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A few months after Thancred busted Ryne out of Eulmore in broad daylight, Urianger and Y’shtola wound up on the First. Ryne wouldn’t get to meet Y’shtola until years later, but after Thancred found out Urianger was moving to Il Mheg, he’d bundled her up and they headed north to intercept him.
As it turned out, Urianger had already settled into something hospitable with the fae. The pixies gifted him the Bookman’s Shelves, a sizeable manor home to a library in the loosest sense of the term. They’d showed up at the door, Ryne still small enough to stand in Thancred’s shadow, and Urianger had been surrounded by books and looked completely and utterly lost when Thancred sidestepped all of them to pull him into a crushing hug.
That was the longest they’d stayed in one place. Eulmore was still looking for them—for Ryne, at least—but the pixies were kind if not tricky, and promised to give ample warning. Ryne learned very quickly that Urianger was not, in fact, a bumbling disaster; it was the sleep deprivation from the seven-day riddle contest with the pixies. Once he was well-rested, Ryne had a rudimentary understanding of how to shelve books, and Thancred had a better understanding of Vrandtic literature, and then:
And then they were something of a family. It turns out the speech wasn’t the sleep deprivation, that was all just Urianger. He didn’t ask invasive questions about Minfilia and reincarnations, just showed Ryne several entry-level incantations and told embarrassing stories about Thancred. Both of these were more than enough to occupy her free hours when she wasn’t shelving books.
And then, when she was supposed to be asleep, she’d creep down the loft and almost all the way down the stairs. The house creaked, but not under her feet, and she’d listened as the man she would later consider a father spoke to perhaps his only confidante in the world.
“Thou were but gone five days before myself and Y’shtola,” Urianger was saying. “The war progressed not more than a few ilms since thy departure.”
“Did it, now.” Thancred sighed and threw back whatever was still in his cup. “You don’t have to hide anything from me, Urianger. I know Ghimlyt was like a heaping pile of chocobo shit when I left.”
Silence. Then: “it hath been two years for thee.”
“Nearly. Pass the ale?”
“Thancred,” Urianger said, forcefully, “I do not jest. Thou hath been alone for a long time.”
“Not long.” A hiccup. “The Exarch kept me in the Crystarium, and then I went and picked up Minfilia. I’ve never been alone.”
“But thou were the first of our number to land in this world, and if mine inference comes to fruit, thou wilt not be the last.” A shuffle, and then Urianger set down the cup that had been in Thancred’s hand. “‘Tis a difficult path to forge.”
Thancred snorted. “Well, someone’s got to do it.” He didn’t lift his gaze. “So. Ghimlyt. How goes?”
“Last I was apprised, ‘twas stalemate. The Warrior of Light, summoned to the front lines.” Urianger sighed. “In our absence, th’only thing we can do is have faith that the fight will carry on.”
War was no place for a girl her age then, and it is still no place for a girl her age now. Norvrandt sleeps in an uneasy sort of peace without the sin eaters; there’s still the flinch that comes with loud noises, the fear that accompanies it, the lookouts around the Crystarium. Ryne still looks over her shoulder before she enters rooms and keeps a hand on her knives in sunlight.
But with uneasy peace, in due time, comes the easy, and then it just becomes—hell, it becomes an everyday. When she wakes up, the world is bright outside; when she goes to sleep, it is dark. It still fills her with wonder to be able to count the stars in the night sky. She still catches herself staring at the sunset, feeling like the world is starting anew whenever it does.
And then there is, of course, Gaia.
“Like this,” Gaia says, taking the rolling pin from Ryne’s hands and dropping another portion of dough on the counter. “Roll it out into a triangle, and then roll it back up. You’re getting too ahead of yourself with the second step.”
Ryne pouts. “I thought I’d rolled it out enough.”
“No, dummy, you gotta make it bigger. Here, watch me as I do it.”
In all honesty, Gaia is the newest thing to Ryne’s idea of everyday. She still remembers living in that dingy little room in Eulmore, where her entire life was confined to a single bookshelf of rationed-out interests; still remembers those years of adventure, leading up to a few months of world-changing wonder. Gaia is the newest of the new, and the best part is that she never stops being new.
So Ryne listens and watches as Gaia rolls out the dough with an even, firm hand. Her nose is dusted with loose flour and her lipstick is smudged. The dough stretches to an impossible translucence between her deft fingers, and then she’s rolling it back, curling the ends in on themselves to form a perfect crescent shape. “Like this,” she says, pawing at the croissant with her fingertips until it lifts from the countertop so she can place it in the baking tray. “Got it?”
“I don’t know,” Ryne teases, scrunching her nose cutely when Gaia harumphs at her. “How am I ever going to be as good as you at it?”
“Yeah, but one of us has to go write down the recipe in her journal before we forget,” Gaia says, bopping her nose with a buttery finger. “And one of us has significantly neater handwriting.”
Ryne sticks her tongue out, but takes the rolling pin anyway. Gaia blows a raspberry in return, but towels her hands off anyways and goes to get her journal and pen.
This is their everyday, now. Ryne can barely believe it. Any moment now, it could end, and the Light could come crashing back over the night sky and she’d have to throw herself into being Minfilia again. Her gentle piece of heaven lit up in flame and fear. As far as she knows, either this life simmers until it boils over, or it reduces to nothing and then burns.
