#alas ao3 is BARREN when it comes to sharp content | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

farplane · 5 years

Text

the taste of defeat

août 2019: eorzea sairsel and baelsar’s wall. ffxiv patch 3.5 spoilers. 5,043 words. (read on ao3)

Sairsel had been raised under the shadow of Baelsar’s Wall.

Far enough, deep enough inside the forest, it could easily be forgotten—as was the plight of the people who suffered on the other side. Beside it, the Wood still lived, breathed, thrived. Sairsel had never known the world any other way: the Wall had stood, skeletal and cold, in the seasons before he came into the world.

His people lived as the heart of the land beat, calling no place home but the Wood itself. If ever they camped by its eastern borders, the children were under the strictest warnings not to approach the limits of the Wall; all they needed to obey was the shadow of a girl who had wandered too close and returned with a gaping hole in her chest, a memory they were not soon to forget. Nairel—six years her brother’s elder, and nine summers on the day the hunters had carried the girl’s body home—had told Sairsel that their people had very nearly taken up arms against the Empire in revenge, arms long since laid down when the war against Ala Mhigo had been won.

The clans of the Twelveswood had been the first to fall to the griffins’ blades, in those days; the stories of the elders made that abundantly clear. What could they do now, against the might of a magitek empire? They would not suffer the slaughter of all their children to avenge the death of one. The Empire won; the Empire had already won.

The jagged metal spires slicing the sky, in the eyes of all those who lived among the trees beside it, were the forefront of its dominance. Ala Mhigo was an enemy left behind in the past, and a neighbour forgotten in the present.

When the Calamity came, the sky bathed the Wall in its red shadows. Sairsel couldn’t forget the sight of the way the crimson moon in the west had rained down fire, so devastating in its destruction that it spread west, too, everywhere they looked; everywhere burning. The sky had been red, and the Wall had been red. It had stood tall and angry, sharp and unshaken on the horizon, never faltering. Even in the disaster of its own making, the Empire never seemed to suffer. Dalamud was cut down from the sky, and it stopped burning, and the Wall stopped flowing red. Its sharp lines were choked by grey, barely visible, but no one ever came. It simply stood while the smoke drowned the forestborn.

Ever flows—

Months. It had taken Sairsel months to forget the stink of it, the feeling of ash under his feet, so thick it blanketed the earth like the first blush of snow when winter came to kiss autumn. Had the imperials on the Wall felt that fear—the one that crept in and pierced the heart, whispering that everything was lost? Had they seen the sorrow, the loss? His people’s laments and the wailing of the Wood itself had seemed like an echo to answer the waning call of Hydaelyn, her voice long extinguished by the fading of the light.

the land’s—

They never returned west after that; the desolation alone was near impossible to stomach. The whole of the Twelsvewood had fallen so quiet since the red moon had taken to the sky that even the forestborn strained to hear its voice, and in the west, the corrupted aether was so stifling that it was utterly silent. Rock and barren earth, singing no songs but that of the dead. None could live upon that land.

well of purpose.

In the five summers of healing that followed, Sairsel never saw Baelsar’s Wall again, either. With every passing season, it seemed, the imperials encroached upon the Wood more and more: with the threat woodwrath had once posed no longer standing against them, there were only bodies, always too few to oppose them. Sairsel’s heart broke for his home and ached not to be far from it, but for the horizon itself. For skies not darkened by the shadow of that wall. And when his feet took him away at long last, they took him west, as far as the sea of sand—until a daughter of the griffins welcomed him to a home he’d never even known to seek.

“You were a sellsword?” asked the Griffin.

“Aye,” answered Morgana Arroway. Her voice scraped like sand on stone when she spoke of the past. “My brother and I were courted by one of the companies, in the end, that led the charge against the mad king—gods, I don’t even remember the name. But I imagine we would have stayed with them for the new world order, if that order had been ours.”

The Griffin was silent for a moment. Even sitting a ways from them, pretending to be wholly focused on sharpening a new batch of arrowheads, Sairsel couldn’t help but wonder what sort of face lay behind the mask. Did he look kind? Hard? Broken? Perhaps half-mad? Handsome? His silences held as much weight as his words, always spoken in a low voice like a serpent’s venom filled with shards of glass.

