Chapter Text
With you I could have
more than one skin,
a blank interior,
a repertoire
of untold stories,
a fresh beginning.
Margaret Atwood, Paper Bag
twice upon the lake
The Warrior of Light has few matches in combat. So it goes, that the opponent she cannot anticipate is nature itself.
It is hot in Shaaloani, but they are so near to the lake they press ahead regardless. The relief of the canopy of leaves is not enough, so they unlace their boots and step with bare feet upon the grass. The little blades are waxy and sun-warmed beneath their feet. It is Sabre who suggests they wade into the shallows of the clear water, and Erenville cannot find any reason to protest. He rolls his pant legs above the knees and follows after her, pack and shoes left to the trunk of one of the towering trees.
The relief of the cool lake water is every bit as rejuvenating as its gemstone reflection would imply. They’re tired from travel, yes, but the full exhaustion hasn’t caught up yet. With relief comes playfulness: one comment leads to another until she splashes water at him. Erenville cannot well let it go.
They dance towards each other and away, splashes of sparkling water flung from their hands. She is quick, but he has reflexes honed in the wilderness here. He may dart away like avoiding a snake in tall grass. She is honed from battle and training and battle again, sure-footed, but she must be holding back, that both their clothes are spotted with water droplets.
On one retreat, though, her impeccable balance gives. It happens like a lightning strike: her laughing eyes go wide instead, and her weight pitches to one side. She throws out an arm to catch herself, but disappears halfway into the water.
“Ariadne?” Erenville wades waist-deep as she recovers herself. She’s on all fours up to her chin, ripples from her fall coasting into her cheeks. Water sweeps against the cutout against her low back, drenches her shorts, and drags against the tips of her hair. Erenville bends to offer his arm; she clings, and he rises enough that she need not worry about choking out water atop the rest. She looks genuinely stunned in a way he has not seen, her eyes scanning the lake's glassy surface like she might have missed something beneath it.
“A rock, I think,” she says thinly.
“Are you all right?” Erenville says.
“Oh, I—yes. Just startled,” she says. Her voice is rather far away, still, like the splashing chased it off.
“I imagine it’s not often you’re taken by surprise,” Erenville offers. She has not moved an inch, but she clasps his hand with enough force to bruise. She hasn’t fully recovered her weight, either, centering her balance against Erenville.
“Hardly ever,” she says. “It’s all right. T’was a rock.”
He walks with her to the shallow shore. The water is a constant press against their progress, by by the time they arrive, he’s certain she’s limping.
“Why don’t you sit a moment?” Erenville says. “I’ll set up the tent. The sun will dry your clothes.”
The look she offers him is assessing, though warmer than the way she scrutinized the lake and the rock that sent her tumbling. Still, she nods with her agreement, and he leaves her at the shoreline.
Afternoon sun has Erenville's own clothing dry in minutes, even through the dappled leaves. Perhaps it is the motion, too, Erenville busying his hands with setting the tent poles beneath the trunk of a large tree where he's confident the shade will shelter them. They’ve shared sleeping space this whole trip without a word, nestled like two birds among carefully constructed twigs and woven grass. She sleeps better knowing he’s there, she says, though he thinks it’s more due to the unsettling simulacrum she posts outside the open flap every night when she thinks he’s fallen asleep. It looked straight at him once, and he swore it laughed when the color drained from his face.
Once their blankets have been shaken out and laid atop their bedrolls, Erenville unfolds the last in front of the firepit. The afternoon sun has finally dipped lower, and its light skates like molten gold across the length of the lake. Erenville dusts off his feet and laces his boots back up. He finds Ariadne’s socks and boots laid neatly nearby and brings them over.
She sits with her knees pulled up to her chest just where he left her, though she has maneuvered herself that she might keep one foot in the lake. She unfolds herself a bit when he’s nearer. Erenville crouches at her side. He thinks a bit of color has drained from her face; where there was a sunny flush, the beginnings of a burn, even across the fair skin of her nose and cheeks, she looks pale as if the day has turned cloudy.
“Did you roll your foot?” he asks.
“I’m hoping that’s all,” she says. She lifts her foot from the water. The red could be from the chill, but he sees a faint stamp of bruising along the curve of her ankle. Her hand buzzes faintly with aether, but she grimaces and lets it go out.
“I got the swelling down,” she says. “The rest—well, my healing education has room for improvement, if you ask Alphinaud.”
Erenville can picture the exact inflection in the boy’s voice, too, as he says it. “Let’s avoid a lecture, then. I can wrap it for you. A night of rest may do the trick, if it’s not paining you terribly.”
“I’ll ask Raha if it doesn't,” she says. “He’s a gentler teacher.”
