Work Text:
“I am not very fond of Bronnwyr,” Rahmi announces as he steps into Faoric’s office, a tidy looking box tucked under his left arm as he approaches the desk. He already knocked, and Faoric said he could enter, so it’s probably fine to start reporting. “The people there weren’t too polite, it all smells bad, and the people you wanted me to talk to made it very difficult for me to finish my work when they realized I what I wanted...oh, here though!” Checking his pretty little box for any possible leftover grime one last time, Rahmi finally sets it down on Faoric’s desk.
The killoren is, predictably, entirely unfazed by Rahmi’s tirade, his eyes flicking up to the box for one moment before he makes a note on a paper. “Astute observations, Romazi. Anything further to add?”
Rahmi thinks on that, then nods decisively. “I probably still smell like farm. Maybe not though. I haven’t...checked.” He hesitantly begins to lift one arm when Faoric clears his throat.
“I will let you discover that information on your own, Romazi.” As usual, his master doesn’t seem affected by the information either way. As Rahmi remembers his manners and lowers his arm, Faoric’s fingers brush over the top of the box... he seems to find everything in order, entirely ignoring the strange, gnarled paw that pops out of the box once he touches the lid. Rahmi opens his mouth to point it out when, without blinking, Faoric drops a gold piece onto the box's top - and the paw grabs it, dragging it in as the lid snaps shut. There is a moment of silence...then a loud, almost pleased sound comes from beneath the lid.
Meeeeow .
Sometimes Rahmi can't believe the things he gets paid to bring back to Faoric.
“If there is nothing further," Faoric says, ignoring Rahmi's shocked look, "you will find your pay in your quarters as usual.”
As usual, there really isn’t anything further…
...yet still Rahmi sits down, pulling out his personal notes and flipping through them. Faoric doesn't say anything of it - it's not uncommon for Rahmi to spend time in his office when the killoren isn’t too occupied. So long as Rahmi isn't terribly distracting, it seems it's alright for the knight to take his time and do whatever he needs to do.
He begins quickly scrawling down some notes - things he didn’t get to write down on his way to see his boss regarding what he might have encountered on his journey. Sunbeams lazily crawl across the desk as the time slips by, neither Rahmi nor Faoric speaking as they work.
After a while, Rahmi looks up from his notebook briefly - he sees that Faoric has already withdrawn the odd box and put it on one of his many shelves for later use, now writing down something Rahmi can't read from his position.
A question strikes him in a cloudburst of thought, as they all tend to, and Rahmi finds himself speaking up before he can think to hold it back.
“I have a question, sir.” Faoric does not look to him, and Rahmi occupies himself with doodling a rather fancy-looking bird in the corner of his page while he awaits a response. After a minute of writing, Faoric nods.
“Speak.”
“How were you born?” Rahmi thinks it over for a moment, rephrases after a beat. “That is to say, the circumstances of your creation... I’m wondering what they were.”
“Why do you wish to know?” It isn’t admonishing. Faoric has gone back to writing, patient as ever with Rahmi’s interruptions, and Rahmi shrugs.
“Curiosity.”
There’s no further answer from Faoric, and Rahmi closes his eyes in the growing silence.
“Knowledge is never a bad thing,” he continues, his mind starting to wander... It reminds him of his mother and her muteness, sometimes, when Faoric doesn’t answer or even look at him. Back home, Rahmi had to learn to talk to fill the void of silence that was left in Selle's inability to communicate - he thinks he might have gone insane if he hadn’t. He slips into the old habit, not thinking much of it.
“I just sort of wondered if the circumstances of a killoren’s creation reflect their personality… you know, the same way where someone is born can affect them as they grow up.” He pauses, mulls that over, trying to see what he can remember of anything like that. “You said that Ratheum was born from an inferno - the one that destroyed years of natural formation and consumed an entire druidic cabal - but I don’t know enough about her to know if the event reflects who she is.”
As he talks, Rahmi begins to sketch again - now drawing flames at the bottom of his page, slowly licking their way upwards and destroying whatever they touch. “Loroveth... She’s ‘The Learned’, but I don’t know anything of her personally. If she did reflect the event, would she reflect the inferno? Or could she reflect the things, and people, lost in the blaze?”
It’s as though he’s back at home in his kitchen now, seated at the table while his mother stands at the oven - silently and impassively cooking for the two of them, because he’s reminded her that she needs to eat. She doesn’t answer, as usual, and he goes on. “It could also be both, couldn’t it... It’s hard to say when I don’t know much. And Razeiya, he’s…”
He starts to doodle something new now - dark, angry clouds at the top of his page. “He doesn’t seem like a wildfire to me, if that makes sense? If the event is a reflection of the person... When I thought about this at first, I thought maybe he came from a flood.”