The stone, the sand, the broken glass. Everyone in the Resistance had something of it in their voices—the ones old enough to have known the fall, at least.

“I was, too. A sellsword.” Another pause. Morgana made no effort to fill it; every moment, she seemed to be taking the measure of the Griffin. Not out of the same naïve fascination of her son’s that bordered on burgeoning admiration, but the way she regarded every man and woman who asked to lead her sword. “So you would have stayed, then, if not for the invaders?”

“Of course. I never had any other intention. I’d entertained the notion of taking my sword elsewhere, for a time, but never without my brother, and he had a wife and a boy. Never without my family.”

The broadhead in Sairsel’s hand slipped, slicing the side of his finger open. It stung, and his breath hissed; blood welled up from the shallow cut. Both the Griffin and his mother’s attention were pulled to him, but he didn’t look at them, because he didn’t know what reaction he might have if he looked into her eyes after hearing this. Never without her family—without Gotwin, Havisa, Mathias. But her own son? He’d not been born in Ala Mhigo. Him, she’d had no qualms leaving in the Wood with the shadow of a mother he thought long dead.

“Your family—”

Morgana shook her head, jaw tight. “Gotwin, my brother, he wanted to stay and fight—thought we could drive the Garleans back. If not for the child, I’d have stayed, too, but we convinced him to leave. We fought in the arena for a time; earned a reputation. It was right around the time General Aldynn was fighting, too—gods, but they loved pitting the Griffin’s Talons against the Bull of Ala Mhigo.”

Neither she nor Sairsel could have seen the minute shift in the Griffin’s expression, even if he had not been hiding it behind the mask. She went on, none the wiser: “We were set to have a match against him, and we were approached to make certain he didn’t make it out alive. He’d come to the bloodsands in irons, see, and won his freedom—and by then was costing the wrong people too much coin. I would have gone through with it, but my brother, the honourable fool, he refused.”

Knuckles white-hot as she gripped the hilt of her sword, mouth in a snarl; there was no other way to tell that story. It was the first time Sairsel heard so much of it, but he knew.

“They slit his throat and left him in the desert. I tried to hide his wife and boy away in the Shroud, but I lost them, too. That’s when I joined the Resistance; it’s what I should have done from the first instead of running.”

The Griffin shook his head, his voice raw with quiet anger. “Even scattered beyond that accursed wall, they’ve taken everything from us. We ran to protect our families, only to fall to the blades of those who were content to watch them slaughter us. The only way forward is back where it began.”

“So that’s your play,” Morgana said slowly, after a moment. “You listen to our stories, and then you make a rousing speech of it.”

“Do I seem to you like a man who is playing?”

“No. But whoever you are underneath that thing,” Morgana said, reaching out to tap a finger against the mask, “you should know, already, that I don’t need convincing.”

“So you’re prepared to do what it takes?”

“Anything,” Morgana said.

The Griffin held out a hand, palm angled upwards. Morgana looked down at his gauntlet, as though considering, then slipped on her own to grip his forearm with fingers like claws. “I’m with you,” she said, then tugged his arm towards her, bringing him closer, “but I can’t be doing with the mask. The imperials hide their faces, too, my friend.”

Behind the mask, the Griffin smiled bitterly. “We are brother- and sister-in-arms. That is all that matters.” As Morgana let go, he deigned a glance towards Sairsel; he could feel the weight of that gaze even behind the blank white of the mask as the Griffin motioned to him with a tilt of his chin. “The little Elezen. He’s yours?”

“Aye.”

The Griffin turned back to Morgana. “Has he got the stomach for it, too? Anything?”

Sairsel answered before his mother could do it for him; he wouldn’t have put it past her. “I do,” he said between gritted teeth, wishing that it were true.

The Griffin looked at him. Sairsel did not know what he saw.

