,784 words (part two)

“I have need of you, boy,” said Morgana.

Sairsel glanced over his shoulder at the walkway that led into the palace. “I’m still on watch. You’re aware there’s to be a summit taking place here in less than two days, are you?”

“I’m aware.” It was Morgana’s turn to glance around. “Won’t take long.”

“What, you’re going to finally put me down like a lame chocobo?” Sairsel asked—stupidly, he realized as Morgana’s gaze fell upon him again, perplexed and vaguely annoyed.

“What?”

Gods, he might as well have shrunk then and there. “Bad joke.”

Morgana’s reply was to purse her lips and whistle—mortifyingly, at Leofric. “Oi, Snakesbane. You have an eye on my boy, yes? Be a sweet and fill his post for a spell. Better use of your time than trying to fill something else.”

“Oschon’s balls.”

Leofric raised his eyebrows at Morgana, then glanced over at Sairsel—who had now raised a hand to his face as though it might be enough to hide its colour.

“Ever the poet, Morgana,” Leofric said gracefully. “I’d have said yes even if you hadn’t asked so nicely.”

“Right.” She didn’t spare Leofric even a second glance, nudging Sairsel’s arm and already beginning to walk. “Come on. We haven’t got all evening.”

“I’m sorry,” Sairsel hissed at Leofric, arms outstretched and shaking his head. It earned him a wink, and so he was all too glad to follow after his mother. She always walked like a soldier at march. “Have you decided to make up for twenty years of living without being embarrassed by my mother all in one afternoon?”

“If he’s truly fond of you, he’ll be glad to know that someone who cares is looking after you.”

“I don’t need looking after,” Sairsel said quickly, bristling. “And he’s my bloody unit captain; there’s nothing to be looking for. This isn’t Little Ala Mhigo where he was—where I was— anyroad, things have changed.”

“You’re telling me you plan on staying with the Resistance long?” Morgana asked. From her tone, it was clear enough that she struggled to believe that such a thing could be true.

“I don’t know,” Sairsel began, but she spoke again.

“Because even I’m considering moving on. You realize what it’s going to change into, now that we’re free, don’t you?” She glanced over at him. “You don’t want to be a soldier.”

“I’m glad for you that a few moons is more than ample time for you to understand me so well that you can decide what I may or may not want for myself,” Sairsel said with a voice that sounded surprisingly like her own, flat and unforgiving. “What do you plan on doing?”

“I left Ala Mhigo a sellsword. I see no reason why I shouldn’t take up mercenary work again.”

Sairsel was silent, but Morgana knew, even without facing him, that he was glancing sidelong at her left arm, at her skin pulled taut by scarring.

“I may not be able to hold a shield anymore, boy, but I can still fight. My sword arm was always my right.”

“I know. I didn’t mean—” Sairsel said, then sighed. “You’re still wearing two swords.”

“How observant. I am,” Morgana said. She kept her eyes ahead.

Her decisive pace was leading them north; they left behind the towering walls of Ala Mhigo and the rare greenery of the Queen’s Gardens to travel alongside Loch Seld’s eastern bank. The dwindling sunlight made the still waters shimmer, and when he squinted, each crystal of light thinned and stretched like blades. Above them, the sky was turning a deep blue-grey that bore coloured clouds, shifting with the sunset.

But Morgana did not seem to notice it.

“We’re going north,” Sairsel said slowly.

“Aye.” When Sairsel added nothing to his observation, Morgana spoke: “Do you understand what that means?”

“Bloodhowe.”

Morgana nodded. “The Tomb of the Errant Sword. I’m assuming you know—”

“It’s a place to honour mercenaries who died on foreign soil,” Sairsel said heavily. “I’ve been. Wilred—it’s where they took Wilred’s sword.”

“It is,” Morgana said. She glanced over at Sairsel, but only for a moment; today, she saw a ghost in his face. Her eyes remained on the horizon as she spoke. “When Gotwin was killed, I took his body to Little Ala Mhigo. But it’s a long way from there to Ul’dah, and I had no time to waste, so I went back to make certain Havisa and Mathias would be out of the city before any more horrors could befall us. Havisa charged a friend as we left to take care of his remains, but I never— For as long as I lived in Little Ala Mhigo, I never found out where he was.”

“I’m sorry.”

“But I did see that friend again, on this side of the Wall. He told me he buried Gotwin himself near the Sepulchre. Twenty years, and I never knew my brother was interred just next door. Some irony, eh?”

Sairsel frowned. “Why didn't he reach out to you? The friend?”

“He didn’t know I was alive, I suppose; we lived in different worlds. Or, if he knew, he didn’t want to show his face in Little Ala Mhigo. I could have reached out to him, but I… didn’t. I was angry. He was no friend to the Resistance, at the time.”

Of all the ways to feel, Sairsel was rediscovering the looming shadow of doubt that he'd only barely succeeded in dismissing; just as he was finding a place for himself in Ala Mhigo, he walked to Bloodhowe with his mother fearing that this was no place for him. He looked upon the spire of the Tomb of the Errant Sword, its silhouette clearer and clearer upon the horizon, as though he were trampling sacred ground.

“Are you—are you certain you want me there for this? I’m…”

“Would I have asked you to come if I didn’t want you there?”

Sairsel shook his head, his voice creeping on the edge of sheepish. “No, I don’t imagine you would.”

“Gotwin loved you like a son,” Morgana said. The words came all at once, landing at Sairsel’s feet with the force of a fire blast; he didn’t know how to handle their shape, as though it didn’t belong in his hands.

Gotwin Arroway was his mother’s brother. He knew that; he knew that, for a few months, he and his uncle had been of the same world. Still, he’d never stopped to imagine what he might have meant to this man whose life had been ripped away long before he could ever remember him. Sairsel had always thought of himself as something from outside what should have been his mother’s life. He didn’t know how to belong within it.

She noticed his silence. “Does that surprise you?”

“I knew you were close,” he said clumsily. “I suppose I never realized he even knew me. He died—”

“Before you’d even seen a summer, aye. But this is something you’ll learn once you have children in your life: it takes only an instant. With you, he had more than instants,” Morgana said, her eyes distant upon the sky. “He looked at you with as much wonder as he’d looked at Mathias when he was born. You were a tiny little thing in his arms.”

Sairsel didn’t know what to say to that. How could he? He rarely knew how to speak to his mother on a normal day, let alone while she was recalling a past that was lodged between her ribs like a blade.

But she didn’t seek any words from him. She sniffed and pushed on towards Bloodhowe, her footsteps heavy and intent, as she lay her hand against the pommel of the scimitar at her right hip.

“After we moved on to Ul’dah, it was Gotwin who kept in touch with your father; they sent letters back and forth like they were courting. He wanted to know everything about you. Tried to tell me all about it, but I never wanted to hear.”

“Why not?” Sairsel dared to ask, aching. Why didn’t you care?

These past few months, he’d been learning to understand her reasons, to make sense of how he could live alongside her after a lifetime of absence—to forgive, for his own sake, if not forget. Some days, he even did forget. She had left him to protect him from herself, to keep him safe with a father who wouldn’t get himself killed as she might; he could accept that.

But it never went away, the nagging hurt. The part of him that resented her.

“Didn’t care to twist the knife. That’s how it felt, without you,” Morgana said stiffly. “Thought I was going to drown in my own blood if I let myself miss you.”

Sairsel swallowed.

“When he died, it was like I lost you for good, too,” she added, looking at him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice rough in the quiet. The sand had crept into his voice, too, now—even if only barely.

They were silent as their feet touched sacred ground; silent as they made their way down into the darkness of the Tomb of the Errant Sword, its halls empty of bodies. All that was given to this earth was steel—and steel was all Morgana had to give.

She knelt in the low light of a candle with Sairsel at her back, and slowly drew the scimitar, holding it in both of her hands. Her breath was audible in the silence, deep with emotion, as she laid down the sword.

“Ancestors, receive the blade of Gotwin Arroway, fallen in Thanalan,” she said, her voice steady but sapped of strength. “He died for honour, and for a brother.”

Only silence answered her, but Morgana bowed her head nonetheless. She pulled a worn strip of embroidered fabric with patterns like delicate feathers from her pocket and tied it to the hilt of the sword with a length of leather cord.

“Remember his beloved, Havisa, fallen in the Black Shroud. She died with strength, as only a mother can.”

It wasn’t until she raised a hand to wipe roughly at her face that Sairsel realized she wept. Silently, he knelt down beside her and reached out—his hand hesitant—to touch her shoulder. Her own hand rose, fingers blindly grasping his.

Perhaps no gods or ancestors would answer her in a voice that she could hear, but Gotwin and Havisa were not forgotten, and Morgana was not alone.

Saskia was even more beautiful than she had been when they were twenty—or perhaps it was merely the simple fact that they stood in reach of each other, alive and whole, that coloured Morgana’s view of her with elation. Her eyes still crinkled when she smiled, dark and bright and glittering like diamond sunlight on the waters of Loch Seld; the thin lines of crow’s feet added shape to that smile. Two decades of occupation had worn her, but never tarnished her glow.

She was brighter, now, if anything: the light hair she’d inherited from her white-star mother sat like a length of braided gold upon her shoulder, woven together like a fish’s tail. Back then, she’d always dyed it, darkened it to brown-black and Ala Mhigan violet and indigo and everything in between—for pleasure as much as it was to hide her fair tones. It fell naturally around her face, softened her.

Somehow, the years seemed to have made her even more gentle, though the steel was unmistakable under her silk; the Empire had turned them all to metal or to stone, and Saskia had survived it. There was even less restraint, now, in the way she reached for Morgana’s hand, than there had been when they were young and foolish.

“You look sad,” Saskia said gently, her voice deeper. More subdued.

Morgana almost laughed, but it would have cut like a blade. The tea Saskia had made her was colder in her hand than it was warm, by now; it had spread through her with the loose ease of alcohol, warmed her as the stone of the promenade cooled under their feet.

“These last few days have been some of the happiest of my life.” She shifted her hand underneath Saskia’s, touching the tips of her fingers to the inside of her wrist. Saskia had always made her softer around the edges—that had been before, but Morgana was realizing that perhaps that weakness had not entirely faded away. “And they’re all the sweeter now for seeing you well.”

“And you.” Saskia smiled and pulled Morgana close, standing on the tips of her toes to press a kiss to her forehead.

They were not the same women they had once been—little more than girls playing at starting their lives. But the last few weeks had taught Morgana one thing: that the past clung back. Once it sank into her, her heart might sink back regardless of whether she wished it. The past lay in Saskia’s hands, in her eyes, in her lips; something in Morgana called to it.

Too much of her life lay unfinished. She closed her eyes at the fleeting touch of Saskia’s mouth to her brow, let go of her hand to touch the tips of her fingers to her cheek.

