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Urianger noticed the Warrior’s light corruption before anyone else. He tried to forget it, to push it from his mind, but because they were lovers, he was simply the one close enough to see its beginnings.
He first noticed it after she had slain the fae king, while healing her. During a spare bell of quiet in the Bookman’s Shelves, he dug his large, slender hands—and his healing magicks—into the muscles of Don’s back. It was something he’d done for her and many other fighters plenty of times. But even in the midst of war, he’d never felt such tension in anyone before. Beneath skin and scale, every other muscle was knotted and cramped; every few minutes, one of them twitched in some odd rhythm.
He tried to chalk it up to the strain of the situation. What the Exarch was asking of her was quite literally world-saving—it would have been an impossible task for anyone else. She was not simply slaying mere Eorzean primals. But what he felt beneath his ministrations that evening felt wrong. Unnatural. Like something was trying to escape her very flesh.
After felling the Lightwarden harbored in the Rak’tika Greatwood, he found Don alone again. They stood beneath the bright rays of the newly revealed sun. He looked down at her short form as she embraced him, her arms around his waist. Clearly proud of her recent victory, she gazed up at him happily—her expression almost… innocent? No. Stature aside, the woman before him was not childish. The look she gave him was one blissfully ignorant of the truth.
She rose up on her toes and tilted her chin toward him. He knew this to be her way of asking for a kiss, so he leaned down slowly to indulge her. He stopped mere ilms from her face, gazing into her eyes lovingly—until he saw what awaited him within them.
They had been lovers for years before he was sent away to the First; he’d looked into her eyes countless times. Read them, studied them, written bad poetry about them. Of course he noticed the instant they changed. Where bright white limbal rings once contrasted sharply with irises as pitch-black as her pupils, he now saw smoke-like wisps of white and grey lining said pupils, reaching outward into her iris—like they were slowly trying to overtake her eyes.
No one else said a thing. It was likely no one else saw a thing. But here, with the sun’s warm rays illuminating her face—as close as only a lover could be—he saw it. Even without reading her aether, the Light had left its mark upon her.
His gut twisted, and he nearly shivered as he tried to school his expression. He kissed her deeply, hoping she couldn’t feel the weight of his deception behind it. For weeks, every bit of eye contact they shared sent his head spinning, his stomach turning, and his pulse thrumming in his temple. He began to wish he hadn’t abandoned his habitual cowl and goggles from the Source.
But every time he tried to pull away, to create some measure of distance, she closed it again. He supposed she was in the right—he was her lover, after all. Why should she not seek his affection? As far as she knew, he had no reason to deny her.
Amongst his sleepless nights, he spent several with his head hung over a wastebin. Tomorrow she would face the final Lightwarden, the Crystal Exarch would kill himself, and he would become the villain—losing his lover for good.