As she speaks, she pulls her boot back onto her good foot. Then she hesitates, stuffs the remaining sock in the remaining boot with a small frown, and wraps the laces around her hand. It is then Erenville realizes she will rise whether or not she feels she actually can and walk with him the dozen feet back to camp and undo all her own work on the matter. The Warrior is vaunted for perseverance, certainly, but he feels a pang wondering if this is how she earned the reputation.
“Here, let me,” Erenville says. “No need to complicate matters.”
He convinces her to set the boot aside, then pulls both her hands into his to tug her up. One of his hands goes to her hip to steady her wobble. Before she can contemplate hobbling along at his side, he pulls one arm around his shoulders and bends so that she can find her hold. It earns him another curious look.
“Hold there,” he says. “And jump.”
She follows, bending her good leg and hopping. It’s enough he can swing his free arm under her legs and sweep her up with the momentum. She doesn’t feel any heavier than his backpack, truth be told, and the look of pleasant surprise that takes her face makes him gleam with a little pride. Her face is very close to his, in fact, the faint glitter of scales at the edges of her cheeks outlined in sunlight for him to see. She angles her face just so to keep the horn at the side of her head from bumping into him.
“I daresay that’s better,” she says.
There is much to do when he sets her down upon the blanket by the firepit. The fire she trivializes with her aether. He wraps her foot as promised before setting dinner to bake, and by the time they eat, and the sun sets. With the waning of the light, the bustle catches up to him. He’s always been good at moving forward—the months in Sharlayan leading up to the final days were a frenzy for them all. He became too adept at ignoring that buzz of exhaustion. He could do so here, but when he can't hide a yawn behind his hand, Sabre catches it from him.
“Shall we rest early?” she says, once she's staved off her own yawn at his prompt.
He agrees. With familiar shuffle, they trade traveling clothes for looser sleep attire. It is cool enough that the blankets become appealing. Once they nestle down, even though the sun has set and he is tired, Erenville finds his eyes don’t want to close. Sabre remains awake, her eyes keen in the dark, sketching on her side of the tent. This is common enough; he has fallen asleep to the scratch of her drawing the last several nights. Her simulacrum rests in a mirror posture to hers, though without the sketchbook.
Erenville rolls over after a while, and her gaze flicks to him.
“What is that shadowy figure you create?” he asks.
Her hands pause, the tip of her pen dragging. “I didn’t expect you’d be able to see,” she says haltingly.
Before Erenville can remark how alarming that thought it, she continues.
“That’s Fray,” she says. “When I need strength beyond myself, I ask Fray.”
The admission is one he doubts she makes often. Erenville sits up, leaning his weight onto one hand so that he can face her. She closes the cover over her sketchbook and sets it beside her pillow.
“You’ve seen my shield, haven’t you?” she says.
None that she carries. But he’s seen her fight several times now, and her question spurs to mind a glow of purple-blue aether that flashes around her. Blades slow against it. He's only seen it shatter once, and she moved so quickly from its shell for her counterstrike she ended the confrontation in a blow.
“Alexandria isn’t the only place a memory can live on longer,” Sabre says. “Fray was a day dead when I met them in the Brume. Ah—sorry. Is it all right if I tell this story now?”
“Is it truly that harrowing?” Erenville says.
“It’s not a bedtime tale,” she says. “I’ve never really explained it to another. I don’t know if it even makes sense.”
Sabre’s eyes drift towards the open slice of the tent flap where Fray is stationed. Her countenance shifts. She looks dreamlike, her mind settling beyond their tent. He expects to hear her voice, but instead, her aether shifts. It fills the air like fine perfume, settles along the surface of their blankets like mist.
“Have you ever met someone you needed precisely when you needed them? They may not have stayed very long, but you never forgot them? That’s Fray. It wasn’t the lesson in the sword I needed, even if that’s what they offered. It was…”
She pauses. There’s a face she makes when she stumbles over her words, and her mouth pinches that way now. “It was them. Someone gentle and fierce and unafraid of edges undone. In the end, it didn’t matter that they were only a memory. It was enough to move forward.”
She looks up, a measure of clarity returned to her eyes. Her gaze is like burnished metal when it’s dark.
“They spoke to you?” Erenville says. “Taught you, spent time with you? Just like…”
The realization catches him off guard despite the fact she started their conversation with the connection. It shouldn’t. Unusual things happen all the time, and he has had his time to make peace with his mother’s memory.
An ache drags through him all the same. He thought he stowed it away. Thought he categorized it, observed it, felt it enough to move on from. But the feeling does not pass through him like a thread between seams. It is a channel undammed, and with its rush come all manner of unwanted questions.
“When you call upon Fray now,” Erenville says, glancing towards the simulacrum, “is there anything left of Fray as they were? Or is it only your memories of them?”
“I don’t wholly know,” Sabre says. “Their aether was in the memory stone when I took it. I suspect I carried dregs of it for a time and followed the pattern of their aether while I learned. Sometimes I think it stained.”