“There is something I need to ask,” Saskia said, eyes downcast, as she touched Morgana’s arm. The feeling of another’s hands on the fresh scars still almost made her flinch, but she felt like a cliff beside Saskia. Unmoving, steady against the crashing of waves and the beating of wind.

“Ask it.”

Saskia’s voice came as half a whisper, laden with regret. “Do you resent me?”

“I did,” Morgana said without a moment’s hesitation. She knew Saskia spoke of the night their paths had split, and there was no other answer. Her heart had always broken for more than Ala Mhigo alone. “For a time. But I resented you because I missed you, or—or I was afraid for you.”

Saskia nodded, silent, her gaze falling. Morgana never wanted to see her like this; she tipped her chin up with a finger, looked into the near-black of her eyes, framed by pale lashes. “No longer, Saskia,” she said. “We both made our choices for our families. My family died halfway across Eorzea. If I’d lost you with them, I’d— I wouldn’t have survived it.”

All at once, Morgana pulled away, turning to lean over the parapet overlooking the Lochs; she swallowed down the rising tide as she watched the sea of clouds, the red mountains. “What’s done is done.” She sniffed. “No use dwelling and regretting. It’s to the future we need to look, now.”

Saskia was silent for only a few heartbeats, but it seemed a great chasm. She leaned against the parapet, too, shoulder to shoulder with Morgana.

“So long as looking forward does not keep you from seeing what is beside you,” Saskia said. She tilted her head, her attention focused on the lines of Morgana’s face; it made her wonder what it was that she saw. Whatever it was, it pulled at her lips to form a sad sort of smile. A smile for the lost. “I recall a time when you’d wave me off if I so much as uttered a word about the future.”

The memory hit Morgana like a crashing wave, like it belonged to someone else. But it had been her, young and brash and biting into everything around her. ‘Let's not,’ she would say, usually sealing the topic away with a kiss. ‘I would rather enjoy the now.’

“Oh, gods. You’re right,” Morgana said, letting out a puff of a sigh. “I’d forgotten.”

“You’ve changed. It took over.”

Seeing the regret weighing down Saskia’s gaze, Morgana grasped at a new memory, intent on dispelling some of the shade the last twenty years had drawn over them. “I had started changing by the time we left,” she pointed out. “When Mathias was soon to be born. We’d started to make plans.”

Saskia’s expression turned for the bittersweet. “True. A child of our own. You remember?”

“Of course I do. That conversation we had with Gotwin about him siring the babe with you was one of the most haunting of my young life,” Morgana said, a smile tugging at her lips. It soon fell; she looked down at her hands. “And I thought of it constantly before my son was born. I was always thinking of you.”

“You were?” Saskia asked softly.

Morgana nodded. “It never felt right, a child in my belly. I thought it should have been you—for us, together. I… I still look at him, sometimes, my son— I wonder what he might be like if he had been yours.”

“So you do torture yourself,” Saskia said, swaying towards her to bump their shoulders together.

“I am not without faults,” Morgana said with a meager smile. “And perhaps I learned it from him. He’s kind, you know—which, I suppose, is more like you than me. But not to himself. Always looking back over his shoulder.”

“You think he might be different if he had been mine?”

“I’m certain of it.”

“But he’s yours, Morgana,” Saskia said gently. “You have it in you to help your son to look forward and be kinder to himself just as much as I could—but you need to let him help you, too. To see what is beside you.”

Morgana sighed and closed her eyes, tipping her head to the side to rest against Saskia’s. She wanted to tell her that she had missed her gentle heart and her way with words every day of her life, but the words wouldn’t come. They belonged on the tongue of a woman she no longer knew how to be.

“You always found it irksome when you knew I was right about something,” Saskia said of her silence, the smile shining through her voice. Morgana chuckled.

“Nothing irksome in it now. But I am glad you’ve become confident.”

“Doing away with my uncertainties was the only way I found to survive the Garleans. Anything less, and they thought they were right to call you savage.” Saskia disdainfully scrunched up her nose. “It almost feels too good to be true, walking these streets without having to answer to some cock of a bucket-head.”

Morgana snorted. “Those Resistance helmets are much more pleasant to look at, aren’t they?”

“Aye,” Saskia said with a smile. “I was wondering why I wasn’t seeing you in uniform.”

“Well, I’m not on duty right now. And, besides—I’m not sure that I will be again. I suppose we’ll see how the summit goes; I don’t think even the commander herself knows what will become of the Resistance yet.”

Saskia hummed. “What do you want?” she asked. “For yourself. From the future.”

Maddeningly, Morgana thought of Raubahn. She knew, at the very least, that she did not want what he did—and that made her insides twist.

“I don’t know,” she said stiffly. “All this time fighting, all this time hoping, and I never even stopped to think about what might come after. Feels like I ought to pick my life back up where I left it, but it’s been so long that there’s nothing left of the way it used to be.”

A part of her hoped that Saskia might say that she was still here; that they could start again. But Saskia did not say it.

“I don’t quite know, either,” she said.

The other part of Morgana was still caught on the question of what she wanted, clamouring with an answer she didn’t want to swallow: I don’t want him to leave.

There was a trace of blood on Sairsel’s cheek. His every gesture still had the stiff harshness of a body that had seen battle, his voice taut as a bowstring.

“Where in the bloody fuck were you?” he demanded. He bent down, planting a foot down on an ananta’s corpse to pull out an arrow with a squelching sound that did not make him bat an eyelash.

“I was—” Morgana said, raising a vague hand to point to nowhere over her shoulder only to cut herself off. “What happened?”

“Fucking Qalyana happened. Summoned a primal in the middle of the Hall of the Griffin.”

“Twelve,” Morgana breathed, dread filling her veins.

“We had to fight some of our own. They were already tempered,” Sairsel said through gritted teeth. So battle alone hadn’t put him in that state: it was killing someone who should never have been an enemy. He sniffed, glancing over his shoulder. “Ashelia and Arenvald put her down. But it could have been a lot worse. Lyse—Commander Hext, she— she and General Aldynn fought her. Without the Echo.”

Morgana took it like a punch to the gut. Her breath fell short, and her mind raced ahead. Fool. How could he—how could they both have been so reckless? Foolhardiness was to be expected of someone as young as Lyse, even if she had wisdom beyond her years enough to lead their people, but—

She gritted her teeth. Never could she understand him running back to Ul’dah, but letting himself fall to a primal to assuage his guilty conscience for leaving his home behind, she couldn’t even begin to forgive.

“Are they—” she asked, her voice scraping.

“Sound of mind and body,” Sairsel said, his gaze furtive. The muscles in his jaw tensed. “The Butcher fought, too. Lyse took her out of her cage. She saved their lives—all our lives.”

Morgana barely heard his words; her eyes kept pulling her towards the palace, like a tether stretched as far as it might go. She did not want to find out what might happen if she let it snap. “They’re all still inside?”

Sairsel’s shoulders were low. They drew in towards his heart. “Aye.”

At first, there was no question in Morgana’s mind, no doubt: she was who she had been before the Wall, decisive as the path of an arrow. She patted Sairsel’s arm in passing, more comradely than maternal, and got as far as three steps away from him before she heard him sniff again. Her feet stilled.

He was all that mattered beside her; all that lay ahead.

Damn her memories. Damn the past she had dragged into the present as though it might be a part of her future. She turned, walked back towards her son, and did what no one had ever done for her when the sword she sold had seemed to bear the weight of the world in her hand.

“Sairsel,” she said, taking him by the shoulders—shoulders wider and stronger than they had been back in Little Ala Mhigo. “Are you hurt?”

He frowned, shook his head. His gaze still fell towards the bodies, so Morgana gently took the bow from his hands and slung it over her shoulder. “It was a mercy and a kindness. They weren’t our own anymore, and anyone wearing that uniform would rather be dead than turning on their comrades.”

“I know,” Sairsel said stiffly. “I only—”

“Telling yourself doesn’t make it feel true, and neither does someone telling you the same,” she finished for him. Her gaze softened. “I know. But you have to fight it. You have the strength.”

For the first time, his eyes unwaveringly met hers—with cynicism to veil his doubt. “You really believe that?” he asked. Even his sarcasm sounded weary.

“I do,” Morgana said. It astonished her to think that, for once, her uncompromising nature served rather than harmed; she knew it had done Sairsel more ill than good over the last few months to be met with a brick wall at every turn. “Do you want to know why I think it?”

“Because I’m your son and I can’t be weak?” he suggested with a feeble, bitter half-smile. “Because I’m Gotwin’s nephew?”

Morgana looked over the promenade, hoping it would draw Sairsel’s own gaze. The kind thing might have been to preserve him, to make it so he didn’t have to look again at what had come to pass, but Morgana was not the kind one. The only kindness he needed was his own.

“You didn’t run,” she said, insistent. “You fought without the Echo, too, didn't you?”

“It’s easy to fight when you don’t have to walk past the strong ones,” Sairsel said. He motioned to his bow with his chin, but didn’t ask for it back. Not for now.

Morgana, for the most part, chose to ignore the comment. “You’re stupid, but you’re not weak. Stupid is fixable.”

Of all the ways to react, Sairsel laughed—a mirthless laugh that broke Morgana’s heart, but a laugh nonetheless. He was strong. He would survive this as he had survived everything else.

“Thank you, Mother, really. ‘Stupid’ is the only praise I ever needed from you.”

“It is one thing to be brave, Sairsel,” Morgana said, matching his tone. “It is another when that bravery is suicidal. The important part is knowing which is which.”

Sairsel’s frown narrowed his eyes as he considered her words. He opened his mouth, his lips forming no words, closed it, then spoke at last: “I couldn’t— I had to fight. Having the Echo doesn’t make Ashelia invincible.”

“I could have told you that the second we met,” Morgana said smartly, and immediately regretted it as Sairsel’s expression closed, if only for a moment. He rolled his eyes and went on.

“She’s better, but she’s not well. So I couldn’t. Not after… not after the tempered. It had to mean something.”

To that, Morgana could find no words—no words, at least, that could preserve what little remained of Sairsel’s spirits. She had been younger than he was when she first came to realize that death was meaningless, and then she had suffered for it as the years passed. There had been no meaning in Gotwin’s throat being cut open by rich men’s spite, in Havisa meeting her end at a hateful Wood-Wailer’s spear; in young men and women lost at Baelsar’s Wall as though their blood and pain were currency for one of their own; in brave Resistance fighters living to rip their home back from the Empire’s claws only to die a primal’s puppets.

Morgana had stopped looking for sense in death that was not chosen, but Sairsel was young and beholden to a gentler heart than he would admit to having.

It had to mean something.

A young man searching for meaning somewhere under the weight of battle as though redemption or reparation lay within. It was too familiar by half.

