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Three days and no nights after the Crystal Exarch's worst failure, the door to the Ocular burst open with lethal force and a stranger whose name he knew well from the halls of history shouted his title. The Exarch stood with his back to his guest, and though he dismissed the shimmering image projected on the mirror before him, he did not face him.
"Master Thancred," he said. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"
No voice responded—only the slam of heavy footsteps, then a clatter and the sound of paper dragging on the crystalline floor as a book skittered to a stop at his feet, face down on an open page.
A moment passed in tepid silence he found himself unwilling to break.
"At what point did you plan to inform me of this?" It was Thancred whose voice filled the room instead, dagger-sharp and just loud enough to echo lightly against the crystal walls.
Anger was a rational response. Gods knew it had been more than warranted on the day he'd arrived, once the initial disorientation had cleared. The Exarch had turned him loose, then, to see the place for himself and get his bearings, rather than keep him captive to long-winded, apologetic explanations. Experience was a better teacher than any lecture, after all, but it would take time for the shock to wear off regardless, so it would also be reasonable for the anger to linger, but—
"Answer me," he snapped.
The Exarch turned.
Thancred stood at the base of the dais below the mirror with a glare as harsh as a Source summer sun. He'd chopped his hair short—likely himself, given it was ragged and uneven in the back, but it would do to combat the endless heat—and he wore a simple black tank top that clung to muscle pulled taught by tensely folded arms, far more suited to him than the shapeless gray robes the Exarch had on hand when he arrived.
There he stood, plain and real, though aether rather than flesh, a symbol of the Exarch's shortcomings brought to life. Would it feel like this every time he saw the man, he wondered? Like the universe mocked his lack of finesse.
He knew he must play the gracious host nevertheless, if only to placate. Never mind the months, if not years, this misstep would set him back; to Thancred this whole ordeal would certainly be a personal slight, and given the ire spelled out across his face…
He stooped carefully, knees aching as he bent, to retrieve the book. It was familiar, an old children's tale, history and myth blended into a palatable, colorful storybook like an extra cube of sugar to cut the horrid taste of a necessary medicine. On its cover, a young blonde girl, and one he realized with an icy jolt he… likely should have mentioned.
She'd been a Scion. This was hardly the only thing deeply interwoven between their two worlds, but perhaps the history lesson should have come earlier, rather than been an afterthought, something for the nebulous "later," whenever that would come.
As he knelt beside the book and made to retrieve it, Thancred climbed the dais two steps at a time, planting his feet less than a fulm away from the Exarch's face and looming tall and dark above him.
The Exarch took a measured breath.
An intimidation tactic. Few attempted the same nowadays, but he faced his fair share of such things in his youth, as even a Hyur of modest height towered over him. Resigned, he took the book in one hand, letting it fall closed around now-rumpled pages, and made to stand.
The book was torn from his hand the moment he rose.
"I thought it best you acclimate to your surroundings first," the Exarch said as gently as he could muster, "before I inundate you with a century's worth of history you were never meant to need."
"Acclimate?" Thancred snapped, closing what distance remained between them.
"Acquire a weapon, armor, the like—"
The words were snatched from his mouth when Thancred's hand gripped the base of his hood. For a moment he feared the man might try to rip it down and expose his face, though he'd long ago perfected the enchantment that made that impossible. Instead, he found himself thrust off balance.
"You'll come to find I'm perfectly capable without a weapon," Thancred growled, then shoved.
The crystal scar bisecting the Exarch's cheek cracked hard against the surface of the mirror, and his skull followed quickly after. A lightning flash of pain shot through him and he tasted blood on his tongue. Thancred's arm pinned him there, solid against his collarbone.
"I'll acclimate when you explain this—" He shook the book with his other hand and let it dangle in front of the Exarch's face. "—this farce. Am I supposed to believe this is anything but a cruel joke? You say you know of the Source? The Scions? Then you know of her. This is a mockery."
The Exarch planted his feet and pushed back. He may have been a small man, but the Tower's blood flowed in his veins, and there were certain advantages to sharing one's physical being with a structure of stone and crystal. What little headway it gave him was enough to slip his arm behind his back and grasp the staff that hung upon it.
In one swift motion and a burst of unrefined aether, he drew the staff and pushed with a force that sent Thancred staggering backward five fulms and the book in his hands skittering across the floor to land once again on folded pages. That he kept on his feet was a testament to his dexterity.
"You—"
Forgive me, the Exarch thought, brandishing the weapon in front of him. "Break."
The room fell quiet but for the ringing echo of the sharp end of his staff hitting the floor as he righted himself. The strongest opponents could tug at the bonds of his magic should they try, but Thancred stood rigid, half-crouched and glaring, entirely unmoving.
For better or worse, G'raha Tia had been a historian. Of all things from the distant past, it was this to which the Exarch clung the tightest.
Deep in the bowels of the Tower, the Ironworks had left him a library stocked full of every text they could find, from cookbooks to grimoires to schoolchildren's notepads, and from it he had carefully curated his own private collection: a single shelf of rare, esoteric, and mostly handwritten tomes preserving a history it would be his life's work to erase. He'd obsessively read every page that even so much as mentioned the Scions of the Seventh Dawn in passing, committing them to his mind so thoroughly he could still recite many from memory if asked.
"Thancred Waters" was a name he knew only in ink. He was a ghost who haunted the margins—a handful of words in the dark and little more. This, the Exarch had long surmised, was by design.
But no name on a page could be a suitable substitute for meeting a man in the flesh. No written account could have possibly prepared him for the volatility, nor for the instinct to hold his breath and brace himself in his presence, to dig in his heels and stand his ground. He'd been prepared for an Archon, an academic from his homeland, but instead he found callused hands and a shadowed sneer. The similarities between them ended at the Sharlayan marks on their necks, and the Exarch's had long been consumed by crystal.
"Allow me a moment," he said, shattering the quiet, "and I will explain."
With some regret, he slipped into the Exarch's commanding voice. He'd cultivated it carefully, but he had nonetheless clung to the hope that one day he could put it away. Against his better judgment, he'd brought a glimmer of that hope to bear—that after a century of determination led him to this first summoning, he would be in the company of someone who would understand and allow him, if not honesty, a moment to breathe.
A pity that his poor execution had brought this to his doorstep instead.
"You'd do well to keep it in mind, friend, that should you kill me as it is so clear you wish to, you will lose your only path to salvation. Do not mistake this as a threat, but simply the truth. Should you wish to see your friends again, to see either of our worlds survive, you will leave me to this work."
He took slow, cautious steps toward where the book once again lay on the floor, watching one hazel eye track him in the process. The other was a stark, pupil-less white, indistinguishable from its sclera, but the Exarch knew it burned with invisible fury anyway.
He stooped to retrieve it once more, this time without the risk of being cornered while on his knees. The pages were creased but otherwise undamaged, and he smoothed them with a gentle hand as he approached his companion who may as well have been a statue.
He let the book fall open to the page on which it had landed and held it out.
"Ere I elaborate," he said, "I would have you tell me what you know."
Thancred's eyes never left him, unblinking and wrathful.
