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The name of the ship that had been chosen to carry them to Aleport was the Flying Pig: a vessel that fit its moniker perfectly, for it wallowed in the ocean like a feeding hog, merrily rooting in the muck. Its paint was peeling; its deck planks were in sore need of a good dose of tar. Somehow, its roegadyn captain was overwhelmingly proud of it anyway, taking every opportunity he could to clap his hand upon its lines and boast about its unseen virtues. The ship's crew seemed long-inured to his tastes, jadedly going about their business as they rigged the sails for the journey. None of the passengers looked impressed.
Fordola leaned on the rails and watched the waves roll past, sending up a fresh crest of foam every time they slapped the aging vessel's flanks.
It had been a surprise to her when the call came to send them all the way to Limsa Lominsa, as far away from Ala Mhigo as one could imagine. Those with the Echo were sparse in availability, it seemed. The Scions were doubtless busy investigating the affairs of new lands -- too busy for less glorious jobs which would not earn themselves fame and attention, seating themselves instead beside generals where they could pick the fates of nations they did not even belong to.
No. That was ungracious of her. Fordola had peered within the Warrior's heart. She knew exactly how thankless their life truly was.
Not a sun went by now without a flash of someone's intimate history -- unveiling their tragedies and their loved ones in equal measure. Strangers offered up their pains to Fordola without knowing how deeply their secrets were being doled out before her eyes, visions shared without their permission. The thaumaturge, his daughter giggling as she received a stuffed aldgoat for her eighth nameday. One of the sailors, experiencing his first kiss at the age of twenty-three. Arenvald, holding back tears as he crouched in an empty room of the Waking Sands, fingers trembling as they touched a rusty smudge of long-dried blood.
She was seeing them all the time now, which was wretchedly inconvenient; it made it harder to hate people.
The ship rocked with another swell of the winds. Fordola stared down into the endless depths, ever aware of her thaumaturge minder watching dutifully behind her, and wondered what the man would do if she simply jumped.
Before she could debate how worthwhile it would be to toy with her keeper's nerves, the sound of footsteps alerted her. She glanced up in time to see the flash of Arenvald's white facepaint, and then the man leaned against the railing beside her, close enough for conversation without imposing further.
"Been on many ocean voyages before?" he asked.
Fordola turned her gaze back towards the horizon, a new frown tightening her mouth. She'd known about seasickness -- a few of the sailors had helpfully reminded her to aim for the side if her stomach started to lurch, and one had even demonstrated how to pop the latch on a porthole -- but the effects hadn't struck her any harder than riding a chocobo carriage. Rather, the ocean air had been refreshing. The cold salt of it had filled her nose and invigorated her senses; it had felt familiar, somehow, though she had never experienced it before in her life.
She could guess why, too. Similar moments had been happening to her ever since the Resonant experiments had ended. She didn't like all the same foods as before; with other meals, Fordola could predict the taste of a particular spice before the fare had even touched her tongue. During her treatments, Asina's researchers had made it sound -- at the time -- as if they had simply intended to convert the life energy of their prisoners and pour it into her, strengthening Fordola's physical body until it could support the use of Echo magic, or whatever manner of power it was. Vile, but that was all it was to it.
Afterwards, however, once the Resistance had laid hands on her and their researchers had begun to make worried comments in her vicinity, Fordola had slowly begun to take note of their words. It was not simply her vitality that had been enhanced -- the entirety of her aether was denser, physical and more. Her soul itself was thicker than what it should have been. Everything was greater than a single person's measure.
Fordola had been granted the powers of others because she had been given parts of them.
Sitting in her cell one evening, Fordola had kept trying to fit the small bits of what she understood into any conclusion that was not completely grotesque. She had failed. Instead of having absorbed simple aetheric energy -- like eating the meat of a gazelle, a matter of blood and bone -- it had been people's souls which had been ground up and plastered over her, like breaking down stones to make gravel, filling in crevices in a walkway.
She didn't know how many she had taken. But they lingered in countless ways in the corners of her own life, like the fading whispers of ghosts: the last inheritances of their souls, bequeathed unwillingly to her as their killer.
Dimly, she realized that Arenvald had been waiting in silence for her reply, patiently watching as she had stared out across the waters and ignored his presence. "No," she finally said aloud. The word came out raspily; she hadn't spoken for most of the day to anyone, let alone held extended conversation. "It's my first time."
"Mine too." Offering an easy smile, Arenvald squinted out towards the horizon. "Dolphins are supposed to dwell in this stretch of the waters, but the sailors say they don't know if we'll be able to spot them. I've never seen dolphins before." His face suddenly broke into a grin, guileless and wide. "If we miss them, well -- maybe we'll see them around another time. We'll be doing this for the rest of our lives, after all."
Fordola could not help the scoff which came out of her mouth. "Hardly. You'll find someone while you're out saving the world," she said, hearing the raw bitterness of it, "either rescuing them, or them rescuing you, and then you'll realize that there are more things to do with your life. There're other ways to fix the damages of war than simply through battle. And then you'll hang up your sword and go off to do them, and that'll be that."