Later, she walked that path again—alone and under a velvet blue sky slowly coming alive with blinking stars. She climbed the palace steps, passed through silent halls that seemed to both forget and remember every second of the horrors they had seen. Today, weeks ago; through twenty years of occupation and a mad king’s reign of blood and all the ages of a nation. Bricks chipped by blades and bullets and scrubbed clean of blood, scorched black, drinking the echoes of pain. She walked floors that had seen her twisting and screaming herself raw as fire ate at her skin.

The Hall of the Griffin still crackled with aether, but traces of the primal and the fighting were gone. Morgana paid it all little mind; the throne room had seen far worse days in its history, and she hardly had any reason to linger. Twenty years ago, she would have never even dreamed of standing there—much less passing through as though it was a thoroughfare leading to a tavern.

She climbed more stairs, and emerged once more into the night. The sky stretched high and far over the Royal Menagerie. The sound of her own footsteps grated her own senses, too loud in the quiet stillness.

And her voice, too, but she couldn’t help speaking as she fell in at Raubahn’s side, keeping to his left. She couldn’t leave it at silence.

“You’re a fool,” she said.

Everything about Raubahn’s demeanour came softer in a way Morgana hardly recognized; not because it was not in his nature, but simply for the fact that he never seemed to have the time for it. In quick, stolen glances his way—it was easier to gaze upon the sky—Morgana could hardly tell what she saw in the lines of his face, in that unassuming smile that drew up his lips. Peace? Resignation? Weariness?

She had only ever learned to read a man’s face, his eyes above all, in battle. This was so far from it that she barely knew how to stand.

“I suppose I am,” he said humbly, “though you could stand to be more precise.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve already forgotten about fighting a primal—what, three hours ago?”

“No.”

“Or done something even madder since then.”

“Not yet.”

“That you know of,” Morgana said.

Raubahn smiled again. This time, Morgana thought it was most definitely weary; too soft around the edges to merely be peace. “That I know of,” he agreed. Stars filled the spaces of his silence. “Your son fought as well.”

“I know. Told him it was stupid, too.”

“He seems a good lad.”

Morgana nodded, her expression giving no sign of the pride that swelled within her breast. She did not need to be told of Sairsel’s qualities, not after all the work of trying to know him when he was almost as stiffly guarded as she was, and not by any man—but Raubahn’s opinion mattered to her far more than she might wish. He was half a legend, with a son of his own who was courageous and fierce and caring, and he had seen her brought low by the mere thought of who Sairsel might become when he had been but a babe.

Those words meant more to her than many of the things he had said to her.

For a heartbeat, she almost told him as much.

“I know,” she said instead.

Silence found them once more, but Raubahn was not idly watching the stars as Morgana did to divert her own focus. His smile courted the bittersweet. “Have you naught else to say to me?”

“Was there something you wished to hear from me, General?” Morgana said. She felt as though she were spitting poison, but only drop by drop.

Slowly, Raubahn breathed out through his nose. “No. I suppose not.”

He turned his gaze back towards the sky; only then did Morgana chance a glance at him. She thought her words might have soured him, but it seemed she was the only one in reach of her own poison. Was he so secure in his decision that her disapproval left him utterly unbothered? The thought pushed anger through her ribs. Were she in his place, leaving Ala Mhigo and returning to the land that had been little more than a prison to her might have torn her apart.

And yet—nostalgia was the only thing she could see on his face.

“It almost seems strange, a peaceful farewell, for you and I,” he said after a moment.

Morgana chuckled mirthlessly. “I could think of a threat or two, if you like.” She swallowed the emotion of the memory, the horror and the pain still raw in her throat after twenty years, and the new bitterness. Her voice came with such calm it almost seemed to belong in another body. “You’re leaving on the morrow, I imagine?”

“Aye,” Raubahn said gently. “Ala Mhigo no longer needs me.”

“That’s a bold fucking claim,” Morgana scoffed.

A part of her wanted to move, to stand in front of him so that he could no longer look at the sky as though it were the last of something, to shake his shoulders and remind him of who he was. After a reign of blood and twenty years of occupation, Ala Mhigo needed the good men and the legends more than ever; what fool could not realize that he was both?

“I would not begin our alliance with a free nation by interfering in its affairs.”

Morgana turned her gaze towards him, frowning. “‘Our’ alliance?” she asked, bewildered. “Ul’dah’s?”

“You know what I meant.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Ala Mhigo is in good hands.”

“And yours are—what? Bound?” Morgana asked. She closed her mouth, pushed out a sharp sigh through her nose. “Don’t answer that.”

She would not tell him that Ala Mhigo needed him, if he could not see it for himself. It was the part of her that was afraid it might sound too much like I need you that kept her quiet, that moved her as far away from the words as she could be.

“What of the Ala Mhigan Brigade?”

Better curiosity, even if it made her seem interested in the Flames’ affairs, than clinging to the past.

“Disbanded,” Raubahn said, as relieved as he was saddened. “Too many have chosen to stay, and I am glad for it. Those who would return will become a special unit dedicated to bringing aid and protection to refugees throughout Thanalan as much as the rest of Ul’dah.” He hesitated for a moment, then said: “There is yet a place for you within those ranks, if…”

“Do not insult me, Raubahn,” Morgana said, sharper than he deserved. “The only way I’m ever leaving Gyr Abania again is in chains.”

Infuriatingly, Raubahn almost smiled; she could hear it return it to his voice, gentle with some strange, fond resignation. “Some things never change, do they.”

It was not a question, and Morgana had no mind to give an answer. He turned, tried to reach out for her, but she ambled away before he could touch her. She kept on dictating the terms: she faced him, kept her distance, extended her right hand—her thumb turned out, palm upwards. At the very least, their comradeship deserved it.

“It was an honour to fight at your side,” she said honestly, drowning out every other part of her that was not a warrior. “On the bloodsands and on this ground.”

Raubahn’s hand was heavy in hers. For a moment, he seemed to want for words. “I won’t forget it,” he said. “And I am glad for the peaceful farewell. May you find the freedom you deserve, Morgana.”

Morgana nodded stiffly. “Safe journeys.”

She left before anything else could be said; before she could feel the weight of what was not. As she trotted down the stairs, she nearly barrelled into Ashelia Riot.

Of all the people.

“Morgana,” said Ashelia. It seemed like more than a greeting, but Morgana pretended it didn’t.

“Riot,” she answered curtly, and kept her eyes forward—towards home.

#from the heart #c:morgana #c:sairsel #f:xiv

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farplane · 4 years

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to the horizon, part four

novembre 2019: morgana and sairsel arroway, freedom, and the future; a direct continuation of to the horizon, part three. ffxiv:stormblood (4.1) spoilers. 3,639 words (part four)

“I’m not sure about this, Morgana,” said Sairsel.

“I can’t tell which is stranger,” Morgana said, content to ignore his concerns as she bent down to pick up a training sword. Her left arm still felt on fire if she so much as held a kitchen knife, but she had no intention of letting it make any sort of difference in her life. She’d had enough of staying still for the sake of allowing something to heal that would never return to what it had been before. “You calling me ‘mother,’ or addressing me by my name.”

Sairsel frowned and let his tone fall flat, the way Morgana liked. She was growing rather fond of what character he allowed himself to show her; a little more every day. “If you can tolerate neither, I’m afraid our only recourse is to not speak to each other at all.”

“Wouldn’t that please you,” Morgana snorted.

“I don’t like talking.”

“Or fighting, by the looks of it.” With the end of her training sword, Morgana nudged Sairsel’s crossed arms, trying to dislodge his stiff posture. “Come, now, boy. If you’re going to be roaming the highlands on your own, you had better know how to keep yourself alive.”

Sairsel scrunched up his nose and swatted at the sword. “I can fight just fine.”

“So show me, then. Put some peace in your poor mother’s heart.”

“You don’t want to fight me because you’re concerned,” Sairsel said. He had keener eyes than he let on, and their sight was beginning to break through the naïve veil of his youth. “You just want to fight someone. And you know the reason I won’t fight you has nothing to do with my own skill.”

“You think I’m afraid of some green boy who’s been fighting for, what, a year? I was on the bloodsands while you were still in swaddling clothes.”

At first, her goading only served to make Sairsel roll his eyes again. “And now you’re old and injured,” he said with all the sharp edges he’d learned from her, turning away to swipe up a staff from the ground. “If the healers ask, tell them you’ve brought this on yourself.”

Morgana found herself grinning; when he turned back towards her and saw her expression, Sairsel paused, almost drawing back. His surprise gave him the look of a deer about to bound away, but he stayed firm, and gave the staff a tentative twirl as though it were a spear. Seeing how easily he fell into his battle stance, Morgana matched his focus. The smile fell away as quickly as it had come.

“I haven’t seen you with a spear in your hands since the Reach,” she said.

“I’m not talking about this.”

Sairsel’s grip shifted on the staff, his fingers tightening; halfway between moving to strike and staying still as a statue, his limbs bound by doubt. Of course he wouldn’t try for the first move; Morgana didn’t know what he was afraid of, but his hesitation was familiar. If his initial discomfort with violence had been his foremost enemy in learning sword-skill back in Little Ala Mhigo, what now remained was his nature—as simple as holding back.

Waiting for him to finally strike first would have delighted Morgana, had she the patience for it—but she was too restless, too hot-headed even when tempered, and Sairsel needed the impetus.

So she opened with a feint. Her foot stomped down heavy on the ground, the shock of it running up her ankle and wrapping around her shin—almost delightfully so. Reactive, Sairsel stepped back and raised his staff with both hands to block a blow that didn’t come. It almost made Morgana click her tongue. She pushed forward; he stepped back.

Someone whistled from behind her; a few Resistance fighters had gathered to watch. “Come on, Sairsel!” shouted Leofric Snakesbane.

Morgana laid the point of her sword against Sairsel’s chest before it could distract him. She heard Brida’s voice, too, cheering her on—the voice that had bellowed rallying cries through the royal palace when Morgana fought with the Ala Mhigan Brigade. Her neck pricked at the sound of some of Brida’s words: the Griffin’s Talons.

“You are in your head, boy,” Morgana said sharply before the words could become true for her, feinting again: striking wide, stopping her own momentum. Sweeping up an underhanded blow.

Sairsel saw her eyes. He bent forward, stepping away, and jabbed his staff into her ribs. A hiss slipped past Morgana’s lips. Sairsel said nothing of the blow, his focus as sharp as his gaze. Good. Pain hitched where he’d struck, but it was welcome: pain in her right side, the pain of the slightest bruise.