He took a breath and swallowed the creep of bone-deep despair. Necessity, he told himself. Circumstance, and nothing more.
"Do not think you are the one with power here," he said. "I will end the spell, and you will speak. Do not mistake this for kindness, nor weakness. Should you lash out again I will not hesitate to take what measures I deem necessary. There is work to be done, and I will not suffer you to interfere."
With a wave of the hand, he dispelled the enchantment. Thancred collapsed, and the first thing he did was ball his hands into fists.
The Exarch summoned a swell of aether, an ilm away from molding it into another spell.
But the man made no move toward him. He only picked himself up slowly, standing straight and crossing his arms tight across his chest. The disdain in his eyes, now augmented with a scowl as he regained control of his body, did not fade.
"It occurs to me you are unaware of what you are dealing with," the Exarch said. "Of what is at stake, and what I am willing to do to ensure what must will come to pass. I will be happy to inform you of all these things—should you allow me."
Thancred cast his eyes to the floor. The Exarch recognized the calculations in his stance—fight had failed him; flight had yet to. But in the end he only shook his head and bared his teeth, accepting that perhaps his only remaining recourse was to freeze. He shrugged and his shoulders fell, like an aggressive animal ashamed of being brought to heel.
"Should you expect me to wax poetic of the antecedent—because that is what she is, not your mythical, legendary 'Oracle'—I'm afraid you'll be disappointed." Thancred barely tamed the simmering rage under his voice. "Tell me this, Exarch: you know my name; you know my role. What makes you think I'll happily share such things with my captor?"
Perhaps he should have been prepared for this—thought it wasn't as though he meant for the Scions' iron-willed spymaster to land in his lap. That he saw this as an interrogation by a hostile jailor was clear.
"It seems I've given the wrong impression," the Exarch said. He sighed and propped his staff upright against the wall, then held his hands up. That he could still cast without it from within the Tower was a secret Thancred did not need to know. "I've no wish to harm you, nor even upset you. My plea for your organization's aid is genuine."
"If you're offering me peace, frankly, you're doing a terrible job of it."
Thancred Waters, tempest of a man, crossed his arms and leaned himself against the cold crystal wall of the Ocular—indignant, perhaps petty, but regardless, utterly resigned.
The Exarch sighed. "It seems I have my work cut out for me to earn your trust."
A shrug was the only response.
"In the meantime, then," the Exarch said, holding out a hand, palm up, and in the other he held out the book one last time. Thancred took it, never breaking his suspicious eye contact. "Will you tell me of her instead? Your Minfilia."
Every muscle the Exarch could see the shape of tensed.
"With respect," Thancred said, "I will not."
The Exarch sighed. It was worth a try. He could only hope it would not further stoke the fire.
"Very well," he said. "We need not speak more on it. But know I will do all I can. On this, you have my word: we will find a way to send you home, and soon. Until that time, you are welcome here. This world is a harsh one, and unfamiliar to you besides. I pray you take what comforts you can."
"Welcome." Thancred spat the word more than said it.
The Exarch only sighed. This battle, it seemed, would be hard-fought.
"Please," he said. "Come with me."
Thancred was well-accustomed to walking in shadow, but not when that shadow belonged to a man.
Cut loose to wander the Crystarium alone, he'd drawn strange glances but little more. The place fair bustled with the displaced and disheveled, and a crowd was as good a camouflage as any, but it was rather impossible to slip by unnoticed when that crowd instead parted in reverence and respect for his hooded escort.
The eyes upon him dug into his veins as the Crystal Exarch paraded him through the city, up ramps and stairs to its uppermost levels where rays of scorching not-sunlight beat down hot at all hours.
They walked for an eternity until the sounds of voices—"Exarch!" "My lord!" "'Tis good to see you about!"—finally drowned in the ringing of hammers on metal and the full-bodied rush of air through a blacksmith's bellows.
A canopy of crystal and wrought iron soared high above the space, framing the glittering walls of the Crystal Tower in a backdrop that would suit a painting but ill fit reality. A tangle of blackened pipes and vents spit dark smoke into the air above them while a handful of smiths worked sweat-soaked in the endless heat. The whole place smelled of charcoal and the sour tang of steel and coke, underpinned by the burnt bitterness of an explosive powder he'd grown intimately familiar with many years ago.
The Exarch marched him up to a desk stacked high with papers where an overwhelmed-looking Elezen woman chatted with a Hyuran man, an easy, tooth-bearing smile locked on her face despite the bags beneath her eyes. The moment she spotted the pair of them, the smile vanished for a split second, her eyes flying wide, before she pasted the expression back on her face.
"Exarch!" she said, far too brightly for Thancred's taste. The man across the desk turned with eyes equally wide. "Please, let me—"
"No, no," the Exarch answered, his voice far too smooth and friendly in comparison to the way he'd spoken to Thancred in private so recently. "We are in no rush. Carry on your business."
He waved a hand at the woman, who paled in her bemusement. She returned to her task nonetheless, shuffling through meticulously organized forms before pulling one from the stack and holding it out to the man.
Thancred did not care to overhear them. Instead, he busied himself studying his escort.
A practiced smile sat passively on the Exarch's lips, stretching the skin in a painful-looking way around the streak of crystal cutting across his cheek. The crystal itself, which descended down his neck and beneath the fabric of well-kept robes, glimmered in the light, catching the reflection of tiny motes of bright, raw magic that drifted ever-present in the air. A shadow far too dark to be natural obscured his eyes beneath the hood.
Thancred knew well the reasons a man might hide his eyes, and he misliked every one of them. Obscuring identity was low-hanging fruit, but from whom did this man, who by all evidence held a place of great respect here, need to hide? And were it not about identity, that only left one, much more sinister option: that the Exarch wished to hide the eyes of a liar.
It did nothing at all to engender his trust, but as the exchange came to its conclusion and the Elezen woman once again turned her attention to the Exarch, it was terribly obvious that trust was not an issue for her. Nor did it seem to be one for anyone else he'd met so far in this surreal, godsforsaken place.
The Exarch strode up to the desk like he owned the place, and, he supposed, it might as well be that he did.
"Katliss," the Exarch said with a fondness and familiarity that made Thancred clench his teeth.
"Of course, of course!" the Elezen woman said, and her eyes flicked briefly to Thancred. "Apologies for making you wait. What is it you need?"
The Exarch waved a nonchalant hand. "Think nothing of it. We've come to place a custom order—weapons, for my friend."
Friend? The Exarch had a funny way of showing his friendship.
Very well. Playing the charming liar was second nature to Thancred, too—and he did not need to cover his face to do it.
He shrugged himself into a practiced posture—casual, unthreatening—and wiped the scowl from his face. His hair was in utter disarray, he knew, and there was nothing he could do to hide the empty eye. (It was so much worse here, possessed of his soul but not his own body. He hadn't had time to think too hard on the reasons, nor had he dared to ask his captor.) But the stance he adopted was comfortable and familiar, leaning in with an elbow on the desk and an easy smile on his face.
"Daggers, am I correct?" the Exarch said, turning to face him.
