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katimus_prime) wrote2020-02-22 01:00 am
katimus_prime) wrote2020-02-22 01:00 am
Friendship Ended With Zodiark
Please excuse me while I tie my own tourniquet!
Fandom: FFXIV
Warnings: Major Character Death, Shadowbringers 5.2 Spoilers, talk of death and violence and personal losses
Basically I've been trying to brain at keeping Varis special in a way that fits with canon despite it backhanding me. I know this piece might make it look like I'm an Emet Anti, but please take note this is not true. This is about me being closer to my fave than my second-fave and being in my feelings at the moment. I love all of you and need to heal myself by making content that includes my fave.
He was dead, and he knew it. There would be no more. There need be no more. He had no idea why he had struggled so hard and gotten so little accomplished. Nearly five decades worth of regret churned within him as he watched people scramble haplessly about his corpse.
He thought on Solus's words on how the Empire existed to sow chaos across The Source instead of quell it. He had been taught naught but lies as a youth and become so attached to the idea of order and support of the people through societal infrastructure that he was blinded to the thought that it was a ruse. The anger and humiliation he felt in that moment had been explosive. It was the beginning of the end for him. He had lost Mia, Regula and Zenos. With so little left, what was there really than to sit in place like a lead weight and try not to give his people a reason to panic?
It was the mandate of the nobility to provide stability for the common people. But the Ascians were beyond that, with their dogged devotion to their god and stopping at nothing to get their goals accomplished. He hated them. He had always hated them, and seeing them get that much closer to getting their way was the last straw.
He sat down on the stairs next to himself and put his head in his hands.
The chaos he was trying to hold back with his bare hands washed over everything, as it was naturally going to anyway. Trying to halt it was hubris, and the people who had gathered under him for shelter stood to be swallowed by it. He had made them weak.
Before despair could take him entirely, a light shone out of the periphery of his vision, and a woman he barely recognized strode forth. It wasn't his wife, as he had hoped it would be, and looking upon her, she had a familiarity to her that was just beyond his ability to connect. "I'm sorry that you had to wander alone in darkness for so long," she said. "You had no chance, but you tried as hard as you could, and you deserve credit for that at the very least."
"Do I...know you?"
The woman was of middling size, with her long blonde hair done up in braids, wearing a white dress. Her bare feet looked out of place on the cold steel of the throne room floor, but her luminous form (and by proxy his own now) rendered her immune to any environmental discomfort. "You may not have known or seen me in person, but I was called Minfilia in this life in The Source."
Indeed, he had seen pictures via reconnaissance reports once or twice, younger-looking of course. "What business does one of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn have with me?" In life, his tone would have been defensive and demanding, but it was one of hesitant curiosity now that everything mattered so much less.
"Through no fault of your own, you were stolen from us, into the waiting arms of one of our greatest enemies, and raised to become as such yourself." The expression on her face was apologetic, but her eyes were hard.
Varis stood up, trying to read her meaning. It was always just beneath the surface, in the way he was treated, in the way his grandfather looked down at him. He was through and through his blood, but there had been something roiling and incompatible about how they interacted, restrained hostility that manifested not a day after Varis's father had died. He knew the parts he was told of his grandsire's story, but he had always wondered but not had the space to express if there had been another side to it. He met Minfilia's gaze. "The work of the Ascian, Emet-Selch?"
She nodded. "To hear him tell the story, the only way to have gone about anything was to have let Zodiark guide the will of the star from the point where he was created unto its doom."
"That was the only version I was taught of that story. I always thought there was another side to it, but it was not acceptable to talk about." He remembered once when he was 6 or 7, writing about it in a journal that mysteriously vanished after he had been told the story of Amaurot and Zodiark for the first time. He had it locked in a place he thought was safe, but had learned that nothing of that nature was safe or secure once he had told his grandfather about it.
"There always was. There is always another perspective and explanation for just about any event. Perspectives as myriad as there are people experiencing the same thing. The thought that there is but one path and that straying from that path denotes moral failing is itself the moral failing. But you know this. You've felt it inside and been taught to repress it to keep yourself safe, alive but caged."
"How do you know all of this?" That part angered him, but he tried not to scowl too much at her.
"There has been enough time for this to have happened many times, and not just to you. Sundered souls...it is very difficult to see where they end up, and Zodiark's children work very hard to get Him back. We were all one people once, however. You know that."
Varis nodded, unsmiling, his sense of regret roiling.
"Can I show you something, before we go our separate ways?" She held a hand out.