Better pain than what burned through her left arm like a memory. She wanted it, wanted the breathlessness of a fight. And Sairsel made a fine opponent—even if he fought like someone else. Morgana dodged an upward thrust, saw him unbalanced: his lunge was too wide, as though it belonged to legs longer than his. Even the way he held his staff was not him; not his shoulders, not his arms.

He fought like he couldn’t dare to make anything that wasn’t the bow into his own. His feet scraped against the ground with a weight that didn’t belong to an archer, but he spun away from her next blow like a gust of wind, and for a moment she thought she saw herself at his age.

And Sairsel was smart. One second’s hesitation, and he cracked his staff across Morgana’s knuckles. Her grip faltered; the sword fell. Instinct brought her left hand down to catch it.

A practice sword, and she couldn’t even lift it. Sairsel saw this, too: he faltered, both hands tight around the staff, and Morgana shoved him away. When he stumbled back and down to the ground with a huff, she didn’t press her advantage; she stopped her own momentum dead in its tracks.

“Sairsel,” she said, just as Raubahn stepped forward.

She hadn’t even noticed him.

“Mind if I cut in, lad?” he asked, offering Sairsel his hand.

For a moment, the boy had that startled animal look about him again; his gaze flicked to Morgana, who simply gave a shrug, and he finally gripped Raubahn’s wrist and swung back onto his feet.

“I’d be glad to end the thrashing there,” Sairsel said with a nervous smile, looking back to Morgana again as he rubbed a hand to his lower back.

“Come here,” Morgana said, beckoning him. She laid the point of her sword against the ground, resting her left hand on the pommel as though it were a cane, and ignored her throbbing skin as Sairsel walked over to her. When he was close enough to reach—always keeping his distance—she raised her hand to rest against the back of his neck. “You did better than you think. Just don’t hesitate so much. Who taught you spear-skill?”

Sairsel scratched the stubble at his jaw. “A pirate.”

“Your Elezen friend?” she asked, and Sairsel nodded stiffly. “She’s taller than you, isn’t she? Longer limbs.”

“I—what?”

“You fight with her body, not yours.” Morgana clapped Sairsel’s back, and rose her voice that it might carry further than her son’s keen ears. “Think about it some. I have a war hero to humble.”

Raubahn chuckled. “Full glad am I to see you’re as cocksure as you used to be.”

“Cocksure, or simply self-aware?” Morgana said. It was too easy to match the smile dancing on Raubahn’s lips, to forget her fear of the ache in her left arm as she took up the practice sword again. She rolled her wrist, twirling the sword once in her hand, and slowly circled him.

“That remains to be seen.”

Morgana smirked. “Wonder what’s changed since the last time we did this.”

“I’ve lost near a stone of my own flesh.”

“And I spent the better part of twenty years starving while that arse got fat sitting on the Syndicate,” Morgana said, thumping the flat of her sword against Raubahn’s backside, “so don’t make me cry.”

“So I might just hold my own against you, then?” he said, narrowing his eyes with a shadow of a smile. He faced her, widened his stance, and hoisted his practice sword onto his shoulder as though it were far heavier than it truly was—inviting her to make the first move.

She smirked. “Might.”

Much had changed in the last twenty years: Raubahn had spent far longer on the bloodsands, for one, and commanded forces at Carteneau and beyond; they had both suffered injuries, small and grave, that irreparably changed their bodies; they were older, and they had learned to survive in ways that their youth could never have foreseen. But, most of all, they knew each other—beyond everything they might have learned even by the very end of the time they had shared at the Coliseum.

In the breathless, thrumming anticipation of the last moments before battle, Morgana wondered if she would even need to read him.

She inhaled, drew her ribs in, and charged. And she did not need to read him: she realized that it was rather more like hearing a melody, following each familiar rise and fall; knowing the notes before they even came. She knew Raubahn did not intend to dodge even before her sword connected.

The shock of his block reverberated through her whole arm, dug the hilt of the practice sword deeper into his hand. He threw the brunt of his strength at her to push her back: Morgana’s boots rasped against the ground, almost like stumbling. But she was firm even on the back foot. Rooted down. Anchored in Raubahn’s eyes, in the sound of his breath, in the way his body moved.

Her muscles burned like the breath in her lungs, and she welcomed the flames. Every time her skin touched Raubahn’s in a parry, she felt that familiar spark, the heat—and it only made her battle-fierceness grow.

They traded blows, quick and relentless; quicker than anyone watching might have expected, she knew. The breath of the small crowd gathered around them floated around her like a fading dream of the bloodsands, a chorus of quiet gasps and hisses brought on by the brutality that was to them a second nature. Still, she could hardly hear them—not over the sound of her own panting, of Raubahn’s sharp breaths, of their grunts and groans.

A bruise blossomed at the center of Morgana’s chest where her breastbone had caught the pommel of Raubahn’s sword, backhanded but sharp enough to last; she stepped hard enough on his foot that his bones would remember on the morrow. His kicks were stiffer, now, and the way he bore his weight different, but not unfamiliar. Morgana had held him enough since breaching the Wall to know it by heart.

And she no longer ducked and dodged with the same speed. Raubahn saw it: he caught her on clever backstrokes when she was recovering, sent her stumbling back more than once. A reach like his and only one arm, and he still kept close, kept his blows sharp rather than sweeping wide. Not the best way to stay alive in a real fight, but he knew how to guard his left far better than Morgana did her own, and this wasn’t about staying alive.

It was finally a dance: a brutal, graceless dance, but one that knew to join their hearts and guide their feet better than anything else could.

On instinct, Morgana deflected a backhand with her left palm: her hand shot down, pulling at the taut scars, sending pain clawing down the length of her arm. She cried out through gritted teeth, and Raubahn faltered—but she shook her head, charged once more, crouched low in her momentum to trip him and send him crashing down on his back. He rolled away, leveraged his sword against the ground, pushed himself up. Blocked her cleave while still down on one knee.

“Old tricks,” Raubahn said with a smirk, and smashed the flat of his sword into her right side.

For a mere few heartbeats, the flow of battle broke while Morgana found her breath again among the pain flashing up her side and Raubahn bounded to his feet.

“Can’t fault me for trying.”

Raubahn saw the stiffness begin to settle over her shoulders and down her arms, an emptiness bleeding through her muscles; likely he felt the same. “Tired?” he asked.

It was all he could do to dodge the wide sweep of her sword, pushed back by her desperate advance. One foot in front of the other, heavy on the ground.

“Aye,” Morgana said. But she did not stop.

She brought her sword down to bear, and he raised his, the dull blades caught in a crossing that became a contest of will as much as it was strength. With her fingers tight around the hilt of her sword, Morgana pushed until it ached, until she shook—the sensation sweet and terrible and like life itself being poured into her lungs as she breathed sharp and burning. She threw all her weight into her front, leaned in close.

When she looked into Raubahn’s eyes, it was as though she were looking at herself. She saw him; she saw the way forward.

It was the strangest thing, how badly she wanted to kiss him. If not for the pointed awareness of their humble audience, she might have—but she was as competitive as she valued her privacy.

All at once, she let go: let his strike fall free, pushing back against nothing. By the time the sword might have struck her, she had already danced away. She threw up a backhanded parry, struck a new bruise onto his arm. Raubahn grunted, but didn’t drop his sword; his riposte lacked in strength, but not in speed.

Morgana sidestepped to his left. She felt his vulnerability like the crack of a whip, watched him snap into the familiar gamble—and her feet were too heavy to escape his charge, this time. His shoulder struck her chest, sent her tumbling down.

Instinct before sense. As soon as she touched the ground, it was her left arm that tried to recover, and pain tore through skin and muscle both. Sharp, like the strangled cry that left her throat. She rolled to the other side, all her weight leveraged on her good arm, and brandished her middle and forefinger with a shaking hand as though they were a weapon.

“Missio,” she rasped. Raubahn was already dropping down to one knee by the time she had finished uttering the word.

And Sairsel was on the other side of her quickly enough, too. “Are you all right?” he said, more alarmed than he ought to be.

“I’m—fine. Bloody hells, that hurts,” Morgana said, trying to steady her breathing as she curled her left arm against her torso. Her fingers went to the scars, sweeping quickly over the expanse of skin she could still hardly bring herself to touch on a normal day. Thankfully, they didn’t come away bloody. “I’m all right, boy. Go on.”

Sairsel threw Raubahn a glance before looking back to her.

“Are you sure?”

“Sairsel,” Morgana said, her voice low. Sairsel raised both palms, surrendering.

“Fine. I’ll get you some herbs for the pain.”

“I’ve got her, lad,” said Raubahn reassuringly. He watched as Sairsel gave Morgana some unreadable expression and left, then added a pointed look of his own.

“He was going to fuss,” Morgana said flatly. “Son shouldn’t be fussing over his mother. Should be the other way around.”

Wordlessly, she nudged Raubahn's arm; he understood, rose to his feet, and offered his hand. Morgana gripped his forearm and hoisted herself back up, still gritting her teeth as chattering Resistance fighters wandered away.

“That was some hells of a fight, Morgana,” said Brida in passing, before nodding at Raubahn, “Commander. Felt like the bloodsands again. Shame about that arm.”

Morgana waited until she was out of earshot to speak. “Do you think she meant my arm, or yours?”

Raubahn snorted. He steered her towards some weapon stores adjacent to the training grounds, closing the door behind them. Morgana leaned against a table with a sigh, and allowed herself to cradle her left arm in her right. Pain still coursed through her, morphing with the passing seconds: now it was pins and needles, halfway between pain and an itch that burrowed under her skin, and a chorus of aching muscles and weary bones.

That, at least, she could appreciate. But not her arm.

“Bloody useless,” she stormed under her breath.

Raubahn slipped his hand under her elbow to inspect the scars, and Morgana opted to let him. His touch was warm, soothing.

“The pain?”

“Bearable,” Morgana sighed, her jaw tight with the admission that came: “My pride hurts worse.”

“No shame in surrender,” Raubahn said—Raubahn, who had given her the first surrender, so long ago it seemed like half a dream. For a moment, his eyes were distant as he raised his hand and ran fingers under his pauldron, scratching idly at what remained of his left arm. “One of my first commanders in the army—she drilled us like she loathed us, but she had wisdom. ‘Every hurt is a lesson,’ she said. I had to accept a great many lessons from the day Ilberd took my arm.”

Morgana sighed slowly through her nose. “And?”

“From experience, I would advise against shame. You will adapt.”

She knew he had the right of it; he was as infuriating in that way as Saskia had been. But Morgana had never been one for easy wisdom. Her very nature seemed to know only how to push back.

“I didn’t think it would be so bad,” she confessed, keeping her voice low and her gaze distant. “It’s only burns, isn’t it? I still have an arm. I can still use it. It’s stopped hurting every time I moved, so I thought I might still be able to fight.”

“You can still fight.”