He bristled, though he smoothed his face not to show it. What little the Exarch seemed to know of him was still far too much, and vague platitudes had done nothing to soothe the unease. In return he'd learned little and less, because, trusting or otherwise, it seemed even the people who had lived their whole lives in this place had not themselves seen beneath the hood.
Thancred sometimes fancied himself a man of many secrets, if only because an air of mystery went far when it came to drawing the unguarded attention of many a fair maiden, and he thought himself equally adept when it came to insight. It took a liar to know one, after all, and he knew them well. But the Exarch's secrecy felt different somehow, and it left a bitter taste on his tongue.
For a moment, he considered contradicting the offer. His expertise drew him to daggers, yes, but he'd trained with swords in his youth, the occasional shortbow still felt at home in his hands, and years back he'd even become rather adept with the gunblades often carried weakly on enemy shoulders, though he'd given that up when he could no longer manage his own ammunition. Even without it, though, the latter could perhaps be…
No. A gunblade was a weapon suited for protection. Distraction. And here, surrounded by city-folk but feeling more alone than he had when the Lifestream spat him out half-blind in Dravania, there was no one worth protecting.
At least, no one alive.
He pushed away the thought.
Regardless, he'd kept his training with such a blade a guarded secret, and if secrets were currency in this cursed place, he would keep this one close.
"You are correct," Thancred finally said, and he did not miss the little twist of the Exarch's lips into a smug smile made lopsided by the slash of crystal.
The following half a bell was spent allowing strangers to measure his fingers and place knives in hands, some finished and of considerable quality, others still in pieces—a handle without a blade to see how it sat in his grip; a blade without a handle, its tang awkwardly pinched between his fingers to find the ideal weight that would put its pivot point as close to his hand as possible but not in it. The work was thorough and not a little invasive, far, far beyond any effort he'd put into choosing a weapon in the past, the process of which more often than not involved plucking a weapon from the hand of a freshly bloodied corpse with no further thought paid to its suitability.
Once the forgemaster—a young Hyuran woman with a slight build and mousy brown hair cropped a bit too short for his taste—seemed satisfied to let him be, she ushered him from their workspace with vague promises that a pair of daggers perfectly suited to his hands would arrive at his door within the coming days.
"No payment necessary," she said as she led him out from beneath the crystal canopy to where the Exarch waited. "Not for a personal request from the Exarch."
The trust implicit in those words left him even more ill at ease than before. Here he was, further indebted to his jailor, who himself came to collect his captive quickly after.
"I trust their work is to your satisfaction?" The smooth, practiced friendliness in the Exarch's voice seemed a thinly veiled condescension.
Thancred nodded, allowing his own overly friendly mask to slip as the Exarch began to lead him back the way they had come. A fine spectacle he'd make once again, trailing behind the city's beloved leader—like a prisoner, or perhaps a pet. (The distinction did not matter. Both options were equally sour.)
"That remains to be seen," he said curtly.
Common courtesy demanded gratitude—custom-made weapons were nothing to scoff at, after all—but Thancred felt the creep of debt beneath the charity.
"Last I checked," he said in lieu of thanks, "all but royalty were still expected to pay their own dues."
"Ah, yes," the Exarch said with damnable ease. "Call it… trust long earned."
Thancred frowned. It seemed secrets really were currency here. Perhaps that meant he would be uniquely suited to picking the Exarch's metaphorical pocket and relieving him of his.
The Exarch sent him away without instruction, leaving Thancred to simmer alone in his new reality.
Denial hit first, and it burned fast and hot.
He took the book back with him to the room he'd been given in the city's residential quarter. The Pendants felt more like an inn than a home, like his stay was meant to be fleeting, but as the days dragged on, leaving him alone between bare tile walls with only a set of thick curtains to block out the hells that sparkled in the sky outside, he began to doubt it would be.
The book was a child's thing, more pictures than words, but it was all the history and connection he had. It sat open on the bedside table to a page that remained half-folded from his confrontation, and he spent the first week pointedly ignoring its existence. But it never disappeared, nor did the images from its pages that burned behind his eyelids when he closed them every night—though night was a strange concept when the hours blurred together without the passage of a sun.
So he stopped denying it quick enough.
Nor was there any denying the reality of this place. One moment he was in Ala Mhigo, and the next, simply not. He could perhaps have convinced himself it was a trick of the imagination, years of overwork catching up to aging bones, but the heat here was too visceral and the days too long, and the time for waking from a fevered, fraught dream had long passed. It would be another thing he'd simply have to accept—just one more in a long line of truths too bitter to face head-on.
When the anger came after, it hit him in waves, night after night spent staring at a ceiling growing far too familiar above him, wallowing in a sour helplessness that bubbled beneath his skin until it inevitably burst forth in the weak moments. A broken glass here and there. A bruised fist when the wall refused to give way.
The daggers arrived a week later in the hands of a courier whose insistent professionalism made Thancred horribly aware of the state of his dress and the dark circles beneath his eyes. The weapons themselves were just as refined, steel gleaming and sharp enough to draw blood painlessly as he tested the point with the tip of a finger.
But what good was a weapon when pointed at nothing? Books and stories could only teach him so much. If this world were truly so dangerous, so unforgiving, as the Exarch insisted, surely the Crystarium could not be such a bastion of safety.
They'd taught him bargaining would come next, but it never did. Instead he only drifted further down, waking each morning with heavier eyes than he'd gone to sleep with the day before, entire weeks slipping away in a purposeless haze of light and whiskey.
Thancred had never been one to sit idly by, and it had been years since the last time he'd bothered whispering desperate prayers into the dark, hoping some god might chance upon him and spare some pity. He did all he could to dig deep beneath the blanket of secrets and lies that sat heavy over the city, to search for something, anything, that might tell him who the Crystal Exarch was, or what he wanted.
All his efforts failed—and beyond that, barring the occasional note checking on his well-being and how he was "settling into" the city, the Exarch truly left him to his own devices. He'd made no demands, no implications of a debt come due, and it left Thancred almost more uneasy than if the opposite were true.
Time passed nonetheless, so when the anger reached its boiling point, he simply left. He sharpened his blades and marched from the city without a word in the broad midnight light, only turning back long enough to spit on the last wooden plank of the bridge into Lakeland.
If there was something better in this world, he'd find it. And if there wasn't, then at least he wouldn't waste away the rest of this cursed half-life lamenting a freedom he'd never have unless he took it for himself.
It would be a tainted freedom, he knew, but better that than a prison, no matter how comfortable the cell.
He stuck mostly near the road while traveling, though doing so was hardly to his taste. He bought his food more often than hunting it, with gifted gil he loathed carrying, from the occasional traveling merchant whose goods unfailingly came equipped with a hearty warning of, "Watch yourself out here, sinner. It's not safe to travel alone."
He brushed it off each time. None were more suited to solitary travel than he.
At the perfectly reasonable age of thirteen, Thancred's mentor took him to the wooded mountains on the far edge of the Isle of Yorn, a day at sea to the south of Old Sharlayan, and left him there. He was given only a small pack with a single day's rations, a chunk of flint, and knife a bit too large to fit comfortably in his hand. "Survive" had been the order, and the advice to do so lacking, but he had.
