Chapter Text
Crimson River hits the sands back first, and two of his teeth land behind him. The crowd erupts, feverish, as Kithira Vari wipes the blood off her knuckles and holds them to the sky.
It has been two years since she came to Ul'dah. Five years since the Calamity.
She grins as the cheers crash down upon her. She is an impressive sight—tall, exceptionally so for a miqo'te, wearing a chestwrap and a pair of loose gaskins which, while actually fairly conservative by colosseum standards, do very little to hide a figure which could have been cut from solid stone. But it's the way she holds herself that really sells it. No chest-thumping arrogance; no brash confidence, feigned or otherwise. Every muscle, from fingertip to toe, projects exhilaration.
Thancred nods to himself, clapping along with the rest as his companion shrieks and leans over the rail beside him, chanting the woman's name. She—his companion, not the gladiatrix—is Esthemie, the daughter of a local textile merchant who's been padding out his shipping crates with illicit crystals. She herself has nothing to do with her father's business, but she was easier to seduce, and Thancred has spent the better part of the last week carefully coaxing out whatever little she knows and compiling it with the rest of his dossier. By now, the case is all but closed. The Immortal Flames are likely raiding her father's warehouse as she cheers her favorite in the ring.
At least Esthemie will be spared the worst of the consequences. A large share of her father's funds will go to her—all of it, if he turns out to have been tempered—and the Flames know not to question her or give her any further grief. Thancred may be a spy and a self-admitted scoundrel, but he always does his damnedest to ensure that his paramours are shielded from the nastier aftershocks of his work.
But the shock of discovering that her father has been aiding in Ifrit's summoning... he won't be able to save her from that.
On the sands below, the gladiatrix drops her hands, turning to the chirurgeons as they rush into the ring. She speaks with one of them, pointing to several areas of her body as the others give Crimson Mountain a once-over. It takes Thancred a moment to piece it together—she's telling the medics where she hit the man, where he's likely to be hurt, how badly, which injuries to focus on first. It's not something that most gladiators would bother with, and so it catches in Thancred's memory. The chirurgeon nods, goes to assist the others, and Kithira turns back to the crowd and thrusts her fists back into the air.
The cheers reignite, Esthemie loud enough among them that for a brief moment she catches Kithira's attention. The gladiatrix waves at her, grinning, and blows her a kiss, to which Esthemie responds by nearly tumbling over the railing before Thancred catches her arm. She's beet-faced and beaming when she slips back into her seat, fiddling with her hands in her lap.
"Isn't she amazing?" says Esthemie, as Kithira exits the ring, and the announcers begin declaring the next fight of the evening.
"Indeed she is. I can certainly see why she's your favorite."
"They're saying she might actually take the belt this year. Last year she ranked third, just behind Proud River and the White Tiger. She's the first miqo'te to make it that far since the Hellfire Phoenix—and that was before the Calamity!"
Thancred nods, letting Esthemie's enthusiasm carry the conversation. He'll slip out of Ul'dah that night—his next assignment is taking him to Vylbrand, and he won't be back in Ul'dah for around four months. During that time, Kithira Vari of the colosseum will be filed away into the back corner of his mind like so many other faces briefly encountered.
He won't think of her again until he meets her underneath the Sultantree.
Nanamo Ul Namo is having a very bad day.
It started with a Syndicate meeting, like many bad days do. She'd made the mistake of bringing up the refugee crisis and proposing a modest import tariff on precious metals to help support new infrastructure and housing projects. It wasn't a radical proposal, nor was it a controversial one. Ul'dah mined most of its own metals anyway, and the monetarists knew that taxes kept the city running, even if they detested such necessities.
The problem, as always, was that the suggestion came from her.
Lolorito had waited, politely, for her to finish speaking, and then promptly tore her rhetorical throat out. His rebuttal went on for almost ten whole minutes, during which he managed to slip in no less than six veiled insults to her intelligence, two pointed references to her "youth," and capped it all off with, "Nevertheless, your Grace, I appreciate your traditionalist perspective, though I believe I have made clear that we must needs look to the future, rather than the past."
Which was essentially his way of saying, "We don't need a sultana in my kingdom, little girl."
Raubahn fumed beside her, of course, but there was little he could do. Everything Lolorito said was, on its face, polite and unimpeachable. Were Raubahn to raise his voice, Lolorito would turn his rhetorical wit on them both, and then they'd both be humiliated. It'd happened before, and it would most surely happen again.
So the motion never made it to a vote, and discussion quickly shifted back to the typical concerns: Assigning more Brass Blades to patrol the road to Gridania, the recent crackdown on a major crystal smuggling ring, preparations for more retaliatory strikes against the Amalj'aa. All in all, it was a miserable session, and while Raubahn attempted to comfort her afterward, she really wasn't in the mood.
So, as the sun begins to set, Nanamo dresses herself down and takes a walk.
The Sultantree is beautiful today. The evening sun lights the leaves translucent, and the blossoms rustle in the faint wind. For a while, Nanamo just casts her gaze up into the boughs, filled with an emotion she cannot name or describe. Somewhere between longing and despair, perhaps, with fear and fury at the edge like embers encroaching on parchment.
She prays, but it hardly feels like it matters. When have the spirits of her ancestors ever aided her before? As beautiful as it is, the Sultantree is just a tree, and all she is accomplishing is proving that she is just as traditionalist as Lolorito claims. Looking backwards to outmoded traditions and beliefs for comfort while her city slips away into a future ruled by coin and capital.
