#Oberic Brightroar

[idanwyn-et-al]

No context needed, really.

#ffxiv shitposting #Anne-Sophie Bale #Oberic Brightroar

[idanwyn-et-al]

(XIV||20) 30. Splinter.

Anne-Sophie Bale would like to tell you everything she can about Il Mheg, about Vrandtic history, but she cannot. Not now, and likely, not ever; a fact that you can tell bothers this passionate knight-scholar.

Truth be told, even if you pulled up a chair, watched her sit across from you with ankles crossed, shared a strong cup of tea (with plenty of cream and sugar for her; you alone know how you take yours), and asked her about her home world, the Source, she would be the first to admit that she doesn’t know the half of that world’s story, either. With animated gesticulations, tapping her nails on the table or jiggling her restless leg, she would tell you all she knew of Ishgard and its surroundings, and the little she knew of Vylbrand, but would also confess that most of her knowledge of the Twelveswood, of Ul’dah, Thavnair, Doma, Ilsbard came from reading, just like yours.

She has told you of House Bale, of her loving, eccentric parents and siblings, and their tower within Ishgard, their country estate in Coerthas. She’s told you of the Scholasticate, that academy for a lucky handful of students, and her life after finishing her education there. She’s told you of her participation in the Dragonsong War, and how Ishgard is still seething after its conclusion, unable to make peace, unable to apply any quick poultice to ancient, festering wounds.

The redheaded Hyur with skin the color of sand after rainfall has done her best to try to tell you how it was she made her way to another world entirely, leaving all that she ever knew behind. Her cognac eyes still can’t meet yours when she talks about this; she knows her family is under suspicion of dire heresy, still a crime in Ishgard despite its new laws. Though they encouraged her research in the name of scientia et sapientia, they certainly must be as surprised as you are to see that her tireless efforts bore fruit, and now she is here, in the Bookman’s Shelves, attempting to follow in the footsteps of one of the mysterious Scions of the Seventh Dawn.

As she finishes her tea and leads you over to the cottage’s eponymous bookshelves, she tells you what she can of this fallen kingdom’s current inhabitants. Though they are united by oath under a singular King, there are still splinter groups among them; the fuath, notably, follow the King’s rules only when required, still attempting to drown any mortal that attempts to reach their underwater palace. She pales as she remembers her own experience with this, the eerie, staccato song that almost lured her in to breathe only algae, hair drifting in the watery glow of the sun beneath the placid lake.

Still, she is protected, after a fashion. You may recall Nee Ys, a pixie, and Dawn, Anne-Sophie’s faerie that travelled this far with her mistress, even though said mistress cannot understand Dawn’s ancient Nymian language. Anne-Sophie is still a knight, too, capable of protecting herself, of donning armor and fighting with a shapeshifting sword that moves between rapier and an aetherically-charged defensive weapon as required. She is brave to the point of being occasionally foolhardy, but still has her doubts, fears, and weaknesses; you may recall how she long ago lost the only friend she had, and very nearly lost the first she’d made here after making callous remarks at his expense. Thankfully, she still has Oberic Brightroar at her side, the knight spelled to stone a hundred years past as his kingdom crumbled; and she has Sawyer Reeves, too, a brave, straight-talking woman from the Brume that Anne-Sophie had only met after coming to this new world. The Fury works in truly mysterious ways.

As Ser Bale continues to journey within this world called the First to some, called Vrandt to its inhabitants, will you continue to follow her journey? Will you, perhaps, add the weave of your own threads into the tapestry of her story? She is looking for allies, for friends, for teachers, and everything in-between. Even as she gets lost in yet another dusty book, completely missing your departure, she is still hoping you will join her, should you wish to do so.

((Mentions @whitherwanderer​ and @knight-in-voeburt​ , whom I’d also really like to thank for helping this character come to life in RP, and whom I’m looking forward to so many more Knights of the Nerd Table adventures with!))

#FFXivWrite2020 #prompt 30 splinter #my writing #Anne-Sophie Bale #Oberic Brightroar #Sawyer Reeves #ffxiv hyur #ffxiv midlander #ffxiv highander #last prompt equals my least favorite sort of writing to do: SECOND PERSON #admittedly it's pretty light on the actual second-person nature of it because i just hate telling anyone what they do or feel lol

[idanwyn-et-al]

(XIV||20) 25. Wish.

Anne-Sophie and Oberic stood on the shores of the lake that had buried a city; his city, Voeburt, gone from bustling metropolis to moss-covered sunken ruins while he spent a hundred years spelled into stone on its outskirts. 

