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Mor Dhona’s daylight had been tinged viscera-pink for a week straight as the aetheric storms fizzled and sputtered overhead. I drummed my fingertips against my jaw, leaning on my elbows to look out the window from my room on the Seventh Heaven’s fifth floor. People stumbled awake below, wandering across the aetheryte plaza in the early morning light toward whatever they had to do that day. The shadows in the cobblestones were flat and textureless; we’d all stubbed a toe or six getting used to the light.
I rubbed my eye and scraped a little gunk from the corner of my limp-lidded left socket, then straightened away from the window and scooped some clothes from the pile at the foot of my bed. I tugged on a pair of short pants, tied them off below the knee, and pulled on a shirt whose sleeves I’d thoughtlessly torn off once while sweating my tits off in the Black Shroud. It was a bit too cold to go barefoot, so I stomped into my short, stiff boots, then grabbed my sword belt off its peg on the wall and cinched it around my waist. The little pouch holding my pipe and hash dangled half-empty from it.
I draped my hand across Wrothbite’s pommel, feeling steady with his weight at my hip, and closed my eye for a moment. Quiet room. Summer; no fire in the fireplace. A little shuffling on the floors below. A little shuffling above as the rest of the Scions woke.
A scrape and a creak from the side as Kethry exited her room, just next to mine. She didn’t knock before coming in, but I snagged my eyepatch off my nightstand the moment before she came through the door and had it halfway on by the time we made eye contact.
She still flinched, almost imperceptibly, at the sight of the socket she’d emptied. Was fine. I’d asked her to empty it. I’d told her not to worry about it, but she hadn’t managed to stop yet.
“Mornin’,” she hummed, staring two and a half feet up at my chin as I pulled my eyepatch strap snug. Her tail flicked behind her, swishing the hem of the green linen shirt she was wearing: Didn’t sleep well.
“Mornin’,” I hummed back, planting my hand on the crown of her head and splaying my fingers around her pointy, brown-furred ears to ruffle her hair: Could’ve stayed with me.
She sighed, the dark gray skin of her cheeks wrinkling as she pursed her lips, and ducked away: Wasn’t a big deal. “Tataru has errands for us,” and she was out the door before I could blink.
I followed close behind, ducking a little to get under the doorframe. The Seventh Heaven wasn’t built for roegadyn in the first place and I was taller than just about anyone else I’d ever met, so my forehead was always purple with bruises whenever I stayed for more than a day or two. I laced my fingers into my hair and started to braid it, hoping I had a string or something in one of my pockets so I could tie it off.
Kethry’s footsteps were heavy enough to be audible, which meant she wasn’t excited about the errands, which then meant we’d have to talk to a lot of people and probably wouldn’t get to hunt anything interesting. We clomped down the stairs—or I clomped, while Kethry padded over each step until her boots finally scraped stone on the ground floor.
The Seventh Heaven’s bar wouldn’t be open until the afternoon, so we wove between the polished tables and stacked chairs in dim light and silence to push through the back doors into the Rising Stones.
Tataru was already calling us over before I’d shut the door behind me with my elbow, just about done braiding my hair and resigned to scavenging a piece of string to tie it off. “Ladies! You’ll sure be on your feet today, or Thal’s coffers don’t jingle. But first, Pakik, come and sit. You won’t like this, but I need your signature on some things. Kethry, do whatever you want for a few minutes.”
Before Tataru had finished speaking, Kethry had plopped herself into the only cushioned chair in the room and pulled out her journal and a pencil. She set her heels on the edge of the chair, ankles crossed, then braced her journal against her knees and started to slowly draw her meaningless little lines into it.
Alphinaud said she needed to learn her letters. She seemed to believe him. I couldn’t think of a single goddamn reason why I should have to look at a piece of paper and read words when someone could just say them out loud to me instead.
Tataru waved me down into a chair sized for a hyur. It creaked under my weight. All the good chairs in the Rising Stones had been stolen—or “reclaimed”, depending on who you asked—while the Scions had been in exile in Ishgard; the ones we’d been able to afford to replace them so far were cheap and shitty. I’d broken three already. With my knees crunched up into my tits and the end of my braid pulled over my shoulder to hold between my fingertips, I hunched forward over Tataru’s desk and stared down the barrel of a million pages of stupid little scribbles that couldn’t possibly be important at all.
“This is incredibly important, Pakik. Listen closely.” Tataru, standing upright on a chair just like mine, leaned both her hands onto the table. On her feet atop the chair, she was about at my eye level when I was sitting; only the feather sticking out of her dark pink beret made her any taller than me. “We’re under attack!”
I shot to my feet, dropped my braid, and clamped my hand around Wrothbite’s hilt. “Where.” The room was empty, nothing breathing except for the three of us, as my chair clattered to the ground.
“What? No! Sit back down.”
Kethry chuckled from the corner: She’s talking about the paperwork, idiot.
I grumbled and picked the chair back up, setting it upright and crunching myself back onto it. “How the hell are we under attack from some fucking paper?” I cocked my head to pull my braid around to my chest, fixed the strands that had come loose, and added, “Also, you got a string?”
