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“This should not be that difficult,” Hades sighed from where he and Hythlodaeus sat, under the shade of a flowering crimson tree. “There's a saddle, and handholds. You're sitting on one and grasping the others.”

Hythlodaeus heard Phanès laugh before answering, their voice ringing like a set of dissonant bells, and he smiled to hear it, content to stay in the shade and the sweet-smelling breeze. Somewhere far above, the sun shone down in gentle rays, scattered through the branches. A perfect spring, the fruits of generations of Man’s caretaking upon the Star.

“It isn't, chrysè mas! But I would learn the limits you placed on your familiar before I begin to consider how to make my own.”
“You’ll choke the poor beast, please, have some restraint…”
“You mean I'll choke Grani. One, you cannot name him and expect us not to use that; two, no I won't, he's perfectly fine.”

Hythlodaeus raised his head, just a little, to take a look under his mask. Sure enough, Grani was huffing, lowering its snout to nose at the long blue grass swaying in the wind. Phanès held the saddle securely in their hands, and he was certain they were frowning under their mask, their tongue peeking out of their lips pressed together as they concentrated.

“So… how do you steer it?”
“You ask,” Hades answered, crossing his arms, still sitting down next to Hythlodaeus in the shade.
“What happens if I fall?”
“You won’t,” Hades said.

Hythlodaeus laughed, raising himself up on an elbow to better look at the sight before him.

“The proper response would have been “Not to worry, I’ll catch you.” But…”
“No,” Hades answered him, and Hythlodaeus could hear how fast he spoke, how embarrassed he was to even consider flirtation with their friend. “It… Grani won’t let them.”

At that, Phanès leaned to one side, as if to test his words; Grani swayed, following their lead.

“Please don’t hassle my familiar,” Hades spoke again, a little louder.
“I’m not!” Phanès shouted back, and straightened up again. “He’s a sweetheart, you know.”
“Hear that?” Hythlodaeus said, smiling, at his oldest friend. “Your familiar is sweet.”

If looks could hurt, the glare that Hades was throwing at Hythlodaeus beneath his own silver mask would have been enough to send the soulseer to an extended stay in Emmerololth’s halls.

“He is perfectly serviceable,” Hades grumbled. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
“He?”
“Do not.”

Hythlodaeus grinned, and stood up, brushing off imaginary grass from his robes.

“Phanès,” he said, rapidly advancing on their friend. “My dearest, sunniest friend.”
“Hythlodaeus,” they answered, and Grani kneeled, to let them dismount. “My dearest, cleverest friend.”

He watched as they slid down the saddle, dark hand gliding across the leather and cloth and metal and silk- and they tripped, their foot caught on one of the silk extending from the familiar’s side.

They leapt at him, arms outstretched, laughing. He caught them, of course, for what else could he do?

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In the final days of the Republic, mere hours before the appointment of Garlemald’s new Dictator, Legatus Solus van Galvus and Decurio Heliodora pyr Galvus sit in his study in the Galvus gens’s town villa, sheaves of paper scattered around them.

“And with this one, I have, at last, looked over all the suggestions you had the Master of Ceremonies draft up,” Heliodora hums, breaking the silence.
“And what have you decided?”
“First of all, I am flattered that you believe I have had any substantial training in the musical arts.”
“You know enough to criticise and discuss it with me, if my memory holds true. Or have these past few months of listening ”

Heliodora smiles.

“Second of all… I had another song in mind.”
“It is meant to be an anthem, uxor mea.”
“Something our people should cherish to remember what they strive for, yes?”
“That is the very definition of a hymn, yes. Stir up grand feelings, and so on. It isn’t anything new on the Star, and hundreds of such anthems for hundreds more nations will come after.”
“Let me play the part of your advisor once more, your insight into the hearts of our people.”
“By all means,” Solus answers, swirling his glass of uncut wine in one hand, staring at her from his seat near the woodfire.

Heliodora stands up, and throws all of the music sheets into the fireplace. Solus does not even react, except to brush away a spark that landed on his knee.

“These are pretty pieces to please Senators and merchants sitting in a theatre, not songs to sing in the bitter cold around a campfire.”
“Not all of Garlemald will need to be soldiers.”

Heliodora feels her lips twist, in a not-quite grimace.