It isn’t becoming of her. She’s supposed to be the Oracle of Light, a beacon of hope for Norvrandt. But some days, some cruel days, she can’t even be a beacon of hope for herself.
The future looks so bright. It terrifies her.
The problem isn’t necessarily existing, per se. Ryne likes what she has right now—loves it, even. Life has been kind to her as a whole ever since she left the dungeons of Eulmore. Sure, she’s been roughed up more often than she cares to admit, and the bruise of Emet-Selch’s magic still refuses to fade from her side, but on the whole her life has improved significantly.
That, perhaps, is where she falters. In Eulmore, she was only expected to be Minfilia. Her life was confined to that room, and that in itself was a purpose: to be obedient, which was for some reason equated to being Minfilia. Then Thancred steamrollered that life away, and she learned to simply be, and when they started bringing back the night she got to learn to be her own person.
But the First is quiet now, or at least it is compared to those halcyon days. She doesn’t miss the constant ache in her feet from being on the run; she gets a healthy amount of travel anyway. At most there’s politics here and there to clean up, or routine trips out to Eden to check on the wildlife and collect samples for the botanists at the Crystarium.
The real problem is that she doesn’t have a direction anymore. First she was running; then she was chasing; and now that she has been forcibly sat down and told to take care of herself she aches to stand on her own again. Where does she go from here? Her heart is restless. She’s worried her way through every flavour of coffee the Crystarium has to offer, and almost all of what Runar has sent her.
So Ryne’s helped save the world. She’s decided who she wants to be, made her own name. What now?
“Hey! Eyes on the road!”
She blinks the sun where it lingers on her lashes. Gaia is staring down at her from a rock ledge about four yalms up. Her black pants are covered in chalky dust. “If you keep spacing out, you’re going to fall off,” she scolds. “If you can’t scale this, how are we ever going to go cliff climbing in Kholusia?”
“Ah, give me a second.” She looks around for a good handhold, and hoists herself up. A few more steps upward, and her hand meets Gaia’s. The other girl hauls her up, and for a good few minutes they sit gracelessly sprawled in the dust and rubble, staring over the landscape of Lakeland below them.
What now, she asks herself. Now is Gaia’s playground, of course, in the most abstract sense of the present. Gaia has a hunger for the world in a way Ryne can’t even begin to fathom, like she’s trying to absorb as much of it as she possibly can, and she’s determined to drag Ryne along for the ride. The million futures she’s rewriting are constantly becoming present events. She puts cliff climbing in Kholusia on their list with the exact same gravitas as finding the waffle iron, which says very little given how the waffle iron is still missing in action.
“You can still see the Crystarium from here,” Gaia says, pointing into the distance. Sure enough, the glass domes glint in the afternoon sun, an oasis in the violet sea of trees that line most of Lakeland. The Crystal Tower rises up into the sky like a needle threading the earth. “Do you think we can climb the Tower?”
Ryne snorts. “It’s too smooth. And besides, even going through the inside is a workout. I’ve never been higher up than the throne room.” She reconsiders. “I mean, thanks to the Exarch we can go through the inside of the Tower now, but I’m not certain the security systems won’t kill us if we try to scale the outside.”
“There are security systems? Is this one of those things from the Source that we’ll just never have?”
“Not for the foreseeable future, anyhow.” Ryne takes a water skin from her pack and hands it to Gaia, who takes a grateful sip. “Remember when the Warrior of Darkness last came to visit? The book I got was a gift from the Crystal Exarch—er, I suppose I should address him by name, now that he’s no longer the Exarch.” It’s weird no matter how she thinks about it. Alphinaud sent her a sketch of G’raha Tia, hair all red with bobby pins holding his bangs aside, and he’d looked simultaneously like an old friend and a stranger. “G’raha had annotated it—the book, it was on the Allagan Empire. They were the ones who built the Tower.”
Gaia makes a face and passes the water back to her. “Oh, I remember this word. The Allagans. Beq Lugg was telling me about this last week. Didn’t they catch an elder dragon in a ball and turn it into a moon?”
“And then they harnessed it for energy with the Crystal Tower and proceeded to tear the earth apart with the excess aether, yes.”
“Oh, that’s just stupid.”
“Harsh, but very true.” Ryne shoulders off her backpack. “Emperors shouldn’t be allowed to be immortal and make world-changing decisions more than once per career, I think.” She considers this seriously as she unpacks their lunch. “This goes for more than one emperor, on both the First and the Source.”
The twist of Gaia’s lips as she takes a sandwich from the backpack is neither a smile nor a frown. “We haven’t had that many emperors here on the First, have we? Ronka had theirs, but I think Voeburt was a kingdom and not an empire.”
“That too. I hear the people of the Crystarium tried to make an emperor out of G’raha while he was the Exarch, but he turned them down.” She smiles around the crust of a sandwich. “We could be emperors. Norvrandt ruled by Dark and Light.”
Gaia seems to think about it for a second. “We’d be awful at it. And besides, I’ve already made my world-changing decision for my career. Stay still.”
“Already? What is it?”
