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Fandom: FFXIV
Summary: Snowballed Headcanon!
Chapter Summary: A lot of 'No seriously what am I getting into' mixed with getting horribly distracted before reality comes crashing back in.
Warnings: References to really bizarre cultist porn. Louisoix speed-chessmastering.
He slept deeper than he'd expected; waking up was a slow drag out from half-remembered fragments of uneasy dreams. The room was still dark, and somewhere in the semiconscious muddle, he realized he wasn't sure what time it was; the curtains over the window were heavy enough to blot out any incoming light, and although there was a thin light from under the door, he wasn't sure if it was daylight or lamplight.
The door opened, and the light from outside was bright enough to get him flinching under the blanket away from it with a strangled noise. The door closed and it went back to being dark, enough that he slowly shifted the blanket back down, to be met with a pair of glowing green spots in the dark, eyes on an indistinct pale figure.
“I'm going to need to open the curtains; there's no reason to spend the day in the dark.” Y'shtola's voice issuing from the shape was amused; now that his eyes were adjusting back from the light of the door, he could make out the Miqote's ears and tail.
She walked across the room to window, and just before she reached up he woke up enough to realize it was probably a good idea to shade his eyes.
It was definitely into the day, and early enough for the sun to be very firmly on that side of the building, bright light flooding into the room. “Now that you're awake, I'll see to getting you something to eat; you should be up to something more substantial?”
“Ah...yes.” He lowered his hands slowly, squinting through the sunlight.
“It's only a bell or so to mid-day; you needed the sleep.” She dropped something on the side-table with a metallic clink, and he gave the small knife a confused frown; it was one of his, from one of his wrist sheaths. “You must've dropped it yesterday; the guard found it.”
From there he noticed that his soulstone was next to it, and then the counter by the side-table; the rest of the sheathed knives were settled neatly. “How's everything going for tomorrow?”
“Well, the Magistrate has been overseeing; the Inspectors have been quietly contacting every one of their men that will do work out of uniform, briefing them in a bright, sunny room. They're in better spirits than they've been for weeks.”
He brushed fingers over the soulstone, finally picking it up, holding it cradled in one hand in his lap. “Then this truly is almost over.” He traced the harp symbol with a fingertip. “Do you have any clue what it would want in this city?”
She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, one ear sliding out to the side. “A few theories; the simplest is the nature of the libraries and our relation to the rest of the continent – we may be a weak nation by ourselves, but when the other nations are faced with something they don't understand, they send someone here to inquire. This one has also been targeting us more specifically; if it is the same one as an incident you've likely heard referenced, then it's trapped Urianger outside the campus once already. It attempted to turn that into a trap, but it underestimated the lot of us together, and overestimated its own power; if it is attempting to open a voidgate, it may be seeking a better power base for another attempt.”
“Then by Urianger's calculations, we'll likely be walking into a half-laid trap even if it doesn't expect us coming.”
“Oh doubtless, but one we're prepared for. As morbid as it is, its actions of recent speak of it beginning to feel cornered; that trap was something beyond the means of a mortal, and did nothing for its attempts to sow conflict.” She moved closer, a hand on his wrist. “Your friend scared it into acting rashly, and you've scared it by giving us a way to find it faster than it wants. He did an incredibly brave and difficult thing, and it won't be in vain.”
“He won't be there to see it.”
She squeezed his wrist. “Always the tragedy of these things. We'll save what we can; in the meantime, he wished you whole and well, as did Mattye, and that you can grant them with certainty.”
“...I'll do what I can.” It still settled with a dull ache in his chest that had nothing to do with the injury; something missing where he wasn't sure he'd ever be used to it. It left him almost dreading going back to his old routine; how long would it take before he stopped going to the tiny cafe Mattye was fond of using for lessons, or to remember that Gib wouldn't be showing up with medicine if something went wrong in the winter? If he did accept Louisoix's offer, would it just be running away from too many empty spaces?
Y'shtola's hand moved from his wrist to rest around his shoulder, and he blinked at a drop on the soulstone, reaching up to rub at his eyes.