Morgana glanced up at Raubahn. He regarded her with unyielding conviction—the sort that did not allow even the slightest contradiction. It was the kindest thing he could do for her, to set aside even the mere possibility of pity. She sighed again.

“Of all the people to complain to; I know.”

Raubahn almost smiled. “Who better?” he said, then laid his hand against her shoulder. “You lost a spar, Morgana, and barely. I have no concerns for your future.”

Unthinking, Morgana raised her hand to lay over his, slipping her thumb under his palm. Her own fondness shocked her.

“It was a good fight,” she said, dropping her hand. Raubahn removed his own.

“Aye.”

It was a fight she couldn’t have had with anyone else, but Morgana could only hope that he grasped that meaning without the words to express it. Because they were equals, because they were the same; because he knew her and she knew him.

Morgana’s heart hammered in her chest hard enough to make her believe she was still fighting. “I’m tired, Raubahn,” she said, surrendering.

“After all the years of fighting—”

“No. It’s not that. I’m tired of fucking and pretending that’s all there is.”

Raubahn’s silence, weighed down by his steely gaze, was nigh unbearable. He glanced down at the old scars on her throat, keeping his distance. “I never pretended.”

“You mean that’s all there is? Just two old comrades having some convenient arrangement?” Morgana asked, frowning. She could almost taste her own poison again.

“No, Morgana,” he said slowly. “I mean I never could pretend. Not twenty years ago, and not now.”

The floor might have spun away under her feet, then, and Morgana might not even have noticed. Her own ribs seemed to want to pierce her heart, and she could hardly make sense of his meaning as it was.

She understood the words. She understood, but she couldn't.

“Have I made a complete arse of myself?” she asked, her voice rasping in its near-silence.

“Utterly,” Raubahn said. A smile pulled at his lips. “But it comes with the territory, I suppose. You always have been a bit of a bastard.”

Morgana realized that she was laughing. Aching and weary from the fight and half a lifetime, but laughing. She curled the fingers of her right hand in the fabric of Raubahn’s cloak and brought him close, looking up into his eyes before pressing her lips against his. Her hand slid up to anchor at the side of his neck; she could feel his heartbeat underneath her fingertips. And she felt it like a tether.

When he pulled back and touched his brow to hers, she closed her eyes and simply breathed; simply lived, taking the quiet seconds as hers. His voice filled the spaces in the silence, threaded into that peace.

“Would you let me be yours? Call you mine?”

“You have me,” Morgana said—words she thought would never again leave her lips. “For as long as you’ll want me.”

Raubahn sighed; his shoulders dropped, falling with his breath. And Morgana unraveled, too, so that she could weave herself back together with him. Gently, he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

For that moment, the aches no longer mattered. The bruise forming on her chest, the burning memory burrowing through her left arm—all she heard them scream as she moved was that she was alive, and for once, living did not feel like a burden. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders, held him close, buried her face in his neck as he wound his arm around her. Steady and sure.

Her surrender had taken much too long to come, but she felt lighter without the weight of carrying it than she had in years.

#from the heart #c:morgana #c:sairsel #f:xiv

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farplane · 5 years

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to the horizon, part one

octobre 2019: morgana and sairsel arroway, freedom, and the future; a direct continuation of for hearth and home. ffxiv:stormblood (4.1) spoilers. 3,172 words (part one)

“I was told there was an urgent matter for me to attend to,” said Raubahn.

Morgana shrugged, her tone coming surprisingly lofty. “Well, I didn’t raise my son to be a liar.”

Raubahn thoughtfully narrowed his eyes, considering the integrity of his retort, then dared it: “You didn’t raise your son.”

“Oh, so the Bull plays dirty, then,” Morgana said, dropping her voice as she stepped closer to him and put a hand on her hip—only the right. Her left arm was still almost entirely bandaged, and for the most part, completely useless.

They made a fine pair.

“Is it fair to involve my son in whatever machination this is?” Raubahn asked. He matched her tone, met her eyes.

“When I mentioned to young Pipin—the vice marshal, my apologies—that I had a bottle of arak waiting for you to celebrate, he all but threw a sack of gil at me to contribute and made it his personal mission to usher you towards it. Thinks you ought to rest,” Morgana said, primly patting his chest. “So, really, this ‘machination’ is rather more his doing than mine.”

“There is much to do.”

“Ala Mhigo will be no closer to being whole again no matter how many nights of sleep you miss. If one man was all it took, we wouldn’t be a nation.”

Morgana turned around and walked to the table where she had set down the bottle of arak before he could offer up any more protests, pouring water from a jug into two goblets before adding the arak and watching it turn milky white. “One drink, Raubahn,” she added, picking up one of the goblets to hand to him. “You have to raise a glass to our freedom.”

“I ought to celebrate,” Raubahn said as he plucked the goblet out of her hand, making no effort not to let his fingers brush against hers, “but should you be?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at her arm.

“I’ve spent almost every second since the fighting stopped in so much pain that I thought I was going blind,” Morgana said honestly. To anyone else, she might have diminished her own suffering in the days since their victory, but there was no point in it with him. He knew pain better than most. “I think three different healers have exhausted themselves making it better. If I’m able to stand on my own two feet, I owe it to them to make the most of it.”

“And your son?”

“Healthy and whole. Keeping busy. Likely doesn’t want me to talk about him about as fervently as I don’t want to talk about him, right now.”

Morgana held up the second goblet, and Raubahn knocked his against it; they drank in unison, eye to eye. She was taken with the urge to make a contest of it, but it would be a waste of good arak—better to save games for whatever piss the Ul’dahns might have brought with them.

“Gods, the taste,” Raubahn said as he looked down at the goblet in his hand. “I think I’d forgotten how much I missed it.”

Morgana nodded, then tapped her nose. “I felt the same about the salt from up here. The westerly winds.”

“Would that it were so easy to bottle up the wind,” Raubahn said with a small smile.

“Might be easier to do than finding good arak these days. You wouldn’t believe how much this cost.” Morgana glanced down into her goblet, drumming her fingers against it. “Have you heard? Word in Ala Ghiri is there’s to be the first date crops in decades. In Coldhearth.”

Some manner of nostalgia flashed across Raubahn’s face as he drank. “No, I hadn’t heard. I’m glad for them.”

Between their newfound freedom and her burns making her near delirious with pain, Morgana had not spent much of her recovery worrying about the future like a lovesick little girl—and she didn’t intend on starting now that she was on her feet. Still, it was near impossible not to wonder: Raubahn had fought for Ala Mhigo because the Alliance had finally chosen to involve itself; what chains wouldn’t pull a man like him back to Ul'dah?

“I’ve been trying to imagine you as a date farmer,” she said with a tentatively wicked smile, instead of asking the question that lingered at the back of her mind.

“Is that so?”

“Mm,” she hummed into her goblet, raising a telling eyebrow at him before dropping her gaze to his chest. “Date farmers don’t wear shirts all that much, do they?”

“Perhaps you ought to go to Coldhearth and ask,” Raubahn said, smiling despite himself.

“Will you?” she asked, dropping the act like the snapping of a drillmaster’s whip. “Go back.”

“There isn’t much left for me back in Coldhearth,” he said simply. “I’ll never renounce my home, but there never really was.”

Morgana hummed again as she drained the last of her goblet and set it down; the sweet warmth was spreading through her, but she’d had enough of the haze the healers had put on her to manage the pain these past few days to drink any more.

“What of you? Once a sellsword, always a sellsword?” Raubahn asked.

“Perhaps; I haven’t given it much thought yet. Was waiting to see how this heals,” she said, nodding her chin towards her left arm. “Chirurgeons keep telling me that they won’t know for certain how much strength I’ll regain until I can move without too much pain. Might be it won’t hold a sword or a shield ever again.”

“I’m sorry,” Raubahn said. He set down his goblet, too, raising his hand to her left shoulder—gingerly avoiding the vicinity of the highest bandages. He touched the braid that lay against her neck, then the familiar scars.

“Don’t be. I’ve survived everything that’s tried to kill me so far and I don’t intend on letting this stop me any more than worse has stopped you.”

“You know that isn’t what I meant,” Raubahn said, almost wearily.

“And you know I still have a fair few fights left in me.”

“I do.”

His hand shifted, palm coming to lay flat against the side of her neck as his fingers splayed and his thumb rested at the edge of her jaw. This time, he was the one who kissed her, bowing his head as though to some higher power; it was out of freedom that she sank against him, anchoring her good arm around his shoulders.

“What are you doing?” she asked against his lips.

“Celebrating. Would you rather I stop?”

“Absolutely not,” she said, and kissed him again.

“The pain?”

“Bearable. Maybe I’ll even forget about it.”

Morgana wasn’t sure whether it was she who steered Raubahn towards the table or he who led, like a dance with steps so familiar she no longer realized how she even moved her feet.

“If it gets worse—”

“Missio,” she said, lifting middle and forefinger.

Even after twenty years, after the life-rending struggles, the words and gestures of the bloodsands were a shorthand she shared with him—without Gotwin, him and no one else. He needed no more words, no further explanation. From the first, surrender had been something between them that bore none of the shame that it might in the arena. Surrender and abandon; their meaning shifted, pulling down walls.

And she added, opening her knees and hooking her leg up around his waist to pull him closer: “It won’t get worse.”

For good measure, she grabbed a fistful of his cloak and gave a tug.

“I would not want to be that which battles against your will,” Raubahn said, smirking.

“No battles for today. Not for a while,” Morgana said; she smiled in spite of herself.

“Your braids are a mess,” said Morgana. Blessedly, it made Raubahn laugh.

“And whose fault is that?”

She had spent upwards of ten minutes running her fingers through his hair—pulling on it, sometimes—while he had his mouth on her, it was true, but she now wore an expression that completely eschewed responsibility.

“Do we need a culprit?” she asked, sighing lightly as she sat up. She combed her own hair back with her fingers, then nudged Raubahn’s shoulder. “I would rather look for a solution. Come on; sit.”

Raubahn grunted and all but rolled off the bed as Morgana pointed to the floor, sitting down with his back to her. She moved to sit over the edge, one leg dangling beside his shoulder, and began running her fingers through his hair.

“You didn’t have to bother,” he said quietly—a small courtesy, given that he was already leaning his head back, his eyes fluttering closed.

“And how exactly were you planning on fixing it with one hand?” Morgana asked, then snorted. “Gods—actually, I think I won’t bother. I would love to watch the great General Raubahn Aldynn skipping back to the Alliance garrison fresh from a tumble and looking like it. Do you think anyone will have the balls to comment?”

Raubahn grimaced. “Let us pretend I said nothing.”

“How long is the Alliance planning on staying here, anyroad?”