This is beyond him. Esoteric. His use of aether is practical and daily, not suited for the expanse of memory and form. He imagines what it might be like to take a thought and mold it out like clay, something from nearly nothing. He thinks secondly about how the semblance of life would be breathed into such a creation, and he cannot grasp the means to do so. He knows his mother, recognizes her in the way he can observe the minute differences between flora or fauna, but he seldom understood why she acted how she did, and there he’s already lost the core of her.
Sabre’s hand closes on his wrist. Her fingers are cool, but the weight of her touch draws him towards the shore of his rushing thoughts.
“Erenville?” she asks.
“I was just thinking,” he says. He lets her twist his hand and wrap her fingers around his. “It would not help to make mother’s shape out of shadow. No justice done to her, that way. But the thought came anyway.”
“No, it wouldn’t,” Sabre says. She says it gently, a petal landing on the water’s surface. The rebuke tightens him anyway. “You would never be satisfied.”
Tempered though it is, he hears the understanding in her voice. The hints of her own old grief that rise just high enough to make him suspect she speaks from experience. He has no reason to refute her. But he wonders at the word she picked. He has never felt himself an insatiable man, but then again, one of their first interactions was his critique of her frogs.
“I do not look for perfection in everything, you know,” he says.
“Not perfection,” Sabre says. “Precision. Which is why you will come to decide how you will honor her and mourn her, and it will be more fitting than a shadow in the dark.”
“She would never stand for being a mere shadow, anyway,” Erenville says.
“It takes a particular sort,” Sabre says. It’s Fray’s gaze she meets briefly, sharing some private smile between them. When Fray sees Erenville looking, they lift a hand in a wave. Erenville doesn’t quite choke off the strained nose in the back of his throat.
“I suppose you won’t sleep after my ghost story,” Sabre says.
“In time,” Erenville says. The tension of their conversation hasn’t shaken its way free of his shoulders yet.
“All right,” Sabre says. “Sit up with me, then.”
He intends to watch, but a spare pen flashes in her hand like one of her knives. She presents it to him handle first. Pulling herself close, she balances the sketchbook on her knee and opens to a fresh page. At a few strokes, he sees the ripple of water wrought from her strokes and the long lines of gator snouts breeched above them. She asks about the shape of the nose, and soon he’s sketching his own alongside hers.
The page fills with wildlife (she insists the bizarre catfish-like creature truly did crawl from the lake while he was busy setting camp). There’s room yet for more, but Sabre shifts one too many times with the lingering discomfort of her ankle for him to ignore. She assures him it is no worse, but protests no further when he suggests they lie for bed.
She drifts to sleep with an ease Erenville still cannot find. But the restlessness has shaken out of him. His thoughts stretch from their cluster, so he files them away. Tomorrow, if she does not feel better, they will take a rroneek into town and call Alphinaud on the linkpearl. The aetheryte travel will be easy, and if she is better by lunchtime, there are many more creatures at the lake that did not make it into her sketchbook. Mother would love the drawings, he thinks. Would love to know he is still discovering what is under every rock and up every branch.
Sabre did him the kindness of learning his homeland. Perhaps, if he has not exhausted her, she would share hers in turn. It would give him something to tell mother, when he finally finds the words to speak to her.
once upon the lake
They have time yet before the railway will be ready, and Erenville wants her to see the lake; the allure of cool water after days in the relentlessly dry desert is more than enough to earn her agreement.
The lake near town is beautifully blue, the clearest she’s seen in Tural. The grass grows thicker the closer they draw to it, easing her feet from the packed-down roads. Overhead, the canopy catches the afternoon sun, lifting the weight of the heat from her shoulders. Sabre pauses beneath one trunk and takes one knee to kneel, but Erenville stops her.
“Wait, wait,” he says. Before she can ask why, he’s sloughing out of his backpack and reaching into one of the pockets. He does it with grace she never understands, though he says the same when she wields her greatsword. Sabre leans against the trunk instead while Erenville searches. In moments, he’s holding a folded blanket in one hand. He frees himself all the way from the pack and uses both hands to fling it open. The blanket flares out in bold woven colors and geometric shapes. He fans it out near the spot she’d wanted to sit, straightening the corner.
“There,” he says. “The day is spent. We may as well be comfortable.”
Sabre perches at the edge and unlaces her boots. Her feet tingle, finally at rest. She scoots back to the center of the blanket where Erenville joins her.
“Did you get this in Urqopacha?” Sabre asks. The colors and pattern evoke it, and it feels soft with newness. She runs her fingers across it, the little grooves in the weave rippling beneath her touch.
“I traded for it,” he says with a little pride. “Alpaca wool is a treat. It’s not often I ventured as far south as Urqopacha.”
“I imagine not. You know this place as if you’ve memorized it.”
“Spend enough time with my mother and Iyaate and you’re hard pressed not to,” he says.