“Why now? They haven't done anything like this before in this city, why now?”
Y'shtola shook her head slowly. “We aren't completely certain, but …. there was a tablet found, with a seventh verse of the prophecies of Mezaya Thousand Eyes.”
A set of quatrains describing each of the umbral and astral eras in turn; there had been six sets only, six smaller cycles to match the six elements and a belief that the present astral era would continue on, having completed the cycle.
A seventh verse for a seventh Umbral Era, the cycle restarting through another era of disaster and strife; every past Umbral era had seen civilizations wiped off the map, ruins and old bones buried and forgotten.
“Louisoix has had visions as well; we think they may be seeking to bring about another Umbral Era. We hope to perhaps turn that fate aside. There may always be suffering, but it need not be on that scale.”
There were a hundred things nagging there, thumb running along the harp engraved on the stone, his voice wobbling and weak. “...when Louisoix first brought me to my room, Yda asked if I was the one he'd been looking for... he said, when this was all over, that I had – an invitation. Was this a part of what he'd foreseen?”
“...He knew its shadow had yet to pass from us, but not what it was doing until your theft drew his attention; and he oft will have blank spaces where he does not know what he's looking for or exactly why something is important until he finds it – you can tell how much he's chasing a premonition against how much he knows for sure by how forceful and vague he becomes.”
“And if I choose to stay?”
She shrugged, although he caught her ears lowering faintly from the corner of his eye. “The Weaver's pattern is an ever-changing thing; if it were inviolate, there would be no use to prophecy. He would continue seeking someone to fill whatever space is worrying at his mind.”
It left him with even more questions about what to do when this was over; if he had a chance to help prevent something that horrible, could he really walk away?
“I'll go see to that food – although I should warn you that you may yet be put to work; Urianger has a backlog of translation that includes a few that he had only gotten far enough into to know that they weren't something pressing and vital. He can't take time away from the more urgent work, but leaving it unfinished nags at him terribly, and some of them are in languages you apparently follow.”
She swept out, leaving him unsure if he should be glad to maybe have something constructive to do while he was down, or feeling some kind of vague dread.
Y'shtola was in and out and not around much, mostly tending to other things; he overheard edges of some lesson in conjury to a younger student passing by in the halls, and a bell's worth of other random traffic before Urianger arrived, with an armload of a few battered, aged metal tablets and a couple of tomes, an explanation that the tablets were Nymian in origin, while the tomes dated back to the Sixth Umbral Era and were possibly maybe in the same language as some things he'd been heard singing in, and there was a blank journal, a pen, and an inkwell to record what he found.
It led to a funny, awkward moment as Urianger was settling them where he could reach them, and he caught a glimpse of the top tablet, perking up and singing a few lines from memory. Urianger concluded it was a good thing there was more than the Nymian tablets, and left him with a dry comment to at least translate and annotate them for posterity.
The translation was almost more transcribing as he read than work, with a little more time spent on annotations of what he knew to add, notes cross-referencing some of it to other bits of ballads and poetry. It didn't take nearly as long as was probably expected, and he'd gotten through them by the time Y'shtola had brought in soup and bread around mid-day.
The rest of it was hit or miss, but he managed to pick out a couple illuminations in common between one that he could kind of follow and one that was in the same language as that blasted other tome he'd “borrowed”; someone from one nation had transcribed and translated the volume from the other. He ended up half working on translating the one he could puzzle through, and half using it as a primer to start making sense of the other language. He was going back over notes in the journal over dinner, and kept busy with it by lamplight well after sunset.
He didn't realize he'd fallen asleep until he was nudged awake, and then handed a damp rag and a mirror to clean smudged ink off his face where he'd dozed off on the not-yet-dry journal; Louisoix was trying and mostly succeeding at not laughing, but the effort was not at all hidden. “I see he has you started on learning Amdapori.”
