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yloiseconeillants · 3 years

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⌛ for a sleep headcanon - sent by @lilbittymonster

The new governess was crying. Again. This was the third night since her arrival at the Manor and the third night that B’raemha could not fall asleep, no matter how hard she tried to ignore the just-not-muffled-enough sobbing coming from the room above the one she shared with the other kitchen maids. Judging by the state of the fire, it was well-past midnight, and B’raemha had to get up in a few hours to start breakfast for the day. As it was, she had gotten maybe half an hour of sleep at best. Fine. Enough was enough. B’raemha threw her blanket to the side and sprung out of bed, groggy and irritated.

B’raemha navigated the dark hallways with ease. She’d spent her entire life here, along with her mother who was a kitchen maid before her and her sisters, who would be kitchen maids after her. She had slept through chronic snoring and storms and nightmares - but this crying was something new. Something had to be done. The governess’s room was at the end of the hallway on the second floor. B’raemha’s bare, padded feet didn’t make a noise as she approached, and she was pleased to find that the door was unlocked when she turned the door handle, not bothering to knock.

A gust of wind from the opposite side of the bedroom pushed the door open once the handle had turned. The windows were thrown open, letting the storm kick up the curtains and rain puddled on the floor before them. A shaking pile of blankets was heaped onto the bed. The governess was so busy crying she hadn’t noticed her door opened. B’raemha stomped over to the windows and shut them. At the clatter of the windows closing, the sobbing stopped, and the startled governess climbed out of the blankets, her limbs kicking pillows off the bed. When she finally emerged, puffy-eyed and red-faced, she straightened her back and tried to dry her face with her nightgown sleeve before addressing B’raemha.

“Good evening.”

“Is it?” B’raemha grunted.

“I suppose not,” the governess managed to choke before another round of tears welled in the corners of her eyes. “Did I wake you?”

“Yes. Every night. It’s very annoying.” B’raemha sat on the bed next to her and drew a blanket around her own shoulders. The room was freezing.

“I’m sorry.” The governess hid her head in her hands as her shoulders shook with sobs. “I… I’ve never slept by myself before,” she gasped from behind her hands.

B’raemha scoffed. “Oh? Is that it? There’s an easy fix for that.” B’raemha pushed her hips into the governess’ side, scooting her to one side of the bed, while she drew up another blanket toward the two of them. She tossed the tear-soaked pillows onto the floor and threw her arm over the governess’ lap. “Come on. Time to cuddle.”

“But-”

“No. I’m too tired to argue and I need to be up in four hours and I can’t have you crying all night.” The governess moved further down the bed and stiffly settled into B’raemha’s embrace, shuddering occasionally from both the cold air and the lingering need to cry. B’raemha shut her eyes and found the governess’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

“I’m Yloise,” the governess whispered.

“I know. Go to sleep.”

#pre-arr #yloise coneillants #b'raemha falh #and then they were girlfriends #~writing tag

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yloiseconeillants · 3 years

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💐 BOUQUET - create a bouqet for them! what do those flowers mean? are any of the flowers their particular favourite?

The children had already picked out the prettiest and most pristine of the wildflowers they had collected that afternoon, leaving their governess in her quarters with a few crumbled and crushed specimens to clean up after they ran off to greet their mother with a gift bouquet. Yloise considered each: a tall stalk of chamomile missing half its petals, a handful of sea oats, and stray sheaths of long yellow grass. All hardy plants, still thriving in the early fall of the chilly bay climate, laid low only by the callous hands of enthusiastic youth.

She handled each delicately, adding them to the dried lavender already in the vase by her bedside. The lavender had come from a bush she planted at the manor herself a decade ago, during some summer trip to visit her mother’s patroness, now her employer. Yloise decided that snipping a few stems would be a forgivable sin, considering the circumstances, though she was sure to reap her bounty when the groundskeepers weren’t around to witness. As she finished arranging the remaining sheaths of long grass, her bedroom door opened and closed behind her. She turned around to confirm her guest was B’raemha, though the soundless footsteps had already given it away. Her usually pristine apron was grass-stained and crumpled, but B’raemha was beaming, her hands held behind her back.

“What’s that?” Yloise attempted to sound suspicious, but the words couldn’t come out that way around her growing smile.

“I wanted to contribute to your little project today!” B’raemha swept her hands around, revealing a fistful of thistles. Her palms were scored by the spindles with fresh welts and punctures. “B’raemha! Why-” she did not complete her thought as B’raemha unceremoniously plunked the thistles into the vase behind Yloise, taking advantage of their brief proximity to plant a kiss on her cheek. Yloise blushed, the tips of her ears suddenly burning.

“Thank you,” Yloise managed to stammer before pushing a grinning B’raemha away. “They’ve very pretty.”

