Aulus mal Asina - Heart Buttons
this was SUCH a pleasure to design, thank you everyone for your support as always!!
see the above link for the etsy listing ~
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If you play FFXIV long enough, you're bound to find your big main character faves, but you're also bound to find some little side NPC that shows up maybe twice that you get attached to anyway even though they are irrelevant to the plot after 5 minutes.
Anyway, mine is Aulus mal Asina, an evil Garlean scientist who shows up and is unceremoniously killed by the Warrior of Light not long after, who I just thought was Neat. Look at him! What a nasty little purple man! I love him.
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FFXIV Write 2023 | Prompt #27: Sole
me try writing something this month that isn't about mia and her backstory challenge (impossible)
-787 words
-cws: character death, violent imagery, one "fuck"
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It happens so fast, she doesn’t have a chance to think about it. All she knows is that one moment, Aulus had been cackling, Lyse had been gasping in pain; the next, her sword is through his chest.
It’s as if time freezes; the sounds of the battle around them fades away, and Lyse even seems to fall in slow motion. Aulus’s face, formerly a mix of gleeful madness and smug superiority, has fallen into horror and shock as he stares up at her. A drop of blood begins to trickle from the corner of his mouth; it rides all the way down and stains the collar of his Garlean engineer uniform. His hand shudders as he reaches up towards her face; his gauntlet has stopped glowing, its charge apparently dissipating along with the lifeforce of its wielder, though from the strength of the blast that had just struck Lyse, it may as well have just consumed everything it had. Sparks crackle off of it, one or two brushing her cheek. She doesn’t react. She just looks back at him, her face set firmly with resolve. She can feel her heart hardening, inuring herself to pain.
Were even a single circumstance different, this might have been something to mourn. In the abstract, it’s certainly a tragedy that it’s the sword of the man’s daughter that has been stabbed through his chest.
But Aulus mal Asina had disowned her, thrown her out of the house and damned her to a life of exile. Contributed to the Garlean war efforts on innumerable fronts, responsible for who knows how many crimes against mankind. Tortured Lily and Krile for the purposes of empowering Imperial agents with their Echoes. Worst of all, according to one of the notes they had recovered from that ghastly laboratory: killed her mother, attempting and failing to extract her essence to see if it could account for the Echo bestowed upon Mia herself.
“My… dar… ling… Maia…” Aulus gasps.
No. This man may be my father, but I feel no remorse for ending such a monster’s life.
Mia tightens her grip on her sword hilt, her teeth grinding together, as she glares Aulus in his eyes, watching the life slowly fade. “Fuck you,” she says quietly, deliberately. “My name is Mia Longhart.”
Another drop of blood trickles from Aulus’s lip as he stares at her. Finally, he throws his head back and lets out one final, harsh laugh, poisoned with irony, before he slumps and falls still.
She can vaguely sense there’s immediately a flurry of activity around her. She hears Lyse coughing as she reassures Lily and Alphinaud that she’s okay. She hears the low voices of Ellie and Raubahn, discussing something in an undertone. She hears various scraping and groaning noises from the wreckage of the hoverchair they had forced Aulus out of during their fight, as Arenvald and Yugiri appear to search it for usable salvage.
But she can barely parse any of it. She just watches the still face of her father, frozen forever in mockery, and feels the rage draining out of her. More than ever, she’s so tired.
She tightens her lips, places the sole of her boot on her father’s shoulder, and yanks her blade free, slamming and crumpling his corpse into the ground in front of her. Blood begins to pool around him and seep from the open wound in his chest. As she lifts her boot and brings it to rest on the floor once more, his head lolls limply, his face pointed away, but she still feels as if his discerning, disapproving eyes are upon her still. They clearly aren’t… but it feels that way nonetheless.
“Mia?” The tension in her face drains as well as she looks up and sees Ellie nearby, looking at her with a deeply furrowed brow of concern. “…Stupid question, I know, but are you going to be okay?”
Mia smiles ruefully and nods. “He had it coming.”
Ellie gives an exasperated chuckle and rubs her forehead. “That’s… fair enough, yeah.” She looks down upon Aulus’s corpse. “…Still, I’m sorry.”
She shakes her head and swipes her sword through the air by her side, flicking at least some of the blood off of it, before sheathing it. “Forget it. I have no regrets.” When Ellie looks back up at her, she makes sure to smile warmly. “He was no family of mine. I much prefer the one I’ve chosen.”
Ellie’s eyes widen a little, but a soft smile alights upon her lips then too. “I’m glad to hear it.” The tall roegadyn then hefts her greatsword upwards and rests it on her shoulder. “Come on, let’s kick Zenos’s arse.”
“Right behind you.”
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