He took it, his misgivings dull and distant. In an instant, they were transported to the vision of Amaurot Emet-Selch had created in The First.
"We both know this place. You belonged to it as much as he and I did, but due to his hatred of those who brought Hydaelyn about, he worked to keep your spirit crushed and your mind trained on the life you lived instead of your true nature. A punishment befitting one of the ones he blames the most for The Sundering."
Varis looked up. He had been shown a version of this in his youth several times, had even badly drawn it as a child. He remembered the look that drawing had evoked in his grandfather. At first, pride and nostalgia, but as he looked upon the details, he realized there were parts to it he had not recounted specifically for Varis, and his eyes flashed with anger. He had known who he was from the start and had hoped to keep him ignorant, but the truth just naturally leaked through. "This is impressive, but there are parts missing." His natural reaction to things his grandsire created.
Minfilia nodded. "This is the vision he created to show the Warrior of Light, at the bottom of the ocean in The First. It's good enough to get the concept across, but there are myriad lies by omission."
"Of course there are. He's always done that. Always."
"You're beginning to remember?"
"Trying to forget took a lot of deliberate energy on both of our parts." He walked over to one of the lampposts and put a hand on it. It was disturbingly solid. "I had so many nightmares as a child, of my beloved being ripped away from me to create Zodiark. It overwhelmed me and I became afraid to talk to anyone who would get the information back to my grandfather. The feelings were so complex that I couldn't process them, so it just distilled down to intense and irrational fear. It was ruled as night terrors, and Garlemald's advanced technology had a cure for that with a sleeping draught. Sometimes, especially when I found myself stranded overnight on the battlefield, I didn't have access to it, so I got to have those nightmares again. I thought they were about the death of my wife in this current life, and that the night terrors I had as a child had been prophetic, but everyone knew there's no such thing as prophecies. Most certainly not from a practical and pragmatic son of Garlemald."
"Most of us lost loved ones to Zodiark." The pain that flickered across her face was infectious, and Varis kept turned away out of respect as much as the need to not let her see how deeply being back in this place affected him. Or maybe this was the point all along and she expected both of them to be emotionally compromised.
"I remember saying, to his face, that I would rather live a thousand thousand small lives with my beloved than a long, perfect life without them. So many people agreed with me. I wasn't the first one to have said this, but my having said it in front of the audience I said it in front of bore much greater weight, and it offended him so very deeply. Had I not spake, it would have been someone else, but the sharp and solid blame he placed on myself and Hythlodaeus was inescapable. The look of hatred on his face is etched indelibly in the back of my mind. I spent my life training myself to ignore it."
"And so when he recognized you, he caged you."
"I should have been smart enough to see through it, but I lusted for the power of the Empire. I needed to feel something other than insignificant. I needed to fix the flaws he built into the system, to make it better for everyone. All of those rebellious notions of mine, it turned out, were also by his design, to keep my mind trained on my small life. The misdirection and the anger and my attempts to move against him were all a part of his plan." He was still wearing his armor, and the weight of it hadn't bothered him until now.
"Cruelty in its most potent form."
"I can't know how many times he's been able to do this to me. I don't think I want to know."
"Should you wish it, it is known. She knows."
He turned to her, his face unnaturally contorted into an uncharacteristic look of apology. "My blindness has caused unimaginable strife."
Her eyes became hard again. "Let me show you what we stopped from happening to The First." In a flash, they were in a cold but arid-looking landscape, suspended about a malm above the ground.
"This place is known as Ahm Ahreng. This is where I stopped what is called The Flood, which was set in motion by your decision to unleash Black Rose upon The Source."
There were details missing, but he understood the basic principle of it.
She cut him off before he could react. "Sorry doesn't even begin to cover it."
They floated there for a few moments in silence before he hefted his pauldrons off his shoulders, cape and all, and hurled them to the ground below. "It doesn't." He ripped his tabard away from his armor as well, and it fluttered haplessly away, blown off-course by the wind.
"I'm glad you don't need much convincing now that you're out from under his heel."
"I want to do something to undo at least some of the damage I have done." He wore a look of determination now.
Minfilia's eyes just kept getting colder. "I need some distance from this conversation. So much has been jeopardized because of your stubbornness. However, keeping you cut off from Mother will only make things worse. I am not free from sin myself at this point. Our hands have all been dirtied. We have had this conversation many times before, not always on the same side, and in the end, the more time we spend punishing each other is time we've lost fighting our real foe, but this is happening too close to the pain for me. Were there another available to show you back to Mother, I would have insisted. But times are desperate."