The air had been cold and salty, the woods dark and dense, the land cragged, and the nights unforgiving. Necessity and solitude were harsh teachers, though no harsher than his usual one, and desperation quickly made him a model student. There he began to perfect the art of hunting; of starting, controlling, and hiding a fire; of disappearing into the shadows downwind of passing beasts.
They were skills which served him well in Eorzea, and even more in Garlemald, but beneath the lavender canopy of the land outside the Crystarium, he might as well have been the green child dropped in the wilderness all over again. Here there were no shadows to hide in, no cold in need of shunning by way of fire, and what little wildlife remained was sparse and skittish.
He slept among the trees out of sight of the road wherever he could, silent and solitary. Days passed out in the forest just the same as they did trapped in the city, though without the bustle of the Crystarium around him, keeping track of time became nearly impossible. It had been six nights. Maybe seven. He couldn't be certain.
He walked when he could and slept when he was tired, over and over, until the lavender monotony was cut by a scream tearing through the woods.
Thancred was on his feet and running before he'd realized the instinct had kicked in, but the moment the edge of the road came into sight between the trees, he slowed.
He was a stranger here. He had no connections, no responsibilities, no need nor obligation to interfere. But he watched a flash of white dart impossibly fast toward the silhouette of a man, broad-shouldered and armed with something heavy, and the mantras he'd had driven into his skull since childhood surfaced in a haze of guilt. To ignore the plight of—
Gods damn it.
For his hesitation, he reached the road too late. He darted from the last of the trees just in time to see the man—a Roegadyn, tall and moderately armored—raise a massive axe in an attempt to block vicious claws from raking across his chest.
He failed, and with a garbled yell, he fell.
"—please!" Another voice pierced the air.
Thancred tracked it to its owner, a figure on the ground beneath a wooden cart and the shadow of the clawed creature bearing down on its next target.
Thancred had seen this beast before. The silhouette matched a cartoonish drawing that had etched itself onto the inside of his eyelids. Unnatural, horse-like, and, he'd thought, terribly exaggerated by the artist's interpretation.
No drawing nor description did justice to the real thing: a horrid mass of twisted limbs and pock-marked alabaster skin, wings tattered and too paper-thin to bear anything into the air without the help of whatever unholy magic held it aloft, hovering two fulms above a Hyuran man who lay cowering halfway beneath the cart, eyes shut and feet kicking at nothing but loose dust on the ground.
The stories said to die by the claw of a sin eater would make a man into one of them—a spectacle Thancred had no desire to witness, let alone not twenty fulms from where he stood. With a heavy sigh and gritted teeth, he tugged one of the daggers free from his belt. It had yet to taste blood, but that would change today.
He hurled the knife with fatal finesse, burying it directly between the creature's malformed wings and jutting, misaligned shoulder blades. A screech like grinding metal ripped through the air as the wings beat frantically for a moment, until the sound ceased and the sin eater burst into motes of pure-white light, leaving the dagger to drop to the ground and no corpse to be seen.
(On the First, Thancred was a being of aether without a true body, or so the Exarch had told him. If a dagger found itself between his shoulders, would this be what became of him, too?)
He shook the thought from his head and scowled. This was not his world. These people were not like him. But apparently this was his fight now, too.
He sprinted toward the caravan, feet skidding to a stop in the dirt beside the cart where his dagger had fallen. He extended a hand, but even when he shook it in the man's face, all he did was blink dumbfoundedly.
"Are you catatonic, man?" he snapped. "Get up and run."
At the sound of his voice, the stranger scrambled out from under the cart. Thancred reached out a hand to pull him to his feet. He stammered a slew of unintelligible nonsense before nodding with wide eyes and dashing toward the cover of the trees.
Another scream ripped through the air, feminine and frantic. He whipped around to see a woman some hundred fulms from him, longsword in hand and shield raised, eyes wide and trembling as she took slow steps backward from a quivering clump of feathered white on the ground.
It broke open like a monstrous egg, spilling glowing white liquid across the ground as a writhing mass of something rose within it. Wingless, hulking, shoulders as wide as two men and head set forward in a bestial silhouette. It took a heavy step toward the woman who, armed or not, seemed frozen in fear.
"Gods damned useless—" Thancred cursed under his breath and knelt just long enough to snatch the dagger from where it lay in the dirt.
Had that been a person? It didn't matter. He dashed toward the creature as it found its bearings, the seconds ticking by in slow motion.
For a mercy, he reached it before it reached the woman, but only barely. With the dagger clenched in his fist, he slammed it beneath the creature's arm—a strike to the heart, or so it should be. The woman's horrified, garbled yell drowned the sharp, wet sound of the knife piercing thick flesh.
The beast did not burst into light and aether.
He hadn't found a heart.
Instead it turned, slow and lumbering, to face him. It wasn't fast or dexterous; it lacked finesse and relied on raw strength. Though that strength was enough to tear the dagger from his grip, leaving it buried between the creature's ribs, it would still be its downfall.
He dug in his heels as it bore down on him, teeth sharp and dripping luminescent white. Its jaw distended to bare misaligned fangs as its head tipped toward him, and unlike the wild beasts, voidsent, or undead he knew from home, there was no foul stench of rot on its breath—only a cold, sterile nothingness like an unnatural winter breeze across his face.
Its arm drew back, bulging with the misshapen facsimile of muscle. He ducked beneath its clumsy swing and lunged toward the woman.
"Your sword," he said. "Give it to me."
She stared at him with blank blue eyes blown wide and mouth hanging half-open, trembling.
"Come on!"
The woman shook her head.
"It—it was… he was…" She fell to her knees, the sword slipping out of her limp hand and clattering to the ground.
With a frustrated growl, he dove for it, but her hesitance cost him time. The beast's claw tore through his right shoulder at the same moment his hand closed around the weapon, leaving a jagged, deep gash behind, but the warmth of blood drenching his arm was nearly ignorable, and the pain far too familiar to break his focus even though it screamed at him when his muscles tensed to raise the sword.
He danced to his feet and in a wide half-circle, leading the sin eater's eyes away from the woman who knelt there unresponsive in the dirt.
Useless, he thought. All of them. How they'd survived thus far escaped him.
"Are you not supposed to be their guard?" he shouted between quick, measured breaths while he lead the beast in a calculated and violent dance, waiting for his moment to plunge the borrowed sword deeper between the creature's ribs than the dagger could reach.
The woman did not answer. Not that he expected her to.
She kept her silence for all the long seconds it took for him to find his opening, to dive in close and narrowly miss another swing of wicked claws as he drove the sword straight into the center of its chest until his hand at the hilt met the creature's pallid flesh. It was cold to the touch, and he felt no pulse.
Whether the sin eater had a heart to pierce or not, it let out a shrill, warbling shriek that gave way to unnatural silence as it dissipated, leaving the blade near-weightless in his hand and the dagger free to clatter to the ground once more.
The chaos calmed and so did the sound of blood rushing in his ears. The sharp stinging pain of the wound on his shoulder and the blood cooling on his skin snapped into sharp focus.