“Is that what that is?” He gave the tome in question a bleary, suspicious look; Amdapor had been a powerful civilization in the Fifth Astral Era … and very likely a major contribution to its transition into the Sixth Umbral Era, after they and, to a lesser extent, the other civilizations of that day did enough damage to prompt the Twelve flooding Eorzea to wipe them off the map. “Hadn't they gone heavily into void-worship?”
Louisoix gave a nod, looking oddly proud. “Very; the tome you hadn't been able to translate is a rather abstractly written paeon from their dealings with the Ascians. It has enough information to be dangerous, but enough reverence and zealotry to be hard to navigate for anything overly useful.”
He grimaced. “I think I'm almost glad I couldn't read it.”
“Oh, there's worse; if you gain a better grasp of the language, mind what Urianger hands you if he has a reason to be irritated with you.”
“Something worse than hymns to beings that feed on suffering?”
“I believe you likely already know that many cultures can occasionally tangle more explicit passions with their reverence?”
Somehow, the calmly cheerful delivery made the concept worse, and did not help the sudden backfiring of a resolve to not form mental images; he found sudden reason to try and make doubly sure the ink was no longer on his face, and a sudden regret of knowledge the concept ever existed.
“He came out of discovering it with some very creative swears about voidal resonators.”
He knew just enough of what that meant for there to be a muffled wail through the wet cloth; metal tools for channeling void energy and opening rifts were bad enough by themselves and did not belong in some contexts, and he really wished he could turn off the part of his mind that could gleefully and vividly run away with images and ideas. He could hear Louisoix moving the books to a neat stack nearby.
“It is well into the night, although you may want to go over your other notes again before you go back to sleep.”
He lowered the cloth enough to use one eye for a dim, tired glare. “At least I'll know who to blame if that ends up in my dreams.”
Oh that smile was entirely too amused. Apparently not only were some of the oddball stories of the Twelve being half-crazy and having occasionally warped senses of humor true, but it extended to the Archons. It did trail off, at least. “Sleep well; we'll send someone for you in the morning.”
He turned off the lamp after Louisoix left, finding it harder to focus on Nymian holiday dance-reels while trying not to think about Urianger's hypothetical revenge; he ended up with his face buried into the pillow, trying to focus on singing less objectionable tavern bawds under his breath until he passed out.
“Sending someone” was Y'shtola nudging him awake and leaving fresh clothes folded by the bed with breakfast. He was pretty sure some of it was a little spiked by the alchemist, since he was feeling more steady than was probably warranted by how recovered he was.
Well, as long as he didn't do anything reckless, he'd have time to rest more properly afterwards.
He was going over a last check that all of his knives were settled out of sight, but within easy reach, when Louisoix came in, carefully closing the door behind him, hand resting on his staff.
“Before we go, there was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
He looked up, pausing in his last paranoia-check.
“The way Ascians gain a host. It's common and easy enough for them to simply cast out for an existing willing worshipper, if those exist in the area they want to move in, but...” Louisoix paused, considering carefully. “In many cases anymore, they find their hosts via other means; they seek out those they can deceive or bargain with – people who have lost hope, people who would give anything for something they want, people who have turned against others or believe they can come out the better for the bargain; sometimes even someone unwitting of what they've agreed to.”
He stayed silent, not sure he liked where this was heading.
“Its host is likely someone familiar to you, that the others would trust, and it need not be someone you wouldn't trust; just someone it could trick a bargain out of. Be careful.”
“...I will.”
Louisoix crossed the room to hand him something; a small, round piece of smooth crystal.
“It's the source from one of the lamps; we can't afford to carry lanterns or torches into this. It works simply enough, responding to focused will.”
A light source in the tunnels and, if the meeting room was any indication, something that would give an early warning of the host. “Thank you.” He opened his mouth on a question, and stopped uncertainly; Louisoix waited, a faint gesture to go ahead.
“...Is it possible to save an Ascian's host?”
Louisoix closed his eyes, looking away with a worried, headshake, looking older and wearier than he'd ever seen. “Some are looking in the old homeland, but...”
He closed a hand around the light stone. It wasn't something where they could really hold one of those indefinitely on the hopes of an answer that might never come.