The people of the Wanderer were easy enough to find, if one knew where to look—and Sairsel never needed to look very long or very far to come home. It had been months since the last time; he’d found his clan near Urth’s Fount then, as though by some twisted game of fate. He hadn’t stayed long, too distraught and broken to let the world come into focus around him, but his father had come with him to the place where Wilred’s body was found. The water was not stained red. No part of the Wood bore traces of his passing, or his lonely grave—instead the weight had traveled all the way to Little Ala Mhigo and remained where his absence left the greatest void.

“The worst part is I didn’t even know him all that well,” Sairsel had said, his voice half-caught in his throat, “but he was so desperate to free Ala Mhigo when I met him, even though he’d never even seen it. This must have been the closest he’s ever been to it. And I—all my life, I’ve been so close, and I never even cared.”

He’d barely felt the weight of his father’s hand on his shoulder. “I kept too much from you. I worried that it would only cause you pain to know that a wall stood between you and your mother’s homeland.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. It’s not about my Ala Mhigan blood. It’s about all of us not giving a damn about this—this cruelty that’s been under our noses for twenty years. Twenty years, Baba. All of Eorzea turned their backs on them, and Wilred, he… he died wanting to protect it. Killed by one of his own.” And he’d sounded like a boy, then, even to his own ears: “It’s not fair.”

“One of his own?”

Sairsel had heard the name Ilberd a fair number of times, through the Resistance as much as through what covert information he exchanged with the Riskbreakers. A brother-in-arms. A traitor. No one knew whose blade had killed Wilred, but the whispers running through the Resistance said that it could have been no one else’s but Ilberd’s. Hearing the name was one thing, and hating it, too, but speaking it was something else entirely, too caustic on Sairsel’s tongue.

“An Ala Mhigan. A comrade in his company.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” his father had said, and Sairsel knew that he truly was.

The weight of Wilred’s death had pressed too hard, too close; he’d left soon after.

Now that he returned, it was only in passing again: he found his clan near the Sylphlands, this time, far enough from the Wall that he hadn’t run into the hunters while scouting, but too close for him to be comfortable.

He’d told Gundobald and the Griffin and anyone who would listen that this was his home—that he knew the Wood inside and out, that it was on his doorstep that the imperials had built that monstrous thing. For once, he could show that he was not playing at this for his mother’s sake: he was not two halves, not forestborn one day and Ala Mhigan another, but a whole of a boy who had grown up under the shadow of a chained homeland he’d never known was as much his as the Twelveswood.

He was forestborn. He was a Riskbreaker. He was Ala Mhigan. And he was a damned good ranger.

It wasn’t his first time being sent on a reconnaissance mission by the Resistance; if the gods were kind, the next would be beyond the Wall, scouting the reaches of Gyr Abania. He hoped he would live long enough to see Ala Mhigo itself. The thought that he might not had haunted him on every one of the nights he spent in the Wood on his own, watching for guard patterns and breaches in the Wall’s defenses. It was an inescapable reality, burrowing inside him and settling through every empty space of his being, but he was even more afraid of running than he was of dying.

The Resistance did not own him. It could be easy, he thought: he could send his last report, toss his linkpearl into the bushes, and take the nearest aetheryte to the Goblet. Ashelia hadn’t thrown him out on his arse for associating with the Resistance; surely she’d welcome him back if he said he had given them all that he could. I could not bear it if you became another corpse. Even after all this time, all those days spent with the Resistance wondering if there was even anything left of the boy he had been when he lied to his mother that he no longer had anything to do with the Riskbreakers, the Grand Steward’s words rang as clear in his mind as they did when she spoke them.

He was afraid of hurting her, but he was selfish. When he thought of leaving, he couldn’t help but imagine what his comrades would say of him—that he was a traitor, craven, that he had only needed himself to prove that he never belonged. He thought of the Griffin turning that blank-faced mask to his mother and showing his judgement of her even through it. Whoever he was—Sairsel was beginning to think that it didn’t matter, because what mattered was the way he spoke, the way he led—Sairsel wanted to prove himself to him almost as much as he did his mother.

So he did not run, but he did not return to Little Ala Mhigo. He would wait for the others to join him, he said, and one of the Masks replied that they would come.