It sounded more pitiful than she meant it to. It was supposed to be proud, factual, as if she had already assessed every possible course that Arenvald might take in his career as another hero for Eorzea's people, and had determined that she was indifferent to them all. Arenvald was there by choice. It was only a matter of time before he chose otherwise -- just like everyone else who might come and go out of Fordola's world now, while she remained a conscript.
But Arenvald only shook his head, looking at her sidelong with an oddly serious frown.
"I mean, I think we'll be doing this," he repeated, more emphatically, "for the rest of the time we have to live."
The sentiment took a moment for Fordola to grasp. Then she blinked, looking away sharply as she registered just what the man intended by it.
There were no elderly Primal slayers, after all. Either they retired of their own volition, or their enemies did it for them.
"Fool," she retorted. "The only worse thing I can think of than dying young is dying young next to me. Don't abandon your future that easily. You still have years left you can use."
With that, Fordola shook her head, unwilling to say anything more on the subject. Ever since pushing herself into Garlean service, she had been prepared to die alone. There had been no shortage of potential causes. Whether it was from being executed on public display or slain for offending the wrong officer, stabbed in an alleyway or cut down by beastmen, Fordola had made sure she would be ready for it.
Yet to have her life end with someone else beside her, someone that she knew -- to have someone there with her, as the darkness came -- was more of a comfort than she wanted to admit.
"But I'm not." Undeterred, Arenvald leaned both arms on the railing, fingers laced together as he regarded the waves with no concerns for if she might push him over the side or not. He was dressed only in simple clothes for their trip -- wearing heavy metal armor was suicidally foolish while on a ship -- and the ocean wind plucked at his tunic, tugging on the laces. "I'm not here to give up my life, Fordola. I'm here to find a new path forward with what I've got now. I never knew anything about the Echo when I was young, and I'm still trying to learn how to use it properly," he admitted, lifting a hand to rub his hair sheepishly. "Never would have imagined that I'd be here helping people like this. And... that means I can't say I know what might happen next, either."
With a shrug, the man clapped both his hands firmly on the wooden rail, slapping it once more for good measure. "You and I are both set up in this fight against the Primals," he added, turning to her with a resolute nod. "We've still got a long ways to knowing just what that'll look like. The future is going to be a lot different from what I first imagined, but as long as I'm surrounded by the people I have now, I'll have the chance to discover it. And the same goes for you too, Fordola. We're all figuring it out together."
The generosity of it felt like a kick in her gut, a steel-toed boot stubbed hard into her stomach. Fordola twisted her gaze around, glaring down at the waters as if they might leap up and drag her into their mercies. The moment she had become a conscript, she had known that she would not live out a prison sentence naturally. As a tool against Primals, she would likely have only a handful of years at best; she had assumed her story to end violently on a battlefield surrounded by strangers, passed from brigade to brigade like an anonymous magitek unit.
It would be an insult to the dead if she was slain too readily: a waste of their sacrifices, their souls gone to dust in her hands before she even had the chance to make reparations with the power they had given her. But choosing to live for them on their behalf was even more of a mockery. If any of them had had the choice, they would have wished to live for themselves.
Her future -- no, Fordola's entire life was like a compass spinning between north and south, no longer certain which pole it was intended to point towards. It left her paralyzed in the middle, waiting to see which direction was correct, wondering which way the needle would turn.
A new path forward, he'd said.
Perhaps.
Before she could summon the courage to reject Arenvald's promise, a sailor's shout cut through the air. Both of them jerked their heads up to see several of the deckhands peering intently into the distance, several with spyglasses already lifted. Fordola frowned, confused that the voyage might be over so quickly, but Arenvald already had the answer at hand.
"Look," he grinned, clapping her on the shoulder in his excitement as he pointed at the horizon line. "Right there, see those splashes? Looks like the dolphins came out to bid us luck after all."
The Sahagin were easier to deal with than Fordola had expected; rumors of their crystal hoarding had been thankfully overblown, turning a few crates into a mountain by the time the tale had reached the Maelstrom. Their magicks were vexing to deal with, but the creatures themselves were much simpler once Fordola got into arm's reach of them. She did not like grappling with them, but their strength was spindly compared to the Amalj'aa, and she could break their bones with far more ease. As long as she stayed free of their waters, the advantage was hers.
The Resistance forces didn't give her a gunblade, which was smart on both sides. Though Fordola had no intentions of planning an assassination in the heat of battle, it was far too easy for someone else to implicate her betrayal with a single stray bullet, and the scimitar they placed in her hands was sufficient enough. She worked through the Sahagin ranks with only minor injuries, Arenvald's shield advancing beside her, and in the end -- watching him nod to her once the beastmen had been cleared out of their lair -- she found herself nodding back.
The Flying Pig was still waiting in Aleport by the time of their return, taking them back to Ala Mhigo after it finished exchanging its own cargo duties. It was a faulty thing, gawky and imperfect -- no one's first choice when it came to a ship. There were patches in the patches of its sails. Only a fool would embrace it as a means of reaching their destination; there was no guarantee it would arrive anywhere in the end.
But it carried them all safely back through the waves, its captain never flagging in how he championed its virtues, and Fordola found herself back on its ratty deck again, watching the horizon unfold endlessly in the distance.
It was, she decided, just as good as it needed to be after all.