The midlander spoke after a long moment of silence. “When I read about this place, the wings on the castle were sketched differently. Smaller; still growing. The Hingan mystic who penned the tome that ultimately led me here, led us to be having this conversation; he swore that one could climb the castle, make a wish on those wings, and it would come true. If that is a sound theory—which I have some doubts about—would you do it, Oberic? And, if so, what would you wish for?”

Oberic chewed at his lip in thought. He followed her gaze, though he frowned as an errant bout of fog rolled in. His eyes instead turned to the water that had drowned the village beneath the castle. “There’re so many things I could ask for in that situation.” he said openly and quite honestly. His arms folded across his chest as he thought. “…to go somewhere that I’m needed. A new home that has need of an old Knight.”

The knight-scholar watched the gleaming wings as they were subsumed by fog. “You wouldn’t ask for all of it to be undone, then? All to be returned as you remembered it?”

Oberic hesitated at the question, furrowing his brow before responding. “Voeburt had fallen before the Flood. That was simply the knife that cut her throat.” He ran his left hand over his hair to smooth it down. “And if I were to undo all of that, where would that leave you, after all? If I were not encased in stone? Would you go looking for another Knight? Would there even BE another?”

Anne-Sophie turned a curious little grin to him. “The nature of wishes is truly one of the last great mysteries, I should think. There are no magickal disciplines that deal with such capricious fates; no way of knowing if your wish upon those wings would simply restore your lost kingdom while leaving everything else intact.” She paused a moment, running the possibilities through the sieve of her mind, arriving at a few possible conclusions dense enough to withstand its scrutiny. “Theorem the first! You do not climb the castle. Nothing changes. Theorem the second; you climb it, and everything changes. I am awoken back in Ishgard; or, more likely, reduced to a dream in this world, much like…hmm. That is…never mind. Theorem the third; we consider this a thought exercise, and you do not actually wish to climb the castle.”

The knight of the ruined kingdom listened as she spoke, rolling his neck. As she finished the end of her haphazard presentation, he raised an eyebrow. “And if that were the case. The wish was true, and I chose to climb the castle, would you want me to?” He closed some of the distance between them as he spoke.  “…would you want to climb the castle yourself? Presuming the same rules would apply? What would you wish for?” he asked before looking over his shoulder to the Shelves. “And what if the wish granter was a malicious entity? Would it be worth the risk? There are stories where such things exist, you know.”

Anne-Sophie tilted her head, then began restlessly pacing while postulating, as was her wont; he’d gotten her started. “Even with my aetherically-augmented strength, I doubt I would be able to reach some of the finials, nor could I guarantee my step would be sound on the corbels. Even assuming that I reached those wings—which are quite material, as you can see by their shadows moving across the lake—I am uncertain if I would have the wherewithal to make my wish upon setting a hand upon them. What is their nature? Am I aetherically shocked by them, tossed like a ragdoll into the lake below, landing at terminal velocity? Do I enter the castle’s confines by interacting with a very visible form of its magicks, wherein I encounter this hypothetical malicious entity? One merely cannot say, Oberic.” She finally paused to breathe, fussing with her embroidered sleeve cuffs. “Though…truth be told, I have spent much of my life forming a wish, if one could call it that, though it was actually a ritual of exacting specifications, and if it failed, I would have…well. My ‘wish’, if we are reducing it to that? Was to come here. And you said earlier, that I was perhaps not meant to find you…but I am telling you, I saw other worlds, and none of them had you, or any facsimile thereof.” Turning her eyes to his, she jabbed at his chest with her index finger for emphasis. “My. Wish. Came. True.  I came to this beautiful, sleeping, dreaming kingdom, and I awoke a dreamer within it. Thus, it is no longer a wish, but a rite manifested.“ 

Her scholar’s fury left her all at once, her fingertip still resting on his exposed chest, and she faltered, drawing her hand back as if she’d touched live coals. “Ah—that is—that is to say. I am glad I met you. And…no, I would not wish to go back, nor to change anything along the way.” The pair of them watched the fog melt from the beauty of Il Mheg, revealing the castle, the mountains, the rivers in all their splendor.  “I should think that is clear by now,” she murmured; she was here as long as she was welcome to be.

((Big hugs to @knight-in-voeburt​ ; all of Oberic’s dialogue and actions are his from tonight’s RP, which just happened to align perfectly with the prompt!))