The brush of her thumb against Ryne’s lips takes away crumbs and a smudge of coral. “To stay by your side for as long as I live,” she says, as though it is obvious. As though it is the only truth that needs to be spoken; as though it needs to be spoken to begin with.
She wants to exist. She wants to see the rest of the world through with Gaia, wants to see the Empty flourish and become populated again. The hard part, perhaps, is figuring out the order in which those things can be accomplished. A life is a long time, after all.
So, for now: rock climbing and sandwiches. The world sways in violet foliage below them, and Ryne lives in the eternal winds and smiles into the sunlight.
What were they like?
For all that Gaia asks it close to never, Ryne finds herself rehearsing for this question in her head all the time. It’s like a contingency plan. She needs to be prepared, after all, and it wouldn’t do for her to answer wrong. There’s no time for her to mourn the memories that Gaia has lost, not when the future is on their doorstep.
So: what were they like? Well, Thancred was Thancred. Ryne never quite finds the right words to describe her father. He very clearly cared about her, just as he’d cared for Minfilia, and he swore and he drank and he loved and he lost. He gave her a new life, a new name. That was, she thinks, the best thing he ever did for her.
The same could be said for Urianger, honestly. All her rudimentary knowledge of the Fae-tongue she owes to him, as well as most of her education. He’d made sure she was never without a book throughout her travels with Thancred, and took time to sit down with her to explain that which she didn’t understand on her own. Thou hath vast arcane potential, he’d say, just as easily as Thancred, cease hassling thy charge and have faith, and all will be well.
On the other hand, Y’shtola—Master Matoya. She hid everything behind that second name, that which belonged to her mentor. Behind the mask, she was callous but kind, all mischievous whispers and silver smiles. Ryne figured, from the lengthy hand-penned letters that never left her study, that there must have been someone who meant the world to her, and thus Y’shtola had been her first source of advice when Gaia had stumbled into her life.
Alphinaud never cried. Ryne suspects he’d already lost all his tears to some other tragedy, a scar still weeping. Eulmore was a redemption, for him—a chance to right the wrongs, a chance he thought he’d never have. He had a knack for administrative organization, despite his own desk looking like a flock of amaros went through it. He loved the Chais like a second pair of parents.
And Alisaie—
“What can I say,” Ryne says. “I think you would have gotten along well with her, had you had more time to make friends. She fought with a rapier.”
“Ooh, flashy.” Gaia whisks the gravy harder; it doesn’t seem to get any thicker. A large bubble bursts on the surface. “I do remember the twins, a little. Not much. Alisaie told me to protect you, you know.”
“Did she, now.” It doesn’t seem like something that Alisaie would have said, but then again, the twins had continuously found new ways to surprise her. “She had a porxie familiar named Angelo. Alphinaud said she’d named him after their family dog from when they were children. Oh, and she had a thing for making things explode. Preferably with lots of light.”
Gaia snorts. “She sounds like she’d be fun at parties.”
A thought rises unbidden to Ryne’s mind: they did have a party, once, after they all stumbled back from Amaurot and stitched themselves back together. The entire Crystarium lit up the night, and oh what a feeling it was, to have a night that was consistent and didn’t disappear behind a curtain of flame in certain corners of the world. Y’shtola had yelled at Thancred for ten whole minutes about “letting the children drink” before throwing her hands up in defeat and handing Ryne’s glass back to her.
It wasn’t bad. Thancred had a thing for hard liquors and strong beers, a taste that left Ryne with the impression that alcohol was meant to burn. The Crystal Exarch had cracked open several bottles from his own stash for them, and it was sweet as sleep, fizzing away on the tongue and settling smoothly in the pit of her salt-worn stomach.
One glass later, Alphinaud was out cold on the table, and Alisaie was staring morosely at the glowing tower. “We’ve got one of those back home,” she said, poking her brother with a poised finger. “The same one. Whatever. It’s a half-hour walk from—” she belched, and wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “From the Rising Stones.”
Thancred had spoken of this Rising Stones before, in a tone that suggested it was synonymous with home. “In Mor Dhona,” Ryne replied. “You lived there?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” Alisaie laughed. “I only stayed for a sennight at a stretch at most. Did a fair bit of travelling.”
“Oh? Tell me about it.”
“Doma, with the Warrior of Light and Lyse.” That was another semi-familiar name. Ryne had learned a little bit of Eorzean script here and there, and she hadn’t meant to snoop in Y’shtola’s study, but there were just so many letters, unsent and unspoken. “Stayed at Rhalgr’s Reach for a while. Ugh—Ishgard? Idyllshire. Me and Alphinaud were born there.”
Her eyes dimmed. “Wineport,” she said quietly. “Grandfather. The Warrior of Light was there with me. And before that… Emery.”
“Where’s that?”
“Who,” Alisaie corrected. She’d begun to lean on Ryne’s shoulder. “She was my friend. I loved her.”
“Oh,” said Ryne, tongue suddenly too dry for her mouth.