His tone is as layered as feathers upon a bird, and ruffling just the same. It’s not black enough to be bitterness, but threads of tension pull here and there when it comes to his mother, his mentor, Iyaate. He’s like a machine pulled from alignment.
“Coming back is different,” she says, in hopes of pulling a knot free.
“That it is,” he says, leaning into her words. “The mountains lie to the west, and the roads still wind the same, but…”
“It is Erenville who returns, not Elene’shpya?”
His nose wrinkles like it did when Iyaate said it. “Just so,” he says.
“You don’t like Elene’shpya?” she says.
He glances at her from the corner of his eye. He’s not truly agitated, but she’s yet to win his smile back. “Not all of us have such straightforward names,” he says, gesturing to her.
It gives her pause. She finds, despite herself, a laugh escapes her. When his brow only furrows, she says, “Do you think my mother named me for a weapon, Erenville?”
It’s all on his face, the realization. He looks at her fully, mouth parting, and she swears she sees embarrassed red rise into his cheek. He says, “I thought it a surname. But when you put it that way, I suppose she wouldn’t have. It’s Eorzean, besides, and many of the rumors state the Warrior of Light is Hingan. I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me if that’s untrue.”
“What a kind rumor,” she says. “Yes. From a little farming village in Othard.”
“That spares me some embarrassment,” he says. “Now that I’ve made a fool of myself, may I ask your given name?”
“Only my brother calls me by it, anymore,” she says. There’s a little ache to hear Touya say it. It sounds right in his accent, and it calls all the love of their family to her mind. She’s jealous with it. She doesn’t wish to spurn Erenville’s question, though. Another name rises more easily to her mind these days, anyway.
“There’s another. You said when you went to Sharlayan, you chose Erenville to better fit the customs of the Viera there, yes?” she says. “When we…when mother and I…”
Her throat dries suddenly. Erenville does not need the veritable trench of upset that is her flight from Othard and the splintering of her family. She rushes past it in her mind like water over river rocks. He must recognize the hitch in her breath. He sees the rustle of a single leaf on a branch, so it must be easy to read her hesitation. But he is kind enough to wait for her to gather herself and try again.
“There was occupation of our village,” Sabre says. “We refuged in Ishgard, and my mother gave me a name to use there.”
The Scions all know it by now, though fewer know it from her mouth. Alphinaud heard it from her first, she thinks, the first time they returned to Ishgard. Thancred got it not long after, and from there she forgets. She thinks Raha knows it from the book, rather than her voice. Few others. Haurchefant asked point blank and she was stunned enough to answer; Aymeric inquired as a formality, has used it once or twice when he wishes to honor her, though more often just through written word. Ameliance likes to use it when she comes for tea, and undoubtedly learned it from Tataru, who may have truly been the first to discover it at all.
“I was young enough to pick up the language, but that’s only half the trouble,” Sabre says. “I think she hoped the name would make it easier for me. Ariadne.”
“Ariadne?” Erenville says. It tumbles so differently from his mouth than from an Ishgardian’s, but it’s no less lovely. “I’d hardly know it wasn’t your only name. I’ll not use it if you’d prefer, but it suits you very much.”
Mother would have loved to know so. Sabre hasn’t thought about it in so long. Perhaps it’s the speak of Erenville’s own mother, of Wuk Lamat’s nursemaid, that brings Sabre’s own to mind. So often has this name stung, each spoken instance reminding her of the one who can no longer speak it to her, of the dreadful, freezing years in Ishgard alone, hiding away the last gift mother ever gave her. But Erenville holds it differently, and it doesn’t hurt to hear. It feels like the slow seep of warmth from a fresh mug of tea, or a sunbeam falling upon a shoulder after the shade.
“You can call me that, if you’d like to,” Sabre says. If her voice is softer than before, if her answer takes a moment too long, Erenville does not comment.
“Perhaps when it is just you and I,” he says. “Do you mean to keep it secret?”
She did before. Ariadne. The only thing mother had given her that couldn’t be stolen, or lost, or broken. It was hers alone when she had nothing else. Sabre was cheeky, perhaps. On the nose. But in the same way her brother had thought his fourteen years enough to stay behind at war, young Ariadne needed a shield. Quick as her quill and just as dexterous, but with a cutting edge and a lethal point. A safeguard in the Brume, or so it felt, even coming from a trembling girl.
She has other defenses now, and offenses besides. Her other monikers speak louder than even the name she’s given herself.
“Not as I used to,” she says. “But it’s like an old book of sketches I’ve forgotten about.”
She stretches her legs out, crossing one ankle over the other. She’s finally cooled in the shade of the tree and the breeze of the lake, enjoying the softness of the blanket on her legs. She leans her weight back on her hands.
Erenville hums. “Then I will stop asking you to turn its pages.”