B’raemha bounced backward onto Yloise’s bed, watching her rustle through a desk drawer. “They remind me of you, you know.” Yloise found what she was looking for - a stack of gauze and a small bottle of clear alcohol. She sat down beside B’raemha.

“What, pretty?” Yloise scoffed and set about cleaning the cuts on B’raemha’s palms.

“No, blue,” B’raemha winced as the alcohol stung her skin. “Prickly. Grows on cliffsides, hard to reach.” Yloise smirked, wrapping B’raemha’s palms with the gauze. “Worth the effort, though, I reckon.”

... ... ...

Thank you for the ask @pidgeon-sorrel! It's not quite a direct answer, but I got it into my head that I wanted to write about these two anyway.

#makes a wol but only writes about her time before adventuring #pidgeon-sorrel #yloise coneillants #b'raemha falh #pre-arr #~writing tag

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yloiseconeillants · 3 years

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Prompt: What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

"Stay here." Lady Margelot de Nevelle smiled with what she thought was the greatest kindness she could muster given the chaotic circumstances. She gestured toward a high-backed chair beside a closed set of double doors in a stark white marble-floored hallway in the west wing of the De Nevelle Manor. Yloise set her frayed bag on the ground beside the chair and sat down, folding her hands across a loaf-sized metal tin she carefully balanced on her lap. Distant shouts rang out beyond the hallway. Lady Margelot glanced back toward the sound, then turned back to Yloise. "I'll be right back." Her eyes radiated sympathy. Yloise caught her gaze for just a moment before fixing her eyes back on the box in her lap and nodded, forcing a wan smile. Satisfied by this exchange, Lady Margelot swept down the hallway, turning once to wave pleasantly before closing the far door behind her. Her footsteps faded and Yloise realized that this was the first time she had been alone since the tidal wave had struck the shores of Western La Noscea a few nights ago.

She breathed in and out again, slowly, stretching the moment out for as long as she could. Her lungs felt weaker than they had before. How long would she last underwater? The impact of the wave, if she survived it, would have probably knocked the air out of her anyway before she was dragged under with the current. Would she have tried to outrun it before it overtook her? Sitting in the chair, Yloise could feel her pulse quicken and her cheeks burned. Adrenaline rose from somewhere within her and she needed to be far away from even this place, a sturdy manor on the high cliffs of an island, sheltered in Galadion Bay from the open ocean. She swallowed and pushed down her fear, drowning her anxiety in a brief calming numbness.

Time passed. Clink. Clink-clink. Clink. Yloise’s absent-minded tinkering with the locked latch of the tin on her lap settled into a vague rhythm. Her eyes drifted from the hallway to the window across from her seat and to the sea beyond it. The grey sea reflected the grey sky beyond the dampened cliffs, giving the impression that they had merged into one great, grey void stretching out into a dull nothingness. Her mother was out there somewhere in that void, taken by the tidal wave along with the ruins of the Halfstone colony. Yloise’s eyebrows furrowed when she realized she was pondering whether her mother’s body could be found in the sea or the sky or if it would be found at all before something else swallowed it up. She straightened her back and tried to think about anything other than the ocean. The sound of waves or blood pounded in her ears as she dug her nails more forcefully into the latch. It did not budge.

She thought of her brother, Vallerin, half a continent away in the city of Gridania. He would have to be informed of their mother’s death. Yloise remembered Lady Margelot mentioning her eldest children, Irielle and Rolandaix, would be joining him in investigating the impacts of the Calamity on the ancient city of Gelmorra in the hinterlands beyond Gridania. Would she send word of the tidal wave to them before Yloise could reach Vallerin? Would she let them know – no, no, we’re safe. The wave didn’t reach the island. But do sit young Vallerin down before you tell him what happened. Yloise frowned. Regardless of who told him first, she would still have to write to him. But what could she say? All of Halfstone, gone in a moment, overtaken by a great wall of seawater churned up by Leviathan, the dread god of the Sahagin? The lavender fields, the fish-drying racks, the stacks of rocks they had left in the caves as children. Their beds and all the memories they hid beneath them. Their neighbors and friends, at least, had survived, aside from gruff old Aerghaemr, who had died a hero, occupying the Sahagin so the rest could escape – but Maman went back. A fool to the very end. Yloise grimaced as tears welled in her eyes. What could have been so important she had to go back before the alarm had even stopped ringing? What could not have waited?

Gone now, anyway.

Blinking away the tears, Yloise felt an unfamiliar wetness on her fingertips. Her eyes focused with some effort on her hands, finding blood where her finger had dug too deeply into the rough edges of the latch, still no closer to opening the damned thing. Resisting the urge to fling the tin against the darkening walls, she looked down one end of the hallway, then the other. No one. Had it been an hour? She looked out the window again to the grey void. Maybe... a few hours? She slumped against the high back of the chair and turned her attention back to the tin, holding it with one hand as she stuck the bleeding forefinger of her other hand into her mouth, gently sucking on her shallow wound as the coppery taste of blood sat on the tip of her tongue.