#FFXivWrite2020 #prompt 25 wish #my writing #Anne-Sophie Bale #ffxiv hyur #ffxiv midlander #Oberic Brightroar #ffxiv highlander #voeburt #il mheg #others' writing #friend writing #rp snippets #not pictured: us RPing for like 7 hours #it was an amazing session tbh #ffxiv scholar #actual scholar RP

[idanwyn-et-al]

(XIV||20) 20. Vessel (free prompt).

((As usual, I rely on words from others for the prompts, so thanks to my friend The Artist Formerly Known As Kashel for giving me this one!))

She had made it here, and yet, she didn’t fully understand how or why.

Well, that was not entirely accurate, of course; she wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t charted out every single aspect of the rite needed to travel such a great distance. It was more a sense of being adrift, of spending most of one’s life desperately wanting to leave one’s world behind for another, and now that she had achieved it and had had a few moments to breathe, she felt restless. 

The tired old maxim of “be careful what you wish for because you just might get it” rattled around in her mind as she explored the gardens of the Crystarium, careful not to touch anything (she’d learned that lesson the hard way, and the rash on her left palm was the proof). Anne-Sophie had found the knight written about in so many faerie tales; well, if he was not the knight, he certainly was a knight that matched the description. With the help of a creature called a Nu Mou named Osre Tyrdae who was a friend of the man named Oberic, Anne-Sophie and Dawn had managed to free him. It was a kiss that did it in the end, a desperate hope that perhaps faerie tales were true in a land populated solely by faeries; her warm lips on his stony ones, feeling him warm and limber up as the enchantment faded, begin to kiss her back before she sprawled to the ground like a startled cat. 

Her second kiss...ugh, how embarrassing was that?! How could she possibly tell him that?! She balled her hands into fists and shivered with shame, unaware of the few curious glances her little fit earned her. Oberic was patient and wise without being stodgy; he had respect for her prowess on the battlefield, and answered her constant barrage of questions willingly enough, if somewhat bemusedly. 

To have awoken a hundred years after being turned to stone, the last known knight of Voeburt whose unseeing eyes had watched his kingdom fall into ruin...she could scarcely imagine it. Even after a lifetime of watching her world be reforged by the Calamity, seeing countless hamlets and great stone towers reduced to smoking rubble by the wrath of the great wyrms...somehow those things lacked the profound, aching sadness that Oberic’s own losses contained.

She could see it in his eyes, sometimes, when he spoke about his strong blacksmith of a mother, or brilliant goldsmith of a father; the realization that their bones had long since turned to dust, along with everyone else he had ever known. There was one question she always hedged around, couldn’t quite bring herself to ask; what was it like for him, to be a vessel of all the lost kingdom’s hopes and dreams, a living memory of a place now filled with soaring beauty and tricky fae? 

The knight-scholar’s fervent desire to learn ever warred with her senses of empathy and propriety on this point, and she worried at this mental knot as surely as she fussed with the blisters on her palm. Both were fruitless actions, doomed to only make their respective problems worse, and yet, she couldn’t seem to help it. Perhaps after a few more moons had passed and she had gotten to know him better, she would ask him. Until then, she vowed to leave it alone; it was not her wound to bear, nor mend.

(( @knight-in-voeburt​ for the mention!))

#FFXivWrite2020 #prompt 20 free prompt #vessel #Anne-Sophie Bale #Oberic Brightroar #my writing #ishgard #first shard #ffxiv midlander #ffxiv highlander #hyur #two posts in one day on top of running an RP event for Nixie...my writer brain is crying

[idanwyn-et-al]

(XIV||20) 22. Argy-bargy. (Make-up post!)

Anne-Sophie sat solo at a table in the Crystarium, drinking alone for the first time in her life. She wasn’t a very good drinker; despite being a solid hundred and forty ponze at five fulms, two ilms, she never really built up a good tolerance for alcohol. So it was that half a bottle of wine had her lightly swaying in her seat, her head stuffed full of fuzzy regrets.

“Did I really snipe at him like that?” she slurred to herself. “He says he’s goin’ back t’ Vurrburrrt,” she drawled out the name of the lost kingdom, “and I tell ‘im ‘what’s left of it’?!” Burying her face in her hands, she let out a strangled moan, then immediately sat back in her seat. “Ugh!! Wine breath! That’s...that is not great when it’s not in a...in a romantical-type setting.”

Her own words caused her to slide down the chair until her ponytail was draped over the back of the seat, her boots braced against the table’s pedestal. “Now there’s never gonna be any more romantical anythings!! I ruined it!” Memories flooded through the mental fog; seeing Oberic without his armor, tracing her fingertips over his myriad scars, fumbling together towards pleasure in the dimly-lit room, his willingness to stop when she was not ready. “An’ then he...he brought me breakfast the next mo-hoo-horrrning!” she sobbed, her face to the sky, her spectacles pushed askew by her dramatic wailing.