It was over. That was it. There had only been the one, though one made two, and only by dumb luck had two not become four.
He caught his breath and slowed himself with purpose. A calm, critical eye. Evaluate the scene. Secure the area. Thancred glanced around. He saw no more violence, no more death, and, most importantly, no more alabaster white amid the trees. Only himself, the man who'd hidden poorly in the woods and was visible from the road with ease, and the woman who knelt silent in the dirt.
He offered his hand to the woman. She was Elezen—an "elf," he reminded himself, now that he had a moment to think—lightly armored in carefully crafted chain links, blood spattered across a pretty face and reddening pieces of long blonde hair that fell forward over her shoulders. She looked uninjured, so the blood must not have been hers. His eye searched for the corpse it came from on instinct, but the only signs the man he'd watched fall had ever existed were scuff marks in the dirt and an axe lying abandoned on the edge of the road.
She allowed him to haul her to her feet, some amount of lucidity returning to her along the way. His shoulder burned as lacerated muscle flexed. He grit his teeth.
Thancred held the sword out to her. No blood stained the steel. She hesitated.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It isn't me you owe an apology." He shoved the blade into her hands and stalked away.
He only made it as far as the trees, ready to slink back to the dappled dancing shadows to lick his wounds and then continue his solitary wandering, before he heard a shout behind him.
"You!"
The man he'd found cowering beneath the cart dashed up beside him. He was on the high end of middle-aged, short and stocky, drenched in sweat and breathing heavily despite not lifting a finger in the confrontation other than to haul himself to his feet and run. A merchant, he'd wager.
He held out a hand, and Thancred simply glared at it.
"You're alive," he said. "What more do you want?"
The hand withdrew to be raised in mock surrender.
"Alright, alright," the man said. "No need for anger. Please."
"Make it quick."
The stranger's face fell. "I wanted to thank you," he said. "Lest you think me ungrateful that you've saved my life."
Thancred shrugged and began to walk further into the trees, but the man's hand on his shoulder—the uninjured one, for a mercy—stopped him.
"And it seems I'm in need of a new guard."
Thancred jabbed his finger in the direction of the woman who stood statue-still by the cart, itself undamaged. "You have one." That she was useless when faced with actual danger wasn't his problem.
The stranger rubbed at the back of his neck. "I hired two," he said. "Hired 'em together. Not to be callous, but, down to one now and she's—"
"Not my responsibility."
Thancred had not come here to listen to the mewling of an unprepared, privileged trader who'd dared to ignore the advice he himself had been hearing on repeat since he'd first decided to leave the Crystarium.
"You have your life," he said. "Do something with it."
A smarter, less desperate man would have let him leave it at that and slink away into the paltry excuse for shade, but unfortunately the stranger was neither.
"Please!" he nearly shouted, grasping onto Thancred's elbow. "I can pay well. And—" he lowered his voice "—frankly, I am not eager to gamble on our survival if there's another attack. We're two days out from the Crystarium. Come with us that far, then you can be on your way."
Thancred rubbed his forehead absently, before realizing the blood had made its way down to his fingers, too. He wiped it away from his face with his other hand.
He'd come without a plan, though if he were asked he would certainly say the plan was not to help bumbling strangers with their self-inflicted problems. But even he could not lie to himself well enough to deny he wanted for purpose, and at the very least, it was a task that needed doing with a monetary reward on the other end.
He sighed heavily. "Fine," he said. "On the condition that there is no more travel today—tonight. A rest, then we leave."
The strangers eyes lit up. "Oh, thank you!" he said "Thank you, thank you! I am in your d—"
"And absolutely no more of that," Thancred interrupted.
The man nodded his apology.
"Very well," he said, and began to walk, clearly expecting Thancred to follow. He did, though the reluctance hadn't entirely dissipated.
"I am Miller," the man went on as they approached what remained of their sorry caravan—just the woman standing listlessly in the center of the road, and a hand-pulled cart of miraculously undamaged goods. "The elf is Elysse. We came from out past Holminster."
Thancred squinted. He'd spent long enough studying a map to recognize the words, but the meaning and implication was beyond him.
"Ah, not a local, then," Miller said. "There's a vineyard. One of the only ones in the region still producing. These go for a pretty gil in the city." He patted the top of one of the barrels that lay on its side in the cart.
They set off from the scene, Miller dragging the cart himself with a strength his body belied, around a bend and down the road until the scuffs carved into the dirt in the violence couldn't be seen. Then they parked the cart alongside the road, lashing it between two trees with the ropes that kept its cargo from rolling free.
Wordlessly, the Elezen woman set to work gathering tinder, then knelt to start a small fire in the spot Miller pointed to. Every movement was slow and methodical. Thancred recognized easily the movement of someone simply going through the motions.
"A fire in this heat?" he asked, stepping up beside it once he was satisfied the area was some amount of safe and he could finally take a moment to tend to the stinging gash across his shoulder.
"They say it keeps the eaters away," Miller said. "Like mosquitoes."
"And does it?"
"Dunno. Probably not. But it feels better."
Thancred shrugged and sat heavily on the ground across from where Elysse remained on her knees staring into it. He folded his legs beneath him and tugged free the little weather-proof pouch he kept hanging at his belt, packed full of the kind of supplies one might need to start a fire, brew something to bring down a fever, or treat a wound. He'd hoped he wouldn't need to use it, but optimism came with too high a risk, so he'd sought out a handful of the same things he'd kept in his survival kit back home. To be ill-prepared was as good as death where bad luck was concerned.
"Those barrels," he said, gesturing to the cart that blocked the road from view. "Open one."
"What? Why? It's wine, my product," Miller said.
"High alcohol?"
"Decently."
"I need it for cleaning," Thancred said, waving his left hand at the gash on his right shoulder that still wept warm blood down his bicep. "What's the cost to open one?"
Miller thought for a moment, then gave a dramatic shrug and stepped over to it with a confidence and authority he had, until now, displayed none of. "My patron won't miss a single barrel, I suppose. Things get destroyed in transit sometimes. They know the risks."
He tipped the cask on its side and, with a deft hand, popped the cork and slipped a tap into its place. Once he was certain it wouldn't leak, he rummaged in the cart and returned with a tattered rag which he held under the tap as he poured deep amber liquid over it until it soaked through to dripping.
He held it out with a somber face.
Thancred took it without a word and pressed it to his exposed shoulder. It burned, but that meant it was working.
He worked drops of the alcohol into the wound with his fingers, biting down on his tongue to stifle the tension in his throat as he went. The cut was deep—another fraction of an ilm would have exposed the bone and he'd be dealing with much worse—and jagged, like he'd been torn open with a serrated, dull knife. It would heal ugly and uneven, but luck willing, it would heal.
When he was satisfied with his cleaning, he used the remaining liquid to clean the blade of one of his daggers, then scrub away the drying blood that had dripped down his arm, leaving the rag a dull and dirty brown by the time he finished. He tossed it onto the ground. Unlikely Miller would want it back.
"Do you have spare clothes in there?" Thancred asked, gesturing at the cart. "Something cheap, but clean. I'll need to tear it."
Miller gave a long, intense look to Elysse, who still sat unmoving.
