#I make zero claims the dragonspeak is correct but

[meracydia-miqo]

FFXIVWrite 2024 - Day 26: Zip

late arr bridge; contains some descriptions of violence

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Streaks of fire, and clouds of soot and ash filled the air. Hurled rocks, disturbed from their rest and sent from earth to sky. It was chaos, everywhere she turned. The roar of a dragon filled her ears, soon drowned out by the high-pitched screech of another. Blood splattered on the ground before her, and the ground beneath her feet shook, threatening to give way as the heaving body of a dragon crashed, and fell.

Ahki could only stand there and watch.

It was senseless. It all was.

She heard somebody’s voice call out to her, but she didn’t move. The sound of cannon fire, echoing around her and making the bridge itself quiver, as if in fear of the fighting happening atop it.

It was all in defence, she knew. They couldn’t let them take the city, couldn’t let the buildings be razed to the ground, homes set alight. But why was it like this? What had driven such a thing to happen in this place?

“Ehk morn an in.”

Ahki held her tome tightly as a dragon approached her, eyes wide, and her carbuncle at her feet. I didn’t, she thought. It wasn’t me. I never asked to be here.

She jumped back as the dragon reared its head to attack, and closed her eyes tightly as she fired off a Ruin spell. She couldn’t watch as she did exactly what the dragon had claimed. Couldn’t watch as she was forced to betray all she had been raised to believe.

She had a duty to fulfill. People relying on her, people who trusted her. She could not get caught in the past. She could only walk forward, no matter how much it hurt, or the depth of the pit in her stomach.

She heard a Temple Knight cry out and fall to the ground, struck down by a wyvern, before the very same got stabbed by a dragoon, hurtling down from their perch, a predator out for prey. She closed her eyes once more, her hair blowing behind her, and ignoring the pain in her feet, searing up her legs. She stepped over discarded rock and stone, the remains of a pillar, now nothing but rubble. A long-lost amulet, split and broken and never to be found. It would fall to the abyss in a hundred shards before the day was done.

“N ahs Alan eil in.”

But I’m not… I do not wish to be…

Ahki could only close her eyes, trying to hide the tears that threatened to fall. To look serious, determined, and unafraid of what awaited. She knew she could not fault the dragon’s words, the meaning coming to her perfectly in a way it both always had and never should have. She was walking in her enemy’s shoes. To hold her tome, and perform summonings like those of ancient Allag, in pursuit of dragons. Who was she, really?

It wasn’t what she wished. It wasn’t what she had set out to do, when she left her home on the southern continent. Yet here she stood, face to face with one who should’ve been a friend.

”Smorn in na!”