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crimsonfluidessence · 2 years

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Prompt 13: Confluence

Content Warning: Endwalker Spoilers

They were Garleans.

Beings incapable of magic driven away from Eorzea, only to return with an army of every other race and newfound fury to destroy everyone. Even more than dragons back when he was a Temple Knight, they were the enemy, the divine evil. With their large, metal contraptions that spit fire much like a dragon did, and far more numbers to boot. They had no wings of organic matter, but wings of a metallic nature in the sky.

Yes, of course they were terrifying, and as a Temple Knight, Esredes had no sympathy for them. A sword could at least stand up to scale if you managed it- but it could not stand up to pure metal and fire with an unreachable heart. Everything was simple- they were bad news, they were the enemy, they must be fought back at every turn.

As a heretic, Imperials were even more terrifying. Without the might of a properly equipped military, and with full knowledge their machines could down a dragon, how could they ever stand up to them in any meaningful way? They couldn't. At least, not until they discovered a secret Garlean underground lab in the early days of the movement, and there was no one else around to stop their kidnapping and experiments but them. Garleans didn't know about heretic versus Ishgardian, after all- they were all just targets to slaughter, indiscriminately, and a mutual enemy was no friend. And oh, did Esredes find himself much more terrified of facing down Imperials than any Dragoon or Temple Knight.

Yet when they got there, someone was waiting. A woman was waiting to lead a select couple of them in and to victory, because anything was better than working for the mad scientist inside. It would have been so easy to be a trap, an easy way to take down the enemy- and yet, for the first and hopefully last time in his life, Esredes hesitantly donned Imperial armor and a helmet and followed her in, with all of her instructions.

With each passing second, the lifeless, metallic walls all felt like they were closing in, ready to crush him to pieces. And yet the woman kept her word, and when it was all in place, soon everything erupted. Soon there was running, Magitek armors, the base being blown up by one of the defectors, and most of all, the scientist herself, appearing with a laser gun of some sort that shot right at Esredes- and instead hit the woman who jumped in front of him, and died but less than a minute later. Yet the captured, rescued voidsent among the others broken out said she could fix this, if he would make the pact for her, and soon along with four defectors Esredes was left with a lot of people he was forced to trust that day.

Yet there was no benevolent voidsent woman around when that ship had shot Ysayle down, not that there was even a body to revive, so thoroughly had the beam destroyed her... and in an instant, the Imperials had taken away his only chance at happiness, like they had done to so many others.

And in the end, when he joined the fight for Ala Mhigo's liberation as a freelancer, Esredes couldn't deny there had been a rush, a pleasure, a hunger as the fight went on and the blood kept running out of these stunted beings and their allies- and when it had all quieted and the dust settled, it merely retreated back further into him, awaiting another day to breach above water.

Time passed, and passed, and passed. Ishgard continued its subtle and quiet, or not so quiet shifting, and Esredes monitored it from his place within. And then the towers came, and the summons came, and the Garleans came- in tempered form, against all logic. The Alliance had a strict rule in place- there was to be no killing of the tempered unless absolutely necessary. And that hunger Esredes had felt before- was nowhere to be seen. Not even a protest or a whimper. Even the black heart was silent. And when the Contingency formed, and set off to Garlemald- Esredes hadn't taken more than a day to say yes. His heart and blood sang with the need to go despite the logistics of leaving his life behind for a while, and he was there at the Quarter with all the rest within the evening.

There was little joy to be found from the surroundings as the Contingency trudged into Garlemald. The cold bit into ones' very bones, and the tempered Imperials who came to impede their progress, for all their tools, looked hollow and like something was missing. At the least, being a Temple Knight was certainly good for quite a few things, and one of them was disarming and holding people down. It was almost like those days again, pinning down each tempered and handcuffing them before moving on, on each mission that came and went.

Worse was the civilians. The black heart remained still, but each time there were civilians to save, the other parts of Esredes' heart flared to life as long conditioned instincts kicked into gear and he rushed to save and defend them. Surviving amongst the ash and the snow with everything they once had gone, at risk of freezing to death in a hopeless world- no. This time, he would be the one to show them what was over the horizon, even if he knew not what it was. Even if not a single word of thanks or appreciation escaped them, the instincts continued to drive his every move, and the heart laid still.