While he waited, he found his clan. He found the nightfires, pulled his sister from her watch almost feverishly; the dawning of the assault was twisting him with apprehension.

“You have to leave,” he whispered to her, taking her face between his hands. Watching her face like it was the first time he saw it; like it was the last. “You have to leave, all right? Tell your mother whatever she needs to hear to move camp as quickly as possible.”

“Sairsel—” Nairel said, but he shook his head.

“No, listen to me. There’ll be fighting at the Wall, and if—if it spills out on this side, or the Garleans decide to retaliate, they will put anyone they find to the sword. You need to go west, or north, or—I don’t know. Just be as far from the Wall as you all can get.”

Nairel narrowed her eyes; she looked at him like he was half-mad, and for that, he couldn’t blame her. He certainly felt as much. “What are you saying? Why would they retaliate against us?”

Because if we do everything right, they’ll think the whole of Eorzea has moved against them. “I need you to trust me, Nairel. Please.”

For a moment, Sairsel thought that his own sister would turn him away once and for all. She searched his eyes, as though watching for some truth she knew him to be hiding, and, at long last, gave a nod.

“I’ll talk to my mother,” she said, squeezing both of his arms. “We’ll alert the Wood Wailers, too, try to get—”

“No. No Wood Wailers; they’ll only report back to the Adders. Only the clan.”

Nairel’s frown deepened. “Sairsel, what have you gotten yourself into?”

“We’re finally doing something. This is the first step for Ala Mhigo. It’ll be worth it, you’ll see—I promise.”

It made Sairsel ache more than he thought, to slip his hands from his sister’s, but he retreated back into the shadows before she could tell him to stay safe, or anything else that might sound like what Ashelia had told him—it could only hurt more.

The next morning, his people were gone, but this part of the Wood remained as he had always known it. Baelsar’s Wall stood with its sharp edges, dark against the colour of ash, as lightning split the sky.

Sairsel had always hated the Wall’s cold, graceless metal and the angry lights of all the Empire’s blighted magitek polluting the peace of the Twelveswood. ‘Beautiful’ was a word he never would have thought to be applicable to that thing, but tonight, it was—because tonight, Baelsar’s Wall was burning. Shrieking alarms blared, watch dogs barked and howled, and men and women in all the colours of the Alliance shouted battle cries as they clashed against imperial soldiers.

For the first time in his life, Sairsel found beauty not in the peace of the Wood, not in the quiet and the solitude he so dearly sought, but in chaos and violence.

“It will be a long while before the Empire is done paying for all they’ve done to us,” Morgana had said to her unit as they readied for the assault. She’d been restless the whole day before the attack, likely spurred by the urgency of being so close to home yet so many battles far—but Sairsel had an inkling it was the Twelveswood, too: the place that had taken from her far more than it had given. She’d barely looked at him all day. “But for tonight, I’ll be glad to take back some of that coin in blood.”

And blood there was. It slicked the metal footpaths under Sairsel’s boots, and he was glad not to be encumbered by a Serpent’s uniform; he spent much of the assault scouting ahead, and back and forth to ensure the infiltration of each unit, sticking to the shadows. His ranger’s clothes served him than those glaring yellow jackets and heavy boots ever could, and he was thankful for it as he climbed higher through the castrum, closer to the sky, deeper in the blood. Every ladder he found, he climbed.

Morgana was alone, pulling at the collar of her Flames uniform, her sword more crimson than steel when he found her. Far from the fires, the air was cooler, and the breeze blew stray strands of greying hair across her damp forehead.

“All right?” Sairsel asked breathlessly.

“All right,” she replied, weariness sewn into the fringes of her voice. “My unit’s deployed. Everything to plan. Finding higher ground?”

“Aye. Putting those forest-soft skills to good use,” Sairsel said curtly, designating his bow. “I—”

“Wait.” Morgana made a beckoning motion that was more a quick tilt of her head and grabbed Sairsel’s wrist when he came closer, pulling him to the edge of the walkway. “Look.”