Summary: Snowballed Headcanon!
Chapter Summary: A lot of 'No seriously what am I getting into' mixed with getting horribly distracted before reality comes crashing back in.
Warnings: References to really bizarre cultist porn. Louisoix speed-chessmastering.
He slept deeper than he'd expected; waking up was a slow drag out from half-remembered fragments of uneasy dreams. The room was still dark, and somewhere in the semiconscious muddle, he realized he wasn't sure what time it was; the curtains over the window were heavy enough to blot out any incoming light, and although there was a thin light from under the door, he wasn't sure if it was daylight or lamplight.
The door opened, and the light from outside was bright enough to get him flinching under the blanket away from it with a strangled noise. The door closed and it went back to being dark, enough that he slowly shifted the blanket back down, to be met with a pair of glowing green spots in the dark, eyes on an indistinct pale figure.
“I'm going to need to open the curtains; there's no reason to spend the day in the dark.” Y'shtola's voice issuing from the shape was amused; now that his eyes were adjusting back from the light of the door, he could make out the Miqote's ears and tail.
She walked across the room to window, and just before she reached up he woke up enough to realize it was probably a good idea to shade his eyes.
It was definitely into the day, and early enough for the sun to be very firmly on that side of the building, bright light flooding into the room. “Now that you're awake, I'll see to getting you something to eat; you should be up to something more substantial?”
“Ah...yes.” He lowered his hands slowly, squinting through the sunlight.
“It's only a bell or so to mid-day; you needed the sleep.” She dropped something on the side-table with a metallic clink, and he gave the small knife a confused frown; it was one of his, from one of his wrist sheaths. “You must've dropped it yesterday; the guard found it.”
From there he noticed that his soulstone was next to it, and then the counter by the side-table; the rest of the sheathed knives were settled neatly. “How's everything going for tomorrow?”
“Well, the Magistrate has been overseeing; the Inspectors have been quietly contacting every one of their men that will do work out of uniform, briefing them in a bright, sunny room. They're in better spirits than they've been for weeks.”
He brushed fingers over the soulstone, finally picking it up, holding it cradled in one hand in his lap. “Then this truly is almost over.” He traced the harp symbol with a fingertip. “Do you have any clue what it would want in this city?”
She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully, one ear sliding out to the side. “A few theories; the simplest is the nature of the libraries and our relation to the rest of the continent – we may be a weak nation by ourselves, but when the other nations are faced with something they don't understand, they send someone here to inquire. This one has also been targeting us more specifically; if it is the same one as an incident you've likely heard referenced, then it's trapped Urianger outside the campus once already. It attempted to turn that into a trap, but it underestimated the lot of us together, and overestimated its own power; if it is attempting to open a voidgate, it may be seeking a better power base for another attempt.”
“Then by Urianger's calculations, we'll likely be walking into a half-laid trap even if it doesn't expect us coming.”
“Oh doubtless, but one we're prepared for. As morbid as it is, its actions of recent speak of it beginning to feel cornered; that trap was something beyond the means of a mortal, and did nothing for its attempts to sow conflict.” She moved closer, a hand on his wrist. “Your friend scared it into acting rashly, and you've scared it by giving us a way to find it faster than it wants. He did an incredibly brave and difficult thing, and it won't be in vain.”
“He won't be there to see it.”
She squeezed his wrist. “Always the tragedy of these things. We'll save what we can; in the meantime, he wished you whole and well, as did Mattye, and that you can grant them with certainty.”
“...I'll do what I can.” It still settled with a dull ache in his chest that had nothing to do with the injury; something missing where he wasn't sure he'd ever be used to it. It left him almost dreading going back to his old routine; how long would it take before he stopped going to the tiny cafe Mattye was fond of using for lessons, or to remember that Gib wouldn't be showing up with medicine if something went wrong in the winter? If he did accept Louisoix's offer, would it just be running away from too many empty spaces?
Y'shtola's hand moved from his wrist to rest around his shoulder, and he blinked at a drop on the soulstone, reaching up to rub at his eyes.