Another flash, and he was alone, suspended in front of a gigantic blue crystal.
Fandom: FFXIV
Warnings: Major Character Death, Shadowbringers 5.2 Spoilers, talk of death and violence and personal losses
Basically I've been trying to brain at keeping Varis special in a way that fits with canon despite it backhanding me. I know this piece might make it look like I'm an Emet Anti, but please take note this is not true. This is about me being closer to my fave than my second-fave and being in my feelings at the moment. I love all of you and need to heal myself by making content that includes my fave.
He was dead, and he knew it. There would be no more. There need be no more. He had no idea why he had struggled so hard and gotten so little accomplished. Nearly five decades worth of regret churned within him as he watched people scramble haplessly about his corpse.
He thought on Solus's words on how the Empire existed to sow chaos across The Source instead of quell it. He had been taught naught but lies as a youth and become so attached to the idea of order and support of the people through societal infrastructure that he was blinded to the thought that it was a ruse. The anger and humiliation he felt in that moment had been explosive. It was the beginning of the end for him. He had lost Mia, Regula and Zenos. With so little left, what was there really than to sit in place like a lead weight and try not to give his people a reason to panic?
It was the mandate of the nobility to provide stability for the common people. But the Ascians were beyond that, with their dogged devotion to their god and stopping at nothing to get their goals accomplished. He hated them. He had always hated them, and seeing them get that much closer to getting their way was the last straw.
He sat down on the stairs next to himself and put his head in his hands.
The chaos he was trying to hold back with his bare hands washed over everything, as it was naturally going to anyway. Trying to halt it was hubris, and the people who had gathered under him for shelter stood to be swallowed by it. He had made them weak.
Before despair could take him entirely, a light shone out of the periphery of his vision, and a woman he barely recognized strode forth. It wasn't his wife, as he had hoped it would be, and looking upon her, she had a familiarity to her that was just beyond his ability to connect. "I'm sorry that you had to wander alone in darkness for so long," she said. "You had no chance, but you tried as hard as you could, and you deserve credit for that at the very least."
"Do I...know you?"
The woman was of middling size, with her long blonde hair done up in braids, wearing a white dress. Her bare feet looked out of place on the cold steel of the throne room floor, but her luminous form (and by proxy his own now) rendered her immune to any environmental discomfort. "You may not have known or seen me in person, but I was called Minfilia in this life in The Source."
Indeed, he had seen pictures via reconnaissance reports once or twice, younger-looking of course. "What business does one of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn have with me?" In life, his tone would have been defensive and demanding, but it was one of hesitant curiosity now that everything mattered so much less.
"Through no fault of your own, you were stolen from us, into the waiting arms of one of our greatest enemies, and raised to become as such yourself." The expression on her face was apologetic, but her eyes were hard.
Varis stood up, trying to read her meaning. It was always just beneath the surface, in the way he was treated, in the way his grandfather looked down at him. He was through and through his blood, but there had been something roiling and incompatible about how they interacted, restrained hostility that manifested not a day after Varis's father had died. He knew the parts he was told of his grandsire's story, but he had always wondered but not had the space to express if there had been another side to it. He met Minfilia's gaze. "The work of the Ascian, Emet-Selch?"
She nodded. "To hear him tell the story, the only way to have gone about anything was to have let Zodiark guide the will of the star from the point where he was created unto its doom."
"That was the only version I was taught of that story. I always thought there was another side to it, but it was not acceptable to talk about." He remembered once when he was 6 or 7, writing about it in a journal that mysteriously vanished after he had been told the story of Amaurot and Zodiark for the first time. He had it locked in a place he thought was safe, but had learned that nothing of that nature was safe or secure once he had told his grandfather about it.
"There always was. There is always another perspective and explanation for just about any event. Perspectives as myriad as there are people experiencing the same thing. The thought that there is but one path and that straying from that path denotes moral failing is itself the moral failing. But you know this. You've felt it inside and been taught to repress it to keep yourself safe, alive but caged."
"How do you know all of this?" That part angered him, but he tried not to scowl too much at her.
"There has been enough time for this to have happened many times, and not just to you. Sundered souls...it is very difficult to see where they end up, and Zodiark's children work very hard to get Him back. We were all one people once, however. You know that."
Varis nodded, unsmiling, his sense of regret roiling.
"Can I show you something, before we go our separate ways?" She held a hand out.
He took it, his misgivings dull and distant. In an instant, they were transported to the vision of Amaurot Emet-Selch had created in The First.