"S'pose so," he said. He pulled from the cart a clean, off-white shirt far bigger than would fit either Hyur. "Sorry." He mumbled the last word, and Thancred knew it was not directed at him.
Necessity outweighed sentiment every time. He'd learned this decades ago. He nicked the fabric with the edge of a dagger and tore a long strip from the lower hem, then laid it across his lap to wait while he did what unenviable work remained.
He extended the dagger into the crackling fire, holding it in the flame for a long few seconds before drawing it back and up to rest at the edge of the wound.
It was an awkward angle to get a good view, but with his neck craned over his own shoulder to the point it ached, he could see bits of loose flesh around the bloody edges graying. Only as expected, of course, but seeing it still deflated him. This, he knew from experience, was the worst part.
With an unsteady left hand, he guided the tip of the blade to the wound and pinched the damaged skin between the dagger and his thumb. With meticulous, careful pressure, he worked the dead flesh free, far more concerned about whether his teeth might crack for how hard he clenched his jaw against the raw, unmitigated pain of sawing through his own skin with no anesthetic than he was about the tip of the blade digging into his thumb along the way. He only realized he'd forgotten to breathe when his vision began to turn gray at the edges too, but by then the task was nearly done.
Next came a needle and a little spool of catgut from the bottom of the pouch. He held it as far into the fire as he could without scorching his fingers, threaded it, and set to work. The pain didn't quite measure up to the knife, though that wasn't saying much.
"I, ah, can't say I'm well-versed in what you're doing," Miller said, "but d'you need—"
"No," Thancred snapped through gritted teeth. He raised his eyes just enough to see the man wringing his hands with a worried scowl and a greenish tinge to his face.
Another pull, another stitch, another agonizing, burning drag of thread. Slowly, methodically, he pulled the skin together as neatly as was possible for such a ragged gash.
When he finally tied off the catgut and sliced away the loose end that remained, his left hand, the dagger, and the needle sat decorated with blood that hadn't stopped seeping from the wound the whole way through. He wrapped his shoulder and most of his upper arm carefully in the strips of torn cloth, ignoring the red that peeked insistently through each new layer as he went.
He looked up at the end of it to see Miller standing before him, two hands on a large wooden tankard held out to him.
"At the very least," Miller said, "any man would need a drink after that."
He plucked the mug from the man's hands unceremoniously and took a long, heavy drink. It wasn't wholly off-putting. It had the color and the woody fruitiness of brandy, but with an odd sour tang he'd never tasted before. The brandy he knew from the Source had been F'lhaminn's favorite, years ago. He'd insisted on trying to acquire a taste for it, though he never really did, instead finding a frivolous use for his face of unshakeable iron. He would not break beneath lies or torture, so what was a little brandy?
He didn't bother hiding the grimace this time. No one here was worth the effort of lying to.
A tense silence fell as he nursed the drink. Miller poured his own and sat. Elysse remained still as a statue but for the occasional sniffle.
For a fleeting half-second he considered moving to sit beside her, to drape an arm over her shoulder and offer comfort, though the warmth wasn't needed. But that was an old habit and old trouble came with it, and he hadn't the space for more problems here.
Regardless, her patron offered nothing by way of condolences, so just as he would be their new "bodyguard," the responsibility for that would fall on him, too.
"What was his name?" he said.
"Ansel," she said softly. Her eyes never left the fire, and even under the everlasting light, the reflection of flames danced inside them.
"Mhm," he hummed, but he had nothing else but cold comforts to offer.
Elysse fell back into a somber silence, and Thancred an uneasy one along with her.
The "night" wore on, disorienting and long, bringing with it a fatigue that had little to do with lack of sleep. But regardless, as time passed, the cask grew lighter and Miller's lips grew looser.
After half of bell of listening to him tell some story about the winery that seemed to have neither a point nor an ending, Thancred ventured a risky question.
"Tell me your thoughts of the Exarch," he said.
Miller's eyebrows rose. "You really are an outsider then. What, been hiding in some Kholusian backwater your whole life?"
"Not exactly," Thancred said.
It took a moment for Miller to accept he would not say more, but in the end he gave in. "Fine, fine. I don't live in the Crystarium, just in the area, but the Exarch's a good man. You won't find any in the whole of the city with a harsh thing to say about him."
"Do you not find that strange? Surely everyone has grievances from time to time. Political. Personal. Anything?"
"Maybe," Miller said. "But I'm told he's kind, and when he protects your whole damn city with a wave of a staff and smiles at you the whole time, I guess petty grievances don't mean so much."
If asked for a word to describe the Crystal Exarch, not in an entire lifetime would Thancred have chosen "kind." Duplicitous. Arrogant. Charismatic, perhaps. Fascinating, were he honest with himself. But kind?
Unless the persona he'd worn out and about in the city was the real one, and the authoritative, high-and-mighty man who'd imprisoned and immobilized him with underhanded magic the mask, he'd struggle to believe it. If only the damnable lies and infuriating charm did not also strike at his curiosity. Regardless of the truth, a liar was nothing if not intriguing—and disdain and intrigue made for a dangerous cocktail.
"Besides," Miller continued, "you need someone to believe in. Relate to. Everyone knows someone who's lost someone. Someone who's seen the change." He gestured toward Elysse, who stirred for the first time since the fire crackled to life.
"Thought I'd be… ready," the woman said softly from across the fire. She'd tucked her knees to her chest, curling up despite the armor in a way that made her look terribly lost and small.
"You never are, Lyss." A pet name. More than just a necessary hire, then. Thancred wondered if he knew the dead man well, too. "It never gets easier. But when you have someone who's seen it all—and worse—telling you you're safe… It helps."
Miller reached a hand out to Elysse. She ignored it, so instead, his gaze locked onto Thancred's.
"It's been worse lately," the man said. "There have been more eaters, more attacks, since Eulmore changed. Road's never been all that safe, but now it's even less. Without a Minfilia fighting—"
Thancred gripped the mug with a sudden force that sent some of his drink sloshing into the fire where it sizzled and popped in a quiet rage.
"Wicked white, man, are you alright?"
"Fine," he said tersely.
Miller shrugged. "Few years back, it used to be that going out was safer so long as you had an escort. Entire weeks could pass without an attack, and when there was one sometimes you'd hear a grand story about Her, leaping out of the shadows with a scythe as big as she was. A veritable Warrior of Darkness, cloaked in light and flame."
He paused and took a long breath and a drink. Thancred tracked his gaze as it lifted to the sky, where embers from the fire drifted up among the tiny, ever-present motes of light that hung in the air.
"Now you're lucky to go two days without hearing about some grisly death," he said. "And that's if there's even anyone left who saw it. There's no savior here. Not anymore."
The words joined the embers and lingered there in the air above the fire. No Minfilia indeed. Not anymore.
"But enough sad sap," Miller said with a forced brightness, clapping his hands together. "We're alive! And thanks to you, we get to make it back home."
Thancred only scoffed.
Home. Entire moons spent wasting away waiting for the Exarch to make some progress, to send him home. He wouldn't say it aloud even were a knife at his throat, but he missed the place. The quiet echo of footsteps and laughter in the front hall of the Rising Stones. Real, familiar brandy, despite his failure to acquire the taste.