Beyond, the sky bled from the steely black above to a soft, dusky blue. And against that blue lay a horizon, bright and clear but for a few wisps of clouds, marked by the rising lines of mountains that spread as far as the eye could see. For the first time in his life, Sairsel gazed upon the other side of the Wall, stretching far beyond the Twelveswood he knew.

“The Gyr Abanian highlands,” Morgana said. She raised a bloody hand, pointing east. “It’s too far to see, but—far beyond that tower, there. You’re looking at Ala Mhigo, boy.”

Sairsel opened his mouth to speak, but found no words. Instead he took his eyes from the mountain peaks and looked at his mother, trying to understand the look on her face. He never quite could, but the intensity in her eyes was more familiar than anything he’d ever seen; he simply couldn’t remember, in that hasty moment, why it was.

“How do you feel?” he asked, quietly. Surely she’d find the question appalling. Surely—

“I feel,” she began.

A crash resounded below, shaking the ground. Morgana swept around and fell into a battle stance—but no attack came. She rushed to the other side of the narrow platform upon which they stood, with Sairsel beside her, a hand at his quiver. A pair in Garlean colours ran across just below them; Sairsel nocked an arrow and readied to draw, but his mother’s hand lowered the bow.

“Wait. I know those men.”

“What?”

Morgana’s fingers tightened around his arm. “I’ve seen them with the Griffin—those traitorous shites.” She gave an urgent squeeze, then a small shove. “You need to go find him. Tell him we’ve got turncoats. I’ll make them talk.”

“Morgana—”

“That’s an order, boy. Go!”

The two men were headed back towards the fighting, and Morgana would be following them down into the Garleans’ hells. It was enough to make Sairsel hesitate, but there was no going against her. Not now. He turned, made to run off—and heard her voice again, quiet, not directed at him.

“Bloody hells, Ilberd,” she hissed, a desperate curse for her own ears.

He never should have heard; he would not, had he been anyone else. But he had a ranger’s ears, and the name cut through the faraway battle and the wind itself, turning Sairsel’s blood cold.

So he’d shown Morgana his face. He’d told her his name, and it had meant nothing to her, and her loyalty had been unshaken—or maybe the name meant something to her, too, and she hadn’t cared. Anything, she had said. Anything it took.

Sairsel tasted blood in his mouth as he ran. He ran until his breath burned in his lungs, ran until he could see the proud line of the Griffin’s back, his black-and-white figure stark against the night. A victory so close at hand below him—and Gyr Abania beyond, at his right hand. Sairsel watched the griffin embroidered on the fabric of his cape and felt, above his rage and his disgust, a grief so heavy and sharp it clawed at his throat.

“Look at me,” he said. His fingers were tight around his bow, the string biting through his gloves. The arrow was already nocked. He’d seen the Griffin in his armour enough to know that his throat was bare, unprotected—Sairsel had wondered, once, about the point of so much armour if one arrow could do the trick. Does he want to die?

The Griffin turned, pinned him with the blankness of that stare shadowed by mask and hood. He said nothing.

“Two of your people are in imperial soldier uniforms. Morgana is chasing after them for turncoats.”

“She’s more loyal than most.”

Sairsel was tired of wondering what lay beyond that mask. The itch to see the eyes hidden underneath was a raging gale, and everything—all of it—made his hands shake.

“What are you really afraid of?” Sairsel asked, breathlessly. “People knowing your face, or your name?”

“You assume wrongly, to name it fear,” said the Griffin. “Is it that you’re afraid, boy?”

“I’m a lot of fucking things, right now.” He raised his bow, keeping the tip of the arrow level with the Griffin’s throat. All he had to do was draw, loose. Set it free. “I knew Wilred. In Little Ala Mhigo. I didn’t join the Resistance until after he went off to fight for the Braves, but—I knew him.” He swallowed. “Did you kill him?”

“He died to bring us closer to freeing Ala Mhigo, like every man and woman here,” the Griffin said, steadfast. No doubts; no remorse. Sairsel ached. “Some of us are worth more in death than in battle.”

“Then you die, too,” Sairsel yelled, his voice rising too harshly from his throat, “and maybe it’ll bring us another step closer.”