“Do you recall what I sang with the rest of the mess hall, the second time we met in person?”
“There were many songs that evening,” he says, eyes lost into the fire.
“I offered, ah, to teach you. If you cared to learn.”
“And I told you, I seem to recall, that I preferred listening to others make fools of themselves.”
“You did, you did! But a hymn is meant to be sung together. To close ranks, to warm our hearts and our hearths when even the winter winds howl and we must stand shoulder to shoulder.”
“So you would have our nation’s new anthem be a soldier’s drunken songs?”
“I would have our anthem reflect our hopes. Our dreams, Solus. We weep, for that home beyond the horizon, that past taken from us.”

Solus stands, at last, and walks to the window.

“I would not incite weeping. Especially not on what should be a glorious occasion as the ascension of the Republic into such a tool as can defend itself.”
“Use it as the base for what you’ll have the composers rewrite then. But, listen. This is what we’ll do. We’ll get your Legion and have them chant to our people’s glory.”

Solus hums, thinking.

Heliodora knows she has won when he shrugs, and summons the Master of Ceremonies.

Hours later, as the Senator Princeps and the rest of the Senate acclaim Legatus van Galvus as Dictator Solus iyl Galvus, the First Legion sings of a home beyond the horizon.

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On the third moon after successfully averting the end of the world, yet again, Idunn viator Etheirys, born Idunn Hyskaris, experiences the very first tropical storm of her life.

The island sanctuary, as advertised by Tataru Taru, grand bookkeeper of the now-dissolved Scions of the Seventh Dawn, does fulfil at least one of its promises: it is calm. Too calm, but Idunn has told herself she will give a fair chance for peace. For quiet serenity, and for building rather than tearing down, destroying, upheaving society over and over and over and…

So, in her first tropical storm, Idunn counts the mammets, and lies down staring at the water hitting the ground, outside of her shelter. 

“Excuse me,” comes the tinny voice of a mammet.

Idunn looks down from where she lies on the bamboo bed.

“A sheep seems to have escaped the enclosure,” it says. 
“So?”
“I would go and look for it, but I am afraid the current weather will damage my inner workings.”

So? She thinks. They’ll find the sheep after, when the storm passes.

Still, the mammet is staring up at her, its great big eyes unblinking.

Urgh.

“Fine,” she says, and unfurls from her bed, leporine feet touching down on the ground. “Point me to where it escaped off to.”

The mammet waddles off. Heliodora follows, of course, grabbing for her walking stick, tugging her ears into her hood to avoid the battering rain running down her neck.

You’ve never been one to avoid something as inconsequential as some water, comes a gentle voice in her head.

She ignores it.

The ground is muddy beneath her feet, as she walks further into the jungle; the wind howls through the trees. It is a song, discordant and real, of nature and life.

Once, she stumbles, her heel catching on an unsteady rock. 

“I have to save it,” she says to the empty air. “I have to save it, because if I don’t… At least something. Someone.”

You could rest, comes the gentle voice again. Let someone else do it. Haven’t you earned it by now? That respite?

She has, she has, Idunn thinks, and wails with the wind. 

But she cannot. She will not. Louisoix’s words echo in her mind, even for something as small as a sheep. For those we can yet save, she thinks, and repeats it aloud, over and over and over, as she slips in the mud, as the branches hits her face, as her feet hit the rocks, the roots.

And then, she hears it. Bleating, in a crevasse. Idunn kneels down, and sees it: the sheep, looking none the worse for wear, except for a little mud. Still, she takes off her cape, fashions a sling around her walking stick, and tries, so hard, to loop it around the animal.

The sheep is calm, now that she’s here, and Idunn is thankful, for all she hears is the beating of her heart and the howling of the wind.

It takes a few tries, but she succeeds. 

When she lifts the sheep out of the crevasse, and into her arms, she could weep. The animal stays still, steady in her arms, as if it could feel the unnamed sorrow in her breast.

Idunn does weep, all the way back to the buildings and the mammets.

The tempest washes it all away, as night turns to day, and Idunn keeps on holding one very small sheep.

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“I thought I’d find you here,” Hythlodaeus says, delicately stepping into the silencing spell Phanès has conjured around themself.