But if this was the world Minfilia died for, he could think of no graver betrayal than abandoning it for a "home" that was little more than a lonely shell—and nostalgia ill-suited him anyway.
He stared at Elysse across the fire, at the white-knuckled grip she kept on the wooden tankard she hadn't even taken a sip from, and the ring on her finger that sparkled as it caught the light of the dancing flames.
Thancred would be no one's knight in shining armor.
Perhaps he could cut down a sin eater menacing a stranger, but, saving everyone? A knife was just a knife, confined to the length of his reach and the deftness of his hand. It wasn't enough. It wasn't enough.
He had to do better. He had to be stronger. It was a weakness he could not allow.
The last time he indulged such thoughts, when he'd watched a burning battlefield from an agonizing distance, cut the throats of its doomed victims himself, and slept away the following week at the bottom of a bottle of gin, well…
He would not repeat his mistakes.
For that he knew he needed guidance, though it was bitter to admit. What good was a weapon, after all, when pointed at nothing? The knowledge that none could properly wield him but the Exarch weighed heavy on his shoulders and boiled red-hot within him as he and what remained of the caravan trudged their way back to the Crystarium.
Grief could make monsters of even the best of men; this, the Crystal Exarch knew well.
He could see it writ plain since the moment Thancred arrived back in the city, and the tense, silent days that came after. It was in the way his eyes narrowed each time anyone mentioned the Oracle of Light in passing or otherwise, in the ripple of defensiveness and the flexed fingers, in the way he hid behind the shadows cast on his own face by a curtain of hair he refused to cut though it had grown long and unkempt over the months since his arrival—a subtle attempt at what the Exarch himself had mastered with the help of magic: total concealment of emotions, made all the easier with shrouded eyes.
Indeed, few things were as familiar as grief. He'd witnessed it in the fallen shoulders of a brother mourning a sister's sacrifice; the empty hands of a mother who could never again hold her child; the heavy, dogged steps of ten thousand men whose losses built the foundation of this city more than any stone or brick. And through this familiarity, he'd grown accustomed enough to its effects to stay on his guard each time the door to the Ocular crashed open, announcing the arrival of one who could either be ally or adversary.
On this particular day, as the sound of a metal door handle striking the crystal wall reverberated through the room and he waved a hand to dissipate the image projected on the mirror, he could hazard a guess at which it would be.
He turned to see Thancred stalking toward him, fury driving his feet.
"To what do I owe the pleasure?" the Exarch said in a practiced, even voice. It had become a script of sorts, a verbatim greeting each time the Archon burst in, and it made him feel much like a territorial predator circling his competition, waiting to see who struck first.
He had barely enough time to brace himself as a raised fist shot toward him, but this time there was no crack of crystal on crystal nor skull-shaking impact—only the muffled thud of a gloved fist meeting the wall above him.
Thancred planted his other hand beside the Exarch's head, thoroughly caging him in. The Exarch glanced up just enough to see desperation in one amber eye.
"I no longer know how many moons have passed," Thancred said, and despite the hot and heavy breath, despite the heaving chest and arms flexed as if he held back a great deal of barely-contained violence, his voice was smooth and even, too. "And you've no further progress on releasing me from this hellscape."
The Exarch blinked slowly. "This it not for lack of effort," he said. "You know this."
The fist above him lifted for half a second before reconnecting with the wall.
"Exarch," he nearly growled, leaning his head closer to the hood under which the Exarch's ears twitched with the subtlest betrayal of anxiety. "I cannot do this alone."
A century in the past or near enough not to matter, before he'd donned a hood and a title, G'raha Tia had told himself he would do everything asked of him alone. He'd taken up a shield of his own that no one else ever need die for him, a staff so none need fight as his weapon. But he recognized well in that single desperate eye the yearning for purpose he himself had only found filled when he'd resolved himself to die.
There was a wisdom in it, he thought—the refusal to walk alone. If even one such as Thancred, a solitary shadow in the margins of the past, could acknowledge this…
Perhaps he could as well.
It would not be the first time he resigned himself to playing the shepherd. The people—his people, though the words still rattled ill-fitting in his mind—looked to him for guidance, no matter how misplaced he felt their trust might be. He could do so too for a lost soul who did not belong in this world, who was only here because of his own missteps. It was only to be expected.
And if it meant another might join him in his guardianship, who would he be to decline?
He had no opportunity to say as much before the fist on the wall gripped his hood instead and he found his back pushed against the mirror again, head tipped up with Thancred's breath hot on his face, lips just ilms away from his own.
"I am tired of lies," Thancred said, voice low and gritty and barely above a whisper.
"I have told you none," the Exarch hissed back, but that in itself was a lie.
The huff he received in response told him Thancred knew that.
But he made no move to lash out, nor yell, nor even retreat in disgust and disdain. The hand tangled in the Exarch's hood remained there, a desperate look in his eye as he searched for something beneath the shadow.
Not for the first time, the Exarch wished the darkness need not be so impenetrable.
When he finally did let go, he spun on a heel, took five angry steps away, and stood there in tense silence with his back to the Exarch, briefly exposing a flash of reddened skin with a tangle of brown-stained thread woven through it.
The Exarch sighed. Word traveled quickly through the Crystarium, every new face notable and new occurrence newsworthy, and he'd heard nearly immediately of the man's uncharacteristically heroic clash with sin eaters. Given his previous attempts to reach out and make peace were so handily rebuffed if not entirely ignored, the Exarch had restrained himself from reaching out in the days since. But he had watched more than his share of deaths at the claws of those cursed creatures, and guilt gripped his throat as he squinted at the injury.
What would he tell the Warrior of Light, should Thancred die before he completed another summoning?
And beyond that, animosity and venom aside, it would be a terrible, undeserved death.
"I owe you my thanks," he finally said, shunting the Exarch's authority back into his voice out of sheer desperation to break the tension. "You've done a great thing for the Crystarium."
"By what, ensuring your drink arrived in one piece?" came the sarcastic reply.
The Exarch sighed. "I am sure some may find joy or comfort in that, but no. You saved two lives and rid the world of one more sin eater. That is not meaningless."
The man gave a dismissive laugh. "One among hordes, it seems."
"Regardless," he said, "I would be grateful for your continued… service."
"I'm certain you would."
"You were injured on the road," he said matter-of-factly, gesturing at Thancred's shoulder.
"That's none of your concern." Thancred folded his arms. "And from what I've heard, far from uncommon."
"Indeed," the Exarch said. "But so long as you are here on my account, it is in fact my concern."
Thancred groaned with frustration but otherwise did not protest again—nor did he protest when the Exarch once again approached him to look closer. He stepped around to Thancred's right side and peered at the wound, nearly at his eye level.
It was clearly done by Thancred's own hand. The cord he'd used was far too thick, for one, and the skin had begun to harden around where a needle pulled it through at uneven intervals.