Tataru shuffled through one of her drawers and handed me a string while she talked. “You remember Momodi, of course?”
“Mm-hmm,” I nodded as I wrapped the string around the end of my braid. A lock of hair from my forehead pulled loose from the braid as I tied, hanging down in front of my face. I quirked my lips to puff it aside. “At the Quicksand. We almost got her a seat on the Syndicate with that little gang war, y’know, before the Sultansworn broke it all up.”
“Right. Of course you did. Well, see, she still... sort of owns your contract. And I, ah... well, we...”
“The paper’s attacking you, is what you’re saying.”
Tataru winced. “Precisely. Ah... do you remember how we all used to skip the “of” when we said your name? We wrote it wrong, too. And Momodi, the crafty old fox, didn’t. Now, she’s trying to leverage her position as the head of the Ul’dah Adventurer’s Guild to demand a commission for just about every bit of work you’ve done for the Scions all at once, claiming you were under her Guild contract the entire time.” Tataru clenched her fist, then stopped herself from punching the table. “Which you weren’t, but she’s looking to exploit a legal loophole involving our, um... misspellings. So! I need your help to do some creative retroactive accounting. Or, more precisely, I need your signature!”
“You spelled my name wrong for a year?”
“You don’t even know how to spell your name, Pakik!”
“Yeah I do! Pakik at the front, Of in the middle, and Manahacha at the end!”
“Those are words, not letters! Anyroad, all I need is your thumb.”
“You can’t have it. I’m already down an—” I cut myself off and glanced over at Kethry. “You can’t have it.”
“Not the whole thing, Pakik; just the print.”
“You can’t have that eith—”
“Shush. Here’s the ink sponge:” She slid a little black square over to me. “Just press your thumbprint into that, then press it down onto the papers I hand you. Do be careful; that ink is particularly expensive.” She winked at me. “And not entirely legal to procure. It’s meant to dry and age quickly so that it’s indistinguishable from older records; that way, the Syndicate’s lawyers won’t be able to tell the difference. I even took the liberty of digging up all this old, unused parchment,” she gestured at the stack in front of her, “so I could copy down your entire contract file. All last night, by the by.”
We shuffled through at least four hundred thousand pieces of scribbled-on paper, each with a little line for my thumbprint. I stamped until my knuckle was sore.
Thancred was the first of the Scions to get downstairs, which was surprising until I realized he hadn’t slept. The bag under his eye—the one not covered by that raggedy eyepatch—was big enough to stuff a live chocobo inside with space to roam. He set himself down on a chair at the same table as Kethry, easing onto it as it creaked under his weight. He was less than half my size, but the chairs still protested for him. He still hadn’t explained about his eye yet, but he’d been busy doing spy shit; he hadn’t even been out drinking with us since that night at Buscarron’s.
He leaned back in his chair and drew his knife and whetstone, filling the room with a rhythmic, soothing scraping.
Shtola came down next, but just swept wordlessly up to Tataru’s desk and grabbed three books stacked on the corner before returning upstairs.
We finished with the thumb-stamping and Tataru called Kethry over. I unfolded myself from the chair, rolled out my shoulders, popped my neck so loudly it echoed off the stone walls, and leaned against the wall by Tataru’s desk with my arms crossed. “So what’s the rest of the day?”
“I have to clean Phoebe. She got into some dead fish again,” Kethry said, stepping up to my side. “So I need to be back by the evening.”
Tataru knuckled her round, soft jaw. “If you’re quick... Bah, what am I saying. You’ll have plenty of time. Hmm... Actually, Kethry, you’ll have to come back early regardless. The last thing on this list is a visit with Ser Aymeric, and last I checked, you aren’t exactly welcome in Ishgard.”
Kethry’s face paled and her fingers flexed: I didn’t have a choice. She made a little noise.
I clicked my tongue: S’fine. I can handle it.
The little shifts in her stance, the language we spoke to each other without words, showed me how her body flooded with guilt. No, not quite guilt: embarrassment. She didn’t regret the Temple Knights whose bodies she’d tossed off the edge of the city or the way she’d snuck into Ser Zephirin’s house to kill him and his wife. She didn’t regret all the damage she’d done to the Church of Halone; she’d die believing she was right about that.
No, she was embarrassed that she was making me do the work. I slapped her shoulder. “See? Plenty of time for Phoebe.” Under the words, pushed into her through my hand: Stop feeling bad about it, dipshit.
She didn’t like it, but she collected herself. “What’s before that?”
“First things first: Voidsent in Thanalan. Last sighting was near the road between Zanr’ak and the Sagolii Desert. It shouldn’t be powerful enough to pull more monsters from the Void after itself yet, but we’d rather take care of it before the Amalj’aa start thinking about summoning Ifrit again.”
I straightened a little. “That, then breakfast, or breakfast first?”
Tataru chuckled. “Not that urgent, Pakik. Just before the next thing, which is... well, neither of you are going to like this.”
My head started to hurt as I ran through all the things she could say that I wouldn’t like. I lost count pretty quick.