Some of them came with the Alliance, as well, inevitably. The defectors, the former Imperials and those of Garlean citizenship. A woman with a mysterious little flying device that followed her she claimed could do whatever she wanted, a needed diplomat to establish a relationship with a small cell of survivors and their trigger happy leader, the reserved and mysterious silver-haired Garlean that Esredes never talked to, but watched his various fancy tools of technology come in handy on mission after mission, or him, the young Hyur in the imperial coat who opened up to Esredes as they both worked to heal an injured tempered, eyes full to the brim with the weight of everything he had endured the past year. Perhaps had it been anywhere else, these people would have been looked upon with disdain and hatred- but Esredes merely looked at them with the same blank, composed expression that was almost always on his face. They were the most useful on the campaign, after all, and if he wasn't ever going to have the respect of diplomacy back home, he would at least pass it on.

And then came the partial Miqo'te, the trigger happy one who shot two of them on their attempted parley, who made the black heart beat a few times, yet Esredes ignored it, and silently watched him as they went on missions together, and stood by and talked to him when he was in their infirmary after trouble with exhaustion, some habits unable to die hard. Then came the civilian girl who clutched her head when the Tower sounded again, and without a second thought Esredes had rushed to her side and took his scale in one hand and put it in hers, and shouted for her to stay with him. Then came her, yet again, that pureblood teenager he met at a war camp in Dravania who hadn't defected, yet kept seeming to want to talk to him as she took him to her apartment after an outing in a fancy dress and served him soup and told him about her current ongoings in her life.

Through each beat of the campaign, his heart remained still, but a few others' here and there seemingly did not- it was more than once that someone asked why they didn't just kill the tempered. The first time it was asked he had simply reminded them it was against the rules, but that soon grew to a much more vocal irritation that told people off quite harshly to get out and go home if they did not want to follow the rules they had signed up for.

If only it had been us. The thought was underlying, and persistent- if only the Warrior they all thought worthy of the descriptor Light had learned not to blindly kill people when it was his in their way and welcomed aid and being the bigger person into their heart. If only the Alliance had thought anything of the same, but no. His people were long frozen in the ground, and here he stood, side by side with the enemy once again- the much more distant enemy he didn't deal with in his everyday life back home.

In those quiet moments before the Tower had emitted, and the two groups were socializing together, this ugly hell of a snowland had felt warm and beautiful, if only for a moment. When the beam had shot into the sky, and the source of its power became apparent, Esredes' heart sank directly into his stomach, and his appetite was lost.

"Talk to me." It was a simple request, uttered to the young Garlean Hyur back at the camp after the fact who looked almost as if he were a living corpse. The sounds of screaming and sobbing and pounding soon came, and looking between the young man and the sky, once more Esredes felt very small in an endless land of snow.

And yet, this would be the future. After so long, the war was over, and it was not the eager storming of the capital and brutal execution of the royal family Esredes had hoped of for so long.

Instead it ended in a long and tense moment of silence.

"I hope you can rebuild," he told each Garlean when it came up, a default response when no other could be right. Yet even after everything, the memories did not cease to be- the lab, Ysayle, the airship that kidnapped several of his and experimented on them, the other lab in Dalmasca and the fury with which he fought to destroy everything and everyone-

And mistrust beat through the black heart as he stayed silent. Though he searched the hearts of these people to answer a persistent question in his mind- could you really trust a nation of vicious conquerors to change?- he did not have the power to find any other answer than what came from his own heart. No, you couldn't. Just as you couldn't trust a nation of vicious Halonic Orthodoxy to stay in and keep power, and yet every week Esredes walked through the Firmament. Just as before, it was not his decision to make. The world was going to change as he stood at the head of time, nothing but a man watching it unfold, and he knew he was not ready for it.

Yet time did not stop for him, and once more, it seemed he would simply watch. And only time would come to tell if the warmth that came from Garlemald would cool, and if his heart would regret it as he stood by.

And in the end, through the warmth that had spread from his heart and turned it from black to red, through the memories that burned into his mind permanently for times to come, there came a man, kneeling down in the snow and holding the heart gently, just like a delicate object.

He wrapped his arms around it tightly and held it to his chest as a question rang out in endless repetition, echoing far over the mountains and into the unknown-

What does it all mean? What will it all mean? Here in the eye of the storm, who am I?

What is it all going to be now?

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