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loldragoon-ffxiv · 2 days ago

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Heritage Found

When Zoisite wasn’t forced to be there by circumstance, she tried to avoid Everkeep and Solution 9 like her life depended on it. She had plenty of valid reasons for that. The people and their culture would be off-putting to just about anyone from the Source. That some percentage of the population likely resented her for murdering their beloved queen was another obvious reason. But her reason wasn’t so simple or defensible, really.

It was the unsettling feeling that she had every time she introduced herself to someone from Alexandria, and they furrowed their brows in confusion at her name. Some had outright asked about it, but Zoisite almost reflexively dismissed it as a coincidence, even when Sphene herself had explained the significance of stones in Alexandrian naming practices, and Zoisite could practically feel everyone’s eyes boring into her as she did.

Zoisite had been too distracted to really think about it when they'd originally made this discovery. She was distracted by Krile, and Wuk Lamat, and Koana, and Gulool Ja. By thinking about her own child that she’d secretly abandoned only just a few years ago, and that she hoped might one day forgive her as easily as they had.

For weeks after she defeated Sphene, Zoisite had sobbed about everything, alone in her inn room in Tuliyollal. Eventually, she pulled herself together, licking her wounds and making peace with the fact that Feldspar might hate her one day. She certainly hated her own absent father, and for far less.

A lot of that resentment came to the surface when Erenville revealed the truth about why he left home. Zoisite could definitely see herself in Erenville, could relate to feeling like her father had loved adventure more than he ever loved her or her sister. But she also saw herself in Cahciua, or at least she saw the type of mother she probably would have been if she’d tried to be a mother at all. Zoisite was in Tural now because of the same curiosity that Cahciua and her father had, and even if she'd kept Feldspar, she still would have ultimately left him behind. Perhaps he’d one day be grateful that he hadn’t known her at all, instead of just being disappointed with what he did know, like she was.

Maybe that resentment was why Zoisite had started questioning everything her father ever told her. During his fleeting periods of interest in his daughter’s life, he had always spoken at length about his travels and his adventures, but never about his origins. He described every corner of Othard to Illsabard, and of Meracydia and Aldenard, in vivid detail. He’d even told her all sorts of things about both Xak and Yok Tural, though she now was seeing those stories through a different light. But he’d never said much about Eorzea, or of the Shroud specifically, aside from what an adventurer might recall, even though he’d supposedly spent the first two decades of his life there.

When Zoisite first came to Gridania, she’d hoped to feel some sort of connection to her ancestral homeland of sorts. She’d hoped to recognize herself in the people there, or at least meet a distant relative with candy-colored hair and a geologically inspired name, that ought to exist if her father’s claim they’d merely come from a long line of Eorzean miners and rock enthusiasts were true. But she didn’t. She felt as much an outsider in Eorzea as she did back home in Doma. She long since chalked that up to being born of parents from two very different worlds, but now she was staring down at someone named Shale and she had a lump in her throat and pounding in her chest to go along with it.

Zoisite was mortified to even imply her newly found theory. The irony wasn’t lost on Zoisite that, after discovering she’d been sent forward in time half a decade, and apparently been reincarnated from an ancient hero predestined to save the world, that her father might have come from another shard was simply too coincidental and implausible for her to consider. “I was wondering if you could look into someone from the past… discreetly.” Zoisite shifted on her feet, leaning against Shale’s desk in the Backroom.

Shale raised her eyebrows briefly and then lowered them at the sudden request, especially surprised to see Zoisite without any other Scions around. “From how distantly in the past, exactly?”

“I’m not sure when he would have been alive by this shard’s sense of time, but,” she sighed, doing the math in her head. “He would be in his 50s on the Source by now. His name is Garnet.” She lowered her voice a bit. “My father.” “You think he might have travelled between shards,” Shale confirmed aloud, her face oddly neutral despite the obviously absurd claim that Zoisite was making. Zoisite told herself it was because Shale w‌as a scientist that she could hide her surprise, and not that Shale had already suspected Zoisite’s Alexandrian origins the moment she introduced herself. “For that to be the case, he would have been a member of Preservation or Oblivion, most likely...” She turned around, tapping out a query into her computer that Zoisite couldn’t even read. A few moments later, she hummed. “I can’t find any results for the name in either our records or Preservation’s, but if they had some reason to hide his existence, perhaps because he managed to travel to the Source on his own, it’s possible that they’ve long been erased. With Y’shtola’s help, I might narrow down a better timeline of events, and, with that information, potentially recover some of the deleted records…”