“Admiral Bloefhiswyn,” Merlwyb was cool; wasn’t sure what I’d be pissed about yet, “has requested your presence at the Moraby Drydocks,” she was starting to lose me, “to say a few words about the Lominsan shipyards’ newest vessel, Charybdis.” Uh-oh. “They’ve named it in honor of your triumph over Leviathan, so they’d like to—”
“She wants us to give a speech? Is she fucking stupid?”
Kethry shook her head. “The Admiral isn’t stupid. But also, we’re not doing that.”
Tataru frowned. “Given our still-tentative relationship with the nations of Eorzea after the Crystal Braves disaster, I think you might not have a choice. We need to do whatever it takes to stay in their good graces right now.”
“Can’t they ask Alphinaud?” Kethry asked, ears twitching madly to say: I’d rather be keelhauled on that ship than make a speech about her.
“He’s too busy; you know that. After the Braves... well, I don’t think he’s ready yet. And here, I already wrote you a speech!” Tataru whipped out a sheet of paper, held it up, blushed, said, “Whoops, wrong one,” and swapped it for another. “I kept it short and simple so you can read it, Kethry.”
Kethry pinched the paper from Tataru’s outstretched hand like it was coated in acid, then held it up close to her face. Her eyebrows were knotted up like bootlaces and her tail lifted dust clouds from the floor as it swished back and forth. “I... would have been, um. Proud? Proud. To sail on this fine ship, uh...”
She turned the paper around and pointed out a word to Tataru, who whispered, “Charybdis.”
“This fine ship, Charybdis. I wish the...” She twitched, almost showing Tataru the word again, then wrinkled her nose: No, that one’s easy. “I wish the Maelstrom calm seas and s... stee... steady? Steady, um, winds, on her ma—”
Kethry’s deep gray cheeks flushed darker and she handed the paper back to Tataru. Half-covering her mouth, she mumbled, “Can you read it to me? I’ll just try to remember it.”
Tataru’s eyes welled up with pity for a brief moment before she stomped it back down for Kethry’s benefit. “Of course. Here, listen up: ‘I would have been proud to sail on this fine ship, Charybdis. I wish the Maelstrom calm seas and steady winds on her maiden voyage.’ Then, just do the old salute. They’ll hand you or Pakik a bottle of wine and you’ll break it on the bow, then you’ll be done.”
Kethry’s jaw bunched up. “I would have been proud to sail on this fine ship, Charybdis. I wish the Maelstrom, steady, uh, seas... shit. No, I got it. I wish the Maelstrom calm seas and steady winds on her maiden voyage.” She nodded curtly. “There.”
“Then I break the bottle? Am I supposed to drink it, too?” I pressed my fingers into the back of my neck, massaging the knot in the muscle there. Ever since Kethry had popped my eyeball out, I’d had to angle my head a little to adjust my field of view; my neck muscles hadn’t quite adjusted yet.
“Hah! No, the wine is for the ship. You just break it and toss the neck into the water.” Tataru folded the paper in half and handed it to Kethry. “In case you forget.”
“I won’t,” Kethry promised, but took the paper anyway and slipped it into a pouch on her belt.
“After that?”
“Well, after that, Kethry has a chocobo to clean, but you’ll be headed to Ishgard to meet with Aymeric.”
Kethry hummed a high note. “I thought you said we’d be busy all day?”
Tataru sighed. “I wanted to give you plenty of time to find the Voidsent, even if you’ll probably make short work of it once you do. And you might get roped into some of the celebrations around Charybdis’ launch. Pakik, you’ll need to be in Ishgard by mid-afternoon.”
I shrugged and said my goodbyes, then followed Kethry up to her room to help her get her armor on. No point in going out half-cocked, even if it was just a Voidsent.
#
After wolfing down breakfast in Ul’dah and spending the rest of the morning tracking the Voidsent, the damn thing exploded into a cloud of aether in three hits. I blasted it off balance with a stone spell cast through my hora, Kethry bowled into it from the side to stab her sword through its carapace, and I whipped Wrothbite across the spot I figured was probably its throat. Barely had enough time to figure out what kind of animal it looked like before its corpse dissipated, melting into the ambient aether around us. Crab, but with bear legs. Probably.
I flicked Wrothbite clean, sending a spattered line of black blood onto the dirt, and sheathed him. “Great. Easy.” My fingers twitched, unsatisfied, and my stomach growled as my too-small breakfast burned itself out in my belly. I’d accidentally stabbed through one of the Voidsent’s foot bones instead of between them. My aim was way off with Wrothbite; I couldn’t even stab wasps out of the air with him. Just needed practice. Just needed a real fight, then I’d get back into the groove.
His shape, weight, and balance mirrored my wife Wellwisher perfectly for no reason I could tell. His blade didn’t seem to dull—or at least hadn’t dulled so far—and the leather-wrapped handle under his crossguard seemed to fuse with my hand when I lifted him. After a few weeks wielding him, the ache of memory wasn’t so bad anymore. I knew where my memories of Wellwisher and my husband Manahacha were: down at the base of my gut, wrapped in chains made of the violence I’d learned since falling to Eorzea.