He laughs under his breath - his mother doesn’t respond. He can smell the noodles she's cooking, closes his eyes as he hears one of the very soft 'ah's she sometimes manages to make. Most times, they don't mean anything. He goes on. “But I thought about it, and that didn’t seem right to me. He couldn’t be. If the event and the personality match up, a flood is as much like Razeiya as I'm like a fish." The joke gets him no laughter, no anything. He doesn't even hear his mother sigh... "I think of him as something else now. I don't know if I'm right or not, though."
He trails off to focus on his doodle rather than speaking, growing distracted. He doesn't look to his mother now, speech forgotten as he starts to draw swirls in the clouds above his wildfire, organizing them, spinning them, turning them into--
“Romazi.”
His kitchen bursts out of view in his mind's eye, vision of his mother consumed by a flash of awareness, and suddenly he's back in Faoric's office... He never left.
Rahmi can’t help flinching in his chair as he snaps back to reality. This is not his childhood home, and Razeiya Faoric is the farthest thing from Selle Romazi he can imagine. He looks up shamefully as his mind returns to the present and finds Faoric looking directly at him.
“This degree of inattentive speech is unusual even for you.” It isn’t necessarily an admonishment - more an unspoken question, prompting Rahmi to speak up if he isn’t feeling well without being directly asked.
“I apologize. I lost myself there, for a moment,” he admits, shoulders hunching up higher and higher. “Maybe I’m just tired. Silence, um... It reminds me of my mother."
"Mm. She is mute, correct?"
Rahmi tries not to let his surprise show on his face. He didn't expect Faoric to remember any details like that about him without at least looking at his notes...
"Right. It was hard, having no one to talk to, so I used to talk to fill the silence... It's sort of a just a habit to do it now, if I'm not paying enough attention? But the compulsion isn't usually that powerful. Don't know how it got away from me... I apologize if my lack of focus disturbed you, sir.” As he looks back to his paper, Rahmi realizes - it was probably the doodling that pushed him past the threshold of memory.
“Hm.” Faoric looks down again, calmly making a note on a new paper. If he thinks anything of Rahmi's odd habit, he'll keep the thought to himself. “It is even more unusual,” he continues, “to hear an analysis of myself coming from you, rather than the opposite.”
Rahmi’s stomach drops when Faoric sets his pen down, leaning back in his chair and observing him critically. “I would have you finish your thought, if you can recall it.”
Rahmi knows the end of that sentence for what it really is: A way out of the conversation, a chance to reconsider what he’s said and take it all back by pretending he doesn't remember. It’s an extremely generous offer from Faoric... and maybe he’s a fool for it, but Rahmi won’t take it.
He closes his journal and looks back at his master seriously, sitting up in his chair and nodding. “I can,” he confirms. Faoric doesn’t react one way or another, and after a beat, he goes on.
“Like I was saying... you couldn’t be a flood.” Rahmi looks away to the window, out to the sea - gesturing vaguely with one hand as he speaks. “A flood is raw power, destruction with no direction. I don’t know much of them or their origins, but I’d put that sort of thing closer to Rahamon Izien or Rakhan Xult in its nature. You’re powerful, Razeiya, but there’s more than that…”
He hesitates then, briefly. There’s still a chance for him to retract this, claim forgetfulness, and perhaps Faoric won’t think badly of him for it... but there’s no harm in speaking his thoughts, is there? Undaunted, Rahmi goes on.
“My thought was... a hurricane.” Rahmi thinks of the swirling clouds in his notebook, making slow, spinning motions with his fingers against the paper. “An unstoppable force with a clear path, certainty and direction, some form of control still to such a driven, untiring power.” He takes on the formality he normally uses for reports, hoping to treat the situation with respect as best he can.
“A hurricane might still destroy, but there’s still, deep in the center of it all, a calm amidst driving winds and pouring rains. The...” He pauses, fingers halting in their motions as he tries to recall the word for it. Hesitantly, he glances to Faoric for help. “I lost it. Do you know the term, Razeiya?”
“The eye.” Faoric is still watching him, expression and tone both entirely neutral. This man will never cease to astound Rahmi with how perfectly passive he can look no matter what.
“Yes, that. The eye of the hurricane. It’s calm there, yellow skies and quiet... There’s a focus to it.” Rahmi challenges himself to look Faoric in the eyes as he speaks, finding them the very same color as the clouds of his hypothetical storm. “It’s not all mindless destruction. A-And I’m not saying that hurricanes think , of course! But...there are certain traits of them that I could match to you.”