“She died,” Alisaie said. The night swam into a discordant hum, like the party was just starting to get too loud. Her hands got tighter around Ryne’s arm. “There—there was a landslide, and I couldn’t—”
“Shhh, it’s alright.” It clearly wasn’t, but Ryne hadn’t known what else she could say. “Alisaie—”
“And Tesleen.” Alisaie had grabbed her by the shoulders, staring at her with desperate eyes. “Tesleen, I couldn’t save her, the Lightwarden got her and I couldn’t do anything, and I…” A strangled sob escaped her, and she lurched into Ryne’s lap. “I keep losing them, Ryne, I can’t lose you too.”
“Ryne?”
The gravy has finally thickened. Gaia has the saucepan handle in one hand and a concernedly tilted ladle in the other. “You alright?” she asks, in that standoffish Gaia way of hers that Ryne loves so much. “Head in the clouds again?”
“A little.” She smiles as she threads her arms around Gaia’s waist; Gaia makes a grunt of complaint, but doesn’t push her off. “You were saying something about Alisaie being fun at parties?”
“Yeah. You said you thought we’d get along.”
Tesleen, Tesleen, the Alisaie of her memories wails, I’m sorry. I couldn’t save you. I’m so sorry.
“Not everyone has your alcohol tolerance or mine,” she jokes. “I’ll go get the gravy boat, hang on.”
Ryne’s lineage is not particularly special, as far as her current life goes. A dig through the Eulmore archives showed that her birth parents were almost certainly killed to put her in Eulmorean hands, when she was but a babe. Ran’jit maintained some kind of presence in her life; he still does, if she’s honest with herself.
If she taps back further, there’s little more that even the Scions can offer her. Y’shtola said Minfilia’s father was a spy named Warburton. Thancred spoke of a town square and a rampaging gooblue, and a woman named F’lhaminn who took in the orphaned Ascilia. The twins sat her down to explain what Garlemald and Ala Mhigo and Ul’dah were, drawing up maps of their home that seemed too close to the First for comfort.
So that’s her family, by birth. A faraway dream, at best. She doesn’t like having to read her heritage out of a textbook, so she doesn’t. This is Ryne, as she chooses: Oracle of Light, ward of Thancred Waters, honorary member of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Friend to all of Norvrandt. Gaia’s other half. A family found—a family made, cobbled together chasing lightwardens and night skies.
Gaia, on the other hand, remembers none of the recent… and, admittedly, none of the ancient, either. At her request, they haven’t tapped into her Eulmorean documents, but she’s willing to indulge Ryne’s curiosities.
“So you were Loghrif?”
Gaia makes a thoughtful noise. “Kinda. You met an Ascian before me, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Emet-Selch.” Ryne can still see the man in her memory, his constant cheshire half-smile emblazoned in her mind. “He called himself Hades.”
Something akin to understanding passes through Gaia’s expression. “Then I would have known him,” she muses, before picking up Ryne’s hand again. “Stop fidgeting! Look, you’ve already smudged the thumb.”
“Sorry, sorry!”
Gaia clicks her tongue, though there’s no real venom behind it, not when it’s Ryne. She uncaps the bottle of nail varnish again and goes over Ryne’s thumb with a gentle hand. “His real name was Hades,” she explains, “just as mine is Gaia. Emet-Selch was his title.”
“So Loghrif is a title,” Ryne infers, and gets the lazy grin for it. “That’s what you mean, by the seat of Loghrif. Were you a part of the Convocation, too?”
“I suppose.” Gaia puckers her perfect lips and blows gently over Ryne’s nails. The varnish this time around is the colour of midnight, the same colour as Gaia’s hair, with tiny flecks of starlight glitter. Even with the tiny brush she makes quick work of painting. “I mean, most of this is not from my memories. I know this objectively because the Warrior of Light told me. I think I should make that clear.”
Ah. Ryne figured about as much. Before is a topic not to be brought up before sunset, not in broad daylight, and certainly not while they’re preparing for another diplomatic trip to Eulmore. No doubt Dulia-Chai will insist on giving them a room twice the size of their apartment during their stay and ply them with pastries and espresso con panna. The Chais have always been kind to them, and Ryne suspects Dulia-Chai wants someone to spoil in the twins’ absence.
But then Gaia looks up. “Do you think the Warrior of Light remembers?” she asks. “I mean, they had a seat too. The seat of Azem.” On her tongue, the word dips into something ancient, like the hum of Amaurot’s shades. “Though, I figure, even if they did remember it’s not like they’d want to tell us.” She shakes out Ryne’s hand a little, and nods approvingly at it. “See if Mrs. Chai tries to paint this over.”
She says it with such finality that Ryne can’t help but laugh. The last time they’d been in Eulmore, a manicure treatment had scrubbed away the baby blue Gaia had painted her nails with the week before. It had put a mild damper in her mood, at least until Ryne had cuddled the pout away.
“I’ll let the spa ladies know,” she says. Gaia’s eyes flash, and she laughs again. “You know we’re not going to get away! We’re Mrs. Chai’s only source of gossip about the happenings in the Crystarium.”
“I know. Doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
“You like it,” Ryne teases. “You like being pampered. You look like a cat whenever I cut your hair.”
The effects are immediate. Gaia goes pink in her powdered cheeks, and looks away shyly as though they aren’t grown women who share a home. “Only because it’s you,” she says.
And then it’s Ryne’s turn to go very red, and think about the way her painted hand is still burning in Gaia’s.