I shuffled on my heels and turned thoughtlessly to face south. The high crest of a dune peeked over the top of a low mesa—the headsands of the Sagolii Desert. The first ground I’d touched in Eorzea. Waking up in midair, twenty or so feet above the top of the dune, then falling and tumbling naked down its slope. Dragging myself to my feet and running from a sandworm that’d burst from the dune when I’d come to a stop, feeling the strain in my scrawny muscles and knowing exactly one thing: I wasn’t home anymore.
On the northern edge of the desert, I’d fallen facefirst into a little oasis town, passed out from everything that could make a person pass out, and woken up in a cot in the back room of Ul’dah’s Pugilist’s Guild. I hadn’t understood a thing I’d seen or felt when I’d woken up. They’d barely been able to piece together my terrified gibbering about everything being wrong. Chuchuto was the first lalafell I ever saw. I’d thought she was a child and she’d jumped six feet off the ground to slap me for saying so. We were best friends after that, half because I’d never known what a friend was before and half because she taught me almost everything I knew about living in Ul’dah. She’d showed me how to make myself strong again: speed, strength, weight, the flowing motions of pugilism that turned fighting into a dance. Nothing like the power I’d known before, but the closest I could get.
To the drydocks? asked the clicking of Kethry’s sword into its loop on her back.
I blinked, shook myself, and nodded, then slackened myself to slip into the Lifestream.
Inside, I focused in on the signature of the aetheryte at the Moraby Drydocks, thrust myself toward it, and started the tedious and obnoxious process of keeping all my parts attached while I teleported. Arm started drifting away; pull it back. Brain slipped through my skull; yank it in again. The body I’d rebuilt for life in Eorzea was the only thing in this world that I was really proud of. I knew every inch of it: how all the muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and bones moved. I’d built it up to be as strong as possible. After dismantling King Thordan in the bowels of that Allagan ruin in the sky, I’d started to think I was getting pretty close.
I popped out of the Lifestream boots-first, then towed the rest of myself onto the flagstones overlooking the harbor. Kethry was already sweeping past me, head down, eyes narrowed, aimed straight for the giant boat in the main drydock. I followed her.
I knew every inch of Kethry’s body just like I knew my own. A month or two back, we’d entered a tournament on the Bloodsands in Ul’dah together. I’d been weaker than her when we started and just as strong when we finished. I’d paid my toll for it: she’d crushed my left eye and torn it out when we’d faced each other in the final round. The scar she’d put in my shoulder—the sword stroke that had cleaved through my collarbone and nicked the meat of my heart—never ached. I knew the scar under her ribs where I’d knifed my hand into her chest never ached either. They tethered us together, showing each of us the way the other would move. The memory of how we’d moved on the Bloodsands—and the memory of why—meant we could talk the easy way: by meaning things, instead of saying them out loud.
Right now, Kethry was telling me that she was considering putting one of Merlwyb’s guns to her own head instead of giving the speech. How had it gone? I mumbled to myself, “I’d be proud... aw, fuck.” Hoped she had it.
She did: I saw the way the sides of her neck twitched as she mouthed out the words. She’d be fine.
We found a Maelstrom officer, decked out in that thick-ass red uniform that always looked miserable to wear when it was sunny, who pointed us to Merlwyb. The Admiral was standing just inside the shadow of the huge-ass boat, flanked and dwarfed by three of her beefy roegadyn lieutenants, each almost as big as me. I crossed my arms and settled onto my heels to wait for her to finish whatever she was saying to the lalafellin man in front of her. Guessing off the leather gloves, toolbelt, and wooden mallet, he was probably the shipwright.
“An’ she’s seaworthy, but the—”
“If you have few enough concerns to worry yourself over something as trifling as a smudge on the captain’s cabin window, Patutopu, I trust Charibdys’ essential rigging is more than ready,” Merlwyb interrupted, voice teetering on the edge between exasperated and dangerous. “Withdraw your wrights so my sailors may board.”
Patutopu dragged his hands down his cheeks and groaned. “Would you—?! Argh, o’course, Admiral.” He turned away with the laziest salute I’d ever seen and jogged toward one of the ladders set against the side of the ship, then started clambering up it.
Merlwyb turned to us. “Ah. Warriors of Light. Good of you to join us. I trust you have a few words prepared?”
She was looking at me when she asked, which would’ve been funny if it didn’t make her seem kind of stupid. I nodded down toward Kethry, even as I felt her whole body lock up like she’d just gotten stabbed in the neck.
“Mm-hmm,” Kethry nodded, reaching into the pouch at her belt where she’d stashed the speech Tataru had written. “Yeah. Um, when do I...?”
“I will call for you. Thank you for this, truly. The sailors will do well to hear from someone who once wore the uniform.” Merlwyb extended her hand to Kethry. “Private Ament.”
Kethry got caught halfway between a Maelstrom salute and taking Merlwyb’s hand. I flicked my head toward Merlwyb: Second one, idiot.
She caught the motion from the corner of her eye and corrected to the handshake. “Yeah. Um, it’s short.”
“I hardly expect you to provide the kind of exhaustive oration that the Leveilleur boy gives.”