Yloise regarded the tin. A lidded metal box, no markings. A hinge on one side of the lid, a latch with a keyhole on the opposite. No key, of course. Was that what Maman went back for? Whatever was inside was lighter than the tin itself. When she shook the tin, something small and metallic pinged off the unlined walls inside, but, she noted with some curiosity, not against the bottom wall. Was that wall lined? Or was something soft inside this tin?

Yloise had seen this tin, or many others like it, stacked under her mother’s bed. One night, ages ago, Yloise and Vallerin scurried into the night with one of the tins while their mother slept. That tin wasn’t locked that night. Swinging open the lid revealed the tin held only a few scattered, tiny black seeds. Yloise, by virtue of being older and, therefore, smarter than Vallerin, declared that these were the lavender seeds her mother had been sowing. Vallerin conceded that Yloise was right, but did she consider that these were maybe magic seeds and that’s why Maman kept them under the bed? Yloise said that she had, of course, considered whether they were magical, but what is the use of magic seeds if they aren’t sown? Vallerin nodded sagely and closed the lid, satisfied at solving this small mystery before they snuck back into bed.

How long ago had that night been? And how long ago had Lady Margelot left her in this hallway? The growing dark obscured the doors at either end of the hallway. Yloise’s eyes tracked the stark white walls and cold white marble floors from north to south. Windows on the west side offered a view to the cliffs and the ocean beyond it. On the east side, a line of chairs, broken by a few doors, stood beneath a gallery of wood-framed paintings depicting the history of the storied De Nevelle family. Yloise craned her head to examine the painting behind her, a moody and evocative oil painting of the Galadion, shipwrecked upon Vylbrand, the stormy sea beyond its shores dark, roiling, foam-capped.

Yloise had not witnessed the tidal wave herself. That night was confused and hectic in her memory. She remembered her mother shaking her awake amidst shouting and smoke and, above it all, the ominous toll of the lighthouse’s foghorn. Yloise’s mother shoved a hastily packed bag into her arms as Yloise fumbled with her shoes, then they were running alongside their neighbors, wet blades of tall grass stinging at bare legs as they weaved through the fields towards the highlands of Skull Valley. At some point, the running stopped. Huddled in the cold, the villagers silently watched the light of fires on the hatched rooftops of Halfstone, mirrored in a dozen other villages dotted along the northwestern coast. Turning from this horror, Yloise watched her mother rifle through the bag she had brought with her with increasing alarm until Maman looked up and locked eyes with Yloise. “Stay here,” she ordered, firmly, but softly, as if Yloise was still a child that needed direction. Maman kissed Yloise’s forehead gently and tied a thin shawl around her shoulders as rain began to fall. “I’ll be right back.” It didn’t even occur to Yloise to protest before Maman disappeared into the night.

She had not returned by dawn. The fighting had stopped and the fires had died down but the foghorn ceaselessly continued to sound. Yloise had managed to fall asleep for an hour or so without realizing. She blinked awake through bleary, unfocused eyes, struck by the thought that the black sea looked differently somehow – wrong, even, but before she could consider what this meant, a sharp sudden pain pierced her skull. She’d had sudden headaches before, but never this painful and dizzying. She clambered to her feet and staggered toward the nearest person, but the pain pulsed again, stronger this time, and she collapsed into darkness. Images flashed in her mind of waves and flames, falling stars and burning villages. Her mother suspended in space, serene and smiling amidst the chaos. When she finally opened her eyes again, everything had changed.

The door at the far-end of the hallway clattered open, startling Yloise out of her reverie. It was dark now, and she could only see the light of a glass-shielded lantern bobbing toward her. As the light approached, she could make out a red-haired Miqo’te girl in an apron holding the lantern before her as she hurried through the hallway. The girl curtsied as Yloise stood up, looming above the Miqo’te in the dark. “Miss Yloise?” Yloise nodded and the girl smiled, setting down the lantern, and lighting the sconce beside the double doors. The aproned girl spoke nervously and with a punctuated rhythm, as if she were reciting. “Lady de Nevelle sends her sincerest apologies that she will not be able to dine with you tonight, but you are welcome to join the staff for supper or take it in your room if you want to be alone.” Yloise smiled politely and picked up her bag, stuffing the tin inside. “I think I’ve had enough of being alone for now.” The girl laughed lightly for reasons Yloise could not begin to fathom and gestured for Yloise to follow her back to the kitchens as their shadows danced on the walls and across the faces of ancient de Nevelles peering out from their portraits.

#ffxiv #yloise coneillants #mateus #crystal data server #i guess this is a thing here then #margelot was the worst and stuffiest name i could consider #and this from someone who actively loves the name 'margot'#pre-arr #b'raemha falh #~writing tag

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