It takes her entirely too many moments to notice that someone is standing behind her.
She whips around, on guard immediately, and finds two familiar faces. "You."
Kithira Vari leaps back, wide eyed as she points to herself. "Thal's—ah. M-me, your um. Your Grace?"
"I think she means me, actually," says Thancred Waters, standing directly behind her.
Kithira lets out a startled little shriek of shock and, to Nanamo's complete surprise, spins around and decks Thancred square in the face.
The Scion, evidently, is also not expecting this, as he takes the full hit and tumbles back onto his arse. He tries to play it off, sweeps it into a roll and comes up in a crouch, but he's blinking and bloody-nosed as he exclaims, "Sweet hells, woman! What was that for!?"
Kithira gawps at him. "What for? You snuck up on me, you little shite!"
Nanamo does her best to suppress a most unladylike snort of laughter as the two fume at each other. While Thancred is, for better or worse, well known to her by now, she's never actually met Kithira Vari in person. She'd attended a scattering of the gladiatrix's matches, mostly at Raubahn's behest—the man was always excited when a promising new face appeared on the Bloodsands, and Nanamo never passed up the chance to encourage his hobbies for a change—but while Nanamo had cheered from the balcony and Kithira had bowed to her respectfully from the sands, this is the first time they've spoken face-to-face.
...Not that this is how she expected such a meeting to go.
Regardless piecing together the architecture of this encounter isn't difficult. With a muttered sigh, Nanamo crosses her arms and summons up her royal presence. "Papashan sent you both, I presume?"
The two look over at her, Kithira's eyes widening as she seems to realize that she just punched an acquaintance of the Sultana in the face. Thancred, however, reclaims his customary roguish smirk. "You suppose correctly, your Grace," he says.
Of course. Nanamo rolls her eyes with a huff. "Well, you two can go right back to him, then. I need no escort. And I am not anyone's Grace , but Lilira Lira."
"My apologies, Lady Lilira." Thancred stands and offers a bow, which is only slightly spoiled by the blood still trickling down his lips. "But it truly isn't safe for you alone out here." His voice drops into a more serious register. "There've been disturbances in the ambient Aether. I can't say for certain, but—"
There is a shriek, and the beating of wings, and a pair of claws snatch Nanamo Ul Namo up by the shoulders and lift her clean off her feet. She kicks and screams, but the terror is so sudden and complete that she cannot piece together any kind of cogent thought beyond fighting for her life.
A glint of steel, and a spray of black blood as a throwing knife plunges into the joint at the base of a wing. The beast howls, pitches, loses its grip, and Nanamo is falling thirty fulms through the air, with the barely-formed realization that this might be the end of her short, short life, when she lands, heavily, in a pair of strong arms.
"I've got you," says a calm voice, as Nanamo buries her face in Kithira's chest. "I've got you, you're okay."
Nanamo cries. Levin chatters through her body, her heart thumping like an earthquake, her eyes squeezed shut. She is twenty-one summers but she feels like she is a child again.
Kithira sets her down firmly on her feet, though her legs feel they can hardly support her. "It's alright," the gladiatrix says, kneeling in front of her. Beyond, Thancred is engaged with the beast—a voidsent, Nanamo recalls from illustrations in old books. He is fast, but it is twice his size and she can see two more coming over the ridge.
Kithira lays a hand on her shoulder and looks her in the eyes. "We're not far from the city gate," she says. Her voice is steady, and Nanamo latches onto that, grounds herself. "Can you run?"
Nanamo has never been more certain she can run in her life. She nods.
Kithira nods in turn. "You!" she shouts in Thancred's direction. "We're making a break for the city!"
Thancred ducks a claw and sweeps up to sever a wing in a spray of syrupy ichor. "Go!" he shouts back, and they go.
Nanamo's breath is fire in her lungs. Black fog creeps into the edges of her vision. She's not sure she's ever run this fast, this hard—but then she hasn't been this afraid since the Calamity itself. Kithira keeps pace beside her, and when another leather-black nightmare comes shrieking down out of the sunset sky, the gladiatrix meets it with a kick that snaps its neck with an audible crack. The second it dies, the body erupts into acrid black smoke.
The Brass Blades at the gates see them coming and break into a run across the field. Somehow, somehow, Nanamo's legs carry her past them, to the gate, and through it. She nearly collapses on the cobbles of her city, gasping for breath.
Kithira is still beside her, winded herself as she falls to her knees. "We made it," she gasps, turning to Nanamo and grinning.
Nanamo, despite herself, grins back. She's still crying, and she's pretty sure she's bleeding from at least one of her shoulders, but now that she's safe the adrenaline rush is subsiding into a kind of delirious euphoria. "Good heavens, we lived!" she cries, absurdly. "Good heavens..."
"We lived," Kithira agrees. She blinks, her attention caught by something on the ground. She crouches down and picks an object off the street.
A crystal. Vivid blue.
Kithira stares at it with a baffled sort of expression, and then without any kind of warning her eyes unfocus and she pitches sideways onto the cobbles.
Nanamo blinks, wondering for a moment if her senses have actually failed her.
"Oh dear," Thancred says, standing directly behind her. "That makes things rather more complicated."
"Hear... feel... think..."