Merlwyb left us to go do something else important. With no familiar faces in the small crowd of sailors, shipwrights, and locals, we just stood where we were. The sun crept higher and pulled the shadow off us, making me glad I’d found a shirt with no sleeves. Kethry had to be roasting in her full plate armor.
Her forehead was glistening, but it wasn’t from the heat. A vein pulsed in her temple. I tapped her shoulder with a knuckle: Practice again real quick.
In a perfect monotone, she recited, “I would be proud to sail on a ship as fine as Charibdys,” then stopped.
“Was that it? I thought there was more.”
“That’s all I can remember,” Kethry whispered, teeth chattering.
“Where’s the paper?”
“I wanna get it right.”
Merlwyb appeared on a raised platform and started giving a speech to the crowd.
I worked my tongue through my teeth. “Then read it off the paper.”
“That’s—” Her eyes said cheating, then she coughed and pulled the paper out. “I would be proud to sail on a ship as fine as Charibdys. I wish the Maelstrom calm seas and steady wind for her main— for her maiden void... maiden... Shit. Shit, shit.” She barely stopped herself from crumpling the paper, instead carefully folding it with quivering hands.
We both turned to watch as Merlwyb shouted something and the dockhands heaved on massive ropes to pull the ship out of the drydock and into the water. They guided it to the end of the dock, then tied it back in place there. Red-uniformed sailors dashed back and forth across the deck, readying it to sail. “Fuck, did we miss it?”
“No,” Kethry murmured. “Next thing is the speech.”
I put my hand on the back of her head and stepped in close, pulling the side of her face into my belly: Just go give it a shot and we can leave.
She blew a raspberry into my shirt, then pulled free: We could just go now.
“Tataru would yell at you.”
I heard our names from the raised platform. Kethry and I whipped our heads that direction.
“The Warriors of Light have been so kind as to offer Charibdys their blessing! Miss Ament, would you like to say a few words?”
“Knock ‘em dead, bud,” I chuckled, then shoved Kethry into the crowd.
Her steps steadied and she stopped fidgeting with the paper as she walked through the space the audience cleared for her. She drummed her fingers on her thigh: I would be proud to sail...
A hyuran Maelstrom sailor tapped my elbow. “Miss Manahacha?”
I quelled the chill that ran up my spine whenever anyone called me that. “Yeah.”
“With Miss Ament giving the speech, will you do the honors?” He held up a wine bottle. I recognized the dark glass and the label: the same one Kethry and I had “borrowed” from Shamani Lohmani when we’d gone fishing together on the cliffs above the Bloodshore. His ninth-best. Would’ve thought the Maelstrom would spring for a better one.
“You got it.” I snatched the bottle from the sailor’s hands and went to stand by the bow of the ship. It towered over me, probably twenty-five feet above my head. Big fucker. At least I couldn’t miss with the bottle.
Kethry’s voice barely reached me, but I could make out her words clearly enough. “Hi, uh.” She chewed her cheek for a second, then shook out her face and returned to that mechanical monotone: “I would have been proud to sail, um, on a ship seas like Charibdys,” and I watched all the blood drain from her cheeks. She gulped and plowed onward. “I wish you would sail steady and—”
Ah, hell. I turned away before I could see her knees start to shake, drew Wrothbite, screamed “HEAVE HO, MOTHERFUCKERS!” at the top of my lungs, and slashed through both of the six-inch-thick ropes holding the ship in place before throwing the wine bottle up at the bow as hard as I could.
I turned around and sheathed Wrothbite to see everyone in the crowd staring at me (and away from Kethry). A few drops of wine and a little shard of glass bounced off my head as I watched Kethry slip off the stage and disappear. Perfect. I did a bad Maelstrom salute and walked back down the dock, ignoring the confused eyes on me until they slowly started cheering and clapping for the ship.
The sailors probably had a handle on it, so I picked up my pace to a jog and followed Kethry’s path out of the drydocks and onto the cliffs to the south.
I found her squatting on her haunches in the lee of a copse of trees, wrists set on her knees and fingers tensed into claws. I stopped behind her and thought for a second, then grabbed her by the collar and yanked her to her feet.
She yelped, which meant she’d been so deep in her own head that she hadn’t noticed me approach. I flicked her forehead: Over now. Stop worrying.
Kethry slapped my hand away and huffed, then slumped her shoulders. “Fine. Let’s go.”
#
I left Kethry to mope her way back to Revenant’s Toll and wash Phoebe, then slumped into the Lifestream to get myself to Ishgard.
I didn’t like the city either. It was like a bad version of Ul’dah: most of the same things still sucked, but everyone’s name was too hard to say, only the Temple Knights were allowed to mug people, it was cold as fuck, and there was never a drop of tequila in the city. I lit my pipe and puffed away as I trudged up the long walk to Aymeric’s office.
The route took me across a bridge over a gap between the cliffs. I bet Ishgardians joked about what it’d be like to fall all that way, getting all the details wrong because they didn’t know what was down there, didn’t know the Tunnel or the Dark below. I kept my eye aimed straight forward and walked directly along the middle of the bridge, shouldering past a man in a fancy suit and ignoring his indignant blubbering until I got back to solid-ish ground on the far side.