They give him a withering stare, which he meets with his usual aplomb, before they dissolve the magick and all the world’s sounds rush in at once, a cacophony of life, even here on the balcony of Hades- no sorry, Emet-Selch’s apartment.

They’ve covered the ground in grass, in the bright flowers they’ve brought back from their trips following wherever the aether currents take them. Some are even bigger than their entire body, obscuring them from any who might pass by in the sky or look from another building.

“You’re oddly cheerful,” they say. “For someone who will soon, ah, be intimately acquainted with two of the Fourteen. I thought you disliked politics?”
“I dislike politicians,” he replies, and sits down next to them, heedless of how the wet earth will sully his robes.
“Administrators are necessary to the well-being of our current social system,” Phanès frowns.

Hythlodaeus hums wordlessly, and begins tressing together a chain from the flowers that sprout on the ground. They watch him, for a moment, until the silence appears to grow heavier than their thoughts.

“It’s a great responsibility,” Phanès says.
“One you do not think you can fulfil?”
“People have never had many expectations for me,” they tell him, and grab his hand to play with it, the flowers falling to his lap.

Their umber skin flits over his pale one, until their fingers sneak beneath his sleeve and up the arm of his robe. Their thumb finds the little scar at his elbow, the one he’s kept from an accident in childhood. He had hidden it from his caretakers, as though the blemish itself was a black mark, and never had it healed. He had been uncertain, when they had first seen it, even before they had deepened their acquaintance; when all they had been to each other were Hades’s other friend. 

He needn’t have been; they had traced the scar, first with their eyes, then with their fingers, and given him such a smile he had had to change his sight to soulseeing, if only to avoid growing speechless from the recognition he had seen.

“It is not an enviable position, I assure you,” he says, and smiles when they look up and meet his gaze.
“I know that. I’ve spent long enough at the side of two eminent soulseers to see the burden of expectation.”
“But Azem herself chose you as her successor. You have earned this power, unlike us who were born with it. No need to be so reticent, as you can rest assured that all believe in your skill, in your ability to shepherd our people like the sun gives rhythm to our days.”

Phanès says nothing, and picks up the half-finished flower chain from where it lay on his lap. They place it, gently, into his other hand, and close his fingers around the stems.

“I am glad you were born,” they say. “I do not know who I would have been if not for you.”
“I am glad I was born, yes,” he laughs, and brings his other hand onto the one they hold.

They stay there, for a quiet while, on that balcony.

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Solus,

I dreamt of you. 
What a way to start a letter, I know, but I awoke this morning with tears in my eyes, the image of blue fields of grass, and only the memory of your eyes to sustain me. This is not an official report, far from it, but I hoped to nourish some kinder, fonder feeling than what must be between officer and general. Our alliance has not yet passed its first winter, and yet I find myself wondering as to what you would think of what I see. The miners’s guild, from the southern mountains, and how you might convince them. The blue of the skies, ever changing, from grey to blue, and sometimes so dark that it is as though night fell before its time. With every report I send, every deal I make, some part of me considers the future. What world, what path are we blazing for our people? What is our plan, beyond the next campaign?

Yours as faithfully as to my oaths,
H.

My friend,

I have, I assure you, read much more explicit and less charming assertions than your informing me you dreamt of me. Would that I could say the same, but it appears that all of my dreams end in tears, and it has been thus for far longer than I would like my memory to hold.
But do not despair: for it is in my waking thoughts you find your throne, head held aloft and with the promise of our people at the ready, united at last under our banner. I thought I would labour alone; I was afraid of a lifetime on my own with none to understand my vision. Now, I dare to hope.
The moving platform is performing as expected, and should reduce the time needed to ferry supplies to our troops by more than half. With this, with your work with the merchants, we ensure better provisions. Better supply lines, safer travel, and protection for our people. With this, we rise. We forge the chain that binds. We do what we must, and I rest, if only for a few hours, much easier, as I know you understand the necessity of all we do.

Yours in hope,
S.