There is absolutely nothing Ryne wants to wake up to more than this: the haze of natural sunlight peeking between the blinds. Soft velveteen juxtaposed against the chafe of a set of callouses not her own, curled in the hollow of her waist. A warm body against hers, draped against hers—draped in worn cotton, in hair the colour of midnight.
The idea of “brunch” has intimately acquainted itself with Ryne and Gaia over the past few years, in the wake of late mornings spent like this in bed. But today they cannot afford to sleep in. On mornings like this, Ryne wakes up to arms around her waist and Gaia’s warm snoozing breath in the crook of her neck, and simply turns to jelly.
Waking up is hard. She doesn’t want to ever leave this.
“Good morning,” she whispers, and Gaia stirs behind her. Even without turning to look, she knows Gaia has been conscious for a bit—there’s nothing quite the same as the feeling of Gaia playing with her hair. She will refuse to admit this, just as Ryne refuses to admit to watching the crest and fall of her body in slumber, if only to make sure that she’s still breathing. “Did you sleep well?”
Gaia makes a rumbling noise. This one means about as well as I can with you hogging the blankets, which really means I slept well, good morning, I love you.
Every waking is a new task, a new journey. The beginnings of a million divergent futures. That means waking is a choice. Fortunately, it’s not one that Ryne is so scared of—not when she knows whose arms she’ll be waking up in. Gaia mumbles something incomprehensible and buries her nose into Ryne’s shoulder, offended that they need to get up.
That’s okay. Ryne doesn’t want to get up either. If she could stay here forever, lost in this moment, she would.
(But the world doesn’t stop spinning, and they are the Oracles, after all. There’s a lot of world they have to chase.)
Objectively speaking, Gaia is beautiful. Her eyes aren’t the same blue as Ryne’s, nor are they the colour hers once were, but rather a richer tone dipped in indigo. She has a mole under her left eye, on the ridge of her cheekbone. Her eye makeup and lipstick are always flawless. She has strong arms from swinging that massive hammer of hers all the time. Her hair is the colour of perfect midnight.
Now, that isn’t to say Ryne is insecure. She’s had plenty of suitors herself, some of whom sent the same pickup lines to Gaia mere minutes later. But Gaia is beautiful in other ways, too.
Like this: when Ryne gets up at eight in the morning, some internal alarm reminding her that she must play Oracle today, Gaia is still mostly asleep. She looks different like this without her makeup, a little less the protector and a little more protected despite the fact that she’s wrapped around Ryne like an octopus.
Like this: Gaia doesn’t like kissing. This is of no particular consequence to Ryne, who does enjoy it but enjoys Gaia’s happiness more. She is, however, alright with being kissed, and Ryne is more than happy to oblige. In this hazy hour, she lifts a lock of Gaia’s perfect midnight hair where it’s sprawled out between their pillows and presses it to her lips, once. This is her one indulgence, nevermind the million other things Gaia indulges her in on the regular.
Like this: as Ryne pulls the oatmeal out of the cupboard over the stove, a pair of strong arms snake around her thin waist, and a warm body sinks into hers. “Good morning,” she says again, amused, as Gaia groans and presses her face into her shoulder. “Oatmeal for you?”
“No. Oatmeal is stupid,” says Gaia in a voice with no particular venom or emotion beyond sleepiness. As with all things she says in this voice, it sounds very cute and comes out as more of a murmur than anything. “Weren’t we supposed to go get coffee biscuits… today… You said last night.”
“That was before Captain Lyna asked us to help with the lower stories of the Tower, remember?” Ryne chides. “Do you want waffles? I’ll find the waffle iron.”
“No, it’s fine.” Gaia’s hug gets tighter, and her eyelashes flutter shut against the side of Ryne’s neck. “I’ll eat your stupid oatmeal.”
This Gaia is the most beautiful, in Ryne’s opinion. Perhaps she’s biased because she’s the only one who gets to see. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. She presses her cheek against the top of Gaia’s night-crowned hair and closes the cupboard door. “Let’s compromise. I’ll make eggs and toast, and then we can stop for coffee before heading to Captain Lyna?”
“Mmm.”
“Perfect.” Gaia doesn’t let go, and Ryne wouldn’t want her to. This is just how they are, Ryne the daughter of sunrise and Gaia the midnight star-child. “How do you want the eggs?” she asks, even though she already knows the answer.
“Sunny side up. You always make them the best.”
Light cannot exist without Darkness; that much is simple. One without the other is an imbalance, and Ryne has seen firsthand how that imbalance could tip their world to destruction in an instant.
She thinks that’s why Gaia appeared so quickly in her life so soon after she inherited Minfilia’s crown. Norvrandt would have buckled without an Oracle of Darkness to balance out her newly-minted Oracle of Light. They exist in tandem to each other, perfect foils—the shadow in the mirror, the moonlight on still water.
One cannot exist without the other. Ryne cannot exist without Gaia, and Gaia cannot exist without Ryne. The demise of one would spell the demise of the other, and if not, the demise of the world as they know it.
That doesn’t mean they are so attached at the hip that they cannot be separated. That would be unhealthy for the both of them, both in their capacity as Oracles and as individuals. Though they’ve built their fighting styles to complement each other, they can still hold their own in a fight just fine, especially in Norvrandt’s recent peacetime. There’s nothing to be afraid of when Ryne gives Gaia a kiss and a hug goodbye at the amaro launch before they make their respective journeys.