With real rock under my feet, I spun to walk a few steps backward and flip the guy off, then tromped the rest of the way to the big tower where Aymeric worked. Like there was any building in Ishgard that wasn’t a big tower.
He wasn’t there. A Temple Knight with a dent in his breastplate exactly the size and shape of my worn-out right boot told me Aymeric was waiting for me at the top of the vault of the big church, giving me directions through a seething lockjaw and barely succeeding at keeping his hand off his sword. I thanked him with a pat on the head and skedaddled before he had a chance to draw.
Aymeric was all the way up, probably because he was an asshole who hated me. I squeezed inside one of the skinny-as-hell spiral staircases, then shuffled sideways up exactly a thousand and twenty-four steps that were cut for narrow-shouldered elezen. Had to take a break near the top as my lower back started to cramp; I plopped down to sit cross-legged in a little alcove, fiddled with the eight-inch-wide window, smashed the glass with my elbow when I realized it didn’t have hinges, and smoked half a bowl of hash as the thin-aired breeze froze the sweat on my face. Rejuvenated, I trudged up the last hundred and twenty-ish steps to the horrible and shitty airship dock at the top.
My eyes locked on the place where they’d scrubbed Haurchefaunt’s blood from the stone. I knew exactly how many steps it had been from that point to the end of the long, suspended aerial pier. I knew exactly how quickly I could cross the distance and how far I could jump off the conical pillars at the end. I knew exactly how long it took to hit the bottom.
Aymeric probably didn’t. “Ah, Pakik! ‘Tis good to see your face. I trust the shattering of glass I heard a few moments ago was your doing?”
I grunted and leaned against the doorframe with my arms crossed, rubbing my triceps to fight the chill. “What’d you want?”
Aymeric drew himself up straighter, folded his hands behind his back, and inhaled. His words puffed clouds into the wind. “Though much remains to be done, I wished to—”
“And why the fuck did you make me come all the way up here for it?”
He closed his eyes and his face fell. “I spend much of my time here of late. Where my office must remain bedecked with the trappings of Ishgard’s past—false—glory, this place is... bare. I hear little but the wind.” He took a smooth step to the side and nodded me forward. “Would you spare a moment to listen?”
“Can hear it fine from here,” I mumbled under my breath, then pushed myself off the wall and walked over to Aymeric. I kept my eye down to watch every step. Wasn’t taking any chances. When I reached his side, I sat cross-legged and draped my wrists over my knees.
Decent weather. A bit clouded over, but not a dull enough gray to flatten out all the shadows and not a harsh enough wind to drive me back inside. Warm for Ishgard, which meant chillier than fuck. Should’ve followed Kethry back to Revenant’s Toll for my jacket first, but then I probably wouldn’t have come and Tataru would’ve yelled at me.
Aymeric knelt at my side. “In the rush of your hunt for the Archbishop in Azys Lla and the chaos of the aftermath, I had no chance to properly thank you. Or Kethry.”
“Mm-hmm.” In what fucking world did that matter?
“I regret that I could not invite her as well, but...”
“But she killed too many of your Temple Knights.”
His eyebrows twitched, then he nodded. “Despite the Heaven’s Ward’s involvement in the Archbishop’s plot, her... incursion into Ser Zephirin’s household was not well-received among Ishgard’s noble houses. There was only so much I could do to assuage their fears. She is, of course, wanted for murder in Ishgard, though few would be so bold as to risk a trial by combat against her. So, in addition to the thanks I wish to give you for your aid in ending the Dragonsong War, I would ask that you convey those thanks to Kethry.”
“Sure.” I rocked up to my feet and turned to leave.
“Pakik.”
I stopped; my shoulders sagged.
“The former Count du Fortemps wishes to know if you have visited Haurchefant’s grave.”
If Kethry were there, she would’ve seen me answer. Since she wasn’t, Aymeric just watched me leave.
#
Couldn’t focus well enough to get into the Lifestream from the top of Ishgard, so I had to go down the hard way. Easier than up. About halfway down, the staircase let out into the church’s gigantic attic space; I stepped out and took a seat on a crate to collect myself before teleporting back to Revenant’s Toll.
Breath came easier under Mor Dhona’s pink-clouded sky. The aetheric crackle coming off the looming storm had swollen, whispering that the lightning and rain would start any second now. I licked my lips and fiddled with my eyepatch as I looked up into it. Probably another week of bluster, then we’d find out if the storm would actually hit.
Back inside the Rising Stones, Tataru was shuffling the same old papers, alone at her desk in an empty room. I walked over to her and set my hands on the only two open spaces on her desk to ask, “Where’s Kethry?”
“Ah! Hi, Pakik! How was... oh, hells, I don’t know. I was so absorbed in my—but then—she hasn’t—what time is it?”
“I dunno. Late afternoon.”
“She should have been back a long while ago, then. Maybe she... No, I would have—”
Before Tataru had a heart attack, I rapped my knuckles on her desk and straightened. “I’ll go find her.”