Solus,

I wish you had waited for our reunion in the capitol, so I could have thanked you in person for your gift. And yet, I will not lie, as I unrolled that map, and beheld the far west of Aldenard, my heart swelled near to bursting. I have never, in the years I have spent walking the Star, been given such a gift. The world was limited to duty, to the next step in my career, the next heavy load of burden, blind to everything but the smallness of my rank, the idiocy of our leaders, of the petty officers whose orders I had to follow. Yet now, I see how vast the world is, I see how much I have yet to experience, how much hungrier I can allow myself to be. How hungry you are too, and I promise I will match your craving for knowledge, to make sense of this world and the injustices done to us. 
Someday, I dream, we will take an airship, and go where none have gone.

Yours in every step I take,
H.

My friend,

I promise you the sea. Allow you to comprehend how vast, how deep it truly is, and let you drink your fill of knowledge until the sun itself grows cold. Airship, seaship, the new motorised carriages our very work has brought about: there shall be no land beyond our reach, not sight beyond our skill to grasp for it.
This is only the beginning, for our people as for ourselves. The future seems brighter than it ever was for the first time in a very, very long time, as I behold the sunrise.

Yours in this life or the next,
S.

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“You must learn the crests of the noble houses of Ishgard,” Honoroit insists, sitting next to Idunn in the Fortemps kitchens.
“Aye, she must,” Evarnée the cook grumbles. “Especially as she’s like to keep on messing with them.”
“Teach me, in that case,” Idunn says. “O most learned Honoroit Bandarlois.”

Honoroit, at that, brings out a giant, leather-bound book, and drops it in front of her. It is heavy, the table shaking as it hits it.

Idunn opens it, gently, touching the illuminated lettering with the tip of her claw. It is of incredible make, far beyond her own skill as an artisan, to say nothing of the art within, the delicate paints and script.

“The Complete Book of Ishgardian Heraldry,” she reads on the cover. “Well, I doubt we’ll have me ready to recite it by dinner, will we?’
“Perhaps if you tell her stories,” the cook huffs from where she sits dicing onions.

Honoroit huffs.

“What about… This one?”

Idunn points to a page chosen at random, a beautiful two-page spread with a golden swan on its nest, floating over clear water.

“Ah… Halcyone?”

Evarnée laughs, gravelly, from where she sits.

“That’s a good one,” she says, and throws an onion at Honoroit. “Peel, boy, and tell us your tale.”
“I’m a pageboy,” he frowns, but he sets about taking the skin off the root vegetable, obediently.

Idunn laughs, and holds a hand out for Evernée to throw an onion at her too, so she can help.

“Halcyone was a nobleman’s daughter, from the very first days of our city,” Honoroit begins. “True, beautiful, and with more suitors than could be counted. But her heart was ever devoted to our Lady Halone. Every morning she went to pray in the chapel at the tallest tower of the city, and every night she walked the Brume, accompanying lay sisters and brothers to feed the destitute. But she was too beautiful, and too kind.”
“A Brume brute decided to make her his,” grumbles the cook. “Course, some versions of the story have it be a priest taking advantage of the poor lass, but don’t repeat that in polite circles, you hear?”

Idunn nods, quietly.

“She leapt from the taller tower above the chasm,” Honoroit continues, and sweeps together the onion peelings into a pan to throw them into the fire. “As she fell, however, Halone took pity on her most faithful, and changed her into such a bird as could survive. Out of sorrow for their lost sister, her siblings took on her name and image as their crest, and strove to imitate her devotion to their people and the Goddess.”

The blue is familiar, she thinks.

“The original heraldry,” Honoroit points to a smaller drawing at the bottom of the page, “was a common kingfisher. The swan was a later influence, brought from, it is believed, some marriage with another minor house.”
“Oh,” Idunn realises. “Halcyone, like the limsan alcioun. Those birds migrate in the winter, though. There must not have been any seen here in…”
“Five years, yes,” the pageboy replies. “We shall never see their like again, if this cold endures.”

How sad, Idunn thinks, and engraves the image of that small blue kingfisher into her mind.

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Phanès measures their freedom in bite-sized morsels, from cradle to, if not grave, at least adulthood. 

Their mothers never pay attention to them, so any chance they get after mousike, where they learn the basis of the arts, of writing and reading and philosophy, Phanès practises mastery over their body: they run, they climb, they learn how to make balls of aether and throw it from the rooftop or the balcony to see what it even looks like when it hits the streets below.