He has to stop himself from clarifying that he means it in a good way, figuring that Faoric doesn’t particularly care how he means it. “You’re... amazingly powerful, but even when you exercise that power, it’s directed. You have a path, and at your core...there always seems to be focus. At the center of everything you do, there’s clear reason, even if others can’t understand it through the storm surrounding it…”
He trails off, still looking Faoric right in the eyes. It’s difficult to keep doing, but at the very least, he should end on a strong note. No trailing off. “I don’t think I’m correct in my assumption. But, at least on a metaphorical level, Razeiya, I think it’s easy to compare your power and methods to a hurricane in some ways. I hope I haven’t put this in a way that would offend you.”
The silence descends again.
Rahmi finds he has to bite his tongue to keep from starting to speak again, the old instinct once more trying to kick in and make him fill the space with his own words, conversation enough for two.
“It is almost never detrimental, Romazi, to know the opinions that others hold of you.” Rahmi realizes that he’s been sitting ramrod straight in his nervousness and finds his shoulders sinking in sudden relief once Faoric speaks. “I am intrigued to hear your perspective of me in this respect.”
“...good intrigued or bad intrigued, sir?” He wishes he didn’t have to ask.
“Intrigued.” Faoric’s tone is flat. He should have expected that.
With that, Faoric returns to his notes. Rahmi reopens his notebook, touching up his messy sketch. He draws rain falling from the hurricane, dousing the flames at the bottom of the page. It is silent yet again... but this time, Rahmi does not feel so driven to fill it. He finishes the drawing while sitting in quiet introspection, considering Faoric’s reactions…
He never did answer Rahmi’s question...
Hesitantly, Rahmi looks up. “Sir. It’s alright if you just don’t want to answer, but I am still curious to know what you came from.”
As he finishes writing a sentence, Faoric’s pen stops entirely. Rahmi worries for a moment that he’s going to be sent out, that this was too much to push for--
But Faoric, unfettered, simply sits back once more... and tells Rahmi of his creation.
When he tells it, he speaks of it from an outside perspective rather than his own - telling, as a professor might lecture, of a city at war. How their enemies engineered a plague, biological warfare at its worst, and how it quietly swept through the city when it was brought in through subtle, unnoticeable means. How the city, or what was left of it, became a massive, ornate, gilded ghost town…
...until the inventors of the plague found him , Razeiya Faoric, upon the throne of the previous king.
Though that was information enough, Faoric continues on - and Rahmi is the one who listens patiently now as Razeiya Faoric tells, in disturbing detail, of how he moved on the opposing faction and killed every last being responsible for the disease with nothing but his bare hands and weapons he picked up along his path. Of how, when it was all said and done, he stalked to Eyrien to claim his title... and how they called him 'destroyer' - both for what he'd done, and for the destructive disease that gave him life.
When Faoric has finally finished, Rahmi can only look at his notebook. Neither hurricane nor inferno... but Rahmi had figured he was wrong anyway. It is still remarkable, somehow, to know of Faoric’s beginnings, and to know that the man has been this way since he was made. Rahmi can’t quite decide what part of the event would most specifically reflect Faoric, if any specific part at all… but...
“Thank you for telling me, Razeiya.” Rahmi nods his head gratefully, and Faoric simply inclines his. It is as much as Rahmi can think to say.
They settle, again, into quiet. The light has long since gone with the setting sun, and Rahmi can feel the slight weight of exhaustion settling on his shoulders. He ceases writing, remembering all at once that he must still smell like cow and farm and Bronnwyr (ugh), and carefully closes his notebook, replacing it in his backpack. His eyes find Faoric again, still making notes and working on his own things, and Rahmi can’t help the little sigh that escapes him as he sits back.
There's no need for his master to be like what made him - and indeed, Rahmi doesn't think he is. Even if there are some reflections in him of what he was born of, Faoric is Faoric, just in the same way that Rahmi is Rahmi. The things that created him only serve to drive him forward, not to become him. He is not an inferno, nor a plague, nor even a hurricane... He's the man who gave Rahmi a chance to rise above his circumstances when all seemed futile. He is enigmatic, confusing, dark at times, but altogether...
He is simply Razeiya Faoric. Perhaps that in itself makes him more extraordinary than all other things combined.
His mind finally settling, Rahmi slowly rises from his chair. Faoric glances upwards to him briefly, and he nods.
“I’ll be going now,” Rahmi says plainly. “Thank you for your time today, Razeiya. Have a good evening.”
He moves around his chair and makes his way to the door - not waiting for an answer. Faoric doesn’t usually have a response to his farewells... but that’s just Faoric, just as Rahmi likes him. He can’t help smiling a little as he slips out the door, silence following him into the halls.