She wasn’t in her room upstairs. Wasn’t in the stables either, even though Phoebe was. I couldn’t tell if Phoebe was clean. I never bothered washing Chunks; he took care of that himself. Kethry wasn’t up at the Ironworks tent or talking with the Doman refugees.
My steps quickened with every Kethry-less stop. She’d been spacey lately. She could’ve wandered off somewhere. She was probably fine. I skidded to a stop on my heel and turned to chase down a pair of brown miqo’te ears poking up over the marketplace crowd, but the woman’s gait was wrong. Couldn’t hear her voice over the clamor, even if she’d been talking. I wrapped my left hand around Wrothbite’s hilt and squeezed.
He filled my left eye socket with aether vision; I traced through people’s signatures until my head hurt, then squeezed tighter and hunted for trails. Nothing.
So she’d wandered off. I jogged down the hill from the markets to the aetheryte, then past it and through the gates toward Silvertear Lake, holding my eye wide and scanning back and forth for her. She could handle any mess she got into in Mor Dhona, but...
There, by the old ruins where the science camp used to be: Kethry, still in her armor, staring up at the top of the giant crystal spike—or tower, whatever the fuck—looming, a thousand feet tall or so, over Mor Dhona. Her hands were clamped around the red steel fauld armoring her hips. I could hear its leather straps creak from ten yards out.
I’d never found out what the science camp was for. They’d been set up there when the Scions had moved into the Rising Stones, but I hadn’t been paying much attention to anything at all back then. I’d gone to find a bag of sand for the scientists once, but I’d lost it on the way back and never stopped by the camp again. They’d been researching the crystal spike, probably. Sounded like it’d appeared out of the ground a few years back, long before I got to Eorzea.
Kethry stood right about where I remembered the edge of the tents being. I kicked a rock to let her know I was coming, but she didn’t react. I took a deep breath and approached.
“Kethry.”
No response.
“Kethry,” a little louder, and nothing. I relaxed my hips and shoulders to brace for an attack, then put my hand on her shoulder and shook her a little.
She yelped and whipped her head around to me. Her hand shot halfway to the hilt of her sword before she realized where she was. “Mrmgh,” she gargled, smacking her dried-out lips and scrunching up her face. “Hi. Um. I’m fine. Just tired.” The way her arm went limp and fell to her side said something besides exhaustion. “Where are...?” she started, then trailed off as she looked around.
When she’d looked up at me, I’d seen the last few wisps of yellowish-gray mist flow into her tear ducts. It’d been clouding her eyes. I’d seen it plenty before. Something Fray did to her, or for her, sometimes.
“C’mon, you didn’t even clean Phoebe.”
She shook a flash of guilt out of her face, spraying it into the chilly air as a fan of sweat, revealing a deep worry that I couldn’t do anything about. Her expression groaned wordlessly through our bond as the slow, hesitant relaxation in her core said: Sorry you had to come get me.
I held out my hand: It’s not hard. C’mon.
Kethry took it, lacing her fingers through mine so we could walk back up to Revenant’s Toll together. Through the shifting and squeezing of her fingers, I felt her worry condense into a little marble that she shoved into the back of her mind, pushing it aside for now. It’d be back, but it was tucked safely away and she had a chocobo to clean.
After going up to her room so I could help her out of her armor, then telling Tataru that everything had gone fine, I plonked down on a stool in Phoebe’s stable while Kethry picked through what seemed like every single one of Phoebe’s feathers and I regretted smoking my hash bag empty in Ishgard. She scrubbed, brushed, picked, and groomed obsessively, throwing herself into the familiar movements like they were a steel cable tying her to the present.
When she finished, I asked, “Can you do Chunks, too?”
The sagging of her shoulders said: That’d be nice.
#
I went to sleep alone in my room above the bar with the window open and a candle burning so that the Tunnel and the Dark couldn’t find me. I woke up with the window closed, the candle extinguished, and Kethry snoring softly in my arms. She stayed asleep when I wriggled my arm out from under and craned my neck to see the pre-dawn glow outside. Her feet kicked a little: Gimme the blanket, so I tossed it back over her before dropping to the floor and doing a few hundred push-ups to start my day.
She woke up around the time I moved on to squats, squinted at me for a moment, then rolled out of bed and joined me in my exercises.
The sun had risen by the time we finished our workout and went downstairs. Our faces were flushed and we’d only gotten halfway dressed; I hadn’t bothered braiding my hair yet and Kethry’s still hung loose and tangled over her shoulders.
Alphinaud, standing ramrod-straight in front of Tataru’s desk, glanced our way and blushed a little. The springy little lock curling up from his hair jiggled as he turned away. “I do hope you slept well.”
Kethry sighed and hummed contentedly. I set a hand on her shoulder and squeezed: I did. Thanks.
“Would it kill you two lovebirds to be the slightest bit circumspect? You’re worse than Aenor and the Boulders lately!” Tataru groaned, then waved Alphinaud’s attention to a stack of papers on her desk and winked at us. “You know how he gets about your… pillow-friendliness.”
I didn’t, but I sat down cross-legged on a table and started twisting my hair into a braid. The same old lock pulled out and hung loose in front of my good eye. I puffed it out of the way and asked, “What’re we doing today, Tataru?”