A barmaid set down a glass of water and a plate of freshly-baked bread, already spread with curls of butter melting into its nooks and crannies. “We’ve all been there, miss. Just talk to him. Apologize. If he’s really that good, he’ll understand. If not? Send him my way; he’s a looker.”

Anne-Sophie turned teary eyes to the barmaid, who seemed like an embodiment of the Fury Herself in this moment. “O wise one,” the knight-scholar warbled, slowly pushing herself back upright. “How...how do I just talk to him?” She nursed the water; she knew she needed it. The bread followed.

The Roegadyn---no, Galdjent, Fury take my mutton-for-brains!---shrugged her broad shoulders. “Same way as you’re talking to me now, I reckon. Though you might want to get sobered up first; not good for business here, but we can take the hit. Collect yourself, tell him you’re sorry, and try your best not to cry. If you do cry, make sure you’re still listening. Crying happens, but you can’t let it derail a perfectly good discussion.”

“Thnk yrgh, wrse...mm.” Holding up a shaky index finger, she finished her slice of bread. “Thank you, wise sage,” she replied solemnly and entirely seriously. “I will heed your counsel.”

The Galdjent grinned. “Better than an unwanted pinch on the ass. I like your manners.” Off she went to tend to other customers, leaving Anne-Sophie to learn how to act like a woman grown. Academia had gained her much of one type of intelligence while stripping her of others, and it was past time she learned those disciplines, too.

#FFXivWrite2020 #prompt 22 argy-bargy #my writing #Anne-Sophie Bale #ffxiv hyur #Oberic Brightroar #ffxiv midlander #ffxiv highlander #first shard #Anne-Sophie you are terrible sometimes #lil drama mess #make-up post

[idanwyn-et-al]

(XIV||20)27. Alluring. (Free Prompt)

.

As easy as it was for her to talk anyone’s ear off, at any time, for any reason, she still hadn’t told him yet.

After Anne-Sophie and Oberic had their spat in the Crystarium, she had kept tabs on him. It was not terribly hard to do, even in a city that diverse: a Hume six-and-a-half fulms tall wearing antique armor with a dialect to match, offering to lead expeditions throughout Lakeland and Il Mheg made him stand out plenty. Besides---as she’d remind him later once they had made peace---she’d found him from a few stray tales and a magicked mirror back in Eorzea, so tracking him within the same realm was child’s play in comparison.

Still, once the knight-scholar had returned to the Bookman’s Shelves ahead of her quarry, she took a few days to explore. Many mysteries had been calling to her from the old manuscripts about the fallen kingdom of Voeburt, alluring in their vagueness that plagued contemporary writing in any world, in any time. Small hamlets were mentioned in passing, as if the reader would obviously know that the best lettuce came from Sud-am-Mein (why?), whereas one should take pains to avoid the cobbler’s shop in Hinterburg (again, why? Whom had they wronged?!). Though this was a problem the erudite Hyuran woman was long-familiar with, it was even more irritating when she had no frame of reference, no lodestar by which to orient her mental compass in order to make educated guesses about any of these now-drowned or levelled villages.

There was one place that the new documents referred to---the ones left by “the elf man in the long dress”, as Nee Ys not-so-helpfully had called him---called Wolekdorf, that evidently was still somewhat intact. Early one morning after her swim in the lake and exercises in the clearing behind the Bookman’s Shelves, Anne-Sophie donned her dress armor and set out on foot, having only a crude map and the mysterious assistance of Nee Ys to guide her. The dress armor was in case she happened to encounter any other mortals on her journey; it was always proper to make a good first impression, after all, and the armor was as functional as it was flashy, being embedded with magicked threads and aetheroconductive metals.

Ignoring Nee Ys’s suggestions that she “ignore that boring old bird’s nest and go play in Lyhe Ghiah instead”, something that she knew would lead to Nee Ys and their fellow Fae keeping her enthralled forever, Anne-Sophie climbed higher into Il Mheg’s mountainous regions. Carpets of blushing flowers gave way to spring green grasses and countless narrow, clear mountain waterfalls that sparkled spectrums in the sunlight. As the sight of ruins came into view, she sighed. It was foolish, but somehow, she had been hoping that this last outpost had been spared the same fate as the rest of Voeburt, and though these, at least, were not beneath the lake nor overgrown with plantlife, they were still ruins, slowly succumbing to the twin powers of time and the elements.

