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The fire reminded her of the warmth of home. It was a loving and comforting embrace, here by the cook-pot of the Blessed; nothing like the cold and aching Light that beamed through the canopy. The shadows of leaves played across her face in the bright nothingness, sending a shiver down her spine at the empty memories of sunshine and satisfaction.
Sunlight here felt like nothing at all. Its golden rays were predatory, threatening. The glow held discomfort and anxiety: the sudden cessation of birdsong in a once-full forest; the snap of a bowstring. A brilliant, dazzling promise of death. There were no colors, no true colors held within its terrible hand.
Aphraa missed the sting of light from a lethargic, hot day, missed waking up from a nap amongst the branches of Golmore to the red glare of the cardinal sun brushing its glowing wingtips against her eyelids. Even the sun in Ishgard had been warmer than this .
She heaved a sigh and began drawing in the dirt with a fingertip.
“Ataphraa?” a small voice spoke beside her. Aphraa first swiveled her ears towards the sound, then followed with her eyes.
Minfilia crouched nearby, studying what Ataphraa had scribbled.
“Is that a horse?” she asked meekly, moving to sit down beside the viera. Aphraa looked back down at the shoddily-drawn unicorn and nodded.
“Of a kind,” she said before wiping away the sketch with her hand.
The girl nodded, eyes glued to the ground. A question hung in the air between them, and Ataphraa laughed under her breath at the young oracle’s timid nature.
“I promise not to bite,” she said with a smile. “What is on your mind, Minfilia?”
Those blue eyes, those focused pools of hope, met her own.
“You move so differently here,” she began. “Your steps are measured, your breathing slower. There is no way of knowing what lies around any corner, yet you are more at ease here than even amongst the fae. How do you hold such confidence, here in a place hardly anyone inhabits?”
Almost immediately, Minfilia looked bashful regarding her candid question, yet she held Aphraa’s gaze with a determined focus that must have only come from butting heads with Thancred more than once. Aphraa smiled.
She hummed in thought, and began gathering up a handful of long grass blades from near where she sat. When she’d collected enough, she began braiding them all together, twisting the strands without needing to look down at them.
“The forest where I am from is quite different from this one. Hotter. More damp. Yet similarly ancient.” She reached out briefly to take Minfilia’s hand in hers, measured her wrist, and went back to her braiding. “She speaks— spoke —with the wisdom of ten thousand halcyon summers, and ten thousand weathered storms. A long time ago, I could hear her voice as clearly as you now hear mine.”
She looked out over the camp clearing, the light reflected off the nearby aetheryte casting her in its blue glow. Minfilia looked on, enraptured, and both were unaware of another pair of eyes now focused on the story—eyes that were golden, focused, fascinated.
“It is a sacred and beautiful thing, to know the thoughts and dreams and joys of the very grass beneath your feet. The branches above cradle you in their arms, and you can walk with confidence when you know that wherever you go, you go with the love of a mother. You step upon a living, breathing thing, so you make your steps light, and with intention. Never place your full weight down if you do not intend to keep it there. That is how I learned to walk, and live.”
Ataphraa finished the last braid and took Minfilia’s hand in hers once more. She fastened the grass bracelet to her wrist, securing it with a tight knot. The girl furrowed her brow in thought.
“Then why pluck the grass?” she wondered, twisting the green band. It smelled fresh and bright, a woodland perfume of broken blades.
“My mother told me that by the time my bracelet fell off, I would no longer forget about the grass beneath my feet. I would look down at my wrist and remember the pain of the blades it took to make it, and act accordingly.”
Minfilia nodded, still focused on the band. It stained her fingertips a dull green, and she felt tears come to her eyes, unbidden.
“All things must die,” Aphraa continued, quieter. “I cried for hours when I cut my first sapling to make my first bow. I felt its pain, its tears. But I learned what it means to live within something, as part of a greater whole: the sapling I cut would not have lived another twenty years. It would have withered and wilted in the shadow of its brothers and sisters, a hopeful and beautiful little thing doomed to a slow death. It lived on as a weapon, the forest was healthier for it, and I fed my family. Such is the way of things,” she finished with a whisper.
The oracle scooted closer to her, wide-eyed. “Thank you,” she said, smiling a little. “Thank you for sharing your story.”
Further away, the golden eyes wished they could echo the sentiment.
Ataphraa didn’t have to try to overhear. She assumed people trying to keep secrets would know to speak quieter considering the giant ears sticking out of her head. Yet time and again she would stumble into conversations she had no invitation to, through no desire of her own.
“I tire of these games, Urianger. Why do you pretend you cannot see it!?”
Y’shtola’s voice rang out, frustration clear despite the thick wooden door that separated the viera from her. Aphraa paused with her hand halfway to the handle, waiting.
“The blessing may spare her the fate of becoming a Lightwarden...But you cannot be blind to the nascent corruption! She is not as she was in the Source.”
Ataphraa blinked. She felt no different from before in any way that mattered. True, she was more tired, more world-weary. A heavy heart mattered not when it came to a larger purpose, however. A tool trained for war could do little else. She had always been a blade at the behest of others, what difference did it make to be quenched in darkness or light?
In her thoughts, she missed some of what Y’shtola had said.
“—has been suffused with their light.”
“Though I have given thought to this possibility, I dare not speak until more is known.”
Ah.
She took a step back from the door. It shouldn’t have been surprising that he was being circumspect, that his pine-green tone was laced with a venomous secrecy. Her heart ached , though nothing had changed since she had last judged him to such an extent. He had expressed regret about his past actions back in Il Mheg; regret, yes, but not apology.
Fool , she thought bitterly. Heartstrong fool so desperate to save someone so intent on self-destruction . She could almost hear Fray’s voice overlaid upon her own, a reminder of the tenebrous boundaries placed around her weary heart.
“Urianger—I know full well, after all these years, that you have only the best of intentions,” Y’shtola’s exasperated voice continued, “but that does not make it any easier to put my faith in a man so infatuated with secrecy.”
Aphraa took another step backwards.
“Or perhaps it is not the secrecy you are so infatuated with. The Eight Umbral Calamity and all that followed; everything you claimed to have seen—did you?”
Her gratitude for the Eulmoran invasion’s interruption would haunt her later, in the quiet hours of the night. It was a pitiful thing, to be grateful to grief for sparing her the embarrassment of knowing .