Alphinaud turned to me—and Kethry, who’d flopped into a chair in front of me and leaned her head against my knee—and clasped his hands together. “Today, ladies, I have something special in mind for you. ‘Tis my hope that it will prove more engaging than your errands yesterday. Come, I will tell you of our plans en route,” he said, not moving.
“What is it?” Kethry scratched at the tips of her ears and smoothed the fur there into points. “Also, Tataru, do you have some string?”
“Shit, fuck. For me, too?” I scooped some goo from the corner of my good eye and wiped it on the edge of the table, holding the tip of my braid in my other hand.
Tataru made Alphinaud bring us the strings, fished from one of the bottomless drawers in her desk, and Kethry put her hair up into a ponytail as I tied off my braid. Alphinaud settled onto his heels and drew himself up straighter, still about two feet shorter than me where I sat hunched atop the table, and said, “Do you recall the lighthouse at Pharos Sirius, Kethry? You had been slated to assist a team of Maelstrom soldiers in slaying the siren that had claimed it, but an unknown adventurer eliminated the threat before you had the chance.”
“Mm-hmm. I remember.” Kethry nodded confidently: Not even a little bit.
I bit down a laugh as Alphinaud continued, “A faction of kobolds has established a base of operations in the newly emptied lighthouse. The Maelstrom once again calls for the aid of the Scions. Confident as I am that you will accept, I could not in good conscience do so on your—”
“Yeah. When?” I kicked my legs forward to dangle them off the table on either side of Kethry, then picked a pillow feather from her hair: Does sound a hell of a lot more fun than yesterday.
Kethry sagged forward, then stood. Alphinaud stepped back to give her space, his smile only a little forced, and said, “A Maelstrom skiff pilot will await you at Aleport.”
#
There was no Maelstrom pilot in the skiff at Aleport. “What now, we fuckin’ swim?”
Kethry rolled her eyes and hopped into the little boat, ducking under the beam-thing and plopping onto a bench by the steery-stick. We’d gotten her armor on before leaving Revenant’s Toll; even under its spiky scarlet bulk, her movements were smoother than a fish in water. “Just get in.”
I stepped into the boat one foot at a time, not wanting to risk falling in and soaking the whole entire shirt I’d put on before setting out. The boat was built to carry a squad of roegadyn marauders, so it just dipped an inch deeper into the water and rocked a little. Sitting on a sideways-facing bench and kicking my heels up onto the opposite side, I reached back and fumbled with the knot holding the boat to the dock, trying to pull it loose, but it just kept tightening.
I had Wrothbite halfway drawn when Kethry stood: Stop that. Let me, and stepped across me to lean over and yank the rope free. “Never cut ropes on boats.” She cocked her head and chewed her tongue, mumbled, “Mm…” then leveled a look at me: Unless I say so.
Our little boat started drifting away from the dock. Kethry started pulling on random ropes and somehow got the sail raised, then set the boat on a steady tilt and let the wind carry us out into open water. From the corner of my eye, I saw a little blotch of red sprint down the dock and skid to a halt at the end, waving madly at us and shouting. Kethry waved back, then pointed down below the bench I was sitting on and said, “Gimme.”
I reached under myself and found a thin rod, then pulled it out and handed it to Kethry, who flicked her wrist to unfurl a little flag from it. She whipped it up and down, side to side, and in some weird circles, gesturing toward the distant Maelstrom sailor and almost thwacking me in the face a couple times.
Looking back and forth between Kethry and the rapidly shrinking sailor, eyebrows scrunched up so hard my head hurt, I tried to figure out what the fuck she was saying, but whatever signal her movements were supposed to give wasn’t for me. I clicked my tongue and pulled out my pipe, hash, and sparker so I could smoke the rest of the ride away.
“If you fall behind, I’m not waiting for you,” Kethry grumbled, shoving the little flag back under her seat.
“What? Why would I—?” I waved my pipe at her, then figured out the problem. “Oh, this is a weak one.”
She hooked her knee over the steery-stick and crossed her arms with a rope pulled tight in one of her hands, then slumped back against the edge of the boat: Fine. Then can I try?
I shrugged and tossed the pipe to her. She snatched it from the air with her free hand and took a small test drag, chewed the smoke for a moment, then squirmed deeper into her seat and sucked down a whole lungful before passing my pipe back. Her contented little expression told me the blend wasn’t much stronger than the incense they burned in the temples in Ul’dah.
With Kethry adjusting our steering with her leg, we made our winding way across the strait toward the Pharos Sirius lighthouse. My pipe bowl burned down to ash and I tapped it over the edge, then looked at the sky as the gray specks disappeared under the fold of our wake. Dark down there, but bright up here, and we wouldn’t capsize with Kethry sailing. Salt stung my empty eye socket and sun massaged tension from my muscles. Wrothbite’s hilt hummed a sad little melody into my fingertips as Kethry hummed a tired tune just barely louder than the rushing of wind. I joined in somewhere halfway between the two, drumming my knuckles on the bench in time.
None of the songs were happy, but we were singing them. That counted for more.