Still, she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t excited to see her other half again. Her order of business has her down in Amh Araeng, helping with building efforts in a small residential district for recovered victims of the Light, while Gaia’s doing business with their highness Titania and the fae folk. The mail arrives every other day, and with it a new letter from Il Mheg, but Ryne can’t wait to get back to the Crystarium, back to Gaia’s pouty lips and smiling eyes.
While she’s here, though: Amh Araeng is recovering. Much of the Empty is now covered in growing foliage; the Flood remains calcified, but recent joint endeavours between a dwarven mining party from Komra and the locals have proven that it’s gotten easier to chip into it. Ryne’s primary job, in an odd twist of fate, is to help safely dispose of what they’ve removed. It seems strange in an ancient sort of manner. Once, Minfilia was here, stopping the Flood with all the power of Hydaelyn. Now, she’s taking up the reins, picking up where her predecessors left off.
“We’ve separated the samples into three major groups, based on their hardness and how they crumble,” says Imogg. “Shame we can’t tell what the stuff is just looking at it—you gotta swing a pickaxe at it to figure it out.”
It can’t be all that bad. At least, it can’t be worse than trying to swing Gaia’s big old hammer. They stop in front of a cordoned-off area, and Imogg hands her a pickaxe. Yep, Gaia’s hammer is definitely heavier. Almost experimentally, she hefts it up and sinks it into the Flood. It crumbles like a coffee biscuit, scattering crumbs of Light everywhere. “Type three,” Imogg explains. “The easiest to crumble. We think it’s because it’s been exposed to nighttime the most.”
They whack at the Flood a bit more with their own pickaxe, brushing aside a whole layer of the stuff until something goes plink like metal hitting solid stone. “Type two. Still chippable, but harder. Not for the faint of heart.” They knock their gauntlet against the surface. “And if you get past that… type one. Absolutely indestructible. We don’t let people work on it for too long, because the last guy who did nearly turned into a sin eater.”
“I remember that,” Ryne remarks. She and Gaia were answering Beq Lugg’s mail, and there’d been a hastily-written letter from Amh Araeng requesting a healer with a porxie. “Well, I’ll see what I can do, but I think you already have a very good point about the exposure to nighttime.” She kicks the growing pile of Light at their feet. “Does it fade if you leave it out?”
“A little, but not much. Mostly it just crumbles more. Like sand.”
Ryne frowns. Maybe they should have brought Gaia here instead. Alone, Ryne can’t exactly test her theory on exposure to Darkness. But Feo Ul had needed Gaia for other things, and Ryne needs to be able to hold her own.
She sweeps some of the crumblings into a little pouch. It glows through the fabric like a pulsating heartbeat splayed out on her hip, casting shadows in the folds of her white skirt. Later, after she’s helped sweep away a cart’s worth of Light crumblings and peeled enough popotoes to feed the whole dig for dinner, she returns to her assigned room and spills the contents of the pouch out onto the table.
Gaia, she writes, I hope you’re doing well. It’s good to hear that the folks in Dohn Mheg aren’t reacting too badly to the night, though I imagine it’s a learning curve as any. And I’m glad Their Majesty has put a stop to the pranking—I can’t imagine returning to find you with antlers or extra fingers, though it must be said I would not love you any less if you did!
The team here let me have a go at the Flood of Light today. I have some theories about its composition. Minfilia stopped it, put it into stasis as Light oft does. Now that night has returned, the outermost layers of the Flood are starting to decay—which, in itself, is a transition to active aether. I wonder if we can speed up its activity by using your Darkness.
Putting down her pen, she turns her attention back to the glowing pile on the desk. A day of being jostled has practically turned it to fine sand, slipping through her fingers. She locks her palms firmly over each other, and inhales. An absence of Light can be Darkness yet, so: what if she takes the Light… out of the Light?
The pull doesn’t come naturally. She has to reach down into the deeper parts of herself to find the strength for it, where Y’shtola’s lessons on conjury and the whisper of Urianger’s lectures sit protected. There is space in her yet, and she draws the Light into it, into herself the way the Warrior of Light once did. It burns itself into her bones like a cup of ginger tea steeped for too long, like a comb passing through too many knots at once.
She opens her eyes. The pile of sand has been reduced to little more than glitter. There is a dark stain the size of her head where it once was on the desk. The paper she’d been writing on now sports an interesting gradient from its natural cream colour to a hazy grey.
I’ve done some preliminary testing, and it holds promise, she writes, trying to keep her hand from shaking. Though I admit I think I should have done it with a porxie present. If you receive this letter a day late, assume it’s because I am taking a nap to sleep off the worst of it and have missed the mail moogle. Love you!
She dots the exclamation mark, and stumbles out of her seat. The sheets meet her halfway in a wash of blinding white.
A memory:
“You’re going to the Flood of Light?” Gaia asks. “What for? There’s nothing out there but sunburns and eyesores.”
