Work Text:
To use the body of a mortal was a simple affair. A necessity, after surrendering their own physical forms. Moving across the shattered planes of reality required a soul that might exist independent of body, but communing with any of the reflections equally benefited from a physical form. They learned quickly to make use of what a stronger soul might do to a weaker one.
The Scion was no exception.
Lahabrea looked down at a calloused hand as he held it up to the light. Marked by years of wielding blades, he surmised. A faint scar on the thumb seemed as though it might be self-inflicted. An accident , the muffled, partial soul rose to correct him. The blade had slipped from his grasp when performing a little knife trick in hopes of charming a barmaid. A gesture that struck him as feeble and quaint. He raised the other hand to touch the scar, but turned his head when the woman returned with a serving tray laden with a polished silver teapot and two porcelain cups.
“I trust that he will suit your needs?” The soothsayer asked through a warm smile as she sat the tray down on the table. Lahabrea assumed that, to the uninformed, Ruina’s disposition would seem at odds with her role as accomplice to their machinations. A lesser Ascian in all but name, in truth.
He always found it rather endearing.
“Yes, I believe he shall,” Lahabrea said. He allowed the pitch of his voice to shift, moving gently into the well worn patterns of vocal cords not his own. “I daresay I might not even need practice maintaining his mannerisms, if the matter of these ‘Scions’ is to be dispelled as swiftly as we hope.”
The smaller soul within the body pitched wildly at the suggestion, snapping at his aether like a dog. Lahabrea was long accustomed to muzzling such resistance. His own soul loomed far grander than his, and only a flicker of power was needed to send him skittering back to a dark, quiet corner.
He looked back to Ruina.
“Apologies, I did not mean for my glyph to flash before your eyes, Ruina. An internal conversation, you understand.”
“Of course.” She nodded. Lifting the silver pot from the tray, she poured him the customary cup that was always offered when he came to the halls of her home. Two cubes of amber sugar were added and stirred into the fragrant tea before she handed it gingerly to him. He nodded his head in thanks, lifting it to his lips and savoring how the warmth rolled down his throat.
She poured her own cup next before sitting down in an empty chair.
“He seemed to have a…” Another smile played over her lips. “Fiery nature during our little meeting. Though I suppose that might be no challenge to your own, Speaker. Child of the flames that you are.”
Bitch . The Scion’s soul snarled wordlessly at her. Ascian’s harlot .
Lahabrea hummed in a low tone as he let the talons of his aether sink down deep into the mortal soul. Like tugging hard at the ring through the soft cartilage of a beast’s nose, or allowing a collar to close tight around a neck. The man known as Thancred writhed at the jolt of aether meant to inflict pain. You will mind yourself , the ancient rumbled.
“He is temperamental, if that is what you mean. Otherwise, I find his mind to be in a state of cold rather than flame.” Lahabrea elected to stand even as he drank his tea, his mind ever restless, and his soul quicker to adapt to a new body if he fed it the stimulae of pacing and glancing out the pane of glass that looked out to Ishgard. “He is easily fooled through the promise of warmth, be it carnal or otherwise. I thank you again for indicating this weakness.”
Lahabrea felt an amusing ring of kinship with that assertion. He had been the same once, in a distant past. With the mortal suitably cowed by the aether which threatened to rend his soul and the words that seemed to make him shrink from naked truth, he smiled when Thancred retreated at last into some deep, dark vestige of his mind.
They were little more than animals, after all. An intact soul could not be made to cower within itself. To attempt to wrest control from one of Unsundered stock was unbearable, unthinkable; an agreement to fight ceaselessly for dominance within one body. Shattered pieces, however, yielded control with ease if one had due practice to rely upon. Lahabrea once oversaw the creation and containment of beasts. Controlling a mortal soul was little different from ensuring the locks and bars of a cage remained intact.
A pity , he thought to the mortal soul that strangely, did not attempt to hide even further as he brushed against it. Your only recourse to resist this lay in surrendering your mind to a primal. If you had not taken such care to avoid the fate you condemned others to by your failures to protect them, you would have spared yourself a role in your companions’ execution.
The Ascian sighed aloud in his borrowed voice.
“But enough about this vessel.” Lahabrea said with a thin smile. “You humor me by asking after it. I would hear of how the work of you and your boy goes. Even as I take other roles upon my shoulder, I remain the overseer of your progress.”
His eyes stayed fixed on the steel gray skies outside, watching as the snowflakes tumbled ceaselessly downward upon the city at the edge of the world.