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0bsidian5ire · 6 years

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The Allagan Raids - Bit #1

Climbing Syrcus Tower

Early mourning of the Praetorium/Ultima Weapon Assault

Erin took a deep breath and looked around her one last time. She was alone and her visor calculated no one had been around the Crystal Gate for at least five hours if the aether readings were anything to go by. Erin took a deep breath and nudged the Crystal Gate open. Directly in front of her were the Eight Sentinels. Behind them loomed Syrcus Tower and beyond that was Lake Silvertear. Let's hope we don't find anything in there... she told herself and walked though the gate. It silently closed behind her. Unfortunately, it was doubtful Syrcus Tower would be empty. Amon and the rest of the Allgan royal family had never been ones to let something as simple as an earthquake doom everything living in the tower. Erin knew that all too well.

At the first set of sentinels, she stopped and looked at the force-field being emitted. Fortunately, there was nothing in the force-field that hinted it was malfunctioning. Her visor displayed the aether type (fire [nts: figure out what the elements of the eight sentinels is!]), the amplitude (??? Hz), and any energy fluctuations the force-field had (none for five thousand years and normal ones for the past five years). Erin let out the breath she had been holding. She had hoped to never see any of this again. However, someone had to see if Syrcus Tower was still active and she was the only one who had the right genetic markers and enough knowledge to do it. As it was, she was running out of time. This era's Warriors of Light were going to confront the Ultima Weapon tonight. Everyone in St. Coniach's Find was back in Mor Dhona in case the Imperials tried something. No one would be around to notice that Erin had tech that was more advanced then anything the Imperials had or that Erin's heritage caused most of Syrcus Tower's defenses to ignore her.

Come on, she told herself, you've managed to survive everything Bahamut and the Warring Triad could throw against you back in Mercydia. And you got out of Amon's hellhole with your sanity mostly intact. What's one force-field you walked though a hundred times when you were a kid meeting your aunts and uncles? She bit her lip and rushed though the four force-fields in one go. Nothing happened. Erin let out the breath she had been holding. If the Eight Sentinels recognized Allagan Royal Genetic Markers when they saw them, it was likely the rest of the Crystal Tower complex would as well. That would make getting to Syrcus Tower much easier. She could ignore the Labyrinth of the Ancients and make use of the warp-points to make straight for the tower. On the other hand, it would make figuring out what was in Syrcus Tower harder. While getting into the tower itself was as easy opening the front door, doing so more then likely wake up anything in the tower. Given who Erin knew had been in Syrcus Tower last, that was something she wanted to avoid.

Good thing I brought all my old climbing gear with me, Erin thought as she pulled her Aetherial Radiation Visor down so the visual node next to the last sentinel could get a reading of her eyeball. A warp-point appeared next to the node and Erin walked though it to find herself on the steps leading up to Syrcus Tower's main entrance. She walked down the steps and around the base of the main tower until she was on the side facing away from Mor Dhona. It would not do to be found out just because someone looked up at the wrong time.

Once she got to a good spot, Erin pulled her uneven white hair back into a ponytail and put on her climbing gear. Gloves made out of a thin wire mesh were pulled over her usual fingerless gloves. The same mesh went on over her boots. The meshes were attached to the crystal aether store that was always on Erin's waist. When Erin turned on the meshes, they produced a thin aether field around her arms and legs. Erin turned a dial on the back of one of her gloves and felt the aether filed become aspected more towards earth. After giving the field enough time to become fully aspected, she placed her hands as high up on the base of Syrcus Tower and put her full body weight on them. Her hands stuck to the wall and held her weight. Erin laughed and put her feet on the wall as well. She jerked her body around, but nothing moved. Satisfied that the earth aether-field would keep her from slipping off Syrcus Tower, Erin began climbing.

Dawn had came and went before Erin finally saw something in Syrcus Tower that could be considered alive. Early on in the climb, she had gotten into the habit of looking through the thin sections of crystal that served as Syrcus Tower's windows, but had yet to see anything that could be called living. That changed when she looked through a window over one thousand fulms up and saw a yellow Mercydian dragon. Oh dear, she gulped. No neurolinks, no sign of a recent fight, so why are you still asleep? This was bad. Dragons had the rather annoying tendency to not need much to stay alive. If anything could have managed to survive five thousand years underground with no food, it would have been the dragons. Only this wasn't a Dravainian dragon that had only lived a thousand years at most and only fought with Ishgard. This was a Meracydian Dragon that had most likely been dragged back to Allag from Meracydia after the war. If it ever got out of Syrcus Tower, hardly anyone would know how to fight it. All the more reason I should have done this earlier, Erin reminded herself. There are far more dangerous things in here then one Meracydian. She climbed on.

