#a reminder that the carbuncles are just a little bit eldritch

[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #2: Drumming Song

Prompt: bark || Master Post || On AO3

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“I think I’ve found it,” Synnove muttered to herself, examining a rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb made of tiny, glittering aetheric equations repeated over and over in a perfect tessellation, floating amongst a ribbon of other geometries.

Her new carbuncle, Tyr, was a lovely, sweet boy, gentle despite his enormous size, but he was…quiet. Unnaturally so: he made no physical sounds like the purring or chittering common of carbuncles, nor did he communicate via the aetheric harmonic that Galette uses with her. The lack of it has clearly frustrated the lad, and so Synnove had spent this first sennight of possessing a new summon on unspooling his physical form into a single line of code to examine each and every fragment of his full manifested array. The written array was perfect, so clearly something had gone pear-shaped during summoning.

And now, finally, she’d found it. This equation tessellating into the honeycomb, at a glance, seemed to be related to sound; Synnove jotted down the full equation in her notebook, as well as a sketch of a flat rendering of the shape it formed, to better study it later. Her current theory was that the sheer density of aether contained in Tyr’s topaz had caused some sort of interference and so far, the evidence supported it. That this was the only hiccup was a pleasant surprise.

For all that he couldn’t communicate in a traditional manner at the moment, Tyr was still aware and able to make himself known: the ribbon of his unspooled-self did an excited little shimmy. Synnove grinned as she began to pluck the honeycomb apart, pinching a dodecahedron here, smudging one with her thumb there.

As she worked, something rhythmic began to niggle at the back of her mind, thumpthumpthump, like someone rattling a door, growing steadily louder as the honeycomb. Her grin widened. “Patience, Tyr,” she crooned, and despite her growing excitement, she kept to her own methodical pace.

Finally, as the penultimate dodecahedron melted away, leaving but one behind:

--ama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama!

“Hello, Tyr,” Synnove said, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. Tyr’s aetheric harmonic was the comforting thrum of gazelle-hide drums and tolling brass bells. “It’s nice to finally meet you!”

MAMA! MAMA MAMA MAMA HI HI HI!

Synnove shoved her chair back, and the long, glittering ribbon of golden light abruptly rolled itself up with an audible snap! As the roll completed, Tyr burst back into full materiality, and he landed with a wood-creaking THUD. For such an enormous carbuncle, he was fast, and in the blink of an eye he had rushed forward to shove his head into her stomach, his tails lashing as he tried to crawl into her lap, and chattering at a high pitch.

She aggressively cuddled him back, leaning down to plant a smacking kiss between his ears, and laughed when the action elicited in an adorable tippity-tap from Tyr’s paws. “All right, my boyo,” she said, drawing away and cupping his head in her hands, “want to give me a nice big bork hello?”

Yeah! Tyr chattered. He backed up a few steps and sat down, so excited he was visibly vibrating. His chest expanded and he opened his mouth and—

[the agonistic colliding of tectonic plates and the melting of corruption into coal into diamond and the igneous iron at the heart of the star and the tintinnabulation of limestone water into stalagmites and stalactites and the ever-wait as fire becomes stone and the ancient humming at the root of a mountain and the patient rumbling as crystal becomes Self]

—Synnove’s  eyes snapped open and she wheezed for breath as she stared up into Tyr’s worried face.

Mama, did I do it right?

Synnove was not sure what he had just done. Her scientific brain was furious about that. Her common sense brain told her scientific brain to shut the fuck up and reminded it that sometimes stupid mortals Did Not Need To Know Things. Synnove listened to common sense brain, and promptly let her memory go fuzzy and grey.

Instead, she reached up and patted his cheek. “Think so,” she croaked. “We’ll work on volume. And tone.”

Tyr promptly dropped down onto her in a full-body sprawl—she wheezed again—and began to purr. It was deep, almost soundlessly so, but it sunk down into her bones and caused every muscle in her body to relax and woah. All right, yes, that. That was good. And amazing.

Synnove wrapped her arms around her carbuncle, and decided this was probably as good a time as any for a nap.

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#ffxivwrite2023 #final fantasy xiv #ffxiv #oc: synnove greywolfe #synnove's carbuncles #dt's writing #a reminder that the carbuncles are just a little bit eldritch