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Dawn was the quietest time at Garreg Mach. Before all the students were up and about, when the bustle was all staff trying to find the best moment to start their tasks that wouldn’t cease until the day was done. No over-eager students searching for training partners, no merchants selling their wares. Just semi-quiet.
It was the best time to get away. Technically, Khalid wasn’t meant to trek out to the woods. Technically, there were bandits out there, or sinister forces that would claim his life at a moment’s notice. Or demonic beasts, or just plain old predators. But the monastery buzzed almost every hour of the day, and Khalid needed to get away.
Sometimes, he hated Fódlan for all its insular ignorance and inability to just understand. On other days, he mostly just hated that in Fódlan he was someone people wanted to be heard by. Funny, how the moment his opinion truly mattered, Khalid didn’t want to hear them. They weren’t looking for his opinion anyway.
So there he was, exactly where he shouldn’t be. Out in the woods with nothing but the sounds of the world around him. At dawn, he could pretend that there was no monastery; they didn’t ring the bells until the start of the school day. There was no Church of Seiros, no teachings that restricted nor doctrines that confined him. Just him, existing as himself in a way that no doctrine could—
“Ah!” Someone cried out, and Khalid promptly fell out of the tree. Pain lanced through his left side as he hit the ground, his whole body jarred by the fall.
“Ow, give a guy a warning?” Khalid squinted up at his unintentional assailant, then relaxed slightly. Petra. The kind of person who wouldn’t tell on him, at least; a recent transfer to the Golden Deer, and one who had even more reason than he did to hold a little of a grudge against the Church and the regimes it gave legitimacy to.
“My apologies.” Petra dipped her head briefly. “I did not think anyone would be out here at this time.”
“Well, it is against the rules.” Khalid shot her a grin; she returned it with a small smile of her own. “I think you can be forgiven, provided you don’t tell the Professor we had a little encounter out here.”
Petra smiled wider. “The Professor would not care either,” she said — probably a correct assumption, honestly. Some weeks, Khalid didn’t think the Professor cared about anything, least of all if their students were breaking the rules they only reluctantly communicated to the class.
“I think that’s just part of their charm,” Khalid said, and a little kernel of recollection floated to the front of his mind: the way Petra sometimes looked at the Professor, all thoughtful and wondering. “They exist on a different wavelength to the rest of Fódlan.”
Petra tilted her head slightly. “Why do you say Fódlan?” she asked, because she was smarter than anyone else in this damn monastery gave her credit for, and she could see a gap in his facade when it was set out like that.
“Oh, just something I read once,” Khalid said, his shrug as nonchalant as he could make it. “They might be more at home somewhere like Almyra. They do the whole business of men, women, and people beyond that a little differently to Fódlan.”
“You found a text on Almyra?” Khalid saw Petra in the library sometimes. She had to know that the only books talking about Almyra were histories written by Fódlans and that one travel guide Ignatz practically worshipped.
“If you know how, you can get an… insight into other viewpoints,” Khalid said. “You know, for someone who came from Almyra, the way Fódlan does gender might actually be pretty confusing. They might talk about it, even, given the right opportunity.”
Petra hummed. Her eyes saw more than she let on. “Almyra is not the only place that does things differently,” she said. “Sometimes, it is the Fódlan system that seems strangest.”
Khalid let a small smile sneak through. “Brigid takes a different approach?”
Petra glanced to the side, then spoke. “Brigid does not have two genders and then something beyond explanation,” she said. “It is not that the Professor would not be strange. I think they would be strange anywhere.”
Khalid chuckled. “Yeah, I think you’re right. But there might be… what, another word for them? Something that works better than ‘not a man or a woman?’”
“Traehyrt.” It was murmured, barely audible above dawn birdsong and the morning breeze. But it sounded right there, right in Petra’s mouth in a way that things didn’t always sound right when Khalid thought against the background noise of Garreg Mach. “It resists translation. I do not have the verbal command of Fódlan’s language to explain it.”
She sounded almost ashamed, and it tugged at Khalid’s heart. “Traehyrt,” he repeated, louder, and Petra smiled slightly.
“Not quite. The sound of the hyrt is a little longer, but you are nearly there.”
Khalid nodded, and let the word settle in the air. Where it belonged, aloud and spoken and not trapped on the hostile side of the sea. Maybe, out in the open like this…
Petra already knew. There was no harm. Still, fear rattled around in Khalid’s chest just as much as the words did. But she bore her heart to him; wasn’t it only fair he did the same?
“Fratr az jraan.” It was an exhale onto a mirror, with Petra on the other side. A concept that could encapsulate something Fódlan didn’t understand, something that would mark them both out as foreign but would render them no more understood.
The words didn’t mean the same thing; just like in a mirrored surface, something was slightly shifted. But it was recognisable. Neither of them had to be alone.
“Fratr az jraan,” Petra echoed, and she didn’t have an Almyran accent to speak of. But it sounded better than Nader’s name on Alliance noble lips, or the countless times he’d tried, all alone, to replicate the concept in Fódlan’s language in a way Fódlans would understand. “May I know more of the phrase?”
Khalid nodded. Petra might have a better chance at grasping how he felt. “It’s the same words as ones used to describe a river. It’s like… a life moves in one direction, from birth to death. Fratr az jraan… w- they move in ways you don’t expect. That’s the best way I can describe it, I’m afraid.”
“Is it celebrated?” Petra’s nonchalance was false — Khalid knew the feeling.
“It’s not celebrated; it just is,” he said. “Some people are fratr az jraan, and some aren’t. It’s not good or bad.”
“We are celebrated in Brigid,” Petra said. “Traehyrt is- I cannot explain. It is a good quality to have, an important part of our lives. It is part of me, but in Fódlan I feel its absence.”
Khalid nodded. “It’s still there, but the words to express it are gone. It’s a part of you that can’t exist in anyone else’s mind, and when people look they can’t see it.”
“You do not let people see you when they look anyway,” Petra pointed out.
Khalid laughed; right as always, of course. “It’s safer that way. For both of us.”
“Thank you for letting me see. And thank you for seeing.” Petra nodded to him, before turning back towards the monastery. “It is safer, when you hide from a predator, if an ally knows where you are.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Khalid said, turning for a different route out of the woods. It was getting close to time for morning classes, when he’d go back to a classroom and wish that it was even possible for his class to understand him in the way they understood the Professor. “It was nice to leave the underbrush for a while.”
Petra smiled, and then she vanished back amongst the trees. It was like she’d never been there, but the conversation left a mark in its own way. Caught between the mountains and sea, they could try to understand each other. Even if it could never truly map into words more familiar to the ear, it helped.
For the first time since crossing the mountains, crossing the sea, someone had listened, and the words had resonated.