“Why now? They haven't done anything like this before in this city, why now?”
Y'shtola shook her head slowly. “We aren't completely certain, but …. there was a tablet found, with a seventh verse of the prophecies of Mezaya Thousand Eyes.”
A set of quatrains describing each of the umbral and astral eras in turn; there had been six sets only, six smaller cycles to match the six elements and a belief that the present astral era would continue on, having completed the cycle.
A seventh verse for a seventh Umbral Era, the cycle restarting through another era of disaster and strife; every past Umbral era had seen civilizations wiped off the map, ruins and old bones buried and forgotten.
“Louisoix has had visions as well; we think they may be seeking to bring about another Umbral Era. We hope to perhaps turn that fate aside. There may always be suffering, but it need not be on that scale.”
There were a hundred things nagging there, thumb running along the harp engraved on the stone, his voice wobbling and weak. “...when Louisoix first brought me to my room, Yda asked if I was the one he'd been looking for... he said, when this was all over, that I had – an invitation. Was this a part of what he'd foreseen?”
“...He knew its shadow had yet to pass from us, but not what it was doing until your theft drew his attention; and he oft will have blank spaces where he does not know what he's looking for or exactly why something is important until he finds it – you can tell how much he's chasing a premonition against how much he knows for sure by how forceful and vague he becomes.”
“And if I choose to stay?”
She shrugged, although he caught her ears lowering faintly from the corner of his eye. “The Weaver's pattern is an ever-changing thing; if it were inviolate, there would be no use to prophecy. He would continue seeking someone to fill whatever space is worrying at his mind.”
It left him with even more questions about what to do when this was over; if he had a chance to help prevent something that horrible, could he really walk away?
“I'll go see to that food – although I should warn you that you may yet be put to work; Urianger has a backlog of translation that includes a few that he had only gotten far enough into to know that they weren't something pressing and vital. He can't take time away from the more urgent work, but leaving it unfinished nags at him terribly, and some of them are in languages you apparently follow.”
She swept out, leaving him unsure if he should be glad to maybe have something constructive to do while he was down, or feeling some kind of vague dread.
Y'shtola was in and out and not around much, mostly tending to other things; he overheard edges of some lesson in conjury to a younger student passing by in the halls, and a bell's worth of other random traffic before Urianger arrived, with an armload of a few battered, aged metal tablets and a couple of tomes, an explanation that the tablets were Nymian in origin, while the tomes dated back to the Sixth Umbral Era and were possibly maybe in the same language as some things he'd been heard singing in, and there was a blank journal, a pen, and an inkwell to record what he found.
It led to a funny, awkward moment as Urianger was settling them where he could reach them, and he caught a glimpse of the top tablet, perking up and singing a few lines from memory. Urianger concluded it was a good thing there was more than the Nymian tablets, and left him with a dry comment to at least translate and annotate them for posterity.
The translation was almost more transcribing as he read than work, with a little more time spent on annotations of what he knew to add, notes cross-referencing some of it to other bits of ballads and poetry. It didn't take nearly as long as was probably expected, and he'd gotten through them by the time Y'shtola had brought in soup and bread around mid-day.
The rest of it was hit or miss, but he managed to pick out a couple illuminations in common between one that he could kind of follow and one that was in the same language as that blasted other tome he'd “borrowed”; someone from one nation had transcribed and translated the volume from the other. He ended up half working on translating the one he could puzzle through, and half using it as a primer to start making sense of the other language. He was going back over notes in the journal over dinner, and kept busy with it by lamplight well after sunset.
He didn't realize he'd fallen asleep until he was nudged awake, and then handed a damp rag and a mirror to clean smudged ink off his face where he'd dozed off on the not-yet-dry journal; Louisoix was trying and mostly succeeding at not laughing, but the effort was not at all hidden. “I see he has you started on learning Amdapori.”