They cherish the moments when they can take off their mask, let their hood down, and breathe the open air in, fully. In public, there is some allowance from the more socially conscious grown-ups, due to their young age, but they frown, they reprimand. Always within the boundaries of the city, always within the confines of expectations, but even now, even then, Phanès tests their limits.

They discover, sometimes round the earlier days of their age in double digits, a small square where, every so often, the other children of the surrounding district come to play, accompanied by their guardians. Phanès becomes a sensation, when the adults aren't looking, and gathers the other children into games, and shares in mischief.

A little pale girl has a voice oh so lovely, so Phanès takes her aside, and asks her to sing, when her father's familiar is busy sleeping on a bench. For fourteen months, they practise music with uneven harmonies, enjoying the ability to make false notes, to fail and not seek perfection. On the fifteenth she isn’t allowed to play with them any longer, after her tutor complains.

A boy with hair so black it seems to drink in the light shows them the books he's taken from his guardian's study, and together Phanès and him practice fighting, out of sight, using their aether to catch the hits and redirect the energy. Several broken noses, black eyes, and a dislocated shoulder later, and he is forbidden from even looking at them anymore.

Adolescence is a terrible time, but also the beginning of true freedom. During the day, Phanès learns mathematics, harmonics, dialectics, and the theory of aetherology. The other children have no more time for Phanès’s little follies, focused as they are on fitting in. On their futures.

At night, Phanès practices control. True control and mastery over themself; they attempt transformation, safe inside their bedroom, all alone. Localised, miniscule: scales over their skin, at first. It hurts, every time, and worse when they move onto the rest of their body: eyes, fangs, their spine when the wings first appear, their limbs growing in size.

It's a good hurt. 

It's freedom, it's the next little bite of individuality they take, here alone in their empty home, in the busiest city in the world.

It's sad.

When they reach the next stage of their life, as expected of one who demonstrates quite unexpected control over manipulation as they do, but not quite a prodigy (not enough to warrant special attention) , they enter the Akadaemia.

No farewell, no help to settle in; one day, Phanès walks out of the front door of their mothers’s home, and through the entrance of the foremost institution on the face of Star as yet another mind to mould and conform.

They keep trinkets in their room. 

They pilfer things, from locked offices, forbidden zones. Clippings of flowers, dried and stuck to their walls; projections of the stars in the sky, practising the old forgotten art of astronomy, wondering if there is anything out there, beyond the veil of the atmosphere. Music, on repeat, and they scratch up crystals to make it imperfect, unique.

Their chest aches, weeps, for freedom, freedom, freedom, at night. 

The other students are pleasant enough, but the twelfth time another group in the hall of Debate nods and accepts That All Is As Should Be, that we must wait and see, Phanès wants to stand in the middle of the symposium and SCREAM. 

ARE YOU NOT CHOKED BY THESE CHAINS IN YOUR MIND? 

Are you not weeping from this stifling?

Do you not yearn for more?

For something beyond these expectations, of identical moulds?

Their next bite of freedom comes when they find Azem’s followers, their gatherings in the dark. 

But that isn’t a morsel, it is a feast; and Phanès gorges themself on it, drinking deep.

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Heliodora surveyed the open-air quarry with an untrained eye.

Far as she could see, ordered, neat rows of blocks of stone, all in different points of the process of excavation.

“And how much would it take, for two of your journeymen to come ply their trade for Garlemald?”

The head of the miner's guild stared at her, scratching at his thinning head of hair - a feat, for a Hrothgar - before answering.

“Far too much for your pockets, I reckon.”
“But would you be able to offer us your knowledge?” 
“That depends. The guild’s got a tight vise on who learns what, and for good reason. Might be we trade you a couple of journeymen, and you go and in a generation kick us out of business. ‘Fraid I can't let you have your hands on my folks just like that.”

She had considered doing just that, yes. Solus had thought her to be a little optimistic, but in the end he had promised to have faith in her capacity as a negotiator.

“What about an exclusive contract with the Republic?”
“We're the only guild willing to take contracts north of the Skatay Range.”
“Ah, but see. I have looked into naturally occurring ceruleum deposits. I know that it exists in Thanalan, very rarely.”
“So what? Why would we ever try to go that far to the West?”
“Well, consider. We are on the cusp of a technological revolution. Very soon, ceruleum will serve to do more than heat our homes and fuel airships. Even the gilded bazaars of far western Thanalan will want to employ those who know how to safely extract liquid, blue gold. No, better than gold: ceruleum.”