It was near the two thousand fulm point that Erin looked in a window and saw one of people she feared was still alive. Shit. Aunt Scylla. The cainine humanoid was draped over a gigantic chaise lounge with her staff within easy reach. From the way she was breathing, Erin could tell she was asleep. But her paws twitched every now and then and some of her heads sleepily shifted around. Erin looked further up the tower, and started climbing faster. She wasn't even a quarter of the way up Syrcus Tower yet.

It was once she got up to 2,500 fulms that Erin took a break. It was midday and she was a quarter of the way up the whole of Syrcus Tower now. Fortunately, that wasn't as high as she had to climb. Only the bottom half of Cyrcus Tower was hollowed out. The last five thousand fulms were nothing but solid crystal, the better for capturing and channeling aether from the heavens down to the gigantic crystal aether stores in Syrcus Tower's base. Up this high, there was more dragons inside. Only, they were slightly more active then the dragons Erin had seen earlier. Tails twitched and smoke drifted out of nostrils. Guess that means the tower is waking up from top to bottom, Erin thought as she climbed on. It made sense. Solar energy would have collected at the top first before traveling down the tower.

At three thousand fulms high, Erin was not happy. Through a window, she could see Glasya Labolas and he was definitely not asleep. The commander of the Imperial Honor Guard was going through a series of stretches, clearly exploring what kind of shape his body was in after five thousand years of sleep. From what Erin could see, he was just as formidable as he had been when he had hunted down members of the Anti-Allagan resistances. I hope the other Warriors of Light kill you, she thought as she climbed on. She'd lost a lot of friends and acquaintances to Glasya. And from what she had heard had happened to Phlegethon after he had been captured, the ones Glasya had killed were the lucky ones.

The further up Erin climbed, the more active the tower became. Dragons were now roaming about, torching the walls; minotaurs charged at each other, and artificial voidsent flew around. Most unsettling were the vacant-eyed clones of people who Erin recognized as what might her distant cousins. At least Amon wasn't able to expose them to Sephirot's aether before the 4th Umbral Calamity, Erin mused to herself. That would be really annoying.

She heard Amon long before she saw him; sounds, like the most perfect aether-vibrations imaginable rang out from the floors above her. When she looked up, her visor saw the most spectacular display of aether that she had seen since the 7th Umbral Calamity. Unfortunately, she recognized what Amon was playing. Oh great... 3rd Movement of the Water-Aspected Gavotte in C Half-Flat; he's annoyed. Erin sighed. And there's absolutely no reason I should still know that after five thousand years even if it was the only thing keeping me semi-sane even when Amon was experimenting with Sephirot's aether on me. She grit her teeth and kept climbing up.

And tried not to remember the last time she had really seen Amon. Back when she had come home from the Meracydian war and had woken up surrounded by aether laced with Sephirot's aether. Not enough to temper (and wasn't that laughable now; the Echo meant she could have been drenched in Sephirot's aether and come out sane), but enough to sustain itself and her off of the unclaimed aether around her. Enough to ensure she couldn't die normally. Fortunately, that had been back in the early days before Amon had learned to use enough of Sephirot's aether to induce massive growth in people permanently.

She had seen him then though the blue-green aether and glass; an elezen slightly taller then she was sitting at an aether-organ and playing pieces that changed with his mood. She both hated and loved it. Hated that the music told her when Amon would be coming to drip more of that blue-green aether into the tank with her. Loved that it gave her something else to focus on other then the new aether that rooting itself in her. But what she loved most was the Voice. That Voice that had called Erin its daughter and told her to Hear, Feel, Think. The Voice that had given her an shining aether crystal the size of her two fists. The same aether crystal she had smashed the side of the aether-tank she was in and -- there was silence.

Erin stopped and blinked at the crystal wall beneath her hands, her head suddenly empty. This high up, it was eerily quiet. The sun was setting in the distance and her visor was reading an altitude of 4,377 fulms. Damn him to the Hell of Earth! Erin shivered, and not from the cold. I haven't been that lost in the lab in decades. She snorted and resumed climbing. Granted, I haven't heard music like that in millennia. Go figure. In one of the windows, she caught a glimpse of a figure sitting at the largest aether-organ she had ever seen and quickly hurried on. Amon's music followed her up Syrcus Tower.