The Exarch's knowledge of field medicine was limited, but he carried the basics with him ever since a desperate Ironworks researcher in the depths of the Crystal Tower had talked him through setting a bone and closing a wound with a calm only belied by the amount of blood. Thancred would certainly know far more than he, but knowledge alone would not steady a non-dominant hand.
"Hold still," he said, then he reached out to hold his own hand an ilm or so above the wound. Healing magic did not come naturally to him, but most skills could be learned to a degree of competency, given enough time.
The air around his hand crackled with a gentle, cool aether that reached for the wound in wispy tendrils, and it—
"Do not condescend to me," Thancred snapped, slapping the Exarch's hand away hard enough to sting. "I am perfectly fine."
The spell dissipated in a scattered cloud, and the Exarch did not miss the grimace as his thumb caught the edge of the ragged stitching. He stared dumbly for a moment. In all his century and more, he'd never seen someone resist being healed.
"I mean no offense," he said, "but your stitchwork is shoddy and the area around it is red. At the very least, you should see a chirurgeon. Sin eater-inflicted wounds have a lower risk of infection as the light tends to scour them clean, but the risk is still present, especially given the… rustic nature of your remedy."
"My 'remedy,' as you say, is perfectly functional," Thancred said, and for the first time inside the Ocular, his forceful, angry facade broke, dissolving into something defensive instead.
"Functional, perhaps," the Exarch agreed, "and were you still on the road with no other options I would not begrudge you any of it. But we have the resources in the Crystarium that you need not settle for functional."
Thancred rolled his eyes.
"Like it or not, you are here now. You may treat this city as your own until we find a way to return you home, or you may allow your stubbornness to get you killed. The choice is yours." The Exarch gave what he hoped was a convincing scowl. It remained rather difficult to project authority in private to a man some six ilms taller, but he tipped his chin up and put his shoulders back nonetheless.
The standoff continued, but the Exarch did not break. He was, after all, half a statue already.
"Fine." Thancred sighed audibly as he said it. "Do what you will."
The Exarch shook his head, but reluctant acceptance was better than nothing. He stepped forward and laid his hand over the stitching as the wound beneath it shrank and whitened. The skin was even warmer than the rush of healing aether twining around them both. Thancred visibly relaxed.
"You should remove the stitches soon—preferably with the help of a professional," he said once the spell had taken root enough for him to draw his hand back. "It won't be painless, I'm sure you know."
Thancred only shrugged and turned his face away, exposing the skin on the side of his neck. A striking show of vulnerability, were the Exarch as predatory as Thancred seemed to think.
He left his hand atop the healing wound for a long moment. The man could not see his eyes to track where they wandered up the side of his neck to the tattoo that rested just below his ear, half-covered by a soft leather collar that shifted subtly as he swallowed. Ever-present, always meaningful, and horribly, painfully familiar.
The Exarch bit back the tension that rose in his throat. He could just…
"Permit me a moment," he said softly, and when the man did not stir from his stoicism, he raised his hand from where it rested, closer to the symbol on the side of his neck.
Were he watching closer, he might have seen the grit of teeth behind the curated impassivity on Thancred's face, but the Exarch found himself too preoccupied by the loops and angles of the Archon mark emblazoned there. With a single finger, he tugged the collar out just an ilm, then with another he traced the tattoo. Beneath a growing sheen of sweat, he could feel the texture of it—the marks healed, yes, but the lines were too bold and the skin there too sensitive, so they remained ever so slightly raised. It was subtle, but enough to find and feel if one knew what they were looking for.
Even after all this time, he remembered well receiving his own: the ceremony headed by Studium leadership who spoke in the monotone voices of people who had done this often enough to be thoroughly bored by the script; being led to a private chamber after the fact where an apologetic woman brandished an intimidatingly large needle; how the aetherial ink stung for days, itching down to his bones in a way broken skin would not do alone. They were memories the man before him would share, as were the memories he clung to dearly of walking the snow-dusted streets of Old Sharlayan. He could never say as much, but the thought alone ached to the pit of his stomach.
Here stood a piece of home he could not reach for. There would be no reminiscence over tea, though Thancred did not strike him as the wistful type anyway, nor would there be a chance to acknowledge the homesickness seeing those marks injected into his very soul—at least, not in the company of any save himself and the dingy old mirror he'd never bothered to dispose of from his private chambers, despite the stranger who stared back at him with shadowed eyes every time he passed the thing in his haste to return to his work.
For a long moment, he let the tip of his finger, this one yet flesh and blood, rest there. He could feel the shallow rise and fall of labored breath, the thrumming of a pulse in a vital vein—a warmth of skin he hadn't felt in decades. Touch was a luxury of which he had so little. There were handshakes of course, often muted by crystal, and the occasional passing clap on the shoulder, but nothing like this, not since—
He shook his head. This was no time for lonely little G'raha Tia to take the reins.
He let loose his grip on Thancred's choker, which snapped back to the skin with a harsh sound, and this time he was watching close enough to catch the twitch of lips into a grimace wiped clean in a split second. The silence and stoicism spoke of practice, of many long hours spent learning to endure. His training had served him well, it seemed—the Archon marks well-earned—but he could not silence the pounding of a heartbeat any more than the Exarch could silence the part of himself that screamed to lay his palm flat against the exposed collarbone.
No one would stop him. Thancred remained unmoving. He could be even closer, bask in the radiating body heat, breathe deep of the gentle scent of freshly laundered clothes and low-end whiskey. It would be so easy to just—move—
No.
One hundred years.
An entire world already as good as sacrificed.
It was too great a risk at too great a cost. His own desire, and the desire he swore he could feel in warm, shallow breath and a racing heart—was it wishful thinking, he wondered?—could not take precedence.
Were he weaker, or Thancred more trustworthy and trusting, perhaps he would consider sharing a shred of the truth. But neither he nor the man before him would be ready, and he could only foresee disaster should he lower his hood or his guard in present company.
He took a slow step backward instead and let his arm drop back to his side. The siren call of touch still rang in his ears, and his heart clenched to deny himself. But the Exarch was a paragon of self-discipline and pragmatism—regardless of how G'raha Tia felt about it.
He would continue telling his lies. To Thancred, and to himself.
"Forgive me," he said. "Relics of another world will never cease to fascinate me."
He watched Thancred's fingers flex before closing into loose fists.
"I would be grateful," he said tentatively, "should you choose to stay near."
A long moment passed in total quiet. From beneath shadow, the Exarch watched Thancred's eye scan the room, landing everywhere except his face. But the tension in his arms seemed to have fled, and finally, it was he who broke the silence.
"I will stay," he said firmly, "on one condition: if I've a role to play, Exarch, then tell me what it is."
"Very well—if you are so eager to be put to use." The Exarch stood straight and smoothed his robes. Even after everything, he could not allow the mask to slip. He would not. "There are people in this world who need protecting. It is your decision if you will take up your blades on their behalf, or stay here and lament your lack of purpose. You may not be the one who can bring back the night, but perhaps, given the tools and the drive, you may yet bring them some shade."
Thancred sighed and gave a terse nod, then turned on his heel in utter silence and stalked from the Ocular. The Exarch did not miss the dull, echoing thud of a fist hitting the wall as the doors closed behind him.