“That’s fine. I don’t want to distract you from what you’re already working on.” Zoisite sighed and shook her head, almost relieved she wouldn’t get an answer so easily. “It’s too bad that I don’t know where he is now, or if he’s even still alive…”

Shale stood up straight at that. “He might be alive? Are you certain we shouldn’t tell the others? If a member of Preservation has been alive on the Source for decades, he might be able to help us-"

As the reality of what she was implying by this dawned on Zoisite, that her own father might have been a part of all of this somehow, and that facing him after 12 years might be necessary to get any real answers, she scrambled to her feet, practically knocking every loose object off of Shale’s desk in the process. “Forget I said anything. This is probably ridiculous. He wasn’t any kind of scientist or engineer,” she told herself, even though she knew, deep down, that he was probably intelligent enough to be.

“He never mentioned Alexandria or Everkeep at all?”

“We didn’t talk much,” Zoisite admitted awkwardly. “He was an adventurer, and he always claimed to be from Eorzea, but…”

Shale finally shot Zoisite a sympathetic look. “You have reason not to believe him.”

“I’ve never met anyone in Eorzea with names like ours,” Zoisite admitted, swallowing hard. “But that’s not a good enough reason to assume he’s from another shard. I don’t have any kind of earring, or clue, aside from that,” and a feeling, but Zoisite had just as many of those when her hunches were wrong.

“The passing of time between shards is unpredictable, and all we know for certain is that it was only a few decades ago from your perspective, but many more from ours, that the key was left on the other side of the portal. It’s not impossible that someone else might have found a way through the same portal while leaving the key behind a decade earlier, if time slowed on our shard soon after.”

Zoisite could already imagine the looks on the Scions’ faces if she and Shale were to involve them in this now. How she’d have to tell them all her entire life story when only a handful of them even knew she was from Doma to begin with, despite them liberating it from Garlemald together. She’d have to admit that she’d not mentioned so many things after all of them had poured their hearts out to her in various ways over the years. She’d kept so many secrets from these people that were so close to her, some for good reason and others for no good reason at all. Aside from wanting to avoid the attention on herself when they ought to be paying attention to something more important, that is. Each lie of omission had built onto the other, and now the deception had snowballed out of control, big enough that she doubted many of them would forgive her for it.

So instead the snowball would have to grow, and Shale would join Zoisite’s ever-widening roster of accomplices. Mercifully, it wasn’t Alphinaud again this time. “So it’s probably unlikely,” Zoisite shook her head. “Again, I’d prefer if you didn’t mention this to anyone. I’m sorry for asking.”

Shale shook her head as well, smiling sadly in reassurance. “As much as it pains me to leave a mystery unsolved, your secret is safe with me.”

Zoisite smiled at that, understanding why she and Y’shtola had seemingly hit it off so well.

Though Zoisite left Solution 9 that day with no answers, she couldn’t stop imagining the story anyway. Maybe he really had been from Everkeep. It wasn’t as if anyone on the Source would have believed him if he’d told them the truth. Even Zoisite would have assumed he’d lost his mind.

As she made her way back to her inn room, she looked out at the water and paused, recalling her last memory of him, standing on a dock just like this, the sun bright overhead. She was only 16, bound for Eorzea, her sister already gone to fight Garlemald. Their father had thought they were fools for getting involved. He’d wanted her to run away from it like he had, seeing the world and taking no responsibility for it. It was the first moment that she let herself hate him. Where she told herself she'd never be like him.

It was suddenly easy to imagine that same man discovering Preservation’s plans and making the same choice. To leave. That made a lot more sense than imagining him fighting alongside the likes of Krile’s parents. He was always very good at running away.

Zoisite shook her head, unlocked her door, and collapsed onto her bed, laughing bitterly. In some ways, she was different. She had stopped Garlemald. She had even stopped Sphene.

And still, in all the ways that mattered, she was exactly the same.

#zoisite #had a lot of feelings about dawntrail

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