Heliodora saw the glint of greed in the Hrothgar's eyes. His tail swayed, sweeping along the floor, and his eyes followed her as she walked and spoke.

“What did you say your name was again, miss?”
“I work for Senator Galvus,” she smiled, and showed him the seal Solus had given her when they had parted. “And he would reward his allies well.”

The man took the seal from her hands, examining it. She knew what he saw: the eagle, the Garlean chain. 

“What would we need with technology? We have magic.”
“Yes, but our people don't. What we do have is bodies used to hard labour. A task force used to following orders without flinching. And now… knowledge.”
“I want an exclusive contract for the next fifteen years, and double our usual price.”
“A decade,” she said, “double your pay, and you train our people. After that, you will be able to ply your trade with any outside of Ilsabard.”
“A decade, double our pay, we train your people, and you cover the cost of tools.”
“Oh, that was the intent. Better tools will come from what we just spoke of.”

The Hrothgar squinted, and handed her back the seal.

“It's a deal,” he said, and offered her his hand to shake.

Heliodora took it, and shook. 

Below them, the miners still scurried about like ants in the quarry below.

Chapter Text

Idunn has never gone to the magitek academia. Never trained, in any official military service, except for the private lessons the Rector had seen fit to impart on his favourite Lictor’s daughter, and then the lessons from the Prima Frumentaria.

Idunn has, however, learned how to bear criticism.

This serves her well: the Sharlayans she shadowed out of Garlemald gave it handily. So do the Limsans, the Mighans, the Gridanians, the Ul’dahns, everyone from Aldenard to Othard. Not a single soul on the Star, far as she has seen, is able to keep from criticising any and all little things.

This, it seems, is difficult for Alphinaud to understand.

“I do not understand why the noble houses are so intent on focusing all their energies on casting us out,” the teenager grumbles, sitting at the campfire, “when there are more important topics to consider.”

Idunn hums, and waits for him to continue. He likes the sound of his own voice, even now.

“Honestly, what are three poor, downtrodden souls, compared to the threat of the drakes at their door?”

“Has anyone ever made you feel unwanted, Alphinaud?” she asks, brushing some snow out of her long ears.

“I beg your-”

“I mean this question in good faith, my friend.”

The boy is sullen, considering her question.

“The Ishgardians are very much the same as your own people,” Idunn offers. “Afraid of something, though I never could quite figure out what it was that made your people so. And when people are afraid, there is little space for understanding.”

“Oh, have you…”

“Yes,” she says. “I saw your colony, some time before the Exodus.”

“That’s before Alisaie and I were born,” he realises. “But you’re…”

“Garlean? Not really,” Idunn answers. “I do not have a people. I’ve always been an outsider, and I’ve made my peace with it.”

“Like my sister and I in Eorzea,” the boy says, and Idunn sees it for the connection he means it as.

Not really, she thinks. Alphinaud was a revered hero’s heir. Idunn has been a weapon for most of her life.

“I mean this in good faith, again. You need to get used to being used.”

Alphinaud frowns, and kicks at the dirt near where he sits.

“You are a…”

“Really bad advisor? Yes,” Idunn shrugs. “I accept that bit of criticism.”

The teenager gives her a quick smile, at that. Good. 

“But you are one. We can learn from each other, yes?”

Idunn startles, ears drooping flat to her skull.

“I… I suppose,” she says. “Might give you lessons in Garlean spycraft, if you’re willing to listen.”

“I’d like that,” the Sharlayan answers. “Only if I get to criticise your summoning. Honestly, what is it with the way you’re handling aetherial flow?”

Idunn throws a snowball at his shoulder. 

He isn’t expecting it, and it lands on his chest, over the nice new clothes Tataru made him.

“I’m self-taught,” she sticks out her tongue. “Not all of us can be tutored by Archons, or have special tools crafted by Louisoix himself!” 

“I can tell!”

Her heart relaxes, a bit, as she pelts his knee with another handful of snow. This boy isn’t so bad. 

The future isn’t so dark.

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