“Is that what that is?” He gave the tome in question a bleary, suspicious look; Amdapor had been a powerful civilization in the Fifth Astral Era … and very likely a major contribution to its transition into the Sixth Umbral Era, after they and, to a lesser extent, the other civilizations of that day did enough damage to prompt the Twelve flooding Eorzea to wipe them off the map. “Hadn't they gone heavily into void-worship?”
Louisoix gave a nod, looking oddly proud. “Very; the tome you hadn't been able to translate is a rather abstractly written paeon from their dealings with the Ascians. It has enough information to be dangerous, but enough reverence and zealotry to be hard to navigate for anything overly useful.”
He grimaced. “I think I'm almost glad I couldn't read it.”
“Oh, there's worse; if you gain a better grasp of the language, mind what Urianger hands you if he has a reason to be irritated with you.”
“Something worse than hymns to beings that feed on suffering?”
“I believe you likely already know that many cultures can occasionally tangle more explicit passions with their reverence?”
Somehow, the calmly cheerful delivery made the concept worse, and did not help the sudden backfiring of a resolve to not form mental images; he found sudden reason to try and make doubly sure the ink was no longer on his face, and a sudden regret of knowledge the concept ever existed.
“He came out of discovering it with some very creative swears about voidal resonators.”
He knew just enough of what that meant for there to be a muffled wail through the wet cloth; metal tools for channeling void energy and opening rifts were bad enough by themselves and did not belong in some contexts, and he really wished he could turn off the part of his mind that could gleefully and vividly run away with images and ideas. He could hear Louisoix moving the books to a neat stack nearby.
“It is well into the night, although you may want to go over your other notes again before you go back to sleep.”
He lowered the cloth enough to use one eye for a dim, tired glare. “At least I'll know who to blame if that ends up in my dreams.”
Oh that smile was entirely too amused. Apparently not only were some of the oddball stories of the Twelve being half-crazy and having occasionally warped senses of humor true, but it extended to the Archons. It did trail off, at least. “Sleep well; we'll send someone for you in the morning.”
He turned off the lamp after Louisoix left, finding it harder to focus on Nymian holiday dance-reels while trying not to think about Urianger's hypothetical revenge; he ended up with his face buried into the pillow, trying to focus on singing less objectionable tavern bawds under his breath until he passed out.
“Sending someone” was Y'shtola nudging him awake and leaving fresh clothes folded by the bed with breakfast. He was pretty sure some of it was a little spiked by the alchemist, since he was feeling more steady than was probably warranted by how recovered he was.
Well, as long as he didn't do anything reckless, he'd have time to rest more properly afterwards.
He was going over a last check that all of his knives were settled out of sight, but within easy reach, when Louisoix came in, carefully closing the door behind him, hand resting on his staff.
“Before we go, there was something I wanted to talk to you about.”
He looked up, pausing in his last paranoia-check.
“The way Ascians gain a host. It's common and easy enough for them to simply cast out for an existing willing worshipper, if those exist in the area they want to move in, but...” Louisoix paused, considering carefully. “In many cases anymore, they find their hosts via other means; they seek out those they can deceive or bargain with – people who have lost hope, people who would give anything for something they want, people who have turned against others or believe they can come out the better for the bargain; sometimes even someone unwitting of what they've agreed to.”
He stayed silent, not sure he liked where this was heading.
“Its host is likely someone familiar to you, that the others would trust, and it need not be someone you wouldn't trust; just someone it could trick a bargain out of. Be careful.”
“...I will.”
Louisoix crossed the room to hand him something; a small, round piece of smooth crystal.
“It's the source from one of the lamps; we can't afford to carry lanterns or torches into this. It works simply enough, responding to focused will.”
A light source in the tunnels and, if the meeting room was any indication, something that would give an early warning of the host. “Thank you.” He opened his mouth on a question, and stopped uncertainly; Louisoix waited, a faint gesture to go ahead.
“...Is it possible to save an Ascian's host?”
Louisoix closed his eyes, looking away with a worried, headshake, looking older and wearier than he'd ever seen. “Some are looking in the old homeland, but...”
He closed a hand around the light stone. It wasn't something where they could really hold one of those indefinitely on the hopes of an answer that might never come.