Thankfully, it was dark by the time Erin reached the outcropping the Royal Throne was on. Unlike the other areas, it was outside and if anyone happened to be on it, Erin didn't want anyone to see her. Fortunately, the perpetual waterfall meant no one would hear her moving around. She positioned herself to be slightly above the outcropping while still being hidden behind the main spire of Syrcus Tower. Slowly, she inched her body around until she could see the throne. And froze. Amon was bad enough. On the throne was Xande, his head resting on one fist while he drummed the fingers of his other hand on the arm of the throne. He was the picture of boredom. Erin, and anyone else back in the latter days of the Allagan Empire, knew better.

Hoping he hadn't seen her, Erin crept back around the tower. As soon as she was out of sight of the outcropping, she teleported off the tower to Mor Dhona.

Mor Dhona was a welcome relief to Erin after Syrcuss Tower. It was all wood and mortared stone and the most advanced piece of tech in the town was the engineering tools to be found in the Ironworks. She peeled off her climbing gear and fit it into her belt-bag. At least the archanists of Eorzea had figured out a variation of the Space Compression Enchantemnt in the time since Allag. Hopefully they'd figure out more useful Allagan math now that it was possible to read tomestones easily.

Erin made her way into the 7th Heaven and looked around it. It was obvious the Eorzean Alliance was making it's move on the XIVth Legion tonight; she had never seen the bar so empty. Out of habit, Erin made her way over to the bar and pushed a pile of gil over the courter without looking at how much it was. "I'll have a bottle of your strongest drink," she told the bar-tender [nts: look up NPC name].

The bar-tender looked from the pile of gil to Erin and then slid an unlabeled bottle of dark brown liquid over the counter. "Don' blame me if you don' remember what happen' tonight," she told Erin.

Erin snorted and picked up the bottle and left the 7th Heaven with it. She pulled out the stopper and took a drink as she walked to her inn room. It was hardly the worst alcohol she'd had. At least it burned going down. One of the more practical side effects of being infused with Sephirot's aether was that Erin couldn't get drunk. Sephirot's aether absorbed any unclaimed ambient aether and it wasn't picky about the kind of aether it absorbed. Alcohol with it's high water and fire aspects was absorbed almost immediately.

In her inn room, Erin rolled onto her bed without undressing. Even with all the excess aether she naturally had access to, she was tired. She had been up for 24 hours by now and had spent most of it being physically active. And then she had gone and dumped salt on some very old wounds. She took another drink of alcohol and felt it go down. On a whim, she pulled her visor off and looked at the world as everyone else saw it. It looked strangely dark. She snorted to herself at that. One of the things she forgot after having worn her aether visor for so long was that most people couldn't see well in the dark. Instead of lighting a candle, she pulled out her favorite personal light source; her Crystal of Light.

Unlike the current Warriors of Light's crystals, hers was the size of her two fists and she could barely hold it in one hand. In its light, she could see herself reflected in the alcohol bottle the same way other people saw her. It wasn't something she usually got to see. An angular hyur face was frame by uneven hair that was long on one side and short on the other. In her first century of life, her hair had been brown. By the time she was three hundred and was counting her age in decades, it was pure white. Standing out against her unnaturally pale skin (another effect of Sephirot's aether; it kept absorbing solar aether) were several large purple tattoos. Nowadays, many people though they were the tattoos that were from some forgotten Gyr Abanian clan. In Allag's time, they would have been easily identified with several of the more outspoken rebellions. If only Mom and Dad could see me now, she laughed. The scandals I could cause them... She snorted at that mental image and took one last drink from the bottle before setting it down on the bedside table. Yawning, she burrowed under the covers. Her Crystal of Light went out as she went to sleep.

She dreamed of a great Darkness that shook the world from the Seventh Heaven to the Seventh Hell that night. She also dreamed of a great Light that shielded her younger siblings and cast out a shadow. When she woke up, Erin manifested her Crystal of Light and wept as she hadn't wept in millennia. The day had finally come when Hydaelyn no longer had the strength to speak to her children.

#ffxiv #ffxiv fanfiction #fanfiction #nanowrimo #crystal tower #warrior of light #oc #bad memories

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