“Not much longer,” Raubahn said after a moment. “The Elder Seedseer has already returned to Gridania with a significant portion of Adder forces and the Knights of Ishgard in tow. Maelstrom Command is making preparations to sail home.”

“And the Flames?” Morgana asked, detached, as though getting a first braid back into shape was something so utterly demanding that it sapped her interest.

“We’ve made no preparations as of yet. The matter of the Ala Mhigan Brigade alone is a complex enough matter, and given our close working relationship with the Resistance, I’ve yet to…”

“You mean you’re still trying to solve every single problem that crops up.”

“Cut off one head and two more shall appear.”

Tensely, Morgana smiled. Already, she knew she shouldn’t have broached the subject, but it was becoming as difficult to ignore the looming shadow of Raubahn’s commitment to Ul’dah as it was uncomfortable to speak of it. And it wasn’t that she cared, really, not for herself—she hadn’t taken a lover with the thought of becoming partners since Ala Mhigo fell, and liberation wouldn’t change what had become her nature—but for his own sake. She knew she would sooner cut off her sword arm than return to that gods-forsaken desert now that the griffin standard flew over the walls of the city once more.

It made her ache, to think of chains pulling him back again as they had once bound him to the Coliseum; and it felt like half a betrayal, even after all the fighting, to imagine that they were not chains at all, but a true desire.

Raubahn’s fingers trailed idly along her calf. He seemed half a world away, too.

“I think this may well be my first time braiding someone else’s hair since my brother died,” Morgana said clumsily after a time—as though that were a more pleasant subject.

“Is that so?”

Morgana made a noise of assent at the back of her throat. “After our parents died, we—well, we’d trade to save time. I did his, he did mine. He had a knack for it. I could go days without having to touch them.”

Wordlessly, Raubahn turned his head—careful not to undo her work—and pressed a kiss to her ankle. “It’s not often you speak of him.”

“Dwelling on the past has made me want to die time and time again. I’m not fond of the idea of dying, so I don’t.”

To her surprise, a chuckle escaped Raubahn’s lips—rather mirthless and grim, for something of a laugh, but a chuckle nonetheless.

“How is this amusing to you?”

“I’ve had many opportunities to dwell, over the years. Oftentimes on you,” he admitted with ease. “I would always imagine you saying something much like this when I snapped myself out of it.”

Morgana finished the last of his braids, but didn’t move. “So I’m predictable.”

“Or perhaps I simply have a good memory,” Raubahn said simply. “It would always remind me of who I had once been—who we both had.”

“Sounds an awful lot like dwelling to me.”

Raubahn smiled, bittersweet, and looked down at his hand. “Aye, I suppose I did dwell, after all; I never stopped thinking of this land as my home. Then I came to realize that it may not think the same of me, for all that I had changed. Thinking of the past made it seem as though it might keep me from becoming unrecognizable.”

Silent, Morgana swallowed thickly. She dropped her hands back to her lap, only to shift with a shudder as the fingertips of her right hand brushed against the burn scars of her left—and then she slid off the bed, folding herself beside Raubahn. She looked at him.

“Do you recognize me?” she asked.

Raubahn did not need to even glance at her to know the answer, but he turned his head to meet her gaze nonetheless. “Aye.”

“I recognize you.”

It never ceased to confound Morgana that a boy born of a Highlander and an Elezen—regardless of how middling and slender Nimaurel had been—could be so short. Sairsel was of a height with most Midlander men, and she understood that Nimaurel’s girl, too, had more of a Miqo’te’s size, which was all the more puzzling. Still, Sairsel stood as a shadow against the building at the very edge of the Alliance’s temporary headquarters shared with the Resistance in the Ala Mhigan Quarter—and that shadow stretched long and tall on the cobblestones.

He’d taken to wearing Ala Mhigan archer’s attire along with his ranger’s coat, the deep green and brown tones as perfectly suited to his woods as the dusty Gyr Abanian highlands; now that he dressed to look as whole as he felt, he appeared five years older than he had but a year past. There was a nonchalance about the way he held himself that Morgana beheld with such fondness that it surprised her—she understood that her son’s mind worked in ways that made true assurance impossible, but he was a fighter, now. The set of his jaw, the length of his spine, the broadness of his shoulders all seemed to say he was strong enough to fight his own battles.

“You look busy,” Morgana commented as she stopped beside him. Without a word, Sairsel tore off a piece of the flatbread in his hands—buttery and still warm—and handed it to her.

“Your friend, the general—he’s just finished making his address to the Flames and the Resistance about how he’s going back to Ul’dah,” Sairsel explained around a mouthful. Sharp green eyes still on the crowd. “Caused some hells of a stir.”

Morgana breathed out a sigh through her nose, her shoulders tense as she willed them not to drop with the disappointment. “I imagine it would. He’s a hero and a legend even here, after all these years; the Resistance will be as disheartened to see him leave as the Flames will be glad to go home with him.”

Sairsel only met those words with a wordless hum.

“What?” Morgana asked.

“Suppose I just don’t understand it,” he said with a shrug. “I was born after the imperials came and I’d never even seen a malm beyond the Wall before the Griffin, and you’d have to drag me kicking and screaming out here, so soon after it’s just become ours again.”

Morgana opened her mouth to speak, but Sairsel went on: “Make no mistake: the Wood is still my home, it’ll always be, but I didn’t fight and bleed and—and lose so much for Ala Mhigo not to want to be a part of it.”

“You’re young; Raubahn is of an age with me. It’s easier to wander when you’ve only seen twenty summers.”

Sairsel made a face. “Sure, but it’s the words he used,” he said, scratching short nails thoughtfully against the stubble at his jaw. “Back to Ul’dah; not home. All the Flames are talking about going home—except for the Ala Mhigan Brigade, I suppose—but not him. It’s Ala Mhigo he calls home, and he’s still leaving.”

“Some people don’t want to die at home,” Morgana said coldly. “If he wants to spend the rest of his days with his sultana and waste away in the desert, it’s his choice.”

“That’s grim,” Sairsel said, looking at her.

Morgana shoved the piece of flatbread in her mouth.

“I heard Gundobald and a few others have decided to stay in Little Ala Mhigo, too.”

“True,” Morgana said. “Not everyone’s well enough to make the journey back. I’m not surprised he’d choose to stay; it was always about the people, with him. That’s why we chose him to lead us.”

Sairsel nodded, and watched the crowd in silence for a moment. “What about you? Have you thought about going back?”

“I bloody well won’t,” Morgana said without a second’s hesitation. “I’ve seen enough of Eorzea. When I die, I don’t want to be buried in the Tomb of the Errant Sword. I promised myself that a long time ago.”

The unrestrained look of relief on Sairsel’s face spoke volumes about his own intentions. A part of Morgana struggled to believe that he wasn’t running back to the Shroud now that the fight was over, but she now understood that it was all too easy to assume things about the young man in front of her and be wrong. Sairsel was bound to those woods, it was true—he’d been unhappy enough in Thanalan, as though he were himself a plant wasting away without water and rich soil and shade to nourish him in the desert—but he had wandering feet, too.

He looked upon Gyr Abania with a hungry wonder that elated her as much as it broke her heart to see not familiarity but novelty in the way her own son beheld her home.

It was strange, being a mother. She’d never known so many regrets, before—but she could console herself with the knowledge that they had all the time in the world, now, to build monuments to the future that might make up for lost time.

Unbidden, Morgana reached out to pat Sairsel’s shoulder. He had filled out over the last few moons: wider, firmer, stronger. “I’m staying here,” she assured him, with a gentler tone than she’d just used. Gentler than the way she spoke most of the time; however inflexible her nature may be, she was beginning to find that she had no love for the way she would speak to him until the Wall.

“So am I,” Sairsel said, nodding solemnly. “For a while.”

Morgana almost smiled. She spared one last look towards the Alliance headquarters, bristling at the over-familiar scale bearing flame and diamond upon its black banner, and made to go on her way.

“I’ve some business to take care of. I’ll seek you out later,” she told Sairsel in parting.

It was time, too—a return already overlate—to let go of what was lost.

#from the heart #c:morgana #c:sairsel #f:xiv

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farplane · 4 years

Text

on this side of the grave

août + décembre 2019: pavane, sairsel, and imagining. takes place some time after this. 5,088 words. 🎧

“You could have anyone you wanted in this city, really,” Relienas had said to him once, reclining against the pillows with a heavy, satisfied gaze and the sprawling of a man who was as lazy as he was intent on the display. The curving smirk on his lips said as much as any word. He dropped his eyes, almost coy, tilting his head to look down at himself as he traced one finger around the fresh, pale welt colouring the milky skin of his inner thigh. “And of all beds, you fall into mine.”

“You flatter yourself so well it’s a wonder you don’t prefer the comforts of your own hand,” Pavane shot back. He bent to retrieve his shirt, ignoring the pull of Relienas so close in reach, the greed making him want him again, more, as though walking out of this room would mean never knowing whether he could have him—could have anyone—again.

He didn’t want to feel like he could never have his fill of him.

Relienas clicked his tongue. “I praise you and you call me arrogant.”

“You praise me to praise yourself.”

Pavane began to slip his shirt over his head, met Relienas’ eyes, and paused. Caught like a prey in a net.

He could never decide which had more power, between that rich amber gaze or the bow of his mouth. His elegant, straight nose; the sharp lines of his jaw; the smell that clung to him, spellwork incense and lilac flowers. Handsome, pretty, too charming by half. Pavane wished himself stronger as he so often did in so many ways, strong enough not to be a fool who fell to men like him—like Relienas, and like himself.

“Be kinder to me, my prince,” Relienas said, his smile twisting because he knew Pavane loathed the very words almost as much as the tone with which he uttered them.

He reached for Pavane’s wrist, fingers against his pulse, a familiar dance from opposite ends of a room finally coming to a touch: as he had for so many years, Pavane found himself torn between wanting to blast Relienas’ jaw shut with a force spell and silencing him with his tongue in his mouth.

“I don’t need to be kinder to you, Haxcus, and I couldn’t do it without blinding myself anyhow. I see you like I see everyone else in this town; this game isn’t one you’ve invented, I’m sorry to say,” he said, tugging his hand back. When Relienas didn’t let go, Pavane grabbed his shoulder, pinning him down to the bed. “It’s a blood prince you like having in your bed, not me. And I’m in it because I don’t want to fuck any of the daughters my family’s friends are throwing at me, so let’s not pretend this is anything other than what it is.”

Relienas pressed a palm to Pavane’s chest, warmth spreading over his skin. “There’s no heart beating in here, is there?”

“You’d be a fool to think there is,” Pavane said, and caught Relienas’ lips in a bruising kiss.