"We both know this place. You belonged to it as much as he and I did, but due to his hatred of those who brought Hydaelyn about, he worked to keep your spirit crushed and your mind trained on the life you lived instead of your true nature. A punishment befitting one of the ones he blames the most for The Sundering."
Varis looked up. He had been shown a version of this in his youth several times, had even badly drawn it as a child. He remembered the look that drawing had evoked in his grandfather. At first, pride and nostalgia, but as he looked upon the details, he realized there were parts to it he had not recounted specifically for Varis, and his eyes flashed with anger. He had known who he was from the start and had hoped to keep him ignorant, but the truth just naturally leaked through. "This is impressive, but there are parts missing." His natural reaction to things his grandsire created.
Minfilia nodded. "This is the vision he created to show the Warrior of Light, at the bottom of the ocean in The First. It's good enough to get the concept across, but there are myriad lies by omission."
"Of course there are. He's always done that. Always."
"You're beginning to remember?"
"Trying to forget took a lot of deliberate energy on both of our parts." He walked over to one of the lampposts and put a hand on it. It was disturbingly solid. "I had so many nightmares as a child, of my beloved being ripped away from me to create Zodiark. It overwhelmed me and I became afraid to talk to anyone who would get the information back to my grandfather. The feelings were so complex that I couldn't process them, so it just distilled down to intense and irrational fear. It was ruled as night terrors, and Garlemald's advanced technology had a cure for that with a sleeping draught. Sometimes, especially when I found myself stranded overnight on the battlefield, I didn't have access to it, so I got to have those nightmares again. I thought they were about the death of my wife in this current life, and that the night terrors I had as a child had been prophetic, but everyone knew there's no such thing as prophecies. Most certainly not from a practical and pragmatic son of Garlemald."
"Most of us lost loved ones to Zodiark." The pain that flickered across her face was infectious, and Varis kept turned away out of respect as much as the need to not let her see how deeply being back in this place affected him. Or maybe this was the point all along and she expected both of them to be emotionally compromised.
"I remember saying, to his face, that I would rather live a thousand thousand small lives with my beloved than a long, perfect life without them. So many people agreed with me. I wasn't the first one to have said this, but my having said it in front of the audience I said it in front of bore much greater weight, and it offended him so very deeply. Had I not spake, it would have been someone else, but the sharp and solid blame he placed on myself and Hythlodaeus was inescapable. The look of hatred on his face is etched indelibly in the back of my mind. I spent my life training myself to ignore it."
"And so when he recognized you, he caged you."
"I should have been smart enough to see through it, but I lusted for the power of the Empire. I needed to feel something other than insignificant. I needed to fix the flaws he built into the system, to make it better for everyone. All of those rebellious notions of mine, it turned out, were also by his design, to keep my mind trained on my small life. The misdirection and the anger and my attempts to move against him were all a part of his plan." He was still wearing his armor, and the weight of it hadn't bothered him until now.
"Cruelty in its most potent form."
"I can't know how many times he's been able to do this to me. I don't think I want to know."
"Should you wish it, it is known. She knows."
He turned to her, his face unnaturally contorted into an uncharacteristic look of apology. "My blindness has caused unimaginable strife."
Her eyes became hard again. "Let me show you what we stopped from happening to The First." In a flash, they were in a cold but arid-looking landscape, suspended about a malm above the ground.
"This place is known as Ahm Ahreng. This is where I stopped what is called The Flood, which was set in motion by your decision to unleash Black Rose upon The Source."
There were details missing, but he understood the basic principle of it.
She cut him off before he could react. "Sorry doesn't even begin to cover it."
They floated there for a few moments in silence before he hefted his pauldrons off his shoulders, cape and all, and hurled them to the ground below. "It doesn't." He ripped his tabard away from his armor as well, and it fluttered haplessly away, blown off-course by the wind.
"I'm glad you don't need much convincing now that you're out from under his heel."
"I want to do something to undo at least some of the damage I have done." He wore a look of determination now.
Minfilia's eyes just kept getting colder. "I need some distance from this conversation. So much has been jeopardized because of your stubbornness. However, keeping you cut off from Mother will only make things worse. I am not free from sin myself at this point. Our hands have all been dirtied. We have had this conversation many times before, not always on the same side, and in the end, the more time we spend punishing each other is time we've lost fighting our real foe, but this is happening too close to the pain for me. Were there another available to show you back to Mother, I would have insisted. But times are desperate."
Another flash, and he was alone, suspended in front of a gigantic blue crystal.