And, if not, it might help Wilred rest, at the very least.

Sairsel did not hesitate as he pulled back his bow string as far as it would go, unfeeling. He loosed; pain blossomed in his chest as the arrow flew towards the Griffin’s throat. It would have torn through him, if not for the blade that rose to slice it in two.

No man should have been capable of such a thing—but Ilberd Feare no longer was the man he had once been. And Sairsel had not the sense to let people stronger than he defeat the things that made monsters of someone like the Griffin; not tonight. He tossed his bow to the ground, sprinting forward, and tore his sword from its sheath.

His sword-skill was never good enough; blades didn’t sing in his hands the way they sang in his mother’s. Swords always felt too heavy, their weight all wrong, their steel too firm compared to the wood of the bows that seemed to know his hands, his eyes, his heart. But he was beginning to understand how people worked with swords in their hands—beginning—and so he managed to dodge the first thrust with which the Griffin met his forward lunge.

Sairsel found himself beside the Griffin’s left shoulder, with Gyr Abania at his back as he slashed at that bare throat. The Griffin threw his head back just in time, sidestepped away, then charged back in to throw his shoulder into Sairsel’s chest. That sent him hurtling back, his head and shoulder meeting the unforgiving metal of the platform hard; it knocked the wind out of his lungs, tearing a groan from his throat, and his sword clattered away.

Not like this.

The pain was spreading like wildfires through his body, but his fingers still searched frantically for his sword, and his eyes still saw the Griffin’s blade bearing down on him. He rolled away, scrambling to his feet. His chest felt like it was going to collapse in on itself from the force of the Griffin’s blow, but he could still stand, so nothing mattered. He still had a knife.

“I don’t want to kill you, lad,” the Griffin said, and Sairsel couldn’t see in his eyes if it was true. That didn’t matter, either. He lunged again, slashing and slashing and slashing like a wild coeurl swinging its claws until they found purchase.

And his claws drew blood. For a heartbeat, Sairsel stopped, but it wasn’t enough; only a glancing blow drawing a shallow line under his jaw. It was enough to make the Griffin hiss, but he was a man who barely faltered, and Sairsel had already given up his opening in the hesitation. The Griffin’s blade slashed upward, and Sairsel staggered back.

The pain in his chest changed. He barely felt the blood that began to run down the front of his jacket.

“I didn’t want to kill you,” the Griffin said as he collapsed—first to his knees, then to the ground. And, just like that, he turned away to watch the fighting below.

Sairsel didn’t know if he was breathing anymore, but he knew that it hurt, worse than anything he had ever felt before. Sobs that wouldn’t rise from his lungs died on his lips, and his fingers clawed at the Griffin’s ankles, too far from him to reach. He wanted to ask— he wanted to ask—

“How could you do this do us?” he croaked out.

If the Griffin answered, Sairsel didn’t hear it. He turned his head and watched the mountains fall into the night sky as the fighting went on.

That voice.

Shining is the land’s—

He heard it again.

“Mother?”

light of justice.

It was a foolish thing to ask, because he had never heard his mother sing, and the voice was soft. But it reminded him of her. The echo rose all around him, at once distant and so near it seemed to resonate within his very heart. Like the Wood, on the day—

On the day—

Sairsel reached an arm out again, heavy as stone. His fingers found the narrow spaces in the metal below him, and he dragged himself—wheezing and whimpering—until he could curl one hand against the edge of the platform. He shook as he peered over, lifting his head with everything he had left.

Was her voice rising for the piles of bodies that lay silent upon the metal? Did she lament for him, too—for Ilberd Feare, broken among them, his unmasked face a horror in death?

As the light rose from them into something without shape, something far brighter than the fires and far greater than the deaths that served it, Sairsel’s mind latched onto one last thought.

Does she sing for me?

It hurt so much. Sairsel rolled onto his back again, let his head fall to the side, and saw light again. Not that light—not the light that consumed.

The light of a warrior.

Sairsel watched her, gleaming in her armour, as the edges of his vision blurred and that angry light burst.

#from the heart #c:sairsel #c:morgana #f:xiv

9 notes · View notes