She is right, of course. But Ryne needs to go to the Flood, needs to leave the simple comforts of the Crystarium with Thancred before she runs out of time. She may be Ryne now, but there is still a little piece of Minfilia Warde in her—a name she bore for over fifteen years, a life whispered in her ear. This is goodbye, for once and for all, for herself just as much as it is for Thancred.
“It’s a little complicated,” she says. “Someone… someone important to Thancred died there. And I suppose she was important to me, too. Even if I didn’t really know.”
Gaia studies her for a heartbeat too long. Then, “is this an Oracle of Light thing?”
Bingo. “I guess it is.”
“How’d Thancred know her?”
“She was his—” she falters. Their family isn’t one so easily defined. “Sister, I guess. In their world, she gave her life to save them. Then she came here, and gave it again to save Norvrandt, and again and again.”
“Until you.”
“Until me.” The poison and bile of guilt rises and settles in Ryne’s lungs. Thancred’s grief had been hers to give, after all. “She gave me—she gave me all of this. The torch of the Oracle of Light. All of me, as I know it. She could have come back, and I wanted to be me, and she gave me that.”
Gaia sniffs. “Sounds like she was important,” she says, and breaks her coffee biscuit in half, offering one piece to Ryne. Eating a whole biscuit alone was always too sweet for her, though Ryne has started to suspect she’s gotten accustomed to the idea of sharing. “Coffee?”
“Maybe a little, before I go.”
They sit together in the din of midday, and Gaia calls a waiter to bring another cup. They dip their biscuits. It tastes like acid on Ryne’s tongue today, the bitter underset by the sour aftertaste. She’s forgotten the sugar. She doesn’t know if she deserves it.
“Hey.” Gaia prods her in the forehead with one thin finger. “Stop nodding off. Isn’t coffee supposed to wake you up?”
Ryne nearly goes cross-eyed. Gaia retracts her hand. “You can’t go off saying goodbye like this,” she says, and for a moment Ryne thinks she’s about to have to argue and maybe chug another coffee, but Gaia continues: “you’re clearly out of it. Amh Araeng’s going to be awful for you, you’ll get heat stroke or something. And you’re not going to have a good time getting back, either.”
“I’m awake, I swear.”
“It’s not about being awake. You’re not in the right mind to go about saying goodbye like this.”
Something flares up in Ryne unbidden. “And what of them, then? What of the Scions? They don’t have such luxuries as time. They didn’t. The Warrior of Light watched as the Crystal Exarch—” She cuts herself off as the blue of crystal encroaches her vision with rage and grief. “I don’t have time.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Gaia snorts, and pushes another coffee biscuit at her. “What’s a goodbye without love? All these people—Thancred and Urianger, and the Warrior of Light—they all love you. But they trust you, too. Including this Oracle of Light of yours, she trusts you to carry on.” She gestures with her mug, the surface of the coffee dotted with crumbs. “You said it yourself. You’re carrying their torch, now.”
An ending and a beginning, rolled all into one. Up until now, Ryne’s never been alone. The next chapter, she supposes, will have to be penned by her own hand, so that they might hear of her story and smile. “I suppose,” she says, “when you put it like that. I’ll treasure the time we spent together, and I’ll keep up the fight even after they leave.”
For those we have lost, whispers some ancient voice in her. For those we can yet save.
“Best be going, then. Your Scions can’t stay forever.”
Nothing stayed forever, after all, not even Gaia’s memory of that day. Ryne stares at the ceiling now, thinking about Thancred’s grief of losing Minfilia, and her own grief of watching Mitron take those memories of Gaia’s away, and does not try to move. Waking is slow. She is in Nabaath Areng. She is real and living in the present. She has a job to destroy the rest of the Flood of Light, if it doesn’t dissolve itself with prolonged exposure to night.
The dreams of Hydaelyn’s chosen are always just a touch more vivid than the situation calls for. You relive every moment in technicolour as though it is the present—even when the memories are not strictly your own. Especially then.
Ryne sits up in bed. “Wicked white,” she says into the morning sun. “So that’s what he meant.”
A hundred years of Light, and Norvrandt finally gets its Darkness. A hundred years of Minfilias, and Ryne finally gets her own name. These two things are bound together on principle, she thinks.
Not just on the grounds of direct causation. Ryne would never have decided what she was going to do with her life had it not been for Thancred breaking her out of Eulmore, and Thancred would never have made it here if the Crystal Exarch hadn’t needed the Warrior of Light to save Norvrandt. Yes, her name was a gift, but now she chooses it wholeheartedly, with all the weight it carries, as she grips another glowing chunk of Light and hauls herself up.
“More type two,” she yells up to the outcropping where Gaia’s setting up camp for the two of them. Kholusia will have to wait; Ryne thinks by the end of this, climbing even Mt. Gulg will be a walk in the park. “We’re going to have to go with the drill. I’m coming back up.”
Gaia hauls her up, hand-over-hand, when she reaches the little platform. For a hundred long years, the Flood of Light has spelled death for Norvrandt. Then Ryne took that first impossible step into the Empty, and now Gaia walks at her side. They’ve shown again and again that life can return to that which is barren—that the First can begin to heal.
Two hundred yalms in the air, Gaia looks like a splash of ink among the stars, and is currently hacking at the Flood of Light with a modified drill. Ryne shrugs off her backpack and spills a few extra drill bits over their outcropping. “You shouldn’t be far from the type one now,” she says, looking with her mind’s eye. “Here, let me.”