Blood, in Acheron, was a thing of power. Magic flowed through it; and where magic flowed, so did power. It was a fine balance to build; many had been the fools and the power-hungry who were consumed in overuse of blood magic, and many would they continue to be. The power of blood could be a candle, a bright fire in a hearth—or it could be a roaring monster tearing through a street in a matter of hours. Pavane knew the song in his own blood, had seen it flow black from his veins since the curse had burrowed into him, had spilled it to wet the bones of the dead until he could touch spirits with only words and will.

Blood was familiar. He didn’t flinch at the sight of it, and neither did he expect others to. Not until the Continent, and not until he met the ranger; not until he found himself startled by the way Sairsel never batted an eye at the blood on his hands after a kill.

It was the strangest feeling, watching the same colour and finding that it was life and death more than it was power. Pavane felt as though the world had been turned upside down, because the familiarity was gone; it seemed to dislodge every certainty he had. If blood wasn’t power, he no longer knew what was. More and more, Sairsel—quiet in words as much as magic—seemed to be strong in every way that had never meant power in Pavane’s mind.

On his hands, blood was nothing. He didn’t mind the sight of it, but he didn’t use it, either. It simply stained until it was washed away. Every hunt ended the same way: with the peeling of his gloves, his hands bare against the red; with quiet words on his lips that Pavane didn't understand, and then a practiced knife. What he whispered then had seemed almost like an incantation, at first, but none of the magic Pavane knew to recognize stirred. He did not know how to listen for the whisper of the wind fluttering in the leaves, an answer in a voice Pavane had never known could be heard—old gods, nameless and nearly forgotten.

“Is it Elvish?” Pavane asked him one evening. It was a wonder he'd managed to make himself wait this long as a courtesy for Sairsel’s taciturn nature before his curiosity got the better of him. “Those things you say when you kill an animal. It sounds like Elvish.”

Sairsel glanced at him—sharp green eyes that never rested long enough on him. There were days when Pavane wanted nothing more than to take his chin and meet those eyes and say please, look at me, if only for a moment. He never found the courage, faltering in a way he had never faltered before.

“It's a dialect. Elvish roots, Sylvan leaves.”

Always the shortest possible answers, the least revealing sentences. After so many hours together, Pavane still felt like he knew only half of Sairsel’s voice: only the tones that were deep and quiet and felted. He wanted to hear it laugh—not just restrained half-chuckles—hear it sing, hear it soar. Every day, Pavane dared a little more when Sairsel didn’t shut himself away; it should have seemed like so much work, coaxing every little thing out of him, but he barely noticed it.

He had always been hungry in the face of a mystery.

“What do you say? Are you—I don’t know, comforting the beasts?”

“Of course not. Why would I comfort something that’s already dead?” Sairsel asked, perplexed. “It’s a prayer.”

“A prayer,” Pavane repeated. “I didn’t realize you were religious. Who do you—”

Sairsel shook his head. “I don’t pray to any god who’s got a story. It’s just—nature. The earth. It provides, so I give thanks. No death should be meaningless.”

That, Pavane understood. He had touched too many spirits of dead who had passed on cruelly, or without purpose, and they were different. Taut, like bowstrings. The first thing he had been taught was not to care, but he had never been able to tune his own spirit in such a way; it was always, at the very least, like using a knife that was too blunt, a staff that was too heavy, a current of magic that didn’t flow right.

Sairsel glanced at him again, then dipped his bloody hands back into the carcass on the ground, pulling out entrails as simply as plucking fruit from a tree. In time, Pavane found himself watching his hands not because of the blood, but because they were his hands.

“He is handsome, your friend, lord,” said the merchant from Hiskaris. She leaned comfortably against the table at her stall, fingers beside the pooling silks and flowing sheers with which Pavane laboured to distract himself. If he followed her gaze towards where Sairsel stood negotiating with a tanner—with surprising ease, given that the tanner was as reserved as he was, and they seemed to find a silent understanding in that—he feared he wouldn’t be able to draw his eyes away.

“You think so?” he asked idly.

The merchant smiled like they were lifelong friends: the warmth of compatriots meeting in a foreign land. Pavane was beginning to realize that he ached for home even only in the language of her body. “Well, not like the men back home. Not like you, lord.”

“You flatter me,” Pavane said, working an easy smile onto his lips to counter the stiffness that threatened to settle into his bones, make him stand in her line of sight so that she’d be looking at him and not across the market alley. In Acheron, half of business was flirting. He didn’t have the heart for it.

“I flatter you and the company you keep.”

“Have a care, my friend, so that it doesn’t seem like empty guile. Most people back home would say he’s rather uncouth, and I would say from experience that they are right.”

She responded to the quirk of his eyebrow with a sly, knowing smirk. “I am not most people, and I am not back home.” If anything, Pavane enjoyed her confidence. He touched a length of patterned black gossamer, drawing her gaze down only for a moment. “Call me adventurous, but he reminds me of the shadow-hounds in the Lethan Plains. Have you ever seen them hunt, lord? True grace is in the wild.”

Pavane hummed, noncommittal. Wild grace. The back of his neck prickled, and his senses left him—and with them, his careful restraint. He glanced back over his shoulder for a heartbeat too long, and another; lingering, always lingering.

He snapped his attention back to the table. “All right, you’ve seduced me. How much for this?” he asked, running his fingers along the gossamer.

“For a countryman? Five silver, lord,” the merchant said, grinning.

On the Continent, it was a steep price—but a fair one, for something brought all the way from Acheron. Back home, Pavane would have paid twice that, even after haggling. He held the merchant’s gaze, not bothering to look down as he dipped into his coin purse and produced the silver pieces. He took up the length of fabric, stroked his thumb over it as he watched how the violet of his skin bled through sheer black between the thicker parts of the pattern.

“Fine wares,” he said, and paid her what it would have been worth back home.

“Thank you, lord. You honour me.”

Pavane smiled and draped the gossamer over the back of his neck, tucking it down the front of his coat—making no effort to cover up the skin he already left exposed. “Not really.”

His feet moved too quickly to return to Sairsel; his mind balked at it like it was a betrayal. Every day he felt more like a fool, tangled up in some pointless want for what was in front of him because he had nothing else. I think you think everyone wants to fuck you and it gets misleading. Sairsel had smiled, then, everything about him furtive, and Pavane’s gaze had lingered on him and never seemed to stop.

Coins jingled in Sairsel’s hand as though he were weighing them, a supple leather strap in his other hand.

“Fruitful trip, Master Strider?” Pavane asked lightly as he came up next to him.

“Mm. The strap of my quiver was starting to fall apart,” Sairsel said, glancing up; his eyes flicked down to the gossamer, then away. “And you’re buying dire essentials too, aye?”

Pavane smirked. The effort was wasted—it had to be; Sairsel could never look at him longer than a glance—but he still ran a finger under his collar. “Certainly. A little piece of home.”

“Feeling homesick already?” Sairsel asked, turning away without any other direction; he simply started walking, leading Pavane out of the market as he led the way on the road.

Pavane walked a half-step behind. After all the time they had spent in the wild, watching Sairsel in the city felt stifling. Perhaps it was noticeable only to him, because he couldn’t stop himself from stealing too many glances, but the minute changes in Sairsel’s gaze and his posture almost made him ache. Like a bird with its wings pinned to its back. In the crowd, they walked close, shoulders almost brushing. Pavane would have barely had to reach out to press his palm between Sairsel’s shoulder blades; he shoved them in his pockets and found dwelling on yearning thoughts of home to be preferable to thinking of how clearly he remembered the exact way the muscles of Sairsel’s back shifted under his skin for the few times he had seen him remove his shirt.

“It doesn’t take much to feel out of place out here,” he said.

That, Sairsel understood. “I could drink to that.”

“Splendid idea. I’ll buy.”

For once, his dour companion was content to follow his lead, even if the destination was a murky tavern that smelled like rain. In the low light, Sairsel looked almost like he belonged; Pavane almost felt like it was the world in which he had always lived. By their third round, the wisdom that only came to drunks hit him with the full force of a mace blow: it wasn’t that either of them belonged. Sairsel’s place was with the earth under his feet, the sky above him, centuries-old trees towering over kings and queens in their majesty.

Pavane’s place… he no longer knew. Was it back in Hiskaris, with a token seat in the periphery of the Acheronas Consul as a blood prince, finding meaning in stolen moments of study and in hiding away his lovers, a stranger to the worth of his own position outside the mere possession of power? He had run from that life as much as he had run from his father and the curse. He had run from the emptiness, the gnawing hunger.

Even now, he no longer knew whether he was still running. The Continent did not feel much like a place for him, either: he was a foreigner here, a devil in dark finery; he was as cursed as he had been in his homeland, and no closer to answers. The great lurking thing beyond his reach, so far it sometimes seemed removed from reality entirely, still ate at him. His dreams were no more peaceful. His own mind no less maddening.

He had no place, perhaps, and neither was this Sairsel’s.

But sitting in a tavern, deep in his cups across from a man far rougher than anyone at home would find suitable for his company—and yet, kinder and a better man than Pavane could ever be; willfully anchored in his solitude, even when it gave way to something that spoke in his ear that he was worthless—Pavane dared to think that this fleeting arrangement was where they both belonged.

By morning, they were back on the road. Even heavy with a bottle-ache but bereft of the drunkard’s wisdom, Pavane couldn’t get the thought out of his mind that this felt more right than slumming it with a surly hermit of a ranger ever should have.

And he wanted that ranger.

“We’ll be getting to that, uh, that ruin of yours tomorrow,” Sairsel had said as they finished their dinner at an inn so decent—in Pavane’s view—that he said he ‘would be better off sleeping on the floor.’ The luxury made his shoulders stiff. Pavane didn’t know whether he found it endearing or maddening; then he no longer thought of it as the realization sank with Sairsel’s next words: “Suppose this is our last night before we go our own ways.”

Pavane glanced at the map Sairsel was poring over, wrapping silks around the disappointment before it could be in his voice. “You’ll be glad to be free of me, I imagine,” he said with too easy a smile.

“Will I?” Sairsel asked, looking up. His resolve immediately faltered when he met Pavane’s eyes, and his gaze dropped down to Pavane’s neckline.

“I’m sorry, you choose to be mysterious now? What does that mean?”

Sairsel grimaced. “Means what it means. Maybe in some mad way I’ll miss having someone around to talk like they’re waiting for applause. Striders aren’t half as entertaining.”

“And I’m sure the ruins won’t be half as miserable as you,” Pavane said.

In a way, Pavane was glad to be free. This had gone on long enough; with any luck, he would find his answers and be able to return home, where he wouldn’t be eaten by this foolish yearning. He would settle back among his people, take lovers who suited him, and dispense with all the doubt. That alone was enough to put a spring in his step: he had never nurtured doubt, not in himself and not in his desires. He’d always taken what he was given, reached out for what he wanted. Around Sairsel, he was half a fool, always with unsteady ground underneath his feet. He wanted to feel himself again.