The air whistling through crumbling crenellations and splintered apple groves smelled clean and sweet, with an undercurrent of---musk? Something akin to chocobo, but not quite the same; any son or daughter of Ishgard knew the scent of chocobos well, and this was not it. Her armor, well-forged so as to be quiet in comparison to many other makes, clanked as loudly as infantry gear in the silence, and she felt foolish for having worn it. Once she was perhaps a hundred yalms from the central group of buildings, she pulled out her spyglass, peering through it and gasping, “Amaro!” There they were, dozens of them, most of them sleeping on great nests within dilapidated walls. Though she was used to seeing them in captivity, she’d heard that there were some who lived in the wild; it seemed she’d found where.

After another bell or two of careful inspection from a distance, she was forced to conclude that, indeed, there were no other mortals present. No other knights or villagers magicked to stone, awaiting someone from a distant star to awaken them. As she made her way back to the Shelves while the sun began its descent, she felt the strange, sweet, sleeping melancholy of Wolekdorf swimming inside her blood like an alchemical solution. She would have to tell Oberic when they met up once again, after she apologized for acting like a chocobo’s ass in the Crystarium.

Another sennight had come and gone, and she still hadn’t found the words. She would start to tell him, then change her mind, not wanting to spoil the moment, wanting to protect him from something he likely knew within a bell of awakening. Anne-Sophie hoped she could find her courage, find the right hoop on which to stitch the picture of words for him. Perhaps it was better that he saw it for himself; it might make the other secret she had discovered easier to bear.

((tagging @knight-in-voeburt​ , as usual, who also gave me the word!))

#FFXivWrite2020 #prompt 27 alluring free prompt #my writing #Anne-Sophie Bale #ffxiv hyur #hyur #ffxiv midlander #ffxiv highlander #Oberic Brightroar #Il Mheg #First Shard #Wolekdorf #dun dun dunnnn cliffhanger ending

[idanwyn-et-al]

(XIV||20) 23. Shuffle.

“It’s still surprising to see it here,” Anne-Sophie confessed, still a bit winded from the very long climb up the observatory tower. “The Crystal Tower, I mean.”

Oberic cleared his throat, a tic of his that usually was the only outward sign the giant of a man was carefully thinking over his response. “I figured that was what you meant, seeing as it’s really the only noteworthy thing on the horizon at this point in time.”

The midlander shot him a wry look, but shrugged her shoulders within their pauldrons. “Fair enough. Even without all this fog, though...it is still a mystery to tickle my mind.” She lifted her quill and brushed the feather against her hair to illustrate her point.

“You’re free to sit up here and have it tickled, Anne-Sophie. As for me...I’ve got to see about supplies.” Resting his gloved hand on her back for a moment in a gentle, comforting gesture, he turned and strode off, in search of a guardsman who might know a smith who might know an alchemist...and so on.

Her eyes turned back to the jagged crystalline structure piercing the gathering evening gloom like the manifestation of a desperate prayer; a beacon, it had been, for these past hundred years, though Anne-Sophie’s keen mind hadn’t yet been able to make sense of the *how* of all of it. The mysterious Crystal Exarch and his loyal guards were polite to all, of course, and willing to help them make a life for themselves in the town surrounding the base of the tower, but when it came to the specifics of the tower itself, they were quick to shuffle off all questions. Anne-Sophie had gone so far as to try to dispatch Dawn to learn more of it; the chittering Nymian faerie had merely signalled that she could not bypass the structure’s wards, but it was indeed from the same world as Anne-Sophie and Sawyer. For her troubles, the Ishgardian expatriate received a politely-worded letter at her inn room the next morning, asking her to refrain from further attempts at magickal prying; she had blushed furiously while dressing that day, feeling like she’d been chided at school, which was something she had always found unbearable.

“The way back,” she murmured to herself, tapping the quill feather against her chin. “There must be a reliable way back somewhere within it. All the writings back at home...all the Allagan magicks that were sealed in there for Eras.” She would research this; she couldn’t help herself. Still, in her heart of hearts, she knew that at least as of now, finding a way back to the Source was not a high priority for her, and possibly never would be. No need to overtax herself just yet, right?

For the first time in her life, Anne-Sophie willingly turned away from a great arcane mystery, turning her focus to the more mundane task of resupplying. It was a relief to choose to not study something, even if she felt strangely guilty for making such a choice.

#FFXivWrite2020 #prompt 23 shuffle #my writing #Anne-Sophie Bale #ffxiv hyur #hyur #ffxiv midlander #first shard #crystal tower #Oberic Brightroar #Sawyer Reeves