“You need to preserve your strength,” Gaia argues, even though her knuckles are starting to go white.
“So do you,” Ryne fires back, and takes the drill from her. “Have some water. I asked Beq Lugg to send word to the amaro to have them on standby.”
If Ryne, beacon of Light that she is, could permanently dissipate chunks of the Flood of Light, then the combined force of the Oracle of Darkness and a veritable army of porxies might just be enough to take out the rest of it. Gaia, with her mildly morbid sense of humour, has taken to naming the porxies after dishes logged into her journals. They stand (or fly, anyhow) at the ready, as Ryne and Gaia pierce to the heart of the Flood of Light.
They’re under no pretense that this is guaranteed to work. Perhaps Ryne’s little disintegrating sample was a stroke of luck, after all. But Gaia read the blackened paper, and saw the Light settling into Ryne’s bones when they met up back in the Crystarium and held her until it dissipated. Gaia has hope that, if the Darkness can seep into the worst of the Flood of Light, then it may be enough to neutralize it.
So here they are, under the night sky. Gaia’s eyes blaze into the stars, brighter than the pulsating crystal beneath them. The wind picks up her hair in a jetstream around her—Ryne’s going to have to trim it again soon.
The drill plinks when it hits the core of the Flood. Ryne hoists it up and find that the bit’s been ground to nothing. “Well, that’s that,” she says, disassembling it. If all goes well, they’ll be able to salvage it. If not, well. Gaia kicks it aside where it won’t hurt them if they all go tumbling off this cliff. “Are you ready?”
The grin she gets in return is nothing short of brilliant. “Only if you are.”
This next bit never fails to amaze Ryne. Gaia breathes in, and the night sky seems to grow infinitely darker until the Flood shrinks away, terrified of the sky caving in on it. Darker still, as the world turns entirely to black and white. She doesn’t even break a sweat doing it—night is Gaia’s territory, after all. She is the calm after the storm, the stability chasing those hectic few months of Ryne’s life where she saw the sky split in stars.
The Dark amalgamates into her hands like a handheld void, and she feeds it down the glowing pit that they’d painstakingly drilled. “We’re already losing altitude,” she says, and Ryne looks down and sees that the Flood is crumbling, then even that is turning to dust and blowing away. “Wicked white—hold on to me, Ryne!”
Their hands find each other in the dark. Drill bits start to roll off the rapidly shortening edge of the cliff. A jump from here would be certain death—the teams below are already clearing the area as they’d previously rehearsed, leaving no one to catch them. Gaia’s grip tightens, fingers threaded through Ryne’s. “The amaro should be here any second now,” she mutters.
“Gaia,” Ryne cries, “the Flood!”
The Darkness has begun to trickle to the very heart of the Flood. It runs in veins and brambles up and down the side of the Light, cutting into it. All around, the Flood is crumbling like an avalanche, shattering into pieces that tumble down the sides into Nabaath Areng and the Empty alike. The outcropping they’re on lurches, and Ryne has barely a second to think ah, we definitely should have sent the drill bits down first before the wind rushes up to meet them and they’re falling, falling—
The impact hits her more as a sound than a feeling: the sound of an affronted amaro, a grunt from Gaia, the shuffle of fabric as her arms tighten around Ryne’s waist. She’s always got her arms around Ryne, one way or another, even when they’re so high in the air that it’s hard to breathe. The adrenaline only continues to shudder through Ryne’s blood as the amaro swoops, bringing them level with Captain Lyna.
“You’ve done it,” she calls, sounding deeply impressed—and a little emotional, in the way Ryne hasn’t heard her since the day the Scions left. Behind her, Imogg is cheering, their armor clanking as they pump a fist in the air. “The Flood of Light is finally fading!”
And so it is: as Ryne looks down, the Flood is melting away, its light dribbling out of the ancient stone that had been Nabaath Areng. It crumbles from tilted windows and sinks into the windswept sand, and when the amaro land Ryne stumbles from the saddle, stomach still rolling from the fall, to stick a hand under the stream.
It melts on her skin like ice. The last sparks of the Flood of Light seep into the night, and darkness settles comfortably over them all, and then—
“They’ve done it!” a Ronso shouts, over the din and the cheering. “The Oracles have banished the Flood of Light, for once and for all!”
Gaia trips a little when she slips from the saddle, mobbed by people and still finding her footing in the sand. Thankfully, the crowd gives little resistance when Ryne wades to Gaia’s side, drowning in her decadent smile and the way she bonelessly laughs into Ryne’s arms. “We did it,” she says, and her voice is like ink on parchment.
“You did most of the lifting work.”
“But you paved the way,” Gaia argues, poking Ryne in the forehead with one thin finger. “I’m just following in your footsteps.”
At the end of the day, they’re all pretending to be people they look up to. An unending chain of people inspiring people inspiring people. Ryne may be no Minfilia, but she is glad, honoured to have carried the torch, no matter for how long.
Have faith in me, my friends, Ryne thinks, holding tight onto Gaia’s hand as they step into the night and face their paradise. I’ll carry on the fight.