He wanted it, he knew, and he told himself that it didn’t matter that he wanted him, because it was only desperation. And Sairsel had laughed him off, and he was many things—glib, arrogant, greedy—but he wasn’t the sort of man to persist in his attentions when they were unwanted.

But there was still a part of him that always asked what if, because he had always been curious—and because, sometimes, it seemed like Sairsel’s gaze lingered, too. Pavane had lacked the courage to make something of the question every single day, every single night, and the thought of never finding its answer made him feel empty.

He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want to be alone again. He didn’t want to never see that man again.

It wasn’t just courtesy that made him walk to Sairsel’s room when the evening was done, because he was oddly, unreasonably afraid of letting this night bleed into the next day. Afraid of letting go of something without first finding out what it was—and yet not at all intent on driving towards an answer at all.

“Last night,” Pavane said, presenting a bottle to Sairsel as soon as he opened the door. “I know you won’t let me compensate you for your time with coin, so I won’t even try, but I— Well, proper thanks are only right. There is, unfortunately, not a single cellar in this town that could possibly hold even one bottle of the calibre that would be appropriate by my standards.”

“I wouldn’t know what to do with fancy wine, anyway,” Sairsel said, because of course he wouldn’t.

Pavane almost smiled, but he kept his expression unimpressed. “You drink it, Master Strider,” he said flatly, then held out the bottle. “They had this, at the very least, downstairs. I'm told it's earthy. I thought it might fit the bill."

"I like sweet wine and honeyed ale."

Sairsel held his gaze, a faint smile passing over his lips, and took the bottle—slowly, fingers curling around the neck and slipping it out of Pavane’s hand. For once, his eyes weren’t furtive; something like a lock clicking into place. He said nothing as he pressed his back to the door and held it open, waiting until Pavane was inside to close it behind them.

“Funnily enough,” Sairsel said, surprising him—speaking without first being spoken to, “I don’t even like sweet things all that much. I mean, I grew up in the woods; fruit was what we ate that was sweet. Anything sweeter than berries makes me nauseous. But we got the stuff with honey from travelers we traded with—usually Striders, in fact—and to me, it tasted like… I don’t know. Warmth. I never got tired of it, and most wine tastes like vinegar compared to it.”

In spite of that, Sairsel uncorked the bottle with a satisfying pop, and turned to a small table under the window. He picked up the wooden cup that sat there, sniffed it, and poured. Pavane watched his every move and hoped that, if anything, he seemed only to lay his gaze there because nothing else in his periphery moved. The fact of the matter was that there was something about his gestures that fascinated Pavane, like Sairsel was the only real thing he could see for miles.

Sairsel offered him the cup and raised the bottle by the neck in a toast; Pavane dared to look him in the eye, because that was the polite thing to do, as he tapped the bottom of the cup to the bottle, and drank.

It was decent wine; no more than that, certainly, and no less. Earthy, as promised, and rich in proportions reasonable enough to be on the pleasant side of surprising.

“I think this might be the first time you’ve offered up personal information without me forcing it out of you first,” Pavane said, licking his lips.

Sairsel lowered the lip of the bottle from his mouth and swallowed, taking little time to taste the wine. He had the grace not to grimace. “That’s not true. I told you I liked dogs better than your snake,” he said, in a tone that was only half-serious. His gaze flicked down for a beat. “You might have noticed I don’t much like talking about myself.”

“I’ve noticed you don’t much like talking at all.”

That smile pulled at Sairsel’s lips again: bashful, reserved, but open all the same—a smile alone said more for him than for most. Carefully, Pavane added: “And I’ve been thinking it’s a shame, really, because you have a rather pleasant voice.”

“Killing me with kindness, Viper; that’s not like you,” Sairsel said, hiding his smile by taking a drink. Viper. It was like a fist tightening in Pavane’s ribcage every time he heard that nickname, and found it to seem more fond every time. Sairsel never said it enough.

“Will I be beating a dead horse if I tell you that I rather like the things you have to say, too?”

Pavane was too bold, he knew it; too daring, as though making up for all the times he hadn’t had the courage, and now it spilled out of him so quickly that he couldn’t measure it. By the next sunset, he would be alone again, and their paths would diverge permanently. He had been many things since coming to the Continent, but he had never in his life been one to like leaving things unfinished.

For all the good it did. Sairsel’s walls spun back up around him so quickly it left Pavane dizzy for his sake. His eyes narrowed, almost imperceptibly; Pavane could almost see behind the guarded suspicion and glimpse the meaning of it, the reasons. Almost. Like sitting in a dream trying to read books in front of him, searching for answers, and never seeing anything but a blur no matter how much he focused.

“What are you doing?” Sairsel asked, halfway to an accusation; too weary to be wary enough. “What could you possibly be trying to get from me at this point?”

Pavane frowned. “I’m sorry?”

“The flattery. You usually use it to get something.”

“So that’s what you think of me.”

Sairsel’s lips parted; his eyes opened to what was beyond the walls. He looked at Pavane like he was surprised to realize that his words could offend—and Pavane, the smitten fool, could only find it endearing.

“I don’t—”

“I’ve only ever been honest with you,” Pavane said. Then he added, thoughtfully: “After a fashion. But I am honest now.”

The truth of it was that, much as he did use flattery like currency, he was well aware that there was no buying what he did want; not like this.

Sairsel looked at him in earnest; more squarely than he usually allowed himself. “I’m sorry.”

“Please.” Pavane waved a hand and drained his cup. “You’ll have to try a lot harder than that if you want to do any real damage.”

“Of course,” Sairsel said, and there was a tight smile on his lips as though he regretted something that had yet to come to pass.

He watched as Pavane set the cup back down on the table under the window, feeling like some shadow cut against the darkening sky—and feeling, perhaps most keenly, the weight of Sairsel’s gaze. Always so heavy; so inevitably sharp. Now that it wasn’t some furtive thing, some little beast hiding in the trees, Pavane wondered how he could have thought he had it in him to bear it and let himself be bared to it.

“Go easy on that bottle,” Pavane said with an eye on the door, his tone lighter than he felt. “I won’t be around to keep an eye on you in those wilds come tomorrow.”

Despite the obvious irony, Sairsel neither laughed, nor even smiled. He simply set the bottle down, independent of Pavane’s comment, his gaze catching on the cup beside it. Watching him, Pavane wished that he could pluck the shades from his mind, to give him some freedom while someone more deserving of curses battled with them.

Someone like you? taunted some part of him.

Someone.

He had his hand on the door, its groan the only thing that found its voice in the silence as he opened it. Sairsel’s footsteps were barely a whisper upon the floorboards; he moved like a hunter, always—like a shadow even when the earth was too far from his feet, even when he stood in the light. Like some intangible, stalking thing.

But he wasn’t a shadow when he reached a hand to the left of Pavane’s shoulder to nudge the door closed again. He felt like everything but in the way he framed Pavane’s jaw with his hands, gentle with hesitation, and kissed him.

Pavane sank into the sea of him as purposefully as breathing.

His touch, his mouth, his closeness. It filled him up like water in his lungs, made him burn from behind the heat of his skin; his body waited to ignite, but he could only kiss him back slow and careful, as though it might cut him up to rush it.

And, hells—hells, gods, saints—he didn’t want to rush it.

He had his hand anchored near Sairsel’s wrist, fingers a breath away from feeling his pulse, when Sairsel pulled back. He pulled back, but not away, and he didn’t flinch when Pavane’s hand ran up his arm. Pavane could almost hear the breath racing up his lungs, could almost see the roots tangling around his feet. He could still feel the press of Sairsel’s lips—and the lingering wasn’t enough.

Sairsel was still looking at his mouth, and then he looked up into Pavane’s eyes, and Pavane knew he wasn’t leaving this room without having the first of his answers.

He moved his hand to the back of Sairsel’s neck, pulled him in, kissed him hard because he knew—he knew—Sairsel would answer in kind. His back hit the door, and Sairsel’s fingers curled in the fabric of his jacket; it wasn’t long before he was tugging it down his shoulders, pulling it off of him, touching the bare skin at his open collar. He laid his palm flat against Pavane’s chest, thumb and forefinger framing the hollow of his throat, and felt his racing pulse.

He left open-mouthed kisses along Pavane’s neck like a trail of fire. Every part of him burned; every part of him felt free.

Pavane tangled his fingers in Sairsel’s hair, tugged just enough to make him look up, caught his gaze with his, and then his lips.

“Tell me you want me,” he whispered, breathless.

“Fuck off,” Sairsel said, taking a fistful of his collar to kiss him again.

Pavane almost grinned against his lips. “I want you.”

All at once, Sairsel stepped back, mouth parted as he breathed. He kept his palm pressed to Pavane’s chest for one, two heartbeats; and then his touch was gone, but not his gaze. His eyes didn’t leave Pavane as he reached down, unbuckled his sword belt, and let it fall to the floor with a dull clatter.

He took off his own jacket, too, but it was Pavane who undressed him the rest of the way, because he needed to be close and to touch him and kiss the skin he bared.

The bed was the softest thing Pavane had laid upon in weeks. He barely noticed; not until later, when he was lying on his back and Sairsel was shifting beside him, sitting up like something had bit him. Everything came back into focus: the ceiling above him, shaking with the shadows of a low-burning lantern; the warm body next to his, too far away as Sairsel swung his legs over the side of the bed to sit with his feet against the floor; the moon outside the window that counted their hours.

“What are we going to do?” Pavane asked, careful; meticulous in his distance. Sairsel’s head tilted to the side, but he didn’t look over his shoulder at him.

He ran his hand through the mess of his hair, tied it back again. “What about?”

“Tomorrow.”

Sairsel said nothing.

“Would you want this again?”

“I’d want it all night if you offered,” Sairsel said, almost scoffing.

Pavane reached out to run his fingers, feather-light, down his back; it made Sairsel shiver. It was strange to see him so still, so unburdened by restlessness, but Pavane wanted it to feel right.

He didn’t say that it was an idea. He didn’t say that he was flattered. To anyone else, he might have said half a hundred things, glib and charming and perfectly detached. None of it seemed to fit; there were half a hundred other things he should be saying now.

He’d spent so long wanting, and now he’d had it, and instead of leaving him satisfied or disappointed, something greater than that want had opened up beneath his feet and he didn’t know how to walk around it and steady himself as he always did.

Sairsel didn’t make anything of his silence, for all that Pavane could tell. “I’ll take you to your ruins,” he said simply. “With luck, nothing will make a meal of us, and you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for. And then you’ll go home, I suppose.”

“Almost sounds too good to be true,” Pavane said.

It didn’t; not really.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:pavane

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